|
As a Buffalo kid educated in a parochial school, I was exposed to considerable history of the building of the Erie Canal, perhaps more than students in Billings, Montana, or Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We were proud of the Canal. The Erie Canal, in its original routing, ran through the Buffalo city limits. [Today the “official route” runs north of Buffalo and ends at the Niagara River in Tonawanda—at a swell breakfast restaurant on your way to Niagara Falls, about six miles downriver.] The Canal was the first mega-project of the United States. Completed in 1825, it was the first water route from the Midwest to New York City.
The New York City to Albany stretch was already cut by nature, the Hudson River. It was the 360-mile segment from Albany to Buffalo/Lake Erie that faced planners. Carol Sheriff’s The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862, is a captivating description of the obstacles facing construction: swamps, rocky escarpments, lakes along the route, rattlesnakes, and malaria. The route was broken into fifteen segments, and private companies bid on each leg of the project. Each of these companies faced a massive problem: manpower. It is possibly a measure of conditions in Ireland that thousands of its sons made their way to New York to build the canal with all its dangers and hardships. I attempted to find “immigration procedures” for 1817 at the Port of New York, but there was nothing I could nail down. The Canal Project was approved by the State of New York, the bonds and loans arranged, and the Governor of New York, DeWitt Clinton, was enthusiastically waiting for the first shovel. I have a suspicion that “not too many questions were asked” regarding custom status and paperwork. The Irish worked their way across the state for eight years—on schedule--to complete a project that would prove to be a financial windfall for the empire state, notably the port cities of New York and Buffalo [the latter becoming the tenth largest city in the United States.] Much of the construction connected farm communities; the canal would reduce shipping costs 90%. One would have thought that the upstate citizenry would have welcomed the canal and the men who labored to complete it. But the truth was quite the opposite. Historian Sheriff describes the construction march as a pitched battle between local farmers and the Irish laborers. Irish workers were killed in the line of duty. The Irish had a grim time in America. President John Adams attempted to expel those Irish living in the United States because they tended to vote for his opposition. [Adams is remembered for his “Alien and Sedition Acts” of 1798 which some present-day politicians would like to restore with greater vigor. Thomas Jefferson allowed three of the four acts to lapse.] But the bigger issues, as most readers might suspect, were immigration and Catholicism. To an extent, Americans might be forgiven at the turn of the nineteenth century of fear of recent arrivals from overseas, given the excesses of the French Revolution, Napoleon, and general turmoil in Europe. Many of today’s immigrants have fled to our shores to avoid chaos and disorder in their own countries. Curiously, the reactions of fear experienced by many Americans was not so terribly different from several of the popes of the nineteenth century, notably Pius IX [r. 1846-1878] and his Syllabus of Errors, in which he condemns democracy, science, and freedom of thought, pillars upon which the American experiment was built. Irish came to be seen as disrupters of the status quo in the U.S., a predominantly English-Protestant nation. There is irony in that these “foreigners” built the waterway that would eventually strengthen the American unity. But this reality was lost upon Americans, and later the “Know Nothing Party” of hatred of immigrants and Catholics would become a significant political force through the 1850’s when Abraham Lincoln began his run for the White House. In an 1855 letter to a friend, Lincoln muses: I am not a Know-Nothing– That is certain– How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid– As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal" We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics". When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty– to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. When I was in Ireland last year, at the Museum of the Potato Famine in Dublin, I came across a remarkable event in time: when the Irish were starving to death in 1847 in an engineered genocide by the British, an outpouring of cash aid came from the United States, specifically from the Choctaw and the Cherokee Tribes. These were the same tribes that Andrew Jackson in 1830 removed militarily from their homes in Mississippi in the infamous “trail of tears” to the far and unsettled reaches of present-day Oklahoma; 6,000 of the tribes died on that forced march. Like many of you, I am distressed daily by governmental and grassroots attitudes and actions toward vulnerable persons. We live in a time where there is infectious fear. I look at myself and say, courage. The line that keeps coming to me is Jesus’ command to keep the lamp burning bright: that we are open in sharing our inner joy, loving in our charity, wise in our judgments and strategies, peaceful in sharing our truth. What will save our country is what will save our Church.
0 Comments
When Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected to the office of the papacy not long ago, he took the name of Leo, the fourteenth successor of St. Peter. Our new pope did not specify which of his thirteen predecessors was predominant in his choice. Later, it appeared that he had Leo XIII in mind; Catholic school students years ago learned that Leo XIII had written Rerum Novarum, the encyclical remembered for its defense of the working man and the Church’s first modern foray into what we refer to in this age as “social justice.”
Before I jump into the procession of Leonine popes, I need to remind myself that the history of the Church is unimaginably complex. Even the geography of Christianity is diverse. The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are clear that the Church, as a structured community, developed its first generation in Jerusalem. It was not until c. 50 A.D. that the Church became missionary, as we see in the Scriptural letters of St. Paul. Paul’s efforts to convert the world to Christ took him to Greece and Rome, setting the table for new centers of pastoral leadership to emerge in Rome, Athens, Byzantium [modern Istanbul], and Alexandria, Egypt. While Rome would eventually hold a spiritual preeminence because it was the resting place of the bones of St. Peter, each of these major cities enjoyed a preeminence in their region, and most of those regions were Greek-speaking and Greek thinking, as opposed to the more barebones Latin West, specifically the Italian peninsula. By the time of the first bishop of Rome named Leo, 440 A.D., the Roman Empire itself had moved its base and its military east to Byzantium, renaming the city Constantinople after the famous emperor who had legalized Christianity a century before. Rome was rapidly decaying and was in fact sacked by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410, unable to defend itself militarily. Nor was the Latin western half of the empire contributing much to the formulation of the Christian Creed; the bishop of Rome did not attend the Council of Nicaea in 325 but sent a deacon to represent him. The time was more than ripe for a Western Christian voice to join the Greek-speaking and Greek philosophizing Church Fathers in the formulation of the Church’s repository of Faith. Which brings us to… Leo I [r. 440-461 A.D.] If you are looking for an answer to the question of which Pope Leo was the most important in the history of the Church, you would have to say the first Leo. The Catholic Church’s full title for him is St. Leo the Great, Doctor of the Church. He was an aristocrat, a man of deep faithfulness to the Christian Church, a student of philosophy and theology, and a competent civil manager, no small credential for a time when Rome was falling into the Dark Ages. He brought his own name into the office of Bishop of Rome [Leo, as you might have guessed, means “Lion” in Latin]. He served as a deacon to his bishop before his own popular election in 440, and his wisdom and theological acumen became known to his Greek peers to the East. The Greek Church fathers, having established that Jesus is God and that God is Triune or Trinity, were now debating the internal life of Jesus. Put simply—much more simply than the major players of that day—what was an accurate rendering of Jesus’ psyche? Did He think like a man or like God? Did his divine nature trump his humanity? Given his divine nature, was death even possible for Jesus? As Bishop of Rome, Leo followed these discussions which were now coming to debate in the Council of Chalcedon [451 A.D.] He offered for consideration one of Christianity’s most famous texts, The Tome of Leo. In his offering, Leo essentially set the outer limits on much one can know, and how far one can speculate the question of Jesus’ two natures. Leo stated that the humanity and the divinity of Jesus were/are perfectly compatible. Going farther was to say more than the Scriptures themselves revealed. Speculation on the experience of Jesus was to question the very nature of the Incarnation; in short, it was heresy. Chalcedon accepted his teaching, and the creedal beliefs of the Holy Trinity were enshrined for all time. There is considerable irony that a Latin Westerner would put the exclamation point on four centuries of primarily Greek theological speculation. In doing so, Leo I salvaged something of the authority and respect for the Chair of Rome in its darkest days. His diplomatic skills came into play for another purpose entirely. He was successful in persuading Attila the Hun, and three years later the Vandals, from sacking and destroying the northern regions of Italy. Leo II: [r. 682-683] Leo was possibly from Sicily; in the seventh century the Sicilian Island was under attack by Islamic forces, and many clergy fled to the relative safety of Rome. Leo’s installation was held up for nearly a year, awaiting the approval of the Byzantine Emperor. Wikipedia defines the years 537 to 752 as the era of the Byzantine Papacy, “when popes required the approval of the Byzantine Emperor for their episcopal consecration…” The East-West differences evident in Leo I’s reign [above] were much more significant by Leo II’s time. The pope himself was a man of distinguished charity who fought to maintain fidelity to the earlier Credal formula, particularly Chalcedon. His reign, sadly, lasted but a year. Leo III: [r. 795-816] The third Leo is a major figure in Church History. Unlike Leo the Great, whose major contribution was doctrinal, Leo III’s lasting influence was/is political: his actions created the union of the Western secular world with the Church world, creating “The Holy Roman Empire,” the marriage of church and state. If you teach or study Church History, you have probably seen authors debate the church-state issues from both sides, i.e., how much relationship between the Church and worldly culture, notably political policy, is a good thing? There are rich and influential Catholics today [see the Napa Valley Summer Institutes] who long for a return to Christendom on earth. Leo III’s election to the papacy in 795 was not welcomed by his predecessor’s followers, who tried to rip out his tongue and blind him. Leo escaped to the shelter of the one man who enjoyed success in uniting large tracts of land in Western Europe as a counterweight to the Byzantine East. Charlemagne helped Leo to restore order and papal holdings on the Italian peninsula. In return, Leo famously crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas Day, 800. Together the Emperor and the Pope would work for the advancement of temporal and spiritual goods. How large was the Holy Roman Empire? For most of its history the Empire comprised the entirety of the modern countries of Germany, Czechia, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Slovenia, and Luxembourg, most of north-central Italy, and large parts of modern-day east France and west Poland. It finally dissolved in 1806 in Napoleon’s time. Of course, this union was not a perfect weave by any stretch of the imagination, but it ended the dominance of Eastern Christianity over the West and led to the formal break of Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1054. Leo IV: [r. 847-855] Leo IV is remembered for repairing Roman churches that had been damaged during the Arab raid against Rome, and for building the Leonine Wall around Vatican Hill to protect the city. He organized a league of Italian cities who fought and won the sea Battle of Ostia against the Saracens. For centuries after his death the rumor circulated that his successor was “Pope Joan,” a woman disguised as a cleric. However, historians have discredited the tale. Leo V: [r. 903-903] One of history’s hard luck stories, Leo V was captured by another Cardinal, Christopher, upon his election and was either murdered or died in prison. Christopher was believed to be the genuine pope for the next year, at least, and listed in the official Church records as such until 1900. Today Christopher’s papacy is not recognized by the Church, though small comfort to Leo. Leo VI: [r. 928-929] Leo was elected during the saeculum obscurum or dark age/century of the 900’s. The famous historian Will Durant refers to the period from 867 to 1049 as the "nadir of the papacy.” Leo came to the throne through the influence of one Marozia, whose husband had killed Leo’s predecessor. In his one year as pope Leo did conduct administrative matters. He settled disputes and banned castrati from marrying. Leo VII [r. 936-939] Leo VII was something of a welcome break from the conduct of those manipulating the papacy at this time. He was a Benedictine monk who encouraged reform of the German clergy and forbade forced conversions of Jews. A trend we will see over the next several centuries is the model of monastic life invoked as an ideal for the clergy at large. Leo VIII [r. 964-965] On this pope, I quote from the Vatican 2001 publication Annuario Pontificio: "At this point, as again in the mid-eleventh century, we come across elections in which problems of harmonizing historical criteria and those of theology and canon law make it impossible to decide clearly which side possessed the legitimacy whose factual existence guarantees the unbroken lawful succession of the Successors of Saint Peter. The uncertainty that in some cases results has made it advisable to abandon the assignation of successive numbers in the list of the Popes.” The problem with Leo VIII is that he took office while his predecessor was still alive, making Leo an antipope. Later, Leo was properly elected. He owed his restoration to the Emperor Otto, and during his brief reign he approved legislation giving emperors rights to intervene in papal elections. However, there is some doubt among historians that Leo wrote these decrees. And, as you probably noticed, despite the recommendation of the Annuario Pontifico, we still number our popes today. Leo IX: [1049-1054] If the previous centuries were not glorious ones for the papacy, Leo IX was a beacon of reform. Born in modern day France, he became a bishop at 25 and embarked upon a reform of the monasteries and the clergy in his area of Toul. He was named pope at age 47 by Emperor Henry III, but he insisted upon a popular election by the people and clergy of Rome. As pope, he addressed the issues of clerical concubinage, simony [buying church positions] and lay investiture, i.e., kings and other royalty selecting and installing clerics to high office…such as Henry’s appointment of Leo to the Chair of Peter! He brought together a standing council of some of the greatest Church minds to address general reform, a body that would evolve into today’s College of Cardinals. Of this group, Britannica writes: “These men succeeded in transforming the papacy from a local Roman institution into an international power. This farsighted and able group was determined to make papal ideology a social reality. The pivotal point in this ideology was the primatial position of the pope as so-called successor of St. Peter—an ecclesiastical expression for papal monarchy.” With this advice ringing in his ears. Leo’s attention turned East to relations with the Greeks. Leo understood the papacy as a universal governing position, which meant that he needed the submission of the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius. Leo dispatched Cardinal Humbert to Constantinople to obtain the Patriarch’s oath of submission to the Roman pontiff. Cerularius refused, and again in the words of Britannica, “On July 16, 1054, in the full view of the congregation, Humbert put the papal bull of excommunication—already prepared before the legation left Rome—on the altar of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Thereupon the patriarch excommunicated the legation and its supporters. This marked the final breach between Rome and Constantinople. This schism was to last, with short interruptions, until the modern age.” In summary, the official break of the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches dates to Leo IX, though Leo was dead three months before the dramatic scene in Hagia Sophia. Leo X: [r. 1513-1521] I was hunting around for sources on this Medici pope who succeeded Julius II, a Borgia. Surprisingly, there are several books on Leo X listed on Amazon. Most appear to be defenses of him written by Catholics years removed from the events of his times. The objective treatments of Leo appear in respected historical texts of this era; my “desk copy” of Leo and his times is Reformations: The Early Modern World 1450-1650 [2016, Yale University Press]. By the time Leo X became pope, Columbus had been to America four times, the printing press was revolutionizing the exchange of ideas, and Western Europe was in the pleasures of the Renaissance. The Renaissance looked backward at classical beauty in all the arts. Leo, a peaceful artisan, was a product of the Renaissance who won kudos for his efforts to make Rome a cultural center, including the construction of the new St. Peter’s Basilica we are all familiar with today. To finance this work, Leo authorized a sale of indulgences in Germany. Unfortunately, the Renaissance was a very insular world, too. Leo—and the men who surrounded him—had little sense of the common man’s outrage at the commercialization of the Church and the rage embodied in reform minded thinkers and teachers such as Martin Luther, who nailed his theses of protest during Leo’s reign. In a strange way, Leo is best remembered in history for what he did not do: [1] call a true reform council of the Church, and [2] take Luther seriously. Leo XI: [r. 1605-1605] Leo’s papacy lasted from April 1 to April 27, 1605. His very brief reign occurred forty years after the reform Catholic Council of Trent, and in his brief time he labored to implement those reforms. As AI puts it, “Despite his short reign lasting only 27 days, Pope Leo XI's reforms aimed to enhance governance and address pressing issues within the Church and the broader community. His efforts to reform the electoral process, mediate conflicts, and ease the financial burdens on his subjects reflected his commitment to a more harmonious and effectively governed Church, even amid a turbulent period marked by the Protestant Reformation and other challenges.” Leo XI was a nephew of Leo X and thus chose his papal name to remember his family predecessor. Leo XI died of a cold he apparently caught during the exertions of his papal installation. [The same thing happened to a U.S. president, William Henry Harrison, who died exactly one month after his inauguration in 1841.] Leo XII: [r. 1823-1829] There is considerable irony in the fact that the conclave which elected Leo was told that the candidate was gravely ill. The future Leo XII pulled up his robes to show his ulcerous legs and announced, “You are electing a dead man.” Which is exactly what the conclave was looking for, a place holder after the lengthy reign of Pius VII. In truth, Leo XII [Della Genga prior to his election] had been a handsome and articulate papal diplomat who traveled through the courts of Europe during the dangerous era of the Napoleonic Wars. After his election to the papacy, he proved to be an energetic worker despite his illnesses. There is a significant amount of information about the man and his policies. He was, in today’s parlance, an “ultraconservative” in both his political and magisterial Church teachings. The nineteenth century development of democracies, freedom of conscience, and even medicine [he was rumored, probably falsely, to be an “antivaxxer”] was considered by many churchmen in Rome as threatening the Church’s supreme teaching and governing position. He was deeply engaged in the Spanish-American wars of independence, essentially steering his policies there to those parties loyal to the teachings of the Church. Leo’s reign was an effort to reform society and morals. Wikipedia notes that “[Leo] decreed that a dressmaker who sold low or transparent dresses would incur ipso facto [immediate] excommunication.” He revived medieval restrictions against the Jews on owning property and goods and reinstated the requirement that Jews wear identifying clothing. He was not generally liked by the faithful, who found him a busybody and a nag in his crusade to manage their lives. Leo XIII [r. 1878-1903]: Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci is the fourth longest reigning pope in history; he succeeded the longest, Pius IX. He had the good fortune to present an academic paper to cardinals while still a student and consequently was marked for a church career. Leo XIII’s life is so lengthy and varied that I linked his Wikipedia biography here for greater detail, with a second link to his encyclical against Americanism late in his reign. In truth, Leo had significant interest in the United States, and his famous encyclical on social justice for the working man, Rerum Novarum, was issued simultaneously with labor organizing in the United States. But the millennium-long belief in the union of Church and state, the “Holy Roman Empire” described earlier, still lived in the minds and hopes of popes till the early twentieth century. Leo found America’s separation of church and state a potentially dangerous situation, particularly for Catholic children attending public schools. In 1899 he issued Testem benevolentiae nostrae against “the American Heresy,” in which he warned of what we now call “cafeteria Catholicism,” but in fact few people in the United States even knew of its existence. The bigger picture of Leo XIII is the peace and tranquility he brought to the Chair of Peter after years of the authoritarian Pius IX. In fairness, Pius suffered the brunt of the Italian Revolution for democracy and independence from clerical hegemony. Pius issued “The Syllabus of Errors” what was basically a condemnation of the Enlightenment and the modern age, and later he summoned the Council Vatican I [1868-1870] at which time the doctrine of Infallibility of the pope was decreed. Leo undoubtedly had a broader world view, having engaged with monarchs and diplomats as far away as England. He had a developing sense of the relationship of business to public life, and much firsthand experience in his dioceses of the need to care for the victims of floods, plagues, homelessness, and even victims of the Mafia. He knew how to work with local officials, no small feat when the population and the new leadership of Italy was decidedly anti-papal. On the spiritual tone of his reign, Leo’s devotion to the Virgin Mary was intense and he advocated frequent recitation of the rosary and the wearing of the scapular. He was the author of the famous prayer to St. Michael the Archangel—recited at the end of every Mass until the 1960’s. I am looking for a full biography written in this century on Leo XIII; such a book, if well done, would double as a history of Catholicism in the nineteenth century. I will keep my eyes open. + + + + How did our new pope, Leo XIV, select his name? There are many who believe he is following the tenets of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in his concern for a just society. But I wouldn’t overlook the first Leo, “The Great,” whose wisdom brought us greater understanding and humility in our following of Christ. When put together, those two popes set out a blueprint to know and love Jesus, and consequently to do his works. I get more than a little nervous listening to Cardinal Dolan on CNN talking to reporters about praying for the repose of the soul of Pope Francis. If a pope needs prayers, my goodness, how many prayers will I need? But there is an unspoken doctrine of Catholicism that if you pray for someone who is already in heaven, the prayers get “spread around” to those in Purgatory. It is doctrine that every person, living and dead, is remembered at every Mass offered anywhere. Listen closely to any of the Eucharistic Prayers at Mass—it’s in there. And so, the memorial Masses celebrated around the world over the next few weeks are blessing us, the living, as well as our loved ones who have died. Stop a few times to think about that. We are part of something greater than anything we can imagine, under the provenance of a God who is a mystery of love.
When I reflect on Pope Francis, I remember that we were both pastors, ordained just five years apart, although he was a decade older than me. The difference, of course, is that his churches, particularly his final one, St. Peter’s, were a little bigger than mine. But no matter how big or how little your congregation is, the world looks different from the position, and nothing really prepares you for it. I was poorly prepared for the priesthood spiritually and mentally, and when that happens, you just dig a deeper hole. The Vatican agreed and gave its blessing to my efforts to begin a new journey of marriage, mental health practice, and teaching. My pastoral issues were miniscule compared to Pope Francis’ life as a cleric and Jesuit. Reading his career biography from Wikipedia is quite a revelation. The fact that Pope Francis died in the heart of the Easter Celebration is stunning to me, that he gathered his strength to survive the Lenten Season and celebrate the Easter Eucharist with his “parish” one final time—I just can’t get over that. My first reaction was tears: not grief, exactly, because his physical sufferings were beating him down and now, he is at rest. But call it an emotion without a name that needed to be expressed. I was well enough on Easter to dose myself with Dayquil and attend the sunrise Mass, which was quite moving. Our associate pastor delivered one of his best sermons ever. He stopped, extended his arms to the sky, and invited us to behold the moment. Early dawn, Venus shining brightly in the East, birds singing, music to fit the mood. I could not help but notice, too, both Sunday and on Holy Thursday, that our parish is becoming visibly multicultural, a wonderful thing. I’ve been in this parish for thirty years, but I was hard-pressed to remember a more powerful Easter observance. I am grateful for a recommendation a few weeks ago to read The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change [2024] by Tomas Halik. It’s philosophical and it is slow going, but I found an interesting summary on Amazon: “The fruitfulness of the reform and the future vibrancy of the Church depends on a reconnection with the deep spiritual and existential dimension of faith. Halík argues that Christianity must transcend itself, giving up isolation and self-centeredness in favor of loving dialogue with people of different cultures, languages, and religions. [Emphasis mine.] The recommendation came from my pastoral colleague of a decade, “Sister Carol,” as everyone in the parish called her. Back in the day when all of us on ministry staff had giant theology libraries, Carol, a Dominican sister, actually read the books. Looking back, I see today that it was a great mistake not working her into the preaching rotation on Sundays. When Pope Francis told every guest he met to pray for him, he was dead serious, for he faced countless decisions every day of how best to lead, teach, and best love the People of God on the delicate matters of Faith and practice. “Who am I to judge?” Did he later regret saying that in reference to LBGTQ Christians, in the sense that he raised hopes before the Church as a whole was ready to “own” the outreach? Rome may be the “Eternal City,” but its bishop for the past twelve years has been an Argentinian, the first pope of the Americas. Will our next Holy Father come from Africa? Or Asia, notably the Philippines? It is entirely possible. What will our visceral reaction be to that? After all, we do belong to a global Church. ON THE LIGHTER SIDE: This morning’s New York Times has a good sketch of the dozen or leading candidates. From experience, I have found that in the secular press, “handicapping the Conclave” is usually a better source of straight-up analysis. Understandably, Catholic publications play down such discussions as unseeming. You can bet on the outcome of the Conclave with major betting houses, believe it or not. In 2005 the industry’s favorite was Jorge Bergoglio, but Joseph Ratzinger carried the day. In 2013 Bergoglio was not even on the board because of his age, but the high rollers were wrong again. Pope Francis is going to be buried at St. Mary Major, one of the four major churches of Rome which predates St. Peter’s by a millennium or more. In 2013 there was an ATM machine behind the church, and I used a major credit card for a $700 cash withdrawal to pay our private guide for several days of work. To my chagrin, there was a $200 limit on the machine, but she agreed to wait for final payment. As luck would have it, on the crowded subway her wallet was stolen on the way to St. Paul Outside the Walls—but thankfully she was not carrying our full payment when it happened. FIRST, LET’S BRING SCIENCE TO THE TABLE…
I am an advocate of integrating the social sciences into the ministry and general life of the Church. Science is not perfect and carries on in perpetual trial and error, but we cannot live what the ancient Greeks called “the good life” without the best understandings available of who we are as human beings. Failure to understand how the human species works has and will continue to hamstring our sacramental lives as we attempt to deliver the Good News in our faith formation efforts with young and old. In the opening lines of his epic, The Gift of Therapy, [2002], Irwin Yalom recalls the contribution of Karen Horney, M.D., [1885-1952] who articulated the early goals of psychoanalysis nearly a century ago: “If obstacles are removed, Horney believed, the individual will develop into a mature, fully realized adult, just as an acorn will develop into an oak tree.” [p. 1] Last January, sitting through days of state psychology recertification workshops, I was struck by the shallowness of so much of the present-day mental health landscape. My fellow practitioners have ceased to be scientists in the true sense of the word, and our patients have come to expect truly little from us. When I was practicing full time, the men patients would often begin immediately with the request/demand: “Teach me some techniques.” [For psychiatrists, the requested shortcut remedy is “write me a prescription for Valium.”] Clients often had little interest in richer introspection, and third-party insurance companies would reimburse about 5% of the process anyway. [Freud saw his patients every day; he only saw rich patients.] Much the same can be true of sacraments. I harkened back to my confessional days of years ago. “Skip the advice and get to the absolution, father.” During my January study blitz—which I passed, by the way--I was feeling grateful that I was born into the Catholic tradition which so strongly emphasizes the dignity of life from conception to the grave. Our prolife creed is indeed the heart that beats in the body of the Church. To be born and baptized means that every word, every action, is an extension of God’s love and life within us; a main reason we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation, by the way. The challenge, though, is creating a unique and continuing support and growth environment for every baptized person, recognizing that every baptized person of any age carries a unique psycho-spiritual DNA. What is missing in our Church—and in our society, for that matter--is the will of leaders and members of the Church to listen to each other, a breakdown which lies at the heart of many mental health pathologies, too. Consider faith formation at any age and in any form. If we are teachers of the Faith, we often come to this ministry with our briefcase of authority, and we talk. True, we use “group formats” as in the catechumenate, but with nothing approaching a medical/psychological appreciation of what a group is empowered to achieve. To return to Dr. Horney’s metaphor of the acorn, we talk too much and listen not at all, making of ourselves obstacles, not facilitators, of the search for self. You can kill a young oak tree with an overabundance of manure. If we believe in the sacredness of life, and if there is truth to the theology of the sacraments of initiation—that we are born of God and receive the living presence of the Holy Spirit in our very being—our role as fellow Christians and teachers, as Yalom might put it, is removing the obstacles and cultivating the full bloom of the “trees” in our midst. The studies I posted on March 23 in that day’s Café “Books” post, reveal a highly active religious discernment among young people. Several readers expressed surprise to me that a significant number of former Catholics told pollsters they decided to leave the Church between the ages of 5 and 9. [Quite coincidentally, the Archdiocese of Baltimore just announced it is moving the age of Confirmation back to…you guessed it…9.] What’s going on here? “I AM NOT MAKING FIRST COMMUNION!” Meaning? I don’t mean to overwork the word “unique,” but each of us is, in the sacramental realm and the scientific world, unique. The Bible puts it well: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” [Psalm 139:13] I wonder if we err by talking about sacraments in the collective, as in “first communion classes,” or even “ordination classes.” Or, for that matter, even Sunday parish Masses. In fairness, since Vatican II, our catechetics and liturgy books have stressed the importance of “community,” as a counterbalance to the older terminology of the Mass as a sacrifice, as I learned 70 years ago. But each sacramental encounter is a very personal drama, a duality of God’s personal grace and my human situation in that moment. Looking at a first communion candidate, a spouse on wedding day, or a candidate for Holy Orders on the floor of a cathedral, we can never say that each is a clone of the candidate next to them. Each is living out a personal drama, a template for future life or a wrestling match with the present. Even more reason, then, for my curiosity when I learned that a young child—whose family is known to me—put her foot down and announced that she is not going to make her First Communion this spring. I would give $100 to sit and listen to her reason[s]. Given that First Communion occurs in the first or second grade, most commonly around the age of 7 or 8, and having read the studies that children opt out of the Catholic Church as early as 5 to 9 years old [CARA-St. Mary’s Press study, 2018], I went to my bookcase and blew the dust off my human development library to find the works of the father of modern human development theories, Erik Erikson. He is famous for his theory of the eight stages of human development, that life is a progression of crises which must be solved before moving to the next stage. Children in the 7–8-year-old range fall into Stage Four of Erikson’s progression, called the “Industry vs. Inferiority” stage. I am not doing justice to its nuances here, but this is the stage where a child gives objective thought to his or her place in society, by comparing achievements with peers and developing the ability to read feedback from people in authority. Wikipedia adds this: “Additionally, the child is asking many questions to build knowledge of the world. If the questions earn responses that are critical and condescending, the child will also develop feelings of guilt. Success in this stage leads to the virtue of purpose, which is the normal balance between the two extremes.” Failure, of course, costs us a promising Catholic. Bottom line: Stage Four is the age of independently “sizing things up” for the first time in the real world. At the very least, stage four is an introduction to “street smarts,” the ability to tell when you are hearing the truth from peers and authority figures and when you are getting the con. Unfortunately, the capacity for abstract thinking—like, maybe somebody meant well when they told you Santa Claus was making a list—comes often at a later stage. If you think about it, catechetics makes some big promises in general, and I bought the con 100% at sixth grade Confirmation. We were promised we would feel stronger and more confident, so powerful was the Holy Ghost. Well, I came home feeling exactly the same as before, so much so that I sat up late thinking about the contradiction. In retrospect, I suppose I did receive the Gift of Wisdom that night, but it didn’t feel much like a gift then. The next year puberty hit me like a category five hurricane, and I stopped worrying about religion, at least for a while. If, as studies have shown, sizeable percentages of adult Catholics do not understand or do not believe in Transubstantiation, it stands to reason that children may have doubts, through no fault of their own. Why are young people denied the right to question, to doubt, to object—rights that baptized adults enjoy. Eucharistic faith calls for a measure of abstract thinking that is beyond the faculties of the 7-8 year old cohort [though there are exceptions] but concrete reasoning is well-enough developed for the young candidate to question the process of the First Communion event for reason[s] we adults might understand if we took the time to really listen to the thinking of the young…who can, if taken seriously, serve up an unbridled articulation of realities that we adults routinely side step because, in our older conventional mores, it is much easier to live in a world without “controversy.” There is no shame in admitting that we can’t answer their arguments and critiques and instead suggesting that “maybe this is something we can figure out together.” First Communion at ages 7 or 8 is a new practice in the Roman Catholic Church. In 1910, per Wikipedia, Pope Pius X “issued the decree Quam singulari, which changed the age at which Communion could be received from 12 to 7 years old, the age of discretion. The pope lowered the age because he wished to impress the event on the minds of children and stimulate their parents to new religious observance; this decree was found unwelcome in some places due to the belief that parents would withdraw their children early from Catholic schools, now that First Communion was carried out earlier. Pius X even personally distributed First Communion to a four-year-old boy the day after the child was presented to him and demonstrated an exceptional understanding of the meaning of the sacrament. When people would criticize Pius X for lowering the age of reception, he simply quoted the words of Jesus, "let the little children come to me". Intriguing, isn’t it, that Pius X would designate age 7 as “the age of reason?” The 1917 Code of Canon Law codified this age for the universal Church as the marker of a comprehensive faith. Does the young lady I cited above speak for all her peers, and for old timers like me, in seeking her baptismal right to discern—individually and communally—where her divine DNA is taking her? Doesn’t every child deserve our attention to hear their faith stories? It is an accident of history that one of the United States’ major research centers happens to be called PEW. Privately endowed fifty years ago to poll a wide range of opinion and sentiment across all aspects of American life, PEW does include religion among its multiple populations. Early this week Crisis Magazine, a conservative Catholic publication which has been sending me free news updates of late, published a lengthy analysis of a newly released PEW study of religion in the United States, a cross section of 34,000 adults. PEW undertakes such religion studies every seven years and has developed a measure of statistical and social expertise on religious practice, integrating trends like the “nones” as they come along. I should note here that the Catholic Church has its own polling instrument conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate [CARA] at Georgetown University, but it is not supported by the U.S. bishops and it is limited in its projects. PEW, on the other hand, is a commercial business which charges for its work.
The Crisis report on March 4 begins with the headline “Catholics Are Rapidly Losing Ground.” For the curious, and especially “numbers geeks,” a detailed breakdown is available here, but for our purposes in this post I will stick to the analysis provided by the editor in chief of Crisis, Eric Sammons. An intriguing metric developed by PEW is the numerical ratio of new members to departing members, or the “join/leave” ratio. Put simply, for every person who enters your parish through infant baptism or the adult rites of initiation, 8.4 persons leave the parish, for a ratio of about 8.4 to 1.0]. Sammons comments that it could be worse: “So while millions are leaving the Catholic Church, immigrants keep the overall numbers from looking horrific.” I wonder if Catholic elected officials in Washington know that. I believe that most Catholic pastors have more than a little inkling of the join/leave ratio. A half-century ago I would look at my own end of year records and contrast infant baptisms against funerals, and I always ran a negative ratio [though the PEW study counts only living people.] PEW found that when youthful or adult Catholics leave the Church, they tend to join the “Nones.” We are hearing more about the Nones, and indeed we should. They are the number one identifiable religious group in America: Nones [32%], Evangelicals [24%], Catholics [23%]. About this group, PEW states: “Most Nones believe in God or another higher power, but very few attend any kind of religious service. They aren't all anti-religious. Most Nones say religion does some harm, but many also think it does some good. Most have more positive views of science than those who are religiously affiliated; however, they reject the idea that science can explain everything.” On the precarious state of Catholicism in the U.S., Sammons continues the bad news by pointing out the PEW study definition of a Catholic, i.e., as someone who states to an interviewer that he or she is a Catholic. As members of the Church, we learned a long time ago that we are supposed to go to Mass every Sunday and confess our sins once a year [the latter admittedly a low bar]. PEW did not research how many of the 23% identified Catholics in its study meet the standard of “practicing Catholic” set by Church Law and pastoral practice. Sammons estimates that there are thirteen million practicing Catholics across the country, or 3.8% of all Americans. Sammons proceeds to the burning question; how did we get to this point? He lists his reasons, and while he does skew toward conservative and traditional thinking, at least half of the American Catholic population would find common agreement on several of his points. __________________________________ Ineffective leadership, especially among bishops. The USCCB holds most of its executive conferences [spring and fall] behind locked doors, so it is impossible to know what our American synod of bishop really thinks or how they react to PEW’s study, though clearly, they know about it. Moreover, the clergy abuse scandal and its attendant financial costs and parish closings has made the body more closed mouth than less. Enmeshment in American politics and elections has not proved wise or effective, either. It wasn’t always this way. In 1972, the USCCB issued a book on religious faith formation for the U.S., called To Teach As Jesus Did. It was written with high hopes, but impossible logistics, and I reviewed it here on Amazon a few years ago. A half-century ago, bishops would write such directives—though today that rarely happens—but even in 1972 episcopal teaching had surprisingly little impact or attention. Religious indifference. It is hard to know how the author defines “Indifference.” My experience working for the Church suggests to me that when people give up on the Church, there can be powerful emotions at play: anger, frustration, neglect, etc. Poor Catechesis. One of the worst mistakes we make as the Catholic Church is propagating the idea or model that “catechesis” is a youth ministry. I made this mistake for many years, until one of the newly baptized adults from our catechumenate asked me after Easter, “What’s next?” I was embarrassed to admit, very little. For a multitude of reasons, this issue distresses me intensely because it is the hardest issue to solve. I am immensely impressed with the years of work undertaken by a group of Catholics in my parish who, of their own initiative, meet to study the key documents of Vatican II. But I have witnessed their struggles, too, in such things as selection of sources or commentaries, pedagogy, and group dynamics, and attracting young adults into their studies. There ought to be “house theologians” on the staffs of parishes—or at least of dioceses—who, without disrupting the initiative of local determined Catholics—can provide the sources, insights, and tools to help them achieve both the competence and enthusiasm so essential to evangelization. I would include in this office the development of sampling and purchasing skills for spirituality and theology texts for individual and group use. It is no accident that the best teachers and preachers are voracious and prayerful readers. [The printed treasures that await us….] Sadly, I don’t see this happening soon on a large scale. Despite Canon Law’s dictate that every bishop and every pastor is the chief teacher/catechist of his community, the idea of educating adults with the same urgency as we do First Communion and Confirmation candidates has rarely taken root. We don't include sermons in faith formation discussions. In fact, listen to the sermons in your own parish. If there is a certain “sameness” to each week’s sermon, this is a “tell” that the preacher is either not preparing or not reading religious scholarship. When a priest or deacon preaches and doesn’t read, he reverts to the one or two sermons you in the pew are subjected to over and over. Take it to the bank. Of course, the same principle holds true for our own private meditation and prayer. Scandals within the Church. This is a multilayered tragedy. The first layer was the victimizations. The second was the wholesale revelations of episcopal coverup. We are now in the third phase, coming to grips with the significant financial deficiencies of the Church that face us now and in the future. About 25% of Catholic Dioceses have declared bankruptcy. This may come as a shock, but on my reading desk I have a new copy of Gone for Good: Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition [2024]. Did you expect to need that in your lifetime? The anger in my home diocese [Buffalo] about church closures and sales is palpable. ____________________________________ Sammons has other issues he believes drive people from the Catholic Church, but I think we have enough here to get a grasp on why so many people have grabbed a lifebuoy and jumped off the bark of Peter. Clearly, the upper echelon of the Church—both in Rome and the United States—will need to enter a prolonged period of assessing its strengths and weaknesses, lasting at least 60 years or the time since the last Church Council [1962-1965]. But that need not be a discouragement. You must wonder if Pope Francis saw the need for a “rethinking” when he declared the move to Synodality—community between all members of the Church, lay and priestly. [It is unfortunate—although predictable--that most American bishops avoided participation in the synodal process at the local/parish/diocesan level like the plague.] But…Evangelization cannot wait. It is a welcome gift, the Holy Spirit come to us in Scripture, lectio divina or sacred writing, and the fraternity of fellow seekers of God’s truth and love. If we bring one fellow seeker into our lives or our groups, we have done God’s work. At 6 AM Wednesday [July 31st] Margaret and I were in the air from Buffalo Airport heading back to Orlando after a week in my hometown. Aside from the chilly temperature of the plane—maybe that’s why they call it Jet Blue—I enjoyed watching the 1983 film “Local Hero” and I cried at the end as I always do. Believe it or not, we were back to our house in Apopka, Florida, in time to roll out the recycling for the Wednesday AM pickup!
“Going home” to the place where I grew up is a different kind of travel from sightseeing, particularly as I grow older. The younger generations of my maternal family really don’t know me well—or in some cases, at all. This was brought home at our annual family reunion last Saturday [July 27]. We Floridians rarely get to them because of the distance, and the event lasts only one day. I have lived in Florida since 1978 and before that in the seminary from high school dating to 1962, so I have always been something of the unknown senior member, the oldest sibling who went to sea, so to speak. When Margaret and I arrived at the reunion site Saturday, straight from the Wegman’s bakery [but of course], two younger generations of offspring looked up and asked each other, “Who are those old people with cakes?” The good news: they polished off all the cake after supper. I will say that lots of my family members worked hard to “heard cats” into one meaningful day, and Margaret and I are both grateful for everyone’s arduous work and the arts and crafts souvenirs we received. Some years ago, Margaret and I attended the keynote presentation of the National Catholic Educators Association and heard a magnificent address from Garrison Keillor, then in his prime, on “family reunions.” It was a terrific presentation—not long after 2002 as I recall and how the Catholic Church as a family was going through its crisis of clerical child abuse. Keillor described the “liturgy” of every family reunion he ever attended in Minnesota’s Lake Wobegon, right down to the varieties of potato salad. But it was this insight of his that struck me: “Have you ever noticed that family reunions are very structured, and there is not enough time to do the one thing we need to do as families—talk!” There is never enough time! There was a professional photographer who snapped a photo of the five of us siblings, whose collective ages are 76 [me], 73, 70, 66, and 61. We five got into some grim humor about which one of us would get X’d out of the picture first. The actuarial tables would say yours truly. [The actual photo is not ready yet.] I will make provisions to be sure there is lots of cake for my post-funeral bash. At the very least, a family reunion can be a reconnection with the family members you do know well and with whom you have broken bread, so to speak, in the fairly recent past, where you can make mental notes of those who need a boost or who are facing new ventures in life and career, for whom a long phone call or Facetime would be an enriching encounter both ways after we get home. And I did meet new members of our family! I was lucky to have time while in Western New York to have some of those in-depth encounters: with people and, curiously, places. More specifically, parishes I have known now on the cusp of closing. ON THE WATER AND IN THE HILLS: I’ll start with people and places. We had a pleasant visit with relatives I hadn’t seen in years--in an intriguing setting. They retired to a home, if you can imagine this, which overlooks the Niagara River where it enters Lake Ontario. On the U.S. side their neighbors are Fort Niagara. Across the river in plain sight is the Canadian Fort George. On a bright day [as this one was] you could see across Lake Ontario to Toronto. I said: “You know, if Canada and the United States ever go to war, you folks are in a lot of trouble!” Given that we are in peace time, they introduced us to a new restaurant in tranquil Lewiston, NY, the best town to dine if you are a Niagara Falls tourist. I only regret that we never got around to talking about the Diocese of Buffalo and the parish closings. My family has had its share of upheaval. But on the other hand, why spoil a delicious meal in Niagara Country? My baby brother always takes care of the old man, and we had a lovely evening in the Village of Hamburg and then on to his country home in “The Boston Hills” [the foothills of the Allegany-Appalachian Mountains begin just south of Buffalo and Hamburg]. Although he was raised Catholic with the rest of us siblings, he seems to have found a home in the Presbyterian Church and serves as an elder on several committees. It was interesting swapping notes on shared challenges to both the Presbyterian and the Roman Catholic Churches: aging congregations, reaching youth, the Covid aftermath, finances, etc. Presbyterianism dates to John Calvin and “the work ethic.” That’s a good fit for my brother, who has renovated his house from the ground up mostly with his own hands. He’s happy, I’m happy. ON THIS DIOCESAN REORGANIZATION AND PARISH CLOSINGS: As I noted in earlier posts over the past week at the Café Facebook sites, I wanted to visit churches in the hill country south of Buffalo to the Pennsylvania line, parishes I have attended over the years and have emotional attachment to. I am not that familiar with North Buffalo or the Niagara Falls metro areas, though the reorganizations and closings in the Buffalo diocese are intense there, too. Over several days I was able to enter five churches without difficulty along the “U.S. 219 Corridor” mostly, attend Mass at a sixth, and was locked out of just one. [The parish had a security number code to enter.] I gathered up as much information as possible from vestibules and bulletins. I didn’t have the time to visit the offices of the churches, but I had visited the Epiphany Parish staff in Langford/North Collins, N.Y. just a few years ago and they graciously talked about their parish. I want to talk a bit about Epiphany and suggest you look at its website. The parish dates to 1851 as St. Martin’s Parish, which is how we knew it as kids. It is situated in the “hamlet” of Langford in the town of North Collins, N.Y. I noted in the parish’s online history that St. Martin’s Parish “was under interdict from June 23 to September 1, 1878” meaning every Catholic in the hamlet was excommunicated! There are no details; my guess is that the local farmers refused to cooperate with a foreign pastor for control of the parish resources and management. This was a quite widespread problem in the United States, even in New York City, and it has bearing on the clerical abuse issues of the present day. The control of Catholic property in the 1800’s rested with lay boards of “trustees” who were incorporated civilly. “Trusteeism,” as the system came to be called, was gradually condemned and done away with, as the Encyclopedia Britannica explains quite well, late in the 1800’s. Today, the owner of all diocesan entities—parishes, cemeteries, schools, seminaries, Catholic Charities—is the bishop or archbishop alone, corporation sole. [When “my” Florida parish built “our” church in 1987, the Bishop of Orlando signed all the construction contracts.] No one, I imagine, foresaw a time when thousands upon thousands of victims of ministerial malfeasance would go to civil courts across the country seeking damages in the billions of dollars. About 25% of Catholic dioceses in the United States have sought bankruptcy as of this writing, and because of corporation sole the bishop is the officer legally responsible for the damages to the flock, which alas makes every Catholic financially responsible, theologically speaking. In Buffalo’s case, both the number of victims and the scope of administrative malfeasance were so great that even with a declaration of bankruptcy, the Buffalo Diocese as a corporation is on the hook for $100,000,000. The money will come from consolidation of parishes, sales of properties, and outright assessments from the parishes that survive the cut. It is my understanding that the diocese cannot sell its cemeteries, which factored into the Buffalo Diocese’s closing proposals. St. Martin’s/Epiphany has a fine cemetery next to the church, which scored heavily in its favor, as well as a former school/social hall and a remodeled church which has not lost its historical flavor. St. Martin’s was renamed Epiphany when the parish absorbed a closing neighboring parish in 1996, and I could not help but notice the addition of a colorful Three Kings statue set in the sanctuary. [See Facebook or inked In.] If you read their bulletin/website, there is a notice that this community will carry the title: Member of Catholic Family of the Holy Rosary [of the region of southern Erie County]. I guess the Church itself will still be called Epiphany, and the statues will stay. Margaret and I were both impressed with the gentle country warmth of the parish and the congenial pastor who celebrated the Mass on July 28. Even at the early [for me] 8 AM Sunday Mass, the folks “hung around” after the celebration. If I read the diocesan proposal correctly, Epiphany should survive the final cut to be announced later in August and there was no sense of angst in the congregation. This cannot be said everywhere; at least 24 "clusters" are aggressively appealing their rearrangements. I have been watching my family’s parish status closely in diocesan “family” or cluster 28 [of 36] and this is the official language from the diocesan website in explaining why St. Bernadette’s in Orchard Park, my family’s parish, will soon be no more: Recommendations for Family #28: Projected number of active priests for this family by 2030 = 2 Based upon scoring and metrics, it is recommended that the family [28] right size and reshape this family evaluating the following recommendations: 1. St. John the Baptist will merge with SS. Peter and Paul in Hamburg. 2.. Utilization of St. John the Baptist’s sites as secondary worship sites. 3. St. Bernadette in Orchard Park is recommended to merge with Sts. Peter and Paul in Hamburg. 4. Sale of the entire property of St. Bernadette is recommended. Justification: 1. St. John the Baptist in Boston is a needed location for the surrounding area, especially with recommended merger and closure of the St. George West Falls parish. The practicality of utilizing the East Eden site on a weekly basis for Mass will have to be determined by the family going forward, but sale of this site is not possible with the cemetery. 2. St. Bernadette is located in an area of the Diocese that needs to be right sized and is the only parish in that family that does not have a cemetery. 3. St. Bernadette is only 5 minutes away from Sts. Peter and Paul in Hamburg and 9 minutes from Nativity of Our Lord in Orchard Park. 4. This is a strategic move to address number of priests to minister to this family. My sister had sadly but correctly predicted the closing of her parish, St. Bernadette, some time ago in this process. The parish did have a school until about a decade ago when the diocese closed it as being financially unfeasible. The school closing and its metrics were hotly contested at the time. The pastor and parish leaders considered a lawsuit. And, as the above summary notes, St. Bernadette does not have a cemetery and is thus available to go on the market immediately, the only parish in Family 28 which presumably can be converted to quick cash, though the market for former churches in Western New York is a major unknown. The charisma of the parish’s location—a quiet residential and wooded setting on twenty acres—may or may not impact its sale value. It is my understanding that St. Bernadette is appealing the closing on the grounds that “metrics” do not consider the spiritual and communal health of the parish—I have attended perpetual adoration there—but I suppose many churches would claim the same thing. Regarding selling churches, see today’s New York Times, “As Hundreds of Churches Sit Empty, Some Become Malls and Restaurants” [August 4, 2024] and the attempts to sell Buffalo’s closed Seminary. Commenting further on Family 28, Sunday Mass[es?] will be offered at the St. John the Baptist Parish edifice in Boston, NY, and possibly at the satellite parish of St. John’s, but there will be only two priests available for this entire enterprise of Family 28. St. John’s is about ten miles from the Hamburg site of Sts. Peter and Paul—in the summertime. Both parishes are in the precarious “Lake Erie snow belt.” The satellite parish to St. John’s has a cemetery, which complicates matters further. The merger of St. John’s and Sts. Peter and Paul appears to be a concern about overworking its priests, a fair consideration. When you get down to those kinds of numbers, all the sacramental and faith formation ministries of a parish/diocese suffer. Consider confession and ministry to the sick. The old pastor in me worries about the “faith formation structure” of closings and mergers. There is research that when parishes shut down operations—or provide Mass only—they lose 30-40% of youth involvement, period. If a parish closes, the kids just drop religious formation, CYO, even Catholic school attendance entirely. The” winner” in Family 28 is Sts. Peter and Paul Church in Hamburg, another parish dating back to the 1800’s. This parish was my family’s church for decades after moving from Buffalo in 1962. My siblings went to school there; I offered my first Mass there in 1974; and my parents are buried in the parish cemetery. However, the Catholics in my family who remained in Hamburg opted later for St. Bernadette’s for its intimate family atmosphere and devotion, as well as its school. There is more than a little irony that families like mine will be steered toward Sts. Peter and Paul by the diocese. SPP has had serious issues of clerical abuse over the years and unfavorable newspaper coverage as recently as 2019. [If you missed a previous post, I told the story of my parents’ concern about an associate there who invited boys to the parish basement to make wooden crosses, and that was in the 1970’s.] As I talked to my sister and brother-in-law about the practical and spiritual impact of losing their parish, I could not help but think of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief. In truth, priests are suffering as much as their people. I’ve never seen a diocese in reorganization take the time to acknowledge or address the pain of its members, at least in public statements, beyond the immediate victims of abuse. The Diocese of Buffalo refers to its administrative crisis and reorganization as “The Road to Renewal,” but I doubt many people look at it this way. If by renewal we mean getting back to episcopal styles of management as we have done things in the past, we are just digging the hole deeper. Bishops got us here in the first place; planning the future must be less defensive and more honest. Again, there are competent studies which get little attention in the Catholic press but underscore the pain, anger, and distrust of the clergy themselves in their bishops. [See this 2022 study from Catholic University, of all places.] In one of the studies, a priest told an interviewer that “my bishop no longer looks at me like a priestly son, but as a potential corporate liability.” After I got home from Buffalo, I ran into a priest of my own diocese in Florida. We worked together on diocesan projects back in the 1980’s. I came to realize that he is currently the senior pastor of a four-parish arrangement that seemed quite grueling. And I discovered this week that my own parish today, a flagship in the Orlando Diocese and larger than SPP in Hamburg, NY, will be down to two fulltime priests shortly. In our conversation we wondered why the Roman Church places greater institutional energies in preserving the practice of ordaining single men than upon access to the sacraments. I don’t have an answer, but this is possibly the kind of subject Pope Francis would have liked to address in the Synod on Synodality. I would be very surprised if Buffalo came anywhere near its projections for future financial and clerical arrangements. In fact, I would bet that another “renewal” will be necessary before 2030. What I did suggest to my family was a freedom of conscience to cultivate an interior life with God, to do what they felt necessary to grow closer to Christ in deeds and prayer. The famed Trappist monk Thomas Merton himself built a little house or hermitage on the monastery grounds where he lived alone to pray, write, and correspond during the final years of his life. A unity in Jesus’ Gospel calls for all of us to make our homes a mirror of Christ’s chosen community. The photos with today’s post are my childhood parish, St. Mary Magdalene, in Buffalo. The steeples nearly blew off in a 1963 windstorm and smaller ones replaced. The parish closed in 1976 or 1978 and was sold to the Antioch Baptist Church, along with the rectory and convent, for $40,000. I asked the Antioch pastor about the transaction some years ago. The new owners have done a remarkable restoration of my old church.
In my last post I noted that I would be heading to my birthplace this week, Buffalo, to see my family. Tomorrow my Jet Blue will be landing during a particularly troubled time for the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, which has directly or indirectly impacted many members of my family. For the next few weeks about half of the Diocese’s parishes must prepare a defense that it can both stay afloat financially itself and contribute to the $100,000,000 settlement arrived at for victims of clergy abuse in the recent bankruptcy settlement of the Diocese of Buffalo. If I am not mistaken, about 25% of all dioceses in the United States have declared bankruptcy. The abuse of minors by trusted ministers is almost unthinkable for a devout Catholic—or for anyone who finds faith in a community of believers. The need to understand how this grave situation fell upon us is the first step for all Catholic communities to grow and return to the apostolic tradition of living and preaching Christ Crucified. While I left Buffalo for good in 1962 to pursue the ministry with a religious order, the template of my faith was formed by my parish, teachers, and family—all of us under the umbrella of the Diocese of Buffalo. Ironically, my home parish, St. Mary Magdalene on Fillmore Avenue in East Buffalo, was closed and sold to the Antioch Baptist Church in 1978, long before today’s crises, a point that one of our readers made in a thoughtful response to last week’s Cafe post. My cousin Mark, of my generation, who also received infant Baptism at St. Mary Magdalene, lived his entire life in the Diocese of Buffalo. He posted this response to my Part 1: I am sickened at what has happened to the Buffalo Diocese as well. I studied for a pastoral ministry degree at the seminary (now closed and for sale) and I knew some of the seminarians who subsequently brought down the bishop. But it was really the abusive behavior of some priests that generated the financial loss for bankruptcy. We need to remember the long history of decline as well, though. I was baptized at St Mary Magdalene, and we know how far back that was sold off. [Café note: 1976 or 1978, unrelated to scandal] And there were many factors that lead to the cultural change of Buffalo's east side. As far as I know, right now, all our 27 cousins…are still alive. How many of them still live in Buffalo? I only lived in the city [limits] during the 1980s. My parish was the Buffalo State Newman Center which has been sold off. Most of our parents followed the American Dream to suburbia. So, we caused our own diaspora, and the Catholic East Side is no more. But maybe it was never really Catholic. It was always nationality first. German Catholics in one section, Polish Catholics in another, Italian Catholics in the West Side, and Irish Catholics in South Buffalo. I wonder if we had been more Catholic and less nationalistic, whether we could have included newcomers and spread the faith. There is a lot to what Mark says—and I look forward to a long lunch with him later this week on the shore of the Niagara River. I would say that the problems of the Church in Western New York and many dioceses of that vintage [nineteenth century founding] put into play the divisions we still suffer today. The ethnic struggles Mark alludes to are not unrelated to the racial and immigration controversies of 2024, either. [I can remember as a boy standing on my church’s steps and listening to the church bells of Our Lady of Sorrows, about a 25-cent cab ride away.] We had churches for about every neighborhood and language. Webster defines the word parochial as “confined or restricted as if within the borders of a parish: limited in range or scope.” The ancient Greeks before Christ used the root word for parish as a temporary residence or neighborhood for newly arrived foreigners. Imagine that. Catholicism in the U.S. was a quilt work of peoples who wanted nothing more than to enjoy their cultures and memories. To govern dioceses of such diversity required bishops of exquisite skill and understanding. Unfortunately, there weren’t many ecclesiastical giants of pastoral thought. There were powerful bishops in the Tammany Hall sense, but few with vision and comprehension of the challenges facing the American Church. In 1955 a courageous Church historian, Father John Tracy Ellis, was the first cleric to state this hard truth aloud, in a national publication, in 1955. Ellis wrote that there were too many Catholic colleges [and seminaries] in the U.S. with too few professors of excellence. In his essay he decries the fact that in 1955 there were 200 American Catholic colleges, underfunded and understaffed. In 1992, in his Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children, Jason Berry, noting that many seminaries were both intellectually and morally bankrupt, numbers the seminaries just under 500 in the mid to late 1900’s. In the late 1950’s, when the Bishop of Buffalo, Joseph Burke, raised funds for a new Buffalo major seminary, there were at least a half-dozen seminaries within one hundred miles of the city. [Their deficiencies: they were not Bishop Burke’s seminary.] It is ironic that Bishop Burke’s seminary will go down in history as the one that nearly sunk the Diocese of Buffalo. I must leave the Café now and pack for tomorrow’s early trip. I will try to post each day with photos and brief observations. Some of you may find interesting an America essay on Father Murray to read while I’m away. Watch your Facebook or Linked In notices and I’ll send you some nice pictures of Niagara Falls. THE GOOD THINGS….
In a week Margaret and I are heading to Buffalo. I loved Buffalo. It was a cool place to grow up [1948-1962] While Buffalo’s famous “lake effect blizzards” with thunder and lightning still make the national news several times a year, we loved it when our schools were closed because of dangerous winter conditions, and we could spend all day outside in “the danger” building snow forts and playing street hockey once the plows made a sweep of the streets. Buffalo summers were very pleasant; we kids were able to organize ourselves for baseball and basketball in our school yard or city park, or play in the notorious city wading pool, known locally as “the polio pool.” On summer nights we played Monopoly on our front porches by the indoor lighting. I have good memories of growing up in Buffalo. Buffalo is my place of birth [1948], where I went to Catholic school through the eighth grade—taught by the Christian Brothers in middle school, no less--and received my sacraments of initiation. My parents today are buried in a Catholic cemetery plot just outside of the city. My family, particularly my mother, nurtured the idea of priesthood, and my parish did nothing to discourage that. I am told I made this priestly vocational declaration when I was four. I assumed for most of my childhood that I would be a parish priest, a diocesan priest like the priests in my parish, with whom I got along well. In those days Buffalo had a day-school minor seminary, “The Little Seminary.” As I began seventh grade in 1960, I believed my destiny would be Western New York. AND THE NOT SO GOOD… Buffalo’s economy was beginning to tank as I was growing up; the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway meant that grain and steel exports could bypass my city entirely. [Goodbye to Hostess and Cheerios, formerly products of Buffalo.] And, as in many “Rust Belt Cities,” numerous families moved to the suburbs in an exodus called white flight. We began to hear rumors that the seminarians commuting to and from the Little Seminary were frequently beaten up in that neighborhood. As it happened, a Franciscan friar preached a retreat attended by my mother, who discussed my career plans with him. He convinced her that I would be happier with the Franciscans, though I would have to leave home to attend the high school/junior college seminary of the Order in the Catskill Mountains 300 miles away. [Sadly, the priest who recruited me was recently listed with credible accusations of sex abuse of minors in the data released by the Franciscan Order; he was not a teacher at my future seminaries, however.] I applied to both seminaries, Buffalo’s, and the Franciscans.’ I received acceptance to both on the same day. The Franciscan option seemed the better one, though I wasn’t thrilled with leaving my family. I have mixed feelings about my early years in the seminary—there was an adversarial relationship projected by several of the friars, though that receded some by my junior year of high school with some positive faculty changes. Years later I saw that three friars on the minor seminary faculty/staff were listed with credible abuse complaints when my Order published its list sometime in 2021, but I know of no sexual assaults firsthand. On the other hand, in the friars’ major seminary in D.C. at least two of my friends were assaulted by a priest professor. One victim told me personally, years later; another published his experience in Commonweal, a Catholic journal, in 2004. I did not suffer personal abuse, nor was I groomed, and I remained in the Franciscan formation program through ordination in 1974 and for fifteen years in the field. What if I had remained with the Diocese of Buffalo? I googled “The Little Seminary” and came across an interview of Beverly Malona, a counselor for the Diocese of Buffalo, reported October 18, 2018, by WKBW-TV: Malona recalled seminarians [of Buffalo’s major seminary] coming to her office downtown at the chancery in the 1980s and 1990s to tell her they were being ‘targeted’ for sex by older priests at the seminary. “It was a hotbed of sexual activity,” said Malona, who served as a lecturer at Christ the King and taught deacons. “I’d walk in, and the hair would stand up on my neck.” Many older priests in the Diocese of Buffalo attended the “minor seminary” [i.e., The Little Seminary] on Dodge Street on Buffalo’s East Side starting at age 13. Malona said there was at least one “predator priest” who was known to prey on the boys, many of whom were just hitting the age of puberty. “These boys were told that celibacy simply means not marrying a woman,” Malona said. “[They were told] this doesn’t violate our celibacy if we touch each other, have sex with one another. And that’s part of the grooming, and how you get a 13-year-old very confused.” 7 Eyewitness News has also spoken with a recent seminarian, who confirmed that a culture of sexual activity still exists in the seminary as recently as 2011. He did not want to go public with his story because he fears retribution for speaking out internally about the sex he witnessed around him. WHEN THE NATIONAL STORM BEGAN TO BREAK… After ordination and four years as a college chaplain in Albany, NY, I was assigned pastor to a Franciscan parish near Orlando. My family, of course, remained in the Buffalo suburbs and I would go home every summer on vacation. Sometime in the late 1970’s my parents expressed concern about an associate pastor in their parish who, it was said, invited boys to the rectory basement to make wooden crosses. In those days, of course, there were no 800-hotline numbers either for state police or diocesan reporting, and in the absence of a victim’s or parents’ complaint, there wasn’t much you could do except give a heads up to a pastor or write a letter to the bishop. [But in 2018 Buffalo’s WKBW-TV reported that two individuals did reveal they had been abused while the associate was stationed in my parents’ church forty years earlier. He was relieved of Buffalo pastoral duties in 2002, in the wake of the Boston Globe expose, according to the Diocese of Buffalo, for “medical leave.” He was never reassigned.] 1985 was probably the year I began to grasp the scope of clerical child abuse in sheer numbers. I had newly enrolled in a master’s degree program in counseling at Rollins College, and I chose child abuse as my summer research project that year. To tell the truth, we know more about the psychodynamics involving both victims and perpetrators than we did forty years ago when I studied the subject. The books back then talked about either [A] husbands turning to their young daughters as surrogate wives when their marriages were strained with the minor girl assumed eager to meet his needs; or [B] the brain abnormalities of male perpetrators, particularly where coercion or violent outright rape of a child was involved. Such issues as PTSD, grooming, or power differential were not well developed at that time. Our insights into the nature of such abuse came into clearer focus in the judicial system, when lawyers seeking damages for victims and lawyers defending priests needed to determine appropriate damages for affective families and the level of neglect and risk a diocese could be held accountable for. I was president of the diocesan priests’ council and stopped by the Orlando chancery from time to time to talk to the bishop about agendas for meetings. On one such visit a chancery priest called me into his office. “Are you following the Gilbert Gauthe case in Louisiana?” I admitted, “only superficially.” In my memory, only National Catholic Reporter was covering this abuse trial with any intensity. He went on to tell me that the damage assessed to the Diocese of Lafayette could run to $80 million. He added, “we better talk to our men and let them know how dangerous this all is,” or words to that effect. [For a very disturbing narrative summary of the Gauthe case, see Jason Berry’s pioneer reporting in an extended piece from The Times of Acadiana (LA), May 30, 1985] Later that year, one of our own diocesan priests was arrested, and again I ran into the same chancery priest, who remarked to me, “We were told this guy was trouble when we took him in from Brooklyn.” Which made me wonder, by what mechanisms did this cleric come into our diocese in the first place? I can recall somewhere in the late 1980’s receiving a formal letter from the Provincial of my Order. After mentioning the growing visibility of clergy scandal cases such as the Gauthe case in Louisiana, he stated this: if you need legal and/or psychological help, approach us now. If you wait until you are arrested/accused, there is nothing we can do for you. There was something about this that did not sit right with me. What exactly could a superior or bishop do for a serial molester? The letter also gave the impression that the Order was not sure what was happening in the field, or it was worried about what was happening. Unknown to me at the time [and much of Buffalo, evidently] my Order was having difficulty in the 1980’s with one of its flagship institutions, Buffalo’s major seminary. Management and staffing of Buffalo’s major seminary, Christ the King, passed from the Franciscan friars to the Diocese of Buffalo in 1990. The seminary closed in 2020 in a chaotic fashion. [The parish cited in this link was my family's parish for a half-century, where our weddings, funerals, and my first Mass took place. The younger generation transferred to another Catholic parish down the road--a parish now scheduled to be closed and joined to the first one.] AND THEN IT BROKE… Jason Berry’s reporting, dating back to 1984, and his epic work on clerical abuse, Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children [1992], are probably the best sources of that era, though his book was never a best seller, either because, in the public mind priests like Gilbert Gauthe were rare anomalies, not symptoms of an epidemic moral lapse of significant numbers of the nation’s priests; or child abuse in general was much more common in American life than anyone wanted to believe, and no one was interesting in opening an ugly truth about the culture. In everyday church parlance, it is common to date “the scandals” to 2002. What made The Boston Globe’s 2002 Spotlight reporting of widespread national interest—inside and outside the Catholic Church--was the forceful direction of the paper’s executive director, Marty Baron. Baron, newly arrived from Miami, met with the Globe’s Spotlight Team of reporters/investigators, and asked for a clarification of why the paper had never investigated the issue of clerical child abuse by thirty Boston priests over the past few decades. Baron understood that a critical issue was mismanagement of these priests and others yet to be discovered; that a tacit conspiracy of silence and reshuffling of chronic offenders from parish to parish, and even diocese to diocese, was in play. [In fairness, Berry and other insightful priests and professionals were coming to the same conclusion a decade earlier but did not enjoy the visibility of The Globe.] Dioceses and their bishops faced the real possibility of conspiracy and facilitation charges, though in most cases the penalties had been negotiated to cash settlements before going to trial. While insurers covered many costs in the earlier days, bankruptcy settlements with victims have been more often subsidized from diocesan reserves, and in cases like Buffalo--which presently has $100,000,000 of financial obligations--garnered from parish assessments and the sale of property. This in turn has led to the consolidation and closure of parishes of long standing—a trend long before Covid. In the past month, the Diocese of Buffalo has put forward a plan of consolidation which will eventually close about half its parishes, including my family’s. After the Globe’s breakthrough in 2002, and “The Dallas Charter” published in the same year by the United States Bishops the national press and Catholic abuse survivor organizations began to tally the number of priests with credible allegations—in states and in dioceses. There were [and are] maddening inconsistencies, as the national counters—independent organizations--must depend upon the dioceses, court records, or local secular papers for these statistics—as do prosecutors, district attorneys, and law enforcement agencies. There are some dioceses which publicly report only priests with two or more credible allegations. Many dioceses make public the priests’ names only; others list all the church assignments the priest held during his lifetime with the dates of tenure. Victims and their families insist that dioceses must make known the career dates and assignments of every priest with a credible accusation. [About 14 dioceses have not made any public disclosures.] In my own case, the Order—which released, finally, its own list of credibly accused friars in 2021--listed three friars who staffed my minor seminary, but it provided no information about when they worked there. (All three were news to me.) The rationale given by some dioceses and orders is a reluctance to officially name an individual priest who has not been convicted in civil court, whose case was settled out of court, or who died. A high percentage of accused, though, escaped criminal prosecution because of the statute of limitations laws in effect until recent times. By the time the Globe had brought the story to national status, I was no longer working for the Church. I sought and received laicization from Pope John Paul II and permission to marry. I worked as a licensed psychotherapist for public and private health treatment clinics for children and families. Starting in 1994 I treated youths including victims of abuse and testified at several trials in Florida, though none involved clergy. When the first tallies of diocesan/order clerical abuse were reported nationally in 2002, Orlando reported about a dozen cases, reflecting its status as a relatively new diocese [1968] broken from Miami and St. Augustine, and we do not have an Orlando seminary. The Orlando number of accused priests today is around 18 in most surveys. After the shock of the 2018 Pennsylvania Attorney General’s statewide investigation, the Florida Attorney General similarly subpoenaed all dioceses’ priests’ files who had served in Florida. The Florida AG reported 97 priests and church personnel statewide credibly accused of sexual abuse. But the Florida Attorney General, in the introductory remarks, noted an equal number who were reassigned or retired to Florida dioceses for abuse allegations elsewhere and here. And sure enough, on the Florida list is the “cross making priest” my parents worried about over forty years ago. [That this same priest is listed in two states shows the complicated nature of reaching an accurate number.] NEXT POSTS: HOW IS MY HOME DIOCESE COPING? ON NOT LOSING HEART ADJUSTING TO THE FUTURE So how do I summarize the past eighteen days in Greece and Türkiye? I can start with one humorous scenario: celebrating Easter Sunday for the second time in 2024. In Greece, the patriarchs of the Eastern Rite Christians in communion with Rome have the authority to set the date of Easter to coincide with the larger Orthodox Church, the latter composing 90% of the population. I had no idea of this practice, though it was sanctioned in the Vatican II decree Orientalium Ecclesiarum [“On the Eastern Churches,” para. 20] in 1964. Here in the Latin West, we celebrated Easter Sunday on March 31, as you probably recall. Bottom line: when our plane touched down in Athens on April 30, we landed in the middle of Holy Week. As Yogi Berra put it, it was déjà vu all over. And, I might add, Greek Labor Day fell during Holy Week, too.
By the time we learned all this, we had a week of reservations and tours contracted, so we were unable to attend the Triduum, although that was not quite true as the Easter Vigil comes to your door in Athens. There were several Orthodox churches in our neighborhood which broadcast the chanting of the monks over loudspeakers which we could hear from the porch of our rental. During the Easter Vigil, at Midnight, the celebrants in these churches proclaim, “Christ is Risen!” And suddenly there are public fireworks displays throughout the city including, I believe, from the Parthenon itself. I have no idea how many Greeks do go to Church every Sunday—Eastern Rite or Orthodox—but they do identify as Christians. Of course, this being primarily an Orthodox Greek-speaking country, there was one Eastern Rite Catholic Church—the Cathedral, actually--within subway range which offered a 6 PM Easter Sunday evening Mass in English. We visited the Cathedral earlier in the day, on the way to our Easter dinner, to confirm said fact and discovered that there was also a 4 PM Mass, and that sounded pretty good to us in any language as we were dead tired by Sunday and heading off to Türkiye on Monday morning. So, we ate, drained an ATM, and headed back to the Cathedral, where we met our partner couple fresh from the Athens airport from back home in Orlando. It was an Easter Mass I certainly will never forget. There is a Philippine Catholic community in Athens in communion with Rome, and this 4 PM Eucharist was their Easter youth Mass. They darn near filled the church, too, lots of teenagers, mothers, and little ones. They sang enthusiastically to guitars and other instruments. And the entire Mass was offered in the Tagalog language! My Tagalog is more than rusty—it is nonexistent. But the Eucharist is the Eucharist. As the homily was delivered, I was struck by the delightful religious incongruity of sitting in the cathedral of Athens, Greece, with Margaret and two dear friends from my home diocese, celebrating Easter in Tagalog for the second time in a month with Catholics from Asia, praying for a safe trip to Islamic Türkiye. Just another day in the Kingdom of God. ____________________ Jet leg is a bummer, so 2 AM is as good a time as any to switch on my computer after returning from Greece and Türkiye sometime between Thursday and Friday. For whatever reason, it is easier adjusting from jet lag after the eastern Atlantic crossing, perhaps because it is dark outside while you fly. Coming back, you take a noon flight from, say, Athens, fly for ten hours and land on North American soil at 4 PM. I felt my age on this trip; I have two more booked in my future—Ireland later this year and Western Europe next year—but I am scaling back. That said, it was a privilege to spend three weeks in a part of the world I had never seen before. We rented an apartment in Athens for a week just several subway stops from the Parthenon, and then relocated for ten nights to the Celebrity Infinity for a sea journey to Türkiye and the Greek Isles. As I noted above, we unknowingly booked this trip during a peculiar time: we arrived in Greece for Holy Week and the Triduum, as well as for Labor Day, which is a national holiday and celebrated with more political gusto than our American September holiday. About 90% of Greece is Eastern Orthodox, i.e., not in union with Rome, but there is a 10% Eastern Rite Roman Church presence as well, which has permission from Rome to celebrate the Easter Triduum on the same days as the Orthodox. Holy Thursday is called “Good Thursday” in Greece, and according to one of our guides, “Getaway Thursday” as well, as many residents leave the city for their hometowns to celebrate Easter dinner with roast lamb. Consequently, my interactions with churches and religious institutions in Greece was limited. We visited several Orthodox churches, which are most memorable for the feature of the wall in the sanctuary, behind which the Liturgy of the Eucharist [the Orthodox Eucharistic Prayer] is conducted. Religious art is primarily ikons, as there is a long tradition of Eastern Christians avoiding statues, the art form by which so many pagan gods were and are portrayed. Much of my Grecian experience involved exploring the famous remains of temples, notably the Parthenon, the Delphic Oracle, and the Temple of Poseidon, the latter two several hours outside of Athens. I will include photos with this post. Athens itself is an interesting city which extends in all directions from the Parthenon. It was very friendly to us, and English is spoken widely. But it is in massive need of infrastructure work—traffic is maddening—and its subway, relatively new, was funded by the European Union. The next ten days were spent aboard the Celebrity Infinity, departing from Athens, and heading north to Türkiye and then to the Greek Islands. Along the way to Istanbul we passed through the Dardanelles, a vital waterway through Türkiye famous for, among other things, the tragic Gallipoli military campaign of World War I that led to 500,000 casualties and the disgrace of Winston Churchill, who conceived the strategy. I would say that one of the more powerful moments of the voyage was entering Istanbul harbor itself, the city skyline highlighted by massive mosques. We had two full days in Istanbul…and we used them to the max. We had several guides over our stay, and between them we learned that Istanbul’s population is 15-16 million and its mosques number between 2500-5000. Ironically, I did not visit the city’s most famous mosque and former cathedral, Hagia Sophia or “Sacred Wisdom” based on the collective advice of guides. The truth is that the government cannot decide whether to preserve Hagia Sophia as a mosque or a museum; tourists pay a not-insignificant admission fee for a limited walk on a gallery walk-around, as I understood it. We were advised that the “Blue Mosque” was a better experience, but I came away with a sense that entering any major mosque is akin to the screening and boarding process of an airport. The Blue Mosque was so full of people—presumably, tourists--that it was impossible to soak in the atmosphere…and as a male I was carrying my sneakers in a sack; Margaret purchased a prayer shawl for the occasion. I cannot say that I had a profound Islamic experience, nor could I gauge the intensity of Islamic pastoral life, i.e., what percentage of Turkish citizens “go to Mosque weekly.” When the Adhan or call to prayer is sung across the city [five times per day], I did not notice any slack in the marketplaces or restaurants. Truth be told, I had a lot of secular fun in Istanbul and dropped more Liras than I expected to. Istanbul’s Spice Bazaar is world famous, and yours truly partook of an exhaustive sampling of candies, nuts…and tea. I admit I bought several pounds of blackberry tea to bring back home, among other tasty treats. Later we took an evening cruise around the Golden Horn—where Asia and Europe meet—and the staff served up more exotic teas and countless snacks. We pulled ourselves away from Istanbul and proceeded to Ephesus. The main attraction is a massive archaeological dig to uncover the city as it was in ancient times. While a considerable amount work has been completed, the full project will go on for decades, at great cost. I learned more about ancient plumbing than I really needed to know. We pushed on about ten miles to the reputed site of Mary’s residence with the Apostle John. There is no evidence that Mary moved to Ephesus from Jerusalem, but I was hoping that at least the site might be a quiet and/or inspiring moment of the trip. To be honest, you get a single-line rush through a nondescript chapel. Nowhere to sit, kneel, or meditate. When we got back on the bus, I whispered to Margaret, “I was hoping to at least see some pots and pans.” Our cruise ship did a three-day swing through the Greek islands of Rhodes, Mykonos, and Santorini, exceedingly popular tourist sites. I guess you could call this the la dolce vita stage of the trip. Sailing through these islands was like boating through the Grand Canyon. In fact, I passed on a few excursions just to sit on the Infinity and take in the atmosphere from the balcony. I should add here that we had super companions for the cruise, Kathy and Tim. We have known them for almost thirty years through church and diocese; they hosted our wedding reception in their home twenty-six years ago. The nightly dinners and thoughtful conversations brought each day to a pleasant close. Margaret and I arrived back at our own home at 5:30 AM Athens time on Friday, or 10:30 PM Orlando time on Thursday. If there isn’t yellow police tape around my house when we get home, I consider it a good trip. Back to regular posts on Tuesday or Wednesday. Yes, it is just hours away, and I regret that I did not think sooner about the total eclipse in a “catechetical setting,” but here we are. Margaret and I are not driving north from Orlando to see this eclipse; we are going overseas in a few weeks, and you can only do so many trips. However, in 2017 we drove nine hours from our Florida home to Clemson University near the South Carolina/Georgia border for that year’s August total eclipse.
Clemson is not a Catholic university, but it is an attractive place to study and the village adjoining the school was quaint and pleasurable. Clemson advertised and hosted an “eclipse viewing” on campus with the science faculty on hand to chat, and an innumerable number of kindly student hosts in the “quad.” [I said to myself, “Boy, this is like an ultra-friendly parish.”] All the buildings were open for water, air conditioning, and clean bathroom facilities as it was 100 degrees that August afternoon. About 50,000 folks in all gathered on the campus. Overall, people were moved in many emotional directions in the few minutes of totality. For a 9-minute professional video of the Clemson kids’ joyous reaction to totality taped in the quad, check this. On the other hand, The Weather Channel’s Stephanie Abrams cried on the air as she checked in from the west coast viewing site where she was stationed. Link here. Margaret and I decided that we would rather watch the eclipse alone, and we found the perfect spot—an elevated tee on the university golf course—all by ourselves. The eclipse experience itself was so different from what I thought it might be. The darkness is surprisingly sudden…for all the hour or so that the moon starts “eating the sun,” it is not dark—rather, the sky turns a bright orange. The photos on the Café social media posts were taken two minutes before totality. And then, suddenly, I was surrounded by a 360-degree twilight on the horizon as the final seconds of the moon’s transit reached the sun, in those final seconds, the sun is visible only from between the valleys of the moon, creating an effect known as “Bailey’s Beads.” And then, total coverage and the emergence of the corona, the flares of hot gas shooting from the sun that we cannot see in daylight. Our time in total eclipse at Clemson lasted two minutes. By contrast, the 2024 eclipse in places like Buffalo will last over four minutes as the moon is closer to the earth for this eclipse than in the 2017 event. Total eclipses will not continue to infinity. The Planet Jupiter exercises a gravitational pull on our moon [how dare they!] and is pulling the moon further from the earth until the moon is too small to fully cover our sun. I do not foresee this as an issue on Monday, though…. nor in anyone’s lifetime currently alive. As a personal experience, Margaret and I felt that seeing it alone as a couple was a shared marriage moment we will never forget. If you can, experience an eclipse with that very special person—a spouse, a partner, an intimate friend—who understands how truly lucky you both are to see a total eclipse in your lifetime, and the divine miracle that is creation. Many people are drawn by the metaphysical/spiritual power of the event. It is my understanding that authorities are planning for one million people to view Monday’s eclipse at Niagara Falls…as if to see two great wonders of creation in one cosmic sweep. [On a slightly less heavenly note, watching the three bridges over the Niagara River—the Peace Bridge, the Rainbow Bridge next to the Falls, and the Lewiston-Queenstown Bridge—manage all those cars might be an astronomic feat, too. And if the stranded barge about the Horseshoe Falls breaks loose after a century and finally goes over the edge during totality, I will be on my knees for the Second Coming! I will confess that at the peak moments of the 2017 eclipse I was rushing to check off my list of things to explore and see. I was an avid astronomer as a boy with my little telescope who went faithfully to the Buffalo Museum of Science for its Thursday night public viewings. I saw the rings of Saturn with my very own eyes from the Museum observatory’s telescope. And, I read voraciously on astronomy, including “Martian Canals” [a big topic till about 1960] and total eclipses, which I never thought I would see. So, in the 2017 eclipse I looked hard for Planet Mercury, which is extremely hard to see from earth with the naked eve, ordinarily, because it is so close to the sun. An Albert Einstein theory was proven during a 1919 eclipse when telescopes and cameras discovered, during totality, that the light from Mercury was distorted by the sun before it reached the earth. Good thing I was not Albert’s wing man, because I never found Mercury during the 2017 event. What I did see were the thousands upon thousands of little crescents on the ground beneath my feet. These appear just before and particularly after totality. After our eclipse in 2017 Margaret and I walked the half-mile back to our AirB&B on a bed of Disneyesque sun crescents. RELIGIOUS OPPORTUNITIES? Obviously, I am a little late for practical parochial suggestions. On the internet I came across several parishes around the country which are hosting viewings and parish picnics on their ground, not to mention places to park. I was hoping that the subject of the eclipse might make its way into the homily of last night’s Mass [in 1969 the Sunday Masses of July 21 were focused—at least in my neighborhood—on the upcoming landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon later that evening.] Unfortunately, last night we got an indecipherable stew centered on the mystical writings of Mother Faustina which was inserted—without much liturgical or theological thought—by Pope John Paul II even though the Church has celebrated “Good Shepherd Sunday” three weeks after Easter, for centuries. But that is small beer today. The wonders of God’s heavens and earth take us out of our sense of self-importance and remind us that it is a miracle we are even here, and that we tend the tiniest speck. The early medieval Church Father St. Anselm wrote, in so many words that God is “that than which no greater can be conceived.” If you are lucky enough to see the partial or total eclipse tomorrow, you may be overwhelmed or too preoccupied to think through the theology of the event as it is happening. This was my first experience, personally. But the image of a black sun surrounded by a fiery corona will stay with you, implanted in your imagination, a visual sacramental of the loving power of God. Since I saw the 2017 eclipse, the Webb telescope space probe has been launched and is revealing both the size of the universe and its age. We are seeing entirely new galaxies at distances of 13.5 billion light years, and for what purpose? To reveal the infinitude of God…who lives out there and who lives in the soul of our mind and hearts. On Sunday, July 21, 1969, my congregation prayed Psalm 8 as we approached the moon to land for the first time. You can pray this with and beyond the eclipse: Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is humankind that you are mindful of us, human beings that you care for us? You have made us a little lower than the angels and crowned us with glory and honor. You made us rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under our feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! Use your glasses! |
On My Mind. Archives
July 2025
|
RSS Feed