Back To The Bishops Who Forgot They Were Apostles

Cardinal Bonzano kneeling before the outdoor

altar at Soldier Field during the 1926 Eucharistic

Congress

Another great prince of the Church was Cardinal George Mundelein, Archbishop of Chicago from 1916 until his death in 1939.  Mundelein was born in a Middle Class family of German parentage in Manhattan in 1872.  He attended Manhattan College before entering Saint Vincent’s Seminary in Latrobe and then going on to the Pontifical Urban College in Rome.  He was ordained to the priesthood in 1895 and named an auxiliary bishop of Brooklyn in 1909. 

Mundelein was named Archbishop of Chicago in December 1915 and installed the following February.  At that time he was the youngest American Archbishop, but also one of the most capable administrators.  Despite the restrictions of war-time economy (World War I) he was able to lay the foundations of economic administration that would permit a tremendous expansion of the Archdiocese even during the years of the great depression which lay ahead.  In 1924 Pius XI named Mundelein to the College of Cardinals—the first American Cardinal west of the Alleghany Mountains.  Returning from Rome with his red hat, Mundelein was given an exceptional civic reception in Chicago.  Arriving by special train from New York, the new Cardinal was greeted by the Mayor and members of the city council who escorted him to his cathedral in a parade with marching bands.  The cardinal’s limousine was emblazoned with his Coat of Arms and escorted by Chicago’s finest walking alongside.  At the Cathedral the Cardinal presided at a service of thanksgiving before proceeding to a reception for five thousand guests. 

Mundelein did everything on this scale and his magnificence made quite an impression on Chicago, but his crowning achievement was the construction of an opulent campus for  his new seminary and as a site for an international gathering of Catholic prelates and laity planned for 1926. 

In 1844 the State of Illinois had chartered a Catholic College at the request of Bishop William J. Quarter.  The school was meant primarily for the education of future clergy but the financial burden proved insupportable and the school closed in 1866.  Mundelein revived it in 1921 and situated it on the campus of a failed experimental educational institution in Area, Il—a village whose name was changed in 1925 to Mundelein in honor of the Cardinal.  Cardinal Mundelein spared no expense in building the campus of his new seminary.  A magnificent chapel—larger than many parish churches and built in a distinctly American Architectural style—was flanked by a huge library to the one side and a matching administration building and faculty residence on the other.  The philosophy wing stretched out the campus to one end, the theology to the other, all in perfect symmetry around the central chapel.  The campus also contains a gymnasium and theatre as well as a golf course.  Running down from the chapel  to an artificial lake are flights of stairs. The lake is the center point of the campus.  Three large piers reach out into the lake, the larger center one directly below the chapel with the two smaller ones flanking it.  The entire campus was designed as the location for the 1926 Eucharistic Congress Mundelein hosted in Chicago. 

Nothing bespeaks Mundelein’s princely tastes like the 1926 Eucharistic Congress.  Mundelein met Cardinal Bonzano, the papal legate, in New York and escorted him and Cardinals O’Donnell of Armagh (Ireland), Hayes of New York, Charost of Rennes, Reig y Casanova of Toledo (Spain), Du Bois of Paris, von Faulhaber of Munich, Piffl of Vienna, and Czernoch of Esztergom (Hungary) back to Chicago.  Each of the Cardinals had his own private Pullman car for himself and his entourage, painted Cardinal red and decorated with his coat of arms.  The train made a grand sweep of the Catholic Northeast—Utica, Syaracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo where it was greeted by throngs of devout Catholics. On the morning of Thursday, June 17^th, The train arrived at Chicago’s Park Row station on Michigan Avenue from which the Cardinals were taken in parade to Soldier Field for a Mass with over a half-million people present. 

Mundelein’s triumph was resented by Cardinal O’Connell of Boston who, though he had to be present, refused a place on the Cardinal’s train and instead came from Boston by steamer across the great lakes.  In full Cardinal’s regalia, he led 500 pilgrims from Boston off the ship to the celebrations. 

The entire Congress was a meant to be—and was—a triumph of Catholicism over the dominant American Democratic Protestant culture. For a week, Chicago was flooded with the scarlets and purples and magentas of Cardinals, bishops, and monsignors in their finery.  The final ceremony, held at Mundelein’s new seminary with a procession around the lake and Solemn Benediction being given to the crowd of one million from the central pier below the seminary chapel was perhaps the most outrageously extravagant piece of liturgical theater in this country’s history—a sort of Catholic precursor to the dramatic Nuremburg rallies of the third Reich.  The cost of the entire event will never be known and certainly today could never be duplicated.  I am not sure what Jesus would have thought of this, but in many ways Mundelein, while over the top by today’s standards, was, in his own time, an effective evangelist.  First of all it must be remembered that he built Chicago’s Catholic Charities, the largest charitable institution in the City of Chicago.  He had a Saint Vincent de Paul association established in every parish.  He built a Catholic School system that provided both immigrant and American children a quality education that afforded them a chance to break out of poverty and into the Middle Class.  He built a network of Catholic hospitals and health-care institutions that ministered to all Chicagoans, regardless of religious affiliation. 

Mundelein was a political liberal and strong supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.  He was a good balance to the autocratic Cardinal O’Connell of Boston—with whom he had a rivalry and contest for power that was anything but friendly.  Mundelein took on the infamous Father Coughlin when Coughlin began using his radio pulpit to push anti-semitism.  And Mundelein famously referred to Adolph Hitler as “an Austrian paper-hanger, and not a good one at that.”  To a great extent his princely style enhanced his public presence and enabled  him to wield the sort of power he needed to accomplish the good that he did.  He created a mystique of power around himself that awed Catholic and non-Catholic alike.  It would not work today, indeed today would be a scandal, but we cannot judge people in the past by today’s standards.  In the end, I am a bit nonplussed by George Mundelein.  I find that I can’t respect him for his style, but neither can I judge him for his accomplishments.  He is a curiosity from an age that I am glad has passed but have to acknowledge for the successes of its own day.  

When Bishops Forgot They Were Apostles, Resumed

The Mausoleum Chapel that had been the tomb

of Cardinal William O'Connell before his remains

were expelled from what is now Boston College

grounds.

  Well, I guess the Pope Francis is going to “profane” the Holy Thursday Mass again this year by indiscriminately washing the feet of men and those lesser people we call "women" as well.  O well.  “The old order passeth away and giveth place unto the new.”  But we aren’t going to go there, other than giving a shout-out to the Holy Father for letting us know that some rules are just stupid and should be treated as such.  Are you listening, Bishop Morlino?   Probably not.  If bishops listened we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now.  Of course, on the one hand Archbishop Gregory listened; Archbishop Myers apparently has not which brings us back to our topic of Bishops living like princes. 
I left off half-way through the saga of William Cardinal O’Connell.  I had already mentioned his palatial Italian Renaissance villa in Brighton which he built for himself and his successors and which Cardinal O’Malley ironically had to sell off to pay the debts incurred by the malfeasance of his predecessor, Cardinal Law, in handling matters of sexual abuse.    But there is so much more to the O’Connell story that I am not ready to move on. 
When it comes to irony, my favorite O’Connell story is irony’s payback to one of the most mean-spirited acts of cold revenge that I have ever encountered.  Remember that I mentioned in a previous posting about O’Connell that he had been expelled from St. Charles Seminary in Ellicott City MD by the Sulpician Fathers who ran the seminary?  They determined that he was “not fit” for the priesthood—an euphemism that generally meant he was discovered to be sexually inappropriate with other members of the seminary community.   (It could mean other things but as O’Connell’s history will indicate, the usual meaning is the more probable.  O’Connell certainly did not suffer from academic limitations or from health issues, the other reasons often given for dismissal, but not usually under the ambiguous banner of “not fit.” )  In any event O’Connell went on to complete his college work at Boston College and then re-entered studies for the priesthood in the Boston Archdiocese.  He did not study at the Boston seminary of St. John’s—which was run by those picky Sulpicians who had cast him once before into the outer darkness—but went on to the North American College in Rome.  Eventually he ended up as Rector of the North American and then returned to the States first as Bishop of Portland MA and then as Coadjutor Archbishop of Boston.  O’Connell took over the diocese in 1907 and in 1911 had his revenge on the Sulpicians—ordering them out of St. John’s seminary.   What makes the story really great—and gives us an insight into the soul of this Prince of the Church—is that he told the Sulpicians to “get out, and take your dead with you.”  The Sulpicians had to dis-inter their deceased confreres from the seminary cemetery and arrange for their reburial outside the Archdiocese of Boston. 
Now for the irony.  When Cardinal O’Malley sold the Cardinal’s residence to Boston College as part of BC’s campus expansion, there was an issue about a small chapel on the grounds.  Cardinal O’Connell had not wanted to be buried in the Cathedral crypt along with the other Bishops/Archbishops of Boston and constructed a mortuary chapel on his palace grounds.  Boston College announced that they didn’t care to have the Cardinal buried on their newly acquired property and so O’Connell—like the Sulpicians whose mortal rest he had disturbed—was dug up and moved.  His new grave is in the seminary from which he had the Sulps carted away.  Even Cardinals are subject to karma.     Maybe expecially subject to karma.
There is much more to tell of this prince.   O’Connell was to prove a major embarrassment to the Church over the years of his Cardinaliate. His nephew, a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, was aware of the Cardinals’ homosexual affair with a married judge and used the knowledge to cover his own embezzlement of funds from the Archdiocese to support a secret wife. O’Connell had made the nephew, a Monsignor James O’Connell, chancellor of the Archdiocese, a position which gave him access to diocesan monies. The nephew secretly married a woman in Ohio in 1913. O’Connell’s secret was safe as long as Merry del Val was running the Vatican. Merry del Val fell from power with the death of Pius X in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I.  During the War years there was little communication between the American Church and Italy because of the disruptions of war and the Pope, Benedict XV, was preoccupied in trying to bring about a peace, but O’Connell’s injudicious behavior would come back to haunt him.  In 1922 when confronted about his nephew, O’Connell lied to the newly elected Pius XI—and was caught in the lie—which sealed his fall from influence in Rome.  (Pius was an inveterate foe of Merry del Val and the Spanish Cardinal’s influence came to an end with Pius’ election.)  O’Connell still had great power in the American Church,  however, where he continued to exercise a bullying influence over the other bishops especially after the death of Cardinal Gibbons in 1921. O’Connell found an unholy ally in Cardinal Denis Dougherty of Philadelphia in attempts to suppress the emergence of a national bishop’s conference. There had been the National Catholic War Council, organized in 1917 under the auspices of Cardinal Gibbons, to coordinate an American Catholic response to the social needs created by World War I.  O’Connell and Dougherty wanted this body disbanded as soon as the war was over but fortunately the Gibbons party outmaneuvered them and established the National Catholic Welfare Council to succeed the National Catholic War Council.  Gibbons knew he was an old man and that O’Connell was just itching to step into his place as leader of the American hierarchy—and he knew as well that O’Connell’s agenda and style would be very different from the Americanist and democratic style which he, Gibbons, used in consulting with the other bishops.  O’Connell and Dougherty, in Rome for the conclave that elected Pius XI in 1922, obtained a decree suppressing the NCWC, but with the help of Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri (another Merry del Val opponent), the Executive Committee of the NCWC won a delay on enforcing the decree while they polled the American bishops about their desire to continue with a national conference.  O’Connell protested to Rome that this “plebiscite” was just proof that the American Church had been taken over by “Democracy, Presbyterianism, and Congregationalism.”  (So much for  his claim that “the Puritan had passed.”  Apparently the Puritan [Congregationalist] had simply become a Catholic and the sort of Catholic that O’Connell didn’t want.) 
O’Connell and Dougherty believed their position as Cardinals should have given them authority over the other bishops and rendering any sort of consultative body superfluous.   As I said, however, O’Connell’s stock was low in Rome and he lost the case.  The NCWC continued and its successor nowadays is the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops—still the bête noire of the Catholic wing-nuts. 

Disappointed Dreams

John XXIII convoking the Second

Vatican Council, Basilica of Saint

Paul outside the Walls, January 25,

1959

55 years ago today Pope John XXIII made the surprise announcement that he was convoking the Second Vatican Council.  People had long presumed that with the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870’s, councils were redundant—there was no need for a Council when the pope “could do it all.”  But John had other things in mind—a veritable revolution in Catholicism that would throw off four centuries of fossilized and moribund stagnation that had locked Catholicism into an anachronistic curiosity that was no longer a credible witness of the Gospel with which its Master had entrusted it to proclaim. 
I wonder what Good Pope John would think today as he looks from heaven on the wreckage of his Council.  While John certainly had no idea—or intention—that the Council would make such radical changes as it did to the liturgy, he had great hopes for how it would alter its relationship to the world around it—and in particular how it would work to restore the unity of Christendom to that there might be one flock and one Shepherd.  (Notice the capital “S” in the word shepherd—denoting that Christ is that one shepherd.)   After such a good beginning at the Council and for sometime afterward, we have allowed the ecumenical movement to become a train wreck. 
Some are inclined to blame this fiasco on the decision of various Reformed and Evangelical Churches to ordain women.  (Notice, I am using the term “Churches,” something the Vatican eschews in favor of the insulting “ecclesial communities.”)   Others do not see how we can maintain an open dialogue with Christian Churches that do not share our views on abortion or on same-sex relationships.  But we Catholics have taken disagreement and chosen to make it disagreeable.  We have all but retrenched into the “unconditional surrender” approach to ecumenism of Pius XI and Mortalium Animos which the Council had so dramatically overturned.
On this feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul let us ask Christ to send the Holy Spirit to bend our stubborn hearts and will, to melt the frozen, and warm the chill that the work of this Council may revive and that the Church may be given shepherds who never lose sight that the flock is Christ’s and not theirs. 

Christ The King

The Battle of the Vendée:

“Henri de La Rochejacquelein

at the Battle of Cholet in 1793”

by Paul-Emile  Boutigny

During the French Revolution there was a reaction to the violence and the extremes of republicanism by royalists in the Vendée region of France where the people rallied to the defense of the Church.  Relative to the rest of France this area is still more strongly Catholic than the more secularized regions around the capital.  The Catholic Royalists bore a motto on their banners—Dieu Le Roi—God is the King. 
Also during the French Revolution the Carmelite nuns of Compiegne, ardent royalists as were most of the French Carmelites, offered themselves as Victims of the Divine Justice to end the Reign of Terror.  In fact, their martyrdom at Paris on July 17, 1794 came just ten days before the end of the ten month Terror and has been credited by Catholic sources as the reason for the end of this bloodiest period of the Revolution.  The nuns, as royalists, had been particularly devoted to the Infant King (Infant of Prague), a traditional Carmelite devotion.
The Catholic Church suffered terrible losses—of personnel, of property, and of power—not only in the Revolution but in the subsequent development of history.  The historic alliance of “Throne and Altar” which had prevailed since Constantine’s recognition of the Church in 312-313 was effectively broken by the secularization of the Revolution and has never been successfully restored.  For brief periods of time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Catholicism has been established as the State religion or given Constitutional preference in various countries, but such privilege has not only not lasted but has led to reactions in which the Church has again suffered greatly.  Nevertheless, the image of “Christ the King” has remained a rallying point for those who wish to establish a Catholic dominance over civil culture. 
Among the occasions where “Christ the King” became the symbol of Catholic Restoration, a revolution broke out in Mexico in 1911 that had dire consequences for the Church.  The Catholic Church had over time acquired extensive land and wealth in Mexico and the clergy, either Spanish or from the upper classes of Mexican society, represented reactionary political and social views.  With the revolution Church lands were expropriated, foreign clergy expelled, and the Mexican clergy forbidden to wear religious garb in public, to vote, or to comment on political matters.  The situation only got worse over time.  In the 1920’s under President Plutarco Elias Calles, an avowed atheist, the anti-clericalism escalated into a persecution of the Church and triggered a rebellion known as the Cristero Rebellion.  The cry of the rebels was Viva Cristo Rey!—Long live Christ the King.  The Cristero Rebellion, as this was known, was the occasion of a great number of martyrs for the faith—especially to be noted Miguel Pro SJ, whose feast was celebrated yesterday. 
In support of the Mexican defenders of the Catholic Church, Pius XI brought the title “Christ the King” to a universal Catholic Consciousness when he instituted the liturgical feast of Christ the King in 1925.  At the time it was to be celebrated on the last Sunday of October.  The Pope had written on the subject that same year in his encyclical letter Quas Primas.  This was meant to be a support to the Catholics of Mexico during their time of persecution but also as a challenge to secularization wherever it might be taking place in the Catholic world.  The institution of the feast was the high water mark of Catholic resistance to the French Revolution and all that it stood for in its challenge to royalism and Catholicism. 
Americans, of course, never fully understood the political symbolism of the feast as American Catholics have always been rather naïve to the Church’s historical preference for monarchy.  Ever since the French Revolution the Catholic Church had seen republicanism as a threat to its theology of power which devolves not from the people but from God directly to the rulers.  In the years before Vatican II regimes such as Franco’s Spain which was in name a monarchy (with Franco functioning as regent for an as yet-to-be-named King) and where the Church enjoyed a political hegemony to the exclusion of other denominations and religions, were held to be the ideal.  It was only at Vatican II that the Church made peace with the idea of democratic government and in subsequent years it is proving to be an uneasy peace. 
Now all this is not to say that Christ is not King.  But what do we mean by King?  Demagogues such as Michael Vorris or Solange Hertz have advocated replacing the American Republic with Catholic Monarchy but such extremist views relegate them and their more faithful disciples to the realm of religious psychosis.   How then are we to understand Christ as King?
I noticed that in the revised Missal that was promulgated last year that the feast previously known as the Solemnity of Christ the King is now the Solemnity of Christ the King of the Universe.  This is a significant shift, but not a healthy one.  It moves the understanding of Christ’s Kingship from an authority over the hearts of believers to a claim of jurisdiction; that is from a claim of authority to a claim of power. 
The difference of power and authority is a significant difference.  Power is the ability to coerce obedience.  Those who exercise earthly power can force their subjects to conform to their will.  They can “make things happen.”  A general has power over his army.  A bishop (sadly) has power over his priests.  A dictator has power over his people.  Is this the type of Kingship that Christ models?
Authority, on the other hand, is the moral weight to inspire others to freely follow, to willingly subject their will to the will of the one who exercises authority. This is the sort of conversion of heart to which Christ calls those who hear his gospel.  Is Christ to be the Ruler-King or the Servant-King?
Once again we see the struggle today for the Church to emerge from its centuries of an addiction to power and become a Servant Church.  As I have pointed out before, Cardinal Avery Dulles says that this is the ecclesiological shift of our times—from the previous millennium of power to yield the future millennium of service (see entry for June 18, 2012).  But for those prelates who are crowding Gamarelli’s for their buckled shoes and silk capes and those priests who are given to pom-pommed hats and the Tridentine Mass this shift represents a threat and Christ the King of the Universe means a validation of institutional power.  For our part, let’s just remember that our King wears a crown of thorns and reigns from a Cross not a throne.      

Too Severe a Judgment?

Cardinals Gibbons and

O'Connell--not a mutual

admiration society

I had mentioned in the previous blog that among the horses’ asses honored with a miter (and later with a Cardinal’s hat) in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States was William O’Connell who from 1907 until 1944 was Archbishop of Boston.  Some have thought I was too severe on O’Connell and other named prelates in this judgment but I think the history bears out O’Connell’s reputation for one of the most undeserving of men to rise to power in the American Church.  Sean Winter, writing two years ago for the National Catholic Reporter, and comparing the tragedy of O’Connell’s rise to that of the equally fatuous Cardinal Raymond Burke in an essay “Gibbons Cried,” wrote:

It is said that when, in 1911, James Cardinal Gibbons learned that Archbishop William Henry O'Connell was named a cardinal, Gibbons cried. O'Connell was referred to at the time, by a woman who worked at the Vatican, Ella Edes, as "Monsignor Pomposity." He was most known for his efforts to have the U.S. Bishops Conference disbanded and his opposition to laws against child labor.

Cardinal Gibbons was no enthusiast for O’Connell whom he recognized not only as lacking in ability but strident in his antediluvian views on social reform.  Not only did he oppose laws outlawing child labor but he ridiculed the theories of Albert Einstein, suggested that priests refuse communion to women wearing makeup, and decried such singers as Al Jolson for their “crooning” which he considered effeminate.   

O’Connell’s promotion in the American Church was due to his sycophancy towards Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, the Machiavellian Secretary of State of Pius X.   O’Connell was to prove a major embarrassment to the Church over the years of his Cardinaliate.  His nephew, a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, was aware of the Cardinals’ homosexual affair with a married judge and used the knowledge to cover his own embezzlement of funds from the Archdiocese to support a secret wife.  O’Connell had made the nephew, a Monsignor James O’Connell, chancellor of the Archdiocese, a position which gave him access to diocesan monies.  The nephew secretly married a woman in Ohio in 1913.  His secret was safe as long as Merry del Val was running the Vatican.  Merry del Val fell from power with the death of Pius X in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I.  In 1922 when confronted about his nephew, O’Connell lied to the newly elected Pius XI—and was caught in the lie—which sealed his fall from influence in Rome but not from power in the American Church where he continued to exercise a bullying influence over the other bishops especially after the death of Cardinal Gibbons in 1921.  O’Connell found an unholy ally in Cardinal Denis Dougherty of Philadelphia in attempts to suppress the emergence of a national bishop’s conference.  O’Connell and Dougherty believing their position as Cardinals should have given them authority over the other bishops and rendering any sort of consultative body superfluous.  O’Connell died in 1944—but there are humorous stories there as well.  Perhaps next time.    

Vatican II--A Radical Break With the Past

Plaque marking the 1986 interfaith

gathering in Assisi hosted by Pope

John Paul II

As we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Council, I want to make some comments on the Robert Blair Kaiser lecture I posted on October 19^th .  In particular I want to address the issue of whether the Council represents a “hermeneutic of continuity” as some claim; “a hermeneutic of rupture” as others claim, or the “hermeneutic of reform” as Benedict XVI has now picked up.  In other words—does the Council mark a sharp departure, even a reversal, with the past?  Are the teaching of the Council consistent with the teachings of the Church before the Council?  Or have the teachings of the Church been “reformed” (reformulated?) as part of the “development of doctrine” that is part of the evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) expansion of human understanding of Divine Truth?  Let’s look at one area that clearly was revolutionary, Ecumenism and Interfaith Religious Dialogue: 

The Council changed the way we thought about God, about ourselves, about our spouses, our Protestant cousins, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Jews, even the way we thought about the Russians. When a handful of bishops kept pushing for conciliar condemnation of Communism, John XXIII kept insisting that that kind of talk would only blow up the world. Pope John and his Council made some preliminary moves that helped end the Cold War. For this, the editors of Time made John XXIII the Man of the Year.

The Jews? The Council reversed the Church's long-standing anti-Semitism. Until the Council, Catholics believed that, if Jews didn't convert to Catholicism, there was something wrong with them. The Council Fathers took another look at that idea and decided that Jews were still living their ancient covenant with God. We decided there was nothing wrong with the Jews; they became our brothers and sisters. ….

 Before the Council, we were told we were excommunicated if we set foot in a Protestant Church. After the Council (where Protestant observers were welcomed, given seats of honor, and spoken of no longer as Protestants, but as 'separated brethren'), we stopped fighting the Methodists and the Presbyterians and conspired with them in the fight for justice and peace and marched with them to Selma.

I recently gave a talk at an adult education program in a bustling suburban parish.  As I looked out at my audience before speaking I suddenly had a chilling awareness.  “How many of you were born after 1962, the year the Council opened?” I asked my audience.  Four-fifths of the audience raised their hands.  Today most Catholics have no idea of what life was like before Vatican II.  I am old enough to remember the world before the Council.  I can rattle off the old “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutum meum” of the days when altar boys were altar boys and could rightfully swagger about the sanctuary, proud of the immense amount of nonsense syllabus they had committed to memory.  And I remember when to enter a Protestant Church was considered seriously sinful and when the Jews were annually called “perfidious” in the Liturgy.  (Oremus et pro perfidis Iudæis…. Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui etiam iudaicam perfidiam a tua misericordia non repellis…)  The Catholic Church had established a long policy condemning the ecumenical movement—or rather claiming that authentic ecumenism was that all schismatics (the Eastern Churches) and heretics (The Protestant Denominations) should “return” to the Papal Catholic fold.  Any prayer with such schismatics or heretics—so much as saying the Lord’s Prayer together—was forbidden as mortally sinful.  Rome had been horrified with American participation in the 1893 World Parliament of Religions held at Chicago’s Columbian Exhibition (see entry for March 30, 2011).  Pius XI had been outraged at Cardinal Mericer’s “Malines Conversations” with the Anglicans in the years after World War I even though Mercier—Archbishop of Brussels in Belgium had had the permission of Pius’s Predecessor, Benedict XV for the dialogues.  Pius XI issued an encyclical condemning ecumenism, Mortalium Animos, in 1928 and through the reign of Pius XII any ecumenical activity was strictly prohibited.  When John XXIII announced the Council in January 1959 and explicitly declared that one aim of the Council was heal the breach in Christianity represented by the East-West Schism of 1054 and the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was radical news.  For these religious bodies to be invited to send official delegations to the Council and the warmth with which these delegations were received would have been unimaginable only four years previous.   And when the Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Reintegratio) and the Decree on Non-Christian religions were published (1964 and 1965 respectively), the book had to be rewritten from beginning to end.  No, on ecumenism and interfaith dialogue the hermeneutic is certainly not “continuity” and not even “reform”—in fact not even “reform” but an entirely new beginning. 

Popes: Pickled, Preserved, and Putrefying.

the image today is the catafalque for the funeral of Pius XII

There is a lot of excitement about the upcoming beatification of John Paul II including speculation about whether, when the body is disinterred, will it be “perfectly preserved.”  There are plans that his coffin will be on display for a period of time in Saint Peter’s Basilica, but some are hoping that the remains will be intact and the body of the pope will be put on display.  When the body of John XXIII was disinterred in 2001 it was found to be in remarkably good shape, but the Vatican has said that there is nothing miraculous about this as the body had been properly embalmed before its burial in 1963.  When one visits Saint Peter’s Basilica today one can see the remains of John XXIII in a glass coffin beneath the altar of “The Last Communion of Saint Jerome” on the eastern side of the basilica’s north transept.  John does look pretty good for someone who has been dead almost fifty years.  On the other hand what you actually see is a finely crafted wax mask and “gloves” covering the actual face and hands of the deceased pope.  There apparently was some discoloration of the skin over a period of time which is not abnormal in embalmed bodies.    

There are several other deceased popes and prelates on view beneath the various altars of the basilica, most notably Pope St. Pius X (pope from 1903-1914), Pope Bl. Innocent XI (pope from 1676-1689) and Saint Josaphat, Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Polotsk (martyred 1623).  Their bodies are all on display, but faces and hands—the only visible parts—are concealed by silver masks and gloves.  I do remember my first several trips to Rome before the time when Josaphat’s face and hands were covered and I would describe the remains more as “mummified” than as “preserved” if, what one means by “preserved” is appearing as natural as at the time of death.  Perhaps I will do some entries in the future about various saintly remains in Rome and elsewhere that are deemed to be “incorrupt.” 

But all this brings up the topic about preserving papal bodies.  When John Paul I died, somewhat unexpectedly, the lack of an autopsy was explained by the “fact” that papal bodies are never autopsied.   But this is not true—autopsies were performed on a number of popes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Furthermore, it was a common practice as part of the embalming practice of the time to remove the entrails and internal organs of the popes and place them in canopic jars which were then inhumed in the Church of Saints Anastasio e Vincente facing the Trevi Fountain.  Twenty-two of the popes between  Sixtus V (d. 1590) and Gregory XVI (died 1846).  (I have heard as many as 25 popes and as late as Leo XIII (d. 1903) but the information varies from source to source and I have chosen the most conservative statistics.  I hope that when I am in Rome again next month I might be able to check for myself the plaque to the left of the altar that records the information).    This Church was chosen as the depository for the remains because of its proximity to the Quirinale Palace which was the usual residence of the Popes from the end of the sixteenth century until the fall of Papal Rome in 1870.  The Church was long referred to as the parrochia  pontificale —the papal parish.

There has been no consistency on the issue of embalming papal bodies.  John Paul II supposedly was not embalmed but “prepared.”  It seems that what the Vatican meant by “prepared” was sufficient embalming to prevent an embarrassing incident during the laying in state.  News reports at the time said the pope was not arterially embalmed (which would have involved replacing the blood in the arterial system with a preservative fluid) as was John XXIII, but that at least visible parts of the body—hands, head, and neck were injected with sufficient preservatives to keep the body presentable until burial.  Orifices (mouth, ears, nose) would have been sealed to prevent leakage of internal fluids while the body was on display.   This sort of embalming would not prevent or even significantly delay decomposition.  I saw the John Paul’s body twice—once as it was carried into the Basilica for the laying-in-state and once (the day before the funeral) while it lie-in-state before the central altar.  He didn’t look great—I must admit—but most dead bodies don’t unless under special lighting and the Vatican makes no attempt for its deceased to “look like he’s just  sleeping.”   I don’t recall how John Paul I’s body held up or what preparation had been done to it, though I seem to recall that like his successor the body had been “prepared” rather than embalmed.  Paul VI likewise had been only lightly embalmed; he had died August—the hottest and most humid month in Rome and thus not a good time for dead bodies awaiting burial.  By the time came to put him in his coffin and close it most sources agreed burial had been delayed a little too long.  

One of the reasons that John XXIII probably had been thoroughly embalmed is the disaster over the preparation of the body of his predecessor, Pius XII. You know, this whole thing is getting a little macabre and it’s about to get even more ghoulish, much more.  Pius’ physician, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, a man of questionable skill and no discretion, organized the embalming according to a new method devised by Professor Oreste Nuzzi from Naples.  A papal funeral is not the time to experiment, but Galeazzi-Lisi and Nuzzi put the pope’s body in a plastic bag filled with herbs, spices, and resins “that,”they claimed,  were “the same with which the body of Jesus Christ was preserved.”  Well, Jesus wasn’t dead that long, and what happened to Pius wasn’t pretty.  Pius died in October and the summer of 1958 was a lingering one.  The heat at Castle Gondolfo was oppressive and enclosing the body in an airtight bag actually accelerated the decomposition.  After the body had been “treated” it was dressed in pontifical robes and put in a coffin for the journey into Rome and the funeral at St. Peter’s Basilica.  During a ceremonial stop at the Pope’s cathedral, St. John Lateran, a rumbling noise and “bang” was heard from within the coffin—Pius’s chest cavity had exploded from built up gasses.  Galeazzi-Lisi and Nuzzi had to treat the body two more times but body parts began to detach and the skin turned green and then black—all this within four days of his death.  Several Swiss guards standing watch at the catafalque fainted from the stench and the body had to be recoffined and interred on October 13, 1958—seven days before the scheduled funeral.  At the official funeral on October 20^th, an elaborate three tiered catafalque surmounted by the papal tiara replaced the body.   Part of the fault for this debacle goes to Pius himself as he had not wanted the internal organs and workings of the body altered in any way and an essential part of embalming is to release the gasses that build up in the chest and stomach cavities.         

Popes had been routinely embalmed—as had various other world leaders such as Queen Victoria when funerals were to be public and there was to be some delay before burial.  Pius X, a man who always—even when Patriarch of Venice and then as Pope—had cherished the simple customs of his peasant background left instructions that he was not to be embalmed—which makes his reported incorrupt status somewhat remarkable.  Of course embalming techniques before the latter part of the nineteenth century were not only primitive but verged on the barbaric.  Papal bodies—unlike British Royalty and current American practice for public funerals—were traditionally displayed for burial not so much for religious reasons as to demonstrate that the body of the deceased did not show poison, strangulation or other obvious violence. 

Benedict XV died at 6:00 a.m. on January 22, 1922.  The un-embalmed body (the New York Times, January 24^th 1922 says that this was “contrary to the usual practice”) was taken on the 23^rd to the Basilica of Saint Peter’s where it lie in state behind the closed grille of the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament from eleven in the morning until that evening when it was removed to the crypt and interred on the afternoon of January 24^th—just over 48 hours after his death.  Pius XI died seventeen years later on February 10, 1939.  The following day his body was brought to the Vatican Basilica where it lay for four days until its internment.  I have not been a able to find any information as to whether or not he had been embalmed but the delay of five days between death and burial suggests he may have been.

Well, enough of this morose subject.  Perhaps we will revisit some idiosyncrasies of papal  interments at another time, but I knew this one would be an attention grabber.