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In this Morality Stream I have been commenting on the book by Alberto de Mingo Kaminouchi, An Introduction to Christian Ethics [2020]. The author’s opening chapter—the first Café post on this topic--examines the eras just before and just after Vatican II. After the Council, Catholic moralists by and large moved from a highly legal and structured approach to morality, the “manual era,” to a more biblically oriented moral spirit drawn from the person and ministry of Jesus as interpreted by intense study of the Scriptures, most notably the Gospels. In the second Café post below, I addressed the resurgence of study into the nature and intent of Jesus, as scholars used multiple methods to discern what can be known of the historical Jesus as well as how the Church came to define Him in its “Christological Councils” of the fourth and fifth centuries.
One of the constants of Christian morality over the centuries has been its relationship to greater goods beyond human experience. In the Act of Contrition which I learned almost 70 years ago, I prayed that I was heartly sorry because of the “pains of punishment” [imperfect contrition] and my having offended the God who is “all good and deserving of all my love.” [perfect contrition]. In other words, human behavior was connected to divine meaning—we were created by God to live and function in an optimum way that we may enjoy eternal reward in God’s presence. After the Reformation, Catholic and Protestant teachings on salvation differed in detail but all Christians maintained the relationship of human life and behavior to Baptism and our ultimate destiny beyond the grave. If we look at present day culture with an honest eye, it becomes painfully evident that generally people do not align their behavior today with major concern about divine or external consequences either now or beyond the grave. The closest we have to some sort of mystical consequence is “karma” and from where I sit the rules of karma in popular American culture are not nearly as potent as the Hindu or Buddhist understanding of the term. So, the question becomes—when did Western folks make the break to individual judgments about morals, and quit worrying about “bigger picture” norms proclaimed in the churches? The split between human conduct and divine destiny—when the science of morality switched from outside sources, such as Scripture or religious revelation to subjective human decision making—can be traced back to a particularly devastating point in European history, the Wars of Religion. This is a series of armed conflicts that ravaged Western Europe shortly after the beginning of the Reformation in 1517 and extending for well over a century till the “Peace of Westphalia” in 1648. These wars were diverse and involved separate nations and regions at different times. In Luther’s back yard, a German revolt called the Peasants’ War [1524-25] touched off a series of increasingly destructive campaigns that would last well into the next century. In France, Catholics and Huguenots [French Reformed Calvinists] battled within the country between 1562 and 1598. The defeat and destruction of the Catholic Spain’s Armada in its efforts to seize Protestant England in 1588 is a featured date in history. The bloodiest prolonged conflict of this period was The Thirty Years War [1618-1648]. Fought primarily in the territory of modern Germany, historians estimate that about eight million people were killed in this struggle alone. All told, about 50 million were killed in this series of wars fought under the banner of religion. While religious beliefs served as an identifying flag, like all wars this prolonged series of conflicts was juiced by territorial and economic considerations as well as the fervor of jihad. Westphalia put a temporary end to the era of religious wars. By this time the continent was exhausted in every sense of the word. The idea of fighting for religious supremacy had lost its appeal. However, something more was lost, and we live with that loss today. Some of the greatest minds in Europe were beginning to despair of the idea that organized religion could organize itself and stand in the way of great evils. Put another way, the learned classes throughout Europe began to abandon the doctrinal and moral premises of organized religion in favor of a new way of philosophizing, in which man stood at the center of the universe. Truth would be sought not in the churches but by scientific inquiry. A similar pulse of discouragement about religion took place after the twentieth century world wars and was a major factor in the decision to call the Catholic Council Vatican II in 1962. Two figures stand out in this period of change. Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626] was a devout English Anglican who is remembered today as the father of the scientific method. For any philosophers in the house, Stanford University provides a very thorough on-line examination of his life’s body of work. Bacon held that the human brain is structured to receive observable sense impressions and to formulate them into logical thought. This is the “inductive measure of thinking,” i.e., from small observations to general hypotheses and eventually permanent principles. Philosophy, which had long been structured around eternal general principles—metaphysics—would be turned over on its head as modern man turned to what could be proven from experience as the basis of truth. The dogma of religion as well as the ideas of philosophers like Plato fell into disregard. The greater name in this intellectual revolution is Rene Descartes [1596-1650]. He is most remembered for his maxim, Cogito, Ergo Sum, or “I think, therefore I am.” On its face, this pithy saying is a philosophical revolution, for it is a declaration of the center of reality as man’s thoughtful being. He developed a philosophy of human existence around the intellectual awareness of man. Descartes is one of the most colorful men of any age; his entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica is well worth reading if you have the time. He was a man with his fingers in a lot of pies. Among other things, Descartes believed in a mechanical approach to man; if the proper parts of the human machine could be replaced or healed, Descartes and his followers believed—hypothetically at least—that man might live indefinitely. Descartes expected to live till 100, at least. He made it as far as age 53. Ironically, his patron demanded he write a sonnet on the occasion of the Treaty of Westphalia, and the overwork caused him to acquire a bronchial infection which killed him. Neither Descartes nor Bacon were atheists. Both believed in God, but they eschewed the complicated metaphysical belief system that accompanied Roman Catholicism and other Christian churches. By the time of the American Revolution in 1776, most of the intellectuals who formulated the founding documents of the United States were “Deists;” Webster defines Deism as: a movement or system of thought advocating natural religion, emphasizing morality, and in the 18th century, denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe. In short, “The Enlightenment,” as this period of history is called, created a split between the intellectual credibility of man and religious ideals which, to the scientist, could not be empirically proven. A good example of this separation can be found in Charlottesville, Virginia, the site of Thomas Jefferson’s famous estate at Monticello. Jefferson is a splendid example of the “enlightened mind.” His political thought on the freedom of man to manage his destiny in a collective form of government is the backbone of American government. He did not believe that kings or churchmen had the natural right to restrict the will of the people. Curiously, Jefferson did not see a contradiction here in his own conduct, as he owned slaves and in fact fathered children by at least one of them. It was Jefferson’s intention to bequeath land and his library toward the establishment of a state university at Charlottesville, now the University of Virginia. Curiously, Virginia already had a university in its state, William and Mary. But Jefferson did not trust the school, in part because it required its students to study a catechism of basic Protestant beliefs. He endowed the University of Virginia on the condition that it would never open a department or school of theology. He championed his school as an international model of free thought, and later in life he requested that history books record the establishment of this school as his chief accomplishment, ahead of his presidency of the United States and his purchase of the Louisiana Territory! It is good to bear this history in mind as we endure what has come to be called “the culture wars,” though in truth one could call this same national stress a “morality war.” For much of what divides America is the ultimate source of moral authority. Many believe that morals are revealed directly from God through the medium of direct revelation, scripture or another inspired text, or the churches and its ministers. Others draw moral conclusions from experience, public debate, science, or personal confidence in what one knows. A lifetime of experience suggests to me that Catholics walk a fine line here. In the next morality post, Kaminouchi describes what many Christian moralists are doing in the twenty-first century to reframe moral theology—returning to the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose thirteenth century synthesis of reality and grace remains one of the greatest theological achievements of all time.
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It has been about a month since the last moral theology entry, specifically a review of An Introduction to Christian Ethics: A New Testament Perspective [2020] by Alberto de Migno Kaminouchi. In my last post in April on the Morality Stream, I laid out the shortcomings of moral pastoral practice in the Church, dating back to the legal structuring of morals for confessional practice after the Reformation. I cited Kaminouchi’s observation that Vatican II’s document on priestly formation, Optatam Totius [1965], in paragraph 16, calls for a restructuring of moral theology centered on the Biblical example and teaching of Jesus.
Some years ago, the expression “What Would Jesus Do?” or WWJD became a popular meme. Given that we have four Gospels and a trove of other books in the New Testament, it seemed logical to assume that the answers to most moral dilemmas can be found rather easily in the New Testament, and the need for structured moral instruction in the Catholic Church or any other Christian community was superfluous except as a resource to read and reflect upon the life of Jesus. But this is not as easy as it sounds. In Ecclesiology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium [2020, see the Café’s Liturgy Stream], in a treatment of the Sacrament of Baptism and our identity in the priesthood of Christ, the authors raised two hypothetical questions. If you asked an average Catholic on the street what happens when a person is baptized, not one in one hundred would answer that in Baptism we become personally shaped into the witness and being of Jesus, which is the precise biblical answer provided by St. Paul. Which brings us around to the second question, i.e., do we know enough about this Jesus of Nazareth from our own reading and reflection to discern his intentions in all the moral decisions we must make during a lifetime? Knowledge of the sacred scriptures has never been a strong suit of popular Catholic identity, which is the more remarkable when one considers that every document of Vatican II called for an intensified renewal of the Church through a renewal of biblical study. Because the habitual parochial life of Catholics is not used to Bible reading as a staple of daily life, we tend to turn to other staples to solve our problems. In moral theology, for example, we depend heavily upon tradition, natural law philosophy, and ethics probably more than we should. There is plenty of blame to go around for our chronic deficiencies regarding the sacred scripture. Some of this problem dates to the complicated times of the Reformation when Protestant emphasis upon the Scripture alone [sola scriptura] threatened the importance of sacraments as understood within Catholicism and the authority of bishops to interpret the Bible into rules of moral life. It was only during the reign of Pope Pius XII [r. 1939-1958] that Catholic biblical scholarship was encouraged, and the average Catholic was commended to read the bible, but this counsel never percolated down to the parochial level. In my youth we were still cautioned against reading the Bible because “we might misunderstand it.” In truth, there is a great deal of Scripture that still lends itself to misunderstanding without the appropriate guidance and commentary. The treatment of the “Jews” in the Gospels of Matthew and John called for special clarification by the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission in the 1960’s, to use one example. The Swiss Theologian Hans Kung [1928-2021] wrote that of all the world’s religions, Christianity is the only one whose moral mandate is to become like God. All other religions rest upon a code or contract within the confines of human reason and experience. But it is Jesus alone who commands us to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” [Matthew 5:48] Jesus alone commands us to sell everything and come follow him. [Matthew 19:21] Jesus commands Peter to forgive his brother “seventy times seven,” an idiom for an infinite extension of forgiveness. St. Paul’s teaching on Baptism, then, makes much more sense: we are configured by the sacramental pouring of water into a union with God brought to fulfillment in imitation of Jesus Christ. As Kaminouchi writes [p.27]: “…the focus of attention of moral theology has to be centered on the person who responds to this revelation with his or her entire life.” In the second chapter of An Introduction to Christian Ethics Kaminouchi raises the complicated question of our knowledge of Jesus from the Scripture, a complicated balance of seeking the “Jesus of history” as well as the “Christ of faith.” [This balance was one of the four questions I was asked to explain in my final board examination for ordination in 1974.] The author takes us back to the late 1700’s and the work of Hermann Reimarus, an Enlightenment thinker who postulated that the four Gospels were not pure history but reflected the philosophies of the writers. Reimarus began what is called “the quest for the historical Jesus” that continues to the present day. This quest has produced several personality sketches of Jesus—the “social Gospel” school that continued till World War I was followed by a “radical faith” school which held that encounter with Jesus was a matter purely of faith, i.e., that nothing of Jesus’ human existence could be known with certainty. Today we live in a more balanced atmosphere regarding our interaction with the Gospels. To no one’s surprise, the Gospels are accepted today as faith documents, expressive of the mystery God wishes to share with us. However, this revelation occurs in real history, as God became a man who lived in time, space, and culture. To penetrate the mystery, one must know the person and the time from which he speaks. Jesus stands in real history to reveal a truth beyond history. Consequently, the study of moral theology cannot progress without the study of the Scripture. Here we address the need for a Church in matters of morality, for none of us is truly equipped to take the Bible into our hands and state definitively, “this is exactly what Jesus would have done in this specific circumstance.” There is a collective wisdom in the Church community guided by the Holy Spirit such that none of us need start from scratch in our reflection upon the Gospels. What all responsible commentaries on the New Testament agree upon is that the preaching of Jesus flowed from his understanding of himself as ushering in the reign of God or the final age of God’s love and revelation. How the kingdom of God gives birth to our moral identities is the focus of the next post on this stream, the third on An Introduction to Christian Ethics. "An Introduction to Christian Ethics: A New Testament Perspective" by Alberto de Migno Kaminouchi4/28/2021 There was an old saying that more ecclesiastical teaching careers came crashing to an end on the rocks of morality than any other theological discipline in the Church. As a psychotherapist in private practice with a master’s in theology and college teaching experience, I worked weekends for my home diocese teaching theological disciplines to catechists and schoolteachers over many years for their certifications. I could not help but notice that I was getting a lot of assignments to teach morality and human sexuality. Perhaps it was the fact that I did not depend upon my diocese for my full-time employment, unlike my fellow teaching colleagues, which gave me a certain bulletproof status in teaching the most contentious of Church disciplines. For we live currently in a time of “old school versus new school” understanding of Catholic morality.
I approached the challenge of teaching morality and sexuality in a twofold way. I was careful to teach the literal instructions of Catholic texts, but I also provided pastoral background on how some of the more controversial teachings, such as those dealing with divorce or artificial birth control, were handled in the confessional or in confidential priestly counseling, known as “the internal forum,” of pastoral moral practice. In fact, my own seminary training included a course on the internal forum dynamic of confession, i.e., how to assist those whose consciences led them to other moral decisions at variance with official public Church teaching. Several students over the years accused me of teaching heresy and in some cases became highly disruptive in the classroom at the idea that there might be “exceptions” in the face of what they believed to be infallible Church teaching. These instances, fortunately, were not common. What I did come to see were several distinct attitudes among Catholic adults in approaching Catholic moral teaching. [1] Catholic moral teachings were absolute. Students could nor conceptualize exceptions without bringing down the whole house of cards. [2] Catholic moral teachings obliged to varying degrees. Although artificial contraception, such as the pill, is explicitly forbidden by the Church, no student minister of mine seemed unduly concerned about the preponderance of two and three children families at the communion rail every Sunday. [3] Celibate, fallible males do not possess unquestioned authority to dictate matters of personal choice to lay Catholics. Few would say this out loud, but I read it frequently in course evaluations, and recently much more so in Catholic blog sites and Facebook streams. What is painfully obvious to me is the perception of morality as a matter of the institution and the individual. One is hard pressed to extract from any discussion of Catholic morality a relationship to the Bible, or more specifically, to the following of and discipleship of Jesus Christ. Nor is there any widespread sense among Catholics of why the Church has felt obligated to teach as it does. Consequently, the need for an overhaul in the catechetics and pastoral life of the Church is desperately overdue, and since the Catechist Café started posting in late 2014, I have been searching for an introductory moral theology text I might use in my own work and review and recommend to those who follow this blog, one that explains the present day conflicts in moral methodology. I am enthused to say that I have come across a splendid introductory book on understanding the meaning of a moral life. A few weeks ago, I posted the 2021 Spring Catalogue of Liturgical Press, and I noted the inclusion of An Introduction to Christian Ethics: A New Testament Perspective [2015, 2020] by Alberto de Mingo Kaminouchi. The term “introduction” is appropriate. The author provides an overview of how to conceptualize faith and right behavior; he uses the term “Christian” [instead of Catholic] because of his belief that all morality flows from a union with Christ as we meet him in the Bible, and in this respect Christian ethics or morality is an ecumenical venture we share with all the baptized. Typically, Catholic morality was [and for many, still is] conceived as a free-standing legal system, akin to a superficial understanding of the Law of the Hebrew Scripture, a point-by-point directive for all peoples always to observe at the command of God, to avoid hell and achieve heaven. Western Catholicism is unique in that it believes itself to be the official arbiter and interpreter of the Bible in its moral legislation, inspired to properly articulate moral behaviors for new circumstances not envisioned in Biblical times. Consider sexuality. The exhortation in the Book of Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply” has been conjoined to Genesis 38:9, [“But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his. So, whenever he went in to his brother’s wife he would waste the semen on the ground, so as not to give offspring to his brother”] to formulate Catholic teaching against a multitude of sins, including masturbation, in vitro fertilization, and artificial birth control. Since the mid-twentieth century Catholic theologians have come to question the propositional approach to morality, known as casuistry. Kaminouchi explains in his introduction that casuistic morality does not date back to New Testament times but was born on July 15, 1563. On that day, the Council of Trent mandated the creation of seminaries and a new science of morality to train future confessors in making proper judgments of guilt in the confessional. The priest, as judge, needed case law to assess the moral condition of the penitent’s soul. Case law was compiled into manuals, hence the term “Manualist Era” which has endured in some circles into our lifetimes. Consider the life and work of Father John Ford of Boston College. He is widely believed to be the manual moralist who convinced Pope Paul VI not to change the ban on artificial birth control in the pope’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae on the ground that changing one moral law in the system would bring the whole system crashing down. Such is the congenital weakness of systems. Ford retired from his teaching post in the following year, 1969, as BC students stopped registering for his courses. [See “John Cuthbert Ford, SJ: Moral Theologian at the End of the Manualist Era” who died in 1989]. If the desired product of moral theology was correct judgment on the state of the soul in terms of guilt, appropriate sorrow, and absolution, the system was sufficient, if not engaging. However, over the past two centuries theological scholars in other Church disciplines, notably Scripture, discerned from their studies of the New Testament a different dynamic of salvation and redemption, drawn from the example of Jesus and his early followers. The beginning of moral law, they found, was not codes and propositions but a radical change in the human being who, having encountered Jesus personally or in the preaching of his followers, “became a new person” in baptism and sealing by the Holy Spirit. In the 1950’s the German moralist Father Bernard Haring brought the insights of the Scripture into the realm of moral theology in his epic The Law of Christ. [See my review of Haring’s 1998 autobiography, Free and Faithful: My Life in the Church, which describes how Haring’s World War II experiences led him to reexamine the role of moral theology in the Church.] Kaminouchi quotes Haring: “Such a moral theology [the manualist tradition] no longer promotes the patterns of discipleship, of that righteousness that comes from God’s justifying action and in loving response to his call to become ever more the image and likeness of his own mercy. All this was left out, or at least left to dogmatic or spiritual theology.” [p. 7] During the reform council Vatican II [1962-1965] the bishops of the Church approved a decree on the training of seminarians for the priesthood, Optatam Totius, October 28, 1965. In paragraph 16 the document addresses a reform of moral theology: “Special care must be given to the perfecting of moral theology. Its scientific exposition, nourished more on the teaching of the Bible, should shed light on the loftiness of the calling of the faithful in Christ and the obligation that is theirs of bearing fruit in charity for the life of the world.” However, this reform has never been fully implemented, the result being that where the moral life of the Catholic is concerned, “sin and law [remain] the center of interest.” [p. 9] Of particular concern is the present tendency of many newly ordained priests to prosecute sinful acts in the confessional at the expense of emphasis upon Biblical renewal and the complexities of the human situation. Kaminouchi, in his introductory chapter [pp. 8-9], lists six reasons why the manualist approach to the teaching and pastoral practice of morality is inadequate for the Church. First, it cultivates minimalism. “An ethics centered on sin does not teach people to do good, but to avoid evil and occasions of sin.” It is a far cry of the New Testament ethics of Jesus, whose beatitudes are open ended challenges to holiness. Second, “If the criterion of moral goodness lies in keeping the law, I can consider myself ‘good.’” This is the pharisaic complacency that Jesus decried during his ministry. Third, “Following the rules blindly creates personalities reluctant to think for ourselves.” Not only does the human conscience atrophy over time, but just as in civil law, circumstances inevitably arise for which no existing law has yet taken account. Fourth, given that no human can meet the requirements of moral law perfectly, there is a permanent state of guilt which can lead to discouragement and even scrupulosity, on the one hand, or cynicism and loss of faith on the other. Fifth is an excessive individualism. “I have to worry first of all about saving my own soul. What others do is their problem.” Such an attitude is contrary to the unity of the Body of Christ. The moral life is a shared life in charity. And finally, sixth, “The preconciliar treatises on moral theology hardly mentioned God at all.” Kaminouchi calls this reality “the idolatry of the norm.” The goal of a healthy morality is precisely communion with God. Ideally, we meet the divine in the confessional as we do at the Communion banquet. In our next post on An Introduction to Christian Ethics, we will look at the source of Christian morality, the life of Jesus as we know it from Scripture and his witnesses. For much of my adult life the term “cafeteria Catholic” has been invoked as something of a slur against those who allegedly “pick and choose” what Catholic teachings they will observe to suit their tastes. I believe the term is a straw man which overlooks several critical points: [1] No one is without sin, and we all select choices compatible to our own lights, contrary to Church and Gospel. In other words, all of us without exception live our moral lives like cruisers at the ship’s smorgasbord; show me an instance of someone who does not. [2] Moral purists overlook the considerable body of Church history and tradition—particularly from the medieval era—that moral choice making is a complex and, in many ways, still poorly understood process. See this essay from Stanford University on new interest in medieval mental operations. [3] The Church has always provided a forum for discernment of individual moral decision making, as in the 1970’s on the matter of birth control, in the confessional. It was only in the 1930’s that confessors were instructed to interrogate married persons on matters of contraception. [4] Even under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Church has had to consistently review its moral directives in the light of deeper discernment, as with Pope Francis’ revision of Catechism Code 2267 on the inadmissibility of capital punishment.
With all of this in mind, I do not envy the job of catechists who are attempting to convey the teachings of the Church to young people and adults, nor any Catholic who is attempting to make moral decisions or engage in meaningful conversations with family and friends who are trying to decipher the Catholic moral way. Catholic morality certainly holds absolutes, but its greatest moral teaching is the love of God and neighbor. Unfortunately, we have something of a new phenomenon to behold, a collection of bishops in the United States who claim, for all practical purposes, to be more Catholic than the pope and to hold their charges to a higher standard of conduct than the official Vatican guides prudently advise. The specific issue in question is the Covid vaccine and its relation to biological strains of aborted fetuses from the 1970’s and 1980’s employed in the development. Although my graduate specialty in the early 1970’s was moral theology, there have been so many scientific advances in the past half century that I am in the same position as most of my Catholic fellows today: dependent upon the information of honest, peer reviewed science and the Church’s moral guidance as processed by the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. During the reign of Pope Benedict XVI, on September 8, 2008, the above cited Congregation issued a teaching entitled Dignitatis Personae, “The Instruction on Certain Bioethical Questions,” an ethical directive covering a wide range of new medical research and practices, including the development of new vaccines. The Congregation took note of the practice of using strains from fetal tissue to develop new treatments and, not surprisingly, condemned the practice of harming or aborting an unborn child for the purpose of extracting tissue or other organs for research purposes. But then, in para 35, the Congregation writes this: “Grave reasons may be morally proportionate to justify the use of such “biological material”. Thus, for example, danger to the health of children could permit parents to use a vaccine which was developed using cell lines of illicit origin, while keeping in mind that everyone has the duty to make known their disagreement and to ask that their healthcare system make other types of vaccines available. Moreover, in organizations where cell lines of illicit origin are being utilized, the responsibility of those who make the decision to use them is not the same as that of those who have no voice in such a decision.” There are two critical “take-aways” from this 2008 directive. First, the Congregation states that moral responsibility lies with those who made the original decision years ago to use aborted fetus cells for medical research; the guilt does not extend to those “who have no voice in such a decision,” i.e., those of us decades later who need the vaccine to protect not just ourselves but the most vulnerable members of society, the elderly, the ill, and the young. In the technical terms of moral theology, the question is direct versus remote participation or causality. Certainly, we can and should study the issue and “make known [our] disagreements and ask that [our] healthcare system make other types of vaccines available,” as Dignitatis Personae exhorts. Unfortunately, the urgency of a pandemic does not give us this luxury in the cases of the three vaccines developed to combat Covid-19. The second “take away” is the long tradition of Catholic practice in matters of moral decision making of recognizing that in certain circumstances there is no perfect choice. Put simply, we are sometimes faced with choosing the lesser of two evils from the vantage point of Catholic moral teachings. A textbook case is a pregnant mother suffering from an invasive cancer in the reproductive system. Surgical removal of the cancer may necessitate removal of the fetus. The moral choices open to the mother are the unfortunate termination of her pregnancy, on the one hand, or permitting the cancer to metastasize further and eventually take her life. In such moral dilemmas, the choice is between two morally challenged outcomes. For centuries, dating to medieval theology, the virtue of prudence has been invoked to determine which option is the wiser in view of available data. On December 14, 2020, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral directive calling upon Catholics to be vaccinated against Covid-19, stating that “being vaccinated safely against COVID-19 should be considered an act of love of our neighbor and part of our moral responsibility for the common good." At that time, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were being distributed for use in the United States. The Astra-Zeneca vaccine was also ready for use in England, and there was some question that this vaccine was more “morally compromised” because of greater dependence upon strains of fetal cells in its testing. In a directive that can be easily applied to the newer Johnson & Johnson vaccine as well, the bishops wrote: "It may turn out, however, that one does not really have a choice of vaccine, at least, not without a lengthy delay in immunization that may have serious consequences for one's health and the health of others. In such a case ... it would be permissible to accept the AstraZeneca vaccine." On January 11, 2021 Pope Francis, who himself was vaccinated, spoke of the process as a “moral obligation” and authorized immunization of all employees of the Vatican. One would have supposed that by this point it would be clear that a Catholic could be [and probably should be] vaccinated with a clear conscience. But on March 2 the USCCB felt compelled to issue a new clarification: “…if one can choose among equally safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, the vaccine with the least connection to abortion-derived cell lines should be chosen. Therefore, if one has the ability to choose a vaccine, Pfizer or Moderna's vaccines should be chosen over Johnson & Johnson's.” Rather remarkably, also on March 2, the Diocese of Bismarck, North Dakota, issued this statement: “The recently approved (FDA 2-27-2021) vaccine produced by Janssen/Johnson & Johnson used abortion-derived cell lines in the design, development, production and lab testing. This Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine is morally compromised and therefore unacceptable for any Catholic physician or health care worker to dispense and for any Catholic to receive due to its direct connection to the intrinsically evil act of abortion. No one should use or receive this vaccine but there is no justification for any Catholic to do so. Two morally acceptable vaccines are available and may be used. As always, no one is bound to receive this vaccine, but it remains an individual and informed decision.” The St. Louis and New Orleans archdioceses have counseled Catholics to avoid the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. If you have ever wondered about that saying, “more Catholic than the pope,” you have a good example here. Those of us who love the Church and minister in its name have a right to be troubled when maverick bishops issue directives which deviate from universal Church guidance, not to mention the Church’s tradition of thoughtful prudence. Certainly, one factor here has been the U.S. bishops’ longstanding policy of making abortion the preeminent moral concern in its public policy statements, including election guidance. Another is a palpable discomfort of a good number of American bishops with Pope Francis himself, whose moral vision of social justice is considerably broader than that of traditionalists in the United States. For whatever reasons, these bishops feel empowered to exercise more restrictive rulings than the Vatican itself. Jesus expressed himself clearly enough about the challenges of living a moral life; it is hard enough without creating more obstacles: “They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and lay them on people's shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them.” This being the first anniversary of the pandemic in the United States, it is worth pausing to reflect upon the many who have died, suffered, lost their livelihoods, their schooling, their family bonds, and even their access to the Eucharist. The discovery of vaccines in a record short time which promise alleviation of such suffering ought to be seen as a gift from God. I am saddened that some churchmen cannot see this medical intervention in that light. If any vaccine facilitates a single person’s reunion to reception of the Eucharist, a prudent judgment will render it wise. While there has been much discussion about Q-Anon and its impact on American life and politics, I have seen little—nothing, actually—directed toward a pastoral or catechetical approach toward a conscious embrace of Q and other radical conspiracies. Like many of you, I have family and friends who embraced the Q-anon conspiracy to varying degrees and who have made this known on social media. None has ever approached me personally or on-line to recruit me or to discuss their experiences one-on-one, nor have I engaged in any on-line comments or discussions with them, despite my strong concern about the subject. Social scientists—some of whom have been engaged in on-line chats with Q-anon adherents for months—observe that the members tend to create “new families,” very frequently online, instant camaraderie with individuals who share the same concerns and understand the range of emotions that drove them to identify with Q-Anon in its various forms in the first place.
I can say with certainty that Catholics have embraced the Q-Anon conspiracy to varying degrees, at least in some cases in the mistaken hope that the Pro-Life cause would be strengthened. Q-Anon emerged in social media around 2017 and appears to be a fear of a “deep state,” i.e., a perceived power force that would eradicate Christian identity and patriotic rights and values. Q’s outline of the specifics of the deep state conspiracy carries a certain shock value to anyone hearing them the first time—elements of pedophilia, child trafficking, cannibalism—and has become wedded to the Presidency of Donald Trump and the narrative of the 2020 stolen election, which is probably the reason for the Pro-Life attraction to an otherwise bizarre worldview. We would make better use of our time examining the underlying fears that would attract otherwise common-sense folks to a conglomeration of extreme beliefs. It may be of some comfort to realize that radical interpretations of the present and future are nothing new. Waves of “anxious heightened consciousness” appear from time to time. Such highly potent emotional waves date to Biblical times, under the term Apocalypticism. The Books of Daniel and Revelation are two outstanding examples of extreme futuristic projections of order and deliverance from the evils of the world. Both books were written during persecution, Daniel during the Syrian desecration of the Jerusalem temple around 150 B.C., and Revelation during a local Roman persecution of Christians during the first century after Christ. Apocalyptic movements developed throughout history, after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., at the fall of Rome in the fifth century [which inspired St. Augustine’s classic, The City of God], during the Bubonic Plague or Black Death in the fourteenth century, the fall of the sacred city of Constantinople in 1453 at the hands of the Turks, and during the “Wars of Religion” from 1524 till 1648. There have been countless smaller waves in the fine print of history. In every one of these crises, witnesses and victims were forced to reconfigure the way they viewed the world, intellectually and psychologically speaking. This “refiguring” usually had positive and negative outcomes. The shock of the fall of Jerusalem intensified Christianity to embrace its Gentile mission to the entire earth. On the other hand, Christians interpreted the Jerusalem destruction as God’s final judgment of the Jews for failure to recognize Jesus as Savior, a mindset which justified persecution of Jews till our present day. Marjorie Taylor Green, the Q-Anon congresswoman from Georgia, recently claimed that the California wildfires were started by lasers from space under the direction of the Jewish House of Rothschild, the centuries-old banking establishment named after the extraordinarily successful family of Jewish financiers. Antisemitism is usually a significant component of Christian extremism. Q-Anon adherents, for their part, look at the polar opposite of their world view as “woke.” A 2018 editorial from the Harvard Crimson describes the meaning of “woke” quite well: “The word "woke" implies that to support the liberal viewpoint is to be socially aware. Woke people are heavily informed and actively involved with liberal social issues. If you’re leading a Black Lives Matter protest, you’re probably woke. If you’re calling your congressperson to advocate for Planned Parenthood, you’re probably woke…. This biased nomenclature is rooted in a belief held by some on the left that people are only conservative because they are uneducated. If only people were smarter, more informed, more woke, then surely they would see the Democratic light and switch sides.” While the details of the Q-Anon conspiracy are dangerous and groundless, it is important to look past the bizarre headlines to the needs of those who embrace the Q community, where their concerns are worthy of consideration and where there is need for fraternal correction for all of us. One can hopefully sense the fear, resentment, and frustration of basically decent people who for many years have been told in a variety of ways that their ideals and way of life are parochial and dumb. The dynamics of the Catholic Church in the United States are as good an example as any. With the advent of the reform council Vatican II [1962-1965] many of us who were privileged to study theology in seminaries and Catholic universities after the Council went into parishes “woke,” so to speak, with the attitude that everything new was good, and the old customs of Catholic devotion and worship were, ipso facto, bad. I confess that many of my pastoral stances were elitist, self-assured, and authoritarian. It is worth noting, too, that “Catholic woke” is vulnerable to the charge of conflating Pro Life with “anti-women.” My own mellowing over age came with a greater appreciation of the liberal arts tradition of Catholic education, a wisdom I missed in my first flyover in my 20’s. As this past week has marked “Catholic Schools Week,” consider that Catholic Education at every level, and has—where it has met its mandate--enriched its students by immersing them in liberal arts education. Thanks to the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas and his confreres in the 200 universities of Medieval Europe, Catholic education embodies a vision in which full creation is united in the glory of God and the service of mankind. All the arts and sciences, if carried to their frontiers at any point in history, take us to the infinity of God, whether that be the complexity of viruses in the laboratory, the endless lessons of history, or the mystery of human behavior in Shakespeare on the stage. The term “renaissance man” may be dated and sexist, but its truth is as contemporary as ever. The broadest view of worldly wisdom produces a prudence and caution that guided the work of Aquinas and the body of Catholic scholar-saints. Aquinas understood, too, the moral imperative of learning. We cannot spin opinions out of the air and proclaim them true without grounding, nor can we create an internal universe out of “alternative facts.” The Eighth Commandment holds us to the obligation of bearing true witness, by such standards as Church Tradition, history, due process, and peer review. Due process is appeal to legitimate authority; the riot at the Capital on January 6 was caused, among other reasons, by a failure of some to accept the judgment of duly authorized state officials and courts of law throughout the country on the matter of the 2020 presidential election. Augustine, in his City of God, was a staunch defender of legitimate civil order. By contrast, it is peer review that assures us of the safety of the various Covid-19 vaccines now in use; a claim for any new drug must stand up to strenuous testing by other independent research centers and government agencies entrusted with this responsibility. [Peer review accounts for the delays in the release of newer vaccines, to test for safety before public release, delays which can be frustrating but necessary.] Even the best educated and best intentioned among us fall prey to hubris, the pride of worshipping the supposed infallibility of our own intellects, an important symptom that our adult learning and reading is self-centered, not God-centered. Aquinas himself once referred to his lifelong body of work as “straw.” The principles of Catholic education across all disciplines puts a person in a classroom, a library, or a reading den for the purpose of being awed. A useful devotional and instructional guide for any adult Catholic is Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina [1995] by the Cistercian monk Michael Casey. Casey speaks of reading with humility. I reviewed this book on Amazon in 2011 when I was “unwoking” and I made this observation: Casey instructs his readers to embrace Lectio Divina [spiritual reading] with humility. I tend to read critically or pragmatically [as in, can I use this material in a class?] The author advises us to approach the text purely for its own sake, its access to the wisdom of God. We read for grace and guidance, for introduction to a world of the Holy Spirit that to some measure will be foreign to all of us. Casey is cognizant of the human tendency to rebel against new ideas as well as to avoid any trace of the ancient as "irrelevant," that favorite curse word of 1960's Catholicism. He calls to mind that the theology of both Hebrew and Christian Scripture is in fact backward looking, toward the saving deeds of God. A Christian who is not historically minded does not know himself. Casey goes on to discuss the skill of selecting appropriate works for study. I see a lot in the Q social postings about “doing the homework” and “reading for yourself.” I commend the energy but with one critical caveat: One of the most important fruits of liberal arts education is discernment in self-study, i.e., making sound judgments on the selection of persons, texts, resources, and public discourse one chooses to engage. Reading is not the same as reading judiciously. The monks, of course, would be guided by their abbot and the senior members, and for those of us with liberal arts backgrounds this is one of the skills imparted in research and composition. The rapid transmission of information on social media suggests to me that the skill in separating sources like wheat from weeds is a discernment that desperately needs reinforcement. I can only speak to the arena of institutional religious life, which suffers division and misinformation in the same way that civil society does. I do wish that parishes provided more input on religious reading in Catholic adult education; for example, I always integrated instruction on publishing houses and respected mainstream authors [peer reviewed] in my courses for catechists and church personnel, and I began the Catechist Café some years ago as a resource for adult Catholic education along these lines. I have been asked by friends if there is some way to meaningfully connect [or more often, reconnect] with family and intimates enveloped in Q-like conspiracy fears and advocacy. I must admit I am at a loss myself, and I do my share of “tiptoeing” with various members of my family. It can be grating and wearisome. There are cultlike characteristics to some Q-Anon adherents, and the certitude and anger are hard to endure at times from the outside; there are none more fervent than the recent convert. It is probably not wise to respond in kind. Jesus prayed that we would all be One. I will risk the charge of naivete with my belief that pain and fear are the fuel for extremist beliefs and behavior and make allowances for that. Remember that all conspiracy theories eventually break the hearts of their sincere adherents. For anyone in pain and disillusionment, the porchlight should always be lit for the homecoming of those who have been through a great deal. With my counseling offices closed due to Covid-19, I have had a little more time to read and reflect upon the way we “do catechetics” and “form faith.” Some of my reading has been published research, some theological texts, journal articles, and several blogsites devoted to the trials and tribulations of religious educators and, in one case, deacons or wanna-be deacons. I will continue researching, of course—it takes about three days of focused study to produce one post—but this year has shifted my outlook on the very nature of evangelizing and precisely what we think we are doing in our parishes and in the universal Church under the umbrella of “catechetics.”
The earliest biblical texts of the Christian experience speak of our Church as an ecstatic little group which had experienced Jesus as raised from the dead and promising to lead them into eternal glory when He returned in glory. “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” [I Corinthians 15:55] or in Peter’s Pentecostal sermon in Acts 2. For the early church and its converts—Jew and Gentile alike—the radical promise of eternal glory was psychological as much as religious. Baptism meant a destiny that no one deemed possible. The behavioral and psychological focus of an early Christian was rescue, an experience that an intervention by God in a pouring of cleansing water and invisible grace had rescued one from at best meaninglessness and at worst an eternity of pain or nothingness. Forgiveness, salvation, redemption---think of learning that you are cancer free after years of grueling treatment. Apostolic baptism had that kind of impact upon converts that produced a new way of life and a new take on the world in which they lived. I read a good number of blogs from religious education personnel in the field who lament that their students—and the students’ parents—“know nothing” when it comes time for pastors to assess competency for sacraments of passage, such as Confirmation. The word to underline is “know,” for the Catechism and pastoral approaches of this era seem to go overboard in defining, at the cost of experiencing. It is more accurate to say that most students—nor their parents--have ever experienced the terms of catechetical shorthand, sin, and grace. The terms become for students just another hoop of data to master before life’s next adventures. Ironically, children, adolescents, and young adults actually do have significant episodes of evil and hope in their lives, but the very limited skills and training of [mostly volunteer] religious educators has limited their catechetical scope of work to the jargon of religion, not the lived experience of it. In my mental health practice, I have had many discussions with parents, and on occasion their offspring, over family issues of religion. One parent put it quite well: “I wish my teenaged son loved the Mass as much as I do.” I pointed out that there was at least 25 years age difference between mother and son, and I observed that they were looking at life from different points in their human development. The parent responded as I think most church ministers would: “But the Mass is the Mass, it is the same for everyone.” True enough if one is speaking from the objectivity of Scripture and Tradition. Where catechetics habitually drops the ball, though, is the mistake that everyone experiences Eucharist—or any sacrament--in the same way, regardless of age and circumstance. Or, for that matter, that everyone has a common experience of the human tragedy of sin or the euphoria of being saved. When I was making my bones in the “family business” fifty years ago, so to speak, it was commonly held in my seminary that the conservative moralists were too pessimistic and too preoccupied with sin and hell. The progressive or post-Vatican II moralists opted for a more optimistic theory of baptism and salvation, explaining baptism as birth into the family God. I have lived more comfortably with the progressive school throughout my years as a pastor, teacher, and even therapist. But in very recent years I have come to a place where I can’t argue with the numbers—the numbers of young people who are leaving the Church, and the number-crunching of researchers who are seeking to explore the reasons why these young people leave. Some examples: In January 2018 St. Mary’s Press and the Center of Applied Research in the Apostolate [CARA] released the results of their benchmark study on the subject, “Going, Going, Gone! The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics, and just this week “The State of Religion and Young People 2020: Relational Authority” from Springtide Research Institute was released and will be Primed to my front door in 48 hours. It is amazing to me that the research of the past decade never makes an appearance in Facebook sites such as “Catholic Directors of Faith Formation” or “Catholic Parish Staff,” two very interesting sites if you want a feeling for grassroots frustrations among church workers in parishes across the country. The pain of parish ministers—and many parents, to be sure—is an absence of a sense of developmental psychology—i.e., what we can reasonably expect from a youth at any particular age in his or her march to adulthood. I have great respect for those who teach religion in Catholic schools and parishes, and equal respect for the small percentage of Catholic parents who integrate prayer, discussion, and good works into the family routine, educating and leading by example. Institutionally we are hamstringing this population by [1] insisting upon an almost compulsive adherence to the terminology of catechisms, beginning with the big one, and [2] trying to mold children and young adults into attitudes and emotions when their natural human development has not yet prepared them. Put another way, we rush to give answers to questions yet unasked, while paying little heed to the developmental dramas of the young. Religious narrative about sin and deliverance makes no sense if there is no developed sense of one’s precariousness, or what it is that you are being rescued from. I think that our dependence upon catechisms at times serves as a buffer to keep us ministers from having to listen to the actual sufferings of young people. We have no language or training to engage with them and discover what they really fear in their lives. About two weeks ago I purchased on a whim a paperback copy of one of the twentieth century’s best selling but most controversial novels, Peyton Place [1956] by Grace Metalious. The term “Peyton Place” has passed into the English language as a metaphor of the sin that lurks beneath the veneer of every human and, in this case, a proper New Hampshire town. The book was banned for a time for its explicit depictions of sex and cruelty. I remember how adults talked about the book when I was in third grade, and through most of my life I was always of the impression that this work was a tale of adults behaving badly. That part is certainly true, but what struck me to the core was the incredible sufferings and injustices perpetrated upon children and minors, and now that I think of it, just about every woman in the book. Peyton Place—its individuals, families, businesses, schools, institutions—virtually screams for saving grace, the adults from their elected blindness and self-righteousness and the young from their anger, fear, and confusion as they navigate the minefield of their adults’ demons. I do not recommend reading the book—there are plenty of other American fiction pieces that explore the same theme--but it is a secular lesson that we can hardly use the term salvation till we know the private hells. There continues to be controversy about the dueling issues of public safety surrounding Covid-19 and the closure or limitation of church services, particularly the Sunday Eucharist. About a month ago I commented on the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, where the archbishop stated the date at which Catholics needed to return to Sunday Mass in person without incurring mortal sin. The Catholic internet is full of questions about how following Mass on streaming devices can be spiritually uplifting last Sunday, but this Sunday could be a mortal sin. Can a bishop arbitrarily make such a statement? In truth, Archbishop’s Listecki’s directive was, for the most part, a restatement of universal current Church discipline; he notes the variety of considerations that excuse one from live attendance at Sunday Mass. It may come as a surprise that a Catholic home provider for a sick family member or spouse is excused from the obligation even if the caregiver is not ill. Archbishop Listecki’s directive that “Fear of getting sick, in and of itself, does not excuse someone from the obligation” is mitigated somewhat. “However, if the fear is generated because of at-risk factors, such as pre-existing conditions, age or compromised immune systems, then the fear would be sufficient to excuse from the obligation.”
The very idea of bishops mandating Mass attendance at all rattled some sensitivities. I got a letter from a gentleman of my generation who inquired something along these lines: “I thought that the Old Testament was the age of laws, but that Christianity is the age of love.” He added that he believed Christian morality was built upon doing the loving thing in all circumstances. I, too, remember being taught that in some way, shape, or form in later seminary years, too. For this post I was able to put a name and a face to that theory of morality, specifically the school of Situation Ethics inspired by the then Episcopal priest James Fletcher [1905-1991]. Fletcher was both hailed and reviled for his 1966 Situation Ethics: The New Morality. Fletcher dared to go where few had gone, specifically in squaring the circle between Biblical codes of morality and the individual Christian’s freedom to make moral choices based on the most loving outcome. The contrasts between the age of the Law and the age of Love in the Bible are not as clear as some of us would believe. The Hebrew Scripture depicts God as doing many gracious things that He was not bound to do, the primary act being Creation itself. It is easy to forget that there is no natural or scientific reason for us to exist, let alone to exercise some form of dominion over all the creatures God had made. The term “Chosen People” is a clear indication that God loved this small nomadic culture and as early as Genesis 12 revealed this love in tangible, substantial ways, in His encounter with Abram [later Abraham]. A one-sided love, however, is pathology to both parties. The giver is constantly taken advantage of, and the receiver fails to recognize how good he or she has it. From this vantage point, the encounter of God and Moses on Mount Sinai is a betrothal where the terms of the relationship are clarified. How do we show love? Do not let the legalese or the strictness of some of the terms overshadow the heart of the matter including, for our purposes in this post, the example of worshipping as a community on the Sabbath. How many of us travel significant distances to be with our families at Thanksgiving? The tradition of giving thanks to God and breaking bread as a family community on Thanksgiving carries with it more than traces of God’s desire to share the memory of first love for His family. Regarding the Christian Testament, I believe that the contrast between the Mosaic Law and the Christian ethic is too sharply drawn. Jesus was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and died a Jew. [I often wonder if antisemitic “Christians” realize this.] Those who read the Gospels carefully note how often Jesus speaks with religious respect and even zeal for the Mosaic Law. In Matthew 5:17 Jesus states that he has not come to destroy the Law and the Prophets but to bring them to fulfillment. He lived what we would call the “Judeo-Christian way” and a close look at the Gospels reveals that Jesus was willing and capable of articulating principles and judgments with the best of the Hebrew social prophets, such as Amos. Consider Matthew 25: 31-46. As clearly as possible, Jesus draws out the deepest wishes of his Father as expressed in the Hebrew Scripture, with the precision of the Pythagorean Theorem. The hungry are to be fed; the homeless sheltered. The sick are to be cared for. Those who fail to do such things will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. Biblically speaking, we continue to observe [hopefully] a continuous strain of love that permeates both Testaments, a love that rises above feelings into the world of behavioral change and outcomes. One issue, too, is the meaning of “love.” Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics is built on the premise that Christians are called to do “the loving thing” in making choices about behavior. One can understand why no Christian Church embraced this philosophy as part and parcel of its moral and sacramental practice [though some priests and laity were enamored of the system in its day.] The determination of “the loving thing” in Fletcher’s system is a purely subjective judgment. The Catholic moral tradition has always respected a “well formed conscience” in the confessional, the operative adjective being “well-formed.” Such would assume that the individual has made a studious effort to understand how his or her religious tradition has adopted its various assessments of the good or evil of acts under consideration. Admittedly circumstances do arise where values conflict and the moral dilemma has no desirable options. Traditionally, Catholics have always enjoyed access to a confessor to assist in the determination process. Which brings us all the way around to the question of the “Sunday Mass Obligation.” In the best of all worlds the Eucharist is the center of our Christian life. The Christian tradition of Sunday Eucharist can be dated through St. Paul’s Epistles as the occasion when the family of believers came together to repeat the command of Jesus to “do this in memory of me.” Sunday Eucharist exhorts God’s greatest gift, the promise of a glorious renewal with Christ at the end of time and an eternity in the reward he has prepared for us. Admittedly, Sunday Mass does not look or feel this way. I would be the first to admit that attendance every weekend is hard. It takes every ounce of strength to recapture the traditional reason I am there. And yes, there was a point this past May during the lockdown where I seriously wondered if live-streamed Mass from a different location, celebrated in this spirit, would be the better route for me to take. But over the past few months I had to remind myself that love is about behaviors, in my case the behavior of planting myself in the church pew of my regular parish. The “feeling of love” or devotion will follow. And it has, a bit. I remember hearing in class years ago a quote from a famous theologian: “When a man gets down on his knees, the action adds nothing to God but everything to the man who kneels" I was in London early last summer—my first visit—where my wife Margaret and I had preregistered to see Winston Churchill’s underground war command. It was a compelling experience, immensely popular with tourists. Be sure to make an on-line reservation before you leave home [whenever that is]. A few hours later we walked to Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square. The tourists around us were talking about the electric current that flows through the statue to keep the pigeons from relieving themselves on the Prime Minister’s stately head. Granted, I am just another soak-it-up tourist, but I had a lingering doubt about this assertion. I had several doubts, too, during a trip a few years earlier, about whether the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul are enshrined in Rome’s Cathedral, St. John Lateran.
The Lateran question will not be solved in today’s post, but the Churchill statue has played a major role in current affairs as a target of English protests responding to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis several weeks ago. Churchill’s statue has been boxed and protected after the word “racist” was painted on it. The wrath expressed upon Winnie’s statue is amazingly simple and complex at the same time, and the rationale of toppling statues and monuments around much of the world raises questions about living with history and the sins of our fathers. It is an issue that Catholicism must deal with because the statues and stories of canonized saints have come under new scrutiny and physical assault as well. I have no doctrinal answers, but several moral observations on events and movements currently interacting with just about everything we do and think--except statues, as it turned out. The killing of George Floyd: the outrage at this systematic torture and murder is beyond words. What adds to the pain is the knowledge that this is not an unheard-of practice in altercations between police and persons of color. I must think that a significant percentage of law officers in the United States are practicing Catholics who, hypothetically at least, have been catechized on Catholic teachings—from popes and the Catechism--on the dignity of persons and abuse of civil trust. At least I would hope so. This summer presents every local church with a catechizing moment from the pulpit or on-line programs on the sinful nature of violence as a matter of social interaction as well as the often submerged prejudice we Catholics carry within us, without a thought that this grave sin. Strangely, Church leadership in this country has been noticeably quiet. Thankfully, several bishops have individually stepped up to provide moral guidance and support to the rising numbers who question the chronic illnesses of the social status quo. In fairness, the Covid-19 virus is probably at the front of the parochial agenda, though even here I notice that some pastors strongly suggest the use of masks while other pastors in my own diocese state clearly on social media that unmasked individuals cannot join the collective Eucharist. There is the political element of “the mask thing” going on, but with today’s [Saturday’s] just-released Florida report of 9,585 new cases, a new record in a week of records, it will be a long time before I attend a Sunday Eucharist, perhaps not until a vaccine is in common use. We presently attend Mass on Thursdays at noon, where the assembly is quite small, but with the escalation, we may rethink that. [Methinks the State of Florida may be on the cusp of another shutdown anyway.] The public protests: Someone asked me what I thought about all the people in the streets and the sporadic damage and confrontations, and I replied, “For what black human beings have suffered in North America for four hundred years, we’re getting off very, very easily.” As I viewed the coverage, I thought to myself that this is different from 1968. Back then, the fuel was the Viet Nam War…or more specifically, the potential that us college white kids might get drafted and really must go. The 2020 demonstrations are remarkably inclusive in terms of ethnicity and manifest a broader agenda, a plea that all segments of American society enjoy the same rights and protection of law, a true “right to life” cause. The plea of “I can’t breathe” has grown into a commentary on the unnecessary impediments to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Research on young Catholic adults who have left the Church would suggest that the overlap of nationwide young protesting idealists—those we see in the peaceful protests--with disenchanted young Catholics or “Nones” is worthy of comment. We as Catholics are missing golden opportunities to learn about Generations Y and particularly Z. “Generation Z” or those born after 1994 is demographically the future cultural wave that Catholicism will address through much of the twenty-first century. Business and retail studies about Generation Z planning for future marketing ventures agree that this cohort [Z] grew up in less traditional (nuclear) family backgrounds, is more likely to hail from single-parent or same-sex parent or blended families. Generation Z individuals are more likely to have friends from various ethnic, religious, and racial groups. [Italics mine.] They are more averse to risk than Millennials or Baby Boomers, have less confidence in the current economic system, and are more inclined to become small business owners. They are, interestingly, more religious in their own way than the generations ahead of them. I listened to a fascinating podcast, “Why Do Young People Leave the Catholic Church?” A symposium broadcast by NPR in Minneapolis and based on the groundbreaking study funded by St. Mary’s Press, journalists, clergy, and representatives of cohorts Y and Z, the exchanges were respectful but painfully honest. Y and Z would have considerable difficulty comprehending the action of the Bishop of Indianapolis, who this week banned transgender children from all Catholic schools in the Diocese. Generations Y and Z do not have the disposition nor the interest in blanket labeling “disordered individuals” that Catholic sexual teachings documents seem to do almost reflexively. [The full 49-minute NPR broadcast is available for listening here.] These generations have grown up with a broader “anthropology” and—with credibility—can ask the hard questions that we too often answer with mathematic and dogmatic formularies or vanilla indifference. It is hard for me to understand faith formation programs that begin without frank but friendly dialogue, assuming the best in all generations. Violence in the streets. The sad incidences of violence against persons and property are morally wrong, violations of the fifth and seventh commandments, respectively. That said, there are three important considerations when assessing 2020 as a learning moment. [1] Revolutions are never tidy [ask Queen Antoinette] and the heightened emotions can take on an energy that impairs both the long-range goals and the sympathy of the broader public which is necessary for success. I was saddened to see a remarkably peaceful national event scarred to some degree by outlandish acts; in fairness, not all of them were generated by demonstrators. [2] Martin Luther King was profoundly inspired by the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. Both men had their “Selma Bridge” moment. King would be 91 had he lived, and the generation of civil rights leaders he inspired are aged or expired. Which leads to the question of how effectively Dr. King’s principles have been passed along to the future generations he died to bring to full freedom. I do not raise this as a racial question or a judgment on black Christian catechetics. Catholicism has a parallel problem. The teachings of Vatican II on peace and justice were supposed to form the backbone of Catholic social teachings, but in the present culture a peacemaker of the philosophy and conduct of a Dr. King or a Pope John XXIII can be downplayed as coming from a “snowflake.” [3] The national protests arose precisely because of an excess of violence against Mr. Floyd [and many others over time] by specifically those officers who are sworn to uphold the law. Again, I am not arguing that two wrongs make a right, but with an ironic twist the burning and looting serves as a mirror of how many persons of color view “white justice,” so to speak. Both sides of the mirror are ugly, and the problem of the one will not be contained without addressing the problem of the other. I looked up the Boston Tea Party [December 16, 1773] and discovered that white colonialists disguised themselves as persons of color when they illegally destroyed 373 cases of tea on three merchant ships in Boston Harbor. Statues. I was all set to wrap this up when I suddenly realized that Catholic of all people should understand the symbols of statues, monuments, and flags. We are a sacramental people. Our worship is about “outward signs” that bestow power and point to the future. So, there is a Catholic philosophy that speaks volumes to the establishment or removal—legally or forcefully—of statues and memorials. That should be enough for a full post in a few days. One of the dependable pleasures of my life is a regular evening phone call from one of the senior priests of my diocese. He was an established pastor when I arrived in Florida in 1978 and we served on numerous committees together over the years, including one which developed the first policy on maternity leave for lay employees of the diocese. Now well into retirement, he called last night, and our conversation turned rapidly toward the challenges to our Church and diocese presented by the Covid-19. We agreed that there is a sea change across the board, that the “new normal” will take a long time to unfold. Several things resonated strongly with both of us: a sense that a good many of our parishes do not have the resources for a long term shut down for reasons of public safety; and second, that many Catholics who were somewhat borderline about Sunday Mass may never come back.
[I asked him, toward the end, “what would you do if you were pastoring today, and he immediately quipped, ‘I’d suffer along with everybody else.”] How bad will it be for parishes and parochial schools? Despite the soundness of the prediction, it was somewhat unnerving to see that Central Florida’s economic flagship, so to speak, Disneyworld, may not open until January 2021—at a projected attendance of 25% in the first six months and 50% in the last six months. Disney, as the USA Today story explains, faces some extraordinary challenges in terms of health safety, as anyone who has visited the facility can easily imagine. How do we maintain “safe distancing” in “The Pirates of the Caribbean” or the cozy French pavilion at EPCOT, one of my favorites? The Magic Kingdom is hardly the only industry with such problems, and the forecasts for Disney are quite applicable across the board for all institutions—from meat packing to parish operations. I received an interesting article by Monsignor Charles Pope in Sunday’s National Catholic Register on some practical steps that parishes can undertake to allow at least some access to the sacraments, depending on local ordinance and intensity of “hot spots.” I do not agree with every one of them, but the thinking was crisp and practical. Monsignor Pope was wise to recommend some flexibility in matters of Canon Law, reminding us that “these are not normal times.” Communion on the tongue, he writes, should not be a viable option for the foreseeable future. Nor will we return to anything close to normal until a reliable vaccine is available, not just in the United States, but globally. It is a shock to the system when one’s way of life is disrupted. One example will suffice: here in Orange County, Florida, the public-school system announced this week that schools will remain closed for the rest of this current school year. [I am surprised anyone doubted that.] Our Catholic school system follows the public-school calendar, so our schools will remain closed, too, and the homeschooling on-line will continue till the end of May. From what I understand, there is a rather strong backlash about this directed at Catholic school administrators. Someone posted this observation: “To educate a child, it takes a village. To homeschool a child, it takes a still.” As my pastor noted at the end of Sunday morning’s televised parish Mass, an exceptionally large number of highly charged church and personal events have been cancelled or postponed indefinitely. All our initiation sacraments of the spring remain to be celebrated, including First Communion. Weddings and funerals have been postponed. Even if we can somehow celebrate these events in full ritual down the road, and that is a big “if,” they will obviously be muted by the fact that the planned event—in its proper liturgical and/or traditional time--will be postponed. High school graduation on December 5? Baptizing Catechumens on the 31st Sunday in Ordinary time? St. Augustine wrote that time is linear, it moves with historical energy that we cannot undo. Perhaps Augustine coined the phrase “the moment is lost.” But the loss of life moments is not the only problem facing the Church, and these may be relatively insignificant when the historians tally the toll of this decade. The major immediate concern is money, period. From funding research to keeping Catholic schools open, the “new economy” will have to be worked with. Presently the unemployment rate in the United States is 20%. At the height of the Great Depression, the rate fell to 25%. Moreover, the federal government has already allocated several trillions of dollars for one-time stop gap aid to individuals and small businesses—a temporary one-time boost. Since the Covid-19 was not budgeted for, the money going out must be gotten quickly in some fashion. One solution is simply printing more dollars, which naturally decreases the value of the dollars you have in your wallet. The other method is borrowing, which places a significant portion of our economy in the hands of banks and other nations. [Ask your financial planner/consultant for a better explanation.] To return to the local parish setting, cash is running low. Before the virus crisis began, about 20 dioceses in the United States had filed for bankruptcy, mostly due to clerical sexual abuse settlements but also due to poor management and “edifice complex” compulsions. In truth, however, the biggest financial problem facing the American Church is the nature of the day-to-day parish existence. For my entire life, the Catholic Church in the U.S. has been cited as one of the lowest in terms of financial support from members. Christians in general contribute 2.2% of income, Catholics 1.1%. Weekly Catholic church attendance presently runs to the 25%-30% range. During the Corona virus shut down, the Archdiocese of New York is losing $1 million per week. It is unlikely that any church institution will “recapture” what it lost during the pandemic, given that the return of parishioners to Mass will probably be lengthy and protracted…and that assumes no second wave. In the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, two schools--dependent upon diocesan subsidies--are closing due to the virus. Bishops, by closing parishes and schools, selling property, and laying off personnel at the diocesan and parish level, have been able to shield parishioners to some degree from the outside rail of church financial bad news. But in today's environment, that strategy will be very hard to maintain. In the next post on this stream, I will talk about some of the inventive rethinking it will take to adjust to a very “new normal.” Who says timing isn’t everything? As I was wrapping up this post, I received an email from my boss at the rural Catholic Charities clinic where I have worked every Monday for four years. She informed me that “during changes and closures needed during the past weeks” her position was being laid off. For a time in my life I considered an academic specialization in Church Medieval History, and after a few dismal semesters one of my Catholic University professors, Dr. Guy Lytle, pulled no punches in discouraging my continuing along that track. However, I maintained my interest and still stay abreast with books in the field as I can. My medieval readings over a half century bring me over and over to a specific factor of late Medieval history that turned the known world on its head. Both the classic analyses of that age and very recent research go to considerable length to discuss a factor of medieval times rarely discussed in Church history catechetics, Y Pestis, which changed the trajectory of Christianity and contributed in no small way to the Reformation. Y Pestis is the cause of The Black Plague [1347-1352]; an excellent source on this event is The Great Mortality [2005]; my slightly dated 2005 Amazon review is here.
For all its influence in the Church, no Christian soul ever laid eyes upon Y Pestis. In an age before the microscope, it was too small, a bacterium that lived and developed multiple forms in places and ways we don’t fully understand even today. The predominant theory seems to favor transmission by flea-bearing rodents. In the early 1300’s A.D. trade between Europe and the Orient was novel and flourishing. The trade routes which carried Y Pestis agents extended from China over land all the way to Byzantium [modern day Istanbul] and then by ship to all major ports in Europe. That said, very recent research has discovered traces of Y Pestis in the western Roman Empire as early as 600 A.D.; this would correspond to accounts of a mortal plague during the reign of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian [r. 527-565 A.D.] Y Pestis arrived in Constantinople in 1347 and began to encircle the entirely of Western Europe. Those who were bitten by fleas or breathed upon by human carriers became seriously ill within hours. As one observer records [from a distance, apparently] a man could be infected at noon and dying by sunset. Moreover, the grotesque symptoms brought a special terror: the most frequently reported and longest remembered symptoms were black swellings in the groin area or elsewhere. Reportedly the size of eggs, these swellings were called “buboes” and gave the contemporary name to the affliction, The Bubonic Plague. The exact number of the dead is not known even today, but reputable texts generally agree that a 25-50% mortality rate is a fair baseline, versus the 2% death rate of the Spanish Influenza pandemic in 1917. I discovered news coverage of a lecture delivered by Dr. William Langer of Harvard University in 1963. Langer, a historian, makes the argument that the social havoc of the Black Plague wrought by Y Pestis is the closest comparison to the impact of nuclear war available to military planners and sociologists. Of particular concern to Langer was the “rather disgusting performance of the leaders of medieval society who fled the cities in the face of approaching disaster. Officials of the towns and the upper clergy fled, professors and students dropped their books, wealthy tradesmen closed their shops.” Catholic history books concur that the most dedicated clergy and religious remained at their posts, celebrating sacraments to be sure, but particularly tending to the spiritual needs of the dying and providing reverential burial, if possible. [An ironic historical twist: when the city government of Philadelphia collapsed under the onslaught of the Spanish Influenza in 1917, the Catholic clergy went door to door in horse-drawn wagons on a regular basis to collect corpses.] Medieval piety was deeply rooted in a fear of hell; a disease which cut down its victims so quickly would bring a particular terror of loss of recourse to the forgiving sacraments. Fear of gruesome death and loss of eternal reward generated a multitude of aberrant reactions. One reaction, noted above, was flight from the cities and civic responsibilities. Many clerics, for example, fled to the mountains to ride out the plague while their peers and monks died in extraordinary numbers tending to the faithful. Another reaction was hedonism, as many persons, having little or no hope of deliverance in this world or the next, threw themselves into their vices with wanton abandonment. A particularly grim reaction was scapegoating, and Catholics turned to their accustomed targets, the Jews, persecuting and killing large numbers, using the pretense that the Jews had caused the plague by poisoning Christian wells. The Black Plague devastated European economies, reduced populations for about a century, and turned much of the Christian West from an agricultural society to an urban one, due to a scarcity of labor. The impact upon the Church was immense. The best of Catholic priestly leadership and theological scholarship was dead, and the post-plague religious reactions were diverse. Already traumatized and deprived of quality ministry, waves of mysticism developed among the laity. Some of these groups, absent the restraint of ministerial supervision, took up extreme practices such as self-flagellation or whipping. Among the men of letters who survived, such as Petrarch and Boccaccio who left narratives of the plague in their letters and literature, and philosophers who had previously embraced the orderliness of St. Thomas Aquinas’s thought universe, a gradual and diverse rethinking of the order of things began to take root. Both the Reformation and the Enlightenment would probably have set roots in European [and eventually American] soil without plague, but the impetus of a catastrophe which no one could understand hastened a discontent to discover the true nature of things. The issue of salvation itself came under greater scrutiny. As Kevin Madigan explains so well in the conclusion of Medieval Christianity [2015], the late Medieval era on the eve of Luther was divided between a desperate search for assurances of salvation, on the one hand, and a depressive cynicism that no amount of devotion, sacraments, and good works could win salvation. The issue that sparked the Reformation was the propriety and trustworthiness of claims of absolute certainty of heavenly salvation through the preaching and cash sales of indulgences. Catastrophes of any sort cut to the quick of the human experience, shattering the illusion of control and full understanding of one’s universe. When the barbarian Alaric and his troops sacked and occupied the city of Rome in 410 A.D., the image of the Eternal City as religious and political center of the earth was such a critical wound to collective consciousness that St. Augustine was compelled to write his classic, The City of God. The increasing incidence of the Coronavirus is occurring in the Christian Lenten Season. And now that we know the drill of washing hands for twenty seconds and avoiding crowds, it may be spiritually useful to spend quality time with ourselves, reflecting upon the sobering truth of our own limitations in this universe to know all and fix all. This humility renders us open to the grace and wisdom of God, to the point that we, too, with St. Augustine, can understand the differences between the passing “City of Man” and the eternal “City of God.” |
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