Let That Fire Fall From Heaven

Irish Crowds celebrating victory
in Same-Sex Marriage Referendum

Well, I was going to run quickly through Methodism and then into the Second Great Awakening, but that will have to wait a day or two as I want to make some comments about Ireland and the national referendum that overwhelming endorsed changing the national Constitution to include the right of same-sex couples to marriage.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin said the Church (in Ireland) needs a “reality check” to see if it has drifted away from its younger members.  All due respect to His Grace, but sort of reminds me of the “Captain Obvious” commercials for Hotels.com.   On the other hand, at least the good Archbishop is one step ahead of his American confreres (including those who work—or used to work—at the Vatican) in their ostrich-like head-in-the-sand approach. 

I remember reading a book several years ago, A Whisper of God: Essays on Post-Catholic Ireland by Richard Clarke, now Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland.  Bishop Clarke was way out ahead of his Catholic colleagues in identifying the reality that Ireland has over the past four decades moved very rapidly from a devoutly Catholic country where the faithful followed the directions of their parish priests to a society in which people think for themselves and have no difficulty in adjusting to the changed social realities.  Bishop Clarke (he was then Bishop of Meath and Kildare) and I shared a platform some years back when invited by a Roman Catholic Religious Order of men to help chart their future in Ireland.  He astutely named the very dramatic changes in Irish society and the impact those changes were to have on the Catholic Church in Ireland and what the Church must do if it wants to remain a part of Irish life.  We could use a similar analysis today.  Of course, Andrew Greeley warned us thirty years ago but remained only a voice crying in the desert.  Thanks to pressure from the infamous Cardinal John Cody, then Archbishop of Chicago, we chose to ignore Greely’s spot-on sociological research.  We need to be careful and ignore no longer or we will see—as the Pew Survey released last week—the Catholic Church shrink into total irrelevancy in American life. 

To a certain extent I think this does tie into the theme I am currently working on of the Great Awakenings.  I think an evangelical revival, a truly evangelical revival, not a fundamentalist reign of terror, is needed in America today to give a boost not only to the Catholic Church, but to all the Churches of Christian orthodoxy, that is to say all the Churches that profess the faith of the traditional Christian creeds.  As you probably note from earlier postings I am intrigued by George Weigel’s definition of Evangelical Catholicism.

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

I think that if the Catholic Church wants to capture the spiritual imagination of the next generation it must address the following issues.

1.   Integrity.  The Church—and Church leaders in particular—need walk the walk they preach.  In particular they need to embrace a less materialistic and consumerist lifestyle and adopt the servant-model of Church in both their personal lives and episcopal ministries.  A key part of this re-visioning is to drop the C.E.O. model of the majority of bishops and the Renaissance Prince model of that wing-nut minority that parades around in Church-drag.  Pastors are neither executives nor princesses but loving fathers of adult sons and daughters. 

2.   We need to re-vision ourselves as Church not as an institution but as a people commissioned by baptism to spread the Gospel of the Kingdom of God in concrete terms of establishing among ourselves and inviting others into a culture of community, peace-building, and a passion for a more just world, 

3.   We need to refashion ourselves as Church not only to be more inclusive and welcoming, but to put the emphasis on community—a family of people who know one another and are invested in one another’s lives as we encourage each other to grow in discipleship.  Part of this community emphasis has to be the development of small groups in the parishes to network in mission and fellowship. 

4.   We as Church need to redo our moral theology to bring its historic values—rooted in the scriptures and tradition—into dialogue with the social, biological, and psychological sciences to come up with a credible anthropology and, in particular, a sound theology of human sexuality.

5.   We as Church needs to permit greater inculturation in its worship, maintaining a unity of faith but recognizing the vast cultural differences that cut across not only nations and language groups, but age and economic groups within societies. 

6.   We as Church need to rethink and re-theologize our understanding of sin in a way that reminds us that we are a community of redeemed sinners and not an “us” (the saved) faction in an otherwise damned world of a supposedly unredeemed “them.” 

7.   We need a reemphasis on spirituality and an empowering of the average Joe or Mary Christian to develop a rich personal spiritual life, rooted in a personal friendship with Jesus as encountered in the scriptures, the sacraments, the community of the faithful, and the poor. 

8.   We need to move beyond the clerical/lay distinction in the Body of Christ so that each Christian is empowered to make full use of the gifts of the Holy Spirit entrusted to him or to her by God for the good of all the Church and indeed, the entire world.

9.   Without abandoning our historic faith and the creeds that express it, we need to move from a Church marked by doctrines and rules to a community of faith where people personally encounter Christ through the fellowship of believers, worship, preaching, and mission. 

There is some redundancy in what I propose and there probably are other features that I am overlooking but the current model of Church is not working.  Religion in general and Christianity in particular are fast losing their credibility in this post-modern world and it is time for a radical renewal of our identity as Church.  The work of theologians such as Avery Dulles, Karl Raher, Edward Schillebeeckx, Yves Congar, Hans Kung, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Richard McBrien, Jean Vanier, Elizabeth Johnson, Marie Dominique Chenu, and—surprising to some—Josef Ratzinger, make just such a renewal possible, even imperative.   Indeed, while I am not happy about the way Weigel unfolds his thesis in Evangelical Catholicism, I concur with him that the fundamental shift in Catholicism began not with Vatican II, or even with Pius XII’s revolutionary encyclicals Mystici Corporis,  Divino Afflante Spiritu, and  Mediator Dei, but can be traced back to the fundamental shift in Catholicity by Leo XIII at the end of the 19^th century.  Leo’s embracing of the cause of the non-establishment working class with Rerum Novarum, his naming the very non-traditional John Henry Newman to the cardinaliate, and his reconciliation with democracy in his recognition of the Third French Republic may seem to us today small potatoes, but they signify a very dramatic shift in the direction of the Institutional Church that would bear fruit in the Second Vatican Council.  Up to that point the Church had been little more than a well-embalmed vestige of Renaissance Catholicism, but Leo breathed the Spirit upon those bones and we have seen them slowly come back to life.  Now is the time to unbind the resurrected Church and let it go free into the future where we, as Church, can fulfill the great commission to bring the Good News of God’s Kingdom to all nations.  Happy Pentecost.  

Tying Up This Tiger on An Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life, or, The Issue Is Not The Veil

I was on a long car trip the day before yesterday and while I drove along through the snowy Appalachians I was listening to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on my iPod.   And of course I came to one of my favorite passages in that classic, the scene in Stave 3 where Bob Cratchit has just returned with Tiny Tim from Christmas morning church services:  

“And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.

“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

There is a lot of whining among the Katholic Krazies that what few nuns are left these days are overly involved in “social action” instead of teaching second grade or knitting scarves for tuberculosis patients.  Dickens’ remarks—indeed his entire career—is a reminder that there is nothing new about Christians seeing the intimate connection between the disadvantaged (we might actually choose to say “oppressed”) in our society and the Lord whom we claim—somewhat falsely I fear for some—to worship. 

There is no authentic Christianity that is not rooted in a passionate commitment to work for a just social order.  What I mean by a “just social order” is a society in which each of God’s children has access to the resources that God—who is Father of all—has intended for each of his children.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children go without food sufficient for the day when others of us can afford to waste so much excess.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children can have multiple homes while others sleep on the streets.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children can waste the opportunity for a good education that prepares them to make contributions to the common good of society while others have no escape from a life of drudgery—or even poverty—for no other reason that despite their intelligence, finances have closed the opportunities for learning.  There is much about the way our society is ordered that is fundamentally evil and we need the prophetic voice of Religious men and women to snap open our eyes and see beyond the blinders that the social order has fixed on us from the day we were first able to see.  Religious who shun the role of social prophecy make Religious Life redundant.  But the problem is that Religious today either tend uncritically to buy into the social order, living the lie that charity is sufficient and pursuit of justice is for those in the “secular world” of politics and economics, or they—as Sister Joan Chittester put it so well in her book The Fire in The Ashes endorse “postures, positions, and actions that are wildly prophetic and prophetically wild, and then we retire to our separate little worlds and wait for someone else to do them on the grounds that we ourselves are too old, too unprepared, too tired, too involved elsewhere in more important things to shift direction now.”  To go back to where this series began and Sister Sara Marks: good heavens, gal, would you put down the latte and stop talking about the cute Calvin Klein dress you found at Good Will and get serious about something.  Nobody says you can’t go to the beach or even stop in at Starbucks—but are you so shallow that that is how you want to describe yourself?  Don’t be trendy—that is the last thing that gives credibility to Religious Life.  Be a pot-stirer.  Point out the turd in the punch bowl.  I don’t care if you wear a veil or not but I do want you to be authentic.

I spend a lot of time with a Religious priest I know who lives in a sufficiently comfortable parish his Order staffs.  Nice guys.  But they should call themselves the Order of Martha Stewart.  Do you really need to drink your single barrel Bourbon out of a Waterford tumbler?  Or if you do, do you have to point it out?    How many sets of dishes do you really need?  Yeah, yeah, yeah—your parishioners live this sort of a lifestyle.  I know the song.  But no, they don’t.  They normally eat in the kitchen, not the dining room.  A lot of nights they grab a bowl of soup or a couple of slices of pizza—shellfish or prime meats are not the everyday event.  I am not saying that you shouldn’t eat healthy, or even well: just be as invested in visiting the sick as you are in doing the shopping. 

On the other hand, for those who criticize the Religious for being too secular: get your own house in order first.  We all have the same call to holiness though we may live it out with some legitimate differences of style.  But God is no more impressed by superficiality in the laity than he is among the Religious. The Martha Stewart/latte bar/trendy life-style is just as vacuous for the lay disciple as it is for the Religious.  No matter who we are in the Church or in Society, in the eyes of God we are each only stewards of the gifts given us to build his kingdom here on earth during our lifetime. 

And as for those newbie Religious Orders who think that it is “evangelical poverty” or “discipleship” to keep their members from having the tools and resources with which to do God’s work—whether it be cars or computers or a good education—stop lying to yourselves and be honest that you are simply playing a manipulative game of control over the lives of your members.  Not everyone needs a car or a doctorate or his own room to achieve the work that God has set out for him or her to do—but there are those who do need things that sometimes cost money if they are to achieve their divinely-called potential.  The virtue lies not in not having but in not having more than we need to do the work that God has called us to. 

And if Religious are the first and foremost the People of Prayer whom they have been called to be by their vocation to the Religious Life they will come to a love for the poor, for the sick, for the disadvantaged in whose face they see the face of Him who became poor for our sake.  And they will not be satisfied with the false piety of a phony charity that thinks it is sufficient to alleviate today’s pangs of poverty by throwing some crumb or other to “comfort” the poor or the sick.  True charity realizes that while we must minister to the immediate need before us, we must also work to eradicate the evils that cause the poverty and suffering.  I can only think of Dom Helder Camara, the saint-Archbishop of Recife in Brazil, who challenged his critics with the words: “When I feed the poor you call me a Saint; when I ask you why they are poor, you call me a Communist.”   No,  Religious belong in the forefront of Social Justice, armed with the Gospel of Christ and with the Word God spoke through the Prophets.  If they don’t do that we really don’t need them in the Church today.  

Still More Reflections on an Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life

The monks at Weston
"back in the day"

The next element to look as we look for opportunities and challenges for an evangelical renewal of Religious Life is drawn from Weigel’s idea that friendship with the Risen Lord—the basis of all Christian Life but the sole reason for one giving oneself in the consecrated life—is nourished by a rich sacramental life. 
We have already examined the idea that friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by an immersion in the Scriptures which is the only foundation for a sound Christian spirituality, now let’s look at how a lively sacramental life can bring us into a deeper friendship with Christ.  I think the biggest challenge here is that the Western Church has long emasculated its Sacramental heritage leaving us not with the splendid banquet of rich foods and choice wines promised by Isaiah but with crumbs and dregs that has left most of us spiritually emaciated.  While I will be the first to admit that a lot of babies went out with the Vatican II bathwater, the real problem is not that we lost much in the conciliar Reform of the Liturgy but that not enough of our rich heritage has been restored to us as was promised in Sacrocanctum Concilium
I remember—case in point—teaching a class about fifteen years ago in which I had a number of students from a local Anglican seminary which was involved in renovating their collegiate church.  During a break in the class they began to discuss whether or not the baptismal font should be constructed for pouring or for full immersion.  I told them that I was a bit nonplussed that  this would be even be an issue.  Once one has seen baptism by immersion one can understand what the Sacrament of Baptism is all about and one would never advocate “pouring” as the means of baptizing.  At the time I was attending an African-American parish where all baptisms were done by full immersion—they had a permanent baptismal pool built into the sanctuary—and I had become used to seeing the Easter Baptisms where the whole idea of going into death with Christ so that we might be raised with Christ was not simply a formula but a profound sensory experience in which the rite was actually able to symbolize effectively its meaning. 
I also recall often attending the Liturgy at Weston Priory and seeing the one bread fractured into the many pieces by which we would actually be nourished (it was real bread, not a unsubstantive disk of bleached flour and water) and reminded us that though we are many we become One in Christ by sharing the one loaf and the one cup.  Similarly I once attended the Easter Vigil of a neo-catechumenal community and while I was somewhat taken aback by a strong Gnosticism in some of the texts and in in the homilies, the visuals of the beautiful golden loaves of bread and silver basins of wine set aside for the Eucharist and the full immersion baptisms empowered the Liturgy to be not simply a formulaic exposition of our belief in Baptism and Eucharist but a portal into participation in the profound Paschal Mystery at the center of our faith.
I do not know why Roman Rite Catholics are such sacramental minimalists.  If our churches before Vatican II were ugly (and more often than not they were) too often they are sterile now. While we rarely heard music—good or bad—before the Council, now we too often are subjected to the most banal of Church music.  (If I hear “On Eagle’s Wings” or “Be Not Afraid” at one more funeral, I will offer to switch destinies with the corpse.)  And I am sorry, but the latest translation/revision of the Roman Missal is a “dog’s dinner” of unintelligible English, convoluted syntax, occult vocabulary, and ambiguous theology.  If we are to be nourished by the Liturgy we need liturgical forms that are actually prayerful. 
And if the Mass is bad, the breviary is even worse.  While it can serve well as a book for private prayer—as long as one doesn’t feel a need to complete any liturgical hour but wants to use it as a springboard for meditation or lectio divina—it is piss-poor for communal prayer.  We have to slog our way through the psalms and canticles only to get to scripture lessons that are way too truncated.  And while I like antiphons in general, the need to keep going back and forth from one ribboned part of the book to another is just far too distracting.  Why can’t our prayer be more simple?  Read the mystics—read people like Saint Thérèse of Lisieux or Brother Lawrence—prayer just isn’t that complicated.  Don’t make it complicated.  Whether it is liturgical prayer or private prayer let’s just keep it simple so that we can give our attention to the prayer and not be preoccupied by the how we are praying.  Don’t get me wrong—I like the psalms.  I like canticles.  I like antiphons.  I just want something that lets me pray without overwhelming me in a bizarre combination of verbiage and ribbons. 
All that being said, I love the Liturgy.  I love how it guides us through the days and through the seasons.  How mornings are mornings and nights are nights and one tastes the hopes of the Advent and the introspection of Lent and the long lazy aimless passage of Ordinary Time.  And I want to see us as Church—not only the Religious but all of us—swim in the moving currents of Liturgical prayer.  We need to find ways to bring what we already have—the Eucharist and the Sacraments—to far greater vitality in our parish communities and also to revive the Prayers of the Hours so that we can all be nourished with that splendid banquet of fine meats and choice wines.  And it is not unfair of us to expect that the Religious—who supposedly have kept and preserved at least the bones of this one fine Tradition—to guide us on reviving a full rich Sacramental life.
Perhaps we need to remember that Christ is the fundamental Sacrament—the Visible Presence of the Invisible God.  And the Church which makes Christ visible present in his Body is the spring from which the seven sacraments originates.  Above all we need to recover  a strong sense of community.  Religious need to take this with a particular seriousness.  Again, it is the vocation of the Religious to set the pace for the rest of us.  Both in common prayer and common life, not only the rest of the Church but the rest of the world has the need of the witness that Religious can give.  Community means something different to a Benedictine than to a Jesuit—and I can appreciate that—and we don’t need Jesuits to live like Benedictines or Franciscans like Redemptorists.  Religious can give us not only the witness of community but the witness that there are different models for common life.   But in our culture of rampant individualism, the chief Sacrament of which we have need is the visible sign that in Christ people of different ideas and different backgrounds and different personalities can still be knit together by the Holy Spirit into One. 

Reflections On An Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life --It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun V

So the report came out on American Religious women from the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of the Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and gave the Sisters a clean bill of health.  This investigation and report needs be differentiated from the ongoing investigation and concerns of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which is not nearly so positive.  The “difference of opinion” between the two Congregations says more about Roman politics and infighting over curial reform than it says about the Sisters, but that is somewhat beside my point in this posting.   The harassment of the Sisters has been political from its inception and now very much reflects the stress between the pro-Francis faction in the Curia and the anti-Francis faction.  This will make it all the more interesting to see if Archbishop Lori of Baltimore gets a red hat in the upcoming February consistory as Lori, along with his mentor Cardinal Law and with Cardinal Burke, has been one of the primary movers in the persecution of the Sisters.  I am not saying not to expect Lori to be made a Cardinal—Pope Francis can be very unpredictable when it comes to balancing out his supporters with opposition members—but just that it will be interesting to see what happens and how it plays out.  But let me get back to the subject of an evangelical renewal of the Religious Life.

In earlier posts I drew eight principles for the renewal of Religious Life from George Weigel’s description of what he means by Evangelical Catholicism in his book, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform for the 21^st Century.  I am not advocating Weigel’s program for reform, either for Religious Life or for the Church in general as I think it is in fact anything but evangelical.  I do think, however, that his basic description of Evangelical Catholicism is superb and it is from that description that I picked the eight principles.  We have looked at the first three in previous posts and more recently have been looking at the fourth which is that the integrity of Religious Life—and thus the success of its evangelical renewal—comes from the Religious having a friendship with Christ.  Of course, for any of us to live out our baptismal vocation with any degree of integrity means to live in friendship with Christ.  In the previous post I differentiated piety and spirituality with the claim that piety alone is not sufficient to sustain a truly intimate friendship with Christ and that the Religious—or any Christian—who wants such friendship needs to mature beyond piety into a genuine spirituality.  Now the question arises: what do I mean by “spirituality” and this segues into the next principle which is “This friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by an immersion in the scriptures.”

There is no authentic spirituality in the Catholic Tradition that does not find its principal foundation in a prayerful approach to Sacred Scripture.  Dom Jean LeClercq, the great historian of Christian mysticism wrote that in the literature of the Desert Monks the most important source for learning the virtues was the Scriptures and that the goal of the monastic in his or her search for God was to come to know the scriptures by heart.  Now some Religious will argue that they are not monks and that such a principle of spirituality does not apply to them, but as I wrote in an earlier blog that if Religious of any Order or Congregation hope to have any purpose at all it must be that the principal drive of their vocation is the hunger to find God.  And indeed, as I agree with Karl Rahner, that the Christian of the future will either be a mystic or be nothing at all, let me express my opinion that each and every Christian—if they want to persevere in their baptismal vocation—must set themselves on this path to find God.  And there is one language and only one language in which this search can be pursued and that is in the Scriptures.  The Scripture is the Word of God, it is the means by which God communicates God’s Self to us.  A prayer life that is not closely tethered to the reality of the Sacred Scriptures is all too likely to drift off into the lalaland of religious fantasy.  Every acknowledged mystic in the history of Catholicism from Saint Paul to Origen to John Cassian to pseudo Dionysius to Gregory the Great to Gertrude of Helfta to Teresa of Avila to Ignatius Loyola to John of the Cross to Thérèse of Lisieux and all those in between peppered their writings or sayings with words from Scripture.  They knew the scriptures inside out because the scriptures provided them the vocabulary of their prayer.  

But beware the Word of God is a two-edged sword and an encounter with the Word will challenge and change one.  It is like a mirror in which we both see ourselves for whom we truly are and for whom we can be if we take that Word seriously and let it refashion us in its own image. 

In the years since Vatican II Catholics have been exposed to the Word of God much more than we had ever been before.  There was a day in which many Catholics were discouraged from reading the Scriptures for fear that they would fall into “Protestant heresy.”  (Talk about not trusting in the Holy Spirit.)  But since the Council we have been accustomed to hearing Scripture read to us at Mass.  Many Catholics belong to Bible Studies or Bible Sharing Groups.  Even more read the scriptures on their own daily or at least several times through the week.  And while we, as a Church, still have a long way to go until exposure to the Word of God reaches each and every Catholic “where we live,” the effects have been incredible.  Reading the Scriptures we see that “Social Justice” is not only the legacy of the prophets, but part of the very warp and woof of Christ’s own Gospel.  Reading the Scriptures we see a vision of Church which is—as Pope Francis speaks of—A Church for the Poor.  Reading the Scriptures we see that the humility of a contrite heart is an even greater gift than one’s own moral righteousness.  Reading the Scriptures we see that the self-appointed judges of others are liable to judgment themselves.  In other words, reading the scriptures we see that God has taken all the fun out of being churchy people and instead challenge us to a personal conversion where we have to leave all we cherish behind if we are to be disciples.

I think this is a huge challenge for Religious today—indeed a huge challenge for any and all who want to lead a full Christian life.  Joan Chittester writes a scathing critique of her fellow Religious that all Religious should take and examine with self-searching honesty.

We started renewal and then left it in mid-flight.  We know that renewal has “slowed down”  we do not realize that we abandoned it.  …we live within all the rules …docile and dutiful, and risk very little to get it, not our reputations, not our clerical connections, not even the peace at our dinner tables.  We want the ministries of the congregation to continue, we tell ourselves, but too often we concentrate more on funding our retirement programs than on subsidizing the ministries that are needed and trusting our retirement programs to take care of themselves if we take care of others, as our foundresses did before us.  We vote in chapter after chapter endorsing postures, positions, and actions that are wildly prophetic and prophetically wild, and then we retire to our separate little worlds and wait for someone else to do them on the grounds that we ourselves are too old, too unprepared, too tired, too involved elsewhere in more important things to shift direction now. Or worse, we support nothing at all that would in any way damage the reputation or the security of the group because “What good will it do to irritate people?,” or so that we can challenge without confronting.  We want the future without having to pay the price to get it.  We regard the local prophets with great suspicion and sink deeper and deeper into ourselves every day. We become old religious sissies, far from the quality of the visionaries who withstood social, political and theological resistance of their time so that we would do the same in ours.

If Religious return to a monastic spirituality in which they forge a friendship with Christ rooted in an ardent attachment to his Word, they can fight this tendency to be “old religious sissies” and their communities can be lively and  life-giving. 

 But if they stay rooted  in the spiritual apathy of some communities or the quasi-spiritual silliness of others or the unhealthy pieties of a revived past that some of the newer communities have embraced, they are ultimately doomed for death.  

Evangelical Catholicism And It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun

Sister Joan Chittester OSB

I want to return for several entries to the subject of an evangelical renewal of Religious Life.  The Vatican Report on the Religious Sisters in the United States is supposedly to be released on Tuesday and I am anxious to read what it has to say, but I am not overly hopeful that the Holy See will—or, for that matter, can—do a substantial critique of Religious Life as most of those who hold key positions, other than Pope Francis himself, are not Religious and have typically shown (as have our American bishops) a gross inability to capture the substance of the vocation to the consecrated life.  I think of Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, a somewhat typical American bishop—that is to say a well meaning but dense individual who has no appreciation for the limits of his own knowledge and who, in a once-hopeful ambition for higher things (The Archbishopric of Hartford) has traded his moral compass to become nothing more than a “company man.”  Now that the “company” has had a change of direction under its new pontifical leadership, the Bishop is befuddled and confused and the Church entrusted to his care is finding its wheels spinning but unable to move forward.  Tragic.  But I digress.  The Bishop remarked to some friends regarding a community of women Religious that has to withdraw from their apostolate in his diocese for lack of vocations that “everything would be fine if they only still wore veils.”  Now I think this particular community of women is dying out in great part for reasons of their own doing, but not for lack of veils.  In fact, I think the preoccupation in the pre-Conciliar Church for how veils got pinned or how the Sisters were to keep their eyes lowered left many religious congregations totally incapable of the sort of renewal to which the Council called them. 

I mentioned in previous blogs George Weigel’s vision of an Evangelical Catholicism and while I think his treatment of the renewal of Religious Life is absolutely from Planet Qo'noS or some other distant unreality produced by a mind unaccustomed to having to confront the daily challenges faced by those who belong to the working class, I do agree with his fundamental thesis that

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

 From which thesis I have drawn the following principles to look at Religious Life.

1.   The Religious vocation, like all other vocations in the Church is rooted in the baptismal vocation common to all Christians.

2.    Therefor all Religious, of whatever tradition they belong, are called to participate in the evangelizing mission of the Church

3.    The authenticity and power of the Gospel to which they bear witness will be dependent on their integrity as human persons (human decency)

4.    Their integrity, in turn, flows from their friendship with Christ

5.    This friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by an immersion in the scriptures

6.    This friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by a rich sacramental life

7.    This friendship with the Risen Lord is sustained by a life of deep personal prayer

8.    This friendship with the Risen Lord will bring us into a profound solidarity with the least of his sisters and brothers.  

We have discussed the first three of these principles in an earlier blog; let’s look at the fourth, which by the way, I consider key.  Sister Joan Chittester in her book The Fire in These Ashes which concerns the renewal of Religious Life writes that there is one reason and one reason only to come to Religious Life and that is to find God.  A friend of mine, himself a Religious and a Professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, expanded on this and said in a homily: “There is only one reason to come to Religious Life and that is to Find God through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  To me this is spot on and I think it is what Weigel means by “to make friendship with Christ.”  It is great to want to be a missionary or to teach children or to nurse the sick or to work with the poor but these are not reasons to enter Religious Life.  And the problem with many of the communities founded in the 19^th and 20^th centuries is they copied the trappings of the monastic vocation—habits and choral prayer and kissing one’s scapular when begging pardon—but not the essence of the monastic vocation which is the solitude of the heart in search for God.   Many of these communities, both of men and women, have great pieties but no spirituality at their foundation.  The particular group of Sisters to which Bishop Loverde was referring run a retreat center where they have for years triaged the spiritually ill and comforted them with palliative care but not given them the health of a mature and genuine spirituality.  And they couldn’t because, while several of the individual sisters had discovered the spiritual life, their Congregation itself never understood the substance of Spirituality proper to their particular identity.  In fact many Religious today have nothing more to offer than the milk and cookies of the Spiritual Life.  That must change if Religious Life is to survive.       

I have to say that I am not impressed by most American Religious today.  On the one hand you get the mascara-wearing latte-sippers like Sister Sara Marks who was written about in the article that triggered this series.  On the other hand you get groups like the Friars of the Renewal or the Franciscans of the Immaculate or the Sisters of Life which groups revert back to that model where the religious are so different from the rest of the Church that they cannot effectively serve as witnesses to the universal call to holiness.  On the one hand, in a world that needs the witness of community, we don’t need Religious living individually in apartments—we need the example of people who are struggling to live in an intimate communion with one another despite the individual differences and preferences that we all have.  We need people who choose to live together in charity and to work out their differences and conflicts in mutual respect with one another so that there is an example for families—and by families I mean all the arrangements of human persons that designate themselves as families—that some sort of communal life is not only possible but an attractive alternative to the isolation of our modern culture.  In this secularized world we need examples of men and women who are educated and intelligent and professional who still gather for prayer and consider such a gathering the most important time of their day.  In a world of crass consumerism we need the challenge provided by men and women who have what they need to live with dignity and self-respect and to accomplish the work entrusted to them but who aren’t out to have the latest and the newest and the most costly of everything.

At the same time, we need to have men and women who embrace a simple life freely and whose lack of life’s frivolities are their own mature choices and not because someone else has determined what they need and what they don’t need.   We need mature men and women who can make sound decisions for themselves in in how best to serve God and his kingdom and not be at the whim and prejudice of a “superior.”    We need a Religious Life that brings out maturity in its members, demands of them a responsibility for their choices and actions, and permits them to respond to the graces that God has given them individually and not expect them to conform to some cookie-cutter “ideal” that a founder or a bishop has/had for them.  A mature spirituality will evoke this psychological autonomy  balanced with a free desire for self-emptying (kenosis) from Religious that will enable them to serve as examples of mature Christian discipleship.  I admire the enthusiasm of the various new congregations that are springing up; they are a welcome breath of spring after the burned out and tired old souls who no longer have the passion for radical commitment but I at the same time I am afraid that the enthusiasm will shortly be quenched by unhealthy structures of power copied from pre-conciliar days and a lack of roots due to the shallow pieties that characterize the devotional life of these new communities.  A genuine renewal of Religious Life will find a via media that will both provide a depth of the Spiritual Life and a psychologically healthy model for communal living.  To be cont.