American Communion Wars and Unity in the Eucharist – Can’t we all get along?
- Sun 24th August 2008, 2:39 pm
Now that Senator Barak Obama has chosen Senator Joe Biden as his running mate in his quest for the Presidency of the United States, the issue I had hoped and prayed would not enter the fray this election cycle has – the communion wars. Biden is Catholic, and as most know, the Democratic party, of which both Obama and himself are members, is pro-choice. Because of only the abortion issue, Archbishop Charles Chaput, the Archbishop of Denver, where the Democratic National Convention will be held starting this coming Monday, has effectively excommunicated him, saying he should not present himself for communion. This is the same thing that happened to John Kerry in 2004 when he was running and more recently to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (who received from the Pope earlier this year) and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius. Even further, there are segments of Catholic society in this country – including some bishops – who feel that it’s an all or nothing proposition, namely you either accept all of the Church’s teachings as they stand with no nuance and act accordingly or you are not Catholic – end of story – or as a document from the Council of Trent might say, Anathema Sit (Latin: Let him be cursed/damned to hell, etc.).
This is not, however, the view of most American Catholics. In fact, some would take exception to being referred to as less than Catholic over this one issue. In fact, the social welfare and peace and justice issues that make up the majority of the Democratic party platform are much more in line with Catholic social teaching than the Republican platform. Even further, on the abortion issue, this year the Democrats have decided to work for ways other than criminalizing abortion to reduce the number of abortions that are out there. When Governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed an anti-abortion bill because she deemed it would not be good for Kansas, and was promptly excommunicated for it, Lisa Cahill, a moral theologian at Boston College, said it fundamentally boiled down to a disagreement between the bishop and the governor about the best way to reduce the number of abortions.
While this issue is emotional on all sides, we need to evaluate somebody and their commitment to the faith based on the whole picture, not just one issue. So far that one issue of abortion has not been that important to American voters, who are more worried about the cost of power, gas and the overall state of our collapsing economy. The bigger picture of what these issues are going to mean to the poorest of us is far more important than the process of criminalizing abortion and getting the Supreme Court to go along with it. In fact, it should not even be something that should be considered as a matter of public policy. Should we do everything we can to minimize it? Most definitely yes. Should we criminalize it? OH HELL NO! – It would result in too much of a public health and safety hazard to do so, on account of coat hanger practitioners and other unsafe and unscrupulous practitioners.
Some would argue that taking this stance is somehow diluting Catholic teaching. I don’t think it is at all. While some of us may feel like shoving our rosary beads down the throats of those who would say we aren’t Catholic because we don’t literally accept that part of Catholic teaching, vote for the Democrat, etc., that would do more harm than good and therefore not be a good practice. Best practices here would include compassionate things that can be done - like providing shelters, job training, education, placement for adoptions, etc. for women who find themselves pregnant under duress. In my home diocese, Oakland, next to nearly every Church there are billboards in both Spanish and English letting people know where they can get help if they need it. That kind of response is far more helpful and far more effective than excommunicating and cursing people who have abortions or are pro choice – including politicians who are trying to stand up for these people and see the public health issue that criminalizing abortion will cause.
Therefore, in the spirit of Paul the Apostle, I implore all of us, laity, clergy and religious: Lighten up. Bishops: The bigger imperative you’ve been charged with is proclamation of the Gospel. Focus on that. Excommunicating Catholic politicians who are exercising the best judgment they can regarding what is best for our non-Catholic society and culture as a whole, is counter productive and distracts from the primary proclamation of a good message. It also undermines your credibility as a whole when you reduce it to politics. Catholic Politicians: We know you have constituents to answer to as well as your own consciences. Listen to your bishops, and research the issues you face fully. Use reason informed by faith, the crux of moral theology to help you make the tough calls as to where to stand on an issue. If you’ve gone through this process, you’ve done your duty and almost nobody will hold it against you. Catholic Laity: Listen to what the bishops have to say, but be mindful of your own life experience and views as well. Listen to what your heart is telling you about the issues as well as being mindful of the overall effect on society, namely that a choice you make in the voting booth now could come back to haunt you much later on in life. If you come to your views, whatever they are, in this manner of reason informed by faith and experience, again, nobody can in good conscience hold it against you
One thing about human nature the Catholic Church recognizes quite well is that humans are social pack animals that depend on each other to survive. The nature of the Eucharist reflects that. Therefore, again, I implore these bishops in question to stop politicizing what is supposed to be our supreme moment of unity in Christ. It is not for you to make the judgment as to who is worthy – only God can. Therefore, for your own souls and the good of humanity, let God make that judgment. Despite what Jesus told Peter in Matthew, in the end, Christ has the final word in all matters. Therefore, let us not make an issue out of whether a Catholic politician supporting abortion rights can or should receive communion, but rather, let’s unite in the Eucharist to face the problems we face not just as the United States of America, but as a whole planet.
For more that I have written about the contemporary church and American Politics, see:
Eucharistic Danger
Politics and Catholicism -- An Independence Threatened?
Here We Go Again -- Another Bishop getting involved in politics.
Here Come the Children … Best Practices in Catechesis
- Tue 5th August 2008, 6:38 pm
Here we are, in August again, and for those of us in the northern hemisphere, the time of return to school is fast approaching. With the end of summer vacation and the beginning of a new school year/term, parish life also seems to wake up and start again. And once again we begin to deal with the great honor, privilege and challenge of sharing our faith with our children in a more formal way than through dinner and bedtime prayers.
The question of what works well in catechesis is one that is an on-going challenge for the Church and for the teachers who seek to reach them. It’s one thing to have a group of children who have to be present in a class in order to receive the next sacrament. Parents and children tend to be more enthusiastic about coming to classes and programs with a sacramental goal in mind. But for those in between, a group one mother called the “tweenies,” it can be a different story.
I was blessed to be able to observe a “master” catechist/teacher in action when I was in high school and college – my mother. Mom is a born teacher and has a wonderful sense of how to take complex ideas and present them in ways that captivate her students, all the while leaving them with a sense of having left “school work” behind and entered into a world where games and other fun activities are the rule. One boy remarked, “If you aren’t careful, we’ll all learn the answers to all of these questions. What’ll you do then?” Her answer, “Gee, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have to make a new game.” Both of them were delighted. He never suspected the reason for the game, and he did learn all the facts she wanted him to learn. She just kept on developing new games.
When it came my turn to teach, I took the insights received from watching her teaching around our dining room table and applied them to my own classes. Sharing this common interest with her has been a great gift over the past 20+ years.
For those of us who grew up in the 1950s or earlier, religious education was a relatively straightforward thing. We went to church on Sunday, attended the local parish school, memorized the answers from the Baltimore Catechism, took part in parish festivals and had most of our friends from among the parish community. Being Catholic was a cultural experience and we began absorbing it with our first breath.
At least that was the ideal. It didn’t always work so smoothly or so positively. For those who didn’t attend the parish school, religious education was through “CCD classes,” held once a week for an hour or so, in borrowed classrooms at the school. Tensions often arose between the two communities; the school families and the CCD families. And if a family moved from one category to the other, it could be devastating to the larger life of the community.
With the 1960s, major changes came both to the secular society and the Church. The changes had been long in coming and, as a woman who came of age during that time, many of them were very positive.
Yet … change always brings challenges. As our understanding of what it is to be Church changed, through the work of the Holy Spirit and the Bishops in Council, we had to find new ways to express that reality and share it with our children. New ways to become adults in our faith had to emerge.
It wasn’t easy. It was an exciting time. It was a time of great heartbreak for some - a time of great joy for others. The things we tried didn’t always work. But enough of them did that we still have a vibrant community of faith 40 years after Vatican II ended, and a new generation on the way to adulthood.
There’s a lot of remedial work needed. But then again, there were always people who couldn’t have told you the answer to a specific theological question, but who had a very close relationship with the Lord. We’ve got a lot of them today too. And we’ve got a whole new crop of children eagerly, or not so eagerly, waiting for their catechism classes to start. Faith formation classes, we call them now.
Now, at the beginning of the school year, is a good time to share with each other what is working in our parishes around the world. How are you reaching your children, teens and adults? Do you have a program that’s particularly successful? How about an exceptional teacher? How do you define success in faith formation programs? What are the hallmarks of a good faith formation program?
I invite you to use the resources of www.theologika.net in your exploration of this topic and in your teaching. Many materials are listed in Theologika’s search/discovery engine that are of use in catechesis. (At Theologika, we include only materials from trusted authoritative sources. If you don’t find what you need, let us know and we’ll look for it.) Items suitable for children and teens are included as well.
Please open your own free Directory at www.theologika.net and use our “Watch List” function to share resources among yourselves or with your classes.
Over the next few weeks and months, I invite your feedback on the topic of catechesis and family faith formation. We’ll share what you send us, so as a worldwide community - 21st Century Catholics - we can meet this challenge more fruitfully.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Power, Vocation and Charism
- Mon 14th July 2008, 1:42 pm
When challenged by a freshman, a sophomore in my high school seminary cited the delegation of authority to him from the Pope, by way of the Cardinal, through the school hierarchy. After a pause to gain his breath, the “authority” figure was startled to hear the freshman’s riposte. “Oh yeah, I’m a temple of the Holy Spirit! So top that.”
As I recall, a summary detention seemed to end the matter. Lesson #1: Speaking truth to power doesn’t necessarily trump power. As Max Weber, one of the 19th century founders of social science said, “Power is the ability to make other people do what they do not want to do.” It is a primary feature of any human organization. However, power operates in a set of patterned relationships, such as parent-child, teacher-student, and pastor-parishioner. These are social institutions, just as marriage (husband-wife), family (children-parents), and church (preacher-followers) are.
The wreck of a couple’s life when they were expelled from their small evangelical church is one of the most devastating expressions of power of which I have heard. In our secular society, banishment by a church doesn’t normally affect our social standing or ability to earn an income. In fact, if there is a factional split in these free-church tradition organizations, generally the dissident group merely sets up another church. If you are with a group, the sanction is muted or rejected all together as an unjust act with no moral force.
Patterns of dominance and submission characterize human interaction. In American culture the rule of law is superior to all. However, some are more equal than others, since the law as an instrument of power generally reflects the interests of those who have the most influence with legislatures and individual law makers.
Even within the Church, equality as children of God is not always seen in practice. Traditionally, in Christian communities, women are to be submissive to men. St. Paul’s admonition that men are supposed to give their lives for their wives has not been a primary emphasis. Lay people traditionally, are supposed to “pray, pay, and obey.”
The celibate clerical vocation and the consecrated vocations of clerics and lay men and women as members of religious orders have been seen for a very long time as a more perfect state and something to be aspired to. We only have a couple of married couples who have been canonized, and in both cases they were celebrated for living together as “brother and sister.”
According to traditional Catholic philosophy, theology and folk culture, popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns, and brothers were all part of the “Great Chain of Being” in a world which emphasized the essence or fundamental nature of things over their actual existence. Occupying a higher plane in the world of vocations indicated an intrinsically higher status, with a concomitant increase in moral and social power.
With the collapse of rigid social structures after World War I, the emergence of the United States, with its Calvinist secular religion, paved the way for notions of capitalist economic success legitimized by and representative of moral achievement. Personal prosperity was indicative of Divine blessing on one’s life and activities. The existentialist philosophies of Camus and Sartre focused on different responses to the absurdity of reality. Camus gave us the opportunity to create meaning by conscious choices. Sartre said that there was now way out. Hell is other people.
By and large, the Christian churches and their teaching organs held to their traditional view of the world and rejected existentialism and the early psychology of both Freud and Jung. All of the social and power relationships in Christianity were seen as divinely ordained for both Catholics and Protestants.
However, Catholicism harbored a hidden shame. The psychological, physical, and sexual abuse of minors has been the elephant in the room since the second century. Sex abuse is first documented in the Council of Elvira in 309. St. Peter Damien graphically described and protested it in the mid-eleventh century. Various attempts were made to deal with the issue with varying degrees of success.
As a boy at Catholic boys’ camp, there were a number of rules to make sure that we would be protected, which were basically the same as for Boy Scouts. The high school seminary also had similar rules. Parents like my own, who were not cowed by the status of priests and nuns, conferred a special protection on their children, since those in power and those who were predators knew which parishioners were not sheep. However, the ultimate institutional guardians of minors were the bishops and the civil authorities. Much has been said and written recently about the role of the bishops and I won’t go into that here.
Yet, there is a larger set of occasions and causes for sexual abuse and they are related to our concept of vocation. In my high school seminary, when one student asked a respected older priest about how you know if you have a vocation, the answer was “You have a vocation if you can keep the rules.” In my training as a Jesuit novice, the emphasis was on charism and discernment. “Do you have the gifts?” “Does the life bring a sense of happiness and peace?” In essence the focus was on discerning how and where we were being called.
It took me some years to internalize that second view. When I did, I knew that I was not being called to be a Jesuit. I remember very distinctly that one of my classmates asked me why and I said that it was not my vocation. I said that we are most truly ourselves in God’s holiness when we choose to accept our gifts and our true calling in life. I was surprised to hear an honest and pragmatic reply. “If what you say is true, religious life is not an objectively higher state.” I wasn’t really prepared for what came next. He said, “If I were to leave, I wouldn’t be able to pursue my graduate studies.” I didn’t say anything, but the look of bewilderment in his eyes left me shaken.
A couple of weeks later, I saw Jason (not his real name). I was heading to my apartment and something told me to take him with me; to somehow extricate him from his life with the Jesuits. Yet I also knew that he had to come to his own decisions and there was no moral justification for me to interfere. Many other scholastics had left and, by and large, friendships endured and the men looked out for each other. Still, something was amiss.
A couple of months later the news came swiftly and shockingly. Jason had committed suicide. He was a brilliant student, a promising poet, a cellist, and a young man in an existential crisis. His teachers and fellow students were disconsolate. The older, stoic, Jesuits openly wept. I became emotionally convinced of what I had known to be academically true. Philosophy and theology are more than academic matters. They are matters of life and death.
Why did we make such different decisions? Why did I see new horizons and feel fresh energy? Why did Jason feel that there was no exit? Obviously, we will never know. However, a big part of it has to do with what my mother told me as a small child and what I heard from my fellow freshman classmate. “I am a temple of the Holy Spirit.”
It is the only reason I can think of for having the disposition of leaving something that isn’t working; of leaving a life and setting a course by a pillar of fire. It is the only way to be free of the power and intimidation of success and the pathology of the institutional norms we have swallowed whole. It is the only way that we can free ourselves and our children to make a ruckus; to hold others accountable regardless of their status and power. It is the only way to live “in the freedom of the children of God” in our lives as members of the Christian community and of our secular communities. “I am a temple of the Holy Spirit.”
Old and New Inside St. Peters.
- Mon 30th June 2008, 9:05 pm
This past Sunday’s celebration of the Feast of Sts Peter and Paul and the imposition of the Pallium in Rome was quite striking in terms of its inclusion of both the old and the new. While it was mass according to the standard form we are used to, it had a number of things different from how we might be accustomed to. One of them was the presence of the Patriarch of Constantinople at the Liturgy of the Word even with the gospel being read in Greek. Another, which will become a feature of future Papal masses, is that communion will now be distributed in two different ways. Those that receive from one of the many priests that distribute communion at Papal events will still have the choice of receiving the Eucharist on the hand or on the tounge, standing, kneeling, etc. Those who receive from the Pope however, must kneel and receive only on the tounge – just as one did before the Second Vatican Council. The Vatican points out that while receiving on the hand is legal, albeit by special indult that nearly everybody has, it is not the ordinary, or normal method for reception of the sacrament, others have complained that it represents a return to the past by an old man looking for some comfort. While part of that may be true, the fact that the Pope did not celebrate according to the Tridentine suggests something that others have mentioned, namely that he’s looking for reconciliation. Not only with traditionalists, by insisting that people kneel to receive communion, but also with the Eastern Orthodox churches by celebrating certain events with their clergy and including the Gospel in the original language of Christianity, Greek.
Both the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches have ancient foundations. As Christianity spread, it went from Palestine in all directions. It was articulated in Greek because that was the common language for that part of the Roman Empire. Because of that, all of the Christian Scriptures are written in Greek as well as all of the early letters we have. Before Christianity, they even translated the Old Testament into Greek as Hebrew had fallen out of use and Jewish people living outside of Palestine were speaking mostly Greek anyway. Over time, conflicts of culture and translation of the creed from Greek to Latin and the like ended the fellowship, or communion between these two ancient churches. Even so, the cry Kyrie, Eleison, (κυριε ελεησον), or Lord, Have Mercy, still remained. The Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritus, given during World War II allowed Catholic Scholars to view the Greek texts to be viewed as authoritative.
Today, there are certain occasions in Papal masses where the Gospel is read in Greek after it is read in Latin. Not only was it read at Pope Benedict’s Inaguration as Pope, but it was also read at this Pallium mass with Patriarch Bartholomew present. The cry of “Wisdom! Stand and pay attention to the good news!” and the responses that follow before the reading sound strange to us in the west. Even so, it opens a different yet equally ancient and valid way of looking at the good news, what the Greek word for Gospel, evangelia (ευαγγελια) of our Lord and Master is.
In terms of kneeling and only receiving communion, that is an extremely reverent way to do it. It initially started in the latter part of the middle ages when everybody was required to receive on the tounge, as dirty, non consecrated hands could not touch the body of Christ. Therefore to make it easier, everybody was required to kneel. Over time it became a gesture of reverence and so it remains today. While some may see only those receiving from the pope required to kneel as being inconsistent and extremely irreverent if not inconsistent, having attended a Papal Mass in St. Peters, I can honestly say that it’s just the way things are there. As I said in an earlier posting about my experience, away from the Pope’s giving communion, it is utter chaos. This is because most congregants are seated on the other side of a system of barricades and kneelers. Come communion time, the priests carrying the sacrament come to the barricades and rails and go up and down them as well as the aisles when they get access while everybody else scrambles over stackable chairs and other people’s personal effects to get communion. Also, when they get there, they often stand, or kneel and receive both on the tounge and in the hand and the priests just go with it quickly and methodically. Therefore it’s no big deal for the pope to want to do it one way for people he gives communion to, but have others do it their own way.
This sort of diversity in language and custom is going to be integral to any sort or reconciliation that is to come. Even more appropriate was the fact that it came during a Pallium Mass, where the Pallium, a symbol of further fellowship amongst the major Bishops is given to newly appointed Metropolitan Archbishops. While these are baby steps towards unity after centuries of separation and alienation, they are welcome and should be lauded whenever they occur.
