LITURGY

A Real "Handful": Praying the Our Father at Mass

10/1/2026

IT STARTED WITH A SIMPLE QUESTION...

A few weeks ago, one of our Café friends asked the question of whether we are allowed to extend or raise our hands in prayer during the recitation or singing of “The Our Father” during Mass. Strangely, I had never given this question much thought. I went with the currency. When I was newly ordained, my congregation was about one thousand Catholic college students who were singing the Our Father, as we had “guitar Masses” most of the time. I have no recollection of what my students did with their hands during the Our Father. I do remember, though, at Christmas and Holy Week in the 1970's helping the friar confessors at our downtown shrine in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the Fall River Diocese. It seemed that the students at the Catholic high school there were used to holding hands during the Our Father at Mass—a fairly common practice from place to place. But the Bishop chewed them out for the practice during a school Mass one day and created something of a hurt feeling mess, about the last thing you should do with youthful congregations.

Over the past weeks I have attempted to track down the official Church teaching on how to manage your hands during the Our Father at Mass. Bear with me here as we undo this gordian knot.

The first formal Council statement on the reform of the Mass is, not surprisingly, the Vatican II Decree on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium [1963]. I have a link to the English translation here. I think many Catholics would be surprised to discover what the Council taught and did not teach about the Mass. As is the case with the other fifteen documents of the Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium is something of a compromise between those devoted to past history and practice, on the one hand, and those calling for a new vision for the Church on the other. It is not unusual to find statements in the same documents that seem to contradict each other. Sacrosanctum Concilium, for example, states that no priest should take it upon himself to change any part of the Mass on his own. [Of course, there was a seven-year gap between SC in 1963 and the release of the new Vatican II Missal or Mass formulary of 1970. This was definitely a limbo phase.]

On the other hand, SC also had this to say to priests: “Pastors of souls must therefore realize that, when the liturgy is celebrated, something more is required than the mere observation of the laws governing valid and licit celebration; it is their duty also to ensure that the faithful take part fully aware of what they are doing, actively engaged in the rite, and enriched by its effects. [SC 11, Italics mine.] Thus began a generation of experimentation in which priests and lay Catholics alike engaged in newer forms of celebrating Mass and overhauling Catholic life in general. I remember as a high school seminary senior our priest/class moderator would offer Mass for us as a class in a small chapel where we could stand around the altar with him and pass the consecrated hosts to each other as well as the chalice of consecrated wine. That was radical for 1965, a long way before lay ministers of the Eucharist were formally approved in the 1970’s. Even my seminary itself began to pull back the strict and formal daily discipline—a little bit, anyway. We were allowed to go home for Easter [1965+] and Thanksgiving [1967+].

The years immediately after Vatican II felt like a lifting of burdens and an opportunity to express one’s inner personhood in the life of the Church. It was a time when lay male lectors became a common staple at the Mass—altar girls, women lectors, and lay ministers of the Eucharist would follow as the age passed into the 1970’s. Those of my generation recall the Charismatic Movement, where lay prayer meetings inspired members to speak in tongues. Many bishops tolerated these changes; some did not. Many lay persons welcomed “the changes,” and many did not.

After the world’s bishops left Rome in December, 1965, the conclusion of Vatican II, the general plan called for each national conference of bishops to meet in synods to determine which new procedures and policies would be approved, and which traditional practices and laws would remain in force; these conclusions, in the form of requests, were sent to the Vatican Curia or papal office for ultimate approval or rejection. This procedure included examination of the translation of two critical texts: the Bible and the Roman Missal. All of us Catholics have familiarity with the Vatican’s approval of the New American Bible or NAB in 1970, and of its revision, the NABRE in 2011. The NABRE, or New American Bible Revised Edition, is the translation we use at Mass in the United States today.

Approvals of these translated texts went smoothly compared to translations of the Mass rite itself from its official Latin text to English and other tongues. My best read is that the popes who followed the Council, notably Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, were seriously concerned that not just rubric discipline but the very doctrinal integrity of the Mass itself was threatened by years of experimentation, much of it unauthorized. Consequently, the end of the twentieth and the beginning of this century is a story of a partial return to uniformity, as in “no priest should take it upon himself to change any part of the Mass on his own.” Coupled with this was a renewed emphasis upon the unique role of the priest at Mass; there was to be no confusing the role of the priest with the role of a non-priest during Mass or other sacrament.

Some variation of this 1997 Vatican directive appears or underscores all liturgical directives: “Neither may deacons or non-ordained members of the faithful use gestures or actions which are proper to the same priest celebrant. It is a grave abuse for any member of the non-ordained faithful to "quasi preside" at the Mass while leaving only that minimal participation to the priest which is necessary to secure validity.” [Instruction on Certain Questions Regarding the collaboration of the non-ordained faithful in the sacred ministry of priest. Vatican City 1997, Section 6, para. 2] The fear of the popes during this era seemed to be the diminishment of the unique role of the priest in the Church. Put another way, the role of the priest was reemphasized as the official representative who offers Christ back to His Father in the name of all the Faithful. He, he alone, raises the praises to the Father at the Our Father with extended hands, or so the argument goes. Any infringement in which a lay person assumes a role assigned only to the priest during Mass is strictly forbidden. The contrast of priest and laity, spelled out clearly in some quarters of Catholic journalism regarding the Our Father, is not universally held, however.

BUT GETTING BACK TO THE HANDS….

What does all this legislation have to do with what I do with my hands during the praying of the Our Father at Mass? Sitting here in the shadow of Disneyworld, I attend the same 5 PM parish every week [except when in Ireland, LOL]. I hold my wife’s hand through much of the Mass and quite frankly never gave the matter much philosophizing. My wife’s presence next to me, coupled with my own reflections on The Lord’s Prayer, is plenty enough for this boy.

When the question was posed to me several weeks ago, I did look around to see what the “common practice” was here at home. It is safe to say that my parish Mass has adopted a number of stances during the Our Father, none of them outlandish and many seem to engage the worshippers. I should point out that there are three main postures in play. [1] Some persons stand and pray the Our Father aloud with hands folded. [2] A cluster or pew of people hold hands while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. [3] Individuals raise their hands/arms heavenward to various degrees while praying the Lord’s Prayer. [I realize I left out a fourth group, the parents who brought young children to Mass to instill in them the practice of common prayer and love of the Eucharist. After Mass I try, when I can, to thank them for enriching God’s Church and to encourage the little ones to come back soon.]

As I noted earlier, Church leaders seem to have less angina about handholding during the Our Father. Commentators do point out that public handholding can be distressful for introverts, those fearful of Covid and other infections, and those who would prefer the older, pre-Vatican II style—when all rubrics were devoutly uniform. It is true that multigenerational families in attendance have the added advantage of familial closeness. Affection for the hand-holding ritual is not universal but it is not forbidden, either. Since the priest celebrant never holds hands during Mass, there is no “lay overstepping” issue in play.

It is the laity’s praying of the Our Father at Mass with hands open and/or raised that creates controversy. The Latin Missal, the mother ship, instructs the celebrant [and only the celebrant] to pray with raised, extended hands 29 times during each Mass at assigned times. There is no instruction that the laity do likewise. Hence, the praying with open/extended arms has been designated a “priestly” rite in itself, not to be imitated by the laity.

The priest's Latin command to pray with extended hands is orans. Wikipedia defines this word: “In Christianity, orans (from Medieval Latin orans, meaning "one who is praying or pleading") refers to a posture of prayer where a person stands with elbows close to the body and hands outstretched sideways, palms up. This position is rooted in Scripture, notably 1 Timothy 2:8, and was common in early Christian worship. It symbolizes supplication, submission, and the outline of the cross, and is depicted in early Christian art, including catacomb frescoes and icons."

If there is anything we should be doing in common—during Mass and the 167 other hours of the week—it is begging for the Lord’s food, submitting ourselves in contrition for our sins, and outlining ourselves with the sufferings of Christ on the Cross. My thought is: defining the celebrant at Mass as the only ritual officiant to extend his arms and pray thusly is overreach. Orans includes the spirit of submission! How can one logically argue that the laity would be "overreaching" when our open arms are empty and we are pleading for bread and forgiveness?

This may be one of the times when the governing Church, collectively, might best serve the universal Church by stepping back from an ill-advised rubric. In fact, that strategy may already be in play. The Latin Missal says nothing about the lay faithful’s prayerful position of extended armshands. A handful of U.S. bishops have issued instructions to their dioceses to catechize against extending hands/arms during the Our Father at Mass: Lincoln, Nebraska; and Columbus, Ohio, to cite two. However, the American bishops as a whole [the USCCB] have not forbidden hand-holding or the extended arms of supplication during the Our Father. The USCCB site offers no directive I could find. Italy itself has no prohibition of either stance.

AND SO:

It is for each of us to determine what attitudes and postures we bring to this critical juncture of the Mass. No one should be forced into contacts which are uncomfortable for them. Nor should anyone feel inhibited from extending one’s arms to embrace the words that Jesus used as the prime formula of prayer for the Meal that gives us Life. We cherish unity over uniformity.

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Canon 630 and Choosing Confessors

9/21/2026

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About a year ago I instituted an innovative way to put forward topics for discussion on the Catechist Café. [Remember that any reader is free to submit a topic for the Café for my expert team to research and address in a blog.] I used AI to list at random all 1752 Codes of Canon Law, the official collection of laws and procedures of the entire Roman Catholic Church’s life—including sacraments, religious orders, property, etc. After the Café post earlier this week which ran to almost 4000 words, I thought a round of “Canon Law Bingo” might be easier and better digested. The AI wheel stopped at Code 630. The subject: Can Religious Superiors hear the confessions of their subjects? Code 630 opens many doors of discussion for every baptized Catholic. The Code breaks this down into five components, and we will discuss each.

Before we progress, I should note that the Code of Canon Law currently in use was published in 1983; the previous Code is from 1917. Sadly, the abuse crises in the Church have uncovered several cases in the U.S. where a priest solicited sex from a man, woman, or child in the confessional setting. That abuse is covered in Canon 1387 in the present code. Our discussion today will not address Canon 1387 because of its complexity. But know that if such a thing happens to you, every diocese is prepared to help you with spiritual and traumatic counseling, among other services. As the penitent and victim, you are not bound to confessional secrecy if you report.

CANON 630

[1] While safeguarding the discipline of the institute, Superiors are to acknowledge the freedom due to the members concerning the sacrament of penance and the direction of conscience.

The term ‘superior” can apply to the local bishop or religious superior of a monastery, a friary, or a women’s community of religious. The point of this sentence is to maintain opportunities for religious to always have access to confession but also protecting the right of the penitent to choose the confessor best suited to the individual’s age, personality, and spirituality.

The word “institute” here applies to the specific order or religious community. The “discipline” of an institute is a reference to superiors’ responsibility to provide all his or her charges with opportunities to confess. It is not stated that the subject must confess to appointed confessors, or for that matter, to anyone at all. Admittedly, it is a little hard to imagine a dedicated priest, religious, seminarian, or practicing lay person never going to confession at all. The Church Council IV Lateran [1215] mandated that all Catholics must confess and receive the Eucharist once a year, the “Easter Duty” as it was referred to prior to Vatican II. Although IV Lateran’s mandate was a considerable improvement for the Church in 1215, today we hold to a much higher standard for sacramental engagement.

In summary, this sentence obliges church authorities to make confessors available for religious orders—and by extension, the faithful at large—but it does not rule to whom or how often one confesses.

[2] According to the norm of proper law, superiors are to be concerned that suitable confessors are available to the members, to whom the members can confess frequently.

Two important takeaways from this segment. The first deals with the competency of the confessor and his authorization, the latter called “faculties,” from the local bishop. [Priests cannot freelance, and after the abuse scandals, the paperwork/legal checks for a priest to hear confessions or do other kinds of pastoral work outside his diocese is more scrutinized.] Regarding the word “suitable” it is safe to say that when priests and religious are on retreat, for example, it would be suitable to bring in confessors with experience in the spirituality of religious life and the order’s particular spirit, or with the unique lifestyle of a priest.

Having said that, I must admit that I gave my first week-long retreat for sisters in New Hampshire in 1975, about five months after I was ordained, and I heard many of their confessions despite my “rookie status.” I did religious order retreats for about four years before going to Florida in 1978; I think the reason I was constantly invited around the Northeast was precisely my youthfulness. In the 1970’s, religious communities of women were theologically and ministerially far ahead of those of men in the reform process, and there were openings for those of us priests with post-Vatican II education and an openness to respect the blooming feminine spirituality.

But this brings us to more questions. We know that, all things being equal, absolution administered by an ordained priest in good standing forgives sin, regardless of respective ages, cultures, and devotions of the priest and the penitent. Are Catholics free to select a confessor with whom they spiritually “resonate?” 630[2] makes a clear statement that penitents should have a choice of confessors to the degree that this is possible. The question is whether one chooses a specific, regular confessor because he is “easy” and content with one’s routine, or because he takes the time to work with the penitent to grow in holiness and/or provide personal advice for moral living. It is probably wise to ask yourself this question from time to time.

630[2] uses the adverb “frequently” regarding confession. Two factors in making determination of “frequency” for yourself: [1] Do you have spiritual input from other sources, such as Bible studies, personal meditation, religious societies, and even personal spiritual direction? Some parishes have laity with special training to offer spiritual advice and ways to grow in holiness. [2] In the present day the Penitential Rite at Mass is observed so quickly and without reflection that its significance to forgive venial sins is totally lost. [That is the responsibility of the celebrant, not the congregation.] If you are free from mortal sin, the Penitential Rite [“I confess to Almighty God….”] in the context of the entire Mass frees or “remits” the guilt of venial or lesser sins. All my sources recommend, though, that confession remains a part of your life for the purpose of maintaining moral purpose and strength, even if you do not sin mortally. Here’s how one Catholic DJ handled the confession question.

[3] In monasteries of nuns, in houses of formation, and in more numerous lay communities, there are to be ordinary confessors approved by the local ordinary [bishop] after consultation with the community; nevertheless, there is no obligation to approach them.

During my novitiate year [1968-69] prior to entering the major seminary, the novitiate staff consisted of only three priests. The custom was for two other religious priests from my order to drive to our cloistered residence on the mountaintop to hear confessions as outsiders. They came every week or every other week to be available for us to confess. One day our novice master told us as a group that the two priests—fine gentlemen—were concerned that their services were not needed, as no one was coming to them for confession.

The novice master was not angry with us—Church Law is clear that you can’t force anyone to go, even seminarians and religious order candidates. The novice master sounded somewhat torn himself about the decreasing frequency of confession, not just in the novitiate but in the Church in general. While I was in novitiate, Pope Paul VI issued [1968] his teaching Humanae Vitae, prohibiting all forms of artificial birth control, which impacted all Catholic married couples, not just thirty friars in training on a mountain. A strong argument has been made that Humanae Vitae discouraged Catholics from confessing, that it imposed significant hardships on couples. As I have not heard confessions in over thirty years, I can’t say whether fewer or more people are confessing, and how they are doing it.

I confess twice a year, outside of my parish, usually on retreat at a Trappist monastery and to a religious order priest about an hour away from my home. In those instances, I make a “general confession.” The explanatory link here underscores the importance of getting to one’s core spiritual sinfulness and deficiencies while at the same time tracing one’s efforts to cultivate personal acts of goodness and a desire for closer communion with God. [General Confession, because it takes longer, is best done by appointment; most priests will be happy to help you.] I once made a general confession at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington—there is a chapel with four confessors for tourists—and when I was all finished, I discovered the priest did not understand English. All he said was “say the rosary.” That, fortunately, was my only "general confession mishap."

I would add that my 26 years of regular three-month sessions with my psychiatrist [for prescription and counseling management of depression] continue to serve as a building block to inner honesty and hence, richer spirituality. Intense counseling cuts to the core of motivation, which has a way of bringing honesty to religious observance. An experienced spiritual director will not let you off the hook easily, either, if you are open and honest with such a director.

[4] Superiors are not to hear the confessions of subjects unless the members request it on their own initiative.

This clause reinforces earlier teachings on the freedom of those in religious life to choose their confessors. The New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law [2000] explains this in detail [p. 793], but it goes on to another dimension of the issue, whether bishops can or should hear the confessions of the priests incardinated [incorporated] to the bishop’s diocese. The New Commentary agrees with several AI searches I conducted that a diocesan bishop enjoys the faculties to hear the confessions of diocesan priests.

ChatGPT did raise a cautionary note. “There can, however, be a pastoral reason for the priest to choose another confessor—especially if the bishop has to make decisions concerning the priest’s assignment, discipline, or other matters where maintaining a clear distinction between sacramental confession and governance would be prudent.” And what about lay ministers and employees who must, by the nature of their work, develop close ties with pastors?

The pastor—employee relationship demands closer examination from Catholic sociologists. Over the years I had to discharge several employees. Such moments are never pleasant. The problem is that the bishop or pastor represents the “official Church” to many people locally. Being discharged is sometimes interpreted as a repudiation by the pastor personally or by the institutional Church as whole.

A partial solution to this dilemma would be to place all lay employees on contract, with six month or annual job evaluations, so that promotions or demotions have a concrete basis and possibly less impact upon the spiritual relationship between a pastor and a parishioner and/or employee. My diocese does not offer the contract option, except for the parish school personnel. Nationally, dioceses have the option regarding contracts and due process regarding termination for lay employees.

[5] Members are to approach superiors with trust, to whom they can freely and on their own initiative open their minds. Superiors, however, are forbidden to induce the members in any way to make a manifestation of conscience to them.

This rule, written explicitly for religious in 630, holds true for all Catholics in their relationships to their local clergy.

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Pope Leo's Excommunications: Background

8/22/2026

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I was out of the United States when Pope Leo XIV excommunicated the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), or specifically the bishops of that society who consecrated new bishops without Vatican approval. Leo declared the entirety of the SSPX community—priests and laity--to be in schism, i.e., separated from the universal Roman Catholic Church; there are options and procedures for them to return to full communion with the Church. Wikipedia’s entry on the Society of St. Pius makes for heavy reading, but it does summarize the players and relations of Rome with the SSPX since its founding in 1970 and down to Pope Leo’s most recent disciplinary action this summer.

WHAT ARE THE ROOTS OF THE SSPX?

Despite the documents of Vatican II [1962-1965] and the overwhelming votes of support by the bishops in attendance, in truth there were major disagreements in some quarters about the Council’s theological stances on ecumenism, religious liberty, and collegiality. Regarding ecumenism, Vatican II taught that the Trinitarian Baptism with water, i.e., “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” is valid in all Christian Churches—not just Roman Catholic ones--because we all share the same intent of being born again “by water and the Holy Spirit,” as the Bible puts it. Converts to Catholicism do not need to be rebaptized if they were baptized with the Trinitarian formula in, say, the Methodist Church. The Council’s teaching on closer relations to other non-Catholic Christians was a sea change from the days of my growing up, when our understanding of relations with other religions was summarized in the Latin phrase extra Ecclesiam nulla salus or “outside the [Catholic] Church there is no salvation.

There was a similar reaction by a minority of bishops on the question of religious liberty discussed at Vatican II. The bottom line: It was during discussion of this question that an American theologian, the Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray, [1904-1967], was chosen to articulate the principle that “the church could and should support religious freedom in secular states.” Put another way, Murray argued that a human being has an innate right to choose any religion he wishes—or none—without coercion by the state. This is another Vatican II teaching that seems like a statement of the obvious, but in its long history the Catholic Church had held that its mandate called for the establishment and maintenance of Christendom across the globe; the state would be the subservient protector of the Church. Those who opposed Murray at the Council recalled that Martin Luther’s break from Roman Catholicism had been protected by the German princes of the sixteenth century. Two years before the Council, John F. Kennedy ran for president of the United States, pledging that he would not be unduly swayed by his Catholic faith in matters of U.S. governance. To the old guard in Rome, this was an untenable situation.

The third point of contention among the Council fathers was collegiality, or shared responsibility. Less than a century before, in 1870 the Council Vatican I had declared the doctrine of the Infallibility of the Pope in matters of faith and morals. After 1870 there were many who held that councils would be irrelevant in the future, because the popes enjoyed full authority. But by the time of Vatican II, church scholars were making the argument that the early church in the New Testament was led by the college of the apostles with Peter as their head. Bishops at Vatican II supported more communion with the pope in the spiritual mission of the Church. Pope Paul VI, who succeeded John XXIII in 1963, would during his reign inaugurate some form of regular consultation or synods with bishops from around the world. The traditionalists at the Vatican II Council saw broader input by the bishops as a threat to the absolute doctrine of Infallibility of the Pope.

For those of you with a historical sense of irony, it is worth noting that U.S. bishops were strong practitioners of synod government, going back to the 1840’s. In the 1880’s our bishops actually mandated that every Catholic parish have a Catholic school. It was a brilliant concept, debated after Vatican I. Clearly our bishops felt independent enough to establish bold initiatives collectively. However, in 2020 when Pope Francis called for the first steps to “synodality” in which bishops and pastors and laity would gather to discuss the ministry of the local churches, there was an episcopal disinterest, and U.S. Catholics missed their opportunity.

BUT THERE WAS MORE TO IT THAN THAT

The Council Vatican II has been blamed for all sorts of problems in the Church since 1965. One major miscue, maybe the major miscue, was the absence of a critical reading of the sixteen documents when they were released. As Catholics, we didn’t take time to read the fine print, and we just went full speed into changes we wanted. Speaking for myself, I was a high school seminary senior in 1965. I was generally aware that the Council had relaxed some old prohibitions and obligations and added new dimensions to worship and religious life.

But the introduction of the actual Council directives and processing them into the life of the Church took years and is still quite incomplete. Our seminary professors were hit with the new spirit of the Council like the rest of us, and few were prepared for it. The Mass Missal—the official ritual approved by Pope Paul on Vatican II principles—was not ready until 1970. The seminary Masses in my junior college years [1966-1968] were a mix of the old and the new—Latin Gregorian Chant, Renaissance polyphony, and of course the new guitar/folk Masses. I was in the choir and very sad to see the Latin polyphony go, but still, I learned to play the guitar, bought a Martin 12-string, and played Saturday nights at Mass at Arlington Cemetery and countless other D.C. locales till my ordination in 1974. I never had formal instruction in “saying Mass,” either. My religious superior said, “You’ve seen enough of them.” My generations of priests, and probably the next one, were trained to do whatever was necessary to boost the energy of the Church. Did we go overboard at times and roughshod the devotions and manners that many people still found [and find] precious? I’m afraid we were guilty on that count.

Today’s Mass, as celebrated in most parishes in the U.S., is a curious hybrid that is long overdue for a reexamination by the principles of the Council. It is not an exaggeration to say that the missalette companies have as much influence as the official church texts, particularly in music. Our Mass today is doctrinally correct, of course, but there are guidelines of Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium that get routinely trampled in the rush. People attend Mass today with good will and religious loyalty, but are they emotionally and spiritually drawn into the central mysteries of the Eucharist? Pope Leo has indicated that he wants to see Church worship reformed uniformly, and by the Vatican II directives. I doubt that his wishes will be set aside in the fashion that Pope Francis’ pastoral directives on synodality were. See his recent address on Church Mass music given August 19, 2026. Pope Leo is quite serious about this.

My thinking is that Leo’s excommunication of the SSPX bishops, and his declaration that all SSPX adherents, priests and laypersons, are “in schism” or formal separation from the Church of Rome is not his last word on the subject. I believe that he genuinely does not want to lose the artistic, historical, and devotional attraction of the older rite. The Vatican II document Sacrosanctum Concilium goes to considerable lengths to preserve the best of this past while extending more opportunities for all the attending faithful to actively engage in the ultimate prayer that is the celebration of the Eucharist. This may win back the SSPX-inclined while demonstrating Pope Leo’s effort to achieve unity in the Church.

THE “EMPTY CHAIR” BRETHREN

However, there is another factor to consider. There are clergy and laity who believe that Vatican II itself, in its entirety, should never have been convoked. Going further, they are convinced that the Church, dating to the election of Pope John XXIII in 1958, fell into grave error with the election of Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII. There are individuals and groups who hold that there has been no valid pope since the death of Pius XII [r. 1939-1958], that all the popes since then have embraced accommodations to modern society versus the true teachings of the Church, have gone too far in accommodating other religions in dialogue, and have destroyed the “true Mass” or 1570 Tridentine Mass of Pius V in favor of the Novus Order [“new rite”], the Mass we celebrate in our churches. Those who hold to the idea that the Chair of Peter has been vacant all these years are called “sedevacanists,” from the Latin “the chair is empty.” I follow a Facebook site called “Sedevacanists Society.” Sedevacanists present a different sort of problem. While their literature is aggressive, there is a sadness, too, because sedevacanists lament that they have nowhere to go. The SSPX is not sedevacanist because it does not deny the office of the Roman Catholic papacy, even if it does not presently obey the papacy. Sedevacanists present a different challenge altogether. I pray for them.

In a future post I will take Vatican II directives from Sacrosantum Concilium and lay them side by side with typical American practice. at Mass.
A copy of the Vatican II teaching on liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, is available on this link.

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WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR THE SACRAMENT OF PENANCE?

1/8/2026

OLD THERAPISTS DON'T DIE...THEY ANALYZE RELIGIOUS LIFE

Sometime this year I must decide whether to renew my mental health counseling license with the Florida Department of Health, or to change my status from active to retired. If I choose to continue holding an active license till the spring of 2029, when I will be 81, I will need to take 30 to 36 classroom hours in recent developments in the field of psychotherapy. Some of you may remember my posting last January [2025] about attending the state counselors’ convention. [If you are curious about the offerings at such a convention, here is the 2026 curriculum that I am not attending this year.]

I was disappointed in last year’s mental health event. Most of the presentations focused on a narrow range of clinical concerns, mostly post-trauma stress, and it was clear that the evolution of the insurance companies toward reimbursing only short-term treatment was impeding the work of most of the practitioners I met. [I went to the 2025 convention in part to learn how my practicing colleagues were treating transgender issues. There was no discussion about that.] When I closed my practice in 2014, United Health Care was requesting that I have my patients undergo a paper-and-pencil symptoms exam every six sessions to receive third-party reimbursement. When treating mood disorders like depression, my clinical concentration, I found that often a patient was feeling quite poorly around the sixth session, acknowledging for the first time plausible causes for their pain and recalling their roots. Also, many clinical antidepressants do not produce symptom reduction for four to six weeks. If Rome can’t be built in a day, it certainly can’t be rebuilt in a day, either. The same is true with human beings who [often courageously] bring a lifetime of pain into a counselor’s office. Or, for that matter, into the confessional.

CONFESSION AND COUNSELING

Reading James O’Toole’s For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America, and Irwin Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients, has prompted me to think of how much the confessor and the therapist can help each other, must help each other, in healing the pain, loss, and confusion that every one of us experiences when we have the courage to step out of the world for a time and taste the reality of God’s existence. Without this profound awakening within ourselves, evangelization will never get off the ground. In fact, it would be a dishonest venture.

O’Toole’s book on Confession concludes [p. 276] with his observation that “the older form no longer speaks to the great majority of Catholic laypeople; a new form is needed…church leaders and theologians neglect their duties if they do not begin the long work of articulating [a new form].” I agree, and there are several things we can do immediately to stop the hemorrhaging.

There are significant similarities between the challenges faced by confessors and mental health professionals. Some might argue that the sacrament heals the soul and the counselor heals the body and mind. But in truth how can one make that distinction? Medical research over the past century has isolated a variety of neurotransmitters in the brain that impact thought and behavior. Ironically, Church language itself depends heavily upon what we might call psychological strategies. For example, in confession we are instructed to put forth our sins with information about the number of offenses, our intentions in the act, and our contriteness. A competent confessor can gather an initial sense of the penitent’s spiritual status from the manner the information is offered up, although it must be remembered that the typical confessional encounter is extremely brief. In a perfect world, a confessor with the same penitent over time would gain better insights into the penitent’s life—and thus obtain information that would enable better spiritual counsel and appropriate penances. We will come back to that point.

Counselors and priests have different challenges, too. If a prospective mental health patient has health insurance with a major provider, he or she can go into the company portal on-line and shop for any or all mental health therapists in the region and, in a sense, create their “ideal counselor” by their instincts. United provided us providers with 24 areas of expertise to claim on our personal sites. Some therapists claimed all 24! I listed three: Mood Disorder, Couples Counseling, and Christian Counseling. A funny thing: several couples told me they came to my office because I was a Christian marriage counselor. “We figured that as a Christian; you’d try to keep us together.”

Counselors, using their clinical training, can ask many more in-depth questions than priests in the confessional. One obvious reason is time: a therapy session, historically, covers fifty minutes of encounter. Priests are often constrained by assigned times and/or waiting lines unless a penitent makes a special request to meet the priest outside of assigned confessional hours. As James O’Toole notes in For I Have Sinned, for over a century, probably back to the days of St. Alphonsus Liguori and St. John Vianney, Catholic moralists have debated how far a confessor can probe about personal conduct, most famously when birth control pills, considered mortally sinful artificial contraception, became available for general use in the 1960’s. There was considerable argument among priests whether to inquire of a married person whether the couple was using the pill. In my family’s parish years ago, it was general knowledge which priest asked, and which one[s] didn’t. Those priests who did ask feared that the penitent’s withholding the fact of artificial contraception usage rendered the sacrament invalid and would thus send the penitent to hell.

On the other hand, priests and penitents have the benefit of the seal of confession, which despite the efforts of some state legislatures [see Arizona], remains absolute in the Sacrament of Penance. Counselors, on the other hand, are bound to break confidentiality in several circumstances, varying from state to state, generally in cases of imminent or past harm to vulnerable persons. As a counselor I received periodic subpoena duces tecum summons, which means “show up in court with all your patient’s records.”

REFORM OF THE PENITENTIAL SACRAMENT BEGINS HERE.

In the process of blogging, I receive and review all sorts of Church publications—diocesan websites, parish bulletins and fliers, religious order updates, and every kind of Catholic publication—from Substack to Vatican City. I notice in my reading that there are many segments of Roman Catholicism talking about renewal and refilling the pews. The thing that troubles me is a subtle implication that the pews emptied because of the weakness or arrogance of those who left, that they were seduced by the culture, so to speak. Sort of a “come back and we’ll forgive you.”

Research does not support that. I wrote in an earlier post how my dad, then in his 70’s, who prayed the rosary daily and went to daily Mass, told me “I don’t get anything out of confession anymore. I only go because your mother makes me go.” He might have gone more enthusiastically if he knew in advance that he would receive Christ’s love and guidance through the piety and wisdom of a confessor who knew something of geriatric life and the particular crosses of my dad—watching children process through adult struggles, coping with physical pain and infirmities, carrying the trauma of a front-line medic for four years of World War II.

Research indicates that the “nones,” those who have left membership in churches of all denominations, do not renounce spirituality, overall. The quote “I am religious, but I can’t deal with organized religion” comes up a lot. Many of my close friends from seminary days express such sentiments, and with good reason—there was little or no emphasis upon developing an internal spiritual life, strange as that may seem, in our seminary years. [Another post for another day.]

If Penance is to take its place as an integral rubric of Catholic life, its connection to Baptism—to what Baptism itself ultimately means—must be restored. In the present day, Penance is still held captive to the moral manuals—a juridical release from divine punishment—isolated from the broader experience of collective Church faith, the liturgical calendar, and most important of all, the tangible experience of God’s love. In psychological terms, confession is the admission of deeds without full context of the acts or the larger narrative of an individual’s personal faith and life.

By coincidence, next Sunday [January 10-11] is the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus. It is one of the episodes of Jesus’ life reported in detail by all four evangelists. Matthew’s Sunday Gospel text includes this:

After Jesus was baptized,
he came up from the water and behold,
the heavens were opened for him,
and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove
and coming upon him.
And a voice came from the heavens, saying,
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Did Jesus need to be baptized, we asked our elementary school teachers seventy years ago. Matthew himself, in the same Sunday text, reports a debate between John the Baptist and Jesus about the propriety of John’s baptizing Jesus. Jesus replies,

“Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us
to fulfill all righteousness.”

Fitting for us. By John the Baptist’s ritual, the heavens were opened for Jesus, he beheld the Spirit of God and was acknowledged to be God’s pleasing Son. Was this baptism a prototype for all Christians? Given that the Apostles baptized 3000 on Pentecost, the “Birthday of the Church,” we are reminded of something so casually forgotten: the lives of each of us, and the collective life of all the baptized, pivots around baptism, when God affiliated each of us and all of us with an unimaginable love.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR PENANCE?

I can only guess. I do have hopes along these lines, though.

Penance, in its present form, looks disjointed from the rest of church life. Think of the traditional confessional, which symbolizes the religious and psychological detachment of this sacrament from the liturgical stream of saving waters. Would it not make sense for each penitent to walk with the confessor to the baptismal font, where the penitent professes the Faith and is sprinkled with the baptismal waters of life as a fitting conclusion to the sacrament of forgiveness?

In theologizing about the Sacrament of Penance, the Church needs the input of psychology for multiple reasons. Psychology does not have the answers to all questions; it is not a substitute for religion. But if the goal of Penance is to bring people to their full baptismal identity, psychology has much to offer. Take the topic of human development. For example, most theories recognize a period of young adulthood wherein a human sorts out major decisions about purpose of life, such as career path, relationship bonding, coping with the unknown, and perhaps gender identity. Morally speaking, are we stuck in the Manualist Era of acts and punishments where one size fits all? Would a confessor do better to ask broader questions about the penitent’s present-day lifestyle vis-à-vis his or her identity with Jesus Christ through Baptism? Open ended questions, the therapist’s best friend, can lead to deeper and realistic discussions which in turn may awaken a greater hunger for God, or at least add grace to the search for identity.

It will be a half-century before the numbers of newly ordained clergy replace what we have lost in my lifetime, and we have no guarantee that such an ambitious hope is even possible. I know that bishops are worried about finances and staffing, but it is time now for a “plan B.” The Ritual of Penance contains a format for “general absolution.” That is, a biblical service whereby the celebrant extends absolution to a congregation without personal confession. The United States bishops have essentially buried this rite on the grounds that it is only to be used in an emergency. Personally, I think the bishops fear a “cheap grace” misuse of the rite to avoid the embarrassment of confessing directly to a priest. When did shame become an essential part of the rite of Penance?

All the same, the General Absolution rite does not provide for the personal direction every baptized person deserves, which leads me to comment on the practice of spiritual direction. In the last several decades I have observed a growth in training programs for spiritual directors, servicing mostly a lay student body of future directors. A few months ago, while on retreat, I requested a conference with a lay spiritual director on the staff. I spent at least 90 minutes with her as she sliced and diced my personal spiritual condition at that moment. Later I thought to myself that if every lay spiritual director were as competent as she, we would have a new energy with which to celebrate our common faith and serve the world. Is it possible?

I discovered that my neighbor to the north, the Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida, has a particularly useful site describing spiritual direction, a list of available directors, and an inventory of diocesan approved sites for training. This is indeed hopeful. The website states that spiritual direction is not psychological counseling. It would be my hope, however, that basic counseling principles from works such as Yalom’s cited above would be included in the curriculum. Teaching faith and sharing a faith walk require different shoes.

This concludes formal posts around the book For I Have Sinned. And I think I have sinned by neglecting other streams on the Café post. Come back soon! For my penance, I will now proof-read all 2308 words above.

Can We Celebrate During Advent?

12/20/2025

Centuries ago, the seasons of Advent and Lent were observed with similar gravity, i.e., intensive fasting, penitential Scriptural and liturgical tones, etc. Have you ever noticed that both Advent and Lent have a break from the gravitas—a midway Sunday in rose color vestments, as we had last weekend [December 13-14, Gaudete Sunday] and on the Fourth Sunday of Lent [Laetare Sunday]? My household certainly observed Advent, though we did hang stockings on the night of December 5, in the hope that good St. Nick would give us a foretaste of Christmas joy. [Tangerines and fudge, usually.] We got away with our own little pre-Christmas celebration because the visit came from a saint, Nicholas of Myra, in modern day Türkiye. Nicholas was quite a character: tortured by the Romans, he survived and was a voting member at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., which formulated our Mass Creed today. It is fairly certain that during the council he encountered Arius, the heretic who denied the divinity of Jesus, and smacked him across the face. The secret gift-giving on December 6 has come down to us from Nicholas’ practice of leaving bags of money on the windowsills of young women for use as their dowry, so they could marry and not resort to prostitution. [See, we never hear the good stuff in catechism class.]

Unlike Lent, Advent did not have the daily adult fasting rule except for the three Ember Days which, coincidentally, are this week as I write, December 17, 19, 20 this year. See the U.S. Bishops’ explanation of Ember Days here; these days are still observed but without the obligation of mortal sin attached, as they did when I was growing up. The Ember Days used to catch your attention, coming as they did four times per year with fascinating prescriptions. The Ember Day Masses in the old missal included multiple Scripture readings, unusual for that time. I haven’t heard a parish explanation or announcement about the Ember Days since I was about 15.

All of that said, my mother was still disgruntled with all the pre-Christmas celebrations and decorations in the neighborhood and on TV, etc. Even among us kids, she suspected that our spiritual devotions, such as they were, focused too much upon the coming of Santa and a generous haul from his workshop. To tell you the truth, in the third grade I worried more during Advent about what Santa thought about me than Jesus did. Meanwhile, my mother would pronounce annually—usually around September—that “this year we were going to have a ‘spiritual’ Christmas.” That sounded ominous to us little kids, until I learned to say, “Next year, ma, next year. Promise.” My mother lived to be 94, and in my adulthood, I never thought to ask her what “a spiritual Christmas” would have looked like. Even today I think it meant fewer toys, more rosaries, and only God knows what else—some monasteries around the world still practice self-flagellation. We’ll never know.

Third grade was the tectonic shift year as I moved on from Santa [but not the gifts] to intensive Church involvement, with allowances for age, of course. [At the bottom of this post, I have a funny story about my last Christmas with Santa.] In the third or fourth grade “Santa” brought me a leather-bound adult daily Missal. I started going to Mass every day even on Saturday mornings and summer vacations and soon became an altar boy. I have to say that the missal was very useful and yet it raised questions about Advent and Christmas.

ADVENT, AS SEEN FROM SCHOOL AND PULPIT, c. 1956

I should note here that I am recalling a time when the Mass was offered entirely in Latin if you can imagine. That included the [then] two Scripture readings, one from St. Paul, and one from the Gospels. The Lectionary as we know it today did not come into existence till 1970. The readings were the same every year, no A-B-C cycles back then. In the 1950’s I believe the Gospel might have been read occasionally in English—by one of the associate pastors—at the conventual or parish high Mass. But as a rule, you never heard English at Mass except during the sermon [which was sometimes skipped] and the announcements…as on one Christmas in the 1950’s when my pastor read, at all the Christmas Masses, including the children’s Mass, a letter from Buffalo’s Bishop Burke instructing all Catholics to avoid a downtown movie theater which was showing the film, “Baby Doll.” Buffalo already had a thriving burlesque house, “The Palace,” so I figured this must be a really naughty movie to get a Christmas warning. [It was a morally troubling movie, I learned today, but not for the reasons you might think.”]

As a youngster I got the drift of the Gospel arrangement in the liturgical year: it paralleled Jesus’ life. I had no understanding of St. Paul, his texts, and their placement in the Missal. The Gospels for the Sundays after Pentecost [today’s “Ordinary Time”] covered Jesus’ life till the end of October with the Feast of Christ the King on the last Sunday of October. November Sunday Masses were “fill in Gospels” because of the moveable date of Easter, but “The Last Sunday after Pentecost in late November ended, I thought, the biography of Jesus with Matthew's awesome telling of the end of the world.

So around comes Advent--new beginning, turn toward joy and Christmas. The vestments switched from green to purple, Catholic calendars reminded us that we were entering a new liturgical year. Our Catholic school teachers taught us ahead of time about the coming of Jesus and the season of Advent. There was no Advent wreath in my church; the practice was introduced into the United States in the 1930’s by the Lutherans, actually, who invented the practice in Europe in the 1600’s. More likely than not, my parish’s sermon on the First Sunday of Advent in 1956 or 1957 outlined what we should do during Advent, specifically, to be good and to prepare ourselves for Jesus’ coming, however one interpreted that. Confession was implied in that preparation, but beyond that, life went on as usual in the parish. When I used my missal for Advent the first time, I assumed that the Advent Gospels would be a build-up to the birth of Jesus, and I was looking forward to that. Imagine my shock at discovering, on the first Sunday, that the Gospel had nothing to do with the biblical countdown to Bethlehem. Rather, the text was a repeat of the previous week’s Gospel, from Matthew 24, about the terror of the last days. [Ironically, that same text was read this year—2025--from Cycle A in the reformed lectionary!]

I felt somewhat let down, but I had high hopes for the next week, the Second Sunday of Advent. But the Gospel of that day, Matthew 11: 2-10, told of John the Baptist in prison, an event thirty plus years after Bethlehem. With my disappointment mounting, the Gospel of the Third Sunday of Advent featured a debate between the scribes and the adult John the Baptist. And, to close out the Advent Sundays, Luke’s Gospel consisted of a sermon by the adult John. Not a word, at least in my understanding, of the Christmas narrative we learned at home and in religious instruction. Notice I did not mention preachers; in their honest moments they will tell you even today that preaching during Advent was/is a bear. I cannot remember a single Advent sermon I preached in twenty years; that may be a blessing in disguise. I don’t recall ever giving a scold sermon during Advent—decrying materialism and too much partying before December 25, because I knew no one would take it seriously and I saw no point in spending credibility on a lost cause.

SO, WHAT DO WE MAKE OF ADVENT?

It was not until I attended graduate school that the season of Advent with its liturgies and Scripture readings were explained in a way that addressed my youthful puzzlement. I will start with that.

Advent is indeed a united season, observing the coming of Jesus. But Advent focuses upon the two comings, so to speak. The beginning of Advent focuses upon the Second Coming of Jesus at the end of time. It carries forth the theme of the year ending before it. The Second Coming is such a cosmic event that the evangelists struggle to find words for it. Jesus himself uses several similes, including the parable of the great king who divides the human species into the sheep and the goats. The reason for God’s unfathomable act of creation is expressed in Jesus’ own words: “And I, if I be lifted from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” God has given everyone that choice to bond with Jesus as he reveals himself in the Gospels, to accept his invitation. It is a choice that must be made in brutal honesty [“many will cry out, Lord! Lord!”], without reservation, at many points in our lives, a choice that governs every one of our major decisions.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Advent is very close in spirit to Lent. John the Baptist—highlighted in Advent--preached a forgiveness of sins so that we might be ready to be counted among the elect. Were I preaching today, I think I would place emphasis upon the urgency of honest reflection upon how much I need to be in step with the One whom God has sent. I don’t have a clear answer for how we integrate and celebrate the Second Coming of Christ in glory during Advent; perhaps the point of the first part of Advent is to impart the nature of divine time, that our clocks are all running toward a future time when God will embrace his universe and his faithful souls in a glory we cannot imagine.

A logical question involves the Advent timeline. Wouldn’t it make more sense to open the Church Year, including the Advent season, with the humble but miraculous events of Jesus’ birth, and then go into the future promise of universal glory down the road? In the seventy years since I first wrestled with the Advent liturgies, I’ve come to some fresh thinking on the matter. Put simply, the birth of Jesus would have been noted in the Roman Empire as just another number for its census takers. There must be a setting for the coming of this child, which both Matthew and Luke provide as best they can.

When the Angel Gabriel announced God’s mission for Mary, she was right to ask, “How can this be?” She was not stubborn or insolent. Rather, she represented all of us in asking “what is this marvelous event to unfold before our eyes?” Of course, as we now read the liturgical Gospel accounts of Jesus’ arrival in the second half of Advent [which began on December 17] and continue through Christmas and Epiphany, it is hard to overlook that the origin of the human Jesus—i.e., the Christmas narrative--was filled with worry and pain of all sorts. Matthew reports that babies were killed as King Herod sought Jesus to kill him, for example.

Every priest ordained has a standard sermon in his file for Advent about the celebrating and materialism of Christmas, particularly as it begins earlier every year and swamps the observance of Advent. And it is true that Christmas spending is a pillar of the U.S. economy, that we give and receive a lot of gifts we don’t need, that we eat and especially drink more than we should. You must have heard this before.

But at the same time, we can hardly absorb the Scriptural message of Advent without an impulse to celebrate. Christ now and Christ to come; there would be something terribly wrong with us if our redemption in this life and promise of endless future glory did not call forth an impulse to rejoice. Remember Luke 15:22ff:

Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to celebrate.

As Advent unfolds, we should celebrate, too.

A childhood memory:

Back in third grade I was on the cusp of belief in Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve my maternal grandparents hosted an annual low-key party for their children and families. We began every year with the Rosary, prayed with various levels of tolerance by children less than twelve hours before Christmas morning. Then there was a one-gift exchange and cookies and punch. I think—I’m not sure—that December 24 was a day of fast and abstinence, so the adults just chatted while we ate cookies. I was having a fun time, and I was not happy to go home—three blocks away—at 9 PM. I grumbled and piled into the car for the short ride home.

This being East Buffalo, we passed three bars on the short ride home along Filmore Avenue, all of them open for business. As we passed the largest one, I was shocked out of my boots and mittens. There, in front of the drinking establishment, stood Santa Claus. And Santa was smoking a cigarette.

I was pretty young, and no Einstein certainly, but I’m in a panic because Santa is probably 600’s from my house. I was sure that when he finished his Camel’s he’d be in my house very soon, and he might not stop if we weren’t there. My father was very nonchalant about the crisis, and by some miracle we got to bed before Santa arrived.

This, of course, got me to thinking previously forbidden thoughts, that there might be more to this “Santa Claus” deal than I had been told. And I suppose that this episode was a painful if vital step in my psychological development. It was like finding out later in life that wrestling is fixed.

Ordination and Women

10/22/2025

For starters, a serious study of the question of ordaining women to the sacramental order of diaconate involves just about every branch of Catholic Theology—Scripture, History, Sacraments, Ecclesiology [or “the nature of the Church”], the evolution of Church Law or Canon Law, and I know I have forgotten several other segments of Church academia. By the way, the best summary of sacramental development through the twenty-first century remains Joseph Martos’ Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church. Make sure you obtain the 2014 or most recent edition as a valuable reference in your religion library.

Perhaps the most useful way to organize the discussion is by looking at the questions piece-by-piece, so long as we remember that the whole is not always the sum of its parts.

SCRIPTURE: The New Testament was not written immediately after the happenings of Jesus’ life and death, but only some years later as the earliest Christians reflected upon life of Jesus and his impact upon them. Early Christians did not break from Judaism and for several decades worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem under the aegis of the Jewish chief priests, men. Christians also celebrated a weekly meal commemorating the Lord’s resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 11, written in the mid-50’s A.D., Paul gives us an outline of this Resurrection feast that sounds quite like a primitive rendering of the modern Mass. But there is no mention of who would lead such a celebration, or who would preach or bear witness at these times. Paul was more engrossed in the segregation of rich from poor members at such meals in this Corinthian text.

St. Luke, writing a generation later in the Acts of the Apostles, points to a more distinct structure of preaching and other ministries in his commentary on the early days. In Acts 6, the Twelve were faced with complaints that bread distribution to Hebrew Christian women was more generous than those to Hellenist [Greek] Christian women. The Twelve respond with this: “It is not right for us to neglect the word of God to serve at table. Brothers, select from among you seven reputable men, filled with the Spirit and wisdom, whom we shall appoint to this task, whereas we shall devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the word.”

Interestingly, the text does not call these seven appointees “deacons” as a class, nor does it really distinguish these seven from the Apostles themselves, i.e., the Twelve. The Paulist Biblical Commentary [p. 1199 ff] actually suggests that the designation of special servants was written as a springboard of sorts for one of these seven, Stephen, whose fiery sermon before the Jewish Sanhedrin [Acts 6:8 ff] led to his becoming the first Christian martyr. Reading Acts makes clear that Stephen—and probably his cohorts—did not spend their days simply waiting on tables. Martos notes that the Stephen model of service to the poor and preaching continued until the third century when the number of converts required a bureaucracy, so to speak, of fulltime assistants to the bishop, which ultimately became a sacramental/liturgical state.

A text from Romans [16: 1-2] appears in recent Catholic writing as a possible example of a “woman deacon.” Here is the text in detail: “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, deacon of the church in Cenchreae. I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been the benefactor of many people, including me.” I am a little uncomfortable with equating Phoebe’s role in the 50’s A.D. with what we understand today as a formal sacramental deacon, since today’s definitions of the Sacrament of Orders did not develop till well into the second, even the third, century. Moreover, Paul describes her ministry as one of direct service. As I think of it, one could argue that Phoebe was a prototype of what Pope Francis hoped his clerics in our day would be.

I should note here, though, that the Catholic Liturgical Press is turning out a 60-volume series of interpretations of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures from a feminist scholarship perspective. From the homesite: “The Wisdom Commentary series is the first scholarly collaboration to offer detailed feminist interpretation of every book of the Bible. The sixty-volume collection makes the best of current feminist biblical scholarship available in an accessible format to aid preachers and teachers in their advancement toward God’s vision of dignity, equality, and justice for all.” I have read St. Luke’s Gospel commentary from this series at considerable profit, and this style of scholarship does gently underscore the reality that the entire New Testament corpus comes to us from males.

But in the final analysis, given the social mores of people in the New Testament era, in the discussion of the diaconate it is probably more fruitful to examine the interpretations of Church life as the centuries unfolded.

THE WAXING AND WANING OF WOMEN’S MINISTRY THROUGH HISTORY
Some years ago, I was making retreat in a Trappist monastery when I caught sight of a woman monk in full habit. As it turned out, she was making retreat as I was—her community was on a different timetable--but the relationship of adults in monastic life raises interesting and enlightening questions for what might be possible as the Catholic Church evolves.

Monastic life did not evolve from the Sacrament of Orders. It evolved from Baptism, the primordial sacrament, and the consequent desire to live a life of fulfillment of the baptismal promises without the allurements and distractions of a lukewarm society. The earliest roots of consecrated life seem to go back to the 200’s and 300’s A.D. Certainly the fourth century was a watershed moment for flight from Rome and other cities, once the Emperor Constantine designated Christianity as the state religion and the Church acquired many of the “bad habits” of the rich, leisured classes. I believe it was St. Jerome, while he was living in Rome, who complained about rich women dressing their pet monkeys in gala costumes and bringing them to Mass. A deeply committed Christian would leave such an environment for the solitude of the desert or the mountains. Women and men appeared to have sought private, prayerful solitude in about equal numbers, and lived equally austere conditions to draw closer to God.

From Constantine’s era till the thirteenth century—roughly, a millennium—Christianity was enhanced and sanctified by the monastic movement, which by the Council of IV Lateran in 1215 thrived nearly everywhere in Europe. It is often overlooked that women equaled men in monastic lifestyle and enthusiasm. St. Benedict [480-547], founder of the Benedictine Order of monks, composed a monastic rule that remains the basis for monastic communities to this day. St. Scholastica, his sister [or colleague, depending upon a variety of Dark Age translations] founded the Benedictine Sisters, employing Benedict’s rule.

A fruitful study of monastic liturgical life would be immensely helpful here. Although some monasteries housed men and women, most were single sex. Did the abbess in a woman’s monastery perform the same rites her male counterpart performed in his monastery? That would include the “chapter of faults,” inaugurated by Irish monks, in which each monk at day’s end confessed faults and failures to the abbot and was blessed/forgiven. The chapter of faults evolved into the form of the Sacrament of Penance we use today. Did abbesses exercise this ministry? Continuing, who preached in women’s monasteries? Even allowing for the likelihood that Mass was offered less frequently than it is today, there were feasts and rites that called for preaching. And since we’re heading down this road, who actually celebrated Mass in monasteries of women religious?

On that last point, Benedict frowned upon male monks visiting female monasteries. As an example to all monks, he himself visited his sister Scholastica once a year, and returned to his monastery before nightfall. The two monasteries were a mere four miles apart, per his biographer St. Gregory the Great. I must think that, in those many confusing centuries we call the Dark Ages, if you told me the old Latin phrase mater artium necessitas [“necessity is the mother of invention”] was never invoked, I would have trouble believing it. We don’t know precisely how the varied times and circumstances were navigated across the Church. However, one of the outcomes of the Council IV Lateran [1215] was the order from Pope Innocent III that all parts of the Church clean up their acts [such as priests giving up their concubines.] Reforms of monasteries were mandated as well. Interestingly, Francis of Assisi attended this Council, and by the time of his death in 1226, the Poor Clares, the women followers of Francis’ way, were living a strictly cloistered life in the style we now understand the word “cloistered.” Male friars were free to move about and minister to the public without the constraints of the cloister wall.

AN AMERICAN MODEL: Limited time necessitates some generalities here, the main one being that from medieval times till “modernity,” however one defines that, most women in consecrated life were not public figures but rather “cloistered.” Preaching, the theological backbone of the diaconate, was not standard fare for the lifestyle and ministry of women religious.

The eventual establishment of the United States in the eighteenth century provided something of a clean slate for the Catholic Church. Granted, many Americans distrusted Catholics as “foreign agents” when our country was founded and for years afterward. If there was a single balm for this wound, it was the witness of Catholic religious women, who migrated across the Atlantic in growing numbers through the nineteenth century. Sisters migrated here from Europe, primarily Ireland, not to establish cloistered convents but to undertake public apostolic work, for which there was desperate need as Catholic immigrants came to American shores in ever increasing numbers. Beleaguered missionary bishops and priests in the U.S. were hardly disposed, for the most part, to restrain the public ministerial efforts and planning of communities of sisters who demonstrated remarkable versatility and dedication.

It is not always appreciated, for example, how many sisters served as nurses and comforters at nearly all the major battle sites of the Civil War. They served both Union and Confederate encampments while becoming something of a “Catholic face” to thousands of veterans. This ministry would expand to hundreds of hospitals in the U.S. well into the twentieth century. The other major ministry of women religious was education. In 1884 the Plenary Council of Baltimore mandated a Catholic school for every parish in the United States. As late as 1965 about five million minors were enrolled in Catholic schools, not counting collegiate and graduate contributions. And for the most part, it was women who “unpacked the Word of God” for the young baptized in the U.S. who grew up to become us. That sounds like existential Faith preaching to me. That fact must be worked into the discussion/equation.

One of the ironies of Vatican II was its efforts to address the priest shortage in the Amazon Basin and other distant parts of the world through the restoration of the permanent diaconate, married men who would preach, baptize, and perform marriages and blessings. Good intentions but the outcomes were quite unexpected. In South America, the ministry of “catechist” was already well established and evidently much respected, because there was no gold rush to diaconal ordination. Meanwhile there was a rush of older candidates in the U.S., such that the greatest concentration of permanent deacons in the world is found in the Archdiocese of Chicago, where 1400 men were ordained deacons since 1972, nowhere near the Amazon. A 2018 article from the Chicago Catholic reports that “about 99 percent of deacons work outside the church.” There is something wrong with that picture; I can’t quite put my finger on it, but in any case, discussion of the diaconate must begin with a thorough examination of the years since Vatican II alongside any other discussion on the diaconal sacrament.

MY THOUGHTS ON WOMEN AND ORDINATION?

I’ve probably written too much history here already, so I shoved all the books to the floor: it is just me with my thoughts. To start, it has been my good fortune through my life to have known, befriended, and worked with a number of women who would have made excellent Catholic priests, even bishops. In fact, one of my friends in the Lutheran Church has just completed her studies for the priesthood of her faith. I will be very interested in her observations about her new role. The least I can say is that the discussion about ordination is not a matter of character, skill, or spirituality.

Pope Leo XIV has expressed himself on the subject, and I do respect his judgment and the way he presents himself. He has made himself clear that the ordination of only men to the priesthood is a profound teaching of Catholic hegemony, i.e., the theological teachings of the universal Church. Our tradition has held that the maleness of the celebrant of the Mass is a necessary and integral component of the “outward sign” that gives a sacrament its power to save. That concept has been on my mind for many years.

On the other hand, the pope has expressed interest in key concepts regarding orders and lay church life. For starters, he is committed to the process of synodal meetings begun by Pope Francis in which the life experiences and challenges of all baptized Catholics are given voice. [Honesty compels me to say that many American bishops ignored the world-wide synodal process during its first phase a few years ago. I don’t think Leo will tolerate this neglect the second time around.]

Second, Pope Leo, when asked about women’s ordination, has been very clear that he does not favor the Church’s entanglements in the waves of trends and politics of secular society. In other words, the focus of the Synod will be the imitation of Christ and our struggles to live that baptismal consecration across the board, and not with national or regional social trends.

Third, Pope Leo has stated that before other questions are addressed, the Church must face the problem of clericalism, the excessive narcissism of many ordained men which poisons the wells of honesty and shared ministry whenever it rears its ugly head. See this excellent essay on clericalism from the New Hampshire Catholic paper, as fine a summary of clericalism as you will find. Clericalism over the years has damaged and hindered morale of many women’s religious movements, pastors and bishops so fearful of imaginary encroachments into their “territory.”

Another good friend reminded me this week that the ultimate biblical definition of “deacon” is service—as in distributing bread among Hebrew and Hellene women per Acts 6. And my wife Margaret suggested to me that there might be a new rite by which lay men and women dedicate themselves to intense lives of prayer and charity. This is the kind of thinking and discussion that the Synod was intended to hear and provide wisdom for Pope Leo and his successors. I guess the thing for me to do, at my age, is to work hard for the younger generations that they may find a Spirit-filled Church eager to welcome their talents and charisms in ways we might not even imagine yet.

St. John's Good Friday Passion Reading will Open Doors You Didn't Know Existed

4/17/2025

THERE ARE FOUR GOSPELS AND FOUR PASSION NARRATIVES, NOT JUST ONE

Being that this week is Holy Week, and we heard the majestic proclamation of St. Luke’s Passion on Palm Sunday, I got to wondering about the four evangelists—Sts. Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John—and how stunningly different each Gospel is. We tend to think of the four collectively, written together—four accounts of the final year of Jesus’ life—with the consolation that if you’re read one—or even three—Passion accounts, you’ve milked the stories of everything you need to be saved. Mark, Matthew, and Luke, brought us the biography of the Christ with a uniformity we carry in our heads as our “default” story of Jesus. The Gospel writers were not literalists, to be sure, as Sts. Luke and Matthew write their Infancy narratives in separate ways. But nobody wrote like St. John, whose narrative of the Passion is proclaimed annually at the Good Friday Rite [this year, on Friday April 18.]

THE WILD CARD KNUCKLEBALL GOSPEL

The accepted sequence of the writing of the four Gospels looks something like this.
St. Mark: 60’s A.D., first written, before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
St. Mathew: 80’s A.D. Used Mark and independent Q-source, viewed Jesus as the new Moses.
St. Luke: 80’s A.D. Used Mark and Q-source, viewed Jesus as universal savior.

But then we come to St. John, where every page has a twist or a dip that makes us back off home plate and try to figure out what it will take to get a grip on such a pitch. Bob Uecker, the late catcher, humorist, and broadcaster, described catching a knuckleball: "The way to catch a knuckleball is to wait until it stops rolling and pick it up." There is a theological message here. St. John’s Gospel is unconventional, and we need the time to digest the major and the minor differences of this Gospel from its three predecessors. [Note to Good Friday lectors: give us an opportunity to process the nuances.]

For starters, we are not sure who, precisely, is the name attached to this brilliant Gospel. For centuries we assumed it was an apostle named John. The Gospel itself refers to “the disciple whom Jesus loved” but without a reference in the text to John. The “John” who is named in the text is referred to as one of the two boanerges, “the sons of thunder” who, along with his mother, lobbied for places to the right and the left of Jesus when he returned in glory at the end times. In the modern era of Biblical scholarship, possibly the best American Biblical scholar of the twentieth century, Father Raymond Brown, wrote The Community of the Beloved Disciple [1976] in which he speculated that the church of the late first century was already splintering to a degree over personalities and primitive doctrines, including a sect loyal to “the disciple Jesus loved,” not the successor of St. Peter. [See John 21: 15-23 on the “chain of command” in the Church.]

By the time John [and I will continue to use this name throughout] had died, his loyal and gifted disciples compiled his reflections about Jesus’ works and teachings along with his probable thoughts on issues in their time. This is so true of the Last Supper; an episode of John’s Gospel account of that sacred meal is proclaimed during the Holy Thursday Mass. Stop and consider how much history had transpired over seventy years, from Jesus’ Resurrection to the time this Gospel was written, a period of at least seventy years. Certainly, all the Apostles were dead. The Church had evolved from a small community of Jewish Christians in Jerusalem to a worldwide vision of converting the Gentile world centered in other major cities, notably Rome; Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D.; there were doctrinal errors developing, most notably that Jesus was only divine and not human, a movement call Gnosticism. How would these writers compile their understanding of Jesus and the disciple whom he loved? Clearly it would take some out-of-the-box inspiration to address Christianity as the second century of the Church began. Without sounding irreverent, someone with a handle on a knuckleball.

JOHN’S PASSION NARRATIVE

The Good Friday narrative for the Catholic Liturgy proclaims Chapters 18 and 19 only, but we will treat the entire Passion here.

Traditionally Christians consider the Passion as beginning with the Last Supper. Right from the beginning John rethinks this narrative outside the box. He states in the very opening line of 13:1 that the disciples’ Last Supper was “before the feast of Passover;” the laws of fasting and cleanness in preparation for the Passover meal do not, in John’s narrative, begin until the next day. Thus, on Good Friday we find in 18:28 that “[the Sanhedrin itself] did not enter the praetorium in order not to be defiled so that they could eat the Passover that night, i.e., Friday]. John has a greater reason for moving the Passover back one day—a brilliant gambit we will unpack further down the narrative.

John is the only evangelist who does not describe Jesus’ designation of the bread and wine as his Body and Blood. Instead, he substitutes the washing of the disciples’ feet, a major staple of the Holy Thursday Evening Mass. [John 13: 1-20] John may be drawing from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians the theme of receiving the Eucharist unworthily. This would make sense because after the washing of the feet John records Jesus as “deeply troubled” and saying “Amen, Amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” [John 13:21] This scene reminds us, too, of how deeply painful to the early Christians was betrayal of the Way of the Messiah. We don’t talk about that much in today’s Church, i.e., betraying the good of our neighbor. But one of the most haunting musical pieces of Church music was composed in 1585 as Catholics were abandoning the faith and moving to Protestant worship and belief. The song, written originally as a response to the First Reading for the Holy Thursday Mass, is called Judas Mercator Pessimus or “Judas, Most Wicked Merchant.” [You can hear it sung, with the English translation, here.]

John uses sun positions in the sky as theological clues. Bright sun and closeness to noon are symbols of God’s intense presence. After Judas has been singled out by Jesus’ handing him the morsel, “He took the morsel and left at once. And it was night.” [John 13:30] If you think back a moment, Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman at the well at noon in John 4, but Peter’s eventual threefold betrayal occurred in the dead of the night. Pilate’s exclamation of Jesus at the end of the trial, Ecce Homo, or “Behold the man!” took place at noon on our Good Friday. [John 19:14]

Having washed the feet of his disciples and dismissed his betrayer, Jesus delivers a five-chapter sermon to the eleven that summarizes his law of love and his prayer to the Father that all may be one. Likely, this sermon is a combination of teachings that Jesus delivered during his intimate moments with his chosen ones; the authors/editors wisely put this lengthy reflection on the heels of the Crucifixion as something of an explanation of Jesus’ coming self-giving upon the cross. I can’t do justice to the sermon text in its entirety, but it is important to recall that Jesus talked about the coming of the Holy Spirit [or “Spirit” in the text]. Hold that thought as we move into the next day.

As we move to the post-supper arrest and subsequent events [John, Chapters 18 and 19] we will notice that despite his predicament, Jesus oversees everything [John 18:4]. This is a long way from the Crucifixion scene in Mark’s Gospel forty years earlier where Jesus cries, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me”? What was happening at the time of John’s composition [c. 100 A.D.] was the early Church’s developing sense of what we call today, “The Holy Trinity,” though it would take 200 to 400 years to find the right creed words to profess our belief in God’s trinitarian being at Mass, i.e., the Nicene Creed [325 A.D.] John’s Gospel lays out the nature of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This newfound wisdom of the Johannine Gospel’s authors explains why the garden scene in the Kidron Valley is absent all the internal anguish expressed by Jesus in the other Gospels—no report of sweat “like drops of blood” as St. Luke put it in his Palm Sunday Gospel last weekend. Jesus is ready to reveal his Father and the Spirit to Pilate, the Sanhedrin, his Jewish brethren, and eventually to the four corners of the earth. When the soldiers approach and ask if he is Jesus of Nazareth, he replies “I AM”—the same name God used to introduce himself to Moses…and the soldiers fell to the ground, just as Moses had been overcome. [John 18: 6-8]
When Jesus is arrested, he is followed from a distance by Peter and “another disciple,” usually identified as the disciple whom Jesus loved. This unnamed disciple knew his way around; the text states that he was “an acquaintance of the high priest.” [John 18:16] I have to say, this is a peculiar report, that the beloved disciple is an acquaintance of the man seeking Jesus’ death. It is also worth noting that Jesus is first interrogated by Annas, and then by Caiphas. And while the audience with Annas is remembered for Jesus’ mistreatment during the interrogation, it should also be noted that Jesus replied with dignity in defense of the truth. [John 18:23] in stark contrast to Pilate’s later cynicism “What is truth?” [John 18:38]

Peter’s three denials are hung out for all to see; his betrayals meet the scholarly rule of multiple attestation: events reported in all four Gospels are considered to have a high historical probability. Given the timing of this fourth Gospel, there was some risk in highlighting Peter’s vulnerability, given one of the text’s purposes of restoring and maintaining good order and the authority of community leaders. It is quite possible that John 21: 15-19 was inserted as a counterweight to Peter’s previous betrayal, where Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loved him. Again, the authors are trying to bring the disciples of the beloved into a peaceable communion with the whole church and the succession line from Peter.

Pilate has the unenviable task of passing judgment on Jesus. There is one piece of historical data that often gets overlooked: the trial and crucifixion of Jesus took place during the time of Passover. In Anthony Saldarini’s excellent text, Jesus and Passover [1984], the author describes what Passover in Jerusalem would have been like in Jesus’ day: there is one statistic that stands out. In normal times the population of Jerusalem was 10,000 people. During Passover, it swelled to 100,000. Not that this figure excuses shoddy neglect of due process, but it does assist us in understanding Pilate’s dilemma.

Another factor here is a strong opinion among scholars that there is a subtle but real strain of antisemitism in John’s Gospel and some other New Testament texts. See Matthew 27:25, “And the whole people said in reply, “His blood be upon us and upon our children.” Pilate may have felt his hands tied in condemning Jesus, but he was not happy about it. This is evident in his reaction to Jewish leaders who demanded that the sign on the cross, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” be amended. Pilate’s retort will last forever in history, Quod scripsi, scripsi. “What I have written, I have written.” [John 19: 21-22]

The authors of John record that Jesus carried his cross alone to Calvary. [No Simon of Cyrene.] Once the crosses were erected, we come upon events that, like a knuckleball, will scramble your “comfortable stance of knowledge” about the meaning of the crucifixion forever. This Gospel records who is standing at the foot of the cross as Jesus lingered between life and death: four women and the beloved disciple. One of the women is Mary, Jesus’ mother. John’s Gospel is the only one to identify Mary at the Calvary scene, and there is a reason. We are familiar with how Jesus—in command despite of his rapid decline to death—constitutes a new family among those beneath him.

Jesus has selected the time for his wine: when he is “aware that everything was now finished [John 19:28], he asks for wine. But why now? Probably to fulfill a promise found in St. Matthew’s text: “But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom. [Matthew 26:29] The time had come. Having offered himself in perfect love as man and God, Jesus has ushered into time the new Kingdom of God. The Gospel text states that having finished the wine, Jesus declares: “It is finished…

…and bowing his head, he handed over the spirit.” [19:30] This is the Pentecost moment in John’s Gospel, the fulfillment of sending the Spirit upon the earth. Now consider what is happening in the Temple simultaneously. The Temple had closed around noontime so that the priests could slaughter lambs throughout the afternoon for each family in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover meal that evening. As the Passover lambs are being cut, a soldier on Calvary pierces the side of Jesus…John’s Gospel had been laid out timewise that these two events would occur simultaneously! The marriage of the old and the new. And when the soldier pierced Jesus’ side, “immediately blood and water flowed out.” [19:34] In the early Church, blood and water were symbols for the Eucharist and Baptism. The new community of God’s Kingdom was constituted at the foot of the cross.

Everything came together on Good Friday afternoon. In a sense, God saved his best Gospel inspiration till the end. A new community constituted by the outpouring of the Spirit took wings. If you attend Good Friday Service in your church or read/reflect upon the Johannine Passion narrative at home, let the power of this narrative stir your soul to gratitude, joy, and hope. Follow the sun.

No Past, No Future: Just a Plastic Present

4/3/2025

1067 "The wonderful works of God among the people of the Old Testament were but a prelude to the work of Christ the Lord in redeeming mankind and giving perfect glory to God. He accomplished this work principally by the Paschal mystery of his blessed Passion, Resurrection from the dead, and glorious Ascension, whereby 'dying he destroyed our death, rising he restored our life.' For it was from the side of Christ as he slept the sleep of death upon the cross that there came forth 'the wondrous sacrament of the whole Church."' For this reason, the Church celebrates in the liturgy above all the Paschal mystery by which Christ accomplished the work of our salvation.

I can see that a Catholic attempting a self-study of the Catechism might be inclined to bang his head against the wall after attempting to decipher para. 1067, the second paragraph of the Catechism’s treatment of the liturgy. In the earlier post in this stream two weeks ago [scroll down], I pointed out that Pope John Paul II expected the local churches to teach the catechism to Catholics with personnel who had been appropriately trained and commissioned for this sacred task, that a “translating process” take place to create local catechetical aids, and that the Catechism truths be taught in a manner that connects the listener to the body of Christ’s followers, with respect for the age, education, and culture setting of the listeners.

Para. 1067 covers a great deal of territory, so I will attempt to break it down into digestible pieces. There are three distinct themes in the text: [1] the relative place of the Old Testament or Hebrew Scripture next to the New Testament; [2] the relation of Christ’s death to the sacramental life of the Church we engage in today, and [3] our loss of emotional realization that Christ as the savior of the world.

The first sentence of para. 1067 can be misinterpreted as depicting the Jewish history as a warm-up to the Christian era heralded by Christ, which is a common misconception, for the Hebrew Scripture is of one weave with Jesus, God and Man. For starters, Jesus was born and died a Jew. He was even buried under Jewish law and custom. There is no evidence that Jesus intended to start a new religion. He drew his identity from his Israelite heritage and his chosen disciples were Jews—twelve, in fact, after the twelve tribes of Israel. The Acts of the Apostles details how after the Resurrection and Pentecost events, Peter, John, and Stephen [and others of Jesus’ intimates] maintained their ties with the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus never separated Jewish history and tradition from the idea that the Kingdom of God was at hand. He saw the future as the fulfillment of Israel, not its demise or replacement.

There is no denying that Jesus was critical of structures and attitudes of his native faith, i.e., excessive legalism, commercialism at the Temple, loss of a missionary spirit, easy divorce, and—most of all—a complacency of faith. [Ironically, many of the same afflictions impact twenty-first century Catholicism.] It was his fidelity to Jewish history and the morality of the prophets that led to Jesus’ execution. Several New Testament authors have foisted Jesus’ crucifixion om the entire Chosen People, which is absurd and utterly dangerous. [For example, St. Matthew records the Good Friday crowd as crying, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”] Christians of following centuries—to this very day—find such writing as justification for antisemitic attitudes and behaviors.

Unbelievably just two decades after the Holocaust, Vatican II [1962-1965] found it politically difficult to formulate a document of reconciliation with the Jews. The justification during Vatican II for remaining alienated from the Jewish Faith—which endures in many quarters today—is that Jews still await a savior, that Jesus is not recognized as the Messiah. One journalist put it this way: “But one awaits the return of the Messiah who died and rose from the dead and is recognized as Lord and Son of God; the other awaits the coming of a Messiah, whose features remain hidden till the end of time; and the latter waiting is accompanied by the drama of not knowing or of misunderstanding Christ Jesus.” But thanks to the heroic efforts of Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing, The Council did finally produce the document Nostra Aetate [“in our time”] in 1965; the shortest of all Vatican II statements, the full text is here.

The second part of para. 1067 focuses upon Jesus as our Savior by virtue of his Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension. In fact, the paragraph quotes from the Roman Missal of 1970, “dying he destroyed our death, rising he restored our life,” the congregational response to the consecration of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. Before the Council Catholics participated in the salvation of the cross by attending Mass. It is worth remembering here that we old timers were raised in a Church that defined the Mass as “the unbloody sacrifice of Calvary.” We came to Mass to participate in the saving grace of Christ’s death, particularly in the reception of Holy Communion [preceded by confession, if necessary.] One might say that before Vatican II the word “salvation” was as likely as any to fall from our It was after several centuries of historical, biblical, and sacramental research that the Church began to incorporate the words “celebration” and “community” when speaking of sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. For example, it was common for priests to celebrate Mass alone if not required to meet a congregational obligation like a public parish Mass. If you have visited large medieval or renaissance churches in Europe, for example, you noticed that both walls of the church are lined with impressive side altars. Even in my seminary, built in 1904, there were enough altars for ten priests to offer Mass at the same time, not counting the seminarians’ Mass at the high altar.

But by the time I left this old seminary in 1968, all the seminary professors were offering Mass together, “concelebrating,” and we in the pews were singing the parts of the Mass [often to guitars] and sharing the bread and the cup at communion. The pastoral thinking regarding the sacraments turned to the baptized congregation coming together in tangible, social expression [e.g., the congregation wide Kiss of Peace. We were celebrating what Christ has done for us, not just upon the cross but by conquering death and sending forth his Spirit. As a T-shirt of the times put it, “We are Easter People—Alleluia is our song!”

For those of us who lived through that era of change in the 1960’s and 1970’s, official worship went through this tectonic shift. I was ordained in 1974 and thus never celebrated the “old Mass”, but I became a pastor and listened to complaints about the changes in the Mass for twenty years. Unfortunately, Vatican II’s theological reasoning behind the changes was never made clear from the pulpit or through religious education or it was done poorly, with little care for the spiritual sensitivities of the faithful. Truthfully, having been trained and ordained to “build community” through the sacraments, it is only in recent years that I have come to appreciate how plastic the word “community” really is. Which leads me to the third point of 1067.

This paragraph of the Catechism ends thus: “For this reason, the Church celebrates in the liturgy above all the Paschal mystery by which Christ accomplished the work of our salvation.” Per Wikipedia, “the term ‘liturgy’ in Greek literally means to ‘work for the people, but a better translation is ‘public service’ or ‘public work,’ as made clear from the origin of the term as described above. The early Christians adopted the word to describe their principal act of worship, the Sunday service (referred to by various terms, including Holy Eucharist, Holy Communion, Mass or Divine Liturgy), which they considered to be a sacrifice. This service, liturgy, or ministry (from the Latin "ministerium") is a duty for Christians as a priestly people by their baptism into Christ and participation in His high priestly ministry.”

We are in something of a conundrum here when talking about the sacraments, our liturgy. The references to worship in the New Testament era are rare. What we have looks like this: the first Christians worshipped in the Temple, and then on the first day of the week convened to recount memories or recollections of Jesus, shared the bread and cup as Jesus had commanded, and then partook in a community meal. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians [1 Corinthians 11], written in the mid-50’s A.D., gives indication, alas, that the community fest at the end was not always an edifying experience and needed catechetics.

Sacraments will always present a mystery with roots in the past, present, and future. Present day Eucharist, for example, is afflicted with a weekly blandness because [1] Catholics have little or no consciousness of their Judeo-Christian roots, and [2] a fuzziness about the future takes the urgency out of our sacramental experiences of the present. Why repeat Christ’s saving death every Sunday, for example, if—as is quite common—many do not believe in hell or purgatory, or the consequences of conduct beyond the grave.

Thus, ignorant of our history and assuming an easy destiny, we have focused for years now on our present—the celebratory factor—which falls flat most Sundays because, well, we bypass the urgency of past and future. There is little to celebrate if Christ’s death and resurrection are not at the center of things. Our young people understand this at some level, and many go off seeking experiences of the Lord that cut to their souls. I don’t know how to fix the rest of us…except to refer to the examples of the monks, who not only pray frequently but devote significant time each day to reflection and study of our sacred texts…and thus eat and drink the Eucharist because they know their lives depend upon it.

Catechisms Are Only as Potent as the People Who Teach Them

3/15/2025

Paragraph 1066 is posted here as a sample of the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s language and style. It is also the opening paragraph of the Catechism’s teaching on the seven sacraments.

1066 In the Symbol of the faith the Church confesses the mystery of the Holy Trinity and of the plan of God's "good pleasure" for all creation: the Father accomplishes the "mystery of his will" by giving his beloved Son and his Holy Spirit for the salvation of the world and for the glory of his name.

Such is the mystery of Christ, revealed and fulfilled in history according to the wisely ordered plan that St. Paul calls the "plan of the mystery" and the patristic tradition will call the "economy of the Word incarnate" or the "economy of salvation."

THE PURPOSE AND USAGE OF THE 1993 CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH:
I feel sorry for well-intentioned Catholics who attempt to tackle major Church documents for the first time. Paragraph 1066 here, the first of the Catechism’s teachings on Sacraments, cited above, is poetic and florid, employing terms and phrases we don’t use in Church parlance every day. There are reasons why formal documents of the Church are composed in this way, the primary one being that such documents from the popes or councils go into the Church’s collection of teachings over the centuries, a body of collective faith documents known as Church Tradition. Such documents call for a classical, timeless linguistic setting, in Latin. Like nearly all major Church documents of the modern era, the Catechism is very lengthy. It is a work you would see in the reference section of your parish bookstore, along with the Bible and the Weekday/Sunday Mass missals.

I see on social media that some Catholics believe the Catechism must be read cover to cover, but this is not the case. In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is not a catechism in the way that local churches—including American ones—understand the term. In the United States, at a plenary council or synod of U.S. bishops in the 1880’s in Baltimore, the decision was made to erect a Catholic school in every parish in the country. Along with this was a call for a national [American] catechism for classroom use. And thus, the Baltimore Catechism was born, and it remained in use until the 1960’s, when Vatican II called for a theological reorientation of catechetics across the board.

The Baltimore Catechism was short and to the point, about 100-pages of principles and practices of the faith interspersed with illustrations, pious ferverinos, and prayers. We learned the Q&A format much like the multiplication tables, memorizing formulas that we would, hopefully, carry with us all our lives. “Why did God make me? God made me to know, love, and serve him in this world, and to be happy forever with him in the next.” As Wikipedia records, catechisms of this sort go back to the 1500’s and much credit has gone to St. Robert Bellarmine, a Vatican scholar of that time. It was during the 1500’s that educated priests and laity in Italy formed an association to teach the new catechisms to children: the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, or good old CCD. [I still use this old label for religious education with fellow senior citizens, and it is so much easier than the terms we use today.]

In the introduction to the 1993 release of the Catechism, Pope John Paul II himself explains that “This catechism is given…that it may be a sure and authentic reference text [emphasis mine] for teaching catholic doctrine and particularly for preparing local catechisms…This catechism is not intended to replace the local catechisms duly approved by the ecclesiastical authorities, the diocesan Bishops and the Episcopal Conferences, especially if they have been approved by the Apostolic See. It is meant to encourage and assist in the writing of new local catechisms, which take into account various situations and cultures, while carefully preserving the unity of faith and fidelity to catholic doctrine.”

This is an intriguing instruction by the pope which impacts the role of the Catechism, to be sure, but equally, provides insight into the pope’s thinking and teaching about catechetics and faith sharing in general. The 1993 Catechism or CCC was never intended for instructional use in an educational or faith formation setting as a stand-alone teaching text. The pope assumed that each diocese or parish was already developing full faith formation resources for cradle to grave Catholics, with the new Catechism serving as both inspiration and guard rail in the handing on of Sacred Tradition. He also assumed that the handing down of the Faith is a venture of the local church, specifically the diocese, taking place in a communal fashion. Canon Law identifies the bishop as the senior catechist in his diocese, assisted of course by clergy and laity. The pope’s acknowledgement of “various situations and cultures” recognizes that the perfect revelation of God comes to imperfect people and communities who must wrestle with what a famous scholar called the Bible, a two-edged sword.

The Catechism or CCC has been with us now for 32 years. It is still a work in progress. In 2018 Pope Francis reversed the Catechism’s teaching on capital punishment in para. 2267, stating that the execution of criminals undermined the Church’s professed faith in the sanctity of all life. Paragraphs 2357-2359, on homosexuality, probably need a rewrite down the road to address the personal circumstances of those in monogamous same-sex relationships. But for the moment, let’s look at the Catechism and its presentation of the Sacraments, now and in the future.

BUT GETTING BACK TO SACRAMENTS, STARTING WITH CATECHISM PARAGRAPH 1066….
Sacraments—all seven—are the greatest works of the Church. They are, in fact, the Holy Spirit living and acting among us in the human material world. We often think of sacraments as solely divine, internal, metaphysical encounters with God. But in fact, the proper celebration of any sacrament is earthy, material, and communal, centered around the Biblical proclamation of how Christ is working among us in that event. Even Penance, which we think of as a “private act,” is a sacred point where the transcendent God visits his people, even if the sacramental celebration is focused upon one person. For that one person in the confessional is committing to deeper faith life in the Church, and we are all richer for that.

But even with the Catechism and three decades past, there is no strategy from the universal church or individual dioceses on how to promulgate, unpack, and preach the essential Tradition of the Church. I haven’t posted much lately on sacramental theology, the Catechism’s specific emphases on the sacraments individually and collectively, or on the ways we teach and learn about sacraments, a learning process that should continue throughout life, and not as a passage through childhood. Of course, we must take into consideration the “condition” of the Church in the United States, which is different from the days of Vatican II in 1965 and even from the days of the Catechism’s release in 1993. Studies of the Church from a sociological vantage point are on the rise.

Early this AM I received notice from America Magazine of a release of a new work, Catholicism at a Crossroads [2025], which, thanks to the army of Amazon Prime drivers, will be on my front porch by 9 PM tonight. I am anxious to see what four of the best Catholic sociologists have to say based upon several years of interviews and inventories, and how they interpret this data. We know there is a priest shortage that will endure through much of this century. It is time to stop saying “priest shortage,” so that we won’t spend the next century sitting around like the Gospel virgins trimming their lamps. There is no “bridegroom” coming to rescue us. We have all been baptized to do the work in the Spirit’s will, including the manner we can select our priestly ministers. St. Augustine, the venerable father and teacher of the Church around 400 A.D., was drafted by his people to become their bishop—held in house arrest till he agreed!

When I was young, we prayed for the Lord to send missionaries into the Amazon Region, Bolivia, and the Communist-atheist countries to make converts through the sacraments. The reason I’m backing off the term “priest shortage” is because we have—now—a greater shortage that presently goes unacknowledged, i.e., church professionals. I am speaking here of the titles you see in your bulletins [or don’t see.] That would include the parish director of faith formation, a position in many parishes that needs multiple personnel. We just lost our director in my parish, a charismatic and effective deacon, who joined an extraordinary new Catholic high school—a Cristo Rey High School—in the City of Orlando.

Just for the heck of it, I looked up our parish posting for the now-vacant position in my parish, on our diocesan employment website. I did not know whether to laugh or cry. The responsibilities are far beyond the time capacities of the director; here is a red flag, too: “The omission of specific statements of the duties or functions does not exclude them from the classification if the work is similar, related, or a logical assignment for this classification. Other duties may be required and assigned.” You don’t need an interpreter for this one. A pastor is bound by no legislation in terms of the open-ended work expectations he may place upon any church employee. Fifteen years ago, as an EAP provider to my diocese in my psychotherapy practice, it was sad to hear the discouragements and the depressions of lay employees in churches. I would get truly angry in the therapist’s office that there is no true due process to protect church employees from arbitrary church officers who demanded too much, or who did not maintain a congenial work environment, or who could fire at will. Strange thing that we never hear a sermon [or even mention] of Pope Leo XIII [r. 1878-1903], who taught that worker exploitation was a problem that must be faced by the State and the Church, along with the social responsibility of employers. Personally, I favor contracts for all church employees with independent HR services available.

I won’t be around to see what parish life is like in the U.S. in 2050, or 2100 for that matter. But for those who will live in that world, it will be necessary to honestly and critically review the Church’s recent past and the crises of the present; more specifically, to assess the successes and failures of the implementations of Vatican II—and it is OK to say out loud that we botched a good deal of the conciliar reform, to the detriment of Church unity. In our hurry to experiment with the Novus Ordo, i.e., the Mass Missal of 1970 promulgated by Pope Paul VI, we overlooked both history and charity. Pope Pius V [r. 1566-1572], when he mandated the Roman Latin Rite Missal [the one we old timers grew up with], allowed for geographic regions in Europe to continue worshipping in their previous rites if they dated back to 1370, two centuries before Pius issued the universal Latin Mass of 1570. You wonder: could Pius V’s generous consideration of the faithful’s devotional needs been repeated by Paul VI in 1970 by allowing use of the Tridentine Rite? Did we even stop to consider it? Would we have the conservative-liberal divisions within Catholicism had we listened to each other in the 1960’s?

You can have magnificent Church Councils throughout history; you can have the best Catechism in the world. But both must be “received” by the folks in the pews and the preachers in the pulpit. A Lenten meditation might be: “Do I honestly love Jesus’ Church enough to invest my body and soul into the Church’s survival?”

We will pick this up in two weeks.

Did You Miss Mass on the Immaculate Conception?

12/10/2024

Did you meet your obligation to attend Mass on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, or were you frantically searching on-line for a local 11 PM Mass yesterday, December 9? And I would lay heavy odds that if you went to Mass yesterday, you may be rightfully confused about exactly what you celebrated. Two problems: the definition of a “holy day of obligation” in general and the precise meaning of the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Let’s start with holy days. The Boston Pilot, Beantown’s Catholic newspaper, carried a detailed piece on November 27 explaining the Roman Catholic list of feasts to be observed universally as days of common worship at Mass [aside from Sundays, the primordial feast days.] It is an interesting list:

Canon 1246 of the Code of Canon Law tells us that "the Lord's Day, on which the paschal mystery is celebrated, is by apostolic tradition to be observed in the universal Church as the primary holy day of obligation" -- that is, a day where the faithful are obligated to attend Mass. "In the same way, the following holy days are to be observed: the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Epiphany, the Ascension of Christ, the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, the feast of Mary the Mother of God, her Immaculate Conception, her Assumption, the feast of St. Joseph, the feast of the Apostles Sts. Peter and Paul, and the feast of All Saints."

As you may notice, Canon Law’s list of special days of obligatory Mass attendance is longer than our current American list of obligatory observances—the Epiphany, the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ [Corpus Christi], St. Joseph, and the Apostles Peter and Paul are not obligatory in the U.S. But let’s read the law further: “[T]he same canon goes on to add: "However, the Episcopal Conference may, with the prior approval of the Apostolic See, suppress certain holy days of obligation,” meaning that the U.S. Conference of Bishops has some authority to remove the “obligation” from Mass attendance from some feasts. For example, the Feast of St. Joseph on March 19 does not carry a Mass obligation.

Over the last several decades the USCCB has received permission to transfer certain feasts to the closest Sunday. Thus, in the U.S., the Epiphany is always on a Sunday, as is the Ascension [in most dioceses], and The Holy Eucharist [Corpus Christi]. Some of you may remember when most U.S. dioceses moved Ascension Thursday back to the next Sunday, permanently. It caused no little stir because most of us were raised on St. Luke’s Gospel, which reported that Jesus remained on earth for forty days after the Resurrection. Moving the feast seemed to imply that Jesus remained on earth forty-three days, though in truth Luke is the only Evangelist who mentions “forty days.” But some dioceses, including Boston, still observe the Ascension on Thursday.

Margaret and I got caught in a peculiar situation traveling to Boston from Orlando. The Orlando Diocese, like most in the U.S., celebrates the Ascension on the Sunday before Pentecost, or the Seventh Sunday of the Easter Season. Consequently, we were not obliged to attend Mass on Thursday, the day before our trip. But Boston observed the Ascension on Thursday. So, when we attended Saturday evening Mass in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the missalettes were set to the Seventh Week of the Easter Season, as Boston had celebrated the Ascension several days before. We missed the observance of the Ascension for that year.

This year the feast of the Immaculate Conception fell on a Sunday and was transferred to Monday, December 9. The Second Sunday of Advent takes precedence in such cases. In years past, the obligation to attend the Feast of the Immaculate Conception transferred to Monday was dispensed in such circumstances, but the Vatican recently ruled that all the faithful are obliged to attend Mass on Monday when the transferred feast celebrates a mystery of Jesus or Mary. In Ordinary Time—i.e., outside of Advent, Lent, and Eastertide--holy days can be observed on Sunday if they fall on Sunday. All Saints, for example, always trumps a Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Truth compels me to admit that, obligation or not, the Holy Days have never been well attended, Christmas being the obvious exception. As I understand it, the concept of a “holy day of obligation” engendered more enthusiasm from early medieval times when the serfs were given a holiday from their farming to attend Mass in town and then feast and enjoy “morality plays.” In surveying the online literature about holy days, one constant about them is “freedom from work.” There were as many as 36 holy days until the Industrial Age and modern banking and commerce made that number prohibitive when factoring in the bottom line of corporate profits.

Consequently, the social reinforcement element of holy days—holidays! -- is no longer there. In fact, the opposite has resulted: the faithful find themselves scrambling to attend Mass around the pressures of their job and family obligations. A weekday Mass is now, ironically, work. To add to our current dilemma, there is not exactly a groundswell of energized piety around some of the current holy days. Today’s feast, “the Immaculate Conception,” is an excellent case in point, as it commands considerable reflection to sort out what exactly we are celebrating.

Wikipedia provides a good summary of the history of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which was not declared until 1854 when Pope Pius IX stated:

We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.

The development of this doctrine is a logical result of St. Augustine’s fifth century teaching all humans born on this earth are the biological inheritors of the guilt of Adam’s sin. Consequently, sexual intercourse between a husband and wife was viewed as a conduit of sin, which is why we rushed newborns to baptism. Christians, as far as we can tell, always believed that Mary was sinless in her own conduct, but as Augustine’s thinking took root, one had to admit that Mary was not sinless since she inherited original sin at the time of her conception.

It took about fifteen hundred years to address this contradiction to the satisfaction of the universal Church: the idea that God intervened and exempted Mary from the reality of original sin [“a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God”]. Mary was conceived in the natural act by which all of us came to be, but God protected her alone from inheriting the sin of Adam, given her destiny to become the Mother of God. The Church came to the formulation of this doctrine, the Immaculate Conception, through prayer, logic, and popular devotion to Mary, a good example of the continuing work of the Spirit in the life of the Church. The doctrine and feast of the Assumption, another Marian holyday of obligation celebrated in August, is not recorded in the Scripture, and found expression from the organic life of the Church.

There is no literal Scriptural reference to the reality of the Immaculate Conception, and as a result, the Church has had to use another Gospel text for December 8: St. Luke’s account of the conception of Jesus, when Mary gave her “yes” to the Angel Gabriel to mother the child of the Holy Spirit. As one might expect, when most Catholics hear the term “Immaculate Conception,” they tend to think of Mary’s marriage to Joseph and the conception of Jesus. As Luke makes clear, the Holy Spirit is the father of Jesus in every sense of the word. Wouldn’t it be pastorally more meaningful to call December 8 [or March 25] “Incarnation Day,” a celebration of the mysteries of God becoming man which would embody Mary’s exemption from Original Sin and the Annunciation?

Holy Days will always be plagued by the reality that we do not fully understand the fact or the piety of the meaning of the day. As one author put it, holy days are marked but not celebrated by the wide body of the faithful. “All Saints” is celebrated on November 1, but imagine if the Mass obligation were applied instead to November 2, “All Souls Day?” I would bet that Mass attendance would be quite respectable because we all have loved ones who have died. Moreover, imagine if some of those Masses were offered on the grounds of Catholic cemeteries? The emotions of grief and hope would form a visceral engagement to Eucharist and the community of the universal Church.

We still have work to do.

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