Our friends had a lovely day for a wedding in Cincinnati. We were deeply glad to be in attendance.

There was a time when I should have filed a report about our quick trip, or at least a travelogue, but I’ve grown too discreet for such antics. In the eight years and more that I have been keeping a Web log, I’ve developed what I hope is a finer ability to locate the line between my stories and those of other people. I’ve also lost interest in writing about uncongenial encounters, à propos of which I’ll defer to Susan Sontag’s remark about living on an ocean liner tied up at the dock of the United States. I’ll add one thing: at the mention of “New York,” in response to questions about where I came from, conversation stalled if it did not stop. Gotham seemed to have a strange anti-importance in Cincinnati. I assiduously avoided all risk of having to say that I spend my day reading and writing, and that I don’t get paid to do either.

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But when I say that I was deeply glad to be at the weddding, I mean it, because otherwise I don’t see how I could have gotten through the Mass. It has been a long time since my last experience of that service, and what made this one harder to bear was the coincidence of being in the middle of reading James O’Malley’s excellent history, Trent: What Happened at the Council. It was at that council, which met for three sessions in the middle of the Sixteenth Century, that the liturgy of the Mass was given its current form — current, that is, until the overhaul effected by another council, Vatican II. By and large, the clergymen and others who met at Trent displayed an almost obstinate inability to grasp what drove Martin Luther to break from the Church. In his summary of the canonical review of “justification” and divine grace, O’Malley puts the impasse very well:

The fundamental problem in reconciling the two positions is that they are manifestations of different intellectual cultures, the one more academic and analytical;, the other more personal and existential. The same words have different connotations and perhaps even denotations, and the emotional framework is more different still. The interpreter’s task, therefore, is to get beyond the words to the systems of which they are an expression. Luther’s justification-by-faith-alone was his eureka experience that, as he saw it, liberated him from the jaws of spiritual death. He clung to it, therefore, for dear life. Trent’s decree was the intellectuals’ emotionally cool response to Luther’s spiritual anguish.

Today’s vernacular Mass, it cannot be denied by anyone with an open mind — or, worse, well-remembered experience of the pre-Vatican II rite — is both ugly and boring. Although the reformers saw fit to throw over Latin, they permitted the celebrant to choose to recite a Eucharistic Prayer that features not one but two parades of all-but-forgotten saints’ names — Cosmas and Damian, anyone? And then there is the startlingly unmusical attempt at singing. Positively hateful is the sign of peace, which varies “according to local custom,” and might as well, to my reserved demeanor (the self-restraint of a rather large but civil man), involve snake-handling. I sat through the last third of the service, in order to be only locally consipicuous.

The next morning, at the airport, Kathleen read about Tony Flannery, a Roman Catholic priest of the Redemptorist order — for the time being. Flannery has advocated the ordination of women and generally readjusting the reactionary views of sexuality that flow so naturally from a hierarchical fraternity of celibate males. More than that, he has questioned the legitimacy of that very fraternity, and on purely historical grounds. The essay in which he sketched his doubts about any actual connection between Jesus and the hierarchy has, not surprisingly, been taken offline (if it was ever on-), but the Times report that Kathleen read at the airport, and I the next day, included a fragment.

In the letter, the Vatican objected in particular to an article published in 2010 in Reality, an Irish religious magazine. In the article, Father Flannery, a Redemptorist priest, wrote that he no longer believed that “the priesthood as we currently have it in the church originated with Jesus” or that he designated “a special group of his followers as priests.”

Instead, he wrote, “It is more likely that some time after Jesus, a select and privileged group within the community who had abrogated power and authority to themselves, interpreted the occasion of the Last Supper in a manner that suited their own agenda.”

This is what really got Flannery into trouble, and, according to him, this is what the Vatican has demanded that he retract. But we are not talking about miracles of mysteries of faith here. We’re talking about the historical development of the Roman Catholic Church in the earliest years of its existence — which, as Flannery suggests, is unlikely to have begun anywhere near as early as the lifetimes of those who knew Jesus personally. Long in control of literacy, the Church was able to tell its own story uncontested for well over a thousand years, but that monopoly came to a crashing end in 1945, when the Nag Hammadi library was unearthed, a collection of writings that had been banned by St Iranaeus in the late Second Century. It’s not that the Nag Hammadi writings tell us much that we didn’t know or couldn’t guess. It’s not the contents themselves, but the mere survival of documents unredacted by the orthodox. The library is evidence of a desire to preserve alternative views instead of destroying them. And whatever the ecclesiastical authorities might have done to the library if it had been discovered any sooner, the facts of modern times rendered them impotent to take any action now. And yet the hierarchy continues to parade itself as if we were living in the age of Innocent III.

Tony Flannery may not be a saint — his position on the priestly abuse of children, it seems, is not what one would wish — but it’s not sanctity that’s needed now. It’s historical rigor. If the Church requires belief in a historical account for which there is no historical evidence, then it forfeits its claim to intellectual honesty.   

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 at 10:43 am.