Popes Can't Afford To Be Tone-Deaf

According to news sources, the Holy See is instructing bishops that it is “not necessarily” their duty to report accusations of clerical child abuse and that ultimately victims or their families should make the decision to report abuse to police.  The document, produced by the Pontifical Council for the Family, advises bishops that while they must be aware of local laws that require allegations to be reported to civil authorities, as far as the Holy See is concerned the only duty of the bishop is to deal with the matter internally. 

Now, despite the impression the news agencies are giving, the Vatican isn’t telling the bishops that they can break the civil law in those places where it is required for social workers, teachers, and other authorities to report abuse cases. And I can understand the dilemma of a bishop who becomes aware of an allegation against a member of the clergy or a Church employee but also is confronted with a victim or a victim’s family that is reluctant for the matter to be made public.  But the directive obviously shows that some people in Rome are still tone-deaf to the crisis of credibility that is facing the institutional Church. 

And, of course, this story follows up on the the suspension of clerical sex-abuse survivor, Peter Saunders, from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.  Saunders was “voted off the island” by an all but unanimous vote of his fellow commission members.  (There were sixteen votes against, one abstention, none for Saunders.)  Now, again, this was not an executive decision from above but a decision by peers.  And we have all served on committees where one member keeps gluing up the works with his or her own agenda.  But again, however justified the commission members might be, it is a matter of tone-deafness that brings considerable scandal on the Church and undermines our credibility. 

And now we have the president of a Catholic University, fortunately in this instance a layman and not a priest, comparing under-performing students to “bunnies” who “should be drowned.”  Boy, where in the Gospel do you get that????    I realize that good academic management requires weeding out those who will not succeed so that more viable candidates can take their space—but again, how does the murdered bunnies image play in Peoria?

Why is the Catholic Church on a suicide mission?  If there is a failure in regard to implementing the mandate of the Second Vatican Council for the Church to take its place on the modern world, it is this: the presupposition that we, as Church, are not accountable to the larger human community among whom live and work.  How can we be that “light of revelation to the nations” if we maintain that we are somehow exempt from the standards of behavior we ourselves set with our Christian ideals? 

And I must admit that as much as I admire Pope Francis he too seems at times to have become bogged down in protecting the institution rather than witnessing to the integrity of the Gospel.    The Pope’s appointment and defense of Juan Barros Madrid as Bishop of Osorno, Chile, despite Barros’ ties to notorious priest-abuser Fernando Karadima, is another case of Rome being tone-deaf.  Barros’ installation in his cathedral church turned into a huge fracas as the vast majority of the faithful made their rejection of their bishop public.  Moreover, the vast majority of his brother bishops in Chile, including the two Chilean Cardinals, refused to attend the installation, signifying that few, if any, supported the Pope’s appointee.  Francis allegedly referred to those who opposed Bishop Barros Madrid’s appointment as “lefties” and “dumb.”  Holy Father, we know you can’t carry a tune in a basket, but get to a hearing-specialist and get your ear canals cleaned out.  We can’t afford to have a tone-deaf Pontiff sitting on the chair of Peter. 

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that hearing confessions desensitizes the clergy to the evil of certain sins.  This isn’t just a Catholic problem.  I suspect that many Protestant clergy  and rabbis after years of pastoral counseling ministry, also become somewhat immune to the impact of evil.  The problem is that most of the evil encountered in confession or counseling is done by basically good people. Bad people—and there some—generally don’t come to see the priest or rabbi.   Most people sin to, in some way or other, escape the pain they feel in life.  (Pardon the split infinitive in the above sentence; I too am a sinner.)  The husband who finds himself continually rejected by his wife (or the wife, by her husband), turns to an illicit relationship. This is not right but the sin is most often the result of the pain and anger of rejection.  Beneath the abuse of alcohol or drugs is often a huge amount of psychological pain.  And when it comes to physical or emotional or sexual abuse: how many abusers have themselves been the victims of abuse?  None of this justifies the evil we choose,  but the priest or minister, becoming aware of the complexity of people’s lives, puts sin in a context that not only involves judgment but compassion.  In pastoral care that is most probably a good thing.  But it can’t leave us, as a Church, in a world of moral ambiguity.  It is a difficult balance to achieve, especially without risking the sin of phariseeism ourselves, but we need to find it.   Our integrity as a Church demands that while we deal compassionately with sinners we keep true to the moral compass of the Gospels. 

Perhaps the problem is, at least in part, that the bishops and clergy have no idea that they are in any way accountable to us, the People of God.  We are still an overly hierarchic Church rather than a true community of the faithful.  There are still too many working on the pyramid model of Church where the Pope is over the bishops, the bishops over the clergy, and the clergy over the people.  In this model, communication is one way—top down and the role of the laity is still perceived to be “to pay, pray, and obey.”  And need I say that for many of us, those days are over. 

We need to develop an ecclesiology in which we—and I mean all of us, not just the laity—see ourselves  not in a hierarchic pyramid but in a communal model of concentric circles with the bishop at the center, the clergy around the bishop, the faithful around the clergy.  In the same way the larger perspective is viewed with the Bishop and Church of Rome at the center surrounded by the communion of local Churches with their bishops at their center.  This model of Church is far from new and was the predominant ecclesiology in the patristic period from the second century through the thirteenth. 

To a certain extent we have already begun to move towards this model of Church.  The decrees of the Second Vatican Council, particularly Lumen Gentium (the dogmatic Constitution on the Church) and Christus Dominus (the Decree on the Bishops), and to a lesser extent in Apostolicam Actuositatem (On the Apostolate of the Laity), actually lay out this theology.  Unfortunately, as we all know, John Paul II didn’t much care for this model and pretty much smothered it in its post-Paul VI cradle.  Francis has given us hope of reviving it, but the above-mentioned actions on the part of the Holy See show not only some back-pedaling but even the Pope’s failure to see the implications of his actions.  Hopefully his remarks about “lefties” and “dumb” is only another case of a live-mike picking up an indiscreet comment from a world leader, but it is still troubling that the Pope doesn’t see the profound theological issue when not only the faithful but the regional episcopate reject a candidate for bishop. 

Today’s adults are not going to continue to belong to an organization—even a Church—that doesn’t take them seriously.  I am not advocating a democratic Church but one in which there is genuine communication so that those whose ministry it is to speak the faith of the Church know what is in the mind and the hearts of the Church’s members.  The consensus fidelium needs to be restored as an essential part of the dynamic of the Church’s teaching and governing mission. 

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.  

More on Myers: What is the Agenda?

Archbishop Myers in a delusional

world: proving the axiom that once

one becomes a bishop one has had

his last bad meal and will never hear

the truth again.

Why would a bishop tell Catholics that they should not present themselves for Holy Communion?  Archbishop Myers of Newark is certainly not the brightest votive candle in the rack but he certainly knows that total doctrinal conformity is no requirement for Holy Communion.  The essential doctrines of the faith are set forth in the historic Creeds and the Nicene Creed was included in the Liturgy in the 11^th century precisely to be a statement of faith for believers to subscribe to before approaching the Eucharist.  Of course by the 11^th century the reception of Holy Communion was in decline with few people receiving the Eucharist more than once or twice a year, and many not even that often which is why the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 had to mandate an annual communion (at Eastertide) for all Catholics.   

In the seventeenth century communions were still rather rare and becoming ever more so due to the influence of Jansenism.  We have often discussed the Jansenist heresy in this blog (March 6,  and November 27, 2011, February 28, March 1, August 19, September 13, 16 and 20, 2012) and I have said that I believe that it is alive and well and thriving in certain sectors of American Catholicism.  Michael Voris of ChurchMilitant.TV (formerly Real Catholic TV) is one proponent of the heresy which is one of the reasons he was ordered to remove the title “Catholic” from his productions and why he is not given an audience in many dioceses.  Christendom College in Front Royal Virginia has a reputation for being tainted with Jansenism as does the seminary at Mount Saint Mary’s Emmitsburg, but these reputations may be due more to individual graduates than actual academic philosophies, courses taught, or faculty teaching.  That being said, there are some that claim that Germain Grisez, professor emeritus of Mortal Theology at Mount Saint Mary’s, picked up the Jansenist mantle of the late Monsignor Gommar de Pauw who had taught at the Mount in the 50’s and 60’s before establishing the Catholic Traditionalist Movement, but I have not read Grisez and while he seems quite rigid, rigidity alone does not make one a Jansenist.  This idea however that in order to approach the Eucharist one must agree in theory and not merely conform in practice to the Church’s moral teaching certainly opens wide the door to Jansenism, especially when the admonition is applied to every detail of every issue.  When one hears the rants that it is necessary to deny the Eucharist to those who disagree with Church teaching in order to “prevent sacrilege,” there is sufficient smoke of self-righteousness to surmise the fires of Jansenism are burning brightly somewhere nearby.

Now, that being said, I doubt that Archbishop Myers is a Jansenist.  Jansenists are usually gaunt and dour folk, rarely suffering from gout.  I would look for another reason.  His Grace knows that at age 71 he is no longer a candidate for a higher see with an attached and much longed for red-hat and while he is not, as I said, bright, neither is he so unobservant as not to see that it is the Donald Wuerls and Timothy Dolans and Sean O’Malleys that get entrusted with the crucial sees.  (Though Charlie Chaput is probably headed for a cardinal’s galero and he can be a bit restrictive on the Eucharist, but I don’t believe Chaput has gone so far out on the crazy limb as Myers.)

“Farmer John” as he is known to his priests (it is that East-Coast snobbery about Midwesterners)  may simply have been bored and wanted some attention before his impending retirement relegates him permanently to the obscurity of an ecclesiastical has-been.  His remark that he felt it necessary to issue the statement because of the lack of clarity on the issue by his brother bishops was not designed to win him support from his peers but it sure has gotten him some attention.  Anyone who has taught second graders knows that infantile minds find negative attention preferable to no attention.  I suspect, however, that His Grace was playing to the Republican bleachers, knowing that that is where the big donors sit.  Like the steward of Luke 16,he is about to be out of a job and may know that he had better make friends fast with the mammon of iniquity as his days of service are coming to an end.  Jesus praised the crafty steward for his astuteness and I don’t disparage the Archbishop for his foresight.  I have met him often enough to know there is no malice in him and we all know well where our own bread is buttered.  Furthermore, I think that he—like many of his colleagues—honestly believe in the Republican philosophy and think it better for America.  I myself find certain planks in the Republican platform that I prefer over the alternatives and in particular I can’t support “abortion rights.”  I believe that a fetus is a human person with an inalienable right to life and that laws that permit that life to be taken at whim are unjust.  I don’t believe this because the Church says so—I believe it based on my (albeit limited) knowledge of biology.  Unlike many of the moral vocal in the anti-abortion camp, I support a consistent life-ethic.  It is not that I think the Church’s teachings here are “true” because the Church says that they are but rather I see that they reflect a Truth that is greater than the teaching of any particular religion.  Well, enough of that sermon; I am getting sidetracked.  I do intend to come out of my political closet in a future entry just for the sake of full-disclosure, but let me say that I believe a Catholic can be a Democrat in good faith and I believe that a Catholic can be in good faith a Republican. Either one requires some compromise with our faith as neither party can claim to be consistent with our Catholic (or even Christian) values but if one had to follow everything the Church teaches when one entered the voting booth either no one of us could vote or no one of us could receive Holy Communion.  ‘nuff  said.     

Why Arlington? Historical Context of Clerical Madness 2

Mount Saint Mary's Seminary, Emmitsburg

where many of the Arlington clergy are

trained.

Arlington began to chart its distinctive ecclesiological path under its second bishop, John Keating.  Keating was an unusual choice for bishop as he was not particularly religious.  He was not a bad man, much less a bad priest; it was just that the Church for him was more a career than a vocation.  He was trained in canon law and had a love for the law, not in the sense of being a rigorist (which he was anything but) but as a genuine aesthetic appreciation of the Canon Law as an intricate intellectual system with its own unique internal comeliness and logic.  He approached the law like a chess-master appreciates his game or a calligrapher his script. 

Keating had made his mark as a canon lawyer with his Doctoral Dissertation at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome “The Bearing of Mental Impairment on the Validity of Marriage.”  This dissertation was a game-changer for Catholics seeking annulments to their marriages as it opened up the issue of psychological maturity (or, actually, lack thereof) as one the grounds for a marriage being declared null in Church courts.   In fact, Keating was no conservative during his tenure where he served as Vicar General of the Chicago Archdiocese under Archbishop Cardinal John Cody from 1979-1983.  He also was apostolic administrator of the Chicago See from the death of Cardinal Cody to the tenure of the new archbishop, Joseph Bernadin in 1983.

While Keating had a reputation for being a progressive, he and Bernardin were not cut from the same cloth and Bernardin wanted rid of him.  Yet, his years of service in the difficult final period of Cody’s tenure which saw the diocese in chaos because of  Cody’s deep unpopularity and the allegations of financial and moral impropriety against the Cardinal, meant that Keating had to be pensioned off in some way and not merely returned to a parish posting as a pastor.  And so he was named to be the second bishop of Arlington.  Bishop Welsh was translated to the Diocese of Allentown in Pennsylvania—a lateral move at best—and Keating was ordained bishop in his place on August 4, 1983. 

As I wrote above, John Richard Keating was not a bad man but neither was he particularly religious.  He always reminded me of a 12^th century Bishop of Reims to whom is attributed the declaration: “This wouldn’t be a bad job (being a bishop), if you didn’t have to sing Mass.”  The liturgical duties of being a bishop seemed a torture for the canon lawyer.  Allegedly rather than officiate in his Cathedral or a parish church in his diocese on Sunday Mornings, he said a private Mass in his chapel and then headed out for a standing tee-time of 9 a.m. Sunday mornings at the Washington Country Club.  When he did say Mass publicly, he wanted the ceremonies had to be abbreviated as much as possible.  Confirmations were streamlined.  At the Easter Vigil he permitted the minimum of only two readings from the Old Testament and no baptisms or confirmations; you would be out in 90 minutes from a rite that took at least two and a half hours in most parishes.  After his body was entombed in the new mausoleum constructed in the crypt of Saint Thomas More Cathedral, the clergy joked that it was the first time that Keating had been present for all the Holy Week ceremonies in his Cathedral. 

I am not faulting Bishop Keating for his detesting the long and complicated rituals of his office—actually I think it could be seen to his credit.  As I have often complained about Cardinal Burke, most of the rituals surrounding prelates are more to their glory than to God’s.  But I don’t think the man was interested in the oversight of his diocese and he let many things go somewhat unsupervised.  One of them was vocations recruitment.

From this point out I am not going to give names to most of the figures I will write about as they are still living and perhaps they have repented of their misdeeds but one of the unnamed is a priest who served as vocation director for most of Bishop Keating’s tenure. 

In just over ten years as bishop, Keating ordained 84 priests for service in his diocese—record numbers for a small diocese in what was a national vocational drought.  How did he do it?  Well, let me tell one story.

Among my friends is a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington who served as a driver for Cardinal James Hickey during Hickey’s tenure as Archbishop of the nation’s capital, just across the river from the Arlington diocese.  This good priest has a poor sense of boundaries and loves to put the needle of jest, sometimes poisoned and always barbed, into anyone higher up the ecclesiastical food-chain than himself.  So one day he said to Cardinal Hickey: “How is it that Bishop Keating is ordaining twelve men this year and you are ordaining three.”  Hickey’s response was: “I don’t want the lawsuits.” 

The Vocation Director (they are called V.D.’s for short) for Arlington was notorious for grabbing any candidate he could in order to “make the numbers.”  A student was dismissed from a seminary for failure to make the grades—Arlington would grab him and send him on to a seminary where the standards might be a bit more, shall we say, “flexible.”  A seminarian was let go because his bishop thought he was too rigid or too conservative—no problem Arlington would take him.  Many—not all, but many—of the Arlington seminarians were part of the ‘biretta brigade’—seminarians who collected the antique vesture and vestments of the past with dreams of restoring the days of priests in the gender-amorphous regalia of nineteenth-century French abbés.  (When you think of it, you never saw Father Chuck O’Malley, aka Bing Crosby, dressed in all that folderol.  He wore a black suit, a clerical collar, and a straw hat.  No biretta.)  While Arlington managed to acquire some good men in this period, it also acquired a significant and disproportionately high number of highly dysfunctional ones thanks to this particular V.D. 

And it was not only the V.D. who was proactive in creating the ecclesial fantasyland that we developing in the northern reaches of the Old Dominion.  There was a small coterie of priests in the diocese who would train the young blood in the ways of reconstructing 1950’s Catholicism.  I remember one time asking a professor at Mount Saint Mary’s, the Emmitsburg seminary where many of the Arlington clergy train, “what are you teaching them there?” in response to some recent bizarreness I had witnessed.  I was told by this professor: “It isn’t us—it is what they are getting from Father X, Father Y, and Monsignor Z back in Arlington.”  And it is true.  But more on that next time.  

Fr. Guarnizo, Communion Controversy, and Janssens Redivivus

Cornelius Janssens, 1585-1638, Bishop of

Ypres and the theologian who gave us

Jansenism

I am a big Saint Augustine fan.  I get kidded about this all the time, but then so is Benedict XVI.  Most conservative church people are disciples of Thomas Aquinas but Saint Thomas is just far too liberal for either the Pope or myself.  I always hear people complain that Augustine is just too “obsessed with sin,” like there’s something wrong with talking about sin.  Pop Theologians like Matthew Fox—whom I shudder referring to as a “theologian,” even a”pop” one, make that claim all the time.   I wonder if they have ever read Augustine—I mean other than a quck glance through the Confessions.  I will admit that at first read, the Confessions does sound pretty negative—but only at first read.  (I had to read the Confessions for five different courses in grad school—and that was at a secular university!   That just shows to go you how influential Augustine is for Western Thought!  Think about that you ‘Religion on Tap’ people.)  But when you read Augustine in depth—really get to what he is saying—he is not talking about sin at all.  Augustine is the Doctor Gratiae—the Doctor of Grace.  Augustine is obsessed with Grace and he talks about sin only because sin is the foil against which grace is visible.  You can never understand God’s Mercy and Love if you don’t give serious consideration to the subject of sin.  All of which is prelude to the ongoing debacle of Marcel Guarnizo, the suburban DC priest who refused communion to a woman because she is, according to him, “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin.”  (That is a quote from the infamous canon 915 which is used (or abused) to justify withholding communion from a variety of people ranging from those who vote for pro-choice politicians to grieving lesbians.) 

      Cornelius Janssens (1585-1638) was the Flemish bishop of Ypres in the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium).  Janssens was of an easily irritable personality, given to fits of temper and moodiness.  He was withdrawn and suspicious by nature, inclined to see the negative side of things.  In other words, he wasn’t a lot of fun at parties, not that he tried to be or would even go them if he could help it. (I know some of my friends are going to say: “hmmm. We know someone like that"; ‘curmudgeonly’ is the word one friend in particular uses.)   Janssens despised the Jesuits and their scholastic theology (yes, in the old days Jesuits were conservative Thomists) preferring the patristic approach, and he was particularly fond of Saint Augustine. (Well, yes, the shoe may fit, though I am by no means the scholar.)  In any event, Janssens wrote his magnum opus,  Augustinus, a summary of Augustinian thought.  Now, nobody ever has been able to write a summary of Augustine’s thought—even Augustine (who tried).  Augustine was a prolific writer and his thought was constantly evolving.  At the end of his life he wrote his Retractions to try to systematize his thought, but even he failed.  His work is simply too broad both in volume and scope to be put in a nice coherent and consistent précis.  What Janssens did was to write a brilliant theological work reflecting his (Janssens’) thought with references to the great Doctor of the Western Church.  Unfortunately he went a bit overboard on some of his ideas and the work was condemned and put on the Index of Forbidden Books.  But that is not to say that it didn’t have influence.  It had huge influence as one might expect a forbidden book to have.  Without wanting to oversimplify, Janssens basically devised a Catholic variation on Calvin.  It was certainly not what Janssens intended to do, but his anthropology was so negative, that is to say that his understanding of human nature was so depraved, that it basically reduced the human person to a pawn in the hand of a Sovereign God who might or might not choose to save it with no regard to the individual’s will.   

     Janssens’ name was lent to a heresy that in all truth has gone even far beyond what the dyspeptic bishop would ever have taught.  It attracted notable adherents, not least of all Blaise Pascal,  Angelique Arnauld and the nuns of Port-Royal-des-Champs, the Abbé de Saint Cyran, and others.  The Jesuits were the opponents of this heresy.  Though condemned by the Pope in 1653, Jansenism persisted to infect French seminaries and religious establishments up through the time of the Revolution.  And it came to America—not with the Irish of the mid-nineteenth century as is commonly said (though the Irish Church indeed was, and is, infected with the heresy) but with many (I am not saying all) the French émigré priests who fled the Revolution in 1789 and helped build the American Church.  It is often said that the American home of this heresy is Mount Saint Mary’s, Emmitsburg, which was founded by émigré priests.  While this is a great over simplification, many priests of the Diocese of Arlington VA, a diocese known for (some) clergy with a very narrow and not necessarily authentic interpretation of Church teaching, have been educated there.  Many Washington priests also have studied there, though whether Marcel Guarnizo is an alumnus or not I do now know.  And—to be balanced—many really fine priests who are knowledgeable in the faith and pastorally sensitive men have studied there.  

       One of the keys to understanding the basic flaw in Jansenism is that it does not see the world—and its inhabitants—as existing within the love of God.  The world is seen as fallen and not redeemed—those whom God has chosen for salvation are saved out of the world, not in it.  Creation is fatally flawed and anything to do with creation is an impediment to grace.  This leaves us with a negative understanding of human sexuality.  Sexual relations, even within marriage, are tainted by human concupiscence. Jansenism would say that marriage gives a permissible forum for sexual relations if they are restricted to narrow conditions—they must, for example, be used (only for) procreation.  All sexual acts must be open to the possibility of procreation.  The unitive element of sexual relations—increasing the intimacy of the spouses through the mutual exchange of physical pleasure—is not a constitutive part of the marriage act—for Jansenists—and indeed is sinful other than as a byproduct of the procreative element.  And even as a byproduct of the procreative element, the taking of pleasure in sex is wrong.  This will give us a very distorted view of marriage—certainly one incompatible with the scriptural roots of our Christian faith, especially those found in the Hebrew (Old Testament) tradition.

       Given such a “theology” of human sexuality we can see why Jansenists and Catholics influenced by the Jansenist heresy, would believe that those who forgo marriage for remaining single (and, of course, chaste), and especially those who consecrate themselves to a celibate lifestyle, are spiritually superior to those who must accommodate themselves to the married life.  Thus the religious and the clergy are “higher” than the married laity in the hierarchy of holiness.  This delusion is particularly dangerous as we have seen in the recent sex-abuse crisis, not that there is anything wrong in celibacy but rather that such an attitude encourages a psychological state in which human sexuality is buried away in the remote corners of one’s self-awareness, leaving an individual open to a denial of reality.  (See Blog Entry: History in the Making, Sex Abuse Crisis—Let’s Stop Telling Lies,  5/20/2011)

The idea that a priest has a responsibility to “safeguard” the Eucharist against an unworthy reception is not of itself a Jansenist doctrine though it does reflect a Jansenist view of the state of a soul.  Jansenists were preoccupied with making those sorts of judgments about both themselves and others whereas the mainline mystical tradition in Catholicism takes a more moderate approach.  I am teaching a course on Saint Teresa of Avila this semester and I am struck by how often Teresa speaks of being “unworthy,” but also what role that unworthiness plays in her spiritual life.   A consistent theme in Saint Teresa is humility and  by humility Teresa explains that the more advanced a soul is in grace, the more aware it is of its own unworthiness of God’s favor, yet this unworthiness does not make it back off from God but only approach God with deeper gratitude.  Teresa would not approve of a person receiving Holy Communion in what our Catholic Tradition calls Mortal Sin but neither is she hung up on “worthiness” and “unworthiness” in approaching Christ.  In fact, Teresa would be deeply grieved by a person in serious sin rather than preoccupied about their receiving Holy Communion.  This is what I find disconcerting in the current question.  Aside from the priest’s spiritual attitudes in refusing Holy Communion, what is the spiritual condition of those who are so anxious to keep others whom they judge—wisely or not—to be “unworthy” of the Eucharist from receiving?  The priest in this case might not be ("might" being the operative word) infected by Jansenism, but the howling chorus of those justifying his actions would certainly seem to be.  When I read the local blogs—“An Archdiocese of Washington DC Catholic” and “Restore DC Catholicism”—I pick up a sense of Jansenist infection—not just in this question but looking back through their archives.  These “Catholic Bloggers”  remind me of Henri Brémond's judgment of the Jansenists: "Before penetrating into the depth of the mind Jansenism ruins the peace, condition of all true religion.  Before making converts it makes partisans, sectarians, whom it fatally severs from the mystical currents of their time."

Altar Girls? A Question Once More? Only in Arlington

O c'mon, do you realy think the

gates of hell are going to prevail if

girls are allowed to serve at the

 altar?

The Diocese of Arlington has made the news again—it’s never good and this time downright foolish.  It seems that a local pastor, Father Michael Taylor, has decided to disallow girls from serving mass in his parish.  Almost two-thirds of the parishes of the diocese do not permit girls to serve mass despite Vatican assurances that there is nothing in Church law that prohibits it.  I really must admit that I am a bit baffled by this.  If we said that only white kids could serve at the altar we would see the arbitrary injustice involved but hey, it’s ok to discriminate against girls because we have a tradition that upholds that custom.  In Virginia they had a tradition that discriminated against blacks too, but fortunately that has been done away with, at least in the more visible situations.  Come to think of it though, how many black priests does the Diocese of Arlington have?  About as many as they have women priests, I would guess.  After all there is no law against ordaining blacks as long as they have the biological equipment that certifies a candidate as fit for ordination.  And that brings us to the crux of the problem in the Arlington Diocese.       It isn’t Father Taylor’s fault, at least not at the root.  I know Father Taylor.  When I lived in the DC area back about ten years ago I attended mass at the parish where he was the parochial vicar.  He is a sweet man.  He is the sort of priest you want for confession.  He is just good.  The problem is that he is also, well, to put it bluntly, stupid.  That’s ok, God doesn’t always choose the best and the brightest and—by the way—I do think that Father Taylor is among the best, just not among the brightest.  He could never grasp the big question but would always get hung up on some semi-relevant (at best) detail in any situation.  He tried so hard to do the right thing but would have a failure of moral courage because someone somewhere told him some obscure law or theological detail or papal whim (real or imagined) and without checking it out, he would make the wrong decision.  It was never from an uncaring heart, only from the confusion of super-ego and conscience.  And where were those super-ego tapes—those little “voices of authority” in one’s head coming from?  Well that is part of the problem in the Arlington Diocese too.  There is the magisterium of the Church  and then there is the shadow magisterium of a group of self-appointed mentors who have too long shaped the minds of many of the younger priests of that diocese, confirming them in ignorance and disinformation.  When Father Taylor would say some of the outrageous things he would say and I would ask him for his source it was always Father Fasano or Father McAfee, or Monsignor O’Brien or Father Pokorsky or someone else in the “Gang of Thirteen.”  Once when I was at the AAR convention I was having lunch with several professors from Saint Mary’s Seminary Emmitsburg, and in relating to them various stories about the Arlington clergy, I asked them—teasingly—what they were teaching up there at the Mount.  “O, they’re not learning that from us” I was assured.  Amidst laughter they told me “They have a special post-graduate program in the diocese where they bring in the ‘experts’.”    
      Much of the Arlington quagmire dates back to the episcopacy of John Keating (1983-1998).  Well actually the problem is rooted in the fact that the Arlington diocese, like all of us except the Blessed Virgin, was conceived in sin and born in iniquity, but we won’t go there in this entry.  John Richard Keating was a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago and had been, I believe, administrator of the Archdiocese between the death of Cardinal Cody and the appointment of Joseph Bernardin as Archbishop.  Bernardin knew he was on a very different page than Keating and so to remove him from power (he had been Vicar General prior to Cody’s death) without humiliating him, Keating was named the second Bishop of Arlington.  He reminds me of an eleventh century bishop of Reims in France, Manasses II (1096-1106), whose famous quote, describing the office to which he was called, was “This wouldn’t be a bad job if you didn’t have to sing Mass.”  Bishop Keating was an administrator, a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat.  He was a superb canon lawyer and responsible for introducing the “psychological maturity” argument into the annulment process.   He wasn’t a bad man, at least as far as anything I have heard.  He just wasn’t very religious.  Nine o’clock Sunday Morning would find him, most weeks, not in his cathedral but out on the links at the Washington Country Club.  After his death, a crypt was constructed in the cathedral to hold the remains of the Bishops of Arlington and Keating’s body was removed from the mausoleum at Fairfax Memorial Park where it had been temporarily entombed and properly put in the episcopal crypt.  The joke was circulated among the clergy of the diocese the following Easter that this had been the first Holy Week the Bishop had spent in his Cathedral.  While he would show up at the Cathedral for the Mass of the Chrism and the Easter Vigil, he would not permit baptisms and confirmations at the Vigil and would only allow the minimum number of Old Testament lessons so that the liturgy would not go over an hour and a half.  “This would not be such a bad job if you didn’t have to sing Mass.” 
     Bishop Keating was a great delegator of responsibility which is to his credit, but he seems not always to have followed up.  He really didn’t care much if individual priests or parishes were conforming to Church practice as long as they weren’t actually breaking any canons.  This led to a lot of idiosyncrasies in Arlington.  Some places had “Solemn High Masses” which were the (at the time required) Novus Ordo Rite but which were counterfeited with Deacons and “Subdeacons” and an ad apsidem posture to masquerade as the old Tridentine Solemn High Mass.  Birettas and cottas and even maniples were salvaged from closets and drawers, altar-rails were installed and kneeling for communion restored, and old time religion, Catholic style, became somewhat normative in the Arlington Diocese.    And when the clergy informed the bishop that should he permit girls to serve Mass as was being done in other dioceses, they were “outta here”—well, Keating was not one for confrontation and so “altar girls” were on the verboten list. 
     This preconciliar Shangri-la was bound to attract vocations from other dioceses where seminarians were afraid that they might not be permitted as priests to do the grocery shopping in their soutanes or required to take a Latin exam before being permitted to say Mass in the language.  There was a very enterprising vocation director, Father Jay Gould, who scoured seminaries around the country for men who would be thrilled to be part of this ‘50’s revival and for years Arlington had an abundance of vocations.  Conservatives in the diocese, clergy and laity alike, look back on the “Golden Days of Gould” when vocations abounded and cassocks were de rigueur.   A prominent Washington Archdiocesan Monsignor who had served as driver/Master of Ceremonies to the late Cardinal Hickey (Archbishop of Washington 1980-2000) told me that he had once ribbed the Cardinal saying: “What’s wrong with our Archdiocese?  Keating is ordaining twelve priests this year, you’re ordaining two.”  Hickey’s response to the disparity of vocations was “We don’t want the lawsuits.”   So much for screening.   
      All this is background to the issue of female altar boys in Arlington.  About five years ago, Bishop Loverde, the current bishop, lifted Bishop Keating’s ban, allowing pastors—with the advice of the Parish Pastoral Councils—to permit girls and women to serve Mass.  Rome had no problem with it; the Bishop had no problem with it.  But there are always those like Father Taylor, who know better.  I am not saying that sometimes priests and even lay folk don’t know better than bishops—or even the Pope.  History bears out the facts.  I am only saying that a smart priest doesn’t come into a parish and stir up a hornet’s nest over an issue as inconsequential as this one.  But then, as I began, while Father Taylor may be no less intelligent than many of his colleagues, he sure didn’t demonstrate street smarts, much less pastoral sagacity, here.