Silence of Joseph

""The website Catholic Online reported that "Pope Francis has directed those closest to him in the Curia, notably the cardinals and the archbishops, to hear confessions at the church of Santo Spirito just outside the Vatican" this weekend.

Confessions are already heard there on a daily basis. But now these high profile Churchmen will be doing same and Pope Francis expects to join them as well. It is one more sign of the Holy Father's efforts to remind all Catholic priests - be they parish priest or administrative cardinal - of their primary duty as pastors. The motivation for the order, according to Catholic Online, is to emphasize for the people the importance of the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the greatness of God in forgiving human sin. 

On this date the Holy Father also gave his "state of the union" address to members of the Roman Curia. He identified two important qualities these members must have - professionalism and service. He encouraged them not to fall into the weakness of gossip which is an all too familiar habit among bureaucrats in any institution. Pope Francis believes members of the Curia must behave like St. Joseph, who, he claims, "is so necessary at the side of Mary." Joseph's silence is a model for these men to emulate.

Pope Francis is clearly getting back to basics - certainly in terms that remind the clergy of their calling as priests. He has already clearly ruled out the fascination with a clerical lifestyle and he has called for bishops to spend less time in airports than in their own dioceses. It is not our vocation to be solely engaged in polemics. It IS our vocation to be with people and listening to their joys and sorrows.

Catholic Online concluded its story by saying "This appears to be the dominant theme of Francis' pontificate. That God is great, powerful, and merciful, and that when we act with humility, we truly serve God and one another."

What did I go out to see?

John the Baptist wondered who this man Jesus was. Jesus responded by asking John's followers what they saw. The blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised. The poor have the good news proclaimed to them.  What do we see? Where are the blind, the lame, the deaf, the leper, the dead and the poor? Are they not all about us and maybe even within us?

Shoppers defied bad weather to spend money on two successive bad weather weekends. Another high schooler shoots a classmate in a school and then kills himself. Butler beats Purdue in basketball. Peter O'Toole and Joan Fontaine are two well known celebrities who died this past week. Nelson Mandela was laid to rest. Congress is finally getting a little work done. Those are some of the headlines. So just what is Jesus talking about anyway?

He does not seem to understand that gas prices are high and I have less to spend on necessities. He does not seem to grasp that a friend's family life is falling apart. He doesn't emphasize the pain of same sex couples who want to marry or of heterosexual couples who are divorced and want to remarry and receive the Eucharist. Or do none of these represent broken lives?

What did you go out in the desert to see, Jesus asks? John was unlike anything they had known. Jesus is even more so. Perhaps I am too caught up in my own self to notice the blind, the lame, the poor all around me. Perhaps I do not any longer recognize what good news is unless it is the value of the hamburger at the local fast food restaurant on which I can gorge myself. Why should I even care about the deaf and the poor anyway?

It is only of value if the person of Jesus has made a difference in my life. Otherwise I am traveling a road that leads nowhere fast. Still there are some who prefer that road to one that is well lit and safe, one that has an end to it, an end that makes absolute sense and that offers satisfaction.

No exceptions allowed

Alas! Big business - especially big retail business - is so hurting these days that Thanksgiving Day was pulled in to assist the struggling big retail department stores from going under and causing Americans to lose out on all the junk we might not otherwise be able to buy for Christmas. We schmucks who struggle from paycheck to paycheck are now enlisted in the cause helping the rich to get richer and rightly making ourselves poorer by spending all our money on useless goods so that we don't miss out on the Fight Club experience held annually on what is known as Black Friday. Brown Thursday is now an anticipatory event leading up to that nonsense. I once erroneously thought Brown Thursday referred to the gravy on my turkey and dressing but now I find it is mostly on my face for not admitting to the stupidity and ignorance of the American character. I've been duped, Jeremiah said to God after prophesying and realizing how much trouble it gave him. And I've been duped into thinking that Americans can still revere a holiday tradition for our families. But American families aren't families anymore. They are something else which no word can define.

In Indianapolis on November 29 the youth membership of Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral on Monument Circle was raided by city code enforcement officials because they were selling cookies and hot cocoa to the crowds gathering for the lighting of the monument's Christmas tree. This violated a city ordinance that regulates vendors from taking advantage of innocent citizens during special events held in the downtown area. There is a 'clean zone' in which such vendors must refrain from all sales.

The Indianapolis Star reported that Christ Church has been giving away hot drinks during the Circle of Lights for decades, and selling a few cookies on the side as a youth fundraiser for quite a while.

But because big business is hurting so much, on Friday night city code enforcement officials sent the youth membership packing and their cocoa and cookies went undrunk and uneaten. The city ordinance enacted before the Super Bowl in 2012 enables big Downtown special events to establish a "clean zone" where vendors are closely regulated, if not out-and-out prohibited. According to the Star, Christ Church "and its outlaw cookie operation — fell into the clean zone for the Circle of Lights."

The church requested of city officials they be allowed to give away the left over cookies. But no way! That would harm the city's ideals assisting only the biggest of vendors. How dare those youth try to undercut the greedy city's aims. You see, the ordinance protects the hosts of large special events, such as the Super Bowl, the Final Four, Indiana Black Expo's Summer Celebration or the Circle of Lights from competing interests. It should be emphasized that these expensive venues can compromise not at all with the aggressive and unruly youth wanting to earn a pittance by selling cookies and cocoa. Why waste your pennies on such foolishness? It means less income for big business.

A curious addenda to this incident is that even the neighboring Starbucks had to close down a sidewalk sale at the same time. I would have thought Starbucks would have regarded the youth as unnecessary competitors.

I believe both youth and church hospitality events have been put in their place!

The malady of contemporary life

Ah! First Sunday of Advent and this morning was not much different from yesterday morning. Same people, same headlines, same wars, same crimes, same habits, same lies, same movies, same prices, same, same, same. It does not feel very different and that is probably consolation. If it felt different, it wouldn't be human life on this scarred and blessed earth.

My favorite annual reading is a 28-page booklet I've had for many years by Johannes Metz titled "The Advent of God" in which Metz argues that "the malady of contemporary man is his  deliberate effort to forget the coming of God into human history." Each year when I re-read this tome the truth of it seems to me more and more palpable. Our attention in Advent is one of preparation for the coming of Christ but we are more attentive to the bargains we can obtain that we will throw away in the new year. It would also appear that shopping these first days is not the kind of family ritual that brings us together but the implementation of some kind of economic war game that requires law enforcement to intervene when someone else grabs first the item I want. We human beings are flawed characters in the book of life.

My Christmas shopping memories are a very young age with my mother and two siblings going to see Santa Claus at a downtown department store, the bell of the Salvation Army Santa outside the store, the endless stream of dimes on the sidewalk placed there for the March of Dimes appeal for polio research, a bus ride home, some snowfall as we walked two blocks to our door and knowing we would be warm and happy once inside. That is nostalgia. Tyranny has replaced the memory.

The current season takes on many colors - Thursday was once Thanksgiving Day, now it is Brown Thursday; Friday is Black Friday; Saturday is Small Business Saturday (is that a neutral color?) and Monday is Cyber Monday (that probably is multi-colored like fireworks). None of it revolves around people anymore. It is all about economics. 

For many Americans today, God is a thing of the past. The Christian believes that God entered human history and it is up to us to make "a continuing effort to keep ourselves open to the coming of God." We do not know when the Lord will return, Metz writes. This gives us a "lowliness and poverty" that are intrinsic to "any genuine faith in God's first Advent." But Americans can't stand to be poor and wouldn't admit their impoverishment because of the absence of God in their lives anymore than an alcoholic can admit to being unable to not drink.

Advent is a season of preparation. The preparation is not for recognizing our wealth. It is for admitting our poverty. Our lives are quite definitely and absolutely meaningless without God.

 

 

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What's in a gesture?

A priest recently remarked to me that he is waiting for Pope Francis to make his mark. For this priest, Pope Francis has not yet defined his papacy. He has not yet grabbed onto the Pope Francis band wagon and he is not a critic of Francis but he believes Francis has yet to make any significant sign that makes his papacy stand out. Perhaps today's release of the pope's apostolic exhortation will begin to make him more of a believer.

Maybe. I read a claim that the crowds in St. Peter's Square during the almost eight-month pontificate of Francis have already exceeded the entire pontificate of Pope Benedict. At the same time the Pew Research people have surveyed U.S. Catholics and found that Francis' pontificate has not made a difference in terms of Mass attendance in the U.S. I'm not sure what that means other than that Francis can draw a crowd and that perhaps U.S. leadership in the Church is on life support.

Has Francis from the beginning identified his papacy with the gestures he makes? Like Therese of Lisieux and her Little Way, do Francis' embrace of babies, a tumored man, and others not identify a markedly different papacy as if to say we didn't get it quite right. We are concerned like Martha with many things and yet Mary has chosen the better part. Jesus spent his time healing people of their illnesses. The political world around him did not change much. In fact, it got worse. Is Francis here to prevent WW3? Or is he the great preacher of love your neighbor to each one of us individually? Maybe he really is the reincarnation of his namesake.

Some have noted that Pope Francis certainly seems to have been effective in keeping the situation in Syria from boiling over. He asks for prayer and a week later there are negotiations going on. Tensions have decreased. Is the situation in Syria solved? Not at all. But faith is not measured in nuclear explosions or comets streaking through the sky. Faith is a step by step process of giving oneself over to one greater than oneself.

What Francis has done so far is to ask us to rethink our way of business. What we've been about has had diminishing returns. Can Francis take us off life support and offer us real food once again?

Out with the old

Among the things I have learned in my lifetime - as we grow older, change and make decisions for ourselves, it does no good to linger. Move on! I have experienced life in enough institutions - schools, sabbatical programs, parishes, etc. - to know that there is a time for each of them and a time to leave them. Leave behind the old life. Put on the new. Don't try to take the old life with you.

Some seminarians make a disagreeable choice when choosing to leave seminary formation by not really leaving at all. Some discern well, pray and talk things over with their formators, pack up, leave, and then return to the seminary to visit old friends regularly or meet them in neutral locations to share good food and drink. Retaining and developing healthy friendships is always a great experience. What is not so great is clinging to such friendships when there is so much life to experience beyond the seminary. I have seen too many individuals from high school and college and other programs hang on to old haunts and older relationships as if nothing has changed.

I cannot believe this is healthy. We all grow at our own pace, we are not one size fits all, but when the former friends in one lifestyle keep reappearing as if that lifestyle were continuing for him or her there is a problem. A former seminarian, for example, whose relationships continue to be other seminarians without any new ones developing risks an arrested development. Oh, yes, it is important to maintain good relationships with good friends, but the nature of the relationships have changed and too many people act as if they are still in the former place rather than the new one. Cut the cord, as a wise man said.

Discernment is not a simple process and some try to circumvent it with quick decisions. There are those who know they need to make a change and do and slowly but surely their whole base of friends gradually change so that there are now acquaintances in the past and new friends are now the closer relationship. But some make the change and continue to cling to old relationships as if life has just made a slight turn rather than a full detour. Such relationships gradually feel strained among those left behind while the one moving on often clings to former ways of life.

There is nothing so sad, for example, as a former seminarian defensive about the seminary, the diocese, the religious order, the Church, etc., yet who has not fought the current battles and lacks the knowledge of what is current and who continues to think in an environmental awareness that ended years ago. Such people can often do damage to the continuity of such religious life or even Church life. For those who continue within the structure there is often a misunderstanding and ignorance of the truth that one is separate from other worlds. The call of Christ in Church life as a cleric or religious is all-encompassing and requires total commitment.

Forty-five years ago when I was ordained priests tried to prove to the Church that we were just like everybody else. But the truth is that we are not. We really are called to give up father and mother and brother and sister. God wants no mediators between Himself and His disciples. For the person called to be a priest among disciples, there can be no accompanists other than the Lord Himself.

Do things just stay the same after reform?

As a young child educated in Catholic schools, I remember being impressed in my study of Catholicism with the importance of the Council of Trent in solidifying and unifying our Catholic faith in the face of challenges made by the Protestant Reformation. As a young Catholic growing up in the 1950s the Reformation was the great enemy of our faith. There was nothing good about it. It upended and destroyed the Catholic faith that I understood made me the Catholic that I was. We always regarded the neighborhood kids who attended P.S. 82, the public school two blocks from my Catholic school, as less than human. They were, after all, Protestants.

That view has been altered since I finished reading Fr. John O'Malley S.J.'s book on the Council titled Trent: What Happened at the Council. Primarily I was left underwhelmed by the results of the Council's work. Given the corruption that existed in the Church of the 16th century, that the Council had any effect at all is most remarkable. Reform was not encouraged so much by churchmen themselves so much as by the political powers of laymen in the form of kings and emperors and their representatives who realized Europe was being torn apart by religious controversy. What was needed was not so much churchmen making changes but churchmen living the ideals they claimed for themselves.

By the time it closed after 18 years the Council had not really accomplished all that much. What really made its decrees work were the efforts of individuals - Charles Borromeo is specifically an example - who understood the necessity of reform and who began implementing reform in their own home dioceses. Just residing in your own diocese was a huge change for bishops who, to that time, often either lived elsewhere or who headed several dioceses at once.

Among the myths about the Church that I grew up with was the distinction between the authority of Scripture (important to the Protestant Reformers) and the authority of Tradition (important to Catholics). Yet, as O'Malley explains, Trent never spoke of Tradition but only of traditions. The Council did not decree a global category of transmission but only of specific traditions, e.g. doctrinal traditions, pastoral traditions, liturgical traditions, etc. The Council decreed there were two ways in which God's message is communicated - Scripture and traditions - but it did not determine the relationship of those two media.

The Council had begun with an eye toward reconciliation with the Lutheran Reformers and it might have happened but because of internal squabbling within the Roman Church and because the backs of Protestant Reformers were by then in fixed positions, any attempts failed. So we have today what we have. What most impressed me is that men like Charles Borromeo among others carried out real reform in their dioceses and so began real reform that continues well into the present day. Trent did not solve all the problems that existed in the Church of its time. But it did set in motion the possibility of reform and also real discipline by recognizing the dangerous path the Church was traveling by not striving toward internal holiness.