The Room of Tears

 

This is the Room of Tears.

It is a small chamber to the left of the altar in the Sistine Chapel. Some day quite soon, one man will walk into it, don one or more of the garments in this photo -- not having been tailored, they will not fit properly; it is possible they will be secured with safety pins -- and then be presented to the crowds waiting in Piazza San Pietro. He will be the new pope.

The people in the crowd (and watching on television) will be straining their eyes for some hint of what is to come.  Will he wear the mozzetta, or abjure it?  Will he speak in Italian -- and if so, with what accent? Before he has gone to bed, the city and the world, but most especially the internet, will be alive with hopes and fears, acclamations and derogations, all based on the flimsiest guesswork, and the most trivial research.

You can imagine where this plain little room gets its nickname.  It has long been our custom ot offer condolences to our friends and colleagues elected as mere bishops. The challenges of serving as the Bishop of Rome, Patriarch of the West, and all those other things they are called, are unimaginable.

The Tragedy of Sweden?

 A few Lutherans have expressed mild interest in the potential papacy of Anders Arborius. We are not among them.

Arborius is a well-respected church leader, the first and only Swedish cardinal, formerly chair of the Episcopal Conference of Scandinavia (which we imagine must be a rather small organization.) He is also a convert from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism.

It is this last fact that excites the mild interest among Lutherans -- "One of us," we cry, out of habit.  Bit of course, he has deliberately chosen not to be one of us, preferring instead not only to join the 1.5% of his countrymen in communion with the Pope, but also to become a Discalced Carmelite, a group with strong ties to the Counter-Reformation. (We do wonder how he manages to go shoeless in those Swedish winters).

In an interview published online, when asked about the unique contributions of Swedish Catholicism, Arborius first denies that there are any, saying in effect that "we're just like other Swedes," and then takes a cheap shot at the church of his childhood:

Because there is no real longing for female priests among Catholics, we can concentrate upon the real [sic] possibilities for women. We have seen the tragedy of the Lutheran Church of Sweden, where there have been female ministers since 1958. Since then, a fierce conflict has raged between those in favor of female ministers and those in opposition.

Disapproving of the ordination of women is not, by itself, remarkable or disappointing in a cardinal; it is pretty much his job description. But the fact is that he wasn't asked about it, or about the majority church in his nation  He decided on his own that those were the things he wanted to talk about. 

On balance, we do not think somebody who considers the Church of Sweden to be a "tragedy" would be a useful ecumenical partner for the LWF. 

On the other hand, we are interested in Robert Cardinal Prevost, Archbishop Emeritus of Chiclayo, Peru.  He will never be pope, goes the familiar logic, because he is an American by birth.  But among his many leadership positions, Prevost served for twelve years as the Prior General of his religious community -- the Order of Saint Augustine.  We do like our Augustinians.

Papabile

 Pope Francis has been in the hospital for a week and a half at this writing.  Ten days are not so many for an old man, even in this era of shortened stays. Nonetheless, when you are the pope, every sneeze is greeted by worldwide murmurs of "conclave." 

Let us say from the outset that we wish Francis nothing but the best. He has been as fine a pope as it is possible to be given the realities of the Smalcald Articles 2:4:10 and their reiteration in the Formula.  We hope that he recovers and is able to serve the church for at least a few more good years, and failing that we wish him a speedy and painless return to his maker.

But one wonders, inevitably, what the future may hold for the world's largest Christian communion, which encompasses roughly half the planet's believers.  Outsiders, especially the press, frequently imagine that popes are like politicians, easily defined by adherence to a platform and described by "right" or "left." Insiders assure us, and we at the Egg firmly believe, that this is by no means the case.  All the conceivable candidates are bound by the same shared commitments and convictions: the same Scriptures, the same historic teachings, the same canon laws. There will be no pro-choice pope, no pope who ordains women priests, just as there will be no pope who despises the poor or encourages international violence.

But there are differences of style and emphasis. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were both "conservatives," as the press would style them, but only one wore red shoes. ( John Paul in fact introduced the same photogenically simple attire for which Francis is sometimes scorned by his opponents.) John Paul and Benedict were both scholars, Francis is not. John Paul and Francis were both far more comfortable mingling with crowds and kissing babies than Benedict ever appeared to be.  Benedict alone seemed to have a real softness for the Tridentine Mass and its advocates; both John Paul and Francis appeared to see them as troublemakers, if not outright enemies. Not one of the the three was a native of Italy, a fact of some historical importance.  It is factors like these, no less than doctrine and surely more than politics, which will influence whichever cardinals vote in the next conclave -- whenever that may be.

Those important things said, perhaps we can relax and play a little bit.  Predictably, the gambling houses have begun to lay odds on who will follow Francis, as well as what regnal name he will take. We have recently seen a story by the Asbury Park Press, which takes its information from something called BetUS. It identifies these potential popes, and gives them odds:

• Luis Antonio Tagle: +300
• Mark Ouellet: +400
• Pietro Parolin: +400
• Francis Arinze: +500
• Peter Turkson: +600
• Peter Erdo: +600
• Willem Eljk: +600

We have no idea who drafted the list, but we suspect it is nonsense. For one thing, Arinze is now 90 years old. Ouellet is 80. Not one in the group was elevated by Francis, although a large majority of the cardinals elector will have been. A couple look slightly nuts. On the other hand, Parolin seems … viable. 

But you know what they say about the man who goes into a conclave papabile, right? He leaves a cardinal.

A Very Christian Concept

The War on God has a Catholic front, and it has seen some fighting lately.

The chief battle, of course, comes from crypto-paganism, in the form of what the press calls  President Trump's "transactional" view of relationships, which recognizes no principles except self-interest, and so cannot conceive of altruism or charity as ends in themselves.  This meshes easily with a variety of other ideologies: New Thought, the Prosperity Gospel, even good old Objectivism.  To be clear, the president is not himself an ideologue; he is rather a raging Id, a Hyde with no Jekyll; but he is surrounded by people who have constructed or borrowed ideological structures to justify their own self-interest.

With this in mind, it is interesting to consider our vice-president, JD Vance.  Vance is quite a different figure from Trump.  Rather than privilege, he is a child of relative poverty, whose Horatio-Alger story has been the subject both of a bestseller and a movie.  Where Trump seems to have emerged from his father's brow a fully-formed braggart, liar, swindler and racist, Vance has engaged in a more interesting process of self-creation; his rise from poverty, his education, his profession(s), and even his name are the result of his own deliberate and purposeful choices. 

What interests us in all this is that Vance is an adult convert to Roman Catholicism, having been baptized and confirmed in 2019, at the age of 35.  It would be a terrible injustice to attribute something as personal as a spiritual conversion to expressly political motives, but it should be noted that, rather than being formed intellectually by the church, Vance entered the church fully formed as an intellectual and a politician.  As he said to his friend Rod Dreher, 

My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching. That was one of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church. 

This remark is noteworthy because, to an outside observer, it raises the question of how much Vance knew at that point in his life about the details of Catholic social teaching.  Surely he knew about abortion and birth control. Had he yet been catechized concerning, for example, the rights of workers to form and join unions? The preferential option for the poor? Unclear, but he was already helping to lead a party that is sketchy about these things, and many other things spelled out in the documents.

Questions like this became more pointed on 30 January 2025, when Vance, during an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, said: 

... as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn't mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there's this old school, and I think it's a very Christian concept by the way, that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society. 

Many listeners resonated easily with this statement.  It appeals to our sense of what is "natural." It is hard to imagine caring about a far-off stranger the way one does for one's spouse or child.  As church council members never tire of saying, "charity begins at home." Right?

But Vance identified this as "a Christian concept," and one did not need to be an expert theologian to observe that, as such, it struck a sour note  After all, agape, a foundational Christian idea, is understood to be a universal love, one which is not conditioned by relationships of family, tribe, nation or what have you.  Specifically placing "neighbor" between family and community will have drawn a cringe from those reared on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Actual skilled theologians were quick to observe that, so far as they could tell, Vance had been referring to, and misrepresenting, the ordo amoris. That phrase literally means the "order of love," although it is often glossed in English as "rightly-ordered love," which isn't unfair. One finds it articulated by Augustine in The City of God, 15:22, and refined by Aquinas in the Summa, 2/2/Q26.  (Both, incidentally and somewhat strainedly, cite Songs 2:4, which says in the Vulgate "ordinavit in me caritatem.")

To be clear, Augustine does not say what Vance attributes to him.  For one thing, and we may call this the first flaw, Vance doesn't mention God, whereas Augustine's central point is that God must be loved above all other beings.  This is because lesser things -- art, music, a spouse -- are susceptible to being loved wrongly, because they are loved in preference to to God or to the things God wants.  This is not because art, music or a spouse are bad, but because human beings are sinful. As Augustine puts it, "when a miser loves his gold more than justice, it is not the fault of the gold." Aquinas even argues that we are obliged to love our neighbor (a term he does not define with Vance's narrowness) more than our own body.

So if the first flaw in Vance's attempt at theology is setting God aside, the second is that he replaces God's desires for us with what we may (and Augustine does) call the desires of the flesh.  Because of these flaws, he proposes an order of love that is quite at odds with the one known to the Christian tradition. Vance wants us to love family first, a concept that would have been ridiculous to the generations of Christians who looked to the fable of St Thecla for solace when faith separated them from their families. He wants us to love our nation next, which would have looked suspicious to those same early Christians as they died rather than sacrifice to the emperors. What he does not ask us to love, but Augustine does, is virtue itself, and things virtuously.  

All Christians have a right to think as deeply as they are able about the things of God.  But when Roman Catholic leaders of nations begin to opine in public about theology, they will naturally draw the attention of those to whom theological judgments have been entrusted in their church -- meaning, ultimately, the Pope. And so on 10 February 2025, US bishops received a letter from Pope Francis which referred obliquely to "the crisis in the United States," meaning the Trump Administration's announced program of mass deportations, which it described as problematic from the point of view of Catholic social teaching.  (You remember:  the same Catholic social teaching that Vance was so excited about in 2019).

Francis also addressed, beginning with paragraph 6, Vance's misrepresentation of Catholic doctrine:

6. Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

7. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.

Yes, we know:  it is written in Vaticanese, so it seems dull or even obscure.  Read closely, however, this is a sharp rebuke.  "Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests" -- which is just how Vance described it. Instead, the Pope reminds us, each of us Christians has a relationship with all people, and it is through these relationships, especially with the poorest," that we become our true selves.  Talking about our relationships, such as national identity, apart from this universal relationship and option for the poor is to take part in a lie told by the strong to harm the weak.

That's what the Pope's letter actually says, in print, and it is a swayt on the knuckles with the proverbial rule.  Reading between the lines, the message is more like a slap in the face:  Hey, JD -- leave theology to the theologians.

Easter Sermon Hints from Gregory the Great

 Holy Week having begun, many readers of the Egg (if only there were many such readers!) may be busy with printing bulletins, recruiting acolytes, arguing with cantors, and otherwise preparing for the Paschal Solemnity in ways other than prayer and study.  If so, there is some danger that such hypothetical readers might enter the pulpit come Sunday a tad unprepared.

Never fear.  Pope St. Gregory the Great has your back.

In his Homily 25, which is (mostly) concerned with St. John's account of the Resurrection, Gregory comments on some detail upon the Lord's appearance to Mary Magdalene.  It is all worth reading, including the fascinating and grotesque interpretation of Job 41:1.  In one lovely and much less grotesque passage, Gregory says:

"Mary Magdalene came and made known to [Jesus'] disciples, 'I have seen the Lord, and he said these things to me.'" See, how the sin of the human race was removed where it began. In paradise a woman was the cause of death for a man (Gen. 3:6); coming from the sepulchre a woman proclaimed life to men. Mary related the words of the one who restored her to life; Eve had related the words of the serpent who brought death.  It is as if the Lord was telling the human race, not by words but by actions, "Receive the draught of life from the hand of the one who offered you the drink of death."

The Christ-as-new-Adam typology is well known, as is its counterpart in Mary-Eve typology -- but of course the Mary in that usage is normally the BVM (surely, you recall the palindromic Ave/Eva from so many Annunciation paintings). We cannot remember seeing this blog's patroness recruited to make the same point.

The typology is rife with problems, not least the danger of a misogynistic reading.  Still, Gregory's image of the Apostle to the Apostles as the one who delivers the "draught of life" to her comrades is a powerful one, and raises Mary Magdalene to a stature more often afforded the Lord's mother.  (It is almost as if Gregory is apologizing for his great mistake, of officially identifying his subject as a prostitute).

A preacher might also find use for the pairing of Eden and the Empty Tomb as loci for life and death.

As a bonus, a very tired preacher looking for inspiration on Quasimodo Geniti, these days called Easter 2, might borrow from the stirring conclusion to the same homily:

Let us find evils distasteful, even if we have experienced them. Almighty God freely forgets that we have been guilty; he is ready to count our repentance as innocence. If we have become dirtied after the water of salvation, let us be born again from our tears. Accordingly, we must listen to the voice of our first pastor: Like newborn children, desire milk ((1 Peter 2:2). Return, little children, to the bosom of your mother, the the eternal Wisdom. Drink from the bountiful breasts of the lovingkindness of God. Weep for your past misdeeds; shun those that avoid what lies ahead. Our Redeemer will solace our fleeting sorrows with eternal joy -- he who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

These references to God's breasts, while they may seem a little mischievous to contemporary congregations, were common enough in the Middle Ages, as Carolyn Walker Bynum has shown, and continued to be so at least into John Donne's time.  Easter may not be the best time to marshal defensive citations in proud array, but remember that they exist.

Smart Pope, Dumb Journalism

"The Pope in the Attic" is a long article in the current Atlantic Monthly, exploring the supposed weirdness of having the Pope Emeritus living a few hundred yards from a ... well, the real Pope.  It's one of the worst pieces of religious journalism we have ever seen in a reputable publication.

Paul Elie is trying, we think, to explore the confusion he imagines is created by having two living popes, each with his own style and each with his own supporters.  The problem is that, so far, this is a kind of non-story.

Oh, the Ratzinger Fan Club has made a lot of noise this past year, worrying publicly that Bergoglio's "humility" is a kind of arrogance that casts aside capital-T Tradition.  And Francis has certainly made a name for himself, not least with the fawning press, to the extent that Elie calls him a "rock star" on par with JPII.  But the Traddies are a fringe bunch, and even casual observers of the religious scene know better than to take the newspaper headlines -- including those making Francis a secular saint -- without many grains of salt.  At the end of the day, it is an odd situation, but it has yet to prove odd in any way that imperils or even affects the normal operation of the Vatican or the ongoing life of the Roman Church.  So ... there's no real story.

And even if there were, Elie doesn't report it, for the very good reason that he seems to have no sources.  There is no evidence that anybody of any significance was willing to speak to him about this, with the sole exception of the seemingly voluble Walter Cardinal Kasper.  Other than that a few polite remarks from Kasper, Elie seems to have nothing more than press-corps scuttlebutt and one Friday night drive through the Vatican City, during which he saw neither Francis nor Benedict.

So thinly sourced is the story, in fact, that Elie is reduced to simply making stuff up.  Several hundred words consist of nothing more than his own imagined version of Benedict's private prayers -- in the form of  monologue which politely criticizes his successor's much-ballyhooed reluctance to judge gay people. Need it even be aid that inventing from whole cloth the private prayers of anybody -- much less a priest, much less a pope, much less a man of Ratzinger's piercing intellect -- marks a new frontier in presumption.  Elie replaces journalism with speculative fiction.  And it isn't even informed speculation.

Anyway, the good news is that Terry Mattingly plans to handle this tomorrow at GetReligion.  He will no doubt do a better job than we can of explaining just why this story is so incredibly bad. [UPDATE:  Here's Terry's take. ]

"A Figure of Discontinuity"

Bishop Enrico dal Covolo is the rector of the Pontifical Lateran University, a position to which he was appointed by Benedict XVI.  Speaking in Guam just before Christmas, he expressed great approval of Benedict's successor -- who of course is not unreservedly admired by all of Ratzinger's friends, fans and appointees.

Dal Covolo said:

I believe that Pope Francis is a figure of discontinuity with the previous pontificate, but a very, very good discontinuity because he's pushing the Church, he's exorcising the Church from all the fears that she had in the past. 

I agree totally with these changes that Pope Francis is doing because they correspond precisely to the challenges we face today.

On one hand, it should come as no great surprise that a prominent bishop supports the Pope.  That's pretty much what you would expect.  On the other hand ....

Rorate Caeli, the blog from which we have this story (and at which you can see a YouTube clip of dal Covolo speaking) reads this as an expression of ingratitude toward one's patron.  To do so seems a little short-sighted to us, as it depends upon any number of dubious assumptions (as, for example, that Francis stands in polar opposition to Benedict; that Benedict was always right and Francis therefore always wrong; that "gratitude" is best expressed as unswerving loyalty to a person rather than to the institution the person serves, and so forth).

But consider the source:  Rorate Caeli, the go-to blog for Traddie gossip, has a view of Vatican affairs as jaundiced as the most antipapal Protestant.  It seems to believe that Benedict abdicated under pressure from liberals who had engineered the so-called Vatileaks scandal, who threatened to release more embarrassing information, and who since then have determinedly purged Benedict's supporters.  So he writes:

[D]espite the amazing coincidence of the end of all "Vatileaks" rumors or threats via the media after February 2013 (indicating clearly that the Vatileakers got what they wanted, that is, the end of the Ratzinger pontificate), and all of Francis's repeated words against "gossip"..., intrigue and backstabbing are more intense in the Vatican now than at any time since the [Second Vatican] Council. 

We have no idea whether or to what degree any of this may be true.  We scarcely care; it is, after all, somebody else's hierarchy.  But it sure makes for fun reading.

There is one thing in that brief clip from dal Covolo which supports Rorate's argument, though:  the choice of the word "discontinuity."  Benedict and his supporters have used "continuity" as their rallying cry, if not indeed their organizing principle, hermenuetically and otherwise.  (This is, in our own estimate, a brilliant and inspiring move despite certain inherent limitations.)  So, when dal Covolo praises Francis for discontinuity, it is hard to imagine that some slap at Benedict, or at least Benedict's crowd, is not intended.

Needless to say, that's no real evidence for "intrigue and backstabbing," but it is still noteworthy.

Locutus Roma ... sed non Latine

Pope Francis has provoked a great deal of discussion with his Apostolic Exhortation entitled Evangeliii Gaudium.

We were amused to learn recently that, despite its Latin title, the document has not yet been translated into the Latin language.  Apparently popes no longer write in the official language of their kingdom, which is a disappointment but certainly no shock.  We assume that this exhortation was composed in Spanish, making its "real" title La alegria del Evangelio.

We should point out that, thanks to the late Alex Comfort, the English title -- The Joy of the Gospel -- invites a certain adolescent giggle.  (Specifically, it makes us think of naked people with lots and lots of hair.  We wish it were otherwise, but there you are.)

That's every thing we have to say about Evangeliii Gaudium today.  But while we're on the subject ....

We notice that the exhortation has, with its mild criticism of trickle-down economics, aroused the ire both of Rush Limbaugh and Peggy Noonan, with Anne Coulter no doubt waiting in the wings.

The first thing one must say, of course, is that conservative critics expressing shock at Catholic social teaching are simply ignorant.  They don't know what they are talking about.  One takes this for granted, of course, in a buffoon like Limbaugh; Noonan is a special case.  She is not so much ignorant as wilfully blind.

So impressed was she, and so impressed were many of her contemporaries, with what they perceived as John Paul II's spiritual support for Saint Ronald's Holy War on Communism -- not to mention the whole abortion thing! -- that they decided that the Roman magisterium must be on their own side in all matters political.  Crazy, right?  Yet the history of the Neoconservative movement, when it is written competently, will doubtless list the many Roman Catholics who switched their allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican one; it will also show a modest number of politically conservative converts to Catholicism.

Such was the enthusiasm for Rome among 80s-era conservatives that they seem to have skipped the drudgery of actually, well, reading things.  Had they read just a little bit, they would have discovered the strangely dichotomous presence of Roman Catholicism in 19th- and 20th-century public affairs. 

On one hand, it retained the instinctive royalism of the preceding eras, and so was happy enough to align itself not only with actual kings but also with rightist strongmen like Francisco Franco.  And, like Franco, Rome certainly did not care for Communism, with its materialistic and atheistic bent.

But on the other hand, Catholicism felt just as threatened by the emerging democratic and capitalist order of the West.  Until very late in the day, it routinely expressed doubts about democracy and religious freedom, and it is still no real friend of sexual egalitarianism.  Rightly or wrongly, the magisterium assumed that movements like this undermined its own authority, and led inexorably to the establishment of a materialism no less toxic than the Marxist-Stalinist-Maoist variety.

And why not?  Capitalism, when you think about it, emerged in the Renaissance -- just like Protestantism and, for that matter, modern forms of democracy.  They aren't the same thing, but they share a certain constituency, and nowhere (around 1900) was that constituency so concentrated as in the United States.  Thus we get Leo XIII warning about the supposed heresy of "Americanism."

But here's the money point:  for all its panicked fear of modernity, the Roman Catholic church never lost sight of the needs of the poor.  In fact, it seems to have believed that both the emerging economic regimes -- Communism and capitalism -- would hurt the poor.  (Not that the church had anything better to offer, mind you; nostalgia for the Middle Ages wasn't going to bring them back, and in any case the Middle Ages hadn't been a notoriously good time for the peasants.)

The key fact, though, is that in 1891, Leo issued one of the most important papal documents of the modern age.  Rerum novarum served as a thoughtful Christian response to the industrial age, and especially to the cutthroat capitalism of the Gilded Age.  While supporting the rights of property owners to use their belongings as they saw fit, it also said:

Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. 

If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.

In other words, living wages are a matter of natural law -- the very idea that, even today, Wal-Mart and the service economy in general are trying to argue against.  More than that, employers who do not offer a living wage are abusing their workers, subjecting them to "force and injustice."  Although Leo does not like strikes and wants to avoid them for the sake of the common good, he supports labor unions, worker safety, collective bargaining, and other causes then labeled "progressive."

A century later, celebrating the downfall of the Soviet Union and its satellites, John Paul II reflected on Rerum novarum in his encyclical Centesimus annus.  It's a comparatively conservative document.  The Peggy Noonans of the world no doubt read it and hear the strong condemnation of Communism and, in particular, atheism.  But we hope they also catch this:

[I]t is unacceptable to say that the defeat of [socialism] leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization.

And this:

[P]rofitability is not the only indicator of a firm's condition. It is possible for the financial accounts to be in order, and yet for the people — who make up the firm's most valuable asset — to be humiliated and their dignity offended. Besides being morally inadmissible, this will eventually have negative repercussions on the firm's economic efficiency. 

In fact, the purpose of a business firm is not simply to make a profit, but is to be found in its very existence as a community of persons who in various ways are endeavouring to satisfy their basic needs, and who form a particular group at the service of the whole of society.

Get it?  A company's job isn't just to generate shareholder value; it is to provide for the basic needs of its employees, and to serve society.  If it isn't doing all those things, it is a failure.

Centesiums annus displays a particular concern for the people of the Third World -- the encyclical's own, now somewhat old-fashioned phrase.  John Paul is concerned that people in these nations are excluded from the material benefits of the more developed economies.  This concern informs the broader "economics of exclusion" of which Francis writes.

John Paul goes on to warn against the "irrational destruction of the natural environment," a form of "tyranny" which leads to destruction.  This doesn't necessarily mean he would have opposed pipelines, offshore oil rigs or fracking, but it certainly does raise the question of whether those things are compatible with the Catholic social vision.

It is obvious that the most debated sections of Evangeliii gaudium (parapgraphs 53-60) are in line with these two predecessor documents.  Like Leo and John Paul, Francis has his doubts about capitalism; like Leo and John Paul, Francis is concerned that some people are excluded from the benefit of the emerging global economy.  Like them both, he is concerned that a purely materialistic economic theory damages the social fabric and leads, ultimately, to violence.  We defy anyone to argue convincingly that all three of these men are mistaken.

And we ask that political conservatives, especially those who make much of their own Roman Catholic faith, would pay more attention to their church's now-long-standing critique of their pet economic theories.

In Paradisum Deducant

Today, lest anyone forget, is the Feast of All Souls.  Dia de los Muertos.  Commemoration of the Faithful Departed.

It is the day on which we remember all the faithful who have died -- including especially those who were not, at the time of their death, distinguished by any particular holiness of life.  If yesterday we thanked God for those saints whose lives serve as a witness and inspiration to our faith, then today we thank God for the abundant grace which offers eternal life even to those whose time on earth was (ahem) less than inspirational.

At which point, some readers may respond, like Tonto to the Lone Ranger, "What you mean we, white man?"

Sad to say, we Evangelicals do not much observe All Souls.  One does not find it on our church calendars, nor indexed in our hymnals. (Hymn suggestions here, if you need some.)  Our tendency, so far as Fr. A. can tell, is to merge the two days, and remember all the Christian dead on All Saints (or, more usually, the Sunday following).  This is entirely sensible for people whose theology makes much of the simul iustus idea, and which grounds salvation in baptismal grace rather than works.  We are all saints and we are all sinners; dividing the two is redundant at best and actively misleading at worst.  Indeed, it requires us to make a judgment -- saint of sinner?  sheep or goat? -- which must properly be reserved for God alone.

At least that's the idea.  Personally, we at the Egg are not convinced.  The division of the two days may serve valuable purposes, both psychological and pedagogical.   We Christians know in our heads that God makes no distinction between Mother Teresa and, let us say, that nasty old Uncle Harry who died last week, the one who never had a kind word for anybody and cursed the nurses on his deathbed.  To God, both are equally sinful and equally beloved.  But in our hearts, we feel them to be quite different from each other.  Dividing the days allows us to acknowledge our own very different experience of the lives these two people have led -- while still proclaiming clearly, still teaching, that God has saved them both.

Frankly, it may be useful to some people -- those whose memories of Uncle Harry are tainted by a keen awareness of just how loathesome the old coot was in life -- if we set aside a day for saying, clearly, "It isn't just virgins and martyrs; loathesome old coots are God's people too."

This brings us, naturally, to the overweight gorilla in the room:  Purgatory.  The medieval piety surrounding All Souls was very much concerned with Purgatory, and specifically with figuring out how we on earth could move ourselves and others out of the place as fast as possible.  This led first to prayers for the dead, then to paying other people to pray, and thence by an ugly road to the traffic in indulgences, the sale of Masses, and all the other terrible things that prompted the 95 Theses.  The worst of this was superstition rather than formal doctrine, but still, there it was.  And no sane person, Protestant or Papist, wants to go back there.

Protestant theology deals with Purgatory much as it once dealt with the Canon of the Mass -- effectively saying "This thing is so messed up that we cannot fix it.  Therefore, let's throw it out altogether."  Never mind the old axiom that abusus non tollit usum.  We despise the bath-water more than we love the baby.

Luther provides a ready example.  Melanchthon, in the Apology, was careful not to throw out Purgatory, even amid his sustained and forceful attack on the abuses it had occasioned.  Luther, in the Smalcald Articles, is less careful.  He writes:

[P]urgatory, and every solemnity, rite, and commerce connected with it, is to be regarded as nothing but a specter of the devil. 

This seems amply clear.  But in context, Luther is really raging against the attempt to define doctrine solely upon human opinion -- in this case, St Augustine -- apart from the Scripture.  If the Papists were to stop making that particular error in theological method, he says, then we might discuss these things with them.  To this, theologians of a later and less controverisal era might well respond that negotiations are often freer when entered into without conditions.

And of course, we should remember that there is Purgatory and then there is Purgatory.  Jacque LeGoff has brilliantly traced the history of the idea, from its roots in antiquity to its blossoming in Scholastic Paris, and demonstrated that not all conceptions of Purgatory are identical.*  Simply put, one can believe that God has means to purify impure souls after death without necessarily signing on to the whole Dantean cosmography.  As Newman said in Tract 90, recognizing (with the 39 Articles) that the Popish Purgatory is "a fond thing vainly invented" does not prevent us recognizing some other, non-Popish, version.

Tertullian's casual reference to a "refrigerium interim," a place of temporary refreshment for those who are not yet prepared for the Beatific Vision, could be one starting place for an Evangelical account of Purgatory.  Call it Heaven's Narthex, or Confirmation Class for the Dead.

In a sense, one might even argue that simul iustus depends upon the assumption that God has some means to strip from the newly dead their sin and leave only the holiness of Christ.  That there are tools appointed on earth for this is clear:  baptism and absolution.  But it seems natural that there are also tools in heaven, to be used upon those who die impenitent, the nasty old Uncle Harrys of the world.  To believe otherwise is to weaken either God's omnipotence or, as the Calvinists sometimes do, God's mercy.

And "Purgatory" is simply the name that we give, as  a matter of convenience, to these tools.

At least it could be.  The Orthodox, so we are told, believe that God deals mercifully with the dead, but shy away from giving this merciful dealing a Latin name or attaching to it the trappings of either indulgences or "purgatorial fire."  We Evangelicals, being also Latins, might be able to take a middle position here, and call Purgatory by its customary name, while making clear at the same time that its inner workings are God's business, hidden deliberately from our eyes and certainly from our power to alter or affect.

_____________________________________________________________________
* For those who care, Father A. has explored some of the implications of LeGoff's research in the light of anthropological theory, in an article published in Pro Ecclesia (13:4, Fall 2004, pp. 494ff.)

Vatican Misspells "Jesus"

Stolen from The Telegraph

On Tuesday, the Vatican released, and hours later withdrew, a medal intended to celebrate the present pope's first year.

Around its periphery, the medal was mean to show the words of a sermon by the Venerable Bede, on St. Matthew's Gospel (9:9-13):

Vidit ergo Iesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi "Sequere me."

It means, roughly,

Therefore, Jesus saw the tax collector, and because he saw by having mercy and by choosing, said to him, "Follow me."  

This is the source of Pope Francis's personal motto, "Miserando atque Eligendo."  The official translation is "Lowly but chosen."

Sadly, the medal actually read "Vidit ergo Lesus."  With an L.

Lesus, needless to say, is not the name of our Lord and Savior.

The Post-Authoritarian Pope

If you listen to the news, you have surely wondered just why Pope Francis insists on picking fights with the traditionalist wing of his church.  Don't judge the gays!  Give women a voice!  Skip the ermine cape!  It is a miracle, one mutters half in jest, that the guy has not yet gone the way of John Paul I.

Quite a bit of what is being reported this week now has its origin in a single source, an interview in the Jesuit magazine America, conducted by Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J.  The interview is long, but well worth reading in its entirety.  The image of the Pope that emerges is better balanced, although not much less charming, than the caricature in the headlines.

As you might expect from one Jesuit talking to another, there is a lot of inside baseball.  One of the Pope's great heroes is a guy named Peter Faber, a companion of Loyola; he makes many offhand references to the Jesuit Constitution, the Institutes, and things like that.  These are the ordinary background of life in a particular order, like Lutherans talking about Samuel Simon Schmucker or the Smalcald Articles.  To outsiders, of course, it means a lot of googling.

But there are parts of the interview which have not yet attracted much attention, but ought to.  In particular, Francis talks about his own leadership style, and how it has changed through the years.

He became a Jesuit provincial at the remarkably young age of 36,   Here is how he describes himself in those days:

That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself.  ...

My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I lived a time of great interior crisis when I was in Cordova. To be sure, I have never been like Blessed Imelda [a goody-goody], but I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

This is quite a contrast to the Pope we have seen recently, with his emphasis upon episcopal collegiality and the authority of regional bishops' conferences.  Nor, these days, is anybody accusing Francis of ultraconservatism.  (And that's an understatement).  The implication is that he has learned from his mistakes, and in fact been transformed by what he has learned.  This is an impressive quality, if genuine.

One image from the interview that has already attracted a lot of attention sis "the Church as a field hospital."  It is a brilliant and compelling picture, which deserves to be considered in context:

“I see clearly,” the pope continues, “that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.... And you have to start from the ground up."

It is immediately after this, though -- and in this context -- that he says something rather complicated, but worth hearing.  First comes the part that we love to hear:

“The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all." 

Then the part that we don't, really, but which he needs to say:

"The confessor, for example, is always in danger of being either too much of a rigorist or too lax. Neither is merciful, because neither of them really takes responsibility for the person. The rigorist washes his hands so that he leaves it to the commandment. The loose minister washes his hands by simply saying, ‘This is not a sin’ or something like that. In pastoral ministry we must accompany people, and we must heal their wounds."

This last remark helps to explain his recent defense of the Church's teaching on abortion, which has no doubt disappointed some of his most starry-eyed admirers on the left.  (Those, that is, who somehow imagine that the Pope is not Catholic).  Neither rigorism nor laxity, according to Francis, is a genuine proclamation of the Gospel.

Anyway, it's a great read, and we recomend it highly.

Broken Symbols

Recently, Fr. A. has been leading a parish study group through The Use of the Means of Grace, the ELCA's 1994 statement on sacramental practices.  It is, so far as we know, the only statement of its kind to have been adopted by the churchwide assembly, and therefore it enjoys a unique level of authority in matters of Lutheran worship. (Fact checkers?  Are we mistaken in this?)

We spent quite a bit of time on "Application 7a," which says:

The use of ELCA-approved lectionaries serves the unity of the Church, the hearing of the breadth of the Scriptures, and the evangelical meaning of the church year.  The Revised Common Lectionary and the lectionaries in the Lutheran Book of Worship make three readings and a psalm available for every Sunday and festival.

Discussing these words with our class, we observed, somewhat wistfully, that the proposition that lectionaries serve Christian unity was true only insofar as the same lectionaries were used.  The ELCA's authorized and widely-sued worship books actually offer quite a number of lectionary choices.  The Sunday lectionaries of LBW and ELW are only a little different, but the use of the semi-continuous Old Testament series can increase that difference.  The daily lectionaries presented in the two books are entirely different.  This divides, on one hand, all those who pray the Daily Office using the 2-year lectionary in LBW, ALPB's For All the Saints, or the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, from those who pray it using the ELW's 3-year daily lectionary.  The present lectionary arrangement is a very fragile sign of unity, if it is a sign at all.

Of course, the old one-year lectionary still has its enthusiasts, although they seem to be principally Missourian.  As always, they demand "unity" on their own backward-looking terms.

And, as we observed to our class, the geniuses at "Luther" Seminary have also spent quite a bit of time promoting their Narrative Lectionary.  This is a four-year cycle of readings for the "green" season, which attempts to sketch out the arc of the Biblical narrative, beginning to end, in nine months.  It is aimed at a culture which no longer grasps that arc naturally from childhood.

The Narrative Lectionary is not an intrinsically bad idea.  As pedagogy, it is just fine, even admirable.  As liturgical theology, it is, obviously, a disaster.  If the use of a common lectionary serves as a sign and symbol of unity, then the introduction of a radically different one seeks to shatter that symbol, and supplant it with one which means something else entirely.

Frankly, it just like Luther Sem --the faculty of which led the fight against full communion with the Episcopal Church -- to find a new way to weaken the fragile unity of the English-speaking Church.  At a time when preachers in Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, Methodist and Roman congregations are likely to preach on the same texts from week to week -- thus achieving a remarkable degree of formal unity -- our friends in St Paul have struck a blow for division and disunity.  That they have done it in the name of "cultural relevance," or even that they have done it with innocent intentions, is beside the point.  They have attacked a symbol of the 20th-century Church's greatest achievement, the move toward reconciliation.

And symbols matter.  They do not merely indicate, they also participate in the reality toward which they point.  Just this morning, we learned that one of our old Bible study groups has ceased to meet.  One group of pastors uses the RCL, while another has adopted the Narrative Lectionary.  They are still friends and neighbors, but their week-to-week unity has been broken.

Thanks, "Luther."

Their Novus Ordo and Ours

Over at NLM today, Gregory DiPippo continues his litany of complaints about the Roman Catholic liturgical revisions of the 20th century in excruciating detail.  We don't usually bother with these, but today's entry, on the "Baptism of the Bells," is worth a  look even for people who have no particular interest in the ceremony.

The practice in question is not, obviously, a baptism.  It is a blessing of bells for church use.  The particular ceremony is said to be 1200 years old, but -- like so much else -- it was extensively revised in the twentieth century.  In this case, it was the 1961 pontifical -- on the eve of Vatican II, but well prior to the creation of the Novus Ordo properly so called.  (Thanks, Mikael, for the correction!)

DiPippo's main point is that the comments of revisers, Annibale Bugnini and Carlo Braga, were either ignorant or deceptive, or perhaps both.  Bugnini and Braga wrote:

The rite has undergone no essential variants. … The seven penitential psalms, which opened the function, have been omitted. The washing of the bells, which was suggested by the medieval concern to structure the consecration of a bell like a baptismal rite, has also been abolished. There remains, on the other hand, the sprinkling of the bells, accompanied by the singing of Psalm 28 [i.e., 29], which is done responsorially.

DiPippo considers virtually every statement in that paragraph to be false.  Only five of the original psalms were actually penitential; the consecration lacked any of the distinctive features of a baptism; the sprinkling does not "remain" because it was added in the new ceremony.  Whether because they do not know or because they do not care, the authors make no mention of why or how Ps. 29 and its antiphon, Vox Domini, are supposed to figure in.  DiPippo adds that, "Unfortunately, the practice of mangling the source materials like this when revising liturgical books would become even more common in future years."

To all of which, a Protestant may answer:  Who cares? 

Honestly, the endless combat within Roman Catholicism regarding the precise details of comparatively obscure ceremonies hardly registers among us.  Our challenges are generally more basic:  to see that the Eucharist is celebrated without making a total hash of it.  To fend off little cups and self-intinction, to be sure the Blood of Christ is not poured into the septic tank, to keep our full-communion partners from feeding the Lord's Body to dogs.  We will get to the matter of anointing the new bells ... well, someday.  Just before Jesus gets back.  If then.

If we listen, however, it is possible that we will hear in DiPippo's lament some things which may be applicable to our own situation.  Along with the other NO dissenters, he argues that Bugnini & Co. were ham-fisted revisers of the traditional liturgy, and that when they discussed their revisions, they were either ignorant or, far more likely, deceptive.

Among Lutherans, it would be hard to make an equivalent case for the revision process that created the 1978 LBW and its blue sister volume, Missouri's LW.  Whether one likes them or not, the dramatic changes to the Lutheran liturgy that occurred in the late 1970s were widely and publicly discussed.  They reflected what then seemed like an emerging ecumenical consensus.  (One problem, of course, is that the consensus had largely been shaped by the prior work of Bugnini and his companions.)

However, the process of "Renewing Worship" which created the ELW was somewhat less transparent, and the results have been considerably less satisfactory.  While Episcopalians retained their Rite I and Roman Catholics, reflecting upon their "new" rites, have chosen to provide a wider range of more traditional worship resources (more Latin, a more literal English), Lutherans have taken the opposite direction.  The shapers of our newest worship book have taken it upon themselves to make deep changes to the shape of the liturgy, while offering little by the way of rationale.

We wonder whether, in the "Renewing Worship" process, anybody actually asked for a paraphrased, inclusivized psalter.  And if they did, were any of the people who might resist it even consulted?  Likewise, did anybody ask to remove the Gloria Patri from the canticles in Daily Prayer?  We wonder, in particular, whose brilliant idea it was to take the Pax from Holy Communion and insert it, almost randomly, into other ceremonies as well?  (As though the post-70s Pax, described by one layman as "a seventh-inning stretch," were not already a significant problem in pastoral liturgics!)

The longer we use ELW, the more deeply we feel betrayed by its creators.  And with that sense of betrayal comes the question at the heart of DiPippo's post about Bugnini and Braga:  when liturgical revisers "mangle the source material," is it because they are ignorant of the traditions, or because they hate them?

Whosoever Desires

This time last year, we talked about the Athanasian Creed.  Specifically, we talked about ways to incorporate this extremely long piece of Christian history into one's worship service, should you so desire -- and we insisted, we think now too forcefully, that you should so desire.

The subject was raised again last night in an online chat among some colleagues.  It was a good chat, but one very specific thing that came up was confusion about the role of the Athanasian Creed in historic liturgies, whether Evangelical or otherwise.  We did a few minutes of research, and want to clear up some misconceptions on the subject.

Briefly, the liturgical history of the Athanasian Creed looks like this:

BEFORE THE REFORMATION

The Athanasian Creed seems to emerge in the 5th-6th centuries in southern Gaul.  It is a Latin document reflecting Augustinian theology (and, obviously, has nothing to do with Athanasius).  No matter what the Book of Concord says, it is not really an "ecumenical creed," since it was never accepted by any of the councils.  However, its structure suggests that it may have been intended from the beginning as a liturgical document.  Indeed, in documents from the 10th and 11th centuries, it is called "the Hymn of St. Athanasius on the Trinity" or "the Psalm Quicunque vult."

From at least 820, according to the old Catholic Encyclopedia, it occurred on Sundays at Prime in the Roman and Ambrosian breviaries (as well as derivatives, such as Sarum).  The Ambrosian rite also used it, sometimes, in the commendation of the dying.

Unsurprisingly, it has no formal role in Orthodox worship, but it is sometimes printed on the Horologion, as a text for private devotion.  As you would expect, it is printed without the filioque.

DURING THE REFORMATION

In his commentary on Joel, Luther says of the Athanasian Creed that, "I doubt if, since the days of the apostles, anything more important and more glorious has ever bee written in the Church of the New Testament."  This is hyperbolic, to be sure, but it shows that the Reformers had no plan to surrender their inheritance.

Among Evangelicals, the Athanasian Creed was used in two ways.  Some church orders (Wittenberg 1533; Braunschweig Wolfenbuettel 1543; Pomerania 1563; John Casimir of Saxony, 1626) used it as part of the Daily Office. In these cases, according to the 1899 Lutheran Cyclopedia article, it was typically sung at Matins on Saturday or Sunday, alternating in use with the Te Deum and Benedictus.  In practice, it was sung antiphonally, with the Gloria Patri added (because, obviously, it wasn't long enough already).

Timothy Wengert describes the use at Wittenberg, during Luther's lifetime, in detail:

It was to be sung at Matins on Sundays by the boys choir in Latin, alternating week by week with the Te Deum, after the sermon and a German hymn sung by the congregation. The same choir was to begin the Matins service reciting the catechism in Latin antiphonally.

A smaller number of orders used it as part of the Communion service, following the Gospel.  (Hesse 1574 and, specifically on Trinity Sunday, Schwaebisch Halle 1615).

The Pomeranian agenda also prescribed it for use "at the opening of synods, and once a month," at least according to an 1899 article by R. Morris Smith. It also seems to have been used at ordinations.

What must be added here is that, while some Evangelicals retained this creed in worship, others did not.  The Lutheran Reformation was liturgically diverse, and -- for all its conservatism -- sought to impose no common liturgy upon its adherents.

Anglicanism, of necessity, sought precisely that.  Each successive revision of the Prayer Book became, at least in theory, a legal document prescribing just what would be said, and when, at worship in each parish church.  In 1549, the BCP prescribed the Athanasian Creed for use after after the Benedictus at Matins on Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity.  The 1559 added seven saints' days, for a total of thirteen recitations.  This rubric was retained in the 1662 book, which remains the principal liturgical book of the Church of England.

Thirteen times per annum, the Anglican rubric (which remains in force to this day, at least on paper) seems like a lot.  It is worth remembering that the Pomeranians, and presumably some of the other German churches, sung it about as often.

DURING THE BAD YEARS

Notwithstanding Fr. Zuhlsdorf's thing about red and black, we all know that rubrics are made to be ignored.  It seems pretty clear that, during the 17th and 18th centuries, the Athanasian Creed fell into disuse.  Evidence is that the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA, when it developed its own version of the BCP, omitted the Athanasian Creed entirely.  A post at the Prayer Book Society blog avers that the minatory clauses were to blame, and this sounds likely.

We aren't sure just what the various Lutheran churches did during these years.  Perhaps, on paper, some retained the Athanasian Creed at Matins -- but then, it seems that the Daily Office dropped almost entirely out of use, which would moot the rubric without abolishing it.

THE 19th CENTURY REVIVAL

In a curious 1875 essay, the Anglican writers Pebody and Kenny describe the gradual restoration of the Athanasian Creed in their own church.  They extol the frequency of its use in English churches, where it seems to have been sung to instrumental accompaniment.  They admit, however, that it has only returned to widespread use over the preceding 60 years, as BCP rubrics have been more carefully followed, and that even in their own time many of the English clergy refuse to obey the rubric, and they estimate that 3/5 would prefer it were removed.

They also mention that, in 1829, the Prussian church had given permission for the Athansian Creed to be used "in any churches where the use had lingered to that time."  This suggests that at least a few Lutherans had continued the practice through the liturgical lean years.

Nonetheless, such use must have been exceptional.  A 1906 LLA essay on the liturgical use of the creeds in Lutheran churches states flatly that it "is not used ... at this time."  It is not clear how the author knows this, or even whether he is correct.

THE 20th CENTURY

In 1914, revisions to the Roman breviary reduced the use of the Athanasian Creed to Prime on Trinity Sunday.  (In the contemporary Liturgy of the Hours, it is used only on Trinity.)

Among Lutherans, recitation on Trinity Sunday seems to have been common enough by the mid-20th century.  The Athanasian Creed was not included in the 1917 Common Service Book, or the 1958 Service Book and Hymnal, but it was in The Lutheran Hymnal (1941).   In 1967, Catholic World noted in passing that Lutherans and Roman Catholics were "almost" the only American churches to use the Athanasian Creed in worship.

In a 1965 article, Arthur Carl Piepkorn prescribes thusly for TLH users:

On Trinity Sunday, at Matins, the Athanasian Creed may be used instead of the Psalmody. The Lutheran Liturgy [a manual for TLH] authorizes you to use the Athanasian Creed in place of part of the Psalmody. When you use the Athanasian Creed, render it like a Psalm or Canticle; use Gloria Patri at the end and, if you wish, use an appropriate Antiphon at the beginning and the end. The Athanasian Creed should never be substituted for the Nicene (or the Apostles') Creed.

It was printed in the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship, and although we recall no rubrics concerning its use, we have neither our desk edition nor Pfatteicher's Manual on the Liturgy available to us just now.  The latter, we assume, had at least some suggestions.

Meanwhile, Episcopalians added it to the back pages of their 1979 BCP, as "an historical document" like the 39 Articles or the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, rather than a liturgical text.   Evangelical Lutheran Worship omits it entirely.

This, so far as we know, covers the field.  At the moment, Lutherans (at least users of LBW, ELW or the new Missouri book) have no rubric prescribing the Athanasian Creed, but a fair number of congregations are accustomed to its use, at least on rare occasions.  This use, while by no means obligatory, is deeply rooted in the history of the Evangelical movement, and deserves to be remembered, whether or not it is continued.

"Pastors, Not Functionaries"

That is the line that Rocco Palmo pulled out of a sermon by Pope Francis, delivered at a recent service of ordination.  The sermon is posted at Whispers in the Loggia, and well worth a read.

Tow sections grab our attention.  In the first, Francis briefly distinguishes the general from the particular priesthood:

It is true that God has made his entire holy people a royal priesthood in Christ. Nevertheless, our great Priest himself, Jesus Christ, chose certain disciples to carry out publicly in his name, and on behalf of mankind, a priestly office in the Church. For Christ was sent by the Father and he in turn sent the Apostles into the world, so that through them and their successors, the Bishops, he might continue to exercise his office of Teacher, Priest, and Shepherd. ...

After mature deliberation and prayer, these, our brothers, are now to be ordained to the priesthood in the Order of the presbyterate so as to serve Christ the Teacher, Priest, and Shepherd, by whose ministry his body, that is, the Church, is built and grows into the people of God, a holy temple.

In being configured to Christ the eternal High Priest and joined to the priesthood of the Bishops, they will be consecrated as true priests of the New Testament, to preach the Gospel, to shepherd God’s people, and to celebrate the sacred Liturgy, especially the Lord’s sacrifice.

This is a lucid statement of something we have long tried to communicate to our fellow Evangelicals.  The "priesthood of all believers" -- a phrase not to be found in Luther -- is built, in the Confessions, on just the passage to which Francis refers here, 1 Peter 2:9.  Some Lutherans like to imagine that our Confessions establish the Evangelical priesthood on a basis quite distinct from the Catholic one, but it has never been clear to us that they are correct.

Rather the opposite; the various theories (one cannot call them doctrines) concerning the office of ministry abroad in the Lutheran churches are surpassed in their inadequacy only by our myriad and conflicting ecclesiologies.  One of the much-remarked-upon ironies of Lutheran life is that we have sustained a generally competent and traditional priestly practice despite a dismal supporting theology.

A shocking number of Lutherans are taught to believe that, since all the baptized are priests, there are no essential differences in their ministries.  At its most extreme, this leads to lay presidency at the Eucharist, pastors ordained without bishops, and congregations reciting the Collect en masse, as if to spite the millennia.  (Some days, we do not know which of these abuses is worst.)  But even without these gross abuses, the simplistic understanding of the general priesthood has led to many smaller failures.  How many congregations treat their pastor with barely suppressed contempt, the result of an anxiety about the office that leads to inadvertent anticlericalism?  How many treat the pastor as an employee, a subordinate rather than a leader?  And how many pastors let them?

It seems to us that the Confessions permit a more traditional reading, and that indeed the hermeneutic of Apology 14:1 practically demands it.  The general priesthood is a Biblical reality; but so long as it cannot be proven to overthrow the particular priesthood, we must assume that both institutions continue, as they have throughout the history of the Church, distinct and complementary.

And Francis describes the duties of the particular priesthood in language that Lutherans will recognize:  to preach the Gospel and celebrate the sacraments, and to shepherd -- to pastor, to lead -- God's people. No matter how confused, contradictory and inadequate our theories have been, our practice has almost always recognized that these are duties peculiar to the people set aside and blessed for them.

He then goes on to talk about something Lutherans have buried like pirate's treasure, keeping it as far from our everyday conversationas we can:  the rites of confession and forgiveness.  We at the Egg are constantly astonished by the umber of lifelong Lutherans who can recall from memory which page of the LBW or SBH or TLH their favorite hymn was on, but who do not even know that those books contain an order for individual confession.  How many recall, with varying degrees of affection, a confirmation class in which they were asked to memorize the Catechism -- and yet never seem to have stumbled across Chapter 5?

Anyway, it is in this context that Francis offers wise advice to the whole  clergy, and especially to those newly ordained, or soon to be ordained:

Today I ask you in the name of Christ and the Church, never tire of being merciful. You will comfort the sick and the elderly with holy oil: do not hesitate to show tenderness towards the elderly. When you celebrate the sacred rites, when you offer prayers of praise and thanks to God throughout the hours of the day, not only for the people of God but for the world—remember then that you are taken from among men and appointed on their behalf for those things that pertain to God. Therefore, carry out the ministry of Christ the Priest with constant joy and genuine love, attending not to your own concerns but to those of Jesus Christ. You are pastors, not functionaries. Be mediators, not intermediaries.

Now For A Real Journalist

We have been reading a lot, lately, by John L. Allen, Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter.  He is easily the most respected journalist covering the Vatican.  In an interview with Nicholas Hahn at Real Clear Religion, Allen talks about what to expect from the Bergoglio papacy, and -- more interesting still -- about his work as a journalist.  Here are some highlights.

ON REFORM, BOTH CURIAL AND LITURGICAL::

I think this was clearly, and self-consciously, the most anti-establishment conclave of the last 150 years. I think you'd probably have to go back to the election of Leo XIII in 1878 to find a conclave where the Cardinals understood themselves so clearly to be voting for a change. In this case it wasn't a rejection of the substance of Benedict XVI's papacy, but it was a rejection of the methods of management and governance. ... 

RCR: There has been some concern from conservatives that this Pope won't be friendly to their issues. Are those concerns valid? 

JA: I wouldn't worry about him rejecting them. I would worry that it's not what he's going to be thinking about when he gets out of bed in the morning. I mean, I don't see him abrogating Summorum Pontificum. However, I don't think you're going to get what you got under Benedict XVI who self-consciously tried to set an example of a more reverent and sober liturgical style. To the extent that the reform of the reform in the liturgical life of the Church goes on, it's probably going to be led less from Rome. I don't think the Pope is going to get in the way of it, but I don't think he's going to be the agent of it in the same way Benedict XVI was.

ON REPORTING:

RCR: Newsweek's Ken Woodward once wrote that outside of North Korea, "no bureaucracy is harder for a journalist to crack than the Vatican's." Do you agree with him? 

JA: I'm not 100 percent sure that's true. The problem with the Vatican isn't so much secrecy, because this isn't like the Pentagon where they have troop movements they're trying to conceal. There aren't really state secrets in that sense. There aren't spy satellites orbiting. 

RCR: No drones either? 

JA: [Laughter] No. The problem with the Vatican is that it's unique. It is unlike any other institution so you have to learn how to crack the codes. Now, it's not rocket science, but you have to spend enough time doing it that you learn to speak the languages.

(That "cracking the code" and "learning the languages" is true for any sort of journalism -- and also, incidentally, for rpaish ministry).  

Hahn observes that Allen does not necessarily support the positions taken by the NCR's editors, who sometimes dissent from church teaching.  Allen responds:

JA: I'm a reporter and an analyst, so I'm trying to give people tools to think about issues in the Church. I'm not trying to tell them what to think about these issues. 

RCR: Your kind of objectivity has been described as "maddening." Does it ever drive you mad? 

JA: I take it as a compliment, if it's true. I have never in my life set out in an effort to write an objective story. I'm just trying to get the story right. That's it. Getting the story right means you have to respect the complexity of reality. There's always more than one view of what's going on in the Church or anything else.
You try to assemble the facts as best you can, then you try talk to a bunch of different people representing different points of view about those facts, and then you try to lay it all out there in a way that's engaging to people who don't have a Ph.D in ecclesiology. More than that, I'm very nervous of any journalist who has a loftier notion of what our calling is. Any journalist who goes into a story with an idea of who the good guys and bad guys are makes me nervous. 

The aim should always be getting the story right and objectivity is a byproduct.

There's more where that came from, and it's fascinating.

Picking the Pope

Well-informed writing about religious matters is rare enough that, when you stumble across an example, the angels start to sing.  Or Maybe Mother A. is rocking out while she does her Pilates; whatever.

In any case, the Wall Street Journal has an excellent article called Fifteen Days in Rome:  How the Pope Was Picked, by Stacy Meichtry and Allessandra Galloni, that is worth reading.  Its general subject has, of course, received immense attention; the article does a nifty job of pulling together the facts and turning them into an atmospheric narrative.

Meichtry and Galloni sketch out some of the factions, or perhaps we should call them "schools of thought," among the cardinals, and make a surprisingly strong case for the power of the English-speakers.  But most impressive is that they tell the story without falling back on the easy and inaccurate language of "liberals" and "conservatives," words that -- as we never tire of saying -- mean almost nothing in this context.

The description of Bergoglio's speech to the General Congregation, and especially the reflection by Peru's Cipriani Cardinal Thorne, is very revealing. Bergoglio appears to have turned the conversation in an important direction -- toward what in Italian s called the periferia, meaning the edge either of a city or of a society, or what we might call the margins and the marginalized.  But he did this in a way that gave no ground to the liberation theology of the 70s.  The importance of this cannot be understated.  It is easy to imagine Roman Catholicism as though it were divided between reactionary fat cats and rag tag revolutionaries, and that the former have in recent years all but suppressed the latter.  This is wildly inaccurate, and the effect of Bergoglio's speech is proof of that.  The people at the very center of the church's power structure heard an authentic call to concern for the margins, and responded at once.  Because, whatever their personal flaws and failures, they know that they are the living symbols of a powerful tradition.  Or, simply, the sheep recognize the voice of their shepherd.

Apparently, this an excerpt from a book.  We will probably buy it, once we have money.  You might not want to wait.

"Lesbian Nuns Puking Nails"

A Renaissance bishop casting out demons.  Image stolen from Al Mohler, of all people.

That is the least forgettable image in a Prospect review of Brian Levack's new book, The Devil Within, a history of demonic possession, and exorcism therefrom, in the Christian West.

The real takeaway, however, is this thought:

Like witch-burning, demonic possession feels “medieval” in our contemporary imagination but it didn’t actually happen with any regularity in the medieval period. Rather, Levack shows how demonology persisted into the era of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, when one thinks of science and rationality beginning to shine light on the darkness.

Just so.  We're well acquainted with the history of witch trials, which were in fact discouraged by Church law from antiquity through the late Middle Ages, and only came into their own during the period of the Renaissance and Reformation.   (Much of our time in college was taken up with this stuff, which helps to explain why we are unemployed today).

The natural conclusion, and one much in vogue among witchcraft scholars in the 1980s, is that witch trials arose out of a pervasive anxiety connected to destabilizing social change.  This change is not merely the rise of Humanism and Protestantism, although those were indeed destabilizing, but also changes in the age of marriage and the number of unmarried women, as well as changes resulting from the first hints of capitalism and a rising middle class.  Like fundamentalism today, it was a reactionary movement passing itself off as a conservative one, even though it did not seek to conserve a genuine heritage.

To extend the study beyond witchcraft (about which Levack has written a previous book) to possession and exorcism is one of those brilliant ideas that seems obvious after somebody else thinks of it.  One principal difference appears to be that, while witch trials were spread fairly evenly over Roman Catholics and Protestants on the continent -- having been rare in Britain -- exorcism is said to have been principally a Roman Catholic affair.

As reported in the review, Levack takes a different tack, less sociological and more anthropological.  He describes possession and exorcism as public rituals that express the needs and beliefs of the surrounding culture, in the same sense that a coronation does or, more aptly, a modern politician's drama of sin and repentance.  This sounds extremely promising.

We are a little uncertain about some of the specifics, however -- but this may have less to do with Levack's scholarship than with the limitations of the reviewer, a grad student named Josephine Livingstone.  At one point, having described the public, practically festival, exorcisms typical of the 17th century, she says blithely, "But we all know what goes on in a Catholic exorcism," and lists as her authorities a string of Hollywood movies.  It is not clear whether Levack imagines that movies are a good guide to historical practices or Livingstone does, but in either case the idea is mistaken.

Indeed, Livingstone has a great deal to say about horror movies.  She believes that Levack has handed her the key to understanding, say, Children of the Corn and other "psychological dramas that go heavy on the religion and that feature supernatural children."  This seems unlikely.

More problematic still is this paragraph:

Levack explains [the rise of exorcism in the 16th and 17th centuries] by highlighting the rise of nominalism in the early 15th century, the view that “an inscrutable, arbitrary God might give the devil great latitude in the world for reasons unknown to humankind.” Popular apocalyptic thought—the strong suspicion that the final battle between good and evil was under way—made possession seem reasonable, even expected. The devil (or his attendant demons) taking control of your body was like the forces of evil saving seats at the cinema by putting coats on them.

Really?  Is that what nominalism was?  Because we were fairly convinced that it was, and remains, the philosophical rejection of Platonic universals, pioneered in the fourteenth century by William of Ockham.  While we do not doubt that somebody with a New Historicist bent might capably bring together nominalism, theodicy, and apocalypticism, they are not related in any immediately obvious or intuitive fashion.  As it stands, this paragraph is gibberish.

Nonetheless, this book sounds extremely interesting, not only to medievalists and but to anybody with an interest in the ways that a society in turmoil creates public rituals.