Francis, Rebuild My Church

Well, we are coming into Holy Week and the fuss of the papal inaugural is dying down.  We can move on from the anger at who went to communion and the sorrow over who didn’t wear a mozetta to the substantial issues at hand.  “Francis, rebuild my Church.”  As Christ spoke to Francis of Assisi from the Crucifix at San Damiano and the Holy Spirit spoke to the Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel, the task of rebuilding is at hand. 
I think the clear signals of the reduced pomp and friendly smiles, as welcome as they are, are no more than the initial sweeping away of cobwebs.  They don’t address the issues, only let in some fresh air and much needed sunlight.  Over the past few days I had to read a doctoral thesis on the expanding role of lay ministry in the face of the growing clergy shortage.  Here I found several things to reflect on.  First, despite the implications to the contrary that the candidate kept reinforcing to my frustration, that the expansion of the laity’s role in the Church is not—or at least should not be—consequent to the decline in vocations to the religious life and priesthood.  The problem is, as he did point out, that over the centuries the rightful roles of the laity in the Church had been assumed by the clergy.  Today we need to restore the commitment to active apostolate to every baptized Christian.  The bishop, the priest, and the deacon each have specific ministries to which they must apply themselves, but the baptized have a wide variety of ministries that belong to them—teaching, healing, counseling, administering, raising funds, publishing, reading the lessons in the liturgy, serving at the altar, feeding the poor, spiritual and corporal works of mercy, caring for the material structure of the churches, sacred art, liturgical and catechetical music, ad infinitum.  The Church’s mission of bringing the Good News (Evangelion, Gospel) of God’s Kingdom into the whole world involves a complex network of ministries to which each and every Christian must be committed. 
This idea of a Church of ministers whose mission involves a complex of ministries helps us as a Church to move from the old model of Power to the new model of service. I have written in previous posts of Cardinal Dulles’ insight that as we move into the third millennium we, as Church, must move from a paradigm of power to service paradigm.  Pope Francis’ new style is pointing us in that direction but it is a model which we must all embrace.       
But returning to the earlier assertion that this expansion of lay ministry must be not a consequence of the shortage of vocations to the religious life and priesthood but a restoration of the rightful vocation of the laity, we must still face the fact that there is a dire need of ordained ministers to serve the ministries that are rightfully theirs—namely the preaching of the Gospel, the celebration of the Liturgy, and the administration of those sacraments proper to the Sacred Orders.  In order to attract vocations to the ordained ministries, we must restore the credibility of the clergy.
There is no doubt that the credibility of the clergy has suffered due to the sex abuse scandals and the way in which clerical sexual abuse has been handled.  The problem is much greater however.  Vocations were seriously falling off for over twenty years before the scandals hit.  Moreover, as the vocational crisis affects not only the ordained clergy and male religious but also female religious communities which have not, for the much greater part, been complicit in the sex abuse crisis, we need to look at the broader issue.
Fifty years ago the priest or religious was widely respected. In great part this was due not merely to the supposed (sometimes wrongly so) holiness of the priest or religious, but to their having a superior education to the laity.  The priest, the doctor, and the lawyer were the three educated men in the Catholic parish of the 1950’s.   Catholics, in general, were working class people with high-school education.  That changed after World War II and by the ‘60’s and ‘70’s Catholics were increasingly college educated and a decade later, had post-graduate degrees.  The laity had quickly surpassed the clergy in formal education.  Moreover, the inbred seminary systems—while providing better than high-school education—could not (and for the most part, still cannot) match the education provided by universities and colleges.  As a Catholic I have often been embarrassed by clergy whose provincialism and narrow views on a wide range of subjects show an inability to think critically.   No one expects the priest to be a renaissance man—indeed with the explosion of knowledge in our contemporary world renaissance men and women are increasingly hard to find—but we need clergy who have been thought to think critically and not merely swallow any shallow doctrine or silly notion proclaimed by someone higher up the ecclesiastical food-chain. 
But intellectual ability alone is not enough to restore credibility to the clergy.  We must strive for genuine holiness.  Piety is a beginning but piety is not to be confused with holiness.   Virtue is fundamental but virtue alone is not holiness. We need a spiritual rebirth in the clergy, among the religious, certainly among the hierarchy, and among the faithful.  Hopefully our new pope with his experience as a novice director in the Society of Jesus and his personal familiarity with the riches of Ignatian spirituality can help show the way.  I suspect the scaling down of pomp and ceremony are already signs of a deeper spiritual life on the “throne” of Peter.  Anyone who has given serious mediation to the Man of Sorrows would lose taste for scarlet capes and brocaded robes.   
No entries the next few days--back on Palm Sunday or Monday.

Voices Past and Present

Bishop John Carroll, the first United States

Bishop and a model for bishops who can
think "outside the box" to effectively

evangelize in new and uncertain situations

I am on the road this weekend giving a workshop in the History of the Church in the United States and don’t have access to my library so  let’s do a divergence from our saga of the building of Saint Peter’s.  I had dinner the other evening with a group of seminarians—several Catholic and several Protestant.  Each was asked to introduce himself or herself and say something about their experience in seminary and how they realized their vocation.  One young man, an Episcopalian Seminarian from the (Episcopal) Diocese of South Carolina,  mentioned in his introduction that his bishop had identified him for “church planting and evangelization.”  “Church planting” is the process of establishing a new congregation in an area where there is no existing congregation of the particular denomination that is sponsoring the mission.  We Catholics begin plenty of new parishes—especially in the south and the west of the United States where the Catholic Church is growing;  not so much in the north-east and upper mid-west where the there are often more churches than are needed and we find parishes being closed or  amalgamated with other parishes.  But we Catholics don’t usually engage in “church planting.”  We simply divide the existing parish or parishes and split off a new parish.  Church planting is something different.  It really requires beginning a new parish or congregation “from scratch.” 
     What impressed me in this conversation with this seminarian is not that he is being prepared for this challenging and creative mission.  What impressed me is that his bishop is thinking so creatively about how to make the best use of his present and future clergy.  The bishop is “thinking outside the box,” seeing possibilities that do not yet exist.  There was a time in the history of the American Church when our bishops had that sort of creative leadership.   One of the seminarians present at the dinner, a Catholic, is a recent immigrant from Germany.  He asked a question about the “chapter” providing guidance for the bishop.  The other Americans, at least the Catholics in the group, all looked at him blankly.  “Chapter?” they asked, “what is a chapter?”  He was surprised when I explained that we don’t have chapters in the American Church.  The Chapter is composed of the canons of the cathedral and they have certain rights and duties in the election of the bishop and in advising the bishop in his ministry.  Chapters are—had have been for fifteen hundred years—standard operating procedure in European dioceses.  But when the American hierarchy was established with John Carroll’s appointment in 1790,  Carroll told Rome that chapters were not practicable in the United States.  We could not afford to tie up seven or eight priests to serve a cathedral when we needed every available priest to go out and “ride the circuit,” saying mass, hearing confessions, baptizing, blessing marriages, anointing the sick, preaching, and teaching catechism in the dozens and dozens of rural communities in Maryland, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and along the Canadian border where there were Catholic settlements.  Carroll and his priests found many creative ways of meeting the challenges of a small and minority denomination in a large and then rural society.    
      It would be interesting for today’s  American (Catholic) bishops  to think outside the box how to meet the pastoral challenges of an expanding Catholic population in some parts of the nation while it is shrinking in others.  It would be great to see them come up with some creative solutions to the vocation problem and how we can keep our Catholic communities tied to the Eucharist when we just don’t have enough priests to go around.  It would be wonderful to see them address the complex problems of a Church that is so heavily immigrant and non-English speaking before there are more Latino “evangelicals” than Catholics.  If only they could repair their moral credibility and speak with authority rather than from what has become a very shaky power.  This is the time to think creatively and try new solutions.  When you know the History of the Church, creativity is the Catholic response.  Just ask Augustine of Canterbury or Innocent III or Hildegarde of Bingen, or Bernard of Clairvaux, or Charles Borromeo, or Ignatius Loyola, or Mary Ward or Vincent DePaul, or Madeline Sophie Barat, or Catherine McAuley or Mary MacKillop.  These were creative thinkers.  We have been blessed in more recent times with people like Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton, and Dom Helder Camara,  and Gino Baroni, and Joseph Bernardin, and  Monika Hellwig.  Today we have among us Elizabeth Johnson, and Richard Rohr, and Thomas Keating, and Joan Chittester, and Daniel Berrigan, and Tom Gumbleton, and Ronald Rohlheiser.  It isn’t that the Holy Spirit isn’t trying to open our eyes, our hearts, and our imagination to challenges of proclaiming the Kingdom of God.   It is just that the hearts of this people has grown dull.  Let us beg for the grace to listen to the Holy Spirit with the ear of our hearts. 

History in the Making: Mass attendance--The Reasons Why People Come to Mass (or don't)

Sunday Mass in a vibrant Catholic Parish

The final point I want to make about the reasons for people attending Mass—or drifting away from mass—depends in great part on the personality of the clergy.  We may argue that it should not make a difference, we come to Church to worship God not because of Father So-and-so.  But the single most common reason that Catholics will give as to why they no longer attend church depends on their interaction with a particular priest.   Some priest at some time said something cruel, or failed to be present at a key pastoral moment, or did something offputting in the liturgy or in some other way gave scandal or offense. 
     I have used the parish where I regularly attend mass as an example of an active and vibrant congregation.  Approximately three thousand people attend one of eight weekend liturgies, some coming from as far away as fifty miles, because they find something in this particular parish.  I have already mentioned the sense of community, the quality of the liturgy and the preaching, the sense of mission, but a significant number of people feel drawn by the priests here in the parish.  There are two priests assigned to the parish—the pastor and the parochial vicar.  The Parochial Vicar is a native Spanish speaker, his English is weak, and most of his work is with the Hispanic community in the Parish.  We recently, within the last two months, have had a change of pastors and are just coming to know our new pastor.  He is not a total stranger: far from it.  His family lives in the parish and he himself has “filled in” various weekends over the years when we needed some auxiliary help.  There is a third priest who lives in the rectory while pursuing a graduate degree and who helps out.  And there are two religious order priests who help out as needed. 
      We have been fortunate in the personalities of each of these priests.  Each one is a very unique person with different gifts and talents but they have certain common denominators.  First they are all good preachers—not necessarily great preachers, but good preachers.  One of them is quite outspoken but handles disagreement well—he always says  “I don’t want you to agree with me; I just want you to think!”  Each of them brings his spirituality to bear in his homilies and they all, each in his own way, is candid about his own faults and failings.  None of them talk down to us.  We find something worth grasping and taking home in their homilies.  Secondly, they are all reverent in their celebration—again each in a somewhat different style.  Some are a bit more formal than others; others perhaps warmer in their style.  But they are all prayerful.
       And they are friendly.  They have time for parishioners.  They stand outside church after mass to greet people.  If someone wants to talk—or needs to talk—they make themselves available.  If there is a social they come—and the religious priests don’t live on campus and have to come some distance—but they are generous with their time.  Most parishioners call the various priests “Father” but they each seem comfortable when they are addressed by their given name.  One of the religious priests is quite humorous and makes everyone laugh whether in a one-to-one conversation or when speaking with a group.  They all bring a sense of joy in their priesthood and are an advertisement for vocations. 
      Too often I hear about other situations where priests are very remote from their parishioners and are not available to them except in sacramental roles.   The priest pontificates both at the altar—mistaking pomp for reverence—and in the pulpit, declaiming about things of which he knows little or nothing.  Many priests presume to tell their parishioners how to think or for whom to vote as if we were incapable of making good moral decisions on our own.  Few priests seem to know much about the life of the laity.  They speak in ideals as if  they had a congregation of Ozzie and Harrietts (that dates me) or the Cleavers.  Some speak about complex medical or psychological issues as if all wisdom lie digested in their bellies. 
       One of the real weaknesses today in the Church is the effeminacy of so many of the clergy.  Some priests argue that men are put off by the presence of so many women in the sanctuary as lectors, Eucharistic ministers, servers, etc.  I don’t think so.   But many men are made uncomfortable by the effeminate vesture and mannerisms of the priest saying mass.  This is not to say that vestments are somewhat “drag” but lace and pompoms and fussiness don’t lend themselves to the Sunday afternoon beer and football crowd.  Priests should be simply and with dignity vested, but avoid the self-aggrandizement of  decking themselves out conspicuously ornate robes.  Similarly they should walk like a man and not mince around the altar like a ballerina with a weak ankle.  There was a guide-book some years ago to teach priests good manners and handsome mannerisms at the altar and it was entitled Strong, Loving, and Wise.  These many years later that is still what we are looking for in our priests.