Editorials
Thus,"Facing the Future" starts and ends with believers where they are to be found, in parishes. Not some idealized parish, but parishes as they are: rural, urban, suburban; rich or poor,...
...THE NEWS FROM LIMBO Three years ago, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art briefly exhibited The Descent into Limbo by the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna (1431 - ! 500...
...Her name was reported incorrectly in the Advance yesterday...
...At its center is a whirling scene, Christ striding out of Limbo and leading forth a troop of ancients, Father Adam at their head, second-bom from the dead...
...Raphael's purpose: "To make sure that that hell doesn't last...
...Interestingly, there are two other things he doesn't see (or, more probably, doesn't care to talk about...
...God doesn't exist here...
...The secret of conveying hope in prison, writes Raphael, is personal contact and long hours of listening: "One of the priest's gifts is that of hearing the secrets of the heart, of taking risks to do so, and without approving everything, nevertheless, of accepting and understanding it...
...Second, that letting married men be ordained will inevitably lead to requests from ordained men for permission to marry, and to requests for reinstatement from men who have left the active priesthood to be married...
...For all these reasons, I would like to present the following for your reflection: "--if a parish that cannot have a regular Mass on Sundays because of the shortage of priests remains faithful in assembling each Sunday for the Liturgy of the Word, presided over by a lay minister or a deacon, and with the distribution of Holy Communion outside of Mass only on rare occasions such as feasts, lest it become habitual and be seen as a normal substitute for the Mass...
...The painting, its action and detail, envelops the viewer...
...The subject: Christ's first act after his own death was to free captives...
...and an unrelenting willingness to pay attention...
...could be he does but knows 180: Commonweal better than to stir up more than one hornet's nest at a time, and prefers, like a sound conservative, to let the logic of history and experience prevail...
...But, in our view, it's certainly a challenge, one that is both pragmatic and principled, at once visionary enough, given the times, as to be startling, and so packed with common sense as to demand assent...
...And not even the most punctilious people here take exception to it...
...It is 440-acre Rikers Island, the nation's most populous penal institution...
...Father Pierre Raphael, a Catholic chaplain who has worked on the island since 1980, says that he has seen more than eighty suicides...
...Weakland admits to certain con- servative biases...
...a parish with more than twenty-five hundred families is too big...
...A French worker-priest ordained in 1961, Raphael is drawn to what he calls "the hard core...
...FELLAS Democrats are suffering from an acute case of the "wimp factor," that debilitating political bug that afflicted George Bush just a few short wars ago...
...To provide that hope at Rikers, a place where "the Spirit of Discord finds a prime locus," he and a group of other chaplains and volunteers have worked diligently to create a"parish behind bars...
...When someone has reached absolute bot- tom.., the church, which has itself the treasure of life, is the only organ that is truly a friend capable of response...
...First, that many in the church have used the argument from pastoral needs to contend for the ordination of women (which is not to say that the issues are identical...
...The Eucharist, the liturgy, "they are the source and end of everything we are seeking here," the lighthouse and reference point, "the half-hour of truth...
...Could be he doesn't like these solutions...
...For them, I am a kind of emer- gency exit, a way to 'somewhere else.'" He writes these things with a kind of pure modesty and without the least note of self- aggrandizement--as anyone who has ever heard him give a homi- ly can attest...
...It is a demand of Jesus...
...22 March 1991:181...
...For Weakland, "the sacraments must always be relat- ed to life or they become magic...
...Adequate training is then provided according to the capabilities the church has at this time...
...The work takes all his wits, all his faith...
...But Democrats should take heart...
...once every three months, a retreat for prisoners and their families...
...There are, at the moment, over fourteen thousand men and women incarcerated there...
...Let them print up buttons that read: "I Voted My Conscience...
...ET CETERA THE COMPUTER DID IT Courtesy of the Washington Post, we pass along this "Correction of the Year," published in the Fresno Bee: "An item in Thursday's [paper] about the Massachusetts budget crisis made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts 'back in the African-American.' The item should have said 'back in the black.'" CALL ME ANYTHING, BUT...
...He includes himself...
...Lay ministers, even permanent deacons, cannot preside at the Eucharist, and without the Eucharist and the other sacraments Catholic identity will be lost...
...It would not be surprising...
...Celibacy is to be praised and vocations to the celibate priesthood are to be sought...
...forty-six died there in 1988 alone...
...To give an unmediated taste of it we close, as promised, with the most significant parts of its most significant passage...
...Even as it stands, however, this is already the most interesting pastoral letter we've seen in some years...
...Because "we never have communal prayer without men- tioning the victims...
...and "it is impossible to con the gospel...
...The small painting, from a private collection, was placed at eye-level and could be grasped at a single glance...
...Most Americans, if not most Republicans, still know what that means...
...And faith: "In a situation of dereliction, malice, and intense anger, only the gospel is able to disarm, to restore...
...then I would be willing to help the community surface a qualified candidate for ordained priesthood---even if a married man--and, without raising false expectations or unfounded hop~s for him or the community, present such a candidate to the Pastor of the Universal Church for light and guidance...
...a quarterly newsletter, The Link...
...A ministry to prisoners is not a gratuitous gesture, he says...
...Why does he call them that...
...classes that aim at being a school of faith...
...Is such a thing possible...
...And the second--without which the painting might have been little more than an illustration for a catechism is the mastery of Mantegna's execution...
...Viewing the painting, one feels a palpable rush of air...
...rich or poor, ethnic-based or polyglot, liberal or conservative in outlook...
...In New York City's East River there is another sort of limbo...
...Most of all, he recoils from the prospect of priestess parishes where the Mass is routinely replaced by a Liturgy of the Word, however well and carefully done, with or without distribution of Holy Communion...
...For him--as, one hopes, for the rest of us---the old-time religion is by definition and in its essence a sacramental religion, one that obeys the command, "Do this in memory of me...
...Isn't that precisely what Mantegna's Christ is doing...
...Raphael tells the story of what he calls the "antiprison" at Rikers Island: "What I love most about the tabernacle in the chapel at Rikers...is that the door...has nothing to hold it shut...
...Republicans obviously want to turn the debate over the use of force in the Persian Gulf into this year's Pledge of Allegiance issue...
...What follows...
...Two things are remarkable about the Mantegna...
...We had done our best...
...and if it seems that this state of affairs may continue for many years, perhaps into the next decade...
...In Inside Rikers Island: A Chaplain's Search for God (Orbis), he writes that"one thing is for sure, no one who gets into this place will ever come out the same...
...At least initially...
...He is troubled also by the notion of "circuit-riding" priests serving several churches every week--priests must have time to prepare their sermons and to know their people, else they run the risk of bum-out and/or of becoming "sacramental machines...
...At the island prison, he notes, the graffiti spell out a sense of death and no exit: "Kill for fun...
...Does wind rush through the corridors of Rikers when Pierre Raphael and his co-workers walk through them...
...Advance: "Josephine Kowaleski was elected senior vice-president of the Agony Auxiliary of the Military Order of the Cooties...
...Hell cannot last forever...
...And you can't have the sacraments without priests...
...and if the parish has an active vocation program for the celibate priesthood...
...It's not exactly, "Here I stand, I can do no other...
...When they settled on the Fresno Bee as winner of the corrections derby, the editors of the Post may not have seen this item from the Staten Island (N.Y...
...What do prisoners expect of me...
...But realism forces acknowledgment that, in this country and many others, no great surge of new vocations is at hand...
...The program consists of regular church services...
...For it is through the bearers of God's for- giveness and freedom--people like Raphael and his compan- ions-that we too experience the ongoing reality, the unapproach- able power, of the first Easter...
...given the looming shortage of clergy, he says, this is the only way he sees to let Catholics be Catholic...
...SHOW SOME MUSCLE...
...But then something extraor- dinary happens...
...It is good to have lay ministers at hand and to give them responsibilities in the parish...
...The liturgy, Raphael concludes, "is not there to help us live, to support and console us, but to change us...
...In short, what Weakland is saying, or singing, is: "Gimme that old-time religion, it's good enough for me...
...Read his book...
...and if the parish continues to have all the characteristics described in the first section of this document, namely, worship and a sacramental perspective that is a part of their theology and practice whenever possible, education at all levels, and ou t reach to the needy...
...Apart from that brief historical reference, the archbishop's whole case rests on the needs of the faithful, and not on any new view of the nature of priesthood...
...The island has a special ward for AIDS patients...
...Wits: "There is an intelligent instinct in the prison because it is the instinct of the poor...
...Weakland reports learning on a visit to the Soviet Union that the Russian Orthodox, also a sacramental com- munion, are suddenly reacquiring thousands of churches that had been closed for decades...
...50...
...Not dreams and fantasies they have already seen enough of thesel--but hope...
...For years he lived in a community of Charles de Foucauld near New York's Bowery and worked as an aid in a detoxification unit at a city shelter, a work he says "prepared me quite naturally for Rikers...
...Federal judges have issued more than twenty separate orders on overcrowding and brutality at Rikers...
...At least from us...
...But not by promising escape...
...Their solution: "The bishop usually assembles the people, announces that the church will reopen, and then elicits from the people the name of one of the older married men who should be their pastor...
...In such a case we would have done all possible at the local level and could feel that we had been responsible stewards of God's goods and graces...
...There are living and explosive forces, full of question marks for a society that is too simplistic...
...He was at the height of his powers here: Every single hair of his figures bristles, and the throng of those following Christ out of the cavern of death are sucked inexorably into the light, as if by a massive vacuum...
...No doubt he'll be heating from his readers on these points and will have to deal with them in the next draft...
...it is good, because necessary, that priests give up some of their accrued powers along with some of their traditional duties...
...To no avail...
...It may just be a minor classic...
...Closing or merging parishes as the solution to the priest shortage troubles him...
...He doesn't like "mega-parishes...
...That is the way the good news reaches the far corners of creation...
...The only door in the whole building that has no key is here, at the center...
...This practice has a certain resonance with that of the early church...
...If the strength of the church then should diminish here because of the continued lack of ordained priests and sacramental opportunities for the faithful, our consciences could remain in peace...
...each parish coming equipped or burdened with a history, problems, and opportunities all its own...
...No wonder the rush of air, the gasping, as lungs begin to breathe again, almost as if for the first time...
Vol. 118 • March 1991 • No. 6
