OK--What Is The Agenda Behind Cardinal Sarah and the "Ad Orientatem" Movement? II

In the previous posting, I laid out a theology of priesthood rooted in the Patristic tradition of the Church,  but  before moving on to Cardinal Sarah, the back-asswards Mass, and what is the underlying agenda I want to flesh out that patristic theology a bit more. 

Now, as I have often said, while I have a graduate degree in theology, I am not a theologian but a historian.  This may be why I prefer patristic theology to the scholastic, neo-scholastic, post-scholastic and—most common today—pseudo-scholastic theology.  When you work with the Fathers, you are working with historical texts. A historian can skim across the patristic pond without too much danger of falling in if he or she just stays with the sources. 

What I think we need to look at to grasp the patristic approach to the Priesthood, whether the priesthood of the faithful or the specific priestly ministry of the ordained, as a participation in the Priesthood of Jesus Christ is the precise nature of the Christian assembly as the Body of Christ.

Paul makes at least 17 references in his epistles to the Church being the Body of Christ and this relationship between the Church and her Lord is rooted in the Resurrection.  We must first erase from our consciousness the inherently false vision of the Resurrection with which we have all been raised.  First and foremost, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was in no way the resuscitation of a corpse.  It was not like the Raising of Lazarus, or the daughter of Jairus, or the son of the Widow of Naim.  In those cases a person who had been dead was brought back to life.  Paul makes it clear that the Resurrection of Christ—an absolutely unique phenomenon in history-to-date—is a new creation.  This is not to say that the physical body of the man who had been Jesus of Nazareth is still decomposing somewhere outside Jerusalem, but rather that Christ who is raised from the dead is both radically that same Jesus and yet is equally radically transformed in a new order of being, one that foreshadows a new order of being to which we are all called in the parousia. 

The second thing we must reconsider is the meaning of death.  For the Christian the moment of death and the passage to new life is not at the time of our corporeal shut-down but rather the moment of our baptism.  In baptism we have surrendered our lives and embraced death and in baptism we are raised to newness of life—to participation in that new order of being with Christ.  We are members of his Body.  Paul does not mean this metaphorically—he is quite literal about it.  We are members (limbs, organs, etc.) of the Risen Body of Christ.  He is the head and we are the members.  We (not individually but communally) are Christ and Christ is us.  As such all that can be attributed to Christ can be attributed to us.  Christ is the priest and we share in that priesthood because we compose the Risen Christ.  Christ offers the Sacrifice and we, as his Body, share in that offering of the Sacrifice.  The Eucharistic Sacrifice is, first and foremost, the Sacrifice of the Church because it is the Sacrifice of Christ who is inseparably united to his Body, the Church.  It is only in a secondary—though very real—way the sacrifice of the priest.  That is why the idea of the human priest offering the sacrifice on behalf of the Church is so patently offensive.  It undermines the entire nature of the Church as the Risen Body of Christ. 

We used to refer to the Church as the mystical Body of Christ and this was most unfortunate.  In English “mystical” has connotations of “spiritual” as opposed to “real.”  For Paul the reality of the one-and-the-sameness of the Risen Lord with the community of his disciples was realized on the road to Damascus when Jesus said “I am Jesus whom you persecute.”  Paul had known he was persecuting the Christian community—but in that revelation he realized that to persecute the Church was to persecute Christ, that Christ and his Church are one and indivisibly the same reality.   

We make a similar error when we take sacraments as something “symbolic” rather than “real.”  The issue is that symbols are more real than the literal.  Why do people get upset when they see the flag being burned or the Scriptures trampled underfoot.  It’s a piece of cloth!   It’s a book!  NO! It is not, it is something far more.  Symbols introduce us to levels of reality that transcend the boundaries of the literal, that open not only our minds but our psyches to visions of Truth that mere words can’t grasp. 

So when we say that the Bishop is the Symbol or the Sacrament of Christ the Priest—and admittedly with most of our current crew it is more a matter of blind faith than of spiritual insight—there is a profound reality of Christ the High Priest hidden there beneath an excess of avoir du pois, surly arrogance, and blind ambition.  Indeed, I cannot but wonder if this isn’t the main crisis in the Church in the United States today—that the Sacramental visibility of Christ in the clergy has not been totally obscured in too many cases by psycho-sexual-spiritual-intellectual immaturity of many with the ranks of hierarchy and clergy.  But read the prayer of ordination of a priest and see to what the priest is called—it is an amazing thing really.  No wonder so many of the less worthy want to put things back to Latin—they wouldn’t have to be confronted by the grace of understanding. 

So to sum it up: we all, by virtue of our baptism, share in the Sacrificing Priesthood of Christ and thereby we all, in the specifically unique capacities appropriate to our place in the Christian community, offer the Sacrifice in union with Christ whose Body we are.  Within the Community of the Body of Christ there are those who sacramentally re-present the specifically priestly Presence of Christ.  They have an unique and indispensible place but the priesthood of Christ does not belong to them alone but is shared by all who compose the Body of Christ, the Church.

Now—if you were to take this theology of priesthood seriously, what would liturgy look like?  What would the Christian assembly look like when gathered for worship?  How would the space be arranged?   Rather than top-down pyramidal structure, might it not be concentric circles gathered around an altar—a community with its sacramental leadership in solid communion with one another?  But more next time.  

OK--What Is The Agenda Behind Cardinal Sarah and the "Ad Orientatem" Movement?

 

Christ the High Priest
Byzantine Icon of
Christ in Bishop's Robes

Ok, I am going to try to keep this simple so that I can be perfectly clear.  Some of the Krazies who troll this site will be screaming “heresy” as it is so it is important that I aim for precision. And consequently it has taken a little longer to check my research and make sure everything is both precise and well-defined.   

It won’t be obvious in this first post where I am heading in the next two or three unless I give you a clue—so let me put it out front.  What is the real agenda behind this movement for the priest to face ad apsidem (towards the rear wall) for the celebration of Mass? I say ad apsidem rather than ad orientem because unless the church itself is built facing east, the presider is not facing ad apsidem.  The term—and indeed the concept—of “liturgical east” is one of the most patently ridiculous ideas to come down the pike.  I understand why, in many of the Church’s Rites, the churches (and those within) are “orientated” and in the context of those rites where this is an ancient tradition it makes great sense—but only if it is true east and not a south-by-northeast that we are somewhat pompously referring to as some mythical “liturgical east.”  But we don’t start there: let’s look first to the root of the problem: the understanding of the ordained priesthood. 

In both Latin and in Greek, the two languages that serve to shape the Church’s articulation of the deposit of faith, there are two distinct words that the one English word, priest, is used to translate.  It is unfortunate that English lacks this precision because each of the two words in Latin, like their Greek counterparts, relates to a substantially different reality.

The Latin word sacerdos (and its Greek equivalent ὁ ἱερεύς) signifies a cultic figure whose work it is to offer sacrifice.  The Latin word presbyter (and its Greek Equivalent, ὁ ‎πρεσβύτερος) signifies “elder” in the sense of a member of a governing board of a 1^st century synagogue.  (The first and second generations of the Church simply borrowed the administrative structures with which they were familiar from the synagogues.)  In the New Testament—and we see this theology developed most clearly in the Letter to the Hebrews—there is but one sacerdos, one sacrificing priest, Jesus Christ.  There is also one and only one sacrifice, the once and for all eternal Sacrifice in which Christ offers himself on the Cross as both priest and victim.   While in every celebration of the Eucharist we are given access to this one, eternal Sacrifice, that sacrifice is not repeated.  Christ is not sacrificed over and over again, day after day, on the altar, but rather in the Eucharist we move beyond time and space to become sacramentally present to that one eternal Sacrifice of the Cross. 

Now we in the Church are not passive witnesses to this Sacrifice but by virtue of our baptism, we share in the priesthood of Jesus Christ.  1 Peter 2:9 refers to us (collectively) as a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.  The sacred author uses the word ἱεράτευμα (priesthood), a cognate of ἱερεύς indicating that Christians, by virtue of their incorporation into Christ in baptism, become participants in his sacrificing priesthood. 

Now—and this is where we need to be careful—while we all share in the sacrificing priesthood of Christ by virtue of our baptism, there is a unique participation in that priesthood reserved to the bishop. 

According to the patristic Tradition—and again we Catholics recognize two sources of revelation: scripture and Apostolic Tradition passed down through the centuries—the Bishop is the Sacramental Presence of Christ the High Priest in the Church.  The Bishop stands as Christ in the Church and when the Church is gathered around him for the Eucharist he, not of his own authority but in virtue of his re-presenting Christ the High Priest—he alone offers the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The bishop stands at the altar offering the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving; he was flanked by his presbyters and assisted by his deacons but there was only one Eucharistic celebration to which the entire Christian community was expected to come.  The deacons helped with the offerings of the faithful and prepared the bread and wine upon the altar but they did not assist directly in the Eucharist. The presbyters helped the bishop with the distribution of the Eucharistic elements and it can even be said that they concelebrated the Eucharist with the bishops, though not according to the manner our contemporary rites, but it was the bishop alone who offered the Eucharistic Prayer.  

By the middle of the third century, many Christian communities had grown beyond the capacity of a single Sunday assembly.  The bishop would then assign a senior presbyter to preside over a second gathering in another place but to show that there was only one Eucharist in the one (local) Church, the bishop would dispatch a deacon from his Mass with a piece of the Bishop’s hostia (the consecrated bread).  That Eucharistic fragment (called a fermentum) was then placed in the chalice at the presbyter’s assembly to show that while the one community was meeting in two separate places, it was still only one community.  The evolution of presbyter-led Eucharists make it clear that presbyters were acting not in their right in celebrating the Eucharist but in persona episcopi. 

In the fourth century the Church adapted the Roman Imperial administrative system of dioceses and bishops became the religious leaders of much larger areas that required many more Eucharistic assemblies to meet the challenge of a rapidly growing faithful as well as the relative distances under the Church’s administration.  As presbyters took over the various outlaying churches presbyter-led Eucharists became the norm but the Church has always made the distinction between the bishop (sacerdos) and the priest (presbyter).  Technically a priest is not supposed to celebrate the Eucharist without receiving “faculties” from the local bishop—and—except in danger of death—he may not hear confessions or absolve without those faculties.  The priest still performs his ministry in persona episcopi.

And for those who cherish all things pre-Vatican II, the hymn: Ecce Sacerdos Magnus (Behold the Great Priest) was sung only for the entrance of a bishop, never a priest 

Now, the fatal flaw in this theology of the Bishop being the presence of Christ the Priest and his presbyters sharing in the priesthood of Christ as extensions of the bishop is through the centuries too few bishops have proved themselves worthy of the august responsibility.  Bishops have done well, in their day, as Imperial administrators, as princes, as patrons of the arts and learning, as bankers and today as CEO’s—but none of this lets us look at our Bishop and see Christ the Priest.  Maybe that is why Pope Francis seems such an odd duck with all his talk of mercy and a poor church. 

Our Whackadoodle and Friends: Not Catholic, Just Bizarre

Plenty of Room for Diversity in
the Church--but not all diversity
is legit  

 My last posting was a commentary on an article write by “a notable traditional Catholic Scholar” who affects the nom de plume of Benedict Constable. Le Seigneur Constable, to my reading, overplays his hand a bit in his wish to ban biological women (as differentiated from the more frilly-garbed transgendered clerical ones) from service at the altar.  I did point out that his ecclesiology, though perhaps having some credibility before Mystici Corporis (and certainly not since Lumen Gentium/Gaudium et Spes) is not in line with the current teaching of the Church, and his theology of the Sacrament of Orders is highly deficient even by pre-conciliar standards.  This is not to mention serious flaws in his Christian Anthropology and Christology.  But as I suggested, the even more basic problem is not with his theology but with his psycho-sexual self-understanding.   The gentleman displays some obvious discomfort of sharing space with women.  There could be multiple reasons for this; I won’t presume to guess which ones.  But what interests me in this posting is the reaction to his article and a subsequent one “Male-Female Symbolism in Liturgical Roles: Not Bizarre, Just Catholic.” 

Frankly, the sequel article made me somewhat uncomfortable in as that it reminded me of—though it was nowhere as beguilingly salacious as—a talk given years ago by Archbishop (later, when he was given one of the most undeserved red hats in the history of the Church, Cardinal) Stafford of Denver.  As I recall, the talk was reported in the National Catholic Reporter (aka Fishwrap, a name given it by the Krazies but one which I won’t dispute.  NCR to my mind is simply an latter-day ecclesial version of the William Randolph Hearst school of Yellow Journalism.  But that would be another series of posts) and quoted Stafford comparing the priest’s kissing of the altar at Mass with a husband performing cunnilingus (there is a word I never thought I would use in this blog) as foreplay to matrimonial lovemaking.  Now I have always been somewhat charmed by the adage that I once heard in a sermon that sacramentally a husband making love with his wife is to the sacrament of Matrimony what the priest celebrating the Eucharist with the people entrusted to his care is to the sacrament of Holy Orders.  I mean each act is somewhat at the center of the particular sacrament.  Nevertheless, after reading Stafford’s analogy I must admit that it was months before I felt it safe to go to Mass again and these twenty-some years later that image is still stuck, rather distastefully (if you will pardon the entendre) in my mind.  Symbols are most effective when they are employed without explanation or commentary.  And in any case, I am not sure that the various sexual symbolisms of either Cardinal Stafford or our dear Benedict Constable are inherent in the Eucharist or are the results of a somewhat overactive half Jungian/half Freudian imagination.  Maybe Mr. Constable is not alone and I too have my sexual hang-ups—most of us do to some extent or other—but when I go to Church I want to go to Church and not to some piece of theatre that is fraught with sexual undertones (if your are female) and overtones (if you are male.) (See, I do believe that the sexes are not the same.)  Let what operates in the subconscious remain in the subconscious; I am not one who wants to make Mass an occasion of sin for those whose hormones still rage. 

All that being said, what I really want to do in this blog, is to show how what the Right Honorable and Somewhat Pretentious Mr. Constable, a “noteworthy traditional Catholic Scholar,” says and what his audience hears are two very different things and while what the noted scholar writes can be amusing—perhaps even erotically so—what his audience is taking from it portends the ever widening cracks within the unity of the Church. 

Our dear Professor Kwasniewski, whom I think has been remiss in remaining in the wilds of Wyoming far too long, grasps the problem that I mentioned in my previous post—that B.C. sees lay liturgical ministers filling in for insufficient clergy rather than exercising their baptismal dignity—only Kwasniewski doesn’t see this as a problem.  But then, the good Cowboy Philosopher studied philosophy and not theology so what can one expect.    He writes:

Celeste, the way to reconcile your point and Constable's is simply to observe that whenever laymen are doing the readings, they are substituting for clerics. That's all they're doing. (The same goes for altar servers, who should, ideally, be instituted acolytes.) If we didn't have a huge shortage of clerics and if we had a better pastoral plan for the use of instituted lectors and acolytes, we wouldn't need to be always tapping on laymen's shoulders and having them fill in.

That being said, laymen are, as such, symbolically configurable to Christ the High Priest, in a way that laywomen are not -- and that makes a huge different for liturgy, which is a language of symbols.

His “clerical error” is repeated by one Romulus Charles Lewis.

If you are bringing up female competence and spunk and devotion, I can only agree that you are not getting the explanations. Our Lord is the Bridegroom. Women cannot stand as symbols of this. Because the only indispensable person in the celebration of Mass is the a priest, other persons active in the sanctuary are there only as additional hands and feet -- extensions of his body, so to speak. (The Italian word for altar boy is "chierichetto" -- a little cleric). Female servers at Mass obscure and de-signify the maleness of the priest-celebrant.

I love the name Romulus, don’t you?  Why didn’t my parents think of naming me Romulus.  Or Benedict.  Or Euston. Or Archibald.   Great names, all.    Raised by wolves, Romulus was; maybe that was the reason the name was chosen. 

And then there is Jared Clark.  That is another great name. Jared.  I also life Geoffrey, but only if it is Geoff and not Jeff.  Vulgar Americanization, Jeffrey. 

I am aware that this practice is currently licit, and I'm not actually all that concerned with appearances. It's not the bad result that women lectors and altar girls lead some to think priestesses are a real possibility (I am not a consequentialist; if that were the core of my objection, I'd just be calling for better catechesis), but that it goes against the nature of the sanctuary, wherein all liturgical action is priestly. The fact that sanctuary=priestly seems strange is one of the biggest problems in the Church today.

If taking a small step towards correcting this error by requiring a seminarian, or a non-seminarian instituted lector, or another man to read the readings would be seen as sexist....oh well. Still not a consequentialist :P

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET PEOPLE TO READ LUMEN GENTIUM!!! And Sacroscanctum Concilium.  Lectors and acolytes (much less ordinary readers and Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist, and Altar Servers et al.) are not standing in for ordained clergy!!!  They are there by right and duty of Baptism!!! Baptism is the most important of the Seven Sacraments and yet perhaps the least appreciated.  

But then there are the ‘oi polloi, the great unwashed who act not so much out of (bad) theology as about a rejection of everything connected with the Second Vatican Council for the sake of rejecting everything connected with the Second Vatican Council. And so, one Michael Dowd writes: 

Yes, on no female lectors. And no female altar servers, either. And no communion in the hand. And forget about communion under two specials (drop the cup). And turn the priest around to lead, not face the people. Do these all these things and we are off to a good start to celebrating Mass as it should be. : God is there, we need to show proper respect which leads to love. That's what the show is all about folks!

OK, no theology here.  Keep moving on.  Nothing to see.  Just put all the toys back in the toy box and let the nursery look like the night Tinkerbelle came and led the children off to a magical fantasyland.  Pure “restorationism” without a hint of theology.  I can deal with those whose faulty theology leads them to bad liturgical practice, but when it is just this sort of thoughtless demand that the Church be refashioned to their particular taste I cannot help but think of the adage of Aristophanes:

‘Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.’

And speaking of that sort of vacuous a-theological rhetoric we have one Augustine Thomas (sounds like another Anglophile wannabe) who just dismisses Conciliar Catholicism as a perfidious devolution into an insultingly negative caricature of Protestantism   

Most Catholics who even still bother to go to church have been Protestantized in their beliefs of what the Mass, or should I say the "worship service", is.

And then, in a classic example of the fire hydrant pissing on the dog, Augustine Thomas goes on to say that it is the Vatican II crowd that are given to wildly illogical and inherent falsification of the truth:

Don't expect reason from Novus Ordo Catholics. 


They're like leftists. They don't trade in logic. They use any deception or dishonesty necessary to lead the majority astray and then use that majority to silence the opposition, no matter how wrong they are.

Mr. Thomas gives no data to support his thesis that contemporary Catholics have been “Protestantized” in their beliefs and again without any examples goes on claim that supporters of the Reforms of Vatican II resort to deception and dishonesty in advancing reform.  Give examples.  Back up your claim with evidence.  I would hardly dismiss so cavalierly the scholarship of generations of theologians and historians like Chenu and Jungmann and Dix and Bea and Congar and Bouyer and Schillebeeckx and the other brains behind Vatican II. 

But there is one “lwhite”  (perhaps Lily White) who redefines “orthodoxy” and attacks the work of John Saward to strike at two of the theological architects of the   Council, Hans Urs von Balthasar  and Henri de Lubac, both of whom were made Cardinals in their old age by John Paul II, hardly a devotee of Modernism. 

Fr. John Saward, called the "Balthasar of the English-speaking world" is not someone who is a trusted source for Catholic orthodoxy. Balthasar's writings are full of heresies and should be avoided by faithful Catholics.
It was Hans Urs Von Balthasar's writings that became the primary source of confusion in Catholic philosophy and theology. He carried further Henri de Lubac's infection of Modernism into the Church who introduced the principle of self-contradiction into the very heart of truth.


So what we have following Benedict Constable’s just bizarre, not Catholic argument against women reading in the liturgy or taking any other active role that requires their presence in the area surrounding the altar, are two diverse camps.  One camp, typified by Constable himself, rejects the ecclesiology put forth in the Second Vatican Council which recognizes the priestly character of the baptized (distinct from the priestly character unique to those ordained to the presbyterate or episcopate) and empowers every baptized individual, regardless of sex, to liturgical ministries not reserved to the ordained.   The other camp, without any theological rationale, have simply rejected the Conciliar and post-Conciliar developments in the Church out of hand and are equating authentic Catholicism with a return to the pre-Conciliar status quo.

Both these stances are not only warning signs of trouble to come but are dangerous in themselves as they represent an increasing polarizing splintering of the faith, and it will ultimately become impossible for Conciliar and non-Conciliar Catholics to remain united in the same Church.  This is not to say that there is no room for legitimate diversity in the Church.  The Eastern Church not only has a different discipline regarding celibacy, for example, and different liturgical traditions, but also differs from the Western Church on significant doctrines such as purgatory and original sin.  There is, however, a mutual respect for the varying rites and an agreement to let charity trump doctrinal disagreements and permit a certain unresolved ambiguity of belief.  What we see between the Conciliar and non-Conciliar Catholics is not merely a divergence of theological models, but a rejection of authority whether it be the authority of the reigning pope, the authority of his predecessors who approved the various liturgical changes, or the authority of the Council which established the theological framework against which the non-Conciliar Catholics are rebelling.  

Years ago I was at a seminar conducted by the Reverend Martin Marty, a Lutheran and distinguished Church historian.  I recall Dr. Marty saying that the Roman (Catholic) Church has shown itself through the centuries willing to tolerate a huge amount of doctrinal diversion but it is never willing, for a moment, to tolerate a challenge to its authority.  As a historian myself I have come to see that.  Ultimately the non-Conciliar Catholics, whether they be Bishop Fellay and his Society of Saint Pius X or the more home spun variety such as Benedict Constable and Augustine Thomas and Michael Dowd and Jared and Romulus and all the rest will have to submit to the authority of the Council and the Conciliar Popes or they will find themselves on the wrong side of the Church Door.