The Synod Starts

After the solemn Opening Mass in Rome yesterday (photo), the Synod of bishops gets down to business today. The 279 voting members of the three-week long Synod will start their deliberations with two days of general discussion, after which they will break into circuli minores ("small groups"). Synod procedures are not aimed at the public and traditionally have not generated much interest outside the Synod Hall. 

But this synod (Like last year's) promises to be somewhat different in that there is already such widespread outside interest - in part because of the salience of the topic, but mainly because of the appearance of profound and intense conflict among the Synod Fathers that has highlighted the seriousness of the issues at stake, and also the unusual sense that no one really knows what outcomes to expect. 

In his homily at yesterday's opening Mass, Pope Francis called the Synod a "moment of grace." He focused his homily on three themes: solitude, love between man and woman, and the family. 

Starting with Genesis' image of Adam's solitude prior to the creation of Eve, Pope Francis offered a stark picture of contemporary culture: “the paradox of a globalized world filled with luxurious mansions and skyscrapers, but a lessening of the warmth of homes and families; many ambitious plans and projects, but little time to enjoy them; many sophisticated means of entertainment, but a deep and growing interior emptiness; many pleasures, but few loves; many liberties, but little freedom.”

To this, Francis proposed what biblical revelation has revealed about God's original alternative to human loneliness. "God’s dream for his beloved creation," Francis recalled, is "to see it fulfilled in the loving union between a man and a woman, rejoicing in their shared journey, fruitful in their mutual gift of self." In his response to the pharisees' attempt to trap him in the gospel, Jesus, the Pope reminded the Synod Fathers,  “brings everything back to the beginning, to the beginning of creation, to teach us that God blesses human love, that it is he who joins the hearts of two people who love one another, he who joins them in unity and indissolubility.”

The Pope then challenged the Church to respond to today's context and "to carry out her mission in fidelity, truth and love."

First, "in fidelity to her Master as a voice crying out in the desert, in defending faithful love and encouraging the many families which live married life as an experience which reveals of God’s love; in defending the sacredness of life, of every life; in defending the unity and indissolubility of the conjugal bond as a sign of God’s grace and of the human person’s ability to love seriously."

Second, “in truth, which is not changed by passing fads or popular opinions. The truth which protects individuals and humanity as a whole from the temptation of self-centredness and from turning fruitful love into sterile selfishness, faithful union into temporary bonds.”

And, then third, "in charity, not pointing a finger in judgment of others, but – faithful to her nature as a mother – conscious of her duty to seek out and care for hurting couples with the balm of acceptance and mercy; to be a “field hospital” with doors wide open to whoever knocks in search of help and support; even more, to reach out to others with true love, to walk with our fellow men and women who suffer, to include them and guide them to the wellspring of salvation.”

Holding those three demands - fidelity, truth, and charity - together is, of course, the great dilemma which challenges the Church int he face of so many families in crisis and society in crisis. However distinctive today's circumstances may be, it is not a novel dilemma, but one which, one might say, was evident in the very ministry of Jesus and all throughout the historical continuation of that ministry in the day-to-day life and work of the Church.

Fittingly, Pope Francis ended by quoting from Saint John Paul II's 1978 address to Italian Catholic Action: ““Error and evil must always be condemned and opposed; but the man who falls or who errs must be understood and loved… we must love our time and help the man of our time."

The Sunday After

Here in the United States, we are still in the after-glow of Pope Francis’ visit to Washington, New York, and Philadelphia, while today in Rome the long-awaited Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops begins. Four popes have now visited the United States. In each case, the visiting pope was rapturously received. All those visits were considered successful at the time. Evaluating or analyzing longer term consequences is another matter - much harder to judge, if indeed it is possible to do so at all. That is because the primary impact of such an occasion is spiritual and takes place in the hearts and minds of those whose souls have been somehow touched by the event. For the many thousands who attended Pope Francis's Masses in Washington, New York, or Philadelphia, or any of the other events at which he spoke, or who watched his motorcade pass by them, their experience was likely a once-in-a-lifetime sort of event - a spiritual "high," in which even those who were not physically present but who watched on TV could feel themselves participants and be touched by the spiritual power at work in the event. At the doctor’s office and elsewhere this past week, all sorts of people – non-Catholics, for the most part – have wanted to talk to me about the Pope and have evidently been moved in some way by his presence. There is no way of knowing how many people were uplifted in some way, who felt God's grace at work in them - or who will feel that later in life as a result of participating in this event. There is no way of knowing how many were touched in various human ways, how many felt invited to re-examine an old faith or consider it anew. The many movements of grace that may have been at work this past week will hardly ever in this life be fully known to us, let alone be measurable by us! But for all of them we ought to be truly grateful.

Officially, what brought the Pope to America was the triennial World Meeting of Families, and the theme of the Synod starting in Rome today will be The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the Church and in the Contemporary World. Here too we have no immediate way of measuring the Pope's impact on the main focus of his visit – families. Families, as we all know, come in all shapes and sizes - stable families, struggling families, split families, single-parent families, and what are nowadays called “untraditional” families of all sorts. What the Pope’s visit and the forthcoming Synod have highlighted for us, however, is that this issue of the family, as Paulist President, Father Eric Andrews, has recently written, “deserves robust conversation and dialogue.  While we know and are blessed by many healthy and happy families, we are painfully aware of other families in crisis.”

Today’s Gospel [Mark 19:2-16]  has 2 messages – one focused on our human life lived in family and society, and another focused on our life in God’s kingdom. The Old Testament reading from the creation story [Genesis 2:18-24] highlights the social message about marriage and family life, while the reading from Hebrews [Hebrews 2:9-11] highlights the Gospel’s 2nd message.

The Gospel gets at marriage and family life by the back-door of divorce. Now, you don’t need me to tell you how deeply entrenched divorce has become in American life, especially in the last half-century or so. (I believe that now there are even greeting cards you can buy to send to people when they divorce.) What once was relatively rare and obtained only with difficulty and usually only as a last resort has now become as common as marriage itself. And that is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As we also know, nowadays fewer people are even getting married at all. Just about half the adult population in the United States is married now, compared with about three-quarters of the population half a century ago. Meanwhile, the number of Catholic marriages taking place in the United States has declined even more - by almost two-thirds – during the same time period. 

And then, thanks to increasing economic inequality in our society, there is also a very visibly obvious class component to this phenomenon of fewer people getting married.

During his visit to the United States last month, Pope Francis invited the Church in the United States to reflect on the many circumstances currently challenging marriage and family life in America and offered us some suggestions for how to think about and respond to these and other pastoral challenges.

Addressing the Bishops in Philadelphia, the Pope noted that: Today’s culture seems to encourage people not to bond with anything or anyone, not to trust.  ...  Today consumerism determines what is important.  ..  A consumption which does not favor bonding, consumption which has little to do with human relationships.  ... The result, the Pope warned, is a culture which discards everything that is no longer “useful” or “satisfying” for the tastes of the consumer. … a kind of impoverishment born of a widespread and radical sense of loneliness.  ….  Loneliness with fear of commitment in a limitless effort to feel recognized.

Having painted such a bleak picture of our present situation, however, the Pope went on to warn against the kind of negative responses that so often seem to characterize such conversations in our society and, sadly, even in our Church.

Should we say, he asked rhetorically, “it was all better back then”, “the world is falling apart and if things go on this way, who knows where we will end up?”  No, the Pope answered. Instead, we are asked to seek out, to accompany, to lift up, to bind up the wounds of our time. To look at things realistically, with the eyes of one who feels called to action, to pastoral conversion.  The world today demands this conversion on our part. 

Whether as participants or spectators, when we look back on these amazing six days, and do as Pope Francis challenged us to do, and ask ourselves the question Pope Leo XIII asked Saint Katherine Drexel, if we ask ourselves what we are actually going to do, then there will be plenty of opportunity for individual conversion of heart and renewed common activity as a Church community.

In particular, these six amazing days have been an invitation to all of us to re-examine our own priorities and activities to align them more closely and effectively with the priorities Pope Francis has articulated for the Church. Of course, different people respond differently to the movements of grace, and there will always be a variety of vocations in the Church focusing on different dimensions of discipleship. Not everyone is called to do exactly the same things or even to care about all the same things with exactly equal intensity. Even so, right now one immediate and pressing challenge to the American Church as a public institution in society is to embrace the particular priorities the Pope has highlighted for us – high among them certainly, welcoming immigrants, caring for the environment, and a certain sort of pastoral stance regarding how the Church’s teaching is presented and practiced in the public square.

As Pope Francis said at his final Mass in Philadelphia: Our Father will not be outdone in generosity and he continues to scatter seeds. He scatters the seeds of his presence in our world, for “love consists in this, not that we have loved God but that he loved us” first [1 John 4:10]. That love gives us a profound certainty: we are sought by God; he waits for us. It is this confidence which makes disciples encourage, support and nurture the good things happening all around them. God wants all his children to take part in the feast of the Gospel. Jesus says, “Do not hold back anything that is good, instead help it to grow!”

Homily for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, October 4, 2015.

Meeting People

In the 2011 TV movie Too Big To Fail, about the 2008 financial crisis, there is an early scene in which Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (played by William Hurt) is in China and one of his children is given a Chinese flag to hold - in an obvious ploy to have Paulson appear on film with the flag, something he deftly attempts to avoid. The fact is that public people are required to meet many individuals and groups in the ordinary course of their duties, to meet people who will in many instances try to use the meeting to identify them with some special interest or ideological cause. 

Even I, just a plain parish priest, have had that experience, shaking hands with whoever comes to Mass, many of them total strangers whose personal histories, special interests, and ideological causes I cannot possible know. If someone were to take a picture of me shaking hands with such a stranger, would it mean my endorsement of something that stranger stands for? In fact, sometimes a stranger does try to pull me into a conversation endorsing something I don't agree with. My usual course is to say something bland and change the subject, politely signifying my unwillingness to go in the direction he or she is trying to take me. 

It is hard to know exactly what was going on when Pope Francis had his now famous meeting with Kim Davis at the Holy See's Washington nunciature last month. The Pope was gracious and welcoming, as he is wont to be - as any pastor ought to try to be. He was probably told something about her, but exactly how much he knew or understood about what the Holy See now calls "her position in all of its particular and complex aspects" is unclear, to say the least.

Perhaps he was told that she was someone who had spoken out publicly in defense of marriage, which is certainly true. Perhaps he was even told that she was a fighter for religious liberty who was jailed for following her conscience, which is false or, at least incompletely true. (She was jailed for not only not doing the $80,000 job which she was elected to do but refuses either to do or to resign from, but also for preventing her deputies from fulfilling her job's duties in her place - in other words, not just for conscientiously following her own religion but for forcing her religion on others.) 

Even if the Pope knew her whole story, which seems highly unlikely, what was the Pope supposed to do? He said some friendly, encouraging words and gave her a rosary. Popes talk with powerful people with whom they do not necessarily completely agree all the time (including obviously on this trip to the US, indeed every day of that trip). Shouldn't he extend the same courtesy to someone who is not so powerful? 

By the way, don't we all do that? Or, if we don't, shouldn't we? When Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito attended Mass in my church, I made a point of going up to him to greet him and welcome him - out of normal human politeness and sincere respect for his exalted office. That most certainly didn't mean to suggest that I necessarily agree with or endorse anything he has ever said or done as a lawyer or as a justice.

Or are good manners only for friends, and "mercy" only for the "politically correct"?

And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? (Matthew 5:47).

The more pressing question, of course, is who invited her and why? Obviously someone with the right connections at the nunciature saw an opportunity - like the person who slipped the Chinese flag into Paulson's son's hand in the movie. 

Downton Abbey at Simla

The latest PBS period-piece, costume drama, Indian Summers, made its American debut a week ago, with episode two now set to air  tomorrow. Set in British India in 1932, when the British Raj was still going strong but was already in fact doomed, it portrays the British governing class at work and at play at their summer retreat at Simla in Northern India, with all the usual complex interactions and intrigues, both within the group and in relation to the local Indian population.  It is a sort of Indian Downton Abbey, as stunningly beautiful in appearance and as intricate in its socially stratified relationships. Only here, the Upstairs, Downstairs dimension is not not the story of another aristocratic family's subtly complex relationships with its servants, but the story of the British governing class and the native Indian population. In Downton Abbey, it is the inexorable decline of the landed aristocracy couples with the social and political rise of the English working classes that defines the socio-historical background. In Indian Summers, it is the imminent end of that jewel in the British imperial crown coupled the rise of Indian nationalism.

In last week's opening episode, the Brits who have just returned to summer in Simla are variously busy governing an empire while barely able to govern themselves. The local club (off-limits to Indians) is a sort of playpen for the (to us) attractively enviable and privileged characters' predictable antics and flirtations, but it is also where dinner begins with the band playing God Save the King and a loyal toast to the King-Emperor. Like Upstairs, Downstairs, Downton Abbey and all other such dramas of a world we have lost, Indian Summers entertains us with such perennial appealing attractions as family dysfunction, sexual attraction, political and inter-personal intrigue, and actual encounters with violence and danger - all set within the context of a real historical period which was transformative for the both fictional characters and the real world they are meant to illustrate. 

(The photo above is of the Imperial Indian Crown, created for King-Emperior George V and worn by him at the December 1911 Delhi Durbar.)

Family Saints

October begins today with the commemoration of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (“The Little Flower”). And, later this month, her parents Blessed Louis and Zelie Martin will be canonized by Pope Francis, during the 14th Ordinary Synod of Bishops, which starts Sunday in Rome to discuss “The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the Church and in the Contemporary World.” Louis and Zelie will not be the first husband and wife who are both saints, but they will be the first from the modern era. They are commemorated together on July 12.

After an earlier career as a soldier, Louis Martin (1823-1894) a watchmaker, settled in Alencon, France, where on July 13, 1858, he married Zelie Guerin (1831-1877), who ran a successful lace-making business in town. Together, they had nine children – seven girls and two boys. Both boys and two of the girls died in infancy. Through their difficulties, they persevered strong in their Catholic faith and in their deep love for each other and for their five surviving daughters – Marie, Pauline, Leonie, Céline, and Thérèse. Eventually, four of their daughters - Marie, Pauline, Céline, and Thérèse - all became Carmelite nuns at the local Carmel, while Léonie became a Visitandine nun at Caen.

Canonized in 1925 by Pope Pius XI, who called her “the greatest saint of modern times,” Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face (to use her full religious name) was proclaimed Universal Patron of the Missions by the same Pope in 1927 and a Doctor of the Church by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1997. Devotion to “The Little Flower” and to her spirituality of “the little way” have been widespread in the Church for much of this past century. Her beautiful Basilica in Lisieux is now second only to Lourdes as a place of pilgrimage in France. I had the great privilege of visiting the Basilica of Saint Thérèse in Lisieux in 2009 and while there also had the opportunity of venerating the relics of her parents (photo). Famous for their saintly daughter, Louis and Zelie’s inspiring family story eventually propelled forward their cause for canonization as well. They were declared Venerable by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2004 and Blessed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008. A Call to a Deeper Love: The Family Correspondence of the Parents of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, 1863-1885 was published in English in 2011. 

Louis and Zelie with their five daughters in religious life represent a special sort of family vocation and family sanctity. As we celebrate them and as the Synod on the Family assembles in Rome, we are invited to reflect upon and celebrate the multitude of models of holy, happy, and healthy families which the lived history and experience of the Church offers to us. 

But, of course, we also know of the struggles of so many families - among them, divorced families, single-parent families, and families challenged by lack of social, and cultural opportunity in this era of increasing economic inequality. May the needs of all such families be before us and before the entire Church in a special way during this forthcoming Synod!