Politics and Rite

Archbishop Romero 

receives a sack of beans

 at the presentation of the 

gifts at Mass 

Yesterday, just to have something to post, I grabbed the famous quote of Pope John Paul about the failure of “trickle-down economics” to bring about greater justice and inclusiveness to our world-wide human community.  (It hasn’t worked well here in the U.S. either.)  I entitled the post: a short musing to keep this liturgical thing in context.  Aaron replied “I see what you did there.”  Well, it wasn’t all that subtle and nor was it meant to be, but I am glad that someone picked up on it.

You see, Liturgy is a highly political thing.  A few months ago I received this comment to my posting of March 12 this year:

 I have always believed that the most subversive product of the conciliar reform was the Lectionary and Pope Francis has proved my point. While conciliar documents and papal encyclicals have their value -- though go, as you say, mostly unread, much less acted upon -- it is the broad, daily exposure to the Scriptures, and the Gospels in particular that are likely to rankle the conservative mindset even more. To wit, the daily Domus homilies by the pope. There has been nothing more offensive to the wingnuts than the almost daily harangue against them based straightforwardly and without varnish on the day's readings. I have always been amazed at how the worst of right wing Republicans and Katholic Krazies of my acquaintance can attend daily Mass and retain their political and religious views when they hear, over and over again, the diatribes against pharasaic religion, the prophetic denunciations against social injustice, the narratives of divine mercy, and the pauline invective against religion grounded in mere tradition and works righteousness. All of this has been the subject of Francis' daily preaching and it has driven them to utter distraction. This is also why, I believe, they are so enamored of the "Extraordinary Form" -- it effectively shields them from such uncomfortable exposure to the Bible behind clouds of incense, the cover of a foreign language, the distraction of rubrical obsessions and the comparative paucity of reading from Scripture.

It is an old axiom in our Catholic tradition that if you want to change what people believe change the way the pray.  (Lex orandi, lex credendi)  The Novus Ordo has been extremely effective in raising the Catholic social consciousness for several reasons.

1.   The direct participatory access to the liturgy of the current rite vs. the pre-conciliar rites changes the hierarchal self-expression of the Church

2.   as you cite—the direct exposure to the Scripture, read in one’s own language, from a more widely inclusive lectionary, and preached on a daily basis.

3.   The integration of the horizontal and vertical dimension of our faith with a shared awareness of the Presence of God and the presence of our neighbors.

4.   The move away from monarchial models of worship and environment for simpler, plainer vestments, vessels, décor.

5.   The inclusion of new music that not only expressed our relationship to God, but to each other and often emphasizes the needs of the poor or the special place in God’s care which is given to the poor. 

6.   A church architecture that often places the altar in the midst of the assembly and thus emphasizes not only our common participation but our personal responsibility to God 

I can’t help but think that much of the opposition to the current Liturgy isn’t motivated by a desire to preserve the socio-economic and political status quo. When I read blogs like Rorate Caeli or Father Z’s Blog I cannot but notice the political undertones (admittedly no stronger than the political undertones readers find in my blog).  I don’t think Pope Benedict realized the political impact the liturgy was taking in his pontificate, but I do think that Pope Francis is far more savvy about the relationship between cult and politics.  (We expect Jesuits to be savvy, even well, Jesuitical.)  And I think that much of the opposition to Francis and the protests against his style of liturgy (and his style of papacy) is in fact a protest against the shift to the left on highly politicized issues in which he has sunk the pontifical dentures.  The place of immigrants is one of these issues; the environment is another; income inequality is a third.  Certainly the projected beatification (and possible canonization) of Archbishop Romero has generated a flood of Internet complaints.  And now Dom Helder  (“When I feed the poor you call me a saint; when I ask you why they are poor you call me a communist”) Camara is being considered for posthumous promotion to the dismay of those whose model for sainthood is the late great 40^th POTUS.  And then of course there is our dear friend in Malta who from his liturgical style seems to be waging a campaign to be elected to fill the slippers of the late Queen Mother.  Unfortunately for him it is not an elected position. When you see how at home he is at the Palace in Gricigliano he would be so good at it.

"Blessed" Paul VI, How Sad

I am anxious to comment both on the final document of the synod and the homily that Pope Francis gave for the close of the synod, but that hopefully will unfold through the coming week.  Unfortunately, though, right now is a time that I am particularly rushed with both some travel and work pertaining to my “day job.”  For now let me just comment on the beatification of Blessed Paul VI.  

I am not happy about it.  It isn’t that I don’t like Paul VI.  I love Paul VI.  He is my favorite Pope of my lifetime and indeed of the last century and more.  I never go to Rome that I don’t make a pilgrimage to his grave in the Vatican grottoes.  Much of what we credit to John XXIII:  Mass in our own language, the liturgical changes of Vatican II, the progress in ecumenical dialogue (or rather, what progress there was before a freeze set in under John Paul II and Benedict XVI), the Church’s stance on human rights and so much more is actually the contribution of Paul VI.  Paul was Pope for the final three sessions of Vatican II, the sessions from which the documents of the Council emerged.  He took an active role in pushing those documents through in spite of some hard opposition from the conservatives, especially those within the Curia.  Moreover, Paul seems to have been a genuinely holy man.   He had his human flaws—and some of them reportedly were deep—but he also radiated a mature and deep faith.  His final years mirrored the suffering servant: he reminds me of the Mezzo-Soprano Air from the Second Part of Handle’s  Messiah: He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

Paul had long been hated by the neo-trads for the direction in which he led the Council, but His Encyclical Humanae Vitae brought down upon him the wrath of the liberals whose disappointment morphed quickly into a scornful wrath.  Is Paul a saint?  I have no doubt.  But we don’t need more pope-saints, or even blesseds right now.  Yes, we need more married people saints, but that is not my point.  In canonizing or beatifying popes or cardinals or bishops, we are canonizing the Institution.  That is not a good idea.  We need to move away from the Institutional model of Church and embrace the other models, especially the Servant model.  I am not saying that there are no bishops or clergy who should be raised to the altars.  You have the martyr bishop, Oscar Romero.  You have Dom Helder Camara, the Bishop of the Poor.  There are circumstances of their lives that outweigh the episcopal handicap.  They transcended their hierarchical status, their being part of the institution, to identify with the poorest of Christ’s people.  Despite their being prelates, they are symbols of the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters. 

Dorothy Day said that she did not want to be trivialized by being declared a saint.  That is my other objection to beatifying Paul VI.  He was too great a pope to be turned into plaster statues; his contribution to the Church too great to be relegated to the dust bin of pious thought.  I think he would be embarrassed by it as well.  He knew his flaws and he took them seriously.  I suspect—and again, I can only suspect and this may, in fact, be what psychologists call “projection” but I suspect that Paul would rather have been forgotten and only that his work remain than that he be remembered and his work pushed into his shadow.  

The Council and the Move to the Left

Archbishop Thomas Toolen of

Mobile Alabama who forbad

his clergy to participate in Civil

Rights Demonstratons

I want to give another example of where the Council brought about a change of direction in the Church—here perhaps more of what Pope Benedict would call “reform” rather than “rupture” but a change none the less.  Robert Blair Kaiser writes in his Tablet article to which I have referred in my last two posts:  

Before the Council, we thought we were miserable sinners when we were being nothing but human. After the Council, we had a new view of ourselves. We learned to put a greater importance on finding and following Jesus as 'the way' (as opposed to what we said in the Creed. It didn't matter so much what we said. What mattered was what we did: helping to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and find shelter for the homeless. That's what made us followers of Jesus. …. Before the Council, we identified 'salvation' as 'getting to heaven.' After the Council, we knew that we had a duty to bring justice and peace to the world in our own contemporary society, understanding in a new way the words that Jesus gave us when he taught us to pray, 'thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' By the end, among the most influential figures at the Council, we encountered two humble souls, one a woman, Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who wasn't allowed to speak to the assembled bishops at Vatican II (no woman was), and a bird-like figure, Dom Helder Camara, the archbishop of Recife, in Brazil. Both of them went around Rome telling individual bishops and those who were putting together the Council's crowning document, Gaudium et Spes: please don't forget the poor.

The Council did not forget the poor, and the statement out of Rome in October 2011 allying the Church with the world's have-nots only proves that even the current powers-that-be in the Church (still so unaccountable in so many other ways) get it. I will quote Gaudium et Spes: The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.

The Council radically reshaped what we meant by “sin.”  Before the Council sin meant—to the Catholic-in-the-pews a personal violation of the Church’s moral code.  While this  most frequently fell into the category of a sexual transgression, there were other types of sin possible ranging from missing Mass on Sundays or Holy Days to eating meat on a day of abstinence to stealing from one’s employer to lying under oath.   The pivotal element was, however, that it was a personal violation of the moral code.   There was no awareness—to the ordinary Catholic—of the social dimension of sin.  While various popes such as Leo XIII and Pius XI had written encyclical letters talking of the rights of labor and the obligations of employers towards their employees, connections were not being made in the pulpit or confessional between such magisterial teaching and moral culpability.  Of course, in the first half of the twentieth century, as in the century before, most people in a position to exploit their employees were in the Protestant ascendancy in this country and Catholics were far more likely to be sinned against than sinning when it came to the sins outlined in the economic theories of the magisterium.  But the Church’s hands were not entirely clean.  Such prelates as Cardinal O’Connell of Boston and Archbishop Corrigan of New York, being Paddies of the most shameless social-climbing sort,  had always allied themselves with the Protestant ascendancy and its economic interests.  And of course Cardinal Spellman in 1949 sent his seminarians to dig graves to break a strike by cemetery workers in Archdiocese of New York graveyards—and was proud of it. 

Moreover, while the Church did have—at least on paper—a credible theology of defending the rights of workers, there were other social sins rarely spoken of and even more rarely condemned.  Racism was not only rarely denounced from the pulpit but the Catholic Church had long supported policies of segregation and did not accept African-American candidates for the priesthood until the ordination of Father Augustus Tolton in 1886 and such vocations remained rare until the mid-twentieth century.  Tolton himself had to be sent to Rome for his studies as no American seminary would have him as a student.  (In telling this story I have omitted the saga of the Healy brothers who—despite their slave mother managed to be accepted and treated as whites—one becoming a bishop, a second a Vicar General of the Boston Archdiocese, and a third, president of Georgetown University.  See entry for February 14, 2011.)  Cardinal Glennon of Saint Louis blocked the integration of Webster College and tried to do the same with Jesuit Saint Louis University.  Archbishop Toolen of Mobile forbade his priests to take part in any civil-rights demonstrations and won the support of other bishops who initially forbad their priests to travel to Alabama to be part of the marches led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Cardinal McIntyre suspended priests and expelled from this Archdiocese priests and religious who preached or spoke on civil rights.  (See entries for August 31 and September 1, 2011).
All this changed with the Second Vatican Council.  Catholics have become very much aware of the social dimension of sin and consequently have moved from being a conservative force in American society to a force for social change and liberation.  This fits the model of a “hermeneutic of reform” more than a “hermeneutic of rupture” as the Ecumenical and Interfaith issues addressed in yesterday’s posting.  However it is probably one of the reasons that some influential members of the hierarchy are so anxious to “turn back” the Council and the Church’s record of social progress during the last 50 years. 

Christ and His Church

Dom Helder Camara, model

pastor for the Church

It seems to me that if religion has a purpose it is to be the determinative influence on the culture in which human persons can be guided towards a spiritual, intellectual, and moral development, indeed a holistic development, that brings them to the highest possible self-realization possible to the potential of each individual for the good of the wider human family.  If this sounds too “secular” or too “humanistic” let me rephrase that in explicitly Christian language.  I believe that the purpose of religion, including and especially the Christian religion, is to bring the human person to the recovery of the Divine Image and Likeness in which each human person is created.  Let me cite a Master’s thesis of which I am one of the reader’s on this point. 

That as Christians the first role of culture in providing models of higher self-realization that result in higher culture is evident enough.  The Church has done well to preserve the Gospel in a way that invites its members to take on more Christ-like identities and realize more Christ-like actions in more Christ centered communities

At the same time, I would have to argue from history and from experience that religion, and specifically Christianity, has too often been corrupted precisely to prevent spiritual, intellectual, and moral development in the individuals in order to subordinate individuals to the interests in various political, economic, educational, and yes, religious institutions.  If I have a purpose in this blog it is precisely to speak up against those voices that have corrupted the Christian message.   Sometimes I do this by serious critique.  Sometimes by ridicule.  Sometimes by pointing out historical data or contemporary facts.  Sometimes by anecdote.  But I am sincerely concerned that our religious faith, the most important gift we have because it is the only gift that ultimately gives meaning to our existence, is too often manipulated for unworthy purposes.

It is crucial for us to distinguish between “the Church” and the Institution which governs that Church.  This is not to say that the hierarchy is not a constitutive part of the Church, but the Pope and the College of Bishops, much less the Roman Curia, do not by any means exhaust the theological reality of “The Church.”  The hierarchy is a constitutive part of the Church, but only a part of the Church and only one facet, as it were, on this incredibly beautiful jewel.  And it is perhaps the most flawed facet on that jewel.  I gladly accede to the dogma that the Church is founded by Christ.  That is a theological statement, not a historical one, and the corresponding historical statement is that the visible institutional form that Church, and explicitly its leadership, has taken is the product of historical development.  Historically, we cannot claim that Jesus sat down with Peter and gave him the floor-plan of the basilica or advised him on how to set up the Curia Romana.  The Petrine ministry can be found in certain interpretations of passages in the Gospels but that does not mean that Jesus of Nazareth historically established the papacy as we know it.  The papacy is clearly an evolutionary phenomenon.  The “papacy” of Sylvester I at the time of Constantine, the papacy of Leo I a century later, that of Gregory I two centuries after that, that of John XII in the 10^th century, of Innocent III in the 13^th century, Paul III in the 16^th, Pius IX in the 19^th and Benedict XVI today are each remarkably different institutions because they occurred in very different historical situations and at different points along what we might even call a dis-continuum of development. 

Something similar can be noted for the episcopacy.  It seems to have taken several generations of the faith for the Episcopal-presbyteral-diaconal model of Church ministry (note, I don’t choose to say “leadership” or “authority”) to emerge.  Being a bishop was a very different experience, vocation even, for Saint Augustine in the fifth century than it was for Thomas Becket in the twelfth.  It was different for John Carroll in 18^th century America than it is for Carroll’s contemporary Baltimore successor William Lori.  For that matter, the “priesthood” (better, “presbyterate”) of Hippolytus in the 3^rd century is a very different ministry than for Thomas Aquinas a millennium later, for Edmund Campion in Elizabethan England, John Vianney in post-revolutionary France, and a suburban Chicago curate today.  Sorry, the contemporary term is “parochial vicar.”  But I don’t want to digress too far.  We can look at the instability of institutional models at another time.  I want to focus on the reality that the Church, institutional and every other form, in its periods of greatest health has facilitated spiritual maturity among its members from the hierarchy down through those of us who comprise the lowerarchy.  Augustine, Gregory, Anselm, Jerome, Campion, Vianney, Innocent, Fisher, Carroll, Chrysostom weren’t  peacocks who preened before the mirrors of their self-importance.  They were pastors who were focused not on their power or authority—much less on their silk robes and pom-pommed hats, but on shaping the spiritual depths of the souls entrusted to them.  We too have seen shepherds in that model—Dom Helder Camara, Bishop Topel, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Archbishop Desmond Tutu,  O wait, he isn’t one of ours.  Pity.       And there are many fine priests who fit this model too.  But we need to hear more from them than from those who, like the pharisees of Jesus day, bind heavy burdens on people’s shoulders and never lift a finger to ease the load. 

Thank You Ignatius Loyola For the Loyal Service of Two Sons

I am a great admirer of the Society of Jesus.  I owe a lot to them for the education they gave me—especially teaching me my Latin which in turn has given me a necessary tool to be a historian.  Two Jesuits I particularly admire are the late Cardinal Avery Dulles and the very much alive Father James Martin.
     One of my colleagues who is a theologian, or at least a professor theology—I really don’t think he does the original work that would qualify him a a theologian though, like most academics, he has sufficient ego to claim a designation he hasn’t earned—dismisses Dulles as a “conservative” or even “reactionary.”  I think the gentleman is simply jealous of Dulles’ record of publications as well as his being honored by a red hat late in life.  I was always surprised that Dulles was so honored as I find his ecclesiology nothing less than subversive of the current Church order.  That, by the way, is to me a positive thing. While his book Models of the Church is his classic work—and I think prophetic for calling us to move beyond the institutional model to see the Church in its fullness—it is his book, Catholicity of the Church, that I have really enjoyed.  In Catholicity of the Church Dulles tells us that the predominant characteristic of the papacy’s first millennium was witness; the second millennium was characterized by power; the third millennium will be a time of service.  As a historian I think Dulles is spot on but while he speaks of the papacy, I think this is true of the Church at large.  The first millennium with the great evangelization of the then-known world was a time of witness to the Gospel.  In its second millennium the Church became entangled in the web of earthly power as it joined throne and altar to extend its authority into law.  And we are now entering a time when some—those prophetic souls who chart the course—see that we must give ourselves to service of humankind. 
      I think it is this shift of the Church’s tectonic plates that is at the source of so much of the tension in the church today.  It is very hard for many people to walk away from the power model.  Power is addictive.  Many people cannot imagine a Church that is not based on power—heavenly or earthly.  Ironically Jesus instructed his disciples to eschew power—“you know how it is among the Gentiles; how their great ones made their power felt over them; it must not be that way with you.”  The gospels tell us that Jesus “spoke with authority” but they do not ascribe power to him. Indeed, while he said that he could call upon legions of angels to come to his aid, he never did.  It is the conversion of the heart, not compulsion or a conversion by force, which characterizes the teachings of Jesus.
      In the Church’s second millennium power proved to be too tempting for churchmen (and notice, I mean churchmen)  to avoid.  Some—like Peter Damian or Gregory VII or Innocent III—for the most part used power well.  Others like the Medici Popes Leo X and Clement VII or Cardinal Wolsey, abused their trust. 
       When I see nuns—whether habited ones like the Little Sisters of the Poor or out-of-habit ones like the Daughters of Charity and Sisters of Mercy—running nursing homes or day-care centers or infant-homes or shelters for women and children, I see the sort of service to which we are all called as Christians.  I see some prelates who fall in that category too.  I knew—only slightly—Cardinal Dulles in his final years and found him a humble man, more professor than prelate, devoted to getting his students to think both critically and profoundly.  I remember the late Bishop Bernard Topel of Spokane.  I never knew, except by reputation, Dom Helder Camara of Recife, Brazil.  His famous quote is: When I feed the poor,  you call me a saint; why I question why they are poor, you call me a communist.  I see Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston who moved out of the mansion and is normally seen in his simple Capuchin robes and who, at least used to, work in soup-kitchens.  Bishop Hubbard of Albany has a good reputation for not taking himself too seriously and keeping his feet on the ground and his heart with his people.  I have had the privilege of sitting down with Bishop Tom Gumbleton—a man who has suffered terribly at the hands of other prelates for his witness to the Gospel.  But for the Cardinals Burke and Law, for Bishops like William Lori and Thomas Olmsted, for Grand Poobah Knight of Columbus Carl Anderson and laity like George Weigel or Russell Shaw the model of power is just too hard to walk away from.  Che peccato as we say in Rome—what a pity! (Literally, “what a sin” which might be more accurate.)  The future lies in the models of service, not of power.   When we say we are afraid of losing our religious liberties, what we really mean is that we are afraid of losing out ability to dictate to the larger society how people should live and reproduce and express love.  We think that we should be able to dictate to the world what we perceive to be God’s law.  Jesus never told us to do that.  He told us to win people’s hearts not control their lives.  Win their hearts and their behaviors will follow but simply try to force your ways on them and they will never surrender their hearts.  Service is the way to win hearts for Christ   
      And then there is Father James Martin—a Jesuit and associate editor at America Magazine.  Boy does he get the religious crazies upset and why—well, most of all because he makes a rational case for rational Christianity.  Father Martin is not some way-out radical—though their fields  (journalism and theology) are different and so a direct comparison is impossible, I find him more reserved in his opinions than the late Cardinal Dulles.  Father Martin only writes (or says) what most thinking Catholics are saying at their dinner tables, their book-clubs, their faith-sharing groups, their Adult Ed classes etc.  He has come out solidly behind the American nuns and now he has written an interesting article about DeLaSalle Christian brother Louis DeThomasis, president of Saint Mary’s University in Minnesota, which is a thoughtful critique of Catholic faith and practice in our contemporary world.  Of course Father Martin is in a long tradition of America editors who speak up in a Church culture where the leadership wants you to pay, pray, and obey.  But the reason that the boys in red don’t want you to think for yourself and ask the tough questions is that, frankly, they don’t have answers nearly as rational as your questions.  When reason fails, they appeal to “Tradition.”  There is nothing wrong with Tradition, of course, but Aquinas would be the first to say that when reason and tradition diverge, reason trumps the commonly held perceptions of the Faith.  This is not to say that appeals to Tradition can be discarded when irrational but rather that the understanding of the Tradition, when it is against reason, is a distortion of the authentic deposit of faith.  In other words, a religious doctrine which deviates from reason, does not correctly apprehend the Tradition handed down from the Apostles.  There are many such “doctrines” circulating today that would require a Catholic to reject scientific knowledge and reason if he or she were to hold them.  It is time that such “doctrines” were seriously studied and redefined for our current age.  Faith, of course, transcends intellect but it does not repudiate intellect as some would have it.   God blesses simple hearts, but not stupidity. 

Two Churches--To Serve or to Be Served

The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve
Matthew 20:28

I am anxious to move on to the subject of the Gregorian Reform but should finish exploring the need for Reform in the contemporary Church beforehand.  While I love the past and can regale myself—if not others—for hours with historical details, I firmly believe that history is not about the past.  Those interested in the past qua past are not historians but antiquarians.   History, on the other hand, employs the past as a means of discussing and understanding the present and constructing the future.   In the August 1  posting I made a claim that the conflicts over the “correct” interpretation of the Second Vatican Council have left us with a bifurcated Church,  with one branch looking backwards to a world of power and pomp and another looking forward into a new world and a new role for the church in the world.  Avery Dulles wrote in his book The Catholicity of the Church, (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1985.  p. 136):  
... papal primacy in the first millennium was envisaged principally as witness, and was closely linked to what had been called the apostolicity of the Church.  In the second millennium, until Vatican Council II, papal authority was understood as a matter of power, and was linked to the Church’s attribute of unity.  A more recent kind of theology, reflected in the documents of Vatican II, links papal primacy rather with service, and interprets it in relation to the catholicity of the Church.    
      It is an interesting observation and if there is a flaw in Dulles’ analysis it is that applies this three-millennia-schema to papal authority when in fact it actually fits the wider self-understanding not simply of the papacy but of the Church itself.  It was not only the papacy, but the Church itself that understood its apostolic mission to be kergymatic, that is to witness to the Gospel to the ends of the earth. That understanding of mission shifted as the first millennium gave way to the second, the very time of the Gregorian Reform of which we are soon to speak, and not only the papacy but the Church itself saw that its “mark” of unity required to have a universal dominion, i.e. a power that extended over all peoples of all times.  The transition was not a smooth one as well shall see—in fact well into the second millennium there were still voices such as Peter Waldo and Francis of Assisi—who rejected the power model in favor of the witness model.  Nonetheless, the power model won out and the Church fitted its structures to accommodate it.  The papacy picked up the trappings of monarchy, the bishops forged alliances with the princes—indeed were often princes themselves.  The hierarchical nature of the Church became more evident as ecclesial power consolidated itself in the hands of prelates and indeed as the evangelical concept of authority gave way to the notion of “power” in ways that Jesus had explicitly condemned.  The liturgy too evolved in ways that emphasized power and hierarchy.  Ecclesial and social hierarchies mutually collaborated to reinforce each other’s dominance over the working and peasant classes and the Church became hopelessly (though at the time it was seen not as hopeless but as the ideal) entwined with the civil powers to create the ancien regime.  When that regime came tumbling down with the Bastille in 1789 (and the subsequent decade) the Church worked for its reestablishment, despising democracy, trumpeting absolutism and monarchy.  If you recall the various entries in this blog about “Americanism” you will remember that the Holy See really didn’t know how to deal with the unique situation of the American Church with its republican convictions in a world of monarchial Catholicism.   
     And so, according to Dulles, the time has come again to shift the paradigm—this time from power that guarantees the Church to be “one”   (though it never really did) to the catholicity of the Church marked by an upcoming millennium of service.  And here is where the conflict lies.  There are those who cannot let go of the “power” paradigm with its trappings of monarchy and lordly domination.  They love their Tridentine Mass which so clearly displays the hierarchy of persons in ecclesial society.  The Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest based at Gricigliano in Tuscany epitomizes this ecclesiology of obsolescent fantasy and the ostentatious displays of Cardinals Burke, Pell, and Castrillón Hoyos as they travel the world in their ermine trimmed cappae magnae keep alive the hope of those who believe in a world of kings and peasants and hope to see once again throne and altar united and Catholicism supreme throughout the world.  
      There is, on the other hand,  those who recall and regard as prophetic the speech by Bishop Emil deSmedt  in the first session of Vatican II calling for an end to “triumphalism, juridicism, and clericalism”  There are those in the Church today who have a radical vision of a Church putting itself at the service of the poor.  Some, like Mother Teresa, embraced this new vision from a very conservative perspective.  Others, like Dorothy Day came at it from a very left field.  Some, like Archbishop Helder Camara or the American bishop, Bernard Topel just walked away from cumbersome pomp of their office and became witnesses to a truly apostolic Gospel.  Others, like the martyred Oscar Romero had been “party men” who found themselves surprisingly, even against their own expectations, converted to a radical Christianity.  Some were simply hard workers who pitched in and got things done like the four American churchwomen (Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan) martyred in El Salvador.  Some, like theologian Monika Hellwig,  left religious life in order to live the Gospel even more authentically than would have been possible as a religious.  Others—like Dulles himself—found that religious life and the institution of the Church gave them the better platform from which to make their contribution.   
       There are those who find this paradigm shift to be very difficult, indeed threatening, to accept and who do what they can to resist it.  Gamarelli’s stays in business supplying silver buckled shoes and purple stockings for those curial monsignori who are not about to give up the buttons and bows they’ve dreamed of since their seminary days.  Those members of the Roman Curia who are members of or have influence with the Congregation for Bishops try to insure that men named to the episcopacy today are not too inclined to the service model foretold by Dulles.  Certainly in the United States most bishops are quite friendly to be with and usually without much pretense,  but at the same time are corporation men through and through who will not effect any drastic social reformation within the Church or regarding the Church’s position in society.  But the wheels of history, while they do turn slowly, turn nonetheless and eventually one will come to the Chair of Peter who knows that humble service speaks the gospel more convincingly to our contemporary world than do the circumstances of pomp.  Dulles, I have no doubt, is right—service will mark the Church of the third millennium but we are only in the second decade of that epoch and there is much time to come.  The autocracy and the silk gowns alike will one day appear as ridiculous anachronisms  and the battles over models of the Church will be a historical footnote—at least until the paradigm must shift again. 

Backpedaling from Vatican II?

I noticed this petition at morning prayer today and it made me very sad. 

Make us eager to work with you in building a better world so that it may listen to your Church and its gospel of peace--Jesus, you feed and heal our souls; come to strengthen us. 

It made me sad because I am not sure that the Church’s Gospel is the Gospel of Peace.  I think sometimes—and, to be frank,  more than sometimes—we talk out of both sides of our mouth.  I enjoy working on this blog but I think you can see as clearly as I do that, not the Church, but the Institution of the Church (and they have to  be distinguished because on several levels they are different realities) has as its primary agenda, not the Gospel, but its own self-preservation.  In fact, I do believe that in the years during and immediately after the Second Vatican Council the Church—and here I mean the whole Church, Institution and popular reality, was enthused by the Gospel.  John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris gave us a new and energetic vision, a holistic vision, an integrated approach to faith and life-in-this-world.  O sure there were voices that decried it, did not understand it, were terrified of it—voices that even saw how it would undo their own positions of power.  It totally overturned the cosmology of Alfredo Ottaviani and other traditionalists such as Giuseppe Siri, Marcel Lefebvre, the American Francis McIntyre, and others, but in the papacy of Paul VI they were not able to seize the upper hand and there was a strong hope for a true evangelical renewal of our Catholic Church.   There was a period in which the Church—Institution and faithful together—became the cry of peace and the voice of justice.  Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio, echoed by voices such as Dom Helder Camara and Oscar Romero had not only credibility but a power that led men and women to give their lives—literally—for the Gospel to the poor.  With leaders in the Church like Basil Hume and Paul Hallinan, Paulo Arns, Joseph Bernardin, Denis Hurley, the Institutional dimension of the Church had a credibility among those people of good will who were anxious to see the human family brought together in solidarity with one another.  I am intrigued to figure out what happened to reverse that dynamic over the last thirty years but it does seem that we have reverted to an emphasis on the Institution rather than the Mission.   There are prophetic voices in the Church today but at least in the developed world they seem more on the periphery, without the weight of the Institution behind them.   Why didn’t the American bishops pass on papal objections to the Gulf Wars?  Why are we not hearing about the plight of our Catholic and Christian brothers and sisters in Palestine and in the Arab World?   Where is a Catholic critique of the economic injustices that led to the financial collapse of 2008?  Granted there were problems with the Obamacare proposals, especially in regard to the sanctity of life, but where were the hierarchical voices giving leadership for a Catholic approach to universal health care?  Where is Church leadership on the moral issues of how we are dealing with the current budget crunch?  Maybe the Church has lost its moral credibility due to the clerical sex scandals—or, more likely, to the way the hierarchy has handled the sexual misconduct issues—but the way to rebuild that moral credibility is not to remain silent on controversial issues but to develop a consistent social ethic and not only teach it and preach it, but live it.  Maybe the Institution needs to shed some of its own blood and surrender some of its own power and even alienate some of its own supporters, but we need leadership—sound leadership—that can inspire us with the gospel and we are not getting it.   Cardinal Burke (seen blog for April 4, 2011) thinks that the reason the Church is bleeding members is “poor” celebrations of the liturgy—by which he means we lack in pomp and circumstance—but His Eminence’s galero is too tight and is choking blood supply to an already enfeebled cerebellum.  The reason that we are bleeding members is that the gospel fire is going out in the hearts of those who have been called to lead.