I have never owned a dog, but I am told by my friends who have them that at some point the dog starts to own you. I laughingly feel that way about The Catechist Café. The “soft” opening of the Café was September 2014, which coincided with the closing of my private psychotherapy practice. In those early days I had visions of a daily post for catechists and parish ministers as well as motivated Catholic adults while I continued to teach theology to catechists and schoolteachers for my diocese.
A few years ago, I realized that I had run out of about everything I know from 70 years of living and working with the Church. It was time for me to retool as a teacher and writer by expanding my own reading into new areas of theology and Catholic life. It has been and continues to be an exciting change…except that it takes more time to read the books—the new releases and the classics I have missed along the way. So be patient as I digest what is often for me new material so I can pass it along to you in a fashion that makes sense. Therefore, I am setting the Café goal at about two posts a week, give or take. My hope is to enrich your Catholic experience as members and ministers. I know that most of you don’t have the time to read as much as you’d like, and my hope is to facilitate your access to the best the Catholic world has to offer. I am going to open an eighth stream on the Café’s home page--Catholic novelists and their books. In the general world of literature, it is amazing how secular critics and readers devour novels by outstanding Catholic authors—from Graham Greene to Flannery O’Connor to Sally Rooney. I am constantly amazed at how secular literary critics return again and again to Catholic literature through the ages. It is amazing to me that with the dozens of acclaimed Catholic fiction writers in our faith family, none ever seem to make their way into a sermon or a faith formation program. I have been asked by several people how they can subscribe to the Catechist Café for updates if they do not subscribe to Facebook, Linked In, or Twitter, the three current update portals. Fear no more. You can subscribe for a direct email alert and link by simply sending me your email address. You can do this from the mailbox at the bottom of the Café home page. The Café welcomes suggestions and questions of any kind, as a basis for future posts related to Church life, theology, personal experiences with the Church, etc. Please feel free to drop me a line, anonymously if you wish. I’ll do my best. Facebook: Search "The Catechist Café" Linked In: Search "The Catechist Café" Twitter: Search "Catechist Cafe@TheCatechist Home: www.catechistcafe.com
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I began this post on Wednesday afternoon [yesterday] sitting in my car under the watchful eye of the medical professionals for my 15-minute crisis observation in case I suddenly started to retch or do whatever a bad immunization makes you do. For just a few moments earlier I received my first injection of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at the Orange County Convention Center, just north of Disneyworld. I am as amazed as anybody that this opportunity to receive the two-dose vaccine came up so quickly and, in my case, so easily. It was/is my best Christmas gift this year.
I know that all of you watch enough news to know that the distribution of the Covid vaccine, in my case Moderna, is becoming a national crisis, both in terms of limited distribution and national debate about who should get the limited supply first. On our Monday evening local news [December 28], we saw our Orange County executives receiving their shots. Privately I did not think I would be able to get vaccinated till March or April, and probably then in my doctor’s office. When I learned that 19,000 doses had been sent this weekend to my county for first line providers and the like, I never considered that the average senior gentry like myself would get anywhere near these precious first shipments. However, there on TV was the announcement that anyone 65 or older whose residence was Orange County could go on-line to register for 3000 available doses offered this week and next. Margaret and I do not normally win lotteries, but immediately, in the middle of dinner, Margaret and I each logged in on to the Orange County Covid site on our IPads, just as we had been instructed on TV. Naturally, the site was overloaded for both of us, but we each kept hitting the “Next” button—literally about several hundred times--and about an hour or two later our pads lit up like Christmas trees and we obtained reservations—in the same two-hour window, no less. I believe there were eleven openings left. Tuesday morning Orange County texted us with our bar codes for admission and record keeping for the next day’s vaccination. Naturally, I was surprised this all happened so quickly for us. I had long believed that there would be an elaborate pecking order for vaccine access, from first providers to nursing homes to teachers, etc. [Margaret is, in fact, an adjunct professor at UCF who visits public schools as part of her job, but we did not expect that to open any privilege doors for us.] We are both in the 73-74-year-old range, short of the CDC’s guidance of age 75, and neither of us have unusual health issues or think of ourselves as particularly vulnerable other than what the actuarial tables tell us. We are both proactive about flu shots, pneumonia vaccines, shingle shots, etc. We had no expectations of early opportunity; just hopeful we could be treated before summer to do some long-postponed travel abroad. So, to what do we owe our unusual good luck? Well, our case is a textbook example of who you know and where you live. By the norms of the Center for Disease Control standards, the age of 75 is currently the cutoff for inoculations for vulnerable populations; my generation is, nationally, in the next lower tier. There is, of course, a national consensus of sorts that front line providers and nursing home residents should move to the front of the line. However, I live in Florida. Our governor, Ron DeSantis, has been governed by one principle since the virus reached the Sunshine State almost a year ago: his reelection in 2022. Consequently, our protective measures throughout the state have been minimal at best. There are no statewide orders on lockdowns, masks, or public gatherings to speak of. Truth be told, major businesses and Catholic bishops have been more proactive in protecting the public. Governor DeSantis recently addressed residents at Florida’s giant retirement mecca, The Villages, about 30 miles north of my county, promising to make the vaccine available immediately at age 65. This would be fine if the vaccines were rolling out in large numbers of dosages, which is presently not the case. [In fairness, this underwhelming availability of vaccines is a federal failure as much as a state issue.] In Florida there is a political twist here, as residents of The Villages, like many of the 250,000 seniors who live in my county, are “snowbirds,” the folks who spend large portions of the milder months up north with families and grandchildren. There is political capital in freeing them up to travel when the first buds of spring appear. And Orange County is one of the world’s vacation meccas, and there has been great effort to keep the restaurants and bars open [though Disney’s policing of CDC policy is very stringent, I am told by my patients.] Given the absence of state supervision, each county must fall back on its own resources to establish vaccine protocols, and there is a disturbing inequality in funding, infrastructure, and experience across county lines even here in Central Florida. Orange County’s on-line reservation and delivery system is first rate. [There is an expectation of Disneyesque quality, I guess.] But we have good friends in bordering counties where no on-line registration system exists, and individuals must call county health offices, whose phone lines are jammed and offices severely understaffed. This morning’s Orlando Sentinel describes the statewide problems encountered so far. The current situation certainly weighed on my mind when I took advantage of the opportunity to be vaccinated. There is unfairness in the system, to be sure, and as you might expect, I do try to examine issues from a Catholic moral perspective, and there are indeed moral considerations surrounding both Covid-19 and the medical means of treating and preventing it. The medical resources available for illnesses and pandemics are uneven even across state and county lines, but this is a small paradigm of the challenges facing world health. Pope Francis has written and preached exhaustively about the rights of all persons on God’s planet to enjoy a modicum of preventive and proactive health care, matters that include clean water, sanitation, nourishment, and access to professional care. Covid-19 is teaching us that an international fraternity of care needs to govern our interactions across the globe. Closer to home, the medical profession’s “do no harm” principle extends to all public officials in the establishment of public policy. It is becoming clearer that our country’s ability—at all levels of government—to address chronic and unexpected health emergencies is compromised by inadequate funding and an unseeming politicization of the healing process. Our Catholic catechetics must review its contents and resources to address the morality of self-care and social responsibility. The many breakdowns of Covid-19 preventive personal discipline are rarely addressed as sin, but what other term would you use? The Fifth Commandment, in Catholic tradition, has come to imply an obligation to care for one’s own body and the physical safety of others. The political statement of going mask-less, for example, can hardly be justified in the face of honoring the body as a “Temple of the Holy Spirit.” Catholics are obliged to seek truth in both the religious and the scientific realm. We hold that God is revealed naturally in the wonders of science. Consequently, there is an obligation to respect sound scholarship—and that includes the principles by which we come to understand more about ourselves and our surroundings. To undermine the common good through the seeding of “offbeat theories” which have continually failed the crucible of peer review and scientific method carries moral guilt commensurate to the harm it causes. Anti-vaxxers need to address their stance by a moral light. About fifteen years ago I sought medical help for deafness; a specialist explained to me that there is a strong correlation between mumps and adult deafness. At age 14 I was hospitalized for a severe case of mumps that invaded much of my body. Of course, this was long before the discovery of the mumps vaccine. It is hard for me to comprehend how parents expose their children to such long-term risks today when vaccines are readily available. At the very least, I believe there is a moral imperative to prevent the proliferation of Covid and other contagious diseases. I am not going to lie and say that I had no thoughts about the consequences of injection of a new drug into my arm. However, I trust sound medicine and the institutions that brought it forth. I understand that Covid-19 is a grave danger to a good number of those infected. I also understand that my inoculation contributes to the common good, and in some way is my contribution to the ministry of Protection of Life. I regret that in my corner of the world there was not a fairer system of distribution in my state and in my country, but I could not see that declining the drug would any way change that equation. So, it is now early morning, and you might be wondering about side effects. [The CDC advisory on side effects is here.] I woke up at 3 AM with a very sore arm and a case of euphoria [I do not usually blog in the middle of the night] for I consider myself extremely lucky to have had this health intervention so soon, and I look forward to my second dose on January 27. This was a Christmas gift I never expected to get, and I sincerely hope all of you can protect yourselves and your loved ones as soon as possible. Time for breakfast. It is a testimony to the times we live in that I cannot remember the occasion which prompted my last pastor to engage a local law enforcement officer to stand guard over our congregations and parking lot on Saturday and Sunday Masses. Perhaps it was a shooting massacre at a church—Charleston, South Carolina comes to mind—but last Saturday an Altamonte Springs, Florida, city police cruiser sat near my car in the lot, a reminder of the vulnerability of all gathering places and sites of worship.
I imagine that the officers working our church this coming Christmas Eve will be busy, for this year we have the new—and hopefully the last—challenge of Covid 19 to good church order. The pandemic and its challenges to Christmas worship in the United States has been chronicled in some detail at National Catholic Reporter, with reports on how various dioceses are accommodating the expected large numbers of worshippers at Christmas, how the Vatican is permitting each priest the privilege of offering four Masses on Christmas Eve if the pastoral need exists, and church-state struggles on worship and civil Covid regulations. The State of Florida has gained some measure of national notoriety for its loose Covid-19 precautionary standards. The optics as well as the content of the state’s guidance webpage offer little encouragement or hard restrictions, and the governor has declared that local jurisdictions cannot impose stricter measures than the state. That said, major retailers and the Disney complex in my county are running tight ships. Several of my patients tell me that Disneyworld is policing its masking, eating, and social distancing rules forcefully across its parks. Publix grocery stores, Costco, and Staples [my regular shopping haunts] require masks and social distancing for admission and service. I am pleased to report that the Diocese of Orlando has publicly maintained strong safety policies. Our bishop, John Noonan, has situated all Covid discussion in the context of Christian service and responsibility to neighbor. There is still a dispensation from the Sunday Mass obligation for those in vulnerable populations, no questions asked. It remains to pastors to enforce diocesan policies on such matters as communion in the hand and to develop unique strategies of safety best suited to the size of the parish and its configuration. Again, my home parish, Annunciation Church in Altamonte Springs, Florida, has met this challenge very well. After the two-month lockdown during the first surge in the spring, my wife and I, who fall in the “vulnerable population” as we are in our 70’s, experimented with returning to Mass by attending a sparsely populated noon Mass on Thursdays. Having established our comfort with the level of protection provided by the parish, we eventually returned to our favorite Saturday vigil Mass and continue to worship in peace. From where I sit, it is rare to see an unmasked individual. [I do note with some humor the appearance of a “Trump 2020” facemask at one of our Masses; I cannot remember if this was before or after the election. Maybe that mask will reappear on January 6.] My parish is one of the largest in this diocese and possesses state of the art technology. Early on, the parish staff developed a system of on-line reservations for the weekend Masses. On Tuesday mornings the website is open for reservations for each of the following weekend Masses, and the names are duly logged in the parish records. On Saturday night when my wife and I enter the church for Mass, we must present ourselves at the door to a greeter with an Ipad tablet, who checks off our names. I have no problem with this method of insuring social distancing. It is not clear precisely what sort of algorithm is used to determine in my church [or any other in our diocese] what constitutes a safe maximum number for preserving social distancing. I am lousy at guessing crowd numbers, but my sense is that my parish admits about 400 persons maximum in a building that perhaps holds 1500. I do notice that although my Mass is frequently listed as “full” on the reservation site, there are a fair number of empty available pews, suggesting that attendance may lag reservations. I think the biggest test of the adage, “see how Christians love one another,” will come on Christmas Eve. Historically, Christmas Eve is the largest assembly of the faithful; the phrase “Christmas and Easter Catholics” is not a cynical invention but a recognition that even the most marginal Catholic makes an appearance for Mass in the glow of holy nostalgia and sometimes spirited reinforcement from the punchbowl. This is a unique post-Vatican II challenge; in my youth there were no vigil Masses, just a standing room only Midnight Mass. As an altar boy I reveled in the beautiful music, poinsettias, and gold vestments of the Latin Mass. I also remember individuals passing out, and the unique aroma of alcohol induced bad breath. As my pastor would tell the altar boys, put out the candles quickly or this place will explode. In the past half-century, the popularity of the earlier evening vigils has grown exponentially. When my wife and I were married over twenty years ago, our attendance at Midnight Mass was unshakeable. But then we drifted earlier, to a 9 PM Mass, and over the past decade, to a 7 PM Mass. We are not courageous enough to attend one of our 4 PM Masses. In my mother’s parish up near Buffalo, the pastor used to plead with the weekly 4 PM congregation not to attend the Christmas Eve 4 PM Mass, where the parking lot would be near full at 2 PM, even in the region’s worst lake-effect snow squalls. Given these logistical challenges in an ordinary year, how does a parish maintain sanity and safety in a Covid environment? Evidently, even the Pope has been reflecting upon this problem, for he has given priests the permission to offer four Masses on Christmas, if parishes would want to offer extra Masses in smaller groups. Bishops in many dioceses are granting a special permission to begin Christmas Eve Vigil Masses at 2 PM [Church Law forbids Vigil Masses before 4 PM.] My parish has taken advantage of these permissions. But it took the extra step of a strict on-line registration policy, announcing well in advance from the pulpit, bulletin, and website that a preregistration was sine qua non for admission to any of the Masses. Ground Zero for on-line reservations was December 18, last Friday, at 10 AM. My wife and I, for reasons of safety and my curiosity, had decided to reserve space for the novel 2 PM Vigil Mass. My wife literally had her finger over the button on her Ipad when the reservation site turned green. Evidently, so did many other folks, and we heard later that there were a few hiccups in service given the incredible on-line demand. The parish added two more Vigil Masses, but quickly all available space was booked. On the parish website now is the list of Masses with a statement that all Masses are now closed, and that those without reservations should watch the parish livestream of two Masses on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. So, I wonder how my parish—or any parish--will manage the inevitable visit of the annual worshipper who never got the fax and will be expecting admission. As a Church we do not have collective experience with turning people away from our doors. [We are trained to think counteractively.] I will admit that in twenty years as a pastor I sometimes gave my local fire marshal gray hairs to include everyone for Christmas Eve or Easter Morning. My sermons on those occasions were pitched in part to the occasional worshipper or stranger to welcome them physically into the parish family, with an offer to assist anyone in second marriages, LGBQ estrangement, confessional fears, or dislike of me personally for my perceived shortcomings, of which there were plenty. And I was hardly the only pastor who brought this approach; a parish that does not evangelize on Christmas and Easter is missing the boat. The Covid-19 environment puts a good parish and a conscientious pastor in a most uncomfortable predicament: protecting the safety of those in his building while extending pastoral concern to those who showed at least a spark of grace by turning up. How this dilemma is addressed will depend initially and most importantly on how the folks on the ground defuse the disappointment, surprise, or anger of those who cannot be admitted inside the Church. Again, as any minister will tell you, there are many Catholics on the cusp of leaving institutional contact at the next slight. And while such individuals may have doctrinal or personal issues with the Church, nothing is quite so definitive as having a door slammed in your face—on Christmas, no less. There is a political edge to consider here, too. If the analyses of recent elections and polling are any indication, there is a strong current in the United States of fear that government and culture are overtly anti-Christian and anti-Catholic. In New York and Washington, D.C., for example, Catholics sought judicial relief for what they viewed as excessively harsh restrictions on the exercise of religion by local authorities. In Washington, for example, church gatherings were limited to 50 persons. It was probably galling for Catholics to live under these restrictions when the federal government was hosting gala balls for hundreds in indoor settings. I must think that somewhere in the United States—and Florida, with its statewide laissez-fare approach to the Covid crisis is as opportune a place as any—political activists in premeditated or spontaneous ways may demand access under the banner of freedom of worship. It is my profound hope that the priests and lay ministers who will lead the Church’s parochial celebrations of the Lord’s birth have given prayerful thought to the unique challenges of this Christmas Season. Last Easter was observed when much of the country was shut down and there was more unity of purpose in protecting life and limb. But after many more months there is either lethargy or rage in the face of energized Covid-19, exacerbated by fear and uncertainty after a tumultuous election and economic woes. Amid this, our church ministers have gamely pushed on in the face of financial strain, material interruptions to ministry, and, in a very real way, missing their families in faith. My hope is that the liturgical Christmas “rush,” such as it is during an untamed pandemic, will energize our parish leaders Even within the confines of social distancing, tell them you appreciate them at Mass [and cover their backs, if necessary, as they work to protect ours at the church doors.] I read Peyton Place [1956] a few weeks ago, a novel about a 1940’s small town in New England where everybody knew everybody’s business until one thing led to another and the real village secrets came into the light with a fury that left no one the same. In 2018 Pope Francis ordered a thorough Vatican investigation of a living American Cardinal, a nearly 500-page report released this past Tuesday [November 10, 2020] and easily accessible to the public in English. “Report on the Holy See’s Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related to Former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick [1930-2017]. The full text is here and on other websites. If you are starting from scratch or confused about Cardinal McCarrick’s career and behavior, there are good narratives including this one from America Magazine or a podcast from the same site.
Given that church ministers, catechists, and Catholic adults in the world are looked up to for answers about the Church, including its inner working, it is imperative that anyone in a church leadership role [say, as an adult education teacher] have accurate information at the ready, not hearsay. Every national dinner hour television news ran the McCarrick Report alongside the national Covid-19 spread and the election vote-counting on Tuesday evening. To get caught flatfooted by a fellow parishioner who is angry, distraught, or looking for information is unprofessional for a Catholic minister. On the other hand, as I review dozens of Catholic blogsites nearly daily to get the grass roots pulse, I see more posters upset about the election returns than the serious revelations of Pope John Paul II’s mismanagement of abusive bishops, though I have come across pockets of communities which advocate removing the name of the canonized pope from church entities. How does a local catechist or pastor awaken and explain this current crisis in the Church? And trust me, it needs to be addressed. Too many good folks have left the institutional practice of Catholicism already because of an absence of transparency and honesty on the part of Church leaders. Some former brethren, sadly, are victims themselves of clerical perpetrators and the bishops who failed to address the problem. Many more are angry and perceive [often rightly] that portions of their offertory funds are being diverted from ministry to pay damages and lawyers, much of this information hidden in non-disclosure settlements. Before any meaningful ministry of evangelization can get off the ground, there must be a clearing of the air as well as institutional/attitudinal reform of the exercise of Church ministry. First, how has your parish responded to the clergy abuse scandal since the story burst on to the American scene in 2002 with the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting, portrayed recently in the film “Spotlight?” My impression is that if abuse occurred in a parish [or in widespread numbers in a diocese], there is a much greater psychological and spiritual impact, and heightened publicity of abusive events such as new revelations about Cardinal McCarrick can trigger relapses and emotional discomfort. Parish staffs may want to keep an ear to the ground for distressed members in the current flurry of publicity. Parishes such as mine, which have had no reported clerical abuse cases in its thirty-year history, may possess a blissfully ignorant congregation which has little grasp of the scope or the damage suffered by Catholics around the country and around the world. The risk of complacence, “that type of thing happens in Boston or Buffalo but not here,” sometimes needs a pastoral reminder or jolt that bad things can happen anywhere. Second, Catholics need reminding that the narrative of clerical abuse has evolved over the years. In 2002 the Church was reeling from the sheer numbers of clergy and victims. Over the next decade the complicity of many bishops in cover-up became the focus, and a few were arrested and sent to jail. In 2017-2018 the tentacles of cover-up were discovered to reach higher than local bishops, into the highest ranks of the Church. In very recent years the influence of money for protection, promotion, and other favors came into general focus, such as the case of Bishop Bransfield of West Virginia [2018] and of course McCarrick. For some years now just about every diocese in the United States has developed strict protocols on the protection of minors and, in my own diocese, the handling of money at every level. While these painstaking steps should be applauded, it is painfully evident that no protocols exist for bishops, some of whom use cash gifts, promotion, and intimidation to buy favor and, evidently, protection if that was needed. Third, clericalism at the very least hindered internal church discipline and gave many priests and bishops a false sense of security. I have read several hundred individual abuse investigation reports over the past two decades. One of the most common features of clerical-lay interactions in an abuse allegation is the contempt of clerics for lay persons seeking help. [There are several such examples in the McCarrick Report.] A common theme is a complaint made by the parents of a minor abuse victim to a local pastor or officer of the diocese about a specific priest. Often local dioceses use the old philosophical medieval maxim of “Ockham’s Razor,” which roughly translated means “the simplest answer is usually the right one.” Thus, the local priest or chancery official consoles the parents/victims that “there must be a misunderstanding and I’ll have a good talk with Father X. You don’t need to worry about this anymore.” If the parents are not so easily dismissed, the pastor may appeal to their standing in the Church with reminders that “rumors like this can destroy the Body of Christ,” or in my classmate’s favorite phrase, “pious drivel.” If the parents or adult victims are adamant and litigious, they may get an interview with a diocesan official with promises of follow-up, and in a few cases, funds for counseling. Often, their complaints were buried. The grip of clericalism in hiding abuse was only broken when the clerical structure finally faced an immutable force, civil law enforcement. Clericalism’s central pillar is an interpretation of Catholic theology that an ordained priest is, by nature of the Sacrament of Orders, a superior man. Sacramentally speaking, a priest is unique in the Church in the way he serves it, as leader and gatherer around the Eucharistic banquet and the other sacraments of life in the Apostolic tradition. Clericalism holds that a priest is better than a layman, period, in the natural order of things. Seminaries and certain devotional trends promote the idea that a priest as priest is superior to lay persons, the thinking goes, and the need to protect his elevated status in all circumstances supersedes any other considerations even when criminal activity is involved. The optic of the Church becomes the Roman collar, not the pouring of baptismal water which raises all the faithful to the priesthood of Christ. John Paul II was a fierce defender of the image of the priesthood: in 1992 in Pastores Dabo Vobis [para. 20] [or “I will give you shepherds”] he wrote: “Therefore, since every priest in his own way represents the person of Christ himself, he is endowed with a special grace. By this grace the priest, through his service of the people committed to his care and all the People of God, is able the better to pursue the perfection of Christ, whose place he takes. The human weakness of his flesh is remedied by the holiness of him who became for us a high priest 'holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners' (Heb. 7:26).” It is not unthinkable that Pope John Paul’s idealism regarding the image of the Church and the priesthood impacted his ability to separate the sheep from the goats, so to speak. As Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote in 2011, we have many “John Paul II seminarians and priests” who identify with their uniqueness and do not grasp Pope Francis’ call for clerics to “smell like their sheep.” It is also true that there is clericalism within clericalism. The crux of the McCarrick Report is John Paul’s appointment of McCarrick to the Archdiocese of Washington in November 2000 against the advice of laity, seminarians, priests, bishops and even Cardinal John O’Connor of New York. McCarrick had, by 2000, been refused three major promotions by the Vatican for his lifestyle [including the Washington, D.C., position which he ultimately attained after a second review.] While the November 10 report cites numerous examples of “bishops behaving badly” in McCarrick’s vetting, the pope elected to make the appointment by his own judgment, overriding both the brotherhood of the priesthood and the wisdom of the baptized faithful knowledgeable of the case. Fourth, priests and parishioners need to understand the nature of their relationship, both in terms of Church Law [Canon Law] and, equally important, their day to day coexistence in parish life. A good way to start a conversation might be a parish-wide study and pulpit reflection on the nature of the parish, based upon Canon Law and a reasonably understand of what a parish is. [Over lunch yesterday with one of my old catechetical students, I complained that parishes should have been doing this kind of reflection during the Covid-19 restrictions when there was enforced time to stay home and pursue the important things in life we don’t usually address. “We’ve wasted a catechetical year,” I lamented, and worse, we have the technology to do this sort of thing and didn’t use it.] For years I have heard the complaint that priests do not understand the challenges of the laity, and as a former pastor I will own that. But it is equally true that parish members do not understand the challenges to conscientious priests, either. There are two texts which strike me as honest descriptions of priestly parish life, a pair of studies of case histories of priests in the ministry. The National Opinion Research Center [NORC] undertook significant studies of Catholic priests in the context of Christian leadership for the new millennium. The first volume, The First Five Years of the Priesthood, was released in 2002, and Experiences of Priests Ordained Five to Nine Years arrived in 2006. Just slightly dated—the influx of international priests to pastorates in the United States has accelerated and, in some ways, compounded preexisting challenges—the works may open eyes to a healthy commiseration and trust that priests, as a rule, are disgusted with malfeasance by their bishops or the Vatican as much as their parishioners. A good deal of local church conflict with pastors involves matters already set in stone. Parishes are bound by Canon Law to have a finance council to advise the pastor, who by the same law does have the last word on fiscal decisions. From experience I can say that a pastor is treading difficult terrain who ignores frank concerns of the parish family. While Canon Law states that Bishops may mandate parish councils throughout their dioceses, the last research, around 2010, indicates that about half of the U.S. Church operate with established pastoral or parish councils. More recent research has found that many priests, notably younger clergy, have difficulty dealing with the laity than in the earlier decades after Vatican II. Consequently, I put more hope in less structured and more personal and trusting interactions between the priests and people of any given parish. With the demand for priests so high, some bishops are ordaining men with obvious personality disorders. These sorts of preconditions are not cured by prayer and experience. When combined with the hubris of an imperial theology of priesthood, honesty and transparency will lose every time. Congregations and, worse, individuals, can suffer significant disdain and wounds from poor pastoral interactions. We are past the time of grin and bear it. It is not a sacrilege to report first-hand poor pastoral interactions with a priest to a bishop or his delegate in the chancery. [I am assuming here that readers are already familiar with the civil obligations of reporting child abuse.] As a counselor I have advised such a course of action to a few patients who suffered from thoughtless pastoral insensitivity. The usual objection is that “they won’t take me seriously” or “nothing will be done.” The McCarrick Report is witness enough to that. But I reply that a complaint or a report makes the next complaint from another person much more believable. This is the end of a rather long post, I will admit. I began it last Tuesday. I have added to it throughout the week while I am caring for my wife, Margaret. She was injured and somewhat incapacitated by a bicycling accident on October 24 that required surgery on November 3. She is doing well but still has significant therapy coming down the road. Keep her in your prayers. And I promise some upbeat posts coming along this week. On Tuesday, November 10, at 2 PM Rome time the Vatican will release the so-called “McCarrick Report.” This mammoth document—minimally estimated at 600 pages by those few who have seen it—covers the entire priestly career of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was ordained in 1930 and forced to retire from the College of Cardinals in 2018. The report is a multitiered analysis of a scandal that may seriously impact the reputations of present and past Church officers in the United States and in Rome, and possibly cast a shadow over at least one pope. Senior churchmen such as Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and much of the national Catholic press have warned of its impact when released on Tuesday. [As a rule, such matters as those discussed here in this post are not featured in parish websites and Facebook pages sponsored by parishes.]
It is useful to look at why the disclosures on next Tuesday may be received with greater shock and grief than other public revelations of clerical abuse. In 2002 the public became aware that abuse of minors by priests was a much more common practice than previously believed. For much of the twenty-first century, the identification of perpetrators was undertaken with varying degrees of foot-dragging. Reasons for hesitancy and even outright stonewalling of internal investigations ranged from embarrassment to the Church, potential payouts to victims, and loss of offertory revenue from disgruntled worshippers. During those twenty years since the Boston Globe’s Spotlight on the problem of abusive clerics raised national consciousness, there has been more attention paid to the conspiratorial side of the abuse crisis, an organized pattern of diocesan behavior in which victims were quietly paid off for their silence and known serial perpetrators were knowingly transferred to other parishes by their bishops. It is not an exaggeration to say that this pattern was in many dioceses the norm; the result of such a strategy was the exposure of many more children to abuse and the exclusion of civil law enforcement in the protection of minors and removal of dangerous offenders from access to children and minors. I cannot pinpoint the exact date, but some time after 2015 a number of high visibility civil law suits against a Catholic religious order drew so much attention in the State of Pennsylvania that in 2017 the state determined that the Church would not or could not manage itself in matters of youth safety. Attorney General Josh Shapiro demanded access to all clerical personnel files in chanceries across the state. The Pennsylvania Report of 2018 was a bombshell, particularly in terms of unreported priests and the large number of victims, over one thousand according to the New York Times. Both the numbers and the raw witness accounts from victims was of such a scale that about twenty attorney generals across the country almost immediately opened similar statewide investigations, including my own state, Florida. [The Florida Attorney General’s Office released my state’s findings a few days ago, including an analysis of the Orlando Diocese.] The evolution of awakening to the abuse crisis has drifted more to those responsible for the hiding and the coverups of child abuse in the Church. To put it bluntly, attempts to hide and reassign abusive priests, particularly without warning the new parishes and pastors, can be a criminal conspiracy. A few bishops or chancery officials have actually served time in prison in the past decade here in the United States, but if Florida is typical of the nation, most of the perpetrators and their superiors are dead, or the statute of limitations has long expired. In 2017, however, one of the highest-ranking prelates in the American Church—a cardinal who had voted in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI—was called to face his past—and it would seem that he will take other prelates down with him. The life and church career of Theodore McCarrick covers so much ground that if you have never heard of him, you may find his biography in Wikipedia very useful, as it traces his journey up the clerical ladder [and down], and with a little insight one can decipher that young Father McCarrick, ordained a priest in 1958, enjoyed the favor of powerful friends and learned to cultivate them into four distinct episcopal promotions. By 1977 he was consecrated an auxiliary bishop of New York by Cardinal Terence Cooke. In 1981 he was named first bishop of the Diocese of Metuchen, New Jersey; in 1986 Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey; in 2000 Archbishop of Washington, D.C. He submitted his mandatory retirement [age 75] in 2006 but maintained a powerful figure in the United States and Rome. His considerable skill set included fundraising for a wide swath of church enterprises. However, by all accounts I have seen over the past two years, the ex-Cardinal’s personal habits were widely known in Church circles for many years. In February 2019, a Vatican trial found him guilty of sexual crimes and abuse of power and dismissed him from the priesthood. McCarrick’s penchant for seminarians and young priests is reflected in his choice of residences, seminaries, and in a notorious beach home he owned. When approached for favors by the Cardinal such as sleeping in his bed, seminarians, who naturally needed his approval for ordination, found themselves in impossible situations. Young priests who needed McCarrick’s blessing for such promotions as first pastorates found themselves in similar dilemmas. McCarrick’s pattern of sexual coercion leads one to the old Watergate question of “what did they know and when did they know it?” in reference to the superiors who promoted him through the episcopacy and later his bishop colleagues who looked the other way on matters of his reputation and fitness. In 2018 Pope Francis realized that the McCarrick saga would never be put to rest unless the ex-Cardinal’s enablers were identified. Cardinal Shawn O’Malley, for example, lobbied for a thorough investigation of McCarrick’s career vetting. Such an investigation would involve American prelates, of course, but all episcopal appointments come from Rome ultimately, and appointments to the Archdioceses of Newark and particularly Washington, would get scrutiny from the very top. This is the ultimate nightmare of the McCarrick investigation, and certainly an anguishing decision for Pope Francis, for most of McCarrick’s career successes were sanctioned by Pope John Paul II. If Pope Francis approves a full revelation of the McCarrick promotions, he may have to reveal, at the very least, some extremely poor judgments from a sainted predecessor. If Tuesday’s report is redacted, then Francis will be accused of prolonging a cover-up and his own papacy may be irretrievably damaged. As I say, Tuesday’s deed needs to be done, but it will cost. My niece Amanda posted on her Facebook site this morning her disappointment with the decline of Facebook over the years, from the time she was in college in the early 2000’s when you needed a college “edu” email address. The site we know as “Facebook” took its familiar form on February 24, 2004. I was 56 at the time [a depressing thought in itself] but as soon as the “edu” requirement was dropped, I signed on, went off around 2010 because the site was getting too crazy, and returned in 2012 to stay connected with family, friends, and book publishers. And, in 2014, I started using Facebook to plug “The Catechist Café.”
That said, I strongly agree with Amanda’s description of early Facebook. “There was zero talk of politics, religion, fighting over differences of opinion, tagging your exact location, buying/selling groups, marketing, personal businesses, commercials, advertisements, and posts from strangers that show up on your feed because one of your three-hundred Facebook friends was tagged.” Or, as my nephew Ryan summed it up nicely, “Facebook now is just a joke.” I think he is speaking generically, in the sense that the site is misused, often dangerously, on many levels. This may sound like a strange concept, but personally and morally, a Facebook user must decide what his or her “brand” is going to be when it comes to posting. As a mental health counselor, I can see some of my family and friends using their Facebook posts as streams of conscious, running commentaries on their unvarnished feelings. I wonder at times if Facebook subtly encourages too much self-revelation with its “add to my story” option. It is not a good idea to live your life as your Facebook “inner circle model” because [1] Facebook is not reality world, though many believe it is, and [2] every moment on Facebook is a moment wasted on connecting with real people face-to-face or in different formats—a letter, perish the thought--for supportive encounters, i.e., true friendship. Again, my nephew Ryan tosses a pearl to be considered when he described his infrequent visits to Facebook thusly: “I use it solely for mindless scrolling,” though I know that he follows the rest of us to stay collected. Those who take Facebook too seriously for personal support will always be hurt. This accounts for the many posts that go something like this: “I have 500 friends, but I never hear from anybody. So, I want to see how many people just look at the photo on a post and move on. Type ‘copy’ or some other equivalent to prove you read my entire entry.” Close cousin to this post is the post on behalf of a troubled population, say those contemplating suicide. It generally begins with “97% of you won’t do this, and I know which ones won’t, but if you care, prove to someone contemplating suicide that there are sympathetic people out there by sharing my post.” Aside from revealing a significant anger, the poster never considers that a better use of the Facebook space might be to provide the source where genuine professional help is always available, Suicide Prevention on Life Line, which has a website and a national phone number, 1-800-273-8255. Ironically, the original post might get, at best, two shares, hardly an encouragement to those in depression and despair. On a religious note, nearly all of us were brought up with the Commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” In Sunday school or Catholic religious education, we were taught that this commandment forbids lying. All my adult life I could not help but notice that this commandment vacations in Aruba during election season. There is not much we can do about political lying except in the election both, but I would call out those who perpetrate misinformation on matters of health and safety. Those who post “health information” about Covid-19, for example, are obligated to provide their source so that we, the readers, can assess the source and its credibility. It takes me several days to write a 1200-word post, with most of the time spent documenting any information I introduce. In the case of medicine, a discovery must be repeated successfully in other independent labs in a process called peer review. Truthfulness on-line falls under the Eighth Commandment. To go back to Amanda’s point, I think that we can retain an element of fun and concern for our family and friends by judicious management of our sites and avoiding, in Amanda’s phrase, “crap, anger, and personal agendas.” Some posts—especially the lives behind them--are truly inspiring. My seminary buddy has been working with troubled vets for years by introducing them to fly fishing. I hear regularly from an old deacon friend working under challenging conditions for the Church in Honduras. I have tried over the years from a distance to support family and friends with humor, congratulations, and messages of prayer. Do I have agendas? Yes, but that is why I established The Catechist Café, blog, my opinionated niche off the Facebook beaten path. Anyone can block that with their controls, and I would not be the least bit offended. At my age, I need family and friends more than I need to be right. You could have knocked me over with a feather back on July 8 when the Vatican released the news that my very own pastor and longtime friend Father Stephen Parkes had been chosen bishop of the Savannah, Georgia Diocese. Father Parkes was installed two weeks ago, September 23 to be precise. Among the consecrating bishops was his brother Gregory, bishop of the St. Petersburg-Tampa Diocese. Let me be quick to point out that my surprise was not due to any doubt about the appropriateness of the appointment; the new Bishop Parkes meets the measure of the office in every respect as a spiritual, pastoral, and administrative leader. My surprise is the result of my age and years of observing “bishop making” in the United States. The “how?” is sometimes just as interesting as “the who?” [In this video Bishop-elect Parkes describes how he learned of his appointment.]
For much of my life there was a certain formula for becoming a bishop in the United States. Ultimately the final decision on the appointment of new bishops, then as now, is channeled through the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, D.C. The Nunciature’s website defines its duties: “The Pope, as the Vicar of Christ on earth, in order to ensure that each country has a tangible sign of his care for the Lord's entire Flock, appoints an Apostolic Nuncio (Ambassador of the Holy See) as his personal and official representative both to the Church in the United States and to its Government.” The present U.S. Nuncio is His Excellency Archbishop Christophe Pierre. The nuncio’s primary responsibilities involve the good order of the Church in the U.S. and the appointment of bishops. As it is impossible for a nuncio to know every priest in the United States, he must depend upon the advice of local, regional, and national advisors, usually bishops, to identify episcopal candidates; this would include the qualifications of priests for their initial episcopal ordinations, and the promotion of already ordained bishops to larger sees, particularly where some delicacy or diplomatic touch was required. Rocco Palmo, whose Whispers in the Loggia blog is usually the best source for the “how” of every episcopal assignments, had little to say on Father Parkes’ appointment because he [Rocco] was preoccupied with the high visibility appointment and installation of the new Archbishop of St. Louis, Mitchell Rozanski, a pastoral moderate succeeding several St. Louis bishops of the cultural right, during the height of the George Floyd protests this summer. [Rozanski is already dealing with conflict as of this writing.] St Louis [Ferguson] had been the site of the Michael Brown shooting in 2014. I would call the Archdiocese of St. Louis in 2020 a “special circumstances” appointment; Savannah, as best I can tell, does not suffer from this level of tension nor does the diocese have a notoriously high number of abusive priests. According to Bishops Accountability, the Savannah and Orlando Dioceses each have had fourteen abusing clergy in their respective histories. By contrast, my home diocese of Buffalo reports 176. The selection and appointment of bishops made directly by the Vatican is something of a modern development, beginning shortly after the exile of Napoleon in the 1800’s. In the early Church bishops might be chosen by the citizenry, as in the case of St. Augustine, where the Church of Hippo in North Africa virtually put him under house arrest till he agreed to take the miter around 400 A.D. Similarly, two of the Church’s Bishops of Rome, St. Leo the Great [r. 440-461 A.D.] and St. Gregory the Great [r. 590-604 A.D.] came to their offices to, among other things, fill the civil leadership void when the seat of the Roman Empire was transferred from Rome to Constantinople [modern Istanbul, Turkey.] By the high middle ages church and state were so tightly drawn that kings, princes, and other secular powers had, at the very least, veto power over episcopal assignments made by local bishops in regional synods. The sin of simony, the outright purchase of a church office such as bishop was a perennial problem throughout the period. It was only in the nineteenth century that the Church asserted its independence in the fashion we have today, notably under the reign of Pius IX [r. 1846-1878]. The limited technology for significant papal oversight of dioceses on matters such as episcopal appointments [and many other matters] hindered communication until the twentieth century. The era of Pius IX began the centralization of church management and doctrinal unity we are accustomed to today, and as noted above, the apostolic nuncio serves the pope by submitting names of worthy candidates in the country of his assignment. Traditionally the nuncio presents the pope with three names for an episcopal opening. I was pleased to find the American process on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which incidentally is a fine teaching instrument in adult education. There are several factors or general norms not listed on the site, though. After the defrocking of Cardinal McCarrick of Washington two years ago, more attention is paid to a candidate’s “rabbi,” so to speak, the man or men of power or influence who lobbied and/or promoted the candidate throughout his career. Pope Francis has delayed releasing the McCarrick report for fear of releasing the names of the ex-Cardinal’s promoters over his career. Another unspoken criterion factor in bishop selection is the candidate’s public theological stance on the teachings and emphases of the reigning pope. At least since the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, numerous commentators have identified several sine qua non litmus tests for prospective bishops. Prior to Pope Francis, candidates were expected to publicly affirm [or at least not publicly dissent from] several sexual teachings of the Church which had come under questioning by working theologians and many parish priests. Specifically, candidates for the episcopacy were screened for their teaching and non-dissent on issues of the sinfulness of artificial birth control and conduct issues such as cohabitation, in vitro fertilization, etc. In very recent times Vatican examination of candidates has been expanded to measure support of Church teaching on matters of homosexual lifestyle and marriage, and the ordination of women. According to the USCCB guidelines cited above, the investigative process of candidates usually takes six to eight months from the time that a diocesan see becomes vacant. Of course, the USCCB has “binders full of candidates” to paraphrase Mitt Romney’s unfortunate phrase about women candidates in the 2012 presidential campaign. The nuncio and his collaborating archbishops are not starting from zero. What kind of a priestly career favors consideration for an empty see? When I was ordained in 1974 the cursus was somewhat clearer than it is today. A seminarian or young priest given permission to study in Rome [at the Pontifical North American College] had a leg up, having studied orthodox theology literally in the shadow of St. Peter’s. Career-minded clerics used their Rome years to make vital connections, working for Vatican dignitaries and learning “the Roman way” which begins with fluency in Italian speech and wines. Graduates of the PNAC were likely to return to their home dioceses to serve as chancery officials, such as Chancellor of the Diocese, Director of the Tribunal, or rector of the diocesan seminary. In recent years, however, there has been a subtle shift toward the selection of bishops from a broader pool of “field career experience.” Since Vatican II there has been more racial diversity evident in episcopal nominations. Priests who have excelled in specific ministries can be considered if their skills match the needs of the vacant see. Father Parkes’ predecessor in Savannah appears to have made his bones in Catholic secondary education. Orlando’s present bishop, John Noonan, was a teacher/officer of the Florida seminary along with parish experience. The bishop Margaret and I have known the longest was pastor of an oriental parish in New York City, as I recall, when he was called to join Cardinal Egan as his auxiliary at St. Patrick’s Cathedral before assuming his present position as bishop of Camden, New Jersey. The new Bishop Parkes was the consummate parish priest. He did not study in Rome, did not write a book, did not engage in high visibility attention-getting ventures. He was a parish priest for all his twenty-two years. He undertook numerous time-consuming responsibilities at the requests of the bishops he served under, such as establishing a new parish, energizing campus ministry at UCF, participating in the development of capital gifts and estate planning ministry for the diocese, and serving on the endless boards that keep the chancery in business. I believe that the bishops in Florida recognized him as an able candidate for the episcopacy and put his name forward to the nuncio, As a parishioner in his parish, over the years I had the sense that he was replicating the parish model he had grown up in years ago in Long Island, an experience of church that brought him considerable happiness and direction in his life. The devotional life of our parish was strong; he did everything possible to cultivate prayers and practices, particularly around the Eucharist. He was strongly prolife and fostered parish involvement in several charitable ventures including Habitat for Humanity. He navigated the parish through the culture wars that flare up intensely in swing states like Florida. He believed in maintaining a healthy, large, and tastefully appointed parish plant [and the only time I really got angry with him was a time that I thought he might be going overboard on the HGTV side of his pastoral priorities.] Being a pastor to his bones, I sincerely hope that the inevitable change in his work environment will not prove too much of a strain. Pastor Parkes knew the names and circumstances of a great many of the 4,000 families in our parish. He had a reputation for particular care in the celebration of life events such as First Communions, weddings, and funerals. It was not unheard of that he would perform a wedding of an Annunciation alumnus hundreds of miles away on a Saturday and be back in time to offer the conventual Mass on Sunday. With his new responsibilities he will be fortunate to see his 79 parishes only infrequently. I worked in the Savannah Diocese as a seminarian in 1973, in Thomasville, Georgia, and several smaller Franciscan parishes in the southwest corner of the state that bordered the Florida Panhandle and Alabama. Georgia is a large state, with only two dioceses, Savannah and Atlanta. I pray that his clergy will accept him. Many books could be written on the nature of the relationship between bishops and their priests. I believe it was Pope Pius X who complained that “I can be thwarted by the lowliest curate.” Thomas Jefferson said that it is nearly impossible to get thirteen clocks to chime at the same time. Much will depend, of course, on the policies and bearings of the man he succeeds. [As a former pastor myself, I knew it was time to move on when I started cleaning up my own mistakes and not my predecessors’.] The impact of the Covid-19 virus will be another challenge, as it is all over the country. The good news is that 50 miles across the Cooper River at Savannah is the Trappists’ Mepkin Abbey. This is a site where harried clerics can find some measure of peace and solitude. It is also where I have purchased my final resting place. Pastor Stephen was always fond of saying “let us meet in our prayers.” If I end up in a dark corner of Purgatory, at least I can shoot flares in the direction of the bishop’s residence and ask for help from Bishop Stephen. Catholic Schools Week versus Catechetical Sunday 4: The Decisions Made and Not Made in 19725/24/2020 “To Teach as Jesus Did” [1972] was the first formal statement by the collective body of the United States Catholic bishops on the Council Vatican II about religious education and faith formation. The document is still available on Kindle [$4] and paperback [as high as $64, for a 56-page treatise.] In all the years that Amazon has sold books online, I remain the only soul who ever published a review of the document on its Amazon page, in 2015, which suggests to me that this American nugget of Catholic history has been generally forgotten.
Vatican II ended in 1965, and every national conference of bishops was expected to adapt the mood and spirit of the Council into its catechetical and faith formation programs. In the case of the United States, our bishops would have had in hand guidelines from a Vatican document, the General Catechetical Directory, released in 1971, unless one considers Paul VI’s Credo [1968] below a catechetical document. By the early 1970’s the American Church was well on the way toward a progressive-traditional rift. If you have been following the Saturday Café blog stream on the Council’s liturgical decree Sacrosanctum Concilium, you have sampled the moderate tone of the conciliar statements. Sacrosanctum Concilium is neither radically traditionalist nor open-ended futurist. Sacrosanctum Concilium does not advocate altar girls or abandonment of the church organ, for example, or take a position on even communion in the hand. By the same token, SC does not advocate preserving the Tridentine or pre-Conciliar form of the Mass, either, calling instead for rubrics that would symbolize the togetherness of the Church around the Eucharistic banquet. Once the Council ended and the world’s bishops went home, the Roman Curia assumed the direction of reform, a word which made Pope Paul VII and his cabinet uncomfortable. It is worth noting here that on June 30, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his Credo of the People of God. I was in college at the time, and I assumed that Pope Paul was getting skittish about the progressive drift of theology and religious education and wished to centralize both academic theology and catechetics. Reviewing it again today, I notice it is considerably longer than the Nicene Creed used at Mass, and that it goes to great lengths to elaborate doctrines not contained in the earlier Creeds now used at Mass, particularly the Nicene Creed of 325 A.D. In Paul’s formulation there is elaboration on the Mass as a sacrifice, at a time when religion teachers were teaching the Mass as a Eucharistic meal. There was emphasis upon Marian Doctrine, Original Sin, Transubstantiation, again matters of belief not emphasized in the ancient creeds, and in particular the supreme authority of the Pope to teach in faith and morals. But Credo was published on June 29, 1968, just before the Pope’s controversial birth control teaching, Humanae Vitae, which was declared at the end of July. Few Church issues in my lifetime created more public discussion, anger, and grief of conscience. Pope Paul may have been attempting to strengthen his position of apostolic authority in the Credo before issuing his epic teaching and demonstrating his vision of true catechetical style. This is the world into which the U.S. bishop-authors of “To Teach as Jesus Did” tried to follow a path where bishops could come to agreement on principles and practices of catechetics. American Bishops in 1972 were somewhat less divided than they are today. As TTAJD is the product of endless staff work, it is difficult to know the full range of intentions of the bishop contributors. When I reviewed the document six years ago, I criticized it for a shortage of hard data and an overabundance of faulty utopian long-range planning. But in recent years, honesty requires more sympathy on my part for the bishops who were in a sense trying to square a catechetical circle. They were forced to make judgments on the most basic question of catechetics, i.e., where do we put our eggs: whether faith formation is most effective in a Catholic school setting or in the CCD setting, or even some third and fourth models in the very early stages of development. It is true that TTAJD would have profited from more ground research, i.e., what did people—priests and laity—think about Catholic schools and religious education programs circa 1970+. Some important data was free for the taking: Catholic schools were well into the attendance decline that began in 1966; more religious sisters were leaving the classroom [and religious life itself], with the subsequent increase of lay teachers in the schools who required salaries commensurate with the needs of supporting a family; tuitions of Catholic schools—which had been free in my years, 1954-62—were rising. In reviewing the available literature of the time, and even my own experience, there was also a sense among college educated progressive Catholics that Catholic schools themselves were not worth the money, that the funding or subsidies paid by parishes for their schools was better placed in ministries to the poor; or, in later years as parish offertory collections declined and larger numbers of Catholics left the church, school subsidies were seen as a backbreaking burden where they were still offered, and many Catholic schools would close in the years ahead—including a number already during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the 1970’s many dioceses were able to backstop the rising costs of parish schools from reserves of the diocese itself. That would be rare today. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, about 20 of the 185 U.S. dioceses had filed for bankruptcy dating back to 2004, due primarily to the multiple child abuse claims. A working estimate of the cost of the abuse crisis in the U.S. places Church losses at $3-$5 billion. The state of Catholic schools in 1972 was a big matter for the writers of “To Teach as Jesus Did,” because in many ways the health of religious education programs depended upon the health and resources of Catholic schools. The bishops teach that “Catholic schools afford the fullest and best opportunity to realize the threefold purpose of Christian education among children and young people. Schools naturally enjoy educational advantages which other programs either cannot afford or can offer only with great difficulty.” [para. 101] Earlier in the document the bishops write that “despite their achievements and bright hopes, such [religious education] programs face serious problems which should concern the entire Catholic community.” [para. 91] In short, the episcopacy did not see the freestanding faith formation programs of the day as capable of carrying the torch for evangelizing the young. The bishops did not have the resource of standardized ACRE testing of religious learning, which was begun later in 1979, which might have given them solid information on the comparable religious learning taking place in schools and religious education programs. Today the ACRE standardized testing is administered in the fifth, eighth, and eleventh grades across the board. The school results are often made public as a recruiting tool for prospective client parents. It is not clear how widespread standardized testing is utilized today in after school or other structures, and given that most religious education programs have at best about 26 teaching contact hours per year, the disparity of results compared with an accredited school with daily religious instruction is probably skewed, apples and oranges. The number of minors depending upon religious education or CCD outside of a Catholic school has been a major concern of the American hierarchy since the 1800’s. Even with the bishops’ mandate of 1884 that every Catholic church have a school, in the best of times only 50% of parishes might be complying, usually for the obvious reasons of funding and availability of women religious. The U.S. bishops of 1972 were hesitant to trumpet their concern in TTAJD, but they did not whisper it, either. The document cites that 5.5 million Catholic youth depended upon CCD at the time of writing, and it puts forth the hope that CCD and its school counterpart exert equal energy in the three-legged stool model of instruction, involvement in liturgy, and community service. Hoping to make lemonade from lemons, the bishops write that “a limitation, which is also a potential source of strength, is [CCD’s] voluntary character which, while making it more difficult to secure participation, also offers significant opportunities for the building of Christian community.” [para. 88] There is a suggestion that since religious ed programs were [and are] purely voluntary, in terms of both students and teachers, the esprit decor of faith sharing might be more intense. This concept has some merit. It was my pleasure to work with fellow Franciscans in my major seminary years [1969-1974] giving weekend rural retreats to high school aged students from the DC/VA/MD region. Our clientele ranged from the toney Georgetown Catholic high schools to suburban CCD or CYO parish clusters in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. It was a stimulating ministry, though we often felt that the CYO participants seemed somewhat more “juiced” about their three-day experience. During those years I discovered that often the parish’s religious education director was a religious sister or a former religious, making them professionally qualified as a rule for parish catechesis. With the passage of a half-century, though, this level of professionalism can no longer be maintained. The bishops go on to say that CCD/CYO programs were not reaching a large percentage of Catholic youth. Research in the present day has revealed that the median age of disaffiliation from the Church is 13, but this was not appreciated at the time. TTAJD offers remedies [para 92ff], noting the elongated civil war between school and CCD over resources and attention and addressing the parishes to “work harmoniously.” There is a call for incorporating religious education with Catholic school students in organizations and activities, presumably more that just the initiation sacraments like First Communion. Clearly the bishops were concerned about the professional training or lack of it for catechists, an issue that is probably more acute than ever in today’s Church. Honesty compels me to say that many Catholic school teachers in our schools are barely cognizant of Catholic culture, either. I worked as a catechist/schoolteacher theological instructor in my diocese here for close to 40 years…until my diocese went to outside streaming programs and eliminated face-to-face education of its catechists and teachers about four years ago. [I switched over to Catholic Charities as a psychotherapist in their clinics, but I do miss the teaching.] TTAJD does reference the idea of greater adult education, particularly for parents. It is often forgotten today, but from the end of World War II through the years of Vatican II and beyond, many Catholic adults were reading voraciously and attending lectures and workshops on renewal of Bible studies, liturgy, and particularly morality. Many returning veterans from World War II, thanks to the “GI Bill,” were able to attend Catholic colleges to earn professional degrees and absorb adult level religious instruction from the required theology courses at Catholic colleges in their home vicinities. This intensity of instruction has declined into today’s fundamental and emotional religious instructional content, often on-line. The problem with dependence upon excessive evangelical methodology was best described by my seminary rector years ago: “Piety comes and goes; stupidity remains forever.” I hope that this post has at least introduced you to the pivotal document of 1972, “To Teach as Jesus Did,” the gateway to several generations of faith formation. We are the inheritors of decisions made and unmade. We can see what has worked and what has not over five decades. If a similar document were written today, how would it differ? I will address that in our next post on this stream. Catholic Schools Week versus Catechetical Sunday 3: The Crossroads of "To Teach as Jesus Did."4/19/2020 “To Teach as Jesus Did” [1972] was the first formal statement by the collective body of the United States Catholic bishops on the Council Vatican II on the subject of religious education and faith formation. The document is still available on Kindle [$4] and paperback [as high as $64, for a 56-page treatise.] In all the years that Amazon has sold books online, I remain the only soul who ever published a review of the document. I will try not to repeat myself here.
The Council ended in 1965, and every national conference of bishops was expected to adopt the mood and spirit of Vatican II to Catholic education and faith formation. The guidelines for such directives did not appear from the Vatican until 1971, the General Catechetical Directory, [unless one considers Paul VI’s Credo below a catechetical document.] By this time the concrete principles of Vatican II and the less specific “spirit of Vatican II” were beginning to diverge, at least in the United States. If you have been following the Saturday Café blog stream on the Council document Sacrosanctum Concilium, you have sampled the moderate tone of the statement. It is neither radically traditionalist nor open-ended futurist. Sacrosanctum Concilium does not advocate altar girls or abandonment of the church organ, for example, or take a position on even communion in the hand. By the same token, SC does not advocate preserving the pre-Conciliar form of the Mass, either, calling instead for rubrics that would symbolize the togetherness of the Church around the Eucharistic banquet. It is worth noting here that on June 30, 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his Credo of the People of God. I was in college at the time, and I assumed, along with others, that Pope Paul was getting skittish about the progressive drift of theology and religious education and wished to centralize both academic theology and catechetics. Reviewing it again today, I notice it is considerably longer than the Nicene Creed used at Mass, and that it goes to great lengths to elaborate doctrines not contained in the earlier Creeds now used at Mass. There is elaboration on the Mass as a sacrifice, at a time when religion teachers were teaching the Mass as a Eucharistic meal. There was emphasis upon Marian Doctrine, Original Sin, Transubstantiation, and particularly the supreme authority of the Pope to teach in faith and morals. But then it dawned on me that Credo was published just weeks before the Pope’s controversial birth control teaching, Humanae Vitae. Few Church issues in my lifetime created more anger and grief of conscience. This is the world in which the authors of “To Teach as Jesus Did” tried to follow a path where bishops could come to agreement on principles and practices of catechetics. American Bishops in 1972 were somewhat less divided than they are today. As TTAJD is the product of endless staff work, it is difficult to know the full intentions of the bishop contributors and voters. When I reviewed the document six years ago, I criticized it for a shortage of hard data and an overabundance of faulty utopian long-range planning. But in recent years, I have more sympathy for the bishops who were in a sense trying to square a catechetical circle. They were forced to make judgments on the most basic question of catechetics, i.e., where do we put our eggs: whether faith formation is most effective in a Catholic school setting or in the CCD setting. Again, the memory of the Council era is colored by the times, and a popular rendering has it that most Catholic youths in the United States attended Catholic schools. The Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 had mandated nationally that every church have a Catholic school, with this goal of near universal enrollment of Catholics. In the 1880’s most Catholics lived in the Northeast and Midwest; Archdioceses like New York, Boston, Baltimore Chicago and Philadelphia, and statistics do bear out a high concentration of Catholic schools. As one looks south and west, the concentration of schools would be less, though Catholic schooling was considered a hope in places where it was not available. By the time of the Council in 1962 the peak enrollment of Catholic children in Catholic schools was 50%; I was shocked to learn this; growing up in Buffalo’s Catholic ghetto, I thought it would have been much higher. The high-water mark for enrollment in U.S. Catholic schools was the academic year 1965-1966 and has decreased every year since. Why this decrease after the post-World War II boom has never been comprehensively explained in one volume, but there are theories in abundance. The Depression, World War II, and the baby boomer phenomenon all factor into rises and declines in Catholic demographics. The easy and unexamined thesis about the numerical decline of Catholic schools in the 1960’s and beyond has painted the villains as the religious sisters—paid a pittance, in truth--seeking their own destinies in the post-Council days of relaxed discipline, who deserted the schools seeking their own destinies in the post-Council days of relaxed discipline, itself a concept worthy of reexamination. The problems with this explanation are multiple and refuted to some extent by statistical analysis. Repeated studies have shown that only in the years 1940-1960 did the United States produce enough homegrown priests. [Where would my Florida be without the “Irish” priests who built most of the churches and schools? When I arrived here as a pastor in 1978, all my pastor colleagues were educated at Maynooth, not Washington’s Catholic University.] Technically, it would be more accurate to speak of a temporary boom in clergy and religious, rather than a precipitous decline to a level that our ancestors of a century ago would have been accustomed to. Religious sisters were also recruited from overseas, mostly Ireland, by bishops and pastors in the United States. In When the Sisters Said Farewell: The Transition of Leadership in Catholic Elementary Schools [2012], there is a lengthy account of a 1949 negotiation between an Irish sisters’ community and an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles who seemed perplexed that the community was hesitant to take up his offer of a princely $50/month stipend in the U.S. when each sister was paid an annual $10,000 stipend by the Irish national government. However, the dynamics of women religious in the post-Vatican II American Church are complex, and while some interesting first-person experiences of those years can be easily found, few or no hard research studies exist to explain why religious women [and priests, for that matter] were becoming more scarce. When coupled with declining enrollment in Catholic schools, the authors of TTAJD had a significant challenge in mapping strategy for faith formation, and their analyses and recommendations remain with us to this day. In 2008, a half century after Vatican II, Catholic University’s eminent professor of Religious Studies, Father Berard Marthaler, O.F.M. Conventual, published The Nature, Tasks and Scope of the Catechetical Ministry. Marthaler’s book is a brief analysis of every post-Vatican II document issued about religious education. If you include the Catechism of the Catholic Church [universal], and such regional documents as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “To Teach as Jesus Did,” [1972], the grand total of documents in Marthaler’s study is an astounding 34! Getting a handle on the challenge of faith formation of young and old alike has been a very slippery eel indeed.
This figure includes only documents and teachings issued since 1971, after Vatican II. Attempts to put together teaching philosophies and practices for what we call today faith formation and catechetics go back centuries. Most popes since the Reformation believed that the poor state of Catholic education of children and adults was a major cause of the confusion over Church doctrine and Protestant questioning. [This was probably true, but the example of the papacy itself and poor education of the local clergy during the Renaissance had no little effect on events, either.] In 1539, at the height of the Reformation, Ignatius of Loyola sought permission to found an order after the model of the Franciscans, but the pope instructed him to focus his ministry on religious instruction, which is how we know the Jesuits today. Around 1560 a society of dedicated Catholics—priests and laypersons—organized, with the approval of the Church, for the purpose of teaching the essentials of faith to the young. It would eventually become the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, or as my generation remembers it, CCD. The CCD movement, endorsed by many popes until Vatican II, was a highly flexible and versatile vehicle of instruction in existing schools, parishes, free standing classes [particularly on Sundays or after regular school], and even home instruction. It was quite strong in the United States, until the Plenary Council of Baltimore [1884] mandated that every Catholic parish in the United States must have a Catholic school. CCD then became something of the backstop program of Catholic catechetics, targeting Catholic children in public schools and those in rural settings. Religious education after 1884 was distinct from the Catholic school systems and in many ways overshadowed by the structure and professionalism of the schools. Popes in the early twentieth century called for every parish to contain a CCD program, but the U.S. situation of emphasis upon Catholic schools created something of an inherent imbalance, a major and a minor league team playing in the same ballpark. By the time of Vatican II [1962-1965] religious faith formation and catechesis of young American Catholics was running on multiple tracks: Catholic elementary and secondary schools, CCD programs for minors, Catholic colleges, Catholic campus ministry in state and denominational colleges, and the military [i.e., families living in base communities.] Catechetics for adults in general was not yet thought of as a specialty, though movements such as the Christian Family Movement were gaining notice in the 1950’s and many returning American servicemen after WW II were able to attend Catholic college with the aid of the “GI Bill.” My first priestly assignment [1974-78], the Franciscan Siena College , was so overwhelmed with veterans in the late 1940’s that Quonset huts were pressed into service for night school classes. If you have read snippets of Vatican II documents—such as on the Café’s Saturday Liturgy stream—you know that the Council Fathers painted their vision of the future in very broad strokes, leaving the details to committee work. The matter of catechetical reform was discussed in many, if not most, of the Council’s documents, and the biggest shift in the ministry of religious education was the adoption of what we term today “evangelization.” The Council could just as easily have said “memorize more stuff,” but the idea that faith formation rests in hearing the Gospel and seeking an authentic rebirth in Jesus Christ, never entirely lost over the centuries, was a truly revolutionary moment for the Church and the ministry of catechesis. The devil, as always, is in the details. As with other Vatican II reforms, many academics and ministers in the trenches rushed into battle without appropriate weaponry or battle plans. The liturgy is the worst example of this, but our focus here is the Catholic educational/formational enterprise, where several unproven assumptions and social factors altered the American Catholic educational experience. The Council ended in 1965, but the first catechetical instruction to the universal Catholic Church, the General Catechetical Directory, did not appear until 1971, a point in time where a lot of water had already passed under the bridge in floods of enthusiasm. It is useful to remember that many Catholics in the United States were quite aware of the Council and what changes it may bring. There were hopes that some onerous church practices might be softened, such as fasting [there were about 60 days of obligatory fast in 1962] and moral teachings on birth control. On the whole, the expectations of Catholics were not avoidance of work and sacrifice but positive responses to generally agreed upon problems: the need for evening Masses, worship in the vernacular [local language], more involvement with the Bible, lay participation in governance and ministry, better protocols for the divorced to rejoin the Eucharistic banquet, and communion under both species, to cite some that I vividly remember, having grown up through that time frame. In middle school I remember serving the first permitted Masses of the evenings of Holy Days of Obligation, so several liturgical reforms were permitted by Rome even before the Council under the approval of Pope John XXIII. Pius XII had transferred the Triduum rites to the evenings in the early 1950’s before the Council as well. Consequently, there were wholesale changes and experimentation in process when the official Vatican II guidelines were formulated in the late 1960’s and beyond, up to and including the revised Code of Canon Law in 1983. I can recall that some of these documents were not enthusiastically promulgated, as a good number of Church ministers interpreted them as Roman restraints upon experimental practice already gaining traction. In the case of the General Catechetical Directory, for example, there is a peculiar addendum from the Congregation on the Clergy stating that children must make first confession before receiving first communion, clearly addressed to American practices of catechizing at that time. In reviewing the GCD today, however, this document is indeed forward looking in its revisioning of catechetics and faith formation. Marthaler outlines the six issues of concern addressed by the editors in the development of post-Council catechetics. [1] The Reality of the Problem of Religious Education/Formation: The World, the Church. The document acknowledges that the world of the twentieth century is unique in many respects, citing many factors including science, technology, mass media, and general indifference to things religious, which must be addressed and understood by the Church. [2] The Ministry of the Word. This segment calls for a restoration of Biblical evangelization. “Jesus Christ embodies the fullness of all revelation;” faith formation gives voice to the words and meaning of Jesus. Through the Sacred Scripture, humans, moved by grace, respond to revelation in faith. This segment acknowledges the existence of Catholic schools and religious education programs, but in a major departure from the past, the GCD explains that “this [Biblical] renewal has to do with a continuing education in the faith, not only for children, but also for adults.” [note 9] The implication here is that the “gas ‘em up and go” approach to catechetics, ending with Confirmation for minors, is inadequate for adult faith in the post-Council era. [3] The Christian Message. This is a technical section dealing with the content of what is taught and proclaimed in the formal settings of church life. At the time of composition, theologians were actively debating a number of major issues of Church Tradition, particularly in the area of morality. Eventually the follow-up to this section of the GCD would be the Catechism of the Catholic Church, issued in 1993. [4] Elements of Methodology. Part 4, a very brief segment, discusses the “how” of teaching the faith. I detected an internal debate among the editors; some felt more secure with “inductive” methods and dependence upon tried and true formulas involving memorization of prayers, creeds, and doctrinal formulations in a common language of faith understanding. Others called for a more deductive and subjective use of the divine imagination. A critical assumption of this text is the professionalism and experience of the teacher as well as the good intention. [5] Catechesis According to Age Level. The GCD puts forward an initial “stages of human development” consideration for catechists working with different age segments of the population. By the time of Vatican II, some of the major theories of human development were well established, from Freud, Adler, Maslow, Piaget and Erikson, among others. Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development was required reading in my graduate morality courses in the early 1970’s. The GCD reflections on the challenge of each life stage are quite good and reflect interdisciplinary scholarship. [6] Pastoral Activity. This final section gets to the specifics of what is expected of each bishop in terms of establishing and monitoring the structures of catechetical instruction. It is more than a little disturbing to look at the standards proposed by the GCD and the actual product on the ground in so many sites in the United States. For one thing, catechists are referred to here as “fulltime catechetical personnel;” they are “graduates of schools of training.” Their training must be continuous throughout their ministry. The GCD is a universal document, but read from the American shores, what seems implied is college educated catechists as the norm. Today, 2020, the instructions of section six sound preposterous and undoable in this nation. One would think that the United States Catholic Church, of all the nations of the globe, would lead the way in this pursuit of catechetical educational excellence. Unfortunately, the U.S. bishops issued their own working document, as instructed by the GCD, called “To Teach as Jesus Did” in 1972. This American blueprint is a story unto itself, the subject of our next post. I note with humor and pathos that only one person in the world has ever reviewed “To Teach as Jesus Did” in the entire Amazon review service. That would be me, in 2014. See for yourself. Note: In the United States the term CCD has been used till very recently as a generic title for all catechetical programs not offered in a Catholic school. The USCCB has absorbed the CCD corporate identity for what appears to be publishing and catechetical resource sharing. |
On My Mind. Archives
January 2024
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