The Sacramental Revolution of Pope Pius X

Liam suggested in a comment last week that a look at “(t)he century of reform might also take into account the sacramental revolution of Pius X,” namely two documents. First, Pius X’s 1905 Sacra Tridentina: On Frequent and Daily Reception of Holy Communion and the curial decree Quam Singulari, issued five years later.

If Vatican II is fading into a historical memory to be advanced or retreated on political spin or even whim, then Pius X’s efforts at urging the laity to receive the Eucharist regularly and from an early age must surely be dissolving in the mists of time.

Each of these is a brief document, and so shouldn’t take up much time or e-space on this blog. My hesitation on tackling these pieces is that the commentary on them is a very well-worn path, and largely lies within the domain of scholars these days. But the same could be said of Vatican II, and certainly the new Roman Missal. I also wonder if looking at these documents might not suggest an analysis of Pius XII’s encyclical Mediator Dei. Frankly, that doesn’t hold much interest for me at the moment.

Blogging will be light the next few days as I attend to family and financial matters. I’d like to ponder how to set up this discussion. I’m leaning to these two shorter, earlier documents. Then perhaps it will be time to look at the dedication rites and Built of Living Stones. I also confess my energy is lagging for the push to complete the GDC. But we’ll keep that going, too, given that we’re only one-fourth of the way from the end.

 

 

 

Five Not-So-Easy Pieces

I had noticed Jim Martin’s piece before on the new site, The Jesuit Post, but Liam emailed it to me with this commentary:

An inspirational break from the dispiriting

Indeed. So I read “The Five Best Pieces of Jesuit Wisdom I’ve Ever Heard” with a little more attention this time. I commend it to any serious believer. After reading it, I also had to do my own examen because just in the last hour I’ve had battles with numbers one, two, and four. And the other two are still pretty lukewarm for me.

It never gets easy to deal with envy. I think Fr Martin is an outstanding writer. I actually caught myself thinking, “I wish I could write like him!” before realizing that I have other things I do better that don’t involve the internet or writing books and articles. Stick with what the retreat showed me, I thought gently.

Piece number four was sparked by a difficult fellow novice. Fr Martin:

At one point in my Jesuit training I lived with a difficult person in community.  (Imagine that!)  He had many good qualities, but he was also argumentative and combative.  (Eventually he would leave the Jesuits.)  Since I was always running into him, it seemed that I was slowly changing in response.  I was always on guard – combative and argumentative myself – in order to protect myself.

The Jesuit community? Sounds more like the blogosphere to me.

At one point, I told my spiritual director that his personality seemed to be making me into a different person, someone I didn’t like.  I was becoming someone in reaction to him.

The advice:

Don’t let anyone prevent you from becoming the person you want to be.  He has no right to do that, nor does he really have the power.  God desires you to become loving and charitable.  Don’t let him distract you.

It may only have taken fourteen years, but this piece seems very appropriate for the Catholic blogosphere these days, at least from my perspective. Maybe I stick too close to the flock just to make a point of not being part of it. There might be something to just going my own way for a time. It won’t be easy or overnight, and Fr Martin is wise to realize that …

It was hard advice to follow.  But it was essential.  Rather than let someone else’s problems mold you, become the person God wants you to become.

Sounds good to me. Thanks Liam.

 

Looking Back on Baptism of the Lord

Liam sent me the link on what your parish should have been celebrating yesterday if it observed Epiphany this past Sunday.

Here’s a riff on that theme …

Many feasts of the Lord lend their names to parishes: Nativity, Transfiguration, Sacred Heart, Corpus Christi, Christ the King, etc.. Have you ever wondered by some feasts do not inspire such patronage? Baptism of the Lord strikes me as one of these.

The celebration of the Baptism of the Lord has been given a place of honor through the reform of the General Roman Calendar, which has assigned it to the Sunday after Epiphany. This is meant to facilitate observance of the feast by the whole Christian community gathered together on that Sunday, since in the history of salvation and in the liturgical year this feast has highly important doctrinal, pastoral, and ecumenical dimensions.

If this is true, I would expect more parishes dedicated to the Baptism of the Lord.

 

The Armchair Liturgist: Continuity for the First Weekdays in Ordinary Time

Liam offers another armchair liturgist bit for us today:

Studying my new daily missal for the coming week, I see that it provides that, when the Baptism of the Lord is celebrated on Monday, as it is this year in the USA, then the readings for the Monday of the First Week of Ordinary Time may be added to the readings of the Tuesday of the First Week of Ordinary Time, so that the continuity of the passages is retained. This is true for the Gospel in cycles I and II. It is also true for the first reading in cycle II (which is what we are in this year); for cycle I, the merit of this approach for the first reading is less clear.

So, who will be advising celebrants and lectors of this option? What’s your preference?

Another choice for liturgists: how would you handle an instance like this where the Lectionary doesn’t give you the merged option? Are your lectors skilled enough to start on “Monday’s page,” then flip to the next day? Same for the priest–flip back and then finish up with Tuesday?

A small editing observation: on the USCCB page linked above, a typo on the choices of Gospel readings.

 

The Armchair Liturgist Ponders Epiphany

Liam suggested I pose some armchair questions for you liturgists-to-be:

The new Missal, finally, contains propers for the Vigil of Epiphany. The readings (including the psalm) are the same for the Vigil and the Day. The collects, offertory prayer and communion prayer are different. So, too, the spoken entrance and communion antiphons (which would be used for those unusual weekend Masses without music). Whose celebrants know this? If you were the parish liturgist, would you proactively advise the parish priests?

Does this feast need its own Vigil readings? What gospel would possible work for this? John 1:10-13? What about the other readings? Baruch 5:5-9? Psalm 2?

 

Just Desserts

Liam sent me Jonah Lehrer’s piece, “Is The World Just?”

It turns out that we all have an intuitive belief in justice – people get what they deserve. This instinct makes all sorts of social contracts possible, but it comes with a perverse side effect, causing us to ignore stories of suffering that directly contradict that assumption. Because we believe in justice, we ignore stories of injustice.

This article has been sticking with me for a while. I meant to blog on it and with a few stories popping up about divorce and Christian persecution, the connections seemed to be clicking.

I suspect that everyone is predisposed to ignore injustice when it’s beyond their circle of comfort. Divorced people might have suffered any sort of abuse while they were married, but it was their own fault for getting married sleeping with the enemy in the first place.

The martyrs fared even worse. Even though this victim was supposedly performing an act of altruism – she was suffering for the sake of others – the witnesses thought she was the most culpable of all. Her pain was proof of her guilt. Lerner’s conclusion was unsettling: “The sight of an innocent person suffering without possibility of reward or compensation motivated people to devalue the attractiveness of the victim in order to bring about a more appropriate fit between her fate and her character.”

Maybe Christian martyrs in the modern world are devalued. Even other Christians (but certainly secular media and government) can dismiss them as loony holy rollers who are too in-your-face about their faith. So they get what they deserve. Never mind that many martyred Christians in these countries have a religious legacy longer and deeper than, say, the United States.

The situation in Iraq is compounded by the Bush legacy. Conservative Christians seemed to align with adventurism in southwest Asia. That the Iraq War would lead to catastrophe for Christians is just incomprehensible to many. The war was supposed to be about extremism in Islam. Of course, Iraqi Christians may be easy to dismiss–they don’t profess in so many words Jesus as personal Lord and Savior. Plus they don’t look white.

What to do? Perhaps realize that it is human nature to have blind spots. When confronted with any possibility we are wrong, we can ask, “What have I missed?” We can also presume the best of any victim, regardless of ideology.

Read the whole Lehrer piece, especially the stories.

 

Infrequent Sacramental Encounters Good?

A few weeks back Liam sent me this quote from a NLM guest contributor, Maurizio Bettoja:

In the first place, there is the fact that communion is evidently a particularly important and exceptional rite. Communion as practiced today is essentially due to St. Pius X’s encouragement of frequent communion but before then, communion was sparingly given and almost all faithful communicated only at Easter (the “precetto Pasquale”) and perhaps one or two times a year. In the late 18th century frequent communion meant once a month. Msgr. Barbier de Montault’s Année liturgique à Rome (1862 and 1870) lists the few Roman churches where general communion was distributed, showing that generally communion was not included in ordinary Masses. In fact, very often communion, especially at Easter, was not part of the Mass: the faithful would go to confession in Lent or Easter and a priest distributing communion would be placed immediately next to the confessional so that penitents passed directly from confession to communion without time to sin! Generally speaking, in the past one would go often to confession and rarely to communion, whereas now it is the opposite. All this contributed to the reverence, sacrality, and exceptional importance of holy communion.

… along with this comment:

So, I guess that means infrequent confession has contributed to the reverence, sacrality, and exceptional importance of Reconciliation.

Or that the real Catholics out there are the ones who come only on Christmas and Easter.

In another day or two, we’ll be seeing lots of those “old-style” Catholics–the ones who receive Communion only once or twice a year. I wouldn’t mind making a few converts to Pius X Catholics.

 

Britain Resists the Great War

We used to call it the Great War, but in the sense of glory or accomplishment, there is nothing “great” about it. Ghastly would be a better term. Several years ago I read a substantial history of it, and I’m convinced that the period 1914-18 was nothing less than an experience of utter evil under the guise of near-total incompetence. Generals/aristocrats sent soldiers/commoners to their deaths by the hundreds of thousands because they failed to graduate from cavalry and rifle warcraft. And it wouldn’t have been much better if the western aristocracy had trained for stone knives and flint arrowheads for all the good it did brave men at Gallipoli and other places. And for what? All it did was usher in a generation of bitterness followed by an even worse hemorrhage of violence two decades later.

Liam sent me a link to Adam Hochschild’s essay on the antiwar movement in Britain. A comparison with our own day:

Unlike, for example, American opponents of our wars in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, or Afghanistan, the Britons who opposed this war had no major news­papers and only a tiny handful of legislators on their side. For someone in a prominent position to advocate any compromise was considered close to treason. When Rev. Edward Lyttelton, the headmaster of Eton, proposed some possible peace terms, the resulting uproar forced him to resign. From Parliament to pulpit, ferocity reigned. “Kill Germans! Kill them!” raged one clergyman in a 1915 sermon, “ . . . not for the sake of killing, but to save the world. . . . Kill the good as well as the bad. . . . Kill the young men as well as the old. . . . I look upon it as a war for purity. I look upon everybody who dies in it as a martyr.” The speaker was Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Anglican Bishop of London.

If I gave you all but the first two words of the Winnington-Ingram quote for you, would you be quicker to attribute it to a Nazi than to an Anglican bishop?

Love this:

Recruiting posters appealed to shame: one showed two children asking a frowning, guilty-looking father in civilian clothes, “Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?” (Keir Hardie’s friend Bob Smillie, leader of the Scottish mineworkers, said his reply would be: “I tried to stop the bloody thing, my child.”)

If the Church had come to terms with the corruption and incompetence in European aristrocracy in the early part of the twentieth century, and sided with the cause of peace, I would suggest the Gospel would have a far greater appeal, especially in Europe, than it does today. The strength of the Church  would be enhanced by emphasizing those who resisted military service in a holy and heroic way–people like Ben Salmon.

This strength is needed still today. With Iraq we received the worst of both worlds: an immoral war, conducted with criminal incompetence. We should stand with others around the world to ensure that if we find ourselves unable to stop future violence, that we will resist it with all that is holy that is within our grasp. And expose war advocates as misguided and duped.

One thing that struck me in this essay was how authorities were scared of pacifists. The reality is no less true today.

 

Pre-Lent Catholic Culture

 

(This is Liam.)

Let’s talk culture for a bit, shall we?

Well, for the faithful on this side of the sanctuary rail, it was Carnival [or insert cognate term from your Catholic culture of choice - of course, in the Protestant-dominated USA, there was little Carnival culture outside Louisiana, Mobile and ethnic Catholic ghettoes (especially Polish, German, and Italian) that brought their respective Carnival traditions with them - the Irish being notably MIA in this regard, as their cultural pre-Lenten semi-pagan midwinter celebrations were deliberately euthanized (along with a lot of pre-Famine Irish cultural practices) by the Irish hierarchy in the wake of the Great Hunger in favor of sturdy Victorian bourgeois values (think Methodism in Catholic devotional drag, with none of the good music - considering the rich musical culture of the Irish, it's rather amazing how impoverished Irish liturgical music became)].

It was probably the most schizo time of the year for the Catholic church. Within the sanctuary rail, violet replaced green (which was very noticeable), the Gloria on Sundays was suppressed (likewise), tracts replaced the gradual psalm (not the most PIPs would notice much except for the omission of Alleluia) and breviary readings took a different turn (which the overwhelming majority of the faithful would have no idea about). Outside the sanctuary rail, the faithful were fattening up for the Lenten fast, and having a helluva grand old time (again, not those Irish). The gentry and aristocracy in Old Catholic Europe threw lavish entertainments; it was the height of the “social season”. The rich areas of Catholic cities were bathed in a kind of nightime light that was rare (and very welcome in the dark-but-lengthening light of late winter, though it would seem exceedingly dim to our modern eyes accustomed to electric light in the dark) until the advent of gaslight and then electric lighting.

Of course, this was all fueled by a sense that Lent was the main event and Eastertide (the period after Easter Sunday) had become something of an afterthought. The cultural source of this trend was probably in the late Middle Ages and was accelerated by the early Modern and Industrial Age trends to cut back severely on the way the Easter holidays were once celebrated. (It’s important to remember that, until late Middle Ages, Catholics not only abstained from meatflesh but also dairy and eggs and sex during Lent – while canons kept those precepts on the books until the 20th century, in practice they were greatly diluted by promiscuous indults. Still, try to imagine what Eastertide was like before this started to unravel in the late Middle Ages….)

The point of the post-conciliar suppression was to recover the sense that Easter and Eastertide is the main event, and Lent is a period of preparation for it. I think that is very right. For those who find suddenly descending into Lent odd, it is no less odd than suddenly descending into the schizoid former season of pre-Lent (if anything, it’s easier for the lack of the schizoid quality).

The decline of Lenten fasting during the 20th century has been accompanied by a decline in pre-Lenten festivities (except in Carnivale Disneylands like New Orleans, Rio and Venice that have cultivated a modern echo in return for tourist coin). Not that anyone complaining about the suppression of pre-Lent appears to notice that.

The English term “Shrove Tuesday” is a faint echo of when people confessed their sins just *before* Lent and did their penances *during* Lent. It’s been many centuries since that practice (the actual prevalence of which cultural historians continue to debate) was anything resembling a reality. That is the one link the Roman tradition may have had to something resembling a Forgiveness Sunday of the Eastern churches.

Which is a very long-winded way of saying the the pre-Lent that survived to 1962 was a withered scrap of liturgical detritus that had long since been unconnected to the real life of most Catholics outside cathedral chapters, monasteries/convents and certain oratories where the Divine Office was cultivated with care. The weeping for its loss by latter-day traditionalists outside those contexts is one indicator that it has more shibboleth ideological value than true traditional value.

 

Engaging the Torturous

Liam forwarded Mark Shea’s latest essay on the pro-torture crowd. I have to confess my surprise the heat this is generating among conservative Catholics. Mark correctly identifies the cowardice inherent in abusing other human beings for one’s own ends. Even a pseudo-generous end. Torture is of a kin to child abusers, sex offenders, and playground bullies. Only that Popular Television Shows aren’t usually made on the subject.

Mark pierces to the heart of the false faith:

When you point out that he has not only the whole civilized world, but Holy Church against him, he falls back on a diabolical inversion of moral values which identifies grave sin with courage like Milton’s Satan:

“let’s say that I lose my soul to save innocent lives. Then so be it.”

This is the *real* heart of the matter. When all is said and done, the coward is saying, quite nakedly, that he will commit a sin for which God would be perfectly right to damn him to the everlasting fires of hell–and pridefully congratulating himself for it.

I can’t add much of significance to this, except to suggest that to me it reveals something of a false activism, a sort of neo-pelagianism. It’s an easy trap to fall into. There is so much wrong with the world, so much mess nobody’s bothered to call the maid about–I guess I’ll have to clean it up myself. The implication is that there is no room for patience. The implication is that there is no place for trust in the agency of God. The implication is that God has empowered me to be a Messiah, and even if it means going beyond what I can do well (like caring for my own soul’s good health) I will do it, because nobody else, including God, seems to care.

Do I have it about right?

 

Liam on Eunice Kennedy Shriver

I thought I’d take the occasion to note an almost-absence in Catholic blogdom: the near silence about the passing of one of the most extraordinary American Catholics of our time, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

Vox Nova offers by far the most complete appreciation so far.

That said, I am frankly amazed at this near silence. Maybe I was hoping for too much. Are Eunice’s and Sargent’s identification with the Democratic party establishment so salient as to blind people to their authentic Catholic advocacy in the best of the seamless garment tradition? Of course, I guess I should not be surprised when too many people spit out “seamless garment” as a facile epithet meaning “cop-out” and they forget people for whom it was never a cop-out.

The lives of two Kennedy sisters who never held office – Rosemary and Eunice – should demonstrate yet again that one need not hold civil or ecclesiastical office to do the most for the least of God’s children. In Rosemary’s case, it was not voluntary as such, but I think the two of them together represent a powerful reminder of the traditional Catholic appreciation of the complementarity of the operations of grace through human lives, not merely through our actions but through our just being who we are.

Would that any of us could meet our Creator with the lives they presented back to Him at the end of their earthly pilgrimages.

Pax ex bonum

-Liam

 

Blood in the Water

Liam sent along this link, a concern that a little nick (or maybe a few of them) have those terrible, scary, liberal sharks sniffing out the weakness. Offer it up, comes the advice. Here are Liam’s musings on it:

Fr Z  seems to be trying to whip up a frenzy of anxiety that the Pope is surrounded by enemies (some of his own choosing). Reminds me very much of the kind of fevered, anxious group-think I use encounter (and even participate in) in radical hothouses. For example, the comboxers in this thread have gotten to the point of the Pope being spiritually assassinated.

Imagine if, for Lent, we had to abstain from addictive behavioral patterns of Us/Them thinking and rhetorical excess designed to show how right We are and how wrong They are. (Knowing, of course, that in writing this message I myself echo this, too.)

 

Liam on Weigel on Maciel

The Fr Maciel scandal is not one I feel particularly inclined to blog about. I’m not in LC or RC, nor do I know anyone personally who is. I did scan George Weigel’s commentary yesterday. But Liam read it, and he has his own analysis. I’ll let my friend and long-time commentarian handle it from here:

Mr Weigel has good questions about audits and transparency, but they are “backward looking” or “forensic” as we might say in the securities and compliance businesses, but they lack curiosity about forward-looking and prophylactic dimensions of this problem, as well as the all-important matter of making restitution and amends to those harmed by Fr Maciel.

Mr Weigel hints at the issue of the need for curial reform, but contained to its utility in auditing this miasma.

The basic questions anyone familiar with risk management and similar systems that are being avoided are:

1. What are the most appropriate and timely remedies to restore what can be restored to injured persons and make meaningful amendment for that which cannot be restored?

2. What must be done to significantly reduce the likelihood of recurrence anywhere in the system?

Diagnosis of went wrong specifically in this case is necessary to help answer these questions, but it is far from sufficient.

A culture in which prelates and religious superiors are effectively accountable only to the Pope and to God is a culture that indulges avoidance and non-transparency at multiple levels, and thereby virtually guarantees abuse over time. Doctrine and dogma do not require this result. After all, while the clerical state has Priest-Prophet-King dimensions, so too does that state of the baptized, and somehow we merely baptized manage to have checks and balances placed on our kingship.

Sunshine is a powerful disinfectant, but its power is limited when only old, dry laundry is hung out.