Thanks to Beatrice who called attention to this blog post on her site
principally to protest some assertions presented as 'fact' by the blogger, who is the editor of the nominally Catholic French magazine LA VIE, which, she recalls, blisteringly opposed Benedict XVI's decision to lift the excommunication of the four FSSPX bishops in the guise of objecting to the very presence of a Holocaust denier in the Church (.e., Mons. Williamson)...
Such an unfortunate lapse of judgment against a throughly-considered decision by the Supreme Pontiff (in a matter that had nothing to do at all with the personal opinions of any of the FSSPX bishops, only with the fact that they took part in an illegal episcopal ordination expressly prohibited by the Pope at the time) is, of course, highly questionable conduct by eminent Catholics, in the eyes of simple orthodox Catholics like me. But it is also freedom of opinion, which one cannot dispute no matter how one disagrees with the opinion - somewhat like Sandro Magister's criticisms of Benedict XVI for allegedly paying only lip service to the cause of sacred music worthy of the Vatican, the kind of criticism made more out of self-indulgence in one's personal opinion or ideological commitment than out of concern for any actual damage or harm to the Church!
Nonetheless, once one has dismissed Mercier's non-facts having to do with the life of the young Joseph Ratzinger, the rest of Mercier's arguments have to do with the role of priests in general, about which he does make a lot of good points. As a take-off, however, Mercier uses the recently revealed Christmas note to the Christ Child of the seven-year-old Joseph Ratzinger. Instead of simply reporting it for the lovable early trace it represents of the boy who grew up to become Pope, Mercier feels compelled - in keeping with the title of his blog - to decipher something that is pretty clear and obvious to anyone at that time and place (Bavaria in December of 1932), and which the original reports on the letter had made clear. In his useless and counter-productive 'decryptage', Mercier trips up on his facts.
The boy Joseph's letter to the Christ-Child
and reflections on the role of priests
December 24, 2012
It is a letter written to the Christ Child by a seven-year-old boy, who writes: "Dear ChristChild, You will be coming down to earth soon. And you will bring joy to children. Bring joy to me as well. I would like a Volks-Schott, a green Mass garment, and a Heart of Jesus. I will always be good. Greetings from Joseph Ratzinger".
It's just as 'cryptic' as a message from a boy in 2012 who would specify to Santa Claus the model number of some game he wants... The Christ Child would have understood right away what little Joseph wanted. And none of the items on his wish list would surprise anyone who was aware that as children, Joseph and his older brotehr Georg liked best to play at 'saying Mass'.
At that time, it wss not rare for little boys to play at being priests, wearing costumes sewn for them by their mothers or family dressmakers, using little altars and all kinds of Mass 'accessories'. It was the masculine version of girls playing at hosting a tea party. Such toys for boys were in the merchandise catalogs sent to homes in Europe till the 1940s. And in Catholic countries, there still is a market for such toys. [Beatrice questions these assertions. Was it really so, she asks? In the Philippines, where the home catalogs we got in the mail up to the 1960s were generally from American retailers like Sears (long before there was Walmart), there was no section for religious items at all, or for religion-otiented toys and games in the children's section. And as a schoolgirl who was taken along by my grandmother and aunts on their occasional trips to Manila, during which a visit to the one Catholic retailer of Catholic books, accessories and supples at the time was obligatory, I never saw such toys and games on sale. Is Mercier having a 'false memory' recollection?... I think, however, the greater offense here is in dismissing the boy Joseph's intensely focused interest in objects having to do with the Mass as simply 'typical' of boys in his time! Even assuming boys his age preferred playing priest instead of playing soldier, wasn't the seven-year-old's single focus extraordinary? Children usually want a whole list of things, including necessities like shoes or a new sweater. Little Joseph apparently felt no lack of such necessities, but did want things his heart desired and which no other little boy might have thought of!]
Thousands of boys have played at being priests, but by their adolescence, they have usually ditched chalice, paten and surplice for other interests. The two Ratzinger boys were, however, serious enough that they both became priests, becoming ordained at the same time. An incredible twinship!
But their priesthood was a family undertaking. One that entailed sacrifice. In 1939, when Joseph entered minor seminary (high school level),
his older sister Maria quit her studies and became a house cleaner to help their parents meet the cost of his enrolment in the seminary. This would be unthinkable in our day, even in a family considered to be 'super-Catho'. Just as unthinkable as a priest's costume or a mini-altar would be among the presents found in a European child's Christmas shoe these days...
[There are two major objections here. The first is a mis-statement of fact. Cardinal Ratzinger says in his autobiographical MIlestones:
The pastor urged me to enter the minor seminary in order to be initiated systematically into the spiritual life. For my father, whose pension was very scant inded, this represented a great sacrifice. But my sister, after receiving her diploma from the scitienfic school and doing her obligatory year of service in agrioculture, found a job [as a secretary] in 1939 with a big company in Tranustein, and thus eased the family budget. And so, the decision was made, and at Easter of 1939, I entered the seminary.
The second objection is the chauvinisi implication that Maria, being female, was 'sacrificed' in any way for the good of her younger brother. As the oldest child, she was probably most happy that she was able to help her parents at this time, just as years later, she would serve as her brother's typist and housekeeper. It was obviously the apostolate intended for her by the Lord, though she was also a third-order Franciscan.
All this, not to illustrate the colossal cultural change that has come over the Church and which partly explains the lack oif priestly vocations in Europe. But to examine the priest in Benedict XVI. Since his childhood, the future Pope appears to have been a priest in every fiber of his imagination and of his emotions. Something similar occurred with John Paul II, not since childhood as with Benedict XVI, but because of his experience of solitude during the war which led him to his radical choice of vocation...
A Pope is some kind of 'total priest', one who finds himself in maximum identification with Christ, the only High Priest. Since it is Christmas time, I wish to explore this link that exists between what we are celerbating - the Incarnation of God in his Son, Jesus Christ, and the institution of the Papacy, though I know this is a risky undertaking...
Some theology is necessary. The Incarnation is that moment in history when God decided to take on the human condition out of his radical love for his human creatures in order to save them.
The first stage of the Incarnation is the arc that goes from Mary's Yes to the angel Gabriel, to the Ascension of Jesus, passing through the Crib and the Cross, namely Jesus's time as a human being.
There is a second stage of the Incarnation, where we are today, an arc that started with the Pentecost through to the second coming of Christ: Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, the presence of Christ has 'erupted' in the bosom of his Church.
One finds a pictogram from the famous scene with the cripple at the 'Beautiful Door' of the Temple of Jerusalemn, recounted in the Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 3):
Now Peter and John were going up to the temple area for the three o’clock hour of prayer. And a man crippled from birth was carried and placed at the gate of the temple called the 'Beautiful Gate' every day to beg for alms from the people who entered the temple. When he saw Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked for alms. But Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, "Look at us".
He paid attention to them, expecting to receive something from them. Peter said, “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean, [rise and] walk.” Then Peter took him by the right hand and raised him up, and immediately his feet and ankles grew strong. He leaped up, stood, and walked around, and went into the temple with them, walking and jumping and praising God.
The parallels between this miracle and those performed by Jesus during his earthly life are absolutely gripping. The message is very clear: The victorious power of Christ had passed to each of those who believe in him or invoke him.
The 'second stage' of that I would call the 'rocket' of Incarnation is therefore that which is mysteriously prolonged in the Apostles. Jesus has been present since then in the bosom of all those who wre baptized in the fire of his Spirit.
Observe that Peter did not perform the above miracle by himself - he was with John. He explcitly asks the cripple to look at both of them. It is a sign that the second stage of the Incarnation mystery involves the Church as a brotherhood. God works in the Church through couplings of power, through complementary, even opposite, personalities. "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”
(Mt 18,20).
The Incarnation of Christ in the Baby wrapped in swaddling clothes in the manger of Bethlehem thus leads to the mystery of the Church mediating the presence of Christ. To celebrate Christmas means celebrating the mystery of Christ's active presence among us through each of his disciples. We celebrate the mediation of divine reality by men themselves, a fact that is at the heart of Christianity.
The second stage of the Incarnation is truly an unfathomable mystery.
[Aren't all mysteries by nature unfathomable?] It is not anodyne to say that this power can be relative as it was for the apostle Peter. We are told by Scripture that Peter presumed too much on his own powers when he told the Master that he was ready to die for him. And then he denied him thrice during the Passion.
it means that every human being is capable of a weakness that leads to sin as well as of the power of the resurrected Christ. That is the difficult reality and calling for every baptized person: to be a mediator of Christ through his own powers, his own capacity for greatness, despite his sins and limitations.
The Catholic Church goes farther by affirming that the mediation of Christ goes through a visible hierarchy, identified in her priests, bishops and the Pope. It is what amounts to a third-stage in the Incarnation, The priesy acts, specifically within the sacraments,
in persona Christi. The Pope stands at the vertex of the mystery of priesthood.
I have convered many apostolic trips by Benedict XVI. I particularly enjoy talking to the people who make up part of the great crowds that come to attend his Masses. From Cuba to Germany, from Beirut to Madrid, what I often hear is this: "The Pope is Christ on earth".
{It is what we Catholics are taught - or used to be taught - almost with our first prayers.]
The answer moves me, especially if I hear it from the 'simple folk'. I remember most especially a housecleaner from the Philippines whom I asked in Beirut last September. She had come to 'warm herself' at the Pope's symbolic flame, she who had not seen her children for six years except through Skype, she who was doing menial work in a foreign land to feed her children...
I can already sense my Protestant friends protesting, and some of my Catholic friends - who would find this identification of the Pope and the person of Christ a theological horror, that this constitutes sheer idolatry.
[Not to anyone who reads Christ's messaga when he gave the keys of the Kingdom to Peter, after telling him he was the rock on which he would build his Church: "I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” He is delegating the remission of sins - which is the function of the Redeemer - to Peter in persona Christi.]
But it shows that simple Catholics
[who get the idea of the Pope as Christ's representative on earth without any apparent difficulty] have a radical access to the mystery of the priesthood, which is the continuous mediation of divine intervention.
This mediation is what makes the Catholic Church so interesting, because of the inevitable mingling of good and evil in the persons called by Christ to represent him sacramentally. It is a mingling that is both a strong point and a wek point for the Church.
A strong point when the persons who take on this ministry of representing Christ are true models of holiness, as the numberless saints who were priests, bishops and Popes, Fr. St. Augustine to Jean Paul II
[and Benedict XVI], passing through the Cure d'Ars and Maximilian Kolbe.
A weak point when the members of the hierarchy and the priesthood are out-and-out bastards. In 1940, Fr. Robert Alesch was a parish priest in the Parisian region. He gained the confidence of the Resistance networks by profesisng Gaullist ideas and was able to deceive many leading intellectuals of the time. But he was a paid agent of the Nazis, who paid him enough so he could support two mistresses. He encouraged young people to join the Resistance, in order to more easily denounce them eventually. In 1942, he disclosed a network that led to the arrest of 80 persons who were tortured and subsequently sent to extermination camps.
Then there are the perverted priests who vie with each other in seducing and catching as many children and minors as they can in their traps, families whose trust they exploit the better to destroy them. The most notorious example of these is the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel.
The other problem about the priesthood is that the Church affirms that the sacramental representation of Christ an only be done though males, not females.
In fsct, I think that the argument that carries the best weight for why a priest (and therefore, a bishop, and a Pope), must be male is this continuous incarnation of Christ, this third stage of the rocket...
Ordaining women would be a way of relativizing the reality that God came to us as a male human being. Which would relativize everything else about his Incarnation, especially his being a Jew
[and all the rights he possessed as a first=born Jewish son] and his specific rootedness in a precise historico-geographical context.
I am quite aware that I am touching sensitive points. My aim is not to polemicize or to proclaim domas, but to put some spiritual realities in perspective, within a specific framework.
There would also be a fourth stage of the rocket, which derives from the third: Through the priest's ministry, Christ becomes truly present in the bread and the wine at Mass.
According to the Catholic teaching of trans-substantiation, Christ is present body and soul, God and man, in the consecrated bread and wine. This is why we can adore him in the Sacframent, a devotional practice that has seen a spectacular comeback in the past 20 years.
My friends from the reformed churches do not believe in the third stage of the Incarnation - that a priest could have a different ontology from other baptized Christians - so they would not believe in the fourth stage, either.
It's true John Calvin never thought God could transform and inhabit matter.
[He believed in a God of such limited powers, then?] But this blog is not about getting into a theological debate with the Protestants, even if it is sometimes useful to think of Catholicism in terms of how much it differs from Protestantism.
{I've often thought that Protestantism has devolved into Christianity-made-easy or Christianity-as-you-like-it - Catholicism without tears and without beatitudes.]
One of the challenges of contemporary Catholicism is to live this question of the Incarnation through the priesthood. First, the priesthood of all baptized laymen that the Second Vatican Council forcefully emphasized.
It is no small matter to think that through Baptism, we carry the capacity of Christ to prophecy, calm down storms, chase out evil spirits, and offer our lives in a sacrifice of love. Which is to say that we vowed to incarnate Christ through our lives, in a priestly manner, even if we are not ordained.
[All the pathetic priestettes and would-be priestettes obviously never heard of the lay prieshood of the baptized!]
Nor is it any small matter to consider the fact of the priestly hierarchy, from the lowliest priest to the Pope. One of the reasons for the crisis in the sacrament of confession is the growing inability of sinners to believe that they could possibly confess their sins to Christ through the agency of a human priest.
And one cannot exclude that the crisis in priestly vocations could come from the lack of faith among those who feel 'called' before the but recoil before the challenge of incarnating Christ through their own personal life, a task which they think is above and beyond their human abilities.
[But who said the difficult task of living according to Christ is all to be done through our individual abilities and merits? God does not expect us to be self-sufficient in everything! That is why we need his grace to make up for our human limitations, for what we do not have...]
Nor is it any small matter to believe that the priesthood of ordained ministers is at the service of the proesthood of laymen. The problem here is that one can get the impression that the ordained priesthood is being used to legitimize power. One cannot deny that nominations to a bishopric or a cardinalate can serve power strategies.
In the Vatican, one cannot head a 'congregation' without the power linked to being a cardinal.
[It's not 'power' per se linked to being a cardinal, because there is none other than the right to vote for a Pope. Any other power is derived from the powers associated with the position a cardinal happens to occupy, usually as a diocesan bishop or as the head of a Curial dicastery in the Vatican. In turn, dicastery heads need to be cardinals so they can exert a dignitarial superiority over the bishops and priests that they must supervise, and enjoy parity with their peers who head other dicasteries. Htat's not a power game - it's simply the routine reality of any hierachical organization.]
One could argue that it has to do with authority rather than rank, but the truth is that it is not always clear. The Church sometimes confuses the exercise of hierarchical responsibilities with the sacrament of priesthood, whose fullness is realized within the episcopate.
And women
[not all women, but feminists, yes!, who are ideologues before they are Christian] feel excluded from taking part at high levels of responsibility in the Church because they cannot become priests, to begin with.
For the two kinds of priests - the lay priesthood and the ordained - the faith itself is at stake. It is totally delirious - and discouraging - to believe that any of us can 'incarnate' Christ without faith, that is, without trusting that God is present in us, and that, through his grace, he acts in us and through us.
It is also the message of Christmas: The Baby God who holds out his arms to us from his crib encourages us to believe in the mystery of his Incarnation, a mystery that continues throughout our life and in our life despite its misery and uncertainty.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/12/2012 23:12]