Happy Halloween

No, it's not who you
think; it's me in my
Halloween costume

I can’t help but notice this year that almost all the houses in my neighborhood are festooned for Halloween.  Orange lights and tangles of spider webs, half buried in the lawn skeletons, witches on brooms suspended from porches, hearses parked in the drives—it is absolutely ghoulish here in suburbia.  And yet when Christmas and Chanukah come rolling round in December, fewer and fewer houses are illuminated these days.  O, there are some to be sure.  And you can see the appropriate tree or menorah in the windows—but the all-out-over-the-top Chevy Chase Christmas Vacation sort of exuberance is no longer quite the thing. 

Halloween, being so overtly secular, might be becoming more and more popular as easier to explain to the li’l ones than Chanukah and Christmas where it is particularly awkward to talk about without using the G Word.  Christmas has been pretty much secularized, along with having been commercialized, but still, some overly observant kid is likely to ask about the occasional angel or even the baby in the straw.  It is just too tricky a path to navigate, though, if you want to raise your kids free of all that guilt and inhibitions that religion brings.  But Halloween—hey knock yourself out.  Be a witch or a pirate or even a Kardashian.  Overdose on candy and get your sugar high cause when you grow up it is a night for excess too.  Adult themed Halloween parties are sooooo coooool!  You’ll never remember what you were drinking and you never know with whom you might wake up the next morning.  But that is the 21^st century way of living life meaninglessly.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like Halloween.  I loved it as a kid—what kid doesn’t?  We all need some fantasy, a chance to be someone else—to escape into some wanna-be that lurks deep in our psyche.  There was an interesting article in the New York Times this morning on Halloween costumes and political correctness.   Apparently dressing up like Caitlyn Jenner, Pancho Villa, a geisha, or Pocahontas crosses a line.  I guess going out as the Reverend Al Sharpton, a knife-weilding ISIS terrorist, or Penny from Big Bang Theory would similarly be offensive.  For that matter I suppose Dr. Ben Carson, Hillary and the Donald are off limits (the first because of race, the second because of gender, the third because he’s just a jerk), though Ted Cruz might be acceptable.  What a bunch of hooey.  This is the one night where it is not correct to be politically correct.  This is our Feast of Fools where the sacred cows are meant to be mocked. 

Of course in the glorious days of the Church before the Reformation, the Feast of Fools was usually January 1.  People would dress like the bishop or the pope or even the village priest and give mock blessings and conduct mock rituals, even parodies of the Mass.  This was in the days before Bill Donahue and the Catholic League or Father Z or Rorate Caeli or other drab and humorless parodies of plaster saints would see sacrilege wherever idolatry was under siege.  But Halloween has become that day of de-sacralizing the sacred cows and the target has expanded far beyond the Church.  Popes and bishops should be relieved they are no longer the target, though lots of gay men like dressing up like the nuns of old.  Whoops, I guess that differentiating gay nun wanna-bes from the general population of nun wanna-bes isn’t politically correct either.  But then I am just not into political correctness.  It is too limiting of our ability to speak up and point out the foibles of the world around us. 

The name “Halloween” has Christian origins—and not very old ones at that.  The term first appears in present form only in the mid-eighteenth century.  It is a contraction of the more formal—and older—All Hallows Even.  Even is an antique form of our word “eve,” signifying evening, or more precisely “the evening before” such as Christmas Eve.  All Hallows refers to the feast of November 1, All Saints’ Day.  Hallows is another word for saints and still is commonly used in Ireland and Britain. “All Hallows” being a common term for “All Saints” in the dedication of Churches, schools, and other religious institutions. (A famous seminary of that name in Dublin was known as “All Shallows “ as a way of testifying to its less rigorous curriculum than the national seminary at Maynooth.)  The term “All Hallows Even” for October 31 can be traced back to the sixteenth century.

The weirdness of the day is pre-Christian.  Though many different cultures celebrated festivals at this time when summer was clearly over and the winter was beginning to make its presence felt, and some—such as pre-Columbian Mexico even associated these festivals with bridging the gap between the living and the dead—the primary influence in the development of Halloween was the Celtic (Irish and Scots) festival of Samhain.  This festival had a deeply mystical theme in which the veil separating the world of the living from the world of spirits was particularly thin at this time, allowing the dead as well as fairies, sprites, and other jinn to walk the earth.  If you have ever been to Ireland (real Ireland, not Dublin and its suburbs—you had might as well be in Hackensack as Dublin), especially in the west, once the sun goes down and especially in the winter months, it is very easy to believe in leprechauns and fairies.  Strange lights appear and travel over the bogs and sudden blasts of frigid air startle you, make you loose the thread of conversation, and are gone again.  Wispy tunes emerge from the distance and are gone again with the wind.  Of course, a pint or two of Guinness and a few belts of Irish Whiskey can enhance the experience but who is to argue with tradition? 

So for those super-Christians that think Halloween is of demonic origin or those whose sensitivity binds them in the chains of political correctness, just learn some history about what this day is all about and loosen up a bit.  And for the rest of us, let’s have some fun—responsible fun, but fun.  I think I’ll dress up as Cardinal Burke if I can get to Victoria’s Secret in time to find a suitable negligée to serve as my rochet   

By the way, I hope to do one or two more posts and then will take a leave for about three weeks while I tend to some personal matters.  more later.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church, VI

St. Hilda of Whitby

The British historian, William Henry Maitland, (1850-1906-) was known for his sharp tongue and ironic sense of humor which provided several famous quips.  My favorite runs something like this: “High-Church historians are anxious to show that the Church of England was Protestant before the Reformation and Catholic afterwards.”  Maitland was correct in his ironic twist, but nevertheless there is some truth to the alleged claims of Maitland’s high-Church historians.  I am going through this Anglican history to show that the English Church indeed had a great measure of autonomy before the Reformation broke its communion with Rome and that even after the Reformation there were serious efforts to preserve much of its Catholic heritage. Right now we are focusing on that first premise and I want to be very clear that the Ecclesia Anglicana—the Anglican Church—was not something “invented” by Henry VIII but had existed within the Roman Communion for centuries yet with sufficient uniqueness and autonomy to be in its own right a “branch” of the Universal Church.  Indeed the very term, Eccclesia Anglicana, The Anglican Church, can be found as far back as the 13^th century, three centuries  before Henry VIII,  but the concept of an autonomous (which implies a measure of independence but not separateness) English Church can certainly be found in Bede and reflects the heritage which Bede chronicles. 
The North British Church which followed the Irish Celtic traditions it inherited from Iona was in full communion with the Roman Church but differed from it in several important matters of ritual and discipline.  The papacy never made any attempts to bring the North British Church—or its Celtic mother-Church—under Roman control, nor did it feel any need to.  (The Irish Church would eventually be Romanized in the twelfth century through the efforts of its primate, Saint Laurence O’Toole, 1128-1180.)  While there were difference in ritual and canon law, there was a unity of faith.  Of course many of the doctrinal issues which today divide Christianity: notably the Real Presence and the Marian dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption—were then non-issues because they did not yet comprise part of the canon of faith. 
One of the crucial differences between the Roman and Celtic/British Churches that is often overlooked is the different approaches to canonical penance.  In the Roman practice a Christian only submitted to Penance for extremely grave faults, most notably apostasy, murder, and adultery.  The first of these sins was not as rare as one might think.  Many Christians in times of persecution gave way to their fears and performed the ritual offering of incense to an image of the Emperor.  There was quite bitter argument in the early Church over whether this sin could be forgiven at all.  The consensus was yes, once.  Thus in the Roman Church one only received penance once in one’s lifetime and only for extremely grave sins as aforementioned.   Penance was public, it was imposed by the bishop, it lasted over a period of time, and the individual could not receive Holy Communion until it was completed.  Penitents were not even allowed to be present for the Eucharist, but like the catechumens had to leave the assembly after the homily and then devote themselves to prayer and penitential practices while the community proceeded with the Eucharist. 
The Irish had a different practice for penance.  The Irish Church was not organized into dioceses like the Church in the old Roman Empire.  The clan provided the basis for religious organization.  The clergy were all monastics and the leading ecclesiastic of the clan served as the abbot or abbess who did not have the sacramental powers of a bishop but exercise the episcopal jurisdiction over the clan members, religious and lay.  One of the monks would be an ordained bishop and the sacramental responsibilities fell to him, but not the jurisdiction.  And we know in several instances, such as that of Brigid of Kildare, that women sometimes held this jurisdiction.  (Incidentally, it was not rare on the Continent for Abbesses to hold ordinary jurisdiction over local churches either.  More on that in other entries, but as late as the eighteenth century there were over a hundred surviving abbesses nullius.)  To refocus on our topic of penance in the Irish/Celtic Church, monks and nuns would “confess” their faults (not only their sins) to the abbot or to a wise older religious designated by the abbot or abbess to be ones anam cara, or soul friend.  The Irish developed an elaborate system of penitentials, books containing advice and suitable penances for every fault and sin.  Some of these were quite harsh.  Indeed Celtic Christianity tended to be more puritanical and harsh than Mediterranean Christianity.  The sacrament of penance in the form we know it owes more to the Irish practice than the Roman, not in its severity but rather in the practice of more frequent confession and confession of minor (venial) sins, as well as it being a private arrangement between penitent and confessor.  On the other hand, limiting the role of confessor to an ordained person acting in the name of the bishop is a survival of the Roman tradition.  The synod held by King Oswig at Saint Hilda’s Abbey of Whitby in 664 marked the abandonment of Celtic customs for Roman, but at least in terms of the reconciliation of penitents, the Celtic custom won out.     

When Women Ruled the Churches

Ruins of Whitby Abbey

Yesterday I mentioned Matilda, the Abbess of Quedlinburg, and the immense ecclesiastical power she wielded.  It was not unusual in the Middle Ages for women to exercise such authority even though they were technically not in Holy Orders.  In the future, and perhaps in the near future, I do want to look at the issue of women’s ordination from a historical perspective.  It is not as black and white as some would have you believe—either as to the point that the Church has never had women priests and bishops, or the position that some have taken that in the early centuries the Church did in fact ordain women as priests and bishops.  But we will save that conversation for a series of entries of its own.  Let me for now just bring up the story of Saint Bridget of Kildare as her situation is pertinent to today’s topic of jurisdiction.  There is an ancient tradition that when Saint Mel was bestowing the canonical blessing upon Bridget as Abbess, he actually (but mistakenly) ordained her a bishop.  The rites of episcopal ordination and abbatial blessing are very similar.  Of course the key word here is mistakenly.  What is significant for us today is not whether or not she was a bishop, but what her powers as an abbess actually were.

The Irish Church before the twelfth century was very different than the other Churches of Christendom.  Irish society was very different.  It was clan based.  There were no cities or towns.  The various “kingdoms” of Ireland were ruled by clan chieftains or petty kings who were more or less subject (the Irish have never been good on authority) to the four regional kings of Ulster, Connaught, Munster, and Leinster who, in turn, owed allegiance to the High King.  The religious authority in each region was exercised not by a bishop, but by the abbot of the clan monastery—the monastery to which the monks of that clan belonged.  The Abbot was not necessarily a priest; sometimes the king himself was the abbot, or the abbot was also king.  Several of the monks would be priests and one would be a bishop but he had no authority (that being exercised by the abbot) and his role was to perform the various ministries reserved to bishops, notably ordination.  In the case of Bridget of Kildare, she was the abbot of her clan monastery and exercised the jurisdiction over her clan which was centered in Osraige (Ossory) which includes much of modern County Kilkenny and parts of  County Laois.  Bridget’s power, probably due to her family connections, was immense and her influence even more widespread.   Though she lacked ordination (despite the legend about Saint Mel there is no evidence that the mistaken ceremonial was taken to actually confer the episcopacy and its ministries upon her) she was the most important prelate in Ireland.

A similar Abbess of influence was Hilda of Whitby.  Converted in her youth along with the rest of the court of her uncle, King Edwin of Northumbria, Hilda was consecrated as a nun by Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne.   Aidan named her abbess of Hartelpoole and she then went on in 657 to establish a new monastery at Whitby.  B0th monasteries followed the Celtic monastic pattern of double communities of monks and nuns who lived in separate enclosures but worshipped together in a common church.  Hilda’s authority as abbess extended over the monks as well as the nuns.  In 664 Hilda hosted a synod at her abbey in which the English Church agreed to give up many of its Celtic traditions and conform to Roman practices, healing the division between the older English Church in the North of England and the newer Roman-planted Catholic Church spreading out of Canterbury.  This will be an interesting topic to return to when we talk about the Ecclesia Anglicana and non-Roman Catholicism and the question: Was there an Anglican Church  before England was ever Catholic?  Did King Henry VIII start a new Church or did he revive the ancient Church of England?  Sister never knew just how complicated the history of the Church is and Father was sworn to secrecy.  Fun, fun, fun.  But for today just note that women were not always without power in the Church.