Let the Holy Spirit Shed Her Wisdom

Patriarch Bartholomew of
Constantinople

It was only three and a half years after the 1959 announcement of the Second Vatican Council that 2500 Bishops, Abbots, and General Superiors of Religious Congregations gathered for the Council’s first session in the nave of the Patriarchal Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican to begin deliberations that would radically alter the face of Catholicism throughout the world.  On the other hand, it has taken the Orthodox Churches fifty-five years to prepare for the first Holy and Great Council, the first such gathering of the Orthodox in 1139 years and the first since the Great Schism which divided the Orthodox and Catholic worlds.  (This refers to the Fourth Council of Constantinople, regarded by some, but not by all as “Ecumenical,” which healed the Photian Schism and was actually held not in 887 but 879-80.)
The rules are different for this Holy and Great Council than for an authentically Ecumenical Council.  In an Ecumenical Council—and here I am referring to the first seven Councils which are accepted by both Churches of the East and West—all bishops are invited to participate and the vote of each bishop counts.  There is also free (and often free-for-all) discussion of the agenda with decision by majority and not by universal consensus.
The rules set forth for the upcoming Holy and Great Council to be held the end of this week in Crete call for each self-governing Orthodox Church to send 24 Bishop-delegates and each Church will have but a single vote in the final deliberations.   Moreover, the documents of the Council have been pre-agreed on (with some exception regarding the proposed legislation on marriage) and not subject to editing upon the discussion and voting.  It is then quite rigidly structured.
And now, at the last minute, the Holy and Great Synod appears to be imploding as several of the constituent Churches—including the most powerful, the Russian Orthodox Church—withdraws.  Orthodoxy is not a single Church, nor even like Catholicism, a communion of Churches but rather a family of Churches in communion with one another.  Let me explain.  The Roman Catholic Church is a single Church comprised of local Churches (dioceses) who have irrevocably submitted their autonomy to the Patriarchal Church of the West, the Bishopric of Rome, the papacy.  The Catholic Church (as distinguished from the Roman Catholic Church) is a communion of Churches, the largest and most influential of which is the Roman Catholic Church, in Eucharistic Fellowship with the Bishop of Rome.  Some of these Churches in Communion are the Melkite Patriarchate and its constituent local Churches (eparchies or dioceses), The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Major Archbishopric (some would say Patriarchate) and its constituent Churches, The Maronite Patriarchate of Antioch and its constituent Churches, The Syro-Malabar Major Archbishopric and its constituent Churches, and others.  While there is, and certainly more so after Vatican II, a certain amount of autonomy exercised by these Churches in communion with Rome, it does not compare with the total independence of each of the fourteen Churches that comprise Orthodoxy.  The authority exercised by the Patriarch of Constantinople over the other Churches is purely titular and without any means of enforcement.  Thus the Patriarch is unable to prevent the Holy and Great Synod from dissolving before it even assembles.
There are factions within Orthodoxy that have long militated against the assembly of a Holy and Great Council.  One motivation is political.  While the primacy belongs to Constantinople, the power has long belonged to the Moscow Patriarchate which holds—by far—the allegiance of the largest number of believers.   Moscow has long been jealous of the influence of Constantinople and anxious to take over, as the “Third Rome” the universal primacy.  But even among the smaller Churches there has been a certain amount of jostling over precedence as might be expected in a religious culture so sensitive to the details of ceremonial as in Orthodoxy.
Even more serious, however, is that there is a significant number of Orthodox who fear that any assembly of bishops will bring the Church into encounter with modern heresies.  Many Orthodox oppose ecumenism for fear that it will introduce into Orthodoxy the “modernist heresies” that have infected the West.   Indeed Ecumenism is seen by many, particularly in Russia and Greece, as the arch-heresy.  The lack of a contemporary theological education on the part of many clergy and bishops in the more remote corners of the Orthodox world has confused theological substance with human traditions—a situation with which we Catholics are not unfamiliar on the part of our Katholik Krazies.  Changes in the liturgical calendar, for example, are often treated with the same apprehension as would be the controversy over the Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father.  I am not saying that the krazies in the Orthodox world are irrational to fear a Council.  Assemble a Church and should the Holy Spirit decide to process from the Father (and the Son) onto that assembly, who knows what will happen?  Vatican II is pudding-proof of that.

A Question That Still Haunts: Who Am I To Judge

Even a pope can get

absolution

In my last posting I mentioned that opposition to Pope Francis is being orchestrated before the second session of the Synod on the Family that meet this coming October. The divide in the Church is growing wider every day as one part of the Church is embracing Francis’ theme of mercy in the hope that the Church will find someway to more fully incorporate those Catholics who are in irregular unions into the sacramental life of the Church while another faction is closing ranks to maintain the current official discipline that those who are married outside the Church (including those who have remarried after a civil divorce but without a Church annulment) or who are in committed same-sex relationships, or otherwise sexually active outside of a Church marriage be barred from receiving the sacraments except in periculo mortis.

It was suggested by some in the Church, particularly Cardinal Walter Kasper, that we might look to the discipline of the Eastern (Orthodox) Churches and bless a non-sacramental form of marriage for those who have been divorced but not annulled.  In practice, the Catholic Church does not question the canonical practices of the Orthodox Churches including these marriages where the parties’ Orthodox priest has performed the rites after a penitential period during which the formerly married persons have examined their hearts and repented of the reasons that caused the breakup of their sacramental bonds.  I say that in practice we do not question the Orthodox canons because the official line is that such parties must still have their marriages annulled by a (Catholic) Church tribunal before the second marriage can take place in a Catholic Church.  However, as we do recognize the validity of marriages between Catholics and Orthodox, even when it is performed in the Orthodox Church and without the proper dispensations, there is this little squeak-hole through which the divorced can squeeze.

I have been doing some reading on the Orthodox practice, however, I am doubtful if the Catholic Church could officially recognize—much less appropriate for our own—the Eastern canons on this practice.  It seems that the Orthodox practice emerges not from scriptural warrant or even from the patristic commentaries but rather from pressure on the Church by the Imperial government of the Byzantine (and later Russian) Empire.  The Greek Church was totally under the control of the Emperor (and the Russian Church under the control of the Tsar) who could make and break patriarchs at will and while the Church remained orthodox in its Christology, its moral theology suffered considerably as it accommodated the various marital (and extra-marital) escapades of the Emperors and their families.  From the time of the Patriarch Photios in the ninth century the Church began to acknowledge reasons for which a divorce could be obtained.  Photios, you may remember, was the Patriarch whom the Emperor Michael III installed after removing Patriarch Ignatios.  Ignatios had offended the Emperor Michael’s uncle, Caesar Bardas, by refusing him communion because Bardas was publically carrying on an affair with one of his daughters-in-law.  Pope Nicholas I refused to recognize the Emperor’s deposition of the Patriarch and consequently refused to recognize the legitimacy of Photios’ patriarchate.  This led to a schism of that divided the Latin and the Greek churches fro 863-870.  It is not a moment in which the Greek Church can take much pride.  Photios was deposed in 869-870 and unity restored to the Church.  He was legitimately elected patriarch in 877 and he served the Church well in his patriarchate.  No one can deny that he was a great bishop.  Ironically, his son was elected Pope Theodore II in 897, though is reign lasted only three weeks.

The Greek practice is not an annulment of a marriage as Church tribunals grant in the Catholic Church.  It is an ecclesiastical divorce that does not “undo” the first marriage.  That is why the rite for a second—and in rare cases, a third marriage is substantially different from the rite used for the first marriage.  The practice of “crowning” the nuptial couple at the first marriage is not repeated which symbolically implies that in the Kingdom of God the first spouses will be reunited eternally: how that reunion is supposed to reflect the bliss of the eternal heavenly banquet is unclear. 

The practice of the Church recognizing certain divorces might have worked out differently in the west had not the Popes been able to break imperial control over the Church during the Gregorian Reform in 11^th century.  While the Ottonian Emperors of the 10^th and early 11^th century had in fact been able to use their power to enforce reforms on the papacy, the tide turned by the middle of the century and the Popes began a long battle to free themselves of an Imperial supervision which had begun benevolently but was turning into a political subservience that was undermining the Church’s integrity.  Going back before the Ottonian revival, when Pope Stephen III had warned Charlemagne not to divorce his first wife, Himmeltrude, the Emperor had ignored him without any consequences and entered into several subsequent marriages.   Charlemagne’s great-grandson, Lothair II, a junior member of the Imperial family, was initially denied an annulment of his marriage by Pope Nicholas I (the same Nicholas who defended Patriarch Ignatios of Antioch against the Emperor Michael III and Photios), but Pope Adrian II eventually granted Lothair and his wife the requested annulment. It is hard to say “no” to an Emperor or his family unless you are free of their dominance.  Had the Emperors in the west been able to establish and maintain the same control of the Church that their Byzantine counterparts had, we may well have come to find ecclesiastical divorces in the west as well. 

It really is difficult to see how the Orthodox practice could be accepted in the Roman Church, but I personally don’t see that as the problem.  From an ecumenical standpoint, while I don’t see how we could justify adopting the Orthodox practice as it lacks scriptural or patristic foundation, I think we need to recognize the Orthodox right to determine their own practices without our criticism.  Unity does not require conformity; there are legitimate diversities even in moral issues.  I think the problem is our presupposition that some sort of moral uprightness is a pre-requisite to the reception of the sacraments. I think—and again, I am no theologian—that we need to take a long look at our basic moral theology and come to a deeper understanding of sin, grace, and the role of the sacraments. 

Cardinal Burke’s egregiously stupid statement that persons with same-sex attraction and who are kind, dedicated, and generous are equivalent to “the person who murders someone and yet is kind to other people” is not only amazingly stupid—even for him—but is so theologically unnuanced as to be obviously a bigoted rant rather than a serious moral evaluation.  What organizes the Cardinal’s primitive moral schema is his sad lack of pastoral experience whereas good shepherds pick up from their contact with the people of God a sensitivity to the complexity of the mystery of sin and grace in our lives. Pope Francis alludes to his in his famous remark that shepherds should smell like their sheep.   It is far too easy to live in a blinding blizzard of moral ignorance if you never have to deal with real people in real life situations.  Of course, a sound spiritual life introduces one to the contradictions within one’s own soul but if all one knows is the superficial pieties of an exaggerated devotionalism—as, for example, the faux “spirituality” propagated in most seminaries today—it is all too easy to remain in one’s own fortified tower of denial, not unlike the pious Pharisee in the story about the Pharisee and the Publican. 

Catholic moral theology has been stuck in a rut for the last forty years.   While Biblical scholarship, liturgical/sacramental theology, canon law, and even—to a great extent—Dogmatic theology have been allowed a considerable range of freedom of scientific investigation, any innovation in moral theology—at least as regards issues of human sexuality and reproduction—has been a lightening rod to attract quick and negative response from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.  The distinguished German moral theologian, Bernard Häring, an innovative and acclaimed author even in the reign of Pius XII and one of the leading periti at the Second Vatican Council, fell from favor after the election of John Paul II because of the though questions he was posing about the entrenched moral theology of the day.  Other moralists who tried to integrate insights from the social and behavioral sciences have found their books banned and they themselves banished from Catholic faculties.  There is a desperate need to reexamine not only the particularities of the variety of sins to which we mortals foolishly give ourselves, but to look at sin itself.

I understand why a person in an ongoing relationship other than marriage—and marriage as defined by the Catholic Church—that involves sexual intimacy should not approach the sacraments.  A non-canonical marriage or union can be defined as a persistent state of sin and membership in such a relationship does not show repentance.  I will, at least for a moment, accept that premise.  But I do have two questions.

The first question is quite concrete, even specific.  Jeannette X who sings in our parish choir, is an openly racist individual.  She speaks very negatively of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.  She comes to our church—a ten-mile drive from her own parish—because she does “not want to Mass with those people: they smell bad.”  Yet she marches up to communion, first in line with the choir, every Sunday with head held high, like she is Mother Theresa.  Her bigotry, to which she gives expression, is a persistent state of sin and yet no one suggests that she should not go to communion. 

My second question is a bit more abstract, but I will put it in concrete terms.  X and Y are two middle-aged men who have been together for fifteen years and civilly married for five.  X graduated from a Catholic seminary (he was ordained deacon, but left before priesthood.)  Y had also attended a Catholic seminary for several years in his native Spain before moving to the United States twenty years ago.  He currently teaches music twice a week in a rather traditional religious community of women who are aware of his status.   Both attend Mass not only on Sundays, but frequently through the week.  Both find their relationship to be spiritually deep and a source of grace in their lives in a way that is analogous to how a devout married couple might find their marriage to be life-giving.  Why should they not be able to receive the sacraments?  They do not experience their relationship as sinful but only as a source of God’s grace.  How can third parties make an evaluation that ignores the experiential evidence? 

So then, why do some “persistent states of sin” bar people from communion but not others?   Why can a man who beats his wife come to confession and be absolved without having his anger treated, but someone who is remarried after a divorce not be able to receive absolution and communion?  Why can a drunk be absolved without entering an AA program but not a person who lives with another person of the same sex to whom he or she is committed? 

I don’t want people—even wife-beaters or drunks—to be barred from the sacraments.  I guess what I am asking is not for the Church to start restricting more and more people from the sacraments, but to realize that the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, have a remedial purpose in which the sinner finds the strength to look at his or her life and correct the course to put us more in line with the Will of God.  Again, I am a historian and not a theologian, and I recognize that throughout its history the Church has barred those in serious sin from the Eucharist, but when I hear the Gospel account of Jesus sitting at Table with sinners (Matthew 9:9-13), I am not sure that we get this right. I don’t have answers, but there are questions I think we need to be brave enough to discuss.

Here Is Where the Need of a Fortnight For Freedom Is Real

The Mar Elias Monastery in

Bethlehem--Christians in the

Near East are in great peril

I want to post these selections from a United Press article by Bassem Maroue that was posted several days ago to make us more aware of the pressing concern for the safety of Syria’s Christian minority.  By and large the “Arab Spring” has been a disaster for the Christians of the Near East and American foreign policy is not helping them—to the contrary the suffering of Christians in Iraq is directly traceable to the policies of the Bush administration and the support of the Obama Administration for the “pro-Democracy” movement in Egypt is destabilizing the situation of the Coptic Christians there.  (For more information on Christians in Islamic countries see entries for December 24, 26 2011,  March 20, 21, 23, and June 7, 2012.) 

Christians, who make up about 10 per cent of Syria's population, say they are particularly vulnerable to the violence sweeping the country of 22 million people. They are fearful that Syria will become another Iraq, with Christians caught in the crossfire between rival Islamic groups.

"What is happening in these neighbourhoods pains our hearts," said Maximos al-Jamal, a Greek Orthodox priest who is still in Homs. He says about 90 of the civilians in two besieged Homs neighbourhoods are Christians, down from thousands who lived in the area before the uprising began.

"Before we were staying here to guard our homes but now the situation is unbearable," one Homs resident told The Associated Press by telephone, asking that his name not be used for fear of reprisals by both sides of the conflict.

He said he feared the rebels want to keep the Christians trapped in the city as a bargaining chip while the army's bombardment and ground attacks on the city intensify. Syrian Christians have largely stuck by President Bashar Assad, fearing the strength of Muslim hard-liners in the uprising against his rule.

Several mediators have made an urgent appeal to evacuate the Christians who they fear could be targeted for their religion. Syrian Christians don't have to look far for an example of brutal treatment. Hundreds of thousands of Christians fled Iraq after their community and others were repeatedly targeted by extremist militants in the chaotic years after Saddam Hussein's 2003 ouster.

The Christians, who are trapped in Homs' Hamidiyeh and Bustan Diwan neighbourhoods, include four children under the age of 10. There is barely any electricity or running water, telephone lines are unreliable and they are forced to hide in shelters during daily shelling. 

Al-Jamal said that many Christians from Homs are coming to his office in the city to get marriage or birth certificates to apply for visas to leave the country.

"If Syrian Christians get visas from other countries, I say more than 70 per cent of them will leave," he said.

 For what you can do to help, contact the Catholic Near East Welfare Association. (Paste this into your browser: http://www.cnewa.org/home.aspx?ID=26&pagetypeID=12&sitecode=HQ )

Origins (and Origen) of the Coptic Church

The Cathedral of Saint Mark in Cairo, Seat of the
Patriarch and Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church

In our last entry I wrote about Pope Shenouda III and how the Coptic Orthodox Church emerged out of one of the five great Patriarchates of Christianity, the Patriarchate of Alexandria which traces its origins back to the Evangelist Mark. 

     I want to look a bit at the Coptic Orthodox Church because it is one of the Christian Communities of the Near East that is in grave danger today.   Blog entries of December 24^th and 26^th spoke of the Palestinian and Iraqi Christian communities and I had always intended to get back to the Coptic Christians of Egypt but there is so much happening these past few months to comment on that I haven’t had the chance to do an entry on the Copts. 

      In the ancient world of Greek and Roman culture, the first three centuries of the Christian, or Common, Era, Alexandria—situated on the Mediterranean coast at the Nile Delta was the great center of learning where Philosophers and scientists met and exchanged idea.  The philosophy of the day was neo-Platonism and it was in Alexandria that Plotinus, probably the most influential of the Neo-Platonists studied.  In addition to the Greek and Roman pagan philosophers, it was also a center of Jewish studies, having a huge Jewish community. Some scholars think from the evidence of certain medical and scientific knowledge available in Alexandria that there may have been Buddhist monks from India in Alexandria.  That is not as farfetched as it may sound because we know the trade routes took sailors and merchants down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean to Indian ports. There was an ancient synagogue dating to this era in the city of Cochin in Kerala. Christians gravitated to Alexandria as well, Alexandria becoming the catechetical center of ancient Christianity with Clement of Alexandria, Athenagoras, and Origen all teaching there.  At the time of the Council of Nicea it was a priest from Alexandria by the name of Arius that had triggered the heresy of Arianism which the Council was called to correct, but it was also a Patriarch of Alexandria Athanasius who led the opposition to the heresy.  Indeed Athanasius is the personification of Christological orthodoxy. 

     It was only in the fifth century at the time of the Council of Chalcedon the Church of Alexandria (and several other Oriental Churches) could not agree with the Churches of Constantinople and Rome regarding the precise way in which Divinity and Humanity are each and both characteristic of Jesus.  This is a complicated issue—far more complicated than I want to get into here and far more complicated than I need to get into here—and so let us just say that while agreeing that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, they differed on precisely how that should be explained.  

      While it may seem a bit trivial to us, or at least while we may see that there is essential agreement and the disagreement is more a matter of definition, it was a serious enough difference that the Chalcedonian Churches (Rome and Constantinople) no longer shared Eucharistic fellowship with the Churches that did not accept the doctrine as defined by the Council of Chalcedon (451). 

Egypt was part of the Byzantine Empire and the Imperial Court ascribed to the Chalcedonian formula—consequently the Emperor made life very difficult for the Christians of Egypt who rejected the Council’s doctrines.  It was a case of Christian persecuting Christian and ultimately it undermined the place of Egypt in the Empire.  In 639 when the Arab armies came into Egypt, the loyalty of the people to the Emperor in Constantinople had been weakened by these religious disputes, empowering the conquerors to take Egypt into the Caliphate without much resistance.  While initially the vast majority of Egyptians remained Christians, over the next six centuries through intermarriage and for economic advantage most of the Egyptian population had become Muslim.  Today between 10 and 12 percent of the Egyptian people are Coptic Christians.   More on this next time.

Of Valentines and Diversity

Cyril and Methodius--the saints of
reconciliation and unity in diversity

We always think of today as Valentine’s Day—the feast of Saint Valentine, a third century Roman presbyter (priest) who, while in prison and awaiting execution for his Christian faith, wrote letters of affectionate encouragement to his fellow prisoners to keep up their spirits.  From these billets-doux comes the tradition of sending “valentines” to one’s friends and loved ones.  Sweet. 

      But, actually for those of us who were at Mass today it is the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius whose influence is not as broad as Valentine’s but has considerably more depth.  Cyril (827-869) and Methodius (815-885) were brothers, born in Thessalonica in what is today northern Greece.  Their father was Greek, their mother a Slav and there were five other brothers in the family.  Their father was a battalion commander in the Byzantine Army and he had met their mother while on duty in the northern reaches of the empire.  Their mother’s Slavic origin gave them a familiarity with the Slavic languages and customs.  Cyril, the younger brother, served the Emperor on a number of diplomatic missions to Islamic and Jewish states where he learned both Hebrew and Arabic as well as conducted serious theological debates regarding the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

      The Prince of Moravia, Ratislav, appealed to the Byzantine Emperor Michael III and the Patriarch, Photius, for a mission to his realm (which is in today’s Czech Republic.  The Moravians had already accepted Christianity from missionaries sent from Louis the German, king of the Eastern Franks (today’s Germany).  But these missionaries were trying to make Moravia a subject state in Louis’ growing empire and Ratislav wanted to balance the political influence by replacing the western missionaries with eastern ones.  (It is too early to say “Catholic” and “Orthodox” as the Church was not yet finally divided though there was a dispute between the Patriarch Photius and Pope Nicholas I in which Nicholas had declared Photius’ nomination as Patriarch invalid and excommunicated him. Photius, being a gentleman, returned the compliment. For more information see entries for January 25, August 23, September 5, and 10—2011.)  The Emperor and Patriarch selected Cyril for the mission and he brought along his brother, Methodius. 

     Once in Moravia their knowledge of the Slavic tongue enabled them to translate large portions of the Bible into Slavonic as well as to translate the liturgy into the popular tongue—something that gave them an edge over the western missionaries who persisted in using Latin for Church services.  Even though they came from Constantinople, initially the brothers seemed to have used the western liturgy for their model in designing a liturgy for the Slavic peoples.  The resistance to a vernacular liturgy by the German-oriented clergy who celebrated the Latin Liturgy made that project ultimately unsuccessful, but the brothers realized that if their mission was to succeed they needed not only the blessing of the Emperor and Patriarch who had sent them, but of the Pope to whom the Moravian people had already become attached through the efforts of the German missionaries.  The situation was very complicated because the brothers were walking a tightrope and trying to hold the Church together at a time when the Pope of Rome and Patriarch of Constantinople were duking it out.  When Pope Nicholas invited them to Rome they went—and they brought with them the relics of Saint Clement, believed to be the third successor to the Apostle Peter as “bishop of Rome” (pope).  Clement supposedly had died as a martyr in the Crimea after being deported there by the Emperor Trajan.  (The reason I use quotation marks is that the actual history is much more complicated than the pious legends and sixth-grade history that Sister told us in her naiveté, mostly because Father never told her either.)  In the event, they were warmly welcomed in Rome—the Pope saw it as an opportunity to stick it to his rival in Constantinople—and their use of the Slavic tongue in the liturgy was “approved” by Pope Adrian II (who had succeeded Nicholas in December 867).  When I used to have a pied-a-terre in Rome, I would often walk by the Basilica of Santa Prassede where there is a plaque remarking that the brothers lived there during their visit to Rome and so I have always had an affinity for these fellows—plus which I used to attend the Sunday Liturgy at the Russicum where it is sung in Old Church Slavonic a la Cyril and Methodius.  Cyril died in Rome and was buried near the relics of Saint Clement in the basilica of San Clemente where one can visit his tomb today.  Methodius returned to the Slavic mission—this time to Pannonia (in what is part of today’s Hungary and the Balkans with a bit of Austria thrown in for luck).  Here he came into conflict with those German bishop-friends of Louis the German again and the Archbishop of Salzburg was particularly annoyed as this was supposed to be his turf and he wanted Mass in Latin not some Slavic lingo.  Methodius went back to Rome to get the Pope’s support against the Salzburg claims and was consecrated bishop by Pope Adrian and give jurisdiction over Pannonia and Moravia.  This didn’t go over well with the German King and bishops and Methodius was arrested until the Pope ordered him freed.  The papacy continued to support Methodius and his Slavic mission throughout his lifetime, but after his death sided with the German/Latin Mass folk.  There has always since been tension between Slavic Rite Christians and Latin Rite Christians, even when all are Catholic.  Slavic Christians in the region evangelized by Cyril and Methodius—today’s Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and the Balkans tend to vacillate between communion with Rome and communion with the Constantinople Patriarchate. Most of those who were governed by the Austrian Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tend to follow Rome, most of those in the Balkans where the Empire was resented, have autocephalous Churches in communion with the Greek Patriarch.  Perhaps the greatest influence of the brothers however are in lands they never visited—in the Ukraine, Russia, and other northern Slavic states that still use Old Church Slavonic in their liturgy and the Cyrillic Alphabet for ordinary every day communications. 

     The importance of the brothers is that, loyal both to their Greek roots and Roman patronage, they represent an effort to keep the Churches of the East and West in Communion and Cooperation.  Maybe their intercession restore the Unity of the Church.  And let us Latin Rite Catholics remember that we aren’t the only peoplein the Church but the Church is truly Catholic and its history teaches us that there is plenty of room for diversity of liturgy and even doctrine.  Maybe we should send more Valentines and do less arguing about silly things.   

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. 

Original Sin: Is There Anything New Under the Sun?

Saint Ambrose of Milan,

mentor of Saint Augustine

Yesterday I wrote on the subject of prevenient grace as the prayer over the gifts in the new translation made a reference to it, but it might be worth our while to take a look at the history of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.  It is curious because the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception  is only held in the Western Church and not shared in the East (including those Churches which are in Communion with Rome)  which celebrates the conception of the Virgin but, because it has a very different understanding of original sin,  avoids the issue of Mary’s being conceived without (original) sin.  The Eastern Churches pass over the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in silence—not denying it but also not teaching it.  They hold that Mary was sinless but do not attribute this to her not having been conceived subject to original sin.  As I just pointed out, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is dependent on one’s understanding of original sin. 
       Saint Augustine is usually “blamed” for introducing the concept of original sin into Catholic (and Protestant) theology, and this explains why the doctrine is held in the Western Church where Augustine is a major figure and not in the Churches of the East where his influence is minimal.  In fact, however, while Augustine devoted considerable paper and ink to the subject of original sin, he inherited the doctrine, at least in seminal form, from earlier Church Fathers such as Iranaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, and Ambrose who saw in the disobedience of Adam the origins of human rebellion against God.  One of the reasons this doctrine of original sin never “ took off” in the East is that in the early Patristic era (the second through the fifth centuries) the Eastern Churches had more of a challenge from the Gnostic heresies that tended to grossly overstress the role and power of evil and that forced Eastern theologians to stay focused on the essential goodness of God’s Creation.  To admit that human nature is somehow essentially flawed, even by the inherited effects of Adam’s sin, would have played into the hands of the sin-obsessed Gnostics.  Of course Augustine had himself belonged to a Gnostic sect and while he rejected Manicheanism even before his conversion to Christianity, he was far more given to reflect on the dark side of human nature than most, indeed any, of the earlier Church Fathers.  Augustine took the tradition of an inherited sinfulness that had come down from Tertullian through Ambrose and runs with it, developing a very negative anthropology in which the human person is enthralled by Adam’s disobedience and only by grace regains the freedom of the will.  Augustine came into conflict with a Roman priest by the name of Pelagius who argued that the human will is essentially free and able to choose between sin and grace.  This positivist view of human nature and the consequent superfluity of grace was more than Augustine could bear.  He knew from experience—his experience—the evil that lurks within the human heart.  (Sort of like “The Shadow” of old-time radio fame.)    The Church would come down on Augustine’s side—they had to as he was (and still is) the most prolific theologian in the history of the Church and lays the foundation for all subsequent Western Theology—thought in practice we Catholics have a tendency to slide into Pelagianism which is what triggers our attraction to “salvation by works.”  Anyway, as I have said, Augustine taught that the human person has inherited a nature that, while created good, is inherently flawed by the disobedience of our first parents and that this flaw, rooted in human concupiscence, is passed down from father to child through the act of sexual intercourse by which the child is begotten.  This is not to say that Augustine understands concupiscence exclusively in sexual terms.  Augustine gets a bad rap for being anti-sex while in fact he is just about anti-everything, one of those persons who believe that if something is at all enjoyable it must be sinful.  By the way, I am a big fan of Augustine and think that he is the greatest mind in the history of Christian thought so I am not slamming him but the fact of the matter is that he has an incredibly negative understanding—not necessarily wrong, just incredibly negative—of human nature. And then, if human nature is so corrupted by sin, the problem becomes how could the Blessed Mother be tainted by this human nature?  How indeed?   That is the conundrum the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was formulated to resolve. 

The East West Schism--more on that story

The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.  After

having served as the seat of the

Patriarch of Constantinople for

centuries, it was turned into a

mosque.  Since the secularizaiton

of Turkey at the end of World War I

it has been a museum. 

Well, I think we have looked enough, at least for awhile, at the problem of so many bishops not being up to the grade needed to meet the leadership challenges of the Church in the Modern World and we can return to the eleventh century.  I will have some entries to bridge the Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century and the Innocentian Reform of the Thirteenth, but before we go there I would like to return to the topic of the East-West Schism.  You might want to check the entries for January 25 and August 23. 
     The first notion to get out of our heads is the idea that the Greek Orthodox Church “broke away” from the Roman Catholic Church.  Break they did, but the Greek and the Roman Churches broke away from each other, or rather, they broke with each other.  The Greek—and other Orthodox Churches—were never “under” the Pope.  As pointed out in the August 23^rd entry, the five patriarchs were recognized as equals and each was seen as supreme in his own jurisdiction.  The Roman Patriarch was the first among these equals, and recognized as such since the First Council of Constantinople.  The other Patriarchs ranked—according to the Council in Trullo (recognized as Ecumenical by the Eastern Churches but not the Western) Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.  Indeed, Jerusalem was recognized almost solely for its antiquity as the Mother Church; it really had no daughter Churches to speak of in its patriarchy.  Antioch on the other hand controlled the Churches of Syria, Iraq, Persia and down into India—a vast region.  Alexandria led the Churches of Egypt and North Africa as well as along the Red Sea with the Coptic Church of Ethiopia.  And then there was Constantinople.  The Patriarch claimed descent from Saint Andrew, the First-Called and elder brother of Peter.  These titles nudged the Bishop of Rome a bit about his position.  Yes, Peter was the leader, but it was Andrew who told Peter that he had met the Messiah and invited Peter to come along in discipleship.  (John 1:41).  Andrew the First-Called was a reminder that, well maybe, Constantinople should be first and Rome, Peter’s See, second.  After all, Constantinople was the capital of the Empire and Rome was now just a backwater town, abandoned and in ruins.  And the Emperor—the real Emperor, not that German fool in bearskins and with dirty feet—reigned in Constantinople.  And there was the great basilica of the Hagia Sophia and the splendid liturgies in Constantinople while in Rome Saint Peter’s was falling down around the congregation as the papal chaplains stood around yawning and scratching their backsides at Mass.
     The tension was building on a number of fronts.  Constantinople was sending out missionaries to convert the Slavic Peoples to the North and West in what is today Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania.  The Holy Roman Emperor was sending out missionaries with papal ties to the Slavic Peoples in what is today the Czech Republic, Poland, and Croatia.  What would happen when the western missionaries spreading papal ties met up with the eastern missionaries spreading dependency on Constantinople?  Meet they would in what is today Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and along the fault line between eastern and western Slavs. (I don’t mean to imply here that the Hungarians are Slavs—they are not—but they got caught in the mix, sort of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.)  Actually in 862 the Greeks had sent the brother team of missionaries Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs but the brothers had been politic enough to first go to Rome and get the pope’s encouragement for their mission as well.  Both Catholic and Orthodox Slavs look to these brothers as their Apostles, but the peace the built between East and West and was not to last.     
      Greek missionaries had reached beyond the Black Sea up the Dnieper River to the site of modern Kiev where they had made progress in converting the local Rus people.  The Rus were of Viking extraction, peoples from modern Sweden, who had colonized along the Rivers of the Ukraine as the Norse had settled along the Seine and Loire in France.  There is an old story that Prince Vladimir the Great, the leader of the Rus, had wanted to introduce Christianity (the religion of his Grandmother, Saint Olga) to his subjects and so he sent an embassy first to Rome and then to Constantinople.  The ambassadors witnessed Mass in the Vatican Basilica. It was ok.   Proceeding on to Constantinople, they witnessed the Divine Liturgy in the Hagia Sophia.  “We did not know,” they claimed, “whether we were in Heaven or still on earth” for the beauty of the Divine Liturgy.  It is a lovely story, but the facts are that the ties of the Russian Church had always been to the Constantinople Patriarchate.  While the Roman Church never claimed authority over the Russian Church, the spread of Greek Christianity among the Slavic Peoples on the frontier between the two empires was an annoyance to both sides.
     Then came the Photian schism.  You can read about it in the August 23^rd entry.  Basically the Emperor deposed Patriarch Ignatios of Constantinople because he had offended the Emperor’s uncle.  The Emperor, Michael III, appointed a new patriarch, Photios, in Ignatios’ place.  The Pope, Nicholas I, felt that as senior patriarch he had to defend the cause of the Ignatios, claiming that an Emperor had no authority to depose a Patriarch.  In the end Ignatios was restored, the breach was healed and when Ignatios died Photios was elected in his own right and Pope and Patriarch played nice.  But it was remembered that the Pope had interfered in internal matters of the Greek Church.   The Greeks resented this.  The Latins, for their part, stopped claiming that Nicholas had done this as senior patriarch protecting the rights of his second-in-dignity confrere, and instead began to claim that the Pope had a universal jurisdiction over all Christians.  This was a considerable advance in the theory of papal authority.  And the Greeks would respond in kind—but that is for the next entry. 

Same Sex Marriage: Did the Church Always Disapprove?

Saints Sergius and Bacchus, a seventh century icon
in which historian John Boswell interprets the placement
of Christ to be the pronubus (or best man) at a same
sex wedding. 

New York State has just joined the list of States approving same sex marriage.  Twenty years ago, I don’t think anyone saw this concern coming but now it is an issue which is not going to go away for the foreseeable future.  The Catholic Church has taken a strong stand against the legalization of Gay Marriage and it seems obvious that this is consistent with our tradition.  But, at least from a historical perspective, the issue may not be so simple. 

John Boswell, an exceptionally talented historian, wrote Same Sex Unions in Pre Modern Europe (Random House, 1994) arguing from his exhaustive research that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches blessed same sex unions from late antiquity until well into the early modern period.  His interest in this subject arose from a seventh century Icon of Saints Sergius and Bacchus.  Boswell interprets the icon as a marriage icon in which Christ is standing as the pronubus, the man who stands behind a marrying couple in the Orthodox ceremony holding the marriage crowns.  This is equivalent to the “best man” or “supporter” in our western marriage ceremonies.  It is a curious interpretation.

Boswell made his name as a historian with an earlier book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1980) in which he investigated the long history of how homosexuality was viewed by the Christian Church from apostolic times through the Medieval period and how those views shaped social attitudes towards same-sex relationships. 

John Boswell was himself gay and Catholic—a convert to Catholicism who became a very devout practitioner of the faith.  He was a devout Catholic who attended mass daily and who did not rebel against the Church’s teachings on homosexuality but who did want the Church to reexamine and refine its teaching in the light of current knowledge.  He died of an AIDS related illness in 1994 at the age of 47.  As a historian he was an enfant terrible—while still in his thirties achieving an unparalleled reputation as a talented and meticulous scholar whose incredible ability with languages, ancient and modern, opened archival material beyond the reach of even most good historians.  A Harvard graduate, he chaired the history department and taught at Yale.  Revered and loved by his students and all who knew him he was a gentleman and a scholar.   What can one say about the quality of his work?

I had read Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality as a graduate student.  Boswell had not only taught my professor but directed her doctoral dissertation.  She was a great admirer of his—as indeed were most (if not all) of his students.  I probably should reread the book today.  Boswell was an incredible linguist.  I, for my part, cherish my Greek as a distant but useless memory; my Latin—on the other hand—is pretty good.  When it comes to other ancient languages—Syriac, Coptic, even Hebrew—well, truthfully, I have never studied them and will not be as pretentious as those who with some scrap or other of linguistic knowledge will presume to evaluate Boswell’s work.  For evaluating Boswell’s uses of sources, I can only use the Latin.  To be fair, indeed to be profoundly respectful, towards John Boswell, he always put the citation in the original language in the footnote with a translation for the student.  I did find that at times, even frequently, the Latin citations were well translated but any ambiguity was translated in favor of his thesis.  In other words, sometimes when I looked at the Latin text, I thought to myself: “yes, it could mean that; but it doesn’t have to.”    He didn’t fudge his Latin translations, but neither did he always warn the reader that the citation might not be as strong an endorsement of his thesis as he implied. If he did this with the Latin, I suspect he did it with other languages as well.  And as he did this frequently, I am not sure he always proved his point.  On the other hand, the University of Chicago Press does not print history books whose arguments are questionable; Harvard does not grant the doctorate to students whose language skills are faulty; and Yale does not hire shaky scholars.   Bottom line, I do not always agree with Boswell, but one has to take him seriously. 

As to his book,   Same Sex Unions in Early Modern Europe—if my Greek is but a distant memory, don’t expect me to be able to work with Old Church Slavonic.  I don’t have a clue about Slavonic, old or new.  And again—Syriac and the variety of near-Eastern languages—not a word do I know.  Some of the medieval French, English, or Italian I can handle.  And again, I find the Latin to be biased.  It has been several years since I last read Same Sex Unions, but I was not convinced.  On the other hand, one has to admit the possibilities—especially given the vast number of same sex alleged Marriage Rites that Boswell uncovered that there could be something here.

When Boswell published Same Sex Unions there was a flurry of reviews, pro and con, but they tended to be more polemic—pro or con gay marriage—than substantive reviews.  The problem is that there are few scholars with the linguistic abilities to evaluate Boswell’s interpretation of the vast array of documentary sources cited.   

Among other archives where John Boswell found his sources was the Vatican Archives and Library.  He had to obtain access to the material by deceit as Vatican officials knew his reputation as a “gay historian” and would not facilitate his use of documents that might establish the thesis that the Church had once blessed same-sex unions.  This is surprising as the Vatican Library and Archives are usually most helpful to scholars, even scholars who are known to be challenging Church teaching.  The Church, at least at the highest academic levels, does not fear dissent but normally seeks to engage it in scholarly conversation;  Boswell's thesis, however, apparently was too hot an issue to allow for conversation.   Boswell arranged with a Jesuit scholar who was working in the library at the same time that he, Boswell, would ask for the documents the Jesuit needed and the priest would ask for the documents regarding same-sex marriage rituals; they then would exchange materials and do their respective work.     

Boswell wrote a third book, The Kindness of Strangers: Child Abandonment in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (University of Chicago, 1988).  This book is particularly interesting, not for its content (though it is interesting and well written) but as a contrast to his two books with Gay themes.  Here I found no ambiguity in his use of sources.  In that regard—his objectivity—it might be considered his best book. 

Well, since ambiguity might be considered the theme to today’s entry, and I seem to be rather ambiguous myself on how to interpret Boswell’s thesis that the Church has, in the past, not only approved but blessed Gay unions, what does all this say about the history of Same-Sex Marriage?  I have to say that I don’t consider the thesis proved, but the existence of scores of these rituals in both the Eastern and Western Churches in late antiquity up through the Renaissance, the similarity of these rituals to known heterosexual matrimonial rites, and the explicit mentioning of the partners “sleeping together” (to be taken in the literal and not the euphemistic sense) certainly does not close the door on the possibility that at various times and places in the past same-sex marriages were blessed with Church authority.  That does not mean, of course, that the Church should today—or even could in the future—do the same.  Doctrine develops—which means it changes—and we are not bound to the past but called to respond faithfully in the present.  There are  other things which the Church once approved—the death penalty for example—that it no longer condones and there are things it condones today that it once condemned (the loaning of money at interest).  Gay Marriage will be a political “hot potato” for some time to come but it is an understatement to say that it is unlikely that the Catholic Church might someday sanction it.  Nevertheless, at least from a historical perspective, the issue may not be as black and white as some might declare it.