Glorious Saint Patrick

Saint Patrick is a figure about whom much has been written but very little is know—in other words most of the stories we tell about Patrick are more legend than history.   Indeed for several decades many historians disputed the historical reality of Patrick or thought he was a combination of several individual persons.

Christianity had come to Ireland before Patrick.  Possibly as early as the late third century monks from Egypt and Syria sought the greater solitude of islands on the western coast of Ireland.  In addition trade routes from both western Britain and northwestern Spain would have caused some Continental Christians to settle in Ireland.  Some scholars maintain that Christianity had, in fact, taken a strong hold in the southern parts of Ireland by the earl fifth century, decades before Patrick arrived.  By the third decade of the fifth century there were sufficient Christians in Ireland for Pope Celestine I to send his deacon, Palladius, as Bishop there.  Unfortunately Palladius ran afoul of the King of Leinster, the south-east portion of the country and was sent back to Britain, his mission unsuccessful.

Palladius cannot be blamed for his failure.  Christianity was not an easy match for Irish society.  In the first place, the Irish had no towns or cities and Christianity is essentially an urban religion, or at least is organized on an urban plan with dioceses and deaneries and such.  And where do you build your churches if you don’t have towns?   And your schools?

But the complexity grows beyond that.  The Irish are a tribal society.  Every person belonged to a clan and the head of the clan ruled supreme.  The clans themselves were united by blood and marriage into super-clans or tribes. The heads of the various clans and super-clans each claimed for himself the title “king.”  Over this myriad of families and clans were four regional kings: Munster, Leinster, Connaught, and Ulster.  And over the four great kings, was the High King who made his capital, such as it was for a somewhat migratory people, at the Hill of Tara. No king, even the High King, really had any authority (except possibly force) over another king    Every time you turn around you have to deal with a new king.  And if King A likes you, his enemy, King B won’t.   In other words, there was no political infrastructure. 

Irish religion, like that the ancient Britons, was Druidism which was a combination of magic and spiritism.  The Irish saw the sacred everywhere—in certain groves of trees, in mountains, in holy wells.  They were convinced they lived in a world inhabited by spirits—the spirits of the dead as well as the spirits of nature.   They did practice human sacrifice, though not on the extensive scale as the Aztecs and some other societies. 

Under Brehon Law, women were equal to men and wives could divorce their husbands.  The law was harsh in its punishments, especially for thievery.  There were ten different types of marriage recognized by Brehon Law, depending on the various social standings of the partners and most marriages were easily dissolvable

Patrick himself was from an upper-class Romano-British family, probably located on the south-west coast of Britain.   His father was Calpurnius, a deacon and Decurion in the Roman Army. His grandfather had been a priest.  Yet Patrick as a young boy showed little interest in religion and was somewhat of a wild teenager. 

We have two authentic sources for Patrick’s life—both written by him.  The first is his “Confessions,” which he wrote to answer charges against him by the British bishops who were upset that he would not accept their authority over him and the Irish Church.  (It was heavily a matter of the British bishops wanting to get “their share” of the tithes of the Irish Church).  Patrick was determined to maintain the independence of the Irish Church.  In part this determination was based on the fact that Patrick had to make a lot of “adjustments” to make Christianity adaptable to the peculiarities of Brehon Laws and customs, including turning a blind eye to some of the irregular customs surrounding marriage. 

The second and shorter document which can be considered is Patrick’s “Letter to Coroticus.”  Coroticus was a Christian British chieftain, who regularly ran pirate raids on the east coast of Ireland looking for booty and slaves.  In a recent raid, Coroticus’s soldiers had come across a band of Patrick’s newly baptized converts, raped and enslaved the women and children and killed the men “still in their baptismal garments.” Patrick excommunicated Coroticus and his soldiers which enraged the bishops of Britain who saw his actions overstepping onto their boundaries.  

We are getting a bit ahead of our story, however.  Patrick as a youth of about 16 was kidnapped by Irish pirates, brought back to Ireland and sold into slavery.  He spent about seven years as a sheep-herder in Antrim, in the north of Ireland.  During the long, lonely nights on the Irish hillsides, he rediscovered his faith and developed a life of deep prayer.  One night he heard a voice: “Your ship is ready.”  Patrick, at great risk to his own life, escaped and traveled as a fugitive 200 miles to Wicklow where he was able to talk a group of sailors to take him back to Britain.  While home he had a vision of an Irishman saying: We appeal to you, holy youth, come and walk among us once more.”  Patrick felt a vocation to return to Ireland with the Christian faith. He studied under Saint Germanus of Auxerre and was eventually ordained.   Returning to Ireland Patrick did not have an easy time of it.  If his mission was to succeed he could not afford to tie himself into the clan system as being identified with one clan would alienated him from others and yet, without being part of the clan system, he had not patrons or protectors.  He also faced tremendous opposition from the druids who saw him destroying the old ways on which they depended.  At the same time the bishops of Britain were very jealous that he would not accept their oversight of the Irish Church.  They were more than suspicious of his accommodating Christianity to the Irish ways and customs. 

A major part of Patrick’s strategy in winning converts was his appeal to women.  Winning the mothers to the faith, guaranteed the children.  He also made a point of aiming for slaves and did much to better their lots.  By the end of his life vast numbers of the Irish had been Christianized but it was a somewhat unique version of Christianity, differing from nearby Romano-Britain and from Rome itself.  The Church in Ireland had a different way of calculating the date for Easter than that followed by the Roman Church, meaning that the actual dates varied from one another from year to year.  The Irish monks also did not shave the crown of their heads in tonsure, but everything forward from a line from ear to ear.  Most disconcerting to the Roman authorities, was that the Irish made their confession to priests privately rather than to the bishop and did not perform public penance but ironically it is the Irish, not the Roman form of the Sacrament of Penance that has survived.  Because the Irish did not have cities and towns, Patrick organized the Church in Ireland according to the clan system.  Each clan had its monastic establishments for men and for women.  The religious head of the family, directly under the family’s chieftain or king, was its Abbot.  The bishop was a mere functionary to ordain and perform those actions limited to bishops.  All jurisdiction was given to the Abbot.  At times, such in the case of Saint Brigid of Kildare, the Abbacy was held by a woman and thus a woman directed the Church in and among her clan.   Roman Law gave no legal recognition to women or their authority but Brehon Law had no scruples.   The Irish church was also pretty sloppy on its canon law of marriage, tolerating divorce in many cases and following the Brehon Law that accorded validity to marriages in respect to the ten different types of marriage recognized in the Brehon Law.

It was only in the twelfth century through the ecclesiastical services of Saint Lorcan O’Toole and the political skuldullgery of Stronbow, King Henry II, and Pope Adrian IV that the Irish Church was brought into conformity with and canonical union with the Church of Rome. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXI

Peterborough Abbey Church,

raised by Henry VIII to Cathedral

status for a new diocese the King

established. 

Well, let’s leave Pope Francis and his critics for awhile and travel back to Merry Old England and the adventures of Good King Hal.  Or maybe not such a good fellow.  Where we left off the saga was in the middle of the closing of the monasteries. Just to recap:  If you remember, in the 1520’s, before Henry’s break with Rome, Cardinal Wolsey had closed down a number of smaller religious religious houses, transferred their members to more successful communities, and appropriated the endowments and lands of those closed houses to establish Cardinal College (now Corpus Christi College) at Oxford and a grammar school in his native Ipswich.  This was not a new tactic—the Crown had, with permission of the Holy See, suppressed a number of failing monasteries in the 14^th and 15^th centuries and diverted their revenues to other projects.  Wolsey’s right-hand man and leading disciple, Thomas Cromwell, had noticed the profits of this strategy of the Cardinal and after Wolsey’s fall had suggested this strategy to his new master, Henry VIII, in order to replenish the royal funds.   Henry was a spend-aholic. He was taking England from a back-water feudal monarchy into one of the leading Nation States of Europe, competing with both the Empire and France.  Henry was building up the Royal Navy—a task which centuries later would pay off in spades.  He used funds copiously as bribes and rewards to expand his influence on the continent.  He was pushing England into international trade and exploration for new markets and new sources of raw materials.  He also was relying more and more on the gentry and the mercantile classes for civil service and had to find funds with which to pay them or lands which to ennoble them.  Henry was very much the one who laid the foundation for the great Empire England was to become in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  And it cost money.  At the same time he was spending lavishly on himself and his succession of queens.  Henry was into building palaces.  Some he would seize (York Place which became Whitehall, and Wolsey’s Hampton Court along with the Hospital of Saint James which still retains its name today as St. James Palace.  In fact, the Royal entourage is still called “The Court of Saint James.”)  Others he bought and refurbished such as Beaulieu and Oatlands Place.  Some were existing royal residences he rebuilt, remodeled, or refurbished  such as Eltham Palace, Hatfield House, and Greenwich,   Still others he built from scratch such as Bridewell, Chelsea Manor, and Nonsuch Palace.  Henry was also given to magnificent spectacles such as his meeting with Francis I of France in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold because of the extravagance of the two monarchs trying to outdo each other in display of wealth.  Henry regularly traveled in great state—often by a flotilla of royal barges on the Thames.  He loved clothes and armor and tournaments.  In fact, there was probably no European monarch so spendthrift until in the following century Louis XIV, the Sun King, ascended the throne of France.  All this extravagance, whether personal or political, had to be paid for and the English Crown was particularly poor.  The sentiment in England was that “The King should live off his own”—which meant that the King should use the revenues from his own lands to pay not only for his private expenses but even for the Army, the Navy, and other government projects.  The Crown could not impose new taxes without the consent of the House of Commons and the Commons believed, as I wrote, that the Crown should live off its own.  So where was Henry to get money?  The Church had money—more money than the Crown, much more money.  How was the Crown to get that money?   Cromwell remembered the trick of suppressing monasteries.  In 1536 he went after the small monasteries—some of which were quite wealthy in land and revenues, despite their small numbers.  Monks and nuns were given the choice of secularizing with a small cash settlement or of transferring to larger monasteries.  The following year Cromwell went after some of the larger monasteries and gave handsome settlements to those who voluntarily surrendered their property.  This time monks and nuns were not given the option of transferring to other monasteries (Cromwell had determined to pick the monastery tree fruitless) but were given the settlement of an annual pension, sufficient for the monks to live comfortably.  Abbots and priors were given pensions far more generous than that granted to ordinary monks, pensions that enabled them to live as gentlemen of means, and this assured their cooperation in closing down their houses.   (The nuns had a smaller pension that was not quite enough for them to do the same, though it was presumed they would return to their families where the allowance would be sufficient for their maintenance.)  Neither monks nor nuns were released from their vows and thus were not free to marry (though some, especially among the nuns, did).  They also were expected to retain their religious garb (though few did).  Monasteries that did not voluntarily surrender were visited by royal commissioners and shut down.  By 1539 there were still a considerable number of monasteries operating, but these were either in more remote corners of the kingdom or they were some of the great monastic houses with ties to the Crown.  But even these were to fall.    Before we get to that, however, we need to look at a particular type of monastery and how Henry dealt with them and these are the Cathedral priories.
The medieval Church of England had a particularly unique tradition in which several cathedrals did not have the usual dean and chapter of canons but a monastic community that followed the Rule of Saint Benedict and was governed by the Prior (the Abbot being, in theory, the Bishop.)  Canterbury, Winchester, Ely, Carlisle, Durham, Rochester, Norwich, and Worcester were all such arrangements.  (Carlisle was not a Benedictine foundation, but one of the Arrouaisian Canons who followed the Rule of Saint Augustine.)    Typically in such situations, the Prior was named as dean of the newly constituted chapter of secular canons that replaced the monks.     Thomas Goldwell was prior of the Benedictine monks at Canterbury—a large house of 69 monks.  He signed the assent to the royal supremacy in 1534 which acknowledged Henry as head of the Church.  Monastic life continued as normal until 1539 when the monastery was suppressed.   Goldwell was given an annual pension of £ 80 and named a prebendary (canon) of the Cathedral.  (1539 £ 80 equals about $60,000 in modern currency, but approximately five times that in actual buying power.)  Winchester Priory had 45 monks and the last prior, William Kingsmill, was appointed dean of the Cathedral.  Robert Steward had been prior of Ely since 1522.  Although he had supported the validity of the Royal Marriage to Katherine of Aragon, he soon switched sides to Henry and supported the Royal Supremacy as well as playing an active role in convincing monasteries to surrender to the King.  When his own monastery was suppressed in November 1539 he was given a handsome pension.  Two years later he was appointed first dean of the new Cathedral.  Hugh Whitehead was Prior of the monks at Durham from 1519.  Like the others, he acceded to Henry’s supremacy.  The monastic community was dissolved in 1540 and he was pensioned but then appointed first dean of the new secular chapter.   Under Edward VI he was imprisoned in the Tower of London along with his bishop, Cuthbert Tunstall, for refusing to go along with the Protestantization of the Church of England by Archbishop Cranmer.     
Henry was not only into dismantling the monasteries—he was also into building up the Church.  While his primary goal in suppressing the monasteries was to enrich the royal coffers, he not only provided for the monks and nuns out of the revenues of the suppressed houses, he also used the monastic endowments to establish a number of new dioceses to provide good pastoral oversight for the Church.  Most of these dioceses were founded on, and from the revenues of, suppressed monasteries.  Dioceses were founded at Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, Peterborough and Westminster.   Henry also moved the See of Coventry to Lichfield.    Other than Lichfield, the new sees were all established in former Benedictine abbeys, except for Oxford which was originally established in the former Augustinian Osney Abbey and later (1545) transferred to Saint Frideswide’s Priory (Augustinian) which had been suppressed and then incorporated into Wolsey’s Cardinal College in 1525.  Peterborough Abbey was the site of the grave of Katherine of Aragon who had been buried there only five years before and so was saved from being destroyed or deconsecrated.  Henry was faced with an even greater conundrum in what to do with Westminster Abbey which had been the site of English coronations for almost five centuries.  Henry may have been willing to break continuity with the papacy, but not when it came to his Crown and its traditions.  He had a superstitious urgency to preserve any and all symbols of Royal legitimacy and Westminster Abbey was central to this.  Westminster Abbey was also the second wealthiest religious house in England.  The monastic community was suppressed in 1539 and in 1540 Henry took the city of Westminster and the county of Middlesex from the Diocese of London to create the Diocese of Westminster.  Thomas Thirlby, a churchman loyal to Henry was named bishop and William Benson (sometimes Boston), the former monastic prior, was named Dean of a chapter of 12 canons drawn mostly from the monks.  The idea of a Diocese of Westminster was only to preserve a reason for the Abbey Church to be preserved and was neither pastorally useful nor economically feasible.  The Diocese was suppressed in the reign of King Edward VI.  The Abbey was left impoverished of its revenues and almost destroyed by the greed of the Duke of Somerset, the uncle of King Edward VI and “Lord Protector of England” in the King’s minority.  The Church was restored to abbatial status during the reign of Mary and then under Elizabeth became a “royal peculiar”—directly under the Crown who appoints the dean and canons.  It remains that way today as a Collegiate Church (a church with a college of canons led by the dean) under the Crown.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church LVIII

Christchurch, Oxford--a foundation established 

on the income of suppressed religious houses

I want to get back to Pope Francis as he makes history faster than I can write it, but before I do I want to treat Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries as this is his one significant “Protestantization” of the Church of England—other than, of course, the break with the papacy.  Henry was interested in Church Reform—but not in the Protestant mode.  His greatest contribution was the creation of six new dioceses—Westminster, Chester, Gloucester, Peterborough, Bristol, and Oxford.  Each of these was founded on the incomes previously ascribed to various religious foundations that Henry closed down.  Let’s take a look at Henry’s policy of suppressing the religious abbeys, monasteries, and convents. 

In the background of Henry’s decision we should note that over the centuries the Church had become very land rich—indeed the Church owned more land in England than the Crown—owning approximately a third of the land in England.  About half this land was owned by religious orders, the other half by the dioceses, bishops, rectories, and other entities representing the secular clergy. 

How did the Church manage to come into such wealth?  Remember that medieval Europe did not have a cash economy.  The foundation of wealth was land.  And when people wanted to make a contribution to the Church they often gave land.  Kings and nobles, in founding monasteries, provided land for the support of the monks or nuns.  Kings and nobles might also—out of piety or penance or even just good will—give land for the support of a particular church.  The Earl of Warwick, for example, might give a manor to provide income for a pastor in Warwickshire.  The pastor—or actually, “rector” of the church in question would receive the rent each year from this manor as part of his income.  The Duke of Norfolk might give the tolls on a bridge to the Dean of Norwich as part of the income to the deanery.  A knight in Coventry, dying without heirs, might will his fief to salary a canon at Lincoln.  You get the idea.  And of course the King, using the bishoprics to provide positions and salaries for his important advisors, would richly endow those bishoprics with income-producing lands.  These endowments—or rather the positions they salaried—were called benefices.  Over the centuries, these incomes add up and positions from Archbishops and their Archdeacons down to canons and rectors were usually well provided for.

Moreover, people making pilgrimage to certain shrines—the tomb of Saint Thomas a Becket at Canterbury being the richest—but also Saint Frideswide at Oxford, Edward the Confessor at Westminster, Saint Hugh at Lincoln, Saint Cuthbert at Durham, et al—drew pilgrims and gifts to these abbey and cathedral churches.  Glastonbury Abbey was associated with King Arthur but also had legends that it was founded by Joseph of Arimathea. There were even stories that Jesus had visited there as a boy—and returned after his resurrection to see it again.  Some monasteries contained relics of dubious provenance or artifacts that were just outright frauds such as the “Rood of Grace” at Boxley Abbey—a crucifix that could move its head, shed tears, and make various facial expressions—controlled by a system of levers managed by a monk from behind a curtain.   Fraud it may have been, but as P.T. Barnum said—“There’s a sucker born every minute” and pilgrims flocked to the abbey with their gifts and donations.  Such relics—and frauds—would bring in gifts of jewelry, gold, silver, and coin as well as donations of property.  People might give or bequeath in their wills to a monastery or to a cathedral houses or shops—the income from which would provide for Masses to be said or prayers to be offered or processions to be conducted for the souls of the donor and his or her loved ones. 

Property went to the Church—but the Church, like wise financiers, never alienated property and thus grew very rich.   The Benedictine monks and Augustinian Canons, like the bishops and secular clergy, tended to rent out their lands and salary themselves from the rents, but the Cistercian monks were more hands-on.  The Cistercians had vast number of lay brothers who actually worked the monastery properties.  Indeed the Cistercians were masters at sheep-herding and ran a vast wool industry with the work of the laybrothers.  Moreover, unlike the Benedictines and the Canons, both of whom tended to put much of their income into the ornaments for the abbey churches, the Cistercians both lived and prayed frugally.   Cistercian churches had no stained glass.  Vestments were only of wool and never of silk.  Altar cross and candle holders, as well as thuribles and other required furnishings, were of iron, chalices of silver and not gold.  Books were not illuminated and there were no organs or instruments in their churches.  Thus, by hard work and meager living they grew exceptionally wealthy. 

Over the centuries, various monasteries had closed—or been closed—and their incomes diverted to chartable endeavors but the idea of systematically suppressing monasteries was first that of Cardinal Wolsey and it was done for reasons of “reform.”  While many monasteries, and especially those of nuns, were poor and had a tough time getting by, there were others whose incomes were more than sufficient.  Since many of the poorer ones had few—if any—vocations and numbers were dwindling, Wolsey thought for the sake of organization it might be a good idea to close the smaller houses, move the nuns or monks to larger and more secure communities, and use the property of the closed houses to endow a number of new charitable or educational endeavors.   Among his other endeavors, the Cardinal founded two educational institutions from the income of suppressed religious houses: a grammar school in his native town of Ipswich and Cardinal College, Oxford.  The former exists today as The King’s School, the latter as Christchurch College, Oxford.  Wolsey had no idea of eliminating religious life in England—far from it—and indeed at the time of his fall in 1530 it would have been inconceivable to think that the vast monastic institutions would totally disappear in just a little over a decade.  But we will hear more of that in the next posting. 

Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis? 3

Gregory XVI

I think a third reason why so many are afraid of Pope Francis is his being a religious, and in particular being a Jesuit.  The last religious to be elected Pope was the Camaldolese Benedictine Mauro Cappellari who reigned as Gregory XVI (1830-1846).  He was one of the most conservative men to sit on the Throne of Peter.  In reaction to the French Revolution and the overthrow of the ancien regime, Gregory resisted the introduction of any and every novelty to the Papal States.  He was succeeded by the liberal Pius IX but despite the new Pope’s openness to reform, the repression of Gregory’s reign burst into open rebellion in 1848—the year that revolutions swept all Europe—and Pius had to flee Rome until French troops could restore order.  The challenge to his temporal authority represented in the revolution drove Pius to the extreme conservatism that marked his reign and has made him an enduring hero to the wing-nuts of the Catholic right.  Pius and all his successors—Leo XII, St. Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI have been diocesan priests, but in the intervening years, religious life has changed from representing the more conservative face of Catholicism to being the voice of Catholic liberalism.
The roots of the monastic and mendicant Orders (the Benedictines, the Cistercians, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians) were in part in protest against the socio-economic structures of their times. The friars in particular rejected the budding urban capitalism of the 13^th centuries in favor of communal property.   Both the monastic and mendicant movements were at first extra-canonical movements of the laity who were discontent with the options offered them by the clerical and institutional structures of their days.  (Neither Benedict nor Francis was a priest and both their movements were originally lay movements that accepted priests among their members but only as equals to the lay monks (Benedict) or lay brothers (Francis).  (The Carmelites and the Augustinians were also originally lay movements.)   The mendicants understand their role to be a prophetic voice that warns about those elements in society—and in the Church—that contradict the values set forth in the Gospel.  Moreover, from the beginning the mendicants rejected hierarchy and authoritarian government in favor of a radical democracy in which their superiors were not only elected by the brothers but were accountable to the brothers gathered in Chapter. 
Ignatius used a different model in establishing the Society of Jesus.  Drawing from his experience as a soldier and determined to effectively combat the inroads of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers, Ignatius imposed a military structure on his new Society and demanded unquestioning obedience to one’s superiors in the society.  He also placed the Society at the disposal of the Pope for whatever missions the Pope required them to serve.  But in that service they were given remarkable freedom.  Ignatius did away with the choral recitation of the Divine Office—traditional not only for all religious up to that time but even for the secular clergy.   He also chose that his men would not have a religious habit.  While they normally wore a black cassock, standard clerical dress, they were free to abandon it for lay clothes as the mission required.  When the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in China they abandoned western dress for the saffron robes of Buddhist monks but then as they understood the culture better, they adopted the silk gowns of Confucian scholars in order to be more effective in presenting their ideas to the Chinese.  They celebrated Mass in Mandarin rather than Latin and adopted other elements of Chinese culture.  They were wildly successful in their mission and served in the Imperial Court where they wielded immense influence until the Augustinians and Franciscans, jealous at their successes, complained to Rome about the “Chinese Rites.”  Forced back to western expression by Rome, their mission failed as spectacularly as it had succeded.
Today most religious see their role in the Church very differently than do diocesan priests—and this is often a source of tension with bishops who are, for the most part, drawn from the diocesan clergy.  A Benedictine or Trappist who is ordained will tell you he is a monk first and a priest second. They are usually reluctant to take on ministries that require them to leave their monasteries. Similarly a Franciscan or Carmelite or Augustinian will tell you that he is a brother who is ordained for the service of the Church but who takes his primary vocational identity from his religious community rather than from his being a priest.  More and more religious look to serve in ministries that reflect the charism of their particular congregation and are anxious to leave parish ministry to the diocesan clergy.  Many religious priests today wear their religious habits in the Church or around their monastery or school, but beyond that dress plainly in ordinary clothes.  All this is fine, but to my mind it is the icing on the cake.
In the Civil Rights movement of the early and mid-sixties and in the anti-war movement of the late sixties and early seventies, the religious were first to get involved.  Not the religious priests, however, but the Sisters.  The world was shocked—and then delighted—to see Catholic Sisters marching with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery.  The women finally shamed the men into putting on their jock straps and joining them.  Once into progressive causes, the men were not shy.  The Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother, the Josephite Philip Berrigan were the leading Catholic voices against the war in Viet Nam.  Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, wrote thought-provoking books giving the spiritual roots of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.  Bishops clamped down on the clergy—Cardinals Spellman of New York and McIntyre of Los Angles in particular—and while the diocesan guys had to cave, the religious, independent of the bishops, went on against the war, for open-housing, against American support for Latin American dictatorships, and for a series of social justice issues.  When Liberation Theologian Gustavo  Gutierrez fell afoul of the Peruvian hierarchy he found refuge in becoming a Dominican.   
These social changes worked their ways into the curriculum of Catholic schools, colleges, and universities—again, for the most part the province of religious communities.  Religious began to see that they had a role to play in being an alternative voice in the Church and for the Church—not contradicting the magisterium but raising the questions posed by the evangelical values laid out in the gospel even as Saint Francis had done in his day. 
Religious often refer to this role as their “prophetic call.”  I am not sure yet if that role has evolved to where it is truly prophetic.  I think religious need to look at themselves long and hard and ask themselves if they themselves are faithful to the gospel.  Frankly, I don’t think the renewal of religious life envisioned by the Council has reached anything near its potential.  Religious are still often very much a part of the systems they decry.  Nevertheless, I think someone needs to be a prophetic voice in and for the Church today.  Whether it is bishops who spend millions on refurbishing their residences, or the failure of so many Church institutions to pay a just wage or allow their employees to unionize, or the lack of just processes in ecclesiastical trials, the Church needs to be held as accountable as the Church wants to hold secular institutions and it is often the religious who are most outspoken in “outing” the injustices.
On the other hand, we need to see that leading prophetic voices in the Church such as Dom Helder Camara or Archbishop Oscar Romero or John XXIII came from the diocesan clergy.  How many secular priests staff inner-city parishes where they fight for better conditions for their parishioners and for their neighbors regardless of religion.  And when these diocesan priests run afoul of their bishops for their social activism they don’t have the escape hatch of a supportive community and the possibility of a new assignment that religious have.   

As a Jesuit Francis was never cutting edge.  In fact, he played the game very safely working closely with the Argentine hierarchy and even turning a blind eye to much of the injustice in his native land during the years it was ruled by a military junta.  Nevertheless, it is clear that Francis thinks differently than this predecessors.  He is more spontaneous and far less attentive to the fine details of rubric or law.  He is emerging as prophetic voice—not the radical Amos or even a Jeremiah—but prophetic none the less.  It is clear that there is a new sheriff in town.  When it comes to simple things like whether women can be included in the Holy Thursday Rite of the Washing of the Feet  or the call for us all to look at how we live and can we scale it back a notch or two, Francis is setting a new pace.  I don’t think there is much to fear, but then I don’t want to be a bishop who lives in a 41 million dollar Residenz. 

A Path for the Wise

That picture of Mother Delores Hart in my last post drew an above average number of readers.  People love good old traditional nuns—I love good old traditional nuns, but then I believe that the monastic life in its various expressions—traditional and modern—is very much a hope for both the Church and the world in which we live. 

        Sister Joan Chittester, a member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie PA, is a great example of the contemporary monastic.  I have never met Sister Joan though we have exchanged letters on a few occasions and she was a friend of a dear cousin of mine who died several years ago.  I have read a number of her books and find that while sometimes her ideas are challenging she can speak right to me.  One of my favorites is The Fire In These Ashes (Sheed and Ward, 1995).  In The Fire In These Ashes, Sister Joan says that the raison d’etre for monastic life is “to find God.”  You don’t become a monk or a nun for any other purpose than to find God. 

      I have always been a bit jealous of those who are called to the monastic life because at the end of the day, what is there except the search to find God?  I am a busy person.  I teach.  I run a library.  I give talks, retreats, renewal programs.  I am on committees.  I advise students with their research and papers.  I see people for spiritual direction.  I do a lot of things—but to what end?  Is life about keeping busy?  Or “putting bread and butter on the table?” I am a historian.  Do I really care about the Battle of Agincourt?  Am I supposed to think there is something worth caring about in the economic bubble of the twelfth century? Why should I bother with the Pirenne Thesis?  The fact of the matter is that history intrigues me not because some event a thousand years ago happened—things happening today have more import—but  because men and women in every age run around like ants on an anthill trying to find something? The question is: What are they looking for?  God?  No, of course not. At least not consciously.  But they are looking for meaning, for purpose.  And different people find different purpose in life.  For some it is love.  For some money. For  some power. For some freedom.  For some Beauty.  And does any of it last?  At the end of the day, does any of it matter?  No.  And so most just keeping running around in their busy circles.  But for those who wake up from their manic quest and realize how transient life is, the search then continues for that which is eternal. We want to set our eyes on some beacon that shines consistently drawing us on and through the pains and the sorrows, the transient joys and passing hopes of today.   Back in the third century people who realized how empty an unfocused life can be began going out into the deserts of Syria and Egypt.  They left their business and their families and their ambitions—and their religion—to live as solitaries, haunted by the realization that there has to be something more than money in the bank, love in their bed, a fancy house in which to live, and even moving ceremonies on Sunday mornings.  Perhaps the most startling thing is that they realized that a nice ceremony on Sunday morning wasn’t answering the call of their heart.  Here they were looking for God and they saw the emptiness of ritual and rite—the failure of religion to capture and hold the Divine Mystery.  Saint Antony Abbot is a prime example: he left his home and his pharmacy shop in Alexandria and shut himself up in an abandoned fort for over twenty years—never coming out, even for Sunday Mass.  

       Now I am not against Mass.  Far from it, I attend daily.  But Antony Abbot realized that the practice of religion was not enough.  There is something more, something beyond even the most fervent practice of religion.  Eighty some years ago Simone Weil wrote an essay in which she clearly distinguished the Love of God from the Love of Religion.  (Simone Weil, Waiting For God, trans. By Emma Craufurd, New York: Harper & Row, 1973.)  Religion is Religion—it isn’t God.  The Church is the Church—it isn’t God.  Religion or the Church can be the path to God and while it might advance you along the way, it ultimately will fall short of the destination. And often Religion or the Church are misused as paths that only circle back upon themselves.  Even the Sacraments will ultimately fall short.  The Uncreated can never be encapsulated in the created, the Creator in the creature.  This is why monks and nuns—real monks and nuns—have an affinity for agnostics.  They know how elusive God is.  God is always one step beyond us.  We arrive at the place where God was only to find that God has slipped away leaving a trace, a scent, some intangible sign that only makes us more ardent in our pursuit.  And at the same time we are pursuing him, ever more ardently, we begin to suspect that he is, in fact, pursuing us—luring us on ever deeper into  Mysterium—mysterium tremendum et fascinans.  And it is this that drives men and women into monasteries.  

        Sometimes in history the monasteries have taken on lives of their own—lives that distract the monk or the nun with the needs of administration, of building a church, of organizing the work, of feeding and clothing a community, of raising the money to do it all.  At the same time the formal prayers can easily replace the inner eros that impels the monk or nun on.  The need to practice the chant or shine the candleholders can seduce the heart away from its hunt and the monk or nun can forget the vision of their earnest years.  That is a tragic pitfall one hopes they can avoid. It is not unique to Christian monasticism—read the Dalai Lama and he will tell you the same about monks in his tradition who become lost in the superficial details and observances of their lives.   But monastic life is no place for religious people.  It is certainly no place for the pious.  Monastic life isn’t about the habit or the incense or even the chant.  All that is just icing on the cake—maybe even a seduction away from the heart of the life which is simply to seek God in his nakedness and in ours.

       And this is why we need to hear more of the monastic voices in the Church.  They have a wisdom that speaks beyond the superciliousness of the pious and directly to the dark night of the seeker.   As Elizabeth Barret Brownking wrote 

      Earth’s crammed with heaven

      And every common bush aflame with God

      And only he who sees takes off his shoes

      The rest sit round it

      And pluck blackberries

A lot of people are plucking blackberries—we need people in the Church today who can point and shout: “Fire!” For what a fire it is for those with eyes to see.