Bring Fire on the Earth

The Gospel for Monday of the 15th week of ordinary time presents some interesting challenges. In this Gospel (Matthew 10:34 - 11:1) Jesus says that he has not come to bring peace but the sword and to set members of a family against one another. A similar passage in Luke (Luke 12: 49-53) adds, "I have come to bring fire on the earth...." This passage seems to contradict the many passages in the New Testament that emphasize love and the need to preserve the unity of the community.

Some commentaries suggest that the images of fire and conflict represent a judgement against non-believers. Other commentaries suggest that the passages refer to the conflict that already faced the early Church because of persecution by civil and religious authority. I suspect that the second explanation is the best one. Still, I think that the passage could have an important message for the Church today.

We know that we live in a society that believes that each individual constructs their own reality. Increasingly people seem to feel that ideals which come from an external source (like that magisterium of the Church) are invalid and damaging to individual freedom. Some people seem ready to reject the teaching authority of the Church simply on the basis of personal opinion. This creates problems for the Church. On the one hand we want a Church that is welcoming and is intended to embrace as many people as possible and so we, in the Church are often reluctant to "correct" Catholics who hold positions that are contrary to established Church teaching. The controversy over abortion is an especially vivid example of this. The question of the ordination of women is another example.

Now some people feel that not correcting these Catholics who they call "Cafeteria Catholics" is a disservice to both the Church and the individual. They suggest that allowing such dissent to continue unchecked blurs the truths the Church has worked for centuries to pass on. Further, they suggest, that to be charitable to someone who dissents without seeking to correct them tends to jeopardize the salvation of their souls. So, sometimes it might be necessary to have confrontation in the Church in order to provide correction of some kind. So, for example we see the controversy over a bishop refusing the Eucharist to a pro-abortion politician. Agreeing with this point of view has some risks however. The danger of an over zealous emphasis on correctness can result in a cold emphasis on the externals of faith rather than on personal faith and relationship to Jesus.

Inclusive Language

The setting was a funeral for a fairly young man. The occasion was solemn. There were about 1000 people in the Church and four priests and a deacon at the altar. At the end of the Eucharistic Prayer (I don't remember which particular Eucharistic prayer it was) the celebrant (a visitor) intoned, "through whom and with whom and in whom ... ." At least that is what I heard. I had not heard this particular part of the liturgy subjected to inclusive language and the attempt sounded quite shocking.

The basic premise of inclusive language is that the use of masculine pronouns in the liturgy makes females feel excluded and therefore these masculine pronouns should be avoided. While I don't necessarily agree with the basic premise I think there are times when a masculine pronoun can be substituted with a more generic one. For example at morning prayer yesterday (Liturgy of the Hours, Friday, week III) one of the intercessions ends with: "pour forth your Spirit upon all men." In a case like this I would have no problem with the text simply saying all, or everyone, or all people, instead of men.

A basic problem however, comes when a masculine pronoun that refers specifically to Jesus is "neutered" in this way. So in the case of the mangled end to the Eucharistic prayer mentioned above the latin reflexive pronoun used here (per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso) is clearly intended to point strongly to Jesus Christ mentioned in the previous sentence in all four Eucharist prayers. So I would say that to substitute "whom" for him in this particular part of the Eucharistic prayer should be unthinkable. If you were determined to avoid a masculine pronoun here the best you could do would be : through Jesus (himself) and with Jesus and in Jesus .... This would be the only way to preserve the basic meaning of the prayer. Basically I think that we all can agree that Jesus was male and I don't think that liturgical language should obscure or ignore that fact.

More Motu

On the weekend I had a chance to visit with an old friend and colleague. At one point the talk turned to the "extra ordinary" form of the mass as outlined by the recent motu proprio. The topic came up because a former student-athlete that we both knew is now attending Mass at a chapel of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) in a town about two hours away. While driving two hours to attend Mass is evidence of amazing devotion I wondered if she and her family would return to the local parish if the parish began to offer Mass according to the 1962 missal.

I think that one of the motives behind the motu was to restore some of these people (like our former student) to their proper parishes. After some discussion I'm not sure that a simple "if you build it, they will come" approach to this is going to work. Many of the people that we know who attend the SSPX mass have complicated issues in the area of religion. On reflection the one explanation for this that makes partial sense to me comes from a book that I read when preparing for a master's degree project a few years back. In the book (What Prevents Christian Adults from Learning? by John Hull) the author describes several possible reactions to the increasing disconnect between religion and modern culture. He suggests that a common reaction is an attachment to something (or anything) that seems to provide certainty. So, people (even people like our student who was not alive in 1962) develop an attachment to the "old Mass" because it represents a time when things were more "black and white". I recall another example of this kind of attitude. Several years ago during a discussion on high school religious education I was told that we could solve a lot of the problems we were having with our young people if we only had more altar calls. This clearly is another example of someone seeing an overly simple solution to a complex problem. Still, my friend tells me that the SSPX chapel in his community in Southern Alberta has two Sunday Masses that attract 80 to 100 persons. That certainly represents a "stable number" referred to in the motu. If those numbers could be restored to the Church simply by instituting a regular "old Mass" in the parish it would be worth the time and effort. Still, its not certain that there are simple solutions to this situation (SSPX) as I've already said.

Factions

Rocco writing in Whispers in the Loggia blogspot makes an interesting point about current factions in the Catholic Church. Writing about Benedict XV (who became Pope in 1914) he quotes the Pontiff's encyclical: "24. It is, moreover, Our will that Catholics should abstain from certain appellations which have recently been brought into use to distinguish one group of Catholics from another. They are to be avoided not only as "profane novelties of words," out of harmony with both truth and justice, but also because they give rise to great trouble and confusion among Catholics." Rocco asks if this sounds familiar to anyone.

Of course it does. I read a number of "conservative" bloggers. Anyone who reads such bloggers is familiar with the contempt some of these bloggers seem to have for other Catholics who do not share their point of view. These other Catholics are called by a variety of names, one common name being "cafeteria Catholics". Sadly some of these "conservative" writers even directly attack the character of particular Catholics who disagree with them. I was particularly distressed a while back when one of these authors made a particularly nasty and personal attack on the character of the well known auther Fr. Ron Rolheiser. Now Fr. Rolheiser's spiritual writings often do not seem to reflect the usual traditions of Catholic spirituality but then again perhaps that is because he is not writing to "traditionalist" Catholics but is in fact writing for those who might be alienated from the Church in some way. Anyway, It seems to me that personal attacks like the on just mentioned can not be justified. Of course "liberal" writers would not allow such attacks to go unanswered. Most recently a liberal writer coined the term "neocath" to describe such writers. Naturally by his definition "neocath" is not a positive word.

Now I know that this kind of factionalism is nothing new in the Church. St. Paul frequently writes to urge unity in the Church. In first Corinthians he writes: "10 Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters,* by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose." In the letter to the Ephesians he writes: "4There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, 5one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all." So, even in the apostolic era we seem to have had some divisions in the Church. The current factions are nothing new. This same problem also shows up later in the Church of the first few centuries. Ignatius of Antioch in his letters frequently urges the faithful to be united and faithful to their bishops. Now Rod Bennett writing in his book, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words makes the point that Ignatius was struggling against factions that wanted to dilute the original message of the Apostles. So when we have factions one faction might be faithful to "pure" Catholicism and the other not.

I'm not sure how to draw conclusions here. I am probably more "conservative" than I was thirty years ago, but it troubles me that people take their differences so seriously. The Church is called catholic (small c) because it is capable of embracing everyone. People who are baptized into the Church are in fact Catholic. We need to make every effort to welcome everyone into the Church without diluting or distorting the message of Jesus. That is why I welcome the recent motu proprio restoring limited use of the missal of John XXIII for Mass. If doing this makes some Catholics feel more welcome in the Church it will be a positive move. If (as might happen) it ends up being another case of "who wins" and "who loses" then we all lose. We should fight for what we feel is right but a Church that is needlessly divided is a scandal to the whole world.

Nuptial Cohabitors?

Two researchers and writers from a Catholic university recently published an article in US Catholic that provoked a lot of comments. The authors were attempting to find a pastoral way to deal with the reality that fewer Catholics are going through with sacramental marriage and also that a significant number of those couples who do approach the Church for marriage preparation are already "cohabiting." The authors make a distinction regarding cohabitation between those who are already mutually committed in some way and so are "nuptial cohabitors" and those who have no intention of marriage (non-nuptial cohabitors). Their proposal involves a way to remove the stigma of "living in sin" from those who live together prior to their marriage. Their proposal involves a restoration of the period of betrothal to marriage:
Our pastoral proposal is straightforward: a return to the marital sequence of betrothal (with appropriate ritual to ensure community involvement), sexual intercourse, possible fertility, then ritual wedding to acknowledge and mark the consummation of both valid marriage and sacrament.
Since these couples will have already initiated their marriage through betrothal, their intercourse would not be premarital but marital, as it was in the pre-Tridentine Catholic Church. We envision a marital process initiated by mutual commitment and consent lived in love, justice, equality, intimacy, and fulfillment in a nuptial cohabitation pointed to a wedding that consummates the process of becoming married in a public manner. Such a process would meet the legitimate Catholic and social requirement that the sexual act must take place only within a stable relationship.
The process would be: Betrothal: The couple’s betrothal, which would involve a public ritual highlighting free consent to wed in the future, would be witnessed and blessed on behalf of the church community. The betrothal ritual would differ from the present wedding ceremony in that the consent would be to marry in the future. Such betrothal, as it did in earlier Catholic tradition, would confer on the couple the status of committed spouses with all the rights that the church grants to spouses, including the right to sexual intercourse.
Nuptial cohabitation: During this period the couple would live together as spouses, enjoying the approval and support of the community, and continuing the lifelong process of establishing their marital relationship as one of love, justice, equality, intimacy, and mutual flourishing. During this time the church would assist the couple with ongoing marriage education aimed precisely at clarifying and deepening their relationship.
Finally, sacramental marriage would be a celebration of the committed relationship that exists and a commitment to further growth.

The authors were severely criticized for their proposal. The bishop of the diocese where they teach wrote a public condemnation of the proposal in question. The fear behind the criticisms apparently being that the proposal is simply finding a way to condone behavior that has long been considered immoral by the Church.

In the RCIA blogs which I read from time to time I regularly find discussions of the problems of dealing with these "nuptial cohabitors". I suspect that this matter is dealt with in a wide variety of ways from not dealing with it at all to insisting that the couple spend a period of time apart before the wedding. Would reintroducing the idea of betrothal (commitment to marry in the future) be a way of regularizing this increasingly common form of living arrangement? Would any of the couples who are "nuptial cohabitors" care? In the long run would accepting the author's proposal have any impact on the long standing Church teaching regarding the role of sexual intimacy in a relationship? These would be interesting questions to explore but I suspect the volume of criticism that this proposal generated means that such a proposal in not about to be considered any time in the future.

The "Old" Mass

In the blogs that I read regularly there is a great deal of discussion about so called "liturgical abuses" and about a declaration supposedly coming from the Pope (a motu proprio) that will permit celebration of the Mass as celebrated before Vatican II without expressed permission from the local bishop. This "restoration" of the older form of the Mass is of, I suspect, little interest for the vast majority of Catholics. It is apparently intensely interesting to about three smaller groups of Catholics.

The first of these groups are those who basically oppose the authority of the Popes who came after Pius XII. The most outstanding example of this group is the Society of Saint Pius X. This group was founded by Archbishop Lefebvre in Europe some years ago in defiance of Pope John Paul. What Lefebvre did was to ordain more Bishops without the consent of Rome. We have representatives of this group here in Alberta. Its main "raison d'etre" seems to be the preservation of the "old Mass" but in reality there seems to be a broader disagreement in ecclesiology. The leaders of SSPX claim to be loyal Catholics but do not wish to accept many of the initiatives of Vatican II. Some writers have suggested that Pope Benedict's interest in a motu proprio is primarily to bring the SSPX back into union with the Church. In addition to SSPX there are a number of smaller groups who cling to the "old Mass" and reject the authority of the Church. On the internet you can find groups who insist that Pope John XXIII excommunicated himself when he initiated Vatican II and that subsequent Popes included Benedict were improperly elected and that consequently there currently is no valid Pope. Google "Pius XIII" and you will find the site of an elderly priest who now claims to have been elected legitimate Pope as the successor to Pius XII. The anticipated motu proprio might have some appeal to this group, particularly the SSPX, but many of their writings suggest that their problems are with current ecclesiology as much as with liturgy.

A second group of people interested in this anticipated motu proprio, I would suggest, are simply deeply conservative people who were taken aback by the sudden change that seemed to take place in the Church (especially in the liturgy) during the 1970's. These are simply people who feel that "old ways are best" and who long for "the good old days" of Catholicism which were before Vatican II. I have to say that I can recall the days before Vatican II and I remember our Pastor telling us that only protestant churches changed and the Catholic church would never change. I have read the expressed opinion that the current malaise in the Church is the result of changes in the liturgy instituted following Vatican II. These people, while well intentioned seem to forget that there were many changes in the broader society that brought about the current state of affairs in the Church since Vatican II.

A final group of people interested in the motu proprio I would suggest are people who are interesting in a reformation of the liturgy. These are people who feel that there is an over emphasis on the Eucharist as the meal of the assembly in current liturgy. These people would like to see a greater emphasis on the sacred nature of the Mass. They see the "old Mass" as a vehicle to restore a balance which they feel has been lost in contemporary liturgy.

People who supposedly know these things write that the motu proprio in question has been written and signed and that its promulgation is imminent. I only hope that whatever is said the changes that might come will result in better liturgies and greater unity in the Church.

The Tomb of Jesus

The finding of Christ’s tomb
This past week or so has been filled with stories about the possible finding of a so far unknown tomb complete with the remains of Jesus and other members of his family. The stories were to generate publicity for a documentary set to air on the Discovery channel in the U.S. and on Vision TV in Canada this weekend. Naturally, a book is set to appear this spring (likely before Easter?) The basic content of the stories so far seems to be that:
In 1980 a tomb was excavated in a district of Jerusalem. Inside this tomb the excavators found ten ossuaries (bone boxes made of stone) which included some skeletal remains. The ossuaries were inscribed with names that were common at the time such as Joseph, Jesus, Mary, and Judah. At the time little was made of this discovery.
About fifteen years ago the BBC made a film suggesting that this might be the tomb of Jesus. The suggestion seems to have been laughed away by all. Now drawing on the fame of the Da Vinci Code and using the prestige of DNA evidence these film makers put forward the theory that the remains found are in all probability those of Jesus of Nazareth, his parents, his wife Mary Magdalene, and his child, Judah. The film will apparently try to make a case based on statistics to establish this probability. The DNA likely could only show that one set of remains was not related to the others (its unlikely that the filmmakers sent to heaven for a control DNA sample).

What to make of all this? Well, first of all the early Church was quite clear about the tomb - it was empty. St. Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians is also quite explicit: "If there is no resurrection from the dead, Christ himself cannot have been raised, and if Christ has not been raised then our preaching has been useless and your believing it is useless..." (1Cor: 15:14). Secondly, the fact that other people at that time were named Jesus, Mary, and Joseph is not surprising. For example, one article that I have seen suggests that about twenty percent of the female population at that time was named Mary. Jesus was not the most common male name but it was still relatively common (sixth most common according to the article). So, for example, my neighbors are named Frank, Ken (his son), and Marj. If twenty years from now (never mind two thousand years) I go to a cemetery in another town far from here and find a family plot with just those markers, (mentioned above) it is extremely unlikely that I am viewing the graves of my former neighbors. So, I am not going to lose sleep about this so-called "earth shattering" discovery. In fact, it seems like "deja moo" to me (I’ve heard this bull before). I suspect that visions of the fortune made by the Da Vinci Code dance before the eyes of the film makers and obscure any honest search for truth.

It seems to be that plain greed as the motivation for projects such as this is the most likely explanation for their existence. Another explanation seems to be (in my opinion) an almost antirational quality of modern culture that makes people ready to believe in cover-ups and in bizarre alternative explanations for events. One of the first examples that I can recall came with the book, Chariots of the Gods, which theorized that intervention by space travelers was the most likely explanation for the achievements of ancient civilizations. That book was popular and spawned a whole industry of people providing alternative explanations for things. Finally, I think that some people who are nominal Christians are ready to accept stories that cast doubt on traditional teachings of the Church because they are more comfortable with picking their own beliefs rather than accepting the beliefs handed down by the Church.
Update: I watched most of the documentary last night on Vision TV. It was fairly boring. You have to accept a series of highly dubious conjectures about the identity of the individuals in the tomb and then the triumphant conclusion of the film becomes, "Then if all this is true, statistics suggest that this must be the tomb of Jesus. Of course if each of the individual conjectures is false, then the final conclusion is very false.

Magisterial authority

These words written at the beginning of World War I by Pope Benedict XV (no not the one we have now) still illustrate the tensions the exist between individual freedom and the teaching authority of the Church:

24. It is, moreover, Our will that Catholics should abstain from certain appellations which have recently been brought into use to distinguish one group of Catholics from another. They are to be avoided not only as "profane novelties of words," out of harmony with both truth and justice, but also because they give rise to great trouble and confusion among Catholics. Such is the nature of Catholicism that it does not admit of more or less, but must be held as a whole or as a whole rejected: "This is the Catholic faith, which unless a man believe faithfully and firmly; he cannot be saved" (Athanas. Creed). There is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Catholicism: it is quite enough for each one to proclaim "Christian is my name and Catholic my surname," only let him endeavour to be in reality what he calls himself.

Conservative Catholics today use the term "cafeteria Catholics." By this they mean the Catholics who accept some aspects of Catholic teaching but do not accept others. This quote strongly suggests that we cannot pick and choose but rather must accept or reject the whole of the Catholic faith.

Many people today would, of course, reject such a statement. We have Catholics who are well educated in their faith and who as adults should be free to make their own minds up about their beliefs. The problem is this dissent from the teaching authority of the Church has become too easy to do. We can only disagree with the Church after much prayer and studying. At the same time it is important to remember that the Church in the 20th century, especially leading up to Vatican II, changed precisely because some theologians took the risk of pointing to problems in the Church. So, I guess the point is, I do not quite agree with the point made by the Pope above. Our first reaction to Church teaching should be to understand the reasonableness of the teaching in question and to agree with it. However, we need to recognize the possibility that persons of good faith could in some circumstances disagree with Church authority.