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.

The Blood of Martyrs Is The Seed of Christians

Martyrs of the 20th Century--
Great West Door of Westminster
Abbey

This past Sunday I noticed a middle-aged man get up and storm angrily out of Church when the priest mentioned the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, bishop of San Salvador, who was murdered while saying Mass in 1980.  Though Father did not mention that the Archbishop was murdered by American-backed forces in the Salvadoran army, the very mention of the Archbishop and his upcoming beatification obviously stirred the memory of this gentleman and triggered his anger.  It was particularly surprising as our parish, while somewhat heavier than we would like with us “late middle-aged” folk, is pretty liberal, both politically and religiously.   But the mention of the murdered Archbishop, as the preacher was saying, is a reminder that the age of martyrdom is not over. 

Over the great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London, the gothic niches have been filled with statutes with the “Martyrs of the 20^th Century.”  Archbishop Romero stands among them.  In addition to Archbishop Romero, the Catholic Church is commemorated with the memorial to Saint Maximillian Kolbe , the Polish Franciscan who, in 1941, voluntarily took the place of another prisoner in a starvation cell at the Nazi Auschwitz Concentration Camp. 

The Anglican Church is represented by Manche Masemola, Archbishop Janani Luwum, Wang Zhiming, Lucien Tapiedi, and Esther John.  The Orthodox Church is represented by the Grand Duchess Saint Elizabeth of Russia, and the Protestant faith by the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoffer and the Baptist, Dr. Martin Luther King. 

Martin Luther King, of course, is familiar to us Americans as the great preacher and apostle of non-violence who led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 until his murder by a white racist in 1968.  Just as attempts were made to tarnish the reputation of Romero by his foes both in El Salvador and here in the United States, King was subjected to character assassination by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI who wanted Americans to think that the preacher was a Communist agitator in an effort to discredit his objectives of an America in which there was an equal opportunity for all regardless of race. 

The Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia was a German Princess who married into the Russian Royal Family and converted to Orthodoxy.  (Her younger sister also married into the Romanoffs—married Nicholas II and became the Tsarina Alexandra.)  Elizabeth’s husband, the Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei, was assassinated in 1905.  The young widow sold her jewelry to fund a convent of Orthodox nuns who worked among the sick and poor.  She herself headed the convent as its Abbess.  She was arrested during the Revolution and like her sister, the Tsarina, was brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.   

Manche Masemola was a young South-African woman murdered by her own family in 1928 for converting to Christianity from the traditional tribal religion.  Esther John similarly was murdered in the Pakistani Punjab region in 1960 for having converted from Islam to Christianity.  Archbishop Janani Luwum has a story much like Archbishop Romero’s.  Luwum was primate of the Anglican Church in Uganda and spoke out against the reign of terror in Idi’ Amin’s Uganda just as Romero had spoken out against the death squads in El Salvador.  He was arrested and died in police custody.  When the body was released to the family, it was riddled with bullet wounds.  Some present claimed that Idi Amin had personally shot and killed the Archbishop. 

Dietrich Bonheoffer was a German Lutheran Pastor who, with other Lutherans formed the “Confessing Church” when they found that the official Lutheran Church was collaborating too closely with the Hitler Regime.  Although already in prison by the time of the 1944 plot to kill Hitler by placing a bomb in the conference room where the dictator was meeting with his staff, Bonheoffer was connected with the would-be assassins.  He was hanged on April 9, 1945—just a few weeks before the fall of the Nazi regime.  

Lucian Tapiedi was a Papuan New Guinea Anglican lay evangelist who was killed during the Japanese invasion of that Island during World War II. 

Wang Zhiming was a Chinese Protestant brutally murdered during the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” in 1973  in a stadium before a crowd of 10,000 (mostly Christians) in an attempt to terrorize Christians to give up the practice of their faith.  These ten figures from different parts of the Christian family alert us to the sufferings of Christians today.  Christians in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, India and other countries often hold on to their faith at the cost of their lives. 

When I lived in Rome, I always attended a very special prayer service each Holy Week sponsored by the Community of Sant’ Egidio to commemorate those men and women who in the 20^th and now the 21^st century have laid down their lives for their faith.  We too should remember them—the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.  

What May Be Francis' Most Dramatic Break With Tradition II

In the last posting, I began the story of Archbishop Oscar Romero who it is rumored that the Pope will canonize during his trip to the Americas in September.  This would involve skipping the step of beatifying Romero,  a step which is in the papal prerogative but which is highly unusual. 

Romero’s conversion to a more radical outlook on the Church’s mission to the poor after the murder of his friend, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, was not simply a personal shift: it shifted the Church in El Salvador from being a buttress to the oligarchy and the old moneyed families to supporting the cause of the peasants.   This shift happened in 1977 and indeed in 1979 the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena was overthrown by a military junta determined to uphold the political power of the old families but, at the same time, initiate some degree of land reform.  Romero saw through the charade of the new government, however, and realized that far more drastic reform would be needed if civil war and possible Marxist takeover of the government was to be avoided.  Romero wrote President Jimmy Carter in February of 1980 to inform him that military aid to the junta would only “sharpen the injustice and political repression inflicted on the organized people whose struggle has often been for their most basic human rights.”  President Carter, afraid that El Salvador would go the way of neighboring Nicaragua and end up with a socialist government, continued American military aid to the junta.   It was one of the few moral failures of Jimmy Carter. 

The same month he wrote President Carter, Archbishop Romero was invited to the University of Louvain in Belgium, a noted international Catholic theology faculty, to receive an honorary doctorate and he went to Europe in February 1980 to receive the degree.  While in Europe, he also had an audience with Pope John Paul II.  The audience did not go well.  The Pope, new in his papacy but already forming a plan to bring down Marxism, was not happy with Romero’s social activism which he feared might politically radicalize Latin America at the very time John Paul was trying to deliver a deathblow to Marxism in Europe.   Romero, for  his part, insisted that he could not support the government of the Junta because of its programs of state-sponsored assassination and terror.   Less than a month after his unhappy meeting with the Pope, Romero was dead. 

Roberto D’Aubuisson, a major in the Salvadoran Army who had been trained in the “School of the Americas”—a United States Department of Defense Institution located at Fort Benning, Georgia and which gained infamy for many of its alumni who used terror, violence, torture, and murder against their political adversaries throughout Latin America—organized right-wing death squads in his effort to overthrow the ruling Junta in El Salvador and institute an extreme right-wing dictatorship in the country.  It was just at this time, the winter of 1980, that D’Aubuisson’s movement was gaining in power.   Catholic clergy, nuns, and lay catechists, because of their identification with the poor, were a specific target of the death squads. 

On March 23^rd 1980, two weeks before Easter,  Archbishop Romero gave a sermon which immediately gained international attention because he called on the soldiers of the Salvadoran army to disobey the orders of their military superiors when those orders violated basic human rights.  This was a direct challenge to the military and give the piety of many ordinary soldiers threatened the government’s control.  The following afternoon as Romero celebrated Mass in the chapel of a cancer hospital run by Carmelite Sisters and at which he lived, he was shot through the heart by a sniper through the chapel doorway as he lifted the chalice at the consecration of the Mass.

But the drama—and the terror—were not over. 

On March 30, over 250,000 people gathered in the plaza outside the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador for Archbishop Romero’s funeral Mass.  In some ways it was an awkward assembly.  The Archbishop of Mexico City, Cardinal Corripio y Ahumada, was the legate of Pope John Paul II and celebrated the Mass.  It was not an easy tightrope to walk.  John Paul had not been happy with Romero’s radical stance and it is rumored had even signed the letter removing Romero from the Archbishopric of San Salvador the very morning Romero was murdered.  Yet not only the quarter million Salvadoran peasants but the several hundred cardinals, bishops, and priests who came from Ireland, England, Spain, Belgium, Nicaragua, Peru, Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil and other nations held the Archbishop as a hero.  The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, had been informed of Romero’s murder just prior to his enthronement in the ancient Cathedral of Thomas à Becket, and had halted the ceremony to decry the murder.  Pope John Paul, on the other hand, was—and remained until his death—opposed to the sort of liberation to which Romero had been converted by the death of Rutilio Grande.  As the funeral progressed and Cardinal Corripio heaped the perfunctory praises on the murdered Archbishop, a bomb suddenly went off in the crowd.  Then a second bomb.  Suddenly snipers appeared on the roofs surrounding the square and began shooting at the worshippers.  The scene turned to bedlam and people ran for shelter from the bullets.  Prelates were hurried inside the cathedral and the coffin containing Romero’s remains was hastily interred in the crypt.  Somewhere between 30 and 50 died in the melee.  While no official blame has ever been assigned for the atrocity, it is generally agreed that the snipers were army troops in civilian dress.  Indeed, the whole events surrounding the assassination and the murders at the funeral were suppressed from investigation for decades with neither the Holy See, nor the United States, nor the Salvadoran government pressing for a full and open investigation.  It was only decades later that witnesses definitively linked D’Aubuisson to the murder of the Archbishop.   Roberto D’Aubuisson was not the sniper but he was the one who gave the orders. 

In El Salvador Archbishop Romero has been considered a saint from the day of his martyrdom.  Pope John Paul (somewhat reluctantly) approved the introduction of Romero’s “cause” (case for sainthood) but it went nowhere during the remainder of his pontificate.  Yet various prelates from the Americas have slowly insisted on its continuance and it has cleared the doctrinal panels who have examined the Archbishop’s writings and sermons for orthodoxy. 

While the normal process of canonization involves a long investigation that includes the certification of miracles performed through the intercession of the posited saint, there is and has always been an alternative route whereby the Pope recognizes, in the name of the Church, the “cult” or devotion offered to a particular person who has long been venerated in a local Church (diocese or region) as a “saint.”  Marko Krizin, Melchior Grodziecki, and Hildegard of Bingen were so canonized by Pope Benedict XVI.  Actually the list of such extra-canonically “raised to the altars” is quite impressive: Albert the Great, Good King Wenceslaus, Margaret of Scotland, Stephen of Hungary, Boniface, Cyril and Methodius, Peter Damian, Peter Faber and Angela of Foligno among others. 

Nevertheless, despite the somewhat illustrious company in which this would put Archbishop Romero, it would considerably anger many right-wing American Catholics who identify Archbishop Romero with the liberation theology of which they have a peculiar paranoia.  Perhaps more threatening to them, however, is that such a canonization would indisputably mark a realignment of the Church with the world’s poor that would make it far more difficult to reconcile the vision of American foreign policy with the Church’s geo-political stand.  As popular as Pope Francis is among most American Catholics, there is a deep fear of him spreading on the American right.  His intention to write an encyclical on our responsibility toward the planet and his open acknowledgement of climate change has been a red flag to conservatives from John Boehner and Paul Ryan to economist Steve Ryan of the Heritage Foundation.  His brokering a change in American foreign policy towards Cuba has sent right wing-nuts from Senator Marco Rubio to Paul Kengor of The American Spectator over the edge. Maureen Mullarkey (how aptly named) of First Things, called Pope Francis “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist” who “sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.” And as for American political gadfly Rick Santorum—he has always considered himself more Catholic than the Pope; now he says he has the proof.  What could be really interesting is what the Pope says when he fulfills Speaker Boehner’s invitation to address a joint session of Congress.  (My bet is that the invitation will be rescinded under the pretext of the first amendment.)  The last thing the right-wing wants is to let a plain-spoken man with Francis’ views get that kind of audience.   Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi will march up the communion aisle with confidence while John Boehner and Paul Ryan will fear refusal, or as Saint Luke put it: the mighty will be cast down and the lowly will be raised up.  And if that isn’t a sign of the end times, I don’t know what is. 

Post script: Commenting on Maureen Mullarkey’s blog, Katholik Krazy blog Rorate Caeli proclaimed: “Well... when you've lost First Things, you've lost mainstream American Catholicism.”  First Things, mainstream American Catholicism???? What parallel universe are they living in???

What May Be Francis' Most Dramatic Break With Tradition

Rumors are flying around that when Pope Francis comes to the United States in October he will continue on to El Salvador where he will canonize Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered by  an assassin from the American backed Salvadoran military in 1980.  The interesting aspects of this canonization is that Romero has not yet been beatified—the normal preliminary step to sainthood—and there as yet no approved miracles to testify to his sainthood. 

Romero was born on August 15, 1917 to carpenter Santos Romero and his wife, Guadalupe de Jésus Galdámez in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador.  He was one of 8 children. The family does not seem to have particularly devout as the child was not baptized for 20 months after his birth, yet Oscar himself was drawn to the churches in town even as a very young child.   There were only three years of formal schooling available to him but he was tutored by a local teacher and at age 13 went off to a high-school seminary.  His father, a practical man, had wanted him to be a carpenter and the boy showed promise in that trade, but wanted to be a priest.  His intelligence was noticed in the seminary and he was eventually sent to Rome for theological studies and he was ordained in Rome on April 4, 1942.  World War II was raging at the time and on his way back to El Salvador, Father Romero and his companion, Father Valladares were imprisoned in Cuba as they were coming from Italy, then an Axis power.   He was soon repatriated and took up pastoral work in his native region in eastern El Salvador. 

Romero was by nature a conservative and a pious man.  He did what for the time and place were some innovative things such as establish Alcoholics Anonymous groups, but by and large he was given to supporting the traditional devotions and pieties of the Salvadoran peasants. 

El Salvador had from the time of its independence from Spain been controlled by an oligarchy sometimes called “The Fourteen Families.”  (There were, in fact, more families than fourteen, though they were all inter-related through marriages and had common interest.)  These were the great landowners of Spanish blood.  Their children were sent to Cuba or Mexico or even to Spain and other European countries for education.  They lived on large estates farmed by peasants of Native American or mixed blood.  After independence their cash crop was indigo from which an expensive blue dye is produced, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century the economy had switched to coffee production.  90% of the land was owned by this small number of wealthy families.  The Constitution was written to give these families a majority of seats in the national assembly and they—or their client families—held the officer positions in the military.  The military controlled the government by a series of dictatorships from 1931 until 1979.  A 1932 peasant rebellion led by Farabundo Martí was brutally suppressed with the murder of over 40,000 Salvadoran peasants.  In 1979 the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena was overthrown by a conservative but reformist military junta that realized unless there was some economic and land reform the situation in El Salvador would be untenable and the country would be vulnerable to an extreme left-wing (read Marxist) power-grab.  The American government under President Carter, and later President Reagan, supported to the Junta, while Cuba and more left-wing governments supported the FLMN  (Farabundo Martí Liberation National Front) rebels.  This led to a violent civil war.  In an attempt to suppress the rebels the Salvadoran Army, under command of the Junta, was often responsible for indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, most notably the El Mozote Massacre in 1981. 

The teachings of the Catholic Church regarding a just social order—teachings rooted in the Encyclicals of Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI and the decrees of the Second Vatican Council—were a powerful stimulus for the poor of El Salvador to seek social change and this left priests, nuns, and lay catechists vulnerable to attack by Junta forces who saw the work of the Church as supporting a more radical social change than they were prepared to make. 

Meanwhile in 1970 Romero had been named auxiliary to Archbishop Luis Chávez of San Salvador and four years later given his own diocese of Santiago de Mariá, a poor rural diocese.  In 1977 Paul VI named Romero to be Archbishop of San Salvador in succession to Archbishop Chávez who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Romero was, as I said, a pious priest of a more conservative bent.  He was certainly no political activist.  But like many holy people, he did not limit himself to those with whom he agreed but had friends across the political and theological spectrum.  Among his closest friends was the Jesuit Rutilio Grande.  Grande worked among the peasants, catechizing them and raising their consciousness to understand that the sort of social dysfunction where wealth in concentrated in the hands of a few while others lack necessities is contrary to the Gospel and the Kingdom of God.  Rutilio Grande had huge influence among the peasantry and his message became a threat to the existing social order.  In a famous homily he declared

I am fully aware that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border at Chalatenango, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God ... of being an agitator, of being a Jewish foreigner, who confuses the people with exotic and foreign ideas, anti-democratic ideas, and i.e., against the minorities. Ideas against God, because this is a clan of Cain’s. Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again. And they have said so.

On March 12, 1977, Grande and two lay associates travelling with him were ambushed and killed.  Romero heard of the murders and went at once to the church where the three bodies lay.  After celebrating Mass there, the Archbishop spent hours listening to the stories of the peasants who had gathered their to mourn.  Unable to sleep, he spent the night in prayer and underwent a deep personal conversion where he realized that the Church, if it were to be faithful, could not stand silently by while the poor were being driven ever deeper into the dirt but had to stand with them and for them.  He said that as he looked at the body of his friend,  he thought “If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path” The morning after the murders, Archbishop Romero announced that he, as Archbishop, would attend no government function until the murders had been investigated.  In a Catholic culture where the presence of the Archbishop gave a legitimacy to the government, this act of separation was seen as a repudiation of the government’s moral legitimacy and a severe blow to its credibility.  It was an invitation to reject government authority.  The following day Romero published the following statement

The true reason for [Grande's] death was his prophetic and pastoral efforts to raise the consciousness of the people throughout his parish. Father Grande, without offending and forcing himself upon his flock in the practice of their religion, was only slowly forming a genuine community of faith, hope and love among them, he was making them aware of their dignity as individuals, of their basic rights as words, his was an effort toward comprehensive human development. This post-Vatican Council ecclesiastical effort is certainly not agreeable to everyone, because it awakens the consciousness of the people. It is work that disturbs many; and to end it, it was necessary to liquidate its proponent. In our case, Father Rutilio Grande.

As if this was not sufficient aggravation to the government, Archbishop Romero next cancelled all Masses throughout his Archdiocese, instead summoning the faithful to a single outdoor Mass in San Salvador.  150 priests and over 100,000 faithful attended.  
to be continued