If the Church is the Answer, What is the Question?

When I was fifteen years old in 1960, I read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and Albert Camus' L'Etranger. Then when I started at Brandeis University in 1963 a few weeks before I turned 18, I continued my exploration of the ideas of Jean Paul Sartre and other existential philosophers in my college courses and personal reading. The existentialists promoted the idea that belief in God and in Christ is a crutch that weaklings use to prop themselves up because they are not brave enough to face the existential dilemma: that life has no meaning. This idea continues to have wide currency 60 years after I discovered it. It is one of the cookie-cutter list of beliefs that almost every college student graduates with, that and the belief that you must have sex before marriage to find out if you are compatible, and many more. But I digress . . .. (This digression on sexual morality will be returned to later.)

Back to the existentialists’ ideas. For the unreligious person, human life on this earth makes no sense except the meaning that one can tentatively cobble together for one's self in face of the indifference of the cosmos. Existentialists admit it is tough living with the conviction that one's existence and that of one's species is just an accident of evolution. But, they say, one must resolutely turn away from the childish notion that humankind was created for a purpose and push on with one's chin up to do what one can bravely do to apply meaning to a meaningless life.

Tellingly, Jean Paul Sartre was a compulsive womanizer, and I believe he convinced his life long partner Simone de Beauvoir to accept that marriage was also an outmoded notion, as was fidelity. Obviously for him, without religion, there was no external or internal reason to value these old-fashioned notions, when they would only restrict his freedom to please himself with the philosopher groupies at the Sorbonne.

Sartre and de Beauvoir

Since I wanted to be considered as a peer of the great intellectuals of my time, I followed these ideas and turned away from my Catholic faith. The lure of being an intellectual and becoming privy to a new knowledge that the common people don't have was the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that was proffered to me as an arrogant young student, and I bit it.

Remember this was 1963. Since then, I tried many of the alternative philosophies that the times had to offer. After I dropped out of Brandeis, I continued to search for truth by seeking out intellectuals and artists, thinking the avant garde had the answers. I was under the illusion that without the moral principles taught by Revelation, learning alone would make people good.

This reminds me of a story I heard during that time about the famous avant garde lesbian couple Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The way I heard the story, when Gertrude was dying. Alice B. Toklas asked her, "Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?" Gertrude answered her, "What is the question?" and then died.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

The Christian Church: A Theological and Historical Sketch by a professor at the diocesan Institute for Leadership in Ministry put forward Paul Tillich's construct that the Church must answer the questions of each age as the method for doing theology. There is a lot that can be said against that concept, but, as is hinted at in the above story, even the avant garde intellectuals don't seem to have either the right answer or even the right question.

If people relying on their own understanding do have questions, they may be the wrong ones. I think about Howland the owl in Pogo comic strip, who said, "I didn't know there was any other question besides 'Who?'"

Here is one of the common objections to Paul Tillich's method of correlation mentioned in the above-mentioned book:

[T]he method distorts the significance of the Christian message by reducing the Christian answer to whatever human experience requires or finds expedient. This weakens divine Transcendence and the divine cutting edge in human life, transforming God into a projection of human needs and desires."

Keeping that fallacious notion that “Christ’s will is as simple to divine as one’s own desires,” in mind, we now return again to my search for the meaning of life. While some around me took drugs because it was the in thing to do, for about a year I sought enlightenment through psychedelics, because people like Aldous Huxley, Carlos Casteneda, and Timothy Leary (who I saw one night at a public lecture in a Harvard classroom, after he had been fired from Harvard, when he was still wearing a suit) told us we could reach previously-unheard of heights of knowledge and lead others to these new heights. I subscribed to the Psychedelic Review. Pursuing better living through chemistry only meant for me that I went on some risky adventures that I'm lucky I survived. I certainly didn't find the answers to the meaning of life that way, although a boyfriend of mine told me that during an acid trip he had met God, and God was Bob Dylan. Obviously, the path to true enlightenment lay elsewhere.

By the time I was 30, I was divorced with two children two and four years old and attending Moorhead State College in Minnesota on the opposite bank of the Red River from Fargo North Dakota, and using government help for child care while I worked on finishing my college degree. One of the things that got me interested in Christianity again was the simple observation that living according to Christian values made economic sense, if you think of your energies and emotions as resources to be spent in building your life.

Intercourse without commitment is a risky business. You open yourself up to a person to whom you are attracted, and by the rules of the game as it was played then and is played now, you must at the same time work hard to avoid giving any impression of being possessive.

What used to be called the marital act was now defined to be without any intrinsic meaning. The real bonding that often takes place even between two people who do not love each other, do not want to love each other, is totally ignored. After taking that risk, and allowing that intimacy without commitment, if you are rejected or even if you break off the "relationship" yourself, you have to take the pain that follows without whimpering. I've heard it admitted that it takes about 6 months or more to recover from a "failed relationship." After you recover (with scars) from the grief (for which society offers no support) you pick yourself up and start again, burned but determined, usually thinking that there is something wrong with you, instead of the obvious fallacy of the basic premise, that asking for commitment is ignoble. This notion hearkens back to one of the basic premises of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which has infiltrated society, that marriage is a form of prostitution in which women barter their bodies for a lifelong commitment from men.

In contrast with those who practice the serial promiscuity that was the norm at that time, and who live through cycles of ecstasy followed by death and grieving, people who follow the moral teachings of Christianity, who marry and keep their vows, skip that painful cycle of loving and losing and are able to do other things with their time and emotions, such as build a home and a family and make a contribution to society as a whole. The passion that brings them together and bonds them at the start of their relationship is understood to be a part of the lifelong process of loving, not the goal in itself.

"Aha!" I thought. For these and many other reasons, I realized that the rules that some people rebel against are actually protections laid down by God to keep His beloved children from harm's way. Should I hate the mayor whose employees put up the stop signs for cramping my freedom of expression, when observing the rules of stopping at those signs make traffic flow easier and prevent accidents? Should I hate my loving God whose Church teaches me that sex belongs in marriage and has as an intrinsic purpose the creation of new life? Or should I defy this loving God because modern intellectuals think that the Church is a big meanie trying to steal people's joy? Modern intellectuals in my 75 years on this Earth have believed and taught a lot of hooey. Why should I trust them? Their "truths" are always changing.

I practiced Transcendental Meditation. Explorations into paranormal phenomenen had one salubrious effect. I had to realize that if I admitted that spiritual forces of any kind exist, there was no grounds for denying the reality of the spirit of God.

A long series of similar explorations: a dabble in Zen Buddhism here, six months of Sunday meetings with Unitarians with an empty altar there, a couple of more months at Presbyterian churches, a stint with the Episcopalians at the University of Minnesota. Finally, a Bible study with a daughter of a former mayor of Minneapolis who was active in Campus Crusade for Christ led me to make a commitment to Christ. I received the gift of faith. Or maybe I retrieved it from where I'd thrown it aside when I bit that apple. There was no turning back after that.

After a couple of years soaking up the Bible at an Evangelical Free Church and a charismatic church called "Jesus People Church, " I found my way back to the Catholic Church. I became a relapsed Catholic. And boy was I ever shocked. What had happened to the Church I was returning to? Vatican II and the 60s had happened, that's what.

Fast forward to 2003 when I wrote the first version of this essay. I was enrolled in the bishop of San Jose's Institute for Leadership in Ministry, and I was not expecting this, but the professors were telling me that after Vatican II and the new theological revival, we Catholics now are free to and indeed must make up our own faith. One priest told us, "The Resurrection is the only thing we need to believe by faith." Another teacher suggested that we have to sort out and cling to the beliefs that make sense to us in the context of our current society.

No longer are we enlightened post-Vatican II Catholics in the 21st century expected to live by the morality and doctrines of the past. Now we know better than the great Church fathers like St. Augustine that the teachings of the past two thousand years about the truth of the most of the New Testament have been discovered to be false.

These so-called discoveries were uncovered by a series of brilliant Protestant Bible critics. As soon as the Church allowed its theologians and scholars to embrace the new critical methods, Catholic theologians found out things that the Church has never known before about what Jesus really meant and did.

To people who think this way, the old certainties are dead. We are expected to believe like Alice in Wonderland, several contradictory things at the same time. We are encouraged to agree with the debunkers that, even though our Church's founding documents are culture-bound fictions, but we are also expected to think they are inspired and can guide us in our Christian lives--as long as we don't take any one of their statements or stories as literal fact.

And now we don't have to be passive recipients of doctrines from the magisterium of the Church "hurled at us like rocks," to quote one of the professors dismissal of the notion of a Church that teaches the truth. Solely with a personal relationship with Jesus as our guide, and our self-referential consciences, we are supposed to bravely cobble together a new morality and set of doctrines that “answer the questions of our age.”

Sounds like the spirit of Jean Paul Sartre or maybe Timothy Leary in the clothing of a priest from San Francisco or a professor from Santa Clara University. Been there. Done that. Not going down that primrose path again. The lure of becoming privy to a new knowledge that the common people don't have and disabusing them of their old primitive childlike faith is another fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil being proffered to us all, and we still have a choice not to bite it.

I almost forgot to answer the question posed in the title about what is the question?

What is Truth? is the question. The authentic teachings of the Catholic Church are the answer. Not some cobbled together self-assembled assortment of dogmas we happen to chose to believe in.

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Following is my original introductory paragraph to this essay, which I wrote for a class at Bishop now-Emeritus Patrick McGrath's Institute for Leadership in Ministry in the Diocese of San José: "The Catholic Church is the answer to all existential questions. I'll try to illustrate my reasoning behind this statement by telling the story of how I came to believe that the Church had the answers, while addressing some of the points made in the class Basic Topics in Ecclesiology and in The Christian Church: A Theological and Historical Sketch, by Professor Frederick J. Parrella." Roseanne T. Sullivan 03/19/03

Frederick Parrella (without the French beret he wore in ILM classes)

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P.S.: When Frederick Parrella taught the "Basic Topics in Ecclesiology," he was moonlighting at the ILM. His day job is a Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University, so he is not some outlier. He is allowed to form (or reform) the Catholic faith of many SCU students. In 2019, he was interviewed about his  course, "The Theology of Marriage." A few snippets from the interview interspersed with my comments follow.

THE THEOLOGY OF MARRIAGE

"The longtime Professor of Religious Studies is renowned for teaching 'The Theology of Marriage' since 1983; it fulfills one of three Religious Studies classes every SCU student is required to take before graduation."

He didn't seem to bring in any Catholic readings about the theology of marriage into the course. He gives a book by Jewish Martin Buber and a lot of folksy "wisdom" to these students. If they come to his class seeking Catholic doctrine, it seems they are out of luck. 

"Have any of your students met each other in your class and gone on to get married?

"Oh yes, a couple of times, and I’ve been invited to their weddings. Years ago, a former student asked me to marry her, and perform the ceremony. I said, 'I can’t do that.' She said, “Check your email—you’ve just been ordained a Universal Life minister.' I’m marrying a former student next month."

So a theology teacher at a Catholic university was willing to officiate at the marriage of one of his students, while acting as a Universal Life minister with a mail-order ordination, without pointing out that for Catholics, marriage outside the Church is invalid, and seemingly without entertaining the thought that it is inappropriate for him to "marry" anyone.

The Miracle and the Hope: Cardinal Kung's Requiem and Burial

Five Wounds Portuguese National Church before a Requiem Mass

Many think it was providential that Ignatius Cardinal Kung of Shanghai got his wish to have a traditional Requiem Mass in spite of how it was nearly impossible to get permission for the pre-Vatican II form of the Mass at the time of Kung's death in 2000. This story describe why the permission was requested, and how the permission was obtained—after a few setbacks. This story also tells about the hope that motivated Cardinal Kung's nephew to bury his uncle in Santa Clara, California, far from his uncle's place of death on the East Coast of the U.S. and even farther from the Shanghai Cathedral where exiled Cardinal Kung had longed to be buried under the altar as its bishop.

This is a follow-up to another article about the Cardinal Kung: "Bishop Kung Was Tricky That Way, and Other Stories of the Saintly, Stubborn, Persecuted Ignatius Ping-Mei Kung of Shanghai."

To briefly summarize the main points of his life: Father Ignatius Kung, a fifth generation Chinese Catholic, was ordained Bishop of Shanghai just before the Communists took over China, and he was imprisoned in 1950 for thirty years because he would not renounce the pope and join the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association that the Communists created as a local version of the Church under their control. Five years after his arrest, Kung was convicted of treason and sentenced to life. While he was in prison, he was forbidden to correspond with anyone, even family members, forbidden to say Mass, and not permitted to read the Bible.

During his imprisonment, the world did not forget his heroic sacrifice. Bishop Fulton Sheen wrote in his Mission magazine in 1957: “The West has its Mindszenty, but the East has its Kung.” (Jozsef Mindszenty, as you may already know, was the leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary, who was given a life sentence by the Communists in 1949 because of his resistance to the their policies.)

In 1979, while still in prison, Kung was named a Cardinal by Pope John Paul II in pectore. In pectore means secretly, in the heart of the Pope. Elevations in pectore are sometimes done when a pope wants to honor a cleric while not putting him or other Catholics in danger in a situation where the Church is being persecuted.

Cardinal Kung's Death in CT

When Ignatius Cardinal Kung died in March of 2000 at the age of 98, he was in exile far away from his Shanghai homeland, living in his nephew's home in Stamford, CT.  As Fr. George W. Rutler wrote in a Crisis magazine article, when Kung first went to Hong Kong from Shanghai for medical care after his release, he had been unsettled by how much had changed in the Church while he had been in prison. Just for one small example, Kung "was amazed that Catholics no longer observed the Friday abstinence that he had kept for 30 meatless years."

In order to realize how difficult it was going to be for Cardinal Kung's friends and relatives to be able to arrange for a traditional Requiem Mass after he died, you have to realize that after the revised Mass of 1969, now called the Ordinary Form, was introduced, the new form of the Mass became almost the only Mass there was for the Roman rite of the Catholic Church all over the world. The older form of the Mass, now called the Extraordinary Form, was almost completely banned in practice along with Latin, and along with Gregorian chant, between 1969 and 1982, and the Extraordinary Form Mass was still greatly restricted in the year of Kung's death.

Cardinal Kung's Requiem Mass in CA

Cardinal Kung's Requiem Mass was remarkable because it was unusual in many ways.

The year 2000 was thirty-one years after the virtual ban of Latin and the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, along with Gregorian Chant, after the Second Vatican council. When Cardinal Kung died, sixteen years after the 1984 indult that allowed bishops to give permission in some cases for the Extraordinary Form to be celebrated, and twelve years after the 1988 motu proprio in which Pope Saint John Paul II urged a "wide and generous" application of the 1984 indult, permission was still hard to come by.

Ignatius Kung died seven years before Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum further relaxed restrictions against the traditional Latin Mass and opened the way for more frequent celebrations.

Five Wounds Portuguese National Church

Arrangements were made for the Requiem Mass to be celebrated at the Five Wounds Portuguese National Church in San Jose. Five Wounds is a distinctive church modeled on a Portuguese basilica, which preserved its traditional arrangement after the Second Vatican Council. To this day, the building still has a high altar at the top of many steps with an altar rail at the bottom, rows of pews face the altar, and scores of statues of saints abound. The only architectural modification to suit the new Mass that is apparent in Five Wounds Church is the insertion of a freestanding altar in front of the high altar, to allow what is now the usual celebration of the Mass with the priest facing ad populum, towards the congregation.

For a while, things seemed to be going smoothly. Cardinal Kung would not only get his wish for Requiem Mass, but Cardinal Shan of Taiwan agreed to celebrate a Pontifical Requiem Mass in his honor.

Then Bishop Patrick McGrath of San Jose gave permission for Kung’s Requiem Mass, but with one restriction, that the Mass would be celebrated facing the congregation in the ad populum direction.

In the celebration of Extraordinary Form Masses, the priest faces the altar, which is understood to be the "liturgical East," so that posture is called ad orientem. The symbolism behind ad orientem celebrations of the Mass can be glimpsed in the definition of the Latin word orientem, which means: daybreak, dawn, sunrise, east. The sun rises in the East, Christ is called the Sun of Justice, the dawn from on high, and His Second Coming is expected from the east.

Some people have been taught to believe a priest facing ad orientem is offensive because the priest is "turning his back to the people." But the result of the priest praying the Mass ad orientem is to take the focus away from the priest and to focus our attention on God. In that way, the priest together with the people face together in the direction from which we look for the Second Coming of the Lord. Even though the ad populum orientation became common after Vatican II, the council did not mandate it.

When the bishop of San Jose at first made his stipulation, consternation ensued. It must have been hard to imagine how the ad populum orientation could have been carried off in an Extraordinary Form Pontifical Mass. Then at some point, to the relief of all those who were trying to organize the Mass, the bishop changed his mind, and he agreed to allow Cardinal Kung’s Requiem Mass to be celebrated ad orientem.

Some say that the bishop removed his restriction because Cardinal Shan of Taiwan was going to be the celebrant, and it would be impolitic to contradict the wishes of a living Cardinal, even if he was willing to contradict the wishes of a dead one.

Cardinal Kung’s nephew, Joseph Kung, has written at the Cardinal Kung Foundation website that the bishop’s change of heart was due to intercessory prayers of the his dead uncle, and also that the bishop's allowing them to celebrate the traditional Requiem facing the liturgical East was Kung’s first miracle.

On March 20, 2000, an astounding one thousand people attended Cardinal Kung’s Pontifical High Requiem Mass. The St. Ann Choir sang the Gregorian chant for the Mass along with Renaissance polyphony under the direction of Stanford Musicology Professor William P. Mahrt.

The St. Ann Choir is also remarkable for its endurance, because it had providentially been able to keep on singing Gregorian chant and polyphony at Masses in nearby Palo Alto for more than thirty years by then before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council, long after that type of Sacred Music was virtually banned. (For more about the St. Ann Choir's remarkable achievement, see Miracle in Palo Alto: How the St. Ann Choir Kept Chant and Polyphony Alive for 50 Years.)

Requiem Mass at Five Wounds in 2009

The choir sang the hymn “Tu Es Petrus” (You are Peter), which uses the words Christ used when He made Peter head of the Church. For those who know the stories of Kung's life, as described in the article mentioned earlier, “Tu Es Petrus” was a poignant reminder of Kung’s long martyrdom. In addition, “Tu Es Petrus” was a celebration of the canny way Kung was able to convey his courageous refusal to deny the pope to Cardinal Sin in the face of Communists trying to keep them apart during a show visit.

Kevin Rossiter, who had only recently joined the St. Ann Choir at the time of Kung’s funeral, sent me these recollections.“There were a lot of photographers and people apparently from the (non-communist) Chinese press. The homily alternated between Chinese and English and was very good, telling the usual stories about him (the show-trial, about the singing “Tu Es Petrus” ) but also explaining his political strategy from very early on (e.g., in preparing lay catechists for the time when he knew the church would have to go underground). The cardinal used the occasion to announce the beginning of the case for his canonization. The cards for the funeral with his picture were very beautiful—I have one somewhere, but it has been misplaced during moves, so it's still probably in a box or pressed into a book. Those are the things I remember most. The atmosphere was very joyful.”

Choir Director Professor Mahrt shared some of his recollections of Kung’s Requiem Mass also. “At some point the casket was opened for the congregation to pay their respects, and all filed by the casket. At the time I thought, ‘I will probably never again witness the funeral of a saint or see him resting in a coffin.’”

Burial in Santa Clara Mission Cemetery

After the Requiem Mass, Cardinal Kung’s body was interred in an above-ground vault in the Saint Clare Chapel at Santa Clara Mission Cemetery.

Before I knew anything about Cardinal Kung, somebody pointed out his marker to me at the doorway to the chapel, and I wondered how it came about that a Shanghai cardinal came to be interred there. Now I understand.

Six years previously, the body of Archbishop Dominic Tang of Canton, another Chinese member of the Church's hierarchy and friend of Cardinal Kung, had been placed in a nearby vault. In a chapter about Archbishop Tang in his book Cloud of Witnesses, Fr. George Rutler recounted that when Dominic Tang was a young priest in Shanghai, Tang “cycled with his friend Rev. Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei from parish to parish to hear confessions.” Tang had been appointed as apostolic administrator of Canton in 1950, the year after the Communists took over. Like then-Bishop Kung, who accepted his ordination as bishop of Shanghai that same year, Tang realized and accepted the persecution he would be forced to undergo as the result of his ordination. Three years after Bishop Kung was arrested, Tang was also arrested,and he spent twenty-two years in prison without trial.

After they both were released and forced into exile, they maintained their friendship. Archbishop Tang had died while visiting Cardinal Kung in Stamford in honor of the cardinal's 65th anniversary as a priest and his 45th anniversary as a bishop. Archbishop Tang died in the presence of his friend Cardinal Kung, on June 27, 1995. After Tang's death, Cardinal Kung’s nephew Joseph Kung had brought Archbishop Tang's body to Santa Clara for interment. It was fitting that after Kung's funeral, the two friends were reunited.

Father Rutler wrote, “His Eminence was buried next to his friend, and both bodies face the horizon in the expectation that the two old men who, in youth had bicycled together will in a great dawn be buried in their cathedrals in Canton and Shanghai."

Joseph Kung wrote these additional details about the burial in Highlights of the Funeral at the Cardinal Kung Foundation website :

"That the bodies of these two Chinese bishops, ever faithful to the Successor of Peter and devoted to their flocks in Canton and Shanghai despite all adversity, are interred above ground expresses the hope that one day their mortal remains will be transported to China and interred, each at the foot of the altar of his respective cathedral. The same hope was expressed when Cardinal Mindszenty was interred above ground in Austria; and the hope was rewarded when his remains were transported back to Hungary.”

Please pray for this intention, and for the canonization of Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei.

For more about Cardinal Kung, check out the trove of information at the Cardinal Kung Foundation website.