It is reported that, without publicity, the K of C have severed (or downsized?) their “partnership” with Crux – the voice of Bergoglio in the United States. As we recall:.

The Knights of Columbus and Crux are pleased to announce that they plan to enter into a partnership in which Crux will remain an independent news outlet headed by John L. Allen Jr. and Inés San Martín. (3/15/2016)

We look forward to hearing more about this most interesting development.

Sermon for Pentecost IX

by Father Richard Cipolla

From the gospel of St. Matthew:  Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.  And from today’s epistle from Paul to the Corinthians:  Let no temptation take hold on you, but such as is human: and God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able; but will make also with temptation issue, that you may be able to bear it. 

Another difficult passage to deal with on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost.  Last Sunday we had to deal with the” dishonest steward” and Jesus’ commendation of him. Today we have to deal with St. Paul’s teaching on temptation.  But we must deal with this, for this passage points to one of the most best known phrases in the Lord’s Prayer. “ Lead us not into temptation.”  

The present Pope has expressed dissatisfaction with the English translation of this part of the Lord’s Prayer from the Latin: ne inducas tentationem.   His problem is with the verb inducas.  For it seems to imply that God leads us into temptation, which we know cannot be true.  God is not a tempter. The Devil and his minions are the tempters.  So he would prefer a translation that makes it clear that God does not lead us into temptation.  But the fact is that the verb in both Greek and Latin is clearly the verb which in English means “to lead.”  Now it is true that in both the Greek and the Latin the “command”, known as the imperative, is softened by the use of the subjunctive.  It is as if it is saying not “Lead!” with an exclamation point but rather a softer order, almost a plea, for God to not lead us into temptation.  That is important.  And just as an aside here, contrary to what is expected of priests at this time in the Church, they should be able to analyze the New Testament in this way.  And if they cannot, they should refer to the interpretations of the Church Fathers in these matters.  That too many priests in the Church today rely on canned homilies or on cursory and contemporary riffs on Scripture is a sign of the times.

 But the problem is not the verb “to lead”.  No one believes that God is a tempter.  The only tempter is Satan and his minions.  And why we are tempted to sin is because we are part of the fallen universe, the whole of which is out of synch with God.  But God defines synch, for God is the creator of all that there is and he created all as good and he created all that there is out of love.  The problem is with the word in Latin ”tentationem”.  Its meaning is more subtle that “temptation”.  Its meaning is also trial, things that one has to go through that one does not want to go through.  What we are talking about is a test of faith.  Few Catholics know anything about the book of Job except that is supposed to be depressing to read.  But it is in this book of the Old Testament that we discover what “do not lead us into the trial” really means.  Everything is taken away from Job, his family, his worldly goods, he is reduced to a man sitting in ashes.  And his friends, pious and real friends, insist that he must have done something against God to merit the terrible situation in which he finds in himself.  And Job insists that he has not succumbed to the temptation to deny God and that whatever he is going through is not because he has succumbed to the temptation to deny God.  And for his reward, when Job tries to cry out to God that he does not deserve the terrible afflictions that have befallen him, God tells him essentially to shut up. His ways are not our ways. But there is a happy ending to the book of Job, where everything is restored to him, a new family, new wealth, new standing in the community.  

This is what we pray when we pray “do not lead us into the trial.”  When I pray this I say to God:

 I am weak, I am not strong, do not put me into a situation where I am going to be tempted to give up my faith, that I am going to want what I want, knowing that what I want is contrary to the will of God.  Who here wants to be put to the test?  And yet it is Jesus, who in the words of the Gospel of Mark is driven into the desert to the tempted by Satan.  God drives him into the desert not to tempt him but to be tempted by Satan who is the ultimate temptor to prepare him for his ultimate trial and temptation.

But if we want to begin to understand what this pleading to not be led into temptation means we must look at the agony in the Garden.  The Son of God prays that if possible his suffering and death be taken away, that there be an alternative to the demand of faith in the Father.  But there is no alternative to the death of the Son of God who cannot die and who must die for the salvation of the world. 

Once we understand this, we understand what ne inducas in tentationem means for you and me.   In our weakness, despite infusions of grace through the Sacraments and prayer and sacrifice, we plead to God to not put us in a situation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     in which we will because of self love turn our backs on the grace of God that is always there.  It is a plea to God who knows our own weakness.  But that phrase “Do not lead us into temptation” is an affirmation of faith: that God will never abandon us even if we abandon Him.  But you see, that is the definition of love.  Even if I turn my back and abandon the one I am called to love most deeply because he is God, he will never turn his back on me.

I close with St. Paul’s words we heard in the Epistle:

Let no temptation take hold on you, but such as is human: and God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able; but will make also with temptation issue, that you may be able to bear it. 

Father Richard Gennaro Cipolla

(Above and below) The somewhat arid appearance today of the late Gothic Frauenkirche in Munich, Germany. Reformers took the opportunity of repairing severe wartime damage to carry out a wholesale housecleaning. “They got rid of all the junk!” an otherwise esteemed professor told me gleefully once in my student days at Georgetown. It now turns out that not only was the 19th century art thereby lost of great value, but that real medieval works (such as in the choir) were mistakenly destroyed as well.

A most interesting article in Katholisch.de: “When the decoration disappeared – why so many old churches are so ‘empty.’ ”1) It tells the sad story of the so many churches in Germany after the Second World War. Innumerable churches had indeed suffered severe wartime damage from bombing and then from ground fighting. Yet the implementation of modernistic doctrines in art and architecture after the war completed the process – both in the damaged and undamaged churches. The champions of modern art thought that the church should be a  “bridge to God” and that churches overflowing with the art of many centuries didn’t serve this role. According to Professor Thomas Erne:

“They wanted to be modern, to go with the times. Churches had to be functional, everything else was superfluous.”…It seems to [Professor Erne] almost if the Church had been intimidated by the greatness of her own centuries-old cultural achievement.

The consequences were all too real: 

Magnificently carved altars were demolished, pulpits torn down, sandstone ornaments broken off, murals whitewashed. Images and statues disappeared and a great part of the often so richly ornamented “historicizing” furnishings went with them – final resting place unknown. So many an altar rail may have ended up as a garden gate for a vacation home.

I can personally testify to the presence of gilt baroque images of saints installed in upscale bars.

We should note that this iconoclasm and “purification” began well before the Vatican Council. It sprang from ideology. “Artistically, modernity wanted to exist only on its own: older approaches and traditions didn’t have a role to play anymore.”  Examples of such an architecture had been created as early as 1930 in Germany. “The walls are ostentatiously white and empty, not even a crucifix hangs on the end wall. The space, without images or decoration, very consciously celebrates the void.”

A particular target of the modernizers was the lavish ornamentation of the “historicizing” art of the 19^th and early 20^th century, which had sought to imitate – and often creatively combine – styles of diverse artistic eras.

In Germany today feelings are mixed. New ultramodern churches continue to be built. On the other hand, there is a growing recognition of the incalculable losses inflicted by modernity. And restoration attempts are being made in many churches to recover some of the decoration and furnishings that had been so heedlessly cast aside in the past.

But isn’t the postwar wave of destruction in church design and decoration the perfect equivalent of, and even prelude to,  the liturgical reforms of the 1950’s onward? Based on questionable theological and liturgical ideas, the liturgical reformers also strove to cast out the accumulated contributions of the past and free up the view to some “inner core “ of meaning. That’s not how things work – as we have belatedly realized! Baroque decorations are returning  to some German churches, in the very heartland  of Catholic modernity.  But how many more churches throughout the world have celebrated  the return of the Traditional liturgy – which had made all this art possible!

1. Hartmann, Christoph Paul, Als die Verzierung verschwand: Warum viele alte Kirchen so “leer” sind. Katholisch.de 7/31/2020

A Response to George Weigel

By Father Richard G. Cipolla

Recently George Weigel offered an Op-Ed titled  “A Paradox for the Next Pope” as part of the Wall Street Journal’s Houses of Worship series.  He quite rightly calls attention to several issues that will confront the successor of Pope Francis:  confronting and ending the terrible scandal of sexual abuse by clergy; reform of the financial structure and administration of the Church; and the challenge of supporting the vitality of the Catholic faith in those disparate places in which it found and at the same time embark on a program of renewal in those parts of the world, mostly Europe, where the Catholic faith is less than robust.

Weigel says:  “The past fifty years should have taught the Catholic Church that the only Catholicism with a future is Catholicism in full.”  And what Catholic with faith could disagree with that?  But Weigel, while correctly seeing that “aggressive secularism” is antithetical to the Catholic faith and is part of the reason for the parlous state of Catholicism in the West does not see that the root problems of the Catholic Church today lie in the deliberate ambiguities of the documents of the Second Vatican Council and the post-Conciliar radical assault, in the name of aggiornamento, on the heart of the Catholic worship that is the Mass.  The Catholic Church decided in the 1960s to become “modern” at the same time that Western culture turned its back on Modernism and embraced, with all of its ambiguities, Post-modernism.  The obvious increasingly irrelevant state of the Catholic Church in the West is not due mainly to secularism but rather to the failure of the Church to be true to herself and her founder, Jesus Christ, and instead trying to become relevant to a society that was already then and is even more now post-Christian.  

It is no accident that the horrific sexual corruption of the clergy during the 1960s and beyond occurred at that particular time.  The moral rot was there before that time, but the romanticism of the post-Conciliar Church that adopted the worst of the sentimental understandings of what it means to be human and a secular understanding of freedom opened up the gates that led to the mass of sludge the symbol of which is Uncle Ted McCarrick.  Even today we read with terrible pain the pain and suffering inflicted on young boys and men by this prince of the Church and by so many other priests of the Church.  

Pace George Weigel, the moral rot in the Church cannot be addressed merely by “creating safe environments for its young people.” The problem is much deeper.  The heart of the problematic situation in which the Catholic Church finds herself today is the failure of the Church hierarchy to stand up to that which is not Christian in our society.  But this “standing up” does not consist of vacuous and pietistical pronouncements from the United States Conference of Bishops, a group that models itself on already outdated modes of expression and communication.  

There is a real movement among young priests and among young men and women in the Catholic Church, especially, mirabile dictu, in our own country, whose basis is the rediscovery of the glorious Tradition of the Catholic Church: of the intellect, of the arts, of liturgy and above all depth of faith. These young Catholics have come back to the Church not because they are now married and have to have their children baptized. They are coming back because they have seen an alternative to the banal post-Vatican II way of worshipping God, modeled on a Brady Bunch culture that has no relevance today.  These young men and women have found meaning in what Pope Benedict called the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, a convoluted phrase  (that fools no one) for the Traditional Roman Mass.  These young people, both laity and priests, are rediscovering the Tradition of the Church, not in some merely aesthetic sense but at the level of faith, a faith that is relevant to the world in which they now live.  And the Church for the most part ignores this real flowering, for it goes against the mantra of “whatever happens in the Church is the will of God.” For the Catholic Church to admit a serious mistake by those who are “in charge” of the Church is very difficult, perhaps impossible.  But it is not impossible to let go of wrong turns in the road and to embrace once again that which is at the heart of Catholicism, worship of God in Spirit and in Truth in the Cross of Jesus Christ. 

This turn to the Tradition of the Church is not at all conservative in a normal understanding of that term.  It is rather a rediscovery of that which is at the heart of the Catholic faith, that is, in George Weigel’s words, “Catholicism in full”. 

Father Richard Gennaro Cipolla

 

“Thirteen years after naming a new residence hall at Loyola University Maryland in honor of the Catholic author Flannery O’Connor, Jesuit Fr. Brian Linnane, the university’s president, removed the writer’s name from the building.

Concerns about her use of racist language in private correspondence prompted more than 1,000 people to sign an online petition asking Loyola to rename the residence hall.

“We were looking to name the building for someone who reflects the values of Loyola and its students at the present time and whose commitment to the fight for racial equality — from an intellectual point of view and from a faith perspective — would be more appropriate for the residence hall.“

In my view the Roman Catholic Church of the United States – and in particular the Jesuit order – deserve anything unpleasant that likely may be coming their way.

Source: National Catholic Reporter 7/29/2020

(Title of this post courtesy of Triumph magazine, 1969)

Pity the poor parish! Msgr. George A. Kelly devoted an entire book to the development of this institution, focusing on the church of St. John the Evangelist in New York City. 1) By 1973 Msgr. Kelly (who, appropriately enough for our age, is already listed as “Professor in Contemporary Catholic Problems”) had to record a decades-long decline of this parish’s membership. Those numbers of course now look good by 2020 standards. And the irony is that Msgr. Kelly himself, as pastor of St. John’s, was instrumental in completing the process of disrupting the parish community, by razing the old parish church and substituting a glorified hotel lobby in an undistinguished high rise. Since that time in New York City and throughout the United States an almost endless series of parishes have followed St. John the Evangelist into restructuring or oblivion.

In Germany things have reached an even more extreme state. In much of that country religious practice and new vocations verge on the nonexistent. The response of at least two dioceses – Trier and Freiburg – has been, in essence, to abolish the parish: substituting a few dozen larger groupings for hundreds of historical parishes in these traditionally Catholic regions (in Freiburg’s case, 1,000 old parishes). And in Trier it was further planned that each of these new units would be jointly led by a priest and a layman (woman).

After a recent Vatican attempt to rein in these developments was met with defiance, the Congregation of the Clergy issued last Monday the Instruction The pastoral conversion of the Parish community in the service of the evangelising mission of the Church. 2) Although prefaced by long paragraphs of Vatican II – speak ( “creativity,” “the Parish is called upon to read the signs of the times”) the actual operative provisions and the factual assumptions they reflect are sobering: the dearth of vocations, the need to close parishes, the search for alternatives to maintain ministries once exercised by priests etc. The Instuction’s basic message is to reconfirm the role of the parish and of the pastor in canon law and also, in theology, of the unique status of the priest. Further, the closing of a parish must be in accord with canon law and be determined individually with reference to the facts of the specific parish (no summary, diocese-wide restructuring is permitted). And please bear in mind these provisions are a reaction not to a crisis of some missionary territory (like the infamous “Amazonia“) but to catastrophic developments in the heart of formerly Catholic Europe.

The reaction of German Church has been apoplectic. German Church’s internet site has swarmed since Monday with articles by priests, scholars, laymen and bishops denouncing the new Instruction.3) Only a handful of bishops have (publicly) swum against the tide. It’s quite a change from their recent adulation of Pope Francis’s Vatican – and demonstrates that the fear that the “Amazonian” concepts would promptly be implemented in Germany was all too well founded.

The new Instruction, strangely enough, has not yet received much attention in the United States. I think, however, everyone working to save traditional parish life – or even his parish’s very existence – should give it a close read. For the concepts actually on the point of implementation in Germany have been at least toyed with here. For example, Cardinal Dolan has written how he could envisage a reform whereby the property of all Archdiocesan parishes would be transferred to the Archdiocese itself. Combined with the current strict enforcement of term limits for pastors, such a centralization of assets would in effect reduce all New York parishes to chaplaincies. The Instruction would seem to put at least a brake on the realization of such ideas.

Regarding the Instructions’s rejection of laymen exercising contol, jointly with a priest or otherwise, of parishes, since 2018 in the Bridgeport diocese one parish (St. Anthony’s in Fairfield) has been entrusted to the “decision-making authority” of a laywoman, while the clergy involved (Jesuits, not surprisingly) act as providers of “religious services.”

Eleanor Sauers has been involved with St. Anthony of Padua Church since 2002 as the director of religious education and as a pastoral minister. As of Jan. 1, she will become the parish leader, the first woman in the Diocese of Bridgeport to serve as such…. Officially, Sauers will be the parish life coordinator at St. Anthony of Padua, meaning she will oversee the daily administration of the parish while a team of priests will fulfill its sacramental needs, such as celebrating Mass. 4)

Eleanor Sauers’s role, however, would seem to directly conflict with the spirit and the letter of the recent Instruction, e.g.:

96. In that vein, it is the responsibility, first of all, of the diocesan Bishop and, as far as it pertains to him, the Parish Priest, to see that the appointments of deacons, religious and laity that have roles of responsibility in the Parish, are not designated as “pastor”, “co-pastor”, “chaplain”, “moderator”, “coordinator”, “Parish manager”, or other similar terms^[141] reserved by law to priests,^[142] inasmuch as they have a direct correlation to the ministerial profile of priests

In referring to the aforementioned faithful and deacons, it is likewise illegitimate, and not in conformity with their vocational identity, to use expressions such as “entrust the pastoral care of a parish”, “preside over the parish community”, and other similar phrases, that pertain to the distinct sacerdotal ministry of a Parish Priest.

For example, the terms “Deacon Cooperator” or “Coordinator of (a particular sector of pastoral care)”, “Pastoral Cooperator” or “Pastoral Associate or Assistant” seem to be more appropriate. 5)

The contrast of the Instruction with recent “Amazonian” synod is striking – at a very minimum it shows growing confusion and conflict within the Vatican. Will it stand up to the growing German resistance? I do not know – but clearly here, as in several other areas, Pope Francis’s progressive steamroller seems to have encountered unanticipated diffculties.

1. Kelly, Msgr George A. Kelly, The Parish: As seen from the Church of St. John the Evangelist New York City 1840-1973 (1973 St. John’s University, New York). Msgr. Kelly was the author of The Battle for the American Church, a foundational text of conservative Catholicism.
2. SOURCE
3. Katholisch.de
4. “Woman appointed to lead Fairfield Church“, Fairfield Citizen, 12/13/2018. See also “Connecticut bishop appoints laywoman to lead parish”, Crux 12/10/2018
5. See footnote 2 above.

The following churches will offer the Traditional Mass on the Feast of the Assumption, Saturday, August 15:

St. Paul the Apostle, Yonker, NY, Missa Cantata, 11:30 am

The Lamp: A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Etc.

Website.

Over the transom comes the latest attempt to establish a serious “Catholic journal.” We have covered here and there in this blog the previous ventures from the early 1970’s onward, after the demise of Triumph magazine.1) The most recent iteration was the US edition of the Catholic Herald, launched with great fanfare in late 2018. The aim was obviously to create a Catholic “big tent” publication – “orthodox” yet “inclusive” – but also offering incisive reporting and commentary on the state of the Church. Things fell apart from the very start as one “Catholic” would-be contributor first denounced the magazine’s management for alleged contacts with Steve Bannon and then indicted one of the magazine’s own writers for “antisemitism” – other contributors of course felt compelled to join the latter attack ( Taki, the gentleman in question, has contributed more good writing over the years than all of them put together). Next, Damian Thompson, the UK editor largely responsible for the recent rise in visibility of the Herald, was out the door, followed by the US editors (I gather Thompson’s caustic commentary on the current state of the Church did not endear him to the ecclesiastical establishment). The US edition folded (replaced by an online presence) and even the UK parent underwent a drastic crisis. What survives in hardcopy is a UK publication featuring admonitions to piety, harmless articles on the past glories of “Catholic culture'” and otherwise nothing that would give offense to the Catholic powers that be.

Into the resulting gap comes The Lamp. Its focus is cultural commentary – in particular, consideration of literary topics – rather than reporting on current events. We applaud the attempt to avoid polemics and to explore the “Catholic” aspects of life in all their many manifestations. The editor – at least as a matter of intellectual conviction – is laboring under no illusions regarding either the dire situation of the United States and of the Church today, or of his magazine’s capacity to singlehandedly save the day. That’s refreshingly realistic. We note further in places a curious Germanophile flavor of this publication. A poem of Goethe introduces the first issue; there is a “Feuilleton” section and a final piece, “Pestsäulen,”on a visit to Vienna. Most intriguingly of all, William Marshner – presumably he of the original Triumph team – is listed as “Kapellmeister“!

I regret to report, however, that the first issue falls short of the editors’ ambitions and would-be Catholic radicalism. I frankly didn’t find most of the contributions provocative, compelling or stimulating reading. They generally rambled over assorted uninteresting topics – for example, a lengthy review of a new translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea(s) which gives the reader no idea why John Senior included it among his “Thousand Good Books.” More modest yet more sucessful is P.J. Smith’s informative story of the beginnings of one Midwestern parish. Michael Hamill expounds to us how popes (at least more recent ones) are never wrong and when problems crop up it’s because the hierarchy, the clergy and the elites failed to support them. Amoris Laetitia? “If the pope wants me to take [that civilly remarried divorcees should receive holy communion] seriously, though, he is going to have to say it.” J.D. Vance tells us how, as a “conservative Catholic” writer defended his criticism of the pope, said gentleman was abruptly silenced when “a wine glass seemed to leap from a stable place behind the bar and crashed on the floor in front of us.” Thus Pope Francis is triumphantly vindicated.

I was also struck by a certain artificiality of style. “We were drinking white wine spritzers at a restaurant run by Jesuits” writes Susannah Black of a recent visit to Vienna. In view of the current state of the Church – especially in that city – it’s like enjoying sherry with the vicar in the rectory while the parish church burns down. For its hard to read of such things when in our country Catholic churches are (literally) burning, statues of Catholic saints are being smashed and the most violent anti-Christian rhetoric is endorsed by the secular media and educational powers. Here and abroad, governments freely order churches closed and regulate and even prohibit the administration of the sacraments. Unresolved sexual and financial scandals continue to percolate. Both the Vatican and the local hierarchies seem incapable of exercising leadership. And while all this is going on, the number of practicing Catholics, of priests and religious, of schools and parishes, continues to plummet. Yes, there is much to write about today – but a Catholic can hardly comment on these things dispassionately.

In the online introduction to the new journal the editor claims kinship with the above-mentioned Triumph magazine. But Triumph was virtually the polar opposite of The Lamp both in style and substance. At a time of upheaval much like our own, Triumph was forceful in its language and confronted directly the major issues of state and Church, regardless of the popularity of the views it expressed. The contributors to Triumph displayed passionate intensity and a willingness to take clear and even radical political positions. Not that everything they said was right or that all of their practical policy initiatives were sound. Yet their analysis of our age has stood the test of time far better than that of the establishment Catholic journals – or of their secular equivalents.

I hope these comments don’t discourage the reader from giving The Lamp a try. A good Catholc journal is so desperately needed! And the editors’ vision and statement of principles are admirable. But in this case more focus, more passion and more engagement with the reality exploding about us will do the publication good.

1. Of course all through these decades there have been Commonweal, America and the National Catholic Reporter. For decades these have been the most ‘Catholic” magazines in terms of the support of the ecclesiastical establishment , while their substance has been the least “Catholic” – derived as it is almost exclusively from the secular “liberal” media. In the distant past that was not always the case: Commonweal published Thomas Molnar.