Peter’s Dispute with Simon Magus

Many years ago I rashly volunteered to teach a 7th-8th grade Sunday school class at a rural and somewhat fundamentalist church, and, on my first Sunday on the job, was tasked with teaching the first three chapters of Second Samuel, which includes one of three accounts of the future King David presenting 200 Philistine foreskins as the bride price for Saul’s daughter Michal. Fortunately none of the kids had read their Bibles beforehand, so I did not feel compelled to explain the passage. I have since used it in arguments with Christian fundamentalists as an example of a Biblical passage whose relevance to spirituality and salvation is tenuous at best, one that no modern preacher would touch with a ten foot pole.

Perhaps I spoke to soon. Recently, reading a letter of Peter Damian (1007-1072), Benedictine monk, church reformer, and canonized saint, I encountered a commentary on the episode of the Philistine foreskins as an illustration of simony, and it seemed relevant not only to ecclesiastical appointments in the 11th century, but to the process of appointment and advancement in the sciences in American universities. If that seems like to wild a leap of speculation, consider at least that for many people in the West science has become the new religion, and that there are distinct parallels between a medieval bishop, supposed advocate for the spiritual well-being of the masses and defender of ecclesiastical purity, and a modern tenured professor or department head, who becomes the gatekeeper determining who is allowed to pursue a scientific career, what are legitimate objects of scientific inquiry, and what results are disseminated under the imprime of a prestigious peer-reviewed journal.

Simony is defined as the sale of ecclesiastical offices. The term refers to Simon Magus, a first -century figure who fell afoul of Saints Peter and Paul when he attempted to purchase the gift of the Holy Spirit. His downfall is frequently depicted in medieval art. In Damian’s day, the task of appointing bishops fell to secular noblemen, some of whom were quite corrupt and lacked any motivation to further the physical or spiritual well-being of the people they governed. Paying large sums of money and/or serving the lord’s corrupt ends became the only avenue for entry into the higher echelons of the church hierarchy.
Damian used the example of the Philistine foreskins to illustrate the principle by which continued service to a corrupt lord is actually worse, spiritually, than a straight cash payment. In the case of the cash payment, the aspirant could have gotten the wealth by honest means, and once he had bought the office, he was a relatively independent man. The man who had obtained his position by enabling the interests of a corrupt Lord, on the other hand, earned the office through malfeasance and was expected to continue toeing the line. David’s motives for marrying Michal (influence, inclusion in the royal succession) were not inherently bad, but he used his military prowess in the service of a king who had, in the words of scripture, “abandoned God.”

Until well into the nineteenth century, becoming a scientist was pretty much a career objective limited to men of independent means. Academic positions did not pay very well. The purer the science, the less likely it was to produce a saleable product in a reasonable time frame. Although the cost of tuition was not necessarily high, the cost of withdrawing from the labor force for the time required to get an advanced degree discouraged people of modest means. On the plus side, many scientific disciplines did not require a huge amount of capital on an ongoing basis, so independent researchers had a better chance of succeeding.

At present, in the United States at least, entry into a scientific career is in theory open to anyone with the ability and the drive to invest a huge amount of labor into a path that offers no guarantee of success for the laborer. The work that graduate teaching and research fellows, postdoctoral fellows, and people on the lowest rungs of the faculty ladder expend goes disproportionately towards enhancing the power, prestige and wealth of a small number of people at the top. The person on the bottom labors to increase knowledge and to make discoveries that benefit humanity, and hopes someday to gain enough autonomy to realize that vision. That’s how science is supposed to work. That’s how most people seem to assume science works.

Both academic science departments and government laboratories have become heavily dependent upon government grants for their continued existence. The ability to bring in money has become the main criterion for hiring into tenure-track positions and promotion in academic ranks. The granting agencies are under strong pressure from corporate interests to favor lines of inquiry that strengthen the corporate bottom line, and, conversely, to suppress anything that calls into question a lucrative paradigm. The dependence upon grant funding also favors costly, technology-intensive branches of science over more traditional method of observation.

A result of the very long unpaid or inadequately paid period of apprenticeship, during which survival is dependent on adhering closely to programs established at the higher levels of the hierarchy, is training in avoiding independent thought, especially avoiding noticing when the results of research are not serving the general public. It would be remarkable indeed if any great proportion of people who succeeded in such a system, upon finally achieving a position of relative security, miraculously recovered the idealism they were forced to shelve two decades previously.

I was three years into a PhD program in ecology at Cornell University when I dodged the request to teach seventh graders about Philistine foreskins, and I was still excited about the prospect of finding solutions to pressing dilemmas through observation of the natural world. More than forty years later, I can still get excited, at least momentarily, by a fleeting glimpse of synergy between that experience and the writings of an eleventh-century theologian who is currently under an even deeper shadow in academia than his contemporaries, because of his attacks on sodomy. I have given up all hope that it is anything but an armchair exercise.

Image Credit

“Peter’s conflict with Simon Magus,” by Avanzino Nucci, 1620. Public domain.

Einsiedeln Abbey

(We had bought second-class travel on our Swiss Travel Pass and when we boarded the train for our first official day of rail travel we were surprised to see how luxurious second-class is in this country. The trains are modern and very clean and the seats are comfortably plush. Through the huge windows of the second-class car we inhaled the lovely scenery and gorgeous homes along our route.)

Once we arrived in Einsiedeln and received directions from a train station employee and then again from a man on the street, we made our way through the town and up to the monastery, a huge complex of buildings, dominated by an impressive church, built in the early eighteenth century. As we entered the church just before ten, it was immediately apparent that a Mass was about to begin in the chapel of the Black Madonna, called the Chapel of Grace, located at the back of the church. The chapel itself appeared to be constructed of black marble and featured a fifteenth-century statue of the Madonna, her face blackened by centuries of dust and the soot of candles and incense; she was surrounded in gold and dressed in a beautiful robe (which apparently changes according to the seasons of the liturgical calendar), behind the altar. As we walked around the church we could hear the progress of the Mass, some of which was beautifully sung, behind us.

The Grace Chapel

The church is decorated in the baroque style, and how over-the-top baroque it is! It seems that every square centimetre of this church is covered with painting, iconography, and gold filigree. Even the pipes of the organ are decorated. Down either side of the church are numerous altars, dedicated to various saints, of different sizes and made of different materials. The main, high altar at the front of the church is the quintessence of baroque excess.

Going for Baroque

Einsiedeln Abbey is a working monastery with about sixty monks in residence. According to Switzerland.com, “The monastery complex includes not only the living space for the monks but also a diocese school, ten workshops, a wine cellar for the monastery’s own wine and stables for the monastery’s own breed of horses.”

View from the Abbey into Einsiedeln

The heavily decorated church at Einsiedeln Abbey stands in marked contrast to many of the large churches in Switzerland, like the Grossmünster in Zurich and the Cathedral of Lausanne, which were once Catholic but were taken over by the Protestants in the early 1600s during the Swiss Reformation, which was led by Huldrych Zwingli, who had once been a priest at Einsiedeln. In the process of the takeover, these churches were stripped of all their icons.

Image Credit

Photos by Juswantori Ichwan. All rights reserved.

We had moved from a street on which our neighbours had lived for as long as we could remember, which was two blocks from the small parochial school we attended, and which served as a year-round playground for the gangs of kids who lived there.

There was no Catholic school for my brother and me in Richmond, so our parents enrolled us in Cartier College (not the school’s real name, for reasons which will soon become obvious), a venerable all-boys school in town which was run by the Christian Brothers of Ireland. The school, where I spent my fourth and fifth year of elementary education, offered classes for grades one to twelve, with class sizes of about fifty.

For a timid and sensitive boy, Cartier College was a frightening and intimidating institution.

My grade four teacher was Brother B., a jock in a Roman collar who later left the brotherhood and became a well known football coach at a local Catholic high school. In fact, Brother B. ran his classroom as if it were a year-long football practice. I recall that during that school year of 1959-60 I sat in the first desk in the second row nearest the classroom door; Brother B’s desk was closer to the window, opposite the door. Late in the afternoon one day, during the heavy quiet of study period (there seemed to be a lot of study periods in this venerable institution), I suddenly felt something hard strike me in the head; the hard object turned out to be a golf ball thrown by my sporty teacher. I had apparently fallen asleep and provided the reverend brother with an opportunity to practice his aim.

My grade five teacher was Brother O., a young man with a serious mien, not nearly as sporty as Brother B. In the autumn of that year, 1961, the giant old deciduous trees in the school yard dropped their customary load of colourful leaves, leaving them in lovely heaps around the trunks, soft mounds that invited nine-year-old boys to frolic in them. During one particular autumn lunch hour, a few of us grade-fivers engaged in a leaf fight – a contest essentially consisting of our throwing leaves at each other – which in retrospect seems a sufficiently safe and innocuous recreation for timid, non-sports-minded boys (such as I was) to engage in. We soon learned, however, that Brother O. had issued a secret interdiction against leaf throwing by grade five boys in the school yard in the autumn, and my fellow warriors and I were punished with the leather strap carried by all the collared and cassocked denizens of this venerable institution.

Fortunately, my parents must have been as unhappy in Richmond as we were and we moved back to North Vancouver after a year in exile. One year after that I was allowed to once again attend the school attached to our parish and remained there until the end of grade eight. In grade nine I was sent back to Cartier College following an unsuccessful venture into studies for the priesthood at the Seminary of Christ the King in Mission, B.C. I thought the elementary school regime was frightening and severe, but I was utterly unprepared for the brutality of high school.

Not long after I again began attending classes at College, I was told that my home room teacher, a celebrated member of a local professional sports team, had whacked a student so hard on the butt with a bolo bat that the poor fellow sailed head first into one of those old-fashioned heavy metal heating registers, suffered some kind of head injury, and was sent to the hospital. If he did return to school, I think he must have been placed in another home room.

My grade nine math and science teacher, Mr. M., who later became a renowned coach for another Canadian professional team, bolo batted half the class one day, including me, for failing to do their homework. The whacking noise was so loud and lasted such a long time that the Latin teacher, an elderly and corpulent brother with an Irish accent, an unpredictable temper, a penchant for wearing Old Spice after-shave and for hugging boys he liked (I was good at Latin), and whose classroom was next door, registered a grumpy complaint with the sporty and energetic – and equally Irish and grumpy – Mr. M. A brief Irish verbal altercation ensued before the bolo-batting resumed.

The grade nines occupied four classrooms at one end of the large classroom building of Vancouver College. During the last period of the day, which was (what else?) a study period, secretaries from the school office acted as classroom monitors. If a student misbehaved he was sent out into the hallway to be dealt with by the patrolling Brother M., a swarthy ape-like man who was reportedly a former professional wrestler. When a poor unfortunate was cast into the ring with the undefeated Brother M, all was quiet in the grade nine classrooms as every student had both eyes glued to his books and both ears tuned for the sound of the next slap or punch or the loud report of a body hitting a locker. There might have been a drop kick or two but these moves could not be accurately identified by sound alone.

In the school year 1965-66 I was in grade ten. One of the students in my class, who always sat in a corner at the very back of the room, was in a rock-and-roll band, so his hair was appropriately long. Our mathematics teacher, a short, stout brother whom we called Magilla (Gorilla) and who never smiled – in fact, I do not recall any of our teachers smiling unless the smile was ironic, in which it case it usually appeared on the brother’s face when he was in the midst of administering some form of corporal punishment – took exception to the length of this young man’s hair and ordered him to get it cut. When the student showed up for class the next day with his hair uncut Magilla went down to his desk and slapped him hard on the face. The following day, his hair still rock-star length, he received two hard slaps to the face from the solid, grim-faced brother. The next day the boy came to school with his hair freshly cut. Perhaps he wore a wig for the band’s gigs after that.

One day, during the lunch hour, when a crush of boys was proceeding through the halls to the cafeteria, I pushed my way through a hallway door ahead of the oncoming Brother A. The angelic-looking brother grabbed me before I could take another step, slapped me sharply across the face, told me to get some manners, and strode off down the hall. Much laughter and finger-pointing ensued among my classmates who were watching this little drama.

The cadre of grade ten teachers, then, was as brutal as the grade nine crew, but we were shocked to discover which of our collared masters was the most explosively violent of all. Brother B. was a young man, likely in his late twenties, with brush-cut hair and thick spectacles, who “taught” us Latin, the teaching consisting of his coming to class, assigning work, sitting at his desk for a short while, and then leaving the room for most of the rest of the period. It was rumoured that he went down to the school canteen for a milkshake or outside the building for a smoke.

Brother B. never raised his voice to us or disciplined any class member for real or imagined infractions. He even, as I recall, had a sense of humour and smiled on occasion. One day, however, a day on which he did not leave the classroom during our Latin block, Brother B. asked a student who was sitting in the desk directly in front of the teacher’s desk to go to the school office on an errand. The student replied, “Do I have to?” The young brother, our friend, leapt out of his chair like a mad dog and pounced on the student, dragging him from his desk and knocking him to the floor, whereupon he set about beating and kicking the boy in a fury. The rest of us watched this shocking drama in fear and amazement.

I remember nothing of my days at Cartier College following this incident. I subsequently convinced my parents to allow me to attend the local public school for the last two years of my secondary education and College became a dark memory. In the public school, corporal punishment was not unknown but it was administered exclusively by the principal and was applied only in what were considered the most serous cases.

If my father were alive to today and read this account of my “education” under the care of the Christian Brothers, he would most likely say, “Good discipline in those days if you ask me. Anyway, you survived, didn’t you?”

I guess it all depends on what you mean by “survived,” Dad.

Image Credit

“Public School 9” by Vlad lorsh. Flickr Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

The speculation on whether this statement – and others made by the pope since then – signalled a sea change in how the Catholic Church treats homosexuality and LGBTQ persons has been endless and loud. Francis himself claims that as “a son of the Church” he cannot and does not wish to change its doctrine, but he has also made it clear that he wishes the Church both to take a more merciful attitude to those who have been marginalized in the past and to shift its energies away from policing doctrinal orthodoxy and in the direction of reaching out with love – to all humans, not just heterosexual, obedient Catholics.

But it is difficult for the Church, as it is for other churches and other religions, not to judge when much of its doctrine is based on judgment. An insistence on moral absolutism implies that the one insisting possesses the wisdom, the knowledge, and the authority necessary to determine what is right and what is wrong, who is right and who is wrong on every moral issue. Perhaps Francis is seeking to soften this insistence and the often harsh judgments resulting from it; to this Holy Father, it appears, moral absolutism must be tempered with mercy and love.

Meanwhile, in spite of Francis’s apparent encouragement of a more reasonable and more pastoral approach, the Catholic Church in the United States continues to marshal its moral and financial resources, at the front lines of the culture wars, in fierce opposition to the legal enfranchisement of gay rights in that country (while their Canadian Excellencies lost the battle many years ago). However, losses in recent skirmishes – the Supreme Court overturning DOMA and effectively burying California’s Proposition 8; the legalization of same-sex marriage in an increasing number of states through popular vote or legislation; courts in other states declaring illegal constitutional amendments affirming marriage as only between one man and one woman – may be signalling that a more conciliatory approach is not too far down the road. The pope’s often stated requirement that the names of more pastoral clergypersons be put forward for possible appointment to the office of bishop may speed this process.

Perhaps because the Holy Father is a Jesuit himself, the Jesuits in the U.S. have made the first formal public gesture of any substance in bringing the two sides of this issue, as it is being played out in the Church, closer together. Moral philosopher and Georgetown University professor John P. Langan, S.J. has written a thoughtful and very carefully worded piece, entitled “See the Person,” in the Jesuit journal America. In his article Father Langan attempts first to “read [Francis’s] words and actions and offer suggestions about how to construe them so that they form a coherent picture.” Langan believes that the pope, while unwilling (and perhaps unable) to change or reverse doctrine, is attempting to modify the Church’s stance on homosexuality to one that is “more discerning, more compassionate.” The author implies that the pope’s public rethinking of the issue stems both from who he is and from the fact that the “traditional view [of the Church on homosexuality] is now widely regarded as vulnerable, embarrassing and unpersuasive.”

Father Langan suggests that “four important elements should mark a new stance toward homosexuals and homosexuality.” These are humility (both sides must acknowledge what they don’t know); “respect for the dignity of homosexual persons”; acknowledgement of “the problems of perception and trust that complicate our efforts to understand and collaborate with one another”; and patience on all sides.

The conclusion to the article is that there must indeed be a change in the way that the Church treats LGBTQ persons; the “principal change would not be in the teaching of the church on the moral acceptability of homosexual activity, but in affirming and practicing pastoral ministry for persons engaged in irregular or questionable unions.”

It is refreshing and encouraging to witness the courage of a member of the clergy of the Catholic Church in suggesting in a public forum that the stance of his Church on the issue of homosexuality is in need of change. Moreover, Father Langan has clearly laboured painstakingly to present a balanced view of the problem, to mitigate the intransigence, the anger, and the hostility that has characterized this argument and to raise it to the level of a dialogue marked by respect and open-mindedness. Many will see his article as a significant step toward a meeting of Catholic hearts and minds on a delicate topic.

I am afraid that I am not one of the many. First, if Father Langan and others hope that his essay will become the basis for a broader discussion of bringing the Church and Catholic LGBTQ persons closer together, they must first understand that the exclusive use of the word “homosexual” to refer to gay people is going to be an obstacle to fruitful dialogue; anyone who has even marginally followed the gay rights movement over the past 45 years is aware that the term “homosexual” reflects the view that being gay is a disorder and that it will be taken by the vast majority of gay people as both ignorant and insulting.

Father Langan’s article also demonstrates a lack of understanding of the LGBTQ community when he uses terms such as “gay and lesbian agendas,” “alternative lifestyles” and “personal choice” in reference to sexual orientation, and “irregular and questionable unions” in reference to gay relationships. It is common knowledge in contemporary life that being gay is not an alternative lifestyle, unless marginalization constitutes an alternative lifestyle; in fact, as Langan himself acknowledges, more and more LGBTQ people are choosing so-called traditional lifestyles by marrying their partners, raising children, and buying homes in suburbia. And it is even more ludicrous to refer to being gay as a personal choice. Who would consciously choose to be closeted or ridiculed or bullied or rejected by their families and their church?

The most fundamental flaw in Father Langan’s approach lies in what he so valiantly attempts to accomplish: to validate the arguments of each side. While it is admirable on the surface, the problem with this approach is that validating the argument of the traditionalist side automatically invalidates that of the LGBTQ side. What if we were to say to left-handers: “We know that we have treated you badly in the past and that it might be wrong for us to force you to use your right hand, so we are going to offer you more compassion and greater pastoral care. Nevertheless, we still think that you are disordered and we are pretty sure that we should not approve of using the left hand.” The tone and language of Father Langan’s article will lead just about every gay person who reads it to believe this is exactly what he is saying about him or her.

A teaching, a tradition, a doctrine, even a stance is a construct, albeit often a complex one. None of these is a human being created in the image of God. An LGBTQ person is just such a human being, and science has shown that he or she is in no way disordered, unless marginalization, rejection, or demonization has disordered that person. An LGBTQ person is equal in every way – in intelligence, in creativity, in holiness, in the ability to love and in the need to be loved – to a straight person. Any theology, any religious teaching that places this community in the category of “other” is not only flawed; it is immoral.

If Pope Francis is telling the Church through his words and through the example of his behaviour that the first duty of the faithful is to set aside judgment in favour of the practice of unconditional love, there is hope that the Catholic LGBTQ community will find a home in the Church. While Father Langan’s essay reflects deep thought and careful consideration of a sensitive issue, it does not reflect an understanding and appreciation of gay people as whole human beings, which is a necessary starting point, in my view, of accepting us as full members of the Church.

Image Credit

“Visita Papa Brasil” by Semilla Luz. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.

 It was John XXIII, considered to be a transition pope and dismissed by many among the curial elite as a peasant, who surprised the world and dismayed the Roman curia when he announced the calling of the Second Vatican Council. The theme that John envisioned for the council was aggiornamento, an opening up of the Church to the modern world, an updating not only of liturgical practices but of attitudes, to modern life, to other Christian churches and other religions, to the Catholic laity.

 For the past thirty-five years, the papacy and its bureaucracy, the Roman curia, have been the Catholic Church although such a state of affairs has constituted a betrayal of the spirit, if not the law, of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Swiss theologian Hans Küng articulates the nature of this betrayal as reflected in the papacy of John Paul II (1978-2005):

 “Instead of the words of the conciliar program there are again the slogans of a magisterium which once more is conservative and authoritarian. Instead of the aggiornamento in the spirit of the gospel there is now again the traditional ‘Catholic teaching’ (rigorous moral encyclicals, the traditionalist world catechism). Instead of the collegiality of the pope with the bishops there is again a tighter Roman centralism which in the nomination of bishops and appointments to the theological chairs sets itself above the interests of the local churches.

 “…the Roman legalism, clericalism, and triumphalism, which was [sic] so vigorously criticized by the bishops at the council – cosmetically rejuvenated and in modern dress – has come back with a vengeance. This became evident above all in the new Canon Law promulgated in 1983, which contrary to the intentions of the council, sets no limit to the exercise of power by pope, curia, and nuncios. Indeed it diminishes the status of the ecumenical councils, assigns the conferences of bishops only advisory tasks, continues to keep the laity totally dependent on the hierarchy, and thoroughly neglects the church’s ecumenical dimension.”

 Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI (2005-2013), was for virtually all of John Paul II’s pontificate the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, essentially the enforcer of his boss’s restorationist policies. The restoration continued under Benedict’s pontificate.

From his very first appearance on the loggia of St. Peter’s less than an hour after his election, it has been apparent that Francis has a different agenda from that of his two predecessors. In the first six moths of his pontificate he has, through his words and actions, set about to dismantle the wall of orthodoxy, constructed over three decades, between the church and its members, to throw open the doors of the church to all who seek to enter and to be embraced. Francis has made it clear that the hierarchical, authoritarian Church of the past thirty-five years will be replaced under his pontificate with a pastoral church.

 In a stunning interview given to the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Catolica and published in Jesuit media throughout the world, Francis stated, “I see clearly…that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds…. And you have to start from the ground up.”

 Progressive Catholics, many of them disaffected by the doctrinal rigidity – often carried to painfully ludicrous extremes – of the previous two Holy Fathers, are pleased and encouraged by Francis’s de-emphasizing of the hot-button moral issues which seemed to obsess John Paul II and Benedict.

 From the La Civiltà Catolica interview: “The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules…. We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things and I have been reprimanded for that. But when we speak of these issues, we have to talk about them in a context…. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently…. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”

 The pope is the head of the Roman Catholic Church and its flock of more than one billion faithful. As such, he is powerfully influential man, both within the church and outside of it. But the Chinese have a saying, “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away,” which might have some relevance to the current pontificate. Francis has told his nuncios, the papal representatives in countries throughout the world, that he wants candidates for new bishops to be “pastors who are close to their people, fathers and brothers, who are meek, patient and merciful.” He does not want bishops with the “mindset of a prince.”

 This is a good beginning and we can only hope that Francis will live long enough or remain pope long enough to replace a majority of the princes appointed by his predecessors with “pastors.” It is going to take time – and indeed some degree of struggle – for the humility, the open-mindedness, and the love and respect for the people of God to reach the level of the diocese, of the parish.

 “The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbor… The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost. The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they also must be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.”

 I cannot help but think that Francis is sending a message directly to the faithful (i.e., bypassing the hierarchy) that says, “You are the church. I am setting the example, showing you the way, but you must change this church. You must insist to your priests and your bishops on the kind of church you want.”

 I hope they are listening.

Image Credit

“Visita Papa Brasil” 2013 by Semilla Luz. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.

 From the moment of his election, it was clear that Kyril was going to be a prelate of a different colour. While retaining his more traditional views of doctrine and theology, Kyril acknowledged the brilliance of his friend, the free-thinking Father David Telemond, along with the young priest’s right to shape and express his unique theology. This attitude did not sit well with the doctrinaire Vatican establishment.

 One of the first acts of the new pope was to “escape” from the Vatican in the cassock of an ordinary priest and wander about Rome on foot. While on this little adventure, Kyril was conscripted by a British doctor to purchase medicine for a dying man in a poor tenement. When the Bishop of Rome realized the man was Jewish, he put on his hat and began chanting, in Hebrew, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

 And Kyril had little patience for the protocols so cherished by the members of his bureaucracy, the Roman curia. Like the real-life Paul VI, he eschewed the triple tiara traditionally placed on the heads of new popes at their coronation, and he made it quite clear to “the walking encyclopaedia of dogma,” Cardinal Leone, that he was not interested in giving audiences to every politico and cinema actor looking for a photo op with His Holiness.

 Finally, as noted in my first article, Pope Kyril, in face of the virulent protests of his inner circle of cardinals, pledged all the wealth of the Church to feed the victims of famine in China.

 At the end of my article, I expressed the (ludicrous) hope that the cardinals participating in the conclave would watch this film and allow the story of Kyril Lakota to influence their vote for a new pope.

 The man they elected on March 13 following five rounds of voting, less than two days after the start of the conclave, appears to be the incarnation of the spirit of Kyril I. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio gave himself the name Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi, the twelfth-century Italian who so loved the poor. That no other pope in history had taken the name of this humble saint was one of the first signs that this pontificate was going to be different from the several that preceded it.

 Here are some other Kyril-like signs that indicate a humbler role for the pontiff and perhaps for the Church:

•  When Francis made his first public appearance, on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square, he was wearing a simple white cassock. When the papal Master of Ceremonies moved to place on his shoulders the mozzetta, “a shoulder-length cape of red velvet trimmed with fur,” Francis refused the garment, allegedly saying, “I prefer not to.”

• In this same initial appearance, Francis, like an ordinary parish priest, asked the crowd to say with him the prayers familiar to all Catholics from childhood: the Our Father and the Hail Mary. Then, asking the crowd gathered in the square to pray for him, he bowed before them.

• “On his first full day as pope, he met with schoolchildren, picked up his bags at a hotel where he had stayed prior to the conclave, and paid his own bill.” (National Catholic Reporter, March 23, 2013)

• While Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio lived in a small apartment rather than in the Archbishop’s palace, cooked his own meals, rode the bus to and from work, and was known for his love of the poor. One expression of this love was his annual washing and kissing of the feet of the poor at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday.

• In his first Sunday Mass following his election Francis chose to celebrate the liturgy at tiny St. Ann’s church in the Vatican. Following the Mass, which was mostly attended by Vatican staff and their families, the pope stood outside the doors of the church, again like any parish priest, greeting parishioners with handshakes, hugs, and kisses. When the church was empty, he turned and greeted the crowds of onlookers that had been contained behind barriers, again shaking hands with some and embracing others as nervous members of his security detail followed along.

• On March 26, the Vatican announced that Francis has decided not to move into the papal apartments but to remain living in the guest house where he has been since the beginning of the conclave. The pope said he preferred “to live in community with others.” According to Catholic News Service, “Pope Francis has been…taking his meals in the common dining room downstairs and celebrating a 7 a.m. Mass with Vatican employees in the main chapel of the residence.”

 According to an editorial in The National Catholic Reporter, “Early indications are that things are going to be different. The heavy encrustations of royal paraphernalia and palace behavior are beginning to fall away. Francis, if first impressions prove correct, seems more inclined to embrace than wag a finger in rebuke.”

 As I write this, Francis has been pope for less than two weeks, but already his apparently natural inclination toward “the common touch” has brought him closer to Catholics and non-Catholics, to tradition-oriented believers and progressive Catholics alike, than his two predecessors. In these brief moments at the dawn of his pontificate, Francis has shown himself to be far more like Kyril, the idealized pope of Morris West’s imagination, than like John Paul II or Benedict XVI. He has given to many the hope that the Vicar of Christ—and thus the Church itself—will become more like the Nazarene carpenter’s son than were the pontifical monarchs who reigned for thirty-five years.

Image Credit

“Habemus Papam” by Catholic Church (England and Wales). Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.

The Shoes of the Fisherman

 As in other films of this ilk and of this era, the acting is generally less than stellar, perhaps because much of the cast is attempting—sometimes with ludicrous results—to speak in one foreign accent or another. Moreover, the movie relies a great deal for its dramatic impact on the opulence of the Vatican, from its magnificent buildings to its stately rituals. The Shoes of the Fisherman is also marred by a cheesy subplot.

 But there is more to this film than its Cold War setting and plot orientation, and in light of current events unfolding in the Roman Catholic Church, it is well worth spending 162 minutes to experience Morris West’s idealized vision of the papacy, a vision rendered achingly compelling by the possibility of its realization.

 From the outset, the movie deals sensitively with the question of tension between orthodox and unorthodox theology, an ever-present theme in the post-Vatican II Church. When Kyril Lakota, political prisoner 103592R (played by Anthony Quinn), is brought to Moscow from a Siberian work camp, he is released into the custody and care of a representative sent by the Vatican, Father David Telemond (Oskar Werner). The young priest is a theologian/archaeologist/philosopher whose “work is under study by a special pontifical commission.” On the flight to Rome Father Telemond tells Lakota, “For years I have been forbidden to teach or to publish anything. I was suspect of holding opinions dangerous to the faith.” Once in the Vatican, the newly appointed Cardinal Lakota reads one of the young cleric’s books and declares to the dismayed theologian that he does not understand and cannot support his radical views. Nevertheless, a close friendship develops between them.

 Meanwhile, Father Telemond is called to explain his views in front of a commission composed entirely of clergy. He is told that the purpose of the commission is to examine the content of his works “to see if they conform to fundamental Christian doctrine.” Telemond claims that he is “one man trying to answer the questions of every man…Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Is there any sense in beauty and ugliness, in terror and suffering and in daily death, which make up the pattern of existence?” Through a series of leading questions, his interrogators eventually come to the ultimate question of Father Telemond’s views on “good or evil, right or wrong, in the Christian sense.” At one point the young priest is accused of heresy.

 The meeting is adjourned when a priest arrives to announce that the pope has collapsed. The pontiff soon dies, and the inquisition resumes only after the new pope has been elected. In the end, the commission rules that “the works of Father Telemond present ambiguities and even grave errors in philosophical and theological matters which offend Catholic doctrine.” The commission recommends that the priest “be prohibited from teaching or publishing the dubious opinions above mentioned until a full and formal examination has been made.” The newly elected Pope Kyril, who has not only remained Telemond’s friend but has also appointed him as a special papal advisor, has no choice but to accept the ruling of the commission and to silence the earnest young theologian. One wonders how many times those words of prohibition were used during the pontificates of Pius XII and John Paul II.

 The movie also gently criticizes the pretensions and perks of the Roman curia, the elite group of senior clerics that governs the Church from the Vatican. Here is a conversation between Cardinals Rinaldi (Vittorio De Sica) and Leone (Leo McKern) which takes place shortly before the conclave to elect a new pope begins:

 Rinaldi: We are all too old. There are not more than half a dozen of us who can give the church what it needs at this moment.

 Leone: Do you think you are one of them?

 Rinaldi: One what?

 Leone: One of the half dozen.

 Rinaldi: I know I’m not.

 Leone: Do you think I have a chance of election?

 Rinaldi (laughs): I hope not.

 Leone (also laughs): Don’t worry. I know I haven’t. You know, Valerio, I should have been a country priest, with just enough theology to hear confession and just enough Latin to get through Mass. I would sit in front of my church on summer evenings and talk about the crops. And what am I now? A walking encyclopaedia of dogma. A theological dictionary on two legs.

 Rinaldi: Each of us has his own cross….Do you know what mine is? My cross, I mean. To be rich and content and fulfilled and to know that I have deserved none of it and that when I am called to judgment, I must depend utterly on the mercy of God.

 One wonders whether Leone is sincere in his desire for the simple life, but if he does covet the papal ring, he is soon disappointed. After seven rounds of voting have failed to elect a new pope, the frontrunners have all exhausted their chances. During a break in the conclave, a group of cardinals is discussing the new generation of priests who favour change, even revolution, and the Russian cardinal is asked for his opinion as he has experienced revolution first-hand. Reluctantly he offers his thoughts, and the humble but steel-willed Lakota makes a powerful impression.

 Lakota: We should manufacture the authentic Christian revolution: work for all, bread for all, dignity for all men.

 Leone: But without violence.

 Lakota: Well, excuse me, but violence is a reaction against a situation that has become intolerable, isn’t it?

 Leone (dubiously): Oh?

 Lakota: Well, in the camps in Siberia, we were starved and brutalized. I stole…I….I stole some bread. I fed it crumb by crumb to a man whose jaw had been broken by a guard. I…I fought the guard to save my friend. I could have killed him. That was a terrifying experience. I, a bishop, could have killed a man.

 Rinaldi: So as a bishop you would give your approval to social disorder.

 Lakota: I might be forced to accept it as a price for social change, yes.

 Rinaldi: You are walking a moral tightrope.

 Lakota: We all have to walk it. That is what we pay for being men.

 Rinaldi: But what if you had killed the guard?

 Lakota: I don’t know. I…I don’t know, Eminence. I do know we’re in action in a brutal world. The children of God are ours to protect, and if we have to fight, we fight.

 In the voting session that follows this conversation, Rinaldi stands to pledge his vote to Lakota, and within moments enough cardinals follow suit to ensure that the Russian is proclaimed pope. It is from this point, and throughout the second half of the film, that the movie’s ideal image of a modern pope is presented. We should keep in mind that the film was released just three years after the end of the Second Vatican Council.

 The film strives to depict the new pope as a man of simplicity and humility. Upon his election he introduces himself to his private butler as Kyril Lakota. A short time later, he prevails upon that same butler to find him a black cassock and hat so that he can sneak out of the Vatican and explore the alleyways of Rome as an ordinary priest. In one of the more touching scenes from the film, Kyril brings medicine from a pharmacy to an English doctor who is treating a dying man in a crowded tenement. When he sees the condition of the man, Kyril immediately begins to administer the last rites, but he is quickly told that the man is not Christian; he is a Jew. The Holy Father puts his hat on, covers his face with his hand and begins to chant the Hebrew prayer for the dying.

 When Kyril I meets the Soviet premier Kamenev on the way to negotiate with the Chinese leader in an effort to avert nuclear war, Kamenev says, “You are changed.” Lakota responds, “I do not feel changed.” Kamenev tells him, “There was a pride in you once. More, an arrogance, as if you carried the truth in a private purse and no one could dispute it with you. When I hated you—and I did—it was because of that.” Lakota says, “I am a low man who sits too high for his gifts.”

 Yet Pope Kyril recognizes both his power—as religious leader of 800 million people—and his terrifying responsibility to embrace and carry out the charitable mission of the Church. After the meeting with the Chinese premier, in spite of the opposition of many in the inner circle of the Vatican, he pledges the entire wealth of the Church to save the Chinese people from famine. The pledge is made as an example to remind all in the West of their duty in charity.

 At his coronation, in front of half a million people in St. Peter’s Square, Kyril rejects the Triple Tiara that has been a papal symbol since ancient times and says, “Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose Vicar I am, was crowned with thorns. I stand before you bareheaded because I am your servant.”

 He then recites the famous verses from 1 Corinthians: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not charity, I am nothing.”

 As I said above, the film offers us its vision of an ideal pope, one who has the humility to recognize that he—along with his Church and all its wealth—is the servant of the people of God, in other words, of all people.

 Should this film, by some miracle, be shown to the cardinals participating in the coming papal conclave, and should the fact of that screening, by an equally stupendous miracle, be made known to the world, a glimmer of childish hope for the election of a humble shepherd held by millions of thoughtful Catholics and non-Catholics alike might in fact grow into a ray.

Image Credit

“The Shoes of the Fisherman.” Wikipedia Image

This is an updated version of an article that appeared in my blog, Confessions of a Liturgy Queen, on April 14, 2010

The tone and content of the article are astonishing. Fr. De Souza writes about two elderly and distinguished experts on the Second Vatican Council, both of whom were slated to be “highlighted” at a Vatican II conference in Ottawa this past weekend. One of these men is Gregory Baum, a former priest who was a peritus, or theological advisor, at the council. Baum is nearly 90. Here is what Wikipedia says about him: “He was the Professor of theology and sociology at University of Saint Michael’s College in the University of Toronto and subsequently professor of theological ethics at McGill University’s Faculty of Religious Studies. He is currently associated with the Jesuit Centre justice et foi in Montreal.” Professor Baum has written thirteen books. Here is what Fr. De Souza says about him in the B.C. Catholic column: “Baum too was a peritus at the council. But at nearly 90 years old he is a lion no longer able to hunt whose roars have long since lost their capacity to terrify the jungle. More than a theological force, he is now of principal interest as an archaeological specimen, the relic of a time when the future of the Church was expected to be an abrupt break with her past.”

Fr. De Souza is equally dismissive of the Catholic journalist Robert Blair Kaiser, 82. Wikipedia: “As a correspondent for Time Magazine, [Kaiser] won the Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award in 1962 for the ‘best magazine reporting from abroad’ for his reporting in the Second Vatican Council.” Fr. De Souza: “…Kaiser is another of the old lions rather grumpy now that the new Church never quite took hold in the Catholic world as it did world [sic] of mainline Protestantism.”

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council by Pope John XXIII. The council, consisting of four sessions from 1962 to1965, was attended by nearly three thousand bishops from all over the world. The pope’s vision for Vatican II—and for the Church—is captured in the Italian word aggiornamento—“updating”—a word which he used in the 1959 announcement of his intention to hold a new ecumenical council; John XXIII saw the mission of the council as bringing the Church into the modern world.

A significant aspect of aggiornamento was to effect the reversal of a trend that had been evident in the Church since the eleventh century but had intensified in the past one hundred years, a trend which saw power increasingly concentrated in the hands of the pope and his officials in the Vatican, the latter collectively known as the Roman Curia.

The council attempted to redefine the Church as “the people of God,” empowering the laity and encouraging them to participate more fully in the liturgical and pastoral life of the Church. A recent editorial in America Magazine described the effect of this re-imagining: “It encouraged a keen awareness of corporate belonging to the one body of Christ based on the unity of baptism, the priesthood of all believers and the universal call to holiness. Appropriating the image as their own, hierarchy and faithful, clergy and religious experienced an intensified sense of communion in one body.”

Vatican II, then, was striving to flatten the hierarchical structure that had rigidified over the centuries and in doing so create a Church characterized by the harmonious participation of all its members in bringing the message of love to the world.

The council fathers concretized this re-imagining in several ways. The Mass was now to be celebrated in the language of the congregation, rather than in Latin, and the celebrant was to face the people in the pews as he conducted the liturgy. The altar rail that separated the priest from the people was removed. Lay persons became acolytes, lectors, and Eucharistic ministers. Diocesan pastoral councils and parish councils, with full and equal participation of the laity, were formed.

Lay people, including, for the first time, women, became theologians and experts in religious studies, invigorating parish education programs with their newfound religious perspectives and theological knowledge and expertise and adding a new dimension to the faith life and the intellectual life of the Church. Finally, in the face of virulent opposition from the Curia, the authority of bishops, particularly within their own dioceses, in communion with the pope as “the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity of the bishops and of the multitude of the faithful,” was reaffirmed, in effect diminishing the power of the papacy and of the Curia.

Despite shock experienced and expressed by certain members of the laity and clergy at the sudden and radical changes in the liturgy, there was a general sense of euphoria among the Catholic faithful both during and after the council. The council fathers had succeeded in overcoming the resistance and machinations of the Curia and set in place the foundation for a new and modern Church, one in which “The People of God are the Church. Whatever structures and other institutional elements exist within the Church are to assist the People of God to fulfill their mission and ministries. These elements, therefore, exist to serve the whole People of God, not the other way around” (Richard McBrien, in The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism).

Father de Souza’s article, and the dismissive and disrespectful tone he takes toward two distinguished men who undoubtedly know more about Vatican II than this arrogant priest ever will, is a small, parochial example of a much larger reality: the communion of all the faithful envisioned by the council fathers and celebrated by the majority of Catholics in the early post-conciliar years has been forestalled by reactionary forces within the Church. Beginning with the weak and indecisive Paul VI, successor to John XXIII (who died in June 1963), and followed by the ultraconservative and restorationist John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI, the papacy, with the support of the Roman Curia, has succeeded in restoring the hierarchical, patriarchal structure of the Church and the dominant and privileged position of the Catholic clergy.

While Rome attempts to enforce unity through papal and curial authority, there can in fact be no communion of the faithful under the present conditions in the Church as the unity that the hierarchy seeks is in fact merely conformity to its view of what the Church should be. In their desperate attempt to maintain power and to hold together the medieval structure of the Catholic hierarchy, pope, cardinals, and bishops use threats, disciplinary procedures, and campaigns of condemnation against groups or individuals perceived as departing from orthodoxy as it has been defined by Rome. Clearly the reformist vision of Vatican II, not to mention the gospel message and the example of Jesus proclaiming universal unconditional love, has been replaced with a thinly disguised megalomania that has transformed communion into division.

Given the vision of Blessed John XXIII, the courage of the bishops in attendance at Vatican II, and the hopes of millions of laypeople sparked by the council, the state of the Catholic Church—divided, defensive, exclusive—fifty years after this miraculous event is sad indeed. It is little wonder that thinking people, many of whom are lifelong Catholics, are leaving the Church in frustration, even despair. Writer Michael J. Walsh states, in another America article, “Pope Benedict has launched a ‘new evangelization’ in an effort to win people back to the practice of their faith. But loss of belief is not, I am convinced, the main reason Catholics no longer turn up to church on Sundays. Rather, it is the feeling that their church has been stolen from them.”

To this I can only add a sorrowful “Amen.”

Photo Credit

“Second Vatican Council” by Lothar Wolleh. 

The Benedictine order was established in honour of Saint Benedict of Nursia, who lived in the sixth century. The order follows the Rule of St. Benedict, a set of precepts governing monastic life laid down by Benedict toward the end of his life. Rule 53 states: “Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ, because He will say: ‘I was a stranger and you took Me in’ (Mt 25:35). And let due honor be shown to all, especially to those ‘of the household of the faith’ (Gal 6:10) and to wayfarers.” In my communication with the abbey’s Guestmaster (who, to my great astonishment, remembered me from nearly fifty years earlier) I learned that the maximum length of stay permitted by the abbey was three nights. I would thus be getting a glimpse of monastic life rather than a true feel for it, but I happily accepted the condition and booked my stay.

I arrived at the monastery on Wednesday afternoon, the last day of February, after a ninety-minute trip along unfamiliar roads in the ubiquitous rain of the Fraser Valley, miraculously turning at exactly all the correct intersections. The rain turned to snow just as I entered the abbey driveway and by the time I got to my room the beautiful and extensive monastery grounds that slope down from the guesthouse toward the Fraser River were covered in a blanket of white. Unfortunately the snow ultimately turned to a cold rain that lasted for the remainder of my visit.

The motto that governs the lives of Benedictines is ora et labora, work and pray. Thus the monks (of which there are about thirty, ranging in age from early twenties to early nineties) and the senior seminarians pray in the abbey church four times daily (in addition to hours of private prayer); there is also a sung Mass every morning at 6:30. On that Wednesday afternoon, I attended Vespers, the most elaborate, and to my heart and my ear, the most hauntingly exquisite of the prayers. The antiphonal chanting of the psalms fills the church with a kind of benignly masculine sound that is at once enchantingly medieval and thrillingly in the moment, a moment that is enriched by the excellent acoustics of this unusual and impressive building. For the rest of my visit I attended all the prayers, including Lauds at 5:05 AM; on my last day I even joined in the chanting, if somewhat tentatively and quietly.

The abbey’s guesthouse is busiest on weekends when large groups come for retreats; for the first twenty-four hours of my visit there was only one other guest and on the evening of the second day, four Anglicans arrived for a short retreat. Individual retreatants and small groups like the Anglicans take their noonday meal and their supper with the monks in the refectory, a large high-ceilinged room that used to be the abbey church. This was an experience I had not anticipated and which I found fascinating.
Rule 53 also states: “On no account shall anyone who is not so ordered associate or converse with guests. But if he should meet them or see them, let him greet them humbly, as we have said, ask their blessing and pass on, saying that he is not allowed to converse with a guest.” I do not believe that this part of the rule is strictly observed today, but there is still very little opportunity for protracted contact with any of the monks other than the Guestmaster and those who are charged with assisting in the guesthouse. Certainly the monastery building itself is off-limits to guests. Thus it was a privilege to be given the opportunity to be with the monks in a slightly less formal setting than public prayer and Mass.

In the short time since my retreat ended I have been wondering why I found eating with the monks to be perhaps the most interesting and memorable aspect of my visit. I suppose it is because observing them in this setting allows us to see them both as monks and as human beings just like those of us who live in the “dusty world.” Monastic meals do have their strictures, the rule of silence being what we of the secular world might consider the most demanding, but there is something about the act of eating that touchingly humanizes these men, reflecting their individuality and exploding the image of monk as pious cipher.

If I harboured any stereotypical preconceptions about monks, they were quickly swept away by the Guestmaster, a man whose wry humour, solicitousness, and knowledge of the world would make him a welcome neighbour. At breakfast one morning (these meals were not taken with the monks but in the dining room of the guesthouse), he was an active and interested participant in a conversation that ranged from the Stanley Cup riots to homosexuality and ephebophilia. The following day our breakfast companion was the celebrant of that morning’s Mass, a priest who happened to have been rector of the minor seminary when I was a student in 1964 (in fact, it was likely he who called my parents and suggested that I was not ready for seminary life and should be taken home) and is now approaching 85 years of age. As sharp as any knife in my mother’s kitchen, he charmed and entertained us throughout the entire meal and then graciously took his leave as he pushed the cart full of dirty dishes back to the kitchen.

In the company of these two men it was easy to forget that they have lived lives of chastity, poverty, and obedience, of prayer and work, in this small community for at least fifty years. Whatever sacrifice such a life once entailed, though, appears to have long since been transmuted into a sense of peace and joy that, while tempered indeed with traces of ego and with the daily irritations of life, radiates from them with a gentle luminosity rarely encountered in men of the secular world.

As for the many hours I spent alone in my cell (actually a simple but very nice room, with a large, private bathroom), they were almost entirely taken up, after an evening and a morning of “spiritual” reading, by an unexpected yet utterly satisfying journey into William Styron’s flawed but achingly beautiful and passionate novel, Sophie’s Choice. The discovery of this work and the lessons it offered to me as a writer were a gift that the quiet hours of this retreat allowed me to receive and to appreciate and that deepened my commitment to my own humble vocation, doubly treasured for the very lateness of its arrival.

A rewarding three days indeed, for which I am deeply grateful.

Photo Credits:

Westminster Abbey by new_sox
Backside by iBjorn
inside church #9595 by Nemo’s Great Uncle 

I am a child of the modern world. On the one hand, I have been educated to think critically and thus do not suffer gladly what I consider to be foolish ideas or foolish beliefs. On the other hand, I keenly desire to be a fool for God in the sense that I seek to submit fully to “that which is greater than we are”— in the Christian tradition, this would be God. Moreover, I long to be fully engaged in a faith community that accepts me unreservedly and unconditionally for the person that I am while seeking to be uplifted by the beautiful liturgical traditions of the Church in which I grew up and with which I have a powerful emotional connection.

The tension becomes even more acute when I reflect on my belief in God. Who is God? Is he the bearded (and somewhat fearsome) figure sitting on a cloud and touching the finger of his creation Adam? Few of us can relate to this Old Testament image. But if the personification of God does not work for us as it did when we were children, who, or what, do we pray to? How do we experience God?

I am certain that there are others who feel, or have felt, this tension. The lucky ones find an individual church or faith community within their religious tradition that supports their personal quest and fulfills their spiritual needs. Others may deal with the tension by becoming secular humanists or “spiritual but not religious” people, by adopting a faith or subscribing to a philosophy outside of their cultural experience, or by simply setting the whole business of God to the side and going on with their lives.

Shortly following my return to Catholicism after many years of “lapse,” I had lunch with a young priest. In our conversation, the subject of faith came up and the priest told me that when he was a teenager, he, like many other young people, was bored with church and did not share the strong faith of his parents. I asked him what had restored his faith so radically that he decided, before he reached the age of twenty, that he wanted to become a priest. He gave me a few reasons, but the first thing he said in answer to my question was, “Well, we all have to believe in something.”

As I had already begun to experience the great tension between faith and reason, I was stunned by this statement. Was all that stood between agnosticism and faith a conscious decision to “believe in something”? Do we just sit down one day and say, “Let’s see now: I have to believe in something, so I guess, since I was raised Catholic and I pretty much know all the doctrines and stuff, it might as well be Catholicism”? And once that belief decision is made we are magically able to accept holus-bolus the body of Catholic teaching. No doubts, no going back, no questioning this belief or that doctrine. True peace of mind.

Despite his years of seminary indoctrination, his conservative cultural background, and the predominance of orthodox Catholicism among clergy and laypeople in the archdiocese in which I live, it is difficult to imagine that doubt does not at some point swamp this young man’s confident and comfortable belief. Can there be no conflict when you refuse Holy Communion to a couple you know is living together without the sacrament of matrimony yet offer it to a “legally” married couple you are 99 percent certain are using contraceptives? In your homily, when you tell us what God wants us to do, do you really believe you know what God wants? I am curious as to what happens to the orthodox believer when new information or problems of everyday life intrude upon the comfort zone of belief.

If we acknowledge God as our creator, surely we must also acknowledge that part of that creation is a brain and that the little creature is simply not content to accept whatever it is told. As modern, educated individuals, we also have to acknowledge the significant body of religious-historical research, biblical scholarship, and theological insight that has formed over the past one hundred years.

Let’s start with the concept of faith. If you asked any Christian the definition of faith, the reply would likely be that faith is belief; the more intellectually sophisticated Christian might say that faith was belief in something for which there is no evidence. When I was thinking of becoming a priest, I had a talk with a spiritual director (arranged by the young priest I mentioned above). The spiritual director, who writes a weekly article on scripture in the archdiocesan newspaper, told me that he had no difficulty believing in God. After all, he said—with a straight face—he had never seen Australia but it is obvious to everyone that Australia exists. (Well, Father, that’s because we all have to believe in something; it might as well be Oz.)

How did we come to adopt this narrowly defined concept of faith as belief?

It turns out that the idea of faith as belief is relatively new. New Testament scholar Marcus Borg tells us that “two developments account for its dominance in modern Western Christianity.” The first is the Protestant Reformation, which created a number of different Christian denominations, all of which distinguished themselves from other groups by emphasizing what they believed, “that is, by their distinctive doctrines or confessions.” In the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation, Catholics firmly reasserted their version of Christian truth.

Borg says that the second development was the Enlightenment, which “identified truth with factuality” and which “called into question the factuality of parts of the Bible and of many traditional Christian teachings.” So Christians, and especially Catholics, had to defend their territory by declaring the literal-factual “truth” of the virgin birth, the miracles performed by Jesus, the Resurrection, and all the other biblical events; and if you didn’t believe these truths, you had no business calling yourself a Christian.

The post-Enlightenment Church, then, has defined faith for us as belief in the literal-factual interpretation of the Bible and agreement with/adherence to a set of doctrines stipulated by the institution. The Catholic Church has taken a particularly hard line on the issue of faith in the modern era. In so doing it has created an unending cycle of conflict with those who don’t accept the whole package but wish to remain in the church, and it has cast many others out to wander alone in the desert.

So what are the “faithful doubters” among us supposed to do?Marcus Borg expresses his understanding of the tension between reason and faith-as-belief by saying that “we cannot easily give our heart to something that the mind rejects.” In his book The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith, Borg offers alternate definitions of faith that have more to do with the heart than with the head. One of these is faith as fiducia, which amounts to “radical trust in God.” Borg says, “Significantly it does not mean trusting in the truth of a set of statements about God….Rather, it means trusting in God.” He also defines faith as fidelitas, which is fidelity or faithfulness to our relationship with God; and as visio, “faith as a way of seeing the whole, seeing ‘what is.’”

These are liberating definitions if we accept them; they free us from the constraints imposed by “faith in a box,” the requirement of believing in a predetermined and fixed set of dogmas and doctrines and following a code of man-made laws in order to maintain our status as members of an institutionalized faith community. Naturally, if we are to adopt this new paradigm of faith, we must also free ourselves of the guilt of imagined disloyalty to the faith of our childhood, the faith of our parents. To make such a change requires emotional, psychological, and spiritual adjustment. For some of us it may also mean moving to a new faith community.

Borg’s faith paradigm assumes that we are comfortable with how we perceive God. But many of us are not. We have not made the transition from our childhood belief in a personal, even anthropomorphic God to a more mature understanding and acceptance of a being or entity that embraces and infuses all creation and that dwells within us and is a part of us. We are stuck in our logical thinking mind and are afraid to make the imaginative leap necessary to experience the divine in all of creation.

In his book Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the “spiritual leader of the Jewish Renewal movement,” acknowledges the contradiction between our logical minds and our heart’s desire to experience God in our lives. But, he says:

“Contradictions we can live with. Nothing we can say about God will survive the rigors of logical analysis. But that shouldn’t get in the way of our search for the presence we have felt in our most spiritually open—or spiritually hungry—moments. If there is a tension between what we know in our minds and what we feel in our hearts, let’s stay with that tension. If there is a contradiction let us take it upon ourselves. Only let us press on with our desire to experience the numinous and serve the patterns of the universe in a deeper, more meaningful way.”

At the same time Reb Zalman recognizes our very human need for “spiritual intimacy” with an Other, a God we can relate to in our moments of great joy and great pain. After all, we cannot talk to—or pray to—an abstraction or a concept. But Reb Zalman recommends that in order to deal with “the limitations language imposes on our grasp of the infinite,” we create our own names for God and our own ways of speaking to God that reflect our unique understanding and experience of the divine.

What I get from all of this is that for faith to work for us in the modern age we must be able to joyfully manage the tension between the head and the heart. On the one hand, I cannot believe that God would give me an active brain and then ask me to check it at the church door. I am very happy to be a “cafeteria Catholic,” freely choosing what to believe and eschewing what does not resonate. On the other hand, I must accept that an imaginative, childlike approach to God is not a bad thing if it allows me to experience the divine. Perhaps our need for God is as much emotional as it is spiritual.

A friend who read this article shared the following observation: “I sense that your journey is very much head stuff and you need a real blast of heart stuff. Not the emotional stuff that comes from good music, well performed liturgies, moving and meaningful sermons. You need a blast of the infinite.” She knows me well.

Photo Credits

“Thinking then having a doubt” fabio @ Flickr.com Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
“Blind faith” xurde @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
“Blind Faith Cafe” Swanksalot @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.