In The Nuptial Mystery, Cardinal Angelo Scola synthesizes insights from John Paul II and Balthasar to highlight “nuptiality” as the deepest truth about Being and Transcendent Being, God’s very self. “Nuptiality” he sees as the circumincession of three realities: (sexual) difference, love, and fruitfulness. The key text is the creation account of Genesis: “male and female he created them, in their own image he created them.” Taking these words literally, we see that the “communion of persons” between male and female, in all their radical difference, is inherently fruitful (procreative) and a privileged icon or image of the inner life of the Trinity which itself is that same threesome: difference of persons, love between them, and infinite fruitfulness (the Holy Spirit.)
Tradition has always found the image of God in the human’s distinctive spiritual nature: intellect and will. This view ignores the physical as participating directly in the imaging of the Divine. Following John Paul and Balthasar, Scola integrates the tradition into a new synthesis: the community of the Trinity and the Infinite Self-donation of each of the Three is imaged fully in the communion of persons, especially marriage, and the complete gift of self which is physical as well as spiritual, intellectual, volitional, emotional and social.
He echoes Balthasar’s understanding of the dramatic nature of the person: a created freedom who interacts with infinite, creative Freedom. He finds three distinctive polarities: man and woman, body and soul, person and community. The human person is, therefore, always a dual unity: a communion of contrasting polarities which are held in tension and yet in union with each other, with neither ever losing its identity by melting into a single monad. The person is never complete in himself, but always dramatic: always in relation to the other, always in tension, always “on the way.”
The body-soul polarity is perhaps best captured by the question: “Which is more true: I have a body or I am a body?” Most initially answer “I have a body.” This is contradicted by the conclusion that if I torture or make love to your body, I am not doing it to you but to something you have, something extrinsic to yourself. On the other hand, “I am my body” is a complete identification with my physical self and tends to deny transcendence and the possibility of life beyond the mortality of the flesh. So we see that both statements have to be held in tension: “I am my body, which is to say that my body is me, but I transcend my body, I am more than my body, which is the spiritual dimension.” But the two are married together so that they cannot be separated but also cannot be confused and must be distinguished.
And so, regarding sexuality, every human is male or female…which is to say that each person is already directed to the opposite. Each person is a unity but a unity directed to the opposite so that it is only in the meeting of the two that you have complete humanity. Neither man nor woman is a completed human and yet each is completely human. The completion of humanity is found only in the couple.
But the Greek myth (Aristophanes) which held that female/male are the two halves of what was originally an organic whole is rejected by this understanding of nuptiality. It is NOT true that man and woman complete each other by forming a completed, satisfactory whole. Rather than complete complimentarity, there is asymmetric reciprocity. While there is partial complementarity in the spousal union, there is also asymmetry: the two do not perfectly fit together. If anything, a genuine love between man and woman will accentuate and recognize the difference between the two. There is distance and difference between the two which never disappears but is bridged by love, surrender, gift of self, and reception of the other in her very difference or alterity.
Out of this union in difference, love in alterity, there emerges no completion, but the fruition of another person, the child. So the love of man and woman does not lead to satisfaction, completion, wholeness, and rest; rather it self-transcends (imaging God’s own inner life of superabundant fruitfulness) into another person, another love and another mission…actually two loves and two missions, those of maternity and paternity, which are themselves distinct, complementary and asymmetric.
So we see that the sentimental language that speaks of “my soul mate” or “the one who completes me” or “my satisfaction” or even “my better half” is misleading: nuptial love does not complete or satisfy itself in the union of the two, but it opens itself up to the Other, the third: the other who is the child, the other who is all the other beloveds (family, community, the needy), and ultimately the Other who is God.
Today’s Unique Historical Situation
All human cultures have always intuited the circumincession of the nuptial realities: sexual difference, love, and fruitfulness. Modern technology, initially contraception and now an entire network of bio-technical processes, has torn the three apart. The Pill separated sex (and love) from fruitfulness; in vitro procedures and cloning tear procreation away from the love act itself; and the gay movement diminishes the iconic meaning of sexual difference. Modernity tears apart the nuptial icon, the very image of the Divine in the human person, the spousal union of man and woman.
(Circumincession is an important term: it refers to the Mystery by which the three persons in one God “live within each other.” So complete is their love for each other that they literally indwell each other: to see the Son is always to see the Father and the Spirit. By analogy, in the created realm, we are able to “indwell” each other to the degree that we really know each other but especially when we love each other. So, spouses “indwell” each other by a finite, limited “circumincession;” as do parents/children and friends, To the degree that I love my mother I carry her within me as a good son; to the degree that I love my daughter, I carry her within me as a good father. All of reality, imitative of the Trinity, at the various degrees (analogy) within the hierarchy of Being, is oriented to donation-of-self and reception-of-the-other. The classic formulation is that “being diffuses itself.” Every reality gives itself: the rose its aroma and the bird its song and the lover his heart. Ultimately, or eschatologically, we will live in God and in all of reality. All of Being, in other words, is nuptial.)
Modern culture can be understood as the disparagement of "difference:" men are not really different from women; the foetus not really different from tissue; the Creator from the creature; and the animal from the human. Catholic, Trinitarian faith by sharpest contrast exults in "le difference!"
Providentially, this deconstruction has occasioned the articulation of the nuptial mystery in all its splendor in a genuinely novel manner. The “communio theology” of Benedict, John Paul, Balthasar, Schindler and Scola is penetrating into this magnificent mystery in a way hardly glimpsed by Thomas and Augustine.
For instance, while Catholics have always known that women cannot be priests, now we know why that is so. Christ’s love for the Church is a nuptial mystery: he is the groom that loves his bride. He is the initiator, she the responder; he the donator, she the receiver; he gives his life, his blood, his body, his word, and his seed (of eternal life) and she receives the same, sacramentally which is to say in the flesh. So, the priest who re-enacts the role of the groom, in word, sacrament and governance, is playing a masculine role, a spousal role, a paternal role…and clearly is a man.
The consecrated or virginal life is itself a higher form of nuptiality since it is the direct surrender, body and soul, of the bridal (ontologically “feminine” or receptive, even if male) person to the Godly groom. If marriage is the highest icon of the Divine in the created or natural realm, the virginal life transcends this in entering into an eschatological or heavenly marrage, a participation in the Triune Life itself in a physical, historical, concrete manner.
This nuptial mystery is the key to all of reality as it reveals the inner life of God and permeates all of creation which is in his image. The different levels of Being show this reality in analogous ways. The crucial doctrine of analogy identifies a similarity within always a greater dissimilarity. And so, I as a man am an image of God…as a son, a brother, a husband, a father…in all of this I image God; but there is an infinitely greater dissimilarity between me as creature, and him as creator; me as finite, him as infinite; me as historical, him as eternal.
Even here, however, the dissimilarity, the gulf between us, the difference between God and us is not absolute. What is absolute is Love. He created us to love us, to enjoy our difference, to bear fruit with us and in us and through us. He delights in our “not-Godness” as we rejoice in his “Godness” analogously as we men delight in femininity and we fathers cherish our daughters.
The Bible ends with the wedding feast of the Groom and his Church. Each of us is conceived in the nuptial embrace; each of us (and all of reality) was originally imagined and envisioned in the nuptial intimacy of the Trinity; each of us lives each second of our earthly lives within the love and difference and fecundity of Nuptial Being; and we are all together, nuptially, moving dramatically towards the Great Wedding Feast.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Three Maryknolls
Maryknoll, soon to celebrate its 100th birthday, has sent forth thousands of missionaries…each entirely distinctive and unique. Nevertheless, like any community or organization, it does develop a shared or corporate personality. I have known three distinct Maryknolls:
- The original Maryknoll of the founders: China-loving, anti-modernist, Tridentine Maryknoll.
- Transitional Maryknoll of the 1945-65 years after World War II: modern, Latin America-loving, Americanist, social action Maryknoll.
- The declining Maryknoll after Vatican II: multicultural, post-modern, leftwing, psychology-as-religion Maryknoll.
The Maryknoll of Price/the Walshes/Ford was a classic expression of Tridentine Catholicism as it emerged from the combatative, countercultural immigrant American Church. This Church was reactive against a hostile Protestant culture and therefore fiercely loyal to the institutional aspects of counter-reformation Catholicism: the sacraments, moral teachings, hierarchy, and traditions of piety including love for Mary. The primary focus of their mission activity was pagan China which needed to hear the Good News and to come to know the saving power of Jesus Christ as mediated in the one, only, Catholic and apostolic Church. This Maryknoll might be described as anti-modern at least in the sense of anti-modernist in theology. Its concern was to bring the Catholic faith to unbelievers and was in no way enamored with nationalism, politics, technology or social engineering. It was classic, traditional, sacramental Catholicism …nothing more or less.
The end of the war found Maryknoll expelled from communist China and refocusing, largely on Latin America. This was a Catholic continent, not in evident need of evangelization, but plagued with material poverty. By contrast, America was now THE superpower, materially, economically, technologically and culturally. American economic expansion in those two postwar decades was something extraordinary: surely unparalled, in sheer quantity and mass, by any period in the history of the world. Maryknoll shared this American confidence and therefore entered into mission with a great concern to feed the hungry and clothe the naked using all our cultural resources (credit unions, cooperatives, etc.) In this period, Catholicism became widely accepted within American society and the Church in turn took a positive view, free of ambivalence, of America and all the modern developments including democracy, free markets, trade unions, and the secular academy. Maryknoll Magazine was everywhere and full of inspiring stories of confident, virile missionaries teaching the natives agricultural methods or how to form coops or credit unions or trade unions. At this point there was no break with tradition or hierarchy as the fundamentals of Catholicism (pro-life and pro-family, sacraments, etc.) coexisted peacefully with the dominant revivalist values of the USA of Billy Graham and Bishop Fulton Sheen. The Church was no longer at war with a Protestant America but was becoming enamored of her and would finally fall into bed with dominant elite culture at the close of the Vatican Council. Ivan Illich was possibly the most incisive critic of Maryknoll as a vehicle for American cultural imperialism and his work was one of many forces that worked for Maryknoll’s rapid deconstruction after 1965.
1965, the close of the Council, is the beginning of end of Maryknoll as she joined most of the Catholic elites in opening wide the windows for renewal, understood as mimicking a secular world that was rapidly turning agnostic, relativist, and post-modern. An enchantment with change spread through Maryknoll in a radical disconnect from tradition, authority, pious customs, and traditional sexual morality. Maryknoll is not a religious order and never had a distinctive unifying spirituality but the late-Tridentine piety of the founders was clear, deep, and motivational. In the late 60s this piety was scornfully dismissed. A collage of fashions was to take its place: liberation theology, humanistic psychology, and alertness to God’s presence in other cultures and religions. Maryknollers continue to do beautiful work with the poorest of the poor all over the world. Indeed, the word “beauty” might best characterize their work. Maryknoll Magazine always offered splendid images, especially of the human face in all its agony and magnificence. This tradition continues. For example, the mission museum at Maryknoll is filled with such photographic icons. But noticeably missing from that collection is any real focus on the dogma, the morality, or the liturgy of the Church. The beautiful has become detached from the true (dogma…which is a dirty word for the postmodern), and from the good (morality, which is scorned as moralism when it shows its absolutism). Indeed, one of the hallmarks of postmodernism is this disconnect: beauty is accepted but truth and morality as absolute claims are rejected. The only absolutes are tolerance, relativism, and inclusiveness.
This soft, inclusive, aesthetic Maryknoll, uprooted from authority, tradition, and law cannot attract our young. It lacks the virile backbone of the earlier Maryknoll as well as its gentle Marian piety. It is a neutered, de-gendered, sterile and impotent hybrid, similar to its Episcopalian sister, champion of contraception, choice, homosexuality and (the latest fad) masculine, Episcopal nuns. (I am not making this up.)
Maryknoll as an institution does not seem to have much of a future. Surely, we will never again see the “glory days” of the mid-twentieth century and the remarkable synthesis of American confidence and Catholic piety. Nor can we return to the Tridentine Church of the founders. The drastic decline of the society over the last ½ century is a sorrow for those who have loved her.
The future of mission is, however, another story. Institutions, like Maryknoll, come and go but the Church will endure until the end of time. The Church is a garden that is ever new and fruitful, giving birth to new orders and movements in every age. The spirit of the founders of Maryknoll, the love of Christ specifically IN His Church, is alive in a new flowering of groups fiercely loyal to Mary, apostolic authority and the sacramental life. We are in the midst of a renaissance of Catholic life as the bridal Church is being aroused with a fervent love of the Bridegroom who loves her so intimately in sacrament, apostolic Word, prayer, and Marian holiness. Some disparage this renewal as “Romantic Conservatism.” Nevertheless, the founders, heroes and martyrs (“witnesses”) of Maryknoll must smile as they look down on the corporal acts of charity still practiced by aging but faithful Maryknollers as well as the flourishing of Catholic life and mission in so many new, thrilling expressions under the shepherding of John Paul and Benedict.
- The original Maryknoll of the founders: China-loving, anti-modernist, Tridentine Maryknoll.
- Transitional Maryknoll of the 1945-65 years after World War II: modern, Latin America-loving, Americanist, social action Maryknoll.
- The declining Maryknoll after Vatican II: multicultural, post-modern, leftwing, psychology-as-religion Maryknoll.
The Maryknoll of Price/the Walshes/Ford was a classic expression of Tridentine Catholicism as it emerged from the combatative, countercultural immigrant American Church. This Church was reactive against a hostile Protestant culture and therefore fiercely loyal to the institutional aspects of counter-reformation Catholicism: the sacraments, moral teachings, hierarchy, and traditions of piety including love for Mary. The primary focus of their mission activity was pagan China which needed to hear the Good News and to come to know the saving power of Jesus Christ as mediated in the one, only, Catholic and apostolic Church. This Maryknoll might be described as anti-modern at least in the sense of anti-modernist in theology. Its concern was to bring the Catholic faith to unbelievers and was in no way enamored with nationalism, politics, technology or social engineering. It was classic, traditional, sacramental Catholicism …nothing more or less.
The end of the war found Maryknoll expelled from communist China and refocusing, largely on Latin America. This was a Catholic continent, not in evident need of evangelization, but plagued with material poverty. By contrast, America was now THE superpower, materially, economically, technologically and culturally. American economic expansion in those two postwar decades was something extraordinary: surely unparalled, in sheer quantity and mass, by any period in the history of the world. Maryknoll shared this American confidence and therefore entered into mission with a great concern to feed the hungry and clothe the naked using all our cultural resources (credit unions, cooperatives, etc.) In this period, Catholicism became widely accepted within American society and the Church in turn took a positive view, free of ambivalence, of America and all the modern developments including democracy, free markets, trade unions, and the secular academy. Maryknoll Magazine was everywhere and full of inspiring stories of confident, virile missionaries teaching the natives agricultural methods or how to form coops or credit unions or trade unions. At this point there was no break with tradition or hierarchy as the fundamentals of Catholicism (pro-life and pro-family, sacraments, etc.) coexisted peacefully with the dominant revivalist values of the USA of Billy Graham and Bishop Fulton Sheen. The Church was no longer at war with a Protestant America but was becoming enamored of her and would finally fall into bed with dominant elite culture at the close of the Vatican Council. Ivan Illich was possibly the most incisive critic of Maryknoll as a vehicle for American cultural imperialism and his work was one of many forces that worked for Maryknoll’s rapid deconstruction after 1965.
1965, the close of the Council, is the beginning of end of Maryknoll as she joined most of the Catholic elites in opening wide the windows for renewal, understood as mimicking a secular world that was rapidly turning agnostic, relativist, and post-modern. An enchantment with change spread through Maryknoll in a radical disconnect from tradition, authority, pious customs, and traditional sexual morality. Maryknoll is not a religious order and never had a distinctive unifying spirituality but the late-Tridentine piety of the founders was clear, deep, and motivational. In the late 60s this piety was scornfully dismissed. A collage of fashions was to take its place: liberation theology, humanistic psychology, and alertness to God’s presence in other cultures and religions. Maryknollers continue to do beautiful work with the poorest of the poor all over the world. Indeed, the word “beauty” might best characterize their work. Maryknoll Magazine always offered splendid images, especially of the human face in all its agony and magnificence. This tradition continues. For example, the mission museum at Maryknoll is filled with such photographic icons. But noticeably missing from that collection is any real focus on the dogma, the morality, or the liturgy of the Church. The beautiful has become detached from the true (dogma…which is a dirty word for the postmodern), and from the good (morality, which is scorned as moralism when it shows its absolutism). Indeed, one of the hallmarks of postmodernism is this disconnect: beauty is accepted but truth and morality as absolute claims are rejected. The only absolutes are tolerance, relativism, and inclusiveness.
This soft, inclusive, aesthetic Maryknoll, uprooted from authority, tradition, and law cannot attract our young. It lacks the virile backbone of the earlier Maryknoll as well as its gentle Marian piety. It is a neutered, de-gendered, sterile and impotent hybrid, similar to its Episcopalian sister, champion of contraception, choice, homosexuality and (the latest fad) masculine, Episcopal nuns. (I am not making this up.)
Maryknoll as an institution does not seem to have much of a future. Surely, we will never again see the “glory days” of the mid-twentieth century and the remarkable synthesis of American confidence and Catholic piety. Nor can we return to the Tridentine Church of the founders. The drastic decline of the society over the last ½ century is a sorrow for those who have loved her.
The future of mission is, however, another story. Institutions, like Maryknoll, come and go but the Church will endure until the end of time. The Church is a garden that is ever new and fruitful, giving birth to new orders and movements in every age. The spirit of the founders of Maryknoll, the love of Christ specifically IN His Church, is alive in a new flowering of groups fiercely loyal to Mary, apostolic authority and the sacramental life. We are in the midst of a renaissance of Catholic life as the bridal Church is being aroused with a fervent love of the Bridegroom who loves her so intimately in sacrament, apostolic Word, prayer, and Marian holiness. Some disparage this renewal as “Romantic Conservatism.” Nevertheless, the founders, heroes and martyrs (“witnesses”) of Maryknoll must smile as they look down on the corporal acts of charity still practiced by aging but faithful Maryknollers as well as the flourishing of Catholic life and mission in so many new, thrilling expressions under the shepherding of John Paul and Benedict.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
What Happened to us at Maryknoll?
What Happened to Maryknoll? What Happened to Us at Maryknoll… Long Ago?
Our senior year at Maryknoll Seminary College (1968-9), at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, involved heated discussions on questions like “Why Mission?” and “Why Maryknoll?” Our personal struggles to form our identities mirrored the macro-crisis of the Maryknoll Society and the entire American Church. That robust, vigorous Maryknoll was not to survive this crisis: today the average age of a Maryknoller is 77 and new ordinations usually don’t exceed one or two a year. Maryknoll Society as we know it is on its death bed (Although miracles DO happen: if He did it for Lazarus He can do it for Maryknoll.)
It is of interest however that our cohort of ex-Maryknoll seminarians now in our 60s, who passed through and out of the formation system in the late 60s, today becomes fervent and emotional in expressing their gratitude and devotion to Maryknoll. We become sentimental and nostalgic, despite the fact that we left the society decades ago and have maintained little or no contact with the order itself. One wonders: What is the object of this affection?
Our love affair is not with the actual Society of Maryknoll. We have spent the four plus decades of our lives raising families and pursuing careers with the slightest contact with the society. I doubt many of us even contribute financially to Maryknoll with any regularity and generosity.
There is, however, a genuine gratitude and affection for the priests who taught us during those tumultuous years; there are even stronger bonds of loyalty and affection for each other: friends and classmates who went through that “coming of age” together. What unites us even today is the memory of the extraordinarily intense experience we shared within Maryknoll…an experience which generally led us to leave Maryknoll for other life paths.
We entered the formation program, sometime around 1965, intending to serve God, the Church and the poor as missionary priests. Several years later, we left this path to pursue family, career, and generally happy, prosperous bourgeois lifestyles. In 1965, with the close of Vatican II, Maryknoll leadership followed the prevailing fashions and discarded the rich network of Church and seminary traditions in favor of “change and renewal.” Unfortunately, the Church was looking to the world for guidance just as that world was itself undergoing a drastic Cultural Revolution centered on values including: liberation into sterile sexuality (contraception, homosexuality, and radical feminism); freedom from authority and tradition; pursuit of personal fulfillment and disparagement of classic practices involving chastity, poverty, obedience, sacrifice, humility; and justice for the poor through governmental or “systemic” engineering.
Maryknoll, indeed the entire American Church, was unprepared intellectually and spiritually to confront the Cultural Revolution. Maryknoll was always identified with the pragmatic, hands-on, masculine dimension of American spirituality. Many of our professors, for example, pursued doctoral studies out of obedience as they really wanted to be in the missions, working in the ditches and fields with the poor. I cannot recall a single professor who was able to comprehend, confront or critique, from classical Catholic reasoning, the emerging liberational, anti-Catholic consensus. Many of the brighter intellects threw themselves exuberantly into the current of change, left Maryknoll and priesthood, and assumed a confident, self-righteously “prophetic” stance toward the pathetically dysfunctional institutional Church (e.g. Eugene Kennedy.) Those who remained faithful to their vocations remain to this day befuddled as to the nature of the tornado of confusion that fell upon us in that troubled few years. I vividly recall, for example, a lucid presentation by theologian Bill Frazier, circa 1968, in which he taught us that the pace of cultural change had become so fast that only youth were in tune with modern realities and that moral and spiritual leadership had shifted from the elders to the young. Attributing a vague indefectibility to youth, he forcefully, if unintentionally, discredited tradition and authority and validated the narcissism and arrogance of the Youth Rebellion.
But for those of us emerging out of adolescence into young adulthood at the time it was a different story, a remarkably happy one. How exciting: every day it seemed there was a new book, a thinker, a movement…coming to us from psychology, politics, theology or the humanities. Every day a new horizon of freedom and fulfillment seemed to open. The intuitive optimism and expectancy of youth was inflamed by ever new currents of renewal and liberation. And Maryknoll: What a happy place to process all this change and excitement. We were surrounded by idealistic, wholesome friends, classmates and teachers. We were protected from sexual promiscuity (indeed, from women in general), from the drug culture, from the more vicious and resentful currents of revolution. Humanistic psychology and liberational politics on behalf of the poor filtered through only the more enlightened aspects that were acceptable to what remained of our Christian idealism.
Bursting confidently out of “ghetto,” reactionary, counter-cultural Catholicism, we threw ourselves trustingly and uncritically into messianic psychology and politics. We reacted violently against the “thick” (Carlin) Catholicism of our forefathers and fervently embraced the “thin” Catholicism often referred to vaguely as “the spirit of Vatican II.” Carlin describes a “thick” religion as one with strongly distinctive practices, beliefs and values so that it is sharply set off against the dominant culture. Examples include: Orthodox/Hasidic Judaism, the Amish, and the Catholic Church before mid-20th-century. “Thin” religions are those which blend seamlessly into the dominant culture, accommodating all essential beliefs and values, with the weakest veneer of opposition or contradiction. Examples would be Unitarianism, Reform Judaism, and today’s Episcopal Church.
The “thin” religion we were being inducted into in those years entailed:
- A critical rather than a trusting attitude towards Church authority and tradition.
- A new sexual ethic of sterility and satisfaction rather than fruitfulness and sacrifice.
- A weakened sense of the sacraments which became social celebrations rather than efficacious actions of Christ in his Church.
- A boredom with holiness and piety, Mary, the communion of saints, and the last things.
- Trust in psychology and liberal politics.
- A positive embrace, ambivalence-free, of secular culture as well as other religions along with embarrassment for own tradition (as patriarchic, rigid, moralistic, doctrinaire, homophobic, etc.)
Example: I returned home for vacation from the seminary, around 1968, to find my family still praying the rosary as they had done for about two decades. With an arrogant air of infallible authority, I told them that the rosary was formalistic, mechanical, and retrograde and that they needed to move into bible study and more informal and creative forms of group prayer. They immediately discontinued the rosary. Where did I get this confident contempt for the rosary? Not from the documents of Vatican II. It was in the air we breathed at the time. Upon arrival at Glen Ellyn in 1965, just before the viral madness struck, a traditional practice was for small groups of 2-4 men to walk around the grounds, after supper, and pray the rosary together. It was a most wholesome, un-self-conscious masculine expression of Catholic piety. It vanished quickly as the toxic “spirit of Vatican II” spread. This happened quickly, subtly, deceptively. It was fed by many currents: a reductionist critical-historical approach to the Bible; a bogus ecumenism which scorned Catholic distinctiveness; and an unacknowledged rationalism which disparaged the genuinely feminine and especially the Marian. What are the chances of any of us praying the rosary together in small groups at our upcoming Maryknoll Alumni Reunion?
There is a refreshing clarity and candor about one who explicitly renounces the Catholic faith to become, say, an Episcopalian, an evangelical, a Wiccan priestess, or a postmodern nihilist. Implicitly, at least, the apostate recognizes the integrity of the Catholic Way (doctrine, liturgy, morals) which is being rejected. This allows for the possibility of a future dialogue and a “reversion” to the Church. The apostasy of our generation of liberals was more deceptive and subtle: it self-identified as a renewed, contemporary, and authentic Catholicism. It scornfully dismissed as outdated and ignorant essentials of our Catholic way: apostolic (Petrine) authority, the inherent fruitfulness of sexuality, the femininity (bride, mother) of the Church, and the masculinity of the priesthood (of Christ the Groom.)
We fell away from the Church in a mimetic contagion; in a (sophisticated) mob mentality; in a fog of seductive confusion; in a swoon of infatuation with liberation...liberation from the past, from authority, from God as father and Church as mother, from a rigorous sexual ethic of sacrifice and fecundity, from the restrictions and limitations of the institutional (which is to say “enfleshed”) Church. It involved neither rational deliberation nor a clear decision of the will; it was a kind of “group-think,” an adolescent infatuation, a movement out of desire and self-interest.
What is, then, the “Maryknoll” which we aging ex-seminarians cherish so? It surely is not the classical, foundational Maryknoll of Fathers Price, Walsh and Walsh, Ford and a long list of heroes and martyrs. For this Maryknoll was: love of Mary, mother of God; loyalty to THE Church; sacrifice and discipline; and a hunger for souls (to guide them to heaven and away from hell.)
Rather, we cherish the complex of culture forces, friendships, movements and ideas which led us away from classic Maryknoll into the novel, promising pastures of an acculturated, thin religion; into the anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-tradition of the “spirit of Vatican II.” What enthused and motivated us in those heady days was actually a spirit of Anti-Maryknoll (the actual, historic institution) and Anti-Catholicism (the concrete, One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic reality.)
In other words, in those thrilling years, we lost The Faith together. We lost the Catholic Faith…that is, faith in Christ’s presence in the authoritative, sacramental, Marian Church. We did not lose all Christian values, far from it. But we “converted” (or maybe “diverted”) out of foundational Catholicism into an alternate Christianity. We were catechized into mainstream, late-or-post-Protestant American Christianity. Some simply left the Church in all good candor; others remain at the edge, defiant and dissenting. It is likely that most of our children (and now their children) have melted seamlessly into enlightened, liberal America and are indistinguishable, as Catholics, from their progressive Jewish, Protestant or even atheist neighbors. Our grandchildren, if they are baptized at all, are immersed into the “thinnest” kind of Christianity.
The tentative schedule for our reunion of Maryknoll Alumni in 2011 plans an ecumenical prayer service rather than a mass for the weekend. This is a candid, if tacit, acknowledgement that it is not the Catholic faith, more particularly the Eucharist, which unites us. Rather, it is bonds of affection and communion in a more diffuse pattern of de-institutionalized Christianity.
In 1965, at the age of 18, we left home for Maryknoll to convert the world to Christ; within a few years we had been converted to the world…the exhilarating world of personal fulfillment, leftist politics, and relativistic multi-culturalism. Maryknoll was the place this happened. But what a thrilling time it was!
Our senior year at Maryknoll Seminary College (1968-9), at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, involved heated discussions on questions like “Why Mission?” and “Why Maryknoll?” Our personal struggles to form our identities mirrored the macro-crisis of the Maryknoll Society and the entire American Church. That robust, vigorous Maryknoll was not to survive this crisis: today the average age of a Maryknoller is 77 and new ordinations usually don’t exceed one or two a year. Maryknoll Society as we know it is on its death bed (Although miracles DO happen: if He did it for Lazarus He can do it for Maryknoll.)
It is of interest however that our cohort of ex-Maryknoll seminarians now in our 60s, who passed through and out of the formation system in the late 60s, today becomes fervent and emotional in expressing their gratitude and devotion to Maryknoll. We become sentimental and nostalgic, despite the fact that we left the society decades ago and have maintained little or no contact with the order itself. One wonders: What is the object of this affection?
Our love affair is not with the actual Society of Maryknoll. We have spent the four plus decades of our lives raising families and pursuing careers with the slightest contact with the society. I doubt many of us even contribute financially to Maryknoll with any regularity and generosity.
There is, however, a genuine gratitude and affection for the priests who taught us during those tumultuous years; there are even stronger bonds of loyalty and affection for each other: friends and classmates who went through that “coming of age” together. What unites us even today is the memory of the extraordinarily intense experience we shared within Maryknoll…an experience which generally led us to leave Maryknoll for other life paths.
We entered the formation program, sometime around 1965, intending to serve God, the Church and the poor as missionary priests. Several years later, we left this path to pursue family, career, and generally happy, prosperous bourgeois lifestyles. In 1965, with the close of Vatican II, Maryknoll leadership followed the prevailing fashions and discarded the rich network of Church and seminary traditions in favor of “change and renewal.” Unfortunately, the Church was looking to the world for guidance just as that world was itself undergoing a drastic Cultural Revolution centered on values including: liberation into sterile sexuality (contraception, homosexuality, and radical feminism); freedom from authority and tradition; pursuit of personal fulfillment and disparagement of classic practices involving chastity, poverty, obedience, sacrifice, humility; and justice for the poor through governmental or “systemic” engineering.
Maryknoll, indeed the entire American Church, was unprepared intellectually and spiritually to confront the Cultural Revolution. Maryknoll was always identified with the pragmatic, hands-on, masculine dimension of American spirituality. Many of our professors, for example, pursued doctoral studies out of obedience as they really wanted to be in the missions, working in the ditches and fields with the poor. I cannot recall a single professor who was able to comprehend, confront or critique, from classical Catholic reasoning, the emerging liberational, anti-Catholic consensus. Many of the brighter intellects threw themselves exuberantly into the current of change, left Maryknoll and priesthood, and assumed a confident, self-righteously “prophetic” stance toward the pathetically dysfunctional institutional Church (e.g. Eugene Kennedy.) Those who remained faithful to their vocations remain to this day befuddled as to the nature of the tornado of confusion that fell upon us in that troubled few years. I vividly recall, for example, a lucid presentation by theologian Bill Frazier, circa 1968, in which he taught us that the pace of cultural change had become so fast that only youth were in tune with modern realities and that moral and spiritual leadership had shifted from the elders to the young. Attributing a vague indefectibility to youth, he forcefully, if unintentionally, discredited tradition and authority and validated the narcissism and arrogance of the Youth Rebellion.
But for those of us emerging out of adolescence into young adulthood at the time it was a different story, a remarkably happy one. How exciting: every day it seemed there was a new book, a thinker, a movement…coming to us from psychology, politics, theology or the humanities. Every day a new horizon of freedom and fulfillment seemed to open. The intuitive optimism and expectancy of youth was inflamed by ever new currents of renewal and liberation. And Maryknoll: What a happy place to process all this change and excitement. We were surrounded by idealistic, wholesome friends, classmates and teachers. We were protected from sexual promiscuity (indeed, from women in general), from the drug culture, from the more vicious and resentful currents of revolution. Humanistic psychology and liberational politics on behalf of the poor filtered through only the more enlightened aspects that were acceptable to what remained of our Christian idealism.
Bursting confidently out of “ghetto,” reactionary, counter-cultural Catholicism, we threw ourselves trustingly and uncritically into messianic psychology and politics. We reacted violently against the “thick” (Carlin) Catholicism of our forefathers and fervently embraced the “thin” Catholicism often referred to vaguely as “the spirit of Vatican II.” Carlin describes a “thick” religion as one with strongly distinctive practices, beliefs and values so that it is sharply set off against the dominant culture. Examples include: Orthodox/Hasidic Judaism, the Amish, and the Catholic Church before mid-20th-century. “Thin” religions are those which blend seamlessly into the dominant culture, accommodating all essential beliefs and values, with the weakest veneer of opposition or contradiction. Examples would be Unitarianism, Reform Judaism, and today’s Episcopal Church.
The “thin” religion we were being inducted into in those years entailed:
- A critical rather than a trusting attitude towards Church authority and tradition.
- A new sexual ethic of sterility and satisfaction rather than fruitfulness and sacrifice.
- A weakened sense of the sacraments which became social celebrations rather than efficacious actions of Christ in his Church.
- A boredom with holiness and piety, Mary, the communion of saints, and the last things.
- Trust in psychology and liberal politics.
- A positive embrace, ambivalence-free, of secular culture as well as other religions along with embarrassment for own tradition (as patriarchic, rigid, moralistic, doctrinaire, homophobic, etc.)
Example: I returned home for vacation from the seminary, around 1968, to find my family still praying the rosary as they had done for about two decades. With an arrogant air of infallible authority, I told them that the rosary was formalistic, mechanical, and retrograde and that they needed to move into bible study and more informal and creative forms of group prayer. They immediately discontinued the rosary. Where did I get this confident contempt for the rosary? Not from the documents of Vatican II. It was in the air we breathed at the time. Upon arrival at Glen Ellyn in 1965, just before the viral madness struck, a traditional practice was for small groups of 2-4 men to walk around the grounds, after supper, and pray the rosary together. It was a most wholesome, un-self-conscious masculine expression of Catholic piety. It vanished quickly as the toxic “spirit of Vatican II” spread. This happened quickly, subtly, deceptively. It was fed by many currents: a reductionist critical-historical approach to the Bible; a bogus ecumenism which scorned Catholic distinctiveness; and an unacknowledged rationalism which disparaged the genuinely feminine and especially the Marian. What are the chances of any of us praying the rosary together in small groups at our upcoming Maryknoll Alumni Reunion?
There is a refreshing clarity and candor about one who explicitly renounces the Catholic faith to become, say, an Episcopalian, an evangelical, a Wiccan priestess, or a postmodern nihilist. Implicitly, at least, the apostate recognizes the integrity of the Catholic Way (doctrine, liturgy, morals) which is being rejected. This allows for the possibility of a future dialogue and a “reversion” to the Church. The apostasy of our generation of liberals was more deceptive and subtle: it self-identified as a renewed, contemporary, and authentic Catholicism. It scornfully dismissed as outdated and ignorant essentials of our Catholic way: apostolic (Petrine) authority, the inherent fruitfulness of sexuality, the femininity (bride, mother) of the Church, and the masculinity of the priesthood (of Christ the Groom.)
We fell away from the Church in a mimetic contagion; in a (sophisticated) mob mentality; in a fog of seductive confusion; in a swoon of infatuation with liberation...liberation from the past, from authority, from God as father and Church as mother, from a rigorous sexual ethic of sacrifice and fecundity, from the restrictions and limitations of the institutional (which is to say “enfleshed”) Church. It involved neither rational deliberation nor a clear decision of the will; it was a kind of “group-think,” an adolescent infatuation, a movement out of desire and self-interest.
What is, then, the “Maryknoll” which we aging ex-seminarians cherish so? It surely is not the classical, foundational Maryknoll of Fathers Price, Walsh and Walsh, Ford and a long list of heroes and martyrs. For this Maryknoll was: love of Mary, mother of God; loyalty to THE Church; sacrifice and discipline; and a hunger for souls (to guide them to heaven and away from hell.)
Rather, we cherish the complex of culture forces, friendships, movements and ideas which led us away from classic Maryknoll into the novel, promising pastures of an acculturated, thin religion; into the anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-tradition of the “spirit of Vatican II.” What enthused and motivated us in those heady days was actually a spirit of Anti-Maryknoll (the actual, historic institution) and Anti-Catholicism (the concrete, One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic reality.)
In other words, in those thrilling years, we lost The Faith together. We lost the Catholic Faith…that is, faith in Christ’s presence in the authoritative, sacramental, Marian Church. We did not lose all Christian values, far from it. But we “converted” (or maybe “diverted”) out of foundational Catholicism into an alternate Christianity. We were catechized into mainstream, late-or-post-Protestant American Christianity. Some simply left the Church in all good candor; others remain at the edge, defiant and dissenting. It is likely that most of our children (and now their children) have melted seamlessly into enlightened, liberal America and are indistinguishable, as Catholics, from their progressive Jewish, Protestant or even atheist neighbors. Our grandchildren, if they are baptized at all, are immersed into the “thinnest” kind of Christianity.
The tentative schedule for our reunion of Maryknoll Alumni in 2011 plans an ecumenical prayer service rather than a mass for the weekend. This is a candid, if tacit, acknowledgement that it is not the Catholic faith, more particularly the Eucharist, which unites us. Rather, it is bonds of affection and communion in a more diffuse pattern of de-institutionalized Christianity.
In 1965, at the age of 18, we left home for Maryknoll to convert the world to Christ; within a few years we had been converted to the world…the exhilarating world of personal fulfillment, leftist politics, and relativistic multi-culturalism. Maryknoll was the place this happened. But what a thrilling time it was!
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