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SOURCE: The New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law [2000]
Canon 985. The director and assistant director of novices, and the rector of a seminary or of any other institute of education, are not to hear the sacramental confessions of their students resident in the same house, unless in individual instances the students of their own accord request it. Canon 240 §1. In addition to ordinary confessors, other confessors are to come regularly to the seminary. Without prejudice to the discipline of the seminary, students are always free to approach any confessor, whether in the seminary or outside it. §2. When decisions are made about admitting students to orders or dismissing them from the seminary, the opinion of the spiritual director and confessors can never be sought. It does happen in Canon Law that certain laws repeat themselves because they apply under several different headings in the Code. In this case Canon 240 appears in the section under “The Formation of Clerics.” Canon 985, almost identical to Code 240, appears in a later section covering “Ministers of the Sacrament of Penance.” Both deal with the Sacrament of Penance, but here with subtle shades of meaning. The main concern of the Law here is the integrity of the Sacrament of Penance, and specifically the “seal of confession,” the one facet of the sacrament that is known to any man on the street. The State of Washington passed legislation this year that priests hearing confession are “mandated reporters” of child abuse, and face prison if they do not report said information to authority. See Bishop Robert Barron’s commentary here. Both Canons 985 and 240 address the issue of seminarians preparing for ordination, and presumably young men preparing for solemn vows or promises as brothers in religious orders or fraternities where the rector/superior and others on the staff are priests available for confessions. Religious orders and communities of women do not have the precise problems outlined in 985 and 240—although my guess is that the conflict of privacy and spiritual direction in both men’s and women’s houses of formation is always a concern. The conflict, to be precise, is votation. In seminaries and houses of formation the faculty and administrators must vote periodically on the progress or regression of candidates to vows and orders. Canon 240-2 states “the opinion of the spiritual director and confessors can never be sought.” I worked summers for a former seminary rector who told me of a case where a seminarian/cleric had systematically confessed to every voting member of the seminary board, and thus there was nobody who could say a bad word about him at votation. [The situation was referred to Rome; I guess that ploy had been tried before.] Canon 240-1 states that outside confessors “are to come regularly to the seminary,” to give a seminarian a full range of choices when frequenting the Sacrament of Penance. On the other hand, 985 offers the choice to the student to confess to his director/rector, giving the candidate the freedom in conscience to seek insight and counsel from someone he trusts. My novitiate class in 1968-69 was visited every Tuesday by two friars from a neighboring parish to hear our confessions, but they told my Novice Master that “nobody was going.” Those were the 60’s, all right. In scanning related material in the New Commentary, candidates for orders and solemn vows/promises go through a considerable screening which includes a psychiatric component and competent references outside the Sacrament of Penance. At the same time, the final decision to be ordained is also a moral one on the part of the cleric that, in the best of circumstances, is made with a trusted and knowledgeable confessor and an experienced spiritual director. DO THESE CANONS APPLY ELSEWHERE? The Irish monks, as early as the 400’s A.D., were developing the format for the Sacrament of Penance as we know it today: sorrow for sin, oral confession of specific misdeeds, absolution, and a post-confession act or deed to make reparation. For most of our history, then, confession has embraced a “defensive posture,” i.e., deliverance from the devil and evil that we might enter the Kingdom of God. As I get on in years, the Sacrament of Penance looks less to me like an insurance policy, and more like a challenge to recognize the wondrous God who created me from a love I will never fully understand. The “offensive posture” of rushing to meet God’s love sounds foreign to us in a confession discussion, where we so often confess in anonymous code that the “seal of confession” is almost redundant: I was uncharitable/I missed Mass/I lied/I drank too much/I used the pill/I was impure. Good priests know by grace, study, and experience that their ministry in the confessional is far greater than stamping passports to Purgatory. Unfortunately, we don’t talk much about the confessor as a spiritual director who, with the penitent’s openness, kindly probes for the core of our spiritual hunger and emptiness. [Clock time, of course, is a major factor, but for something so important, we can figure something out.] In the confessional the priest is as much an alter Christus, “another Christ,” as he is when he consecrates the bread and wine at Mass. In the Sacrament of Penance, it stands to reason that we encounter Christ with the same intensity as receiving communion, but here we take the role of Zacchaeus. The conversion of Zacchaeus as it appears in Luke Chapter 19 seems very quick and dramatic, and it may be that standing face to face with Jesus had something to do with that. Luke was, after all, a literary artist. Based upon years as a confessor, a psychotherapist, and a struggling Catholic though, I would venture to say that, practically speaking, for most of us conversion is a history, a lifelong journey through the desert to the Promised Land on poor sandals. We don’t talk about confession that way—it is usually described as a clean start, an erasure of the past. In fact, I sat through a sermon a few months ago where the homilist was talking about confession, and he kept repeating in a mantra, “God forgets.” Once confessed, forever gone. That didn’t seem right. Comforting to some, maybe. But it is not a true way to catechize the Sacrament of Penance. Our life with God is a whole. Like the AA Big Book says, alcoholics like myself do the Fourth Step—the moral inventory—repeatedly till we die, in the comfort that our Higher Power forgives us. As we age, we look back. Confession is a place for that. I confess twice a year—to a Trappist and a Franciscan—and I take out my spiritual GPS and describe to them my walk through the desert, where I’ve been and where I need to go in the years I have left. I am not Luther; I believe in the sacraments’ forgiving of my life’s sins, but I still regret many things over my life and even more that I left undone. My confessors seem to understand that and reframe the narrative, often using my past as an interpretative guide to the future. I might add here that I take the Penitential Rite of the Mass very seriously--our venial sins are forgiven by the words of Absolution at the beginning of Mass if we are sorry. [Some celebrants whiz through the Penitential Rite like Jesse Owens.] Canons 985 and 240 boil down to giving seminarians a wide freedom of selection in choosing a confessor and a spiritual director within the formation structure for vows and orders. As a pastor, there was another population I thought about where penance and spiritual direction was concerned: my employees and advisors. I tried from time to time to bring neighboring priests into the parish during Advent and Lent to give my staff [and the whole parish, really] the opportunity to confess or seek counsel from someone other than their pastor. I wouldn’t say there was a stampede, but I still believe in the principle.
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THE HARD NUMBERS
Chapter Three of Maureen K. Day’s et.al. new publication, Catholicism at a Crossroads: The Present and Future of America’s Largest Church [2025] is devoted to both a detailed numerical summary of Catholic cultural demographics across the country and interviews on the question of parochial inculturation. The numbers don’t lie; the authors report how much we have changed in the past four decades. In 1987, of all Catholics polled that year, 86% identified themselves as white. In 2017 that number dropped to 56%, meaning that we are rapidly approaching a day when a white Anglo-Saxon Catholic is a minority in his or her diocese in the United States, at least in many locations. [pp. 103-104] The largest increase, ethnically speaking, in this study is Hispanic respondents [10% in 1987 to 35% in 2017]. Black/non-Hispanic Catholics reported in at 3%, and others, including Asian Catholics, at 6%. The authors cite the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 as a factor in the present-day diversity of Catholics, and certainly of the U.S. population. Prior to 1965 U.S. immigration policy favored northern and western Europe, the old “quota system.” The post-1965 wave of immigrants came “from Catholic-dense countries and regions such as Mexico, Central and South America, and parts of Africa and South Asia.” [p. 104] Some other takeaways in the raw numbers: while Hispanic Catholics are more likely than either White or Black Catholics to take the Church’s ban on artificial birth control seriously, it is not a radical difference; Hispanics answered affirmatively on obedience to this teaching at 25%; White Catholics 12% and Black Catholics 5% respectively. On the need for personal confession to a priest: Hispanic 42%, White 28%, Other 27%, Black 25%. Black Catholic respondents scored highest in the obligation to extend charity to the poor at 58%. In this chapter of Catholicism at a Crossroads, the authors wisely recognized that the numbers, per se, are not the whole story. If anything, the raw numbers indicate a need for evangelization and faith formation in all quadrants in many ways and degrees. But there are two key issues that defy quantification. First, all the populations polled in the surveys have long histories with and against each other. Second, the American Church must address itself to unity in sacramental/communal life, however difficult that may be. THE LONG HISTORY It probably depends upon where in the U.S. you live or grew up in, but certainly east of the Mississippi the strained relationship of race—Anglo-Saxon to African American—continues to this day. Some portions of this history we learned in school, though some states—including my own state, Florida—have attempted to sugarcoat their textbooks when dealing with a painful truth, that the first people from Africa arrived on North American soil for purchase and involuntary servitude to sustain the American economy. It is a particularly sad chapter of American Catholicism. If you are a student of history, you probably are aware that professional historians are examining Catholic involvement in the slave trade and the Church’s purchase and use of slave labor. To its credit, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., has owned up to the Jesuit ownership of the “GU272,” or 272 slaves [about half minors] sold by the university/order for the retirement of debts. See this current link, Collaborative on Global Children's Issues, for the full story and Georgetown’s efforts to make amends. The post-Civil War era of relations between the races is so complex that I cannot summarize it here, and in fact I doubt if anyone could. Many of us white Catholics grew up in predominantly white urban parishes where, after World War II, middle class whites moved to the suburbs or the countryside as African Americans moved into our neighborhoods, a phenomenon referred to as white flight. The belief among whites was that an influx of persons of color lowered housing values…a belief later undermined by the process of gentrification, whereby the old neighborhoods were refurbished and restored to luxurious standards and placed on the open market at massive profits to the developers and investors. One thing that is clear: Black Catholics themselves seemed to have embraced the energy of Vatican II; the Council itself [1962-1965] was held during a time of massive civil rights battles in the U.S., in government and on the streets. Black Catholics across the country engaged in two decisive strategies to enhance their pastoral care. First, they petitioned Rome for the appointment of black bishops. Second, they actively embraced the development of their cultural style within the reform of the Mass, particularly in music. The Vatican responded by appointing auxiliary bishops in New Orleans and elsewhere in the 1960’s; in 1991 James Lyke was appointed Archbishop of Atlanta [1991-1992], and Wilton Gregory has served as the Archbishop of Washington, D.C. until his retirement last year. The book’s commentators make an interesting point—in long established Black parishes in the United States, contemporary immigrants from various African nations such as Nigeria experience degrees of stress in the process of inculturation with Black American Catholics. [p. 116] Looking West, Spanish Catholics settled in what is now the United States long before the thirteen colonies got themselves organized. The past generation has seen significant academic research into the introduction of Catholicism to the Indigenous populations of the Pacific Coast, Central and South America. Again, the history of this process is too long to treat of in detail, and there continues to be heated discussion of the intentions of the European Spanish missionaries and the establishment of the mission-Church. Were the missionaries saviors of souls, importers of European culture, or task masters? Mexico in the 1800’s was a Catholic country; the Battle of the Alamo pitted Catholic Santa Anna versus Davy Crockett [though the church habits of both men are uncertain.] After the U.S.-Mexican War [1846-48], the United States acquired from Mexico the future states of New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Texas, and western Colorado. Much of this acquired territory was already divided into Catholic dioceses; Mexican bishops were replaced by primarily Irish bishops, unfamiliar with the culture of the landscape. THE QUESTIONS ABOUND The two preceding examples of ethnic-pastoral history have been presented here in response to the authors’ concern for the dignity of all people and the principle of unity in the Church. We know from St. John’s Gospel that Jesus prayed “that all may be one” and from Tradition that all sacramental celebration is communal. This being the case, several questions need to be addressed. They are open ended; I have no concrete answers but rather “table questions” for every Catholic gathering. Must, or can, we apologize? I am writing as a white male, so take that into account. I start with the thorny question of reparations. There is sentiment that the no-brainer in this consideration is the Native American: whites stole the land, livelihoods, and ultimately the children. In both the Canadian and the U.S. West, there were structured programs—government and religious—running into the twentieth century whose purpose seemed to be deprogramming Native American children from their culture and recreating them to be absorbed into predominantly while society. If you are a sports fan, there is a very recent [2022] biography of the Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe [1887-1953] by David Maraniss which describes in detail the travails of Native Americans. Thorpe, incidentally, was raised Catholic. If one is looking for a “legal and binding” sort of reparation, I have significant reservations. It is too big a challenge for paper and pencil; the specifics alone—as in who gets what and how much—would add to lingering estrangement for decades. A better approach is truth. Florida is a state rich in Native American culture. Given my state government’s sudden interest in history, I wonder whether Native American culture receives respectful attention in public and Catholic schools. I do believe in public apologies. Pope Francis in 2022 issued strongly worded remarks about the [Canadian] system which extended into the 1990’s, describing the schools as a form of “cultural genocide.” Again, one cannot undo either the ignorance or the arrogance, but we can listen to the memories, engage in the cultural beauty, and visit the lands sacred to Native Americans to this day. The sufferings of a few—or even one—are my sufferings, too. In 2021 Margaret and I visited the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 in South Dakota, near Badlands National Park. I felt disturbed by the paucity of symbols and care of this memorial. Can we worship together? Last year I attended an Easter Mass in the Athens, Greece, cathedral, celebrated in a Philippine tongue for residents of that ancestry. In Belgium we attended a Mass in the local tongue in a church claiming to have a vial of Christ’s Good Friday blood, which was processed through the church to its sacred enclave in the structure. Even in Ireland, where we spent three months last year, the brogue can be so thick that conversation is nigh impossible. Every time a new pope is elected, here in the United States many outlets of Catholic media immediately look for clues as to whether the new pontiff will allow/encourage/command the celebration of the Mass in the Latin Rite of Pope Pius V and the Council of Trent [1545-1563], the Mass we old timers remember. Every now and then I do wonder if the struggle for Church unity might be strengthened by the unity of Mass in Latin. However, I quickly come to my senses. The claims by some [certainly not a majority] that the Tridentine Latin formula is the only valid form of the Mass is absurd. I belong—as you probably do—to the Latin Rite of the Catholic Mass, which is one of about two dozen rites in communion with Rome. For two millennia we have been a Church which accepted a variety of forms and languages. To mandate a universal Latin Mass format for the entire world would be yet another dismantling of culture. Beyond that, I just pray that Pope Leo XIV will lead us in an enlightenment of our hearts and a love of the Eucharist that will spill out in warmth to anyone with whom we worship, at home or on the road. Language is not our only means of engagement. Is there anyone who does not understand the language of hot coffee and donuts, for starters, after church? Or baklava in Budapest? Here's a priest for any culture! My hero! Bending Toward Justice [2025] "When the bishop and the realtors come sniffing around your church.""5/13/2025 In 1986 I was a pastor in Florida when I received an invitation from former parishioners of the church where I was born and raised in East Buffalo, St. Mary Magdalene on Filmore Avenue, to offer a Mass at a reunion. I say “former parishioners” because St. Mary Magdalene was formally closed by the Diocese of Buffalo in 1978 and the property was purchased by the Antioch Baptist Church. The reunion event was held at a fire hall picnic pavilion in Bowmansville, N.Y., and I said Mass under a large tent. The organizers had asked to buy space for a public invitation in the Buffalo Catholic paper, but the chancery wouldn’t give them the time of day, hoping to keep all publicity and details of the closing and sale hush-hush. I guess my Aunt Margie did not want to get a local priest in trouble with the bishop, and I was happy to fly up, see my family, and form some impressions.
I grew up half a block from St. Mary Magdalene and witnessed firsthand what was called at the time “white flight.” More families of color moved into my neighborhood, and eventually most white households moved to the suburbs. Eventually St. Mary Magdalene, its 1900 elementary school long demolished, served a miniscule congregation. At sunrise on the morning of the 1986 reunion, I drove to the old church several hours before the Antioch Sunday Worship to visit the site where I was born into Catholicism, which I had not seen since 1962. As the church was still locked, I went to the old rectory—now an administration building—and found the pastor at his desk painting his nails. So, I sat down across his desk and talked for quite a while. Noting the size of the former parish plant--the church itself and two large residences converted to other uses--I inquired about the price the Diocese of Buffalo had asked for. He replied, “We got everything for $40,000.” Later in the afternoon at the reunion I was sitting with some elderly relatives next to the Genesee Beer tap recalling my morning visit, and they asked me what the selling price was. I said, “$40,000.” There was a pause. Then one of them exclaimed, “I knew if we could get the right white man in there, he could get some [N-word] to tell us the truth.” As I flew home to Orlando, it occurred to me that the author Thomas C. Wolfe was right: “You can never go home again.” [And Antioch Baptist Church has been magnificently restored in recent years.] I began with this elongated episode to illustrate that the closing of parishes is not a “new thing” in the American Catholic Church. What the tipping point for my childhood parish was, I can only speculate that many white Catholics embraced suburbia and the countryside and/or felt constrained by the changing culture to move elsewhere. The new residents were Baptists or Evangelicals if the success of Antioch Baptist is any indication. [If any Buffalo readers can fill me in, please do so in the comments section below or contact me privately.] From where I sit right now, it would seem the parish simply dissolved. In some dioceses, bishops might convert the style and human services of a parish like SMM into a sacramental-Catholic Charities inner city outreach, but to my knowledge no such project was considered for St. Mary Magdalene. St. Mary Magdalene’s story in Buffalo was hardly unique, at least in the Northeast U.S. and the Rust Belt. Other parts of the country were doing well. Two years after that Buffalo reunion, I built a church in an Orlando, Florida suburb in 1987 for $4,222,698.06 in 2025 dollars, and in this diocese several more new churches would follow into the next century. Florida has for years served as a destination for people relocating from other states and countries. However, this flow into the state has decreased significantly; earlier this year Newsweek reported: “The net migration of people moving to Florida from other American states has fallen sharply from 317,923 in 2022, to just 63,346 in December 2024, according to a Vintage population estimate released by the United States Census Bureau.” On a separate track, we have the national statistical decline of Catholic membership, which is well documented by many sources, plus the Covid disruption of much of Catholic life. Thus, even in sections of the country like Florida, where Catholic parishes are thriving or at least holding their own, Catholics cannot become complacent. Financial stress—even to the point of closing parishes and or institutions—may someday overwhelm the present-day Church in Florida or the state where you live. In 1980, would you have thought that New York City, Boston, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, to name a few, would all have wholesale programs of parish mergers and closings in 2025? We talk about the “shortage of priests” but in fact the United States has rarely produced enough homegrown vocations. As I understand it, the years 1940-1960 were the only ones where we can say the American Church enjoyed self-sufficiency in terms of ordained priests. The evidence of a shrinking clerical pool was evident already from statistics in the 1960’s. It is fair to say that few ecclesiastical leaders addressed the problem, believing that “things would get better.” Instead, things got much worse. The sexual abuse of minors by Church clergy led to defections from Catholic parishes by outraged or saddened laity, as many as 10%, though studies vary. Whereas parishes in the past sometimes simply dissolved due to pastoral absence of need, today 25% of U.S. dioceses have declared bankruptcy resulting from lawsuits in civil courts, lawyers’ fees, therapeutic services to victims, etc. How much money are we talking about? It is impossible to put a price on human suffering, but in dollars the costs [so far] range from $6-10 billion dollars. The Diocese of Buffalo is burdened with a $150,000,000 settlement; neighboring Syracuse at $100,000,000; Los Angeles $1,500,000,000. [You read that right.] What has resulted is a new and exceptionally large class of aggrieved victims: faithful Catholics served by fewer priests whose parishes are being closed and sold on the open market to developers to meet the staggering costs of settlements. Of particular pain was the failure of many dioceses to consult individual parishes in open meetings and/or formalized consultations, and the suppression of information. But, as we all learned in Catholic schools or CCD programs, bishops have unlimited powers in such matters. Or do they? Go fill your coffee cups and come back for the story of a Catholic nun, one of few women Canon [Church] lawyers in the U.S., whose doggedness and genius with the fine print of the 1983 Code of Canon Law saved the futures of dozens of parishes across the United States. [Imagine intermission music.] Our book is Bending Toward Justice: Sister Kate Kuenstler and the Struggle for Parish Rights [2025] by Sister Christine Schenk, CSJ. Mary Kathleen Kuenstler, born in 1949, was raised in Wendelin, Illinois, and adopted by a Catholic couple when she was four months old. “Kate’s” parents were parish leaders, and the local convent was staffed by the Congregation of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ [PHJC]. As a teenager Kate was on the fast track toward becoming a farmer, but she entered a local high school/junior college for potential candidates to the PHJC community. She followed through and professed final vows in 1976. Kate’s religious career is intriguing: several years of classroom teaching, troubleshooting, and earning a master’s degree in theology. She established a catechists’ certification program for the Diocese of Belleville, Illinois, and later for other regions of Illinois. It was not until 1988, when Kate was 39, that her community asked her to study Canon Law. As is well documented, the Vatican under Pope John Paul II was uncomfortable with the direction of women religious in the United States. Did the PHJC community foresee a need for “in-house counsel” in dealing with the John Paul and Benedict XVI papacies? My guess is quite possibly, but the book does not address this in detail. After a period of internship in the South Bend, Indiana Tribunal, where she learned to process annulments, she left to study in Rome. According to the author, Kate graciously turned down an offer from Fort Wayne Bishop John D’Arcy to pay for her studies in exchange for ten years’ service to the Fort Wayne-South Bend diocese. Rather, her religious community funded her Roman studies. [Privately she joked that “I’m no cheap date.”] The author subtly brings to the fore the maxim that “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” Women religious are lay persons, not clerics; Kate herself seems to have developed a theological appreciation of the rights of all baptized persons and did not desire a future as a diocesan house lawyer, so to speak, representing individual bishops in church business--a true turning point in her career. Chapter Three, “Canon Law Studies in Rome,” is captivating. Kate elected to pursue her canonical doctorate at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas, also known as “The Angelicum.” A top-flight school for canonists? This is the Canon Law-Italian equivalent of Stanford or Yale civil law schools in the U.S. One of its graduates was an Augustinian priest named Robert Prevost…whose doctoral dissertation was “The Role of the local prior [superior] in the Order of Saint Augustine.” I’m guessing you’ve heard of him, if not his dissertation... But for Kate, the Roman years were hard. The Angelicum conducted its lectures and examinations—including the grueling oral comprehensives—in the Italian tongue. The language, the living situations, the unreliability of Roman public transportation, and the absence of her religious community were formidable obstacles, and they are best described in the book itself. But it is worth noting Kate’s areas of academic concentration: annulments, international law, and sacraments. Of the latter, Kate would say that Canon Law addressed sacramental life but “never in a theological way. It’s always in a procedural way.” She also studied “temporal goods” in the 1983 Code of Canon Law—matters of finance and property management of a diocese. She was, in fact, preparing herself to become something of a pioneer in American Catholicism, a defender of lay rights where parish entities were involved, based on the theological principle that Baptism confers rights upon all members of the Church. Her dissertation was her first exercise of muscle, an account of a conflict between the Carmelite Order of women religious—then renewing its constitution and structure--and Pope John Paul II’s Curia or administrative bureaucracy. Evidently no career-minded soul in Catholic academia rushed to assume the cause of the Carmelites in a public forum until England’s Cardinal Basil Hume personally asked Kate to write a frank history of the affair. [A sixteen-page summary of her dissertation, “The Fractured Face of Carmel,” is posted on-line for free.] Before delving into the specifics of Sister Kate’s work, it is important to say a few words about Canon Law itself, which governs every aspect of Catholic life. I studied Law under the 1917 Code then in force. I was ten years ordained when the new 1983 Code was released; our Orlando bishop, Thomas J. Grady, brought in a team of nationally known Canon lawyers for a week’s workshop for all the priests of our diocese to familiarize us with the changes from the 1917 legislation. It was one of the finest educational programs I have ever attended. Florida was in full growth mode—there was little or no discussion of legislation on closing parishes. Most of us were looking for new legal guidelines on such matters as annulments and marriage laws. I am embarrassed to say that I do not own a copy of the 1983 Code—it got lost in a move--but fortunately the Law in its entirely is available free on-line and in English. Of particular interest for us in this post are two provisions which play a significant role in Sister Kate’s work: Can. 1222 §1. If a church cannot be used in any way for divine worship and there is no possibility of repairing it, the diocesan bishop can relegate it to profane but not sordid use. §2. Where other grave causes suggest that a church no longer be used for divine worship, the diocesan bishop, after having heard the presbyteral council, can relegate it to profane but not sordid use, with the consent of those who legitimately claim rights for themselves in the church and provided that the good of souls suffers no detriment thereby. It is the “grave causes” wording that created serious difficulties in many dioceses and disheartened many Catholics. The local bishop alone makes the final decision on what constitutes “grave causes;” the presbyteral council must be “heard” but it is not legislative, i.e., it cannot override the bishop. [I was president of Orlando’s Priest Council for two terms; the limitations of Canon Law I know.] In everyday language, Canon 1222 would seem to say that closing parishes and all the attendant implications are solely matters for the bishop, with a cautionary reminder to respect the sensitivities of Catholic parishioners regarding the future use of the church and parish facilities. You wouldn’t want your parish church sold to a gambling establishment for “business purposes.” The ‘post-abuse” era created a new dilemma, i.e., the closing of healthy, vibrant, solvent parishes in dioceses with heavy debts, penalties, and bankruptcies. Does the evangelical spirit and identities of such parish communities count for nothing in a bishop’s decision to close the facilities and disperse the faithful to other parish communities? Again. Canon 1222 does not consider this question. Generally, bishops interpreted the “grave causes” phrase exclusively to financial circumstances and shortages of priests—a dangerous road because the law thus interpreted implies that a parish is buildings and assets, nothing more. The Baptismal community of its members—its sacramental identity—had no bearing on the final destiny of a parish. These would be the kinds of parishes likely to seek the services of an independent Canon Lawyer such as Sister Kate, though she took up this ministry at a time when lay Catholics were painfully learning that demonstrations, church occupations, and media blitzes had little to no impact on local bishops, let alone on Vatican appeals courts. And as the author documents, the Catholic Church closings themselves were bittersweet, even cruel. In one diocese the bishop personally celebrated the final Mass of every closing parish in his territory and then padlocked the doors behind him. Kate’s gift to the Church in this crisis was a gallant attempt to bring the Biblical-theological sense of parish as a Spirit-filled communion of faith into the nuts and bolts of canonical-legal considerations. In short, Faith must count for something in the deliberations of the Church. She was asking the Church Court system in Rome—and American bishops in their administrative behavior—to bring to law the teaching of Vatican II that parish communities are grace-filled creations exclusive of their temporal assets. I would be remiss if I neglected to comment on how plowing new ground brings together a true variety of souls. In 2010, during Roman litigation of parish closings in the Diocese of Camden, New Jersey, Kate engaged in fascinating correspondence with Cardinal Raymond Burke of the Apostolic Signatura [akin to our Supreme Court]. Burke is known to many Catholics as the ultra-conservative defender of the Tridentine Mass, an advocate for the right of Catholics to worship in the Latin Rite of the Council of Trent [1545-1563] and a fighter for the rights of Tridentine Catholic Churches. The heart of the book is a detailed account of several dioceses where Sister Kate was retained as an independent Church canonist to defend parish communities against arbitrary dismantling of their membership, closure and/or sale of their church buildings, and dispersion to other Catholic churches. These include parishes in the dioceses of Syracuse, Camden, Cleveland, and New York City. While the problems of each diocese are similar, each one cited here had/has unique personalities, issues, and timelines; you would not be reading the same plotline multiple times. The author notes that for every hour of “lawyering,” Kate spent multiple hours of counseling broken, angry Catholics from across the country. Frankly, there was true pastoral need for the care of this new cohort of victims. One could call the heart of this book “Bishops Behaving Badly.” My little sister’s parish—St. Bernadette’s Parish in Orchard Park, New York—was decreed closed last November, effective May 1, 2025, just a few days ago. My understanding is that her parish has retained counsel for a Vatican appeal. If you’ve never seen a diocesan “Dear John” letter, here is St. Bernadette’s. I commend the parish for making this correspondence public, and I offer prayers for the resolute priests in Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, and around the country who are ministering solicitously under very troubling conditions. I know that my family is grateful. Obviously, one issue I have not tackled is the outcome of cases. Even when Sister Kate and other canonists were able to win reprieves or reverses in Roman court, there was and is still the issue of enormous indebtedness. If you read the St. Bernadette letter, you saw that the pastor-administrator was told to clean out all accounts and to alert parishioners that major fund drives in all parishes would be held to retire a $150,000,000 indebtedness. Frankly, I think that is impossible for Buffalo, and I will do a follow-up posting as developments warrant. Please feel free to let me know what is happening in your parish/diocese. The intensity of Kate’s work came to an end when she died of cancer in 2019. I was reading my notes and writing this review when Cardinal Prevost was elected to the papacy last Thursday. It is hard for me to imagine that the scenarios played out in Bending Toward Justice will repeat themselves with a practicing Canon Lawyer, Pope Leo XIV, at the helm. Better interpretations of the Code and clearer understandings of baptismal rights are to be hoped for. And on top of that, the pope’s childhood church in Chicago, St. Mary of the Assumption, was closed and converted into a community center. [See photo on Cafe online sites, courtesy of the Cardinal Newman Society.] He has skin in the game, as they say. In a few weeks I will return to revisit this discussion with an emphasis upon Church debt –a real thing, as we saw the numbers above—and a perceived shortage of parish leadership. I promised to continue reflections on Catholicism at a Crossroads [2025], the results of polling and analyzing thousands of Catholic responses from across America, and I began in the previous entry on the Book Stream for March 23, 2025, posted below [scroll down]. I learned today that Crossroads is now in the top 3% of Amazon new book sales, so the subject is attracting attention. Again, if you missed the opening post, a cluster of professional sociologists takes an exhaustive read of U.S. Catholics on multiple subjects, with an instrument called “The American Catholic Laity Survey.” This inventory is undertaken every seven years, beginning back in 1987. Having the raw data in hand, the authors then summarize their findings in an eminently readable volume in a way that assists our own understanding and practice of the Faith and the administrative authority and leadership of the national and diocesan churches. The fact that there are successive polls dating back in this case to 1987 allows for a longitudinal view of Church trends.
Picking up with Chapter 2 of Crossroads, “Authority,” there is considerable discussion of the relationship of Catholics to American bishops as teachers and shepherds of the Faith, and whether the bishops stand higher or lower in the estimation of the faithful in the present day. The question of whether Church teachings are taken seriously in everyday life management is obviously a global one, not restricted to the U.S. On the other hand, each country, culture, or region sees Catholicism through a different lens where social justice and human life priorities are concerned; in the U.S., that is often a regional/political lens. Boston is not Lincoln, Nebraska. Illinois is not Idaho. Since the Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973, the USCCB has opted [1] to convince Catholics to undo the legal abortion ruling of the 1973 Supreme Court decision by voting for anti-abortion national and statewide candidates, and thus logically [2] to form an allegiance with the Republican Party on the matter of abortion, as the GOP has historically included some form of this position in its party platform. [Note that tax free non-profits, including churches, cannot blatantly endorse specific candidates.] The drift of the American hierarchy to the Republican right has precedent in American history. In 1960, running for the presidency as a Roman Catholic and Democrat, John Fitzgerald Kennedy took pains to distinguish papal and episcopal authority from a U.S. president’s civil authority. [History does require that I include here John F. Kennedy’s remark to the press during the 1960 presidential campaign: “Everybody knows that all bishops are Republicans, and all nuns are Democrats.”] Whether as cause or effect, an issue that raises its head throughout this book is an observed tendency of American Catholics to think and act by political party affiliation rather than Gospel teachings or, more specifically, the leadership of their bishops, when engaged in everyday life, including civil participation such as voting. During every presidential election season the USCCB issues a Catholic voters’ guide, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” and distributes it in parish churches. [2023 edition highlighted] Frankly, I had never read a bishops’ voter guide until preparing this post, and I was pleasantly surprised at the wholesale inclusion of the emphases upon the poor and suffering, clearly reflecting the teaching of Pope Francis [and the previous popes of the Vatican II era.] That said, it is also clear from the USCCB document that the bishops have a hierarchy of public morality. See, for example, this excerpt from the 2023 C guide: [Para. 22] There are some things we must never do, as individuals or as a society, because they are always incompatible with love of God and neighbor. Such actions are so deeply flawed that they are always opposed to the authentic good of persons. These are called “intrinsically evil” actions. They must always be rejected and opposed and must never be supported or condoned. A prime example is the intentional taking of innocent human life, as in abortion and euthanasia. In our nation, “abortion and euthanasia have become preeminent threats to human dignity because they directly attack life itself, the most fundamental human good and the condition for all others.” It is a mistake with grave moral consequences to treat the destruction of innocent human life merely as a matter of individual choice. A legal system that violates the basic right to life on the grounds of choice is fundamentally flawed. Going back to Crossroads, the authors [and other polling services] attempted to determine how many Catholics believe they are free to vote their consciences on matters of abortion and/or euthanasia if such votes run counter to Church teaching. Chapter Five of Crossroads, “Love,” focuses on the wider sweep of family life and specific sexual and gender issues. Chapter Two, today’s subject, examines general respect for the teaching and administrative authority of the Catholic Church, bishops. Thus, it is not surprising that Chapter 2 opens with a narrative of an actual clerical sex abuse case dating to the 1980’s and its subsequent mishandling by an American diocese. The “Spotlight” crisis—national news coverage of the issue of Church personnel and child abuse—pressed the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [or USCCB] in June 2002 to adopt a series of protective and preventative policies known as the Dallas Charter. The first surveys after the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” expose, basis for the 2015 movie, showed laity concern about the bishops’ management of their dioceses vis-à-vis child abuse committed by clerics. An early outlier, an April 2002 poll from Quinnipiac reported that 64% of Catholics favored the resignations of bishops who did not report child abuse to local law enforcement agencies. Later, the CARA-Georgetown Catholic surveyors ran several polls which found a critical stance against bishops which grew progressively worse as more and more malfeasance was discovered. “Favorable” sentiments toward bishops fell from 34% to 22%, meaning that three quarters of the Catholic public--including priests--had major doubts about the apostolic leaders of their dioceses. What is statistically and pastorally troubling today in 2025 is the consistency of the strained relationship between priests and bishops. I think there is a direct relationship between the implementation and fine-tuning of the Dallas Charter that, hard to imagine, is making priests more tense and discouraged. I have seen this quote dozens of times in print in recent years, uttered by a diocesan priest: “My bishop no longer regards me as a spiritual son; he looks upon me as a legal liability.” The unanswered question, though, is whether the recent negative polling regarding American bishops is showing up for the same reasons as it was in 2002+. Times may have changed, and not for the better. I tend to look at the abuse scandal in three phases: [1] the revelation of youthful abuse and the scope of the problem; [2] the discovery of episcopal conspiracy; and [3] the money phase. The third phase might last the longest and send more people out the doors. I was typing and researching yesterday when a news story broke that the Diocese of Albany, N.Y., was divesting one-third of its diocesan holdings to survive. If my math is correct, about 25% of American dioceses have opted for bankruptcy and/or other radical strategies to meet the therapeutic and legal obligations resulting from generations of episcopal neglect. Earlier we talked about the authors’ observations that many Catholics experience Catholicism no further than their parishes, and only the 30% who attend weekly or monthly, by multiple surveys, would know much about such things as the Dallas Charter. [CARA found that in 2003, for example, 50% of Catholics were unaware of the Charter.] Consequently, if your parish did not have a scandal, there may have been an understandable relief that you had somehow “dodged the bullet,” with sympathy for parishes laboring under grief and anger due to the suffering of its vulnerable members there. But given the twenty or more years of media coverage, courtroom testimony, and processing of victims’ claims, settlements, attorneys’ fees, etc., the time has finally come to settle accounts. Given that the bishop of a diocese owns all funds and properties--churches, schools, everything—by virtue of the legal principle of corporation sole, all diocesan entities bear responsible for financial obligations of the diocese. [France, by contrast, does not have this arrangement; churches, including Notre Dame in Paris, are owned by the state.] I think you can see where we are headed here. No one knows precisely how much the American Church has spent and how much it owes, Our Sunday Visitor reported earlier this year: “The Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ $880 million abuse claims settlement, announced Oct. 16, brings the total payouts of U.S. Catholic dioceses for abuse claims since 2004 [italics mine] to more than $5 billion — and possibly more than $6 billion.” Remember, too, that these numbers represent only public settlements. When intense coverage of the crisis began in 2002, investigators learned of previous settlement or compensations dating back forty years or more. If you told me the number was closer to $10 billion, I could believe that. I have been following several dioceses closely, especially those I have particular affection for, such as my home diocese of Buffalo. The crosses of Buffalo priests and laity have been long and bitter, and the shortages of clergy and funding [Buffalo is on the hook for $100,000,000] has led to a wide range of parish closings and sales, including the projected dismantling of my family’s parish, St. Bernadette, in Orchard Park, N.Y. On Christmas Eve last year WKBW-TV interviewed three St. Bernadette parishioners about their predicament, i.e., that their parish sits on desirable real estate if sold. _______________________ [1] Why are we paying for their sins? That’s my first question. It’s their sins, why would you destroy a family of faith? It’s just an ongoing faith-filled community that we built. [2] I have never been part of a community that is more loving and spiritual than St. Bernadette…Honestly, I wish I could move elsewhere, so that I could be in a diocese that would listen and will respond when we have concerns. [3] We feel very strongly that St. Bernadette is a strong, vibrant parish. [The Diocese] wants the land it’s plain and simple. ___________________________________ I can understand that for professional researchers it would be very difficult to create a question or sequence of questions to tease out the resentment of Catholics about perceived and real consequences to their parishes and schools over the misdeeds of priests they never knew or bishops who were woefully slow to protect their dioceses. Crossroads goes on in Chapter 2 to assess the level of trust in the Church and bishops on a wide range of questions regarding moral teachings and authority, including abortion. But I fear that the office of episcopal teachings has been battered in the United States to the degree that it may take fifty years to repair. It will be up to the authors of Crossroads to research and then deliver this message over the next 6-7 years before we can take the elementary steps to restore trust in the office of the successor of the Apostles. We will take time to discuss issues raised by Chapter 3, "Race," in about three weeks. I started reading Catholics at a Crossroads this past weekend, and I can see already that this may be one of the most intriguing and colorful analyses of Mother Church to come down the pike in a while. Released by New York University Press earlier this year [2025], Crossroads was written by five noted analysts of Catholicism who examined several major polls of Catholics taken since 2017, analyzed their questionnaires and proceeded to interview Catholics across the country. They then used the results to project strategies for the “New Evangelization” for future generations: how to become Christ to the world without tripping over your own two feet. Call them philosopher-pollsters if you like.
A few points to bear in mind here. Crossroads was published by New York University Press, which is not conjoined to a Catholic institution of higher learning as opposed to, say, Catholic University Press to Catholic University. Second, polling and listening to the Catholic faithful is a dicey business; you never know quite what you are going to hear. My impression is that polling and research into American Catholicism is moving more to the public sector—i.e., universities and research centers unaffiliated to Catholic authority and financially not dependent upon fiscal support of the hierarchy. Bishops do not like to hear bad news, which is also the reason that many American dioceses and/or parishes provided very minimal or no support of Pope Francis’ call to Synodality, where laity would have had opportunities to meet and offer insight, criticism, and possibly roadmaps for the holiness and mission of the Church, to be forwarded to Rome. And finally, poll research is not an exact science, as Crossroads readily admits. You probably have heard of two recent examples of “embarrassing research” still talked about [even anguished about] today. In 2018 the Catholic “Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate” [or CARA, as it is known], teamed up with a Catholic publisher, St. Mary’s Press, to produce “Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young People.” [2018]. This study, with a target population of young adults aged 15-25, discovered that youth make the decision to disengage from Catholicism as early as age ten, and 18% report making such a decision between the ages of 5 to 9. I know one child in the 5-9 cohort who is refusing to make First Communion this spring. I cannot recall an episcopal-institutional response to the St. Mary’s—CARA study aside from the usual sidebar tut-tutting on social media about deficiencies in parenting. One thing I am enjoying about Crossroads is its commentaries on other related studies, including the St. Mary’s findings, to clarify the strategies and interpretations of other pollsters. Crossroads interviews a wide range of church officials and laity and its efforts to seek the views of other professionals in the Church with a critical eye. The executive director of the National Black Sisters’ Conference offered this: “Children really are just incredibly bored with Mass and liturgy and just don’t understand the rituals that go along with it.” [p. 36] In my parish church—and most others—if you are a seven-year-old kid standing further back than row three or four, you spend much of the Mass looking straight into the posterior of the adult in front of you. And let’s face it: we adults are rarely set on fire by the rites, either. Crossroads pairs the childhood affiliation question with statistics on adults who attend Sunday Mass infrequently due to work conflicts and “busyness,” judging correctly, I believe, that church worship is impacted by the pace of family life in society. Tired parents are not going to fight the attendance battle. Nothing was done by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop in response to the St. Mary’s Press/CARA study. However, another study riled American Bishops to a hurried and extensive/expensive response because it addressed a core doctrinal belief of Catholicism: The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In 2019, PEW Research, ironically, an independent firm unrelated to any religious tradition, reported its findings that only one-third of Catholics believe in Transubstantiation, the doctrine that defines holy communion as the reception of the real Body and Blood of Christ. Many Catholics, per PEW, believe the Eucharist is a symbolic Catholic fellowship of bread and wine only, by a ratio of 70%-30%. The study was not targeted at Catholicism per se. The PEW study reviewed the knowledge and practice status of Americans in general by drawing up four “flagship beliefs” of each religion. [Another question in the survey revealed that many Catholics believe in Purgatory.] The best Catholic news summary of the study’s release I could find comes from the Brooklyn Tablet/Crux news services, whose editors did not sound overly surprised. The U.S. Bishops, however, were stunned. I spent much of this week wading through diocesan lamentations on-line from the time of the PEW release. At its next scheduled meeting, the USCCB budgeted for a three-year Celebration of Eucharistic Devotion, culminating in a national Eucharistic Congress and solemn Mass at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The projected cost was announced at $28 million, but the actual outlay and promotion are described here. CARA, meanwhile, sprung into action with its own study of the Eucharistic question with deeper analysis that examined PEW’s methodology and conclusions, but CARA’s findings and analyses of such profound questions would take a long time, and the bishops felt they could not wait several years for a public reaction and renewed mission in regard to the Eucharist. CARA’s conclusion was a correlation between weekly Mass participants and positive outcomes of faith on doctrinal questions such as Transubstantiation. In its commentary on this episode in recent American history, Crossroads draws several conclusions about the structure of the Church in the U.S. Practically speaking, the recent Eucharistic Congress was probably a helpful rejuvenation for the deeply committed, but its publicity and events would have been know only to “church regulars.” Inactive Catholics and the unchurched were untouched by the Eucharistic Congress. This, the authors point out, is a critical issue for the American Catholic Church; we are myopic and local, and our gestalt of the faith is our local “support system.” What happens in Rome, or one’s home diocese, rarely crosses the radar at the basic affective level where we live. Another point of analysis is the value of “difference” in social structures. A good case in point: those who denied or did not know the doctrine of Transubstantiation did not reject the idea or the importance of a common sharing of a meal based upon the unity of Christ around the table. As an evangelizer, I look at this population as siblings in faith, waiting for embrace. No one’s belief in Real Presence is perfect. When I receive communion, I pray: “I believe, Lord. Help my unbelief.” Having had years of Catholic education, I know enough to realize that Eucharistic bread and wine is the touchpoint of the Incarnation—God entering the human dimension. Full understanding of this mystery is not possible in this human life. The doubters among us keep us honest, steering us clear of a religious “knowledge” akin to the Pythagorean Theorem. Faith is not mathematics. Two other points in Chapter One examine the issues of preaching and what the authors refer to as the relationship of the structured Church to the “loosely tethered.” [pp. 53-56] Regarding the latter, “poor first dates” are a major roadblock to our witnessing of Christ’s love and welcoming the “loosely tethered.” I cannot put a number on the people who approached the Church for help or a request and were treated, frankly, with suspicion, bureaucracy, personal questions about their moral lives, sacramental history, or my favorite word here, “hoops.” Crossroads does not, in any sense, denigrate the need for divinely inspired order in the Catholic Church. But it notes that there is an appropriate time and an order for everything approaching the Church, and that pastors need an exquisite skill in discerning the best order of interventions in assisting an individual into the full community of faith, or in keeping a struggling believer in the family. Questions on the use of church envelopes is not the first step to “welcome to the family.” We will pick up this book review/analysis in two weeks. Chapter 2 deals with bishops and their relationships to their people, particularly after the child abuse scandals and the various dimensions of its impact upon the Church 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. 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. |
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