Some Lenten Thoughts On the Church In the Present Millennium

Sorry, things have gotten away from this past week and I have neglected to post any entries.  I hope I can make it up over the next week or two—though the schedule gets incredibly busy at this time of year.  But it doesn’t stop the Krazies, so if they can find the time for all their manic ravings and bizarre pseudo-religiosity, I, in my little self-appointed hermitage, should be able to as well.  It is just that this time of year is so rich in the readings and prayers and liturgies of this season that it is hard to tear oneself away from Lent’s austere beauty and sit at the keyboard.  In the early morning, I just want to take my coffee and sit on the glassed-in verandah and watch the sun come up over the barren late-winter landscape and ponder how these inner and outer worlds coalesce into some sort of harmonious unity. 

This year we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Thomas Merton and the fifth centenary of the birth of Saint Teresa of Avila.  They are two of my favorite spiritual writers.  They have a huge amount in common.  Both were very much down-to-earth sort of mystics—not the sort of flighty and vague romantics so favored by the sentimental and the pious.  Both had wicked senses of humor and were quick to turn a phrase that was both pithy and mirthful.  Both were deeply sensual and each, according to their particular genders, expressive of a highly sexualized spirituality.  But for me what is most important is that each, despite they themselves being monastics, were determined to open the arcane gateway of contemplative prayer to ordinary folk like you and like me. 

I wonder if it had not been for Merton—I read him before I ever read Teresa though I have over my career done a deeper study of Teresa than of Merton—I wonder if had it had not been for Merton would I ever have found the entry point of that Interior Castle of which Teresa speaks?  Had it not been for Merton, I am not sure that I would ever have realized the potential for prayer that went beyond the devotional.  I still enjoy the devotional, of course, much like I still like Jelly Beans; but I am glad that Merton and others showed me the darker and richer delights of still and silent prayer.

Some years back I was part of a group trying to arrange to bring Father William Menninger, like Merton a Cistercian (Trappist) monk, to our parish in Northern Virginia to give a workshop on contemplative prayer.  It was all set.  At the last minute, the pastor—who up to that time had been too busy to learn much about the program other than to insure that Father William was a priest in good standing and of “orthodox” Catholicity, cancelled the program.  “I didn’t realize it was about contemplative prayer,” he protested.  “That is something for monks and nuns, not for mere (his words) lay people like yourselves.  Why, if it isn’t part of our life as priests, would it ever be part of your lives as lay people?”  I had been reading Merton for over forty years at the time—and Teresa for about twenty-five—and I knew that all Christians are called to contemplative prayer.  It is not for “the elect.”  Indeed I have come to realize that all human persons are called to contemplative prayer as Saint Augustine pointed out in his famous lines:

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

A source, while far less credible than my beloved aforementioned Doctor Gratiae but still infinitely more insightful than any contemporary writer (including Merton), the Jesuit Karl Rahner wrote:   

“The devout Christian of the future will be a ‘mystic’, one who has experienced something, or he will cease to be anything at all.  For devout Christian living as practiced in the future will no longer be sustained and helped by the unanimous, manifest and public convictions and religious customs of all, summoning each one form the outset to a persona experience and a personal decision.

We live, in this country and throughout “the West,” in what has fast devolved into a post-Christian era.  The “Christian Culture” of Europe and Anglophone North America has been for the most part nothing more than an ever-thinning veneer since “The Enlightenment” and its Rosemary’s Baby, the French Revolution.  The days when one’s Christian worldview and consequent values could be widely shared with one’s family, neighbors, colleagues, and friends are gone.  This is not to say that there isn’t a sort of human goodness or moral framework to be found anymore, but it is at best the habitual remnants of an earlier era and more often a natural—and inconsistently fickle—sort of natural sense of decency or integrity.  One doesn’t need to be a Christian—or even a believer—for such natural sense of fairplay, but as I said it is often a very fickle system.  I have written in some previous posts about how the lack of philosophy in the curriculum required for a college education has led to the inability of so many in our society to make any sort of a moral judgment beyond the rule that “works for me” is good and “doesn’t work for me” is bad.   What Rahner is saying in the above quote is that if Christians are to find a moral compass in this “culture” of soulless modernity—or actually post-modernity—they must have some sort of direct experience of God.  The key word here is direct.  God’s presence can be mediated by sacred things, sacred people, sacred actions, sacred gatherings, sacred institutions.  We call these physical manifestations of the Divine “sacraments.”  (I am not speaking narrowly here of the Seven Sacraments as defined by the Fourth Lateran Council but of the entire realm of the sacramental: the visible channels or manifestations of invisible grace.)  Used correctly these sacraments/sacramentals are genuine channels of grace, but as Colm Luibheid points out in the preface to his John Cassian, Conferences (Paulist, 1985), the human heart longs for a direct and unmediated encounter with God.  Our hearts are restless until they rest in God—not in rituals and ceremonies (as helpful as they may be to some), not in icons and candles (as good as they too can be), nor even in the Bread which has become Christ’s Body and the Wine which has become Christ’s Blood—but all this only ignites a hunger for the Creator that transcends the created.  In no way does the Christian ever dispense with the mediated channels of grace—we are incarnate beings and we need the tangible, the edible, the visible, but we are also Spirit and as such we long for that which is beyond the creaturely.  

This eros for God has always been in the human soul.  It doesn’t come with baptism or with some sort of mid-life conversion or being “born again.”  As Saint Augustine points out, we are created with this hunger for God.  It is us; it is who we are.  It has always been there, though not all have let an awareness of the hunger surface.  It was there for the psalmist when he wrote “Like the deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is longing for you, my God.”  It was there for Jesus when he said: Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be given to you.”  It was there for Saint Augustine when he wrote the line I quoted earlier.  Pseudo-Dionysius, Saint Bernard, Saint Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhardt, Saint John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Archbishop Fenelon, and countless mystics in between wrote or spoke of it.  It drove the desert fathers out to lives in the barren wilderness.  It provided John Cassian with the major theme of his conferences.  It populated Mount Athos and Subiaco.  Ignatius experienced it in the cave of Manressa.  Teresa of Avila was obsessed with it.  Elizabeth of the Trinity wrote to her sister Guite about it.  And to come back full circle, it is the core of all of Merton’s writings. 

And it is shaping the Church for its third millennium.  I am somewhat racing a deadline as this evening we have Taizé prayer in our parish.  People still come out for Stations of the Cross and Benediction on Friday evenings, but more and more are coming for the monastic quiet of this simple contemplative prayer around the Cross.  When we have a speaker on contemplative prayer we fill the parish center; when we have a speaker about the Catechism of the Catholic Church a dozen donuts will do.  When I sit in church during the day and see people come in, one less and less sees rosaries come out or prayerbooks opened, but people just sitting silently in God’s presence for 20, 30, even 40 minutes and more.

We need to find ways to encourage people to deeper prayer.  Merton’s books are still to be found in bookshops and on Amazon.  I think the biggest challenge, however, is to convince our priests that there is more to prayer than them parading around in a cope and carrying a monstrance or mumbling away in Latin jingo as they versus apsidem and mistakenly call it versus Deum.  Rahner has not only spoken truly that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or cease to be anything at all, but also that we, as the Church itself, will either be contemplative or cease to be.  

More Thoughts on Pope Francis, A Bridge Too Far, and The Two Church Problem

It's about the future 

Sitting at breakfast this morning with a colleague we got talking about various priests we knew over the years and found out we both have great admiration for the Society of Saint Columban, a Society of secular priests who work in the missions.  When I was a kid our house was always filled with Columbans and they were all great guys, but there was one in particular who was just the best priest I ever knew—Father Al Buckwalter.  Unfortunately when Father Buckwalter finally got to the foreign missions—his dream—, in Chile, he died in a motorcycle accident after only about six months.    I think the reason I love Pope Francis is that he epitomizes the sort of Church that Father Buckwalter represented to me as a kid.  He was a priest who never judged people but could see the good in everyone.  It was the heady days when Vatican II was in session and this priest represented that optimism that the Good News of Jesus Christ was the key to a better world.  I am not saying that he was naïve and could not see the flaws in human nature—but only that he lived and treated people like he really believed that God’s grace could and would triumph over sin both on the personal and societal levels. 

When I look at the two Churches that have grown up side by side in the fifty years since the Council, I think this is the key difference between them.  I had mentioned that the one Church—a holdover from the Neo-Scholastic centuries of the Reformation/Counter-Reformation period through the Reaction/Recovery from the effects of the French Revolution—has never accepted the fundamental paradigm shift represented in the Second Vatican Council.  That paradigm shift is attributable to the ressourcement theologie of the inter-war period in which theologians such as Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and others went to the pre-Scholastic Church Fathers and recovered the Patristic heritage for our modern age. 

It would be simplistic to claim—but essentially true nevertheless—that the patristic theology has a far more positive anthropology than the Neo-Scholastic.   The patristic heritage certainly acknowledges the reality of sin and dysfunction.  I myself am a huge fan of Saint Augustine and nobody but nobody in the Christian tradition calls out sin like Augustine did.  Yet, despite his intellectual appreciation for the frailties of our human nature, Augustine is known as the Doctor Gratiae—the Doctor of Grace. For Augustine the emphasis is not sin, but grace; sin is merely the foil by which we can see the operation of grace. 

I think that perhaps the inability of Pope John Paul II to see the dangers of the direction in which he took the Church—in his allowance of the anti-Vatican II Church to take root and even thrive inside the Conciliar Church—was that he himself was steeped in the Neo-Scholastic philosophy and theology of the pre-conciliar era.  I am not saying that he endorsed the survival of the counter-Church or that he did not endorse the basic direction of the Second Vatican Council, but only that he failed to see the problem of permitting this alternative ecclesiology of those for whom the Council was problematic. He himself didn’t have the monolithic theological models usually associated with Neo-Scholasticism.  He was certainly was open to the ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue of the Council, indeed he was not always as precise in his actions vis a vis other Churches and other religions as some thought that perhaps he should have been.  John Paul also had no personal enthusiasm for the pre-conciliar Liturgy, he merely permitted its revival to keep the peace with those who were being drawn out of the Church by the Lefebvrists and other schismatics.  He never celebrated, at least as far as we know, the usus antiquior and his own liturgical celebrations could be quite avant-garde with liturgical dance, adaptations to local cultures, and some minor but interesting deviations from the official rubrics.  However, when it came to his basic theology John Paul’s Neo-Scholasticism came through loud and clear.  In much of his writing and speaking there was a strong emphasis on sin and the sinfulness of the human person that appealed very much to those on the neo-Traditionalist end of the spectrum. 

Pope Benedict XVI was, in many ways, the reverse image of his predecessor.  Benedict had been, in his life as a theologian, a proponent of the nouvelle theologie. There was nothing of the Neo-Thomist in him and he was—and I have always admired him for this—a strong Augustinian in his theological framework.  His encyclicals and his addresses were far more positivist than those of his predecessor.  He was, however (and so typically German), far less flexible on the connection of theory and practice.  As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Benedict had been seriously concerned about John Paul’s imprecision in papal dealings with non-Christians and even with non-Catholics.  (The position given to the Archbishop of Canterbury at Benedict’s installation as Pope was markedly different than how that prelate and his predecessors had been ceremonially treated under John Paul II who had always accorded the Anglican Primate a position roughly equivalent to how he treated the various patriarchal representatives of the Orthodox Churches.  On the other hand, Benedict’s precision in these matters puts a very different spin on his giving Holy Communion to Brother Roger, the Protestant Prior of the Taizé Community.)  Benedict, unlike his predecessor, has a strong personal attachment to the pre-Conciliar Rites.  While he never celebrated them during his papacy—at least publicly—he had as a Cardinal been very involved in the Abbey of Fontgombault’s conferences on restoring the old rite.  As Pope he widely extended permission for the use of the pre-conciliar rites even to the point of usurping the authority of local bishops in their diocese to regulate the liturgical usages.  He hoped, I think somewhat naively as an academic might, that the revival of the pre-conciliar rites alongside the Liturgy of Paul VI might in some way create a hybrid rite that would moderate the excesses of each.  Instead, of course, it seems only to have further polarized the liturgical disputes.  My own read on Benedict’s liturgical preferences is that they are not due to his theological convictions but rather to his ardent passion to preserve the cultural heritage of the Europe in which he was raised and which has been so culturally devastated first by Hitler’s crude efforts to create and impose on his conquests a sort of Nazi Art Deco and later by the equally soulless post-modernism and secularism of the last sixty years.  Like the music of Mozart to which Benedict is so deeply attached, the Baroque represents to him the epitome of Western culture.  His garish refurnishing of the Papal Apartments from the elegant simplicity of Paul VI (retained by JPII) to the heavy gilt of the reigns of Pius XII and John XXIII along with his penchant to raid the sacristy for the discarded remnants of his gloriously reigning predecessors, like his conviction that the 20^th century produced no great music, just screamed “Bavarian bourgeois.”  But in this fascination with the antique he validated the efforts of those who thought they could bypass the Conciliar Catholicism of the last sixty years and remain comfortably within the Catholicity of the Church. 

Now along comes Pope Francis who is utterly indifferent to the antiquarianism of Benedict and who doesn’t share the pessimism of John Paul II and we have a problem.  A segment of Catholicism cannot identify with this Pope.  “I am a Catholic, but I don’t have a Pope” is becoming a rallying cry for a gamut of folk that range from climate-change deniers to Baltimore Catechism enthusiasts to Libertarians to fans of Palestrina and Tallis.   Even such recent bastions of Catholicism as Christendom College and the Cardinal Newman Society are teetering.  Rumors are starting to rise that Benedict’s resignation was “coerced” and thus he is still the valid Pope—his aide-de-camp, Archbishop (Gorgeous Georg) Ganswein has had to come out with several affirmations that Benedict himself recognizes Francis as Pope.  Many are wondering—and some are hoping—about what Cardinal Burke’s vow “to resist” Francis should he go too far might mean.  The pot is roiling.  There is considerable concern about the Cardinals Francis has appointed and his ability to shape the next papal election. The September address to a joint session of Congress could be telling.  The upcoming October second session on the Synod on the Family could tip the scales. In the end the worst of what might happen is what should have happened forty years ago—those for whom Vatican II represents unacceptable change need to pack up their birettas and mantillas, um I mean maniples, and go where they can be more comfortable.  Vatican II is here to stay.  Compromise was tried and it proved to be not only a bad choice but an exercise in futility.  We need to cherish our past as history but move into the future in pursuit of the Kingdom of God.  It is a kinder, gentler Church with Francis—a Church that is Rich in the Mercy of God 

The Foundation of the Anglican Church III

The Image of Christ as Apollo

found in the Vatican Necropolis

beneath St Peter's Basilica.  The

rising sun is here used as a

symbol for the Resurrected

Christ.

Before we go on let me draw your attention to two aspects of Romano-British Christianity that bear note.  The first is a small point but could have some significant repercussions.  In my last posting, I used the illustration of an ancient church discovered in the archeological dig at Calleva Attrebatum, a Roman town on the site of modern Silchester in Hampshire.  What I found curious about this church is that while it runs on an east-west axis, the altar was at the western end, the doors at the eastern end.  I say this because there is always much discussion about how early churches were oriented, that is built facing eastward to that priest and people faced the rising sun as they celebrated the Eucharist.  This argument is used by those who want to reverse the altars in Catholic Churches and have the priest again face away from the people as was the usual custom before the Second Vatican Council.  Well, this ancient church could be a sort of fluke in the normal practice except that as I have noted in other blogs that deal with the “ad orientem” (facing eastward) issue, the practice was not followed at Rome where ancient churches can be found facing every direction of the compass.  Yes, the ancient churches of Rome face every direction of the compass except that Saint Peter’s Basilica and Saint John Lateran Basilica—two of the three Constantinian Basilica’s in Rome face westward. That does not seem to be a co-incidence given that they are such prominent churches built under imperial supervision. The argument, for St Peter’s, was always given that the terrain of the Vatican Hill gave the builders no choice in how to situate the church, but in fact Constantine had his builders level out the hill and built the basilica on top.  It could have  been built in an eastward position.  Moreover, while the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls—the third of the Constantinan basilicas in Rome and the “twin” to St. Peter’s—faces east, I was surprised on a recent visit to Rome to read in a museum display at Saint Paul’s that it too originally faced west.  Hmmm.  And now we find an ancient church in Roman Britain also facing west.  Could it be that these churches were built so that the bishop or priest standing at the altar faced, not the rear wall of the Church, but, looking over the altar, faced the east and the rising sun?  Was there a Roman peculiarity here of situating the priest—but not the faithful—to face the rising sun?  We do know that the custom in Rome up to at least the 11^th century was for the bishop or priest to stand behind the altar facing the people, not with his back to them.  A westward facing Church would permit the celebrant to face the rising sun while maintaining the Roman custom of facing the faithful over the altar.
Now, the late Monsignor Klaus Gamber in his book The Reform of the Roman Liturgy (Die Reform der römischen Liturgie)made the somewhat preposterous claim that in St. Peter’s and other westward facing churches, the people stood at the Eucharist facing eastward towards the open doors of the Church to greet the rising sun.  This means, that they would have stood with their backs to the priest and the altar for the Eucharistic Liturgy—a very strange position, especially if they believed that Christ became truly present in the Eucharist.  Gamber would have us believe that the faithful stood facing a symbol of Christ—the rising sun—while their backs were to his Real Presence in the Eucharistic Gifts?!?  Gamber was opposed to the liturgical reforms that followed the Council and his work is more a polemic undermining the Liturgy of Paul VI than it is a critical study of Liturgical history.  Jungmann and Dix still remain the better works for liturgical history.  Nevertheless, Gamber is often cited by those neo-traditionalists who want to restore the pre-conciliar rites, especially the ad apsidem position of the priest at the altar with his back to the people.    
What we do know about this small Roman church in Hampshire is that the altar was freestanding.  A somewhat more elaborate mosaicked square in the apse of the Church marks where the altar would have stood and like all other altars of the period it was square and free standing.  The priest presumably stood behind it in the Roman fashion facing the congregation and beyond them the rising sun. 
What is this importance of the rising sun?  We have wandered far from the topic of this chain of postings—the history of the Anglican Church but it is worth commenting on none the less.  The Eucharist was normally celebrated early in the morning—at dawn.  The ancient cultures were far more sensitive to the interplay of nature and religious faith and the liturgy expressed this.  From the beginning of the Christian cult the rising sun was a symbol of the Risen Christ.  In the catacombs of Rome, or rather in a Christian tomb in the necropolis beneath Saint Peter’s Basilica, one can see Christ depicted at the god Apollo whose chariot daily drew the sun on its arc across the sky.  The paradigmatic liturgy of the year—the great Vigil of Easter—was always timed so that the great prayer of Thanksgiving, the Eucharistic Prayer, was being sung at the moment that the morning sun, representing the Risen Christ, broke over the horizon.  Each Sunday, therefore, the liturgy was celebrated at dawn to continue the Easter celebration in the weekly Eucharist.  The Sunday Eucharist was seen—and still is—as the weekly renewal of the Easter Proclamation.  We moderns with our vigil Masses and our preference to lie abed on Sunday mornings with coffee and papers have lost that connection.  Anyway, let’s get back to British Christianity.   
My second point that I wanted to make regarding Christianity in Roman Britain is that is spawned a heresy.  Pelagius (c. 354- c.420) was a British monk who came to Rome at the end of the fourth century. (There is some possibility that he was from Brittany in France rather than from Britain but most sources believe he was British.)  Coming out of the very strict ascetic tradition of hiberno-british monasticism, he was a man of very severe temperament shocked by the moral laxity in Rome.  (He would have an absolute apoplectic seizure if he saw Rome today.)  He blamed this laxity on the influence of Augustine of Hippo—who was still alive—the distinguished North African bishop-theologian who determined the course of Western theology and is usually considered a rigorist, though not by Pelagius.  Pelagius was actually far more morally rigid than Augustine and he thought that Augustine’s emphasis on grace was simply a cop-out that let people blame God for their own moral failures.  “I committed perverse sexual acts because God didn’t give me the grace to resist,” or as Geraldine used to say “The devil made me do it.” 
Little of Pelagius’s writings have survived.  His name being associated with heresy, his once-extensive writings were destroyed early on.  We know what various councils such as the one Augustine called at Carthage in 418 claim he taught but Pelagius was not at that Council and had no opportunity to explain himself.  The Council of Diospolis in 415—at which he was present—heard him out and confirmed his orthodoxy.  From what little we do know, we probably should conclude that Pelagianism, the heresy named after him, is more of a caricature of his actual teaching than an accurate reflection.  Pelagianism says that the human person is capable of doing good moral acts independent of God’s grace.  This is a heretical position, but nowhere do we find that it is actually what Pelagius taught.  Being a strong Augustinian myself and having what might even be an overdeveloped appreciation for the mystery of Grace, I abhor Pelagianism which I see very much reflected in the shallow naiveté  of today’s happy-clappy Matthew Fox pseudo-Christianity.  Of course I think the morose and sullen pseudo-Catholicism of Michael Voris and Joseph Fessio is shot through and through with Jansenism, equally heretical and the moral opposite of Pelagianism. 
All this takes us far away from today’s topic, the development of the Ecclesia Anglicana but I did want to draw reader’s attention to the vitality of the Romano-British Church before we move onto its Celtic salvation and the Anglo-Saxon era.                

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

Three elderly Mennonite women, all between 84 and 90 years old, were tied up and attacked with a stun gun in a small eastern Pennsylvania town Friday—the same day a gunman killed 20 children, six teachers, his mother and himself in an affluent Connecticut town.  Dereck Taylor Holt, 22, attacked the women apparently for no reason other than their religion.  The irony is that Mennonites, like their spiritual cousins, the Amish, are a peace loving people who for centuries have consecrated themselves to non-violence.  Meanwhile members of the Westboro Baptist Church—the notorious Kansas sect that pickets military funerals with signs declaring that “God Hates Gays” have announced that they are going to picket funerals of the victims of the Newtown shooting.  One has to wonder how evil such as the assault on these elderly women, the murder of children and teachers, and the hate that fills the hearts of this Topeka Kansas synagogue of Satan  can be reconciled with our belief in God.  How can a good God tolerate the harm done by evil people? 
I have been listening to Catholicism –the made for Public Television series by Father Robert Barron of Chicago as I do my treadmill routine—practicing to wow my cardiologist at my stress-test.  I am really impressed by the series.  As you know, I am a bit jaundiced by most official Catholic propaganda and there are things that Father Barron says that I find a little more “inside the box” than I might choose to say.  But overall, I am finding the series to be very thought provoking and faith-inspiring.  But he asks that very question: How can a good God tolerate evil in our world?  I think he comes up with some credible answers why God doesn’t just burn down Westboro or strike dead bullies and sociopaths.  But the real issue is—why do we tolerate evil?
I spent a weekend last year as the guest of some friends at their seaside vacation home.  There was another family there with their college age sons.  A priest friend was also there and said Mass for the group the Sunday morning.  We were all there except for the younger son of the guest-couple.  I was a bit surprised as this family are practicing Catholics and the sons are graduates of Catholic grade and high schools. The young man not only wasn’t there, he made his absence conspicuous by walking past the group several times during the liturgy and then taking out his hand gun and doing some target practice where we could all hear him. 
Afterward I asked the host “what was that all about?”  “Joe is angry with God.” My host said.  “He was bullied in school and he blames God for not doing something about it?”  To be honest, I am frightened for this young man.  This sort of unresolved anger combined with his fascination for guns are two components of what could be a toxic psychiatric cocktail.   But his question is simply a variation of why doesn’t God burn down Westboro or strike dead those who are doing harm to elderly women or defenseless children. 
The Catholic answer, rooted in Augustine and Thomas as well as Ratzinger and Rahner is that we need to take responsibility for evil in our world and we need to do something about it.  It isn’t God’s problem.  God did not create evil.  We have shattered the inherent goodness of creation by our greed, our anger, our lust, our jealousy, our need for control or power.  We have caused the problem and we must—with God’s grace—find ways of healing it.  Notice, I said “heal.”  In most cases punishment is only the petri dish that grows the evil.  But the culture of violence in which we wallow is the seedbed of the murders and assaults and the bullying and the hatred we find in Newtown and Pennsylvania and Topeka and your town and mine.  Christ alone has the answer.  Christ is the answer.   

Mothers and Bishops Who Drink Too Much

Today is the feast of Saint Monica.  Monica has always been held up as the pious mother praying with copious tears for the conversion of her son, Augustine.  Read the Confessions, however, and you get a different picture.   Had Monica done her duty as a Christian mother and had her son baptized in infancy or early childhood, Augustine claims, he would not have strayed down all the wild and wicked ways of life (which, again, if you read the Confessions aren’t that wild and wicked, in fact are far from lurid, disappointing even).   But Monica and her non-Christian husband, Patricius (Patrick—you didn’t need to be Irish in the ancient world to have that name) had ambitious plans for their son, career plans that baptism would have impeded, and so he went unbaptized.  At that time, Christians were not allowed—by Church discipline—to study the great  non-Christian (I am avoiding the word “pagan”) authors—Cicero, Virgil, Livy, Terence —whose prose and poetry set the literary style.  Augustine studied hard and indeed excelled in rhetoric—equivalent to the study of law today—and had a successful career as an academic and then in the Imperial service, but to Monica’s horror he never did join the Church in those salad years.  His life, as I said, was not that dissolute—he lived in a long-term common-law marriage with a woman to whom he was faithful and with whom he had a son whom both he and Monica adored.  The son died in adolescence.  Augustine was prevented by law from marrying his companion as they were of sufficiently different social strata (she much lower) and the Empire had laws prohibiting such matches even as many State Governments in the 19^th and first half of the 20^th century prevented interracial marriages.  Monica, interfering in the most intimate details of her son’s life, indeed found her son a more suitable match and broke up the relationship with his son’s mother, forcing Augustine to send the woman away.  He said that losing this woman was like having his heart torn from his breast, but he did as Mother said.  What a wus!  He is one of my heroes, though, and I think the Confessions are one of the most beautiful books written.  And one of the most touching scenes in the book is the final conversation Augustine and his mother have in Ostia as they wait for the ship to return to their native North Africa.  Monica was never to make the journey, dying shortly after this conversation.    

Augustine also tells us in the Confessions that his mother had a drinking problem—indeed even as a child she seems to have had an alcohol addiction.  She would overcome it in her adult life a la George W Bush by totally refraining from alcohol.  

Speaking of Alcohol issues, yesterday I mentioned San Francisco Archbishop-Designate Salvatore Cordileone.  Cordileone is known for his vehement opposition to same-sex marriage as well as for his love for the bejeweled ornaments and long silk robes with which he has tricked himself out as Bishop of Oakland.  His Grace was arrested the other day for a DUI. We all make mistakes and we need to have compassion on one another for various moral failures such as getting drunk.  His being drunk shouldn’t be a problem for his assuming his new duties, but his lack of prudence and responsibility in getting behind the wheel of a car requires a reconsideration of whether he can handle the responsibilities of such a post as he is about to undertake.  Perhaps if he chooses to undergo evaluation and treatment (note, I say evaluation and treatment as evaluation can determine if there is a serious problem here or merely an indiscretion) in a facility such as the St. Luke Institute or the Southdown Institute he can learn important things about himself that will prepare him to be a good and wise pastor to the flock entrusted to him.  Such places have helped many priests and religious come to terms with themselves and find grace in the midst of the chaos of their lives.  This brings us back to Saint Augustine.   So many people think that Augustine is obsessed with sin but when you read the Confessions, really read them, you see that Augustine talks about sin because it was in the brokenness of his life that he found the mystery of Grace.  He is the Doctor Gratiae—the Doctor of Grace.  May Archbishop Cordileone find Grace in his life through exploring his failures and may he become the compassionate and wise bishop that was Augustine. 

Are We Straining Gnats and Swallowing Camels?



Paul VI--author of Humanae Vitae

 Behind the “Fortnight For Freedom” and controversy over Catholics and Obamacare as well as the complaint that the good Sisters of the LCWR are too concerned about social justice and not sufficiently vocal about “Catholic Issues” such as speaking out against Abortion and in favor of the Church’s stance on birth control, is the magisterial demand for agreeing with the teaching of the Catholic Church on the inherent sinfulness of artificial methods of family planning. 

How, in heaven’s name, did contraception become the litmus test of being a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ?  I am not denying the importance of the Church’s teaching.  I have read Humanae Vitae—several times, including when it was first issued—and I think Paul VI had some very crucial insights and issued some dire warnings that time has borne out.  While accepting the magisterium on this matter as the present “state of the question” for us Catholics, I do think the teaching needs to be critiqued to see if the scientific premises on which several presuppositions of the teaching rest are valid.  The reproductive sciences have made huge discoveries just in the past quarter century but much of the Church’s theology of sex is still influenced by fourth century Augustinian biological notions borrowed from Galen (Aelius Claudius Galenus c. 120-200 AD).    This need to maintain an ongoing critique of theological teachings in the light of ongoing developments in the physical and social sciences affects other questions as well—same sex relationships, masturbation, in vitro fertilization, and perhaps medical use of stem-cells and even abortion.  I am not saying that these teachings should be fundamentally changed, but every “truth” needs to be constantly re-examined as the human erudition from which the knowledge of that “truth” is derived is itself expanded. 

But again, let me ask, how did contraception become the litmus test of being a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ?  It is one teaching among many—how did it come to the top of the Catholic identity checklist?  (Well, actually it is probably 2 or 3—after abortion and maybe something else: I don’t know, same-sex marriage, women priests, Catholic Campaign for Human Development, voting against Obama—something like that.)  How did something as divisive as contraception rise to the top of the list?  And a somewhat broader question: why, in fact, do we define morality in terms of bedroom behavior?  The Church’s magisterium considers morality from a variety of vantages and over a variety of fields—social justice, human rights, economic justice, business ethics, truthfulness and integrity, duties of citizenship.  Why is it that in practice we boil it down to what some people (for the most part, “other people”) on the most occasional of opportunities do in the privacy of their homes and in the exclusiveness of their most intimate relationship?  Why have we as a Church turned ourselves into voyeurs who, like maladjusted teenagers, give a priority to speculating on what other people are doing in bed?  Why aren’t we more worried about children locked into cycles of poverty in our inner cities? Or refugees in the Sudan?  Or the rights of the Palestinians?  Or corporate greed?  Come to think of it, why is a man who loots his employees retirement fund not only able to go to communion without embarrassment but is honored with a papal knighthood when a mother of four who takes the pill made to feel unworthy of the Body that was broken for her and the Blood that was shed for her?  Of course, in the smackdown of the nuns, word came from pretty far up the ladder (not the very  top, however) that we should be more concerned about stopping gays from being given economic equality with married couples than we are with children who are hungry or mentally ill people living on the streets.  Something is wrong here, but then I think we have all known that. 

Fr. Guarnizo, Communion Controversy, and Janssens Redivivus

Cornelius Janssens, 1585-1638, Bishop of

Ypres and the theologian who gave us

Jansenism

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

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

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

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

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

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