The Church Rejoining the World

As an historical event, the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) are ancient history to today's generation, not unlike Trent and Nicaea. For my generation, however, it is a memory of our youth. Memoirs by participants in that event - serious, gossipy, or (better yet) both - bring me back to a time when all this was news, even at times exciting news - although, being just  a teenager, then my knowledge, let alone comprehension, of it all was limited at best.. 

"The Church Rejoining the World" sums up much of what the famous French Dominican theologian Yves Congar (1904-1995) aspired to achieve and how he ideologically interpreted the Council. He was intimately involved in the event, first as a member of the Council's Preparatory Theological Commission, then as a member of several committees that drafted conciliar texts and a participant in many formal and informal meetings, making him one of the most formative theological influences at Vatican II, the main point of which to him was "not to vote on some texts, but to establish a spirit and a new awareness" (February 1, 1964). 

It is this unique experience that Congar recounted in considerable detail in a journal which he kept from July 1960 to December 1965. In keeping with his own explicit instructions, this journal was not to be published until after 2000. Finally published in two volumes in 2002 as Mon Journal du Concile I-II, présenté et annoté par Éric Mahieu, a one-volume English translation finally appeared in 2012 as My Journal of the Council, tr. Mary John Ronayne, OP, and Mary Cecily Boulding, OP (Collegeville: Liturgical Press). Its 900+ pages are well worth the effort, both as a valuable commentary on the Council itself and as an insight into the vocation of one very influential European theologian at a particularly pivotal point in the ongoing history of the Catholic Church's encounter with modernity.

Congar consciously saw his Journal as focusing on his work, with minimal reference to his personal life. We do, however, read about his mother's death during this period, an event which elicits some poignant personal reflections about "the sweetness of these bonds, which are tied not only at the level of a single generation, but from one generation to the next" (December 1, 1963). Congar worried about "a large general feeling of emptiness in my life ... without close friends, without confidants" (May 7, 1965). We also read constantly about Congar's many ailments. His debilitating aches and pains are an intriguing component of his account, contributing to the reader's amazement and wonder at how Congar could accomplish so much, despite his apparent sense of himself as a borderline invalid. "I have no longer anything to offer to God except the total absence of strength. ... At Rome. St. Dominic received the staff and the book, but it was a pilgrim;'s staff. I carried there only a staff of weakness" (May 2, 1965).

One perhaps less attractive aspect of Congar's personality that permeates the journal is an extreme preoccupation (almost obsession) with his intellectual "work," which so completely dominates his life that it causes him to denigrate and/or skip even some of the Council's liturgical celebrations. (Today, one would wonder about insufficient "work/life balance.") Also, as an intellectual, Congar could be somewhat snarky in his comments about those he disagreed with, occasionally employing really demeaning language to describe even Cardinals. Even the two popes to whom he owed his position at the Council and who admired his work (John XXIII and Paul VI) were subjected to severe criticism at times (although praised at others). Of Paul VI, for example, he wrote "he has neither the theology nor the intellectual backing for his gestures" (November 22 1964). Along the way, we also learn a lot about his dislike for Fiumicino Airport, Italian noise, and, in general, the Roman way of doing things.

On the other hand, Congar's comments often reflect a rootedness and a serious sense of balanced moderation sometimes lacking in others. Thus, for example, this prescient comment about one of his most famous theological colleagues, Hans Küng. "Küng is critical. He loves the truth, but has he any mercy for human beings? Has he the warmth and the measure of love?" (February 22, 1963). Later that same year, Congar worried about Küng "that he has not the support of a community of religious and regular life" (October 12, 1963), supports which Congar himself at least had access to. More broadly, Congar also offered a pointed critique of the "Xavier Rynne" interpretation of the Council, which "while saying a good number of things that are true, it yet distorts the truth.  It politicises everything" (January 15, 1965).

He even showed awareness of the early appearance of some of the Church's post-conciliar problems, among them the decline in vocations (January 17, 1965) and "a system of antiphonal psalms, which is a bit overdone and of which one will soon grow tired" (September 16 1965). He suffered "in sensing, here or there, a sort of virtual schism" (January 24, 1965). Toward the end, he was "very disturbed" by "the seriously worrying situation in Holland," where some "reduced Christianity to a mere humanism" (March 10, 1966). And he recorded Karl Barth's warning "that the Catholic Church should not make the same mistake as Protestantism which, since the end of the seventeenth century, had followed all the fashionable philosophies in turn" (September 24, 1966). Ominously, he also alluded, obviously with personal pain, to bishops "found in brothels" and propositioning papal gendarmes (February 7, 1965).

Apart from his period of military service (for much of which he was a prisoner of war), Congar's career had been completely committed to intellectual work. Ordained in 1930, he had discerned early on what he called an ecumenical and ecclesiological vocation. Much of what Congar said and did during the Council (and wrote in his Journal) reflected this ecumenical sensitivity and the high priority he wished the Church to accord to such concerns. Thus, throughout the Journal, we hear Congar expressing a special sensitivity to the ideas and feelings of Eastern Catholic Patriarchs and Protestant Observers. From the Eastern Bishops especially, Congar seemed to see the prospect of recovering certain ecclesiological elements that had been lost from the Catholic tradition. He especially appreciated how "the East speaks through liturgical action" (October 16, 1964).

Part of the post-war French Catholic intellectual renewal, Congar famously wrote True and False Reform in the Church (1950), which was read by the future Pope John XXIII when Nuncio to France. Caught up in the Roman suspicion of modern theological tendencies, he was sidelined from teaching for some time in the 1950s. This traumatic experience left him an anxious legacy to which Congar constantly referred in his Journal. "Personally, I have never, I have still not,  escaped from the apprehension of one who is still under suspicion, punished, judged discriminated against." Even when widely admired and obviously influential, he still sounded at times like someone with PTSD and could not help recalling "a long period of suspicion and difficulties" (December 7, 1965).

Perhaps that contributed to his frequent pessimism about what the Council could or would accomplish - a pessimism apparently shared by others who thought as he did. Given how dramatic the Council's impact turned out to be, this anxious current of pessimism is one of the more intriguing features of his account, and offers an interesting window into the perfectionistic and sectarian tendencies of so many modern progressive movements. 

One particular issue on which this account sheds considerable light is the complex history of the Council's statement on the Church's relationship with the Jews and how this was constantly threatened by Arab governments and those Christians who lived in fear of them. "Really, it is quite scandalous and unacceptable that the Church in order to please some Arab governments that obey no other reason than just an instinct that is simplistic and all-inclusive, should have to refrain from saying what should be said on a question which comes within its province, and on which it has a duty to speak" (April 25, 1964).

Through it all, however, it was the admirable idea of a Church somehow rejoining the world that summed up and expressed Congar's aspiration for the Council. Early on, he shared the hope for "a new kind of bishop," who "will be characterized by the presence of the Church to the world" (October 29, 1962). But he also eventually came to appreciate "some remarks of extreme gravity" made by Cardinal Wojtyla (the future Pope John Paul II), who pointed out that "the new world situation" not only posed questions for the Council to consider but provided answers of its own, "and we must reply to these answers, for they constitute a putting in question of our own response" (February 2, 1965). I think this observation - and Congar's acknowledgment of it - goes to the heart of much of what has happened since the Council, which did a remarkably good job of responding as Church to some of the new questions posed by modernity, while the Church continues to struggle, maybe much less successfully, with the answers modernity itself offers to its own questions.

Despite his infirmities, Congar continued to work after the Council. He was a member of the International Theological Commission from 1969 to 1985. Increasingly, he focused on the Holy Spirit, publishing a now classic three-volume work on the Holy Spirit in 1979. He was created a Cardinal by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1994 and died the following year.

Epiphany

In the liturgical calendar currently in use in the U.S., the ancient solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord has been transferred to today from its traditional date (January 6). If anything, this unfortunate change, which regrettably comes across as a demotion whatever the intention behind it,  may further relegate Epiphany to a kind of post-holiday merely vestigial after-thought. After all, isn't Christmas (our weeks-long American consumerist capitalist extravaganza) all over already? Didn't it end when the stores closed on December 24 (if, that is, they even bothered to close)? 

Of course, contrary to our consumer capitalist calendar, Epiphany, a feast more ancient than Christmas, remains in theory one of the high points of the Christian calendar.

In August 2005, I attended World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany. The great Gothic Cathedral in Cologne (the architectural model for New York's Saint Patrick's Cathedral) was originally built to house the relics of the magi, who, according to the Gospel account read on this feast [Matthew 2:1-12], came from the east to do homage with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Those magic men the Magi

Some people call them wise

Or Oriental, even kings

Well anyway, those guys

They visited with Jesus

They sure enjoyed their stay

Then warned in a dream of King Herod's scheme

They went home by another way

 

So begins James Taylor's song Home By Another Way, about our friends the Magi.

Several Christmases ago, the British newsmagazine The Economist featured an interesting article on the Magi. Historically, there have been a lot of interesting, but ultimately unanswerable questions about those the Gospel calls Magi (which just means wise men). Because they were observing the movement of a star, the early Church imagined them as astronomers or astrologers – perhaps Persian Zoroastrian scholars. The Economist article cites a 4th-century account, according to which generations of such scholars had been watching for such a star on a mythical Persian mountain - starting with Adam himself, who had gone there in his old age with gold, frankincense, and myrrh he had somehow salvaged from the Garden of Eden! In the Middle Ages, the image of them as kings took over, suggested by both today’s familiar first reading [Isaiah 60:1-6] and the responsorial [Psalm 72]. The Gospel doesn’t say how many they were; but, based on the three gifts, three has seemed a logical inference. Over time, the “Three Kings” also acquired the now familiar names, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, of whom Balthasar eventually became identified as an African King – presumably from Ethiopia. The three also came to represent the three ages of humanity – Melchior an old man of 60, Balthasar a middle-aged 40, and Caspar a young 20-year old. According to a different Cologne tradition, the three were closer to each other in age. By then much older, the three reunited one year at Christmas, after which they each died on January 1, January 6, and January 11 respectively!

All that is just speculation, of course. The fact is that we really know next to nothing at all about the magi themselves – not their names, nor their exact social status (whether really royal or not), nor even their number.

The Gospel tells us none of these things, but it does tell us what it is important for us to know about the magi. It tells us that they were foreigners, Gentiles, pagans. As such, they represent the majority of the human race – past and present – in a world in which darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples [Isaiah 60:2]. The magi were armed, in other words, with only human, natural knowledge, which they put to good use and sought, as St. Paul said in his speech to his pagan audience in Athens, the God who made the world and all that is in it and gives life and breath to everyone [Acts 17:24-25]. In his book a decade ago about the birth of Christ, Pope Benedict XVI wrote that the magi “represent the inner dynamic of religion toward self-transcendence, which involves a search for truth, a search for the true God.” He called the magi “forerunners, preparers of the way, seekers after truth, such as we find in every age” (pp. 95-96).

The story also tells us that, whatever many and varied the paths that different people may start out on, to get to where we ned to be our paths must all finally converge in Jesus, the one and only Savior of the world, and that the interpretive key to the story of Jesus is God’s revelation of himself in the history of Israel. Thus, it was to Jerusalem, that the magi came to learn the full significance of the star – a meaning revealed in the Jewish scriptures, which translated the natural light of a star into the revelation of a person. Nations shall walk by Jerusalem’s light, and kings by her shining radiance [Isaiah 60:3].

By way of warning, however, the story also illustrates how easily we may miss the point. When Herod heard the Magi, he was greatly troubled and all Jerusalem with him – troubled, not overjoyed like the Magi! What troubled them? What made such good news seem to them like bad news? The same Christmas star that filled the magi with hope somehow seemed like an evil portent to those who somehow sensed the threatening challenge it posed to their power and priorities.

And then there were those scholars whom Herod consulted. They correctly quoted the scripture, but they didn’t get it either. It was as if they had an abundant academic knowledge of the subject, but lacked any real knowledge. So none of them did the obvious thing – go to Bethlehem and do Jesus homage. Only the pagan magi did! (This reminds me of how many time my mother warned of the limits of book-learning unless accompanied by common sense!)

Talk about missing the opportunity of a lifetime!

The magi, on the other hand, were overjoyed, not troubled. The magi were probably also scholars, but they had set out as true pilgrims – and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother … prostrated themselves and did him homage. In the old liturgy, when these words were read or sung in the Gospel everyone was directed to genuflect, a gesture of which we are no deprived to no discernible benefit. In the old rite, that genuflection was the liturgy’s way of physically bringing the point of the story home, helping us to identify personally with the pilgrim magi.

As for the magi, we never hear about them again in scripture. We know only that they departed for their country by another way. Nativity scenes sometimes seem, so to speak, frozen in time. Everybody stays stationary – at least until it’s time to put the figures all back in the closet. But the real magi didn’t just stay put, anymore than the shepherds did. They went back to wherever they had lived before, but they departed for their country by another way. They went back to whatever they had been doing before, but they would never be the same again. And, thanks to Christ’s coming into our world, we too must be different now from what we would otherwise have been.

This is, I think, by far the more important meaning of the "new" in the new year. Every January, after "the holidays," we return (as we inevitably must) to our ordinary activities – at home, at work, whatever and wherever. Like the magi, however, we have been challenged to travel through our ordinary life by another way, because something so special has happened which makes everything different from what it would otherwise have been.

Long before there were printed parish calendars for general distribution, Epiphany became the annual date which the Roman Liturgy assigned for announcing the date of Easter and other important dates in the coming year.

None of us, of course, can even begin to foresee what this new year will bring, whether for better or for worse. If we didn't understand that before, this terrible pandemic has certainly fixed that for us forever! Yet, even as we navigate our way through an uncertain and challenging present, the Christmas star invites us to travel with the magi – to go on pilgrimage with them to Bethlehem and back again – confident that, whatever else may be the case, the Christmas star will precede us to illuminate every new day of this new year, and so will guide us, first, to Christ, and, then, thanks to Christ, on that new way, which, like the magi, we have all of us together, been invited to find and follow. 

(Photo: World Youth Day Pilgrimage Way to the Cologne Cathedral's Shrine of the Magi, 2005.)

Looking Ahead to 2022

 

A venerable, if little noted, practice of the Church is to pray the 9th-century hymn, Veni, Creator Spiritus, in honor of the Holy Spirit on this first day of the new year. (A plenary indulgence is even attached to its public recitation on this special day.) Obviously, invoking the assistance of the Holy Spirit is always appropriate at any major moment in life. But, given where we have been as a Church and a society these past problem-filled years and our increasingly poor prospects for the future, doing so seems even more than especially appropriate right now.

Of course, no one can ever foretell the future. Looking ahead to 2022, however, it looks from here like more of the same - more climate change and its accompanying catastrophes, more covid and its accompanying suffering, disruption, and death, and more political polarization, Republican party political malfeasance, and Republican party attacks against constitutional government.  Sadly, when we as a society stay on the same disastrous path instead of changing, things usually don't get better or even really stay the same. They get worse.

Overshadowing everything, there is the persistence of the pandemic, which quite unexpectedly upended Christmas celebrations for so many and which keeps getting in the way of ordinary life, let alone the "return to normalcy" so many seem to crave. However long or short the current omicron surge may prove to be, "normalcy" is not the answer. This crisis has demonstrated beyond any doubt the dangerous fragility of our national public health preparedness and response - and indeed the fragility of all our political, social, cultural, and religious institutions. Even with the medical miracles of vaccines and the potential of therapeutic drugs, experience suggests that we will continue to stumble about, afraid to address the crisis adequately as we have been afraid to address climate change adequately. And when the next pandemic comes, will we have learned anything from this terrible experience? Will we be any better prepared, any less complacent, any less narrow-minded and short-sighted in our responses?

Meanwhile, the impending anniversary of the attempt to overthrow our government on January 6, 2021, reminds us of the fragility of our political system, of the undermining of our once seemingly stable, democratic political culture - and of our completely inadequate response to this continuing threat to our constitution and way of life. No one can predict what will happen in the November elections, but if current rends continue and expectations are fulfilled, President Biden and the Democrats have only a few more months in which to accomplish anything. Are they ready to focus this year on what needs to be done? 

And, meanwhile, glaciers are melting and the Antarctic Ice Shelf is threatening to fall into the ocean, heralding higher sea-levels. even so, we continue to drive cars, fly jet planes, and emit carbon. That too is a "normalcy" we can no longer afford, but which still seems to be the direction in which we are headed as we move into 2022.

Hopefully, some good things will happen in this new year, if not in politics and society then at least in our personal lives, in our families, at work or at school, or wherever our emotional energies are invested.

As Isaac Hecker said in his Sermon for the New Year on this date in 1863 (in the middle of the Civil War):

“It is the common custom in meeting of friends at this season, to greet each other with a Happy New Year! This is a praiseworthy and pleasant custom, and in accordance with it, I greet you all, my dear brethren, with a Happy New Year! Happy New Year to all our friends and the inhabitants of this city, and to all our fellow countrymen, whether dwelling north or south, east or west, in this our native land. Happy New Year to all men of whatever race or clime; for God is our common Creator, and in Christ we are all sons of God, and therefore brethren.”

On New Year's Eve

And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14).

On New Year’s Eve, I often like to recall what the late comedian George Burns once wrote in The New York Times: “Growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I always looked forward to New Year’s mainly because it was the only thing we could afford that was really new. And we always believed that things were going to get better during the New Year.”

The Roman god Janus, for whom the first month of the year is named, was the god of beginnings and endings, of doors and passageways, of past and future. Hence, he was typically portrayed with two faces – one looking back to the past, the other ahead to the future. In a sense, that is what we all do every year at this time. We look back on the past, particularly the past year, perhaps with some mixture of gratitude and regret, while we likewise look ahead, sometimes with increasing worry but with worry mixed with hope.  Some of these sentiments are captured in the religious customs that have traditionally been associated with New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day – the traditional singing of the Te Deum, the Church’s official hymn of thanksgiving on New Year’s Eve, and the Veni Creator, the Church’s great hymn invoking the grace of the Holy Spirit on New Year’s Day.

To be sure, for all our holiday cheer, many of us may be marking the end of another socially difficult and politically challenging pandemic year by looking ahead to 2022 with more than a little anxiety. It’s not for nothing, after all, that we pray every day at Mass that we may be safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.  

But, if our distress and anxiety as we look ahead to a new year are real enough, so too must be our hope, the hope we all share as Church, the hope we have been proclaiming this Christmas season, and on which we must all rely in all things and at all times, all the year round: the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Our hope is founded and focused on Jesus Christ, the one whose birth 2000+ years ago is the very basis for the calendar we mark today. God’s showing up in the world in Jesus – the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us – has realigned all of time and given all of history a new and more hope-filled meaning, giving us a hope for the future we would never otherwise have had.

Time has always been very precious – precisely, I suppose, because we have only such a limited supply of it. By becoming part of our time, however, God has turned our limited time on earth into a time of unlimited opportunity. So today he invites us to look ahead to a new year – this year of our Lord 2022 – with gratitude as his gift and to enter it not in fear or anxiety, but with the hope that counts as one of God’s greatest Christmas gifts to us.      

Happy New Year!

 

Homily for New Year’s Eve, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, New York, December 31, 2021.

 

Looking Back at 2021

To borrow (and update) Queen Elizabeth II's famous November 24, 1992, annus horribilis speech at the London Guildhall, l might begin by saying that 2021 "is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure." Nor, I suspect, am I at all alone in that sentiment!

For me personally, this year began with an inevitable but nonetheless painful period of transition. On New Year's Eve 2020, I woke up still the pastor of a parish (albeit a "lame duck" one), with full responsibility for a parish community of which I was an integral part. On New Year's Day 2021, I woke up with no responsibilities and a part of no parish community. That, of course, is what happens as we age, and we are rightly required to pass on our responsibilities to others who are younger and fitter. Still, it would be the most unbelievable fantasy to pretend that such a transition, however necessary and appropriate, is anything but depressingly difficult and challengingly lonely.

Yet, life goes on (until it doesn't), and we all adapt. So, in January, I moved back to my community's mother house in New York, where I had previously lived until 10 years earlier, and so was already "home" on so many levels. And here I am, a year later, still discerning a proper path for myself. As the future Pope John XXIII when he turned 70 in 1951: "the bell has rung for Vespers and our best course is to hold ourselves ready in loving expectation for any summons."

Meanwhile, a lot more happened this year (sadly most of it bad) on the bigger and more important stage of the wider world.

Looking back at 2021, I suppose that the year's biggest story had to be the pandemic's persistence. On the one hand, there was the amazing scientific success with developing and administering vaccines (and boosters). There can be no question that one of the greatest advantages of living in our modern world is the success of science in developing such vaccines and (on the horizon) effective treatments which, while not eradicating this disease, may eventually transform it into a more manageable, endemic affliction. On the other hand, however, we have suffered society's simultaneous failure to get the rest of the world fully vaccinated and the consequent continuation of the pandemic, as the virus has continued to mutate and threaten to undo the progress we have made against it, something we are experiencing so dramatically now with this latest omicron-induced surge.

Undoubtedly, this has been the great tragedy of this year now happily ending: the failure of so many of our political and cultural leaders (including inexcusably even some religious leaders) to get the world (and even our own country) completely vaccinated. Indeed, in far too many cases, we have seen political, cultural, and religious leaders, who certainly should have known better (and in many case probably do know better), actively opposing vaccination mandates and other self-evident public health measures like mask mandates. We would have had a pandemic no matter what, and many would certainly have sickened and died, but it would be much more under control and many fewer would sicken and die if vaccine and mask mandates had been universally employed and enforced, and if all political, cultural, and religious leaders had done the right thing rather than exploiting this crisis in a bid for crass culture-war political power.

All of which, of course, brings us to the other great calamity of 2021 - the attempt to overthrow our constitutional government on January 6 and the enabling of this by too many powerful political, cultural, and religious figures both before and since. If the covid pandemic represents a direct threat to human life, January 6 and its enablers (before and since) represent a real and direct threat to the continuance of our over 200 years of admittedly imperfect but surprisingly successful and resilient constitutional government. In this, the coming year and the outcome of the 2022 elections may prove dangerously decisive, a threat to which a surprising number of people seem somewhat indifferent. The ultimate test will come, of course, on January 6, 2025, when we will either pass or fail the test Benjamin Franklin famously set for future generations of Americans: "a republic if you can keep it."

Finally, as if all that weren't enough, there remains the ongoing and seemingly unstoppable threat of climate change, which has this past year shown itself in increasing threats to our existing way fo life in one weather disaster after another. Of course, this is not new news at all. Scientists have been warning that this was coming for decades. Yet still - as recently as this past summer's failed climate conference in Glasgow - we have again shown ourselves unwilling to reform our demonstrably destructive way of life. Accordingly, the consequences for even the near term, but even more so for the long-term future of human civilization on this planet will likely be catastrophic.

All in all, then, 2021 has been a really bad year. Surely, good things have happened here and there in individual lives and in families, for all of which we one and all ought to be grateful. But (for all the FDR and New Deal wishful thinking this year) sadly this is certainly no time to sing Happy Days Are here Again. A year ago, there was widespread hope that, thanks to vaccines, we might be putting the pandemic behind us, and that, thanks to the 2020 election, we might be putting Trump and the malevolent movement he personifies behind us. Instead, the opposite has happened. To update what Queen Elizabeth said so well in 1992, this now ending year 2021 is not a year on which anyone should look back with undiluted pleasure.