Jews, Sports, and Maculinity

in Judaism, Masculinity, Sports 4 Comments Tags: , , ,

I am revising my first book, The Church Impotent, and I am including a new section on the struggle  with masculinity that Jews have had in the modern world. For two millennia the Torah scholar was the ideal Jewish man; his exercise was not physical but mental. After the Fall of Jerusalem rabbis regarded sports, especially violent sports, as goyim naches, the games Gentiles play, things which if not forbidden by the law were still felt to be foreign and perhaps despicable. Sports were at best bitul Torah, a waste of time that should be spent studying Torah.

 

When Jews came to the United States, they were immersed in the American sports culture.  Jewish boys born in the United States wanted to fit in, but their parents were unsympathetic, and those who wanted to be athletes discovered that Jewish law made it difficult to compete in sports: Saturday games and a non-kosher training tables were the biggest problems. The Law indeed was designed to keep the Jews from becoming like all other nations, but Jewish males felt they could not be recognized as real men, either by themselves or by the Gentile world, if they did not become part of the sports culture.

 

The problem has led to endless disputes among Jews about the proper role of exercise and sports in Jewish life. The desire of men to be masculine is a strong competitor to the desire to remain a Jew, and many chose masculinity rather than Judaism. Among those who wished to remain loyal to Judaism while pursuing athleticism had to battle many obstacles.  Jeffrey Gurock, a professor at Yeshiva and an athlete, has written a informative, funny, and moving book on the struggle: Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports. He begins with the Maccabees’ rejection of the Greek gymnasium and ends with the New York marathon.

 

A sample:  

Growing up, Abe Gerchik, who in his parents’ opinion spent too much time playing ball in the streets of Brooklyn, “thought his  first name was ‘get a job’ and his last name ‘bum’ because his mother always used to say to this budding athlete ‘get a job, bum.’” 

Of himself: 

Does my passion for sports ever face off against Judaism’s religious teachings? Rather than conflicting with faith, athletic participation enhances me spiritually. The prophet Isaiah’s runners’ creed always moves me:

 

Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.

 

 

It is fitting that this particular prophetic portion is read in synagogues the week before or after the New York City Marathon. Here, Judaism and sports’ calendars surely intersect. I also encounter the Almighty up close and personal at the starting line of an arduous race when I confidently “entrust my spirit…as long as my soul is in my body. The Lord is with me, I am not afraid.” 

 

I believe that even if sports has not made me a more observant Jew, my deep devotion to athleticism has certainly bonded me closer to my Creator. 

The struggle that Jews have engaged in to keep loyal to the Law, even what Christians regard as the ceremonial precepts, is extraordinary and humbling for a Christian to observe. Too many Christians compromise the ethical demands of the Law, while Jews will often do their best to keep even the ceremonial Law.

 

Uniting body and soul in demanding physical activities is also rare, and one of the reasons men distance themselves from religion. Not everyone can be an athlete, but Christianity can become too cerebral, a matter of words rather than actions. Physical intensity and challenge is something men desire, and like us goyim, Jewish males feel the same pull.

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German Reform Catholicism and Nazism

in Anti-Semitism, Catholic Church, Vatican 30 Comments Tags:

As I mentioned in a previous post, the historian Derek Hastings has investigated the religious roots of Nazism, not in a broad civilizational sense, but specifically the Catholic groups in Munich from which the early Nazis came. Hastings is the only historian to have done this. I have just read his Catholicism and the Roots if Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (2010)

 

What he has found is extremely interesting. Although Germany had a Catholic Center party which was ultramontane (pro-papal), it also had a group of reform Catholics who saw Germany’s roles as opposing the papal version of Catholicism and spreading the German version of Catholicism (and there are many Catholicisms in the world).

 

The theologian Döllinger, who was excommunicated for his opposition to the Syllabus of Errors  and the proclamation of papal infallibility, was the most famous. But inspired by him was a loose group of Reform Catholics who opposed ultramontane Catholicism, One was Gerhard Himmler, tutor to the royal Bavarian family, who was the father of the initially pious Heinrich Himmler.

 

Many of these  Reform Catholics were anticapitalist and anti-Semitic and were also eugenicists.

 

Some drifted away from Nazism after the refoundation of the party in 1925; others became brown priests and were on the outs with the hierarchy which had to deal with an more andore anti-Catholic and antichristian Nazi party. One initial Catholic Nazi (pre-1923) was the Catholic editor and writer Franz Schrönghamer. He very early on, in 1918, wrote an anti-Semitic book about the affinity of Catholicism and Nazism. The Nazis ignored it after they came to power. When Schrönghamer was tried in denazification proceedings his defense was that he left the party in 1923 and in any case couldn’t possibly be associated with the destructive parts of Nazism, because he was so such an active Catholic and so honored by the church. The court believed him and he lived a peaceful life as a popular Catholic writer. 

 

Hastings comments 

Schrönghamer lived out the rest of his days as a local Catholic celebrity … until his death Catholic writer; he was never forced to confront his role in the early Nazi movement. Coincidentally, at the time of Schrönghamer’s death in September 1962, preparations were in full swing for the opening of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, which convened in October 1962 and was infused in many ways by the same reform impulses that had shaped the prewar Reform Catholic movement in Munich. While it would be inaccurate to draw any sort of direct relationship between the irenic theological openness of the 1960s and the religious Catholicism espoused by early Nazis – such an examination would in any case vastly exceed the boundaries of the present study – it is nonetheless interesting to note  the extent to which the discarding of the Nazis’ early Catholic orientation allowed the trajectory of prewar reformist Catholicism to emerge almost miraculously unblemished after 1945, its exculpatory narrative having been largely written and disseminated by the (anti-Catholic) Nazi mythologizers themselves.

That is, as the Nazis became more antichristian, they attacked Catholicism in general, and did not want to discuss their roots in anti-Roman, anti-Semitic, racist, eugenicist Catholic circles. Therefore German Catholic reformers never had to confront the uncomfortable association with Nazism that some of their members had. It is the usual story of German history.

 

What does this mean for the modern Church? I am not sure; but it should at last be a cautionary tale. Simply because Catholic circles oppose the Vatican in the name of modern ideas does not mean that they are correct. Racism, eugenicism, and anti-capitalism/anti-Semiticism were all modern, ideas which a group of reform Catholics in German espoused. Reform is not a magic word; it needs to be scrutinized carefully. A deeper problem is who is to say what the correct form of Catholicism is? The Reform Catholics rejected Roman authority; they thought they were just as good, indeed better Catholics than Pio Nono. Ultramontane Catholics had their own share of anti-Semitism. Perhaps Catholics, like Protestants, are ultimately driven to rely of private judgment in the light of the Gospel and of prayer – the Church must always be judged by the Gospel, since the Church, or at least sections of it, is quite capable of deforming the Gospel. I have no easy answer to this conundrum.

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Confession and the Dangers of Intimacy

in Catholic Church, clergy sex abuse scandal, Confession 10 Comments Tags: ,

Spiritual direction, therapy, and counseling all can be dangerous even to well-intentioned people. Emotional intimacy itself can be problematic, and can lead to physical intimacy.

 

A friend of mine who was an Episcopal minister said that always remembered that both his and the women’s guardian angel were in the room when he talked to the parishioners (almost always women) whom he was counseling.  (When he told this to seminarians, they laughed.) He also sat behind his desk and handed tissues to a crying woman. A man’s natural tendency is to put his arm around a crying women to comfort her, but…

 

One time he was sitting behind his desk talking to a women crying about her abusive husband when the large and intensely jealous husband barged into the office. Fortunately my friend was behind the desk, not sitting next to the women, innocently holding her hand trying to comfort her.

 

There are grave dangers in the therapist/counselor/priest becoming emotionally involved with the person with whom he is relating. Freud discovered the process of transference in his psychotherapy sessions and therapists have had chronic problems with sexual involvement with patients.

 

Confession and spiritual direction has long been a source of concern to church authorities,   Stephen Haliczer has written a book on the subject, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned.  He looked into the archives of the Inquisition which have numerous cases of such abuse. The Church did try to act against them, but never succeeded in ending them.

 

The Church’s safeguards and penalties did not stop abuses, but what to do? People want to talk about their failures and worries, and if they don’t talk to a priest they go to a therapist, who has even fewer safeguards. Or worse still they go on TV and tell the world.

 

When I was a young teenager, I went to confession often, and I remember that one priest started a line of questioning that made me very uncomfortable. Decades later, I learned that one of the priests in that parish was a known abuser, but I do not remember if my questioner was that priest.

 

But what is a priest to do. Someone confesses a sexual sin, well, is it a fantasy or is it adultery or incest or bestiality? A priest really has to know what is going on to give a suitable penance and strong advice about avoiding the occasion of sin.

 

As to spiritual direction, I think that in general women should give spiritual direction to women, which I believe is the practice in some organizations. The danger of emotional involvement is far greater than in confession, because spiritual directional usually involves talking about the general troubles and concerns of life that affect the spiritual life, including sexual difficulties and problems with spouses.

 

And all this applies to well-intentioned people. Narcissists and abusers use confession and direction as ways to seduce people, both boys and women.

Here, on the subject, is the background of a lawsuit that was just filed by a woman: 

She said she met Wenthe [a priest of the archdiocese of St. Paul] when she took a class for adults converting to Catholicism. Wenthe was a speaker for the course.

A spiritual adviser told the woman she should seek out a priest to be her “regular confessor” for spiritual comfort, guidance and consolation. The woman asked about Wenthe, and the adviser agreed he would be a good choice.

She subsequently went to confession with Wenthe at least four times, she told police. At times, he took her confession in a private sitting room adjacent to his bedroom in the church rectory.

The woman said, “I thought I was talking to God.”

The first sexual contact occurred in his bedroom when the defendant lay on top of her and asked her to perform oral sex, she said.

“I remember pleading with him that we should stop, that degree of sin mattered and we should stop. He became incredibly frustrated with me. He made me feel like I had done this to him and that I was obligated to finish the job,” she said, according to the complaint.

The two began to have sexual encounters about every two weeks. Meanwhile, she continued to attend Mass and receive communion from him, something she said “restored her faith in him as a priest.”

At times, the defendant invited her to the sacristy after the service — an area of the church containing vestments and furnishings that is not accessible to the general public — and they had sex.

The woman told police her eating disorder worsened. “I was subconsciously using my eating behaviors as a way to punish myself for what I believed was my sin,” she wrote in an October 2006 letter to a high-ranking church official, describing the relationship.

Police met with Wenthe and his attorney in August. He acknowledged the sexual contact and that it continued regularly for several months. He said he was sent for treatment by the archdiocese for a “generalized anxiety disorder.”

“He stated he believed the entire time he was acting as a friend to (the woman) and not a priest,” the complaint said.

 

State law forbids sexual contact between members of the clergy and those they are counseling.

It is not clear whether the violation of the state law is a criminal or civil matter. If it was a criminal matter, church officials do not seem to have reported matters to the police.

The archdiocese sent Wenthe for a psychological assessment and treatment and he was returned to active ministry in August 2006 “with certain conditions and restrictions,” McGrath said.

But once a priest had committed such an egregious violation of the sacraments, can he ever be trusted again?

 

 

 

 

 

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Ex-Prostitute-Priest Sues Pro-Life Group

in abortion, Catholic Church 11 Comments Tags: , ,

Raymond Gravel is in the news again.

 

He is a colorful figure.

 

Back in 2006 the Globe and Mail (article no longer available on line) reported

Rev. Raymond Gravel had to get permission from the Vatican to run in a federal by-election. Now, the former prostitute who used to work in gay leather bars has to convince the voters of Repentigny riding that he is the right man to represent them.

(snip)

He followed a childhood dream and entered the priesthood in 1982 after a rough-and-tumble life that included work as a prostitute and in gay leather bars between 1976 and 1982.

Mr. Gravel gave up prostitution after being so severely beaten by a client that he ended up in hospital.

His tenure as a priest has not been low key, either. An outspoken advocate, Mr. Gravel has publicly decried the Roman Catholic Church’s position on same-sex marriage. He also received a disciplinary letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI.

Mr. Gravel was also one of 19 priests who created a tempest in February when they signed an open letter criticizing the church’s position on same-sex marriage and its opposition to ordaining gays.

“I would say that 50 per cent of the priests in Quebec are gay, but if I became a priest, it’s because I’m a believer and I believe in the message of Christ,” he said in an interview last year with Fugues, a gay magazine. 

Life Site News criticized him, and he is suing them for $500,000. They report 

Regular readers of LSN will need no introduction to Fr. Raymond Gravel – he’s the Quebec priest and former Member of Canada’s Parliament who stated on a radio interview in 2004: “I am pro-choice and there is not a bishop on earth that will prevent me from receiving Communion, not even the Pope.”

Then, in 2008, he defended the awarding of Canada’s highest civilian award to the country’s ‘father of abortion’ – arch-abortionist Henry Morgentaler! During his political career he was rated as ‘pro-abortion’ by the political arm of the pro-life movement. He has also repeatedly and publicly criticized his church’s teachings on homosexuality and abortion.

Even though LifeSiteNews reports have overwhelmingly reported on what Fr. Gravel himself has publicly said, he is suing us for libel. Among other things, he argues that he isn’t pro-abortion, but he has said in the past that he is “pro-choice.”

He’s demanding $500,000 in damages – which, coincidentally, is a full year’s budget for us. That would put LifeSiteNews out of business!

One does wonder how Gravel got himself ordained and has gotten away way with his public stances. As a former sex-worker he may well have some useful information about members of the hierarchy. Comment dit-on “blackmail” en français?

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Women and Confession

in anticlericalism 27 Comments Tags: , ,

 

Crowhill makes the point:

There is a perspective on the problem of (heterosexual) abuse that I think Catholics avoid — for obvious reasons.

When a man gives a woman spiritual counsel, it is an intrinsically intimate thing and the possibility of sexual entanglement is very real. The husband is the head of the home and of his wife. When a priest gives “spiritual direction” to a married woman, he is usurping the husband’s place and creating sexual tension.

No man, priest or not, has any business giving spiritual counsel to any woman who is not his wife. And no woman has any business giving spiritual counsel to a man.

I have been researching anticlericalism. It is much milder in Protestant countries than in Catholic countries, where it sometimes becomes murderous.

 

A recurring theme in Catholic anticlericalism is the resentment and jealousy that the husband feels when his wife starts talking intimately to another man, whether in confession or spiritual direction.

 

Jules Michelet, the French historian, was horrified by this intrusion into the relationship of husband and wife. He objected to confession because priests asked detailed questions about sexual practices. One historian has observed that French disliked priests “because through the confessional, where the penitents were mostly women, they exercised power over men’s sexuality.”

 

A really sore point in France for Catholic men was contraception. If the married couple practiced coitus interruptus, the wife was blameless; the sin was solely the husband’s. The French bishops in 1870 at the First Vatican Council were going to ask the Council to allow priests to give absolution to a man if he was practicing coitus interruptus, but the Council adjourned because of  the political situation before the matter could be discussed.

 

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The Basic Questions

in clergy sex abuse scandal, clericalism, Narcissism, psychopathy 14 Comments Tags: , ,

Rick asks the fundamental questions.

What intrinsic deterrents did the abusers overcome to begin their sordid behaviors? What spiritual blindness did the bishop have to see this a clinical problem? These are the core questions. They are both spiritual. Enforcement both internal and external to the Church are certainly factors, but essentially they are not intrinsic. What happens to a man spiritually that would incline him to take advantage of minors to satisfy his own lusts? If we can answer this we have the most important (but not the only) solution to the problem of clerical sex abuse.

The abusers, as far as I can tell from the documents, range from narcissists to psychopaths. They have no feeling for the pain, sometimes literal, physical pain, they are inflicting on the victims.  I don’t think that some of the abuser were even believers; they were atheists, who saw the priesthood as an easy life that gave them access to victims and which protected them from prosecution. Those who were not atheists often pickled their brains in alcohol (and more recently, drugs); alcohol does bad things to the judgment center of the brain.

 

How did these extreme narcissists and psychopaths and atheists get themselves ordained? There was a gross failure of discernment in the seminary, even when the bishops and seminary officials had plenty of warning signs (read the murder-suicide case of Ryan Erickson).

 

The bishops and the officials in the Vatican also suffered from narcissism and a lack of empathy. In any hierarchy, business or ecclesiastical, those people who are cold-hearted and are willing to step on other people on their way to the top rise to positions of authority. The narcissism becomes a culture, clericalism.

The phenomena are both spiritual and psychological. How to keep narcissists out of positions of authority? I wish there were an easy answer; but conditions in the church, chiefly clericalism, both attracted and enabled narcissists and psychopaths. The case of Maciel is probably one of the most disturbing in the history of the Church. Benedict rightly called  the psychopathic Maciel  “a false prophet” – but John Paul praised and enabled him.

 

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The German Trials of Clerical Abusers

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Germany 11 Comments Tags: ,

Three quotes about clerical sexual abuse and its causes:

 

In the sold mass of so-called “regrettable individual lapses,” in the over-tolerant attitude of clerical superiors, and in the lying propaganda of this international body under the guidance of Roman or Vatican laws, we perceive symptoms of a disease leading to the complete internal decay of an institution

 

All who today bear the name of Christian share responsibility for all those ecclesiastical sins of past days whose expiation the Lord of righteousness is now completing.

 

We must not blame the agents of these deeds so much as the system. It is a system which has brought untold misery on mankind… Perhaps Saints can manage to love according to the rules of these Orders; certainly ordinary, natural man will only achieve sham sanctity.

 

These quotes seem apropos of what the Catholic Church is going through now. Unfortunately, they were all made in 1936-1937 – in Germany – by Nazis.

 

Hitler had long railed against the corruption of the monasteries. He had been in a Benedictine school for a year – there is some suspicion that something happened there, but only vague and circumstantial evidence.

 

In 1936 the Nazis began the Sittlichkeitsprozesse, the Immorality Trials, Eventually about 250 priests, religious, and employees of Catholic institutions were found guilty. The German bishops admitted the truth of these cases, but said they had handled them when they know about them. Apparently the bishops had usually dismissed the offenders, but they had not reported the offenses to the police. The bishops also objected to the way the press was portraying what happened. Sound familiar?

 

The Nazis had a field day attacking the Church. The failure of the Church allowed the Nazis to seize the high moral ground (!), and they enjoyed lecturing the bishops about morality. The Nazis also lied, distorted, fabricated evidence, suborned perjury, and otherwise behaved like Nazis, claiming that 7.000 abusers had been convicted.

 

How widespread was corruption in the German Church? Were the Nazis right (gag) in the substance of their charges? History has many ironies, but this one…!

 

(The quotes are from a  1940 book The Persecution of the Church in the Third Reich by Walther Mariaux, a German Jesuit in the Curia who worked with materials smuggled out of Germany).

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Clerical Mendacity and the Information Age

in clergy sex abuse scandal 9 Comments Tags: , ,

Jason Berry gave a talk on the crisis on the church. One of his main points is that the Vatican and the bishops are unable to cope with the instantaneous flood of information that the internet has provided. You shouldn’t do anything that you don’t want the whole world to find about, because as soon as one person knows it, the whole world will know it. The Vatican doesn’t understand this, and the Williamson affair demonstrated. No one googled Williamson to discover his peculiar opinions on the Holocaust.

 

The convenient lie has long been a staple of church (and other) bureaucracies.  Jason called it a culture of mendacity. When can tell an untruth is a vexed moral question, and sometimes the line is hard to draw. The classic example is the Gestapo asking you where the Jews are hiding. But ordinarily, one is obliged to tell the truth if the person with whom one is communicating has, in the ordinary course of life, the right to receive the truth.

 

Church officials have never learned this ordinary lesson.

 

The Rev. Martin O’Laughlen, when he was 29, became sexually involved with a 16-year-old girl: 

Father O’Loghlen had sex on several occasions with Julie Malcolm in the 1960s while she was a student at Bishop Amat High School in nearby La Puente, Ms. Malcolm said. Nearly three decades after the abuse ended, Father O’Loghlen tried to reach Ms. Malcolm, who was then living in Phoenix.

After receiving several phone messages from Father O’Loghlen, Ms. Malcolm filed a complaint with the Diocese of Phoenix and later filed a lawsuit against the priest and his religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. In 1999, she settled the lawsuit for $100,000, Ms. Malcolm said.

 

O’Loughlen went on to become Provincial of his order and served on the sexual offenses review board for the Los Angeles archdiocese.  

…the provincial, the Rev. Donal McCarthy, who now oversees the religious order in California, wrote to the archdiocese in March 2009, asking that Father O’Loghlen serve as a priest in Los Angeles. The letter included assurances that Father O’Loghlen “manifested no behavioral problems in the past that would indicate that he might deal with minors in an inappropriate manner” and had “never been involved in an incident or exhibited behavior which called into question his fitness or suitability for priestly ministry due to alcohol, substance abuse, sexual misconduct, financial irregularities, or other causes.”

He was appointed as an associate pastor in the San Dimas church four months later. Father O’Loghlen also worked at the parish’s elementary school.

The archdiocese’s Vicar for Clergy’s Office “did not fully consult” other records of the priest’s “previous assignments in the archdiocese, which would have indicated that he admitted to having had a sexual relationship with a female minor,” Mr. Tamberg said. 

In 2009 O’Laughlen’s name was on the internet; he was listed in BishopAccountability.org’s database, with a link to the report that the LA archdiocese had released.

 

Church officials do not think they are bound by the same moral laws that we mere laymen are bound by. A diplomat, it is said, is a man chosen to lie for his country; do bishops and religious superiors think that their mission from God is to lie for the Church?

 

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The Courage of Women – “I leave for heaven”

in Catholic Church, France, Women in Church 5 Comments Tags: , , ,

As Chesterton said, the existence of every human being is a testimony to the courage of women. There is so much bad news about the failings of Catholic priests and religious, it is good to remember the examples that shed a light of divine light on our troubled existence.

 

Women and women religious in France during the Nazi occupation were active in the Resistance. They faced a heavy penalty if caught. Here is how one nun responded: 

 

Women, religious and laity alike, were particularly remarkable for their bravery not only in hiding wanted persons and weapons, but also for gathering intelligence, and producing forged documents, from identity documents to ration cards. Even more remarkable was their fortitude when caught. Mother Elisabeth de l’Eucharistie, for example, was arrested in Lyons in March 1944 for concealing arms in her convent. Sent to a concentration camp, in order to fortify the courage of women singled out for extermination because unable to work, she voluntarily joined their number. On Good Friday 1945 she mounted with them the lorry that was to take her to the gas chambers of Ravensbrück, saying, ‘I am leaving for Heaven’ (‘Je pars pour le Ciel‘), adding almost casually, ‘Let them know in Lyons.’ (Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France.  W. D. Halls, p. 217)

Another witness said she volunteered to take the place of a mother who was being sent to the gas chamber.

She was born Élise Rivet in Algeria, and died at the age of 46 on March 30, 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war. If the Catholic Church wants to canonize anyone, it could find few better candidates.

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Ignacio Matamoros o Peregrino

in Camino de Santiago, Jesuits, Uncategorized 13 Comments Tags: , ,

 

There is a well-known story about Ignatius of Loyola.

 

He was a soldier and, like Don Quixote, his favorite reading was books of chivalry. After he was wounded and recuperating all that he had to read was lives of the saints, and this reading led to his conversion.

 

After his conversion he was travelling to Montserrat on a donkey and met a Moor who scoffed at Mary’s perpetual virginity. What I had forgotten was that of course by this time there were no Moors left in Spain; they had all been expelled, so it must have been a morisco, an imperfectly converted Moslem. I just learned that moro also meant a sodomite.

 

Ignatius was seething, and the Moor went ahead. Ignatius was mulling whether to kill the Moor with his dagger for insulting Mary. Ignatius came to a crossroad and let the donkey choose the way. If the donkey chose the road that the Moor had taken, Ignatius would catch up with him and kill him. If they donkey chose the other way, Ignatius would let the matter go.

 

Fortunately for the Moor, the donkey chose the other path.

 

What I just learned was the last episode in this story.

 

When he finally arrived at Montserrat, Ignatius once and all for exchanges the dagger for a pilgrim’s staff at the altar of Our Lady. 

Ulrike Strasser explains the significance of this: 

 

The contrasting phallic images of dagger and staff are emblematic of a shift in masculine identities. The dagger stands for a life of warfare, aggression, and the defense of women’s honor. The pilgrim’s staff stands for a life of service to God, wandering the earth, forgoing violence. By trading one for the other, Ignatius is changed from a soldier to a soldier of Christ. He will continue to be brave but will now be brave on behalf of God. He will no longer think of “a certain lady” but pledge all his loyalty to the Queen of Heaven. 

(Ulrike Strasser, “’The First Form and Grace’: Ignatius of Loyola and the Reformation of Maculinity” in Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn, eds., Masculinity in the Reformation Era, p. 60)

 

What Strasser does not mention, but which must have been prominent in Ignatius’s mind, and which I could scarcely miss, having recently walked 500 miles on the Camino Frances, is that Ignatius is exchanging the model of Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moor-Slayer) for Santiago Peregrino (St. James the Pilgrim). 

 

 

No longer Ignacio Matamoros, but now Ignacio Peregrino, taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

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German Catholicism and Celibacy – A Short History

in anticlericalism, Celibacy, clergy sex abuse scandal, Germany, homosexuality, Masculinity, Moral Theology, Pope Benedict, Vatican 9 Comments Tags: , ,

 Supi, celibacy is going to disappear,and you can marry me – or?

 

German Catholics have long manifested a discontent with clerical celibacy. One of Luther’s first acts was to abolish clerical celibacy; Germans currently criticize Zwangszölibat, compulsory celibacy, forced celibacy. As Cardinal Brandmüller points out, the term Zwangszölibat misrepresents the discipline; no one is forced to be celibate.

 

Now a third of German theologians have come out asking for an end to clerical celibacy (and also demanding women priests and the acceptance of gay couples and divorced and remarried couples while we’re at it).

The appeal, published in newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung’s Friday edition, called on the church’s leadership to stop excluding gay couples and remarried Christians.

“The Church also needs married priests and women holding positions in the clergy,” the appeal said—in clear defiance of the Vatican’s dogmas.

In Germany theologians need the Vatican’s approval to hold chairs of Catholic theology, so this situatSupim cleibacy is going to disappear,a nd oyu can marry me, or…ion is ripe for conflict.

 

Josef Ratzinger himself at one time had asked for a discussion of the possibility of married priests.

 

The background of this conflict is the tension between German (and other national) Catholicisms and ultramontane Catholicism espoused by the Vatican, and behind that at least in part are conflicting images of masculinity: the one that sees sexual expression as an almost universal, necessary, and good aspect of masculinity and the other that sees celibacy as an expression of masculine self-discipline.

 

During the Kulturkampf in German (c. 1875) the Catholic Church was attacked as feminized and perverse. This accusation stung Catholic men, and a reform group in Munich, the Krausgesellschaft,  arose which tried to show that masculinity and Catholicism were compatible. 

 

 One of the aims of this group was the end of clerical celibacy, because it kept young men with healthy drives out of the priesthood and let in perverse types such as were exposed in a series of scandals around 1900 – scandals which turned out to be baseless. Furthermore, celibacy kept these healthy young German men from reproducing, and degenerate types, many of these Catholic reformers went on to say, were reproducing, and they should be sterilized. And German priests should produce German children because the Aryan race was the purest and most important race and the Jews were polluting it and… I think you can see where this ended up.

 

Historians have been puzzled why Nazism arose in Munich; later of course the conflict between Nazism and the Catholic Church was bitter, but at the beginning Catholic reformers – and remember, these were reformers –  were espousing naturalist and racial theories in Munich. The young Heinrich Himmler was a pious Catholic university student in Munich.

 

This is not to say that the current crop of German reformers are racialists or Nazis, but the Vatican has a long memory, and suspects with justice that demands for a change in the discipline of clerical celibacy often lead to demands for radical changes in Christian doctrine. The theologians who coupled  a demand for the end to clerical celibacy with a demand for the acceptance of homosexual couples have simply strengthened the Vatican’s determination not to make any major changes in the discipline of celibacy at this time. 

(The information about the Krausgesellschaft comes from Derek Hastings’ article  “Fears of a Feminized Church: Catholicism, Clerical Celibacy, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Wilhelmine Germany.”)

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Celibacy and the Mission of the Church

in anticlericalism, Celibacy 7 Comments Tags: , ,

In Männer Glauben Anders, Markus Hofer sketches the situation in the early church: the married men heading local churches and the wandering celibate missionary.

 

In Death Comes to the Archbishop, it is clear that the missionary priests must be celibate, because they have to be ready to go anywhere, into dangerous situations, on a moment’s notice. Celibacy can be lonely, especially for a missionary far from his native land and extended family, but it is necessary to spread the kingdom. The model of the celibate missionary won out in the Western Church, although it was not observed with great care. The constant legislation against clerical marriage and clerical concubinage indicates that priests were not following the discipline. For a priest who lived in a village his whole life it was hard to see the missionary purpose of celibacy.

 

After Ignatius of Loyola’s conversion, he established for his followers an intensely masculine environment in which they had to be ready to go anywhere at anytime to do the work of God. It was an adventurous masculine life, and obviously incommpatible with marriage. Ignatius would upset the local clergy in Spain when he arrived and tried to get the local bishop to enforce the discipline of celibacy.

 

The missionaries of the Church have an obvious connection with celibacy. While I respect married Protestant missionaries, I wonder how they can bring their wives and especially their children into dangerous environments. These do not have to be in the recesses of Africa or New Guinea. Many urban areas are dangerous, both in the United States and Europe. A priest in Naples who tried to keep young men out of organized crime was murdered by the Mafia.

 

Perhaps (and I emphasize perhaps) the missionary vitality of the Western Church as compared with the Eastern Churches is at least in part explained by the celibacy of it clergy.

 

As to celibacy being a sign in a sex-obsessed age – I don’t know. We do not know how often violations, even criminal violations, occur; but they get a lot of publicity and they discredit celibacy, and give evidence for the belief that celibates are hypocrites. However, I have been researching the anticlericalism of the Spanish Civil War, and the anticlericals had a special and intense hatred for truly celibate priests. Some priests were told their lives would be spared if they had sex; the priests refused to violate their vows and were shot – shot if they were lucky. Sexual torture was a favorite weapon of the Republican anticlericals.  So perhaps celibacy is a sign of contradiction, and a necessary one.

 

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Death Comes to the Archbishop

in Camino de Santiago, Southwest, Spain 4 Comments Tags: ,

I have been reading Death Comes to the Archbishop. It is balm for the soul after the other stuff I have been reading: the endless tales of clerical crimes, and the horrors visited by the anticlerical Republicans upon the often innocent priests of Spain. Willa Cather traduces Father Martinez, and is somewhat condescending to the Indians and the Hispanics, but she loved New Mexico and is sympathetic to French Catholicism.  My wife informs me that Cather taught my wife’s grandfather (Pittsburg High School, Class of 06). Cather wore mannish tweeds and sat on the edge of the desk – very daring.

 

Toward the end of the book Cather recounts a story told about Junipero Serra, the missionary to California. He and a companion had set off across the desert with only one day’s provisions.  On the second day they came to three cottonwood trees and an adobe house with a Mexican family: a father, mother, and small child who had a pet lamb. The family welcomes and fed them; Serra wanted to question them how they fed their flock, but he was exhausted and fell asleep. In the morning the family was gone, Serra assumed to tend their flocks, but a breakfast was laid for the Franciscans. 

When Junipero reached his goal those who welcomed him couldn’t believe he had survived the desert. Sierra told them that the Mexican family by the three cottonwood trees had saved them. They knew the three cottonwood trees, but there was no Mexican family there, his hosts insisted. They travelled back to the site: there were the trees, but no house. 

Junipero  remembered: 

When he bade his hosts good-night, he did indeed stoop over the little boy in blessing’ and the child had lifted his hand, and with his tiny finger made the cross upon Father Junipero’s forehead.

 

For They had returned 

to play Their first parts, in the persons of a humble Mexican family, the lowliest of the lowly, the poorest of the poor,– in a wilderness at the end of the world, where angels could scarcely find them. 

Years ago, a friend of mine was a law student living in Turkey Thicket in northeast Washington, D. C.  When I was visiting him, someone came to the door. He answered it and spoke for a few minutes to a woman, and then came back in with some potholders which the woman was selling. He explained to me that his Croatian grandmother had told him that Jesus and Mary often wander the earth in the guise of a poor person to test our hearts.  One never knew whether the poor person who asked for help was the Son or God or the Queen of Heaven – and did it matter?

 

In the novel, Latour, as he lay dying in his study in Santa Fe, reviews his life. All his past life becomes contemporaneous with him. When I was walking the Camino de Santiago, I wasn’t sure what I should be doing. I found myself reviewing my past life, all the people I had known, from my playmates when I was three years old up to the present.

 

One person I had worked with was Norm Rebhorn – he was my second level supervisor when I was a federal investigator. I came into investigations under unusual circumstances, and he gave me a break and confidence. He worked out of Philadelphia. He told us that he was often approached by beggars. One guy said he needed money for lunch. Norm said, sure, I was just going to have lunch too. Let me take you to McDonald’s. He guy sat with Norm, grumbling through his cheeseburger. Another time a beggar approached Norm and asked for money. Norm asked him what he wanted it for and the beggar said he needed a drink. Norm gave him the money, saying that he understood perfectly, every now and then a guy needed a drink.

 

I read John Chrysostom when I wake up at 3 AM from my nightmares induced by reading about sexual abuse. Chrysostom is the Father of Almsgiving. He told his flock in Antioch and Constantinople that they were too harsh in cross-examining poor men who asked for help. Does God cross-examine us when we ask for His help? I would be at a loss to answer His questions – but fortunately He gives when we ask and even when we don’t ask, when perhaps someone asks for us.

 

When I walked the Camino, I met some people who were begging their way along it. One was a young woman outside the church in Pamplona. I gave her some money, and I thought I should accompany it with a fatherly lecture that this is not a good idea for a young woman to do, but my Spanish is weak, and I thought I could be misinterpreted, so I let it go.

 

Spain is full of unemployed young men (45% unemployment of those under 30) and some were begging their way along the Camino. I gave a euro or two to them. Once as I entered a town I rested, and the young peregrino asked for 5 euros to pay for a bed at the refugio tonight. I gave him 10, and asked him to say a prayer for me when he got to Compostela.  Probably just another young Spaniard down on his luck, but who knows? And does it matter?

 

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What is a Vocation?

in Celibacy 14 Comments Tags: , ,

Several of the commentators have raised a question which has never been clearly addressed by the Church, at least to my satisfaction. Catholics believe each person has a vocation, a calling by God to a state of life, single, celibate, married, priesthood, religious, hermit, missionary, etc.

 

The Churches responsibility is to discern a vocation to the priesthood: does the person who says he hears a call from God to be a priest in fact have such a call? Certain objective signs may indicate the person is mistaken: he may not have the health or intellectual or physical abilities to be a priest: e.g.. at an extreme,  a deaf-mute. Or for other reasons he may not be suitable.

 

I know that pious and orthodox Catholic women sometimes feel a call to be a priest. The Church says that they do not have such a call. I have explained to them that they may indeed have a special call to the priesthood that is more important than the sacramental priesthood and which the sacramental priesthood was instituted to serve: the priesthood of the baptized, by which we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to God.

 

The call to celibacy and the call to marriage are distinct. The Eastern Churches, both the Orthodox and those in union with Rome, ordain married men.

 

But how has the Church decided that God will call only celibates to the priesthood in the Western Church, while he calls married men to the priesthood in the Eastern Churches (and recently he calls married Protestant and Anglican ministers to the priesthood in the Western Church)? When God calls men does he conform himself to the changing dictates of canon law?

 

I think the concept of vocation has to be examined more closely. Mostly, except in rare instances, in is expressed through the needs of the community. Does the Western Church (unlike the Eastern Churches) need only celibate priests? Perhaps, but if the need is that clear, why can’t it be explained clearly? And the explanation has to refer to the needs of the Western Church, not the universal value of celibacy.

 

Eastern Churches in union with Rome have been long forbidden to ordain married men in the United States – the Irish bishops thought it would confuse the faithful, but then the Irish don’t regard the Eastern Churches is really Catholic. Recently, some of the Eastern Churches have decided that they are self-governing and do not need to heed this prohibition, and are ordaining married men in the United States. Their experience will show whether married priests can function well in Western society.

 

For my part, I would rather have a married priest celebrate the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom than a celibate priest do a dreary or narcissistic version of the Mass.

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More Reflections on Celibacy and Priesthood

in Celibacy 21 Comments Tags: ,

The Eastern churches and the Western church agree that there is an affinity between celibacy and the priesthood. The episcopal office is the fullness of the priesthood, and in all Eastern churches only celibates can be consecrated bishops.

 

The question is whether only celibates should be ordained to the priesthood. The Western church makes an exception and ordains some married men (former Anglican priests and Protestant ministers).

 

The call to celibacy is distinct from the call to orders. Newman, even when he was an Anglican, felt called to celibacy. The theory is that men are called to celibacy and the church chooses some of them to be priests. The reality is different: men feel called to the priesthood, and accept celibacy more or less willingly as part of the bargain.

 

A celibate priesthood creates problems; so does a married priesthood. The trials of ministers’ families are well known in the United States. Can you imagine what it would be like to be a priest and have several rebellious teenagers to supervise? Paul said that a bishop should be a man who can govern his own household well; Paul was celibate.

 

There is also the difficulty in combining a married and celibate priesthood in the same church. My understanding is that in the Orthodox churches celibates who are not monks are not assigned to parish duties. They live in the bishop’s household so that they have a community to support them.

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