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.  

Bishops (and a Pope) Who Remember That They Are Called To Be Apostles

Tucson Bishop Gerald Kicanas

giving communion through the

fence at the border to would-be

immigrants on the other side.

Well the Katholic Krazies are all over the blogosphere again about how Pope Francis “set a bad example” by “profaning” the Holy Thursday Mass by including women in the mandatum—the ritual foot washing.  Part of the problem is understanding what the mandatum is about.  (By the way, the word Maundy—as in Maundy Thursday—is a corruption of the Latin word mandatum which means “commandment” or “mandate.”  You can see this Latin root in in the word commandment.)  Some understand this to be a ritual portrayal of Christ washing the feet of his Apostles.  Others see it as fulfilling the command Christ gave to his disciples that night before he died of washing the feet of others in humble service.  For those for whom it is a ritual portrayal, the idea of including women as “Apostles” is dangerous because it remotely opens the door to women’s ordination.  For those who see the ceremony as fulfilling the command of Christ that the Apostles (represented in the ordained clergy) should was the feet of others—it is no problem.  Actually the best practice I have seen is when the clergy wash the feet of several congregants who then turn and wash the feet of their fellow parishioners who then take up the towel and basin and wash the feet of still others until all have both washed feet and had their feet washed.  When Jesus told his disciples at the Last Supper to wash the feet of others, he did not intend to create a liturgy to be done once a year, but rather a humble service that would be part of everyday life.
For centuries the mandatum was a ritual that was not limited to Holy Thursday but part of regular life.  In some medieval monasteries, the abbot (or when he was not there, his representative) would wash the feet of pilgrims and guests.  Abbesses would do the same in women’s monastic houses.  Bishops often performed this service for the sick or the lame.  Clergy might do it in their parishes.  This might be done not just on Holy Thursday but at various times of penance—ember days, the beginnings of Great Lent or St Martin’s Lent (the period from St Martin’s Day, November 11^th until Christmas).  Sometimes Kings or Nobles were commanded to wash the feet of the poor as part of a penance—and sometimes Kings (and Queens) or nobles did it voluntarily out of their own holiness.   In pilgrim centers or monastic guesthouses it might even be a regular feature of hospitality.  Nowadays it is a much sanitized sort of thing as congregants present a well-scrubbed foot, with nails freshly clipped, out of a sock without holes and from a well-polished shoe to the priest to have warm water scented with lemon poured over it and be rubbed try with a nice fluffy towel.  Jesus probably just rolls his eyes at how we have sucked the need for humility out of the whole process. 
By the way, as this was not part of the Holy Thursday Mass but a separate service usually carried out in the monastic refectory or the cathedral chapter house, there were not normally restrictions about the sex of the participants.  (In monastic houses, however, it would generally be seen as improper for a man to wash the feet of a woman or a woman that of man unless the recipient of the deed was quite elderly.)        

The real problem with those who want to keep the Foot-Washing to be a ritual reenactment of Christ washing the feet of his disciples is that they want to overly spiritualize things.  We keep it Jesus and his disciples: no problem for us, they’re all dead—well except for Jesus of course, but he doesn’t count, he’s God.  It doesn’t have to bring us face to face with Christ-in-our-world.  There is a firewall between our religion and the exigencies of everyday life.   Ultimately such spiritualization of our faith is a denial of the Incarnation.  Everything is in the realm of the (pseudo)spiritual so it doesn’t impact on me and the choices I make in this world.  When Pope Francis goes to a youth-detention center or to a center for the disabled to wash feet on Holy Thursday (or any other day) it brings Christ and his disciples into the nitty-gritty every day realities that I must confront.  I can’t keep Jesus locked away in a tabernacle but run the danger of seeing him in the least of his brothers and sisters and being reminded of my responsibilities to him in those same brothers and sisters.

Just over two weeks ago Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston and Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson led a delegation of American Bishops to celebrate Mass at the fence that marks the border with Mexico—you know, that fence we have put up to keep Latino immigrants out of the United States.  The Blogosphere exploded with the Katholic Krazies talking about how the Mass had been “profaned” by this “little bit of episcopal nonsense.”  George Weigel—whose own brand of Catholicism has been shredded by the papacy of Pope Francis—declared “It’s not clear to me how holding Mass in these circumstances can be anything other than politicized…. To turn the Mass into an act of essentially political theater is something I thought we had gotten over in the Church, no matter how noble the cause might be.”   Of course what Weigel and the Krazies both overlooked is that Pope Francis had done precisely this same thing when he journeyed to the Italian island of Lampedusa and celebrated Mass to call attention to the plight of the thousands of Africans entering Europe illegally.  Like that Mass wasn’t political?  But then for some there is a difference between “their problem” (Africans coming into Europe) and our problem (Latinos coming into the United States).  For O’Malley and Kicanas—and Pope Francis—it is one and the same: “I was a stranger and you gave me welcome....  Whatever you do for the least of my sisters and brothers, you do for me."  What George Weigel overlooks in his somewhat monophysite Catholicism is the Incarnation is the most political act of all. God has chosen to enter history and history is forever changed.  For those of us who believe that the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us (John 1:14), nothing can be more political than the Eucharist.  Every time we encounter Christ in his Body and Blood we must also encounter him in his Body, the Church.  And when we encounter him in  his Body the Church, we cannot escape coming face to face with the least of his sisters and brothers: the immigrant (legal or illegal), the AIDS patient (gay or straight), the abused (sexually, physically, emotionally, bullied), the aged, the poor, the mentally ill, the physically handicapped—whomever.  If you don’t believe in political Christianity you are caught in the heresy of denying the Incarnation.  So nothing proclaims our Orthodoxy more than Pope Francis washing the feet of the disabled or Cardinal O’Malley handing the Body of Christ through the fence to communicants on the other side.  A Blessed Good Friday.    

Of Gnostics, Carmelites, the Incarnation, and Communion in the Hand

Two Carmelites, sisters by blood as well as in religious

life, at the Detroit Conference

I mentioned in the last entry that heresy sometimes lurks just beneath the surface of trumpeted orthodoxy.  Let me give an example.  Some years ago I was in Detroit to do some research on the infamous Father Coughlin who had a very popular radio show in the 1930’s which he used as a platform to attack Franklin Roosevelt  as well as to proclaim his anti-Semitic views.  I was staying, courtesy of a friend of mine, at a retreat center run by the Passionists.  Coughlin was very popular with a large segment of the American people though he was a huge embarrassment to the Church.  Coughlin had no endorsement from the Archbishop of Detroit –to the contrary.  The Osservatore Romano, the semi-official Vatican newspaper condemned him in 1935, but Coughlin remained popular with anti-Roosevelt Americans, Catholics and Protestants alike.   Cardinal Pacelli, papal Secretary of State discussed the matter with American officials on his 1936 visit to they United States but was unable to silence him.  Cardinal Mooney was appointed to Detroit in 1937 with the mandate to silence him but was unable.  American Catholics are notorious for listening not to the Church but to those voices in the Church with which they agree.  There must be something in the water in Motown as we currently have Michael Voris setting himself up against the hierarchy with his “Real Catholic TV.”   O well, I digress. 
     While I was staying at the Passionist Retreat Center there was a conference of Carmelite nuns going on—a meeting of about a hundred cloistered nuns—mostly the Prioresses (mothers superior) and Formation Directors (novice-mistresses) of various monasteries in the United States and Canada, though I did see some younger nuns with the white veils of novices.  It was interesting seeing these women outside their monasteries.  They were anything but a somber group.  There was much laughter and a strong sense of family.  They looked very traditional—almost all in the same habit their predecessors had worn  for centuries though a few had modified veils that showed a wisp of hair.  They were very serious when it came time for prayer and it was a privilege to attend their Mass each morning.  I served the Mass—or rather I served the old priest who celebrated the Mass for them each morning.  I was surprised to note that at communion not a single nun received communion on the tongue.  Young and old, reverent all, but each nun extended her hands to receive Holy Communion.  I mentioned this one day at lunch—I had my meals with them in the retreat dining room—and the nuns at the table all thought for a moment and then began to discuss it.  They had never given it much thought, they agreed, it just seemed natural to them.  Then one older nun—the prioress of a Carmel on the West Coast—said “Well, why wouldn’t we?  The Incarnation is the central mystery of our lives.  Holy Mother (Saint Teresa of Avila) says that we should meditate on either the Passion or the Incarnation.  When you meditate on the Word Becoming Flesh, you burn with desire to hold the Flesh of the Lord for yourself.    In this sacrament, his Flesh becomes our Flesh and our Flesh becomes his.  Why should be afraid to touch him?  He is our Spouse, the deepest Desire of our being.”  I was impressed at her fervor as well as her insight.
     Several years before while in Minneapolis I had been taken to hear a young priest, a Father Robert Altier, who at the time was something of a seven day wonder.  Father Altier drew huge crowds to Saint Agnes Church where he celebrated what at the time was the “indult” mass.  A college buddy of mine who had just returned to the Church after three “marriages” (only one of them with a woman if you get my drift)  would go only to Saint Agnes.  Saint Agnes with the Latin Mass facing the wall represented the Church he had left forty years ago and it was the only Church to which he was willing to go back now that he had religion again. (That is the danger in being a historian: the temptation is to restore the past, a futile effort, rather than build the future on the past.)   Father Altier told us in his talk that day—it wasn’t a sermon but a talk in the hall after mass as I recall—that receiving Communion in the hand was “an abomination, a sacrilege”  The Blessed Mother, he assured us, had never received Communion in the hand.  I almost laughed out loud.  She who had changed Jesus’ diaper (I could use a more graphic phrase) was too awestruck to take his flesh in her hand in Holy Communion?   Who is this Christ in Whom this young priest believed?  Is it the Christ of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, the Christ whose human nature is preserved intact in the hypostatic union?  Or does this Christ have a different sort of human nature than we do?  Sure he is “consubstantial” with the Father according to his Divinity.  What I wonder if people believe is whether he is “consubstantial” with us regarding his humanity?  Here again is Gnosticism lurking behind orthodox piety.  It is perfectly all right to receive Communion on the tongue if that your choice, but can we say that it is wrong or sacrilegious to receive Christ in our hands?   If so, what is that implying about human nature?  What is that saying about material creation?  Beneath such “orthodoxy” lurks some very dark beliefs.