Let's Not Play In The Mud

Michael Voris

Just as I was posting the last entry on Father James Martin and his “ten takeaways” from Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia, there was a not so startling public confession from self-proclaimed Catholic media apologist Michael Voris that he had, prior to his “reversion” to our Catholic faith “lived a life of live-in relationships with homosexual men.” 

What prompted Mr. Voris to emerge from the closets of his former lovers is that apparently the Archdiocese of New York has been going to considerable lengths to investigate Voris who is an outspoken critic of the Cardinal-Archbishop of New York and many other American bishops.  The Archdiocese—and its Cardinal Archbishop—apparently see a need to discredit Mr. Voris and are willing to get down into the mud to do it. 

I am not surprised at Mr. Voris’ admission.  I am a bit off-put by his avoidance of a deeper self-honesty, attributing his choices to being “confused about my own sexuality” and his claim that “From the outside, I lived the lifestyle and contributed to scandal in addition to the sexual sins. On the inside, I was deeply conflicted about all of it.”  The implication is that others took advantage of “the deep pains of my youth.”   It would not be fair to say that Mr. Voris should acknowledge his homosexuality because it seems from his statements that that he has yet to connect the dots of his past relationships to create an accurate self-portrait.  I think he has been as honest, as remarkably honest, with his audience as he is with himself; the need is for him to do more homework on himself and come to understand better his own psycho-sexual identity.    

I must admit that I am not surprised at Mr. Voris’ admission of having led a gay lifestyle for so long.  His opposition to same-sex issues—gay priests and seminarians, same-sex marriage, a supportive policy of pastoral care of those with same-sex attraction, parishes such as Saint Francis Xavier in NYC that are “gay friendly”—has been so disproportionate to other issues as to identify homosexuality as one of Mr Voris’ obsessions, and an unhealthy obsession at that.  Happy, well-adjusted heterosexual men don’t usually have the passion to wage homophobic campaigns that Mr. Voris had demonstrated. 

I only wish that the wild and wooly sexual experiences of Mr. Voris’s past life  had taught him compassion rather than had confirmed him in black and white judgment.  By this I don’t mean that he should validate the LGBT socio-political agenda but rather that it is sad that he cannot look at the LGBT socio-political agenda and see not a niche for a cultural warrior to make a name for himself  but to see the individual men and women who have all the challenges and confusions and “deep pains” of their youths that comprise the struggles of human lives, gay or straight.  We all need to look beyond the categories into which we pigeonhole people and see each individual in his or her particular struggle to find the inner energy to love God and to love one’s neighbor.  Life is just not lived in the black and white. 

What is the scandal in this story is not Mr. Voris’ past life.  Every one of us has a past.  What is the scandal is that the New York Archdiocese decided to snoop in various closets in order to discredit a detractor.   I will be the first to say that the American hierarchy should have long ago sidelined Voris—along with the late Mother Angelica, Judy Brown, Michael Hichborn, Matt Abbott and others who set themselves up as an alternative magisterium, but do it without slinging mud and digging into individuals’ personal lives.  Mud does not become Holy Mother Church; we have given our enemies enough mud to sling at us, we don’t need to play in it ourselves.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXV

The young John
Henry Newman

 The “Father of the Oxford Movement” was really John Keble who preached the famous sermon “National Apostasy” on July 14, 1833 in the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Oxford, but the main driver behind the movement—and the best known of its proponents—was John Henry Newman.  Indeed it was Newman who made the claim—which has stuck—that it was Keble’s sermon that gave birth to the movement. 

Newman had not always been a member of the High Church party and, in fact, was for the first thirty years of his life tied to the Low Church or Evangelical Party.  The oldest of six children of a prosperous London Banker he was sent to George Nicholas’ Great Ealing School where the faculty included Louis-Philip Bourbon (future King of France), and George Huxley (father of Thomas Henry Huxley, the English Biologist and advocate of Darwinism).  Fellow alumni included Thomas Huxley and W.S. Gilbert.)  The school was something of a hotbed of Evangelicalism and the Classics Master, Walter Mayers, loaned the young student books on Calvinism.  To be fair, Newman also read the religious skeptics at this point—Voltaire, Rousseau, Paine, and Hume.  And more significant for his later career, he became immersed in the romantic novels of Walter Scott.  The skeptics had little influence on him other than to give him a life-long horror of Enlightenment liberalism, but Calvinism pierced his soul immediately.  Scott was only a seed that would later bloom as Newman moved away from Evangelicalism into High Church theology—but that is still a way off. 

The particular type of Calvinism to which Newman was exposed was, in the day, referred to as “Clapham Sect” Calvinism.  It was a movement within the Church of England that was classically Calvinist with its emphasis on double pre-destination and justification by faith alone but, perhaps somewhat incongruously, it was tied to social progressivism with opposition to slavery and the slave trade as well as to concern for England’s underclass.  Newman went on to Oxford, Trinity College, where his desire to succeed produced an anxiety that led him to flub his exams—graduating with only third honors.  Nevertheless, he was elected a Fellow of Oriel College the following year. A colleague at Oriel was Edward Bouverie Pusey who was to play a significant role in the Oxford movement as well.  In 1824 Newman was ordained deacon in the Church of England and ordained priest the following year. At Oxford he met Hurrell Froude, another young priest of the Church of England.  Froude and Newman developed a particularly intimate friendship which, while there is no evidence of sexual intimacy, would fall today at least under the theme of “bromance.” 

Our modern word, “homosexual” only appears in the last third of the 19^th century.  The word is a hybrid of the Greek (‘ομοσ, “same”) and the Latin (sexus, “sex” or “gender.”).  The creation of a word to describe same-sex attraction permitted people to organize their thoughts in a new way: understanding the difference between a person normally attracted to members of the opposite sex having sexual relations with a member of their same sex and a person whose sexual attraction was normally towards a person of their own sex.  In other words, the creation of the word “homosexual” helped people understand that sexual attraction to members of the opposite sex is not universal and same-sex attraction needs to be considered on its own terms rather than as an aberration form some imagined heterosexual norm.  Of course, this century and a half later, there are still some—notably in the backwoods of Kentucky—who just don’t get it, but I don’t want to wander down that path right now.  For the moment we will concentrate on John Henry Newman who, like his contemporaries, did not have the tools to understand the deeper levels of the human psyche but who were able to choose to conform the moral norms of both religion and society in that day. Newman and Froude could not have understood the probable complexities of their relationship but they did have clear sense of moral right and wrong and there is no evidence of them crossing the moral boundaries of the day. 

Froude was, tragically, ill with tuberculosis and Newman had accompanied him and his father on a tour of the Mediterranean in 1833 returning only just in time to hear the famous sermon that changed the course of the Church of England. 

In the latter 1820’s and 1830’s Newman’s own theology had gradually been evolving as his scholarship led him into reading the Fathers of the Church.  He came to see the weaknesses of Calvinism, in particular in its ecclesiology.  Calvin saw the Church as an invisible association of those pre-destined to salvation rather than the visible and concrete communion of the Baptized.  This overly spiritualized notion of Church made the Church irrelevant to salvation as, since it was known only to God who were in and who were out, the Church was of no human use.  Everything that mattered lay simply in the relationship of the individual soul to God—had God chosen that person for salvation or for damnation.  In Calvin’s scheme Church, sacraments, piety, prayer—all is quite irrelevant to the final outcome and Newman came to recognize that Calvinism offered him only that blind alley. 

Moreover, Newman and Froude—both fellows at Oriel—took a new approach to their role as tutors, offering spiritual guidance as well as intellectual vision to the young men entrusted to them.  This did not go over well with the liberal establishment in the University where Enlightenment secularism still held sway.  As Newman’s views grew more and more “High Church,” the Evangelical wing grew equally alarmed with his influence. 

As stated in a previous posting, Keble’s sermon “National Apostasy” triggered a series of tracts outlining and defending the High Church position.  Newman was most assiduous in his contribution to the Tracts For The Times, writing almost a third of the 90 Tracts.  Newman wrote the final “Tract 90” in which he asserted that there was nothing in the 39 Articles of the Church of England that could not legitimately be interpreted in a manner consistent with the Catholic Faith.  This was too much and the outcry caused the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Bagot, to insist on there being no further tracts published.  Bagot was actually sympathetic to the High Church party and ordered Newman and the other “Tractarians” to desist in order to protect them from being disciplined by the Church and even possibly by the Government as the Church was Established by Law as the State Church and the government, from the newly ascended Queen, Victoria down to her ministers, were quite avidly Protestant in their Churchmanship.

In all this it must be remembered that Newman’s role at Oxford was not primarily academic but priestly.  He held the vicarship of Saint Mary the Virgin, the University Church, which was a benefice in the gift of Oriel College.  In addition to the Tracts, Newman’s Sunday afternoon sermons were exceedingly popular with the undergraduates and his influence over the spiritual life of the University was quite marked.   This alarmed the Evangelical Faction and Newman was increasingly isolated from the Academic side of the University. 

In all this Newman was no ritualist.  His focus was always on the theological principals and he was no liturgical innovator but stuck quite close to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the official rites of the Church of England. While many others of the High Church party were rapidly introducing Catholic practices into their Anglican parishes: Eucharistic Vestments, candles and crucifixes on the altar, incense, processions, statues and even counterfeiting the rubrics of the Roman Mass upon the Anglican Holy Communion, Newman was sticking to his surplice and hood and a reverent but plain liturgy.  He would later write Edward Pusey about this stage in his spiritual journey.

The utmost delicacy was observed on all hands in giving me advice: only one warning remains on my mind, and it came from Dr. Griffiths, the late Vicar-Apostolic of the London district. He warned me against books of devotion of the Italian school, which were just at that time coming into England; and when I asked him what books he recommended as safe guides, he bade me get the works of Bishop Hay. By this I did not understand that he was jealous of all Italian books, or made himself responsible for all that Dr. Hay happens to have said; but I took him to caution me against a character and tone of religion, excellent in its place, not suited for England.

Newman never did embrace the Italian version of Catholicism which would appeal to so many of the Tractarians, both those who remained in the Church of England and those who “swam the Tiber” to become Catholics.  The faith into which he was evolving and the faith to which he would cling as a Catholic was the old English recusant Catholicism, understated and discreet without the bells and whistles so cherished by Mediterranean Catholics. 

As Newman’s influence declined in official Anglican circles (it was only growing among the High Church Party) he retired to a row of cottages in the dependent parish of Saint Mary, Littlemore—an Oxford suburb which was part of  his parish of Saint Mary the Virgin.  He was joined here by several friends who were each growing less comfortable with the Church of England and its Protestant history.  The other men at Littlemore were John Dobree Dalgairns, Ambrose Saint John, Frederick Oakeley, William Lockhart, and James Christie.  Like the Wesleys and the first Methodists, they adopted a sort of schema for piety with certain times for fasting, for Holy Communion, for various prayers.  Unlike the Wesleys and the Methodists, they were then suspected of being a “monastery.”  And in fact to some extent they were trying to adopt a common life though more on the model of Saint Augustine’s Rule for clergy than Benedict’s for monks. 

Lockhart was the first of the group to become a Catholic.  His conversion shook Newman who, about eight months later, preached his famous final sermon as an Anglican “The Parting of Friends” and resigned as Vicar of Saint Mary’s Oxford.  He continued living at Littlemore for two more years until his own conversion.   To be continued.   

Time for a New Copernican Revolution

Meeting of the Pontifical
Academy of Science 

Easter Sunday morning, I read an extremely disturbing article in the New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/us/ashley-diamond-transgender-inmate-cites-attacks-and-abuse-in-mens-prison.html?_r=0

It is the story of Ashley Dimond of Rome Georgia who was born male thirty-six years ago but who in adolescence began living as a woman and who, for 17 years now, has been undergoing hormone therapy designed to support her transition to female.  Ms. Dimond had achieved some small degree of professional success as a song-writer and singer before falling into the trap of drugs and petty crime.  She eventually ended up in the Georgia Penitentiary system where she was placed in a men’s prison—she has male genitalia (a word, by the way, I never thought I would be using in my blog) where she has not only been subjected to humiliation by prison officials but raped more than a half-dozen times by fellow inmates.  She was denied continued access to the hormone therapy she has been on the past 17 years and that has had serious physiological as well as psychological impact on her.  Now I know that this posting is going to get some hostile and even vulgar remarks from various krazies—if they are offended by what I write about the Traditional Liturgy they sure aren’t going to like what I write about a transgendered person—but actually Ms. Dimond is not my primary subject.  This article stopped me in my tracks.  I don’t believe I have ever met, much less have known, a transgendered person.  Consequently, I have never given the issues regarding transgendered people much thought.  When I read a newspaper story or heard something on the news, I think I just shoved it into a pre-fit category in my mind and moved on to something more within my experience.   We had a neighbor, when I was growing up, that liked to wear his wife’s underthings around the house.  We kids weren’t supposed to know what our parents and the other neighbors were laughing about, but kids aren’t stupid and eventually find out the story.  I have certainly met my share of effeminate men and even a few who, while not exactly dressing in women’s clothes didn’t exactly dress like men either.  (I mean people other than certain prelates who like to get all frilled up Cinderella style.) But I must admit that I am totally unfamiliar with this transgender phenomenon and so I think I just lumped a wide spectrum of people into a single category and not a very flattering one.  This article has made me stop and realize that I need to learn more before I rush to judgments or even stereotypes.  I realized reading this article that I had always misidentified transsexual persons as transvestites when in fact it is something very different and that I know very little, and understand even less, about either phenomenon

In the course of writing this blog I have several times suggested that the Church too must rethink certain issues “from the ground up.”  A variety of the sciences –the medical, the sociological, the anthropological, the psychiatric—have made discoveries that fundamentally change the way that we are able to understand a variety of moral quandaries from in vitro fertilization to same-sex attraction to embryonic stem-cell research to gender identity.  I am not saying that this demands that we come to different conclusions, but we do need to take the new knowledge into account as we theologize for a Christian response to people whose lives are locked into these and other complex realities.  In the past it has too often taken us, as Church, far too longer to make the interface between our faith and the contemporary world, especially the sciences.  I am not going to get into the whole Copernicus/Galileo thing, but with the knowledge explosion in contemporary society we cannot afford not to engage in that dialogue now.  The Church’s—and indeed religion’s—credibility has already been all but lost to the under 30 generation.  It will take work for the theologians to absorb the immense motherload of new scientific data and it will take trust for the Magisterium to delegate the research to competent scholars, but our faith should assure us that while the way ahead seems dark and filled with pitfalls, the Holy Spirit ever guides the Church towards the truth.  There is nothing to fear about knowledge; nor is there any reason to block inquiry.  There is but one Truth and we cannot be afraid to search for it.  

The Devil Enters the Church Through the Choir

Pastor Schaefer and son, Tim. And just what

would Jesus do?

The Reverend Frank Schaefer was suspended this past Tuesday from his duties as a Methodist minister for thirty days for performing the same-sex marriage of his son, Tim, in 2007. 
Pastor Schaefer was not always an advocate of same-sex marriage.  Schaefer was born and raised in Germany and came to the United States about twenty-five years ago.  He studied for the ministry here in the United States and originally was far more conservative in his views, particularly on homosexuality, than he is today.  Part of that change was learning that his son Tim, then 17, was gay and was contemplating suicide because of his sexual orientation.  Tim’s experience made his father re-think his ideas about same-sex love.  When Tim asked his father to preside at his 2007 wedding, Schaefer agreed—not, he said, to flaunt Methodist discipline but out of love for his son.
I am not disagreeing with the action of the local jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church—certainly any Catholic priest who performed a same-sex wedding would be held to an even stricter punishment and I think justly so.  When we deal with matters of faith, it is not a matter of I think or I believe, but what is the faith we hold in common. Faith—at least in our Christian Tradition—is not a personal opinion but a personal commitment to common belief.  Moreover, not being a Methodist I am not going to give an opinion on Methodist Church polity on this matter.  But what I find sad is that the real issue is not the gay wedding.  Pastor Schaefer is in hot water because he has tried to shake his parish out of their very un-Methodist complacency.  Like John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, Pastor Schaefer has been burning with zeal to bring the Gospel into the lives of those who have been pushed to the margins of the established Church or who have found the staid churchiness of the establishment to be too pallid for their spiritual hungers and are waiting for a preacher who can make the Word of God to be something alive and vibrant.  Pastor Schaefer has tried to evangelize—to bring the Gospel—and some of his congregation prefer religion to Gospel.  That is to say they want that old time religion in which they grew up rather than a living faith in a Lord who came to shake things up in his world—and in ours.  That happens in Catholic churches too—a lot. Pastor Schaefer added a contemporary worship service to the Church schedule and this angered a traditionalist faction within the congregation. Especially angered was the choir director, Deb Boger. The popularity of the 11:00 am contemporary service pushed her out of the spotlight.  Anyone who thinks that the focus of worship is “All Glory to God” has never dealt with a Church musician, especially a home-grown volunteer for whom being an organist or soloist or—height of heights—director is the opportunity to be someone important, a big fish in a really small pond.  Like the saying goes, “the devil enters the Church through the choir.”  And somebody in that choir held the door wide open for him.    
Pastor Schaefer never challenged the United Methodist Church on its position about same-sex marriage from the pulpit, but he did try to make the Church a more welcoming place for all and frequently spoke of “inclusiveness” in the Church.  Given that three of his four children are gay, Church members could read between the lines and some did not like the implications.  Like the people who challenged the Apostles that “your master welcomes sinners and eats with them” they weren’t quite in agreement with “healthy people do not need the physician, the sick do…for I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” The righteous always feel a little left out when Jesus sits down—or they should if they knew their New Testament.  Not everyone at Zion Methodist wanted a pastor who was going to welcome sinners into their Church. Pastor Schaefer was shaking things up just a bit too much for them.  He had said in one of his sermons: 

The truth is that God, while being our comfort, always seems to push us to grow more, to do better, and to change the world. Neither of these things can be achieved by sitting on our butt in the comfort of the spiritual lazy-boy chair.  

That message is more than some people want to hear. 

Deb Boger found herself more and more at odds with the Pastor.  She was not the only one, of course, but this was her church and her choir and she didn’t like where things were going.  Pastor Schaefer found that he could not work with a choir director who was leading an incipient rebellion.  He was the Pastor and as such the person responsible for preaching the Gospel.  To be fair, no Pastor can afford to be undermined by a member of his staff.  You ultimately have to work together or you have to part and go separate ways.  It is not usually the pastor who goes. 
Now the real failure was the Bishop.  Methodists—like Catholics—are an episcopal Church.  That is to say, they are governed by bishops.  And in the Methodist Church, like the Catholic Church, the Bishop has the power to remove a pastor from a congregation for cause.  In this case, however, the Bishop told Pastor Schaefer and the choir director to “work things out.”  That was like seeing a trash-can on fire and just closing the door and walking away, hoping that the Church wouldn’t burn down.    
Faced with no other way “to rid (themselves) of this meddlesome priest” the Boger faction played the wedding-card. Deb Boger’s son, Jon, travelled up to Massachusetts and obtained a copy of the marriage license that showed that six years ago Pastor Schaefer had presided over the marriage ceremony of his son, Tim, to another man.  Now the wedding wasn’t at Zion Methodist.  It wasn’t in Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t in a church.  It didn’t happen last week.  It didn’t happen last month.  It didn’t happen last year.  The wedding was a small family affair.  Pastor Schaefer didn’t flaunt this in his congregation’s face.  He performed a wedding for his son—he didn’t lead a rebellion against the Church. He has not made Zion Methodist a wedding chapel for same-sex couples.  He hasn’t made a career out of same-sex marriages. He disobeyed but it can’t be said he defied.  Should he have done it?  I don’t know.  I can’t say.  I don’t have a gay child.  Was it disobedience?  Yes.  Should it have led to jeopardizing his ministry?  Should it have led to driving a wedge in a congregation?  I don’t know.  I have no idea how Jesus would handle this.  He never said a single thing about same-sex marriage—or even about same-sex love.  I would think from my reading of the Gospel he would be disheartened by the anger and the spiritual violence that has pitted congregant against congregant, both invoking his name and his authority to justify their position.  But who am I to judge?  I am sure of this, though, from reading Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians: You don't tear the Body of Christ apart.  The Church--the Church of Christ--has to deal with its discipline issues but it does so in a way that reconciles and not divides.  Paul would be disgusted with the sort of spectacle that this situation was turned into and I don't think Jesus is too happy either.  At the end of the day we have to be able to break the one bread of his body and drink the one cup of his blood together as brothers and sisters and that is a lesson somebody at Zion seems to have forgotten.  "I would rather be right that president" is fine, but "I would rather be right than Christian" leaves you neither right nor Christian.  Shame on those who brought this disgrace on the Church! 
As I said in the beginning of this post, I am sure that a Catholic priest who presided over a same-sex marriage would be disciplined even more severely, and given our theology of the Sacrament of Matrimony—which is considerably more complex than the understanding of marriage in most Protestant traditions—I think such punishment would be justified.  At the same time, the strategy of undermining a priest or deacon by bringing frivolous accusations against him is not unknown in Catholic circles.  Some years back an organization calling itself “Roman Catholic Faithful” led by a southern Illinois lawyer, Stephen Brady, advertised seeking personal information on various Catholic bishops that could be used to discredit them and leave no choice but that they be removed from office.  Mr. Brady ultimately lapsed into the anti-Vatican II schism and closed down his operation. But there are others in the Church who travel from parish to parish, recording what they see to be illicit practices or heretical homilies and forwarding their observations to the Holy See.  A pastor refuses to include an Extraordinary Form Mass (the pre-conciliar Tridentine Rite) in the parish schedule, and they write to Rome.  A church renovation takes out the sanctuary railing and they demonstrate.  A gay man is permitted to give the eulogy at his partner’s funeral, and they want the bishop to remove the priest.  A Protestant congregation is permitted to use the parish hall while their church is being renovated, and they call the nunciature.  It is this same mean-spirited Phariseeism that went after Pastor Schaefer—not for doing the wedding of his gay son but for offering a vision of a Church where all are welcome to the Table where the Lord sits with sinners.  And you know—I don’t think Jesus had a choir director at that supper.  Maybe for a reason.