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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.
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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. 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 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. I was at a social recently with a group of active Catholics who were lamenting the quality of preaching in their respective parishes. Having been a preacher myself for twenty-some years I keep my mouth shut, in part because my former congregations would probably give me mixed reviews, too. But recently I decided to make preaching the subject of discussion here at the Café site, because there is considerable confusion among clergy and laity about exactly what should happen in that space between the Gospel and the Profession of Faith. In the 1960's the U.S. Supreme Court was considering an indecency case; Justice Potter Stewart observed that while he could not define obscenity, "I know it when I see it." Do we know good preaching or poor preaching when we hear it?
BACK IN THE OLD DAYS: I looked at the evolution of explanations of what we call the “preaching” at Mass. A pre-Vatican II daily Missal [i.e., prior to 1965] describes this space as a homily, as in “the priest explains the Word of God for us.” A critical part of the explanation was a translation: the Tridentine or pre-Vatican II Mass was celebrated in Latin, and the Gospel was read in the vernacular [e.g., in English] after the solemn singing of the Latin text. As I recall, liturgical law did not demand a sermon but strongly encouraged it on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. I can clearly remember that some priests interpreted “explaining the Word of God” rather liberally, focusing on everything from pious devotions to parish finances to the need for confession to “the last things,” i.e., heaven, hell, and purgatory. In my parish I was in the second grade in 1956 when our monsignor preached that no one should see the morally objectionable film “Baby Doll” then playing in theaters in Buffalo. [“An immature, naive teenage bride holds her anxious husband at bay while flirting with an amorous Sicilian farmer.” [per IMDb] Unfortunately, it was the Christmas morning Mass when he delivered this message. It is probably fair to say that what Catholics heard in the years before the Council was a brief exhortation to be prayerful and good, a “pious exhortation,” as a rule. It is also true that “professional preachers” were invited into parishes, particularly for annual parish retreats and Forty Hours devotions, etc. Often the visiting preachers were members of religious orders who specialized in parochial renewals and perfected multiple crafts in communication style and composition. One of the highest-rated television shows in prime time during the 1950’s, if you can imagine this, was “Life is Worth Living,” a half-hour spiritual exhortation/reflection/instruction from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, an auxiliary bishop of New York City. He was to preaching what Johnny Carson was to comedy: he understood “connectedness” as well as any public performer. He mixed devotion with poetry, theology, and even humor. I still remember his accounting of a letter he received from an actress who wrote that she was listening to his show while applying her facial make-up to go on stage. She said she was moved to return to religion by his words. Sheen, with a perfectly straight face, looked into the camera and said: “The first instance of grace after grease.” Sheen’s program won awards and maintained high ratings, even more remarkable as his broadcast competition in that time slot was the number one rated “Milton Berle Show.” But Berle and Sheen were good friends and “Uncle Milty” as he was known would often joke that he was changing his name to “Uncle Fulty.” [Bishop’s Sheen’s program was ended in 1957 by Sheen’s superior, New York’s Cardinal Spellman, who literally hated his auxiliary, Sheen.] There is a doctoral dissertation waiting to be written on the impact of Bishop Sheen’s preaching on parochial life in the United States. Whether a Catholic attended Sunday Mass or not, he or she would have been exposed to the captivation of good preaching at least a few times during the run of “Life is Worth Living.” I doubt that many Catholics expected their parish priests to replicate the effectiveness of Bishop Sheen, but at the same time they [and I] had some clue to the spiritual magic that certain men could summon in the pulpit. When I “played Mass” as a kid, I always preached, so I must have gotten something from my parish priests. A CURIOUS CONTRADICTION OF DEVELOPMENTS: You can look at all sixteen documents of Vatican II [promulgated between 1963 and 1965] and find a call to all Catholics to turn to the Bible as the primary text to learn the will of God, to return to the atmosphere of the Apostolic era. This was, to borrow a biblical phrase, “a hard teaching.” The old joke described the Catholic family bible as the repository for family documents, stocks and bonds, and there was truth in that. Even after Pius XII [r. 1939-1958] encouraged Catholics to study the Bible, there was parochial reluctance to do so, particularly where the Hebrew Scripture or Old Testament was concerned. Regrettably, antisemitism permeated Catholicism as it did much of American society. It is also true that Catholics in general regarded emphasis upon the Bible as a “Protestant thing.” Before the 1960’s you could miss the entire Liturgy of the Word and still get credit for attending Mass, because only Catholics had the true presence of Christ in the Consecration and reception of Holy Communion. When the Vatican II fathers labored to put the Scripture at the center of Catholic/Christian life—the sacraments, after all, take their very meaning from the sacred scriptures-- there was considerable grumbling that Catholicism was “turning Protestant.” The renewed emphasis upon the Scripture was applied to all the sacramental rites, but none with more vigor than the Eucharist itself. The Mass expanded from two to three readings, adding a passage from the Old Testament to the calendar of Masses. The Mass readings were richly expanded to the three-year cycle we have today, and as we know, the readings are proclaimed in the local language, no longer in Latin. Such drastic changes of a half-century ago would have theoretically altered the nature of the sermon and the identity of the preacher-homilist at Mass. But here we are in 2024, and researchers still report that Catholics are more dissatisfied with preaching than most any other aspect of parish life. What happened? AN UNCERTAIN TRUMPET: The reform documents from the Council, as well as sixty years of follow-up directives, were long on exhortation to preach energetically, but short on specifics. A commentary on the Roman Missal instructs: “For in the readings, as explained by the Homily, God speaks to his people, opening up to them the mystery of redemption and salvation, and offering spiritual nourishment; and Christ himself is present through his word in the midst of the faithful. The reading of the Gospel constitutes the high point of the Liturgy of the Word.” And in another place, “The Homily is part of the Liturgy and is highly recommended, for it is necessary for the nurturing of the Christian life. It should be an explanation of some aspect of the readings from Sacred Scripture or of another text from the Ordinary or the Proper of the Mass of the day and should take into account both the mystery being celebrated and the particular needs of the listeners.” I was in the Franciscan major seminary when the first directives on preaching were coming into our classrooms. Collectively, they were rather thin gruel for 22-year-old students who were cutting our teeth in public ministry—in my case, working on retreat weekends with Catholic high school students and religious education programs in the Washington, D.C. area. Looking back, we worked with some of the best high schools in the Capital area: Georgetown Visitation, Trinity High School [where “The Exorcist’ was filmed], Seton High School, and a number of suburban Maryland and Virginia high school religious ed programs. I guess the counsel we received from our mentors and superiors was “keep them enthused and attached to the Church.” We loosely followed a teen retreat program model called TEC or “Teenagers Encounter Christ” which I discovered today is still in use around the country and considerably expanded. But even today the TEC website describes its preaching mission in generalities: TEC begins with a retreat that offers a powerful, life changing encounter with Christ. Christ’s Paschal Mystery is shared through a dynamic sequence of peer reflections, small group discussions, sacraments, recreation, prayer, and respectful support. Team members share the gospel with retreat participants who in turn go forth and continue to share with others. It was up to each of us, as young aspiring preachers, to craft that invitation in the confines of our strength and weaknesses and the personalities of our clientele. I learned early that there is a strong psychological component to the ministry of preaching—you are not just conveying a body of information, but also opening yourself—connectedness—to your congregation. You become one with them. BUT THERE IS MUCH MORE: To tell the truth, evangelical Protestant theologians—most notably Karl Barth—seem to have a more powerful and concrete definition of preaching and preachers than their Catholic counterparts. Barth [1886-1968] wrote: Pastors [preachers] are sinners. They are unprofitable servants with all their words even though they do all that they are under obligation to do (cf. Luke 17:10). Nevertheless, they are servants of the Most High (cf. Dan. 3:26). They speak in his name. They carry out his commission, which is a reality even today. No matter how well or how badly they do it, this in the presupposition of listening to them…. They know fear and trembling whenever they mount the pulpit. They are crushed by the feeling of being poor human beings who are probably more unworthy than all those who sit before them. Nevertheless, precisely then it is still a matter of God’s Word. The Word of God that they have to proclaim is what judges them, but this does not alter the fact – indeed, it means – that they have to proclaim it. This is the presupposition of their proclaiming it.” In Roman Catholic theology, a Catholic priest becomes an alter Christus [“another Christ”] when he consecrates the bread and wine as Jesus did at the Last Supper. Barth would argue that, in so many words, the preacher in any Christian denomination speaks in God’s name and makes known the concrete judgments of God. Little wonder that there is fear and trembling in Barth’s theology of preaching. Barth, a Reformed Calvinist, becomes much more understandable to Catholics when we remember that in 1935, he was deported from Germany to Switzerland for preaching against the evils of the growing Nazi government. Interestingly, around the same time, the Catholic bishop Angelo Roncalli was diplomatically expelled from Rome to Bulgaria for decrying the fascism of Benito Mussolini. The silence of so many bishops in Europe in the face of the totalitarian menace was one of the prime reasons for the calling of Vatican II by Pope John XXIII in 1959, the very same Angelo Roncalli! A Catholic theologian pointed out to me that in Barth’s thinking, a congregation should be so moved to conversion by a sermon that they wish they could be baptized again at its conclusion. It is no accident that in much of Christianity—and certainly in Catholicism—we make the Profession of Faith, the Nicene Creed, the same creed professed at Baptism, immediately after the sermon. I think of Barth many weekends at Mass as we rumble half-heartedly through the Nicene Creed. WHAT CATHOLICS SAY THEY NEED: I was at a dinner party recently when I realized that I was the only person at the table who did not hold a doctorate degree—and, no, two master’s degrees do not equal a doctorate, as my Ivy League doctor/wife reminds me when I get on my high horse. For years now I have been hearing from professionals in many fields that sermons are sandwiches thin on the meat. The clerical excuse used to be—and may still be—that the “simple faithful” would not understand a sermon with either academic thought or moral conviction; put another way, we address the lowest common denominator. Barth, whose Church Dogmatics runs to about 9000 pages, was correct that preaching requires both study and the passion of faith, i.e., Biblical reflection upon the human condition. It is a curious thing that in an American presidential election year where public morality is a major issue, not a single moral issue comes up in homilies, and this although Pope Francis preaches regularly—and controversially—on a wide range of issues, from ecology to abortion to refugees to human sexuality to acts of war. It may be that with our country sharply divided, most pastors and preachers believe that to wade too far into Biblical/Church moral teaching runs the risk of alienating members at a time when we have already lost a good number of our confreres in the Catholic family. I was a young pastor when John Hinkley shot President Ronald Reagan and two others. The following Sunday I preached on the need to reflect upon the proliferation of handguns. As you might expect, I received my share of strong criticism. After all, this is Florida, the land of open carry. Looking back, I might have done better to wait until my own anger had cooled down and I could have drawn more from the generally good rapport I enjoyed with my people. Another issue which challenges preachers is the complexity of moral teachings of the Church [and the state, for that matter.] My moral professor advised us that at times in our ministry the issues would not always be “yes or no” or “good and evil.” “Sometimes your choices are evil versus less evil.” I raise this question because ten states have some form of constitutional proposal on the November ballot dealing with the issue of abortion, including my state of Florida. In 2022 Catholic News Agency ran a lengthy piece on the moral complexity of some prenatal cases, notably involving ectopic pregnancies and cancer: A Catholic woman is allowed to undergo life-saving treatment — even if it means that her unborn baby will die indirectly as a result of that treatment, according to the U.S. bishops’ directives. The intention and action, here, is to save the mother’s life. It is not to end her baby’s life through abortion, or “the directly intended termination of pregnancy.” “Operations, treatments, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child,” the directives read. For a more complicated case, see this 2010 study from America Magazine. A total ban on every procedure to save the life of the mother--as some states legislate in their abortion codes—actually lacks the traditional wisdom of the Church in these tragic and delicate cases. Clearly, no homilist would or should go into such details from the pulpit. However, it is certainly appropriate to exhort Catholics to study moral issues closely and to integrate resources such as books, journals, and websites into the homily and subsequently into the adult education ministry of the parish. The Catechist Café itself was developed to address adult education and discussion in the Church. FINALLY, SOME FRANK OBSERVATIONS FROM THE PEW: One man’s thoughts…and you can refute them as you wish. Preachers, particularly priests, do not seem to read. In thirty years, I have heard exactly two books mentioned in a sermon in my present church. There ought to be book quotations and recommendations from the pulpit—and in church bulletins-- on studies of Scripture, Spirituality, Church History, Morality, etc. Introduce the major Catholic publishing houses. There are a lot of Ph.D.’s in the pews who can master St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Thomas Merton, and would eagerly do so. I think that most Catholics regardless of their education would be honored and motivated if their preachers considered them smart. A sermon should not be ego centered. I was guilty of this; from my sermons my parishioners knew I lived and died with the Buffalo Bills and that I attended the Daytona 500 every year, among other things. A preacher can feel “too much at home” particularly if he has lived with his congregation for some years. Pope Francis recently stated that a sermon should last no longer than ten minutes. Ten minutes goes by very quickly. Get down to business. Talk about the golf at coffee and donuts. Deacons prepare more diligently than priests. In part, this is due to the deacons’ self-realization that ordained ministry is a life-long school of the study of the holy. They have more in common with monks, for whom religious study is embedded in daily spirituality. Priests, I fear, believe that graduation from the seminary will hold them intellectually for a lifetime. The three deacons in my parish read/proclaim their sermons. I didn’t always agree with this method at first, but today, when one of our deacons opens his homily folder, the same thought comes to everyone: HE’S PREPARED! People respect the preacher and the message when they see the sweat that went into it. We do not live in a bubble. It would be a pleasant change to hear mention of the culture outside the Church bookstore. I would wager that many Catholics would be shocked to know that bestselling novelists Toni Morrison, Dom DeLillo, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, Cormac McCarthy, J.F. Powers, Louise Erdrich, Phil Klay, Ron Hansen, and Alice McDermott are themselves Catholics who weave narratives with the richness of parables. And of course, Flannery O’Connor. Novelists and other artists, at their best, are prophets of our culture. The sermon is a component of a bigger event. It is time we began thinking again of the Mass as a dramatic whole. Aristotle’s [384-322 B.C.] Poetics played a big role in my sacramental formation; his main premise of drama was unity of action. In our circumstances, the sermon’s content and delivery must fit the rest of the Mass like Cinderella’s slipper. Preaching suffers when the rites of the rest of the Mass are ignored or poorly observed. I had recent occasion to read again Sacrosanctum Concilium [promulgated 1963], Vatican II’s decree on the Liturgy. It is a shock to see how the typical American celebration of Mass overlooks the directives of the Council and the Roman Missals. Did you know that the official Church teaching on music cautions against “performance music” [with clapping!?] at Mass and states that the cantor’s role “disappears into the strong sound of full congregational singing?” Or, that there are three identified moments at Mass where the congregation is given silent time for personal reflection and prayer? [During the Penitential Rite, after the homily, and after the distribution of communion.] If the Mass is celebrated in its proper form, an engaged congregation will look to the homily with greater hunger—and most likely energize the preacher to pour out his grace. AN UNCONVENTIONAL STUDENT
My graduate studies in theology involved several three credit courses which were in fact independent studies with the production of a 30-to-50-page paper, under the guidance of a professor of my choosing. I learned one thing in graduate school: when there are research choices, always pick a topic your faculty advisor knows nothing about. I had tried that in 1971 with “Women’s Liberation and the Catholic Church” the year before; then, I was certain nobody on the faculty was reading Simone de Beauvoir or Betty Friedan—not that I was, either, but I was certain there was a window of opportunity in that I could level the playing field with my faculty reader. It worked. I got the A. Now, would I dare try it again in the next academic year? I had noticed in graduate studies than many of my professors in several branches of theology said virtually nothing about the Virgin Mary. There are reasons for this. When the Council Vatican II [1962-1965] convened a decade earlier, the first draft of the documents included recommendations of many additions to the role and status of Mary in the Church. These included the additions of multiple Marian feasts to the liturgical calendar [there were seventeen already in the 1962 missal]; a separate decree on the Virgin Mary in the Vatican II documents; and the most controversial, a declaration of Mary as the “Mediatrix of All Graces.” But most Church fathers at Vatican II did not approve these recommendations for multiple reasons. The title and function of Mediatrix of God’s graces was, on its face, heretical. [God does not need a broker.] A separate full conciliar decree on Mary was also doctrinally questionable, implying that she was not one of the faithful family of the Church but on a higher—almost angelic—plane. Her role was better defined as first member of the People of God, one of us. And in a Church seeking to put more emphasis upon Christ, the Bible, and the Eucharist, the addition of yet more feasts of Mary was viewed as excessive, confusing, and counterproductive. Consequently, among Catholic academics after the Council, this change in emphasis led to a decline in emphasis on Marian theology in many quarters. Perhaps because the drift of seminary academics became more biblically emphasized, I became curious about the standing Marian doctrines and how they could be retrieved or made pastorally understandable in the post-Vatican II era, and particularly as Catholicism was becoming actively engaged in dialogue with other faith traditions. This was particularly true regarding the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, which Protestant scholars have challenged do not have basis in Scripture but were declared doctrines by popes [the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950.] Moreover, the Churches of the East—in union with Rome and the Orthodox Church—hold different theologies and understandings of Mary’s final time on earth. So, my project was to reframe the Assumption, and luckily, I found a Capuchin Franciscan who agreed to supervise it. WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT MARY’S ADULTHOOD FROM THE BIBLE? Historically speaking, truly little. Only one of the four Gospels [Luke] details Mary’s role in the motherhood of Christ; Matthew, by contrast, highlights Joseph’s role in the Infancy Narratives, and two Gospels begin with Jesus as an adult, Mark, and John. Over the history of Christianity, the Church has studied both the Hebrew and the New Testament for prophesies and subtle references to Mary. Notable among these is the passage Genesis 3:15 where God curses the serpent in the Garden of Eden: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers.” If you study many statues of Mary, even small ones you might have in your home, you might find that Mary is crushing a snake with her foot, an obvious allusion to Genesis. Similarly, in the New Testament Book of Revelation [12:1-6] there is description of “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth.” Then a huge dragon appears “To devour her child when she gave birth. She gave birth to a son, a mail child, destined to rule all nations with an iron rod. Her child was caught up to God and his throne. The woman herself fled into the desert where she had a place prepared by God, that there she might be taken care of for twelve hundred and sixty days.” This text is an excellent example of biblical apocalyptic literature, inspired poetry about the future, and in this case written by “God’s servant John” under the inspiration of an angel. Note that while the Scripture passes down several references about mysterious significant women, none specifically names Mary of Nazareth except for the Gospels, and even here the information is limited. Over the centuries under the Church's guidance and grassroots devotion of the faithful, the definition of Mary’s role in the divine plan has gradually taken shape in both doctrine and devotion. That Mary is the Mother of God was defined by the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. The doctrine of the virgin birth was defined by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. But the next two declarations were a long time coming, in 1854 and 1950, as the study of Christendom and the Bible moved into the era of historical and scientific method. The Protestant revolt against “unbiblical” teachings and practices had some effect upon Catholic doubling down on its cherished identity with the Virgin Mary. The Assumption, as we saw, has no concrete historical moment in print. [Of course, neither does Jesus’ Resurrection.] Even today, there is still debate about whether Mary clinically died, or whether at the moment of the end of her life she was raised to glory without tasting death by her son in heaven, who would not subject his mother to the grave. For our purposes, let us look at John 19:25-27. This passage describes the Good Friday account where Jesus entrusts his mother Mary to “the disciple whom he loved.” The curious thing is that the Gospel with John’s name does not say that “the disciple whom Jesus loved” was, in fact, John. The best theory on this omission is that John died before the completion of the Gospel and the text was completed by one of his devoted disciples, and as a rule we give that answer when someone asks. Mary, John, and several others were standing under the cross when Jesus poured forth his Holy Spirit in his dying words, and again when the soldier pierced the side of Christ, and water and blood burst out upon them—symbols of sacramental initiation. What we have here on Good Friday is John’s description of the birth of the Church. There is Biblical consistency that this new community of the Son of God gathered in Jerusalem and lived there for the foreseeable future. It is hard to imagine that Mary would distance herself from this community in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, we have no hard information on the deaths of these first members of the early Church, but we do know from multiple sources that relations between Christians and Jews were difficult, sometimes violent, and that Christians emigrated around the Mediterranean. Many devout legends would arise about the final days of the apostles and the community of the early Church, and Mary was not exempt from divine speculation. The most enduring and speculative rendering of her death came from the eastern half of Christianity—today’s Eastern-rite Catholics and the Orthodox—and described Mary’s death by natural causes amid the Christian community in Jerusalem. The apostles and others processed with her body to a selected site, only to be put upon by a Jewish mob. Peter, as the story goes, took his sword, and cut off the ear of one of the attackers. In any case, the story states that Mary was dead and eventually buried, like all human beings. No burial site is known today. Official Church teaching in the East refined this primitive account by affirming that Mary had died but that she was awaiting a glorious resurrection. A solemn feast developed, “The Dormition of Mary,” which became one of the first major feasts as the Church developed its liturgical calendar. [“Dormition” comes from the Greek, “to sleep.”] As centuries of theological disputes continued, there were many who argued that since Mary was conceived without original sin and maintained perfect obedience, she was the sole person who did not deserve to taste death, that she was taken to heaven miraculously though the precise place and moment were unknown to us at this time. Consequently, we Roman Catholics in the West do not celebrate the Dormition but rather the glorious Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Body and Soul, into heaven. If you are interested, here is a link to Pope Pius XII’s declaration of this dogma in November 1950. A SPIRITUAL REFLECTION: Personally, I believe that Mary did die first. I believe in her glorification, too, though I know nothing about its time and place. I may be very wrong here, but I harken back to the fact that Jesus died, really died. His followers buried him. As St. John wrote, “But when they approached the cross of Jesus, they discovered he was already dead.” Despite what a lot of us were taught at some time or other, Jesus was not going through the motions on Good Friday. As he was fully human, his faith was deep but his knowledge of the “other side” was limited, as is ours. The early Church fathers used to say that “What is not assumed is not saved,” meaning that Jesus had to know and experience human life to the full, particularly when he embraced the cross and certain death. Jesus embraced full human life to save it. It is hard to imagine Mary separated from the Community of Christ, i.e., those of us who embrace the prospect of death in faith but also in trust. Mary was a model of obedience and trust; “Be it done to me according to thy word.” As Vatican II taught, Mary is one of us, not an exception in the redemptive process. When the Church established the Assumption as a major feast of the Church, it did so as a way for us to consider our own destinies. On Easter Sunday we celebrate a death and a resurrection. On the Feast of the Assumption, we commemorate a death and a trust. When I was researching for my three credits, I came across a passage from the German theologian Karl Rahner in his treatment of the Assumption. He acknowledged that it is possible the Assumption has not happened yet, but that we know/believe by God’s inspiration that it absolutely will happen. At the time Rahner’s hypothesis seemed “a little out there,” but the annual feast of the Assumption has come to represent for me the need for greater trust in God’s goodness and providence as my own mortal coil continues to rust away. Faith, Hope, Charity. Maybe the order needs to be Faith, Charity, and Hope. Hope is the ultimate step up the ladder. Oh yes, I got the A. I am getting vibes that it is hard to find godparents and sponsors in local parishes. I am a little surprised that the issue of “Godparent shortage” hasn’t worked its way into the upper reaches of current public Catholic conversation in the United States. I can tell you that I have been “drafted” several times over the past two years to prepare adults for Confirmation and accompany them to the Cathedral. I don’t think it is my charm that brings these invitations; rather, the clergy in my parish are finding it difficult to find candidates who meet the canonical requirements. In Catania, Italy, Archbishop Salvatore Gristina issued a decree to end abuse of the godparent tradition. It seems that in the Catania vicinity there were too many situations of families using the sponsorship positions to cement relationships with criminal elements rather than fulfill the “true ecclesial function” of accompanying their godchildren on their journey of faith. [National Catholic Register, 2021]
I doubt that the Mafia is the root of the problem in the United States. Data--sheer numbers and statistics--tell us a great deal. In 1965 there were 1,237,000 infant baptisms in the United States; in 2022 there were 437,942 such baptisms, roughly a two-thirds decline which is even more remarkable when one considers that in in 1965 there were 44.3 million Catholics on the books compared to 66.5 million in 2022. [CARA Database; save database link for your work.] My read on this is that many Catholics are not having their children baptized—for a multitude of reasons we will examine below. Baptism, of course, is the gateway to Christian-Catholic life and the first pillar of what the Church would consider as “being a good Catholic,” a basic requirement for sponsorship for church sacraments. In conversations, clerics raise another factor—many who present themselves as candidates for the responsibility of godparents and sponsors are not validly married in the church and, beyond that, require annulments to reconcile their good standing in the Church. A valid Catholic marriage is an ipso facto requirement for a married sponsor unless he or she is single. In 2020 19,500 full annulment proceedings were begun in the entire country of 17,000 parishes. I am not going too far out on a limb here to suggest that a majority of those who identify themselves as Catholic may be living in invalid unions, sacramentally speaking. Sacramental law and practice are one of those massive superhighway interchanges where liturgical, sacramental, ecclesiastical, and canon law theology interconnect with each other. The identity and character of a godparent or sponsor is defined by each of these disciplines of study and with multiple terms and emphases. Suffice here to say that the Church’s mission, given by Christ in his last encounter with his followers, is “preach the Gospel to the whole world” and bring all to the table of forgiveness and unity that is the Eucharistic community. Preserve the unity of the Church in its longstanding guidance but err on the side of mercy. For today, I thought it might be profitable to review the Catholic Canon Law regarding Baptism. I have two hopes here: [1] the expansion of understanding of Church law and practice for the Catholic general population, and [2] the avoidance of embarrassment to potential sponsors of being declined the office of sponsorship. The following pertinent canons were taken directly from the Vatican’s website: [872] Insofar as possible, a person to be baptized is to be given a sponsor who assists an adult in Christian initiation or together with the parents presents an infant for baptism. A sponsor also helps the baptized person to lead a Christian life in keeping with baptism and to fulfill faithfully the obligations inherent in it. Canon 872 indicates that infants, children, or adult candidates—all candidates regardless of age should be given a sponsor. The law assumes that there will be times when a solitary person of any age may be presented or presents himself/herself for baptism, and in this case the Church should provide a sponsor presumably from the local community if the candidate has not connected with a personal prospective sponsor. The sponsor is expected to work with the candidate in preparing for intense Catholic living. Interestingly, 872 envisions the sponsor working with the parents of the infant or child in reviving the intensity of the Catholic faith family which is the Catholic home. Frequently the parents of the baptismal candidates are still living off what they were taught in the sixth grade [or worse], so it does not take much imagination to see evangelization needs and opportunities surrounding the parish’s celebrations of infant baptisms. Some parishes provide a program of preparation just for the sponsors and parents prior to the baptism. I wish that churches did not refer to these faith sharings as “classes.” The common wisdom of the Church intends a personal union of faith between the godparents and the family [or families] that extends after the baptism. As one Christian website puts it, ““Godparents or sponsors should be willing and able to take on a supportive role in the life of the baptized individual. This may include attending church services together, offering guidance on matters of faith, and being a source of encouragement and wisdom as the baptized person navigates their spiritual journey.” Were I pastoring today, I might consider a baptismal alumni circle of parents and sponsors. An adult candidate for baptism will, under ordinary circumstances, enter the year-long catechumenate of the parish which culminates at Baptism during the Easter Vigil. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has provided a descriptive summary of the process. I have cited the sponsorship instructions here: “Prior to the Rite of Election, the Catechumen may choose one or two godparents, who will accompany the Catechumen on the day of Election, at the celebration of the Sacraments of Initiation, and during the Period of Mystagogia. They are called to show the Catechumens good example of the Christian life, sustain them in moments of hesitancy and anxiety, bear witness, and guide their progress in the baptismal life.” In parishes where the preparatory rites [e.g., the scrutinies] are performed at a Sunday Mass, you might notice that the sponsor walks with the candidate through the ceremony. Here again we see the rich opportunities for sponsors to themselves be born again as they were at the time of their own baptisms. [873] There is to be only one male sponsor or one female sponsor or one of each. The law here assumes that there will be one or two sponsors. Two parties are not required but seem to be customary. The sacramental registry of every parish—the official Church database—has two lines for sponsors, but commentaries indicate that one line can be left blank. Where there are two sponsors, they must be of different sexes. I doubt that this binary gender directive has any subconscious political intent given the current transgender debate that followed years later, but assumes, as most of us would have in 1983, that godparents, in their role as spiritual parents, would be fatherly and motherly in the traditional sense. [874§1] To be permitted to take on the function of sponsor a person must: 1/ be designated by the one to be baptized, by the parents or the person who takes their place, or in their absence by the pastor or minister and have the aptitude and intention of fulfilling this function; [See above.] 2/ have completed the sixteenth year of age, unless the diocesan bishop has established another age, or the pastor or minister has granted an exception for a just cause; A sidebar: Given that research has found the median age of disengagement from the Catholic Church to be 13, and often as young as 10, engaging young members into the work of the Church deserves all our energy. 3/ be a Catholic who has been confirmed and has already received the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist and who leads a life of faith in keeping with the function to be taken on; Subset rule three is one of the most subjective of the guidelines. The law assumes that a godparent is living as we would expect a “good Catholic” to live. An outlandish example of an abuse here would be the selection of Michael Corleone for the role of sponsor by his sister Connie in the first Godfather movie. As Michael professes the baptismal vows at the family christening, his henchmen are eliminating the heads of the four other crime families…and Moe Greene in the massage parlor, lest we forget. “I’m Moe Greene!” But in real life, including parochial life, things are rarely so black and white. I accepted every proposed godparent submitted to me. As a pastor I found myself working with two populations of baptismal candidate infants and children: those from visible and active members of the parish whose general Catholic reputations were without blemish, on the one hand, and families who were virtual strangers to me on the other. As to the second cluster, my experience was that if you are kind to an unattached family at special events—baptisms, weddings, funerals, etc.—they do think to call you for the next “event,” and over the years they feel like this is “their” parish, even if Sundays are not their thing. Who knows? The next pastor might inherit a more vigorous involvement on their part. One scatters, another harvests. Isn’t this true of life? Today I would be more aggressive in my invitation to become involved in the parish faith family, but still with the openness to honor the judgment of the parents. Several parishes are adopting specific ministries of hospitality and outreach to families experiencing the baptismal moment or other “events” including deaths. And I am impressed with the number of “small communities” I encounter, families who meet in each other’s’ homes for prayer, discussion, and social interaction. Some groups around here have lasted 15 to 20 years and generously invite new people to join them. As a very young pastor, I had a men and women’s parish softball team, and I could always invite adults to play who might have nothing else to do with their Catholicism. [After the first season of our city’s church league, the executive board adopted an alcohol ban for all interfaith games. Rumor had it that the ban was directed at my parish…a very real possibility.] Unfortunately, there were and are some obstacles where a pastor is powerless to extend all the hospitality he might wish to, which brings us to 874-4/ not be bound by any canonical penalty legitimately imposed or declared; If you have been following the confession posts on the “morality stream” of the Café, you no doubt remember the discussions of “reserved sins.” 874-4 wanders into this area of latae sententiae [“instant excommunication” or “things we can’t take care of in the parish confessional.”] Pope Francis has greatly expanded the confessional faculty of forgiving abortion to the local parochial priest—abortion is on the list of reserved sins normally reserved to the local bishop because the act of procuring an abortion incurs an automatic excommunication, period, that must be lifted by a higher authority. A far more difficult circumstance is when the chosen godparent by the family was married in the Church, civilly divorced, and did not obtain an annulment before entering a second marriage before a minister or civil authority. This circumstance is common. The penalty of excommunication is not attached; the term “irregular state’ is applied in that the sponsor candidate cannot receive communion in mortal sin; by Church theology a person in an invalid second marriage is having sinful sex outside of a “valid” marriage and thus, objectively speaking, in a state of mortal sin. My guess is that over the past half-century a number of folks in “irregular states” have served as sponsors for a wide range of reasons, very few of them devious. The main obstacle is the need to proceed through the annulment process. [There is an excellent Canon Law summary from the Newark NJ archdiocese of the annulment process here.] In the seminary, I took an elective course, “Divorce, Remarriage, Annulments, and the Internal Forum [the confessional].” For my first ten years or so as a pastor I worked on some annulment cases in my own parishes, but it was very time consuming. I understand why many Catholics shy away from the process. Moreover, annulments can be psychologically difficult. On the matter of requiring annulments for full eucharistic participation, let alone sponsoring roles, I can only confess to confusion, pastorally speaking. Forbes Advisor asked in January 2024: “So, what about the famous statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce? That’s true, but only when it comes to first marriages, half of which are dissolved [civilly]. Second and third marriages actually fail at a far higher rate.” All of us are aware that divorce is a sad reality of American culture. What becomes of practicing Catholics whose marriages fail? For an excellent focus on Pope Francis’ philosophy and recent statistical studies of divorced Catholics, see this April 2021 treatment in America. I tend to agree with Francis, but I can understand the spiritual anguish of Church leaders who disagree with the pope, on the grounds that traditional Catholic teaching on the sanctity of the marriage bond is the last bastion of the institution of marriage. 874-5/ not be the father or mother of the one to be baptized. Interestingly, the Roman rite of the baptism of infants refers to the parents as “the first teachers of the faith…and the best teachers…” 874-5-§2/ A baptized person who belongs to a non-Catholic ecclesial community is not to participate except together with a Catholic sponsor and then only as a witness of the baptism. The language of the law implies that the non-Catholic individual is an active Christian in an organized church. The idea of a Buddhist serving as a witness is incomprehensible. But Baptism is a universal Christian sacrament, so no scandal is given by a Christian witness; his or her presence has a healthy ecumenical tone to it. The name is entered as “Christian witness” in the official registry. The Catholic Church recognizes the baptisms of all Christian Churches which use the Trinitarian formula. [Father, Son, Holy Spirit]. A Christian of another tradition enters the Catholic Church through a solemn profession of belief, Confirmation, and First Eucharist. Can. 875 A person who administers baptism is to take care that, unless a sponsor is present, there is at least a witness who can attest to the conferral of the baptism. Contrast this directive to that of sacramental marriage, which absolutely requires two witnesses besides the priest. In the U.S., and in much of the world, witnesses are mandated by civil law for validity and their signatures submitted to the state. Can. 876 To prove the conferral of baptism, if prejudicial to no one, the declaration of one witness beyond all exception is sufficient or the oath of the one baptized if the person received baptism as an adult. In these cases, there is no civil authority invoked. But see the next canon, 877. Can. 877 §1. The pastor of the place where the baptism is celebrated must carefully and without any delay record in the baptismal register the names of the baptized, with mention made of the minister, parents, sponsors, witnesses, if any, the place, and date of the conferral of the baptism, and the date and place of birth. Don’t lose your copy of your Baptismal certificate. It will tell you where all your sacramental records are stored. This is your Church passport. Demand one if it is not given to you automatically after the rite. It is your or your child’s historical record. You will need your child’s certificate for all subsequent sacraments and perhaps even for the “Catholic rate” at a parochial school. [My baptism certificate includes Confirmation, solemn vows, diaconate, orders, exclaustration from a religious order, laicization, and marriage, for example.] There is a very reasonable chance that your church of baptism will be closed or consolidated down the road if it hasn’t already. My certificate is now in storage at the chancery of the Diocese of Buffalo, having had two churches shot out from under it. Expect a slow delivery. After every major sacrament of your life, record of the event is mailed to the church of baptism. You are asking for a copy of the original issued within the past six months. Somewhere a secretary will go into the archives and copy all your sacramental entries up to the date of the event from the original parish entries. 877§2. If it concerns a child born to an unmarried mother, the name of the mother must be inserted, if her maternity is established publicly or if she seeks it willingly in writing or before two witnesses. Moreover, the name of the father must be inscribed if a public document or his own declaration before the pastor and two witnesses proves his paternity; in other cases, the name of the baptized is inscribed with no mention of the name of the father or the parents. For my first ten years as a pastor, we had neither the 1983 Code of Canon Law nor DNA testing on a wide scale. There were, over my years, a few cases where the father was genuinely unknown due to multiple partners. I would inscribe pater ignotus or “father unknown” in the father’s box. Can the sacramental records of a parish be subpoenaed later in a custody suit? Since the promulgation of the 1983 code, and the subsequent child abuse crisis, the state seems to have more access to parish and chancery records where due cause exists. Today I would assume that anything said or written outside the confessional can be examined by civil authorities, all things being equal. Consult a family civil lawyer in these unusual instances, as in the cases of adults seeking their natural parents after adoption. §3. If it concerns an adopted child, the names of those adopting are to be inscribed and, at least if it is done in the civil records of the region, also the names of the natural parents according to the norm of §§1 and 2, with due regard for the prescripts of the conference of bishops. Given the complexities of adoption, I would discuss matters of confidentiality and privacy with my attorney and my pastor. Can. 878 If the baptism was not administered by the pastor or in his presence, the minister of baptism, whoever it is, must inform the pastor of the parish in which it was administered of the conferral of the baptism, so that he records the baptism according to the norm of can. 877, §1. This refers to situations where an infant is baptized in a hospital or a parish other than his or her “home” parish. The official record must be entered and stored in the “home” parish. If the parents are in the military, all baptismal records are reserved in a special diocese which serves the U.S. service community, the “Archdiocese of the Military Ordinariate” in Washington, D.C. You can be baptized on any military base in the world, but the records will go to the AMO. You can request baptismal records here. Summary of guidelines for godparents and sponsors here, courtesy EWTN. In a few weeks we will look at the pastoral opportunities surrounding the sacraments of initiation. I took the accompanying photo of the mother and small child on August 29, 2023, at De Katheraal, the mother church of Antwerp, Belgium dedicated to Our Lady. The church itself took 170 years to build [1352-1521] and was never officially declared “finished.” One reason was the repetitive “Wars of Religion” in the sixteenth century which made capital projects risky in many places. But in the 1600’s the cathedral became best known as the “House of Rubens.” Peter Paul Rubens [1577-1640] was a devout Catholic artist and diplomat who painted the famous triptych of Christ’s Passion for the church’s sanctuary. In truth, there is a large collection of Rubens’ work in De Katheraal, and as happens in the old venerable churches, the line between cathedral and gallery can often become blurred. A very good thing, really, along the lines of “one picture is worth a thousand CCD classes,” etc.
While it is true that rich patrons and the craftsmen guilds commissioned works of art and even whole side altars in medieval and renaissance churches for the donors’ self-aggrandizement, the fact is that church art was one of the most powerful catechetical tools in the transmission of the Faith. In the case of the prolific Rubens, his body of work centered Catholics of his time on the major mysteries of the Faith at a time of civil and religious unrest. When you look at Rubens’ portrayals of salvation history, the glory of salvation and the utter horror of damnation, you understand the fervor of the times to buy indulgences. In viewing Rubens’ bigger than life portrayals, I was struck by several things. First, the artist knew his Bible very well. Second, he could capture human emotions, notably wonder and terror, with skill. And third, he grasped the meaning of apocalyptic—the “big bang” of the future. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the adjective “apocalyptic” in this way:
The Bible--both Testaments—is rich in apocalyptic flavor but very few Catholics today recognize the genre for what it is. When I was growing up in the 1950’s apocalypticism was taught and preached regularly in my parish and school, though not exactly by that name. We typically used the word “judgment.” My third-grade teacher, a devout sister on the cusp of dementia, explained that when we died, we would have two judgments: an immediate individual assignment to either Purgatory or Hell. Then later, there would be a massive final judgment where everyone from all of history would each stand individually and watch every one of his or her sins on a giant movie screen before God and the entire human race. [The “giant movie screen” was sister’s interpretation. She also told us third graders we would have a new modern school in two years, or 1958. She was half right. Our present school was demolished in the 1970’s.] Look at an old family Bible printed in the mid-twentieth century: the final book of the New Testament was called “The Apocalypse.” Recent editors have gone to the title “The Book of Revelation,” perhaps to soften the blow for modern readers. Actually, the spirit of apocalypticism has been part of Church life and teaching from the beginning. Jesus does talk about both individual judgment [see Luke 16: 19-31, the Rich Man and Lazarus, for example] and general judgment [Matthew 25, in its entirety.] The readings at our parish Mass last weekend for the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time [A, particularly Matthew] were rich in apocalyptic theology—the five foolish virgins locked out of joy for all time because they [literally] fell asleep on the job. My wife Margaret quipped on the way home that you had to be pretty stupid to go out at midnight to buy more oil at a time when there was no artificial lighting. She’s right, and certainly St. Matthew was, too: when you lose track of reality and the imperative of watching for God’s coming, you are prone to grave consequences. The most dramatic apocalyptic language in the New Testament is found in the “Little Apocalypses” which appear in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. [The Book of Revelation, the old Apocalypse, is in a class by itself.] Mark 13 is a brilliant apocalyptic commentary straight from the lips of Jesus, and Mark’s two successors, Luke and Matthew, pick up his lead. As the evangelists describe the coming ferocious moment of truth, they seem to go out of their way to describe the terror and suffering of mothers with nursing children at the end of time. It is not that these vulnerable people will necessarily be damned, but rather that even infants will be consumed by what they see. Consider St. Matthew’s words in 24:19: “How miserable those days will be for pregnant and nursing mothers!” But consider Jesus’ words in Luke’s Gospel as he carries his cross past the women weeping over his fate: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. Look, the days are coming when people will say, ‘Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore, and breasts that never nursed!’ At that time, they will say to the mountains, fall on us! and to the hills, Cover us!” Matthew’s word “miserable” is intriguing and fitting. Our certainties, our casualness, our complacency about the reality and meaning of the universe will be turned upside down. Dives the Rich Man never expected that he would end up in hell while poor Lazarus at his gate, who starved while his sores were licked by dogs, enjoyed eternal comfort in the bosom of Abraham. The mothers with children at the breast were dreaming of a long progeny. We weekly profess our belief in the end of the cosmos as we know it: He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.” Deep in our hearts we know that the world is not right, that our personal existence is not right, but we hug to the security of the given moment, nodding off to sleep like foolish virgins while the poor Lazarus figures of the world suffer patiently to occupy the throne in the eternal kingdom that you and I assume is ours. The language of the Bible, or the paintings of Rubens and others, on the “end times” were not to traumatize us but to wake us, to remind us that the works of God—creation, redemption, final completion—must always be at the center of our thoughts when we think of ourselves as Christians. Put here in miraculous creation, blessed with divine presence from our first days as nurslings, we are heading toward a reunion with our creator which will determine whether we bask in God’s love or hear the worst words imaginable: “I don’t know you.” SO, WHAT, REALLY, IS ADVENT? We are on the heels of Advent, less than two weeks away. How have we traditionally approached it? As a 25-day countdown to Christmas Eve? From a thematic vantage point, one can make a good case that Advent—the Latin word for “coming”—really begins liturgically on the dual feasts of All Saints and All Souls, the observances of those who have heard the words of God, “enter into my kingdom” and the much larger population of those not yet ready to behold the face of God. Regardless of what the liturgical calendar says, the weekend liturgical readings of the months of November and December are future oriented and heavily apocalyptic. In 2023 there is barely a hiccup at the end of the liturgical year A [November 26] and the beginning of the liturgical year B [December 3]. Apocalypse is the rule of the realm. After nearly two months of reflection on Christ’s second coming and the judgment and deliverance of the saved the first “Christmas readings” [weekend and weekday] begin on December 17! A mere week before Christmas That’s a long time after Black Friday. I have provided the assignment of readings from the Lectionary for the next five Sundays, lined up for your convenience: 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time [A] Christ the King, Final Sunday of Year A 1st Sunday of Advent [B] 2nd Sunday of Advent [B] 3rd Sunday of Advent [B] These readings—particularly the Gospels—are apocalyptic in style and a counterpoint to the way our friends, society, and nation approach the “holiday season.” The most powerful of the apocalyptic readings over the next weeks is proclaimed on the Feast of Christ the King on Thanksgiving Weekend…when we are well fed and comfortable. In Matthew’s text for that feast, the Great King separates the world into two groups: those who fed, clothed, and sheltered the needy, on the one hand, and those who did not on the other. It is always a mystery to me how we soft shoe through the apocalyptic months of November and December. The Liturgical books describe Advent as an observance of the first and second coming of Christ. If this year is like the other 75 years of my life, I expect to hear from the pulpit a lot of homilies about the first coming of Christ and only a hint of the second coming. Odd, because it is the Second Coming still out there, at a time “known only to the Father.” Live like it is today. I just returned from my fourth trip to Europe to see the venerable churches and cathedrals that hopefully received more than just passing mention in your youthful Catholic education. Appropriately enough, my first visit to a continental church was to Saint Peter’s in Rome in 2013. On our third trip in 2019, my wife and I had reserved tickets for a special tour of Notre Dame in Paris. Three weeks before we left home, my personal devices all sprung to life in my office with those extraordinary camera shots of the cathedral in a ball of flames. We were able to take a boat ride around the island on which Notre Dame sits, the smell of charred wood still in the air a month later. The rebuilding of Notre Dame has not been without controversy. There are those who would like to see Notre Dame restored to its original form, and others who envision a remodeled cathedral as a sort of bridge between the old and the new worlds. Like so many of the churches in Europe, the original Notre Dame dates to around 1000 A.D., and some churches are considerably older than that.
The first time I laid eyes on St. Peter’s in 2013, I said to myself, “How in the world did they ever pull this off?” When I attended Mass last weekend in Brussels before flying home on Tuesday, I wondered to myself, “How much longer will these churches continue—physically and spiritually?” There are thousands of cathedrals and churches in Europe desperately in need of repair and restoration, if indeed that is the appropriate response of Catholicism to its material heritage in the third millennium. I am not for a moment suggesting that we do not need places of beauty to proclaim the Word and break the Bread. If anything, European history has reinforced the marriage of beauty and faith. What I am thinking is that our earthly holdings are going to accelerate our religious thinking about our identity as Catholics. How we dress ourselves, so to speak, proclaims volumes about our self-identity. You do not need to be a theologian or an economist to comprehend the enormous cost of maintaining the large network of majestic and famous churches across the Atlantic. Catholic dioceses in the United States are facing this problem as well, possibly with some measure of denial. St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York was completed in the late 1800’s, and while it is constantly under maintenance and refurbishing, it is a young church compared to Paris’s Notre Dame or Rome’s St. John Lateran. This is not to downplay the critical pressures here in the states as parishes close and consolidate. While we were away, several more U.S. dioceses declared bankruptcy while others polished their consolidation plans. I believe that about 10% of American dioceses have declared bankruptcy. At the least, American Catholicism is not going to have a lot of loose change jingling in its pockets for splendid extravaganzas of religious showcases, at least if the public accounting is straightforward. For years how many of us have heard people say, “I don’t give money to the Church because it is awash in priceless treasures in Rome?” The fly in that argument is precisely the “priceless” tag—the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel cannot be liquified into hard cash, for starters, and caring for such art is enormously expensive—as the proprietors of Notre Dame Cathedral discovered, to their grief. I say “proprietors” because, after considerable research, it is still not clear to me who, ultimately, is responsible for the survival of that cathedral and/or its restoration. This is not a spiritual question about the authority of the Archbishop of Paris, but more about his landlord. The next time you are flying the red eye across an ocean, go to the Wikipedia entry on ‘Paris Notre Dame Cathedral.” Just be sure you are powered up for several hours of reading. It seems that the French Catholic Church and the “secular arm” [government authorities] have been intimately joined in a “throne and altar” marriage dating back to early medieval times. This was quite common in the medieval era, and even today Germany subsidizes communities of worship for those who register with the government in a particular faith. In the 1800’s, after the French Revolution had settled, there were many in France who believed the cathedral should be demolished because it had become a decrepit eyesore. In 1831, Victor Hugo published his classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which led to something of a Gothic art revival and renewed interest in Notre Dame as a national monument. However, after two world wars and the cultural revolution of the 1960’s, the structure had again declined such that in 2018 some very essential inspections and stop-gap repairs were undertaken. It is hard to believe, but in 2019 there was no fire alarm system between the structure and the local first providers. The internal alarm at Notre Dame sounded at 6:18 PM on that fateful night. The construction supervisor sent an assistant to crawl into the rafters to determine what exactly was happening. The fire department was not called until 6:51, and the first trucks arrived at 7:01. What followed is a lesson in the complication of managing old church treasures. In the days immediately following the fire, almost $1 billion was promised by some of France's richest and most powerful families and companies, some of whom sought to outbid each other. Critics complained that the bidding was more about the vanity of the donors wishing to be immortalized in the edifice's fabled stones than the preservation of church heritage. Then the French President, Emmanuel Macron, publicly stated that the restored cathedral would indeed combine the new and the old. Macron could say this in confidence because, strange as it may seem to Americans, Catholic cathedrals in France are insured by the government, through legislation dating to 1906, I believe. The construction company is being investigated for negligence as well. France is hosting the Olympics in 2024 and will host tourists at the cathedral, though full regular services are hoped for in 2025. Curiously, Americans are donating to the reconstruction through a website established for that purpose. I have discussed the Notre Dame situation at some length because the route of the past month’s travels opened my eyes to the large number of aged churches from Budapest to Brussels; we traveled on a Viking River Cruise along the Danube and other waterways, and I cannot even guess how many Catholic churches we viewed along the water, and even more to the point, how many churches/cathedrals we toured at some length. Every one of those churches is playing out its “Notre Dame drama” in its own way. In a few days I will talk about the religious experiences conveyed to me by medieval and renaissance builders and artists in their structures, what it is like to compose yourself in prayer surrounded by Michaelangelo and Reubens, on the one hand, and a vial of what was reputed to be Christ’s Good Friday Blood on the other. Can the boy in Florida get back to his Sunday Mass after he’s seen Budapest and Brussels? In this post, which appeared at 5:30 PM on Friday, I made two errors I need to correct. I neglected the link to the hymn "Crown Him With Many Crowns" which I successfully completed at 8:15 PM. Second, I erred when I stated that the bells were not rung at my church during the Gloria. Indeed, I have it from an impeccable source that the outside bells were rung on Holy Thursday, my source being none other than the bell ringer. Apologies all around!
In her 2016 work, “Sin in the Sixties,” Maria Morrow laments that as American Catholics we have lost a sense of togetherness in our guilt over our sins and our practices of repentance, such as fasting during Lent and abstaining from meat on all Fridays. I had just posted a review of her book to its Amazon site in time last week to get to my church for the solemn Holy Thursday Mass opening the 2023 Triduum. I was later than usual, so I had the chance to size up the cars in the parking lot. It was a decent sized turnout, the equivalent of a good Saturday night gathering, though the irony was not lost on me that we were about to celebrate THE mysteries of our salvation with twenty percent of our active membership [we utilize our parking lot with similar turnout five times on an average weekend]. This is not a new phenomenon; my parish in the 1950’s only conducted one set of Holy Week services, too, and the present Roman Missal is adamant that the Triduum services cannot be celebrated more than once in a day except under extraordinary circumstances. In a sense the Church is either resigned to limited understanding and interest in these holy rites, or it is tamping down expectations to avoid public embarrassment. As a kid I asked in school why Good Friday was not a holy day of obligation, and I got one of those “next he’ll be asking where babies come from” looks. The year I entered First Grade [1954] was the same year Pope Pius XII’s reforms of the Triduum went into effect, with the primary change being the clock: all three of the major feasts, which had been celebrated in the morning [!] were moved to later in the day, closer to the actual times of the events in the Gospels. I got into the ground floor of liturgical reform. HOLY THURSDAY 2023: GRADE C Consider, for a moment, living as a Catholic in a world where the Holy Thursday Mass, for example, was celebrated at 8 AM, as was Good Friday and Holy Saturday. I was too young to attend the Triduum Masses when they were morning events, but I vividly recall this arrangement because of the Holy Thursday custom of “visiting the seven churches,” where devout Catholics, during the day on Thursday, walked to seven different parishes in their neighborhoods to visit the ornately decorated “altars of repose” where a Communion host in a ciborium was revered at a decorated temporary site for veneration by the faithful until the Good Friday morning service, when only the celebrant received communion. [The Good Friday service was often referred to as the “Mass of the Presanctified” in which the celebrant alone received the communion host consecrated on the previous day, Holy Thursday. We faithful did not receive communion during the Triduum until Pius XII restored the rites in 1955, a change which in turn necessitated new laws about the communion fast, which in those days began at Midnight.] My mother was very good at getting us kids in tune with the spirit of Holy Thursday, taking us to visit several churches during the day and praying before the Eucharist in each one. This was a fine example of Dr. Morrow’s thesis that such devotions of piety bonded the parochial and communal identity of Catholics. It is true, though, that I lived in a German enclave of East Buffalo, and unofficially the Polish churches won the “contest” for the most original and extravagantly decorated repository altars. When the Holy Thursday Mass was moved to the evening in 1954, devotion at the altar of repose extended from late Thursday evening to the Good Friday service the following night—and over the years the repository altars became more modestly prepared. Today’s 1970 Missal simply calls for veneration of the Eucharist at the repository site until around Midnight on Thursday.] Unfortunately, we live in a time when most of our celebrants and liturgical planners are not familiar with the color, devotion, and pageantry of our recent history, nor are celebrants truly familiar with all the prescriptions of the present Roman liturgical law governing Holy Week. In fairness, the instructions of the Roman Missal for Holy Week—indeed for the liturgy in general—does not offer much help to priests and students of liturgy in conveying the importance of emotional experience in the sacred rites, given the Missal’s near obsessiveness with detail. Priests ordained in the last generation or two do not always have the feel for drama, nor for Aristotle’s [384-322 B.C.] principle of unity of action expressed so effectively in his Poetics. The Encyclopedia Britannica explains Aristotle’s principle of effective dramatic portrayal: a play must be a single action represented as occurring in a single place and within the course of a day. These principles were called, respectively, unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time. The Triduum is the world’s greatest drama. Powerful and effective worship must have the compelling emotional impact of the best Greek tragedy. Aristotle referred to the impact of drama as catharsis, the healing release of powerful emotions. “Catharsis” comes from the Greek word for “washing,” i.e., washing out our emotions. Without this emotional component of liturgy, we end up with what one of my professors used to call “talking head liturgies.” Or, in my experience, the liturgy becomes a checklist of things [separate rites] to be gotten through, without that undefinable involvement of the emotions that quickens our hearts and unites the sacred actions into an experienced whole. Consider the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke with us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?” [Luke 24:32] The Protestant theologian Karl Barth put it this way in the twentieth century, that the sermon should rouse us to a point where, at its conclusion, we demand the opportunity to loudly recommit ourselves to our Baptism, i.e., the Creed. I scored our Holy Thursday celebration a “C” primarily because there was very little unity that grabbed the heart. I do need to acknowledge that my parish’s choir did a yeoman’s job under difficult circumstances; the position of music director has been in flux since late last year. The choir sang very well. The problem is more along the lines of what we have been singing over the years on Holy Thursday. I am not opposed to annual repetition; ritual actions and local traditions are very healthy and ideally would foster community participation. However, our Holy Thursday custom over the years has been to open with Marty Haugen’s 1991 “We Remember How You Loved us.” There aren’t five men alive who can reach the soprano range of this melody line, nor its twin tranquillizer “And I Will Raise You Up” which also makes itself annually heard, if not sung, at our Holy Thursday Mass. What does the Roman Missal say about opening hymns in general? “The purpose of the entrance music–whether an antiphon or a hymn–is to open the celebration, foster the unity of those who have been gathered, introduce their thoughts to the mystery of the liturgical season or festivity, and accompany the procession of the priest and ministers” (General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 47). Does a ballad, any ballad, really serve this purpose? The Missal, incidentally, assumes that ordinarily the opening music will be the prescribed Psalm or text from Sacred Scripture, sung in alternating form of cantor/choir and congregation. [You can easily find this assigned antiphon in your missalette or worship guide. So, the universal Church takes as its opening motif the introductory theme for Holy Thursday Galatians 6: 14: “We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is our salvation, our life, and our resurrection; through him we are saved and made free.” If a hymn is selected, and a feast like Holy Thursday certainly is worthy of one as a supplement to the introductory Biblical verse, a much better opening hymn might be the 1851 classic “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” a more powerful hymn with a long tradition of lusty congregational involvement that resonates with the Galatians theme of the Mass in the Missal. If you want to get goosebumps, here is a rendering of this hymn from England. Or skip it and just consider its text: Crown Him with many crowns The Lamb upon His throne Hark, how the heav'nly anthem drowns All music but its own Awake, my soul and sing Of Him who died for thee And hail Him as thy matchless King Through all eternity. The upbeat nature of this hymn, when paired with the congregational singing of the Gloria—particularly if the bells in the church are rung during the Gloria, as the Missal allows—sets the table for a strong, emotionally compelling celebration of a very conflicted night of slavery, deliverance, Passover, brotherly farewell, washing of feet, betrayal. A strong musical entry stokes the emotions and allows us to enter the depth of the events narrated later in the sacred scripture and liturgical rites. Moreover, a rousing beginning captures the dramatic sweep of this Mass, from joy to sorrow. The Missal directs that after the Gloria the organ and bells are no longer used as we head deeper into the dark night of the New Passover. Unfortunately, the liturgy I attended began listlessly with the Haugen piece, and its residue hung over the opening rites till the Proclamation of the Word. The ringing of the church bells during the Gloria, inside and outside the church as the Missal recommends—would have helped us—and probably enthralled the children in attendance--but that special effect was not employed last Thursday in my church. Another “downer” was the unimaginative use of lighting in the church: what if, after Gloria, the church lights had been darkened noticeably. This would set a magnificent backdrop for all three biblical readings—all of which describe nighttime events. However, the Scriptures were proclaimed very well—a selection of three unusually powerful texts detailing the First Passover, the Last Supper Rite of Institution, and John’s majestic description of Jesus’ washing of the feet of the Twelve. The homily was another matter. In various forms of poker, you better play your best hand when there is a lot of money on the table, and the same is true for homilists when preaching on such a rich array of readings as those of Holy Thursday. I officiated at 16 Triduum’s, and preaching on Holy Thursday and doing justice to this sequence of Sacred Scripture is a daunting challenge. The Roman Missal, never a font of artistic sense, is not helpful or particularly imaginative for preachers: “The homily should explain the principal mysteries which are commemorated in this Mass: the institution of the Eucharist, the institution of the priesthood, and Christ’s commandment of brotherly love.” This is a peculiar instruction because it does not gel precisely with the permanent Scriptural template of the Holy Thursday Mass, which focuses upon the Last Supper as the redemptive new Passover celebrated in a fraternity of love.” Holy Thursday demands of homilists their most creative and affective juices, a true feel for the drama that this liturgy embodies, and I think that it catches a lot of priests off guard. We all come to know the styles and idiosyncrasies of our priests—my congregations could mimic mine and mercifully they tolerated me over the years. When our new pastor arrived a few years ago, he remarked—or was reported to have remarked—that when he mounts the pulpit, he awaits the Holy Spirit to tell him what to say. If that is the case, then the Holy Spirit was still recovering from the opening hymn on Thursday evening, because the homily opened with a reflection on the standard opening rite of the Mass, the invocation of the Trinity. A good opening—for Trinity Sunday. For the life of me, I couldn’t get where he was going---it was nowhere near the Mass readings--and it was some time into the sermon before he himself seemed to hit a thematic stride, the importance of the priesthood. It is true that the Missal cites the institution of the priesthood as a suitable topic for the Holy Thursday homily, but when the subject is presented in a sermon or elsewhere, the discussion always seems to turn to a collective failure of the laity—i.e., we do not pray hard enough for vocations, we are not answering God’s call, we are not encouraging the young. The second half of the sermon was a mildly apocalyptic prediction of what the future would look like without priests: who will offer the sacrifice of the Mass and bring Christ upon our altars? Who will hear our confessions? Who will anoint us when we are sick and dying? Who will marry us? It reached a point where I half expected someone in the back to stand up and say, “Uh, women?” That did not happen, of course, but neither did a straight up reflection upon the heart of the magnificent Scriptures of Thursday night. Again, an opportunity of thematic unity in the evening’s liturgy was lost. We were left in that land of liturgy as the list of things to be gotten through. And, as a side thought, it strikes me as a bit unfair to blame the laity for a problem it does not control. We proceeded to the evening’s most distinctive rite, the washing of the feet. [I was surprised to see that in the Missal the foot washing is optional.] In my parish—and certainly not just in my parish we are stuck with our architecture, which in American churches continues to be one of our biggest enemies. Most churches today are long rectangles with the sanctuary at the far front end—actually, they are blueprints for Eucharistic Reservation chapels, not the celebration of sacraments. By their definition, sacraments are outward signs that must be seen to be effective. In a flat rectangle like my church, no one past the third pew gets a glimpse of very much—and think of the parents whom we are always hectoring to bring their children to Mass. Why? So the kids can stare at the backsides of adults? I ask that question all the time and no one ever has an answer except with something like “well, it’s good for the kids and God will give them graces.” Sorry, no cigar. We can and should do better—we are a sacramental church of bread and wine realities; we receive our truth in concrete visuals, not Vulcan mind melds. On Holy Thursday my parish—and others I have visited over the years—cobbled together an attempt at a visual solution of sorts for this feast’s most distinctive rite, the washing of the feet. In our situation this year a dozen or so candidates for foot washing were selected and sat scattered throughout the expanse of the Church at the end of their pews. The pastor then proceeded to leave the presidential chair and enters the congregation to wash the feet of those chosen. For those of us in the pews, the celebrant disappeared for 10-15 minutes, leaving a liturgical dead space for the congregation, though this year a camera operator attempted to follow him through the church and stream the washing of feet on the walls next to the altar in jumbotron fashion. This is not how the Roman missal recommends the rite be celebrated. The older 1970 missal states that “the men who have been chosen are led by the ministers to chairs prepared in a suitable place.” The 2016 update from Pope Francis—which officially allowed women to have their feet washed as well as men—puts it this way: “Those who are chosen from amongst the people of God are led by the ministers…» (and consequently in the Caeremoniali Episcoporum n. 301 and n. 299b: «seats for those chosen»), so that pastors may select a small group of the faithful to represent the variety and the unity of each part of the people of God. Such small groups can be made up of men and women, and it is appropriate that they consist of people young and old, healthy, and sick, clerics, consecrated men and women and laity.” [And you thought IRS forms were complicated.] It seems that the 2016 revision envisions more than twelve people gathered in one place, a collective experience, following St. John’s description of the apostles having their feet washed together. In the past, in my parish the washing of the feet did take place together in the sanctuary of the church. But “I kind of get it” as to why a pastor might go into the congregation, if he believes that more people will be exposed visually to at least one set of feet being washed as opposed to much of the congregation trying to view it with periscopes from pew 26 when the washing is done in the sanctuary. Unfortunately, we are stuck with the architectural structure we have, certainly till long after I’m gone. The Roman Missal seems mindful of the “dead space” issue and does recommend several antiphons for congregational singing during the washing rite, based upon John 13, the evening’s Gospel, which might be helpful in addressing this “dead space” problem. It would be a helpful addition to a parish’s congregational repertoire that it can sing from memory. Our congregation does respond well to “Ubi Caritas,” which is also specifically recommended in the Missal. Progressing to the Eucharistic Prayer, it is interesting that the Missal does not demand Eucharistic Prayer I, the “Roman Canon,” be used, though it is used everywhere I have attended Holy Thursday Mass over the years, probably because it does contain a “Holy Thursday insertion.” This is the lengthiest of the Eucharistic Prayer options, and truthfully it can be ponderous, with its multiple listings of saints’ names, particularly in a Triduum Mass which is already longer than usual. In reviewing the options, I would suggest that liturgical planners might consider Eucharistic Prayer IV, a very rich text, though if there were many children and families present, it is legal to use Eucharistic Prayer II to accommodate human needs, so to speak. Another consideration in using a shorter Eucharistic Prayer is the length of time required to kneel. Except for a few breaks at the Our Father and Communion, the congregation at Holy Thursday Mass is kneeling from the Sanctus to the end of the procession which ends the full Mass. By the time my wife and I returned from communion, we decided to sit to make our communion thanksgivings; having turned 75 recently, I can pray much better when not distracted by arthritis. And I was not the eldest person in the church, not even close. Not even in my marriage, LOL. While the Lenten season is dedicated to sacrifice and suffering with the Lord, it does not necessarily follow that those long periods of physical discomfort during the Triduum need be part and parcel of the liturgical experience, a principle that should be applied to Good Friday and the Easter Vigil as well. The final rites of the Holy Thursday Mass include what the Missal calls “The Transfer of the Holy Eucharist.” This is another event that needs careful study and execution. The Missal speaks of carrying the Eucharist “in procession,” but the rite is not “a procession” in and of itself, in the way that we process on Corpus Christi, for example, with the consecrated host in the gold monstrance. The function of the Holy Thursday rite is the relocation of the sacrament from the altar of sacrifice to a second site for temporary storage and veneration. The Eucharist is carried in ciboria, the everyday containers used for storage and distribution of communion, and not in the more festive monstrance which might be used at other Eucharistic festivities during the year. The Missal assumes that the transfer is just that, from point A to point B, the latter a temporary and decorated site away from the body of the church. The Missal goes on to spell out what the celebrant is to do upon arrival at the temporary site—incense the Eucharist with the singing of Tantum Ergo, and then place the ciboria in the temporary tabernacle and close the door. As I noted earlier in the piece, there is a certain drama in venerating the Eucharist in a foreign site, so to speak, and many of us have developed a devotional tradition built around the memory of Jesus being seized in the garden and taken away. Holy Thursday has a lengthy history of observance of the arrest and abandonment of Jesus; the Eucharistic relocation at the end of this Mass is “Jesus taken away.” The Missal states that Eucharistic adoration may continue at this site until Midnight Thursday, keeping vigil with Jesus in his capture and suffering. Coupled with this transfer of the Eucharist is another rite of significant emotional power, “the stripping of the altar.” In Pius XII’s 1951 and 1955 reforms of Holy Week, the stripping was a powerful rite with its own specific sung psalms, as everything that was not bolted to the floor in the sanctuary was removed in a darkened church. The celebrant returned to the body of the church, changed the color of his vestment from white to purple, and personally engaged in the dismantling rite. As a first grader I was tremendously impressed by this rite, and even in my 70’s it remains a backbone of my affective Holy Week spirituality. The official church documents after Vatican II demonstrate what seems to be a bit of embarrassment about the stripping, no pun intended. The 1970 Missal barely mentions it: After the Eucharist is carried to the temporary altar of repose “the priest and ministers genuflect and return to the sacristy. Then the [high] altar is stripped and, if possible, the crosses are removed from the church.” Later supplements state that the altar can be stripped at a convenient time after the service. Possibly the theologians who cobbled together the new Holy Thursday rite were more influenced by doctrinal concerns—the unity of the Mass rite, possibly--than affective spiritual ones. The stripping rite, ironically, has endured, even thrived, in many places for a half century though our trusty missalettes barely mention it at all. It has been a staple of my parish’s Triduum for all my 27 years as a member. The congregation was given a choice to join the procession with the Eucharist to its temporary repository, or to remain in the darkened church for the stripping, to the music of “Stay with me, remain with me, watch and pray.” Our congregation has developed an affinity for that antiphon. This year, the stripping rite disappeared. Last Thursday our transfer procession with the Eucharist was not a true transfer. It was a circular route through the church and the Eucharist was returned to the main altar, where it would remain for the duration of the evening for adoration. If I had to guess, the pastor may have intended to enhance attendance at the evening’s adoration by reserving it on the altar in the main church, particularly given the U.S. Bishops’ push for greater appreciation of the Real Presence of Christ. I respect that, but I think that for children—and the little child inside all of us—the dual rites of a Eucharistic transfer to a special altar, and the solemn dismantling of Christ’s permanent home in the dark bring home Real Presence in a cathartic, poetic sense that even the pagan Aristotle would have appreciated. GOOD FRIDAY: -A The service was much improved over last year, as the individual veneration of the cross was replaced with the general congregational veneration silence/prayer during the rite, with the option for individual veneration after the rite’s conclusion. This took nearly two hours off the clock from last year. A very large number of folks took the option to venerate the cross after the rite, and some thought will need to go into an orderly fashion to do that next year. The choir and lectors were excellent. The “General Intercessions” ritual— “let us pray, let us kneel, let us stand”—seems hokier to me each year, but that is the fault of the Missal itself. Can you honestly make a meaningful prayer for each detailed intention in five seconds on your knees, much of it taken up by flipping the kneeler up and down? An official change in that ritual would need to originate with the USCCB but I don’t see that happening, to be honest. Locally, we can probably enrich that rite with a longer period of quiet prayer after each intention, but without the “up and down.” I’ll never report this local innovation if attempted to the bishop’s office. There were very few young people. Later we realized that our county’s public schools are open on Good Friday, so a 3 P.M. start eliminates an important constituency of the parish, as well as those adults who work. To my knowledge, there is no law against conducting Good Friday liturgy at, say, 7 PM. THE EASTER VIGIL: N/A In 2021 I convinced Margaret that the Vigil was too long and too late for us, and we have been attending the sunrise Easter Mass since then. This year, on Holy Saturday evening, we watched “Father Stu” on Amazon Prime. It was a very moving, redemptive experience, and it left us in a good place for Easter morn. THE SUNRISE MASS: A Sunrise Mass is truly a different experience of Eucharist that makes Easter something special. It must be a bear to set up, logistically and liturgically, so my hats off to those who labor behind the scenes. I was taken with how many old friends we encountered, those who attend other Masses than ours, or those who come only occasionally. A funny thing happened: as the pastor was wishing us a Happy Easter before the final blessing, a little kid behind us blurted out, “Can we go home now?” Reminded me of my years in the pulpit, except that in my parishes it was the adults calling out. |
LITURGY
April 2025
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