Voices Past and Present

Bishop John Carroll, the first United States

Bishop and a model for bishops who can
think "outside the box" to effectively

evangelize in new and uncertain situations

I am on the road this weekend giving a workshop in the History of the Church in the United States and don’t have access to my library so  let’s do a divergence from our saga of the building of Saint Peter’s.  I had dinner the other evening with a group of seminarians—several Catholic and several Protestant.  Each was asked to introduce himself or herself and say something about their experience in seminary and how they realized their vocation.  One young man, an Episcopalian Seminarian from the (Episcopal) Diocese of South Carolina,  mentioned in his introduction that his bishop had identified him for “church planting and evangelization.”  “Church planting” is the process of establishing a new congregation in an area where there is no existing congregation of the particular denomination that is sponsoring the mission.  We Catholics begin plenty of new parishes—especially in the south and the west of the United States where the Catholic Church is growing;  not so much in the north-east and upper mid-west where the there are often more churches than are needed and we find parishes being closed or  amalgamated with other parishes.  But we Catholics don’t usually engage in “church planting.”  We simply divide the existing parish or parishes and split off a new parish.  Church planting is something different.  It really requires beginning a new parish or congregation “from scratch.” 
     What impressed me in this conversation with this seminarian is not that he is being prepared for this challenging and creative mission.  What impressed me is that his bishop is thinking so creatively about how to make the best use of his present and future clergy.  The bishop is “thinking outside the box,” seeing possibilities that do not yet exist.  There was a time in the history of the American Church when our bishops had that sort of creative leadership.   One of the seminarians present at the dinner, a Catholic, is a recent immigrant from Germany.  He asked a question about the “chapter” providing guidance for the bishop.  The other Americans, at least the Catholics in the group, all looked at him blankly.  “Chapter?” they asked, “what is a chapter?”  He was surprised when I explained that we don’t have chapters in the American Church.  The Chapter is composed of the canons of the cathedral and they have certain rights and duties in the election of the bishop and in advising the bishop in his ministry.  Chapters are—had have been for fifteen hundred years—standard operating procedure in European dioceses.  But when the American hierarchy was established with John Carroll’s appointment in 1790,  Carroll told Rome that chapters were not practicable in the United States.  We could not afford to tie up seven or eight priests to serve a cathedral when we needed every available priest to go out and “ride the circuit,” saying mass, hearing confessions, baptizing, blessing marriages, anointing the sick, preaching, and teaching catechism in the dozens and dozens of rural communities in Maryland, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and along the Canadian border where there were Catholic settlements.  Carroll and his priests found many creative ways of meeting the challenges of a small and minority denomination in a large and then rural society.    
      It would be interesting for today’s  American (Catholic) bishops  to think outside the box how to meet the pastoral challenges of an expanding Catholic population in some parts of the nation while it is shrinking in others.  It would be great to see them come up with some creative solutions to the vocation problem and how we can keep our Catholic communities tied to the Eucharist when we just don’t have enough priests to go around.  It would be wonderful to see them address the complex problems of a Church that is so heavily immigrant and non-English speaking before there are more Latino “evangelicals” than Catholics.  If only they could repair their moral credibility and speak with authority rather than from what has become a very shaky power.  This is the time to think creatively and try new solutions.  When you know the History of the Church, creativity is the Catholic response.  Just ask Augustine of Canterbury or Innocent III or Hildegarde of Bingen, or Bernard of Clairvaux, or Charles Borromeo, or Ignatius Loyola, or Mary Ward or Vincent DePaul, or Madeline Sophie Barat, or Catherine McAuley or Mary MacKillop.  These were creative thinkers.  We have been blessed in more recent times with people like Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton, and Dom Helder Camara,  and Gino Baroni, and Joseph Bernardin, and  Monika Hellwig.  Today we have among us Elizabeth Johnson, and Richard Rohr, and Thomas Keating, and Joan Chittester, and Daniel Berrigan, and Tom Gumbleton, and Ronald Rohlheiser.  It isn’t that the Holy Spirit isn’t trying to open our eyes, our hearts, and our imagination to challenges of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.   It is just that the hearts of this people has grown dull.  Let us beg for the grace to listen to the Holy Spirit with the ear of our hearts. 

Benedict's Flawed Understanding of Evangelism

Pope Benedict grew up surrounded
by the rich cultural heritage of the 

Catholic Baroque in his native

Bavaria 

  In a recent posting (July 30), I mentioned that the re-Christianization of Europe is a priority for the papal ministry of Pope Benedict XVI.  Indeed, when Josef Ratzinger was elected pope in 2005 he chose the regnal name Benedict precisely because Saint Benedict, the great sixth century Abbot and monastic lawgiver is both one of the patron saints of Europe and the patron saint of culture.  Benedict’s followers, the great Benedictine Order of Monks and Nuns, has been one of the great sources of European—and thus Western—Culture.  We will do some entries on Benedict (the Abbot, not the Pope) sometime soon, but much of western art and architecture, music, literature and other cultural manifestations was conserved by or created for the Abbeys and monasteries of this Order.  Since the ninth century, and to some degree even before, the Benedictines have been great educators and their abbey schools—and this is true for the nuns as well as the monks—kept the liberal arts alive through the Viking invasions and incessant feudal warfare of the Central Middle Ages.  Names like the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, Suger, Peter the Venerable, Abelard (albeit somewhat reluctantly a monk), Heloise (as a second career), Hildegard of Bingen and other luminaries of the eighth through the thirteenth centuries are associated with the Benedictine Order.  Cluny, Westminster, Saint Gall, Monte Cassino, Saint Denis, the Nonnberg, and the great English Cathedral priories are (or were) all  Benedictine foundations.  So Benedict, both the pope and the saint, deserve our acknowledgement; but still it must be said that the pope gets culture wrong.   
     The Holy Father is a refined and cultured relic of the pre-Hitler German bourgeoisie.  His father, also Josef, recognized how Hitler’s policies were not only evil but undermined the rich German cultural heritage that had been so shaped by Christian faith and practice and was a firm anti-Nazi. Nevertheless the senior Ratzinger was a policeman who served in the German police both before and during the Hitler regime, retiring at the age of 60 in 1937.  The future pope had two older siblings—his brother Georg (also a priest) and his sister, Maria, who never married and kept house for Josef until her death twenty years ago.  The family were devoutly Catholic and like most Bavarian townspeople of the inter-war years wanted a classical education and exposure to German culture for their sons.  In school Josef studied Latin, Greek and French (subsequently he has learned several other languages) .  He also studied piano and is an amateur classical pianist.  (His brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, is an acknowledged musician, director of the famous Regensburg Dom (Cathedral) choir.  Georg claims that his brother has an “interesting” approach to Mozart and other German composers).  Ratzinger’s early education, typical to both his peasant/bourgeois background and seminary education, was remarkably narrow and while exposed to the artifacts of culture seems never to have explored the concept of culture itself.  While he became a significant theologian—in his own right and not merely as pope—his university studies would have focused quite narrowly on the philosophical grounds of theological reflection and it seems quite unlikely that he ever did address the issue of culture qua culture.  His mistake, and it is a common one and one shared by most Americans, is to confuse “culture” with its products.  Culture is not music or art or literature, it is a system of values inculcated in the consciousness, subconscious, and unconscious of a people.  It is a weltanschauung (a word often translated as “worldview” but meaning something even more pervasive) both unarticulated and articulated at every level of the society whose “culture” it is.  It is this set of fundamental understandings that influence and produce the art, the music, the literature, the architecture and every other expression of the society, including its religion. 
      As Ratzinger knew well growing up in Hitler’s Germany with its attempted revival of the ancient German mythology, the pre-Christian Nordic culture gave the German people a vivid but violent—extremely violent—vision of the world and their place in it.  Christianity came along and modified, indeed drastically altered this culture which is one of the reasons that the Hitler regime planned ultimately to destroy Christianity and replace it with a Germanic neo-paganism.  Indeed, while German Protestantism fragmented into different factions—some working with the Regime to varying degrees while the Confessing Church remained opposed to Hitler—in some Protestant Churches particularly tied to the government, the so-called “German Christians,” the Old Testament was rejected, the altar bible was replaced by Hitler’s Mein Kampf  and the cross by an upraised sword.   Both this Nazi altered “Christianity” and the more overt neo-pagan revival encouraged by such Nazis as Alfred Rosenberg saw that the introduction of Christianity to the Germanic peoples in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages weakened the German Spirit.  The Catholic interpretation of the same phenomenon, a view espoused by Ratzinger and indeed by most Euro-centric historians, is that Christianity and its Gospel transformed, indeed purified, the ancient Nordic—and Celtic, Slavic and other European root cultures—from their violent self-identities and unified them in a common culture that brought a civilizing Christian humanism to Europe and from Europe in the age of colonization to the larger world.   
      There is truth to this theory, but there are also dangers and, true or not, it doesn’t correct the mistaken view that culture consists of its products and that the task before us is to reinforce the products—the classical literature, art, music, etc.  After all, while rejecting the Christian contribution to European Culture, the Nazis kept—and manipulated to their own non-Christian ends—much of the product, whether the great classical German musical heritage so valued by Ratzinger himself, or the art, or the literature.  But much like the Nazi philosophers, the Europeanists presume that European culture is inherently superior to other cultures;  its music, art, etc. superior to that of other cultures; and that Christianity is exclusively linked to European culture.   I write this as a person who prefers Mozart to Indian music, Shakespeare to Kabuki, and Michelangelo to Aztec pottery, but I realize that is my subjective preference and does not denote an objective superiority of my cultural tastes over others.  And while I may prefer a Latin Sung Mass (or an Italian Opera for that matter) over an African Liturgy with drums and dancers, that does not mean that my preferred liturgy is more Christian, more pleasing to God, or more effective a means of salvation than an a Mariachi Mass, a “Guitar Mass,” or a Gospel Mass.   
        Two millennia of European Christian cultural tradition does not mean that the Christian faith and liturgy cannot be refitted into Japanese Culture,  Australian Aboriginal Culture, or the First Nations Culture of the Canadian West.  Christianity is not indigenous to Europe.  A Semitic system of doctrine and a Jewish practice of prayer had to be adapted to the Graeco-Roman world in the second and third centuries and then again adapted and adopted into the cultures of the ancient Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic peoples from the fourth through the eleventh centuries.  It has given us the beauties of the Russian Divine Liturgy, the devout Bach’s superb settings for the (Lutheran) Mass, the Catholic glories of the agnostic Mozart, and the ambiguously Catholic-Anglican liturgical settings of Tallis and Byrd.  But none of this is culture—it is only the manifestation of culture and that Christian culture can manifest itself in a wide variety of world cultures today if only we learn to think outside the very limiting box of what has  been and learn the possibilities of what can be for Christ’s Church and his Gospel.  A reformation today must be one that is open and inclusive ; not a looking back towards an admittedly glorious past but a looking forward to the New Creation Jesus proclaimed as the Kingdom of God