Fed up with the Church

I capitalize Church partly out of habit, partly to signify that I refer to Holy Mother the Church, as Catholics once referred to their often unholy community of believers. Today, as bishops are found guilty either of predatory crimes and coverups or worldliness or moral blindness, it is inevitable that many within the church should be critics. Richard Rohr in his current series on prophets ("Daily Meditations")reminds us that criticizing the church is "being faithful to the very clear pattern set by the prophets and Jesus" himself. We criticize what we love and want to improve; this is very different from hateful attacks. What I've read lately about the hierarchy are honest and helpful critiques. Elizabeth Scalia in America (8 May) calls herself a "mad, fed-up Catholic." She refers to the presence of too many spoiled princes and too few true servants, in other words, an institution crippled by clericalism, in which laypeople still have a tiny role. She writes, I think, as a prophet. So does Margaret Renkl in the New York Times (1 July), who reminds us of the primacy of the informed conscience. When a bishop (as recently in Indianapolis) demands that all teachers in Catholic schools be considered "ministers" and therefore forbidden to marry those they choose (such as same-sex partners) and when such a bishop fires these well-qualified gay teachers, many thinking faithful might well object. Obedience to bad morality is not required. Renkl reminds us what is often overlooked: the principle that says Catholics should be informed of church teachings, study them, listen to the arguments and pray for discernment goes back to Thomas Aquinas and has been re-affirmed by Pope Francis. This process might well result in our respectful disagreement with the official teaching, which is often the case in sexual matters about which the celibate clergy are often unenlightened. She does not say this principle of the "primacy of the informed conscience" was also re-affirmed by the Second Vatican Council, which conservatives in the church tend to minimize. Do these and many, many other upset and angry Catholics belong outside the church? No! Our tradition has always thrived on conflict and respectful dissent. To leave the church and go it alone is to cater to the cult of individualism. We need to be part of something larger than ourselves. Again, Rohr comes to our aid: We got the idea of church, he says, from the Jews who taught us that we need a kind of collective good that unites us, strengthens us, transforms us. Because "there is no way that we as individuals can stand alone against corporate evil or systemic sin." So for individuals to say that the church is guilty of corporate evil and systemic sin is a duty, based on fact, not a heresy; it is part of the prophetic tradition and is a sign of health, the first step, perhaps, in healing. Now others must join these individuals and demand change.

Looking at Pope World

One of my former students, a librarian at the Orlando Public Library, asked me recently if I would repeat my talk, "Behind Vatican Walls," as part of the library's Preservation Week. The topic, she said, was all about saving and preserving the culture in various parts of the world, and my talk, which she had heard last year, was important.

I was initially surprised at the invitation because my research into what happens in the world's smallest country, Vatican City, had focused mainly on the surprising customs and practices of what I call Pope World.  Yet, as I thought about how the Holy See (the papacy) has for centuries valued tradition and maintained its vast art collection, library, and archives, I realized that the preservation emphasis was worth emphasizing.

So I mentioned how Latin is still spoken by 200 or so of the priests who work in the Secretariat of State, translating documents (and many of the Pope's tweets) into the language of Cicero and Caesar.  Latin is not a dead language at the Vatican, although Italian (along with English and other languages) is used for daily business. The Vatican uses eight official languages to communicate with the world.

I mentioned how the Vatican Library's vast treasures include the earliest example of Arabic (a 7th-century Koran), 800 Hebrew manuscripts, including a Torah used by Maimonides, as well as Persian and Hindu texts,  rare papyrus manuscripts dating back 2,500 years and 300,000 Greek and Roman coins. This library was founded in 1451 and has been open to scholars since the 17th century.

The so-called Secret Archives are not really secret (just private)--except that, for the past 100 years, scholars can consults nearly all of them. They include the letters of Henry VIII asking for an annulment of his first marriage, the excommunication of Martin Luther, letters from Mozart and the first Queen Elizabeth.  Official documents from 1939 to the present remain sealed, but many of the famous documents, like letters from President Lincoln, can be viewed online.  Novelists who write sensational fiction about Vatican secrets prefer to ignore what the Archives are really about.

I also mentioned (among many little-known facts) that the first high-ranking woman hired by the Vatican was Jewish: Hermine Speier was hired in 1934 to set up a photographic archive, which she headed for forty years. Today, 41 percent of the female employees have university degrees: they are curators, librarians, linguists, media experts, historians, and lawyers. About 19 percent of the staff are women.

I mentioned that the Vatican Observatory has been doing important work in astronomy for 400 years and now is a partner with the University of Arizona. Of course, the eight museums with 100,000 objects from Roman, Etruscan, Egyptian, Greek and medieval times as well galleries filled with Renaissance art make the Vatican home to the greatest concentration of art in the world. Today, there is a Ministry of Culture to promote exchanges with other museums.

Although the past is a constant presence in Pope World, I reminded the audience that the Pontifical Academy of Science (and of Social Science) has regularly invited scholars of many faith traditions to discuss humanitarian issues: most recently, stem cell research and the environment.  When the mayor of New York City, Bill De Blasio, recently attended an economic summit at the Vatican, he declared that, for the first time in his life, he could say that "the Church is one of the centers of progressive thought in the world."  Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia Univ. economist, has been a regular consultant on the environment; he stated that the Catholic Church, through the various Vatican agencies, has provided leadership on nuclear disarmament, the international debt crisis, human trafficking, and refugee relief.  A lot goes on behind those old walls besides theology!

I have been fascinated to learn how the past and the present intersect in this unique place that Lord Norwich, the historian, has called the "most astonishing social, political, and spiritual institution ever created."

The Vatican has been around a long, long time, often as a center of controversy and conflict, but also as a powerful institution that affects much of the world, beyond the 1.2 billion members of the Catholic Church.

Thanks to my interest in Pope Francis and the way he is reinventing the papacy, I have learned a great deal about the colorful, complex organization he heads and have enjoyed sharing what I've learned with audiences.

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Same-sex marriage and Catholic voters

The election in heavily Catholic Ireland last week, with 62 percent of the populace in the Republic voting in favor of same-sex marriage has been widely reported and analyzed.  The first piece I read was by Frank Bruni in the NYTimes, who raises a question he does not answer about why voters in traditionally Roman Catholic countries--from Argentina and Brazil to Belgium, France and Spain--have suddenly, it seems, become "gay friendly."

Why do sixty percent of American Catholic voters polled say they approve of same-sex marriage?  Bruni suggests that young Catholics are "less rooted in Rome." In Europe and Latin America, he goes on, many people pay "primary obeisance to their own consciences, their own senses of social justice."

That last phrase is troublesome. I doubt if the sense of social justice on the part of many Republican politicos in this country is congruent with the church's teachings, going back to Leo XIII in the late 19th century and including Dorothy Day and the Franciscan tradition embodied today most visibly by Pope Francis.  Bruni is overlooking the importance of "thinking with the church," which is not the same as agreeing with everything taught by the church.

That point aside, each country that has so far legalized same-sex marriage is different, so generalizations are not easily made. What is there about the Irish, for example, other than disgust with the hierarchy's handling of the sexual abuse scandal, that would lead them to such a surprising vote?

I would like to think it has a lot to do with charity toward an oppressed minority, a respect for equality in the eyes of God, even if this basic human respect is at odds with the moral teachings of the church.  Of course, there are other reasons, too: a higher percentage of Catholics today are better educated than in the past, at least in the USA.  There is also the Catholic experience with celibate clergy whose numbers include many homosexually inclined priests.

There may also be a paradoxical love of tradition, as E. J. Dionne mentions in his current Commonweal article. What is more traditional than marriage, which indicates a belief in the past as well as the future, a belief that a structure exists, even though outside the sacramental rubric of the church, enabling fidelity and fostering stability.

So it was sad to see the harsh response to the Irish vote from the Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Parolin: "a defeat for humanity." The Archbishop of Dublin was wiser, less hysterical: he said that church needed a reality check, that bishops should listen to young people.

Cardinal Kasper of Germany, in another context, has called for a "listening magisterium": a hierarchy that pays real attention to the capacity of individuals to think about moral and social issues in the context of what the church stands for.

One thing is now clear from the vote in Ireland and other seemingly Catholic cultures: the days of top-down authority coming from Rome are coming to an end, with more power being given (in keeping with the Second Vatican Council) to the laity and the local churches.  I hope that gay people will feel more at home in such a church and actually be treated in a Christian way.

A Good Man

This week, June 3 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Pope John XXIII, a man of remarkable humor and humility who once remarked, "Anyone can be pope. I am the best proof of that." Despite the honors heaped upon him, he never took himself too seriously or forgot that he was the son of a poor sharecropper.

"I am not a good looking pope--just look at my ears--but you will get along with me."  He was old and fat and unpromising at the time of his election in 1958 at age 78; yet, in barely five years, the changed the Catholic church and the relation of the church with the world. He began the Second Vatican Council, which came as surprise to many who expected the former Angelo Cardinal Roncalli to be a caretaker until someone better came along.  And he endeared himself to millions.

Like Pope Francis, he loved people and shunned pomp--not easy at the Vatican with its entrenched traditions. He walked the city streets, picking up the nickname Johnny Walker, and visited a Rome jail because the inmates could not come to see him. 

About ancient traditions, he said: "Tradition means 'protect the fire,' not 'preserve the ashes'."  About reform, he believed in taking things step by step: "See everything. Overlook much.  Correct a little."

He had a positive rather than judgmental attitude toward people and was a good pastor in Venice. Before that, in Paris as the nuncio after the war, he encountered a workman who had just hit his thumb and was cursing, calling upon God to damn everyone imaginable.  Roncalli stopped him, smiled and said: "Why don't you just say 'shit' like everyone else?"

That anecdote speaks volumes about the man.

The Pope's Decision

The stunning news today that Benedict XVI is abdicating his office as pope is probably the most enlightened and important thing he has done since taking office; it is, sadly, the thing for which he will be remembered.

His election in 2005 struck me as unwise and unimaginative: a shy intellectual and theologian who wanted to retire to Germany to write was instead installed as the head of a vast institution that required the leadership of someone younger, stronger, and more enlightened,who could begin to streamline its royal trappings and elaborate bureaucracy and continue the work of the Second Vatican Council.

That council and the events that followed in 1968 seemed to frighten Cardinal Ratzinger, as he was then known; he retreated into conservative mindset that did not serve the church well.  He must have watched in horror as his predecessor grew older and more infirm, refusing to resign even when everyone could see his inability to function. I suspect his alarm was increased by the sexual scandals of the past two decades and the official cover-up in which he was involved. He felt embarrassed by various mis-steps during his pontificate that suggested that the job was too big for his frail shoulders. Resigning was, no doubt, a great relief.

What effect this decision, and he, will have on his successor remains to be seen. Things change with uncommon slowness in the gilded world of the Vatican, so we cannot expect some of the changes I would like to see in the priesthood and in the role of women in the church.

But at least Pope Benedict ended on a positive, realistic note. That itself is a change.

A Priest Confronts Same-Sex Marriage

Like Obama and many others, my acceptance of the idea of marriage as applied to two people of the same sex has been evolving. If opinion polls and the media are right, Americans' attitudes toward this reality have been changing. This does not mean an automatic decline in homophobia but a greater acceptance of gay couples in society.

Attitudes in the Catholic hierarchy move with exceeeding slowness. Lately, they seem to be going back rather than forward. So, when the Archbishop of Baltimore recently asked that a letter be read in all churches urging the faithful to vote against a civil marriage protection amendment, one man, Richard T. Lawrence, was emboldened to speak his own mind.

As pastor of St. Vincent's church in Baltimore for 39 years, according to National Catholic Reporter, Father Lawrence gave his own respectful and carefully worded response. He is to be applauded for his courage.  No doubt his Archbishop is not pleased.

Here is what Fr. Lawrence had to say (I summarize the account in NCR):  I am in awe of parents and of all couples whose faithfulness to one another, in good times and bad, is a sacrament, a sign of God's faithfulness to all.

Clearly one of the Vatican II priests of the John XXIII era who are becoming more and more scarce, Lawrence cites that landmark council as signaling an eventual change in church teaching whereby we could recognize "the total, exclusive and permanent union of gay and lesbian couples as part of the sacrament of matrimony." Wow!

He cites the line from Genesis: "It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him." So what if a guy's suitable partner is another guy?

Citing the church practice of marrying couples beyond the age of childbearing who pledge to devote themselves to each other, he asks, How can it be sacramental to bless the union of an elderly couple (straight) and not a gay couple? "Neither," he said. "will procreate but both can be sacraments of God's faithfulness..." 

Lawrence, a pastor who obviously has learned a lot about human needs in his long ministry and who values experience as well as doctrine, believes this is a line of future development in theology and perhaps even in church teaching. But if this is not even a possibility, can we not at least say that the civil marriage of gay and lesbian couples should be allowed by the state, if not the church?

Neither I nor Fr. Lawrence will live to see any change in the sacrament of marriage to include same sex couples, but I hope to see a change of heart, a more pastoral and caring openness--the type bravely displayed by Fr. Lawrence--on the part of bishops and others in authority toward homosexual unions.  Civil unions, apparently, do not suffice in most states, especially when a same-sex couple is raising children, as many do.

I don't see why we can't bless such unions and so honor the love they represent rather than add to the hatred and bigotry so often directed to homosexual people. (I say "we" because we who are Catholics are the church, as those in Rome tend to forget.)

The growing change in my attitude to this topic is far from unique and reflects human reality in the 21st century. Still, it's hard to use "marriage" and not mean a man and a woman. We are a church of tradition, yet this is a living, and lived, human tradition.

Francis and Frederick

I am thinking today, on his feast day, of one of the most remarkable men in Christian history, St. Francis of Assisi, in part because of a solid new biography of the saint by Augustine Thompson, who tries to find the real man beneath the legends that have surrounded him.

Francis, a troubled man who changed history, presumably met Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, before the saint's death in 1226. Whether or not this encounter between two radically different men occurred, it is interesting, as Richard Bressler notes in his recent biography of Frederick, that the worldly emperor, with his love of Eastern (Muslim) customs and language, saw in Francis a condemnation of the worldly corruption, power and wealth of the Catholic hierarchy of the thirteenth century.  Although we can say little with absolute certainty about a man of those times, Frederick believed that a church closer to the simple Franciscan model was necessary.

One point in comparing these two divergent figures is that being a Catholic is, and never has been, as monolithic and uniform as it is often portrayed, as I, in fact, was educated to believe--not even in the Middle Ages.  The diversity and independence of each of these men, combined with their respect for the spiritual power of the pope and the church, makes them important representatives of an important era in the church's emergence as a world power.

Frederick, called in his time a heretic, even the Antichrist, for oppposing several popes, nevertheless remained a faithful Catholic Christian. At his death, he wore the habit of a Cistercian monk, renouncing the wordly glory he had pursued.   What emerges from the books I have read about Frederick, called in his time the Wonder of the World, was that he was a highly energetic and independent thinker, interested in languages, science, poetry, law, and kingship and open to both the Jewish and Islamic worlds as he encountered them in the cultivated kingdom of Sicily, which he inherited in 1197.

In believing that the spiritual aspect of Christendom should be in the hands of the papacy, but that the church should not be about land, money and power politics, he may be seen as a forerunner of the Reformation. Francis, too, disturbed by the worldly excesses of the church but always respectful of its spiritual authority, is an interesting counterpart to his contemporary, the emperor.  I would like to think they met and respected each other.

I am glad that both men, revered for many reasons by many people, have found biographers able to sift through the myths of the centuries to try to find out what they really were like. In doing so, we find some amazing correspondences between Francis, the least aggressive reformer of all times, and Frederick, who fought the church for the sake of an empire that never succeeded yet who is valued nevertheless for his tolerance of non-Christian cultures.  Both were sons of the church, which like all vast institutions, needs criticism and ongoing reform.

I am glad that I happened to discover books about them at the same time.