TWO POPES, TWO BISHOPS, TWO SISTERS AND A TRANSFIGURATION - BUT THE SAME SPIRIT (OR, Why Two Visible Heads Are Better Than One)

Well, hello, everyone.  Been a while, hasn't it?  See, I had this hospitalization thing (Type II Diabetes), and some long, slow recovery.  Then there was the soul-searching, as I questioned my motives for blogging in the first place - yeah, that's probably going to come up again at some point, but that's me.  I won't promise anything regular, but while my first novel is out to beta readers and I'm well into the research-and-notes phase of my second, I've got a moment to put some thoughts down on . . . er, electrons, I guess.

So, what have I missed?

Oh, yeah, we've got a new pope.  In fact, it turns out we have two popes!

Two popes, and a whole lot of dopes.

We've all heard the narrative, haven't we?  Heard it to death.  Big bad Benedict was the Pope for this Church:

You're not supposed to like this.  If you're into smells, bells, and solemnity, you're elitist and exclusionary, you hate women and poor people, and you're probably a Republican.

While Pope Francis represents this Church:

That's more like it!  All heresy and nowsy and bursting with okayness.  You can tell these guys don't discriminate against women, or the poor, or minorities, or the untalented, or trivial things like sin.

Well, let's put this idea to the test, shall we?  Only instead of quoting lines out of context from ill-translated interview questions answered on the fly, what say we turn up the volume and focus on actions, hmm?

Let's take a recent example from my own beloved upstate.  When Buffalo's Bishop Kmiec retired, Mean, Nasty, Recactionary, Misogynist Benedict replaced him with an über-devout catechetics expert from New England.

His Excellency, Bishop Richard Malone of Buffalo.

Two years later, when Rochester's Bishop Clark retired, Humble, Caring, Progressive, Pastoral, Did-We-Mention-He's-From-The-Third-World, Rock-Star Pope Francis replaced him with . . .

An über-devout catechetics expert from New England.

His Excellency, Bishop-Elect Salvatore Matano of Rochester.

Big difference, yeah?

Hermeneutic o' Continuity, FTW.

WHAT'S UP WITH THAT?

Well, part of it has to do with ill-managed expectations.  For some reason, people assumed that if Francis didn't explicitly repeat everything Benedict said before him (and sometimes even when he did), he must not believe it.  This is like saying that since John's Gospel omits many of the events found in the Synoptic Gospels, John must be repudiating Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  Rather odd, when it's John who has Jesus praying for unity among His disciples in Chapter 17.

The reason Francis doesn't go around repeating Benedict is that he assumes (perhaps foolishly) that we already heard Benedict.  That he treasures Benedict's doctrinal legacy is clear in his speech last month when awarding the Ratzinger prize, praising Benedict for his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy:

No one can measure the good he has done by means of this gift; only the Lord knows! But we all have a certain perception of this, having listened to so many people who, thanks to these books on Jesus of Nazareth, have nurtured and deepened their faith, or have indeed drawn close to Christ for the first time, as adults, bringing the demands of reason alongside their search for the face of God.

Benedict didn't just give up, give in to his enemies, and let them have the new direction everybody wanted.  He had a plan in mind.

THEN WHY DID POPE BENEDICT RETIRE? 

Pretty much why he said:

I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry. I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering. However, in today's world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.

In a word, he'd taken us as far as we can go, and the next step required a pope with the physical stamina to go out to the world.  And isn't that just where Francis rocks.  Our.  Socks?

In the end, I think, it all comes back to the Transfiguration.

Jesus takes his Big Three up Mt. Tabor - Peter, James, & John - The first Pope, the first to die, and the last to die.  There they see His glory for what it is, at least insofar as unregenerate human eyes are able.  Peter wants to build a shrine, maybe sell tickets.  This is what he signed on for, baby.  That and fish.  Lots of fish.

As Bishop Sheen put it, Peter "tried to make the honeymoon the marriage."

Our Lord is having none of it.  Back down the mountain with them.  Down where the other nine are making asses of themselves, trying to exorcise a demon that just Will. Not. Budge.

In a word, it's Monday down there.  Coffee break's over; back on your heads.

If, when you think of the Transfiguaration - as I will this morning in the Luminous Mysteries - you think only of Jesus standing up there with Moses and Elijah, while the apostles stand there picking their jaws off the ground, I humbly suggest you're missing much of the story's point.  Yes, Jesus is Lord.  He is glorious.  And to be fair, his chat with the two prophets seems to be revolving around His impending crucifixion (the problem being, the apostles still don't get it).  But the coming back down is the punch line, if you will.

The first thing Christ told His disciples was, "Come and see."  The last thing he said was, "Go, and tell."

This is the sum of the whole Christian mission.  First we go up the mountain and behold Christ's glory - the glory of His Divinity, and the glory of His victory over death.  Then we go back down, to a world full of devils, convulsing society and growing ever more entrenched.  This is the meaning of the New Evangelization.

It also recalls the story of Mary and Martha.

From the tenth chapter of Luke:

 38 Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. 39 And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. 40 But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me." 41 But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; 42 one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her."

For centuries, doctors of the Church have seen in Martha and Mary the embodiments of the Active and Contemplative modes of Christian life, respectively.  Methinks Pope Benedict represented the contemplative.  As Pope Francis said, 

 "He gave a gift to the Church, and to all humanity, of what was most precious to him: his knowledge of Jesus, the fruit of years and years of study, of prayer, of theological investigation, and he made it available in the most accessible form”.

And Benedict will stay on, to pray and contemplate on our behalf, while Francis leads us down the mountain to do battle. 

In the last chapter of her Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila says that Mary and Martha ought to walk together on our path to heaven.  Now we have them both in Rome.  SCORE!

"Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!"  (Ps. 133:1)
Our popes can do it; why can't we?

If You're Going to San Francisco, Lock 'n' Load!

Far to the West, I feel a great disturbance in the Force:  a million voices, screaming at once, chaos, confusion, mass panic, dogs and cats living together . . . What could be happening?

Oh, I see.  The bishops' Traditional Marriage czar just got appointed Archbishop of San Francisco.  That'll put bees in a few bonnets.  Just in time for the Year of Faith, too!  What a swell coincidence!

This is why, back in 2005 when I learned whom they'd picked to succeed John Paul II, I danced around, singing, "No more Mr. Nice Pope!"  The house party's over; Mommy and Daddy have come home early.  I get the feeling this metropolitan won't be slow to initiate the long-awaited "dialogue" that Archbishop Niederauer never quite got around to.

Archbishop-Elect Salvatore Cordileone - a new Lionheart for a new Crusade against a  Very Different Infidel Indeed!

This is the equivalent of putting Father Z. in charge of the LCWR reform (not a bad idea, since it looks like the SSPX Reconciliation's going to take longer than we'd hoped).

God bless our Holy Father, Benedict XVI, and the Archbishop-Elect.  May his reign be long and yield a bountiful harvest of souls for Christ!

Oh, and by the way . . .

OH, ROCHESTER . . . LOCK 'N' LOAD - YOU'RE NEXT!

Heroic Virtue

 

Heroic charity is rare.

Without it, what, except despair,

Can shape the hero who will dare

The desperate catabasis

Into the snarl of the abyss

That always lies just underneath

Our jolly picnic on the heath

Of the agreeable, where we bask,

Agreed on what we will not ask,

Bland, sunny, and illumined by

                                             The light of the accepted lie?- W.H. Auden, "New Year Letter, 1940" 

 It was hard to be a Catholic kid in the 1970s.  Hard because you couldn't get anyone to tell you exactly what being Catholic meant.  You learned your basic prayers, of course.  You'd see a crucifix, and someone might tell you that Jesus was God's Son, Who died, then rose again on Easter, when bunnies lay colorful, pre-cooked eggs.  Your grandmother might teach you the Rosary (mine did).  Your parents took you to church, maybe sent you to a Catholic school (mine did).  That didn't necessarily help all that much.

In the theological turmoil and confusion that followed in the wake of Vatican II, amplified by the rebellion against Humanae Viate, few Catholics on the ground were really sure exactly what the Church taught anymore.  How much still applied from the old days?  How many of the new ideas were true?

Small wonder, then, that religious education was a mess.  Mark Shea is said to have quipped that CCD stood for "Cut, Color, and Draw."  I'd say that's pretty apt.  The less old, more progressive teachers, following the workbooks, spoke of "Signs and Symbols," which apparently existed so we could draw them on construction paper, cut them out, and make mobiles and mozaics out of them. (Hosanna to the Lord of Arts & Crafts!)  So much for doctrine.  As for morals, it essentially added up to "Mean people suck," swathed in a vague echo of Kennedy-era volunteerism.

On the other side of this bad coin were a few leftover Jansenists, who painted us a face of God that wore Big Brother's moustache, with our Guardian Angels as a kind of heavenly KGB, just waiting for some juicy sin to report.  Caught betwixt this catechetical Scylla and Charybdis, you practically needed a Freedom of Information request to get any idea who this God person was, why somebody would want to kill His Son, and what any of this had to do with you.  Who are you, Jesus Christ, and what do you want from me?


The answer came when I was about nine or ten, and it came from a man who would be dead within a year.  Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen had a gift for preaching and teaching whose equal I've not seen since.  He was the world's first televangelist. (Bet you thought that was a Protestant invention - nope!  Billy Graham took notes from him).  His 1950s show, Life is Worth Living, ran up against Milton Berle, and beat him in the ratings.  He worked with the missions for years, as Director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, held professorships at Catholic universities and seminaries, and made numerous converts, some of them notable.  He also served a brief stint as Bishop of Rochester, NY, but left after three years, having neither time nor talent for administrative duties - not unlike some other bishops I could name:  "It would be a grave mistake for us to neglect the word of God in order to wait at table." (Acts 6: 2) [NOTE:  I'm using the New English (NEB) translation here, because that was Bishop Sheen's favorite.]

IIRC, it was in 1979 that my father got hold of a series of tapes from retreats Bishop Sheen had led.  They were my road to Emmaus.  The Bible, Christ's life, His death, His resurrection, the Church, the Mass, the Sacraments, the love of the Cross, the value of pain, and the transferability of merit - all of it began to make sense, as one coherent whole.  It's the same faith I have today, thirty-some-odd years later.  Everything I've learned since has merely added to or clarified the picture.

Archbishop Sheen prefigured much of what the Church is about today:  the need for evangelization, a more Biblical dimension to our theology, the dual dangers of Marxism and Ayn Randinanism, the need for personal holiness as the strongest argument for the Faith.  If you've followed the pontificate of Benedict XVI much, you'll note these same themes coming up again in his teaching as well.  Small wonder, then, that yesterday the Holy Father approved a declaration of Heroic Virtue for Bishop Sheen, the first concrete step toward canonical sainthood.  In the blogosphere, I've heard someone propose making him the patron of the Internet.  I'll second that, especially for Catholic Bloggers - he'd have been all over this technology!  More than this, though, I propose Fulton J. Sheen as patron of the New Evangelization in general.  He who wore a silver pectoral cross in reparation for all those priests and sisters who took off their identifying apparel to blend in with the world - he above all knows how to reclaim our Catholic identity.

Venerable Fulton Sheen, pray for us!  Pray for Rochester.  Pray for America.