Our Whackadoodle and Friends: Not Catholic, Just Bizarre

Plenty of Room for Diversity in
the Church--but not all diversity
is legit  

 My last posting was a commentary on an article write by “a notable traditional Catholic Scholar” who affects the nom de plume of Benedict Constable. Le Seigneur Constable, to my reading, overplays his hand a bit in his wish to ban biological women (as differentiated from the more frilly-garbed transgendered clerical ones) from service at the altar.  I did point out that his ecclesiology, though perhaps having some credibility before Mystici Corporis (and certainly not since Lumen Gentium/Gaudium et Spes) is not in line with the current teaching of the Church, and his theology of the Sacrament of Orders is highly deficient even by pre-conciliar standards.  This is not to mention serious flaws in his Christian Anthropology and Christology.  But as I suggested, the even more basic problem is not with his theology but with his psycho-sexual self-understanding.   The gentleman displays some obvious discomfort of sharing space with women.  There could be multiple reasons for this; I won’t presume to guess which ones.  But what interests me in this posting is the reaction to his article and a subsequent one “Male-Female Symbolism in Liturgical Roles: Not Bizarre, Just Catholic.” 

Frankly, the sequel article made me somewhat uncomfortable in as that it reminded me of—though it was nowhere as beguilingly salacious as—a talk given years ago by Archbishop (later, when he was given one of the most undeserved red hats in the history of the Church, Cardinal) Stafford of Denver.  As I recall, the talk was reported in the National Catholic Reporter (aka Fishwrap, a name given it by the Krazies but one which I won’t dispute.  NCR to my mind is simply an latter-day ecclesial version of the William Randolph Hearst school of Yellow Journalism.  But that would be another series of posts) and quoted Stafford comparing the priest’s kissing of the altar at Mass with a husband performing cunnilingus (there is a word I never thought I would use in this blog) as foreplay to matrimonial lovemaking.  Now I have always been somewhat charmed by the adage that I once heard in a sermon that sacramentally a husband making love with his wife is to the sacrament of Matrimony what the priest celebrating the Eucharist with the people entrusted to his care is to the sacrament of Holy Orders.  I mean each act is somewhat at the center of the particular sacrament.  Nevertheless, after reading Stafford’s analogy I must admit that it was months before I felt it safe to go to Mass again and these twenty-some years later that image is still stuck, rather distastefully (if you will pardon the entendre) in my mind.  Symbols are most effective when they are employed without explanation or commentary.  And in any case, I am not sure that the various sexual symbolisms of either Cardinal Stafford or our dear Benedict Constable are inherent in the Eucharist or are the results of a somewhat overactive half Jungian/half Freudian imagination.  Maybe Mr. Constable is not alone and I too have my sexual hang-ups—most of us do to some extent or other—but when I go to Church I want to go to Church and not to some piece of theatre that is fraught with sexual undertones (if your are female) and overtones (if you are male.) (See, I do believe that the sexes are not the same.)  Let what operates in the subconscious remain in the subconscious; I am not one who wants to make Mass an occasion of sin for those whose hormones still rage. 

All that being said, what I really want to do in this blog, is to show how what the Right Honorable and Somewhat Pretentious Mr. Constable, a “noteworthy traditional Catholic Scholar,” says and what his audience hears are two very different things and while what the noted scholar writes can be amusing—perhaps even erotically so—what his audience is taking from it portends the ever widening cracks within the unity of the Church. 

Our dear Professor Kwasniewski, whom I think has been remiss in remaining in the wilds of Wyoming far too long, grasps the problem that I mentioned in my previous post—that B.C. sees lay liturgical ministers filling in for insufficient clergy rather than exercising their baptismal dignity—only Kwasniewski doesn’t see this as a problem.  But then, the good Cowboy Philosopher studied philosophy and not theology so what can one expect.    He writes:

Celeste, the way to reconcile your point and Constable's is simply to observe that whenever laymen are doing the readings, they are substituting for clerics. That's all they're doing. (The same goes for altar servers, who should, ideally, be instituted acolytes.) If we didn't have a huge shortage of clerics and if we had a better pastoral plan for the use of instituted lectors and acolytes, we wouldn't need to be always tapping on laymen's shoulders and having them fill in.

That being said, laymen are, as such, symbolically configurable to Christ the High Priest, in a way that laywomen are not -- and that makes a huge different for liturgy, which is a language of symbols.

His “clerical error” is repeated by one Romulus Charles Lewis.

If you are bringing up female competence and spunk and devotion, I can only agree that you are not getting the explanations. Our Lord is the Bridegroom. Women cannot stand as symbols of this. Because the only indispensable person in the celebration of Mass is the a priest, other persons active in the sanctuary are there only as additional hands and feet -- extensions of his body, so to speak. (The Italian word for altar boy is "chierichetto" -- a little cleric). Female servers at Mass obscure and de-signify the maleness of the priest-celebrant.

I love the name Romulus, don’t you?  Why didn’t my parents think of naming me Romulus.  Or Benedict.  Or Euston. Or Archibald.   Great names, all.    Raised by wolves, Romulus was; maybe that was the reason the name was chosen. 

And then there is Jared Clark.  That is another great name. Jared.  I also life Geoffrey, but only if it is Geoff and not Jeff.  Vulgar Americanization, Jeffrey. 

I am aware that this practice is currently licit, and I'm not actually all that concerned with appearances. It's not the bad result that women lectors and altar girls lead some to think priestesses are a real possibility (I am not a consequentialist; if that were the core of my objection, I'd just be calling for better catechesis), but that it goes against the nature of the sanctuary, wherein all liturgical action is priestly. The fact that sanctuary=priestly seems strange is one of the biggest problems in the Church today.

If taking a small step towards correcting this error by requiring a seminarian, or a non-seminarian instituted lector, or another man to read the readings would be seen as sexist....oh well. Still not a consequentialist :P

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET PEOPLE TO READ LUMEN GENTIUM!!! And Sacroscanctum Concilium.  Lectors and acolytes (much less ordinary readers and Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist, and Altar Servers et al.) are not standing in for ordained clergy!!!  They are there by right and duty of Baptism!!! Baptism is the most important of the Seven Sacraments and yet perhaps the least appreciated.  

But then there are the ‘oi polloi, the great unwashed who act not so much out of (bad) theology as about a rejection of everything connected with the Second Vatican Council for the sake of rejecting everything connected with the Second Vatican Council. And so, one Michael Dowd writes: 

Yes, on no female lectors. And no female altar servers, either. And no communion in the hand. And forget about communion under two specials (drop the cup). And turn the priest around to lead, not face the people. Do these all these things and we are off to a good start to celebrating Mass as it should be. : God is there, we need to show proper respect which leads to love. That's what the show is all about folks!

OK, no theology here.  Keep moving on.  Nothing to see.  Just put all the toys back in the toy box and let the nursery look like the night Tinkerbelle came and led the children off to a magical fantasyland.  Pure “restorationism” without a hint of theology.  I can deal with those whose faulty theology leads them to bad liturgical practice, but when it is just this sort of thoughtless demand that the Church be refashioned to their particular taste I cannot help but think of the adage of Aristophanes:

‘Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.’

And speaking of that sort of vacuous a-theological rhetoric we have one Augustine Thomas (sounds like another Anglophile wannabe) who just dismisses Conciliar Catholicism as a perfidious devolution into an insultingly negative caricature of Protestantism   

Most Catholics who even still bother to go to church have been Protestantized in their beliefs of what the Mass, or should I say the "worship service", is.

And then, in a classic example of the fire hydrant pissing on the dog, Augustine Thomas goes on to say that it is the Vatican II crowd that are given to wildly illogical and inherent falsification of the truth:

Don't expect reason from Novus Ordo Catholics. 


They're like leftists. They don't trade in logic. They use any deception or dishonesty necessary to lead the majority astray and then use that majority to silence the opposition, no matter how wrong they are.

Mr. Thomas gives no data to support his thesis that contemporary Catholics have been “Protestantized” in their beliefs and again without any examples goes on claim that supporters of the Reforms of Vatican II resort to deception and dishonesty in advancing reform.  Give examples.  Back up your claim with evidence.  I would hardly dismiss so cavalierly the scholarship of generations of theologians and historians like Chenu and Jungmann and Dix and Bea and Congar and Bouyer and Schillebeeckx and the other brains behind Vatican II. 

But there is one “lwhite”  (perhaps Lily White) who redefines “orthodoxy” and attacks the work of John Saward to strike at two of the theological architects of the   Council, Hans Urs von Balthasar  and Henri de Lubac, both of whom were made Cardinals in their old age by John Paul II, hardly a devotee of Modernism. 

Fr. John Saward, called the "Balthasar of the English-speaking world" is not someone who is a trusted source for Catholic orthodoxy. Balthasar's writings are full of heresies and should be avoided by faithful Catholics.
It was Hans Urs Von Balthasar's writings that became the primary source of confusion in Catholic philosophy and theology. He carried further Henri de Lubac's infection of Modernism into the Church who introduced the principle of self-contradiction into the very heart of truth.


So what we have following Benedict Constable’s just bizarre, not Catholic argument against women reading in the liturgy or taking any other active role that requires their presence in the area surrounding the altar, are two diverse camps.  One camp, typified by Constable himself, rejects the ecclesiology put forth in the Second Vatican Council which recognizes the priestly character of the baptized (distinct from the priestly character unique to those ordained to the presbyterate or episcopate) and empowers every baptized individual, regardless of sex, to liturgical ministries not reserved to the ordained.   The other camp, without any theological rationale, have simply rejected the Conciliar and post-Conciliar developments in the Church out of hand and are equating authentic Catholicism with a return to the pre-Conciliar status quo.

Both these stances are not only warning signs of trouble to come but are dangerous in themselves as they represent an increasing polarizing splintering of the faith, and it will ultimately become impossible for Conciliar and non-Conciliar Catholics to remain united in the same Church.  This is not to say that there is no room for legitimate diversity in the Church.  The Eastern Church not only has a different discipline regarding celibacy, for example, and different liturgical traditions, but also differs from the Western Church on significant doctrines such as purgatory and original sin.  There is, however, a mutual respect for the varying rites and an agreement to let charity trump doctrinal disagreements and permit a certain unresolved ambiguity of belief.  What we see between the Conciliar and non-Conciliar Catholics is not merely a divergence of theological models, but a rejection of authority whether it be the authority of the reigning pope, the authority of his predecessors who approved the various liturgical changes, or the authority of the Council which established the theological framework against which the non-Conciliar Catholics are rebelling.  

Years ago I was at a seminar conducted by the Reverend Martin Marty, a Lutheran and distinguished Church historian.  I recall Dr. Marty saying that the Roman (Catholic) Church has shown itself through the centuries willing to tolerate a huge amount of doctrinal diversion but it is never willing, for a moment, to tolerate a challenge to its authority.  As a historian myself I have come to see that.  Ultimately the non-Conciliar Catholics, whether they be Bishop Fellay and his Society of Saint Pius X or the more home spun variety such as Benedict Constable and Augustine Thomas and Michael Dowd and Jared and Romulus and all the rest will have to submit to the authority of the Council and the Conciliar Popes or they will find themselves on the wrong side of the Church Door.   

By George 2

Leo XIII, the Pope who introduced the

Catholic Church to modernity

Weigel lays the foundation for his book by claiming—and rightly—that Leo XIII breaks the continuity of what Weigel calls “Counter-Reformation Catholicism” which he characterizes as the marriage of catechetical instruction with devotional piety.  I think this is another genius insight—both Leo’s radical turn towards modernity from the defensive-mode Catholicism that preceded him and the description of pre-Leonine Catholicism as a combination of catechism and devotions.  However, what raises my suspicions of Weigel and I seeing things very differentlyis the term “Counter –Reformation.”  Historians are very divided on the precise nature of the program of Church Reform in the sixteenth-century.  There are those Catholic historians who see Ignatius and the Society of Jesus, Philip Neri and the Oratory, the Theatines, Mary Ward, Charles Borromeo and the Council of Trent all as a reaction to Luther and Calvin—thus “Counter-Reformation.”  I belong to the other school of thought that looks through a wider lens and sees the above in the context of Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spanish Reformation, the Fifth Lateran Council, Desiderius Erasmus, Dean Colet, Teresa of Avila, the Capuchins, the Ursulines, and call it “The Catholic Reformation.”  The issue is whether sixteenth-century Reform of the Church came about only because of Luther and the Protestant Reformers or was there a genuine movement towards Reform in the Church that happened independently of—and had even begun previously to—Luther and his contemporaries?  Indeed, there is even the question whether Luther and others were even part of that same impetus for Reform and their break with the Catholic Church due to the Catholic Reform proceeding too slowly for their little patience?  This question of “Catholic Reformation” or “Counter-Reformation” has serious implications for ecclesiology and for ecumenism and while it can never be resolved one way or the other, it needs to be discussed, argued, and understood.  Weigel and I obviously see the issue of Catholic Reformation/Counter Reformation from very different perspectives and that will undoubtedly play itself out as I delve further into his book. 
That being said—and remember I think his identification of Leo XIII as the Pope who breaks the train of this Counter Reformation (or Catholic Reformation) Catholicism with its emphasis on catechism and piety, is sheer genius—I also think he is right on with the unsuitability of this catechism and rosary Catholicism for the modern age.  (Which is not to say that the catechism, much less the rosary, doesn’t have a place in contemporary Catholicism—only that we have to have a much more deeply rooted and more intellectually sophisticated faith if we are to be anything more than religious idiosyncratists.) 
Weigel makes the argument that both the “traditional Catholics” (whom I usually refer to as “neo-trads” because the traditions by which they identify themselves are not part of the Tradition/Deposit of Faith but later customs and pieties) and the “progressives” by which term he means the Catholic-Lite variety we so often find today reading the NCR or going to dour Voice of the Faithful covens held in the borrowed Presbyterian basements, cannot move beyond the “rule-based catechetical devotional Catholicism.”  Weigel claims that the one group wants to “tighten up and ratchet down the rules;” the other wants to “loosen the bolts in the name of openness or compassion.” For Weigel—and I agree—both groups are wrong because the rules-catechism-piety type religion is waiting to catch a train that left the station more than a century ago when Leo began serious engagement with the social complexities of the modern world. For the neo-trads: you can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube.  And for the happy-clappies—why remodel a house that no one is interested in living in any more?  Whichever end of the spectrum from which you are coming: we need something new.  That something new Weigel calls “Evangelical Catholicism”—a faith rooted in taking the Word of God to heart in our daily lives and nourishing ourselves with a full sacramental life in the Church.  So far I am with him.  However—as I look ahead, I see some stormy seas and realize that we have some very different ideas of how the barque of Peter should set these sails of Word and Sacrament. I also can’t help but wonder if George is doing a bait and switch—talking the new game but offering his reader the same old same old.  I am seeing hints that beneath the “Evangelical”
 language there is little more than catechism and rosary beads. 

The Dream That Has Turned to a Nightmare

Archbishop of Boston,Cardinal Sean O'Malley 

greets President Barack Obama at the Funeral

of Senator Ted Kennedy in 2009.

Sean Winters, a writer for the liberal-oriented National Catholic Reporter wrote a scathing attack on the Obama Administration last week over the decision not to exempt Catholic educational and health-care institutions from the mandate to provide employees with insurance coverage for abortions, sterilizations, and contraceptives including abortifacients.  Winters wrote: 

President Barack Obama lost my vote yesterday when he declined to expand the exceedingly narrow conscience exemptions proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again.

Winters is one of the many Catholic liberals whose enchantment with the Obama presidency has “hit the wall” as they have realized that the candidate and Administration they went out on a limb to support has betrayed them.  Catholics have probably not voted as a bloc since the 1960 campaign that put John F. Kennedy in the White House as the first Catholic President.  Certainly by the 1972 election the liberal/conservative split in the Church was reflected in the political choices that Catholics made in the polls with liberals going for Humphrey and conservatives going for Nixon.  The situation became even more divisive with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision establishing constitutional protection for a woman’s “choice” in opting for abortion in an unwanted pregnancy.  By 1980 Republicans had realized that the abortion issue could be used to political advantage in weaning Catholics away from their traditional alliance to the Democratic Party.  Ronald Reagan and the Bushes promised us the sky when it came to ending abortion while they delivered very little.  Yet the gradual shift of many Catholics to the GOP was not so much about “the Right to Life” as it reflected the emergence of American Catholics from labor to management level jobs and from working class to professional class.  As Catholics became more and more educated and Middle Class, and as Democrats moved from being the party of Labor to the party of suburban liberals the political face of American Catholicism began to shift as well.  “We have worked hard,” many thought, “and we want to keep what we have—let those behind us work to get here like we have worked.”   Yet there was a faithful cadre of Catholics left in the Democratic Party.   Mostly they were intellectuals, or at least committed Catholics who took their faith seriously and were familiar with the long tradition of social encyclicals and they could not bring themselves to embrace a party whose economic theories are at such variance with the Catholic Tradition.  Now this group has become disillusioned.  Winters writes:

I accuse you, Mr. President, of treating shamefully those Catholics who went out on a limb to support you. Do tell, Mr. President, how many bullets have the people at Planned Parenthood taken for you? Sr. Carol Keehan, Father Larry Snyder, Father John Jenkins, these people have scars to show for their willingness to work with you, to support you on your tough political fights. Is this the way you treat people who went to the mat for you?

There will be few true-blue Catholics left in the Obama camp but the President need not worry.  I doubt those Catholics will go running to Mitt Romney.  They recoil in horror at Newt.  Santorum, they think, is from another planet all together, and they can’t recognize his Latin Mass Catholicism  as anything other than the ecclesial equivalent of the embalmed (and poorly embalmed) remains of Pope Pacelli.  (See blog entry for April 14, 2011.)   Where will they go in November?  They will be like homeless ghosts wandering in the political underworld seeking some provisional shelter where they might alight long enough to cast their spectral -vote for some obscure pale shadow-candidate of some phantom sixth party who champions all that is just, all that is iconic, all that is virtuous—someone who can replace Obama, not in the White House for sure, but on that pedestal they had constructed for him in their own temple of Feel-Good-American Civil Catholicism.  Obama has let us down But that is our fault not his.  He is intelligent and articulate but he never was the Angel of Democratic Idealism we projected him to be.  We made him into something no man could be.  I have that Jansenist streak that runs through us American Catholics, especially those of us who pretend to a pharisaical orthodoxy, and I know in my heart that no man is pure and God alone is holy.  It just took us three years to realize that Barack is made from the common mud from which God rolled out you and me. 

Roots of the Reformation IX: danger signs of future Reformations.

Troops in Iraq receive Holy Communion at Christmas Mass
 Such situations are often the occasion where Protestant
Christians find themselves welcome to receive Holy Communon

I am including the following posting in my Roots of the Reformation series because I think the issues addressed here might well  be among the roots of the next Reformation.  Most of what I am dealing with in this series is not simply the story of Reformations past—but I am hopeful that you can recognize that they parallel some contemporary situations and could well be apparitions of Reformations-yet-to-come. 

I don’t normally read The National Catholic Reporter for the same reason I don’t read The Wanderer, The National Catholic Register, or most diocesan newspapers.  They are not newspapers.  They’re polemical pamphlets promoting a particular point of view—liberal or conservative—to which they will sacrifice not only objectivity but even factual truth.  That being said, I did recently pick up a copy of the NCR and found it, for the most part, as partisan as I had long thought it.  (I can’t say always because there was a time in the late sixties and early seventies I enjoyed it quite a bit and thought it reliable.  That may have been before I learned to think critically, or perhaps if I searched the archives, the paper itself had more to offer.)  I found two articles that gave me something to think about.  One was by Jamie Manson and discussed “how to lose Catholics and alienate people.”  The other referred to a conference at Marquette University Law School where Archbishop Diarmud Martin (Dublin, Ireland), Bishop Blase Cupich (Spokane, Washington) and several priests spoke about how a “culture of clericalism” has fostered the sex abuse crisis and hindered the ability of the Church to effectively recover and repair the damage—both to victims and itself—that the numerous instances of clerical sexual abuse have caused. 

The two topics—alienation of the faithful and the sex-abuse crisis—overlap but are two distinct issues.  There can be no doubt that one of the major factors in many people being disillusioned and disheartened with their Catholic faith is not only the numerous instances of sexual abuse by clergy, religious, and lay ministers in the Church but even more by the dreadful ways in which abuse cases have been handled over the years—and in some cases continue to be handled. (The same edition of the NCR said that there are 55 dioceses in the United States that are not complying with the protocols the bishops set for themselves in 2002—The Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.)  At the same time, there are many more reasons why increasing numbers of Catholics are becoming discouraged—and alienated—in the practice of their faith.  Estimates claim that there are more the twenty-five million Americans who identify themselves as “former Catholics” (as distinguished from non-practicing Catholics), making ex-Catholics the second largest religious denomination in the Country, second only to Catholics (practicing and non-practicing, estimated to be 75 million).   It would be interesting to reflect somewhat on these two articles. 

Ms. Manson attributes alienation from the Church over the question of exclusion from Holy Communion.  There are many who are not permitted Holy Communion in the Catholic Church.  Indeed, more are forbidden the Eucharist than are welcome to it when you consider that, at least under ordinary circumstances, only those who have formal membership in the Catholic Church are welcome to receive Holy Communion.  (There are some limited circumstances when Protestants and other Christians can receive; these circumstances are largely unknown and, at least in the United States, almost always stingily applied when known).  In addition to being Catholic, one who wishes to come to the Eucharist must be “in the State of Grace,” that is they must not be conscious of having committed a grave sin and not (yet) having received sacramental absolution.  Catholics living together without benefit of clergy, those in a marriage not “blessed” by the Church, those in same-sex unions or the unmarried practicing sex—heterosexual or homosexual—are all prohibited from receiving the Eucharist.  Abortion is another block to receiving the Eucharist—indeed it not only bars one from the Eucharist but imposes excommunication on them.  Some would also say that voting for a politician or a political agenda that supports legalized abortion or would establish the legality of same-sex marriage would also excluded one from Holy Communion.  Sins outside the genus of sex don’t seem to incur this prohibition, at least in the popular understanding or from most pulpits.  It seems that in the eyes of many Catholics a sin can’t be mortal unless it is sexual. We certainly don’t talk of excluding from Holy Communion politicians or members of the judiciary who deviate on the conservative side from Church teaching.  

Our Catholic faith has a long tradition of requiring a scrupulous examination of conscience and sacramental confession before the reception of Holy Communion.  (Technically confession is only required before Holy Communion when the prospective communicant is guilty of “grave” or “mortal” sin.)  For the most part that seems to go by the wayside these days.  There are those who, reckoning themselves to be in good conscience, ignore Church laws and come to Communion blissfully unaware (or unacknowledging) of their moral failures .  And there are those—actually the majority—who simply come to mass rarely, if at all, to avoid the situation where they are left sitting in the pews while everyone around them goes to communion.  It is uncomfortable to sit back while everyone else goes forward.  I know.  When I am at Mass with my Methodist sister-in-law—who patiently accepts the fact that she is unwelcome at the Lord’s Table simply because she is a Methodist—I sit with her in the pews.  There is more than one way to be in Communion with Christ; sharing the loneliness of those members of his Body who must stand back is one of the alternative ways.     

Not coming to Holy Communion has not always been as uncomfortable a plight as it has become these more recent years.  Fifty years ago fewer Catholics went to communion.  Those who planned to receive went to early mass; those attending later mass rarely went to communion.  With each later hour, the number of communicants drastically fell.  The sinner and the Methodist need not have felt so alone.  This was because the communion fast made it difficult to wait until ten or eleven o’clock, much less noon mass.  Perhaps we need to add non-Eucharistic worship-Morning Prayer, for example—to our Sunday Services to accommodate those who want to be part of the Community of the Faithful and worship God but who find not being able to come to communion too difficult to bear.  This is not as revolutionary as it sounds.  Morning Prayer was long a part of the Sunday (and even daily)   liturgies in Catholic churches.  Moreover, in the Eastern tradition—both Catholic and Orthodox—those who attend “Orthos” (Matins) or Vespers fulfill their canonical obligation for Sunday Worship. 

Keeping people away from church, or making them uncomfortable once they are there, is no way to bring them back to God and to rectify their lives.  Nor is it consistent with the teachings and practice of Jesus in the Gospel.  Maybe it is time to look back into our tradition and find a way to make all welcome—if not at the table, at least in the household. 

The clericalism topic—maybe next time.