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My best wishes today to all of my friends with ties to the Jesuit Order as we celebrate today the Feast of the Jesuit founder, Ignatius of Loyola. My grandfather wanted me to become a Jesuit, given the reputations of Canisius High School and Canisius College in Buffalo. (St. Peter Canisius was an early follower of Ignatius and an outstanding educator, and yes, he wrote a catechism, too.) However, at the age of fourteen I packed my worldly belongings in a trunk and headed off to the Franciscan boarding seminary in the Catskills, beginning a 27-year sojourn with the followers of St. Francis of Assisi instead. How I ended up with the friars is an interesting story; how I ended with the friars period an even better one, but we’ll save that for a slow news day.
I can say that even as a boy the intense academic demands of the Jesuit formation program lasted longer than I cared to wait. I was told in elementary school that Jesuits were not ordained until they were 32 years old. I did not see myself as a priest-scholar, but more along the lines of a parish priest or retreat master. The Franciscan recruiters indicated that these were very viable options at that time. A few years ago I took that highly accurate Facebook test to determine my best suitability for religious life, and I learned that I was called to be a Dominican. By my values today, that does make more sense, but in 1961 there was no Facebook to help us with such critical decisions. I did not become a real “student” until I was about 24 or 25, which is a bit late in the game, but like the baptized adult convert I tried to make up for lost time. The late Father Andrew Greeley used to decry what he saw as the “anti-intellectualism of the clergy;” I can’t say I encountered a lot of that, but my priest peers in the 1980’s were sincerely puzzled that I would go to night school for a second master’s degree. What I do see in some areas of the Catholic press is a tendency to label many Catholic scholars as “dissidents” or disloyal to the Church. In truth the Jesuits—and all the religious communities, of men and of women, who place a premium on advanced scholarship—are providing a critical service to the Church. In the first instance, there is much about our world and our culture that is genuinely new and challenging. Pope Francis’ Laudato Si alone will create work for Catholic moral theologians as they sort out the ethical implications for public policy and internal Catholic consciences. In the second instance, it is my observation that much Catholic devotion on the parish level is of a highly emotional and pietistic strain. At the turn of the twentieth century the philosopher of religious experience William James wrote that “if merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.” One of my professors did him better: “Piety comes and goes; stupidity remains forever.” In his classic Varieties of Religious Experience James observed that enthusiasm can rarely maintain itself over the human lifetime as the bedrock of a religious commitment, as he correctly incorporates the fatigue of aging and the inevitable deterioration of the human mind and body into the internal experience of religion. James was focusing on American Methodist revival, but Roman Catholic saints have taught much the same thing. Francis of Assisi insisted upon an uncomfortable life of austerity and service, while Thomas Aquinas became the embodiment of the theological arts, “faith seeking understanding,” a mental labor Feeling is that occasional gift to be cherished, but as I can speak from experience, my religious pieties can be altered by coffee as much as by grace, and with greater predictabilities. I am presently devouring a history of Vatican II by Xavier Rynne. If the name sounds peculiar, it is a pseudonym for a Catholic theologian serving as a peritus or expert for a bishop who wrote extensive inside coverage of the Council for New Yorker magazine, which agreed to maintain his cover, much to the delight of Catholic intellectuals who followed the proceedings closely. Rynne’s writings on the Council run to four volumes, though there is a one volume summary I am currently reading. He annoyed the Curia no end, which at that time was releasing only the most general of news releases from its press office. The first session of the Council, 1962, was marked by a titanic struggle between the Curia and its theologians on the one hand, who wished to change nothing; and the majority of the world’s 2500 bishops, on the other, who believed that the changing world called for fresh thinking and pastoral approaches to invigorate the Church. Celebrating the sacraments in the vernacular was just one of many issues under debate. What becomes immediately clear in Rynne’s reporting is that despite the Curia’s efforts to curb theological research and innovation (against the wishes, I might add, of Pius XII and John XXIII), the work of professional theologians was invaluable to the Council. Each bishop, as I noted, was allowed to bring one or more periti or experts into the session with him. For some, like Cardinal Cushing’s, their main role was translating the Latin, the official language of the floor, but which most bishops could frankly not understand. But other participants brought into the proceedings some of the most gifted theologian/scholars of the day. New York’s Cardinal Spellman invited the brilliant Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray to the final three sessions (1963-65) despite the fact that Murray was officially silenced by the Vatican at the time. Murray would make major contributions to the Council’s teaching on religious freedom and freedom of conscience. The aggressive and painstaking work of the academic theological community is worthy not just of our gratitude but our attention. Clergy, religious and lay theologians--men and women, I am happy to say—are at this moment producing works of great benefit for thoughtful, college educated Catholic laity and their clergy. They are a population generally unknown in most quarters, actively hated in a few, and generally ignored in recent decades at the highest levels of the Church. Strange for a Church that celebrates Aquinas, Bonaventure, Augustine, and today Loyola. Maybe this is easier to do when they are safely dead. But if you know a living theologian, take him or her out to dinner.
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I reported on Wednesday that I had attended a meeting of youth ministers at the chancery of the Diocese of Orlando, and during that meeting the participants were given an opportunity to discuss their personal and local concerns about their current anxieties in the field. I was able to find several threads in the spoken concerns: (1) a frustration in getting the Church’s teachings across to teenagers on matters of sexuality; (2) deep concern about the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage; (3) a general despair that American immorality was malignantly invasive and would swallow us up, and (4) some hints of a siege mentality, “us against the world” as if Catholic ministry is now the final battle of Armageddon.
With regard to the first point, I felt and feel great sympathy for the group and others like them, for youth ministers and formational educators are in many respects taking the fall for a bigger problem in American Catholicism, that perhaps a quarter of practicing Catholics at best can claim to be living in full solidarity with the Catechism’s articulation of Church sexual teaching. This state of affairs can hardly be dropped at the door of present-day formational ministers. A number of informed commentators point to a break in lay adherence occurring at the issuance of Humanae Vitae in 1968, which reaffirmed the Church’s prohibition of artificial birth control. There were several participants this week who raised the need for more effective programs or resources; although, given the personalized nature of faith sharing that seems to work with teens, I wondered to myself if any catechist would (or should) discuss with inquiring fifteen year old minds who asks how the catechist squares adherence to Church law with parenting a 2 or 3 child family. A number of ministers brought up the issue of homosexuality among teens, specifically boys. “It’s in to be gay now.” This concern seems to be two-fold: that being gay is itself a condition of degeneracy, and that homosexuality ipso facto destroys the hetero-sexual family model. Here is where experience—including one’s own youth--and a sense of history serves a minister well. I was a teen from 1961 through 1968 and we all drank from the well water of utopianism, arrogance (the great constant of every generation) and self-indulgence, in my case in a boarding school seminary, no less. In my early twenties I gave weekend retreats to both CCD and Catholic school students at a time when self-awareness and feelings ran wild among our charges. Jump ahead to the 1990’s in my early psychotherapy days when teenaged girls equated self-esteem with servicing on demand the sexual needs of their male counterparts surreptitiously in school. I, who did a semester’s work on women’s liberation in 1972, found this really, really perplexing. I asked gingerly if there was reciprocity in all this, and in every case the young ladies would say no, that they did all the work. “That sounds a little demeaning,” I would say, as delicately as a 50-ish gentleman can broach such matters. The retort was usually the same: “But it’s my choice.” Fortunately God let me live into the next teen era, when parents would phone me because their teens were becoming Goths. I found my Goth “patients” very entertaining. Several of them explained the Goth scene to me in extremely lucid and coherent fashion. In short, the Gothic culture in our local high schools had taken shape because the general student populace looked with scorn upon kids who read and studied; sometimes serious students were beaten. “I’m a Goth because I want to study and I know somebody’s got my back. We get some respect now.” Hard to argue with that. Some were very inventive: I remember one young man whose parents refused to buy him black sneakers, so he crafted them out of electrician’s tape. Sadly, youth ministry has such a high turnover rate that there is no collective “ministerial memory” to draw from, so see a commonality with teenaged behaviors and needs in earlier periods. Another anomaly of youth ministry is its polarity from the style of Christian initiation, where the candidate is actively encouraged to tell his or her story. With teenagers, there is a great temptation to “set them straight” rather than process their journeys, which are often grace-filled and very interesting, albeit with a diamond in the rough motif. With regard to my second and third observations, I have been amazed by the reactions of mainstream America to two matters of public morality, the aforementioned issue of same-sex marriage and the reaction to the devastating shooting of nine praying church-goers in Charleston, with the attendant dismantling of the Confederate flag. Ten years ago I would never have expected to see either. One can interpret this summer’s events, perhaps for our purposes most notably the same-sex marriage court decision, in a number of ways. Yes, there is a major gulf between public and civil acceptance of such marriage and Catholic moral teaching. By the same token, there is a major gulf between attitudes toward homosexuals today and what they were a generation ago. Can one read the events of this summer with at least a glimmer of relief that society erred on the side of fairness and understanding rather than in the direction of continued targeting of our neighbors and families who are “different” in ways that we don’t fully understand? In their incomplete and one dimensional ways, teenagers bring this kind of reasoning to the moral forum. As to point four, fear of moral collapse and the end times have always been with us. In one of my medieval history courses the professor described a great fear of the disintegration of order and society at some juncture. The cause? The invention of a crossbow that could pierce a knight’s armor and thus end civilized warfare as then known. Ah, for the old days. I am back on this side of the Atlantic, hoping that coffee and exercise will overcome the jet lag from yesterday's (Thursday's) flight from Shannon, Ireland. I have learned one thing: it is better flying the red eye as we did going over, when there is the probability of sleep, than leaving at noon for a boring seven hour afternoon that is just beginning again when you land. It is "Morality Friday" here at the blog, though I noticed with some embarrassment that I have not been home or settled enough to blog on a Friday in some time. I was fortunate enough in Ireland to have excellent wi-fi in all the places I stayed, so I did have regular updates from all my usual news and church sources. There is, in some quarters, great alarm about trends in American society, and it is true enough that some remarkable changes have occurred in the U.S. in matters of racial and sexual attitudes. If I understand Donald Trump correctly, not always an easy task, there is fear in some quarters that Christianity is under great siege. The Chesterton in me tends to think the true danger to Christianity is more a matter of great indifference, but in some quarters there is acute stress about the ACA mandate and the Little Sisters of the Poor, for example. In my own state of Florida there is talk of the legislature considering a "pastor's bill of rights," so concerned are some. The biggest trap we can fall into is too easily accepting two questionable premises: (1) the present age is uniquely evil, and (2) the moral issues of present day discussion represent the apex of western civilization. Without denying the importance of the questions at hand, some historical perspective might be useful in giving us a bigger picture of our moral landscape, and perhaps some insight into what Pope Francis is trying to teach through his recent encyclical. On Wednesday, our last full day in Ireland, my wife and I walked from Sand Hill into Galway. Sand Hill is a bit of a surprise, something of an Oceanside amusement center; we parked on the street in front of a giant Ferris wheel. It is a town of pubs, amusement rides, arcades, toney condos and B&B's; the kind of place you stop for fudge and forbidden foods. Yes, the waters of Galway Bay are a bit cold and unforgiving, but there is no place more romantic to hold hands and walk with your best gal than along the wide promenade at water's edge that eventually leads to Galway's splendid Cathedral. It was on the cusp of Sand Hill and Galway that we came upon it. A large but simple memorial stone tells the story of the little girl for whom this stretch of beach is dedicated. She was brought for medical assistance to social services, but she was beyond help--her starvation was too far advanced, and this youngster, like thousands of her peers, died far before their times in the late 1840's of what can only be described as a calculated, engineered act of sinful omission. I learned early in my trip that you don't speak of "The Potato Famine," any more than you would speak of American slavery as an intense indenture. There had been periods of crop failure and chronic hunger long before the intense suffering of the mid-1800's in Ireland. A century before, the churchman and bitter satirist Jonathan Swift had attempted to draw attention to the plight of the Irish with his outlandish essay, "A Modest Proposal," which called for the breeding of children as food products. But in the collective memory of Ireland to this day, what we learned in school as "The Potato Famine" was a government engineered agricultural policy that favored business interests at the expense of intense deprivation across the Irish isle. For those who wish to pursue this shameful episode of inhumanity, I recommend "The Graves Are Walking," which opens with an unimaginable episode of neighbors returning corpses dug up by scavenging dogs. Irish starvation was not a random act of violence. It occurred on the watch of the world's most powerful nation, Great Britain, in the days of the famous prime ministers Disraeli and Gladstone. At a very basic level the management of a national/colonial policy emphasized business interest over human life. It would be a wonderful thing to be able to say that the Irish starving was an event of the past from which we have learned to deal with smaller nations in fair and equitable ways in matters of quality of life and distribution of natural resources, particularly food. But only the most morally obtuse would claim that impartial international fair play is the coinage of the planet. This, I think, is what Francis is driving at in his writing, preaching, and traveling: the heart of morality is the mindset of human care. Decisions of state, business, science, and trade are to be governed by God's stance toward every human being: "the very hairs of your head are numbered." Theologians speak of a hierarchy of doctrine, so to speak, an attempt to understand the priorities of the mind of God. Nowhere is a discussion of priorities more necessary than in the scope of moral theology. A lot of ink has been spilled within the church and elsewhere over matters such as medical insurance plans and Catholic institutions. Francis by contrast is laboring on behalf of those who never see doctors or drink clean waters, and he challenges the Church and society to reorder the menu of God's generous table,   This is our last day on Valencia island at the very top of Ireland, the precarious peninsula that juts into the North Atlantic, the path to Iceland and Newfoundland. A misty morning turned into a steady cold rain which curtailed our sightseeing by 1 PM. We did get a chance to tour the Valencia lighthouse, and the guide pointed out a small work shed along the ocean. This, as it turned out, was the site of the first terminus of the Atlantic Cable in the 1850's. I learned that there were three tries at laying a cable of about 1800 miles between Newfoundland and Valencia Island. The third and successful connection was completed, as luck would have it, here in Knightstown, several doors down the street from our present accommodations. I have had a chance to visit about half a dozen churches this week, including both here on the island. As I described last weekend, the church here in Knightstown is an impressive gothic structure but I did not get a sense of what the parish life was like. Yesterday I visited the other Catholic Church on the island, St. Teresa and St. Dorarca, in Chapeltown. This church was less impressive from a structural vantage point; it was built in the late 1930's, as I recall. However, one of my nephews discovered a small cemetery of former pastors dating back much further. We speculated that there must have been a fire that destroyed the original structure. That there were earlier Catholic Churches on the island is a very strong probability, as Cromwell built a fort here that encloses the current lighthouse we visited today. The population of the Island reached 2000 perhaps a century ago; today it is at 400. The first communion class at St. Teresa's (combined with Immaculate Conception here in Knightstown??) totaled seven. I believe that the custom here is to print one church bulletin weekly; curiously the newsy homemade publication available at St. Teresa's was not available here in Knightstown, though the news pertained to both. The front page leads with an inspirational piece on July as the month of the Precious Blood. Members are reminded that this is the year of St. Columbanus, actually the 1400th anniversary of his birth or death(bulletin was not clear). As the remarkable Skellig monastery is often visible ten miles offshore, devotion to the monastic life is quite strong in Ireland, and certainly here in County Kerry. The bulletin lists all the feast days of the month (tomorrow, coincidentally, being the feast of the great monk St. Benedict.) The intentions of the Mass are listed along with general requests for prayers for the dead. I found this one quaint: "You are asked to pray for Mary Ellen Burke who died at this time of year." The second collection is for the sick and retired priests of the diocese. An envelope is stapled to the bulletin, along with an attractive bookmark commemorating another saintly monk of local devotion, St. Brendan the Navigator. We drove yesterday to another site of piety, the reputed site of St. Brendan's well. The St. Teresa bulletin carried several local diocesan events--from a walk in honor of St. Columbanus to a youth convention in Tipperary to a "historical rally" led by two priests, evidently an auto caravan to points of historical interest. There is a note about the American Fourth of July, highlighting the Declaration of Independence. There are biographies of the lives of the saints celebrated this week--Maria Goretti, Killian (a missionary martyr from the 800's) and the aforementioned Benedict. On the final page is a brief instruction on the general thrust of the Gospel of St. Mark. Aside from the assertion that Mark received his material from St. Peter (a dubious proposition) the paragraph does capture the theme of "cost of discipleship" quite well. I should note here that I visited several churches on the mainland. The most memorable was a most impressive Gothic church in Cahirciveen. The name of the Church is "The O'Connell Memorial Church" after the great Catholic rights activist Daniel O'Connell. Among other things, this parish has Mass each summer at all the local cemeteries. I have noted in several church bulletins that confessions are heard on Friday. On the way home I passed another smaller church with just one notice on its information board: "EWTN now available on satellite 589." This time tomorrow we should be in Dublin. I can't wait to experience that, but the two days in Dingle and seven on Valentia Island have left quite an impact on me. |
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