From Benedict XVI: Great words for those in formation for ordination

My friend and brother deacon, Greg Kandra, has a wonderful posting today on a sermon delivered by Pope Benedict XVI to a group of seminarians.  As Greg points out, it is a wonderful exhortation for deacon candidates as well, and I am forwarding a copy of it to all of our deacon candidates for this diocese.  Read the entire homily here, but here is a wonderful excerpt.

Dear friends, you are preparing yourselves to become apostles with Christ and like Christ, and to accompany your fellow men and women along their journey as companions and servants.

How should you behave during these years of preparation? First of all, they should be years of interior silence, of unceasing prayer, of constant study and of gradual insertion into the pastoral activity and structures of the Church. A Church which is community and institution, family and mission, the creation of Christ through his Holy Spirit, as well as the result of those of us who shape it through our holiness and our sins. God, who does not hesitate to make of the poor and of sinners his friends and instruments for the redemption of the human race, willed it so. The holiness of the Church is above all the objective holiness of the very person of Christ, of his Gospel and his sacraments, the holiness of that power from on high which enlivens and impels it. We have to be saints so as not to create a contradiction between the sign that we are and the reality that we wish to signify.

Meditate well upon this mystery of the Church, living the years of your formation in deep joy, humbly, clear-mindedly and with radical fidelity to the Gospel, in an affectionate relation to the time spent and the people among whom you live. No one chooses the place or the people to whom he is sent, and every time has its own challenges; but in every age God gives the right grace to face and overcome those challenges with love and realism.

Happy Feast Day to My Hero!

My wife and I have just moved again; the original house we rented turned out to have certain, shall we say, issues.  We have now settled into a wonderful new place and I'm back online!

And what a great time to return to the blog!  August 10th is the feast day of the greatest deacon who ever lived, Deacon Lawrence of Rome!  OK, so that's one person's opinion, but consider:

1) Lawrence, when instructed to gather up the treasures of the Church to present to the magistrate, did just that -- he gathered the poor of Rome and presented them as the treasure of the Church!

2) Notice that Lawrence was correctly assumed to be responsible for the temporal goods of the Church -- a longstanding tradition of the Church.

3) Lawrence displays a particularly diaconal sense of humor when he tells his executioner to turn him over because he's done on that side!  Not to mention the wit mentioned above about playing on the term "treasures of the Church."  His rapier wit is seen quite often in his deacon-successors around the world, who frequently take great joy in "tweaking" people and getting them to think and to laugh!  Deacon Larry of Rome would fit in easily with any community of deacons (and wives of deacons) with whom I'm familiar!

4) John Paul II recognized all of this in Lawrence.  During the Jubilee Day for Deacons in 2000, an urn containing the relics of Lawrence was brought to the audience hall from the Basilica of St. Lawrence.  When the pope began his address to us, he gestured to the urn and said, "You were unable to go to Lawrence, dear Deacons, so I had Lawrence brought to you!"

So, dear sainted brother Lawrence, we celebrate your feast with great joy!  Thanks for the inspiration!

A Liturgical Rant: Wearing Underwear Over Outerwear

OK, so this isn't a post dealing with a particularly earth-shaking issue!  Still, it's something that continues to crop up and I get questions about it all the time, so I thought I'd address it.  The issue?  The horrible practice of wearing the deacon stole OVER the dalmatic!

I'm old enough to remember very well the days prior to the Second Vatican Council.  I began serving Mass in 1957 when I was seven years old, and often served two or three Masses a day.  I then spent high school and college in the seminary during and after the Council; liturgically, that's a lot of experience!  I first served as a liturgical Master of Ceremonies when I was 15.  OK, that's some background.

For centuries, the accepted practice for all clerics in the major orders was to wear the amice, alb, cincture, and maniple.  Over these foundational vestments, the subdeacon added the outer vestement of the subdeacon, the tunicle.  Over those same foundational vestments, the deacon added the stole (tied diagonally and held in place by the cincture) and then the outer vestment of the deacon, the dalmatic.  Over those same foundational vestments, the priest added the stole (worn crossed over his chest and held in place by the cincture) and then the outer vestment of the priest, the chasuble.  Notice the pattern?  THE OUTER VESTMENT, by definition, was worn OVER EVERYTHING ELSE!

Catholic clergy didn't adopt the Protestant practice of a "preaching stole" worn over other vestments.

So -- what happened?  Why do priests and now some deacons choose to wear these so-called "overlay" stoles?  How did this liturgical novelty catch on, DESPITE liturgical guidance (read: law) otherwise?

Let's get the legal stuff out of the way.  The General Instruction of the Roman Missal (the GIRM) has always stated that the dalmatic or chasuble is worn OVER the stole and other foundational vestments.  Period.  So why do some choose to wear their liturgical "underwear" over their liturgical "outerwear"?

I think there are a couple of things at play here.

First -- and this is a good thing -- we have seen a wonderful emphasis on the primary role of the bishop, presbyter and deacon for preaching the Good News.  I get that, and support it.  This led some priests, immediately after the Council, to adopt the common practice of other Christian churches to wear the stole, associated by many of those Churches with the function of preaching, OVER their chasubles.  Vestment makers picked up on this and began to design "overlay" stoles.  Still, it's worth noting that the liturgical law of the Church has NOT changed on this regard: it still tells us to wear the stole UNDER the chasuble/dalmatic.  What's next, wearing the cincture over the chasuble/dalmatic?  How about throwing on an amice over everything?  That would be an interesting look, too!

Second -- for deacons, many of us are still getting used to the dalmatic.  After the Council, most parishes got rid of their old "Mass sets": fiddleback chasubles, dalmatics/stoles, and tunicles.  New liturgical vestment styles were developed, except that in the late 1960s and early 1970s these often didn't include vestments for the deacon, since the permanent diaconate was still in its infancy.  This led to expedient of wearing an alb along with a "priest" stole tied or pinned diagonally.  There were very few dalmatics.  This led to the liturgical innovation of a deacon of the Mass wearing only an alb and a stole: this was NEVER the practice prior to the Council.  So, deacons often associated the stole as the primary sign of their Order of Deacon.  HOWEVER, the actual sign of the deacon is the DALMATIC: that is the vestment unique to the diaconate (and the episcopate).  So, when overlay stoles were developed by the vestment makers, they gradually extended that mistake to the deacon's vestments as well, and some deacons have embraced it because they can wear "their" identifying vestment (mistakenly assumed to be the stole) in plain view over the dalmatic.

During this time of ongoing liturgical renewal, it seems a good time to get back to the basics: Wear the stole UNDER the dalmatic!

A Lesson for Sinatra, an insight for all of us

Bob Greene over at CNN has a nice little story about Frank Sinatra, and his friendship with Pasquale "Patsy" Scognamillo who owned what became known in the 1950's as the singer's favorite restaurant.  It seems that the men became friends when both were about to make it big, Frank in entertainment, and Patsy with his own popular restaurant.  Then, when Sinatra's career tanked for a time in the early 1950's, Patsy and his restaurant became sources of comfort and support.

Patsy's grandson still runs that restaurant, and the family recounts this time justifiably with great pride. Greene writes,

 A person recalls how he is treated not when he is on top of the world, undefeated, but when he is at his lowest, thinking he will never again see the sun.

 This is such a good insight for all people of faith.  Not only do we ourselves remember how we were treated when we were down, it is a reminder about how we treat others when they are most in need.  As Greene points out, many people didn't want to be seen with Sinatra during his "down" time, but Patsy reacted with generosity and compassion.  That's a good lesson for all of us, especially those of us who are deacons.

Read the whole story here.

On the Road to Tucson: Fundamentals

I just arrived in one of the greatest cities around -- Tucson, Arizona.  I'm here for an annual gathering of the diaconate communities of the dioceses/archdioceses that comprise Region XIII.  It's always a wonderful event, with lots of great fellowship, wonderful food and drink, and conversation.  They've asked me to talk about "The Diaconate in the Liturgy: Past, Present, Future."  That's quite a broad topic, but here's what I plan on doing.

There's been a lot of talk about the implementation of the 3rd Edition of the Roman Missal in a few months, and so most of the folks have already been to classes and workshops on the particulars.  I don't want to prattle on about things they already know.  What I think (hope!) will be far more beneficial is to really turn the clock back and reflect on WHY we have the Mass in the first place!  We often spend all kinds of time talking about WHAT the Mass is, and WHAT TO DO at Mass, and many times we don't have a real clue about WHY we're doing it in the first place!

We are going to start with the most fundamental dogma of the Church.  That will be my first challenge to the deacons and wives present tomorrow at my presentations: Just what IS the most fundamental DOGMA of the Catholic Church.  A dogma, of course, is a teaching (doctrine) of the Church that we believe is divinely-revealed.   Think about that for a minute.  What do YOU think that most fundamental dogma is?


If you said the TRINITY, you get a gold star, or maybe we should make it a gold triangle!  So, the first thing we're going to do is talk about the Trinity.  Where did that whole idea come from?  What led Christians to take the ONE GOD of the Jewish faith and further define that ONE GOD as being in Three divine Persons?  Why was such a radical step necessary?

Because Christians had to answer a very important question, one that they'd been wrestling with since Jesus asked if of Simon at Caesarea Philippi: "Who do you say that I am?"  Every Christian has to answer that question for himself or herself.  Well, the range of possible answers includes: "You are a man," "You are God", "You are neither God nor Man," and "You are both God and Man."  But here's the rub.  If you answer that Jesus is simply a man, you have no problem.  But if your answer involves Jesus being divine, you then have to figure out HOW to explain His relationship to the ONE GOD.  Of course, as any good church historian will tell us, these dicussions about who Christ is (the Christological debates) and who God is (the Trinitarian debates) occupied many of the early centuries of the church's life as disciples struggled to explain all of this.

And while all of this debating was going on, faithful Christians continued to gather in their various communities and traditions to worship Mystery through the breaking of bread as modeled for them by Christ.  Those earliest Christians didn't wait till they had answers to all their questions before they acted: they lived and acted out of sheer faith.

We'll get into many things tomorrow, but this will be our starting point.

Moving On. . . . What shall we talk about?

OK, I'm all settled in (well, mostly) to my new jobs, and there's been so much on the news (both religious and secular) to choose from!  I entered (briefly) into the whole Corapi mess, but now it's definitely time to move on.

So, what shall we talk about about?  What's on YOUR mind these days?

The Corapi Matter and the Polarization of the Catholic Church in the United States

Permit me to give some necessary personal context to the reflections that follow.

If you look at the brief biography that accompanies this site, you'll notice that I have been blessed to be a Catholic my whole life, and from an early age I knew I had a vocation to ordained ministry.  For eight years I attended high school and college seminary preparing for diocesan priesthood.  Although I discerned that I did not have a vocation to the priesthood, I remained active in ministry throughout the years as a lay person.  I pursued graduate education in Theology during my off-duty time throughout my Navy career.  Eventually, I was ordained a deacon by Cardinal James Hickey for the Archdiocese of Washington, DC in 1990.  From that time to this I remain an incardinated deacon of that Archdiocese although ministry has taken me frequently to other dioceses for service.  My Ph.D. is in Theology from the Catholic University of America, with a special emphasis on Ecclesiology and Sacramental Theology.  Since 1989, I have been associated with the USCCB headquarters variously as a consultant and later as director of two of the Secretariats there.

Against that background I wish to respond to a couple of recent comments made on this blog.  Here's what the readers wrote.

The first reader stated:  

While I am fiercely loyal to the Church, I also accept the reality that She has been gravely harmed by some members in the USCCB who have championed a liberal/progressive agenda in place of Gospel values.

A second reader then wrote:

And there in lies the problem...with the USCCB and their progressive/liberal ALINSKY tactics in order to protect their agenda. I hear nothing about the PRO-ABORT-CATHOLICS in Congress [http://www.canon915.org/list_people.php?figure_ind=P] because they, too, are 'progressive/liberal' .... I see what's happening to Father Corapi as "Rule 13" in Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. And it takes the focus off of the USCCB's failures to uphold the Church's Pro-Life teaching and their refusal to own up to their own guilt and complicity in failing to promote and uphold the Teachings of the Magisterium.

The USCCB fails to take today's Gospel to heart. They're too busy allowing sin to run rampant in their diocese and across this nation.

PS this is not an indictment against every member of the USCCB. There are some truly godly men doing their best against the tide of those 'progressive/liberals' who would silence them.

God have mercy on The Catholic Church in America.

The first reader at least qualified his criticism by saying the "some members" of the USCCB were involved in pursuing a liberal/progressive agenda.  The second goes much, much further, eventually only qualifying the indictment in a postscriptum to her remarks.

It is precisely this kind of broad brush and imprecise language which does much damage to the Body of Christ.  I am not saying that all bishops, their staffs, including the national staff in Washington, DC are perfect.  They (we) are not.  And people SHOULD criticize the bishops and their staffs when that criticism is warranted, by all means!  We have, under canon law, an OBLIGATION to do so.  I am not suggesting otherwise.  What I am pleading for, however, is precision in language, temperance and charity in tone, and accuracy in reporting.  Here's one example.

With both writers above: What do THEY mean by the term "USCCB"?  Do they mean the bishops as a body?  Or do they mean just the staff of priests, deacons, religious and lay persons who staff the headquarters in Washington?  Or do they mean both, the body of bishops AND their staff collectively?

Then, we need to ask: How is this language understood by the READERS of the posting?  Do they understand what these terms mean?  Do they understand the term in the same way as the writer does?

We need answers to all of this before we can even begin to assess the validity of the claims being made about whatever this "USCCB" is in the minds of the writers!  As this language now stands, it is clearly based on emotion, is grossly over-generalized, and, frankly, designed to incite to fear and anger.  It appears to be rhetorical, not factual.

Well, let's get to some actual FACTS here.  The USCCB is the assembly of all ordained bishops (and for some matters, this includes priests who are administering dioceses while the diocese is sede vacante awaiting the appointment of a new diocesan bishop) of the United States, and it includes bishops and eparchs of both the Latin and the Eastern Catholic Churches.  Once a priest is ordained a bishop, he is automatically a member of the USCCB (prior to Vatican II, membership in the predecessor organization was purely a voluntary matter).  While the majority of the bishops are serving as diocesan bishops, others are auxiliary bishops, and still others are "retired" bishops (although the preferred term is to refer to them as the "seniores").  As you can well imagine, such a diverse group would be very difficult to characterize as "liberal", "progressive," "conservative" or "traditional," or any other adjective you care to apply.  In fact, even if you tried to do this, you would find that in many cases, the same bishop might -- on one issue -- adopt a progressive stance, while on another issue, he will be conservative.  These broad generalizations about bishops are just as inaccurate as they are about most of us who are NOT bishops!

The same applies to the national staff.  The staff is also a part of the "USCCB" and the job of the staff is to implement the policies SET BY THE BISHOPS.  No staff member sets his or her own agenda; even if they tried to do so, they wouldn't be around long.  The bishops alone staff the various Committees (some years ago, this was different, but not now), and the Committees set the policies, directions and priorities that they desire, and the staff carries them out.  Let's talk more about the staff.  I will share with you that during my time on the senior staff, we sometimes would find it almost amusing to hear ourselves referred to by some folks as "progressive-liberal"!  After all, here we ALL were, serving the institutional church through her bishops -- not really where you'd expect to find a nest of progressive liberals!  And, as a matter of fact, there weren't.  Did some among us have more progressive views than others?  Of course!  But as diverse as the staff was on the "theo-political" spectrum, we were all there to serve the needs of the bishops; the staff is a professional organization, made up of priests, deacons, religious and lay persons, ALL of whom have extensive diocesan, national and international experience in their areas of expertise.  One of the great joys for me when I worked on the staff was the ability to walk down the hall and have a conversation with such exceptional and dedicated professionals.

All of that is "the USCCB" to me.  To read a comment that somehow there is a cabal trying to implement some "Saul Alinsky" plot is, frankly, just ludicrous.  It would humorous if it were not so tragically inaccurate and, bluntly, libelous.

Dear Readers: We ALL have to find ways of communicating and dealing with each other as Christian disciples, and quit trying to find villains around every corner.  There is enough sinfulness in the world already, and we all are guilty of sin.  But the world -- and the church which is supposed to be the "soul and leaven"  of society -- is just not as black and white as many people would like it to be.  When things are black and white, decisions can be seen as simple things; in such a polarized world, we would be free of struggles and strife, because choices would be so clear and obvious.  But we all know, from our own gained experience, that life is simply not like that.  This side of heaven, we must strive, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to do the best we can, enjoying the good, struggling against the evil, and accepting the bumps along the way.  Just as we can acknowledge such complexity in our lives "outside" the church, we need to accept that complexity within the church as well.

God bless all here, and let us pray for each other!