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Book Club: The Catholic Books You Haven't Had Time To Read

To stay current, shop judiciously, and spread your education dollar.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

1/23/2021

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A few weeks earlier I posted a review of Nick Ripatrazone’s Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction [2020]. Longing for an Absent God explores both the identities of significant Catholic novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and their vision of life as impacted by Catholic upbringing. For example, the noted author Flannery O’Connor observes that the Catholic novelist begins from the vantage point of Original Sin, or the flawed imperfections of human subjects, and works along the tortuous road of seeking God’s ever-present grace.
 
One such author is Louise Erdrich [1954-] who in a 1995 interview stated that she was raised "with all the accepted truths" of Catholicism alongside significant rooting in her Ojibwe Native American roots in Minnesota. Ripatrazone highlights her work as an example of Catholic cross-cultural experience, as many of her novels are inspired by Native American life. I was intrigued by the title of her 2001 work, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and even more so by the premise, a most unusual marriage of Catholic and Ojibwe life.
 
As this story goes, in 1996 a chancery bureaucrat, Father Jude Miller, is sent to a remote Ojibwe reservation near the U.S.-Canada border to investigate a report of miracles attributed to a Sister Leopolda, a deceased member of the convent community at the reservation. For many decades, the reservation Catholic church has been shepherded by Father Damian Modeste, now in extreme old age and in many ways sheltered and protected by the tribe for his long and faithful service. Father Damian rouses himself for his visitor, for he has much to share…and much more to hide.
 
Father Damian’s biggest secret is his identity. He is not a priest. He is in fact Agnes DeWitt, who came to pastor this church back in 1912. Her journey began in a convent as a seventeen-year-old postulant who was deriving excessive worldly pleasure from her mastery of Chopin at the piano. Young Agnes leaves the convent in fulfillment of her carnal pursuits and settles for a time with a powerful common law arrangement with a farmer-lover until their relationship is untimely and tragically ended. When Agnes has a near death experience in a natural catastrophe that kills the real Father Damian en route to his mission, Agnes decides to assume his identity in a conversion event that is part existential trauma and part coming home, so to speak, to what was most natural to her. In her first Mass upon arrival, for the convent community, “the Mass came to Agnes like memorized music. She had only to say the first words and all followed, ordered, instinctive. The phrases were in her and part of her. Once she began, the flow was like the river that had carried her to Little No Horse. In the silence between the parts of the ritual, Father Damian prayed for these women in his charge.” [p. 68]
 
If the sacramental role was assumed so naturally, life among the Ojibwe would be a greater challenge. Her first pastoral crisis, literally hours after her arrival, involved a tribal dispute over wives. This elongated scene introduces not only the major players and families who will love and challenge the priest throughout Father Damian’s career, but it puts into focus the ambiguity that many Catholic missionaries have faced in their attempts to overlay a Western European Christian creed and code upon an indigenous culture. One of the undercurrents of the community of Little No Horse was the gnawing sense of defeat and ongoing irritation at the intrusion of European, and later American, colonialists. In an NPR interview on this book in 2001, the author cited a quote from the Catholic feminist theologian Mary Daly, “Conversion is the most loving form of destruction.”
 
Perhaps as a woman Agnes has a finer appreciation of “loving destruction” and exercises her ministry accordingly. For while she sublimates her earlier feminine experiences of intimacy and love for the sake of her pastorate, she never eradicates her past from her living memory. Her resolve is tested when a younger priest is sent to the mission by the bishop to hone his pastoral skills under Father Damian’s tutelage. It is here that Agnes must make a second conversion, a rededication to her missionary work.
 
Agnes/Damian, over many years, comes to appreciate and respect her people, in the aggregate and as individuals. Many were Catholic, a good number were not, but Agnes developed close ties with those who eschewed public commitment to a foreign church or, like the tribal elder Nanapush, embraced an earthy but profound wisdom of life from his ancestry and personal observations. Over the chessboard one summer afternoon Damian accuses Nanapush of trickery in his strategy. Nanapush replies, “You’ve been tricking everybody! Still, that is what your spirits have instructed you to do, so you must do it. Your spirits must be powerful to require such a sacrifice.” [p. 232] Nanapush maintains a respectful silence, however, as do the few others who know or suspect that Father Damian is a woman.
 
The most significant threat to Agnes’ secret comes just before the end of her life in 1996, when the visitator investigating Sister Leopolda’s sainthood cause makes an extended stay, which opens his tired, middle-aged eyes to a great many mysteries beyond Leopolda. But those “demanding spirits,” as Nanapush called them, intervened in salvific ways, if not conventional ones.
 
If we were to recommend Last Report to a Catholic reading circle, what points of discussion would we submit to the facilitator. Of course, one can argue that this work belongs nowhere near a Catholic endeavor, given the deceit upon which the story line rests. [In August 2020, a priest in Detroit discovered on a home video that his infant baptism was defective and invalid, and thus his ordination to the priesthood was invalid as well. See story.] I do not condone deceit, either, and objectively speaking, Agnes DeWitt’s assumption of the priestly role was wrong on many levels. I would point, though, that our actual Catholic experience in the United States is hardly free from clerical and episcopal deceits. We have learned in recent years that functioning priests were active pedophiles, routinely reassigned by complicit bishops. Are these deceits less egregious than Father Damian’s? Again, as Flannery O’Connor reminds us, the Catholic novelist writes from the ground up, from sin to conversion.
 
The most obvious talking point would seem to be the issue of women’s ordination, but to raise that issue here is not faithful to the novel’s text. Agnes does not present as a woman priest. The struggle over her role as a Catholic cleric is an internal one, not a tribal issue. It is highly unlikely that the Ojibwe patriarchal mores would have accepted a woman priest in 1912. Moreover, Agnes herself feared that the inevitable discovery of her true sex after her death would shake the Catholic community, leading her to some extraordinary means to prevent this from happening.
 
However, this novel does raise valuable questions about the priesthood itself and the fashion in which it is lived. There are three priest figures in the tale—Agnes, the young associate, and the chancery visitator. All of them are broken people in some sense, and all are impacted—one can argue favorably--by encounter with the Ojibwe reservation. One can reflect upon a clerical life that tends toward the one dimensional, i.e., a life which resists the impact of two-way encounter in which the baptized enrich their shepherds as much as the other way around. One can argue that even the faux priest dies rich from a life of such communion, a point that is not lost on the visitator, who begins to wonder if he is investigating the wrong saint.

There is, to be sure, food for thought in this story about “evangelization.” In my youth we called it “missionary work,” and every self-respecting seminarian was expected to go through a phase of reflection about going to foreign lands. My order had extensive missions in Bolivia, Jamaica, and Japan, among other places. I will admit that I did not give it much thought, but I understood the common wisdom of the time, “to make disciples of all nations.” In recent years there has been much public discussion about whether the missionaries to what is now the United States were unintentionally colonialists as much as evangelizers to Native American peoples.
 
The template of Father Damian’s mission to the Ojibwe is remarkably sound. Vatican II permitted liturgical accommodations for the needs of indigenous peoples, but this story for the most part predates the Council [1962-1965] and the Latin Mass would have been normative, even on the reservation. The mission church provided regular confessions, communion was brought to the sick, and those unbaptized were visited and invited by Father Damian. But it was the priest’s willingness to share the full life of the tribe that seemed to have been his most effective witness. Reservation life was harsh by any measure. [Even in 1996, the visitator went offsite when possible for good coffee and hamburgers]. Father Damian mastered to a fair degree the Ojibwe language—no mean feat—and engaged in the various celebrations and sorrows of the community’s life.
 
Perhaps the greatest witness was the dedication of one entire life to the community. “Greater love than this no man hath, to lay down his life…” There is a universal message here about “making converts.” Talk, even religious talk, is cheap without the sacramental sign of engagement at cost. Agnes DeWitt/Father Damian, the priest without portfolio, crossed a cultural divide to bring a universal experience of Christ, by staying for the long haul to underwrite her message. 
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The Catechetics and Preaching of Today's Catholic Novels

1/10/2021

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One of the pleasures of the Christmas Season was a new acquisition for the Catechist Café Library, Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction [2020] by Nick Ripatrazone. The December 7 edition of The Presbyterian Outlook provides an excellent brief review here, but I will add some of my own thoughts as well. The premises of the author are twofold: [1] to highlight the significantly large number of Catholic novelists and their works throughout the twentieth century, and [2] to assess the impact of their experiences with Catholicism upon the stories they weave.

I wish I could remember the author [possibly George Bernard Shaw?] who was asked whether he wished to go to heaven or hell after his death. The response: “Well, I suppose I should say heaven as the safe bet, but in truth I think all the interesting people will be in hell.” I am not quite as cynical as all that, but it is hard to imagine a good novelist—and that includes Catholic novelists—who has not come to know evil very well. Our youthful Catholic catechetics has drilled in us the idea that the nature of Catholic living is perfection. The thoughtful adult Catholic comes to appreciate that life is uneven, unfair, cruel, and seeks an interpretive key. The Catholic novelist, true to his or her art, presents a “take” on human existence that brings the eternal to the moment, or at the very least, provides consolation to the soul that for whatever reason has despaired of a tradition once loved.

This work’s author, Nick Ripatrazone, is a student of novels, a critic who has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Esquire, The Poetry Foundation, Outside, The Sewanee Review, Commonweal, The Kenyon Review, and America.  He approaches Catholicism and its artists with both admiration and some wonder that more Catholics are not conscious of their American confreres who have made their bones in the literary world. In truth, beauty for its own sake, ars gratia artis, is not a noticeable staple of present-day catechetics. The overemphasis on moralizing from lectern and pulpit dulls the curiosity to see God’s hand in an old sot of a burned-out cleric. Alas, Graham Greene’s “Whiskey Priest” in The Power and the Glory [1940] is a graced moment tasted by relatively few.

Ripatrazone divides Catholic novelists by generation [Myles Connolly’s Mr. Blue of 1928 versus Phil Klay’s Redeployment of 2014 and the Gulf War] and by what might be called for want of a better term, intensity of engagement with Catholic life—e.g., cradle Catholics, converts, and the fallen-away. These are not always smooth distinctions--many Catholics never totally break away--and the author’s title seems to emphasize alien former Catholics, those writers who, despite Catholic upbringing and in many cases quality Catholic education, have disengaged from regular practice and write in the quest to find new mediums to address “the mess” of modern living. But a surprising number of those in full communion make major contributions, energizing the possibilities of Catholic conversation with the marketplace of thought and primarily experience .They all bring worthy bread to the table.

Ripatrazone highlights Catholic authors through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but he begins with the ever-controversial Flannery O’Connor [1925-1964], a devout if eccentric Catholic woman from Baptist Georgia. Blunt and uncompromising in person and in her works, O’Connor once attended a dinner where new theories of the Eucharist were being discussed, O’Connor famously declared “Well, if it’s [only] a symbol, to hell with it.” She believed in Real Presence, in the host and in human experience. Her belief in God’s immanent presence extended through her short stories and novels, which are not for the faint of heart. Marked by surgically detailed accounts of humans at their worst. O’Connor defended her style, observing that “violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.” I have read Wise Blood [1952] and seen the 1979 movie adaptation with a magnificent performance by actor Brad Dourif.  O’Connor is currently enjoying a renaissance of academic interest among with censure in some quarters for her southern racist views.   
 
The author proceeds to Dan DeLillo [b. 1936] as an example of a writer who cannot shake his Jesuit education despite his misgivings about religion, which he describes in an interview as “interesting as a discipline and a spectacle, as something that drives people to extreme behavior.” [Little wonder Wikipedia lists Flannery O’Connor as one of his literary influences.] DeLillo recalled his religion courses at Cardinal Hayes High School as convincing him that he was a “failed mystic,” which may account for an important theme in his works, the outsider versus the crowd. Ripatrazone cites Underworld [1997], End Zone [1972], and White Noise [1984].

Ron Hansen is also the product of Catholic education and a daily Mass attendant, bearing nostalgia for the drama of the Latin Mass. Hansen’s first novels, including The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, were not overly Catholic themed.  But in 1991 Hansen produced Mariette in Ecstasy, a drama of a 17-year-old postulant in a 1906 convent. I was amazed that such a highly acclaimed Catholic novel slipped under my radar. Ripatrazone calls this “the rare book lauded by both The Village Voice and diocesan newspapers.” An Amazon reader exclaimed “It's the kind of book I would have LOVED to have read in a devout Catholic book group, but only a prayerful group of practicing Catholics who actually live what they believe.” For all of that, Ecstasy “asks readers to follow belief toward its logical conclusion. If the sisters in the convent seek Christ, they must be ready to receive him in their midst. They are not. They are petty. They want a God of the mind but not the body. That, it seems, would eliminate the mystery and neuter their theology.” [p. 29]

Catechists and homilists have the luxury of operating in an a-sensual and a-sexual world of concepts; the downside of this luxury is an intellectual negation of the mystery of the Incarnation, where God assumes flesh, not theorems. The Catholic novelist carries the burden of marrying God’s love and purpose to the human flesh which, though scarred by sin, is capable of communion with God-in-flesh. Catholic novels are not always overtly Catholic in their settings—see Flannery O’Connor, for example, “who loathed devotional fiction”—but they are true to the language of the honest confessional.

The struggle of sexuality, identity, and faith is brought home vividly in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse [2001]. I purchased this on Ripatrazone’s review and have completed about half of it through this writing. Erdrich [b. 1954] operates a bookstore in Minneapolis which includes Native American artwork. She is a thoughtful and eclectic Catholic—her bookstore contains a restored confessional—and she herself is a product of German and Chippewa blood. Her upbringing exposed her to significant Catholic and Ojibwe religious worldviews.

Her Last Report is a tale of a missionary priest, Father Damien, who devotes his life to pastoring a far-flung Ojibwe mission near the Canadian border. But this is no ordinary pastor, and his pre-Ojibwe days take us to his true origin, as Sister Cecelia, aka Agnes DeWitt, a young nun who discovers her sexuality through her mastery of piano classics. The erotically awakened sister leaves the convent for full self-discovery, and after several ecstasy-agony adventures, assumes the identity of a new missionary priest killed in a spring flood in yet another quest for identity, in this case a conversion; upon offering her first Mass at the mission, she experiences a sense of destiny and permanence.

On the face of it, executing a sixty-year ecclesial fraud may strike one as the consummate sacrilege. But human life is deeper than our language’s ability to define or compress it. Erdrich masterfully narrates the inner experience of this faux priest, to the degree this is possible, but also the interior lives of her parishioners. We cannot judge morals till we know the culture, in this case the world of Ojibwe peoples whose lives and outlooks are scarred by Anglo-Saxon intrusion, poverty, conflicts with other tribes, and internal tensions over traditions including polygamy. [Last night’s evening read described the impact on the tribe of the Spanish flu.]

So, this narrative becomes a tale of a broken priest shepherding a broken people. There is prophesy here for Catholicism of 2021, where we are still reeling from the double lives of priests [and cardinals, for that matter] who stole the innocence of children much as colonial expansion snuffed out the integrity of Native American culture. Who indeed has committed the greater sin? Does clericalism eviscerate priestly identity just as sure as false impersonation? Such a question is never asked from a Sunday pulpit, where our sermons are generally the “loathed fiction” that Flannery O’Connor detested. Last Report gives us much to think about in our preconceptions about social justice and particularly evangelization, but there is more to it than that.

Ripatrazone does not carry his book to its logical conclusion, but he implies that the Catholic novelist has been and remains the true conscience of the Church, and for all people of good will. Aristotle, in his Poetics, spoke of drama and tragedy as a catharsis, a washing of the emotions. In our time the tales of Catholic novelists wash away the clutter of frivolity and deliver reflections of the Word that was sent to save us, soul and body.   
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Don't Run to Barnes & Noble Just Yet

11/20/2020

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The question most frequently asked here at the Café these days is: do I have to read the entire McCarrick Report on my computer? Where can I get a bound copy?

Unfortunately, no hardcopy is presently available unless you download the report to a ream of paper. All the links at various news services take you to one place, the Vatican’s copy. I would imagine at some point the text will get a hard cover and a gift box, but for the moment its availability is limited to an on-line pdf file. There is no arguing the cost: this link is free. I can say from years of Church ministry that the most economical way to obtain a church document of any type is by downloading the file to your Ipad or tablet. You can store the report on your Ipad in the handiest app; in my case, I downloaded it to Kindle, and Voila! Rest assured that when the published form is released in hardcopy, it will not be cheap. The Warren Commission Report on the assassination of Present John Kennedy runs $19 on paperback and $30 hardcover as of this morning on Amazon, and that text is over 50 years old.

If you would rather read published descriptions and analyses in online newspaper or magazine format, here are some suggestions:

National Catholic Reporter has the best and most detailed journalistic investigation and analysis of the content and reactions to the McCarrick Report. Reporter is a national lay-operated Catholic newspaper begun in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1964. Reporter has many enemies who consider it slanted left and even heretical, but this publication was printing serious analysis of the clerical abuse scourge twenty years before the Boston Globe breakthrough in 2002 and serves the Church well.
  
The National Catholic Register was founded in 1927 and is probably the first choice of priests and bishops. At its website, the Register describes its work: “Our mission is to provide a perspective on the news of the day as seen through the eyes of the Magisterium [i.e., Teaching Church]. We assist Catholics in engaging the culture with confidence in the saving and sanctifying Gospel of Jesus Christ.” But the paper has not pulled its punches on coverage of the McCarrick Report. It is owned by EWTN.

Crux describes itself as “a news site dedicated to offering the very best in smart, wired and independent coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church.” Crux was founded by the Boston Globe in 2014 and became totally independent in 2016. I respect and consult it in large part because of its editor, John L. Allen, one of the most respected Catholic journalists across the full spectrum of the Church. Crux is particularly respected for its Vatican coverage.
 
Catholic News Service or CNA, founded in 1920, is the official journalistic arm of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops or USCCB. Generally, its focus is aimed at issues of importance to the bishops in American life, and its news stories are subscribed to by many local Catholic diocesan papers.

 
All the above have generous online presence as well as weekly or bi-weekly mail editions. I much prefer the on-line services. Crux is free though a donation is requested for regular use. Reporter is $53/year for immediate on-line news and U.S. mail delivery. Register is $50/year, but it does offer a free email Church news service update for free. CNA requests a donation if possible. 

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Can You Hear Me, Church--part 2

10/9/2020

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This is the second part of the review of Sister Thea Bowman: Do You Hear Me, Church? [2020] by Peggy A. Sklar, released as Sister Thea [1937-1990], has come into the formal process of investigation by the Church for determining her sainthood. In the first post below, I outlined her early years in the Deep South [Canton, Mississippi] as a precocious and observant middle class African girl living in a Jim Crow state where doctors like her father were refused admitting privileges in the region’s hospital. A turning point in her adolescent awakening occurred when a Catholic community of sisters, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, established a school in 1948 which Bertha, [Sister Thea’s Methodist baptismal name] attended. Her involvement with the sisters included conversion to Catholicism, and at age 15, acceptance into the community’s formation program. Bertha, assigned the name Thea, completed her formation, and began school teaching as Sister Thea, first in Wisconsin and then in her hometown of Canton.
 
After several years of school teaching, Sister Thea was granted permission to attend Catholic University in Washington, D.C. I noticed in a second reading of this book that Sister Thea lived in a campus dormitory residence, and not a local convent. Although a very button-down conservative institution today, CU in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s was a forum for every religious, social, and political cause. [I was a student there at the time.] It appears that Sister Thea was able to network with the burgeoning black awareness movements on campus, a profound experience for an adult who had lived as a black minority of one in her professional world. She evidently gained respect for her energies on behalf of black artistic expression and education, and received an invitation to speak at Howard University, also in D.C. But Sklar observes that Sister Thea was able to balance her personal involvement in black cultural awareness activity with an ambitious and challenging course of studies on her way to an M.A. in English in 1969. Her master’s thesis reflected her admiration of St. Thomas More [1478-1535], the Chancellor of England martyred by Henry VIII. Sister Thea, familiar with More’s writings such as his Utopia, wrote her thesis on an early work of More [1503], “A Rueful Lamentation on the Death of Queen Elizabeth,” the mother of Henry VIII.
 
It would seem a curious choice for one who is remembered today for raising black consciousness to liturgical expression in the Catholic Church, but as early as her Howard University address she expressed her passion that the key to advancement of her race was education, and by extension, Catholic education as a cultural and evangelization strategy. Her Catholic University years coincided with controversies in many northern cities, notably Boston, about school bussing, i.e., black children transported to public schools in affluent neighborhoods where the quality of instruction was superior. As if to confirm her passion, she remained at Catholic University to pursue her doctorate; she also taught undergraduate courses at CU in black literature
 
In 1970 Sister Thea was invited to a conference of African American sisters in Pittsburgh hosted by the Sisters of Mercy, forerunner to the National Black Sisters’ Conference. [See the NBSC’s current on-line status here.] She had undertaken the doctorate to enhance a career in university teaching at her community’s Viterbo College. For her doctoral dissertation, she returned to St. Thomas More and his Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Sklar writes that Sister Thea was attracted to More’s rhetoric “to explain his belief and actions.” [p. 48] Sklar brings home the depth of Sister Thea’s academic commitment to emphasize her deeply founded belief that the education of young African Americans was the key to full equality in America.
 
Upon receipt of her doctorate Sister Thea returned full time to Viterbo College in La Crosse, Wisconsin [later, a university] where she taught English literature and chaired the English Department. She was invited to present a three-week summer seminar, presumably on Thomas More, at Oxford in England upon the completion of her degree, which gives us something of an idea of her standing in the international academic community. That said, she was also a free spirit in the classroom, innovative in her methods of engagement and her efforts to develop independent thinking and experiencing—though she was old fashioned in her tough grading standards.
 
To this point in her life, she was recognized as a colorful and brilliant religious order teacher and researcher in the inner life of the English language, something of a rarity for a woman of color. Her image as the Apostle of Black religious experience in America did not fully emerge until she returned to her hometown of Canton, Mississippi, to live with or near her elderly parents, with her community’s approval. Fortuitously she was hired by her local bishop, Joseph B. Brunini, himself a remarkable advocate on behalf of the Black Catholic experience and a major supporter of St. Augustine Seminary in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, where suitable black candidates could study for the priesthood.
 
Brunini created for Sister Thea the diocesan position of “Diocesan Consultant for Intercultural Awareness for the Diocese of Jackson.” This proved to be one of those deliciously broad job descriptions where an energetic self-starter with a clear vision could go where the Spirit willed her and draw from her rich experiences in both English and Black Society. Her official duties included “designing a variety for diverse audiences, including children, teens, and adults, to break down the existing barriers between cultures.” [p. 54] Under this mission were listed other populations including Hispanic, Native American, and Asian communities as well.
 
Her presentations and programming would appropriately fall under the description of thoughtful evangelicalism. When I worked at St. Mary’s in Anderson, SC, in the summers of 1970 and 1971, I had noticed that many of the Black youth of multiple churches in our section of town turned out eagerly for any summer’s day activity I scheduled—bible stories, games, sports, etc.-- but on Sunday only older and more successful Black members came to Mass. Catholicism’s dignity and ritual appealed to the more successful African-American population. The high-spirited, swaying, song-filled Biblical rubric we associate with Black worship, particularly but not exclusively in the deep South, never made much inroad into Catholic parochial life. Conversion to Catholicism meant conversion to a white ritual of stability for blacks, even if as in Anderson the Charleston SC diocese maintained both white and colored parishes.
 
Many bishops of the South—in partnership with religious communities in the twentieth century—showed considerable energies in evangelizing African-Americans in the South, with these efforts dating back to at least the 1930’s. After Vatican II concluded in 1965, the adaptation of the liturgy and the style of evangelization made it permissible and possible to celebrate Church life in the evangelical style of cultural Black experience. My impression is that Black Catholicism suffered the same throes of adjustment as white Catholicism—high levels of enthusiasm for innovation among some, and an angry grief at the disruption of the known in others. I have not had the opportunity to review Sister Thea’s writings or addresses—she died in 1990, before the age of the new electronics--but she seems to have appreciated the dynamics of her time.
 
Her style invited listeners to experience God in the idiom of their cultural experience, Among other things, she set aside her religious habit in favor of a colorful dashiki to exemplify a return to native culture. [See the cover of Sklar’s book.] She invested considerable energy in forming choirs and integrating Black music into Church life, in part to help her own people recover their heritage. In the fall of 1987 Sister Thea served as contributor and editor for GIA Publications’ Lead Me, Guide Me, The African American Catholic Hymnal, songs, and psalms for liturgical use.  
 
Her position with the Jackson, Mississippi Diocese allowed her to travel widely to several continents for conferences and addresses to energize Catholic movements of cultural awareness. Diagnosed with cancer in 1984, she suffered a fatal relapse and died in 1990. She had once described her life as “a shooting star.” By the numbers, she was right. Her full-time work as an evangelist of Black Catholicism lasted but twelve years, but she continues to be celebrated in a variety of ways. Siena College, my first priestly assignment, renamed a building after Sister Thea this year; the previously honored demoted individual was none other than the Catholic writer of the South, Flannery O’Connor. There is some irony in that.
 
As a student and English scholar, Sister Thea devoted much attention to precision and logical exposition. As an evangelical, she eschewed wordy cerebral expression for a holistic and sensual encounter with God. I hope that future scholars will be successful in piecing together her paper and experiential remains with the same skill she addressed St. Thomas More. Thirty years removed from her death, one wonders what Sister Thea would have made of the decreasing number of practicing Christians in the United States, or for that matter, the interracial response to the killing of George Floyd this past summer. The process of her canonization will no doubt progress or fall on our ability to understand where her brief life has taken us.   

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Can You Hear Me, Church--part one

9/18/2020

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I am more than a little surprised that in a year filled with strife and moral debate over racism in the United States, there has not been more attention paid to the initiation of canonization steps for Sister Thea Bowman [1937-1990] at the request of her home diocese of Jackson, Mississippi. Bertha Bowman was a youthful convert to Catholicism inspired by white Catholic religious sisters ministering to her black community [“Thea” was the religious name assigned when she entered the convent some years later]. From Peggy A. Sklar’s introduction to Sister Thea for Paulist Press [2020], I came away with the thought that Sister Thea is one of those people who zoom across the sky for a relatively short time but leave words with lasting potential. [She died of cancer at the age of 52.]
 
If Sister Thea is canonized, it will not be in recognition for having lived a lifetime behind cloister walls. Her life was remarkably diverse: sustained by an optimistic ego strength and devotion to a multi-cultural God that reached far beyond Western European Catholicism per se. Her diversity begins on her street. She lived on the “black side” of the street that divided her native Canton, Mississippi. Crossing the line was always trouble, even when the Bowman family dog wandered into Caucasian territory. No matter that Bertha’s father was a physician and her mother a retired schoolteacher. When Bertha, a late-in-life child was born, her father delivered her at home as Canton had no hospitals that would treat African American women.
 
Bertha, born in 1937, grew up in a stimulating household with two professional parents—her biographer describes her simultaneously as energetic, playful, and social. Her tea parties were occasionally integrated as circumstances permitted. A significant contribution to Bertha’s future was her mother’s voice and cultivation of music. Sklar identifies a community leader named Mother Ricker who taught the neighborhood children in her home Bible songs with accompanying Scripture stories. It is worth reflecting upon the Scriptural and devotional spirituality of Black evangelical song and worship: the music and sermons are drawn heavily from the Hebrew Scriptures, psalms of deliverance and the intervention of God to right the wrongs inflicted upon his chosen people. Even academic Black Theology today carries this salvific characteristic. It was not until the twentieth century and the ecumenical renewal of Scripture scholarship that trends such as Liberation Theology and Women’s Theological Studies took their places on many Catholic campuses [often kicking and screaming, to be sure.]
 
Bertha’s education was a major worry of her parents, who understood the “separate but equal” philosophy was a grave handicap to most black youngsters seeking a better future. It is little talked about today how Catholic bishops and certain religious orders pioneered Catholic evangelization in the South among African Americans. In 1946 Catholic Bishop Richard O. Gerow of Natchez, Mississippi asked the Servants of the Holy Trinity to develop a Catholic community. Catholics southern missionaries were not “poaching” from other Christian denominations; in fact, two-thirds of the African American community around Canton was unchurched. A pastor was named, and eventually the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration—including a nurse-- arrived in Canton to establish a school. [In 1884 the Plenary Council of Baltimore had mandated a parochial school in every parish in the United States.]
 
It is an interesting thing that of the first 94 students enrolled in this new Catholic school, the most enthusiastic to see it launched were black professionals—including the children of Protestant ministers. Bertha Bowman’s parents enrolled her, and Mrs. Bowman volunteered. As is true today, the local Catholic Church became a magnet of social services, particularly for mothers and children. It is hard to know how many converts were brought into this Canton church, but I have to suppress a smile whenever I hear the phrase “new evangelization” because the old time religion of St. Francis of Assisi seemed to be highly effective, thank you very much. [My own order of Franciscans began such work in the 1930’s.]
 
We do know of one convert—Bertha Bowman. Sklar describes the deep impression on Bertha made by the sisters of the parish. Bertha converted to Catholicism at 10, but her desire to follow the sisters’ example led her to seek entrance into the community itself. Her wise parents understood the culture shock of relocating from the Jim Crow south to the German sisters’ formation/mother’s house in Wisconsin. But at age 15, a determined Bertha and a sister chaperone made the trek via segregated trains to the upper Midwest to La Crosse, Wisconsin.
 
For Bertha, her cultural and social world turned upside down. She found herself a distinct minority of one, a black candidate in a white religious community. As every newbie to religious life quickly learns, the admirable members one meets in the field are not always representative of the entire community. Sklar is not overly specific about racial slights to the new applicant, noting that “she also had to adjust to the comments and behaviors of some of the sisters, not all of whom were as kind or accepting of her as those she knew in Canton.” [p. 21] But the author tells a good deal when she observed that Bertha’s learned practice of subservience around white people in Canton served her well during the formation years. The candidate from Canton had to adjust from the traditional cooking of the Deep South to the sui generis German cuisine of the northern sisters. And despite her parents’ best efforts on behalf of her education, she tested several grades behind her new northern peers.
 
Bertha persevered, however, and graduated from high school in 1955. She took the habit as a postulant to the religious community and began her studies at Viterbo College. She fell ill to tuberculosis and lost about one year of her formation to recovery at a TB sanitorium in Wisconsin, too ill to undertake even basic college studies at a local college. In 1956 she had sufficiently recovered to take the next step pf her formation, novitiate, a time of intense reflection upon vowed community life. As part of her entrance rite into the novitiate, she was given the religious name “Thea” meaning “of God” and not incidentally close to her father’s name, “Theon.” Novitiates in general are strict with greater isolation from the world; the overall theme is the prospect of vows at the end of the two-year period, an intense scrutiny of one’s spirituality, understanding of the order’s mission, and one’s capacity to live the vows and community life.
 
Having completed her novitiate and taken simple vows in 1958, Sister Thea was ready for field work and assigned to a Catholic school in La Crosse. Sklar comments that some parents at her new school were “alarmed” by her placement. Sister Thea taught a combined fifth and sixth grade class with little or no training, a practice known as the “twenty-year plan” in its day, when sisters went to summer school to the cusp of middle age to complete a bachelors degree. Sister Thea, age 21, did more than survive; she seems to have thrived in the classroom on the strength of her cheerful personality, her imagination and innovation, and strong bonding with parents.
 
When serious canonization investigations begin, and when the definitive biography of Sister Thea is written down the road, it will be fascinating to review the minutes of superiors’ assignment meetings, for orders varied in the amount of input allowed from members as to their preferences of career studies and assignments. My professor of New Testament Studies in the seminary told me that he had submitted a request in his seminary days to earn a doctorate in botany to teach in a Franciscan college. Sister Thea’s career track is intriguing. After two years teaching in La Crosse, she was transferred to, of all places, her hometown of Canton, Mississippi, where she taught in the Catholic elementary and high school over a seven-year span. It is here that the author describes the more intimate details of segregation.
 
The social indignities and the economic hardships of Southern black individuals prior to the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement are hopefully well-known among those familiar with American history. Sister Thea had departed Canton as an adolescent; now she was returning in 1961 as a professional woman, a habited Catholic nun, just as the movement was gaining national attention and regional opposition. Sister Thea’s ministry in Canton was an empowerment of personal dignity and faith. She labored to restore an appreciation of Black heritage, prose, and hymnody through her teaching and evidently in her other parish ministrations.
 
The word or gestures of “empowerment” can be heard in several ways. To much of the white establishment, empowerment sounded subversive and threatening. Her passion for music, for example, led to her fifty-student choir recording an album in 1967, The Voice of Negro America, composed of fourteen spirituals. It was clear to many, including some in her own convent who feared for their safety that Thea was not just another Franciscan nun teaching the alphabet to the poor. Her vision for her students—and her own people, for that matter--was broader, loftier, and concretely Biblical.
 
Thea was pursuing her summer “twenty-year plan” at Viterbo College, but around 1966 she transferred to Catholic University in Washington, D.C. in pursuit of a degree in English literature. She would study at Catholic University until 1972, earning her doctorate in English Language, Literature, and Linguistics. Pursuit of a doctorate in any decent school is quite expensive and takes a member out of circulation for productive community service for some time. I can only guess that her religious community was preparing her for college teaching, but again it would be intriguing to assess the community’s decision. Was she being brought north due to racial tension, or was her community prescient about her gifts to the broader American Church?
 
I am wrapping up part one of this post with one of those odd coincidences of life. For two years Sister Thea and I attended Catholic University simultaneously [1969-71]. As a doctoral candidate, she was teaching undergraduate courses and I could have signed up for one of them in my last semester. However, I took “urban planning” instead. I had no clue who Thea was or what her course was about. True Renaissance Man here.   
            
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The Catechetics of a Spy Novel

7/25/2020

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I have been dragging anchor over the past week or two in meeting deadlines for those who check in to the Catechist Café for information or book leads. My last substantive post was the life and times of Lord Acton, which required a good deal of reading and independent research, and frankly wore me out. Facebook, which posts new alerts to Café entries, reminds me that there have been only five posts in 28 days, a considerable reduction from those early days of 2015 when the goal was a heady daily informative piece. Mix in the oppressive Florida heat and the limitations imposed by the Covid-19, and you can see where my inkwell might be going dry.
 
So I took stock yesterday and went back to the original mission of the Café, to educate and stimulate those veteran ministers of Church life, best represented by the teachers and catechists, and to attract those adults of college education or its equivalent who are searching for identity as present day or former Catholics. When I was in high school, we studied Gresham’s Law, i.e., bad money drives good money out of circulation. The same, unfortunately, is true of Church publications and teaching programs. Enmeshed in politics and culture wars as well as a resurgence of a seventeenth-century trend known as Jansenism, which devalues human energies and learning in the search for God, our Church is not well. The Café was founded as the friendly site to find the middle road in the Kingdom of God.
 
Plumbing the Catholic experience in study, travel, the arts, and religious experience can take us in many directions and fire up greater personal interest in the Church that many love and many despair of. On Sunday afternoon the Amazon Prime Truck stopped by our house to deliver a book for my wife, Margaret. She is a member of a very stimulating book circle where each member is reviewing separate texts for 2021. Doing her due diligence, Margaret is now the owner of one of this summer’s hottest selling books, currently rated #47 in Amazon’s multi-million bookseller’s empire. I was telling her on Sunday that I need a novel to read, that my brain was “all work and no play.” So, she said, “try this” and she flipped me a hard-cover copy of Daniel Silva’s The Order. [released July 20, 2020]
 
I had no idea that The Order was Daniel Silva’s eighteenth book based upon the fictitious Jewish art restorer and senior Israeli spy Gabriel Allon. Consequently, I was not prepared for the plotline which involves the mysterious death of a pope [Paul VII, the fictional successor of John Paul II in the story] and the upcoming papal conclave in the Sistine Chapel to elect Paul’s successor. The unfolding of this “who dunnit?” will probably come fairly easily to fans of this genre, though some of the early Amazon reviews from readers suggest that the intelligence master Allon, now approaching middle age with a younger wife and two small children, might be showing his age a bit [read: few catastrophic violent events.] However, a terrorist catastrophe at the Vatican a few years earlier resulted in Allon’s saving the pope’s life and his becoming intimate friends with Pius VII and particularly his personal attendant in the papal residence—in case you were wondering how an Israeli master spy embeds in the preparation of a papal election.
 
Solving the mysteries, in my opinion, was less compelling than descriptions of the forces at work to seize control of the Catholic Church. I was not overwhelmed by The DaVinci Code [2003] years back because the plot seemed too farfetched. Sad to say, the forces at work in The Order are easy enough to see in real time today with the potential to do real damage. The book takes its name from a religious order gone rogue in the name of “saving” Catholic Western Civilization, in league with the new wave of Western nationalism, the rise of neo-Nazi elements in Europe and the United States, and ultraconservative money. When I read a book like The Order, which millions of Catholics in the United States will do during the dog days of August and Covid isolation, I regret that we overlook the catechetical opportunities that fall into our laps to explain the nature of the Church—its healthy and holy powers and its perpetual Achilles heels.
 
With that in mind, I cooked up a “catechetical guide” or Q&A drawn from various sections of The Order. If you read the book, or even if you don’t, when your friends come to you with “Catholic questions” you’ll be ready to address them honestly. Also, the issues bandied about in this book are currently being investigated by critical Catholic journalistic circles or have long histories, and I have attached links where helpful.
 
Have there been suspicious papal deaths in recent history?
In my lifetime the only death with a shadow is that of Pope John Paul I on September 28, 1978, after a reign of 33 days. A variety of papal household contradictions on the circumstances of discovery raised eyebrows, and no autopsy was performed. Conspiracy theorists say he was murdered because he planned an overhaul and reform of the “Vatican Bank” whose practices attracted an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice among other law enforcement agencies. The film “Godfather III” addresses the general corruption of Vatican monies. But Pope John Paul II, upon his election, apparently did not see evidence of personal foul play in the death of his predecessor.
 
Can a papal conclave be purchased?
[If you need a refresher on how popes are elected in conclaves, the Encyclopedia Britannica has an excellent brief history here.] From the time of Constantine to that of Napoleon, the election of a pope would have had to meet the approval of the Holy Roman Emperors, who were not above military and other coercive means to get the Bishop of Rome they wanted, for any of a wide range of political reasons. As late as 1939, Mussolini allowed a conclave to elect Pius XII on the grounds that as a lifelong diplomat, Pius XII would not embarrass the Duce’s regime publicly/  
 
The new late twentieth century makeup of the College of Cardinals—with the red hat being conferred upon churchmen of all continents, affluent and starving—certainly enhances the opportunities to purchase influence. The isolated leaders with major public health and economic struggles can be more welcoming to the overtures of senior well-placed churchmen in Rome or elsewhere, cleric or lay, who can do them and their dioceses some good with charitable infusions of cash for a clinic, for example.
 
From two cases that dominated American newspapers, Bishops Theodore McCarrick [2018] of Washington, and Patrick Bransfield [2019] of Wheeling, West Virginia, we get a picture of what a Church bribe might look like. An interesting point in real life and in the novel is the lack of recipients’ efforts to hide such payments. In The Order, most recipients deposited their seven-figure awards in the Vatican Bank! I must add editorially that Pope Francis has not released the results of the McCarrick and Bransfield investigations as was promised in 2019, which suggests that monetary influence is still in play in many parts of the administrative Church; the names of high ranking churchmen who received payoffs in these two scandals have yet to be revealed.
 
Why is winning a papal election worth all the trouble?
Two goals top the list: clusters of cardinals may want something to happen, or they may want something not to happen. In the [second] conclave of 1978, many cardinals wanted to break the grip of Italian clergy on the selection process, and they wanted to show solidarity with Catholics behind the Iron Curtain and other totalitarian regimes. Both objectives were met in the election of Karol Wojtyla—a non-Italian Pole whose election so stunned and disturbed the Communist Bloc nations that John Paul II was shot nearly fatally three years after his election.
 
The ideology of a pope—any pope—affects the world’s stock market and global economy as well as a nation’s internal politics. There are over one billion Catholics throughout the world, enough to shape public opinion. As a very general rule, a papal candidate known to be traditional, predictable, and orderly would be preferred by most world governments; a true radical reformer candidate—anti-war, moral critic of capitalism, green environmentalist, etc.—would probably not be invited to speak at the G20.
 
What about the candidates? Does their spirituality play a decisive role in how electors might be inclined to vote? 
Generally speaking, cardinal electors assume that the men they vote for are no more or no less holy than they themselves are. Given that most Cardinals come up the ladder through Church administration as bishops or curial officials, overall their spiritual identities tend toward Church ministry and management. A papal candidate is expected to be a good communicator and evangelist more than a mystic.
 
As The Order underscores so well, most voting Cardinals have history—good, controversial, deeply personal, and in some cases, disqualifying. In the NETFLIX film “Two Popes,” Benedict XVI admits to the future Francis I his failure to face the wide network of predatory priests and particularly bishops. Cardinal Bergoglio in turn confesses his failures to protect social reformist priests under his charge from imprisonment and torture at the hands of the right-wing Argentinian government. The Curia has a reputation for intelligence gathering on both personal and administrative missteps of bishops, leading theologians, and papabile [those considered papal front-runners.] I would not be surprised to learn that national intelligence gatherings include papabile in daily “housekeeping” around the time of a conclave.
 
Voting Cardinals outside of Rome arrive several days before a conclave and are housed together to give them time for prayer, rest, meals, drinks, long walks, and of course scuttlebutt about those perceived by the media and in certain Church cliques as papabile. Although a confidential decorum is expected, the oath of secrecy--and its penalty of excommunication--is not administered until the doors of the Sistine Chapel are locked. However, the voting Cardinals are still free to discuss candidates and vote tallies with each other throughout the conclave.
 
Do we know what happens inside a papal conclave?
For all the oaths and confiscation of cell phones, there are several narratives of recent conclaves provided and/or confirmed by the participants themselves. A largely forgotten but intriguing read is Peter Hebblethwaite’s The Year of Three Popes [1979] which covers both conclaves of 1978. But much closer to our own time is the compelling The Election of Pope Francis [2019]. The author is Gerard O’Connell, a journalist who has covered the Vatican since 1985. He was the TV studio analyst for the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s live coverage of the conclave. O’Connell’s wife, Elisabetta Pique, is the Vatican reporter for the Argentinian newspaper La Nacion. The couple had been friends with Cardinal Bergoglio for years before his election, and O’Connell predicted his election on the CBC. The new Pope Francis called them within a day or so of his election.
 
Having read O’Connell’s work myself, I have the feeling that the strict secrecy of papal conclaves may be a thing of the past. Conclaves will never be televised, and non-voting observers will not be admitted, but the process might become more transparent, a quality desperately needed in the contemporary Church. A good number of cardinals talked freely to O’Connell, and none of them has been excommunicated to my knowledge. The tallies of each ballot are reported, along with tidbits such as serious considerations of both Cardinals Dolan and O’Malley of the United States as papabile. O’Malley, in fact, tallied as high as fourth in one ballot.
 
Is planning and lobbying going on right now for the next conclave?
Indeed, there are three books currently on the market laying out pastoral profiles for the next pope, by journalist-authors Russell Shaw, Edward Pentin, and George Weigel. Weigel was Pope John Paul II’s biographer, and from reviews I have read, he would like the next pope to govern in the mold of John, conservatively and traditionally. Weigel’s book created a news story when New York’s Cardinal Dolan sent a copy of Weigel’s book to all 200+ cardinals around the world, an act that in Roman circles would be regarded as an infamia.
 
One of the most powerful themes of The Order—the “facilitating crisis,” one might argue--is the two millennia persecution of Jews by Catholics and Christians. Is this a fair rendering?
Historically, hatred and persecution of the Jews roots back to two erroneous theological traditions which, while repudiated today by scholars of all reputable religious academies, are still a staple of poorly catechized Christians. The first is early frustrations of Jewish-Christians to convert their temple brethren to belief in Jesus as the new messiah. The destruction of the Jerusalem temple by Rome in 70 A.D. was interpreted as God’s final rejection of his once holy people and their replacement with Christianity.
 
The second tradition dates to the Gospel of Matthew, written years after the fall of Jerusalem. Consider Chapter 27: 24-25 of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Passion: When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. "I am innocent of this man's blood," he said. "It is your responsibility!" 25All the people answered, "His blood is on us and on our children!" Christians soon coined the term deicide [“the killing of God”] to brand the entire people of Abraham a despised race.
 
In the novel, the Jewish spy Gabriel Allon consistently reminds his Catholic clerical friends of the sufferings of his people at the hands of the Church. For example, Allon explains to one cleric that guards and executioners at the notorious Holocaust death camps were likely to be practicing Catholics, to which his listener has no answer. His accusations throughout the book are more than fair; worse, our history of antisemitism is not a major staple of preaching and catechetics today. Catholicism has not yet experienced its “Jewish Lives Matter” moment.
 
All things considered, could the next papal conclave resemble that of The Order, particularly in terms of fault lines? 
Pope Francis appears to be in good health, so the next conclave could be several years off. A few things can be reasonably assumed. The economic impact of the Covid-19 virus has virtually just begun. One example: next week the Covid-19 rental relief program comes to an end in the United States. The gap between rich and poor will be enhanced even in the traditionally affluent countries. In Third World nations the picture would be bleaker.
 
In many countries, including the United States, the Church has become entangled in the so-called “culture wars,” unwisely in my view. Subsequently the temptation of political parties and establishments and independent Catholic organizations, such as the Knights of Columbus, to exert influence on Church life becomes greater. The nationalist and neo-Nazi movements are discussed at some length in The Order, particularly in Europe. The current anti-Christian acts of terror, such as desecration, along with the perennial rages against Judaism, reflect multiple issues, at least one being the identification of Christianity with colonial oppression.
 
The continuing absence of Vatican transparency regarding finances is a critical problem. Not only does it scandalize Catholics, but the secrecy obscures the sources of gifts and makes the compromise of all Church business real possibilities. In the Bransfield 2019 report, still not released, the names of ten of the eleven bishops who received gifts were not identified. The eleventh, Archbishop Lori of Baltimore, was the Vatican’s investigator and publicly donated his $10,000 to Catholic Charities.
 
The Order devotes itself to crimes and politics in the Church; it does not much wander into the spiritual side of religion except to take note of moral guilt. Consequently, it is unclear how the victor of the fictional conclave will address the spiritual hungers of his people, particularly as he himself has history. In real life a new pope will face the “Archimedes Problem.” Archimedes, the Greek inventor of the lever, claimed: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Every pope must pray that his place to stand was not ill-gotten.  

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The Arch Enemy of Unfettered Power

7/17/2020

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In the introduction to Lord Acton [2002], the renowned English historian Owen Chadwick [p. ix] observes that those who know little of Acton’s life and works are at least familiar with one of Acton’s quotations which remains alive and well in English conversation to this day, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” What is not generally appreciated by Catholics and others is the context of the quote, a letter to the Catholic Archbishop Mandell Creighton in 1887, or seventeen years after Vatican I and the solemn declaration of papal infallibility. Writes Acton:  
 
“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which . . . the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, . . . but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science….”
 
This from the pen of a devout Catholic Englishman whose home included a chapel and chaplain for daily Mass. John Emerich Edward Dalberg Action [1834-1902] was possibly England’s most influential Catholic layman of the nineteenth century whose life, works, and particularly his ideas continue to throw much light upon the struggles of the Catholic Church in 2020. If one were to ask the nature of his profession, he would probably answer “historian,” and in fact he did hold the chair of history at Cambridge for the last six years of his life. It would also be fair to call him a political scientist, who learned that trade from a long and close friendship with William Gladstone [1809-1898], the British Prime Minister during the latter decades of Queen Victoria’s reign [r. 1837-1901]. His peers would call him “connected” both by birth and activism. Acton himself would serve six years in the House of Commons early in his career.
 
But Acton’s personal involvement in Church life and dialogue is what makes him a valuable source of reflection in our own times. He was born in 1834 in Naples, Italy, one of several sites where he maintained homes outside of England. By marriage, the Acton family had deep roots on both sides of the Channel [Bavaria and southern France being favorite retreats over the course of his life.]. His father was wealthy and well placed but died when the future Lord Acton was three. That both father and son were able to succeed to the degree they did is indicative of the slow but real restoration of Protestant tolerance of Catholics after several centuries of persecution begun in Henry VIII’s day. The Acton English homestead was in Aldenham, the site where he would accumulate as many as 70,000 books, a collection that has passed to Cambridge after his death in the twentieth century.
 
Acton applied to Cambridge in mid-century for his higher education but was refused admission, ironically because of his Catholic faith. This proved to be a blessing in disguise, for his family sent him instead to the University of Munich under the tutelage of the priest-historian Ignaz von Dollinger. Dollinger is a major name in Catholic history primarily for something he did not do—accept the 1870 proclamation of papal infallibility at Vatican I [1870]. But that was in the future. The teacher-student relationship blossomed into an intellectual and personal friendship that endured till Dollinger’s death at 91, through several stressful periods including Dollinger’s excommunication.
 
To grasp Acton’s life, some background in European history itself is vital. The author, Roland Hill, devotes enough description to explain Acton’s role in it, but the nineteenth century in Europe and in the United States is enormously complex. Consider that Acton was born in 1834, as Europe was still recovering from the roller coaster years of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and that he died just a decade before World War I. Acton studied the damages wreaked by uncontrolled popular excesses on the one hand, and the capricious and frequently disastrous actions of uncontrolled despots on the other.
 
Hoping to find a better middle way, there was a slow but consistent drift toward national unification in several regions, notably Italy, which existed as several autonomous kingdoms including the Papal States. A generic term for this era is the rise of nationalism, often along the lines of ethnic unity and history. When Garibaldi rallied the peoples of the Italian peninsula into one sovereign state, his intentions included absorbing the Papal States, land which held a practical and especially a religious significance for popes who had considered their sovereignty as religious and temporal since about 800 A.D. The national unification of Italy, with its critical implications for Catholic theology of the papacy, became an all-consuming issue for Catholics throughout the Western World, not least of all in Acton’s England.
 
Having been trained by Dollinger in Munich, Acton returned to his home in Aldenham and bowed to pressure to serve six undistinguished years in Parliament, eager to get on with his greater calling as a scholar, researcher, book collector, and most of all, a facilitator of discourse and ideas among men of letters, particularly but not exclusively Catholics. Given that he was independently wealthy, highly competent, and a known devout Catholic, his periodic journal the Rambler, could tolerate a broader range of views than more orthodox Catholic periodicals. Bishop John Newman [now a saint], a clerical convert to Roman Catholicism, was one of the Rambler’s most famous contributors as well as its editor for a time, and his famous Rambler contribution, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” [July, 1859] is required reading in higher religious education.   
 
In the 1850’s Dollinger had introduced Acton to the renewal of the discipline of history that was sweeping Western Europe at that time. Scholars such as Leopold von Ranke [1795-1886] were revisiting the methodology of history, or historiography. [When you ignore a Facebook photo or report because there is no source provided, you are practicing sound basic historiography.] In the 1800’s the practice of history was evolving from a narrative of the names, dates, and places we all hated to memorize in high school into interpretations and judgments of past events with implications for present day life. If you look back at Acton’s letter to Archbishop Creighton above, you can see that Acton’s understanding of the “historian’s science” is restoration of just balance, calling to task past kings and popes for abuse of power. In a sense, the maturing Acton was defining for himself a philosophy of history as an act of public service for present day good order and morality.
 
It was Acton’s relentless search of books and documents on the history of the Church that led him to serious doubts about the wisdom of a declaration of papal infallibility. Ironically, Acton’s work was significantly enriched when he was granted access to secret Vatican archives through an intervention to Pope Pius IX [r. 1846-1878], who had met Acton and Dollinger in a private audience earlier in their careers. Convinced of his duty, Acton used his journal writings and exchanges with both English and European laymen and bishops to gather opposition to the solemn declaration of papal infallibility as a doctrine of the Church. One pressing reason for his urgency was the proposed doctrine’s threat, as he saw it, to freedom of conscience, a principle being embraced by progressive nations including his own England. Prime Minister Gladstone, though not a Catholic, shared Acton’s concern of a severe limitation on human thought and exchange. Gladstone was also concerned that papal claims to unfettered supremacy would seriously damage relations with the Church of England and the Orthodox. Interestingly, Acton was a correspondent with the Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his wife. Lee explained to Acton that he personally abhorred slavery but fought the war for the protection of freedom of conscience, understood by Lee as states rights and by Acton as an oppression of conscience by an intrusive federal government, i.e., the Union. Acton, of course, was not an English outlier on the subject; the British contemplated military support of the Confederacy until its defeat at Gettysburg in 1863.
 
Acton and his followers were at odds with the “Ultramontanes,” [literally, those beyond the mountains, specifically the Alps] who argued for retention of a powerful Roman centralized Church buttressed by the formal declaration of infallibility. Hill describes the battle leading up to the Council Vatican I [1869-1870], including the debates within England. The author concludes that Acton’s [and Dollinger’s] struggles to ward off an infallibility decree were, at the end, Quixotic. Most bishops may have questioned the need for such a profound declaration, but their respect for Pius IX remained strong. Acton and his family hosted a steady stream of bishops at a rented apartment in Rome for dinners and lobbying, but the control of the agenda of the Council by the Roman Curia and the instincts of bishops not to defy a sitting successor of Peter carried the day. Only two bishops voted against infallibility, one of them from a former Confederate state, Arkansas.
 
Dollinger, a priest, suffered much greater fallout for his opposition. Ordered to swear fealty to the new doctrine, he refused, was relieved of clerical duty, and eventually excommunicated. He became the organizing factor for an international schismatic Catholic Church [the “Old Catholic Church”] which was identical to the Roman Catholic Church except for its denial of a monarchical papacy. It is hard to know the degree of Dollinger’s actual sentiment and involvement with this movement, which exists to this day, but the Vatican justly identified him with it, and Dollinger was never reconciled to the Church. He was anointed on his deathbed by an Old Catholic cleric.


Acton, a married Catholic layman with five children, was never significantly disciplined by the Church and never truly lost his church or civil standing. As a layman, he was never summoned to swear an oath of fealty to the Council’s decree. And while excommunication was threatened by his longtime English foe, the Ultramontanist Cardinal Manning, it was hard for the auditors of the Index of Forbidden Books in the Roman Curia to sanction the thousands of journal articles, public letters, lectures, etc. that Acton would continue till his death in 1903. For the rest of his life Acton believed that the infallibility pronouncement was a mistake, and he did not hesitate to say so until his death, but he did not follow Dollinger’s radicalism and continued fidelity to the sacraments and a daily prayer regimen. In a recently discovered correspondence, his wife Maria writes to a close friend that, after intercourse, Acton got on his knees and prayed that they had conceived a child. Evidently his prayers were heard from time to time, though Maria found it peculiar. This was, after all, Victorian England.
 
Dollinger, despite his troubles, and others of Acton’s friends began to wonder what Acton’s literary legacy would be, given that he was now well into his 50’s. Given all his research, his contributions to journals, his book acquisitions, and his personal dinners and travels with learned men across England and Europe, he had never written a substantive book. His estate devalued to the point that the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, at Gladstone’s request, purchased Acton’s collection of 70,00 books, keeping Acton solvent until he received two prestigious offers. The first was Queen Victoria’s appointment to the Regius Chair of History at Cambridge, a remarkable turn of events in that the university had rejected his application four decades earlier because of his Catholicism. Acton and the Queen were good friends stemming from the former’s past services at Buckingham Palace.
 
Acton was 61 when he received this honor, but his rich dining and utter lack of exercise produced a serious condition of gout which likely shortened his life. There is sadness in that Acton was born for Cambridge life, immensely popular among students and peers alike; he added informal seminars to his routine for those students eager to engage in historical studies careers. Alas, he had arrived there at the twilight of his life. A second recognition of respect was Cambridge’s invitation to edit the master Cambridge World History series, a complicated project which taxed his diminishing strength. He died in 1902 at the age of 68, at his Bavarian residence where he had gone for some hope of convalescence. The author notes that the Bavarian burial site is so overgrown that it is nearly impossible to find, as of 2000.
 
Acton was eulogized profusely by friend and foe alike. The year 1903 saw a resurgence of Ultramontane energies which spared no efforts to decry Acton’s suspicions of excessive Church authority and paint him into a corner with the expelled Dollinger. But those who knew him well understood that he was a complex lay Catholic who as a political thinker embraced the English liberal positions of self-determination [as with Ireland], freedom of conscience, and concern over the economic inequities of the industrial age. On the other hand, he was a most traditional Catholic who drew strength from such works as Thomas a Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. He serves well as a template for loving the Church by reforming the Church and laying the groundwork for lay activism in the post Vatican II era.
 
Acton’s understanding of history was almost prophetic in the Biblical sense, passing moral judgments on the actions of the major figures of history to correct them, with the end purpose of protecting human liberty and freedom. Acton’s relentless hard judgments on past figures led even Dollinger to tell him he was starting to sound like an old shrew. The consensus recurring criticism of Acton’s philosophy of history, manifested again in his lengthy quote at the opening of this post, is the inconsistency of denying moral righteousness and authority to kings and popes while awarding moral infallibility, so to speak, to historians.  
 
Acton, were he alive today, would have much to say about America’s struggle over the interpretations of its history and the way it is celebrated or denounced. At the very least, he probably would have saved some of those Robert E. Lee statues for his garden at Aldenham.
  

There is a fine 30 minute presentation about Acton on YouTube.
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"What Happened at Vatican II" by John W. O'Malley

5/1/2020

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If you were catechized before the 1960’s, the term “ecumenical council” probably did not come up in your texts or your classroom discussions. The last one prior to 1962’s Vatican II was, appropriately enough, Vatican I [1868-1870]. Vatican I was the first council conducted in St. Peter’s, and fittingly so, as the fathers in attendance voted for the promulgation of the doctrine of infallibility of the pope when he solemnly teachers on matters of faith and morals. Prior to Vatican I, some ecumenical councils were conducted in St. John of the Lateran Hill Cathedral in Rome, Christianity’s mother church for a millennium until the sixteenth century construction of St. Peter’s and the strengthening of the papacy. But most councils have been held around the known Christian world in Europe as far east as modern-day Istanbul, Turkey. The declaration of pope as final arbiter of matters of faith and morals in 1870 seemed to eliminate the need for future councils of bishops.
 
An “ecumenical” council is a meeting that includes every bishop of the Church, including the two-dozen Eastern Rite Churches, such as the Melkite and Syriac rites, in communion with Rome. In Catholic practice, the term “ecumenical” [from the Greek oikoumenē, “the inhabited world”] is used somewhat more narrowly than in other Christian Churches. At Vatican II, no Orthodox patriarch or representative of a Protestant Church served as a voting member, though a small contingent of outside observers were permitted to attend. Synods, or regional/national meetings of bishops, were permitted before and after the infallibility decree of Vatican I; the famous 1884 Plenary Council of Baltimore’s decision that every Catholic parish was to have a Catholic school is a prime example. But with the doctrine of papal infallibility now declared, and the central governance of the Church resting with the Roman Curia, most Catholics—and probably most bishops—assumed that ecumenical councils were now unnecessary, a piece of Church tradition that no longer served its consultative purpose.
 
It is hard for us to appreciate both the odds of another Council ever being called in the twentieth century, and the radical renewal that this Council, Vatican II, attempted to bring forth both into the Church and into society at large. An excellent analysis of Vatican II—how it came to be and what transpired during its four years of meeting—is John W. O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II [2008]. This is not an easy book—some exposure to Church/European history is probably desirable, though Chapter 2, “The Long Nineteenth Century,” provides as lucid an analysis of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church as one is likely to find. During our “unexpected sabbatical” this is just the right book with which to orient one’s self to the life of the Church in 2020.
 
What strikes me about O’Malley in his narration and conclusions is his ability to make sound judgments without lapsing into judgmental excesses. Many commentators have found this balance hard to achieve in their own writings on the Council through the present day. The negative assessment of Vatican II—no doubt enhanced by opponents of the radical reforms of Pope Francis--as progressive European theologians stealing the agenda from the Roman Curia still lingers, particularly on traditional Catholic blog sites. There are Catholics who identify as sedevacanists [from the Latin, “empty seat”] who hold that there has not been an authentic pope since Pius XII died in 1958, such is their distrust and rejection of Pope John XXIII, who announced a council in 1959 and “started all the trouble.” O’Malley does not run away from “prelates behaving badly,” but he provides an insightful overview of how those passions developed.
 
Chapter 2, “The Long Nineteenth Century,” is an intriguing and balanced account of Church and society in the formation of Vatican II; the author dates this century as extending from the French Revolution (1789) to the eve of Vatican II (1962). The “nineteenth century” was the coming to full bloom of secular modernity; for the Church, there was no hope of turning back the clock to a time before nationalism, democracy, science, and separation of Church and State, the end, as O’Malley phrases it, of the “old marriage of throne and altar.” (p. 54) Given that the modern era posed physical as well as philosophical threats to the Church of Rome--Risorgimento and the end of the papal states, for example--an embattled central church used the tools at its command: a fierce adherence to its past and a resistance to the present. The defensive posture of the Roman Church maintained itself through the election of Pope John XXIII.
 
Vatican II sprung from the mind of Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, elected to the papacy in 1958 at the age of 78, probably as an interim pope to serve until the Curia could arrive at a long-term consensus. No one was more stunned at the 1959 announcement of a council than the papal curia, which reportedly sat in “icy silence” when John announced his decision to them. O’Malley captures the scope of the Council in terms of size and cost with some wonderment that such an event as Vatican II could have taken place at all. The author does not idolize Pope John; he recognizes that the pope—a keen observer of twentieth century horrors—came to the Throne of Peter with a conviction that the times called for a new conversation between the Church and the world. Pope John could model what he hoped for in his messages and encyclicals, taking the unheard-of measure of addressing his encyclicals to the whole world, not simply the Roman Catholic Church. but O’Malley critiques the unwieldly machinery collected for the drafting of goals, documents, and floor management. Visionary as he was, John XXIII fielded an old guard administration for the Council that admittedly used its many bureaucratic tools to befuddle the proceedings and maintain an administrative control that angered many of the bishops in attendance.
 
The Curia hoped to engineer a brief council in the mode and format of Vatican I, a tightening of nuts and bolts and additions of new feasts and titles for the Virgin Mary. And yet, O’Malley explains the Curial mind without malice at numerous points in the narrative. If I may jump ahead to a telling episode on the debate over Revelation, Dei Verbum, in October 1965, the floor debate virtually ground to a halt over the language on the relationship of Scripture and Church Tradition as twin sources of Revelation. While a strong majority of the Council fathers endorsed a greater role for the Bible in Church life, the Curia lobbied Pope Paul VI to maintain a definition of Tradition as equal to Scripture. For Cardinal Siri, among others, any hint of diminution of Tradition as an equal revelation source would undermine doctrines of the Virgin Mary, notably the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, neither of which enjoyed a strong Biblical foundation. (p. 278)
 
O’Malley’s narrative incorporates three impulses driving most Council fathers and their theological advisors: Aggiornamento, Ressourcement, and Development of Doctrine. “Aggiornamento” is a term often applied to Pope John’s “throwing open the windows.” In his addresses, John used the term favorably as a need to openness and change in the face of new challenges throughout the world. Implied, of course, was the critique that the modus operandi of the Church had grown stodgy and academically stale. Aggiornamento was a mood; Ressourcement, on the other hand, was a technical theological term for a contemporary review of the primitive or early practices of the Church. A good example of the Ressourcement method is seen in the Council’s decree on the renewal of religious orders, Perfectae Caritatis. The Council challenged the orders to return to the principles of their founders, the original inspirations of a St. Benedict or a St. Francis of Assisi. “Development” was a theological principle of exploration of existing teachings to consider new applications. A notable example is the American John Courtney Murray’s contribution to the Council’s “Declaration on Religious Liberty,” a defense of freedom of conscience that distanced itself from the older Catholic principle that “error has no rights.”
 
O’Malley manages to produce a consistent chronology of the floor proceedings despite considerable odds. Among them was uncertainty over just how long the Council would last. That Vatican II extended over four years [generally from September to December] came as a gradual surprise and point of concern for bishops—and certainly to the Curia, which had hoped for a one-session conclave of several weeks. Once the original Curial plan for a pocket council was scuttled, its proceedings were managed by Vatican moderators in a fashion of haphazardness, an unevenness of clock management, and a maddeningly disjointed daily agenda of serious debate interrupted frequently by calls to vote on schemas or portions of schemas on entirely different subjects. Hardly a Roberts Rules convocation. All public sessions were conducted in Latin.
 
As a result, many bishops from the “third world” and the Eastern rite churches received precious little attention to their pressing concerns by Council’s end. Moreover, some documents were written hastily (on “Social Communications,” for example) so that precious time could be allotted to major doctrinal and pastoral concerns. The author speaks positively of the bishops themselves—their openness to Pope John’s vision, their own theological acumen or their selection of competent advisors, and their willingness to tackle controversial questions from the start: Sacrosanctum Concilium or the “Sacred Constitution on the Liturgy” was the first document promulgated. In total, sixteen documents of varying degrees and importance were promulgated by December 1965. O’Malley summarizes the major documents and the pros and cons of the floor discussions in such a way that the reader can reflect upon the wisdom of conciliar determinations and whether their goals have been satisfactorily achieved in the past half-century.
 
In his final chapter, “Conclusion,” O’Malley does offer a telling assessment of perhaps the biggest error of the bishops, particular Western bishops: “They assumed an easier transition from ideas of the scholars’ study to the social reality of the church than proved to be the case.” (p. 292) Hence the turmoil when the bishops returned home. Put another way, the cutting edge thinking of the theologians and many bishops did not easily compute to an attainable catechesis. The strong reaction to the recent encyclicals of Pope Francis and charges that he is a socialist reflect that much more study of Vatican II remains to be done.
   
I dislike using the pedestrian term “useful” to describe fine literature, but John W. O’Malley’s 300-page overview of the Council is the kind of work one buys in hardcover if possible, because it will enjoy a long shelf life. It is the quintessential one-volume history of the Council for catechetics, adult education, the college classroom, and the general adult Catholic readership. It is also worthy of study and review in our present downtime; our Catholic experience will be the richer for it. 

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The Tears and Hopes in Our Prolonged "Eucharistic Fast"

4/10/2020

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My personal Facebook account this morning includes reactions from my relatives and friends who participated in the Holy Thursday Mass last night via telecast or streaming. Here in the Orlando Diocese the Cathedral Mass was live cast on YouTube, and my wife and I viewed the liturgy on our widescreen. I was happy for all the children who might be viewing, because televised Mass is probably the only way most of them ever get to see the altar. [Architects, are you listening?]
 
I was struck by two responses of people I deeply respect. For one, a fellow parishioner, celebrating this high holy day in the fashion we did was uniquely inspiring. As she put it, “Tonight, through technology and the efforts of the clergy, religious, and lay people of the Diocese of Orlando, I and thousands of other Catholics in Central Florida were able to celebrate this most holy night. Different, yes. Still personally holy, yes. In the words of our Jewish ancestors “why is this night different?”. As said at the end tonight’s homily it’s not because we celebrated Mass via the wonders of technology but because “we remember, we celebrate, we believe”.
 
The second response, from my young niece, reflected another genuine reaction: “There is a lot of scariness right now. I am afraid for everyone's health and well-being. It's hard to adjust to our new lifestyles. But even with all of that, the first thing that truly caused me to be overcome by emotion was watching Holy Thursday mass on Facebook live. My heart breaks that I can't celebrate Holy Week in my church, with my community. The loss of that makes almost everything else seem trivial.”
 
Set side by side, these testaments complement each other in the ways we relate to the Eucharistic sacrament. There is something stunning about the idea that our hunger for Eucharistic communion with the Lord and our brethren in the Lord led so many of us to electronically follow the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on 61” screens or even smart watches in a pinch. Equally true, the pain of missing full communion through the Mass and/or the opportunity for Eucharistic adoration is an ache of the soul that can only be softened by the reality that our prolonged “Eucharistic fast” is a sacrifice on behalf of the most vulnerable of God’s people among us.
 
I have come to respect a young Catholic theologian from Regina, Saskatchewan, Brett Salkeld. As a father of seven children, it is a wonder how he finds time to write and do his research. Last year, family notwithstanding, Salkeld published a splendid new book on the Eucharist, Transubstantiation: Theology, History, and Christian Unity. A specialist in ecumenism or inter-church relations, Salkeld discerned a need for a clear understanding of what the Catholic Church believes and teaches about Real Presence, i.e., how Christ becomes present in the bread and wine. The term “transubstantiation” refers to that process of change.
 
Salkeld draws heavily upon the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas [1225-1274] and his exhaustive writings on sacraments. My kiddie catechism in 1956, the year of my first communion, defined sacraments as “outward signs, instituted by Christ, to give grace.” Aquinas, in his technical Latin, would define sacraments as signs that deliver what they signify. Pouring baptismal water over an infant’s head is a sign of washing, but in this sacrament, there is a real washing taking place, a cleansing of the collective sin of Adam and his descendants. We can be certain that “baptism works” because it is done at the command of Christ [or “instituted by Christ,” to use the older language.] And, if one lives faithfully to Christ’s example, one will be saved [i.e., given the “grace of redemption.”]
 
The same principles would be true for every sacrament, including the Eucharist. But Aquinas and other great thinkers are quick to remind us that sacraments are provisional realities, for the period between Christ’s cross and the Last Coming. At the end of the world there will be no need for sacraments, since we will be in the presence of the fullness of God. Consequently, no sacrament makes us perfect in this life, but if celebrated frequently with faith and played out in our human conduct they will prepare us for our final destiny of perfect joy.
 
Communion, when administered to the dying, is called viaticum, “food for the journey.” In truth, all communion is viaticum in the sense that we need the constant food that is Christ to push on through our fears and weaknesses. My niece articulated this well. It is also true that as a provisional sacrament, the Eucharist points to a day “when every tear will be wiped away.” This is the Jewish hope of Passover. Our Christian Passover this year has been disrupted but not stopped. As every Passover ends with “next year in Jerusalem,” in a special way we Christians can look to the day when we are physically united to the Eucharistic meal and to our family in faith.
 
Prayers and blessings to all.
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"The American Pope"[1983]--Spelly's World

4/2/2020

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When I was old enough to start noticing such things, a few American bishops crossed my consciousness. I never laid eyes on my own diocesan bishop, Joseph Burke [r. 1952-1962], who skipped my parish confirmation and paid a visiting missionary bishop $5/a head for the privilege. According to Buffalo folk lore, when bishops were polled by the pope’s representatives prior to Vatican II for the topics they wished to see discussed, my bishop replied that the Council should mandate red altar coverings, so as to easily spot the tiny white crumbs from the broken communion host. Bishop Burke has a small footnote in the history of Vatican II; he was the first bishop to die at the Council, during the first week, no less.
 
In the 1960’s many Catholics could be excused if they thought the highest ranking American churchman was Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston. Cushing was very close to Joseph P. Kennedy, patriarch of the Massachusetts Kennedy clan. Cushing married John and Jacqueline Kennedy, supported John in his run for the presidency in 1960 against the wishes of most U.S. bishops who preferred Richard Nixon, and may be most remembered for the televised funeral Mass and Arlington Cemetery rites of President Kennedy three days after his assassination. In 1968 Cardinal Cushing came under harsh criticism in some quarters for refusing to condemn the widowed Mrs. Kennedy’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis, who was divorced.
 
In terms of significant power in the Church, in government, and in international affairs, the most significant bishop to this point in the history of our country was Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York [r. 1939-1967]. When I recently obtained and read a copy of The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman [1984] by John Cooney, I was surprised that near 40 years later no one has seen fit to write a definitive history after Cooney’s. Cooney’s biography of Cardinal Spellman is, in the words of Kirkus Review, “a drawn-out hatchet job on a distasteful man who seems to deserve most of what he gets…” A richer critique of this book is William V. Shannon’s 1984 “Guileless and Machiavellian.” Shannon, a highly respected author in his own right and an ambassador to Ireland, writes that “this is not a great biography, because the important issues are not weighed judiciously enough, and the writing is not careful and nuanced.” And yet, Cooney's is the only biography of Spellman that stands.
 
To know and understand Spellman is to know much of the history of the Church of the United States from the Great Depression to the Viet Nam War, to know an era of incredible ecclesiastical growth, and to appreciate, if that is the right word, the golden age of clericalism, when a bishop could forbid his diocese from patronizing a particular movie. An excellent fundraiser, one of Spellman’s considerable achievements was the construction of churches, schools, and other institutions throughout the Archdiocese of New York. A little-known fact is that the calendar year 1966 was the first in which Spellman failed to build a new school in the Archdiocese, which corresponds to the end of the post-war building boom of Catholic schools in the United States.
 
Spellman hailed from Whitman, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, and seems to have crafted his own seminary cursus, obtaining a master’s degree at Fordham University and then to the North American College in Rome to complete studies for the priesthood. Spellman was frank from the beginning that he had little use for theological disputations or deep personal piety. [“I hire theologians.”] He envisioned his priesthood as an energetic builder. Like other ambitious clerics, Spellman used his time in Rome to befriend both Vatican officials and rich lay Catholics, serving as something of a genteel go-fer, arranging tickets for papal audiences, for example.
 
His superior, Archbishop William O’Connell of Boston, did not like him. Perhaps it is the nature of the beast that go-getter clergy make bishops nervous. But O’Connell put Spellman in onerous administrative posts such as hawking the diocesan paper, The Pilot. For his first pastorate, Spellman was sent to a poor parish with a large debt. Spellman retired the debt and demonstrated his ability to connect with wealthy potential contributors. It was his skill as a translator as well as a fundraiser that prompted Rome to disengage him from O’Connell and work for the Curia, where he wrote English language radio addresses for the sitting pope, Pius XI.
 
Soon Spellman was serving as a special currier throughout Europe on behalf of the Holy See, where he made the most valuable friendship of his life, with Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli, who used his influence to situate Spellman as an auxiliary bishop under O’Connell back in Boston. [O’Connell was never consulted.] Spellman served as middleman in negotiations between Franklin Roosevelt and Pius XI over diplomatic recognition of Vatican City. In 1939 Pacelli was elected to the papacy as Pope Pius XII and one of his first acts was the appointment of Spellman to the position of Archbishop [and soon Cardinal] of New York. Soon after his New York appointment, Spellman was named Apostolic Vicar for U.S. Forces, i.e., archbishop for all U.S. military units stationed around the world.]
​
Unbeknownst to most Catholics at the time was his private work for President Roosevelt during World War II. As a clergyman, Spellman enjoyed access to international state leaders and generals that would not be available to a professional diplomat. He discovered in his private dealings with the high command that U.S. military leaders privately viewed Russia as the major postwar threat, a view that enhanced Spellman’s deep hatred of totalitarian Communism and would color his work back in the United States after the war. Spellman had genuine respect for the fighting men in the trenches and spent many Christmases overseas with U.S. troops, a practice he continued through the Korean War and the Viet Nam War till his death in 1967.  
 
As World War II ended, Spellman engaged in rebuilding his archdiocese, heavily in debt, its facilities aging, and baby boomer families extending into Long Island and the Hudson Valley. Between 1954 and 1959. Spellman supervised the construction of churches [15], schools [94], rectories [22], convents [60], and other institutions [34]. Coupled with his own construction were the donations of millions of dollars to the operation and discretion of the Vatican, still recovering its losses in World War II. By this means the Cardinal cemented his ties with Pius XII, the Roman Curia, and churchmen around the world.
 
Spellman was able to generate funds in several ways. He centralized all parochial finances in the chancery, commonplace today but apparently not the practice of New York when he arrived. He taxed his 400+ parishes and centralized all operation and construction through his office, simplifying oversight and enhancing the archdiocese’s purchasing power. He developed “white glove soliciting” in the nation’s finance capital and attracted donations from celebrities and business barons. He inaugurated the Al Smith Dinner, now de rigour for national politicians each October, particularly during election years when the two candidates for the American presidency are seated at the head table with New York’s archbishop between them. [At the 2000 dinner, candidate George W. Bush addressed the audience: "This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base." In 2012 Barack Obama famously roasted builder Donald Trump, then in attendance, over the “birther issue.”]
 
Spellman was a man of superlative generosity and administrative genius. He was one of the first American bishops to recognize the pastoral needs of a growing Hispanic Catholic population and gave his blessing to weekly Spanish Masses. Under ordinary circumstances I would have expected several expanded and detailed biographies of Spellman to have appeared in my lifetime. However, any biographer would have to come to grips with several aspects of Spellman’s life that today’s reading audience would find hard to hear and where available evidence is debatable or contradictory.
 
Spellman’s politics. As noted earlier, Spellman was a rabid anticommunist who in later years found it difficult to separate Church, State, and free speech. His public statements and government advice lent the credibility of the Church to the witch hunting and career destructions of the McCarthy era. Spellman’s open support of Senator Joseph McCarthy was in many respects a dereliction of duty, well intentioned as it might have been allowing for the “Communist scare.” When the need for a moral voice against McCarthy was greatest, Spellman and the U.S. Catholic Church was in no place to deliver it. Thus, in 1954, it was left to the attorney for the U.S. Army, Joseph Welch, to confront on national television the excesses of McCarthy’s tactics with his famous “Have you no sense of decency, Senator, at long last?” In 1956, when McCarthy was disgraced, sick, and drinking heavily, Spellman saw fit to provide McCarthy with an infant for adoption from one of his archdiocesan foundling homes, an act viscerally condemned by authors who mention it.
 
Spellman’s graveyard. Pope Leo XIII had granted workers the right to organize and negotiate in the 1870’s, but in 1949 Cardinal Spellman refused to hear the request of the diocesan grave diggers union, seeking a 40-hour week instead of its current 48-hour arrangement. Spellman locked them out, and when the number of coffins reached about 1200, he ordered New York seminarians to dig the graves. Spellman’s overworked defense was his belief that unions were rife with communists.
 
Spellman and Bishop Fulton Sheen. When Fulton Sheen grew tired of his academic career in Washington in 1950, he was transferred to New York where he is most famous for his prime time TV show, “Life Is Worth Living” on the Dumont Network as well as his directorship of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Sheen’s TV and publishing reputation as “America’s Bishop” would hardly sit well with his superior who believed himself to hold that popular moniker. In 1957, Spellman and Sheen had a major falling out over powdered milk donated by the federal government for distribution overseas. Spellman gave the milk to Sheen to distribute through the offices of the Propagation of the Faith but charged him over $1 million for the milk. In “the great milk scandal” Sheen appealed to the pope, the dying Pius XII, who sided with Sheen against his protégé Spellman, who pulled him off television and made him a pariah among diocesan priests.
 
In reviewing America's Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen [2002] I commented on Spellman’s plan to break Sheen: “These factors, coupled with Spellman's own devils, led to an estrangement between the two that produced one of the strangest episcopal appointments of our lifetime.
 
“In October 1966 Fulton Sheen was appointed bishop of Rochester, NY. To church observers it was clear that Spellman had orchestrated the transfer for ultimate humiliation effect. In public, at least, Sheen put the best face on things, explaining that his tenure would be an experiment with the reforms of the recently concluded Vatican II. In truth, Sheen was a pre-Vatican II autocrat who alienated nearly every local constituency. His unilateral decision-making cost him his priests, and his explicit criticisms of racial policies at Kodak the support of the city's largest employer. He was deeply wounded that Rochester did not recognize the celebrity in its midst, and within three years "America's best preacher" withered into retirement.” Spellman, in short, had given Sheen the rope to hang himself.
 
Spellman’s personal life: I noted above Cardinal Spellman’s “own devils.” In the first galleys of the book I am describing here, John Cooney devoted four pages to Spellman’s alleged active homosexuality. The publisher, The New York Times Press, of all people, ordered the material suppressed and Cooney devotes one paragraph to the fact that rumors persist but distract from the main thrust of Spellman’s life and ministry. It is true that J. Edgar Hoover maintained an extensive FBI file on the Cardinal, which has been made public through the Freedom of Information Act, though it is so heavily redacted that I could make little of it. It is easily located on the internet. 
 
Spellman has been dead for 53 years, and Cooney, as well as lesser known writers and eventually posters in social media, have been content to consign the question to ancient history. Cooney published his biography in 1983, before the revelations of bishop misconduct came to light in the 2000’s. Spellman seemed to have dodged any new assaults to his reputation—until February 9, 2019, when Lucian K. Truscott IV, a longtime journalist and writer, came forward in Salon magazine with an allegation that Cardinal Spellman groped him four times during a 1967 meeting. Truscott was a West Point cadet interviewing the Cardinal for the student publication The Cadet. Three witnesses were present, Truscott’s two classmates and a Monsignor who scolded the Cardinal after each attempt.
 
True to its new policies, the Archdiocese of New York has opened an investigation, reporting that the allegation was news to the Archdiocese. Whatever the outcome, Spellman’s story illustrates how the Church looks for different qualities in its bishops today, a result in part of the new vision of the episcopacy articulated in the Documents of Vatican II. Speaking of Vatican II, Spellman had little use for the Council, particularly the proposed English Mass. As he himself put it, “None of this will get past the Statue of Liberty.”   
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