A reflection on priestly life -- part 10

Letter to Ann T. Clerikuhl continued. (I guess I’m still whining, but now I’m whining about evangelism and our lack of it.)

You may well ask, “If this stuff is so great, why didn’t we Catholics used to talk this way?”  Catholics don’t “get saved.”  They don’t “accept Jesus as their personal Lord and savior.”  They don’t have altar calls, they don’t have revivals and above all, lay people, the rank and file doesn’t pray spontaneously with other people. Clergy don’t even pray like that. You might say an “Our Father” or for the really fanatical, you might say a Rosary, but praying with someone to “meet Jesus”?  Unheard of! Impossible! My interior should stay right where it is: inside! That’s why it’s called interior. Religion is best left to the professionals. Let the clergy do the praying.  My job as a layman is to go to Mass, shell out the bucks and keep my nose clean. Now you want me to hold someone’s hand, tell them to close their eyes and ask Jesus into their hearts. If someone did that to me I would suspect they were thinking about picking my pocket. No, sir! When I want religion I go to a professional and when I go to Mass I sit in the back pew because I am not worthy and proud of it!

Alright, I’ll admit we didn’t talk this way years ago, we didn’t have to. We lived in a world where we couldn’t help but meet the Lord. He lived down the street from us in the big house with the steeple. We went to Catholic schools where we were taught by nuns, some of whom actually had an intense faith. Our two parents, one male, one female, taught us to pray and took us to Mass. To see my parents pray quietly after Communion was to see someone who was talking to the Lord. We absorbed Him from our very environment.

Now, Communion is a chaotic melee as we get ready for the after-Communion liturgical dance, the speaker who wants to shake down the congregation for a worthy cause or the Communion class singing a “meditation song” that is sweet enough to give you diabetes. Kids don’t get the chance to watch their parents or anyone else in prayer. The only thing kids can absorb in church these days is a strong desire for donuts and coffee. The idea of lingering in church to pray after Mass is unthinkable. All the best donuts will be gone!

I was saved by watching my parents pray. Kids in this present age of the Church rarely have this experience.
The dear nuns reinforced this sense of the presence of the Lord, but at the same time as they encouraged us to have a strong spiritual life, they warned us never to talk about it, because that would be spiritual pride, and that would cancel out all the grace we had just gotten from prayer. Grace was sort of like points in a video game that you could lose instantly with one false move.

If as a kid you actually prayed, you never talked about it for two reasons: you were afraid that because of spiritual pride you would wake up one day roasting in hell because you had committed the sin of PRESUMPTION!!! And there was a yet more dreadful fate! You kept your mouth closed about your spiritual life because if you seemed excessively pious, they might just ship you off to a convent or seminary at the age of 13 just when those formerly yucky members of the opposite gender were beginning to get interesting.

It was just best to leave the whole religious thing to the clergy and to those rather strange children who demonstrated an unhealthy interest in religion and were obviously destined to waste their life in a convent or rectory. In the good old days you were a Catholic or some other flavor of Christian because everyone else was, not because you’d had an experience that convinced you this stuff was real. Of course it was real. Everybody said it was real. Hollywood made movies about it and the president of the USA said it was real.

Have you looked out the window recently? Things have changed. The important people in the world, Hollywood stars and the politicians who idolize them are no longer saying this stuff is real. Most of them are saying it’s all a bunch of hooey. Your kids don’t believe for precisely the same reason you did believe. Everybody says it’s NOT real. What evidence do they have to the contrary? Have they met the Lord? Have they heard the Gospel? Have they witnessed a miracle? They may have seen a lot of liturgical dances and learned some really zingy new hymns, but those get old fairly fast. Real miracles, the Gospel and above all a sense of the presence of Christ never get old. We are giving them theater and thinking that somehow showbiz religion will save them. It ain’t working.

In the old days when they dragged you to church as a little kid, you had a little kid’s openness to truth. That was before your brains had turned to concrete and you lost a sense of wonder and awe. The stained glass windows, the strange rituals, the music, watching your parents kneeling with heads bowed and eyes closed. It was special. Now not much goes on in a Catholic Church that couldn’t happen in your basement entertainment center or in a theater near you, that is if you don’t count the miracle of transubstantiation. We need a new strategy if we believe the Church and the Gospel are worth the effort.

In the 1960’s there was this big convention that a lot of bishops went to. I think it was called the Ecumenical Council, or just Vatican Two. It was odd as far as councils go. It wasn’t a response to a heresy or anything like that. It didn’t produce any new Church teaching as such. It didn’t change the liturgy very much. That came later. It was about the role of the laity in the work of the Gospel.  It seemed to be saying that the people of God, clergy and laity together, are the Church.

When people heard that, they decided it meant everybody in the Church is the same. I remember a truly blasphemous comedy song written in the style of rag time tune that mocked the Church and the Council. One of its lines went, “Everybody say his own Kyrie Eleison, doin’ the Vatican rag.” And “Say whatever prayers you want if / you have cleared it with the pontiff.”  The attitude after the Council was “Anything goes.” We have not recovered to this day.

We may all be equal in God’s eyes, but we most certainly aren’t the same.  We all have our jobs to do in the Body of Christ. Eucharistic ministers are a good case in point.  A priest I know suddenly had a surplus of priests and deacons in his parish. They all were happy to help distribute Holy Communion. This meant that lay extraordinary ministers of communion were less necessary.

This drove one of the extraordinary ministers to a near crisis of faith. She railed at the pastor, “You’ve ruined my ministry! This was the only thing I could do and now you’ve taken it away!”

To which he responded, “Why don’t you visit the sick or help with religion classes?”

She had failed to notice that part of her title was EXTRAORDINARY minister. The priest and the deacon are the ordinary ministers.  She served the Lord just by being available to help. Her ordinary ministry is the one thing that belongs to all lay people, to make Christ present in the home and the workplace, to join in the spiritual and physical works of mercy. The aggrieved minister had lost her moment to shine, not the opportunity to serve. This sort of thing is a clear example of the misinterpretation of the Council.

The Council didn’t teach that the laity were to do the work of the priest. The Council taught that the priest should stop doing the work of the laity. I had another good example of the misunderstanding of the Council when some parishioners wanted to start a Charismatic prayer meeting. It was an obvious thing to do. I am, in effect, one of the founding fathers of the Charismatic Renewal, though I heartily dislike the name “Charismatic”. I prefer to call myself a Pentecostal Catholic as we did at first because Pentecostalism is a spirituality of conversion, not a movement.

It seemed absolutely natural to have a prayer group here. It was a colossal failure. Few of the lay members of the group took responsibility. If they had something better to occupy their time on Sunday afternoon, they were no-shows. Father had to be there. If Father couldn’t come, we had to cancel the meeting. Father set up the chairs, made the coffee, played the guitar, gave the teaching, prayed with people after the meeting, turned off the lights and locked up the hall, all this after having said two or three Masses. The prayer group was not a calling for anyone but the priest. For the others it was an optional entertainment. It was the post Vatican II Church in miniature. The only person who now has a Sunday obligation is the priest. For everyone else there is a Sunday option.

Clericalism is alive and well, not among the clergy, but among the laity. All those people who are unhappy with the Vatican Council are quite mistaken. The Vatican Council has gone unimplemented. The laity who now dominate the liturgy offices and the parish councils assume that they are supposed to tell the priest how to do his job. The Council was really about getting the laity to do their job, not to tell the priest how to do his, or worse to do the priests’ job themselves. Where the laity doesn’t learn how to share the good news, the Church will invariably die.

The Church is currently growing by leaps and bounds. Conversions, vocations to the priesthood and traditional religious orders are up. The Church is flourishing in places like Africa, Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and the rest of Asia. In Europe and North America, the great consumerist societies, the Church is evaporating, but even there, those Catholics who can share the beauty of the Gospel without hesitation are creating dynamic enclaves of Catholic faith.

Next week: What is the job of the priest?

What do you have to say about Bishop Olson? part 2

Continued from last week

There is a great deal of talk about the Tridentine Mass and the ordinary form, but the Mass envisioned by the Council is not what is being offered in most churches today. The Mass of the liturgical movement, or perhaps we should call it the Mass of Rembert Weakland, is said everywhere and people think it is the Mass of the Council.

Liturgical dancers wearing little more than loin cloths and feathers were never envisioned by the Council Fathers. The theatrical presentation that passes for the Holy Sacrifice more resembles something envisioned by Calvin and Luther. It tends to be a show, not a sacrifice. It is directed at the people, it is improvised not according to local custom, but according to the whim of the celebrant, or of the parish liturgy committee whom he dare not contradict.

Herein lies the heart of the problem. When the liturgists presented their new Mass to Paul VI, he refused to approve it because they had removed the word “sacrifice” from the Mass. Paul insisted that the Mass was, is and always will be a sacrifice. It is not an entertainment or even a classroom presentation. It is not an improvisation. It is a sacrifice in which we are joined to the one sacrifice of Christ on Calvary.  It is a liturgical abuse to use the Mass to express an opinion, to make a political or theological point, or to express the aesthetic tastes of the celebrant or the congregation. If I am correct in this, then the Church is rife with liturgical abuse — this includes everything from the most punctilious version of the extraordinary form to the gyrations of the most diaphanously festooned liturgical dancers. When Mass is a show, it is wrong, no matter the nature of the show. Mass is meant to be a sacrifice.

My suspicion, and it is only that, is that Bishop Olson limited the use of the Mass of St. Pius V, the so-called Tridentine Mass, because it was being used to make a point, the point being the old Mass is somehow superior to the Mass offered elsewhere. It is my contention that the Mass of Paul VI and the Mass of St. Pius V are equally pleasing to God. Even the Mass of Rembert Weakland, if offered sincerely, is pleasing to God. (I must admit that the Weakland Mass seems designed to be an entertainment. Its designer was quite a performer. If you visit the cathedral he redesigned, the altar has been replaced with a huge organ. Rembert was, after all, an organist.) Still, even a Mass like the Mass of Rembert Weakland, designed to display the talents of performers, can be pleasing to God if one has a sincere desire to give his life to Christ.

All this to explain why I offer the Mass of St. Pius V only once a month? I offer it not because I like it, nor because it is better, but because I believe every priest should be required to say the Mass of St. Pius occasionally to remind himself that the liturgy is not his property. The Mass of Pius V allows no improvisation because improvisation is the enemy of liturgy. Adaptation to local custom is fine, but individualistic improvisation is the exact opposite of liturgy. Liturgy is a Greek word (of course) that means “the work of the people.” When I was a lad in seminary that definition was the pretext for using coffee and bagels at the Mass instead of bread and wine. After all, Americans had coffee and bagels for breakfast, so if the Mass was the work of the people, why not coffee and bagels?

The liturgy is most definitely the work of the people. The question is, “What people?” The liturgy is the work of the people of God in every county and every age. The liturgy ties us to all those who ever loved the Lord, not just to the people around us with whom we happen to agree. The Mass should be identifiable to all those who belong to the Lord. 

A first century Christian, or a 12^th century Christian, or a 19^th century Christian, or a Christian from Kathmandu should be able to walk into a church in the twenty-first century and be able to say “Oh, this is Mass!” That’s why we use Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew and even some Latin in the Mass. These words taken from foreign languages tie us to our history and recognize the communion of saints in all places and all times. Amen, Kyrie, Hosanna, Alleluia, Sanctus are all borrowed from our history and the history of the Temple in Jerusalem and even from the wandering of Israel in the desert. The Mass of Rembert Weakland is such a radical departure from the tradition that even twentieth century people don’t recognize its variations.

When I was pastor of a parish that did not allow me to say the main Mass because I was too traditional(and they had their own priest anyway) a fellow who wanted to return to the Lord, started attending. He stumbled into one of the other Masses by accident, one that I was saying, and was shocked to realize that he was in a Catholic church. He had been coming to the “progressive” Mass for over a month and had no idea that he was in a Catholic church.  Could a Christian from another time enter a service where fat men in tight white pants and giant paper maché puppet heads were dancing around and say, “Oh, this is Mass?”  The celebration of the Old Mass, so-called, is a reminder to us, the clergy, that Mass is not about the celebrant. This is a message that all deacons, priests and bishops need to hear regularly, especially the writer of this article. I offer the old Mass once a month to remind me and my congregation the beauty and dignity of the Sacrifice of the Mass.

I do not offer it more than once a month because I don’t want to create a second parish of “real Catholics.” Allow me to be frank. I have met a few aficionados of the Old Mass who are mean as junk yard dogs. I recall a Tridentine Mass during which a parishioner who had never been to the Old Mass wanted to see what it was like. She was following along on her smart phone. Across the main aisle from her was a true believer who started to yell at her during my sermon. You don’t sneeze loudly at the Old Mass. No one talks except the priest and the servers and then only in Latin. No one! This true believer was yelling across the aisle in a roar that she believed was a whisper. I actually had to come down from the altar to quiet her. This is NEVER done at the Old Mass. You never leave the altar except for a prescribed gesture. By communion time the true believer was roaring again. After Mass I apologized to the victim of the tirade and tried to explain to the true believer that the object of her sanctified rage was only following the Missal on her smart phone. The true believer started yelling again, “I don’t care! It’s a sin! It’s electronic!” So much for pleasing God.

I usually avoid Masses that are associated with big events. I detest the way that Mass is abused by liturgists, charismatics and some musicians. And remember, I am one of the founders of the Charismatic Renewal. They all start with good intentions but generally end up with a bout of narcissism. I remember a grand liturgy at which there were not one, but two, yes two choirs, one in the choir loft and one on the ground floor! A veritable battle of the bands! After the show — I mean the Mass — the breathless choir director ran up to me and asked, “How did you like the music?” I said, “It was really great. I hope God enjoyed it as much as I did.” 

Now to skewer the other end of the spectrum. I love Mozart. Few things lift the soul to God like the Ave Verum, but I’ve seen Mozart used as the tool of liturgical abuse. I remember a grand Tridentine Mass with a full orchestra that performed, and I do mean performed, Mozart’s Requiem on All Souls Day at a church not far from my own. All the Mozart aficionados left after the Sanctus, because apparently Mozart never completed the Mass and they will not stoop to listen to the parts not written by him. They were there for the show. Another big Mozart Tridentine Mass ended with a presentation of a big novelty check to the pastor by the organization that had footed the bill. There he stood in the sanctuary dressed like the Infant of Prague, biretta et al., smiling for the cameras.

So we have three variations of the Mass in the Latin rite currently. My contention is that they are all three quite valid and quite licit, provided the Mass of the liturgical movement doesn’t depart from things permitted in the Missal of Paul VI. Prayer is the lifting of the heart and mind to God. If Gregorian chant lifts your heart and mind to God, good. If Gospel music does it, fine. If Latin is a better way for you to pray, excellent. Myself, despite having taught Latin for 25 years, after having studied it for twelve, I still prefer to pray in English which is my first language.

Tolerance and empathy are very rare things in our time. Most people who would call themselves liberal are as rigid as the traditionalists to whom they would deny the Old Mass. The Traditionalists are centered on their own opinion and their own liturgical tastes as the liberals whom they detest. Some of us prefer roses to daisies. If daisies are my favorite flower and I offer them to my beloved, they’re the gift of my heart, and my beloved knows that. If you however prefer roses, then offer roses to your believed, but don’t disdain my daisies. Roses are not better nor are they worse than daisies; nor are daisies better than roses, if they are an offering of the heart. Just remember that the flowers are to be given for the enjoyment of the Beloved, not kept for our own selfish pleasures.

And Bishop Olson, if these thoughts come to your attention, hang in there. You are in my prayers. Don’t let them keep you from laughing. The devil hates good honest laughter. Isn’t it curious how little the very progressive and the very traditional laugh?

Your Old Latin Teacher,

The Rev. Know-it-all

P.S. A careful reading of Article 5 §1 of Summorum Pontificum says that the Tridentine mass should be offered, “In parishes where there is a stable group of faithful who adhere to the earlier liturgical tradition... (and the practice) of these faithful harmonizes with the ordinary pastoral care of the parish, under the guidance of the bishop in accordance with canon 392, avoiding discord and favoring the unity of the whole Church.” The Old Mass should be offered. It also says that any priest may say this Mass without special permission.  Fisher-Moore College is not a parish, and one suspects that they aren’t much worried about harmony.

P.P.S. If the Traditionalist crowd, of whom I am pretty much a card carrying member, wants the old Mass to make a comeback, they should request permission to use more English in the Extraordinary form so that anyone can follow it. A lot of young people are looking for dignity and beauty in the age of Miley Cyrus. They will never fall in love with a liturgy that needs a graduate degree to understand. “Latin is a language as dead as it can be. First it killed the Romans and now it’s killing me.” And this from an aging classicist!

P.P.P.S. Let’s dump this Ordinary/Extraordinary nonsense. The Mass said for five hundred years is not un-ordinary and a Mass with people in giant paper mache heads or loin clothes, feathers and clown costumes is ordinary only in a mental asylum. 

   

What do you have to say about Bishop Olson?

Dear Reverend Know-it-all,

I was wondering what you thought about the smack-down administered to Fisher-More College in Dallas by the new Bishop Olson who has forbidden them to have the Latin Mass? Hasn’t He read Summorum Pontificum which gave us the right to have the Latin mass?

Yours,

Ivanna K. Vetch

Dear Ivanna,

Odd you should ask me about Bishop Olson and the Latin Mass. I was his Latin teacher.  I know Bishop Olson fairly well and love him very much. He is a very smart and a very strong man. When I think of Bishop Olson, I hear laughter, full-throated, joyful laughter. I can’t remember a time that we saw each other and did not start laughing immediately. When I think of Bishop Olson, I think first of joy, but there is another word that better describes Bishop Olson. He is pious.

Piety is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. The pious man has a profound respect for God and His Church. It is Bishop Olson’s signal gift, beyond even his joy, his wisdom and his fortitude. In our times, piety is a much neglected virtue. These days, to say someone is pious can be an insult. It implies a dour and reclusive character in the modern mind. The modern mind is crazy, so who cares what it thinks? Bishop Olson was brave enough to be pious when progressive and tolerant sorts wanted to throw him out of the seminary because he prayed too much. Those were terrible times in the seminary when a young man who went to Mass every day or, heaven forefend, said the Rosary was suspected of excessive and morbid piety. Mike Olson was brave enough to keep saying the Rosary and going to daily Mass. Now he is a bishop. He loves the Lord, the Church, the Blessed Mother, and by the way it was Michael Olson who taught me to love St. Theresa, the Little Flower. Boy, did his devotion to her get him grief! That’s what I have to say about Bishop Michael Olson.

Now a little about me, I taught Latin and classical Greek for 25 years. I say the Latin Mass, not every Sunday, but monthly. It is beautiful. We have a men’s schola, no organ music, just Gregorian chant. I love the Old Mass. I grew up with it. The dignity, the ceremony and the mysticism of it touch me deeply. Why don’t I say it every Sunday? That is complicated.

First of all let’s look at the current state of the liturgy. You can learn my opinions from my other fulminations. Just look up my diatribe “A Brief History of the Hootenanny Massand Other Absurdities.” Here I prefer to take a more sober look at the modern liturgy.

In the Catholic Church, there are currently 13 rites: the Coptic, Ethiopic, Maronite, Syrian, Syro-Malankara, Armenian, Chaldean, Syro-Malabar, Byzantine, Latin, Ambrosian (Milan), Braga (Portugal), Mozarabic, (Spain) and the Anglican Use for former Anglican priests. It is not a rite, but may eventually become one. Within these rites of the Church there are different ways to say Mass. For instance the Chaldean and Byzantine rites have three anaphoras or Eucharistic prayers. In the Syrian rite there are 12 different Eucharistic prayers! They have such colorful names as the Liturgy (Mass) of St. John Chrysostom or the Mass of Theodore of Mopsuestia.

I would venture that we now have a few liturgies in the Latin (Roman) Rite of the Catholic Church. We have the Mass of St. Pius V (Tridentine), the Mass of the Venerable Paul VI, and the Mass of the liturgical movement. After the Council of Trent, Pope St. Pius V authorized the Missal that codified the earlier and sometimes variant practices of the western Church. After the end of the second Vatican Council Pope Paul VI authorized the current Missal. The Mass of the liturgical movement is always thought to be the Mass of Paul VI, but it is really the product of the liturgical movement that got its start in the enlightenment. In Austria, around 1750, there was a political and religious movement called “Josephine” from the name of Emperor Joseph II. The Austrian government tried to take control of the Church to “demystify” the Mass in the spirit of the enlightenment. Contemplative orders were dissolved and their assets taken by the state. Priests became civil servants. This drive to demystify the Church resurfaced around 1850. Even before the Second Vatican Council, the earlier “Josephine” spirit in Austria influenced the new liturgical movement. There was a great scholarly effort to “restore” the Mass to its assumed earlier simplicity. I remember the excitement in the air before the Second Vatican Council.

One of my earliest memories is of attending the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday morning. It was thought of more as the blessing of the Easter Water than the first Mass of Easter. It had been gradually moved forward on Holy Saturday beginning around 700AD so that it eventually became a Holy Saturday morning Mass. It was restored to the ancient use only in 1956. During the whole nineteenth and twentieth century there were reforms and changes that tried to return the liturgy to a more ancient use, among these was the renewal of Gregorian chant. We like to think that Gregorian chant is an unbroken heritage from the earliest Church. It isn’t. Go to you tube and listen to some Old Roman Chant. Gregorian chant was itself a reform of what had gone before. Liturgical adaptation, reform and renewal are continuous in the history of the Church. The change and development of liturgy has been gradual and organic. The Mass of Paul VI was the fruit of this desire for liturgical renewal and simplification.

What happened in the twentieth century turned out to be anything but simple, gradual and organic. It was abrupt. The incorporation of secular popular music into the liturgy had no precedent except for the orchestral, operatic Masses of the enlightenment such as those of Mozart and Haydn. There is a true saying that things aren’t like they used to be, but then again they never were. The unchanging Mass of the Latin Rite has never stopped changing. The Mass of Paul VI, Mass of the Council, was a simplification of the old Roman rite. As it was planned, it was major change but still not an abrupt departure from the Mass that had developed slowly over 2,000 years. When said by the book, it still resembles the Mass of St. Pius V. It still expects that Latin will be used at Mass along with chanted Mass parts, psalms and prayers. Almost no one realizes that the missal of Paul VI expects that the priest face AWAY the congregation for some parts of the Mass. The prayers at the foot of the Altar and the offertory prayers are the biggest changes in the Mass of Paul VI. The Mass said in most churches now little resemble the Mass as said for two thousand years, or even what Paul VI intended. The Mass of Paul VI is said almost nowhere outside St. Peter’s Basilica, and of course my church here in Frostbite Falls, but we do only one Paul VI Mass here, the 8AM. The rest of our Masses are the usual liturgical movement Mass with its hymns, facing the congregation and offered in English.

To be continued

We have lost our minds..

Letter to Mary K. Lastima, the grand finale.

It must seem a little far fetched to you, that somehow the banality with which the liturgy is celebrated by many officiants, the prevalence of abortion and the worship of demonic spirits are somehow all tied together. Perhaps I should throw in space aliens and Bigfoot while I am at it.

I say the Mass of St. Pius V (more commonly called the Tridentine Mass) regularly.  I more often say the Mass of the Venerable Paul VI (commonly called the Ordinary form of the Novus Ordo. I am not opposed to the Mass of Paul VI. I actually love it. It is the Mass that I have mostly said all of my priesthood. My problems are not with the Novus Ordo, so called, but with the outrageous manipulation of the liturgy for personal or political motives. I think of liturgies with giant paper mache heads, old women dancing in flowing skirts and fat men dancing about in tight white pants, or I think of para-liturgies that feature angels roller skating to circus music. I’m not making this up. You can look this stuff up at the following sites.

Liturgical Abuse: Puppets (WCCTA 2008)

And in the next one, the men are not as fat, but they are still wearing white. Why do large liturgical men favor white when black is so slimming?

Novena Solene | Entrada da Bíblia - 3º dia - dia 05 de Outubro

I love the Mass of Paul VI. I remember once reading that the liturgy of the Latin rite is characterized by its simplicity and dignity. One is reminded of that old song, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma.”  Paper Mache dancing heads and fat guys in white pants? Dignity? Simplicity?

Still, I maintain that the simplified Mass of Paul VI offered the way intended is very beautiful. The way we priests have mangled it has lowered our standard of the sacred, with horrifying consequences. The Mass as said in many parishes is a venue for rebellion, not for worship. “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry.” (1Sam. 15:23) I am regularly asked why a priest changes the Mass, or uses his own words or leaves part out while he puts in things that aren’t supposed to be there. It is simple. He is a rebel and “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry.”  Three thousand years ago the prophet Samuel saw a connection between the abuse of liturgy and the demonic. Look it up: First Book of Samuel the 15^th chapter. Saul offered sacrifice which was forbidden to him and for this he lost the crown and his life, as well as the life of his son, Jonathan.

Have you ever read the Book of Wisdom, also called the Wisdom of Solomon? It’s one of those extra Catholic books. You would have read, “…through the envy of the devil came death into the world.” For what, you may ask, is the devil envious of us? He is immortal; he is immeasurably smarter and more powerful than we. This, too, is simple: Angels don’t reproduce, and the devils, who are fallen angels, can only steal our children. God shared something with us that He didn’t share with the angels. We can create something immortal.

God creates the soul, but a man and a woman in their coming together create the body, which is immortal, if Christ’s promise of resurrection is true. Humanity in its art and in its children shares the creativity of God in a way that angels cannot. Therefore, the devil hates art and beauty, for which the Catholic Mass and Catholic churches were the principle venue for a thousand years. The devil has convinced us to swap the amazing music and architecture of Catholicism for ugly buildings and banal music. The simplicity dignity and beauty of the Latin rite, both in the new mass and the old, gives way to the spectacle of the circus. But more than art, the devil hates children. They remind him that “God so loved the world.” In his diabolical envy, he has contrived to create sterile art and sterile marriages. Abortion, artificial birth control, rampant divorce, same sex marriage, on-line and off line pornography. They are the utensils with which the devil devours children and we feed them to him as surely as our forbears threw their children into the fires of the demon-god Moloch, all for the sake of our well being and prosperity.

Why do I lump divorce in with all those other more clearly anti-reproductive activities? Simple: Children need stable homes in which to flourish. Even faithful marriages between men and women who cannot themselves have children strengthen the dignity and reverence in which marriage and the home are held. If the sacredness of the bond between a man and a woman can be cheapened, then children may be born, but in their hearts they usually can’t flourish.

The Latin word sacrament means an oath to the death. We have reduced it to a show, a kind of entertainment, and shamefully this is not just done at the new Mass, but I have seen Tridentine Masses where it is all about the show. The degradation of one sacrament, the breaking of one solemn oath hardens our hearts. We receive the Body and Blood or the Lord without reverence, without “discerning the body” as St. Paul says, and we likewise have no trouble breaking the oath that gives life in the flesh after we have cheapened the oath which gives us life in the spirit.  I cannot fathom how a person can think that the pleasures of what is most certainly an aberrant, use of our bodies, even if it is pleasurable to some, can be compared to the sacred, life-giving secret shared by a husband and wife.

I said earlier, the devil hates good art and the devil hates children, He has tried to teach us that sexual desirability is the ultimate beauty. We go to the gym, the diet clinic and the plastic surgeon to keep ourselves physically desirable. All the while we remain morally and spiritually weak and deformed. We are cheap paintings in expensive frames. We are fifty dollar haircuts on seventy five cent heads. When we mistake the paint, the hair dye and the varnish for beauty, we are fools. True beauty lifts us to God. False beauty fixes our eyes only on our desires. True beauty makes us better. False beauty makes us less. False beauty ties us up in our own needs and fantasies. It fixes our gaze on the filth beneath our feet, not on the stars over our heads.

How can what the modern world calls love ever be compared with that love that brings new life? The disordered desires of the modern marriage movement bring nothing but passing pleasures that are soon devoured by boredom and regret. I know three things that are beautiful: a simple Mass, an old couple and a newborn baby.

A simple Mass simply said, lifts the heart and mind to God. A simple Mass doesn’t entertain. It brings heaven down to earth and earth to heaven in the flesh and blood of the Savior made present on the altar.

The charm of a young couple in love cannot be compared to the beauty of an old man and woman, who after a life of faithfulness walk hand in hand with each other and call each other by names like “sweetheart,” or “Mama” and “Papa”. 

And more beautiful still is that ultimate work of art, fashioned by the Maker of all things in a woman’s sacred womb: a child. Is there anything more wonderful than that little bundle of hope that reminds us of God’s great love? We have trashed the churches and murdered the children, all in the name of progress, freedom and tolerance.

We have lost our minds.

The Rev. Know-it-all

The fruits of Liturgical Chaos

Letter to Mary K. Lastima continued

When last I wrote, I tried to make the farfetched argument that “…liturgical chaos spawned moral chaos which in turn spawned abortion, infanticide and abortive artificial birth control, and you see, the devil hates babies.”

At face value this seems both simplistic and absurd. Allow me to invent my own wacky conspiracy theory. The madness that engulfed the Catholic Mass in the mid-1960s had consequences that went much farther than people realized. The wholesale de-formalization of the Mass changed the way Catholics looked at themselves and the world. When one fifth — give or take — of the world’s population changes its way of thinking, living and praying, that’s huge, and that’s exactly what happened in the 1960s. We Catholics lived in a hierarchical Church until the Mass changed. Hierarchy is of course a bad thing in the eyes of modern people. I recently heard about an interview in which the products of modern American education were astonished that the earth moved around the sun and that President Roosevelt had died. The product of modern education and culture are for the most part as well educated as gravel. Where was I? Oh, yes moderns dislike hierarchy, but they don’t have a clue as to what it means.

It is assumed that hierarchy means chain of command. It doesn’t originally. Hierarchy is a Greek word that means sacred leadership. I know of only two forms of sacred leadership: the bishops of the Catholic Church and the original hierarchy: Mom and Dad. The old Mass embodied hierarchy. The priest went into the holy of holies, the sanctuary and spoke to God. Nothing was given him except through the hands of those ordained. The deacon gave him bread and he offered it to the Lord. The deacon gave him wine and he offered it to the Lord. The people didn’t do much. They responded and prayed along quietly. The priest assisted by deacon and sub-deacon went into the sanctuary to intercede for the community. There were moments when the priest could not be heard. There was no microphone at the altar. It was as if parts of the liturgy said “I’m talking to God, not to you. Mind your own business!” How insultingly un-democratic.

There were times when we could not see or hear what was going on. All we could do was look at the play book i.e. the missal. There was a clarity of roles and everyone knew the drill. It sounds awful to modern ears, but if you’ve ever seen it done it is a fascinating thing to watch, almost like a ballet. The new Mass was designed to be less mysterious, but mystery was not thrown out all together. That came later. I remember the day it happened in my life. I was about 15 or 16 years old. We lived down the street from the church and we were about to have our first home Mass. Until that time a Mass could only be offered in a public place of prayer, for instance a church. Masses were meant to gather the faithful together, and were never thought of as private celebrations. Somehow we thought that private Masses would democratize things. Go figure.

The young cool priest in our parish was coming to our house to celebrate Mass on the dining room table. People kept asking, “Can I come?” We managed to cram 50 plus people in our house and a choir of nuns with guitars. It was well-intentioned chaos. We thought it must have been like the early Church, so informal, so homey. Why we thought that I have no idea. There is no evidence for the assumption that the first Christians celebrated Mass on dining room tables, but it just had to be true.

Needless to say the celebration had all the dignity of a coffee klatch as we slouched around sitting on radiators and folding chairs etc. trying to get a good look at what was going on. I kept thinking maybe we should move it down the street to the church where there was more room. It was great. It was NEW, and in the 1960's NEW was wonderful. We had new and improved shampoo, new and improved cars, new and improved dog food, new and improved antacids and now we had new and improved Masses. It was not long before vestments and rubrics went the way of the dodo. Words were changed and we were consecrating bagels and Ripple. If hierarchy, sacred leadership, was important in old, the new seemed to be neither sacred nor led by anyone. We were desensitized to the need for leadership, sacred or otherwise. This is the same era in which 18 year-olds believing that this indeed was the Age of Aquarius, took to the streets to attack the evils of society. It was the time of the sexual revolution and the drug culture. Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll!  Well, we certainly tore down the walls, but we had nothing with which to replace them. The sexual revolution gave way to epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases and the culture of divorce. The drugs gave way to burnout and worst of all rock n’ roll gave way to disco and polyester pants suits. Talk about societal decline.

This was also the era in which TV sit-coms like “Father Knows Best” gave way to shows that could have been titled “Father Is An Idiot”. The correlation between the demise of the Mass and the demise of fatherhood is not too farfetched. Don’t forget that Catholic Priests were called Father. Priests everywhere stared to shy away from their titles. You might say, “Hello, Father,” only to be met with “Oh, I’m not your Father, just call me Pete.” That was how you showed you were a cool priest — that and wearing blue jeans instead of dreary black. It didn’t mean you were cool. It just meant you weren’t sure what you were doing with your life.

You were no longer a man who was called and ordained to intercede for the people of God in imitation of Christ, so what were you — sort of a life-coach or a Saul Alinsky community organizer?  We were anti-clerical clerics and were supposed to be close to the people. Some of us got close to people in a very unfortunate way and I needn’t go into that. I will just quote an old Lithuanian priest who shook his head when they removed the confession screens. “They’re going to find out pretty quickly why they put in the confessional screens in the first place.”

The world threw out sacred leadership and in the “spirit of Vatican II”, we joined in the party. The TV shows went from “I Remember Mama” and “Father Knows Best” to “Maude,” a show that celebrated divorce and geriatric promiscuity. It was an overnight transition. The Catholic prohibitions against promiscuity, artificial birth control and divorce became laughable. The Catholic prohibitions against abortion and same-sex relationships became crimes against tolerance and are fast becoming crimes against humanity.

What has this to do with human sacrifice?  In Deuteronomy 12:31 we read, “You must not worship the Lord your God in their (the Canaanites’) way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods.”

In our county we worship the twin deities, Freedom and Prosperity. Why do you think babies are snatched from the womb? Either for the sake Freedom or Prosperity.  And what do you think they do with those babies? They are thrown out and from there either go into landfills or into incinerators, just like Jews in the Holocaust.

Burn ‘em or bury ‘em. Just get rid of them. There was a shrine in the Valley of Gehenna called Tophet or the Roasting Place. There was set up an idol of the god Molech. According to the medieval Jewish sage Rashi, “Moloch was an idol made of brass. They heated him from his lower parts and his hands being stretched out, and made hot, they put the child between his hands, and it was burnt; when it vehemently cried out; but the priests beat a drum, that the father might not hear the voice of his son, and his heart might not be moved.” 

The drums beat, the doctor recommends, the paper work is filled out, the insurance pays, so that our hearts might not be moved. The Early Christians as well as the Jews believed that Moloch was no god, but a demon — the very personification of evil. So we seem still to be throwing our children into the fire, or into the landfill. It really makes no difference. It is all for the worship of the gods Prosperity and Freedom.

There is no father to weep for his children, no father to protect his wife, no Father in the pulpit to speak for God, no father in the home to teach his children. We may do as we please because nothing from the liturgy to human life is sacred.

Next week: I’m far from done.

Sex, the Devil and the Second Vatican Council

Sex, the Devil and the Second Vatican Council, Letter to Mary K. Lastima continued:

When last I wrote, Mary Kay, I quoted the Venerable Paul VI’s words: “…from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God. There is doubt, incertitude, problematic, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation.” 

The Venerable Paul goes on to say:

“There was the belief that after the Council there would be a day of sunshine for the history of the Church.  Instead, it is the arrival of a day of clouds, of tempest, of darkness, of research, of uncertainty. We preach ecumenism but we constantly separate ourselves from others. We seek to dig abysses instead of filling them in. How has this come about? The Pope entrusts one of his thoughts to those who are present: that there has been an intervention of an adverse power. Its name is the devil, this mysterious being that the Letter of St. Peter also alludes to. So many times, furthermore, in the Gospel, on the lips of Christ himself, the mention of this enemy of men returns. ....We believe in something that is preternatural that has come into the world precisely to disturb, to suffocate the fruits of the Ecumenical Council, and to impede the Church from breaking into the hymn of joy at having renewed in fullness its awareness of itself.”

The Vatican Council was most certainly inspired by the Holy Spirit, but at least in the estimation of Pope Paul VI, the so called “Spirit of Vatican II" was more like the ghost of Christmas past, or some other specter that goes bump in the night. I remember the craziness well.

I spent many years in a parish of interesting ethnicity. The liturgical music that flourished after the council in the out of the way country whence came my parishioners was mostly in the form of a tango or military march music. I suspect that if the council fathers had heard the tango at communion, they would have ended the council, packed their backs and gone home quickly and quietly. The same parish also had a large Spanish speaking component. Some liturgical genius adapted a 1971 Budweiser beer commercial for Eucharistic use. It was a very catchy melody, “When you say Bud, you’ve said a lot of things nobody else can say....” The banality that afflicted the liturgy immediately following the council was stupefying. From stupefying it went to horrifying. I cannot count the invalid Masses at which I failed to receive communion in my seminary training. From bagels and Mogen David we move on to matzoh and fortified Port and occasionally Coca-Cola. Non-Masses were offered on coffee tables amidst the detritus of college dorm rooms. The modern liturgy crowd has become more sophisticated but no less banal with giant paper mâché head liturgical dancing and circus style enthronements of the Scriptures. This was not what the council was about, but it is what the council means to most people who have never bothered to read the documents.

Can you say “rubric”? I knew you could!  A rubric is a decorative text or instruction in medieval documents that were written in red ink to distinguish them from the text to be read or spoken. They were like medieval parentheses. In the Roman Missal, or Mass Book, the words to be said are in black and the actions to be done are in red, hence “rubrics” as in “ruby red”. Here is a rubric from the Roman Missal: 127.

The priest, turned toward the people, extending and joining his hands, adds: The peace of the Lord be with you always.

There are seven or eight other rubrics like it. In other words the Roman Missal currently in use assumes that the priest is facing away from the congregation in certain parts of the Mass.

“No, that can’t be! The council directed that the Mass be said facing the people.” 

No, it didn’t. The thespian interests and preferences of people like Rembert Weakland dictated that the Mass be radically different. When people are suddenly and completely yanked away from what they have known for a lifetime, they are much more malleable, much more controllable. To alienate people from the things with which they are comfortable is a kind of “grooming behavior”. If you want to manipulate someone it is helpful to take away their sources of stability. For purposes of their own, Rembert Weakland and a few others alienated as much of the church as they could from the kind of liturgy that had sustained the culture and morality of Catholicism for more than a thousand years.

The Mass of Paul VI is a simple and elegant adaptation of the Catholic liturgy. It was not meant to look that different from the Mass of the 20 preceding centuries. It was meant to be more approachable and more easily understood by the faithful. The aberrant way in which the Mass came to be said by a group of people who seemed to hate their history was taken to be the dictate of the council, and as the Mass changed, so too did the sense of obedience and morality that are the hallmarks of Catholic faith. Just after the Vatican Council, Tom Lehrer, a Harvard math teacher and comedian wrote a song called “Vatican Rag”, using the melody of an old ragtime tune, “Spaghetti Rag”. Here are some of the words of Mr. Lehrer’s song:

First you get down on your knees, 

Fiddle with your rosaries,

Bow your head with great respect,

And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want, if

you have cleared them with the Pontiff.

Everybody say his own Kyrie Eleison,

Doin' the Vatican Rag.

“Everybody say his own Kyrie Eleison.” That pretty much summed up the heady days following the Council. If a priest could make up his own Mass, the faithful could certainly make up their own rules, and when in 1968 Paul VI published Humanae Vitae reaffirming Church opposition to artificial birth control, the faithful, led by the clergy just laughed at him. Paul VI warned us of the consequences of widespread artificial birth control:

1.         A general lowering of moral standards throughout society;

2.         A rise in infidelity;

3.         A lessening of respect for women by men; and

4.         Tthe coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.

It seems that the Venerable Paul was a prophet. Just ask the Chinese who need government permission to have a child. The European era seems to be drawing to a close. Europeans and their colonial relatives have a reproduction rate of about 1.60 children per woman. The rate needed to insure the existence of a nation or people is 2.1. Catholics in Latin America, Asia and Africa are still having children, and in the words of the historian Will Durant, the fertile will inherit the earth. Europe laughed at Paul VI and now can’t find enough children to sustain its own economy, or even existence for that matter. The misinterpretation of the Second Vatican Council has been profoundly demonic in its effects.

Yes, demonic.

Liturgical chaos spawned moral chaos, which in turn spawned abortion, infanticide and abortive artificial birth control, and — you see — the devil hates babies.

Next week: Human sacrifice makes a comeback 

Can my pastor turn his back to me?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

My piece-of-work, hare-brained pastor has done it again. He is now celebrating the first Mass of Sunday facing the wall. There is already some Latin sung at the Mass, and he allows people to receive communion kneeling. Now this! Doesn’t he know that the Vatican Council did away with Latin at Mass and kneeling for communion and facing the wall? Is he trying to drag us back to the dark ages?  My parents built this church and now he is changing my Mass, the Mass I have always gone to. How dare he turn his back on us! What are we? Chopped liver?

Yours,

Patty D. Maison

Dear Patty,

It is clear to me that you are an enlightened progressive person, who will not tolerate intolerance. I can see that you want nothing but the best for God’s Church and you will not allow people to slip back into former modes of prayer from the dark days when the churches were full and confessional lines long. It is clear that you feel it your duty as an enlightened person to make sure that everyone does what you think is right. Bravo!

I fear however that you may be mistaken about a few things. Before launching into a few slight corrections, I urge you to be flexible with your old pastor. He is probably an aging hippy who read Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book one too many times, particularly the line “Let a thousand flowers bloom....”  You said that he allows people to kneel for communion. Does he force them to kneel, or does he let them make up their own mind about the matter?  He has brought back Latin, or is there Latin at all the Masses? It is curious that you say it is your Mass. Are there other people at the Mass, or are you the only person in attendance?  The Mass I would think belongs to the Lord and the Church Universal. If you don’t benefit from his antique style at the early Mass, you might go to one of the Masses that is more to your personal taste. It doesn’t sound like he has forced this foolishness on all the Masses, just the earliest one on Sunday.

As for the Vatican Council ending kneeling for Communion, that is not quite true. As far as I can find, the first incident of standing for Communion had nothing to do with the council. It was something used at a liturgical convention in Seattle in 1962. The reason given for the change was that it would speed things up, a deeply spiritual reason if ever there was one, I’m sure.

And as for the Vatican Council taking Latin out of the mass, it just isn’t so. Surprisingly, the Vatican Council foresaw a limited use of the common modern tongue at mass for pastoral reasons, but intended the Latin rite Mass to continue in Latin. The Council said that “. . . the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites.”(Sacrosanctum Concilium, #36; December 4, 1963)

The council never mandated that the priest face the people at the liturgy. Altars were to be moved out from the wall, making it possible to walk around them, but I have never been able to find the document that says the whole liturgy must be offered facing the congregation.

Still more shocking, the newest Roman Missal assumes that the celebrant is facing away from the people for large sections of the Novus Ordo, or Ordinary Form of the Mass. In the Missal there are black letters and red letters. The red letters are called rubrics, form the Latin word for red. The black letters are what the celebrant is supposed to say, the red letters indicate what the celebrant is supposed to do. In the 3^rd Roman Missal the rubrics indicate that the celebrant must face the people only seven times, as far as I can tell. Here are the citations from the missal. You can look ‘em up if you don’t believe me.

1.      When the people are gathered, the Priest approaches the altar.....venerates the altar with a kiss... then... with the ministers, he goes to the chair. When the Entrance Chant is concluded, the Priest and the faithful, standing, sign themselves with the Sign of the Cross, while the Priest, facing the people, says: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  (The rubrics  seem to imply that the greeting and the penance rite are said facing the people, since they are addressed to the people, not to the Lord and thus are included in the rubric indicating that the celebrant face the people at this point in the Mass.)

29. Standing at the middle of the altar, facing the people, extending and then joining his hands, he says: “Pray, brethren...”  (The end of the offertory)

127. The Priest, turned towards the people, extending and then joining his hands, adds: “The peace of the Lord be with you always...” (The sign of peace)

132. The Priest genuflects, takes the host and, holding it slightly raised above the paten or above the chalice, while facing the people, says aloud: “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb...”

139. Then, standing at the altar or at the chair and facing the people, with hands joined, the priest says “Let us pray...” (The final prayer)

141 Then the dismissal takes place. The Priest, facing the people and extending his hands, says: “The Lord be with you...”  (The blessing)

144.  Then the Deacon, or the Priest himself, with hands joined and facing the people, says “Go forth the Mass is ended.”

The part of this that I find most interesting is not just that the priest may face away from the congregation, but that it seems expected. Still more interesting is that almost no one except the Pope Emeritus and a few curmudgeons like your pastor seem to notice or follow what seems to be clearly implied in the rubrics. Go figure. 

Why no one seems to notice, much less follow the rubrics is completely beyond me. I suppose that’s because no one actually reads the rubrics. They assume these things were mandated by the council and are demanded by the rules. You know what they say about the word “assume.” “To assume makes a beast of burden out of you and me.”

I suppose that it is allowed to say Mass facing the people, but it seems odd when you think about it. The rubrics seem to indicate that when the priest is speaking to the people, he faces the people. When he is leading them in prayer, standing in for Christ, he faces the Lord, with the people. This makes sense. It isn’t as earth shattering as it first appears. The priest faces the people these seven times and while he is seated in the presider’s chair. In the average mass of 50 minutes, using the 2^nd Canon and including a homily, the priest faces away from the people for all of 10 minutes maximum.

In the old days there were quite a few mortal sins that a priest could commit while saying Mass if he willingly altered the structure of the Mass. It used to seem absurd to me that the rubrics were that important. I have had my mind changed in my old age. After seeing enough clergy skipping down the aisles distributing Easter eggs, or wearing clown makeup or dressed as Barney the Purple Dinosaur, I understand that the prohibitions were aimed at clerical narcissism. They were not simply medieval taboos.

You said that the 8 am Mass was your Mass. I understand what you mean. It is your custom. However a priest who decides that the Liturgy of the Church is “his” to play with as he pleases does commit a very grave sin. The Mass is unfortunately a wonderful stage for those who fancy themselves actors. The Mass is no one’s property except the Lord’s and the celebrant is nothing more than the servant of the Lord and of His bride, the Church. To personalize the Mass excessively is to take what belongs to the Lord for one own self expression and even aggrandizement. Perhaps it is a good thing that the priest occasionally turns to the Lord with the people whose servant he is and of whom he is just a part by virtue of his Baptism. Perhaps by turning away from the people and facing the Lord with them, the celebrant will remember that he is not the center of the Mass. It is the Lord who is the object of adoration as Pope Francis has reminded us.

Who is in charge when there is no pope? Epilogue

Letter to Sue Quetta, epilogue)

It has been pointed out to me, by people who are paying entirely too much attention, that I promised to explain the Defenestration of Prague but have not yet done so. Remember that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Still, for the sake of the curious I will explain the incident.

There were not one but two Defenestration’s of Prague! The First Defenestration occurred on July 30, 1419. During a religious procession, an angry mob of Hussites (followers of Father Jan Huss, a precursor to Luther and Calvin) stormed the town hall of Prague where they threw a judge, the burgomaster, and thirteen members of the town council out of the window to the pavement below where they were killed by the fall or by the mob of devout religious reformers.

The second Defenestration was the result of the election of Ferdinand of Styria as King of Bohemia. The Protestant Bohemians wanted nothing to do with this devoutly Catholic monarch.  So, when he sent two Catholic representatives to Prague in 1618, the Protestants, in a kind of reminiscence of the good old days, pitched the ambassadors out the castle window (a height of about five or six stories). Amazingly they lived! The Catholics said that angels had softened their fall, thanks to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Protestants said that it was dumb luck that they landed on a pile of manure in the castle courtyard. Are the stories not irreconcilable? After all, grace builds on nature. No matter the reason, the angry Protestants failed to kill the ambassadors of the new Crown Prince Ferdinand, (soon also to be Holy Roman Emperor). They lived, but a lot of other people didn’t. 

The fight soon spread to all of Europe and killed an uncountable number of people. Half of the male population of Germany died, and at least a third of the general German population, perhaps a million people. During the mayhem the Catholic villages of my maternal and paternal families were burned to the ground by the Protestant Elector, the Duke Christian of Braunschweig, home of the yummy delicacy usually called liverwurst. Perhaps that is why, as a boy, I often ate fried liverwurst, much loved in our household. Anyway, Duke Christian certainly fried a number of my ancestors.  The wars of religion raged for thirty years in central Europe, from 1618 to 1648. Simultaneously, the Huguenot and Puritan Wars ravaged France, England, and particularly Ireland, killing thousands possibly millions more. All because a couple of guys got tossed out the window in Prague. Who knew?

It is interesting to think that in the oppressive Catholic lands of Italy and Spain, dominated by medieval superstition and the terrors of the Inquisition, not a single person died as a result of the wars of religion.  In Germany, it may have been one million. In Ireland, it was about 600,000. In France, the Catholics got the upper hand and, rather than slaughter all the Protestants, they forced them to convert or leave. So, I suspect that the French death toll was less than 100,000.  The total death toll of the wars of religion was certainly more than two million. 

The wars finally ended in the German states in 1648 with the peace of Westphalia. Each prince would have the right to determine the religion of those under his authority. This is called “cuius regio, eius religio” (His region, His religion). In other words, “If you live in the town or land I own, you will practice my religion,” said the duke, the count, the baron etc. The principle of freedom of religion ended in Europe with the peace of Westphalia. And the end of religious freedom meant the end of religious conversion which has ultimately resulted in the end of Christian religion in much of Europe. Religious affiliation was no longer a matter of choice, but of good citizenship.  Now it is non existent in many places.

It is easy to find pundits who rail against the Inquisition, but who rails against the disorder and death that resulted from simple and grandly defiant gestures like Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church or the glorious Defenestrations of Prague? These appeal to us as heroic defiance in the defense of liberty. They in fact initiated a new form of government enforced religion and resulted in far more death and oppression than the Inquisition ever could have.  Still, we Americans and our modern imitators love the grand gesture.

I cannot get over the scathing criticism of Pope Benedict’s red shoes. The rumor went out that they were by Prada or Gucci! They were in fact made by a Peruvian shoemaker, by the name of Antonio Arellano, who has a small shop in the neighborhood of the Vatican. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger used to have his old shoes repaired there. When he got a new gig as pope, he revived the custom of the red papal shoes, red being the color worn by popes before the white cassock. He simply steered a little business Antonio’s way. Benedict tried to restore the unity of Catholic history which he called the hermeneutic of continuity. He wanted to remind the world that there had been a Catholic Church long before the Second Vatican Council. The Church grows. It doesn’t change. Its expression is ever new. Although the appearance is different, the truth is eternal. The DNA is always the same, to use a modern analogy.

The world clucked its tongue led by the American media. We Americans felt so vastly superior to the luxury loving pope with the flashy shoes because we buy our shoes at cheap outlet stores, thus being somehow simpler and more noble. Look a little more closely at the red shoes. When his shoes were still black, Joe Ratzinger had his old shoes repaired by an immigrant cobbler. He made them last a little longer. We throw old shoes out and buy new.  When he needed new shoes, decent shoes for a demanding job, he paid about $200 to a worker he knew, a just wage for a decent product. We, in our simplicity, go to the mall and buy $300 sneakers made by slave laborers who get pennies on the dollar if they get anything at all. And we are superior? We are more moral? We are frauds. We are stealing from the poor of the world, but have the gall to criticize a man who pays a fair wage to a free worker. We love the gesture, not the truth.

The pundits of the entertainment world  critique the old men who run the church as they pretend to be philanthropists. In reality, they do no more than let crumbs from their tables fall to the poor and feel noble for doing so. And we are foolish enough to think them sincere. We love the gesture, not the truth. C.S. Lewis in his masterpiece the “Screwtape Letters,” has the demon Screwtape remind his nephew that “the Enemy (God) wants men to be humble, or charitable or to be forgiving. We, the demons want them to feel humble, to feel charitable, to feel forgiving.” 

We moderns don’t believe that something is real if we don’t feel it. A Mother Teresa, or a Joseph Ratzinger, or for that matter, a Christ on Calvary who begged His Heavenly Father to let Him off the hook, have no place in our shallow sentimental culture. Because we love the gesture, not the truth,  Cardinal Ratzinger’s repaired shoes, Mother Teresa’s service in the midst of dryness and the nails in Christ’s hand were no gesture. They were truth.  Our new pope is being lionized by the media for what they perceive as humility. If, heaven forfend, his humility turns out to be more than a gesture, I have no doubt that they will turn on him, and would throw him out a window if they could. The grand gesture has caused more suffering and human misery than can be imagined. 

The truth and only the truth will set you free.