Good Pope John

Today, the Church commemorates "Good Pope John," Pope Saint John XXIII (1881-1963). Elected Pope in 1958, John famously convoked the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). In fact, his feast is observed not on the anniversary of his death (June 3 - already occupied in the calendar by the Ugandan Martyrs), but today on the anniversary of the opening of the Council on October 11, 1962. At that time, of course, October 11 was the feast of the Maternity of Mary, established in 1931 by Pope Pius XI to commemorate the 15th centenary of the Council of Ephesus (which had affirmed Mary's title as Theotokos). Ironically, the post-conciliar liturgical calendar of Paul VI abolished that feast n favor of the more ancient feast of Mary, Mother of God on January 1 - thus effectively freeing an especially fitting space on the calendar for Pope John after his beatification by St. John Paul II during the Jubilee Year 2000.

St. John Paul II beatified John XXIII in the same ceremony with Blessed Pius IX (1792-1878), the longest reigning Pope (1846-1878), who convoked the First Vatican Council (1869-1870). St. John XXIII would certainly have appreciated being linked that way with his long-reigning predecessor and that earlier council. On retreat in 1959, Pope John wrote, " I always think of Pius IX of sacred and glorious memory and, by imitating him in his sufferings, I would like to be worthy to celebrate his canonization" (Journal of a Soul, 63).

Obviously, I have no personal memory of Pius IX, but I have very vivid recollections of John XXIII. His predecessor, Pius XII (Pope 1939-1958) had been the first modern media pope - appearing in public to enormous audiences and on film to even larger audiences around the world. This media-centric personalization of the papal office would be brought to previously unimagined levels by John Paul II (Pope 1978-2005). John XXIII was, of course,more old-fashioned than his theater-trained, media-sensitive successor, John Paul II. But the coverage he got was almost uniformly positive. It was his personality - outgoing, people-friendly, kind, and fatherly that got most of the attention. I was only 10 when he was elected and 15 when he died and probably paid more attention to church news than the average boy of my age. Even so, my impressions were also largely formed primarily by his attractive and engaging personality, and secondarily by his boldness. No one, of course, was anticipating the dramatic changes ushered in by - or at least in the name of - Vatican II. But the mere fact that he had called a council and devoted his pontificate to preparing for it marked his as a bold and active leader, which at the time added to his attractiveness.

At the time, I more or less just expected poes to be holy. Pius XII had seemingly set the bar quite high in that regard. (I remember, after Pius XII's death in October 1958, one of my aunts saying to my grandmother that there could hardly be a holier pope.) But the combination of John XXIII's personality and his evident piety more than fulfilled the expectation that a pope should be very holy. In the afterglow of his pontificat, I found reading about his life and then reading his spiritual journal intriguingly inspiring, even as the world around me was changing rapidly and radically undermining the world John had lived in and the piety he had professed so steadily.Yet, after all that has happened, the witness of his sanctity continues to shine through the confused character of our age. He remains a remarkable example of goodness in a committed man of the Church.

As he wrote on November 29, 1940, while serving as Apostolic Delegate to Greece and Turkey, "if we do our best the Lord continues to give us his grace, the grace of feeling we are his for ever" (Journal of a Soul, 48).

The Church and the Future of the Family

The contemporary obsession in western, secularized societies with questions about divorce and remarriage may be both an illustration of the uniquely modern problems of the nuclear family and an obstacle to our ever getting beyond it. So argues Seattle Blogger Arthur Rosman in "Synod 14: the Church Needs to Replace the Family" - http://www.patheos.com/blogs/cosmostheinlost/2014/10/08/synod-the-church-needs-to-replace-the-family/.

As he sees it, the real problem is "the breakdown of the extended family." Not only is the modern nuclear family not the traditional family, but, he argues, it is not a realistic family model in a modern world in which both parents have to work. "The raising of a solid family requires outlets and avenues of help that are not available to a nuclear family. They can only be provided by an extended family or an adequate substitute."

Reading Rosman, I could not help but recall my own experience, growing up in the 1950s, in an era when the nuclear family's dominance had by then supposedly become normative. In fact, my grandmother lived with us from my parents' marriage in 1947 until her own death 20 years later, and for many of those years her active presence in the home made it possible, for example, for my mother to work - something I think she liked doing but which was in any case an economic necessity for us. Of course, my grandmother was more than just a babysitter. Her role in the overall life of the family, her influence on me and my sister, and in particular her impact of my own personal religious formation were immeasurable. I can't say how typical we were. Probably most of my generation did grow up without resident grandparents. But neither were we that atypical. I can recall others my age who had live-in grandparents as well. Add to that the presence of grandparents and other relatives not necessarily int he same apartment but nearby, and one can make a convincing case that the extended family was still a significant component in my generation's upbringing. In my own case, I saw my aunts and uncles and cousins regularly - almost weekly - and even more often than that in summer, when we might be at the Bronx's Orchard Beach together almost daily. Obviously, all that interaction had an impact. Obviously, the presence of close relatives nearby was an important assist when family members had new babies, or someone was ill, or had some economic or other need - not to mention the informal advice that I am sure passed among my aunts and uncles in my parents' generation, among us cousins, and cross-generationally. 

While my situation may not quite have replicated the way it had once been in the old country or how farm families, for example, may have lived a few decades earlier, still it had more in common with that older world than the increasingly common contemporary experience of families as virtually isolated islands without other nearby relatives to rely on.

Rosman is not saying anything new when he asserts that "the real breakdown of the family" began "when the traditional extended family broke down due to economic pressures of capitalism" - something Karl Marx had already noted in the mid-19th century - and that it was the mobility created by the new economy that "broke up extended families and created the nuclear family." And certainly we have all, I think, experienced how it is increased mobility that continues to isolate young couples with children from the traditional supportive networks they left behind with their parents and other relatives.

What he does offer that is novel, however, is his blunt suggestion that it is the Church itself that will need to step in as a sort of substitute for the extended family. He wants parishes and dioceses "consistently providing the free services (childcare, career advice, food, and money) that would have otherwise been provided by the extended family." Such a strategy, he notes, could "give invaluable child-rearing experience to teenagers who are not usually exposed to taking care of young children," as well as "something to do for older parishioners whose biological families live far away." Only in this way, he suggests will the Church be able to  speak seriously about the family "as the first school of the faith."

What he is proposing, of course, to me resembles the apostolic Church, which (at least as portrayed in Acts) actually functioned in many ways as an alternative to the natural family. I think Acts is always a good model to start with when trying to imagine something new. I think too that the New Testament was much less family-oriented than we sometimes want to remember. What distinguished the New Testament community was the extent to which the Church itself represented a new kind of relationship, which, while it did not completely replace or suppress natural family relationships offered people a new dimension of relationship, which was primarily spiritual (rooted in a common relationship with Christ) but offered as a consequence many of the human benefits of traditional relationships. As the Church grew and became coextensive with civil society, its character as an alternative community diminished - only to see that survive in religious communities, which took the replacement of the natural family by an extended religious family to a newer level.

Whatever the Synod says about the challenges facing the family, someone certainly needs to address how to retrieve for present and future families some of the manifold benefits of the traditional extended family - something the Church is uniquely equipped and uniquely challenged to do.

The Synod

I have hesitated until now to write anything specific about the Synod (the Third Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, called to discuss "the pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelization"). Obviously, that is not because it is unimportant - far from it! Certainly, the Synod is important, although exactly how important and why will be determined more by what happens after (and after the "Ordinary" Synod on the Family next year). 

Regardless of that, however, the Synod has already acquired an enormous importance in consequence of the quantity of coverage it has received in both secular and religious media. Such coverage, of course, especially in the secular media has tended somewhat toward the sensational - emphasizing conflicts among Cardinals and among the Synod Fathers (as if such disagreements were completely unprecedented) and focusing on issues of interest largely in secularized "First World" societies. We have not heard so much about the concerns of bishops from "Third World" countries, where poverty, religious persecution, family disruptions due to migration, and polygamy are particularly important preoccupations, perhaps of more interest to those societies (the majority of the Church) than Western concerns about, for example, divorce and remarriage.

That is not to say, of course, that divorce and remarriage are unimportant. Obviously they are. That is one thing on which both sides of an increasingly shrill debate do agree. (The debate is increasingly shrill in the media. How shrill it may actually be within the Synod is, of course, a whole other question.)

The increase in divorce and the apparent breakdown of anything resembling the traditional culture of marriage and family life is in fact one of the particularly distressing dynamics of Western societies over the past 50 years. Obviously, the Church needs to address this issue in order to understand what is happening so as to anticipate and react to its adverse impact on so many aspect of modern life  Like it or not, the state of the family directly impacts the Church's ability to pass on the faith from one generation to the next. Meanwhile, the Church must also provide effective pastoral care for those most adversely impacted by the contemporary breakdown of marriage and family life (among them, single people who would probably prefer to be married but for whom marriage is increasingly foreclosed because of economic and other factors, the victims of divorce - notably children, whose social and economic prospects predictably suffer as a result of being children of divorce - and divorced couples themselves, including, of course, those now in subsequent "irregular" unions).

The Eastern Orthodox Churches famously have their own special way of addressing that last issue. I remember writing my first seminary course paper on that topic. At the time, I think I found the Orthodox approach somewhat attractive, but even then I recognized that (theological considerations aside) it might be rather difficult to implement such a two-tiered approach in our contemporary Western culture of equality and rights. Still, there is something to be said for giving people a second chance - especially if that second chance is recognized as a merciful concession not quite equal to the first marriage. It has long appeared obvious to me that different people - and the same people at different times due to different circumstances in their lives - find themselves in different relationships to the Church's life. And we need to have ways of reaching  out to and including as many people as possible, recognizing the complex diversity of their Church connections.

At the same time, what (for lack of a more nuanced terms) could be called the other side of this debate raises real concerns of grave theological and pastoral significance. How free is the Church in regard to Christ's clear prohibition of divorce and his condemnation of subsequent remarriage as adultery? How free is the Church in regard to its traditional view of that as an impediment to the reception of Holy Communion? Theologically, these are not trivial concerns. And then there are legitimate pastoral concerns about further undermining the culture of marriage at a time in human history when one could argue that what the world needs is more marriage, not more divorce.

Each "side" (to oversimplify the debate as if this were about politics) has serious, legitimate concerns and has raised serious, legitimate concerns about the other's arguments. It will require rigorous discernment to navigate through this issue, and I for one would not presume at present to predict any outcome.

Outside the Synod, however, there is also the potential danger of disappointment that some may feel who have been led - by the way these issues are being presented in the media - to expect outcomes that are actually rather unlikely. Inflated expectations - when finally deflated - can be devastating. One need only recall the ominous precedent of July 1968!

And, apart from such specifically neuralgic issues, there remains the larger problematic - illustrated in the responses to the pre-synodal survey - of the communication gap between the Church's vision of marriage and family life and the experience of contemporary couples. The intervention of the Australian married couple at yesterday's session was surprising only in that they said what they said in that setting. But what they actually said should hardly have been much of a surprise. "Our faith in Jesus was important to us. We went to Mass and looked to the Church for guidance. Occasionally we looked at Church documents but they seemed to be from another planet with difficult language and not terribly relevant to our own experiences." 

It will take more than a Synod to bridge this gap - this inter-planetary gap! But somehow a beginning must be made, a beginning which both responds boldly to a new social situation and also is faithful to God's plan for his creation.

In circumstances such as those in which the Church now finds itself, she must all the more trust in her Founder's promise to remain with the Church forever and in his promise that the Holy Spirit really will guide the Church wherever it needs to go.

Our Lady of Victory

Today’s feast of Our Lady of the Rosary was originally also known as Our lady of Victory and commemorates Christian Europe’s decisive naval victory over the Muslim Ottomans in the Gulf of Lepanto on this date in 1571, which definitively ended the perennial danger of Muslim domination of the Mediterranean. As the naval coalition of southern European Catholic seafaring states, known as the Holy League, set sail to face the powerful Turkish fleet, Pope Saint Pius V, appreciating the Ottomans’ military advantage, called upon the faithful to pray the Rosary and himself led a Rosary Procession in the city of Rome. Attributing the ensuing Christian victory to Our Lady’s intercession, Pius instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory – later renamed the feast of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary and now known as Our Lady of the Rosary. Growing up, I really never acquired an adequate attraction to the Rosary as a form of personal prayer, but the lesson of Lepanto certainly stuck with me.

A decade after Lepanto, there would be one further Ottoman assault on Europe by land , leading to the final Christian victory at the Battle of Vienna, after which the Ottoman Empire’s story would be one of slow but inexorable decline leading to definitive defeat in World War I. For 400 years, from the late 16th century on, the West would experience successes and setbacks of all sorts, but not until the late 20th century would Muslim militancy again threaten the Christian (and increasingly post-Christian) Western world.

Then as now, the the 16th century Islamist threat was a very serious one indeed. “”Modern historians examining contemporary comment produce reliable estimates that Islamic raiders enslaved around a million western Christian Europeans between 1530 and 1640; this dwarfs the contemporary slave traffic in the other direction, and is about equivalent to the numbers of West Africans taken by Christian Europeans across the Atlantic at the same time.” (Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation, 2004, p. 55). 

And abductions and enslavements are still with us in conflicts with Islamist groups in the Middle East and Africa. It almost boggles the mind at times how little seems to change!

Meanwhile, the Rosary remains as one of the greatest popular devotions ever developed. 

Being a Productive Tenant in God's Kingdom

Many of us here are surely old enough to remember a time when religion’s public place in American society seemed strong and secure, when Church attendance was higher than it had ever been, when seminaries and convents were bursting at the seams, and when it seemed as if things could go on like that forever. A similar assessment could be made in the secular world. Many of us here are likewise old enough to remember a time when manufacturing jobs were plentiful, unions were strong, a family could support itself on a single salary, prosperity was widespread, and inequality was much less. Back then, 50 or 60 years ago (before, for example, the contemporary plague of divorce), a meeting like the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops that begins today in Rome, probably would not have had for its title, “The Pastoral Challenges for the Family in the Context of Evangelization,” – or, if it did, it probably would mean something somewhat different. 

And so we may easily appreciate the Prophet Isaiah’s description of the vineyard that had so dramatically failed to produce its expected crop of grapes [Isaiah 5:1-7].  Just as we, in our society, seek explanations for things that seem to have gone wrong, likewise the Prophet Isaiah was offering an explanation for the disasters that Israel was facing. In ancient Israel’s case, of course, there was no ambiguity about why things were going badly. Isaiah’s vineyard represented God’s People who, in spite of all God had done for them, had failed in fidelity.

Centuries later, Jesus used the same image of the vineyard to challenge his hearers regarding their own behavior by judging the way they in turn either did or didn’t live up to their responsibilities [Matthew 21:33-43].

When vintage time drew near, the landowner in the parable, naturally sought to collect his share of the harvest and so sent his servants to the tenants to obtain his produce. Now, as is always the case in conflict situations, both ancient and modern, how we hear and interpret the facts depends in large part upon whom we identify with in the story.

Yet, even though this particular parable does not begin with the typical, “the kingdom of heaven is like,” it is nonetheless obvious that we are intended to hear and interpret it in continuity with Isaiah’s vineyard story. In other words, we are intended to hear and interpret it from the standpoint of the landowner, who is obviously the parable’s stand-in for God.

Historically, of course, Jesus addressed this parable to the chief priests and elders of the people, with whom he was in conflict. Through them, however, he is now addressing this parable to all of us. And for us it should be obvious who is being sent, when the landowner sends his son. Hence his question (What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?) is addressed as much to us, as it was originally to the chief priests and elders of the people.  And, like them, we all know the obvious answer, even before we hear them say it.

This, of course, is what being a disciple challenges us to do – to look at ourselves and at our relationship with God from God’s point of view. When we do that, then we necessarily have to re-evaluate everything – just as the stone that the builders rejected was re-evaluated in order to become the cornerstone. And then we will become a new kind of tenant – a people that will produce fruit.

Now that’s actually meant to be good news. The challenge of the parable is to recognize the incredible opportunity God has given us in sending us his Son – a life-transforming opportunity to be productive tenants in God’s vineyard, a people that will produce fruit.

Homily for the 27^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, October 5, 2014.