This Friday at 6:30 p.m., the TLM and California Mission Music Return to Mission Santa Clara, in Honor of the Holy Man of Santa Clara

One sad fact for lovers of traditional Catholic liturgy everywhere is that almost exactly fifty years ago—after the first Sunday of Advent of 1969 when the new Mass was mandated—the traditional Latin Mass was effectively banned, with few exceptions.

Although Pope John Paul II granted two indults in the 1980s to allow the TLM to be celebrated with permission from local bishops, I know—from talking to TLM-loving priests and laity who were around at the time—permission was rarely granted.  Pope Benedict XVI greatly loosened restrictions in 2007 and allowed the TLM to be celebrated more widely under the name “extraordinary form,” but another sad fact is that extraordinary form Masses are even now rarely celebrated at most Catholic colleges and universities.

The disdain for the past is widespread. A few years ago outside the Mission Santa Clara, I ran into a new Santa Clara University graduate who came back for a summer program on the campus, and I was saddened to learn that he had never been taught about the role of Latin as the official language of Catholic Church and had never attended a Latin Mass or heard Gregorian Chant. That smart young man was in total ignorance about these aspects of the Church's heritage after 12 years of parochial school and four years at a Catholic university!

A third sad fact also related to the main topic of this article is that the traditional liturgical music of the Roman Catholic Church has been replaced in most Masses on- and off-campus with often-banal and sometimes even heretical hymns. Who could then imagine a day would come when an extraordinary form High Mass would be chanted again on the Santa Clara University campus? Or that  actual polyphonic Mass settings written by missionaries for converted natives during the Mission days would be sung at Mission Santa Clara again?

 On November 21, 2018, as the result of a lot of prayer and persistence by a group of lay Catholics and the help of priests from the Institute of Christ the King, the day did finally come when a high Mass was celebrated at the restored and enlarged Mission Santa Clara, which now serves as the Santa Clara University chapel. Two local choirs came together to sing the Propers for the day in Gregorian Chant and the Ordinary in a polyphonic Mass setting titled the “California Mission Mass."

 The “California Mission Mass” was arranged by California composer John Biggs from music written down by the missionaries for the converted Native Americans to sing and play, which Biggs curated and arranged from various Mass settings archived by the Franciscans at Mission Santa Barbara. This year, on Friday, November 22, 2019, at 6:30 p.m., that day will come again—with even more solemnity, when the traditional Latin Mass and the California Mission Mass music returns once again to Mission Santa Clara.

 This year a Solemn High Mass will be celebrated by Canon Raphael Ueda, rector of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Oratory in San José, with the help of Canon Jean-Marie Moreau, at the Mission Church’s main altar, which is used only for wedding Masses.

Elevation of the consecrated host at the main altar last year

Canon Moreau who has returned for a one-week visit to the area after eight years at other apostolates of the Institute of Christ the King, will preach the homily from the otherwise mostly-unused high pulpit. Canon Moreau will bring a lot of memories to the event, since he was the first priest to assist the lay people who started the process—eleven years ago—that eventually helped bring the traditional Latin Mass back to SCU, if only once a year.

Homily given from the reconstructed
Mission pulpit last year

After the Mass for the Feast of St. Cecilia, the two priests will lead a prayer for the canonization of "The Holy Man of Santa Clara," Father Magin Catalá, who died on November 22, 1830; this year marks his 189th death anniversary.  Father Catalá first came to Mission Santa Clara in 1796, nineteen years after the mission was first founded by Saint Junipero Serra in 1777, and Father Catalá labored there with love and great personal sacrifice for thirty-six years until his death in 1830. Although he is not as well known as Saint Junipero Serra, Father Catalá won the devotion of the Native American converts and the Spanish settlers he served. When he died the mourning was universal; natives crowded his bier to obtain relics, snipping away pieces of his habit until his body was almost nude. When a new habit was put on the body, they did the same thing again. The Spaniards and the converted natives mourned his death vehemently, crying, "The saint has left us.” To read more, you can find a two-page biographical sketch of Father Catalá here.

A fascinating 1909 biography of Father Catalá titled The holy man of Santa Clara or, Life, virtues and miracles of Fr. Magin Catalá, O.F.M. is also free for download at The Internet Archive. It includes testimony from several reliable witnesses that was taken when Father Catalá's cause for canonization was opened that year. (Those letters still can be viewed in the University of Santa Clara Library Archives). Witnesses saw Father Catalá levitate when he prayed in front of a carved wooden life-sized crucifix from Mexico, and they reported that the figure of Christ detached his hands from the cross and laid them on Father Catalá shoulders. That very same crucifix hangs over an altar where the prayer will be recited for his canonization.

When a fire burned down the Mission in 1926, students and priests risked their lives to save the crucifix. Later, Father Catalá’s remains were retrieved from the ashes. As documented in the SCU archives, his remains were re-buried in the reconstructed church, at the Gospel side of the rebuilt side altar where the crucifix now hangs. His marble grave slab, whose carved inscription was formerly filled with gold, now is on the wall to the left of the altar. It's inspiring to realize that the music for the Gloria, Credo, and Sanctus that will be sung at the Mass on November 22 may well have been sung by the natives at the same form of the Mass at Mission Santa Clara back when Father Catalá was alive.

From Small Beginnings

The return of the Mass and the music came about this way: for the past 11 years, a group of lay people have organized an annual commemoration as close as possible to the death anniversary of Father Catalá, which falls on November 22, the feast of Saint Cecilia.

Eleven years ago, Canon Moreau was rector of the former Oratory of Our Mother of Perpetual Help in Santa Clara about ten blocks away from SCU, and the first year he celebrated a Mass at the Oratory before he led a rosary procession to the Mission, where the group said the canonization prayer at the altar of the crucifix. After Canon Moreau was assigned to New Jersey, the institute priests who replaced him along with the late venerable diocesan priest Father William Stout continued the commemoration. Six years ago, the Jesuits who run the university granted permission for one traditional Latin Mass a year (the group was refused when they asked to reserve the Mission for a TLM to celebrate another event). For the next four years, the group was able to reserve the Mission for a Low Mass at the altar of the crucifix, and the oratory choir joined with the choir from Thomas More School in San José to sing the California Mission Mass. Last year the group was able to arrange for the first High Mass to be celebrated at the high altar, and finally this year they obtained permission for a Solemn High Mass, again at the high altar.

Masses in the SCU chapel for students are celebrated in the middle of the nave, with chairs with kneelers arranged around a simple altar, and the homily is given at a podium with a microphone. The organizers who set up the High Mass on November 22 will need to redirect the chairs to face towards the high altar and the liturgical east, and they will also need to bring in candles and altar cloths and Mass cards, but all will be a labor of love.

---

Father Catala taught the converted natives to say this prayer when blessing themselves with holy water:

"Holy water, blessed by God, cleanse my body and save my soul."

Then while making the sign of the cross:

"By the sign of the holy Cross deliver us, O Lord, our God, from our enemies."

Jan Halisky, co-founder of the Familia Sancti Hieronymi, translated this prayer into Latin:

"Aqua sancta, a Deo benedicta, corpus meum lava et animam salva."

…

"O Domine, Deus noster, per signum sanctae Crucis, libera nos ab inimicis nostris"

Mr. Halisky told me he found it edifying that the book, The Holy Man of Santa Clara, recounted that Father Catala always insisted on the utmost reverence during every religious or ecclesiastical function, however slight. Much of the current Catholic world seems to have cast this reverence aside.

It’s easy to imagine that Father Catalá rejoices along with those who attend this yearly event, when, through the efforts of a persistent few of his devotees and some dedicated priests and choir members, the reverence and sacred music of the traditional Latin High Mass returns for one evening a year to the beautiful Mission Santa Clara.

---

For More Information

Two articles about the yearly Mass have been published by California Catholic Daily:

• "Latin High Mass returns to Mission Santa Clara Church for an evening" and the following articles.
• "The Holy Man of Santa Clara: Traditional Latin Mass for canonization cause of Fr. Magin Catala"

This article about Father Catalá and the long history of devotion to him was published in Latin Mass Magazine:

• "Soul of Father Magin, Help Us: The Wonder Working Lesser-Known Missionary of the California Missions"

The Holy Man of Santa Clara: Father Magin Catalá (A Short Biography)

In 1796, Father Magin Catalá, O.F.M. arrived at Mission Santa Clara, nineteen years after the mission was first founded by Saint Junipero Serra in 1777. Father Catalá is much less well known today than Saint Junipero Serra, but according to testimony by those who knew Father Catalá, he was a mystic, a miracle worker, an exorcist, and a wonderfully holy man. 

During Father Catalá’s lifetime, he won the devotion of the Native American converts and the Spanish settlers he served. When he died in 1830, the mourning was universal; twice natives crowded his bier to obtain relics, snipping away pieces of his habit until his body was almost nude.  The Spaniards and the converted natives mourned his death with vehement sorrow, crying,”The saint has left us.”

Father Catalá labored at the Mission Santa Clara for thirty-six years, persevering in spite of ill health. The mission’s territory was huge, including much of the peninsula on the west side of San Francisco bay. Father Catalá, along with another priest, Father José Viader, taught the faith, administered the sacraments, and guided all the work necessary to teach, feed, clothe, and house the growing population of Native Americas at the mission, who by 1795 numbered one thousand five hundred and forty-one. They also ministered to the Catholics in the nearby pueblo of San José. 

It’s hard to imagine how so few priests did so much, but the two of them taught the natives how to build with adobe and ceramic tiles, and to farm, and to tend tens of thousands of heads of cattle and sheep on the vast lands of the Mission, and to do a myriad of other tasks. Even though the good will of missionaries is disputed in this cynical age, their intention was always to hand the lands back to the Indians. The disciplined work ethic and skills the friars taught were meant to enable the natives to sustain themselves on the mission lands after they were on their own. Above all else, the faith the missionaries worked so hard to teach was intended to save the natives’ immortal souls. 

Mission Santa Clara Altar with the Miraculous Crucifix 

Reports of several reliable witnesses (whose letters still can be viewed in the University of Santa Clara Library Archives) were given to church officials who were investigating the holy man’s cause for sainthood. Several reported they saw Fr. Catalá levitate when he prayed in front of a crucifix, and that the figure of Christ detached his hands from the cross and laid them on Fr. Catalá’s shoulders. That very same life-sized crucifix still hangs over an altar in the restored Santa Clara Mission Chapel. 

Not only did Fr. Catalá levitate like St. Joseph of Cupertino, he was also reportedly seen several times during his life in two places at once, bilocating like St. Padre Pio.

Fifty-four years after he died in 1830, Fr. Catalá’s cause for canonization was taken up by Archbishop Alemany, the first bishop of San Francisco. Testimony about his life and virtue was submitted to Rome in 1909, but the cause for canonization of this worthy servant of God has stalled for the past 110 years. Friends of Father Catalá work to spread the story Father Catalá’s holiness, and they  meet monthly at the altar of the crucifix to pray for his canonization. 

Canonization Prayer

O God, You sent Your holy servant, Father Magin Catalá, to preach Your gospel to Native Americans, and You inspired him to glorify Your holy name among them by the example of his eminent virtues. We humbly ask You to honor Father Catalá on earth with the testimony of miracles performed through his intercession. Grant us by his merits all manner of blessings. Fill our minds with the light of Your truth that, walking always in the way of Your commandments, we may come to eternal union with You. We ask this through Christ our Lord.
- Imprimatur + Patrick J. McGrath Bishop of San Jose

Some of Fr. Catalá’s Remarkable Prophecies

A free-for-download 1909 book, The Holy Man of Santa Clara, documents the miraculous events of Padre Catalá’s life. You can download it at this link. Some of his prophesies reported in the book are included below.

 “It appears that Almighty God in those days allowed His servant a distinct view of the future of California. There were still many witnesses alive in 1884 who under oath declared that the holy man had preached substantially as follows: People from almost all the nations of the earth will come to this coast. Another flag will come from the East and the people that follow it will speak an altogether different language, and they will have a different religion. These people will take possession of the country and the lands. On account of their sins the Californians will lose their lands and become poor, and many of their children’s children will give up their own religion.”

‘The Indians will be dispersed, and will not know what to do, and they will be like sheep running wild. Heretics will erect church buildings, but these will not be true temples of God. Sons will be against their fathers, and fathers against their sons, and brother will be against brother. The coming of so many people will create great scarcity, so that a measure of wheat will be bought for its weight in gold. ‘Una fanega de trigo se compraria a peso de oro.’ As a consequence, much distress will come upon the Indians and Californians. ‘I shall not see this,’ he exclaimed, ‘but there are those alive that will see it.’”

Traditional Latin Christmas Mass Schedule in San José (Diocese-approved Extraordinary Form)

I just submitted this ad listing the Immaculate Heart of Mary Oratory's Christmas Mass schedule  to the Valley Catholic, the San José diocesan newspaper, for their mid-December issue.  If you attend a Mass at Five Wounds Church, look around on your way in or out to find the beautiful Nativity window that I used in the ad.

Note: The Immaculate Heart of Mary Oratory is hosted at Five Wounds Portuguese National Church. Masses are held in the church and in the I.E.S. chapel nearby, as indicated on the map and in the schedule.

The schedule is as follows in plain text.

Traditional Latin Mass Schedule for Christmas

Tuesday, December 24, Christmas Eve

• 12:00 p.m. Christmas Vigil Low Mass—Five Wounds Church
• 9:00 p.m. Midnight Mass of Christmas—Five Wounds Church

Wednesday, December 25, Christmas Day

• 8:30 a.m. and 9:45 a.m. Low Mass—I.E.S. Chapel 
• 12:30 p.m. High Mass—Five Wounds Church

On Insulting God at Mass: and the Scriptural and Patristic Origins of Ad Orientem

One disputed topic in "the liturgy wars" came up yesterday when I was talking to a pleasant woman from Ireland who is in her late 70s. I'll call her Bridey. As we drove through Oakland with two friends, I mentioned in general conversation that I have a friend who goes to St. Margaret Mary Church in Oakland. "Oh, I know St. Margaret Mary," Bridey said disapprovingly. "They are very old school. Very traditional." 

"That's the only kind of Mass I go to, the traditional Latin Mass," I said.

"The priest says the Mass with his back to the people." Bridey added, I think for the benefit of the other two women in the car, with distaste in her voice.

I'm surprised to hear that bit of slander against that particular aspect of the traditional way of celebrating Mass is still being thrown around. There's no grounds for such smug dismissal of a time-honored practice of the priest facing the altar, which means he faces the crucifix, and the tabernacle, if it hasn't been moved elsewhere, and he also faces a direction called liturgical east. When the priest faces that way, his posture is called ad orientem, which means "to the East." Find something else to feel aggrieved about if you must: celebrating the Mass ad orientem is no insult to anyone.

I think that claim was first bandied around at a time when people were being incited to nurture grievance, and were being told that the hierarchical priesthood was an insult to the laity, depriving them of their proper place.  As for what that proper place might be, evidence suggests that the aggrieved came to think where they should be was at the exact center of everything, even of the Mass.

The document on the liturgy from Vatican II did not even mention which way the priest should face during Mass. It was one of the many changes pushed through after the close of the council, under the rallying cry of the "Spirit of Vatican II."

I replied to Bridey, "The priest is saying Mass facing God, not facing people." Sort of annoyed, she said, "God is in all of us." As if that was the last word.

So I thought, "Does that imply we are worshipping each other in the Mass?"

I didn't want to start an argument, and I didn't have a ready reply to explain why she's wrong. But here are some of the things I thought of later (as one does).

The prayers of the Mass are addressed to God. Why should the priest be facing the people? Doesn't it make more sense to face the crucifix on the altar?

Since Bridey and others complain it is insulting to people when the priest shows his back to them, isn't the priest who celebrates Mass facing the people showing his back to God? And isn't that an insult to God?

My personal experience when I came back to the Church in the mid 70s gradually brought me to this point of view. At first, I accepted the changes that had occurred while I was fallen away. After all, I had come back because I loved and trusted the Church. Then I gradually noticed that the change in posture with the priest facing people while saying Mass (along with the emphasis on "active participation" by the laity) had negative effects on the reverence of the priest and participants. Church musicians were performing, sometimes even singing secular songs that had nothing to do with the Mass, instead of praying the words of the Mass while singing Gregorian Chant. Before and after Mass, priests started playing to the crowd, and during the homilies started telling personal stories, sometimes telling jokes; a few of them even told risque jokes. The primary bad effect was that Jesus and His sacrifice was no longer the focus of the Mass.

It took me almost forty years after I came back to the Church before I chanced to find an oratory where the traditional Latin Mass was being celebrated, and after a while there I began to find the post-Vatican II ordinary form Mass with the priest facing the people to be distinctly uncomfortable. Now I rarely attend that kind of Mass any more, for this and many other reasons: I can't stand seeing the priest being rude to God.

When I posted some of these thoughts on Facebook today, Father Anthony Hernandez, pastor of the St. Basil the Great Byzantine Catholic Church in Los Gatos posted this excellent explanation about why priests prayed facing away from the congregation since the earliest days of the Church. Most churches have been built to face "liturgical East" and the liturgy is offered in that direction for profound spiritual reasons. 

"The original reason for praying 'oriented,' facing East, was to look to Christ as the 'Orient from on high' (oriens ex alto; i.e. the rising Sun, the 'Dawn from on high') Luke 1:78. The Mass/Divine Liturgy is not only a 're-presentation' of the salvific cross, tomb, resurrection but also an anticipation of the coming again of the Lord. 

"Masses/Liturgies were offered in the early morning in the direction of the rising sun, a sign of our looking to the return of the 'Sun of Justice (sol justitiae)' Malachias 4:2/3:20, that is, Christ, the Light of the World. 

"A great Eastern Father, Saint John of Damascus (Damascene) wrote: 'It is not for simplicity nor by chance that we pray turned toward the regions of the east (...). Since God is intelligible light (1 Jn. 1:5), and in the Scripture, Christ is called the Sun of justice (Mal. 3:20) and the East (Zec. 3:8 of the LXX), it is necessary to dedicate the east to him in order to render him worship. The Scripture says: "Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and he placed there the man whom he had formed"(Gen. 2:8). (...) In search of the ancient homeland and tending toward it, we worship God.  Even the tent of Moses had its curtain veil and propitiatory facing the east. And the tribe of Judah, in as much as it was the most notable, encamped on the east side (cf. Nm. 2:3). In the temple of Solomon, the Lord's gate was facing the east (cf. Ez. 44:1). Finally, the Lord placed on the cross looked toward the west, and so we prostrate ourselves in his direction, facing him. When he ascended to heaven, he was raised toward the east, and thus his disciples adored him, and thus he will return, in the same way as they saw him go to heaven (cf. Acts 1:11), as the Lord himself said: "For just as lightning comes from the east and is seen as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be' (Mt. 24:27). Waiting for him, we prostrate ourselves toward the east. It is an unwritten tradition, deriving from the Apostles." (Expositio accurata fidei orthodoxae IV, 12: PG 94, 1133-1136.)'"

I rest my case. 

Social Justice Starts at Home, and at Church

One Sunday when I was about four, after we got back from Mass my mother made dinner and ate with me and my sisters, and then went to her room to lie down. A few years earlier, my fireman father had been killed in a firetruck accident. His death had left my mother alone with  three little girls, a 2 year old, a 1 year old, and a baby born the month after his death. I was the oldest.  

My mother’s family was half a continent away, and she was alienated from my father’s family. We were barely getting by on a small fireman’s pension. At the time, we lived in a low-income housing project in Jamaica Plain, an incorporated township in Boston, Massachusetts. 

When my mother got up, she was shocked to see I was not in the apartment. My sisters were in the living room happily playing together without me, as usual.

My mother found me outside sitting on a bench in the concrete yard in the hot summer sun, where I was giving away money from her purse. A small crowd had gathered around when word got around what I was doing. I told everyone, “Jesus said to give all you have to the poor. They said that in church today.” My mother quickly checked her wallet and found to her relief the dollars were still there. Since my mother had given me small coins every Sunday to put into the collection plate, I knew coins were money by then.  I think I was young enough not to know that dollars were money, because I wasn’t giving the dollars away. She explained to the beneficiaries of my largesse that I had made a mistake, and people started giving back the change I'd given them.

She smiled at me and said Jesus didn’t mean I should give away all her money. She didn’t state the obvious to me, that by objective measurements, we were the poor. 

At around eighteen years of age, I left the Catholic Church, and then I came back to belief in Christianity at around thirty-one, after a divorce. At the time I was living in Minneapolis. Because my ex-husband stopped paying child support and didn't pay alimony, I applied for welfare to support me and our two children and took advantage of some generous social programs that paid for my child care and made it possible for me to work on completing my college degree. (Those programs have long ago been cut.) 

After I paid the rent and bought food stamps, I had only about $40 a month to pay for everything else: clothing, soap, transportation, my children’s school supplies .  .  ..  Like my mother had been, I was all alone. And I was additionally impoverished without the help that Catholic faith can give.

Providentially, during this hard time, I was helped back to faith in Christ because I was invited to a Bible Study and prayed for by a fundamentalist Christian fellow student who I'll call Jane. Jane and her fellow Christians took literally Christ’s instructions at the end of the gospel of Mark to go out and preach the Gospel to the whole creation. 

The opinion of some biblical critics—that the “great commission” ending was tacked on by the community that supposedly wrote St. Mark's Gospel, and that those words may not be reliably attributed to Jesus—would have left Jane and the other evangelical Christians at a loss. Without Jane's literal belief in the words of Christ, I would not have been drawn back to faith by her eagerness to share the Gospel and thereby follow what she personally believed that all Christians had been instructed to do by Christ. And so it happened that because of blessed literal mindedness of that dear young woman, the poor (me and my two children) and many others had the gospel preached to them.

Then later I joined an evangelical Free Church who sent volunteers out as part of a Busing Ministry. They went door to door to invite unchurched people to their Sunday services, and so I boarded their bus with my kids. In my experiences there and at other Bible-believing churches, I found they took almost all of the words in the Bible pretty literally. 

And so I was surprised at how they reacted one Saturday morning when a homeless man wandered into the church.  I was there for a women’s Bible study. Some older women and men, deaconesses and deacons, were preparing for an elders’ lunch meeting. A strange man with unkempt black hair and a ripped green Army jacket, American Indian from the looks of him, probably Ojibway because they are the largest local tribe in the area, walked into the church basement and his big frame filled the doorway to the kitchen. 

The deacons and deaconesses were cutting up slabs of Jello embedded with canned pear halves and setting the jiggling green squares out for serving on iceberg-lettuce-lined salad plates. Chicken pieces were roasting in big pans in the oven in a sauce of cream of mushroom soup. The strange man asked for money for food.  

I was shocked at their response: one of the deacons slipped away to the phone in the pastor’s office, called the police and within a few minutes, the police had taken the stranger away.  Let me show what I think they should have done instead and why.

Evangelicals don't follow the liturgical year, of course. So, the pastor would get up every Sunday irrespective of the season of the year and preach from the Bible, starting each time where he had stopped the week before. Not too many weeks previously, we had all heard him talk on these words from the letter of St. James about how to treat a poor man in filthy clothing:

My brothers, don’t hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory with partiality. For if a man with a gold ring, in fine clothing, comes into your synagogue, and a poor man in filthy clothing also comes in; and you pay special attention to him who wears the fine clothing, and say, “Sit here in a good place;” and you tell the poor man, “Stand there,” or “Sit by my footstool;”  haven’t you shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?  Listen, my beloved brothers. Didn’t God choose those who are poor in this world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the Kingdom which he promised to those who love him?  But you have dishonored the poor man. . . .  However, if you fulfill the royal law, according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you do well. . . . [If] you show partiality, you commit sin.—James 2: 1-3, 5-6a, 7-9

If they took the words of St. James literally, I would have expected the evangelicals to invite the poor man to join them for lunch. This would not be comfortable. There would be dangers. To do something like that is foolishness, but our faith as a whole is foolish, as St. Paul said.

After I was safely back in the Catholic Church, I remembered that incident where the evangelicals had not welcomed or fed the stranger, when I went to a Seder supper sponsored by a parish I attended in Milpitas, California. By that time I had finished my education, I had become a technical writer. Sun Microsystems had recruited me and paid to move me from Minneapolis to work in Milpitas. I had joined the local parish church, but I had not been welcomed there. I was used to not finding community in the Church by then. But it was still hard because I craved it so badly. What made it worse is that I was in a new part of the country and had left my friends and some family members behind in Minneapolis. I was a stranger, and nobody took me in. 

Being welcomed didn't seem an unreasonable thing to expect when I'd read about how the members of the early church shared everything with one another, and how we are all equals, brothers and sisters in Christ. I couldn’t help but be a little jealous at the Seder supper that the pastor only talked to the mayor and his wife. Nobody at the table at which I sat was even polite enough to show any interest in me. And when I asked questions to try to draw them out, they gave short, curt answers, and acted as if I was weird for trying to talk with them.  

Mother Teresa of Calcutta spoke extensively (for example here and here) about how we have a unique kind of poverty in our society, the poverty of loneliness. Making Silicon Valley wages as a technical writer, I was no longer financially poor. But I still had the kind of poverty Mother Teresa described. 

Maybe not all of us are called to live the radical poverty of Christ the way St. Francis of Assisi and others like Dorothy Day have done. But we all have to take what He taught seriously and find ways to become his true followers. We have to be ready to answer Him at the Last Judgment when He asks us, not if we were Church goers, but whether we clothed Him, fed him, visited Him when He was in prison, cared for Him when He was sick, buried Him when He died. 

Even though He didn't mention keeping the commandments, it was clearly understood, since He said elsewhere, "If you love me, keep my commandments." 

It goes without saying, doesn't it? that— without chastity—holiness and effective works are impossible. And of course need to be in a state of grace in order to perform works of love for others. So, of course, we need to worship God on Sundays and receive the Eucharist at Mass as often as we can.

Jesus also said, "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another. —John 13:35 

Social justice starts with personal justice. Personal justice includes following traditional teachings about how we honor our commitments and take care of others around us. Do we use people outside of marriage for selfish pleasure and drop them when we have no use for them? Do we keep our marriage vows? Do we give selfless faithful love to our spouses? Do we make sure that we give all the attention and guidance our children need? Do we take care of our parents and honor them? 

Taxpayer-funded programs to help the needy would be much less needed if we all gave love and care to the family members God has given us to love.

And shouldn't we be doing what we can to make sure nobody feels left out in our Church family? Do we include fellow Catholics we see in Church social groups even when we have no use for them or they don't appeal to us?  

We don't have to like people to love them. And we may find that we do like them if we love them enough to get to know them.  

Saint Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Theresa) often told people who wanted to come and help her in Calcutta,  “Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering, and the lonely, right where you are — in your own homes and in your own families, in homes and in your workplaces and in your schools. You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have eyes to see. Everywhere, wherever you go, you find people who are unwanted, unloved, uncared for, just rejected by society — completely forgotten, completely left alone.”

None of Jesus' commandments have an exception clause that we should do these things only if the other person is pleasant or attractive.  Jesus just said that whatever we do to the least of His children we do unto Him. He didn’t say, do these things unless they don’t appeal to us or unless they don't deserve it.

The Wonderful Gospel Truth Most of Us Ignore: We Are Not Merely Saved but Also Deified

Sometimes certain familiar phrases from the Mass will leap out at you. One phrase in Chapter 1 of the Gospel of John stands out for me every time I hear it the end of traditional Latin Masses,“. . .as many as received him, he gave them power to be made the sons of God, to them that believe in his name.” Does that ever make you wonder, as it makes me wonder, what will it be like to become a son of God? Obviously, “sons” as used here does not mean only members of the male sex. All who believe in His name and live according to the will of God will share in His divine life. Mary, the Mother of God, is the living proof of woman’s divinization. She was conceived without sin, lived always in perfect harmony with God’s will, and her body has been assumed into heaven. In her union with God she became the first to be divinized. She is the fulfillment of the promise of divine adoption, and she fully shares in God's divine nature, as far as any created human can become like God. As the First Chapter of John verse 2 also says:

Dearly beloved, we are now the sons of God; and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know, that, when he shall appear, we shall be like to him: because we shall see him as he is.

Think of what these promises mean. We are now the sons of God. We don’t see yet what we shall become, but when He appears we shall be like to Him. At the end of Dante's La Divina Comedia in the last canto of Paradiso, Saint Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin Mary praises her because through her the Son of God became a human being and through her human beings come to the Son. And St. Bernard said:

"Lady, you are so highly placed and helpful,
Whoever seeks grace and does not call on you
Wants his desires to fly up without wings."

Only with the help of Mary's intercession we will become like God as Mary is now like Him. -------- These are some reflections that made me jump at the chance to review a collection of essays titled, Called to Be the Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification, which I'm now getting back to after a long delay. --------- Image: Mary in Glory, Paradiso XXIII, Gustave Dore

Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One and the Four Last Things

I re-read Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One a few days ago. It's one of the few books I've read and enjoyed multiple times. (Another is Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana.)

The Loved One is a great satire on British expatriates, the American film industry, our extravagant burial practices for humans and animals, and the mad romantic fantasies about death that people engage in when they lose track of the realities of the Four Last Things (Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell). I was led back to read The Loved One this time by coming across a good essay on P.G. Wodehouse, by the otherwise-loathed-by-me Christopher Hitchens. In Hitchens' essay I learned that Wodehouse had a stint writing for the films in Hollywood before he wrote the Jeeves and Wooster books, and that Wodehouse started the Cricket Club there in 1933 or thereabouts. Hitchens wrote that Waugh was indebted to that Cricket Club started by Wodehouse for the extremely funny first chapter of The Loved One.

The story of what brought Waugh to Hollywood in 1947 is a funny one too. He pretended to negotiate with MGM about a film adaptation of his book Brideshead Revisited to get a free trip for himself and his second wife, Laura, while being paid $2000 a week during the negotiations. The studio refused to see the novel as anything other than a romance, and he was not going to let them film it since they dismissed the religious elements that were so important in the book. Its actual title is: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. MGM was not interested in the Sacred. Waugh was actually ashamed the novel was so well regarded in America, since Americans missed the point about everything he thought was valuable about the novel.

While Waugh was in Hollywood, he was given tours of Forest Lawn Cemetery by the founders, got ahold of a book about techniques of embalming, and he relished the prospect of writing a novella about it all. A Waugh biographer wrote, "As Waugh felt that the eschatological or apocalyptic implications he had intended in Brideshead Revisited had escaped many American readers, he was determined to highlight eschatological aspects of American society in The Loved One." Eschatological, to save you the trouble of looking it up, as I had to do, means having to do with the ultimate destiny of humanity.

And oh how sublimely Aimée Thanatogenos, the main female character, misses the real point of human destiny and just about anything else. Named after evangelist Aimée Semple McPherson, her first name is French for "loved one" while her last name is Greek for "born of death." Her end is both a little sad and very funny. Come to think of it, I once chanced across online an essay a student wrote about Aimée's vaporous musings about death, and to my amusement, the essayist took them seriously! That was sad and very funny too.

After I posted this on Facebook, Jonathan McDonald, the editor I work with on the Dappled Things Deep Down Things blog, pointed me to a interesting post of his about the above-mentioned vaporous musings, which gives more credence to her thought process than I have done here by a writer whose opinion I respect: The Attic Epiphany of Aimée Thanatogenos.

Image: This is the same book cover that was on the copy I read when I was a 15 year old high school sophomore in 1960, and it is also the cover of the copy I read recently at the Internet Archive. The first time I read it, I was in a long-term care hospital recovering from spine surgery, and this is one of the two or three books my high school English teacher sent me every week for the many months I was there. Miss Marjorie E. Frye was a creative writer manquée and was encouraging me to be a writer, and the plan— I think it was a good one and would recommend it to would-be writers—was for me to learn how by reading lots of books by many great writers.

C. S. Lewis was Wrong about the Liturgy; Observations from Sohrab Ahmari's From Fire By Water

Ahmari, Sohrab, From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith. San Francisco, CA. Ignatius Press. 2019. 240 pages.

Capuchin Monastery with "Alien" Jesus 

One Sunday evening in 2008, after two nights in a row of binge drinking—part of a pattern of compulsive misbehavior that shamed him when he was sober—Sohrab Ahmari was pacing around the block near Penn Station in New York City, killing time waiting for a train back to Boston. After several turns past a building that had what he described as a “nondescript brick façade” with “a relief above the entrance of an almost alien Jesus,” he went in and found a passage into a church where Mass was about to begin.

Sohrab Ahmari’s First Mass

Ahmari had never attended a Mass before. “The first thing I noticed on entering the vestibule was the serenity of the place, which struck me as almost impossible. Miraculous even, amid the pandemonium of midtown.”

A young guitarist with a man-bun played and led the congregation in singing hymns. While the congregation around him stood, kneeled, sat, prayed, and sang, Ahmari stayed seated in the back and wrestled with his ambivalence about religious belief. He paid little attention to what the friar was doing at the altar.

Skepticism had been ingrained in him in Iran from his bohemian family, and it had been reinforced by his experiences after he came to live in the United States with his mother at the age of 13. He had deep spiritual longings, but he didn’t want to be counted among the gullible by his intellectual peers. He thought he was too smart to be a believer. “But all of a sudden, the singing and the strumming dissolved into that all-encompassing serenity, and something extraordinary happened.”

During the consecration, he began to cry, not tears of sorrow or of joy, but of peace. The Mass appealed to two deeply-rooted parts of his personal make-up that he described in the first chapters of the book: he had always admired the ideal of heroic self-less sacrifice, and he longed for cosmic and moral absolutes. The words of the consecration struck him because they made present at the Mass the redeeming death of the blameless Victim, who humbled Himself to become human and died on the Cross that all may live. On his way out after Mass, he saw a photo of Pope Benedict XVI in the vestibule, and that set off a new bout of tears— because he intensely craved loving, paternal, moral authority and the continuity that the papacy stands for.

He attended another Mass, and from then on he found that he could no longer honestly say he was an atheist. As he said in a Fox News interview, although he felt the faith was true on the level of his imagination and emotions, “it took, still, a long time to finally assent to faith.”

Wrong Worship (without the Mass)

Sohrab and Ting Ahmari

Seven years later, Ahmari was married and was working in London as an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal’s European edition. He had come to believe in Christianity and—with the encouragement of a zealous friend—he occasionally worshipped at evangelical services. He lived near an evangelical Anglican church called Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), and he began to occasionally attend services there.“[T]he Regency church with its elaborate stained-glass windows and vaulting arches, played host to charismatic worship that included JumboTrons, rock bands, and funky lighting.”

The Mass at the Brompton Oratory

On the way home after one such charismatic service at HTB at 8:30 on a Sunday morning, Ahmari noticed a sign at the nearby Catholic Brompton Oratory (Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) advertising a Solemn High Latin Mass, starting at 11, and he went in.

It was Pentecost Sunday. The richness of the church decor with abundant marble and carvings, the way that the architecture beautifully leads every eye to the altar of sacrifice, and what he felt was the rightful inclusion of the carving of the Immaculate Heart of Mary under the baldacchino and in a painting above the main altar, all captivated him. “It was a holy place. It was a place of right worship.”

A world-renowned choir chants and sings traditional sacred music at the Brompton Oratory’s Solemn High Latin Masses. The priests celebrate ad orientem, facing towards Jesus, towards liturgical East. Instead of staying aloof as he had at that first Mass, Ahmari threw himself into following along with the other worshippers as best he could, standing, sitting, kneeling, and blessing himself (a few times with his left hand).

Ahmari was struck that “the metalwork and masonry and painting directed my imagination to spiritual realities,” and in contrast to what he had just experienced at the HTB service, “the Catholic Church didn’t need to herself to the vacuous fads of 2016.”

The very next day he sought out a priest at the Brompton Oratory’s offices and announced he wanted to become a Roman Catholic.

There is more of great interest in Ahmari’s story, much more. For the rest of the fascinating story, you need to read From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith yourself. Conservative journalist and media figure Sohrab Ahmari wrote it to show the influences and events of his life and the changes in his convictions that brought him—from the fire of misery and the captivity of sin, through the water of Baptism—and into the Catholic Church.

Ahmari Speaks About the Mass with Ignatius Press

As noted at the start of this article, From Fire by Water was published by Ignatius Press. The quotes below are from “From Fire by Water, pt. 4, Summary with Sohrab Ahmari”—one of a series of videos discussing Ahmari’s book as part of the Ignatius Press FORMED Book Club series. Ahmari talked about the differences between his experiences at the two Masses described above, and the form of the Mass he prefers. The quotes are included here by permission from Ignatius Press.

You can watch the entire episode here.

Abbreviations and Terms
FJF: Father Joseph Fessio, S.J., founder and editor of Ignatius Press
VD: Vivian Dudro, senior editor of Ignatius Press
SA: Sohrab Ahmari
Novus Ordo: NO, Mass of 1969, Mass of Pope Saint Paul VI, New Mass, Ordinary Form OF of the Mass
Traditional Latin Mass: TLM, Mass of 1962, Mass of Pope Saint John XIII, Vetus Ordo, Extraordinary Form of the Mass.
________________________________________
FJF: In your conversion story two liturgical events were critical. One was right around Penn Station . . . when you went into the Capuchin Church. The other was when you went into Brompton Oratory. Vivian, why don’t you make your point about the first experience?

VD: When you went to the chapel near Penn Station, . . . that Mass was a low Mass in English. At the consecration when you heard those words, “This is my Body,” you made the association that a sacrifice was occurring, and that was an “aha” moment for you. And then later you were at a Brompton Oratory Mass in Latin. I was wondering if your first experience of the Mass had been the one at the Brompton Oratory, do you think you would have understood that a sacrifice was being made if you hadn’t been able to understand the words of the consecration?

SA: I think it would have struck me more, but I would have understood less. That [Brompton] Mass is a richer presentation of both the symbolism and the supernatural action of the Mass, and it would have been an experience I would not soon have forgotten.

“But I don’t think I would have put two and two together to understand that this is an altar like any altar of every civilization that has offered sacrifice—which all civilizations have—but in this case, it’s God Himself offering Himself up as the sacrificial Lamb. I don’t think I would have understood that as much, but at the level of mystery and emotion and imagination I have no doubt that the Brompton Mass would have made more of an impression on me.

“But overall my state of mind in going to that mass was one of ‘I am lousy. I am abject. I need something to redeem me,’ and as it happened, I found the Mass but thereafter within twelve hours I had forgotten about it.

“In either case it would probably have taken some time to get to the point of willingly seeking out the Roman Catholic Church.”

11:00am Solemn Latin VO Mass Ahmari Attended

FJF: What’s your preference liturgically now?

SA: I have a son who I like to take to Mass. [Since the interview, he has also a baby daughter.] I’m registered at a church that has a Solemn High Latin Mass on Sundays. But my son can’t sit through all of it. I vary. Sometimes I need that beauty of the Latin Mass. . . . So that means I will go alone on some Sundays to have that. And then on other Sundays, when I want to take him and my wife, then we’ll go to a different church where the liturgy is fifty minutes, a reverent Novus Ordo Mass [in English]. I try to go to Mass daily; I don’t always succeed. My day is so packed that I’m grateful for the twenty-minute daily English Masses at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

FJF: I celebrate ordinarily the Novus Ordo mass, but in Latin, with English for the readings and prayers and the Preface and for everything that changes each day. I celebrate the rest that stays the same especially the Roman Canon, [Eucharistic Prayer I in the Ordinary Form] in Latin.

SA: I have to mention the Mass that is described in the book in the final chapter at the Brompton Oratory was not the Traditional Latin Mass. It too was a Novus Ordo Mass in Latin—also with the variable parts being done in English. I’m quite fond of that format.

FJF: You’re young and energetic and a talented writer, so I hope to pass the torch onto to you from the Brompton Oratory and from me that in the future you can agitate for more widespread use of the Novus Ordo in Latin. I call it the Mass of Vatican II because it’s what the Vatican fathers were thinking about when they were talking about the reform of the liturgy.

What Actually Is the Mass of Vatican II?

You might wonder what led Father Fessio to refer to the Novus Ordo Mass in Latin the “Mass of Vatican II”—especially since most of the Masses celebrated around the world are not in Latin. Following is some background information to help explain.

It is a much disputed topic whether or not Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s Apostolic Constitution on the liturgy published in December 1963, was implemented correctly in the Ordinary Form of the Mass that has been celebrated since 1969. Even now, 50 years later, lots of people argue in favor of rethinking some of the changes that were supposedly justified by the Second Vatican Council, including the Church Music Association of America President, Stanford Professor William P. Mahrt, along with many others in the CMAA, contributors to the New Liturgical Movement website, and scholars of the liturgical changes of the twentieth century fro, around the world.

Most people who attend the Ordinary form of the Mass are not aware of this, but most of the changes that were made to the form of the Mass, the music, the vestments, and even the furnishings and arrangement of churches after the Second Vatican Council were not actually called for in the council's document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium—and in some cases the changes contradicted what Sacrosanctum Concilium literally said.

For example, the following list of practices were not mandated by Sacrosanctum Concilium but are almost universally seen wherever Novus Ordo Masses are celebrated:

• Vernacular-only Masses, with Latin virtually banished
• The priest facing versus populum (towards the people) instead of ad orientem (to the symbolic East, towards Christ)
• The abolishment of Gregorian chant and polyphony
• Randomly chosen hymns replacing the sung Propers and Ordinary (the Four-Hymn Sandwich)
• Organ music replaced with secular instruments
• Removal of altar rails
• Female altar servers: “girl altar boys”
• Communion received in the hand
• Communion in both species at all Masses
• Standing instead of kneeling for Communion and after Communion
• Resurrection images replacing crucifixes over the altar
• Churches in the round
• Iconoclasm (removal of images of saints)
• Felt banners
• Lay lectors
• Lay ministers of Communion

What Sacrosanctum Concilium Actually Said: A Few Examples

It’s too big a topic to cover thoroughly here, but here is one example concerning the use of Latin. Section 36 of Sacrosanctum Concilium states:

36. Particular law remaining in force, the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites.
37. But since the use of the mother tongue, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or other parts of the liturgy, frequently may be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended. This will apply in the first place to the readings and directives, and to some of the prayers and chants, according to the regulations on this matter to be laid down separately in subsequent chapters.

The above two paragraphs justify use of the vernacular in the readings, and some priests like Father Fessio and the Oratorians at Brompton, extend the use of the vernacular to the Preface and other parts of the Mass that change every day. But it took later directives after Sacrosanctum Concilium to effect a sweeping change of the entire Mass to the vernacular.

It may be a surprise to learn that the definitive version of the form of the Mass put in place after the Second Vatican Council is in Latin, and from the Latin version all other translations are made. And it was never forbidden for priests to celebrate the modern Mass facing the altar.

For another thing, it was nowhere written that chant should be replaced with hymns. Or that hymns should replace the prayers of the Mass.

116. The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as especially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services.
117. The typical edition of the books of Gregorian chant is to be completed; and a more critical edition is to be prepared of those books already published since the restoration by St. Pius X. It is desirable also that an edition be prepared containing simpler melodies, for use in small churches.

Pope Paul VI's Wish for the Faithful: To Say or Sing Unchanging Parts of the Mass in Latin

To bring about the desire expressed section 54 of SC, which said that "steps should be taken enabling the faithful to say or to sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass belonging to them" in 1974, Pope Paul VI issued Jubilate Deo (Joyfully Sing Out to God is an English paraphrase, but note that the title is in Latin) a booklet with simple chant settings of the Ordinary chants and responses and some other hymns. An accompanying letter to all the bishops and heads of religious orders said that the Gregorian chants contained in the booklet were to be considered the "minimum repertoire of plainchant." Pope Paul VI asked them to both teach the faithful these Latin chants and have the faithful sing them.

The sad truth is that the bishops ignored the pope’s gift, and Jubilate Deo is unknown in most parishes.

The Spectrum of Opinion

Some claim that the additional changes are “essentially institutionalized abuses.” A more-moderate line of thinking goes: since some changes were not explicitly mandated, such as the versus populum posture of the priest, those changes might easily be reversed in Ordinary Form Masses, and the ad orientem posture of the priest could be normalized again without undermining the council's reforms.

Others believe that Sacrosanctum Concilium was deliberately and appropriately worded to leave the way open for additional changes beyond what was explicitly set down. Those who think that way believe that the Ordinary Form Mass as it is ordinarily celebrated now is the correct and complete interpretation of the directives in Sacrosanctum Concilium, and it should be left as it is currently celebrated.

Final Thoughts

Sorab Ahrari's conversion experience seems to affirm the power of a reverently celebrated Novus Ordo Mass in Latin to appeal to the imagination and emotions of a person trying to decide where best to worship God. Here is a comment from Ahmari's book about the importance of liturgy, in which he takes exception to C. S. Lewis:

Lewis had been wrong to write off "style of worship" as a secondary matter in Mere Christianity. As with beauty and imagination, the order and symbolism of public prayer were bound up with truth. The Mass gave full expression to the truths and mysteries of Christianity."

Here is what Father Joseph Fessio, S.J. of Ignatius Press thinks.

Those who advocate the reform of the reform want to see the present Novus Ordo Mass celebrated in a way that makes visible the deeper christological continuity with the Church’s celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice of the Mass over the millennia. Cardinal Ratzinger called attention to this deep christological continuity in his Spirit of the Liturgy, when he evoked “the real interior act” of Jesus’ “Yes” to the Father on the Cross that takes all time into his heart (pp. 56-57). This is the “event of institution” that assures organic continuity down the ages. It is possible to make this profound reality visible by celebrating the Novus Ordo Mass in ways that make the continuity with tradition much more obvious. The Novus Ordo permits that Mass be celebrated with all its parts, or the canon and ordinary parts, in Latin. It permits Mass to be celebrated ad orientem (facing the Lord); the traditional first canon may be used; Gregorian Chant is still to be given "pride of place"; incense may be used and sacred polyphony sung; altar boys, bells, patens, communion rails where people may kneel if they choose, beautiful and noble vestments and sacred vessels; all this is permitted in the Novus Ordo. Permitted, but too rarely experienced.”—Father Joseph Fessio, S.J., in his “Foreword” to Martin Mosebach's The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and Its Enemy

And this is what the late author Michael Davies thought:

Altar of the Brompton Oratory on the cover of
Michael Davies' The Catholic Sanctuary

Anyone wishing to see a famous church which has stuck to the letter of the law in reordering its sanctuary and made only those changes which are mandatory should visit the Brompton Oratory in London. The Oratorian Fathers are certainly the most liturgically literate group of priests in Britain, and they have not made a single change in their sanctuary because there is no law requiring them to do so. Their magnificent altar stands just as it always has, with the prominent tabernacle in the center."—Michael Davies, The Catholic Sanctuary And The second Vatican Council

The Musings of a Pertinacious Papist blog posted this photo:

And the blog continued: "Pictured above is the sanctuary of the Brompton Oratory in London after all the changes had been made that were mandated for Catholic churches by Vatican II and post-Vatican II legislation. Yes, that's right. Read it again.

"In short, NO changes were mandated -- not moving the Tabernacle from the central point in the altar, nor placing a chair in the middle of the sanctuary, or removing the Communion rails, or even Mass facing the people with the priest standing behind a free-standing altar."

Now for what Cardinal Robert Sarah thinks. He has been quoted as stating that a more reverent and sober form of liturgy that places the accent on the “primacy of God” has never been more important than now, facing a world marked by “an ever more aggressive secularism, consumerism, a terrorism without God, and a culture of death that puts at risk our most vulnerable brothers and sisters.” He also stated that “much remains to be accomplished for a complete and correct application” of the vision of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) on sacred liturgy.

Cardinal Sarah celebrating Mass at the Bromptom Oratory in 2016

And finally, I was amused to come across this in the writings of  the late bohemian British Catholic novelist and editor Alice Thomas Ellis. She used photographs of the Brompton Oratory in her book Snake on the Rock, which was her exploration of the changes that happened since Vatican II. Photos of the outside and outside of the oratory were compared (unfavorably) with the straight unembellished lines of a modern Catholic church exterior and the "scooped out look" of its interior.

Interior Bromptom Oratory Compared to Modern Renovation

What do you think?

Respectfully Critiquing Pope Francis: Father Rutler's Example

The Spider and the Fly, by Ernest Griset from"Child life: a collection of poems" (1871)

I respect Father George W. Rutler’s tact and appropriately dutiful reverence to Pope Francis, since he often quotes the indisputable good things the pope says and does. He refers to the pope as His Holiness and never dismissively just as Bergoglio, as some of the pope's critics do. 

I also admire that Father Rutler has the nerve to point out the often ludicrous and just plain wrong things the pope and some of his closest cardinals are reported as saying and doing; but he does it without vitriol.

Here are two examples of articles that show his deft approach, from Crisis Magazine:

• Nothing new under the sun: St. Bernard’s advice to a pope
• A Nursery Rhyme Pope Francis Would Do Well to Read

I also think Father Rutler is courageous, because he, after all, is a diocesan pastor St. Michael the Archangel Church in New York city who could be called on the carpet by his superiors if his loyalty came into question.

Father Rutler appropriately writes his critiques and, from all accounts, lives his vocation in such a way that it would be impossible to dismiss him as a benighted traditionalist, and he is so generous in his ability to give credit where credit is due that it would be equally hard to label him an enemy of the pope, even though I’ve come across articles on the Internet that try to paint him that way.

Sometimes, the only way to deal with unpleasant realities is with humor and deflection, as is illustrated in this delicious piece I chanced upon: an article with Father Rutler writing as the Catholic Herald’s “resident agony priest.” (In case you don’t know, advice columnists used to be dubbed “agony aunts.”) In the “advice column,” Father Rutler gave a serious answer with a funny twist, in answer to the question, “What should I do when my family trash-talks the Pope?” Consider this excerpt, which has a bit of both, humor, and deflection (dated 20 December, 2018):

Dear Father Rutler,Roger S. Reading, MA 

Pope Francis isn’t my favourite Vicar of Christ of the last couple of millennia, but I don’t like the way some of my friends and family trash-talk him. Should I say something? If so, how do I put it without sounding cloyingly pious?

The response:

With the best of intentions, people may forget that at the heart of piety is “reverence for the fathers”. That does not mean indulging the extravagant and unfounded notion that the Holy Spirit chooses each pope. It does mean that the Holy Spirit can pick up the pieces of whatever mere mortals may break, and it also means taking seriously the prayers at Mass for a pope. Our Lord had the most righteous anger, but our anger may not always be altogether righteous, losing temper rather than using it. Arguments about such things usually are cathartic rather than constructive. If friends and family rant, just quietly ask: “When the apostles remembered Psalm 69:9 about being consumed by zeal, what do you think was meant by the Septuagint’s use of katesthio?” If that doesn’t silence them, gently ask, “Do you want to be Shem and Japheth, or just Ham?” It is unlikely that they will continue the conversation.1

As is characteristic of Father Rutler’s style, we can see good advice almost subliminally embedded in his humorous reply to the question, words that show the kind of actions a frustrated Catholic should take. First of all, the commandment to honor our fathers still stands (and it does not have the exception clause “unless we think they don’t deserve it”), and we owe reverence to our Holy Father. Second, it is important to understand on the one hand that not everything a pope does is willed by the Holy Spirit, even though some of the current pope’s supporters claim otherwise, and to remember, on the other hand, that nothing can be broken by any man that cannot be fixed by God. Third, we must pray for the Pope, and, fourth, we must restrain our tendency to anger when we hear of things that outrage us, because often times such anger is merely self-righteousness rather than constructive. And, finally, if people don’t agree with you, you can always stop them in their tracks by pelting them with your erudition.

---

This is a modified excerpt from "Fr. George Rutler’s Calm in Chaos: Catholic Wisdom for Anxious Times A Review Essay,"  published at Homiletic and Pastoral Review on February 12, 2019.