Healing Rifts

                                           Healing Rifts

Recently I have been interested to see a long-time Anglican community in College Park join the Catholic Church. They will maintain much of their traditional ritual and church structure under an Anglican diocese independent of the Roman Catholic bishop of Orlando, but subject to the authority of the Pope. While I have no clear understanding of the details of their reunion I presume that they will continue to have married priests, but not female priests. Whether their priests will be allowed to marry after ordination or whether they will ordain men already married I don’t know. What does interest me more is that they represent a traditional wing of the Anglo-Episcopal Church which went into schism and eventual heresy under Henry VIII and his successors. It has taken almost five centuries for them to find their way home.

On the other side of the process we are in negotiation with the Society of St. Pius X who split off after Vatican II, fifty years ago.  So far little progress seems to have occurred, but the Church moves very slowly. Efforts at reunion with the Church of England have been going on for almost two hundred years with these fairly limited results. It is almost 1,000 years since the Roman-Orthodox schism and it was only recently that Rome and Constantinople withdrew their excommunications of each other but got no further.

I also see some Christian communities that have exited their home denomination due to disputes over doctrinal issues which they consider essential. One with which I am familiar, along with their priest and most of their Church staff, left the Episcopal Church a few years ago over practices which they felt were contrary to Scripture. This week they are being formally accepted into the American Communion of the Anglican Church along with several similar groups.

Because I had known come of them socially when they were still Episcopalians, I have watched their progress with interest. They are a very close-knit group, possibly because they took a step into the unknown and supported each other in so doing.  They are open and warmly welcoming to visitors and newcomers. They left their former church without rancor. There are several who were former members of other churches, including the Catholic Church. Catholics would find the Liturgy familiar, with the spontaneity of post-Vatican II. They are an active and accepting community, fully  and comfortably integrated as to age, income  and race. They are committed to the social gospel and to evangelism..

God has blessed this group in many ways. I pray that they may continue to prosper His work in the community. It is my prayer that we Catholics may come to recognize that God works in other Churches too and that we may pray for and with them, learn from them and work with them. Hopefully we will eventually unite once more with them in doing God’s will: “that we all may be one”, both here and hereafter.

Election issues

With the presidential election campaign dominating TV both in advertising and news we get a daily surfeit of information, accusations, half-truths, misinformation and downright lies. Most of us take it for granted as the price of democracy.

 There are certain facts that we should keep in mind. Most candidates are basically decent people who really have the impression that they can do what is best for you. But in their efforts to get elected they try to "spin"  the facts in a way that will appeal to you. That may mean denying their own failures and twisting what their opponents do/say/plan in a way that makes them look bad. So don't believe everything they tell you. They are not angels and their opponents are not monsters. They are human which means they can make mistakes and some of their mistakes come back to haunt them.

You will make mistakes too in the candidates you vote for or against. But you can try to make good choices by listening to and reading what they have to say. Don't vote for somone just because they carry a label of a party your family always voted for. Two of my favorite candidates in the past were Bobby Kennedy and Barry Goldwater who were philosophically  opposed to each other. But both were consistent in their policies and spoke with conviction. I felt that you knew where they stood even when you disagreed with them, that they would make hard choices, not necessarily popular ones. On the other hand I thought Jimmy Carter was a better person than Richard Nixon, yet Nixon was a better president.

Sometimes we need to vote for a candidate with whom we disagree because we respect his character and honesty. Sometimes we will make mistakes about policies but character is harder to fake.

Rampant Restorationism

The attached account grabbed my attention as it is so similar to some of what is transpiring in my own parish since our pastor of a dozen years retired and was replaced by a younger, recently ordained priest. Not all of the restorations described have come to pass yet, but they are looming in the not too distant future. Will this be the same story everywhere?

"My (former) Catholic Parish has been transformed in less than two years. Our last priest was a good solid man but over-shy. Our parish is small-town, immensely good-hearted but not exactly thoughtful or progressive, and not young in this employment-starved area of England. But we were united and loving, and co-operated widely with other Christians in town.

The new man came with a reputation for the old ways - as a 39 year old he had no personal experience of the Church pre-Vatican 2. He had been required to say that he would celebrate Sunday Mass for the Parish in English, and this promise he has kept - thus far. However, within his first fortnight he had abolished the elected Parish Pastoral Council, forbidden services of Word and Communion led by the Deacon in the absence of the priest saying Mass, established a celebration of the Tridentine Latin (1962 authorised) EF Mass 6 days per week, cut the English weekday Masses which he would celebrate at top speed and provided a table-full of literature promoting ultra-retro books, newspapers, liturgy, retreats, pilgrimages.

Within his first two months he had estranged himself from his fellow priests in the Deanery, refused to work with the other local Christian clergy, introduced old-style devotions (eg Quarant'Ore), attempted to oust the deacon from his very much valued chaplaincy in the local prison. His supporters were about 5% of a 100 approx total parish numbers and the remainder laughed at his biretta brandishing and highly decorated vestments but made allowances for 'difference' _ "After all, we still have Mass, and he's very good with the children."

Two years on he has eliminated the free-standing altar though without reference to the deacon or the foreign priest who comes regularly to celebrate a Sunday Mass for our immigrants in their own language, refuses to celebrate Mass facing the people, has expressed hatred of the English of the Ordinary Form of Mass we were formerly allowed to use and has preached publicly his contempt of the Second Vatican Council. He has disobeyed the Bishop when told to restore the free-standing altar - a defiance that has lasted 8 months already.

Some parishioners, myself included, no longer attend. Others, reasonably, refuse to be driven from their own church which they built, and the school to which they sent their children, the place where they have buried and mourned parents, spouses, off-spring and friends. A Requiem these days is celebrated in full black vestments. or if the chief mourner forbids this, in a green so dark that it is indistinguishable from black.

The Latin Mass, now 7 days a week attracts a zealous company on Sunday who drive in from far and wide. Our country parish church is effectively now the Latin Mass centre of the diocese, a diocese which is often regarded as the most open to the Tridentine forms of all the Sacraments, not just the celebration of Mass. The financial collections have been spectacularly boosted, but members of the drive-in congregation play no part in the social life of the parish and have no responsibility for maintenance of church premises let alone supporting the school.

Some contributors to liturgy blog discussions suggest that there is scope for both forms of Mass (Ordinary and Extra-ordinary) to be celebrated regularly in the same parish. I can assure them that where a priest has an overwhelming preference for the EF, he is put under a considerable tension when celebrating OF. This tension can make attendance at his OF Mass so intolerably agonising that it cannot be deemed worship for the parishioner and presumably not for the priest either.

I have to say to our readers, in my experience these words are possibly all too true a description of a parish situation that may arise next to you - or even take you over. Soon. The majority of seminarians in this country are asking for this style of liturgy, theology and management. By the time they.ve learnt better, most of us will be dead."

We need to stand up and remember that WE are the Church. The body of Christ is one,  whole and entire; without the laity the clergy and the hierarchy are a head without a body or limbs.

By their fruits you shall know them.
This simple test tells us a lot about all the venom and hatred spewed out in the last few days against the CEO of Chick-fil-e and many of those who workl for him.

I am not even going to get into the the question which led him to answer honestly what he believed. I was reminded of him when reading how the Pharisees questioned Jesus in order to entrap Him. Apparently he should have lied to satisfy his critics. Alternatively they do not accept that in this country religious freedom is protected by the constitution, at least until now. Perhaps our bishops were not so far off the mark in warning us recently that this freedom was threatened.

But an issue which was ostensibly about the right to love your neighbour even when they are of the same sex as yourself sure produced a lot of hatred without regard for sex.

I apologize to the many gays and lesbians I know and respect who I feel are being used and manipulated for the agendas of those who could not care less about their human rights and dignity.

Lost in the desert

I was reflecting on the tone of my comments in reacting to a variety of articles in the NCR last night. Why are some angry and critical while others appear thoughtful and helpful? To some extent they reflect my mood as I start to write. And I think other writers do the same.

Very often today I feel that we as a Church are wandering in a desert without a compass, angry at our lack of leadership. We look back to the Church of the sixties and seventies, the warm, joyful celebrations, the enthusiastic communities of which we were a part, the larger-than-life shepherds who led us. What has happened, where have they gone?

The metaphor of wandering in the desert drew me to the Israelites led by Moses in the desert of Sinai for forty years. They too started out with high hopes after they had escaped from Egypt and crossed the Red Sea into Sinai. But as they pushed ahead to their ultimate goal, the Promised Land, their leaders seemed to lose their way. They rambled about aimlessly.They grumbled incessantly. They were distracted by a variety of conflicts and just bogged down in the wilderness.

If we substitute "Church" for "Israelites" the story is still the same fifty years after Vatican II. I wonder how the Israelites felt a year or even a month before they stormed Jericho. Does our frustration today match theirs? Apparently the old men who had left Egypt died off before they achieved their final goal. Must the old men, like me, who remember Vatican II, disappear before we reach our goal?

You know it really does not matter. What matters is God's will, not mine.

LCWC & Bishops

Bishop Blair is one of the three bishops appointed by Rome to supervise reforms of the leadership organization of American nuns and he has indicated that they are willing to enter into dialogue with the leaders of the nuns on needed changes. It might help the "dialogue' if we can get a clarification of his vision of "Church" which seems distinct from that which most Christians find in the Scriptures and in the teaching of Vatican II.

Among my favorite ecclesiologists were Adrian Dulles and Edmund Schillebeeckx, neither of whom were notable liberals. Both significantly influenced my concept of the Church as well as that expressed by the bishops at Vatican II, Dulles in delineating various models of Church, Schillebeeckx in forming a vision of the Church as the Body of Christ who acts and speaks through it in the world today. I also have found Richard McBrien to be a most readable writer as well as an outstanding theologian.

When I started to formulate my vision for the Church of the future, not the heavenly New Jerusalem but the church down and dirty in its members, I tried to put that vision in words in the context of the world in which we live and love and strive and fall and rise again today. I think that it is the same vision as that expressed by Vatican II in the document Lumen Gentium.

The structure and authority of the Church, and the way that authority is exercised is not clear in the New Testament, but it developed over centuries. More important: What is the purpose of the Church? Why did Christ establish this community and why does He maintain it in existence in spite of its faults and failures, its betrayals and its rejection of His message?

Scripture tells us that God made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants and that this covenant was renewed or extended by Jesus with those who accepted Him and His message until the end of time. "You will be my people and I will be your God." God poured out His everlasting love on us, freely and without merit on our part and wants our love in return.

The Church is a means to achieve this end by introducing us to that loving relationship with the Father for which we are made and to nurture and grow us in that relationship. It is not a legalistic or dominating relationship: God does not force us, He invites us to love Him and trust Him as we journey to that eternal Kingdom where we will be with Him forever.

And that is why I reject the concept of a Church which juridically expels or excommunicates members whom God has called to Him. God calls each one individually to this relationship with Him. The Church exists to help us on our way, to provide doctrinal and moral principles to guide us, but faith is a personal gift, not an institutional one and in the final moments when our life changes the relationship is not with the Church or the hierarchy but with the Father.

Christ's Church is a servant Church, not an authoritarian structure,one where service not power is the keyword. The initial appointments made by the apostles were deacons to care for the needs of the widows, and the only fund raiser described was Paul’s appeal for funds for the needy in Jerusalem. Peter was the leader appointed by Christ to lead His Church, but we know that Paul challenged Peter on some issues and prevailed. That is my vision of the Church – the pope is head of the Universal Church, the sign of unity and spokesman for the Church on issues of faith, on our understanding of the Gospel, but individual bishops are free to express their opinions and seek a consensus as they appear to have done at the Council of Jerusalem. This is the role of the pope in the Church, preserving its unity and fidelity to the teaching of Christ. The pope is "servus servorum Dei", servant of the servants of God, and his primacy is rooted and expressed in that role. In the early Church the bishop of Rome functioned primarily as a mediator of disputes rather than an interpreter of doctrine or an ultimate authority.

McBrien describes the role of Peter’s successor: "The Catholic Church considers the pope to be the Vicar of Peter, that is, the one who personally succeeds to the distinctive ministry of St. Peter for the sake of the unity of the universal Church." "Before the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073-1085) … (the popes) did not appoint bishops. They did not govern the universal Church through the Roman curia." John Henry Newman, who was beatified recently, "contended early in his Catholic career that the laity should be consulted on doctrine, since it was sometimes more faithful to revelation than was the hierarchy (including the pope.) He pointed out that the promise of the Spirit was to the whole Church."

Many Christian theologians of various denominations in the post-Vatican II period seem to have shared that same vision of the servant Church, though it has never been fully grasped or implemented.In 1966, Cardinal Cushing issued an Advent pastoral "The Servant Church." He set forth the image of Christ the Servant who "came to serve to heal, to reconcile, to bind up wounds. Jesus, we may say, is in an exceptional way the Good Samaritan," and argued that the Church must be the body of Christ, the suffering servant and hence the servant Church. "So it is that the Church announces the coming of the Kingdom not only in word, through preaching and proclamation, but more particularly in work, in her ministry of reconciliation, of binding up wounds, of suffering service, of healing . . . As the Lord was the ‘man for others,’ so must the Church be ‘the community for others.’

A similar understanding of the servant church is present in declarations of other church bodies of the period: the Presbyterian Confession of 1967, the Uppsala Report in 1968, the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellin in 1968 and the document on Justice in the World issued by the Catholic Synod of Bishops in 1971.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggested that the Church should give away all its property to those in need, and the clergy live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling. The Church would thus experience the secular problems of ordinary human life. Anglican Bishop John A. Robinson argued that the house of God is not the Church but the world." Robert Adolfs took Paul’s phrase in Philippians 2:7 "Taking the form of a servant" to mean that Jesus divested himself of all craving for power and dignity. The Church, if it is to be like Christ, must similarly renounce all claims to power, honors, and the like; it must not rule by power but attract by love.

While my vision of the Church may not be as radical as Bonhoeffer’s, neither does it include an Episcopal palace such as the one currently on the market for 8 million dollars or a twelve room beach house for the summer. I recall one bishop who lived in a normal family sized home in a middle-class neighborhood, probably valued at less than $100,000, and several others who lived in the parish rectory.

In many ways I think this vision harks back to the early Church we find in the Acts of the Apostles. It is the Church described by Paul who wrote, "Have that mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross". (Phil 2:5-8). It is the Church of the ghetto and the catacombs, the weak and the voiceless, the Church of the Servant Christ who told His Apostles at the Last Supper, "I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do….no slave is greater that his master nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him" (John 13:35-36).

I find it troubling that Cardinal George in a recent interview speaks about the bishops’ mandate to be "governors who exercise … the power to punish." He does not make it clear whence they derive this power. It is certainly not from Christ’s command to His Apostles at the Last Supper. Nor is it in Paul's description of what Christ did: "He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave coming in human likeness, and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross." (Phil.2:5-8).

The true definition of the bishop's role in the Church is service and leadership (like the "good shepherd" who leads out his flock), a vision certainly absent in many recent highly publicized statements and actions by bishops, not only in America but around the world. In spite of Cardinal George's opinion to the contrary, most Catholics seek from their leaders clear moral principles on which to base their decisions not moral micromanaging by the hierarchy. Christ’s Church calls for pastoral leadership, not juridical and punitive authority.

In like manner the role of patriarchs and bishops is rooted in the same service to their flocks. Vatican I diminished their role but Vatican II clearly restored it. Statements by the Pope which express the teaching of the universal Church are truly guided by the Holy Spirit but his personal opinions are not infallible.In a Church that seems to be gradually eroding the changes of Vatican II and reversing its teachings, it is important to remember and defend this principle. Unity in faith refers to formal teachings of the universal Church, not personal opinions. And nowhere is there any basis for authoritarian edicts or legal decisions affecting the life of the faithful, only teaching and guidance in the way of the Lord.

Bishop Kevin Dowling echoes this when he says:"It is, therefore, important in my view that church leadership, instead of giving an impression of its power, privilege and prestige, should rather be experienced as a humble searching ministry … which does not presume to have all the answers all the time."

It seems clear that Bishop Blair has a different concept of the nature of the Church and the role of the bishop. It might help if he could clarify the differences.

Movie Massacre

Once again we are faced with the senseless murder of normal people assembled to enjoy a pleasant evening at the movies. What makes it worse is the apparent lack of motive for the massacre. These casual killings seem to occur randomly all over the world, but many of them in the United States. We can only pray for the victims and their grieving families and friends.

We ask ourselves what can be done to prevent a recurrence of the killings. There is no guaranteed solution, but we can think of some ways to help, both the killers and the victims. For the killers also need help. They are sick, mentally ill, deranged. We are our brother's keeper, no matter what Cain thought. We should be aware of their lifestyle, needs and problems, without interfering in their personal lives, and available to help them or steer them toward community resources if it is warranted. Isolation and hopelessness are major forms of mental illness and we can help break through these barriers by being good neighbors. We can also be available to help victims by our sympathy and support in time of need.

Crimes like the Aurora massacre stir recurring demands for gun control. However, the right to bear arms is enshrined in our constitution, and it will take more than a few dead bodies to end America's love of guns. But perhaps we don't need unlimited access to weapons of mass destruction, to weapons that can fire 100 rounds without reloading, or hand-guns that can be modified to use clips with twelve or twenty bullets. And no private individual needs 6,000 rounds of ammunition.

A frequent argument is that if we limit gun ownership, criminals will still get guns. On this argument we should also allow unlimited sale of drugs. We don't because drugs are harmful. We allow limited use and possession of drugs when prescribed by a licensed physician. Limited possession and use of guns could also be permitted under license, with restrictions on the type and number of guns. A very simple control of gun ownership could be achieved by banning online sales of guns and ammunition. A purchase made in person with a valid identification would provide a check much as bank reporting does with money laundering. It would not be perfect but it would provide a paper-trail.

There are numerous ways in which suspicious behavior can be tracked but most of them involve profiling and would probably infringe on individual rights and liberties. The Biblical "Love your neighbor", meaning care about him and his well-being, is the most effective.