Catholic Church

Lost in the Past

in Catholic Church 13 Comments Tags:

Der Spiegel interviewed Hans Küng, who continued his criticism of the way the Church is being governed and what he thinks is the resulting decline of the Church in Germany.. He thinks it is being recentralized in the Curia at the expense of the bishops, but Der Spiegel pointed out

You don’t just want to reduce the power of the pope. You are also calling for an end to celibacy, you want women to be ordained as priests and you want the Church to lift its ban on birth control. Catholics loyal to the pope say that these elements are part of the core values of the Catholic Church. If you peel all of this away, how much of the Church is left?

Whatever the merits of these proposals, clearly adopting them would not stem the decline of the Church in developed countries. The Evangelical Church, the Anglican Church, and the Episcopal Church have all these and are in massive decline. Moreover, adopting them would alienate Catholics who have tried to remain faithful to Church teaching.

King looks like he is mired in the past and is fighting the battles of his youth, a common failing as people age. My late father-in-law could never be convinced that Communism had indeed fallen in eastern Europe.

The same criticism could be made of Benedict, with his focus on Nazism and Communism. However, it would be unseemly to say the least, of a German pope to ignore the phenomnenon of Nazism. Benedict, unlike Küng, shows that he is aware of changes in the world situation. He pointed out to the Lutherans that the traditional churches were faced with erosion of two fronts: on one hand, to secularization which disregards all religion, and on the other hand to charismatic movements which are weak on institutions and rational inquiry.

The pope said this common witness of the Gospel has been made more difficult by the rise of fundamentalist Christian groups that are spreading with “overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways,” leaving mainstream Christian denominations at a loss.

“This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and little stability. This worldwide phenomenon poses a question to us all: What is this new form of Christianity saying to us — for better and for worse?” he said.

Kung and most progressives ignore this religious phenomenon: it does not fit in with their ideas that the Church must be adopted to the modern world, the modern world consisting almost exclusively of academic central European types.

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Ave atque Vale, sisters

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The New York Times has an article, Nuns, a Dying Breed, on the disappearance of Catholic sister from the Catholic Health system

The history of religious women has had its ups and downs, There was an order if widows in the early church, but it gave Paul headaches, and he advised the younger widows to marry and raise families, rather than gadding about and spreading gossip. The Middle Ages saw formal and informal groups of women such as the Beguines, but the Council of Trent, in its attempt to bring order to a chaotic church, ordered that all religious women be subject to cloister, thereby ending any active charitable work.

The Daughters of Charity were the first to escape from this prohibition; they scrupulously avoided anything that would make them look like a nuns to avoid being forces into a cloister. . The nineteenth century saw an extraordinary increase in the sisters of the active congregations 0 8n 1898, 13,000 members, but in 1878, 135,000 members. They founded numerous schools and hospitals and social welfare services, educating, to the displeasure the anticlericals, the majority of the girls in France.

Historians look for human motives, and there were natural motives for a woman to join a congregation. At a time when women were confined to the household, a congregation gave a women opportunity for work in education and health care that no other lay women had. A sister lived with like-minded and supportive women, respected by all, and had security in illness and old age. Lay people were also told that religious life was superior to married life. There were no doubt supernatural motives, but the natural motives contributed to the vast increase in sisters, There were 1.5 sisters per priest in France at the height of the congregations, and 3 sisters per priest in the United Sates. The vast majority of the staff of the Church was female.

But this is all gone with the wind. Prosperity and the opening of careers to women meant that women could choose their work and support themselves outside of a congregation. The emphasis in theology changed and the dignity and importance of the lay state of life was now recognized. Ill advised changes also undermined many congregations.

The congregations are dying, and many are making plans to shut down. The one in the NYT article has not had a new member in 25 years, and has decided to accept no more.

The congregations that ran hospitals have done well financially. A few years ago the Wall Street Journal tracked the money the Daughters of Charity had gotten for their hospitals and found a billion of so of it in the Grand Caymans. This will pay for the retirement of the sisters in those congregations. I am not aware that the prosperous congregations have shared any of this wealth with the aging sisters of the teaching congregations, who had few or no assets when the schools they had staffed shut down.

I do not expect any rebirth of these congregations on a grand scale in the West; there will always be a few women who are drawn to the contemplative life and A few small vital congregations will survive. Women in the third world are still drawn to the congregations for the same reasons Western women were in the nineteenth century, but eventually those societies too will modernize.

Catholic health care can be run economically with employees, but Catholic educations is vanishing. No alternative method of educating the laity in the rudiments of the faith has been put in place, and we are returning to the middle ages in the level of religious literacy.. In the book on Catalonia I previously mentioned, the zealous clergy of the Counter Reformation were astonished to find the level of ignorance of basic doctrine among the population – and I am afraid we are returning to that. What that curious word Trinity means, what or who the Holy Spirit is, who wrote the four gospels, will all be mysteries to most Catholics – who are confronting biblically literate Protestants. Sounds familiar? — 16th C redux.

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A Disquisition on the Spanish Inquisition

in Catalonia, Catholic Church 7 Comments Tags: , ,

Most people’s knowledge of the Spanish Inquisition is limited to the Monty Python sketch “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” etc

But there were other Inquisitions in Spain. In the northeast corner of Spain lies Catalonia, with its own culture and language and laws. It was ruled by the Spanish king, but was independent of Castile and León. It therefore had its own Inquisition.

The Catalan Inquisition was set up to deal with conversos, Jews who had pretended to convert to Christianity after all Jews were expelled from Spain. However, there were only a handful of conversos in Catalonia, and that problem rapidly disappeared.

Like all bureaucracies, the Catalan Inquisition had no desire to end itself and instead sought to find other problems that would justify its existence. Of course heretics were a proper object for the Inquisition to investigate, but, alas, there were no heretics in Catalonia, much to the Inquisition’s disappointment.

Inquisitors were headquartered in Barcelona and were supposed to travel around to all parishes in Catalonia to investigate problems. However, Barcelona in the 15th-17th centuries was a very pleasant city, the roads in the countryside were bad, the weather was too hot or too cold much of the year, and there were bandits and bad food to deal with. So every few decades or maybe every century or so the Inquisition would show up at a parish and read in Castilian Spanish a long list of obscure heresies and ask people to come forward to denounce anyone who held them. Most people in the countryside did not understand Castilian, and their parish priests had already warned them to keep their mouths shut. The Inquisition, although it is accused of terrorizing the peasantry, in fact had minimal contact with 90% of the population.

The Inquisitors spent most of their time in Barcelona censoring books. As many classical texts had been edited by humanists who later became Protestants, the Inquisition confiscated the editions of Terence and others. The University complained, and the Inquisition contented itself with inking out the offending names of the renegade humanists. (Take that! Melancthon)

(This reminds me of the second grade at St. Matthew’s Elementary School in Baltimore. The first poem in our little poetry book was a sappy poem by Father Leonard Feeney. He got into a fight with Cardinal Cushing over the meaning of the doctrine of extra eccelsiam nulla salus –outside of the Church there is no salvation. Cushing had Feeney excommunicated. Therefore all over America an equally sappy poem was sent out and pasted over the offending poem of Father Feeney. Later I and my friends always referred to Feeney by the Homeric epithet, “he of the pasted-over poem.” But I digress.)

Occasionally the Inquisition would find a monk who had given a badly phrased sermon, or a young man who claimed that fornication was not a sin (“I do not believe anyone will go to hell just for screwing,” one opined), but usually its search for heresy was fruitless. It had to content itself with other crimes under its jurisdiction, like sodomy and bestiality – not very dignified crimes for learned Inquisitors to concern themselves with. It is hard to have a really good auto de fe with only a shepherd who has been too affectionate with the sheep. The only possible heretics the Inquisition encountered were Frenchmen who aroused popular hostility because France was infected with Calvinism – but most French immigrant laborers had no intellectual interests.

Popular Catholicism in Spain was somewhat different from clerical and especially Tridentine Catholicism. It was much more active and rowdy. Pilgrimages, carnival, dancing and fireworks (inside the church!) and so on. Reforming clerics sound like spoilsports and wet blankets in their attempts to end the fun.

But popular religion had a much darker side: belief in witchcraft. The Catalan Inquisition decided that witchcraft did not exist and that belief in it was a vile superstition. Unfortunately, the people and the secular authorities did believe in witchcraft and often executed old women whom professional witch hunters accused of witchcraft. The Inquisition did everything it could to protect the accused and sometimes to literally snatch them from the hands of secular authorities before the supposed witches could be executed.

The Inquisition’s campaign against belief in witchcraft had a long history. Charlemagne had forbidden the burning of witches and made the killing of a supposed witch a capital offence. I believe that the persecution of witches was far more prevalent in Protestant countries than in Catholic ones. Why this was so I do not know. Both forms of Christianity shared a belief in the existence of demons, but the clergy of the Catholic Church seemed to be much more set against the belief in witchcraft.

The Inquisition’s campaign against heresy and against the belief in witchcraft may be manifestations of the same rationalism. The Inquisition did not believe that witchcraft existed and despised the popular belief in it because it led to the murder of innocent women. It also looked for heresy, wrong ideas about God and the Church, because it had seen the damage that false beliefs could do. I don’t think that Calvinism or Lutheranism was likely to result in crimes (although one should remember the Anabaptists at Munster) but the Inquisition was not taking any chances.

Also, and more importantly, if the Inquisitors stopped looking for heretics, what would they do? It was hard to find a cushy and respectable clerical job in Spain. Many of the Catalans whom the Inquisition prosecuted were accused of the offense of saying that the Inquisition was wasting time and money by looking for heresies when there were none in Catalonia. No bureaucrat likes to be told his job should be abolished.

(PS, I derive much of this from The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation by Henry Kramer. I am reading up on Catalonia in preparation for a hike there next year).

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Christianity and Churchianity

in Catholic Church, Protestantism 29 Comments Tags: , ,

I just read Pierre Hagy’s Wake Up Lazarus! On Catholic Renewal. In the first part of the book he documents the decline of the Catholic Church in the United States and the comparative success of evangelical Protestant churches. The Catholic Church, like the Episcopal Church, has lost a third of its members in the past generation; the loss in concealed in the Catholic Church by Hispanic immigration.

 

Hegy examines the culture of two local churches, an evangelical church started in 1955 which has grown to 2700 members and an astonishing missionary outreach, and a Catholic parish which seems to be doing everything right – shared governance lively liturgies- small communities – but whose attendance and support is shrinking.

 

In the Protestant church 80% of the members tithe, although tithing is not required. In the Catholic parish, parishioners give only 1% of their income, on line with national Catholic giving.  The Protestant church has a large number of converts and an international missionary effort; the Catholic parish has about 10 adult converts per year and no missionary effort.

 

Hegy’s main point is that church involvement does not produce a growth in spirituality, but a growth in spirituality produces church involvement. Successful evangelical churches are constantly leading their members into a deeper life of prayer and a relationship with Christ, and the core 5% of their membership lead a life of spiritual discipline comparable to a Catholic secular institute. 

 

Hegy also says that the Tridentine church’s emphasis on rules does not work, but a cultivation of moral habits does work in forming Christians. In the U. S. a larger percentage of Protestants than Catholics attend church. Other statistics I have seen indicate that evangelical Protestants are stricter in sexual morality than Catholics are.

 

Hegy sees the renewed emphasis on rules in the Catholic Church as doomed to failure. Instead the Church should encourage all its members to cultivate spiritual growth and discipline, encouraging its members to move up from minimal involvement to the beginning of spiritual disciple to serious discipline to complete commitment to Christ. It is not necessary to enforce attendance in mass under pain of mortal sin if Catholics wanted to come to mass to thank God for Jesus.The Catholic Church focuses on the church; the evangelical churches focus on Christ.

 

I have been asked whether what I have learned about sexual abuse among Catholic clergy has not destroyed my faith in the Catholic Church. The answer is no, but it has made me realize that simple reception of the sacraments does not produce virtue. With a lively faith and habits of payer the sacraments are fruitful. Without faith and prayer the sacraments have little or no effect. Priests said daily mass and raped children on the same altar.

 

Hegy mentions the transformation of the U.S. Catholic church into an Hispanic Church, but does not explore what this might mean. He also mentions that in the evangelical church women were far more involved than men, and what this might mean. I am returning to that subject in a book I am working on,  Meek or Macho? Men and Religion.

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The Decline and Fall of Catholic Marriage

in Catholic Church 21 Comments Tags: ,

Commonweal has a discussion of the decline in the number of Catholic marriages; they have declined 60% since 1972, even as the Catholic population has grown by 17 million. Our Sunday Visitor has the data and some speculation about the causes.

There are parallel declines in mass attendance and reception of the sacraments.

Everyone has his favorite target. Liberals blame the failure to follow through what they see as the logic of Vatican II, which seems to mean the acceptance of contraception, abortion, divorce, women priests, and gay marriages.

Conservatives blame Vatican II for breaking good habits of sacramental and prayer life that had taken centuries to develop and replacing them with incoherence. But these habits were so easily broken one has to wonder how deeply rooted they were.

The Episcopal Church and other mainline churches, which have followed the liberals’ prescriptions, have suffered similar declines, so something apart from failure to update the Church has caused the decline.

Conservative churches seem to be doing better, because they attract new converts to replace the members who leave. That is what the Catholic Church in the US  has failed to do. Catholic numbers grow because of Hispanic immigrants, who have replaced the 1/3 of baptized Catholics who leave the Church. But Hispanic populations have never accepted all the church discipines of the post-Tridentine Church, such as getting married in a church ceremony. The Hispanic male aversion to the clergy is probably also starting to affect Catholic practice in the U.S. – in general, Hispanic men do not go to church or to confession – the book on which I am working, Meek or Macho? Masculinity and Religion, examines the hostility that Hispanic men have long felt to the clerical version of Christianity. Hispanic and Spanish men, if they are Catholic, have their own way of being Catholic, a way which often does not include going to Church or receiving the sacraments.

My hypotheses is in short: whatever is causing the decline in the mainline churches is also affecting the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is replacing its lost adherents with a population that has a lower level of sacramental practice. Hence the decline in the number of marriages

A good sociological survey could confirm or disprove this; if the problem is the lack of Hispanic practice, a approach must be adopted to their background and culture, which is different from that of Euro-American Catholics who have undergone secularization.

This table from Our Sunday Visitor suggests this is the explanation:

Marriages in the Church per 1,000 Catholics by diocese in 2010

Highest Rates

Salina, Kan. 7.3

Owensboro, Ky. 7.3

Wichita, Kan. 6.2

Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo. 5.9

Oklahoma City, Okla. 5.8

Belleville, Ill. 5.7

Bismarck, N.D. 5.7

Yakima, Wash. 5.7

Tulsa, Okla. 5.6

Rapid City, S.D. 5.6

Lowest Rates

Las Vegas, Nev. 0.9

Brownsville, Texas 1.0

El Paso, Texas 1.2

Dallas, Texas 1.2

Sacramento, Calif. 1.2

Juneau, Alaska 1.2

Laredo, Texas 1.3

Gallup, N.M./Ariz. 1.4

Brooklyn, N.Y. 1.5

Orange, Calif. 1.6

Most of the cities with the lowest rates have large Hispanic populations.

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Two Religions in One Church?

in Catholic Church, demography 17 Comments Tags:

Maureen Fiedler reports in the NCR about the American Catholic Council that just met in Detroit: 

1.     The issue of women’s ordination, and gender equality generally, has risen to a new level of prominence on the roster of reform. It is at the top of many reformers’ lists — men as well as women. It’s clear as never before: the denial of women’s equality just makes no sense to most Catholics anymore, especially these Catholics.

2.     The issue of gay and lesbian rights has become mainstream in the movement, just as in society at large. It’s not a “fringe” issue for Dignity or New Ways Ministry; it’s everybody’s issue. And of course, over the years, Call to Action has had a lot to do with that.

3.     New and independent communities are flowering as never before. If the Church is a garden, new sprouts are proliferating. There have always been tall trees and shrubs (cathedral and parish communities) in the church. But now, there are new flowerings: intentional communities — lots of them, the communities of the Roman Catholic Women Priests’ movement, the “Ecumenical” and “American” Catholic churches and dioceses, even new religious orders like Green Mountain Monastery in Vermont. Most of these are outside the purview of the hierarchy.

4.     The “priesthood of the faithful” was visible. When the celebrant at the Pentecost Sunday mass said the words of consecration, hundreds of people in the congregation chimed in without prodding or instructions in the program. Why? I suspect that many do it routinely in their intentional communities, and they believe that they have the power, along with the priest, to call for the presence of Christ.

It is hard to see how these people can remain in the Catholic Church: they are on a collision course with Rome. They want women priests, married homosexual priests, and lay celebration of the Eucharist.

 

Their theology puts them outside the bounds of historical Catholicism. Rome might ignore that, but their practice threatens the integrity of the sacramental system, at least as Rome sees it.

 

 

Sociologically, this movement is aging. I have noticed that as people age their minds sometimes get stuck. My late father-in-law (a Harvard, Harvard Law graduate) could never believe that Communism had really ended in Europe – he continued to fight the battles of his youth.

 

Similarly, I think these people are fighting the battles of their youth, not realizing that conditions have changed. They also are very parochial geographically and historically – they seem to have no concept that unity with the Orthodox is the highest priority in healing the unity of the Church , and that their proposals would end any possibility of unity. They lack any historical perspective of the post-Enlightenment feminization of Christianity and the chronic lack of lay men in the Church; and they have no sense of the needs and culture of the Hispanic community which will be the Church in the United States.

 

 

Also these small, intentional communities (read splinter groups) are susceptible to manipulation by narcissistic con artists, even more than communities that have a structure of accountability and discipline  – however much they have been ignored by the hierarchy.

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The Priests We Deserve?

in Catholic Church 16 Comments Tags: , , ,

Maciel was recommended by John Paul not such much because of the money he raised, but because of the number of vocations to the priesthood he cultivated in the Legion of Christ. 

Similarly, Karadima in Chile was almost universally honored because his group of young male friends produced four bishops and fifty priests. 

And this in a church which in the developed countries is seeing a substantial decline in priestly vocations.

But what kind of priesthood do we have if psychopathic molesters, who may even be atheists, like Maciel and Karadima, are the most successful priests in bringing other men into the clergy? 

It should give Benedict pause. Perhaps it has. But underlying this bizarre phenomenon is a long-standing and widespread distortion of the priesthood, which I and some of the commentators (Mary Ann’s is a good scholastic explanation) have tried to describe. 

This distortion will eventually be condemned as a heresy, but in the meantime it is doing much harm. 

 For a theological exploration of the source of this distortion, I recommend Bernard Doering. Here is a section from his essay.

On the one hand, Berulle was right, Maritain insists, and magnificently so, in his insistence on the holiness toward which the priest ought to strive. . .

On the other hand, Berulle was mistaken, and seriously so, in exalting the sanctity of the state of life in which the sacrament of Holy Orders places the one who receives it. From affirming the eminent perfection to which the priest is called so that he may exercise his function in a manner that is in complete harmony with what the office demands, to affirming the eminent perfection of the state of life which is conferred on him at the same time as the sacramental powers, there is no more than an imperceptible step for Berulle, and he was happy to take that step.

And the Cardinal did not miss an opportunity to explain that the priesthood itself is a “state of sanctity,” Maritain finds this conception rather bizarre

when one recalls that the indelible mark that the character imprints on the soul of the priest is no other than the power with which he is invested to transubstantiate bread and wine and to absolve, even if he happens himself personally to be unworthy by the loss of grace.

The sacrament of Holy Orders does not constitute the priest in a state of sanctity any more than baptism constitutes an ordinary Christian in such a state. The state of life of the priest, Maritain maintains, “is the same as that of most ordinary members of God’s people” and a clear distinction must be maintained between this state of life and the priestly function.

The mediation that he is called to exercise as a priest is of a completely different order: It is a “ministerial” or functional mediation which he exercises in the hierarchical structure of the Church, in which he is endowed with a canonically fixed authority to transmit to men the truths of faith, to celebrate in their midst the sacrifice of the altar, to give them the Body and Blood of Christ, and to confer on them the graces of the other sacraments — without his having in any way to be a superchristian in order to acquit himself of these holy functions as such.

According to Maritain, the French School did an immense service to the Church by insisting with admirable zeal on the sanctity toward which the priest has the duty to strive, but at the same time it promoted an illusory sublimation of the priesthood through a serious misunderstanding of its true grandeur.

The belief that “God took on flesh” is absolutely and strictly the very same thing as “God made Himself a priest”; the belief that the priest is a superchristian, and even more than that; the belief that he is a conjoined instrument of the Savior; that he enters into His divine Person; that by his ordination he is constituted in a state of perfection and sanctity; finally the belief that through this very state all those things that he happens to do in the exercise of his functions are marked with the seal of the sacred.

He maintained that the French School went so far in this illusory sublimation that, at least in more recent times, many of those it formed believed that the priest communicates a higher dignity to and actually sanctifies whatever he happens to do in his ordinary life. Some even thought (contrary to Berulle) that any act at all accomplished by a priest — trimming trees, fixing a watch, indeed even scolding an altar boy (and we might ask in the present crisis, what have many altar boys not been required to submit to?) or eating a meal with friends — is a sacerdotal act.

We were to believe that from the moment he does something in the exercise of his functions, the priest, because his ordination, in making him the hand of Christ, constituted him in a loftier state than that of the ordinary Christian, then acts as being of Christ by privileged right and brings to men a ray, sometimes a bit obscured (but in such a case we shed a furtive tear and then quickly pull the veil), a ray which emanates from Christ. . . Sacerdos alter Christus — this is the maxim. . . for a long time now. . . the way in which [followers of the French School] sublimate the priesthood was considered the guarantee par excellence for maintaining the respect we owe the Church’s ministers. (And not only were we supposed to respect them, but to love them as well.)

Maritain calls this an “illusory sublimation” of the priesthood. He is not using the term “sublimation” in the now-popular Freudian sense of the word. What he means is the illusionary raising of the priesthood and of the reverence due to the priest to a level far higher than is warranted.

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Thumos

in anger, Catholic Church, clergy sex abuse scandal 7 Comments Tags: , , ,

 

In watching Al Jeezera, I have noticed that the protests always began with young men, who have given an extraordinary example of what the Greeks called thumos, spiritedness. The Arabs peoples feel themselves oppressed, and the spark that set everything off was the self-immolation of a young man whose fruit stand was confiscated by the police.

 

Susan M. Purviance  has eamined the classical political idea of thumos. 

I examine the Greek notion of the spirited part of the soul which resents injury and resists injustice. 

Thumos has several effects: 

—A. Thumos invigorates: Thumos energizes civic life as a spirited pursuit of honor in any competition that is regulated to produce a social good.

—B . Thumos detonates: Thumos causes civic life to explode, as in riot, revolution, factionalism, or stasis, a stalemate of factions in government, making its victims incapable of self-governance.

— C. Thumos disrupts: Thumos disrupt civic life positively in civil disobedience and direct protest designed to reveal conditions of injustice.  

By invigorating citizens thumos bolsters civil life, leading to economic, cultural, and political vitality. By detonating or igniting passions for self-respect and good reputation, thumos can lead to actions that destroy civic life, since the agent loses all fear of the sanctions which authorities would impose. Thirdly, thumos disrupts ordinary civic order, but does not destroy it, becoming another form of the public’s way of doing political business with its rulers. 

Thumos is an emotion or leads to the manifestation of emotions. But emotion is not self-justifying. 

Yet emotions alone cannot sanction action. For us, thumos cannot function as an independentfaculty of truth. There must be a rational element which validates, or consolidates the feeling of injustice with the standard by which one knows what is just or injust. 

That is, reason must govern emotions, and anger is the proper emotion to feel to injustice, but an injustice that is rationally discerned, not simply felt (remember Al Capp’s SWINE, Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything?)

 

Anger gives energy to fortitude in combating evil.  

To endure being insulted and to put up with insult to one’s friends is slavish, so anger has a part in courage.

What has been largely lacking in modern Christianity is a recognition of the role of thumos. Church authorities, like civil authorities, like a docile subject population which will obey, or at least not oppose, the authorities. I have been deeply disturbed in my reach on the sexual abuse crisis in the Church by the lack of righteous anger on the part of both Church authorities and the laity. The Church lacks thumos and has been unable and unwilling to confront the profound injustice of letting children be abused in the name of God.

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German Reform Catholicism and Nazism

in Anti-Semitism, Catholic Church, Vatican 30 Comments Tags:

As I mentioned in a previous post, the historian Derek Hastings has investigated the religious roots of Nazism, not in a broad civilizational sense, but specifically the Catholic groups in Munich from which the early Nazis came. Hastings is the only historian to have done this. I have just read his Catholicism and the Roots if Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (2010)

 

What he has found is extremely interesting. Although Germany had a Catholic Center party which was ultramontane (pro-papal), it also had a group of reform Catholics who saw Germany’s roles as opposing the papal version of Catholicism and spreading the German version of Catholicism (and there are many Catholicisms in the world).

 

The theologian Döllinger, who was excommunicated for his opposition to the Syllabus of Errors  and the proclamation of papal infallibility, was the most famous. But inspired by him was a loose group of Reform Catholics who opposed ultramontane Catholicism, One was Gerhard Himmler, tutor to the royal Bavarian family, who was the father of the initially pious Heinrich Himmler.

 

Many of these  Reform Catholics were anticapitalist and anti-Semitic and were also eugenicists.

 

Some drifted away from Nazism after the refoundation of the party in 1925; others became brown priests and were on the outs with the hierarchy which had to deal with an more andore anti-Catholic and antichristian Nazi party. One initial Catholic Nazi (pre-1923) was the Catholic editor and writer Franz Schrönghamer. He very early on, in 1918, wrote an anti-Semitic book about the affinity of Catholicism and Nazism. The Nazis ignored it after they came to power. When Schrönghamer was tried in denazification proceedings his defense was that he left the party in 1923 and in any case couldn’t possibly be associated with the destructive parts of Nazism, because he was so such an active Catholic and so honored by the church. The court believed him and he lived a peaceful life as a popular Catholic writer. 

 

Hastings comments 

Schrönghamer lived out the rest of his days as a local Catholic celebrity … until his death Catholic writer; he was never forced to confront his role in the early Nazi movement. Coincidentally, at the time of Schrönghamer’s death in September 1962, preparations were in full swing for the opening of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, which convened in October 1962 and was infused in many ways by the same reform impulses that had shaped the prewar Reform Catholic movement in Munich. While it would be inaccurate to draw any sort of direct relationship between the irenic theological openness of the 1960s and the religious Catholicism espoused by early Nazis – such an examination would in any case vastly exceed the boundaries of the present study – it is nonetheless interesting to note  the extent to which the discarding of the Nazis’ early Catholic orientation allowed the trajectory of prewar reformist Catholicism to emerge almost miraculously unblemished after 1945, its exculpatory narrative having been largely written and disseminated by the (anti-Catholic) Nazi mythologizers themselves.

That is, as the Nazis became more antichristian, they attacked Catholicism in general, and did not want to discuss their roots in anti-Roman, anti-Semitic, racist, eugenicist Catholic circles. Therefore German Catholic reformers never had to confront the uncomfortable association with Nazism that some of their members had. It is the usual story of German history.

 

What does this mean for the modern Church? I am not sure; but it should at last be a cautionary tale. Simply because Catholic circles oppose the Vatican in the name of modern ideas does not mean that they are correct. Racism, eugenicism, and anti-capitalism/anti-Semiticism were all modern, ideas which a group of reform Catholics in German espoused. Reform is not a magic word; it needs to be scrutinized carefully. A deeper problem is who is to say what the correct form of Catholicism is? The Reform Catholics rejected Roman authority; they thought they were just as good, indeed better Catholics than Pio Nono. Ultramontane Catholics had their own share of anti-Semitism. Perhaps Catholics, like Protestants, are ultimately driven to rely of private judgment in the light of the Gospel and of prayer – the Church must always be judged by the Gospel, since the Church, or at least sections of it, is quite capable of deforming the Gospel. I have no easy answer to this conundrum.

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Confession and the Dangers of Intimacy

in Catholic Church, clergy sex abuse scandal, Confession 10 Comments Tags: ,

Spiritual direction, therapy, and counseling all can be dangerous even to well-intentioned people. Emotional intimacy itself can be problematic, and can lead to physical intimacy.

 

A friend of mine who was an Episcopal minister said that always remembered that both his and the women’s guardian angel were in the room when he talked to the parishioners (almost always women) whom he was counseling.  (When he told this to seminarians, they laughed.) He also sat behind his desk and handed tissues to a crying woman. A man’s natural tendency is to put his arm around a crying women to comfort her, but…

 

One time he was sitting behind his desk talking to a women crying about her abusive husband when the large and intensely jealous husband barged into the office. Fortunately my friend was behind the desk, not sitting next to the women, innocently holding her hand trying to comfort her.

 

There are grave dangers in the therapist/counselor/priest becoming emotionally involved with the person with whom he is relating. Freud discovered the process of transference in his psychotherapy sessions and therapists have had chronic problems with sexual involvement with patients.

 

Confession and spiritual direction has long been a source of concern to church authorities,   Stephen Haliczer has written a book on the subject, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned.  He looked into the archives of the Inquisition which have numerous cases of such abuse. The Church did try to act against them, but never succeeded in ending them.

 

The Church’s safeguards and penalties did not stop abuses, but what to do? People want to talk about their failures and worries, and if they don’t talk to a priest they go to a therapist, who has even fewer safeguards. Or worse still they go on TV and tell the world.

 

When I was a young teenager, I went to confession often, and I remember that one priest started a line of questioning that made me very uncomfortable. Decades later, I learned that one of the priests in that parish was a known abuser, but I do not remember if my questioner was that priest.

 

But what is a priest to do. Someone confesses a sexual sin, well, is it a fantasy or is it adultery or incest or bestiality? A priest really has to know what is going on to give a suitable penance and strong advice about avoiding the occasion of sin.

 

As to spiritual direction, I think that in general women should give spiritual direction to women, which I believe is the practice in some organizations. The danger of emotional involvement is far greater than in confession, because spiritual directional usually involves talking about the general troubles and concerns of life that affect the spiritual life, including sexual difficulties and problems with spouses.

 

And all this applies to well-intentioned people. Narcissists and abusers use confession and direction as ways to seduce people, both boys and women.

Here, on the subject, is the background of a lawsuit that was just filed by a woman: 

She said she met Wenthe [a priest of the archdiocese of St. Paul] when she took a class for adults converting to Catholicism. Wenthe was a speaker for the course.

A spiritual adviser told the woman she should seek out a priest to be her “regular confessor” for spiritual comfort, guidance and consolation. The woman asked about Wenthe, and the adviser agreed he would be a good choice.

She subsequently went to confession with Wenthe at least four times, she told police. At times, he took her confession in a private sitting room adjacent to his bedroom in the church rectory.

The woman said, “I thought I was talking to God.”

The first sexual contact occurred in his bedroom when the defendant lay on top of her and asked her to perform oral sex, she said.

“I remember pleading with him that we should stop, that degree of sin mattered and we should stop. He became incredibly frustrated with me. He made me feel like I had done this to him and that I was obligated to finish the job,” she said, according to the complaint.

The two began to have sexual encounters about every two weeks. Meanwhile, she continued to attend Mass and receive communion from him, something she said “restored her faith in him as a priest.”

At times, the defendant invited her to the sacristy after the service — an area of the church containing vestments and furnishings that is not accessible to the general public — and they had sex.

The woman told police her eating disorder worsened. “I was subconsciously using my eating behaviors as a way to punish myself for what I believed was my sin,” she wrote in an October 2006 letter to a high-ranking church official, describing the relationship.

Police met with Wenthe and his attorney in August. He acknowledged the sexual contact and that it continued regularly for several months. He said he was sent for treatment by the archdiocese for a “generalized anxiety disorder.”

“He stated he believed the entire time he was acting as a friend to (the woman) and not a priest,” the complaint said.

 

State law forbids sexual contact between members of the clergy and those they are counseling.

It is not clear whether the violation of the state law is a criminal or civil matter. If it was a criminal matter, church officials do not seem to have reported matters to the police.

The archdiocese sent Wenthe for a psychological assessment and treatment and he was returned to active ministry in August 2006 “with certain conditions and restrictions,” McGrath said.

But once a priest had committed such an egregious violation of the sacraments, can he ever be trusted again?

 

 

 

 

 

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Ex-Prostitute-Priest Sues Pro-Life Group

in abortion, Catholic Church 11 Comments Tags: , ,

Raymond Gravel is in the news again.

 

He is a colorful figure.

 

Back in 2006 the Globe and Mail (article no longer available on line) reported

Rev. Raymond Gravel had to get permission from the Vatican to run in a federal by-election. Now, the former prostitute who used to work in gay leather bars has to convince the voters of Repentigny riding that he is the right man to represent them.

(snip)

He followed a childhood dream and entered the priesthood in 1982 after a rough-and-tumble life that included work as a prostitute and in gay leather bars between 1976 and 1982.

Mr. Gravel gave up prostitution after being so severely beaten by a client that he ended up in hospital.

His tenure as a priest has not been low key, either. An outspoken advocate, Mr. Gravel has publicly decried the Roman Catholic Church’s position on same-sex marriage. He also received a disciplinary letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI.

Mr. Gravel was also one of 19 priests who created a tempest in February when they signed an open letter criticizing the church’s position on same-sex marriage and its opposition to ordaining gays.

“I would say that 50 per cent of the priests in Quebec are gay, but if I became a priest, it’s because I’m a believer and I believe in the message of Christ,” he said in an interview last year with Fugues, a gay magazine. 

Life Site News criticized him, and he is suing them for $500,000. They report 

Regular readers of LSN will need no introduction to Fr. Raymond Gravel – he’s the Quebec priest and former Member of Canada’s Parliament who stated on a radio interview in 2004: “I am pro-choice and there is not a bishop on earth that will prevent me from receiving Communion, not even the Pope.”

Then, in 2008, he defended the awarding of Canada’s highest civilian award to the country’s ‘father of abortion’ – arch-abortionist Henry Morgentaler! During his political career he was rated as ‘pro-abortion’ by the political arm of the pro-life movement. He has also repeatedly and publicly criticized his church’s teachings on homosexuality and abortion.

Even though LifeSiteNews reports have overwhelmingly reported on what Fr. Gravel himself has publicly said, he is suing us for libel. Among other things, he argues that he isn’t pro-abortion, but he has said in the past that he is “pro-choice.”

He’s demanding $500,000 in damages – which, coincidentally, is a full year’s budget for us. That would put LifeSiteNews out of business!

One does wonder how Gravel got himself ordained and has gotten away way with his public stances. As a former sex-worker he may well have some useful information about members of the hierarchy. Comment dit-on “blackmail” en français?

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The Courage of Women – “I leave for heaven”

in Catholic Church, France, Women in Church 5 Comments Tags: , , ,

As Chesterton said, the existence of every human being is a testimony to the courage of women. There is so much bad news about the failings of Catholic priests and religious, it is good to remember the examples that shed a light of divine light on our troubled existence.

 

Women and women religious in France during the Nazi occupation were active in the Resistance. They faced a heavy penalty if caught. Here is how one nun responded: 

 

Women, religious and laity alike, were particularly remarkable for their bravery not only in hiding wanted persons and weapons, but also for gathering intelligence, and producing forged documents, from identity documents to ration cards. Even more remarkable was their fortitude when caught. Mother Elisabeth de l’Eucharistie, for example, was arrested in Lyons in March 1944 for concealing arms in her convent. Sent to a concentration camp, in order to fortify the courage of women singled out for extermination because unable to work, she voluntarily joined their number. On Good Friday 1945 she mounted with them the lorry that was to take her to the gas chambers of Ravensbrück, saying, ‘I am leaving for Heaven’ (‘Je pars pour le Ciel‘), adding almost casually, ‘Let them know in Lyons.’ (Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France.  W. D. Halls, p. 217)

Another witness said she volunteered to take the place of a mother who was being sent to the gas chamber.

She was born Élise Rivet in Algeria, and died at the age of 46 on March 30, 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war. If the Catholic Church wants to canonize anyone, it could find few better candidates.

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Who Needs Men Anyway?

in Catholic Church, Women in Church 18 Comments Tags: , ,

Occasionally churchmen (and churchwomen) notice the lack of male involvement in the various Christian churches and try to think of ways of getting men involved, but the more common reaction is seeking to make the church ever more and more a women’s club.

 

U.S. Catholic celebrates the feminine triumph in the Church:

It’s lunchtime at St. Clement Parish in Chicago, and although some of the city’s best restaurants are within walking distance, most of the staff members instead opt for microwaved leftovers and conversation with colleagues around the conference table. The building engineer and associate pastor stop by for a quick bite, but otherwise this makeshift lunchroom is Estrogen Central.

A large parish of 4,000 mostly middle- and upper-class families, St. Clement boasts 12 full-time, well-educated lay employees. Only two are men.

St. Clement is a great place to be a woman in the church. The pastor is open and collaborative. Women are visible in leadership and liturgy, and they are accepted and respected by parishioners. Older women mentor the younger ones. And the flexible hours, reasonable salaries, and decent benefits make it possible for women to do the meaningful work they were trained and feel called to do.

Nor is this a peculiarity of St. Clement’s.

Women virtually run the church in the United States. They make up the majority of parishioners, volunteers, and staff at the parish level, and make up at least half of employees at most diocesan offices. A third of Catholic students pursuing advanced theological degrees are women—and most plan to use their education in service to the church.

At the parish level even more employees are women:

Parish employees—as many as 80 percent of whom are women.

The triumphant march of women through the Church will be completed (many of the female employees hope) when ordination is opened to women, and the last vestiges of male presence in the Church are swept into the dustbin of history, and the Bride of Christ will be composed almost exclusively of women – a process that is almost complete in the mainline Protestant churches.

 

As to the men – well, there is sports, war, crime, and other diversions – if the women are lucky. Fascism and Nazism replaced Christianity for many men in Europe in the twentieth century.

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David Berger on Himself

in Catholic Church, homosexuality 9 Comments Tags:

Tom put this in a comment box below, but it is so important I thought I would highlight it in a separate blog. As Berger points out, traditionalists priests are disproportionately homosexual, and traditionalist laity are homophobic – a bad combination.  This is from Pray Tell.

 

I have read with interest the lively discussion at Pray Tell about my book Der heilige Schein. Als schwuler Theologe in der katholischen Kirche. (“The Holy Illusion. Being a Gay Theologian in the Catholic Church,” 3 reprints within 4 weeks). After reading through all the comments, I thought it might be helpful to respond to some of the main points raised, and to expand upon the reporting provided so far.

Am I trying to discredit traditionalists by linking them to homosexuality? No, not at all.

First, there is no reason for me to get even. I have benefitted greatly from my academic career with traditionalists. They generously opened their publishing media to me and made possible my habilitation (a sort of second doctorate – Ed.). I owe my knowledge of classical philosophy and theology, especially Thomas Aquinas, to conservative clergyman.

Second, for me homosexuality is no devaluation of the person. Every person has an inalienable dignity apart from their sexual orientation. Indeed, I have observed that homosexual males have particular gifts which have very much benefitted Catholic liturgy, sacred music, and the liturgical arts in general. To say that there are many homosexual men in the Tridentine scene is, if anything, a compliment.

Homosexual Priests and Laymen

Do I really think there are more troubled homosexuals in traditionalist liturgical circles than elsewhere? Yes. All my experiences tell me that this is the case.

For one thing, this is endemic to traditional liturgy, in which one can sublimate homosexual feelings very well. This is a technique that even the Catechism of the Catholic Church seems to suggest to homosexually oriented men. When these men sublimate in this way, this is nothing reprehensible from the Church’s perspective. This has happened throughout history. Much mysticism is animated by such sublimation.

For another thing, these conservative circles cultivate an extreme homophobia. This leads people not only to sublimate their orientation, but also to hide it and to live it out in anonymous situations. This way of living it out falls victim in turn to repression, and this repression gives birth in turn to homophobia for these people.

I should be clear that I am speaking more about homosexually oriented clergymen here than laymen. The proportion of homosexual laymen who prefer the old liturgy is only a bit higher than in the general population. But among clergymen it’s about half of them. This is tied to the reality that in traditional Catholic families there is only one way out for dealing with the shame of a homosexually oriented son: becoming a priest. Thus one makes a virtue of necessity. Repeatedly people in these circles said to me, often with a smug smile, “You’re still not married? You should become a priest. That would be wonderful!”

My Credibility

Why should anyone think I’m a trustworthy source of information? It is true, as some of my critics have pointed out, that my book is merely anecdotal and not based on rigorous social research. It is a report of my experiences. However, this report attains a certain credibility because of two aspects:

1. For over ten years I was completely at home in every possible traditional quarter. I edited German’s most important traditionalist journal, Theologisches, for seven years. Internationally, I had close contact with the Opus Dei university in Pamplona and also, through my position as corresponding professor of the Papal Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, with the Vatican. (This is not the Angelicum, as an American traditionalist site mistakenly portrayed it!) During this time most everyone knew of my homosexual orientation, which opened my path into traditionalist gay circles.

2. Since my outing and the appearance of my book, I have received basketfuls of letters and numberless emails from Catholic priests, seminarians, and religious from all parts of the world. 95% of the submissions confirmed to me that my story from my book is very representative. Some have even written to me, “You have portrayed everything much too mildly. The reality is much more extreme!” Even to the point of a tale of two homosexual priests who were “married” in the traditionalist rite, with exchange of rings and the whole business. I have been pleased that my book found affirmation from the commentators in all the large (inter)national German language newspapers. They pretty much were in agreement in their judgment, which was pointedly expressed by the Tages-Spiegel (Zurich): “The promise in the book’s blurb to offer the key to the scandals of the Roman Church is almost an understatement. It offers the key to the Ratzinger pontificate as a whole.”

The Way Forward

What advice would I give to the hierarchy to address the problems I discuss in my book? How can the Church be made more healthy and holy?

The Vatican document of 2005 which states it is impossible for a homosexually oriented man to become a priest must be replaced as soon as possible and shelved. It has practically dogmatized dishonesty and lying among the clergy. Nowhere are there as many lies as when seminarians are asked if they are homosexually oriented.

The Church must finally face the reality that it has a very large group of homosexually oriented priests. Only when we allow these priests to speak about their orientation without fear or condemnation can we offer them help, so that they can hold to their celibacy the same way that their heterosexually oriented brother priests can. Only then will we have that honesty which the Pope has made the highest commandment in connection with abuse cases.

Pope Benedict’s Legacy

Above all history will speak of a tragic Pope who, because of his love for the aesthetic of the traditional liturgy and its milieu, and for whatever deeply personal reasons, lavishly pulled extreme forces to the very center of the Church. For this he has accepted that Catholicism in Europe and the U.S. is increasingly transformed into a fundamentalist sect, a “holy remnant,” and distances itself ever more from the rest of society.

Where I Am Now

I have as much admiration as ever for the great tradition of the Catholic Church. It is most amazing how the Church was able through the centuries, right up until the Enlightenment, to adapt itself and to play a role in the development of art and culture. Only with antimodernism did the Church lose this capability.

I am as fascinated as ever by the magnificent philosophical-theological synthesis of Aquinas – although I have increasingly learned to read this synthesis from a historical-critical standpoint and not as a timelessly valid intellectual structure.

I still attend the traditional liturgy, but only in places where nobody knows me. After several murder threats from traditionalist quarters, I have been advised to stay away from such liturgies for security reasons.

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A Pox on Both Their Houses

in Belgium, Catholic Church, clergy sex abuse scandal, clericalism, guilt, Moral Theology, repentance, Responsibility 4 Comments Tags: , , , , ,

Tom Roberts at the National Catholic Reporter reflects on the failure of the hierarchy:

Danneels was generally seen as one of the last of the Vatican II generation who knew that council intimately and supported its reforms. He would be, for lack of a better term, a liberal by many of today’s ecclesiastical measures. But it doesn’t matter. So was Archbishop Rembert Weakland, and his handling of some abuse cases was notoriously callous, and in his own attempt to hide a homosexual liaison he saw fit to lift nearly a half million dollars from archdiocesan coffers without telling anyone.

By contrast, Cardinal Anthony Bevelacqua of Philadelphia was a noted conservative, one of those who could be described as leading the reversal on Vatican II reforms. The Philadelphia Grand Jury report on his role in hiding sexual predators and using the law to avoid accountability is deeply disturbing reading. So are the documents in which Cardinals Bernard Law and Edward Egan are depicted overseeing the handling of abuse cases in their respective dioceses. Both are staunch conservatives and would be considered by many as protectors of a traditionalist approach to ecclesiology and church teaching.

Wherever members of the hierarchy are on the political, theological or ecclesiological spectrums, they meet first as brothers in a unique culture of celibate men who have sworn oaths of allegiance to the papacy and who have repeatedly acted to protect the institution while shunning the plight of thousands of child victims of abusive priests.

“I came to think that the problem was in some way cultural,” wrote Australian Bishop Mark Coleridge of the sex abuse crisis. “But that prompted the further question of how; what was it that allowed this canker to grow in the body of the Catholic church, not just here and there but more broadly?”

Coleridge does not provide a magic answer in that pastoral letter prepared last spring for Pentecost. However, he raises a number of issues – inadequat seminary training, the church’s “culture of discretion,” seminary training that creates “a kind of institutional immaturity, “a certain church triumphalism,” and the church’s tendence to see things in the light of sin and forgiveness rather than crime and punishment – that deserve far wider discussion and examination.

He includes in that list “clericalism understood as a hierarchy of power, not service.” It is one of many influences that caused so many in the hierarchy to confront the abuse crisis in ways they now say they regret. Perhaps it ought to be at the top of the list. Danneels is merely the latest sorry example, though a current one, demonstrating that for so long the actions of many of the community’s leaders were drastically out of step with what they were preaching.

Roberts identifies clericalism as the attitude that caused bishops to protect abusers. Even more disturbing, and Benedict has touched on this in his remarks on repentance, is a distortion in Catholic attitudes and teaching on sin, repentance, punishment, and expiation. Unconditional forgiveness is preached: God forgives unconditionally, we are repeatedly told (without our repentance?) and therefore victims must unconditionally forgive their abuser and oppressors, even if the abusers and oppressors remain unrepentant and unpunished. There is something seriously wrong with this, as the first word of the message of the Gospel is “Repent,” but it needs someone more learned in doctrine and history than I am to sort out what went wrong.

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