What Will Francis' Place In History Be?

There are three popes whom history has designated as “The Great.”  Troublingly, two of them, Gregory I and Gregory VII, have the same name, giving us two Gregories the Great.  The Third is Leo the Great. 

As I have mentioned before in this blog, Avery Dulles in his 1985 book, The Catholicity of the Church, speaks of the three millennia of the papacy.  The first millennia was marked by an evangelical spread of the gospel; the second was marked by the rise of papal temporal power, and the third, Dulles anticipated, will be marked by the papacy putting itself—and the Church—at the service of human society. 

Leo I (400-461, reigned 440-461) is considered by many non-Catholic historians to be the first pope because he consolidated and extended papal doctrinal authority to a level not before reached.  In his reign Rome was acknowledged to be the first of the five patriarchal sees.  At the Council of Chalcedon (451) when his famous Tome was read to the bishops outlining the precise terms of how the Divine and Human Natures were united in the One Person of Jesus Christ, the assembled bishops cried out “Peter has spoken through Leo.”   With the support of the Emperor Valentinian Leo asserted papal authority over the Church of Gaul (modern day France) and would do the same for the Church in North Africa.  This was not for Leo, as it would be for his successors eight centuries later, a matter of power but a matter of consolidating doctrine for the preaching of the Gospel.  There was no attempt as yet by the popes to centralize papal power over local Churches. Administrative decisions were still exercised by local bishops who were, in turn, elected by their clergy and faithful.  Leo’s aim was to clarify the evangelizing message by preserving a single orthodox faith against the threat of Arianism which was being spread by the Germanic tribes sweeping down from north of the Rhine and the Danube.  He wanted to have a clear and universal doctrine that proclaimed Christ to be of the same Divine Nature as the Father and the same Human Nature as the Son.  Many of the Germanic tribes running down through North Italy and Gaul into Spain and North Africa were Arians and spreading a gospel that made Jesus inferior in Divinity to the Father.  Leo’s Chalcedonian faith would prevail in the Western Church and the Chalcedonian faith spread from Rome to Gaul. It would also eventually triumph over Arianism among the Visigoths of Spain, the Vandals of North Africa, and the Ostrogoths and Lombards in Northern Italy.   The Christological faith held by the Catholic Church throughout its subsequent history is the faith that Leo defined. 

Gregory I (540-604, pope 590-604) was also very interested in the evangelizing mission of the Church and in 595 sent the monk Augustine from Rome with a band of 40 monks on an evangelizing mission to the Saxon kingdom of Kent in today’s South-eastern England.  While England had been Christianized in Roman times, the 5th and 6th century invasions of the Germanic Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians from across the North Sea had all but obliterated Christendom in most of England.  Irish missionaries kept Christianity alive in the far north and in the west, but it was Gregory’s missionaries who would reintroduce the ancient faith to England and its recent immigrants.  From England then Anglo Saxon missionaries would go out to what is today Holland, Germany, and Scandinavia. 

Leo I and Gregory I very much epitomized the spirit of that first millennium of spreading the Gospel throughout the world known to them.  Gregory VII, in his battles with the Salian Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, would capture the spirit of the second millennium—power.  Gregory was anxious to establish the temporal power of the papacy in Italy to gain a political sovereignty for the papacy so that it would not devolve into the sort of pawn of Imperial politics in the West that the Constantinople Patriarchate (and later the Moscow Patriarchate) would in the East.  While Gregory died in exile defeated by the Emperor, his insistence on the independence of the Church and its supremacy over the political power of the Emperor survived, permitting the papacy to outlast the fall of the Holy Roman Empire and become a major influence in world politics even when the papacy itself lost its temporal sovereignty in 1870 with the absorption of the papal states into the Kingdom of Italy. 

These popes, Leo I, Gregory I, and Gregory VII each captured the zeitgeist of their particular age and expressed the mission of the papacy for their epoch.  Other popes in the first millennium had a driving zeal for evangelizing.  Other popes in the second millennium were anxious to extend the Church’s power into the political world.  But Leo and the two Gregories were somehow symbolic of the Church’s defining mission in the two millennia, even archetypical of what the Church needed at its helm in their respective periods. 

So now we enter into the third millennium—the one in which the papacy—and by extension, the Church—will supposedly give itself over to its servant mission.  Will Francis someday be known as “The Great?”  He has charted the new course with the same clarity as Leo, the same dedication as Gregory I, and the same stubborn opposition in the face of his enemies as Gregory VII.  Only time will tell if he gets the appellation “Great.”  It is never awarded during a pope’s lifetime; it takes decades and even centuries for its effects to be judged.  What is remarkable is that we could not have foreseen, even in the heady years of Vatican II, the sort of papacy and the sort of Church which Francis would herald.  What are Francis’s accomplishments to date that might win him the title?

1.    he has changed the style of the papacy from the monarchial style of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period to the style of a pastor who is in touch with the reality of his parishioners. 

2.    He has changed the face of the Church from a moral judge to a reconciling community of forgiven believers

3.    He has moved the teaching of the Church from ivory tower abstractions to concrete imperatives of our long-held moral principles 

4.    He has engaged the secular world on its own turf and applied the values of the Gospel to everyday life. 

5.    He has demanded of the institutional structures of the Church an integrity, a transparency, and a modernization that gives the Church a long-lost credibility in the contemporary world. 

We will see the long-term effects of this papacy. Please God they will continue after Francis has vacated the Chair of Peter and please God they will take root not only in the policies of his successors but in the hearts of the faithful so that this will be an era of Reform such as the Church faced in the 12/13^th centuries and again in the Catholic Reformation of the 16^th century.   

A Follow Up With Some Thoughts On Mandatory Celibacy

Rereading my last post several hours after it went up I came across a statement that unfortunately is very unnuanced and which I want to correct.  I had mentioned that Archbishop Laud, like many churchmen before and since “could make celibacy look like an option for holiness rather than a cover for psychological struggles.”  This sounds as if I do not think there is a positive value for clerical celibacy or that celibacy is indicative of a psychological disorder when in fact I believe that in a mature, or maturing, individual celibacy can indeed be “an option for holiness” and is totally compatible with a healthy psyche.  I do not believe, however, that celibacy, especially when it is not a choice one can freely make and still follow one’s vocational pursuit, is automatically healthy much less holy.  I know many priests and religious who are profoundly holy and mentally healthy; I also know many whose psychosexual development is severely arrested to the detriment of their own spiritual welfare and of the welfare and even safety of those with and to whom they minister. 

The celibacy of the clergy is part of a very ancient tradition.  While celibacy as a canonical requirement for ordination can be traced in the western Church back to the Councils of Elvira (306) and of Orange (441), it would be centuries before it became universal law in the Western Church.  There are a number of factors that contributed to it.  First there developed a very negative attitude towards human sexuality and there were various decrees insisting that priests abstain from sexual intimacy with their wives for a set period (usually 1-3 days) before celebrating the Eucharist.  It was, thus, a purity requirement.  Secondly, with the rise of monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries, it became more and more common to choose bishops from among the monks—who were celibate—and not infrequently these monastic bishops did not have a positive appreciation of marriage or marital sexuality.  That may explain, to a certain degree, the decision at the aforesaid Councils.   Through the early Middle Ages celibacy became more and more expected of the clergy and the problem of hereditary churches—churches and church property passing from priest-father to priest-son to priest-grandson—would lead to proscription’s against clerical marriage.  This problem was limited more or less to the Western Church.  In the Eastern Churches after the fifth century bishops were invariably monastics and ecclesial preferment was limited to celibates, but the pastoral care, especially in rural churches, was entrusted to married priests and deacons.  In fact, most priests in rural parishes of the west were married as well, it was just that the Church did not recognize their marriages nor the legitimacy of their children which barred the children from themselves being ordained or inheriting property—thus solving the inherited church problem.  It was not uncommon for the secular clergy even in the large cities, and even for bishops and archbishops, to be in what today we would call a common law marriage.  While the Reform Canons of the 11^th century “Gregorian Reform” outlawed clerical marriage—and declared all such marriages to be invalid—it was only in the 16^th century reforms of the Council of Trent that there was any significant enforcement of clerical celibacy.  And even then—and now—it is not entirely successful as there are priests and even bishops who are for all practical purposes in a somewhat less than formal marriage.  Only recently I came across the story of a priest who has just retired from active duty as an Army Chaplain who has been civilly married at least twice with the knowledge of both his military and ecclesiastical superiors.  Some years back during a trip to Africa I was invited to lunch with a Bishop with whom I am acquainted.  His wife and three teenage children were all at the table.  Their presence was not explained to me in anyway but the priest-friend who accompanied me that day confirmed my surmises.  Both these men are highly effective ministers and neither is particularly “liberal” in their theological views. Those who do not know their particular stories would undoubtedly consider them both to be “good priests.”  While I must admit that I have found the chaplain to be a man for whom I personally do not have respect, it is not because of his marriages per se but rather what I perceive to be a general lack of integrity; I can’t but stand in awe of the Bishop whose selfless work in building a strong Church under the most challenging of conditions, I have seen over many years.  More to the point of this posting, whatever the irregularity of life of either of these two men, my dealings with them have shown them to be psychologically mature and well-integrated men. 

On the other hand, I have seen some of the grossest psychological and spiritual immaturity on the part of some priests who conform to celibacy.  I remember an American priest I knew in my Rome days—he was a confessor at Saint Peter’s where he was known for his rigid penances and the somewhat prurient questions with which he would interrogate penitents, going far beyond not only what is required but what is allowed a priest to ask a penitent.  Younger members of his Religious community learned to give him great distance as he had a tendency to “violate boundaries” in his relationships with them.  He was considered a saint by those outside his community but those who lived with him found him controlling, sly, untruthful, and manipulative. 

The fuss that some priest have created in refusing communion to those whom they suspect—even with good reason—of not conforming to Church teaching regarding human sexuality: abortion, masturbation, same-sex relationships, etc., and even more their self-righteousness in defending their position when summoned by their bishops or criticized by their parishioners, indicates a probable lack of psychosexual integration. Indeed, the choice of judgment over compassion might well be an indication of an arrested spiritual—and probably psychological—development.       

Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s I have vivid memories of how much many of the clergy drank and how common alcoholism was among priests.  In retrospect I wonder how much of this was triggered not simply by the loneliness of celibacy for those not called to it, but by the lack of psycho-sexual maturity that mandatory celibacy fosters.

At the same time I write this, I think back on my school days and a Jesuit who taught me junior religion and senior Latin.  He was a man of exceptional kindness and compassion, a man who could look into a person’s soul and see beyond all the superficial crap right to the best of what is in the human heart.  I also think back on a priest friend of my parents—a Diocesan priest—who was the epitome of priestly modesty and discretion, but in a way that was overwhelmingly joyful.  He never drank anything stronger than tea but could sit at the piano for hours making you laugh and making you cry with music ranging from Ragtime to Verdi.  This was a man who for all his natural dignity and grace, was not above doing the laundry for a shut-in or frying up some ham and eggs for a homeless man. Celibacy can be one man’s manna and another man’s poison.  It is clear from experience that just because a man is given a vocation to the priesthood, he is not necessarily given the vocation to celibacy.  And there are more than enough men there who have opted for celibacy but who have not the “shepherd’s heart” that is a sign of an authentic priestly vocation.  

Reformation Today! 5

John Henry, Cardinal Newman,

champion for the voice of the

faithful in the formulation of

Church Doctrine

This issue about the “loyalty oath” in the Arlington Diocese returns us to the topic of necessary reforms in the Catholic Church.  As I had written in some earlier entries, reform and reformation is always part of the Church’s agenda.  Semper reformans, semper reformanda—always reforming, always in need of reform is an old axiom of ecclesiology—the theology of the Church.

In the past many of the Church’s reformations such as the Carolingian Reform or the Tridentine Reform (sometimes called the Catholic Reformation to distinguish it from the Protestant Reformations which it followed and attempted to staunch) have been internal reforms.  Other times, unhappily, attempts to Reform the Church have ended up splitting the unity of the Church.  Luther’s Reformation and the English Reformation are two examples of this.  Sometimes Catholics lump Luther and Henry VIII and John Calvin and others all together into a single “Protestant Reformation but the history is far more complex and Luther, Calvin, the English Church, and other Protestant movements of the sixteenth century are as different from one another as they are from the Papal Catholicism from which they split.  If one is to consider the new religious groupings of the sixteenth century in general it is better to pluralize it and refer to the “Protestant Reformations.”   But that isn’t where I want to go today.

I think that “liberals” and “conservatives” alike can agree that there is an urgent need for Church Reform today.  We may disagree on how that reform be implemented, but we all can agree that there are serious problems facing our Church.  The sex-abuse scandals and the financial irregularities, both of which stretch from the highest authorities in Rome down to the level of local parishes, are only two such indications.  The emerging stories of nuns being sexually abused by priests in Africa is a third.  The loss of huge numbers of Catholics to secularism in Europe and to Evangelicalism in Latin America is yet another.  The vocation crisis facing the Church in Europe and North America is one more. 

At the same time that we speak of these problems, however, we can also see that in some ways the Church is healthier than it has been in centuries.  We have a much better educated membership.  We have a laity that is stepping up to bat and assuming vocations and ministries in the Church proper to their status as baptized and confirmed members of Christ’s Body.  The Church is growing rapidly in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa—and Latin America, where once the Catholic faith had fallen into gross inactivity through the lack of priests, is now alive and vibrant with small faith communities who are evangelizing and animating the faith of their neighbors.  While the Church in the Northeast and urban centers of the upper Midwest sees parishes closing, South of the Mason Dixon (once staunch Baptist land) and west of the Mississippi, new churches are being built to hold large congregations. 

Well what about the Arlington Oath?  How does that give us any indication of what is needed in Church reform?  Any reform of the Church today needs to respect the laity and take seriously their vocation as full members of the Body of Christ. When I speak with people who have left the Church for other religious groups, and especially the evangelical communities, it seems that the most common response I hear is that they were frustrated in the Church because they were not being listened to and their gifts were not being taken seriously. 

According to Blessed John Henry Newman, in the early days of the Church, when the Church was in its first flower and at its strongest, it spoke with three voices: the Magisterium—the bishops; the theologians, those who studied and knew the tradition and prepared the work of the magisterium; and the consensus fidelium—the articulated faith experience of the laity.  Over the centuries first the laity and then the theologians have been pushed to the margins.  The faithful were told to be quiet and think as they were told to think and act as they were told to act.  (Some would call this “assent of the intellect and will.)   Then from the end of the Council of Trent up to the present, the theologians have not been allowed to think for themselves but relegated to providing a rationale for what the magisterium was proclaiming.  And then, after Vatican I, the bishops—an essential component of the magisterium—were told that the Pope (and his Curia) would do the thinking for them and they simply had to utter to those below what they had heard from those above.  Although Vatican II and the decree Christus Dominus was an attempt to restore at least the bishops to their proper authority, the effort has been reversed in this and the previous pontificates.  This is not a healthy situation.  As Newman also said: when the laity stop questioning the bishops, the bishops fall into heresy.  (He was referring to the Arian heresy of the fourth century into which the majority of bishops fell and from which only the faithful adherence to orthodoxy of the laity preserved the Church.) 

We need a laity today who are educated (which we have), informed (which they must be) and are allowed to ask the significant questions and articulate the faith as their experience provides.  It doesn’t mean that they will always be right or that the Church is a democracy.  But they have been baptized and sealed with the Holy Spirit and their voice is an essential part of the confession of the Church’s faith.    And theologians must be allowed the freedom inquiry without which their work—formulating the faith of the Church with intellectual credibility—will be dismissed as insubstantial by those who use the intellects God has given them.    

 

Back to the Future: Saint Peter Damian

Pope Gregory VII--sponsor of the Gregorian
Reformation in the 11th century

Today is the Feast of Peter Damian—one of the most important reformers n the history of the Church and one of my favorite saints.  Peter lived a thousand years ago (1007-1072) at a time when there was an even greater need for Church reform than there is today.  The Church had become hopelessly entangled in the political scene as the Ottonian emperors (Otto I, II, and III as well as Henry II) used their imperial power to reform the Church but in the process had subjugated it to imperial politics.  What had begun as reform threatened to make the Church little more than a slave of the State and it became necessary for Church to both undertake internal reform and seek independence from the Crown.  The struggle would culminate under Gregory VII, the pope for whom the Gregorian Reform is named and who would challenge Henry IV and begin a long struggle between the papacy and the Salian (and later Hohenstaufen) Emperors.  It was not a good time for anyone—kings, popes, or faithful, but it ended with the Church asserting its independence and having benefitted from the Gregorian and then the Innocentian reformations.  Although Gregory VII (the monk Hildebrand) is credited with the Gregorian Reform there were a number of others equally important and one of these is Peter Damian.  Damian is most noted for insisting on the Reform of the clergy, especially as regards enforcing celibacy and his demands that the clergy be purged of all those whose lives did not conform to traditional moral norms.  I want to reprint some material (edited) from an earlier blog posting. 
      There was reason for Peter Damien to insist on reform with a passion. The secular clergy were not taking celibacy seriously. This was a time in which the Church was drawing more seriously on canons (church laws) derived from various early regional church synods (Elvira 306, Carthage 387, Turin 401, Orange 441) that prohibited bishops, priests, deacons, and subdeacons from being married. As we discussed in some earlier postings (July 21, 23, 24 2011) the concern in the eleventh and subsequent centuries was primarily the protection of church property from being alienated to clergy families and many bishops turned a blind eye to the fact that most of their clergy were living in what we might call common-law marriages. To Peter Damian, however, this was not marriage of any sort but concubinage. The clergy wives were, to his mind and in his vocabulary “whores”; the clergy themselves men who had given themselves over to base passions.
     Speaking of base passions, if Peter Damian thought little of the secular clergy for their loose morals, he thought less of his fellow monks. Monasteries, whether in fact or in Peter Damian’s perception (and probably to some extent in both) were filled with homosexuals, and monks, when not busy with Divine Worship, gave themselves over to the most gross of sexual practices. Peter Damian wrote a book, the Liber Gomorrhianus, (The Gomorrhean Book—named after the famous Gomorrah, twin cities with Sodom) outlining the same-sex practices of the contemporary clergy with the most explicitly vivid detail.) By the way, he did not limit his accusations of clerical homosexuality to the monks but extended it to the papal court (the Curia) whom he thought were nothing more than a coven of mincing catamites. (Now that is a word you don’t hear often.) 
      Peter Damian was even more intolerant of gay clergy than married clergy. He wanted men inclined to same-sex relations barred from ordination and those who were ordained stripped of their Orders and reduced to the lay state. When Leo IX (pope from 1049-1054 and himself an ardent reformer of the Church) refused, Peter Damian turned his anger on the pope and wrote an angry letter accusing the pope of neglect in his duties. 
      Peter Damian was by no means a stupid man, but he was quite anti-intellectual. Steeped in monastic tradition—and the tradition of the ancient desert monks more than the urbane Benedictinism, Damian rejected the importance of secular studies, even (and perhaps especially) Philosophy. For him, as for Cassian and the early monks of the Egyptian and Syrian deserts, the monk was a “man of one book”—the Bible. This no doubt contributed to his zeal (some would say fanaticism) in “purifying” the Church. He was one who, like the Gnostics in early Christianity and the Puritans in the English Reformation could simply not bear compromise with what he believed to be the Christian ideal. 
       Surprisingly, while such a “puritan” and anxious to rid the church of what was its biggest problem, simony (the buying and selling of Church offices or positions), he was not nearly as rigid with simonical clergy as with sexually active clergy. He wrote a second book defending not simony, but the validity of the ordination of bishops and priests who had purchased their offices. Some in the Church were saying that simoniacs (those clergy who had obtained their position by purchase) were not validly ordained. (The subject of valid orders is an interesting one and one that we should take a look at sometime as it has impact on contemporary ecumenical affairs.)
To his credit, Peter Damian was a monk and not a man of ambition; nevertheless, he was forced by Pope Stephen IX in 1057 to accept nomination as a Cardinal. Stephen and subsequent popes frequently used Peter Damian as a legate to conduct business in the pope’s name in various places where the Church was having difficulties. His most important legation was to Milan in 1059, representing Pope Nicholas II to decide the dispute between the clergy of Milan—who openly violated the canons on celibacy and who, for the greater part, had obtained their various benefices through purchase. One of the cathedral canons, Arialdo of Cucciago had allied himself with Bishop Anselm of Baggio, the Bishop of Lucca, to form the pataria, an organization that motivated the faithful to reject the ministry of married clergy. Arialdo and Anselm mobilized the middle and working classes against the Bishop, Guido da Velate, and the nobility who supported the married (and simonical) clergy. It was a very complex issue, as married clergy were still the norm through much of the Church and as for simony—well that too, if wrong, was a well-established practice. Beneath the surface there were other issues. One was the attempt of the papacy to establish control over the independent dioceses such as Milan who often were allied with the Emperor and his policies.             
     Another issue was the social conflict between the working classes that supported Arialdo and the propertied classes that supported the bishop. In any event, Peter Damian effected a compromise. The archbishop agreed that no church position would be given in return for money or gifts. He then imposed penances on all who had purchased Church office, but agreed that they should keep their positions if they accepted the obligations of celibacy. The rigorists were furious, because they wanted the offending clergy—both simoniacs and married clergy—permanently deprived of office, but Damian’s compromise held—temporarily. It was to break out again under Alexander II. 
        When Nicholas II died in 1061, the Cardinals met per his instruction (Nicholas was the pope who in 1059 had designated the Cardinals to be the sole electors of the pope; see blog entry January 12, 2011) and elected the aforementioned Bishop of Lucca, Anselm da Baggio, as pope. Anselm, as we saw, was a proponent of reform. Several weeks later, an anti-reform group of bishops met at the summoning of the Empress Regent, Agnes of Poitou, and elected Pietro Cadalus as Honorius II. This created a schism in the Church as the Reform Party and Imperial Party struggled for control. This shows what the real issue for the Gregorian Reform was to be—not Church reform per se, but imperial control of the papacy. Was the pope to be free to exercise his authority unimpeded by the Emperor or was he to administer the Church at the Emperor’s bidding? Peter Damian was on the side of a free papacy and did his best to resolve the schism in the Church in favor of Alexander. He was unsuccessful in the short run, but at a synod convoked in Augsburg by the Archbishop of Cologne, Anno II, in 1062 Peter Damian made a spirited defense of Alexander and the autonomy of the papacy. Through the influence of Peter Damian, Alexander was determined to be the authentic successor of Saint Peter.

Church Reform Today: The Political Ties of Bishops, 1

One of the goals, indeed the chief goal, of the Gregorian Reform was to free the Church from political entanglement with the Empire.  The purpose was not create the two separate spheres, or I should say separated spheres, of Church and State which our American mythology values so highly because the Church, with its mission to proclaim the kingdom of God, cannot act as if the State—or any other institution—simply exists in a universe parallel to itself.  The Gospel demands that we take an appropriately critical, critical according to the norms of the Gospel, stance towards the world and all that is in it.  By critical I do not mean negative.  A negative critique of creation slides too easily towards Gnosticism.  By critical I mean that we as Church must critique the world as to where it does and where it doesn’t match up to the Gospel.  Note: we as Church.  It is not the role of the “Institution” alone to do this.  Indeed, the Institution, which is not the Church but only one aspect of Christ’s Church, itself must stand under the critique of the Gospel.  That itself is a lesson that most people in the Institution seem to have forgotten these days.   But to critique with integrity we must not only have stood under the judgment of the Gospel ourselves, we must not be indebted to the institutions we critique.  I am not sure that as the Catholic Church we are equipped to critique our society.  The sex abuse scandal has revealed the lack of gospel integrity in the Church, not because of the sinfulness of certain clergy or religious (though that does not help), but because we, both as Institution and as Community of the Faithful became complicit in the abuse by our failure to address the issue honestly and openly.  We will always have sinners in our midst.  There will be sexual predators of all varieties because human society, and we are a human society, will always have sexual predators.  We will have adulterers and fornicators of both gay and straight sorts. We will have drunks and druggies, thieves, embezzlers, abortionists, those who practice euthanasia, who bear false witness, who cheat their employees, who don’t give their employers an honest day’s work, and who pollute the air and water.  We will have people who take us to wars that cannot be justified, and those who sell bonds that are junk.  Sinners are what makes the world go ‘round and moreover Jesus died for them.  They belong in Church.  indeed, they—or rather we—are the Church.  Don’t get on your high horse about “those” or “that kind of people” or “them.”  We have met the sinner and he is us” to paraphrase Pogo.  That being said, however, it is not our task as Church to bless sin by tacit complicity in remaining silent.  Acknowledging our own sins and failings, individually and collectively, we need to be able to speak out about injustices in the world around us—from sexual abuse of minors to abortion to the death penalty to unjust wars, to human rights abuses, to whatever is wrong and unjust in the ways that we relate to one another whether individually or societally.  Because I sin, there are fundamental wrongs in the way I myself and an individual treat people around me.  I need to be reminded of that and challenged to take responsibility for that.  And there are fundamental wrongs in the way that I, not as an individual but as a member of our American society, treat people around me.  I—and other Americans—need to be reminded of that and take responsibility for that.  And there are fundamental wrongs in the way that I, not as an individual but as a member of the Church, treat people around me.  I—and others in the Church with me—need to be reminded of that and take responsibility for that. 
     One of the ways that I, as a member of American society, am guilty of fundamental wrongs in the way I relate to others around me is that I tolerate the murder of the unborn, hundreds of thousands of the unborn.  I don’t approve of it but I am as complicit in it as any bishop has been complicit in the sexual abuse of minors.  I know it goes on.  I confess it is wrong.  I lament it.  But I go about my day; I eat my meals; I go to work; I hang-out with my friends; and I sleep at night in spite of it.  “I wish we could do something about it.”      But that is only one of the sins I am complicit in as a member of our society.  I stood by while Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield led George Bush like a pig with a ring in his nose to war—and led us to war along with him—a war that cannot and never could be morally justified and a war that was energized by a knowing web of lies about WMDs.  And I see the coffins come home and the mothers and the wives and the children trying to make heroes of those who are in fact victims because these deaths must have some significance more than the loss of pawns on a chessboard to make the Vice President and his friends even richer than they are.  And I watched while hundreds of thousands of senior citizens were robbed of their retirements by the Savings and Loans Debacles.  And I have no idea how many people are put to death—legally but not morally—in Texas and Virginia and wherever else while I sit down to dinner, or have a drink on the patio, or sleep undisturbed at night.  And Latinos who just want a chance for them and their children to have a better life die in the desert night after night while I dream undisturbed.   And I know that racism didn’t die with Miss Hilly Holbrook when I hear Sunday Mass goers say “Well, he isn’t my president.” 
     There was a time when our bishops gave moral leadership.  There was a time when our bishops wrote a pastoral letter warning us about the fundamental moral evils beneath “Reaganomics”—you know that system that made some people rich before it made a lot of people poor when it imploded back in 2008.   There was a time when our bishops gave moral leadership and wrote a pastoral letter on War and Peace.  They didn’t make these letters up out of whole cloth.  They took the scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, papal pronouncements, the Documents of Vatican II—they mined the whole tradition to give leadership in our day and age.  But today?  Where are they today?

     “When a Baptist gets money, he becomes a Presbyterian,” a friend told me a few years back. “And when a Methodist wants to join the country club, he becomes an Episcopalian.  When a Catholic priest becomes a bishop, he becomes a Republican.”  One of the senior bishops in the United States, a man who has been a bishop since the “old days,” even before the Apostolic Delegation of Jean Jadot and his crop of liberal Vatican II bishops, told me “The problem with the bishops today is that they are the sons of doctors and lawyers and professionals.  They have no connection with the working class—they were raised to see the working class people as a threat—they come from ‘management’ families.”  Yes, I think that is part of the problem.  The bishops know only a segment of society, they have lost touch—as most white Americans—with their own roots.  But I think the problem is far more serious.     You have men as bishops who have lost their socio-political autonomy and who see the challenges facing society not from the perspective of a Gospel critique but from a political ideology.  More to come.   

The Gregorian Reform--Mixed Successes

A Medieval Bishop sits enthroned
holding his crozier or episcopal staff

There were three main projects to the Gregorian Reform: the imposition of celibacy, the elimination of simony, and breaking the imperial or royal authority over bishops.  This final point is referred to as “The Investiture Controversy” and we discussed it briefly in our last posting with the example of William of Saint-Calais, Bishop of Durham, in the reign of William Rufus of England.  We will look at the Investiture issue more in this posting.  But before we do, let’s review the first to goals.
      The Gregorian Reform managed to impose clerical celibacy as the universal law for the Western Church. That is to say, by the end of the eleventh century it was known and accepted as law that clergy above and including the Order of Subdeacon in the Western Church were to be celibate.  Accepted does not mean, however, that the law was enforced, much less complied with.  As mentioned in some earlier posts (July 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, August 9), clerical marriage—of a sort of common-law variety—remained somewhat the norm until the reforms of the Council of Trent.  We often refer to the practice of the clergy having a less than formal (that is to say church-blessed) union as “clerical concubinage” but it should be considered more as common law marriage as the relationships tended to be permanent, exclusive (faithful), fecund (child-bearing), and if not public nor were they secret.   It is only after the sixteenth century that celibacy, though not necessarily chastity, became the practice as well as the law.
      Simony, the purchasing and selling of Church offices, did not have a better fate.  One does not come across it as much after the Gregorian Reform, at least by that name, but in fact it persisted under various guises and indeed still persists in the Church today under the camouflage of well accepted practices.  We will see that in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance huge amounts of money as well as promises of lucrative positions were shelled out to the Cardinal-Electors by papal wanna-bes every time there was a conclave.  When we look at the situation at the time of the Protestant Reformations we will examine the issue of “annates”—the practice of giving the Holy See the first year’s income from one’s new position in return for papal confirmation of the election or appointment.  Can you imagine giving to the Holy See the entire income of the Diocese of Winchester in England for, let us say, 1532?  Or the Archdiocese of Cologne?  One can see why so many supported the breaks with Rome just to keep that  money local.   Today too—and many Catholics are surprised (and even shocked) that it is customary for a newly elevated prelate ranging from Cardinals down through Monsignors in developed societies such as our own to give the Holy See (I refrain from saying “The Pope”) a handsome gift in acknowledgement for their appointment.  Such honorariums can range anywhere from a million dollars for a more important appointment to perhaps ten or fifteen thousand for the monsignoral purple belly-band.  In the case of Cardinals or bishops, these gratuities are usually offered by their dioceses to thank the Holy See for providing new leadership and, to be fair, the gifts offered newly named monsignors by their friends help defray the offering the new domestic prelate or chaplain to His Holiness or whatever makes to our friends across the seas.  Moreover the gifts and fees accruing to a major prelate (not a monsignor) make their gifts to the Holy See affordable.  For example, when a bishop visits a parish for confirmation or comes to a religious community to perform an ordination—priestly or diaconal—the normal gratuity would be between five hundred and a thousand dollars.  Even a casual visit to the parish merits an “Irish hand-shake.” One East Coast Archbishop, when complimented on some expensive cufflinks  that matched his arch-episcopal ring (all three holding a Roman coin from the time of Jesus—also the time of Herod the Great), said “Oh, when you’re an archbishop you don’t pay for these things.”    No, I guess you don’t.  And so it is indeed right and just that the Holy See should be thanked for facilitating a step up into a more gracious life-style.     As Thernadier was inclined to sing in Les Miserables: “But nothing gets you nothing Everything has got a little price!”  It can be argued that this provides necessary income for the Holy See which always has a terrible time balancing its budget—an even tougher time than the United States Government, though more successful than the Feds in the end.  I buy that.  The problem isn’t the financial transaction; the problem is the lack of transparency.  But Catholic Church finances are notoriously non-transparent, excepting for some religious orders of women who are way ahead of the pack in knowing what the Church needs today for genuine Reformation. 
     Well—on to the Investiture Conflict.  You know, I don’t think we have time for that today after all.  Let me set it up and we will continue it in the next posting.   The problem is that, as I described yesterday, the custom had arisen of the Emperor, or a King, or even a major nobleman “investing” bishops and abbots in their respective empires, kingdoms, or duchies with the insignia of office.  This implied that the prelate received his jurisdiction and authority not from God (or from God’s Church) but from the secular lord.  Indeed, the problem was even more serious.  In fact it was usually the Emperor, King, or major noble who instructed the cathedral chapter (or in the case of abbots, the monastic chapter) for whom to vote in the election.  Church offices were in the gift of the political authority and this threatened the independence of the Church.  It also, and this was even more to the point, threatened the loyalty of the bishop or abbot to the Holy See should a dispute arise between the secular power and the Church, as it indeed often did.  Thus Gregory VII—who is my second favorite pope in history—undertook to break this practice of imperial/royal investiture and so he took on the Emperor, Henry IV.  But that is for our next posting.