Pope Francis and the Anti-Hero Heroes of Today

 

Pope Francis’ citing Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton in his speech to Congress was a red flag to the Katholic Krazies.  Both Day and Merton, though they really represent the Church before Vatican II in as that the greater part of their work was done in the years prior to the Council, are icons of Contemporary Catholicism.     

The Pope cited Thomas Merton for his openness to dialogue and the reconciliation to which dialogue can lead.  Merton (1915-1968) was a convert to Catholicism while in graduate school at Columbia University and he later entered the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky.  Merton’s literary background put him in a unique position in the Abbey as he was commissioned to write several books introducing the Cistercian tradition to the American public.  Merton was also cast into a vital role in the Abbey as Master of Novices which mean that it was his task to oversee the instruction of the young monks in the first six or so years of their monastic journey.  During this time he immersed himself in the monastic tradition going back before Benedict to Cassian and the Desert Fathers.  As he explored the world of mysticism he began to notice similarities between the ancient traditions of the Desert Fathers with spiritualties in other religious traditions, most notably Zen Buddhism. In the last few years of his life, Merton began writing on this subject but while his exposure to Zen (in particular) and other Eastern traditions enriched his spiritual growth he remained orthodox in his Catholic faith and a priest in good standing. 

Merton’s contemplative journey has had a huge impact on many people over the years.  Despite the monastic setting in which he lived, tens or even hundreds, of thousands of Catholics and other Christians have learned from him how to practice a much deeper life of prayer that was typical of the Catholic laity (or even most Religious) in the those golden days of yore to which the neo-trads always harken as an alleged “golden age” of the faith.  Meditation has become a common practice among Catholic laity and Merton’s practical guides to a contemplative life have channeled out from his Cistercian cloister through the Benedictines, Carmelites, Augustinians and other apostolic communities to the laity.  Indeed through the influence of Merton, it is often more likely to find a deep spiritual life lived by laity than by many Religious or priests and this is a most unfortunate situation.  Fellow Cistercian Thomas Keating and Franciscan friar Richard Rohr have done much to advance Merton’s work in providing down to earth spiritual guidance rooted in the monastic heritage but suited to people “in the real world.” 

Merton did have a final crisis in his life that was very significant.  During a hospitalization two years before he died, he fell in love with a student Nurse.  The relationship is complex and it is uncertain whether or not and to what extent Merton was faithful to his vows.  In the end, however, he did recommit himself to the monastic life though, despite the admonition of his abbot, he never broke contact with the nurse.  Merton had also fathered an illegitimate child in his youth before his conversion.  Merton devotees seem to be able to take his faults in their stride; those who see Merton as negative influence stress his failings. 

What has set the krazies off about Merton is his commitment to dialogue and his conviction that dialogue with those who differ from us can enrich our own understanding of the Truth.  To those who have an absolutist view of the universe this is a very threatening concept.  They believe there since we possess all Truth in itself we can learn nothing—ours is but to impart the truth to others which is not dialogic but didactic.  Dialogue can lead to change and change is threatening to them. 

Merton’s exploration of mysticism also gave him a passion for social justice.  His was an early voice both for Civil Rights and against the War in Vietnam.  Merton understood that a contemplative life changes us, makes us see the world through God’s eyes, and recognize the fundamental evil of human-caused suffering whether it be poverty, war, discrimination, prejudice, sexism, religious hatred or other source of evil.  But it was Dorothy Day that Pope Francis cited as his model for the Church’s engagement with contemporary social issues.

Day’s life was as complex as Merton’s.  Like Merton, Day was a convert to the Church after a fairly raucous and even libertine life.  While she had always been a nominal Christian and even, for a while, a devout Episcopalian, her twenties were caught up in a somewhat bohemian existence.  She became pregnant by one love and terminated the pregnancy with an abortion.  She became—to her surprise (she had thought she was sterile after her abortion)—pregnant by a second lover and bore the child.  Motherhood changed her radically and her concern for her daughter made Day bring her life more sharply into focus.  Her politics had always been radical.  From the beginning her views were shaped by a Christian perspective on distributive justice, but in her relative naïveté this led to strong ties to the American Communist party.  She also was involved in Women’s Suffrage and had been arrested at the White House during the Wilson Administration for demonstrating for the right of women to vote.  Upon her conversion to Catholicism she moved away from Communism to the principles of Distributive Justice as were being articulated at the time by Pius XI as an alternative to both Marxism and uncontrolled market capitalism.  She came under the influence of Peter Maurin, a French immigrant well steeped in the Fathers of the Church and Catholic Theology who articulated a clear vision for what Catholics hold to constitute a just society.  Distributive justice of course demands an equitable distribution of wealth and this appears to many—both then and today—as socialism.  Day was no arm-chair radical but a very hands on practioner.  She and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement and began publishing its newspaper, The Catholic Worker.  The movement continues today, with the Church’s blessing, but on the extreme left of contemporary Catholicism.  Day herself has been proposed for the canonization process and has been given the title “Servant of God” in recognition of that status.  She died in 1980.

Dorothy Day, like Merton, is a threatening figure to the krazies because she isn’t a cookie-cutter Catholic.  Their being cited by the Pope as examples of American (and in this case Catholic) virtues signals a real re-ordering in our moral hierarchy.  No longer is righteousness limited to the field of sexual propriety but deeper values are permitted to transcend the superficial categories which we cathari, perfecti, pure ones, self-righteous have constructed to demonstrate our moral superiority.  This Pope is turning things upside down and if you don’t have a strong sense of adventure the ride is becoming frightening.  

Of Buddha and the Gospel

The Abbey of Our Lady of

Gethsemane, site of the first

Catholic Buddhist Dialogues

The death of actor/comedian Robin Williams has dominated the news yesterday and today and Hollywood has certainly lost a brilliant artist, but I have to admit that while I admired his incredible range of talent, I was not a fan.  About ten years ago I was with friends when we saw him in a three hour stand-up marathon.  I remember sitting there, roaring with laughter for the first hour until I suddenly realized that his humor was anything but funny.   It was not a good hearted poking fun at our private and social inconsistences but rather rooted in a pool of tremendous and intolerant rage that was striking out against people who saw things differently from him, including religion and especially the Catholic Church.  Now I have no problem with pointing out institutional flaws—including that of the Church—and, in fact, I think humor can be an excellent forum of the precise sort of constructive criticism that keeps us all honest.  What disturbs me is anger—and rage in particular—because anger moves us from rational beings to the sort of hateful firebrands that divide and pit us against one another.  Our mission as Christians is to bring creation together into one in Christ; division undermines this mission of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.    
In the years after the Second Vatican Council, the Holy See (much to the annoyance of the Katholic Krazies) opened up official dialogue not only with other Christian denominations, but with the other great World Religions.  The Catholic Buddhist Dialogue was entrusted to a panel of Catholic Monks and Nuns—mostly from the Benedictine and Cistercian traditions—who meet with a corresponding group of Buddhist monastics.  Their first meeting was in 1996 at the Cistercian (Trappist) Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky, once home to the famous spiritual writer, Thomas Merton, who through his books and lectures introduced many Catholics, including myself, to Buddhist thought as a sort of lens through which Christians can bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ into sharper focus. 
The status of Buddhism as a religion is somewhat questionable.  Buddhism is non-theistic in as that it does not posit the existence of a God.  Neither does it deny the existence of God; the question of God is simply not considered in Buddhist thought.  It might be better described as a philosophy and in particular as a “philosophy of life” as its primary focus is the concern for attaining human happiness.  Much like the tradition of our Catholic mystics, and especially Saint John of the Cross, Buddhism teaches that desire for things—wealth, possessions, relationships, to love and be loved, power, prestige—is the source of all unhappiness.  True happiness is found in no-thing.  As I said, this echoes the insights of Christian mysticism, and indeed, echoes the teachings of Jesus that in order to attain eternal happiness one must leave behind mother and father, spouse and children, houses and wealth—whoever loves these things more than me (Jesus) is not worthy of me.  (Matt 10: 37ff)
Now I want to make it perfectly clear that, while I have always found Buddhist thought to enrich my own spiritual journey, I find Christianity to be greatly richer in what it offers than Buddhism.  Buddhism focuses on the avoidance of suffering whereas Christianity teaches us to embrace suffering—and particularly to embrace the suffering of the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters—and to reach out to alleviate their suffering.  (Buddhism, in its doctrine of compassion also teaches that we should alleviate the suffering of others, but alleviating the suffering of others is subordinate to the avoidance of one’s own suffering, or can be seen as the fruit of having attained a state where one is now beyond the power of suffering because one has attained that freedom from desire, whereas Christianity more encourages us to pro-active in addressing the pain of others.)    I think this explains why Christians have always been somewhat more pro-active in both in building hospitals, schools, orphanages and other charitable institutions as well as working for societal reform to eliminate the root causes of poverty, disease and other conditions that afflict humankind.  That being said, I still think there is much we—Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, secular humanists—can learn from the Buddhist tradition. And one of those things is addressing anger.  
In that first encounter of Catholic and Buddhist representatives at Gethsemane Abbey eighteen years ago, Buddhist scholar Pandith Vajiragnana said:
There is no way in Buddhism that we accept anger as a good thing. Under no circumstance is it accepted as a good thing. Besides anger, at the root of our mind is also selfish love or attachment.
Anger is a tremendous force for evil and despite all our western talk of “righteous anger” or justified anger, I sincerely doubt that anger qua anger can be used to produce any good results.  While a certain measure of social change may be attributed to the anger triggered as a reaction to racism or other injustices, I wonder how lasting change founded in anger can be.  It seems only to give rise to the anger of opposing forces.  The increasing polarization of our society and the rise of such anger-drive  movements as the “Tea Party” with their rabid opposition to immigration reform, their intense personal hatred of President Obama, their fascination with guns and violence, their intransigent refusal for political dialogue and collaboration that keeps bringing our government to standstills is, I believe, a reaction to the social “progress” that has been achieved by anger-drive movements on the left that worked for needed social change but did so from a position of outrage and anger rather than from a deep conviction of building a more open and just society.  I am of an age where I can remember the anger of the riots in 1968, the anger of Stonewall and the anger of burning flags and burning draft-cards.   Pictures of aborted fetuses and pictures of bloody-coat-hangers represent the irrational anger on each side of the abortion debate.   I remember standing at a rally at the US Capitol and hearing Knights of Columbus denounce Cardinal Bernadin in the most angry and derogatory of terms for his call for “Common Ground” and dialogue with those with whom we disagree.  And I think one of the greatest crimes in our history was how J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI disguised the non-violence of Dr. Martin Luther King and had him portrayed in the media not for the apostle of non-violence he was but as a communist trying to bring our country to revolution.  
We are a society consumed by anger.  How much of our entertainment is anger-driven whether by video games or television or movies or contemporary “music?”  Our societal fascination with guns and the artificial “need” it has created for semi-automatic and automatic weapons is only one more expression of how anger is poisoning our society.   We have countless instances of road-rage, domestic violence, sexual abuse—all anger driven. 
 We cannot deny that anger is in  our makeup.  At that same 1996 meeting at Gethsemane Pandith Vajiragnana said:
People have different temperaments, and one of those temperaments is informed by anger.  Anger is in us all, so we need to recognize it, then, what to do?  The Buddha very clearly said that anger cannot be appeased by anger.  It is to be appeased by love.  So, we must practice love.
So said the Buddha.  So also said Jesus.  As his disciples we must learn to tame our anger as we must tame the other vices that original sin has woven into our character.  We can’t deny our anger—it is most dangerous when we claim it has no power over us.  We must tame it by cultivating the virtue of compassion whereby we try to come to a patient comprehension of the forces that drive those who are different from us, who think differently, who hold different values.  We must not, as Pope Francis likes to remind us, judge others but seek to understand them.  This does not mean that we will let go of our own values and commitments, but rather that we try to bring them into some sort of dialogue.
Mental Health Professionals claim that one of the roots of depression is anger that is not well managed.   Anger, when not given proper outlet, can overwhelm the psyche and turn into depression.  This is perhaps the root of the tragedy that overwhelmed Robin Williams.  It is a great loss.  We need to wake up to the perils of anger and learn to convert our anger into compassion. 

The Politics of Spirituality

Thomas Merton, leading

American Spiritual writer

of the last 100 years.

A friend of mine called me the other evening with a question he is facing on a take-home exam at Catholic U in Washington.  He wanted my advice as it is a field in which I teach.  And the question was “Compare and contrast contemporary spiritual writers with the classical spiritual writers.” 

I suggested several ideas he might want to follow—contemporary spiritual writers draw on other fields such as psychology, anthropology, sociology of religion etc. in their writing, fields not developed at the time of Francis de Sales or Teresa of Avila or Bernard of Clairvaux.  Moreover, contemporary spiritual writers will also draw insights from other world-religion traditions such as Buddhism or Islamic mysticism and they will also find insight in Native American spirituality or in the spiritual
traditions of cultures such as the Australian aborigines.  This would not have been done before Nostra Aetate at Vatican II nor could it have been done in the more culturally narrow worlds of the medieval or even the early modern periods.  At this point my friend interrupted me and said that the contemporary authors they had read for this course on the history of Christian spirituality drew neither on an inter-disciplinary nor a inter-faith tradition.  So whom, I asked, had they been assigned to read.  The answer was Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Karl Rahner, and Henri deLubac.  I had been expecting Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, Joan Chittester, Ronald Rohlheiser, Richard Rohr, Evelyn Underhill, Henri Nouwen, and other contemporary writers.  Ratzinger, Rahner, and deLubac are great writers—but they are systematic theologians not spiritual theologians.  Granted that each of the produced some writings of profound spiritual importance and each has shown through his writings a profound personal spiritual experience but it is interesting that the writers who are influencing contemporary American Catholics are overlooked in favor of these ivory-tower pietists. 

Now I realize that a Ratzinger or a Rahner or a deLubac  bring an academic rigor to their writings that the above mentioned authors do not.  But Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux and even Francis de Sales were not academics.  Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises are not the overflow of scholarly reflection. Thomas à Kempis did not write from a theological perspective.  Eckhardt was a theologian of course—but clearly distinguished between his mystical works (which were usually in the vernacular being in the way of sermons for enclosed nus) and his speculative theology which was written in Latin.   So too Bernard—while his work is theologically sound—wrote from inner spiritual experience not from rational constructions.  I am not questioning why a fellow professor assigned Rahner and Ratzinger but I do wonder why he passed over Merton, Underhill, and others?  But then, it is Catholic University and the ecclesiology of some professors is rather narrow to suit the purposes of the University’s governors and their own advancement.   Such is how the academic world plays its politics. 

It is, I am afraid, another symptom of the widening gap between the Church of the hierarchy and the Church of the Faithful.  Those who buy into the hierarchical model of Church dismiss the work of the Holy Spirit among the ordinary rank and file Christians.  It is tragic that this dichotomy has opened up at all but it is dangerous that the gap is widening.  There is so much spiritual vitality among the everyday Catholics that can be harnessed for a true New Evangelization if only those leading the hierarchical Church could look beyond their narrow vision and see it.      

 

The Prophetic Mission of the Religious Sisters

this doesn't quite speak to me, or if it does,

I don't think the message is orthodox and

it should be looked into by the Congregation

for the Doctrine of the Faith

I was preparing a lecture on monasticism this past weekend and I came upon this quote from Thomas Merton

Special Emphasis is put on the mystique of martyrdom—the consummation of the Christian’s consecration of himself to Christ in baptism   Tertulian writes: “A prison provides a Christian with the same advantages that a desert gives to a prophet.”  This is interesting,  Not only are the Desert Fathers heirs to the vocation of the martyrs, but the martyrs are heirs of those pre-desert Fathers, the prophets   

  Thomas Merton, Cassian and the Fathers: Initiation into the Monastic Tradtion, edited by Patrick F. O’Connell, Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo  2005.  p. 11.

OK, this I recognize

seems to me to be what

our faith is about.

Merton demonstrates, citing Tertullian, a connection here between monasticism (and by extension, religious life) and prophetic charism.  Monasticism had its origins, in part, in the desire of men and women to give their lives totally to God in the age where the option of martyrdom was fast closing because the persecution of the Roman Empire was drawing to a close.  The word “martyr” comes from the Greek μάρτυς, a witness.  Prophet comes from the Greek προφήτης—which means someone who speaks up on behalf of, testifies for, another.  Tertullian makes a link between prophets and martyrs.  That link passed to the desert monks.  Men and women whose passion of faith led them to want to surrender their lives totally to God, turned to the ascetical life in the desert as hermits or monks.  Origen draws the connections between the martyrs and the desert ascetics when he interprets the parable of the sower and the seed (Matthew 13:1-23).  Origen says that those who bear increase a hundred fold are the martyrs.  Those who bear increase sixty-fold are the ascetics (those men and women who have opted for lives of celibacy and prayer), and those who bear witnesses thirty-fold are the widows—who give themselves to prayer and good works. 

     The monastic life began as a witness by those committed Christians who understood that the society around them with all its distractions and pleasures was no place for the heart that seeks God and his kingdom.   They desired a purity of heart that would empower them to focus on God and God alone.  Their function within the larger Church was to witness, to keep alive the testimony, that God demands our all.   It was not, as it was with the gnostics, a rejection of the world as evil, but rather a witness to the Christian that there is a Reality beyond this world and that our hearts, whatever our particular vocation is, must be set on that reality. The witness was a powerful one and this prophetic role within the community highly values, so much so that by the fifth century and afterwards, bishops were increasingly chosen from among the monks.  And the preaching of those monk bishops is remarkable.  Many of those readings from Chrysostom, Augustine, Jerome (who was not a bishop but very prominent, none the less), and other “Fathers” of the Church are still read today in the Office of Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours.  The monks, despite their withdrawal from society, were keenly aware of the concrete demands of the Gospel in the world.  They understood the fundamental connection between the Eucharist and an advocacy for the poor,  they realized the responsibilities that came with financial prosperity.  They understood that true religion demanded a distributive justice—that true faith demanded good stewardship of one’s material goods.  One of these Fathers, Saint Basil wrote:

The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the person who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the person who has none; the money which you hoard in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help."     

Chrysostom wrote

Do you wish to honour the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk, only then to neglect him outside where he is cold and ill-clad. He who said: "This is my body" is the same who said: "You saw me hungry and you gave me no food", and "Whatever you did to the least of my brothers you did also to me"... What good is it if the  Eucharistic table is overloaded with golden chalices when your brother is dying of hunger?  Start by satisfying his hunger nd then with what is left you may adorn the altar as well

     And there are people today in the Church that think that the Sisters are too involved in social justice? 
        Over a period of time, and especially with the Rule of Saint Benedict, monasticism became more formalized and new forms of religious life emerged—Canons Regular in the 11^th and 12^th centuries, mendicant friars in the 13^th,  The  Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life in the 15^th, the Apostolic Congregations such as the Society of Jesus, the Theatines, the Vincentians in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  Similarly monastic institutions of women evolved as women affiliated themselves to the canons regular, the mendicants, and apostolic congregations. Charismatic women such as Mary Ward and Angela Merici established autonomous women’s communities not affiliated to men’s communities and with—for the time—the radical vision of educating women.  Vincent de Paul made a radical leap with his daughters of Charity who were very untraditional.  He instructed them
…for a monastery, only the houses of the sick, for cell, a rented room, for chapel, the parish church, for cloister, the streets of the city, for enclosure, obedience, for grill, the fear of God, for veil, holy modesty.  

Perhaps among all the congregations of religious, the Daughters of Charity have been the most prophetic because of the heroic service they have given to the poor. 

      It is the role of religious in the Church to be prophetic—to speak up against the institutionalism, whether in the worlds of business, government, society, or even the world of the Church, that is contrary to the Gospel.  To do this authentically, religious need to reexamine the monastic roots which may not lay at the foundation of their particular institute but which do comprise the underpinning of religious life itself.  Religious must be contemplatives.  That does not mean they must be cloistered but it does mean that their hearts have to be set on God and on his Word. They must strive for that singular focus of the Kingdom of God. 
         And this is the irony of the present moment.  When Cardinal Burke parades around in his nine yards of scarlet silk topped by a fur wrap it is not God’s Kingdom that is being witnessed to.  When Cardinal Law, fleeing accountability in Boston for his role in cover-ups of criminal activity, enjoys the luxurious quarters that were his as Archpriest of Saint Mary Major, it is not God’s kingdom to which he was witnessing.  The rank and vicious ambition for which Archbishop Lori became known as aide-de-camp to the late Cardinal James Hickey of Washington is not witness to God’s Kingdom.  When Carl Anderson draws a million + a year from the Knights of Columbus while using Knights funds to accomplish political agendas both at home in the States and in the rats’ nest of the Roman Curia, it is not God’s kingdom he is witnessing to. 
         But the good Sisters.  I go to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, shelters for abused women and children, inner-city schools, day-care for the elderly, and I find the nuns, not the prelates.  Sadly, I don’t even find the priests, at least those with pontiff collars and silver cufflinks under their cassocks.  No, the religious are the prophetic voice—and that is their vocation.  There are those who want to silence that voice but the ladies have the credibility of living what they bear witness to.  Moreover it is their right, their responsibility, and their vocation to give witness. You go girls!

Genuine Spiritual Hungers and Pious Charletans

How is it that a Marcel Guranizo or a James Haley can have such devoted followers who swear to their “holiness” while at the same time Church authorities see it necessary to remove them temporarily (Guarnizo) or permanently (Haley) from ministry?   Now granted there are dozens of stories in the history of the Church where good men—and women—fell afoul of the Institution and paid the price for their integrity.  This past week I related the story of Margaret Anna Cusack, the foundress of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Peace, whose persecution by Archbishop Corrigan led her not only to leave the Sisterhood she had founded but to return to the Anglican Communion in which she had been baptized and raised.  Saint John of the Cross was persecuted by his fellow Carmelites and even imprisoned for nine months in a monastic prison for his “disobedience” to his religious superiors when all he was trying to do was encourage reform among his brothers.  Saint Mary MacKillop, Australian foundress of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart, was excommunicated because she wouldn’t buckle under to the local bishop’s demands to control her religious order.  But even as they say that being paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t out to get you, so too persecution is no sure sign that one is a saint.   
       I have never met either James Haley or Marcel Guarnizo, but their ecclesiastical status is troubling vis a vis the perceived sanctity about which their defenders are loud and long.   There are degrees of censure.  “Administrative Leave”—the status of Father Guarnizo is probably the lightest form of censure under which he could be put.   It is not, I believe, even a canonical category.  As I explained in an earlier blog (April 25)  it seems that it is just removing him from the public eye while circumstances totally unrelated to his refusal of communion to Barbara Johnson are investigated to make sure that in his involvement with Aid to the Church in Russia and the Educational Initiative for Central and Easter Europe he has done nothing illegal or that would otherwise “embarrass” the Church.  His administrative leave only affects his ministerial status in the Archdiocese of Washington.  He is totally free to return to his home diocese, the Archdiocese of Moscow, and serve there at the will of that Archbishop.  In fact, he probably is free to assume ministry in any other diocese, even in the United States—or the world—with permission of the local bishop. 
       The next most serious step would be for a priest to be deprived of his faculties and this would bar him entirely from priestly ministry but leave his clerical status intact.  Such censure would apply only the diocese where the faculties were withdrawn.  This is sometimes used against religious order priests to force them from a diocese where the Bishop finds them troublesome for their preaching social justice themes or their failure to adhere strictly to liturgical norms, but it could be used against secular clergy as well.   Another bishop, another diocese, is free to admit the priest and restore his faculties for the new diocese.  Suspension a divinis which bars him from public ministry would be the next most serious step and in this case the accused is not able to resume ministry even in another diocese unless and until the suspension is lifted by the priest’s canonical superior who had placed him under suspension. 
      For a priest to be defrocked is the most serious punishment and it is rarely used. It is invoked only when the priest’s behavior would continue to bring extraordinary disgrace on the Church.  The priest is not only prohibited from exercising ministry but is returned “to the lay state”—that is to say he is no longer acknowledged as a priest.  Persistent and public immorality would be one reason this censure would be invoked, but it might also be used to distance the Church from a priest with serious psychological problems for which he either refused or is unable to be treated.  A priest with a sexual addiction that cannot be brought under control might be defrocked.    A man who uses the priesthood or the Church in a serious financial scam might be defrocked.  In both those—and most other cases—the individual usually would first be given the opportunity to resign his priestly ministry voluntarily but the refusal to do so would result in his being defrocked.  
        I don’t know why James Haley was defrocked but the fact that he was not only defrocked but then, according to his defenders, excommunicated is an indication of some very serious misdeed which he will not acknowledge.  It may be that psychologically he cannot accept responsibility for whatever misconduct has brought down this punishment but in any event it is a tragic story not because he didn’t deserve the punishment but because he cannot bring himself to take responsibility for his actions and be restored to the unity of the Church.  If this were a case, as in the case of Mary MacKillop, of an individual bishop, it could be a personal vendetta but if the excommunication comes from the Holy See—as “defrocking” would have to (the local bishop not having that authority)—the charges must have grave weight.      
Reading various blogs and entries on the internet, both Father Guranizo and James Haley have impressed many people with their being “holy priests.”  How is it that people are so easily impressed?  A colleague of mine was a parishioner at Saint Lawrence Church in Arlington where James Haley had once served as parochial vicar.  I remember this story because my friend and his wife left Saint Lawrence, their long time parish, and joined Saint Matthew Cathedral parish across the river in Washington, precisely because of James Haley.  Then-Father Haley would speak at Mass of the “visions” he had while gazing into the chalice of the newly consecrated Precious Blood.  They found this very disturbing without being able to explain precisely why.  Other parishioners, however, ooohhhed and aaahhhed at Haley’s profound “mystical gifts.” 
       Many are taken in by great piety and devotion because they confuse piety with true holiness and this is one of the structural faults in contemporary Catholicism.  A newly ordained Methodist pastor with whom I was speaking recently told me that when she was in seminary she and other Protestant students cross-registered with a Catholic seminary for courses in spirituality because the Methodist faculty didn’t offer any courses while the Catholic theology school had an entire department of spirituality.  Yet, she was surprised that most of the students in the spirituality courses were Protestants or lay people.  Candidates for the Catholic priesthood were too busy with their canon law and liturgics classes to have the room in their schedules to study the mystics.  This corresponds with my own experience where I find the secular clergy in particular to be grossly ignorant of the mystical tradition in Catholicism.   I think these accounts for much of the poor preaching today when Catholics are either subjected to pious drivel or drowned in doctrinal complexities, neither of which belongs in the pulpit.   Modern people have great spiritual hungers and the Catholic Church is blessed with a rich tradition of spiritual teachers such as Francis de Sales, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius Loyola, Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Bernard of Clairvaux,  Elizabeth of the Trinity,  Thomas a Kempis, as well as a host of lesser known writers—Brother Laurence, Dom Augustine Baker, Marie of the Incarnation, Hadewicjh of Antwerp, Jan Ruysbroeck.  The work of many of these writers is available in the Classics of Western Spirituality series by Paulist Press.   In addition to these great writers of the past, current Catholic spiritual writers such as Thomas Keating, Ronald Rohlheiser, Ruth Burrows, Joan Chittester, Richard Rohr, are writing books that are helping tens of thousands of people—Catholic and non-Catholic alike—on their spiritual journeys.  And of course the work of the twentieth century Trappist monk, Thomas Merton (d. 1968) continues to inspire countless people.  And yet, do we hear about the spiritual journey in our parishes?  All too rarely.  One of my students last year mentioned that her pastor had cancelled a talk by the Trappist monk William Menninger  because  as her pastor told her “contemplative prayer is for monks and nuns, not people like you.”  What a pity.  Richard Rohr writes:
      Much of the Western world has given up on the church and is going other places for wisdom.  Unfortunately, in these other places they are sometimes “willingly filling their belly with the husks the pigs are eating” (Luke 15:16) But we in the church must ask ourselves if we have not been the parent who sent them away because there was nothing trustworthy or life-giving at home.

I think he has a point.

How Religion Has Changed These Last 50 Years

Does this sort of religion "work" today?

I caught a few minutes of Fresh Air with Terry Gross Easter Monday afternoon while I was in the car and she was interviewing anthropologist T.M. (Tanya Marie) Luhrmann who was speaking about prayer and the experience of evangelical Christians of God “talking back” with them in prayer.  I should have listened to the whole show before I make a judgment but I am a little skeptical of God talking with “evangelical” Christians ever since Jesus told George Bush to invade Iraq.  Trust me, if I ever had a good reason to push saying the rosary it is what God supposedly says to politicians and preachers when you get into free style prayer.  But what caught my attention was this:

“American spirituality has shifted since the '60s toward a much more engaged, responsive, intimately experienced sense of the spiritual. Every church is different. Every person within a church has a somewhat different experience of God. But I thought this represented something really important about American spirituality."  I think this insight has a lot to say about the changed Catholicism of the last fifty years. 

        Now I grew up, or at least got a good head start on growing up, in the pre-Vatican II Church.  I was in High School when the Council met.  I had at that point been through eight years of Catholic grade school and was safely ensconced in a private Catholic Boys High School where we were expected to be in Sodality and where the entire student body went to Mass in the gym every Friday morning.  I grew up with family rosary, Mass on Sunday, Wednesday night Holy Hour, and Friday Stations during lent.  We had no meat on Friday, fasted in Lent and the Vigil of Christmas (and several other days), and had a crucifix in every room in the house (except the guest bathroom), and assorted statues and holy pictures not only in the bedrooms but the living room, family room, foyer, and dining room.  We weren’t fanatics—though it sure sounds like it now—it was what everybody we knew (‘cause everybody we knew was Catholic) did.  We didn’t have Mass in English, communion in both kinds, charismatic prayer meetings, centering prayer, bible study, Lectio Divina, or guided meditation.  Thomas Merton was Seven Story Mountain, Joan Chittester was still wearing a wimple (and not yet writing books), and Richard Rohr and Ronald Rohlheiser were both in Little League. It seems strange in retrospect, but this sort of religion worked.

     Mass was something Father did for us.  He said Mass.  We went to Mass and, if we were in the “State of Grace” and hadn’t eaten, we went to Holy Communion.  God to us was “mediated” by the priest. Those gates in the communion rail were a powerful symbol—they kept us at our respectful distance but they swung open and closed to admit the priest who went from us to God and from God to us.  In the same way, the priest standing at the altar with his back towards us and “facing God” was a clear sign of his role as our designated mediator. 

       And if there was anything that the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council did, it was to give us direct access to God in which the priest may have remained a facilitator but no longer was the mediator.  The gates were gone—the rail was gone—the barrier stood no longer and we could enter the sanctuary without obstacle.  Prayer was in our own language and we could speak with God directly without Father having to take our prayers to God in Latin, God’s language of choice.  The Mass and rites of the Church shaped our prayer, but didn’t exhaust it.  Now people would gather for prayer meetings.  Now there were bible studies.  Now people began reading books about meditation and growing in the spiritual life.  Lay people began having spiritual directors and spirituality shifted from staying out of sin and saying prayers to serious paths of spiritual journeying.  It wasn’t only evangelicals who wanted an experiential prayer life—it was Catholics. 

     This has had various consequences.  For some of us, we have found communities in the Church that help us on this journey.  We attend parishes where the homilies are scriptural and make faith a matter of daily life.  The Liturgy of the Church nourishes us spiritually and is an important component of our relationship with God.  Others have found their experiences of Church lacking anything meaningful.  Sometimes this is because they don’t know what they are looking for, they just know they aren’t finding in Church, or at least the Catholic Church.  Some have found that once you take away the spoon-fed mediated sort of religion, they are not interested in the work a spiritual life takes.  Others have found the Church, or even religion in general, to be no more than stories and ceremonies in which they aren’t interested.  And still others attend churches where the priests are still trying to give them the old mediated religion where the priest will sit on them until they hatch and then feed them beak to beak the worms of piety, predigested in their priestly gullets as if that will give them the nourishment to be spiritual eagles.  I think Vatican II made a brave new start but then I think have had a loss of confidence, not unlike Simon Peter after those first tentative steps across the sea.  I think those who have taken the Council seriously have benefitted in their spiritual growth.  I know I have

Voices Past and Present

Bishop John Carroll, the first United States

Bishop and a model for bishops who can
think "outside the box" to effectively

evangelize in new and uncertain situations

I am on the road this weekend giving a workshop in the History of the Church in the United States and don’t have access to my library so  let’s do a divergence from our saga of the building of Saint Peter’s.  I had dinner the other evening with a group of seminarians—several Catholic and several Protestant.  Each was asked to introduce himself or herself and say something about their experience in seminary and how they realized their vocation.  One young man, an Episcopalian Seminarian from the (Episcopal) Diocese of South Carolina,  mentioned in his introduction that his bishop had identified him for “church planting and evangelization.”  “Church planting” is the process of establishing a new congregation in an area where there is no existing congregation of the particular denomination that is sponsoring the mission.  We Catholics begin plenty of new parishes—especially in the south and the west of the United States where the Catholic Church is growing;  not so much in the north-east and upper mid-west where the there are often more churches than are needed and we find parishes being closed or  amalgamated with other parishes.  But we Catholics don’t usually engage in “church planting.”  We simply divide the existing parish or parishes and split off a new parish.  Church planting is something different.  It really requires beginning a new parish or congregation “from scratch.” 
     What impressed me in this conversation with this seminarian is not that he is being prepared for this challenging and creative mission.  What impressed me is that his bishop is thinking so creatively about how to make the best use of his present and future clergy.  The bishop is “thinking outside the box,” seeing possibilities that do not yet exist.  There was a time in the history of the American Church when our bishops had that sort of creative leadership.   One of the seminarians present at the dinner, a Catholic, is a recent immigrant from Germany.  He asked a question about the “chapter” providing guidance for the bishop.  The other Americans, at least the Catholics in the group, all looked at him blankly.  “Chapter?” they asked, “what is a chapter?”  He was surprised when I explained that we don’t have chapters in the American Church.  The Chapter is composed of the canons of the cathedral and they have certain rights and duties in the election of the bishop and in advising the bishop in his ministry.  Chapters are—had have been for fifteen hundred years—standard operating procedure in European dioceses.  But when the American hierarchy was established with John Carroll’s appointment in 1790,  Carroll told Rome that chapters were not practicable in the United States.  We could not afford to tie up seven or eight priests to serve a cathedral when we needed every available priest to go out and “ride the circuit,” saying mass, hearing confessions, baptizing, blessing marriages, anointing the sick, preaching, and teaching catechism in the dozens and dozens of rural communities in Maryland, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and along the Canadian border where there were Catholic settlements.  Carroll and his priests found many creative ways of meeting the challenges of a small and minority denomination in a large and then rural society.    
      It would be interesting for today’s  American (Catholic) bishops  to think outside the box how to meet the pastoral challenges of an expanding Catholic population in some parts of the nation while it is shrinking in others.  It would be great to see them come up with some creative solutions to the vocation problem and how we can keep our Catholic communities tied to the Eucharist when we just don’t have enough priests to go around.  It would be wonderful to see them address the complex problems of a Church that is so heavily immigrant and non-English speaking before there are more Latino “evangelicals” than Catholics.  If only they could repair their moral credibility and speak with authority rather than from what has become a very shaky power.  This is the time to think creatively and try new solutions.  When you know the History of the Church, creativity is the Catholic response.  Just ask Augustine of Canterbury or Innocent III or Hildegarde of Bingen, or Bernard of Clairvaux, or Charles Borromeo, or Ignatius Loyola, or Mary Ward or Vincent DePaul, or Madeline Sophie Barat, or Catherine McAuley or Mary MacKillop.  These were creative thinkers.  We have been blessed in more recent times with people like Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton, and Dom Helder Camara,  and Gino Baroni, and Joseph Bernardin, and  Monika Hellwig.  Today we have among us Elizabeth Johnson, and Richard Rohr, and Thomas Keating, and Joan Chittester, and Daniel Berrigan, and Tom Gumbleton, and Ronald Rohlheiser.  It isn’t that the Holy Spirit isn’t trying to open our eyes, our hearts, and our imagination to challenges of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.   It is just that the hearts of this people has grown dull.  Let us beg for the grace to listen to the Holy Spirit with the ear of our hearts.