andrewuttaro - Tumblr blog

andrewuttaro · 2 months

Text

Catholic Hope for America in an Election Year

The story of the American Project in the United States has a familiar cycle to it. Two or three times a generation there will be a crisis or a new wave of immigration that causes those who consider themselves Americans to revise what that title really means. Though rarely without some degree of pain and suffering, the revision is normally accomplished in the short or medium term. Only the United States of America’s most lasting sins defy this cycle of challenge and revision: racism, isolationism and a quiet socio-cultural violence supporting them. The true strength of the US is its ability to evolve within the better ideals of its vision.

The phases of this cycle are so regular that they have become stereotyped. With the immigrant wave of Germans and Scandinavians the Midwest changed. With the immigrant wave of Italians and Irish the East Coast changed. With both, the meaning of what it meant to be an American grew. Since World War Two these evolutions have mostly come from within. Though there are spasms of domestic violence periodically, with violence dwelling nearby the most marginalized throughout, the American project in this country has valued peace and increasingly diverse fraternity in its national project. This institutional memory has come to define the people of the American project in the United States.

To mock one contender to a Presidential nomination this election cycle: Yes, America was founded with racist systems entrenched, but it always came with the potential to do better by that same founding.

The “Land of the Free” ever-expanding rights-based image of the US was so successful in the twentieth century it was exported everywhere. In political self-conception at least, there are many non-Americans who are American in political principles today. I said the “American Project in the United States” off the top for a reason. Meanwhile the original American project has become largely the guarantor of international peace in the last eight decades. For better or worse, American principles are inescapable in almost every nook and cranny of the modern world.

This had many side effects, good to bad. American Espionage goes largely unchecked killing and toppling regimes as it pleases with little consequence. American culture brings a value for education and self-determination to places where it didn’t exist previously but often at the cost of a certain cultural genocide where local polity and identity cannot stand up to it. The Spanish countryside for example has been carved out of anyone young or possessing economic mobility in an expression of the relentless, destructive individualism of American economic principles.

While American economics have lifted millions out of poverty, they have also hastened a demographic decline and began the erasure of whole cultures with a system of neo-colonialism that has become the standard. Not only does economic mobility come with an increase in education, but it also comes with a birth rate decline and a detachment from family and cultural traditions that were held dear sometimes as recently as a generation prior. Nowadays many countries in the developing world have large political movements hostile to these American socio-economic principles as two or three generations on a people can feel orphaned of anything belonging to them except the cultural imperialism of a distant juggernaut in the US.

Those realities are for an article from me a few months down the line. As Americans we should be introspective in some more domestic ways at the moment as a Presidential election approaches this year.

Institutional Memory in an election year

The urgent question facing the American project in the United States of America today is an internal one. President Joe Biden is not incorrect when he says the soul of America is at stake in these times. This country has yet another presidential election year at hand and once again it seems as though, for the second time in as many Presidential election cycles, this one is yet again the most important in our lifetimes. Without diving too in depth into the personal character of the two old men rematching for the Presidency later this year, we might say the institutional memory, the nature of the project itself is at stake in this election and its results.

What do I mean by institutional memory? In my studies of public administration, I learned a lot about civil servants. These are the unelected “bean counters” as my mother would say. The political leanings of these people are not supposed to matter in fully realized America-style democracies. They do what the agency charter tells them to by direction of their appointed boss who is picked by one of the elected politicians. These people carry an institutional memory of how things work best if they’re doing their jobs right. These people have been under attack in the Federal government since the President elected in 2016 took over.

The real longevity of a project as big as the United States depends upon the continuity and longevity of those bean counters as they outlast the politicians and ultimately work on behalf of the American people insofar as their agency mandate is aligned with it. That means that if political partisanship destroys the institutional memory of the civil servants, by firing or installment of political puppets in those positions, we’ve already done half the work of destroying the project as a whole. Kleptocracy and fascism don’t fall too far behind.

What gives birth to that kind of destructive institutional disruption? Cynicism about the status quo. Change is a crucial, everlasting reality of politics in the free world but if change is fathered by cynicism, it often does not provide the better results of our brighter moments a la woman’s suffrage and civil rights. The great Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have a dream” not “I have a nightmare.” Though its true the man and his movement faced nightmarish racism.

Winston Churchill once said, “America will do the right thing once it exhausts all the other options.” The cruel irony of the human political experience is that change is the only constant. For both natural and forced reasons this American Project must change and learn how to change. Longevity is really the battle to change while maintaining the things that make up the sacred core of a thing. America’s increasingly inclusive vision of liberty and justice for all is part of its sacred core: a democratic republic interested in the independent flourishing of all. In a word: hope. A hope for freedom. A hope for safety and opportunity. How will that vision maintain itself going forward?

Hope is the opposite of cynicism. Drop the cynicism and choose a hope that pushes forward. Hope will preserve the blessings of this nation, and hope will guide it rightly in this election year. But we must have the correct hope to get there. Hope that is not rooted in either believing America is flawless or sinful beyond repair. We must have a moderating hope that nonetheless has a vision and the will to pursue it. That is how a diverse nation like our own can move forward.

Institutional memory, Longevity, and the Catholic Church

The American project can take notes on longevity and the right kind of change which it requires from the single greatest model of such perseverant hope in the Western World: The Catholic Church. Yes, this institution also has many sins. And yes, there are those competing for guardianship of its sacred core with different conceptions of its vision right now as well. The winds of reform are changing the Church for the better while some prefer a more regressive, destructive path for it. The parallels are closer than either group may feel comfortable admitting.

I say that as an American Catholic who is not obsessed with a bygone romanticism of either institution. Catholics in this country protested against the Civil Rights movement just as much as any other denomination buying into whiteness as a bigotry. I am willing to admit and confess the sins of both these institutions I claim. There is something to be learned, something urgent to be learned, for America in this election year, from the Catholic Church in a tide of change.

The True Catholic Hope for America: not the vision of some of the more misguided traditionalists in the Catholic orbit which dream of an American project fundamentally anathema to its founding like a monarchy. Cultural capture and dominance are toxic to both institutions whether the most conservative voices in both see it or not. True Catholic Hope for America lies in the peace and universal fraternity both the Catholic Church and the American Project of the United States of America share as part of their sacred core. Let us look at the Catholic Hope America might find in the mainstream Catholic Church firmly in the hands of its magisterium in Rome headed by the bishop of that city: the Pope. Pope Francis is currently that leader, but this story requires some background.

Since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Catholic Church has prioritized treating their faithful like adults on the theology side and treating outsiders with a newfound respect a la ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue. The Council spent a whole document apologizing to the Jews of the world for the Holocaust. The five Popes since the closure of that Council have even found new ways to flex the geopolitical might of the faith: see Pope St. John Paul II and the fall of the Soviet Union. The post-Vatican II Church can be agile, becoming a “field hospital for the modern world” as Pope Francis puts it, or it can be sluggish, stumbling over old bigotries as with Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address in 2006. In either case the pace of reform has never grinded to a complete halt. As reform speeds up again now after a slow period, resistance is bound to crop up.

Resistance to reform is inevitable and the post-Vatican II traditionalist movement increasingly finds friends in those bad actors of bigotry, fascism, and misogyny. The Sex Abuse Crisis as it developed after 2002 has so eroded old-fashioned institutional trust that the youngest generation of traditionalists often confuse their faith with the bigotries of the political climate. For them all criticism is as predatory as the endless jokes and distrust of the Church. A secondary effect of the rightful spotlight of abuse in the Church was the destruction of guardrails against the radicals a generation on.

As a result, you’ll find many Catholics wearing the American red hat, if you know what I mean, and embracing values contradictory to basic teachings of Jesus Christ. This is a toxic and an untenable way to proceed as American Catholics and Americans period. Ironic then that this reaction to a reforming Pope is largely limited to the United States, the English-speaking world, and a few other culturally unique situations.

The institutional Church has nonetheless continued down the path of the Council and even largely banished sex abuse from all but the highest auspices of leadership a la former Pope St. John Paul II’s disbelief in the credible and extensive abuse allegations against former American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

While nobody with any sense would declare the Sex Abuse Crisis over, most news-making stories on it are now almost exclusively set in a backdrop decades ago or between adults in run-of-the-mill power imbalances. For reasonable Catholics of my generation, we have long ago accepted that our Church will, for the rest of our years on this earth, be associated with pedophilia. That is an intractable truth that has made the youngest traditionalists indifferent to the outside world and fiercely damning of reform in any variety, even that of the Second Vatican Council. This siege mentality is not unlike the cynicism that seeks to throw out civil servants if they aren’t political sycophants.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis, at the head of the magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church as Catholics would say, has truly directed it toward the gutters. Not the gutters of decay and irrelevance traditionalists with their crusader profile pictures would have you believe. No, to the gutters where Jesus founded his Church. The self-obsessed medieval Church is not coming back, the pedophile Priests made sure of that. The “Field Hospital” Church of Pope Francis is a return to the roots of Catholicism. It is a focus on the poor and outcast which, for whatever material good it can do, becomes the penitential era of a Church that knows the wrongs it has committed more intimately than critics care to show. The lesson for America where she stands right now lies there in a refocus on the least of these to use a biblical allusion.

As the center of unity and orthodoxy in the Catholic Church, the Pope has the authority to drive the Church this way despite any of the aforementioned resistance. To deny this as a Catholic is to willfully break unity with the Bishop of Rome, the clearest indicator of what makes one Catholic in the contemporary sense. But willful ignorance is the currency of those undermining the good works of a worthy hope for humanity. Willful ignorance is the mask of cynicism.

A Catholic Hope for America in an election year

Another hope for humanity is freedom and liberty for all. Yes, the United States of America has something to learn here as she must pull herself from the grip of willful ignorance of all her wrongs in this election year. America must choose to hope over cynicism.

The U.S. is not free from the putrid realities of its more racist, isolationist past. The past isn’t even past: not in the Catholic Church and not in that sacred core of the American vision that throws off those persistent demons of our national identity. But the metaphor has been laid on rather thick here and I suspect some readers have tired of it. Let’s call a spade a spade in this election year.

For two men over the age of 77, both major party candidates have changed a great deal in their long lives in the public eye. Flee from simplistic descriptors of these two men. Many such descriptors will be apt but if we are to address the underlying flashpoint in American history that each man represents, we miss the opportunity to turn a corner for the better. We must choose the hopeful worldview.

Joe Biden is the last evolution of an American liberalism that idolizes the Kennedy Camelot with all its hypocrisy masked by hopeful prose. Donald Trump is the last evolution of an American Conservatism that idolizes Reaganism in all its self-defeating drive for conformity. Both men have arrived at those ends by mixing in just enough of what the political extremes currently salivate over. But a choice here we must make, and I recommend we make it with hope. Choosing the lesser of two evils is a false dichotomy. One candidate will be better for America as America ought to be.

The domestic threats to America today thrive on cynicism. Cynicism blinds you to the solutions presented by peace and universal fraternity of peoples. Cynicism erodes hope and replaces it with nothing short of a willingness to do violence, physical or not. Hope, like faith, is not blind. Hope builds faith in the other because it isn’t waiting for the error even if it’s guaranteed to come. Sometimes we are so absorbed in our individualism we cannot imagine the faith in others that hope requires, particularly in regards to politics, as anything more than childish and stupid.

Drop that cynicism. Hope is the first action of faith borne from a belief in someone. That first action is essential with something as intangible as the vision of a national project. Cynicism can’t do that because it refuses to do that. Cynicism takes no risks; it only shrinks into its own echo chamber.

Hope akin to the Catholic who stays with their Church because of love for Jesus can defeat cynicism. Hope akin to minority Americans who have been so wounded by America in the past but work to make it better nonetheless. That same hope can defeat the cynicism that drives the wedge deeper in the fishers of the American project represented by our political divisions which now seem inseparable from identity. That welcoming hope that bears the wrong and tries to correct those wrongs and build a better future nonetheless, no matter what the differences that arise are, there is a hope to buoy your sanity in this election year. That is the hope that will keep America going no matter what, in the right direction God willing.

If you want a straight answer out of me on the Presidential election itself, it is obviously to not vote for the one who tried to overthrow the government a few Januarys ago. Peace and universal fraternity, remember? Do I need to spell it out?

Choose to hope in a vision of the post-November reality: not hope for the guy I don’t like to get locked up but for the best expression of the sacred core of this special American project we’re still holding onto. Do you still want it? It is a blessing worth preserving. Abandon the relentlessly negative cynicism that counts no blessings and build something anew for once. That doesn’t mean we have to abandon the good things either.

How could I post an article with Catholicism as a theme on Ash Wednesday without invoking some humility? From ashes we come, to ashes we go. When the rage wells up in you about someone who disagrees with you remember how short life is. Remember that the point of any national political project is to leave something for future generations. Those future generations won’t remember how you totally dunked on the opposition, they’ll remember what you preserved for them while you were still breathing.

There is another conversation to be had about what our elections in the United States mean to the rest of the world. Long story short, it matters a lot to so many people who don’t vote in this country and to remember that is an act of charity all its own. I will be writing another article about that in a few months down the line.

If you found this article tolerable, or even enjoyable, please consider buying my book: “How to catch feelings for Jesus” (Wipf and Stock).

#catholic #catholicism #2024 elections #america #united states

1 note · View note

andrewuttaro · 9 months

Text

The Coming Schism of the American Catholic Traditionalist

Introduction

There are some things in life that are so context specific that they are nearly rendered incomprehensible to the average person. My mother is a nurse and of the many medical conditions I have had explained to me over the years the one that always eludes my understanding is the hernia. How are the organs pushing outward? What causes that? How can one do that to themselves doing basic lifts? Would not all organs be pushing against weak spots in the muscles then?

Though I have never had one somehow I know what hernias are like on a visceral level. They’re common enough that I have met people suffering from them and heard all about the effects of having one. I have empathized to the point of getting those ghost pains and its one of those injuries that also happens to be ripe for comedy unfortunately, at least when I was a child.

Religious folks like me often use signs and symbols to describe spiritual realities. In the Catholic tradition the Body of Christ is often invoked as a very tangible, bodily metaphor for the whole community of the Church. The ongoing Great Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches is sometimes referred to as the separation of two lungs: we speak of ecumenical pursuits as reuniting the two so the whole Christian body can breathe as one again.

But alas, great diversity is possible within one body. We have so many different cells working together to do so many different functions. We have so many different systems of cells working together to create higher functions more basic forms of life could never muster. The religious parallel I am going for here is the numerous rites. Though most Catholics are part of the Latin Rite there are dozens of others who have different liturgical practices and subtle pastoral differences all within the body of Christ we call the Church in communion with Rome.

To consider a Church community as a body is to rethink how to handle its issues. Why is Church attendance shrinking? Why does a body atrophy? Why is there disagreement in leadership? Why is the body suffering a mental burden? Don’t worry, this clunky metaphor is only for the introduction. Religion, for the sake of this article my Catholic religion, also has such scenarios. Catholic Traditionalism might be considered the more fundamentalist viewpoint in my faith. It is a phenomenon that is indisputably and enormously context specific. As in, it is so very Catholic that a great many people who are casually Catholic or not Catholic at all will have never heard of these issues.

Catholic traditionalism, like fundamentalism across the religious world, behaves in ways that often seem counter to the right functioning of the whole body. I am not so naïve as to wonder why people choose simplicity, but I am obsessive enough to want to see such a way of thinking through in a fair way. I hold no resentment for my coreligionists of a traditionalist bent, in fact I even respect there beliefs in a few idiosyncratic ways. Beyond the people who really enjoy the old Latin Mass it may be hard to even imagine who these people are. That is why we will start with the basics before we venture into the storm on the horizon. Get comfortable in your seat, we’re going for a deep dive.

To be clear, since the title of this article is meant to be provocative, the narrative this article builds up to at the end is a worst case scenario. For reasons we will get to, formal schism is not an easy or particularly worthwhile pursuit. However, I would be foolish not to present it as a possibility given the subject matter we are looking at here.

Back then and right now

In the world of Protestant Christianity there is a vast diversity of liturgy (ritualism) and theology (philosophy of who God is). The easiest comparable there are fundamentalists. As is true beyond the world of religion, when you break down leadership structures into ever more independent parts the sacrifice paid for that independence becomes increasingly clear: dissension. I will spare you enduring a Catholic trying to discuss the problems of the vast array of Protestant denominations but do remember that this habit of dissension is true among those of us who submit to the Pope in Rome as well. Catholic Traditionalists may be thought of as the Evangelical Fundamentalists of the Catholic world.

In spite of what some triumphalists will try to tell you, there has always been dissent and disagreement within the Catholic Church. The difference is that the center with which the dissenter disagrees is a human being with a face in the person of the Pope. In spite of that fact, the Church, at least in substance, changes on a timescale of centuries even though stylistically there is a constant evolution.

That allows the sacred deposit of faith, the substantial, dogmatic, eternal and unchangeable things, like belief in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, to persist unscathed. The heresies that contended with those life-giving treasures have largely been dealt with more than a millennia ago. The last millennia plus of Church history has been more or less re-litigations of long-resolved debates wrapped in the pastoral concerns of the day… well that and ultimately political issues that are so culturally embedded that it’s not really for the Vatican to untangle them. In a way, that is where our story begins.

One of the first things you notice about a Catholic traditionalist, “Trads” as the internet slang goes, is that terminology even devout believers don’t use anymore is employed: a la heresy. Heresy is a very specific term in the Catholic Church. Heresy is not apostacy which is leaving the faith. Heresy is contesting something essential about the faith in a way that goes beyond oneself to affect others. Heresy generally only refers to dogmatic stuff: the deposit of faith I mentioned earlier. Heresy is also fundamentally a social act. You need a group of supporters to be credibly accused of it, generally supporters who are themselves real-life theologians. It is actually very difficult to commit heresy in any meaningful way.

Unless you are charged with it while spreading the Gospel as a member of the clergy or religious life… well then accusing you of heresy is like accusing the family dog of tax evasion: yes I suppose they aren’t paying their taxes right but… uh… that’s not a responsibility of theirs.

Nonetheless heresy is a charge leveled at just about anyone who disagrees with the traditionalist. Accusations of heresy and false teaching are commonplace among all fundamentalist movements in the religious world. When one claims the need to go to back to basics, for a whole religious body not just themselves on a personal spiritual level, they are making an assertion that is, by definition a negative point: something is wrong with how things are now so let’s go back to an imagined version of the past when things were better.

Pope Francis is somewhat straight forward on these things: “Many call themselves traditional. No, they are not traditional, they are people looking to the past, going backward, without roots; and looking backward is a sin.”1

Practically speaking if the average person has ever encountered a Catholic traditionalist here in the United States their traditionalism will present itself in the form of a fondness for the Pre-Vatican II Latin Mass. There is a great generational divide here. In most places in the English speaking world the Latin Mass disappeared from wide usage at some point in the 1970s.2 People generally enjoyed hearing the Mass in their own language even if it did not succeed in deepening their faith. That reform to the vernacular caused the Church to grow dramatically in Africa, South America, and the greater Global South3, but in much of the English speaking world it was a net break even on the Church attendance front.

Stateside, the 1980s and 1990s saw Church attendance begin its long descent that continues to the present day, in line with general Church disaffiliation across all Christian denominations (excluding nondenominationalists and Evangelicals) in the US4. By the time Pope Francis is elected in 2013 most of the interest in the Latin Mass isn’t coming from the boomer generation that remembered the old ways; rather it was millennials who found something beguiling and old fashioned in it. This group is small but very vocal as this generally goes in the age of everyone-gets-a-bullhorn social media.

In 2007, then Pope Benedict XVI made the old Latin Mass more accessible to everyday lay Catholics5. By 2021, his successor reversed those reforms because a culture so toxic and separatist had grown up around the Latin Mass that it had to be curbed6. Turns out liturgical preferences were a superficial part of the traditionalist movement that now expressed itself in combative attitudes toward Rome, and pretty much all the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. This vocal minority was taking over Catholic spaces on the internet and, through a growing minority of traditionalist clergy, even taking over parishes here and there.

From the who-could-do-what at Mass to how we Catholics present ourselves in the public square, from moral theology to political ideology, the traditionalist movement wanted to turn back the clock on everything. The movement now wanted the Pre-Vatican II Church back to some degree. But why?

Rads and Glads!

Let me take a step back for a moment. It is not a problem if you like your smells and bells. There is a certain ritualism to Catholic faith that you don’t need to be a traditionalist to appreciate. I would even go as far to say that traditionalists have a point when they say most modern Catholics have a lack of reverence that doesn’t necessarily help the inner, spiritual life. There is something lost spiritually when we cannot respect something beyond our comprehension. We ritualize the things we love most in life and certainly our deeply held religious convictions fit the bill. Lack of reverence, I would contend, is a deeper cultural issue to attend to in other ways but I digress.

Moreover, Traditionalists, particularly of the younger sort, are overwhelmingly adult converts or those who have newly rediscovered their faith after being away from it a while. The passion of a convert is something spiritual masters the world over have commented on for good and bad reasons. It is good to care so much about this new faith you’ve taken on; its not so good when that fervor becomes condemnation and judgement upon all who have not also made your particular decision, including those within the Church itself who aren’t as interested in the smells and bells or classical theology of it all. I think the more self-aware Catholic Traditionalists will admit this if you really press them on it… well a certain variety at least.

I have a friend who is a convert to the faith as an adult in the last four years. My buddy has described that over-zealous time post-conversion and how he came out of it in a constructive way. He had to be corrected by a Priest who made sure his fervor found healthier expressions and the deeper levels of conversion where you are converted evermore by a Christ whose very being is love. To sermonize for a moment: when you really know the God who is love, the Prince of Peace Jesus Christ, condemnation becomes the rarest approach on your mind.

My friend embraces this title of traditionalist with a qualifier: glad-trad or glad traditionalist. Yes, the slang goes deeper. Even within Catholic traditionalism there is a sense of difference. While we may be talking about an overall group of people that probably number less than a couple million worldwide, the differences with the subgroups are not terribly subtle and actually tell you a lot about who wants what in this movement… at least among the younger generations.

As you might be able to guess about a glad-trad: they aren’t big on the confrontations with their coreligionists. They love the faith with a vigor that truly does seek to welcome people in. Unlike any other greeter in Church smiling as they hand you the hymnal, a glad-trad may also remind you to genuflect before the tabernacle or wear more reverential clothing. Fair to say among most traditionalist women there is a movement back to veiling in Church. That is the gaudy head covering that was heavily worn in the pre-Vatican II world but yes, you guessed it, is catching on again among the younger ranks of the traditionalist movement.

Unlike the other subgroup we’ll be talking about, most glad-trads will not descent from Church teaching much, if at all. As you might have gathered from the Pope Francis quote earlier and his suppression of the Latin Mass in 2021, the current Pope is not all that popular among traditionalists, but glad-trads are the ones least likely to openly voice that descent or even possess it at all given their excited ascent to some of the Church’s most obscure and least popular teachings, like that on the use of artificial birth control. Non-clergy Catholic voices against widely used artificial birth control for example are almost exclusively traditionalists, as your average Lay Catholic, to be quite frank, generally uses it if they need it.

If it has not become clear to you yet there is a very chronically online undertone to all this. Most Catholics in this country realize the parts of their faith that are least popular with the general public will probably not be the tip of the needle for outreach to that same general public. Brought up in the savagely vulgar world of internet forums focused on religion, a lot of traditionalists, even of the glad variety, seem to insist on reversing the order: put the unappealing appearances of the faith at the forefront. Why not? Are you ashamed of Christ?

Again, glad-trads aren’t prone to the confrontation of it so they might have an enlightening conversation with you about the dynamics of how we are to practically spread the faith in the world today. That gentle nature is not the case with the other subgroup among Catholic Traditionalists: the radicals, Rad-Trads if you will.

Dissent versus Sedevacantism

Radical traditionalists, unlike their glad-trad counterparts, dissent from official Church teaching as a point of pride. This has some nefarious outcomes, but we will go there next. For now understand that the radical designation is there because they do not care for the niceties and formalities that they believe have shepherded the Church into misguided teachings if not fully-heretical dogmas that offend Jesus Christ himself.

While you may readily find the sins of misogyny, racism, and antisemitism among glad-trads, they would generally apologize and seek reconciliation for it like any reasonable person found guilty of such things. The radicals, oh no, they flip it back on the one pointing out the sin. The world outside the Church walls has nothing to teach the radical. Holiness is only found where dogma explicitly says so and that is in the sacraments… which you need to receive in this specific way. The plank is always in the other’s eye to use a biblical analogy.

Radical Traditionalists, more than any other group within Western Catholicism, particularly in the English speaking world, are most willing to embrace schism... other than of course those who have actually gone into schism. Let’s stop on that word for a moment here. I stopped on heresy earlier because its an overused term that most people, including cradle Catholics, don’t generally understand. The same is true for schism.

Here I am using the word in a clickbait title, I better clarify it. Schism, like heresy, has to be a movement. Any layperson can erroneous comprehend something and its somewhat irrelevant until that misconception spreads: either way it doesn’t mean he’s in schism. Schism is a formal choice. Moreover, schism, like heresy, normally includes a clerical element.

When a Kansas man named David Allen Bawden declared himself the true Pope after a thrift store conclave involving his parents, himself, and three others in 1990 what followed was more of an interesting oddity than a serious schism. Pope Michael, as he declared his papal name, was the child of a real schism, the Society of St. Pius X, which was the Church of his parents through which he was educated. Their leader, French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, broke with Rome (a way of saying you reject the authority of the Pope) in the 1970s claiming that the Second Vatican Council had surrendered the Church to the ever-changing contemporary heresy of modernism. That is another overused term you will here Trads throw around. My apologies, I simply do not have enough time to go down that rabbit hole.

The Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) is also a story for another day. However, for the sake of comprehension it is important to understand that this group and its leader broke away after being denied the Pope’s ascent to their openly rebellious congregation of priests and bishops7. The paper trail and the all-important formal breach of apostolic authority is all there. We Catholics treasure our formal connection to the Apostles via this continuous chain of priestly consecration that goes all the way back to them historically. We call this apostolic succession. When that chain is broken by schism, all liturgical and theological authority of the schismatics is lost, even if they were high-placed Priests and Bishops. SSPX is just the most modern example of this.

That is a schism. Schism is not Pope Michael (not seriously at least), schism is not that Priest that Tom the Trad doesn’t like because he is too nice to gay people, schism is not your cousin insisting Pope Francis isn’t validly-elected because Pope Benedict XVI lived almost ten years after his resignation, and schism certainly isn’t the official magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church promulgated in the form of the Second Vatican Council and every Pope since then. That last thing is called Sedevacantism. That is probably another term you want to know.

For Rad-Trads, their annoyance with Pope Francis will often lead them to Sedevacantism. This is a broad group across the Catholic world who believes, for a variety of different reasons, that there is currently no validly elected Pope. The latin root of the term literally means “the seat is vacant”. This belief has a lot of different variations as to the when and how but the why is always that the Church has fallen away from more perfect beliefs it had in the past and its because it lacks proper leadership. In the Catholic world there are about five or six of these kind of groups who one could clearly call Catholic in origin, SSPX is one of them.

Radical Traditionalist Catholics dissent wherever something isn’t neatly defined in Vatican-approved documents, the Catechism, or the bible. When it comes to all three of those sources the older is the better because the radicals talk themselves into and out of schism depending on how they feel about what is going on in Rome and or their national capital. A papal document from the sixteenth century is just holier to them than anything that could have possibly been written closer to the present day. It’s the fundamentalist way far beyond the auspices of the Catholic Church.

Dissent, for many radical traditionalists, is the name of the game if they can envision themselves as more holy than their target up to and especially contemporary Popes. Dissent is just the disagreement of it all. On the one hand most people dissent from their religious group’s teachings in some way. Why are you dissenting? If everyone dissents from the ideal explicit in moral teachings anyway then why should any dissent be concerning to us? On the other hand it’s all about intent, right?

Good Catholics dissent all the time. It’s different for radical traditionalists. They generally dissent without the honesty of admitting to it: “Our dissent is toward the truth! Your dissent is to justify your sin!” Radical Traditionalists will tie themselves up in knots that eventually force them to reject the legitimacy of the Pope. Dissent is one thing if you are respecting the norms of a system set out to accomplish a shared end worth pursuing: we Catholics believe Jesus set up the system so that respectful dissent really means something to us. Dissent is a whole other thing if it doesn’t have that ultimate unity in mind.

The next logical step is Sedevacantism and that is why SSPX has seen the internet, and the generations who grew up on it, swell its ranks anew. Chances are there is an SSPX-run chapel in the City closest to you. Those places, steeped in the smells and bells ritualism of a Pre-Vatican II Catholicism, feel just foreign enough to be exciting. This is where the radicals recruit the glad-trads… well there and on Reddit but I think that’s a given when you talk about any movement amongst people under 50.

Now this might all sound rather benign to you. If you’ve read this far you’re either my mother, my wife, or someone who thinks this might be somewhat relevant to contemporary life beyond the auspices of the Catholic faithful proper. Thank you all, you deserve a reward: How does this affect the bigger picture?

The goals of radicals indeed threads into something much larger going on in the United States of America and that is what we have to talk about beyond all these definitions and funny church-isms. The present, chosen obstacle of this movement is Pope Francis and that is where you have to start to understand the radical traditionalist endgame which dovetails into the broader story of the United States today.

Resistance to Pope Francis

Pope Francis has ignited something in the Catholic world. He has ignited a rethinking about the faith that ultimately seeks to push the Church into the back-half of implementation of the Second Vatican Council. In Church history we say every such Council takes a century to implement. Seriously, when you consider theological and liturgical developments ultimately it takes three or four generations to really get the Church onboard with its own program.

This unhappy truth of Catholicism is true for the clergy as well: it moves slow even in regard to its own official teachings! The opposition to Pope Francis’ program is led by clerics: egotistical but ultimately tone deaf Priests, and opportunistic but ultimately foolish Bishops.

Pope Francis’ most basic development is the look to the peripheries. Who is on the outside looking into our Church? Who is not listened to and what are we missing for ignoring them? He means this in every way: the poor, the oppressed, the outcast, all the groups his namesake, Saint Francis, would draw our attention to. That is a profoundly Christian message: you can almost hear a sermon of Jesus between the lines of a lot of the teaching Pope Francis does. But that outsiders-first messages is not easy for the comfortably centered if you will, and that is where the resistance originates. That unfortunately often means Bishops and Priests.

Pope Francis directs us outward and the reactionaries against him direct us back inward as a religious group. A common denominator of Pope Francis’ critics is that they enjoy a far more self-referential Church: one that cares more for protecting the treasures within than sharing those treasures in innovative ways with those without. That is where traditionalism, particularly since the reign of Pope Francis began, make their bread and butter.

But don’t let the cuteness of that analogy fool you: they’re making poison. The endgame is either reconquest or schism. Everyone involved in this drama knows the deposit of faith is not at stake. The Traditionalists need to turn something like sexual ethics into a matter of salvation when it obviously isn’t because their project is fundamentally about conformity to an older way of doing things. This is poisonous to the Church because, laugh as you might at this suggestion, we are to believe the Holy Spirit guides the Church forward into newness and continued conversion.

In other words, if you spend all day looking in the mirror you probably don’t know where to begin forging your way toward the horizon. Slow as its progress maybe the Church’s mission is oriented toward the progress that is the conversion of souls and building the Kingdom of God. In that worldview it has to be the Holy Spirit leading. Mere power dynamics, the realm of fundamentalists and traditionalists the world over, is often beside the point for the Holy Spirit. But this is the space the reactionary Priests and Bishops who shepherd the Traditionalist movement in this country along traffic in.

Reconquest is the easy answer for traditionalists. It is less messy to just wait for another conclave then take on the Pope directly. The age of antipopes is long past and anything approaching that would simply be so tacky as to be self-defeating in the modern world. Since the Protestant Reformation schism has had a hard backstop for Catholics who might seriously contemplate it. The only thing you can claim that might separate you from simply being called a Protestant is that apostolic succession we mentioned earlier. And Catholic schismatics do not want to be called Protestants!

That’s how SSPX clings to whatever vainglorious legitimacy they think they have. That’s why the Old Catholics (AKA the Church of Utrecht who rejected the First Vatican Council in the nineteenth century) still exist. That chain of ordination is our hardwire connection to the apostles, the ethernet cable to the Protestant World’s over-the-air Wi-Fi if you will. That Apostolic Succession is one of the first things Matin Luther and the other Protestant Reformers rejected. Catholic breakaway movements always refuse to cross that Rubicon. It is a matter of validity of the Sacraments for us.

You may have noticed Pope Francis has been Pope for more than a decade now. The reconquest strategy is taking longer than the radicals wanted. Schism, in spite of all these aforementioned difficulties, is becoming more palatable. To be clear I am mainly talking about traditionalist-leaning Bishops now. They are the movers and shakers of the movement with real ecclesial (Church political) power slow rolling orders from Rome in their locality or making the local seminary all that more traditional as to pump out more traditionalist priests.

In the early days of this papacy it was just snide comments in the media: “the pope is confusing Catholics with this way of saying things.” This was the strategy with Amoris Latitia7. That was an apostolic exhortation Pope Francis published in 2015 that committed the great sin of extending rhetorical olive branches to irregular families, specifically divorced and remarried people. The Traditionalists went a step further from there.

The next step was accusation. Now the comments were: “This is a bridge too far, your holiness.” The big example here to the general public is Laudato Si8 which was the Pope’s encyclical letter on the environment and environmental justice. It went against the grain of the conservatism traditionalists naturally embraced in the English speaking world. I would direct your attention to the more sinister example in 2017 when the Amazonian Synod, a gathering of lay and clerical Catholics from the Amazon region of South America at the Vatican, led to accusations of papal idol worship that were more than a little racist. As part of a liturgy during the synod an image of the Virgin Mary as a pregnant Amazonian woman was the centerpiece. This and Amazonian dance was too much for the radical traditionalists who threw the Marian imagery into the Tiber River.

The third, penultimate step arrived the following year when a number of Bishops, who still have not retracted9, accused Pope Francis of mishandling abuse claims as a front for calling for his resignation. Make no mistake this was an attempt to get attention outside Catholic echo chambers mentioning the abuse crisis, specifically in regard to the former Cardinal and infamous abuser Theodore McCarrick. That not to mention the Dubia, as it was called, hardly looked to hide its homophobia when it spoke of the Pope playing kindly with a much rumored gay lobby hidden deep within the Vatican. It was a radical traditionalists fantasy come alive.

Pope Francis has dealt with the abuse crisis better than any of his predecessors, so he waited out the more flatly spurious and confrontational allegations. Theodore McCarrick was already becoming the first Cardinal to be removed from such a post in modern times due to his long history of sexual abuse. He was stripped of his priesthood and handed over to secular authorities. The leading Dubia Bishops were gradually rotated to lesser roles out of the spotlight of ecclesial prominence. The most notable of whom was Archbishop Carlo Mario Vigano who had been the highest ranking Vatican representative to the United States as Apostolic Nuncio to our country.

Vigano is now hardly a serious churchman. He writes a periodic screed he circulates to the most traditionalist publications rife with conspiracy theories and heinously bigoted language throughout. While most traditionalists do not look at the man with reverence, his Dubia and the stunts he pulled against Pope Francis in the months and years immediately afterwards provided a blueprint for the radical traditionalist movement who now see the fourth and final step before schism coming together: rallying the resources to step into the breach and say no to the program of the Pope. This now requires a specifically American Endgame.

The American Endgame

The Catholic Church in the United States of America is an odd cultural thing when taken as a whole. Always the gritty, overwhelmingly Protestant frontier of the Church, the faith in this country has a chip on its shoulder. Following such a thoroughly European version of Christianity came with a cost once upon a time in this country. Churches were burned and clergy murdered in the early republic whenever the tide of nativism rolled in.

With waves of Irish and Italian immigrants the bigotry directed at them was not so much their ethnic background as much as their religious background. They joined a stateside Church that was always trying to prove it was Catholic enough in a country that hated it, in a broader world Catholicism that saw it as provincial: a bunch of rural bumpkins who Rome needed to babysit. The anti-Catholic mobs infamously chased the first Papal legate from the country in the late 1850s. Though less violent, after the Civil War this history of distrust persisted into the twentieth century: How do you trust those who answer to another head of state overseas in the Pope? They must be infiltrators!

That anti-Catholicism may have died in the Second World War. It may have died with President John F. Kennedy. As American as apple pie, many historians of American religion say the nation softened its view of Catholicism after seeing that family in the White House. Kennedy famously had to deal with his religious beliefs on the campaign trail, there were still many Americans who simply could not trust a Catholic with the Presidency10.

American Catholicism more closely aligned with politically liberal American values back then. After Kennedy, and particularly after Roe V. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, the stateside Catholic Church was swept up in the rise of the “moral majority” and the broader American conservative movement which pitted American Christianity against all the forces of racial, sexual, and economic progress. This was to the ultimate determent of all the Christian groups involved. By the 1990s all of the mainline Protestant denominations were seeing their congregations shrink and even though those losses have been much slower for Catholics the effects are clearly impacting them as well.

President Ronald Reagan normalized diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1984, a move which American conservatives a few decades earlier would have cried to the heavens was foreign domination. It was a convenient alliance to have a moral authority like Rome in the fold in the eyes of the Reaganites. Of course it was another piece on the Chess Board of the Cold War: President Reagan loved having such a vigorous anti-communist in his camp in the form of Pope St. John Paul II. Nonetheless the American Catholic Church still felt it had something to prove to Rome. That proverbial chip on the shoulder was now a certain kind of piety: “Look how devout we can be among so many Protestants!”

In a post-Trump, or rather the Post-Roe world I should say, the old fashion anti-Catholicism maybe making a comeback. Put bluntly, the political alliance that captured half of all American Catholics in the moral majority via abortion, no longer needs them. Old insults are back again. Radical right wingers like Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green feel comfortable saying the Catholic Church is run by the devil: rhetoric that most people my age, most people my parents age for that matter, have never heard from government officials in their lifetime. Against this backdrop its important to understand another angle on American Catholicism as it exists today… and it is oh so American: money.

While the global Catholic Church has grown most in the developing world, the “Global South” if you will, since the Second Vatican Council, the most sizable monetary donations to the Vatican have in that same time span begun coming from the United States. This country isn’t a Catholic powerhouse in any of the meaningful metrics of sacramental engagement or vocations to the Priesthood, but it is the greatest source of financial stability for the Church11. As the economy has begun to hollow out the middle class by attrition those donations are increasingly coming from a class of wealthy American Catholics. US Bishops who are all too ready to appease this donor class.

As you may have gathered from the discussion on resistance to Pope Francis, he’s not really a rich man’s Pope, quite the opposite in fact. Traditionalists of both varieties have discovered that if you pay a theologian enough they’ll say just about whatever you want them to. If you’ve never heard of the NAPA Institute then consider yourself blessed. This group invites all kinds of Bishops and Catholic influencers from across the nation to their California conferences detailing how some creative theologizing can actually show being super-wealthy is good and just. These are the hotbeds of resistance to Pope Francis in the American Church.

And so elite, wealthy Catholic donors will bankroll a large Church restoration in a Diocese to get on the local Bishop’s good side and then wine and dine him to curry favor. You guessed it, these wealthy lay Catholics are often ultra-conservatives interested in an increasingly right wing battery of politicians and ideologues. Traditionalists, particularly the radical variety, have taken note of this apparatus and employed it to their use. The same Catholic voices, clergy and lay, who you may find at a NAPA Institute Conference or lecturing in the traditionalist hotbed that is Steubenville, Ohio, pick and choose culture warriors to elevate within the radical echo chamber.

Once great celebrity-teaching priest turned media-focused Bishop Robert Barron makes more content looking to excuse the misdeeds of more hateful voices on the political right like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro than he does teach the faith these days. Whoever can be an ally in the ideological battle is someone worth bringing in no matter how unsavory they are to the outsider groups Christianity historically centered. They will mask it in the guise of good-old Christian compassion but there is an agenda there when you pay Jordan Peterson to talk about his rabid transphobia rather than an actual bishop talk about actual Catholic teaching.

These wallet-smart traditionalist-aligned voices know what they are doing. When Pope Francis or one of his proxies say something vaguely progressive one of these types will not even attempt a good faith reading of what’s been said: they go right to scoring political points with their increasingly traditionalist base. Meanwhile traditionalist Bishops churn out young traditionalist Priests from their seminaries and suddenly you see how organized this movement is becoming. I have personally discovered you run about a 50/50 chance of a Priest under the age of 40 having some traditionalist leanings.

You don’t need to read too deep between the lines to see where this is going: schism. But not just schism, January 6th style schism: the kind that wants an outright regime change governmentally to supplant a perceived cultural high tide radical traditionalists see as objectively evil. They have an all-too-willing ally in an increasingly insurrectionist conservative movement in this country. Sure, a lot of the traditionalism in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church has roots in France (a la SSPX) and that more European Sedevacantism that hates the Second Vatican Council; but they also know their deck of cards is stronger if they can claim a position of power financially over Rome via Washington DC.

Sure, these folks would prefer undermining a Conclave to get a Pope more sympathetic to their cause. Reconquest is the easier option. But the United States of America is a place uniquely positioned for schism in the Catholic world: the financial weight is the leverage over Rome and that old, pious chip on the shoulder to prove their Catholicism is so easily misdirected against a Pope who conservatives find too progressive for such a powerful religious voice in the world. The schism endgame will quite possibly come to a head before this year, 2023, comes to an end, with an outside chance next year is the zero hour. Why is that the case?

Synod and Schism

Pope Francis’ legacy project is the Synod on Synodality. The Second Vatican Council saw liturgical atrophy in the centuries long gaps between Councils and thought “why not have an ongoing synod of Bishops”? The Synod deals with superficial modernization and liturgical update issues on a regular basis. The Council imagined it as a much more revelatory institution, but the Popes who came along immediately after the Council were not ready for all that. Remember what I said about a century to implement?

This Synod on Synodality, which is what you’re thinking: a meeting on what these synods should be doing. And it has been very ambitious to this point. Pope Francis declared it a three year project of listening sessions starting at the Parish/Diocesan level, up to the National/Regional level, up to the continental level, and finally, this Fall, all the way up to the Vatican. These listening sessions have centered all the issues you might otherwise think the Church won’t touch: women’s role in the Church, marriage, the LGBTQ+ community, and a liberalizing of who can vote in these Vatican Synods along the way.

The issues highlighted at the lower levels will be brought before a synod that isn’t all Bishops for the first time in history. The voting members will include a battery of laypeople and a large portion of women. Over two Vatican gatherings, one this October and the next in October 2024, this discerning body will discuss where the Church has room to grow on the issues the whole body of world Catholicism wants to go forward on. Ultimately the decision to do anything with the final recommendations rests with Pope Francis but its hard to imagine he puts his papacy and the Church through such an extensive process for nothing.

Certainly for Catholic Traditionalists, namely the radical variety, this is the inflection point of their growing opposition to this Pope. As the German Bishops in their Synodal assembly proclaimed recommendations rife with progressive dreams for the Church, the radicals here stateside hollered that those Germans were entering into schism at the top of their lungs. Ironically Germany is second only to the United States in financial sums given to the Vatican11.

Radical Traditionalists are preparing themselves for what they will proclaim the last straw with Pope Francis. How the machinery of the schism will look is the only question remaining. So, without any further ado, lets do some imagining for a moment. One could imagine a radical scenario going something like this…

After the first session of the Vatican-level Synod ends the first wave of official recommendations hit the airwaves. While nothing is finalized yet pending the second gathering a year on, it is clear at least two issues will be dealt with in the eventual final recommendations to the Pope: the revival of the female deaconate, and the blessing of same-sex unions under a rite yet to be promulgated. While left-wing political groups across the world rush to misunderstand the latter, calling it “separate but equal”, the traditionalist community is convinced the Church is preparing to go directly against the words of Jesus in scripture.

All Souls Day, November 2nd, 2023: in the early afternoon a traditionalist blog passes a manifesto to the New York Times. While editors initially see it as another fringe group’s laundry list of complaints what they find at the end astonishes them. Signatories on the document include two Archbishops of major cities: Allen Vigneron of Detroit and, even more shockingly, a Cardinal in Timothy Dolan of New York. In their rush to confirm the news it leaks and becomes the top story on the evening news. The document these Bishops signed onto is unique in American history and exceptionally rare in the long history of the Catholic Church: it is a declaration of formal schism.

Among a pedantic treatise on liturgical and moral theology, the signatories declare themselves sedevacantists. They decide that Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation was not valid and therefore he was Pope until his death at the end of 2022. They will convene a conclave, on U.S. soil, to elect a true successor of St. Peter. The signatories are all American clergy and wealthy donors so as the news ripples around the world the event is simply dubbed: the “American Schism” by the media. The Vatican issues no response for weeks before a Christmas season audience with the Pope leads to a question Francis must answer: “Who must your flock listen to?”

Pope Francis, resistant to the language of condemnation his whole papacy, extolls the reporters gathered to truly pursue the reasons at the heart of the matter for the American Bishops in schism. With that he acknowledges schism has occurred. When further pressed for comment on who Catholics should look to for leadership the roman pontiff responds simply to “look to Peter and the Apostles for authority if that is what you seek.” Behind closed doors Francis is holding back his own bureaucracy, the Curia, from unleashing a hailstorm of excommunication on the five American Bishops and the Cardinal preparing for Conclave across the Atlantic. Pope Francis fears legitimizing the renegade Bishops. It is a dangerous gamble that he posits time will break down the group of potential antipopes.

On the other side of the Atlantic there is disappointment among traditionalists. The glad-trads were hesitant to embrace the clear schism at first but now, six weeks on the ones who tested the waters feel burnt by a lack of movement toward opening the conclave. Some are spooked now that the Pope has spoken on it.

The radical traditionalists are increasingly frustrated too. The clerical leadership of the schism, in consultation with their deep-pocketed funders have delayed the promised conclave in the hopes of attracting a larger, more diverse college of voters. While a handful of traditionalist circles across the English and French speaking worlds have signed oaths of coherence to the “Congregation of Pope St. John Paul II” (CPSJ) those lay groups and their clergy were not as deep or diverse a pool as they had hoped.

American Catholics, even of a conservative strain, overwhelmingly flee the Churches turning to the schism and the vanishingly few Bishops come to join the movement from overseas are eccentric to the point the American rebel prelates feel uncomfortable welcoming them into the CPSJ College of electing Bishops. Their electing college is also looking for a venue grand enough for the occasion. All the Bishops involved in the schism, per canon law, forfeited shepherding of their diocese when they signed on to the formal act of schism. Their Dioceses don’t want them. As New Year 2024 comes and goes they settle on the oversized private chapel of one of their wealthy donors on Long Island. The American Schism jumps back into the headlines.

There is really only one candidate for the first anti-papacy in six centuries: the magnanimous former Cardinal Timothy Dolan who already holds a leadership role amongst his fellow schismatics though he is a close second in age seniority to the Archbishop of Detroit. His weekly YouTube addresses are the biggest thing unifying the movement. With them Dolan has gone on a speaking tour to whoever will take him. He is practically already the movement’s leader with his lively missionary tour.

In four months he has failed to stir up a mass conversion to the CPSJ and it visibly wears on him. His conscience grows heavier as the snow melts and the Spring arrives. Easter comes and goes without any word on a Conclave and Dolan begins to disappear from public appearances beyond the weekly updates. With the second and final part of the Vatican Finale of the Synod on Synodality looming in the autumn Dolan is finally forced by his fellow CPSJ prelates to put the date on the calendar: the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29th.

International Press arrives on Long Island for the day the conclave is to open. Intrepid observers trying to explain the event to their viewers posit the conclave could not take more than a day or two considering the tiny six man College of electing Bishops. The TV cameras exaggerate the popularity of the event as radical traditionalists, desperate for their new leader to be formally christened flood the island. Former Cardinal Dolan is visibly unhappy, if not sick looking, as he enters the chapel and seals it shut, locking away the outside world. They provided for the spectacle nonetheless: a chimney fitted with white or black smoke sits on the railing of a second floor balcony overlooking the vast lawn of the elite venue. Delighted by the attention, the affluent lay devotee of the CPSJ hosting also becomes upset at the press for trampling his lawn.

When Dolan disappears from the Conclave early the next day the cracks begin to show. A disgraced former Nuncio appears among the crowd outside: Cardinal Carlo Maria Vigano becomes the man of the hour demanding entry to the conclave professing their same Sedevacantism and vigor for a purer Catholicism. After a vainglorious debate inside the Chapel they agree to welcome him in. The conclave is back to six electors, but it quickly becomes a circus.

Leaks abundant make it out to the gathered world press and it becomes clear there is a deadlock. Vigano came in expecting to be made Antipope, Vigneron thinks its owed to him. The electors are split 3-3. Every media outlet in the free world knows it. And now, with the pompous, self-obsessed nature of the radical traditionalist movement exposed for the world to see, the Holy Father releases his excommunications from Rome. The Press contingent diminishes by the following morning. The crowd declines to a few dozen zealots by that evening as the ninth ballot yields no victor and the smoke billows black yet again.

The sun rises on a conclave no longer surrounded by throngs of potential adherents. While the Chapel’s wealthy owner breathes a sigh of relief that his lawn wasn’t as damaged as he had feared, he now peers in on a completely irrelevant group of self-important churchmen conducting an exercise in futility against a Pope more universally adored than ever before.

Conclusion

Forgive the creative license. Schism is a hard and ugly thing to do in the Catholic tradition, at least in the way that the radical traditionalist in this country would prefer. Here I painted an example of what I think is the most extreme outcome. A formal declaration of schism is unlikely as even those who break with Rome will generally do so trying to provide condescending correction instead of forming their own authority. However, the historical narrative around schism in the Catholic world offers some interesting pointers.

Throughout the history of the Church there have been high profile breaks with Rome in the nations with the most numerous and affluent adherents. You might be able to recall the Avignon Papacy that brought about the Western Schism for almost ninety years in France12. What you may not have known is that French Catholicism had always been so independent from Rome that Gallican Catholicism as it was called, persisted well up into the era of the French Revolution. Napoleon tried to hijack this before he outright banned the Church. France saw itself as the epicenter of European Catholicism and had the financial sway to capture the papacy itself for a time. Does that sound familiar?

The modern day papacy will not easily be captured, literally or figuratively. Since the Avignon Papacy the Cardinals electing new Popes have avoided electing anyone from a nation they see as a dominant world power. That is not to mention that the French have still not seen another Pope hail from their homeland since that captured papacy. The conditions are only moderately different in the United States for a schism that similarly taps into an independence driven religious culture with well-monied interests behind the scenes.

There is nowhere on earth where the culture of a place does not affect the religion of the place. The rebellious Protestant spirit of America long ago infected the Catholicism on our shores. Humility and meekness are not virtues here, not in any public displays of faith I’ve seen recently. While the Bishops here have historically counteracted this cultural inclination in their flocks, this was always for the purpose of proving themselves to Rome. With the increasingly traditionally-minded Bishops of the US now seeing Rome as a progressive influence counteracting the conservative cultural touchstones they treasure at home; the tension pushes them toward some level of independence from Rome.

One peak example of this is the Eucharistic Revival. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) initiated this effort fully knowing that Rome was going in the direction of this massive Synod on Synodality. The Eucharistic Revival is focused on making Catholics believe in the Real Presence in the Eucharist again, an issue that largely draws the energies of the clergy and laypeople inward, while the Synod on Synodality is fundamentally about encountering varied opinions and living in the tension of disagreement long enough to see where the Spirit calls us: a fundamentally outward-looking endeavor.

The two Catholic measures don’t need to be oppositional, in fact I think they would feed into each other in a less politically divided American moment, but the USCCB knew what the Pope was up to. They also scheduled the major events of the Eucharistic Revival to correspond with the 2024 Presidential Election cycle including the big finale convention within weeks of each major American political party’s nominating convention13. It’s not an accident. That is significant because more than a few US Bishops have openly discussed denying President Biden, a devout Catholic in his own right, communion for his support of abortion rights. Opposition to their own coreligionist seeking reelection will not be far from the lips of those more traditionalist voices at that final revival gathering in Indianapolis next summer.

It is also worth mentioning that the USCCB has not used similarly strong rhetoric against Catholic politicians who are great supporters of more right-wing policy areas that go against Church teaching such as the Death Penalty. They have only discussed communion denial in regard to several pro-abortion politicians in Washington DC; however when you map political allegiances onto Catholicism in America you see those toward the left wing more supportive of the Pope and traditionalists congregating around stateside rightwing forces in greater opposition to the Pope’s program.

One defiant traditionalist Bishop in Tyler, Texas, Joseph Strickland, even went as far as to say he does not support the “Pope’s program of undermining the deposit of faith”. In the Catholic Church those are fighting words. Even a radical traditionalist like Bishop Strickland would not first choose schism over simply waiting out a Pope he does not like, but the aforementioned two-act finale of the Synod on Synodality poses a properly regal climax point.

The fact of the matter is that Pope Francis, like almost every Pope in recent centuries, has and will not change anything of substance in the Catholic faith, only the style with which it is presented. The sea change occurring in Catholicism now, far greater than American preoccupations, is this kind of changes envisioned more than fifty years ago at the Second Vatican Council. Those ultimately stylistic changes, which may well include elevating women to greater leadership positions and working for greater inclusion of sexual minorities in the life of the Church, are not the apocalypse of Roman Catholicism the traditionalists would have you believe. The Church has to look forward to move in that direction, looking backward won’t bring anyone back to Church.

As with every deeply-held conviction in life it helps to consider why you believe the things you do. It is also clarifying, even edifying, to question why anyone would have you make an enemy of someone seeking to teach in good faith; especially when that functionally means asking you to think of yourself as more Catholic than the Pope. At the end of the day schism is medieval and counterproductive to the modern mind, even contemporary Catholics, so if it does come it will likely only mortally wound the radical traditionalist cause. A hernia, rather than a true fatal ailment for the Catholic Church in America.

Footnotes

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2022/july/documents/20220729-voloritorno-canada.html

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/07/16/latin-mass-pope-francis-restrict-summorum-pontificium-benedict-241060

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/02/13/the-global-catholic-population/

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/attendance-at-religious-services/by/state/

https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/motu_proprio/documents/hf_ben-xvi_motu-proprio_20070707_summorum-pontificum.html

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio/documents/20210716-motu-proprio-traditionis-custodes.html

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20160319_amoris-laetitia.html

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

https://wherepeteris.com/put-the-dubia-in-the-dustbin/

https://www.history.com/news/jfk-catholic-president

https://cruxnow.com/analysis/2016/07/american-money-flowing-vatican-packs-greater-moral-punch

https://www.britannica.com/event/Avignon-papacy

https://www.eucharisticrevival.org/

#Catholic #Catholicism #America #US #Traditionalism #january 6 #Pope Francis

1 note · View note

andrewuttaro · 11 months

Text

The Trinity: a bridge

The first Sunday after Pentecost on the liturgical calendar is Trinity Sunday. After the end of the Easter season, standing at the beginning of the vast summer stretch of Ordinary time, this feast may seems irrelevant. Perhaps it feels as irrelevant as many theological debates us religious nuts allow ourselves to have in public places against better judgement. How practical can theologizing about the nature of God be?

The Trinity is the bridge between the practical and theological as I discovered.

Pentecost recalls the coming down of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles as fiery tongues. It is a typological callback to the Tower of Babel and the birthday of the Church. The doors then swing open and, as my own Parish’s Vicar preached, the Church goes public if you will. We may forget that the Holy Spirit is a person of the Trinity. It may be the person we think the least about, but it is indeed the person that moves every grace and motivates every prayer.

Pentecost is a practical solemnity, pointing us to a mission to evangelize the world, and Trinity Sunday might be considered the solemnity marking the divine reflection of that calling. The Holy Trinity, in its much theologized nature, is a meditation on what the calling is. God is, in his very being, a relationship of three persons.

Perhaps you can see it in my writing: I am treading lightly because on the theology side there are few topics more finely defined in what they are not: what we cannot say about them. Rightfully so, we are talking about God after all, but if you saw the image here below and turned and ran the other way you would be forgiven for thinking we’re descending into the irretrievably wonkish depths of theology.

Do not fear, we shall only wade into the shallows there. We’re building a bridge in this article. There are a dizzying amount of metaphors meant to explain the Trinity to some degree because it is inarguably a fundamental tenet of Christian faith. Missionaries ponder it. Ascetics devote themselves to it. Perhaps only the most contentious debates on Christology are as beguiling as the Trinity.

In religious studies Trinitarian belief is sometimes used to delineate if newer denominations have strayed from the most treasured beliefs of the faith explicit in the Nicene Creed. But the theologians, normally so precise in what they accept the homilists say about such nuanced matters, even they give us the most open ended proclamations most of us will ever hear from theologians:

If you think you understand the Trinity, the theologian tells the homilist, you don’t. Or, more sharply, if you think you understand the Trinity you must be misconceiving it.

Indeed the Trinity is a beautiful, unsolvable mystery for which faith is needed in. Even as I try to lay out the basics here now you would not be alone to see all these propositions as saying the same thing in different ways: how exhausting!

1. The Trinity is not belief in three Gods.

2. This one God exists in three persons.

3. The three persons are not different parts of God, but rather fully and equally God.

4. God is not one person with three roles.

5. None of this is a contradiction because of the distinction between a person and essence.

I will pass on trying to describe the distinction between persons and essence. I am not quite educated enough to be so concise. However I do want to draw your attention to the rare thing these truths about the Trinity force us to do. We must define negatives not positives in these assertions: theologians prefer quite the opposite. They like to give detailed descriptions, not these pondering contemplations. Perhaps we might even say the average human being prefers to describe things as what they are and not what they are not.

And that, right there, is precisely it. That is where this discussion gets so very practical. We now cross the apex of the bridge: mystery. God is a mystery. While simultaneously being love, order, and truth, God is a mystery. Indeed, despite sin, we too as beings made in God’s image are complicated, even mysterious… even mysterious to ourselves. Why did I do that? Why do I want this? The way we exist in ourselves and in relation to others: these are not narrowly definable things. We are mysteries that cannot ever be fully solved. We are mysteries that need not to be solved because the unknowing is part of the spiritual majesty of the thing. Spiritual beings exist in a state of relational mystery.

As Pope Francis himself repeats “Reality is more important that ideas” (Pope Francis, Evangeii Gaudium, para. 231).

To be clear, we believe God acts: God reaches out to us in numerous ways both via institution and personal intuition. But always the spiritual mystery of ourselves, God, and our relationship with him must exist in this realm of active unknowing: faith if you will. As the great Thomas Merton once wrote: No man is an island. We need one another. But we do not capture one another. As much as my wife may love the creepy Netflix original “You”, she would also readily admit that Joe Goldberg is not a model for anything healthy, particularly love. Love does not capture: it exists in a state of mystery.

I think we are uniquely disposed to contemplating this truth in our day and age. So many of my peers keep religion at arms-length not because of any hurt or the many hurts religion has inflicted on people: no many of us in this materialist age just don’t want to be fools. We don’t want to get it wrong and there seems to be a lot more space for wrong in believing in a divine being than correctness. Yet these same friends readily acknowledge an intangible, more spiritual reality we may call vibes.

For my parent’s generation this is the old Donatist paradox. In a Church with such widespread abuse how can one trust a priest and, by extension, participate in the Church. The heresy of Donatism dealt precisely with this question and was answered in that the Holy Spirit, God the advocate, works through unholy people because the holiness of the Church is in its sacred contents, not the ministers who govern it. In both my generation and my parent’s generation the deeper concern is relationship: a relationship untainted by foolishness on the one hand and ignorance of abuse on the other.

The Trinity is our answer on both accounts. God himself is relationship. In that reality we may find the peace of a faithful humility and a discipleship that holds the Church accountable. If we know God is a relationship, then what relationship of peoples is not redeemable, not a potential site of healing grace?

Toward the beginning of this article I mentioned my Parish Vicar’s homily on Pentecost. To come full circle on this I want to share what my Parish Pastor’s homily on Trinity Sunday had to say. My pastor started by saying a parishioner challenged him on his usage of “she” and other feminine pronouns in describing the Holy Spirit. This detractor told him to go to the Catechism for his definitions of God as if they were a disappointed instructor from his seminary. My Pastor responded by reading those Catechism paragraphs and directing us to the mystery of God therein.

In his first weekend homily of Pride Month, my pastor bravely pointed out the mystery of God’s triune nature as a point of humbly remembering we cannot capture God or one another. We cannot tell each other to simply acquiesce to our earnest theologizing or rigid plans for a life well lived. The unknowing is the grace… that and the fact that the unknowing is a relationship too. A healthy relationship can figure a thing out without demanding a severe program from the other beings within it. There is grace here in the Trinity: there is a bridge of faith that ultimately enriches us by patient love.

The Trinity is a grace: a mysterious relationship. The trinity is a divine relationship. God is a relationship! Then we ought to recall the humbling truth this imparts when all theologizing ends and all that remains is God and us in some imperfect state of unknowing: we are all together if we have faith. We are all together because even God himself is a relationship. So too must we be in relationship with every other person made in God’s image. Division, the scattering of peoples even for justified reasons, does not accomplish the divine justice the trinity may bring to our lives.

There is a deeper relationship to explore here. Hopefully I can help you discover it. My book, “How to catch feelings for Jesus”, is available online through Wipf & Stock, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere books are sold online. Stay tuned to this blog for more content from the author... me. And I also encourage talking to me about what I write whether in the comment section, through a private message, or if you see me in person. Some things, especially God, are better understood with the help of others.

3 notes · View notes

andrewuttaro · 1 year

Text

CCC Reflections 5

CCC 456-460 lays out four reasons the word was made flesh (Jesus Christ). The personal nature of this is what Fr. Schmitz emphasized. Each reason also provides the mission statement for Jesus and how we might know him, four pillars of relating to God if you will.

CCC 488 specifies that Mary consented to the divine plan for salvation springing from her pregnancy. God specifically wanted to achieve the salvific mission through human consent.

Just let that and its incredible implications across multiple dimensions of human life and self-image sink in. It is the feminist edge as well as the divine olive branch of the Christian story.

4 notes · View notes

andrewuttaro · 1 year

Text

Legacy of the Rhinos: a Eulogy

What is the legacy of the Rochester Rhinos soccer team?

The Rochester Rhinos were founded in 1996 with visions of soccer grandeur akin to the Lancers of NASL past. They caught fire, fought hard and forged a winning pedigree, a dynasty of six regular season conference or divisional titles, four league titles and a legendary U.S. Open Cup Championship greater than anything else. A scrappy, small-city soccer club outside the bounds of the newly founded Major League Soccer had won the domestic title.

That Open Cup title has no comparable in American sports.

The club rode the wave of their dynasty, grasping at the topflight only to fall short profoundly close but yet so painfully far. The fall began. The original dreamers who founded the organization lost it by financial mismanagement only to see their successors mismanage it every other way. The dynasty declined but the pedigree never did. They made the playoffs all but one season for the rest of their existence. Somehow, through a multi-year hiatus and a global pandemic, the club came back just long enough to change the brand, court a named European footballer, and then fall apart again only a season back from the dead.

As we carve the epitaph we can’t help but ask: What is the Rochester Rhinos legacy?

I’ve pondered it a lot since I returned to the club of my childhood as an adult. I came too late. You could already read the writing on the wall before hiatus was on anyone’s lips. My parents’ generation endeared me and many others to the club of the horn-skewered soccer ball. They chanted “If you can’t join em, Beat em!” The Rochester Raging Rhinos did beat em. They beat them all. Perhaps the only thing they couldn’t beat was the shifting sands of time and a domestic soccer landscape leaping ahead itself as the rage was dropped and the club couldn’t keep up. They didn’t want us anymore and that was enough for many to lose interest.

What is the legacy of the Rochester Rhinos? They are proof winning doesn’t do anything for you if the sports business isn’t enriching the right real estate barons. Ain’t that the truth?

Legacy is something transmitted to or received from ancestors. Legacy is something of deep value beyond the immediately evident. Legacy is an intangible thing more than just championships or records on a stat sheet. Legacy is what makes history last emotionally. What makes the Rochester Rhinos last? Who sings their swan song? What does the green and gold, the black and white, the solid yellow, the Rhinos of Rochester mean beyond the obvious failings of the indifferent morality of the almighty dollar? Hope. The answer is hope.

The Rochester Rhinos won fun soccer games twenty years ago. Even then the whole thing ran on hope they’d be something awesome in a sport this country still hardly appreciates. Hope.

Once upon a time professional sports emerged from college campuses on this continent with the idea it would be a profitable venture riding on the back of civic pride. Ra-ra stuff but for those of us who aren’t attached to a ubiquitous D1 collegiate team in insert-sport-here. I still lose my mind at hockey games when they stop playing and start fighting: those guys are wearing the laundry representing my once-great rust belt city after all! Who knows what my city looks like in fifty years when I pretend to retire: I’ll always have this civic hope Kool-Aid the ruling class deemed safe for the peons. Those are memories. Those are little rays of hope that I am from somewhere at the very least. Maybe even a peak into the legendary eternal.

That was the legacy of the Rochester Rhinos. A dynasty twenty years ago and a long decline that reminded you what intangibles are and how much rich people hate your ruinous town.

Major League Soccer didn’t want us because those owners were in over their heads, and we weren’t a top fifty media market. The stadium location excuse is for white flight babies and lawyers on City Hall payroll. This team could have survived in the rough-and-tumble world of lower league American soccer with the right kind of owner. They never came. The generation that grew up watching the dynasty moved to North Carolina for more promising work just like the women’s team. Us gross soccer nerds who remained were too busy to adapt or too ultra to innovate. A good owner could have given us the right incentives and amenities. They never came. Help never comes for hometowns like ours. Hope sustains us helping each other.

Now the Rochester Rhinos are gone, and the hope remains.

It’s not the hope for yet another revival. That part is over. The hope is what it leaves with us. Hope that what we decide to keep alive in our hearts will be worth it one day in some stupid, semi-spiritual way. The greatest things in life are like that. That is what the Rhinos really were, in the good times and the bad, feast or famine: a clinic on how to hope. For that I am eternally grateful.

Hope and rage forever.

In the end that old cheer still rings out: “If you can’t join em, Beat em!” They didn’t let us join em, and eventually they even found a way to prevent us from beating any meaningful club too. Tax the rich. They never took the rage out of us did they? Hope never dies. And they only made the rage in us burn evermore. We’ll rage forever whether the plutocrats say we can or not. That is the Rochester Raging Rhinos. That is the spirit of the club that will never die.

The Rochester Rhinos forever in the hope of our hearts.

1996-2023

#rochester rhinos #Rochester New York #soccer

0 notes

andrewuttaro · 1 year

Text

CCC Reflections 4

CCC 159-160 clears up the faith vs science false conflict and the freedom of faith. Anyone who is deconstructing their faith would do well to read these paragraphs.

Your religious trauma comes from poorly catechized people, not God.

CCC 208 is for all the self-hating, overly scrupulous among us. God is greater than our hearts, knows everything, and does not condemn us.

Humility before God can help heal us: “...because God is holy, he can forgive the man who realizes that he is a sinner before him.”

CCC 299-306 really hits home on this idea of working with God’s plan. God gives us free will so we can choose to cooperate with him or not. The empowerment of it is acute: 306 specifically calls it a dignity God gives us!

CCC 396-412 lays out this oft misunderstood tension around Original Sin. We’re made wonderful beings but as a symptom of merely being human we contract Original Sin: not by a personal fault of our own doing but merely by our fallen human nature.

I was also surprised how much this section covered why God didn’t prevent evil from the start of this whole drama? The answer is of course both a mystery and an effort to preserve the free will God desired to create us with.

#deconstruction

0 notes

andrewuttaro · 1 year

Text

Why is Lent like that?

When I was in High School my family would get together to put together Lenten resolutions. After a family dinner one awkward night in February we would try to figure out something more creative than chocolate to give up. I remember not mocking that common idea too much because somebody would do it every Lent and take offense to mocking it. As a younger kid I remember only ever giving up one thing seriously that I never went back to: Hawaiian Punch. I was such a fiend for that stuff that it gave me digestive issues.

As I got older I came across the other facets of Lent. The three pillars of Lent as many high-liturgy Christian sects will tell you is prayer, fasting, almsgiving. Each one of these pieces of the journey of Lent has a rich history that I won’t cover here. Each one of these pillars has a distinct reason its worthwhile that, forgive my bias here, has a transformative power in your life if you really engage with it. Each of them help explain the weird questions we have about Lent. As a child and well into my adulthood I have found myself asking the same question repeatedly: Why is Lent like that?

You know what I mean, right? For one the fasting thing comes across masochistic or even unhealthy. If you don’t do it right it certainly can be the latter but when you look back just a couple generations you see how that problem was already solved. Perhaps for many Lent just becomes a second chance at your New Year’s Resolutions: some things I should give up but didn’t have the self-control to two months ago. That thinking isn’t entirely wrong. Long before I came across the three pillars I heard this advice about it from a teacher in my Church community: we give up things in Lent that we think we would do better not having in our lives.

This coreligionist was a wise matriarch of her family who always managed to make more complicated things practical. That is the basic motivation for me writing religious articles and even a book (more on that at the end of this article): making more complicated spiritual realities practical. That is also the beginning of understanding why Lent is the way it is. The forty days leading into Holy Week and Easter, the height of the Christian calendar, Lent is a preparation I some sense. In another sense it is the making practical of the beautifully complex truth at the center of Christian faith: Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection.

Think of it as a relationship. In order to have a friend in your life you adjust your schedule a bit here and there, you focus in on the common interests, and you accommodate the little differences as strengths, not obstacles. This same dynamic intensifies with more intense forms of relationship: when you marry and adjust your life to the life of another it requires some pain. It is often a joyful pain, if such a thing exists, as we align elements of our lives as sweeping as long term life goals and plans down to the most intimate day-to-day getting along and finding consolation in one another. Our relationship with God is just like this but we are very prone to neglecting what we often decide is a too nebulous, spiritual effort to prioritize over anything else in our busy lives.

That is the starting point of Lent: refocusing on God, putting some effort in, and hopefully making the more complicated dynamics of how we relate to God more practical and doable on a day-to-day basis. This is where our three pillars come back into the picture. Each one of prayer, fasting and almsgiving is bridge to God and into the greater depth of God’s very essence: love itself. Once we figure this out all the other puzzle pieces to this crazy thing called Lent start to fall into place. Anything will make more sense when we have the full picture.

Let’s start with prayer. This pillar may seem obvious: of course we talk to God if we intend to relate to him. But prayer is a wide world of diversity akin the variety of plants one can raise. My mother began getting dozens of plants when she moved into her knew place. It has become a joke we like to roast her for. There are plants in every room and most of them look different. My mother has to water them all on a regular basis and tend to the amount of sunlight they receive and how their containers are holding up and so on. This is prayer. I don’t just mean it’s a great metaphor, though it is, thanks mom. I mean this kind of regular care attended to another living being is what prayer is made of.

A wise man once said prayer is just “thinking with another”. Prayer is every action we take outside ourselves. As a spiritual reality most of us will acknowledge, whether we consider ourselves religious or not, nobody is a true island unto themselves. Even if you try to be your not. Even hermits and shut-ins need the outside world in various ways. Prayer is the way we interact with others in love. In Christian faith we believe God is, in his very nature, love. That is to say relating to God is relating to love. Putting it that way really makes you realize how many of us interact with God in some way, eh? As we set out on his Lenten journey let us consider how our prayer lives are needing and what we can do to provide for those needs.

Fasting on the other hand is a big leap for most of us. We give up things in Lent because, like my wise teacher once told me, we do need to remove some things from our lives that we would be better without. Hence why Lent often becomes New Year’s Resolutions Part II. This is a well-tread thought process in our self-improvement culture, so I’ll flip right onto the positive inverse of the practice of fasting.

We believe as Christians that Jesus Christ, God made man, choose poverty in a special way. He entered human existence not as a fully-grown man descending upon a cloud, but via a natural, pre-modern pregnancy and birth of a woman. Moreover he wasn’t born into privilege. He labored for a living in carpentry. Mentally there was an impoverishment there too: he did carpentry with his father. He didn’t even get the autonomy and independence of going his own way with it!

The bible passage which was historically the inspiration for the fasting of Lent is Jesus’ time in the desert in the fourth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. Before Jesus even tries to assemble followers and start his ministry even he takes a forty day penitential trip we can imagine as something of a proto-Lent. This includes temptations where he explicitly rejects Satan tempting him with power, prestige, and a host of other earthly pleasures Jesus could have taken up with the slightest effort. He refused at great agony. Before his final saving work on the cross Jesus is again tempted by Satan to give up this painful final act ahead of him. He refuses again, this time at the cost of tears of blood. There is something about Jesus’ human existence that elevates an impoverishment, a lack of things, that points to the spiritual worth of not cluttering our lives with the pursuit of ultimately meaningless fantasies.

Moreover, in our day and age I think we have a wealth of examples of what happens when does get everything they want in this life. Seldom ever do we consider these people moral exemplars. They’re normally jealous politicians, titans of business, celebrities, or just people the folks around them recognize as the friggin worst. There is a spiritual need for having less. This need points to a right relationship with God through Jesus and a more fulfilling spiritual life in general.

Fasting is just the blunt physical experience that reorients us toward our neediness and smallness next to the loving embrace of almighty God. I feel the rumbly tummy and I remember my mortality, my neediness, my imperfection next to the grandeur of God. Then when the time comes to break a nice, safe fast we realize how blessed we are to have what we have and then, perhaps more profoundly: what we actually need. Consider this the practical reality of fasting: the spring cleaning of the soul. The decluttering of the spiritual closet. The elimination of the junk before we can fill up with the fullness of spiritual joy at Easter. We do penance for forty days but then we party for fifty days. There is a spiritual healthiness to fasting that has preserved the practice over millennia as a result. Once you mix in the aforementioned prayer to help the refocusing of our souls you can see how productive this can be for us.

Finally we arrive at almsgiving. You probably already understand this concept more than you realize. The giving part can be self-explanatory though the “alms” part is the real clarifier. Alms is prefix that implies justice. In other words, a giving not from one’s excess but from what they keep near to themselves. If you want to put it how Jesus and many Saints in the first millennium put it we’re talking about returning to the poor what we took from them. St. John Chrysostom went as far to say: “The rich are in possession of the goods of the poor, even if they have acquired them honestly or inherited them legally.”

Wait, what? I am a hard worker, darn it, why am I not entitled to some excess!? God being love has consequences for us beyond what is immediately comfortable to face. We are called to do charity to our fellow human beings not simply out of some abundance of virtue but from owing it to the God of love and his loved ones less loved by the world. Giving alms isn’t pity: it’s paying our dues to a more just, loving world. This is the cutting edge of the wake-up call that is Lent: things have to change within us and among us.

While we can take on new habits of prayer and fasting to draw nearer to God, improve ourselves in virtue, and maybe even make the world a better place, almsgiving most directly calls us to realign our social nature toward God according to the way God loves: unconditionally and extravagantly. That kind of love does change the world because all are equally loved in God’s eyes therein. That kind of love can change us when we put the effort in like Lent invites us to. It all starts there with a little bit of effort. Those who have historically put in a lot of effort in this regard produce the wildest Lenten practices. All weirdness of Lent stems from these three pillar and attempts to prepare for the central mystery of Christian life that awaits us in the end at Easter. And that is where the final key to understanding why Lent is the way it is lies.

You may have noticed the word “penitential” here as we’ve come to understand Lent in this article. To do penance, to not only seek forgiveness for our wrongs but to take action to make them right, is the implied truth underwriting all this. You and I are not God, and we never will be. That is okay and important to realize as we struggle along. In fact, it brings us right back into that spirit of poverty that properly reorients us to our relationship with God. One thing that we should carry from Lent into the rest of our lives throughout the year is that its better not to be so high on ourselves. Yes, wholesome self-esteem is a necessary ingredient in our sanity, but what makes the spiritual part of our lives worthwhile at all is the outgoing love of it. This is the original secret sauce of all religious belief, behavior, and belonging.

The students of religion among us may have noticed that all three of these pillars transcend religious boundaries. Muslims practice all three of these pillars, particularly fasting, during the festival of Ramadan and Jewish people integrate them into every special feast day. In many ways even non-Abrahamic faiths like Hinduism and Shinto go out of their way to give alms, pray and refocus themselves on the divine presence. The Buddha famously recognized his own mortality and, as a result, the need to go outside himself toward enlightenment.

As you prepare yourself for Lent do not feel isolated in a esoteric, bothersome religious practice with no bearing on your life beyond a reloaded New Year’s Resolutions. Where we put a little effort in we see the plants of our spiritual life flourish again, our selfishness fade, and we see substantive efforts to make the world a better place. And at the end of it all we arrive at the joyful feast of Jesus’s ultimate passion and resurrection for us as if to say: its all worth it for at least the good that comes from it. That is why Lent is the way it is.

Whoa, Lent starts next week as of the posting of this article! It always sneaks up on us doesn’t it? If you enjoy the way I write about spiritual matters then I have a gift in mind for you! Last November I published my first book: “How to catch feelings for Jesus”. It is available online at Wipf & Stock, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other book retailers. I would say it’s a great step-by-step practical dive having a relationship with Jesus just in time for the Lenten season, but I already feel greedy promoting here. I’ll let you decide how good it is at that! My hope is that it may help you find the Jesus who gave his all loving us. Let us love him in return!

Thank you for reading.

0 notes