Can you explain papal infallibility?

Dear Rev. Know it all,

Can you explain papal inscrutability?

Yours,

Betty Kencownzell 

Dear Betty,

I think you mean papal infallibility, and of course I can explain it. Have you forgotten to whom you are writing?

The Oxford dictionary defines “infallible” as incapable of making mistakes or being wrong. Papal infallibility means that the Pope is never wrong when he speaks a) in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, b) in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, and c) when he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church.

When the pope, successor of St. Peter as Bishop of Rome, speaks “in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians”, he is said to speak “ex cathedra.” A “cathedra” was a straight backed chair, or throne. A cathedral is, thus, where the teaching chair of the bishop is kept. The “cathedra” in question is the teaching chair of St. Peter. There is an ancient chair kept at St. Peter’s in Rome, enshrined in the great bronze throne behind the main altar.  It was thought to be the chair from which St. Peter taught. It was probably a gift from Emperor Charles the Bald to Pope John VIII in 875. Still, it’s a nice thought.

The reason much ado is made about a chair, is that at least at the time of Christ, rabbis taught while sitting in a teaching chair. When Jesus went up the mountain with His disciples to deliver His famous sermon on the mount, He sat down to do it.  “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and opening his mouth he taught them.” (Matt 5:1) If a rabbi had something important to say, he said it sitting down; hence he spoke “ex cathedra” or “from the chair.”

 There is a swell book, a real page-turner by, a German theologian, Heinrich Denzinger (1819-1893) called the Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum. It contains the chief decrees and definitions of all church councils, along with the oldest forms of the Apostles' Creed and a list of condemned propositions. The first edition has just 128 documents. The latest editions have included the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and recent Popes, so if you want to know what some doctrine means, get what, in seminary, we fondly called “a Denzinger.”  Here is what Denzinger has to say about infallibility.

“What is claimed for the pope is infallibility merely, not impeccability or inspiration”  and that to  speak infallibly “The pontiff must teach in his public and official capacity as pastor and doctor of all Christians, not merely in his private capacity as a theologian, preacher or allocutionist, nor in his capacity as a temporal prince or as a mere ordinary of the Diocese of Rome. It must be clear that he speaks as spiritual head of the Church universal.” 

Denzinger has a lot more to say about infallibility, but why be tedious in a church bulletin? What people don’t understand about the teaching of papal infallibility taught by the first Vatican Council (1869-70) is that it limits the pope’s authority.

There have been some really wild and wacky things popes have said over the years. For instance, according to Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) “All princes should kiss the feet of the pope alone…” and “that it is lawful for him to depose emperors …” and in 1302 Pope Boniface VIII said in the papal bull Unam Sanctam, “Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff. And how about the unpleasantness with Galileo? Didn’t the church infallibly declare that the earth was the center of the solar system?  No, what Cardinal Bellarmine, a really nice guy, said was that “treating heliocentrism as a real phenomenon would be a very dangerous thing, irritating philosophers and theologians, and harming the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture as false.”  The Cardinal was thinking about the wars of religion north of the Alps in which Protestants and Catholics were killing each other in the millions and he thought, “We don’t need that down here right now.”  The problem was that Galileo was directly saying that the Bible was wrong, and in so doing he was laying the groundwork for a social upheaval that was dangerous. If Galileo had said it differently, there wouldn’t have been a problem.

In fact Galileo was wrong. His theory didn’t fit the number. The planets don’t travel; around the sun in circles as he claimed — they travel in ellipses. Why get thousands killed over a theory that didn’t work mathematically. Galileo declared himself far more infallible than any pope. The Church is not capable of speaking infallibly about science. Neither are scientists and that was the point!  

As for the statements of Boniface and Gregory, they were political in nature, and thus couldn’t be called infallible. That is why there is not a lot of foot kissing going on in the Vatican these days.  (By the way “papal bull” refers to the Latin word “bulla” or “seal” in English by which the pope applies his personal seal to the letter to guarantee its authenticity. Don’t get any silly ideas.) So you see, the First Vatican Council reminded popes that they were not infallible when they spoke about politics, cosmology, ecology, and most other -ologies. They were infallible only when they spoke about faith and morals, and it has to be clear that they are doing so. Furthermore, the pope has infallibility, not impeccability or inspiration. Lack of impeccability means that he can sin and the lack of inspiration means that he cannot come up with new doctrine. He can only illuminate and declare what the Church has always held and believed. We Catholics are not Mormons.  We have no chief “Prophet, Seer, or Revelator, “as do the Mormons. The “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator” is the title of the supreme Mormon authority. A Mormon revelator “makes known, with the Lord’s help, something before unknown. It may be new or forgotten truth, or a new or forgotten application of known truth to man’s need.”

Before 1978, anyone with African ancestry could not be priest in the Mormon Church, and could not participate in most temple ordinances, including celestial marriage. That meant that they could not go to the highest heaven. But, Glory Be! In 1978, the prophet seer and revelator said that God had changed His mind and now blacks would be allowed into the highest heaven.  A pope could only dream about such infallibility. Our poor pontiff is stuck with what we have held and taught from the beginning, things like marriage being a relationship between a man and a woman since Jesus said that, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Matt. 19.5)

For Catholics, Scripture and Sacred Tradition are the only sources of revelation. The magisterium (teaching authority of the Church) is not a source of revelation. It can only bring forward and restate what we have believed from the first. The last words my boyhood pastor said to me were “Keep that faith handed down to us from the apostles Peter and Paul.”

 Lord knows I’m trying, Monsignor O’Brien, Lord knows I’m trying.

Rev. Know-it-all

Of butterflies and monsters -- part 1

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

Our new pope seems to have an interesting way with words. Just the other day he said the “heart is a flea market of desires.” I suppose I know what this means, but I am more concerned by his referring to the clergy as butterfly priests and little monsters. Can you shed some light on what he means?

Yours,

Ms. Ann Salting

Dear Ann,

Of course I can shed some light on the issue — or at least lay down a good smoke screen.  Personally, I think the papal candidness is an absolute hoot.  I have known a few crabby old Jesuits, and personally, I find them refreshing. Remember that, at least in my ancestry, I am a German. We have always esteemed crabbiness.

People say that the former pope was German, but we true Germans did not consider him a German. He is a Bavarian, and Bavarians are far too nice. I have known a few people who know him. They say that he is actually kind to a fault, despite what the air-heads of the press would have us believe. He really listens to you and makes you feel important.

The new pope has a more obvious form of the common touch. In his heart, he is just a parish priest. He is always taking pictures with people. I know four people who have posed with him for snapshots since his election as pope. You would be amazed at how much of a parish priest’s life is taken up by smiling for photos. He is a parish priest, and being one myself I know what wacky pieces of work we can be. We sometimes say the darndest things. And then wish that we hadn’t. Let me dig up the exact quotes.

Pope Francis seems to have said that poor formation in seminaries will create priests who are “little monsters.” He went on to say, "To avoid problems, in some houses of formation, young people grit their teeth, try not to make mistakes, follow the rules smiling a lot, just waiting for the day when they are told: 'Good, you have finished formation.' This is hypocrisy that is the result of clericalism which is one of the worst evils.” 

He said on another recent occasion “...What is the place of Jesus Christ in my priestly life? Is it a living relationship, from the disciple to the Master, or is it a somewhat artificial relationship... that does not come from the heart?....We are anointed by the Spirit, and when a priest is far from Jesus Christ he can lose this unction.... Those who put their strength in artificial things, in vanity, in an attitude... in a cutesy language... ‘This is a butterfly-priest,’ because they are always vain.”

Wow! He doesn’t mince words. And I think he is absolutely correct in his assessment. As you know, not many people call me a liberal. I am somewhere to the right of Torquemada on some theological and liturgical issues. My fellow reactionary curmudgeons always think the pope is aiming at them. I’m not so sure. I have met smarmy, little-monster, butterfly priests on both sides of the imagined liberal/conservative divide. I am delighted to see a young priest in a cassock. I get nervous, however when that cassock has no bulges at the knees indicating that its wearer never prays, and it has no wear at the wrists indicating that he never does much hard work. I believe that all young priests should be familiar with the Tridentine Mass. For a priest to hand down the tradition, he has to know the tradition. However, when a priest who doesn’t know a word of Latin thinks it impressive to throw some Latin into the liturgy, I am tempted to wonder, does he realize that he is supposed to be praying at Mass? If someone loves the old Mass because it is a vehicle of the mystical spirituality that is a huge part of the Tradition, I couldn’t be happier. If it is simply a delight in smells and bells and funny hats, with glitter and brocade on the side, best to let it go. To love beauty in the service of the Lord is noble. To love kitsch in the service of narcissism is, well, monstrous. I can hear all eight of the traditional uber-Catholics who read this stuff beginning to grumble. Don’t worry I am now going to lambaste the ecclesial left.

I am equally amused by the young progressives, most of whom are in their late sixties who go about wearing sandals and serapes and burlap vestments in order to express their solidarity with the poor. The poor are tired of wearing serapes and sandals. That’s why they are up here working three jobs at once. They would like to wear Brooks Brothers some day. I had to endure the Viva la Raza crowd for years in my seminary days and early priesthood. These were the priests and seminarians who had seen the movie, The Magnificent Seven one too many times. (Magnificent Seven is a movie in which a bunch of gun-toting American cowboys save a Mexican village from a blood-thirsty group of banditos. Personally I am hoping that Mexican villagers will save us Americans from our own materialism. It’s not looking good. A lot of the Mexicans turn into materialists after a few years north of the Rio Grande. Still, I have hope. At least the Mexicans still love their children more than they love their poodles.) 

As far as I am concerned a priest who cannot be devoted to the Lord, the Lowly, the Liturgy and Our Lady is, as the pope says, liable to become a little monster who demands that the faithful do and think what Father tells them to think. Believe me, the serape wearing, Viva la Raza crowd has a lot of very strict rules. I am sure you have heard that old saying, which I myself made up, “There is no one so conservative as a liberal.” Well, someone has to make up old sayings at some point, and I did make it up a few years ago. In my youth I endured the tyranny of liberalism.

There were seminarians who were tossed for being too pious. I am not making this up. If a young man went to daily Mass in the eighties and said the rosary, he was suspect. You toed the line if you wanted to be a priest. It was not much better after ordination. I remember being at a meeting of the Hispanic Priests Fellowship of the Diocese of Frostbite Falls sometime during the seventies. These were priests who were devoted to wearing serapes and living in solidarity with their poor Hispanic rectory housekeepers and janitors. The level of group think was amazing. I looked around at those in attendance at the meeting and realized that there was not one person of the twenty or so in the room who actually spoke Spanish as a first language or who even had a single Hispanic chromosome in their bodies. I said, in humor, so I thought, “Perhaps we should call ourselves the Irish Priest Fellowship.”  Chairman Ron Deadly, president, guru and bellwether of the group turned pale and said, “No, Never, Not Ever. No, No, No!!!”  Here we see a striking trait that the extreme left has in common with the extreme right — they are humor impaired. We of course boycotted grapes. These were the days of Cesar Chavez and the migrant worker strikes. To admit to being a serial killer in this group was less offensive than to be caught with grape jelly on your breath, depending of course on whom were serial killing. (For those who are humor impaired I am kidding here, but it would have been quite a faux pas to have served grapes at one of their lunches.)

There was no room with this bunch for novenas and rosaries and processions etc. Those were archaic, monarchical, superstitious, medieval, oppressive, manifestations of a bourgeois spirituality that existed only to oppress THE  PEOPLE.  Remember that St. Karl of Marx had warned us against religion, the opiate of the people. It didn’t matter a fig that THE PEOPLE loved novenas and rosaries and processions and all that other old stuff. We had to bring them out of their medieval darkness. Some of us would condescend to allow these devotions if they were suitably folkloric and accompanied by scantily clad Aztec dancers whirling about dressed in feathers while carrying bean pots that belched incense that smelled vaguely like burning cat fur. I promised myself that the first time someone whipped out a basalt sacrificial knife for cutting out human hearts in honor of Our Lady Guadalupe, I was out of there.

I personally believe that churches should be beautiful and vestments should be glorious, and the music should be majestic because the church is the one place where the poor man can sit next to the millionaire. The grandeur is for the Lord and for the poor. The rich have palaces enough, but a Catholic church should be a palace for the poor and for their carpenter-king. The serape and sandals crowd stripped the churches down to the bare bones and removed the beautiful statues and art. They thought that the poverty of the churches would make the poor feel at home. The poor have enough ugly. We took away the beauty of the liturgy that nurtured and uplifted them. They abandoned the Catholic churches that they found cold and sterile and joined evangelical and Pentecostal churches that allowed a more emotional expression of faith. What we did back then was indeed monstrous.

However, the smells and bells crowd is no more or less monstrous than the serape and sandals crowd. Both look at the liturgy as a wonderful venue for their own brand of performance art. The pope warns against hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is an ancient Greek word the means play acting. A hypocrite is an actor. Nothing more. Of course an actor needs a good costume.  Sandals and serape will do just as well as glitter and brocade. If you wear the serape or the brocade chasuble because you love Jesus and His Bride, the Church, all well and good. If you are doing it to make a statement, or just because you think you look good in a serape or a fiddle-back, brocaded chasuble maybe it’s time to go on a forty-day silent Jesuit retreat.

Next week: Caterpillar Priests and Butterfly Bishops

Are Scripture and Tradition reliable?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I was recently on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and our tour guide, Abdul ibn Turghaid, showed us the stone for lack of which Jesus had no place to lay his head and then he showed us the inn where the parable of the Good Samaritan didn’t happen, but would have had it not been a parable. Then we saw two tombs where Jesus rose from the dead. Abdul insisted that Jesus had risen at both tombs. He explained that apparently there was a matinee performance for those who had missed the early morning resurrection. Eventually we made our way past many check points and frowning bureaucrats to a dingy old church in Bethlehem where we stood in line to go down some steps into what seemed to be a basement that was in fact a cave when you looked behind all the tapestries and wall hangings. Come on, now.  I have been to enough Christmas pageants to know that Jesus was born in a stable, not a cave. Isn’t that what the Bible says? How do they know what was what after two thousand years? Isn’t most of this stuff made up? The Bible stories don’t agree with each other. I heard one theologian say that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and then another one said the whole story was made up. How do we know what happened

Yours,

Paul Grimage

Dear Paul, 

You don’t know if you’re not a Catholic, or at least in an apostolic church. An apostolic church is one that can trace its origins back to the founding of the Church by Christ through the ministry of the Apostles. We have an early Christian writer, a Greek who was the bishop of a Roman city in what is now France. His Name was Irenaeus of Lyon.  He was born around 130 AD. That’s only 100 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. That’s not a very long time. I know stories that my mother told about her father that go back to 1880. I am an American and we Americans have the memory span of distracted goldfish. If I can remember trivial details that go back 130 years, certainly an ancient Greek or Jewish Christian who was paying attention to the stories for which he eventually would give his life as martyr probably got the story down pretty well from the people who told it. The martyr-bishop Irenaeus was the student of St. Polycarp, born 69AD who was also a martyr. St. Polycarp was a disciple of St John the Apostle. This is what Irenaeus had this to say about apostolic tradition:

....It would be very tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the Churches.... [we do this, I say,] by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul... which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with the Church (of Rome).... inasmuch as the apostolic tradition has been preserved continuously by them... (Adversus, Book III, Chapter 3)

I quote this text not for my usual smug “Hurray for our team!” purpose for which I usually quote sources, but to point out that 100 years after Christ, remembering and passing on these traditions was very important to Christians. This may be hard to believe for us moderns who can barely remember who won Dancing with the Stars last year, but ancient people valued their history and did their best to preserve it, though their sense of history was different than ours.

You have two questions, “Is Scripture reliable and is Tradition reliable?”  The Scriptures, especially the Gospels can be spotty, and even seem to be contradictory at times. The four Gospels leave out details like what color veil did the Blessed Mother wear? (Everyone knows it was blue, because the picture in my grandmother’s bedroom has her wearing a blue robe, the exact color of her blue eyes, framed by her flaxen blond hair.) There are things that just weren’t important to the ancients that we think crucial, like the exact time and date of birth of a poor boy, born in a barn. The great and mighty noted the time and date and place so that they could have their horoscopes prepared. Mary and Joseph apparently weren’t worried about Jesus’ horoscope. They were worried about Herod, who was very interested in the time and place of Jesus birth. I imagine a more important date for the Holy Family was the day they arrived safely in Egypt. The Gospels can be very disappointing if one is looking for gossipy details. Far more disturbing are the apparent contradictions. How many angels were at the resurrection? Did Jesus ascend to heaven from the Mount of Olives or from a hill in Galilee? Was he born in Bethlehem or Nazareth?  Why can’t the Bible seem to get it straight if it’s an inspired text? The answer is simple. The first Christians as we have seen from the text of St. Irenaeus handed down exactly what they received.

There are four Gospels that the early Church most respected, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. John is distinct from the others and seems to have been addressed to a very specific audience. My theory is that it was aimed at those who thought John the Baptist was the Messiah. It is probably the last Gospel to be written. The other three are called the synoptic Gospels. The word synoptic is a Greek word that means “look alike”. The look alike Gospels are pretty similar but, of the three, only the Gospel of Matthew has ever been thought of as eyewitness testimony. Luke and Mark were not among the twelve apostles. The long-standing tradition is that Mark had been an administrative assistant to St. Peter and that Luke had been a friend and assistant to St. Paul. Have you ever seen a car wreck? I hope not. But if you have, you know that two people describing the same wreck describe it differently. One notices the dent in the back of the car, the other the dent in the front, but not always both and so on. So it was with these very different and very human accounts of the events of the life and ministry of Christ. The three Synoptic Gospels weren’t written, at least in my opinion, as evangelistic tools. The Gospel was an oral phenomenon. St Paul says “if someone teaches another Gospel than the one I preached...” (Galatians 1:9)

The Gospel was shared by word of mouth. The texts we have were taken from a common fund of knowledge about the life of Christ. My theory is that Matthew was aimed at Pharisees to point out that Jesus was the fulfillment of prophesy and was the Messiah. Matthew was written to show that Jesus was the Son of God and Luke was written as a sort of “friend of the court brief” to convince the former High Priest, “your Excellency Theophilus”, a son of Annas and High Priest from AD 37 to AD 41.  The theory is that Theophilus was the high priest who delegated Paul’s trip to Damascus to clear up this Christian mess and, to Theophilus’ horror, Paul came back as one of them. Theophilus may have lodged the accusation against Paul with the Roman authorities and Luke, the only non-Hebrew author in the New Testament, wrote Luke/Acts of the Apostles as a two-part defense of Paul requesting that Theophilus withdraw his accusation. Just a theory.

If you think of the Gospels as modern style histories of the life of Jesus, you are going to be disappointed. They are, I believe, documents that were written by their human authors to make certain points about the life of Christ: that He fulfilled the prophetic expectations about the Messiah (Matthew); that He was the Son of God (Mark); that He and His disciple Paul were innocent of the charges (Luke/Acts); and that He, not John the Baptist, was the Messiah, the true Lamb of sacrifice of the true Passover (John). However the Holy Spirit meant, I believe, to show us the aspects of the life of Christ that are necessary for our salvation and redemption. What color Mary’s veil was is not essential to the work of our salvation.

All this doesn’t exactly answer the question, “Are they reliable?” The fact that they seem to be at variance with one another is the proof that they are reliable. That’s the nature of Sacred Tradition. If someone a couple centuries after Christ had tried to polish up the accounts of Christ’s ministry that would be suspicious. They said, “No, this is what we have received, this is what we hand on to you, whole and entire.” The small apparent discrepancies are not very important and are probably quite reconcilable. The four canonical Gospels are unedited because they are eyewitness accounts made by human beings, though inspired and used by the Holy Spirit. Two of them are quite probably eye witness accounts (Matthew and John) and two are probably second hand accounts (Mark and Luke). The Church has, from the very first, been scrupulous to hand down nothing less and nothing more than it received from Christ through the ministry of the apostles, even though that handing down has some questions attached to it. You can trust the Gospels.

As for your question about the places associated with the life of Jesus, that will have to wait until next week!

Who's in charge when there is no pope? Part 2

(Letter to Sue Quetta continued)

“What,” you may well ask, “is a cardinal, if not a brightly colored bird?”  

A cardinal is the pastor of one of the Cardinal churches of the diocese of Rome, Italy. 

“But,” I can hear you say, “ I thought that cardinals were bishops from all around the world who outranked other bishops.” 

This, dear Sue, is not the case.  The structure of the Catholic Church is actually very simple in its basic design. All the bells and whistles, the cool hats and the great art are human tradition. Nice. Very useful. But very human. St. Peter did not wear a little white beanie. St. Bartholomew, one of the “Twelve,” was probably never called "Your Eminence," and it is improbable that St. Paul, an apostle, though not one of the “Twelve” was never addressed as “Your Excellency,” though he certainly seems to have fulfilled the role of bishop. 

When people hear this they become indignant. “Why should we have cardinals and cassocks and all these things if they aren’t in the Bible?” My answer would be “Why not?” Over two thousand years these structures have developed and proven useful as vehicles for the Holy Spirit. They are changeable traditions with a small “t.” They may be human, but is human so bad when it serves the divine? I rather think that’s the way the Lord has designed things. There are traditions that can change, such the color of zucchettas. There are Traditions which cannot change such as the reality of the Papacy.

It is very clear that Jesus established a government for His Church. It is unfortunate that he had only sinners like the disciples to choose from, sinners like John and Andrew who had tempers so bad that Jesus nicknamed them “the Thundersons.”  (Mark 3:17) Simon Bar Jonah was made “the Rock” (Cepha in Aramaic.)  He more resembled a bowl of caramel flan when he betrayed Christ three times.  And what was Jesus thinking when he made a thief, Judas Iscariot, the treasurer of the group? (John 12:6) Jesus really showed poor judgment in some of his personnel choices.  Let’s not be too hasty. Poor Jesus had only sinners to choose from then as now. Jesus thought that things human were not all that bad. In this He disagrees sharply with the devil, who thinks that the very creation of humanity was a bad decision on the part of the Almighty. 

The art and beauty of the human traditions of the faith draw people to its central message. All of the administrative traditions of the Church have not shaken the Sacred Tradition handed down to us from the apostles even one little bit. God had only weak and sinful people to choose from then and he has only weak and sinful people to choose from now, and he has done a remarkable job with the material he has to work with. 

The world defines hierarchy as a chain of command. They look at the Church through their own foggy lenses. Journalists, who are only as deep as the teleprompters they read, are pretty much clueless about the nature of the faith, but we still make the mistake of paying attention to them. They will tell you that the Church is like an army, you’ve got your pope, your cardinals then your archbishops, bishops, monsignors priests, deacons, and at the bottom of the heap, doing all the work are the nuns. No one can quite figure our what a monk, a brother and a friar are. The people of God are just supposed to pray, pay and obey. The pope gives an order and it filters down to the mass of the faithful and 1.2 billion people are expected to obey without thought or hesitation. One morning, the pope gets up in a bad mood and says, “From now on, no jelly beans on Thursday!!!” And bang! Jelly bean sales plummet and there are riots in the jelly bean manufacturing centers of the world. 

If only this were so! I remember a few years back when a bishop who will remain nameless removed the tabernacle from the main body of his old and much loved cathedral and replaced it with an organ and choir stand. The bishop was an organist. The people of the unmentioned city begged him not to do it and the Vatican repeatedly asked him not to do it. His response to the Holy Father’s pleas on behalf of the people was, “With all due respect, your Holiness, go take a flying leap!” People think the pope has all this power. It jut isn’t true. I have previously pointed out that the Vatican budget is smaller than that of Notre Dame University. The glory that was Rome pales when compared to the splendor of the Indiana cornfield in which Notre Dame placidly sits.

The structure of the Church is not a military chain of command. It is meant to be a family and is a very simple structure. Bishops don’t gain their authority from the pope. They received it from Christ by the laying on of hands of other bishops who in their turn were ordained by bishops before them in an unbroken chain that goes back to Christ himself. Francis Cardinal George is a bishop, the archbishop of Chicago because he was ordained by Agostino Cacciavillan, who in turn was ordained by  Jean-Marie Villot who in turn was ordained by Maurice Feltin who in turn was ordained by Henri-Charles-Joseph Binet, who in turn was ordained by Louis-Henri-Joseph Luçon who in turn was ordained by Charles-Émile Freppel. This gets us back to the middle 1800's and it got tedious about three bishops ago. You get my point. This sort of thing takes us all the way back to Jesus, the Carpenter of Nazareth. 

If you think this kind or record keeping rather pointless you will be disappointed to know that the first Christians thought it quite important. I quote St Irenaeus of Lyon:

"We must obey the priests of the Church who have succession from the Apostles,... who, together with succession in the episcopate, have received the certain mark of truth according to the will of the Father; all others, however, are to be suspected, who separated themselves from the principal succession." Adversus Haereses (Book IV, Chapter 26).       

AND

 "Since, however, it would be very tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the Churches, we  put to confusion all those who... assemble in unauthorized meetings by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul... which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. It is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its pre-eminent authority (because) the apostolic tradition has been preserved." Adversus Haereses (Book III, Chapter 3)

Allow me to point out that St. Irenaeus was born around 130AD in Izmir, Turkey, formerly called Smyrna to which one of the letters of the Apocalypse is addressed. He was a disciple of St. Polycarp, who in his turn had been a disciple of St. John, who had been the Beloved Disciple of Christ. That means this idea of apostolic succession goes back to the very first days of Christianity. 

You may not like it and you are free to invent your own Church, but the idea of a continuous Church government is not just an arbitrary decision of a bunch of power hungry fourth century politicians. It is an integral part of what Jesus established.  The bishops of the modern Church have an unbroken connection to Christ, and thus their authority is derived from Christ, and not from the pope! St Irenaeus points out that the Bishop of Rome is the great guarantor of truth, but that he is not the sole source of authority. The first Christians believed this and we believe it. The pope may depose any bishop in order to insure the orthodox teaching of the Gospel, and he is centrally involved in the appointment of these bishops, but these things are done in cooperation with others. A bishop is almost never removed nor appointed without canonical procedures, though ultimately the pope, the Bishop of Rome, is the one who makes the decision. Remember that Papa, (pope in Latin, Italian and a whole lot of other languages) ultimately has to make a decision in the life of the family, at least the traditional family, but if papa is smart, he doesn’t make it without discussing it with Mama, in this case the Church, the Bride of Christ.

I can hear a distant roar even as I write these words. It is shouting, “Who are you kidding? The people making these decisions are all men!”   

Au contraire, mon cher! The real power houses in the Church have always been women, St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Faustina of Krakow, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta and countless more. In times past, religious women have represented motherhood in the church, and still do in many places. They were the primary formators of children. Who do you think taught all those cardinals their Catechism? In Europe and America, the masculinist movement has convinced us that we should dump spiritual as well as physical motherhood, but until recently the women of the Church were its very heart. The Church is a family. Can I help it if the women of the developed world have decided to redefine family? Where was I?

So you see, the Church is as simple and as complicated as a family. The essential structure that comes down from the times of the apostles is as follows: a bishop who is the servant and father of the Church in his diocese. He ordains priests to help him in his paternal role and deacons to help him in his role of service. He is the head elder (presbyter in Greek, priest in common English,) and he is the head deacon, (a Greek word for servant, translated minister in Latin.)  

In the army any general can order privates around at any army base. This isn’t the way it works in the Church. A bishop from another city, can’t come and order me around, unless he is asked to by Francis George, the bishop to whom I am pledged. I cannot go to another parish and order the deacon around unless I am told to do so by the bishop to whom that deacon is pledged. Each diocese is a self-subsistent manifestation of the whole Church and each parish is a mini-diocese, though not a self-subsistent Church, with the pastor representing the bishop as his vicar in that parish. 

The Bishop of Rome, as St. Irenaeus has pointed out, is the universal bishop, but he exercises that ministry according to the traditions that have been handed down. This Tradition of bishop, priest and deacon in its simplicity has come to us from the apostles, and is not negotiable. If the bishops of Wisconsin decide to wear orange zucchettas in deer hunting season, that is negotiable, and perhaps advisable.

I can hear you mumbling, “He promised to tell us what a cardinal is. I still don’t know the difference between a cardinal, a bird and a bishop!”  

Be patient. I had to tell you what a bishop is and where he gets his authority in order to tell you what a bishop is not, and that is a cardinal, at least not necessarily. Have I thoroughly confused you? I will continue to ‘splain it all in my next letter.

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 6b

“TRADITION! (Cue the sound of klezmer music, as in Fiddler on the Roof ) TRADITION!”

(The following will be even more incomprehensible than usual if you have not read last week's action packed installment.)

There seem to be four possible meanings for the word epiousion: 1) necessary for existence 2) daily requirement 3) for the next day 4) deriving from epienai: for the future, for the coming existence. In St. Jerome's translation in 405 A.D. we read (Mat 6:11): “Give us this day our supersubstantial bread" which means “over-being," but in the Our Father the Latin phrase “panem quotidianum” means daily bread. It was understood that way from the earliest times. In the very ancient Aramaic version, the Syriac "Peshitta" the phrase is translated "give us the bread of which we have need today." So even if the grocery list was lost or badly translated, the Greek phrase “ton arton ton epiousion” means "bread necessary for the day." The only definitive way we have of knowing that epiousion means “daily” is, you guessed it! TRADITION! I could come along with a theory that epiousion really means “whole wheat” and if you are in the sola scriptura crowd, you have no way of refuting me unless of course you refer to TRADITION!

People regularly ask me for the most accurate translation of the Bible. There is no such thing. I tell them that they should learn Greek. It’s easy. Every three-year-old in ancient Athens could speak it. (Actually I learned beginning ancient Greek by teaching it for 25 years at a university, but I’m a little slow.) Even if you learn ancient Greek, you’ve still got a problem. The world has changed. You can never put yourself back into the context of those times.

For instance, the Scriptures talk about the denarius. It was one day’s wage for an average worker at the time of Christ. That should make it a simple equivalent to about, say $70 to $90 bucks. If a person is making around the minimum wage these days, he can probably go to a big box store and buy a couple shirts. At the time of Christ, a man may have owned only a few shirts in his whole life. Cloth was not made on machines by slave labor as in our times. It was made inch by inch on homemade looms and was incredibly expensive. The Bible talks about wheat and barley and oil and water, all of which were in short supply. There was no middle class to speak of. It was a different world. Words change meaning in ways deeper than we can fathom.

Let’s take love, for instance. It’s a fairly important word in the Bible. Ancient Romans believed what we call love was immoral. Yes, you heard me, immoral! They were stoics and love made you vulnerable to the control of another, hence it was immoral. Much of what we call love today is, even by our own standards, immoral. The Bible tells us that “God is Love” and “Love one another” “Love endures forever.” It would seem to be very important to understand what love is.

I remember back in the groovy sixties, which I can vaguely remember, there was a new religious group on campus at Watsamata U. Called the “Children of God.” They were very popular. They stressed the texts of Scripture that taught “God is Love.” Their founder, David Berg, who called himself Moses David, was quite fond of discipling charming under-grads of the non-male gender. He taught the “Law of Love.” If a person's actions were not intentionally hurtful to others those actions were allowed by the Bible. So, if it was real, unselfish love, it was okay. They practiced what they called “polyamory” which means lots of partners. Same gender “intimate” relationships between women were allowed because they were not specifically forbidden by the Bible, but similar male relationships, clearly prohibited by the Bible, were sinful. It seems that the Rev. Berg had some interesting issues.

You may now pick your jaw up off the floor. I can hear you saying, “How ridiculous! That’s absurd. Everybody knows that the Bible doesn’t say that!” Why is Rev. Berg wrong? Who’s to say that he is misinterpreting the word “love” or “agape”? His interpretation is every bit as good as mine. He can define the word “love,” that central word of the New Testament, as well as I can, as well as you can or as well as Billy Graham can. Who’s to say? The exact same thing happened during the reformation.

"In 1534, the Melchiorites, a group of Anabaptists, captured the German city of Münster. They immediately burned all books except the Bible, banned the use of money and seized the property of non-believers. They killed Protestants and Catholics and practiced polygamy and sexual excess. Their leader, John of Leyden, had sixteen wives. As to be expected, they proclaimed the Day of Judgment was close at hand.” (Quoted from ‘Early Modern History, Lecture 4: The Impact of Luther and the Radical Reformation’) And why not? Luther had declared every man his own pope, and so it remains today.

If you are Catholic, your answer to these questions is very easy. We have a consistent history of teaching which is carefully guarded by the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. As our Lord Jesus intended and still intends, the Pope is the guardian of meaning. The words may change, but the meaning is unchanging and the teaching authority that Christ gave Peter tells us what the meaning is and has always been.

People are fond of saying “just the Bible. I only want to believe what the Bible says! No new doctrines!!!” If you adhere to the precise words of Scripture as it was written, you lose meaning as the meaning of words shift. In the Scriptures “agape” meant a certain type of love. Christians used the word to mean sacrificial love. In modern Greek, agape can mean a lot of things. A young Hellenic swain might use the word in a way that the apostle never intended, “S’agapo” can mean “I love you.” If you assume that word meanings remain the same, you are going to have problems.

“I want to know what the word meant at the time of Christ!” Scholars argue endlessly about the topic, but the soft spoken Bavarian in Rome, who is actually a very accomplished scholar, has the right and the duty to tell us what it means. This is what it always meant. This is what it will always mean, though the words may change. I have known people who search for scholars and pastors who will let them marry their eighth wife because that scholar or pastor has found a new meaning for an ancient word. You can choose the scholar or the preacher or the snake oil salesman who agrees with you. I will take the quiet, white-haired Bavarian who sits on the throne of Peter.

Remember, Jesus said “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear.” Jn 6:12 and that “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” Jn 21:25 These words and deeds were entrusted to St. Peter and his successors, and despite their many human weaknesses and even sins, they have passed down the faith unchanged from the very first century of Christianity.

So, Principle #7:

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO INTERPRET SCRIPTURE WITHOUT TRADITION

Next Week:

FAMILY FEUD; PETER,PAUL AND JAMES

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible -- part 6

“TRADITION! (Cue the sound of klezmer music, as in Fiddler on the Roof ) TRADITION!”

So, the question becomes, “If the Bible is not a self interpreting book, but a library full of poetry and history and a host of other literary forms, how do we know what it’s really saying?” The answer: Tradition!

Tradition is a dirty word among some Christians. They quote texts like “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition..... rather than on Christ.” (Col 2:8), or Mark 7:3 “For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, don't eat unless they wash their hands, holding to the tradition of the elders.” They never seem to quote passages like, 2 Thess. 2:15 “Hold on to the traditions which you have been taught,” and 2Thess 3:6 “Keep away from every brother that behaves in a disorderly way and not after the tradition which he received from us.”

St. Paul seems to differentiate between human tradition and the tradition that he had received in his instruction in the faith. Remember that he had not been an eyewitness to the ministry of Jesus, but was in that sense, a second generation Christian. He received a tradition given him by the first disciples of the Lord.

Perhaps you have read that Paul was taught directly by Christ, as Galatians 1:12 would seem to indicate. “For I neither received it of man neither was I taught it but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.” If you look closely at the passage, St. Paul is saying that he received good news, (the Gospel) and this Gospel is very simple: “We have been reconciled to God by the physical death of Jesus the Messiah!” (Colossians 1:22-23) Paul received amazing mystical revelations it seems, but he also got to know Peter. Cf. Galatians 1:18 “Then after three years I (Paul) went up to Jerusalem to see Peter and stayed with him fifteen days.”

The word “see” in the text is an interesting one. In Greek it is “historesai” from which our word “history” comes. Its primary meaning is “to inquire.” In other words, he went to learn a few things from Peter. He may have received the good news of redemption on the Damascus road, but he was humble enough to want to know what Peter had to say. What he received from the Lord seems to have included the idea of the Eucharist which he handed on to the Corinthians. (1 Cor 11:23) “For I have received from the Lord that which also I handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus the same night on which he was betrayed took bread.....” The very word “hand on” is the verb form of the noun “paradosis” “tradition.”

Since the first days of the Church we have believed that just as God instructed Moses and the elders of Israel with an oral tradition, (which became the Mishnah), so too, Jesus instructed His disciples in the meaning of what He had said and made them the guardians of the correct meaning of His words. The Catholic concept of sacred tradition simply means that the Church, in particular, the pope and bishops, guarantee that there are no novel interpretations of what Jesus said and did. We don’t add to the Scriptures, we just guard the consistent and universal explanation of what these things mean. Here is an example:

The word “epiousion” is almost impossible to translate. It appears in the phrase usually accepted as “daily bread” but we aren’t quite sure what the word actually means. For almost 2,000 years there has been no other known example of the use of the word other than it’s one time use in the Our Father. It appears no where else in all of ancient Greek literature, only in the Our Father. People get very mystical over it, deciding it must have been a very unique and theologically significant word. I suspect that the opposite is true. Copyists preserve fancy stuff like Cicero or Shakespeare. It may be that it appears no where else because it is such a common word, like "ain't it" or "gotcha!"

In the twentieth century, an archaeologist claimed that he had found the word in a 5th century AD shopping list found in ancient Egyptian garbage dump. The word is written next to the names of several grocery items. It had the sense of "enough for today," or “necessary.” The shopping list is now at the Yale Beinecke Library, but it seems that the word epiousion isn’t there, so we are back to the problem of having no other example of the word. (My personal suspicion is that this particular scholar, like many scholars I have known, couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. He probably put the scrap with epiousion in his right coat pocket instead of his left pocket and it ended up on the floor of some Cairo laundry).

Back to “epiousion.” Epiousion derives from Epi and Ousia which mean “Upon” and “Essence” (sort of? The word doesn’t appear in the form ousion as far as I can tell) So, how can we possibly understand what we are saying in the “Our Father” if there is no other reference to the word we normally assume to mean “daily”????

Well, you are just going to have to wait for next week to find out!

(To be continued......)