(Franciscan) Liturgical Abuse Rant

Recently I've had some occasions to think about liturgical abuse.

Some of it, I think, is just pride and vainglory on the part of clergy. I need to do things my way. I need to get my theological or, horribile dictu, political tagline or slogan into the Mass, etc. But like most expressions of clerical vainglory and pride, these are often more laughable than dangerous.

But there's another form of liturgical abuse I've encountered in my Catholic life, in certain religious houses, schools, and parishes. It's the liturgical abuse that derives from the intuition that the liturgy as the Church presents it does not properly express who we are as a community, and therefore has to be adjusted or changed to fit our needs and identity.

Perhaps my experience of life as a Franciscan friar provides an example.

Correction

Once in a while in my wish to live a spiritual life I have wandered into a dead end or a blind alley. Usually it involves the wrong use of religion. I seek to do something appealingly religious while not paying attention what grace may be really inviting me to do or look at, which may be something less appealing on the surface, that is, to the flesh.

These moments have been very helpful and instructive for me, for they both warn me about my capacity to use religion poorly and leave me better able to discern. In this sense they are missteps that become gifts of grace, for through them God helps me grow in awareness and in the ability to see better what I am supposed to attend to.

Reflecting on a conversation with a confessor the other day, it became clear to me that my 'observance' of the Lent of Benediction was one of these moments. This is not to say that the blessing of God through the intercession of St. Francis isn't upon the friars who observe this 'Lent' according to the Rule we have promised, but that in my case, at this moment, what I imagined to be an inspiration to observe this 'Lent' was really a way to avoid paying attention to what grace is really inviting me to at this particular moment in my story.

The journey on which being a disciple of the Lord sets us is not always so easy and nor is it even pleasant insofar as we have not been delivered from our addiction to comfort and easy consolations. It is all too easy--and indeed the world invites us to this constantly--to self-medicate rather than seek the true health that is our salvation. And religion can be one of these false medications as much as any other created thing that the flesh can learn how to use wrongly.

And so I gratefully let go and try to begin again to be attentive to what grace invites.

Untie my hands and deliver my heart from sloth. Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me, and from the cowardice that does what is not demanded, in order to escape sacrifice. (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 45)

The One Mediator

Yesterday someone challenged me on Twitter with regard to devotion to the saints, asserting that such amounted to necromancy. In the course of things she or he adduced 1 Timothy 2:5,

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

Soupy Spiritual Danger Ramble

Yesterday I went out for my walk. As I usually do when I have some, I offered treats to the feral cats that hang around outside the kitchen. The folks who work in the kitchen seem to feed them, more or less, leaving them this or that: chicken scraps, rabbit heads, old gnocchi. Perhaps they do it out of kindness or perhaps because cats hanging around the kitchen are better than rats. All the usuals were there yesterday--the big, grizzled, black and white tom I've come to call 'Big Meanie,' the one-eyed calico, the tabby that's funny-looking in some way I can't articulate. They seemed hungrier than usual. Then I realized; they must suffer somewhat on fast and abstinence days when there's not much to be cooked in the kitchen.

Having now lived through two fast and abstinence days here in Italy, I can now share with confidence what one eats on them. For the main meal in the middle of the day, you get a bowl of vegetable soup. That's it. For supper, there's spaghetti (with just a little oil and garlic) and scrambled eggs.

I share this partly because of certain recent disappointments I've had with the press. How can you interview someone about having an intimate Holy Thursday lunch with the Pope and not ask him what he got to eat? And if you did ask, how can you leave it out of the article? There's a little Manichean in all of us, friends, of whom we need to beware. The heresy can be subtle and is very seductive. Just watch Star Wars.

Part of our Holy Thursday lunch here was a lentil and potato mush that was pretty good. Or at least I thought so. As I often share with the brethren when we eat lentils, I once made lentil soup for a girl and after she ate it she brought up the idea of marriage. To be fair, she had consumed two glasses of wine and I think she was lonely, but still. After trying to tell this story one of the friars said, very seriously,

"That's not true love."

He's right, of course. But how much easier it is to live in a world of conditional and transactional love, of doing to others as they do unto me, of helping out those who have been helpful to me, of doing good in the hopes that it will dispose others to help me in the future. And how much easier it is to live in such an imagination before God, as if God were the landlord who lets us live a 'state of grace' as long as we pay the rent of our good behavior, instead of surrendering to the God who makes himself our servant and saves us precisely as the unworthy sinners we are, such that we might become liberated servants of one another.

On Discretion and Troubling Conversations

I've had a couple of similar experiences lately that have troubled my conscience. Each was a conversation with an older women who had assisted at a Mass I was celebrating.

In one conversation the woman, on hearing that I was to be transferred to Rome, offered her condolences and encouraged me to "straighten them out over there." The Pope and the hierarchy were "out of touch," she said, as she also explained to me that one of the great virtues of Catholics in the United States was that we "didn't feel obliged to follow every dumb edict that comes from Rome."

In the other conversation, the woman complimented me on my daily Mass homilies and said that I was "right up there" with the "woman priest" whose 'Mass' she attended on Sundays. She went on to explain to me how liberating it felt to have "Mass" with a "woman priest." This wasn't a Protestant thing either, she went on to explain, her priest was a real Catholic priest.

Both times I just listened and tried to be polite. I didn't challenge any of it. I guess doing so is according to some of my instincts; part of me thinks it would be disrespectful to issue uninvited challenges to those who are older than me, especially when they are folks who were probably doing all kinds of good work and parish service before I was a even a Christian, and probably before I was born.

On the other hand, I'm a priest, an ordained minister in the church and a steward of the Church's teaching and sacramental mysteries. In that sense, do I sin in the second case if I don't encourage my interlocutor to attend an actual Sunday Mass? Her confusion probably mitigates her guilt with regard to the Sunday obligation. But if I'm just polite and thus passively encouraging, am I not complicit? Should I not confess and ask absolution for failing to even try to plant a gentle seed of correction? In some sense, am I not now the guilty party in her absence from Sunday Mass?

There are so many situations like this in ministry and community life. It's so hard to know when you should challenge and when the better part of gentleness invites you not to. And since they all have to be discerned in an instant, I know I need to pray for the gift of that discretion ahead of time.

Passion for Salvation

Traveling last weekend I was caught in the snowstorm and took refuge at our friary in Middletown, Connecticut. It was good to see the friars, and to enjoy the peace of the empty, found time. One of the things I did while I was there was read some of a book on the lives of the North American martyrs.

One scene struck me especially. In the midst of torture, one of the priests wrung a few drops of water from his wet clothes in order to baptize another victim who was ready to accept Christianity. That's just one of many moments that illustrate how driven these missionaries were, how convinced they were that the eternal salvation of souls was at stake in their ministry.

How far we have come from such zeal! Yes, of course it's a good thing that we have removed superstition and magical thinking from the practice of the sacraments. But on the other hand, do we really believe them necessary? I once heard a homily at an infant baptism in which the priest said that the baptism was simply an outward celebration of the divine adoption that the child had already received. Is this what the Church teaches?

One of the friars I live with suggests that we should examine our consciences on whether or not we have a 'passion for salvation.' Perhaps that's something like what used to be called a 'zeal for souls.' Do we really believe, as ministers of the gospel and priests of Jesus Christ, that the eternal salvation God desires for every person has some dependence on our faithfulness to our own call, to our finding the energy and motivation to become the holy religious and priests we have promised to be?

Or have we accepted, either consciously or in subtle, uncritical ways, the creeping universalism of our time, in all of its power to absolve everyone from responsibility? How many funerals have you been to in which the immediate, beatific destiny of the deceased is beyond question, and there is no sense in which the Mass is an offering for his or her continuing salvation? If everyone (and their dogs and cats) automatically 'go to heaven,' then what zeal could there be for the baptism with which the Risen Lord sends forth his disciples to all nations?

Or how much have we accepted the comfortable, civil theology of 'many paths to one divine something-or-other' as we stick our 'Coexist' bumper stickers on our cars and congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment? Never mind the fact that this 'theology' implies that God is an incompetent self-revealer; many of us have let it into our heads so that we don't have to say that anybody else might be wrong, the cardinal sin of our relativistic world.

Let us cast off these glittering errors of the world and allow grace to cultivate within us the direct imitation of God which is a zeal for souls and a passion for salvation.

Holy Poverty Against Pious Prosperity

I love how today's gospel of the huge catch of fish (Luke 5:1-11) cuts through the very unfranciscan doctrine of the 'prosperity gospel.'

Peter, James, and John had caught nothing all night, but at Jesus' command the nets are lowered once again. The huge catch that follows is astonishing to all. Trusting in the Lord's command leads to a turnaround for Peter's business. At that moment he is a flourishing success of a fisherman. So far so good for the prosperity gospel. Following the Lord leads to material success.

But what happens next shakes up the materialistic doctrine. Peter and his co-workers don't even enjoy their new success, because their response is to leave it all behind to follow Jesus. They see through the blessings to the Blessed One. Now Peter will be a fisher of human beings, the material success of the moment being realized as a mere sign of the evangelical victory that is his real destiny.

Two truths of the Christian life come to mind. First, we must always remember that the Christian life is not an opportunity to get something, but a challenge to give even our own selves away. Second, the material blessings of this life are not to be enjoyed for their own sake, but as signs and means for the working of the salvation God desires for people.

False Ideas of Catholic Teaching

I'm reading the Confessions for the third or fourth time to get warmed up for the directed reading course I'm doing in St. Augustine and St. Hilary this semester. I notice new things and am grateful for the book in new ways. This morning I arrived at a new favorite quote: in the midst of his proximate struggle to accept the Catholic faith, Augustine writes:

non docet catholica fides, quod putabamus et vani accusabamus.

"The Catholic faith does not teach that which we supposed or that which we vainly accused it [of teaching.]"

As it was true then, so it is now. False ideas about Catholic doctrine are a great hindrance to evangelization. One even sometimes hears such errors from otherwise educated people, or sees them in otherwise responsible newspapers.

Some of the most common: that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are physically changed into the Body and Blood of Christ, that Mary is to be worshiped, that the Pope is infallible in a general way, that divorce is a sin, etc.

Because of such misrepresentations of Catholic doctrine, we all need to speak and preach our teaching clearly and coherently if we hope to demonstrate well the beauty of its reasonableness.

In Defense of Social Justice

In the course of my internet ministry I have noticed something disturbing: sometimes so-called conservative or 'traditionalist'-leaning Catholics dismiss social justice as if it were an error altogether or at least something outside of Christian concern. This is a serious distortion of Christianity and Catholic teaching. Our Lord himself, with the whole prophetic tradition leading up to him, (not to mention the ordinary magisterium of the Church) reveals that social injustice is one of the most serious sins against God's sovereignty, and that the struggle for justice in the world is integral to genuine religion.

I've been reflecting on where this error comes from, and I've arrived at two ideas. First, sometimes folks are distracted by the errors of the 'social justice type' Catholics themselves. For example, sometimes these ignore certain pressing issues of social justice which are not considered such by secular liberals, like abortion or homosexual "marriage" for example, and thus reveal a certain confused assimilation to the world. But if religious conservatives allow such mistakes to make them reject the idea of social justice altogether, they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater and permitting the devil a great victory.

Second, I think there is, among us Catholics at least, a false separation between social justice and evangelization. There is a sense that we have our faith, we celebrate it at the Eucharist, and then we are called to go out into the world and work for justice. This is true as far as it goes, but I think we sometimes forget that the love of God and the Eucharist are themselves the social program par excellence. Yes, goods like a living wage, honest work, and access to health care and education are all things we should work for on behalf of those who need them, but in the end the old cliche holds: Jesus is the answer. In other words, we are good at remembering that we are called to struggle against social injustice, but because the world tells us to keep our religion to ourselves, we conveniently forget that God himself is the remedy for the ills of society.

This second trouble leads to two distortions in our Catholic life. First, if someone encourages others to the devout life, or to return to prayer or the sacraments, or practices the liturgy in such a way that it produces communities of devotion and fervor, this is generally not viewed as a ministry of social justice, when in fact it is so, and preeminently. Helping the greatest number of people to come into the deepest experiential contact with the mystery of Justifying Charity Himself in divine worship makes them into a justifying leaven in the world. On the other hand, if our faith leads us to agitate for social change or to join those who try to compel worldly governments to take better care of the poor, we should not imagine that we have accomplished a great victory if we have not also given people a way to God in Whom they can know the truth about themselves in the world as an alternative to the errors about creation, life, and humanity which are at the root of social problems in the first place. This goes for both the powerful and the poor of this world. It is a failure to properly acknowledge the sovereignty of God that is at the root of social injustice, and to fail to include this in our social works is to only address symptoms rather than the disease itself.

Against Presumption and Pelagianism

All Souls' Day, or as we now call it in English, the Commemoration of the All the Faithful Departed, is the Church's great day of prayer for the dead. The Office of the Dead is prayed in the Liturgy of the Hours, and all priests have the privilege of offering the three traditional Masses according to the apostolic constitution Incruentum altaris sacrificium of Benedict XV. One Mass may be offered for a particular intention, but the second and third have to be offered for all the faithful departed and for the intentions of the Pope, respectively.

To pray for the dead at all is to affirm the Church's doctrine of purgatory, or at least something akin to it. For, if one of the faithful departed finds himself already among the saints in heaven enjoying the perfectly delightful and satisfying vision of God, what sense could it make to pray for such a one? It is rather he who should be praying for us. And if the dead find themselves--God forbid--in hell, there is no point praying for them anyway.

Thus, to pray for the dead presumes some kind of continuing journey after our earthly death, some kind of sense in which the dead can still be 'on the way' to God. The Church expresses this in the doctrine of Purgatory. So often Purgatory is looked upon as a gloomy and morbid concept, but the case is precisely the opposite. Purgatory is an exceedingly positive and encouraging doctrine, and an expression of the near, but not quite overwhelming, goodness and gentleness of God.

To explore this a little, we can see how Purgatory is a good corrective against two dangerous errors of our time: Presumption, on the one hand, and a kind of Pelagian deism on the other.

I offered about seventy funeral Masses in my three years as a parish priest. The typical (expressed) attitude of the mourners was that the deceased was already at peace in Heaven. Now I don't claim that this a strictly theological assertion; much of it is a justifiable attempt to find some comfort in an expressed faith in God. But, on the other hand, sometimes I felt a little presumption in all of it and a failure to accept the possibility that the deceased might not have been ready for the brilliance of heaven and perhaps could use of our prayers wherever he found himself on the continuing journey. Against the presumption of Heaven (not to mention the fear of hell), Purgatory stands as an expression of the mercy and gentleness of God. Even if we have not succeeded in surrendering to the grace to become saints in this life, even if we have not managed to become good before we die, God provides a time or a means (we don't know, and the Church doesn't define it) by which we may continue this journey, already solidly begun, after our earthly death.

This brings us to the second error for which Purgatory is a sound corrective, what I'm calling Pelagian deism. Sometimes people express this idea in which this life is construed as a kind of test. We have this time on earth, by which we are free to make choices that shape our final destiny in the life to come. This is true as far as it goes, but it often contains a very impoverished concept of salvation. God is not an impartial actor in this scenario! He doesn't set up this life and then leave us alone to choose either Heaven or hell. Against this view, I quote (as I often do) the beginning of Hilaire Belloc's Pelagian Drinking Song:

Pelagius lived at Kardanoel
And taught a doctrine there
How, whether you went to heaven or hell
It was your own affair.
It had nothing to do with the Church, my boy,
But was your own affair.

Not at all. God chooses Heaven for all of us. It's not about whether we end up with more goodness and badness in the ledger by the time we die, but about how we find the humility to accept the grace of salvation. God wants to give all of us the infinite blessing of the beatific vision. He is, quite literally, dying to give us Heaven. The only way to go to hell is to obstinately refuse to accept the gift. God is so passionate about our salvation that, even if we have not succeeding in fully accepting the happiness and sanctity He wants to give us in this life, God provides a further purification after death in order to bring us to the destiny He desires for us.

So, just a we pray for each other to become saints in this life, we pray for the dead who continue--by the gentleness of God--on this same journey to the life of the saints in heaven.

This Has to be Some Kind of Record

This morning, at the early Mass, one of the devout souls arrived during the consecration and then departed straight from receiving Holy Communion.

Doubts

From time to time people tell me about their worry over doubting God or some truth of the faith. I become concerned for them, not because they may be doubting, but because such anxiety easily gets in the way of using the experience of doubt well. I tend to offer these sorts of reflections to those who say they are struggling with doubt:

First of all, the human mind is a creation of God. Therefore, there can be no fear of being led away from God by the right and thoughtful use of the mind God has given us. Indeed, the mind is mysterious, spiritual, and sublime and can be thus overwhelming in its incomprehensibility, but this is only part of its imitation of the God to whom it is similar. In other words, we shouldn't be afraid to think. Opening up our minds to the Mystery may wrench some of what we thought were our beliefs, but this is not doubt or danger.

Second, we need to recognize that the truths of faith, though often expressed in simple language, are often quite subtle in their meaning, and are complex combinations of metaphorical, symbolic, sacramental, and narrative expressions. In the Creed we make utterances like, "I believe in God," or "begotten, not made." These are deceptively simple in language, but demand for their understanding at least a partial grasp of many difficult concepts, e.g. eternity, divinity, etc.

Far too often I find that people have not been helped to own a faith that goes beyond a simple intellectual assent to claims that they aren't sure how to understand. I once knew a religious sister in the prime of life who would omit the line, "is seated at the right hand of Father" when praying the Creed, because she found it unbelievable that "heaven was a place with chairs." How bad I felt for her that she had never come to the realization that the language (compare iconography here) is a window into eternity and not a discourse on furniture!*

Most of the time, in my experience, people who think they are struggling with doubt are actually being invited into a deeper relationship with the truths of the faith. They are experiencing God's invitation to give up the role of spectator--those who worship God and his Mysteries as something beautiful and praiseworthy, but without relationship to themselves--and to accept that the Truths of faith are mysteries that we are to step into with our lives.



*Here I have to mention, parenthetically, the error that is commonly made by the world when someone arrives at this spiritual moment. The world suggests the civil theology of 'many paths to one spiritual something-or-other' in which all religious language is more or less inadequate, but all of it points to something, perhaps spiritual, perhaps ultimate, that we call "God." Conveniently, this pseudo-doctrine leads to no demand on anyone and no dogmatic claims, except for the "dictatorship of relativism" in which no one is allowed to say that anything might be wrong or unacceptable.

No. Language is important, not because someone says so, but because we believe in the Incarnation. Christianity is and will always be a kind of 'scandal of particularity' because it proclaims that God is perfectly revealed in the very particular human life of Jesus of Nazareth. By his Resurrection into the Eucharistized community that we call his Body, the mystery of the Incarnation is extended through time. This is why the particular language of the successors of the apostles gathered in ecumenical council is privileged as an unfolding of our understanding of divine revelation.

Domine, Non Sum Digna

We're probably all familiar with those who mean well but wrongheadedly change the texts of the Mass to make them "inclusive." E.g., those who adjust the preface dialogue and say, "It is right to give God thanks and praise," even though the antecedent for the expunged "him" in this case is "the Lord," a title that ordinarily (for us Christians) refers to the risen Jesus. Or we think of those who prefer to pray their own personal Sanctus and say "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord," when even a casual perusal of the Scriptures reveals that the Christian use of this phrase refers to Jesus, making the "he" obviously appropriate. Part of this is the obscuring of the specificity of Christianity after all, in our general slip toward the more civil theology of "one paths to one divine something-or-other." But I digress.

This stuff is generally associated with "liberals," which is why I had to laugh at this post over on WDTPRS, describing someone who adjusted the gender of the Latin text in the Extraordinary Form Mass by saying "Domine, non sum digna ut intres sub tectum meum..." I don't know if I'm offended by the audacity to change the Mass or in love with sensitivity to Latin grammar!

As I've said before, a wider use of the 1962 Missal is going to raise thorny issues for its proponents that perhaps they haven't anticipated!

Liturgical Dance

I'm not surprised that our slightly pompous post from yesterday produced some comments, though it didn't turn out to be the flame bait I had thought it might be.

In one comment our Franciscan friend Jason challenged us to render comment on the Gospel procession from somewhere called St. Nicholas. Apparently their little video was circulating a while back and drawing the ire of the more conservative catholic bloggers. Check it out here.

Now I don't know the place or its background, so it's dangerous to make any claims about it based on this little video. But it is true that this general question of "liturgical dance" produces a lot of strong feelings. For some it is a liberating expression of joy. Others see it as a hippie accretion bordering on sacrilege. So what can we say? Is this sort of thing justified, or even just o.k.? Well, yes and no.

If you haven't seen anything like it, I would recommend The Dancing Church, a video of African Poor Clare sisters put together by Paulist Father Thomas Kane. Here you can see liturgical dance working as worship. It works because it is an inculturation of the Gospel into a dancing culture in which dance is integral to prayer and praise.

It doesn't work so well when north Americans of European ancestry try to do it. Why? Because we come from the culture that produced the sober and understated Roman liturgy we all know and love. When we start trying to do liturgical dance, it's not a legitimate inculturation, but an effort to invent our own liturgy, to do what we feel like doing. And thus it becomes one more symptom of the greater problem (brought to us via the New Age, I think) that we can invent our own religion and worship according to our tastes and fashions.

So if you're an African Poor Clare, praise God in your dance. But if you're a white, suburban European-American, get over yourself, and, as the Beastie Boys put it, stop "dancing around like you think you're Janet Jackson."

Blessings and Woes

Yesterday I ran across a little conflict that was going on over at the always exciting and informative The Cafeteria is Closed. It was over someone's characterization of the Voice of the Faithful movement, but certainly falls into the general category of catholic progressive vs. conservative quarreling. I threw in my two cents in a comment, but didn't feel good about it later. Why?

I think it's because I have problems with both sides of this classic debate.

You "liberal" and "progressive" catholics, you VOTF types, you're great because you insist on justice both within the structures of the church and in the larger world. You take the church's teaching on social sin seriously and understand that part of our vocation is to do something about it. You put church rules into a proper perspective because you believe the good news that our righteousness comes to us apart from the law.

But sometimes you don't understand that the relativism, moral chaos, and pervasive "culture of death" of the early 21st century demands a church that stands for its own positions strongly and plainly. You know that the Gospel is about liberation, but sometimes you can't tell the difference between the liberation that the Holy Spirit desires and every spurious form of human liberation that the world offers. Thus you sometimes want everyone to endorse homosexuality and every other form of moral chaos that the liberals of the world dream up to justify whatever it is they feel like doing. In your ecumenical spirit you attend to other faith traditions, being sure to scrupulously respect their customs and traditions, but when you come home you don't care whether your own Eucharist is licit or sometimes even whether it is valid. And you, for all of your liberal identity, are often the most intolerant of all.

And you "conservative" and "traditionalist" catholics, you EWTN types, you're great because you understand that our time demands that we rebuild our catholic culture. You understand that we need to distinguish ourselves with a proper identity amid all of the competing truth claims in our relativistic world. You see clearly that this demands a back-to-basics approach wherein we simply follow the instructions and take our own legislation seriously. You know that our liturgy and customs need to be protected from the false recipes for liberation that the world offers, from the ever-increasing pressure of New Age accretions, and the impulse to syncretism masked as inter-religious dialogue.

But you too sometimes fall into errors. You sometimes take on some of the conservative views that the world offers, getting mixed up in nationalism. You can be dismissive of the spiritual depth of the liberation experienced by the older generation through the changes of the Second Vatican Council. Sometimes you don't know the difference between retrieving our tradition (for our time) and just trying to restore what was before. And you can be a trifle self-satisfied in your views.