Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis? 3

Gregory XVI

I think a third reason why so many are afraid of Pope Francis is his being a religious, and in particular being a Jesuit.  The last religious to be elected Pope was the Camaldolese Benedictine Mauro Cappellari who reigned as Gregory XVI (1830-1846).  He was one of the most conservative men to sit on the Throne of Peter.  In reaction to the French Revolution and the overthrow of the ancien regime, Gregory resisted the introduction of any and every novelty to the Papal States.  He was succeeded by the liberal Pius IX but despite the new Pope’s openness to reform, the repression of Gregory’s reign burst into open rebellion in 1848—the year that revolutions swept all Europe—and Pius had to flee Rome until French troops could restore order.  The challenge to his temporal authority represented in the revolution drove Pius to the extreme conservatism that marked his reign and has made him an enduring hero to the wing-nuts of the Catholic right.  Pius and all his successors—Leo XII, St. Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI have been diocesan priests, but in the intervening years, religious life has changed from representing the more conservative face of Catholicism to being the voice of Catholic liberalism.
The roots of the monastic and mendicant Orders (the Benedictines, the Cistercians, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians) were in part in protest against the socio-economic structures of their times. The friars in particular rejected the budding urban capitalism of the 13^th centuries in favor of communal property.   Both the monastic and mendicant movements were at first extra-canonical movements of the laity who were discontent with the options offered them by the clerical and institutional structures of their days.  (Neither Benedict nor Francis was a priest and both their movements were originally lay movements that accepted priests among their members but only as equals to the lay monks (Benedict) or lay brothers (Francis).  (The Carmelites and the Augustinians were also originally lay movements.)   The mendicants understand their role to be a prophetic voice that warns about those elements in society—and in the Church—that contradict the values set forth in the Gospel.  Moreover, from the beginning the mendicants rejected hierarchy and authoritarian government in favor of a radical democracy in which their superiors were not only elected by the brothers but were accountable to the brothers gathered in Chapter. 
Ignatius used a different model in establishing the Society of Jesus.  Drawing from his experience as a soldier and determined to effectively combat the inroads of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers, Ignatius imposed a military structure on his new Society and demanded unquestioning obedience to one’s superiors in the society.  He also placed the Society at the disposal of the Pope for whatever missions the Pope required them to serve.  But in that service they were given remarkable freedom.  Ignatius did away with the choral recitation of the Divine Office—traditional not only for all religious up to that time but even for the secular clergy.   He also chose that his men would not have a religious habit.  While they normally wore a black cassock, standard clerical dress, they were free to abandon it for lay clothes as the mission required.  When the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in China they abandoned western dress for the saffron robes of Buddhist monks but then as they understood the culture better, they adopted the silk gowns of Confucian scholars in order to be more effective in presenting their ideas to the Chinese.  They celebrated Mass in Mandarin rather than Latin and adopted other elements of Chinese culture.  They were wildly successful in their mission and served in the Imperial Court where they wielded immense influence until the Augustinians and Franciscans, jealous at their successes, complained to Rome about the “Chinese Rites.”  Forced back to western expression by Rome, their mission failed as spectacularly as it had succeded.
Today most religious see their role in the Church very differently than do diocesan priests—and this is often a source of tension with bishops who are, for the most part, drawn from the diocesan clergy.  A Benedictine or Trappist who is ordained will tell you he is a monk first and a priest second. They are usually reluctant to take on ministries that require them to leave their monasteries. Similarly a Franciscan or Carmelite or Augustinian will tell you that he is a brother who is ordained for the service of the Church but who takes his primary vocational identity from his religious community rather than from his being a priest.  More and more religious look to serve in ministries that reflect the charism of their particular congregation and are anxious to leave parish ministry to the diocesan clergy.  Many religious priests today wear their religious habits in the Church or around their monastery or school, but beyond that dress plainly in ordinary clothes.  All this is fine, but to my mind it is the icing on the cake.
In the Civil Rights movement of the early and mid-sixties and in the anti-war movement of the late sixties and early seventies, the religious were first to get involved.  Not the religious priests, however, but the Sisters.  The world was shocked—and then delighted—to see Catholic Sisters marching with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery.  The women finally shamed the men into putting on their jock straps and joining them.  Once into progressive causes, the men were not shy.  The Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother, the Josephite Philip Berrigan were the leading Catholic voices against the war in Viet Nam.  Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote thought-provoking books giving the spiritual roots of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.  Bishops clamped down on the clergy—Cardinals Spellman of New York and McIntyre of Los Angles in particular—and while the diocesan guys had to cave, the religious, independent of the bishops, went on against the war, for open-housing, against American support for Latin American dictatorships, and for a series of social justice issues.  When Liberation Theologian Gustavo  Gutierrez fell afoul of the Peruvian hierarchy he found refuge in becoming a Dominican.   
These social changes worked their ways into the curriculum of Catholic schools, colleges, and universities—again, for the most part the province of religious communities.  Religious began to see that they had a role to play in being an alternative voice in the Church and for the Church—not contradicting the magisterium but raising the questions posed by the evangelical values laid out in the gospel even as Saint Francis had done in his day. 
Religious often refer to this role as their “prophetic call.”  I am not sure yet if that role has evolved to where it is truly prophetic.  I think religious need to look at themselves long and hard and ask themselves if they themselves are faithful to the gospel.  Frankly, I don’t think the renewal of religious life envisioned by the Council has reached anything near its potential.  Religious are still often very much a part of the systems they decry.  Nevertheless, I think someone needs to be a prophetic voice in and for the Church today.  Whether it is bishops who spend millions on refurbishing their residences, or the failure of so many Church institutions to pay a just wage or allow their employees to unionize, or the lack of just processes in ecclesiastical trials, the Church needs to be held as accountable as the Church wants to hold secular institutions and it is often the religious who are most outspoken in “outing” the injustices.
On the other hand, we need to see that leading prophetic voices in the Church such as Dom Helder Camara or Archbishop Oscar Romero or John XXIII came from the diocesan clergy.  How many secular priests staff inner-city parishes where they fight for better conditions for their parishioners and for their neighbors regardless of religion.  And when these diocesan priests run afoul of their bishops for their social activism they don’t have the escape hatch of a supportive community and the possibility of a new assignment that religious have.   

As a Jesuit Francis was never cutting edge.  In fact, he played the game very safely working closely with the Argentine hierarchy and even turning a blind eye to much of the injustice in his native land during the years it was ruled by a military junta.  Nevertheless, it is clear that Francis thinks differently than this predecessors.  He is more spontaneous and far less attentive to the fine details of rubric or law.  He is emerging as prophetic voice—not the radical Amos or even a Jeremiah—but prophetic none the less.  It is clear that there is a new sheriff in town.  When it comes to simple things like whether women can be included in the Holy Thursday Rite of the Washing of the Feet  or the call for us all to look at how we live and can we scale it back a notch or two, Francis is setting a new pace.  I don’t think there is much to fear, but then I don’t want to be a bishop who lives in a 41 million dollar Residenz. 

Jesus, the Reason for the Season? Or Not?

There is more to Christmas than Christ, and for some
there's less to Christmas than Christ, much less than
Christ, but that's just fine.

A friend of mine recently told me a story about Christmas and grinches. My friend teaches at a private school somewhere in the Northeast.  The school has adopted a strong secular identity and few of the students come from Christian homes.  There is a policy forbidding so much as a poinsettia plant in the faculty lunch-room or a jolly elf in the library.  Even reading The Polar Express is verboten and a teacher was reprimanded for wearing a green sweater with a red and green plaid skirt.  Boy, anybody who thinks only conservatives are rigid needs to visit this school!!!  Well, my friend told me, one parent was upset because—horror of horrors—there was a Christmas tree near the entrance to the parking lot.  You see, this school rents its property from a Christian Church to whom the parking lot belongs but this particular parent obviously thought that the landlords should refrain from decorating their property because she did not want her child to be exposed to Christmas.  A Christmas tree has no religious significance.   And so let’s take a break from this Founding Father and Christian Nation thing and indulge ourselves a bit in a look at the history of Christmas.  After all Jesus “is the reason for the season.’  Or not.  Now when I say that, I am not being anti-Christian or on the “Take Christ out of Christmas” bandwagon.  I am a devout Roman Catholic—more devout than most I would suggest—but we need to look at Christmas in its wider picture context if we want to consider intelligently the issue of the crèche on courthouse lawns that we have been looking at. 

      While Christians began celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25^th in the fourth century they built their celebration on already existing “pagan” festivals.  History does not know the actual date of Christ’s birth.  Some argue that the story’s relating to us that “shepherds were keeping watch in the fields by night over their sheep” argues against a December date as in the winter the sheep would be kept in barns through the cold nights.  I am not familiar with sheepherding protocols in first century Palestine but I do know that December in Israel/Palestine has long nights with low temperatures—not as low as Idaho or Colorado and American sheep, but regularly in the 40’s and occasionally below freezing.  And, in any case, contemporary biblical scholarship would not consider night-time temperatures of Bethlehem fields relevant to whatever historical/biographical shreds might be recoverable from the gospel texts.   Suffice it to say that we don’t know the actual date of the birth of Jesus.  Nor do we need to. The Queen’s Birthday is a Saturday in June—any Saturday her government might choose for the festivities—though she was born on April 21^st.  But it rains a lot in London in April (April showers,May flowers, and all that) so it is celebrated another day.  Same with Jesus.  Who knows when he was born, but December 25^th works well as everybody needs a lift from the dark days and longer darker nights of midwinter.  And long before Jesus was even a twinkle in some celestial star (I am speaking here of the man born, not the Word who became incarnate in that birth) people were reveling at midwinter.  According to the historian the Venerable Bede (8^th century) the ancient Anglo-Saxon peoples celebrated Modranecht (Mother’s Night) on December 25^th.   The Celts had Meán Geimhridh—the festival of the winter solstice.  Germanic and Nordic folk had Yule.  Baltic peoples had Ziemassvētki.  The Slavs had Rozhanista.  The Roman/Graeco culture had a variety of feasts in honor of the god Bacchus, the god Saturn, or the Sol Invictus: the unconquered Sun.  Customs varied from culture to culture but certain common features included gift-giving, revelry (usually to excess), hospitality, and the use of light.  The further north, the darker and longer the nights, the more ardent were the celebrations.  Greens were often brought indoors to decorate the home (and probably to freshen the air of the houses closed tight against winter cold) and to keep the awareness of nature when all outside seemed dead and awaiting the rebirth spring would provide. 

     Initially there seems to have been some resistance among Christian theologians to the idea of celebrating the Birth of Jesus as it was too close in concept to the pagan celebrations honoring the birth of various deities.  Of course Kings, Pharaohs, and Emperors regularly had their birthdays celebrated but primitive Christianity distanced itself from such royal celebrations as well because the implication was attributing divinity to the monarch being celebrated.  It does seem by the middle of the fourth century however that the feast was being celebrated at Rome from where it spread eastwards to Constantinople and the Churches of the East.  This makes it somewhat of the exception as most of the ancient feasts began in the Eastern Church(es) and spread westward to Rome.  The Church in the West was always inclined to a more Spartan liturgical style than the more exotic East.  By the end of the fourth century Christmas had achieved great popularity as it was used to combat the Arian heresy that denied Jesus full divinity, equal to the Father.  Christmas became an affirmation of the idea that in the birth of Jesus, God (the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity) became human, uniting in one person the human and divine natures. 

     The name Christmas derives from the Old English Christemaesse—Christ’s Mass—even as other feasts were called after the Mass celebrated on that day—Michaelmas  (St. Michael’s Day, September 11^th ) or Martinmas (St. Martin’s Day, November 11^th). 

     It’s clear that our contemporary Christmas is an amalgamation of Christian and Pagan elements.  Christianity has often adopted and then adapted indigenous customs, “baptizing” them as it were with Christian meaning.  The Chinese Rites controversy of the seventeenth century is one of the more interesting examples of this practice and the rejection by Rome of the use of Chinese practices by the Jesuit missionaries was a huge mistake from an evangelizing point of view.  Pius XII, in one of the first acts of his papacy, admitted the mistake and to remedy it repealed much of the legislation of Clement XI that had outlawed the incorporation of Chinese practices into Catholic liturgy and devotions.  We will have to do a study of the Chinese Rites issue in the future but before we blame Clement XI for his narrow mindedness we need to locate him in the ambiance of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.  This was the same time, incidentally, that Puritans in Boston were outlawing Christmas because of its pagan roots.  And so we should distinguish between the Christian meaning of Christmas (the liturgical celebration of Christ’s birth with its worship services, scripture readings, and sacred songs) and the cultural survivals of pre-Christian practices with evergreens, blazing lights and fires, revelry and (not so sacred)songs.   They both have their place but a Festooned and light-bedecked tree is no more a Christian symbol than is a Halloween Jack-o-lantern or a Fourth-of July firecracker.  So get over the Christmas tree in the Park or the wreath of lights on the lamppost.  And while you’re at it, let Ms. Paula wear that red sweater and plaid skirt: she looks real cute in it.