The Obamazation of Pope Francis VI

Nelson Mandela died last year on December 5^th.  Tributes to the man who smashed apartheid in South Africa poured out from world leaders, among them Pope Francis who wrote:

 It was with sadness that I learned of the death of former President Nelson Mandela, and I send prayerful condolences to all the Mandela family, to the members of the Government and to all the people of South Africa. In commending the soul of the deceased to the infinite mercy of Almighty God, I ask the Lord to console and strengthen all who mourn his loss. Paying tribute to the steadfast commitment shown by Nelson Mandela in promoting the human dignity of all the nation’s citizens and in forging a new South Africa built on the firm foundations of non-violence, reconciliation and truth, I pray that the late President’s example will inspire generations of South Africans to put justice and the common good at the forefront of their political aspirations. With these sentiments, I invoke upon all the people of South Africa divine gifts of peace and prosperity.

For decades Nelson Mandela was a controversial figure.  He was demonized by those who were desperate to keep South Africa a bastion of white supremacy.  He was lionized by those who were determined to break the stranglehold of the Afrikaner minority over the indigenous peoples of South Africa.  Like most historical figures, and indeed like most of us, he was neither as good a person as he should have been nor as bad a person as he could have been, but few people in our modern world have had the impact for justice that  had Nelson Mandela.  On the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum we can let it rest there. To the average Catholic the Holy Father’s comments were measured, rational and appropriate.

But the wing-nuts in the Church were not willing to let it rest there.  Their discomfort, indeed fury, with Francis was only fueled by his relatively neutral remarks about the late President.  There were those like “Mac” who wrote on motheofgod.com  “Im (sic) disappointed with Pope Francis choice of words again.”  Ok, fair enough. We can always be disappointed.  But then Janet from Restore DC Catholicism came on a lot stronger with her disappointment, writing:

 With disappointment I read the news that Pope Francis paid public tribute to genocide-facilitator Nelson Mandela …by no stretch of the imagination was Mandela "promoting the human dignity of the nation's citizens".   ...  The Holy Father's "tribute" does not constitute dogma or even the lowest level of Church teaching. Deo Gratias!

Ladies and gentlemen, let's be clear about something, shall we? We have been promised by Our Lord that His Vicar will never solemnly promulgate error. But that's it! Never has Our Lord promised that all pontiffs will be wise. The Church's history has featured many popes who did much damage to the Church. ….we  do not hold him (Pope Francis) above question in matters of prudential judgment.  
 Well that was actually fairly mild compared to “EastSideHunky” on Stephenson County Pro-Life’s blog: Pro-Life Corner and their Posting “Pope Francis and the Child Killer.” 

Francis is clearly a modernist, one day quite orthodox and the next a total liberal. On these “off the cuff” comments one can totally ignore and disregard as divisive as they are. They are not magisterial nor proper to the teaching office of the supreme pontiff. Unfortunately, many conciliar Catholics and libs will either be confused by Frank ( Pope Francis) or cheer his heterodoxy.

This marks a notching up of the rhetoric when a figure as multi-faceted as Nelson Mandela is reduced to a simplistic caricature such as “Child Killer.”  This is precisely the same sort of reductionism that these same voices use to demean President Obama.  And where is the heterodoxy in Francis’ message of condolence?  And what qualifies East Side Hunky to label something as heretical?  This is the sort of partisan negativity that makes any true dialogue, whether political or theological, impossible.  It totally undermines rationality with bias.  But it gets even more outrageous.

When Britain’s Catholic Herald headlined “Catholics around the world mourn Nelson Mandela” one Agnus Dei replied

"No they do not! Not those who abide by the Church's teachings. Those who call themselves "Catholic" and who are not, are far more dangerous than those who say they would never join the Church because they do not agree with Her teachings. They do not harm the Church, professing to follow and worship Christ, yet fulfilling Satan's agenda to remodel Christ's Church in HIS own image. Making Her pay lip-service to Holy Church, whilst at the same time allowing Her to be undermined and perverted by those working so tirelessly against Her. 

Wolves disguising themselves as sheep have come into the sheep-fold and the sheep are being led astray. adhering to the doctrines of demons. The Holy Church of Christ is in perilous danger.

So Pope Francis and other prelates who paid tribute to President Mandela are remaking the Church in Satan’s own image and are leading Christ’s sheep astray.  That is far more than a vote of no confidence in Francis’ leadership, it is a strong indictment against him and his papacy.  But it follows the line of argument put forward by one wing-nut website which expressed its unhappiness with Pope Francis, not only for his message of condolence on the death of President Mandela but for his tolerance of gay people.   It gives us a picture into the rabid hatred that motivates those who are committed to the resurgence of racial hatred and the ties of racial bigotry to gender bigotry. 

The increasingly anti-traditional Pope praised the recently deceased communist and anti-white terrorist Nelson Mandela.  ….

Mandela’s South Africa was a genocidal, anti-white nightmare, where the most disgusting depravities were enshrined as “human rights”.  In South Africa we see the future of the entire White world, a future which Francis and the corrupted Catholic Church are fighting for.

Now granted that particular website is clearly wing-nut territory, but let’s look back to a more moderate one: Stephenson County Pro-Life’s Blog, Pro Life Corner, where Linda writes

Nelson Mandela did NOT sacrifice his freedom for anyone! He was justly convicted to life in prison for the mass murders of thousands of innocent men, women and children, white and black–as the leader of the “armed wing” of the African National Congress. He proudly pleaded guilty of terrorist acts, and REFUSED to denounce his violent activity as the leader of the “armed wing” of the African National Congress. He was a ruthless, heartless killer, a Communist, who enacted revenge while president of South Africa on those who protested his legalization of ABORTION, PORNOGRAPHY, PROSTITUTION, GAY MARRIAGE! Adolph Hitler did a lot of “good things” for Germany: built a modern road system, increased jobs, repaired infrastructure, etc. Do you think Pope Pius XII would have given such gushing accolades for Adolph Hitler at Hitler’s death because of those “good things he did”, like Pope Francis did for the Communist Nelson Mandela? Or would the Pope use the very words of Jesus, speaking of another secular governor, Herod: “That FOX…” This is a sad, sad day in the Catholic Church.

Linda’s rants are reminiscent of the sort of the discrediting libel that the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover put out against the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Era.  There is a mad, irrational affixing of labels and names that bears no relation to the nuances of historical facts.  People—in this case, President Mandela and, by association, Pope Francis—are painted with broad brushes that ignore the subtleties of fact and the distinctions of history. 

What explanations can we draw from the sort of the attacks that conservative Catholics are making on Pope Francis?  What are they really upset about?  Is it a message of condolence to a nation on the death of their re-founding father? 

At the transition of millennia, we are witnessing the shift of history’s tectonic plates.  Power—and the future—are shifting from the North to the South.  The White race is losing the hegemony over the world since a global consciousness emerged in the sixteenth century with the Age of Exploration.  In the same way—and much closer to home for many of us—the gender roles have shifted dramatically within two generations.  Women head nations, major corporations, and even religions.  Openly Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered men and women are taking places in society that were closed to them until a decade or so ago.  Those who find their identity (and comfort zone) in the white male patriarchy that has governed life in American—and the greater part of the developed world—society are feeling more and more disenfranchised.  Many of us do not have the standard of living that our parents had twenty years ago.  We feel politically voiceless as well as increasingly economically emarginated.  Change is very threatening.  Nelson Mandela is a powerful symbol of change.  Pope Francis’ papacy is symbolizing change.  A President of African lineage in the White House is enormous change.  Fear and Anger are normal responses when we find ourselves threatened by the slippery slope of being on the downside of history.  Get over it.  Put on your big boy (girl) pants and decide how you are going to be part of the future and stop fighting it.  Our Christian faith tells us that somewhere in that future is the Kingdom of God.  Shape the future, don’t fight it.  

The Obamazation of Pope Francis V

Saw this on facebook 

A week before Christmas, Pope Francis announced his reorganization of several Vatican dicasteries and did not re-appoint Cardinal Raymond Burke to either the Congregation for Bishops or the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints.  This leaves His Eminence with membership on only one Vatican Congregation, that of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.  He remains, of course, head of the Apostolic Signatura which is a post which is mostly honorary and has little real power.  While on the Congregation for Bishops, however, Burke had immense influence over the appointment of new bishops and thus the leadership of the Church in the United States.  The replacement of Cardinal Burke by Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington DC caused an outcry by wing-nuts of the Catholic right because Cardinals Burke and Wuerl have taken very different stances on the issue of administering Holy Communion to public figures whose political stances do not reinforce the Church’s teaching on abortion, contraception, and same-sex relationships.  While Cardinal Wuerl supports the Church’s traditional teaching he has been very outspoken in maintaining that the Eucharist should not be “used as a weapon” politically.  Cardinal Burke, on the other hand, has advocated a policy of withholding Holy Communion to politicians who do not support Church doctrine.  The wrath of the right came down on Pope Francis in the weeks after dropping Burke from the post where he could advance the cause of prelates who think as he does.  Here are some of the comments that appeared on various Catholic websites and blogs.

What in God's Holy Name are Catholics supposed to think about this pope????? 

This could be the worst news we have heard since the election of Pope Francis. Cardinal Burke is the one giant in the American group of Cardinals, head and shoulders above the others in truly living the Word. His recent interview with Raymond Arroyo could not help but leave one in awe with regard to his grasp of Christ's teaching and the Church's mission today. I shall be on my knees in prayer shortly to ask the Holy Spirit's protection and graces for him. .

Well, as a faithful Catholic who has fought the culture of death and modernity WITHIN the Church I can tell you that this papacy has demoralized and confused me for months. I am glad that you are blessed by it, I truly am. But seeing more and more questionable appointments and confusing documents has worn me down. That is just where I am right now

Francis cannot change Church teaching but he can make them look meaningless.

Well, I'm not up on Catholic politics but it seems that a courageous conservative just got squashed and ignored. And here I was saying that the Church should clean house of the Marxists and whatnot. What happens? The just the opposite! This is not a good sign. The Church needs a fighter against the culture of Death. I heard Rush Limbaugh describe the Pope Francis as a Marxist. I'm scared to research it -- there might be something to it.

Why are we so dead-certain that Francis is pro-life?

When the pope is being embraced by a secular humanist mainstream media, that pope may want to reconsider what he's doing and what he's saying.

the “smoke of satan" has invaded the Church........especially in the Vatican

He's  (Thomas Peters)  authored a piece that conveys a few things to me.

1. Urban legends about what inspires faithful Catholics to speak the truth - even when our Holy Father is the recipient of the message - live on.

2. There is still a death grip on clericalism.

The Holy Father informed us of his trajectory through his apostolic exhortation, followed by the actions of replacing Cardinal Burke with Cardinal Wuerl to advise him on what priests in the United States have the spiritual substance and attributes to be a bishop.

Now, numerous faithful Catholics who in charity had been giving Pope Francis' imprudent statements the benefit of the doubt, have publicly calibrated what Cdl. Wuerl's appointment will mean on the ground relative to the catechesis of tools for salvation.

Because it doesn't paint a pretty picture, evangelists who take their role seriously need and want to be most cautious about how to proceed in the public square.

Some of the comments and reactions to my post earlier this week on Pope Francis’s decision not to renew Cardinal Burke’s membership on the Congregation for Bishops revealed a disturbing trend to me, namely, the extent to which many Catholics have adopted an apprehensive attitude about the current pontiff.

First of all, I think we're beyond the apprehension stage. We were apprehensive during the eight months of commentary undermining and insulting the 2000 years of the Deposit of Faith and those who love and evangelize It.

Though Pope Francis has issued numerous clarifications, he then went ahead and contradicted said clarifications with an apostolic exhortation which ratified the trajectory of his original statements.

Pope Francis selected a spineless bishop who operates a chancery that persecutes faithful priests and teaches Church laws can or should be ignored and disobeyed at our own will.

Whether he intended to or he didn't, Pope Francis has repeatedly conveyed that the laws and teachings of the Church are small-minded rules of sourpusses and under his watch the the road to salvation will be the abandonment of teaching right judgment and distinctions between sin and virtue for the new church of social service and being giddy.

 Each one of us who have suffered the ill effects of this counterfeit church knows what this means for the abilities of priests to teach the substance in the Catechism, and teach obedience to the Catechism and Church law in our schools, parishes and in our own homes. And, we know what it means for the salvation of the masses of uncatechized.

 We are acutely aware that many of Christ's elect who have suffered through this undisciplined and counterfeit church have lost touch with that immutable oath.

We have painfully watched the Pope undermine our teachings and sacred traditions which offer the highest unblemished gifts, surrender and respect to Christ and have prayerfully and thoughtfully navigated these waters so as not to scandalize those suffering from despair.

 The more I read about Pope Francis, the more I am convinced that the soul of this papacy is up for grabs.

I am also firmly convicted that it is a duty of our Baptism to inform our loving and beloved Holy Father that we will not subject ourselves or our children to the false church within for a nanosecond longer. Most of us have fled and already found refuge and he is making those refuges fodder for the apostates who have control of power within our Chanceries because of weak bishops like Cardinal Wuerl.

Then again, in a document of this length one would also expect to find a good deal of what has made this Pope so beloved by the worldwide mass media: radical-sounding bombshells about how wrong the Church is and how much Francis must do to make it right, in all humility. That too is there—in spades...

Francis’s “dream Church” involves nothing less than a deconstruction of the papacy in favor of a synodal model governed—God help us!—by the national bishops’ conferences:

These are interesting comments because they show that for the right wing, as for the left, the Pope is no longer the ultimate arbiter of the Catholic Faith.  No Catholic would have dared uttered this level of criticism—or dissent—in the days of Pius XII.  But the world has changed and no authority is above questioning.  That is a positive thing.  Just because the Pope is infallible doesn’t mean that he can’t be wrong.  What is dangerous about it is that it shows for the right wing, as for the left, the individual holds the “right” to determine what is authentic to our Catholic faith.  The true faith is what I believe and this attitude undermines the very nature of the Church, or at least the Catholic Church, where orthodoxy is determined by the harmonious alignment of magisterial teaching, theological scholarship, and the consensus fidelium.  Pope Francis eats in the cafeteria at the Casa Santa Marta—a good protection for his safety.  Hard to tamper with the food when you don’t know what pork chop he will pick.  But it seems that these days all Catholics dine in the cafeteria and the day of a menu fixe is on the ash heap of maniples and mantellones.  To bad, I always wanted to be a prelate di mantellone.  

Why They Are Afraid of Pope Francis 16

Flannery O'Connor  1925-1964

The image of the church I like is that of the holy, faithful people of God. This is the definition I often use, and then there is that image from the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Dogmatic Constitution on the Church’ (No. 12). Belonging to a people has a strong theological value. In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.

This is another quote from the interview that Pope Francis gave La Civilta
Cattolica (and reprinted in America) that explains the very Vatican II course he is charting for the Church in his pontificate.  While John Paul II and Benedict XVI both used the image “People of God” in reference to the Church it was not their operative ecclesiology and when they used it was a very sanitized “people” that they meant as “People of God.”  Of course, John Paul was a Philosopher and Benedict a theologian and they both—and especially Benedict—dealt better with abstractions than with the nitty-gritty dirt of the Incarnation as it unfolds in human life today.  Francis, on the other hand, has a background in the sciences and is more prepared to deal with concrete realities than the sanitized ideals.  Francis has made it clear, whether in regard to gay clergy or nursing mothers or every and any messy life in between, that the People of God is an inclusive reality to which all belong and where all have a seat at the table.  That doesn’t please the Pharisees who want the Kingdom of God to be a more exclusive affair to which the riffraff  find the doors barred. 

Francis also makes the point that God has saved a People and that does not sit well with the neo-trads who, despite their claims to Catholicity have bought into the Protestant idea that we are saved as individuals.  In our Catholic tradition, going back to the Fathers of the Church, we are saved precisely because we belong to Christ—not as his possessions but as his members, the members of his Body.  This is a major theme, of course, in the Letters of Saint Paul. We are the Body of Christ.  For Paul this is not a metaphor.  Paul sees us, corporately, as the physical Body of the Resurrected Christ and individually as the various members (or parts) of that Body.  We have a claim on sharing in his Resurrection precisely because of this membership, not because of any merits (or lack of faults) of our own. 

I remember how th neo-trads wailed and carried on when Hilary Clinton wrote her book It Takes a Village.  I am certainly not going to claim the distinguished Ms. Clinton as a voice that carries a Catholic message, but in this case—or at least in the concept embodied in the title—there is no idea more Catholic.  We Catholics are intensely corporate people and this is something that clashes with our American approach that so stresses individualism.  The neo-trads simply can’t get this.  The see only the individual and forget that the individual—saint or sinner, gay or straight, male or female, red-white-yellow-brown or black, contracepting or birthing, Democrat or Republican, orthodox or heterodox, liberal or conservative, A&P or every Sunday—once baptized, irretrievably belongs to Christ. 

The Catholic Short-Story writer, Flannery O’Connor caught this notion and articulated it well in her story “Revelation.”  Mrs. Turpin, the principal character in the story, is a woman who is very confident of her place in the social and moral hierarchy until an encounter with an ill-tempered girl in a doctor’s waiting room makes her confront her world from a more humbled perspective.  In one of my favorite passages in American literature, Mrs. Turpin sees her fellow denizens of this earth through a different lens.  She is standing one evening looking at the hogs in their pen on her farm:

Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge.  At last she lifted her head.  There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk.  She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound.  A visionary light settled in her eyes.  She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.  Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven, there were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black n****** in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.  And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.  She leaned forward to observe them closer.  They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.  She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead.   In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. 

We all need, like Mrs Turpin, to come to see that our standard of who stands right in the sight of God is a very arbitrary one and not necessarily the definitive judgment that lies beyond our mortal perception.  

Monkeys in Space and Empty Pews in Church

I went on a road trip today (Sunday) and as I set out from my home to the highway, I drove past five, six, seven churches—United Methodist, Eastern Orthodox, Reformed, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian.  Nine o’clock Sunday morning and there was not one car in any parking lot.  I am sure that by 10 30 or 11 it was a different story but there is no doubt that Church attendance is on the decline.  It would not have been that way twenty years ago.  In our parish, one of the priests said that there are two less masses and about a thousand people a Sunday less than when he was stationed here thirty-five years ago. Sure, demographics play a part. Families are smaller.  The ethnic pool is more varied with more Asians and others from non-Christian cultures.  In fact, we see the occasional mosque opening—something that we didn’t see thirty years ago.  And yes, south of the Mason-Dixon there are new parishes opening up with large churches to hold an expanding Catholic population of transplanted North-easterners and Mid-westerners.  But when the dust settles there are still fewer and fewer people attending Church now than a generation ago.

And as my observations of late-opening parking lots this past Sunday would indicate, this is not just a Catholic problem.  While Bible Churches and fundamentalist groups are growing, the liberal denominations are shrinking.  The Episcopal Church, despite an influx of converts from Catholicism and other denominations, has shrunk from 4 million members a generation ago to 2.5 million today.  What is the problem?  Is it, as some allege, the vapidity of liberal Christianity?  Or is it something else?

Neo-trad Catholics have blamed the decline in Mass attendance on the Second Vatican Council and the move away from the old Latin liturgy, but the even more severed falloff  of mainline Protestant Churches belies any attempt to pin the problem to anything within Catholicism itself.  And the Catholic Church has not drunk the “liberal Kool-Aide” of same-sex marriage, ordination of women, abortion rights, and other causes that have caused dissention and defection among the liberal denominations.   If anything, we have lost more members because of our intransience than of any alleged accommodation to the liberal agenda.

Of course not all those who have stopped going to mass regularly have stopped going to Church. While many Catholics have often found new homes in Episcopalian or Lutheran Churches because of  issues of divorce and remarriage or for reasons of acceptance of same-sex marriage and families,  most ex-Catholics who still go to Church have joined Bible Churches or Pentecostal Congregations on the other end of the social spectrum.  Of course, even more former Mass-goers seem just to prefer having Sunday mornings to themselves to read the paper, do brunch, play golf, or just sleep in.

In all the arguing about the reasons for the fall off in church I think we are failing to acknowledge that our cosmology has taken a serious hit.  Those of us on the shady side of Medicare (how I never dreamed that day would come), still remember a heaven above and a hell below.  God dwelt in that heaven.  The Devil lived in that subterranean hell.  One died and one went up to heaven or down to hell.  It was not quite clear where purgatory was, but as it was only a temporary arrangement we could live with the ambiguity.    Today, of course, without much thought such a tiered universe has completely disappeared from the human immagination.  Long before Sputnik or Alan Shepherd and Freedom-7, we knew the vast infinity of space but it was only when people started to pierce it that the boundless vacuum of the universe began to sink into our consciousness.  And when it did, it left God homeless.   It seems embarrassingly naïve to us now to admit that we bought into the picture of Trito-Isaiah who has God declare: “The Heavens are my throne; the earth is my footstool.”   And indeed we may not have put it quite that way, but we did have a place for God and we don’t anymore.  Five hundred years ago, a helio-centric cosmos threatened Christian orthodoxy but now the situation is far more disturbing.  It was bad enough that Copernicus told us that we were not the center of being, but that we were a planet orbiting the sun; now our earth has been reduced to a mere neutron orbiting an atomic nucleus—one of trillions and trillions in a measureless universe.  Such immensity makes us totally irrelevant to a Deity that could not possibly—in our imagination at least—be any more aware of us than we are aware of whatever subatomic particles comprise that neutron that orbits the atom that is one of the trillions that make up the “h” key on our keyboard. 

On the other hand, there are those for whom God, dispossessed of his home in the heavens, has taken up residence in the human soul.  I am not sure what word to use.  I have chosen soul, but I could equally have chosen psyche or even heart.   I would prefer heart, in fact, but don’t want to confuse that to which I am referring as merely the emotions.  I mean that center of consciousness which has access to the emotions, but also consists of the intellect and of the will.  So let’s say soul.  I am not quite sure exactly what the human soul is.  It is a metaphysical category rather than a subject of the physical sciences, and so I mean it simply as our self-conscious being. 

The idea of God dwelling in the soul (or heart, or psyche) is not anything new.  Long before the space program began shooting monkeys and then humans into space, people like Augustine of Hippo and Teresa of Avila wrote of the human heart (or soul) as God’s dwelling place.  You find it in the psalms.  You find it in the Christian scriptures.  Among my favorite spiritual writers, an early twentieth-century French nun, Elizabeth of the Trinity, wrote eloquently of heaven being within the human heart.  She builds her theology on Saint Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle.

The Mass, as it was celebrated before the Second Vatican Council, reflected the cosmology of a God in Heaven above.  The theology, built on the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages—Saints Anselm and Thomas Aquinas in particular—saw a priest, who was a sacramental representation of Christ the High Priest, offering the propitiatory sacrifice of the Cross to God the Father above on behalf of the People gathered below.  An anthropologist could explain how the ritual of the Mass reflected this cosmology and theology.  The people knelt silently—hopefully attentively—beyond the railings that marked the sacred space that only the priest and his assistants (all males) could enter, ascending anywhere from three to ten stairs to do so.  At the top of the stairs, the priest standing (others kneeling) and with the faithful gathered behind him, approached the earthly altar which was a sort of “stargate” that opened into a world beyond and there made a sacrifice of Christ mystically (i.e. sacramentally) re-presented (that is, made present again) in his Body and Blood by bread and wine.  It was a making-present-once-again of the one Sacrifice of Calvary and it was done with the aim of winning forgiveness of our sins.  It really is a lovely conception and when carried out with full ceremony (which was quite rare) is an exquisitely beautiful ritual.  But it sacramentally represents a cosmology that has disappeared.  This tiered universe with God looking down from the clouds above has gone the way of Zeus on Mount Olympus or Woden in Valhalla. 

Now to be fair, the old liturgy could also be a contemplative experience.  The operative word here is “could.”  For most it was a quasi-magical ritual.  The right person (the priest) had to say the right words (the prescribed text) in the right way (in Latin)with the right gestures (the rubrics).  If anything was off, the ritual was “invalid.”  Similarly many of the laity had their self-imposed prescribed prayers and rituals.  They said the rosary or worked their way through a stack of novena booklets preparing themselves for Holy Communion.  There was a huge disconnect between what happened at the altar and what the average person in the pews was doing until the moment of intersection when the person approached the communion rail and received the Holy Communion that had been offered on the altar.  Then the individual went back to his prayers and the priest to his ritual.  But for some, the quiet and the aesthetics of the church building, or if the full ritual was used,  the choir and a full set of sacred ministers, could still their souls into an interior quiet of genuine contemplative prayer.  But even this was a bit complicated as some confused an appreciation of the aesthetics of the Liturgy with supernatural prayer.  The aesthetics could, and often did, emotionally sweep a person into a sort of sweetness that was easily confused for some allegedly spiritual grace.     

One of my favorite operas is Puccini’s Tosca, probably because I lived for a good number of years in the area bordered by Sant’Andrea della Valle, the Palazzo Farnese, and the Castel Sant’Angelo: the sites of Acts I, II, and III of the work.  And Act I concludes with a magnificent scene of a religious procession with the Blessed Sacrament carried in a monstrance by a richly vested prelate and assisted by equally gorgeously garbed clergy beneath a tall canopy carried on poles by lace bedecked acolytes.  There are multiple thuribles sending clouds of incense into the air as the stage is filled with scores of singers chanting a melody reminiscent of the Pange Lingua.  It’s wonderful. It’s mystical.  It carries you away.  And the host in the monstrance is, of course, a dud, probably a cardboard cutout.  Supernatural grace and aesthetic appreciation can find themselves in a shared experience, but feelings of religious transport are no sure sign of grace.  The only sure sign of grace is an increase in charity.  I wish I could say that I find that increase in all those who prefer the old rituals.  I wish I could say that I find it in all those who prefer the new liturgy. 

The problem with the new rites is that they side-step the challenge of a collapsed cosmology and never address the issue of where to find God.  Just as the pre-conciliar rites are built on a medieval scholastic idea of the priest offering a propitiatory sacrifice for the forgiveness of the sins of the people, the novus ordo is based on the patristic understanding of Christ, in his Body the Church, announcing the Evangelion of the Kingdom of God and proclaiming the Death and Resurrection of the Lord until he comes again.  The focus is not on the priest alone but on the assembly which is Christ present in his Body the Church. The various members of the assembly have, as members of Christ’s Body, their diverse ministries.  The priest sacramentally represents Christ, the Head of the Body, in the dual ministries of Announcing the Word and Breaking the Bread.  By Breaking the Bread I mean, of course, not simply the distribution of the Eucharist but the entire Eucharistic Action of offering the Great Thanksgiving in which re-present the One Eternal Sacrifice of Christ.  But the emphasis is Christ and Christ in his Body, the Church.  Where is God (the Father) in all this?  That is never really cleared up—at least not in the ritual itself.  And it is hard to make this liturgy a contemplative experience.  In the first place, I am not sure that the Mass is meant to be a contemplative experience, but at least as it is structured now, we are all rather busy being Christ to one another.   There are readings to be read and responsories to be sung and processions to be processed and all within 60 minutes.  I have seen the liturgy prayed, really prayed, but almost exclusively in monastic settings and not always there.  Cistercians tend to do it well, but then they don’t seem to have much else to do.  I envy them for that.  But in the average parish, the Mass tends to be just one thing after another.  Entrance rite.  Penitential Rite. Gloria. Opening Prayer. First reading. And so on.  Maybe we sprinkle a little silence here and there, but it often becomes just as mechanical as the old ritual but without the magic.  Without the bad magic, but also without the good. 

I don’t think the answer is a reform of the ritual.  This isn’t that the ritual doesn’t need some reform, but that all the liturgical tinkering in the world isn’t going to solve the problem.  The problem is where is God?  Ok, we got Jesus in his Word, in his Sacramental Body and Blood, and in his Body the Church.  That is good.  But Jesus is meant to bring us to the Father. 

We Catholics have a very rich tradition of spirituality and it is for the most part untapped.  O we do the piety thing but I am not speaking of piety, but of spirituality.  We have to recover our spiritual heritage and start making it accessible to our people.  Richard Rohr writes

….  Much of the Western world has given up on the church and is going other places for wisdom.  Unfortunately, in these other places they are sometimes “willingly filling their belly with the husks the pigs are eating” (Luke 15:16) But we in the church must ask ourselves if we have not been the parent who sent them away because there was nothing trustworthy or life-giving at home. [i]

Our Catholic faith has long known that God dwells in the human heart.  I think for worship to make sense to people, we need to recover that awareness and provide the introduction to the spiritual life that allows the liturgy to be that “stargate” that opens us to a Mystery that is already at the center of our own souls. 

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[i] Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993, p. 26

The John Paul Papacy, A Mixed Legacy III

I recently had a friend who reads this blog ask me about something that I had written in my first entry about the legacy of John Paul II and that is what is the connection between the more conservative bishops that were appointed to American sees during his pontificate and the establishment of diplomatic relations between Washington and the Holy See by the Reagan administration in 1984, so I want to revisit this topic in case I have not been clear.

There had been a long tradition of socially progressive bishops in the United States going back into the nineteenth century with such prelates as Cardinal James Gibbons, Archbishop John Ireland, and Bishop Dennis J. O’Connell.  They were succeeded in turn by other progressive leaders as Archbishop John T. McNicholas, O.P., Archbishop Bernard Sheil, and Bishop Francis Haas.  These were all men whose outlook had been shaped by Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum  and later by Pius XI’s Quadrigesimo Anno.   Furthermore, when Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the head of the ‘Holy Office’—today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—came down heavy on American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, even conservative prelates, and especially Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, came to the defense of Murray’s harmonization of Catholic tradition with the American socio-economic-political outlook.  Spellman went so far as to defy Ottaviani and bring Murray (whom Ottaviani had formally “silenced”) to the Second Vatican Council as his personal theological advisor.  In the years before and during the second Vatican Council we saw a blooming of a theologically and socially progressive hierarchy with men like Cardinal Albert Meyer, Cardinal Joseph Ritter, Cardinal John Carberry, Cardinal Lawrence Sheehan, and Cardinal John Dearden, to name only the top ranking.  And then there was the eccentric and indomitable Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston who was willing to overthrow just about everything and break any rule to make the world spin along more happily. Blessed be his memory!   Even men who could be quite authoritarian in the governance of their dioceses—Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle of Washington or Cardinal John Cody of Chicago—championed the cause of minorities, of the poor, and of labor.  It was not entirely a happy situation as men like Cardinal James Francis McIntyre of Los Angeles and Archbishop Thomas Toolen resisted the Civil Rights Movement in particular, but the tide was against them.  In the years after Vatican II positions in the American hierarchy were increasingly filled with talented men of vision—Bishops Howard Hubbard of Albany, Matthew Clark of Rochester, John L. May of Saint Louis, Paul John Hallinan of Atlanta, William Borders of Baltimore, Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, John R. Quinn of Oklahoma City and then San Francisco, and Roger Mahoney who would end up as Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles.  Many of these men—though not all—owed their advancement in part to Archbishop Jean Jadot, Apostolic Delegate to the United States from 1973-1980.   Jadot, a protégé of Cardinal Leo Suenens who had been a principal architect of the Second Vatican Council,  came from an aristocratic Belgian family and had exceptionally progressive views;  he significantly marked the American hierarchy by his choice of intelligent and articulate prelates who were committed to the social agenda laid out by Popes Leo XIII, Benedict XV, Pius XI, John XXIII, and Paul VI as well as by the Second Vatican Council.  Well, Suenens sowed the winds of change but it was Ronald Reagan who reaped the whirlwind.  In 1983 the American bishops—at that point a body heavily influenced, if not controlled, by Jadot protégés, published the Peace Pastoral: The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.  It was a dramatic counter-voice to the ost-politik of President Reagan and virtually was a Catholic vote of no-confidence in Reagan foreign policy.  And that was only the one shoe.  The bishops were preparing a second pastoral letter that they would in fact issue in 1986: Economic Justice for All.   It would prove to be a critique of Republican economic theory that would clearly show that Reaganonmics is not compatible with Catholic magisterial teaching on distributive justice.   Meanwhile, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle publicly declared that he would withhold half his taxes rather than allow money to go to the nuclear arms race.  This was a direct challenge to the Reagan administration. 

This split between the Catholic Church in the United States and Reagan policy—both regarding the Arms Race and Economics—threatened to undermine the joint efforts of John Paul and Ronald Reagan to destroy the hegemony of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.  To keep abreast in the Arms Race, the Soviet Union had to pour its resources unstintingly into military expenditures with no room for developing a consumer economy.  Reagan and his advisors counted on this “breaking the bank” and on it fomenting unrest among the unhappy citizenries of Eastern Europe.  Meanwhile, for his part, the Pope was brandishing the sword of Polish nationalism and egging the population of his homeland on to demand a better life than the Polish government or its Soviet overseers could provide.  Marxisim in Eastern Europe was fighting a war on two fronts.  And it worked.  Poland fell and the dominoes followed.  But that was not until 1989.  In 1984 Ronald Reagan still had to figure out how to hold it together.  He did not want to fight a war on two fronts also—Communism in Eastern Europe and Catholics at home. 

The Holy See had long wanted full diplomatic relations with the Holy See.  When the Popes lost their temporal power in 1870, several predominately Catholic nations maintained ambassadorial ties.  The United States did not. In fact, Congress by law prohibited such diplomatic relations.  In the years between the loss of the Papal States and the restoration of Sovereignty with the Lateran Treaty, more nations gradually began to exchange ambassadors with the Holy See.  Each ambassador gave the Holy See more prestige and credibility in international affairs.  During World War II, President Roosevelt, unable to name an ambassador, sent Myron Taylor as a “personal representative” to the Vatican.  The Vatican proved to be a very important diplomatic post during World War II as representatives from various sides were posted there and it was one of the best—if not the best—channels of communication.  Nevertheless, the outcry from America Protestant groups about any sort of American governmental presences—no matter how unofficial—was so strong that it would not be possible for many years yet to have official ties at the ambassador level.  Periodically Presidents sent “personal representatives” but there was no standing mission.   By 1980 most world powers had established full diplomatic relations with the Papacy, but the Holy See always wanted the prestige of American recognition.  Ronald Reagan gave this in 1984.  As a Protestant himself, and as a not particularly religious man, he was in a good position to do so, but there was still a considerable public outcry and several legal challenges.  Nevertheless, President Reagan appointed William A. Wilson first ambassador to the Holy See.  He served until 1986 when he was succeeded by Frank Shakespeare. 

 “Nothing gets you  nothing” as Monsieur Thénardier likes to sing and while there is no public record of a deal, there is a definite change in the type of priest appointed to the episcopacy during and after the Reagan years.  The concerns moved from issues of social justice, peace, the economy, and the environment to more “in house” matters.  A nominee for the miter—or having a miter, for advancement—had to be explicitly opposed to the ordination of women.  He had to have not blotted his copybook on contraception.  He had to be clear on the Church’s teaching about abortion and same-sex relationships.  There is nothing wrong with making sure that a candidate for bishop adheres to Church teaching, but what was curious is that there were no such litmus tests when it came to the Church teaching on war, on capital punishment, on economic justice.  There was lots of wiggle room there.   The ‘80’ and ‘90’s saw the American hierarchy change drastically in its outlook.  They became far more establishment, some not bothering to conceal their open and uncritical preference for the Republican Party and its policies.  Meanwhile, priests, religious, and laity who were involved in the areas of maintaining Church teaching on social justice—labor relations, health issues, immigration and migrants, against the death-penalty, civil rights—found themselves unsupported by many of their bishops and priests.

The Pope Francis sort of bishop whose priority is the poor was becoming virtually unknown in the United States.  Prelates like Raymond Burke, Robert Morlino, Robert Finn, Edward Slattery, Michael Sheridan, Thomas Olmstead, Frank Dewane became more and more the face of the American Church.  Decked out in pre-conciliar finery and extending their beringed episcopal paw to be slobbered over by the faithful as they proceeded to the altar for a retro-Mass,  they were the epitome of the Tea Party at prayer. 

A few years ago I had a chance to sit and visit with Thomas Gumbleton, retired auxiliary of Detroit.  Bishop Gumbleton is the “last of the lefties”—named a bishop in the heady days after Vatican II and always an outspoken voice crying for Peace and for Justice, he was a thorn in the side of Presidents and Popes alike.  That is what prophets do.  I asked Bishop Gumbleton why there had been such a shift in the way the hierarchy saw things.  He didn’t follow my suspicions of a symbiotic relationship between John Paul’s papacy and Ronald Reagan’s administration.  His explanation was more simple.  He said “In my day, we bishops came from families where our fathers were bricklayers, or worked in a factory, or carried the mail.  Today, my brother bishops’ fathers were Doctors or Lawyers, or Businessmen.  They were raised to think that way.  That is the way their fathers thought.”  Ockham’s razor says that we should accept the simpler explanation and that would be Bishop Gumbleton’s.  Who am I to argue with Ockham, I am—after all—a medievalist.  But I still say, that we got the John Paul Bishops as part of an understanding between the Reagan White House and the Holy See to reach their mutual goal of bringing down the “Evil Empire.”   There are too many fingerprints to think the demise of American Catholic Progressivism was a natural death.  The Good News is, of course, that our whole Christian Faith is based on Resurrection and it does seem that we might be in store for a better cut of Episcopal Leadership.  As they like to say at those Tridentine Masses, Oremus.