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There are many things to say about how to celebrate the Lenten-Easter commemoration, and your parishes or church communities are probably publicizing times for extra Confessions, Stations of the Cross, and the ever-popular Friday parish fish fries. And if you are lucky, your parish is in the process of mailing daily devotional booklets to your home, a practice in my parish for some years now. The rapidly approaching observance of Ash Wednesday [March 5] and the seasons of Lent and Easter are as good a time as any to talk about another aspect of Catholic life, reading: prayer books, spirituality books, the Bible and biblical commentaries, theology books, even select novels—you name it—that great variety of literature that sanctifies our lives. I know that most of us grew up with a somewhat spartan approach to Lent—the fasting, the doing without—but in truth we should be more like the catechumens: falling in love with the rich treasury of God’s Word, the logos.
Rather than reinvent the entire wheel of Lenten observance, I thought this might be a good time to focus on the world of religious reading and the people and publishers who make it possible. So how do you access this multi-millennia library of the Church’s riches? And why? THE WHY. Bottom line, very little of the Catholic Tradition is taught to us in typical parochial life, and when it is offered, it is too simplified. Moreover, our pastoral/catechetical practice is build upon an egregious error, that by age seven or age twelve a Catholic’s theological fuel tank is full and he or she is good to go for life. These young folks have tasted few, if any, of the struggles of life where the wisdom of the Logos may guide and correct them. And worse, we never taught our youth where and how to access God’s wisdom, and there are no adult vehicles in parishes to embrace the Church’s wisdom. In our hearts we know our present system is wrong, but American Catholic leaders—for a variety of reasons—are hesitant, maybe even resistant—to make a major priority of continuous adult-level faith formation about the moral challenges of Christian living and the “two-edged sword” of the Scripture, as a Catholic scholar put it decades ago. Consequently, we Catholics live like ancient stargazers before Galileo discovered the telescope; we grope around the skies with just our eyes with no idea of the depth and beauty of creation that the Webb telescope captures routinely today. What is the most read Catholic publication in the United States? The weekly parish bulletin. While its intent is good, it gives little or no hint of the written wealth of the evangelists, the saints, the councils of the Church, or the sacred scholarship that continues around the world as we speak. And, as a true metaphor of the Church itself: most bulletins can be seen in the pews after Mass after people have left. THE LOGOS MUST FIND ITS PLACE It is no accident that St. John’s Gospel begins “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” [John 1:1] “Word” here is the translation of the original Greek word, Logos, which has passed into the English language itself. Merriam-Webster defines “logos” as “the divine wisdom manifest in the creation, government, and redemption of the world and often identified with the second person of the Trinity.” When we speak of the Word of God, we are not speaking metaphorically. When I was a full-time psychotherapist, I used to ask many patients what they liked to read. The vast majority said that their lives were so full that they did not read at all. Others admitted that they scoured the internet to research the symptoms that ultimately brought them to me. I did not proselytize in my encounters—most patients were Catholic anyway since my third-party health insurance carriers had listed my specialties [at my request] as Christian counseling, marriage counseling, and mood disorders like depression. Following my own experiences, with some patients I recommended a daily routine reading period, preferably with a cup of coffee or tea, in a quiet corner of the house, phone turned off, and in a comfortable chair. [“In verdant pastures he gives me repose.”] I like my Lazi-boy for two reasons. First, I am not distracted by arthritic pain and I experience warmth and rest. But more to the point, I have a spiritual thing about sitting and resting postures in prayer. I feel God’s hospitality and pleasure, as if I were his guest, in a restful and engaging mode. God feels very close to me at times—or his wisdom captivates me in silence-- and I feel I can express myself from the heart. The peace, rest, and sacred discoveries are something I look forward to, and thus I am more likely at 5 PM to put the Café computer to sleep and come down from the loft to my “sacred space.” [Note that this is one man’s experience. I am presently being guided through a six-week experience in the Ignatian Spirituality tradition, i.e., the Jesuit model, which puts much emphasis upon merging the Gospel texts with my imagination and emotions in my encounter with Jesus. The key to personal prayer and reading, in the Ignatian mind, is discovering through trial and error the personal rubric by which you can open your heart to the Logos, God’s Word, God’s Son, who longs to nurture your best inner self. You may be lucky enough to live in a diocese where approved lay spiritual guides are available, or religious societies are established around spiritual outlooks, such as those of the Franciscans, the Carmelites, etc. which teach folks how to pray and read the sacred writings. In my neck of the woods lay Catholics have formed their own cells or little communities which can enrich the personal prayer life. SO, WHERE TO LOCATE THE LOGOS? Catholic reading is a skill, and after a lifetime I am still discovering rich avenues of religious creativity. Like cooking, gardening, or taking up with a local bookie, there are things to know as you “move beyond the church bulletin,” so to speak. Over the past few decades, the walk-in retail trade for printed books in general has declined, probably because of the soaring price of retail rental space and the rising cost of the products themselves. I always enjoy Barnes and Noble, which in some locations has a coffee and pastry bar and upholstered easy chairs for the customers to sit and review $35+ books before tapping the plastic on the credit gizmo. B&N and other “secular” book dealers generally do offer religious texts from all traditions, as they do “self-help” books, but to the best of my knowledge the scope of their offerings is determined by customer demand, trade journals, and foot traffic. I interviewed the owner of a very impressive bookstore in a small Irish village last fall, who admitted to me that soon the “religion section” of the store would disappear in favor of novels and a large Irish culture selection. “Sally Rooney novels,” I quipped. St. Teresa’s Church [the Carmelites] near Grafton Street in downtown Dublin closed its book and café operations on a main street since I was there in 2015. I asked the pastor about it last September, and he laughed. “You’re the second tourist today to ask me that.” U.S. Catholic retail bookstores are few and far between. Orlando, Florida, had “The Abbey” in the 1980’s but the costs even then to operate a street front bookstore with a respectable inventory was prohibitive for the lay Catholics who operated it. Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s those of us studying philosophy and theology in Washington held a warm place in our hearts for the Newman Bookstore, an old house almost in the shadow of Catholic University. Newman had many Catholic books of substance, piled on the floors in many cases—so much so I feared that we customers and the books would collapse into the ground. I went back in 2011, and Newman’s was gone. There are today larger parishes with bookstores, though over the years the parochial “bookstore” has stretched its umbrella of goods to cover a multitude of needs not easily met in local secular markets. [The bookstore photo is from my parish’s website.] Rosaries, medals, household sacramentals [like a holy water font] and greeting cards for sacramental rites of passage, etc. As is evident from the attached photo, the space for actual printed texts is limited but it is a good selection of the very basic needs of Catholics: daily and Sunday missals and various Bible translations. I have always maintained that holding a quality bound prayer book--The Roman Missal, the Liturgy of the Hours, the Bible—is a sacramental moment in itself, whatever the text we are focused upon. In truth, it would be impossible for a single parish to expand the traditional parish bookstore model into a Catholic version of Barnes and Noble or Books-a-Million, and the financial picture of the Catholic Church right now is hardly blue chip for expansions, or for paid supervision, for that matter. The U.S. Bishops do not have the time or the staff to review every book that comes down the pike calling itself Catholic. So where would you start your adult quest for the written Logos? Maybe on your phone. THE INTERNET There are people quick to say that the Internet is the devil incarnate, or more specifically to our purposes here, that the internet has quashed love of the printed word. Sorry, but nothing opens more doors of opportunity than the internet. Back in the mid-1990’s I ordered my first book from Amazon, which was so new that the president, Jeff Bezos, sent me a coffee mug for the next year or two. In 2000 I wrote my first book review for Amazon, and gradually I came to see the value of on-line merchandising display and the tools to connect Catholics to the Logos of God. In 2014 I founded “The Catechist Café” and over the years have expanded the Café format to primarily reviews and discussions of Catholic literature of all sorts, including Catholic novelists such as Graham Greene, J.F. Powers, Jon Hassler, Louise Erdrich, and Flannery O’Connor, to name a few. Essentially, every other post on the Café is and will be an analysis of an important contribution to the treasury of Catholic life and faith. On the humorous side, it takes longer to write posts these days because, well, you have to read the book before you can discuss it. The good news here is that you don’t have to wait for me to wade through a new book with my old trifocals. The internet has permitted our best and venerable Catholic publishers, some dating to the 1920’s, to provide links to both the classics and the cutting-edge Catholic literature. In addition, many publishers will happily send you—free of charge—notices of new books and resources as they become available. Most, if not all, of the sites discussed here are operated by religious orders in good standing with the Church; but there are sites outside the Catholic ambit that have published remarkable works by and for Catholics. WHERE TO LOOK: Paulist Press [1866, Paulist Fathers] Paulist would be my first choice to acquaint myself with the Catholic publishing world. I find their catalog and search engines very useful Liturgical Press [1926, Benedictine Order] You could spend a day exploring the nooks and crannies of Liturgical Press’s on-line purchase offerings. Founded in 1926, LP is the publishing house of Saint John’s Abbey, a Benedictine community in Collegeville, Minnesota. I am familiar primarily with LP’s Bible commentaries. I see on Facebook considerable praise for LP’s “Little Rock Scripture Study” for use by parishes or individuals. Ave Maria Press [1865, Holy Cross Fathers] Ave Maria began as a Catholic magazine in the 1860’s devoted to the Virgin Mary. Due to declining subscriptions, the Holy Cross Order turned to full time publishing of books and pamphlets in 1970 and its current offerings on spirituality are available for your review. Loyola Press [Jesuit] The first word that comes to my mind here is colorful. But beyond that, LP integrates its publishing with Christian community building. Take note, too, of its extensive e-book catalogue. Notre Dame Press [Holy Cross Fathers] You’re in the big league at this site. ND Press is the largest Catholic university press in the world, and it looks every bit as tough as its football team. And yet, ND Press has an intriguing blog site you can subscribe to for free, which highlights Catholic life and history we rarely hear about—like the 150 Catholic priests who served as chaplains in the Civil War. Twenty-Third Publications and Bayard, Inc. [Augustinians of the Assumption] Twenty-Third is primarily a publisher of books which fosters spirituality and renewal. [Think Pope John XXIII; hence the name] But the mother company, Bayard, is international in its missionary and renewal outreach. Orbis Books [Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers] Orbis has distinguished itself over the years for its outstanding output of books on the Church's teachings on social justice and the people who minister where there is no hope. Orbis has made enemies in the Church, too, but so has Pope Francis. You get the picture. Eerdman [non-denomination; wide agenda] Its "about us" page describes Eerdman's as "an independent publisher of religious books, from academic books and scholarly works in theology, biblical studies, and religious history to popular titles in spirituality, ministry, and cultural criticism. I subscribe for its frequent new releases and have plucked some remarkably good Catholic and general works from its offering. Excellent blog page, too. COST AND TIPS It is true that for “big name” Catholic authors the price of a new text can run high. I haven’t seen much difference in price between the Catholic publishers themselves and the online outlets, particularly Amazon. But Amazon has ways for you to save money. There are many independent used book shops who sell their books through Amazon's system. When you visit a particular book’s site on Amazon, be sure to look to the right of the page for purchase options, particularly “used editions.” If I don’t need a book in a hurry, I’ll pay the [generally] lower rate, and it will arrive in the regular mail. Of course, if you are a Prime member, you qualify for overnight delivery for most texts. Amazon has a feature on its larger book pages where you can read portions of the book for free before you commit to purchase. Another service I use is the Amazon wish list. You can create that list yourself without purchasing anything. When you hear about or see a book you might like to own but you aren’t sure, put it on your wish list, as Amazon is set up to do that instantly for you--where it can sit for years. If you decide to buy later, just click the book over to the checkout page. I have had books on my wish list for nineteen years—you can catch a glimpse of my wish list here. [Nobody ever bought me one, though, LOL.] I turn 77 next week; will I read everything on my wish list? Probably not, but it's fun and exciting to know all those books are out there waiting for me. And finally, many religious books are available on Kindle, on the lightweight Kindle pad or other devices. I will use Kindle for novels on vacation, but for my home working library I buy printed texts only. I mark them up and retain them for future use. But, you do what works for you. Feel free to contact me from the bottom of the Café home page if you need help navigating the Sea of Ink and Wisdom. I'll share my raft.
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One problem with writing book reviews, as I do on the Café and Amazon sites, is the necessity of reading the books before writing the reviews and/or commentaries. It takes time, obviously, and an honest appraisal of whether the religious and educational content is worth recommending a book to a community of remarkably busy people. On occasion I must read a book twice, particularly if I don’t get the premise the first time around, or if I am critical of the contents and wish to make a fair assessment. With that said, the Café’s first book review/commentary of 2025 is Theology and Catholic Higher Education: Beyond Our Identity Crisis [2024] by Massimo Faggioli, the highly respected theological and historical professor and author at Villanova University in Philadelphia. Is this book relevant to you? I would say yes, because every aspect of Catholic parochial life dating to the apostles and evangelists rests upon theological excellence. Reading Faggioli’s assessment—twice in my case--Catholic education is in serious trouble—financially, ideologically, and religiously—and in some locations may have already died.
Whether you attend or attended Catholic college or not, the health or illness of these collegiate schools impacts the sermons you hear each week from the pulpit, the excellence [or nonexistence] of parish education of children and adults, the curriculum of seminaries, and the availability of books and speakers for the baptized to pursue their independent commitment to Christ that must underlie the faith life of every parish. For many years Catholic parents went to great financial sacrifice to send their offspring to Catholic colleges, many to deepen the Catholic faith of their children. Today, evidently, Catholic colleges are not what we think they are. The issues are many, but I will start with financial issues—and they are not always what we think they are. FOLLOW THE MONEY I earned my bachelor’s degree in philosophy [1971] from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., as a simply professed Franciscan brother working toward priestly ordination. I was in my early 20’s and I never thought much about the financial condition of my school. I assumed—correctly—that my Order and others were paying my freight, as I was in vows. I was also dimly aware that the school of philosophy at CUA enjoyed a hefty endowment dating to 1914 from Theodore B. Basselin, a Catholic layperson. His gift included $500,000 to fund a scholarship for “the very best and brightest” seminarians. The Basselin scholarship exists to this day. In 1969 the select Basselin philosopher-students cohort did not include me, but I was not crushed to be consigned to the “give ‘em enough philosophy to get ‘em ordained” cohort. Catholic University is unusual in that it was founded in the late nineteenth century by the bishops of the United States as this country’s “official Catholic school,” and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB] is the legal owner. It publicly reports its annual audits, and while I am poor at decoding such reports, I did note that of its endowment income for the last report, restricted gifts exceed general gifts by a ratio of 2-1. About ten years ago CUA was the recipient of a major gift from the Koch Brothers, a transaction that drew protests from within and outside the CUA community for the donors’ politics. More recently, just before Christmas 2024, national media reported that CUA is facing a "structural deficit of $30 million" that the school "must address through both budget cuts and revenue growth," said President Peter Kilpatrick in a Dec. 6 email to alumni. [My letter was lost in the mail.] What will be cut? Who will decide? And given the school’s status as the national Catholic university, what message will be sent from America’s episcopacy, which owns the school and conducts the annual collection held in our churches across the country? The pattern of budget reductions in colleges in the U.S. has been and remains the closure of departments and schools within the colleges with low enrollments and withering interest. Faggioli notes that several Catholic colleges have dropped the requirement of a theology course for all enrolled students, and in a few cases dropped theology departments entirely because of low enrollment. When this happens, is it legitimate to ask what makes a college legitimately Catholic in the first place? The author raises another question along these lines: who is donating the large endowments to Catholic schools, and what precisely do these donors want for their money? It is entirely possible that in your lifetime you have made a “capital gift” to the Church or another non-profit organization of a specific type, or you have a “restricted bequest” in your will for a church or charity, meaning that by civil law your designation must be perpetually honored, to a point. [States’ laws differ.] You could leave your estate, or part of it, to the Diocese you live in, no strings attached, and the money is used at the bishop’s discretion, which is what dioceses hope you do. On the other hand, you may have an affinity for a specific institution or ministry within a diocese or religious order. For example, if part of your Pro-Life commitment involves the adoptions of babies, there is nothing to stop you, all things being equal, from offering a $1 million restricted bequest/grant to your diocese for the exclusive establishment of an adoption program under the umbrella of the Catholic Charities Office of that diocese. But suppose that the diocese in question has an aging seminary desperate to bring its faculty, library, and plumbing up to code? This is not far-fetched. My home diocese of Buffalo, N.Y., is working feverishly to scrape together $100 million to avoid a catastrophic dissolution. It recently sold its diocesan seminary for $4 million to World Mission Society of God, a non-denominational religious organization. MONEY “WITH STRINGS?” Yes and no. I doubt that many Café readers have the wherewithal to establish an endowment anywhere near Mr. Basselin’s for Catholic University philosophy prodigies, but however we make gifts to the Church, we are in a real sense participating in Pope Francis’s principle of synodality; we are using our gifts to express approval, support, and appreciation for a specific ministry or outreach, or the way it is managed. In the above case, the donor is stating with his gift that local options for the sanctity of life overwhelm the need to save, for example, a sinking seminary when there are several other seminaries within the state. Not to be crass here, but money does speak and given the neglect of the Synod on Synodality in much of the United States, monetary support is one of the few vehicles that faithful Catholics can articulate support or dissatisfaction with the direction of the local church in matters outside of doctrine. [ For any questions involving estate planning, wills, etc., always consult your certified financial manager, your tax advisor, and your attorney in the gift planning phase.] A concern among many Catholics is the danger that large gifts from philanthropists who hold a different economic world view from Pope Francis might influence with their financial support Catholic colleges, including their theology departments--toward a more positive interpretation of American capitalism. The pope’s encyclicals on global warming and the world economy, among others, have been critical of the policies of the major world powers, including the United States. The NAPA Valley Institute meets annually to foster religious devotion and culture building within the Church and society. Many bishops attend this gathering. The group's missions include fidelity to the Church and the reshaping of American culture. I don’t lose much sleep about NAPA and other groups. In fact, NAPA’s introductory video is inspiring. My concern is more along these lines: that those college officers and boards of directors who are planning the budgetary cuts and restructuring of colleges like my CUA are savvy enough to recognize the role played by theology in Catholic life and not unduly influenced by donors’ world outlook. [This was my concern about the Synod. I thought the idea was great, but given the poverty of Catholic education at the parish level I wondered what people would bring to the table to talk about?] ARE THESE NEW ISSUES IN THE AMERICAN CHURCH? Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, a distinguished American Church Historian at Catholic University, created quite a stir when he published this piece in an ecclesiastical journal: “The development within the last two decades of numerous and competing graduate schools, none of which is adequately endowed, and few of which have the trained personnel, the equipment in libraries and laboratories, and the professional wage scales to warrant their ambitious undertakings. The result of this proliferation of competing Catholic universities is a perpetuation of mediocrity and the draining away from each other of the strength that is necessary if really superior achievements are to be attained." Monsignor Ellis penned this critique in 1955! Ellis assessed the American Catholic higher education scene accurately. He was a graduate of tiny St. Viator College in Illinois—some years after the future Bishop Fulton Sheen attended the same school—and saw his alma mater close in 1937 with a senior class of twenty. Later, still a layperson, Ellis was so disappointed in the history department of Catholic University in Washington that he applied for admission to the University of Illinois-a Big Ten state school--and would have transferred there if he had been able to obtain a scholarship. Faggioli explains the difference between the Catholic colleges and universities in the United States, and those in Europe. The latter were true to the medieval tradition of scholarship, where theology blossomed side by side in communion with the human sciences. Think St. Thomas Aquinas [1225-1274]. At the risk of gross simplification, suffice to say that Catholic American higher learning was of the “trade school variety,” [my term] sites for training, not philosophizing. I have never been able to nail down the exact number of seminaries functioning in the United States by, say, 1950, but when I started thinking about entering the seminary in the late 1950’s, there were at least four within an hour of my house. Any history of American Catholicism must discuss the GI Bill of 1944, the federal aid package for returning World War II veterans which included college tuition. The sudden need for Catholic college placements was an unusual generational boost to many of those two hundred Catholic colleges that Ellis had discussed before. But even here, the need was career orientation, “training for future accountants, businessmen, and the like.” The same can be said for Catholic seminaries, which needed volumes of new parish priests for the postwar boom. [Los Angeles was opening a new Catholic school every ninety days in the late 1940’s.] Ellis’s main concern remained unchanged, though. American theological thinkers were still no match for their European counterparts. To carry the concern further, were Catholic collegians--and all students in Catholic schools, really--exposed to the depths of personal reflection on the Faith or the meaning of life as part of their Catholic college experience, particularly as more laymen joined faculties and religious order members began the decline that continues to this day? VATICAN II [1962-1965] AND BEYOND It is fair to say that, across the board, the Catholic Church in the United States was not academically prepared for Vatican II. Only one American theologian made a significant contribution to the Vatican II documents, Father John Courtney Murray in the Declaration on Religious Liberty. The U.S. bishops, themselves divided on the outcome of the Council, were uncertain on how to manage its implementation back home. [Cardinal Spellman: “None of this will get past the Statue of Liberty.”] If you are getting on in years, you may remember the 1960’s and beyond as a period of contention and unrest in the Church, not to mention American society. We have a shorthand for describing this ecclesiastical turmoil: the “conservatives,” who were distressed for many reasons involving excessive changes in the Church, versus the “liberals,” who felt that the Conciliar changes had not gone far enough. Faggioli acknowledges this American division but adds a more critical edge to the liberal component of the Church, an outlook not as widely acknowledged [but, spot on.] The author takes issue with the 1967 Land O’Lakes Statement, the product of a post-Conciliar meeting at Notre Dame of American theologians, college administrators, and others to define the need for university theologians and their departments to do their work without interference from the Vatican or the bishops of the U.S. [An example: the Vatican had silenced the American Father Murray in the 1950’s for his writings on church and state prior to the Council.] The author is frank about post-conciliar anger which fueled the conduct and writing of “liberal” Catholic thinkers, writers, and educators, an anger that colored the way in which the Vatican Council changes were introduced to the U.S. Church at large. At Land O’Lakes, for example, this anger was a response to years of Roman and episcopal disciplinary binding, which was probably true in many quarters of the U.S. Church. But in the case of Catholic academia, a claim of independence of sorts from Church authorities by Catholic theologians and faculties raised a bigger issue, one that partly inspired the author to pen this work. Faggioli notes that many Catholic college students ideally come to our Catholic campuses looking for the happy marriage of the academic roots of Faith with the best of the human sciences, i.e., the medieval ideal of faith and reason. Or at least this was the parental hope. But what they heard in many religion/theology classrooms after Vatican II was the discrediting of the entire medieval Church and the construction of a postmodern church which may be fueled by fear as much as anything. As a psychotherapist I must take note of the excessive anguish expressed by some when a Catholic receives communion on the tongue. Is this a fear that we are “headed back to Egypt and the cruelties of the pharaohs?” It is true that the Church has been uneven and heavy handed in imposing the liturgical changes since 1965. The issue of the Tridentine Mass is a good case in point. Vatican II, in Sacrosanctum Concilium, could just as easily permitted the Pius V/Council of Trent’s Latin Mass format of 1570 as an option for priests and faithful after Vatican II for reasons of conscience and piety while teaching the same liturgical principles promulgated at the Council in 1963. Before Vatican II we were already living with seven distinct major Mass rites. I wonder if our schools and catechetical programs across the board describe, for example, the Byzantine Rite of the Mass, with emphasis upon its history as well as its style. History would also teach us that Pius V [r. 1566-1572] was generous in his dealings with local Mass rites which had arisen in multiple regions of Europe over a millennium, such as the local Lyonese rite in Lyon, France, still celebrated today. [I confess that as a pastor in the 1970's and 1980's I had little sympathy for those uncomfortable with the "new Mass." My attitude said: "Get With the Program."] Faggioli does not get into all the specifics I have raised here, and I’m sure that you or other readers may draw different insights and conclusions from his text. But it is fair to say that the backbone of his thinking is his insistence that unity is a divine mark of the Church, in this case a unity in the institutions that form our understandings of the Catholic Faith. But he is not advocating a static unity, either, because stasis is not a quality of a Church guided by the Spirit. Catholic teachers, writers, and professors made major breakthroughs in Vatican II, and their university settings have enriched the Church. We could have done more. Love, trust, respect, discussion, and fraternity cannot remain static, either, any more than a marriage. Faggioli, by his wisdom and candor, has awakened us to a challenging Church future, from top to bottom. The enduring popularity of this work is even more remarkable when one considers that the author is neither a Catholic scholar nor, obviously, a Catholic nun. At the time of writing [2004] John J. Fialka was an investigative journalist for The Wall Street Journal whose previous books had examined, among other things, the nature of war reporting. But in the May 19, 1986, edition of the WSJ, he broke a story that the United States Catholics Bishops were laboring to suppress: the financial plight of Catholic religious orders of women in America, who were facing a collective minimum shortfall of $2 billion in retirement/housing/medical costs. [Later analyses would put the number higher.] By 1986 it was obvious that fewer and fewer women were choosing to enter religious life, upsetting a century-old theorem that the wages of the younger sisters, minimal as they were/are, supported the care of the elderly sisters. My sense is that the author was deeply moved by where his reporting was taking him, and he decided to push on into the 400-page book at hand.
One might argue that Sisters is an imperfect book in that it tries to do too much: describe the arrival and the expansion of religious women across the American continent from the early 1800’s: highlight the extraordinary energy, imagination, and courage of sisters as they expanded into the American West; assess the positive and negative interpretations of the Council Vatican II by the various religious orders; and describe the religious lives of the “survivors of the exodus” and the motivations of women who seek admission to religious orders in the twenty-first century. True, Sisters is an ambitious project, but it introduces the reader to a rich menu for further thought and reading, particularly helpful to those of us in the United States who are attempting to reinvent our pastoral church life in the twenty-first century. Pope Francis’ call to Synodality stresses, among other things, the need for greater voice from the laity, something much more complex than occasional circular discussions in church basements. Fialka’s text is the exercise of one man’s baptismal and synodal right to explore his church’s history and religious practice, and to offer analyses and advice about the future. It is deeply refreshing to hear a level-headed layperson offer straight talk about the Church, mostly free of the “progressive conservative” quagmire into which we professional church people have floundered for many years. To that point: Recently I read an essay featuring Catholic CEO’s and philanthropists, the “high roller” donors. The universal consensus of all of them is that major Catholic donors—the philanthropists-- are most attracted to Catholic educational institutions, the very ministry jettisoned by bishops, pastors, and religious sisters alike, and that donors expect to serve on boards of trustees and cancel mismanaged ministries. In a sense, synodality already does function at certain levels of the Church, and it is necessary to take its contributions seriously, even if the insights run counter to long-held modus operandi. [Catholic University in Washington, my alma mater, has been financially strengthened through its adoption by the Koch Brothers and Tim Busch, though not without controversy.] The spine of this book is the two centuries old Sisters of Mercy community, founded in Ireland in 1831 by the heiress Catherine McAuley. The earliest ministerial identity of the Mercies was “a corps of Catholic social workers” as Wikipedia puts it. The order spread through Ireland, and soon extended to the East Coast of the United States serving multiple needs, but most notably to the destitutes, health care for the poor, and education. Of note is the nursing service rendered by the Mercies and other communities to wounded and dying soldiers of both flags after major Civil War engagements, particularly at Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. Fialka believes that this war service was a considerable step in assisting Protestants to understand and accept Catholics in general in American society, and specifically the identity of Catholic sisterhood. In 1866 and 1884 the U.S. Bishops, in plenary councils at Baltimore, mandated that every Catholic parish must build and maintain a Catholic school. The intentions of the bishops were protection of Catholic students from anti-Catholic harassment in public schools and the establishment of moral and academic formation of the young. Take a moment to digest what an audacious pastoral plan these bishops were proposing and its eventual impact upon the American Church. At its crest after World War II, the Catholic school systems coast to coast were staffed and nurtured by over six hundred religious orders and communities—the vast majority being women. [I myself am a minority: my Catholic education was provided by male religious, the Christian Brothers, and the Franciscan Friars; it was the Christian Brothers who encouraged me to read exhaustively, write, and research—in middle school. The author plays to his strengths: years at The Wall Street Journal are brought to play in his acute and persistent attention to the “business of nuns,” as one might put it. The financing of Catholic hospitals and Catholic schools, the two primary ministries of American sisters until very recently, has always rested upon the personal dedication and radical charity of the sisters. This reality has created some remarkably interesting and stressful episodes between major women superiors and certain bishops. The sisters truly asked bishops for only one form of compensation: autonomy to live their communal and ministerial lives without radical and/or arbitrary intrusions from chanceries. To this repeated request over the years, the bishops gave a wide range of responses. Generally, bishops do not like women telling them what to do. Other bishops had no experience communicating with women at all. But on the other hand, many bishops were so eager to obtain the services of religious women in their dioceses that they made frequent recruiting trips to Ireland. The successful orders, as a rule, enjoyed superiors who could navigate the treacherous waters of troublesome bishops and other men of influence. Fialka is not steeped in the theological lingo and undercurrents surrounding Vatican II [1962-1965], but he can competently report on the impact of the Council on every faction of the American Church, and specifically the sisters. To read his treatment of “the great exodus” of sisters—nearly 200,000 in the U.S. in 1960 compared to 3,409 as of this writing—a Catholic can gain an elementary overview of how things seemingly “fell apart” in many departments of Catholic parish life, particularly Catholic education and the ministry of sisters. First, the four-year history of Vatican II [1962-1965] revealed serious divisions among the world’s bishops: those who advocated a need to reinforce the walls between the Church and the dangers of a secularized world versus those who saw the need for greater openness of Catholicism to the modern world. As a rule, the sixteen documents produced by the Council fathers were styled as compromise documents which could be interpreted in several ways. Look at the decree on religious life, Perfectae Caritatis, paragraph 10: 10. The religious life, undertaken by lay people, either men or women, is a state for the profession of the evangelical [Gospel] counsels which is complete in itself. While holding in high esteem therefore this way of life so useful to the pastoral mission of the Church in educating youth, caring for the sick and carrying out its other ministries, the sacred synod confirms these religious in their vocation and urges them to adjust their way of life to modern needs. Obviously, one can draw multiple and opposite directives from this broad umbrella of instruction; wisely, Fialka remains focused on the U.S. situation and its interpretation of the Council. For starters, the seeds of the decline in religious vocations did not begin with Vatican II. In truth the role of women in American life was revolutionized during World War II. Remember Rosie the Riveter? The postwar feminist Betty Friedan published the best seller The Feminine Mystique in 1963. She observes that American GI’s fighting World War II looked forward to traditional homelife when they returned, only to discover that their wives, daughters, and girlfriends were stronger women with multiple career goals when the soldiers returned home. [If you haven’t seen the 1946 film classic on this stress, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” you owe it to yourself.] Perfectae Caritatis, as it turned out, was too late. Religious women were not oblivious to “women’s liberation.” And in many respects, the orders had more right to their restlessness than about any other branch of the Church. After World War II the wave of Catholic marriages and the advent of the Baby Boomers led to a sharp demand for Catholic parishes and schools in growing population centers, notably Los Angeles, where Archbishop James McIntyre was opening a new parochial school every ninety days! Los Angeles, in fact, became ground zero for “the great exodus,” and its story is worthy of attention for its highlighting of the crisis. [pp. 213-225] In the 1960’s the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary provided 600 teaching sisters to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Moreover, the “IHM’s” [as we called them back in the day], had embraced the event of Vatican II with varying degrees of enthusiasm, embarking on a more democratic form of government, modifying their ancient habits, and assessing their religious and working relationships with their employer, the archbishop. The IHM superior, Sister Anita Caspary, held to the position that bishops cannot self-legislate the inner working of religious orders except in matters of serious heresy or dereliction of duty, The sisters. she contended, can take care of themselves. Caspary also maintained that the sisters should be paid a just stipend and protected by contracts while in the employ of the archdiocese. McIntyre was old school, and he was 80 years old. Caspary met with him personally and discerned that the archbishop’s main concern was the sisters no longer wearing habits in the classroom. McIntyre’s consigliere, present at the meeting, stated for the record that it was the issue of a mass resignation of the IHM’s from the diocese, a threat McIntyre would not tolerate. The negotiations lingered, with Caspary taking her case to the Los Angeles Times and eventually the national media. By June 1968, the IHM’s represented the face of reform of the “liberal wing” of women religious in the United States, but it became more difficult to maintain morale—or even membership—in the order under the burden of this stress. I need to mention here a facet of twentieth century religious life that Fialka must be applauded for bringing to discussion here: the intervention of psychology. During the decade after the Council religious orders began to employ psychologists to conduct marathon group therapy sessions, ostensibly to help religious find common ground among themselves. Lasting from a weekend to a week, the therapy groups as a whole appear in retrospect to be more about existential angst than engagements toward unity. The IHM’s employed such psychological exercises during their Los Angeles crisis. Many other orders did as well in the 1960’s and 1970’s, including my own. I was 22, a young Franciscan, sitting for a week in a circle as middle-aged men vented years of frustration at each other. It was not psychology’s finest hour, nor mine. Fialka notes that in later years some psychologists themselves regretted their involvement and/or tactics. Truthfully, the Los Angeles crisis was nobody’s finest hour. Three hundred IHM’s left the diocese and their order. Sixty remained. Fialka’s lengthy postmortem concurs with what most of us have observed here in the States. The “radical left” is dying off. Many religious women [and men] are living out their last days in secular nursing homes away from community life, due to financial constraints. New vocations to the longstanding orders are scarce, and many communities have consolidated and/or dissolved. That said, the future of religious life is not bleak. Fialka interviewed a number of young to middle aged women who have joined religious communities in the last years of the twentieth century [this book was published in 2004]. As a rule, these individuals had experienced secular American life and found it unsatisfying. They had earned degrees, dated, made some money, and found themselves still hungry for a life with a deeper meaning. Spirituality and community were hungers of these women; the religious habit was not a “put off.” Several of them had spent time in orientation to communities they turned down. The consensus: “I was living a secular life surrounded by angry, isolated, lonely, overworked individuals. I didn’t need to join an order for more of that.” Although the story line of this work was constructed around the Mercy Sisters, the author has a special place in his heart for the “Nashville Dominicans,” as they are popularly called. [pp. 311-324] Founded in the 1800’s, this branch of the Dominican family enjoys an excellent reputation for both the quality of its religious community life and its professional excellence. Some would say that the Nashville sisters are too “structured” or “too conservative.” But they survived the turmoil of the 1960’s by following the instructions of Vatican II: to revisit the vision of the founders, in this case St. Dominic and his early band, who were at heart monks and scholars. Today Nashville Dominicans are attracting vocations, and recently founded a convent at the University of Dallas. Again, I find it fascinating that a national newspaper journalist would find the history and status of religious orders of women attractive enough to devote several years of his life to this work. For American Catholics, it is an invitation to us to return to our roots, to revisit those who are primarily responsible for our faith formation. HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE
Francis X. Maier served eighteen years as the editor in chief of National Catholic Register, a weekly newspaper founded in 1927 and still sold in the vestibules of many Catholic parishes and by mail and is, of course, available today on the internet. The Register, since Vatican II, has emerged as the leading mainstream conservative weekly publication, the preferred news publication of about 80% of America’s bishops. By coincidence, the Register’s call letters, NCR, are identical to the progressive National Catholic Reporter, another NCR weekly newspaper, which sometimes results in humorous identifications of the two publications as vehicles of the ying and the yang of Catholic life. After a long tenure with NCR—the conservative NCR—Maier began a 27-year post as an administrator and confidante of now retired Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Capuchin, during the latter’s years as Archbishop of Denver and then in 2012, Philadelphia. Chaput was probably the highest-ranking bishop in the U.S. who has not received the cardinal’s red hat, possibly because his final assignment in Philly was cleaning up arguably the worst diocesan financial mess in the country, the result of years of mismanagement by previous Philadelphia archbishops who did wear the red hat. The Vatican probably did not wish to call attention to “The Philadelphia Story,” but it gets a candid revisiting in our text at hand, True Confessions, presently in the top 1% of Amazon best sellers. Archbishop Chaput’s episcopal responsibilities included both national and Roman matters, and as his vicar general Maier saw a great deal of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the Church on both sides of the ocean. As a career news editor and diocesan chancellor, Maier maintained and supplemented a hefty rolodex of bishops, priests, lay administrators, professional crisis managers, laity in Church work, ecclesiastics and scholars from other faith traditions, “high roller investors” in Church ministry, operational church consultants, and a smattering of other persons over the years. Late in 2020 Maier set out to interview 103 individuals over the next two to three years on the state of the American Church, and it is my impression that he drew exhaustively from his rolodex. True Confessions is not a statistical analysis, but rather 103 conversations between ministerial friends or individuals the author respects for their work. Primary among these is his longtime superior and friend Archbishop Chaput, who enjoys the honor of place with the opening essay and the final assessment interview. The author interviews himself, so to speak, in Chapter 11, “True Confessions,” and admits in Chapter 2, “Ordinary Time,” that “I’m angry much of the time. Most of the people I know are angry.” [p. 23] Sin is as old as Adam and Eve and as global as humanity itself. When I hear a Catholic like Maier talk about anger, I assume he is not railing about the problems of the human condition per se, but rather about disfunction in a particular place at a particular time. What frustrates and angers the author is a perceived Christian and political disintegration of the United States, mutual collapse, you might say. Many of his interviewees share something of this anger/anxiety. At this stage of his life, Maier wants to talk about the Church of his lifetime and what are its chances of survival. BISHOPS Do the thirty-some bishops of the United States interviewed here share his pessimism? They speak with the voice of concerned administrators who, at the very least, are uncomfortable with Pope Francis’ style that they believe creates confusion when the Church needs clear and literal guidance. This is quite a reversal from forty years ago when most American bishops hailed every encyclical of Pope John Paul II. Several bishops used a verbatim assessment: “My diocese hasn’t had a single vocation to the priesthood inspired by Pope Francis.” Others were blunt about the Vatican itself and its arrogance and mismanagement. While some appreciate the fraternity of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB], there are others who find its machinery tedious and expensive. Archbishop Chaput is surprisingly blunt: “I can’t think of a single, useful thing that the USCCB did for me in my more than thirty years as an ordinary [bishop].” [p. 278] Many bishops commented on the nation’s political scene. There is wholesale unhappiness with President Biden’s outspoken policy in favor of abortion rights and Catholic politicians in general who are not enthusiastic about endorsing policies consistent with Catholic moral law. Some bishops are fearful of the federal government per se, in some measure because of the closure of churches during Covid. On the other hand, several bishops report particularly good to excellent rapport with their local elected officials. One bishop noted that he has his governor’s cell phone number. As a Florida resident myself, I note that the State of Florida funds Catholic school tuition from the state budget and has attempted to pass legislation to limit abortions. “Persecution of Christians” is not an issue in the Sunshine State. My overall impression from these interviews is that this country’s bishops are at a loss about how to engender new enthusiasm among the faithful. There are a few questions I would have asked or emphasized—regarding what kinds of spirituality sustain them, do they have enough money, how do they assess the quality of education and religious faith formation in their dioceses, to cite a few. As we will see, education is a high priority among the “high roller donors,” much more so than among the clergy in general. THE WORKERS: One of the most intriguing quotes in the book comes from a priest-professor at the Pontifical Lateran University. “Very few priests trust their bishops because they—the priests—are often seen as potential liabilities. Bishops are no longer father figures for priests, but rather heads of a bureaucratic machine. Priorities are very different indeed.” [p. 74] Maier may be unaware of independent professional research which has verified a significant estrangement of priests from their bishops. Clearly the Dallas Charter and other new policies to protect minors has church employees, particularly priests, on edge. Lumping together individual priests, deacons, lay ministers, and women religious in one modest chapter of interviews struck me as odd and insensitive to everyone involved, but particularly to the priests, who are in a hard way right now. That said, the priests, deacons, and women religious interviewed here do not come across as traumatically disfigured. I was impressed by their assessment of church life, though sadly there is a discomfort about wearing the collar publicly among some clerics. I wonder what responses we would have gotten if Maier had interviewed more priests. The permanent deacons expressed more anger in this section than any other cohort but offered intelligent observations about the practical difficulties of married clergy, for example. “THE MACHINE AND ITS FIXING” Having worked elbow to elbow with Archbishop Chaput in the Philadelphia restoration, Maier takes a fascinating look at diocesan life through the eyes of corporate managers in the secular world, Catholic “problem fixers” who come in to assess and address the “problems” such as Philadelphia in 2012, and parishes and dioceses seeking to reorganize their fiscal and business operations. The “fixers” address the reluctance of many clergy to listen to “outsiders” in their policies and planning. This cohort supports the atmosphere of synodality, though no one uses the word. They point out that churches, as businesses, are mission oriented—we would hope—but that non-profits in general tend to engage so deeply in service that fiscal management and planning play second fiddle in the institution’s investment of energies. The fixers pick up observations that Catholic bishops and leaders overlook, such as trends in education and seminaries. One operative commented that many vocations to the priesthood are coming from home schooling environments, and fewer from Catholic schools, a trend—if it is a general trend—that would have significant bearing on future fiscal planning. And, as I write this, the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Diocese of Peoria have announced they are halving the number of their parishes. One Catholic planner commented on the closing of parishes: it might regenerate the Church to have ten little sites rather than one big one. Small communities, he felt, would engender greater community and devotion. Significantly, this was a 1960’s mantra, too. It may be true. There is, for sure, a noticeable proliferation of small faith groups even within large parishes and in communion with religious orders such as the Trappists. I have been involved with three groups in the past decade; there is a crying need for trained leadership to nurture this emerging format. “THE HIGH ROLLERS” This is the chapter that most fascinated me, in part because for most of my twenty years as a Catholic pastor, I was employing capital campaign directors and learned the hard way how to solicit major gifts. Maier is the first writer in my acquaintance to address the mindsets of rich individuals and foundations, and how they go about assessing which charities they will embrace. Timothy Busch of the Busch Firm and The Napa Institute begins with the pessimistic observation that “our next challenge…will be financial. I’m frustrated with the [Church’s] corporate governance where the bishop is the chief man in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.” [p. 171] Busch goes on to say, as do most of his colleagues, that bishops are at their best when they promote the devotional and doctrinal life of the Church. High-end donors are attracted to ministries and organisms that move them either intellectually or emotionally, but in either case they expect the opportunity to participate as board members, trustees, or in some other capacity. As a rule, they do not like to function as the sole funding source for a ministry. A big mistake by non-profits is to “hit up the same donors over and over.” Donors will not fund projects that are duplicated down the street and encourage collaboration for better ministerial and charitable service. Major donors are extraordinarily strong on the importance of education. When investing in Catholic schools, they expect a strong Catholic presence and academic excellence. Some of those interviewed admitted to withdrawing gifts of $1 million or more from schools they considered to have virtually lost their Catholic identity. It was hard to glean how knowledgeable Catholic donors are about theology. They are interested in funding seminaries and colleges, again with an eye toward strong fidelity to Church teachings. Of particular interest to donors are college campus ministry programs, in the belief [correctly] that most significant life decisions are made during the collegiate and early adult years. This chapter is followed up by “Things that Work and Why” [Chapter 9] which looks at such organizations as FOCUS, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students founded at Benedictine College, and the Augustine Institute, founded to “equip Catholics intellectually, spiritually, and pastorally to renew the Church and transform the world for Christ.” [p. 209] WHAT TO MAKE OF ALL THIS? Time does not allow specific references to every chapter of interviews, but the nature of the book is obvious enough. Maier targets multiple populations to get a feeling for the present state of the Church in the United States. His career tends to point him toward specific populations, those in orders and/or specific and intense Church leadership. This population is generally male and believes itself to be the voice of Orthodoxy and reason. It is uncomfortable with the raw Gospel of Jesus—though it would deny this—as well as the leadership of Pope Francis and what it sees as demasculinizing of males and the inclusion of gay influence. Business minds, at least in these interviews, cannot connect the dots between societal issues and their own economic theories and practices that, for example, necessitate two income families where both parents work. They have not stopped to ask themselves why Pope Francis questions capitalism. This is a different kind of book from what usually comes across my desk, and it touches base with the energetic conservative population of American Catholicism. I am reminded of the wisdom of CBS-TV commentator Eric Severeid back in the 1960’s who reflected that “if you are not a liberal when you are 20, you have no heart; if you are not a conservative when you are 50, you have no brains.” In 1969, when I first heard this maxim, it did not feel divisive, even to a long-haired guitar enthusiast who played those awful Mass songs from the early days of the Vatican renewal. At age 76, I can accept a healthy traditionalism as a bedrock of Church renewal if it is humble and indeed renews the Church. The organization of the book and the selection of subjects and questions is eclectic, to be sure, and that must be borne in mind. From these pages, those currently in the greatest stress appear to be the bishops. As I wrote in another post, they seem to be “pushing the same old buttons but nothing is happening.” It is hard for them to imitate the Bishop of Rome, who in his late 80’s still manifests considerable joy and energy in his work. Their training, by contrast, taught them to keep good order. Although independent polling has found that many bishops pray close to two hours a day, I wish Maier had asked them how they pray. In midlife I discovered Trappist spirituality; I lamented the book’s absence of discussion of spirituality except in some of the new youth and young adult evangelization programs cited earlier. I was pleased to see the advocacy for greater Catholic education among many of the laity interviewed throughout the book, who seem to understand that raw evangelization without study is pure emotionalism. The shakers and doers—particularly the “high rollers”—agree in spirit with Father John Tracy Ellis who, in the 1950’s, made waves by publishing in a professional journal that Catholicism in the U.S. is anti-intellectual, specifically in its colleges and seminaries. Teaching adults—Catholic school teachers and catechists in particular, face to face--was my own diocesan involvement for forty years until, inexplicably, my diocese dropped the program a few years ago. That was troubling. I might ask the “high rollers” a question. To a man, they seem to agree that the financial ministry belongs to the laity, and that the clergy should tend to the sacramental side of church operations. Indeed, most priests, bishops, and religious superiors would jump for joy if this were possible. But the successful businesspeople who make the major gifts would be the first to say that if they are making massive investments, they expect to deal with the CEO on the other end. Any cleric will tell you that in soliciting major gifts a donor would be insulted if I sent an assistant pastor or a deacon to ask for $250,000. That is just how it is. Response, gentlemen? And speaking of investments, you could do a lot worse than plunking out a few bucks for this book. Any of us who spent time in Catholic faith formation—particularly in our youth—has enough experience such that the idea of reading “Catholic Literature” or “Catholic Books” for the joy of the art as much as the moral value is probably beyond imagination. But in this post, we are going to begin with prose from Bible itself, in a way you might find stunning.
FOR STARTERS, HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN? There are two opening creation narratives from the Book of Genesis. One of the first breakthroughs in modern Bible Study was the understanding that the Bible was written in forms and units, and that different authors at different times composed their works in the circumstances in which they lived. A very good example is the presence of two creation stories in Genesis, side by side-- Genesis 1:1-2:3 and Genesis 2:4-4:16]. The first is noble poetry; the second is philosophy at its painful best. The first creation account is the seven-day narrative, noteworthy for its organization and stateliness. There are many clues that the first account comes from the temple area in Jerusalem and a priestly hand—such as the observation that God observed the sabbath by resting on the seventh day. When and why was it written? Historians look to the time around 500 B.C. when Jews were returning home from the Babylonian captivity and there was considerable turmoil about rebuilding the temple and the observance of the Law on such matters as marriages to foreign pagan wives during the exile. This text from Genesis 1 serves as something of a sermon exhorting renewed observance of the temple law and worship, an encouragement that fidelity to the Lord—who had established order out of chaos at the beginning—would bring order again to the traumatized post-exile community of Jews. THE SECOND CREATION NARRATIVE IS STUNNING The dating of the second creation account—Adam and Eve, the snake, Cain and Abel, God’s curses—is hard to pinpoint. There is so much religious philosophy enfolded in this narrative that I must think we are looking at a text composed in the “Wisdom Era” of the Bible, closer to the time of Christ, possible after Alexander the Great [356-323 B.C.] and about the time that Israel would be influenced by Greek ideas and philosophy. What would have inspired this this Biblical composition? Possibly the same moral anguish that inspired the Book of Job. How does one explain injustice, the suffering of the innocent, the tangible presence of evil, the longings for what one cannot have? How to explain the backbreaking labor necessary to eat and survive, or the grueling and often lethal pains of childbirth? The Greeks wrestled with such questions in their famous tragedies. And so, it would seem, were the Jews in their sacred Scripture—and so we continue in our art and writing today, as we will see below. The biggest difference between “Creation I” and “Creation II” is the subject. Genesis I is the seven-day story of God creating order out of chaos and establishing a place where humans could live, be fertile, and enjoy the earth. The work is utopian. God does the heavy lifting—all the lifting, really. “Creation II,” our focus today, took shape because the world of “Creation 1” was not the world experienced by Israel, and later thoughtful Israelites pondered on the difficult lives they were living century after century. As Catholics, we have the consolation of life beyond the grave where our sufferings and injustices are blessed, healed, and rewarded. Life and consolation after death was not an Old Testament belief until just before Jesus; see 2 Maccabees 12:38-46. And in Jesus’ day only the Pharisaic Jews believed in the concept of life after death. The second creation account is man oriented. Adam is created first, then is invited by God to name the animals as God created them. “To name” something was an idiom of power. God understands that Adam needs a helpmate,” and thus he creates Eve. The USCCB online bible points out that “the language suggests a profound affinity between the man and the woman and a relationship that is supportive and nurturing.” Eve is not subservient to Adam. By the end of chapter two, it is hard to imagine that the world thus created could or should go off the rails. THE SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION All of us little tots in Catholic school learned that bad things began to happen when a talking snake entered the Bible tale. We knew, of course, that the snake was really the devil in disguise, and we were totally untroubled by the fact that the Bible never says this. Genesis 3:1 flatly states: “Now the snake was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made.” We are forced to admit that “cunning” [evil] was part and parcel of the creation package. The snake’s assertion in 3:5 that “God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil” does not sound particularly terrible until one examines the fallout from the act. This is best done by examining the curses that God showers down upon the three actors. To start with, a serpent was frequently invoked as a phallic symbol in much of the ancient world and consequently employed in public pagan fertility rites throughout the ancient world. Idolatry among the Hebrews was often a recourse to fertility gods and rites, as if the God of Abraham would not fulfill the need for human fertility. When the Israelites in the desert were plagued by poisonous snakes, Moses ordered the creation of a bronze serpent that the population must gaze upon for a deliverance from this affliction. In the apocalyptic outlook of Isaiah, a day would come when a small child could play next to the cobra’s den safely. Even Jesus, in Matthew 3:8, uses the term “brood of vipers” to castigate hostile opponents. The snake, then, is the perfect foil for the crisis in the Garden of Eden, and the first readers of this text would see trouble on the horizon. This leads the author to the main points of its inclusion: what is this creature doing here, and why would God create such a “cunning” creature in the first place? The first question is easy enough to answer: the snake lives there, along with zebras and red-breasted robins. [One can easily imagine this tale set in my neighborhood in Central Florida where nonstop housing construction is pushing coral snakes—relatives of the cobra—onto my street.] Commentaries on Genesis report that in earlier times snakes were believed to walk upright. In fact, the giant pythons migrating north nowadays into Central Florida have vestiges of feet if you know where to look. I stick to the photographs on that bit of biology. God’s curses on the snake—that he would slither and not walk, and that he was reduced to eating dirt—are fitting enough, but it would be wrong to brand the snake as the originator of sin. What the text does signify is the pervasive nature of evil and imperfection throughout nature, man, and beast. Those of you who pray Compline at home may recall St. Peter’s imagery of the devil as “a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Or, for that matter, the microscopic monster called Covid. From creation, the world is set against itself. Why this is so is a massive mystery that has troubled the earliest philosophers and continues as we witness the conflict between Israel and Hamas. MORE THAN JUST A SNAKE But by observing the punishment of the snake, we get an insight into the nature of the sin of Adam and Eve and their subsequent curses. When Christopher Columbus landed in the New World in 1492 and discovered a population of generally happy and productive people, he reported to Ferdinand and Isabella that he had come upon what today would be called a “prelapsarian culture.” The term means “before the fall” or what the Garden of Eden was like, the operative indicator being naked. Nakedness was innocence, and for Columbus, a navigator and not a theologian, nakedness equated to a childlike purity that could be spoiled by “knowledge,” or what one might call “the real world.” This seemed to be the sentiment of the Creation 2 author. Columbus did not hold the innocence idea very long; when he returned in 1493 his remaining crew had been killed. The serpent had told Eve that eating the fruit would “open her eyes” and that like the gods, she would know “what is good and what is bad.” Having eaten the fruit along with her husband, the first thing they realize is their nakedness, the end of their childhood purity, so to speak, and they scurry to put together loincloths and tunics from fig leaves. Is this an analogy to emotional and genital sexual awareness? It is hard to imagine that sexuality would come under fire as the primordial sin when the Israelite nation depended upon fertility for its very survival. A better answer is found by looking at God’s interrogation of each party: Adam, Eve, and the snake. When God asks Adam “who told you that you are naked?” Adam replies, “the woman whom you put here with me.” This is a double whammy: it’s the fault of the woman and you who created her.” When God turns to Eve, she replies that the serpent “tricked me into it, so I ate it.” Every man/woman/snake for himself/herself/itself. No Kumbaya at the cobra’s den tonight. What can we say? Creation is plagued with brokenness almost from the moment of its first existence. Why this brokenness in what is God’s crown jewel of creation remains both a mystery and a truth. Adam and Eve suddenly become sullen, betraying strangers. Eve’s curse is twofold: the pain and potential lethality of childbirth, and “yet your urge shall be for your husband….” Adam is cursed to pass from a nurturing life in the Garden to a daily life of thorns and thistles to produce his food. At the very least, Creation 2 is a philosophical-theological reflection which puts forward the curses of human existence. It tries to explain why the world is the way it is to people who are very weary of it. The inability to live in harmony is bad enough. Human violence--physical and psychological—is a curse which visits us in Genesis Chapter 3 and in a remarkable novel [and later, movie] about brother versus brother, in a post entitled “Cain’s Mutiny” later this week on this stream. Confession: I do play the Florida Lottery, not excessively but just enough to dream of what I might do with several mil in my declining years, which have already begun. Our state pot, as of yesterday morning at the Publix Grocery Store casino counter, is only $23.5 million. But still, an old man needs his dreams, and mine would be spending the winnings on the establishment of a regional Catholic library, study, and resource center near my house and the Publix grocery store where I buy my lottery tickets. New homes are going up faster than ever, much to the consternation of the locals who still remember when my town was the “indoor foliage capital of the world.”
One of the true oxymorons of American Catholic life is “parish library.” True Catholic libraries are nonexistent in most parishes, let’s face it. Yes, there are “Catholic bookstores” in some of the larger parishes which, along with religious articles like rosaries and Advent wreathes, carry a line of Bibles, liturgical books, and of course The Catechist of the Catholic Church. Has anyone ever actually bought a Catechism? Or curled up before a fireplace with brandy for an evening with the Catechism? The Catechism falls into the area we learned about years ago in high school economics, Gresham’s Law, that “bad money drives good money out of circulation.” If the Catholic flagship book for adult reading is marketed as the Catechism, we will destroy the last flicker of curiosity and interest among Catholic readers. Pope John Paul II agreed. Interestingly, in his introduction to the Catechism in its U.S. original printing back in 1994, he indicates that he never intended the Catechism as a stand-alone book for cover-to-cover reading [pp. 3, 5, 6.] The pontiff speaks of it as a sourcebook for Catholic teaching texts and an outline for catechetical resources, a reference for teachers, students, etc. As literature, though, reading the Catechism is like reading Webster’s Dictionary. Both resources are correct…and that’s about it. This is not a criticism of parish bookstore vendors, or even of the Catechism, but how we misuse the book. I am puzzled that pastors and bishops, who lament the poverty of knowledge among the faithful—such as the recent survey on belief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist--have a very poor record talking up college level Catholic reading and adult learning resource material, particularly from the pulpit and the general information sources of a parish, such as bulletins and parish websites. Catholics in the “real world” are the most highly educated. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic. What is wrong with this picture? It often starts in the parish home. The priest who is not reading classic and new religious writings—scholarly, devotional, inspirational and/or artistic—as well as keeping a finger on the pulse of contemporary culture and working such material into sermons for the faithful--will eventually give his same stock sermon every week while ignoring the matters that cry to heaven for attention. Has anyone heard a thoughtful sermon about antisemitism or the Scripture teachings about aliens in the past eight weeks? Of course, the same rule applies to any church minister working with populations of any age. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to bring Anne Frank’s diary into youth faith formation during the wave of antisemitic demonstrations in the United States? Why no imagination? Why no books? Why no lifelong faith formation? It is a long story going back many years. As early as the 1940’s American Catholicism came to be regarded as an intellectual graveyard in the international world of theological scholars. Denis W. Brogan, the Cambridge political scientist who was an expert on both modern French and American history, said in 1941 that "in no Western society is the intellectual prestige of Catholicism lower than in the country where, in such respects as wealth, numbers, and strength of organization, it is so powerful." But it was the eminent U.S Church historian Monsignor John Tracy Ellis who brought this issue into public awareness with his 1955 essay, "American Catholics and the Intellectual Life." An analysis published in America Magazine is well worth your time. In his 1955 essay, Msgr. Ellis noted that there was a proliferation of Catholic colleges and seminaries in the U.S.—at least two hundred--in which the limited number of Catholic American scholars were spread too thin, and attendance ran below capacity. The author’s own career reflects the struggle in the U.S. to obtain a first-rate Catholic college and seminary education. St. Viator's College in Bourbonnais, Illinois, was founded in 1865 by the Viatorian Order and closed in 1937. It graduated Ellis, and Fulton Sheen some years before him, but its graduation classes by the 1930’s were in the range of 15 to twenty. As a young man, the future Monsignor Ellis sought to earn a doctorate in history, but finding Catholic University’s doctoral program inferior, he sought admission to the University of Illinois, a “Big Ten” state school. Later, as a priest-historian-teacher-author, he served as an officer of the National Catholic Educators Association. In this capacity he visited many Catholic colleges and grew more despondent about their quality. It was no secret that the United States was represented by a distressingly low number of respected theological scholars during Vatican II. Interestingly, Cardinal Dolan of New York publicly observed just a few weeks ago that the U.S. bishops should reduce the number of seminaries today and focus on a few institutions of excellence. There were only 422 priestly ordinations across the country in 2022 and about 190 seminaries, which buttresses the Cardinal’s argument. But a diocesan seminary is one of the few institutions that a bishop genuinely controls anymore; downsizing is always a very bitter pill. My home diocese of Buffalo has put its seminary, Christ the King, on the market for $5 million, in the face of a $100 million diocesan bankruptcy settlement over sexual abuse. Buffalo now sends its seminarians out of the diocese for priestly education. My own career was impacted by Monsignor Ellis’s work. In 1969 I began my “major seminary study” by entering the School of Philosophy at Catholic University and graduating in 1971. [I had an A.A. degree in Classical Latin and Greek before attending CU.] But I did not continue at CU after graduating with my B.A. In the late 1960’s my religious order, along with about a dozen others in Washington, formed a consortium graduate school, the Washington Theological Coalition. The orders had pooled their best scholars, many published, to teach graduate theology and award degrees, and by the time I showed up at the door of the school in 1971 the Coalition was accredited by the State of Maryland and the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools…meaning that my master’s degree from the Coalition was accepted when I applied to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, for a masters in counseling. There is a fine history of the Washington Theological Coalition [its name later changed to Union] which explains the struggle of small seminaries to stay open. The Coalition/Union closed in 2012. I am very jealous of dioceses that have either a seminary or a major Catholic university in their locale. Accredited colleges and seminaries must maintain first rate libraries, which hopefully would be open to non-matriculating Catholics in the area to at least sample the many various types of Catholic books and resources available, Of course, if you are a graduate of a Catholic college, I believe you can register to use the library, even to take out books, if you live close by, and you may be able to read books online from your alma mater’s holdings. I was pleasantly surprised to discover on-line that the University of Central Florida, a state school where I have taken graduate courses to update, has fifty different books by or on the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. But I recommend that if you find a book that intrigues you, buy it in paperback if possible so that you can highlight it and notate it as a permanent addition to your library. But before we get too far afield on the logistics, let’s step back and ask this question—is Catholic study necessary to save your soul? You will get an argument from some people about this. Thomas a Kempis [1380-1471] wrote in his spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, that “I would rather feel compunction than know how to spell it.” In his day, the great medieval philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and others had run out of steam. Critics accused the Catholic scholars of wasting their time debating “how many angels can dance on the heard of a pin?” A century after Kempis, the Catholic Council of Trent mandated the establishment of diocesan seminaries for the education of priests to restore the long history of Catholic scholarship and to improve the health and holiness of parish life. If you have read the Vatican II document Dei Verbum, or “The Word of God,” It is clear from the Church’s teaching that God’s Revelation to the world comes through the written word—the Gospels, the testimonies of the Apostolic witnesses, and the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament. The baptismal practice of adults in the first centuries of the church included a week of intensive teaching and instruction for the newly baptized during the time Easter, instructions referred to as mystagogia, or mystery. As baptized Christians we live a full life of probing more deeply into the Word of God, the rites of worship, the prayerful wisdom and advice of the saints [and the sinners]. In short, Catholicism has been a “writing Church” for its entire existence. In the second post to follow in a week, we’ll look at how to enter the magnificent world of the printed word of our Faith—trust me, there are books out there for every taste. Books on Catholic life and Culture [Non-Fiction, fiction below]
About 95% of these titles I reviewed on Amazon. Remember that you can catch some excellent sales under the “used book” links in Amazon’s dashboard. Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone [2021] by James Martin, SJ [currently Amazon top 1%] New Seeds of Contemplation [1949] by Thomas Merton A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus [1991] by John P. Meier Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church [2014 edition] by Joseph Martos Sin in the Sixties: Catholics and Confession 1955-1975 [2022] by Maria C. Morrow A History of Catholic Theological Ethics [2022] by James F. Keenan The Story of Christianity Volume One: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation [2010] by Justo L. Gonzalez John XXIII: Pope of the Century [2005] by Peter Hebblethwaite Why Catholics Can’t Sing [2013 revised edition] by Thomas Day Keys to the Council: Unlocking the Teaching of Vatican II [2012] by Richard R. Gaillardetz and Catharine Clifford A Family of His Own: A Life of Edwin O’Connor [2003] by Charles F. Duffy Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors [2006] by James Reston, Jr. The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene [2021] by Richard Greene Being the Body of Christ in an Age of Management [2016] by Lyndon Shakespeare [currently Amazon top 3%] Light of Assisi: The Story of Saint Clare [2021] by Sister Margaret Carney, OSF The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul [2021] by James Carroll [currently Amazon top 2%] Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction [2020] by Nick Ripatrazone Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church [2018] by John W. O’Malley Seminary: A Search [2014] by Paul Hendrickson The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe [1981] by Steven Ozment What Happened at Vatican II [2008] by John W. O’Malley Free and Faithful: My Life in the Catholic Church [1998] by Father Bernard Haring The Church and the Age of Reason [1648-1789] by Gerald R. Cragg Vatican Council II [1968] by Xavier Rynne [pseudo name] Medieval History: A New History [2015] by Kevin Madigan Francis of Assisi: A New Biography [2012] by Augustine Thompson The Inner Life of Priests [2012] by Gerald J. McGlone and Len Sperry The Early Church [1993] by Henry Chadwick The Resurrection of the Messiah: A Narrative Commentary on the Resurrection Accounts in the Four Gospels [2013] by Francis J. Moloney Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages [1990 edition] by R.W. Southern] Confirmation: How a Sacrament of God’s Grace Became All About Us [2013] by Timothy R. Gabrielli Trent: What Happened at the Council [2013] by John W. O’Malley Theology: The Basics 3rd Edition [2011] by Alister McGrath Vows; The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and their Son [2005] by Peter Manseau When the Sisters Said Farewell: The Transition of Leadership in Catholic Elementary Schools [2012] by S.J. Michael Caruso The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah [1983] by Charles Fensham Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics [2008] by Margaret Farley Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations [2017] by Kenneth R. Himes, Editor Robert Bellarmine: Saint and Scholar [1961] by James Brodrick Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics [2012] by Ross Douthat 1,2 Chronicles [1994] J.A. Thompson A History of the Jews [1988] by Paul Johnson [currently Amazon top 1%] Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina [1996] by Michael Casey The College Student’s Introduction to Christology [1996] by William P. Loewe Calvin [2009] by F. Bruce Gordon How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower [2009] by Adrian Goldsworthy Vatican Secret Diplomacy: Joseph P. Hurley and Pope Pius XII [2008] by Charles R. Gallagher 2 Kings Commentary [1986] T.R. Hobbs 1 Kings Commentary [2004] by Simon John Devries The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel [2000] by Robert Alter [currently Amazon top 2%] An Introduction to Catholic Ethics [2003] by Lucien Longtin The Reformation: A History [2004] by Diarmaid MacCulloch Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture [since 1700] [1991] by Jaroslav Pelikan The Gospel of Matthew: Sacra Pagina Series [1991] by Daniel J. Harrington Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation [2005] by Brian Patrick McGuire Cure D’Ars Today: St. John Vianney [1988] by Father George Rutler Fiction by Catholic Authors about Catholic Life, Values, and Conversion [adult content] I have not reviewed every novel here but was captivated by them all. My favorite: Morte D’Urban. This colorful tale of an inept religious order in the Midwest going under for the count just before Vatican II was the best-selling novel in the U.S. in the early 1960’s. The End of the Affair [1954] by Graham Greene [currently Amazon top 1%] The Quiet American [1954] by Graham Greene [currently Amazon top 1%] After This [2007] by Alice McDermott The Cloister: A Novel [2018] by James Carroll A History of Loneliness: A Novel [2015] by John Boyne The Edge of Sadness [1961] by Edwin O’Connor The Leisure Seeker [2009] by Michael Zadoorian The Malefactors [1956] by Caroline Gordon The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse [2016] by Louise Edrich Morte D’Urban [1962] by J.F. Powers Wheat that Springeth Green [1989] by J.F. Powers Souls and Bodies [1980] by David Lodge I spent this past weekend involved in two things: watching the U.S. Open Golf Tournament which was on TV here on the East Coast from suppertime till midnight for four straight nights, and during the afternoons reading my second killer history book this month, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis [2022] by John T. McGreevy. The golf tournament was exhilarating—an upset winner by one stroke—but the book is more discomfiting because [a] it is thinning my herd of sacred cows, and [b] the last third of the book covers my lifetime, a very troubling thing when you still feel young enough to be making history.
McGreevey’s book deserves a lot of attention and discussion. I review books for Amazon, which you may see posted from time to time, but I have a 1,000-word limit on those submissions. [My last review was my 190th with Amazon, dating to 2000.] But in many cases a book deserves a multi-faceted discussion, necessitating a brief Amazon summary for its book site and a longer treatment on the Café blogsite, which has no word limit beyond human compassion and exhaustion. Catholicism deserves a lot of thought and soul searching. I suppose the first question would be the relationship of the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon to the era of Vatican II? McGreevy is not the first historian to begin a modern church narrative with Napoleon. In his What Happened at Vatican II Father William O’Malley begins with a lengthy overview called “The Long Nineteenth Century” in which he essentially dates the moving forces for Vatican I and Vatican II from the era of the French Revolution, which is dated from 1789. The French Revolution—caused in part by French government bankruptcy incurred, ironically, assisting the American Revolution—created a chain of events in Western Europe that ended what is often called “the marriage of throne and altar,” or the interlocking of church and state. After the Napoleonic Wars there was a shift across Western Europe from the older absolute monarchy model toward representational or democratic government with an emphasis upon independence from churches, particularly Roman Catholicism. Coupled with this was the emergence of strong grassroots nationalism and newfound belief in the freedom and conscience of man independent of religious discipline, rooted in the modern philosophies from Descartes to John Locke. In shorthand, the modern secular era had arrived for good. No two nations went through these processes precisely the same way, and McGreevy’s book discusses variants of the process, but across the board the changing face of the West in the nineteenth century created a major challenge to the power, influence, and authority of the Catholic Church. Recall that at the time of the French Revolution Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were Catholic monarchs surrounded by Catholic aristocrats. The immortal phrase “let them eat cake” came from a Catholic queen to an angry and hungry populace. When the French Revolution took its violent turn, the properties and riches of the Church were seized, and the new transitional government would eventually persecute and execute clergy and religious. Ever since the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, the Church had laid claim to secular as well as religious authority—consider, for example, that when Spain and Portugal began exploration and settlement of the Western Hemisphere after Columbus, Pope Alexander VI [conveniently, for Spain, a Spaniard] drew the famous “Line of Demarcation” to divide the claims of the two nations in the New World in 1493. [His line, incidentally, ultimately created Brazil as a Portuguese-speaking nation.] What became very clear in the nineteenth century after the French Revolution was the decreasing influence of the papacy in the course of world events. While Napoleon was finally planted in permanent exile on St. Helena, the future of Europe was debated at the Congress of Vienna [1814-1815], which redrew the map of the old Holy Roman Empire through the workings of Metternich and Talleyrand, to cite two famous international diplomats of the day. Although represented in Vienna, the pope was not invited to draw maps as he had three centuries earlier, and few European leaders were disposed to ask him. The post-French Revolution era was marked by the birth of a liberalism characterized by national identity and pride, greater democratic process, emphasis upon the rights of man, economic free enterprise, and freedom of governments from interference from organized religions, primarily the Roman Catholic Church. McGreevy provides examples of Western liberalization and distrust of a monarchical Catholic Church in such diverse nations as the United States, England, and Italy. By the terms of the founding documents written by the thirteen original colonies, the United States should have been a safe haven for Catholicism, and in many locales the practice of Catholicism was tolerated to a degree. However, periodic flareups of anti-Catholicism were widespread and deadly. In her 1997 The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862, Carol Sheriff describes the animosity between residents of New York State and the Catholic Irish immigrants, hard fighting and hard drinking Irish Catholics who had come to America to dig the canal from Albany to Buffalo. It is no accident that the “Know Nothing Party,” a powerful third-party xenophobic force in American presidential politics, had deep roots in Western New York. The Wikipedia entry on the Know-Nothings has interesting overtones of recent American electoral politics: Fearful that Catholics were flooding the polls with non-citizens, local activists threatened to stop them. On August 6, 1855, rioting broke out in Louisville, Kentucky, during a hotly contested race for the office of governor. Twenty-two were killed and many injured. This "Bloody Monday" riot was not the only violent riot between Know Nothings and Catholics in 1855. In Baltimore, the mayoral elections of 1856, 1857, and 1858 were all marred by violence and well-founded accusations of ballot-rigging. In the coastal town of Ellsworth, Maine, in 1854, Know Nothings were associated with the tarring and feathering of a Catholic priest, Jesuit Johannes Bapst. They also burned down a Catholic church in Bath, Maine. As more Irish, German, and Italian Catholics poured into America throughout the nineteenth century, white Protestant Americans feared that these immigrants were, at heart, loyal to a foreign power, i.e., the pope in Rome, and if the opportunity arose, would take over the United States as a fiefdom of the Papal States. Catholic politicians in the U.S. were accused of representing the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” a charge that rumbled through American politics well into the twentieth century. And, if you listen close enough to monied American interests even today, you hear strains that Pope Francis is a socialist who wants to take our hard-earned money and redistribute it south of the equator. The more things change… In England, the historical memory of Queens Elizabeth and “Bloody Mary” was enough to inflame similar violence against Roman Catholics throughout the post-Napoleonic nineteenth century. Fears—rational or not—of Roman Catholic takeover of the established Church of England were exacerbated by that nation’s own mistreatment of Ireland, highlighted by the Potato Famine, and resulting in protests and immigration. But by far the most tempestuous impact of the post-Napoleonic era may have been the upheavals in Italy itself, the cradle of the Church. If you are a little rusty on your Italian history, the Wikipedia entry entitled “The Unification of Italy,” often referred to as the Risorgimento, chronicles the civil upheavals of the peninsula in the nineteenth century. Italy had not been a unified nation since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 475 A.D. The papacy—with its hold on “the papal states”—lived in constant conflict with outside intruders dating back to the Goths in the 400’s to the newly minted nation states after the French Revolution. [The Church Council Vatican I was disbanded prematurely in 1870 amidst the canon fire of the Franco-Prussian War on the doorsteps of Rome.] The Risorgimento called for a unified Italy with a measure of self-determination, a direct challenge and threat to papal civil authority and land holdings. Recall that the status of the papal states and some reassure of Church independence in the new, unified Italy was not legally defined until the Church’s Concordat with Mussolini in 1929, an arrangement that deteriorated soon thereafter. The French Revolution and its aftermath had two opposite effects upon the Church itself. On the one hand, a sizeable segment of Catholic intellectuals in the Western World began to assess a new understanding of Church life in the “modern era.” The nineteenth century may have been a period of international unrest and searches for new national identities, but it was also a time of intellectual and economic explosion. Consider that the century after the French Revolution would see the advent of modern industrialization, scientific expansion, historical and archaeological advances, democratic governments, medicine and psychology, and even the theories of air travel and nuclear power. Coupled with this were new philosophies and methods of understanding the world, from Hegel to Darwin to Marx. Religions, including Catholicism, could not isolate themselves from the rapid developments of the times. The nineteenth century saw an explosion in religious scholarship in both Protestant and Catholic circles, and it was impossible for Catholic thinkers and leaders to ignore what was happening around them. Possibly no one better embodies the religious complexities of the time or thought more creatively about them than England’s John Henry Newman, the Anglican priest-scholar who converted to Catholicism in 1845. Newman’s journey to Roman Catholicism was long and complicated. As an idealistic youth his evangelical faith caused him to regard the Catholic pope as the antichrist. In his college years he matured into the mainstream of Anglican faith and scholarship. But convinced that the Church of England stood in need of reform, he joined with other Oxford scholars in a spirited study of the early Church Fathers, which they published as papers or “tracts” that came to be known as the Tractarian Movement or the Oxford Movement. In his studies Newman and many of his confreres came to be believe that the Roman Catholic Church had best embodied the traditions of the Christian roots of the Fathers. He converted to Catholicism and would eventually become a Cardinal of the Church. Newman would become one of the greatest minds of modern Catholicism, and his thought forms the basis of many of Vatican II insights, including his writing on the development of doctrine. He was, in fact, canonized on October 13, 2019, by Pope Francis. Newman appreciated better than most that Catholicism would need to make considerable accommodations to the scholarship and the spirit of the best of contemporary thought and practice to remain intellectually honest, but he appreciated—far ahead of his time—the challenges we face today as Catholics. In a famous essay on the nature of a university, Newman described the dilemma of the Catholic in the new world at hand: [From Wikipedia]: Newman believed in a middle way between free thinking and moral authority—one that would respect the rights of knowledge as well as the rights of revelation. His purpose was to build a Catholic university, in a world where the major Catholic universities on the European continent had recently been secularized, and most universities in the English-speaking world were Protestant. For a university to claim legitimacy in the larger world, it would have to support research and publication free from church censorship; however, for a university to be a safe place for the education of Catholic youth, it would have to be a place in which the teachings of the Catholic church were respected and promoted. Finding the balance of “being in the world but not of it” was one of the significant challenges of Vatican II, but that was still long in the future. For despite the insights of Newman and others, much of nineteenth century Catholicism was governed by two Popes, Pius IX, and Pius X, who saw the Church as the last bastion of a sacred history that must be preserved at all costs. Theirs was the predominant reaction of Catholics to the post-Napoleonic upheavals, the “Ultramontanism Era” [from “the other side of the Alps mountains,” a reference to Rome and the papal states.] In our next discussion of McGreevy’s book, we will immerse ourselves in the Ultramontanism revival, which many of us may recognize as the pre-Vatican II world we grew up with. |
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