Franciscans of the Immaculate--St Francis 2

Pope Innocent III 

Well, let’s get back to Saint Francis.  As I had mentioned two posts ago, Francis had given up on his party animal life and took on the position of a lay hermit.  Lay hermits were, as I had written, canonically recognized laity who lived in poverty and prayer, not a cloistered life but a life of wandering in the towns and villages talking about the Gospels and the challenges of following Jesus in the very materialistic society of  13^th century Europe.  These men—and they were invariably men—dropped out of a society they had come to consider shallow and pointless.  (A similar but not quite equivalent option for women were the beguines.  Beguines were not given to the extremes of poverty that characterized the lay hermits.)  Most of the men drawn to the lay hermit life were from the prosperous bourgeois families, were somewhat educated, able to read and write and usually with a little Latin.  What characterized the spirituality of the movement was an absorbing fascination with the humanity of Christ, especially manifest in his suffering and in his poverty which they sought to imitate. 

In the last decades of the 12^th century, the Church had lost many members to new movements arising out of an evangelical zeal for discipleship that had seized the Middle Class.  A wealthy merchant of Lyon (in what is today France but at the time was more culturally tied to Lombardy in northern Italy) by the name of Peter Waldo had been seized with fervor by the gospels and had taken literally the words of Christ to go sell all you possess, give to the poor, and to then come and follow him.  Waldo, who had been immensely wealthy, did precisely that and became a street beggar preaching in the towns and villages around Lyon.  The Archbishop of that city, embarrassed by his wealth in contrast to Waldo’s poverty had ordered him to stop preaching.  Waldo went to the Pope, Alexander III, who commended his dedication to live in the poverty of Christ but, as Waldo was not in Holy Orders, supported the Archbishop’s ban on Waldo’s preaching.  In the end, Waldo and his followers separated from the Church over this ban on lay preaching.  

The Church was facing a steady drain of some of its most zealous members precisely because their evangelical fervor was a threat to the comfort and luxury of the bishops and some priests.  Men like Waldo were considered fanatics and extremists by clergy and hierarchs who wanted to enjoy the privileges their status brought them.  In addition to Waldo and his followers, sometimes called the Poor Men of Lyon, or the Poor Men of Lombardy (to which they had spread from Lyon) there were other groups such as the Umiliati.  Still others were seduced into a form of Gnosticism called Catharism which, unlike Waldo’s followers or the Umiliati, crossed the boundaries into heresy. 

In 1199 one of the greatest—if not the greatest—of men to occupy the Chair of Peter was elected to the papacy.  Lotario, Count of Segni, was elected Pope and took the name Innocent III.  The new pope had studied Theology in Paris, the premier theological faculty of the time known for its liberal thought, and then had studied law in Bologna, the leading faculty for civil and canon law.  Moreover, not only was he highly educated, he was personally holy.  Despite his high office, Innocent led an austere personal life (sound familiar?) wearing the simplest of robes, made of wool rather than silk and expensive fabrics. He ate spartanly and his private apartments were plain.   He upheld the dignity of the papal office by integrity rather than by pomp.  At the same time he was a strong leader who brooked no opposition.  One of his first acts was to distinguish between canonical preaching (doctrine) and giving what we might call today “witness talks.”  Laity could, with the permission of the bishop, inspire others by being given the opportunity even in church to speak of what the Gospels meant to them and how they might better live out the teachings of Jesus.  This role of lay preaching was especially entrusted to these lay hermits.

The Lay hermit movement was especially taken by the sentence attributed to Saint Jerome in his vocation—“naked to follow the naked Christ.”   Lay hermit groups sprung up all over Europe as these men renounced material possessions to voluntarily live in the most abject poverty, to minister to the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters—especially the lepers—and to speak to others of making the Gospels real in one’s life.  This is what Francis sought to do.  He returned to his ruined church of San Damiano where he lived, spending the nights in prayer. By day he ministered to the lepers and other social outcasts, all the time slowly rebuilding the ruined chapel.  His former friends came to see him.  Some brought him help in his projects.  A few joined him, taking the habit of hermits themselves.  They were not, at this point, religious but they did have canonical standing, blessed by the Bishop of Assisi.

In the popular and lovely 1972 Zeffirelli film, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Bishop Guido of Assisi is portrayed as an obese and slothful prelate who doesn’t take Francis seriously.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  Guido, a friend of the reforming Innocent, was enthused by Francis’ vision and anxious to help him.  He provided the necessary introductions to have Francis meet the Pope.  Now the Pope, while ardent in programs to reform the Church, did not at first see Francis as a serious aid in this project.  For an educated man used to the corridors of power, how could this repentant playboy from a mediocre Umbrian hill-town with no theological training be of any real help in cleaning out the nest of sycophants and parasites into which both the Roman Curia and local hierarchy had, for the most part, degenerated?  (If this sounds familiar, remember that the past gives us insight into the present.)   The story goes that the Pope had a dream in which he saw Francis holding up the crumbling Lateran Basilica.  (The Lateran was, at the time, the papal residence.  The Popes only moved to the Vatican in the 15^th century and even then it didn’t become the primary papal residence until the 19^th.)  It is a lovely story and there may be some truth to it but it is more likely that in the interview that Innocent gave to Francis, the Pope’s mind was changed and he saw the potential this hermit had to give the Church new spiritual energy.

An important question is why Francis did not choose to enter a traditional religious order of his day.  He certainly had options,  there were monasteries—Benedictine and Cistercian as well as Carthusian—that would have permitted him traditional religious life.  There were also the Canons Regular—religious, mostly clerics, who led a community life while doing pastoral work in parishes and preaching.  We can see by the choices he made why traditional religious life did not attract him.  Religious had security.  Their monasteries provided a roof over their head and food on their table as well as winning them a respected place in society.  As Francis’ brotherhood developed he forbad them to own property, even the houses in which they lived.  They lived in the neighborhoods of the poor, outside the city walls and the protection those walls afforded.  They wore the patched clothing of the poor, not proper religious habits.  They didn’t aim for the respect of the Middle Class—far from it, they went out of their way to identify with the poor who were held in contempt by the merchants and business owners.  In fact, however, their integrity in embracing the poverty of Christ did win them the respect of almost all in society and they drew vocations in great numbers from the very classes whose values and lifestyle they were rejecting. 

Francis started a revolution that reformed the Church.  Thousands of men took up his lifestyle.  Eventually this small band of lay hermits in Umbria grew into an Order of tens of thousands of brothers spread across the known world. Francis’ spiritual sons would go off to Muslim lands and die as martyrs; they would go on expedition to Peking and the court of the great Kahn.  They would accompany Cortes and Pizzaro in the Americas.  A son of Saint Francis would be the first white man to see the great cataracts of Niagara.  Franciscans would sit on the throne of Peter—some as good popes, others as bad.  Most important though was that the work of Francis and his brothers among the poor and working classes probably staved off a Luther or a Calvin for three hundred years.  It was an evangelical renewal of the Church—something we could use today.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church XVI

King John

Sorry, I sort of dropped the ball this past week as other responsibilities—and a little bit of sloth—closed in on me.  I had some other things planned to introduce reflecting on the blog regarding His Eminence of Chicago and his fears of inevitable martyrdom for his successors a la Becket.  But let’s just lay that aside for now and get back to our saga of the Church of England. 
As I have maintained in previous entries on this subject the identity of the Anglican Church is very complex and it is completely untrue to claim that it was established by Henry VIII.  Historically the Church of England has always had an unique identity and while it was historically “in communion” with the Bishop and Church of Rome from antiquity until Henry VIII fractured those bonds in the sixteenth century, it had its own traditions, liturgies, and canons which were quite independent of the continental and Roman practices. 
We had left off with the story of Thomas Becket and his murder by four knights of the court of King Henry II.  Becket was fighting to maintain the independence of the Church from the Crown which, in turn, was trying to establish its authority to deal with criminal behavior of the clergy and to limit (note, limit not eliminate) the Church’s right to appeal over royal authority to the Pope.  Becket did not die “for the faith” but “for the Church” and, in this particular case I am afraid for insupportable claims of the Church.  No one today would argue that the Church should have exclusive rights to try and punish the clergy for criminal activities.  Indeed the Catholic Church in the United States has lost valuable ground in the battle with an ever-more secularizing society precisely because some American bishops were trying to bloc justice’s pursuit of errant clergy.  If Cardinal George’s dire predictions are to come true we must blame several of his fellow members of the Sacred College for the seemingly irreparable damage done to the Church’s credibility and the squandering of what had been an illustrious record hard earned by the women of the American Church and their two centuries of service to the poor, the immigrant, the sick, and the victimized regardless of religion.  But let’s move on and go back to the English story.
Becket went to his grave in 1170 and Henry to his in 1189.  Henry’s son, Richard Coeur de Lion (Lion-heart for you mono-linguists [I love being a pompous ass—maybe there is a mitre in my future]) succeeded him and in turn died in 1199.  Richard spent very little time in England.  His great love were his French possessions—Normandy, Anjou, Maine, the Aquitaine, and who could blame him?  The English go to France on holiday; the French do not return the compliment—and there are reasons why, weather and cuisine not being the least of reasons.  Richard was a great defender of the Church.  He went off on the Third Crusade—as much for the love of a good war as for devotion to the Church.  He was, a man’s man who by the way, had a thing for manly men.  This is not to say he was gay, he was most likely bi-sexual, or perhaps better, omni-sexual.  His unanchored sexuality seems to be one of the reasons for a piety that was both deep and superficial.  I say deep as it could be quite extravagant; superficial in as that it never seemed to address the deeper levels of spirituality.  His almost continual absence from England for Crusade and French domains was combined with a psycho-spiritual ambivalence as he seems to have had no interest in pursuing his father’s attempt to establish clear constitutional authority over the Church and its clergy.   When Richard died, however, the throne went to his younger—and only surviving—brother, John.  Henry II had been one of the greatest kings to sit on the Lion Throne; Richard was one of the greatest men to do so; John was a failure in both departments.  And not only a failure, but an abysmal shadow of what a man, much less a king, is called to be. 
In 1205, Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, died. King John instructed the monks of Canterbury to elect the Bishop of Norwich, John de Gray, as Walter’s successor.  (Remember, at this time Bishops were elected by their cathedral chapters, not appointed by Rome, though both Rome and various kings or nobles instructed the cathedral chapters on whom they wished to have elected.)  The monks of Canterbury Cathedral, however, had their own candidate—their subprior, Reginald.  In defiance of the King they elected Reginald.  This shows how weak John was that a bunch of monks would defy him on a crucial issue such as who is to be the spiritual leader of the country.  Meanwhile the suffragen bishops of the Province of Canterbury got into the act claiming—without any precedence—that they had a right to elect the Archbishop.  They probably would have chosen the King’s candidate as they themselves owed their appointments to crown nomination.  The monks, sly as monks are, had secretly sent a delegation to Rome for papal confirmation of Reginald.  The bishops discovering this, sent their own delegation.  So the matter ended up before Pope Innocent III.  Innocent was as strong a pope as John was weak a king.  And to make a point of papal power, Innocent appointed his own candidate, Stephen Langton, an English cardinal living in Rome.   
John was furious.  He saw Langton as an agent of his enemy, Philip Augustus of France.  Langton had lived and taught at Paris before Innocent had brought him to Rome in 1203 and had ties to the French court.  John refused to let Langton to enter England.  Moreover, he seized the lands and revenue of the Archbishop of Canterbury for the royal treasury.  The Pope, after an attempt at reconciliation, lost patience and put England under interdict, forbidding any and all religious services except baptism of children and absolution of the dying. 
Now interdict was a serious matter in those days.  You want to get married?  Sorry, no can do.  Granma can’t have a funeral or even be buried in consecrated ground. Sunday Mass?—no.  Daily Mass? no.  Holy Communion? no.  confession? Only if you are dying.  This is for everyone, the whole country.  People begin to fear for their souls.  They were getting restless.  The clergy blamed the king.  The people didn’t like the king anyway.  He isn’t like his brother, Richard.  John is taxing them too much.  He is no warrior.  He’s a bully. 
John, for his part, turned against the clergy who were enforcing the interdict.  He put them in jail.  He confiscated the lands that support them. This wasn’t  helpful to his cause.  People may hate the Church but they usually like their priest.  They know him and he knows them.  When the priest grumbles about the King, it doesn’t help the King’s popularity.  In 1209 the Pope played his next higher card and excommunicated the King but it was not as effective a move as he had hoped. John had no worries for his immortal soul—he was never one to think far in advance. Moreover, he was no more worried about the salvation of his soul than he had worried about the interdicted souls of his subjects. From his blasphemous humor and casual disregard for the things of religion, it seems that John may have considered the whole God thing something for lesser intellects than his, not that there were many minds more obtuse but such is the conceit of minds to shallow to apprise the abstract passions that burn within the human heart. Both Pope and King dug in their heels.  But then Philip Augustus got into the act and began to plan an invasion of England to trounce the excommunicate King of England.  This did make John nervous.  Philip was a great warrior; John was not and had already lost Normandy and Anjou to the French King in 1204.  The last thing John needed was for Innocent to sanction a crusade against England.  So in 1213 John blinked first.  In making peace with Innocent, John had to cede his kingdom to the Pope and receive it back as a papal fief.   This meant that John recognized the Pope as his overlord not only in spiritual matters but temporal as well.  The Pope was sovereign in England and the King was but his governor, a papal viceroy.  While this was symbolic and had no practical effect on the day to day governing of the kingdom, in the medieval world symbol was everything and it gave the Papacy tremendous moral advantage over the English Crown.  Perhaps the most serious outfall of John’s surrender is that it showed the barons of England how weak John was.  They in turn challenged the Crown and confronted John in 1215 with a list of demands that severely limited royal authority, the Magna Carta.   Innocent, as overlord, annulled the charter but it stood and has stood for both English and Americans as a foothold of democracy against arbitrary and unilateral authority. 

Papal Election II

The word conclave comes from the Latin—cum clave—meaning “with a key” denoting the fact that the Cardinals are locked into the place where the election of the pope takes place.  As I mentioned yesterday this is not necessarily the Sistine Chapel and over the centuries the popes have been elected in a variety of places both in the city of Rome and beyond—sometimes far beyond—Rome. 

The Cardinals elect the pope not because they are Cardinals but because as Cardinals they are the pastors or deacons of the principal parishes of Rome.  This is a formality, of course, none of them actually functions as a pastor or deacon, but each one carries the title Cardinal priest of (name of church) or Cardinal deacon of (name of diaconal church).  In addition there are seven Cardinal bishops who hold the title of the seven ancient dioceses neighboring Rome.  These titles too are formalities.  Nevertheless, they represent the suffragen bishops, local pastors, and principal deacons of the Roman Church who for the first thousand years of the Church’s history had the right of election of the bishop of Rome.  The right of the Cardinals to elect comes from their holding title to these churches or dioceses.  There are also four patriarchs of eastern Churches in union with the See of Rome who currently are Cardinals.  Since the days of Paul VI such patriarchs, when they are named Cardinals, rank with the Cardinal bishops but do not carry a title. 

In any event to go back to the conclave and its development in the process of papal elections: in 1216, only two days following the death of Innocent III, the Cardinals meeting in Perugia were locked into the bishop’s palace for the election.  But this was a very peculiar election.  There were seventeen cardinals present and eight who were unable to be there because of the distance.  Among the eight is counted Stephan Langton who upon being named Archbishop of Canterbury in 1207, had resigned his position as Cardinal Priest of San Crisogono and so it is not clear whether or not he was still a cardinal and had a right to vote.  As he was in England and could not have returned in time, the point is moot.   The seventeen Cardinals present chose not to elect a pope.  Instead they elected a committee of two—Cardinal Ugolino de Segni, nephew of Innocent II and future Gregory IX and Guido de Palestrina—to choose the pope.  The two-man committee selected the 68 year old Cardinal Cencio Savelli, known as Camerario (the waiter) who became Honorius III.  Being locked in for the election was an innovation and seems to have been imposed by the cardinals themselves to make them focus on a quick elective process. 
The situation was different in 1241.  The Cardinals were meeting in Rome and there was great pressure on them as the Church had been at war with the Emperor, Frederick II.  The Emperor had Rome surrounded by his army and was blocking the arrival of several cardinals hostile to his interests.  He was keeping two Cardinals prisoner at Tivoli, just outside Rome.  The people of Rome under the leadership of Senator Matteo Orsini, wanting the election to be fast and efficient, forced the Cardinals under guard into the Septizodium, a ruined palace over a thousand years old on the Palatine Hill.  Conditions there were miserable.  The roof leaked—an aggravation increased by the guards stationed there urinating on the roof with their urine leaking down along with rain into the electoral chamber. The cardinals were only allowed two servants each, the food was horrid and still, after three weeks, there was no candidate.  At this point, Orsini locked the doors allowing no one in and no one out.  The situation was so bad that one Cardinal, the Englishman Robert Somercotes, the Cardinal Deacon of Sant’Eustachio, died.  Other Cardinals began to suffer health problems.  Finally on October 25, Cardinal Goffredo di Castiligone was elected as Celestine IV.  It is unknown how old Celestine was at the time of his election but he was among the oldest of the cardinals.  His health was so compromised by the conditions of the conclave that he himself died only two weeks later.  The papacy would be empty for two years until the election of Innocent IV.   Most historians consider this 1241 election the first conclave for while the 1216 election had been conducted in seclusion it was self-imposed whereas in last two weeks of the 1241 election the enclosure had been imposed on them.  Such enclosure did not always insure a quick election however, though it does so these modern days. 
Speaking of quick elections, Cardinal Sean O’Malley said that this will be a “long” conclave.  I agree but, of course, “long” is a relative term.  Five days will be a long conclave and I will be surprised if we do not have a pope by the weekend.  One friend of mine has drawn “nine” on a lottery based on which will be the decisive ballot.  That would be Thursday evening (noon EST) and that sounds about right to me.  But it is all a guess.   In the meantime, prayer is our best way of participating.  These are critical days for the Church and the choice of a chief Shepherd to lead us out of this morass is fundamental to the credibility of the Church

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.    

 

Semper Reformanda

Sorry for the hiatus –I have been travelling a bit and on retreat a bit and have had deadlines to meet and—well, excuses are just that, excuses—but I am sorry.  I realize every time I don’t do an entry for more than two days, the readership begins to drop off and I have to get back to work.  And while my readership is relatively small (a couple thousand hits a month) I know from your responses that it is helping a number of you think more clearly not so much about the past as what we can learn from the past for the crisis the Church is in today.  And it is in a crisis.          One of the themes I explore when I teach—and I have been exploring in this blog as well—is the  periodic  need of the Church for Reform.  There is a precept Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda (the Church, always reforming and always in need of reform).  The current mess in Rome with butlers and bankers out of jobs and into court is only one sign of needed reform.  The clear signs that there is a power struggle going on behind the scenes—indeed that Pope Benedict is more a pawn of warring factions than able to give direction himself—is very troublesome.  Even more troubling is the lack of authority the faithful are willing to invest in the hierarchy.  This is clear from the immense support being given the LCWR by the average Catholic-in-the-streets whether it is comic commentator Stephen Colbert or my 92 year old grand-aunt.  The staged and trumped-up charges against the American nuns by prelates whose own integrity has been shown to be not even questionable but voided (Cardinal Law),  prelates who are known for being supercilious rather than  judicious (Cardinal Burke), prelates whose reputation has shown them to be ruthlessly ambitious climbers (Archbishop Lori) and prominent laity who are base influence peddlers with  ties to the extreme right wing of American politics (Carl Anderson) is a clear indication that there is an every-opening chasm between the hierarchy and the faithful and this is a dangerous situation.
       When we look at the history of Church Reform we see several models.  At times, such as in the Reforms of the Emperor Charlemagne and again in the Reforms of his heirs—the Ottonian Emperors of the 10^th century, the reforms were imposed on the Church by political force.  In the Gregorian Reform of the 11^th century and Innocentian Reform of the 13^th, reform was initiated by the papacy itself under the leadership of convinced and evangelical  popes who threw the traditions of patronage and favoritism to the winds and did not hesitate to clean up the rats’ nests into which much of the hierarchical Church had devolved.  Tragically, in the 16^th century when the political power was impotent to reform the Church and the vested interests in the hierarchy were too strong for effective renewal, reform came from within but ended up splitting the Church and, to be honest, throwing out too many babies and not enough bathwater.  I have to say that in my judgment the Protestant Reformations of the 16^th and 17^th centuries were not only tragedies, they were ineffectual.
       Well, not entirely ineffectual.  Human nature is human nature.  Time has shown that while liturgy and catechesis changed in the reformed Churches, human nature most often did not.  Issues of ambition, abuse of power, intellectual rigidity, greed, jealousy all carried over into the new religious groups.  Granted some of the changes were good and should have happened sooner and with sponsorship of the Catholic hierarchy—scriptures and worship in the common tongue, restoration of the Chalice in communion, etc.  (I use etc. when I can’t think of anything else but know there must be something.)
        The Reformers also triggered the papacy finally into action and led to the Council of Trent which is the most successful reform Council in the history of the Church.  Much good came from Trent, but that is not where I want to go in this entry.
       As a historian I have come to see that as much a failure as the papacy so often has been—and I believe currently is—it is it gives a continuity to the Church with which we cannot dispense.  I am terrified of a new reformation that will cause people to walk away in disgust from the papacy.  On the one hand I see the Roman Curia and many of our bishops being the very force that is undermining the papacy by creating this injurious gulf between the institutional church and the faithful.  We need leadership with credibility not with arrogant self-importance.
       It is said that once a priest becomes a bishop “he has had his last bad meal and will never hear the truth again.”  Much of the leadership of the Church is out of touch with the Catholic in the pews.  When you are out of touch you cannot effectively preach the gospel—you become a buffoon like Chaucer’s pardoner.  This is not a time for blind obedience—only God merits blind obedience and I am not sure that he desires it—it is a time for wise and strong leadership that calls us by credible example to put our faith in Christ and in his Gospel.     

Blessed Are You When Men Persecute You...

The Lay Hermits on Mount Carmel--

forerunners of today's Carmelites--

by 15th century artist, fra Lippo Lippi

Innocent III harnessed the power of the laity for Reform in the Church at the beginning of the 13^th century.  There were many groups of lay hermits in Italy, up through France and the Rhineland, and elsewhere in the Catholic world.  These were independent groups of men who had renounced the materialistic culture of the urban expansion that characterized the 12^th century.  Due to various circumstances such as huge population growth, a revival of trade, more efficient agricultural techniques, an implosion of the feudal-agrarian system, the cities of Western Europe grew rapidly after the year 1100.  And with the rise of the cities, there was a revival of manufacturing and of trade that initiated a period of rapid economic expansion in Europe.  There were many positive features to this expansion with the building of the medieval cathedrals, the rise first of the urban cathedral schools and later the universities, advances in philosophy, theology, the arts, mathematics, medicine and the sciences, engineering, and other disciplines.  Many industrious families rose in just two or three generations from rural peasants who had come to the cities looking for opportunity to being rich merchant families.   But, at the same time, there were those among the new middle class who found the materialism of the new civic cultures repugnant and turned from their families’ wealth to lead simple lives of Christian prayer, pious works, and evangelical poverty.  Wanting to imitate Christ and his disciples they gathered into small communities that strove to live off their own manual labor and whatever alms they could collect to assist them in their work of tending to the sick, the elderly, widows, orphans, the handicapped, and the poor.  

There were those in the Church who saw danger in these hermits.  First, while there might occasionally be a converted priest among their numbers, they were almost entirely laymen without formal education in theology or bible.  Secondly, they exalted the poverty of Christ which made the bishops and many of the priests of their day look flawed for their wealth and comfortable ways.  Furthermore, they concentrated their efforts not on the movers and shakers of the day, but on those whom society had left behind, helpless in their poverty and consequently they were held in great esteem not only by the poor but by many of the middle classes who admired their humble service.  Some bishops and prelates feared that these radicals would become like the Waldensians or the Cathars and offer religious alternatives to the faithful, alternatives that would leave them—the prelates—with fewer sheep to fleece.  Other prelates just felt that these lay hermits made them, the bishops, look bad for their neglect of the poor and for the extravagance of their own lifestyles.  Defenders of the Status Quo accused these poor men of Gnosticism and other heresies when in fact they were only faithful to the Gospel.  Perhaps the reader can see the subtext here and how this period of history speaks to the current situation and the harassment of the American nuns by certain prelates in our time and place, but lest you think that I am making this up, let me suggest a book that treats well of the religious reforms of the 12^th and 13^th centuries in their social context.  Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe, was written by Smith College Professor of European History, Lester Little, in 1983—long before the current group of prelatial ne’er-do-wells  began hatching their plots against the good ladies. 

      Up until the accession of Innocent III to the papal throne in 1198 many voices for genuine reform in the Church were having difficulty but Innocent wasn’t afraid of the Gospel and the impact it had on peoples’ lives.  He recognized the integrity of many people who were trying to lead Christ-like lives in the midst of a society—political and ecclesial—that was obsessed with power and wealth.  Innocent himself, despite his great power as Pope, was a man of frugal, even austere, life and habits.  He had great personal integrity and was amazingly open to correction even from the most humble of his subjects.  He took the gospel seriously and he recognized that these voices for reform needed to be heard.  Even though most of these hermits were not priests, he encouraged their street-corner preaching and calls to repentance. 

     The most important of these lay hermits during Innocents’ reign as pope was a humble man from Assisi, a town about a three days walk north of Rome.  Francis—his father’s nickname for him (his actual name was John but his father—a wealthy cloth merchant—had always referred to him as his “Frenchie”)—came from a nouveau-riche merchant family, but had broken with his father and walked away from the family’s wealth for a life of prayer and voluntary poverty in imitation of Christ.  There is a spiritual axiom going back to Saint Jerome—“Naked Follow the Naked Christ”—and Francis valued the poverty of Christ who had emptied himself of all his divine power for our sake. 

      Innocent greatly admired the poor man from Assisi and empowered him and his brotherhood to preach the gospel.  The impact was huge.  Francis’ brotherhood grew and expanded across the Christian world in just a few years’ time and in his own short lifetime thousands of men chose to follow Francis following Christ.  A corresponding sisterhood was established by a disciple, Clare, who like Francis came from a well to do family but left behind the wealth to establish the Order of Poor Ladies (usually called Poor Clares in English-speaking countries.). 
      Other hermit groups of the time developed into the Servite, Augustinian, and Carmelite Orders.  A society of preaching priests, the Order of Preachers or Dominicans, while not having begun as lay hermits, adopted this model of mendicant friars as well. 
      I have to admit that when I see these School Sisters of Notre Dame and Sisters of Saint Francis, and Sisters of Mercy, and Sisters of Saint Joseph, and Daughters of Charity today wearing what clothes that are given them or they can buy cheaply, and living in apartments or simple homes, and reaching out to the elderly, to the poor, to abused women and children, I am impressed by their generous service and humble witness.  I am old enough to remember the Ladies of Loretto and the Madames of the Sacred Heart and Sisters of the Holy Cross of yesteryear with their starched habits and elegant manners and I appreciate the work they did educating women for leadership but am even more impressed by these same women who have in their senior years left behind the trappings of gentility for service of the poor.  Archbishop Lori lives comfortably in his Baltimore mansion looking forward to his red hat, and Cardinal Burke drags around wherever he goes a nine-yard train of scarlet silk, and Cardinal Law—well we all know what he has done—these are the persecutors of these good women of the gospel.  I can see why these prelates are afraid of the nuns.  I would be afraid of the nuns too if I were in their buskins.  Sinners always try to hide from the light of saints.  These women are showing the way for the reform the Church needs today.  Now we need a pope like Innocent III who can see that.         

Follow the Ladies' Lead, Gentlemen

Innocent III blessing Francis and his
first Friars

I recently mentioned the Reformation of Innocent III as a model for Church Reformation that preserves unity in the Church while addressing the need to eliminate areas of Church life that have become a scandal because they are at odds with the Gospel. 

     Innocent was born into a noble Italian family, the counts of Segni, in 1160 and was elected pope in 1198.  He died in 1216.  His family’s stronghold was only about forty miles south-east of Rome and over the centuries there were nine popes from this family, among them being Innocent, Gregory IX, and Alexander IV.  They were a remarkable family and Innocent is often considered to be the most powerful pope in the history of the Church.  Fortunately, for the most part, he used power well.   His nephew, Ugolino dei conti de Segni, who became Gregory IX, was a great friend and patron of Francis of Assisi and also served the Church well both as a Cardinal and later as Pope. 

       There is basis for criticizing Innocent for some of his decisions—the Crusade against the Cathars (Albigensians), the categorization of the Waldensians as heretics at Lateran IV and subsequent persecution, and the Fourth Crusade which ended up attacking and sacking  Constantinople.  We will look at these events in future posts, but these events, flawed as they are from our contemporary perspective, should not be allowed to overshadow a magnificent program of Church Reform which probably prevented a Luther-style Reformation for several centuries. 

        When Innocent ascended the papacy in 1198 he inherited a Church that was deeply fractured.  Personal hostility between the Kings of England and France had overflowed into Church life and led to a deterioration of the state of the Church in the two kingdoms as Church offices were bestowed by the kings on candidates for no reason better than the political needs of the respective monarchs.  Moreover, a centuries-long feud between the papacy and the empire similarly was sapping energy, especially where the Emperor could hand out religious benefices to his political allies to cement their loyalty.       
        The politicalization of the Church was not only filling major posts with many unsuitable candidates, but was leading to a divide between the ordinary faithful and the hierarchy.  The political alliances of the bishops weakened their authority over the faithful who were looking for good and honest guides for their spiritual growth and, not finding it among the pastors of the Church were turning elsewhere.
        In the Rhineland and in the French Languedoc and Pyrénées massive numbers of Christians were deserting the Church for the gnostic Cathar movement. The rigid and austere morality ascribed to the Cathar Perfecti or Holy Men gave them a credibility that the wealthy and powerful Catholic prelates lacked.  Catharism, while strongest in the Rhine and South-west France, was spreading even into Italy, undermining the Church.
       Cathars were Gnostics and their beliefs were, from a Christian perspective, bizarre, but more orthodox were the Waldensians.  Peter Waldo was a wealthy merchant of Lyons France who took the gospel injunction to “sell all that you have, give to the poor, and follow me” seriously.  Doing precisely that, he ran afoul of Church authorities for preaching while not ordained.  Waldo’s charismatic personality and dramatic conversion gave him a credibility that brought him many disciples in France and northern Italy.  A lay movement, the Waldensians soon found themselves decried as schismatics and indeed were broken off from the Catholic Church.  Nevertheless, they grew and even many faithful Catholics admired them for their pacific ways, simple lives, and generosity to the poor.
       Among Innocent III’s reforms, and perhaps the most important of them, was the encouragement of new religious orders that were strongly evangelical in their simple life and service of the poor.  Francis of Assisi was introduced to Innocent who admired him greatly and helped advance the Friars Minor—Francis’ brotherhood of poor preachers who went out and worked with lepers, the lame, the sick poor and others on the margins of society. 
        Another order that Innocent encouraged were a society of priests under the leadership of Dominic de Guzman, a Spanish priest working in the south of France to win people back from the Cathar heresy.  Like Francis’ friars, Dominic’s priests and their coadjutor brothers lived lives of model simplicity.  Dominic, unlike Francis, stressed the importance of education and many of his priests were both brilliant scholars and good preachers. 
       The first new order that Innocent encouraged with the Trinitarians—a community of priests and brothers who were dedicated to freeing captives captured in the Crusades and held by the Muslims.  They raised money with which to buy Muslim prisoners and then exchange them for Christian prisoners.  Their kindness to the Muslim prisoners gave them great credibility on both sides of the wars. 
        The emphasis of these new communities was living a life in imitation of Jesus and his apostles in prayer, fellowship, and simplicity of life.  Perhaps what we need most in the Church today are new—or renewed—religious orders of men and women who take the gospel seriously.  Men and women who will lead simple lives, give themselves to prayer, and dedicate themselves to the service of the poor.  In the years since Vatican II many of the Sisters’ communities have done just that.  Now maybe it is time for the men to follow their example.      

Will It Take Another Luther?

St Francis, model
for inernal reform
of the Church

There is no doubt that the Church today stands in desperate need of a new Reformation.  When we speak of “Reformation” we usually think of Martin Luther, but his was only one of several Reformations in the history of the Church.  Luther’s Reformation had the unfortunate consequence of splitting the Church—as did the subsequent Reformation of John Calvin as well as the English, Scottish, and Scandinavian Reformations.  There were other Reformations that did not divide the Church.  Previous entries on this blog have spoken of the Carolingian and Ottonian Reformations of the 9^th and 10^th centuries respectively. (See entries for May 9, June 4, 5, 18, 20, 23, 28, 29,  July 1, 16, 18,  28, August 6, 7, 11, 26, 2011, Feb 21, 2012. )  These Reformations were imposed on the Church by the political authority of the Holy Roman Emperors.   Then there was the Gregorian Reform from within the Church, led by a series of Popes and assisted by various saints.  (See July 19, 28, August 6, 7, 25, 27, 28, 2011 and February 21, 2012.)  I hadn’t gotten to the Spanish Reformation of Ferdinand and Isabella or the Tridentine Reformation yet in my postings, but the former of these was, like the Carolingian and Ottonian, imposed by king-protectors of the Church; the latter was the internal Reform mandated by the Council of Trent.  My favorite Reformation is that of Innocent III at the beginning of the thirteenth century.  It was sheer grace.  A wise and good pope empowered a generation of saints—John of Matha, Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Clare, Albert of Vercelli, Jordan of Saxony, Philip Benizi, Anthony of Padua, Edmund Rich, Bonaventure and countless others who founded new and enthused religious orders, stirred up the laity to deeper faith, preached the gospel, called people to live a gospel life, provided good pastoral service to the faithful and gave new life to the Church.  All this was under the guidance of a Pope, Innocent III, who understood that the Institution of the Church was there to advance the Gospel and foster holiness in Church’s members. 
      That the Church today stands in need of a serious Reformation—in head and members—is very clear.  The reforms of Vatican II have been a disaster—not because they weren’t sound and good ideas, holy ideas, but because they have not been properly implemented.  The Council was no sooner over and the last busload of bishops had hardly left for the airport, when curial officials began dismantling the Council, giving it its “authentic interpretation” which steadily and surely has reconsolidated all power in the Roman Curia leaving the Roman bureaucracy unmanageable to the Pope and unaccountable to anyone.  The result is the chaos and scandal we now endure with the Holy See sheltering prelates from prosecution for protecting abusive priests, with money laundering being the business of the Vatican Bank, with cronyism being the chief criterion for the nomination of bishops, and with vicious infighting involving Cardinals and butlers in stabling one another in the back. 
        The monarchial and bureaucratic structure by which the Church is administered cannot be relied upon for honest and transparent leadership needed in a community that professes its mission is to spread the Gospel.  There is a need to change the basic constitution of the Church, not to do away with the papacy or the episcopal structure which we Catholics believe was instituted by Christ (though that needs some historical nuancing), but to integrate leadership into the Church rather than place it above the Church. By this I do not mean introducing democracy into the Church, but I do mean creating structures of accountability.  If the leadership of the Church does not realize that the faithful do already in fact hold them accountable and create structures of administration that “give some teeth” to that accountability, the faithful will continue to drift away from the leadership in ever greater numbers. Right now the choice—Luther or Innocent—can still be made, but if the Church leadership does not opt for an Innocentian Reform from within, then they will find themselves the victims of a Luther style Reform that will lead the faithful away from the leadership.