Beyond the Church's Unending "Liturgy Wars"

In the Church, the so-called "Liturgy Wars," like our secular society's pointlessly destructive "culture wars," continue to divide and polarize people in a way which increasingly suggests that for some it is the "war" itself which is the preeminent point. Even so, as with the secular "culture wars," there are actual substantive issues in dispute, about which reasonable people may differ. For example, given what we know now more than 50 years later, did the post-conciliar liturgical reform really produce benefits for the Church, or has it failed to fulfill its promise (and, if so, why)? Would it have been better to have remained faithful to the limited reforms authorized by Sacrosanctum Concilium, or was the more radical liturgical rupture which actually occurred better for the Church? Was the generous pastoral outreach to accommodate the pre-conciliar liturgy as a legitimate alternative, an "Extraordinary Form" within Roman Rite, beneficial for the Church, or has it in fact failed to benefit the Church, as Pope Francis and many others appear to have judged? Finally, is a preference for alternative liturgical forms compatible with or incompatible with the doctrinal developments associated with Vatican II?

These are all perfectly legitimate questions about which reasonable people may disagree, but which we should not be afraid to discuss. (it is one of the more lamentable characteristics of our time that we are increasingly afraid to discuss disagreements.) To do so safely, with benefit to the Church, however, all of us should adhere to the principle so famously formulated by Saint Ignatius: "it should be presupposed that every good Christian ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation in a neighbor's statement than to condemn it" [Spiritual Exercises, 22]

All that having been said, the present condition of the Church in the United States presents pastoral problems which were obviously unanticipated either by the pre-conciliar liturgical movement, or by the Council itself, or by the post-conciliar liturgical reform. It is an observable fact that Mass attendance has declined in recent decades and that many parish communities, composed increasingly of older members, have been less than successful in forming future generations in the faith and passing on Catholic beliefs and patterns of religious practice to subsequent generations. At the same time, it has been widely observed that one appeal of "Extraordinary Form" liturgy and the communities that celebrate that form of the liturgy is precisely that they appear (especially to some younger families) to serve as alternatives that do actually provide some of the communal context and support for forming families in the faith. This may well be a characteristic common as well to other groups which offer an alternative to - or at least something more than - what may be found in many ordinary, aging parishes. Some examples might be the NeoCatechumenal Way, some charismatic communities, and communities whose most meaningful faith formation occurs in ecclesial movements such as, perhaps, San Egidio, Communion and Liberation, etc.

Whatever the final judgment about the future of "Extraordinary Form" communities, clearly some way must be found to mainstream what such communities are presently providing to support young families and others in forming future generations in the faith and passing on Catholic beliefs and patterns of religious practice to subsequent generations. If ever there were a need for a creative but serious response to a pressing pastoral crisis,  it is staring us in the face right now.

Undoubtedly, the "liturgy wars" will continue. Even so, given the actual condition of contemporary Church life in the United States, all sides would do well to recall Vatican II's liturgical Constitution's admonition:

"The sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church. Before people can come to the liturgy they must be called to faith and to conversion: 'How then are they to call upon him in whom they have not yet believed? But how are they to believe him whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear if no one preaches? And how are they to preach unless they be sent?' (Romans 10:14-15)." [Sacrosanctum Concilium, 9]

August 1844

On this day in 1844, the 24-year old future founder of the Paulist Fathers, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, was received into the Catholic Church at New York's original Saint Patrick's Cathedral. The next day he made his first confession, and subsequently his first Communion. On May 18, 1845, he and his brother George, who had followed Isaac into the Church, were both confirmed, at which time Hecker added the name Thomas. Then exactly one year after his reception into the Church, he was on his way to Europe to join the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (The Redemptorists).

Already in 1843, one week after attending Easter Mass in a Roman Catholic Church, Hecker had written in his diary: "The Catholic Church alone seems to satisfy my wants … my soul is catholic and that faith answers responds to my soul in its religious aspirations and its longings. I have not wished to make myself catholic but it answers to the wants of my soul. It is so rich full."

 

Still, for another year, he continued his inner exploration and comparative study of different churches. He studied the Catechism of the Council of Trent (The Roman Catechism) and was especially impressed by Article IX on the doctrine of the communion of saints. Writing in the Paulist magazine, The Catholic World, one year before his death, he recalled: its impact on him: "When, in 1843, I first read in the catechism of the Council of Trent the doctrine of the communion of saints, it went right home. It alone was to me a heavier weight on the Catholic side of the scales than the best historical argument which could be presented. … The body made alive by such truths ought to be of divine life and its origin traceable to a divine establishment: it ought to be the true church. The certainty of the distinctively Catholic doctrine of the union of God and men made the institution of the church by Christ exceedingly probable."                                                                                                 

  

Like Christian history’s most famous seeker, Saint Augustine, Hecker had examined the leading intellectual and religious currents of his time, paying intense attention to his own inner spiritual sensibility, before finally finding a permanent home in the Roman Catholic Church. In our contemporary idiom, Hecker was “spiritual but not religious” for much of the first 25 years of his life. The very personal story of his spiritual search, of his intense attention to his own inner spiritual sense, eloquently exemplifies the perennially human appeal of such a spiritual search and certainly speaks to the spiritual longings of some in our own (admittedly more secular) society today. What was significant about Hecker’s “spiritual but not religious” period, however, was that he did not remain that way. For Hecker, seeking was never an end in itself. The point of seeking was finding. Once the object was found, the search ended. Having found fulfillment in the Catholic Church, he never desired to look farther. Rather, he desired to devote his life to helping others – especially other seekers, such as he himself had been – to find the truth in the Catholic Church. His conversion was complete, and his spirituality was generously and determinedly evangelizing – expressing a prayerful, lifelong, intimate dedication to and cooperation with God’s design for human beings.

 

Hecker’s enthusiasm for his new faith and his commitment to the Church would permeate all his subsequent activities – from his initial conversion experience as recorded in his Diary, through his active ministry as a priest and missionary preacher, to his final mature exposition in his last book, The Church and the Age. Hecker never composed a definitive formulation of his spiritual teaching, as Saint Ignatius, for example, so clearly did in his Spiritual Exercises. But, by means of his preaching, lecturing, and writing he did communicate his insights into God's grand design and the role of free human beings within God's design.

Fundamental to all this was his recognition of the indwelling Holy Spirit of God acting to call him out of himself and into the Church - his conscious recognition of God’s providential presence and providential action in his life and his personal submission to the presence and providential action of the Holy Spirit.

Hecker’s immediate practical task as a new Catholic in 1844 was to discern his vocation within the Church, how to live this new experience not just for himself but for others. In 1845, Hecker met two other new Catholics, who were planning to travel to Europe to enter the Redemptorist novitiate in Belgium, and he decided to join them. 

 

In a letter to Brownson on July 23, 1845, Hecker had expressed “the need of being under stronger Catholic influences than are so far as my experience goes, in this country.” Writing again around the time when he received his Redemptorist habit in September, he said, "The conditions here are perfect, and all that can hinder me from gaining the end for which God gave me being is a non-compliance on my part. The spirit of the Church with such conditions must produce a truly Catholic life."

 

Despite difficulties with his studies, what he himself later described as a “helpless inactivity of mind in matters of study” that made him “a puzzle” both to himself and to superiors, Hecker found fulfillment in Redemptorist religious routine and in his reading of Catholic spiritual writers. In the Ignatian spirituality of, for example, Louis Lallement (1578-1635), he found confirmed his sense of the presence of God in his daily life. “I was one day looking over the books in the library and I came across Lallemant’s Spiritual Doctrine. Getting leave to read it, I was overjoyed to find it a full statement of the principles by which I had been interiorly guided.” His Novice Master, Hecker recalled, “appeared to recognize the hand of God in my direction in a special manner, conceived a great esteem, and placed an unusual confidence in me, and allowed me, without asking it, though greatly desired, daily communion.”

On October 16, 1846, the day he took his Redemptorist vows, Hecker wrote to Bishop McCloskey: "I have passed my novitiate without any doubt or temptations against my vocation as a religious, and during this time our Lord has blessed me with much and many graces. … Perhaps it is not simply for the salvation and sanctification of my soul that our Blessed Lord has bestowed upon me so many favors over my friends and fellow countrymen, and should it be His will, it would be my greatest delight to be with His grace and in His time, an aid to you, Rt. Rev. Father, in converting our country to the Holy Church of our Lord and the honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary."

 

His academic difficulties continued to present a problem: “all ability to pursue my studies had altogether departed.” Convinced, nonetheless, that he had a vocation to labor for the conversion of his non-Catholic fellow countrymen, he successfully persuaded his superiors that, if left to study at his own pace, he could yet “acquire sufficient knowledge to be ordained a priest.” (Years later, Hecker associated his experience with that of Saint John Vianney, whose incapacity for study he ascribed to “the supernatural action of the Holy Spirit.” He interpreted his own academic troubles in terms of “the relation between infused knowledge and acquired knowledge; how much one’s education should be by prayer and how much by study; the relation between the Holy Ghost and professors.”) His difficulties as a student had helped him to discern that his own sanctification and whatever efforts he might in time expend for the salvation of his fellow-Americans would themselves be products of God’s grace, according to the means God gave him. Hence his writings were a product more of his experience and reflection than of his study and research.

 

Thus, after Novitiate in Belgium and the Redemptorist House of Studies in the Netherlands, he went to England to finish his formation and was ordained a priest on October 23, 1849.  After a brief ministry as a priest in London, in 1851 Hecker returned to the United States as part of a new English-speaking, Redemptorist mission band, which included Clarence Walworth and two other American ex-Protestants, Augustine Hewit and Francis Baker, both of whom would collaborate with him in the founding of the Paulist Fathers in 1858. 

Reflecting upon his experience many years later, Hecker wrote that he “not only became a most firm believer in the mysteries of the Christian religion, but a priest and a religious, hopes thus to die.” 

I Alone Can Fix It (The Book)

A "carnival ride, jerking this way and that," is how the authors of I Alone Can Fix It characterize the early years of the Trump presidency in their Prologue to this sequel to their previous book about Trump, A Very Stable Genius. That "carnival ride" was then followed by Trump's "catastrophic fourth and final year," which Carol Lenning and Philip Rucker describe in detail in I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (NY: Penguin Press, 2021).

Sold as yet another book about Trump,  Alone Can Fix It is as much a book about the pandemic and its tragic impact upon American society - and about the catastrophic failures of the Trump Administration's response to the pandemic, particularly at the beginning but throughout the year. What one of the coronavirus task force's members later recalled about one particular Trump-inflicted disaster could, one could conclude after reading this book, be applied to the entire experience of the Trump Administration's response to the pandemic: "It was just one of those completely disastrous moments that you could hardly believe you were a part of."

The authors' focus on the pandemic provides not only a coherent narrative but also fills the reader in on what was happening back in January and February of 2020, when most of us weren't yet paying attention. At the time, the political news I recall paying most attention to was the Democratic primaries. While the authors do discuss such non-pandemic events that were also taking place during those early months, such as the Soleimani assassination and Trump's first impeachment trial, they virtually ignore that stage of the campaign. While it is true that Biden's unexpected victory in the primaries effectively made much of what had preceded irrelevant, my guess is that President Trump must have taken some interest in what was going on at that time; and it would certainly be interesting to learn more about how he was processing all of that.

That said, the pandemic rightly takes center stage in the account of those early months because Trump's early failures to respond rightly really did set the stage for the rest of the year - both in terms of the health crisis it created and has perpetuated and in terms of Trump's failure to secure reelection. An interpretive key to what happened is provided by the account of Trump's conversation with Chris Christie on March 19.

"There is a way to handle a crisis where you meet people's expectations regardless of how the crisis is playing out," Christie reportedly told the president that day. In response to Trump's claim to be trying to reassure people, Christie said, "you can only reassure them with the truth, not with the stuff that they know from a common-sense-perspective can't be true." Christie's key point and waring was, "if you go further out there, extend yourself in terms of your level of concern, your level of preparedness for what the worst-case scenario is, you can always bring it back. If you go short of the mark in the beginning, you can't ever extend it"  (emphasis mine).

That, to me, seems to sum up both the story of Trump's failure with the pandemic and the story of his larger failures as president.

The authors effectively take us through the relatively familiar ground of the overall dysfunctionality of Trump's White House and the destructive interpersonal climate Trump created among his staff and government officials. And, of course there is the President's perennial problem of talking too much. As Atlanta's Mayor was quoted as saying during the crisis that followed George Floyd's murder: "He speaks, and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet. And I wish he would just be quiet." One gets the impression, Trump's staffers and allies must have felt similar sentiments on many occasions during the year covered by this book.

The book has rightly received much attention for the way it takes the reader through the episode of Trump's own illness and for its revelations about General Mark Milley's personal evolution and his concerns about the threats Trump posed for democracy and constitutional government.

All of which brings us to the catastrophic climax of the Trump presidency in his attempt to undermine the election and its results, a dangerously heightened expression of all the dysfunctions already described. Trump's horrifying post-election behavior represented another instance of his inability to alter a disastrous course once embraced: If you go short of the mark in the beginning, you can't ever extend it.

In recounting the frightening story of Trump's attempt to undermine and undo the 2020 election, the authors highlight the harm he was doing - "For most of the year, the nation had been a tinderbox, and Trump was splashing around kerosene with each false claim of a rigged election" and the bizarrely cultish character of his support. Speaking of the December 12 "Jericho March" rally in Washington, they describe how the rally's opening "felt like a cacophonic religious revival for Trump worshippers."

Leonning and Rucker offer yet another, quite riveting account of the terrible events of January 6  and the anticlimactic final two weeks of the Trump presidency. This section would seem especially relevant reading at this time when so many Republicans are contradicting the reality of what happened on January 6 and even mocking those who were actually attacked on that day. 

To this, the authors append a unique Epilogue, in which  they recount their strange, two and one-half hour, in-person interview with the former President at Mar-a-Lago on March 31 2021. At Mar-a-Lago, "Trump still rules, surrounded day and night by applauding fans, obsequious courtiers, and dutiful servants." There, "none fo the disgrace that marked the end of his presidency pierces Trump's reality." There, "the gospel according to Trump" is maintained "with the most important revelations being that Donald Trump was the greatest president of all time and was unjustly denied a second term."

That Trump in fact invited this interview (having previously declined to be interviewed for A Very Stable Genius and having then attacked the book and its authors) speaks volumes. It was obviously intended to highlight his unprecedented post-presidency as the undisputed ruler of the Republican world. In that world, the pre-pandemic part of his reign was an unqualified success (although, as the authors point out, his approval rating never rose above 46% in that period). Trump seems simultaneously to believe that the second part of his presidency, the pandemic, "killed his chances," and "that he actually had won, and handily."

Likewise, he simultaneously trashes people like Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell, the Justices he put on the Supreme Court, and many others for failing him, while bragging about the loyalty and intensity of his base. For Leonning and Rucker, Trump's "extraordinary capacity to say things that were not true" was fully on display. This trait "had led Trump to the White House" and seems to be the basis for his quasi-cultic power even now.

It is that quasi-cultic power that gives books like this their importance. What would otherwise be but another account of human perfidy dressed up in classic political gossip gives us an insight into the dangerous forces that have been let loose in our land and in their ongoing, continued, and possibly increasing threat to whatever hopes one may have for a better American future.

More on Masks and Vaccines

It was not the kind of comment one might reasonably have expected from a high-ranking member of the Congressional leadership, but in a world where Republican misbehavior has long lost its capacity to shock, Keven McCarthy tweeted that requiring masks "is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to live in a perpetual pandemic state."

“He’s such a moron,” House speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly told reporters Wednesday when asked for her reaction.

It is, of course, one of the idiotic orthodoxies of pseudo-libertarian fantasy that "liberal government officials" are always looking to impose restrictions on the freedoms and liberty of others. Perhaps there really may be those who have been sufficiently deluded by party propaganda who will believe such nonsense. It is, however, highly unlikely that anyone - moron or not - who has risen to the level of leadership that McCarthy has, is really so deluded not to know that the single factor most powerfully pushing us into "a perpetual pandemic state" has been the failure of so many of our fellow citizens to get vaccinated - thereby prolonging the spread of the virus and enabling it to mutate into ever more dangerous variants.

Personally, I think that, if "liberal government officials" are to be faulted for anything, it should be for their reticence thus far in mandating vaccinations wherever they have the authority to do so. Frankly, the Biden Administration and Democratic officeholders have been slow in meeting this challenge. (Yesterday, President Biden finally announced that all federal employees will be required to be vaccinated or face frequent testing, as well as mask mandates and distancing rules in the workplace.) Meanwhile, for some strange reason we are still waiting while the Food and Drug Administration is taking its time to grant the vaccines full approval - rather than the current emergency use authorizations. Such full approval would eliminate the last semi-rational reason why some sub-set of people still resist receiving the vaccine. This is no time for traditional Washington "business as usual."

Compare our situation with France, for example, where once President Macron so much as suggested the likelihood of government mandate the number of vaccinations surged. The U.S. has a long history of requiring vaccinations against smallpox and other scourges of humanity. We need to do the same for the one weapon we have against covid. 

As Ezra Klein, for example, has noted in The New York Times:

"There is nothing new about this. We do not solely rely on argumentation to persuade people to wear seatbelts. A majority of states do not leave it to individual debaters to hash out whether you can smoke in indoor workplaces. Polio and measles were murderous, but their near elimination required vaccine mandates, not just public education. When George Washington wanted to protect his soldiers from smallpox, he made vaccinations mandatory. It worked."

That said, the main culprits in this tragic opera of vaccine resistance have been and remain Republican politicians, who obviously must know better but who in various ways and through their notorious media outlets have tolerated, encouraged, and even promoted vaccine resistance. If this disease continues to spread and sicken and kill people, if students have to miss more school, we know whom to blame.

Pope Francis has made it clear that it is morally acceptable to take any of the vaccines and said that we have the moral responsibility to get vaccinated. There is no moral or religus basis to exempt oneself from this obligation.

Meanwhile, I guess those who have acted responsibly and gotten vaccinated will be keeping their masks on for the foreseeable future.

Honoring Bethany's Sisters and Brother Together

By virtue of a Decree issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship last February, the Roman Rite has now caught up with the soundest traditions about Saints Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, and so starting tomorrow the three siblings will be celebrated together in one liturgical memorial. 

"The traditional uncertainty of the Latin Church about the identity of Mary - the Magdalene to whom Christ appeared after his resurrection, the sister of Martha, the sinner whose sins the Lord had forgiven - which resulted in the inclusion of Martha alone on 29 July in the Roman Calendar, has been resolved in recent studies and times, as attested by the current Roman Martyrology, which also commemorates Mary and Lazarus on that day. Moreover, in some particular calendars the three siblings are already celebrated together.

"Therefore, the Supreme Pontiff Pope FRANCIS, considering the important evangelical witness they offered in welcoming the Lord Jesus into their home, in listening to him attentively, in believing that he is the resurrection and the life, and accepting the proposal of this Dicastery, has decreed that 29 July be designated in the General Roman Calendar as the Memorial of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus."

The full text can be accessed at:

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1538477881080991285/6776238992910616039

And, pending the approval of the translation from Latin into English, the following interim text may be used for the Proper of the Mass:

https://www.usccb.org/resources/sts-martha-mary-lazarus-interim-texts-english.pdf

This welcome development is long overdue, having been long complicated by centuries in which Mary of Magdala was incorrectly identified with Mary of Bethany and both incorrectly identified with Luke's "sinful woman." As the Decree notes, the three are already celebrated together in some particular calendars. According to some traditions, Martha and Mary have been included among the women who went to the tomb on Easter Sunday and saw the Risen Lord in Matthew's account. Also according to some traditions, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus all ended up in Cyprus and are buried there.

But as the decree makes clear, it is the unique relationship that they as a family had with Jesus - including Martha's hospitality to Jesus in her home and her profession of faith at Lazarus's tomb, Mary's attentive listening to Jesus - that this celebration highlights.

(Photo: Traditional Site of Lazarus' Tomb, Bethany, Israel)