A Whackadoodle Writes On Women Lectors At Mass

The Great Organ at
Harrow, a symbolic
font of theological
reflection 

I mentioned in a recent post that I regularly read the blog New Liturgical Movement because it often contains some very fine historical scholarship on the development of the Liturgy.  Historical Scholarship—not necessarily sound theology or advisable pastoral practice—but the sort of historical detail that a trivia master like myself can store in his little brain and pull out from time to time, Sheldon Cooper style, to amaze and mystify his friends over a beer and even occasionally, very rarely actually, stun a room of Jeopardy fans. 

So recently while checking out to see what NLM was offering on its platter of esoteria, I cam across a link to Katholik Krazy blog, One Peter Five and an article by a “noteworthy traditional  Catholic scholar” under the nom de plume of Benedict Constable.   (Why do these neo-traditonalists always adopt the persona of a member of the House of Lords.  They’re never a Joe Podgorski or a Mike Capone.  Benedict Constable, good Lord, it just sounds like someone who for eight years was buggered behind the organ pipes at Harrow before going on to serve as an equerry to the Duke of Kent.  But I digress.)  Professor/Doctor/Canon/Mr./Viscount/ Whatever Constable published an essay on the unsuitability of women to serve as lectors at Mass (and by extension, I would imagine, the Reader at Solemn Vespers—or simple vespers.  Or even Compline.)  He sets the tone for the article in the opening sentence.  

Given that Catholic churches throughout the world swarm with lay liturgical ministers of both sexes,

Catholic churches “swarm” with lay liturgical ministers?  Well that tells us right off the bat what the root of the problem is.  At the core, it is not that there are ladies “within the (no longer existent) rails"; it is that there are laity treading shod on the holy place.  So keep that in mind; we will come back to it. 

And Benedict goes on

First, the ever-increasing number of parishes and chapels in which the Extraordinary Form is celebrated have reintroduced all over the world, to the relief of traditionally-minded men and women, the custom of male-only service in the sanctuary.

So banishing women from the sanctuary, or better put, admitting only men to the sanctuary,  gives his Lordship and others like him “relief.”  I am curious to know why.  Does the sight of women on stage similarly trouble him?  How about at the beach?  Is he somehow or other repulsed by the sight of women at the beach?  In the classroom: what does he think of women professors?  Does he have to compete in academia with women or is this “noteworthy traditional Catholic Scholar” in some academic cloister to which only male scholars are admitted?  Just asking.  He is saying something here about more than liturgy, but about his own psycho-sexual comfort zone.   But he continues;

But the very experience of this once-universal practice necessarily prompts Catholics to raise the question of why it “had” to change at all, and the related question: Is the Church better off for the change, or, as with communion in the hand while standing or communion under both kinds, worse off?

So it is not only women serving at the altar, but the wider issue of liturgical restoration including communion in the hand and standing to receive Holy Communion.  (I say restoration rather than change because standing for Communion and placing the Eucharist into the hand of the receiver are not changes but the restoration of practice in the early Church.) 

He then returns to his bugaboo about lady parts and those who have them:

Third, now that the evil fruits of a disordered feminism are far more apparent in society and in the Church than ever before,

“The evil fruits of a disordered feminism.”  Now I will admit that there are feminisms that are “disordered” and even bizarre even as history can show us—and we can even see today in the way women are treated in some societies such as the sexual violence against women in ISIS—theories of masculinity that are disordered and absolutely evil.  But what precisely for our distinguished scholar makes a feminism “disordered” and with “evil fruits.”  Is it when a woman approaches the voting booth?  Is it when a woman heads a major Catholic Institution such as an Abbess or as President and CEO of Catholic Relief Services?  I am just asking because apparently it is a sign of out of control estrogen when a woman presumes to read from the Book of Wisdom.    

Ok, here’s a good one. 

Especially in our times, when confusion about sexuality is rampant, how we conceptualize and implement male and female roles in the Church cannot fail to have huge ramifications in our theological anthropology, moral theology, and even fundamental theology, extending all the way to the inerrancy of Scripture and the trustworthiness of apostolic Tradition.

Confusion about sexuality is rampant…  well, I suppose it is but it is fascinating how various scientific studies, especially in the field of genomics, is both clearing up much of our confusion and revealing that sexuality is far more complex than who has a penis and who has a vagina.  Of course this new information is frightening to many because it threatens to undermine the legitimacy of various prejudices as well as to shine light in under their own nailed-shut closet door.  It was also much simpler in the days before scientific studies revealed that people of African origin had the same mental capacities as us white folk.  Of course, when you hear some of these neo-trads pontificate how polyphony is “superior” to Gospel music you realize that not everybody got that message either. 

And yes, gender studies and genomics are going to have dramatic effect on our theological anthropology and our moral theology.  As for its undermining inerrancy of Scripture, that would be true only if you were some kind of a snake-handling, strychnine drinking krazy from the mountains of Tennesse who rejects the various forms of scholarly biblical criticism that interpret the scripture in its historical, cultural, and linguistic setting.  For those of us who have embraced modern biblical study, we aren’t finding a problem.  Same goes for the trustworthiness of Apostolic Tradition.  For those who grasp the difference between Tradition and traditions it really is no problem.  But then the neo-trads have always confused Tradition and traditionalism.  Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, this one from Jaroslav Pelikan:

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”

Our friend goes on to explain that since the Word of God is the seed and the male is the one who sows the seed, while the female is the one who receives the seed, it is fitting that the reader—the sower as it were—be male while the ladies should content themselves to sit in the congregation and be inseminated.  This doesn’t quite clarify the role of the men in the congregation—since they can’t all be readers.  Are they too then to be recipients of the “seed” scattered over them by the man at the ambo?  Hmm.  But I forget, Benedict spent all that time behind the organ pipes at Harrow, he is not uncomfortable with men being recipients of the seed.  I mean, really, have you ever heard anything so stupid?  Do you really think this is what Jesus had in mind in Matthew 13?

Let me cite just a few quotes from the article that give us some insights as to where this whackadoodle is coming from:

If males ought to be priests, then males ought to be lectors, servers, ministers of communion, and so forth, because all of these are roles of giving, of acting upon, while the response made by the faithful is always one of receiving and of being acted upon. This, of course, is the very point of the metaphor of planting or sowing the seed versus taking it into the womb of the ground where it germinates and bears fruit.

 it should be said that Holy Mass is not a moment of private prayer or a Scripture study, but a public liturgical act offered to God by Jesus Christ the Eternal High Priest, at the hands of ministers who are conformed, more or less perfectly, to the image of this High Priest.

 it should be said that denying that ministers in the sanctuary need to be conformed to the Eternal High Priest as regards their human constitution amounts to a denial of the mystery of the Incarnation, in which the Son of God became not just human (homo), but a man (vir). Hence, although a lector need not be ordained, it is fitting that the lector be ordainable, that is, one who is of such a nature as to reflect the concrete personal identity of the Incarnate Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth.

When the Church, for her part, needs a ruler, teacher, or sanctifier, she chooses and appoints a man, for no one else can represent the face, the voice, and the hands of Jesus Christ… it is strictly a matter of who may formally act in His person (in persona Christi), when making present His redemptive action upon us who receive its fruits.

Since only a man can be the image of Christ in His total incarnational reality, Christ chose only males to exercise His priesthood at the altar of sacrifice, as foreshadowed by the priests of the Old Covenant.

What we see here, is that the author is totally ignorant of the ecclesiology which the Church teaches in the Second Vatican Council.  To this “noteworthy traditional Catholic scholar” the ministers at the Mass: the acolytes, lectors, and others in the sanctuary are extensions of the (ordained) priest.  He does not understand that all who serve in the Liturgy—including those members of the assembly—do so by right of their baptism and not in persona sacerdotis.  Furthermore, he sees that only the priest “represents” Christ and fails to understand that the assembly itself—the entire assembly including the ordained priest(s)—are there not merely as “representatives” of Christ but as the true Risen Body of Christ.   Christ is not present by “representation” but is there in his Real Presence as his Body the Church.  Furthermore, it is not only the priest who is called to be “conformed” to Christ but every Christian at his or her baptism is given this vocation.  This is not to deny that the sacrament of Orders confers on the priest a unique charism not shared by all the baptized but it is to contextualize that charism within the community of the Church and not to make it a possession of the priest independent of the entire Communion of the Church.  In other words, this guy doesn’t know jack about ecclesiology, the theology of Holy Orders, or the theology of Baptism.  His Christian anthropology is way off.  And when it comes to his Christology, he is in formal heresy.  I can only wonder if his cited hero, Saint Thomas Aquinas, is in heaven laughing his glorified rear end off or weeping in despair for being cited as an authority by this wingbat.   But wait, it gets worse (or better, depending on your sense of perspective). He (I can only presume the author is a man; it pains me to think that a woman would be so imprisoned in self-loathing to hold these ideas) writes:

The Church allows married couples to have relations out of motives of lust so long as they remain open to life, but that is hardly the ideal of conjugal intimacy. Thus, merely because something is allowed does not mean it is, or should be, encouraged. For, as the Apostle says in a similar context, “‘All things are lawful for me,’ but not all things are helpful” (1 Cor 6:12).

For those of us who have not spent our school days being “entertained” behind the organ in the chapel, there is a via media between “motives of lust” and “open(ness) to life.”  Those of us who are not hopelessly baffled by human sexuality believe—if indeed we have not experienced it—that there is such a thing as longing for union with one’s spouse, a desire for true communion with the other which is expressed most profoundly in love making.  There comes a time for most of us where we have moved beyond the rages of lust and seek to both give and receive this foretaste of the heavenly bliss which is at the center of the Sacrament of Matrimony.  Perhaps Benedict Constable is a wizened old celibate who has spent his life fighting off temptations once so easily yielded to at Harrow, but celibate or married, if he were a sexually well adjusted person he would never have written that passage.  Indeed if he were a well balanced individual he would never have written this article.    

Franciscans of the Immaculate--Saint Francis

In my last post I wrote that I would next write about Saint Francis so that we can look at the Franciscans of the Immaculate and see whether they draw their inspiration more from Saint Maximilian Kolbe or from Saint Francis.  To give the spoiler, while I have great respect for this new Congregation I think we will see that they are not Franciscans at all—at least in spirit—but disciples of the Polish Saint who was a martyr of charity at Auschwitz.  And that is not a bad thing at all, it just doesn’t make them Franciscans.  Let me say too, to be fair, while academically I am somewhat of an expert on Franciscanism—my doctoral studies focused on religious movements in 13^th-14^th century Italy—I am not a Franciscan and have no right to say that this person or movement “belongs” or doesn’t “belong.”  Nevertheless, I do know something—more than most—about Franciscanism.

Francis was born in 1181 in Assisi, the only child (as far as we know) of Pietro di Bernardone.  He was baptized Giovanni (John) but nicknamed “Francesco” (Frenchy or Frenchman) by his father—some sources saying that his mother was French.  Pietro de Bernardone was a successful cloth merchant.   Now cloth—the import/export for resale of silks from the Levant, the manufacture of wool, the weaving of brocades and velvets—was the dot.com of the thirteenth century which is to say it was the expanding and lucrative market in which fortunes were made and lost.  Pietro was very successful and the Bernardones were secure in the upper middle class.  Now “upper middle class” is a tricky term; in those days the term was not only financial or even primarily about wealth.  They were bourgeoisie because while they were rich they were not noble.  Many families of the bourgeoisie were richer than the old nobility.  The old nobility had their wealth tied up in land—the urban merchant class had liquid wealth—money and goods for sale.  It often grated on the wealthy that they were not noble and they affected the external signs of nobility—inventing coats of arms for themselves and giving themselves pretentious titles.  They often gave large donations to churches to build family chapels containing burial vaults as the nobility built funerary chapels in cathedrals and monasteries. 

Francis and his friends liked to affect the practices of the old landed families.  When he was about twenty Francis and his friends joined a military expedition against the neighboring town of Perugia.  Francis and his buddies, all spoiled children of parents with too much money to use it wisely, equipped themselves (or their fathers equipped them) as “knights” with horses and armor and set themselves for the glory of war.  What fools.  For all their fancy stuff, these guys were no more knights than they were Martians.  They were the spoiled brats of pretentious families who, unlike the sons of the nobility who were bred to fight, were clueless about the science of warfare.  It was an ignominious defeat and Francis and some of his friends were taken prisoner.  They were lucky they weren’t killed.  They were held for ransom.
About this time Francis became seriously ill.  Some sources imply it was a result of the conditions in which they were held prisoner, others that it was independent of that and was after Francis returned home.  While the illness had physiological dimensions, it seems to have primarily been a nervous breakdown.  Francis’ personality changed drastically during this illness and a slow recovery.  The former party boy became a loner.  He lost his interest in the fast-track lifestyle of his friends.  Instead he began to haunt an old chapel which had fallen into ruins just outside the city walls of Assisi.  He spent long hours wandering through the meadows and orchards that surround Assisi but he always seemed to end up back in this chapel.  It was there that he heard the crucifix speak to him one day: “Francis, rebuild my church that is falling into ruins.”  Obviously, he thought, the church of which Christ is speaking is this chapel of San Damiano and so slowly he began piling up the fallen stones and mortaring them back into place.  Francis, on his rambles through the countryside came into contact with those people who live on the margins of society.  The beggars and the homeless were not permitted to spend the night within the city walls and they slept in barns and sheds or in the open fields.  Probably some sought shelter in the same ruined chapel he was starting to rebuild.  And then there were the lepers.  They were not permitted in the city walls even in the daytime.  They were total outcasts,  picking through garbage for food or old clothes.  Francis began to tend to the sick.  Lepers repulsed him but he knew that they were very image of the crucified—the least of his brothers and sisters to whom Jesus had referred in the Gospel of Matthew. 

We all know the story of how Francis, when confronted by his father for his having given away not only his possessions but some of his father’s wealth, took off his clothes and laid them at his father’s feet and then, naked, turned to the bishop who quickly had him dressed in an old tunic of patched cloth.  This story has long been misinterpreted however.  Francis was not merely renouncing his patrimony to become a beggar but he was embracing a vocation to a particular form of religious life common in those days called “lay hermits.”   Lay hermits were men—the status was limited to men which is why Clare, when she wanted to embrace the same lifestyle had to go to live in a monastery of nuns—who lived in poverty under the protection of the bishop.  They had to be accepted into this status by the bishop but where then given a habit that identified them as hermits—a tunic, usually of mid-calf length, a belt, and a hooded cape called a capuce.  Once accepted by the bishop they had the “right” to beg alms.  They also could preach—not canonical sermons—but what we would call “witness talks” about what the Gospel and teachings of Jesus meant to them.  Lay hermits were not cloistered but usually lived outside the towns or villages where the migrant people and lepers lived.  They often were given the custody of rural chapels or lived in the ruins of monasteries or old barns.  They dedicated themselves to prayer and to this witnessing to the gospel as well as to the care of the sick.  Lay hermits were very common in the 13^th century and not only the Franciscans, but the Carmelites and Augustinians, as well as the Servites, have their origins in the lay hermit movement.  Francis was you quintessential lay hermit.   More on this in the next posting. 
 

History: An Evolving Past



President-elect Obama and Family distribute
Thanksgiving food baskets at Saint Columbanus,
Chicago, November 2008 



I am in Chicago for some meetings and, at the invitation of a friend, attended mass at Saint Columbanus Church on the South Side.  Saint Columbanus was built just over a century ago to serve the needs of the an up-and-coming Irish-American middle class that were building large and gracious brick homes in the newly developing Park Manor section of the “City of Big Shoulders.”  Today, Saint Columbanus is a almost entirely African-American parish.  The Archdiocese of Chicago has invested heavily in renovating the facilities so that Church and School can continue to serve the community.  The magnificent neo-Gothic church, a church of Cathedral design and proportions, today hosts not the soberly silent Latin masses of a century ago with devout immigrant women fingering their rosaries but vibrant African-American style liturgies where Catholics whose forbearers were here long before the Irish sway and clap to Gospel tunes.  I suspect the old Irish of a century ago would look with disapproving astonishment on today’s liturgies, but the changed circumstances reflect the changed demographics of American Catholicism. 

Andrei Rublev's ion The Trinity

I sit here typing today’s entry in the kitchen of a rectory where a friend of mine is pastor.  A group of seminarians have stopped in on their way to a meeting—two Vietnamese, a Mexican, an Irish-American, an African-American, and a Pole.  The associate pastor in this parish is Lithuanian and there is a priest resident here—a hospital chaplain—who is from India. The priest saying the eleven o’clock mass as I write this is Filipino.  We are in a very different Church than the one I grew up in half a century ago.  One of the seminarians is reading aloud an article in the Archdiocesan newspaper about the Cardinal and the “Rite of Calling” for Lay Ecclesial Ministers.  What is a “Lay Ecclesial Minister.”  We didn’t have those growing up.  A Filipino lady stormed into the kitchen about a half hour ago.  For the feast, Trinity Sunday, the pastor had put a large copy of Andrei Rublev’s icon, The Trinity, in the sanctuary with candles and flowers.   “Why do they have wings?” she demanded and then “And they all look like each other!”   When informed that the icon comes out of the Orthodox tradition, the woman said she would call the Archdiocese in the morning about “that heretical picture.”  Well, it is true, “in the day” we never had icons.  But you know, things change.  My Irish grandmother thought that Pius XII had fallen into heresy when he reduced the communion fast to three hours.  She had suspect a weakness in the faith when water was permitted but was absolutely convinced of it when she could eat breakfast at eight and receive communion at noon. 

Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) wrote: To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.”  Now here is a man ahead of his time.  Fidelity requires change.  As the world changes we ourselves, both as individuals and as a Church, must change if we are to keep our eyes and our heart fixed on Christ.  We cannot help but that the ground beneath our feet is changing and just as we must shift our position as the seasons pass from one to another if we are to keep our eye on the sun, so too as the world changes, we must continually shift to keep the focus on Christ. 

The ground is shifting.  The Catholic Church in our country is no longer a mostly-white Church.  Spanish and Vietnamese are the first language for a significant percentage of our Catholic populace.  There are considerable numbers of Creole, Portuguese, Korean, Tagalog, Igbo, Malayalam, French, Mandarin, and Cantonese speakers.  Catholics coming from Kenya, India, Cuba, Brazil, Nigeria, Palestine, and China, and bringing with them traditions from their native countries just as the Irish, Italians and Germans did a century ago. History is not about the past—history is an uninterrupted story, a continuous unfolding of the past into the future, the Eternal Grace of a God who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.