Saints, Popes, and Boatrockers

This morning the pastor at my parish gave a very good homily for the feast of Saint Martin of Tours.  I was impressed as I have always had a deep devotion to Saint Martin and know quite a bit about him whereas my pastor is not a particularly pious man and often has somewhat of a featherweight approach to our Catholic heritage and culture—a typical problem for today’s undereducated clergy whether of the liberal or the conservative bent.

In his homily Father dragged out the old Saint Martin chestnut about cutting his cloak in half to give one half to the beggar—whom Father referred to as “a homeless man,” going somewhat beyond the hagiographical text and introducing a (not unreasonable) anachronism to help us today connect with a saint of seventeen centuries ago.  Unfortunately, not being a historian he didn’t get it quite right.  Martin didn’t cut his soldier’s cloak in half as much as he cut the lining out of it to give the beggar the warm fur lining while keeping the uniform part of his cloak for himself.   I mean, he did cut his cloak in half, but not from top to bottom but rather separating outer from inner.  Small point, but if one is going to be pedantic, as I like to be, these things matter.  

What I really want to highlight in Father’s sermon today though was not simply the story about the beggar and the cloak, but the larger picture that Martin had a passion for the poor.  He had this as a catechumen (when he divided his cloak) to when he was a monk to when he was a bishop.  For Martin, the poor defined the Church and set its mission.  That emphasis is so often lost on those for whom random acts of charity are sufficient fulfillment of the Gospel.  For Martin, and especially as bishop, it was not a matter of occasionally giving of his—or the Church’s—surplus as it was of focusing all the Church’s attention on the needs of the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters. 

This is the Church to which Pope Francis is trying to return us.  We live in a world afflicted by diverse poverties: spiritual, material, social, psychological, emotional.  Francis’ desire for the Church to minister to the spiritual hungers of those who have suffered the pain of failed marriages, of those who find themselves emarginated because of their sexual orientation, of those who give themselves without the surety of commitment are all extensions of his concern for those who live under the weight of the cross of material poverty.  Ironically—or actually without any irony at all—those who cannot see the pain of the spiritually poor most often are those who are content to throw a few crumbs of their leftovers to the materially poor and think they have satisfied their obligation as Christians.  Like those critics of Jesus who were scrupulous on their tithing of garden herbs but neglected the weightier matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness—they fuss over standing for communion or which way the priest faces the altar, but pay little or no attention to the gross injustices and severe pain in which so many today are trapped.  Like the Priest or the Levite in the Gospel of Luke, they walk down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho turning a blind eye to the suffering of those who have been robbed and beaten by life but even worse than the Priest or Levite they are resentful of those who would stop and try to bind up the wounds of the suffering.  And so Pope Francis’ vision of a Church that reaches out to the poor and the pained disturbs their comfort and they find refuge in the fantasyland of a Cardinal who traipses around the world in the furs and silks of a bygone princedom and call it religion. 

Pope Francis’ agenda for the Church is truly revolutionary as he has set out to identify the Church not with those who have long comfortably occupied its pews but with those who, like the beggar of Martin’s day, shivered outside in the cold.  His focus on those immigrants who line the shores of Tunisia in hopes of a boat to Lampedusa or those who huddle by our fenced southern border in hopes of finding their way through the desert has enraged countless of “good Catholics.”  His washing the feet of prisoners and sick—including women and Muslims—has been decried by those who confuse patriarchy with the Church and confuse Allah with a deity other than the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Jesus.  His condemnation of the death penalty irritates those self-styled pro-lifers who can’t see the inconsistencies of their argument.  And his pastoral concern for those who are divorced and remarried, or are gay, or who live together without marriage baffle those who think that because of their moral rectitude they, not “sinners,” should bask in the papal limelight.  As for me, I like it when Peter rocks the boat.  It startles me into remembering how the Master did the same.  

The Times They Are a Changin'

Sister Mary Spano, an American
Religious Sister working in Haiti

Years ago when I was living in Rome finishing my doctorate I volunteered one afternoon a week at a soup kitchen run by a phenomenal group of committed Catholic laity called the Community of Sant’ Egidio.  Four days a week they served approximately 1500 meals to the poor of Rome.  The place was a madhouse as the lines to get in snaked down the street and it was our task to serve the meals—excellent meals prepared by the kitchens of Al Italia, the Italian airline---to the crowds in a room that seated about 150.  You had to keep moving people through.  Get them in, get them seated, get the food in front of them, and then move them out to make room for those waiting to be next.  The room was noisy and brightly lit and the narrow aisles between the tables congested with people trying to find a place to sit and eat and volunteers trying to deliver the dinners.  One afternoon amid the chaos arrived Cardinal Josef Glemp, at the time the Archbishop of Warsaw in Poland.  These were the peak days of the John Paul pontificate and Glemp was a powerful figure in Rome as well as at home in Poland.  He had a huge retinue—several bishops, a half dozen monsignori, and a band of priests.  They had come to see the soup kitchen but spectators were the last thing needed—there was no room as it was and the servers couldn’t negotiate their way around the phalanx of dignitaries and the whole work began to congeal and grind to a halt.  An older Spanish nun in her gray habit and veil pushed through to the Cardinal and with her hands on her hips and looking him straight in the eye demanded: “have you come here to serve?”  (In Italian it would mean “have you come to wait on tables.”)  The Cardinal was startled by the question and jumping back a bit, said “no, of course not.”  Then she said with disgust:  “That’s too bad; The Son of Man has come to serve not to be served.” And with a contemptuous gesture she turned her back on him and started ordering people out of the way to make room for the waiters.     Another prelate might have put on an apron and gone to work but His Eminence’s visit was a short one and the entourage was soon speeding away in their black Vatican Mercedes from the lines of the poor waiting to be fed. 
     Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote in his book on Catholicism that the first millennium of the papacy was about witness; the second about power; and the third will be about service.  I think one could expand this insight from papacy to the Church as a whole.  The first thousand years were the years of great witness as the Gospel spread through the then-known world.  The second millennium was the consolidation of power—political, social, and economic—of the Church.  Hopefully we are on the cusp of the millennium of Service in which the Church will focus on how it can put itself, its personnel, and its resources (spiritual and temporal) at the betterment of humankind.  But this shift in the Church’s tectonic plates is frightening to those who know only what has been and cannot see the mission ahead.  When someone like our friend Raymond Burke has waited for years to get his red cape with the nine yards of scarlet silk and ermine trim and now sees that the new tune is about waiting on the tables of the poor—it scares him to the core.  And this isn’t just for the boys who buy their glad rags at Gamarelli’s (or as one campy Monsignor friend in Rome calls it “Glamorrelli’s”), but for the newly ordained parochial vicar in Gaithersburg or Madison (or your town or mine) who wears his collar and cuffs clerical vest and six hundred dollar black suit.  I was invited to lunch in one rectory in the Diocese of Arlington recently.  It was a spontaneous invitation—I had been to a funeral and when the pastor heard I was a Latinist he asked me to look at some books he had bought and help identify them—but the lunch was fabulous—soup, salad, entrée, desert—all served on Lennox China on top of a damask table cloth with matching napkins.  There was a good White Burgundy (from France) in Czech crystal goblets.  This wasn’t over the top and given the neighborhood of the parish was not ostentatious display but it does bespeak a model of priesthood which is oriented towards privilege. 

     I think that is really what the attack on LCWR and so many other areas of tension in the Church are about.  In the days of large motherhouses with polished floors and silver candlesticks on the altar, in the days when a white-veiled novice brought Reverend Mother her tea and cookies on a silver tray every afternoon at four,  in the days when the Sisters taught piano in the parlor to little girls scrubbed pink and in organza dresses,  in the days when the Sisters had to be picked up and driven to a funeral or a meeting with the bishop—it all bespoke hierarchy, good order, and a world in which the Church had power.   The Nuns Story, Sound of Music, and Trouble with Angels, anchored a certain view of Church into the minds not only of Catholics but of the general public.  The “nuns” were the public relations success of the Church.  Today’s nuns, on the other hand, wearing jeans and sweat-shirts, getting their hands dirty at work in women’s shelters,  speaking up in advocacy for abused women and children, and not taking s*** from no one—even the men in expensive black suits and high starched collars—are a sign that the days of Father Chuck Bing Crosby O’Malley and Sister Mary Ingrid Bergman Benedict are over.  That may be a pity but the times they are a changin’ and Saint Mary’s has done lost its bells (and belles).  So get used to it and put on your big-boy pants get busy on turning the model around from power and hierarchy to service and preferential option for the poor.