Worth The Trip

The windows of the
apse in Suger's Abbey
of Saint Denis

One of my favorite churches is the Abbey of Saint Denis in the northern suburbs of Paris.  It’s fame comes from its being the birthplace of Gothic architecture and while that is certainly one of the reasons that draws me there, there is just a wonderful aura of the sacred that fills the place.  There has been a church on the site since the days of Saint Genevieve, the fifth-century nun who is said to have saved Paris from Attila the Hun and who has long been the patron saint of the city.  The church was the burial place of the French Kings from Clovis through the Merovingians down to the French Revolution.  After the Revolution the remains of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were moved from the Cimetière of the Madeleine where they had been buried in unmarked graves and reinterred in the crypt of Saint Denis.  Louis XVIII, the king at the Bourbon Restoration in 1814 is also buried there. 

The royal connections served the abbey well.  In the Middle Ages the Kings of France granted the abbey the right to hold a semi-annual fair and it was one of the largest commercial exchanges in Europe as merchants came from Italy and Spain as well as Scandinavia, Britain, and Ireland to do business.  Saint Denis was neither the largest nor the wealthiest abbey in France but it was among them.  In 1122, Suger, a monk of remarkable talent was named Abbot.    As abbot of the Royal necropolis, Suger was guaranteed a place at Court but Louis VI and Louis VII recognized his particular talents and relied heavily on his participation in the royal administration.  It was only after fifteen years of royal service that the abbot could turn to his monastic duties and one of his ambitions was the rebuilding of the Abbey Church. 

His first project was a new west front to the church, basing his idea loosely on the Arch of Constantine with its three portals.  This replaced the single door of the 9^th century church and made access to the church all the easier for the large crowds Suger hoped to draw.  Above the central portal Suger constructed what is believed to be the first “rose window” in architecture.  Much smaller than the massive walls of glass that would ornament Reims or later catherals, the window nevertheless represents a breakthrough in engineering,  The west front and the interior narthex behind it are a very interesting example of the transition from Romanesque to Gothic.  Finishing the new front, Suger moved to the other end of the church and built a new choir and apse.  It was here that the gothic became most clearly visible.  Suger modeled his design on the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius’ The Heavenly Hexarchies and its nine choirs of angels.  Suger surrounded the altar with an apse of nine bays, each containing a radial chapel.  Each of the traditional three levels—the pavement, the triforum and the clerestory—held massive windows flooding the sanctuary with light.  In order to support the roof—now that the walls were virtually of glass—several new features including external flying buttresses were introduced.  It was a radical innovation that would influence all European architecture for the next four hundred years. 

Today there is no monastic community at Saint Denis but the Abbey Church serves as a cathedral, the seat of a suburban diocese to Paris.  The royal tombs are, for the most part, empty as the royal corpses had been disinterred and thrown into a common grave at the time of the Revolution.  But when you go to Paris Saint Denis is well worth a trip out north of the city.  In some respects it is superior to Notre Dame.  It is certainly not as crowded and much easier to enjoy but I personally think the architecture is far more pure and conducive to both prayer and admiration than Notre Dame.  Notre Dame has somewhat of a squat  and shopworn feeling to it, like someone stepped on it and crushed it just a bit, whereas Saint Denis has that feeling of light pouring down from heaven and the soul soaring upwards that Abbot Suger aimed for in his design.

The Enlightenment, Catholics, Jesuits, Freemasons, and Revolutionaries

Washington in his Masonic Apron

An important aspect of the Enlightenment that needs to be looked at before we can return to our series on the history of the Church of England is Freemasonry.  Freemasonry is a system of lodges to which men belong in fraternal organization for purposes of business and social alliance, charitable works, and political activity.  Historically it also had much to do with intellectual discussion and exchange of knowledge.

According to Masonic myth and legend, Freemasonry has an ancient history going back to the geometer Euclid, the construction of the monuments of ancient Egypt, the building of the temple of Solomon, the construction of the medieval cathedrals etc.  Historical data is far more mundane however.

The medieval craft system of guilds organized professionals by craft for the training of new members for that craft as well as for charitable outreach, pious devotion, the regulation of the craft and its business practices, and socialization.  One such guild was the stonemason’s guild.  In Britain the guild system survived the Reformation and, in fact, the professional classes which the guilds represented were overwhelmingly in favor of the new Protestantism.  Being of the professional classes and able to send their male progeny to universities, the guilds were composed of men of above average education who were very much alive to the scientific developments and philosophical/theological currents of the day.  In Tudor and Stuart England, guildhalls were often the scene of lively conversations and political intrigue.  They were as much gentlemen’s clubs as they were professional fraternities. 

A stonemasons’ guild “lodge” in Edinburgh, Scotland –the Ancient Lodge of Edinburgh, Mary’s Chapel (so named because it met in Mary’s Chapel, Niddry’s Wind, Edinburgh) –was the first of these lodges that took in members who were not, in fact, stone masons.   The minutes of the lodge show that in 1634 Lord Alexander, Sir Anthony Alexander, and Sir Alexander Strachan were admitted to the lodge as “speculative” members (as differentiated from “operative” members who were actual stone masons).  Some claim that this lodge had been accepting these sort of honorary members since at least 1600.  It is notable that these recorded members are from the aristocracy as it shows both a desire to participate in the intellectual and charitable life of the lodge on the part of men whose own social class lacked this sort of cohesion, and a certain liberality of mind in these nobility being willing to participate in activities with men of wealth but without title. Incidentally, Sir Alexander Strachan, one of these speculative members, was closely connected to King Charles I, which certainly made his membership politically advantageous to the lodge, at least until the Civil War. 

It is difficult to say exactly why the Stone Mason’s guild became the nucleus of these new associations.  There could be a number of factors.  Stone Masons were a more mobile profession than most other guilds with masons moving around the country—indeed around Europe—wherever work was to be found and thus they had a stronger tradition of welcoming new members than the more settled guilds such as goldsmiths or furriers.  Also, because they worked for contract rather than owning their own business, they were not so much in competition with one another as members of those guilds whose businesses in the same town encouraged a certain rivalry and mistrust.  For whatever reason, through the seventeenth and certainly in the eighteenth century, there were fewer and fewer “operative” stonemasons and more and more “speculative” masons admitted to membership in English lodges.

And perhaps because masonry involved the sciences—mathematics, geometry, physics, and even a basic knowledge of geology and the different qualities of stone, the lodges drew men of scientific inquiry.  During the years of the English Civil War and the religious chaos that came with the breakdown of English religion into dozens of sects from the orthodox Presbyterians and Congregationalists to the far more outré groups such as the Quakers, and even more the Diggers, Ranters, and Fifth Monarchy Men, many of your more educated and professional men began to question Christian doctrines such as the Trinity which they perceived to be irrational.  We see by the end of the period the rise of Unitarianism and then the jump to Deism which posited belief in a Supreme Being but One who set the “clockwork” of the universe into an eternal motion and then abandoned it to itself. 

Freemasonry spread from England to France in the early eighteenth century, aided by both the partisans of the exiled Stuarts and the commercial and intellectual ties that developed with France despite the political tensions between the two countries.  The French Lodges tended to draw political liberals (as well as scientists and philosophes) and were in many ways the incubators for democratic ideas that would set in motion the French Revolution.  Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot were all Freemasons.  Freemasonry established itself among the American colonists as well and George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, John Hancock, Benedict Arnold, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Sam Adams, and Elbridge Gerry were all Freemasons. 

In Europe Freemasonry became associated with opposition to the Catholic Church as part of the ancien regime.  The alliance of “Throne and Altar” which characterized pre-revolutionary France proved all but fatal to the Catholic Church.  While Freemasons are not associated with the Jacobins and the extremes of the Terror, the French lodges had long served as breeding grounds of democratic ideals.  The intellectual curiosity characteristic of Freemasonry also made the Masons question many Catholic beliefs and practices that represented the medieval world and had grown into an outdated ridiculousness by the Enlightenment.  The papal bulls of Clement XII and Benedict XIV proscribing membership in the Freemasons had never been ratified by the French Crown and consequently many French clergy belonged to the Freemasons.  Some lodges were exclusively clerical. 

Freemasons, who found the rigid intellectualism of the Jesuits to be opposed to their own spirit of intellectual inquiry, played critical roles in having the Jesuits expelled from Portugal (1759), France (1764), the Spanish Empire (1767) and Malta (1769) leading up to the suppression of the Order in 1773.  By no means,  however, should they be credited (or blamed) entirely for the downfall of the Society of Jesus as the Jesuits had entire coalitions of enemies working against them. 

In the nineteenth century, Italian Freemasons were very active in both the revolutions against the papacy in the Papal States and the move for Italian unification and the ending of temporal power for the Popes.  Giuseppe Garibaldi, the “George Washington of Italy” whose military genius was able to bring down the power of the various Italian princes—including the papacy—was a vehement Freemason.  All in all, the relationship between Freemasonry and Catholicism has not been a happy one.  

A Different Perspective

Let them eat cake

This morning at Mass Father talked about threats to the Sacrament of Matrimony and to the survival of the family.  The Gospel was Herodias’ anger at John the Baptizer for telling her “husband” that he shouldn’t be shacking up with her because she had been the wife of his brother.  OK I get it.  And we need to look at the threat to the survival of marriages and families.  But Father gave us the usual stuff, the Party (as in Republican) Line.  Same sex marriage is the overwhelming destroyer of the traditional family.  Hmmm.  Maybe Father needs to wake up and smell the manure. 

When a kid graduates from College or Grad School with 200,000 or 300,000 dollars in school loans, how is he or she going to even think about marriage?  And when the job market is so closed that he or she ends up back home with Mom and Dad (the Boomerang generation), how is he or she going to think about marriage?  And should he or she marry at some point, when it takes both partners working full time outside the home, and there is no paid parental leave, how are they going to think about having a kid?  A kid, we are not talking about three or four much less six or seven.  And when to make 60,000 or 70,000, or 80,000 a year—the minimum it takes to live in a metropolitan area like Washington DC or Atlanta or San Francisco or Chicago or Boston or Dallas or Saint Louis or wherever—one parent or the other has to work a 50 or 60 or 70+ hour week and gets home at 8 at night or later—how is a family going to have dinner together or the other activities that bond spouses to each other and children and parents?  The biggest threat to the family is an economy where 1% of the population holds 40% of the wealth; expand that to 5% and they control 82% of the wealth; and the bottom 80% of the population hold only 11% of the wealth. 

I went to a fascinating workshop last Saturday at the Stamford Church of Christ where Tony Keating who coordinates their adult education forum gave a fascinating presentation on Income Inequality.  This is a subject that has recently been addressed by leaders as varied as Pope Francis and President Obama.  I had been expecting a presentation from the moral/ethical perspective but when the problem was presented from an economist’s perspective, I was blown away to see the sociological chaos resultant from an obscenely lopsided distribution of resources.  As a Christian I cannot but recognize the sinfulness of such a structure; as a historian I can only fear the consequences: Qu’ills mangent de la brioche. 

And On A Sour Note....

My last posting was about the new peal of 10 bells for Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.  It is an opportunity to talk about  both a current event that is making history—the installation of the new peal of bells that is far more melodious  than the previous set of bells that were cast in the nineteenth century to replace the medieval bells that had—with one exception—been destroyed in the French Revolution.  It also gave us the opportunity to look at the past—the medieval bells and the ruinous state of the Cathedral at the time it was restored to Catholic Worship by Napoleon at the time of the 1801 concordat with the Holy See.  But the reason I posted the story was actually to lay the ground for this sequel about just how nasty some people are.  Below are some of the internet comments responding to the story of the new peal. 

It's a better use of a couple million euros than wasting it on the millions of homeless, hungry, ill, downtrodden, etc., Catholics in poor nations around the planet. Enjoy, your holiness.

When you hear the bells ringing, that means that the pedophiles are entering the Catholic church!

The arrogance and the opulence make me want to throw up

The Catholic Church is responsible for the murder of millions of Jews, Protestants, free-thinkers, women and gays. 

Dumb superstition is nothing to be proud of

Catholicism is a religion of hatred—the world would be better without it. 

How can people possibly believe the things that Christianity teaches in our scientific world?  We have sent spaceships above the clouds and know there is no heaven.  We have explored into the depths of the earth and know there is no hell.  Yet religion keeps its hold over the minds of simple people.   

This should  be something of good news for people regardless of their religious opinions—these bells are things of beauty and will lift the hearts of all who hear them. My question is why do some people have to be so sour about other peoples’ good news?  Why does religion trigger such negativity?  Christians in general and Catholics in particular are increasingly seen as exercising a negative influence on society.  How has this come about and what must we do to change the perception?     

Make A Joyful Noise

  I saw some great stories in the news recently about the dedication of a new set of bells for Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.   In the Middle Ages the bells of the Parish Cathedral were noted for the peal of their beautiful round tones, but those bells—like so many treasures of the Church—were destroyed in the turmoil of the French Revolution.  The Cathedral itself was profaned when on November 10^th  1793 the “goddess of Reason”  was enthroned on high altar of the Cathedral.    Popular legend says that a Parisian prostitute was selected to be the deity-for-a-day, but in fact it was Sophie Momoro, the wife of the Hébertist leader, the printer and bookseller,  Antonine-François Momoro who was to lose his head—literally—in the political struggles with Robespierre less than five months later.  This was not a good time to be in French Politics—one day your wife is a goddess, the next your head is rolling down the avenue.  In any event, when the Cathedral was returned to Catholic worship in the negotiations between Napoleon and the Holy See in 1801, the Cathedral Chapter was so poor it lacked the money to buy a broom for the cleaning of the building.   The Church had been despoiled of its properties during the Revolution and one of the conditions of the concordat was that the Church would not seek the restoration of its endowments that it had lost.  Throughout the nineteenth century the Cathedral Chapter struggled to repair and restore the fabric of the Cathedral while rebuilding its financial base and the bells it purchased to replace those seized in the Revolution were of a very poor quality with  horrible clanging tones as anyone who has visited Paris and heard the peal knows.  Nine new bells have been cast to join the one remaining pre-revolutionary bells.  The bells are currently on display in the Cathedral nave where the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris—Cardinal André Vignt-Trois—blessed the bells in the company of his auxiliary bishops, the Cathedral Chapter, the clergy and the faithful of Paris.  So, on your next trip back to Paris, just as you cross the Pont d’Arcole there is a lovely little bistro to your left as you approach the Cathedral. I believe it is called Aux Tours de Notre Dame.  Sit there—have a kir and perhaps a pastry, and listen to the bells. 

Christ The King

The Battle of the Vendée:

“Henri de La Rochejacquelein

at the Battle of Cholet in 1793”

by Paul-Emile  Boutigny

During the French Revolution there was a reaction to the violence and the extremes of republicanism by royalists in the Vendée region of France where the people rallied to the defense of the Church.  Relative to the rest of France this area is still more strongly Catholic than the more secularized regions around the capital.  The Catholic Royalists bore a motto on their banners—Dieu Le Roi—God is the King. 
Also during the French Revolution the Carmelite nuns of Compiegne, ardent royalists as were most of the French Carmelites, offered themselves as Victims of the Divine Justice to end the Reign of Terror.  In fact, their martyrdom at Paris on July 17, 1794 came just ten days before the end of the ten month Terror and has been credited by Catholic sources as the reason for the end of this bloodiest period of the Revolution.  The nuns, as royalists, had been particularly devoted to the Infant King (Infant of Prague), a traditional Carmelite devotion.
The Catholic Church suffered terrible losses—of personnel, of property, and of power—not only in the Revolution but in the subsequent development of history.  The historic alliance of “Throne and Altar” which had prevailed since Constantine’s recognition of the Church in 312-313 was effectively broken by the secularization of the Revolution and has never been successfully restored.  For brief periods of time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Catholicism has been established as the State religion or given Constitutional preference in various countries, but such privilege has not only not lasted but has led to reactions in which the Church has again suffered greatly.  Nevertheless, the image of “Christ the King” has remained a rallying point for those who wish to establish a Catholic dominance over civil culture. 
Among the occasions where “Christ the King” became the symbol of Catholic Restoration, a revolution broke out in Mexico in 1911 that had dire consequences for the Church.  The Catholic Church had over time acquired extensive land and wealth in Mexico and the clergy, either Spanish or from the upper classes of Mexican society, represented reactionary political and social views.  With the revolution Church lands were expropriated, foreign clergy expelled, and the Mexican clergy forbidden to wear religious garb in public, to vote, or to comment on political matters.  The situation only got worse over time.  In the 1920’s under President Plutarco Elias Calles, an avowed atheist, the anti-clericalism escalated into a persecution of the Church and triggered a rebellion known as the Cristero Rebellion.  The cry of the rebels was Viva Cristo Rey!—Long live Christ the King.  The Cristero Rebellion, as this was known, was the occasion of a great number of martyrs for the faith—especially to be noted Miguel Pro SJ, whose feast was celebrated yesterday. 
In support of the Mexican defenders of the Catholic Church, Pius XI brought the title “Christ the King” to a universal Catholic Consciousness when he instituted the liturgical feast of Christ the King in 1925.  At the time it was to be celebrated on the last Sunday of October.  The Pope had written on the subject that same year in his encyclical letter Quas Primas.  This was meant to be a support to the Catholics of Mexico during their time of persecution but also as a challenge to secularization wherever it might be taking place in the Catholic world.  The institution of the feast was the high water mark of Catholic resistance to the French Revolution and all that it stood for in its challenge to royalism and Catholicism. 
Americans, of course, never fully understood the political symbolism of the feast as American Catholics have always been rather naïve to the Church’s historical preference for monarchy.  Ever since the French Revolution the Catholic Church had seen republicanism as a threat to its theology of power which devolves not from the people but from God directly to the rulers.  In the years before Vatican II regimes such as Franco’s Spain which was in name a monarchy (with Franco functioning as regent for an as yet-to-be-named King) and where the Church enjoyed a political hegemony to the exclusion of other denominations and religions, were held to be the ideal.  It was only at Vatican II that the Church made peace with the idea of democratic government and in subsequent years it is proving to be an uneasy peace. 
Now all this is not to say that Christ is not King.  But what do we mean by King?  Demagogues such as Michael Vorris or Solange Hertz have advocated replacing the American Republic with Catholic Monarchy but such extremist views relegate them and their more faithful disciples to the realm of religious psychosis.   How then are we to understand Christ as King?
I noticed that in the revised Missal that was promulgated last year that the feast previously known as the Solemnity of Christ the King is now the Solemnity of Christ the King of the Universe.  This is a significant shift, but not a healthy one.  It moves the understanding of Christ’s Kingship from an authority over the hearts of believers to a claim of jurisdiction; that is from a claim of authority to a claim of power. 
The difference of power and authority is a significant difference.  Power is the ability to coerce obedience.  Those who exercise earthly power can force their subjects to conform to their will.  They can “make things happen.”  A general has power over his army.  A bishop (sadly) has power over his priests.  A dictator has power over his people.  Is this the type of Kingship that Christ models?
Authority, on the other hand, is the moral weight to inspire others to freely follow, to willingly subject their will to the will of the one who exercises authority. This is the sort of conversion of heart to which Christ calls those who hear his gospel.  Is Christ to be the Ruler-King or the Servant-King?
Once again we see the struggle today for the Church to emerge from its centuries of an addiction to power and become a Servant Church.  As I have pointed out before, Cardinal Avery Dulles says that this is the ecclesiological shift of our times—from the previous millennium of power to yield the future millennium of service (see entry for June 18, 2012).  But for those prelates who are crowding Gamarelli’s for their buckled shoes and silk capes and those priests who are given to pom-pommed hats and the Tridentine Mass this shift represents a threat and Christ the King of the Universe means a validation of institutional power.  For our part, let’s just remember that our King wears a crown of thorns and reigns from a Cross not a throne.