Fed Up With Francis

Well Pope Francis’s favorability ratings among Americans has taken a serious dip.  All I can say is that it is about time.  For two and a half years now everybody has been falling all over themselves over Francis and I have been asking myself: Are they listening to the man???  Really listening???

Well, ok, not everybody was falling all over him.  The Krazies spotted something wrong right from the first.  A Jesuit?!?  Not a good sign!  “Francis”—hmmm, a break with tradition, shoulda been a Pius or an Alexander.   And where is the papal folderol that we had grown used to again???  You know, the fur-trimmed cape, the floppy Santa-hat, the ruby-reds on his feet???  But the regular joes liked it: living simply, eating in the cafeteria with the staff, the used car to get back and forth to the office.  “A poor Church for the poor”—good rhetoric, clever marketing.  But there were a few more who saw the problem: without the fancy shoes and living on the palace, he becomes just another priest doing his job.  I mean he had might as well just get a bicycle to ride around like the Queen of Holland.  Michael Voris was first to sound the blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of a Jesuit claiming to be Pope when the real Pope is still alive.  Now that Mother A. is incapacitated, thank heavens we have Michael Voris to be our infallible guide when the magisterium fails.   

And then there was “who am I to judge.”  That alienated all the Pharisees.  I mean, if the Pope can’t judge then the rest of us can’t keep score.  This time it is Lions 0, Christians 1.  Game’s over.  Son of a Bitch called an “olly olly in free” for sinners.  Damn.  The I’m-holier-than-thou crowd still hasn’t forgiven him for that.  Poor Carol McKinley at Throw the Bums Out 2010, aka The Tenth Crusade, aka What the Pope Really Means, and Janet over at Restore D.C. Catholicism, and Mary Anne at Les Femmes: what will these women do if they can’t cast the first stone at anyone who doesn’t meet their criterion for worthy reception of Holy Communion.  If we don’t get back on track, next thing you know prostitutes and tax-collectors will be entering the Kingdom of Heaven before us. 

But despite all this, still Francis managed to hold on to the vast majority of Catholics.  Only the spiritually elite were seeing it.   Most of us weren’t interesting in sitting in judgment anyway, and most of us liked the Pope being a bit down at the heels after the previous Pope’s somewhat of a dowager’s penchant for damask and old lace.  And all that Swiss Guard, and Gentlemen of His Holiness, and stamping of feet and saluting of soldiers and thrones and things stand in somewhat dramatic contrast to the plain hard wood of the Cross.  The gilded crucifix thing used to work; doesn’t anymore.  So we could live with this guy: we liked it actually.  But then he began to move from the theatrical to the everyday and that increasingly made us uncomfortable. Of course before we run-of-the-mill Catholics realized we were being hoodwinked by this somewhat commonplace excuse for a pope, there was the famous Father Hunwicke, a refugee from women-priested Anglicanism who has been appalled at Francis’ disdain for the pontifical; but then the good Father is a subject of her Britannic Majesty and so can’t imagine life beyond the fantasy realm of Queens and palaces.  And our own America presbyter vagans, Father Z, another convert, has been beside himself about the Pope’s everyday style.  Why did these people become Catholics anyway: it certainly wasn’t the Gospel.  What did you go out into the desert to see?  A pope dressed in fine clothes?  Those who wear elegant clothes and live luxuriously are found in palaces.    If you don’t like a down-at-the-heels Jesuit from Buenos Aires, you certainly aren’t going to be happy with a carpenter from Nazareth. 

But then it began to get a little to hot-in-the-kitchen for the rest of us.  Frankly, when it comes to the immigrant thing, a lot of us want Donald Trump for Pope.  I mean if this Francis fellow wants to ramble on about Africans swimming ashore at Lampedusa, who cares?  Let the I-talians deal with their own problems, but when he starts talking about those Latino types climbing over our border wall with their diseases and their penchant for drugs and rape and violence, well, he should stick to things he knows about. 

And then it only got worse.  He won’t pontificate at the Traditional-Latin-Mass-of-All-Ages-and-Everywhere-Like-Jesus-did-at-the-Last-Supper (you know when he gave the Apostles Holy Communion—in one kind—on the tongue as they knelt around the table), but he’ll pontificate about Climate Change and how he thinks capitalism is ruining the earth.  He should stick to faith and morals.  In this age of abortion and rampant birth control and same-sex marriage any pope has more than enough to keep him busy without interfering with fracking and strip-mining and deforestation and human trafficking.  I don’t go to Church to hear about this world; I go to hear about the next world.  I mean, we are going to be in heaven (or hell) a long time; much longer than we will live on this earth.  So who cares about this world.  God gave it to us to dominate so strip ‘er bare and make what money you can doing so.  There’s no sin in being rich.  Jesus endorsed trickle-down economics when he told us about how that poor fellow, what was his name?  Lazarus?  How he used to eat the crumbs from the rich man’s table.  We need to hear more about that—what was it that Ronald Reagan said: when enough crumbs fall all boats rise.  No, this Francis fellow will destroy America as we know it.   He’s got to go.  Never trust a Pope who wears black shoes; he isn’t the real McCoy.  

Bazinga.  

Anger, Ritual, and Krazies

Jonathan Edwards

Ritual is a highly complex set of symbols that expresses—both on conscious and less-than-conscious levels our relationship with the Divine, with society, with specific others, and with ourselves.  Anthropologists can tell much about societies from their rituals and much about individuals, not only by their private rituals but also by how they relate to the communal rituals to the various societies to which they belong. 

While we are going to be looking at religious rituals in particular in this posting, ritual goes far beyond the religious.  We stand for the national anthem.  We sing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch.  We eat roast turkey for Thanksgiving.  Brides wear white for their first wedding.  We blow out candles on a cake and sing happy-birthday to mark another year of age.  When individuals deviate from these rituals, or elaborate on them, or ignore them completely, it tells us some things about them. 

Families have rituals too.  Italian families often have pasta as the first course of Sunday dinner; Portuguese have a fish plate to begin the meal.  Some families go out to breakfast after Sunday Mass, others cook a big breakfast at home.  Some families have a particular grace they say before a meal.  Some parents say night prayers with their children before they go to bed.  Some families keep an Infant of Prague or a statue of the Blessed Mother in a prominent place in their home.  Most families put up a tree at Christmas and have traditional ornaments that are particular to their family.  All these things reflect certain values and ideas, theologies even, about the various families. 

And individuals have rituals.  There are certain prayers they say in the morning or at night.  They may pray the rosary or begin a car trip with a specific prayer.  They may telephone a parent or a sibling at a specific time each week.  They may choose a certain flower for their garden or put a religious statue somewhere in their garden.  There might be a certain song they listen to when lonely or when wanting to remember a loved one.  They may visit a cemetery or go back to a specific place that holds a special memory.  

Many of these rituals which we celebrate we do without reflecting on their meaning but they each, in some way or other, bring us comfort or fulfill some meaning in our lives.  Anthropologists, psychologists, or other social scientists can tell us things about ourselves by the rituals we follow or the approach we take to social rituals.  The father of some friends of mine was raised in a very strict Polish Catholic family but in college became—or claims to have become—an atheist.  Every year on Good Friday he eats a big plate of kielbasa at three in the afternoon.  It is a ritual for him.  He says that it expresses his belief that religion is a bunch of b.s.   It may, but I think it also represents a rebellious anger against his upbringing and his desire to disassimilate himself from the Polish and Catholic heritage in which he was raised.  When I was in college—many, many years ago—I used to attend Sunday night services in the Lutheran Church up the street. It was an informal service and people could request a favorite hymn.  There was one gentleman who every week asked for “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling.”  It wasn’t church if we didn’t sing “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling.”  This song carried some specific meaning for him on which his entire relationship with God seemed to depend.  I don’t think that was particularly healthy but then rituals can, and often do, express more about our neuroses than our healthy side, especially when those rituals become compulsive behaviors. 

We wrote in the previous posting about the popularity of an angry God in certain circles.  An angry God reflects the faith of an angry believer.  Our society is riddled with anger, indeed we can talk about the “culture of anger” which is another aspect of what Pope John Paul referred to as the “culture of death.”  How much of our television and our movies are about anger, violence, and vengeance?  We are raising our children on the pornography of violence with video games that are about destruction, violence, and death.  Some people feel a need to have semi-automatic weapons in their homes and the strongest lobby in our country is the N.R.A., an organization that builds a culture of fear directed towards a host of undifferentiated “others” from Hispanic immigrants to the Federal Government to Muslims to unspecified liberals to an invasion force from Canada. 

I refer to the “Katholic Krazies” as a spectrum of wing-nuts from hausfrauen Mary Ann Kreitzer of Les Femmes and Janet Baker of Restore DC Catholicism to the genuinely sociopathic minds behind Pope Francis The Destroyer and Mundabor’s Blog to the delusional episcopal wannabes of sedevacantists Daniel Dolan and Mark Pivarunas.  What they have in common is an attraction to an angry god. 

The roots of societal anger—by which I mean those who are angry with society or because of society—are that people feel powerless and disenfranchised.  Often they feel they are not being heard, their opinions are not being respected, they have no influence over the way that the larger society in which they live is running its course.  A sense of powerlessness creates panic and panic can manifest itself in strong anger.  Religious people who feel powerless about the Church—any Church, their Church whichever Church it is—project their anger onto God to validate and make “righteous” their anger.  One can go back to Jonathan Edwards and his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” preached at Northampton Massachusetts in 1741.  Edwards had much to be unhappy about.  While Independence was thirty-five years in the future, the colonists were already feeling themselves to be second-class Englishmen, disregarded by the establishment at home in London.  Moreover, Edwards was a “dissenter”—a Congregationalist in a Congregationalist colony but an Anglican empire.  And he could see that even in his colony of Massachusetts Congregationalism was losing ground to Anglicanism on the one side and to Unitarianism on the other.  Indeed, as the Congregationalists lost their grip on control of Massachusetts, the colony—and indeed all the American colonies—were becoming less and less religious as they grew more and more prosperous.  The original Puritan vision for Massachusetts of a commonwealth was fast disappearing as the Boston merchant class grew wealthier and wealthier and the farmers in western Massachusetts (where Northampton is) worked harder and harder just to survive. 

Puritans like Edwards had certain rituals and ritualistic principles to which they clung furiously.  These principles were essentially re-active in as that they were a reaction to the liturgical principles of the Church of England which Puritans thought had not been sufficiently “purified” of Catholic practices.  (In the next several entries on the History of the Anglican Church we are going to see more about this conflict.)  The set prayers of the Anglican Prayer Book were rejected for the extempore prayer of the Puritan preacher.  The Surplice was rejected for the black academic gown.  The communion table was set aside for a dominant pulpit.  Kneeling for communion was replaced by remaining in one’s seat as the bread and cup were passed along to you in your place. 

What about our angry Catholics and how they view ritual?  An angry God needs propitiation to hold back his wrath.  The Mass, therefore, is first and foremost (and for many, exclusively) a sacrifice.  Christ the victim is offered in sacrifice to appease the Divine Wrath.  Day after day the sacrifice is repeated, the Divine Victim is offered again and again, to counter-balance the sinfulness of the world. 

A sacrifice requires a priest who offers the sacrifice on our behalf.  Because he offers it on our behalf, he goes forth from us and ascends the altar to offer his victim.  The place of sacrifice needs separation from the unholy for whom it is offered.  It is to be elevated and walled off.  Only the priest and his assistants can be in the sacred space.  The priest, since he faces God on our behalf, needs to stand between us and God, thus with his back turned towards us.  It also is necessary that he clearly be not one of us.  He must be worthy of the role of intermediary between God and us, as sinless as possible.  Thus he should have nothing to do with sex, which is the primal base of human sinfulness.  He needs to be dressed differently from us to mark that he is consecrated in a way that we are not.  He needs to speak to God in an arcane language and in a whisper we cannot, for the most part, hear.  The sacrifice must be an experience of total otherness if it is to be accepted by God who is wholly Other. 

We can see why the current liturgy is so threatening to those who have a need for their prayer to appease an angry God.  An altar that positions the priest standing in the middle of the congregation, or even with the priest facing the people across it, changes the entire dynamic.  The idea of a community of people, not huddled in fear but relaxed and comfortable and “very much themselves” in the presence of God undermines their entire concept of God as the Divine Reflection of their rage.  For the priest to celebrate the Mass—to offer the Sacrifice—not on their behalf but with them as full, conscious, and active participants requires a drastic theological—as well as psychological and anthropological—shift that is just too much for some.  We look at this in more detail in future postings.  

If Only The Neo-Trads Knew The Tradition!

Bl. John Henry Newman

patron of change in the 

Church

I picked up the following from one of the katholic krazy blogs (http://lesfemmes-thetruth.blogspot.com/2014/10/what-happens-when-church-goes-wobbly.html) who cites Father Ray Blake, pastor of Saint Mary Magdalene in Brighton, England:

I really am beginning to think that the Papacy, which Vatican II saw as the unitative, if it becomes innovative becomes self-destructive. The very purpose of the Papacy is to conserve that which was handed on to it. In the first millennium the faith of the City of the Two Apostles stood still whilst the world revolved, its lack of innovation made it the touchstone of orthodoxy during the Arian and Iconoclastic crisis and enabled it to be the memory of the Tradition of the whole Church. If the Church of Rome becomes the source of innovation can it also be the touchstone of unity? If not where can we find that unity, which after all was promised us by Christ? Can it exist outside of unity with Rome? The answer Orthodoxy and 'ultra-Catholics' come up with is that it exists within the Tradition itself, are ordinary Catholics going to come up with the same answer?

 Father Blake is no historian (and certainly no theologian) if he seriously thinks that the Church of Rome has historically stood changeless in its Apostolic Faith in an ever changing world. Whatever was he doing in Church history class in seminary?  I hope he did better in his systematic theology and moral theology.  Peter and Paul never heard the word “Trinity” but over the first four centuries the Church of Rome and those Churches in communion with it gradually began to articulate their understanding that the Godhead involves a communion-in-love of three Divine Persons.  “Light from Light, True God from True God” has certainly been the faith from the beginning, but it took three centuries to be articulated not only in those words, but in that particular concept. (The words actually were Φῶς ἐκ Φωτός,
Θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ,  and the concept has not been a stable concept as the Catholic faith has gone on to deepen both the explanation and understanding of those Greek words meant over the years.)  When Peter and Paul led their Church in “The Breaking of the Bread” (“Mass” is something that comes much later) they did so in Greek (Peter possibly in Aramaic) not Latin.   The apostles were not familiar with our practice of private confession and absolution.  Baptism was by immersion.  There was no distinct rite of confirmation, nor of “Christian Marriage” either. They did not think in terms of what we mean by “sacrament.”    The Apostles would never have seen a cross on the altar—and for that matter, would not have been familiar with Christian altars—only wooden tables.  They used leavened bread for the Eucharist and most likely every day cups of pottery or glass.   They did not wear special vestments for “the Breaking of the Bread,” would not have been familiar with “communion in one kind,” and would have been familiar with “communion in the hand.”  They did not know the word “transubstantiation;” it would have baffled Peter and Paul—whose philosophic training was not Aristotelian but neo-Platonic, would have rejected the term out of hand to explain the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.   Indeed for Paul, the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist would have been dependent on what was for him the fundamental Presence of Christ in his Body, the Church, and not be seen as something distinct.  Neither Peter nor Paul would know what a tabernacle or a monstrance was.  They would have been appalled at religious statues as a violation of the first commandment and seen them as a pagan innovation.  There was no monastic or religious life.   Perhaps the one innovation that is truly inexcusable was the adding of the Filioque to the Creed—something that the papacy long rejected but finally caved in on in the 11^th century.  How dare the Pope unilaterally change a dogma defined by an Ecumenical Council!  But he did and the krazies, including Father Blake, would almost undoubtedly “go the mats” over it, otherwise it would have been changed back over the last fifty years.  I could go on and on—but I think the point is made.  Faith—both in doctrine and practice—evolves, develops, and does not remain static.  Yes there is “innovation.”  There always has been to make the ancient faith live in its contemporary world.  Faith in Jesus Christ is not something static but living. And we must be attentive to the leadings of the Holy Spirit in how change comes about and that attentiveness depends on three factors achieving harmony: the faith of the faithful (consensus fidelium), the intellectual discipline of the theologians, and the authority of the magisterium.  I am sorry that Father Blake and my krazy blogger aren’t happy with this, but some of us suffered under the stagnation (or at least the very slow pace) of the last two papacies and we stood, if not silent, faithful.  We most likely will find ourselves tried in patience again in a future papacy, but will stand—if not silent, then—faithful still.  So get over it Father Blake and krazy lady: you don’t have to be happy about it; you don’t have to keep your mouth shut, but in the end you do have to submit yourself to the authority of the Church. 

I remember reading the Catholic philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, when I was studying philosophy all those many years back.  Granted it was a Jesuit University, but Marcel has always been acknowledged as a Christian existentialist and an eminent Catholic thinker.  Marcel claimed in his book Creative Fidelity that change is an essential component to fidelity.  That precisely because the world is not a static reality, in order for us who are in the world to be faithful to the Eternal we must be in constant change.  It may be more clear to put it this way: As the ground beneath our feet shifts, to keep our eyes fixed on that which does not shift, we must shift our own position.  God and Truth do not change but if we remain static we will lose sight of the Unchanging precisely because the world in which we stand has changed.  So in the face of Father Blake’s claim that the Apostolic Church of Rome had never changed in its first millennium, may I offer from Blessed John Henry Newman (an authority, by the way on change and continuity in the Apostolic and post-Apostolic Church): To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

A Katholic Krazie and An Old Heresy

Cornelius Jansen 

I knew it was a huge mistake when the new translation of the Roman Missal came out and the words of consecration were translated “for many” rather than “for all.”  (if you are interested in this, check the side bar for “pro multis” and that will link you to the four postings I did on this subject in 2011 and 2012.)  In the first place while “for many” is a literal translation of the Latin “pro multis” it is a faulty translation because it fails to translate the original Greek text, ‘οί πολλοί, from which the Latin is itself translated.  (The New Testament accounts of the Last Supper, like the remainder of the New Testament, were written in Greek.)  ‘Οί πολλοί means “the many”—an inclusive term signifying the vast multitudes of people.  We know it in English as “the hoi polloi” meaning the common run of humanity, although “the” here is a bit redundant. Greek, like English, has articles. ‘Οί is Greek for “the.”  Latin doesn’t have articles and so the Greek inclusive “the many” became the Latin restrictive “many.”  This has a huge impact for soteriology (the theology of salvation) as it implies that Christ did not die for all but only for some, namely those “many” (but not all) who were to be saved.  This proposition that Christ did not die for all was condemned by Pope Innocent X  in 1653 in the first salvo the Holy See fired against the Jansenist heresy. 

Jansenism, a heresy that stresses the fallen nature of humankind and overstresses the idea of the “election” of the saved, has never been completely wiped out; indeed it is very much the foundation for many of the Catholic neo-traditionalists ranging from the Krazies among the sedevacantists at Mount Saint Michael in Spokane to “Catholic” commentators like Michael Voris.  Jansenism is commonly said to have spread to America via the Irish clergy who came here in the 19^th and early 20^th century—and Irish Catholicism has in its blood a streak of Jansenism picked up from Irish clergy who studied in France during penal times.  But the real infestation of Jansenism came to America even before the Irish migration with émigré clergy fleeing the French Revolution. It found its American home in Mount Saint Mary’s, a seminary founded in 1808 by Father John Dubois and other French priests in the Catotctin Mountains of Maryland.  Jansenism must infest the old floorboards of “The Mount” as despite valiant efforts to erase it on the part of various deans and some faculty over the years it has managed to take root in the hearts of certain grads, and through them has spread to infect the faithful in various eastern dioceses that send their candidates to Mount Saint Mary’s for training.  The Diocese of Arlington Virginia seems particularly vulnerable to infection both in its priests and some of its more outspoken laity. 

Jansenism is basically “Catholic Calvinism.”  It is derived from the writings of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), a theologian and Bishop of Ypres in what is today Belgium.  Flanders, the province in which Ypres is located, then was part of the seventeen provinces, a component unit of the Hapsburg Empire where the Eighty Years war was being waged as the Calvinists were trying to win their independence from their Catholic Habsburg rulers.  In the end Flanders remained under Hapsburg rule and Catholicism was restored, but through much of this period Flanders—like the northern provinces that would become the Netherlands—was dominated by Calvinism.  In the highly intellectual atmosphere of the Calvinist Republic of Ghent, certain points of Calvinist theology spilled over into Catholic circles and Cornelius Jansen’s theology of grace and predestination had a strong scent of Calvinism to it.  Jansen’s book, Augustinus, gave a Calvinist read to the teachings of Saint Augustine of Hippo—the great theologian of the Catholic West.  The resultant distortions of Augustine’s theology of Grace produced a conviction among Jansen’s followers that Christ only died for those who would accept his sacrifice, and did not die so that all might accept his Grace.  This same error was made by Calvin and became one of the distinguishing marks of Calvinism.  This distorted Catholicism was very influential in France in the 17^th century and even its condemnation by several popes did not lessen its influence. 

Jansenism persists today.  Katholic Krazy Mary Anne Kreitzer of Woodstock Virginia who tilts at the windmills of “liberal” Catholicism under the banner of Les Femmes recently published on her blog

Jesus warned about Gehenna more than anything else during his life on earth. He died to save people from it. The Mass (since the restoration of the millenial "for many" at the Consecration) is proof positive that ALL are NOT SAVED because Jesus could only die for the salvation of the many who would accept His sacrifice. Note that the bad thief got no guarantee of paradise. Did he repent in the end? Maybe. Let's pray he did, but we have no evidence of it.

Well, Ms. Kreitzer should read her bible as bit more assiduously as while Jesus certainly did warn us about Gehenna, he did not do so  nearly as much as he warned us about the false teachings of those scribes and Pharisees who were so confident in their own religiosity and despised those whose views were so narrow.  But it is interesting that not only does Ms. Kreitzer espouse the Jansenist doctrine that Christ did not die for all but only for those who would accept his grace, but she uses the faulty translation of the pro-multis to justify it.

A few months back I attended a funeral in upstate New York and the principle celebrant of the Mass—a cassock-wearing, biretta bedecked gentleman in his seventies—pointedly said “for you and for all” as he consecrated the chalice at the funeral Mass.  I chided him about this at the luncheon afterward and he took umbrage as he said: “I have no choice; I will not give in to heresy.  Christ died for all and we must never say otherwise.”  Father then pointed out to me that while one cannot say that all are saved, one must be uncompromising in the faith that Christ died so that all might be saved.  And—to my surprise—this priest is a graduate of Mount Saint Mary’s.  But must have been in better days.