Commentary from Joan Chittister

Who are the people who were waiting for Pope Francis?

Joan Chittister  |  Mar. 14, 2013From Where I Stand

Pope Francis

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Pat Howard, columnist and managing editor of the Erie Times-News, my hometown newspaper, brought his own experience of church-watching to this second papal election in eight years. His description of having been disappointed in the way the church has responded to the questions of the time in the last two papacies gave me a new way to understand what I have been hearing from so many people in so many places these last three weeks.

The importance of Howard's opinion piece as a bellwether comment lies in the fact that Erie, Pa., is not a hotbed of dissent against anything. On the contrary: This is the kind of small city Americans call "a great place to raise a family." There are churches in every neighborhood of every stripe in the Christian catalog. There are some longtime Jewish synagogues with their congregations deeply embedded in the life of the city. There is a growing Muslim social center and a strong core of new refugees. We are, that is, a mixed population, and we live together well. There is nothing either New Age or critically atheistic about the area's social climate. On the contrary: This is a place that registers "average" on just about every social index. Obviously, then, opinion here can be thought to cover a great deal of ground.

So while reams are being written about what kind of man this new pope should be -- scholar, saint, administrator, reformer, whatever -- Howard puts his finger on what kind of people are waiting for this pope, whoever and whatever he is. He describes his own growing disillusion with the character of the church and his reasons for it in ways that are eerily reminiscent of similar conversations across the country and from one group to another.

Howard is clear about the issue: "Pope Benedict's Vatican labeled ... as part of the problem (those who were) too willing to entertain questions and views the hierarchy has declared to be verboten ... too open to engaging the real lives, moral qualms and evolving understanding of people in the modern world. ...

"I still believe the church will change in due course," he concludes. "... What I underestimated was the weariness that comes with the waiting."

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That's it exactly, I said to myself. It is weariness that is palpable in so many groups now. "I have very little hope in this election," I hear over and over again. "It will all simply go on business as usual," they say, and you can almost hear the sigh in the voices.

The problem is that weariness is far worse than anger. Far more stultifying than mere indifference. Weariness comes from a soul whose hope has been disappointed one time too many. To be weary is not a condition of the body -- that's tiredness. No, weariness is a condition of the heart that has lost the energy to care anymore.

People are weary of hearing more about the laws of the church than the love of Jesus.

People are weary of seeing whole classes of people -- women, gays and even other faith communities again -- rejected, labeled, seen as "deficient," crossed off the list of the acceptable.

They are weary of asking questions that get no answers, no attention whatsoever, except derision.

They suffer from the lassitude that sets in waiting for apologies that do not come.

There's an ennui that sets in when people get nothing but old answers to new questions.

There's even worse fatigue that comes from knowing answers to questions for which, as laypersons, they are never even asked.

More false news of a priest shortage drains the energy of the soul when you know that issue could easily be resolved by the numbers of married men and women who are standing in line waiting to serve if for some reason or other, some baptisms weren't worth less than others.

They get tired watching of Anglican converts and their children take their place at the altar.

It gets spiritually exhausting to go on waiting for a pastor again and instead getting a scolding, reactionary church whose idea of perfection is the century before the last one rather than the century after this one.

They're weary of seeing contraception being treated as more sinful than the sexual abuse of children.

All in all, they're weary of being told, "Don't even think about it." They're weary of being treated as if they are bodies and souls without a brain.

It's weariness, weariness, weariness. It's not an angry, violent, revolutionary response. It's much worse than that. It's a weary one, and weariness is a very dangerous thing. When people are weary, they cease to care; they cease to listen; they cease to wait.

These are the kind of people who waited for a new pope, whatever kind of man he might be.

At first sight, Jorge Mario Bergoglio -- Pope Francis -- is a quiet and humble man, a pastoral man and as a Latin American, a leader of 51 million Catholics, or the largest concentration of Catholics on the planet, which is not business-as-usual as far as papal history goes.

But perhaps the most profound and memorable moment of his introduction is that he presented himself on the balcony in front of thousands of people from all parts of the world not in the brocaded fashion of a pope, but in a simple white cassock.

And then came the real shock: He bowed to the people. Bowed. And asked them to pray a blessing down on him before he blessed them. Francis, I remembered, was the Christian who reached out to Muslims. Francis, the one who listened to every creature in the universe and dialogued with it.

Indeed, if this Francis, too, is a listener, there is hope for reconciliation, hope for healing, hope for the development of the church.

No doubt about it: We know who the people are who have been waiting for a pope and why they are weary. The question now is, Does he know how weary they are? And does he care? Really?

From where I stand, something has to change. Maybe, just maybe, this time ...

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A look at recent Catholic and Episcopal Church relations

I've been staying out of church politics for a good long while on this blog, not out of any lack of interest but more out of a feeling others are more knowledgable and saying things better than I could. And as I have mentioned a number of times, church politics is like plate tectonics -- it mostly moves beneath the surface, but erupts now-and-then with an earthquake.

We've had several of those tremors recently from the Vatican, and while those events may not directly affect daily life at St. Paul's  Memorial Church, it is nonetheless worth looking at for how it may impact our greater Church and sense of who we are as church. Here is a commentary published Friday in the Erie Times-Union that is quite readable written by The Very Rev. John P. Downey, the Dean of the Cathedral of St. Paul and the Ecumenical Officer for the Episcopal Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania:

Downey: What's next for Episcopalians, Catholics?

BY REV. JOHN DOWNEY
Contributing writer

Two recent events mark a significant change in the ecumenical relationship of Roman Catholics and the Episcopal Church.

First, a new translation of the Mass was introduced at the beginning of Advent. Then, on New Year's Day, the Anglican Ordinariate for the United States was officially launched. The Ordinariate will serve much like a diocese created especially for Episcopalians and others of Anglican heritage who wish to be in full communion with the Pope. Such folk would fully accept Roman Catholic teaching and authority while retaining some aspects of their former life in the Episcopal Church such as liturgical texts, married priests, and (limited) democracy in governance.

With regard to worship, the recent change is a departure from decades of working together along with other ecumenical partners to provide common worship texts in the various churches and denominations.

The new Mass translation was undertaken unilaterally by the Roman Catholic Church, apparently with no ecumenical consultation. Other Christian bodies, including Episcopalians and Lutherans, made major liturgical changes after Vatican II with ecumenical optimism and a commitment to shared translations among themselves and Roman Catholics. This hopeful project has been abandoned by Rome and we have the curious situation that the "old" Mass texts can now be found in Lutheran and Episcopal churches!

As for the Ordinariate, it is likely that very few will take advantage of the offer, however grateful those few might be for the opportunity. Life in the Episcopal Church is an entire culture, and it remains to be seen if a few parts of it can be successfully grafted onto a very different understanding and practice of Church. Given that Roman Catholics will not be permitted to join Ordinariate congregations, its future will depend on further conversions and evangelism.

This does bring into focus, however, the deep distinction these events and others have revealed between Roman Catholicism and the Episcopal Church, which is the matter of governance. The Roman Catholic Church is structured as a monarchy, governed by the Bishop of Rome. Even though this governance is shared in communion with other bishops, in the end, full authority is vested in the Pope, trusting that this is Christ's will for the Church.

The Episcopal Church is structured as a representative democracy, modeled after the United States Congress. All matters are deliberated and decided upon by elected governing bodies that include bishops, clergy and lay people. Episcopalians trust that, even if some of their decisions are mistaken, the Church will not fail in it basic grasp of the truth, and God will eventually correct any errors.

The relative merits of these two understandings can be debated, but it has become clear that this is the source of the differences between Roman Catholicism and the Episcopal Church. The ecumenical progress of the last decades has shown that both churches share a wide and deep range of common doctrine, including some areas where conflict was once assumed, such as the meaning of the Eucharist and the priesthood. This has allowed a sense of friendship that will probably not go away despite the recent changes.

Nonetheless, the different forms of governance have led to differing outcomes in matters such as contraception, remarriage, ordination of women, and the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in all aspects of the church's life.

We have entered a time of differentiation that will probably not be resolved in the foreseeable future. Traffic is moving in both directions across the Roman Catholic/Episcopalian border.

Hopefully, this time will be lived with both honesty and charity and with the prayer and hope that these differences will not harden divisions, but will motivate a desire to discover a godly diversity in unity that will be a gift to the world.

THE REV. JOHN P. DOWNEY is dean of the Cathedral of St. Paul and ecumenical officer of the Episcopal Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania.

Copyright 2012 The Erie Times-News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride

The story of Sister Margaret McBride ought to concern all of us. She is a Catholic nun and a senior administrator at a hospital in Phoenix, who as a member of a medical ethics review panel, assented to an abortion to save the life of a woman who was in the 11th week of pregnancy.

Sister Margaret was summarily ex-communicated by the bishop in Arizona -- kicked out of the Church. Not even pedophile priests are excommunicated. One of the doctors who works with her was quoted in The New York Times with this to say:

“She is a kind, soft-spoken, humble, caring, spiritual woman whose spot in Heaven was reserved years ago... The idea that she could be ex-communicated after decades of service to the Church and humanity literally makes me nauseated.”

No allowance was made by her bishop for the difficult dilemma faced by this hospital ethics panel of which she was a part; indeed, the statement from the bishop's office all but said that the hospital should have let the pregnant woman die (along with her fetus) and the nun should have gone along with that. Most of those I know who are anti-abortion are not even that hardline.

This incident should be seen as part of a larger picture. I posted in March that American Catholic nuns are virtually at war with the Catholic bishops. They were on opposite sides of the health care debate (please click HERE to read that post), and they are posing an increasingly vocal challenge to the male hierarchy of the Catholic Church. That the Catholic bishops are now excommunicating nuns while still making excuses for their pedophile scandals is nothing less than outrageous, and tars all churches of every stripe with the brush of intolerance and rigidity.

This column ran yesterday in The New York Times by Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Nicholas D. Kristof and I highly commend it to you:

Sister Margaret’s Choice
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

We finally have a case where the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is responding forcefully and speedily to allegations of wrongdoing.

But the target isn’t a pedophile priest. Rather, it’s a nun who helped save a woman’s life. Doctors describe her as saintly.

The excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride in Phoenix underscores all that to me feels morally obtuse about the church hierarchy. I hope that a public outcry can rectify this travesty.

To read the full article, please click HERE.

Photo of Sister Margaret from The Catholic Sun.

The health care debate: The Catholic nuns vs. the Catholic bishops

As you know, the health care debate is reaching climactic votes this weekend in the Congress. As you may also know, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is opposing health care reform unless the bill contains strong anti-abortion provision. The bishops are close to abandoning their long-sought goal of providing universal health care especially for the poorest among us.

However, the bishops are not the only voice of Roman Catholicism. Enter the nuns.

Many years ago, I got to know a courageous nun, Sister Simone Campbell (photo at right), introduced to me through mutual friends. I got to know her when she was the executive director for Jericho in Sacramento, a religiously-based public interest lobbying organization that works on health care issues.

When she got to Sacramento, Sister Simone looked me up and picked my brain about how to work in the Legislature and who-is-who. I happily gave her a crash course.

A few years ago, Sister Simone moved to Washington D.C. where she is now the executive director of Network (read about her and her organization by clicking HERE).

For months, Sister Simone and other nuns have been in the thick of the health care debate. My friend E.J. Dionne wrote about her and the force of the nuns on Thursday in The Washington Post. You can read his column by clicking HERE.

The conflict between the Catholic nuns and the Catholic bishops on this issue is part of a larger conflict that is just beneath the surface. The National Catholic Reporter wrote recently about how the male hierarchy is attempting to muzzle the nuns. The lead: "Bishops have stones in their hands aimed at women religious..." You can read the full story by clicking HERE.

And it should go without saying but I will say it anyway: thanks be to God we have ordained women in the Episcopal Church with full voice and vote in our governance. If you ever had any doubt about what a difference that makes, ask a nun.

The Monday Funnies

We have another entry to the Catholic-Anglican mess-fest cartoon contest.

Once finished with that, you will find below a video tutorial on how to worship like a Pentecostal.

Hope you enjoy your Monday, all in good fun...

Postscript: Reactions across the spectrum to Vatican's bid to lure Anglicans

Was it such a big earthquake? A number of my conservative friends think not (and, yes, I have a few conservative friends and they try very hard to keep me honest, thank you very much). I thought I'd offer a roundup of reactions across the board from the last few days, some that agree with mine and some that don't.

To back up, as you may recall, last week the Vatican did an end-run around its own ecumenical office and announced it was establishing a new office to receive disgruntled Anglicans into the fold of Roman Catholicism.

For a factual summary of the Vatican's move, a good place to start is with a Q&A published by the UK Independent. You can read it by clicking HERE.

Now to the commentaries and analysis:

A few friends tell me they believe that the Pope's offer is a needed pastoral response by the Vatican, and they believe it was graciously accepted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Vatican's move, they believe, will allow for a more orderly exit of "traditionalist" Anglo-Catholics than we have heretofore seen (subtext, they had planned to go anyway). They may be right, and I applaud their willingness to find pastoral concern, not politics, as the primary motivation for Benedict's move.

That said, most commentators are finding this thick with church politics, and a few are finding a subtext of politics beyond that.

Oddly enough, much of the commentary in the Anglican world is consistent across the liberal and conservative divide. Many, but not all, are blasting Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams for allowing himself to be roped into a joint press conference with a Roman Catholic archbishop announcing the move.

Martin E. Marty, the preeminent Lutheran theologian of our time, said in a column Monday that the Vatican "blindsided" Williams, and Martin characterized the episode as "anti-ecumenical" by seeking to "pluck" Anglican priests. Martin nonetheless has sympathy for Williams' predicament:

Archbishop Rowan Williams, though embarrassed by the surprise announcement of dealings behind his back, was characteristically Williamsian and old-style Anglican, as he reacted not in anger but with patience. The Anglican communion for centuries aspired to promote “comprehension,” doing what it could to prevent heresy and schism but in a spirit of openness. The papal visit next year will occasion fresh thinking and policies.

To read Martin's full column, click HERE.

Rowan's participation in the press conference, and his tacit endorsement, seems out of character with his usual emphasis on exhaustive dialogue and careful process, leaving him open to charges that he is far more concerned with placating Rome than in talking with members of his own communion. The UK Financial Times' correspondent David Gardner had this to say:

As takeover bids go, it cannot be said to lack ambition. In some
respects it bears more the hallmarks of a coup d’état than the
acquisition of market share. Pope Benedict’s all-but-unilateral
publication of an Apostolic Constitution to bring high church
Anglicans into full communion with the Roman Catholic church should
“in no sense at all” be seen as “an act of proselytism or aggression”
said Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, his body
language belying his soothing tone.

Yet, this head of a church that withdrew from the Catholic fold nearly
five centuries ago was not given even five days warning of the papal
decree. “I was informed of the planned announcement at a very late
stage”, he told the Anglican faithful apologetically. No one saw the
Roman tanks until they had ringed Canterbury.

To read Gardner's full analysis, click HERE.

By most reports, the Vatican move may have its biggest impact in luring Church of England priests to Rome. The impact on luring Episcopalians in the United States appears considerably less. As one of my conservative friends said to me, "We are closer to Dallas than to Rome," a reference to a meeting many of them attended in the Dallas suburb of Plano a few years back that set them on their current course. A number of former Episcopalians have set up their own church structures, they are fighting hard in courts across the land to keep Episcopal church property, and they do not appear enticed to go under the cloak of Rome.

And then there are those persnickety issues of the Reformation. Most of my conservative friends are quite Calvinist and evangelical. While they may agree with Rome on a few (but not all) social issues, most of them fundamentally disagree on deeper theological issues of salvation, the nature of the sacraments, and ecclesiastical issues about the structure of the Church.

Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, the most visible of the "global south" of Anglican bishops dissatisfied with the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Archbishop of Canterbury, reportedly slammed the door shut on the Vatican's offer over the weekend. You can read about his response by clicking HERE.

Other African bishops are also rejecting the offer. You can read the reaction by the Kenyans, for example, by clicking HERE. Dissing both the Vatican and Canterbury, the All Africa News put it this way:

[Archbishop Eliud Wabukala] added that the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams had sent letters welcoming the offer but he was essentially dealing with local England context and does not apply to other provinces.

For some conservatives, it comes down to ordination -- who gets ordained, who doesn't, and who controls it. I am not prone to promoting David Anderson, the rightwing ex-Episcopal priest who received an irregular ordination as an Anglican bishop and who heads up the American Anglican Council. But Anderson had this to say about the Vatican's move and he urges everyone to examine the fine print:

The details are still sketchy, and much finally depends on the details, but there are clearly some trouble spots even for those Anglicans who are keen about the idea. Those clergy who were baptized and confirmed as Roman Catholics, then left Roman Catholicism for Anglicanism, were then ordained in Anglican orders, and are married, will probably find it difficult if not impossible to bring their Anglican orders into the new Roman Catholic option. In the past, married Anglican priests who were originally baptized and confirmed as Roman Catholics haven't been able to bring the orders and a wife into Rome. The issue is having a wife and a prior relationship with Rome.

Another sticking point is for married Anglican bishops who may wish to take advantage of this new option. Pending disclosure of the new rules and the small print, neither Eastern Orthodoxy nor Rome currently have married bishops, and haven't had for most of their history. Anglican bishops who are married and have no earlier sacramental relationship with Rome may only be able to take the new option as a priest.

There has been considerable commentary in recent days in various secular publications. Martyn Minns, leader of the Virginia breakaway Episcopalians, was quoted in The New York Times and The Washington Post as saying, "I don't want to be a Roman Catholic... There was a Reformation, you remember."

Maureen Dowd, the veteran columnist of The New York Times who was reared Catholic, commented that the Vatican's move should be seen as part of a wider campaign to reign in nuns and fight feminism in the pews. Dowd noted this on Sunday:

As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.

“Most of the Anglicans who want to move over to the Catholic Church under this deal are people who have scorned women as priests and have scorned gay people,” [author Kenneth] Briggs said. “The Vatican doesn’t care that these people are motivated by disdain.”

To read the rest of Dowd's column, click HERE.

Another commentator in The New York Times, A.N. Wilson, opined that Benedict's move will be the death knell of the Church of England. I think he overstates the case (The CofE has a habit of hanging on despite reports of its demise), but his point is worth noting:

The numbers of practicing Catholics in England is greater than the number of practicing Anglicans. Within a generation, there will probably be more Muslims than practicing Anglicans in the British Isles. Britain will no longer be able to endure the absurdity of the laws relating to the religion of the monarch, the Act of Settlement and Royal Marriages Act, which among other things forbid the sovereign to marry a Catholic. Or the Coronation Oath, which promises to uphold the Protestant religion.

To read the full column, click HERE.

Other commentators see it quite differently, not as the demise of the Church of England but as something more ominous in larger geopolitics. In a column the The New York Times Sunday, columnist Ross Douthat began by noting:

The Church of England has survived the Spanish Armada, the English Civil War and Elton John performing “Candle in the Wind” at Princess Diana’s Westminster Abbey funeral. So it will probably survive the note the Vatican issued last week, inviting disaffected Anglicans to head Romeward, and offering them an Anglo-Catholic mansion within the walls of the Roman Catholic faith.

Douthat wrote that Benedict's real agenda is confronting Islam in Europe, and to do so he is willing to gloss over differences among Christians:

But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam...

There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.

To read Douthat's column, click HERE.

Author James Carroll, a former Catholic priest, writes in The Boston Globe that the Vatican's move is part of its larger war on the modern world and science:

Last week’s anti-Anglican salvo from Rome shows how far the Catholic leadership has fallen from the heights of Vatican II. The invitation to “disgruntled’’ members of the Church of England’s extended family to abandon the Thames for the Tiber is a rejection of contemporary human experience, a resounding response of “No!’’ The church against the modern world, after all.

To read Carroll's column, click HERE.

On the other hand, a few media commentators, and a few friends, have noted that Benedict's move could have the unintended consequence of allowing Protestantism to creep in under the Catholic tent, and in the long-run, that may prove more revolutionary than the short-term earthquake in Anglican-Roman Catholic relations. The Washington Post ran a lengthy analysis on its op-ed page Sunday that is far more nuanced than anything I have written. Headlined "Is Pope Benedict a closet liberal?" author David Gibson, who has written a book about Benedict, makes the following point:

More important, with the latest accommodation to Anglicans, Benedict has signaled that the standards for what it means to be Catholic -- such as the belief in the real presence of Christ in the Mass as celebrated by a validly ordained priest -- are changing or, some might argue, falling. The Vatican is in effect saying that disagreements over gay priests and female bishops are the main issues dividing Catholics and Anglicans, rather than, say, the sacraments and the papacy and infallible dogmas on the Virgin Mary, to name just a few past points of contention.

That is revolutionary -- and unexpected from a pope like Benedict. It could encourage the view, which he and other conservatives say they reject, that all Christians are pretty much the same when it comes to beliefs, and the differences are just arguments over details.

And that could be the final irony. For all the hue and cry over last week's developments, Benedict's innovations may have glossed too lightly over the really tough issues: namely, the theological differences that traditional Anglicans say have kept them from converting, as they could always do.

You can read Gibson's full column by clicking HERE.

Also, some in the secular press see this as part of the larger struggle for gay and women's rights. Notably, the Los Angeles Times gave that assessment in an editorial last week, marking it as the position of the newspaper:

This week's announcement that the Roman Catholic Church will welcome disaffected Anglicans en masse is of primary interest to members of the two Christian communions. But this religious realignment is also a reminder to supporters of equality for women and gays and lesbians that they must literally preach to the converted if they are to win believers to their cause.

To read the editorial, click HERE.

Finally, there is Bishop Dan Edwards of Nevada, who may be the wisest among us. He had this to say Monday:

I am just emerging from Diocesan Convention, so this is my first chance to respond to those who have wanted to hear my thoughts on the Vatican Statement inviting disffected Anglican congregations to become Roman Catholics, but the priests can still be married and they can use Anglican liturgies.

I really think it's perfectly fine. Some disaffected Anglicans are focused on issues where they will line up better with the RC Church -- particularly those who are opposed to the ordination of women. They will have to come to terms with some of the hot button issues in the RC Church, but if they can do that, their unity with a larger group of Christians will sustain their faith, help them be financially viable, and generally promote the gospel mission. We wish them well. We wish the Roman Catholic Church well. It is a good thing.

Other disaffected Anglicans are of a more evangelical persuasion and may not find the RC Church to be a good home. That will be for them to discern and not for us to judge.

Meanwhile, we will continue to seek reconciliation and greater unity with all our fellow Christians.

Lastly, if you are new to this blog, you may want to read my commentary on this HERE. Or maybe you've had quite enough of this, thank you, and it is time to move onto a poem or Autumn leaves something else. I couldn't agree more.