Like many young Catholic males of the 1970s and early 1980s, I was attracted by the heroism of clerical and religious life and wondered whether I might be called to serve God as a priest or religious. It that same era, I was blessed to know a young priest, who was about 10 years my senior. Father Frank was extremely bright and a New Yorker, through and through. He liked me, because I was comfortable with his banter: The man loved to argue!
I recall Father Frank's taking exception to what I considered the line of demarcation in Manhattan between "downtown" and "uptown." The man loved to argue! Father Frank was not above punctuating his points with the rhetorical question, "Don't you read the newspaper?"
While I was ill equipped in the late 1970s and early 1980s to put it in clear language, I once suggested to Father Frank that there was an undervaluing in the Church of the Sacrament of Marriage. While the clergy and religious were regarded as heroes, married couples did not seem to be held in special regard. Father Frank returned my volley with a not so gentle reminder of how wrong he thought me to be. While I am glad to say that he was absolutely right theologically, he was missing an historical/sociological phenomenon, called "clericalism":
"those of us who speak of the evils of clericalism need to be careful not to undermine the dignity and sanctity of the ordained priesthood and obscure its radical, ontological difference from the baptismal priesthood of the faithful.
"Clericalism, however, is not an affirmation of these sacred realities but a caricature. It fosters an ecclesiastical caste system in which clerics comprise the dominant elite, with lay people serving as a passive, inert mass....This upstairs-downstairs way of understanding relationships and roles in the Church extends even to the spiritual life: priests are called to be saints, lay people are called to satisfy the legalistic minimum of Christian life and scrape by into purgatory....
"bad thinking about vocation...makes the great leap of supposing that the only real vocation worthy of that name is the clerical state in life. Those whom God doesn't call to be priests (or, by extension, religious) – the laity, that is – may have a vocation in some weak, analogical sense, but they don't have the vocation that's the gold standard for everything else – the vocation to be a priest....
"this clericalist way of thinking overlooks the reality and relevance of unique personal vocation – the particular, essentially unrepeatable role in the carrying-out of his redemptive plan to which God calls each baptized person....
"In 1932, Msgr. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, wrote:
We must reject the prejudice that ordinary faithful must limit themselves to helping the clergy in ecclesiastical apostolates. There is no reason why the apostolate of lay people should always be a simple participation in the hierarchical apostolate. They have a duty of doing apostolate, not because they receive a canonical mission, but because they are part of the Church. They carry out this mission through their professions or jobs, with their families, their colleagues, and their friends (quoted in John F. Coverdale's Uncommon Faith, Scepter 2002)."Talk like that was radical at the time. Then the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) adopted it as its own....
"the council taught that the call to lay people to participate in the mission of the Church does not come to them from bishops and priests; it comes directly from Christ, by reason of baptism and confirmation....
"lay apostolate was seen to be something belonging to the laity as a matter of intrinsic right and duty as baptized members of the Church. And not only that – God's call to sanctity was understood as being directed to all, lay women and men just as much as bishops, priests, and religious....
"it's a bit of a shock to realize that Vatican II, while strongly encouraging lay apostolate, had next to nothing to say about 'lay ministries'....
"the lay ministry boom has been propelled by theologians and lay bureaucrats in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and diocesan chancery offices. It has the support of well-meaning bishops and pastors who apparently believe that letting lay people do some things that only clerics previously could do advances the cause of the laity in the Church" (Russell Shaw, On Clericalism, 5/6/08).At least since the late 1970s / early 1980s, numerous Catholics (clergy, religious, and laity) have been acting as though
- sexual acts were NOT reserved for married couples,
- sexual acts need NOT always be open to life, and that
- marriage itself was NOT indissolubile.
- sexual acts ARE reserved for married couples,
- sexual acts must ALWAYS be open to life, and
- marriage IS indissolubile.
Treating marriage as less than the exalted calling it is has done none of us any good. "Don't you read the newspaper?"
And in the news....
- "‘It’s genocide’ - US Congress challenged over Christian victims of ISIS" (Mercator.net, 10/26/15)
"Members of Congress introduced a resolution on Thursday to label the atrocities committed by the Islamic State against Christians and other religious minorities 'genocide.' Christians in Iraq and Syria are hanging on in the face of the Islamic State’s barbarous onslaught. This is genocide,' stated Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., who helped introduce the resolution....Call it what it is, name it, and especially declare that it is genocide, says Princeton Professor Robert George, Chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom....urgent appeal for citizens in the US to call on their Members of Congress, the men and women people elected to serve there, to support two pieces of urgent legislation in the House of Representatives. H.R. 1150....[and] H.R 75."
No comments:
Post a Comment