"Are we still a Church capable of warming hearts?"

At "catholicity and covenant" today:

Considerable attention is being given to Francis' address to the Council of Bishops’ Conferences of Latin America and the Caribbean, it being regarded as setting out the institutional agenda for his pontificate.  For catholicity and covenant, however, more striking was his address to the Brazilian RC episcopate.  What we see in this address is how Francis understands the missionary Church - of what it means to be a Church with the ability to warm hearts, to authentically bear to the world the grace and love of the Crucified and Risen One. Below are some extracts from the address.

The subtitles are based on the language Francis employed.  

The Grammar of Mystery  

A Church which makes room for God’s mystery; a Church which harbours that mystery in such a way that it can entice people, attract them. Only the beauty of God can attract. God’s way is through enticement, allure. God lets himself be brought home. He awakens in us a desire to keep him and his life in our homes, in our hearts. He reawakens in us a desire to call our neighbours in order to make known his beauty. Mission is born precisely from this divine allure, by this amazement born of encounter.

Icon of Emmaus  

We need a Church unafraid of going forth into their night. We need a Church capable of meeting them on their way. We need a Church capable of entering into their conversation. We need a Church able to dialogue with those disciples who, having left Jerusalem behind, are wandering aimlessly, alone, with their own disappointment, disillusioned by a Christianity now considered barren, fruitless soil, incapable of generating meaning ...

Today, we need a Church capable of walking at people’s side, of doing more than simply listening to them; a Church which accompanies them on their journey; a Church able to make sense of the “night” contained in the flight of so many of our brothers and sisters from Jerusalem; a Church which realizes that the reasons why people leave also contain reasons why they can eventually return. But we need to know how to interpret, with courage, the larger picture.

I would like all of us to ask ourselves today: are we still a Church capable of warming hearts? A Church capable of leading people back to Jerusalem? Of bringing them home? Jerusalem is where our roots are: Scripture, catechesis, sacraments, community, friendship with the Lord, Mary and the apostles… Are we still able to speak of these roots in a way that will revive a sense of wonder at their beauty?  

Slow Church

We see a desperate need for calmness, I would even say slowness. Is the Church still able to move slowly: to take the time to listen, to have the patience to mend and reassemble? Or is the Church herself caught up in the frantic pursuit of efficiency? Dear brothers, let us recover the calm to be able to walk at the same pace as our pilgrims, keeping alongside them, remaining close to them, enabling them to speak of the disappointments present in their hearts and to let us address them.  

Church as womb of mercy  

Concerning pastoral conversion, I would like to recall that “pastoral care” is nothing other than the exercise of the Church’s motherhood. She gives birth, suckles, gives growth, corrects, nourishes and leads by the hand … So we need a Church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of mercy. Without mercy we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of “wounded” persons in need of understanding, forgiveness, love.

(The painting is Daniel Bonnell's The Road to Emmaus #2, 2003.)

"Rebel pope urges Catholics to shake up dioceses"

From Huffington Post, HT Pray Tell.  My bold; I'm really liking this guy so far (although certainly the HP headline is a bit over the top).  To my mind, there's nothing more exciting than somebody who understands and believes that human beings have both physical needs and a "hunger for a happiness that only God can satisfy" - and who aims to seriously address both - while at the same time acting on the idea that the church itself has to be a place of repentance (AKA "perpetual change and growth").

When the church can consistently apply its own principles of metanoia to itself - well, at that point we'll really have something.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Pope Francis showed his rebel side Thursday, urging young Catholics to shake up the church and make a "mess" in their dioceses by going out into the streets to spread the faith. It's a message he put into practice by visiting one of Rio's most violent slums and opening the church's World Youth Day on a rain-soaked Copacabana Beach.

Francis was elected pope on a mandate to reform the church, and in four short months he has started doing just that: He has broken long-held Vatican rules on everything from where he lays his head at night to how saints are made. He has cast off his security detail to get close to his flock, and his first international foray as pope has shown the faithful appreciate the gesture.

Dubbed the "slum pope" for his work with the poor, Francis received a rapturous welcome in the Varginha shantytown, part of a slum area of northern Rio so violent it's known as the Gaza Strip. The 76-year-old Argentine seemed entirely at home, wading into cheering crowds, kissing people young and old and telling them the Catholic Church is on their side.

"No one can remain insensitive to the inequalities that persist in the world!" Francis told a crowd of thousands who braved a cold rain and stood in a muddy soccer field to welcome him. "No amount of peace-building will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins or excludes a part of itself."

It was a message aimed at reversing the decline in the numbers of Catholics in most of Latin America, with many poor worshippers leaving the church for Pentecostal and evangelical congregations. Those churches have taken up a huge presence in favelas, or shantytowns such as Varginha, attracting souls with nuts-and-bolts advice on how to improve their lives.

The Varginha visit was one of the highlights of Francis' weeklong trip to Brazil, his first as pope and one seemingly tailor-made for the first pontiff from the Americas.

The surprise, though, came during his encounter with Argentine pilgrims, scheduled at the last minute in yet another sign of how this spontaneous pope is shaking up the Vatican's staid and often stuffy protocol.

He told the thousands of youngsters, with an estimated 30,000 Argentines registered, to get out into the streets and spread their faith and make a "mess," saying a church that doesn't go out and preach simply becomes a civic or humanitarian group.

"I want to tell you something. What is it that I expect as a consequence of World Youth Day? I want a mess. We knew that in Rio there would be great disorder, but I want trouble in the dioceses!" he said, speaking off the cuff in his native Spanish. "I want to see the church get closer to the people. I want to get rid of clericalism, the mundane, this closing ourselves off within ourselves, in our parishes, schools or structures. Because these need to get out!"

Apparently realizing the radicalness of his message, he apologized in advance to the bishops at home.

Later Thursday, he traveled in his open-sided car through a huge crowd in the pouring rain to a welcoming ceremony on Copacabana beach. It was his first official event with the hundreds of thousands of young people who have flocked to Rio for World Youth Day. Vatican officials estimated the crowd at 1 million.

Cheering pilgrims from 175 nations lined the beachfront drive to catch a glimpse of the pontiff, with many jogging along with the vehicle behind police barricades. The car stopped several times for Francis to kiss babies – and take a long sip of his beloved mate, the traditional Argentine tea served in a gourd with a straw, which was handed up to him by someone in the crowd.

After he arrived at the beach-front stage, though, the crowd along the streets melted away, driven home by the pouring rain that brought out vendors selling the plastic ponchos that have adorned cardinals and pilgrims alike during this unseasonably cold, wet week.

In an indication of the havoc wreaked by four days of steady showers, organizers made an almost unheard-of change in the festival's agenda, moving the Saturday vigil and climactic Sunday Mass to Copacabana Beach from a rural area 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the city center. The terrain of the area, Guaratiba, had turned into a vast field of mud, making the overnight camping plans of pilgrims untenable.

The news was welcome to John White, a 57-year-old chaperone from the Albany, New York, diocese who attended the past five World Youth Days and complained that organization in Rio was lacking.

"I'm super relieved. That place is a mud pit and I was concerned about the kid's health and that they might catch hypothermia," he said. "That's great news. I just wish the organizers would have told us."

Francis' visit to the Varginha slum followed in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II, who visited two such favelas during a 1980 trip to Brazil, and Mother Teresa, who visited Varginha itself in 1972. Her Missionaries of Charity order has kept a presence in the shantytown ever since.

Like Mother Teresa, Francis brought his own personal history to the visit: As archbishop of Buenos Aires, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio frequently preached in the poverty-wracked slums of his native city, putting into action his belief that the Catholic Church must go to the farthest peripheries to preach and not sit back and wait for the most marginalized to come to Sunday Mass.

Francis' open-air car was mobbed on a few occasions as he headed into Varginha's heavily policed, shack-lined streets, but he never seemed in danger. He was showered with gifts as he walked down one of the slum's main drags without an umbrella to shield him from the rain. A well-wisher gave him a paper lei to hang around his neck and he held up another offering – a scarf from his favorite soccer team, Buenos Aires' San Lorenzo.

"Events like this, with the pope and all the local media, get everyone so excited," said Antonieta de Souza Costa, a 56-year-old vendor and resident of Varginha. "I think this visit is going to bring people back to the Catholic Church."

Addressing Varginha's residents, Francis acknowledged that young people in particular have a sensitivity toward injustice.

"You are often disappointed by facts that speak of corruption on the part of people who put their own interests before the common good," Francis told the crowd. "To you and all, I repeat: Never yield to discouragement, do not lose trust, do not allow your hope to be extinguished."

It was a clear reference to the violent protests that paralyzed parts of the country in recent weeks as Brazilians furious over rampant corruption and inefficiency within the country's political class took to the streets.

Francis blasted what he said was a "culture of selfishness and individualism" that permeates society today, demanding that those with money and power share their wealth and resources to fight hunger and poverty.

"It is certainly necessary to give bread to the hungry – this is an act of justice. But there is also a deeper hunger, the hunger for a happiness that only God can satisfy," he said.

 I'm very much hoping he won't deeply disappoint me by going anti-gay....

"The purgative way"

Here's an excerpt from Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America. There are four chapters in this book, covering Prayer, Marian Devotion, Confession, and the Eucharist; this excerpt is from the chapter titled "In the Court of Conscience: American Catholics and Confession 1900-1975," by James O'Toole.  I added the bolding.

For many, the familiar phrases of sermons they had heard on the subject [of Confession] rang true, and they described in glowing terms the sense of relief and joy that followed a visit to the confessional.  Dorothy Day - not, to be sure, an "ordinary Catholic" in any sense of the term, but a woman who, by her own account, had had some considerable experience with sin - remembered affectionately the "warm, dimly lit vastness" of the church as she waited her turn and the welcoming, "patient" attitude of her confessor.  Another mid-twentieth-century penitent said that he genuinely enjoyed going to confession because he found it an "individualized" procedure, in which the priest was "less interested in the guilt of the penitent than he is in helping the latter to avoid sin in the future."  Still another enthused over priests who "give you the impression that they have all the time in the world, that the only thing that matters is for you to  ... unburden your heart."  A woman who mentioned that there was a long line waiting behind her got a soothing response.  "At this precise moment," the kindly priest replied, "you are the only person in this church who matters."  Experiences of this sort could have a powerful emotional impact.   A character in a 1950 short story about a long-delayed confession left the box so moved by the feeling of "complete forgiveness and gentleness" that "his throat was choked and he felt close to tears."

The anonymity of the transaction appealed to most penitents and enhanced its potency.  In fact, parishioners probably worried more than they had to about the possibility of being recognized in the confessional.  Individual traits were masked by the darkness and by the whispering tones in which the sacrament was usually conducted.  Even more effective in obscuring the identity of penitents was the sheer number of confessions priests heard.  A confessor could not possibly remember particular people, a diocesan liturgical commission newsletter pointed out in 1966, "when he is faced with one hundred or more confessions" at once.  "you don't have much capacity for remembering the sins of any individual," another priest said frankly; "all the stories blur together" and all the voices "are like the one great voice of humanity."  A lay woman from Louisiana in the 1970s found all this "a great comfort," since she knew that she could say anything without fear of embarrassment.  A woman in Maine agreed:  "I feel shy and uncomfortable discussing my faults face to face with a fellow human being," she said, even a priest, and the darkness of the confessional was thus very welcome.  The clergy were no less glad to be spared having to see their penitents.  "It is much easier to avoid embarrassment in dealing with people outside of confession," said Gerald Kelly in his advice to "good" confessors, "when we have no confessional knowledge of them."

The salutary impact of confession may also have derived in part from the very fact that it was a difficult and serious business.  "Confession gives you that little rush," one appreciative lay man said, "that bit of fear that keeps you on your toes."  Fear had its uses, and many found in the sacrament echoes of familiar devotional themes.  The "purgative way" in the American Catholic spirituality, which Joseph Chinnici has described, stressed the benefits of doing things that were difficult, and many thought confession worthwhile for just that reason.  The priest who had encouraged the men of his parish to "do the manly thing" by going to confession was tailoring his message particularly for them, but priests often stressed the value of "heroic virtue" of penitents of any gender or age.  "Get the habit of doing things because they are hard," a counselor to teenagers said in 1949; "it will be difficult at first, but they will become easy as time goes on." .... The language of jails and trials proved remarkably resilient, and this reinforced both the sense of dread a penitent might feel before entering the box and the feeling of relief on leaving it.  The force of such imagery might even be missed if an individual abandoned the sacrament.  The narrator of John R. Power's Last Catholic in America gave up going to confession, but he was nonetheless wistful whenever he recalled the last time he had done so:  "I was never again to feel ... the exhilaration of rising from the spiritually dead.  Never again to be free from sin, free from sin, free from sin."

Perhaps because of its inherent difficulties, confession served as a badge of honor for American Catholics, one that stood out in sharp relief from non-Catholic alternatives.  In particular, it offered a striking contrast to Protestant and other "peace of mind" movements in the middle of the twentieth century.  For years, Catholic writers continued to trumpet remarks by Harry Emerson Fosdick in 1927 that Protestants should consider reviving a form of confession, not as a sacrament but rather as a system of counseling in which "the confession of sin and spiritual misery is met with sympathetic and intelligent treatment."  Catholics had no need of such a revival, since they were sure they already had it a purer and better form.  Other writers pressed the same point.  Without mentioning Norman Vincent Peale by name, the Paulist John Sheerin took on the best-selling author in 1951 and scoffed at those who thought that they could find a "rosy way of the Cross." Peale's techniques for self-realization and harmony with the divine were "religious in tone," Sheerin said dismissively, "but how soft and namby-pamby."  Others agreed that there was no getting around the "brutal and humbling" fact of human nature that confession underlined:  sometimes, it was necessary simply to admit "I have sinned" and to take the consequences.  Confession was "not a pleasing prospect; but then, the sacraments are not devices for making us pleasing to ourselves.  They make us pleasing to God."

"Pope Francis Puts The Poor Front And Center"

At NPR.org:

Pope Francis blesses a child Sunday after the
Holy Mass at St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican.
Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images

Over the past week, Pope Francis has launched a crescendo of attacks on the global financial system and what he calls a "cult of money" that does not help the poor.

The 2-month-old papacy of Francis — the Argentina-born Jorge Bergoglio — is shaping up as a papacy focused on the world's downtrodden. And in sharp contrast with the two preceding papacies, this one even contains echoes of the Latin American liberation theology movement that John Paul II and Benedict XVI had repressed.

The new pope's popularity is growing day by day. When Francis appears in St. Peter's Square, the crowd shouts his name in every imaginable language. Women hold out their babies to be kissed; everyone wants to touch him.

Vatican security guards are at a loss as Pope Francis gets off his popemobile to shake hands, to hug and to be hugged.

"Bergoglio wants to be the priest that everybody wants to have in his parish, as confessor, as spiritual director," says church historian Alberto Melloni. "And what we have seen in these few weeks is the start of a pastoral papacy."

Deeply Concerned By Inequity


Francis has shed some of the most pompous symbols of papal power. The ornate Renaissance vestments, the golden crucifix and red shoes dear to Benedict have been put away.

And Francis has shunned the papal apartment. He still lives in a communal setting in a Vatican residence where he delivers daily homilies at early morning Mass.

Benedict's focus on theology has given way to more concrete issues, like poverty, Francis' main concern.

Vatican analyst Massimo Franco says Francis is "a true global pope," adding that, contrary to his predecessors, whose worldviews were shaped by 20th century European history, Francis is steeped in the global issues of today and of the future.

"His focus on slums — megacity slums — and his experience as archbishop of Buenos Aires is very telling because naturally he is focusing on the poor of great cities," Franco says. "That is a non-state actor [who is] going to be a very powerful one in the next dozen of years."
Francis has long been deeply concerned by what he calls the negative aspects of globalization.

On May 1 — International Workers' Day — the pope referred directly to the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,000 people. He expressed anger at their $50 monthly wages.

"This is slave labor," he said.

"And I think of so many people who are jobless, often due to a purely bottom-line view of society, which seeks selfish profit without regard for social justice," he continued.

On Saturday, the pope zeroed in on the financial system.

"If investments and banks plunge, this is a tragedy," he said. "But if families are hurting" — he added ironically — "this is nothing."

Emphasis On Social Justice


Such statements echo liberation theology, an activist Catholic movement that was very present in Latin American slums, or favelas, in the 1960s and '70s, and which was sharply disciplined by John Paul II and his theological watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — the future Pope Benedict — for its Marxist overtones.

Church historian Melloni says there were various schools of thought in liberation theology, and the Argentine cardinal embraced the least political.

"For Bergoglio, social justice is not a sort of service of the church, an external relations department oriented to those who are victims of injustice," says Melloni. "But it is part of the very essence of the church."

One of the pope's first acts was to unblock the beatification process of murdered El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero, a martyr in Latin America. The process had languished under the two previous popes, allegedly because they considered Romero too close to liberation theology.

Leonardo Boff, a prominent liberation theologian silenced by John Paul, hails the Argentine pope as the harbinger of a new spring for the global church.

Vatican analysts are watching to see whether the change in this papacy's style will be followed by a change in substance.

Francis inherited a church filled with problems and scandals, from the decline in the number of priests to clerical sex abuse scandals and corruption within the Vatican. One of his first actions has been widely welcomed: the appointment of a commission of cardinals — all but one from outside the Vatican — who will assist him in governing the church.

This is seen as the first implementation of the principle of collegiality — first put forth in the Second Vatican Council 50 years ago — that called for greater representation of the Catholic faithful in church governance.

"The art of living, as taught by Christ"

A local Catholic center (once a high school, now a "Catholic Center for Evangelization") makes the claim that "Atheists, agnostics, and believers alike must consider the question of God’s existence," and further that "this is precisely why everyone has a place and a home" there.

Here's more about "The Mission":

For those who consider religion non-essential in their lives, we hope to begin friendly conversations.

For those who do not believe in God, we hope to share the beauty that abounds within these walls and in the hearts of all who call St. Paul Inside the Walls, “home”.

For those who doubt and may have drifted from the Church, we hope to listen attentively to their thoughts and experiences.

For those who practice the Catholic faith, we hope to deepen their identities in Christ by reflecting upon beauty, truth, and goodness and by providing them with the language of discipleship.

Within these walls, we are forging new paths in responding to the changing circumstances and conditions of our days. The methods and expressions employed allow the question of God to be placed in context through our sharing of personal experiences in seeking God.

Arising from the truth that all peoples must consider the question of God is the possibility that all, also, can find greater joy and hope. Everyone is welcome at St. Paul Inside the Walls, for the art of living, as taught by Christ, is the only means of possessing such true joy and everlasting hope.

Is it just me, or is this way of thinking not of an entirely different order than what generally gets discussed when considering this topic?    Aren't we getting the cart before the horse when worrying about "attracting young people" (for instance)?  I realize the "youth issue" is a problem for the Episcopal Church in particular - but doesn't that in itself say something about how we approach the thing? 

Isn't it better to acknowledge and consider the entire world and its questions and issues?  Isn't it better to simply state that all human beings "must consider the question of God’s existence"?  Doesn't it make more sense to put the question that way, as if it were actually a question worth considering and thinking and talking about?  And as if there were actually one kind of person - the human kind - we who all have at base the same questions, feelings, desires, and experiences?  (Not to keep harping on the issue, but A.A.'s Step 2 looks at the question in the same way, considering it from all points of view.  That's because A.A. wants to speak to every alcoholic, because every alcoholic is in mortal danger.)

Doesn't it strike you that putting this question first - and flatly stating that "all people must consider it" - demonstrates a calm confidence in both the human beings involved and in the discussion (and whatever answers may come of it) itself?  And wouldn't it be good to talk about "beauty, truth, and goodness" - as if they belonged together as one thought?

We continue to worry about "falling market share," when what we ought to be considering is the whole world and all its people - and what Christianity is for, and what questions it answers.   Why ignore "the question of God's existence," or shrug it off, as if it weren't a live issue?   Catholics can invite people to consider this question, because they can easily draw from their own massive intellectual (and spiritual) tradition - and show how "the art of living, as taught by Christ" can help people "possess true joy and everlasting hope."

In other words:  they have a program.

"Why be a liberal Catholic when you could be an Anglican?"

This, from Theo Hobson in the Guardian; note the section I've bolded below, which is a discussion of the idea of a "Cultural Anglicanism" I talked about here a couple of months ago.  It's also helpful to think about it in relation to the David Brooks article I posted here yesterday.

What's the appeal of Roman Catholicism to a fairly liberal person? Why don't they jump ship? They say they dislike clerical celibacy, which they largely blame for the abuse scandals. Well, there's a church close at hand that rejects it. They say they want to see the ordination of women. Well, there's a church close at hand that ordains women (more or less). They say they dislike the church's intransigence on homosexuality. Well, there's a church close at hand that has an honest, messy debate about this issue. They say they dislike the church's legalistic approach to birth control, abortion, and various other moral issues. Well, there's a church close at hand that rejects such an approach. They say they dislike the church's authoritarian structure, the monarchical aura of the papacy. Well, you know what.

Why do they stay in a church that is so full of things they dislike, when there is one close at hand that is more or less free of those objectionable things? Presumably they would reply: because, despite everything, the Roman church seems to us the authentic church, and the Anglican church does not. But there is a sector of Anglicanism whose style of worship is scarcely distinguishable from that of Roman Catholicism. Yes, they might reply, but the institution lacks authenticity: it was founded by a randy monarch, and remains confined by its national character. Fair point perhaps, but does it really outweigh the benefits of Anglicanism to a liberal believer? Is this really a reason to stay in an authoritarian, illiberal church – that at least it wasn't founded by Henry VIII? The man had his faults but he wasn't Satan.

So what's Rome's appeal to these people? Is it that they want the prestige of belonging to an exotically large, old tradition? Do they feel a sort of thrill to be connected with an institution that strikes their friends as baffling, mysterious, romantically gothic? Do they like seeing eyebrows raised at dinner parties, when they state their allegiance?

This might be a factor, but it misses the central point. It seems to me that the central appeal of Roman Catholicism is its bold insistence that Christianity must be embodied in culture. For Catholics, religion is not confined to a carefully demarcated sphere, or to the realm of individual faith: it must be holistic, public, all-embracing – it demands to be known as the meaning of cultural life. By contrast, Anglicanism seems to accept the marginalisation of religion, and seems to approve of liberal culture. Religion is a wonderfully rich bit of culture, Anglicanism seems to say, but it's just one bit of culture; it knows its place. No, says Catholicism: the place of religion is everywhere; its role is to be everything.

I first got thinking about the greater cultural richness of Catholicism when Pope John Paul II died: I was fascinated by the spectacle of pilgrimage and devotion that ensued. Among the television coverage was some footage of his visit to Britain in 1982, complete with huge rallies and open-air masses and people fainting with excitement. It struck me that Roman Catholicism has the character of a constant carnival, a world-sized show. Soon afterwards I was in holiday in Spain for Good Friday, and the old walled town was abuzz with amateur theatricals: Roman soldiers on horses, huge lines of people in those eerie pointy KKK-like hoods such as the ones Goya painted. This is something that no form of Protestantism offers: the sense of a whole culture joining together in religious ritual.

I had the same feeling when the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux toured Britain: there was much sceptical press comment about the irrationality of Catholicism, but I looked on with a sort of sacramental envy, as excited crowds queued to be near the dead nun's bones (as I explained at the time).

Incidentally, on the subject of relics, John Henry Newman had a sure grasp of this aspect of Catholicism's appeal. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua he poetically defended popular devotions that made dry Anglicans angry. Devotion to relics should be seen as a powerful form of popular culture, he said. "Why then may not the country people come up, in joyous companies, singing and piping, to see the Holy Coat at Trèves?"

My response is mixed. I chiefly view Roman Catholicism through liberal Protestant eyes: it is an intolerably reactionary version of Christianity. On the other hand, liberal Christianity ought to imitate huge aspects of its cultural richness, of its bold belief in religion as culture. We should not turn away in puritan distaste from the tradition of colourful public religion.

Again, though:  I think this is an overly - and unhelpfully - "liturgical" way of thinking about the issue.  The reason Catholicism can do this is not because it likes to do big, colorful, public rites and rituals; it's because of what it teaches about Christianity and its place in the world.

Remember what Brooks said in that article, about Augustine's idea that "the church should go on offense and swallow the world"?  This is the missing piece; the liturgy is a reflection of this idea - it's a teaching method, not a feature standing alone.  If Anglicanism doesn't teach this - and, as far as I can tell, it doesn't - it won't appear in its liturgy.  It's an idea - and I think Hobson's right that "Protestantism" does not contain this idea, because its origin comes out of an attempt to get the church of its time to stop its "swallowing of the world."

That's because the church of its time was corrupt - but of course, the movement went too far, as reactionary movements always do.   Protestantism - of every variety  - is now more concerned with self-referential "purity" (again, as Brooks noted) than with the healing of the world. It's certainly not "deeply preoccupied by the idea of the basic unity of the human race," as Brooks says Augustine was.

Brooks continues, remember, this way: 

He wanted the church to go on offense and swallow the world. This would involve swallowing impurities as well as purities. It would mean putting to use those who are imperfect. This was the price to be paid if you wanted an active church coexisting with sinners, disciplining and rebuking them.

In this view, the church would be attractive because it was hungering and thirsting for fulfillment. Far from being a stable ark, the church would be a dynamic, ever-changing network, propelled onto the streets by its own tensions. Augustine had this deep, volatile personality. His ideal church was firmly rooted in doctrine, but yearning for discovery.

Think, too, at that point, about James Alison's view of the church as "halfway house" - and perhaps add in Father Paissy's thought from TBK:

"You are completely misunderstanding it," said Father Paissy sternly. "Understand: the Church is not to be transformed into the State. That is Rome and its dream. That is the third temptation of the devil. On the contrary, the State is transformed into the Church, will ascend and become a Church over the whole world — which is the complete opposite of Ultramontanism and Rome, and your interpretation, and is only the glorious destiny ordained for the Orthodox Church. This star will arise in the east!"

That is where "cultural Catholicism" (or "cultural Orthodoxy" - or "cultural Anglicanism") comes from.  It can't be had by tinkering with the liturgy; it's got to be a teaching.   It's got to be based on a way of thinking - which is why Anglican fixation with "liturgy" will never be the cure.  The church is a hospital for the whole world - not a haven for the "righteous."  This is the central idea here - and it's crucial to reclaim it.

The church simply cannot presume that anybody, from now on, understands what Christianity is for- still less, that anybody "believes" it.  It can't assume that anybody's grown up with a firm sense of what Christianity is about - of what its value is.  I think perhaps people who've always been involved in it simply don't consider these things very deeply; they don't know what it's like to live without faith, so they don't ask these very basic questions.  The Episcopal Catechism - I'll say it for the hundredth time! - assumes what it's setting out to "prove."  Or, rather, it assumes it doesn't have to answer deeper questions; it assumes that everybody's already hooked into the faith - something that's manifestly not true, even in terms of its own membership.

Again, take a close look at the Catholic Catechism and note what it's trying to do; it uses language and ideas that anybody can understand.  It tries to make a case.  It doesn't assume that these ideas are self-evident.

"How Movements Recover"

From David Brooks today, about the Catholic Church and the new Pope.

The Catholic Church in North Africa was in crisis at the beginning of the fourth century. The Roman emperor Diocletian had persecuted the Christians, and many bishops and priests had collaborated with the regime. Priests had turned over Christian believers to the pagan magistrates. Bishops had surrendered Holy Scriptures to be burned in the public square. An air of corruption and lewdness hung over the church.

Two rival reform movements arose to restore the integrity of Catholicism. Those in the first movement, the Donatists, believed the church needed to purify itself and return to its core identity.

The mission of the church, in the Donatist view, was to provide a holy alternative to a unclean world. The Donatists wanted to purge the traitors from the priesthood.

After they pruned their membership, the Donatists wanted to close ranks to create a community of committed believers. They would separate themselves from impurity, re-establish their core principles and defend them against the hostile forces.

The Donatists believed that, in those hard times, the first job was to defend Christian law so it wouldn’t be diluted by compromise. With this defensive posture, the Donatists would at least build a sturdy ark for all those who wanted to be Christian.

This Donatist tendency — to close ranks and return defensively to first principles — can be seen today whenever a movement faces a crisis. Modern-day Donatists emerge after every Republican defeat: conservatives who think the main task is to purge and purify. There are modern-day Donatists in humanities departments, who pull in as they lose relevance on campus.

You can see them in the waning union movement: people who double down on history and their self-conscious traditions. You can see them in the current Roman Catholic Church, which feels besieged in a hostile world. You can identify the modern-day Donatists because they feel history is flowing away from them, and when they gossip it’s always about intra-community rivalries that nobody outside their world could possibly care about.

In the fourth century, another revival movement arose, embraced by Augustine, who was Bishop of Hippo. The problem with the Donatists, Augustine argued, is that they are too static. They try to seal off an ark to ride out the storm, but they end up sealing themselves in. They cut themselves off from new circumstances and growth.

Augustine, as his magisterial biographer Peter Brown puts it, “was deeply preoccupied by the idea of the basic unity of the human race.” He reacted against any effort to divide people between those within the church and those permanently outside.

He wanted the church to go on offense and swallow the world. This would involve swallowing impurities as well as purities. It would mean putting to use those who are imperfect. This was the price to be paid if you wanted an active church coexisting with sinners, disciplining and rebuking them.

In this view, the church would be attractive because it was hungering and thirsting for fulfillment. Far from being a stable ark, the church would be a dynamic, ever-changing network, propelled onto the streets by its own tensions. Augustine had this deep, volatile personality. His ideal church was firmly rooted in doctrine, but yearning for discovery.

This second tendency is also found in movements that are in crisis, but it is rare because it requires a lack of defensiveness, and a confidence that your identity is secure even amid crisis.

Like most of the world, I don’t know much about Pope Francis, but it’s hard not to be impressed by someone who says he prefers a church that suffers “accidents on the streets” to a church that is sick because it self-referentially closes in on itself.

It’s hard not to be impressed by someone who stands by traditional Catholic teaching, but then goes out and visits Jeronimo Podesta, a former bishop who had married in defiance of the church and who was dying poor and forgotten. It’s hard not to be impressed by someone who ferociously rebukes those priests who refuse to baptize the children of single mothers.

It’s hard not to be impressed by someone who seems to feel a compulsive need to be riding the buses, who refuses to live in the official residences, who sends his priests out to the frontiers and who once said he would die if locked away in the Vatican.

I’ll leave it to Catholics to decide if Francis is good for the church. The subject here is how do you revive a movement in crisis. The natural instinct is to turn Donatist, to build an ark and defend what’s precious. The counterintuitive but more successful strategy is to follow Augustine, to exploit a moment of weakness by making yourself even more vulnerable, by striking outward into complexity, swallowing the pure and impure, counterattacking crisis with an evangelical assault. 

I'm delighted, I have to say, that this new man has taken the name Francis - and actually astounded that nobody else ever has.  It's definitely an excellent beginning, from my point of view.

"The Ratzinger Legacy"

Ross Douthat, in The Times today:

THE helicopter that carried Pope Benedict XVI into retirement left behind a Catholicism in crisis. So say his critics, his admirers and everyone in between.

The church needs “shock therapy” from its next pontiff, writes one observer. Catholicism faces its worst crisis “since the French Revolution,” argues another. “Not since the Reformation,” writes a third, “has the Church been so shaken to its core.”

Up to a point, the language of crisis is justified. To the trends weakening institutional faiths across the Western world — the rise of spiritual individualism, the influence of the so-called new atheism, the gap between traditional Christian sexual ethics and present-day realities — the Roman Catholic Church has added scandals, sclerosis and a communications strategy apparently designed to win the news cycles of 1848. In both Europe and America, Catholicism’s public reputation has worsened since Benedict assumed the papacy, and his nearly unprecedented abdication is a sign that the pope emeritus knows it.

But in assessing Benedict’s legacy, it’s worth looking back on the situation in the church in the late 1970s, when the man who was then Joseph Ratzinger left his academic career to become first an archbishop, then a cardinal and eventually the pope.

In America, the ’70s were defined by not just a weakening in the institutional life of the church but a wholesale collapse. Thousands of priests and nuns left their holy orders each year. Mass attendance had fallen by a third in a generation. The church faced a rebellion from Latin Mass traditionalists, even as progressive theologians confidently planned for a third Vatican Council. Along with institutional instability there was moral laxity, and worse: revelations of sex abuse and cover-up were years away, but the rate of abuse was at its peak.

Beneath these trends was a pervasive sense that Catholic identity was entirely up for grabs — that having dispensed with Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the church might be poised for further revolutions, a major schism, or both. When Walker Percy’s novel “Love in the Ruins” imagined Catholicism in the United States splitting in three — a progressive church modeled on liberal Protestantism, a right-wing “American Catholic Church” that plays the “Star-Spangled Banner” during Mass, and a tiny remnant loyal to Rome — it seemed more like prophecy than fiction.

It was the work of Ratzinger’s subsequent career, first as John Paul II’s doctrinal policeman and then as his successor, to re-establish where Catholicism actually stood. This was mostly a project of reassertion: yes, the church still believes in the Resurrection, the Trinity and the Virgin birth. Yes, the church still opposes abortion, divorce, sex outside of marriage. Yes, the church still considers itself the one true faith. And yes — this above all, for a man whose chief gifts were intellectual — the church believes that its doctrines are compatible with reason, scholarship and science.

It was understandable that this project made Ratzinger many enemies. It turned him into a traitor to his class, since it involved disciplining theologians who had been colleagues, peers and rivals. It disappointed or wounded the many Catholics who couldn’t reconcile the church’s teachings with their post-sexual-revolution lives. And it obviously did not solve the broad cultural challenges facing institutional Christianity in the West.

But it did stabilize Catholicism, especially in America, to an extent that was far from inevitable 40 years ago. The church’s civil wars continued, but without producing major schisms. Mass attendance stopped its plunge and gradually leveled off, holding up even during some of the worst sex abuse revelations. Vocations likewise stabilized, and both ordinations and interest in religious life have actually risen modestly over the last decade. Today’s American Catholics, while deeply divided, are more favorably disposed to both the pope emeritus and the current direction of the church than press coverage sometimes suggests.

This stabilization was not the kind of sweeping revival that some conservative Catholics claimed to see happening, and it did nothing to prevent the church’s reputation from suffering, deservedly, once the abuse epidemic came to light.

But for all of Catholicism’s problems, the Christian denominations that did not have a Ratzinger — those churches that persisted in the spirit of the 1970s and didn’t reassert a doctrinal core — have generally fared worse. There are millions of lapsed Catholics, but the church still has a higher retention rate by far than most mainline Protestant denominations. Indeed, it is difficult to pick out a major religious body where the progressive course urged by so many of Ratzinger’s critics has increased vitality and growth.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t some further version of reform, some unexpected synthesis of tradition and innovation, that would serve Catholicism well. And if such a path exists, Pope Benedict was probably not the leader to find it.

But he helped ensure that something recognizable as Catholic Christianity would survive into the third millennium. For one man, one lifetime, that was enough.

"Moran: Raised Catholic, the church made me 'a spiritual refugee'"

In NJ.com today.

(What interests me most in this piece - believe it or not! - is this sentence in his third paragraph:  "I memorized the prayers, received the sacraments and felt ecstatically cleansed after monthly confessions. I was all in."   That says something really important, doesn't it?  The rest of the piece is about love, and how it manifests in the Christian life, and about "looking after those in need" and that there is "no shame in being poor."  And that third paragraph introduces it all.  Note, please:  he "received the sacraments" and "felt ecstatically cleansed after monthly confessions"; see what that sort of thing can lead to?

Fr. Robert Henderson just made the same point in his latest post, The Church which is His Body: On Restructuring, the Episcopate, and the Sacraments:

We are initiated in baptism, fed in the Eucharist, express our devotion in confirmation, find forgiveness in confession, seek healing in anointing, embrace love in marriage, and some seek new forms of service in ordination. The sacraments walk us through the life cycle, drawing us to God and back to God and home to God. They are the foundation of ministry and unify the faithful in grace. The administration of the Sacraments cannot be unwoven from our pastoral function, nor from our teaching function, nor from social justice for it is through them that we are healed, united, and learn of God’s mercies.

Please take heed, Episcopal Church.  There really isn't any other reason to belong to the church, from my point of view.)

I was born into a devout Catholic family, the fifth of nine children. And one of my earliest memories is learning the catechism from my father, a sales executive who was in the habit of going to church every day before work.

He read me stories about the adventures of a boy who was nicknamed “Raggie” because his family was too poor to buy new clothes. Each story had the same basic lesson — good Catholics look after those in need, just as Jesus did. And there is no shame in being poor.

Sign me up. I memorized the prayers, received the sacraments and felt ecstatically cleansed after monthly confessions. I was all in.

In the decades since, I have fled a million miles from the church, and have never found a new religious home. I am a spiritual refugee.

One in three American adults was raised in a Catholic family, but fewer than one in four identify as Catholic today. No other church has shed so many followers, according to surveys by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

So if I am a refugee, I am walking on a road that is crowded with others who feel the same way.

Which brings us to my recent conversation with Newark Archbishop John Myers, and his attempt to sway the election to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

He didn’t say that, of course. But he wrote a letter last week saying Catholics have a “duty” to cast their vote based on opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

Gay sex, he wrote, is a purely “selfish enjoyment” because it “lacks openness to the procreative meaning of human sexuality.”

Gay parents are bad for children. And if the government grants equal marriage rights to homosexuals, it will soon invade families and churches to impose its moral views, stepping between a parent and child, between a pastor and his flock. Same-sex marriage is a threat to religious freedom.

Finally, he said, all Catholics must embrace his views. And those who refuse should not take Holy Communion.

I’ve gone through stages when it comes to the church, bouncing between anger, estrangement and exasperation. It started when one of my six sisters, at age 10, wrote the Vatican a letter asking why she couldn’t be an altar girl. She never heard back. But the dinner discussions on that planted seeds of revolt in all of us.

They flowered as I began to understand the church’s views on birth control and divorce, which put even my mother on the wrong side of the law, and taught us how Catholics cope with the hierarchy.

A decade after my father died, she married a divorced man, which should have barred her from receiving Holy Communion. Her local priest saw that she would be crushed by that and quietly told her that she was free to take Holy Communion in his church any time she wanted.

“That local priest was wrong,” Myers said when I told him the story last week.

But my mother had no hesitation. Nor did she feel she was sinning by using birth control when she was knocked low by migraine headaches after bearing the nine of us. When she saw same-sex couples raising AIDS babies, she saw no threat to the moral order; she saw Christ’s love at work. She supported same-sex marriage before the New York Times did.

Her obedience to the church hierarchy was not blind, especially after it was exposed as complicit in the sexual abuse of so many children. She trusted her own compass, and in that way, she was a typical Catholic.

Most Catholics, like her, will never leave the church. They will sidestep the land mines and hope for change. They see the altar girls today and hope for female priests tomorrow.

In the meantime, though, men like Myers will drive millions more onto the refugee highway. He had his own small share of complicity in the sex abuse scandal, transferring a priest who had confessed to abuse to St. Michael’s Hospital in Newark without telling the staff. He refuses to release the names of priests who have been credibly accused, as some New Jersey dioceses do.

But the fixation on same-sex marriage may do even more damage in the long run. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 53 percent of Catholics support same-sex marriage, a number that rises to 72 percent among those between ages 18 and 34. Remember, they shouldn’t be taking Holy Communion.

Myers swears that his letter was released during the heat of this campaign by pure coincidence. But he did much the same thing a few weeks before the 2004 election. Imagine the odds.

What’s shocking to me is that this 15-page letter, single-spaced, brushes by the problem of poverty and says nothing of Romney’s plan to savage the safety net.

“Catholic citizens must exercise their right to be heard in the public square by defending marriage,” Myers wrote.

I doubt most Catholics will see this election in such pinched terms. They know how to sidestep this land mine, too.

Because if you visit any poor neighborhood in New Jersey, you can see a more vibrant Catholicism at work in schools, hospitals and food pantries. I’m pretty sure Raggie would see this election through their eyes.

His was the Catholicism I was taught. And it was all about love.