Why Arlington? Historical Context of Clerical Madness 3

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

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

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

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

Follow the Ladies' Lead, Gentlemen

Innocent III blessing Francis and his
first Friars

I recently mentioned the Reformation of Innocent III as a model for Church Reformation that preserves unity in the Church while addressing the need to eliminate areas of Church life that have become a scandal because they are at odds with the Gospel. 

     Innocent was born into a noble Italian family, the counts of Segni, in 1160 and was elected pope in 1198.  He died in 1216.  His family’s stronghold was only about forty miles south-east of Rome and over the centuries there were nine popes from this family, among them being Innocent, Gregory IX, and Alexander IV.  They were a remarkable family and Innocent is often considered to be the most powerful pope in the history of the Church.  Fortunately, for the most part, he used power well.   His nephew, Ugolino dei conti de Segni, who became Gregory IX, was a great friend and patron of Francis of Assisi and also served the Church well both as a Cardinal and later as Pope. 

       There is basis for criticizing Innocent for some of his decisions—the Crusade against the Cathars (Albigensians), the categorization of the Waldensians as heretics at Lateran IV and subsequent persecution, and the Fourth Crusade which ended up attacking and sacking  Constantinople.  We will look at these events in future posts, but these events, flawed as they are from our contemporary perspective, should not be allowed to overshadow a magnificent program of Church Reform which probably prevented a Luther-style Reformation for several centuries. 

        When Innocent ascended the papacy in 1198 he inherited a Church that was deeply fractured.  Personal hostility between the Kings of England and France had overflowed into Church life and led to a deterioration of the state of the Church in the two kingdoms as Church offices were bestowed by the kings on candidates for no reason better than the political needs of the respective monarchs.  Moreover, a centuries-long feud between the papacy and the empire similarly was sapping energy, especially where the Emperor could hand out religious benefices to his political allies to cement their loyalty.       
        The politicalization of the Church was not only filling major posts with many unsuitable candidates, but was leading to a divide between the ordinary faithful and the hierarchy.  The political alliances of the bishops weakened their authority over the faithful who were looking for good and honest guides for their spiritual growth and, not finding it among the pastors of the Church were turning elsewhere.
        In the Rhineland and in the French Languedoc and Pyrénées massive numbers of Christians were deserting the Church for the gnostic Cathar movement. The rigid and austere morality ascribed to the Cathar Perfecti or Holy Men gave them a credibility that the wealthy and powerful Catholic prelates lacked.  Catharism, while strongest in the Rhine and South-west France, was spreading even into Italy, undermining the Church.
       Cathars were Gnostics and their beliefs were, from a Christian perspective, bizarre, but more orthodox were the Waldensians.  Peter Waldo was a wealthy merchant of Lyons France who took the gospel injunction to “sell all that you have, give to the poor, and follow me” seriously.  Doing precisely that, he ran afoul of Church authorities for preaching while not ordained.  Waldo’s charismatic personality and dramatic conversion gave him a credibility that brought him many disciples in France and northern Italy.  A lay movement, the Waldensians soon found themselves decried as schismatics and indeed were broken off from the Catholic Church.  Nevertheless, they grew and even many faithful Catholics admired them for their pacific ways, simple lives, and generosity to the poor.
       Among Innocent III’s reforms, and perhaps the most important of them, was the encouragement of new religious orders that were strongly evangelical in their simple life and service of the poor.  Francis of Assisi was introduced to Innocent who admired him greatly and helped advance the Friars Minor—Francis’ brotherhood of poor preachers who went out and worked with lepers, the lame, the sick poor and others on the margins of society. 
        Another order that Innocent encouraged were a society of priests under the leadership of Dominic de Guzman, a Spanish priest working in the south of France to win people back from the Cathar heresy.  Like Francis’ friars, Dominic’s priests and their coadjutor brothers lived lives of model simplicity.  Dominic, unlike Francis, stressed the importance of education and many of his priests were both brilliant scholars and good preachers. 
       The first new order that Innocent encouraged with the Trinitarians—a community of priests and brothers who were dedicated to freeing captives captured in the Crusades and held by the Muslims.  They raised money with which to buy Muslim prisoners and then exchange them for Christian prisoners.  Their kindness to the Muslim prisoners gave them great credibility on both sides of the wars. 
        The emphasis of these new communities was living a life in imitation of Jesus and his apostles in prayer, fellowship, and simplicity of life.  Perhaps what we need most in the Church today are new—or renewed—religious orders of men and women who take the gospel seriously.  Men and women who will lead simple lives, give themselves to prayer, and dedicate themselves to the service of the poor.  In the years since Vatican II many of the Sisters’ communities have done just that.  Now maybe it is time for the men to follow their example.      

The Immaculate Conception

Mary and Jesus, from an altarpiece in

the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine

Florence, Italy

Well, triggered by the word “prevenient” in the new translation for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, we have been looking at original sin in order to better understand how the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception developed.  It is a fairly late doctrine and despite its being infallibly defined we will see that it cannot claim, at least historically, to have been part of the Tradition handed down from the Apostles.  
     As I mentioned in my previous post, while the idea of original sin can be traced back through Augustine to even earlier patristic sources, it is a theological concept that never developed in the Christian East and is unknown in Orthodox and Eastern Catholic sources.  Without a concept of original sin, there is no doctrine of the Immaculate Conception because the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is that Mary was conceived in her mother’s womb without the original sin that has affected the rest of the human family.  Mary is unique in this regard.  The Church says that she was saved from original sin through the merits of the death and resurrection of her Divine son even though that passion, death, and resurrection had not yet taken place in time: hence “prevenient.”  Although the Eastern Churches did not celebrate Mary’s Immaculate Conception they did celebrate her conception, affixing the date  (originally) to December 9—nine months (minus one day) before the feast of her birth.  In the same way the Church celebrated the conception of her Son nine months before the Church celebrates his birth.  (March 25^th is nine months before December 25^th.)  These are the only two “conceptions” I know of being celebrated in the Church calendar.  The feast of Mary’s Conception originated in the Church of Syria (which included the Holy Land) in about the sixth century but soon was celebrated throughout Eastern Christianity. 
       How did the feast come to the West?  Scholars agree that it was the Normans who introduced the feast to the Western Church.  In the eleventh century Normans conquered Sicily and Southern Italy where the Church, at that time,  followed the Greek Rite rather than the Western Latin Rites.  It was probably at this time that the Normans became familiar with the feast of the Conception of Mary.  There was a problem though in the west.  Western theologians, including Augustine, saw that Mary was, like the rest of us, conceived in original sin.  How can we celebrate a sinful conception?  (Remember the East, not believing in original sin, saw no sin in the conception.)  Immediately a theological debate broke out.  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a great devotee of the Blessed Virgin insisted that she, like us, was conceived in original sin.  Saint Thomas would pick this up and affirm that Mary was conceived in sin.  The Franciscans and Carmelites however, came to Mary’s defense and insisted that she had been spared original sin in order to prepare her for being the Mother of Jesus.  The debate raged through the Middle Ages.  When Pope Sixtus IV put the feast of Mary’s Conception on the universal calendar in the fifteenth century it was simply called the Conception of the Virgin.  The Dominican Pope, Saint Pius V, in revising the Roman Calendar also simply called it “The Conception of the Virgin.”  In Franciscan and Carmelite Churches, and several dioceses, however, it was called “The Immaculate Conception.” 
       The doctrine remained an open question for centuries with Catholics free to believe that Mary suffered the consequences of original sin or that she had been preserved from it by a special dispensation of “prevenient” grace.  In much the same way, while Catholics today must believe that Mary was assumed body and soul at the end of her earthly life, we are free to believe that she died or that she did not die before her assumption.  The matter is undefined.  In regard to the Immaculate Conception,  however, Pope Pius IX closed the issue in 1854 by defining the doctrine that Mary was conceived without sin through a dispensation on the merits of her Son’s passion, death, and Resurrection.  Thus today this is a defined dogma for the Church, though the Eastern Churches—the various rites that comprise the Eastern Churches in union with Rome as well as the Orthodox Churches, sort of nod their heads in ambiguous assent and go on their way thinking that we westerners argue over the darnedest things.  And perhaps we do. 

Baptists, Cathars, and Dominicans

San Domenico Guzman
–Fresco in Cantarana –
Denise Schenardi, 2007

The Church’s initial response to Catharism was to launch a missionary campaign and Innocent III sent preachers into the Occitan to refute the heretical doctrines.  He also prohibited translations of the scriptures into the vernacular as popular interpretations of the bible were at the root of the heresy’s spreading.  The preaching crusade was not particularly successful due to the support the Cathars had from many of the local nobility who saw that breaking the power of the Church also weakened the power of the French Crown (and thus strengthened their local power of the peasants and the towns) and when one of the coordinators of the papal effort, Pierre de Castelnau, was assassinated, Raymond, the Count of Toulouse, was suspected of ordering the murder.  This led to a change of papal strategy and in 1209 a Crusade was launched to wipe out the heresy by destroying the nobles and the city governments that supported it.
     The failure of Innocent’s  preaching mission was due in great part to a gross miscalculation on the part of the Church as to what would work at rooting out this heresy.  The pope sent Cistercian Abbots as preachers.  Now the Cistercians were a reformed religious order and known for their integrity and austere life, but abbots are abbots and these prelates saw themselves as emissaries of the Pope rather than as preachers of the Gospel.  Huge mistake.  Huge.  The abbots came on horseback with their retinue of chaplains and liveried servants and they stayed in the homes of the rich, the great, and the powerful and they lived well.  This did not impress the converts to Catharism who had been drawn to the sect because of the austerity of the Cathar perfecti or holy ones.  It is a bit like the Tridentine revivalists who think the way to appeal to people today to come back to the Church is for bishops to wear long trains of scarlet silk while conducting elaborate ceremonies in an arcane language.  Duh!  It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now.  Anyway, back to the Crusade for a moment. 
     Innocent called a crusade and offered any Catholic nobleman who fought the heretics title to the lands of the various Occitan nobles who were protecting the Cathars.  This involved the French Crown who saw this as an opportunity to extend royal power over this region of what is today southwest France but at the time was a collection of independent baronies.  The French King himself, Philip Augustus,  did not become involved but one of his vassals, Simon de Montfort, led the successfully brutal war in which over 20,000 men, women, and children were killed.    
     Let me just make an aside here.  There are some Protestant groups whose poor knowledge of history allows them to trace their supposed roots back to Jesus and the apostles by identifying themselves with any group that the Catholic Church has ever persecuted.  If you were persecuted by the Catholic Church than you must have been a Baptist!  Won’t earn you a degree in history but sure will make those hymn-singin’, lemonade drinkin’,  bible readin’ po’ folk down in Arkansas and Tennessee feel a might more righteous.   Years ago I was at a rural Baptist Church in Texas—Independence Baptist Church where Sam Houston was baptized.    A gentleman there described the history of the Church, giving us what is known as the “Trail of Blood Baptist” history and according to his story anyone who was imprisoned or killed for their faith in those Catholic Centuries had been Baptist.  He talked about the Cathars as Baptists, unaware that not only did they not practice immersion baptism, but they didn’t even use water.  Nor did he know, even more seriously, that they believed in two gods, a god of light and a god of dark, who were locked in this eternal struggle for men’s souls.  But they weren’t “those Catholics” so they must have been “us Baptists.”  Most Baptists take a more historically critical view and recognize that their tradition comes out of the English Radical Reformation of the seventeenth century and can’t be traced historically to apostolic times. 
     Well, the Albigensian Crusade was pretty much of a failure from a religious point of view—Catharism managed to hold on in Languedoc though often under a veneer of Catholic Orthodoxy.  The fighting was over by 1255 though the Inquisition lingered on to ferret out heretics.  The French Crown eventually triumphed over the nobility and brought the area more and more under central control.  When the French wars of religion broke out in the sixteenth century this area was particularly hard hit as a suspicion of Catholicism remained even after Catharism had apparently died out.  Sometimes, in fact often, religiously divisive movements such as Catharism are not so much about proposing new doctrines as they are about opposing old power structures.  Catharism seems to have been much more about rejecting a Catholic faith that had become over-identified with the power and wealth of the movers and shakers than dangerous ideas of dualism and Gnostic revival. 
     A more positive factor that came out of the Cathar movement was the Dominican Order.  Dominic de Guzman was a canon regular in the suite of the Spanish Bishop of Osma who had been sent on a Diplomatic mission by the king of Castile to Denmark.  As they travelled through the south of France Dominic encountered the Cathars and converted a number of their women members whom he organized into a monastery of nuns at Prouille.  The mission to Denmark completed (unsuccessfully as the marriage they were to arrange fell through due to the untimely death of the proposed bride), Dominic and his bishop returned to France on their way home to Castile.  Dominic saw the papal legates in all their pomp after their preaching had failed to stop the Cathar heresy.  He admonished them:  “The Cathars do not win people to their heresy by the show of power and pomp, by trains of servants and caparisoned horses, by their gorgeous robes—but by zealous preaching, by being humble like the apostles, by poor and simple lives, and by genuine and apparent holiness.  Zeal must be matched by zeal, humility by humility, the pretense of holiness by genuine holiness, preaching lies by preaching truth.”  Dominic decided to stay in France and to do precisely that while his bishop returned home.  Dominic gathered several other priests about him to establish a community of preachers of evangelical truth who, like the Cathar perfecti, would live poor and simple lives as a witness to their faith.  Their preaching was not a huge success in winning back people to the faith, but they did make a difference.  In 1217 Dominic would establish his preaching priests as a new religious Order—the Order of Preachers.  We know them today as the Dominicans.  More about them in future blogs.