Our Spiritual Father
who art in heaven, not Orlando
On Sunday mornings, the Old City of Jerusalem is a soft, quiet maze of streets — at least in the Christian quarter. A few streets over, the Muslim quarter’s storefronts spill onto the street. The suq’s stalls fascinate me—the metal doors open up with surprising immediacy into a little store that’s like a whole new world. There are olive wood statues on shelves in one, piles of toys stacked haphazardly in another, posh gold chains or watches in glass cases in a mirror-walled stall, marbled tile floors under shelves of rugs and shawls, or a fragrant table of spices extending out of a small apothecary-store into the street.
At Tantur, if you wake up early enough, you’ll rise with the sun and, before it gathers strength to burn off the clouds that serve as shade, you can enjoy the outdoors with coffee and cold air. The skyline beyond Bethlehem melts into a haze: if you look at it closely, you realize you’re looking at the sands of the Judean desert, almost-but-not-quite in view.
The divine is right there, shimmering just beyond the surface.
Synodality Update
The reports highlight the lack of communal processes of listening and discernment, and call for more training in this area.
Furthermore, they point to the persistence of structural obstacles, including: hierarchical structures that foster autocratic tendencies; a clerical and individualistic culture that isolates individuals and fragments relationships between priests and laity; sociocultural and economic disparities that benefit the wealthy and educated…
Poland’s report states “…When priests do not want to listen, making excuses, such as in the large number of activities, or when questions go unanswered, a sense of sadness and estrangement arises in the hearts of the lay faithful. Without listening, answers to the faithfuls’ difficulties are taken out of context and do not address the essence of the problems they are experiencing, becoming empty moralism. The laity feel that the flight from sincere listening stems from the fear of having to engage pastorally. A similar feeling grows when bishops do not have time to speak and listen to the faithful.” Document for the Continental Stage, §33
Most of the coverage of the U.S. bishops’ plenary assembly meeting from June 14-16 in Orlando, Florida, focused on their review of transgender medical directives, their responses to migrants being transported out of border states, and the Nuncio begging them to ask themselves the basic questions incompetent leaders are afraid to ask themselves: “Where are we?” and “Where are we going?” I would add to that list of questions: “Who are we?” “What is our mission?” “Why are we doing it?” “What are we for?”
Self-reflection can certainly be unpleasant. Especially if you do not want to see the answers those questions will excavate. But to not ask ourselves those questions is to become, as one commentator on the bishops put it “mediocre,” or as the Gospels would suggest, pharisaical.
For they bind heavy burdens that are grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not lift a finger to help them. (Mt. 23:4)
Jesus does not have kind words for religious leaders who neglect the poor and suffering and who emphasize a rigid moral and ritual purity at the expense of compassion.
Anyhow, the item of business that most disturbed me and wasn’t heavily covered was the passage of the revised guidelines on the formation of seminarians. Which, as most seminarians could honestly tell you, is subpar at the moment. Diocesan seminaries are shortchanging time spent in formation in favor of rushing young men out to fill in bodies in the priest shortage (which really is less a priest shortage and more a real estate surplus). And seminaries are filled with a performative perfectionism—seminarians are formed in an environment of fear and suspicion of sexual abnormalities or malformation—and there’s a lack of integrated human development in seminaries—there’s no time, not when you’re earning two masters degrees and completing pastoral assignments.
The particular document for seminarian formation was criticized for language that emphasized “spiritual fatherhood,” which, one bishop noted, led to one priest in his diocese having seven “spiritual daughters.” It passed with 144 votes.
It doesn’t take a genius to note that applying the language of a family to non-family relationships is an easy way to start to bend boundaries that exist to protect the dignity and sanctity of a person. Especially for a man who has spent seven years in a sexually-repressive environment (such as a seminary), language that expresses a non-sexual intimacy can often hide—even to himself—the sexually-charged dynamics of such a relationship.
It pains me to see that the leaders of the Catholic Church have learned—it seems—absolutely nothing during the past twenty years of scandal. Sex abuse is about power—and the bishops do not seem to understand that part of healing from these scandals is transforming their corrupt image of their own power. We do not need spiritual fathers or patriarchs, we need teachers of the Gospel, shepherds, and humble men willing to do the humble, thankless, necessary work of pastoral engagement and listening.
Yesterday, I abandoned my Magnificat booklet in the back of a church when it interpreted the Gospel, “The harvest is abundant and the laborers are few,” to be solely about the work of priests in the church. I say this in all charity, but who has time for such nonsense? This is 2023, not 1923, and the idea that the laity are in any way exempt from the mission of the evangelical councils was definitively addressed by the Second Vatican Council:
“Finally all Christ's faithful, whatever be the conditions, duties and circumstances of their lives—and indeed through all these, will daily increase in holiness, if they receive all things with faith from the hand of their heavenly Father and if they cooperate with the divine will. In this temporal service, they will manifest to all men the love with which God loved the world.”
(Lumen Gentium, Chapter V, paragraph 41)
There is a universal call to holiness, not just a call to be priests. If you call yourself a Christian and you are not a laborer in the vineyard, what are you?
We have beautiful phrases and lovely documents: co-responsibility, the role of the laity as partners in the mission, and the universal call to holiness. But I can’t help but feel they are nice glosses to distract from the unchanged and unchecked valuing of raw power that is generally adhered to by the episcopacy. No amount of lipstick can really disguise the fact that you are dealing with a pig.
The people of God, on clericalism:
Many express deep appreciation and affection for faithful and dedicated priests, and concerns about the many demands that they face. They also voice the desire for better formed, better accompanied and less isolated priests. They signal the importance of ridding the Church of clericalism so that all its members, including priests and laity, can fulfil a common mission. Clericalism is seen as a form of spiritual impoverishment, a deprivation of the true goods of ordained ministry, and a culture that isolates clergy and harms the laity. This culture separates us from the living experience of God and damages the kinship relations of the baptised, producing rigidity, attachment to legalistic power and an exercise of authority that is power rather than service. Document for the Continental Stage, §58
It is aggravating and aggrieving to see the men tasked with leading the Church spend their time, energy, and money fighting culture wars that, since the 1970s, have done little to help anyone, except line the pockets of the organizations who engage in increasingly divisive rhetoric and behavior. I join in the plea of the nuncio for them to spend more of their time asking themselves questions about what their purpose is and what the hopes and pains are of the people of God—questions that are all (ingeniously and conveniently) a part of the process of forming a synodal Church, as Francis has asked the Church to become. A church that listens. A church that doesn’t just brush asides the harm done to children (and adults) as collateral damage while in pursuit of…of what? What is the church doing if not caring for the least of these? Does it not exist to heal the wounds of those suffering in a sin-marked world? Do not the wounds its leaders and structures cause give them pause?
I understand that bombastic language pays. But to fight culture wars for the sake of driving up Mass attendance, collection plate dollars, and attracting wealthy donors is to make yourself such a scandal to the Body of Christ you are tearing apart that, Christ says, it is better for a millstone to be tied around your neck. “Spiritual fatherhood” is not unchecked authority with no responsibility.
Blowing the Dynamite
Peter Maurin was right. If we look at the theoretical paradigm dominating the discourse of Catholic scholarship in these years, we see that it divided all fields of knowledge according to two fundamentally distinct realms: the natural and the supernatural. Derived from a misreading of Aquinas, this neo-Scholastic paradigm held that the natural desires of the human person-the desire to meet one’s physical needs, to live in society, to marry and raise children, to produce and consume goods, to establish forms of governments which enable such natural activities to be performed in accord with justice and the common good-that these natural desires can be fulfilled without the aid of the supernatural life of Christ in the Church.
The problem with natural law conceived apart from its supernatural end is that it perpetuates the myth of the modern liberal state as a religiously neutral institutional arrangement.
Both [theologians] find [the Catholic Worker] lacking in responsibility when it comes to institutional change. Both appeal to criteria of effectiveness. Both extol the Worker for its inspiring example, but its significance is restricted to the realm of individual witness. Both are indebted to the Weberian paradigm of politics.
It is possible to detect the lineaments of the kind of Weberian critique of the Catholic Worker offered by [these theologians] namely, that Gospel ideals do not pertain to politics and must therefore be translated from ends into means, from absolute into relative terms, so as to have a more direct bearing in the world of pragmatic policy making. But such a translation reproduces the former neo-Scholastic separation of theology and social theory that Peter Maurin criticized in his easy essay. It also runs counter to the consistent claim of Maurin and Day that true society is rooted in the supernatural life of Christ and cannot be abstracted from the beliefs and practices of the Church. Most importantly, this “public theology” approach fails to take seriously a contention that has been central to the life of the Catholic Worker from the beginning, namely, that the modern nation-state is a fundamentally unjust and corrupt set of institutions whose primary function is to preserve the interests of the ruling class, by coercive and violent means if necessary-and there will always come a time when it is necessary.
It is by no means a coincidence, therefore, that these Catholic schools all too often function as production sites of capitalist theory and training centers for capitalist practice. At times, the ethos of these schools is so drenched in late-twentieth-century capitalist culture as to lead one to conclude, in darker moments, that the shepherding being done at these schools is the kind that raises sheep not for the Church, but for the market.
Michael Baxter, on Peter Maurin, 1997. Emphases mine.
Miscellanea
Our Catholic Imagination Conference production of Is the Internet in Color? A play about Alzheimer's and journalism and the internet.