The Problem With Francis; The Problem For Francis A Matter of Perspective

The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community composed of men. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for every man. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds.

Hence this Second Vatican Council, having probed more profoundly into the mystery of the Church, now addresses itself without hesitation, not only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity. For the council yearns to explain to everyone how it conceives of the presence and activity of the Church in the world of today.

Thus opens Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World issued by the Council Fathers of Vatican II and promulgated by Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965.  The Church addresses itself not only to its own members, or even to all Christians, but to the entre human family and it does so in a dialogic manner.  The Church has picked up not only on our spiritual needs but on “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted.” The Church here approaches the world with a very different tone and a revised set of priorities than had been used at Vatican I or Trent or even in much of the papal magisterium of the previous centuries.  I say “much” because the amazing encyclicals Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII (1891) and Quadrigesimo Anno of Pius XI (1931) had made brave sallies into the practical world of everyday concerns regarding the rights of Labor and a just ordering of society, putting aside for the moment the more ethereal concerns of the what some might call the “purely spiritual.”  Even these encyclicals, however, were delivered in a magisterial tone where the respective popes intended to “set things right” by decree.  Gaudium et Spes took an entirely different approach, inviting the world beyond the Church to enter into a dialogue by which both the world and the Church can be enriched by a common exploration for the Truth.  Actually both tone and matter of Gaudium et Spes was to some degree anticipated in the Encyclicals of John XIII, namely Pacem in Terris and Mater et Magistra.

The entire tone of the Second Vatican Council was one of dialogue.  Nostra Aetate calls us into dialogue with non-Christian Religions. Unitatis Reintegratio establishes dialogue among the various branches of the Christian family.  Sacrocanctum Concilium calls for the various differing cultures of our human family to be integrated into our Roman Rite as a way of expanding our awareness of the broad diversity of cultures within our Catholic faith.  Christus Dominus calls for the Pope to act collegially and dialogically with his brother bishops in leading the Church.  Often our vision is so locked on the “trees”—the individual changes of Vatican II—that we fail to see the “forest”—the fundamentally different ecology of the Post-Vatican II Church. 

Unfortunately there was an attempt during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to soothe the nerves of those for whom this fundamental shift in the Church’s self-understanding was overwhelmingly threatening.  This shift led to what was called “the hermeneutic of continuity,” an attempt to blunt the Council Father’s vision but reinterpreting it in a more narrow context.  Certainly there is great continuity in the Church throughout its history and it has not been broken by the Second Vatican Council.  The immutable and eternal Truths of the Creed remain intact.  The basic nature of the Mass as a Sacrificial Banquet in which we are made present to and participant in the Death and Resurrection of the Lord remains.   The Pope is still infallible—in fact, under John Paul and with the articulation of Josef Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) there was even an extension of infallibility into the ordinary magisterium.  John Paul and Benedict often “talked the talk” of collegiality and dialogue, they fairly rarely “walked the walk.” There was a strong recentralization of authority in the Roman Curia with the consequent demission of the authority of the bishops, both collegially and individually.  The Ecumenical and Inter-religious dialogues have all but imploded.  The Liturgy, especially under Benedict, was returned to a European expression of faith.

All this is a bit of a background to Pope Francis and in particular to his visit to the United States.  It is becoming undeniably clear that there are two Churches in the United States. There is a majority Church which not only accepts the Council but is enthusiastic about the dialogical approach.  They want discussion about the issues of the day: climate change, immigration, income inequality, the death penalty.  They want a Church is that more inclusive and where there is honest dialogue between those of differing opinions.  They understand the moral underpinnings of the great social and economic challenges that face our nation and our world.  On the other hand there are those who want to go back to the Church of Gregory XVI (reigned 1831-1846) whose monastic background left him frightened, defensive, and condemnatory of the world around him.  (This was the Pope who condemned gas lighting and railways which he saw as dangerous innovations that threatened the existing social order by promoting the bourgeois class.)  These Catholics want the Church to retain its authoritative tone and to limit is voice to those issues which they perceive to belong to the “spiritual realm.”  Needless to say, they perceive Pope Francis’ speeches and actions during his American visit to threaten their entire understanding of the Church and its mission. 

Ultimately what is at stake from a theological perspective is our understanding of the Incarnation.  What does it mean for God to have become human in Christ Jesus?  An orthodox perspective sees that the Divine has entered directly into our human experience.  As such God has taken on himself the concerns of the human family as one of us.  There is nothing that does not fall under his reign or his benevolence—economics, politics, education, health, displacement of peoples from their homes, the protection of life at every stage—discipleship demands a response from us in this world and the Kingdom of God is seen as something that not only finds its realization in the eschaton but involves the transformation of this world by the grace of God. 

On the other hand, the attempts to limit the Church’s mission to the “purely spiritual” represent theologically a Nestorian position where God comes among us in human appearance but never truly embraces our humanity and makes it his own.  This scheme verges on Gnosticism in which the world is divided into the “sacred” and the “profane” and the Church’s only interest is with the “sacred.”  In such a scheme “salvation” is about the eternal reward of the soul in a post-apocalyptic heaven.   (The body gets to go along as a free ride in the Resurrection of the Dead, but the concern is the soul.)   This world and those who belong to it meet only judgment and destruction.  This scheme separates charity from justice, content that the poor and those on the margins of society receive the crumbs that fall from the tables of their betters.  The orthodox scheme realizes that without a determination for justice there is no true charity only condescension. 

The split between the two Churches in the United States grows stronger and stronger.  It isn’t a result of Vatican II, though I think Vatican II has to some extent crystalized it.   Years ago I approached the same issue from the perspective of the English Colonial Catholic Church and the Maryland Recusant Tradition as opposed to the European immigrant Church Tradition which challenged Colonial Catholicism in the early 19^th century and afterwards.  The conflict for the Church found its way into Vatican II.  There were many influences for reform and change, but there is no doubt that the universal Catholic Church was highly influenced at Vatican II by the distinctly American tradition as represented in the Decree on Religious Freedom and by a more communal and less hierarchical self-understanding.  To a notable extent the Universal Church was “Americanized” at the Council and the conflict continues today between those who want a monarchial and authoritarian Church and those whose vision is a more communal and dialogical Church.  In the end the Vatican II model will prevail both because its foundation was well laid at the Council and because the vast majority of Catholics worldwide have embraced it.  The question will be, how long can the two Churches co-exist in mutual recognition? 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXVII

surviving medieval glass

from Farrington Church

As conservative as the 1549 Book of Common Prayer was, its change of liturgy caused a strong reaction in the more traditionalist parts of the realm and what caused that reaction was not the theological shift which went largely unnoticed but the cosmetic changes in worship.  As I wrote yesterday, Cranmer had very deliberately removed every mention of sacrifice from the liturgy.  The Reformers—both in England and the Continental Reformers—were appalled at the idea of the Mass as a Sacrifice.  Part of their reasoning for being so determined to undo the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist was a failure, given the level of theological scholarship at the time, to appreciate the scriptural basis for calling the Eucharist a sacrifice.  The other factor—and the more crucial one, however, was how late medieval theologians had exaggerated the sacrificial nature of the Mass beyond any scriptural foundation and to a point where the Mass, instead of re-presenting the one eternal sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, had replaced Christ’s sacrifice with repeated supererogatory sacrifices offered by men claiming a priesthood in their own title or right. 

As to the first objection, contemporary Catholic theology first and foremost locates the Eucharist as a participation in the one eternal sacrifice of Christ offered on the Cross at Calvary.  It further ties the concept of the Eucharistic sacrifice into the meal sacrifice or communion sacrifice tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures where the participants received back from the Temple priests a portion of the sacrificial lamb on which to dine themselves as a mystical sharing of the meal with God to whom the lamb had been offered.  The Passover meal was one example of such a communion sacrifice and the concept of a communion sacrifice was a living part of the Tradition and Spirituality of his own faith of which Jesus would have been aware in instituting the Eucharist.  In other words, the Jesus of the Christian scriptures would have consciously intended this meal of commemoration of his Death to be such a “communion sacrifice” in the tradition of the Passover and other such sacrificial meals.  (The Passover meal was not the only such communion sacrifice in Temple Judaism.)  In “proclaiming the Lord’s Death until he comes again,” (I Corinthians 11:26) we share in such a communion sacrifice by which we feast on the Lamb that was slain on the Cross.   Unfortunately for the heirs of Luther and Calvin and Cranmer and Zwingli, the level of biblical scholarship we have today that has let us recover these scriptural roots of the Eucharistic Sacrifice was not available to the Reformers—or to their Catholic contemporaries.  The Catholic Church (and the Orthodox) had received this inheritance of Eucharistic Sacrifice from the ancient Church sources but had lost the rationale for it and could not defend it or dialogue about it with the Reformers and so it was lost in the Reformation tradition.

Had sixteenth-century Catholicism maintained the scriptural roots of patristic theology, the second problem—the exaggerated notion of Eucharistic sacrifice in which each Mass was seen as a new and unique Sacrifice of Christ to the Father—would not have been problematic.  The loss of the patristic heritage and its replacement with Scholastic Theology in the thirteenth and subsequent centuries created an appalling mystique to the Mass where it was claimed that Christ died anew and again day after day upon the altars.  This stands in total contradiction to the scriptures where we are told that Christ died once for all (1 Peter 3:18; Romans 6:10; Hebrews 9:28).  Each Mass was seen to be in its own right a propitiatory sacrifice and each priest an Aaronic priest who offered the victim to God on behalf of the people.  The priest was not seen to be a sacramental sharer in the one priesthood of the One Priest, Christ, but like the priests of the Old Law a man who approached the sacrifice in virtue of his own priesthood.  (Shadows of this exaggerated—and blasphemous—claim to a particular priesthood continue to exist among some clergy today, especially those given to the pre-conciliar rites.  The roots of this egoistic self-deception are psychological inadequacies that make men hide within an artificial persona that deludes them into a faux greatness that compensates for a lack of an authentic grace of knowing one’s true self in God.  That is why these men usually make horrid confessors who sit in judgment rather than as channels of the compassion of Christ who was tempted in every way we are: Hebrews, 4:15.)   The medieval scholastic theologians not only exaggerated the sacrificial nature of the Mass to make it repetitive of Calvary, but they invented a second sacrifice in which bread and wine were offered to God at the “offertory” of the Mass. 

In the liturgical reforms of Paul VI in the 1970 Missal, the Mass was radically restructured to take away any pretense of this second sacrifice.  There is no “offertory” of bread and wine, but rather a “preparation of the gifts” in which the bread and wine are prepared for the Eucharist.  The only sacrifice is the sharing in the One Eternal Sacrifice of Calvary as we “proclaim the Death of the Lord until he comes in glory.”  This is the major objection of those who challenge the 1970 Missal.  There is a clear break here with the 1962 and earlier Missals that follow the 1570 liturgical revisions of Pius V, and indeed many of the medieval rites that had developed and on which Pius V based his reforms after the Council of Trent.  And this is precisely where we see claims to a “hermeneutic of continuity” in the liturgy to be unsupported by fact.  I agree with those who claim that the Novus Ordo represents a break with the past: the 1570 and 1970 Missals have very different theologies of Eucharistic Sacrifice.  Where I disagree with them is that it is very clear to me that it is the 1570 Missal, not the 1970 Rite, that deviates from the Apostolic (and patristic) Tradition. 

In any event, it was not this theological shift away from Sacrifice but the more visible changes that caused the negative reaction to Cranmer’s Prayer Book.  There was great dissatisfaction in the Northern regions of England, in particular Yorkshire, where religious sentiments were more conservative. Rebellions broke out in Devon, East Anglia, and Cornwall where the rebels referred to the new liturgy as “a Christmas game,” the sort of thing of people playing at Mass.  So much of what people counted on for practical devotions—ashes, palms, holy water, images of the saints, saints’ feast days and stories—were being swept away.  Statues were being removed from the churches, paintings whitewashed over and stained glass being smashed.  Holidays and festivals associated with the saints were now common workdays.  What was one to do in a lightning storm if there was no Holy Water with which to sprinkle the house?    Also the local peculiarities of rite—given the diversity of liturgical usages in pre-Reformation England—which gave people a pride in doing things “their way,” were abolished in favor of this uniform Prayer Book Rite.  The commercial centers—London and Norwich in particular—and Kent in South-east England were more open to the changes, but these were areas that would prove to be won over to the Protestant cause as the Reformation developed.  A deep split was developing between the rural and urban populations with the former resisting the religious changes and the latter championing them.  The same split could be seen with the middle class and the new rich favoring Protestantism and the “old blood” clinging to the old religion.  It created a certain amount of political instability and indeed the King’s uncle, Edward Seymour—now Duke of Somerset—would fall from power in 1549 (the same year as the new prayerbook) and later (1552)  be tried for treason and executed.   The Reform party would remain in power, however, as the boy King was not only an ardent Protestant but a rabid-anti-Catholic.  Cranmer retained his power and he would continue to push for ever more extreme changes in the Church.

The Council and the Move to the Left

Archbishop Thomas Toolen of

Mobile Alabama who forbad

his clergy to participate in Civil

Rights Demonstratons

I want to give another example of where the Council brought about a change of direction in the Church—here perhaps more of what Pope Benedict would call “reform” rather than “rupture” but a change none the less.  Robert Blair Kaiser writes in his Tablet article to which I have referred in my last two posts:  

Before the Council, we thought we were miserable sinners when we were being nothing but human. After the Council, we had a new view of ourselves. We learned to put a greater importance on finding and following Jesus as 'the way' (as opposed to what we said in the Creed. It didn't matter so much what we said. What mattered was what we did: helping to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and find shelter for the homeless. That's what made us followers of Jesus. …. Before the Council, we identified 'salvation' as 'getting to heaven.' After the Council, we knew that we had a duty to bring justice and peace to the world in our own contemporary society, understanding in a new way the words that Jesus gave us when he taught us to pray, 'thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' By the end, among the most influential figures at the Council, we encountered two humble souls, one a woman, Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who wasn't allowed to speak to the assembled bishops at Vatican II (no woman was), and a bird-like figure, Dom Helder Camara, the archbishop of Recife, in Brazil. Both of them went around Rome telling individual bishops and those who were putting together the Council's crowning document, Gaudium et Spes: please don't forget the poor.

The Council did not forget the poor, and the statement out of Rome in October 2011 allying the Church with the world's have-nots only proves that even the current powers-that-be in the Church (still so unaccountable in so many other ways) get it. I will quote Gaudium et Spes: The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.

The Council radically reshaped what we meant by “sin.”  Before the Council sin meant—to the Catholic-in-the-pews a personal violation of the Church’s moral code.  While this  most frequently fell into the category of a sexual transgression, there were other types of sin possible ranging from missing Mass on Sundays or Holy Days to eating meat on a day of abstinence to stealing from one’s employer to lying under oath.   The pivotal element was, however, that it was a personal violation of the moral code.   There was no awareness—to the ordinary Catholic—of the social dimension of sin.  While various popes such as Leo XIII and Pius XI had written encyclical letters talking of the rights of labor and the obligations of employers towards their employees, connections were not being made in the pulpit or confessional between such magisterial teaching and moral culpability.  Of course, in the first half of the twentieth century, as in the century before, most people in a position to exploit their employees were in the Protestant ascendancy in this country and Catholics were far more likely to be sinned against than sinning when it came to the sins outlined in the economic theories of the magisterium.  But the Church’s hands were not entirely clean.  Such prelates as Cardinal O’Connell of Boston and Archbishop Corrigan of New York, being Paddies of the most shameless social-climbing sort,  had always allied themselves with the Protestant ascendancy and its economic interests.  And of course Cardinal Spellman in 1949 sent his seminarians to dig graves to break a strike by cemetery workers in Archdiocese of New York graveyards—and was proud of it. 

Moreover, while the Church did have—at least on paper—a credible theology of defending the rights of workers, there were other social sins rarely spoken of and even more rarely condemned.  Racism was not only rarely denounced from the pulpit but the Catholic Church had long supported policies of segregation and did not accept African-American candidates for the priesthood until the ordination of Father Augustus Tolton in 1886 and such vocations remained rare until the mid-twentieth century.  Tolton himself had to be sent to Rome for his studies as no American seminary would have him as a student.  (In telling this story I have omitted the saga of the Healy brothers who—despite their slave mother managed to be accepted and treated as whites—one becoming a bishop, a second a Vicar General of the Boston Archdiocese, and a third, president of Georgetown University.  See entry for February 14, 2011.)  Cardinal Glennon of Saint Louis blocked the integration of Webster College and tried to do the same with Jesuit Saint Louis University.  Archbishop Toolen of Mobile forbade his priests to take part in any civil-rights demonstrations and won the support of other bishops who initially forbad their priests to travel to Alabama to be part of the marches led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Cardinal McIntyre suspended priests and expelled from this Archdiocese priests and religious who preached or spoke on civil rights.  (See entries for August 31 and September 1, 2011).
All this changed with the Second Vatican Council.  Catholics have become very much aware of the social dimension of sin and consequently have moved from being a conservative force in American society to a force for social change and liberation.  This fits the model of a “hermeneutic of reform” more than a “hermeneutic of rupture” as the Ecumenical and Interfaith issues addressed in yesterday’s posting.  However it is probably one of the reasons that some influential members of the hierarchy are so anxious to “turn back” the Council and the Church’s record of social progress during the last 50 years. 

Memories Are Made of This--Refashioning Vatican II

October 11^th this year marks the 50^th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and one of the behind-the-scenes struggles for the direction of the Catholic Church concerns just what that Council taught in its various decrees, declarations, and constitutions.  One would think that the Council’s teachings would be quite clear.  I mean, it is all there in black and white (though in Latin) in the official documents, but one thing historians know and the rest of the world must learn is that a document is not enough—the real “trick” is in the interpretation of the document.  I don’t mean the translation—though that too is a matter of interpretation as despite the best efforts of Liturgiam Authenticam to fool you to the contrary, there is no such thing as a literal interpretation, at least a faithful literal interpretation—but I mean the interpretation of what the documents mean.  We all know what a document says (or actually reads as documents don’t talk) but what does it mean?  We have the same issue in the United States when it comes to interpreting our Constitution.  There are strict constructionists like Mr. Justice Scalia for whom it is a static set of words and ideas and who insist it be interpreted in a narrow historical context for the exact meaning of its author(s), and you have the broad constructionists, generally liberals, who treat it like a living organism whose meaning has evolved over the years as it is applied to situations never foreseen by its 18^th century proponents.  So too the Documents of Vatican II:   must they be understood as to the intentions of the authors and the Council Fathers who approved them or are they able to be mined for new meanings that develop as the Church grows and develops.  Certainly this much is true: the Church of 2012 would be beyond the wildest imaginations of the Pope (John XXIII) and Bishops who marched into Saint Peter’s Basilica 50 years ago.  Where are the legions of veiled nuns?  What are lay people doing bringing Holy Communion to the sick?  What language is this we are hearing at Mass?  Why are these Africans dancing around the altar?  Look at all these black and brown and yellow bishops!  Lots of changes—some good, some not so good.   The once dormant Church of Latin America is alive and thriving—raised from the dead!   The Church of Europe is sinking fast. Who’da thunk it?
So how do we interpret the Council decrees?  When it comes to the US Constitution, the conservatives want a “strict construction.”  When it comes to the Decrees of Vatican II, it is the liberals who are arguing to stay with the original intent of the Council Fathers.  It is the liberals in the Church who believe that the Council has been stolen from them by an attempt to reinterpret the decrees in a way very different from how they were originally understood.  Before the current school year opened, Cardinal Wuerl wrote a letter to the seminarians of his Archdiocese  calling on them to study hard and, as the 50^th anniversary of the Council approached, to study the Conciliar documents closely so as to defend them against those who would interpret them with a “hermeneutic of discontinuity.”   This, in a nutshell,  is the argument over the Council—are the Conciliar decrees “continuous” with the teaching of the pre-conciliar Church or do they represent a sharp break in our Catholic heritage?
It is the conservatives—led by people in Rome, including Pope Benedict—who want to alter the history of the Council by reshaping the teaching of the Council according to a “hermeneutic of continuity.”  A great part of this is from the Holy Father’s ardent desire to reconcile the Traditionalist movement begun by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  Most Catholics think that the fight with the traditionalists is over the “New Mass” but the liturgical reforms of Paul VI are only the tip of the iceberg.  I have long felt that the only people who really understand the Second Vatican Council are those who reject it.   I am not endorsing a rejection of the Council—far from it.  I think the Council has saved the Church for the future.  But the Council saved the Church by taking radical means.  There was at Vatican II, for example, a complete reversal of Catholic teaching regarding ecumenism.  Catholics had been forbidden to engage in any ecumenical activity prior to the Council—discussion groups, collaborative projects, mission work—and never, never, never were we to pray with Protestants (who were heretics) or even the Orthodox (who were only schismatics, but separated none the less from the “True Church”).  Ecumenism had been explicitly condemned by Pius XI in his 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos.   
Another discontinuity is that the Council itself was a bit of backtracking on the infallibility of the Pope.  Vatican I with its decree Pastor Aeternus declaring Papal Infallibility had made the idea of a Council superfluous.  All authority resided in the Pope.  There would never again be a need to gather the bishops to share the teaching office of Peter.  To not only gather them in a Council but to permit them to openly discuss Catholic doctrine and discipline was nothing less than a reconsideration of Papal authority as defined at Vatican I. 
Dignitatis Humanae, the Decree on Religious Liberty totally reversed Catholic Doctrine that taught that freedom of worship should be limited to the Catholic Church and that ‘error has no rights’ meaning that non-Catholic worship should be proscribed by civil law.  Dei Verbum, the Constitution on Divine Revelation not only permitted but encouraged the very sort of biblical studies that Pius X had condemned in his battle against modernism.   
Recently the Vatican announced that The Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences is interested in collecting the journals, diaries, and private notes of the Council Fathers (participants) at Vatican II for the archives so that future scholars could better study the Council.  Hopefully this project will be a failure and the various dioceses and religious orders will preserve the relevant documents.  There would be no more effective way of advancing the lie of the “hermeneutic of continuity” than to isolate from scholars, historians, and theologians the relevant documents that show what the bishops were thinking at the time of the Council.  To reinterpret the Council in the “hermeneutic of continuity” is to rob the Council of charismatic character with which the Holy Spirit endowed it and to reduce it to a tool of those who want to turn back the clock and undo the work of Grace.