Sentire Cum Ecclesia

I have very much enjoyed reading the accounts of the John Paul II Beatification on various blogs and websites. My favourites so far are Ironic Catholic’s and Tracey Rowland’s. Rome is really something else. Rome with crowds is another experience all over again. I can understand that it might have felt (as Tracey puts it) like the end of the world.

Trying to interpret the significance of statistical evidence – and (even more) attempting to draw conclusions from that evidence – is as accurate a science as reading tea leaves. Yes, I can see each tea leaf, and yes, I can see how many there are and how they are positioned in relation to other tea leaves, but what it means for my future is anyone’s guess.

I know that this (Thomas Reese on “The Hidden Exodus” – please ignore the pop up request – do not on any account send money) came out ages ago – ie. a fortnight! – but I didn’t have time to deal with it in the middle of Holy Week. A number of other commentators have offered their thoughts on the piece.

I have just three to offer:

1) The statistics are for America. We cannot assume that they work for Australia as well. My guess is that there are similarities, but we have to make allowances for a lower level of religious practice in Australia general.

2) The conclusions that Fr Reese offers are a long jump (maybe even a hop-skip-and-a-jump) from the statistical evidence, and (surprise, surprise) displays his own particular bias despite his apparent attempt to play even handedly to “liberals” and “conservatives” in the statistical overview. (Full disclosure: I am also biased, and this commentary is also affected by my particular opinions).

3) Blowing the trumpet for either the Protestant team or the Catholic team will be missing the point here. On the one hand there is something called “receptive ecumenism” – which seeks to recognise the particular gifts that traditions can receive from others; and on the other hand there is something called “evangelisation” (or “evangelism” for Protestants reading this) – which is the task of every Christian community (which is not the same thing as what used to be called – rather quaintly – “sheep stealing”).

All that being said, Reese’s conclusions – his “lessons from the data” (aka “reading the tea leaves”) contain a number of “non sequiturs”. One by one:

First, those who are leaving the church for Protestant churches are more interested in spiritual nourishment than doctrinal issues. Tinkering with the wording of the creed at Mass is not going to help. No one except the Vatican and the bishops cares whether Jesus is “one in being” with the Father or “consubstantial” with the Father. That the hierarchy thinks this is important shows how out of it they are.

The first sentence is true. That’s just a description of the tea leaves. The second sentence does not follow from the first. For a start, the liturgical changes are precisely about “spiritual nourishment” rather than “doctrinal issues”. Secondly, quite a few people other than “the Vatican and the bishops” care about whether Jesus is “one in being” or “consubstantial” with the Father. Thirdly, no one has pretended that the liturgical changes will single-handedly stem the “exodus” from the Church. In fact, there’s no reason to draw the new translation of the mass into this argument. At most it will be a tool which could be used for deeper faith formation and in that “more” that we need in our Catholic liturgical practice. On the other hand, attitudes like that of Fr Reese’s in this piece will miss even this small opportunity for doing something positive.

From my own perspectives, the tea leaves in this survey show that what Catholics are looking for when they become protestant is a combination of deeper faith formation and more… – I can’t quite grasp the noun I’m looking for here – …in worship. But it isn’t, as Fr Reese suggests, that “more creativity with the liturgy is needed”. No. Bunging in a liturgical dance here or a “meaningful symbolic action” there isn’t going to make much difference. The more that is needed is something about the gravitas of worship – taking the sacredness of the liturgical action seriously in such a way that it truly serves to bring the worshipper into connection with the divine. We could go on about that. But more “creativity”? I don’t think so…

Father Reese’s second conclusion:

Second, thanks to Pope Pius XII, Catholic scripture scholars have had decades to produce the best thinking on scripture in the world. That Catholics are leaving to join evangelical churches because of the church teaching on the Bible is a disgrace. Too few homilists explain the scriptures to their people. Few Catholics read the Bible.

I think he meant to write that “the church’s teaching OF the bible is a disgrace” – because the Churches teaching ON the bible is in fact exactly that of the evangelical protestants: it is the fully inspired, infallible Word of God as a whole and in all its parts. As the Second Vatican Council said in Dei Verbum 9 “Sacred Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit”. I know that some Evangelicals have a more fundamentalistic interpretation of the Scriptures than the Catholic Church, but I don’t think Fr Reese is suggesting that this is “a disgrace” for the Church. No, I think he is quite right about the need for better and more scriptural homilies and more bible reading (aka lectio divina). But this is teaching OF the bible, not teaching ON the bible.

And he is certainly wrong on his next statement that “The church needs to acknowledge that understanding the Bible is more important than memorizing the catechism.” No it isn’t. The two are not contradictory. You can effectively teach the bible through teaching the catechism and vice versa. Just look at the index of bible passages in the back of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I’d actually like to see a Catholic edition of the bible with references in the Catechism in the side margins or footnotes. When I teach at Anima Education, I insist that my students bring along the two foundational text books: the Holy Scriptures and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. By rejecting the teaching of the Catechism, Reese is here rejecting a fundamental source for learning the Scriptures and deepening spiritual formation.

And now for his final prgnostication on the tea-leaf statistics:

Finally, the Pew data shows that two-thirds of Catholics who become Protestants do so before they reach the age of 24. The church must make a preferential option for teenagers and young adults or it will continue to bleed. Programs and liturgies that cater to their needs must take precedence over the complaints of fuddy-duddies and rubrical purists.

Okay, again the first two sentences are unobjectionable. The first is what the statistics show. Actually, my guess is that when we talk of Catholics becoming Protestants “before they reach the age of 24” we are actually talking about people who were baptised Catholic but not actually formed as Catholics finding faith for the first time in Protestant Churches during their teens and early twenties. This is a story that is repeated many times by guests on EWTN’s “Journey Home” program. Ad infinitum. By God’s grace, some of these folk do find their way back into the Catholic Church later in life in their search for truth.

And so too, I have no complaint about the second sentence. By all means, let’s have a “preferential option” for under 35’s. There’s a real place for programs there, but a greater place for direct engagement on a personal level, especially from priests and significant lay role models and mentors. But we don’t “design” liturgies to cater for the “needs” of any particular group in the Church. The liturgy is “designed” for the worship of God and to enable us mortals to do that effectively. (I guess that is a “need”). The quip about “fuddy duddies” and “rubrical purists” at the end was unnecessary. They are not, for a start, the same thing, nor are they, secondly, confined to the ranks of those who are Fr Reese’s age. Many young people are quite capable of knowing when rubrics are being mucked up by the old fuddy-duddies who are being “creative” with the liturgy.

So, lots to learn from the statistics of the Pew Forum survey. Just what the lessons are, however, will depend on who is reading the tea-leaves.

Since he concluded Blessed Pope JPII’s series on the canticles of Morning and Evening Prayer, Pope Benedict’s Wednesday Audience catechesis has been concentrating on the Saints of the Church, starting with the apostles and, well, six years later having covered just about everybody who was anybody in the calendar of saints.

Yesterday he began something new: a catechetical series on prayer. This will be very interesting indeed…

See the Rome Reports Youtube segment of the Pope teaching in English here.

See text of the first catechesis on prayer here.

In Adam A. J. DeVille’s survey of various Orthodox appraisals of the Roman Primacy (in his Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy), he notes the common insistence that the Primacy cannot be exercised in such a way as to “ride roughshod over the bishops” (see my previous post). On the basis that each bishop in each diocese directly exercises the office of Christ the Head of the Church in that diocese, they argue that it is theologically impossible for there to be a “higher authority” over the diocesan bishop.

Yet DeVille offers an interesting comment on Thomas Hopko’s expressed criticism in a footnote on page 178 his book. He writes:

Hopko lists several changes he insists upon (eg., deleting the filioque; using a Palamite understanding of uncreated divine energies; and denying the existence of “Purgatory” as Catholic theology has traditionally understood it) as well as liturgical reforms (eg., mandatory baptisms by immersion only; Holy Communion always under both kinds; widespread parochial celebration of “Vespers, Compline, Matins and the Hours in the churches”; the restoration of “the practice of having the priestly celebrant in the Latin liturgy face the altar with the faithful”; and, finally, the possible “enforcing [of] the ancient ascetical and penitential practice of forbidding the celebration of the Holy Eucharist…on weekdays of Great Lent)…. It is hard to know what to make of it… Most disturbing of all is the lack of logic in Hopko’s paper: he demands the pope be stripped of almost all his powers, but equally Hopko demands that the pope use those powers…to enforce or forbid certain things that no pope has ever attempted to enforce or forbid. Is the pope to use those powers one last time to enforce and forbid everything Hopko demands and then foreswear the use of those powers ever after? Is he to use them one last time and then be stripped of them – and if so, by whom?

This seems to me to be a very insightful comment. In discussing the intersection of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome and the jurisdictional powers of the same bishop, interesting anomalies arise.

The one that concerns me here is the question of how the pope is to act as a agent of unity among the bishops of the world without some degree of jurisdiction over them. Interestingly, this was exactly what Pope John Paul II expressed in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint, when he opened up the possibility of revisioning the way in which the Petrine Ministry is carried out, “while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission”.

The basic model put forward by our Orthodox brothers and sisters is that the primacy should be exercised as a primacy of love, of mutual encouragement – a kind of moral primacy without jurisdictional powers. This is not unlike the suggestion that Martin Luther made at the time of the Reformation in the Smalkald Articles (Part II, Article IV: Of the Papacy), when he said:

Therefore the Church can never be better governed and preserved than if we all live under one head, Christ, and all the bishops equal in office (although they be unequal in gifts), be diligently joined in unity of doctrine, faith, Sacraments, prayer, and works of love, etc., as St. Jerome writes that the priests at Alexandria together and in common governed the churches, as did also the apostles, and afterwards all bishops throughout all Christendom, until the Pope raised his head above all.

It is a grand hope – which seems to be predicated upon a redeemed human nature that is predominately directed to good rather than to evil. Which is surprising in a theologian who otherwise had such a dark view of human nature – even regenerated human nature – which he believed to remain under the power of original sin even after baptism.

The “primacy of love” principle sounds great in theory – but how would it work in practice? Because practically speaking, have we not seen just how such a model of “unity in love” without a co-existing “primacy of jurisdiction” would work? We see it not only in jurisdictional confusion that exists among the Orthodox (principally in North America) but also in the Anglican Communion, in which all bishops are completely independent and able to act as they wish and teach what they wish without any checks or balances. The history of the Anglican Communion in the 20th Century – as it struggled to find a way in which a church that was never intended to be a world-wide communion could maintain the ties of fellowship without a central and empowered primacy. And then even more painfully under the leadership of the current Archbishop of Canterbuy, we have seen that no amount of loving encouragement could hold together the centrifugal forces that have developed within that communion.

One of the features of the exercise of the papal primacy most regularly criticised by the Orthodox is the practice whereby the Pope appoints all bishops everywhere in the Latin Church (nb. the Pope does not appoint bishops in the Eastern Rite Churches). But is not this power of appointment – and the corollary power of dismissal of bishops when they act in such a way as to threaten the unity of the Church’s faith and communion – in some way realistically necessary for the maintenance of Universal communion?

What are the alternatives? It would be possible that the Bishop of Rome exercise his powers in other jurisdictions much the same way as he does in the Eastern Catholic Churches. But that would still require that someone – a patriarch or a metropolitan or a local synod of bishops – have the authority of appointing (at least by recognitio) bishops in their area of jurisdiction and, yes, also the authority to depose bishops when that necessity unhappily arises. To adopt a situation where every bishop in every diocese has complete independence to act and teach as he sees personally fit – would be a recipe for the dissolution of that unity which now so happily adheres in the Latin Church.

It does not seem to me that there is anyway in which we can do away with some kind of system of authority – whether exercised directly by the Pope or locally by other “higher authorities” – that provides checks and balances even over diocesan ordinaries. Primacy requires jurisdiction, even if that primacy is in some sense devolved into more local expressions.

I welcome any thoughts you may have on the matter. My only limit in this discussion will be that we will not discuss the matter of any particular case. Well, not any particular Australian case anyway. Got that? Good. Go for it.

Another quotation from Benedict XVI’s Beatification Homily for Blessed John Paul II:

Today’s second reading also speaks to us of faith. Saint Peter himself, filled with spiritual enthusiasm, points out to the newly-baptized the reason for their hope and their joy. I like to think how in this passage, at the beginning of his First Letter, Peter does not use language of exhortation; instead, he states a fact. He writes: “you rejoice”, and he adds: “you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Pet1:6, 8-9). All these verbs are in the indicative, because a new reality has come about in Christ’s resurrection, a reality to which faith opens the door. “This is the Lord’s doing”, says the Psalm (118:23), and “it is marvelous in our eyes”, the eyes of faith.

Trust Papa Benny. A grammar lesson in the middle of a two million strong celebration!

But it touched a chord with me. Since Easter, I have been meditating deeply on “joy”. I heard and read all the texts that speak of “Easter Joy” and I have realised that I am hungry for “joy”. Day-to-day life is so mundane. So ordinary. Occasional blips of interest, and occasional deep troughs of despair. I am not a naturally depressive individual (one of my work colleagues calls me “Mr Happy”), so that latter are generally not long or particulary dark (although a recent $2500 bill for an unexpected repair job on my 1996 Diahatsu Pyzar was not a welcome surprise). Yet life does seem so awfully, awfully mundane. Is there any “joy” in my life any more? Am I capable of experiencing “joy”?

My answer to that question is, in my meditation, “Absolutely!” Yet I am also aware that an essential component of “joy” which makes it different from simple (?) happiness, is it’s unexpected nature. When “joy” happens in my life, it has always been a result of an unlooked for or sudden surprise of good news. Like the shepherds out in the fields, who suddenly received “Glad tidings of Great Joy”, or the women at the tomb, who heard the declaration: “He is not here, he is risen!”

And this joy is not something, according to the Pope, that St Peter said we “might” have, or “may” have, or “should pray for”, or even “should expect”: no, he says “you rejoice”, “you have joy”. Is it because “you have faith”? If so, Lord, help my unbelief that I may have JOY!

From the Beatification homily:

During his first solemn Mass in Saint Peter’s Square [Blessed John Paul II spoke] in the unforgettable words: “Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors to Christ!” What the newly-elected Pope asked of everyone, he was himself the first to do: society, culture, political and economic systems he opened up to Christ, turning back with the strength of a titan – a strength which came to him from God – a tide which appeared irreversible. By his witness of faith, love and apostolic courage, accompanied by great human charisma, this exemplary son of Poland helped believers throughout the world not to be afraid to be called Christian, to belong to the Church, to speak of the Gospel. In a word: he helped us not to fear the truth, because truth is the guarantee of liberty. To put it even more succinctly: he gave us the strength to believe in Christ, because Christ is Redemptor hominis, the Redeemer of man. This was the theme of his first encyclical, and the thread which runs though all the others.

Thanks to Miss Jane who wrote in to suggest that the Vatican Website might be the place to go to for the beatification ceremony this afternoon. This suggestion is backed up by Rocco Palmo who writes:

Thanks to its newly-launched video player, Vatican television will feature both tonight’s and tomorrow’s ceremonies live and on demand, with the option of either “clean” audio or translation and commentary in any of five languages.

According to my calculations, the Beatification Mass begins at 5pm EST.

At his blog, Glosses from an Old Manse, Lutheran Pastor Mark Henderson writes in reaction to the report in The Telegraph that “blood taken from Pope John Paul II during his final hospitalization will be used as the official relic for veneration after he is beatified.”
Pastor Mark asks the question which only a Lutheran could ask:

What would Luther say?

No doubt something like this:

“the Word of God is the holy of holies; in fact, it is the only holy thing we Christians know and have. Even if we had the bones of all the saints and all holy, blessed objects heaped together, we would be none the better for the collection. All these relics are lifeless objects that can sanctify no-one. God’s Word, however, is the treasure that sanctifies everything. By it all the saints themselves were sanctified.” Martin Luther, The 3rd Commandment, The Large Catechism

Thank God for Martin Luther!

Well, Luther’s point, shorn of its polemic, is not actually an argument against the veneration of relics of the saints. We Catholics readily grant that all holiness has its source in God alone. It is useful to consult the new translation of Eucharistic Prayer II on this score. Before the consecration, the priest says:

You are indeed Holy, O Lord,
the fount of all holiness.
Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray,
by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall,
so that they may become for us
the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

By the action of Christ in his Word and by the Power of the Holy Spirit, the Father consecrates the bread and wine to make them the “Holy Things” of the Sacrament. Apart from God’s Word and Spirit, they would be just bread and wine. Once God has sanctified the gifts, however, they become a source of sanctification for us too.

Now, I am not going to claim an exact parallel between the transformation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist and the transformation of the human body through the sanctifying power of God’s Word and Sacraments, but I think there IS an analogy to be made. After all, does not St Paul himself call the bodies of baptised Christians the “temple of the Holy Spirit”? (1 cor 6:19). That is a big statement. The Temple in Jerusalem, sanctified by the presence of God’s Holy Name, was where the Jews were told by Sacred Scripture to seek sanctification. By analogy, the bodies of the saints are likewise places where sanctifying power may be found. Granted, the holiness is not theirs by nature, but by gift. Yet unless we are to become spiritualist Gnostics, we must say that God sanctifies not only the souls but the bodies of his people.

I was struck by this soon after I became a Catholic, when the relics of St Therese of Liseux came to our parish here in Melbourne. As Director of Music at the time, I had the duty of preparing all music for all the services of that 24 hour period. I was therefore confronted directly with the very concrete devotion of Catholics to their saints. And I have come to see that it is a good thing, an expression of the sacramentality of our faith, and of the real and concrete hope of redemption, not only of our souls, but also of our bodies.

As Luther said in Pastor Mark’s quote: “God’s Word…sanctifies everything. By it all the saints themselves were sanctified.” And thus the mortal remains of the saints ARE, even by Luther’s own logic, sanctified. Anything that is sanctified by God’s Word can itself become a conduit for that sanctity. Hence the veneration of relics.

Well. That’s what Schütz has to say on the matter. As if anyone would care about that, either!

Rocco Palmo, in Rome for the beatification, put up this excerpt from Pope John Paul II’s inauguration homily in 1978, which he tells us will be the second reading for the feast-day of Blessed John Paul II in the Office for Readings. In it, the Blessed Pontiff related the ancient legend:

According to an ancient tradition, Peter tried to leave Rome during Nero’s persecution. However, the Lord intervened and came to meet him. Peter spoke to him and asked. “Quo vadis, Domine?” — “Where are you going, Lord?” And the Lord answered him at once: “I am going to Rome to be crucified again.” Peter went back to Rome and stayed here until his crucifixion.

It reminded me of another “new thing” that I realised while celebrating the Easter Triduum this year. I was at St Aloysius on Maundy Thursday (as you know) and heard the following reading from John 13 (in connection with the footwashing) in Latin:

Dixit Jesus:… Quaeretis me; et sicut dixi Judaeis, quo ego vado, vos non potestis venire: et vobis dico modo…
Dicit ei Simon Petrus: Domine, quo vadis? Respondit Jesus: Quo ego vado non potes me modo sequi: sequeris autem postea.
Dicit ei Petrus: Quare non possum te sequi modo? animam meam pro te ponam.
Respondit ei Jesus: Animam tuam pro me pones? Amen, amen dico tibi: non cantabit gallus, donex ter me neges.

Reading this I became aware that the legend operates as a kind of book end to this story, in much the same way that the threefold questioning of Peter after the resurrection (“Simon, son of John, do you love me?) bookends Peter’s threeforld denial. Peter could not follow Jesus at this point, he was not ready to lay down his life for Jesus at this point; but afterwards, later, finally, he would ask “Lord, where are you going?” and make the final decision to follow Christ to the point of laying down his life for his Lord.

I guess Karol Wojtyla saw this as his destiny too when “Peter came to Rome” from Poland in 1978. This goes a long way to explaining why, even in his final illness, he never once considered abdication from the Petrine Office. He was following his Lord. Tomorrow’s ceremony is the Church’s declaration that he has indeed gone where Christ has gone.

There is a rather one-sided article in this morning’s Age “World’s future is a crowded place”. It’s basic argument is that while world population growth is slowing, we will still reach a peak of about 10.5 billion by 2050. The argument continues that the world will have difficulty sustaining this kind of population, and that the secret to success is “empowering women” through education, which means largely artificial contraception. The effect of abortion isn’t even mentioned.

This is a one-sided presentation on many different levels. For a start, the world can easily produce the amount of food required for a population of this level – war and conflict and selfishness and greed and bad management on the part of many nations (including our own) are to blame if we cannot achieve this. Secondly, if eduction of women and raising their status is key to balancing population growth, then natural family planning would be a sensible part of this education and “empowerment”.

But most seriously, the article fails to address the fact that there is actually negative population growth in many “developed”, Western countries, especially in Europe. There is a side article by Nicky Phillips (“Growing pains and gains” – not available online) in which she writes: “The final stage occurs when a country’s birth and death rate come into balance and the population stabilises, a situation that is occurring in most developed countries – including Australia.”

Actually, the “final stage” is not this at all, as I have pointed out. The “final stage” is when our birth rate drops below our death rate, a stage which has, as I said, already been reached in many countries.

Recently we held a successful (if poorly attended due to external circumstances) Catholic Muslim Symposium here in Melbourne on Marriage and Family life. The next Catholic Muslim Symposium, planned for late June or early July, will precisely be on this topic of Population. It should be interesting. I will let you know when we have a date. It’s a fair bet that both Catholic and Muslim speakers at the Symposium will differ largely from the standard Fairfax line on this topic…