For What Did Christ Die?

As many of my regular readers know, one neo-trad site that I find worthwhile is New Liturgical Movement.  While those contributors whose focus is on the philosophical merits of restoring the pre-conciliar rites are generally not worth the time, there are frequent articles on historical points that give interesting insights into the history and development of our Catholic, indeed our Christian, faith.  In our storehouse of Catholicism’s two millennia of treasures there are more than some old gilt chairs that broke under the weight of the fat arse of some doddering prelate.  We have Chartres and the In Paradisum and blue as a liturgical color.  (In fact we have yellow as a liturgical color which is really a bit outré.)  We have Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and the Canon of Addai and Mara, and the Easter Sepulcher and the hymns of the Roman Breviary.   Some, many, of the old things are probably best left in the storeroom, but some really need to be taken out a bit more often and polished-up and used.  But in doing so we always need to ask ourselves: What is the Church for which Jesus gave his life? 

There was a great video of the coronation of Pius XII (March 12, 1939) on the site.  It led me to a host of other old videos of the old days of prelates clad in silks and furs like Hollywood starlets or the San Francisco Gay Pride parade. (C’mon boys, even Cardinal Burke says that men should dress like men. Not that he practices what he preaches.) It is a reminder that to work on reinforcing our liturgy with elements both old and new is the work of wise stewards, but to build kingdoms other than the Kingdom of God is to make a mockery of the Cross.  

It Just Never Ends, Does It?

Ah, Cardinal Pell sneaking out for his afternoon gelato.  

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.  

A Note on the Costume of Prelates



Archbishop-Designate Salvatore Cordileone

of San Francisco processing through the

streets of the Bay Area--seriously,  not

making this up!



You may have noticed that I don’t post the comments that come into my blog as it isn’t my intention to hold discussions but rather to present little known aspects of history or to make commentary on current situations in the light of the Church’s previous experience.  When I do get a question or a comment that merits some attention, I do try to respond indirectly.  In my last posting, I showed a picture of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon,  (1651-1715) Archbishop of Cambrai (1696-1715) and it included a picture of the Archbishop wearing a blue mozetta over his rochet.  I had an inquiry asking if Fénelon were a Sylvesterine Benedictine as, my correspondent (an obvious lover of arcane knowledge) reminded me, until Paul VI reformed the costume of prelates in 1969 prelates  who were Benedictines of this congregation wore blue.  But the answer is no—Archbishop Fénelon was not a religious but rather that the custom of bishops and archbishops wearing amaranth purple (actually a red tending towards the purple) is a fairly recent phenomenon.  Previously this reddish color was reserved for monsignori of the papal household.  The Gilbert Stuart portrait of John Carroll, the first Catholic Bishop for the United States, has Carroll in a green mozetta.  Only those bishops and archbishops who, in addition to their responsibilities in their own dioceses, were made honorary members of the papal household wore the amaranth purple habits.  Sometimes people ask why monsignors dress like bishops when in fact historically it was bishops who began dressing like monsignors.  This reminds me of the old joke that while we don’t know when Jesus instituted the priesthood—was it the Last Supper (Do This in Memory of Me) or Easter Night (Whose Sins you Forgive are Forgiven), we do know when he instituted Monsignors.  You can find it in Matthew 6:28.  “See the lilies of the field—they neither toil nor spin; yet not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.”  In any event, in the middle of the nineteenth century it became all but universal that a man, on being made a bishop, was also automatically named an honorary prelate of the papal household and the green or blue episcopal habit disappeared in favor of the red.  The relic left behind, however, is that on his coat of arms a bishop’s (or Archbishop’s) hat is green, not red.  And the cord by which his pectoral cross is suspended is intertwined green and gold, not red and gold. 

Archbishop John Carroll, a man of

more restrained taste

Until the reforms of Paul VI, bishops (and Archbishops and Cardinals) of the monastic and mendicant orders wore choir vesture of the same design as secular prelates but of wool (not of silk) and in the traditional colors of their orders.  Thus most Benedictine prelates wore black; Franciscans grey; Dominicans  and Cistercians, white and black; Carmelites, brown and white and so on.  Prelates who were religious of the various societies and congregations (as distinguished from the “Orders”) such as Jesuits, Theatines, Oblates, etc. wore costumes of amaranth red (bishops and archbishops) or scarlet (cardinals) but of wool or broadcloth in deference to their vows of poverty rather than the silk of the secular clergy.  It made for a more colorful Church and was a bit more fun.  In 1969 however, Paul VI made drastic changes in the vesture of prelates.  He not only standardized the choir habit of all Western Rite prelates in color and design and fabric, but he abolished from papal ceremonies the cappa magna—the great cape with a train of nine yards that bishops could wear in their jurisdiction and Cardinals could wear wherever they wished.  He didn’t forbid prelates from wearing it in their own dioceses or Cardinals from wearing it outside the Diocese of Rome, but the vesture almost died out.  It has received a recent resurgence through the pomposity of such distinguished hierarchs as Raymond Burke, George Pell, Dario Castrillón-Hoyos and now Archbishop-designate Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco.  Of course in San Fran Archbishop Cordileone will fit right in wearing a long train of silk.  I’m sure he won’t be alone in his penchant for lots of silk.          

A Sobering Homily

I have been on an Advent Retreat while here in Europe but went out Sunday at the request of a friend to a “Pontifical High Mass According to the Extraordinary Form.” I am, as readers know, no fan of the Tridentine Revival but I must admit that it was magnificently done with an all male a capella choir. (I do like my chant pure and unadulterated by accompaniment.  I also believe that just as the African voice can do things the American/European cannot, so too the male voice has certain characteristics that the female voice cannot replicate and these are particularly suited for chant.)  The liturgy itself was distilled with great dignity but no pomp—all the extraneous elements such as the cappa magna and vesting at the chair were eliminated so the focus was never on the prelate or lesser ministers but on the liturgy itself.  It was done as the Extraordinary Form should be done if it is to be done at all: pure and utterly transcendent.  Of course, being in a ninth-century Romanesque basilica helps. And I do understand the Latin.   And the sacred ministers were choreographed perfectly—each moving slowly but always on time and in time arriving to where they needed to be.  I am convinced that monks have an instinct on how to do this sort of thing—all that getting the bread to brown at exactly the right minute is good preparation for liturgy.  So it broke all my stereotypes (and resultant fears) of this nostalgia for the “old mass.”  In other words, I enjoyed it thoroughly.  But what struck me was the homily.  Quite short and to the point.  The bishop, seated on his faldstool on the Gospel Side of the altar (as he was not the ordinary he could not use the “throne”) simply asked:  Do you really think God is pleased with this ritual, as beautiful as it is, while a third of his children on this fragile earth are dying of malnutrition.”  He reminded me of Chrysostom: 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 and then with what is left you may adorn the altar as well.”

The Church and a Culture of Power

Our old friend, Cardinal Burke, (then Archbishop)

dressing up for another trip into his fantasy world

of bygone days of glory.  Perhaps he needed a strong
masculine figure earlier in his younger years. 

The final reason I want to give for the deterioration of papal authority, indeed Church authority in general, during—and since—the pontificate of John Paul II is the perceived wealth of the Church.  Note: perceived wealth.  I am reluctant to say that the Papacy or the Catholic Church is wealthy.  It is a bit like saying that the United States is wealthy.  There are wealthy States and there are States where there is much poverty.  The Catholic Church is not a single entity.  Financially each diocese is self-administering as is each religious order.  There are dioceses where there are considerable assets and there are dioceses with few assets.  Just as even poor States have budgets measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, so too even poor dioceses have huge budgets—though, of course, not at all comparable to any State budget.  One would say that relative to other nations, we are a wealthy nation and our citizenry are—by comparison to much of the world—wealthy.  So too the Catholic Church is a much bigger financial organization than other religions, but relative to the size of its membership probably not out of the same ball park as other religious groups.  The central administration of the Church, the papacy, is an enormously costly operation but then its expenses are also enormous.  The Holy See, as the administration is known, maintains diplomatic missions with over a hundred nations.  It was one of the oldest entities to send and maintain embassies and probably the oldest to do so on a continual basis to the present.  I don’t see where Jesus explicitly authorized embassies as part of the mission he entrusted to his disciples, but I would have to admit that over the centuries papal diplomacy has often played a crucial role in history  (not always to the good) and papal diplomatic channels were very important in both World War I and World War II as well as the Cold War, so they could be subsumed under the Church’s commission for peacemaking (Blessed are the Peacemakers—you remember that one from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5: something or other) if not always for evangelism.  In other words, I am not criticizing the Church for its actual wealth of which I think it is a pretty good steward.  The problem is its perceived wealth.  I have lived in Rome off and on over the years and still go there frequently (like next week) and I continued to be dazzled by the splendor of the Churches.  By and large I detest baroque style but you know it was costly to build (and costly to maintain, but that is the Italian Government’s, not the Church’s, problem).  I have been to the Louvre, the Prado, the Hermitage, the British Museum and dozens of other art collections.  The Louvre and the Hermitage are comparable to the Vatican museums but nothing else.  “The pope should sell all this art” some people exclaim and maybe he should. After all,  Jesus didn’t need art—“the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head,” if your remember.  But the problem is that great art doesn’t belong to the Vatican or the Louvre or the Prado.  Great art belongs to civilization as a whole and whether it is the French Government or the Russian Government or the Holy See—they are only the custodians.  I wish we had never gotten into the art business but now that the Church has it, they also have a responsibility.  And as long as it pays for itself (and the Vatican Museums are not cheap for entry)—well, it is a bit like babysitting a kid: you can’t put it up for sale just because it becomes an embarrassment. 
     I think the problem is not the budgets it takes to run a diocese or a religious order or even the Vatican.  I don’t think the problem is the basilicas or the Michelangelo’s.  I think the problem is the “culture of wealth” that the Church inherited from a previous generation when bishops were princes and the Church itself was a monarchy and which needs to be dismantled and replaced today.  During the Renaissance and Baroque eras until the French Revolution the alliance of “Throne and Altar” made bishops princes and endowed prelates with all the trappings of great men of monarchial states.  Cardinals and bishops and prelates and abbots lived in palaces with leagues of servants and carriages and silver and gold plate off which they dined.  They wore ermine and silks and were accustomed to have people kiss their hands on bended knees.  They were entitled to titles: Excellency and Eminence and whatever.  I doubt Jesus was impressed but the whole idea was that everyone else would be.  The bishops and great men of the Church were drawn from the noble families and they moved comfortably in the corridors of power.  (Karol Wojtyla, aka John Paul II, was the first Archbishop of Krakow not to come from the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)  The Gospel was something read at Mass, not something generally believed or preached, but the system worked—at least according to the norms of the world in which the Church found itself.   
     Of course the Church paid dearly for this alliance at the time of the French and subsequent revolutions.  But peace was made, monarchy and Church restored at the Congress of Vienna, and while the earthly powers gradually learned the lesson and moved away from the monarchial models—the Queen of the Netherlands keeps riding around on a bicycle as did her Queenly Mother and Grandmother in their reigns—the Church seems slow to understand that model has changed.  The various monarchies that survived World Wars I and II drastically reformed their courts in the 2oth centuries reducing the pageantry (and expense) and Paul VI did the same in the late 60’s with the papal household.  But damn if that stuff doesn’t come creeping back.  Cardinal O’Malley sold the Archbishop’s Palace in Boston (in part to pay the settlements against the Archdiocese for the sex-abuse suits), but how many other Archbishops and bishops have spent considerable funds buying and furnishing very elegant homes for themselves.  When a priest I know complemented Archbishop John Myers of Newark on his matching Episcopal ring and cufflinks—antique Roman coins—“His Grace” (as he like to be known) dismissed it saying: when you’re the Archbishop you never pay for these things.  In order to simplify the public ceremonial of the Church and to move it away from the baroque courtly appearance of earlier centuries, Paul VI did away with any number of prelatial accoutrements such as the monsignoral and episcopal mantelletta or the fur hood of the winter cappa magna (and discouraged the use of the cappa magna itself though he only banned it in Rome) but that hasn’t stopped the Tridentine Revivalists of Summorum Pontificum from raiding the closets of their dead predecessors to dress up once again in princely finery.  The result is not only to turn sacred worship into a costume ball but to focus on ideas such as “power,” “pomp,” “majesty” attributed not to God—with which no one would have a problem—but towards the Church and Churchmen.  That model reduces Catholicism to an anachronism and trivializes our faith.   
       We need new models to express our identity as a Church, but even as most bishops, thank heavens, turn away from this ridiculous prince-bishop model, too many seem to choose the corporate CEO model instead.  We don’t need shepherds in eight-hundred dollar suits who belong to the Country Club and the University Club so that they can entertain bank presidents and County Executives.   You go to a chancery office these days and it looks like a prestigious law firm or advertising business.  Don’t get me wrong, I think we need a certain professionalism in how the Church is run, but we don’t need the corporate culture. 
        Last week I had the occasion to attend an event over which a Byzantine Rite bishop presided.  I was embarrassed because during the preliminaries I was speaking with him and didn’t know he was the bishop until after he walked away.  I had thought I was speaking with some simple priest or other.  (I mean “simple” here as “unassuming” neither as “mere” nor “stupid.”)  During the Liturgy—which is certainly not ritually bland—he comported himself with an unassuming reverence and attention to prayer.  Afterwards he mixed very easily with parishioners, waiting in the buffet line chatting with those around him and unselfconsciously telling some jokes and making amusing and self-deprecating observations.  There was nothing of the great man about him.   Of course the various Eastern Rite dioceses are smaller in numbers but far more widespread than our Roman Rite dioceses.  Nevertheless I was impressed at the more simple and pastoral impression the bishop gave.  Simple and humble would have much more impact than the self-important style we too often see. 
      Ironically, I wrote this before seeing the gospel for today with its sobering reminder that stone will not be left upon stone.  We need to remember that too—that the earthly and institutional dimensions of the Church are not destined to last.  Something to think about, Your Grace. 

Roots of the Reformation XII: Clericalism—The Paving Stones of the Road to Reformation

Cardinal Dulles suggested that the Servant Model of Church
is the model for the next millenium.  Here a Franciscan friar
speaks with one of the homeless people near St. Francis
Church in New York City. St. Francis Friary was the home of
Father Mychal  Judge, OFM, the NYFD chaplain, the first
registered death of the 9/11 tragedy

 Clericalism leads to-and in turn falls victim to—one of the great Catholic heresies which is to confuse the Church with its Lord.  This is complicated by the Catholic tendency to limit, at least in practical understanding, the Church to its Institutional manifestation.  When Catholics say “The Church…” they tend to mean the hierarchical institution which externally governs the Church, but the Church itself is a far more complex, indeed mysterious, phenomenon.  When I say mysterious, I don’t mean puzzling but rather sacred, indeed numinous, reality.  The late Avery Dulles in his 1974 book  Models of the Church spoke of five key models by which the Church can be understood.  The first on he mentioned—and which he thought was grossly overused—is the institutional model.   This is the model in which am emphasis is place on hierarchy, magisterium, canon law, juridical authority, etc.  Oh, and clericalism!  How could I forget.  And it is this institutional model that most people mean when they talk about “the Church.”

Cardinal Dulles wrote that the Church is not only, or even fundamentally, an institution but it also has a sacramental character.  That is to say that the Church is a visible representation of the Invisible (to the human eye) Master who himself is the fundamental sacrament of God.  In other words, Jesus, the Church’s Lord, is himself the visible representation of the Invisible God and the Church, as the visible representation (re-presentation) of Christ, is a sign and means of God’s Grace in the world.  Moreover, the Church is also kerygmatic—that is to say the Church has a Divinely ordered mission to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, the ongoing message of its Founder and Lord.  Dulles also calls the Church a communio—a covenantal bonding of the faithful into the One Body of Christ.  The Church is truly the physical Body of the Risen Christ—as truly (though obviously in a different mode) as is the Eucharist the physical Body of the Risen Christ.  Indeed the Catholic Tradition as found in Saint Augustine witnesses to the intrinsic unity between the Eucharistic Body and the Ecclesial Body of the Lord.  As Christ is one, the Eucharistic Body and the Ecclesial Body are one and the same, and it can be said that in certain respects each derives its authenticity as the Body of the Lord from the other.  Finally, the Church—and according to Dulles this may be the key model of Church for the next millennium—is Servant. 

  

Cardinal Burke, center, one of the prelates who represent 
the Institutional Model of Church.  Cardinal Burke has not
lately been seen speaking with the homeless outside
Gamarelli's--the Rome tailor shop specializing in retro
prelatial garb. 

Many people, especially those who hold positions of pompous power (Cardinals Burke, Pell, Castrillon Hoyos, and others who like parading around the world in cappae magnae) or even those who have powerless pomp (monsignors, the pezzi grossi of the Vatican Bureaucracy, members of the Institute of Christ the Sovereign Priest) are having difficulty letting go of the institutional model and embracing the servant model.  Can’t say I blame them; washing the feet of disciples is dirty work; it’s much more fun to be bundled up in silk and fur, though I don’t think of that as a “guy thing.”  But the Servant Model is the model that can restore credibility to a Church that has squandered its moral leadership in these last three decades.   Ah, but the gift of hope tells us that someday soon (and very soon) the Gospel will prevail once more over Gamarelli’s catalogue. (Gamarelli is the “tailor to the popes” and papal wanna-be’s.  See blog entry of March 28^th 2011 for photo of Gamarelli’s window.)   But this is the problem with clericalism –it derives its energy from the institution of the Church and the power the institution has rather than deriving its authority from the Gospel and the authority the Gospel confers. 

It is frightening how much of the negative energy that “former Catholics” have towards the Church is rooted in clericalism.  I first noticed this about thirty years ago in Ireland where my relatives—all (at the time) Church-going Catholics—spoke venomously of their Parish Priest because of what they perceived to be (and I think correctly) his abuse of power.  The power of an Irish Parish Priest was something to be contended with even thirty years ago—he had veto over the public school teachers and administrators as well as many other decisions that technically pertained to local government.  Over the years the antagonism toward the clergy in general seems only to have increased.  This is not to say that many individual priests are not very popular with their parishioners.  Those priests who mix easily with the people, sit in the pub, go to the cattle shows, and visit the homes of the parishioners without expecting the best china and fancy tea cakes are well liked.  Let a priest put on airs, however, and the most devout Irish Catholics become passive aggressive in ways only the Irish can; while many more avoid confrontation and simply walk away from the Church and decided that  a “long lie” in bed on Sunday morning will do them as well as a sermon. 

The anti-clericialism in the United States manifests itself differently but is growing even faster.  The main reason that we have so few vocations today is due, primarily I believe, to the fact that the priesthood is no longer a respectable profession.  This is not due only to the sex-abuse crisis; in fact I believe there are other even deeper roots of the decline in respect for priests today.  Compared to the parishioners, the priest is no longer better educated—and indeed in suburban or wealthy city parishes, is often less educated than most of the people in the pews.  When he speaks, the priest speaks more of what he learned from books than what he has learned from life—his own and his parishioners.  He often seems hopelessly out of touch, indeed at times from another planet.  Poor preaching, that is to say, irrelevant prattling from the pulpit, is probably the number one reason Mass attendance is falling in the United States.  It is absolutely embarrassing to listen when a priest makes a fool of himself speaking of things about which he knows nothing or when he expects his educated parishioners believe pious stories of saints who fly through the air, hosts that bleed, or decapitated bishops who continue to preach as they carry their head to the cemetery.  Legends and myths have their place, but it is not in the pulpit.  On the other hand when there is sound scriptural preaching that reinforces doctrine and can be related to everyday life, people find a comfort and credibility in their pastors. 

The key to good pastoral personality, like the key to all deep spirituality, is self-knowledge.  By self-knowledge I mean that one, cleric or lay, needs to know oneself not for one’s role or for whatever sacraments one has received but to know oneself in the unfathomable sea of sin and grace.   One has to strip away all pretense, all external trappings, all peripheral roles and deal with one’s own self naked in God’s eyes and naked in one’s own.  One has to see all the warts and wrinkles and cellulite and discern who we might have been had it not been for our sinfulness, who we truly are, and who we might be yet in the sight of God and by his grace.  And there is nothing more foreign to the clerical psyche as the courage it takes to abandon—totally abandon—role and be naked for who one is and nothing more in the sight of God and one’s own sight.  This is why diocesan priests so rarely make good spiritual directors for the spiritual life does not begin until one has so confronted one’s truest self and has been sufficiently humbled to throw oneself on the Divine Mercy, pleading for grace.  Once you have done that you find it very difficult to piously parade around in birettas and surplices that look like they come from Victoria’s Secret.   Once you have stood naked before God and in your own eyes, you need not title, no robe, no ring or fancy hat.  You know who you are and you can be who God wants you to be for others.  How rich a Church we would be if more of our clergy did that and fewer were seduced by rank and privilege. 

Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda: The Church, always reforming--always in need of reform

Yesterday a woman at church said to me “I am so at the end of my rope with the Church—this sex abuse issue, the coverup.  I resent the fact that a criminal can be a priest, but a woman can’t be.”  I had never heard it put quite that way.   We are in the midst of a mess in the Church these days.  The sex abuse and the cover-up are part of it—a huge part of it.  We are seeing hypocrisy when the “The Church” is taking such a harsh line not only on the political hot-potato of “gay marriage” but of appropriate pastoral care of gay people.  Indeed it seems that “The Church” has defined for itself the most rigid of codes of sexual morals when it is clear that many of bishops and clergy who make up “The Church” are living a double standard, sitting in the chair of Moses, as it were, but not practicing the morals they preach.  In the last few entries to this blog we have seen this is nothing new.  The blog has looked at gay popes and cardinals and bishops and we have looked at bishops and cardinals and popes with multiple illegitimate children.  We have seen prelates who have accumulated vast amounts of wealth for themselves and been interested in their own aggrandizement rather than the pastoral good of the souls entrusted to them.  We have seen abuses of power and resorting to violence to achieve one’s ambitions in the Church.   

Somewhat coincidentally I have been reading A Tale of Two Cities or, more precisely, listening to it on an audio book.  I last read it as a sophomore in High School but it has always remained among my favorite books.  Last evening, on my way home from church, I had been listening to the scene where Monsieur the Marquis’s carriage runs over and kills the child of Gaspard.  One could not help but be appalled at the Marquis’s apathetic contempt for the ordinary citizen.  Here is a man who lives in a universe where he thinks the “vulgar masses” were created solely to provide him with his indolent lifestyle.  And you know, I hate to say it, but in so many ways I see “The Church” reflected there.  In many ways it was the Church of the Renaissance and the ancien regime that Dickens was writing of—quite explicitly.  He does not leave that to your imagination when he speaks of the French ecclesiastics.    “The Church” was complicit in the evil that left so many people in dire poverty and squalor in those centuries when some think the Church was so glorious.  Those Basilicas and palaces of Renaissance Rome were built on the backs of the poor.  Not only Italy, but all Europe was being drained dry by the Medici, Della Rovere, Piccolomini, Borgia, Farnese, et al popes and their sycophant cardinals  and bishops and pezzi grossi prelates who were building their palaces and screwing their pages and poisoning their enemies while God’s poor starved.  I am not being anti-Catholic in saying any of this.  I am just reporting the facts.  And when I say that today we have prelates in Rome and prelates here parading around in silk gowns with trains longer than Kate Middleton’s upcoming dress and pontificating about sincere people who are trying to figure out how to balance their need for giving and receiving love, their same-sex attraction, and their devotion to Christ I am not sure how much has changed.  And when I hear sermons that tell me the priest is from cloud la-la land and has no idea how parents of families with four and five kids are trying to make ends meet without the mother having to work outside the home, or hear priests say that they have a life of sacrifice when a maid plops their three course dinner down before them on a table set with linen, china, and crystal I think that there is a need for change in “The Church.”  When I hear priests disparage women or hear of a Bishop who has instructed his pastors that when he visits, no woman is to be invited to dinner I cannot but think of Monsieur the Marquis and his contempt for the people who carried him with all his comfort on their backs and with the sweat of their brows.

But that is not the whole story, nor even half of it.

Also last evening I was at Tenebrae.  The Cathedral was packed.  The Liturgy was moving.  As I listened to the ancient readings and saw how the scriptures were arranged in the various antiphons and responsaries to tell the ancient story of our fall and our redemption—our fall in the disobedience of one man and our redemption in the obedience of another—I was moved to think of those countless thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of monks and nuns who through the centuries created this prayer, wove these texts together out of their meditations.   In the ever-darkening shadows of the Cathedral as the service progressed, I was reminded of faithful pastors, the holy priests, the humble men and women who, while the false shepherds were making a mockery of the Cross, were on their knees, lost in the mystery of God’s love made manifest in a naked and bloodied thorn-crowned man from Galilee whose faithful obedience set right all the sin in human history.  I looked around me at the Cathedral.  Connecticut Avenue lawyers in their three piece suits.  Mothers with strollers.  A smattering of the DC street people.  Some same-sex partners from the Dupont Circle area.  Senior citizens who live in the neighborhood.  Yuppies and DINKs (Double Income No Kids).  African Americans. Asian Americans.  White bread.  Hispanics.  That’s what it means to be Catholic.  Y’all come.  Everybody’s welcome.  And this is what The Church is.  The hierarchy is not the Church. The Pope is not the Church.  Michael Voris and his “Real Catholic TV” is not the Church (despite what he pretends).   The Church is the whole kit and kaboodle.    We all belong. Even those popes with kids and those popes with pages, even the Borgias with their special mushroom casseroles and Sixtus IV with his pretty-boy Cardinals.  Saints and sinners, wheat and tares, Christ died for all and if you or I are one of the lucky ones who remember that it is about Christ dying for us—and for all—and not about capes and swords and tall bejeweled mitres, just be thankful that your eyes have been opened and pray for those who are still so blinded by the glory of “The Church”  that they can’t see the true glory, the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

History in the Making: Is Cardinal Burke on target?

In a recent interview, Cardinal Burke, an American serving in the Roman Curia, said that Catholics are losing their faith because of masses celebrated without due reverence.  I think he has a point.  What we would probably disagree with is what one means by “due reverence.”  His Eminence has shown a preference for the pre-conciliar mass while he does not object to the Missal of Paul VI, the Novus Ordo, when celebrated appropriately.  There is much disagreement today about how the mass of Paul VI is to be celebrated.  We can look at that in some future entry, but yesterday I attended the Installation of a friend of mine as rector in an Episcopal Church where a fair number of parishioners are former Roman Catholics.  At the dinner afterwards I asked a couple at my table why they had left the Catholic Church. 

“Mostly we left because we have found the Church not to be family-friendly.  Our experience was that the homilies or sermons were not speaking to the world of people with families. They were more theology lectures. We weren’t getting guidance for the real problems of real people; we were just getting a lot of “theology” and it was pretty esoteric stuff.  I don’t need to hear about Aristotle and substances—I need to hear about how Jesus expects me to be a father to my children: what I need to say and do to bring them to a good and holy life.  And I need to hear this from people who have their feet on the ground.  I have to deal with real problems—why my kids shouldn’t expect to get everything they want just because we are fairly wealthy people.  My daughter wanted a $1400.00 prom dress and when I told her that wasn’t going to happen in a world where most people go to bed hungry, she through a fit and said she didn’t care about the poor.  I realized then that we never heard about the poor in our Catholic parish and I decided we needed to go to a Church where they talk about “the least of my brothers.”

This couple called another friend of theirs over and he said:  “Frankly I find the priests in the Catholic Church too effeminate.  I can’t stomach the fussiness of what the mass has become—the priests where I used to go to mass drape lace all over everything including themselves.  When we lived out in the Midwest, the church was pretty simple.  Mass was a straight-forward affair—the focus was on the scripture and the Holy Communion.  But here it seems as if it is about ceremony.  I know there are Episcopalian Churches like that too, but here at Christ Church we are what is called “low church.”  I mean it is all very reverent—you saw that in the service today—but they don’t gild the lilies.   When I am home in Indiana I still go to the Catholic Church, but out here I am just not comfortable with it."       

My friend, the new Rector, told me that about twenty percent of his congregation are former Roman Catholics or Catholics who come to services there will still remaining technically Catholics.  He himself is a cradle-born Episcopalian; his wife is still Methodist though she usually attends the Episcopal Church.  He said in addition to Catholics, perhaps another twenty percent of his parish is made up of those who once belonged to another Protestant denomination and two people whom he knows who were raised Jewish.  His parish has about 650 members which is a fairly large parish in the Episcopal Church.  They have two services on Sundays, the early service draws about a hundred and alternates Sundays between Morning Prayer and Eucharist. The second service is always the Eucharist and draws between two hundred and fifty and three hundred.  These figures show that a considerably higher percentage of his parishioners attend church regularly than Catholics, but it also shows that approximately 140 former Catholics are now Episcopalians.  The Rector says they are among his most active and committed members.  “Us cradle-Episcopalians are much more likely to have a long sleep-in on Sundays, or to chose brunch over the Eucharist—but not my Catholic parishioners—they are there every Sunday.”  Something to think about.    The image today is Cardinal (then Archbishop) Burke leaving mass in his cappa magna.