"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 Cardinal and the Corpse

Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Several readers pointed out that I recently (September 6^th) reposted the content of an earlier entry (August 25^th) on the History of the Anglican Church during Elizabeth’s reign and her struggle with the Puritan faction.  I am sorry—I had lost track of where I was in the saga and will continue in my next posting to pick up where I had left off.  But today I want to address the latest tempest in our Catholic Pot of Tea—the tale of the Cardinal and the corpse. 

It seems that the cause for beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, the famous media evangelist of the 1950’s and early ‘60’s, has come to a halt because Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, will not allow the remains of the Archbishop to be exhumed from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral where they rest in the crypt of the Archbishops of New York and be sent to the Diocese of Peoria, Sheen’s hometown, which is overseeing the process of having Sheen declared a saint.

Normally—and the operative word is normally, there are exceptions—in the process of beatification and canonization, the remains of the candidate are identified and relics are collected from the remains.  There are exceptions.  Saints like Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe who died in the Nazi Concentration Camps were cremated and no remains were available.  Blessed John Henry Newman’s body had totally decomposed leaving not even fragments of bone due to the type of soil with which the grave had been filled.  Various other saints, especially from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been—as was the custom of the day—buried in lye which left no remains.  Many saints from the Middle Ages or early modern period had had their bones deposited in charnel houses where they could not be distinguished from the hundreds of others whose remains had also been put there.  There is no hard and fast rule about needing to examine the remains or to collect the relics.

The Archdiocese of New York has said that they are not willing to have the remains removed to Peoria because it was the wish of the Archbishop, and it continues to be the wish of his surviving family, that he be buried in New York.  Bishop Sheen, like the late Joan Rivers, was Showbiz personified in death as well as in life.  Peoria, on the other hand, would like to have the remains which they had planned to inter in Peoria Cathedral where Sheen was ordained a priest in 1919.  The Peoria Chamber of Commerce would also like the remains to be placed in the Cathedral as it would not only draw the devout to their lovely but oft-neglected city, but also be a magnet for fans of the preternatural because, believe me, the Bishop’s Ghost would haunt the site until his remains were returned to the Archbishops’ Crypt in New York. 

The late Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, dean of the American Catholic historians, in his gossipy Catholic Bishops: a Memoir, relates how Sheen broke down in sobs the morning he read in the papers that Francis Spellman had been named Archbishop of New York.  It had been Sheen’s ambition that he would one day succeed to that See.  Denied the honor in life, he was consoled by the promise of Cardinal Terrence Cooke that he could be buried in the crypt reserved for the New York Archbishops beneath the altar of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. 

Cardinal Dolan is being blamed by the Katholic Krazies for sabotaging the cause for Archbishop Sheen’s beatification.  It is just another indication of how evil this prelate is—talking to President Obama, letting homosexuals march in the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade: is there no end to this man’s dastardly conduct?  In fact, the story seems to be a bit more complicated. 

The New York Archdiocese has said that while short of instructions from Rome it would not release the remains of the Archbishop Sheen to Peoria, but that it would not hinder the process of beatification.  When the Roman Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, the dicastery responsible for the process of beatification and canonization, has informed the Archdiocese that the proper time had come to take the step, the remains could be identified in New York and relics collected from them before the body was returned to the crypt in Saint Patrick’s.  This offer did not satisfy Bishop Jenky of Peoria who suspended the process indefinitely.  There were assurances that the suspension had nothing to do with any new disclosures that undermined Bishop’s Sheen’s character or orthodoxy.

I suspect to the contrary.  Unless Bishop Jenky is just so determined to have the remains in Peoria that he will not move forward without possessing them, there is something here that is not quite right.  The examination of the remains could take place in New York.  The Archbishop should certainly be allowed to have his remains rest in the place of his choice.  It sounds like there is some problem that could stop the cause and this squabble over the remains is a diversion to explain what might otherwise be more embarrassing.  Whatever the issue is, however, it does not detract from the incomparable work that the late Fulton Sheen did in brining the faith—and not only the Catholic Faith, but religious faith in general—to millions of people in his day.  If the popular cult for the Archbishop continues to grow, the beatification will happen whether his remains remain in New York or he sent home to the city from which as a seminarian he could not wait to escape.  

History in the Making: Some Thoughts About the Beatification of John Paul II

One of the thousands of Posters that
dotted the streets of Rome during
the funeral of  Pope John Paul II

This is the weekend that John Paul II will be beatified by Pope Benedict XVI—just six years after his death.  The beatification is not without some controversy and, to be honest, I am surprised that it has all come about this fast.  For one thing, I had heard over the last several years that Pope Benedict was not anxious to advance the “cause” of his predecessor. In part, I think this was a prudent reservation on the part of the current Pope.  The papacy of John Paul will be an extremely complex one to historically evaluate.  “It was,” as one BBC commentator replied at the time, “the best of times; it was the worst of times.”  John Paul was probably the most significant individual in the collapse of the Soviet Empire, not only demolishing the tyrannical regimes but  making Stalin a posthumous laughingstock for his derisive comment “How many divisions does the Pope have?”  John Paul had immense popularity—especially with the world’s youth and never passed up an opportunity to reach out to them.  Yet one cannot say that he brought them back to the practice of the faith, much less to the moral standards which the Church teaches.    He took some remarkable steps with interreligious and ecumenical dialogue.  At the same time, since his death there has been some serious rethinking of those very same interreligious and ecumenical advances, not least of all by the current Pope.  Probably more seriously, there are questions regarding his handling of the Sex Abuse situation in the Catholic Church—how much did he know and in what ways did his policies hinder justice and leave young people exposed to predators?  Too, some observers believe that that he greatly weakened the Church by selecting bishops for their loyalty without sufficient regard to their pastoral skills, prudent judgment, or intellectual ability.  Certainly we can see in the United States that we no longer have sufficient numbers of articulate or intellectual leaders among the American Bishops to write the sort of pastoral letters that the Bishops turned out on Just War Theology and Nuclear Weapons or the Economic Morality that the bishops of thirty years ago turned out.  Of course good leadership or bad leadership does not reflect on the personal sanctity of the candidate.  We have had saintly popes who failed to meet the leadership challenges of their times.  But the question remains—in what way the example of Pope John Paul II reflects the extraordinary degree of sanctity and virtue that sainthood represents.  He was pious, granted—but piety is not holiness.  I am not saying that this beatification is a mistake—only that it will be corrected—if corrected it need be—by time’s passing and history’s critique.

As for the rapidity of the process—note here some medieval canonizations (not beatifications) and see their time line:    

Name                       Year of death     Year of Canonization       

Anthony of Padua            1231                       1232    
            Francis                                 1226                      1228

Claire of Assisi                   1253                      1255

Hugh of Grenoble            1132                      1134

Elizabeth of Hungary      1231                      1234

Thomas Becket                 1170                      1173

Galgano Guidotti              1180                      1184

Hugh of Cluny                   1109                      1120

Gilbert of Sempringham1190                       1202

Dominic                              1221                       1234

Bernard of Clairvaux       1153                      1174

I am sure there are other “quickies” in addition to these, but it does show that at one time the Church didn’t scruple to move ‘em thru.  By the way, I will be in Rome this week and doing some travelling for the next week or two so be patient.  I won’t be posting every day but I will be collecting photos and doing some research.