Time for a New Copernican Revolution

Meeting of the Pontifical
Academy of Science 

Easter Sunday morning, I read an extremely disturbing article in the New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/us/ashley-diamond-transgender-inmate-cites-attacks-and-abuse-in-mens-prison.html?_r=0

It is the story of Ashley Dimond of Rome Georgia who was born male thirty-six years ago but who in adolescence began living as a woman and who, for 17 years now, has been undergoing hormone therapy designed to support her transition to female.  Ms. Dimond had achieved some small degree of professional success as a song-writer and singer before falling into the trap of drugs and petty crime.  She eventually ended up in the Georgia Penitentiary system where she was placed in a men’s prison—she has male genitalia (a word, by the way, I never thought I would be using in my blog) where she has not only been subjected to humiliation by prison officials but raped more than a half-dozen times by fellow inmates.  She was denied continued access to the hormone therapy she has been on the past 17 years and that has had serious physiological as well as psychological impact on her.  Now I know that this posting is going to get some hostile and even vulgar remarks from various krazies—if they are offended by what I write about the Traditional Liturgy they sure aren’t going to like what I write about a transgendered person—but actually Ms. Dimond is not my primary subject.  This article stopped me in my tracks.  I don’t believe I have ever met, much less have known, a transgendered person.  Consequently, I have never given the issues regarding transgendered people much thought.  When I read a newspaper story or heard something on the news, I think I just shoved it into a pre-fit category in my mind and moved on to something more within my experience.   We had a neighbor, when I was growing up, that liked to wear his wife’s underthings around the house.  We kids weren’t supposed to know what our parents and the other neighbors were laughing about, but kids aren’t stupid and eventually find out the story.  I have certainly met my share of effeminate men and even a few who, while not exactly dressing in women’s clothes didn’t exactly dress like men either.  (I mean people other than certain prelates who like to get all frilled up Cinderella style.) But I must admit that I am totally unfamiliar with this transgender phenomenon and so I think I just lumped a wide spectrum of people into a single category and not a very flattering one.  This article has made me stop and realize that I need to learn more before I rush to judgments or even stereotypes.  I realized reading this article that I had always misidentified transsexual persons as transvestites when in fact it is something very different and that I know very little, and understand even less, about either phenomenon

In the course of writing this blog I have several times suggested that the Church too must rethink certain issues “from the ground up.”  A variety of the sciences –the medical, the sociological, the anthropological, the psychiatric—have made discoveries that fundamentally change the way that we are able to understand a variety of moral quandaries from in vitro fertilization to same-sex attraction to embryonic stem-cell research to gender identity.  I am not saying that this demands that we come to different conclusions, but we do need to take the new knowledge into account as we theologize for a Christian response to people whose lives are locked into these and other complex realities.  In the past it has too often taken us, as Church, far too longer to make the interface between our faith and the contemporary world, especially the sciences.  I am not going to get into the whole Copernicus/Galileo thing, but with the knowledge explosion in contemporary society we cannot afford not to engage in that dialogue now.  The Church’s—and indeed religion’s—credibility has already been all but lost to the under 30 generation.  It will take work for the theologians to absorb the immense motherload of new scientific data and it will take trust for the Magisterium to delegate the research to competent scholars, but our faith should assure us that while the way ahead seems dark and filled with pitfalls, the Holy Spirit ever guides the Church towards the truth.  There is nothing to fear about knowledge; nor is there any reason to block inquiry.  There is but one Truth and we cannot be afraid to search for it.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXIII

Christopher Wren's
magnificent Cathedral
of Saint Paul in London

From Sunday September 2^nd until Wednesday September 5, 1666, a raging fire swept through the City of London.  Londoners from King Charles and his brother, the Duke of York, down to street vendors and rag-peddlars joined arm-in-arm fighting the appalling conflagration but without much success. Archeological evidence shows that the fire reached 3,092^o Fahrenheit  (1700 degrees Celsius), virtually able to incinerate stone.   When The Great Fire of London was finally extinguished the “City”—the square mile within the old city walls—was gone.  Over 13,000 homes, 87 parish churches, and the great medieval Cathedral Church of Saint Paul were destroyed.  The fire gave the Diocese of London encouragement to redraw many parish lines as not all the destroyed churches were to be rebuilt, but the Cathedral, of course, had to be rebuilt. 

There had been talk even before the fire of rebuilding Saint Paul’s.  The vast medieval Cathedral,  the second largest church in medieval Europe after the Abbey of Cluny, was 586 feet in length, 100 feet wide, with a span of 290 feet at the transepts.  In its day it had been glorious with the highest spire and the best stained glass in England.  Ironically its construction had begun in the 11^th century to replace an older cathedral destroyed by fire in 1087.  A 1561 fire had toppled the spire but left the cathedral itself undamaged, but that fire combined with the Puritan indifference to cathedrals had led to a century of decay.  With the Restoration of the Monarchy (and bishops) in 1660 the decision had to be made: restore or build anew.  The Great Fire put an end to the discussion, there was no longer a choice but to rebuild. 

The Architect chosen for the work was Christopher Wren (1632-1723), a brilliant polymath who was expert in geometry, anatomy, astronomy, and physics as well as an architect who would build or rebuild over 50 of the London Churches after the fire.  Wren’s initial design reflected the Protestant ideal of simplicity and an emphasis on hearing the Word with a cathedral designed primarily for preaching rather than for pageantry.  The design was initially accepted but with the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy and episcopacy certain shifts both in theology and taste had already begun to occur and the clergy mounted a campaign for a more elaborate—and traditionally formatted—building.  The clergy insisted on the Latin cruciform plan with nave, transepts, and a deep choir.  A second design was submitted, approved by the King, but still did not meet clerical standards.  A third and final design received the Royal Warrant but King Charles permitted Wren discretionary use to make alterations—“more ornamental than essential”—as the building proceeded.  The finished Cathedral bore little resemblance to the final plan as Wren used that discretionary power widely. 

One interesting story is that in laying out the design for the new cathedral, Wren sent a workman to fetch a stone, any stone, to mark the exact spot that would lie beneath the center point of the projected great dome that would rise over the crossing at the midpoint of the Cathedral. The worker brought him a fragment of a gravestone that had been in the pavement of the old cathedral and it was marked with the Latin word, Resurgam: “I shall rise.”  Wren was deeply impressed by this and took it as a sign of his Divine Mission to rebuild the cathedral. 

In the end he produced a magnificent building, and one that bespeaks the emerging via media of the 17^th century Caroline Anglican tradition.  The cornerstone was laid on June 21^st 1675 with Masonic rites.  While some critics complained that it “had an air of popery about it,” it really isn’t very Catholic at all, but neither is it very Protestant.  It is in the baroque style of the day but has an air of Protestant reserve rather than Catholic enthusiasm.   There was a wooden communion table, not a stone altar, at the eastern end of the choir.  Wren had wanted a proper altar beneath an elaborate baldachino—very much like what stands there today—but the Church of England was not about to go that “Roman” yet.  On the other hand, there was a traditional choir screen separating the chancel and altar from the nave.  The screen was removed in the 19^th century to give the view of the chancel from the entire length of the nave.  The screen, or pulpitum as it is properly called, bore the great organ, a “Father Smith” organ (named after the great German organ builder of the day, Bernard Smith) in a case designed by Wren’s team and carved by Grinling Gibbons who was perhaps the finest artist to work in wood the world has ever known.  Gibbons also carved the magnificent choir stalls in the chancel.  The wrought iron work was done by Jean Tijou, the premier iron worker of his day. 

There is a humorous anecdote about the organ.  Wren didn’t want one in the church because he thought that the chancel screen to bear it and the organ itself would cut his cathedral in half and break that magnificent view from back to front.  But the clergy insisted on an organ.  The puritan days were over and there was to be no reserve when it came to good music in church.  Wren would always refer to the instrument as “that confounded box of whistles.”  In the nineteenth century the screen was taken down, the organ moved to the wall on the north side of the choir, and Wren’t desired view was finally opened.   

The construction of Saint Paul’s testifies to an Anglicanism searching to find its unique identity.  There was no desire to return to the Calvinism of Edward’s and Elizabeth’s days.  This was a cathedral built for processions and ceremony; while not for Catholic pomp, certainly for an English decorum.  It was at its heart, Protestant—a wooden communion table stood in place of an altar; but there was a Catholic attention to fine point, a persnicketyness even, in the detail of the carvings and ironwork and other décor.  While it was suited for preaching, it was designed for liturgy.  It reflected the theological shifts of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and while the Oxford movement and its ritualism were still centuries off, so too the sacramental slovenliness of Puritan Anglicanism was left in an unremembered past.  But then London itself was being reborn as a European center in rivalry to Paris and its cathedral—and the religion it represented—could hardly be that Geneva Gown and Psalm singing cult of the days of James I.  Londoners were becoming less rigid ideologues and more cosmopolitan consumers.  

The Problem With The "Old Mass" --or, The Lazy Krazies

Medieval Bas Relief at Lucca
Cathedral showing Mass celebrated
facing the people.

Well, Holy Week has come and gone another year, but I noticed something in the Krazy response to Pope Francis and his manner of performing the washing of feet on Holy Thursday that I had previously missed and which gave me a clue to the problem, not only of why the Krazies go sooooooo kraaaazy about Francis washing the feet of women, but why so many have issues with the current Liturgical Rites in the “Ordinary Form.” 

What I noticed this year and had somehow missed in previous years, is the complaint that “because the Rite of Washing the feet reenacts Christ’s washing the feet of his apostles at the Last Supper…”  Wait a minute.  The Rite does not reenact anything.  The Rite fulfills the command of Christ that as he washed the feet of his disciples, so too should the greater among us wash the feet of the lesser.  This Rite has from ancient times been referred to as the mandatum, the commandment.  It is not a sacred play in which an actor—the pope, a bishop, a priest—is Jesus and 12 other guys are the apostles.  It is the leader of the community washing the feet of 12 (or six or thirty-two or whatever) members of the community because Jesus has told us that whoever is the greater among us is to become servant to the rest. 

But the problem is not simply the foot washing; the problem is seeing the Liturgy as some sort of a piece of sacred theater in which things are “acted out.”  When one sees the Liturgy this way, it makes all the sense that the sanctuary becomes a stage, vestments become costumes, choirs are the chorus, the sacred ministers become actors, and the rest of us sit back and enjoy the show.  This describes the “Extradordinary Form” perfectly.  I have always noted the similarities of that final scene of Tosca to the traditional Liturgy, that scene in the Church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle with the magnificent procession with the “Blessed Sacrament,” which is no more than a cardboard cut-out placed in an antique monstrance but which makes the pious swoon in faux-ecstasy as they recall the “good old days” of the Latin Mass.  Now I realize why that scene always has impressed me as it has.  It is the “Old Church”—where faith is reduced to theatre—good theatre, great theatre, but theatre. The Mass as performance can be great, it can be moving, it certainly can be beautiful when it is done well, but it is not what Christ gave us.  In the Liturgy we are all called to be “actors.”  There are no spectators.  I don’t mean simply that we are not to sit back and watch, but I mean that in the Liturgy we are all called to be directly and intrinsically involved in the sacred action.  We are all “actors” as it were.  In the Reforms of Vatican II, the “stage” is not the sanctuary—it is the entire worship space.  In the “old Mass” we were to sit there (or kneel or stand as the rite dictated) while the “sacred ministers” performed the Rite on our behalf.  Oh, sure, we were to “spiritually join” ourselves to them in the rite—but in the way that members of a high-school musical audience are swept up into Oklahoma or The Mikado.  We certainly weren’t to go up on the stage and interact with the players. But in the liturgy we are to do precisely that.  The word liturgy comes from the Greek and is derived from the word λαος—(the people) and the word εργο—a work or project. (“Laity” also comes from the word, λαος, the people.)  In our modern churches where we are comfortably seated facing the “stage” sanctuary, it is all to easy for us to fall into that audience mode but in the ancient and medieval churches where people stood throughout the liturgy and where much of the liturgy happened in the middle of the assembly—the processions for the gospel and the offertory, for example—there was a stronger sense of the people being participants and not merely spectators.  This can still be experienced in the Eastern Rites, especially in the old churches of Eastern Europe where there are still no seats and where the clergy move easily among the congregation for the various incensations and processions.  In fact in the Byzantine Rite, with which I am very familiar and which I much admire, the entire liturgy is a sung dialogue between the priest at the altar and the people gathered in the Body of the Church. But what some nostalgia freaks want is the old days where you could sit at Mass and engage in some sort of pious reverie that made you feel “spiritual” but was more a quasi-devotional fantasy than genuine prayer. 

The Liturgy is not a play or a historical re-enactment.  It is profoundly mystical but not in an esoteric way.  It is a living engagement with God in Word and Sacrament, an encounter with Grace.  Gone is the railing that once marked stage from audience and for a reason.  Gone is the arcane language that kept the people at a distance from what was taking place.  Gone are the separations and distinctions that urged us into passivity.  “full, conscious, and active” participation is now required so that we too can both make our sacrifice and emerge changed to the heart from this encounter.   

A Question That Still Haunts: Who Am I To Judge

Even a pope can get

absolution

In my last posting I mentioned that opposition to Pope Francis is being orchestrated before the second session of the Synod on the Family that meet this coming October. The divide in the Church is growing wider every day as one part of the Church is embracing Francis’ theme of mercy in the hope that the Church will find someway to more fully incorporate those Catholics who are in irregular unions into the sacramental life of the Church while another faction is closing ranks to maintain the current official discipline that those who are married outside the Church (including those who have remarried after a civil divorce but without a Church annulment) or who are in committed same-sex relationships, or otherwise sexually active outside of a Church marriage be barred from receiving the sacraments except in periculo mortis.

It was suggested by some in the Church, particularly Cardinal Walter Kasper, that we might look to the discipline of the Eastern (Orthodox) Churches and bless a non-sacramental form of marriage for those who have been divorced but not annulled.  In practice, the Catholic Church does not question the canonical practices of the Orthodox Churches including these marriages where the parties’ Orthodox priest has performed the rites after a penitential period during which the formerly married persons have examined their hearts and repented of the reasons that caused the breakup of their sacramental bonds.  I say that in practice we do not question the Orthodox canons because the official line is that such parties must still have their marriages annulled by a (Catholic) Church tribunal before the second marriage can take place in a Catholic Church.  However, as we do recognize the validity of marriages between Catholics and Orthodox, even when it is performed in the Orthodox Church and without the proper dispensations, there is this little squeak-hole through which the divorced can squeeze.

I have been doing some reading on the Orthodox practice, however, I am doubtful if the Catholic Church could officially recognize—much less appropriate for our own—the Eastern canons on this practice.  It seems that the Orthodox practice emerges not from scriptural warrant or even from the patristic commentaries but rather from pressure on the Church by the Imperial government of the Byzantine (and later Russian) Empire.  The Greek Church was totally under the control of the Emperor (and the Russian Church under the control of the Tsar) who could make and break patriarchs at will and while the Church remained orthodox in its Christology, its moral theology suffered considerably as it accommodated the various marital (and extra-marital) escapades of the Emperors and their families.  From the time of the Patriarch Photios in the ninth century the Church began to acknowledge reasons for which a divorce could be obtained.  Photios, you may remember, was the Patriarch whom the Emperor Michael III installed after removing Patriarch Ignatios.  Ignatios had offended the Emperor Michael’s uncle, Caesar Bardas, by refusing him communion because Bardas was publically carrying on an affair with one of his daughters-in-law.  Pope Nicholas I refused to recognize the Emperor’s deposition of the Patriarch and consequently refused to recognize the legitimacy of Photios’ patriarchate.  This led to a schism of that divided the Latin and the Greek churches fro 863-870.  It is not a moment in which the Greek Church can take much pride.  Photios was deposed in 869-870 and unity restored to the Church.  He was legitimately elected patriarch in 877 and he served the Church well in his patriarchate.  No one can deny that he was a great bishop.  Ironically, his son was elected Pope Theodore II in 897, though is reign lasted only three weeks.

The Greek practice is not an annulment of a marriage as Church tribunals grant in the Catholic Church.  It is an ecclesiastical divorce that does not “undo” the first marriage.  That is why the rite for a second—and in rare cases, a third marriage is substantially different from the rite used for the first marriage.  The practice of “crowning” the nuptial couple at the first marriage is not repeated which symbolically implies that in the Kingdom of God the first spouses will be reunited eternally: how that reunion is supposed to reflect the bliss of the eternal heavenly banquet is unclear. 

The practice of the Church recognizing certain divorces might have worked out differently in the west had not the Popes been able to break imperial control over the Church during the Gregorian Reform in 11^th century.  While the Ottonian Emperors of the 10^th and early 11^th century had in fact been able to use their power to enforce reforms on the papacy, the tide turned by the middle of the century and the Popes began a long battle to free themselves of an Imperial supervision which had begun benevolently but was turning into a political subservience that was undermining the Church’s integrity.  Going back before the Ottonian revival, when Pope Stephen III had warned Charlemagne not to divorce his first wife, Himmeltrude, the Emperor had ignored him without any consequences and entered into several subsequent marriages.   Charlemagne’s great-grandson, Lothair II, a junior member of the Imperial family, was initially denied an annulment of his marriage by Pope Nicholas I (the same Nicholas who defended Patriarch Ignatios of Antioch against the Emperor Michael III and Photios), but Pope Adrian II eventually granted Lothair and his wife the requested annulment. It is hard to say “no” to an Emperor or his family unless you are free of their dominance.  Had the Emperors in the west been able to establish and maintain the same control of the Church that their Byzantine counterparts had, we may well have come to find ecclesiastical divorces in the west as well. 

It really is difficult to see how the Orthodox practice could be accepted in the Roman Church, but I personally don’t see that as the problem.  From an ecumenical standpoint, while I don’t see how we could justify adopting the Orthodox practice as it lacks scriptural or patristic foundation, I think we need to recognize the Orthodox right to determine their own practices without our criticism.  Unity does not require conformity; there are legitimate diversities even in moral issues.  I think the problem is our presupposition that some sort of moral uprightness is a pre-requisite to the reception of the sacraments. I think—and again, I am no theologian—that we need to take a long look at our basic moral theology and come to a deeper understanding of sin, grace, and the role of the sacraments. 

Cardinal Burke’s egregiously stupid statement that persons with same-sex attraction and who are kind, dedicated, and generous are equivalent to “the person who murders someone and yet is kind to other people” is not only amazingly stupid—even for him—but is so theologically unnuanced as to be obviously a bigoted rant rather than a serious moral evaluation.  What organizes the Cardinal’s primitive moral schema is his sad lack of pastoral experience whereas good shepherds pick up from their contact with the people of God a sensitivity to the complexity of the mystery of sin and grace in our lives. Pope Francis alludes to his in his famous remark that shepherds should smell like their sheep.   It is far too easy to live in a blinding blizzard of moral ignorance if you never have to deal with real people in real life situations.  Of course, a sound spiritual life introduces one to the contradictions within one’s own soul but if all one knows is the superficial pieties of an exaggerated devotionalism—as, for example, the faux “spirituality” propagated in most seminaries today—it is all too easy to remain in one’s own fortified tower of denial, not unlike the pious Pharisee in the story about the Pharisee and the Publican. 

Catholic moral theology has been stuck in a rut for the last forty years.   While Biblical scholarship, liturgical/sacramental theology, canon law, and even—to a great extent—Dogmatic theology have been allowed a considerable range of freedom of scientific investigation, any innovation in moral theology—at least as regards issues of human sexuality and reproduction—has been a lightening rod to attract quick and negative response from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.  The distinguished German moral theologian, Bernard Häring, an innovative and acclaimed author even in the reign of Pius XII and one of the leading periti at the Second Vatican Council, fell from favor after the election of John Paul II because of the though questions he was posing about the entrenched moral theology of the day.  Other moralists who tried to integrate insights from the social and behavioral sciences have found their books banned and they themselves banished from Catholic faculties.  There is a desperate need to reexamine not only the particularities of the variety of sins to which we mortals foolishly give ourselves, but to look at sin itself.

I understand why a person in an ongoing relationship other than marriage—and marriage as defined by the Catholic Church—that involves sexual intimacy should not approach the sacraments.  A non-canonical marriage or union can be defined as a persistent state of sin and membership in such a relationship does not show repentance.  I will, at least for a moment, accept that premise.  But I do have two questions.

The first question is quite concrete, even specific.  Jeannette X who sings in our parish choir, is an openly racist individual.  She speaks very negatively of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.  She comes to our church—a ten-mile drive from her own parish—because she does “not want to Mass with those people: they smell bad.”  Yet she marches up to communion, first in line with the choir, every Sunday with head held high, like she is Mother Theresa.  Her bigotry, to which she gives expression, is a persistent state of sin and yet no one suggests that she should not go to communion. 

My second question is a bit more abstract, but I will put it in concrete terms.  X and Y are two middle-aged men who have been together for fifteen years and civilly married for five.  X graduated from a Catholic seminary (he was ordained deacon, but left before priesthood.)  Y had also attended a Catholic seminary for several years in his native Spain before moving to the United States twenty years ago.  He currently teaches music twice a week in a rather traditional religious community of women who are aware of his status.   Both attend Mass not only on Sundays, but frequently through the week.  Both find their relationship to be spiritually deep and a source of grace in their lives in a way that is analogous to how a devout married couple might find their marriage to be life-giving.  Why should they not be able to receive the sacraments?  They do not experience their relationship as sinful but only as a source of God’s grace.  How can third parties make an evaluation that ignores the experiential evidence? 

So then, why do some “persistent states of sin” bar people from communion but not others?   Why can a man who beats his wife come to confession and be absolved without having his anger treated, but someone who is remarried after a divorce not be able to receive absolution and communion?  Why can a drunk be absolved without entering an AA program but not a person who lives with another person of the same sex to whom he or she is committed? 

I don’t want people—even wife-beaters or drunks—to be barred from the sacraments.  I guess what I am asking is not for the Church to start restricting more and more people from the sacraments, but to realize that the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, have a remedial purpose in which the sinner finds the strength to look at his or her life and correct the course to put us more in line with the Will of God.  Again, I am a historian and not a theologian, and I recognize that throughout its history the Church has barred those in serious sin from the Eucharist, but when I hear the Gospel account of Jesus sitting at Table with sinners (Matthew 9:9-13), I am not sure that we get this right. I don’t have answers, but there are questions I think we need to be brave enough to discuss.