Organizing Burke's Resistance Movement

Resistance is mounting, indeed is being pro-actively organized, to Pope Francis and his program of mercy as Catholics of a more conservative stripe are making it clear that they do not want to see our co-religionists who are not married according to Catholic law or who are living in irregular unions admitted to the sacraments.  After last October’s Extraordinary Synod where the subject was discussed, Cardinal Raymond Burke, a persistent critic of the Pope, pledged to “resist” Pope Francis should there be any change in the current practice which requires divorced persons to obtain a Church annulment before they can enter a second union.   Pope Francis, or rather his “front man” Cardinal Walter Kasper, has spoken of introducing a process similar to the Orthodox Churches where divorced persons can acknowledge their fault in a marriage’s failure, do penance for their role in the marriage’s collapse, and then have their second marriage blessed—albeit it in a more somber rite that distinguishes it from the sacramental first marriage.  

Nearly 500 priests, Secular and Religious, from England and Wales signed the following letter to the English Catholic newspaper, The Herald, urging the participants in the upcoming Synod on the Family (Part II) this October to maintain the current discipline that excludes the divorced and remarried from the reception of the sacraments. 

SIR – Following the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops in Rome in October 2014 much confusion has arisen concerning Catholic moral teaching. In this situation we wish, as Catholic priests, to re-state our unwavering fidelity to the traditional doctrines regarding marriage and the true meaning of human sexuality, founded on the Word of God and taught by the Church’s Magisterium for two millennia.

We commit ourselves anew to the task of presenting this teaching in all its fullness, while reaching out with the Lord’s compassion to those struggling to respond to the demands and challenges of the Gospel in an increasingly secular society. Furthermore we affirm the importance of upholding the Church’s traditional discipline regarding the reception of the sacraments, and that doctrine and practice remain firmly and inseparably in harmony.

We urge all those who will participate in the second Synod in October 2015 to make a clear and firm proclamation of the Church’s unchanging moral teaching, so that confusion may be removed, and faith confirmed.

Yours faithfully,

LifeSite News, the media face of the Campaign Life Coalition, published an interview with Cardinal Burke, the leader of the opposition to any change in pastoral practice regarding admitting those in irregular unions to the sacraments, in which His Eminence said the only pastoral help which the Church can give to those spouses who have been abandoned, to the children whose parents have divorced, to those who are “struggling with homosexual tendencies,” or to those who find themselves “trapped” in “illegitimate unions” is to hold the line of “traditional teaching” and to recognize “the sinfulness of the situation in which they find themselves” and to “leave that sinful situation and to find a way to live in accord with the truth.”  His Eminence went to say in the interview that the discussion of the possibility of welcoming those in irregular unions to the sacraments should not even have been discussed at the Synod.  For His Eminence, judgment rises or falls on the single issue of conforming to traditional sexual morality.  In regard to whatever kindnesses or generosity or charitable behavior that those in such unions might show, the Cardinal compared them to “the person who murders someone yet is kind to other people.”  The LifeSite News interview concludes with a request to sign a petition to Pope Francis to speak out and put an end to this discussion of changing pastoral practice regarding those remarried after civil divorce. 

Cardinal Burke’s remarks have been quoted—somewhat out of context—to say that he is equating the divorced and remarried and people in same-sex unions with murderers.  I don’t think His Eminence, who is one to express vociferously his opinions, but not always think them through first, consciously intended that judgment. But then with “The Lady in Red” who knows. 

Last year Cardinal Burke was one of five Cardinals who along with an archbishop and three theologians wrote a spirited attack on the proposal that the Church might change its discipline to admit the divorced and remarried to the sacraments.  The book, Remaining in the Truth of Christ, was a response to Cardinal Walter Kasper’s The Gospel of the Family as well as several addresses which the Cardinal gave—including one he gave last spring to his fellow Cardinals—in which the Cardinal outline how Church discipline might be changed to admit those whose marriages the Church does not recognize to receive Holy Communion.  Copies of Remaining in the Truth of Christ were delivered to the Synod Fathers during the October 2014 Phase I of the Synod to lobby against any proposed changes in sacramental discipline, but the books “mysteriously” disappeared before they found their ways into the Synod Father’s hands.  The blame for the books’ disappearance has been fixed on Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the General Secretary to the Synod.  American Life League President Judy Brown, a perennial sounder of the tocsin against Pope Francis and the directions in which he is taking the Church, has done much to pin the blame on Baldisseri without establishing the grounds for the charge.  And it must be remembered that Synod Rules prohibit any general distribution of materials to Synod members without those materials being first approved and then presented through the General Secretariat.   In other words, no one is allowed to just hand out materials on their own authority. 

All that being said, however, I must admit that I am not sure that I can see how the practice regarding admittance to the sacraments can be changed.  I am not a theologian, only a historian—but there is a long history to the Church’s restricting the sacraments to exclude those in irregular unions.  Individual cases have always been able to be adjudicated where due to specific circumstances and with the advice of a confessor or competent spiritual director individuals, either on a specific occasion or as a regular occurrence, are admitted to penance, Eucharist, or the anointing of the sick, but a sort of olly-olly-in-free is somewhat of an innovation.  However, should Pope Francis—Synod or no Synod—decide that it is time for such an innovation, I won’t resist, but then I am no cardinal.    

Anger, Ritual, and Krazies

Jonathan Edwards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing the Katholic Krazies 7

Melanie Calvet

Ok, let's put down both the contemporary issues like the Synod and the older stories like the history of the Anglican Church for a while and go back to the krazies.  It will make it easier as we continue to look at the mounting negative campaign against Pope Francis if we look more closely at the kast of karacters.  But before we can go much further with the Katholic Krazies we need to look at the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to two shepherd children, Melanie Calvet and Maximin Giraud on the evening of September 19, 1846 at the French Village of La Salette.  We need principally not so much as to look at the apparition as to one of the visionaries, the girl, Melanie Calvet. 

According to the children’s account at the time the Blessed Mother, in tears, warned them that unless France repented, and especially repented of the sins of working on Sunday and not honoring the Holy Name of God, great calamities of famine would fall upon France.  Melanie said that in particular Paris and then Marseilles would suffer terribly in the upcoming calamities.  The fact that the vision and its prophecies occurred immediately before much of Europe, and most especially Ireland, were hit with a potato blight that did in fact cause mass starvation won the vision broad attention.  The authenticity of the vision was further strengthened by the fact that several miracles were attributed to “Our Lady of La Salette.”

The local bishop, the Bishop of Grenoble, one Philibert de Bruillard, did a careful investigation of the children and their story and in 1851, after submitting the details of the vision to a commission of distinguished theologians, announced that the children’s stories were most likely true and permitted a cult to Our Lady of La Salette to begin.  He also had the children write the pope, Pius IX.  Meanwhile the Virgin’s call to repentance struck a chord with many of the clergy, most notably the old Saint John Vianney and the young Saint John Bosco.

When the children wrote the Pope, Melanie embroidered her account with several new details.  This would become a pattern as time went on, but initially the additions to her account were simple.  The Pope would be persecuted—he would even be shot at.  There would be a persecution of the Church.  But then, a king would be restored to the Throne of France and Catholicism restored as the State Religion.  Europe would thrive but the prosperity would cause many, including among the priests and religious, to lose the faith.  Finally in this collapse of the faith, a nun would give birth to a child who would be the anti-Christ and while many would believe in him, hell would reign on earth.  All this would happen within the span of a century.

Ok, Melanie’s story is getting to be a little more of a stretch here.  Pius IX could relate to the persecution thing and hatred for the Pope.  It was the time of Garibaldi and his anti-clerical red-shirts.  Pius had been driven from Rome by the mobs clamoring for a republic and sought refuge in Gaeta until French troops arrived to restore him to power.  The stories from LaSalette seemed to vindicate his plight.  But in fact the French Throne has never again been filled.  Yes, the famines were to come about, or rather, by this time famines had come about, and Paris has suffered the commune of 1871, Marseilles, however stood unscathed. There had been no general apostasy of clergy or religious--indeed there was a surplus of vocations.  And as to the anti-Christ, he had yet to appear.  It is a mixed bag.  Of nuts, as I think we shall see.

Pope Pius IX never gave approval to the vision or its message.  Instead, Cardinal Luigi Lambruschini, the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, approved a declaration of the Bishop of Grenoble saying:

We judge that the apparition of the Holy Virgin to the two shepherds, September 19, 1846 ... in the parish of La Salette ... carries within it all the characteristics of truth, and that the faithful have reason to believe it indubitable and certain.

The Bishop made it clear, however, that approbation was being given only to the original message the children claimed to have received in 1846 and no subsequent message;  this would prove a crucial distinction as Melanie Calvet over the years would issue a stream of messages that she purported to be from the Virgin Mary.   It is important to note that the above statement by the Bishop of Grenoble was limited to the original message and is the only approbation the Church has ever given to the revelations of Melanie Calvet.

After the 1846 vision, Melanie was packed off to live with the Sisters of Providence and as soon as she was of legal age, she was received as a postulant in the community.  But Melanie spent all her convent time enthralling people with her stories about the Blessed Virgin instead of learning nun-craft.  She was not approved for profession of vows at the end of her novitiate for “lack of spiritual maturity.”  It is not an easily done thing to turn down a visionary in her claim for a vocation but the Sisters of Providence took that step.  So she went to the Sisters of Charity, a community known for hard work among the poorest of the poor.  Melanie lasted three weeks.  What to do next? Her Royalist views and prophecies made her a political “hot potato” and so the Bishop sent her to the cloistered Carmelites in Darlington, England to help her to move beyond her past and focus on the interior life of prayer.  In Carmel Melanie was permitted to take temporary vows but after a few years was asked to leave because of her stories and “prophecies” which did not suit the contemplative spirituality of Carmel.  That is the polite version of why she left. In fact, she was totally unsuited for a life of prayer and manual labor.  She next entered the Sisters of Compassion at Marseilles.  Then she transferred to the Carmel of Marseilles. When that didn’t work out, she came back to the Sisters of the Compassion on condition she kept her identity as a former visionary secret.  She couldn’t.   She returned to the lay state.  What we are dealing with here is a very troubled soul.  That is not to say that the original vision may not have been authentic, though I have my doubts.  Were I presented with a similar case today, I would suspect that I was dealing with a hysteric.  Melanie, at least as far as stories are told, does not display the qualities of mystic but of a person with some severe personality disorders. 

And throughout the years her “revelations” expanded—and expanded and expanded.  They foretell a great apostasy.   And an anti-Christ who will be the son of a bishop and a nun of Jewish blood.  Rome will lose faith and become the seat of the anti-Christ.  Priests and nuns will lose the faith and fall into disreputable lives.  There will be natural disasters of all sorts.  Lucifer and his angels will be loosed from hell to wreak their evils on earth.  It goes on and on in no particular order but an apocalyptic torrent of horrors.  Her “messages” take on a tone of great anger towards the clergy and a Church who will not accord her the place due her as one who has seen the Mother of God and received revelations from her. She betrays the royalist an anti-Semitic biases of the French political right, the same extreme that will a generation later shape the thought and destiny of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  Melanie is very different from Bernadette Soubirous or Lucia dos Santos, the visionaries of Lourdes and Fatima, both of whom sought anonymity.

Now the only message the Church every approved was the original message calling for repentance and keeping the Lord’s Day and honoring the Sacred Name, but for many who become excited by these things, the later revelations not only foretell some dire prophecies, but are in fact prophecies fulfilled in the Church after the Second Vatican Council, a Church which they see as an apostate Church.  Melanie’s later writings are, even by 19^th century standards, riddled with heresies regarding human nature, grace, soteriology, and ecclesiology, and were, in her own lifetime, put on the Index of Forbidden Books.   They are obviously the products, not of a supernatural revelation, but of a disturbed mind.  Melanie spent the last 37 years of her life living as a laywoman in the south of France and in various places in Italy.  She never ceased talking about her “messages.” 

Among those who pick up on Melanie’s “messages” is the author of the Blog “Pope Francis the Destroyer.”  (http://popefrancisthedestroyer.blogspot.com/)  Other than an occasional whine about having “to drive an hour to Latin Mass because of Pope Francis & the New Evangelization,” the author of this blog says very little, usually reprinting either Melanie’s later “revelations” about how Rome has become the seat of the anti-Christ or quoting William of Ockham on the punishment of heretics and especially a Pope who has become a heretic.  This wing-nut is not a sedevacantist.  He (I am presuming that this wing-nut is a man) doesn’t claim that Francis (or his predecessors) have lost the papacy due to their “heresies,” but he does allege that Pope Francis is a heretic.  Like Melanie, the author seems to be somewhat obsessive/compulsive and to have lost any sense of historical or theological perspective. 

What motivates people like this?  I think the more basic question is what is the appeal of those who, like Melanie Calvet, develop a view of God as angry and anxious to visit his wrath on an unappreciative world?   Apocalypticism is certainly a biblical theme.  You find minor doses of it some of the Prophets—usually referring to the collapse of Jerusalem at the time of the Babylonian threat and subsequent exile.   It becomes a major theme in the Book of Daniel and, in the New Testament, in the Book of Revelation.  There are traces of it in the gospels and the letters of Saint Paul, though nothing like the extreme “prophecies” uttered by Melanie Calvet.  In the Gospels, for example, there are warnings about the stars falling from the skies and a message of a new heaven and a new earth, implying of course that this earth and its heavens (skies) will in some way be refashioned.  Jesus warns his disciples that they will suffer tribulation and persecution.  Over all, however, the gospel message is a set of simple axioms and moral principles by which Jesus shows his disciples how to live faithfully in a world where the Kingdom is not yet a reality.  There is a message of the forgiveness of sins more than of their punishment.  

That for some the Gospel takes a back seat to the “messages” of seers like Melanie Calvet is probably more a matter of psychology than of faith.  If you remember, some months back I did a posting on moral development and the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg.  The initial stage of moral development is fear of punishment.  There are those whose own psychological limitations do not permit them to mature morally and get stuck at this phase.  They project the anger of parents and other key figures onto God.  Perhaps, too, for some it is their own anger they project onto God—I think that was Melanie’s issue—but it necessitates a God who is primarily a punisher and will take out his anger on others whom they perceive as unfaithful. 

This is an extreme form of a neurotic piety that projects God to be totally Other and needing to be pleased by rigid compliance and is easily displeased by our not measuring up to his complex rules and regulations.  This is a deity whose divine mind has become a computer tracking our every thought, word, and deed and weighing it in a balance so as to be able to justly impose punishment in due measure.  This is a God who demands ongoing atonement.  This is the God for whom one cannot talk in Church—even before Mass—or forget one’s prayers or not wash one’s hands after using the bathroom.  This is the God of walking on eggshells. It is not the God whom Jesus reveals in the Gospels. 

At some point we really should look at the different ways in which people experience God—or create a god to meet their expectations.  It is a fascinating matter how we use a word like “God” and at times mean some very different things.  That is why a good spiritual director is important to help us clarify our experience in a way that is consistent with the faith of the Church.  It is too bad that Melanie Calvet didn’t have a John of the Cross or Ignatius Loyola for her spiritual director—her bizarre “revelations” would have been identified for the products of a troubled soul and not for authentic manifestations of Divine Grace.