He looked on them with compassion: Matt 14:14

The following article by a priest of the Newark Archdiocese appeared in Northern New Jersey Papers Sunday morning and attracted a considerable amount of local attention—mostly quite favorable.  Thanks to reader Liam MacBride who brought the article to my attention and sent me a copy. 

Mitis Judex

Dominus Jesus

Opinion: Pope Francis adds more seats around the table

BY ALEXANDER M. SANTORA

Pope Francis adds more seats around the table

On gay inclusion, abortion, pontiff is opening new doors

I WAS LEAVING a Baptism party at Willie McBride's Irish Pub in Hoboken and as I walked past the bar to the exit, three women were sitting near the door. One turned and asked me for a blessing. Feeling like a shaman, I still complied.

I turned to leave and another woman said, "Can you bless me and my fiancé? We are getting married soon. Our names are Christina and Beth." So, I placed my hands over their heads and said, "May the Lord give you health and strength and many happy years together." I made the sign of the cross and as I turned to leave, the first woman added, "You made our day."

Later, I recalled what Pope Francis said in the now-famous America magazine interview: "I manage to look at individual persons, one at a time, to enter into personal contact with whomever I have in front of me." Because of his vast pastoral experience, the pope accepts people as they are. This becomes the starting point for ministry.

On Tuesday, Francis announced that women who have had abortions can seek forgiveness in confession without going to the diocesan bishop. "May priests fulfill this great task by expressing words of genuine welcome ... to obtain the true and generous forgiveness of the Father who renews all with his presence," the pope wrote.

In the past, Francis said, "This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people." Clearly, his image of church has a large eucharistic table to signal that with the right disposition, all are welcome.

After 10 years as a pastor in city teeming with young adults, I find that they don't want judgmental homilies pointing fingers and labeling people. Instead, they hunger for help in navigating life through the prism of faith. Hoboken has a higher percentage of gay people, though there is no gay neighborhood and no gay bars or establishments, and gay people blend in with everyone else. Even at Mass. Gay men and lesbians do not want to be labeled as "other." And it seems to work.

Most parishioners accept people as they are, and society is more tolerant. And more young adults see discrimination as an injustice, which puts a real burden on churches and institutions in the 21st century.

For one, there needs to be a moratorium on labels. The days of separate Masses for gay people sponsored by Dignity for Catholics and Integrity for Episcopalians, for example, are over. Gay people search for hospitable clergy and houses of worship to get involved. There is no need for special homilies or support groups.

A turning point in Pope Francis' papacy was that simple rhetorical line on the airplane, "Who am I to judge?" No pope in recent memory could match Francis' ministerial experience meeting the poor and living like them. Francis is the supreme pastor. And that is why the entrenched hierarchy and Vatican Curia do not know how to handle him.

Francis is not guided by tradition, as much as the needs of the people of God without jettisoning church teaching. The synod at the Vatican last year made headlines because it included current pastoral dilemmas that keep people away from church.

The New York archdiocese, for example, closed and merged a number of churches because it estimated that 18 percent of Catholics attended Mass on a regular basis. And Francis has the pulse of why this occurs all over the world.

Many priests, even many younger ones, think they are living in a pre-Vatican Council church that dictates the way people are expected to live. Some give boring, didactic homilies and burden the churchgoers with the problems of those who do not even go to church. And they offer little help for contemporary Catholics to find faith in daily life.

Francis wants people to have a renewed experience of faith. And that means meeting them where they are and understanding the struggles people face every day. What he will find in typical parishes is that people who might be considered "sinners" in the eyes of the church come despite frequent invective and institutional hostility. That they have persevered is a sign of great faith, which Francis' papacy makes much more hospitable.

The question for the parish is how participation will change the local churches. As society tolerates and legalizes many practices that only 25 years ago would have been taboo, how can churches muster opposition and use rhetoric that denigrates? As parents and grandparents support their children and grandchildren, how will the church turn their backs on them and still expect to be seen as just?

None of these questions have easy answers. But the October synod and Francis's decisions after it will be the real test of whether the church expects to be relevant in the 21st century or still cling to a prejudiced past and diminish expectations. And, by the way, close more parishes because people simply go elsewhere or nowhere at all.

Gay people, divorced and remarried Catholics, and women who had abortions are already at the eucharistic table. Now it's time for the church to listen to their stories of faith and hope, which is the talk at any table when a family comes together.

We learn from one another who we are and what we can become. Francis is a hopeful pope. The local churches can take his lead to heal and help. And maybe, just maybe, those three women I met at Willie McBride's will find their way to Our Lady of Grace or some other church and find that there is a place for them at this huge eucharistic table.

The Rev. Alexander M. Santora is the pastor of the Church of Our Lady of Grace & St. Joseph in Hoboken.

Father Santora’s article highlights a radical reversal in Ecclesiology from the pontificate of Benedict XVI who often spoke of a smaller and more rigorous, perhaps even a more committed Church, one less alloyed with our current culture.  Francis sees the Church more in the “Big Tent” tradition where there is room for those at every step of the journey of discipleship.  Both models of Church have their merits; each has its flaws. But there is no doubt that the basic self-understanding of the Church has shifted under Pope Francis.  And there is no guarantee that it won’t shift again under future occupants of the See of Peter.  Surprising to those unschooled in the history of the Church, the inclusive Francis vision has been the predominant perspective from which the Church has seen itself through the centuries and indeed, the ‘lean mean grace machine’ approach can too easily teeter on the precipice of Calvin’s understanding of the Church as the society of the elect.  While neither Augustine nor Thomas nor Bellarmine would be inclined to view the Church as a refuge for the morally ambivalent, there has always been an understanding that the Church is not the community of the righteous but a community that seeks to heal the wounds of sin with the balm of God’s infinite merciful love.  So thank you Father Santora and thank you Pope Francis for putting the “Good” back into “The Good News.”

What In The World Will Be Postmodern Catholicism?

Tibetan monks with their 

dunchen or Dharma trumpet; 

now that guitar Masses are 

passé, can we look forward 

to hearing these in church?

One of my former students came by to visit a few weeks ago.  Tran is now ordained and has been sent to Rome to the Pontifical Gregorian University to earn a Doctorate in Systematic (Dogmatic) Theology.  It was great to catch up and I was fascinated by what he had to say about his studies.  He was all afire about the problem of God in Postmodern thought. 

Now, Postmodernism is something that has always baffled me.  As a medieval historian, I never really understood Modernism, much less Postmodernism.  Modernism is a school of thought, prevalent in the second half of the 19^th century and into the 20^th, that like so many of the intellectual movements before it, rejected the received tradition and insisted on radically new interpretations of whatever phenomena it was considering.  In theology then Modernism questioned the received tradition of the faith and its doctrines.  Modernist thinkers discarded central ideas of the Christian faith such as the Divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, the Divine Source of Scriptural Revelation, and even the relevance of any idea of God. They attempted to reduce the faith to Myth without understanding the function of Myth to encapsulate levels of Truth that transcend articulation.  Unfortunately the Catholic Church was no better at appreciating the superior levels of Truth contained in Myth and in reaction to Modernism encouraged not only a retreat into re-constructed thought processes of the past (e.g. Neo-Scholasticism) but even an abandonment of serious intellectual fields such as Scriptural Criticism to a morbid anti-intellectualism, even a rabid fundamentalism that it took the Church decades to reverse. 

In theology, as in other fields such as architecture or literature, Postmodernism is a reaction to Modernism.  Unlike the intellectual freeze imposed by Leo XIII and Pius X, however, Postmodernism does not retreat into the embalmed remains of the past but seeks to find ways to express the essence of our faith in modalities that speak intelligibly to our contemporaries.   

Maybe we can look at it more concretely.  The familiar concept of “heaven” has lost any credibility for thinking men and women today.  When we were children heaven was “up there”; hell was “down there.”  That—and especially regarding heaven—was pretty much a literal conception.  But within my lifetime (I am in my mid-sixties) our understanding of the “up there” has shifted radically and allows no place for heaven. While we have known for several centuries that space is a vast and almost limitless entity, over the last five decades it has sunk into our consciousness that there really is no “up there”; only an “out there” that could not be transversed in a hundred million lifetimes.  And not only is heaven a spatial improbability, but reflection on Sartre’s play No Exit has confronted us with how much a hell it would in fact be with a relentlessly eternal existence from which we could never find an end.  (Sartre’s play is set in hell but the problem of a relentless eternity transcends the particularities.) The sort of a nightlessly eternal picnic in the park afterlife, an unending family reunion as it were, becomes not only improbable but terrifying.  So what do we do about an afterlife?  How do we make sense of it?  And would it really be blissful without Häagen Daz Vanilla Swiss Almond?  And Fido.  What about Fido?  I can’t leave Fido behind.  I would only suffer an eternal melancholy without Fido.  We need to find new ways to talk about our conviction that life transcends this mortal coil and when we shed it there is a life in God. 

It is not only Heaven and Hell but a huge range of religious symbols that need to be rethought and re-expressed in ways that make sense to people of the 21^st century.  Indeed, as Tran pointed out to me, even God needs some new clothes if s/he is not to appear dated.  But the task is not to invent faith new from whole cloth—though some have tried to do this with rather bizarre results—but to retrieve and reinterpret the essence of what has always been at the core.  We need to look at the past and realize that the doctrines and dogmas and even the biblical text with which the Truth has been revealed are all simply the reliquaries or ostensoria that permit us to see the Truth and are not themselves the Truth.  (Go and look up ostensorium—the singular of ostensoria—and you might be surprised.  I chose to use the fancier term so as to avoid the connotations the more normal word would convey.)  We do not necessarily abandon or reform those doctrines and we cannot abandon or change the scriptural text but we can seek new interpretations and historically contextualize them in an effort to separate the wheat of the impermeable Truth from the chaff of variable intellectual constructs. 

This cannot be done lightly.  In my series on the History of Anglicanism I have “taken some shots” at what I think has been some very sloppy abuses of sound Theological discipline, not only by those in the Episcopal and Anglican Churches, but by liberal Protestantism in general.  On the other hand when I look at our Catholic Church confronted by the challenge of a world in which, for example, gender roles and an understanding of human sexuality has so rapidly changed, I see our theologians stunned like deer in the headlights or a rat caught in the stare of a cobra, transfixed and unable to move for fear. 

I had coffee yesterday morning with the son of a friend of mine; an interesting man not much younger than myself. He is a hospice nurse but also produces video documentaries, only one of which I have yet seen.  That particular documentary is on the collaboration of religious leaders from various traditions—Buddhist, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant—in their neighborhood on the lower East Side of Manhattan.  It was a very interesting documentary and it revealed much about the religious perspective of its producer.  I might say more about the video on another occasion but I spoke with him—I was already contemplating this posting—on how an educated and fairly sophisticated man of middle years views religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular.  He spoke about his own spiritual journey.  He was raised in the Catholic Church with a devout mother and a father who had been somewhat rigidly Catholic until the late ‘60’s and then went overboard in the other direction.  He had gone to Catholic schools but in his late 20’s drifted away from the faith.  His father had introduced him to Eastern Meditation and that gave him a spiritual foundation as he was on somewhat of a seeker’s pilgrimage (my term, not his) but ended coming back into the Catholic Church but in a very new way.  He said he was drawn back to the Church by just finding churches or other religious spaces to be places where he could sit away from the hubbub of Manhattan.  In particular he said that the vastness of space in churches and synagogues appealed to him as a respite from the city.  But he also uncovered in religion tremendous energy for building a better world.  He is comfortable again with his Catholicism but it is not a Catholicism of doctrine or of rules.  And he also finds himself at home in the various other faith communities around him and with which he has ties.  A Sabbath service in the Synagogue or Vespers in a Russian Orthodox Church or listening to a Tibetan monk sound his dungchen (or dharma trumpet, the long deep bass trumpet used in Tibetan worship) all speak deeply to him of the same Divine Mystery he finds at Mass.  I think he reflects the next generation of Catholics, people for whom religion is more about a spiritual journey than about doctrine, more about experience than intellectualization.  The Dalai Lama speaks to this when he writes: 

“The aim and purpose of religion is to cure the pains and unhappiness of the human mind. …. I would like to point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity, and love.  Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness and save others.” 

It should not surprise us that the Dalai Lama speaks more effectively to contemporary Americans 60 and under than any Christian leader, including the Pope.  The sad thing is that with all due respect to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Gospel offers us the same insight in even more concrete and (I believe) more profound ways, but so much of our leadership and so many of our co-religionists have forsaken the invitation of Christ to let our hearts of stone become furnaces of the Divine Compassion and focused instead on rituals and ceremonies and are hell-bent on emarginating those who don’t measure up to the Pharisee standards.  It is not that I think we have to abandon the key doctrines of the faith: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and it is certainly not to give carte blanche for any arbitrary morality: but I believe those in Church leadership who have shifted their emphasis from theological abstractions to applied Christianity are breaking through a moribund “faith” into a credible Christianity.  The Franklin Grahams and the Archbishop Chaputs or the Cardinal Burkes and the Pat Robertsons are not the effective evangelizers in this Post Modern World.  You don’t have to preach a loosey-goosey Gospel to be effective: look at Mother Teresa or Archbishop Tutu, but you do have to be a witness to the mercy and compassion of God and not to the severity of dogmatic and judgmental religion.  

So It's Not A Catholic Problem

Michelangelo's Crucifixion in Santo

Spirito, Florence--the epitome of Divine

Compassion and a call to forgiveness of

sins

I feel bad about Joe Paterno.  I am not saying that Penn State is wrong; I don’t think they are.  But I still feel bad.  The guy is 84 years old—almost 85—and has given sixty-two years of his life to Penn State.  That is a commitment!  At eighty-one he had to have hip replacement surgery because he injured himself trying to demonstrate a kick technique. This is a guy who always gave his all to what he believed in. But he made a mistake, a huge mistake.  He was told—he didn’t see, but was told—that an assistant coach was seen sexually abusing a minor in the Penn State field house.  Paterno notified the University Athletic director.  The State Police said that Paterno had performed his legal obligation of reporting this to his superior.  The Grand Jury investigating the charges commended him for reporting it.   But Paterno had not personally called the police to report it and that was his mistake.  It is not enough to follow institutional protocols in these matters.  It is not enough even to follow the law.  More is expected of us.  I feel bad for him—terrible for him—because I am sure he acted in good faith and did all that was required but sometimes what is required is not enough. 
     This episode demonstrates  that the vigor with which the issue of sex abuse is being pursued against Catholic clergy accused of sexual abuse of minors is not an attack on the Church.  Sometimes you would think that sex abuse is a disease of the Catholic clergy and sometimes you would think that the venom with which bishops are often pursued for not having dealt effectively with reports of clerical abuse is masking an anti-Catholic or anti-Church campaign.  And sometimes it might be.  But the rancor that brought down Joe Paterno shows that there is an issue here that is not limited to the Church, will strike even heroes, and won’t go away until our society learns to deal effectively with protecting children.  However, at the end of the day, I still feel terrible for Joe Paterno.  Compassion doesn’t have to be limited to victims. Indeed, compassion never knows limits and reaches out to understand the suffering not only of the primary victims, nor even the bystanders like JoePa, but even the offenders.  But then compassion is the most rare of virtues, and the most precious.