Never Trust the Media! (A Holy Week Meditation)

I would now like to add yet a third point: there was the Council of the Fathers – the real Council – but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council apart, and the world perceived the Council through the latter, through the media. Thus, the Council that reached the people with immediate effect was that of the media, not that of the Fathers.

And while the Council of the Fathers was conducted within the faith – it was a Council of faith seeking intellectus, seeking to understand itself and seeking to understand the signs of God at that time…  the Council of the journalists, naturally, was not conducted within the faith, but within the categories of today's media, namely apart from faith, with a different hermeneutic.

It was a political hermeneutic: for the media, the Council was a political struggle, a power struggle between different trends in the Church. It was obvious that the media would take the side of those who seemed to them more closely allied with their world. There were those who sought the decentralization of the Church, power for the bishops and then, through the expression "People of God", power for the people, the laity… Naturally, for them, this was the part to be approved, to be promulgated, to be favoured.

We know that this Council of the media was accessible to everyone. Therefore, this was the dominant one, the more effective one, and it created so many disasters, so many problems, so much suffering: seminaries closed, convents closed, banal liturgy … and the real Council had difficulty establishing itself and taking shape; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council.

But the real force of the Council was present and, slowly but surely, established itself more and more and became the true force which is also the true reform, the true renewal of the Church. It seems to me that, 50 years after the Council, we see that this virtual Council is broken, is lost, and there now appears the true Council with all its spiritual force. And it is our task, especially in this Year of Faith, on the basis of this Year of Faith, to work so that the true Council, with its power of the Holy Spirit, be accomplished and the Church be truly renewed.

Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the Roman Clergy, February 14, 2013

Reflection – I’ve skipped ahead a bit in the talk, and will get back to the parts I skipped later. I wanted to reflect on this section before we move on to Holy Week blogging, as Pope Benedict says something very important here.

It is easy (all too easy!) to bash the media these days. Certainly I have done so, often in language too intemperate for this blog. Although one of my MH lay brothers, listening to me rant about the lousy job the media does, reminded me recently that (via this blog) I am the media now. Ouch!

But there is a deeper point here, and it actually pertains to Holy Week quite directly. It is true that the media distorted the Second Vatican Council, for example. The actual documents and their contents bear little resemblance to the popular picture people have, and that the media still promulgates, of what Vatican II was about. According to Pope Benedict who was there and should know, the media presentation of the deliberations and processes of the Council was equally distorted.

But the deeper point is not ‘the media is terrible and we should ignore them!’ That may be true. But more deeply, we have to be aware that, in a sense, we are all ‘media’. We all are taking in reality and putting forth our own spin on it. We all are presenting our version of things continually. There is the day Fr. Denis Lemieux is about to live, and then there is the day he is going to ‘report’ on to himself and others at the end of it. And these are not quite the same thing.

We are not all a bunch of filthy liars distorting the truth for our own personal gain. But we are unreliable witnesses, all of us, and don’t quite tell it like it is. Beware of the person who claims to ‘tell it like it is’ – really they just are dumping their judgments on you and whoever else will is listening.

And that leads me to Holy Week, oddly. Because… what is reality, anyhow? What is really going on? What’s the real deal, if we can’t trust the media, other people, or ourselves?

‘Behold the wood of the Cross…’ ‘Behold the Lamb of God…’ ‘Behold the man…’ What is going on, perpetually, always, in your life, in my life, in the life of the world, is that God is loving the world unto death and penetrating into the very heart of the world’s anguish and pain to sow seeds of life and resurrection there. God is descending into Hell to raise up Adam and Eve and all their children to radiant life in Him.

 

This is reality. This is not spin. This is what is. And in Holy Week we are invited, not to ‘tell it like it is’, but to ‘see it like it is,’ a seeing that can only happen by gazing upon the face of the Crucified Savior which yields to the radiant transfigured face of the Risen Lord. Un-mediated truth, or a medium of truth that is wholly reliable because it is wholly God’s – this is our time to plug into that truth and be conformed to it, so that our lives can be a little truer, a little less of us and a little (or lot) more of Jesus. That’s where we’re at, and that’s where I’ll be blogging this next week.

How Catholics Read the Bible

The idea had arisen that Scripture is complete; everything is found there; consequently there is no need for Tradition, and so the Magisterium has nothing to say. At that point Pope Paul VI transmitted to the Council fourteen formulae for a phrase to be inserted into the text on Revelation and he gave the Council Fathers, the freedom to choose one of the fourteen formulae, but he said that one of them needed to be chosen in order to complete the text. I remember more or less the formula "non omnis certitudo de veritatibus fidei potest sumi ex Sacra Scriptura", in other words, the Church’s certainty about her faith is not born only of an isolated book, but has need of the Church herself as a subject enlightened and guided by the Holy Spirit. Only then does the Scripture speak with all its authority.

This phrase is decisive, I would say, for showing the Church’s absolute necessity, and thus understanding the meaning of Tradition, the living body in which this word draws life from the outset and from which it receives its light, in which it is born. The fact of the canon of Scripture is already an ecclesial fact: that these writings are Scripture is the result of an illumination of the Church, who discovered in herself this canon of Scripture; she discovered it, she did not create it; and always and only in this communion of the living Church can one really understand and read the Scripture as the word of God, as a word which guides us in life and in death.

Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – There are such fine distinctions and careful reflections in this short passage that it merits careful close reading. Protestants reject this, of course, holding in their classical theology to the principle of sola scriptura – the Scriptures alone as the source of divine revealed truth. It must be said in response to that assertion that sola scriptura is simply not a Scriptural doctrine—nowhere in the Bible does it say that only in the Bible does God reveal himself. Indeed the ending of John’s Gospel explicitly says the opposite (Jn 21:25), and Jesus Himself says that the Holy Spirit would be with his disciples to teach them everything else they needed to learn (Jn 16:13).

Meanwhile, though, we do not exactly say that the Church ‘made’ the Bible. Benedict is clear here: we discovered it, we did not create it. Revelation is a gift from God, not a human product, but it is a gift He gave to His Church who received it, cherishes it, reads it, understands it in the light of all God’s other revelation in Tradition, and passes it on through the millennia.

We tend to think of things in terms of competitive opposites: Scripture or Tradition, the Word of God or the teaching authority of the Church. The more we can understand that God is the primary actor in the life of the Church and of salvation history, the more we can move out of this strange quasi-Marxist power struggle view of revelation and ‘who is in charge, who gets the last word’ being the most important question.

God reveals Himself to a body of believers, giving them a written inspired text and a living Tradition, and above all his Holy Spirit to abide with them to condition and guide their reception and interpretation of the revealed truth. It is a messy process, imperfect because sinful human beings are imperfect, but nonetheless that is our Catholic understanding of it.

And this understanding saves us from so many pitfalls in mis-reading of Scripture. One example, which is commonplace today. The exegete Rudolph Bultmann famously said that it is impossible to believe in miracles in the age of radio waves and antibiotics. Hence the miracle stories in the Bible are symbolic or legendary or something: at any rate, not to be taken literally. The dead cannot be raised, nor the blind healed, nor the lame walk, nor bread and fish multiplied. Of course not: we are modern scientific people, and know better.

Except… the Church has 2000 years of experience of, well, miracles performed by saints all over the place. Bultmann was a contemporary of Padre Pio! Lourdes is a place of ongoing miraculous healings. I personally know of instances of food being multiplied in soup kitchens for Christ’s poor. Miracles are not commonplace events of course—they wouldn’t be called miracles if they were. But if Bultmann was doing his exegesis within the catholic communion, he would never have written such a silly sentence.

 

That’s one example, and there are many others. It is the Church and its long experience of the ways of God in the world that conditions our reading of Scripture to keep it true to God’s Spirit. And that is how God’s revelation of love and saving power is passed on from one generation to the next, for 2000 years and counting.

Talking to Clever Ducks

Even more hotly debated was the problem of Revelation. At stake here was the relationship between Scripture and Tradition, and it was the exegetes above all who were anxious for greater freedom; they felt themselves somewhat – shall we say – in a position of inferiority with regard to the Protestants, who were making the great discoveries, whereas Catholics felt somewhat "handicapped" by the need to submit to the Magisterium.

So a very concrete struggle was in play here: what sort of freedom do exegetes have? How does one properly read Scripture? What is the meaning of Tradition? It was a multifaceted struggle which I cannot go into now, but the important thing, for sure, is that Scripture is the word of God and that the Church is under Scripture, the Church obeys God’s word and does not stand above Scripture. Yet at the same time Scripture is Scripture only because there is the living Church, its living subject; without the living subject of the Church, Scripture is only a book, open to different interpretations and lacking ultimate clarity.

Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – OK, so I’m back as of yesterday in my own bed in my own bedroom in my own priest house in my own Madonna House in Combermere. Whew. While England was great and I loved it there… well, as Dorothy said, ‘There’s no place like home!’

Now just to remind everyone that before all this kerfuffle of the last month or so in Rome we were having something called a ‘Year of Faith’ (remember that?). Incidentally, I think this whole business of papal resignation and the historic election of Pope Francis has been a vital part of the Year of Faith, among other things calling everyone to truly deepen our faith in the Church’s origin and sustenance in God and not in human beings.

But part of the Year of Faith has been the call from Pope (Emeritus) Benedict to study and re-embrace the legacy of Vatican II in truth and in depth. And since this talk to the Roman clergy is virtually the last public statement we have of Pope Benedict on that or any other subject, I’m going to spend the next few days—perhaps until Holy Week or so—blogging my way through it. So… back to Life With a German Shepherd for a few days.

So here we have the thorny issue of Revelation, Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium and their inter-relation. It seems to me, and here I of course defer to the great scholars of the Church who have been far more immersed in these matters than I, that the whole field of critical Scripture scholarship developed primarily in a non-Catholic setting, and its development, methodologies and pre-suppositions reflect that.

Catholic Scripture scholars who wish to work in that field on an equal level with their Protestant colleagues have more often than not simply done their Scripture scholarship on those terms, and in consequence have had to compartmentalize their scholarship and their faith, to the detriment of both and to themselves above all.

It seems to me that, far from stifling the work of Scripture scholarship, the integration of Scripture and Tradition guided by the rightful authority of the Magisterium enlivens it and gives it depth and direction. So often, in my admittedly minimal exposure to historical-critical exegesis, the terminus of the work seems to be this one scholar’s speculative re-construction of the composition of this one text and its original historical intent and meaning. All very speculative—the next scholar promptly comes along and writes a completely different re-construction—and all rather fruitless.

I mean, we get to see what a clever duck Dr. Whositby is and how effectively he debunked Dr. Wheresitfrom (although the radical scholarship of Dr. Wassitmean is coming right behind to debunk him in turn), but what good does their work do in drawing out the deep meaning of the Word of God in a creative spiritual way for the Body of Christ? Especially since most of them cannot write coherent and lively prose to save their lives.

Meanwhile, Scripture scholarship can be done in a lively creative tension with the whole tradition of the Church, an approach and a method that actually takes us somewhere. Pope Benedict’s own Jesus of Nazareth books are precisely his effort to teach by showing us how to do it. My own belief is that this approach rescues Scripture scholarship (and indeed, the Scriptures) from the dusty dry hegemony of the academics and saves it from many of the outright errors and distortions it too often falls into… about which I will blog tomorrow, God willing and the crick don`t rise. See you then.

What Power Do We Have?

In the meantime, in the quest for a complete theological vision of ecclesiology, a certain amount of criticism arose after the 1940’s, in the 1950’s, concerning the concept of the Body of Christ: the word "mystical" was thought to be too spiritual, too exclusive; the concept "People of God" then began to come into play… In the text of the New Testament, the phrase Laos tou Theou… means… the ancient People of God, the Jews, who among the world’s peoples, goim, are "the" People of God.

The others, we pagans, are not per se God’s People: we become sons of Abraham and thus the People of God by entering into communion with Christ, the one seed of Abraham. By entering into communion with him, by being one with him, we too become God’s People… Only through Christology do we become the People of God, and thus the two concepts are combined. The Council chose to elaborate a Trinitarian ecclesiology: People of God the Father, Body of Christ, Temple of the Holy Spirit.

Yet only after the Council did an element come to light – which can also be found, albeit in a hidden way, in the Council itself – namely this: the link between People of God and Body of Christ is precisely communion with Christ in Eucharistic fellowship. This is where we become the Body of Christ: the relationship between People of God and Body of Christ creates a new reality – communion. After the Council it became clear, I would say, that the Council really discovered and pointed to this concept: communion as the central concept. I would say that, philologically, it is not yet fully developed in the Council, yet it is as a result of the Council that the concept of communion came more and more to be the expression of the Church’s essence, communion in its different dimensions: communion with the Trinitarian God – who is himself communion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit – sacramental communion, and concrete communion in the episcopate and in the life of the Church.

Address to the Roman Clergy, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Reading this as a member of Madonna House, I cannot help but hear Catherine Doherty’s voice in the background. She had her own rather strong views on the whole subject of ecclesiology. The Mystical Body of Christ was, for her, the image that spoke most deeply to her, and she never really warmed up to ‘People of God’ as an image.

Her mystical body ecclesiology was anything but ‘spiritual’ (in the wrong sense of the word) or ‘exclusive’ – for her, it meant that she, you, I were deeply connected to the whole of humanity, that in Christ our actions and choices, our prayers and sacrifices, our daily fidelity to the duty of the moment were made efficacious across the face of the earth and could be applied to the needs of the poor, the suffering, the struggling sinners—the whole need of the world for succour and support.

A commentor asked me yesterday what ‘power’ women have in the Church today. I said there, but will say here on the front page of the blog, that the only power any of us have, really, is this power of being a cell in the Mystical Body. Of throwing our tiny humanity, with all its stumbles and staggering, onto Christ and His Power to save, heal, raise up. Power to issue an encyclical, to preach a homily, to enact this program or promulgate that doctrine—well, it’s not that all that is nothing, of course, but the real power is the power of Christ moving through our human weakness.

And the sacraments are the great sign and the great effectiveness of this power. I am glad that Benedict fills out the ‘people of God’ image by linking it to communion in the Eucharist. Catherine didn’t like the image because she saw it being used in a too humanistic and sociological way. So often the phrase became a slogan advocating for more democracy in the Church or ‘empowerment’ of the laity, understood as their being in some kind of zero sum competition with the clergy.

Rather, we are the People of God insofar as we gather around the Lord at His table, and unite ourselves to His sacrifice of praise to His Father. This, and this alone, makes us ‘God’s people’.

And so we are in this ‘time of the Church’ for the next few weeks, called to pray together and truly take hold, I would suggest, of our deep Catholic identity in all the media firestorms, scandals and rumors of scandals, and all that stuff. To know that we are in Christ and Christ is in us, and all we are asked to do is to unite ourselves with Him in the Spirit and surrender our will to His, as Mary did, knowing full well that only thus is Christ brought to the world, and that only Christ brought to the world can heal the world and raise it up to new life.

It's All So Very Messy

I would say that theological discussion in the 1930’s and 1940’s, even in the 1920’s, was entirely conducted under the heading Mystici Corporis. It was a discovery that brought so much joy at that time, and within this context emerged the formula: We are the Church, the Church is not a structure; we Christians, all together, we are all the living body of the Church. And naturally, this obtains in the sense that we, the true "we" of believers, together with the "I" of Christ, are the Church; every single one of us, not a particular "we", a single group that calls itself Church.

No: this "we are Church" requires me to take my place within the great "we" of believers of all times and places. Therefore, the primary idea was to complete ecclesiology in a theological way, but also in a structural way, that is to say: besides the succession of Peter, and his unique function, to define more clearly also the function of the bishops, the corpus of bishops.

And in order to do this, the word "collegiality" was adopted, a word that has been much discussed, sometimes acrimoniously, I would say, and also in somewhat exaggerated terms. But this word – maybe another could have been found, but this one worked – expressed the fact that the bishops collectively are the continuation of the Twelve, of the corpus of Apostles. We said: only one bishop, the Bishop of Rome, is the successor of a particular Apostle, namely Peter. All the others become successors of the Apostles by entering into the corpus that continues the corpus of the Apostles. Hence it is the corpus of bishops, the college, that is the continuation of the corpus of the Twelve, and thus it has its intrinsic necessity, its function, its rights and duties.

To many this seemed like a power struggle, and maybe some were thinking of their power, but substantially it was not about power, but about the complementarity of the different elements and about the completeness of the corpus of the Church with the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, as structural elements; and each of them is a structural element of the Church within this great corpus.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Well, I warned you that, new blog or no new blog, Pope Benedict would not be too far away from my reflections. Especially in this time when we are so very focussed on the Church, on the bishops, on the Cardinals in a particular way, it is good to hear his thoughts on the movement towards collegiality at Vatican II.

Whenever we start thinking about the structural elements of the Church, which if we are using the imagery of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ could be likened to the skeletal system, the bones that keep the body configured in a way that makes life and movement possible, we have problems. Because of course, those ‘bones’ are not just bones, they are men. And as men they are prone to the same sins and failures we all fall into. As men they can be wrong about things, or wicked, or foolish, or weak. As men they can hurt and be hurt.

Oh, it’s all so very messy! Why did God do it this way? Why did He make His Church so dependent on these people, who (it is so easy to say) are so messed up, so wrong, so infuriatingly human, so much of the time?

Well, why did God make the Church reliant on you and me, either? And… it is, you know. The bishops and Cardinals may be the ‘bones’ of the Church, so to speak, but you and I are the muscles, the cells, the organs, all of it together. And they can be either wise and holy or foolish and sinful, but if you and I are not alive in Christ, passionate with love of God and neighbour, what difference does it make, anyhow?

We’re all in this together, in other words. Yes, the bishops have power of a sort and can do great harm or great good in their ministry. But so can you. So can I. And we do. Ecclesial communion is not served by finger pointing, by sneering, by snark and invective against the leaders God has currently given us, or by engaging in whatever sort of power struggle we think will move our agenda forward. We need to pray for them. We need to pray for one another. We need to preach the Gospel with our lives and love one another with sincerity of heart and firmness of purpose.

This is what makes the Mystical Body healthy, vigorous, alive. And this is the call of Christ to us always, but especially in this time of transition in the Church.

Popes Come, Popes Go

And now the second topic: the Church. We know that the First Vatican Council was interrupted because of the Franco-Prussian War, and so it remained somewhat one-sided, incomplete, because the doctrine on the primacy – defined, thanks be to God, in that historical moment for the Church, and very necessary for the period that followed – was just a single element in a broader ecclesiology, already envisaged and prepared. So we were left with a fragment. And one might say: as long as it remains a fragment, we tend towards a one-sided vision where the Church would be just the primacy.

So all along, the intention was to complete the ecclesiology of Vatican I, at a date to be determined, for the sake of a complete ecclesiology. Here too the time seemed ripe because, after the First World War, the sense of the Church was reborn in a new way. As Romano Guardini said: "The Church is starting to reawaken in people’s souls", and a Protestant bishop spoke of the "era of the Church". Above all, there was a rediscovery of the concept that Vatican I had also envisaged, namely that of the Mystical Body of Christ. People were beginning to realize that the Church is not simply an organization, something structured, juridical, institutional – it is that too – but rather an organism, a living reality that penetrates my soul, in such a way that I myself, with my own believing soul, am a building block of the Church as such. In this sense, Pius XII wrote the Encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi as a step towards completing the ecclesiology of Vatican I.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Well, so the day has come at last. At 8 p.m. (Roman time) today, Pope Benedict will step down from the chair of Peter and retire to a life of prayer and seclusion. I find myself unable to offer some sweeping analysis of Benedict’s papacy and its long-range impact, or some grand conclusion about the meaning of his resignation and its implications for the Church.

Partly, I’m still jet-lagged, and very much taken up with my short-term assignment to Robin Hood’s Bay, UK. Mostly, though, I don’t put all that much stock in grand sweeping analyses, especially those made in the moment of the event. Time and history will give us a better sense of ‘what it all means’ than this present moment affords.

Meanwhile, by sheer coincidence I have come to the point of the address to the Roman clergy about the ecclesiology of Vatican II, and particularly about the incomplete ecclesiology of Vatican I. And this is more than slightly relevant to today’s event.

Vatican I (if you are hazy on the details) defined the dogma of papal infallibility—the pope as the final arbiter of the deposit of faith. His ministry can never be exercised in isolation from the rest of the magisterium or in conflict with the whole of the tradition of the Church, but nonetheless, there is a last word, a final authority, and it resides in the occupant of the chair of Peter.

Vatican I said so, and it is binding on Catholics to believe so. But if we leave it at that, as Vatican I was forced to by historical events, then we are indeed left with an unbalanced and undue emphasis on the office of the papacy to the exclusion of the bishops and indeed this whole deeper sense to the Mystical Body of Christ.

Yes, the Pope has a unique and vital role, and may Benedict’s successor do as good as job with it as he did and John Paul II before him. But… your bishop is also a successor to the apostles, and has a role. And… you have a role, too, you know. As do I.

It is this deep sense of the Church as bigger than one man and even bigger than one office, crucial as it may be, that we need to grasp and truly take to heart. Some of the anxiety around Benedict’s resignation betrays, I would suggest, a lingering lack of balance in the Catholic community. A certain focus on the papal office that is just slightly out of proportion.

Everyone who reads this blog knows that my love of Benedict is second to none, and my respect for Church authority and fidelity to the Church is (I hope by now) beyond question. So understand me well when I say that popes come and popes go, you know! It is Jesus who is the life of the Church, and the Holy Spirit whose abiding presence makes this life real, present, vital, effective. And God the Father who is the source and end of our life in the Church.

So, thank you Benedict. We love you, and we wish you well, and will continue to pray for you daily. Now go have a good rest and pray for us as you promised you would. And the Church goes marching on with unfaltering step and unwavering gaze at the Lord who is our life and our salvation.

What Part Do You Understand?

Then there were the principles [of liturgical reform]: intelligibility, instead of being locked up in an unknown language that is no longer spoken, and also active participation. Unfortunately, these principles have also been misunderstood. Intelligibility does not mean banality, because the great texts of the liturgy – even when, thanks be to God, they are spoken in our mother tongue – are not easily intelligible, they demand ongoing formation on the part of the Christian if he is to grow and enter ever more deeply into the mystery and so arrive at understanding. And also the word of God – when I think of the daily sequence of Old Testament readings, and of the Pauline Epistles, the Gospels: who could say that he understands immediately, simply because the language is his own? Only ongoing formation of hearts and minds can truly create intelligibility and participation that is something more than external activity, but rather the entry of the person, of my being, into the communion of the Church and thus into communion with Christ.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Ah, this is so crucial, right here. In the Eastern liturgy, the bulk of the action takes place behind the icon screen. At the most sacred moments, the curtains are drawn, and the priest’s voice is low, barely audible. The reason I have been told for this is that the reality of the liturgy is so beyond our human comprehension, that to see and hear it clearly with our senses is actually not to see or hear it at all.

We have to get this, we moderns who are so clear that everything is so clear all the time. Intellgibility does not mean having everything laid out for us to easily hear and see. Not when it’s the liturgy; not when it’s the mystery of God. 

Liturgy is the great mystery of God – the love of God poured out in Jesus, consummated on the cross, made present to us in the Church by the action of the spirit through the ordained ministers of the rite. It’s not so much ‘what part of this do you not understand?’, as it is ‘what part of this do you understand?’

Get it? So the language of liturgy should be a bit elevated, should be a bit ‘up there’. If it’s all ‘Jesus you are so nice help us to be nice too’ we are actually falsifying the mystery we are supposed to be presenting. And so I personally am thrilled to bits at the new English translation with its sometimes tangled syntax and fun vocabulary words, its sense of hieratic language.

If we easily see it, we are not seeing it. If we immediately comprehend it, we have understood nothing. To be a bit baffled, a bit puzzled, a bit confused – to be uncertain of what’s really being said, what’s really going on – that puts on a more sure footing, a more correct track.

And that’s the intelligibility of liturgy. As it happens, that’s also active participation – to be swept into a mystery beyond our ken, and to give ourselves to it in wonder and in awe. This may look like silent prayer, attentive listening or yes, singing and responding with full voice to what is being said.

Liturgy: not our work, but God’s, not our truth, but God’s, not on our level, but God’s, and how we structure it should reflect this basic understanding.

First Things First: The First Day

I would say that there were several [principles guiding the renewal of the liturgy]: above all, the Paschal Mystery as the centre of what it is to be Christian – and therefore of the Christian life, the Christian year, the Christian seasons, expressed in Eastertide and on Sunday which is always the day of the Resurrection. Again and again we begin our time with the Resurrection, our encounter with the Risen one, and from that encounter with the Risen one we go out into the world. In this sense, it is a pity that these days Sunday has been transformed into the weekend, although it is actually the first day, it is the beginning; we must remind ourselves of this: it is the beginning, the beginning of Creation and the beginning of re-Creation in the Church, it is an encounter with the Creator and with the Risen Christ. This dual content of Sunday is important: it is the first day, that is, the feast of Creation, we are standing on the foundation of Creation, we believe in God the Creator; and it is an encounter with the Risen One who renews Creation; his true purpose is to create a world that is a response to the love of God.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – You know, my intent had been to just do bits and pieces of this talk of the Pope’s, and then move on to my new blog format and content. But the more I dig into it, the less I am able to condense or excerpt it. It is so very fine.

For example this little bit on the Paschal Mystery and Sunday. Sunday is not simply a day to rest, recharge or (as is more likely these days) run around like a lunatic getting everything done that can’t be done during the week.

Sunday is Resurrection Day. In Russian, that is the actual name of the day—Voskrisenie, I believe. Every Sunday we should know, in some fashion, that the whole universe is beginning again from and with the Risen Christ. Every Sunday we should taste this newness, this freshness, this joyful springing hope. In MH we do this in the time-honored ways human beings have always expressed joy and hope: by dressing up a bit, having foods that we don’t normally have during the week, making the liturgy a bit fancier, trotting out the more lovely or elaborate hymns. The library puts up a display highlighting some theme or other of the Sunday readings. Unnecessary work is avoided. Little things, but they create a special Sunday atmosphere, a signal to our senses and from our senses to our whole self that this day is different, this day is new, this day something happened, and is continuing to happen.

Well, that’s MH. Your life is different from ours, but the call is there nonetheless. The Paschal Mystery is at the heart, not just of the Church’s liturgy, but of all our lives. As we pray, so we believe, and as we believe, so we live. Lex credendi, lex orendi.

And the whole thing the Pope says of Sunday – the day of creation, and that creation is bound up in the whole love of the Son and the Father, which becomes our love and our life through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So our whole way of loving the world and carrying God’s love into the world is deeply bound up with the liturgy and its centrality in our lives.

I was just out walking in Robin Hood’s Bay, which is laced with footpaths that extend for miles in all directions. It is truly one of God’s most beautiful creations, this little corner of England… and I must say that man’s creation here isn’t too shabby either. The village is lovely and blends perfectly with the rugged stone terrain. It is this joy and love for creation that such a place elicits in us almost automatically that is elevated and completed by our faith and the Paschal Mystery. God looked on all he had made and said it was very good—so good that He leapt down from heaven to die for its salvation, and rose again raising all creation up with Him into its fulfilment. And this is what every Sunday is about, and what we should strive in our human little ways to reflect.

First Things First

The first, initial, simple – or apparently simple – intention [of the Council fathers] was the reform of the liturgy… Let us begin [there]. After the First World War, Central and Western Europe had seen the growth of the liturgical movement, a rediscovery of the richness and depth of the liturgy, which until then had remained, as it were, locked within the priest’s Roman Missal, while the people prayed with their own prayer books, prepared in accordance with the heart of the people, seeking to translate the lofty content, the elevated language of classical liturgy into more emotional words, closer to the hearts of the people. 

But it was as if there were two parallel liturgies: the priest with the altar-servers, who celebrated Mass according to the Missal, and the laity, who prayed during Mass using their own prayer books, at the same time, while knowing substantially what was happening on the altar. But now there was a rediscovery of the beauty, the profundity, the historical, human, and spiritual riches of the Missal and it became clear that it should not be merely a representative of the people, a young altar-server, saying "Et cum spiritu tuo", and so on, but that there should truly be a dialogue between priest and people: truly the liturgy of the altar and the liturgy of the people should form one single liturgy, an active participation, such that the riches reach the people. And in this way, the liturgy was rediscovered and renewed.

I find now, looking back, that it was a very good idea to begin with the liturgy, because in this way the primacy of God could appear, the primacy of adoration. "Operi Dei nihil praeponatur": this phrase from the Rule of Saint Benedict (cf. 43:3) thus emerges as the supreme rule of the Council. Some have made the criticism that the Council spoke of many things, but not of God. It did speak of God! And this was the first thing that it did, that substantial speaking of God and opening up all the people, the whole of God’s holy people, to the adoration of God, in the common celebration of the liturgy of the Body and Blood of Christ. In this sense, over and above the practical factors that advised against beginning straight away with controversial topics, it was, let us say, truly an act of Providence that at the beginning of the Council was the liturgy, God, adoration.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – First, on a personal note, I survived my trip OK, in spite of very nearly missing the train from Manchester to York due to a criminally slow baggage carousel. I am writing this from the MH Robin Hood’s Bay priest quarters, across from the lovely simply chapel. The village and area await my exploring feet tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it is so wonderful that Pope Benedict should give us his perspective on the Council in these last days of his papacy. The centrality of liturgy is key in this part of his reflection – that before we can know how to carry the joy and beauty of the Gospel to the modern world, we must have this joy and beauty within our hearts and spirits. And we can only have this joy and beauty if our own life is worship is ordered rightly. 

‘Save the liturgy, save the world’ is a slogan in some circles today, and there is great truth in that.

If first things are not placed first, if the core relationship, not simply of my own personal life but of the Church’s common life, is not well ordered in truth, beauty, and goodness, then what do we have to offer anyone? How can we preach a Gospel we are not living? And the right worship of God—orthodoxy in its original sense—is at the very heart of living the Gospel.

Catherine Doherty knew this very well. From the beginning of her social justice apostolate in Toronto, she immersed herself and her followers in the very liturgical renewal movement the Pope mentions here. She knew that we cannot work for justice, love the poor, advocate for life, serve one another in generosity and persevere in righteouness if we are not drawing life from God and bringing him our all in all, which happens nowhere more perfectly and truly than in the Mass and in the other liturgical acts of the Church.

 
So right liturgy is key to the renewal of the Church in the modern world, and I believe Pope Benedict has done more than anyone to work tirelessly for this right renewed liturgy. And… that’s enough for jet-lagged me right now, so I will try to check in tomorrow with our next thrilling instalment of ‘The Council and Me’, by Pope Benedict XVI.

The Herald of the Future

We went to the Council not just with joy but with enthusiasm. There was an incredible sense of expectation. We were hoping that all would be renewed, that there would truly be a new Pentecost, a new era of the Church, because the Church was still fairly robust at that time – Sunday Mass attendance was still good, vocations to the priesthood and to religious life were already slightly reduced, but still sufficient.

However, there was a feeling that the Church was not moving forward, that it was declining, that it seemed more a thing of the past and not the herald of the future. And at that moment, we were hoping that this relation would be renewed, that it would change; that the Church might once again be a force for tomorrow and a force for today.

And we knew that the relationship between the Church and the modern period, right from the outset, had been slightly fraught, beginning with the Church’s error in the case of Galileo Galilei; we were looking to correct this mistaken start and to rediscover the union between the Church and the best forces of the world, so as to open up humanity’s future, to open up true progress. Thus we were full of hope, full of enthusiasm, and also eager to play our own part in this process.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – I want to spend these last days of Pope Benedict’s pontificate giving excerpts from his address to the Roman clergy. This is truly one of the most interesting talks I have ever read of the Holy Father’s, which is saying a lot, and as you can see I have put in a link to the whole text on the Vatican website. It’s too long for me to blog the whole of it, but I encourage everyone to read the whole thing. The Pope in this talk seems much more relaxed, informal, even chatty, as if the impending relief of the burdens of office has already put him more at ease.

And so, like many elderly men, his thoughts go back to younger days. In his case, the reminiscences are of great value to us, since his younger days occurred at the heart of the seminal event of modern Catholicism, the Second Vatican Council. And with his sharp intellect in no way diminished, he has something to say about that seminal event.

It is all about the mission of the Church in the modern world. When the apostles—those twelve Jewish men, a motley assemblage of fishermen, tax collectors and who knows what—went out from Jerusalem into the Gentile world, they were charged with the difficult task of proclaiming Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, the Messiah of Israel, to people who knew neither the law or the prophets nor longed for this Messiah.

By the true sensus fidei already acting in their midst and by the very words of Jesus recorded in Matt 28: 19-20 they knew they must do this… but how? In the first century and following the apostles and their successors boldly claimed the language, the culture, the images, the symbols of the pagan world to express faithfully the truth of the Christian Gospel, and did this while retaining the full moral content it demanded, and the whole Jewish religious sense of the one God and the covenant model. It was arguably the greatest feat of authentic inculturation of the faith in our history, and it occurred while people were being beheaded, crucified, thrown to lions, immolated.

All of which is a slight digression to allow me to say: buck up, folks! If they could do it, we can do it! Nobody’s throwing us to lions yet, much, at least not in North America and Europe. Oh, we get scoffed at and the sins of fellow Christians thrown in our faces, ad]nd it all can be very nasty and vulgar at times, but I don’t somehow see Ignatius of Antioch (‘let the teeth of the beasts grind me to become the pure wheat of Christ!’) feeling toooo sorry for us just yet.

The Vatican Council was all about seeing how best to bring the Catholic faith and the Catholic mission to the modern world which is in such disarray. What is the ‘language, culture, images, symbols’ of this modern pagan world? How can we faithfully express the message of salvation, the full weight and beauty of its teachings, and the true moral implications that flow from them, in a way that modern people can hear?

 

It has to be done in the communion of the Church, in fidelity to the God-given structures of authority in the Church, and in continuity with our past and its wealth of wisdom. That’s all part of the fullness of our faith. But it has to be done effectively, apostolically, evangelically, and that’s the burden we all carry in the year 2013.