Church - Opus Publicum

July 11, 2015 Church, Eastern Catholicism

The Difficult Path to Unity

Despite some hopes last week that the three Assyrian churches may be on the path to unity following an open letter from Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael offering to resign his patriarchal title, it seems there is still a long way to go. Byzantine Texas has posted the Assyrian Church of the East’s detailed, firm, but charitable response. Anyone with any interest in East/West relations or, more accurately, Catholic/Oriental (or Catholic/Orthodox) relations should pay It a careful read.

I make mention of it here not to ignite pointless bickering but because I believe the letter does a splendid job articulating the real barriers that lie in the way of full ecclesial communion between the See of Rome and the separated Eastern churches. Too often these discussions (at least online) devolve into nitpicking over trivial matters with no deep-rooted doctrinal significance. Far too many Orthodox, and not a few traditional Catholics, relish this. Why? What is to be gained? No, the truth should never be compromised — a point the Assyrian Church repeats several times in the aforementioned letter. However, the pursuit of truth could stand to come packaged with a lot more humility from all sides.

I sincerely hope and pray for the day when the Assyrian churches will find unity just as I hope and pray for the day when Catholics and Orthodox lay down their arms, repent of past sins, and restore full ecclesiastical communion. With God, all things are possible.

July 1, 2015 Church

In and Of

More than a few people I know have been less than thrilled with Bishop Blase Cupich’s official statement on the forced legalization of same-sex marriage by the Supreme Court of the United States. Perhaps he should have kept quiet. As the head of the fourth largest Catholic diocese in the U.S., his words carry a great deal of weight — much more than they deserve. They also carry the capacity to confuse the faithful. Still, to the bishop’s credit, his words are honest. There’s no good reason to doubt that he believes what he writes. Depressing though that may be for some, it’s not nearly as depressing as those who intentionally obfuscate their message, seeming to remain orthodox all the while holding tight to the Zeitgeist. Unimpressive academics-turned-bloggers, bloggers who think they are academics, and other charlatans of good cheer have begun circling around this ostensibly singular “cultural moment” in the hopes of generating some cheap hits. Let us be in the world and of it. That way our lives can continue as most people do: As if Christ never came at all.

June 14, 2015 Church, Politics

Secularism, Utopia, and Escape

Quite recently, I was in Paris, and I went to my favorite theological bookstore and found books there titled something like this: A Marxist Reading of St. Matthew; A Freudian Reading of Genesis, and so on. Of course, this approach was being prepared over many centuries when it was thought that human reason, human scholarship, knowledge of late Syriac grammar would finally explain to us what Christ meant by the Kingdom of God. And before Dr. Schnuklemeukle wrote his authoritative three volumes on that subject, nobody ever understood what it was.

But today it is taken for granted: that Christianity is in need of utopianism. We have to repent — for what? For having preferred the transcendent to the immanent? For having thought of the Kingdom of God in terms of the Other World? And now we are obliged to mobilize ourselves and join every possible activism, whether it’s called “liberation theology” or “the theology of urbanism,” or “the theology of the sexual fulfillment”… The word “theology” used to mean “words about God.” Now it may also mean words about sex, or contraceptives… And, as a reaction to that development, Christians surrendered to the Me-Too utopianism.

At the same time, we have a fundamental resurrection of escapism, which takes on many forms in religion today. People turn their backs to the world and plunge into almost anything. As an Orthodox priest I can see the forms it takes in our Church: we have people who do not care what is going on in the world. They have discovered The Icon. Or, of course, one of the areas, into which one can endlessly escape, is a discussion of the high-church, low-church, and middle-church liturgical practices. Vestments… Modern or archaic… You can hear people saying, “But that isn’t right: in the third century in eastern Egypt…” — and you already feel that the Transfiguration has begun. The third century in Egypt, or in Mesopotamia, or wherever it is — as long as it is not in Chicago, New York, London or Paris. As long as this Epiphany or Theophany takes place somewhere in some impossible land! In Caesarea of Cappadocia… — that is music itself: Cappadocia, it already gives you the feeling that you are in the right religious school, you know. Introduce Chicago into that religion, and it spoils the whole dream, the whole sweetness, the whole thing.

So we have either Jesuits disguised as the professional unemployed walking the streets of Chicago, finished with all the Cappadocias at once, or we have people escaping — in orderly procession — to Cappadocia. And this is of course the tragedy of our Christian response to Utopia and to Escape. Now, then what?

– Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “Between Utopia and Escape”

May 31, 2015 Church

The god of Easy Answers

The god (“God”) of Easy Answers, gEA for short, comes in two distinct forms for contemporary Catholics. The first version, what some might call with scorn the “traditional version,” ostensibly supplies his answers through dusty manuals, theological tomes untranslated from their original Latin, and, of course, an endless string of papal documents penned between the second-half of the first century and the mid-1950s. These easy answers appeal to a certain subclass of Catholics who cannot handle either (post)modernity or a casual conversation abut Major League Baseball. That’s how the story goes, at least. But like so many tales spun in the halls of the Vatican, the classrooms of “Catholic universities,” or innumerable online fora, the ring of truth to their gross generalizations is astonishingly faint. Manufacturing nonsense, even nonsense on stilts, comes easy in these environs because all three (though they are not the only three) are hallmark examples of in-group thinking or, rather, “thinking.” They dwell in ideological black holes where the light of truth stands not a chance.

May 3, 2015 Church, Economics

And We’re Back

It was not as if I expected anything to happen during my time away from Opus Publicum, and apparently nothing has. The state of things, be it churchly things or things secular, remains static — the same complaints, the same worries, the same uncertainties surrounding this perpetually perplexing state of life affairs. Maybe the one thing that stands out to me, as I re-scan the blogs and other outlets of commentary, is how indignant certain individuals are over the so-called same-sex marriage case before the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). The fix is in. When the fix came in is a matter of some debate, but it is in and there’s nothing to be done for it. Instead of standing firm and resolute in the face of this dismal reality, people have opted instead to lament or, worse, find ways to square the inevitable with what they claim to believe. This is easier for Orthodox and Protestants to do than Catholics, though make no mistake about it: When it comes to capitulating to the Zeitgeist, faithful little Romans are difficult to beat.

April 13, 2015 Church

Mercy and the SSPX

Two back-to-back pieces of Catholic news are on my mind this morning. The first is Pope Francis’s new bull, Misericordiae Vultus, which opens the Jubilee Year of Mercy beginning on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The second, mentioned over at Rorate Caeli, is that the Argentine government now officially recognizes the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) as part of the Catholic Church. There were rumblings a year ago that Pope Francis himself would intervene on behalf of the Society to ensure they acquired proper legal standing in the Holy Father’s homeland, and so it stands to reason that this is what happened. Civil legal recognition is not the same as canonical recognition of course, though it’s not nothing either—especially if the Pope is involved. If this modest but important act is a demonstration of the sort of mercy Francis has in mind for the upcoming jubilee year, then let us be glad and rejoice in it. That is to say, let even Catholics who are at times understandably confused, perturbed, and/or upset with some of the Pope’s words and deeds recognize that mercy is at the heart of the Church’s divine mission.

April 3, 2015 Church

Good Friday

My original plan was to write nothing today and simply make sure that some “pre-set” posts went live around the appropriate time. Then The Remnant decided to publish online a 1973 letter by the great French Catholic social thinker Jean Ousset. As the newspaper’s editor Michael Matt makes clear in his introduction, the blasphemies and scandals we are witnessing today were probably never conceived of in 1973. On the day when we especially remember the wounds inflicted upon Christ’s body during the Passion, we should not forget the wounds that are daily inflicted upon Christ’s Mystical Body, the Holy Catholic Church, and the mystery of her suffering at this present time. Ousset’s letter is firm in its admonition that no Catholic has any right to despair, regardless of how dark the sky grows. It is a crucial message which, in more recent times, has been delivered forcefully by Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General of the Society of St. Pius X. Regardless of what you may think about the Society as a whole, Bishop Fellay is neither playing ecclesial politics nor advancing an ideology when he cautions the faithful against the temptation to forego charity for bitterness or lose their souls in a state of panic because these days, these often confusing and tumultuous days, do not seem to align with an abstract, perhaps romantic, image of how the Church ought to look, feel, act, and so forth.

April 2, 2015 Church, Liturgy

Maundy Thursday

In his definitive biography of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais takes time to discuss “The Nine,” a band of former Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) priests who went on to form the Society of St. Pius V (SSPV) before eventually splitting apart. The SSPV, contrary to the SSPX, entertains the idea of sedevacantism while remaining loyal to the liturgical books in use prior to Pope Pius XII’s mid-to-late 1950s reforms. “The Nine,” according to Bishop Tissier, demonstrated a typically Anglophone tendency to ground the Faith in ritual, perhaps due to a lack of strong Catholic cultural roots. It is said that Bishop Tissier, like his predecessor Archbishop Lefebvre, has little patience for liturgical minutiae. Another way to frame this is to hold that the SSPX, or at least a significant number of its clerical members, avoids liturgical absolutism, preferring instead to take a broad view of what the fight for Catholic tradition entails. The Tridentine Mass is central; how many Collects are said on this-or-that Sunday during the liturgical year is not. Central, too, are the complicated and contentions issues that emerged out of the Second Vatican Council, including—but not necessarily limited to—collegiality, ecumenism, and religious liberty. For a relatively small but unhealthy number of Catholic traditionalists, doctrine matters little. Maybe it matters not. What does matter, however, is that the priest’s vestments be immaculately tailored, the servers be positioned just right during each liturgical movement, and that their living, breathing wax museum of ritual be left unsullied by the burdens of reality.

March 17, 2015 Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Liturgy

Russian Orthodoxy and the SSPX

Ross Douthat’s recent New York Times blog post on Pope Francis’s critics contained an unfortunate but all-too-common mischaracterization of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) as “schismatic.” Like many who suggest that charge, Douthat backed it up with neither an argument nor a citation to an official decree. Both Frs. John Zuhlsdorf and John Hunwicke—two canonically regular priests in good standing with the Catholic Church—have explained why the “schismatic” label is improper; so, too, has the Society. The thing is, if the SSPX were truly schismatic, Catholics like Douthat (and countless others) would likely have no problem with Rome playing nice, as evidenced by the adulation and cheers which accompanies the brief, insubstantial, and soon-forgotten meetings between a pope and hierarchs of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Never mind of course that unlike the SSPX, the Orthodox do not accept concrete tenets of the Catholic Faith such as Papal Primacy and appear hostile (though not absolutely so) toward others (e.g., Immaculate Conception, Purgatory, and the Filioque). The Society’s “crimes,” according to its critics, are threefold: rejecting modern liturgical reform; criticizing Vatican II’s teaching on religious liberty; and opposing ecumenism. But where does Eastern Orthodoxy come down on these three issues? A brief, but informative, glance at Orthodoxy’s largest canonical body, the Russian Orthodox Church, reveals no measurable deviation from the Society’s positions.