Happy Fourth of July: Religious Freedom and Same-Sex Marriage

A priest friend of mine sent this letter to me and others who are interested in the question of Same Sex Marriage and the Catholic Church. 

This afternoon a couple came to the rectory and asked about getting married.  I turned them down.  It would have been a violation of my conscience to marry them.    No they weren’t a same sex couple—it was a man and a woman.  No, neither of them had been married before and divorced.  Yes, both of them were free to marry.  Yes both of them are baptized Catholics and, I fact, the man is a lector at Sunday Mass and the woman is at Mass more Sundays than not.  But I told them I could not marry them. 

We talked first, of course.  They are lovely people.  I invited them in to the rectory dining room and we had coffee and cookies—I always offer some refreshments to visitors when they come to the rectory; my mother taught me it is rude to have some one in your home and not offer them something to eat and something to drink.   And our housekeeper makes wonderful little petit-fours.  We talked about why they want to marry, how they met, their family backgrounds.  But in the course of the conversation they mentioned that they were not going to have children.  No, there is no problem conceiving.  No, there is no issue of hereditary diseases or congenital birth defects.  No, there are no health problems that either of them is facing.  It is simply a matter of careers.  Janet is a physician—a surgeon actually—and has a very successful practice.  She does not want to alter her career path to be a mother.  Robert is a tenured professor and can’t see himself being a stay-at-home dad.  In what vacation time they have, they are used to travelling.  They both like Opera and usually take a week in Milan for the La Scala season.  They ski Aspen in the winter.  They have some river cruises in Europe they would like to do.  They said that they have nieces and nephews to take to Disney World and to bring to the circus and even to pay their way through college.  They don’t want kids of their own. 

I am not going to say that they are selfish—they really don’t seem to be—but they are self-centered.  They have a vision for marriage but it is not the Church’s vision for marriage.  And so I won’t marry them.

And guess what.  No one is going to make me marry them.  No one is saying that I don’t have the freedom, as a priest, to decide which marriages I will celebrate and which ones I won’t.  It is not a matter of “discrimination.”  No one is to say that I am anti-DINK (Double Income No Kids).  Yes, they will get married.  I am sure some judge somewhere will do the honors.  Or maybe my friend, Celia, the local Methodist pastor across the road. I wish them luck.   I really don’t care if Janet rents the local K of C hall for her bridal shower.  I don’t see that as betraying the Church.  I will not be upset if Bill Rogers—the guy who runs the bakery in town—does the wedding cake.  I will still give Bill communion if he bakes the cake.  And I will still hire Mike—our parish web-designer—if he does the photography for their wedding.  In fact, I hope Janet and Robert keep coming to Mass.  I won’t stop them from coming to communion.  I hope Robert returns to his lectoring at Mass once the fuss is over and people get used to it. I won’t go to the wedding, of course, but if their parents have any qualms about it I will assure them that they should go.

What I am saying here is that I don’t get the religious freedom tocsin that some people are sounding.  Civil Marriage and Christian Matrimony are two separate things—though they often coincide.  I am not interested in Civil Marriage.  When Gladys and Dan came last year and asked if I would celebrate their Marriage without them having to have civil recognition of their marriage (it was an estate issue that would have seriously hurt them financially), I agreed without hesitation.  My job is to witness Christian matrimony.  If the State of Virginia wants to recognize that marriage it is fine with me, but I really don’t give a rat’s behind. On the other hand, let the State of Virginia recognize which marriages it chooses; I only bless those that are in line with the Catholic Church.  And you know, nobody is giving me any grief about that.  My religious freedom isn’t being threatened one iota. 

I certainly think we need to be vigilant about our liberties—all our liberties—as well as about the common good in our society.  But I also think that the screaming about Religious Freedom is simply a mask for the most gross and unacceptable bigotry.  There was a day when in Virginia—and many other “southern” States, a clergyman had to post a bond (usually about 500.00 in 1960 money—or about 2500.00 in today’s money) in order to be licensed to perform marriages.  Why?  He would lose the bond if he performed a marriage in Commonwealth of Virginia between a “person of the white race” and a “person of color.”  Where were the Catholic voices then when the Civil Law contradicted the teaching of the Church?   We need to be mighty careful not to be on the wrong side of history—by which I mean the wrong side of what is right and just—on the issues of who should be able and who should not be able to contract a civil marriage.  

A Katholic Krazie and An Old Heresy

Cornelius Jansen 

I knew it was a huge mistake when the new translation of the Roman Missal came out and the words of consecration were translated “for many” rather than “for all.”  (if you are interested in this, check the side bar for “pro multis” and that will link you to the four postings I did on this subject in 2011 and 2012.)  In the first place while “for many” is a literal translation of the Latin “pro multis” it is a faulty translation because it fails to translate the original Greek text, ‘οί πολλοί, from which the Latin is itself translated.  (The New Testament accounts of the Last Supper, like the remainder of the New Testament, were written in Greek.)  ‘Οί πολλοί means “the many”—an inclusive term signifying the vast multitudes of people.  We know it in English as “the hoi polloi” meaning the common run of humanity, although “the” here is a bit redundant. Greek, like English, has articles. ‘Οί is Greek for “the.”  Latin doesn’t have articles and so the Greek inclusive “the many” became the Latin restrictive “many.”  This has a huge impact for soteriology (the theology of salvation) as it implies that Christ did not die for all but only for some, namely those “many” (but not all) who were to be saved.  This proposition that Christ did not die for all was condemned by Pope Innocent X  in 1653 in the first salvo the Holy See fired against the Jansenist heresy. 

Jansenism, a heresy that stresses the fallen nature of humankind and overstresses the idea of the “election” of the saved, has never been completely wiped out; indeed it is very much the foundation for many of the Catholic neo-traditionalists ranging from the Krazies among the sedevacantists at Mount Saint Michael in Spokane to “Catholic” commentators like Michael Voris.  Jansenism is commonly said to have spread to America via the Irish clergy who came here in the 19^th and early 20^th century—and Irish Catholicism has in its blood a streak of Jansenism picked up from Irish clergy who studied in France during penal times.  But the real infestation of Jansenism came to America even before the Irish migration with émigré clergy fleeing the French Revolution. It found its American home in Mount Saint Mary’s, a seminary founded in 1808 by Father John Dubois and other French priests in the Catotctin Mountains of Maryland.  Jansenism must infest the old floorboards of “The Mount” as despite valiant efforts to erase it on the part of various deans and some faculty over the years it has managed to take root in the hearts of certain grads, and through them has spread to infect the faithful in various eastern dioceses that send their candidates to Mount Saint Mary’s for training.  The Diocese of Arlington Virginia seems particularly vulnerable to infection both in its priests and some of its more outspoken laity. 

Jansenism is basically “Catholic Calvinism.”  It is derived from the writings of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), a theologian and Bishop of Ypres in what is today Belgium.  Flanders, the province in which Ypres is located, then was part of the seventeen provinces, a component unit of the Hapsburg Empire where the Eighty Years war was being waged as the Calvinists were trying to win their independence from their Catholic Habsburg rulers.  In the end Flanders remained under Hapsburg rule and Catholicism was restored, but through much of this period Flanders—like the northern provinces that would become the Netherlands—was dominated by Calvinism.  In the highly intellectual atmosphere of the Calvinist Republic of Ghent, certain points of Calvinist theology spilled over into Catholic circles and Cornelius Jansen’s theology of grace and predestination had a strong scent of Calvinism to it.  Jansen’s book, Augustinus, gave a Calvinist read to the teachings of Saint Augustine of Hippo—the great theologian of the Catholic West.  The resultant distortions of Augustine’s theology of Grace produced a conviction among Jansen’s followers that Christ only died for those who would accept his sacrifice, and did not die so that all might accept his Grace.  This same error was made by Calvin and became one of the distinguishing marks of Calvinism.  This distorted Catholicism was very influential in France in the 17^th century and even its condemnation by several popes did not lessen its influence. 

Jansenism persists today.  Katholic Krazy Mary Anne Kreitzer of Woodstock Virginia who tilts at the windmills of “liberal” Catholicism under the banner of Les Femmes recently published on her blog

Jesus warned about Gehenna more than anything else during his life on earth. He died to save people from it. The Mass (since the restoration of the millenial "for many" at the Consecration) is proof positive that ALL are NOT SAVED because Jesus could only die for the salvation of the many who would accept His sacrifice. Note that the bad thief got no guarantee of paradise. Did he repent in the end? Maybe. Let's pray he did, but we have no evidence of it.

Well, Ms. Kreitzer should read her bible as bit more assiduously as while Jesus certainly did warn us about Gehenna, he did not do so  nearly as much as he warned us about the false teachings of those scribes and Pharisees who were so confident in their own religiosity and despised those whose views were so narrow.  But it is interesting that not only does Ms. Kreitzer espouse the Jansenist doctrine that Christ did not die for all but only for those who would accept his grace, but she uses the faulty translation of the pro-multis to justify it.

A few months back I attended a funeral in upstate New York and the principle celebrant of the Mass—a cassock-wearing, biretta bedecked gentleman in his seventies—pointedly said “for you and for all” as he consecrated the chalice at the funeral Mass.  I chided him about this at the luncheon afterward and he took umbrage as he said: “I have no choice; I will not give in to heresy.  Christ died for all and we must never say otherwise.”  Father then pointed out to me that while one cannot say that all are saved, one must be uncompromising in the faith that Christ died so that all might be saved.  And—to my surprise—this priest is a graduate of Mount Saint Mary’s.  But must have been in better days.  

It Is Time To Dig In and Begin Anew

The Late Father Dick Martin:

would that there were more

priests like him. 

In parish after parish, it can be just so disillusioning to go to Sunday Mass and hear a flat homily and see the liturgy done "by rote."  what happened to the promise of Vatican II?  Where is the Church that thirty-five years ago we were expecting to dawn?  We have in his post looked at the issue of clergy burnout, albeit from the observations of one who is but a layman in the field of psychology, but the question remains: how do we energize what is—in too many parishes—a tired and somewhat disillusioned Church for the task of the new evangelization?  And it is not just the clergy that suffer from burnout:  how many of us are "just too tired, too old, too 'been there and done that' to invest ourselves in what was once a bright and shining promise? 
I think we need to go back again to the Council and take a new look at the Council’s call to be Church.  In particular I think that we need to re-read and re-study Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes, but this time through the lens of the overlooked Apostolicam Actuositatem, the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity.  The first time around I think many of the clergy overlooked the Decree on the Laity.  We, laity and clergy alike, still have not bought into that new vision of the Church that took the laity seriously and we all—priests and laity alike—thought that the work of the Church was the province of the ordained.  And while we are at it, we need to take a look at Christifideles Laici, John Paul II’s 1988 letter on the holiness and apostolate of the laity.  I find that we still work on the assumption that the ordained are there to minister to the laity and the laity are there to be ministered to by the clergy.  This is short-circuiting the action of the Holy Spirit that is meant to drive us all out into the world in witness and in service. 
I saw a few months ago on one of the Katholic Krazies blogs an attack on the message in front of Nativity Catholic Church in Burke Virginia.   The message reads: “The Ministers of the Parish are the entire congregation.”  The KK blogger made fun of the idea that the parishioners share in the ministries of the Church.  They obviously believe that “ministry” is something the ordained do while they, the laity, sit back and have their feet washed or, if they are women, passively watch while the priest washes the feet of their husbands.   They don’t get the message that is so clear to the parishioners at Nativity.  The Church of the Nativity is one of the most dynamic congregations in the United States—due primarily to the leadership given by its late pastor, Father Richard Martin.  In Father Martin’s first year at Nativity a number of parishioners—knowing his reputation—fled for safer ground where they could daydream their way through a quiet Mass. They knew things were going to change at their parish and they didn’t want to be part of it. But under Father Martin’s guidance the parish has grown immensely in active membership as people have come from all over the diocese of Arlington to be members of this dynamic church.  It has all the usual activities—bible study, sodality, Knights of Columbus, Scout troops, pro-life activities, Just Faith, Bereavement Ministry,  Vacation Bible School, Prayer-Shawl ministry, home visitors, etc.  There are six weekend masses and all are filled to standing room capacity; five choirs ranging from traditional to contemporary to family; a fully accredited blue ribbon school with over 400 students, another thousand kids in Religious Education.  Most exciting is Operation Starfish—the parish’s program of outreach to the poor of Haiti.  Hundreds of parishioners have gone to Haiti to have a “look/see” and come back energized for mission.  In the 20 years or so since Father Martin came to the Church of the Nativity, Nativity has built over 800 homes in 7 different “Nativity Villages” throughout Haiti.  They have rebuilt an orphanage for handicapped children after it was destroyed in a fire.  They have bought nine fishing boats to provide employment for residents of the various Nativity Villages that are on the coast.  They have planted over 5000 fruit trees and dug numerous wells for irrigation.  They have built health centers, clinics, and provided relief in the cholera epidemic.  After the 2010 Earthquake the parish raised $300,000 for immediate aid to those in distress.  And this is only a few of the things parishioners of Nativity have done for the poor. 
I asked Father Martin several years ago when we were talking and he was introducing me to the parish and its operations, what made this parish so thriving in a Church that overall was in decline.  He told me that he thought the single most important factor was a serious attempt to provide the very best possible Sunday liturgy.  It was in the Liturgy above all that people are catechized; that they experience community, and that they receive a sense of mission.  While so many other parishes in his diocese were establishing the Tridentine Mass, Father Martin was focused on the renewed post-conciliar Liturgy and its power to open people to the reality of the Kingdom of God.  Unlike so many of his fellow clergy in the Diocese of Arlington, Father Martin understood that the true worship of God demands a sincere commitment to the betterment of our neighbor and that God’s Kingdom of Justice, Peace, and the Joy of the Holy Spirit begins in the Liturgy.  Sadly, Father Martin went to his eternal reward two months ago, but hopefully the Church he helped to build at Nativity with a committed laity will stand strong on the rock of Christ’s word. 

The Trojan Horse in the Tridentine Mass

Franciscans of the Immaculate

meeting with Pope Francis at

Casa Santa Marta June 10

I have written before on the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, a group originating in the Friars Minor Conventual (OFM Conv.) but becoming an independent Institute of Religious Life of Pontifical Right in 1998 with Father Stefano Manelli as their Superior General. Last year Pope Francis removed Father Manelli as Superior and put the community under the governorship of Capuchin Father Fidenzio Volpi OFM Cap.  It is not an extraordinary gesture for the Holy See to remove a Superior General and appoint a Vicar of the Holy See’s own choosing, but it is exceptional to bring in a superior from outside the congregation itself.  It seems that the fuss is because the Franciscans of the Immaculate—or their leadership—made the decision that henceforth they would celebrate only the pre-conciliar rite known as the TLM or “Traditional Latin Mass” or the “Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite.”  But it turns out it is far more complicated and involves the issue of whether or not the friars accept the magisterial authority of the Church as expressed in the Decrees of the Second Vatican Council.
Of course, for a religious community entrusted with parish churches and public shrines to decide that it will no longer celebrate the “ordinary” Rite of the Mass, that is the Novus Ordo, is problematic for any bishop who knows the pastoral needs of his people require the ordinary form as the ordinary every-day rite.  The bishop must provide for those of the faithful who want the “extra-ordinary form” but even more he must provide for the far greater numbers who want Mass in their own language and according to the 1970 Missal.  But it turns out that the problem runs deeper than the rite.
The Holy Father met with a delegation of Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate on June 10.  The meeting was a bit tense on both sides though all remained cordial.  What is interesting though is that after the meeting with the Pope, a considerable number of young friars who were present—novices and those in temporary profession—applied to leave the Order.  One spilled the beans, saying that he left “because he (the young friar) does not accept the Second Vatican Council.”
This is the problem—not with the Franciscans of the Immaculate Conception, the majority of whom I am sure accept the Second Vatican Council, but with many who “hide out” from the Church in the TLM.  The problem is not the rite; it is the Council just as the Council is the sticking point with the quasi-schismatic Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X.  (I say “quasi-schismatic” because though the excommunication against them was lifted, they have still not been restored to the unity of the Church, and this is because they refuse to accept the teachings of the Council.)  We can no more accept in the Church those who reject the authority of the Council than we can accept those who reject the authority of the Pope.  One might disobey a Council (we do every time we kneel in a Sunday Liturgy or during the Easter Season) or one might disobey a Papal teaching (contraceptive Catholics, for example) but disobeying is not the same a rejecting the authority.  As regards the Second Vatican Council, for example, one might personally choose not to have anything to do with non-Catholics, but neither now can one deny the authority of the Church to enter into fraternal dialogue with Protestants or with non-Christians, or criticize a bishop or priest who permits non-Catholic Christians to use a church for their worship, or who participates in non-sacramental worship with them.  That, of course, is only one example but for the majority of those who reject the Second Vatican Councils, the rejection is on matters of Ecumenism or Inter-Religious Dialogue.  
The problem is not only with the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.  I know a parish in the Arlington Diocese which hosts a weekly TLM Mass and which permits parents to “home-school” their children according to the Baltimore Catechism rather than participate in the Religious Education program of the parish.  (The same parish does not have a Catholic School because the pastor does not want to provide an education subject to the diocesan guidelines which would require too many “concessions to modernism.”)  The Baltimore Catechism, a book which provided the basic religious education for many of us, has not been revised to bring it into accord with the teaching of the Church these fifty years since Vatican II and consequently differs from the magisterium on any number of points. 
If the TLM continues to provide an alternative Catholicism, a Catholicism without the Council, it will end up being suppressed.  There is room for a variety of Rites in the Church—we have always had a variety of Rites—but there is no room for rejecting the teachings of an Ecumenical Council.  Ultimately,  unless a conformity of catechesis is maintained across the Roman Rite, Pope Francis or one of his successors will end up suppressing the Rite and the secret schism within the Church will be forced into the open. 

The Sacred Heart of Jesus--More Vatican II Than You Might Think

Today is the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a devotion that while it is associated with Saint Mary Margaret Alacoque  (1647-1690) but which actually goes back much further to Saint Lutgarde (d. 1246), Saint Mechtilde (d. 1298) and Saint Gertrude (d. 1302).  It is a devotion that grew in popularity among Catholics while condemned by both the Protestant Calvinists and their Catholic “cousins”, the Jansenists, because it places an emphasis on the humanity of Christ and the universality of his mercy.  Ironically it is a favorite of many modern-day Jansenists who have interpreted the theological focus of the doctrine far more narrowly, confining the mercy to those who “are worthy” of it through their repentance and acts of penitent reparation for their sins and for the sins of others.  This stands in distinct contradiction to the prayers of the Roman Rite Missal (the Sacred Heart is not celebrated in the Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church) which stress the unconditionality of the Love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus.  I noticed in several parishes of the Arlington Diocese that the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) or what we call “the extraordinary form” was being used for today’s feast.  This allows the “faithful” to avoid being confronted with the mystery of God’s universal and irrevocable love.  This, in turn, highlights how the TLM is used to mask the faith of the Church by removing the catechetical dimension of the Liturgy to the unintelligibility of Latin and require that it be filtered through the homiletic bias of the priest-preacher.  This allows neo-trad clergy to shape the faith of their congregants according to their own beliefs rather than let the Church speak to them directly through the Liturgy.  Doctrines—such as the unconditional love and mercy of God or the gratuity of grace—can be concealed and the faithful can be molded into the semi-Jansenism (or full-blown Jansenism) of their “pastors” rather than confronted with authentic Catholicism. 
In the homily I heard at Mass this morning, the preacher began with a quote from the March 17, 2013 homily of the newly elected Pope Francis:
I think we too are the people who, on the one hand, want to listen to Jesus, but on the other hand, at times, like to find a stick to beat others with, to condemn others. And Jesus has this message for us: mercy. I think — and I say it with humility — that this is the Lord's most powerful message: mercy.
Those who want a stick with which to beat others—same sex couples, those practicing artificial contraception, those conceiving with IVF, those married outside the Church, or those who do not adhere to Church teaching on immigration, or capital punishment, or just distribution of wealth—fail to appreciate the mercy of God which is embodied in the mystery of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  It is something for us all to think about.  A non-Christian source for reflection on this feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, but one that only confirms on a natural level what has been revealed supernaturally in the Scripture and Tradition of the Church, is the following quote from the Dalai Lama.
Finally I would like to point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity, and love.  Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness and save others. [i]
This is what the Sacred Heart of Jesus reveals to us: the transformation of our hearts into his heart; the infusion in our human hearts of the Divine Compassion that fills the heart of Jesus.  As the liturgy tells us: …may we come to share in the divinity of him who humbled himself to share in our humanity.  Beautiful churches and splendid liturgies are all well enough in their place (when not meant to distract us from genuine faith), but they are not the reason that Jesus hung on the Cross for us.   That we might be crucified with Christ and that it may no longer be we who live but Christ Jesus—in all his compassion—who lives in us is the mystery of our faith. 

---

[i] H.H. The Dalai Lama, Spiritual Advice for Buddhists and Christians, edited by Donald W. Mitchell, New York: Continuum, 1998, p. 98

No, but I do like Latin

Monsignor Daniel Gallagher

Ok, I’ve already blown my cover.  I’m a liberal.  I’ll admit it.  I listen to NPR.  And this past week, listening to NPR’s All Things Considered with Audie Cornish, I heard an American accent tackle—syllable by stammering syllable-- Cuique nostrum necesse est proficere, propriam scilicet vitam emendare. Hi quidem quadraginta dies iuvant vitia vincere.
It was Monsignor Daniel Gallagher, one of the Pope’s seven official Latinists, talking about the challenges of putting the Holy Father’s Twitter-thoughts into Latin—one of about 40 languages in which they tweet. 
Now, I don’t tweet.  I don’t even text.  “Liberal” as I am, I am my own kind. I happen to be a liberal who likes Latin—though not for Mass.  That just doesn’t make any sense.  I like Latin like my sister-in-law likes Crossword puzzles or like my nephew likes Jeopardy.  I like to play with it.  I like it for fun.  I also do like it for its own elegant sounds and even more elegant syntax.  (When I say “sounds”—I follow the Ecclesiastical or Italian pronunciation rather than the German.  It never made sense to me why you pronounce an ancient language once spoken on the Italian peninsula like a constipated Berliner, but hey—that’s academia.  Norman Cantor and I used to have wars of the wills over pronunciation when I was one of his students, though he always praised my Latin and said that it gave me away as an alumnus of Jesuit Education.  Years later I met a Princeton contemporary of Cantor’s and he told me that Cantor couldn’t do his Latin to save his life.  Probably true because I am not really that good of a Latinist myself.  I would have said alumni back there if spell-check hadn’t corrected me.)    In any event, I recently served on a search committee for a Church Music Director and I showed off by asking him if he was familiar with the patrimony of music in the western Church and could we expect occasionally to hear Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus or Caesar Franks’ Panis Angelicus.  I mean, I like this music and a little Latin works in Church, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of prayer.  I mean prayer, not the sentimental slop-shop of pious feelings engendered by an unintelligible libretto combined with a clerical corps de ballet swishing through rubrics that exist for rubric’s sake.  As I have said before, if you like that sort of thing, go see Tosca.  You can leave after Act 1 and you won’t be deluding yourself into thinking that your aesthetic indulgence has anything to do with God.
But back, for a moment, to unintelligible libretto.  God bless Monsignor Gallagher, but I had to listen to him eight times to transcribe a single sentence.  The Latin is perfect—or certainly better than anything I could do.  But if we are going to use this language, we need to pronounce it with flow, not by climbing each syllable like it was a rock-wall. I mean the poor minor prelate was breathless after a minute. 
It reminded me of attending Mass at a little Church in rural Virginia one Monday morning.  I had stayed over at a friend’s the night before and we went off to weekday Mass at his parish the next morning.   About 40 people were there—mostly mantilla-draped soccer-moms with their home-schooled children.  Should have been a clue.  Father came out and began In Nomine Patris… The Mass was in Latin.  It was the Novus Ordo, but in Latin.  And so we listened to Father struggle through his Missal, syllable by breathless syllable, for thirty minutes.  He never took his eyes off the book—how could he: he was at sea in a language he had no idea what it meant.  You could tell from where he gasped for breath or how he clumped words (in his case strings of syllables) together that he had no idea, or at least no clear idea, of what he was saying.  On the way out of Mass I said to him.  “Father, I understood you perfectly, but then I am an ex-Latin teacher.  And I am sure God, who reads the heart, understood you.  But no one else in that Church—including you—had any idea of what you were “praying.”  I wished him luck.  But this is not what the Mass is about. 
Maybe I lived in Rome too long and it is easier for the Italians to pronounce the Latin more naturally.  And I don’t think I could to better than Monsignor Gallagher.  That isn’t my point.  My point is that this is the language for prayer only if it is a language that is natural for you.  Pray from the heart, not from a text.  There was a day when the Papal Latinist—an American—spoke Latin as fluently and naturally as he did his native American English.  Father Reginald Foster, a Discalced Carmelite Friar from Milwaukee, served as a papal Latin scholar from the late 1960’s until health issues forced his return to the United States in 2009.  We should do a few blog entries on Father Reginald as he is one of the great characters of Papal Rome, famous for his quips and bon mots that are anything but reverent towards supercilious churchmen.  Maybe before long I can get around to an entry or two that captures the gift this man has been to the Church and to those of us who refuse to take the Church as seriously as some would like.       

 

Whys and Wherefores

Been there, done that, not going back

I do get asked from time to time why I do this blog.  It is time consuming and I have a fairly heavy set of responsibilities as it is.  I do enjoy the research and the thought processes preparing the blog entails.  It keeps me learning new things and finding new perspectives.  But the primary reason that I do it is that I had been finding over the past several years that the understanding of the Church was, for many Catholics, growing more and more narrow because of a lack of historical perspective that was letting them drink the Kool-Aid of the Catholic religious right. 
I am a child of Vatican II.  I was born and mostly raised before the Council.  I remember the Traditional Latin Mass well.  I was an altar server.   Being both the altar boy MC for Solemn Masses and a weird kid, I knew the rubrics and ceremonial in great detail. Moreover, I have had six years of Latin in school (and later became a Latin teacher) and always liked the Latin stuff.  Pius XII was the pope of my childhood and I remember the October night when they broke into the television shows to tell us that he had died.  I remember the meatless Fridays, the Ember Days, the Lenten fast.  When I made my first communion there was nothing to eat or drink ( but water—I am not that old) from midnight.  Nuns were dressed in yards of black serge and heavily veiled.  We had may-crowning every May, Benediction every Wednesday, Stations of the Cross every Friday in Lent.  We stood when Father came in, knelt for Holy Communion, and learned to genuflect on the left knee to kiss the Bishop’s ring. It was Full Monty Catholicism. 
Moreover we were a very religious household.  My Dad was for many years a daily mass-goer as was his father.  Mom went to Mass on Sundays.  We said the rosary after dinner during Lent and whenever else it would strike my parents that we should do so.  We had grace at table.  There was a crucifix in every room but the bathroom.   The Infant of Prague presided over the living room, the Sacred Heart in the foyer.  Various other images and pictures could be found elsewhere around the house. Dad’s sister was a nun, his aunt a Reverend Mother.  Masses were said regularly for deceased relatives.  Candles were lit in Church.  And there were always priest friends in the house.
Maybe it was the priest-friends but ours was not a thoughtless Catholicism.   Religion was discussed and argued.  We had books and magazines about our faith.  My parents belonged to CFM (Christian Family Movement) and several couples would gather monthly in our house with one of the parish priests to study their faith. Dad would ask us at dinner what we had learned in school that day and paid particular attention to religion.  God help the nun who was tinged with Feeneyism.   When priests were over—which was often several times a week—we kids could listen to the conversations and we could ask questions.  Our religion was not something hard and fast, something embalmed or mummified, but something alive and vital.  It certainly wasn’t something somber or joyless.  And it was never above questioning.  You followed the rules—especially Sunday Mass and frequent confession—but you could question anything and anyone.
I remember when Vatican II was announced.  I had no idea what an Ecumenical Council was—who did?  There hadn’t been one in our lifetimes.  We were fascinated by this opening the door to our Protestant neighbors.  (There were, in my family, no Protestant relatives.)   After all these years of cold shoulder, they were now  to be “separated brothers?”   I remember first hearing “A Mighty Fortress” being belted out on the pipe organ in our Church—it was a postlude after Benediction one Wednesday evening and it was Art Smith, a seminarian from our parish at the keyboard.  I knew Luther had composed it; but then I always knew things I wasn’t supposed to know.  I told  you I was a weird kid who had a lot of useless information.  And I knew hearing it that a new day was dawning for me and my Catholic faith.  I have never lost the thrill of that dawn and for me Catholicism represents a continuous dawn.
I began to panic about twenty years ago that the sun that had been so long dawning was now beginning to set.  I could see the slow but steady shutting down of the optimism generated by the Council.  The windows once opened were now being closed and locked.  I was willing to allow the changes to come progressively—not all at once; the slow pace of change made that dawn last.  But now changes were not only coming more slowly, they were being reversed.  I saw things creeping back into the liturgy.  Some priests were refusing to give people communion in the hand.  Others were banning women from serving as lectors or Eucharistic ministers.  Churches where communion had been given under both species were now backtracking on that.  Under the banner of “dignity” the liturgy was being reduced to rubricism in some places.   I was in the diocese of Arlington Virginia at the time and that diocese is particularly weird, or I should say has more than its fair share of abnormal clergy, but there was Father Fessio and Adoremus and there was Mother Angelica and EWTN and there was the Diocese of Lincoln and the Diocese of Peoria and I saw the seeds of this (what one colleague of mine calls) “Mordor Catholicism” starting to propagate like dandelion fluff on a summer breeze. Were we going to lose the Council and the Church of the ordinary folk?
It was at this time that I was offered an editorial position in Rome.  It had nothing whatsoever to do with the Vatican, of course, but it was Rome and it put me into the stream of international Catholicism.  I had lived in Rome before—while doing my graduate work—and was a frequent visitor to the city, but living there deepened my experience of a genuinely Catholic culture that is far richer and more diverse than the ultramontane knock-off Catholicism some people were trying to push as “authentic” Catholicism back in the States.   I saw that the parishes of Rome had altar girls and Eucharistic ministers and women lectors and contemporary music choirs.  I saw that they not only stood for communion but for the consecration at Mass. Italian priests wore regular clothes.  (We always said that if you saw a priest on the street in Rome in a cassock, nine times out of ten he was American, and eight times out of that nine he was an American on vacation in Rome.)  Most of the religious sisters in Rome wear regular clothes. 
Modern religious art is highly valued in Rome—and one of the best collections is in the Vatican museum. 
Coming back Stateside I grew more and more concerned that an unhealthy distortion of Catholicism was being pushed by certain segments of the Church in this country as somehow or other “more Catholic” than mainline Catholicism.  In my work as an academic I have been able to travel extensively and I saw that the Church through most of the world was still alive and vibrant.  I was puzzeled that it was easier to find a Tridentine Mass in Washington DC or New York than it was in Rome and yet this revival of the TLM was allegedly at the desire of the Pope.  I was puzzled to see priests wearing things here (birettas, fiddle-back chasubles, ferraiolos) that you weren’t seeing in Rome.  And prelates in the cappa magna and with the winter cappa of fur—which had been banned by Paul VI—but there were prelates like Cardinal Burke sashaying into TLM’s like the Queen Mother going to the opera.  What was this all about??? 
I don’t make any claim to be any more authentic than anyone else’s blog or that my Catholicism is any  more orthodox than the next Catholic’s.  But I do want to look at our history—both accomplished and in the making—as a voice that sometimes seems to cry in the wilderness to look to draw from the past but to trust the future rather than to build a future on a poorly thought-out appreciation for a distorted past.    More to come.