History in the making?

The significance of [Mary Ann] Glendon’s refusal is enormous. The most accomplished Catholic laywoman in America — former ambassador of the United States to the Holy See and current president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences — has refused to accept Notre Dame’s highest honor.

It is a signal moment for the Catholic Church in the United States. It is a signal moment for the Church’s public witness. It is may even be a signal moment for Notre Dame. What Glendon will not say at Notre Dame will finally be a fitting response to what Gov. Mario Cuomo said there some 25 years ago.

That’s when

the archbishop of New York had clarified that a faithful Catholic could not promote abortion rights, [and] the nation’s premier Catholic university, led by two of the most famous Catholic priests in America, invited the leading Catholic politician in the country to explain why the archbishop of New York was wrong, all this two months before a presidential election in which a vice- presidential candidate was a pro-abortion Catholic.

Fr. Jenkins, “[taken] to school” by the Harvard law prof, unwittingly set things up for the Glendon slam-dunk, argues Rev. Raymond J. de Souza in National Catholic Register.

What New York Gov. Mario Cuomo did in 1984 was with the willing connivance of Father Theodore Hesburgh. Father Jenkins thought he could outdo the master himself, but he has been taught that this is no longer Father Ted’s Notre Dame. Notre Dame is no longer untouchable by the American bishops and the lay faithful.

Strong stuff, but it’s a quite dramatic situation which I do not think this writer exaggerates.  It was Hesburgh and Rev. Richard McBrien vs. New York’s Cardinal O’Connor and the bishops’ conference.  The prize was Notre Dame and its role in the politics of abortion.

This time, Notre Dame took it on the chin, and a woman did it.

Sensible lady!  Former Ambassador to the Vatican Mary Ann Glendon, declining to be honored by Notre Dame at the coming commencement,

charged that Notre Dame’s decision to honor Obama showed “disregard of the U.S. bishops’ express request of 2004 that Catholic institutions ‘should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles’ and that such persons ‘should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.’”

Her letter to Fr. Jenkins is here.  Has the medal ever been refused?

Jenkins had bragged about her coming,using her as a foil:

“We think having the president come to Notre Dame, see our graduates, meet our leaders, and hear a talk from Mary Ann Glendon is a good thing for the president and for the causes we care about”, he said.

To which Glendon:

It is not the right place, nor is a brief acceptance speech the right vehicle, for engagement with the very serious problems raised by Notre Dame’s decision — in disregard of the settled position of the U.S. bishops — to honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church’s position on issues involving fundamental principles of justice.

Jenkins is disappointed:

“We are, of course, disappointed that Professor Glendon has made this decision. It is our intention to award the Laetare Medal to another deserving recipient, and we will make that announcement as soon as possible.” (University of Notre Dame Office of News & Information)

… and that’s it.

He only registers “disappointment”, not even attempting to answer her arguments.

So is Obama.

Hearing from a friend about a Holy Thursday service she found inspiring, I had to respond that my baptism is not taking well in recent years, as I have come to consider Holy Week as the Week of Overdoing It. 

Indeed, I showed up at our church door yesterday for the usual 8:30 a.m. mass (which I attend sporadically), to be reminded by a note on the door to bishops [sic] and other visiting liturgical performers saying where they should group for the night’s mass.  I had plumb forgot, so little have I been concerned about it. 

I labor to figure out why, who have been participating in Holy Week as long as I can remember, though less in recent years.  Part of it is age, I suppose, which militates against marathon services.  Part is a lingering discontent with our reformed liturgy — ah so bland, ah so darn functional, ah so explanatory. 

Part also is a lingering unfamiliarity that dates to my Jesuit days in the 50s and 60s, when “as confused as a Jesuit during Holy Week” was a going simile.  By the time I left, we were changing, it’s true.  A new day was dawning, and some of us, including me, were excited about it.

But then I left center stage, retreating to the pews, becoming a sort of back-bencher in things Catholic —  though welcomed as a highly qualified potential lay leader in the parish of my boyhood.  That potential lay fallow for these many decades, per my choice or series of choices.

Moreover, I wandered in and out of various churches, even Episcopal ones, though never for very long and usually doubling as loyal Roman.  In due time I have found what makes church attendance tick for me and, I think, many others, and that’s the peace and quiet of it all in the presence of praying others who tell me more about religion than most sermons.

Mark Twain called a game of golf “a good walk ruined,” my philosophy classmate Jack Britton, from Maryland Province, told me many years ago, mistakenly attributing it to Winston Churchill.  That’s how I often feel about church services that get too busy. 

To be frank, I’d rather sit and absorb the atmosphere of church, confronting my own demons all the while, than react to what’s going on up front, or most of it anyhow.  Church has a good thing going for it — the gathering of the faithful in a mood and environment of reverence and belief in the holy sacrifice — “throughout the world,” the old Morning Offering says.  This is a lot, and church people should be careful of not distracting from it by overdoing it.

Does Don Wycliff really think the Obama-invite opponents think God is harmed when people do bad things?

“If President Obama were to be disinvited to Notre Dame because of these protests, it would reflect badly on . . . the puny God who needs mere mortals to protect it from a mere president,”

he said in a 3/31 Trib op-ed, to which letter writer Mary Williams Stone, of Wilmette, replies:

God doesn’t need protection from a mere president. However, we mere mortals need protection from one-side ideology.

But the idea is zany on its face, a straw man to beat all.  Hell, if you will pardon the expression, not even host-desecration harms God.

More to the point is the nature of this presidential visit, as explained by letter writer Joseph Chronister, of La Grange, father of an ND spring graduate:

Suggestions that the president’s visit will be an occasion for dialogue and debate are nonsensical to anyone who has ever witnessed a commencement. Instead the day will be filled with symbolic rituals, including Notre Dame’s pronouncement that Obama is now, with his honorary degree, a worthy doctor, or teacher, of the law.

Obama is coming not “to give a lecture or take part in a debate in which there is delicious free flow of ideas,” as I said two days ago, but to receive Notre Dame’s “stamp of approval” in the form of a degree, as Mary Stone writes.

People give you money not because you don’t have any but because of what they know or think you will do with it, the rector of then-struggling Loyola Academy in Wilmette used to say.  Here’s a story of what some did with what they were given:

A married Near North Side couple claiming to be Kenyan refugees whose lives were in danger managed to scam more than $800,000 from an order of Carmelite sisters in Wisconsin, federal agents allege.

Angela Purity Martin-Mulu, 35, and Edward Bosire, 39, made their sale to the Carmelite monastery in Pewaukee, Wis. due west of Milwaukee and to a lesser extent to one on River Road, in NW suburban Des Plaines.  So much the worse for their benefactors.

Mike English was the rector at Loyola.  In 1959 he came on the job to save a failing institution and did so, after enduring his first sleepless nights as a Jesuit in 35 or so years.

I had my own experiences as a priest, including two summer months as fill-in pastor in Marengo, Iowa, in 1963.  One couple came to our door on our quiet small-town street with a sad story, unfortunately bringing a small boy in with them, allegedly their son.  I asked a few questions, and the kid said something that killed their story.  They left giving the kid what-for, pulling him by his ear.

Msgr. Ignatius McDermott would walk Skid Row in Chicago with meal tickets.  The most forgiving, non-condemnatory man in the world, he never turned away a drunk who wanted to try to reclaim himself at McD’s Haymarket Center on Madison Street.  He knew what he was doing with money people gave him.  Not all do-gooders do.

Chicago’s own Loyola and DePaul are among 15 RC colleges still showing “The Vagina Monologues,” reports Catholic Citizens of Illinois, citing Catholic News Service (but oddly not linking to it).

“The play is sexually explicit and favorably describes lesbian activity, group self-abuse, and the lesbian seduction and rape of a teenage girl,” says Catholic Citizens (Catholic News Service? Story can’t be found there).

“CNS encourages protesters to be charitable and respectful, with the understanding that most Monologues productions are not officially sponsored by the colleges and universities but should nevertheless be prevented by policies consistent with Catholic education.”

Also among the 15 are four other Jesuit schools — Holy Cross, Fordham, Georgetown, and U. of San Francisco, according to Catholic News Agency — not to be confused with Catholic News Service, sponsored by American Catholic bishops.

A d.a. has a new stick with which to beat a cardinal:

The U.S. attorney in Los Angeles has launched a federal grand jury investigation into Cardinal Roger M. Mahony in connection with his response to the alleged molestation of children by priests in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, according to two law enforcement sources familiar with the case.

He cites “honest services fraud” by failing to protect kids from molesters, says a source.  Argument is that parishioners relied on Mahony and other church leaders to keep their children safe.

It’s a first?  At first blush it seems a very broad brush that could cover so many other deficient public and private officials that it gives a non-legal mind pause.

This review by a Jesuit teacher at St. Mary of the Lake seminary in Mundelein (IL) identifies another Jesuit, author of a history of the 2^nd Vatican Council, as a proponent of a watershed view of the council:

“John O’Malley, a Jesuit professor at Georgetown University, is a prominent exponent of the view that Vatican II represents discontinuity,” says Rev. Edward T. Oakes, SJ, reviewing O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II.

At issue is whether a brand-new or mostly new agenda was presented in the 1962–65 meetings of bishops from around the world.  Oakes concedes:

At least superficially, Father O’Malley has a point: The Mass is now celebrated in the language of the people instead of in Latin; liturgical translations avoid Renaissance cadences in favor of staccato syntax; thundering condemnations of the modern world (and of Protestants) have been replaced with openness and dialogue — and vocations to the priesthood and convent life have plummeted. [Italics added]

Ouch for that last item, which Oakes hastens to deposit in the “unintended category” dustbin that goes with any major historical event.  This does not keep him from faulting the council, “at least to some extent . . . for the sin of imprudence if not of untruth.”

O’Malley does not see it that way, instead holding for the position that from the council came “unalloyed good, precisely because it marked a break with the past.”  This would be the position that matters were so bad, a revolution was called for.

He employs “the standard ploy of Whig and liberal historiography” when he contrasts “two different visions of Catholicism,” the old in new, clearly giving the nod to the new, what the council approved.  O’Malley here:

from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience,

etc.  “The narrative might be Whig, but the history is fair — and rivetingly told,” says Oakes, giving credit where it’s due.  O’Malley gives in to the yen to editorialize, but his account undercuts his thesis:

He openly admits that, without the advances made in church teaching during Pius XII’s pontificate (1939-58), Vatican II would have been inconceivable. Not only did Pius call on Catholic biblical scholars in 1943 to study the Bible as a set of variable documents conditioned by their respective cultural settings (thereby undercutting a budding Catholic quasi-fundamentalism), he also urged Catholics to promote democracy.

Again, etc.

It’s always good to see Jesuits going at each other, if only for the normally, as here, high level of discussion.  But it’s especially good to see an opposing view to what has become conventional Catholic wisdom on a major church issue.