What May Be Francis' Most Dramatic Break With Tradition II

In the last posting, I began the story of Archbishop Oscar Romero who it is rumored that the Pope will canonize during his trip to the Americas in September.  This would involve skipping the step of beatifying Romero,  a step which is in the papal prerogative but which is highly unusual. 

Romero’s conversion to a more radical outlook on the Church’s mission to the poor after the murder of his friend, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, was not simply a personal shift: it shifted the Church in El Salvador from being a buttress to the oligarchy and the old moneyed families to supporting the cause of the peasants.   This shift happened in 1977 and indeed in 1979 the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena was overthrown by a military junta determined to uphold the political power of the old families but, at the same time, initiate some degree of land reform.  Romero saw through the charade of the new government, however, and realized that far more drastic reform would be needed if civil war and possible Marxist takeover of the government was to be avoided.  Romero wrote President Jimmy Carter in February of 1980 to inform him that military aid to the junta would only “sharpen the injustice and political repression inflicted on the organized people whose struggle has often been for their most basic human rights.”  President Carter, afraid that El Salvador would go the way of neighboring Nicaragua and end up with a socialist government, continued American military aid to the junta.   It was one of the few moral failures of Jimmy Carter. 

The same month he wrote President Carter, Archbishop Romero was invited to the University of Louvain in Belgium, a noted international Catholic theology faculty, to receive an honorary doctorate and he went to Europe in February 1980 to receive the degree.  While in Europe, he also had an audience with Pope John Paul II.  The audience did not go well.  The Pope, new in his papacy but already forming a plan to bring down Marxism, was not happy with Romero’s social activism which he feared might politically radicalize Latin America at the very time John Paul was trying to deliver a deathblow to Marxism in Europe.   Romero, for  his part, insisted that he could not support the government of the Junta because of its programs of state-sponsored assassination and terror.   Less than a month after his unhappy meeting with the Pope, Romero was dead. 

Roberto D’Aubuisson, a major in the Salvadoran Army who had been trained in the “School of the Americas”—a United States Department of Defense Institution located at Fort Benning, Georgia and which gained infamy for many of its alumni who used terror, violence, torture, and murder against their political adversaries throughout Latin America—organized right-wing death squads in his effort to overthrow the ruling Junta in El Salvador and institute an extreme right-wing dictatorship in the country.  It was just at this time, the winter of 1980, that D’Aubuisson’s movement was gaining in power.   Catholic clergy, nuns, and lay catechists, because of their identification with the poor, were a specific target of the death squads. 

On March 23^rd 1980, two weeks before Easter,  Archbishop Romero gave a sermon which immediately gained international attention because he called on the soldiers of the Salvadoran army to disobey the orders of their military superiors when those orders violated basic human rights.  This was a direct challenge to the military and give the piety of many ordinary soldiers threatened the government’s control.  The following afternoon as Romero celebrated Mass in the chapel of a cancer hospital run by Carmelite Sisters and at which he lived, he was shot through the heart by a sniper through the chapel doorway as he lifted the chalice at the consecration of the Mass.

But the drama—and the terror—were not over. 

On March 30, over 250,000 people gathered in the plaza outside the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador for Archbishop Romero’s funeral Mass.  In some ways it was an awkward assembly.  The Archbishop of Mexico City, Cardinal Corripio y Ahumada, was the legate of Pope John Paul II and celebrated the Mass.  It was not an easy tightrope to walk.  John Paul had not been happy with Romero’s radical stance and it is rumored had even signed the letter removing Romero from the Archbishopric of San Salvador the very morning Romero was murdered.  Yet not only the quarter million Salvadoran peasants but the several hundred cardinals, bishops, and priests who came from Ireland, England, Spain, Belgium, Nicaragua, Peru, Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil and other nations held the Archbishop as a hero.  The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, had been informed of Romero’s murder just prior to his enthronement in the ancient Cathedral of Thomas à Becket, and had halted the ceremony to decry the murder.  Pope John Paul, on the other hand, was—and remained until his death—opposed to the sort of liberation to which Romero had been converted by the death of Rutilio Grande.  As the funeral progressed and Cardinal Corripio heaped the perfunctory praises on the murdered Archbishop, a bomb suddenly went off in the crowd.  Then a second bomb.  Suddenly snipers appeared on the roofs surrounding the square and began shooting at the worshippers.  The scene turned to bedlam and people ran for shelter from the bullets.  Prelates were hurried inside the cathedral and the coffin containing Romero’s remains was hastily interred in the crypt.  Somewhere between 30 and 50 died in the melee.  While no official blame has ever been assigned for the atrocity, it is generally agreed that the snipers were army troops in civilian dress.  Indeed, the whole events surrounding the assassination and the murders at the funeral were suppressed from investigation for decades with neither the Holy See, nor the United States, nor the Salvadoran government pressing for a full and open investigation.  It was only decades later that witnesses definitively linked D’Aubuisson to the murder of the Archbishop.   Roberto D’Aubuisson was not the sniper but he was the one who gave the orders. 

In El Salvador Archbishop Romero has been considered a saint from the day of his martyrdom.  Pope John Paul (somewhat reluctantly) approved the introduction of Romero’s “cause” (case for sainthood) but it went nowhere during the remainder of his pontificate.  Yet various prelates from the Americas have slowly insisted on its continuance and it has cleared the doctrinal panels who have examined the Archbishop’s writings and sermons for orthodoxy. 

While the normal process of canonization involves a long investigation that includes the certification of miracles performed through the intercession of the posited saint, there is and has always been an alternative route whereby the Pope recognizes, in the name of the Church, the “cult” or devotion offered to a particular person who has long been venerated in a local Church (diocese or region) as a “saint.”  Marko Krizin, Melchior Grodziecki, and Hildegard of Bingen were so canonized by Pope Benedict XVI.  Actually the list of such extra-canonically “raised to the altars” is quite impressive: Albert the Great, Good King Wenceslaus, Margaret of Scotland, Stephen of Hungary, Boniface, Cyril and Methodius, Peter Damian, Peter Faber and Angela of Foligno among others. 

Nevertheless, despite the somewhat illustrious company in which this would put Archbishop Romero, it would considerably anger many right-wing American Catholics who identify Archbishop Romero with the liberation theology of which they have a peculiar paranoia.  Perhaps more threatening to them, however, is that such a canonization would indisputably mark a realignment of the Church with the world’s poor that would make it far more difficult to reconcile the vision of American foreign policy with the Church’s geo-political stand.  As popular as Pope Francis is among most American Catholics, there is a deep fear of him spreading on the American right.  His intention to write an encyclical on our responsibility toward the planet and his open acknowledgement of climate change has been a red flag to conservatives from John Boehner and Paul Ryan to economist Steve Ryan of the Heritage Foundation.  His brokering a change in American foreign policy towards Cuba has sent right wing-nuts from Senator Marco Rubio to Paul Kengor of The American Spectator over the edge. Maureen Mullarkey (how aptly named) of First Things, called Pope Francis “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist” who “sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.” And as for American political gadfly Rick Santorum—he has always considered himself more Catholic than the Pope; now he says he has the proof.  What could be really interesting is what the Pope says when he fulfills Speaker Boehner’s invitation to address a joint session of Congress.  (My bet is that the invitation will be rescinded under the pretext of the first amendment.)  The last thing the right-wing wants is to let a plain-spoken man with Francis’ views get that kind of audience.   Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi will march up the communion aisle with confidence while John Boehner and Paul Ryan will fear refusal, or as Saint Luke put it: the mighty will be cast down and the lowly will be raised up.  And if that isn’t a sign of the end times, I don’t know what is. 

Post script: Commenting on Maureen Mullarkey’s blog, Katholik Krazy blog Rorate Caeli proclaimed: “Well... when you've lost First Things, you've lost mainstream American Catholicism.”  First Things, mainstream American Catholicism???? What parallel universe are they living in???

Tribute to a Martyr III

Oscar Romero
+ March 24, 1980

 I mentioned in the last posting that Oscar Romero was appointed Archbishop of El Salvador in part because he was considered “safe” by both the Vatican and the Salvadoran Government at a time when many of the clergy and religious of Salvador were being radicalized by “Liberation Theology.”  I will have to do a posting or two in the future on Liberation Theology as it is a very complex issue, but the fundamental flaw that the Church finds with it is that it uses the Marxist analysis of class struggle to interpret the principles of religious faith.  Marx had said that religion is the opium of the people—and indeed it often has been so misused.  Promises of a happy afterlife have been offered the poor and downtrodden as a soporific to deter them from seeking what is justly theirs in this life.  Divine Justice is not human justice, much less any sort of “fairness.”  What we mean by justice is that state in which each of God’s children has the share of this earth’s goods that God has willed for them. Such passages of scripture as the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man in which the Rich Man is in hell precisely and for no other reason than because he had an abundance of goods in this life while Lazarus is in Paradise because he had only trouble in this life (Luke 16:25)  are extremely subversive of the existing social order.  One doesn’t need Marx, only Luke, to envision a world turned upside down with the rich sent away empty and poor fed; the powerful cast down from power and the nobodies of this world raised up (Luke 1:52-53).  When Rutilio Grande was killed for being a “communist” Romero knew that this label was false. Grande was a priest who knew the power of the Gospel to call for social change, no more and no less.  The loss of his friend was the conversion point for the Archbishop who took up Grande’s cry, not much different than how Jesus had taken up the Baptist’s message of the Kingdom of God when Herod had put John to death.  And like Jesus, Romero had about three years of preaching before his zeal for God’s Good News brought down violence upon him. 

      As I pointed out in the last blog, after Grande’s death, Monsenor Romero refused any and all invitations from the Government to participate in public functions and this left the Government naked of moral respectability both in front of its own citizens and of the world.  Moreover, the Archbishop’s separating himself from the government and military made it clear in the eyes of the Salvadoran people that the establishment was inherently sinful.  Though the method was different the results were not unlike the way Becket had undercut  the authority of the King in 12^th century England.  Without moral legitimacy, the Government could not claim any real authority.  Without moral legitimacy, people could resist the Government; even overthrow it to replace it with a legitimate government.  The situation became ever more perilous.  More and more people, especially those connected to the Church, were murdered, “disappeared” or tortured.  And wherever the Government used violence to put down the people, Romero showed up to denounce the Government and legitimize the struggle of the people for social change.

       Now Romero did not, unlike some “liberation theologians’ legitimize the use of violence to fight violence.  He condemned those who had taken up arms against the government though he recognized the justice of their cause. Like Gandhi, King, Tutu and other moral leaders of the twentieth century he was consecrated to non-violence but non-violence, while it may work more slowly, is more dangerous to illegitimate authority than is violence.  Non-violence consistently claims moral high-ground.  By 1980 El Savador was totally destabilized, in no small part by the Archbishop’s preaching.   On March 23, 1980 he gave a famous sermon in which he addressed the soldiers—the common soldiers—of the army. 

       "Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination. ...In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression" 

       Such a speech was calling the military to mutiny.  It could not be tolerated.  The following day, March 24, 1980, Archbishop Romero was shot and killed by a government assassin as he raised the chalice at Mass.  

       Romero’s death caused a huge outcry.  The Pope denounced the “sacrilege” of killing a bishop while he was saying Mass.  World leaders decried the murder.  Bishops and religious figures—from many different Christian denominations and religions—flocked to San Salvador to the funeral to pay tribute to the Archbishop.  But the violence did not stop.  During the Archbishop’s funeral, in an act of moral contempt, the Salvadoran military to cause panic dropped smoke bombs on the huge crowd gathered before the Cathedral.  Then in the panic they began firing on the crowd. Dozens of people were killed.  

      The war in Salvador continued for another 12 years.  Peace has finally come to the country.  Oscar Romero stands as the national hero.  His picture is everywhere.  Scores of folk songs tell his story.  Although not officially recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church, he is venerated as on in Salvador and his tomb in the Cathedral is a place of pilgrimage.  His cause for Sainthood has been introduced at official levels and he has been given the title “Servant of God” by the Vatican, but in Salvador he is “San Romero.”   His statue stands alongside those of Martin Luther King, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, Dietrich Bonheoffer, Maximilian Kolbe, and other “Martyrs of the Twentieth Century” over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey.  Most important however, his memory and example are imprinted on the hearts of the People of San Salvador and in their National story.      

Tribute to a Martyr II

Father Rutilio Grande(1928-1977)
a martyr for the poor of El Salvador

Oscar Romero was born to a working class family in El Salvardor—a country where a small clique of less than twenty families owned almost 50% of the arable land, the vast majority of Salvadorans being share-croppers on the extensive ranches of the oligarchs.  The Romero family, though working class, was not poor by Salvadoran standards and Oscar and his siblings were tutored at home.   Romero was an introverted child and deeply religious who spent much time studying or hanging out in the town’s churches.  The Church sent him to Rome for seminary training and he was ordained to the priesthood in Rome in 1942.   The following year his bishop summoned him back to Salvador.  He spent years as a parish priest before being called to be rector of the seminary. 

A lot of things had changed in the Latin American Church from the time that Romero had gone off to study.  In 1955 the Bishops of Latin America had organized the Latin American Episcopal Conference.  At the time of the Second Vatican Council the Bishops in Latin America, or at least the vast majority of them, made a drastic shift in their alliances.  Traditionally the bishops had been closely tied to the political and economic oligarchies that ruled most of the Latin American nations but as the Gospel began to take root in the hearts of so many of the clergy and faithful, the bishops themselves came to see the radical demands Christ makes on his disciples to embrace the plight of the poor.  The 1968 meeting of CELAM (the Spanish language acronym of  Latin American Episcopal Conference) at Medellín in Columbia gave a strong endorsement to what is called “Liberation Theology.”  The timing of this endorsement was not opportune as 1968 was not only a year of great political unrest and riots in various countries,  around the world but was also the year that Pope Paul VI released—to very mixed reviews—his encyclical, Humanae Vitae, repeating the Church’s condemnation of artificial contraception.  In many ways 1968 can be seen as the year in which the optimistic enthusiasm in the Catholic world unleashed by the Second Vatican Council met the resistance of those in the Church determined to undo the work of the Council.  It certainly was a time when Paul VI’s confidence in Church reform faltered as his difficult decision to maintain the teaching against contraception resulted in an immense fall not only in his popularity but in his credibility.  Paul aged terribly that year and in many ways his papacy faltered, giving him the sobriquet “the Hamlet Pope” for the agonizing indecision that marked the last eight years of his papacy.  It was in this atmosphere of reevaluation of Vatican II that Romero was named an auxiliary bishop.  After a few years in a small diocese, he was named Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977. 
His appointment reflected an alliance among the Salvadoran military, the small oligarchy of rich families, and the Church.  He was considered “safe” by the establishment.  On the other hands, the clergy and faithful were distraught, feeling that they had been deprived of a genuine pastor. 
While the people were unenthusiastic and most of the clergy shunned him, one priest who reached out in friendship was Father Rutilio Grande.  This was somewhat ironic as Grande was among the most radical of the “liberation theologians,” organizing the poor campesinos into Bible study groups that gave the poor an understanding that their suffering was not God’s will but the product of human sinfulness.  Grande’s method of using the scriptures to open the eyes of the poor and to give them a sense that God is on their side was thought by those in power to be very subversive.
On March 12, 1977 Grande and two laymen—one only a lad of 16—were driving to the village of El Paisnal where Grande was to say mass.  Their car was racked by machine gun fire and all three men were killed. 
Romero went at once to the village church to which the three bodies had been brought and celebrated Mass there.  He sent the evening there listening to the local peasants as they told him story after story of their suffering.  This event radicalized the Archbishop.
Romero demanded of the government that they do an investigation of the murders—rumors were strong that Grande and the others had been killed by the Salvadoran military—but President Molina refused.  The newspapers, under duress from government censors, published a highly sanitized version of the murders.  The Archbishop had an independent investigation of the murders and published an accurate account of what happened.  Moreover, the Archbishop announced that he would not attend any Government function nor meet with President Molina until the government investigated the murders and punished the offenders.  This was a huge embarrassment for the government as the presence of the Archbishops—Romero and his predecessors—had always given a legitimacy to the government.  Romero’s blockade of government functions signaled the world that the Church no longer recognized the legitimacy of the government in representing the people.   From this point on, Romero became a public enemy in the sight of the military and the government. 

Tribute to a Martyr

Today is the 32^nd anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, killed by an assassin trained at Fort Benning Georgia’s infamous “School of the America’s,” now reconstituted as “The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.” I will do a future posting on Monsignor Romero’s story, but I was moved this morning at Mass when a young Religious Brother from Latin America gave this tribute.

Monsenor Romero,

32^nd anniversary of his martyrdom.                                                   24 March, 2012.

Monsenor Oscar Romero

I didn’t have the opportunity to know Monsenor Romero during his life but I have come to know him through a very special way: I know him by his word which became flesh in in the hearts of the Salvadorian people, not only because of his way of life, but also in the way he died. Meeting him in his easy to understand words was for me meeting a man of God whose humility and strength call me to conversion, to conciliation, and to action.

Therefore, In 2006, when I was in the novitiate in Lima, a Carmelite came to our house, and that Carmelite was Father Peter Hinde, who lives in “Ciudad Juarez” where he helps the victims of the violence of the Mexican Drug wars. Father Peter introduced Monsenor Romero’s life to all the novices with a deeply moving reflection about faith and justice, and about Romero’s martyrdom. Moreover, when I moved to El Salvador in 2009, one month before this anniversary, I began to experience and see how Monsenor Romero is alive in the lives of the people there. My experience deepened when I met at UCA (The Jesuit University of Central America) people who have lived and shared with Monsenor Romero during his lifetime. So, now I want to share with you my experience, my understanding and my hope about Monsenor Oscar Romero.

Monsenor Romero was confronted by the particular historical reality, in which the Salvadorian people were living at the time. El Salvador was led by a dictator-president for more than 20 years. In 1979, when the president proposed an agrarian reform favoring exclusively the land-owning minority of the very wealthy, most people disagreed with it as the majority of Salvadorans are very poor. The poor farmers began to protest against the government, asking for justice and for their rights, but, rather than seeking a fair solution, the Government initiated a war in an attempt to silence and oppress the camposinos. Monsenor Romero became archbishop at a time when the war got worse and the historical situation of El Salvador could be defined only as a situation of injustice and oppression. Many priests, religious, and lay leaders of the church were killed, tortured, and “disappeared.” There was no light, but darkness, and therefore, the Presence of God was not to be found.

The second point to consider is that Monsenor Romero made himself responsible for the historical transformation of the reality of the people of El Salvador. Like Jesus, Monsenor Romero put his faith in God, and sought God’s will for his native land, where the death or life of the people was constantly at risk. He was named archbishop in order to keep the Church there
“orthodox” and to distance the Church from a social activism. However, being confronted by the stories of so many people who suffered violence in the concrete historical situation of the Government’s war on the poor caused him to change and to speak out against all the powers which were responsible for the murders of countless people. In El Salvador the Church was, and is still, the official religion of the Government. Therefore, the presence of the archbishop was and is still very important in political events. But, after Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande, a young boy, and another man were killed, Monsenor Romero decided not attend any political events until the government explained the death of these people. Confronting this experience of death made Archbishop Romero believe that there is no Christian love if there is not justice. As a result, he proclaimed that he would never tire of preaching love and that the Christian has to work to marginalize sin and to plant instead the seeds of the Kingdom of God. Social Activism is not communism. It is not enough for us to save our souls at the last minute before our deaths. The Gospel requires people, the Christians of today, to enter into the historical situation in which we find ourselves and to participate in making the Gospel alive. Salvation comes about in a historical context.

Monsenor Romero, not only spoke against injustice and oppression; he carried on his own shoulders the suffering, the oppression and death of the people suffering the same persecution. He said “the shepherd does not want security if his sheep don’t have it”. Expressing a sign of true and deep humility he said “with this people, it is not difficult to be good shepherd. I ask your prayers, to be firm on this promise, that I will not leave my people, but I will suffer all the risks that my ministry requires”. Also, he understood that in a situation where many people were killed, where the blood of many innocents, of the poor, and of the oppressed, runs on the streets, if the church does not suffer the same persecution, it is not a Church truly rooted in Christ. The church’s mission is to defend the human rights that are being oppressed.

In addition, Monsenor Romero let himself be guided by the reality of offering his life as hope of freedom for his people. John Sobrino says “Monsenor Romero allowed God to be God”. And Ignacio Ellacuria, one of the martyrs of the UCA, reinterpreted Romero’s life saying “By Monsenor Romero, God came down to El Salvador” because Monsenor Romero confessed “the Christian is someone who loves deeply, the Christian is Christ”. Romero had deep faith in God. God was the beginning and the end of life, of justice, of love and of truth. Therefore, Monsenor Romero found God’s presence and mastery in the poor; and the mystery of God Was shown to him by the poor, those who in the eyes of the powerful of this world mean nothing. He was loved by his people and his people felt loved by him acknowledging him a man who comes from God as Good News and as hope of liberation.

Therefore, Brothers, the challenge is how Monsenor Romero can inspire us today. Monsenor Romero invites us to find God in the simplicity, in “la nada”, and live our faith completely. As soon as he became Archbishop, the rich people and the government offered him a beautiful home with every need met. But being consistent with the gospel, and with his people, Archbishop Romero preferred live in a small room adjoining the chapel of the Carmelite Sisters’ chapel. Finally, Brothers, during this Lent, God invites us by the example of Monsenor Romero to conversion becoming the voice that cries in the desert because Lent is preparation for our resurrection, the Resurrection with Chirst that is our salvation. But if we are to be raised with Christ, it is also necessary for us to accompany Jesus in his suffering and cross. Thus, God is knocking the door of our house, and it will depend of us if we open or not our door to him, and invite him to come in and eat with us at our table.

That's the homily--now let's look at the Gospel for tomorrow, the 5th Sunday of Lent, year B and see Monsignor Romero in this context

Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast
came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee,
and asked him, "Sir, we would like to see Jesus."
Philip went and told Andrew;
then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
Jesus answered them,
"The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat;
but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
Whoever loves his life loses it,
and whoever hates his life in this world
will preserve it for eternal life.
Whoever serves me must follow me,
and where I am, there also will my servant be.
The Father will honor whoever serves me.

"I am troubled now. Yet what should I say?
'Father, save me from this hour?'
But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.
Father, glorify your name."
Then a voice came from heaven,
"I have glorified it and will glorify it again."
The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder;
but others said, "An angel has spoken to him."
Jesus answered and said,
"This voice did not come for my sake but for yours.
Now is the time of judgment on this world;
now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
And when I am lifted up from the earth,
I will draw everyone to myself."
He said this indicating the sort of death that awaited him.

It does give us something to think about--we can see why the Church calls Jesus "The King of Martyrs" Archbishop Romero is only one of many who follows in the footsteps of his king.

A Commitment to the Future, Not the Past

Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred in
El Salvador in 1980

Why do I write this blog—it takes a chunk of time out of my day and I am never caught up in my work as it is.  Well, for one thing, I do need the discipline to write.  Writing is difficult and this is not my best writing.  Most of the time the blog is just a quick sketch and I go over it no more than once while normally, when I write for publication, I labor over revision after revision, tweaking and puttering until I get the words just right but I have no time for that when doing the blog.  It takes me an hour or more as it is.  But at least it forces me to churn out some piece of writing most days; left to my own I would have a thousand reasons to avoid the task of sitting down and marshaling my thoughts and then forcing them out from within the convoluted channels of my brain onto paper—or actually into the circuitry of my computer.

     But I have another reason, and one more serious than just forcing myself to some discipline.  I have a strong vision for the Church, a vision I want to share.  At times I think it is a vision that I want to rescue.  You see I was brought up before all the Vatican II changes.  I learned that Ad Deum qui laetificat stuff.  To a fifth grader, of course, they were just nonsense syllables and damned hard nonsense syllables to memorize, but I did it. And I loved it.  I was one of those taller altar boys who MC’d Solemn Mass.  I knew the bows and rubrics and in those days before middle age spread and pattern baldness I looked quite distinguished in my violet cassock and stiffly starched white cotta.  In fact I loved the whole old Church thing—bevies of nuns in white wimples and mantles, bowing and scraping before tabernacles, tenors and basses in choirs that sing—these were a few of my favorite things.  I mean it was fun being Catholic.  They didn’t make Hollywood movies or Broadway shows about Presbyterians. 

      I have always been a trivia buff which explains why I ended up becoming a historian.  I have a mind that captures the kind of information from which you can never make money.  But I always knew that the Blessed Sacrament and the Bishop when in Miter (though not when in choir dress) got three double swings of the censer.  Speaking of choir dress I knew a mantelletta  from  a mozzetta and I even knew when the diocesan bishop wore the mozetta over the mantelletta which was a very rare occasion but looked quite majestic.  I knew that the humeral veil should match the color of the mass vestments unless the Blessed Sacrament was to be carried with it when it should be white or gold.   I knew the altars were to have their annual washing on the evening of Good Friday in imitation of Christ’s body being washed and anointed before it was put in the tomb and I knew that the cross was to be veiled in violet during Passiontide except on Holy Thursday when the veil was to be changed to white.  I knew all that stuff and I loved it.  Although you would never know if it you saw my office, I have a mad passion for order and “The Old Church” satisfied that.   But what happened?

     I am not sure.  I was excited about the changes in the liturgy as they gradually were introduced between 1964 and 1970.  (That doesn’t seem gradual in retrospect but it struck us so at the time.)  I have always loved music and I liked it when we began to sing more—when music was not just for the noon mass with Palestrina and choir but at each of the Masses, though, admittedly, Ray Rep was no Mozart.   I liked it when we could go to an Episcopal Church for Evensong without thinking we had to go to confession afterwards.  I thought the nuns looked pretty homely when they moved into their “modified” habits and absolutely ghastly when they started to wear ordinary clothes, usually of the cheapest make and poorest coordination, but hey—I didn’t have to sweat beneath yards of serge on a summer day.  I missed the communion rails at first, but gradually came to prefer the more spacious look of the sanctuary.  But more important, somewhere at this point in life—my late teens or early twenties—I began to pray. I mean I had always said prayers.  We were (sporadically at least) a family rosary family.   We would, especially in lent and advent, kneel leaning into the chairs and couches of the living room with our backs to one another and recite the repetitions of this favorite prayer.  Like my father (and his father before him) I began attending Mass each day.  But I slowly learned about mental prayer.  I am not sure how.  I would go out and sit in the back of our parish church at night.  I would just sit there.  I would begin a rosary or some other prayer, but end up just sitting there in the dark staring at the distant red flickering lamp.  Actually it probably began even earlier when at age eleven or twelve I would just go down to the river and sit by the bank among the day lilies and wild daisies and watch the stream roll by and follow my heart to some inner place I had not yet begun to understand.  But I suppose I was only about twenty when I began picking up some of the books of Thomas Merton and they made me think in ways that other books—even books by saints—had not.  Little by little as I went through my twenties, not Merton but the scriptures became my ordinary book for reflective thought.  I still read Merton—and other authors as well:  Henry Nouwen, John Main, Thomas Keating—but the scripture has long been my book.  I began to see connections between scriptures and the choices I was making—or failing to make—in life.  I started to read some of the Fathers, most notably Augustine but also Chrysostom and Basil.  At the time I was getting a Master’s Degree in Theology.  I came to understand from Chrysostom that one cannot separate the Christ one meets in the Eucharist from the Christ one meets in the beggar in the street.  I began to see in Augustine that to recognize Christ in the Eucharist is to know that you are already by baptism part of his body and so is the woman in front of you and the man beside you.  I came to see how doctrine and worship and ethics are all of a piece.  

      When the American Church women were killed in El Salvador with weapons supplied by my government it hit me that I share in responsibility for the crucifixion.  And when Archbishop Romero was gunned down at the consecration of the Mass by assassins trained in my country I realized that I could no longer live in the cocoon of pious claptrap but had to start weaving a consistency that would integrate my public and pious lives.  I came to realize that the Eucharist is the strongest bond of all and that to share in the Christ present on my altar was to stand in solidarity with all others who share in that one Christ at altars throughout the world.  I realized my faith was not simply the affirming of doctrines but the weaving of a seamless garment of faith and works.  There are a lot of dropped stiches in my seamless garment but my faith today is something far richer and far deeper than the doctrinaire piety of my youth.  And I for one am not willing to go back to that that superficial and supercilious smug Catholicism of “We have all the answers and nobody else does.”  The Church for me has long been a door to be pushed out of into the world with a Message rather than a door inside of which to hide behind from the troubles of the world.  

     I eventually went on to earn a Masters and a Doctorate in history and to take up a career as a teacher and research historian.  History for me acts as a brake against the retro-Catholoism of those who are trying to come back to the Leave It To Beaver Catholicism and Americanism of the Eisenhower years.  History is a medium in which we can see the Good News of God’s Kingdom unfolding.  As the reading said at Morning Prayer today: the Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating or drinking, (that is to say, it is not a matter of the Law and its regulations) but of justice, of peace, and of the joy that comes from the Holy Spirit.   I want to keep that word alive.