A Sidebar on the Krazies

Saint Teresa of Avila

I just finished reading a paper by a graduate student from Boston College describing how Saint Teresa of Avila was able to escape the limitations normally placed on women in sixteenth century Spain and write her phenomenal corpus of the Spiritual Life.  Teresa had everything stacked against her.  She was a woman in one of the most misogynist cultures of the Christian west.  She was not only a woman, but had a Jewish bloodline that made her doubly suspect to the Inquisition.  She was writing at the time where the Spanish Church, keenly sensitive to the threat Protestantism posed in Northern Europe, had a social paranoia Iover the Alumbrados, a movement heavily dominated by women, who were practicing and teaching mystic practices  without proper Church oversight.  Indeed, the Church had grown exceptionally fearful of mysticism even among the clergy.  (And this is ironic because 16^th century Spain was a hotbed of Spirituality with not only Teresa and John of the Cross, but Ignatius Loyola, Peter of Alcantra, Francis Borgia, Juan de Avila, and others.) 

Teresa beat the system by using its own rules and without directly confronting it.  Don’t get me wrong, Teresa had confrontative skills to beat the band, but it was not her usual method.  Her life of profound contemplative prayer endowed her with sufficient confidence to go about her mission by remaining anchored in the security of her knowing herself exceptionally well and trusting in God’s providence.  Her skills at patient understanding and prayer did not simply extend to her overcoming the limitations the Church would normally have placed on her—and did try at times to place on her—but also governed her human relationships.  As a young nun, and visiting with her sister for reasons of health, Teresa encountered a priest who she describes as being “enchanted” (literally, as in the use of a magic talisman) by a local woman who then had become his mistress.  Teresa did not admonish him, scold him, declaim him to the bishop, or shame him in front of his parishioners.  She befriended him, even allowing him to fall in love with her, until he got to the point where he could break the spell.  Indeed, while severe with herself, Teresa was a woman of immense patience with others, a patience that was the fruit of contemplative prayer.  In contemplative prayer we learn to see the world and all whom it holds (including ourselves) with the eyes of God.  It greatly colors our perception. 

The author of this paper speaks how in her contemplative life Teresa overcame the sort of binary relationships that dominate our culture: rich, poor; people of color, whites; liberals, conservatives; women, men.  Her method was to move away from the tension created by the binary relationship and introduce Christ as the third party in the relationship.   How did Christ the other? And then, by means of contemplative prayer, to let aside her own vision to see with the eyes of Christ.   The eyes of God are filled with compassionate love for every one of his creatures.  Why do we have to come into conflict when Christ offers us the potential of reconciliation?

When I returned to my writing , I thought back to Pius V and his Bull, Regnans in Excelcis, excommunicating and deposing Elizabeth.  Elizabeth was giving Catholicism in England a discrete modus vivendi.   Her Catholic subjects could be loyal to her and still good Catholics.  But no, Pius had to speak up for “The Truth.” The only problem is if it were God’s Truth it would have been a reconciling Truth and not a dividing one.  Some people are like that.  Teresa and Pius are both saints; Teresa is a Doctor of the Church, an honor not given to Pius.  Both lived holy lives; only one has been found to be an exemplary teacher of the Church’s Truth—and it isn’t the one who was Pope;  it was the Jewish Lady from Avila.

I think this is what gets me going about the Katholic Krazies.  We have a few on the posting horizon, namely one with the blog “Pope Francis the Destroyer” and the other being the infamous “Mundabor”   whom any number of you keep writing me about, who just cannot think beyond what they perceive to be truth.  (Notice the lack of the capital there.)  All who agree with them—and there don’t seem to be many—are “right”  and all with whom they disagree (most notably Pope Francis) are on the short rode to hell. 

I have read that the etymology of the word “devil” comes via the French diable from the Latin diabolus and the Greek diabolos.  Diabolos in turn comes from two Greek words, dia and bollein: dia means “apart;” bollein means to “hurl” or to “force.”   The devil is the one who divides, who undermines God’s plan of bringing all creation into One in Christ.   (Some dictionaries list dia as “across,” but across not in the static sense of distance but in the more dynamic sense of separation and division.  I am not a fan of literal translation because it doesn’t show one how people of another language actually used the language in every day speech, but to satisfy the devotees of Liturgiam authenticam, a very literal translation of dia bolein would be “to throw across” in terms of a person who hurls insults or slanders “across” at someone else.)  

The acrimonious tones of some of these katholic krazies, and here I don’t mean just the krazier-than-thous like Mundabor and his ilk but a lot of the run of the mill krazies as well) reminds me of the tragedy when twenty years ago or so Cardinal Bernadin established the “Common Ground Initiative” to open dialogue among Catholics of different ideas and perceptions in an effort to establish what we could agree on instead of focusing on that about which we disagree with each other.  He was stabbed in the back by two of his fellow Cardinals, that paragon of Sheparding, Cardinal Law and the grandmotherly old Cardinal Hickey, then of Washington.  It was a lost opportunity for harmony and reconciliation.  And the American Church has paid over and over for this cardinalatial evil.

In the same way a distinguishing mark of the Katholic Krazies today is their opposition to Interreligious and Ecumenical Dialogue.  Lines of division must be drawn in the sand, they insist, to defend and affirm “the truth” against the “heresies” of all with whom they disagree: Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, President Obama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sister Joan Chittester—the list just goes on and on.  But what if the truth they want to affirm isn’t the real truth?  If it is a message of division it is the devil’s truth, not God’s. 

Teresa of Avila, in her day, knew nothing of Ecumenism.  She fretted about all the “Lutherans in hell” by which she meant Calvinists, but didn’t know the difference.  Prejudice, even among the saints, is like that—an expression of ignorance.  But even there it wasn’t judgment she was passing but a compassionate concern for souls she feared were or would be lost.  The lack of “Truth” in others caused her pain, not self-affirming pride. 

I have studied (and taught) Christian mysticism for thirty years.  One thing that I have learned is that there is no deep authentic relationship with God that does not produce compassion as its chief fruit.  Indeed, as I tell my students, the only infallible sign of God’s Grace in the soul is the increase of charity.  Individually and collectively we must pursue the path of compassion—it is God’s path to bring all Creation into One in Christ.    

Why They Are Afraid of Pope Francis 15

Bishop Bernard McQuaid--19th century architect

of American Catholic Isolationism.  Like they say,

a picture is worth ten thousand words--not the

faithful kept behind the fence. 

WASHINGTON — Shortly before leaving the Capitol for the holiday recess, Senate Democrats gathered behind closed doors to lay out an agenda for 2014. When the majority leader, Harry Reid, exhorted colleagues to “deal with the issue of income inequality,” the talk took a spiritual turn.

“You know,” declared Senator Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent, who caucuses with Democrats, “we have a strong ally on our side in this issue — and that is the pope.”

That Mr. Sanders, who is Jewish, would invoke the pope to Mr. Reid, a Mormon, delighted Roman Catholics in the room. (“Bernie! You’re quoting my pope; this is good!” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois recalled thinking.) Beyond interfaith banter, the comment underscored a larger truth: From 4,500 miles away at the Vatican, Pope Francis, who has captivated the world with a message of economic justice and tolerance, has become a presence in Washington’s policy debate.

The above is taken from an article that appeared in the New York Times a few weeks ago and it illustrates why this papacy is a very different papacy than its recent predecessors.  We have a Pope that isn’t playing in the intramural league.  This papacy is not nitpicking over internal issues like liturgical translations or nuns not being appropriately veiled.  It isn’t simply that this pope doesn’t think that we should stop “obsessing” over same-sex relationships or contraception, but he has taken the Church back out onto the court for serious game with the big boys.  When President Obama visits the Vatican in March it won’t be for the genteel sit-down and photo-op that it was with Pope Benedict.  This Pope is saying something that Mr. Obama (and Mr. Hollande, and Mr. Putin, and Mr. Peres, and Ms. Merkel, and other world leaders) are very interested in.  We’re back in the game now that we have stopped the navel-gazing and remembered our mission to announce the Kingdom of God.  But this is alarming to certain factions within the Church, and the American Church in particular, who are anxious to restore the ghetto mentality that pervaded American Catholicism from the final quarter of the nineteenth-century to the Second Vatican Council when the opened windows in Rome blew a wind strong enough to knock down the isolationist walls that had been carefully constructed by generations of American clergy who were terrified of the world outside the boundaries of the Church.  In the famous words of Bishop McQuaid of Rochester (1823-1909), one of the chief architects of the isolationist policy of the American Church:  “If the walls are not high enough, they must be raised; if they are not strong enough, they must be strengthened…”  When a pro-choice Jewish senator cites the Pope for policy support to a pro-choice Mormon senator—you know those walls aren’t standing anymore.  And this means that Catholics have to deal with the reality of a very non-Catholic world out there.  We can’t stay in our own enclave cheering each other on in our own in-house competitions and refusing to play ball with people who do not accept our basic premises.

Twenty years ago Cardinal Bernardin tried to stem the re-ghettoization of American Catholicism with his appeal for the Catholic Common Ground Initiative.  He was crushed by his fellow Cardinals Bernard Law and James Hickey who were determined that isolationism was the best policy for American Catholicism.  The complex ambiguities of Pope John Paul II’s papacy allowed the narrow vision of Hickey and Law to prevail and it led the American Church into a long cold dark night of increasing irrelevance.  With Cardinal Law the “kingmaker” of American bishops we were given a hierarchy that can only be described as masturbatory in its ecclesial leadership--  Francis George, Raymond Burke, Edwin O’Brien, William Lori, Michael Sheridan,  Edward Egan, John Myers, Edward Slattery, Charles Chaput, Joseph Martino, Fabian Bruskewitz, Thomas Olmstead, John McCormack, Richard Lennon, Thomas Tobin, to mention a few.  It didn’t get better with the rise in Roman influence of Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke and a new generation of bishops who lack vision such as, among others, Robert Finn, Salvatore Cordileone, Thomas Paprocki, Kevin Rhoades, Frank Dewane, and David O’Connell.  This is not to say that there have not been good bishops—and some very good bishops—over the last twenty-five years—but that the balance of power tipped to men who tried to re-fortify the American Church against the larger society.  I have no doubt that this was done in good faith but the results have been disastrous.  The Church not only retreated into a cultural isolationism—losing credibility among many of the more intellectual faithful in the process—but gained a reputation for being intellectually closed and negative in tone.  As one priest often said in his homilies “everyone knows what the Church is against; no one can articulate what it is for—and that is a disastrous position from which to evangelize.” 

Pope Francis has changed all that but to the consternation of those who favor ecclesial isolationism.  It should not be surprising that these same people favor a cultural isolationism that wants to preserve American Catholicism from the rich diversity that its membership reflects.  Their idea of church buildings is the retro appeal of a 1930’s “Chicago basilica style.”  Music is limited to organ accompaniment and Latin libretto.  Religious art is of the pre-Raphaelite revival.  Prayers are found in the Enchiridion or to be said on beads.  Mariachi bands, gospel choirs, and dance have no place. The politics follow with anti-immigrant bias and an identification of Catholicism with what might be called “Spellman Capitalism” in honor of the Cardinal Archbishop of New York who vigorously supported the “military industrial complex” in its war to defend American economic hegemony.  But that is not where Pope Francis is.  Here he is giving his weapons to those closet Marxists who call themselves “Democrats” and overturning all that we Americans hold dear in our dream that any red-blooded American boy can claw his way to the top, earning 230 times what the slaves who toil in his industry earn.  What would Jesus say?  

A Contemporary Reflection on the Becket Controversy

The shrine in Canterbury

Cathedral that marks the

place of Becket's martyrdom

 The posting on Becket raises a contemporary question that perhaps should give us some thought.  Catholic University School of Theology and Religious Education Professor of Moral Theology and Ethics, Dr. John Grabowski, concluded his class on Christian Marriage this past week with a thought attributed to Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.  Cardinal George reportedly said that he expects to die in his bed but he expects his successor to die in prison and his successor to die a martyr.   Professor Grabowski’s point is, of course, that the Catholic Church and American society are on a collision course which will require Catholics of twenty to thirty years hence to face a choice between martyrdom and apostasy.  Dr. Grabowski is not the only Catholic voice—nor is Cardinal George—to raise this possibility.  And while I find the prophecy glum, even morbid, I do not think it is an impossibility.  My only objection is that if we are to die for our faith, let us make sure that it is the Truth of Jesus Christ and his Gospel that is the price of our blood.
Becket died a martyr—but for what principle?  He did not die for the Gospel nor for faith in Jesus Christ.  He did not die in defense of the Trinity or the Real Presence.  He did not die protecting his virginity or defending the poor.  Becket died defending the “right” of the Church to shelter its clergy from due process of the King’s justice.  He died to preserve clerical privilege.  At the time this was thought to be a legitimate reason for his canonization.  At the time many agreed with Becket that the Church should protect its clergy from the King’s Law.  Today, of course, no one believes that.  Only an eccentric of institutionalization quality would claim that a priest or religious who had broken the criminal law should not be tried in a criminal court and punished in the same manner as a member of the laity guilty of the same crime.  We can only judge Becket’s integrity by the standards of his day, but at the same time we cannot judge him to have been right in attempting the shield the clergy from due process of law. 
So what will be the reason that the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago of 2055 will be required to shed his blood?  Will it be his defense of the Eucharist?  Will it be his defense of the Trinity?  Will it be his refusal to deny the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection of Christ?  Most likely not.   It may be his attempts in some way to interfere physically with the continued slaughter of the unborn, a trespass perhaps on an abortion facility or an attempt to physically bar a woman from entering a clinic.  That would probably bring an imprisonment.  Perhaps he will shoot an abortion provider or bomb a clinic.  That would conceivably bring a death penalty.  It may be his refusal to accord the rights bestowed by the civil law to people of same-sex orientation or his attempts to block the rites of the civil law to the same.  Perhaps he will incite hate crimes against LGBT people from his cathedral pulpit.  That would bring imprisonment.  Perhaps he will engage in some act of mortal violence against the LGBT community—that could bring a death penalty.  Perhaps it will be an act of treason to overturn our Constitution and the rights it grants our citizens in favor of a set of rights limited to Catholic moral principles.  I think all this is highly unlikely.  It is not impossible, of course, but it is unlikely.  What is likely and seemingly more and more so with each new wave of seminary graduates—the people that Professor Grabowski is teaching by the way—is that we will have a clergy (and eventually a hierarchy) that is determined to force praxis based on Catholic doctrine on the larger population.  Shrill voices in the Catholic community are demanding that the laws of our land be written to reflect Catholic moral teaching regardless of the fact that these principles are not shared by the majority of the population.  And so if the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago in 2055 is put to death for our “faith” the question historians in the future will ask is—should he have been attempting to force Catholic doctrine on society or has he exceeded the mandate Christ has given to his Church?    
This has, I believe, been our mistake for the past forty years or more.  We want the law to reflect and enforce our religious beliefs.  Christ never gave us a mission to change laws.  He has given us a mission to change hearts.  And in our misguided zeal to force the law to conform to our values, we have in fact alienated hearts from the truth. 
Twenty years ago Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago called for “common ground.”  We need, he said, to sit down with those with whom we disagree and discover on what we agree before polarizing over those points of disagreement.  I believe that conversation with those who defend a woman’s “right to choose” would have opened our ears and hearts to the plight of women who find themselves “trapped” in an “inconvenient” pregnancy.  That does not mean that we would end up embracing abortion policies—it means that we would have to wrestle with how do we effectively help women not to be held back from realizing their potential and striving for their happiness when they find themselves in a problematic pregnancy.  Would there be anything wrong with looking for strategies that would help women?  Frankly we need to hear the stories of women who do not know where to turn.  At the same time such a conversation would have permitted us raise the perspective of the unborn child and his or her future.  My own experience of conversations about abortion is that while I am talking about a child, my interlocutor is speaking about a woman.  In other words, we are not even on the same topic.  Conversations open the path to changing hearts.  It is not done overnight but we would certainly have made more progress in preserving the lives of the unborn than we have with our posters of aborted babies and our rant-chants in front of abortion mills.  Of course Cardinal Law of Boston—you remember the fellow who wanted to protect his priests from criminal law though no Becket he—and Cardinal Hickey of Washington beat the drums of hysteria to make sure that no dialogue ever happened. 
I think we are facing the same question and challenges about same-sex unions.  Frankly we need to sit down and have honest conversations with men and women whose sexual orientation leads them to become emotionally bonded with members of their own sex.  I think we have serious questions and even challenges for their positions.  But I also think we have much to learn in order that some of our preconceptions can evolve from reflecting bias to being based in experience.  Experienced confessors and spiritual directors are discovering that the issues of sin and grace are not as black and white as some think.  As we discover the physiological elements of same-sex bonding our moral theology is faced with new questions we had not asked before.    
If we continue to claim the privilege of writing the laws to reflect our religious beliefs we will turn our society against us—and rightfully so.  I say “rightfully so” because we are not being faithful to Christ and to his mission.  Any use of power by the Church over those who do not freely subscribe to its doctrines is an abuse of power. And it is not martyrdom when you bring down the roof on your own head.  

Inaugural Weekend IV

Cardinal Law, champion

of Common Ground

Well, the inauguration is over and it is time for the President and his administration to move forward—a point I think he well made in his inaugural address.  And he received an important inaugural gift from the Pope last week when the Vatican came out strongly behind his efforts to impose some rationality over access to fire arms.  Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the “papal press secretary,” editorialized in both print and radio supporting the President’s desire to ban assault weapons and “to limit firearms that are making society pay an unacceptable price in terms of massacres and senseless deaths.” 
Of course Father Lombardi, while a Jesuit and may think he is infallible, is not the Pope and does not share magisterial authority.  But then one must understand how the Vatican uses different spokespersons at various levels.  When the Pope speaks it is a matter of teaching to be received.  When a curial official such as a Cardinal or Archbishop who heads one of the Vatican dicasteries speaks, it is a rule—at least if the prelate is speaking in the area where his dicsastery has authority. (Cardinal Law has no such office and Cardinal Burke tends to run at the mouth about any subject that pecks its ways across his somewhat limited intellectual capacity.)  So when the Pope wants to give an opinion on a current matter without binding the faithful, it falls to Father Lombardi.  In other words, he is speaking for the Pope but in a way that does not bind the faithful.  Would that he spoke more often permitting others, including Benedict, to stand in holy silence.  I think we would all do well if we were more often given things to think about and less often directives to follow, but then I foolishly think that most of us can make morally responsible choices.          
In any event, Father Lombardi went on to say that it would be rash to think that the elimination of firearms alone would prevent tragedies such as the Newtown Connecticut massacre, but at the same time he insisted that while such massacres are carried out by people who are deranged by hatred or anger, in the final analysis the victims are killed by guns.  So yes, while people kill people one can also say that guns kill people.  That does make sense to me. 
This call to limit access to guns fits into the long-time policy of the Vatican for disarmament and for bans on the “production, commerce, and contraband of all types of arms;” and the accusation that the weapons industry is fueled by “enormous economic and power interests.”  Ya think?
So here is some common ground between the Catholic Church and the Obama administration.  Of course going back to the days when those giants of moral integrity, Cardinals Law and Hickey, savaged the eminent Cardinal Bernardin, the Katholic Krazies have had no use for common ground.  Hopefully Father Lombardi’s endorsement will prod some of our more audacious prelates to speak up in support of strong gun control laws but they will face the wrath of those who always agree with the Vatican as long as the Vatican agrees with them. 
Tomorrow marks 40 years of Roe v Wade.  Because of the inaugural services being delayed a day, the annual March for Life has been delayed until Friday, January 25^th.  I hope the March is a strong witness for Life in a culture that is fast devolving into the “culture of death.”  But I think Father Lombardi’s editorials seal the deal, that to be pro-life you must also be in favor of some measure of gun- control. It is not enough to be anti-abortion to be pro-life.  There must be a consistency in the ethic of life for one to truly embrace the Catholic commitment to a culture of life. 

On Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine

Bishop Michael Botean

Romanian Catholic Eparch

of Canton OH

We will take a short break from our “Rethinking God” series in which we are looking at how our basic understanding of God has not been unchanging but has evolved over the course of time and look at an indirectly related issue.  I saw the following statement from Jason Miller of Catholics United on the internet.   

“Members of Catholics United delivered petitions with more than 20,000 signatures which said the church's public stands against contraception and same sex marriage distract from what should be the Church's main mission of helping the poor.”
We wouldn't be able to have this type of success without the support of each and every one of our members. This is our victory, and we will continue to be speakers for the poor and marginalized who do not have a voice, just as Jesus commanded us to do in the Gospels.
Well, I am glad that Mr. Miller and Catholic United were able to deliver their petition to the Bishops during their annual meeting in Baltimore.  But who from the Episcopal Conference was sent to meet Catholics United and receive the petition: Bishop Michael Botean of the Romanian Catholic Eparchy (Diocese) of Canton OH.  All due respect to Eparch Botean and to the Romanian Catholic Church but his Excellency is of sufficiently low stature in the hierarchy as for it to be a sign of contempt for Catholics United and the 20,000 members of the faithful that he would be delegated to meet with their representatives and receive the petition.  A bishop is a bishop, and those of the Eastern Churches in communion with the Holy See are of the same dignity as those of the Roman Rite but I sincerely doubt that there was a single Romanian Catholic signature among the 20,000.  I realize that 20,000 signatures can hardly claim to represent 70 million American Catholics but if our bishops were to take our laity with respect and accord the faithful their proper role in holding the faith which they, the bishops, are supposed to teach, they would have sent an Archbishop or a bishop of a major see to meet the delegation.  But their Lordships obviously see that the role of the laity is no more than to pay, pray, and obey.

In the nineteenth century when Blessed John Henry Newman wrote his famous essay “On Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine,” Newman’s “perennial nemesis” responded with his own description of the role of the laity: “To hunt, to shoot, and to entertain.”  Monsignor Talbot obviously hung out with a rather select class of English gentry, but then too our bishops are for the most part out of touch with the average Catholic in the pew.  They say that when a priest becomes a bishop he “has had his last bad meal and will never hear the truth again.”  Alas too true.  Our bishops are, I am afraid, out of touch with the average Catholic.  And as such they see the faithful as those who are to be instructed with their Episcopal wisdom.  But the faithful are the core of the Church (The Church, of course, is the whole body of the baptized, including the bishops.) The faith of the Church which the bishops are required to teach is the faith held by the faithful.  The bishops cannot teach authentically if they are out of touch with the lived faith of the People of God. 
I have heard it said of Cardinal George, the Archbishop of Chicago, that he “lives in his head.”  His priests and people—or many of them—say that he is a man of very low affect.  This means that his Eminence, admittedly a distinguished theologian, lives in a world of ideas and ideals, unaffected by the emotional, or better, the “wholistic” self that integrates the intellectual with the emotional, spiritual, and physical elements of personality.  The Cardinal suffered from polio as a child and has some severe physical limitations and the opinion has been offered that he “lives in his head” because experience has shown him not to trust his body—his body lets him down.  To whatever degree this analysis is true, I feel sorry for his Eminence because such a sorrow about one’s physical limitations is a heavy burden to carry.  But I think our collective hierarchy is of much the same malady—they see themselves as the (visible) head of the Church and they don’t trust the Body.  They and they alone hold the truth.  But the Truth resides in the entire Body and if the Church is reflect that truth our bishops need to become more intuitive and less dogmatic.
Several years back I had a chance to sit down over coffee with Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, retired auxiliary of Detroit.  Bishop Gumbleton is one of the old Vatican II war horses who has always been light-years ahead of his brother bishops in apprehending the Mysterium of the Church.  I asked Bishop Gumbleton what had happened that the great bishops of the American Church were no more—the Gibbons and the Irelands, the Mooneys and the Topels, the Sheils and the McNicholases, the Cushings and the Deardens, the Bernardins and the Haases.  (Of course you also had your share of mitered horses’ asses –the Corrigans, the William O’Connells, the Glennons and the Francis McIntyres.)  Bishop Gumbleton explained the insensitivity of so many of his current brother bishops as that they no longer come from families that were immigrant, working class and labor union, but now come from families that are in the professions and who have been to the “best schools” and belong to the “best clubs.”  Like Newman’s antagonist, Monsignor Talbot, they are simply out of touch with ordinary people.  But those who are charged with teaching the faith of the Church cannot afford to be out of touch with the ordinary people who hold that faith.  The great bishops who are the “Fathers of the Church” –Augustine, Chrysostom, Isidore, Gregory—these were pastors who knew their flocks and cherished the faith as held in the hearts of their people.   Let us pray that God’s flock will be given good shepherds.     

PG-13 Beware of Strong Language

Archbishop John Myers of Newark:

miter impeding circulation to the

brain

Ok—to pick up where we left off: Archbishop Myers of Newark says that those who disagree with Church teaching on (same-sex) Marriage should not present themselves for Holy Communion.  Well, first for the ad hominem response.  His Grace, as he likes to be known, falls into the buffoon category of prelate along with Cardinal Burke, Archbishop Cordileone, Bishops Gracida, Lennon, Jenky, D’Arcy, Dewane and others who have demonstrated their inability to translate the basic principles of Christianity into evangelically sound leadership strategies.  I would distinguish these prelates from those of a much smaller group like Cardinal Law, Archbishop Lori, and several others whose professional integrity and primary commitment to the Gospel seems questionable.  By no means do I think that that the either of these groups prevail in the American Hierarchy. In addition to the buffoons and the bullies, there are also the bland and the brilliant.  While I wish there were more of the brilliant than the bland, I am grateful that the bullies are few and the buffoons are not more.  

Anyone who has spent any time in the company of John Myers knows that he is not a bad man.  He has a good heart.  His episcopal career, however, has often shown bad judgment—such as the summer of 1991 when as Bishop of Peoria and one of the pioneer turn-back-the-clock members of the American hierarchy, he ended up on the cover of either Time or Newsweek, I forget which, and declared in an accompanying interview “Rome has higher things in mind for me than Peoria.”  Cardinal Bernardin always told the story of how Myers’ secretary (just to prove that stupidity is contagious within chanceries), when Myers was Bishop of Peoria, confided to Bernardin’s secretary that Myers was “going to be sent up to Chicago after Bernardin to clean up the mess that Bernardin left.”  Chicago novelist-priest Andrew Greely invented the character of dumb-as-shit Bishop Gus Quill in The Bishop and the Missing L Train (Forge, 2000) as a parody of Myers.  When Myers was (somewhat surprisingly) saved from the obscurity of Peoria (I guess Newark is “higher” if for no other reason than as an archdiocese it carries a pallium) and sent to Newark, there was some apprehension.  But a combination of his bad health and Newark’s good presbyterate led to a relatively uneventful reign.  Thus just when he had a chance to graduate from the buffoons into the bland, this “pastoral letter” more or less sealed his fate among the mitered monkeys.   O well, when all is said and done, he is a good person and on the Day of Judgment that is what matters. 
But as for telling people that they should not go to Communion—well, let’s attribute that to his inability to grasp theological ideas at any level above the religion he learned at his mother’s knee. 
In the first place, the only thing that should separate a Catholic from the Eucharist is the communicant’s consciousness of being in mortal sin.  To disagree with Church teaching in the internal forum—i.e. within one’s own mind and not within any public protest—is not in any way sinful.  There are three requirements, at least according to the old catechism, for mortal sin.  The action itself must be gravely wrong.  Ok, perhaps—and I say perhaps—the action of rejecting (actively rejecting, not simply not accepting) the teaching of the Church on serious matters is gravely wrong.  People do it all the time, but that doesn’t necessarily make it right.  There are those who disagree with Church teaching on capital punishment.  And don’t give me that b.s. that certain doctrines are required and certain ones are optional.  That is what conservatives call “cafeteria Catholicism” and those who disagree with what the ordinary magisterium (in this case the Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae) declares on capital punishment—or just war, or just economic principles, or rights of workers, or other liberal issues—are every bit as much “cafeteria Catholics” as those who argue for women’s ordination or “abortion rights” or marriage equality.  But let’s all concede the point that active dissent from the ordinary magisterium is gravely wrong; there are still two more considerations for a sin to be mortal.  One is that the person must have the freedom of the will for sin.  Normally we have freedom to make up our minds.  There are occasions, however, in which a person can be emotionally or psychologically blinded to an issue.  A woman who has survived a rape might be psychologically unable to freely choose to support the Church’s teaching that abortion is not an acceptable option in the case of a pregnancy resulting from a rape.  A person whose loved one was murdered might not be able emotionally to support the Church’s teaching on the death penalty.  Such examples, of course are the rare exceptions.
Then the third requirement and the one most pertinent here is that the person must know that it is wrong. This is the tricky one.  We don’t know something simply because someone told us.  When I was a child my father would keep me from swimming alone in the lake by telling me that he had to be there to keep an eye out for sharks.  I was still keeping an eye out for sharks in Lake Michigan when I was in my late thirties.  (If I were a bishop, I guess I would be in the buffoon category.)  We know something because it has been told us and we have come to see the truth of what we have been told.  If there is anything wrong in our society—and Church—today it is that people are not critical thinkers.  FOX News works on the principle that you can tell people the most incredible thing and they will swallow the lie: hook, line, and sinker.  Karl Rove made a career out of feeding the masses lies and the masses believed him.  Mitt Romney is totally right—47% of the American People are going to drink Obama’s Kool Aid.  And 47% are going to drink the Republican Kool Aid.  When are we going to learn to think for ourselves—to weigh the evidence we are being fed and seeing if it rings true or not???  And in this blog—you don’t have to agree with me—I just want you to think for yourselves.  God did not create us stupid, he made us in his own image and likeness.  Our intelligence doesn’t match his, but for heaven’s sake—and I mean that literally—use your intelligence whether it is the President speaking or the Pope; whether it is the Newark Star Ledger or Archbishop Myers,  whether it is this blog or that shi*-house rat crazy lady from Woodstock VA with her Hilly Holbrook Les Femmes. 
Anyway—to refocus—if you disagree with a Church teaching it is obviously because you do not know it.  If, for example, you disagree with the Church’s teaching on abortion it is because while you may know that the Church teaches “x” on abortion you do not understand the issue in the way that the Church teaches it.  You see complexities in the issue that the Church teaching has not—at least as far as you know—sufficiently addressed for you to be able to accept the teaching as the Church states it.  There is something that is preventing you from accepting the teaching—it may be you.  It may be your personal experience that has put an emotional or psychological block in the way.  It may be the Church’s failure to articulate the teaching in a way that you can understand or to examine the question from a perspective to which you have access.  An embryologist, for example, may have some detailed knowledge about embryonic development that leaves Church teaching on abortion or stem-cell research open to further questions.  In fact, a sophomore biology student may have questions that people in the Church have not yet sufficiently answered for the Church teaching to make sense to that student.  It is not reasonable to expect people to accept a doctrine that contradicts the knowledge that they already have until that doctrine can be explained in a way that answers their questions or demonstrates that the knowledge that they had brought to the question was itself faulty. 
Now, when we disagree with Church teaching normally we should do so discreetly. I agree that there is an element of scandal when we publically dissent from the teaching of the Church.  There are exceptions to this—and a future entry will perhaps explore that.  Scandal itself is sinful.  But simply to look at a Church teaching and say “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that” is no reason to refrain from communion and no shepherd concerned for the good of his faithful (I am not going to use the word “flock” or “sheep”—that is the problem these guys have in thinking that we are stupid) would suggest that they should refrain from the Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation simply because they don’t agree on every point of doctrine.   A brighter intellect than John Myers would know that; in fact, a deeper man than His Grace would never have suggested it.    

200 Years Behind:??? How Did That Happen?

Cardinal Wyszinski, Polish Patriot and  

mentor to John Paul II

I had mentioned in the previous post that John Paul II at the beginning of his reign appointed liberals such as the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini SJ to the Sacred College (and, in Martini’s case, to a key diocese, Milan) because John Paul seemed to have wanted to develop a consensus among the episcopate to support his planned “corrections” to the Vatican II course the Church was on.  I also wrote that there was, at least in Martini’s case, another agenda item and that was to move the liberal Jesuit out of the leadership role in the two leading Roman theological faculties: the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Biblical Institute.  Martini was “kicked upstairs” as it were from academia where he had a very definite liberal influence to the busy life of the leader of a huge diocese that demanded all his attention.  This second reason, while perhaps the more pressing, doesn’t overshadow the first, however.  The elevation of Americans Roger Mahony and Joseph Bernardin and the French Henri de Lubac are other cases of liberals being advanced to positions of power and influence in the first ten years or so of John Paul’s pontificate.

John Paul, as Karol Wojtyla,  had been a participant in the Second Vatican Council, in the first three sessions as the auxiliary bishop of Krakow and in the final session as the Archbishop of that city.  He was not an enthusiastic supporter of the Council and its agenda, however.  It is important to keep in mind that from the time Wojtyla was nineteen his country had been under the thumb of two of the most ruthless totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century—the Nazi occupation of Poland from 1939-45 and the Soviet dominated Communist government that succeeded the Nazi regime and which fell only in 1989.  As difficult as the Communist years were for the Church, the Nazi occupation was actually worse.  The Poles—and the Polish Church—survived only by forging an unshakeable unity of the Polish people around the Church and the Church around the Primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski.  Because this consolidation of People and Church depended on the total identification of Polish Culture and Identity with their Roman Catholic faith where the Church was Poland and Poland was the Church, there was great resistance to any change lest the change provide a crack in the impenetrable façade of Catholic Polonialism/Polish Catholicism.   Liturgical changes were minimal and certainly the pre-conciliar pieties were preserved intact.  Ecumenism and inter-religious relationships were somewhat of a moot point in Poland.  There were few, almost no Protestants.  The Orthodox were identified with the Russians and relationships were cool at best with no desire to build ties with a Church that was seen as “Russian.”  And the Jewish population had been all but wiped out in the Nazi years—not, incidentally, without the support of many of the Polish people for whom anti-Semitism was part of their Catholic faith.  The Social Justice message which had flowered with John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra and then went into full bloom with the Council’s Gaudium et Spes never reached Poland where Wyszynski feared it could be distorted to support the Marxist regime’s policies.  Vatican II, for the greater part, never penetrated the Polish Church during those years under communism. At the Council, the Polish participants hung back from an enthusiastic support for the new programs of John XXIIII and Paul VI because they feared the effects of change on their homeland and the solidarity of the Poles with the Church in resisting the political tyranny under which they lived. 

When John Paul was elected to the papacy he seems to have wanted from the beginning to put a different “spin” on the Council.  Certainly the final years of the pontificate of his predecessor but one, Paul VI, had been painful—both for Paul and for the Church.  Humanae Vitae, the encyclical repeating the Church’s proscription of contraception had crashed the Vatican II optimism into the wall of ugly ecclesial reality and the carnage was complete.  Paul VI was bewildered by his loss of popularity.  Bishops, in an orgy of loyalty to the Holy See, were crushing any objections to the Encyclical from the Catholic intelligentsia.  The theological idols of Vatican II—scholars such as Bernard Häring and Hans Kung who had been major players at the Council—were falling from their pedestals. Moreover, the reactionaries were in open revolt under dissident French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  John Paul wanted to reverse the damage and put the Church back onto a major key sound-track.  He couldn’t annul the Council—that would undermine all authority and credibility—and nor did he want to, but he did want to give its decrees a new interpretation. 

John Paul wasn’t totally wrong.  In some ways the Council was out of step.  In a globalizing world, the Council wanted to decentralize Church authority, giving more authority to local bishops at cost to the power of the central administration in Rome.  In a world of totalitarian governments, the Church seemed to want to democratize with greater roles and responsibility for the laity.  In a culture where people were becoming increasingly passive in their entertainment, the Church’s liturgy was demanding increased participation.   

The election of John Paul took the world by surprise, but it probably didn’t take Karol Wojtyla by surprise.  Biographers say that at various times throughout his life people had foretold he would one day be pope and he apparently began to take this message with some seriousness.  He was not an ambitious man and I don’t think it could be said that he sought the office, but he had a preternatural bent to his personality.  He was no mystic—the demands of having to outwit the communist regime at every turn kept him a “feet on the ground” sort of fellow—and I hesitate to use the word superstitious as he was both intelligent and educated, but he was a believer in destiny and I think he came to believe the papacy was in his destiny.  His strong showing in the election that chose his predecessor, John Paul I, probably “sealed the deal” though I doubt he realized just how soon it would be before he sat in the Chair of Peter himself.  But I think he came to that chair with a mission.  He had that single-mindedness, that focus, of the Polish temperament and I believe he was determined from the beginning to refashion the Council into something that he could believe in, a Church that was a global macrocosm of the Polish Church he knew—a Church that was internally strong and united against its external opponents.  It would be, as he was used to in Poland, authoritarian in its internal discipline and populist the face it showed to the world.  John Paul found a Curia anxious to work with this agenda so that it could take back its power from “the College of Bishops” and be even stronger than it was before the Council.  Unfortunately, the pressure of the authoritarianism, instead of forging unity has revealed cracks in the foundation—cracks that need to be fixed before they can no longer bear the weight they are under.  Neither John Paul nor Benedict has been able to close those fissures nor do they seem to know how.

One final anecdote about John Paul and his re-vision of Vatican II.   One of the people I was privileged to come to know in his final years was Denis Hurley, the retired Archbishop of Durban, South Africa.  When Hurley was named a bishop at age 31, he had been the youngest bishop in the world.  When I knew him he was an old man in his 80’s.  He was the voice against Apartheid in South Africa when Desmond Tutu was only a young priest.  He had served on the preparatory Commission for Vatican II.  He was a founder of ICEL.  The last time I saw him was just two weeks or so before his death.  He was in Rome for some meetings with the Communità di Sant’Egidio and I had lunch with him.   He said to me: “I met with the Holy Father (John Paul, just a year before his own death) this morning.  I said to him ‘Holy Father, you and I are both old men.  You know how it is when we get old.  We forget things.  But I distinctly remember that we had a Council.  What did you do with it’?”  They say that Archbishop Hurley, despite his early and prophetic voice against apartheid and his tireless work at Vatican II, had never had been made a Cardinal because he refused to congratulate Paul VI on Humanae Vitae.  It is probably true.  Right to the end he spoke his mind.  What had happened to Vatican II?