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CONSTITUTION
ON THE SACRED LITURGY SACROSANCTUM CONCILIUM SOLEMNLY PROMULGATED BY HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI ON DECEMBER 4, 1963 81. The rite for the burial of the dead should express more clearly the paschal character of Christian death and should correspond more closely to the circumstances and traditions found in various regions. This holds good also for the liturgical color to be used. Many of the paragraphs in Sacrosanctum Concilium call for revisions of the rites of official guidebooks for all the sacraments and public prayer functions of the Church. To be clear, the Vatican II Council Fathers were not engaged in simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic or driven to try new things out of boredom. Focusing on para. 81 on Christian funerals, the fathers wished to incorporate the best current theological and liturgical thinking into the post-Council ceremonies surrounding the death of a human being, Curiously, para. 81 does not go out of its way to restrict these reformed rites to Catholics or Christians only. To do their work properly, the bishops [or their periti or experts at the Council] reviewed the “economy of salvation,” the theological construct which incorporates how God delivers us from our sins and leads us to eternal life. The idea that God has a saving will is the backbone of Christian life; the details over such matters as “temporal punishment for sins” or preparation for meeting God, developed through history into a state called Purgatory. [I will return to present day theological discussion of hell in a later post, as the existence of hell does raise questions about God’s saving intent in the minds of some.] The economy of salvation that probably all of us absorbed in our Catholic upbringing looks something like this. All humans were born into this world having inherited the first sin of Adam and Eve. One can, I believe, interpret this teaching to mean that in an imperfect world, sin is an inevitability. While Baptism washed away or absolved original sin, it did not remove our tendency to sin, and thus, all of us [save the Virgin Mary, through divine intervention] have fallen into post-Baptism sin. In terms of God’s formal forgiveness exercised through the Church, the Sacrament of Penance absolves us of the sins that would destroy our relationship with God, thus sparing us post-death eternal condemnation. Since the earliest days of the Church, whatever form the Sacrament of Penance has taken, there would always be included the imposition of satisfaction to remit the temporal punishment of one’s sins. Those in 12 Step programs such as AA are already familiar with the process of “making amends” to those hurt by one’s conduct while under the influence. Hence the twentieth century move to refer to confession as the “Sacrament of Reconciliation.: While God’s mercy exceeds all human reasoning, there is no such thing as “cheap grace” or easy forgiveness. A true sin is a painful and scandalous breech of human fraternity, and in the confines of the Christian faith, a serious rending of the Body of Christ. We know the “term of restitution” in confession as receiving a “penance” after absolution, and I think we know in our hearts that the assignation of three “Hail Mary’s” is, at best, a rather paltry substitute for the serious things we have done or failed to do. There are two locations one may make serious reparation after penitential forgiveness: during one’s lifetime, or after death, per Church teaching. The postmortem reparation occurs in a state called Purgatory. The Catholic funeral, then, must acknowledge the true state of the deceased as one “on the way.” It is no accident that deathbed communion is called viaticum or “food for the road.” It is impossible to know the details of Purgatory, but the Church teaching has always made sense to me throughout my life. If heaven is beholding the perfect God, I am in no way prepared for that. How I am readied for that, how I disengage from a mediocre [or worse] following of Christ to behold him face to face, I have some ideas but no roadmap; perhaps that remains mystery until the time of death. But the tradition of praying for the newly deceased at this time and state of transition reaches back to pre-Christian times, the Hebrew Scriptures 2 Maccabees, to be precise. Catholicism has always prayed for its dead, but it did not define Purgatory until the Middle Ages. For interested readers on the subject, see The Birth of Purgatory [1986] by Jacques Goff. While the reality of a post-mortem state of being was established centuries ago, no official teaching exists describing what Purgatory is like. The Catechism of the Catholic Church takes a safe approach in defining Purgatory: [1030] “All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.” But the classic enduring pictures of Purgatory have come down to us from the late medieval poet Dante Alighieri [1265-1321], whose epic poem The Divine Comedy is considered one of the greatest works of Italian literature. [Wikipedia summarizes his treatment of Purgatory quite well.] It is also a remarkably insightful analysis of the human mind; Dante’s observations on intent and virtue prefigure the twentieth century theological theory of “fundamental option” toward sin or toward virtue. Dante depicts Purgatory as a mountain, and he is escorted up the mountain by the Latin poet Virgil. The Purgatorial mountain is populated by those in afterlife, beginning at the bottom with repentant excommunicates and progressing upward toward the brightly lit summit of God’s grace. In Dante’s narrative, Purgatory is a physically grueling endurance, a prolonged exercise in mountain climbing, if you will. Other preachers and writers have described Purgatory as a slightly milder version of hell fire. I was told by one teacher that Purgatory is just like hell, except that you know you’re getting out. But Dante mixes the physical with the psychological pain, and here we get closer to an explanation that resonates with twenty-first century experience. My sense is that personal judgment, whenever and however this event takes place, is a vision of how God sees us. Judgment is the moment when we see what we might have been [lost virtue] and how we really are [sinners of omission and commission.] Purgatory may be that moment of excruciating reality and the process of coming to grips with having neglected a savior who died for us. Perhaps Purgatory is our introduction to Jesus Christ, whom we have busily neglected in our earthly sojourn. One does not hear this kind of language during funeral liturgies today, for the same reasons so few people go to confession. The loss of a sense of sin has altered our vision of Jesus from necessary eternal savior to Rotary Club lunch buddy. My experience over the years—and I performed more funerals than I can reckon—is that, in the minds of the congregants, alongside a natural grief, the funeral is a celebration of the deceased’s already being with Jesus. [“Uncle Harvey’s up there now tearing up the golf courses in heaven.”] In one sense of course, this is true, so long as we remember that the deceased is in via or on the way to full union with Christ and needs our prayers, particularly the celebration of the funeral Mass, more than the standard eulogies, which are better suited in a non-liturgical setting like a post-funeral luncheon.] Vatican II attempted to marry the seriousness of death with the joyful assurance that the Resurrection of Jesus has opened the gates to all. But when, after the Council, these rites were put to paper, there was ambivalence about striking the balance between penance and glory. The British Catholic guidelines for funerals reflect this ambivalence in recommending the vestment colors for funeral Masses: “The liturgical colour chosen for funerals should express Christian hope in the light of the paschal mystery, but without being offensive to human grief. White expresses the hope of Easter, the fulfilment of baptism, and the wedding garment necessary for the kingdom. Violet recalls the eschatological expectation of Advent and the Lenten preparation for the paschal mystery. Black is used as a token of mourning, but, in our society, increasingly without the associations of Christian hope. The choice should be made in the light of local custom and perceptions, and in consultation with the family and community.”
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CONSTITUTION
ON THE SACRED LITURGY SACROSANCTUM CONCILIUM SOLEMNLY PROMULGATED BY HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI ON DECEMBER 4, 1963 80. The rite for the consecration of virgins at present found in the Roman Pontifical is to be revised. Moreover, a rite of religious profession and renewal of vows shall be drawn up in order to achieve greater unity, sobriety, and dignity. Apart from exceptions in particular law, this rite should be adopted by those who make their profession or renewal of vows within the Mass. Religious profession should preferably be made within the Mass. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the first declaration to come forth from Vatican II, covers every aspect of Church worship. Much of what it treats is quite familiar—the sacraments, for example—but other aspects of public worship were much more obscure, and in our case at hand remain so today. Para. 80 treats of the “consecration of virgins.” Virtually unknown to most Catholics today, the idea of lay virginity takes its roots from the New Testament and exists to this day, though in minute numbers. Every few years a diocesan Catholic paper will carry a picture of a woman professing a vow of perpetual virginity to the local bishop. The number of vowed perpetual virgins around the world, as of July 2018, is about 5000, per the Catholic news service Crux in 2018. There are but 3200 dioceses on the planet, so you need not be embarrassed if you know nothing of what I’m talking about. It may be more likely that one might encounter a different form of lay dedication, an “associate” of an existing religious order, a person who embraces the ideals of a religious tradition such as the Cistercian [Trappists], Franciscan, Dominican, or Jesuit, etc., while living in the everyday world. “The Third Order of St. Francis” [today referred to as the Secular Franciscan Order] is a good example, as a worldwide structured organization of lay men and women who meet periodically for prayer, instruction in the Franciscan tradition, and participation, if possible, in the Franciscan works of charity to the poor, particularly in large cities. Members live in the spirit of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the best of their ability and make solemn promises to do so, but these promises are not, canonically speaking, vows. [A canonical vow, those taken by full members of religious orders, require a dispensation from Rome for release from the commitment, a process called ‘exclaustration.”] Note that one of the promises or vows is to chastity, as distinguished from virginity. Associates of religious orders continue a conjugal life if married. In recent years the concept of “associate” has taken on a new flavor as a recruiting instrument for religious orders, particularly of women religious. The idea here is the development of opportunities for experimentation in the lifestyle of the institute or order. For example, South Carolina’s Mepkin Abbey, where Margaret and I retreat every year, has developed structured programming of lived experience for those considering a vowed Trappist life. An associate with no intention of joining the order is welcomed to make annual or more frequent retreats, as well as to meet and pray over monthly internet gatherings. The income from retreatants is the main support of the monastery as well. CARA is the only research center I can find which has researched the numerical total of “associates;” its 2016 research places the number of associates at about 56,000 in the United States, with a large majority over the age of 40. CARA does not include associates as an annual category in its census of the American Church. The “consecrated virgins” referred to in para. 80 are not tracked by CARA, either. The church officer responsible for consecrated virgins is the local bishop, and the diocese is required to keep record of those whom the bishop has seen fit to permit the making of a solemn perpetual promise. What is vowed is virginity. The first point to be made is that para. 80 is not talking about nuns, who live in community and make three-fold promises of poverty, chastity, and obedience, or solemn vows if in major orders such as the Dominicans. The second point is gender: the consecration of virgins is a female rite, for reasons enumerated below. And third, the word “virginity” has theological and legal meanings in Church theology and law, and at times these are at conflict with each other. One of my relatives undertook this consecration about the time I was born. She has since passed away, and I’m sorry that I never inquired about her state during my adult years, though I don’t remember anyone ever talking about her state. What I satisfied myself with at the time was that she had taken a major vow to never marry, that she kept her day job in retail clothing, that she was significantly involved in ministries of her parish and civic community, and extended charity of all sorts to her large family of origin. The history of consecrated virgins is quite ancient. The origin of the practice can probably be dated to the time of St. Paul and the apocalyptic mood of expectation of the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ. Paul, in this atmosphere, writes that while married persons should not separate, it is better for the unmarried that they do not engage in new intimate relationships but focus instead on prayer and good works, that Christ might find them thus upon his return. The idea of virginity—the freely chosen abstinence of any sexual activity—is thus wedded to the idea that one has stepped out of the normal world to bear a powerful witness to a world yet to come. In my training for the more conventional religious order vows, this witness to the future aspect of chastity was presented as one of several rationales. Over much of the Church’s history, however, the more common metaphor for the virgin was “bride of Christ.” If you look at the lists of saints in Eucharistic Prayer I, just about all of the female names—Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, etc.—are those of young, marriage age adolescents whose surviving biographies follow a pattern of resistance to men in authority who desired to possess them and who killed them for the saints’ refusal to give themselves to anyone except God. In later centuries women mystics describe their ecstatic encounters with Christ in language that borders on the erotic at times. Even today, the term “Bride of Christ” is used to describe consecrated virgins in Canon Law, code 604. “Bride of Christ” is an official descriptive term in Church practice for women who have taken vows of virginity; the sexual imagery is not accidental. The same marital metaphor is frequently applied to Christ and the Church, before and after Vatican II, most recently in the Catechism, para. 796. Consecrated virginity is described as a “sacramental” of God’s union with his chosen people; virgins are a living sign of this reality. It should be noted that the consecrated virgins live on their own in the world, though post-Council popes have encouraged some sort of common life to assist in preserving the vow and spiritual growth through common prayer and shared good works. [Practically speaking, this is nearly impossible: Russia, for example, is known to have four consecrated virgins in the entire country.] Canon Law is clear that the Church has no financial responsibilities for consecrated virgins. There is a quixotic element to this lifestyle, and perhaps the subject of para. 80 could have been passed over in this liturgical posting stream. But the subject of virginity itself is a major consideration in Catholic theology, particularly morality. My guess is that most readers have some recollection of St. Maria Goretti. In 1902 she was assaulted by a youth seeking intercourse. According to one biographer, she tried to resist, crying out that “No, God does not wish it. It is sin. You would go to hell for it.” She protected her virginity but was stabbed to death for her resistance. In 1950 she was canonized by Pope Pius XII. As theologian Sister Anne Patrick wrote in 1997, her canonization “reinforced the emphasis upon a young woman’s responsibility for the sexual behavior of a dating couple typical for the Catholic education of the day,” i.e., the post-World War II industrialized countries. A similar canonization took place closer to our own time, as the New York Times reported on August 16, 1985. In this case a Catholic nun was killed rather than surrender her virginity to a military officer during Zaire’s civil war in 1964. In his declaration, Pope John Paul II praised Sister Marie Clementine Anwarite, for demonstrating “the primordial value accorded to virginity,” and he added that he forgave the man who killed her. The systematic rape and torture of missionary religious sisters during Africa’s decolonizing wars in the 1960’s reached numbers where the administration of birth control pills was not unheard of; Pope Francis raised the subject in an informal press conference in 2016. Patrick writes that the general acceptance of St. Maria Goretti’s canonization in 1950 was not repeated in 1986 for St. Marie Clementine, as theological concerns about the patriarchal nature of sexual morality were growing on three fronts: [1] that virginity, of all the possible virtues, was assuming too much attention in the moral hierarchy, which in actuality begins with the Beatitudes; “the one virtue worth dying for;” [2] that virginity appeared to subvert women to a kind of sexual scrutiny that men rarely if ever experience; and [3] the catechetics of vows in general was liable to create a spiritual caste within the Church, or rather, continue one. Vowed living has been considered the more sacred or difficult life than the married state, though marriage, too, is a vowed life. Why is one considered more “chosen” than the other? The call for a new rite of consecration of virgins was made in Sacrosanctum Concilium in 1963. The most recent Vatican document on consecrated virginal life is Ecclesiae Sponsae Imago [2018]. I cannot help but point out that there is no comparable rite for males, nor an organized format for monitoring sexual behaviors such as that listed in this document here: Dismissal from the Ordo virginum 71. If a consecrated woman has notoriously defected from the catholic faith or has contracted marriage, even only civilly, the Bishop will collect the evidence and declare her dismissal from the Ordo virginum, so that it is recognized juridically. 72. If a consecrated woman is accused of very serious external and imputable crimes or failings against the obligations arising from her consecration, such as to cause scandal among the people of God, the Bishop will begin the process of dismissal. He will therefore inform the woman about the accusations and the proofs that have been collected, giving her the opportunity for defense. If the Bishop considers her defense insufficient, and there is no other way to provide for her correction, for the restoration of justice and reparation of the scandal, he will dismiss her from the Ordo virginum. The decree of dismissal must express at least in summary form the reasons for the decision. It will not take effect until it has been confirmed by the Holy See, to whom all the acts must be forwarded. The decree will not be valid if it does not indicate the consecrated woman’s right to have recourse to the competent authority within ten days of receiving notification of the decree. The recourse has a suspensive effect. Record-keeping and communication about separation 73. In all cases of the separation of a consecrated woman from the Ordo virginum, the diocesan Bishop will arrange for this to be recorded in the book of consecrations. He will take care to inform the other consecrated women about it, either personally or through the Delegate, and the Pastor responsible so that he may note it in the Baptismal register. |
LITURGY
December 2024
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