Let's Hear It For Those Swiss Abbots

Mariastein Abbey

A few weeks ago (see entry for January 15, 2013) I published an entry about Martin Werlen, the Abbot of the famous abbey of our Lady of Einsiedeln in Switzerland and his call for radical reform in the Church—echoing the same call of the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini shortly before his death last year (cf blog entries for September 2, 3, 4, and 12, 2012).  A reader sent me a link to an article about another Swiss Abbot, Peter von Sury, Abbot of Mariastein , a Benedictine community in Solothurn Canton.
Like Abbot Martin, Abbot Peter pulls no punches in his estimation of what the Church needs today.  Abbot Peter is trained in the canon law and he sees the problem is that the structures of authority in the Church are broken.  He calls for consistency and transparency in the way decisions are made in the Church.  He thinks that politics have replaced the action of the Holy Spirit in Church administration (ya think?) and that there is a need to return to the ancient system of choosing bishops by involving the local faithful and clergy along with the regional bishops.  The present system is nothing more than turning the local dioceses into “papal fiefs.” 
An article by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt in the National Catholic Reporter quotes the abbot:
Asked why episcopal nominations are so important, he replied: "The bishop has a pivotal position in the church. He is a 'pontifex,' that is, a bridge-builder, and must have a personality that integrates. Unfortunately, we have again and again experienced the opposite, as, for instance, at the moment in the diocese of Chur. There the bishop is obviously not a bridge-builder, but someone who sows discord, and that is disastrous.
"In my opinion, a bishop who sows discord is morally obliged to step down. The same applies to an abbot or a parish priest. If they sow discord, they destroy a part of the church. It is not a case of blame. There are simply situations when people sow discord -- perhaps even without meaning to do so, and then they must step down."
"Church institutions, including the papacy, should have an opposite number as it were. In economics or politics we speak of checks and balances," von Sury said. Parishes have parish councils, dioceses have priests' councils, which the bishops are supposed to listen to. "But for the bishops' conference level and the world church level there is nothing similar. This is a great mistake," he said.
Boy, this guy should visit the Church in the United States and see the damage that prelates such as Bishop Robert Finn (Kansas City), Bishop Robert Morlino (Madison WS), Bishop Thomas Olmsted, (Phoenix)  and Archbishop William Lori (Baltimore, formerly Bridgeport) have wreaked  in their climbs up the ecclesiastical caterpillar pillar.  On the other hand, Rome did get Cardinal Law and then-Archbishop (now Cardinal) Raymond Burke out of Boston and St. Louis respectively before they totally trashed those dioceses with the discord they had caused.    
The Bishops of Switzerland, with the exception of the aforementioned Bishop of Chur, Vitus Huonder, have shown themselves very willing to listen to the faithful in their dioceses and the move for more dialogue in the Church. 

My correspondent wondered what sort of water these Swiss Abbots are drinking and if we can bottle it.  O Please God, let such waters flow in your Church today. 

Wanted: Sound Leadership

Hilda of Whitby,

a match for any

bishop today

I was at a talk several weeks ago by Father John O’Malley SJ, a Georgetown professor who is a historian and who has written extensively about the Second Vatican Council.  Father O’Malley was asked about the role of women in the Church and he pointed out that until recently the Catholic Church has been seen as a champion of the cause of women.  He mentioned—as I always make a point in my classes—that sixty years ago the only women in the United States who were College Presidents or Hospital Administrators were Catholic nuns.  (Even the famous “Seven Sisters” women’s colleges had men presidents!)  Catholic sisters had broken any number of glass ceilings in the professional and academic world.  (Of course, this was an America in which few women worked outside the home.)  One can go further back in history and see the medical work done by Sisters on the battlefields of our Civil War as well as some of the horrible European wars.  Educational opportunities were open to Sisters that were not open to laywomen of any faith.  Catholic women like Mary Ward and her Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Angela Merici with the Ursulines, established schools for women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when education was not available to women.  And of course in the Middle Ages the great Abbeys of nuns such as Barking, Gandersheim, Helfta, or the Paraclete were centers of learning for women that rivaled the great monastic schools of men.  There were remarkable women intellectuals such as Hildegard of Bingen, Roswitha of Gandersheim, Hilda of Whitby, Gertrude of Helfta, Heloise, Gertrude of Hakeborn.  In addition to these scholars there were the great women mystics of the medieval period—Hadewijch of Antwerp, Beatrice of Nazareth, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Genoa, Julian of Norwich, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Brigitte of Sweden and others who wrote books about their spiritual experiences that shaped the lives and spirituality of countless people. 
These women were not people who let others—even priests and bishops—think for them.  There were souls filled with grace and shaped by the faith of the Church but who had the courage and intellect to make up their own minds and be true to their own inner lights—or rather, to be true to the grace of the Holy Spirit within them.  And why do some people think that women—and men—should let the bishops and the priests think for them today? 
What we need are bishops and priests who themselves are intelligent, well-read, clear thinkers and articulate who can explain the principles of our faith in a intellectually convincing way. We don’t need fools like Bishop Daniel Jenky who use intelligence-free rhetoric or Bishop Thomas Olmstead who speaks without researching his subject.  We don’t need a Francis George who is brilliant but so tightly wrapped in his intellect that he inarticulate.  We don’t need a Donald Wuerl who with a second-class academic degree and no professorial experience thinks he can take on a far superior and more practiced intellect such as Elisabeth Johnson.  Hearing someone like Father O’Malley talk, I know there are people in the Church who know their stuff, see the connections between the historic faith of the Church and contemporary life, and can explain the faith at a level when people can make the connections for themselves and make rational and responsible decisions for themselves.  Is it too much to ask that bishops and Church leaders be selected from among the ranks of such men?  The day of a laity who will follow directions of a hierarchy and clergy are over.  People today need to be convinced and we need leaders in the Church who can make their case and not merely expect to impose their will. 

America's Two Churches

Catholic Church, St. Mary's

City, Maryland in the simple

American Recusant style



In my courses on the history of the Catholic Church in the United States I show the students that there has existed two distinct Catholic Churches in the American Republic for two hundred years now.  One Catholic Church is represented by the colonial tradition brought by English Recusants to the Maryland colony with the Ark and the Dove in 1634.  Led by Jesuit Father Andrew White the Catholic settlers in Maryland brought the discreet Catholicism of Stuart England.  Due to the penal laws in England, it was a sober Catholicism where devotional life was centered in the family and devoid of the public spectacles of Continental Catholicism.  Its spirituality, impregnated with the heritage of its Jesuit chaplains, was centered about the person and life of Jesus Christ and it was a faith of spiritual reading and meditative prayer.   Its churches were simple and its liturgy plain in the recusant style.  This was the Catholicism of John Carroll and Leonard Neale.  It fit in well with the American Republic and its democratic traditions.  It was glad to be rid of monarchy and monarchial style—the Catholics universally supporting the War of Independence and embracing the new Republic.  Its new Cathedral in Baltimore, the Basilica of the Assumption designed in the neo-classic Federal Style by Benjamin Latrobe, was devoid of statues even of Christ and his Mother.  Its clergy, including Archbishop Carroll, wore simple clothes in the lay style but in black or darker shades and without ornamentation.  Its nuns—Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s Sisters of Charity, eschewed veils and wimples for the sober dress and bonnets characteristic of widows in the early nineteenth century.  

With the waves of immigration that began coming after 1830, another Catholic Church took root in the United States.  Initially predominately German, it was soon supplemented by Italians and later by Poles and refugees from what was the Hapsburg Empire.  Here came the tradition of public processions in the streets and churches rich with stained glass and statuary.  Here came devotion to myriad saints from long ago and faraway places.  (The Irish—having lost their traditions after three centuries of English Persecution—mostly identified more with the old American/Recusant heritage.) This immigrant Catholicism and old American Catholicism barely recognized one another as sharing the same faith.  At first the American bishops tried to suppress the European Continental Catholicism or at least confine it to ethnic parishes but it was not to be contained.  After a period of time it divided along ethnic and more importantly along class lines with the older (and more upper-crust) American families preferring a more sober approach to their faith and the immigrant traditions and working classes liking the more colorful and distinctive expression of Catholicism.  This is far more simplistic than I would like it to be but one can only do so much in a blog entry. 

I think since the Second Vatican Council a second division has cut cross-wise through the American Church.  Again we have two churches.  We have a Church that looks to the past and cherishes the distinctiveness of Catholic identity with its rich ethnic heritage.  There is a strong move to build churches again in the baroque style, filled with color and stained glass and statues.  There is a desire for outdoor processions where priests show off their silk and brocade robes to our mundane world of jeans and sweatshirts.  There is a desire to restore the pomp and power that characterized the Church of the first half of the twentieth century.  I know I make relentless fun of Cardinal Burke and others for their long trains of silk and their fur wraps, but the desire is to hold on to the power that bishops and cardinals once had—and through them we as Church had—over politicians and newspapers for fear of alienating the masses of Catholics who were blindly loyal to their institutional leaders. We resent the loss of power and influence and even mistake this shift as “persecution” or impingements on religious freedom.  

On the other hand there are Catholics today who look not to this past—glorious as it was—but to the future and see the vocation of the Church to be for service.  Cardinal Dulles, in his book on the Catholicity of the Church, says that the first millennium of the Church was characterized by witness, the second by power and the third will be characterized by service.  There are those in the Church who are ready to renounce the drive for power and to move into this third millennium and take up the vocation of service.  They see the Church as here to be servant to the world and think that these signs of earthly power—the long robes, the kissing of hands and rings, the quasi-imperial edicts emitting from bishops like Fabian Bruskewitz, late of Lincoln, or Thomas Olmstead of Phoenix or Cardinal Burke, once of Saint Louis—are anachronisms that make the Church appear, well as the late Cardinal Martini said, 200 years out of date. 

Those who look to the future tend to identify more with the old American tradition; those who relish the past identify more with the immigrant tradition.  Both are Catholic.  Both are American.  But at times we look at one another and wonder how—and if—we are in the same Church at all.    



Of German Popes and American Bishops

Cardinal Sean O'Malley, Archbishop of Boston

with Boston College President, Father William

Leahy,SJ

We have been talking about the German Reform popes and I just want to share one or two reflections on the eleventh century reforms of the Church that might give us something to think about for reform and renewal in the contemporary Church. 
    In a few days I want to review the system of papal elections as one of the chief innovations—or reforms—of the Gregorian Reform was to define the exclusive right of the cardinal clergy of the Diocese of Rome to select a pope.  There were two problems.  One problem was that the custom had arisen of the Emperor, as Vicar of Christ, to appoint the popes.  Fortunately these papal appointees—Sylvester II,  Clement II, Damasus II, Leo IX—were good men and men ardent for Reform.  In fact, the reason the Emperors usurped the ancient rights of the clergy and people of Rome to elect their pope was that the Romans had a tendency to elect men who blocked reform.   Nevertheless, as we shall see, these very same reform minded popes came to see the danger of outside appointment—that the papacy could get caught in politics and the Church might be used for political purposes rather than be allowed to perform its own function given it by its Lord of continuing His work of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  
     I think this should give us some thought for today in regard to the selection of bishops.  At one time, being a historian, I favored a return to the ancient practice that bishops be elected by the clergy and faithful.  As I am older—and either wiser or more cynical, I am not sure which—I have come to believe that this would be disastrous at least in our American environment.  The danger is that the election of bishops would devolve into the most crass forms of partisan politics. One of the reasons for the failure of “parish councils” to be effective in most American parishes is that we Americans automatically think “majority rules” and we failed to understand that councils were meant to be an opportunity for discernment rather than governance.   Americans seemingly cannot help but becoming caught in the whirlpools of politics and then devolve into partisan factions.  The fact that American Catholics are already quite divided into social (and political) liberals and conservatives is a harbinger of impending schism should “democracy” be introduced into Church structures.  In a culture that has given us the Tea Party, and the recent denouements of the irresolvable debt crisis, the Church would tear itself to shreds in such episcopal elections.  We see the issues being faced by the Episcopal Church and to some extent the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America today and I believe this is no time to experiment with democracy in the life of our Church.  In fact, I am not sure that Americans any longer merit democracy in their government.  In saying this, I certainly do not want to change our form of government, but I would like to see our citizenry wake up to their political responsibilities to be informed about the issues and civil in their political discourse. I remember the words of Benjamin Franklin to a woman who asked him, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, what sort of government we were to have under the new Constitution.  Franklin replied: “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”  A Republic demands a responsible citizenship that is informed and educated on the issues before it.  Without mentioning names or espousing one political party over another, it is clear that today’s Americans depend on 15 second sound-bites for their information about some very complex questions.  It would be even worse if the Church with its two millennia of rich and vibrant theological Tradition fell into this trap.  American Catholics—clergy and faithful alike—are too often frightfully ignorant of what it means to be Catholic and fall into the trap of believing what they hear on a “Catholic” radio or TV station or read in blog (even this blog) that portends to speak for the Church.   (This blog has always clearly established that it speaks for no one but its author and that it limits its statements to the historical and make no claim of theological competence.)   
   In expressing my reservations about electing bishops, I am not saying that a process by which clergy and faithful would have a voice in the selection of bishops would not work.  I think the system needs change to permit a genuine discernment process.  But the easy fix of election of bishops would be, I believe, even worse than the current system of papal appointment.  Frankly, it is hard to think of a worse system than the system we now have, but open election would surely be among the possible suggestions.  Papal appointment of bishops is an innovation in Catholic practice, for the most part dating only from the early nineteenth century when, after the defeat of Napoleon, the papacy made a series of concordats with the newly reconstituted European States giving the Holy See the right to appoint bishops in their territory.  For most of history, bishops were elected.  In the early Church they were elected by an assembly of clergy and laity; in the Middle Ages the election tended to fall to the Cathedral Chapters, bodies of clergy that were appointed to staff the Cathedral and often also held the pastorates of the principle churches in the cathedral city.  John Carroll, the first American Catholic bishop, was elected by the Catholic clergy of the new republic and he hoped that future bishops would likewise be elected. Alas, this was the very time that the papacy was wresting the right of election away from the European clergy and was hardly going to grant it to the Americans whose overthrow of monarchy was a challenge to everything the Holy See believed in regarding authority and its Divine Right to govern both in the civil and religious spheres. 
     I think we need to look at the American episcopacy and ask ourselves—and the Holy See—if this is the best they could give us.  Granted we have some outstanding men.  Sean O’Malley of Boston is heads and shoulders above his peers.  Donald Trautman of Erie has a too often overlooked perspicacity.  “Teddy” McCarrick, emeritus of Washington and Cardinal-none-the-less, while sly and ambitious, is a man of unparalleled talents who has well served both the Holy See and the American government in many behind the scenes diplomatic maneuvers.  A trained sociologist, McCarrick has his hand on the pulse of the American Catholic, but alas has gone unheeded by both his mitered peers and Rome.  In fact, the Holy See could not have been more happy to accept his resignation when his 75^th birthday came round some years back.    Another bright boy whose intelligence won him no friends in Rome is John Quinn who took an early retirement (to the relief of Rome and American conservatives) from his post as Archbishop of San Francisco.  Howard Hubbard of Albany and Matthew Clark of Rochester are two survivors of what is now the “Old School” –bishops appointed under the influence of Jean Jadot, the Apostolic Delegate in the late ’70’s.  They have done wonderful work in their respective dioceses, but their influence has been eclipsed by the mediocrity of the vast majority post-Jadot appointees.   There are other bishops of note, but they seem to be in the minority.  Wilton Gregory, once the hope for the future, has fizzled into a bit of a disappointment. Gerald Kicanas was maneuvered out of leadership by the machinations of the intelligent but visionless Cardinal George of Chicago; Timothy Dolan of New York was George’s candidate for president of the Bishops Conference in place of Kicanas.  Dolan seems to have some promise, if not of above-average intelligence at least of good pastoral sense.  Wuerl of Washington has a record of being overly cautious.  He lacks his predecessor’s (McCarrick’s) Machiavellian streak, but he also lacks McCarrick’s dash.  As for Olmstead, Bruskewitz, Chaput, Sheriden—well, alas but mediocrity is beyond their highest reach.  Chaput’s move to Philadelphia and its prospects of a red hat are an indication that the system is broken.   Archbishop Chaput is no Raymond Burke; his Capuchin-Franciscan roots save him from Burke’s pomposity and make him a decent human being but he is not a man of any but the most narrow vision.  Overall, the state of the American Episcopacy is appalling.  When one looks at the outstanding work done in the early ‘80’s with two superbly researched and well thought out  pastoral letters, one on economic morality and the other on the moral issues surrounding nuclear weapons, it is frightening to reflect that today’s hierarchy lack the talent to deliver much needed guidance on contemporary issues.  Sometime I will have to write on why (I think) there has been a dumbing-down of American bishops.  But that will be in the future.  Perhaps a blog on the relationship of John Paul II and Ronald Reagan will give us insight.