Protests

Over parish closings:

All these parishes are closing, the people don't want them too, and they still won't consider married priests. Which is the real issue. There is no financial need to get rid of the buildings themselves, they are free of property taxes and most are owned fully not mortgaged or anything like that:

Borre has helped oversee an effort to keep several churches open in the Archdiocese of Boston, where some parishioners have sat in vigil in closed churches for up to five years. The tactic is intended to prevent sale of the building and has met with some success, as several closed Boston churches were reopened.

In the letter delivered to Grocholewski, Borre details what he believes is a pattern of targeting ethnic parishes for closing in several dioceses, particularly Allentown, Scranton and Cleveland:

• In the Diocese of Allentown, Borre wrote, “in the past few years, 24 parishes of Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, Hungarian and Slovene traditions have closed … almost half of all parishes (52) closed recently in that diocese.”

• In the Diocese of Scranton, he said “of 144 doomed parishes, the overwhelming majority (104, or 72 percent) are ethnic.” Of 38 Polish parishes, only seven will remain, of 23 Slovak parishes, none will remain, and of 14 Lithuanian parishes, one will remain.

• In the Diocese of Cleveland, where the bishop last year announced closings of 55 churches, 24 have Eastern European heritage: nine Polish, six Hungarian, six Slovak, two Slovene and one Lithuanian.

“The ethnic bias in parish closings in America is clearly in evidence,” Borre wrote.

But people are angry:

Some of Cleveland's Polish, Irish, Slovenian and Hungarian Catholics prayed, sang hymns and then rallied angrily outside a closed East Side church on Sunday.

Their prayers were poignant; their accusations even more pointed.

Several speakers sternly criticized Bishop Richard Lennon for the ongoing closings of dozens of churches in the Cleveland Catholic Diocese.

And they staunchly maintained they were still "the church" -- even as many stood shivering outside a padlocked Polish church building.

"Lennon's attempted suppression is illegitimate -- and by gathering here, you have shown that it has failed," said Stanislav Zadnik, a member of St. Lawrence, a predominantly Slovenian church in Cleveland which is scheduled to close in June...

...The rally on Sunday had a similar mixture of faith and fury.

Some banners urged the bishop to re-open the church; others used Bible verses -- "if anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him" (1 Cor 3:17) -- to suggest the severity and peril of Lennon's actions.

But several other speakers prayed for the bishop and asked God to "have mercy on his soul"...

...They're also considering a march on the downtown diocesan offices.

"If we march to the Cathedral, we're going to look like an army," Feckanin said. "And everybody, every nationality, is a link in this chain."

These bishops just don't see what sort of precipice they're standing on, do they? Oh well...

Serendipity

So, my grandma's cousin, a Franciscan friar, once got her a first-class relic of St. Jude, to whom she has a special devotion.

Then, she was pickpocketed, except instead of taking her wallet, the person took her rosary case, which had the relic inside.

Well, she was able to get another relic of St. Jude which she's cherished for years now, but she recently lent it to my uncle for a special intention of his.

Now, just the other day I was at her house, and she opened a drawer and heard something fall, and when we looked behind the case, there was a first-class relic of St. Maria Goretti which she never even remembered getting! She's going to look in the same place where she kept the certificate for the St. Jude relic for the papers. It still had its seal and everything, and we put it in a little ostensorium-shaped reliquary she had.

A very unexpected occurrence, especially as it also led us to find a lost photograph behind the drawers of a family member, another cousin of hers, who died unexpectedly last week.

What a serendipitous set of events! Sancta Maria Goretti, ora pro nobis.

Philosophy

Arturo Vasquez is starting what looks to be a very interesting series on "The Rise and Fall of Neo-Thomism" on his blog:

http://arturovasquez.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/the-rise-and-fall-of-thomism-part-i/#more-5651

He deconstructs the notion that a particular philosophical school is somehow the "correct" one or even the "traditional" one for Catholics (as much as the SSPX might try to insist in its discussions...)

Embarrassed

Right now, I'm just thinking about the question of inviting people to Mass. I'm going to do a post soon (yeah, I know I've said that before and never yet gotten around to a lot of things due to this crisis; but I still haven't forgotten) on the social component of conversion and evangelization, so I'll talk more about this then. Suffice it to say, I think that inviting non-Catholics or lapsed Catholics to Mass, especially if you outnumber them, and especially if it is followed by some other non-religious activity like a meal...can be a great way to evangelize.

Make it seem all matter of course. If there are a few of you with a non-Catholic friend and you're talking say, "Hey, we're getting dinner and seeing this movie tonight. Want to join us?" And then after they've agreed say, "We're going to Mass first, is that okay? It will only take less than an hour. Do you want to just join us?" Then, don't push the issue. They'll probably be curious and have some questions, and then you can address them.

Great in theory. However, I'm writing right now because I realized, like bringing guests home to a messy house, I'd be too embarrassed about the state of our liturgy to invite them to a Novus Ordo. How sad.

And I certainly wouldn't expect it to arouse that much curiosity. I'd think the Old Rite would baffle people much more and seem much more exotic and mysterious. Which is a good thing. The stranger something is, the more questions they'll have, and thus the more opportunities to use it as a teaching experience.

On Bishops

Someone asked me recently why, if the problems I describe in the priesthood are true, these wouldn't still be present in the episcopate in a world where married men could be ordained priests (but bishops would, as traditional, still remain celibate). If bishops had to be unmarried, wouldn't the same problems of a celibate, homosocial, out-of-touch isolated bureaucratic world still exist.

Obviously, I think it's always something to watch out for. But I think there are some important differences about the episcopate that would make this less of a problem.

The biggest difference is that bishops are chosen from men who are already celibate priests. Whereas priests are a largely self-selected group (namely, those who actively seek out seminary), bishops are picked from a pool of men, they do not actively seek or volunteer for it (not directly at least).

While questions can be asked about what sort of man would choose to live institutionally with a bunch of other single men of the same religion in the same building, bishops do not "choose" their life, they are chosen.

Part of the problem with the claim that mandatory celibacy doesn't force it on anyone who isn't called already to celibacy is this idea that priests are simply being chosen from the pool of men "already" called to celibacy. Except when you bootstrap it to the priesthood, and when priests actively volunteer rather than being passively chosen, it muddies the waters quite a bit; who knows how many of those men would be celibate if they didn't "have to" be in order to become priests.

A bishop, however, would be picked from the pool of celibate priests in a world where priests could be married. And there is much less of a chance of someone remaining celibate simply on the off chance of becoming a bishop, so this truly would be a case of picking from the men who would be celibate already anyway, rather than potentially manipulating people into celibacy as a trade-off pre-condition for the position.

Furthermore (despite the jokes about certain colleges in Rome), bishops do not go to some special school for a bunch of years to train to be bishops. They are put on the job and have to learn on the job. They are not insulated in a world with a bunch of other bishops for 5 years. Which makes one wonder why they insist on this for priests. If the differences between a presbyter and deacon allegedly requires this huge difference in intensity of formation...why don't the differences between bishop and presbyter?

Nor is there a separate culture once they become a bishop. Unlike priests, whose primary loyalties and relationships often come to be with other priests, a bishop is the only one of his kind in many dioceses, and certainly their aren't enough auxiliaries or anything like that for him to live in a world of only other bishops. At the very least, his peer group will consist of lower clergy too rather than just of other bishops.

The episcopate is too exceptional, too rare, too small to have its own closed "society" outside somewhere like the Curia in Rome. The problem is the culture of the priesthood in general. If that was dealt with, the existence of one full-time celibate bishop in each dioceses simply wouldn't be a big issue because one man does not a System make. And only Systems can have systematic problems.

Naïveté

These men really have no idea how sexuality works, do they?

A prominent Roman Catholic bishop in Mexico blamed eroticism on television and Internet pornography for child abuse by priests, in the latest incendiary comments on sex scandals in the church.

"With so much invasion of eroticism, sometimes it's not easy to stay celibate or to respect children," Bishop Felipe Arizmendi said during an annual meeting of Mexican bishops near Mexico City on Thursday.

"If on television and on the Internet and in so many media outlets there is pornography, it is very difficult to stay pure and chaste," said Arizmendi, an influential bishop from the colonial town of San Cristobal de las Casas in southern Mexico.

"Obviously when there is generalized sexual freedom it's more likely there could be cases of pedophilia," he added.

No. No. No. It just doesn't work that way. And the fact that they still think it does shows how out of touch they are, which makes it really hard to respect them. If they haven't bothered to learn all this even in the face of the crisis, is it even possible to explain it to them? Their thinking on the matter is adolescent at best, and at worst makes it sound like the pedophile priests are simply the victims of an oversexualized culture. And, more troubling, makes it sound like they still think that increased strictness and repression is the cure for it all rather than openness.

Update: Check the comments thread, where I explain more fully the problem of the hierarchy seemingly viewing this as a question of lust rather than of victimization, concentrating on the sin against chastity rather than the crime against justice.

Excellent

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/world/europe/19pope.html

Hopefully that means he's now heard some of our concerns.

Now, let's see if anything is actually done to men like Law and Brady. Let's see if anything is done to deconstruct the culture of clericalism. Let's see if we get action beyond mere attempts to legislate problems out of existence. Will we see consequences for all this? Will anything be done to restore confidence in these men's ability to act and reform after this huge crisis of leadership?

We shall see. Pray.

The Tide Turning

When even your friends start criticizing, you know something's up. From a Politics Daily article:

"There is absolutely no strategy, and I say that as a friend of the pope's," said an American bishop who travels to Rome regularly and voiced the frustration shared by many churchmen in the U.S. and elsewhere. Apparently, that sentiment is not widely-held in the upper echelons of the Roman Curia, the papal bureaucracy. "I don't think they know how to handle this."

Yes, "restless" is how I'd describe myself. I was a fan once, but he hasn't failed to disappoint:

In the United States -- where Catholics practice the faith more devoutly than in any other industrialized nation, and back it up with donations that are the Vatican's single biggest income stream -- Benedict's fan base is also growing restless, and even angry.

Conservative Catholics like writer Peggy Noonan have been taking the Vatican to task in The Wall Street Journal ("The Vatican badly needs new blood-and a woman's touch," she wrote) and in The New York Times, Ross Douthat said it was time for Benedict to perform an act of contrition (though Douthat also said Benedict looks good compared to John Paul's record -- which is a remarkable observation about the late, and much beloved, Polish pope).

I've also talked about how being a theologian is absolutely not what we want in a Pope:

Almost from the start, churchmen inside the Vatican and around the world complained that Benedict was not consulting widely if at all, even on critical decisions, and that he was refusing to delegate even the more prosaic papal duties. Instead he continued to focus on his own writing projects -- such as a work on the Jesus of history and faith, which has become a two-volume treatise expected to be completed this year -- and on preparing his lucid and profound homilies and other talks on the religious life.

When Benedict did bring on aides to help run his administration they also tended to be, quite naturally, theologically-minded colleagues like himself, and some of them veterans of his own staff at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). The most notable appointment was that of Cardinal Bertone, a canon lawyer by training who worked for Ratzinger for years at the CDF, as Vatican Secretary of State, the key position at the Holy See. Bertone immediately telegraphed his preference for stressing moral truths over diplomatic niceties by saying he thought of himself as a "Secretary of Church" rather than a Secretary of State. Or, as the Vatican-watcher Sandro Magister summed up the new administration, "Less diplomacy and more Gospel."

The slogan fit, but hasn't worked out so well.

And here George Weigel even uses the term "scholar-pope"! Someone once suggested to me banning men with doctorates from becoming bishops. Maybe that is a good idea:

"I don't know what Bertone's gifts are," said George Weigel, a Catholic conservative and author of the most comprehensive biography of John Paul II. "He's a canonist, not a theologian, but he's simply not up to running the Church for a scholar-pope who has his own priorities," added Weigel.

The problem is with these damn nerds in the upper levels of the Church! We need a healthy dose of anti-intellectualism, perhaps, to qualify our anti-clericalism. At least, anti-academia:

Still, even in March, as the revelations were piling up and the heat on the pope was growing intense, Benedict continued to stress the importance of a theological approach to church governance, telling a public audience that to govern is "above all to think and to pray." [Uh...no. Just...no. Such passivity in our leaders is how children get molested.] The problem is that while theologians may be able to figure out the sex of angels, they are not necessarily so good at figuring out how to deal with a crisis like sex abuse in the clergy.

And it's a bunch of prissy little Catholic-nerds in the media who are rallying around him now too, because they were using him as a crutch for their own self-esteem, something they don't deserve (wow...I never though I of all people would be saying that!) But can you really expect not to attract a fair number of this type of man, considering that the criterion is basically choosing to spend life in a bureaucratic world of adult male virgins?

That's not how it was supposed to be, as one of the great hopes of Catholics -- not least those among Benedict's conservative fan base -- was that as pope, Joseph Ratzinger would be in the perfect position to finally reform the Roman Curia. During all his years at the CDF, Ratzinger was a leader of the curia who knew its problems, but was not a curial animal who played the byzantine games the papal court is known for. Now it may be too late.

"That he has done virtually nothing to reform the Curia is, to my mind, perhaps the greatest disappointment of the last five years," Weigel said via e-mail. "It [the curia] doesn't work; he gets hurt by its not working; but he seems unwilling or unable to do something about it, if the doing of it would cause anyone pain."

So yes, the Vatican -- and the church -- needs a capable administrative hand on the tiller, and one that is not afraid to ruffle feathers among those closest to him.

But if poor management helped land Benedict and the Vatican in this mess, good management is only part of the solution. Catholics also want a pope who can display the same sort of self-critical reflection that is expected of Christians, and that pontiffs regularly exhort their flocks to practice. In the context of the church, one might say, good management is a function of good Christian practices -- the kind of approach that would not have allowed child abusers to go unchecked in the first place, or would repent of shielding them as soon as it became clear how wrong that was.

Whether Benedict will do that kind of public penance, or can at this point, may depend on how willing he is to reconsider his track record, not just whether he can improve his crisis-management skills.

The omens are not promising. As a leading Vatican expert, John Allen, recalls, after Ratzinger was blasted for a speech he delivered in Paris a few years ago he confided to friends that the negative reactions didn't faze him.

"I'm like the cellist Rostropovich," he joked. "I never read the critics."

Today, however, they're impossible to avoid.

What an obscure nerdy little joke. Cellist?! Good grief. Now I see why they get beat up on the playground. Pathetic ivory-tower bookworms. Someone ought to go to the Vatican, grab their silk underwear ,and give them wedgies.

I'm just sick of all this. If he doesn't do something dramatic soon (and the longer he waits, the bigger it will have to be) then it's getting close to time for him to resign and live out his sad delusional life playing piano and mentally masturbating with his egghead little "musings" and his cats.

Enough is enough. I'm starting to think the Orthodox are right about the corrupting influence of Western "theology".

Give Us This Day Our Daily Circus

It is apparently being reported that Msgr. Gruber was pressured to take the fall for the Pope in the Munich case. Duh, that's an obvious story. Did anyone seriously not think that was a possibility at the time? Whether it's true or not remains to be seen, but it would certainly make sense. We'll see, but pressuring a guy to lie or at least skew the truth...would be just pure decadent corruption.

A Filipino Cardinal has admitted that many priests do not follow celibacy after a priest was found dead in his underwear in a motel. He also said (and I'd like to see what the original language said because this sounds like an awkward translation) "the Church is doing everything it can to address celibacy." Ha. I don't know if that's what he meant, but the way that's phrased is like admitting that it's a problem that needs to be dealt with (and it could with a simple one-page document!)

And Hoyos had a press conference saying that JPII approved his letter "congratulating" that French bishop for aiding and abetting a child molester, and encouraged him to send it to all the bishops of the world in support of their justly jailed brother.

Apparently he's saying the molestation was learned of in confession, so the bishop couldn't report him, and the congratulations were for not breaking the seal. Fair enough, if that made any sense. But that's not what the letter said, and somehow this all came out later, during the trial and such, so something isn't quite clicking for me. If he learned of it only through confession, how would the authorities ever even know that he knew? If this is an issue of the seal, how is it being so openly discussed now? Update: Apparently this claim was just a lie: "The bishop acknowledged he knew about the allegations from the mother of one of the victims, so it was not a case of secret of confession." Though Hoyos claimed this in his news conference (saying that the priest later admitted it in private conversation...). Meaning he either outright lied, or there is some serious confusion going on here.

Get more popcorn people, this is going to be a long show. But, at the end of it all, married priests and strong, competent, courageous administrators. Just pray the liturgy gets better rather than worse as a part of it.

Why I'm Not Orthodox

For all my sympathy with the Orthodox, there are still some reasons that I would be inclined to avoid them:

The video doesn't totally fit, go watch it on youtube! Hilarious! If you're inclined to schadenfreude...