I am afraid that on top of our Catholic parish problems with Covid-19, we might be creating another. With bishops having exercised authority to absolve all Catholics in the United States from the Sunday Mass obligation last spring, the question has now become how to reinstate the obligation. I listened to Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki’s three-minute video to Catholics of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, where the obligation of Sunday Mass is being restored this weekend [September 19-20]. In essence, he restates the Church’s general law about Mass attendance on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation, which has for years described details of exceptions from Sunday Mass for the seriously ill, and those who care for them. He is one of the first bishops in the country to reinstate the obligation after the first wave of Covid-19. I assumed that the Archbishop had been in sync with Milwaukee’s civil authorities in terms of safety regulations, but in reviewing the city’s local newspaper coverage [The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel], it would appear that the Milwaukee Archdiocese’s relationship with the city of Milwaukee has been, for want of a better word, odd. As early as May, several Catholic churches were reopened as the diocese declared itself an essential service, though groups bigger than ten [e.g., the Milwaukee Brewers MLB team] were closed to the public by civil authorities.
The coverage of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee is beginning to bring to Catholic media the question of whether Catholics are truly bound under pain of mortal sin to return to public Mass if their own reading of public health factors and conditions are more serious than the reading of a local bishop, the corollary issue being whether a bishop can declare individuals in grave, hell-deserving sin on September 20 when he did not condemn the absence from Mass on September 13 as equally sinful Trust me, you will be asked this question or, just as likely, forced to describe Church discipline by anyone who depends on you for “the Catholic straight dope.” I don’t normally post from the news service Life Site because of its sometimes too literal interpretations of Catholic life, but I was intrigued by LS columnist Phil Lawler’s critique of the way the American bishops have pastorally managed sacraments and closings during the Covid-19 first wave. Lawler believes that the Covid closings and dispensations—in the fashion they were executed—have cost bishops a good deal of authority. I told my wife in March that people—particularly parents—will decide when to resume church and public life, and not one minute sooner, despite what our bishop or governor might say. Lawler makes a particularly good point about the exercise of authority. On the question of when to return to common Eucharistic worship on Sundays. He writes “the individual must answer that question for himself. His answer will depend on his particular circumstances: his age, his overall health, the possible risks of exposure to new disease. The pastor cannot come take his temperature and his medical history. The individual must trust his own judgment.” Catholics presumably read newspapers or their on-line equivalent and/or watch local news. If they read The New York Times this morning [September 22] which provides an up-to-the minute national tally of cases and trends, they might have noticed Wisconsin’s third place showing in the last fourteen-day “fastest spiking of the virus” derby. Evidently the Bishop of La Crosse, Wisconsin, reads “The Grey Lady,” for he did not reimpose the obligation of Mass. [By the way, that NYT database is free, as I understand it, and you can have it emailed to your home.] I have to say that the process of deciding when it was safe for me and my wife to return to public Masses was not by any stretch anguishing, but we did think about it critically. We are both well into the “precondition of age” category used in risk management for Corona though with few if any other preconditions. Florida locked down by state order in mid-March, but my parish offered the livestream Mass and the Triduum via YouTube, and we attended from home for a while. I believe it was late May when my parish reopened for offering public Sunday Masses, and weekday Masses soon thereafter, using a computer reservation system for the limited seats on the weekend. We determined during the summer that we would be safe attending the Thursday noon Mass live, as very few people attend that Mass. Florida, as you might remember, was the heart of the “summer spike” with ten to fifteen thousand new cases per day in our state, but as July moved into September and our daily state numbers now sit in the two to three thousand range, we mutually decided to attend a weekend Mass to gauge the safety against our standards. For about a month now we have been attending our Sunday evening “Life Teen” Mass, though evidently some of our senior friends and fellow parishioners also feel safe at this lightly attended Mass, and I got to thinking that the “Life Teen” Mass might acquire a new nickname shortly. I think that collectively our conscience decision circled round our personal Catholic upbringing and understanding of the importance of the weekly Eucharist, our sense that going to Mass together is an important part of our marital common life, and that my wife’s high visibility as the parish school’s founding principal has some sort of bell weather influence on others thinking of returning. In addition, on a more practical note, the University of Central Florida reopened and my wife needed to return to her UCF supervisory role of student teachers at a variety of neighboring public schools, where admittedly some risk is involved [though the public school protocols seem to be holding up quite well, albeit with a bit of anxiety.] We agreed that attending the Eucharist on Sunday deserved the same level of faith-driven risk taking that teachers take on in their work environment. My own personal reflections on returning to Mass ran in a different direction. Strange as it may seem, I deeply enjoyed the break from the Sunday live attendance for a time. For all my adult life I had attended and/or pastored small parishes—seating several hundred—so adjusting to an affluent mega-parish was hard. Our church is situated in a wealthy suburb north of Orlando, and in all my years there we have never had a sermon that might “afflict the comforted,” as someone put it. Actually, I am not criticizing the preaching; it is the best product to be expected in the present-day atmosphere of the unholy marriage of politics, culture wars, and ultratraditional spirituality. Dividing a long-established canonical parish community is a serious thing, and my priests have stuck to a formula that largely avoids this problem. Unfortunately, the product of years of peace keeping is a vanilla religious experience that describes not just the sermons but the selection of music and the style of the rites. If I were to say that “I get nothing out of Mass” the textbook response would be that my malaise is totally of my own making. Perhaps this is true in my case. But sacraments did not and do not originate from sole human experience. They are extensions of God’s love and direction. The Eucharist is the consummate feeding sacrament—feeding of the mind, of the emotions, of the body. Logically, an expectation of being taken to a new plane of existence ought to be the norm for all sacraments, but particularly for the Mass, an in-time reenactment of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the rising of the Lord [hence, “the Lord’s Day”]. The Greek philosopher Aristotle [384-322 B.C.] composed The Poetics, considered the greatest definition of the qualities of drama and tragedy of all time. The Poetics was considered required reading at my seminary, as the celebration of Mass is the enactment of the pivotal drama of human experience. Two points from Aristotle: [1] drama must maintain unity of action, i.e. every word, every rite point to the climax, and [2] the dramatic climax must raise our emotions to a point where we feel washed out, an experience called catharsis. I have experienced precious little catharsis over the years of attending Mass; the sacrament seems celebrated as a checklist of things to be done, interrupted by personal pieties of the celebrant or the inordinately long list of “announcements” that go on longer than Luther’s 95 Theses. And so, for a period of weeks, on and off, I did think about making a break from active membership. I envisioned what life might be like without the Church, or in another faith community like the Quakers, or as a “sole proprietor” of my soul. I suspect that I decided not to give up on Catholicism in large part because I was baptized as one and honestly cannot imagine being something else. Curiously, the Café blog was helpful in stretching my own frontiers of belief and devotion. In doing an entry on the Reformation, for example, I was deeply moved by Martin Luther's metaphor of the Eucharist. When the bread and wine are changed at Mass, he wrote, we experience the final act of the Incarnation--God entering our world in full reality. I remember the first evening I returned to a live Sunday Mass, and as I was leaving I laughed at myself as I remembered all the reasons I was so dissatisfied earlier in the year, and by George, they were all still there. If the pandemic has taught me anything, it is the need for every Catholic to own his or her faith identity in every sense of the word. Put another way, to cultivate a well-formed Catholic conscience in the active tense, to take responsibility to look at the enormous corpus of Catholic prayer, theology, and history. To know one’s self well enough, for example, to confidently make moral choices such as whether it is safe and prudent to attend Mass. To pray in a truly cathartic sense. To do nothing to divide the Church and society further apart. To endure uninspiring liturgy for the many tangential reasons that make sense to you: good example to others, for one. I will probably wrestle with liturgical agitation for a long time, but if I may quote the wise old New York Giants Coach Bill Parcells, “You are what your record says you are.” So, if your behind is weekly planted in a church pew, then you know who you are. One final point: Catholics will always be in tension with some aspect of the Church’s human frailty. I like to think this is one of the reasons Christ instituted the Sacrament of Penance—the place to be honest about who and where you are.
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All sacraments are gifts of God. In one sense the gift is always the same, a better union with a God who is total love. In another sense God’s gifts are differentiated to account for the age of the recipient and his or her specific needs to grow over a lifetime. In its treatment of sacraments during the Council, Vatican II [1962-1965] called for reforms of the seven sacramental rites so that Catholics—and the world at large—can more clearly experience and understand what is happening to them at the hands of God.
Unfortunately, the rites and the catecheses of sacraments have been poorly explained or not executed so that the experience of sacraments is reduced to mental belief in formulas. The old Baltimore catechisms of my Catholic upbringing promised a great deal from the sacraments, but in my own case, I remember how let down I was after my Confirmation that I felt exactly the same after the rite as I had before. [Years later, the American Benedictine liturgist Aidan Cavanaugh would say of Confirmation that that it takes as much faith to believe the bishop is using oil as it does to believe in the coming of the Holy Spirit.] This is the fifth post of a series on COVID-19; specifically, the question of how many Catholics who are not presently celebrating sacraments during the pandemic will or will not return as it is deemed safe to do so in the various regions of the country by health officials. My theme throughout these entries has been [1] to take the longer view of fifty years of Catholic departures, of which Corona is a major but momentary spike in the depletion of parishes, and [2] to recommend a rethinking of why two or three generations of Catholics have already left for good, looking at how the Church might improve our modus operandi and attract or reunite with the many who are not with us now, regardless of the timing. I have been focusing on the sacrament of Penance, though the other sacraments will get their turn. But I focused first on Penance because even the best Catholics, those still attending, struggle to experience what the sacraments promise. My father who attended daily Mass and rosary, admitted to me forty years ago on a fishing trip that he never got anything out of confession, and he went “only because your mother said I have to.” I was in my 30’s then, a pastor, and his comments got me to thinking about the wide gulf between even the most faithful of Catholics in terms of what they were experiencing and what the Church promised regarding Penance, and for that matter, all the sacraments. The heart of Penance is the experience of God’s loving healing through an intermediary ordained to make this love personal and relevant, to help a penitent set aright the areas of life that distract from or dissuade from the journey to the perfect God. The Baltimore Catechism states clearly that we were made to know, love, and serve God in this life and be happy with Him forever in heaven. Spiritual writers through the centuries have advised that in our journey to God, we are either moving forward or drifting backward. Unfortunately, the penitential sacrament became the “automatic pilot” exercise and appears to remain so today, possibly because the term “good Catholic” has become equated to the stable Catholic. It would probably help Catholics if there was a clearer catechetics about sin and forgiveness. The division of mortal and venial sins, for example, results in something of a paradox. Mortal sin is defined in the Catechism [para. 1861] as “a radical loss of human freedom, as is love itself. It results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying [saving] grace, that is, the state of grace. If it is not redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices forever, with no turning back….” The Catechism balances the scales by giving devoting large sections to the joys of heaven and directives on living a virtuous, prayerful. All the same, the idea of a hopeless and abandoned existence such as hell tends to dwarf the rest of the conversation. If there is a second category of sins [venial] not deemed sufficiently bad enough to send one to hell, then we have stretched the word “sin” almost to the point of breaking. The very existence of hell has come under renewed scrutiny throughout my lifetime. Stepping aside from the ivy-cloaked academic halls of theology and related disciplines, the basic catechetics of parish life, starting with the second graders, hammers home not just the reality of hell but also the idea that all of us live very close to the guard rail from eternal damnation. [First Penance, for reasons unclear to me, is presently celebrated before two sacraments of initiation into the Church, First Eucharist and Confirmation.] Given that so little energy was invested in the full Vatican II theology of Penance, and that the full rite of penance is not used even today in many parishes, it is helpful to see what is supposed to happen during individual confession, as in the British Rite of Penance [paras. 15-20]. In 2015 Pope Francis also wrote a personal exhortation to use the full penitential rite [Ordo Paenitentiae, 1973] in personal confession. I offer here two strands of popular thought that need to be addressed if the sacrament is to become part and parcel of Catholic life. [1] God did not have to create us. He did so, we are told, as an act of pure love, and He desires our companionship for all eternity. And yet He has created us with enough free will to land ourselves in eternal torment. Many Catholics find this theology hard to grasp and/or have crafted personal “salvific plans” that they can live with in this world or the next. [2] If a mortal sin can actually bring a Christian to such an unthinkable destination, then it would stand to reason that mortal sins must be universally recognized by reasonable folks, such as atrocious deeds, universally despised, in the league of Hitler and mass murderers. But the Catechism [1860] states that “no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are written in the conscience of every man.” The statement suggests that this inborn knowledge of the law of nature is known and easily accessible to all persons. To complicate natural law further, all sexual sins are considered mortal in official Catholic theology because human intercourse was created. Artificial birth control, for example, is considered, ipso facto, a mortal sin, though I would wager that not one in a thousand Catholics has any idea of the Church’s philosophical argument to support this. Or put another way, do the thousands of Catholics who use the pill to space their children either know or believe they are in mortal trouble, so to speak? [3] I do not know how many people still publicly argue that “I confess to God directly” rather than to a priest or another human being. The question may be moot as, noted above, it is quite possible that many people sense no need to confess in the first place. However, as a close friend critiqued my thinking for this entry, I have to admit that the Church needs to consider the skills set of confessors to personify the various needs of penitents and the best ways of phrasing Gospel morality to a particular soul. My friend and I are both of the “Required Mandatory Withdrawal from IRA Accounts” age, and we talked about whether newly ordained priests, for example, sufficiently grasp the realities of seniors, spiritual and existential. According to Canon Law, any priest validly ordained and enjoying the faculties [judicial approval] of his bishop or religious superior can hear the confession of a Catholic of any age and impart absolution of confessed known mortal sins, as well as of venial sins. But nowhere does the Church teach that in the normal liturgical life only the words of absolution constitute the rite. The penitent should have the opportunity to explain and examine what he or she understands about their current life’s journey and how it is intertwined with conduct at this particular instant, negatively and positively. In my own case, I begin every confession with a very brief but descriptive curriculum vitae, that I am a laicized priest and now a man who is validly married in the Church for nearly a quarter century. I tell my age and talk about the moral challenges unique to this constellation that is me: I have my health, I am not poor, I am happily married, I am trained in two distinct disciplines, theology and mental health. I exercise. Given my advancing age, I know that I do not have unlimited days, so the question of how to do the most good with a racing calendar is always on my mind. I do have doubts from time to time that God loves me or is pleased with the 72+ years body of work I have amassed so far. And with the inevitable wisdom that comes from age and experience, I look back with regrets about the things I have left undone as well as what I have done. Now it may occur to some that such soul searching would be better done in a counselor’s office or even in spiritual direction. But God did not establish a psychotherapy sacrament; his intention was a sacrament which replicated the ministry of his Son, who advised the enthusiastic young man on his conversion [Matthew 19: 16-22], engaged the Samaritan woman on her marital and doctrinal outlook [John 4: 1-26]; and persuasively led a questioning Nicodemus toward a new vision of his faith [John 3: 1-21]. Since the Council of Trent [1545-1563] the Church has placed a great premium upon the healing exchange of the Sacrament of Penance. The patron saint of parish priests, St. John Vianney [1786-1859], was known throughout Europe for his confessional grace, sometimes spending eighteen hours per day engaged in the Sacrament of Penance. Princes and rulers sought to confess to him; obviously, they were seeking more than a brief, juridical exchange they could easily have received from their personal chaplains. In our time, Pope John Paul II restricted the used of General Absolution [a rite of canonical forgiveness without confession] in favor of the interpersonal experience of the confessional, God’s personal intervention and interaction with his people who, like the proverbial snowflakes, are beautiful and unique. If this is what we want, how do we get there? I did not leave Washington, D.C., immediately after my ordination in September 1974, but I remained at my home friary near Catholic University for an extra five days to visit the high schools in Georgetown where my retreat teams had given three-day retreats over the past four years. Armed with my “faculties” from Cardinal O’Boyle, I offered the student body Mass at each location, and then I told the principal I could stay for a while if anyone wanted to go to confession. [There was a long tradition then of confessing to “Father Visitor” in parishes and schools.] Those days were my first true full immersion into the Sacrament of Penance. Some of the students had been on three or four retreats with me over the years, and I remember my overriding intention in those confessions was to reinforce the idea that the Church was their home and that they could trust priests to help them through life. I honestly cannot say I was aware of significant departures from the Church in 1974 [though later professional research would establish that] but I did know that teenagers commonly left the Church in college or the service. I felt a mission to do what I could to reverse that.
After my first day of hearing confession, I felt like I was born for the task in terms of comfort with the rite and the human interchanges. I had done hours of counseling during my years giving youth retreats from the major seminary, so the interactions in the confessional were quite easy. The rite of the sacrament then—confession of sin and absolution—was not exactly rocket science. In fact, just months before my ordination, the Vatican released the “study copy” of the post-Vatican II proposed reform rite for the Sacrament of Penance, so technically we were still using the old rite in 1974, though many parishes and religious communities were experimenting with proposals from the newly proposed rite of Penance, from face-to-face confession to group penance services. I might add here that the New York Times did an exhaustive article on the Vatican Penance reform in 1974, and it is interesting to see the Times predictions vis-à-vis the state of confession in 2020. During my first week of confession I found that my young penitents “had narratives” or life stories to tell, some quite emotionally. This jelled with what my professors had taught, that the moral life was not just a succession of hermetically sealed missteps but a major journey toward meaning and virtue. In the relative leisure afforded to me that week, I was able to hear their narratives. I explained to them that in their parishes their priests might not have the time to give them significant attention or counsel, so I advised them to find a priest they were comfortable in talking with, perhaps at my seminary where a surprising number of “retreat alumni” were already attending our 11 AM Sunday conventual Mass. I told every one of them that Jesus and his Church loved them; I guess that would be called “evangelization” today but it was an attitude that me and many of my ordination classmates absorbed by disposition and example. It did not hurt that my branch of the Franciscan Order had a particularly good reputation as confessors and spiritual directors in the Catholic University ambit. I got to my first assignment later in September 1974, to the chaplain’s office at Siena College. When I got there the term “college chaplaincy” was morphing into “campus ministry” and creating a new template for college work, but basically the chaplains [there were three of us on the team when I arrived] were operating a canonical parish within the college. While not overwhelmed by confessional demands, I have to say that Mass attendance by the students was very impressive. I remembered something from a grad school lecture by the late liturgical scholar Father Regis Duffy. A sacramental genius, Duffy told us that young people effectively minister and heal each other, and that we as future priests must respect and enhance this process. I found this to be excellent advice. Providing compelling Eucharistic celebrations, particularly on the weekends, was my focus, i.e., I spent a lot more time arranging music ministry than hearing confessions. That said, much of my time was spent with students in the coffee shop and the Rathskeller [as well as arranging weddings for alumni.] Sometimes after a long conversation one or another student might spontaneously request absolution. During my final semester there, I offered a late evening Mass on every wing of the boys’ dormitories during Lent and I included General Absolution in the Masses, to keep the sacramental sense of forgiveness and divine reconciliation alive in their formation. I found that, spiritually speaking, most students who confessed or sought advice were using the college years to “figure things out” in the best sense of the term. For example, I got more feedback from students about our 10:15 PM Sunday Quiet Mass than anything else we did. I did not initiate this custom, but I wish I had. We had a commuter student with an ear for meditational music who would play pieces through our sound system in the parts of the Mass where there would have been congregational singing. The most common assessment: “I really liked that opportunity to be quiet with God and get my head together for the next week.” Given the size of our campus ministry staff, I had opportunities to take weeks off during the school year and summers to conduct retreats for communities of women’s religious in New England and New York. [I had made many connections with communities during summer school years at St. Bonaventure University.] In those circumstances I was responsible for the conferences and the confessions. It was involving work, to say the least. Nearly all the retreatants were professed sisters, professionals in education, medicine, or a comparable field. And appropriately enough, many would use the occasion of the annual retreat to make a general confession. Looking back to my first week retreat for the Sisters of Mercy in 1975, I can only shake my head in bemusement. I guess all of us of a certain age look back on our youthful adventures with a certain shudder and say, “I could never do that today.” In my own case, I think that whatever success was achieved in the conferences and confessions of those early years was sustained by youthful enthusiasm. This is not a bad thing except that enthusiasm of itself is not enough to sustain a minister for the long haul. I was able to affirm religious penitents in their ministries, to thank them for their work, console and commiserate with them at a stressful time in the Church’s history, give space to those who were debating their futures, and accept their intentions to live their lives and/or their vows in step with Divine calling. I had the advantage of being young, open-minded, musical, and liturgically updated as well, which might not be so typical for the older diocesan priests who regularly served the religious communities. I learned my inadequacies: I needed more training and personal experience in the development of a spiritual life, both for consecrated religious and the lay persons of the Church [and myself, of course]. I was not satisfied with my advice to sisters, for example, who would tell me of their difficulties in binding together their prayer dispositions with the stresses of work that filled their day. I needed much more understanding of works from Erik Erikson and others to grasp the significance of human development and life stages to provide religious counsel in the confessional in “age-appropriate” idioms. I realized that better retreat conferences require much more “desk time” and research—a lesson reinforced by the Café blogsite just about every day. I had hoped that I might become a full time retreat master for my Order, but I felt that to strengthen my credibility with religious and Church ministers, I should give several years to the stresses of parish life. After four years at the college, I informed my Order’s superior of my intention, and “several years” quickly became eleven years of pastoring one church and four years at another in Central Florida. This span of years included building a new church and serving in several diocesan capacities, including president of the priests’ council twice. I even had time for one sisters’ retreat. I received a frantic call from the chancery one Friday morning informing me that a big-name retreat master was unable to conduct the diocese’s annual sisters’ retreat, and could I be ready to go on at 6 PM at Treasure Island Resort in Daytona Beach? But those opportunities were few and far between. Instead, I was a 24-hour pastor, and after a year or two I learned some things about the spirituality of parishes. Parishes are places that “always remain the same” where the dependable services are celebrated day after day or year after year. You can always count on your parish for Sunday Mass, daily Mass, First Communion, weddings, funerals, Mass cards, etc. Parishes sustain Church life. The challenge for a pastor is making sure that sustaining the faith does not stultify it, either. Confession is a good case in point. When I arrived at my first parish, confession was offered Saturday before the Vigil Mass and “by appointment.” This seems to be an arrangement still current today. Confession in a tight time window—with a line behind the penitent—puts a premium on efficiency for the “sinner” and “the priest.” Such a format only permits time for the bare canonical or legal requirements of confessing all known sins and the absolution of sins by the intercession of the ordained minister, a far cry from the full rite for individual confession released in the post Vatican II reform in the 1970’s. The EWTN website provides the rubrics of how the Penance sacrament is supposed to be celebrated in the confessional. In a sense, years of customary brief confessions overpowered the much more powerful sacramental rite put forward in the 1970’s. The reading of Scripture, the opportunity to personalize the need for forgiveness, the offering of comfort and spiritual advice by the priest—were [and continue to be] stifled to the point that going to confession has become just another “devotional” for a minority in typical parish life. Next time, I will talk about some strategies we employed to communicate the richness of the Penitential experience—some success, some failures. Of course, I was not totally plugged into the reality that by the mid-1980’s a good many Catholics had abandoned the rite altogether. This stream, of which this post is the third—was inspired by a considerable concern that Catholics who are not attending sacraments due to the Covid-19 virus might not come back when the immediate crisis subsides. Given that many catechists and ministers are limited in what they can currently do, this “down time” might provide some opportunities to look back on our ministries with candor. My goal is to assess the reasons people stopped frequenting sacraments over the past half century, and to assess how a new evangelization might create a spiritual hunger in a post-Covid world. “Going back to normal” is not a healthy goal; the “old normal” was hemorrhaging Catholics in droves. This next post will be autobiographical—my own attitudes toward the Sacrament of Penance as I grew up, and the following or fifth one on how I approached my twenty years as a confessor, and what I would teach today.
When I sat down to hear my first confession, on September 14, 1974, I had never been trained in the rubrics of the Sacrament of Penance in my seminary-theology school. Nobody believes that, but it is true. I heard my first confession during the reception after my ordination; someone approached me and requested, and we found a classroom off the courtyard. I was surprised, but not unduly nervous, perhaps because confession in 1974 was still remarkably like 1954, when I made my first confession prior to First Communion. In the previous post on this stream [below] I outlined the development of morality and canon law philosophies about the Sacrament of Penance from the Council of Trent [1545-1563] to the eve of Vatican II, and the emergence of two different pastoral styles among confessors. A typical confession when I was growing up was a pretty simple affair: state your sins, make an Act of Contrition, receive absolution, and upon leaving, say your penance, which usually consisted of “three Our Fathers” or “three Hail Mary’s.” [In 2011 I made a general confession at the National Shrine in Washington and I received a rosary as a penance. Tough crowd in DC.] I cannot remember my first confession with the other First Communion candidates, but for some reason I remember the second, in the general adult Saturday hours. I told my old monsignor I had been punished at home for playing with the bright buttons on our electric ringer washer. He took some time to explain to me that parents have rules to keep their children from getting hurt. Looking back, I am rather impressed that he took time to provide guidance and counsel to a little seven-year-old. Unfortunately, I cannot recall any “St. Paul on the Road to Antioch” confessional conversions in elementary school, and even in the minor seminary the experience of going to confession was at best routine, part of the program. I cannot remember if our St. Joe’s rulebook mandated weekly or biweekly confessions on Tuesdays and Thursday evenings. I can remember when the wheels started coming off the wagon, though. I think I was a high school junior when I took the train back to the seminary, having purchased a steamy detective novel with several naughty passages. Fearful that I had committed mortal sin, I went to confession on the first Tuesday night back. But then I got to wondering if I had told the confessor how much I had read, so I returned the following Tuesday. Both times he absolved me, no questions asked. But his absence of wrath got me to thinking that perhaps he misunderstood what a serious sinner I was. So, I went back the third Tuesday, and then he hit the ceiling—not because of my moral lapse but because I was doubting the sacramental power and succumbing to scrupulosity. I left the confessional, not relieved, but disoriented— “there’s something screwy about this whole thing,” I thought, and I proceeded to give up going to confession for all of Lent that year. After the first two posts on this Café topic, I was surprised to hear from some Aroma Hill friends how they quit going to confession forever during their seminary years. This information jelled with the much later [2018] CARA-St. Mary’s Press classic study, “Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation of Young Catholics.” In that study, researchers found that the process of leaving the Church can begin as early as the age of ten, the mean being thirteen. Lots of reasons have been put forth about why young people give up and leave the Church [including many of my classmates and friends from seminary days] but several reasons have been overlooked, and I would argue that our understanding and practice of Penance is a major one. Vatican II laid out new and/or restored principles for renewal of all the sacraments, but renewal of Penance has been elusive—dare I say untried. The Church is wedded to a definition of sin and restitution that constitutionally falls flat in its efforts to bring the penitent closer to Christ. Put another way, sin is still defined as a precise deed and restitution is weighed out with black leather precision. This is the “casuist” method of justification. Priests were trained in this method until Vatican II, positioned to make certain judgments that every sin was properly confessed and assessed in order that sacramental absolution could be guaranteed to forgive the penitent’s mortal and venial sins. Newly ordained priests were required to attend casus conscientiae or “cases of conscience” meetings with moralists and canonists to examine the kinds of sins they might encounter in the box. I was able to find a sample of such cases here. Looking back, it is a grace from God that many older priests in my youth did not take the casuist approach very seriously. Anyone of my vintage can recall that every parish had a mix of priest confessors—most parishes had multiple priests in the post-World War II era, at least in populated areas—and it was common knowledge in a parish who were the strict confessors of the Jesuit-casuist mold and the gentle confessors of the Redemptorist cut. Often this depended upon which seminary a priest attended, but for some confessors their psychological disposition and/or personal piety played a factor in how they approached the sacrament, or more to the point, how they interacted with penitents. This duality of approaches in confession was exacerbated with the discovery of oral contraceptives, commonly referred to as “the pill,” which came into use in the United States in 1960. As a rule, Catholicism forbade the use of the pill based upon Pope Pius XI’s 1930 Casti Connubii prohibition of artificial birth control. However, theologians of that time were reexamining the theology of marriage, the nature of sin, the role and freedom of conscience, and most of all, the need for a full experience of Christ’s mercy in the rite of Penance/confession. Many, but not all, newly trained ordained priests of the mid-1960’s, reinforced by the general directives of Vatican II, abandoned the legalistic casuist confessional style and brought scriptural and psychological insights into the confessional encounter. It was becoming obvious to educated adult Catholics that salvation did not dangle on an appendage to a technical sin. These newly ordained priests would also become my seminary teachers in college [1966+], and in 1967 I had a two hour talk with my theology professor to inquire about something troubling me: “How can something be a sin last year and not this year, according to our classroom presentations?” He walked me through the history of the sacrament of Penance and the various forms and moral philosophies this sacrament had taken. He introduced me to some of the outstanding moral minds of the times. He shared the importance of healing in the sacrament, not judging. It was one of the most satisfying and enlightening interventions of my life, and I am still grateful to the priest today. A sidebar to this encounter—in the spring of 1968, as my days at St. Joe’s were winding down, I entered my public science fair exhibit--the chemical and medical principles of “the pill.” I knew I would get some scores from the judges for originality. I cannot remember if any seminary officer signed off on it, but I trudged down the hill to the Callicoon pharmacy and a chat with the old pipe-smoking pharmacist. I was hoping to get just a user’s guide, like the patient’s brochure, but he opened the boxes of three different brands and pulled out the full-scale details for doctors and patients and gave them to me, the ones in #2 font-size. Come the day of the fair, many local gentry visited and in the process caught my display—there generally wasn’t much to do in Callicoon—and I started getting questions from couples who thought that the pill was a sin [which, in the public casuist teaching, it was—and still is!] and why was a seminarian presenting this medication for general information. I would talk with them briefly, and then ring the intercom into the friary to solicit a young priest to sit down with them in a parlor. I remember that day so well because every couple told me in so many words that they could not bring themselves to talk to a priest about their marital problems, and in some cases how they wished to return to communion. A few had confessional horror stories. I learned a lot about morality and confession that day, and it stayed with me right through to ordination and beyond. Check in again in a few days for my reflections on twenty years of hearing confessions—where I think we are today and what can be done to move the heart closer to the forgiving Christ “in the box.” Last Friday’s post on “Will Catholics ‘Come Home’ after the Virus?” generated the largest response of any posts on The Catechist Café blog this year: on my own Facebook site, email, and visits reported by my webmaster at Weebly, the blog platform. By way of review, the post’s intention was to examine the impact of the Covid-19 virus on present-day Catholic sacramental life against the backdrop of a steady decline in Catholic sacramental life dating back at least to 1970 and probably some years before. My pastoral intention here is to reflect upon sacramental life—specifically the manner the Church celebrates the rites—and to examine what might be happening to lead so many of our brethren to leave the worshipping family. As I noted last week, Catholic journalism and secular outlets are asking how many Catholics may not “come back” to common Sunday worship when Covid-19 conditions are contained. We will not know for some time, but I cannot think of a better time to discuss the long exodus from the Church, of which the pandemic is but a dramatic [and possibly temporary] spike.
Again last week, I chose the Sacrament of Penance and the fashion it was celebrated over the years since the Reformation to see if its theology and its style would compel penitents to return to the sacrament with heightened anticipation and enthusiasm. We got as far as the eve of Vatican II [1962-1965] when the Church in the United States and some other countries found itself in a quandary over the face of sacraments presented in the confessional box, for a cluster of reasons enumerated below. [1] For starters, last week we looked at the two variant approaches to the judgments of the confessors rendered in the sacrament, dating from the post-Reformation reforms of the seventeenth century. One, reflecting the intellectual influence of the Jesuits, was a strict legal determination of the numbers and kinds of sin in confession, in order that absolution could be administered with near certainty in the eyes of God. The other approach, introduced by St. Alphonsus Ligouri and the Redemptorists, brought an affective and devotional mood to the sacrament, whereby in issues of uncertain guilt, the penitent received the benefit of the doubt, an approach known in the textbooks at “probabilism.” [2] The Redemptorist model was embraced by many pastors and even by popes, who agreed with St. Alphonsus Ligouri that the consciences of the faithful should not be unduly disturbed on matters such as birth control. However, in 1931 Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical, Casti Connubii, which reaffirmed the prohibition of artificial contraception but with greater length and reach than the Church had seen in several centuries. Pius XI had altered the trajectory of both confessional practice and professional moral theologians with his arguments. In the first instance, he made the case that every marital sex act without openness to conception was a grave violation of the law of nature and never permissible, i.e., evil deeds cannot justify good intentions in his train of thought. It was also the style of Pope Pius XI that would impact Catholics in the pew in that the pope made this decision himself. On a matter so delicate and intimate to married couples, there was no broader, episcopal consultation, and certainly none from lay persons. Pius drew from select Biblical texts and ancient theologians such as St. Augustine, who held that sexual intercourse itself without conception was venially sinful. Redemptorist works and writers garnered zero footnotes in Casti Connubii. With the switch in moral emphasis from discernment of intention to a static, timeless, legal definition of acts and guilt, those who approached the sacrament of Penance—possibly the most intimate moments of contact with personalized grace and forgiveness for a Catholic with a priest, was reduced to a formulary. A penitent had no time to interact or, as we say today, “tell his story.” Confession was depersonalized, and academic moral theology had nowhere to go. The story goes that when one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, the Redemptorist Father Bernard Haring, was told by his superiors that he was to study moral theology in Rome, he argued: “'I told my superior that this was my very last choice because I found the teaching of moral theology an absolute crushing bore.'' His superior replied: “We are asking you to prepare yourself for this task with a doctorate from a German university so that it can be different in the future.” [3] The horror of World War II and the Holocaust led Catholic scholars and philosophers to the conclusion that much of Catholic moral methodology was simply not working. Nazi Germany, for example, was a nation of Lutherans and Catholics who participated in antisemitic genocide. Scholars began to redefine the nature of human acts, and more specifically, what does the word “sin” mean? Is the direction of one’s moral life determined by a series of independent individual acts, or is sin better defined as an overarching direction or choice, known by the term “fundamental option?” The Redemptorist Father Haring mentioned above introduced this concept in his post-World War II writings, notably his moral text The Law of Christ [English translation 1961] Haring was a staple of seminary training of priests in my formative era; I had to outline Haring’s theory and writings during my oral masters comprehensive exams in 1974. [4] Casti Conubii was declared in 1930, but events and science were pushing ahead. In the United States, thousands of Catholic servicemen returned home to start families. CC had forbidden birth control practices of the 1930’s, but the medical advances in reproductive health services became more advanced. Pope Pius XII, in a 1951 address to Italian midwives, removed any question on the morality of periodic sexual abstinence during fertile times as a method of spacing children. In my youth this method was called “rhythm” or later “Natural Family Planning.” [Every diocese has an office of NFP for education of the faithful.] In my childhood [1950’s] I remember that my relatives of child-bearing years complained that “rhythm” was unpredictable and unreliable. In the late 1950’s the first safe contraceptive pills were prescribed in the United States. “The pill” was considered morally objectionable by the Church because it was an artificial intrusion against nature, though the rhythm method, many opponents argued, also appeared artificial as couples abstained from sex at the very time nature had prepared for them to conceived. Certainly, in the United States, there were more Catholics attending college—particularly Catholic colleges—than ever before, many by virtue of the GI Bill. It was a time of empowerment of lay Catholics, who were exposed to the intellectual side of Catholic life beyond what they were routinely taught in home parishes. [5] Pope John XXIII stunned the world in 1959 with his invocation of an Ecumenical Council which we know today as Vatican II. The very idea of a council elated some and terrified others, depending upon whether one embraced the idea of “change” or “entrenchment.” Pope John, clearly aware of this, removed several “hot button” issues from the bishops’ consideration, notably priestly celibacy and birth control. But regarding birth control, the pope gathered a small working group, the “Papal Birth Control Commission,” to study the pros and cons of change in the Church’s teaching on contraception. One famous member of the group, Patty Crowley of the United States, was longtime president of the Christian Family Movement to which my own parents belonged in the 1960’s. The struggles of this commission are outlined in Turning Point [1995] by Robert McClory. The existence of such a commission leaked to the public and led to widespread expectation that there would be official papal change in the moral teaching on contraception by Catholic couples. Vatican II did not discuss the issue of conception directly, as it was instructed not to do so. But in December 1965, as the Council was wrapping up its work, the bishops approved a Constitution, Gaudium et Spes, “Joy and Hope,” a message of good will addressed to the entire world, not just the Catholic Church. In GS the Council, speaking of marriage and family life, articulated dual purposes of intercourse in the sacrament of marriage, describing married life as both unitive [bringing a couple closer to each other] and procreative. This phrasing was considerably different from earlier Church tracts which strongly emphasized the creation of children as the primary [and usually sole] reason for sexual intercourse in marriage. In the 1960’s priests who were familiar with the debates of Vatican II, or like myself, were trained in that era, took a more conciliatory stance toward couples who approached them, either as individuals in the confessional or as couples in “the parlor,” the term given to intimate counseling which priests as a rule consider as inviolate as the secrecy of the confessional. On the other hand, there were priest confessors who believed they were bound to strict interpretations of Casti Conubii. It was quite common then that parishioners spread the word discretely about their local priests as to whether they were strict on contraception teaching, or didn’t ask about it in the confessional, or if asked, advised the couple to use their own consciences. Finally, on July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which fortified Pius XI’s 1930 teaching against artificial birth control. It was quite unexpected and bitterly disappointing to many priests and evidently to many lay Catholics as well. I would say that Pope Paul’s encyclical is a much more compassionate document than Pius XI’s teaching, and Paul goes to considerable lengths to explain his reasoning to people he knows will be upset and alienated. The temperament of Humanae Vitae is a good template for the hard discussions the Church is faced with now and in the future in that it treats its opponents with considerate respect. The same tenor has been notably absent in the so-called “culture wars” in recent times in the United States. For our purposes, one of the sad outcomes of the birth control controversy was its impact upon those seeking the grace of the Sacrament of Penance. In a matter of intense moral concern, Catholics found themselves caught between their consciences and the conflicts of their priests and the moral governance of the universal Church. In the next post [sooner than this one, I hope] I will share with you my personal reflections from having lived on both sides of the confessional grill, with some thoughts about this Sacrament that might lead some of our absent brethren to pursue the conversion process with joy and hope, or gaudium et spes. For further research I strongly suggest Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists [1968, 1986] by John T. Noonan, Jr. It has been a little time since the “Monday Morality” stream has jostled itself to the head of the line, but we just completed a week with multiple saints who profoundly influenced moral thinking and pastoral approaches to the Sacrament of Penance. Last Friday was the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order. Saturday was the feast of St. Alphonsus Ligouri, the founder of the Redemptorists, and coming up this Thursday is the feast of St. John Vianney, the nineteenth century French parish priest renowned for his gifts in the confessional.
Penance/Confession is one of the sacraments impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and yesterday I read several pieces online which speculated that Catholics would not return to the sacraments once a vaccine is discovered and group worship is reasonably safe. As is the common theme of such articles, the onus of this defection lies with Catholic laity for any number of reasons, from weak faith in the Eucharist to start with to the convenience of televised Mass, etc. I think that future Church researchers will have a field day assessing the entire Church response to the virus, however long we suffer with Covid-19. But the language of much literature on the current situation in the Church in the United States seems to portray a shock and a deep concern at the Corona intrusion, with its potential to decimate Catholic congregations. If losing practicing members is the measuring rod, then the horse was out of the barn long before a virus jumped species in China, and the thinning of congregations at the Eucharistic banquet was already in plain sight before New Years of 2020. I pulled up current sacramental statistics from CARA and found that the decline of sacramental practice in the U.S. is not only worse than you can imagine, but dates back to 1970, when statistics of this sort were analyzed for the first time. U.S. Priestly Ordinations: [1970] 805 [2019] 486 Religious Sisters [1970] 160,931 [2019] 42,441 Parishes without resident pastors: [1970] 571 [2019] 3572 Former Catholics [1970] 3,500,000 [2019] 29.400,000 * Students in Religious Ed [1970] 4,200,000 [2019] 2,200,000 * Infant Baptisms [1970] 1,089,000 [2019] 582,331 Adult Baptisms [1970] 84,534 [2019] 35,138 First Communions [1990] 849,919 [2019] 600,816 Marriages [1970] 426,309 [2019] 137,885 Weekly Sunday Mass [1970] 54.9% [2019] 21.1% Pray weekly [1980] 80.8% [2019] 80.8% *extrapolated data As it happens, I am currently reading The Struggle for Celibacy [2006] by a priest sociologist who was embedded [with approval] in a functioning American major seminary as a researcher-observant to understand how seminarians are prepared for the sacrifice of married love that celibacy involves. The author, Father Paul Stanosz, observes that people will make sacrifices if there is a corresponding motivating ideal, a supportive peer group, and a fulfillment of a desired goal. I suspect this hypothesis may be true as a determining factor as to why people in general engage in Church membership and sacramental celebrations, or conversely, why they eventually leave, disappointed. I have no doubt that during the extended break from regular church life, there are at least some who are weighing their reasons for continued sacramental participation, but the Covid epidemic is more of a spike than a new phenomenon. Let us take one sacrament, Penance, that has declined in practice over the past half-century, though for many reasons these numbers cannot be tallied, nor should they. But anecdotal evidence abounds. My family took a week-long fishing trip to Parry Sound in Ontario in the 1980’s, I believe it was. After a hard day of netting northern pike, we kicked back after sunset and made serious withdrawals from a bottle of Canadian Club next to the citronella candle. I was ordained around ten years at that time and the conversation turned to “church,” as it always seemed to do in the parts of my family which still frequent them. [I never start these discussions.] My parents were devout Catholics; my father served as a medic in World War II in the North African and European theaters. He was buried in 2002 with the small blue rosary that “got me through the war.” I am sure that being under fire as much as he was, the opportunity to make confession and receive absolution meant a great deal to him. Thankfully, he returned home alive from war and resumed his place in the “peacetime parish church” until his final illness made it impossible to attend. But on that clear Canadian night of our trip he made a remarkable admission: “I don’t get anything out of going to confession anymore. The only reason I go is because your mother makes me.” I appreciated my dad’s candor, because he was no “cafeteria Catholic” and upheld Church teachings at considerable cost, personally and professionally. He also affirmed for me something I was noticing in my decade of parish work. Even though my mother and father met through a high school pen pal program sponsored by Our Sunday Visitor in the last 1930’s, my dad was not, to my knowledge, much of a reader of Catholic literature. He lived instinctively the wise counsel of the late medieval mystic and writer Thomas a Kempis, who wrote in the Imitation of Christ that “I had rather feel compunction than know its definition.” The post-Reformation Council of Trent [1545-1563] is remembered for its clarification of Catholic doctrine and practice that was attacked, denied, or redefined by Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. Curiously, its teaching on Penance, while strict on many points, seems to go the extra mile to give the penitent a palpable experience of God’s mercy. So we find in the Council’s minutes [Chapter 14]: “But the thing signified indeed and the effect of this sacrament, as far as regards its force and efficacy, is reconciliation with God, which sometimes, in persons who are pious and who receive this sacrament with devotion, is wont to be followed by peace and serenity of conscience, with exceeding consolation of spirit. The holy Synod, whilst delivering these things touching the parts and the effect of this sacrament, condemns at the same time the opinions of those who contend, that, the terrors which agitate the conscience, and faith, are the parts of penance.” Often forgotten, confession has a highly personal and After Trent, the theology and practice of the Sacrament of Penance fell under the provenance of Jesuit theologians and canon lawyers, whose textbooks and “manuals for confessors” emphasized the legal aspects of the sacrament, objectifying intention and sincerity [e.g., perfect and imperfect contrition], precision of the confession of actual sins, etc. Jesuits advocated the strictest adherence to the letter of the law in moral judgments—on the grounds that this was the safest way to insure the effectiveness of the sacrament. The Latin word for “safer” is tutior, and in history books this approach to moral theology and confession is often referred to as “tutiorism.” Not for nothing were the Jesuits mocked as “casuists.” However, by the 1700’s, the pastoral life on the ground was becoming overly “tutiorized” [i.e., emotionless], and in reaction to the absence of personal and emotional worship experience--catharsis, the awakening of the emotions as Aristotle used the term in his classic work on drama, the Poetics--there emerged a spontaneous eruption of new and venerable devotions among the faithful [for example, devotion to the Sacred Heart], that nurtured the affective need of believers. Theologians such as St. Alphonsus Ligouri, founder of the Redemptorists, looked to a different confessional stance, one which assumed the good intention of the penitent. Thus, if there was reasonable question about guilt, a confessor could assume that the penitent’s intentions did not reach the level required for a mortal sin. Predictably, this trend is known today as “probabilism,” as in the penitent probably did not intend to sin mortally. One aspect of St. Alphonsus’ teaching and practice was the prudence of confessors not to pry too deeply into the sexual lives of married penitents, specifically on the question of birth control. St. John Vianney followed this advice, and in his retreats for French priests in the 1800’s he advised them not to disturb the good consciences of their parishioners needlessly. In fact, when the matter of contraception-- the use of condoms and coitus interruptus--was raised to popes, the general response was to follow Alphonsus Ligouri’s wisdom on such matters. By the twentieth century, however, as popes saw a numerically declining population in Europe and general immorality in public life, there was a swing back to the stricter Jesuit tradition, and in 1931 Pope Pius XI counseled priests to do more extensive exploration of a penitent’s attitude and practice regarding marital life and procreation. In his encyclical Casti Conubii Pius XI writes: “If any confessor or pastor of souls, which may God forbid, lead the faithful entrusted to him into these errors [contraception] or should at least confirm them by approval or by guilty silence, let him be mindful of the fact that he must render a strict account to God, the Supreme Judge, for the betrayal of his sacred trust, and let him take to himself the words of Christ: "They are blind and leaders of the blind: and if the blind lead the blind, both fall into the pit.” The confessional philosophy of saints like John Vianney or Alphonsus Ligouri was nowhere found in CC. Casti Conubii was written just thirty years before Vatican II, and prior to the invention of “the pill” in the 1950’s. Birth control medication alleviated the complications of the “rhythm method” or periodic abstinence during the facility cycle. Pastors and students in many Catholic colleges were absorbing significant reappraisals on matters of morality. Bernard Haring’s classic, The Law of Christ, led to a redefinition of sin itself, a factor that percolated into the confessional and certainly into my major seminary training. [1969-74] As a priest product of these years, I was exposed to three approaches in extending the Sacrament of Penance, and to be honest, I still debate in my head what might be the best way to celebrate this sacrament—and others, like the Eucharist--in a fashion that faithful Catholics like my father might have found more fruitful and compelling. Whether Catholics will come home after the virus is an extension of a discussion we should have paid more attention to for the last several decades. Ironically, it is Covid-19 that provides the opportunity to rethink the sacramental experience today. I will continue this “sub stream” for at least two more posts. The next will deal with my own training and experience as a twenty-year confessor—what I learned, what my intentions were, what I might have done differently and more profitably for those who came to confession. The third will extrapolate to the Sunday Eucharist. I will post all of these on the Saturday sacrament stream. Please feel free to post reactions—on the Catechist Café website itself, www.catechistcafe.com [Saturday Sacraments stream] or on the Catechist Café Facebook page posting, or privately to me at tjburns@cfl.rr.com “The Unintended Sabbatical” has given me an opportunity to investigate some works and meditate upon mysteries of Catholic life, not least of which are the sacraments, not least the holy Eucharist. It was just last summer that PEW released its findings that about 30% of Catholics believe in Real Presence, the shorthand term for the full presence of the living Christ in the form of bread and wine consumed at Mass. I was not surprised because I had studied the history of the Eucharist in the seminary and even today my own eyes can see that while communicants approach the altar with generally good intentions, no one’s body language portrays much sense of awe or fear at holding the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, either. While I am a weekly communicant, receiving at every Thursday noon Mass with my wife when few others are in attendance, in my meditations I am not always clear to myself which spiritual nerves are being touched by reception of the Eucharist.
Given the shock of the American Bishops at the PEW results [poor Bishop Barron was apoplectic], about three weeks into Florida lockdown I purchased a book whose subject could not have been more propitious. Brett Salkeld’s Transubstantiation [2019] was released within a few weeks of the PEW study. In fact, just after the PEW study became public and just before the release of the book, Bishop Barron posted an in-depth interview with the author, a Catholic theologian with the Diocese of Regina, Saskatchewan. Salkeld had undertaken his book [his doctoral dissertation, actually] with an eye toward the other Christian Churches for whom the consumption of sacred bread and wine was held in as high esteem as Catholics embraced holy communion, and common points of faith and understanding between the Churches, which are more numerous than one might think. This interview link is an excellent summary of a challenging but profound book. I will review the text in a few weeks—I have just started the author’s treatment of Calvinist eucharistic theology—but for this post I want to draw some comparisons from Catholic sacramental experience to our culture’s practices of memorializing and symbolizing, specifically the present-day controversies over matters of race. Something that has always troubled me about the primary definition of the Eucharist as reservation and veneration of God in a local and spatial setting is this: as sacred as this might be, one can wonder how the reservation of Christian Eucharist differs from the Holy of Holies in the Temple, aside from the Christian democratization which allows access to its sacred space along with its high priest. [Luke 1: 8-11] When the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D., Christianity, born from the side of Jewish tradition, might have been expected to continue the Jewish practice of maintaining a “holy of holies” site as a physical orientation to matters of faith. Christianity did bring with it the Jewish sense of history as purpose oriented; most cultures of the era viewed time as cyclic, not linear or heading toward a definitive ending. Jesus consistently spoke of the future coming of the Son of Man and the Holy Spirit. And, like Judaism, there arose among the followers of Jesus a collection of symbolic acts based upon the acts and commands of the Savior. As the years passed along, the Church evolved in both its rites and its understandings of what was happening in those rites. In the case of the Eucharist, it is an interesting point that the first non-Christian description of a Eucharistic gathering describes the symbolic action, not the doctrine. A Roman Governor, Pliny the Younger [61-121 A.D.], wrote to his emperor seeking advice on whether to arrest professed Christians as dangerous to the state. He writes: They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food--but ordinary and innocent food. Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden political associations. Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition. The history of Christian sacramental theology is quite diverse, but for our purposes here I will stick to the communications dynamic between God and his people and how our sacramental model parallels events in universal human life, for now the George Floyd “Black Lives Matter” protests and their counterparts. In my day, the late 1960’s, seminary training began with the nature of communication and how the mind is conditioned to read its environment, including divine revelation. Words, it turns out, can be poor coinage of interaction. If you want proof of the inadequacy of words alone, yell “fire!’ in a theater in Azerbaijan. In my very first semester at Catholic University in 1969, before studying anything dealing with faith, value, or religion, I took an introductory course [required of seminarians] in semiology. Yes, I had to look up the word, too, and Merriam Webster defines semiology as “a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics.” [My paper for the course: “Do large high-priced convertibles in D.C. neighborhoods symbolize black crime, specifically pimping, to white Washington residents?” I got a B.] As I learned, faintly, communication is about signs and symbols. Ashley Montagu, a noted anthropologist and a favorite guest of Johnny Carson in the 1970’s, has defined a sign as a "concrete denoter" possessing an inherent specific meaning, roughly analogous to the sentence ‘This is it; do something about it!’ The nineteenth century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described symbols as “analogues or metaphors (that may include written and spoken language as well as visual objects) standing for some quality of reality that is enhanced in importance or value by the process of symbolization itself.” Put another way, words alone are inadequate communicators of deeper human realities, though they can be part of a broader symbolic communication event. We worship in visible events; we express pain in demonstrations. The great Catholic thinkers developed such understandings of symbolic communication many centuries earlier. As early as the Christological Councils [325-451 A.D.] Catholic theology had learned to live with the inadequacy of language alone and incorporated working definitions of sign and symbols into doctrine and practice. The English creed statement “three persons” in one God is a crude translation of the Greek persona, a term for the mask in dramatic plays and/or the essence of the personality of the actor. By St. Augustine’s time [354-430 A.D.] the science of complex expression of matters of faith [theology] was turning to the Church’s worship, specifically its sacraments, and by the thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas had put together a multi-dimensional understanding of “how sacraments worked.” He identified [1] the visible sign itself, [the sacramentum tantum] which to the eye of faith, explained itself in the gesture, such as washing or feeding; [2] the deeper meaning of the deed [the res et sacramentum]; and [3] the res tantum, the ultimate reality at the completion of the rite, or what God hoped the outcome would be. While the Latin terms sound hopelessly medieval, let us apply them to real life. Take, for example, an organized protest against police brutality sparked by the scandal of the George Floyd killing. Perhaps you live in a small town and 250 persons gather. The visible sign itself [1] is a collection of purposeful individuals with wholesome intentions, at least judging from demeanor and interactions with law enforcement and the banners and speeches. In modern lingo, we are describing the “optics,” the outward sign as the catechism used to say of sacraments. In my opinion this “optic” here is applicable to a standard weekend Mass as well, people gathered for generally good intention. The res et sacramentum [2] is the deeper intentionality of this gathering. There is more mystery here, just as there is in Church sacraments. In the case of sacraments, we know—or should know—what God’s intentions are, though poor catechetics or inadequate orientation can obfuscate the divine purpose. Now with the public demonstration, we can see from its signs, songs, and speeches that the assembly is moved. It is possible to draw from history that this assembly is mindful of American constitutional law that permits gatherings and free speech, with an eye toward fixing a problem. In our example, there must be a measure of anger and grief since the murder of Mr. Floyd is the proximate cause of the gathering. It may be that others have experienced or seen police misconduct in the past and have come to call upon city commissioners to make appropriate policies or departmental changes. There are always historical factors in public acts, some collective and many personal. Some in this group, for example, may have lost relatives in circumstances like Mr. Floyd’s. Even Catholic doctrine—in its interpretations—is not always in agreement on every aspect of the res et sacramentum [2] of a specific sacrament. A good example is the sacrament of marriage, specifically the meaning of sexual expression in marriage. The Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes [1965] caused quite a stir as the first formal Church teaching to state that the purpose of marital sex was both procreational and unitive [read: endearing]. Prior to GS, the Church had generally followed St. Augustine’s pessimistic view that the pleasure bond of marital intimacy was sinful taint justified only to continue the species. GS notwithstanding, the Church still states that every sexual act must be open to the creation of life, which is why contraception is formally banned in the Catechism. This brings us to the res tantum [3] of sacramental theology, translated into English as “the only thing” or the ultimate thing. In Catholic parlance, what is it that God ultimately wishes to give us in a sacrament? As numerous authors point out, despite the clarity of manual theology, there is considerable mystery here. Ultimately, God wants to save us. Our kiddie catechisms taught that sacraments “give grace,” a simple way of translating the Greek word charis for God’s gift, God’s love, God’s charism. Life is a constant discovery of how God loves us. It is thus particularly important to remember that sacraments are provisional, i.e., that a day will come when the need for sign and symbol is over because we behold the presence of God as God is. The sacrament is not over after the final hymn, but depends upon how we are motivated to act. The traditional ending of Mass, “Ite, missa est,” is subject to multiple translations, the best one in my view is “Go, the Church is sent…” [based upon feminine pronoun use.] And consider, too, “we eat this bread and drink this cup until you come in glory.” The critical question is whether we, as Church, take our communion with Christ into the world. As we slowly make our way back to church and out to the streets—wearing masks, hopefully—the pressing communication question is precisely how God would wish us to react to the massive civil sacrament playing out before us. According to multiple sources, including the New York Times, the London Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal, the number of persons who have participated in the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests collectively is the largest protest in the history of our country, estimated at between 16 and 25 million. Our little group of 250 faces the same challenges that every Catholic assembly—every Catholic, for that matter—must confront: what does this national and international movement call forth from me? And from my assembly? The Church—its leadership and members--have sinned in its long history. History teaches that all major movements have been devalued by thuggery, opportunism, and the comforts of unexamined consciousness. No easy answers, but no place to hide, either. I am struck by the fact that we mourners of “I can’t breathe” victims worship a Savior who, on Easter Sunday night, gathered his disciples and breathed upon them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” CONSTITUTION
ON THE SACRED LITURGY SACROSANCTUM CONCILIUM SOLEMNLY PROMULGATED BY HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI ON DECEMBER 4, 1963 106. By a tradition handed down from the apostles which took its origin from the very day of Christ's resurrection, the Church celebrates the paschal mystery every eighth day; with good reason this, then, bears the name of the Lord's day or Sunday. For on this day Christ's faithful are bound to come together into one place so that; by hearing the word of God and taking part in the eucharist, they may call to mind the passion, the resurrection and the glorification of the Lord Jesus, and may thank God who "has begotten them again, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto a living hope" (1 Pet. 1:3). Hence the Lord's day is the original feast day, and it should be proposed to the piety of the faithful and taught to them so that it may become in fact a day of joy and of freedom from work. Other celebrations, unless they be truly of greatest importance, shall not have precedence over the Sunday which is the foundation and kernel of the whole liturgical year. Like most of you I am hunkered down in my own diocese here in Central Florida. My diocese is resuming weekend church liturgies on the Feast of Pentecost, on next Saturday and Sunday. I have Facebook friends from many dioceses in the United States, and I get the impression that the Florida dioceses may be opening for weekend Masses somewhat earlier than others, and in my diocese earlier than the theme parks Disneyworld and Universal. Given that our public schools and universities remain closed, I fear wholesale Catholic worship may be starting too early. The governor of Texas allowed churches to open for regular services a few weeks ago, and a Catholic Church in Houston suffered what probably every pastor is seeking to avoid, a Covid 19 outbreak. The Houston Chronicle notes that despite the governor’s declaration, most Catholic churches in the area remained closed; the Redemptorist parish was an outlier, it seems. I was reading the proposed safety rules under review for Universal Studios. I noticed that the temperatures of every park guest will be taken. When I had a physical a few weeks ago, temperature measurements to enter the facilities were de rigour as they are at our newly opened hair salons, and Frontier Airlines has adopted the practice for anyone, crew or passengers, entering a plane. I did not see temperature screening in any church guidelines I reviewed except for a consortium of black churches in Chicago; in fact, the guidelines posted for my church are benign: “It is strongly encouraged that you wear a mask during your attendance at Church and to practice proper hygiene such as the sanitizing of hands before you enter.” One of the major questions in secular life is the medical protocol of wearing masks. The argument that face masks significantly protect the spray of virus droplets is overwhelming. The purpose of masks is protection of neighbor and limitation of contagion. The issue of masks has become something of a “personal rights” or “political stance” issue instead of a good neighbor opportunity. Having watched the news this weekend, and doing my early dawn jaunt to the grocery store each week, it is pretty obvious that the dependence of public health officials upon adult responsibility is one of the weaker links in the battle to contain the virus. Local government here in Central Florida has asked the theme parks how they plan to deal with visitors who rip off their masks inside the parks? Will Catholics provide a better example in their compliance to the solid advice of their pastors, and how will the pastors in turn balance public safety without alienating some members? Jet Blue, American, United, Delta, Southwest and Alaska Airlines require the use of masks on all of their flights, but this puts the onus of policing upon airline service personnel who, as the Los Angeles Times reports, do not have a federal mandate to protect themselves and other passengers. I am curious to see how Catholics respond to the extensive policing of their movement by lay ministers and ushers. My parish is requiring computer reservations made on-line before the weekend for a specific Mass; some church ministers—one can bank on it—will be put in the strange position of refusing admission to the sacrament to their friends and fellow parishioners without reservations. I was a pastor for twenty years; I know how some members respond to even the slightest inconveniences. It does seem that in the present atmosphere there is a rush to get back to Sunday Eucharistic routine. In the best of all worlds we can find little to disagree with in Paragraph 106 of Sacrosanctum Concilium: “Christ’s faithful are bound to come together in one place…” to hear the Word and take part in the Eucharist. The same paragraph establishes the rationale for Sunday as our high holy day, i.e., it is the day of the Resurrection. The sanctity of Sunday dates to apostolic times, though it is true that the earliest Jewish converts to Christianity worshipped on the Saturday Sabbath and then broke bread in its primitive Eucharist. Para. 106 is articulating the Christian Tradition of Sunday Eucharist as the norm of Catholic life. That said, the life experience of the Church is replete with circumstances in which the Eucharist could not be celebrated with large numbers. Plagues of course, and usually ones much more severe than Covid 19, created vacuums in regular Eucharistic gatherings that lasted several years. Kings and tyrants have forbidden Catholic worship for decades and centuries, even to the present moment. It is worth noting here that Catholic chaplains in World War II won extraordinary respect among enlisted men for their presence at the front for confession and ministrations, and it was not rare for Eucharist to be celebrated amid ruins and the sounds of active battle at whatever opportunity came along. I suppose the ultimate theological question about access to the Eucharist is to examine possibilities for broader criteria of ordinations to the priesthood, but that is a discussion for another day. Again, the “breaking loose” of so many of our citizens from social isolation in recent weeks seems to send a message that the Covid-19 pandemic is retreating or has lost its vigor, which is certainly not the case. Medical scientists point out that widespread group exposures and infection may take as long as a month to show up in hospitals. As I write, 24 states are seeing increased numbers of cases. My modest city of Apopka, Florida, has 180 active cases now. Regarding the Eucharist, Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas remind us that Eucharist is a symbol, like all sacraments. The timing of the resumption of weekly Eucharist is now part of that symbol. As Rita Ferrone writes in an excellent piece in this week’s Commonweal, the general guidelines for safety provided by the U.S. bishops serious distort the very signs and symbols of the sacrament itself. The eagerness of dioceses to resume the regular Mass schedule is understandable, even admirable under difference circumstances. Among those who post with frequency on Catholic parochial blog sites around the country, there is palpable hunger to return to the sacraments, mixed with a desire to see the local church’s family again. This is understandable. By the same token, there is an equal amount who are concerned about safety and the judgment to come together too quickly. I told my wife that “it will not be the president of the United States who will declare the lockdown over, nor will it be bishops. It will be over when parents with minor children say it is over, and not a minute before.” There are two other considerations pressuring Catholic dioceses and parishes. The obvious pressure is financial. The absence of dependable weekly giving through the Offertory collection has been a staggering blow for many. Thankfully, EFT offerings are a resource that was not generally available a generation ago, but this is offset by the large number of unemployed parishioners. My own parish is large and carries reserves; but many parishes operate week to week. Dioceses, traditionally the financial backstop for parish fiscal crises, are generally no longer able to provide this service. If any reader has a paid link to Moody’s, the bond analysts, check out the Archdiocese of Chicago, whose corporate rating was dropped three notches last week. Moody’s went on to say that in the present environment, Catholic dioceses are poor investment risks because of their propensity to embrace bankruptcy and their continuing large exposure to child abuse claims. My home diocese of Buffalo this week announced another round of church and school merger and closing strategies. Some parishes are borrowing from local banks to stay afloat. The very survival of some churches depends upon a return of parishioners and a steady cash flow. Another point, a significant theological and pastoral one, is the impact of the disruption of live attendance at Eucharist and the widespread and immensely popular use of live-streamed or televised Masses. My parish’s YouTube livestream of last week’s 10 AM Ascension Sunday Mass was viewed, concurrently or later, by 5100 persons. There is no way to break this down; my guess is that many participants are from my parish, but some comments on-line suggested that at least some were visitors from other Catholic communities. My wife and I participated in the pope’s on-line Easter Mass, and when left to my own devices I join Bishop Baron’s Mass in his chapel. My parish’s liturgies are generally very good, but I find as I get older that I’m more inclined toward quiet, reflective liturgy, which is why I make an annual retreat each year to the Trappist monastery in South Carolina. If you talk to men of my generation [65+] you might be surprised that I am not an outlier on this preference. The large number of streamed Masses across the country presents something of a catechetical opportunity to observe how other assemblies celebrate the sacred mysteries. Yes, we all use the same Roman Missal, but every community and every celebrant have a unique style of public worship. I have to think that, with the closing of churches for nearly three months now, bishops are deeply concerned that the habit of televised Mass, or the other extreme, of living without engaged, living persons at worship at all, will become deeply and permanently entrenched. It will be instructive to see attendance patterns in the churches, given that many persons—including myself—will return to parish Mass, but not at this juncture, given that we are in that window of vulnerability in our 70’s. As I say, there will be noticeable absences until the virus’s impact on children is better understood and mitigated. Coincidentally, my news ticker just reported that Disneyworld here in Orlando has submitted its reopening plan to Governor DeSantis, seeking a July 15 opening. From ABC News: “Parades and fireworks will be temporarily suspended to enable distancing. Character meet-and-greets as well as playgrounds are also temporarily suspended. Temperature checks will be conducted for both staff and guests… In addition to physical distancing, guests and cast members will be required to wear face masks, and plexiglass at registers and other places where distancing is difficult will be installed.” As the late NBC sportscaster Dick Enberg would say, “Oh my!” CONSTITUTION
ON THE SACRED LITURGY SACROSANCTUM CONCILIUM SOLEMNLY PROMULGATED BY HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI ON DECEMBER 4, 1963 104. The Church has also included in the annual cycle days devoted to the memory of the martyrs and the other saints. Raised up to perfection by the manifold grace of God, and already in possession of eternal salvation, they sing God's perfect praise in heaven and offer prayers for us. By celebrating the passage of these saints from earth to heaven the Church proclaims the paschal mystery achieved in the saints who have suffered and been glorified with Christ; she proposes them to the faithful as examples drawing all to the Father through Christ, and through their merits she pleads for God's favors. Have saints been canonized for heroic services in plagues? I put this question into “search” and instantly came to the colorful Catholic evangelical news service Aleteia. A March 12, 2020 story highlights just six of many Christian heroes and heroines renowned for courage and charity in caring for the sick in the many plagues of the Christian era. In fact, these Gospel motivated “frontline providers” were regarded with the same reverence as martyrs. In Alexandria, Egypt, around 250 A.D., St. Dionysius wrote of these Christians: “Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains.” St. Charles Borromeo [1538-1584], Bishop of Milan, Italy, is included in this summary. When famine and plague visited his city, Borromeo made out his will, prepared himself spiritually for death, and plunged into physical care of the sick and starving. The saintly bishop, known primarily for his work in reforming the clergy after the Council of Trent, survived the plague as well as a gunshot from a disgruntled unreformed cleric. Borromeo was revered by the Church [well, perhaps not by unreformed bishops and priests] for his personal sanctity, his charity, his energies to promote education, including CCD, and primarily as the church figure most identified with reforming the Church in the face of the Protestant Reformation. He checked all the boxes, so to speak. Paragraph 104 of Sacrosanctum Concilium pays special attention to the saints. While it is true that only a very small percentage of canonized saints are universally remembered with feast days in the daily flow of the Church’s liturgical calendar, it is fitting to designate those who have lived the Gospel with extraordinary dedication. Strange to say, but saints are invaluable to the catechetical process because they provide concrete examples of what the generic term “holiness” looks like. The assumption, of course, is that we who look back on the saints take the time to understand them in their historical context. In fact, the existence of a cult of devotion to a particular individual was usually the preferred way of designating a new saint. The formal process of canonization did not originate until 993 A.D. when Pope John XV declared St. Ulrich of Augsburg. By the end of the first millennium there were already many “saints” revered by the faithful, some locally and some universally; the latter had their names included in public liturgy, in preaching, in art, in morality plays, and in the recounting of their tales. The Apostles, including Paul, were honored as companions of Christ and founders of the Christian Church; the evangelists were likewise esteemed. Along with faithful preaching of the Lord Jesus, death by martyrdom was highly esteemed, to the point that history books describe the years 100-300 A.D. as “the age of martyrs.” Consider this citation from our current Eucharistic Prayer 1: “To us, also, your servants, who, though sinners, hope in your abundant mercies, graciously grant some share and fellowship with your holy Apostles and Martyrs: with John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, (Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia) and all your Saints.” Perpetua and Felicity are worthy of special note here, for their executions in the Circus of Carthage in 202 A.D. is possibly the best documented of all saintly martyrdoms of this era. Perpetua kept a diary in prison, preserved by an outside witness who added the details of their deaths. It is easy to understand how the acta sanctorum or accounts of the saints served as powerful catechetics. Where possible, the Eucharist was celebrated over the sites of their burial, and eventually even churches were built over the graves. In the age of the Christological Councils [325 A.D. through 451 A.D.]—which defined the doctrines of Jesus’ true identity as we know them in the Creed—the greatest saints were the scholars, writers, thinkers, and spokespersons, a period which included St. Leo the Great, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine, who was held in house arrest by the citizens of Hippo in North Africa until he agreed to serve as their bishop. Popular cult indeed, even before death! The Dark Ages produced missionary saints who stretched the boundaries of Christianity as the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Famous in this era were St. Patrick, St. Boniface [Germany], and Sts. Cyril and Methodius, who developed the Cyrillic alphabet to convert Eastern Europe. The Dark Ages were enlightened considerably by St. Benedict, the founder of modern monasticism which provided a backbone of civilized existence when civil rule fail. The high Middle Ages saw the universities produce several saints who advanced Christian thinking into the modern era. Sts. Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great represented the height of Dominican scholarship while St. Bonaventure came forth from the new Franciscan order. The appearance of the new “mendicant” [begging] orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, were the tip of a medieval iceberg of grass roots spiritual activism and mysticism that disturbed the authority of the Church and attracted investigation by the new Inquisition. Francis of Assisi received the excellent advice of seeking the direct permission of the powerful Pope Innocent III to adopt the Gospel itself as his community’s rule of life and continued to enjoy the favor of Rome. Many lesser bands were much less fortunate. The age of “canonization by cult” was ending as the management structure of the Church adopted the practice of strict doctrinal and moral investigation of those put forward for sainthood. As the age of the Reformation and the Renaissance pushed forward, the template of sainthood became the defense of Catholic life and authority as well as the propagation of the Faith to the Far East and the New World. St. Ignatius of Loyola led what might be called the pushback to Protestant theology and practice. His Jesuits established Catholic universities throughout Europe and missions around the world. Consider that the Jesuit St. Peter Canisius founded six universities in central Europe in the sixteenth century, while St. Francis Xavier’s mission work took him to the doorstep of China and St. Isaac Jogues and his companions met gruesome challenges and death as missionaries to Native Americans in what is now New York State. Between the Council of Trent in 1563 and Vatican II in 1962, in the “Counter Reformation Church,” there were few canonizations relative to today’s number. Occasionally the piety of the faithful would break through the routine of Church life; consider the devotion to the Sacred Heart [St. Margaret Mary], to the Virgin at Lourdes [St. Bernadette], to the more compassionate treatment of penitents in the confessional [St. Alphonsus Ligouri and St. John Vianney]. In 1950 Maria Goretti, the youngest person ever canonized, was elevated to sainthood by Pope Pius XII a half century after she was stabbed to death at the age of twelve to protect her virginity. Her murderer, who attended the canonization a reformed man, died in 1970. The canonization process was turned on its head by Pope John Paul II [r. 1978-2005] who canonized close to five hundred people in his 27-year reign. His motivations included recognition of the universal nature of the Church, as his new saints hail from all over the planet. Many of his candidates were lay persons, and a good number were women. The pontiff perhaps drew from the observation of para. 104 that the Church “proposes them to the faithful as examples drawing all to the Father through Christ.” Implicitly he made the point that sainthood was possible in simple and unremarkable circumstances; one need not die a dramatic death in a Roman Circus to bring the Gospel to others. John Paul’s great respect of Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s work in utterly hopeless circumstances, and her philosophy of her work, probably impacted his thought as well. Mother Teresa observed that “we are not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful.” It is one of history’s ironies that the pope who renewed the process and purpose of canonization should suffer a questionable process of his own sainthood. Historians—at least the wise ones—realize that it takes generations to know the measure of their subjects. In the matter of Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI proceeded to canonize his predecessor too quickly before the full record of John Paul’s stewardship of ecclesiastical leadership could be assessed. Thus, several of John Paul’s pastoral judgments have embarrassed the Church in retrospect after his canonization. Among them the promotion of Cardinal Law of Boston to a high Roman post after the clerical sexual abuse tragedy in Law’s archdiocese became international news; a long and admiring friendship with Father Gabriel Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, whose leadership style and personal life had troubled Vatican officials since 1943; and John Paul’s multiple promotions of the American cleric Theodore McCarrick, who was removed from the College of Cardinals two years ago and laicized after a career of financial misdealing and sexual coercion. It remains in the hands of Pope Francis as to what he will or will not reveal to the Church about John Paul and McCarrick. This particular case is a pivotal one in the matter of the Church’s transparency regarding clerical child abuse. Speaking early this year during another awkward canonization process, that of Bishop Fulton Sheen’s [1895-1979], postponed last December, Pope Francis encouraged members of the Vatican's saint-making office to continue with their rigorous investigations into lives of candidates, saying their job is to “clear away every ambiguity and doubt” that a person deserves to be a saint. Francis did not mention Sheen by name during his previously scheduled audience with members of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, who vet all saint-making cases. But he did note that “saints aren’t perfect and aren’t some unreachable species of human beings.” Rather, he said, “They are people who tirelessly lived their daily lives with success and failure, finding in the Lord the strength to always get back up and continue the path.” Pope Francis might have been wise to add: “No matter how strong the cult, for the good of the Church it is best to wait a century, when all the documents are unsealed and the lasting influence of any candidate upon the Church can be assessed by the unflinching light of history.” I attended my parish’s Palm Sunday Mass in my own home over YouTube’s livestream yesterday, as I assume many Catholics did throughout the country. The communication production was very well done, the tone solemn, and the pastor’s homily and message struck an affective devotional tone. From what I see on Facebook and other sources, many parishes are streaming Mass, Holy Hours, Stations of the Cross, and other common services of prayer. EWTN will be televising the Triduum observance from St. Peter’s at the end of this week.
At some point down the road after the virus, I’m sure, there will be theological discussions and liturgical guidelines about the administration of sacraments under extraordinary circumstances. [The more significant discussions, hopefully, will focus on medical ethics.] The concept of a televised Mass never gave me much pause, and every Catholic from the age of two knows that if you are healthy you can’t substitute TV Mass for dragging yourself to church. In the 1970’s and 1980’s I was one of several pastors in the rotation to offer our diocese’s TV Mass ‘for shut ins,” as we would say back then. Our time slot on Sunday mornings ran second to the cartoon show “Josey and the Pussycats,” according to Nielson, in the Orlando-Daytona market, a good news/bad news factoid for the chancery archives. With Catholic bishops and pastors making good use of the new media, I was somewhat surprised to see a post on the website of Spain’s conference of bishops by Antonio Gómez Cantero, bishop of Teruel and Albarracín, posted on March 26. [Thanks to my old seminary friend, John Donaghy, an ordained deacon, for passing this along from Honduras.] As the original post is in Spanish, I am dependent upon a commentary from Novena Europe Church News for the heart of the bishop’s concern. Bishop Gomez Cantero writes that with the arrival of the coronavirus – which has now infected over 47,000 people in Spain and killed nearly 4,000 [as of March 26] … “some priests have become very nervous.” Those “nervous” priests have filled messaging and social media apps “with prayers, calls to pray, invitations to follow Mass by streaming… [and links] at which to see the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament…”. “Someone else has taken a walk through the streets with the monstrance as if it were [the Feast of] Corpus Christi (and I wonder with what permission, because for many things we are very strict and for others not so much)”, the Teruel bishop continued. To this point, the bishop seems concerned that worshipping practices might be getting out of hand during the heat of the moment…or, more subtly, that the Spanish Conference of Bishops has been inappropriately nondirective in its leadership role. In the United States, for example, individual bishops appeared to be on their own regarding judgments of worship and public safety, and more recently are following the directives of state governors on matters of group gatherings and open churches. But, and I apologize for the choppiness, I continued with the bishop’s text. “All this bombardment raises many questions for me. Aren’t we treating believers as if they don’t know how to pray and should depend on the clergy to do so? “Don’t you think that so much Mass on screens keeps people in the passive role of spectators? Believers are adults, although we don’t always treat them that way.” What’s more important, a time of prayer or lectio divina with the Word or looking at a mass on a screen?” The bishop has taken his concern to a different philosophical plane here: do lay persons own a theological and devotional command of their own souls? I have two distinct responses to the bishop’s concern. The first is based on Canon Law, notably, that the Church is not structured as a collection of individual persons, but as a community of faith, which over time has evolved into dioceses and parishes with a united identity around the table of the Lord. My pastor, and several his colleagues that I know of, are celebrating Sunday and even weekday Mass over the air waves to maintain a Eucharistic sacramental bond. If a priest is ordained as an alter Christus, another Christ, he is bound to the Great Command of the Gospel, “to be with you all days, even to the end of the world.” There is nothing in the Gospel that suggests Wi-Fi is an inappropriate medium depending upon need and circumstances. That said, the bishop does raise a serious question. When churches started shutting down for sacramental and faith formation ministry, I said to my wife that “now we are going to see how effective our last two generations of catechetics have really been.” Just as parents are looking for all sorts of aids and tools to homeschool their children currently home from regular school, catechists/parents are floundering for family resources. This is an actual unedited post from a religious education site: “I created an online Google Form First Communion Retreat for families to do at home. I will post the link below and you are welcome to go through it (just type test for everything) but PLEASE DON'T SEND THIS LINK TO YOUR FAMILIES AS IT IS FILLS TO MY RESPONSE SHEET.” I hesitate to use terms like unprofessional or ad hoc, but like public health in our nation, it seems like there is little in the reserve tank for true crises when the parish can only deliver a minimum. Which in turn makes me wonder if even weekly Mass attending families have any religious routine and self-generated wisdom. Are parents incapable of talking with their own children eyeball to eyeball about the history and meaning of the Eucharist? This, I believe, is what the bishop is driving at, the question of whether adult Catholics are routinely thinking the deep thoughts of faith on their own or depending upon clerics to always be the grownups in the room. The Church will never be quite the same after the virus, nor will our country, and it is time for the laity to bring strong personal ownership of revelation and conscience to the Eucharistic community to intensify its mission. Another seminary friend passed along this quote from the historian Barbara Tuchman in her 1987 A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century: Survivors of the [Black] plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man. Catechetics begins with adults. Demand it. The kids will catch up. |
LITURGY
March 2024
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