Why Arlington? Historical Context of Clerical Madness 3

While I mentioned Fathers X, Y, and Monsignor Z, unnamed clergy of the Arlington diocese who developed disciples among the more extreme younger clergy of their diocese in order to pass on the “true faith” of old-time-religion, Catholic style.   One of these had come to the diocese in its early days having been refused final vows in the Dominican Order because he was too backwards looking for the Dominicans.  Now, internationally the Dominicans are a very liberal order, faithful to their mendicant tradition of service to the poor and so one of the most committed orders to the principles of justice and peace as laid out at Vatican II and in a string of encyclical letters going back to John XXIII and Mater et Magistra, but the East Coast Province in the USA, the Saint Joseph Province is not typical of the larger Dominican family.  They are good men and well trained in theology and they perform well in their many ministries, but when it comes to the trappings of religious life and to their theological methodologies, they are antiquarians of the first degree.  It is impossible for me to imagine what it would take to be dismissed from them for being “too conservative.”  But seminarian X was.  He was no sooner out of the Dominicans than picked up for Arlington and ordained by Bishop Welsh for the Arlington Diocese. 

I don’t know as much about Father Y except that he is not native to the Arlington Diocese but a refugee from the then liberal Archdiocese of Detroit from the days of Cardinal Dearden.  He has ties to Opus Dei, and is a polished orator—perhaps more accomplished as a stylist than for his content.  In other words, he is more articulate than knowledgeable—a common quality of many clergy.  Well, it would be if one could say that there were many of the Catholic clergy who were at least articulate.  Father also is given to the buttons and bows of clerical dress and to gilding the lily of the Mass with as many liturgical antiques as can be devised.  Before the restoration of the Tridentine Mass he was known as a specialist in tricking out the “new Mass” to look like the old in the “Solemn High Masses” at his former parish.    However, to his credit, I hear that he makes a charming guest at dinner parties in the better homes of Northern Virginia. 

Monsignor Y—and to be honest, while I am not certain that he is a Monsignor (I suppose I could check the Kennedy Directory) I know that that he does not contradict those who called him that—is a pompous Irish windbag who would introduce himself as “Doctor Y” although he had never finished his dissertation.  The Irish are very good at making fun of pompous asses, but that requires that there be among them pompous asses of whom to make fun and Monsignor Y has always been good enough to oblige.  He particularly liked to criticize the “faulty” translation of the 1970 Sacramentary when the fact was his Latin was not, shall we say, itself Ciceronian.  

There actually was (is) a fourth horseman to this Arlington Apocalypse.  This fellow is bright, and I hear an above average Latinist.  He has always dreamed of living in a world untouched by Vatican II and so appealed to go to Bishop Fabian Bruskewicz’s Diocese of Lincoln, the only diocese more conservative than Arlington.  Unfortunately he was sent back after only a few years.  Like the others he was given to whining and complaining about the liturgy and was very active in the “Reform of the Reform” movement championed by Father Joseph Fessio, a member of the minority of Jesuits who have rejected the direction that the late Father Pedro Arrupe took the society during his tenure as General (1965-1983).  These Fathers were the nucleus of a catechetical school for young priests to unteach them anything they had learned in the seminary that smacked of progressive thought and to reform them in their own image and likeness as “Reform of the Reform” clergy.  They have had great influence over many of those 84 priests ordained by Bishop Keating and not a few of those ordained by the current bishop, Bishop Loverde, and their catechisis has created a distinctive sort of priest that one does not often find elsewhere.  In Arlington one might find a priest in his cassock picking up a few items at the supermarket or taking the parish youth for ice-cream at Coldstone Creamery.  In Arlington it is not all that unusual to find a priest facing away from the people for Mass or celebrating the preconciliar Requiem Mass, perhaps in English with some mumbled Latin, for a funeral.  Birettas are common, Roman or fiddle-back chasubles more common.  Purple Vestments (rather than Resurrection-white) is a common color for funeral Masses. Churches being built in the diocese these days are an architectural throwback to the 1950 Chicago-gothic and antique fixtures from the closed churches of Boston and other northern cities are finding new homes in the parishes of northern Virginia.  God forbid you come to Church with an Obama bumper-sticker on your car—you will find a note on your windshield telling you that you shouldn’t be coming to communion and just to make sure, it is not unlikely that some parish stalwart might track down your license plate and tell your pastor that he should refuse you communion at Mass.  It is not only a considerable number of the clergy in Arlington who are throwbacks to the days of the gentle Torquemada but an invisible empire of NKVD apparatchiks who monitor everything from the sermons of the suspiciously liberal to the liturgical oddities of the boomer generation priests to textbooks in religious education programs, to hymns sung at Mass.  One of their favorite targets of complaint and criticism is none less than the bishop himself.  But more on that in future postings.      

Why Arlington? Historical Context of Clerical Madness 1



Thomas J Welsh, First Bishop

of Arlington



I think the thing that has most worried me about this whole episode of a “fidelity oath” that allegedly was to be imposed on catechists and their teaching aides—some of whom are only in their early teens and would have no idea of what they were being asked to swear to—was the expectation that such an “oath” would apply not only to the public or external forum (what we say, write, publish, teach) but to the internal forum (what we believe to be true and by which we direct our moral actions) and this would break new and dangerous ground in the Church.  The internal forum—matters of conscience—are traditionally sacrosanct in our Catholic tradition and are dealt with only with one’s confessor and/or spiritual director but are never subject to public appraisal.  I was struck in a recent book edited by Jesuit historian John O’Malley (Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?, New York: Continuum, 2011 )  by his insight that in all the anathemas imposed by ecumenical councils from the first, Nicea, to Vatican I (Vatican II did not threaten with anathemas) that they always applied explicitly to what one said or denied or taught or in some way did observably—that is to the external forum—and never to what one thought or held interiorly, i.e., the internal forum.   What was so disquieting in the Arlington kerfuffle was how quick some were to take up the crusade against others with whom they disagree and with how much anger they wanted to push those who disagree with them to the margins of the Church, or even beyond.  One person wrote on the blog of a friend of mine “If your conscience prevents you from teaching what the Church teaches, then perhaps you are a better Protestant than a Catholic. There are a hundred thousand alternatives. Take your pick ”as if she could not too quickly be rid of the company of others whose understanding of our Catholic faith differs from hers.  There is a noxious air in the Arlington Diocese, an atmosphere of anger and self-righteous pseudo-orthodoxy, that is rooted in a curious combination of the American “Culture Wars” and the particular circumstances in which the Diocese has its roots. 

Arlington Diocese, of course, is a case somewhat of itself.  If one knows the history of Arlington, the diocese was conceived in sin and over the decades of its existence has probably needed an exorcist more than a bishop.  Back in the early ‘70’s when Richmond Bishop John Russell who had been a Council Father at Vatican II was retiring and Walter Sullivan—a known progressive—was named to replace him, a group of Northern Virginia pastors used their influence with the Apostolic Delegate to split the Richmond diocese and create the Diocese of Arlington from the Washington DC suburbs and the northern half of the State of Virginia.  To be fair, it was probably time to create a second diocese in Virginia, and these particular pastors had been strategizing about it for a period of time, but the way in which the split was organized and the intentions behind it laid the groundwork for today’s rancorous divisions in the new diocese. 

Monsignors Justin McClunn, T.P.Scannell, Richard Burke among other conservative pastors were by no means the ideologues of today’s Arlington right-wing clerics but they were appalled at the extremes to which some Richmond priests were going in liturgical experimentation.  When one looks at the churches they built—McClunn’s St. Louis in Alexandria or Scannell’s St. Michael’s in Annandale—these were not men trying to undo the liturgical reforms proposed by the Second Vatican Council but neither were they the sort to go along with exotic escapades of the likes of Fr. Tom Quinlan who one Christmas dressed as a “Blue Angel” (remember Marlene Dietrich?) or one Palm Sunday drove a Volkswagen Beetle down the aisle in his Procession of Palms.  This is not to say that McClunn and company were simply “High Churchmen”—while they embraced the new liturgy (done according to the established norms of the times), they were not of the temperament to share decision making with the laity in their parishes nor to be “transparent” about finances.  (Scannell was a financial wizard whose foresight in acquiring property all over Northern Virginia served the new diocese well when it came time to open new parishes.)    Let me also say that McClunn, Scannell, Burke and associates were, at least in my memory (I was quite young then and only an observer to the diocese being a grad student in DC but with many ties to Northern Virginia and its clergy) were gentlemen.  While I would at the time not have agreed with them on very much about the Church and where it needed to go, and while most of my clergy friends were in the opposition camp to them, I found them unfailingly hospitable and gracious men.  I cannot say that about many in the current crop of their heirs among the Arlington crazies.  

It was a disappointment to this coterie of monsignoral conservatives that McClunn was not, as expected, named the new bishop.  And perhaps, in retrospect, it was too bad that he wasn’t.   Philadelphia auxiliary Thomas Welsh became the first bishop of Arlington.  Welsh was not a bad man nor a retro bishop.  Granted, he was one to put the brakes on, but not to put the car in reverse much less turn around and make hell-bent-for-leather into the days of preconciliar Catholicism.  Nevertheless, the clergy being given the option of with which diocese to affiliate, most of the progressives fled south to Richmond leaving Arlington with a clergy somewhat skewed to the right.  It was not time yet to panic however.  Most of the Arlington clergy were moderate in their conservative views.  Conciliar and post-conciliar reforms—the RCIA, the 1974 revisions in the Rite of Reconciliation, the use of Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist, the option of receiving communion in one’s hand, all were introduced as they were elsewhere.  Altars faced the people.  New churches were being built in designs that reflected the congregational role of participation in the liturgy.  Arlington may have been moving somewhat slower and more cautiously into the emerging Church of Vatican II, but it wasn’t resisting it or even dragging its feet.  But that was before the proactive campaign to recruit recidivist clergy that would take place under Arlington’s second bishop, John Richard Keating.  More on that to come.