Sentire Cum Ecclesia

How many of you have a “sacred trust”?

By “sacred trust”, I mean a godly duty to which you have publically bound yourself by an oath in the presence of God and in his name.

Off hand, I can think of several such “sacred trusts”:

Holy Orders
Marriage (including Fatherhood/Motherhood)
Religious Life
Military service
Apostolic consecration

Can you think of others? It should be obvious that I am not here thinking of a job, or a profession or a career, or even of a vocation in the general sense of what we aim to do with our lives. I am thinking of those sacred duties for the fulfillment of which a person will vow to sacrifice every other priority in life.

Thinking in these terms may help us to come to a deeper understanding of the issues involved in the debate about clerical celibacy.

There is nothing which essentially – that is, by the nature of these sacred trusts in themselves – excludes a person from holding more than one sacred trust at a time.

For instance, let us take the example of one who is under a military oath. Many military personnel are also husbands/wives and fathers/mothers. Some, such as chaplains, also have the sacred trust of holy orders, and, as we know from history, it is even possible for military oaths and oaths to religious life to be held at the same time. But the fact is that there are real conflicts in all of these cases. A soldier is called away from his family to fight, and knows that he may not come home. His duty as a soldier is in conflict with his sacred trust to his family. A military chaplain may have cases where his obligation to Caesar comes into conflict with his obligation to the Church. And indeed we know what happened to the military religious orders…

Some sacred trusts fit well together (eg. Holy Orders and Religious life – although there have been times in history when religious orders have recognised that priestly obligations can be in tension with the charism of the order); others don’t fit well together at all (for instance, no one is debating whether monks and nuns should be obligated to celibacy!). The difficulty is always in relation to the “to the exclusion of every other priority” clause in a sacred trust. When sacred trusts come into conflict, the result is failure to completely fulfil one or the other trust. In other words, one or the other must take priority at any given time.

In regard to the celibacy or marriage of Christian priests or ministers, there is nothing which in essence excludes those in the state of Holy Matrimony from also entering into Holy Orders. But the growing sense of the Church over the centuries has been that some forms of ordained ministry – in particular priesthood and especially episcopacy – demand such a sacred commitment above all other priorities that a real conflict of interest and priorities exists between this sacred duty and the sacred duty of Holy Matrimony (which is also a commitment above all other priorities).

As has been noted in the comments on an earlier posting, I was once in ordained ministry at the same time as being a husband and father. I therefore have some first hand experience of this conflict – although I hasten to add that my experience is exactly that: only my experience. I know that there are many married clergy out there who will say that by and large they have been able to balance the commitment to the sacred trust of ministry and the commitment to the sacred trust of marriage. But the operative word here is “balance”: it is a balancing game. A married minister must always prioritise between his double commitment. I am fairly certain that if you did a survey of all married ministers, whether priests or ministers or deacons, or Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox, you would not find one person who would tell you that they had never experienced this conflict. AND in case you did find married priest/minister who said they had never experienced such a conflict between their ecclesiastical and domestic obligations, I would suggest you ask their wife or husband for a second opinion!

What this comes down to is this: How do we understand the sacred trust of priesthood? How do we understand the sacred trust of marriage (and family)? I have no hesitation in saying that I understand my sacred trust to my wife and family as being of such high priority that NOTHING should ever come before it. I would guess too that most of us would understand the sacred duty of priesthood to require a similar level of commitment. You can, of course, downgrade one or the other commitments to the level of functional operations; or (perhaps less harshly) at least to “priority no. 1” and “priority no.2”. But if the nature of both sacred trusts is that they require the highest prioritisation of that trust above all else, they cannot well co-exist.

I end with an anecdote that I never tire of repeating – as much for my sake as for anyone else’s. About a year after I left the Lutheran ministry, my four year old daughter came to me and said: “Daddy, you used to be a pastor, didn’t you?”. “Yes,” I replied, wondering where this was going. “But now you are my daddy, aren’t you?”. Yes, Maddy, yes I am, and I always will be.

I understand that the Holy Father’s second volume of his book “Jesus of Nazareth” is now at the translators. The first volume made a beautiful and timely argument for holding together what many “scholars” today prefer to separate: Jesus of Narareth and the Christ of God. (See here for a review of the book in The Times which takes decided issue with this approach and roundly condemns “canonical exegesis” as “groundless” and “an approach to biblical studies [which] would force back Catholic Bible experts, already the objects of frequent papal disapproval in Jesus of Nazareth, to a preCopernican stage of history”).

Now there is a remarkably sensible article in the New York Times, featured in Cathnews this morning, by Ross Douthat titled “Choose your own Jesus”. He begins:

Here’s a striking passage — an aside, really — from Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on the continuing (and continuing, and continuing) quest for the historical Jesus:

“James Tabor, a professor of religious studies, in his 2006 book “The Jesus Dynasty,” takes surprisingly seriously the old Jewish idea that Jesus was known as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Pantera—as well attested a tradition as any [emphasis mine — RD], occurring in Jewish texts of the second century, in which a Jesus ben Pantera makes several appearances, and the name is merely descriptive, not derogatory.”

The whole problem with two centuries worth of historical Jesus scholarship is summed up in those seven words: “As well attested a tradition as any.”

The article is worth reading in its entirety, but here is Douthat’s main point – which squares well with that of Pope Benedict/Professor Ratzinger:

In the event, the synoptic gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles do make absolutely extraordinary claims, and so modern scholars have every right to read them with a skeptical eye, and question their factual reliability. But if you downgrade the earliest Christian documents or try to bracket them entirely, the documentary evidence that’s left is so intensely unreliable (dated, fragmentary, obviously mythological, etc.) that scholars can scavenge through it to build whatever Jesus they prefer — and then say, with Gopnik, that their interpretation of the life of Christ is “as well attested” as any other. Was Jesus a wandering sage? Maybe so. A failed revolutionary? Sure, why not. A lunatic who fancied himself divine? Perhaps. An apocalyptic prophet? There’s an app for that …

But this isn’t history: It’s “choose your own Jesus,” and it’s become an enormous waste of time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with saying that the supernaturalism of the Christian canon makes it an unreliable guide to who Jesus really was. But if we’re honest with ourselves, then we need to acknowledge what this means: Not the beginning of a fruitful quest for the Jesus of history, but the end of it.

ABC Online is reporting Priests’ ‘wives’ speak out against celibacy (HT to Matthias):

About a dozen women have written an open letter to the pope challenging the Church’s position that priestly celibacy is a sacred commitment.

“As far as I’m concerned, celibacy is completely useless,” said one of the signatories, Stefania Salomone. Ms Salomone, 42, had a five-year relationship with a priest. She argues celibacy was introduced for financial reasons, alluding to the fact that clergy without family were less expensive to house.

She also points to the Church’s earlier history for evidence of marriage. “People forget that there were 39 married popes,” she said. [Quick quiz: name them!]

The letter was partly a reaction to recent comments by the pope upholding the nearly 900-year-old requirement of celibacy for priests, calling it “the sign of full devotion” and of an “entire commitment to the Lord”.

Written in March, the letter was initially kept confidential, but late last month it was leaked to news website GlobalPost, and the women decided to tell their stories. “We told ourselves it was time to react,” Ms Salomone said. “Only three women agreed to sign the letter by name, because of the fear that if a woman goes public with her story, her companion priest would break up with her.”

Well, I am sure that that will make the Pope sit up and take notice. It is probably even now in the “for further attention” pile along with Hans Küng’s recent open letter…

There was a story yesterday in Cathnews drawing our attention to an ABC TV Lateline story “Unique Ukrainian priests escape scandal”. The Lateline report began with:

It seems not a week goes by without some devastating revelation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church being reported in the international media. But there’s one nation where the Catholic Church has so far avoided scandal. It’s in Ukraine, where millions follow the Greek Catholic Church, a unique branch of Catholicism, which is loyal to Rome and the Pope but with one major difference. Its priests are allowed to marry and have families and its followers say that makes all the difference.

You can see where the argument is headed a mile off, can’t you? I don’t believe this story is being pushed by anyone in the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and, as I will say in just a moment, I think it would be better not to push this line for a couple of reasons. But the first comment on the Cathnews report to this story sums up the problems with it. Paul Mees of Melbourne writes:

This was an uninformed story, even by Lateline’s standards. The optional celibacy rule is hardly ‘unique’ to Ukraine or the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Mr. Hurmont thinks he has discovered something new, but Lateline could have interviewed married Catholic priests in Australia, had it bothered to do its homework.

And as for married clergy preventing sex abuse scandals, Lateline might have interviewed Anglicans from Brisbane, Adelaide or Hobart, who could soon have put them right on that one.

Lateline failed to mention that the Ukrainian Catholic Church was an illegal organisation in Ukraine until two decades ago, i.e. the period when most of the sexual abuse that is now coming to light occurred. This report deserves an F for Journalism 101.

But there is another side to this story too. In a report this week, John Allen writes about renewed pressure being placed on the Ukrainian Catholic Church by the Service of Ukraine (SBU), the successor to the KGB. It is worth keeping an eye on this story – and keeping the Ukrainian Catholic Church in your prayers – for several reasons, one of them being that Fr. Borys Gudziak, the main character in the report, is coming here on a speaking tour later in the year.

Allen notes that there is another angle on these developments worth considering:

One reason that these developments have not galvanized much Catholic interest in the West is that the rise to power of the Yanukovich government in February more or less coincided with the explosion of the sexual abuse crisis in Germany, which quickly brought Pope Benedict XVI into the center of the storm. Tight focus on the scandals has made it difficult to tell any other Catholic story, and other stories gain traction only to the extent that they have something to say about the crisis.

In the case of Ukraine, finding a connection is actually not as much of a stretch as it might seem. In fact, the growing pressure facing Greek Catholics has implications for a key point about the Vatican’s response to the sexual abuse crisis: The question of cooperation with the police and other civil authorities.

…Such a policy [of universal mandatory reporting of sexual abuse] amounts to a no-brainer in parts of the world where the rule of law holds, and where the police enjoy basic public trust. But consider what it might mean in a place like Ukraine — where the police and security forces are often seen as corrupt and subject to political manipulation, and where Catholics in particular regard them as agents of a hostile regime trying to hobble the church. (Gudziak, for example, says he believes himself to be under regular surveillance by the SBU.)

In that context, a binding requirement under canon law of cooperation with the police could seem self-destructive.

It is something worth considering.

I would also argue that it would be self-destructive of any single part of the Catholic Church – or indeed any Christian community at all – to boast of having “avoided” the scandals (I am not saying, please note, that the Ukrainians are doing this – it is the ABC Lateline report that was ill-considered). The sad thing about this kind of abuse is not what you know, but rather what you DON’T know.

The newswires are carrying this story this morning: Vatican official tells paedophile priests to expect damnation. It is a classic case of the “chinese whispers” effects which often happens with stories eminating from the Holy See. I was especially surprised to read that Msgr Charles J. Scicluna (the man who has been in charge of handling the canonical response to charges of sexual abuse by priests since Cardinal Ratzinger appointed him in 2001) was reported to have said outright “that those who hurt children should be thrown into the sea with a millstone around their neck.”

The circumstances was a “service of reparation” – actually an hour long service of Eucharistic adoration including a meditation by Msgr Scicluna and ending in Benediction – which was organised by the seminarians in Rome last Sunday. The full text of Msgr Scicluna’s mediation is helpfully provided by Zenit here.

John Allen’s report on the service and on what Msgr Scicluna actually said is better than The Guardian’s, but even he loses some of the nuance of the meditation, which was not quite as pointed as he reports it. Allen reports that:

Christian friendship, Scicluna said, is “submitted to the law of God,” so if a member of the church is an “occasion of sin,” then a believer “has no other choice … but to cut this tie.”

Weeding out abusers, Scicluna implied, is a form of “divine surgery” intended to save the body by amputating a diseased part…

The remedy to such scandals offered by God as the “Divine Surgeon,” according to Scicluna, is to “cut out [disease] in order to heal,” and to “amputate in order to restore health.”

Beyond such drastic measures, Scicluna also proposed the “preventive medicine” of solid formation for future priests, calling on them to be on fire with the faith, making them salt and light for the world.

I am not quite sure that this is exactly what Scicluna was actually saying. Here is the section from the actual meditation:

But the Lord, who does not enjoy the loss of his servants and does not want eternal death for his creatures, immediately adds a remedy for condemnation, a drug for the disease, relief from the danger of eternal damnation. His are the strong words of the Divine surgeon that cuts to heal, amputates to cure, prunes so the vine bears much fruit:

“And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off” (Mark 9:43).
“And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off” (Mark 9:45).
“And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out” (Mark 9:47).

Several Holy Fathers interpret “the hand,” “the foot,” and “the eye” as a friend dear to our heart with which we share our life, to whom we are bound by ties of affection, harmony and solidarity. There is a limit to this relationship. Christian friendship submits to the law of God. If my friend, my companion, a person dear to me is for me an occasion of sin, a stumbling block for me in journey, I have no other choice. According to the criterion of the Lord, this relationship must be cut. Who would deny the agony of such a choice? Is this a cruel amputation? Yet the Lord is clear: It is better for me to go alone in the Kingdom (without a hand, without a foot, without an eye), than to go with my friend “into hell, into unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43; cf. Mark 9: 45,47).

He then goes on to quote St Paul to the Romans in Chapter 7, where he says:

The reference to the hand, the foot, and the eye recalls the words of the Apostle Paul in the letter to the Romans:

“So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members [my emphasis] another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (Romans 7:21-25).

The Apostle of the Gentiles, who became a witness to the Gospel of grace (Romans 1:16a), does not surrender to our propensity to sin. He exhorts the Romans with fiery words that invite them to conversion and fidelity: “I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification” (Romans 6:19).

He then goes on to speak about the need for the “fire” of God to purify us of our attachments:

“This effect of the divine fire, however, frightens us, we are afraid of being ‘burned,’ we prefer to stay just as we are. This is because our life is often formed according to the logic of having, of possessing and not the logic of self-giving. Many people believe in God and admire the person of Jesus Christ, but when they are asked to lose something of themselves, then they retreat, they are afraid of the demands of faith. There is the fear of giving up something nice to which we are attached [my emphasis]; the fear that following Christ deprives us of freedom, of certain experiences, of a part of ourselves. On one hand, we want to be with Jesus, follow him closely, and, on the other hand, we are afraid of the consequences that this brings with it.

So my reading of what Msgr Scicluna was talking about is that the “friends” from which I must detach myself are in fact those attachments that lead me into sin, rather than particular persons from which I must cut myself off.

As for the comment about being thrown into the sea with a millstone around their neck, Msgr Scicluna was not, of course, advocating a new universal canonical policy, but simply quoting Jesus (Mark 9:42) as a warning to those who make themselves an “obstacle” in the way of children coming to Jesus, who “hinder their spiritual progress”, who “let them be seduced by evil” and who “make children the subject of [their] impure greed”.

Perhaps all this was just a little to subtle for the news reporters to understand. Or perhaps I am reading it wrong. What do you think?

This half-page ad appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Age. I am not quite sure what to make of it. Any ideas?

I wanted today to show my daughters some of the “Hitler rant” parodies on YouTube (this was the one I was attempting to find), only to find that I could hardly find any of my favourites. The story is here. How sad. One would have thought that all that free publicity would be good for the producers of the film. Some people take the law far too seriously. The really sad thing is that now we can’t have a “Hitler Rant” about Constantine Films pulling all the “Hitler Rant” parodies off YouTube.

Update: Actually – and ironically – I just found one. Apologies for the language used. Funny ending. One warning: by the time you click this link, it might not be there any more.

Last Sunday night Compass featured a film which was mainly made in the Melbourne Archdiocese called “Challenge, Change, Faith: Catholic Australia and the Second Vatican Council”. It was produced for the Burke Family Trust by X-Ray Vision. It features a lot of people we know, and uses some film footage from the Melbourne archives that I have been lucky enough to see in full (you will see Rachel Naughton, our archivist, listed in the credits).

It starts with our own Archbishop celebrating an Extraordinary Form mass at Caulfield (pick the people you know in the congregation!), and then launches into a description of Catholic life in Australia in the 1950’s (predominantly Irish), the election of John XXIII, the Council, the changes to the liturgy, the aftermath of the Council.

It includes a real mixed bag of commentators – everyone from Cardinal Pell to Bishop Robinson to Fr Bob Maguire – but has the virtue of telling the narrative by stringing together excerpts from these interviews: it is “all in their own words”. For this reason, the documentary actually invites deeper study and conversation: you want to say “Yes, that’s exactly right”, or “No, that isn’t the way it was”, or “Yes, but…”. There is no almighty omnipresent invisible narrator who gives the authoritative interpretation – you are aware that you are dealing with impressions and personal stories and interpretations. While the interviewees are perhaps weighted more on the “left” than on the “right”, the producers are careful not play the stories off against one another. Nor are they heavy handed with the message. The archival film footage – both local and from Rome – is really excellent.

If you missed it, you can watch it all here on the Compass Website and find out more about it (or purchase a copy for educational purposes) by visiting this website.

I read this passage this morning from N.T. Wright’s “Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vison“, on page 164. I thought it worth putting up the whole paragraph for your consideration.

When, by clear implication, I am charged with encouraging believers to put their trust in someone or something ‘other than the crucified and resurrected Savior’, I want to plead guilty – to this extent and to this extent only: that I also say, every time I repeat one of the great historic creeds, that I trust in the holy spirit.

Of course, within Trinitarian theology one is quick to say that this is not something other than trusting in Jesus the Messiah, since it is his own spirit; the Father who sent Jesus is now sending ‘the Spirit of the Son’ (Galatians 4.4-7). But the point about the holy spirit, at least within Paul’s theology, is that when the spirit comes the result is human freedom rather than human slavery. When God works within a community, or an individual, the result is that they ‘will and work for his good pleasure’ (Philippians 2.13). The pastoral theology which comes from reflecting on the work of the spirit is the glorious paradox that the more the spirit is at work the more the human will is stirred up to think things through to take free decisions, to develop chosen and hard-woon habits of life and to put to death the sinful, and often apparently not freely chosen, habits of death. Sin is what bubbles up unbidden from the depths of the human heart, so that all one has to do is go with the flow. That has the appearance of freedom, but is in fact slavery, as Jesus himself declared. True freedom is the gift of the spirit, the result of grace; but, precisely because it is freedom for as well as freedom from [this emphasis, BTW, has always been a central emphasis in Ratzinger], it isn’t simply a matter of being forced now to be good, against our wills and without our co-operation (what damage to a genuine pastoral theology has been done by making a bogey-word out of the Pauline term synergism, ‘working together with God’), but a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I too am doing. If we don’t believe that, we don’t believe in the spirit, and we don’t believe Paul’s teaching. Virtue is what happens – I know many in the Reformation tradition shudder at the thought of the very word ‘virtue’, but there is no help for it if we are to be true to scripture and to Trinitarian theology – when the spirit enables the Christian freely to choose, freely to develop, freely to be shaped by, freely to become that which is pleasing to God.

Another TV history professor that I really admire is Simon Shama. I was totally engrossed by his “History of Britian”, both the series, and later the book. So when I saw a new audio book in the library, “The American Future: A History” by Shama, I pounced. By last Thursday night, I had listened to about half of it, and was surprised to look in the TV guide for the evening and see that the first episode of a TV series based on the book (or is it the other way around?) was showing that night. As it turns out, the book and the TV series seems to begin differently (probably because the book concentrated on Obama’s election, and his presidency is not exactly hot news at the moment), but it appears that from next week’s episode, the book and series will be back in sync with a concentration on the history of American beligerance… (it is very interesting, and a story well told, I assure you!).

Any way, yesterday, I was listening to the end of disc 7 – I don’t know what chapter or page that is in the book – and I came across this passage at the end of his treatment of the emancipation of the slaves:

The fervour of the abolitionist evangelicals complicates the way we might feel about the wall of separation erected by the Virginia Statute and the First Amendment between morality and politics.

Of course, it was entirely possible to arrive at an abhorrence for slavery from rationally derived ethics, the degradation of man to commodity, the violation of natural right to sovereignty over person and so on.

Historically though, both in the early nineteenth century and again in the 1960s, the force of shame directed at slave holders and segregationists was religious. Realistically, it was unlikely that the propagation of enlightenment views of humanity would have swayed millions of nineteenth century white Americans against slavery. After all such moral principles convinced Jefferson and Patrick Henry of the infamy of the institution, but still failed to move them to liberate their own slaves. So what hope was there of persuading less high-minded Southerners to make sacrifice of their property, or what Henry described as “inconveniencing himself”.

Both in the 1830’s and 1840’s and then again in the 1960’s, it was the determination of the Rankins and Finneys and Fanny Lou Hamers to cross the line between religion and politics and appeal to the country’s Christian conscience that brought white Americans into brotherhood with persecuted blacks.

For secular humanists like this writer this is an awkward historical truth to acknowledge, accustomed as we are to equating evangelical fervour with illiberal reaction. The abolitionist argument that some enormities were so vicious that they had to be made accountable to the principles of the gospel, even if that meant breaching the establishment clause of the first amendment in the interest of a higher good, is not all together different from the way that “right to life” evangelicals argue today

History sets such snares to make us think harder.

Indeed.

You can find a review of the book here, and if you missed the episode on Thursday night, you can watch it for the couple of weeks here on ABC’s I-View.