New Sheriff, New Rules, Missing: One Red Hat

 Father Robert Nugent, SDS, died last week at the age of 76.  Father Nugent had been the founder—along with Sister Jeannine Gramick—of New Ways Ministries, one of the first and most effective ministries to Gay, Lesbian, and transgendered Catholics.  New Ways Ministries set its agenda for opening a dialogue between the LGBT community and the Church so that the hierarchy could have a better understanding of the complex issues and questions facing Catholics with same-sex attraction, but in doing so did not “lay down the law” in terms as black and white as some thought should be.  (This was, of course, before the “Who am I to judge” approach of our current Pope.)  in their open approach, Father Nugent and Sister Jeannine attracted the particular ire of the late Cardinal James Hickey, then Archbishop of Washington.  His Eminence could be, and most often was, totally irrational at the mention of either name—Father Nugent or Sister Jeannine—or at any reference to New Ways Ministries.   

As an example of his irrationality when it came to New Ways Ministries, in 1998—shortly after the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepherd—several Catholic organizations published an advertisement in The New York Times calling for an end to hate crimes against LGBT persons.  Pax Christi USA was one of these organizations.  New Ways Ministry was another.  Many priests and religious signed the advertisement.  Among them were Father Bruce Bavinger SJ—pastor of St Aloysius Gonzaga Church in Washington DC—and Father Larry Madden SJ, pastor of Holy Trinity in Georgetown.  Cardinal Hickey called their Jesuit provincial and insisted that the provincial make both priests swear an oath that they would never again support any statement sponsored by New Ways Ministry.  Now remember, New Ways Ministry was only one of several sponsors of this advertisement which only called for an end to hate crimes.  Reputable Catholic groups had co-sponsored this petition and the list of signees included many leading Catholics.  The advertisement in no way undermined the moral teaching of the Church on sexuality issues.  That did not matter to Cardinal Hickey—any association, no matter how remote, with New Ways Ministry was enough to get you on His Eminence’s fecal roster. 

In 1999 Cardinal Hickey used his influence to persuade then Cardinal Ratzinger at the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith to issue a “Notification Regarding Sister Jeannine Gramick SSND and Father Robert Nugent SDS” which made it clear that New Ways Ministry was not—at least as it had been reported by Cardinal Hickey to the CDF—consistent with the Church’s moral teaching.  This began a persecution of Father Nugent and Sister Grammick.  Sister Jeannine’s Order, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, were pressured into dismissing her.  Fortunately a more stalwart group, the Sisters of Loretto, took her as a transfer.  Father Nugent was forced into abandoning any ministry whatsoever to persons with same-sex attraction.  So much for searching out the sheep that was lost.

I will not say that Cardinal Hickey was a bad man or even a bad priest.  Granted, his priests found him cold and distant but he actually was just a strong introvert with very poor interpersonal skills.  He was a “company man” who could not understand the Church’s mission of proclaiming the Gospel except in the model of maintaining the ecclesiastical institutions and their power.  To his great credit, he recognized the unique gifts of Capuchin friar Sean O’Malley and advanced O’Malley’s career.  Nevertheless, he can be considered as one of the darker blots on the roster of men chosen to shepherd the Church in the United States.  If it were only the unjust ways in which he acted against Nugent and Gramick, his autocratic ways could perhaps be attributed to a personal antipathy, but his treatment of fellow Cardinal, Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, reveals a most despicable side, a pathology of fear, that impelled the Cardinal to dogmatically fortify his opinions rather than to advance the cause of the Gospel.  When Cardinal Bernardin established the Catholic Common Ground Initiative in 1996 Cardinal Hickey and Cardinal Law—another and darker blot on the history of the Church in the United States—then Archbishop of Boston, publicly attacked Cardinal Bernardin and united their voices and power to do their best to sink his project of opening dialogue with disaffected communities within the Church to discover how the Church in the United States could avoid the polarization and culture wars that were threatening to eat away its vitality.  Hickey and Law made it absolutely clear that in their scheme of things there is no room for dialogue.  Their way or the highway.  They ignited the very firestorm Cardinal Bernardin was trying to avoid from engulfing American Catholicism.  We were privileged to watch he fate of Cardinal Law who, like Lucifer, has fallen like a star from the heavens. Cardinal Hickey went to his grave—actually his mausoleum in the rear of Saint Matthew’s Cathedral—in October 2004, just short of four years after his retirement from the See of Washington at the age of 80.     

While Sean O’Malley is a testimony to the better angels of Cardinal Hickey’s nature, there was—as I pointed out—another side to the man and to that side, another protégé.  His Eminence had a most peculiar relationship with Father William Lori.  I have written elsewhere about Lori—now Archbishop of Baltimore—but perhaps the most telling is the final paragraph of my August 18, 2012 entry on the late Monsignor Ralph Beiting, one of the most outstanding Christians I have met in my lifetime.  Father Beiting, a priest of the diocese of Covington, was for his entire life an outstanding servant of the poorest Americans in Appalachia.  Lori had begun his studies for the priesthood in that same Diocese but as a student, transferred to Washington “because there is no upward mobility in Covington.”  He found that upward mobility in the favor of Cardinal Hickey who appointed Lori as his secretary and kept him close by his side.  Lori, for his part, fawned over the Cardinal in ways that others who were present found nauseating.  It paid off.  Hickey had Lori named one of his auxiliary bishops and before his death was able to secure for him the Diocese of Bridgeport. 

Archbishop Lori, by all accounts, was expected to get a Cardinal’s hat in this upcoming consistory.  Baltimore is the oldest See in the Church of the United States In the last fifty years, each Archbishop of Baltimore but one were named Cardinals.  Moreover, Lori’s enjoys the patronage of Carl Anderson, Supreme Grand Poobah of the Knights of Columbus and generous dispenser of funds to the Vatican and to various conservative causes.  Anderson used his influence to have Lori promoted to Baltimore.  Pope Francis may pay for his decision not to give Lori his coveted hat, but he has sent a significant signal that there are new rules to the game.  I hope for Archbishop Lori’s sake, that he can learn to play by those rules and be the sort of bishop Francis is calling for.  While I have never liked Archbishop Lori, I would like to see Baltimore to have a wise and good Shepherd at its head. And, for that matter, I would like to see each bishop, including Archbishop Lori, be the sort of Bishop Pope Francis seems to want for our Church.

Preparing the Ground for a New Luther?

Are we facing in the wrong

direction?  not only at the

altar but for God's Work in

the world?

I was at Mass Saturday evening and heard the Gospel:

"All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you."

What concerns me most about the nonsense right  now with the Vatican’s complaints about the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the “scandal” with the Pope’s butler leaking confidential documents,  the Vatican Bank and its inability to meet transparency standards set by international conventions, Cardinal Bertone’s alleged coup to consolidate all power in his Secretariat of State, the issues about Caritas Internationalis needing more hierarchical  supervision, Cardinal  Burke parading around thinking he is Louis XIV—and then the nonsense here with the alternative magisterium of Michael Voris and “Real Catholic T.V.,”  Carl Anderson and the mismanagement of the Knights of Columbus, and everything else going on is that—wait a minute: we have a mission and we have taken our eyes off that mission. 

     “Go and make disciples of all nations”—where is that in this current mess? 

     Somewhere in the reign of John Paul II the steersman took his eye off the course of proclaiming the Kingdom of God and the bark of Peter has been foundering in waves of turmoil ever since.  The Second Vatican Council is about more than putting the liturgy into everyday language, turning altars to face the people, (neither of which things the Council itself actually did, mind you); what the Council did do was to set a course for the Church to proclaim the Gospel in the Modern World.  What is going on today is nothing more than a free for all as those with power jockey for more power whether on the level of the Vatican bureaucracy or the American hierarchy.  The political connivance, led by Cardinal Francis George of Chicago in 2010, that kept Vice President of the conference, Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson from becoming president of the conference—the first time that a sitting Vice President did not become President of the USCCB—is only one example of the misdirected energy that is going to infighting rather than carrying out a vision for the Church here in the United States.  The connivance of Archbishop Lori (who owes his Baltimore See to the generosity of Carl Anderson and the Knights of Columbus money which Anderson uses freely for some very  biased agenda items), with Cardinals Burke, Law, and Levada to go after the American Sisters  is yet another.  The transformation of a personal vendetta of an American bishop into a scathing attack on Sister Elizabeth Johnson—a more sound scholar and better theologian than any of the bishops—for her book Quest for the Living God is a third example of wasted energy that should be devoted to bringing Christ to people with profound spiritual hungers.  Richard Rohr has written

      Much of the Western world has given up on the church and is going other places for wisdom.  Unfortunately, in these other places they are sometimes “willingly filling their belly with the husks the pigs are eating” (Luke 15:16) But we in the church must ask ourselves if we have not been the parent who sent them away because there was nothing trustworthy or life-giving at home."  (Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993, p. 26)
      This is precisely the situation in which we are finding ourselves as Church—we have a tremendous storehouse of spiritual nourishment to share with a world that suffering in immense distress and hunger of every sort but instead of bringing the Gospel and its life-giving hope, we are squabbling over who holds the keys to the pantry.  And when the internecine squabbling stops long enough for the Church to speak something to the world beyond its doors—it is always a message of negativity.  As I have written before: today everyone can tell you what the Catholic Church is against but very few can tell you what we stand for.  
       From a historical viewpoint this situation is fraught with signs of danger for the Church.  The loss of reputation for moral integrity, the concern with power and wealth by many prelates, the ignoring of advances in scientific knowledge and learning, the alienation of an educated and competent laity, the defense of antique social and political structures in a rapidly evolving society—these are all reminiscent of situation that led up to the Protestant Reformations of the 16^th century.  Vatican II was called to heal the divisions in Christianity but the betrayal of the Council over the last thirty plus years is threatening us with further discord and schism.  We need to refocus on mission and be willing to surrender our personal ambitions for the sake of advancing the Kingdom of God. 

The Axis of Evil--Catholic Style

Just yesterday I wrote about my suspicions of who is behind the evil conspiracy against the American Sisters in the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.  I had some suspicions and wham, if one of my regular readers didn’t send me the following article from America about London Tablet’s  Rome correspondent Robert Mickens and his analysis.  As a long-time Rome resident with a lot of friends still on the scene, let me tell you that Robert Mickens is an unimpeachable source—in my book even more reliable than John Allen, the Dean of the Roman Correspondents.  Mickens sees Supreme Grand Poobah of the Knights of Columbus (and former Reagan advisor) Carl Anderson behind this (what did I tell you yesterday about who is in bed with whom) but also implicates such fine upstanding characters as Cardinal Bernard Law (speaking of being in bed, remember him from the Boston priest scandal cover-ups?) and Archbishop-Designate of Baltimore, William Lori who is one of the nastiest eunuchs for the kingdom to ever wear a miter.  Just thinking about these boys makes you want to take a shower and change your clothes from the skin out.  And these pots are worried about the nuns’ kettle?  Give me a break.     Anyway, I realize that I am being far too polemical for a historian and I need to make my bias a bit more subtle, just a bit—but this is a serious problem for credibility.  Neither Law nor Lori nor Anderson have credibility with today’s rank and file Catholics but the Sisters do.  If the American Church is to be taken out of its tailspin we need to use those factors around whom there is some stability to anchor the Church.  Just yesterday I received another email about the situation in the Diocese of Madison Wisconsin where we see Catholics being disaffected on a mass scale because of a bishop’s unwillingness to take his faithful seriously.  This isn’t a crisis of leadership in the American Church, it is becoming a failure of leadership.  Anyway, read the article—I have copied it here below. 

The Tablet: Who Was Behind the LCWR Investigation?

Posted at: Thursday, May 03, 2012 12:36:19 PM
Author: James Martin, S.J.

In a "Current Comment" this week America's editors asked some questions about the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's (CDF) "Doctrinal Assessment" of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). "First, there is the history of the assessment. Catholics in the United States and elsewhere are curious about where it came from. How did it originate? Who were the petitioners?" Now Robert Mickens, the Rome correspondent for The (London) Tablet focuses on this question in the Tablet's latest issue, in an article entitled "Rome's Three-Line Whip." He begins as far back as the 1980s, but the story picks up in the 1990s, as Mickens reports. 

       By the late 1990s, they [conservative bishops in the US, according to Mickens] began taking their complaints about the sisters to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in Rome. The CDF, under the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, even issued a doctrinal warning against the organisation in 2001, though the last remnant of a more conciliar group of US bishops was able to stave off any direct Vatican intervention.

       The saga entered a new phase in 2005 when Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope. He quickly appointed the then Archbishop William Levada of San Francisco to his old post as CDF prefect. Significantly, the soon-to-be Cardinal Levada was also chairman of the doctrinal committee of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). According to sources in Rome and Washington, his successor at the conference’s doctrinal office –the then Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Connecticut – was the man who formally petitioned the CDF to launch the current doctrinal investigation of the LCWR. Cardinal Bernard Law, who was forced to resign as Archbishop of Boston in 2002 because of his perceived mishandling of the clerical sex-abuse crisis, was reportedly the person in Rome most forcefully supporting Bishop Lori’s proposal.

      Both Cardinal Law and Archbishop Lori (he was appointed to the prestigious see of Baltimore in March) have long supported women’s religious orders that have distanced themselves from the LCWR. Cardinal Law, 80, staffs his residence in Rome with the Mercy Sisters of Alma (Michigan) and Archbishop Lori, 61, helped set up several traditional communities of sisters during his tenure in Bridgeport (2001-12). All these communities, marked by their loyalty to the hierarchy, belong to the Conference of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR), which broke away from the LCWR in 1992. 

       Incidentally, Cardinal Law was a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for Religious when it launched its own visitation – separate from the CDF investigation – of women’s communities in the US. According to news reports, that project was at least partially funded by the Knights of Columbus, a wealthy fraternal order of Catholic men for whom Archbishop Lori has been supreme chaplain since 2005. Under the leadership of an influential Washington lawyer and former Reagan White House official, Carl Anderson, the knights have increasingly backed conservative causes and routinely make sizeable donations to the Holy See. Mr Anderson is a member or consultor of several Vatican offices, and one of the five-man board of directors for the so-called Vatican Bank. His close association with the Vatican and Archbishop Lori, and the archbishop’s own determination to bring the LCWR into line, should not be underestimated.

      After appointing Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo (Ohio) to conduct the initial phase of the controversial investigation of the Leadership Conference, the CDF has now asked Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle to lead phase two. He heads a three-man team (which includes Blair) to reform the organization or, in the CDF’s sanitised words, “to implement a process of review and conformity to the teachings and discipline of the Church”. --Robert Mickens

 

Sing a New Church Into Being



Sister of Mercy Betty Campbell welcomes

visitors to the house of refuge she runs for

women in Ciduad Juarez, across the border

from El Paso.  Catherine McCauley would

be very proud of how her spirit is kept alive

by women like Sister Betty. 

  

“Sing a New Church” by Delores Dufner, OSB
Tune: “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”

Summoned by the God who made us
Rich in our diversity,
Gathered in the name of Jesus,
Richer still in unity:

Let us bring the gifts that differ
And, in splendid, varied ways,
Sing a new church into being,
One of faith and love and praise

Radiant risen from the water;
Robed in holiness and light,
Male and female in God’s image
Male and female God’s delight:

Trust the goodness of creation;
Trust the Spirit strong within.
Dare to dream the vision promised
Sprung from seed of what has been.

Bring the hopes of every nation;
Bring the art of every race.
Weave a song of peace and justice:
Let it sound through time and space.

Draw together at one table
All the human family;
Shape a circle ever wider
And a people ever free.

I was at Mass this morning with a group of Religious Sisters (one affiliated with the LCWR) and as they sang the hymn “Sing a New Church into  Being” I could not but help see the connection between Rome’s “crackdown on the nuns” and the issues surrounding Father Guarnizo and the refusal of communion to a woman at her mother’s funeral because the woman is in a same-sex relationship.

Summoned by the God who made us
Rich in our diversity,
Gathered in the name of Jesus,
Richer still in unity:

Let us bring the gifts that differ

and in splendid varied ways,

sing a new church into being

one of faith and love and praise

Songs like this point out that there are two Churches today and that the Sisters have a radically different idea of “The Church” than do the clerics who are taking them to task.  It is not so simple as to talk about Magisterium and “rebels.” Now I am not going to make theological claims here, but as a historian I have to speak about differing theological opinions and how they play out.  Just as in the ninth century Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus held conflicting theologies of the Eucharist, so too we have to talk today about the conflicting theologies of Church held by some who belong to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and some who are members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. 

      “Well,” some will object, “there really can’t be a conflict—CDF has the final word on the faith of the Church and so any opinions they judge erroneous are just that—erroneous.”   Well, you might think so, but that is precisely the problem.  The one theology of Church is top-down and “the faith” is determined by what the magisterium declares it to be.     The other theology of Church is “ground-up” and the faith of the Church is what the people actually believe.  While for the last century and a half or so the “top-down” model has prevailed, throughout the history of the Church’s two millennia there have been times when the faith has been a matter of “top-down” and times when it has been a matter of “ground-up.”  In the Arian controversies of the fourth century, for example, orthodoxy was not defined by the bishops (the majority of whom were Arian) and magisterium, but of the rank and file faithful whose faith in the divinity of Christ put them in opposition to an alliance of hierarchy and Emperor. In fact even Pope Liberius faltered in orthodoxy, acceding to a semi-Arian formula proposed by Basil of Ancyra that did not accord the consubstantiality  of the Divine Nature to the Holy Spirit.  It was the dogged faithfulness of the faithful themselves that maintained the orthodoxy of Trinitarian belief against the “magisterium” of the day.  

      And this is an issue not to overlook in this conflict between Rome and “the nuns”—the alliance of hierarchy and Emperor for the preservation of power.  True, there may be more Emperors these days but rank power has taken on other, more modern, incarnations.  It is very significant that the Sisters have been criticized for being “too involved in Social Justice,” as if one could be too involved in proclaiming Good News to the Poor.  What is going on here if this is the criticism?  Who has the true faith?

      The nuns, in their commitment to social change through groups like Network, represent a challenge to the existing power structures not only in the Church but in society.  One has to ask oneself these days if the hierarchy is being true to the Gospel or is it, as it was in the days of the Byzantine Empire,  “in bed” with the powers-that-be of the saeculum, (the fancy Latin name for whatever constitutes the current socio-political-economic  distribution of power.)  The nuns are on the side of the powerless—the poor, women, minorities.  I can’t help but wonder if the internal persecution of the nuns isn’t about their prophetic voice being raised for those who have no voice.  True, bishops—and the Roman See as much if not more than most bishops—have to worry about support from big donors while the nuns depend on their own work and the appreciative nickels and dimes of those whom they have helped over the years, but that makes me wonder all the more how much Rome sings to the tune of those ”devout” Catholics  such as Carl Anderson, the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus or Tom Monaghan, former CEO of Domino’s Pizza,  and other fat Cat’licks on whom the Holy See depends for the substantial donations that keep it out of the “red.”  (Or, depending on how you look at it, keeps them in those red dresses.)  As we all know nullum prandium gratuitatem—just to put it into ecclesiastical Latin—“there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

      Look at this song: “diversity,”  “male and female in God’s image,” “we’ve a song of peace and justice,” “drawn together at one table, all the human family,” “Shape a circle ever wider, and a people ever free”—my God, this is the stuff of Les Miserables; this is a world upside down.  This may be “Good News to the Poor, freedom to captives, sight to the blind,  liberty to the oppressed, and a time of God’s favor” but it surely is a song that threatens the saeculum.  Of course, read the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) and be even more shocked about God’s plan to cast down those in power and to send the rich away hungry, but this is the heart of the problem.  These women take God seriously at his word.  As I pointed out in Monday’s blog—this is the crisis of spirituality today when so many of the men responsible for leadership may  be deep in piety  but have never matured in their spiritual life.  If they had the Church which they have been called to lead would be truly an evangelical Church rather than a faltering institution bleeding members who have been so disillusioned by the failure of faithful leadership that they can no longer stomach the pretense that this institution is the spotless bride of the Lamb.   

Of Courthouses, Christian Nations, and That Damn Drinking Water in Loudon County

Saint Mary's Chapel, Saint Mary City,

Maryland--the first Catholic Church in

English North America

I had an email from one of my regular readers who has been what we might call an active bystander to the Leesburg Courthouse Lawn Debacle that we spoke of the other day.  A spokesperson for the Knights sent the board of supervisors an email saying:
The many Loudoun County citizens who place their belief in God and try to live a faith based life are being continually subjected to policy statements placed on our County Courthouse grounds by a myriad of atheistic organizations. Citizens of faith are infuriated by these policy laden signs, such as the one below, that have been erected at very regular intervals on the Loudoun County Courthouse grounds. These signs, for the most part, refer to God's non-existence, and denigrate those, who believe in God.  So although, some would claim these signs profess our freedom of speech, the very regular and continued placement of them on the courthouse grounds are neither fair, nor civil to citizens of faith. We hope that our Loudoun County Supervisors takes this issue to heart, and more closely monitors its policy for permits to use the courthouse grounds for displays. 
     Now, remember the Knights started this situation when they organized a protest against a county policy that would have prohibited any displays on the Courthouse lawn.  The Board of Supervisors backed down and agreed to allow ten displays allotted on a first come first serve basis.  That was a huge mistake.  The Knights’ protest backfired because the policy that would permit Christians to put up their annual Christmas displays also permitted people of other faiths and no faith to erect displays as well.  Several Knights realized this fight was a mistake from the get-go and want to back-off from supporting displays on County property while others, like the gentleman who sent the above email, want religious displays to be allowed but not displays that advocate rationalism, agnosticism, or atheism.  They are probably right that some of the displays that have been put on the public lawn make light of—if not mock—believers.  That is not civil behavior but then civil behavior has never been part of Loudon culture where polemic has long outshouted reason, goin' back at least to the War Between the States.  What they do not seem to realize is that you cannot allow one opinion access to the public space and bar others.  And this is where I found a historical conundrum come to the fore.  In the string of emails my correspondent forwarded to me a Loudon maven of some journalistic renown got into the fray  insisting that the United States is a Judeo-Christian nation, and not only insisting but leaving no room for dissent. Barbara Curtis inserted herself into the conversation writing: There is also the fact that our nation is indeed a Judeo-Christian nation - there's no disputing that. 
      Are we a Judeo-Christian nation?  I think that can well be disputed.  There are various strands that go to make up our national identity.  The three main colonial pillars on which today’s United States is built are the English, the Spanish, and the French.  The English colonized the eastern seaboard from Georgia to what is now New Hampshire extending westward to the Appalachians; the Spanish colonized Florida and from what is now Texas north to Kansas and west to include California and everything in between.  The French colonized Maine, Vermont and the Mississippi Valley from what is now Wisconsin down to New Orleans and including the Ohio Valley up to the Great Lakes including western Pennsylvania and upstate New York.  The Spanish influence in Florida was neither pervasive nor long-lasting and the French influence faded except in Louisiana.  However, the Spanish influence in the Southwest is stronger today than what remains of English influence along the Eastern seaboard.  All three of these colonial powers were Christian nations though the Catholic Spaniards and French would not have accorded that honor to the Protestant English and the Protestant English would not have considered the papist French and Spaniards to be true Christians. 
     Other than in Louisiana where French influence is still strong on the law, our American legal system is borrowed and adapted from the English.   Our Constitutional heritage, while it has developed differently—and significantly so—from the British, is shaped by Enlightenment Rationalism that was all the rage in English Coffee houses and French salons of the eighteenth century.  It was also influenced, especially as regards the Bill of Rights, in Magna Carta and the consequent English understanding of the relationship of public government and private rights.   (While we all talk about rights, no one speaks of corresponding duties which is a tragic flaw of our republican tradition.)   So basically we need to focus on the English heritage more than the French and Spanish to determine the nature of our nation if we want to talk about “nation” in the political sense.  And in this whole dispute about access to public space on a Courthouse lawn, we are speaking in a political sense.  
      Are we a Judeo-Christian nation?  Well again, we need to look at the various strands of English tradition out of which the political structure of the United States was formed.  When one reads Jonathan Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” speech (actually a sermon entitled A Modell of Christian Charity (“Modell” being his spelling, not mine) we can see that the Puritans came to Massachusetts Bay explicitly to establish a Christian Commonwealth.  Of course, there would be no Courthouse crèche issue with them as they banned Christmas altogether.  It was a “papist” holiday. Initially the Governor, William Bradford, instructed non-Puritan members of the colony that any celebration had to be confined to the privacy of their homes.  In 1647, during the Puritan Government of Oliver Cromwell in England, New England Puritans passed a law criminalizing celebrating the day in the colony.  In 1669 a five shilling fine was imposed on anyone in Massachusetts celebrating the day. So the Massachusetts heritage would say: Christian yes; Christmas no.  Rhode Island was an escape colony for Massachusetts residents who found Puritanism not to their taste.  Roger Williams and the other founders of the Rhode Island colony rejected Puritanism to become Baptists.  In the Baptist tradition they favored individual conscience over law and thus declared freedom of religion for Rhode Island.  I am not sure whether this freedom of conscience extended to Catholics or not but America’s first synagogue is Touro Synagogue in Newport, built in 1763.  Now that date is fairly late for what we are talking about but it is a sign of authentic religious freedom that Jews as well as Christians were granted freedom of worship.  There is no record of Catholic Worship in Rhode Island until the time of the American Revolution.  Rhode Island Baptists were strict on the separation of Church and State as the Baptist tradition has been in general up until the last thirty years when increasingly, like Evangelicals and some Catholics, more and more Baptists, especially Southern Baptists, want Christian practices enshrined in civil law. 
       Pennsylvania was settled by Quakers who did practice religious tolerance for all, including Catholics. There was no “Established Church” in Pennsylvania which functioned with separation of Church and government. New York and Virginia were Anglican colonies where the Church of England was established by law and the clergy were salaried by the government.  Catholicism was illegal in both colonies, but Christmas was not.  In the Anglican tradition, Christmas was a big thing: Church in the morning and dead drunk in the afternoon. That, incidentally, explains why Puritans made Christmas illegal.  This was a time when Anglicanism was still a Protestant religion and while it maintained a recognizably Catholic Liturgy and certain holydays such as Christmas, it eschewed such popish foppery as crosses on the altar much less a crèche on the lawn.   Maryland was the sole Catholic colony and religious freedom was guaranteed by the Lord Proprietor to all Christians of whatever denomination. Catholicism was legal in Maryland—until the Cromwellian Interregnum in England when the Lord Proprietor was deprived of his authority—and then from the Restoration until the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  After that Catholicism was, in practice though not in law, tolerated if practiced discreetly.  During the Proprietorship of the Lords Baltimore, Catholicism was never an established Church.  As for Maryland Christmases,  Christmas was celebrated by the Anglicans and Catholics in their various houses of worship and together the rest of the day in manor houses and taverns as they both had a taste for the grog.  While the Lord Proprietor was Catholic himself, there was no established Church in Maryland and the Jesuit priests who labored there supported themselves as other wealthy Marylanders by their plantations.  The Carolinas and Georgia were nominally Anglican in their Royal Charters but religion didn’t catch on their much in colonial America.  John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached in Georgia as a young Anglican priest but it was only with the residue of the First Great Awakening that the colonists took to religion—mostly Methodist and Baptist preachers at the time of the American Revolution and subsequent decades.  Perhaps it is wrong to say “the residue of the First Great Awakening” but it was several decades after the great preaching of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield and it was just before the Second Great Awakening took off with the Cane Ridge Revival in Bourbon County (isn’t that ironic) Kentucky in 1801.  Thus I think we can say that while each of the colonies had religious roots, only three: Massachusetts, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were founded for religious purposes and of these only one, Massachusetts, was founded to be a Christian society.   We will have to look at our Founding Fathers and their religious practices and views in a future entry.

The Knights and the Leesburg Crusade

Now, I admit it is a bit secular but wouldn't it be

nicer at the Courthouse than a skeleton in a Santa

suit--and more traditional too, in fact more in Virginia

tradition than a creche. 

There is definitely something in the water in Loudon County Virginia that causes Virginians to alter their reality coordinates.  Jeff Heflin and his mother mounted a holiday display of a crucified skeletal Santa Claus on the Courthouse lawn.  Now that may sound bizarre to you, but it is only the latest chapter in a long saga of religious wars in this solidly Christian and Republican town.  Leesburg, by the way, is the home of former Senator Rick Santorum, currently a 2012 presidential candidate, and the tainted water theory probably explains quite a few things there as well. 

      The issue began several years back when the County government said that there could be no holiday displays mounted on the Courthouse lawn in the center of Leesburg during the Christmas season.  Loudon County is pretty solidly Christian with both strong Evangelical and Catholic contingents.  (The Evangelicals represent many of the long-time residents; the Catholics came mostly with the housing developments that have just swamped this once charmingly rural area into what is now a bedroom-suburb of Washington DC, about an hour to the south along the Potomac.)   Many residents were outraged that there would be no crèche on the Courthouse lawn.  There had been a crèche placed there at private expense for over twenty years and the Rotary club had sponsored a Christmas Tree there for half a century. 

     Knights of Columbus Holy Family Council 6831 attached to Saint John the Apostle Church in Leesburg was not about to stand by for this secularization.  They organized a protest that led the County Board to reconsider the policy and the board decided in fairness to all citizens ten displays could be put on the Courthouse grounds on a “first come first serve” basis.  What the Knights had not foreseen was that not only would Christian groups with good will for all vie for Christmas displays, and perhaps a Jewish group would want a Chanukah display (there aren’t many Jews in Loudon County), but atheist groups might want their displays as well. (I am unaware of any requests from Islamic groups, but that would provoke an interesting response.)   In fact, since atheism isn’t seasonal, disbelievers mounted displays throughout the year.  Now as a reward to the Knights’ efforts, there is a war of competing ideologies going on in the middle of this otherwise quaint town.  It is a bit confusing about this crucified Santa however as the woman who put it up is an atheist but her son who helped her is a Christian.  They claim that it isn’t a pro-atheist statement but rather a “piece of art” that draws our attention to how the true Spirit of the Season has been corrupted into gross materialism.  Well, they do have a point but the work is somewhat ambiguous.  Art, after all, says what the viewer apprehends not necessarily what the artist intends. 

      Anyway, we owe this imbroglio to the Knights of Columbus who undoubtedly meant well but who opened Pandora’s Box of religious strife.   The Knights are now insisting that Christian displays be allowed but that atheists not be given space on the Courthouse lawn.  That solution will obviously not hold up constitutionally.    Tempers are running high in Leesburg and the Prince of Peace is becoming a symbol of civic strife—not for the first time in history.      Of course in colonial days when Leesburg had its origins there would have been no issue.  There would not have been a crèche—far too Catholic in a colony where Catholicism was illegal.  There would have been some festive holiday greens perhaps.  The Christmas tree had not yet come from Germany but Virginians draped laurel and evergreen and holly swags and wreathes to cheer them against the cold days and long nights of winter.  Perhaps if there is to be decoration of public property it should be this discreet sort of greening and let the religious displays be made on private and Church properties.  A crèche on the lawns of the Presbyterian and Methodist and Catholic  Churches would be lovely and a contest among them good ecumenical fun;  an electric Menorah at the synagogue (though I think Leesburg’s solitary synagogue is pretty far out of town center) would be pretty silhouetted against the darkening skies of December would non-offensively to anyone give hope.   And you know, I don’t think anyone—even an atheist—would really want a crucified Santa in front of their home.  As for the Courthouse, deck the halls and call it quits.  Besides, the lawns, though spacious, are not nearly expansive enough to handle ten displays without looking tawdry.    And Knights—let’s do something constructive that reminds the world that Christ came to gather all people together into one and not to stir up sectarian strife.  Crusades are over.  They were a disaster.  This is the age of Pacem in Terris.