The 3 PM Good Friday Service in my Church [April 15, 2022] lasted 165 minutes: longer than a nonstop flight from Orlando to Detroit, ten minutes shorter than “The Godfather,” and a full hour longer than Pope Francis’ Good Friday observance of the same day.
Why, you ask, would the pope’s rite be shorter than the one in my parish? How could it be? Quite simple. Not surprisingly, the Bishop of Rome observed the Roman Missal’s instruction for the Veneration of the Cross: Paragraph 19 [the official ritual]: Only one Cross should be offered for adoration. If, because of the large number of people, it is not possible for all to approach individually, the Priest, after some of the clergy and faithful have adored, takes the Cross and, standing in the middle before the altar, invites the people in a few words to adore the Holy Cross and afterwards holds the Cross elevated higher for a brief time, for the faithful to adore it in silence [from their places in the pew.] In other words, the Universal Church directives call for a holy simplicity and does not elongate a particular part of a rite unnecessarily. Interestingly, the same principle applies to the distribution of communion at every Mass—there must be enough ministers so that the communion rite is not longer than the rest of the Mass. I will grant that U.S. Conference of Bishops directives on its website may confuse the Good Friday cross veneration with its commentary on the Vatican’s Paragraph 19, the Veneration of the Cross. There seems to be sentiment in the USCCB office for the individual veneration of the cross by everyone in the congregation prior to the reception of Holy Communion, as occurred in my parish last Friday. Thus, from the USCCB website: “The personal adoration of the Cross is an important feature in this celebration and every effort should be made to achieve it…. It should also be kept in mind that when a sufficiently large Cross is used even a large community can reverence it in due time. The foot of the Cross as well as the right and left arm can be approached and venerated. Coordination with ushers and planning the flow of people beforehand can allow for this part of the liturgy to be celebrated with decorum and devotion.” While the USCCB directive may be well intentioned, it is hard not to smile at the literal indicators— “the foot of the cross as well as the right and left arm can be approached and venerated.” This presents a spectacle far removed from anything inspiring reverence, i.e., multiple persons attaching themselves at the same time to the cross. It sounded for all the world like Twister. Fortunately, we did not have this kind of spectacle in my church, but we did have its opposite, twelve hundred individual acts of piety in succession—in many cases, inspiring to behold—but as my wife said to me as we began the third hour of the rite, “I think the mood has passed.” Or, as a veteran business executive said to me in the parking lot later, “Perfection is the enemy of outcome.” Or something to that effect. I knew exactly what he meant, though. For the first hour of our Good Friday Rite, I was indeed engaged in its spirituality—particularly the Passion according to Saint John and the ancient Great Intercessions, that series of solemn prayers for all members of God’s family. Historians believe that these prayers are the forerunner to our “Prayers of the Faithful” at every Mass. This year’s Intercessions held our attention even more with a heartfelt plea for peace in Ukraine. If, at this point, we all had witnessed the unveiling of the cross and kneel for a moment at our places, and then received the Eucharist and departed for home, my soul would have been filled with the unique grace of the day. However, at the juncture of the presentation of the Cross, it was announced that each member of the congregation would come forward and venerate the cross individually, making any devout gesture one felt moved to express. Except kissing the cross, though many people did that anyway, which would put our two attending deacons at the cross in unenviable positions as the heartless Covid cops. We sat down to wait our turns, all 1200 of us, and somewhere in the church an accountant instinctively started doing the math. I forget exactly what he told me later, but at ten seconds per person, I figured myself that the Veneration of the Cross might extend two hundred minutes. It did not miss by all that much. My wife and I make retreats with the Trappist monks, and we know from experience [well, she does, because she attends the 3 AM Office of Readings and Meditation] that the longest communal meditation of a monk’s day is about 45 minutes. In our church the entire congregation found itself in the position of improvising something akin to meditation—at or least hold sacred thoughts—for at least twice the length of time as monks. The human mind just is not wired for that kind of unaided mysticism unless you are in a cult that stares into the sun on a river’s bank under the influence of a controlled substance. Choirs have limits, too. Our fine choir went through every pre-Easter arrangement in their folders, and then they just shut it down, like exhausted hikers at the top of Pike’s Peak. For the next hour or two there was absolute silence in the building, like I have never heard before. Add to that, an inspiring number of parents brought their children to the service. I am always grateful when parents bring their children to Mass anywhere and anytime, but the endurance that was called forth from them caused my most intense prayer of the day— “Please do not give up this sacred tradition of the Triduum. We can fix this.” I was directly in line of vision of a father of an infant who held his baby for the entire duration. For a good part of the second hour of the service there was little to do but sit and reflect upon what was happening and what was not happening. During this second hour an older gentleman turned to me and said, “Didn’t you people used to use three crosses?” And quickly another voice, “Yea, what is the rule about this?” So, I huddled, discretely as possible, with a small cluster in two pews explaining the provisions of Paragraph 19 and suggesting that they talk to the pastor or write a kind letter regarding next year’s planning. Thinking back, I officiated at about sixteen Good Friday services during my years in the active priestly ministry, and I recalled how we had managed the service, mostly by postponing the full veneration of the Cross till after the formal service had completed and those who wished to leave could do so. Even so, many did stay to venerate the cross individually, and the kids could move about and visit the potty and the water fountain while waiting. The church was darkened [we held services in the evening] and I entrusted the holding of the cross to a father and son team, in part so I could sit in the congregation after divesting and witness the veneration and connect with my parishioners. The cross veneration had a powerful salutary effect as far as I could see, and working within the Vatican guideline of Paragraph 19, there was no pressure or frustration. I also had the time while waiting my turn on Friday to think back to my seminary training on worship, and specifically to a professor who required us to read Aristotle’s [386-324 B.C.] Poetics. Aristotle put down the principles for dramatic plays, including the experience of catharsis, “the washing out of the emotions.” My professor taught us to apply this principle to the liturgy, to celebrate it in such a way that we were drawn into the action both intellectually and particularly emotionally, even viscerally. Aristotle abhorred such things as “dead space and time” or actions extraneous to the plot. It is interesting that the term “liturgy”—the name we give to the celebration of our sacraments—comes from the Greek leitourgia, translated roughly as “public works.” Consider this definition: “In ancient Greece, particularly at Athens, a form of personal service to the state which citizens possessing property to a certain amount were bound, when called upon, to perform at their own cost. These liturgies were ordinary, including the presentation of dramatic performances, musical and poetic contests, etc., the celebration of some festivals, and other public functions entailing expense upon the incumbent; or extraordinary, as the fitting out of a trireme in case of war.” The operative word here is “work,” and the term became associated with Christian worship because all of us who assemble for sacraments are supposed to be “working” with the rite. On Friday, we spent a lot of time leaning on our shovels. I wondered how people were managing the dead time. We had begun at 3 PM and it was after 5 PM that my pew was called to enter the queue. My line extended from near the ambo in front, all the way back to the entrance and then looped back down the center aisle. I had a lot of time to study the faces of parishioners, and I wondered what they were pondering. There were gaps in the seats; some had departed, to be sure. The old pastor in me was hoping they were not giving up on Holy Week. One irreverent thought crossed my mind—boy, this is what voting in Georgia is going to look like with the state’s new laws. A more pressing thought was the reality that we were spending three hours in a confined space with a new variant of Covid now appearing. I had neglected to bring a mask, of course. Finally, the ceremony ended, although by this time any sense of spiritual drama or catharsis was long lost, at least for me, and we stood about with our friends in the parking lot sharing recollections and reactions. It was not an optimum way to conclude the Good Friday mysteries; my immediate frustration focused on a local lack of planning; all those parents trying to do the right thing by their children and put up against formidable odds. Aristotle was right: more is not better. On a lighter note, I was tempted to text one of the clergy who had served at the altar: “We wanted to buy you a drink after the service, but all the bars were closed by then.” It is true, though, that the Triduum, in its present universal form, presents difficulties and contradictions that need to be revisited. The list is long, but I will stay with Good Friday. One of the most curious contradictions of the Catholic calendar is the fact that we regard Good Friday as the day Christ conquered sin forever. In St. John’s Good Friday Passion, Jesus handed over his Holy Spirit while on the cross, and the blood and water from his side splashed upon Mary and John and birthed the Church. Is there any day in our calendar besides Easter itself that embodies the meaning of Christianity? Given that, why is Good Friday of all days not a holy day of obligation? That is an exceptionally good catechetical question, something of a chicken or the egg dilemma. Do we have just one major crowded Good Friday Service because we fear that few Catholics come out on Good Friday? Would we be better served by multiple observances of the Lord’s death on Good Friday so there were more opportunities to attend? It is little known that local bishops have the authority to allow multiple observances of the Good Friday rite. There is nothing to stop a parish from scheduling the liturgies at Noon, 3 PM, and 8 PM. The 3 PM service might be celebrated in a more family friendly style—with brevity, a simple homily, and the Paragraph 19 format of cross veneration, with the children coming forward at the close of the liturgy to venerate the cross. In all services, Paragraph 19’s guidance demands strict adherence. The musical/choir agenda in the Roman Missal for Good Friday is quite minimal and multiple services would not unduly strain the music ministers; several cantors would serve nicely. Holy Week is an excellent time to think about our children and their experience of sacred worship. Twenty years ago, we built a church that is flat, and no child can see a thing from beyond the third row of pews, and that is a stretch. What children made of Friday’s Cross veneration is anyone’s guess. I hope someone asks them. [We are supposed to be listening to our young people in the Synodal process anyway.] I was deeply troubled—though not entirely surprised—at the findings of the 2018 St. Mary’s Press/CARA study, “Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation of Young Catholics.” The results of this study are required reading for anyone in ministry. The biggest surprise to me was the study’s findings that the median age when a minor disaffiliates from the Church is thirteen, and commonly as young as ten. So, we must ask ourselves, is the way we worship having a positive or negative impact on children who are sizing up their future attachment? Holy Week/Triduum was very influential in my life, but I had a tremendous advantage: in elementary school I asked the priest in charge to teach me how to be the master of ceremonies, and by the time I was in the seventh grade I was the MC for the entire Triduum of the Latin Tridentine Missal, all with deacons and subdeacons. My hubris knew no bounds. This was shortly after the rites were moved to nighttime [late 1950’s], and the priests themselves were not always sure what came next. My pastor at the time refused to be the celebrant for any services, and he passed it off to the senior associate. It was a wonderful experience to be involved in, but over the years I reflect that such an opportunity was rare for any Catholic kid. When do you stop being a child at heart? Jesus did say, “Let the children come unto me,” and regardless of our ages we all need the engagement of a compelling liturgical experience. The liturgy of the Vatican II era, while not perfect, is an exercise in engagement when it is celebrated by the book—and that book has a great deal to say about architecture, music, and dynamic along the lines of Aristotle’s wisdom four centuries before Christ. Much of this responsibility rests with the pastor. I can tell you from experience that leading the eucharist—or any sacrament--is a divide between personal prayer [what went on inside me] and my accountability to my people to always draw them together in many tangible and intangible ways. I hope my parish learned something from this year’s Good Friday liturgy. Will I return for next year’s Good Friday rite at my parish? It is hard to say. I will pray and reflect. I do have an alternative, as there is a Catholic Church here in my zip code—the very church where I pastored for a decade. It would be nice to “come home,” after 35 years, if just for the Triduum. I will keep you posted. On a humorous note, my wife and I had planned to stop at Best Buy on the way home from Church. My Fitbit had a cracked face, and I was going to replace it. I used my old Fitbit to time the Good Friday service. When I was finally able to track down a Fitbit Versa 3 that evening [Best Buy was sold out], I was going to throw away my old one. But then I decided to keep it…and wear it every year at the Triduum as a memorial of sorts.
1 Comment
I received a good deal of feedback from Tuesday’s [February 22] post on the Liturgy Stream of the Café Blog regarding the issue of the misuse of the formula for Baptism. The best way to summarize those sentiments is with the adjectives “bewilderment” and “anger.” It is quite true that the recent insistence on the pronoun “I” versus “we” has put the Church in a bad public light and done little, if anything, to enhance the public image of the Church as an enlightened spiritual beacon. I do hope that those who read the first installment on this stream took note that of the four bishops coping with this problem, the leaders of the San Diego and Oklahoma City dioceses exercised magnificent prudence and turned the issue into a profound catechetical moment. They did not rebaptize or require couples married by unbaptized priests to renew marriage vows. Other bishops felt compelled to follow Vatican directives to the letter.
Today I want to go back and look at the Vatican’s oversight over the sacraments, including Baptism. The Council Vatican II authoritatively mandated the reform of the Church’s worship [by the bishops’ vote of 2147-4] in its Decree on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium of December 4,1963. Paragraph 21 of SC states: “In order that the Christian people may more certainly derive an abundance of graces from the sacred liturgy, holy Mother Church desires to undertake with great care a general restoration of the liturgy itself. For the liturgy is made up of immutable elements divinely instituted, and of elements subject to change. These not only may but ought to be changed with the passage of time if they have suffered from the intrusion of anything out of harmony with the inner nature of the liturgy or have become unsuited to it. In this restoration, both texts and rites should be drawn up so that they express more clearly the holy things which they signify; the Christian people, as far as possible, should be enabled to understand them with ease and to take part in them fully, actively, and as befits a community.” Paragraph 22 describes the legal supervision of the reform process and its observation around the world: 1. Regulation of the sacred liturgy depends solely on the authority of the Church, that is, on the Apostolic See and, as laws may determine, on the bishop. 2. In virtue of power conceded by the law, the regulation of the liturgy within certain defined limits belongs also to various kinds of competent territorial bodies of bishops legitimately established. [In the United States, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops holds this position; the USCCB decides, for example, which Holy Days of obligation are observed in the U.S.] 3. Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority. The final drafts of all seven sacraments were completed over the next decade or so; today’s Mass was promulgated in 1970. In practice, the supervision of the celebration of the sacraments falls under two Vatican Offices: [1] The Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and [2] The Doctrine of the Faith. The Office of the Doctrine of the Faith becomes involved when a question or practice of worship involves a doctrine of the Church. In 2004 the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued “Redemptionis Sacramentum: On certain matters to be observed or to be avoided regarding the Most Holy Eucharist.” This lengthy document is a specific critique of errors that had crept into the celebration of the Mass since the end of the Council in 1965, though its spirit applied equally to all seven sacraments. Redemptionis Sacramentum, issued in the final days of Pope John Paul II, is indicative of the Vatican’s concern about the way the Eucharist was being celebrated, certainly in the United States. It is an interesting document to peruse; ironically, many of the errors cited in the directive still go uncorrected and you can probably find several mistakes in your parish’s observance of public Masses. However, none of the errors cited in RS result in the invalidation of the Mass itself, except the consecration of bread that is not made exclusively of whole wheat and water. If you are a church minister in any capacity, it is certainly worth your while to review the official standards for the celebration of Mass, not least of which to avoid critique from “the liturgy police.” For a long time after the Council, issues involving the Sacrament of Baptism were limited to such questions as, for example, whether the Mormon initiation rite suffices the Catholic intention of Baptism, as when a Mormon and a Catholic marry. [It does not.] The first significant Catholic doctrinal intervention into the Catholic practice of Baptism occurred on February 1, 2008, when the Office of the Doctrine for the Faith addressed two questions: “Whether the Baptism conferred with the formulas “I baptize you in the name of the Creator, and of the Redeemer, and of the Sanctifier” and “I baptize you in the name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer” is valid? And following from that, “Whether the persons baptized with those formulas have to be baptized in forma absoluta?” [That is, rebaptized with the Church’s ritual formula.] The Office of the Doctrine of the Faith answered “No” to the first question and “Yes” to the second, i.e., the baptisms are invalid and must be administered again with the proper formula. In 2008, however, the problem was not “I” versus “We” but rather “he” versus “she” so to speak. As early as the 1970’s Catholic feminist theologians had raised the issue of the masculinity of the New Testament Baptismal formula. In their commentary on St. Luke’s Gospel and its treatment of Baptism, [Luke 3: 31-38] Reid and Matthews, in Luke 1-9, observe that “feminists have critiqued baptism as an initiation into Christianized patriarchy.” [p. 107] They cite a corrective strategy: “to use alternative formulae with female or gender-neutral names for the Trinity.” [cit.] The theologian Ruth Duck proposed changing the formula to three questions, to which the candidates for baptism and the congregation respond: “I believe: Do you believe in God, the Source, the fountain of life? Do you believe in Christ, the offspring of God embodied in Jesus of Nazareth and in the church? Do you believe in the liberating Spirit of God, the wellspring of new life?” [cit. footnote 30] Exactly how widespread these feminist alternative baptismal formulas were used is hard to say. Certainly, the concept was being vigorously discussed and published among feminist thinkers, whose numbers were growing in the twenty-first century. The Vatican, in 2008, cites this practice by name and rejected the use of any formula which substituted the “functions of God” for the names of the members of the Trinity, i.e., the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as a way of diminishing the heavy masculine tone. Changing the Trinitarian formula is not a wise strategy given its deep roots in Scripture and ecumenical considerations. Protestants revere the “Great Commission” of Matthew 28: 18-20, “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” But there is another side to this 2008 Vatican intervention, specifically a targeting of what was perceived by the Holy Office as doctrinally dangerous tendencies of prominent Catholic women theologians. Notably, two American Catholic religious were censured for their publications. Sister Elizabeth Johnson in 2007 for her Quest for the Living God and Sister Margaret Farley in 2012 for her Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. Today’s generation of book banners and book burners would do well to consider the delicious irony of the censuring of Just Love. A technical theological text intended for specialists and students of theology at eighty dollars, the book shot to the top 1% of Amazon sales upon its censure. I reviewed this work for Amazon and found it a fine seminal text [and yes, worth the eighty dollars.]. This era was also noteworthy for a Church investigation of the lifestyle of women religious in the United States [2008-2014] for its progressive theological spirit, at precisely the time when new abuse scandals among American priests were making headlines daily. Women in the Church were not getting much respect, and certainly not much of a hearing. One of the underlying currents that has impacting the thinking of Church leadership even to this day is an assumption that as “women increase, the male clerical role decreases.” The pressing need to preserve the unique role of a male clergy is a major factor in the June 24, 2020, ruling by the Office of the Doctrine for the Faith that the collective “we” in place of the singular “I” renders a sacramental baptism invalid when presided by a priest or a deacon. It is important to review the 2020 teaching carefully, for between the lines it highlights several theological issues in desperate need of public discussion in the Church. In the first instance, the 2020 decree applies only to public baptisms conducted by ordained clergy. Many of you communicated to me your questions about this 2020 ruling vis-à-vis the long-standing practice of lay persons baptizing in cases of necessity, the principle we all learned as children. This emergency practice is unchanged because no ordained cleric is present, and that should tell you a lot. At its heart, the 2020 corrective has a great deal to do with the identity of the ordained priesthood, and less to do with baptism per se. Second, the teaching Church is committed to an understanding of ordained ministry as a historical and eternal reality; a priest is considered ontologically changed by the Sacrament of Holy Orders, i.e., changed “in being” from other humans, men and women. “Thou art a priest forever” is a solemn teaching of the Church. Even in my case, when I was laicized by Pope John Paul II and given permission to marry my future wife, my priesthood was not “undone.” I can still absolve sin in an emergency, and hypothetically I could even celebrate a valid Mass in my own home. I choose not to do the latter because I respect the wishes of the Church that I do not—and that I worship in the full assembly of my parish’s Eucharist instead with my wife and laity--and my bishops have rewarded my good faith by entrusting me with numerous non-liturgical responsibilities in my diocese [mostly in teaching and mental health service delivery] over the past quarter century. Given the Church’s strong declaration that an ordained priest is an alter Christus, “another Christ,” it stands to reason that in any liturgical/sacramental gathering, the priest, or in his absence the deacon, is the alter Christus. The role cannot be commuted to a lay person or a community. The commentary from the Vatican accompanying its 2020 decree goes into serious detail to describe the priest as the alter Christus through whom the saving grace of the sacrament is mediated. Therefore, the directive opted for “I” instead of “We.” The use of “We,” in the explanation, would convey a “shared priestly office” which would confuse the nature of the exclusive role of the priest or deacon. Again, a number of you corresponded with me to assert the role of the laity in the celebration of the sacraments, including baptism. You would be correct, of course; the Vatican II Decree Sacrosanctum Concilium cited above instructs the Church to reform the sacraments precisely so that the rightful and necessary role of the laity is brought to the fore in its fullest. The 2020 instruction from the Office of the Doctrine of the Faith makes the point that the reformed rite of infant Baptism, for example, includes significant words and actions of the parents, godparents, and the larger church community. However, in the current theological positioning of the Vatican, at the moment of the pouring of the water it is only the ordained minister who stands as the presentative of Jesus and Jesus’ present-day followers, and therefore the only option for the baptizing priest or deacon is the pronoun “I.” Interestingly, if my memory of Canon Law is correct, the Church identifies the pastor as the most appropriate minister to bring new members into the parish family. I am certain this explanation is not fully satisfying to my readers, nor should it be. In the first instance, the promulgation of this instruction by the Office of the Faith was more than clumsy. In an interview with the Washington Post about the “faulty pronoun” in the baptismal formula, Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit theologian and journalist, makes a critical point. Vatican officials, he says, “think there’s a problem and issue a document to resolve it, and they do that without any wide consultation.” He continues, “The proper way to do this is to say: ‘This issue has been raised, this is something we are studying.’ Then invite theologians and canon lawyers to send in comments.” Synodality should extend to the theological discourse between the Church’s thinkers and the Church’s policy makers. The ”I” versus “We” controversy is a flashpoint involving many aspects of the Church’s theology, from Scripture and History to Liturgy and Ecclesiology to Discipline and Pastoral Care. In our follow up, let us not throw away the baby with the bathwater. As unreasonably trivial as the controversy seems, it is the offspring of many major theological concerns, all of which need attention. This is the first of several installments discussing the accidental misuse of the Baptismal formula which has come to light in several dioceses.
1. A LONG HISTORY OF COMMON UNDERSTANDING It says something about my seminary training that I never baptized a baby during my deacon year when, presumably, you are supposed to learn how to do this at the baptistry; however, I officiated at hundreds of baptisms in my years in the ministry through the year 1992, and it never occurred to me to change the baptismal formula in the official Roman Catholic Baptismal Rite, for I had already been taught it in grammar school! In truth, every child in my Catholic elementary school, St. Mary Magdalene in Buffalo, N.Y., and presumably everywhere on the planet, learned how to baptize, and exactly which words to say: “I baptize thee in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Catholic school children of my generation were given this instruction precisely because, according to Church Law [then and now], we were all extraordinary ministers of the Church in the unusual but thinkable circumstance that someone of any age might be unbaptized and dying, desiring baptism but without the prospect of a priest coming upon the scene. [Think of battlefields and natal units in hospitals.] It was our duty to baptize. That was drilled into us. The Baptismal catechetics of my 1950’s school years had a long history behind it, and it has carried through into the era of Vatican II. Para. 1256 of the Catechism states that “the ordinary ministers of Baptism are the bishop and priest and, in the Latin Church, also the deacon. In case of necessity, anyone, even a non-baptized person, with the required intention, can baptize, by using the Trinitarian baptismal formula. The intention required is to will to do what the Church does when she baptizes. The Church finds the reason for this possibility in the universal saving will of God and the necessity of Baptism for salvation.” Let me reword this for emphasis: an unbaptized person can, in case of necessity, baptize another unbaptized person so long as there is an intention to do what the Catholic Church would wish. We kids were educated to a generous understanding of the ministry of baptism, which I trust has been passed down to the present day. Further, we were taught as children that there were extraordinary circumstances where the saving grace of baptism is given by God in actions other than the use of the Trinitarian formula and the pouring of the water. We were taught of the instances of “baptism of blood,” when someone is martyred for the name of Jesus before being baptized, and “baptism of desire,” where someone dies without the opportunity of experiencing the Church but who responds to the inner calling of God. In the Catechism [para. 1281] we read that “Those who die for the faith, those who are catechumens, and all those who, without knowing of the Church but acting under the inspiration of grace, seek God sincerely and strive to fulfill his will, can be saved even if they have not been baptized.” I would bet that these elementary principles are embedded as deeply in Catholics as any sacramental principles, including Real Presence. Which is why what has followed in the past two years has created such a public uproar, being counterintuitive to our sense of baptism and grace. Given that we grew up with such clear parameters of baptismal action, how did the ritual get so “messed up” years later by people who should know better? It is a long story, but bear with me, because I remember it well. 2. A TIME OF CHANGE AND EXPERIMENTATION…AND WELL-INTENTIONED MISTAKES 1962-? After the Council Vatican II [1962-1965] the Church embarked on a generation or two of reforming its rites of worship. The Council Documents called for both a return to ancient practices [such as the extended RCIA for catechumens, the restoration of the permanent diaconate, communion of both the bread and the cup, etc.] and incorporation of new rites and practices for greater congregational understanding and participation [Mass in the native language, architectural redesign of churches, varieties of music, etc.] I came to adulthood in this era and was ordained at the height of it in 1974 and ministered in its immediate aftermath for twenty years. Looking back, I can say that for the Catholicism I experienced in my little corners of the world, including five years in Washington, D.C., these were the best of times and the worst of times. For many of us who had grown up in the older “Latin” era, Vatican II felt like the gateway to a glorious new era of Church and societal reform. The principles of obedience and common order were questioned as themselves being repressive and alien to a new constructive spirit of freedom. Recall that the Council and its aftermath coincided with the Civil Rights Movement, the growing anti-Viet Nam War movement, women’s liberation, gay rights, school desegregation, etc. Every major institution was questioning its charter and modus vivendi. When I arrived in Washington as a student, many of my classmates at Catholic University were protesting the firing of a popular moral theologian who publicly stated that the Catholic Church had erred in restating its teaching that artificial contraception was sinful, in the 1968 Encyclical Humanae Vitae. [He was reinstated by CU for another decade and granted tenure.] Seminaries were hardly exempt from the currents of the times. As major seminarians of this era of changing emphases, we were taught that our primary responsibility in leading sacraments was the full engagement of the people of God into the rite, whether it be the Mass, Baptism, or any of the other sacraments. Our daily and Sunday seminary Masses modeled this value. Moreover, our seminary training taught us to be compassionate listeners and to do whatever it took to extend the mercy of Christ—whether that be in the pulpit, the confessional, or the counseling office. I took a concentrated elective in graduate school on “ministry to the divorced and remarried”—somewhat cutting edge then--which instructed me on the procedures for filing for annulments and administering pastoral advice in the confessional to those who could not obtain annulments but wished to receive the Eucharist. It is sad that when Pope Francis, many years later, adopted some of what I had learned into his public teaching [2016] on family life, Amoris Laetitia, he was accused vehemently by some critics of violating Divine Law. Like most of my fellow young priests of that era, I made my mistakes. The biggest one was not getting my bearings in an extremely complicated church world around me. My seminary formation was weak, almost nonexistent, on matters of meditation, prayer, and spiritual direction. Contemplation took a back seat to action. As exciting as the post-Council years were, they were also terrifying in many respects. We were trying to do too much; our superiors and our seniors, as it turned out, were feeling very insecure themselves, as they had not had the benefit of formation in post-Council theology. My classmate and I were assigned to campus ministry after ordination and told to create it from the bottom up. Consequently, one of the lasting impacts of the immediate years after the Council was the sense that many priests graduated from them with a stronger sense of ownership of the liturgies they were celebrating. We did not feel as bound to the Roman Missal as the priests of my youth. In fact, today’s Mass Missal itself offers the celebrant several options for the various parts of the liturgy, such as the penitential rites and the Eucharistic Acclamation. The phrase “in these or similar words” appears in several places in the official sacramental rites—though not at the Consecration, for example. As one might expect, the personal piety and emphases of a priest may drift into territory that is off the established liturgical reservation, even with the best of intentions. This may in part account for the personal adaptations of the baptismal rite, though there are other factors in play, as we will see on Thursday. I should add, too, that most of us who were formed and educated after the Council did not feel the weight of Church Law, or Canon Law, as the generations before us had. My schooling took place with the 1917 Code still in effect; the Council had called for a reform of the Code, which was completed in 1983. [Personal confession: I failed the “Canon Law” question in my final ordination examination; fortunately, I passed three other areas on the exam.] There was a provisional sense of Church law and authority among many in the Church through much of my priesthood. A true story: when I applied for laicization during the papacy of Pope John Paul II in 1998, I was told by my canon lawyer that the story was going around Rome how priests ordained before 1978—my cohort—had a better chance of success than those ordained after 1978. It seems that Pope John Paul II felt my generation had been led to believe that there would be a change in the celibacy requirement, and he was inclined to be more forgiving toward us. When John Paul II was elected to the papacy in 1978, he was firm that no such change would be happening, and supposedly he expected greater obedience and dedication from the ordination classes of his era. The highs and the lows of this era of the Church continue to influence us today. What I hope I have accomplished in this segment was provide the background of how deacons and priests might feel free to improvise in worship, including the Baptismal formula. As we will see in Thursday’s post, some of the variations on the baptismal formula were the product of present-day theological thinking as well. 3. WHAT HAPPENED RECENTLY? In 2019 a young priest from the Archdiocese of Detroit, Father Matthew Hood, was watching an old videotape of his baptism in 1990 with his father when something troubled him. As a National Catholic Reporter story of February 21, 2022, summarizes, “Indeed, an error by a deacon who said, ‘We baptize’ instead of ‘I baptize’ spoiled Hood's baptism in the eyes of the Catholic Church — and, in domino-like fashion, erased his other sacraments and meant that he wasn't really a priest.” Consequently, every sacrament Father Hood ever celebrated—every baptism, every Mass, every confession—was invalid in the eyes of the Church. The most serious consequence dealt with baptism. The errant deacon baptized about eight hundred candidates before he retired. The Archdiocese of Detroit then began a rigorous campaign of public information to alert all the impacted Catholics that they would need to be rebaptized and, in most cases, remarried. To date, again quoting from NCR, “That sent people at St. Anastasia [parish] scrambling to find videos of their children's baptism, the official entry into the church and a gateway sacrament to other Catholic rites, such as Holy Communion and even marriage. About two hundred baptisms were found to be valid, while seventy-one people stepped forward to go through baptism and other initiation sacraments again, archdiocese spokesperson Holly Fournier told The Associated Press. Another forty-seven people are making new arrangements, she added, but 455 still have not responded. Ten declined to participate. ‘We reached out directly, mailing letters to everyone impacted using the most recent records we had on each individual. ... We're eager to accompany anyone who comes forward,’ Fournier said. She declined to make clergy available for interviews to discuss why they believe so many people haven't responded over the past 18 months.” Interestingly, while this baptismal fiasco was churning in Detroit, it did not immediately catch media fire until other cases began to pile up. In the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, another priest in 2020, Father Zachary Bozeman, learned he had been baptized with an irregular form, i.e., the “we” instead of “I”. The priest had been ordained one year. He approached his superior, Archbishop Paul Coakley, to inform him. Archbishop Coakley made this public, and the priest was quickly baptized and ordained. Curiously, Archbishop Coakley adopted a much more tranquil general remedy. He did not require that the children baptized by the priest be rebaptized, explaining according to the Catholic News Agency, “as baptisms can be validly performed by anyone using the correct formula (wording) and the right intention.” About marriages performed by the priest, Archbishop Coakley sanated, or validated, the marriages witnessed by Father Boazman prior to his valid ordination. See Canon #1161 #1. The term is an established principle, an executive order by the bishop that validates a defectively performed marriage from the time of the vows. [When I studied years ago, a sanation application needed approval by the Vatican.] Given that no baptisms or marriages were repeated, the Oklahoma Archbishop chose a less intrusive solution within Church law, and this case did not receive significant news coverage. It is the third case that consumed social media and has proved to have the most widespread implications. Several weeks ago, in the Diocese of Phoenix Father Andres Arango was discovered to have used the “We” baptismal formula after the Diocese investigated a complaint possibly prompted by the Detroit news story of the previous year. The difficulty here is that Father Arango has been a priest for twenty years. Prior to his pastoring in the Phoenix Diocese, he had served the Church in Brazil and then in the Diocese of San Diego. There is an interesting link here to the San Diego Diocese’s publication of Bishop Robert McElroy’s letter. The bishop states that the baptism question is “a pastoral dilemma rather than solely a matter of church law.” He reminds his readers that “the bounty of God’s grace powerfully suggests that any men and women who were possibly baptized so long ago have received from the Lord the graces of baptism and all that goes with them in their lives. And thus, they should be at ease.” This is sound theology and sound pastoral practice. Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, where this third case became known, has adopted the Detroit legal approach of attempting to track down everyone who was baptized by Father Arango. See the letter of introduction to pastors outside the Phoenix Diocese linked here which provides some idea of the staff work and paper involved. Father Arango remains in good standing and is actively helping to assist in the process. But this is the case that made the national evening news—thousands of people denied baptismal salvation because of a pronoun. As a blogger I subscribe to multiple Catholic social media sites, and not since the abuse crisis in 2002 have I seen such anger and ridicule vented by the Catholic public against a Church policy. The public announcement of a third clerical baptismal irregularity is probably as welcome to bishops in the United States as a new variant of Covid, for this practice of the inclusive “we” in the baptismal formula is more widespread than we know. If nothing else, the appearance of other such irregularities will highlight a division within the Church between an emphasis upon form and an emphasis upon spirit. Two bishops cited above chose to address the issue in a formal and legal way, and two did so with discretion and theological prudence. Not surprisingly, the two cases which doggedly adhered to the letter of the law were the two that garnered what almost amounts to a public scandal. The discrete, prudent resolutions have received little or no attention. NEXT: [1] We decipher three distinct Vatican directives on the Baptismal formula issued in the past two decades, which seem to be the sources of the confusion. [2] We will consider what can be learned from this liturgical fiasco. Those of you who connect with the Café through Facebook, Linked In, or Twitter have already seen my mildly irreverent cover picture of Frosty the Snowman’s cremation. No sacrilege intended—just a touch of humor to bring us to the most serious question we face, what happens to us when we “shake off our mortal coil,” as Shakespeare put it five centuries ago [Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1.] We are now a week into November, a month Catholics devote to the souls in Purgatory, and as the end of the Catholic Church calendar is just two weeks away, the Sunday Gospels focus on what theologians call the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, hell. [The technical term for this science of theology is Eschatology, from the Greek for “last or farthest,” per Webster.] These are among the most difficult faith issues we face, and I fear that present day Catholic catechetics and preaching does not give us better insights into addressing preparations for our own death aside from “call a priest.”
I am in my mid-70’s, and death takes on a much more concrete existence as more of my friends die and I myself will follow in the not-so-distant future. There is a lot of practical business in the preparation of death. My will is filed. The funeral is prepaid. My bookies are paid except for over/under waging on the age of my death. I have not yet prepared a funeral Mass because I need to research better hymns than “On Eagles Wings;” I can’t stand that song. I had always envisioned myself interred in a nice, wooded cemetery, preferably a Catholic one. This romantic vision dulled a bit after I had to manage a parish cemetery for several years. So, I left my burial decision up in the air for the indeterminate future and moved on to a new career and marriage. When I received my laicization and permission to marry from Pope John Paul II in 1998, our pastor told my fiancé and I, as two fifty-year-old Church professionals, that we did not need to take the Diocesan pre-Cana program. Instead, he recommended that we take several days of spiritual retreat at the Trappists’ Mepkin Abbey near Charleston, S.C. We did, and we both fell in love with the monks, the worship, and the retreat setting overlooking the Cooper River. I took particular note of the fact that Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, America’s power couple in the twentieth century, were buried on monastery grounds by the Cooper River. Henry, among other things, was the founder of Time Magazine and Sports Illustrated. I make it a point to put a new issue of SI on his grave at our annual retreat. Meanwhile, after our marriage our pastor let it be known that he was planning to build a columbarium on our parish grounds here in Central Florida in conjunction with a new church and other additions. This was the first time I gave thoughtful consideration to cremation, and interment on the parish grounds seemed like a very good option for us, but the columbarium could not be built, possibly due to city ordinances. However, not so long ago, Mepkin Abbey announced its plans to construct a columbarium next to the Luce burial site on abbey grounds on the river. This immediately appealed to us; the two biggest reasons were the opportunity to assist the monks financially into perpetuity and in return, to receive the prayers of the monastic community, which prays seven times daily and remembers those buried on its land. I believe I will need those prayers. One of the doctrines of the Catholic faith which gets lost in the shuffle is Purgatory. Very simply, when we die, we are not ready to see God. We acknowledge that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is the only sinless being by virtue of God’s intervention for her unique role in history. The rest of us cannot make that claim, and no matter how good we think ourselves to be, we are in no shape to behold the glory of God, face to face. This is counter to the “funeral parlor conversation” you so often hear at wakes. “Old Joe, he’s up there now teeing it up with St. Peter on the eighteenth fairway.” It is comforting talk for the survivors, but it doesn’t square with centuries of Christian tradition. Admittedly the language of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on such matters is archaic, borrowed from prior catechisms centuries old, which can be misunderstood as portraying Purgatory as “hell, but with an end date.” That said, it is true that we die with unfinished business. Certainly, one roadblock to postmortem encounter with God is the sin of pride, i.e., that we are ready to see God just as we have lived all our lives, and that all we need do is pick up our suite key from St. Peter. No responsible saint or Church doctor ever described death in such a pedestrian fashion. Certainly, the Scriptures suggest nothing of the kind. Having lived many years in the Franciscan tradition, I was always intrigued that as St. Francis grew older and more fervent in his life of faith—his very hands and feet were marked with the wounds of Christ—he came to understand the gulf between himself and God. In his last years he would privately throw himself on the ground and exclaim, “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a worm, and not a man.” This is a pattern of the holy saints—the closer they imitated Christ and reflected upon their own reality, the greater they realized the gulf between God’s perfect love and being, on the one hand, and their own wounded humanity on the other. It is this profound awareness of God’s love versus my lukewarm response that makes the beholding of God a possibility and points us toward the direction of heaven. Part of our Catholic heritage, drawn from the Gospels, is the reality of a final judgment. The Gospels are united in this reality, whether it be Matthew 25, Mark 13, Luke 21, or John 8: 12-58. In a variety of ways, the Gospels speak of a climactic moment of judgment, a determination of the life of every human being. If one does not believe in life after death, the discussion of post-mortem destiny is hardly a pressing concern. But the heart of Christian living is Christ’s conquering of death. Every Sunday is a memorial of Easter, when we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection not just as his own triumph over death but as the promise that we, too, may one day share in his eternal glory. The popular Catholic wisdom of life after death is optimistic, perhaps too optimistic, as many believe that the reward of eternal life is an automatic progression. Generally, present day catechetics and preaching does not clarify the picture with significant depth. Pastorally and popularly, we live with several “avoidance” factors in play. The first is a studied avoidance of judgment narratives in the Gospels as cited above. Human nature tends to cherry pick; we gravitate toward the biblical texts where God rewards gratuitously with no questions asked. We identify with the surprised recipients of God’s mercy in the Bible and assume that, to paraphrase Woody Allen, “90% of redemption is just showing up.” The second “avoidance” is the mistaken notion that the end time judgment narratives of the Gospels are mythic, time-conditioned visions with no historical basis or predictive value. It is true that several narratives cited above were written after the destruction of Jerusalem, and probably influenced by what was known of the horrors of that event in 70 A.D. But in truth one of the most common literary forms in the Gospel is allegory, a type of language that Jesus uses frequently. For example, ““The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” On the matter of judgment at the end times, Jesus uses several analogies [see above] to drive home a single point: there will be a measure of personal accountability for what we have been given, i.e., God’s grace. Of course, if analogies are not your thing, you still must contend with John 8, which carries the directness of a hard-boiled county sheriff. The third “avoidance” is the oft heard belief that God is too merciful to send anyone to hell, or to any measure of afterlife punishment, for that matter. God is indeed infinitely merciful. But, as baptized Christians, we are called to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” [Matthew 5: 48] In other words, we are to be the merciful ones, the donors and not just the recipients. One of the most powerful of Jesus’ parables is the tale of the unforgiving servant [Matthew 18: 21-35], sentenced to indeterminate torture “until he paid back the last bit” of the mercy he had received. Chew on that. As a graduate student a half-century ago, I did not sleep through every class despite what my report card says, and I remember a lecture that made a great deal of sense at the time, and even more so in my seniority today. I was taking an elective in eschatology, and our professor explained that as we age, we begin to see our lives with a growing wisdom of the totality. As I recall, he quoted a famous theologian “that we have the full picture of our lives at the moment of our death.” At that moment the judgment of God and our own assessment of our lives jell in an instant of clarity in which our post-mortem future becomes as clear as the sun. Call this a psychological analogy, if you will, but what an image to carry forth as we reflect upon life after death. I am not aware of any theological formula that better summarizes for this century the meaning of Biblical judgment. If life is about meaning, what a terrible suffering to realize that one has squandered countless opportunities to extend God’s love, or even worse, to understand that our conduct has led others to despair of it. Those late medieval theologians who formulated the language of Purgatory as “this final purification of the elect” [Catechism, para. 1031] were struggling to describe the pain of awareness of the personal gulf between the goodness and wholeness of God and the brokenness that mars our personal histories. The awareness is the pain of healing. At that final moment of life, we all sing the same dirge as St. Francis, “depart from me, O Lord, for I am a worm, and not a man.” Somewhere on your Catholic calendars is the reminder that November is the special month for prayer for the “poor souls in Purgatory.” We are those poor souls. I am grateful to Mark, one of the Café regulars, for expressing an interest in the Sacrament of Confirmation. In my Amazon review of Ecclesiology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium posted on Tuesday, I had summarized the book’s treatment of Confirmation in two sentences. [There is a 1000-word limit for Amazon submissions.] For better or worse, Café posts are limited only by me and vary depending upon the amount of coffee consumed over the past few hours.
Mark was responding to Chapter 7, “The Sacrament of Confirmation and its Role in the Ecclesiology of Communion.” The author, Moira Debono, was attempting to explain the role of this sacrament in the building of the body of Christ on earth, the Church. One of the principles of modern theology is the understanding that all sacraments are given by Christ to build the holiness and unity of the Church. Thus, when one receives the Sacrament of Confirmation, one is not receiving the Spirit simply for personal edification, but for the strength to bring holiness, wisdom, enthusiasm, prayer, and good example, etc. to the Church at hand. Even Penance, which appears to the eye as the most solitary of Sacraments, is a public gift to the Church. If I am truly sorry for my many sins, my newfound humility in confession enriches the immediate Church around me, and beyond that, my conversion away from sin becomes part of the Church’s mission to the unchurched and/or the unbaptized. Faithful living is mission, part of what we mean when we speak of the priesthood of the faithful shared by all baptized Christians. In her essay, Debono is seeking to put meat on the bones of the Church’s understanding of Confirmation. We tend, in church work, to use too many generic and fluffy words without concrete precision. Thus, the specific definitions and rites of the sacraments are very important, or else religious life becomes a game of Vulcan mind-melding. Speaking concretely, the Church has always understood Confirmation as a pouring out of God’s Spirit which occurs in the sequence of conversion. An adult convert embraces three sacraments—Baptism, the bath which washes away the sins of the past and marks the definitive turning point of becoming a new being; Confirmation, the laying on of hands by the bishop, successor of the Apostles, who shares the Spirit of God poured out at the first Pentecost; and Eucharist, the table feast to which one is invited to the fellowship of eating and drinking the Body and Blood of Christ, the bread and cup of eternal salvation. Confirmation, then, is a sacrament of initiation into the Body of Christ in tandem with Baptism and First Eucharist. Today, when unbaptized adults enter the Church, these sacraments are celebrated together at the Easter Vigil. With children and minors, however, the situation has been different. Without reviewing two thousand years of history, suffice to say that since the influence of St. Augustine [354-430 A.D.] and his clarification of what we call today original sin, there was increasing pressure to baptize infants as soon after their birth as possible, lest they die without baptism and face an eternity without the vision of God. Confirmation [and Eucharist] could be postponed until later when a bishop could confer the laying on of hands and the sacred anointing. Once the three sacraments of initiation became separated over time, each one developed its own rationale, catechetics, and timing. In 1900, for example, a child would be baptized at birth, confirmed around seven, and make first communion in the teen years. Poor theology of the time discouraged frequent communion at any rate; Church law mandated that a Catholic receive communion at least once a year, the “Easter Duty,” setting the bar rather low. Pope Pius X [r. 1903-1914] revolutionized the Church’s practice of receiving communion by moving First Communion to the “age of reason” [age seven or thereabouts] and encouraging everyone to receive frequently. Confirmation was subsequently postponed; I received communion in the second grade in 1956 and was confirmed in sixth grade in 1960 with the idea that the Spirit would make me a “soldier of Christ” ready to die for my faith. The Council Vatican II [1962-1965] attempted to restore the ancient understanding and dignity of the anointing of the Holy Spirit, Confirmation, in its document on the Church, Lumen Gentium [1964]. Debono summarizes: “A Catholic, already an integral member of the Body of Christ by Baptism, is effectively brought into active relationship with the other members of the Body; that is, in a new kind of communion with others through the Sacrament of Confirmation. This new way of relationship within the Church for the individual cannot but enhance the communion the Church lives and expresses.” [p. 113] However, Debono shows that after the Council there was very little emphasis by the Church on Confirmation’s role in building the Christian Community. It was not until 2016 with Iuvenescit Ecclesia that any formal Church document talked about this important aspect of community-building as a purpose of Confirmation. However, in the years since Vatican II there has been much written about the nature of the Church. Debono summarizes in her essay the writings of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI on the nature of the Church [“ecclesiology”] and its relation to God. The major theme which emerges is that of unity. God is Triune [a perfect unity of love between Father, Son, and Spirit.] In the act of the Incarnation, whereby the Divine Son became man, humanity has taken on this Trinitarian quality of perfect communion of love, though imperfectly. Consequently, Christianity identifies itself by its love and unity in everything that we do, including our worship and sacraments. Pope Francis, addressing an audience on Confirmation on May 30, 2018, said this: “In Confirmation it is Christ who fills us with his Spirit, consecrating us as his witness, participants in the same principle of life and of mission, according to the design of the heavenly Father.” [p. 119] Francis continues the themes of his predecessors. However, this still leaves two critical tasks in the study of Confirmation. First, how do we concretely talk about this sacrament from the pulpit and our education programs, and second, how do we celebrate this sacrament in a way that best illuminates the unity of the baptized and the Church’s unity with Christ? Finding a common ground of understanding will address such glaring divides as the varying ages of Confirmation, which currently range from age 7 to 16 or thereabouts, or even at infancy in some cases. Debono turns to St. Thomas Aquinas, “The Angelic Doctor,” [1225-1274 A.D.] and the father of modern Catholic theology. Aquinas write that in Confirmation a Catholic is no longer living an “individual life” but is meant to be in relationship with the other baptized. Confirmation strengthens the baptized for the mission of loving union. [p. 112] Aquinas does not mention a chronological age for Confirmation. “For him, the perfect age of the spiritual life is when ‘he [the believer] begins to have communication with others.’” [p. 120] Debono uses the first Pentecost event as an image of “the perfect age.” “Before the tongues of fire rested on them, there was a personal relationship that they [the Apostles] were nurturing with their Lord….In the Pentecostal event, the young Church was spiritually galvanized as a community for the sake of the mission of Christ…The sacramental character of Confirmation gives Catholics not only a similar responsibility for the salvation of the world, but the spiritual means (gifts and graces) to carry out the mission of Christ that continues to this day.” Debono says this about the sacramental character of Confirmation: “We are given a new rank or role in the Church to more visibly extend the Mission of Christ to bring the saving Good News of Christ to others. The power to accomplish this is also made available to us.” [p. 123] The New Testament offers several powerful teachings on this power of the Spirit within us. Romans 8:26 reads: “Now in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know what to pray for as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” Galatians 5: 22-23 lists the qualities of one living in the Spirit: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” In closing her essay Debono has put before us the principles of how to speak of Confirmation, how to celebrate it, and how to nurture a full adult life in the Spirit. However, we are still stuck with the realities of everyday parish life. I follow several blogsites of Catholic religious education directors and teachers, where frustrations with Confirmation practices are frequent streams of conversation. The primary frustration is irregular or nonexistent participation in the weekly Eucharist by the young candidates for Confirmation and their families. This is a sad condition in that the Eucharist is the highest visible union we have as a Church family, and Confirmation is the empowerment to the communal family of Christ. The second is the prevailing attitude that Confirmation is “graduation” from Catholic faith formation. [I started the Catechist Café eight years ago for adult faith formation, in part to counter the idea that faith learning is just a childhood exercise.] Catholicism—all of Christianity, really—is an inseparable marriage of mind and heart. The mind comes into play as we learn about Jesus of Nazareth and how his believers ahead of us have understood him and tried to walk in his footsteps. The heart is the love and affection for our God who loves us beyond definition and who resides in every created person, many times simply waiting to be brought to consciousness. The Spirit is the very breath of God’s love. After studying Debono’s text again this week, I did something I haven’t consciously done in a long time. I prayed specifically to the Spirit to fire up my heart again. If we as the Church cry out for that Spirit, the way will be shown to heal the broken Body of Christ, the Church. There is no denying it: the Church has been in the news a lot this summer, and not always in the most favorable light. There was heated discussion this summer among bishops in the United States over the suitability of President Biden presenting himself for Communion; nearly one thousand unmarked graves of children were discovered on the properties of Catholic orphanages in western Canada; a number of Catholic Churches were desecrated this summer across North America; and, as I write this, Pope Francis is recovering from surgery, a reminder that the Bishop of Rome is subject to the laws of mortality and that the transition of authority in the Church is a delicate but necessary consideration. On this last note it should be recalled that Pope Francis recently convoked a universal synod in 2023--on the very subject of snynodality or grassroots involvement in the mission and vision of the Church.
The polarity that currently afflicts Catholics across the country is complex and made more so by the recent “culture wars” in American society. But ever since the closing of the Council Vatican II in 1965 there has been a rift between those who believe that the Church is moving too slowly in reinventing itself to meet the challenges of the modern age and those who believe that some reform strategies and ideologies have outrun the sacred deposit of Revelation received and promulgated by the Apostles and their successors, the bishops. It can be argued, of course, that this ying and yang is a helpful corrective for a body that sees divine truth only dimly, as through a glass, to cite St. Paul. Unfortunately, the absolutism of those on both sides advocating ecclesiastical reform has had the unfortunate effect of dividing the Church at all its levels. This summer I have turned the attention of one of the Café website streams to Ecclesiology, the branch of theology that studies the origins, structures, and works of the Church. I have referenced the text Ecclesiology and the Beginning of the Third Millennium [2019] in recent posts as a good example of how theologians in this field do this work, in this case a collection of essays by about a dozen Australian theologian-ecclesiologists. If you have a moment, peruse the free on-line sample provided by the book’s site on Amazon to give yourself a flavor of ecclesiological study [many good books on Amazon provide this kind of free sampling.] I will be using the outline of this work through the summer as I file posts on the Church on the liturgical stream, as the Church is defined as the ultimate sacrament of the presence of Christ in the world. This Australian book on the Church begins with an introductory essay by Tracey Rowland of Australia’s Notre Dame University. [See her publications here.] Rowland introduces the reader or novice student to trends in ecclesiological theology over the past 150 years or so. She observes that there are three ways of proceeding with contemporary study of the Church. First, one can examine the official teaching Church documents of the last century, notably the Council documents Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes of Vatican II and several major encyclicals of popes, starting with Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis Christi or “Mystery of the Body of Christ” [1943] and continuing through the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Second, one can “trawl through the publications of the big [scholarly] names” as Rowland puts it, from Cardinal Newman of the nineteenth century to the western theologians of the twentieth century, primarily from Germany and France. The third approach is through controversial Church issues which have arisen in recent times. [p. 2] Ecclesiology involves the Church looking into a mirror and describing what it sees. In St. Mark’s Gospel of the Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time [last weekend’s text] the evangelist sees a primitive body of poor disciples dispatched by Christ to go forth into the world with nothing but a staff, trust, and a call to repentance with the arrival of the kingdom of God. Clearly the Church’s self-portrait in the mirror is more complex today, for better and worse. For myself, I have found it useful for my own faith’s ecclesiology to study the conversion process of great minds who sought admission to Catholicism at the height of their careers—Augustine, Cardinal Newman, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Thea Bowman—who identified something about the Church body as they experienced it that compelled them to embrace it. For Augustine, for example, it was the powerful example of the bishop of Milan, the future Church doctor St. Ambrose, whose faith and erudition was matched by physical courage in protecting his Milanese Church from threats of harm at the hands of a heretical emperor. In my youth the practical ecclesiology of my parish and education was the role of the Church as juridical gatekeeper to the world of the infinite. The thrust was otherworldly, and Church life was understood, as the Memorare prayer reminded us, as a veil of tears. But even then, there were scholars who understood that the Doctrine of the Incarnation—God becoming man—had significant implications for the Church and its members. In some way the Church was Christ, not simply his bodyguard. Both Newman and Pius XII opened the door to this new emphasis in the study of the Church--the relationship of the spiritual/mystical with the concrete world of the real. However, Vatican II, in its teaching on the identity of the Church, retrieved the ancient Biblical understanding of Baptism and the Church. In Baptism, we are changed and become living sacraments of Christ. The Church is the living and acting persona of Christ on earth, thanks to the gift of the Holy Spirit outpoured after Easter. The Gospel promise of Jesus that “I am with you all days, even to the end of the world” is more than just encouragement. It is a statement of fact that he who sees the Church sees Christ who animates it. This dictum applies corporately and individually. Given that the theological and catechetical community has had many decades now to reflect upon God’s plan of sanctity for the Church, Rowland correctly points out that the leadership of the Church has been rocked by scandal which has wounded its witness power significantly. She believes that scholars and leaders will need to address this conflict between the Church’s glorious identity and its less than stellar witness. [Australia was rocked in recent years by the imprisonment of its leading churchman, Cardinal Pell.] During Vatican II, the Council fathers’ ecclesiological document on the Church, Lumen Gentium or “Light to All the Nations” described the Church in the Biblical image of the Chosen People of God in the wilderness, wandering together so to speak until arrival in the eternal promised land. The metaphor “People of God” is one of the most enduring titles of the Church since the Council. It is also something of a reversal of the older model used in my youth—the “pyramid” with pope on top, then bishops and priests, then religious, and finally the laity. In today’s baptismal rite the new Catholic—regardless of age—is announced as sharing in the royal priesthood of Christ. However, precisely how this royal priesthood of baptism relates to the institutional priesthood of Holy Orders is another question, another of ecclesiology’s tasks of the third millennium which is related to but not limited to issues of women’s ordination, married clergy, etc. Similarly, the issue of authority in the Church is another of theology’s tasks. Lumen Gentium went to great pains to restore the independent identity of bishops as successors of apostles whose authority as teachers is derived from their sacramental identities as successors of the apostles. The older texts often described bishops as simply sharing the judicial powers of the pope. LG describes the world’s bishops as a college in communion with each other and with the Bishop of Rome; it is the office of the episcopacy that binds them together. On the other hand, LG describes the pope as having “full, supreme and universal power over the Church” and the bishops having such power only when acting with the consent of the pope. One may legitimately ask: if all the baptized share in the Church’s evangelical mission of Christ, how are the laity to contribute their insights and vision? In truth, Pope Francis is the first pope in modern times to address this question, and if his health holds steady, we may see a true ecclesiastical experiment in Church communication. Francis’ immediate predecessors drew from LG’s priority of unity [or communio in Latin texts], the principle of full union of God and unity among his people. The concept makes eminent sense and is drawn from the Gospel of St. John’s Last Supper Discourse where Jesus prays that “They all may be one, as you Father and I are one.” The ecclesiastical problem, at least as I have observed it over my lifetime, is the absence of a vehicle to raise respectable and good intentioned questioning throughout the Church. Critique is heard as “dissent.” If a priest were to share with his bishop back in 1968 that the papal declaration on artificial birth control was causing significant stress among those sharing their plight in the confessional, a bishop could interpret the priest’s pastoral concern as disobedience to either papal authority or natural law. It is no secret that for years the Vatican forbade the raising of certain topics at the universal bishops’ synods on the grounds, among others, that the airing of disagreement was a breech of communio and “confusing to the simple faithful.” In the present-day pastoral distress over the term “disordered’ to describe homosexuals is another specific example where many good Catholics would like an opportunity to explore—for personal and pastoral reasons—alternatives for this language in the Catechism. Jorge Bergoglio brought a somewhat different disposition to the papacy when elected in 2013. As Rowland writes, “One gets a sense...from the history of the Bergoglio papacy to date, that Pope Francis does not regard conflict as necessarily a bad thing.” [p. 23] In truth I believe that Rowland herself is a bit flustered by what she sees as an untidy papacy, in terms of the latitude that the pope allows for interpretation of pastoral practice. Pope Francis’ description of the Church as a field hospital inspired the author to quote Robert Spaeman that “the Church cannot be a mere booth in the fairground of postmodernity or just another institution trying to provide social welfare.” [p. 24] No pope sacrifices communio, but Francis understands that union/unity is a project as much as a principle; a marriage, for example, is a legal and sacramental reality but it is also a dynamic relationship which is richer at the end than in the beginning. Taking the long view, the pope has engaged the Church on a two-year process of learning cross-current communication, the synodal model. I do not expect to live long enough to see its impact upon the life of the Church in the United States or elsewhere. But in the years I do have, I would like to be a part of a synodal experiment, for the responsibility of the Church would make me a better member. It is hard to jump back into routine after three weeks on the road. Although I downloaded Ecclesiology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium [2020] to my Kindle for the trip to review and share on the Professional Development stream of the blog when I got home, it was not until I got to the airport to come home that I broke out some serious theological reading. As my trip home originated in Las Vegas, I could safely assume I was the only person in McCarran Airport reading up on Catholic ecclesiology, no small feat considering that this airport is full of slot machines as well as the usual distractions.
I did find auto traveling from Omaha to Las Vegas to be captivating and exciting. Our primary targets were natural ones, places for hiking like the great national parks of the West, such as Badlands in South Dakota and Arches and Zion in Utah. But we had opportunities to visit Father Flannagan’s Boys Town, several noted schools and cathedrals, some major cities in states we had never visited before [hello Omaha, Bismarck, Casper and Las Vegas], and a countless number of small-town gas stations and coffee stops as we avoided the interstate system as much as possible. I can honestly say that I encountered nothing but genuine hospitality and some surprisingly good coffee over the broad central expanse of our country. As noted, I did not do much book reading, though I followed both national and Catholic media online throughout the trip. When sunset rolled around after a full day of travel and outdoor activity, we were too tired and heat exhausted for heavy literary pursuits. I am embarrassed to admit that my wife Margaret coaxed me into binge watching “The Gilmore Girls” on NETFLIX across the country. At least the writing is clever, though in every episode I quietly mumbled to myself, “Is there a decent therapist in that town? Or even a mediocre one?” One of my great pleasures in traveling is visiting churches. Naturally, celebrating the Eucharist in a new community is always a lift for me and a lesson in the vitality of the Church. One of the most overlooked catechetical opportunities for children and adults is the chance to encounter other ecclesial settings while traveling, and when I look back over my vacation albums, I can recall nearly all the churches we visited and particularly where we had the opportunity to attend Mass. On this last vacation we traveled over three weekends and thus celebrated in three quite different settings. In Omaha we were the guests of the principal of Mount Michael Benedictine School, an outstanding high school establishment of the Benedictine monks. Monastic liturgies are remarkable for their simplicity and focus, among other things. The chapel had recently reopened for Sunday Mass to the lay community of supporters as the Covid restrictions were just mitigated. Here, as in Mepkin Abbey, SC, where Margaret and I go for retreat each year, the community Mass is offered with devotion in about forty minutes. The monastic tradition has much to teach our parishes about focus and simplicity; my sense is that parochial liturgies get “cluttered”, and this is what makes them feel “boring” to participants of all ages. Our host suggested that we may want to visit the Omaha Cathedral later Sunday. After Margaret and I walked across the Bob Kerrey pedestrian bridge between Omaha and Council Bluffs, Iowa, in the late afternoon heat we decided to take up the suggestion. As luck would have it, I messed up the directions and we visited or passed four churches in the Omaha city limits in our quest to see the church. All the churches were celebrating 5:30 PM Sunday liturgies. The Cathedral itself resembled most inner-city churches, but it was interesting to see the early twentieth-century construction of several parish campuses which featured large edifices for schools, rectories, and convents. Many of these buildings have been converted into social outreach centers or childcare facilities. Again, a catechetical opportunity to see and appreciate the development of twentieth century Catholic parish mission in the United States. Before I leave Omaha, I need to add that Margaret and I had the opportunity to tour the above-mentioned Mount Michael Benedictine School and the famous Boys Town of Father Flannagan fame. While these institutions address distinct populations, it was most encouraging to see well financed and excellently managed ministries at a time when there is a mood of gloom and discouragement in many quarters regarding the future viability of parishes, schools, and social outreach agencies. After a week in Wall, South Dakota, Badlands State Park, and Mount Rushmore, we found ourselves the following weekend in Bismarck, North Dakota. We took a walking tour of the city and came upon the Cathedral of the Diocese of Bismarck. It was a large but unpretentious church; one would not guess that it is a cathedral. I was impressed with a large and well-appointed social gathering room accessible to the church vestibule. As the cathedral was close to our Hampton Inn, we decided to attend the Saturday vigil Mass later in the day. I was impressed again by the appropriate simplicity of the Mass here. The parts of the Mass, including the music, were undertaken with devout simplicity and community engagement was energetic. I felt compelled to sing, which is not true of Mass in my home parish which tends toward the theatrical. What I most remember, though, was being surrounded by little children. We were in the third row, and it was evident that the little members were not routinely shuffled off to a noise-insulated designated site. I was particularly moved by the mother who sat behind me. She appeared to have four or five little children under her wing. The oldest curled up in a corner of the pew for his afternoon nap, but the others engaged with the children from other families in the vicinity, much in the fashion of the prairie dog villages we had seen at Badlands Park. None of the adults seemed unduly disturbed, nor did the celebrant. Again, I was struck by a contrast with my own parish, where little children are by far the exception and not the rule at the Saturday vigil Mass. Why the difference? I cannot honestly say, though we noted in our earlier walk through the neighborhood that the cathedral sat in a middle-class neighborhood with the homes near the church. This is precisely the kind of neighborhood I lived in, just a half block from my church and school. For just about all my elementary school years I virtually lived on the church grounds for my sacraments, school, sports, and CYO activities. My dad was an officer in the parish’s St. Vincent de Paul Society and Catholic War Veterans. My first crush and my first “date’ involved a parish girl. The Bismarck cathedral church had that sort of feel. If I lived there, I would probably become active in that sort of parish. In any event, at the end of Mass I felt compelled to say something to the mother behind me, who was gathering her miniature quintet to go home for supper. I told her that I was inspired by her efforts to bring her little children to Mass by herself and that God would bless her for the effort. Our final weekend of vacation found us in the beautiful mountainous village of Springdale, Utah, less than a mile from the entrance to Zion National Park. Our accommodations there took the colorful name of “The Bumbleberry Inn.” We checked in on a Friday and inquired about Catholic Mass. We were given a welcome sheet to a “Catholic Service” in the Canyon Community Center at 8 AM on Sunday. I should point out here that while all the national parks are very crowded this summer, Zion was extraordinarily full. Given the heat and the number of visitors, Margaret decided that we would not even attempt a morning entry. Our neighbors at Bumbleberry told us of going to the park at 5 AM or 6 AM to do serious hiking. Even with these challenges, I was a bit surprised with the attendance at a Communion Service held in the community center. Led by a local lay woman who read a brief reflection in place of a homily, there were eight of us in attendance—six locals from Springdale and two tourists, i.e., Margaret and me. I do not know what to make of that, as the city was teeming with tourists. Later in the day, we encountered a boy in the park with a “Loyola” tee shirt. Margaret quipped, “I didn’t see him this morning.” [School principals never die; they just go on doing their thing.] I noted in the beginning of this entry that I am currently reading up on ecclesiology, the branch of theology that studies the nature of the Church itself. It is a timely subject that covers a lot of territory, but the theologians who work this discipline agree on several points. First, the mission of the Church is to live as the sacrament of Christ himself on earth. Second, our spiritual strength as a Church resides in our unity. And third, the heart of our unity on earth is the weekly Eucharistic sharing of the bread and the cup. Any amount of travel opens our eyes to the unity we share and the work that remains to be done. DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION ON THE CHURCH
LUMEN GENTIUM SOLEMNLY PROMULGATED BY HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI ON NOVEMBER 21, 1964 1. Christ is the Light of nations. Because this is so, this Sacred Synod gathered together in the Holy Spirit eagerly desires, by proclaiming the Gospel to every creature, (1) to bring the light of Christ to all men, a light brightly visible on the countenance of the Church. Since the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race, it desires now to unfold more fully to the faithful of the Church and to the whole world its own inner nature and universal mission. This it intends to do following faithfully the teaching of previous councils. The present-day conditions of the world add greater urgency to this work of the Church so that all men, joined more closely today by various social, technical and cultural ties, might also attain fuller unity in Christ. And so begins the Vatican II declaration Lumen Gentium as it undertook one of the Church’s most critical self-analyses in history sixty years ago. The title Lumen Gentium is translated from Latin as “the light to the nations.” There are a good number of folks here in the United States who would argue that in 2021 the Catholic Church is generating more heat than light. Are there many people who are pleased with the Church’s status quo? It is no secret that a large number have left the Church in recent decades, and there is a growing anxiety—if Catholic journalists are correct—that the long-awaited return of the faithful from the Covid shutdown will be more of a trickle than a stampede. This is certainly my impression in my home parish. I admit that I must work up my energies for the weekend Eucharist. Preaching as a rule is poor. It is evident that many priests do not read, and thus fall each week into their “default sermon” which neither comforts the afflicted nor afflicts the comforted. The guiding principles of fitting liturgy in general from Church law—from architecture to appropriate participatory singing to reflective silences in the Mass—are frequently ignored or, more likely, were never properly taught to those in charge of planning parish masses. On the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord, the parish cantor at my Mass, during the distribution of the Eucharist, sang two solos—to the Blessed Mother—on a day of universal feasting over the ascension and glorification of the risen Christ. A well-intentioned error to be sure, but one that complicates Catholic identity and catechetics, nonetheless. Paragraph 1 of Lumen Gentium above describes the Church as the visible sign of Christ to the world, “like a sacrament,” the pinnacle of unity with God and the whole human race. Sadly, the public face of the Church in real time can be distressing. Many of our family and friends have left Catholicism to look for Christ elsewhere, and there seems to be a reluctance by American bishops, for example, to research why so many have left the Church and why others are tempted to do so. The official “default” answer from Church officials to the media blames outside factors instead of difficulties within the family—asserting that former Catholics were never strong believers to start with, or the secularism of this age has stolen their faith. Yet there are dozens of other credible reasons why many view the Church with caution at the very least. The tales of clumsy personal encounters are legion, from the pulpit, the classroom, and the confessional. The honesty of official church leaders has been damaged by generations of equivocation or outright dishonesty in the matter of the abuse of minors. The “optics” of church life—from the classification of homosexuals as “disordered” to the attempts to deny public Eucharist to politicians—are embarrassing and distracts from the serious underlying theological issues that do demand reflection and consideration. To top it off, there is grave division within the Church on precisely who is a good or a bad Catholic, exacerbated by “culture wars” and attitudes toward the last several presidents of the United States but which predates recent events and goes back at least to Vatican II itself [1962-1965], or even the 1800’s to be precise. It is forgotten that the Council was nearly shipwrecked in its first sessions during the fall of 1962 and 1963 when the conservative Roman Curia and the more progressive Western bishops came to blows over the very agenda of the Council itself. On November 8, 1963, Cardinal Fringes of Cologne, addressing the heavy administrative hand of the Vatican’s Holy Office headed by Cardinal Ottaviani, accused Ottaviani’s Office of exercising “methods and behaviors…which are a cause of scandal to the world,” a declaration met with prolonged applause by many of the bishops in attendance. [Xavier Rynne, Vatican Council II (1968), p. 221] This tension between forward looking and backward looking is a heritage of the Council which, if anything, has intensified over the past sixty years. Very recent theological writing on the nature of the Catholic Church, the branch of theology called “ecclesiology,” is trying to break loose from the conservative-progressive tug of war to recover the term “communion” or the unity of believers around the table of Jesus Christ. As a lifelong Catholic and a pastor for two decades, I would like to fall in love again with the tradition that shaped my life and identity. Moreover, for the many now discerning whether to remain under the Catholic umbrella—and I think we all wonder about the value of that commitment from time to time—I would like to put forward the Church’s full identity so that whether one stays or leaves, the decision can be made in clear conscience in possession of the heart of Catholic identity. For the next several weeks I will use the “Liturgy” blog stream of the Catechist Café to feature the paragraphs of Lumen Gentium and proceed to a discussion of what the Vatican II fathers envisioned as the unifying identity of the Catholic family. I will add references and commentary on Lumen Gentium from the post-Council popes Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. Pope Francis’ Pentecost Sermon yesterday addresses our very subject at hand. I will also provide references to the latest Catholic works on ecclesiology [the identity of the Church]; the Amazon Prime truck made a large delivery yesterday and I am reviewing several newly written texts on the Church for our use here and possibly your own reading at home. A few weeks ago, I lamented on another post that I did not believe the Church does very much to inform and educate its catechists and Church ministers, nor its baptized adult members in general, many of whom have earned college degrees and are eminently capable of reading and critiquing the same texts used by seminarians in preparation for the priesthood. There are few resource sites where adults can review a bibliography or library of contemporary Catholic theological themes for self-study, such as our focus on ecclesiology or the nature of the Church. I do my best to research such works and provide links. For our purposes today I connected to the excellent on-line theology training program of Dayton University and checked to see what textbook it recommended for its ecclesiology course and where to find it. Save the Dayton link, as it offers dozens of courses and text recommendations you might not find elsewhere. Notice, too, that the Dayton recommended ecclesiology text can be purchased used on Amazon for a few dollars. Vatican documents are free online. The link for Lumen Gentium is here. One of the best books to come my way this Lent is Father James Martin’s best seller, Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone. [2021] I will review it in full in a few weeks when I have completed it, but what I have experienced so far has touched me deeply during this Lenten season and brought me back to the roots of my own childhood spirituality.
Early in his book Father Martin recalls his first experiences with the mystical as a boy. Riding his bike through a meadow one day, he stopped to look around. “All around me was so much life—the sights, the sounds, the smells—and suddenly I had a visceral urge not only to be a part of it, but also to know it and somehow possess it. I felt loved, held, understood. The desire for everything, somehow for a full incorporation into the universe, and a desire to understand what I was doing here on earth filled me. It wasn’t a vision. I was still looking at the meadow. I hadn’t ‘left myself.’ And as a boy, I don’t think I would have been able to describe it as I just did. But I knew something had happened: it was as if my heart had stopped and I was given a conscientious inkling of the depths of my own desire for…what?” [p. 23] The above cited passage stirred an early memory in my own childhood, probably about the age of four. We were living in an apartment over my grandparents’ house in East Buffalo, in the early 1950’s a green paradise of countless elm trees [later destroyed by Dutch Elm Disease]. Buffalo summers are alive with robins and their distinctive early morning and dusk distinctive song. My mother told me that the robins were singing their morning and evening prayers to God, which made a considerable impression on me. Consequently, in the still of sunset I would sit quietly in my bedroom with my face pressed to the window screen, taken up the robins’ medley, captivated by their tune and the stillness of the trees. It was my first sense of “purposeful quiet” and even these many years later I can still listen to a robin with an intuitive sense of home. Father Martin believes that many of us in childhood have such transcendental moments of awareness that, truthfully, constitute an awareness of the beyond that is the essence of prayer. He is too kind to say it, but I have the impression that organized religion, with its stress upon routine, business, order, and correctness in its faith formation of children somehow squashes that early union of loving detachment, play, and comfort. My first communion at age 8 was such a ritual production that I decided to get up early the next morning and attend the sunrise Mass by myself with the handful of elderly and blue-collar workers, to receive the Eucharist without distraction and talk to Jesus in my own way. I consider that to be my true First Communion. I was struck this Lent by Father Martin’s observation that “children may be more open than adults to experiencing God, because they are not as burdened with as many expectations about prayer.” [p. 23] As I guess happens to many of us who progress through church life, the structure of the thing does not allow much attention to spontaneous, unstructured joy. I found this to be true in the seminary, where there were many scheduled prayers but little or no direction on how to cultivate or attain that inner connectedness to the mysterious, or even respect for the possibility of it. For all my high school years my only real source of detached meditation was a copy of The Imitation of Christ which I had received from a relative as a gift. I used to read it after receiving communion after repeated failures to generate my own sense of “talking to Jesus.” In college I did get one insight about prayer that has remained with me as it resonated with childhood experience. I was assigned Peter L. Berger’s A Rumor of Angels [1968] in a philosophy course at Catholic University. Berger was a sociologist in search of divine experience in the common life of man. One of his “clues” [i.e., “rumors” of angels] is the experience of play. As he describes play, it is an experience of disconnect from the world of hard reality and death, and it is children who are particularly good at it. In the true experience of play, the participant[s] lose touch with time and space and enter a dimension of detachment. I always felt sorry for kids on my street who “had to be home at 5 PM” on fear of punishment. In my own case my outside play was curtained only by the site of my dad’s car in the driveway at dinner or nautical twilight at night [and when my mother put a bright lamp in the living room window, we could play Monopoly on the porch if no one noticed how late it was getting.] Childhood play is escape into another true reality. Being with inseparable friends is timeless. In this sense the relationship of playing to praying is uncanny, and I suspect that deprivation of one is deprivation of the other. Mental health professionals are right to wonder how the Covid epidemic has impacted children. There are many ways to pray, of course. Liturgy is the supreme act of prayer in the Church. Liturgy, particularly the Eucharist, is play in the way that the great Greek dramas lifted audiences out of time and space into a new world that Aristotle defined with the word catharsis, a draining of the emotions. [Catharsis: the first time I saw “The Godfather” in a theater, I could not find my car for fifteen minutes after leaving the theater.] The reason why young people [and the not-so-young] find Sunday Mass a chore is because we celebrate it not with the escape of catharsis but with the grim determination of miners. It is worth remembering Jesus’ words: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” My hunch is that heaven will be a playful place. Back in August 2019, shortly before the Covid pandemic, the PEW Research think tank released the result of a national study of Catholics which revealed that only one-third of the Church in the United States believes in “Real Presence,” the full physical and spiritual presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic bread and wine. Bishop Robert Barron of “Word on Fire” took to YouTube to express his dismay, with much of his ire falling upon weak catechetics and diminished attention to the teaching of Church doctrine. If that is the case, the Bishop might have cited the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 1972 pastoral, “To Teach as Jesus Did,” which assured us that religious education programs could easily assume the quality of faith education as Catholic schools, which were beginning to close in significant numbers at that time.
[You can subscribe to daily PEW news releases here.] Significant Church discussion about this study by all the American bishops and the Church’s educational establishment was interrupted by Covid-19 when the reception of the Eucharist itself—whatever one’s understanding—was interrupted for significant periods of time as churches closed and gatherings prohibited. In the meantime, the USCCB was faced with another dilemma involving Eucharistic belief and discipline, this time the election of a lifelong Catholic, Joe Biden, president of the United States, on the Democratic platform which maintains the availability of abortion as a basic right. When the election of Mr. Biden was certified, Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the USCCB, established a “working group” of bishops to determine what kind of action should be taken in response to Mr. Biden’s weekly reception of the Eucharist vis-à-vis his administrative stance of freedom of choice. Three months later the working group was terminated with no public indication of what the USCCB response would be. The two recent Eucharistic controversies are interconnected, for both assume responses of the faithful—in the first instance, to a long held doctrinal formulation of holy communion, and in a second to a national bishops’ conference’s assessment of worthiness to receive the Eucharist based upon an assessment that abortion is the preeminent sin of our times. The PEW study undertook to determine what Catholics actually believe about the Eucharist. The question was framed, as far as I know, upon adherence to the formal doctrine, written in the language of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, which in philosophical and theological terms is called “transubstantiation.” Specifically, transubstantiation asserts that that the reality of bread ceases to be bread and becomes the full living presence of Christ. The appearance of the bread, called its “accidents,” remains the same. Hence Aquinas, who also composed beautiful hymns in prayer to the Eucharist, could write that the glory of Christ is hidden by the “accidents” of the bread. An interesting sidebar here is that three hundred years later, Martin Luther, himself deeply immersed in Thomistic thinking, suggested the term “consubstantiation,” i.e., that Christ and the bread are both present in the Eucharist. His argument was that as the divinity of Christ coexisted with his humanity without destroying it, likewise the enduring divine presence of Christ in communion should not entail the destroying the reality of the bread. Luther’s understanding never gained approval of the Church, but it does illustrate that men and women of good will can comprehend the term “presence” in a variety of ways, all of them in good faith. The PEW study noted that 28% believe in Real Presence and understand the doctrine of transubstantiation. Another 22% grasp the concept of transubstantiation and reject it, presumably for another formulation. Nearly half of Catholics do not know the doctrine of transubstantiation but reverence the Eucharist as a symbol of the Body and Blood of Christ. In his YouTube presentation Bishop Barron anguishes over the fact that so many Catholics are not catechized in the rich tradition of the Faith, and I do agree with that to a point. However, we need to exercise a more nuanced eye toward Catholics who understand the Eucharist as a symbol. They are not wrong. The very definition of sacraments—all seven—introduces them as outward signs of inner realities. There may be many reasons why their adult comprehension of communion is devoid of the full expression of divine presence, but bad will is hardly one of them. To approach the Eucharist with an incomplete understanding—and we are talking about 50% of U.S. Catholics if the research is anywhere near correct-- is still a sign of faith in the communicants. Something religious is occurring in the hearts of these receivers; they are drawing closer to Christ and evidently encounter the Lord in communion even without an understanding of the medieval language of transubstantiation. It is my understanding that the USCCB is taking under consideration some kind of pastoral guidance for Catholics which would encompass the doctrinal reality of the Eucharist, the obligation to participate at Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, and the necessity of receiving communion in a state of grace, i.e., without mortal sin. I would have two concerns about such a strategy. The first is the exercise of caution in demanding an immediate and full allegiance to the doctrine of Real Presence across the board in the Church. The doctrine ought to be taught, to be sure, but with the proviso that, as an article of faith, Real Presence is a mystery toward which all of us are journeying to grasp. Full understanding will not be ours to possess until the end of time, when the need for all sacraments will cease as we behold God face to face. It is worth recalling that when Jesus proclaimed his presence in the Eucharistic food, many in the crowd protested that “this is a hard saying.” Speaking for myself, while I have been a regular communicant for 65 years, the challenge of grasping this mystery of love and awe remains a spiritual struggle the longer I live. Eucharistic teaching by our bishops should not be reduced to allegiance to a credal formulary, but rather, exposure to the faith tradition of two millennia. Real Presence has inspired devotion and intellectual exposition by countless saints. As Father James Martin would put it, we fall in love with God by listening to those who already have. I agree with Bishop Barron that our catechetics is woefully deficient on this score, but this deficiency cannot be laid at the feet of the faithful. A more useful pastoral instruction by the USCCB might result from an honest assessment of the poor condition of all our faith formation efforts. Concurrent with this theme is the idea that one must be in a spiritually proper state to receive the Eucharist. Technically speaking, Church discipline has maintained for centuries—since St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, actually—that to receive the Eucharist unworthily is “to eat and drink a condemnation to oneself.” Specifically, in First Corinthians, Paul writes: “Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord. A person should examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself.” [11:27-29] The full context of this text is the liturgical practice of the Christian assembly in Corinth [Greece] around 55 A.D. When this local church gathered to break the bread, i.e., celebrate Eucharist, there was a social segregation between rich and poor which was a mockery of the unity that Jesus intended when his followers gathered to remember him in the breaking of the one bread. It is interesting that one of the New Testament’s most famous teaching on Eucharistic decorum involves worthy reception vis-à-vis what we would call social justice. This is an interesting contrast to the pastoral and canonical emphasis in recent centuries on sexual sins and their role in rendering persons unfit to receive the Eucharist. It is rare, for example, to hear racists, tax cheats, or corrupt politicians identified among those who cannot licitly receive the Eucharist, while divorced and remarried persons or couples using artificial contraception are the poster children for those to be excluded from the communion table. It is to be hoped that any pastoral instruction on appropriate preparation for reception of communion takes the broad approach of general sinfulness rather than focusing on concerns du jour. Moreover, the strength of the Eucharist as a remedy for chronic sin and moral failure needs greater attention. Which brings us to the USCCB’s dilemma of what to do about Catholic elected officials who support access to abortion. In the first instance, what is the number of Catholics in general who support access to abortion? Studies throughout my adult life have remained remarkably consistent in that American Catholics are divided 50-50 on the subject, a reality which has aggravated many bishops since the famous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision of 1973. Some background on the abortion controversy is in order. I was 25 years old and a graduate student in theology at the time of Roe v. Wade, and as luck would have it, working on a master’s paper for my morality requirement, on women’s liberation and the Catholic Church. In the early 1970’s the push for women’s rights in American society was very strong politically—the ERA was passed by Congress though not ratified just a few years later. The feminist literature of the time made a strong case that decisions about women’s health and reproductive issues were being determined by men, and the Roe v. Wade decision was received into that atmosphere. In the half century since then, and very recently in the #metoo movement, any discussion of limiting legal abortion rights is cast as an assault on women per se. I am not certain that Church leaders understand this or factor it into pastoral considerations when embarking on Pro Life ministries. Second, the term “pro-choice” covers a considerable amount of territory. It can be invoked as advocacy for unlimited abortion, though interestingly the Roe v. Wade decision did not make that determination in its attempt to balance the right of the mother with the right of the unborn child. Moreover, I strongly doubt that all 50% of Catholics considering themselves prochoice are advocates of unlimited abortion. More fine-tuned analysis may discover that many Catholics, like many other Americans, simply believe in more therapeutic options where the life of a mother and her unborn child are at risk. A somewhat notorious case in the Diocese of Phoenix in 2010, where an abortion was performed in a Catholic hospital to save the life of a hypertensive mother, brought considerable national news coverage and, at the very least, confusion over the unilateral actions of the Phoenix bishop, Thomas Olmstead. Others may raise questions about pregnancies involving incest, child rape, etc. While Catholic moralists debate such questions, their deliberations do not seem to percolate upward toward the counsel of the national bishops’ conference. A third factor, dating back at least to the presidential election of 2012, is the decision of the USCCB to designate abortion as the preeminent issue of social justice and to promulgate this designation in all Church sanctioned guides to presidential elections. If taken at face value, such official episcopal guidelines are de facto directives to vote for Republican candidates, as the GOP has included a Pro Life plank in its convention platforms almost since Roe v. Wade. Some bishops and pastors took this designation further in 2020 by publicly preaching that a Catholic in good conscience could not vote for the Democratic candidate, the Catholic Joe Biden, who ran for office under the Democratic pro-choice banner. What has resulted is an uncomfortable alliance of the USCCB [with some notable exceptions] and a specific political party with its own moral baggage that violates the conscience sensitivities of many Catholics. Polls taken after the 2020 election indicate that about 50% of Catholics voted for Mr. Biden. There are bishops in the USCCB who would like to deny the Eucharist to the president. On the other hand, there are many social policies where the president and many Catholics would be in harmony with the bishops, and certainly with Pope Francis. I do believe that abortion is a major moral concern for the Church and for American society. I recall years ago the wisdom of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, who coined the phrase “seamless garment” to describe the unifying ethic of protecting life from conception to the grave. Every baptized Catholic carries a piece of that concern to the Eucharistic banquet. It makes no sense to exclude anyone from the one mission. |
LITURGY
March 2024
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