A Twentieth Century St Francis

Not many people know about Peter Maurin, and still fewer would ever have heard of him were it not for Dorothy Day. She considered him the founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

Dorothy often wrote and said that she was good at seeing and criticizing the social injustices borne by workers, prisoners, and the poor, but Peter had a program to help them and change the system.

Maurin, a one-time Christian Brother from France, accepted the notion that Jesus meant what he said when he told his disciples to feed the hungry, to sell their possessions and give the money to the poor, to see Him in the least of our brothers and sisters.

Peter was often mistaken for a bum in his unpressed and ill-fitting suit, but he was widely-read, a born-teacher, and a determined but gentle “anarchist.”

Peter’s anarchism was totally non-violent; he wanted simply to change the rules of society and culture in order to overcome destitution, homelessness, and injustice.

Those who knew him recalled that he was forever talking, whether out on the street, in a Catholic Worker House, or on a university stage. He formulated his insights into what are now known as “Easy Essays,” summations of wisdom and direction for applying the Gospel of Jesus and the good judgment of others.

It was Peter who persuaded Dorothy to publish a newspaper (The Catholic Worker), to open hospitality houses to serve the homeless (Catholic Worker Houses), and to establish farms and garden communes in order to get people back to the land.

Some of Peter’s ideas seemed to some naïve and impractical. He urged Christians to have a “Christ room” in their homes to accommodate people without shelter. He insisted that anyone who has clothing he does not need, he should give it to the poor. He warned against the growing tendency to let the state rather than the individual person provide assistance to those in need.

Peter could be described as a 20^th century St Francis. He lived a life of voluntary poverty, did not shy away from manual labor, and, in the words of Dorothy, “was a free and joyous person.”

He was fond of capturing in slogans or simple essays his ideas and the many he borrowed from his reading of philosophers, socialists and popes.

He wrote, for example,  “The world would be better off  if people tried to become better. And people would become better if they stopped trying to be better off.”

On another occasion Peter said, “The Sermon on the Mount will be called practical when Christians make up their mind to practice it.”

And some wit once challenged Peter with the question, “Why did God create bed bugs?” Peter’s response: “For practicing our patience, probably.”

Peter gravitated to Dorothy because he thought she shared his vision. She admits in her biography of the man, “Let it be conceded right away, before going any further, that I do not pretend to understand Peter Maurin…I do not understand, for instance, why he talks about the things he does to the people he does. Why, for instance, given an opportunity to talk to a group of striking seaman, during the 1937 waterfront strike, should he pick out the subject of Andre Gide and his reactions to Soviet Russia, and discourse for two hours?”

And yet she acknowledges, “I have always thought of Peter as an Apostle to the world.”

Peter was one of those rare souls who embraced the Gospel wholeheartedly and determined to live it. He took it seriously, and urged all he met to do the same.

Maurin died in 1949, and most of the world is no longer aware of the man and his message. Nonetheless, his example and insights still challenge those who come to know them.

Dorothy concluded her biography of Peter with these observations: “Peter has a message for all, though all are certainly not called to go out as he did among the poor, as a teacher and worker…Poverty is a thing of the spirit as well as the flesh. But we do not see enough of Peter’s kind of poverty. His message of poverty is for all, and his message of personal responsibility is for all.”

 “The truth,” he said, quoting the Norwegian poet Henrik Johann Ibsen, “must be restated every twenty years.”

After 65 years it seems more than appropriate to restate one of Peter’s essays for reflection and maybe even application:

A personalist is a go-giver not a go-getter. He tries to give what he has and does not try to get what the other fellow has. He tries to be good by doing good to the other fellow. He is other-centered not self-centered. He has a social doctrine of the common good. He spreads the social doctrine of the common good through words and deeds. He speaks through deeds as well as words. Through words and deeds he brings into existence a common unity, the common unity of a community.  

The Church of the Poor

When Elizabeth Seton began to talk about conversion to the Catholic Church, her family and friends objected that she was too refined to join those “dirty, filthy, red-faced” immigrants who made up the Catholic congregations in early nineteenth century New York.

Seton’s biographer Joseph Dirvin reminded his readers, “By far the greatest part of the congregation on Barclay Street was composed of poor immigrants, Irish, French and German; and it is no reflection on their piety and faith to record that they had as little manners and polish as they had of money.”

However splendid the European version of Catholicism, the early American Catholic community was an impoverished variant, which, Elizabeth’s family warned her, was “the offscourings of the people” and “a public nuisance.”

When Elizabeth Seton joined the Catholic Church in New York in 1805, she joined the Church of the poor.

When Dorothy Day joined the Catholic Church in New York in 1927, she joined a Church which had grown more respectable and even wealthy, but she became Catholic confident that her Catholic faith would support and strengthen her dedication to serving the poor.

Dorothy was chagrined by the Catholic Church’s wealth and its easy relationship with the state and with capitalism.

She wrote in her biography, “I loved the Church for Christ made visible. Not for itself, because it was so often a scandal to me. Romano Guardini said the Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; one could not separate Christ from His Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.”

In Dorothy’s mind the Catholic Church, despite its variants, was the Church of the poor.

And when he became the Bishop of Rome in 2013, Jorge Bergoglio once again affirmed the Church’s true orientation. In his first meeting with the press, Pope Francis said, “Ah, how I would like a church that is poor, and for the poor.”

This was the reason he took the name Francis, eager to identify with St. Francis of Assisi who embraced “Lady Poverty” as his constant companion.

Pope Francis dramatized his commitment to the poor publicly when he visited a slum area in Rio de Janeiro during his visit to Brazil and privately when in secret he visits poor neighborhoods in Rome.

Like his namesake, Pope Francis speaks and acts his message.

He said last Spring, “Real power is service…(Jesus) humbled himself unto death, even death on a cross for us, to serve us, to save us. And there is no other way in the Church to move forward. For the Christian, getting ahead, progress, means humbling oneself. If we do not learn this Christian rule, we will never, ever be able to understand Jesus’ true message on power.”

Pope Francis’ simplicity, candor, and openness reflect his words. He reminds his priests that if they are to be true pastors “the shepherd smell like the sheep.”

Peter Maurin, the man whom Dorothy Day calls the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, used to distill a great deal of thought and guidance into an “Easy Essay.” On one occasion Maurin, who both spoke about and lived a pauper’s life, offered this counsel:

If the Catholic Church

is not today

the dominant social dynamic force,

it is because Catholic scholars

have failed to blow the dynamite

of  the Church.

Catholic scholars

have taken the dynamite

of the Church,

have wrapped it up

in nice psychology,

placed it in an hermetic container

and sat on the lid.

It is about time

to blow the lid off

so the Catholic Church

may again become

the dominant social dynamic force.

Pope Francis and the legacies of Seton, Day, Maurin and others appear ready to light  that dynamite (exercise the power of service)  -- in the Church of the poor.

Helping or Enabling?

Nearly thirty years ago I was appointed pastor of St Leo Church in North Fairmount, in a part of Cincinnati which had changed from a white middle-class community in the 1950s to a predominately low-income, black neighborhood in the 1960s.

When I told an acquaintance about my new assignment he responded with, “What did you do to get sent there?” He knew the poverty there was obvious, with housing in disrepair and litter on the streets.

A few years before I arrived a dynamic woman named Lois Broerman, intent on addressing these issues, had already initiated a “preferential option for the poor.” She established the North Fairmount Community Center in the parish’s former school building, providing a senior citizen program, child care, Headstart, and GED (high school equivalency) classes. On other sites she and the Center’s board opened a thrift shop/food co-op and a laundromat.

In addition the organizers applied for government and foundation grants, with which they bought existing housing,  repaired it, and then sold it at minimum cost to low-income residents who had been renting.

One of the guiding principles for bringing new life and hope to the area was to seek the active involvement of the local population. Sometimes well-meaning people come into a poor neighborhood to help but they fail to engage in the process the people with the need.

It was a bit of wisdom I learned early on: “When you try to do it for them, you may end up doing it to them.”

My seven years in that parish brought me a number of insights: 1) not all the poor are poor through their own fault; 2) poverty can undermine a person’s self-image; 3) the welfare system is sometimes part of the problem; 4) housing, even public housing, is not always well-maintained; and 5) in some cases the poor pay more for groceries in their neighborhood than their middle-class counterparts in the suburbs.

One of the major conflicts for me at that time was making a distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. It was easy to help those truly in need, but I questioned over and over whether to give assistance or food to those whom I judged unworthy of it.

I knew from experience that some who came for a bag of groceries would take the food to the local bar and sell it to one of the patrons to get money for drinks. Was I helping or enabling?

What brought all these memories back to mind is my reading of the life, ministry and philosophy of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the co-founders of the Catholic Worker movement and their houses of hospitality.

Maurin and Day did not simply help the poor; they chose to live lives of voluntary poverty themselves.

They lived in the poor neighborhood, ate the same food they gave to the hungry, wore the used-clothing they provided for those who had a need, and took in strangers who had no housing, no care-givers, no future.

Both Day and Maurin determined to live the Gospel, to see Jesus in everyone, to follow the Works of Mercy as outlined in the New Testament, especially in Matthew 25 (feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and so on).

Day was often criticized for giving assistance to those who were “poor through their own fault” –the alcoholics, the drug-abusers, the lazy.

Her openness to assisting even the “undeserving” was based on Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes, where he wrote, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” (cf 5:3).

Poverty, she realized, was not just about money; poverty of spirit is about brokenness. The alcoholic, the depressed person, the prostitute, the unwed pregnant girl, and even the lazy, are among the poor in spirit.

Maurin and Day were social activists, sometimes describing themselves as “anarchists” because they wanted not only to help the poor but to change the system which made them or kept them poor.

Maurin used to put his insights in simple, poetic-like statements, sometimes described as “Easy Essays.” He was critical of both the welfare state and the expectation that the federal government is responsible for solving the problem of poverty.

One of his Easy Essays begins with:

People go to Washington

asking the government

to solve their economic problems,

while the Federal government

was never intended

to solve men’s economic problems.

Thomas Jefferson says that

the less government there is

the better it is.

If the less government there is

the better it is,

then the best kind of government

is self-government.

Not only should people help people on a personal and individual level, but the poor must be shown ways of caring for themselves, of changing their dependence on others.

Day constantly urged the readers of The Catholic Worker newspaper, the visitors to the houses of hospitality, and the audiences before whom she spoke to remember the Works of Mercy and to see Jesus in all people, even in the refuse of society.

My experience at St Leo’s in North Fairmount led me to interpret Matthew’s “poor in spirit” as encompassing both those who are broke and those who are broken. I wrote about that distinction in St Anthony Messenger back in 1988.

And yet I have not personally resolved in my own mind how or whether to apply the distinction between “helping” and “enabling.” Perhaps my continued reading of Dorothy Day’s writings will bring some resolution.

It’s the “helping vs. enabling” that continues to trouble me.

Papa Francesco's Agenda

There is a renewed interest and energy in the Catholic Church, and the cause of this post-Vatican II aggiornamento is Pope Francis.

People both inside and outside the Catholic community are talking about him, about his style, about his message.

Some are negative, saying that he is undermining the authority of the papacy, especially in his calling together a group of eight cardinals to advise him on Church policy and reform of the Vatican bureaucracy.  When Pope Francis challenged “unbridled capitalism,” radio-talk host Rush Limbaugh said the pope didn’t know what he was talking about. Still others lament, “He’s just style. He’s the Vatican’s PR man.”

Others praise him as “the people’s pope,” assessing his style, his words, and his example as a refreshing return to Gospel values. “He gives me hope,” is a common response to the question, “What do you think of Francis?” Some of those close to him have noted that he does not want to see a “personality cult” develop around him as did around Pope John Paul II; he wants the cult to be Christ-centered. His choice as Time’s man of the year was bitter-sweet for him.

Few of us knew that Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio was first runner-up in the conclave voting which had elected Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI on April 19, 2005. Eight years later Bergoglio’s name was seldom suggested as a possible replacement for the retiring Pope Benedict, but on March 13, 2013, he was elected with 90 out of a possible 115 votes. He accepted the office of Bishop of Rome, vicar of St. Peter, and chose the name Francis.

The information which trickles out of the secret conclave indicates that the majority of cardinals were looking for a leader who would restore Church credibility and could reform the Vatican Bank and Curia. Some of them insisted the Church needed a Gospel pope.

Pope Francis biographer Paul Vallely thinks that one of the major factors in the election of Bergoglio was a speech he made in the Synod Hall before the conclave. Each cardinal was allotted five minutes to address the assembly of voters. Vallely says that Bergoglio’s talk "lasted just three-and-a-half minutes…but it electrified the synod hall.”

Bergoglio reminded his brother cardinals that the only purpose of the Church is to go out to tell the world the good news about Jesus Christ, that the Church needed to surge forth to the peripheries, not just geographically but to the existential peripheries where people grapple with sin, injustice, ignorance and indifference to religion.

He spoke, it is said, from a few scribbled notes, but later in the day Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino of Havana, Cuba, asked Bergoglio for a copy of his remarks. The next day Bergoglio gave him a copy, and Ortega put it on his diocesan website.

In his book Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, Vallely provides a version of the talk:

            “But the Church has got too wrapped up in itself. It was too navel-gazing. It had become          ‘self-referential’ which had made it sick. It was suffering a 'kind of theological narcissism.’ When Jesus said, ’Behold I stand at the door and knock’ people assumed he was outside, wanting to come in. But sometimes Jesus knocks from within, wanting to be let out into the wider world. A self-referential Church wants to keep Jesus to itself, instead of letting him out to others.

            “The Church is supposed to be the mysterium lunae –the mystery of the moon is that it has no light but simply reflects the light of the sun. The Church must not fool itself that it  has light of its own; if it does that it falls in to what Henri de Lubac in The Splendor of  the Church called the greatest of evils –spiritual worldliness. That is what happens with a  self-referential Church, which refuses to go beyond itself.

             “Put simply, there are two images of the Church: a Church which evangelizes and comes out of  herself or a worldly Church, living within herself, of herself, for herself.  The next Pope should be someone who helps the Church surge forth to the peripheries like a sweet and comforting mother who offers the joy of Jesus to the world.”

These remarks or the gist of them provide the theology/philosophy motivating Pope Francis’ agenda. When he told priests that the shepherd should smell like the sheep, he was telling them to stop being “self-referential.” When he washed the feet of twelve prisoners (two of them women) on Holy Thursday, he was going out to the peripheries. When he chose not to live in the papal apartment, he was warning against spiritual worldliness.

It would be a mistake to put all the emphasis in the Church on its pope. The focus of the Church is Jesus Christ. The pope becomes for us the mystery of the moon, reflecting the light of Christ. His speech before the conclave, reminding his brothers of the Church’s purpose are worthy of ongoing reflection and will likely serve as a helpful preamble to interpreting Pope Francis’ agenda.

 

How Can You Tell?

How can you tell when a parish is fulfilling its purpose?

Canon Law’s definition of a parish is rather stark: “A parish is a certain community of the Christian faithful stably constituted in a particular church, whose pastoral care is entrusted to a pastor (parochus) as its proper pastor (pastor) under the authority of the diocesan bishop” (515).

Legally, then, any parish with these four elements (community, stability, a pastor, and the diocesan bishop) is a parish!

Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church put some meat on those bare bones. There should also be preaching of the Gospel, the celebration of the Lord’s supper, and manifest charity (26). The document on the laity adds a little more: the parish should be an example of community apostolate (active participation in liturgical life, engagement in apostolic works, spread of the word, and care of souls) plus working cooperation between laity and priests (10).

On the practical level, however, we need more.

Clearly a growing number of Catholics are “church shopping,” trying to find “a place where they are fed.”

What criteria make a parish a good parish? a place where the people are fed?

The people of St. Michael parish in Cincinnati were asked recently to answer the question, “What do you like about your parish?”

The top responses included: “a friendly, welcoming place,” “good music,” “good pastor,” “good preaching,” “the people.”

I think those responses can be summarized in one description; they like a church which is “pastoral.”

But is what they like necessarily what a parish should be?

A new book, recently published and growing in popularity, addresses the issue –Rebuilt: The Story of a Catholic Parish by Michael White, pastor of the Church of the Nativity, Baltimore, and Timothy M. Dolan, lay associate (Ave Maria Press, 2013).

Their chief insight is that for a parish to be what it is supposed to be the parishioners must recognize that they are called to be not consumers but disciples!

White and Dolan list ten major mistakes they made in their initial effort to make the parish grow (e.g., trying to please everyone, wasting time and money, fearing to lead).

Resolved to change the parish’s status quo, the two leaders set out to change the parish culture. They started by “challenging church people and seeking lost people.” They decided to evangelize.

In their words, “We just decided to stop doing a lot of things we had been doing and instead concentrate on the weekend…we had a music program; what we needed was a worship program…we are convinced that churches will remain consumer-driven as long as people aren’t singing.”

Most of what these two reformer-authors propose isn’t new; it’s just that they applied it: develop small faith groups, encourage tithing, promote lay ecclesial ministry, evangelize.

The start of their program for making a parish grow is the realization that only God can make a parish grow. The fertile soil for that growth is, in their experience, helping parishioners move from being consumers to disciples: “Our parish had become a consumer exchange, and, as such, it had lost its 'transforming power' in people’s lives.”

When Jesus sent the Church out into the world, he ordered, “Make disciples…”

 

White and Dolan spell out what they tried, acknowledge their mistakes, and urge others to make discipleship the catalyst for change.

There is no human agenda, formula or template for making a parish what a parish is supposed to be. The best we can do is allow Jesus to lead, and remember that being his disciple means picking up a cross.

Maybe that’s why we have a hard time making our parishes work –we’re still afraid of that cross.

 

 

A Woman Cardinal?

Speculation about Pope Francis’ naming a woman as a cardinal this coming February was reportedly rebutted  by  the director of  the Vatican’s press office Father Federico Lomabrdi .  He called the rumor  “nonsense.” 

The Huffington Post quoted him as saying, “It is simply not a realistic possibility…” 

He went on to acknowledge, however, that it (naming a woman as cardinal) is theologically and theoretically possible! 

The history of the origin of cardinals in the Church and of the meaning of the term “cardinal” is still debated. 

Some think cardinal comes from the Latin cardo (hinge), supposing that cardinals were the men on whom ecclesiastical administration turned. 

Others suppose that the word comes from incardinare, a term which Church officials made up to describe bishops who were transferred to other dioceses after their own were invaded and/or destroyed by barbarians. 

Over time those named cardinal formed a body of privileged clergy, becoming advisors to the popes. 

The Third Lateran Council (1179) confirmed that cardinals alone were the electors of a new pope.  

Pope John XXIII in April of 1962 ordered that all cardinals should be ordained bishops. 

Current Church law (canon 351) explains, “The Roman Pontiff freely selects men to be promoted as cardinals, who have been ordained at least into the order of the presbyterate…those who are not yet bishops must receive Episcopal consecration.” 

Basing himself on that law, Vatican spokesman Father Lombardi is on solid ground in describing as “nonsense” the  rumors and speculation that Pope Francis will name a woman as cardinal. 

However, the pope can dispense from the requirement that a cardinal must be a bishop; such was the case with Vatican II theologians Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, and Urs von Balthasar. (De Lubac refused the offer of the red hat if acceptance required his being ordained a bishop; Pope John Paul II respected deLubac’s wish and set aside the requirement.) 

Since the College of cardinals is man-made and not an essential part of the Church’s institution, it could be abolished. There was a strong call for its dissolution in the 15^th century. 
 

History indicates that laymen have been named cardinals (e.g., Fernando I de Medici in the 16^th century, but, though he was never ordained a deacon, priest or bishop, he is said to have received the tonsure, one of the minor orders which made him officially a cleric, no longer a lay person). 

Theologically, theoretically then (as Father Lombardi acknowledged) Pope Francis could name a woman as cardinal but at this time law and custom militate strongly against it. 

 

 

Digesting What Pope Francis Said

I’m trying to digest the many thought-provoking and challenging responses Pope Francis made in his now-famed interview with the editor of the Italian Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica. 

He was asked what he thought about an expression St Ignatius used in his Spiritual Exercises: “think with the Church.”

Pope Francis replied that no one is saved alone. He underscored the relationship each individual must have with the human community, and reminded that “the church is the people of God” and explained that “thinking with the Church, therefore, is my way of being a part of this people. And all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief, and the people display this infallibiltas in credendo, this infallibility in believing, through a supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together.”

He went on, “This is what I understand today as the ‘thinking with the Church’ of which St. Ignatius speaks. When the dialogue among the people and the bishops and the pope goes down this road and is genuine, then it is assisted by the Holy Spirit.”

Then he cautioned that this infallibilitas of all the faithful is not a matter of populism. The hierarchical Church is part of the people of God, “pastors and people together. The Church is the totality of God’s people.” 

He was asked what he thought the Church needed most at this point in history, what he dreamed of for the Church.

Pope Francis replied that the church needs “the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds.”

He went on, “The Church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you.”

Then he cautioned Church ministers that they “must be ministers of mercy above all. The confessor, for example, is always in danger of being either too much of a rigorist or too lax.” 

He was asked what he thought about the Roman Curia (the Church’s bureaucracy).

Pope Francis replied that the Curia and its offices are at the service of the pope and the bishops. “They must help both the particular churches and the bishops’ conferences. They are instruments of help.”

Then he cautioned, “In some cases, however, when they are not functioning well, they run the risk of becoming institutions of censorship..” 

He was asked about the relationship between papal primacy and the collegiality of bishops (a hot but unresolved topic at the Second Vatican Council).

Pope Francis replied that the people, the bishops and the pope must walk together. He brought up the idea of synodality (one of the earliest structures in the Church to maintain unity and communion, a coming together to discuss problems, to express differing opinions, and then arrive at a decision).

He went on to say, “Synodality should be lived at various levels. Maybe it is time to change the methods of the Synods of Bishops, because it seems to me that the current method is not dynamic.”

Then he cautioned, “We must walk united with our differences: there is no other way to become one. This is the way of Jesus.”

(Jesuit historian Father John W. O’Malley reports that Pope Francis has read Bishop John R.Quinn’s book The Reform of the Papacy in which Quinn says, “Today’s synods seem distant from the ideal set forth in the council decree on bishops…The tendency since the council would appear to be to restrict the synod as much as possible.” 

I’m trying to digest what Pope Francis said in his famed interview. His responses seem to me to reflect both the letter and the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.

The full interview was published in the September 30  issue of America magazine (except for one sentence inadvertently omitted from Pope Francis’ reply to a question about women in the life of the Church. The missing sentence began his remarks: “It is necessary to broaden the opportunities for a stronger presence of women in the Church.”)

He went on to say, “The challenge of today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the Church is exercised for various areas of the Church.” 

I suspect I will be trying to digest what Pope Francis said for quite some time.