Of Shepherd's Staffs, Battle Flags, and the Traditional Latin Mass

The wing-nuts are all aflutter over the “hammer and sickle  crucifix” given Pope Francis by President of Boliva, Evo Morales.  Morales, a member of the Democratic Socialist Party, is the first president of Bolivia to be of indigenous Bolivian blood, coming from an Aymara family of subsistence farmers in the altiplano.  Nominally Catholic, he professes to be more interested in the welfare of poor (his country is one of the poorest in the Americas) than in religion.  Overall he is somewhat irreligious and there is no doubt that the gift was meant to embarrass the Pope. Francis,  however, seems to be beyond embarrassment which, while it drives the Krazies to even krazier distraction, is traditionally considered a virtue (Apatheia).   In any event it is not the crucifix that I want to focus on, but the pastoral staff which was presented to Pope Francis for his use in Bolivia.

Popes traditionally have not carried crosiers—the “shepherd’s crook” staff used by bishops as a sign of their authority, although Leo XIII chose to use the crosier during his pontificate.  When the Pope was performing a ritual for which other bishops required a crosier, he used a ferula—a staff surmounted by a plain cross. This was not for ordinary ceremonies—even ordinations or confirmations—but for events like the opening of the Holy Door or the consecration of a church in which ceremonies the Pope “knocked” on the door of the church by pounding the base of the staff on the door.  In the consecration of a church, the bishop traces the Alpha and the Omega on the church floor with his staff—the pope uses the ferula for this ceremony.  It was only Paul VI who began using the ferula for all the occasions that other bishops carry a crosier.  

Much like the “hammer and sickle crucifix” Morales gave Pope Francis, Paul’s ferula attracted a lot of criticism for its departure from tradition.  It was not a plain cross as previous popes had used but a crucifix—and a very modern one—in which the arms of the crucifix are bent downwards.  Some people saw this as a “broken cross,” and even today the wing-nuts who suspect the Vatican II popes as being crypto-freemasons or Satanists or in league with President Obama to establish one-world government love to point to Pope Paul’s ferula as evidence of his betrayal of the church.  I tell you, there just aren’t enough meds to go around to keep all the krazies in contact with reality. 

Anyway, the staff presented to Pope Francis for his use in Bolivia was made by the Artisans of Don Bosco, men and women who, like President Morales, are indigenous Bolivian people.  The staff is not a ferula but more in the style of a shepherd’s crook, though not a traditional crosier.  It is surmounted by the image of Christ, the Good Shepherd, carrying the same staff as he leads his sheep.  Below the Good Shepherd is Mary, the Untier of Knots—a particular devotion of Pope Francis.  The Virgin is holding a knotted piece of cloth that winds around a staff to an indigenous Bolivian below, symbolizing Mary’s untying the knots that bind the people in poverty and suffering.   The meaning of this staff is clear: it symbolizes Francis’ approach to the papacy: The Shepherd of all whose ministry is focused on untying the bonds of the poor and downtrodden. 

There has been a lot of hoopla this week about the decision of the legislature of the State of South Carolina to remove the Confederate Battle Flag—the “Stars and Bars” from the State Capitol.  The meaning of the flag is also clear: pride in the Old South and its heritage. 

Now here is the problem with symbols.  While the meaning is often clear on one level, on deeper levels there is often ambiguity as the meanings are manipulated for other agenda. 

My family had nothing to do with the Civil War.  My grandparents/great grandparents came to this country after all was settled and done between the Union and the Confederacy.  I was raised a Yankee—in an urban, working-class family well north of the Mason-Dixon line.  But I am a historian—not only by training but by instinct—and I have always loved the Stars and Bars precisely because it does symbolize the South and its heritage.  For me that heritage is the vision of These United States rather than The United States.  As a historian I have been drawn to the Jeffersonian vision for America and have always seen the original vision of our Founding Fathers to be a federation of sovereign states.  For me—as a historian—the South’s cause was maintaining that union of sovereign states in the face of a strong centralized government that wanted to reduce the states to mere provinces of a federal government.  Like many Southerners at the time of our Civil War, I don’t approve of secession from the Union, but I think the Union cause was wrong.  The War settled the issue, however, and we all move on; but the Battle Flag is a reminder that people gave their lives for a vision of America in which they believed.  But that is what the cause of the Old South and the flag that symbolizes it means to me.  To others—and the events of recent weeks have shown, to most others—the cause of the Old South represents the cause of Slavery and a society of racial hierarchy and division.  Moreover, while to me the symbol is primarily sentimental, for some others it is a highly effective symbol which keeps alive a conviction of the legitimacy of evil racial theories and fans the flames of hatred, violence, and oppression.  As such the symbol, good as it is in itself, has been perverted for an evil end and it has to go.

Now, to return to the papal staff given to Pope Francis in Bolivia: it symbolizes a papacy of service and liberation to which Francis is remodeling his Petrine ministry.  I like that.  It strikes me as an effective model for the 21^st century.  It fits in with the changing perceptions of power and authority in our world.  It puts the papacy—and by extension, the Church—at the service of the world and especially of those who are held captive by the current political and economic systems of our world.  But for others, that is a betrayal of our heritage.  Much like those who want to hold on to the confederate flag because it reinforces their right to espouse evil racial theories, there are those who want to hold on to the symbols of a Church that commands the power over people to make them conform rather than to embrace the models of service that might win them to convert.  There are those who believe that our Christian beliefs and standards should be written into Law so that all, regardless of their beliefs and values, will live according to our standards.  They want a Church that holds the trappings of power—not a wooden staff, but a golden one, a pope who lives in a palace and wears a crown, prelates who dress in princely robes and take their place among the greats of this world.  They want a Church that can dictate social norms and civil laws.  Basically they want a Christ whose kingdom is of this world as well as of the next. 

We have here a conflict in the nature of the Church.  Long used to a Church of power, a mutual interdependence of “throne and altar,” it is frightening for many to envision a Church of the Poor and the Powerless.  As I have often pointed out in the blog before, we are at the change of paradigms, the shifting of history’s tectonic plates, where we move from Avery Dulles’ model of a papacy and Church of power to a papacy and Church of service.  Of course the problem is bigger than the Church—it betrays the shifting sands of power in our world as the prosperous and powerful of the developed world see the threat to our position in the numerous peoples of the so-called “third world.”  That shepherd’s staff with Our Lady untying the knots that bind the native Bolivian is, in fact, a far more dangerous symbol than Christ nailed to a hammer and sickle.  The struggle of Marxism and Christianity is all but over, and President Morales might as well be handing the pope an antique sex-toy for his embarrassment as much as a Christ crucified on the hammer and sickle. 

But let’s take this one step further and bring this conflict of symbols closer to home than Bolivian shepherd’s staffs and politicized crucifixes.  What is the symbolism of the Traditional Latin Mass and what is it being manipulated to mean? 

There is no doubt that the use of the Traditional Latin Mass symbolizes a continuity with the Church’s past—not its antiquity as some claim, but the Church of the last half-millennium.  But what does that connection of the past actually mean to people?   It can mean something good.  When Paul VI granted indults for its use—something he rarely did—he did so because people who appreciated the historical continuity it symbolizes appealed for it.  (Of course the fact that one needed a papal indult to celebrate the “Tridentine Mass” and that Pope Paul gave very few of these indults, gives lie to the claim that the Tridentine Mass had never been suppressed, but that is material for another posting.) 

But much like those for whom the meaning of the Stars and Bars has come to justify theories of white supremacy, the use of the Tridentine Mass has become something quite evil for most of its adherents.  Even since the Lefebvre Schism the usus antiquior, as it is sometimes known, has been manipulated to symbolize a Catholicism that rejects the Second Vatican Council and its teaching.  Not only the Lefebvrites, but the vast majority of those who attend the Traditional Latin Mass, even those authorized by the local bishops, practice a Catholicism that is unaffected by the Council.  Sermons at Traditional Latin Masses usually either avoid Conciliar teaching or openly criticize it.  Most Traditional Latin Mass groups use the Baltimore Catechism with its pre-conciliar teachings on Protestants, Jews, and other religions to catechize their children.  The Baltimore Catechism also does not present current Church teaching on the Sacraments of Baptism, Reconciliation, and Anointing of the Sick as developed at the Council. As a consequence—or perhaps an underlying cause for the survival of TLM communities—Anti-Semitism runs high among many who participate in the Tridentine Mass.  The teachings of Dignitatis Humanae are often contradicted both in pulpit and religious education.  The Social Teachings of the Church since Mater et Magistra are never mentioned and certainly not accepted.  Many (I insist on many, but granted, not all) of those who faithfully attend the TLM espouse a political agenda at odds with the magisterium regarding the Death Penalty, distributive justice, access to firearms, human rights and other current issues.  Pope Francis is not popular among many advocates of the TLM and in fact is often spoken of very contemptuously, in great part because of his shift from monarchial model (which is the underlying political theory of the Tridentine Liturgy) to the servant model.  While from an aesthetic point of view, the pre-conciliar liturgy is a legitimate option for worship on the principle of de gustibus non est disputandum (for advocates of the Novus Ordo who have forgotten their Latin: “matters of tastes are not to be argued”), the Church, for its own good, needs to make sure that the difference of ritual does not signify a difference of belief.  Like the Confederate Battle Flag, the TLM is a powerful symbol that shapes ideologies, and ideologies that often differ from our Catholic faith.

Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis, 11

Distinguished authority on Marxism, intellectual,

and theological commentator, Rush Limbaugh

I have been meaning to get back to Pope Francis’ interview with La Civilta Cattolica/America and now he has released the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium which, at almost one hundred pages, promises to give us fuel for quite some time to come.  Rush Limbaugh, savant of the Tea Party faction, has gone ballistic accusing the Pope of “pure Marxism,” and taken some easy but irrelevant shots at Vatican “wealth.”  Neo-Trad voices within the Church have either ignored it completely or paid it some light reference—such as Rorate Caeli’s observation that it is “a much more Thomistic text than anything authored by Benedict XVI” and then moved on to their usual cant about how Vatican II has destroyed the Roman Rite and how the advance of “homosexual marriage” is not inevitable.  Meanwhile EJ Dionne, writing the Washington Post, has called the spade.  Maybe they have reason to be afraid of the Pope. 

Christianity has been used over the centuries to prop up the powerful. But, from the beginning, the Christian message has been subversive of political systems, judgmental toward those at the top and demanding of all who take it seriously.

Pope Francis has surprised the world because he embraces the Christian calling to destabilize and to challenge. As the first leader of the Catholic Church from the Southern Hemisphere, he is especially mindful of the ways in which unregulated capitalism has failed the poor and left them “waiting.” His apostolic exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel” is drawing wide and deserved attention for its denunciation of “trickle-down” economics as a system that “expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.” It’s a view that “has never been confirmed by the facts” and has created “a globalization of indifference.” Will those conservative Catholics who have long championed tax-cutting for the wealthy acknowledge the moral conundrum that Francis has put before them?

I am anxious to read it because I think I will find it challenging and I need to be challenged.  This season of Advent is one in which we each need to take a look at our lives and see what the barriers to God’s Kingdom we have erected in our lives and allow the Joy of the Gospel to dismantle them.  But we will go back first to the interview and keep looking at the previews Francis granted us there before looking at the feature Evangelii Gaudium.  And as for Francis being a Marxist, it just shows that ol’ Rush wouldn’t know the Gospel from Das Kapital.  Friday is St Nicholas Day—maybe Saint Nick will bring him a copy of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.    

Fifty Years--And More than Camelot Has Disappeared

The Funeral of President Kennedy leaves the

Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle

  This weekend we have been flooded with memories of the November 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas.  Those of us who are old enough to remember the event, can tell you exactly where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news.  But this might be an opportunity also to reflect on just how much our Catholic life has changed over these fifty years. 
Fifty years ago Mass was still in Latin, though plans were being made for lent the following year to introduce the vernacular languages on a very limited basis for the penitential prayers, the readings, and the Lord’s Prayer. We were assured that the consecration and other key prayers would always remain in Latin. Hymns in the language of the people could now be sung at Mass—though very few parishes had any tradition of congregational singing.  A few churches—very few—had begun positioning the priest to face the people at Mass.
We were at the tail end—though we didn’t know it yet—of a vocation boom that had started with the return of GI’s at the end of World War II.  Seminaries and novitiates were filled and ordinations were at an all-time high.    Religious women were still in their traditional habits and priests were rarely seen without their collars—and wearing hats: straw in the summer, homburgs in the winter.  Women too wore hats to Church—or, the style set by First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, the mantilla. 
We Catholics did not eat meat on Fridays and only once a day in lent.  Moreover in Lent as well as the Vigil of Christmas, Ember Days, and certain other days we ate only one full meal, supplemented by two light “collations” that together could not add up to a meal.  May Crownings, Forty Hours, novenas, Holy Hours, and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament all were part of the regular rhythm of parish life.  The priest wore black vestments for funerals and most daily masses which were offered for the dead.  At funerals a wonderful sequence was sung called the Dies Irae, heralding the final judgment in bone-chilling verse.  As it was in Latin it lacked the impact however and was just a pretty piece of music.    
We had no lay ministers of the Eucharist, permanent deacons, Religious Education coordinators, Directors of Liturgy, pastoral associates, parish councils, finance boards, cantors, or youth ministers.  We did have Altar and Rosary Societies, Holy Name Societies, Saint Vincent de Paul, Mothers’ Club, Sodality, and Knights of the Altar.  Only boys could serve Mass—and, in fact, a girl got inside the gates of the altar rail twice in her life—first communion and her wedding day (but only if she married Catholic).  Of course if she became a nun she would go in to vacuum, change the altar linens, and fix the flowers.  Where there were no nuns to do this work, a mature matron might be allowed.  O yes—I forgot, we still had altar rails because we still knelt for Holy Communion.  Communion was never received in the hand—we could not have imagined it—nor did we every receive from the chalice.
Religion class was mostly memorizing the Baltimore Catechism, though if you went to Catholic School there was time to tell you stories of the saints or of the apparitions of the Blessed Mother.  In Catholic School you also learned Gregorian Chant—especially Mass 8 (Missa de Angelis).  Some parishes had decent—even good—choirs and lovely pipe organs.  We never heard an instrument other than the organ played in Church.  Most of the time, however, the quality of the music reflected the blue-collar working class makeup of American Catholicism.  It would only be in the sixties and seventies, and mostly as a result of the GI Bill, that significant numbers of Catholics moved up into the professional and managerial classes.  The slow rise of Catholics in the professions and business was due in part to lingering bias against them from the Protestant establishment.    
It wasn’t a bad way to grow up.  There was a distinct Catholic culture that left your Protestant friends a bit bewildered but maybe a little bit jealous too.  Little Methodist girls sometimes wanted to be nuns when they grew up because they (the nuns) looked so cool with those long dresses and heavy veils.  Catholics were different—there was something a bit exotic about us.
Of course, underneath the surface all was not well.  Mody of the abuse cases that have caused such a crisis for the Church date back to the ’50’s and’60’s.  Alcoholism was rampant among the clergy—though it was certainly epidemic in the larger society as well.  Convent life was not always a calm and peaceful as it appeared in The Nuns’ Story or The Sound of Music.   
Of course Viet Nam had not yet bloomed into a full scale war and the subsequent anti-war movement had not yet emerged.  Catholics were rabid anti-communists and the Fatima devotion was used to strengthen our resolve against communism.  We were a bit bewildered however as Pope John’s 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra attracted much positive attention from the Communist world.  The April 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris won even more recognition from the Communist world.  John XXIII in the last months of his life received the daughter and son-in-law of Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev in audience and gave them symbolic gifts for Khrushchev as well as for their own family.   John’s openness to the Soviet Union was a cause of anxiety for American Churchmen, particularly Cardinal Spellman of New York, who were anxious to keep Vatican in line with American foreign policy.  In 1963 we were still saying the Leonine Prayers after low mass which originally had been for the restoration of the Papal States but had come to be directed towards the “conversion of Russia.”  And of course that reminds me that at this time we still distinguished between “High Mass” (which was sung) and “Low Mass” (which was read sotto voce).  Despite all sort of claims how beautiful the pre-conciliar rites were, most Masses were these recited Masses at which the priest prayed privately and the congregation silently followed along in their missal or occupied themselves with other devotions such as the rosary.  Such rites were bland at best. 
Our churches were filled with statues—usually of mediocre artistic quality done in plaster on a mass-production line.  Votive candles in red and green and blue stood grouped before the various altars.  There often was, at least in the better built churches, some lovely stained glass.  Similarly vestments and paraments were often beautifully embroidered and hopefully (but not always) kept clean and in good repair.  People bobbed in and out of Church to make “visits” to Jesus present in the Sacrament of the Altar. 
All in all, I think it was a wonderful way to grow up.  I doubt it could have lasted.  In part due to the excellent educational system the Church built, Catholics were raising themselves up by the bootstraps—but rising into the Middle Class and leaving immigrant ways behind meant integration into the larger society as well.  The Catholic Ghetto, constructed so carefully by men like Archbishop Corrigan and Bishop McQuaid was doomed to come down at Catholic hands.  I for one would not want to go back even if I could—but it was a wonderful way to grow up. 

The Silencing of the Shepherds

Rome Weeps and Salutes its Pope

a poster decorating the streets of Rome

at the time of Pope John Paul's death

in 2005

When Karol Wojtyla came to the Throne of Peter as John Paul II in 1978 he set a strong agenda for his pontificate and it was an agenda he was to accomplish quite successfully in the almost twenty-six and a half years he would reign as Pope.  One could look at his pontificate as one looks at any governmental administration in terms of “foreign policy” and “domestic policy.”  “Foreign policy” here would include the Vatican relationship with other  Christian and non-Christian religious bodies as well as with secular states.   “Domestic policy” would be concerned with the internal administration of the Church.  This pontificate needs several (perhaps numerous) entries for an adequate analysis, but for our purposes in this entry we will make just a few observations.  John Paul was brilliant in both his ecumenical/interfaith relationships and his international politics, particularly his ostpolitik.  His internal administration is far more controversial. 
       At least from the time of his first visit as Pope to his Polish homeland three months after his election  John Paul sensed that the Marxist government there was very vulnerable and he probably also intuited that the fall of a Polish Marxist government could set of the domino effect that could bring down the Soviet “empire” in Eastern Europe.  Like many intellectuals—and ordinary citizens—from the Soviet dominated countries of Eastern Europe John Paul had a passionate hatred for both Marxist socialism and its Russian masters.             
      Marxism was vulnerable for collapse for several reasons but chief among them was its inability to provide a standard of living comparable to the western democracies for its citizens.  Radical socialism can only succeed in a state inhabited by angels.  Capitalism has always been able to capitalize on original sin, on the inherent self-centeredness and self-interest of the human animal.  Marxism needs people who aspire to the common good if that common good is to prevail.  “What’s in it for me” is the battle cry of the Christian democracies.  When the Poles and the East Germans and the Czechs and the Hungarians saw the West Germans and the French and the Austrians and the Italians driving their sporty little cars and wearing chic clothing and vacationing on the beaches of Spain and Morocco this sowed the seeds of unrest behind the “Iron Curtain.”  The Western Allies, and the United States in particular, made it impossible for the Soviet Union and its allies to develop the consumer economies that could compete with the west by escalating an arms race and a space race that sucked all available resources in the Soviet Sphere from consumers to government programs.  The Cold War was not so much about nuclear weapons per se as it was a game of Economic “Chicken” as Capitalism and Communism competed to see whose bank would break first.
      John Paul knew that if he was to free his homeland from Marxism and the Soviet network, he needed to support the United States and its policies but he also knew that he had to do this in covert ways that would not endanger what little freedom the Church had in Soviet dominated countries.
     Let me just break here to comment that an irony in this whole affair is that John Paul developed a good personal friendship and I believe mutual admiration with Mikhail Gorbachev and while Americans say that it was Ronald Reagan who brought down the Soviet Empire, Gorbachev has always claimed that it was John Paul who delivered the knock-out punch. 
       John Paul needed to work in concert with the Americans—and this meant with the Reagan administration—if he were to continue to undermine Marxism in his native Poland and in the nations of Eastern Europe, particularly those who historically had large Catholic populations.  But the Reagan administration needed John Paul too.  The Catholic Church, or at least Catholics, were behind much of the social unrest in Latin America and particularly the countries of Central America.  American Catholics were supporting the peasant cause in El Salvador where the American supported government had arranged the murder of the Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 and where government paramilitary forces had raped and murdered three American nuns and an American lay missionary later that same year.  These were only two of the outrageous acts of which American sponsored governments in Latin American were guilty.  Catholic Church organizations in the United States began reporting outrage after outrage and demonstrating the connection between the atrocities and the American military educating and training military from these military dictatorships.  The Reagan administration was not about to back down from its support of the military regimes and faced a particular challenge with FSLN, commonly known as the Sandinistas, who had overthrown the Somoza regime in Nicaragua in 1979.  The Reagan administration supported rebel forces known as the Contras in their effort to overthrow the popular Sandinista regime.  The Sandinista government included a number of priests and former priests, most notably Ernesto Cardenal, a noted poet who remains today a priest in good standing.  (Cardenal had been for some time a monk in the Trappist Abbey at Gethsemane in Kentucky where he had been taught by the famous monk-author-poet—Thomas Merton.)  John Paul used the occasion of a 1983 visit to Nicaragua to publicly rebuke the Sandinista government in general and Cardenal in particular.  In fact, the Pope’s 1983 visit to Latin America (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and several other countries) was a human rights debacle as the Pope seemed more interested in shoring up dictatorships than addressing the social ills which plagued the poor.  His visit to the tomb of Archbishop Romero in the Metropolitan Cathedral at San Salvador seemed perfunctory at best and left the Salvadoran populace who regarded the Archbishop as a martyr for their cause nonplussed. 
     President Reagan had Catholic problems not only in Latin America but closer to home as well.  While many American Catholics liked the conservative direction of the Reagan Administration, the President’s policies were constantly being undermined by Catholic clergy quoting papal encyclicals and the Documents of the Second Vatican Council.  The Bishops were not only not suppressing the liberal clergy, many were joining the chorus of voices calling into question the moral basis of the Administration’s fundamental principles.  In 1983 the American bishops published a pastoral letter on peace that seriously undermined Reagan foreign policy.  (They would publish a letter on economic justice that demolished any theological justification for Reagonomics in 1986.)   Catholics had once been among the most conservative of American religious groups; they were now among the most liberal.
      John Paul had something he wanted from the Reagan administration, something that could cement the alliance that would be mutually beneficial in bringing down the Marxist Dictatorship in Poland and hopefully other countries.  Actually, the Holy See had wanted diplomatic relations with the United States since the late nineteenth century but American politics had always militated against this.  Anti-Catholicism was rife in the United States of the first six decades of the twentieth century.  Paul Blanshard, the KKK, the POAU, and other anti-Catholic voices ensured that no Presidential Administration would take the step of establishing formal Diplomatic Relations with the Holy See.  Catholic participation in the ecumenical movement since the convocation of the Second Vatican Council and the brief White House tenure of a popular US President (John F. Kennedy, 1961-63) did much to reduce that animosity.  Several presidents had personal envoys to the Holy See, a connection that was invaluable diplomatically and especially during World War II.  President Reagan saw that the time had come and gave the Pope his ambassador.   John Paul in turn gave Reagan a more compliant hierarchy. 
      It takes a long time, between ten and fifteen years to change the tone of national hierarchy.   You have to wait until bishops die or retire to replace them with men closer to your own way of thinking.  And John Paul’s object was not simply to provide bishops more in line with conservative American views.  He wanted, indeed demanded, bishops on whom he could count to toe the Vatican Line as well at least for the major cultural issues the Church in the West has been facing.  He had to know that he could count on his bishops to support Church teaching on abortion, women’s ordination, same-sex marriage, and contraception. We will talk more about the need for theological conformity in a future entry, but what about the American bishops and social questions?  I am not so sure that the Pope—and his successor—didn’t get a poor bargain.  When John Paul spoke out against American policy in each of the Iraq Wars, the bishops—for the far greater part—remained silent supporting the Administration.  When the John Paul spoke about the Death Penalty his remarks went unheeded in the cathedrals of the United States.  When John Paul and Pope Benedict have spoken for the rights of migrants, their teachings are not relayed to the Catholic faithful.  No longer do we have the caliber of bishops who can take Catholic teaching and fashion it into a pastoral letter on the economy—now when we need it most.  Yes we have mitered pit-bulls on abortion and same-sex marriage, but they turn into pussycats when it comes to a  host of questions where we need leadership—not necessarily original leadership, just leadership that will pass on to us the moral principles, all the moral principles not just the conservative ones, set forth by John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI and the Bishops assembled in the Second Vatican Council.