In All Things

"Please find a spot for my little machine-y."  If all you know about Mother Cabrini is that prayer for a parking spot, check this out, posted by the Brooklyn diocese's NET channel for her feast day, on Nov. 13.  There is a wonderful interview included with a sister from her order who offers her remembrances of the saint.

James Martin, SJ

Robert Taft, S.J., the great liturgical scholar, has forgotten more about the liturgy than most of us will ever know.  Fr. (and Archimandrite) Taft, one of the world's leading experts on Byzantine liturgy, and former vice-rector of the Pontifical Oriental Institute Rome, was also professor of Oriental liturgy at the "Orientalum" in Rome from 1970 to 2000.  Here he is in a terrifically unbuttoned interview in U.S. Catholic.

Let me put my cards right on the table: I'm a Vatican II loyalist without apologies to anyone. The Second Vatican Council was a general council of the Catholic Church, and the popes since the council have made it clear that there's no going back. The mandate for liturgical reform was passed by the council with an overwhelming majority, so it is the tradition of the Catholic Church, like it or lump it.

Unfortunately, partly as a result of the schism of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers, there has been an attempt on the part of a group of what I call "neo-cons" to portray the reforms of Vatican II as something that was foisted upon the church by a small minority of professionals contrary to the will of many people in the church. This is what we know in the vernacular as slander.

The reforms of the council were carried out under Pope Paul VI in a spirit of complete collegiality. Every suggested adaptation, change, or modification was sent out to every Catholic bishop in the world, and the responses that came in were treated with the utmost respect. When changes were severely questioned or opposed by a large number of bishops, they were revised according to the will of the bishops and then sent back again.

So the notion that the liturgical reform was somehow forced on an unknowing church by some group of "liturgists," as if that were a dirty word, is a lie, and that needs to be said.

James Martin, SJ

The shadow of Pope Benedict XVI was everywhere apparent at the first day of the USCCB meeting. Except that it is not a shadow at all. A shadow obscures the light, making it more difficult to see. The dominant theme of the meeting so far is entirely positive, echoing the Holy Father’s insistence that the Church must proclaim what it is for, not just what it is against.

The opening sentences of the bishops’ statement on the health care reform debate read, "The US House of Representatives advanced major legislation to provide adequate and affordable health care to all. The Catholic Bishops of the United States have long advocated that adequate health care be made available to everyone." They go on to voice their continued concern that health care reform not be used to extend abortion coverage, and they seem confidant that thevictory they achieved in the House can survive in the Senate.

In his presidential address, Cardinal Francis George said, "Relations do not speak first of control but of love. If there is a loosening of relationship between ourselves and those whom Christ has given us to govern in love, it is for us to reach out and re-establish conditions necessary for all to remain in communion." In his address to the bishops, papal nuncio Archbishop Peitro Sambi reiterated the need for the Church to articulate a positive, compelling vision for the flock and for the broader culture.

Father David O’Connell, the President of the Catholic University of America, gave his last address to the bishops as president of their university: O’Connell earlier announced that he is stepping down as president of the bishops’ own university next summer. Nowhere is the need to articulate a positive vision for the Church in the culture more evident than at a Catholic University and few university administrators have done more than O’Connell to meet that need.

During O’Connell’s tenure, CUA focused on the Catholic identity of the institution. He has sponsored a variety of symposia, including one last month commemorating the "Year for Priests," the only such university symposium on the subject in America. He revamped the campus chaplaincy, making it a more integral part of campus life. O’Connell kept a tight rein on the extension of invitations to outside speakers, shunning any who disagreed publicly with the Church’s core teachings, avoiding the kind of controversies that usually shed more darkness than light on the role of the Church in society. On the other hand, he was frequently targeted by right wing critics for sponsoring such cultural events as a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s rock opera "Mass." But, if a Catholic University is not the right and proper place at which to perform such cultural gems, what is?

The shadow under which the Church in America has labored for too long is the negative view of human nature and, consequently, of human culture that is a hallmark of Calvinism. The Catholic Church has always fluctuated between adapting cultural norms and finding its own Catholic identity. Pope Benedict XVI has invited the Church to see its role differently from that of a scold. At the meeting this week in Baltimore, his invitation has been accepted.

Now that the bishops' meeting has begun (see Michael Sean Winters' post below, and keep looking for his continuing coverage for America) Cardinal George has revealed what has been whispered about in Catholic circles for the past few weeks: the USCCB will discuss setting up committees that will determine whether those in three separate groups--the media, colleges and universities, and other organizations (lay groups, etc.)--are legitimately Catholic.  Here's David Gibson on that point, who is covering the meeting for Politics Daily: 

The leader of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States on Monday launched a new effort to rein in Catholic debates and dissidents and to remind the flock that the bishops will be the arbiters of what it means to be a Catholic.

In remarks at the opening of the hierarchy's annual meeting in Baltimore, Chicago Cardinal Francis George made it clear that after years of repeated questions about the bishops' credibility, it was time for the bishops to clarify just who can and cannot speak for the church. He also confirmed that he had set up three committees of bishops to develop guidelines for determining what will be considered legitimate Catholic entities.

...

Church insiders said the divisions and open dissents, and the criticisms that often bombarded the bishops from right and left, increasingly frustrated George and others in the church leadership, and led George to quietly form several committees that will try to find a way to certify which universities, media, and other organizations can claim to be Catholic.

...

But several bishops and church officials I spoke with doubted whether George's desire to implement the certifying committees would gain any traction among the bishops. For one thing, beneath the surface of civility, the bishops are as divided on many of these issues as the rest of the American church.

In addition, George played it so close to the vest in setting up the committees--he launched the initiative over the summer--that up until the first day of these meetings many bishops didn't know who was on the committees or how many there were. There are, it turns out, three such committees: on Catholic universities, Catholic media, and other Catholic organizations, reportedly those involved in lobbying.

San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer, chairman of the committee on Catholic media, told reporters after Monday's opening session that in recent years the political and media landscape has sprouted so many organizations and websites and lobbies using the Catholic label--and advocating competing agendas--that churchgoers are confused.

"Catholics will approach us, and approach their pastors in their church, and ask us, 'Well, I hear this outfit is called Catholic and it says this and another says this and another one something else. Can they all be Catholic and disagree so vehemently with each other?' That does challenge us to makes sense of it and to speak as bishops," said Niederauer, who is widely regarded as a media-savvy prelate with a moderate temperament.

Read the rest of Gibson's story here.

Where this will lead is anyone's guess. 

James Martin, SJ

I am wondering if readers can recommend any interesting ethical discussions of the uses to which email can be put. I have in mind particularly the use of the "blind carbon copy" (or "BCC") function that is included in most email software. I first became aware of the ethical dubiousness of the BCC when I was BCC'd several years ago on a personnel matter among university administrators, with reference to a fellow professor. To be frank, I was honored to be "let in" on the matter and felt the secret "importance" that I was likely intended to feel about it all. (Yes, it typically takes very little in academic life to either wound or elevate the ego. There are many aphorisms about this.) I began using BCC occasionally myself.

It turns out that this feeling of special acknowledgement through the BCC-experience started to fade over time, especially as I began to realize that it was likely that others were being BCC'd on emails to me. (This was confirmed more than once when a colleague would say something to me reflecting the contents of what I had thought was a singular and confidential email.) I started to imagine the totality of the email experience as a potential BCC.

It is clear to me that in the economies of virtual status, BCCs play a special role. I suspect that someone has invented software that allows one to decode whether one has been BCC'd, and as interesting as it would be to see the results, it's probably better if I did not. (On a related note, on one email system at a university where I taught, we could see when our emails were "opened" by the recipient, or if they were "forwarded" -- and it took a savvy colleague to show me how to trick that system so it would not actually reveal to colleagues or anyone else when we had opened emails sent to us.)

There is also the related issue of people carbon-copying ("CCing") others on a reply to you, in a message which was never intended to be seen by anyone other than the original recipient.

These are, in some ways, very small matters, to be sure. But they seem to me to go to the heart of the ethics of how one conducts one's everyday work life in our culture--no small matter. Especially for those who must, like me, spend about an hour a day on email. I know many spend much more.

There are some basic lessons here: only write over work email what you wouldn't mind lawyers reading; consider that what you write might sit for months or years in someone's account, to be parsed later beyond your expectations. But what about the ethics of the BCC or the CC? Some of us in academic life need some guidance.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

Over at the site for the National Institute of Health Policy, a program of the University of St. Thomas, former Minnesota Senator Dave Durenburger was not sharing the joy about both the Stupak Amendment and the historic House vote for health care reform on Nov. 7. His concerns on both the bishops' role in the vote and the path our presumed reform effort is heading—perhaps right to the cashiers' window of some of the self-aggrandizing insurers reform purports to neutralize he suspects—is worth a wider hearing:

The Founding Fathers of this country, and the first and only Catholic president, would be surprised to see the Catholic bishops in the office of the Speaker of the House on the eve of an historic vote on universal health care coverage dictating the terms under which Democrats and Republicans could be free to support this historic-for the U.S.-effort to assure its citizens the right to affordable health care. The Stupak Amendment was a not-so-clever way to expand a 34-year old bar against funding abortion services in public insurance programs to private insurance. . . . Abortion wasn't the only deal the bishops made with the GOP. They stood aside to let the Republicans and right wing media define "euthanasia." The likes of Sarah Palin used the August invention of "death panels" as a means of "killing" the health reform legislation which the House and the president favored. To top it off, the bishops brought out the principle of "subsidiarity" from Catholic social teaching as a foundational principle for this reform. In contemporary Republican "kill Obamacare" terms, that simply means that health insurance regulation and health care coverage should be left to the states wherever possible rather than the national government. So, a political journey which began in the mid-1970s for traditionally Democratic Party Catholics to the Republican Party is continuing to gain strength.

As a Catholic Republican, I am puzzled by the way in which mere mortals can shift the moral priorities of a Church over what, for a 2,000-year-old religion, is a relatively short period of time. As a new member of the U.S. Senate, I stood proudly with my Church in opposition to the expansion of the nuclear arms race, in definition of a just war, in efforts to reduce racial and economic discrimination and enact historic civil rights legislation.

How did a national law to prevent insurance companies, whose premium costs are defrayed in part by tax subsidies, from providing medical services related to abortion get to be a higher public priority for all Americans, not just Catholics, than financing access to health care services? Especially when it is unlikely this law will have that great an impact on the number of abortions performed in this country.

Durenburger apparently views the health care insurance industry as something of a socio-economic hydra. It may appear reform has it on the ropes, but if all Congress manages in this latest attempt to reform the industrialized world's most expensive and least effective health care system are some new regulations regarding client care while forcing a vast new market of 36 million uninsured into the loving embrace of insurers, the 2009 "reform" may prove regrettable.

Durenburger writes: "If you were part of an industry that Americans will pay $2.5 trillion to provide $1.5 trillion worth of value, would you want to change? Of course not. You'd want to create even more public demand for whatever you do. When a president of the United States commits the public treasury to expanding health insurance coverage to 100% of Americans, you hire lobbyists in Washington, D.C., to maximize the effort to expand coverage and minimize its financial impact on your business. A reported $253 million worth of lobbying was done in the first six months of 2009 by, among others, 1,752 insurance company lobbyists (as of 9-1-09). So far they have all been successful." 

Lately, when I find it hard to pray, or am distracted, or can't settle down interiorly, I've started to use musical settings of the psalms and other religious music to help quiet my soul.  It's a wonderful entree into prayer, and sometimes can even become prayer itself, as you let the music and the words express your own feelings and desires to God.  The two resources that I've found the most helpful, and which I would like to recommend, are recordings from two groups.  The first is Gloria Dei Cantores, based in Orleans, Mass, who have several CDs out that use traditional chant and chorale music, and the second, the music of Schola Ministries.  Gloria Dei's website describes them as follows:

Singled out by the American Record Guide for "performances which are impeccable and deeply moving," and by Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe for having "a quality that lies beyond words," the internationally renowned 40-voice choir Gloriæ Dei Cantores (Singers to the Glory of God) holds a passionate dedication to find and express the most authentic and compelling interpretation of sacred choral music spanning two millennia."

My favorite from all the three CDs I have is "His Love Endures Forever," selections of which you can listen to here.

Also Schola Ministries, which centers around the work and music of Kathleen Deignan, CND, uses a wide variety of traditional and newly minted music, much of it by Sister Kathleen.  Here is how they describe their ministry: 

Welcome to Schola Ministries, a cooperative venture in service of the contemplative and liturgical arts that provides a ministry platform to produce and share the musical compositions and creative works of Kathleen Deignan, C.N.D. and other Schola artists.  Since its founding in 1977, and re-founding in 1997, Schola Ministries has grown into a multi-faceted sacred arts company that has produced thirteen recordings of Deignan’s music, providing support for her work of spiritual animation in concert with a host of gifted friends.

Better than reading the above is listening to a sample of their beautiful music, some of which is taken from favorite prayers, selections from Scripture or psalms (as well writings by St. Teresa of Avila or Thomas Merton).  My current favorite is "I am Thine."  Listen to it here.  Another favorite is Beloved City, which I've listened to over and over.  And their version of the Ave Maria is stunning.

I hope both groups help with your prayer!

James Martin, SJ

The USCCB begins its annual plenary session today in Baltimore. On the formal agenda, the bishops will consider a proposed pastoral letter on marriage (which they should scrap and start over) and the final approval of Mass translations (some are good, some not so good but it is past time to fight over them anyway). Behind the scenes, the issue that dominates all the others is the polarization within the Conference, a polarization that seems to have been imported from the political world into the USCCB. The most important thing for the bishops to do this week is to heed the voice of their president, Cardinal George, to resist the political categories of left and right and return to “simply Catholicism.”

In the event, there is a political issue that is tailor-made for the “simply Catholicism” model proposed by Cardinal George: pro-life health care reform. For decades the bishops have backed universal health insurance for all Americans. Since 1973, the bishops have been the leaders, in season and out of season, of the pro-life movement in America. Now, thanks to the 240 members of Congress who voted for the Stupak Amendment banning federal funds for abortion, and the 220 members who voted for the final bill, the possibility of pro-life universal health insurance is that much closer to reality.

The Church’s commitment to pro-life health care reform does not conform to the orthodoxies of either political party. The Republicans have made it abundantly clear that they will do whatever it takes to defeat any substantial reform bill. Many of the most prominent Democratic members are now up in arms because of the pro-life restrictions of the Stupak Amendment. Catholic members of both parties – not just members of Congress but all of us – must ask a simple question of ourselves: Is our commitment to the Church’s teaching prior to our political orthodoxies or is it secondary?

As Pope Benedict made clear in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, life issues are social justice issues and social justice issues are life issues. The Church’s teaching must be received, understood and accepted integrally. I know that integralism is a word with a sinister history, espoused by Catholic witch-hunters during the reign of Pius X and the last years of Pius XII to brand anyone who disagreed with them as heretics. Among those caught in the web of suspicion in the reign of Piux X were Giacomo della Chiesa and Angelo Roncalli, who became Pope Benedict XV and Pope John XXIII respectively. That is not the integralism Pope Benedict XVI calls for. Instead, he merely suggests that all of the Church’s ethical teachings must be seen to flow from our dogmatic claims about the events on a hillside in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.

The solidarity with the human condition that caused the Son of God to endure suffering and death surely requires that we spare no effort to make sure our fellow citizens do not have to endure similar suffering and death unnecessarily because of an insane health insurance system. The abysmal loneliness of death which Christ endured requires all of us who invoke His name to propose a Culture of Life that cannot but see abortion as an unspeakable crime against the child and the mother and against all that it means to be human and humane. If you are pro-health care and pro-abortion, you are missing something about the consequences of Calvary. And, if you are anti-health care and claim to be pro-life, your inconsistency is transparent to all.

As mentioned before, the exact language of Stupak is going to be modified because as currently written it makes it impossible for women, with their own money, to purchase health insurance that covers abortions. I pray for the day when no woman wants such coverage, but I have to acknowledge that in this regard, Stupak goes beyond the Hyde Amendment, which only forbids the use of federal funds for abortion. The bishops should not turn Stupak into a totem: Even if the Stupak language stays exactly as it is, many women will still get abortions and the task of building the Culture of Life will remain. The victory in the U.S. House of Representatives was a great victory, and we should not squander it, and kill health care reform, by over-reaching. In politics, as in physics, every action produces a counter-reaction. If we over-reach, we might get pushed back further than we anticipated. The line in the sand is no federal funding of abortion. 

As a fan of the writer Karen Armstrong -- a former nun who has become one of the leading authorities on religion and its deformation in the modern world -- I was intrigued to learn of an initiative she has just launched: no less than a global charter calling for the restoration of the principle of compassion. It is backed by the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and other world worthies.

There's a danger that such all-inclusive single ideas aimed at uniting the world melt into glibness: is there a hint here of the Enlightenment project, which sought to create a universal "reasonable" religion, and ended up eviscerating all that was best in faith?

Actually I think the Charter -- read it here or watch it being voiced in a clever video -- escapes this danger, because it is written by a woman who deeply respects and understands religion.

One part of it, and I suspect the main motive for the Charter as a whole, is aimed at fundamentalism. The Charter calls for a "return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate".The website invites religious leaders to organize a religious service on the principle.

A wise monk once told me that the two core principles of faith were gratitude and compassion. Gratitude is the realisation that all is gift, and therefore we possess nothing in, of or by ourselves. Compassion is the recognition that we are not the centre of the world and that our fulfillment lies in the service of others.

To reduce faith to a set of principles is reductionism. But to detect in all true faiths these core principles -- that's something different. That's the basis of peaceful coexistence. 

Edward Beck, a Passionist priest,  and author of several books on spirituality (including his compelling memoir God Underneath) is a talented writer and explicator of the faith, who regularly appears on ABC Now and "Good Morning America."  He is intelligent, moderate and helpful on the subject of religion--a rarity these days.  Just recently ABC News pulled together its faith and spirituality content in one place.  So Beck's "Moments of Faith" and his "Focus on Faith" series with Chris Cuomo will be accessible, as well as Dan Harris's "Beliefs" and Nightline's faith content, including a recent series on the Ten Commandments.  Father Beck will also be editing (and occasionally writing) a written reflection, "Weekly Inspiration." He'll be asking people from various faith traditions to contribute to the "Weekly Inspiration" and so should be getting some interesting topics and a variety faith perspectives.  Check it out here.  Even if you don't get ABC Now, I know you get the Internet.

James Martin, SJ

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Servant of God Pedro Arrupe, S.J., (1907-1991) superior general of the Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983.  The Irish Province has a fine website up (though some of their links are on the fritz) on the man called by some the "Second Founder" of the Jesuits.  As for his writings, they are all over the Internet.  You might start with his famous address "Men for Others," the term taken up by so many Jesuit schools across the world (now, of course "men and women for others") as a shorthand way of describing the ideal of Jesuit education.  A fine book introducing his writings is Pedro Arrupe, edited by Kevin Burke, S.J., from Orbis Books.  And through the miracles of Google Books you can read a chapter from my book on the saints, about Arrupe here.   But my favorite resource is One Jesuit's Spiritual Journey, a series of interviews with the great man, with many beautiful stories from his life.  (Photo above by Don Doll, S.J.  In the original his shoes are off to the side; Arrupe, who spent many years in Japan, used to pray in this somewhat "Eastern style."  And here is the story of a beautiful statue at Holy Cross based on this "famous" photo--or at least famous to us Jesuits.)

Perhaps Arrupe's most well-known bit of writing is his "Fall in Love," which can be found on posters, coffee mugs and, now, plenty of websites.  Ironically, the provenance of this famous meditation is uncertain.  When it started to become popular, Jesuits in Rome scoured his papers looking for the original text, to no avail.  Vincent J. O'Keefe, S.J., one of Arrupe's closest friends and a "general assistant" in the Curia, once told me that most likely it was something Arrupe had said at a conference or talk, and someone copied it down and it circulated from there.  Besides, Fr. O'Keefe told me, it's just the sort of thing he would say.  In any event, it's beautiful:

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

But my favorite prayer is one that he delivered a few years after the 1981 stroke that left him partially paralyzed and without speech.  After his stroke, Pope John Paul II installed a "personal delegate" to run the Society, which was widely seen as a rebuke to Fr. Arrupe's leadership.  (It's a long story: check out that chapter above.)  In any event, at the General Congregation called to elect his successor, a Jesuit read out Arrupe's prayer.  To my mind, it is as moving a prayer of surrender as ever has been written.

More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God.  It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God's hands.

S.G. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., pray for us!

James Martin, SJ