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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.
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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! I received my annual mailing this past week from the Diocese of Orlando [you can fill in your own diocese here] inviting me to participate in the annual bishop’s appeal, an event that always seems to fall around the beginning of Lent. There is a certain appropriateness to that, I guess. I chuckled a bit, because this notification causes me much less stress as a layperson than it did when I was a canonical pastor 30-40 years ago. We pastors got a different invitation, one without the standard promotional photo shoots of Catholic school kids in uniform, nuns in habit, seminarians in cassocks praying in a chapel, or food baskets being delivered to a hungry family. A “pastor’s invitation” then in 1979 [my first] and a pastor’s “invitation” today is an assessment, a cold hard number of what your parish is expected to raise in the annual campaign. My first “assessment” in 1979 for my country parish was $8000, and as a new pastor I did wonder if we could ever reach the goal. I honestly cannot remember if we did or not—sometimes it was just easier to roll some of the Easter collection into the fund.
As president of the Orlando Priests Council for several terms, I soon became aware that pastors overall were always unhappy about their assessments. More secret than any of our nation’s nuclear war codes was the “formula” by which the bishop and the diocesan finance board determined each parish’s campaign goals. [I must admit that I arrived in Orlando just as priests were given a substantial salary raise, making us the third best paid priests in the U.S.] As a layperson today, the only trends I can discern is that parishes which struggle to meet their assessment goals in a calendar year may get a slight reduction in the following year. Early in my time here in Florida the diocesan policy was adapted so that if a parish went over its assessment for the annual bishop’s appeal, the excess—or at least a percentage of it—is returned to the parish for its own internal use. Catholic donors, including me, are no different from anyone else. We hope that the needs of the Church get the biggest bang for our bucks. I have always been a bit queasy about the gap between the presentation of the campaign each year [and I am referring here to my life experience in the church, not just my present abode.] Catholic Charities-Bishops Appeals in general have an in-church and on-line video shown at all the Masses which features clipped interviews from those who minister for the Church and those who are helped by the Church, usually both. The video, of course, augments the mailed brochure and donation instructions. The pastors have discretion, I believe, in how they choose to emphasize the campaign locally. If you say too little at Mass, many of your members may get the impression that the project is a “slam dunk” appeal; if you say too much—particularly week after week if you have not met your parish goal yet—then you drive people like me up the wall. I already ran the plastic through my diocesan web site for the 2024 campaign before kick-off Sunday, and now I will sit through twelve weekly pulpit reminders of “For those of you who are still praying and meditating at home upon the size of your gift…” [A personal letter to non-participants was my practice as a pastor after the second week of the campaign. Whether your congregation gave or not, they were grateful.] But in recent years I have concluded that the term “Catholic Charities,” or just charity, for that matter, is much more complicated than it used to be. As pastors we had to give our parishioners honest reasons for them to make substantial gifts, and that was not always easy to do. Let us suppose you call your campaign “Catholic Charities,” as used to be quite common, and you use videos and photos of Catholic school children at your appeal at all the Masses. [At Catholic University I took a course called “Elements of Semiology,” the psychology of sign and symbol. I still have my notes: “pictures of nuns in habits and kids in Catholic school uniforms loosen wallets.”] The titles and visual prompts strongly imply that the donation to “charity” here is tuition assistance to Catholic kids who cannot afford the standard tuition. Does an annual diocesan campaign provide tuition assistance to Catholic kids who need it? It depends on how you interpret that. From my diocesan website, the office of schools serves as a facilitator of access for a variety of aid from state programs and private [not Catholic] foundations for students with identifiable learning issues. Here is the link: you be the judge. It is true that some parishes in my diocese have cultivated endowments over the years to assist with tuition, but eligibility and funding is a parish affair. The FACTS program, a financial assessment tool, appears to be widely used in my part of the diocese, but again, we are not talking about cash funds from the bishops’ appeal for students X and Y. I need to add here that a number of diocesan charitable entities must conduct fund-raising efforts throughout the year to meet their annual budgets. Parishes, of course, have done this for years [remember bingo?] but social service operations are under the gun to stay open and they need the involvement of those of a certain tax bracket. Hence the gala ball or the golf tournament. [We attend one every year for a favorite diocesan charity, and at the last one I accidentally made a pocket phone bid at an auction, winning a large basket of WAWA goodies. It is frightening that an excellent ministry depends upon fools like me who can’t operate their phones properly.] The sticky issue—and pastors have to deal with this when their savvy donors ask them—is the truth that diocesan annual campaigns usually fund chancery bureaucracies—salaries of administrators and programs of all sorts, from school superintendents, tribunals for annulments, fundraising and development, and even a new and critical need—regularizing the immigration status of hundreds of foreign priests, many of whom are in imminent danger of deportation. [My own diocese has been impacted.] I am not opposed to funding diocesan ministerial operations—and I do contribute modestly to my own diocesan appeal. My issues would tend to be the nature of the programs funded, quality of the administrators—where there are administrators--and the programming that sometimes leaves much to be desired, or in other cases does not exist at all. Locally there is nothing here for the Catholic with a college education [or acumen] and quality life experience who would like an ongoing adult-oriented immersion in Catholic scholarship in their parish or locale. This population is also the real or potential heart of the batting order where donorship is concerned, and its potential contribution to the process of synodality would be noteworthy [if the parish took the trouble to schedule Synodal listening sessions as instructed by the pope.] A half-century ago in the larger metropolitan areas it was easy for seminary professors to speak regularly at adult ed theology classes at the local parishes. Not so today. When I reviewed the literature for Catholic Charity drives around the country, it is obvious that seminaries are backbreaking costs for dioceses. A seminary should be an accredited state educational site awarding master’s degree in accordance with the standards of Middle States or Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, etc. In accredited colleges and universities there are strict standards for everything from the number of professors holding doctorates to library facilities. Cardinal Dolan in New York makes an excellent case in this America essay for a merger of seminaries into regional universities of excellence. [Also, see this piece from Forbes.] The Cardinal makes a fine point—there is a correlation between the academic and professional quality of seminaries and the effectiveness of preaching in parishes. This is the kind of issue in which an informed donor ought to have say. It is also true that the initiative of religious and lay Catholics is developing new and energizing ministries independent of the diocesan financial grid. The renowned Cristo Rey network of high schools is preparing to open its doors here in Orlando soon, having recruited from among the best and the brightest of Catholic laity in my region to build the program from the ground up. The cloistered Trappist monks have broadened their influence from their own means. My wife and I belong to an online Trappist Spirituality sharing group based in Mepkin Abbey near Charleston, South Carolina, where we also retreat. Mepkin is a charity close to our hearts here. One can only guess at the number of book clubs, “pod communities” and other novel ways that Catholics find to feed themselves and one another with a concrete exchange of faith, study, and grace, totally without diocesan funding. Again, the shame is that we have no professionally structured ministerial assistance for these motivated folks. But as I have often said to my wife, the American Church is changing, and with that the old methods and labels of donations and fundraising do not mean precisely what they used to. When I was a child the term “Catholic Charities” was about little kids in orphanages, in the same league as ransomed pagan babies and later Operation Rice Bowl, which today takes plastic online. The cost of “doing charity” is higher today: the most obvious reason is the disappearance of so many lay, religious and priests who voluntarily worked for minimal compensation. Today a lay person entering professional ministry needs a much higher rate of compensation to live reasonably and, let me add, to become sufficiently educated and proficient to exercise ministry to a well-schooled Catholic community. The term “Catholic Charities,” by the way, is not just a generic tag. Wikipedia explains: “Catholic Charities USA is the national voluntary membership organization for Catholic Charities agencies throughout the United States and its territories. Catholic Charities USA is a member of Caritas Internationalis, an international federation of Catholic social service organizations. Catholic Charities USA is the national office of 167 local Catholic Charities agencies nationwide. Many local dioceses have partnered with state and local civil governments to deliver social services. The Archdiocese of Chicago’s website states: “The majority of funding for Catholic Charities’ operations is provided by governmental agencies. Catholic Charities recognizes revenues in the fiscal year that the services are rendered. Fee and grants from government agencies revenue and support revenues are recognized in the fiscal year that they are received. Program fees include fees for programs that are received from individuals as well as federal, state, and local governments. The fees relate to case management and fees for other services provided to clients.” Put simply, many services offered by Catholic Charities years ago are now done so in financial collaboration with governments. In recent years, some dioceses—Boston, Washington, and Chicago, to cite some—have disengaged from adoption and foster care services because of civil requitements that forbid exclusion of same sex couples from parenting roles. My own diocese has no mention of adoption on its Catholic Charities site. This is sad: I can recall years ago working with my diocese on monitoring costs of the adoption process. Alongside of Catholic Charities is Catholic Relief Services. Its website explains its mission: “Catholic Relief Services was founded in 1943 by the Catholic Bishops of the United States to serve World War II survivors in Europe. Since then, we have expanded in size to reach more than 130 million people in more than one hundred countries on five continents.” This is one of my favorite charities because it allows us to instantly respond to national or international crises with an online response. Now that I think of it, CRS—whose ratio of funding to services versus administrative costs is enviably high [95% going to direct aid] -- is a much faster way for parishioners to instantly respond to crises. But in the final analysis, a special caution needs reflection where all Catholic charity fundraising is concerned. Charity is a “theological virtue” along with faith and hope. It is a disposition of our faith. When we speak of organized fundraising in a church framework, we need to emphasize that by no stretch of the imagination have we “solved a problem”—not the desperate straits of our local neighbors nor the urgent need for faith formation. A ‘bishop’s appeal” is a sacramental gesture of the Church’s deep concern that we address both communally and individually the hungers of the body and the soul. My wife Margaret—among her many apostolates—assists at a food bank, and she has educated me about the dynamics of hunger. Her busiest times are right before school vacations and summer. It seems that many children here in Central Florida depend upon their local public schools to eat. To reinforce her experience, I note with amazement that the Florida Legislature now in session is debating a bill for universal breakfast and lunch for all public-school students in the state. It has come to a point where a sizeable portion of our school-aged students need state assistance to eat. That is a stunning realization. It does not seem normal in the nature of things. Food, housing, health: meeting these needs is a gargantuan challenge to both philosophy and execution. The virtue of charity includes good citizenry. Charity needs the dollars; it also calls from us prayer and the shaping of private and public policy. But fill out that pledge card in the meantime. II have missed my annual retreats at Mepkin Abbey, South Carolina, during the Covid years. As a necessary precaution for the health of the senior Trappists-- much of the community--contact with guests and retreatants was severely hampered. Happily, the retreat program has resumed, and Margaret and I returned late Friday from our first retreat in three years.
I had high hopes for this opportunity, and overall, they were met, though in ways that surprised me. The grounds, situated on the Cooper River about thirty miles west of Charleston, are massive, but impressively maintained. I would say, though, that on every visit to Mepkin the drive seems further—it is over 400 miles from our home, much of it on I-95 and then two hours on backwoods South Carolina roads. On the other hand, the route takes us past three Buc--ee’s, which bakes the world’s largest frosted cinnabuns. Last weekend I posted about the changing face of retreat houses, given the decline in the number of priests, and particularly the religious order men who have done outstanding work in this ministry for many decades. It was immediately obvious to us that the community at Mepkin was smaller than at our last retreat, and much smaller than it was in 1998, our first retreat. In those days the monks were able to manage a much greater percentage of the plant’s operation in a hands-on fashion, including the kitchen and an egg farm to generate funds. Today there is much more administration on the shoulders of the abbot and the leadership, and fewer “’9 to 5 men” so to speak, and there are more “hired hands” these days to assist in the quality of life for the monks, retreatants, and a remarkably wide range of others who seek the location for a wide variety of personal needs and inspirations. The religious orders of monks sing the Divine Office seven times a day in union with the universal Catholic Church. At Mepkin, this routine is followed, beginning at 4 AM; [1] Office of Readings; [2] Morning Prayer (Lauds); [3] Mid-Morning Prayer (Terce); [4] Midday Prayer (Sext); [5] Afternoon Prayer (None); [6] Evening Prayer (Vespers); [7] Night Prayer (Compline). At the end of Compline, the abbot blesses each monk and retreatant, and the community retires at 8 PM. The spacious and comfortable reading lounge for the retreatants is open all night, though. Silence is observed. I readily acknowledge that I have never gotten up for the Office of Readings in twenty-five years of retreats, though Margaret has never missed, even when it used to be at 3 AM. On this retreat I was up and about around 5:30 AM for a quiet toast and coffee breakfast, and then pulled into the choir for the 7 AM Mass and Lauds and do my part of singing/praying in common for the rest of the day. This year, with the smaller number of monks, my conscience would have killed me if I didn’t join them, though my poor mastery of voice and hymnals was probably as much distraction as anything. I have a very brief clip of Trappists singing the Office at Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky, where the famous monk-writer Thomas Merton spent his entire 27-years. There are no visitors or retreatants in the clip. [You can imagine yourself in one of the empty stalls.] I am attaching here a link to today’s Vespers, to give you an idea of how much singing is involved in each service, and how seriously the monastic orders take their mission to pray—to God, for the Church, and for the world. You can use this link, Universalis, to pray any of the hours that move you. When we arrived at Mepkin, we received an afternoon orientation for our stay. You might remember from my last post that I said this: “If the figures I am seeing are correct, most religious educators, speakers, and scholars in our major schools and university are women, and the retreat ministry in the U.S. may become a woman’s enclave, if it has not already.” Little did I know. The monk who serves as retreat director [and my spiritual director] told us that due to his press of responsibilities, he would not be available for this retreat, but that a fine woman counselor/spiritual director would be available for any retreatant wishing to discuss the progress of his or her retreat. I hadn’t quite planned on that—I am quite fond of this monk who has helped me in the past—but I made an appointment to see her later in the week. Despite the prayer schedule [which is entirely voluntary for each retreatant], a retreatant has about eight hours to be alone in silence each day. [Mine was a private retreat. If you have never made a retreat before, you might begin with a “directed retreat,” which provides public conferences, more “on-site” personal attention, recommended readings, etc. Eight silent hours per day is a long time by yourself in a retreat setting if you have never experienced it before.] I need a focal point to make good use of the introspective time, and I put a lot of time into selecting the text[s] I want to use. Just in time to make a Prime overnight purchase, I discovered Shaped by the End You Live For: Thomas Merton’s Monastic Spirituality [2020] by Bonnie B. Thurston. [I noted, with humor, that on the last day of retreat I discovered the Abbey’s excellent bookstore carries this book in stock. Who knew?] I have been reading Merton—his own writings, and literature about him—since about the time I joined AA in 1990. I will review Thurston’s book soon, but I can tell you that her text provided me with a multitude of insights that I found consoling and challenging. Merton was not the most focused human who ever lived. He entered the monastery in 1941, and in just ten years his letters and diaries began to contain speculation on living alone in a hermitage on the monastery grounds, something he eventually received permission for in 1965. And yet, he had his thumbs in many pies, in terms of correspondences, publishers, advisory projects, and visitors—I had read several volumes of his letters previously, and I was reminded of the old saying about Teddy Roosevelt: “He was the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” He was no less busy in his hermitage than he had been in his common life with the monks. As much as I love the man, I had to admit that his routine resonates with some of my lesser virtues. As I explained to some longtime friends last night over dinner, my seventy-fifth birthday this year “got to me.” The clock is ticking, even with good health, and there is that nagging pressure of deciding where to invest whatever time and energy I have left into something worthwhile…and how to make room for a God I will be meeting intimately, sooner than later. The spiritual message that kept ringing in my ears was simplicity, as in “you can’t do everything, and you can’t remain competent at what you do if you are doing too much or try to do too much…or even harboring fanciful thoughts of what might be done.” Retreat is, in part, an opportunity to step back and look at the project called life. There were other issues, to be sure, but the idea of establishing a God-centered routine—a virtue I much admire about the monks—was a critical one to take home. I know the word “downsizing” is quite in vogue these days, but again I was reminded of the many instances in which Merton had discussed the perennial problem of “distractions” in prayer. I had a very pleasant meeting with the spiritual director late in the week, a woman with backgrounds in both healthcare and theology, in which I dumped this mass of reflections on her desk to get her take on whether I was on the right road. During our meeting she asked me to provide a brief biography of my life’s major episodes, which I did, and she commented to the effect that I had lived a rather full life in a number of settings. This brought home to me another of the tasks of seniority: taking an honest inventory of one’s life and, in the words of the AA Big Book, “making amends wherever possible.” It occurred to me on this retreat that seniority is also the time to memorialize and celebrate the good moments, the happy moments, and the people who were [and in many cases, still are] major players in those gifted times and places. Oh yes, and I need to devote myself to the study of St. John’s Gospel. By the end of the retreat, I wasn’t euphoric, I was tired. On previous retreats I had napped more, utilizing the opportunity to rest. But having missed the “desert experience” for several years, I had work to do—but always with the prayer and the hope that this is the kind of work God intends for me here and now. It is true that Margaret and I do a fair amount of traveling every year, but on Monday next [September 25] we will be off before sunrise for a different sort of getaway, a 360-mile drive to Mepkin Abbey, about thirty miles from Charleston, South Carolina. We have been looking forward to our four-day quiet retreat for quite some time; we have not been to Mepkin since the Covid epidemic first struck and the abbey’s outreach was limited to protect the health of the senior monks and the retreatants. But Monday, God willing, we will be back for the silence and the rest, the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours, the warmth and the silent community support of the monks, the opportunity for spiritual counseling and sacramental confession with a monk who has lived the vowed life for a half-century or more, cozy corners to sit with the Scriptures and the classic spiritual writers of the Church…with the 24-hour Keurig brew master never far away.
There is some irony in the fact that when someone makes a retreat in the context of a religious community, like the Trappist monks, the opportunity is there for that rare intimacy of aloneness with God to discern God’s will in the life of the retreatant. And yet, the healthiness of the solitude is enhanced big time by the proximity to the living, breathing Church of men or women religious who go about their lives in peaceful, prayerful silence—witnesses who remind us, as Jesus reminded Pilate at his trial, that there is a Kingdom at a sacred remove from the personal and environmental chaos where we routinely dwell and call “the real world.” A TWO-DOLLAR HISTORY OF RETREATS Socrates, who lived four centuries before Jesus and was considered an atheist, is reported to have said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” For Socrates, the need to” know oneself, one’s reason for being,” was of the very nature of humanity. [And curiously, Church teaching has held over the ages that God’s revelation is accessible through natural reasoning.] No less so for those who walk in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Hebrew and the Christian Canons of the Bible are generous in their descriptions of those who stepped out of their lives for a time to reflect upon their relationship with God and to open themselves to God’s invigorating new wisdom for their future direction. Certainly, Jesus’s forty days in the desert-- ----with his encounters with Satan--is the most famous “retreat” and the event described in all four Gospels is a reminder that honest prayerful insight can reveal much about ourselves that is disquieting, though the Gospel of Mark also records that the angels came into the desert to minister to him. Christian history has generally treated favorably the idea of meeting the Lord is a quiet space over a time—be it a day or a lifetime. In the Christian era, Roman Emperor Constantine ended the persecution of Christians. Individual. and collective escape to the quiet and solitude began in the 300’s A.D. when Romans employed by the empire [50% of the citizenry, by some accounts] hastened to baptism just to hold good place with Constanine, and not to “take up thy cross.” Many sincere Christians in Rome found it nearly impossible to live a true baptismal lifestyle surrounded by the ribaldry around them. Hermits, and eventually clusters, gravitated to North Africa to pray and live outside of the madness of public life, from which arose the age of the “desert Fathers” or “desert mystics.” A brief but excellent summary of the beginnings of the healthy spiritual movement away from the world can be found in the Britannica’s Life of St. Antony of Egypt. Recent history has publicized the leadership of the “Desert Mothers” as well as the “Desert Fathers” in this era. As the disorganization of the Dark Ages in the Western Church gave way to the more structured Catholicism we are accustomed to today, Religious Orders such as the Benedictines would open their monasteries to assist lay men and women in physical and spiritual need. I should note that there were many monasteries of women—living the same vows as their male counterparts—till at least the thirteenth century. Around 1200 Pope Innocent III ruled that all monasteries must be unisex, which certainly throws a different hue on those boring old Middle Ages. Alongside the vowed communities of renewal, itinerant religious groups such as the Franciscans in the thirteenth centuries established communities of witness and service to the laity of Italy and eventually elsewhere. In a vision, Francis beheld Christ speaking to him thus: “Francis, rebuild my house.” While I was in Bruges, Belgium in August, I came upon the extensive site of the community of the Beguines, founded around 1240, a loose confederation of lay women who lived in voluntary simplicity and did not marry, though they took no canonical vows. They assisted in the corporal and spiritual outreach to the laity, under their own governance. The last Beguine died in the early twentieth century. I have gone out of my way to highlight the renewal work of women in the history of the Church because I believe that in the discussion, we may see history repeat itself in the next generations of the Church’s life. WHAT I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT RETREATS OVER THE YEARS: When I came into this world in 1948, it was not uncommon for a Catholic adult to sign up for a weekend retreat at a local “retreat house” or religious institution. There were men’s retreats and women’s retreats. They typically ran from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. The format consisted of conferences or spiritual talks, Mass, devotions, and confessions/personal spiritual conferences. In fact, it was during such a spiritual conference in 1960 that a Franciscan retreat master talked a mother into sending her oldest son to a friars’ seminary instead of to the “Little Seminary” of the Diocese of Buffalo. [You guessed it.] As I recall, there were a decent number of choices for making retreats in the Buffalo area, along the Lake Erie and Niagara River shorelines. The retreats were always given by priests—partly because of the sacramental duties involved, and partly to strengthen the institutional commitment of the Catholic participant to the life of the Church. In the United States, the concept of the private retreat evolved along with many other church practices in the Vatican II era. In 1969, as a collegiate seminarian student, I signed up to work on a retreat team with fellow friars—composed of seminarians a bit older than I was—to serve the high schools and religious education programs inside the D.C. beltway. In two years, I was one of the two directors of the program, sometimes referred to as “the God Squad.” I look back on those retreats—three-day jaunts with 50 or more “teeny boppers” to rustic outdoor sites rented to use from Protestants, who had a wealth of summer Bible camp experiences and built their sites accordingly. My favorite retreat site for our kids, though, was Camp Maria, in Leonardtown, MD. On a personal note, I spent the day before my ordination reflecting at Camp Maria, as the site was holding no programs that day. When I started in the retreat ministry, on paper we were using a program called “Teenagers Encounter Christ,” or TEC, still in existence 50+ years later, a national ministry established a few years earlier to assist dioceses and parishes in building regular faith support communities of their high school members. The TEC weekend retreat was the first step in undertaking follow-up programming; we assumed that the church and school communities would do that. I was always surprised that the same schools invited us back every year. Nobody, not even our professors, had the time or experience to help us critically assess what we were hoping to accomplish or to break down the skillsets necessary to comprise a unified retreat experience—public speaking, small group leadership, counseling, leading prayer services, etc. Pastoral ministry in 1969 was in that state of flux. We worked from the seat of our pants much of our time, our primary goal was to bring the students closer to God and the Church in an optimum way. I like to think we were successful to some degree at that. Many of our “retreat alumnae and alumni” would join us at the friary for our Sunday morning conventual Mass. I continued to give retreats for the first five years of my priesthood, this time without a team. The Sisters of Mercy in New Hampshire and other religious communities in New England invited me on several occasions, thanks to my summer school connections, and then a retreat house in the Finger Lakes of New York put me on its rotation to give retreats to laity. It is hard to describe how pastorally satisfying it was to give those retreats. It is one of those rare opportunities as a priest to do all the things you were ordained to do—Mass, confession, conferences, spiritual direction—and none of the things you must take care of at home—i.e., administration. My Order did have a “retreat band” of priests who worked full time on the road, and this work looked more and more attractive. But having given retreats to many women religious, I felt it would be dishonest to preach and minister to them without serving some time in the nitty-gritty of parish life. Thus, I applied to become a pastor in Florida…and the rest is a story for another time. CHOOSING RETREAT OPTIONS TODAY One big factor in 2023, a major change from years ago when I was still in the “family business,” is the reduction in the number of priests, and this includes religious order priests, many of whom specialized in retreat work, full or part time. Many of the buildings and institutions that welcomed retreaters a half-century ago no longer stand. Several dioceses, including my own, have established spiritual development centers over the years, offering a wide range of services including retreats, though in fewer numbers than decades ago. In Orlando, for example, we used to have a community of religious priests at the site, but this is no longer possible. If the figures I am seeing are correct, most religious educators, speakers, and scholars in our major schools and university are women, and the retreat ministry in the U.S. may become a woman’s enclave, if it has not already. Today a prospective retreatant must decide if he or she wants a silent/private retreat or a structured/content retreat. If you read the websites of various retreat centers, you may be asked your preference. How to decide, of course, is up to you, but it is a good question to bring up with your pastor or confessor. A “structured retreat” implies that you will participate in the religious exercises [prayer services, etc.] and the “talks.” The contents of the talks should be made available to you before you commit, as you would have the chance to assess which topic would be most helpful to you—I have seen retreats for those in grief or twelve-step programs, for those seeking deeper insight into prayer or the Scripture, etc. I am most at home with Mepkin Abbey, for while it does offer directed or private choices for retreat, the Trappist atmosphere of silence conveys a round-the-clock sense of peaceful sanctity. I choose the silent/private route, though I join the monks for the major Liturgies of the Hours and Mass, as well as confession/spiritual direction. For this week’s retreat I purchased Shaped by the End You Live For: Thomas Merton’s Monastic Spirituality, as well as packing my Gospel of John. Mepkin Abbey now publishes a requested stipend or offering for a four-night stay. The costs of maintaining a community of primarily senior monks as well as the fine retreat accommodations and meals is not insignificant. However, any offering is graciously accepted. Moreover, the monastery has several ancillary services on-line to follow-up their retreat; Margaret and I belong to a circle of retreat alumni who meet monthly via Zoom to discuss assigned spiritual reading. Other religious providers have similar assistance. I am told that it is time to pack, so I will have to cut it short here. My first retreat at Mepkin was twenty-five years ago. We were doing our paperwork with our pastor to marry in October 1998. He told us not to worry about a pre-Cana program, but he suggested we make a reflective retreat at a place called Mepkin Abbey. We did…and here we are, on the eve of our 25th anniversary, returning to the hospitality of the good monks. On June 3 I posted on the dramatic decrease in the number of Catholic weddings in the United States over the past two generations, from 426,309 in 1970 to 98,354 in 2022, per research of the Center for Applied Research of the Apostolate [CARA] at Georgetown University. [Incidentally, CARA’s annual data base of Catholic sacramental life, religious schooling, attendance, etc. is a free and indispensable resource for anyone involved in Church work, though it makes for depressing reading.]
How many weddings are performed in the United States? Let’s break down the official number from diocesan and parish registries across the country. 1970: 426,309 1975: 369,133 1980: 350,745 1985: 348,300 1990: 326,079 1995: 294,144 2000: 261,626 2005: 207,112 2010: 168,400 2015: 148,134 2020: 131,827 2022: 98,354 There were 16,429 parishes in the United States last year, meaning the average parish is performing under 6 weddings per year according to the last available official statistics. Since my first post on this subject a month ago, I checked the numbers against my own region. I learned that my own parish, a “mega-parish” and once considered a “destination site” for weddings with its beautiful church and grounds, celebrated one wedding in the months of May and June combined. A priest friend of mine assigned to a downtown church in Orlando celebrated his first wedding there, one year after he arrived. If the Catholic family is the cradle of the Faith, and parents are the “first teachers of the Faith” as the Baptismal rite for infants proclaims, these numbers are harrowing for the future of Catholicism in the United States, period. Clearly, Catholic brides and grooms are not phoning the church offices as part of their wedding plans. Why? Perhaps they have heard over the years that once you enter the Church office, you are probably in trouble. GUILTY UNITIL PROVEN MORE GUILTY: Prospective brides and grooms generally have significant difficulties when they need the Church to discuss their wedding plans. I would venture to guess that 95% of Catholic couples who approach the Church will run afoul of the many hurdles that lie in their path. I wanted to look more closely at the hurdles faced by intrepid Catholics who might be inclined to approach the Church about a prospective sacramental wedding, with an eye toward the question of whether our establishment approach to “pre-Cana ministry” has become a living example of St. Luke 11:46, ““Yes,” said Jesus, “what sorrow also awaits you experts in religious law! For you crush people with unbearable religious demands, and you never lift a finger to ease the burden.” So, what “burdens” face the prospective bride and groom as they consider picking up the phone to make an appointment at the parish office? Here is the gauntlet. Here we go! About applicant couples: --They are probably sexually active. --They may be living together. --They are using artificial birth control. --They may wish to have a small family or to postpone children. --The bride might be pregnant. --They might not be registered in a parish. --They may have no record of parish stewardship. --They may not attend Mass regularly. --One or both might never have been Confirmed, or even made First Communion. --Their religious education might have ended at the eighth grade, if that far. --One or both might have been previously married and does not understand the reality of a “previous bond” in Canon or Church Law. --One or both might have [unbaptized?] children from the present or a previous relationship. --Their families might be inactive Catholics in the parish. --One or both might have spent some time as a member of another Christian denomination. --Their trust in the Church might have been injured by the abuse scandal. --They might hold political beliefs on such matters as same sex marriage and availability of abortion at variance with Catholic teaching. --One or both might have issues with ICE or other citizenship matters. --The couple might be of modest means with a guest list of 50; the parish church seats 1500 and the fee for a church marriage is $1000. --The couple’s pastor or representative might be grossly incompetent, judgmental, or theologically/pastorally inept. One of the best research projects on the religious experience of young adults—the imminent brides and grooms planning to celebrate weddings--comes from St. Mary’s Press, “Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics.” [2017] There is an excellent podcast on this study from Minnesota Public Radio linked here with a panel of young adults. Interestingly, one of the primary reasons given in the study and in the podcast for youthful disaffiliation is the perception among the young that the Church behaves primarily as an overly judgmental institution toward them. Many, some as young as thirteen in the St. Mary’s study, spoke of a great sense of relief after disengaging from the Church. These young adults are not asking for the moon and a lifetime pass to decadence. They are adrift in a very trying culture and looking for a home. And while it is a worthy venture to parishes and dioceses to establish ministries such as “theology on tap” for young adults, it is unfortunate that the Church overthinks the one event that captures the memory of young adulthood forever: marriage. As you saw above, I came up with sixteen potential roadblock issues in the time it took me to consume a cup of Dunkin’s Cinnamania Coffee, and I have not even touched upon other genre of issues that arise in the initial premarital meetings with couples. As a psychotherapist today, I approach new client couples in medical/clinical settings with a keen eye for substance abuse [particularly binge-drinking alcohol], domestic violence, and a mental health diagnosis such as depression or borderline personality disorder, issues which can be lethal to a relationship but generally unrecognized by most church ministers. WELCOME HOME, KIDS I performed Catholic weddings from 1974-1992, long enough to grow in appreciation of the possibilities of the marriage event as one of God’s sacraments. My seminary days shaped my theological thinking that all sacraments are rites of conversion in the richest sense of the term, a move to something better, i.e., greater intimacy with God and God’s family. In that context, the Sacrament of Marriage marks the end of one era of life with a conversional moment to receive the Spirit with a lifelong partner. Marriage is the one sacrament that two baptized persons administer to each other—the cleric is an official ecclesiastical observer. I did not marry until I was 50 and laicized, and I recall very clearly my wedding day, sitting in the living room of my little house reflecting upon the new way of life I was freely embracing that Friday evening at our wedding Mass. [My meditation was interrupted, I might add, by an untimely knock at my door from a bill collecting agency. It seems my employer at the time had paid all of us therapists on staff with bad checks! For better or worse, richer, or poorer...] In my years of marrying couples, I often felt like a “real father” as I was usually older—sometimes much older--than my candidates for marriage. Fathers love their kids, they bear with their kids when they make youthful mistakes, and they want nothing but the best for them. I could not bring myself to approach the pre-Cana ministry as adversarial. I always assumed as a pastor that my engaged couples were probably sexually active and often living together, and that they were using artificial birth control. I saw no helpful reason to raise these issues as moral obstacles in the course of our work. These were the times. They still are. I might wish otherwise, like parents feel, but these are the cards we pastors were [and continue to be] dealt. I never had the sense that a cohabitating couple, for example, had chosen this route before marriage as an act of contempt for God or disobedience, the necessary conditions for a true mortal sin. Better to think of the young in the words of the Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal [1623-1662], who coined the phrase “the heart has reasons that reason knows nothing about.” Every couple we meet in the matrimonial process comes to us as unique as a snowflake. I also assumed that they had next to no meaningful adult religious formation, a reality backed by strong statistical evidence today. Given these deficits and the others I cited above, I labored mightily to keep their “wedding reunion with the Church” from becoming a time of acute embarrassment or accusation, the same stance I took in the confessional. I tended to adopt the attitudes of the famous confessors Sts. Alphonsus Ligouri and John Vianney that too much prying into sexual domestic matters, for example, unduly disturbed an innocent conscience. But beyond that, I believed that premarital pastoral counseling was primarily an act of embrace by the Church, not scolding. There will be a lifetime ahead for the couple to embrace the challenges of the Gospel for the first time as adults and the riches and wisdom of the saints. My work was to spark the interest and draw them to the Eucharistic table, from which they may trace the footsteps of Christ as lovers and parents. Much of my marital preparation was an introduction to the couple of how much God loved them and the ways that they could foster a prayerful and an apostolic life in their homes and in the parish. In a sense my advising content was not totally different from what a catechumen might receive—and given the wretched state of religious education today, we are probably right to assume nothing and think of most adults as catechumens. I encouraged my couples to engage in the parish—though I came to see that 27-year-olds, for example, have their hands full already with developing their careers, buying homes, finishing education, paying down student loans and the like. And, in many cases, children will soon follow [if they haven’t already]. If I had it to do over, I would have spent more time in marital preparation assisting them in the habits of home prayer and Scripture reading. Those kinds of programs were just beginning to emerge in the 1970’s and 1980’s. When Margaret and I finished our paperwork to marry in 1998, our venerable Monsignor, Patrick J. Caverly, said, “The Pre-Cana Program has nothing to teach you. But I would recommend you make a week retreat with the Trappist monks up at Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina to prepare for your wedding.” We followed his advice. This fall, as we celebrate our silver wedding anniversary, we will be heading up to Mepkin for another week of retreat in late September. We know the retreat grounds and the monastic routine well by now and we even arranged to be interred there when the time comes; and these days we study monastic spirituality on Zoom every month with other regular retreatant regulars. Marriage can be a gateway to a true rebirth in the Spirit. Sadly, younger couples don’t always get the kind of advice we got, I fear. They may be expected to invest an inordinate amount of time in Natural Family Planning instruction instead. Nothing takes the romance out of an engaged couple’s life faster than the as many as eight sessions [!] of NFP at a cost of several hundreds of dollars. [Where are you, St. Luke? Checking in with more burdens....] In my early days as a priest, when my parish was small and rural, at the end of our sessions together I took each of my engaged couples out for a steak dinner—on Jesus’s credit card, so to speak—a month or two before their wedding. I also charged them no money or fees for the wedding. “You are parish family,” I would say, “and we have free coffee and donuts for you after every weekend Mass.” They knew exactly what I was driving at. [BTW, my parish never lost money on free donuts in ten years.] FATHERS CAN'T FIX EVERYTHING, BUT THEY SURE CAN CONSOLE THEIR KIDS It does happen that significant issues can arise which demand greater attention than the parish staff alone can provide or alleviate. One such issue is a previous marriage by one of the parties to a third individual, or more rarely, when both parties were married to other people. Church law is quite firm that in most cases an annulment is required before a new marriage can be attempted. Annulments take time, though over my lifetime diocesan tribunals—the office of the bishop that processes such requests—have worked hard to manage the cases more effectively, on the grounds that “justice delayed is justice denied.” Every church bulletin on the planet contains an advisory that wedding dates are not set until the annulment is granted. However, a low percentage of Catholics attend Sunday Mass anymore and are unaware of this factor, or couples come into the office unaware that a civil divorce alone is not sufficient for them to engage in a Catholic wedding. Circumstances such as these called forth every bit of sensitivity and creativity I could muster. Fortunately, I had taken special courses in Church Law in the seminary such that I could explain the process in considerable detail, to the degree that the logic of annulments might make sense to them, and I knew what the tribunal judges were looking for. I was honest and told them that if I “broke the annulment rule” I would get fired. Suffice to say that I tried to walk with them throughout the prolonged process in a fatherly way. Another issue is evidence of serious difficulties between the engaged couples themselves. I was lucky during my priestly years that this occurred infrequently. Again, I watched for such things as binge drinking, violence, and significant mental health issues such as narcissistic or borderline personality features. I don’t remember ever telling a couple they might destroy each other in a marriage, but I do recall talking to one of the parties in several marriages where I sensed indecision. I always made it clear to individuals that if they had severe doubts, I would help them if they chose to delay or cancel the wedding—e.g., I would talk to the parents, send an update to a prospective therapist, etc. In these cases, I would also dictate a lengthy impression of my work with the couple for the official in the Tribunal, if things reached that stage at some point in the future. An officiating priest is an excellent annulment witness. It is extremely difficult, for an engaged party, to step up and cancel a wedding far along in the planning stages. No one ever canceled a wedding on my advice, and I never told a couple they could not marry for mental health/compatibility reasons. It is interesting to me that twice in very recent years I had two divorced parties from different unions tell me that they wished they had “followed my advice,” so I guess they read my mind because I never said that directly. Today there is public recognition that mental illness strikes as early as the teen years. I hope today’s clerics are getting good diocesan advice and support on mental health ministry or taking courses and reading on their own about marriage and family counseling. [In 1984 my diocese, Orlando, included a $600 annual allowance for its priests to study and take courses. God bless Bishop Thomas Grady. Rollins College was then offering three-credit graduate courses for $290 and ended up paying about 70% of my tuition as I earned my M.A. in counseling in 1988, with the coursework spread over four years.] Some dioceses fund a strong clinical counseling service [usually an arm of Catholic Charities] available to engage with pre-Cana couples where there are major problems. In my day such counseling was mandated for youthful marriages or where a premarital baby was on the way. Today many dioceses are strapped for cash and unable to provide such a range of services. I would suggest to younger clergy that they develop their own rolodex of ancillary services for their marriage ministries. Licensed Catholic therapists in the parish are often happy to help on many levels. I will talk about wedding liturgies themselves in the third post in this stream. But I will lay to rest any rumors or worries as I cannot recall any grim encounters with BRIDEZILLA’s or MOTB’s [Mother of the Bride.] I did have moments when I wanted to throw a groomsman or two out the window, but they were bigger than me. Tis’ the month of June and the season of weddings. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer Catholics are choosing “the Church route” for those June weddings, or any other month, for that matter, according to the Center of Applied Research for the Apostolate at Georgetown University, which keeps records of such things going back to the 1960’s. In 1965 there were 347,179 sacramental marriages performed in the United States, i.e., marriages entered into the official canonical church records. In 2022 there were 98,354 such weddings, or 28% of the 1965 total—and this does not factor in the rise in the population since 1965. CARA’s Catholic statistics on all aspects of Church life in the U.S. are available to the public free online but pour yourself a stiff belt before you read all the bad news.
I am going to slip into my “inner Canon Lawyer mode” for a moment and wonder out loud if anyone has considered the possibility [probability?] that, in the eyes of Church/Canon Law, statistically speaking, at least a majority of baptized Catholics are living in concubinage as the Canons would define it? Look at the law: Can. 1108 §1 Only those marriages are [sacramentally] valid which are contracted in the presence of the local Ordinary [bishop] or parish priest or of the priest or deacon delegated by either of them, in the presence of two witnesses. And Canon 1127 §2: If there are grave difficulties in the way of observing the canonical form [the presence of a priest/deacon and two witnesses], the local Ordinary of the catholic party has the right to dispense from it in individual cases…for validity, however, some public form of celebration is required. It is for the Episcopal Conference [in the United States, the USCCB] to establish norms whereby this dispensation may be granted in a uniform manner. In other words, the local bishop can grant a “dispensation from form” allowing a Catholic to be married in a Protestant Church before that church’s minister, or even before a civil official, if there is good reason and the proper permissions have been signed off by the bishop. This dispensation is required for validity of the Catholic sacrament! Attached here is the Dispensation from Form request to the Archbishop of Los Angeles. I filled out such forms in my years as pastor for episcopal permission, but it was still my responsibility as pastor of the Catholic bride or groom to do the premarital investigations for freedom to marry, collect the baptismal certificates, record the marriage in my parish’s canonical books, notify the Catholic party’s church of baptism, and perform the premarital counseling for the couple. Interestingly, the Protestant minister who was performing the ceremony was often doing his due diligence, too, and conducting premarital counseling while I was doing mine. We put those folks through a lot. [USCCB research indicates that the best long-term results of premarital counseling are obtained by 8-9 sessions.] By the way, if a Catholic seeks to marry a member of a non-Christian religion—such as a Jewish or Islamic believer, or an unbaptized person, there is different paperwork for what is called a “disparity of cult” dispensation—a bishop’s permission to marry a party outside of Christian baptism.] Catholic moral teaching holds that for baptized Catholics, any sexual activity outside of a valid marriage is mortally sinful. Consequently, if most Catholics today are marrying ‘outside the church” as the statistics from CARA and the anecdotal reporting of local churches would seem to establish, then large numbers of our Catholic neighbors and families are “living in sin,” as we say in Catholic circles. Or are they? And we have not even factored in the pastoral situations of couples living together before marriage. BUT BEFORE WE BREAK THE EMERGENCY GLASS… Before we get into the subject of marriage per se, let us reflect for a moment on the nature of mortal sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 1857, defines mortal sin thusly: “For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter, and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent." No argument that matters of marriage are matters of high importance for both church and society. But it is the next two issues that deserve closer scrutiny. “Full knowledge” implies that an individual knows the law, understands the law, and how that law applies to one’s personal situation. Full consent follows from the previous point: armed with the knowledge of the teachings and values at hand, an individual chooses to disobey Church teaching from a motivation of scorn or contempt for Revelation and its legitimate officers. I doubt that Catholics are aware of the multiple conditions for sinning; I have often thought that the psychology of committing a mortal sin is a lot more complicated than we acknowledge, and perhaps we should draw some comfort from that. I am going to make the argument that the vast majority of the brides and grooms make their marriage plans with no contempt for Canon Law or Catholic sacramental theology. Rather, their formation to the faith and their inclusion into the Catholic worship has been so deficient or even absent from their lives that marriage—like many other of life’s key decisions—is totally disconnected from Catholic culture and tradition. Interestingly, the USCCB admits as much. In its own hired research, it found: “Although parents continue to be instrumental in the formation of healthy relational skills and attitudes during this period, many [diocesan marriage preparation] policies refer to the value of classroom instruction in marriage and family life during junior high, high school, and college.” And yet, what is one of the greatest frustrations of parish personnel? That their eighth-grade confirmands fly the coup out the church door even ahead of the ordaining bishop! Thus, in the years of peak formative values of young adults on matters of love, relationships, and marriage, the Church is a non-player. I will return to this thought in a moment. I had the opportunity recently to hear Kenneth Woodward, longtime religion editor of Newsweek and the dean of Catholic editorialists in the United States. Woodward, in an address to diocesan priests, made the point that since Vatican II each generation of Catholics has been exponentially less educated in the rudiments of Catholic life than the previous one. I cannot argue with that; when I was doing weekend workshops for adult catechists in my diocese, I was frequently surprised by what my students did not know in terms of what I always thought to be general Catholic household knowledge. I was delighted that that they had the courage to ask, and I welcomed the questions, but in the back of your mind is always that haunting question, “Quis custodes custodiet?” [“Who will shepherd the shepherds?”] Put another way, parochial catechetics in general are dissolving in content and competence. SO WHY ARE SO MANY UNCATECHIZED AND/OR LEAVING CATHOLIC PRACTICE? In discussions of this sort, I am always reminded of the scene in “Godfather I” where Vito Corleone begins a meeting with the heads of the five families: “Gentlemen, how did things get so far?” Looking for answers, I tend to agree with John Tracy Ellis’s famous 1955 essay on the intellectual state of the Catholic Church in the United States as a place to start. Ellis, a renowned priest historian, shook the American Church when he wrote in effect, that intellectually speaking, Catholicism in the United States was a mile wide and a foot deep. [From America Magazine cited above, 1995] Ellis took as his starting point a comment by Denis W. Brogan, the Cambridge political scientist who was an expert on both modern French and American history. Brogan had said in 1941 that "in no Western society is the intellectual prestige of Catholicism lower than in the country where, in such respects as wealth, numbers, and strength of organization, it is so powerful." More in sorrow than in anger, Ellis commented: "No well-informed American Catholic will attempt to challenge that statement." It does break my heart to see the general low regard for Catholic scholarship and the very limited opportunities for adult study and faith formation at the diocesan and parish level, because all this deficiency percolates downward into family life and the faith formation of children. How can we be surprised that many Catholics know next to nothing about marriage theology and pastoral opportunity when the bishops in the United States are spending $28 million to reeducate American Catholics to the very central doctrine of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist? Ellis argued that the American Catholic Church has been more pragmatic than thoughtful. In 1955 he pointed out that there were vast numbers of Catholic colleges and seminaries in the U.S. but a dearth of worthy intellectuals and scholars to staff them. This was [and remains] very true in most seminaries, with the result that many pastors today are unread, preach poorly, and have little intellectual meat to offer college-educated congregations, including inquisitive youth. [At the Mass I attended on the Feast of the Holy Trinity, the priest homilist told us that book learning does not lead to faith…which would have been quite a shock to Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, and Benedict XVI, the latter a professional theologian and writer before his elevation to the papacy.] To make this point personal, I cite a 2017 America essay on religious education, where a 40-year Director of Religious Education, Ernie Sherretta, wrote this reader response, sharing his experience as a Catholic parent of adult children: My own adult children were raised in a "traditional Catholic" household, if I may say so, and yet they abandoned the Church, each marrying in another denomination and each holding the values/virtues they were taught. They married faith-filled spouses and now worship and serve in ministries of their new denominations. As adults, I respect their choices but asked why, having a suspicion as to the answer. My suspicions were confirmed when they stated that the Catholic Church is behind the times- not so much due to doctrine- which never was a problem due to its irrelevance to their lives but due to a structure that is patriarchal, authoritarian, and not very inclusive. Having participated in their weddings, one at a Presbyterian and the other at a Methodist church, I do understand their preference for another Church community. Another insight that comes from my own 68 years of being a Catholic, is the Church's refusal to incorporate Vatican II, incorporate all the baptized in leadership roles, not just as liturgical ministers, or council/staff members but as pastors, bishops etc. and rid itself of a clerical mindset still attached to the garb and nomenclature of the Middle Ages. Today's adults are no longer the "pay, pray and obey" people our parents and grandparents were and refuse to acquiesce to titles and procedures no longer relevant to the modern world. Catechesis, no matter how new, no matter what venue will not compensate for example, and the experience of inclusion which Jesus exemplified, and which affirms their baptismal anointing of priest, prophet, and king. In other denominations, they see lay leaders, modern worship, and members living in the real world not in convents, monasteries, rectories, or the Vatican. Sorry, but Roman Catholicism is on the path to extinction while the followers of Jesus continue to light the way through personal witness and ministry. Some of the language here is strong, and it is painful to hear a church minister with so much “skin in the game” question the viability of the ecclesiastical body he has devoted his life to serving. But I think he is representative of not just church ministers, but of the much greater number of Catholic parents of roughly my generation [he is 68, I am 75] whose children and grandchildren have opted for other ways to live their values. I discussed earlier the issue of young people being poorly catechized to Catholic life. But what about those who were immersed in the Catholic culture and then opted out of the Church for another Christian communion or other vehicles in their search for meaning, as Mr. Sherretta’s children did? I noted in his response the author’s observation that his children left the Church “not so much due to doctrine- which never was a problem due to its irrelevance to their lives…” That is a telling admission that we can assume nothing, really, about the effectiveness of our present modes of catechetical formation. In my parish—and in many across the country—there was no effort to conduct synodal listening. Can you imagine, as part of the synodal process, if an independent facilitator had spent a private evening with just each religious education class, without the teacher present--and with the Catholic school students, for that matter—and asked them point blank what they thought and experienced in religious education class, or even more pointedly, at Mass? The very thought of it answers the question of why so many American church leaders wimped out of the process. To suggest that all these folks like Mr. Sherretta’s children who have moved in different directions from Catholicism are in dire danger of hell fire because of their canonical marriage status is ludicrous, and I hope that no parent lives under the shadow of that fear. They, like those of us who still practice, do what they need to do to discover the ultimate meaning of our existence. They, like us, will be judged at the end of time by the criteria set by Jesus himself in reference to the Last Judgment [Matthew 25: 31-46], and it sounds like Mr. Sherretta’s children take the Gospel very seriously. We must assume that barring evidence to the contrary, those who choose other paths to God do so in good faith. The early philosophers of Christianity—those guys it is a waste of time to read, according to some—understood, as an anthropological principle, that every human possessed an innate drive for the good, the true, and the beautiful, even before the saving waters of baptism. The numerical decline in Catholic weddings is quite sobering, perhaps more so because it is not an outlier but a reflection of the reality of semper reformanda across the board. But marriage does deserve special attention: it is the most significant relationship that any of us will ever enter, and in the last millennium the Church has designated marriage as one of its seven sacraments or “events that save.” Those of us who are married know that we are “saved” daily by this relationship, in much the same way one is saved daily by holy communion. So, in the next installment on this theme, in a week or two, I would like to muse about Catholic marriage, the before, the during, and even the after. |
On My Mind. Archives
August 2024
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