Well, What Do Liberal Catholics Want?

One of my regular readers—and a good friend—drew my attention to this article by Damon Linker.  You can check out the article at http://theweek.com/article/index/255064/what-do-liberal-catholics-want

What drew my attention was the following paragraph

After reading an endless stream of gushing commentary by liberal Catholics on Pope Francis, I'm beginning to wonder if they ever really cared about reforming doctrine in the first place.

Now I am not sure that Linker knows his Catholicism sufficiently to know what is doctrinal and what is not.  He lumps disciplinary matters like mandatory celibacy in with theological (doctrinal) matters such as abortion and same-sex marriage.  But that isn’t my argument with him.  Frankly, I don’t think “liberal” Catholics have any expectation—or desire—for doctrinal change.  Polls show that while American Catholics stand with the majority of Americans in not wanting a total ban (note the word “total”) on legal abortion, the vast majority of American Catholics believe that abortion is a moral evil in as that it is the deliberate taking of a human life.  Similarly the majority of American Catholics favor the legal recognition of same-sex marriage, but I don’t know any American Catholics (which isn’t to say that there aren’t some, I just don’t know them) who quibble with the Church’s policy of sacramentally celebrating only the marriages of a man and a woman who are free of previous valid marriages to marry.  Similarly, I don’t know of any serious calls to recognize “second marriages” although many would favor lifting the ban on communion from those married outside the Church.  What “liberal” Catholics have long wanted and now found in Pope Francis, is not a revision of doctrine, but a change of tone.  We had just grown tired of being such an unfriendly Church where any who did not conform to our idea of righteousness were judged worthy of only being cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.  We were getting known for what we are against rather than what we stand for—and a negative label is never good for morale.  Nor does this sort of Jansenist condemnatory tone proclaim the Good News (evangelion, Gospel) of salvation. 

The one area where there most likely is a desire for change is the matter of opening the ordained ministries to women.  The two previous popes have declared this to be a theological issue but, frankly, have not been convincing.   Many—including some of the finest theological scholars today—have said this is a matter of discipline and not of doctrine.  The argument is that because the bishop and presbyter (the Latin word for a priest, and better term when talking theologically) sacramentally represent Christ, and Christ was male, the bishop and presbyter must be male to represent him.   Granted the Bishop and the priest sacramentally participate in the Unique Priesthood of Jesus Christ—which is to say that Christ is the only priest in the Christian faith and the bishop and presbyter are sacramental-representations of Christ the Priest.  The bishop or presbyter have no priesthood of their own, but only that of Christ in which they participate.  Of course all the baptized participate in the Priesthood of Jesus Christ by virtue of their baptism—but those who are ordained do so in an unique way proper to and restricted to the Sacrament of Orders.  And granted that Jesus is male.  But is the masculinity of Jesus essential to his being, much less to his priesthood?  What is essential to Christ’s Nature, according to the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon is his humanity, not his masculinity.  But again, we are verging on the theological here and I want to avoid going too far into that field and stay to the historical.  Let us just say that other than the possibility of ordaining women to the ministries of Bishop and Presbyter most “liberal” Catholics are quite content for doctrine to go its slow path of evolutionary development rather than have the Pope—even Good Pope Francis—just start changing the key teachings of the faith willy-nilly.   

Let me also say that as someone who would generally fall into the category of “liberal” Catholic, that I don’t want the Pope to change teachings about contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, or even ordination of women or priestly celibacy.  I want things to be open for study, research, and intelligent discussion.  I am far more interested in a good process than any particularly desired product.  I think we have a lot we need to think about and talk about before we get into substantial change.  Theologians need to reclaim their historic role in moving the discussion forward and not simply providing the rationale for unilateral magisterial decrees.  We need—as we had at Vatican II—bishops making decisions that were enlightened by the theologians.  And we need to involve the faithful in those discussions.  I think Pope Francis and the faithful have learned—and learned instinctively (which is to his credit)—to sing in harmony.  We need for the faithful, the theologians, and the magisterium all to learn how to sing in harmony, realizing of course, that harmony permits descants. 

Finally, let me just add that as a “liberal Catholic” I would hope that any substantial change in Church discipline and any significant development in doctrine would not come from the Chair of Peter  acting unilaterally but from a Universal Council.  What would really seal the Vatican II revival of Francis’ pontificate is the calling of the next Council.  Remarkable things happen when the Holy Spirit gathers the Church and is allowed to “do her (Pentecost) thing” 

History in the Making: More on Cardinal Burke and Mass Attendance.



A Mass at St Mary's College, Notre Dame
a community known for its vibrant liturgies
this mass was during summer break 2010

 About a month (April 4) ago I did an entry on why people are failing to attend mass in the numbers they did thirty to sixty years ago.  I mentioned that Cardinal Raymond Burke, former Archbishop of Saint Louis and currently holding offices in the Vatican, claimed that the lack of reverence in the celebration of the mass is the reason for the decline in mass attendance.  I have received several communications since the original post that I would like to share with you.
I still go to mass every Sunday, but in all honesty I bring my ipod for during the sermon and use the time to listen to religious music or an inspirational podcast because the homilies are absolutely dreadful. 
Another writer made the same point—that they are being driven to distraction, if not away from the Church by the homilies.  They wrote: We used to attend mass at Creighton University and with the Jesuits you can count on a good homily.  My husband’s work has taken our family to the Washington DC area, and we now live in northern Virginia.  Fortunately we found a parish in Burke (a town in Fairfax County) where we are happy because in parish after parish that we had gone to the priests talked down to us as if we were not only uneducated but unintelligent people.  The priest in Burke is no Newman or Lacordaire, but at least he isn’t insulting us by his theo-bable.  My husband and I each have graduate degrees, we read, we keep our professional credentials up—we are not stupid people.  Why do these priests believe that we have to think as they tell us?   Don’t talk down to us.  Give us some credit for being able to make good decisions in life.  
A third person wrote from Northern Virginia:  We belonged to a wonderful parish and when our pastor was forced into retirement, the associate took over and changed everything. We were in the middle of a building campaign and had worked hard to design and raise money—almost four million dollars—for a beautiful church.  The new pastor didn’t like it.  It was “too modern.”  He put the building campaign on hold for eight years—eight years of being crowded into a parish center not half big enough for what we needed—until he thought we had forgotten about the church building we gave our money to build.  Then he—without consultation—met with an architect and designed something that looks like it is from 1942.  We told him that he might want to be Bing Crosby and the parish to be The Bells of Saint Mary’s, but we had survived the pre-Vatican II Church and we hadn’t given our money for a relic of it.  He told us that the Catholic Church is going back to the “traditional” liturgy and architecture.  So we told him, ok—go back but you’re going back without us.  We canceled our pledge and we cross the Potomac and drive a round trip of sixty-five miles to go to mass on Sundays at a parish that is committed to moving forward not backward.  But if he is right that the Catholic Church is going back to the pre-Vatican II days, we’re getting off the Catholic Bus.      
Finally, one more story.  A gentleman stopped me at a conference recently and told me that his wife is hearing impaired.  They are quite well-to-do and their parish is one of the wealthiest parishes in the Diocese.  He and his wife had offered to pay for hearing aids and earphones to be installed in the first two rows in a section of the Church immediately in front of the pulpit.  The combination of location and hearing aids would have facilitated ten “stations” at which hearing-impaired parishioners and guests could have maximized their participation in the liturgy.  The pastor wasn’t interested.  “Don’t see the need of it for two or three people who might need it.”  The family now attends a Bible “Mega-Church” that has an extensive ministry to the hearing impaired.  “What really got me,” the husband said, “was that he didn’t care that my wife couldn’t hear the Word of God.”  
So maybe the good Cardinal has a point.  I like reverence.  But maybe the problem is more systemic. 

Why history?

Every so often it is good to stand back and reflect on why I am writing this blog.  I am amazed how many regular viewers we have and which sites are so popular—everyone seems interested in that site on Catholics and the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln; in fact Civil War entries seem to be particularly popular while the European entries seem less so.  Be patient, however, I am going to have to go back to some of those European topics as we have left a number of strands unfinished.  If you have subjects you would like addressed just make a comment on a blog suggesting a topic and I will add it to my list.  I am going to finish up this series on “origins of radical Catholicism” and I think we will need about ten more entries to examine the situation at the end of the nineteenth century that is responsible for the formation of what one might call a “liberal” and a “conservative” camp in the American Church.  Actually the roots go much further back into colonial Catholicism where the American tradition first began and maybe in a month or two we will look at Catholicism in colonial America and see just how different it was from the Catholicism that the immigrants of the nineteenth century brought over.

All this is why I do this blog—not to supply readers with tons of useless information but to illustrate that our Catholic Church today is affected by its history and when we know its history we can understand better who we are and why we do the things we do.  History is not about the past.  In history we talk about the past as a means of understanding better the present and our options for the future.  When we know the history of the Catholic Church in the United States you can see that we were always different than the Church in Europe and that there have been episodes before as there are now when some in the Church are trying to make us follow a very foreign brand of Catholicism.  That is only one example.  We can see that the popes did not always have the power they have now.  At one times bishops were elected, not appointed by the Papal Curia.  We can see that some religious orders of sisters originally wore ordinary clothes and lived in rented apartments not convents.  We can see that there have been times when bishops and popes abused the authority of their office.  We can see that people who spoke up and against popes sometimes became saints and even doctors of the Church.  We can see when some of the heroes of the conservatives—like Cardinal Newman—were actually quite liberal and some of the heroes of the liberals—like Archbishop Ireland—were quite rigid and authoritarian.  We will see that there were saints who rejected the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception or purgatory.  We will be able to see ideas that once were considered heretical are now part of the teaching of the Church.  History is fascinating because it busts open many of the myths that we never question and it shows that beneath all the changes in the Church throughout its history are the real life needs, situations, ideas, prejudices, designs, hopes, fears and who knows what else of real people.  This is not to say that God isn’t involved only that he acts not by epiphany or direct revelation but through real people and in historical situations. Well, next blog will bring us back to the liberal-conservative struggles in the American Church at the end of the nineteenth century.   you may want to check out the blog-entry by the same title on February 6 2011  The image today is the reconstructed seventeenth century Catholic Church i Saint Mary's City, Maryland.   

          

The Origins of Radical Catholicism VI: The Church and Labor Unions part 2

The late nineteenth century saw the rise of Labor Unions as the working classes in the United States, Canada, Australia, and several European nations developed strategies to protect themselves against the exploitation that was making many of their employers rich.  Indeed American society had a numerically small but very wealthy upper class whose money was being made in industry, transportation, and exploitation of natural resources along with a moderately small middle class of professionals, a “survival class” of rural family farmers, and an immense poor class made of urban industrial workers.  When one sees the great mansions of Newport or the Philadelphia “Mainline” and contrasts them with the urban tenements that blighted so many American cities especially in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, the discrepancy is truly shocking.  What is even more amazing  is that the urban poor accepted their situation with relative complacency while the rich ensconced themselves in their fashionable churches—mostly Episcopalian and Presbyterian—with nary a pang of conscience.  Christianity of every sort—Catholic and Protestant—simply did not question the existing social structures, and when clergymen did raise questions, as Father McGlynn had, they found themselves in very hot water indeed and from their bishops, not from outside the Church.  Even as the Irish bishops sided with the English landlords against their own poor faithful who were the tenant farmers on the English and Anglo-Irish estates, the majority of American bishops failed in their responsibility to look out for the temporal welfare of the vast majority—probably 80 percent—of their faithful.  Of course the majority of bishops, while coming from working class families—or like Dennis Dougherty who would become Archbishop of Philadelphia in 1918) had himself worked in the coal mines as a boy—were setting themselves up in fine mansions in the better neighborhoods of their See cities.  Labor Unions were seen to be socialist, even communist.  They threatened the rights of property.  The poor were to be the objects of charity not the reason for social reform. 

An exception to these establishment bishops was James Gibbons of Baltimore.  He was an unlikely exception in many ways.  He was every bit as much a prince-bishop as Corrigan was or O’Connell and Dougherty would be.   In fact, unlike a number of mitered pigs’ ears who fancied themselves to be silk purses, his manners were naturally genteel without being affected and he moved comfortably in the best circles.  The few other liberals in the hierarchy were not particularly interested in the issues of labor.  Of course Ireland was in the Midwest where most of his sheep were safely grazing on the farms of Minnesota.  O’Connell was still in Rome directing the seminarians at the North American.  Moore was in Florida—not an industrial area.  But when Archbishop Taschereau of Quebec attacked the Knights of Labor and declared its Catholic members excommunicate, Gibbons—like a mad dog awakened from his sleep by a trespassing cat—went straining at his chains to attack the Quebec prelate and let it be known that Knights of Labor in his diocese were perfectly free to continue as Catholics in good standing. 

Taschereau had no right, of course, to make rules for Catholics beyond his Archdiocese but he did not see himself as exercising a universal jurisdiction.  His ban was based on what he perceived to be the universal magisterium declared by popes and councils through the centuries that had defended the right of private property and condemned any form of socialism that threatened that right. 

Archbishops Taschereau and Gibbons received their red cardinalatial hats in the same 1886 consistory.  In fact they sailed over to Rome on the same ship.  They probably weren’t shipboard dinner partners as the atmosphere between them was rather chilly—or hot, depending on how you see things.  Taschereau’s complaints about Gibbons’ public disagreement led to the Pope’s taking the question to himself. 

Leo’s conclusion could clearly be foreseen--or so it was thought.  Leo was aristocratic and doctrinally quite conservative.  Taschereau was consistent with previous teaching.  It came as quite a shock, therefore when Leo published his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891.  Leo did affirm the traditional right to private property and he condemned communism but he said that while the individual had the right to private property the state had the right to regulate it in the interest of the common good.  He also condemned unregulated capitalism.  And, most germane to Gibbon’s argument with Taschereau, he defended the rights of labor to organize.  He viewed the labor of the worker as a commodity that the worker brings to the production even as the owner provides the capital. 

This was a dramatic turn-about in Catholic social thought.  The economic and political establishment could no longer count on the Church’s unrestricted support.  Prelates like Corrigan of New York who had totally opposed the Church’s support of the working class were blindsided—it may be one of the reasons that Corrigan never got a Cardinal’s hat, the last Archbishop of New York to go so bareheaded to his crypt.  I think more important it secured the loyalty of the working class to the Church.  The workers knew that while their bishop and their employer might still enjoy a glass of port togehter on the terrace of one or the other's mansion,  the pope had blessed their struggle for a just wage.  But this wasn’t the end.  Nor is this the end of the thread on the Radicalization of Catholicism. 

The image today is Cardinal Gibbons  

The Origins of Radical Catholicism V: The Church and Labor Unions

Sorry for the break—I needed a few days to catch  up on my day job.  In the meantime, I had several emails asking me to continue with the theme of the radicalization of the American Church.  I had been thinking of returning to that series on the turning back the clock on Vatican II, but I will continue the story of how the Catholic Church in the United States became radicalized.    We finished with Father McGlynn, but not with the rest of the characters.

We will pick up the thread with a layman with some, for this time, radical views—just as radical as McGlynn—and that is Terrence Powderly.  Powderly was the son of Catholic Irish Immigrants who settled in Carbondale PA.  in 1874 he joined a labor union known as the Holy and Noble Order of the Knights of Labor.  The Knights were drawn from a wide variety of professions—not a single occupation—and they had borrowed some key organizational principles and rituals from the Masons.  Post Civil War America was enchanted by medieval images and rituals and the idea of Knights and secret rituals was a drawing card.  Nevertheless, the Knights of Labor began quickly to evolve from a fraternal society towards the more modern concept of a labor union.  With the collapse of the National Labor Union in 1873 many of its members migrated towards the Knights of Labor while others turned to the American Federation of Labor (AF of L).

Powderly joined the Knights of Labor in 1876 and by 1879 was “Grand Master Workman”—the head of the organization.  He remained in this position until 1893. It was a time of growth and victory for the organization.  The membership increased from ten thousand to seven hundred thousand  (some records claim up to a million).  This included 10,000 women and 50,000 African Americans.  Powderly’s vision was not only to protect (or actually to achieve) workers’ rights but  to unite all workers—skilled and unskilled—into a single organization to achieve social and economic reforms that were tilting the balance of power in favor of the big industrialists.   Powderly was advanced for his time, but he did have some chinks in his armor—while open to African American members, his union opposed Chinese immigration as they saw the Chinese migrants undermining the goals of the Knights by providing strike-breakers.

Now the Catholic Church was not in favor of Labor Unions.  European attempts to organize labor tended to have ties to secret organizations condemned by the Church as well as to express socialist ideas not compatible with Catholic doctrine about property.  In the nineteenth century the Catholic Church had a strong record of social and economic conservativism.  You have to remember how badly the Church was burned by the experience of the French Revolution.  Catholicism was very much on the side of the ancien regime.  Even the two popes who had come to Peter’s Chair as liberals (Pius VII and Pius IX) soon lost their enthusiasm for a new social order when they saw how it would undermine the authority (and wealth) of the Church.  The Church—like many people today—put its faith in charity, not justice and believed that the role of those with power and wealth was simply to provide for those who could not care for themselves.  Indeed many people in the nineteenth century felt that wealth was divinely ordained and that the “haves” had at God’s disposal and the poor—again at the disposal of God—had not.  One of my favorite examples of this is an old Anglican hymn, “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

This song was written by Mrs. Cecil Frances Alexander, the wife of an Anglican Clergyman (later Bishop and Then Archbishop-Primate) at Markree Castle Sligo while visiting friends, Col and Mrs Edward Joshua Cooper (the seigneur and dame of the castle) in 1848.  It was the middle of the potato famine.  The people inside the Castle (the Alexanders and the Coopers) whose estate God supposedly had been ordered to being rich, were Anglicans.  The Poor at the gate—likewise ordered by divine will into poverty and famine—were Catholics.  For many people,  both then and now, the fellowship of class is stronger than the fellowship of the Gospel.  But I wander.  Perhaps even pontificate.  Back to the story.

As I wrote, the Catholic Church had opposed labor unions.   That is not to say that it endorsed child labor or unjust labor conditions—only that it thought reform should come about through the conversion of hearts rather than political or social organization.  As the Knights of Labor grew and began to spread internationally, Archbishop Taschereau of Quebec condemned the movement and put an excommunication on any Catholic who belonged. 

Our friend Cardinal Gibbons (then only an Archbishop) disagreed) and publically declared: "Archbishop Taschereau's condemnation of the Knights of Labor should not be taken as the sentiment of the church toward that organization.” Gibbons did not claim that Taschereau could not impose a ban Knights in his own Archdiocese, but he insisted Taschereau did not speak for the universal Church.  Taschereau insisted that he did.  In 1886 both men were named to the College of Cardinals and ironically sailed for Rome on the same ship.  Whatever the weather, it had to have been a stormy voyage but it would fall to the pope to decide the issue 

   the image today is Cardinal Taschereau of Quebec (1820-1898) who condemnation of the Knights of Labor led to a reversal of Church policy on labor unions