A New Feast

Last week, the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments published a decree (dated February 11) inscribing the new Memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, in the Roman Calendar, to be kept yearly on the Monday after Pentecost. Blessed Paul VI declared Mary "Mother of the Church" at the end of the 3rd session of the Second Vatican Council in 1964. A votive Mass in her honor under that title has been in the Missal since 1975, and the title was added to the invocations of the Litany of Loretto in 1980. Now this celebration will be universal - "to remember that growth in the Christian life must be anchored in the mystery of the Cross, to the Oblation of Christ in the Eucharistic Banquet and to the Mother of the Redeemer and of the Redeemed, the Virgin who makes her offering to God.".

Over the centuries the number of feasts celebrated in the Roman Calendar has grown in response to popular piety and then periodically been reduced in reaction. Such a reduction occurred in the Tridentine reform of the Breviary (1568) and Missal (1570). The subsequent centuries were, however, characterized by a continued growth in the number of feasts - including so many feasts of "Double" rite that by the beginning of the 20th century, Mass was seldom celebrated in green vestments in many places. The 1911 rubrical reform of Saint Pius X - aimed at rebalancing the liturgical year without actually removing feasts from the calendar - salvaged a lot of those green Sundays, and even made possible the celebration of some of the weekdays of Lent. Then, following in the tradition of the Tridentine reform, the liturgical reformation that followed the Second Vatican Council radically reduced the number and ranking of feasts, further institutionalizing the modern monochromatic character of the long succession of green Sundays (and even weekdays). In the interim, however, many more saints have since been canonized and added to the calendar. Some saints eliminated in the 1969 calendar have been restored (e.g., Saint Catherine of Alexandria), and some devotional feasts that disappeared in 1969 have likewise been restored (e.g., the Holy Name of Jesus, the Holy Name of Mary). Thus, the current Roman Calendar is clearly richer now than the 1969 product.

This process of calendar renewal has continued in an especially felicitous fashion with the introduction of this new Memorial.  Aside from the intrinsic merits of the celebration itself, it is particularly noteworthy that it has been assigned to the Monday after Pentecost - thus connecting it with the Easter season and in some very modest way remedying the abrupt ending of the Easter season thanks to the truncation of Pentecost (one of the least expected and most criticized features of the 1969 calendar).

Although the Octave of Pentecost was abolished by Paul VI, Pentecost Monday is still a civil holiday in some countries (e.g., Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece,  Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Romania). Thus this new festival may be a nice way of resolving in part the anomaly caused by dropping Pentecost Monday from the 1969 calendar.

(Photo: Maria Salus Populi Romani, Basilica of Saint Mary Major, Rome)

Nuper Nonnulli + 160

160 years ago today, on March 6, 1858, the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars issued the Decree Nuper Nonnulli. At their request, it dispensed four of Isaac Hecker’s Redemptorist colleagues, Clarence Walworth, Augustine Hewit, George Deshon, and Francis Baker from their vows, and attached Hecker himself to their petition in respect to the dispensation. The decree directed the five of them then to work “under the direction and jurisdiction of the local bishops.” It was this event which made it possible for Hecker and three of the others to join together to form the Paulist Fathers the following summer.


The fourth image at the base of Hecker’s sarcophagus in the Paulist Mother Church depicts his ordeal in Rome in 1857-1858 after his expulsion from the Redemptorists.  How Hecker went from successful Catholic author and prominent spokesman for the Church to being expelled from his religious community is a complicated story. It involved a legitimate debate within both the Redemptorists and the American Church about priorities – ministry within the Catholic community, or mission outward to non-Catholic America, or both; and, if both, then how. It involved ethnic tensions within the Redemptorists - between the German-born and the American-born Fathers. It involved canonical questions concerning the correct interpretation of the Redemptorist Consitution – whether or not an individual member had the right to travel to Rome to make a direct appeal to the General Superior and his council. It highlighted contemporary Redemptorist concerns about governance – American anxieties about overcentralization in the community and Roman worries about yet another division of the community. There were also, of course, cultural misunderstandings between Europeans and Americans – rooted in their very different experiences of religion and religion’s relationship with 19th-century society.

The basic story is that Hecker with the four other American-born, ex-Protestant Redemptorists – Hewit, Deshon, Baker, and Walworth - decided to appeal directly to the Redemptorist authorities in Rome for an English-speaking American house primarily focused on missionary work, an idea which had originated with their previous Provincial, but which his successor, Fr. George Ruland, had reservations about. Hecker sailed for Europe, arriving at the Redemptorist headquarters in Rome in August 1857. By the time of Hecker’s arrival, Fr. Mauron, had already received from Fr. Ruland a letter critical of Hecker and his colleagues’ project. Later that month, the Redemptorist General Council met and decided that Hecker’s unauthorized trip was in itself grounds for dismissal. The decree of dismissal accused him of ignoring the prohibition of such trips to Rome, of “procuring money from outsiders,” and having “a way of acting and thinking in general … by no means in harmony with the laws and spirit of our Institute.”

How did Hecker react to this sudden reversal? In a letter to his brother George, written just days after his expulsion, he wrote: “This morning I said Mass in St. Peter’s. Our affairs are in the hands of God. I hope no one will feel discouraged, nor fear for me. All that is needed to bring the interests of God to a successful issue is grace, grace, grace, and this is obtained by prayer, and if the American Fathers will only pray, and get others to pray, and not let anyone have the slightest reason to bring a word against them in our present crisis, God will be with us, and Our Lady will take good care of us."

“So far," Hecker continued. "no step that has been taken on our part need be regretted; if it were to be done over again it would have my consent; the blow given to me I have endeavored to receive with humility in view of God; it has not produced any trouble in my soul, nor made me waver in the slightest degree in my confidence in God or in my duty towards Him. Let us not be impatient; God is with us, and will lead us if we confide in him. “[From a letter of Father Hecker to his brother George V. Hecker, September 2, 1857].

Hecker remained in Rome for another eight months. Armed with supportive letters from leading U.S. Bishops, he took his case to the Congregation of Propaganda, which, as the curial body in charge of the Church in mission territories, then had jurisdiction over the U.S. Church (and would continue to do so until 1908). Already in September he had begun his eventually successful appeal to the Holy See and had had his first interview with Alesandro Cardinal Barnabó, Prefect of the Congregation of Progaganda, who was interested in the Church’s missionary efforts in the U.S. and was already aware of Hecker form his having recently been considered as a candidate for bishop of Natchez, MS. Awaiting the outcome, Hecker actively promoted his case in every available way – including writing two articles in the important Jesuit journal Civiltá Cattolica, optimistically assessing the Catholic Church’s prospects in the United States: “One might say that the longing after a more spiritual life is one of the principal characteristics of the American people. So far from being a nation absorbed in commerce and in accumulating material wealth, there is no other people who are so easily kindled to a religious enthusiasm, hence the success of the Methodists among them. And few will be found who are more ready to make sacrifices for the religious convictions, witness their countless churches, their Bible and Tract societies spread over that vast country.” [“The Present and Future Prospects of the Catholic Faith in the United States of North America,” December 1857–January 1858].

Visiting and celebrating Mass in Rome’s historic churches, themselves so identified with the evangelizing mission of the Church in the past, Hecker had abundant opportunities to pray for the present evangelization of his home country: “Wednesday I said Mass in the Mamertine prison, in which St. Peter was confined by the order of Nero; and also St. Paul. The pillar is there in which they were chained, and the fountain remains which sprung up miraculously at their feet, in whose waters they baptized their gaolers and twenty-seven soldiers. There were with me four American students, and you can easily imagine that I prayed earnestly in Holy Mass to obtain or us all the zeal of the Apostles for the conversion of our country.”   [From a letter to Mrs. George V. Hecker, , November 7, 1857].

Writing to his fellow missionaries back home that Christmas season, Hecker connected situation to his sense of being called to serve the Church in American in a special way: “I must confess to you frankly that thoughts of this kind do occupy my mind and day by day they appear to come more clearly from heaven. I cannot refuse to entertain them without resisting what appears to me the inspirations of God. You know that these are not new opinions hastily adopted. From the beginning of my Catholic life there seemed always before me, but not distinctly, some such work, and it is indicated both in Questions of the Soul and the Aspirations of Nature and I cannot resist the thought that my present peculiar position is, or may be, providential to further some such undertaking.”                              [Letter to the American Fathers, January 1, 1858].

Finally, on March 6,  the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars issued the Decree Nuper Nonnulli, in effect ignoring Hecker's dismissal and authorizing him and his four colleagues to continue their work “under the direction and jurisdiction of the local bishops.” [Decree of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars,” Nuper nonnulli,Translation].

A few days later, Hecker wrote to the other four: “We are left in entire liberty to act in the future as God and our intelligence shall point the way. Let us be thankful to God, humble towards each other and everyone else, and more than ever in earnest to do the work God demands at our hands.” [“From a letter to the American Fathers,” dated Rome, March 9, 1858].

Cathedral

On Saturday, with great joy and gratitude to God, the Catholic Diocese of Knoxville celebrated the Dedication of our new Diocesan Cathedral of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. It was a glorious celebration, enhanced by the presence of cardinals, bishops, as well as most of the priests and deacons of the diocese and about 1000 lay faithful. We were all gathered to fulfill a dream many years in the making, to provide for the growing Catholic Church in East Tennessee a fitting house of prayer for generations to come. 

As the new altar and the walls of the church were anointed with sacred chrism, the bishop prayed that God in his power make them holy, visible signs of the mystery of Christ and his Church.” As incense was burned on the newly consecrated altar (photo), clouds of sacred smoke rising symbolically into the new baldacchino, the Bishop prayed As this building is filled with fragrance so may your church fill the world with the fragrance of Christ. As the altar candles and the candles marking the 12 places where the walls were anointed were lit, the Bishop prayed Light of Christ, shine forth in the Church and bring all nations to the fullness of truth. 

This genuinely beautiful new cathedral is both a monument of human art and an expression of transcendent faith. It unites the far-flung local parish communities of this region into one local Church, united not only with one another but with the Universal Church under the leadership of the successors of the Apostles. The holy relics enshrined in its altar signify our unity across both space and time with the saints in heaven and with generations of heroic martyrs and confessors of the faith.

To erect a church in the contemporary world is a bold statement not just of the Church's institutional presence in a world which would just as soon not notice, but of the abiding, persistent, permanent relevance of what takes place daily inside that building. It is a profession of faith and confidence that the altar at that building's center unites a community around it, a community conscious of its mission to transform the world in which it finds itself.

Living Water

Homily for the celebration of the 1st Scrutiny of the Elect, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, March 4, 2018

Tonight much of the country will be focused on the Academy Awards. Usually by now, I try to see at least all of the nominees for Best Picture. This year I have seen all but one. The last one I saw was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which focuses on Mildred, a divorced mother of a recently murdered daughter, who is now bitter, vengeful, and angry (so it seems) at virtually everyone and everything, whose response to the police’s inability to identify and catch her daughter’s killer seems to be to stay as angry as possible and to lash out at as many people (and institutions) as possible - and to do so in as irrational and destructive a way as possible. Listening today to the familiar story of the Samaritan woman  [John 4:5-42] reminded me of Mildred.

Like Mildred, the Samaritan woman’s family life seems to have been a bit of mess. Like Mildred, her relationship with her neighbors was probably problematic as well. Why else would she have come to well at noon, at the hottest hour of the day, when everyone else would be indoors? Who was she trying to avoid? Whoever she was trying to avoid, she met someone else instead, someone who would change her life forever.

Travelling north from Judea to Galilee, Jesus passed through Samaria – a route Jews generally avoided, because they despised Samaritans as a people of mixed ethnicity and dubious orthodoxy - ever since the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel some 700 years earlier. In a desert climate, of course, wells were very important. At such a well, one associated with the patriarch Jacob, ancestor to both Jews and Samaritans, Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down at the desert day’s hottest time. So, when, despite the unusual hour, a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus asked her for a drink.

For a Jew, Jesus’ request risked ritual impurity. Hence the Samaritan woman’s amazed reaction: How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan, for a drink? Jesus, however, answered by turning the whole discussion upside down, offering her something even better than stagnant well water – living water welling up to eternal life.

Surely, it would have been easy – human history shows repeatedly just how easy it is - to dismiss such talk and settle for the familiar world of stagnant water and unresolved conflict, as Jews and Samaritans had done for centuries already, as so many do in every time and place including our own. But this Samaritan woman wanted something more from life, and so she said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty.”

At this point, Jesus suddenly got very personal with her. In theory, we all  want to be known and loved as we truly are, although we aren’t always actually all that ready and willing to respond when someone offers to do that. What would otherwise seem to some of us maybe more like a frightening invasion of privacy, in someone open (as she was) to conversion, Jesus’ unexpectedly personal knowledge of her offered an opportunity not to be missed.

Now, however heretical Samaritans may have been from Jerusalem’s perspective, they too were awaiting a Messiah, one who would presumably resolve the religious disputes dividing the two peoples. Jesus here minced no words, reminding her of something which we over the centuries sadly have sometimes forgotten - that salvation is from the Jews. But, while the story starts there, it doesn’t end there. Through Jesus, that salvation has at last become the blessing for all the nations that it was always intended to be.  As Saint Paul wrote [Romans 5:1-2], we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith to this grace in which we stand.

And so then the most wonderful thing happened. After all the trouble she had gone through, trudging to the well with her water jar at hottest hour of the day,  suddenly she left her water jar and went into the town and said to the people, “Come see a man who told me everything I have done. Could he possibly be the Christ?” It’s still a question for her, but her hope has been stirred.

And hope, St. Paul [Romans 5:5-8], assures us, does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

So she became a missionary – and quite a successful one, preaching not just with words but by the powerful witness of her transformed life. Perhaps the people in that Samaritan city simply sensed that what Jesus had done for her was what we all need and want – to be known and loved as we truly are and so to find the refreshing possibility of renewed life.

So how do we, here and now, get to Jacob’s well – and the living water, which only Jesus can give us?

Today’s Mass offers us 2 contrasting images of thirsty people. In the 1st reading [Exodus 17:3-7], in their thirst for water the people grumbled against Moses. That’s the same Moses who just a few weeks earlier had led them through the Red Sea. It’s a familiar phenomenon found in every time and place, the fickle demandingness of hard-to-satisfy people, who ask: So what have you done for me lately? Moses’ people do eventually get their drink, but it has a sour aftertaste: Is the Lord in our midst or not?

In the Gospel, in contrast, a foreigner with a somewhat troubled personal history is transformed by her encounter with Jesus into a renewed person – and becomes a missionary to her fellow Samaritans.

This season of Lent is organized around two converging themes: conversion and repentance (and two corresponding sacraments: baptism and penance).  Outsider though she was, the Samaritan woman was open to conversion. Sought by Jesus, she sought him in return, and then shared what she had found. Hence the significance of her story for those preparing for baptism, and the Church’s use of it today to celebrate what is called the 1st scrutiny of the elect in their final stages of preparation for baptism at Easter.. 

But what about the rest of us, baptized long ago, life-long (or at least long-term) members of his Church? Have we perhaps lost some of our fervor? Are we maybe more like Israel in the desert, quarreling and testing the Lord, asking “Is the Lord in our midst or not?” Lent challenges us to rediscover the new life first offered us in the living water of baptism, offered again and again in the sacrament of penance.

As Pope Francis has repeatedly reminded us: “the Lord never gets tired of forgiving, it is we that get tired of asking forgiveness.”

March

March is the third month of the year, the first in the original Roman calendar, which curiously considered winter as a non-time. It was named, obviously, after the Roman god of war, Mars, the putative father of Rome's founder, a war god who happened also to have an agricultural role. Spring, of course, was the season for both agriculture and war to start up again after winter's hiatus. Modern people are less tied to the seasons and the environment than our ancestors. Modern progress means we can make war all year round! And we can also access formerly season-specific vegetables and fruits all year long. The change of seasons is seen now largely in recreational terms, which are increasingly the terms that define social and cultural life. The deplorable Daylight Saving Time now also begins in March (this year, March 11).

In the Catholic liturgical calendar, the monochrome purple character of our modern Lent is interrupted by two great festivals - Saint Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, on March 19, and the Annunciation on March 25. (I am especially partial to the latter feast, since it is my birthday!) Modern life takes little note of the calendar of Christian feasts and seasons that was once-upon-a-time so central to society's self-understanding. But, way back when, the attitude was wildly different. The critical turning points of the natural year (the spring equinox, for example) were all invested with profound religious significance. 

Thus, according to Saint Augustine, He is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since.(De Trinitate V, 9). Some medieval interpretations went even further - connecting March 25 with the eighth day of creation! (For a far more erudite treatment of these themes, see A Clerk of Oxford blog: https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/this-doubtful-day-of-feast-or-fast-good.html and https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-days-of-creation.html)

In the Latin Rites, Annunciation gets displaced this year by Palm Sunday - another harbinger of spring. I am just old enough to remember when Holy Week was "reformed" by Pope Pius XII, resulting in a (temporary) surge of popular interest in and enthusiasm for the symbolically evocative archaic rituals of those fascinating days. 

In the Jewish calendar, today is the 14th day of the month of Adar and thus Purim, a Jewish holiday that commemorates the saving of the Jewish people from the genocidal Haman's plan to exterminate all the Jews living in the ancient Persian Empire.  According to the Book of Esther, Haman persauded King Ahasuerus (possibly Xerxes I) to kill all the Jews in the empire, but his plans were foiled by Mordecai and his adopted daughter Esther, who had providentially risen to become Queen of Persia. The day destined for genocide became instead a day of deliverance and since then a day of feasting and rejoicing - a fun holiday with a perennially and still seriously relevant message.

Meanwhile we moderns have Employee Appreciation Day, which is observed on the first Friday in March in the secular calendar in the U.S, and Canada!

(Photo: March from the famous Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, an early 15th-century prayer book, which is widely considered perhaps the best surviving example of medieval French Gothic manuscript illumination)