In case you haven’t seen it yet, here is my latest article for Inside Catholic that is a review of Archbishop Rembert Weakland’s autobiography, A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church. As expected, this article has led to a minor “feeding frenzy” over there of “conservative” Catholics venting their ire against the fallen liberal prelate. One criticism of my article is that I did not take seriously enough the sexual dimension of Archbishop Weakland’s downfall, which for many commenters was the main driving force behind his progressive agenda. I wouldn’t want to get into it here, but I will only reiterate what I said in my one comment over there: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. We have the scandal of Fr. Maciel, who was apparently JPII’s best buddy, and then we have the traditionalists like Fr. Timothy Svea who fell into worse sins and crimes. What about that master of ceremonies of the current Papal court who got picked up by police in the red light district in Rome? I once knew an SSPX priest, Fr. Benedict Vander Putten, who I thought was on fire with the love of God. Turns out he was on fire for the love of underaged girls. Need I go on?
So here too I will steer clear of the “Fox News” culture of accusation and titillation and just argue the issues I set out to discuss in the essay. I think at times that I might have been too hard on the Archbishop, that maybe I have been guilty of the closed-mindedness that I accuse him of. But probing my own reading of the book, I really can’t say that the man has an ounce of real contrition for what he has done. As AG put it to me, the whole book could be summarized as, “yeah, I know I messed up on this one thing… but I am still a good person who did a lot of great things. And I could have done greater things if that darn John Paul II hadn’t persecuted me so much…” I did not get a sense from Weakland that the Church existed as something bigger than the walls of his head. It’s his ideas or the highway; the only reason he is staying Catholic is because he has a strong institutional tie to the Church. It’s all he really knows.
Nevertheless, there are some issues that I felt were “too nuanced” to place in my Inside Catholic essay. For the sake of time and clarity, I will focus on the very last few pages of the book. In those last thoughts, Weakland describes a sermon he gave to a group of priests during a retreat after the scandal was over and he had resigned from his position. Weakland here shows that he is very perceptive about the current state of the Church. While I doubt at times his sincerity in terms of faith, I cannot doubt his intelligence and knowledge of the Church on the institutional level. The principle thought of this sermon was that:
I realized the Church had to do more dying before it could fulfill the mission given it by Christ. I was distressed that church leaders, myself included, tended always to blame everyone but themselves for the crisis in which the Church finds itself…
What follows are a series of vague observations about how the Church must die to its own sense of “perfection” and completeness, to acknowledge itself as a pilgrim body of flawed sinners. Obviously, he speaks all of this with an agenda we need not get into due to its well-documented details in the modern press. There are, however, a few nuggets that the reader should meditate on, such as this one:
Again I recalled to the priests the phrase used by Cardinal Francis George at the synod for America in 1997 that we American Catholics are, from a religious point of view, culturally Calvinists. We tend to confuse the ideal with the reality; we like to give the world the appearance of the perfect model…
I agree with this, but only if taken in the traditional sense. He uses such a citation to argue against Cardinal Ottaviani’s traditional formulation of the Church as a societas perfecta. If taken in that way, I disagree. The Church is the Ark of Salvation, and in this sense, it must be perfect. In other words, the Church, in its most strict sacramental and doctrinal sense, peddles a perfect product. It’s the people that are handing it out that are the problem. This was best formulated by the Cardinal Consalvi’s quip when he heard that Napoleon sought to destroy the Church, “We have not managed to do it ourselves!” There may be a real mush that surrounds the Church, a soft slimy layer of sinfulness, hypocrisy, and violence that covers her message and life-giving love to this day. But the great task of faith is to find the hard core that we can plant our feet on. Weakland comes dangerously close to denying even that.
He is right, however, if we take it to mean that we get the Church that we deserve. Many people enter the Church or remain in it because they think it will solve all of their problems, get them out of doubt, or make them “better” than those who don’t believe. They are enamoured with the institution and what it can do for them. Weakland is one of those people, though he would probably be the last to admit it. He has an agenda that transcends the being of the Church; he shares it with the Episcopalians, liberal mainline Protestants, and modernists of all stripes. The name of that agenda is “progress”. But there are other agendas. One of the more subtle ones is the “save civilization from godlessness” line. The problem with this one is that it wants to repeat all the mistakes that made Western civilization godless in the first place. Maybe we all just need to cool it and realize that this may not be a problem that we can “fix”. We can’t make a perfect Church that will then create a perfect society if we ourselves are so manifestly imperfect. The Church may be a perfect society because it has no need of anything outside of it to make it better. That does not mean that those inside of it, even the Pope himself, partake of that perfection in any real sense.
In this sense, Weakland counsels the Church to “cool it” in another aspect:
…I mentioned that the Church must die to its omniscience. For some reason, the Church feels that it must hurry to join every controversy and give an authoritative solution. I yearn for the days when the hierarchy would do in our day what it did in the past regarding many squabbles between theologians, especially from competitive religious orders: just saying the equivalent of “Cool it, Boys…”
Again, I think it necessary to read past Weakland’s agenda to get at a real point. There is a sense in our ranks that the Church has to deliver a “complete package”: a complete metaphysics and way of life that we all have to take or leave, no exceptions. But the greatness of Catholicism was not formed by such a tribal, absolutist spirit. It isn’t a brand that we have to be loyal to at all costs. It is the sum total of human experience: sloppy, unedifying, and at times, seemingly contradictory. The gravest error of modern Catholicism is not simply that it doesn’t “preach the Gospel”, but that it seeks to teach “too much”. That is the fundamental flaw of such contrived visions as the theology of the body, the Opus Dei’s theology of work, von Balthasar hoping Hell is empty, and so on and so forth. There is so much fancy-speak that often turns into cacaphonous gibberish. At the end of the day, you don’t know what you need to believe. The Church tries to serve modern man a seven course meal, when all he needs is some doctrinal and sacramental meat and potatoes. The mystical element, the high art, and the poetic theology will take care of itself once fed this nourishing if unappentizing gruel. It cannot be forced on people by committee or ideological fad.
What we know of God is preciously little. We see through a glass darkly. But even those small glimmers of light must be preserved with an almost fanatical exercise of memory. This is the mustard seed that will grow into a great tree of full knowing.
One last thought of Weakland’s resonated in particular with me, and it is a sentiment that I have spoken on this blog many times:
If the Church has lost so many among the American intelligentsia, artists, musicians, and even theologians, it is because it gives the impression that it does not need them – being self-sufficient in creating and judging what it feels best for its faithful to live the gospel message. Because we have alienated all these groups and they do not feel at home in our midst, we no longer are able to create a Catholic culture that is the expression of our faith…
I agree, but point out that the slavish homogenization that Weakland’s generation perpetuated in the Church Universal is partially responsible for this crisis. No creative person wants to be in the shadow of a Church that mimics the worst qualities of the lowest common cultural denominator. The Church has not given a compelling message to struggle with from a creative perspective. Will John Paul II’s Luminous Mysteries (which I make great efforts NOT to pray), felt banners, and St. Louis Jesuit folk-musical tripe ever inspire the human imagination in the same ways as the Dies Irae, the majestic high altar, and visions of souls roasting in Purgatory? Will the inventions of Catholicism in the last fifty years echo through the centuries like old cadences of hushed Latin on marble floors that, if you are very quiet, you can sometimes still hear in old churches? Or will they merely be broken old trinkets from a century of frivolities long ago forgotten, along with much of Catholic Tradition itself? I leave it to you to answer that question.
The Church does need all of these people. Our Faith will not live by the “expertise” of liturgical committees and theological scholars alone. Even in the most “conservative” circles, there is a dictatorship of the technocracy: people who don’t see the benefits of the emotional kitsch of old grandmothers, of hardened criminals lighting a candle before the saint they think “protects” them, of patronal fiestas that tend to “get out of hand”. And as long as such a dictatorship stands, the more “normal” elements, those who will write the Masses performed by agnostics in concert halls, those who will paint the paintings admired by fascinated tourists, those who will write the novels that may spark the unbeliever to believe… all of those people will stay away. The Church needs to stop being a club and start being humanity again.
Weakland reiterates that this may not be a problem that we can “fix”, and in that I am in agreement. But the problem with Weakland, and maybe it is one he struggles with, I don’t know, is that he does not account for the possibility that the Church may be bigger than his own ideas. Many people have accused me of being “un-Catholic” since I am not “obedient enough” or “docile enough” to the statements of the Church hierarchy of the last fifty years. They seem to think that “docility”, that affirming of the dominant line of authority, is the essence of romanitas, and that is what I am missing. I beg to differ. The true essence God are far bigger than the walls of your own skull. You live in a continuity not just over space but over time. You are responsible to an entire history that begins first and foremost with what your family taught you.
There is a wonderful inscription in French in a cemetery in Lafayette, Louisiana, that I saw yesterday. It was from children to their deceased mother thanking her most of all for passing on to them the “faith of their ancestors”. I feel far more indebted to them than I do to any Pope. But even if you are a convert, you are responsible to the Faith and way of life of all of those people (like my ancestors) who had to suffer through fire and sword to put that Faith in your hands. To be Catholic is to live with the burden of history. Even if it seems ridiculous, even if you have a thousand difficulties with it, you pass it on, you defend it, and you show it to others. That is different from “marketing it”, wanting to remove from it all of the “blemishes”, or wanting to “update it”. To be humble is not the same as being brainwashed. To have faith is not the same as being an automaton who doesn’t have to think anymore. This seems obvious, but by the way people behave, it really isn’t.
Overall, I find Weakland a figure to be pitied more than anything. Maybe he made a half-million dollar mistake, and that is nothing to be sneezed at. After all, it would take half a lifetime for a poor working mother to make that much, and for that, Weakland should be much more ashamed than he comes across in this book. But he doesn’t seem to “get” that he comes across as a sad figure rejected by much of the Church he aimed to serve, having taken much more than he contributed. I think for a long time, I will probably remember to say an extra “Hail Mary” for him.