Dear friends:

...If nothing else, such actions offend the memory of the founders, to whom the liturgy was the indispensable heart of the movement and its work...

...A fortiori the use of the same term for ordained ministers connotes an even more complex metaphor...

...As several liturgical commentators (Gabe Huck and Robert Hovda, for example) have pointed out, the practice results in confusion about the nature of eucharistic celebration...

...Today we are faced with a widespread worldview that emphasizes individual development to such an extent that previous church-fracturing struggles seem to pale by comparison...

...In light of these preliminary thoughts, I want to offer the following reflections...

...It seems to me that it would be good to keep these issues distinct...

...house, circulated a letter making it clear that they were the group of whom Zahn had written-and were willing to have their views on the matter made public...

...Unfortunately, the alternative to tradition seems to imply that "my personal experience" becomes the governing criterion for what is real and salvific about the gospel...

...On the other hand, it seems to me that it is an irreducible Catholic conviction that the saving reality of Christ has not been communicated to individuals merely as individuals but rather as members of Christ's body, the church-hence the emphatic concern for the union or communion of believers right from the beginning of the church's experience, a concern revealed rather clearly in Acts 15,1 Corinthians, and 1 John...

...But to separate the ordained and nonordained too radically would be to miss the point as to why one priesthood (the ordained) was created to serve the other (the baptized...

...Even the former has become a dirty word as a result of this confusion...

...If this is true-and if "preside" means "officiate"-the liturgy in question cannot be considered Catholic...

...That is why we have formal prayer once a week as a community...

...By a kind of naive positivism some might argue (and many have) that any developments after Jesus and the first generation of apostles are suspect or, at least, not essential to Christianity...

...The contemporary focus on the value and dignity of the individual has thus resulted in heightening what I suspect will continue to be an irrreducible tension between a laudable and necessary recognition of the person as unique individual and the individual's membership in a Body of Christ that is far greater than his or her own appropriation of the gospel...

...Instead, she would have done what she always did (and with a remarkable degree of success) and kept on working for changes in the church from within the church as a loyal and obedient daughter of the church...

...We are looking forward to having the Catholic Worker live on and flourish for another fifty years in Milwaukee...

...For over a quarter century of college teaching I regularly made a point of including the Catholic Worker as a most significant and influential example of a religiously motivated social movement...

...For all of our contemporary preoccupation with sex and sexuality, we have not appreciated very well how profoundly sexuality affects our understanding of reality...

...Another frustration must be noted here...

...Or worse, people cannot tell the difference between these services and the eucharistic celebration, as in "Sister X had the nine o'clock Mass today" (no exaggeration...

...it is fraught with implications for the church's identity and therefore somewhat of an emotional minefield as well...

...In other words, it is a pity that an article like this has to be written...

...But it is'incomparably more serious for a Catholic Worker house as a definable part of the broader movement to reject or defy established ecclesiastical authority by disregarding rules and procedures relating to that most sacred core of Catholic belief, the liturgy itself...

...God's blessings on each and every one of you...

...However, I have been a more or less faithful "fellow traveler...

...Its use is clearly metaphorical...

...I see this often in liturgical settings where individual communities become so taken with their appropriation of the gospel that they lose sight of the wider church and its tradition of continuity...

...We try to practice the spiritual and corporal works of mercy...

...In fact, one can say that the sacraments themselves constitute the church as the living Body of Christ...

...As a friend of the Catholic Worker Movement, he saw this as destructive of the C. W, and contrary to the spirit of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin...

...The foregoing may seem rather tentative-and it is- because there are a number of significant values that clash over this question, for example, the nature of the church as sacrament as opposed to the right of an individual community to the Eucharist or the nature of ordained ministry compared to the ministry of all the baptized...

...In my opinion the whole of the New Testament presents difficulties for anyone who would want to argue for a cultic understanding of worship and therefore for a system of purity that is anything other than ethical (see, for example, Mark 7:1-23...

...The same can be said for the sacraments...

...Presiders do indeed play a vital role in eucharistic celebration, but never one that is radically separate from the community which celebrates...

...If we accuse our society of being unjust and, thus, refuse to cooperate with it, then we also have an obligation to see the injustice in the church and refuse to cooperate with it also...

...It was just such confusion about institution by Christ that clouded the Reformation debate over the sacraments, although concern for explicit institution by Christ is a phenomenon that appears only in the late eleventh century...

...to be ruled according to what had been done before...

...Several times we have been called and reprimanded by the archdiocesan chancery for having "improper" Masses...

...And sometimes the format of the liturgies is not that condoned by the magisterium in Rome...

...In other words, the links between local churches are in danger of being broken...

...Convictions about purity lie deeply ingrained in our collective Catholic unconscious and must be brought to light if we are ever to get to the bottom of the question of ordination...

...They bear an ironic relation to their pre- or non-Christian usage...

...The Catholic Worker is worth preserving and the Catholic in its name signifies a continuing commitment to the spiritual vision Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day brought to its creation...

...All of this calls for considerable demythologization of the history of the New Testament texts-a task that Vatican II's Lumen gentium (18-19, 28) and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ("The Minister of the Eucharist," Origins, 13:14, September 1983) have been unwilling to undertake...

...In a very important sense, all the baptized are priests of the new covenant, priests whose sacrifice consists in responding to God's self-gift in Christ by offering themselves...

...It has been necessary because unity has been so difficult to maintain both in doctrinal and in practical matters...

...We often fail to remember that a religious faith that makes the outrageous claim that God saved us by dying does not lend itself to nondialectical affirmations...

...The problem the church and some Catholic Workers have with our liturgies is that we allow women, laymen, and some times non-Catholics to preside at them...

...We still claim to be Catholic Workers since we believe strongly in the philosophy of the Catholic Worker movement...

...The problem is that tradition has often been confused with traditionalism...

...On the other hand, new consciousness of the dignity and charisms of women, dissatisfaction with mandatory celibacy, and the shortage of priests have all combined to raise the question of what makes people eligible to be ordained...

...And we would hope that you would come to our house sometime to visit and share with us and our guests...

...Finally, there is the dialectic implied by the very language we use...

...But this does not entail a wholesale rejection of the tradition as such...

...John Baldovin, S.J., agreed to write that article...

...But the kind of power at issue here is one that is used in service of the entire enterprise and based on charisrns of service, leadership, preaching, presiding, and so forth that are given by God and recognized by the church...

...I use the phrase "reasonable discussion" because just who may preside has become much more than a question for academic theology...

...GORDON C. ZAHN FRUSTRATING & ANGERING The current discipline of the Roman Catholic church with regard to the eligibility of candidates for holy orders continues to raise a host of diffi-cult and complex problems for theology...

...It seems plausible to me, however, that if one were to argue that Christ did not command his apostles to repeat certain actions at the Last Supper or even if he did not explicitly utter words of institution over the bread and the cup at that meal, one could still argue that the church in the power of the Spirit is faithful to Christ by celebrating that ritual meal whose structure and content accurately recapitulate his passion, death, and resurrection...

...But it is equally certain that she would have been the first to reject changes that threatened to weaken the movement's basic commitment to the recognized and legitimate authority of the church...

...The slogan, "If you won't ordain women, don't baptize them," reflects a profound insight into the nature of the church...

...DON TIMMERMAN GORDON C. ZAHN JOHN F. BALDOVIN RIGHT & JUST Some months ago we received an article from Gordon Zahn in the form of "An Open Letter to the Catholic Worker...

...By being "public" about this they may actually undermine the spiritual quality and validity of the movement's work by giving scandal and providing occasions for others, knowingly or not, to participate in improper or invalid Masses...

...It does not admit of* a theoretical or practical resolution...

...1:6...

...And, of course, we realize that God is the source and reason for our work...

...Mike Cullen, who founded Casa Maria with his wife Netty, was at one time reprimanded by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee for his actions, which were considered too political . The U.S...

...I, for one, am convinced of the contemporary necessity to emphasize the dignity that all of the baptized have received in virtue of their initiation into Christ...

...In regard to allowing women to preside at our liturgies, we feel that it is right and just to do so...

...No doubt this tradition has often been perverted for ideological reasons and needs to be criticized...

...The situation is both frustrating and angering...

...DON TIMMERMAN CHANGE FROM WITHIN Dear Friends: I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a full-fledged active Catholic Worker, and writing this letter has proved a very difficult occasion for me...

...JOHN F. BATPOVIN, S.J...

...We feel that it is wrong to forbid women the opportunity to preside at Mass, and since it is wrong, we refuse to follow the church mandate which states that only men may preside at Mass...

...Here the document promotes a remarkable weakening of the very sacramental principle it intends to reinforce...

...The editors did decide, however, that since the practice of the nonordained presiding at liturgies was not likely to be confined to the C.W., it would be helpful to ask a theologian to reflect on it and perhaps to draw some general lessons for all of us...

...Needless to say, this concern for unity has been no mere pious or theoretical wish in the course of history...

...While this leaves no room for a kind of democracy in which any member of the community can perform any function, it also avoids a kind of clerical-caste mentality that prevents any particular segment of the church from truly owning the whole church's evangelical mission...

...Nor does the increasingly popular practice of Sunday communion services presided over by deacons or lay ministers have much to recommend it...

...None of the foregoing implies that we should abolish the real distinction between the baptized and the ordained...

...government deported Mike to Ireland, his homeland, after he refused to pay federal taxes and burned draft cards with the Milwaukee 14 during the Vietnam War...

...Continued on page 466) If the matter is as simple as I have just made it out to be, then why don't we ordain women and married men...

...First, there is the dialectic of God's call and human response characterized by self-sacrifice...

...To say this is not to deny that those who participate in such liturgies are faithful to some aspects of "the philosophy of the Catholic Worker.'' But it does say that they are not true to the most essential aspect of that philosophy and, to the extent that a particular community exhibits and promotes liturgical practices "not condoned," they depart from the full service to the spiritual works of mercy...

...The variety of New Testament ministries and their slow development into the ordered offices known as deacon-presbyter-bishop that has characterized the Catholic church since the late second century shows that Jesus did not set down a blueprint at the start...

...A case in point of the debate breaking down on rational grounds can be found in Joseph Fessio's lamentable paper circulated to the 1987 Synod on the Laity against allowing women as acolytes (Origins, 17:22, November 12, 1987...

...It is often claimed that the Catholic Worker "has no party-line,' ' a claim based on a phrase used by Peter Maurin in one of his' 'Easy Essays'' and later as a title for one of Dorothy Day's editorial contributions...

...I suspect that the answer lies far deeper than rational theological argument...

...The same rule ought to apply to those who would reject or disregard generally recognized and accepted norms of Catholic belief and practice...

...THE EDITORS don TIMMERMAN is a long-time member of the Catholic Worker community in Milwaukee...

...Since small groups of Catholics have begun to take the matter into their own hands and to choose nonordained men and women to preside at the Eucharist, it may be helpful to identify the issues involved with a view to reasonable discussion...

...Further, if baptism means the incorporation of an individual into conformity with Christ, it is very difficult to see how a cogent argument can be mounted against ordaining women...

...If so, it would then be a matter for the C.W...

...Perhaps our problems at this level will only be resolved practically: the vast majority of people may only change their attitude toward purity in so far as it is connected with ordained ministry after they have experienced women and married men as holy and competent in this role...

...He is associated with Amnesty Inter-national and The Pledge of Resistance...

...Yet this is what seems to be taking place, as the above letter circulated by a member of the Milwaukee community confirms...

...The relevant passage reads, "The problem the church and some Catholic Workers have with our liturgies is that we allow women, laymen, and sometimes non-Catholics to preside at them...

...If the reader is frustrated at this point, it is not without good reason...

...That uniqueness lies in the Catholic Worker's almost perfect fusion between the commitment to service and its no less binding commitment to the Catholic church...

...Power is, of course, an unavoidable concept when one is dealing with any kind of organization...

...It is difficult to argue this way in light of contemporary biblical studies and Christology...

...This is precisely, I sense, what the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith fears...

...In it he wrote of a Catholic Worker house that permitted nonordained persons to preside at its liturgies...

...That is why I always insist that my students use the term "presider" instead of "celebrant...

...It seems to me that the most appropriate response is continued discussion of this issue as well as clear and vocal expression of dissatisfaction with the current limitations on ordained ministry...

...After long discussion and a good deal of appreciation for his fraternal tone, the editors returned Zahn's article urging him to publish it in the Catholic Worker...

...The Communion elements, when divorced from the celebration of the Eucharist, become a focus unto themselves-surely a regression, given the past twenty-five years of liturgical reform...

...The ordained ministry represents a fundamental aspect of the church's life...

...The current shortage of priests (which will only get worse) forces us to question both the wisdom and the justice of withholding ordination from women and married men...

...The situations they have in mind are not necessarily mission churches, where no presiders are available, at least for long periods, but a kind of "moral" lack of presiders given what they consider an unjust policy...

...As far as the "dead hand of the past" is concerned, Dorothy Day would have been the last to allow the C.W...

...In the meantime, Casa Maria, the Milwaukee C.W...

...Second, there is the dialectic of that response in daily life and its ritualization in sacramental activity under the presidency of ordained ministers...

...More recently, we at Casa Maria have been scolded by some because of our liturgies at the house...

...The Christian community needs and will always need ministers who have committed themselves fully and permanently to serving the community, preaching the Gospel, and leading liturgical celebrations...

...Stung a bit by Zahn's subsequent criticism of our decision-"having a theologian address the broader issue [is] likely to shift the focus from actual practice to the more distanced and theoretical-,,.with the result that...[such articles] are seldom related to the issue as it is encountered day to day"-we decided to print the two open letters and Baldovin's reflection which we think has the sobering effect of reminding all of us of the range of issues that are at stake in this discussion...

...To ignore or defy the discipline of the church at such a deeply symbolic level is what is meant by the term, schism...

...We are not merely passive recipients of this activity but active participants cooperating to make the reality of salvation ever more evident in a world that desperately needs to hear the Good News...

...That would leave us with a religion of our own making...

...There is a good deal to be said for Schillebeeckx's position...

...There are several dialectical relations here...

...Once this move is made, the church becomes an association of the like-minded not the Body of Christ obediently living under the judgment of the gospel...

...teaches liturgical and historical theology at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California...

...By being forced to argue over the question of eucharistic presidency, we have been detoured from the far more basic consideration of the liturgical assembly itself as the celebrant of the Eucharist...

...In fact, for an individual community to "ordain" its own presiders on its own initiative would be to separate itself from the Catholic church...

...In this sense at least, the Catholic Worker movement she founded could do no better than to accept and follow her guidance...

...And since our community is composed of people of various religious beliefs and denominations, we try to allow these people to take part in our liturgies...

...Dear Friends: On October 11, 1987 we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Catholic Worker movement in Milwaukee and the twentieth anniversary of the present Catholic Worker house, Casa Maria...

...For this reason the 1983 letter of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, "The Minister of the Eucharist," is insensitive when it states of communities that lack priests:' 'Through their desire for the sacrament in union with the church, no matter how distant they may be physically, they are intimately and really united to her and therefore receive the fruits of the sacrament...

...The root Catholic perception of ordination (and therefore of liturgical presidency) has a great deal to do with a whole system of purity...

...She would not deny the faults and failures that call for correction, but she would insist that the correction must come through the efforts of true believers guided by love and respect for the church as it is, imperfections and all-and as, given God's grace, we can help it become...

...As to the first, I have no doubt that our consciousness of baptismal dignity and equality is a great boon to the mission of the church...

...But until women and married men can be ordained, what should Catholics who are convinced of the necessity and justice of such ordinations do...

...On the one hand, the emphasis on the church as primarily God's people, or, to use Avery Dulles's phrase, "a community of disciples," has greatly relativized hierarchical distinctions...

...I hope that this approach shows why it is important to avoid the objectified language of "powers" that are granted to some members of the church on behalf of others...

...Hence radical distinctions between the ordained and the nonordained, especially in terms of "power," are not all that helpful...

...In the unlikely event some Catholic Worker community were to publicly endorse SDI, for instance, or any other aspect of the Reagan administration's confrontational anti-Communist foreign and military policies, it is a pretty safe bet that such a departure from "the party line'' would bring censure, possibly even "expulsion" through formal dissociation...

...We take in homeless families and single women, give food to the hungry, give furniture and household items to the poor, offer a listening ear to the many lonely and depressed persons who come our way, give clothing to the needy, and try to change our society from a violent, greedy, "dog-eat-dog" society into a nonviolent, personalist one...

...Contemporary witness to the gospel demands active, committed Catholics who are explicitly aware of their vocation as a sign to the world of Christ's saving activity...

...Anyone familiar with the movement's past history will know that, apart from the narrowly political application both must have had in mind, the claim has no validity and makes no sense...

...I have consistently and intentionally employed the term "presider" and not "celebrant...

...A certain democratic approach considers even these distinctions odious...

...We would welcome feedback, and any criticisms of our beliefs, on the above comments...

...Not in the past...

...Dorothy Day, in particular, would never have taken it upon herself-or allowed the movement- simply to ignore rules or regulations she found distasteful or even unjust and impose her private judgment over that of the "magisterium in Rome...

...Perhaps Vatican IPs emphasis on the importance of the local Christian community has been too "successful...

...The celebration of the Eucharist is indeed the ongoing ritual symbol which expresses the identity of the church, and to do without it weakens the church as sacramental sign...

...And sometimes the format of the liturgies is not that condoned by the magisterium in Rome...

...It would be far better to let people so hunger for the Eucharist that they demand a widening of eligibility for ordination...

...Priesthood is a term that the New Testament employs only of Christ (Hebrews) and the whole body of believers (1 Peter 2:9, Rev...

...It has been a unique force in the history of American Catholicism...

...Here, too, individual Catholic Workers, frustrated by what they regard as insensitive or even unjust policies or regulations of the church, might find it difficult to continue participation in its ceremonials and observances...

...Note that I am not arguing here from divine institution, in other words, that we ought to have certain kinds of office in the church because Christ explicitly desired the church to have this sort of constitution...

...Much difficulty can be avoided when we recognize that terms like "priesthood," ".sacrifice," and "kingdom" have been transformed in Christian understanding...

...But demythologizing does not mean invalidation...

...There is an issue of basic honesty here...

...To put it plainly, the tension between the individual (or a group of like-minded individuals) and the church, as sacramental of God's activity in the world, is here to stay...

...Following my discharge from service as a World War II conscientious objector, the thought of joining the Worker crossed my mind, but one night at the Mott Street house was enough to convince me that my vocation lay elsewhere...

...Today's problem then is twofold...

...Some, I am sure, want to go further and argue, on the basis of Schillebeeckx's contention in Ministry, that the right of the Eucharist is so fundamental that local communities have the right to appoint their own presiders in cases where a serious lack of ministers occurs...

...We have become very well aware today of the oddity of the language we use of God, but rarely apply the same standard to discourse about the church and its activities...

...Without denying the sign value of celibacy-a sign of contradiction for exclusively this-worldly standards-one can still legitimately ask why marriage would prevent a person from full service to the community, preaching the gospel, and liturgical presidency...

...At the same time we know a kind of secondary priesthood in the church, one in which some have been appointed to articulate this fundamental self-sacrifice in full-time service and particularly in a ritual manner, especially by their presidency at the Eucharist...

...Anything short of this is tantamount to false or misleading labeling...

...It almost seems to affirm a let-them-eat-cake attitude toward churches experiencing a dearth of priests...

...not today...

...I cannot regard either solution as viable, for either would do immense damage to the fabric of the church-at-large...

...The second issue with regard to ordination is at the same time simpler in theory and more difficult to resolve in practice...

...As a matter of fact, the asceticism demanded of the married today can often enhance these ministries...

...The recognition of the candidates for ordination as possessing certain charisms inevitably sets them apart...

...The church can and does arrange its ordained ministry and sacraments...

...Until we have understood that distinction, we shall not experience the fruit of genuinely active participation that Vatican II and the past twenty-five years of liturgical reform have sought to bring about...

...GORDON C. ZAHN is national director of the Center on Conscience and War and the author of German Catholics and Hitler's Wars and other books...

...But is the answer for communities to either (a) pass over the issue of ordination altogether, or (b) to ordain their own presiders regardless of church discipline...

...group with which such a person is affiliated to make its judgment as to whether he or she should remain in the work or if, to avoid internal dissension or giving scandal, it would be advisable to sever the relationship...

...The house is and has been a controversial one...