Here's a thoughtful commentary from a Philadelphia lawyer who is not a habitual religious commentator!
Pope Benedict is putting
the Church on track towards unity
By JAMES G. WILES
Sunday, November 01, 2009
PHILADELPHIA - By coincidence, when word came of Pope Benedict’s initiative towards the Anglicans, I was re-reading Father Basset’s history of the English Jesuits.
The day before, I had viewed "A Man for All Seasons" and recalled the paintings in the London Oratory. One of my prized possessions is a beautifully printed account of the English martyrs of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem Hospitaler, a gift of Professor William Tighe of Muhlenberg University. When I took my wife to Ireland for the first time in 1994, we spent more time wandering through ruined abbeys than we did in the pubs.
For someone with that kind of personal background, it was impossible not to think of Psalm 126: “When the Lord turned against the captivity of Sion, then were we like unto them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter.” The music of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd played in my head.
Like the falling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the possibility that the Catholic church of the English might finally come home to Rome in my lifetime was paralyzing.
I was struck by the notion that, like the Soviets and their allies who’d sought to kill Pope John Paul II, instead had seen their Communist empire collapse around them, the shades of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII might now be watching from hell as the Archbishop of Canterbury sat with the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and listened to His Eminence announce the Holy See’s terms upon which Anglicans could return en masse to the Catholic fold. Somewhere, William Shakespeare, that recusant Catholic, was smiling.
The Holy Father’s Apostolic Constitution was not, the archbishops agreed, an act of papal aggression. It was, instead, an ecumenical gesture. Like the same Pope’s attempted reconciliation with the breakaway Society of Pope Pius X, it was an act of charity.
It was impossible to keep a straight face.
This is an earthquake. For two reasons:
First,
this is Pope Benedict’s latest initiative in what is now clearly a papal policy of trying to rally the vibrant, sacramental Christian churches around the Papacy in response to the collapse of the other mainline Christian churches and the oncoming threat of jihadi Islam, especially in Europe.
As such, by offering concessions in exchange for lost sheep returning to the Church and the Sacraments, the Holy Father is seeking to build up a new Christendom and to gather in the still-faithful remnants of the collapsed Protestant Churches – hierarchy, clergy and laity together.
The intended symbols of this new, united Christendom, in my estimation, will be the Papacy and the Mass, including the newly revived Extraordinary Rite of the Mass, which now under Benedict’s motu proprio, is required to be the liturgy celebrated at all international gatherings.
[Well, not really. He wants Latin to be used for Masses with international audiences, but not the extraordinary form necessarily.]
It may be a century before our descendants know if this papal policy is a success. However, the dead end of the Reformation is now apparent for all to see in the spectacle of the American Episcopal Church and the disappearance of the Anglican Church in the United Kingdom.
The break from Rome and fidelity to Scripture and the Sacraments has led precisely nowhere.
There is, thus, every reason for Pope Benedict to seek to sweep together the embers and blow hard upon them. It appears that that’s exactly what he is doing. As with the Easter fire, it will be for later Popes to build this small blaze into a full blown conflagration.
The second possibility is more elusive because we haven’t yet seen the text of the Apostolic Constitution.
Will the new structures contemplated by the Pope and his men establish a precedent for the Orthodox, Lutheran and other Christian churches which have the Mass, are hierarchically-based and sacramentally-centered, to become “sister churches” to Rome?
[It doesn't seem so. As an Anglican prelate-turned-Catholic observed, the returning Anglican communities will not be a 'Catholic Church of the Anglican rite', which is the Uniate formula.]
In the Uniate Churches, for instance, Eastern Rite Catholics retain their liturgies, vestments, art, liturgical languages and music, church structures and titles. Yet, some of their patriarchs are also members of the Sacred College of Cardinals.
The answer is that it’s simply too early to tell. A precedent may not even be what is intended.
In the meantime, a trajectory has been established toward unity. And the talking heads of five years ago have been proven wrong.
This 82-year-old piano-playing Bavarian is not who they thought he was. The man who was called Pope John Paul II’s Rottweiler, the feared head of the Holy Office, the “German Shepherd” who, as a teenager, “saw the gates of hell open” and who, as Pope, adopted the name of the Apostle of Europe who had established the monastic system to convert the barbarian invaders and restore Christian civilization to Europe, turns out, instead, to be a uniter.
Indeed, Benedict VII promises to become as central a figure in Christendom as Pope Pius X. May he be as successful.
A light has cut through the darkness and we have something to celebrate. As they come in, whether en masse or one-by-one, let us welcome our Anglican brothers. And let us learn from them, too.
And the drumroll goes on for the Pope of Christian Unity. This was yesterday's pastoral note for All Saints' Day from the pastor of the church I have attended for Sunday Mass since it started last January 4 to offer the Missa Cantata of the Extraordinary Form at 9 a.m. Sunday mornings. As luck would have it, he is one of the more famous Anglican priests turned Catholic.
From the Pastor
Fr. George Rutler
Nov. 1, 2009
The expression "a living saint" can be misleading. Certainly, we have encountered people in our own lives who fit that description, as best as we can judge. The Holy Church makes the final decision about saints. We celebrate them especially on All Saints’ Day, and on All Souls’ Day, we pray for our loved ones who are drawing more closely into the aura of holiness.
The saints on the calendar are only the tip of the iceberg, and most of the saints who have ever existed are known to God alone. Perhaps churches should have a shrine to "The Unknown Saint" quite as we have a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. All Saints’ Day is rather like that.
My point, though, is that there is no such thing as a dead saint. [good point] There are saints alive now, and there are saints who have physically died, but all are alive in Christ and they are "busy" in heaven, to use a temporal metaphor.
Some saints capture the popular imagination more in one generation than in another. For instance, St. Simon Stylites was admired in Syria in the fifth century for spending most of his life seated on top of a pillar. That is not a useful model for our day, although some may still remember Flagpole Kelly, and not long ago thousands of New Yorkers went to watch a man spend a week on top of a column up the street in Bryant Park.
Millions are drawn to Padre Pio, and some are compelled by an unmeasured fascination with his miraculous spiritual gifts, which were blessings indeed, rather than emulating his heroic humility and discipline.
There remains an astonishing cult of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She was almost the reverse of St. Pio: totally unknown in her earthly lifetime, and accomplishing nothing conspicuous to her contemporaries. She would have remained such had not her spiritual writings been discovered and published.
Perhaps she fascinates precisely because in just barely 24 years on earth, she did the most ordinary things with most extraordinary joy. Whenever her relics are taken on pilgrimage to foreign lands (not to mention the one that was taken on a space shuttle), hundreds of thousands pour out to pray by them. This happened most recently in England, where the media were confounded by the huge crowds.
Concurrent with that phenomenon, there were astonishing developments in long-moribund Christian life there, not least of which was the announcement of the first papal state visit to Britain and the expected beatification of John Henry Newman, who predicted a "Second Spring" of Faith in England.
Then came news of an Apostolic Constitution, which will provide a unique canonical structure to welcome those desiring union with the Catholic Church.
Pope Benedict XVI, who well deserves the title "The Pope of Unity," has shown the power of the intercessions of the saints.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/11/2009 18:34]