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06/22/09

"The Papacy 1000 Years Ago"

Week of June 22, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            History is the great debunker of pre-conceived ideas that are rooted in ideology and false piety rather than in reality. 

            Without a grasp of history, and of the history of the papacy in particular, many Catholics are led to believe that the papacy must always have been as they have known it, and most popes have been just like the popes of the 20th and 21st centuries: Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI.

            The pontificates of a thousand years ago, however, were very different from any that we have experienced in our lifetimes.

            First of all, we do not even know how the pontificate of John XVIII ended in 1009.  Did the pope abdicate before his death and, if so, was it under duress?

            If he did abdicate, what did he do after he left the papacy?  No living Catholic has ever seen that happen.  Indeed, for those who tend to look upon popes as quasi-divine figures, papal resignation is simply unthinkable.  Once a pope, always a pope--until death.  No?

            According to some historical sources, Pope John XVIII most likely did abdicate, or resign, the papacy shortly before his death, and then became a monk at the basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome, where he is buried.

            Otherwise, little is known of his pontificate.  We do know that during this period of church history, from 1003 to 1012, one of the powerful Roman families, the Crescentiis, ruled the city and dominated the papacy itself.

            From 999 to 1003 the first French pope, Sylvester II, was seated on the Chair of Peter.  A dedicated reformer, he denounced simony (the buying and selling of spiritual goods and church offices), nepotism (favoring members own family for appointment to church offices), and violations of clerical celibacy.  He also insisted on the free election of abbots by monks.

            But in February of 1001 the Roman citizenry revolted against foreign domination.  The French pope and his German friend and ally, Emperor Otto III, were forced to leave the city. 

            Otto died the following year, before he could reestablish his authority in Rome.  The new head of the Crescentii family, John II Crescentius, allowed the French pope to return, but only on condition that he limit himself to spiritual functions.  The pope died less than a year later.

            A relative of the dominant Crescentii family succeeded Sylvester II in an election that was undoubtedly engineered by the family’s leader.  What was also remarkable, besides the decisive influence of a layman on a papal election, is the fact that the new pope, John XVII, had been married before ordination to the priesthood and was the father of three sons.

            The pope’s only notable recorded papal act was his authorizing of Polish missionaries to work among the Slavs.  It is not even known how he died or how old he was at the time of death. 

            Although John XVII was pope for less than six months, his pontificate was not among the shortest in history.  For purposes of comparison, Pope John Paul I was in office for just 33 days in 1978, yet his was only the 11th briefest pontificate in history.

            John XVIII was cardinal-priest of St. Peter’s Basilica when elected to the papacy on Christmas Day, 1003 (the Vatican’s official list begins his pontificate in January, 1004).  None of his accomplishments as pope have had any lasting historical significance beyond certain locales.f one’s

            Thus, he restored the diocese of Merseburg in Germany, which Pope Benedict VII had suppressed and divided at the request of Emperor Otto II, and John XVIII also approved the establishment of the diocese of Bamberg in Bavaria. 

            He summoned the bishops of Sens and Orleans to Rome under pain of excommunication because of their threats to the papal privileges granted to the abbey of Fleury.

            There is some evidence that relations between Rome and Constantinople improved during John XVIII’s pontificate, probably because of the pro-Byzantine sympathies of the Crescentii family.  The pope’s name was restored to the list of those to be prayed for at Mass in Constantinople.

            However, the thaw was relatively brief. Less than 50 years later, the formal schism between East and West began, and remains in effect to this day.

            John XVIII was probably forced to resign in late June or early July, 1009–almost exactly one thousand years ago.

            His successor was Sergius IV who, because his baptismal name was Peter, changed it upon election.  Taking a new papal name was still not the custom.

            Alas, Sergius IV was also murdered.    

 

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.   

Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222

06/15/09

"Two Saints, Two Institutions"

Week of June 15, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            The Catholic Church will commemorate the feasts of Sts. Aloysius Gonzaga and John Fisher on the 21st and 22nd respectively. 

            There are some striking contrasts between these two saints, both in their achievements in life and in the institutions which have taken their names: Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, and St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.

            Both saints were Jesuits who lived all or part of their lives in the 16th century, and yet only one of the two institutions which bear their names is in the Jesuit tradition.

            In 1887 when Father Joseph Cataldo, an Italian-born Jesuit, founded his school, it seemed fitting to him to name it after his fellow Jesuit and fellow Italian.  It is today the only Jesuit university in the world named after St. Aloysius.         

            According to the biography on the Gonzaga University Web site, Aloysius (the Latin form of his baptismal name, Luigi) was born in Italy in 1568 into a family of great wealth and prestige.  As the first-born son, he would have inherited his father’s title of Marquis.

            He was only 8 years old when his parents sent him to the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Francesco de’Medici, in Florence.  Aloysius later traveled to Spain with his parents (in the company of the empress of Austria) to join the court of Philip II in Madrid.

            It was in Spain that young Aloysius expressed a desire to join a newly founded religious order known as the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits.  His father opposed the idea and a struggle of wills ensued, but Aloysius eventually prevailed.  He renounced his right to his father’s title and to the vast wealth that he was destined to inherit, and entered the Jesuits in Rome at age 17. 

            While studying in Rome, Aloysius would regularly go into the streets of the city to care for the victims of the plague.  He himself contracted the disease and died on June 21, 1591, at age 23, six years short of his ordination to the priesthood.

            According to the Gonzaga Web site, Aloysius was known for his “love of prayer and fasting.”  His spiritual director was another saint-to-be, Robert Bellarmine.  When Bellarmine was dying, he asked to be buried next to Aloysius.

            What the Web site does not say is that Bellarmine once commented that Aloysius’s example of piety was so extreme that others should not be encouraged to follow it.  Indeed, Aloysius was excessively scrupulous in prayer, almost masochistic in acts of self-mortification, often uncommunicative, frightened of women, and obsessed with the hope of an early death.

            Some commentators have attributed these odd personality traits to a determined reaction against his privileged upbringing.

            Aloysius Gonzaga was beatified in 1621, canonized in 1726, and declared patron saint of youth in 1729.

            By contrast, St. John Fisher died a martyr at age 66.     He had become chancellor of Cambridge University at age 35, bishop of Rochester (the smallest diocese in England, his having declined appointments to larger and wealthier sees), and then a cardinal.  A decade after his ordination to the priesthood, he became chaplain to the king’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, and was later appointed the first Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.

            John Fisher was a famous preacher, chosen to preach at the funerals of King Henry VII and Lady Margaret herself.  But he was always a scholar, having built up one of the finest libraries in all of Europe.  He wrote four volumes against Martin Luther and his theological works were influential at the Council of Trent, following his death.

            He opposed Henry VIII’s plans for divorce and re-marriage and his newly fashioned title as “Supreme Head of the Church of England.”  He was subsequently arrested as a traitor and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he refused to take an oath in support of the king’s claims against the pope.

            Pope Paul III named John Fisher a cardinal, but Henry VIII had him beheaded on June 22, 1535.  He was so debilitated by his prison experience that he had to be carried to his execution on a chair.  He pardoned his executioner and declared in a clear voice that he was dying for the faith of the Church.  He then recited the Te Deum and a psalm.

            His naked body was left on the scaffold all day and subsequently buried without rites or shroud.  His head was displayed on London Bridge for two weeks and then thrown into the Thames.

            John Fisher was beatified in 1886 and canonized in 1935.  The college in Rochester, New York, was founded by Basilians, not Jesuits.    

 

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.   

Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222

06/08/09

06/08/09

"The Silence of the Presidents"

Week of June 8, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            Father Thomas Reese, S.J., former editor-in-chief of America magazine, wrote an exceedingly important article for the National Catholic Reporter (5/21/05) on the silence of the presidents of Catholic colleges and universities. 

            Almost none of them came to the defense of the University of Notre Dame or their fellow president, Holy Cross priest John Jenkins, when the institution and Father Jenkins were under heavy fire from bishops and conservative laity alike for having invited President Barack Obama to be Notre Dame’s Commencement speaker and to receive an honorary degree.

            Father Reese, alluding to a famous line in one of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, referred to their collective silence as the case of the dog that did not bark.

            He called it a surprising development because this one group of Catholic college and university presidents (many of whom, alas, are Father Reese’s fellow Jesuits) knows more about Catholic higher education than any other group and has more at stake than most. 

            And yet, Reese observed, the presidents were “AWOL during the entire controversy.  The Catholic college and university presidents were silent.”

              “Yes, a couple did speak,” he conceded, “such as Trinity College President Patricia McGuire.  Georgetown University President Jack DiGioa also showed solidarity by allowing President Obama to speak on campus.  But most were silent.”

            Father Reese offered four theories for the silence and found none of them finally persuasive.

            Theory #1: Perhaps the presidents agreed that the invitation and honorary degree were a mistake.  “Considering the number of Catholic institutions that have been attacked for their speakers and degree recipients by the Cardinal Newman Society,” Reese wrote, “I doubt this explanation.  If presidents are not for academic freedom and autonomy, who will be?”

            Theory #2: The presidents actually took some pleasure in Notre Dame’s predicament.  “After hearing it so often touted as the premier Catholic university that was truly Catholic..., they were not at all unhappy to see it get its comeuppance.”  But, as Reese pointed out, “such pettiness would not blind them to the stakes that were in play in this dispute.”

            Theory #3: The presidents did not want to anger their own bishops in a fight that had no lothis case,” Reese observed, “the presidents do not agree with Benjamin Franklin who told the Continental Congress, ‘We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately’.”

            Their motto seems to be, by way of contrast to Franklin’s, “keep your heads down, avoid conflict, let sleeping bishops lie.”

            Theory #4: The presidents did not want to anger the bishops as a whole, particularly since they are in continuing negotiations with the bishops over the interpretation and implementation of Pope John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the 1990 apostolic exhortation on Catholic higher education.

            This fourth theory, Father Reese pointed out, “simply recognizes that trying to organize academics is like trying to herd cats.  College and university presidents rarely act or speak as a group, except when they lobby for government money.”

            However, Reese argued, these presidents are “supposed to be leaders experienced in organizing people for a common purpose.”cal ramifications.  “In

 

 

 

            “Whatever the cause of this presidential silence,” Father Reese concluded his piece, “it was shameful.  The presidents owe Notre Dame and Father Jenkins an apology; they owe Catholic higher education better leadership; they owe their faculties an explanation for not defending academic freedom and autonomy.  They stood silent while another educational institution was unfairly and viciously attacked.”

            “The next time when their institution is under attack, they should not be surprised when no one comes to their defense.  Benjamin Franklin was right.”

            The same can be said about the majority of U.S. Catholic bishops who remained silent (as they did in the two previous presidential elections) while a growing minority of bishops spoke and acted in direct violation of the Conference’s own teachings and policies, reaffirmed every four years, and most recently in November, 2007.

            The bishops have made it clear that they embrace the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s “consistent-ethic-of-life” approach to moral issues; that although abortion is a major life issue, it is not the only one; and that they do not presume to tell Catholic voters for whom to vote or against whom to vote.

            By contrast, the 70-odd bishops believe that abortion “trumps” (their favorite verb) all other life issues, whether war, capital punishment, governmental obligations to the poor, health care, immigration, or torture.

            They also believe that it is right to tell Catholics for whom not to vote.

            The reality is that relatively few Catholics are listening to the bishops anymore: neither the militant minority nor the silent majority.

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.    Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222

06/01/09

"More on the Leadership Crisis"

Week of June 1, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            There’s an old saying, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.”  It appears in many places, but its classic source seems to be Shakespeare’s Henry IV. 

            For our purposes, the “ill wind” is the negative reaction of over 60 U.S. Catholic bishops to the University of Notre Dame’s invitation to the President of the United States to deliver this year’s Commencement address and to receive an honorary doctorate of laws.

            What “good” did this “ill wind” blow?  It focused the attention of many in the Catholic Church on the quality of recent appointments to the hierarchy. 

            By “recent,” I mean since the election of John Paul II to the papacy in 1978 and especially since the dismissal of Archbishop Jean Jadot as the Holy See’s Apostolic Delegate to the United States in 1980. 

            Prior to that time, Archbishop Jadot, with the full support of Pope Paul VI, saw to the appointment of so-called “pastoral” bishops, that is, bishops who placed a higher premium on their ministry to their own people than on their obligation of loyalty to the Holy See.

            During the past decade this column has been addressing the question of episcopal appointments with some frequency, and as recently as three weeks ago on what I referred to as “the leadership crisis” in the Catholic Church.

            In the week of May 18, 1998, I acknowledged that there had been a “growing concern” about the quality of appointments to the hierarchy, and that this concern has been expressed even by bishops themselves, who felt that their opinions of potential candidates were neither sought nor respected by the Vatican.

            In the summer of 2002, the year in which the sexual-abuse scandal erupted with uncommon force and exposed the failure of some of the bishops to deal with the crisis effectively, I did a series on the selection of bishops.  I pointed out that it is a relatively new development that the Pope appoints all the bishops in the Roman Catholic Church.

            For most of the history of the Church, especially during the First Christian Millennium, the selection of bishops rested with the clergy and laity of each diocese, in keeping with Pope Leo the Great’s dictum, “He who is to preside over all must be elected by all.” 

            Today’s common practice in which bishops move up a career ladder from a smaller diocese to a larger diocese, and from bishop to archbishop, was explicitly prohibited by the Council of Nicaea in 325 and again by the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

            A reform movement in the 11th century tried unsuccessfully to restore the ancient practice where the clergy and laity as well as the neighboring bishops played a key part in the selection process.

            Pope Pius VII’s concordat with Napoleon in 1801 had the unprecedented effect of vesting in the Pope alone the power to appoint and remove bishops anywhere in the Roman Catholic Church.  It is a system that has remained in place ever since.

            “The fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with the will of Christ or with the authentic tradition of the Church,” I wrote, “seems to escape many Catholics, even many bishops” (week of 8/12/02).

            I ended the following week’s column with these two paragraphs: “Few people would actually favor a process in which every baptized Catholic within a diocese could vote for a new bishop.  The question of active-versus-inactive Catholic would legitimately arise, and so, too, would the concern about political-style campaigning that relies heavily on advertising and media sound-bites.”

            “However, any system that increases participation would be better than the present one” (week of 8/19/02).

            Four years later I wrote that “the crisis of pastoral leadership is a major contributing factor to almost all the problems now facing the Church” (7/3/06).  Afterward, a retired bishop sent me a letter of support, noting that “many on the parish level feel alienated and...the divide between them and the hierarchy continues to widen.”

            Later that summer I pointed to the other, perhaps darker, side of the appointment problem, namely, the deliberate exclusion of good priests from serious consideration (9/4/06).  I listed the names of auxiliary bishops who would have made excellent bishops in their own right if they had not been frozen in place after Archbishop Jadot’s removal (11/5/07).

            I also noted the contrast between the bishops recommended by Archbishop Jadot and appointed by Paul VI with those of a more recent vintage–the kind that believes, for example, that abortion “trumps” all other moral issues and that confrontation rather than seeking common ground is the only sure path to the Church’s missionary success.       

 

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.   

Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222

05/18/09

"Darwin at 200"

Week of May 18, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            There have been several events in North America and around the world marking this year’s 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.  I write this week about his significance–and that of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx–for our understanding of who we humans are and where we fit into the broader contexts of nature, the inner psychological universe, and society at large.

            Charles Darwin was a biologist who, in his early years, was a believing Christian, albeit of an apparently literalist type.  Thus he accepted the fixity of species and their special creation as depicted in the book of Genesis.

            But in 1835, after visiting the Galápagos Archipelago (600 miles off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean), doubts began to surface in his mind.  He had noticed that very small differences were present in the species inhabiting several of the islands (the archipelago consists of thirteen large islands and six smaller ones).

            His doubts were reinforced by his additional observations of flora, fauna, and geological formations at widely separated points of the globe.

            All living things, Darwin tentatively concluded in his book, The Origins of the Species (1859), have developed from a few extremely simple forms, through a gradual process of natural selection, which involved the adaptations of living things to their often hostile environments.

            At first Darwin encountered opposition even from fellow biologists, but eventually all such criticisms collapsed under the weight of data and arguments presented in his later work, The Descent of Man (1871).  The only surviving opposition came from fundamentalist Protestants.

            By the time of Darwin’s death in 1882, many mainline Christians had come to terms with the concept of evolution, viewing it, as the Catholic Church generally has done, as entirely compatible with Christian faith.  Even the highly conservative pontificate of Pius IX did not place any of Darwin’s books on the Index of Forbidden Books, nor did this Pope condemn evolution in his Syllabus of Errors (1864).

            In the 1920s fundamentalists waged a sustained, public battle against Darwinism, with the most dramatic instance being the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee (1925), which pitted the agnostic defense attorney Clarence Darrow against the former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

            A public school teacher, John Scopes, had been indicted for teaching evolution in the classroom.  He was found guilty, but was later released on a legal technicality.  The law itself was repealed in 1967.

            In 1950 Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical letter, Humani generis, which, while insisting that all human beings are literally descended from Adam and Eve, pointed out that any scientific explanation of the origin and development of the human species is acceptable to the Catholic faith so long as it does not exclude God from the creative process.

            Whatever one thinks of the scientific teaching on evolution, thanks to Darwin we now recognize that we are bodily creatures, not disembodied spirits, and that we are materially linked with the rest of creation, and especially with other living beings.

            The survival-of-the-fittest aspect of Darwin’s findings has sometimes been wrongly applied by politically conservative theorists to the detriment of the poor, the sick, and the powerless in society.  Government, these “social Darwinists” have insisted, has no responsibility to them.

            “Social Darwinism” was encapsulated in one of the lines attributed to Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: “If they would rather die [than go to the poor house], they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.”

            Charles Darwin was only one of a trio of major figures who have profoundly influenced our understanding of what it means to be human.

            Sigmund Freud helped us to see that not everything that appears on the surface of human activity is what is really the case.  There is a vast internal universe of hidden psychological drives that affect our thinking and behavior.

            These internal forces do not negate free will (except in cases of severe mental imbalance), but they can influence or impair its normal functioning.

            Karl Marx, on the other hand, helped us to see that we are part of a larger societal universe where our thinking and behavior are shaped by relationships and events beyond our own making.

            Thus, many who live in a relatively prosperous, all-white environment, without the benefit of a critical education, find it difficult to tolerate, much less appreciate, racial and ethnic differences, or to generate any understanding of, and compassion toward, the poor.

            Darwin, Freud, and Marx have frequently been portrayed as enemies of the faith.  But there is still much to be learned from them.

            This 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth serves as a reminder of that.   

 

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.   

Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222

05/11/09

"The Leadership Crisis"

Week of May 11, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            Political commentators have been reflecting for several weeks on television and in the press about the crisis of leadership facing the Republican Party in the United States. 

            Larry Sabato, an oft-quoted professor at the University of Virginia, suggested recently that we may now have a one-and-a-half party system in this country, rather than the traditional two-party system. 

            His reason is that the Republicans have lost the support of most young voters, minorities, women, moderate suburbanites, and those with graduate degrees, and in the process have been reduced to a party consisting mainly of white Southern males.  Sabato pointed out that no party can hope to win national elections with so narrow an electoral base.

            At the same time, various spokesmen for the Republican Party have been ratcheting up their rhetoric against the Obama Administration, calling it by turns Socialist and even Fascist.  As another commentator pointed out, the Republican Party runs the risk of being perceived as a party that stands against gays and for torture.

            What does this have to do with the Catholic Church and its own current pastoral leadership?

            The Catholic Church also runs the risk of being perceived as the Church which stands only against abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, and homosexuality.  This opposition, when voiced without any corresponding concerns about war, violence against women, capital punishment, torture, global warming, and governmental responsibilities to the poor–to cite only a few of the life issues that confront this country and the world at large–turns off many younger people, the educated, and women generally.

            The bishops of the Catholic Church had already lost much of their credibility because of the sexual-abuse scandal in the priesthood.  Their recent tussles with prominent Catholic politicians and their condemnations of the University of Notre Dame for inviting President Obama to be its Commencement speaker this coming Sunday have begun to solidify the impression, deserved or not, that they have become purveyors of single-issue morality and, in the process, unwitting tools of the Republican Party.

            The bishops, too, will find that they have alienated a significant number of younger Catholics as well as those who are highly educated.  It has long since been evident that the hierarchy has a serious credibility problem with Catholic women.

            In spite of the concerted efforts of a minority of the U.S. Catholic bishops, a few threatening hell-fire on those who voted Democratic in November, Catholics supported the Obama-Biden ticket by 9 points (54-45%).  This reversed the situation in 2004 when a smaller majority of Catholics (52-47%) favored the re-election of President George W. Bush, despite the fact that his opponent, Senator John Kerry, was himself a Catholic.

            Something has changed since the election of John Paul II as Pope in 1978, namely, the composition of the Catholic hierarchy.

            At the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the following bishops (a partial list only) exercised significant leadership: Cardinal Bernhard Alfrink (Holland), Bishop Joseph DeSmedt (Belgium), Cardinal Julius Döpfner (Germany), Cardinal Joseph Frings (Germany), Cardinal Franz König (Austria), Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger (Canada), Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro (Italy), Cardinal Achille Liénart (France), Cardinal François Marty (France), Cardinal Albert Meyer (U.S.A.), and Cardinal Leo-Jozef Suenens (Belgium).

            What is remarkable is that every single one of them first became a bishop under Pope Pius XII.  The only exception was Cardinal Liénart, who had been appointed by Pius XI.

            Can one imagine a similar group of progressive bishops assuming major leadership positions at, let us say, Vatican III?  Not likely, since Pope John Paul II, unlike Pope Pius XII–no liberal, he–made a conscious effort throughout his long pontificate to appoint only rigid loyalists to the hierarchy and to exclude, just as consciously, the very type of priests who could become the pace-setters of another much-needed renewal and reform of the universal Catholic Church.

            John Paul II’s bishops, with outstanding exceptions to be sure, tended to be priests known first of all for their readiness to do whatever they were told by the Vatican, and not to think for themselves or to be responsive to  pastoral challenges identified by their own priests, religious, and laity.

            These appointees were largely “careerists” whose apparent main concern was to curry favor with those in the Vatican who could promote them within the hierarchy, and not to do or say anything that could abort their rise to the top.

            At least three cardinals have publicly attacked careerism in the priesthood: Vincenzo Fagioli, former head of the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts, Bernardin Gantin, former head of the Congregation of Bishops, and Joseph Ratzinger, at the time head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and now Pope Benedict XVI.

 

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.   

 

Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222

05/04/09

"Intrinsic Evil vs. Run-of-the-Mill Evil"

Week of May 4, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            As we approach the Notre Dame commencement ceremonies (on May 17) at which President Barack Obama will address the graduates and receive an honorary doctorate of laws, much to the consternation of a certain segment of the U.S. Catholic community, it is long past the time when a major theological fallacy needs to be exposed and rebutted.

            That fallacy consists of the assumption that only an intrinsic evil is to be held against a public figure, such as the President of the United States, a U.S. Senator, a member of the House of Representatives, or the Governor of one of the fifty states. 

            Since abortion is regarded as an intrinsic evil, anyone who is deemed pro-abortion (the assumption is that pro-choice is equivalent to pro-abortion) is, by that fact, deemed unworthy of any honors conferred by the Catholic Church or any Catholic institution. 

            Some have even gone so far as to say that such individuals, if Catholic, should be barred from the reception of Holy Communion.

            In the face of outraged protests against the invitation that Notre Dame extended to President Obama, it has been pointed out that these same people did not protest a similar invitation that the university extended to President George W. Bush during his first year in office.

            Although President Bush had not yet launched the preemptive war in Iraq, over the strong opposition of Pope John Paul II, he had already established an unenviable record as Governor of Texas in presiding over the largest number of executions in the entire country:152.     

            Indeed, even in December 2000, a month after the presidential election, Governor Bush signed off on three more executions, bringing the total number of executions in Texas that year to 40–an all-time record for any state since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976.

            The counter-argument from certain types of Catholics is that capital punishment isn’t intrinsically evil; therefore, then-Governor Bush deserved a pass.

            But Pope John Paul II, in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae (“The Gospel of life”), made it very clear that there are, for all practical purposes, no circumstances under which the death penalty can be imposed, no matter how heinous the capital crime.

            The Pope wrote that the State “ought not to go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.  Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (n. 56).

            Ah, some say, but the Pope allows for that rare exception when capital punishment might be allowed.  Therefore, it cannot be intrinsically evil, because what is intrinsically evil can never be allowed.

            But if only intrinsically evil actions are to be counted against a public official, a whole series of evils could be ignored, including the waging of an unjust war, torture, the denial of human rights, and on and on.

            Even granting the counter-argument that the Pope allowed for rare exceptions, by what reasonable moral standards would 152 executions over the course of Governor Bush’s two terms in Texas be considered “rare”?  And by what moral standards would 40 executions in the year 2000 alone be considered “rare”? 

            And yet less than a year later, in May 2001, the University of Notre Dame invited now-President Bush to be its commencement speaker and the recipient of an honorary degree.  Where were the same Catholics who are now protesting the invitation to President Obama?  Did they also protest the honor to be accorded to George W. Bush because of his presiding over more executions in Texas than any other governor in the United States?  

            No, they did not.  And why not?  Because they did not, and do not, regard capital punishment as an intrinsic evil, like abortion, even though Pope John Paul II unmistakably condemned the death penalty, as does The Catechism of the Catholic Church (n. 2267), which the Pope himself cited. 

            If the only moral condemnations of the Church that a Catholic is required to take seriously are its condemnations of intrinsic evils, then why, by the same process of “logic,” can we not argue that the only teachings of a Pope that we are required to accept are infallible teachings?

            But if that were the case, not a single teaching of Pope John Paul II in all 26 ½ years of his pontificate, would have to be accepted, because not once in his entire pontificate did he issue an infallible pronouncement.

            Let’s finally put the intrinsic-evil argument to rest.          

 

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.   

 

Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222

04/27/09

"A Grieving Church"

Week of April 27, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            I received an e-mail recently from a lay pastoral associate, whose ministerial focus is on adult education and who possesses a graduate degree from a Catholic university.  I have his permission to cite a portion of our exchange in this week’s column.

            I have suppressed some of the details lest his pastor identify the source and seek to jeopardize the pastoral associate’s job.

            The e-mail came from a large suburban parish in which the pastor has apparently done everything that he can to remove most traces of the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council, promulgated by the late Pope Paul VI, and approved by the late Pope John Paul II and the current Pope, Benedict XVI.

            The pastor has done away with all contemporary music at Mass, and has restored pre-conciliar devotions along with auricular confession.  He even gives the impression that Confession is the greatest of the sacraments.

            Perhaps there is some misunderstanding here because the Council of Trent, back in the 16th century, made clear that the greatest of the seven sacraments is the Eucharist.

            Under the pastor’s control, the parish has no youth ministry, no parish council, nor any other consultative body.  According to my correspondent, “consultative is not in his vocabulary.”  He also gave vocal support to the minority of U.S. Catholic bishops who proclaimed in effect that “Catholics could burn in hell” if they voted Democratic in the recent presidential election.

            My correspondent reported that other members of the parish staff are hurting “terribly.”  Indeed, they share the feelings of the woman who darted out of church recently during the homily–in tears. 

            She informed the pastoral associate that she could no longer handle the situation, and that she had to leave the parish.  She said that all that she ever hears from the pulpit is what sinners the parishioners are, and why it is so necessary for them to “go to Confession.”

            That particular Sunday, with the old-fashioned church music, all the statues covered in purple as they were before Vatican II, and the usual severe words in the homily, the pressure was simply too much for her to bear.

            The woman poured out her frustrations, saying that the pastor had taken the parish back to a Church that she knows nothing about and in a manner that showed no understanding of others’ feelings.

            At the end of his first e-mail, my correspondent asked, “Are we expected just to get used to it?”

            In my reply, I wrote: “No, you are not simply to ‘get used to it’.  Parishioners need to go elsewhere, like the woman who left Mass in tears.” 

            I continued: “If there are no parishes or other worshipping communities in the vicinity where the pastoral leadership is healthy rather than driven by a narrow ideology, then one simply has to ‘take a vacation’ from the Church until the skies finally clear and we are bathed in sunlight once again.”

            In response, the pastoral associate noted that “the number of our parish families who are already on vacation from the Church is amazing.  It hurts to see it.”

            “It’s new territory, dealing with people grieving for their Church,” he wrote.  And that provided my working title for this week’s column, “A Grieving Church.”

            The lead article in America magazine’s 100th anniversary issue (4/13/09) is by a Dominican who is justly admired the world over.  It is Timothy Radcliffe’s “The Shape of the Church to Come.”

            What follows here is a continued commentary on the problem of the “grieving Church” and not meant as a criticism of Timothy Radcliffe’s fine article in which he deplores the polarization that is “deeply wounding and inhibits the flourishing of the church.” 

            However, he does identify this polarization as consisting of self-defined “traditionalist” Catholics in open conflict with self-defined “progressive” Catholics.

            My experience with the worldwide Catholic Church is surely much more limited than Timothy Radcliffe’s, and I would defer to his experience if indeed he has come across a significant number of Catholics who actually identify themselves as “progressive.”  On the other hand, I know of countless numbers of Catholics who proudly call themselves “traditional” or “orthodox.”

            The pastor in the true story above surely would regard himself as “orthodox,” but the woman who left the church in tears would never have defined herself as a  “progressive” Catholic.  That adjective would mean nothing to her. 

            She and other Catholics like her grieve simply for the loss of their Church, a Church renewed and reformed by Vatican II. 

            It is not polarization but the pastor of the story and many like him who are responsible for the grieving Church.              

 

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.   

Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222

04/20/09

"Pope Benedict XVI: After Four Years"

Week of April 20, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            On April 19 Pope Benedict XVI marked his fourth year in the papacy.  Three days earlier, he had turned 82. 

            At age 78, Joseph Ratzinger was the oldest person elected to the papacy since Clement XII in 1730.  Just to gain some historical perspective on that, Clement’s election was 46 years before the U.S. Declaration of Independence, almost 60 years before George Washington’s own election as the first President of the United States, and 63 years before the beginning of the French Revolution.

            In an article by the Vatican correspondent for the Rome newspaper La Repubblica, Marco Politi suggests that Benedict XVI’s pontificate has now been broken into two halves: before and after the storm created by the Pope’s lifting of the excommunications from the four bishops of the Society of St. Pius X, including the Holocaust denier, Richard Williamson. (For the English translation, see “The Church’s new age of dissent,” The Tablet, 3/21/09.)

             Politi notes that the controversy has disclosed serious tensions between the central government in the Vatican and important bishops from the Northern Hemisphere.

            He writes: “Reading between the lines of the bishops’ messages of solidarity to the Pope,” following the release of his letter of explanation and apology to the worldwide episcopate, “there are requests that he change his style of government.”

            Thus, his fellow German bishops professed themselves delighted with the Pope’s expressed desire to “enter into dialogue with the bishops (signalling that thus far this has not happened).”  There were similar messages from the bishops of France, where the Society of St. Pius X has its largest membership.

            “But it is the Austrian bishops who delivered the most strongly worded message,” Politi writes.  They pointed out to the Pope that he is not the only one suffering from the consequences of the controversy, but that this pain has also been endured “by many local churches and people outside the Church.”

            Politi asks: “Did it make sense to revoke the excommunications without any statement of faithful adherence to the Second Vatican Council on the very day that marked the fiftieth anniversary of Pope John XXIII’s decision to call the council?  Did it make sense to insist on pardoning the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson in the very week dedicated to the memory of the Shoah?”

            Some explain the indelicate timing on the poor advice that the Pope had received from his associates.  But Politi points out that the Vatican decree lifting the excommunications had been leaked to the press 48 hours before its official publication, and immediately thereafter Bishop Williamson’s interview with Swedish television was disclosed.

            The Pope and his aides had two days in which to block the publication of the decree, but chose not to.

            There was a similarly ignored warning in 2005.  Several hours before the Pope was to deliver his now-famous lecture at Regensburg University, in which he quoted the anti-Islamic words of a distant Byzantine emperor, a group of journalists who had received an advance copy of the lecture advised the Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, S.J., that the talk would cause problems with the Muslims. 

            “No one can doubt,” Politi writes, “that Fr Lombardi informed his superiors.  Above all, it is well known in the Vatican that Cardinal Angelo Sodano warned the Pope of the risks he was taking with his lecture.  Yet Benedict XVI went ahead, with the consequence that he had to express many times his regret to the representatives of Islam.”

            Politi notes that the controversy surrounding the lifting of the excommunications is “the first real crisis” of Benedict’s pontificate.  In previous years, Politi observes, the crises were always outside the Church.  “But this time the crisis exploded ‘inside’ the Church and the fact that emerges clearly is that the bishops have denounced the absence of collegiality in the government of Pope Benedict.”

            The Pope was fully aware that a majority of the Cardinals whom he had convened in Rome in March 2006 insisted that the Pius X bishops should express a “faithful adherence to Vatican II” as a condition of lifting the excommunications.  The Pope chose to ignore their views, went ahead with the decree, and created a firestorm as a result.

            He had done essentially the same thing, again without consultation, in granting permission for the Latin Mass without approval from local bishops.  Earlier this year he had to withdraw the nomination of an auxiliary bishop in Austria because the national conference of Austrian bishops demanded it.

            Marco Politi notes that there are now “ominous rumblings” within the hierarchy, “as under a volcano.”  Can the Pope and his advisers simply ignore them?

 

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.   

 

Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222

04/13/09

 

"President Obama at Notre Dame"

Week of April 13, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            After it was announced jointly by the White House and the University of Notre Dame that President Barack Obama would be this year’s commencement speaker and the recipient of an honorary degree, the predictable flak started coming in from the Catholic right, for whom abortion is the only moral issue that counts.  Other  members of that constituency include additional life-related issues on their agenda, such as  embryonic stem-cell research.

            Unlike the bishop of the Fort Wayne-South Bend diocese in which Notre Dame is situated, I did not receive a heads-up phone call from the president of the university informing me that an invitation had been extended to Mr. Obama and subsequently accepted.  I was as surprised as everyone else on the faculty that the President of the United States would be speaking at Notre Dame’s graduation ceremonies next month.         

            It was clearly a coup for the university that the President chose to include Notre Dame among the first academic institutions that he would honor with his presence this year.  There isn’t another university (and that probably includes most Catholic universities) that would not have been delighted to have President Obama speak at its commencement exercises.

            President Obama himself was well-advised to accept the invitation from the country’s most highly visible Catholic university.  Although he won the majority of Catholic votes in the recent election and at this writing continues to have favorability ratings in excess of 60%, he also continues to be the object of criticism from some of the most conservative members of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States, whose dioceses happen to be in states that supported candidate Obama in November: Colorado, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Indiana, Florida, Pennsylvania, California, and Ohio, to name but a few.

            Joe Feuerherd, publisher and editor-in-chief of the National Catholic Reporter, has written one of the most pointed and effective rebuttals of the critics of the Notre Dame invitation (NCR on-line, 3/23/09).  His counter-criticism focused on the inconsistency (and, to some extent, the hypocrisy) of the Catholic right, which is entirely selective in its outrage over alleged violations of Catholic teachings.

            Some of them even protested the selection in 2005 of Sister Helen Prejean as a commencement speaker at another Catholic university because of her opposition to the death penalty, even though the late Pope John Paul II insisted in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae (“The gospel of life”) that, for all practical purposes, there are no conditions under which such executions can be morally justified.

            These critics were also “strangely silent,” Feuerherd wrote, when then-Vice President Dick Cheney spoke at The Catholic University of America in January 2005.  Cheney, like Obama, opposes a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (his daughter is in an open, same-sex partnership), and had–and still has–some “questionable views on the ‘intrinsic evil’ of state-sponsored torture”–not to mention his and President George W. Bush’s vigorous support of the preemptive war in Iraq.

            Indeed, Feuerherd continued, President Bush also supported embryonic stem-cell research, “though his policies limit it to existing stem cell lines.”  But that is “a position directly counter to church teaching.”

            “Similarly, despite his anti-abortion record, the president [Bush, that is] supports exceptions for abortion in cases of rape, incest or where the life of the mother is threatened.”  That, too, is contrary to church teaching on the absolute sacredness of life, regardless of the circumstances.

            In 2007 President Bush was invited by a former member of his Administration, James Towey, president of St. Vincent College in Pennsylvania, to give the commencement address at this small Catholic school.  There was “not a peep” from the Catholic right--a silence, Feuerherd concluded, that says more about the Catholic right than all the outrage and cries of scandal that have been expressed over Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama.

            An article on the national wire-services (3/25/09) noted that the local bishop had decided to boycott Notre Dame’s graduation exercises this year because of President Obama’s presence on the program.  The bishop pointed to the President’s recent decision to federally fund embryonic stem-cell research.

            But that wasn’t the end of the story.  A well-known conservative Catholic laywoman, Mary Ann Glendon, professor of law at Harvard and outgoing U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, is this year’s nominee for Notre Dame’s prestigious Laetare Medal.

            If only for consistency’s sake, one wonders why she, too, isn’t boycotting the ceremony.  The bishop, however, revealed in a letter explaining why he would not attend the Notre Dame graduation that he had encouraged Ambassador Glendon to attend the commencement exercises and to accept the Laetare Award.

            Strange sometimes are the ways of accommodation.     

 

 

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.   

 

Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222

 

04/06/09

"Easter, 2009"

Week of April 6, 2009

ESSAYS IN THEOLOGY

By Rev. Richard P. McBrien

 

            Easter is at the heart and center of the Christian faith, and yet every year it seems more and more difficult to say or write anything about it that doesn’t strike many listeners or readers as repetitive or riddled with clichés. 

            If we were to pay attention to what Pope Benedict XVI says about Easter in his blessing this Sunday to the city (of Rome) and to the world, his words would have a completely familiar ring to them, as will the words uttered by the homilist at Mass.

            This is not said in criticism of the Pope or of anyone who is charged with offering a reflection on the religious significance of Easter. 

            I had a professor in the seminary many years ago who made a point that has stayed with me ever since, namely, that the liturgical year resembles a spiral rather than a circle.  Every year we celebrate the same important feasts, but we are not in the same spiritual place that we were in the previous year.

            For good or for ill, we change from year to year, and so does the impact of the feast upon our consciousness and our spiritual development.

            We are simply not the same person, for example, who may have read this column’s Easter reflections three years ago: about the Resurrection’s being essential to our salvation (1 Corinthians 15:17), about our abiding hope that we will somehow share in Christ’s Resurrection (Romans 6:3-11; 2 Corinthians 4:14; 11:25-26), or about the Resurrection’s making it possible for us to receive the Holy Spirit (John 7:39; 16:7).

            To be sure, I wrote a year later, “belief in the Resurrection is just that–an expression of faith.  It is not grounded on scientific evidence, which is not to say that the belief is without any basis whatever.

            “In fact,” the column continued, “there was a remarkable and wholly inexplicable change in the disciples (some five hundred in all) who claimed to have ‘seen’ the risen Lord.  Many willingly accepted martyrdom rather than deny him or his resurrection from the dead.”

            “In the end, however, the Resurrection is not about [newly discovered] bones but about the transformation of one’s life.  Faith in the Resurrection requires us to live as Jesus did, dying to self for the sake of others, in the hope of rising again.”

            Last year, too, this column raised the problem of familiarity.  What we say and write about Easter always runs the risk of becoming a kind of religious boilerplate.

            That particular column focused on Jesus’ coming alongside two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus, a village just seven miles from Jerusalem.  The disciples were downcast because they had invested such high hopes in the one who had been crucified.

            When Jesus asked them what they had been discussing, they responded with some measure of disbelief: “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know of the things that have taken place there in these days?”

            “What sort of things?” Jesus asked.

            The two disciples proceeded to tell him about how the chief priests had handed over Jesus the Nazarene to be crucified.  They also relayed the reports of some women in their group who had gone to the tomb the next morning and found it empty, and who insisted that they were informed by angels that Jesus was alive.

            Jesus could contain himself no longer.  He scolded his two disciples for their slowness to believe what the prophets had foretold, namely, that it would be necessary for the Messiah to suffer before entering into his glory.  He then interpreted for them Moses and the other prophets.

            As the three of them approached Emmaus, the visitor indicated that he intended to go on alone.  Since it was almost evening, the other two invited him to join them for supper.

            It was when Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them that “their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (Luke 24:30-31).  At which point, the Scripture says, he immediately vanished from their sight.

            The two disciples hurriedly returned to Jerusalem to share their experience with the Apostles and to tell them how the risen Lord had been “made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (vv. 33,35).

            The Scripture says that Jesus then appeared in their midst, and, after eating some baked fish, led them to Bethany, where he was “taken up to heaven” (v. 51). 

            The question remains: what does any of this mean for us today?  Does the Resurrection make any real difference in our lives, or are we left only with Easter boilerplate?     

 

This essay is provided by the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity.  Please share it with a friend.  We welcome your comments and contributions.  Let us know if you wish to be added to our mailing list.  Our new website that includes these essays and Roger Karban’s commentaries on the Sunday Scripture readings is www.fosilonline.com.   

 

Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, P. O. Box 31, Belleville, Il 62222