ARTICLES
July/August 2000 ARTICLESLETTERS
Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
No Going Back
Cardinal's Pastoral Initiates New Era of "Lay Ministry"
By Don Gueranger
Those "straining for hints of energy and daring," said an editorial in the May 5 National Catholic Reporter, should look to the "increasingly interesting" Cardinal Roger Mahony. This high praise from America's premier journal of dissent was showered on the cardinal for the release of two pastoral letters. The first, his 1997 liturgy pastoral, "Gather Faithfully Together," "stirred the ecclesiastical waters," said the Reporter, "at a time when Rome is furiously scrambling to reassert much of the uniformity in rites and language that Vatican II set aside." The second letter, "As I have Done for You," dated Holy Thursday, 2000, addressed the priests of the Los Angeles archdiocese on the the role of lay ministers in the Church.
As he did with his pastoral on the liturgy, Cardinal Mahony in his latest pastoral envisioned an imaginary parish, St. Leo's, both as it was in 1955, and how it will be in 2005. In 1955, St. Leo's "look[ed] like most parishes throughout the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.... At the time the pastor of St. Leo's parish had been there 22 years and two full time assistant pastors were assigned to help with the Church duties." "The primary pastoral work of the parish," according to the pastoral, "was sacramental, educational and devotional. Five Latin Masses were celebrated on Sunday morning beginning with the 6 a.m. Mass and ending with the 11:30 a.m. Mass... the priests alone distributed Holy Communion at every Mass... confessions were heard every Saturday from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. and from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. The spiritual needs of the parishioners were fairly routine. They attended Sunday Mass faithfully and came to confession at least once a month ... many sent their children to the parish school, while most, who supported the parish financially, had little participation in the ordinary life of the parish during the course of the week. The parish Church was there when needed -- for Baptism, First Communion, Confirmation, Marriages and Funeral Masses -- and the priests responded to such normal family emergencies as illness, accident or death."
The pastoral goes on to state that, "by all accounts," the description of the 1955 St. Leo's "would hold true for almost all of the parishes in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. At the time, Saint Leo's would be described as a fine, active parish of the Archdiocese and almost everyone would agree. The pastoral life of the parish was simple and fairly routine, and the spiritual needs of the parishioners were met in accord with the schedule of services offered."
Commenting on this part of the pastoral, one Rome-based priest (who asked to remain anonymous) told me that the description given of St. Leo's parish is "condescending in the extreme. Any priest who has spent more time in the confessional than in reading Golf Digest can attest to the startling, even searing, spiritual problems that crop up in the most humdrum and conventional venues."
The pastoral then fast forwards to St. Leo's parish in the year 2005. "The parishioners from Saint Leo's in 1955 would hardly recognize their old parish in the year 2005," states the pastoral. "St. Leo's is still a typical parish -- typical for an Archdiocese with well over 6 million Catholics.... The Catholic population of the Archdiocese is richly multi-cultural and quite diverse. Every Sunday, the Eucharist is celebrated in over 50 languages in parishes all across southern California. There are still large numbers of parishioners whose origins are European; however, now there are larger numbers of parishioners from Asia and Africa, while the majority has roots in Mexico and Latin America and a vast number of our population is immigrant and poor. Amidst these shifting circumstances St. Leo's understands itself as a vibrant Catholic community of faith, impelled by the Spirit to evangelize and in word and deed, become a light to the nations."
The parishioners of St. Leo's are not only rich in their ethnic make-up; according to the pastoral, the parishioners are "steeped in the riches of Catholic tradition." They are also "aware that there is no returning to the days prior to the Second Vatican Council when there were huge numbers of priests, Sisters, and Brothers.... At St. Leo's Church it is understood that ordained priests and deacons, women and men religious and the baptized faithful all share in one priesthood of Jesus Christ...."
My consultant in Rome said this description of a modern parish is "rubbish." "This is the language," he said, "of the manifesto or mission statement, a pious hope and not a matter-of-fact statement of the current reality such as was used to depict Saint Leo's 1955. "To suggest that it could accurately represent a typical parishioner's understanding is ludicrous. This kind of rhetorical excess casts doubts on the seriousness with which we are meant to understand the rest of the document".
Too, said the consultant, "no parish, no community of active religious, and precious few monasteries of contemplatives, can conceivably be said to be 'steeped in the richness of Catholic Tradition.' The people of Saint Leo's will have only the most fragmentary and fugitive grasp of the Catholic tradition. Most will be unaware that such a tradition exists and, barring extremely exceptional cases, neither people nor priest will know accurately which elements of liturgy or pastoral practices are ancient, which are post-Tridentine, and which are 20th century innovations. To suggest otherwise is fatuous."
Additionally, said my consultant, "the polemical and tendentious rhetoric of 'there's no going back' is itself divisive and destructive of amity and good will. Such language is theologically irresponsible, minimizing the continuity between previous ecumenical councils and Vatican II in a manner contrary to Vatican II itself. Even within the realm of ministry, there are important ways in which the Church must return to the days before Vatican II, before Vatican I, before Trent, before Chalcedon, etc., because certain aspects of ministry are God given and immutable. Moreover this sloganeering is blatantly partisan, echoing as it does a battle cry in current ecclesiological controversy. It does not serve to clarify the issues but to alienate and marginalize one group of disputants."
My consultant found problematic the pastoral's statement that "at Saint Leo's there is a strong sense of the baptismal call and a deep and growing awareness that all in the parish are responsible ... for being and building the Body of Christ." "Not so," said the consultant. "It is God who builds us into His Body. We do not build it. The language of the New Testament makes it clear that we are to be built into an edifice (1 Pet 2:5, Eph. 2:22, Eph 4:12). Any true Christian community does not assemble itself but is gathered by Christ. The documents of the ecumenical councils, including Vatican II, never use the language of horizontal self-construction initiated 'from below.' If this is meant to be a departure from Saint Leo's 1955, then it is a departure in error."
The pastoral speaks of how "week by week, the people of Saint Leo's gather for Word and Sacrament...." My consultant called this "the European theological cant of 30 years past," saying "it belongs in a museum gallery with Snoopy posters and Metrical. It is Wort und Sakrament, expressing by hendiadys the neo-Lutherite understanding of Eucharistic worship in vogue among heterodox theologians and their workshop disciples of the early 1970s. To suggest, even indirectly, that first-generation Mexican and Vietnamese Catholics of 2005 will be calling out of their indigenous spiritual experience for Wort und Sakrament argues that the authors of this document are out of touch with the reality they purport to describe and to which, God help us, they are currently pretending to minister."
The crux of the pastoral, however, is the changing role of the ordained. "Even as we are faced with a shortage of priestly and religious vocations," says the pastoral, "we are being invited to a deeper understanding of the nature of the Christian vocation and a fuller appreciation of ministry of both ordained and non-ordained."
"This is called making a virtue of necessity," my consultant said. "Most of us would tell a different story: Vatican II was interpreted by groups of clerical academic elite in a manner contrary to the face-value meaning of the documents, such that (in their view) massive changes in pastoral practices and seminary and religious training were required in order to revitalize the Church. Such changes -- almost always instituted and perpetuated in the face of lay resistance -- proved catastrophic according to every objective measure of vitality. Not only are the places that went furthest in institutionalization of the new changes the most moribund in terms of vocations and Catholic practice (Holland, France, Switzerland), but such flashes of vitality still seen in places like Los Angeles are due to the disproportionate number of Catholics newly arrived from regions in which post-conciliar innovations were least violent (Mexico, Vietnam, Korea, and the Philippines). The situation we are now faced with is this: are we [going] to continue to impose the Holland model of Catholic life on the Vietnamese, etc. under the pretense that we are responding to the Holy Spirit in so doing?"
The pastoral says that "what some refer to as a 'vocations crisis' is rather, one of the many fruits of the Second Vatican Council, a sign of God's deep love for the Church and an invitation to a more effective ordering of gifts and energy in the Body of Christ." My consultant called this "blasphemy redeemed by stupidity." He continued: "even if native intelligence did not suffice, the fact that the Holy Father as well as nearly every abbot, provincial, and prior urges us to pray for an increase in priests and sisters should alert us to the fact that there is indeed a crisis, and that it makes little sense to pray that we be spared further signs of God's deep love for the Church. Moreover, even the most superficial survey of the causes of the decrease in vocations (bishops dead of AIDS, pedophile priests borne off to prison in handcuffs and leg-irons, massive and diffuse doctrinal dissent, scandalous abandonment of religious vows and promises) should make one slow to attribute the new situation to the work of the Holy Spirit without further qualifications."
The pastoral speaks of a new vocation when it calls for, a "lay ecclesial ministry." "This is a unique vocation in the Church," says the pastoral, "a call to service in the name of the Church. 'Lay ecclesial ministry' does not describe one type of work, but refers to the ministries of committed persons... which are exercised in a stable, public, recognized and authorized way. This is Church ministry in the strict and formal sense."
My consultant called this treatment of lay ecclesial ministers "odd." "The Code of Canon Law," he said, "published in this pontificate more than 15 years after the end of the council, knows nothing of 'lay ecclesial ministers.' In what sense, then, or in virtue of what authority, are they authorized? According to what form is their ministry 'formal'? If the Code of Canon Law is silent about this ministry, who is competent to recognize it? The pastoral assures us that the 'lay ecclesial ministry' refers to 'professionally trained or otherwise properly prepared women and men' -- but by what canonical entity is this assurance guaranteed? Who is to say whether their instructors are themselves fit?"
At the end of the pastoral, Cardinal Mahony announced "with great joy ... an Archdiocesan Synod which will include members of the whole People of God. The last Synod in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles," he noted, "was held in 1960 prior to the Second Vatican Council." One Los Angeles archdiocesan priest told me that he believes that the cardinal is calling together a synod so he can codify the pastoral on the liturgy as well as this new pastoral.