The Kettle Is Boiling

Pope Francis on his way into the
Synod

 Well the Synod on the Family, Part II is underway and the kettle has come to a boil.  Several Cardinals have written a letter to Pope Francis complaining that the Synod is “stacked” to get pre-determined results in favor of the “Kasper Proposal” for greater inclusion in the life of the Church of the divorced/remarried and the LGBT community. 

The Cardinals expressed three specific complaints about the processes of the synod.

1.   In the past, Synodal documents contained a series of propositions which could be voted up or down according to the mind of the Synod to give an adequate reflection of where the Synod members stood on the concrete issues at hand.   The current Instrumentum Laboris—the Synod agenda—lacks this structure of propositions and makes it difficult to draw the lines of approval/disapproval of the final text.

2.   The Committee which drew up the Synod’s Instrumentum Laboris—was not elected by the Synod members but appointed (presumably by the Pope) and thus the agenda does not reflect the ideas of the Synod but ideas being imposed on the Synod from above. 

3.   The real agenda at work behind the scenes is not about the spiritual welfare of the Family but about communion for those in irregular unions (divorced and remarried, same-sex couples) and this involves doctrinal principles which, if shifted, put the Catholic Church more in line with the cultural trends espoused by the liberal Protestant Churches who are facing extinction as they move away from sound biblical and doctrinal principles.  (To be precise, the letter only mentioned the “divorced and civilly remarried.”)

Frankly, I think the objecting Cardinals have some interesting points, especially the final one.  However, anyone familiar with the Synod process knows that for decades now the conservative curiae of Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI had extremely tight control on the previous synods and the documents were pretty much pre-determined.  The Synods have rarely, if ever, been the truly open discussion forum for the bishops of the world to give honest and open advice to the Popes.  It was always ok when the conservatives did it; but now some people are smelling a rat. 

The strange thing about the letter is that when it was leaked to the press (through the anti-Francis Italian journalist, Sandro Magister) it was alleged that thirteen Cardinal-delegates had signed it.  (There are thirteen Cardinals in the faction determined to block the Francis Agenda, and the Synod is “stacked?”  I am missing something here.)  Four of the alleged signers have, however, denied ever seeing the letter, much less having signed it.

Pope Francis gave a rather strong address to the Synod during the first week condemning a “hermeneutic of conspiracy”—a perspective on the Synod that suspects there is a lot of back-room/back alley pushing and pulling for one agenda to win out over the other.  Signing Cardinals’ names to a letter they had never seen sure sounds to me like there is a conspiracy, but not a conspiracy to push the alleged Francis/Kasper agenda, but rather one to block any significant change in Church practice.  

A New Respect for Gay Catholics? Not if the Krazies Can Help It

Cardinal Shonbron with Pope
Benedict XVI

What is fascinating is that with the release of the Synod’s mid-term relatio, the krazies have all but forgotten their passion to keep the divorced and remarried from Holy Communion and focused on the section entitled “Welcoming Homosexual Persons,” paragraphs 50, 51, and 52 of the relatio.
Now the first thing to keep in mind is that the relatio is nothing other than a synopses of what has been said in the first week of the meeting so that the participants can begin to focus their ideas towards a more definitive statement at the end. The relatio is not a deliberative document and has no authority whatsoever. It is simply a sort of aide-memoire to guide the participants in their responses and reactions. (Responses and reactions are two different types of replies, somewhat akin to a positive and a negative charge, though not necessarily with a response being favorable and a reaction critical. It is possible to have positive reactions and negative responses. It is more a matter of a response being a considered and rational reply; a reaction being a more spontaneous and emotional reply. ) The Blogosphere has lit up with reactions to the relatio however and with the section on homosexuals and their place in the Church getting much more of a reaction—and a negative one—than Cardinal Kasper’s proposal of some sort of penitential process by which those in non-canonical second marriages could receive the Sacraments of Reconciliation and Eucharist. The Bêtes Noires of the Krazies’ Nightmare on Castro Street are Cardinal Christoph Shönborn and Archbishop Bruno Forte. The Cardinal, a Dominican and one of the leading intellectuals among the College of Cardinals, is Archbishop of Vienna. Forte is the Archbishop of Chieti-Vasto in Italy and a distinguished systematic theologian. Both Shönborn and Forte received their Archepiscopal appointments from Pope John Paul II. They also were both well known as progressive thinkers at the time of their appointments. Shönborn in particular had previously criticized a number of traditional positions on sexual ethics and suggested that there is a need for certain matters to be rethought. I could not agree more as most of our sexual ethics have not been informed by advances in the physical, behavioral, and social sciences over the past century and a half.
All that being said, I think the relatio is dead wrong in what it says about persons with same-sex attractions. The section begins by saying:

Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities?

What gifts and qualities do homosexuals have? Bruce is gay and he is really good at arranging the flowers on the altar? Doris is a Lesbian and her being a contractor saves us a fortune when the air-conditioning breaks down? I am sorry but Bruce may be really good at fixing the flowers on the altar and that is his gift, whatever his sexuality. Doris has engineering skills and that is her gift, whatever her sexual orientation.  Their sexual predispositions are irrelevant to their gifts and it is condescending to imply that gifts and talents proceed not from the individual in se but from his or her sexual orientation.  We have learned not to make generalities that reinforce stereotypes such as African-Americans have really good singing voices or that Hispanics make really good salsa.  We have had too many Church musicians fired or gym teachers fired because of their sexual orientation to put up with that sort of nonsense. You are a musician or an artist or a designer or landscaper or sheet-rock installer regardless of your sexual identity. Your gifts are intrinsic to who you are at a very different level than your sexual orientation.  What we need to say is that a person’s sexual orientation must not provide an excuse for excluding his or her gifts from the mission of the Church. 

The one gift rooted in the experience of being gay that I can think LGBT people might well have to bring to the Church is that they know what exclusion is, what it means to be kept out and turned away. They also know what it means to be restricted in how they express themselves and how they are expected to show affection by social conventions that are arbitrary and foreign to them. Perhaps one forum in which sexual orientation might make a difference is who preaches the Good Friday sermon.
He was spurned and avoided by men,
a man of suffering, knowing pain,
Like one from whom you turn your face,
spurned, and we held him in no esteem.
Isaiah 53:3 From the Old Testament Lesson for the Good Friday liturgy.

Of course there are others who could equally well give a reflection on this text—exclusion, isolation, and rejection are by no means solely the experience of LGBT people in the Church—just ask the families of those with “special needs” in terms of developmental challenges or autism.  But it does show us why the Synod needs to make it clear that there is room in the Church for all. The issue is not about sexuality: the issue is do we exclude anyone by not guaranteeing them “a fraternal space in our communities.” We need from the Synod guarantees that when people come to church—whether for Sunday worship, funerals, weddings, baptisms, whatever—that they are treated with respect and welcome. We need guarantees that when a same-sex couple bring their child for baptism or to register the child in the school or in a parish athletic program, they will not be turned away or treated any differently than anyone else. Who goes to communion is a matter between the individual and his or her confessor. But any and all should be welcome to sing in the choir or take up the collection or serve as a greeter at the Church door. Unfortunately experience shows us that we do need a clear and unmitigated promise of such a welcome in the Church.

And to be fair to the clergy that welcome is most often there.  The Rector of one major east-coast cathedral told me: “I couldn’t run this place without my gay parishioners.  They are the altar servers, the lectors, the choir members, the ushers, on the parish council, the finance board.  They take up the door-to-door census of the neighborhood, run the food pantry, and drive the old ladies to Church.”  A few years back I was visiting friends of mine, a gay couple, in the Maritime provinces.  Their pastor—a priest from Ireland who is in his seventies—told me: “Those fellows are the heart of my parish.  XXX is chairman of the finance board; yyyy bakes the Eucharistic bread.  They are both there whenever I need them.”  I don’t think that is very exceptional, in fact I think that is the norm.  But I, for one, would welcome a clear cut policy from the top that says it should be so.  I also know enough LGBT people who today are Episcopalians or Lutherans or Presbyterians because the gifts they had to bring—as individuals—were rejected and turned down because they are gay.  Jesus did not hang on the cross for us to turn people away, sinners or saints.  And my experience is is that those who see others as sinners are even more lost in sin themselves while those who appreciate the giftedness of others are blessed with grace.     What the krazies want is continued justification for their bias and they are frightened that the Synod will identify their self-righteousness for what it is: pure pharisaical hypocrisy. 

If Only The Neo-Trads Knew The Tradition!

Bl. John Henry Newman

patron of change in the 

Church

I picked up the following from one of the katholic krazy blogs (http://lesfemmes-thetruth.blogspot.com/2014/10/what-happens-when-church-goes-wobbly.html) who cites Father Ray Blake, pastor of Saint Mary Magdalene in Brighton, England:

I really am beginning to think that the Papacy, which Vatican II saw as the unitative, if it becomes innovative becomes self-destructive. The very purpose of the Papacy is to conserve that which was handed on to it. In the first millennium the faith of the City of the Two Apostles stood still whilst the world revolved, its lack of innovation made it the touchstone of orthodoxy during the Arian and Iconoclastic crisis and enabled it to be the memory of the Tradition of the whole Church. If the Church of Rome becomes the source of innovation can it also be the touchstone of unity? If not where can we find that unity, which after all was promised us by Christ? Can it exist outside of unity with Rome? The answer Orthodoxy and 'ultra-Catholics' come up with is that it exists within the Tradition itself, are ordinary Catholics going to come up with the same answer?

 Father Blake is no historian (and certainly no theologian) if he seriously thinks that the Church of Rome has historically stood changeless in its Apostolic Faith in an ever changing world. Whatever was he doing in Church history class in seminary?  I hope he did better in his systematic theology and moral theology.  Peter and Paul never heard the word “Trinity” but over the first four centuries the Church of Rome and those Churches in communion with it gradually began to articulate their understanding that the Godhead involves a communion-in-love of three Divine Persons.  “Light from Light, True God from True God” has certainly been the faith from the beginning, but it took three centuries to be articulated not only in those words, but in that particular concept. (The words actually were Φῶς ἐκ Φωτός,
Θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ,  and the concept has not been a stable concept as the Catholic faith has gone on to deepen both the explanation and understanding of those Greek words meant over the years.)  When Peter and Paul led their Church in “The Breaking of the Bread” (“Mass” is something that comes much later) they did so in Greek (Peter possibly in Aramaic) not Latin.   The apostles were not familiar with our practice of private confession and absolution.  Baptism was by immersion.  There was no distinct rite of confirmation, nor of “Christian Marriage” either. They did not think in terms of what we mean by “sacrament.”    The Apostles would never have seen a cross on the altar—and for that matter, would not have been familiar with Christian altars—only wooden tables.  They used leavened bread for the Eucharist and most likely every day cups of pottery or glass.   They did not wear special vestments for “the Breaking of the Bread,” would not have been familiar with “communion in one kind,” and would have been familiar with “communion in the hand.”  They did not know the word “transubstantiation;” it would have baffled Peter and Paul—whose philosophic training was not Aristotelian but neo-Platonic, would have rejected the term out of hand to explain the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.   Indeed for Paul, the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist would have been dependent on what was for him the fundamental Presence of Christ in his Body, the Church, and not be seen as something distinct.  Neither Peter nor Paul would know what a tabernacle or a monstrance was.  They would have been appalled at religious statues as a violation of the first commandment and seen them as a pagan innovation.  There was no monastic or religious life.   Perhaps the one innovation that is truly inexcusable was the adding of the Filioque to the Creed—something that the papacy long rejected but finally caved in on in the 11^th century.  How dare the Pope unilaterally change a dogma defined by an Ecumenical Council!  But he did and the krazies, including Father Blake, would almost undoubtedly “go the mats” over it, otherwise it would have been changed back over the last fifty years.  I could go on and on—but I think the point is made.  Faith—both in doctrine and practice—evolves, develops, and does not remain static.  Yes there is “innovation.”  There always has been to make the ancient faith live in its contemporary world.  Faith in Jesus Christ is not something static but living. And we must be attentive to the leadings of the Holy Spirit in how change comes about and that attentiveness depends on three factors achieving harmony: the faith of the faithful (consensus fidelium), the intellectual discipline of the theologians, and the authority of the magisterium.  I am sorry that Father Blake and my krazy blogger aren’t happy with this, but some of us suffered under the stagnation (or at least the very slow pace) of the last two papacies and we stood, if not silent, faithful.  We most likely will find ourselves tried in patience again in a future papacy, but will stand—if not silent, then—faithful still.  So get over it Father Blake and krazy lady: you don’t have to be happy about it; you don’t have to keep your mouth shut, but in the end you do have to submit yourself to the authority of the Church. 

I remember reading the Catholic philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, when I was studying philosophy all those many years back.  Granted it was a Jesuit University, but Marcel has always been acknowledged as a Christian existentialist and an eminent Catholic thinker.  Marcel claimed in his book Creative Fidelity that change is an essential component to fidelity.  That precisely because the world is not a static reality, in order for us who are in the world to be faithful to the Eternal we must be in constant change.  It may be more clear to put it this way: As the ground beneath our feet shifts, to keep our eyes fixed on that which does not shift, we must shift our own position.  God and Truth do not change but if we remain static we will lose sight of the Unchanging precisely because the world in which we stand has changed.  So in the face of Father Blake’s claim that the Apostolic Church of Rome had never changed in its first millennium, may I offer from Blessed John Henry Newman (an authority, by the way on change and continuity in the Apostolic and post-Apostolic Church): To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

The Spirituality Beneath This Synod's Agenda

C.S. Lewis 

The krazies are besides themselves in anxiety over this Synod on the Family and the direction in which it is going.  Michael Voris, the current dean of the self-appointed magisterium since Mother Angelica’s health crises forced her from the scene, has decided to head to Rome and join the various forces from LifeSite News and other neo-trad lobbies that are determined to resist any change in Church discipline.  Voris and others have gone so far as to oppose the baptism of children of same-sex couples or the “welcoming” of those in non-canonical unions in Catholic parishes. 

A theme proposed at the Synod for dealing with people in irregular family situations is “gradualism,” a solution based on what some moral theologians call “The law of graduality.”   This is a different approach than the somewhat clear-cut, right or wrong, black or white, approach with which most of us have long been familiar. 

Perhaps the clearest statement of which I am aware on the Law of Graduality or Gradualism is found in C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain.  Lewis (1898-1963) was an Irish born agnostic-turned-Anglican who was successively a Don at Oxford and then at Cambridge.  He was a novelist, an essayist, an academic, a poet, a literary critic, a noted public speaker, a theologian and an apologist. He wrote serious novels for both young and mature audiences, but his theological reflections, and especially The Screwtape Letters, are what has made him most famous.  Perhaps due to his own spiritual journey and its complexities he had an extraordinary understanding of the human soul and its relationship with God.  Let me offer the following quote in which Lewis foreshadows the tone Pope Francis has set for the Synod: 

Some modern theologians have, quite rightly, protested against an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity.  The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection.  …God may be more than moral goodness, he is not less.  The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.  The moral law may exist to be transcended, but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure. —C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.

 This paragraph is rich in ideas.

1.    …rightly protested against an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity.

2.    The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection.

3.    God may be more than moral goodness, he is not less.

4.    The moral law may exist to be transcended,

5.    …but there is no transcending it (the moral law) for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them.

6.    … and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim,

7.    … and fairly and square face the fact of their failure.  

Each one of these ideas is worth frequent and long meditation.  Perhaps the final line is the crucial one—that we must fairly and square face the fact of our failure to  meet the claim of God’s moral law.   The sort of rigid moralistic “Christianity” offered by those who imagine themselves to be the truly religious in a world that has abandoned God’s Law is a false road to go down because it invariably leads to a denial of one’s own moral failures.  We may disguise those failures.  We may set up the straw men of lesser sins to distract ourselves from the greater ones.  We may even, like the Pharisee in the Gospel account about himself and the Publican,  design a moral schema which relativizes our particular sins to be less than those of others and thus not as worthy of our condemnation as the sins of our neighbor.  But in the end, if we are to be truthful with God and with ourselves, we must come to see ourselves in such a light that it eclipses any fault of any other person. 

In the end I must acknowledge that my “white lie” is far more grievous than my neighbor’s adultery.  I must acknowledge that my slightly off-color remark is a worse sin than my neighbor’s abortion.  I must acknowledge that my impatience with my spouse is a far more serious sin than my neighbor’s same-sex relationship.  I must do this because it is my sin and that is the only sin for which I am accountable before the Throne of Grace. 

In the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, the priest—immediately before receiving Holy Communion—prays, echoing 1 Timothy 1:15;

I believe and confess, Lord, that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first.  This is the attitude we must have as we come before God and we will be far less quick to judge others.  In fact, we might even mature to where we can say with another well-known voice in our Catholic family: “Who am I to judge?”  Then we will know that we have arrived at a certain level of spiritual and moral maturity. 

Ann and Barry Ulanov wrote in The Study of Spirituality (1986, Oxford University Press, edited by Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarlold SJ)

For what one brings to prayer is either the true self or the lying self.  One prays, if one prays in all honesty, with as much knowledge of oneself as one can muster for the occasion and with as much charity. … Under every circumstance one must be honest with oneself.  That is the special scourging that is in prayer.

And this is precisely the problem with moral rigorists—they are not honest in their prayer, in their relationship with God.  They may admit their faults, granted, but always putting them in the context their sins are not as serious as the faults of others.  The sort of humility/honesty in prayer of which the Ulanovs wrote, on the other hand, makes us far less worried over who is receiving the Eucharist and what is the state of their soul as we come, through our own acknowledgement of the seriousness of our own sin, to comprehend that “worthiness” has nothing to do with receiving the Sacraments and that the Eucharist in particular is the table of sinners.  We know, from our own spiritual experience, that we are on a journey and that we have yet to arrive; and moreover, that the Eucharist is the food for our journey to the promised land and not the putative feast that awaits us once we are there.  But if one rejects the reality of moral gradualism in one’s own life, one simply cannot comprehend this idea.