The Best and Worst

in anticlericalism, clergy sex abuse scandal, priesthood, Spain 9 Comments Tags: , , ,

Pope Benedict  has approved the beatification of six more martyrs of the Spanish Civil War. Because they were martyred, a proof of a miracle is not required, only that they had been killed because of hatred of Christ and had forgiven their persecutors. 

About 2,000 more cases are wending their way through the Vatican. About 10,000 priests religious, and laity were killed during the war because of hatred of Christianity. It has been on the pope’s mind recently; although much of the criticism of the clergy and sexual abuse is fair, some of it begins to look like the anticlericalism of the Spanish Civil War.

 

I have been researching the backgrounds of clerical abusers in old newspapers. One, William Kuder, was loathsome. He abused a 9 year old boy with oral and anal rape, and used confession and threats to keep it secret.

 

Kuder can’t be blamed on dissent or Vatican II; he was ordained in the mid-1930s. He turned up in an old newspaper because he accompanied a black prisoner, who was Catholic, to the execution chamber.

 

On the same day, September 4, 1936, the newspaper headline was Spanish Premier Resigns Post: City of Irun Engulfed in Flames. The retreating Republican forces had set fire to the city (film of evacuation).

 

They did something else. 

In the early morning the monks of Fuenterrabia monastery had been shot by the defenders of Irun, Their bodies, clothed in white robes, could be seen lying on the roof of the monastery from vantage points in Hendaye [in France]. 

The Republicans also shot the bishop of Valladolid, who happened to be in Irun.

 

What to make of it? –  the wheat and the tares, the best and the worst. And how to sort them out?

 

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Light of the World: Benedict on Homosexuality and the Priesthood

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The Jesuit of the Future

Benedict sees homosexuality as incompatible with the priesthood, for two reasons, First, the Latin priesthood is celibate and celibacy does not have the same meaning for a homosexual and a heterosexual and second because the homosexual has a distorted view of the relationship of men and women.

Homosexuality is incompatible with the priestly vocation. Otherwise, celibacy would lose its meaning as a renunciation. It would be extremely dangerous if celibacy became a sort of pretext for bringing people into the priesthood who don’t want to get married anyway. For, in the end, their attitude toward man and woman is somehow distorted, off center and, in any case, is not within the direction of creation of which we have spoke. (p. 152)

I think Benedict is both overstating his case and underestimating the real situation.

As to the first: It seems to me that a homosexual can take a vow of celibacy, just as a poor person can take a vow of poverty. Obviously a rich person who renounces his possession does something different from a poor person who renounces possessions he does not have, but I do not see why a poor person cannot take a vow of poverty or a homosexual a vow of celibacy.

Some homosexuals may have a distorted view of male-female relationships (as do many heterosexuals), but I do not know if that is universal. If a homosexual has a sincere desire to be chaste and has a normal masculine personality, I do not see why he would not make a good priest. If homosexuals were in the priesthood in about the same proportion as the general population (2-3%) I doubt that there would be any problem.

Benedict is concerned about having the priesthood viewed as a gay profession.

The Congregation for Education issued a decision a few years ago to the effect that homosexual candidates cannot become priests because their sexual orientation estranges them from the proper sense of paternity, for the intrinsic nature of priestly being. The selection of candidates to the priesthood must therefore be very careful. The greatest attention is needed here in order to prevent the intrusion of this kind of ambiguity and to head off a situation where the celibacy of priests would practically end up being identified with the tendency to homosexuality. (pp. 152-153)

But Benedict is deceiving himself if he thinks that the Vatican’s directives to exclude homosexuals from the seminary are being observed. The Dominicans ordained a leading gay activist. In Quebec a male prostitute was ordained. The Jesuit novices of the Western province had a drag party and put it on the internet. Seminary rectors, such as Father Donald Cozzens, who are in the best position to know, say that half or more than half of seminarians are homosexual. A Los Angeles Times poll indicated that young priests are both more orthodox and more gay than the older generation – and the two groups overlap (the data are all in my book Sacrilege).

David Berger is a Thomist who moved in conservative Catholic circles and came out of the closet in March. He claimed, and I think with much truth, that the liturgically conservative Catholicism that Benedict is encouraging is especially attractive to gays (not only to gays, I hasten to add). The scandal of the ultra-conservative seminary of St. Polten in Austria is symptomatic.

If Benedict thinks that anyone is paying any attention to Vatican directives about not ordaining homosexuals, he is sadly mistaken. There is perhaps more discretion now – no more photos of novices in drag on the Internet, but the reality remains unchanged. The priesthood in many parts of Europe and America has become a heavily gay profession. The chief effect will be to encourage the heterosexual male tendency to stay away from involvement in the church, and especially to keep their sons away from contact with gay clergy.

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A Jesuit Atheist – Anyone Surprised?

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Roger Lenaers, a Jesuit pastor in the diocese of Innsbruck, is busy preaching his version of atheist Christianity.

„Wie sieht dann dieses moderne und zwar zugleich christliche Gottesbild aus? Es muss atheistisch sein und daher eine Absage enthalten an alles, was mit dem Gott-in-der-Höhe zu tun hat. Und das ist kein leichtes Unternehmen, denn das Glaubensbekenntnis und die Bibel und die Liturgie und die ganze Moral und die ganze Kirchengeschichte sind voll von Gott-in-der-Höhe”, meint er.

What does this modern and at the same time Christian image of God look like? It must be atheist and therefore contain a denial of everything that has to do with God-on-High. And that is no easy task, because the profession of faith  and the Bible and the liturgy and all of morality and the whole history of the church is full of God-on-High, he said.

He wants make it clear that this is to simply an extreme statement of apophatic theology, but a rejection of everything Christianity and Judaism have ever said about God:

“Wenn die Bibel dann nicht mehr als Wort Gottes gelten kann, ist sie Menschenwort und ist sie nicht länger unantastbar, unfehlbar”, meint er schließlich.

„When the Bible can no more be valued as the Word of God, it is a human word and is no longer  sacrosanct, infallible,” he said in conclusion. 
Weder der Papst noch die Bischöfe können sich für den Jesuiten übrigens “Wortführer Gottes” nennen. Auch ihre Worte sind nur “Menschenworte, ohne aus sich bindende Kraft zu haben”. Ihr Lehramt sei “eine Illusion”.

Weder der Papst noch die Bischöfe können sich für den Jesuiten übrigens “Wortführer Gottes” nennen. Auch ihre Worte sind nur “Menschenworte, ohne aus sich bindende Kraft zu haben”. Ihr Lehramt sei “eine Illusion”.

 

 

 

 Neither the Pope nor the bishops can by the way be called for the Jesuits as the   “spokesmen of God.” All their words are only “human words, without any binding power in themselves.” Their teaching office is “an illusion.”

I hope that this belief (or rather unbelief) is uncommon even among the Jesuits, although my optimism may be mistaken.

Lenaers’ preaching is the sort of thing that drives believing Catholics into joining schismatic groups like the Society of Pius X.

A self-proclaimed atheist is a Jesuit and a pastor of a church, a priest in good standing in the Roman Catholic Church, but those who want to have the Tridentine liturgy are beyond the pale and are driven in schism.

The most charitable interpretation is that the good Jesuit is just stupid and thinks that metaphors are meant to be taken literally – “Jesus can’t be the Lamb of God; he doesn’t have four feet and wool, so we can’t believe in him!” Or perhaps Linaers is like the Soviet cosmonaut who came back to earth and reported that he didn’t see God in the sky, and that therefore God must not exist.

And as to the hierarchy’s toleration of Christian atheism – the Jesuits are influential, and will remain influential long after they have given up the last vestiges of Christianity.

PS

Lenaers is active in the group Wir Sind Kirche, and even some of their members express doubts about  things that he has said, such as

Man kann die Botschaften, die sie enthalten (die mythologischen Formulierungen unseres Traditionsgutes: Jesus als Sohn Gottes, Jungfrauengeburt, Auferstehung, Himmelfahrt, Anm.MH), herausschälen und sie so formulieren, dass sie nicht mehr kollidieren mit der richtigen Grundintention der Modernität, dass es keine übernatürliche Welt gibt.“

One can dig out the message that these (the mythological formulations of our tradition heritage: Jesus as the Son of God, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and so forth) contain and formulate them so that they no longer collide with the correct fundamental intention of modernity, that there exists no supernatural world.

Lenaers, or Bultmann-Light, suffers from the fundamental narcissism of German intellectuals who have not noticed that about 99% of the world has a strong sense that the supernatural realm exists, and that Pentecostalism is the fastest growing form of Christianity. Someone should tell Lenaers that Modern Man does not equal German University Professor.

 

 

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Light of the World – The Williamson Affair

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Archbishop Lefebvre was unhappy with the Second Vatican Council and with the way the Church was going. He established the Society of Saint Pius X, which had some success (600,000 members, 500 priests) and became increasingly alienated from Rome. One cannot have sacraments without bishops, so to assure that the Society would have a line of bishops to consecrate priests, Lefebvre consecrated bishops without the permission of the pope. This entailed automatic excommunication for both Lefebvre and for the bishops he had consecrated. 

A similar situation exists in China. Chinese bishops have consecrated bishops chosen by the Communist government without first getting permission of the pope. These bishops also are excommunicated. (p. 22) 

But “when such a bishop professes his acknowledgment both of the primacy in general and also that of the currently reigning pope in particular, his excommunication is revoked, because there is no more reason for it.” (p. 22) 

The Vatican is trying to regularize the situation in China and unify the two factions of the Church – those who acknowledge the primacy of the pope and those who by their action have rejected it. 

The bishops in the Society of Saint Pius X were not excommunicate because of their views on Vatican II but because of their action in the irregular consecration. Once they acknowledged the primacy, they “had to be absolved form excommunication.” 

When the Vatican revoked the excommunications of four bishops in the Society of Pius X, it soon discovered that one of them, Williamson, was a Holocaust denier. He in fact had never been a member of the Catholic Church, but had gone straight from Anglicanism to the Society of Saint Pius X (this is another complication which Benedict did not address – how do you lift the excommunication of someone who was never a member of the Church?). 

It would have taken about three minutes on Google to discover Williamson’s bizarre views, but Benedict admitted “none of us went on the Internet to find out what sort of person we were dealing with.” (p. 121) 

Napoleon said that one should never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence. 

This failure let the tabloid press have a field day: “Nazi Pope Welcomes Holocaust Denier.” etc. Yes, quite unfair, as Benedict complained, but incompetence has consequences. 

However, Benedict says that if he know about Williamson’s views he would have handled the matter differently, “the first step would have been to separate the Williamson case form the others.” (p. 121) 

This calls for follow up questions. Why would Benedict have handled it differently? How would he have handled it?  He said that excommunication “had” to be lifted once the bishops acknowledged the primacy. Where in canon law does it say the bishop’s views can be taken into consideration in deciding whether to lift an excommunication? 

Williamson was not accused of heresy, but of holding an erroneous opinion about an historical event (no doubt from the worst of motives – but some people can’t believe the Holocaust happened because they can’t believe that human beings would do such terrible things). 

Are some views so irrational as to be beyond the pale? Which ones?  — Holocaust denial, Flat Worlder, Extra Terrestrial Abduction, or the belief that the the 2001 attacks in the U.S were carried out by U.S. and Israeli intelligence (a significant part of German population believes this). How about the Central American cardinal who thought the media stories on sexual abuse were a Jewish plot? 

Seewald should have asked follow-up questions, but on this issue, as on many others, he did not really ask hard questions.

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Light of the World – Benedict’s World View

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Pope Benedict’s interview with Seewald, Light of the World, reveals a lot about how the pope thinks. I will comment separately on the issues he raises. 

Joseph Ratzinger grew in a devout Catholic family in Nazi Germany. During his adult life he saw most of the Eurasian landmass under communist dictatorships that sought to marginalize or destroy religion and that inflicted unimaginable cruelties on innocent people. He lived through and saw “the whole power of evil that came to a head in the major dictatorships of the twentieth century – and that in another way is still at work today.” (p. 165) 

That other way is the “the danger that reason – so-called Western reason – claims that it as now really recognized what is right and thus makes a claim that is inimical to freedom…no one should be forces to live according to the ‘new religion’ as though it alone were definitive and obligatory for all mankind.” (p. 53) 

This new religion “pretends to be generally valid because it is reasonable, indeed, because it is reason itself, which knows all and, therefore, defines the frame of reference that is now supposed to apply to everyone.” (p. 52) 

Benedict here is referring to the Western attitude that abortion, gay marriage, and the manipulation human life through biotechnology – as in Brave New World – is self-evidently reasonable and all opposition to it must be eliminated to at least rendered ineffectual. 

But Benedict also sees the danger of a “dictatorship of relativism”: “a large proportion of contemporary philosophies, in fact, consist of saying that man is not capable if truth,” in which case, “the opinion of the majority would be the only criterion that counted.” (pp. 50-51). 

These two views of the modern world seem on the surface to be incompatible: does the Western world now think it has attained truly scientific truth, as the Nazis thought they had attained scientific racial truth and the Communists thought they had attained scientific economic truth? Or does the Western world dismiss truth claims and decide everything by power – the decision of the majority? 

Benedict is right that both attitudes are at work in the modern world. When a Christian tries to argue the truth claims of theism or of Christianity, the modern response is “What is truth?” “That is simply your opinion,” etc.  But when Christianity to act on or merely teach Christian views on homosexuality, they are disciplined and prosecuted because the modern world thinks that such things are so patently false that the person who holds them must be motivated solely by hate. 

If I were Seewald, I would have asked Benedict to explain how these contradictory tendencies can both be at work in the modern world to the detriment of Christianity.

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Death and the Pilgrim

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 The day when the Lord calls him, he will be neither disturbed nor surprised. He will have known this departure, he will have loved it – this manner of going and leaving all things, ready to take them up again or never again to find them, as God wills.  Renunciation will be familiar to him, he has rehearsed it and drilled it, he is ready. For one day having taken the pilgrimage seriously, he finds death sweet and promising, and this fatherland which he has searched for on earth in parable, he is ready at last to find in eternity.

Albert-Marie Besnard

Je vous attends. Je ne suis pas loin, juste de l’autre côté du chemin. Vous voyez, tout est bien. Charles Péguy

I am waiting for you. I am not far, just on the other side of the road. You will see, all is well.

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The Road Goes Ever Ever On

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People die on the Camino de Santiago from age, illness, and accidents. The hazard I had to face was Spanish drivers. Late in the day, as the pilgrim enters a town he often forgets that city streets have cars in them, and steps off without looking, and…. But nothing happened. Nonetheless, it was a sobering to see the memorials to pilgrims who had died on the Camino.

As the pilgrim climbs the path in the Pyrenees that leads from France ot Spain, he sees a stone cross, on which is written Je suis le chemin – I am the Way.

The pastor of San Juan de Ortega, near Burgos, has this meditation for pilgrims:

If you have to die tomorrow, on the Camino, tell yourself that your life is completely fulfilled because you will be in a state of absolute search. And if you return home, tell yourself that you are still on the way, and that you will always be on the way, because it is a way that knows no end. Know this and never forget it.

Forever we will experience Jesus as the Way to the Father, the Camino leads to Jesus, and He is himself the Camino, as the pilgrim is reminded a hundred time by crosses and inscriptions and graffiti  – Yo soy el Camino.

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Triumph of the Will

in Vatican, Voluntarism 5 Comments Tags: , ,

In all the talk about Benedict’s comments on the use of condoms to avoid transmitting AIDS, the words use have been “ban.” “allow,” “permit,” etc, all referring to acts of the will. 

But the Pope was not making an act of the will, he is not making a law, but expressing a judgment. Moral discourse is infected with nominalism and voluntarism, which regards the moral law as an act of the will (either of God or the hierarchy) rather than a judgment, an act of reason. 

Catholics believe that the judgments of the official teachers in the Church are guided by the Holy Spirit, and are reliable, and indeed in certain cases infallible. But they are judgments, not acts of the will.  

In any case the scope of the Church’s teaching on contraception applies to married couples, no one else. As Martin Rhonheimer, a priest of Opus Dei who teaches at the Opus Dei university in Rome, explained:

The teaching of the Church is not about condoms or similar physical or chemical devices, but about marital love and the essentially marital meaning of human sexuality. It affirms that, if married people have a serious reason not to have children, they should modify their sexual behaviour by at least periodic  abstinence from sexual acts. To avoid destroying both the unitive and the procreative meaning of sexual acts and therefore the fullness of mutual self-giving, they must not prevent the sexual act from being fertile while carrying on having sex.

But what of promiscuous people, sexually active homosexuals, and prostitutes? What the Catholic Church teaches them is simply that they should not be promiscuous, but faithful to one single sexual partner; that prostitution is a behaviour which gravely violates human dignity, mainly the dignity of the woman, and therefore should not be engaged in; and that homosexuals, as all other people, are children of God and loved by him as everybody else is, but that they should live in continence like any other unmarried person.

But if they ignore this teaching, and are at risk from HIV, should they use condoms to prevent infection? The moral norm condemning contraception as intrinsically evil does not apply to these cases. Nor can there be church teaching about this; it would be simply nonsensical to establish moral norms for intrinsically immoral types of behaviour. Should the Church teach that a rapist must never use a condom because otherwise he would additionally to the sin of rape fail to respect mutual and complete personal self-giving and thus violate the Sixth Commandment? Of course not.

Whatever one thinks of the magisterium’s judgment on contraception, it simply does not apply to sex outside of marriage.

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Dragons in Spain

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The memories of the Civil war are vivid in Spain, and a new movie, There Be Dragons explores them. Roland Joffe, an agnostic, (The Mission, The Killing Fields), directed it. He is aiming for a Palm Sunday, 2011 release. The movie is intense. 

The plot is that two friends who grow up and take different paths, one a soldier and killer during the war and the other Josémaria, who founds Opus Dei. 

Americans know almost nothing about the Spanish Civil war, although it was the dress rehearsal for World War II. At most they have read For Whom the Bell Tolls. 

Any war is terrible, but a civil war in which friend kills friend, neighbor kills neighbor, brother kills brother is perhaps the worst.

 

Political violence increased in Spain throughout the 1930s – murder became a favored political weapon. Before the 1936 elections, both sides announced that they would refuse to accept the results if the other side won. The Left narrowly won and began an orgy of church burnings and killing. Franco and the generals led a Nationalist armed rebellion against the Leftist Republic and began an orgy of killing. 

The German Nazis and Italian Fascists backed Franco and bombed Guernica and Barcelona; the Communists backed the Republic and soon began killing their Socialist and Anarchist allies. Franco won and killed scores of thousands of leftists – and some priests who tried to stop the Nationalist atrocities. 

Will Spain ever really recover? 

Will other countries go down the same path, or I should say, continue to go down that path? We have seen Cambodia and Rwanda and Bosnia. Where else can it happen? Can it happen again in Europe, or here? Human nature contains dragons, and they may one day devour us.

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Galicia

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When tourists arrive in Santiago, they are somewhat surprised (and occasionally horrified) to discover that the city of full of the dulcet tones of the bagpipe (gaita). At the Santiago Parador, we heard one American ask why a bagpipe was being played in the square, and had to be informed it was the National Instrument. I read a review of that Parador by another tourist who couldn’t understand why the hotel didn’t stop that person from making THAT NOISE in front of the hotel. 

The bagpipe is not confined to the Celts – and in any case Galicia considers itself part Celtic. It is very wet, very green, and very Catholic.

 

Galicia gets the full benefit of the winds that blow across the Atlantic and dump their rains on the province. As it is on the ocean, the province’s cuisine is based on seafood: the coquille St. Jacques, naturally, but also upon the octopus (pulpo). 

Restaurants have display windows featuring complete octupuses (octopi?) in all their glory. The regional specialty is pulpo al gallego.  

Therefore, what could be more natural than the fusion of octopus and bagpipe. Somehow the instrument and the cephalopod seem to have been made for each other.

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American Puritanism and the Vatican

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The Vatican is issuing new guidelines for handling accusations of sexual abuse. We shall see how stringent they are, how much they are followed, and whether there are any consequences for bishops who do not follow them. 

Sandro Magister at Chiesa has some comments on the canonical aspects of the procedures, and he is obviously unhappy that the process has been sped up. One remake he made is ominous for the future. 

In a country like the United States of America, the transition has been made from a phase of permissiveness in dealing with the phenomenon of pedophilia, in both the civil and ecclesiastical camps, to a phase of generalized “zero tolerance,” Puritan in spirit. 

Many Europeans dismiss Americans who reject to their children being raped as “Puritan.” Europeans applauded Roman Polanski and couldn’t imagine why he should be punished for having sex with a young girl. 

The Vatican is staffed by Europeans – they pick up European sexual attitudes, and regard Americans as Puritans who do not understand it is silly to punish a priest who has sex with children. European pedophiles blame the FBI and American fundamentalists for reversing the growing tolerance that pedophilia was experiencing in modern Europe.

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Traditionalist Mass in Paris

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Before I went on the Camino, I stayed in Paris a few days to go to the museums and to wait for my hiking poles to catch up with me (they never did). 

By coincidence, the hotel I stayed at (Henri IV, on the Left Bank) was a few meters from the church of St. Nicholas du Chardonnet, the Paris center of the traditionalist Society of Pius X, which uses the pre-Vatican II Latin liturgy. 

I decided to go to the main mass. To my surprise, it was packed and included many families. Everyone sang the Latin responses, and the music was very, very good polyphony. The general effect was similar to the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. But of course, such Solemn Masses with such music were rare in pre-Vatican II days, in which the Low Mass was the standard and music was, at best, French Romantic. 

My French is OK, and I followed the sermon. I have heard only this one sermon given by a priest of the Society of Pius X, so I won’t generalize, but there were problems. The priest was young and enthusiastic – enthusiastic about the way the liturgy was celebrated. He talked about the great privilege of saying the mass and administering the sacraments in the traditional rite. All very well, but there was no mention of the Death and Resurrection of the Lord. In other words, it was a sermon about liturgical externals, which may be important, but not about the reality to which the liturgy bears witness. The attitude was a little narcissistic and self-congratulatory. Again, this was only one sermon, so I will not generalize that that is the attitude of most or all priests of the Society.  But it did differ from excellent sermons I later heard in Spain. The masses may have been in the new rite and, except in Santiago itself, not equal in splendor to the mass at St. Nicholas, but the sermons were about the essentials of Christianity – the Death and Resurrection of the Lord, of the new life He has given us, and even about our union with Him through martyrdom.

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Indians in Iceland

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Iceland, because of its small and homogenous population, was chosen to be the country to have its DNA mapped. There have been some surprises. 

According to the Vinland sagas, Icelanders discovered  North America and even established a settlement there in the middle ages, around the yaer 1000. The hostile Scraelings (American Iandians) forced the abandonment of the settlement.

What the sagas do not mention is not all the encounters with Scraelings were hostile. 

Mitochondria is passed only through the mother. According to an article in ABC, scientists have identified American Indian mitochondria in the Icelandic population.  An American Indian conceived a child by an Icelander and this child (and perhaps the mother) came back to Iceland. The mitochondria has been passed down from mother to daughter for forty generations. 

Rape? But fathers rarely cherish the child of rape. There seems to have been an affectionate relationship between an American Indian woman and an Icelandic man, perhaps even a marriage.

That was perhaps the first truly intimate encounter between the Old and New Worlds.  But we will never know. 

“Lamentablemente, las mujeres no escribían la historia”, apunta Carles Lalueza.

 

“Sadly, women don’t write the histories,” pointed out Carles Lalueza.

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Martin Sheen and The Way Home

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Several people, both on this blog, and elsewhere, have asked me how I can remain a Catholic after what I’ve discovered about the Church.  That question deserves a long and thoughtful answer, but it would be much along the lines on what Martin Sheen says in this interview about his life and his new film about the Camino, The Way.

The interview also gives one hope that grace can work in the most disorderly lives, and Martin Sheen would the first to admit that his life had been very disorderly.

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Mass on the Camino

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 I tried to go to mass every evening on the Camino. Most churches have evening masses for the pilgrims. Oddly enough, Sunday was the hard day – the sole village mass was in the morning and there was no mass in the evening. But 9 days out of 10 I was able to go to mass. 

Most of the masses were standard parish masses with a pilgrim blessing at the end. Spaniards, like Americans, race through the mass, and often begin saying the responses before the priest finishes the verse. TheLordbewandalsowithyou ElSeñorestéconvosycontuespiritu. I wish people would slow down. It’s not a race. 

A few masses stand out. 

The night before I began walking I went to the church in St. Jean Pied de Port in France. I sat down and opened the missal, and discovered it was in French and Basque. “Lord, please let the mass not be in Basque,” I prayed. Basque is a unique language (some theorize it is the language of the Cro-Magnons who were pushed back into the Pyrenees when the Indo-Europeans arrived) and there is not a single cognate to any other language. Fortunately the mass was in French, so I could follow along. 

Many pilgrims begin their pilgrimage at Roncesvalles, with all its associations with Charlemagne and the Song of Roland, and almost everyone was at the mass. The large and beautiful Romanesque church there has a baldachin with a stature of the Virgin and Child. It was the feast of St. Matthew, so the five priests were vested in red. They chanted Vespers before mass. At the end of the mass the celebrant gave the pilgrim blessing in the languages of the pilgrims, including, to my surprise, Japanese. He not only said the words in Japanese, but used Japanese gestures. Then all the lights were turned out except for the light on the Virgin and Child and we sang the Salve Regina in Latin. 

A few towns later I came to a low point in the liturgy. The church was dedicated to Santiago, and advertised a pilgrim blessing. The priest go though the entire mass in 15 minutes (I timed him) and walked off without giving the blessing. I did not understand a word and the pilgrims were disappointed. He was obviously tired or saying mass and wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.

But then in the monastery of Benedictine nuns in Leon, the nuns sang the office and the mass in Spanish, but using the old Gregorian tones. Even more impressive was the deliberate speed of the mass. After everything the priest said, there was a pause perhaps 2 or 3 seconds before the nuns said the response. El Señor esté con vosotros. (long pause) Y con tu espíritu. It gave dignity and produced a profound meditative atmosphere – the practice adds only a minute or so to the entire mass, and could be adopted in parishes. 

Another priest organized a separate service immediately after mass for pilgrims. He had the pilgrims read the same passage in each of their languages, including Hungarian. 

My first full day of hiking in Galicia was a day of driving rain and heavy wind. I was soaked and cold, but decided to go mass. The Romanesque church was black with mold, chilly, and damp. The priest invited us all to come into the sanctuary and sit around the altar. We had all been sharing the Camino with cows and horses, and the smell of our wet boots gave testimony to that as we sat around the altar with its flickering candles. A Brazilian pilgrim started shivering, and the priest went back into the sacristy and got his coat for her. His liturgy was a little bit inventive, but perhaps there are special masses for the Camino. He was funny too, and he said that at the sign of peace we should do more than hold the tips of our neighbor’s fingers. We all gave one another big abrazos in a dozen languages. 

And then there was the mass of Todos los Santos – All Saints – in Santiago. We arrived at 11 AM for the noon mass and the pews were already full. The cathedral continued to fill up. Parents brought numerous children, some of whom sat on the base of a pillars and played cards while waiting for mass to start. (There is a statue in a Camino church of St. Anthony playing cards with the child Jesus.) Then the mass began. Men in velvet robes played krumhorns and trumpets in the procession that carried the image of Santiago around the aisles. 

Music has always been very important on the Camino. The elders of the apocalypse on the tympana of Camino churches are shown playing musical instruments (including the Galician bagpipe). The choir began singing like angels, and the botafumiero was set in motion.

Pilgrims who had timed themselves to arrive at noon began circulating through the church in their hiking clothes. The cathedral was full and overfull and still people entered, and they were welcome. It was the most wonderful mass I have ever been to, worth walking 500 miles to experience, and more than a little, I hope, a foretaste of the liturgy with all the saints that will go on forever.

 

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