Neo-Trads Hoisted By Their Own Petard

Well, The Triduum and Easter are past with the beautiful liturgies and life is beginning to return to normal but the hornet’s nest that Pope Francis stirred up by including two women, one a Muslim, among those whose feet he washed is alive and buzzing.  A check of the usual suspects and their blogs show that the neo-trads are running scared and not without reason.  The entire structure of the “Reform of the Reform” which has given them such joy over the past fifteen or twenty years is teetering as it slowly begins to implode.  It is not that the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass, aka Tridentine Mass or Extraordinary Form) will no longer be celebrated—it will, but clearly no longer at the alleged bequest of the Holy Father.  Cardinal Castrillon-Hoyos who long claimed that the Pope wanted an Extraordinary Form Mass in every Parish every week clearly can no longer make such a claim.  While Cardinals like Burke and Pell who delighted in marching around in long trains of watered silk with large furred hoods look no more ridiculous now than they did two months ago, but now they are clearly out of step (and out of harmony) with the Pope himself.  The feeling in the Church is new and fresh, like when an old house has been renovated and everything that was dark and heavy with closed curtains and lunky old overstuffed furniture is open and airy and bathed in sunlight. 
The neo-trads are outraged that the Pope “broke Canon Law” by including women in the washing of the feet ceremony.  But, in the first place, the prescriptives for the washing of the feet are not in Canon Law, they are in the rubrics.  And secondly, whether it be Canon Law or rubrical “law,” it is beyond the Pope’s power to break.  I did not say “beyond the Pope’s power to change” but “to break.”  You see to break the Law you must be subject to the Law, but the Pope is not subject to the law, rather he is the law.
In our American system of law, drawing from the legal traditions of England, the Lawgiver is himself subject to the Law.  So the President is subject to the Law.  The Congress, collectively and individually, is subject to the Law.  The judiciary is subject the Law.  The Legislature, Congress, can change the Law.  The Judiciary, the Courts, can invalidate the law.  But unless and until a law is changed or ruled unconstitutional, the Government itself is subject to the Law.  In England, in the same way, the Monarch is subject the Law, as is Parliament, and as is the Judiciary.  But this was not always so.  The matter was settled by the English Civil War in which the King was judged to have broken the law and to have been guilty of treason.  Poor King Charles could not understand this.  How could he, the King, have been guilty of treason; treason was a crime against the Crown and he, the King, was the Crown?  But by the changes that came about in the English Civil War the principle was established that the Crown is something greater than the person of the King.  The person of the King is subject to the authority of the Crown, that is “the Law.”  Up to that point in the development of the British Constitution (in which American Law is rooted) the King had been seen as the Personal Embodiment of the Law.  The Law is whatever the King declared it to be so.  This declaration did not have to be written, or even spoken: the King, by his actions as well as his words, “shewed” what the Law is.  Thus it was from time immemorial.  The Law is in the heart of the Lawgiver: Whatever the Lawgiver declares, is the law.  In England it took a long period of time to change from this absolutist principle to the democratic one.  King Henry VIII traded many of his royal prerogatives to Parliament to win their support for his religious policies.  His children, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth too had had to make compromises with Parliament to win support for their varied changes in the English Church.  By the end of the Tudor dynasties, English absolutism had given way to the rudiments of constitutional government.  The Stuart Kings, James I and Charles I, had not understood this and this being on very different pages from their subjects would lead to Civil War and Charles’ execution.  The same evolution of Law came about in France through its 1789 Revolution.  Louis XIV had declared “Je suis l’Etat, (I am the State)—again, declaring that he personally was “the State;”  the law is whatever he declared it to be and as King he was not subject to the Law for he was the Law.  Like poor King Charles, belief in that principle would cause Louis XIV’s great 3x grandson, Louis XVI his head.  When Louis XVI’s younger brother became Charles X many decades later and insisted on reverting to this theory that he, not a Constitutional Government, was the supreme lawgiver and as such was not subject to the Law, he found himself tossed out of the palace, though with his head still attached.  He was lucky.  Russia saw this evolution with the murder of the Czar in 1918.  Over the centuries—from the sixteenth through the twentieth—constitutional governments have come to accept the principle that they and their leaders are subject to Law.  Of course governments like Israel—or South Africa in the days of apartheid—make no assurances that the laws to which their governments are subject are just; nor do, or did, plutocracies such as the old Marxist republics of the Iron and Bamboo curtains, nor the Islamic “republics” that have adopted Sharia Law.   And Wacko dictators like the fellow in North Korea propose that they are above the Law.   But that is the nature of dictatorship and that is also the nature of the Papal Monarchy. 
The Catholic Church is not a democracy.   The Pope is absolute Sovereign in the Church.  Whatever he declares to be Law, is Law.  All authority in the Church comes from his authority.  Vatican II taught that the Bishops hold their authority over the Church committed to their care directly from Christ, but that is window dressing.  Whatever was given at Vatican II was gradually taken back by the Papal Administration under John Paul II.  This is not to say that the Pope is above the law, but he is certainly not subject to it.  Rather, he is the embodiment of the Law.  Whatever he declares to be law, is law.  What he binds is bound; loosens, loosened.  It does not take Canons or rubrics or any formal declaration.  His doing is sufficient.  Of course he is not saying that you must wash the feet of Muslims and women--but he is saying that one may.   
I remember when I was preparing my doctorate.  I was living in a religious house in Rome.  A huge fuss had been created one day when one of the young monks had read the refectory reading in English rather than in Italian.  The statutes of the monastery said that Spanish, English, and Italian were each official languages, but the refectory reading had always been in Italian.  All official business in the house was conducted in Italian.  The monastery was upside down.  People were rallying to one side or the other of the conflict.  Some were demanding that the local superior punish the young Irish monk who had dared to break the law and read in English.  Others were threatening that if any action were taken against him, they would absent themselves from refectory and chapel.  (This is the problem with celibacy, without the occasional sick child people lose all sense of perspective.)   The local superior, a bewildered Spaniard, did not know what to do.  He called for the Order’s Master General to come and settle the issue.  The Master General did so very nicely.  He arrived in time for dinner and, as was his right as the ranking prelate, said grace.  He said it in English.  The issue was settled without further word. 
Pope Francis settled the issue whether women can be included in the ritual washing of the feet.  There is no question now.  The Law has been amended.  And this is why the neo-trads are so alarmed.  The Pope is sweeping away the Reform of the Reform without saying a word.  Gone is the Mozetta and rochet.  Gone are the red shoes.  Gone are the antique vestments.  With his having an altar facing the Cardinals set up in the Sistine Chapel, gone is the “ad orientem” nonsense.  Gone is the aloofness that permitted the rampant revival of an obscene clericalism.  Gone is the message that we are heading back into the seventeenth century. I am not saying that a future Pope can’t bring it back, but it won’t be easy, especially with the mass approval Francis is winning.  Like Paul VI’s tiara, it will be difficult for future popes to turn back to the palace and the pomp.  Now we are back on track as the Church of Service, the Herald of Good News to the Poor.  

Inaugural Weekend II

So we owe gay marriage to Martin

Luther?  Well, in a certain sense, in

the world of unintended consequences,

yes. 

This weekend the Liturgy of the Roman Rite presents us with the Gospel of the Wedding Feast at Cana.  And there will be many parishes, tragically, that will use the occasion to “defend Marriage” by attacking their fellow citizens whose understanding of what constitutes a marriage is different than our Catholic understanding.  And a fortuitous coincidence of Gospel and calendar will provide an opportunity, while they are at it, to knock the President as he begins a second term of service.  Incidentally, I don’t understand how attacking same-sex marriage, “defends” or upholds the commitment of those in traditional marriages.  I think we need to do everything we can to support those who have committed themselves to Christian marriage, but attacking others doesn’t seem to really add anything positive.   
What we probably should note, though not necessarily in the homily, is that we are at one of those rare historical moments where the tectonic plates of culture are shifting.  The era of Christendom—that period in which a large segment of culture (in this case, “Western” or Euro-American culture) was fashioned by Christian faith and doctrine—is over.   It has been imploding for some time; certainly from 1789 and the end of the ancien regime with its alliance of throne and altar.  The roots of this secularization go back further through the Enlightenment to the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century.  (Martin Luther would die to think that he is in some way responsible for gay marriage, but then as he is dead anyway—what difference would it make?)    
Instead of crying about the spilt milk of the Church’s loss of influence (or should we say power?) over society and its norms, we need to ask ourselves what we must do to live as Christians in a post-Christian world.   The game has changed; indeed I think it is becoming more interesting.  This isn’t about Barack Obama and it isn’t about gay marriage: it is about Christians making a choice to follow Jesus Christ in a world that, very much like the world of Jesus and his disciples, challenges rather than supports Gospel Values.   It is time to put on our big boy (or big girl) pants and take responsibility for making Christian choices in a world that demands discipleship be  a decision and not a default. 

Reformation Today! 3



Pope John XXIII in

the papal tiara--John

loved the pomp of the

papacy

 We have looked at the issue of Church reform from a historical perspective and although I have yet to cover the reformations of the 16^th century—Protestant and Catholic—I would like to draw on earlier entries to suggest some current principles for reform of the Church today.

I had mentioned the Carolingian and Ottonian reforms initiated under the authority of the various Holy Roman Emperors at a time when the Church seems incapable of reforming itself.  I had also dealt with the Gregorian and Innocentian Reforms of the 11^th and 13^th centuries which were successful attempts by the papacy to bring about reform.  This is the challenge—who can reform the Church?  Ideally reform comes from the leadership as it did with Gregory VII, Innocent III, and in the sixteenth century the Council of Trent and Popes such as Paul III or Pius V who were responsible for convening the Council and implementing its decrees.  Earlier in the sixteenth century when the Emperor proved not to have the resolve to reform the Church and reform was the last thing that popes such as Alexander VI or Julius II or Clement VII wanted, an effort for reform initiated from within the Church led to a series of reformations led by such figures as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others that shattered the unity of the Church and has left us today with a divided Christianity.  We need to take a closer look at the various Protestant Reformations to understand them better but we do know that we don’t want to further split the Church.  On the other hand, we do want reform and it doesn’t seem to be coming today from the leadership.

When John XXIII convoked the Second Vatican Council it was his aim to bring the Church into step with the contemporary world—not to accommodate the Church to the culture but to renew and revitalize the Church by divorcing it from the world of the ancien regime to which it was still tied in so many ways.   (The ancien regime refers to the world of absolute monarchy and hierarchical dominance that characterized Europe before the French Revolution.)  Good Pope John was a man of the times—willing to look at old things in new ways but he did rather enjoy the pomp of the ancien regime and did not plan to change the trappings of the Church as much as to relieve it of its fear of the world outside the basilica doors.  His reign was short, however, and his successor Paul VI was far more radical.  Paul abolished the Papal Court and its ceremonial, doing away with most of the imperial trappings of the papacy—the scarlet silk trains and fur capes of the cardinals were abolished from Roman ceremonies, the various ranks of papal nobility and ceremonial guards were done away with, and the heavy gilt furniture and red damask wall coverings of the papal apartments were replaced with more elegantly simple décor.  He began to convoke synods of bishops to seek their advice.  On the local level, he radically simplified the worship and ritual of the Church, expanding the role of the laity and putting the role of the priest within the community of believers rather than over it.

It was during the reign of Paul VI that Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles, a convert to the Church and son of an American Secretary of State (and nephew of the director of the CIA) wrote a very important book called Models of the Church.  Professor Dulles suggested that the time had come to move beyond the institutional and hierarchical understanding of the Church and to understand the Church more in terms of its mission and its identity as a community—or actually as a communio which is something slightly different and much more profound than our normal understanding of “community.” 

Building on the patristic Tradition that underlays Catholicism and drawing on the documents of the Second Vatican Council, Dulles gave us new possibilities of how to understand what it means to be Church.  The centuries old emphasis on hierarchy and governance going back to Jesuit theologian Saint Robert Bellarmine in the sixteenth century was pushed to the side in favor of seeing the Church’s mission as being a herald of the Gospel in the world, as the sacred bond of Christ’s own Body, as a servant for humankind, and as the new People of God who were to be the leaven for God’s Kingdom.  Dulles did not mean that there was to be no institutionalism or hierarchy but only that the narrow view of Church in terms of structure had to be widened to draw on the ancient insights of the great Fathers of the Church.

We will continue to look at Dulles insights over several entries, but one central point of Church reform today must be to break the monopoly of institutional structure that has such a stranglehold on Catholic life today.  Yes there is hierarchy.  Yes there is structure.   But what must define us and give us energy is something less about us and more about God’s Kingdom.  The current hierarchical fascination with power and pomp that has returned like a resurgent virus in the Body of Christ is weakening the Church and sapping it strength. 

At the opening session of the Second Vatican Council, Bishop Emile deSmedt of Bruges decried the Church for its “triumphalism, clericalism, and juridicism.”  His cry became the guide for the reforms of the Council as the Bishops made a sincere and honest attempt to fashion a Church that could be an effective witness to the Gospel in the modern world.   But that vision seems to be lost today as so many of the hierarchy and clergy want to refashion a Church of pomp and power, of law and pecking order.  Reform—genuine reform—must come with a recovery of the Spirituality of Servanthood not the piety of power.

Two Churches--To Serve or to Be Served

The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve
Matthew 20:28

I am anxious to move on to the subject of the Gregorian Reform but should finish exploring the need for Reform in the contemporary Church beforehand.  While I love the past and can regale myself—if not others—for hours with historical details, I firmly believe that history is not about the past.  Those interested in the past qua past are not historians but antiquarians.   History, on the other hand, employs the past as a means of discussing and understanding the present and constructing the future.   In the August 1  posting I made a claim that the conflicts over the “correct” interpretation of the Second Vatican Council have left us with a bifurcated Church,  with one branch looking backwards to a world of power and pomp and another looking forward into a new world and a new role for the church in the world.  Avery Dulles wrote in his book The Catholicity of the Church, (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1985.  p. 136):  
... papal primacy in the first millennium was envisaged principally as witness, and was closely linked to what had been called the apostolicity of the Church.  In the second millennium, until Vatican Council II, papal authority was understood as a matter of power, and was linked to the Church’s attribute of unity.  A more recent kind of theology, reflected in the documents of Vatican II, links papal primacy rather with service, and interprets it in relation to the catholicity of the Church.    
      It is an interesting observation and if there is a flaw in Dulles’ analysis it is that applies this three-millennia-schema to papal authority when in fact it actually fits the wider self-understanding not simply of the papacy but of the Church itself.  It was not only the papacy, but the Church itself that understood its apostolic mission to be kergymatic, that is to witness to the Gospel to the ends of the earth. That understanding of mission shifted as the first millennium gave way to the second, the very time of the Gregorian Reform of which we are soon to speak, and not only the papacy but the Church itself saw that its “mark” of unity required to have a universal dominion, i.e. a power that extended over all peoples of all times.  The transition was not a smooth one as well shall see—in fact well into the second millennium there were still voices such as Peter Waldo and Francis of Assisi—who rejected the power model in favor of the witness model.  Nonetheless, the power model won out and the Church fitted its structures to accommodate it.  The papacy picked up the trappings of monarchy, the bishops forged alliances with the princes—indeed were often princes themselves.  The hierarchical nature of the Church became more evident as ecclesial power consolidated itself in the hands of prelates and indeed as the evangelical concept of authority gave way to the notion of “power” in ways that Jesus had explicitly condemned.  The liturgy too evolved in ways that emphasized power and hierarchy.  Ecclesial and social hierarchies mutually collaborated to reinforce each other’s dominance over the working and peasant classes and the Church became hopelessly (though at the time it was seen not as hopeless but as the ideal) entwined with the civil powers to create the ancien regime.  When that regime came tumbling down with the Bastille in 1789 (and the subsequent decade) the Church worked for its reestablishment, despising democracy, trumpeting absolutism and monarchy.  If you recall the various entries in this blog about “Americanism” you will remember that the Holy See really didn’t know how to deal with the unique situation of the American Church with its republican convictions in a world of monarchial Catholicism.   
     And so, according to Dulles, the time has come again to shift the paradigm—this time from power that guarantees the Church to be “one”   (though it never really did) to the catholicity of the Church marked by an upcoming millennium of service.  And here is where the conflict lies.  There are those who cannot let go of the “power” paradigm with its trappings of monarchy and lordly domination.  They love their Tridentine Mass which so clearly displays the hierarchy of persons in ecclesial society.  The Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest based at Gricigliano in Tuscany epitomizes this ecclesiology of obsolescent fantasy and the ostentatious displays of Cardinals Burke, Pell, and Castrillón Hoyos as they travel the world in their ermine trimmed cappae magnae keep alive the hope of those who believe in a world of kings and peasants and hope to see once again throne and altar united and Catholicism supreme throughout the world.  
      There is, on the other hand,  those who recall and regard as prophetic the speech by Bishop Emil deSmedt  in the first session of Vatican II calling for an end to “triumphalism, juridicism, and clericalism”  There are those in the Church today who have a radical vision of a Church putting itself at the service of the poor.  Some, like Mother Teresa, embraced this new vision from a very conservative perspective.  Others, like Dorothy Day came at it from a very left field.  Some, like Archbishop Helder Camara or the American bishop, Bernard Topel just walked away from cumbersome pomp of their office and became witnesses to a truly apostolic Gospel.  Others, like the martyred Oscar Romero had been “party men” who found themselves surprisingly, even against their own expectations, converted to a radical Christianity.  Some were simply hard workers who pitched in and got things done like the four American churchwomen (Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan) martyred in El Salvador.  Some, like theologian Monika Hellwig,  left religious life in order to live the Gospel even more authentically than would have been possible as a religious.  Others—like Dulles himself—found that religious life and the institution of the Church gave them the better platform from which to make their contribution.   
       There are those who find this paradigm shift to be very difficult, indeed threatening, to accept and who do what they can to resist it.  Gamarelli’s stays in business supplying silver buckled shoes and purple stockings for those curial monsignori who are not about to give up the buttons and bows they’ve dreamed of since their seminary days.  Those members of the Roman Curia who are members of or have influence with the Congregation for Bishops try to insure that men named to the episcopacy today are not too inclined to the service model foretold by Dulles.  Certainly in the United States most bishops are quite friendly to be with and usually without much pretense,  but at the same time are corporation men through and through who will not effect any drastic social reformation within the Church or regarding the Church’s position in society.  But the wheels of history, while they do turn slowly, turn nonetheless and eventually one will come to the Chair of Peter who knows that humble service speaks the gospel more convincingly to our contemporary world than do the circumstances of pomp.  Dulles, I have no doubt, is right—service will mark the Church of the third millennium but we are only in the second decade of that epoch and there is much time to come.  The autocracy and the silk gowns alike will one day appear as ridiculous anachronisms  and the battles over models of the Church will be a historical footnote—at least until the paradigm must shift again.