Our Whackadoodle and Friends: Not Catholic, Just Bizarre

Plenty of Room for Diversity in
the Church--but not all diversity
is legit  

 My last posting was a commentary on an article write by “a notable traditional Catholic Scholar” who affects the nom de plume of Benedict Constable. Le Seigneur Constable, to my reading, overplays his hand a bit in his wish to ban biological women (as differentiated from the more frilly-garbed transgendered clerical ones) from service at the altar.  I did point out that his ecclesiology, though perhaps having some credibility before Mystici Corporis (and certainly not since Lumen Gentium/Gaudium et Spes) is not in line with the current teaching of the Church, and his theology of the Sacrament of Orders is highly deficient even by pre-conciliar standards.  This is not to mention serious flaws in his Christian Anthropology and Christology.  But as I suggested, the even more basic problem is not with his theology but with his psycho-sexual self-understanding.   The gentleman displays some obvious discomfort of sharing space with women.  There could be multiple reasons for this; I won’t presume to guess which ones.  But what interests me in this posting is the reaction to his article and a subsequent one “Male-Female Symbolism in Liturgical Roles: Not Bizarre, Just Catholic.” 

Frankly, the sequel article made me somewhat uncomfortable in as that it reminded me of—though it was nowhere as beguilingly salacious as—a talk given years ago by Archbishop (later, when he was given one of the most undeserved red hats in the history of the Church, Cardinal) Stafford of Denver.  As I recall, the talk was reported in the National Catholic Reporter (aka Fishwrap, a name given it by the Krazies but one which I won’t dispute.  NCR to my mind is simply an latter-day ecclesial version of the William Randolph Hearst school of Yellow Journalism.  But that would be another series of posts) and quoted Stafford comparing the priest’s kissing of the altar at Mass with a husband performing cunnilingus (there is a word I never thought I would use in this blog) as foreplay to matrimonial lovemaking.  Now I have always been somewhat charmed by the adage that I once heard in a sermon that sacramentally a husband making love with his wife is to the sacrament of Matrimony what the priest celebrating the Eucharist with the people entrusted to his care is to the sacrament of Holy Orders.  I mean each act is somewhat at the center of the particular sacrament.  Nevertheless, after reading Stafford’s analogy I must admit that it was months before I felt it safe to go to Mass again and these twenty-some years later that image is still stuck, rather distastefully (if you will pardon the entendre) in my mind.  Symbols are most effective when they are employed without explanation or commentary.  And in any case, I am not sure that the various sexual symbolisms of either Cardinal Stafford or our dear Benedict Constable are inherent in the Eucharist or are the results of a somewhat overactive half Jungian/half Freudian imagination.  Maybe Mr. Constable is not alone and I too have my sexual hang-ups—most of us do to some extent or other—but when I go to Church I want to go to Church and not to some piece of theatre that is fraught with sexual undertones (if your are female) and overtones (if you are male.) (See, I do believe that the sexes are not the same.)  Let what operates in the subconscious remain in the subconscious; I am not one who wants to make Mass an occasion of sin for those whose hormones still rage. 

All that being said, what I really want to do in this blog, is to show how what the Right Honorable and Somewhat Pretentious Mr. Constable, a “noteworthy traditional Catholic Scholar,” says and what his audience hears are two very different things and while what the noted scholar writes can be amusing—perhaps even erotically so—what his audience is taking from it portends the ever widening cracks within the unity of the Church. 

Our dear Professor Kwasniewski, whom I think has been remiss in remaining in the wilds of Wyoming far too long, grasps the problem that I mentioned in my previous post—that B.C. sees lay liturgical ministers filling in for insufficient clergy rather than exercising their baptismal dignity—only Kwasniewski doesn’t see this as a problem.  But then, the good Cowboy Philosopher studied philosophy and not theology so what can one expect.    He writes:

Celeste, the way to reconcile your point and Constable's is simply to observe that whenever laymen are doing the readings, they are substituting for clerics. That's all they're doing. (The same goes for altar servers, who should, ideally, be instituted acolytes.) If we didn't have a huge shortage of clerics and if we had a better pastoral plan for the use of instituted lectors and acolytes, we wouldn't need to be always tapping on laymen's shoulders and having them fill in.

That being said, laymen are, as such, symbolically configurable to Christ the High Priest, in a way that laywomen are not -- and that makes a huge different for liturgy, which is a language of symbols.

His “clerical error” is repeated by one Romulus Charles Lewis.

If you are bringing up female competence and spunk and devotion, I can only agree that you are not getting the explanations. Our Lord is the Bridegroom. Women cannot stand as symbols of this. Because the only indispensable person in the celebration of Mass is the a priest, other persons active in the sanctuary are there only as additional hands and feet -- extensions of his body, so to speak. (The Italian word for altar boy is "chierichetto" -- a little cleric). Female servers at Mass obscure and de-signify the maleness of the priest-celebrant.

I love the name Romulus, don’t you?  Why didn’t my parents think of naming me Romulus.  Or Benedict.  Or Euston. Or Archibald.   Great names, all.    Raised by wolves, Romulus was; maybe that was the reason the name was chosen. 

And then there is Jared Clark.  That is another great name. Jared.  I also life Geoffrey, but only if it is Geoff and not Jeff.  Vulgar Americanization, Jeffrey. 

I am aware that this practice is currently licit, and I'm not actually all that concerned with appearances. It's not the bad result that women lectors and altar girls lead some to think priestesses are a real possibility (I am not a consequentialist; if that were the core of my objection, I'd just be calling for better catechesis), but that it goes against the nature of the sanctuary, wherein all liturgical action is priestly. The fact that sanctuary=priestly seems strange is one of the biggest problems in the Church today.

If taking a small step towards correcting this error by requiring a seminarian, or a non-seminarian instituted lector, or another man to read the readings would be seen as sexist....oh well. Still not a consequentialist :P

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET PEOPLE TO READ LUMEN GENTIUM!!! And Sacroscanctum Concilium.  Lectors and acolytes (much less ordinary readers and Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist, and Altar Servers et al.) are not standing in for ordained clergy!!!  They are there by right and duty of Baptism!!! Baptism is the most important of the Seven Sacraments and yet perhaps the least appreciated.  

But then there are the ‘oi polloi, the great unwashed who act not so much out of (bad) theology as about a rejection of everything connected with the Second Vatican Council for the sake of rejecting everything connected with the Second Vatican Council. And so, one Michael Dowd writes: 

Yes, on no female lectors. And no female altar servers, either. And no communion in the hand. And forget about communion under two specials (drop the cup). And turn the priest around to lead, not face the people. Do these all these things and we are off to a good start to celebrating Mass as it should be. : God is there, we need to show proper respect which leads to love. That's what the show is all about folks!

OK, no theology here.  Keep moving on.  Nothing to see.  Just put all the toys back in the toy box and let the nursery look like the night Tinkerbelle came and led the children off to a magical fantasyland.  Pure “restorationism” without a hint of theology.  I can deal with those whose faulty theology leads them to bad liturgical practice, but when it is just this sort of thoughtless demand that the Church be refashioned to their particular taste I cannot help but think of the adage of Aristophanes:

‘Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.’

And speaking of that sort of vacuous a-theological rhetoric we have one Augustine Thomas (sounds like another Anglophile wannabe) who just dismisses Conciliar Catholicism as a perfidious devolution into an insultingly negative caricature of Protestantism   

Most Catholics who even still bother to go to church have been Protestantized in their beliefs of what the Mass, or should I say the "worship service", is.

And then, in a classic example of the fire hydrant pissing on the dog, Augustine Thomas goes on to say that it is the Vatican II crowd that are given to wildly illogical and inherent falsification of the truth:

Don't expect reason from Novus Ordo Catholics. 


They're like leftists. They don't trade in logic. They use any deception or dishonesty necessary to lead the majority astray and then use that majority to silence the opposition, no matter how wrong they are.

Mr. Thomas gives no data to support his thesis that contemporary Catholics have been “Protestantized” in their beliefs and again without any examples goes on claim that supporters of the Reforms of Vatican II resort to deception and dishonesty in advancing reform.  Give examples.  Back up your claim with evidence.  I would hardly dismiss so cavalierly the scholarship of generations of theologians and historians like Chenu and Jungmann and Dix and Bea and Congar and Bouyer and Schillebeeckx and the other brains behind Vatican II. 

But there is one “lwhite”  (perhaps Lily White) who redefines “orthodoxy” and attacks the work of John Saward to strike at two of the theological architects of the   Council, Hans Urs von Balthasar  and Henri de Lubac, both of whom were made Cardinals in their old age by John Paul II, hardly a devotee of Modernism. 

Fr. John Saward, called the "Balthasar of the English-speaking world" is not someone who is a trusted source for Catholic orthodoxy. Balthasar's writings are full of heresies and should be avoided by faithful Catholics.
It was Hans Urs Von Balthasar's writings that became the primary source of confusion in Catholic philosophy and theology. He carried further Henri de Lubac's infection of Modernism into the Church who introduced the principle of self-contradiction into the very heart of truth.


So what we have following Benedict Constable’s just bizarre, not Catholic argument against women reading in the liturgy or taking any other active role that requires their presence in the area surrounding the altar, are two diverse camps.  One camp, typified by Constable himself, rejects the ecclesiology put forth in the Second Vatican Council which recognizes the priestly character of the baptized (distinct from the priestly character unique to those ordained to the presbyterate or episcopate) and empowers every baptized individual, regardless of sex, to liturgical ministries not reserved to the ordained.   The other camp, without any theological rationale, have simply rejected the Conciliar and post-Conciliar developments in the Church out of hand and are equating authentic Catholicism with a return to the pre-Conciliar status quo.

Both these stances are not only warning signs of trouble to come but are dangerous in themselves as they represent an increasing polarizing splintering of the faith, and it will ultimately become impossible for Conciliar and non-Conciliar Catholics to remain united in the same Church.  This is not to say that there is no room for legitimate diversity in the Church.  The Eastern Church not only has a different discipline regarding celibacy, for example, and different liturgical traditions, but also differs from the Western Church on significant doctrines such as purgatory and original sin.  There is, however, a mutual respect for the varying rites and an agreement to let charity trump doctrinal disagreements and permit a certain unresolved ambiguity of belief.  What we see between the Conciliar and non-Conciliar Catholics is not merely a divergence of theological models, but a rejection of authority whether it be the authority of the reigning pope, the authority of his predecessors who approved the various liturgical changes, or the authority of the Council which established the theological framework against which the non-Conciliar Catholics are rebelling.  

Years ago I was at a seminar conducted by the Reverend Martin Marty, a Lutheran and distinguished Church historian.  I recall Dr. Marty saying that the Roman (Catholic) Church has shown itself through the centuries willing to tolerate a huge amount of doctrinal diversion but it is never willing, for a moment, to tolerate a challenge to its authority.  As a historian myself I have come to see that.  Ultimately the non-Conciliar Catholics, whether they be Bishop Fellay and his Society of Saint Pius X or the more home spun variety such as Benedict Constable and Augustine Thomas and Michael Dowd and Jared and Romulus and all the rest will have to submit to the authority of the Council and the Conciliar Popes or they will find themselves on the wrong side of the Church Door.   

Coming and Going

Archbishop Cordileone celebrating
Mass in the usus antiquior 

Recently over a hundred prominent San Francisco area Catholics published an open letter to Pope Francis petitioning “Holy Father, please provide us with a leader true to our values and your namesake.  Please replace Archbishop Cordileone.”  The letter was signed by leading lay Catholics from the worlds of philanthropy, business, law, civil service, and education. 

Signers complained that the Archbishop is very much out of touch with his flock and is not providing the sort of leadership requisite to his office as he does not know “who the bedrock of the San Francisco Catholic community is.”  The signers also charge that the Archbishop is responsible for “an atmosphere of division and intolerance.”  The loss of confidence in Cordileone’s leadership is not related to a single issue but has been building ever since he was named to the See.  Nevertheless, San Francisco being, well, San Francisco, his attempts to impose a “morality clause” on diocesan employees, including teachers in the Catholic schools that requires not only their adherence to Catholic doctrine but conforming their lives to Catholic sexual ethics has met with considerable resistance.  Later the Archbishop supported local pastor, the Reverend Joseph Illo, in banning girls from serving at the altar during liturgical services at the Star of the Sea parish where Illo is pastor.  Father Illo also distributed a pamphlet to young students listing potential sins including masturbation, sexual acts, abortion, and sterilization.  The pamphlet, designed to help individuals examine their consciences prior to confessing their sins, was deemed by many parents not to be age appropriate to their children.  Illo, a priest of the Stockton Diocese, transferred to San Francisco in hopes of beginning “an Oratory.”  The Oratorians are communities of secular priests who live together in a scholarly and gentlemanly way and generally sponsor churches where there is a revival of the pre-Vatican II liturgy done with great splendor. 

Jesuit Father James Martin, on the editorial staff of America magazine, said that such petitions to remove bishops have not been uncommon over the past few decades but neither have they been effective.  What is interesting in this particular situation, however, is that this past week Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City MO, has “resigned” under pressure from the Vatican.  Bishop Finn had been found guilty of sheltering from legal proceedings a priest whom the Bishop knew to have been guilty of child pornography.  Strangely enough, under Missouri law, that is only a misdemeanor, but a Vatican investigation determined that Finn could no longer function effectively as the spiritual leader of Catholics in the 27 counties of western and north-western Missouri. The question will be does Cordileone have the confidence of his flock to lead.  Conservative Catholics have started a push-back campaign to support Archbishop Cordileone.

Like Finn, Cordileone has a misdemeanor in his background—Cordileone’s for a 2012 driving under the influence (of alcohol) charge.  Perhaps more interesting, both Finn and Cordileone are protégés of Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke who remains a Cardinal in good standing but certainly a prelate in bad odor in Pope Francis’ Rome.  In other words, Cordileone, like Finn, lacks a mediatrix of needed grace at a time most needed. 

Meanwhile, priests and people in the Southern Chile Diocese Osorno continue to protest the installation of Monsignor Juan Barros Madrid as local bishop.  Pope Francis appointed Barros despite the claims of three men that Barros had been present when they had been sexually molested by Barros’ friend Fernando Karadima in the 1980’s and 90’s. Barros denies knowledge of Karadima’s sexual abuse of the men. Although criminal charges against Karadima were dropped due to the statute of limitations, after investigation the Vatican stripped Karadima of his priestly status.  Barros had served as a chaplain to the Chilean military before being named bishop. 

So where will it all end.  It is anyone’s guess, of course, but I will be very surprised if any action is take against Archbishop Cordileone.  It would be a bad precedent to act on a public petition, especially one signed by only one hundred people and a somewhat self-selected group at that. On the other hand, the effort launched by conservative Catholics to support the Archbishop might in turn trigger a more popular response.  There is no doubt that if push were to come to shove, Cordileone would lack the support of the majority of Catholics in his Archdiocese.  This is not only due to his princely ways and dogmatic leadership.  Frankly, many American bishops could not win the support of the majority of their flocks.  People may not mount petitions or get out and demonstrate, but despite the great popularity of Pope Francis, and the loyalty that most give to their local parishes, Americans rarely get much positive energy about their bishops.  At the end of the day, American Catholics are (culturally) Protestants and have never understood the Catholic structure.  While the Popes, even the less popular ones like Pope Benedict, remain a strong symbol of our being Catholic, we really tend to congregationalism and somewhat resent a prelate who usually does not know us well interfering with our parishes and, even more perhaps, taking a percentage of our parish funds for his causes.  Given the size of American dioceses, a parish might only see a bishop once or twice in a year and then in a highly ritualized context.  As long as they are dignitaries they can’t function effectively as pastors.  The fact that so many appointed over the last thirty-some years were chosen not for their pastoral style but for their canon-law ability has not helped their estimation in the eyes of the rank and file.  In Cordileone’s case—as in Finn’s—their penchant for “rings and things and buttons and bows” has certainly not helped them establish the sort of genuine rapport that a few of their predecessors in the episcopal dignity—people like Bernard Topel or Tom Gumbleton or Ken Untener—were able to accomplish.  Archbishop Cordileone is particularly ill-suited for the Church of San Francisco yet I doubt that he will be removed.  On the other hand, as long as Francis is Pope, I don’t expect he will be upwardly mobile either.  But then, Francis is old and Cordileone is still young so que sera, sera.  

Why Arlingtion? Historical Context of Clerical Madness 4

The Arms of the Diocese
of Arlington

Bishop Paul Stephen Loverde is a Massachusetts native who studied in Rome and received  his STL degree there in 1966 before being ordained for service in the Diocese of Norwich, Connecticut.  He worked in the diocesan tribunal and distinguished himself in a number of positions as vicar for priests, being especially popular and trusted among the priests of the diocese.  (The Vicar for Priests is the assistant to the bishop who looks after the pastoral and professional needs of the clergy of a diocese—the “pastor to the pastors” as it were.)  After twenty-two years of priestly ministry he was named auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Hartford and then six years later he was given his own diocese in Ogdensburg, NY.  Bishop Loverde was highly regarded by clergy, laity, and religious in Ogdensburg where he assiduously implemented the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in a collaborative and collegial manner.  One religious sister who worked on his staff remembers him as “a good man, a compassionate man, a listener who truly was interested in you and the challenges you were facing.”  Bishop Loverde’s episcopal motto is—To Encouarage and Teach with Patience. 

In March 1998 with the death of Bishop John Keating while making his ad liminia visit to the Holy See, the Diocese of Arlington became vacant.   The Diocese remained vacant almost a year while the Holy See searched for a successor.  Reportedly a number of bishops turned down the See because of the reputation of the clergy for unruliness.  There certainly were problems.  One retired priest remarked “Back in 1974 when the diocese was split from Richmond we had our conservatives and our liberals.  There was Monsignor McClunn and Dickie Burke and that crew on the one side and Tom Quinlin and the young Turks on the other.  But we all got along.  We would get together on Sunday nights in the summer at one parish or another for supper and have a few drinks.  But now these guys don’t even speak to one another and they tear each other down to the people in the pews.  It is a different diocese; it has become toxic.”  

Paul Loverde seemed a good choice to bring together a divided diocese.  Patience was his motto.  He had a reputation for working well with his clergy.  He had a track record of implementing the counciliar and post-counciliar changes.  Those who had been frustrated by the backwards looking policies of the Keating years were hopeful that the diocese would get on track again. 

Bishop Loverde did his best.  He came in and was not quick to mandate changes but tried to win the trust of his priests in order to build a more cohesive presbyterate.  He made few staff changes in the chancery keeping people in place but trusting that they would implement his vision for the diocese.  Arlington was one of only two dioceses in the United States that did not permit girls to serve at the altar.  Bishop Loverde brought the matter up to his clergy for discussion but decided to maintain Keating’s restrictions until he could win over the resisting priests.  Similarly he kept in place Keating’s restriction on giving the laity the chalice at weekend Masses.  He also made no effort to restore the permanent diaconate program which had been shut down in the Keating years.  The left and center began to grow disillusioned and felt that they were losing out and that all concessions were being made to the neo-traditionalist camp without the moderates gaining. 

The problem was that the hard-core conservatives of the clergy never came aboard the Bishop’s program, but resisted the Bishop at every opportunity.  What they wanted wasn’t compromise, much less conciliation, but total capitulation on the part of those who disagreed with their reactionary policies. They took what they could wheedle out of the Bishop and gave nothing in return.  When the Bishop mandated that each parish have a committee to look at ecumenical cooperation among the churches in their area, few parishes complied.  When he would bring up the question at priests’ meetings of allowing girls to serve at mass, his priests actually booed him.  When he finally did make some compromise about female altar servers—allowing pastors to install them on a parish-by-parish basis if their parishioners wished them—priests wrote to Rome asking if the individual priest had to abide by the bishop’s decision to permit girls serving.  (Rome, incredulously, overturned the theological principles of Christus Dominus and asserted that the individual priest, not the bishop, has the final word over the liturgy!)  The bishop was hurt that his priests would appeal to Rome against his decisions; the liberal and moderate clergy were furious that they had to conform to diocesan guidelines but that the neo-traditionalists could spit in the bishop’s eye. 

The end result has been that the Diocese of Arlington is a deeply fractured Church—almost three distinct Churches in a unity that is no more than nominal.  On the one hand you have parishes such as Nativity in Burke, Saint Francis in Triangle, Christ the Redeemer in Sterling or Good Shepherd in Alexandria that would be mainline in any other diocese but are the “liberal” parishes which are jammed and to which people flock from twenty and thirty miles away.  (You also have the “exiles” who cross the river to Holy Trinity in Georgetown and other Washington churches.)  Then you have other parishes such as Saint Mary’s in Oldtown Alexandria, Saint John the Baptist in Front Royal, Saint John the Beloved in McLean, or Saint Catherine’s in Great Falls that are throwbacks to the Catholicism of the 1950’s.  They too draw from a wide area and are jammed.  And then there are the great number of the bland and the boring, the mildly conservative and stalwartly unimaginative parishes where nothing much happens except disillusionment and discouragement.  But that is not unique to Arlington—spending as much time on the road as I do, and being present at Mass in so many different churches, I can only wonder what has happened to the excitement of the Vatican II years when the fresh breeze let in by John XXIII’s open window made such a difference.  Vatican II is alive in some nooks and crannies of the American Catholic World but in many more places there are shattered dreams of what the Church could be again if only the Council were taken seriously.      

How Arlington's Policy on Altar Girls Helped One Young Man Find His Priestly Vocation

School girls bringing up the gifts at Mass in Kerala

More on the water problem in Loudon County: A few weeks back (November 23) I wrote about Father Michael Taylor of the Diocese of Arlington who is discontinuing allowing girls to serve Mass in his parish.  I received the following reaction to that post.  My correspondent wrote me:  
My wife and I and our three children, then ages 16, 15, and 13 moved from Indianapolis to Northern Virginia in 1994 and registered in our local parish.  All three of my children had been Mass servers in our parish in Indianapolis and wanted to continue in this ministry in our new home, but the pastor said that the two boys (the 16 and 15 year olds) were most welcome but that girls were not allowed to be altar servers in the Arlington Diocese.  My daughter was crushed and her brothers, very protective of her, decided that if she could not be altar servers they would prefer not to serve either.  The boys are “Irish twins”—that is, two siblings born within the same 12 month period—and they are a “matched set”—both over six foot, basketball players—tall, well built, and if I do say so, very handsome.  (They take after their mother.)   
     The pastor was anxious to have them become servers and approached them several times after Sunday Mass about becoming altar servers.  They were awkward and shy in their refusals but told him that no, they were not interested.  They were both in scouting and also active in the parish youth group.  The younger son has a particularly good singing voice and not only sang with the youth choir, but sometimes soloed or cantored at Mass.  The Church has always been very important to us as a family and we had strong ties to Saint Meinrad’s Abbey while we lived in Indiana.  I had taken them several times to Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky as well.  I was always hopeful that one or the other might choose a priestly vocation.  My older brother is a Trappist Monk , and my mother’s brother, now deceased, was a Monsignor in the Boston Archdiocese.  
      In any event, the pastor showed up at our door one summer evening.  Bishop Keating was to come for Confirmation that fall and he wanted to give another pitch about the boys becoming servers.  They would be perfect he said for carrying the bishop’s miter and crosier.  As we sat on the terrace my wife explained to Father that this was a family decision and that if their sister could not serve, the boys chose not to serve.  My wife has a strong personality and felt very strongly about this, as do I, but it was very clear that this was the boys’ decision.  Nevertheless, in mid sentence, Father turned to me and said: “you had better get control of your family back from that b**** and be the man to make decisions for your family.”   The following Sunday my wife, my children, and I began attending the Episcopal Church.  We have found it to be a very happy home.  And yes, my older son found a vocation to the priesthood.  He and his wife are both priests and together serve a large campus ministry parish in the Midwest.  Father opened our eyes to see that a Church that would keep girls—or women—off the altar cannot possibly be proclaiming the Truth of Christ in whom “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Gal 3:28).  So good luck to our former “pastor,” to Father Taylor, and the Diocese of Arlington—the Episcopal Church can use more folk like you.      
A note from your Blogger: I want to make it perfectly clear, lest there be any confusion on the matter, that Father Taylor is not the pastor mentioned in this letter but it was another "gentleman."  Father Taylor was only newly ordained at the time and had not yet been given a parish of his own,  Moreover, as I pointed out in my earlier article, Father Taylor, whatever his opinion on girls serving Mass,  is an exceptionally kind man and good priest.  Obviously that cannot be said of all the clergy today.

Altar Girls? A Question Once More? Only in Arlington

O c'mon, do you realy think the

gates of hell are going to prevail if

girls are allowed to serve at the

 altar?

The Diocese of Arlington has made the news again—it’s never good and this time downright foolish.  It seems that a local pastor, Father Michael Taylor, has decided to disallow girls from serving mass in his parish.  Almost two-thirds of the parishes of the diocese do not permit girls to serve mass despite Vatican assurances that there is nothing in Church law that prohibits it.  I really must admit that I am a bit baffled by this.  If we said that only white kids could serve at the altar we would see the arbitrary injustice involved but hey, it’s ok to discriminate against girls because we have a tradition that upholds that custom.  In Virginia they had a tradition that discriminated against blacks too, but fortunately that has been done away with, at least in the more visible situations.  Come to think of it though, how many black priests does the Diocese of Arlington have?  About as many as they have women priests, I would guess.  After all there is no law against ordaining blacks as long as they have the biological equipment that certifies a candidate as fit for ordination.  And that brings us to the crux of the problem in the Arlington Diocese.       It isn’t Father Taylor’s fault, at least not at the root.  I know Father Taylor.  When I lived in the DC area back about ten years ago I attended mass at the parish where he was the parochial vicar.  He is a sweet man.  He is the sort of priest you want for confession.  He is just good.  The problem is that he is also, well, to put it bluntly, stupid.  That’s ok, God doesn’t always choose the best and the brightest and—by the way—I do think that Father Taylor is among the best, just not among the brightest.  He could never grasp the big question but would always get hung up on some semi-relevant (at best) detail in any situation.  He tried so hard to do the right thing but would have a failure of moral courage because someone somewhere told him some obscure law or theological detail or papal whim (real or imagined) and without checking it out, he would make the wrong decision.  It was never from an uncaring heart, only from the confusion of super-ego and conscience.  And where were those super-ego tapes—those little “voices of authority” in one’s head coming from?  Well that is part of the problem in the Arlington Diocese too.  There is the magisterium of the Church  and then there is the shadow magisterium of a group of self-appointed mentors who have too long shaped the minds of many of the younger priests of that diocese, confirming them in ignorance and disinformation.  When Father Taylor would say some of the outrageous things he would say and I would ask him for his source it was always Father Fasano or Father McAfee, or Monsignor O’Brien or Father Pokorsky or someone else in the “Gang of Thirteen.”  Once when I was at the AAR convention I was having lunch with several professors from Saint Mary’s Seminary Emmitsburg, and in relating to them various stories about the Arlington clergy, I asked them—teasingly—what they were teaching up there at the Mount.  “O, they’re not learning that from us” I was assured.  Amidst laughter they told me “They have a special post-graduate program in the diocese where they bring in the ‘experts’.”    
      Much of the Arlington quagmire dates back to the episcopacy of John Keating (1983-1998).  Well actually the problem is rooted in the fact that the Arlington diocese, like all of us except the Blessed Virgin, was conceived in sin and born in iniquity, but we won’t go there in this entry.  John Richard Keating was a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago and had been, I believe, administrator of the Archdiocese between the death of Cardinal Cody and the appointment of Joseph Bernardin as Archbishop.  Bernardin knew he was on a very different page than Keating and so to remove him from power (he had been Vicar General prior to Cody’s death) without humiliating him, Keating was named the second Bishop of Arlington.  He reminds me of an eleventh century bishop of Reims in France, Manasses II (1096-1106), whose famous quote, describing the office to which he was called, was “This wouldn’t be a bad job if you didn’t have to sing Mass.”  Bishop Keating was an administrator, a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat.  He was a superb canon lawyer and responsible for introducing the “psychological maturity” argument into the annulment process.   He wasn’t a bad man, at least as far as anything I have heard.  He just wasn’t very religious.  Nine o’clock Sunday Morning would find him, most weeks, not in his cathedral but out on the links at the Washington Country Club.  After his death, a crypt was constructed in the cathedral to hold the remains of the Bishops of Arlington and Keating’s body was removed from the mausoleum at Fairfax Memorial Park where it had been temporarily entombed and properly put in the episcopal crypt.  The joke was circulated among the clergy of the diocese the following Easter that this had been the first Holy Week the Bishop had spent in his Cathedral.  While he would show up at the Cathedral for the Mass of the Chrism and the Easter Vigil, he would not permit baptisms and confirmations at the Vigil and would only allow the minimum number of Old Testament lessons so that the liturgy would not go over an hour and a half.  “This would not be such a bad job if you didn’t have to sing Mass.” 
     Bishop Keating was a great delegator of responsibility which is to his credit, but he seems not always to have followed up.  He really didn’t care much if individual priests or parishes were conforming to Church practice as long as they weren’t actually breaking any canons.  This led to a lot of idiosyncrasies in Arlington.  Some places had “Solemn High Masses” which were the (at the time required) Novus Ordo Rite but which were counterfeited with Deacons and “Subdeacons” and an ad apsidem posture to masquerade as the old Tridentine Solemn High Mass.  Birettas and cottas and even maniples were salvaged from closets and drawers, altar-rails were installed and kneeling for communion restored, and old time religion, Catholic style, became somewhat normative in the Arlington Diocese.    And when the clergy informed the bishop that should he permit girls to serve Mass as was being done in other dioceses, they were “outta here”—well, Keating was not one for confrontation and so “altar girls” were on the verboten list. 
     This preconciliar Shangri-la was bound to attract vocations from other dioceses where seminarians were afraid that they might not be permitted as priests to do the grocery shopping in their soutanes or required to take a Latin exam before being permitted to say Mass in the language.  There was a very enterprising vocation director, Father Jay Gould, who scoured seminaries around the country for men who would be thrilled to be part of this ‘50’s revival and for years Arlington had an abundance of vocations.  Conservatives in the diocese, clergy and laity alike, look back on the “Golden Days of Gould” when vocations abounded and cassocks were de rigueur.   A prominent Washington Archdiocesan Monsignor who had served as driver/Master of Ceremonies to the late Cardinal Hickey (Archbishop of Washington 1980-2000) told me that he had once ribbed the Cardinal saying: “What’s wrong with our Archdiocese?  Keating is ordaining twelve priests this year, you’re ordaining two.”  Hickey’s response to the disparity of vocations was “We don’t want the lawsuits.”   So much for screening.   
      All this is background to the issue of female altar boys in Arlington.  About five years ago, Bishop Loverde, the current bishop, lifted Bishop Keating’s ban, allowing pastors—with the advice of the Parish Pastoral Councils—to permit girls and women to serve Mass.  Rome had no problem with it; the Bishop had no problem with it.  But there are always those like Father Taylor, who know better.  I am not saying that sometimes priests and even lay folk don’t know better than bishops—or even the Pope.  History bears out the facts.  I am only saying that a smart priest doesn’t come into a parish and stir up a hornet’s nest over an issue as inconsequential as this one.  But then, as I began, while Father Taylor may be no less intelligent than many of his colleagues, he sure didn’t demonstrate street smarts, much less pastoral sagacity, here.