Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis? 3

Gregory XVI

I think a third reason why so many are afraid of Pope Francis is his being a religious, and in particular being a Jesuit.  The last religious to be elected Pope was the Camaldolese Benedictine Mauro Cappellari who reigned as Gregory XVI (1830-1846).  He was one of the most conservative men to sit on the Throne of Peter.  In reaction to the French Revolution and the overthrow of the ancien regime, Gregory resisted the introduction of any and every novelty to the Papal States.  He was succeeded by the liberal Pius IX but despite the new Pope’s openness to reform, the repression of Gregory’s reign burst into open rebellion in 1848—the year that revolutions swept all Europe—and Pius had to flee Rome until French troops could restore order.  The challenge to his temporal authority represented in the revolution drove Pius to the extreme conservatism that marked his reign and has made him an enduring hero to the wing-nuts of the Catholic right.  Pius and all his successors—Leo XII, St. Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI have been diocesan priests, but in the intervening years, religious life has changed from representing the more conservative face of Catholicism to being the voice of Catholic liberalism.
The roots of the monastic and mendicant Orders (the Benedictines, the Cistercians, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians) were in part in protest against the socio-economic structures of their times. The friars in particular rejected the budding urban capitalism of the 13^th centuries in favor of communal property.   Both the monastic and mendicant movements were at first extra-canonical movements of the laity who were discontent with the options offered them by the clerical and institutional structures of their days.  (Neither Benedict nor Francis was a priest and both their movements were originally lay movements that accepted priests among their members but only as equals to the lay monks (Benedict) or lay brothers (Francis).  (The Carmelites and the Augustinians were also originally lay movements.)   The mendicants understand their role to be a prophetic voice that warns about those elements in society—and in the Church—that contradict the values set forth in the Gospel.  Moreover, from the beginning the mendicants rejected hierarchy and authoritarian government in favor of a radical democracy in which their superiors were not only elected by the brothers but were accountable to the brothers gathered in Chapter. 
Ignatius used a different model in establishing the Society of Jesus.  Drawing from his experience as a soldier and determined to effectively combat the inroads of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers, Ignatius imposed a military structure on his new Society and demanded unquestioning obedience to one’s superiors in the society.  He also placed the Society at the disposal of the Pope for whatever missions the Pope required them to serve.  But in that service they were given remarkable freedom.  Ignatius did away with the choral recitation of the Divine Office—traditional not only for all religious up to that time but even for the secular clergy.   He also chose that his men would not have a religious habit.  While they normally wore a black cassock, standard clerical dress, they were free to abandon it for lay clothes as the mission required.  When the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in China they abandoned western dress for the saffron robes of Buddhist monks but then as they understood the culture better, they adopted the silk gowns of Confucian scholars in order to be more effective in presenting their ideas to the Chinese.  They celebrated Mass in Mandarin rather than Latin and adopted other elements of Chinese culture.  They were wildly successful in their mission and served in the Imperial Court where they wielded immense influence until the Augustinians and Franciscans, jealous at their successes, complained to Rome about the “Chinese Rites.”  Forced back to western expression by Rome, their mission failed as spectacularly as it had succeded.
Today most religious see their role in the Church very differently than do diocesan priests—and this is often a source of tension with bishops who are, for the most part, drawn from the diocesan clergy.  A Benedictine or Trappist who is ordained will tell you he is a monk first and a priest second. They are usually reluctant to take on ministries that require them to leave their monasteries. Similarly a Franciscan or Carmelite or Augustinian will tell you that he is a brother who is ordained for the service of the Church but who takes his primary vocational identity from his religious community rather than from his being a priest.  More and more religious look to serve in ministries that reflect the charism of their particular congregation and are anxious to leave parish ministry to the diocesan clergy.  Many religious priests today wear their religious habits in the Church or around their monastery or school, but beyond that dress plainly in ordinary clothes.  All this is fine, but to my mind it is the icing on the cake.
In the Civil Rights movement of the early and mid-sixties and in the anti-war movement of the late sixties and early seventies, the religious were first to get involved.  Not the religious priests, however, but the Sisters.  The world was shocked—and then delighted—to see Catholic Sisters marching with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery.  The women finally shamed the men into putting on their jock straps and joining them.  Once into progressive causes, the men were not shy.  The Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother, the Josephite Philip Berrigan were the leading Catholic voices against the war in Viet Nam.  Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote thought-provoking books giving the spiritual roots of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.  Bishops clamped down on the clergy—Cardinals Spellman of New York and McIntyre of Los Angles in particular—and while the diocesan guys had to cave, the religious, independent of the bishops, went on against the war, for open-housing, against American support for Latin American dictatorships, and for a series of social justice issues.  When Liberation Theologian Gustavo  Gutierrez fell afoul of the Peruvian hierarchy he found refuge in becoming a Dominican.   
These social changes worked their ways into the curriculum of Catholic schools, colleges, and universities—again, for the most part the province of religious communities.  Religious began to see that they had a role to play in being an alternative voice in the Church and for the Church—not contradicting the magisterium but raising the questions posed by the evangelical values laid out in the gospel even as Saint Francis had done in his day. 
Religious often refer to this role as their “prophetic call.”  I am not sure yet if that role has evolved to where it is truly prophetic.  I think religious need to look at themselves long and hard and ask themselves if they themselves are faithful to the gospel.  Frankly, I don’t think the renewal of religious life envisioned by the Council has reached anything near its potential.  Religious are still often very much a part of the systems they decry.  Nevertheless, I think someone needs to be a prophetic voice in and for the Church today.  Whether it is bishops who spend millions on refurbishing their residences, or the failure of so many Church institutions to pay a just wage or allow their employees to unionize, or the lack of just processes in ecclesiastical trials, the Church needs to be held as accountable as the Church wants to hold secular institutions and it is often the religious who are most outspoken in “outing” the injustices.
On the other hand, we need to see that leading prophetic voices in the Church such as Dom Helder Camara or Archbishop Oscar Romero or John XXIII came from the diocesan clergy.  How many secular priests staff inner-city parishes where they fight for better conditions for their parishioners and for their neighbors regardless of religion.  And when these diocesan priests run afoul of their bishops for their social activism they don’t have the escape hatch of a supportive community and the possibility of a new assignment that religious have.   

As a Jesuit Francis was never cutting edge.  In fact, he played the game very safely working closely with the Argentine hierarchy and even turning a blind eye to much of the injustice in his native land during the years it was ruled by a military junta.  Nevertheless, it is clear that Francis thinks differently than this predecessors.  He is more spontaneous and far less attentive to the fine details of rubric or law.  He is emerging as prophetic voice—not the radical Amos or even a Jeremiah—but prophetic none the less.  It is clear that there is a new sheriff in town.  When it comes to simple things like whether women can be included in the Holy Thursday Rite of the Washing of the Feet  or the call for us all to look at how we live and can we scale it back a notch or two, Francis is setting a new pace.  I don’t think there is much to fear, but then I don’t want to be a bishop who lives in a 41 million dollar Residenz. 

Gay Clergy and Married Clergy--An 11th Century Program of Reform

13th centur Bas-Relief on the facade of Lucca

Cathedral depicting the celebraiton of Mass--notice

the celebrant is facing the people over the altar, a

witness to the fact that this is not an innovation but

the restoraiton of an ancient practice.  The 11th century

bishop of Lucca, Anselm da Baggio, was a key

reformer of the Church. 

We spoke in our last post of Saint Romuald of Ravenna, a monastic reformer who founded several monastic communities, most notably the Hermits of Camaldoli, and who laid some of the spiritual groundwork for the Gregorian Reformation.  Over the years, the Camaldoli Monastery and its daughter houses—the Camaldolese Benedictines—have made a great contribution to the Church including Pope Gregory XVI, (reigned 1831-1846), one of the more conservative popes (understatement) who, in his zeal for the modern world, condemned railroads as the work of the devil (literally chemins de enfer—roads of hell—a play on the French for “railroad”: chemins de fer—roads of iron.)   I’m sure he thought it was a rather clever pun but that’s what happens to sophisticated humor when you spend too much time in a monastery.  Fortunately it was not an infallible proclamation.
     Although it was Camaldoli that made Romuald famous (well, relatively famous, like Mel Brooks’ characters Frederick and Anna Bronski in To Be or Not To Be, “world famous in Poland,” it was his foundation at Fonte Avellana that proved to be the springboard of Reformation in the eleventh century.  From that foundation came many holy monks, one of them being Saint Peter Damian who was quite literally a “holy terror.” 
     Unlike the founder, Romuald, who was a serious monk but not at all rigid, Peter Damian found no penance sufficient for his desire for austerity and self-mortification.     It was Peter Damian who introduced the practice of the disciplina, that is of self-flagellation into monastic practice.  Peter Damian was determined to root out all sexual vice from monastic life and indeed from the Church.  One could say that he went after passion with a passion.  That’s a bit lame; perhaps I am guilty of the very monastic overdose of which I accuse Gregory XVI.  
   Lame as it may be, there was reason for him to go after passion 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) 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 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.  (We will see in a future blog that a key element of the Gregorian Reform was the struggle for power between the Emperors and the Popes.)  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. 

The Origins of Radical Catholicism XXI: Ban the railoads!

Sorry that there was no entry yesterday—those days do happen when it is just impossible to find the time to do everything and those days are going to happen a couple of times a week, at least, on this blog.  But today I want to look at a heresy.  It is questionable whether “Americanism” existed (or exists) except in the mind of those who read La Vie du Pére Hecker.  It is not questionable that there was a group of thinkers at odds with the Roman authority in what is called “Modernism.” 

There was an intellectual movement in the 17^th and 18^th centuries called The Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment presumed that everything that had come before was somehow benighted and the rising intellectual climate of their own time, thanks to their own infallible intelligence, brought the world back to the light it had known in the classical era.  Intellectual arrogance is perennial and every generation thinks it knows so much more than the preceding—this is nothing new.  Of course, the era between the classical era (Greece and Rome) and the 17^th century was the Christian—and specifically Catholic—era.  “Enlightened” minds were contemptuous of the medieval ages—the “Gothic” (synonym for barbarian) period.  One example of this bias is Edward Gibbon, author of the famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who had seen Christianity weakening the vibrancy of the old Roman world.  Again, we all have our biases—for and against—and Gibbon just happened to see Christianity (and the Catholic Church in particular) as the bête noire of civilization.  America had its enlightenment voices—strong among our Founding Fathers—Franklin and Jefferson being two prominent voices, but certainly most of the founders of our Republic, including Washington, were admirers of Enlightenment thought.   Indeed one can even see traces of Enlightenment influence among the Carrolls and other colonial Catholics.  The Enlightenment wasn’t all wrong by any means.  We can talk about that in a future entry.

The Enlightenment critique that the “objective” sciences can be used to critique religious faith or other “subjective” institutions and movements passed into rational Protestantism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century.  Religion in general and biblical scholarship in particular began to be looked at from knowledge of history, linguistics, anthropology, and other established disciplines.  Today we would call this interdisciplinary studies and not (or at least for the most part not) have a problem with it.  But in the nineteenth century liberal Protestantism began to shake the tree of Christian doctrine.  If Moses wrote the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) as tradition has maintained, how can it include the story of his death?  Why is the story of the Virgin Birth in Luke like so many stories in classical pagan mythology?  Why does the Gospel of Mark have two endings, one leaving the empty tomb more a mystery—or even a question—than an article of faith?  People began questioning biblical inerrancy and then biblical doctrines.   The arguments boiled over from scripture into Philosophical theology—what does it mean when we say Jesus is Divine?  The work of Immanuel Kant in the Enlightenment had shaken confidence in the old philosophical traditions beneath both Catholicism and Protestantism and Protestant theologians began doing some heavy duty reworking of Christian doctrines to bring them into accord with reason, but which also shook the faith of many.  The tear in society between the religious and the secular began to be increasingly evident.  Empowered by “Reason” many people began to turn away from religion as a relic of an earlier and superstitious age.  And, of course, reason is the foundation (though a weak and mistaken one) on which democracy rests.  Reason tells us that authority, if it comes from God, comes through the collective wisdom of the people and not directly to the rulers.  (This sort of thinking is precisely what had led to the French Revolution—as well as the American Republic.) 

Well this sort of liberal thinking might be allowed for in Prussia and the Protestant kingdoms of Northern Europe, the popes of the nineteenth century had long known that such ideas would spell only trouble—politically and religiously—for Rome.  Gregory XVI went so far as to ban those new-fangled railroads from the Papal States. Pius IX issued my favourite warning, condemning as error the idea that : “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization”  (In other words—just to be perfectly clear: The Roman Pontiff cannot, and ought not to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.)  This would lay the groundwork for Leo XIII and Pius X to condemn these “modern” ideas that might undermine both authority and doctrine within the Church.  more next blog.  The image today is Gregory XVI, the pope who didn't like railroads. 

American Catholics in the Civil War

Let’s take a look at the role of Catholics in the American Civil War. In the two decades before the war many of your large Protestant denominations (Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) broke apart into Northern and Southern Churches. The issue, of course, was slavery, an issue that was dividing the country. As the abolitionist movement grew strong in the North and as the South became more and more defensive of its "pecuiliar institution," the unity of these denominations inevitably fractured—and would not be healed for decades. The Episcopal Church fared somewhat better, undergoing a “separation” rather than a division as the dioceses in the Confederacy organized themselves into “The Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America,” without undergoing any doctrinal or canonical division, retaining the same prayer-book while praying for different presidents and Congresses.. The Episcopal Church in the Confederate States, decidedly more "Low Church" in tradition than the more "High Church" North, had the distinction of a Bishop-General when Leonidas Polk, Bishop of Louisiana traded in his rochet and chimere for Confederate gray and accepted a commission in the Army as a General. Bishop Polk was killed in the battle of Pine Mountain Georgia by a Union shell in 1864. Division was not on the agenda for Lutherans either as most Lutherans, indeed almost all, lived in the Union and were either loyal to it or, especially the Scandinavians, were obliviously indifferent to the conflict which had no direct bearing on their rural farm life in Minnesotta and the Dakotas. (Lutherans were already fractured along ethnic lines—Swedes, Germans, Norwegians, Estonians, Danes, and their divisions were often as bitter as the North-South divisions tearing the country apart.)
For Catholics division or even separation was not a possibility as their common allegiance to the Papacy held them in communion—if not agreement—with one another. The Papacy itself had a rather ambigious record on the issue of slavery until Pope Gregory XVI in 1839 issued the bull Supremo Apostolatus which condemned both the institution of slavery and the slave trade. Not all Catholics rallied to the papal teaching. Catholic officials in the United States, Brazil, and other nations which still legalized slavery were not inclined to preach against slavery, Catholic slave owners—including the clergy—did not sell their slaves, much less emancipate them. (The American Jesuits had been ordered by Rome earlier in the century to get rid of their slaves and they did.) Perhaps one of the more embarrassing responses from a Catholic was that of Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (and the only Catholic to serve in that position until the current Chief Justice, John Roberts). Taney was a devout Maryland Catholic. He had freed his own slaves and he “regretted” slavery. Nevertheless, he is responsible for the infamous Dred Scott decision declaring: “It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in regard to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted; but the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken. They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” He further declared that Blacks—free or slave—were not and could not be citizens and that Congress had not authority to regulate slavery in the territories. In terms of dissent from Church teaching, Taney’s action would be as if today Justice Roberts or any other Catholic Justice on the court ruled that neither the States separately nor the Federal Government collectively could limit access to abortion. It was a shocking contradiction to the magisterium yet Taney’s dissent from magisterial teaching was in no way punished by Church authorities of his day. This was despite Pope Gregory’s admonition in Supremo Apostolatus: "We further reprobate by our apostolic authority all the above described offences (slavery and the slave trade) as utterly unworthy the Christian name; and by the same authority we rigidly prohibit and interdict all and every individual, whether ecclesiastical or laical, from presuming to defend that commerce in negro servitude under any pretence or borrowed excuse. … or to teach or publish in any manner, publicly or privately, things contrary to the admonitions which we have given in these letters." Pretty clear, huh? By "interdict" Gregory meant of course that any one supporting slavery or the slave trade was to be denied the sacraments and other rites of the Church. It was never enforced against Mr. Justice Taney or any other person--official or citizen--as far as I know, Of course Pope Gregory also had written that race was not to be a barrier to Holy Orders, but no American seminary would accept an Afro-American candidate. It was only in 1886 that Augustus Tolton, the first African American ordinandus, was ordained to the priesthood and that was after being sent to Rome for his educaiton to get around the refusal of the American seminaries to admit him. (There is the case of the Healy brothers whose mixed race lineage allowed them to passé blanc. We will do a blog on them in the future.) Regardless of papal declaraitons, it would not be until the Civil Rights movement in the mid-twentieth century that most Catholic seminaries and religous orders would accept African-Americans and candidates. But Father Tolton is long after the Civil War and we have wandered too far--more to come when we get back to the topic of American Catholics in the Civil War.
The image today is Roger B, Taney, the first Catholic to serve as a justice of the United States Supreme Court and the first Catholic to serve as Chief Justice. He was appointed to the Court as Chief Justice and served from his appointment in 1836 until his death in 1864, He handed down the infamous Dred Scott decision which declared that slaves were property and Blacks, free or slave, could never be citizens.