An Ambrosian Advent

Because Christmas Day falls on Sunday this year, the Advent season will be the longest it can be in the Roman Rite - a full four weeks from November 27 to December 24. This is good for those who like Advent, who like the season's beautiful textual and musical treasures and appreciate how this time more than any other in the liturgical calendar corresponds to the sense and feel of the natural season. 

But, if Advent is your thing, then even better that the Roman Advent is the Ambrosian Advent, which begins always on the Sunday after the feast of Saint Martin of Tours (November 11) and thus has six Sundays instead of the Roman Rite's four. So in Milan and those other places where the Ambrosian Rite is still followed, Advent begins this coming Sunday, November 13. (Photo: Antiphon from Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent in the Ambrosian Rite.) 

The Ambrosian Rite of Milan is an ancient Latin Rite, which has evolved over the centuries (as all rites do), but which has survived - and indeed thrived - as a distinctive Latin Rite up until the present time. When Charlemagne tried to suppress its use in favor of the Roman Rite, the then Archbishop supposedly persuaded the Emperor to allow a trial in which a Roman and an Ambrosian liturgical book were left closed for three days on the altar of Saint Peter's in Rome. The theory was that at the end of the three days the one which God preferred would be found opened. As it happened, they were both found opened. So it was resolved that God found both rites equally acceptable!

In the same spirit, the Second Vatican Council declared that in faithful obedience to tradition, the sacred Council declares that holy Mother Church holds all lawfully acknowledged rites to be of equal right and dignity; that she wishes to preserve them in the future and to foster them in every way (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 4).

Anyone who loves Advent knows all too well how filled with difficulties its contemporary celebration has become. The commercial Christmas, which used to begin with Thanksgiving and now begins right after Halloween, has crowded out all alternatives. Advent's solemn opening notes on "Doomsday Sunday" are submerged in the Thanksgiving "holiday weekend," while by the time we get to the second and subsequent Sundays it is already Christmas for all practical purposes. The great classic Advent hymns are always worth singing - even in a church already all decked out with trees, wreaths, lights, and poinsettias. But their message barely penetrates the already anticipated feast that formerly marked Advent's end.

There is no point fighting any of that. In any competition between Advent and Christmas, clearly Christmas will always win. Nor should they be in competition. 

But what if we effectively moved Advent back into November, a month already identified with the end-of-time theme? A limited liturgical horizon might think this rather radical. But then the Milanese have done this for centuries with their six-week Ambrosian Advent! And even in the Roman tradition, there was a obvious continuity - rather than a break - between the final weeks of the old Time after Pentecost and Advent. (The modern notion that Advent "begins" the liturgical year is simply an inference from the fact that printed Missals and Breviaries have to start somewhere.)

What I am proposing isn't going to happen, of course, for all sorts of institutional reasons. But what if we moved Christ the King back to the last Sunday in October, restoring its original connection with All Saints Day? Then perhaps the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica could also be moved permanently to the Sunday following All Saints and All Souls - uniting the four celebrations in a single Fulfillment-of-the-Kingdom mini-season? Advent, beginning so soon after, would again stand in evident continuity with the preceding weeks of what we now boringly call "Ordinary Time." Then, by December, the second half of Advent would naturally flow right into the contemporary anticipation of Christmas.

Just a suggestion.

Resurrection and New Life

As everyone knows, Tuesday is Election Day. But there is another holiday this week, Veterans’ Day – the 98th anniversary of the end World War I, a day dedicated now to honoring all our veterans of all our wars. North of the border, where I served for six happy years, it is observed in Canada (and in other Commonwealth countries), as Remembrance Day. You always know Remembrance Day is coming when you start seeing practically everyone wearing an artificial poppy. In Commonwealth countries, the poppies, the parades, the solemn laying of wreaths, and above all the ritual two minutes of silence at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, all these rituals are ways to remember those who have died.

Back when I was a seminarian in Washington, DC, in the 1980s, the Vietnam War Memorial was dedicated. People come constantly to that wall of names to find and honor the name of someone they knew and loved. They’re just names, of course, but there is something very special about them, because someone has written them – and someone remembers them. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, I saw something similar in New York – in makeshift shrines in front of firehouses and other places – names and pictures of people being remembered.

Surely, our ability to remember is one of the things that makes us most human. When we remember those who have died, we recognize the humanity we share. We remember that, like us, they also lived once, and that, like them, we too will surely die.

The famous story in today’s 1st reading [2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14] of the seven brothers and their mother, who were willing to die rather than to disobey God’s law, was written to remember those heroes from the great war which Israel fought for its freedom in the 2nd century before Christ. In remembering those martyred heroes, the story also celebrates their faith that God would raise them up to live again forever.

In our Catholic tradition, this time of year is focused in a particular way on the end, and the month of November is dedicated in a special way to remembering and praying for those who have died. 

Our faith challenges us to treat all of life as a preparation for a good death and not to neglect our duty to pray for those who have gone before us. Hence, the importance of a proper funeral - an especially privileged moment when the entire Church visibly intercedes on behalf on the recently deceased. (Sadly, one study I read recently suggested that only about 66% of US Catholics who have died in recent years have had a full Catholic funeral.) But especially in this Holy Year of Mercy, we have been reminded that praying for both the living and the dead is one of the seven spiritual works of mercy, while burying the dead counts as one of the seven corporal works of mercy. 

Recently the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued a new Instruction “Regarding the Burial of the Deceased and the Conservation of the Ashes in the Case of Cremation.” The Instruction does not teach anything really new. Rather it represents a timely restatement of what, not long ago, would have been the common Christian understanding, but now needs to be restated due to the increasing acceptance of secular and neo-pagan, post-Christian beliefs and practices about death. Thus, we are reminded that:

Following the most ancient Christian tradition, the Church insistently recommends that the bodies of the deceased be buried in cemeteries or other sacred places.

Burial is our tradition, but the church recommends it not just as traditional but also because:

Burial in a cemetery or another sacred place adequately corresponds to the piety and respect owed to the bodies of the faithful departed who through Baptism have become temples of the Holy Spirit, and it encourages family members and the whole Christian community to pray for and remember the dead, while at the same time fostering the veneration of martyrs and saints.

While traditional burial remains the norm, nowadays the alternative of cremation can also be permitted, but the conservation of the ashes of the departed in a domestic residence is not permitted. Nor may the ashes be divided among various family members. Nor is it ever permitted to scatter the ashes of the faithful departed in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way, nor may they be preserved in mementos, pieces of jewelry or other objects.

Two centuries after the Maccabean martyrs [Luke 20:27-38], there were those (notably the cultured priestly elite known in the Gospels as the Sadducees), who lived without any hope of future resurrection – just as there are many today, who live their entire lives believing that this is all there is and all that there will ever be (for, indeed, as St. Paul pointedly acknowledges in today’s reading from his 2nd letter to the Thessalonians [2Thessalonians 2:16 – 3:5], not all have faith.)

If, in fact, this life is all there is, then, of course, your only immortality will be your children. In such a world, the worst thing would be to die leaving no one behind to continue your name. Hence, the special provision in the Old Testament Law, that required the brother of a man who had died childless to raise up descendants for his brother. The Sadducees invoked what they saw as the implications of this law to ridicule the very idea of a future resurrection.

The Sadducees’ problem, however, was precisely their inability to imagine any life from this present life - a life limited, indeed defined, by death. But, as Jesus pointed out, the resurrected life will be different. We will still be ourselves. We’re not going to change into somebody – or something – else, as reincarnation alleges. We will, however, be living a new and completely different kind of life, no longer limited and defined by death.

The Sadducees illustrate what happens when we try to imagine in too much detail what that will be like, because, of course, the only life we can actually imagine is the one we already know and live, here and now. Jesus, however, has himself already risen from the dead and is now living that new life. And in him we get a glimpse into that new life God has in store for us, not as some continuation of the way things are now, but as something totally new, a new life we hope, because of him, to live with him forever.

Homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 6, 2016.

Fall Behind

Last March - the last time we engaged in our bizarre semi-annual ritual of moving the hour hand on the clock forward and backward - I said more or less all I had to say about that absurd custom. 

(See: http://rfrancocsp.blogspot.com/2016/03/spring-forward-tonight.html).

As I noted then, the idea behind "Daylight Saving Time" is not new. Benjamin Franklin famously proposed rising earlier in summer to take advantage of the extra sunlight. In effect, of course, that is what we do now with Daylight Saving Time (DST) - except we alter the clock in order to maintain the satisfying fiction that we are still rising at the same time.

The merits - and demerits - of this semi-annual ritual of "spring forward" and "fall behind" have been debated for as long as people have been doing, which goes back at least to World War I in some places. Personally, I prefer "Standard Time." It too is artificial, of course, compared with the actual local time according to the position of the sun, but it is at least a lot closer. It satisfactorily reconciles keeping time by the actual position of the sun with a modern society's need for a certain amount of standardization. "Daylight Saving Time," in contrast, arbitrarily moves us one hour ahead of actual sun time - to little real advantage. 

So I look forward to tomorrow and to it being brighter in the morning when I must start my day.

That said, I guess I have come to appreciate the ritual of these twice-yearly time changes as a season-signaling ritual in a society, which has sadly lost most of its seasonal markers and other rituals. With Global Warming, even the seasons themselves seem to disappearing. Here it is November, and we have been suffering from prolonged summer weather until just this week. "Indian Summer" is one thing. Endless summer is quite another!

It used to be that all sorts of things - from the opening and closing of school to the  kinds and colors of the clothes one wore in public - were determined by the changes in the seasons. The traditional liturgy - rooted as it was in natural seasonal rhythms - reflected that as well, especially in the Divine Office (which was even printed in four seasonal volumes) and in some of the rules regulating the attire of prelates. That too is all gone - as befits a society of climate-controlled church buildings!

In the absence of that world we have lost, all we have left is this silly semi-annual ritual of changing our clocks to remind us of the seasons and the dependence on nature which we once acknowledged but now have foresworn - with less the satisfying consequences in the form of a changing climate and an even  more artificial relationship with the world around us.

The Day of the Dead

In 1970, when I was all of 22, I spent the summer studying German at Schloss Klessheim, a baroque palace 4 miles west of Salzburg, Austria, within walking distance of the Bavarian border. Originally the summer palace of Salzburg's Prince-Archbishops, after the Napoleonic-era secularization it became the property of the Austrian imperial house of Hapsburg. From 1866 to 1919, it was the principal residence of Hapsburg Archduke Ludwig Viktor, younger brother of Kaiser Franz Josef I. During World War II, Hitler (while staying nearby at his Berghof residence) used the palace for major meetings with Mussolini, Horthy, and other allies. The post-war Austrian Republic also used it for meetings and conferences. Now, for the past 20+ years, it has housed a casino - as good an image as any of the decline of Western civilization!

As summer students, we lived and studied not in the palace proper but in other less elegant buildings on the property. Individually and in groups, we would regularly walk to the village of Siezenheim for beer and pastries either in the village Gasthaus or across the border in Germany or else catch the bus there from Siezenheim to Salzburg. Many of us also walked to Siezenheim on Sunday mornings for Mass in its beautiful baroque village church. Attached to that church was the village's Friedhof (cemetery). Archduke Ludwig Viktor is buried there. So, of course, are generations of villagers, whose relatives regularly stopped to visit familiar graves after Sunday Mass. 

When I was growing up, my family also used to visit the graves of our relatives (photo) - not weekly, of course, because the cemetery was not in a local "churchyard," but several miles away, but close enough to visit at least a couple of times each year. It is something I miss now, something I can rarely do now that I live so much farther away.

Cemeteries are important because they are very visible reminders of our connection with the dead. Nowadays, changes in funeral customs mean that all too often we lose that vital sense of connection. Our society is not really comfortable with death and with reminders of death and so seeks to eliminate it as much as possible, seeking to minimize or completely obliterate our connection with those who have died.

In contrast, today's celebration of All Souls Day exists to celebrate that connection and challenges us not only to remember the dead but to pray for them, as we hope in turn to benefit from the prayers of others when our time inevitably comes.

The Pope in Sweden

The Pope is in Sweden. (Photo: Pope Francis with Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Siliva.) The occasion for the Pope's current visit was to participate in a joint Catholic-Lutheran ecumenical event in the 11th-century cathedral of Lund on the 499th anniversary of Martin Luther's "95 Theses," the event that set off the Protestant Reformation in Wittenberg, Germany, on All Saints' Eve 1517, from which it spread, shattering the unity of Latin Christianity. (He will also celebrate a Catholic Mass for the growing Scandinavian Catholic community today)

While Luther's reformation was a predominantly German affair, Protestantism quickly came to the Scandinavian kingdoms when various Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian kings took advantage of the opportunity to establish State Churches of their own. As in Germany and England, the religious Reformation in Scandinavia was always dependent on the more decisive political Reformation. Given the predominantly political rather than religious character of the Swedish Reformation, the Church of Sweden - like the Church of England - has maintained an episcopal structure and a "high" (but Protestant) liturgy.

Until relatively recently, everyone in Sweden was considered a member of the Lutheran Church of Sweden, which is now among the most politically and socially liberal Christian Churches, while the country itself has become increasingly secular in terms of its citizens' actual relationship to religion.

Presumably, the Pope's presence is intended to celebrate not the tragedy of the destruction of Western Church unity by Martin Luther and others, but the modern rapprochement between the Catholic Church and her "separated brethren," in particular the half-century of ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation. Thus, at Lund's cathedral, Pope Francis spoke of our "common journey of reconciliation" and of "the opportunity to mend a critical moment of our history by moving beyond the controversies and disagreements that have often prevented us from understanding one another."

To do this, the Pope challenged us all to "look with love and honesty at our past, recognizing error and seeking forgiveness, for God alone is our judge. We ought to recognize with the same honesty and love that our division distanced us from the primordial intuition of God’s people, who naturally yearn to be one, and that it was perpetuated historically by the powerful of this world rather than the faithful people, which always and everywhere needs to be guided surely and lovingly by its Good Shepherd. Certainly, there was a sincere will on the part of both sides to profess and uphold the true faith, but at the same time we realize that we closed in on ourselves out of fear or bias with regard to the faith which others profess with a different accent and language."

The Reformation resulted in a branch of Christianity without the Church, a highly individualized Christianity in which the individual stood alone before God bereft of the mediation of intercession. This in turn fostered a political individualism which - in clear contrast to the biblical and classical conceptions of solidarity that have been and remain at the heart of Catholic social teaching - has tended to take the individual as the starting point for discussion. and so led to the economic and moral libertarian individualism of our postmodern (and increasingly globalized) era. In this increasingly privatized, individualistic culture, the very basis for and the extent of shared social bonds and moral obligations to one another society have become increasingly problematic to many. 

The theological terrain on which the Reformation was fought has changed. It is possible to overcome at least some of those theological conflicts and mutual misunderstandings - in part because so few in today's world really care as much as our ancestors did about issues of salvation. Remedying the political, social, economic, and cultural consequences of the Reformation's turn to the individual will, however, prove far more difficult, for that turn remains very current and has become increasingly central to our modern and post-modern world's self-understanding.