Tag Archive for ‘church’
From the Commonweal Blog:
“The Fordham Conversation Project … brought together young professors of theology to discuss their emerging role in the Church and university at a time of evident polarization. In this regard the undertaking bears resemblance to the Common Ground Initiative launched by the late Cardinal Bernardin and Monsignor Philip Murnion.
“Here is how one participant describes their intense two days together:
“The concept of friendship, which obviously has a long theological history, was perhaps the central idea of the weekend. If those who disagree actually make conscious choices to engage in practices to create the space to be friends then the disagreement is far less likely to fracture the relationship. And sometimes understanding grows in such a way that the disagreement fades away…or at least is much better understood.
“I think the focus on junior people allowed both of these ideas to flourish in our discussions because ‘our generation’ (1) hasn’t been formed by the culture wars of the 60s and by Vatican II and its aftermath and (2) generally haven’t yet fought the battles that define one’s self in opposition to another person or idea. This allows friendships to flourish across divides.”
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=9598
Tags: church, power of the faithful, tradition recreating itself
In the old days, we had priests who knew how to perform their sacred role. They put on the vestments and performed the sacred rituals behind the altar rail where no one else went, the inner sanctum of the sacred space that was the church. Unfortunately they often conflated that role with an often appalling clericalism, assuming that because they performed a sacred role, they themselves (and the institution that supported them) were also somehow sacred. From that they took leave to perpetrate all manner of malfeasance from which we are now still suffering. (In Chicago at least, I bet the white ethnic alderman didn’t invent the blingy pinky ring; I bet he copied it from his pastor.)
In the old days, the sacred role of the priest often became enmeshed with the ego of the priest and the ego in turn of the institution. In the pedophile scandal we have seen the havoc wrought by the egos of some of these priests and the egos of the diocesan institutions that protected them.
Then came Vatican II and all that was supposed to have changed. The sacredotal role of the priest was de-emphasized, the liturgy was opened up so the people could participate, and the role of the priest was broadened beyond just administering the sacraments to the proclaimer of the Word of God, leader of the community and worker for the common good.
What actually happened was that the priest became more human. Many priests became much more approachable and much more socially and politically active (often to the consternation of their bishops or superiors). The Mass also became more human, much more a function of the action of the community coming together as one. Altar rails were removed, altars turned to face the people, the deaconate was opened (to men), and the laity were allowed to distribute communion. The sanctuary, which was once considered off limits, now became all of a piece with the rest of the church. The Mass became the community itself, celebrating the Word of God, rather than a result of the sacred action of the one anointed to offer the sacrifice and the silent, interior but also sacred participation of the congregation.
So what’s wrong with this picture? I totally get the impetus behind it; Vatican II was a long-overdue lurch towards sanity and we have a long way to go until we really get there. But the ritual of the Mass (at least in my experience) has too little to do with the sacred. As the priest discovered his humanity and took himself out into the community and world, that old sacredotal role, enmeshed as with was with clericalism and authoritarianism, got left behind.
But now we face a different kind of enmeshment. Now, if the priest is just an ordinary human being, the ritual he celebrates is also ordinary. To be egalitarian, one must open the ritual to all. Anything associated with the priest as a specially anointed one who celebrates the sacred rituals is seen as pompous and somewhat ridiculous. The priest, being his fully human self, has to be his fully human self not just outside the ritual but inside it. There is no difference. He is Father Joe on the altar, as approachable as can be, saying the words of the Consecration, as much as he is Father Joe, standing in the lobby in full vestments, greeting the parishioners.
(Of course all this egalitarianism is only skin deep. We may have lost the communion rail and the priest may face the people. But he is still a male celibate, the institution still protects its own, bishops are still closing parish schools, the Pope is still smacking down theologians and threatening excommunications–except for the Holocaust denier whose excommunication is getting his lifted. Since Vatican II the church may have lost its sense of the sacred and its understanding of the intellectual content of the faith but it has hung squarely on to its authoritarianism.)
Again, the problem is conflation of ego and role. What is the answer, for those who would like to see a more vibrant sense of the sacred in the liturgy without a return to the authoritarian days of old? I think the answer is to break the enmeshment between the ego and the role. Like the soldier who guards the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the priest could consciously choose to absolutely distinguish between his role and his person. When in the role, he’s in it, like the soldier is in his role as guard or an actor is in a role in a drama. As a recognition of the sacredness of what is going on, he maintains the role until the ritual is over and the ritual objects are put aside. He would no more chat from the altar than the soldier guarding the tomb would wave to a friend or an actor break the suspension of disbelief in a play by waving to his Mom.
Of course all this assumes that there is a problem, that there is disquiet in the ranks, that there is a perceived lack in the way the Mass is celebrated. Many people I’m sure actually experience a strong sense of the sacred in church or are otherwise quite satisfied with things as they stand; not all experience a lack of the sacred and if they did might not see it as a loss. But many do and that is, after all, the traditional role of religion: to create spaces, times and actions that make manifest the sacred in relation to the divine.
Of course the biggest question of all is this: What exactly is going on at the Consecration? In his sacred role, what sacred act is the priest performing? Our understanding of this will drive the structuring of the ritual. Unless we believe that there actually is something transcendent going on, something set apart from the ordinary, that the actions of the priest bring about the Real Presence of Christ on the altar, then a push for an increased sense of the sacred isn’t going to make much sense.
If we don’t believe it, then what’s the point, let’s all find a nice Protestant church somewhere, complete with good sermons, women ministers, and a nice community. The only reason many of us hang around the Catholic church and tolerate its authoritarian nonsense is because of the sacred ritual of the Mass. If that has become ordinary, what’s the point?
If, however, we do believe it, if we believe that the action of the ordained and specially anointed priest in consecrating the bread and wine is both the sign and the act that brings forth the Real Presence of Christ among us, then what is going on is so much more than a gathering. If that is the case, the ritual needs to be consciously set apart from the ordinary. We need to leave the concept of the priest and the people as one to the Liturgy of the Word and let the priest and the congregation get on with their sacred actions, which are deserving of all the special forms of respect, honor, reverence, protection and veneration that we can give them, not because of the person of the priest but because of the role he is playing. We need to put back the threshold separating the sacred from the ordinary. We can never revitalize the church by returning to the authoritarian days of old or by rehabilitating various right-wing heretics. We can however, return it to its roots by restoring the tradition of the transcendent mystery of sacred space, time and action to the practice of the liturgy.
Tags: bureaucracy, church, loss of the sacred, Vatican II
It’s clear that the church can’t do its job if it ceases to exist as an organization. We’ve seen enough corporations die of late (e.g., Lehman Brothers, Arthur Anderson, and even, sadly, Salerno–goodbye Jingle Christmas cookies). And I lived through the bust up of AT&T as an employee and it was not pretty (even though old Ma Bell seems to be rising up from the dead and reconstituting herself again from her various parts). The point is, it’s worthwhile for the church to protect its corporate structure. But only with the realization that this structure is only a very small part of the richness, messiness and mystery that is the fullness of the church. And clearly any *protecting* that goes via the sacrificing of the innocents, as so often was the case in the pediophelia scandals, is sinful. The church is special, but not so special that it gets to escape the bounds of morality.
I think we should recognize that the sacred role of the priest has become thoroughly enmeshed with the authority of the bureaucracy. In his book What Happened at Vatican II, John O’Malley describes the discussion that took place on The Decree on Ministry and Life of Priests. “Two opinions emerged from the speeches: the first tended to see priests primarily as cultic figures who were empowered to consecrate the eucharistic body of Christ and to forgive sins in God’s name, who exercised an almost exclusively top-down authority, and who were under bishops who exercised the same authority in their regard. … The other orientation saw priests in a more active role in society at large, saw them as having a collegial relationship with their bishops and as fostering a similar relationship with those unto whom they ministered.”
Well the second opinion clearly won the day (which was a good start), but the enmeshment of “empowered to consecrate the eucharistic body of Christ” with “an almost exclusively top-down authority” still stood. What we ended up with was a diminishment of the sacredotal role of the priest without much dent at all in the authority structure of the church. Hmmm. A negative double-whammy.
I think we need to envision a priesthood that is able to execute the sacred rituals of the church with full and glorious transcendence (as is the nature of the sacred), while implementing an authority structure in the church that is much more fully collegial, all the way up and down the line, from the pews to the Pope.
Tags: bureaucracy, church
Religion is the means by which the sacred is given form; sacredness is the raw material of religion. Beliefs, rites, etc. serve to organize, commemorate, and transmit an elemental experience, ineffable, to render it durable and universal in time and space. And religion is a form of belief that specifically implies reference to the authority of a tradition.
Tradition
Tradition actualizes the past in the present, to restore to people the living memory. And it modifies it as it passes it along – imaginatively projecting a lineage of belief. Tradition is at the center of religion. (And presumably we know about tradition because of our collective memory.)
Collective memory
Collective memory forms and endures through processes of selective forgetting, sifting and inventing. At the core of all religious belief there is belief in the continuity of the lineage of believers.
The framework of collective memory provides everyone with the possibility of a link between what came before and their experience, and the ability to extend the chain of memory into the future, as long as they are able to see themselves belonging to it.
What happened
The rational imperative and the assertion of the autonomy of the individual has delegitimized the “figures of transcendence” by which traditional societies ensured the stability and coherence of beliefs and practices. The growth of secularization and the loss of memory in societies goes hand in hand. The complexity of the world shown in the vast incoherent mass of available information can’t be ordered in the way collective memory used to order it, so collective memory morphs into a plurality of specialized circles of memory. Science made the world more intelligible but it couldn’t create a meaningful whole. (We’re on our own for the big picture.) Collective memory is fragmented infinitely because of specialization and all the unique groups that people belong to. (However, many other institutions that depend on different chains of memory survive, like corporations and political parties and sports and cultural institutions. Yet the church has spectacularly tanked.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: church, loss of the sacred
Any boomer Catholic of a certain age, especially in a big ethnic city like Chicago, can think back and remember a church that was so different from the church of today as to hardly be the same organization. It was magnificently confident, enjoying a building boom of churches and schools that transformed the urban landscape. It was its own parallel universe, stretching from the neighborhood church to the city cathedral to Rome. It provided ritual, defining time in a sacred way in the liturgical year, and carved neighborhoods into “parishes.” It provided a world view with an intellectual history that went back two millennium. It provided a clear sense of right and wrong.
That old movie The Cardinal, from 1963, says it all: the bright young priest rising in the meritocracy that was the church, the wisdom of the old pastor, the courage in the face of political pressure. It also shows the dark side: young lives ruined when a Catholic loves a Protestant, back-alley abortion, the absolute obedience to the hierarchy.
The days of that authoritarianism and dogmatism are long gone and no one in their right mind misses them. But that’s not all that’s gone. Much else has been lost, the main thing being confidence in the intellectual fabric of the faith. With that gone, the center doesn’t hold.
Tags: church
