Correspondence Lots on Steinfels & more on Johnson
To the Editors Bring it on You made my day. My July 18 issue of Commonweal just arrived, and I saw the blurb that you will be featuring an article by Archbishop Rembert Weak-land in a future...
...On the other hand, one of the important insights from efforts to understand sexual harassment and many other "sex crimes" is that the issues often are not about "sex," as in an overwrought libido, but about power...
...They also take more time for Mass than the fifty minutes many typical Catholics allow for worship...
...I've been in the exclusive practice of obstetrics and gynecology for thirty years...
...The reviewer replies: Father Egan liked Donald Cozzens's book, but I did not, for the reasons I stated in my review...
...I did not find prayer itself treated in Peter Steinfels's article...
...After all, it is not a process that nature requires...
...Sadly, their trust was misplaced...
...First, my background and bias: I am fifty-seven, married to my first and only wife for twenty-six years, and have two children...
...It is my contention, stated in the review and repeated here, that many of these problems are theological at root and as such were not carefully analyzed in this book...
...FRANCIS X. MAIER Denver, Colo...
...Or do I impose my own...
...Something is more central to liturgy than execution and participation: the action of God...
...Wayne, Pa...
...Far better, it seems to me, to insist on returning to the past, in neo-Gothic, neo-Romanesque, neo-Renaissance churches, much as that might seem a concession, faute de mieux, to the poverty of our age...
...Do I condemn in vitro fertilization...
...Power, not sex Professor Johnson has provided a cogent analysis and a thoughtful historical context for the current crisis in the church...
...3. Is a person with "androgen in-sensitivity syndrome" (formerly tes-ticular feminization-a genetic 46XY male, but by all appearances an attractive female but without a uterus, tubes and ovaries, instead with dysge-netic undescended testes) a candidate for ordination...
...Steinfels & Nietzsche In response to Peter Steinfels's insightful and lucidly written "Fixing the Liturgy" (July 18), I would like to make three observations, two general and one picky: 1. The time has come to admit that the era of Christian aesthetics is over, at least for the foreseeable future...
...And no amount of pious talk about the need for sexual maturity, gender equality, and power sharing will get us off the hook...
...Just go into any suburban church and compare it to any church in Europe built before the Enlightenment, and Nietzsche's point will be proven...
...It is at work in the third world and in many areas of our country where people are marginalized...
...Thinking that liturgy itself will bring this about is misguided...
...Whatever the sins of our priests and bishops, the real problem in American Catholic life is our own comfort, infidelity, and tepid witness as laypeople...
...So let's think about a new mythology for liturgy and learn to be still...
...I attended a First Mass recently, and when the Sanctus was over the priest informed the congregation that it was now the rubric to kneel, but about half remained standing...
...Lee Artman's letter poses the sort of pointed (and well-informed) questions that many faithful Catholics struggle with quietly but with little hope even of being heard...
...There is no way an intellectual and pastoral leader of his caliber should never be heard from again...
...As Luke Timothy Johnson points out, this was a turning point in the church's history...
...What difference does it make to speak of "power...
...My link to the church is maintained in the Eucharist and the liturgy of the hours...
...The horror occurred not through carelessness or indifference but through ignorance...
...2. What specific quality of the Y chromosome qualifies men for the priesthood...
...7.I am the godfather of twins conceived in vitro...
...The best music, the most stimulating preaching, the most prayerful presiding, will not result in good liturgy all by themselves...
...6.I am opposed to abortion...
...But wait until it comes time to enforce the recently promulgated "General Instruction on the Roman Missal," with its requirement that the congregation kneel during the Eucharistic prayer...
...tony visocchi Summit, N.J...
...In Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche exactly captures the problem: "The Beyond in art-With profound sorrow one admits to oneself that, in their highest flights, the artists of all ages have raised to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions which we now recognize as false: artists are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophic errors of mankind, and they could not have been so without believing in the absolute truth of these errors...
...I lived through those years and I haven't changed my view of the church...
...Apropos of Professors Jordan and Hanson: publications in highly regarded academic presses are not ipso facto guarantees that special agendas have not been advanced...
...Finding meaning in the church's sacramental life and the Gospels require unlearning much of what we have gleaned from the secular world...
...the congregation, minds stilled by the unfamiliar tongue, could let their hearts be drawn to the mystery the presider was attending to...
...I spent three years in a collegiate seminary in the 1960s...
...EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J...
...In fact, just naming the types of abuse helps us see connections...
...The following are my thoughts as I read Johnson...
...Fortunately, monosyllables are hard to make out in the din of congregational responses...
...The bishops' teaching on sexuality has been loud and clear...
...I respond that the faith and zeal of American Catholics is quite extraordinary, all the more so, considering the confusions they have had to negotiate...
...On the other side, however, to ignore the ways in which the distrust and dislike of women provide a specific focus to such abuse is also a mistake...
...Fidelity means trusting that God uses the church to proclaim his message of the way to live in this life to achieve salvation in the next...
...EUGENE C. BIANCHI Atlanta, Ga...
...Yet, how can we bring transformation to people who are comfortable and self-satisfied...
...The mandate to teach is not invalidated because some disagree with teachings...
...Perhaps "what we have failed to do" is shape liturgies in which the demeanor of presider and lay ministers is framed in silence that calls attention to the God which faith proclaims is acting...
...The issue of a celibate clergy has nothing to do with sex...
...So what's his "prophetic" call to remedy this...
...Ultimately, poor liturgy is the reflection of poor theology and a lack of spiritual consciousness...
...I have heard believable reports of great liturgy in black churches in Chicago, inner-city New Orleans and El Paso...
...Worst of all is his sneering reference to Cozzens's citations of what he calls "highly suspect gay activists like Mark Jordan and Ellis Hanson...
...To start with, the panel the bishops established to find out the root causes of "sex abuse" is less apt to think about systemic abuses of power than would the same panel charged with finding the root causes of "sexually executed relational abuse...
...Humanae vitae will probably rank alongside the condemnation of Galileo...
...Beneath the crisis is the church's teaching authority"-I don't question the church's teaching authority...
...The accomplishment of the ideal of liturgical reform may take another century...
...We delude ourselves if we think we can be transported into the Kingdom without effort, or make a serious contribution to the well-being of the world by just being nice...
...I suspect that there is a link among sexually executed relational abuse, financially executed relational abuse (embezzlement of church funds...
...Recognizing this and recognizing the needs of the abuser, in her presentation to the American bishops last June, psychotherapist Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea introduced the term "sexually executed relational abuse" to describe these acts...
...Plus lots of politics, safely couched, of course, in Nice Talk (Nice invariably trumps Controversy in contemporary homiletics...
...They lost sight of their position as servants of the living God, bound to follow his laws...
...To declare that the bishops thought first to protect the church's reputation at the expense of victims is to distort the facts...
...Mundelein, III...
...Among many other things, Clare Byrnes says that I "distort the facts...
...LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM False prophet I had a weirdly divided reaction to Luke Timothy Johnson's "Sex, Women & the Church" (June 20...
...Johnson is a New Testament scholar, so perhaps he's a little rusty on his Jeremiah-a real prophet worth rereading...
...It boils down to pride and selfishness, both destroyers of discipleship...
...The rote answers of the local clergy are simply not intellectually satisfactory...
...3. Finally, Steinfels speaks of liturgical one-upmanship within congregations, with one cohort saying "for our good, and the good of all his church" while another wing emphatically upstages the line by insisting on saying "for our good, and the good of all GOD'S church...
...Still, derivative art is better than bad (or at least gimmicky) art...
...shoddy accounting and reporting information...
...No argument there, either...
...CLARE M. BYRNES Clifton Heights, Pa...
...He himself then goes on to talk heatedly about "ecclesiastical stonewalling," "near-farcical episcopal synods," and "the simple terror of bishops or wannabe bishops" faced with ordinary candor...
...I hope that the full text of Steinfels's book contributes more than the "adaptation" offered in Commonweal...
...robert schiavone Franklin, Wis...
...Where people have less, they seem more available to the Spirit...
...That's their job, and I have mine...
...We are too busy singing, listening to sermons, and doing other noisy things...
...I look forward to reading it...
...He refers to the liturgy as rendering "inner, spiritual transformation visible, audible, tangible...
...And Tony Visocchi dreams, as we all do, for a leadership of the church in America that is at least as intelligent, faithful, and holy as the millions of Catholics who, despite everything, trust that the Holy Spirit continues to breathe through this body...
...Spokane, Wash...
...A lot of difference, I think...
...Dennis Haugh is right: the main issues are issues of power and the misuse of power...
...This is now"-It is not the church's fault that many Catholics don't adhere to Catholic sexual mores...
...Nor in his discussion of the poor quality of presiding did I find the word "silence...
...It's the same tired, self-serving message that's cycled through the American Catholic bloodstream for thirty years...
...Compassion is much more than feeling...
...At least to gauge by the preaching: "No hellfire and no heavy theology, simply friendly messages about loving one another linked loosely to the Scripture readings and brightened with the homilist's anecdotes," as the author rightly describes the average homily on any given Sunday...
...Wrong cosmology-Peter Steinfels's article discusses well-trodden paths in liturgical renewal, but it fails to address deeper problems for reforming the liturgy...
...Roman Catholics are now, very often thanks to the efforts of the church itself, well educated, mainstream, and often holding positions of authority and leadership in the private and public sectors...
...To say that my loving and devoted wife is not qualified for ordination because she is a female is insulting...
...So, lighten up, Peter...
...I'm happy to leave the power in the hands of the ordained...
...As Johnson indicated, the laity perceived an abuse of relationship and power in Humanae vitae...
...In July 1968, we had no sooner entered their house when the manager's wife told us that she had just heard the news on the BBC World Service (shortwave in those days) that the pope had condemned artificial contraception...
...He went on to warn that the liturgy "may well corrupt you if you have no theology of prayer, or if that theology is perverse, or if, as Jerome said about Scripture, you do not even know what you do not know...
...My July 18 issue of Commonweal just arrived, and I saw the blurb that you will be featuring an article by Archbishop Rembert Weak-land in a future issue...
...Are they denied the entrance to a heaven that is available to me...
...Lakewood, Wash...
...In the comfortable pew Peter Steinfels is missing an important point...
...Faced with this new situation, church leaders need to be models of spirituality and holiness, love and tolerance (perhaps first by shedding their crosiers, miters, and fancy, expensive chasubles), and admitting into their councils the obstreperous as well as the docile...
...I would prefer to call it a problem of the abuse of power...
...To me, the crisis is about the scandal produced by sinners who, the bishops trusted, would sin no more...
...In line with Nietzsche's remark about Christian artists, I'm not really sure if priests, even the effective preachers among them, really believe...
...However the minds of the worshipers were undernourished, there was opportunity for the "action of God" to be perceived...
...A more relevant modern mythology as a basis for liturgy would at least take into consideration some of the great mental shifts of the last half millennium: toward humanism, interior-izing of spirituality (discovering the Christ or Buddha potential within us), democracy (with echoes in the Gospels), the vastly different vision of the cosmos via science and technology, feminism, ecology, economic and political globalism...
...It is a handy shorthand term, but when we use it we tend to think that the problem is "sex...
...The whole church needs to discern whether there is within the church a culture which systematically endorses, encourages, protects, and rewards abuses of power...
...I read and learned and sometimes disagreed with an article or two, but now I find that I am not at all in sync with Luke Timothy Johnson...
...Without a prayer At the 1973 Scottsdale conference, out of which grew the North American Academy of Liturgy, keynoter Walter Burghardt asked "whether the litur-gists had a conscious and consistent theology of prayer and were ready to say what manner of prayer liturgy is...
...Questions about authority and sexual morality...together they threaten the integrity of the church"-How can the church, always infused with the Holy Spirit-lack integrity...
...I can still recall my absolute astonishment and sense of betrayal...
...Kudos...
...But the illness at the heart of the church in the United States is a lack of faith and a lack of zeal...
...The writer is chancellor of the Archdiocese of Denver and special assistant to the archbishop...
...They needed "expert advice" in areas in which they were not schooled...
...Clergy sexual misconduct is ugly...
...4. What about Klinefelter's syndrome (47XXY)-basically, a pheno-typic male with primary testicular failure and impairment of testosterone production...
...Blaming the guys in black is much too easy...
...Johnson defines the problem as one of authority...
...2. No wonder, also, that homilies are, in Steinfels's accurate term, "nice...
...As a consequence, the encyclical, which includes much we all can profit from, has been rejected in its entirety, and all subsequent papal teachings on whatever subject have lost some moral credibility...
...In other words, I would change the title of Johnson's article to "Sex, Power & the Church: The Need for Prophetic Change...
...They can be extremely conservative or very liberal, but what is important is that now, more than ever, they are able to think for themselves, exercise the gift of free will, and make personal and private decisions for their own good, and the good of their families...
...As we can see now, Pope Paul VI was much like the mythical King Canute of Saxon Britain trying to hold back the waves...
...Fidelity to me means faithful assent to the teachings of the church with regard to faith and morals...
...In this task, we have a long tradition of Western mysticism as well as Eastern methods...
...lee e. artman, m.d...
...He scolds Cozzens for not taking more time and doing more homework, then trots out arguments about the priest shortage Edward Schillebeeckx made more than thirty years ago...
...It received its mandate from Christ himself...
...Again Nietzsche was right: In the absence of faith what we will be stuck with is ideology, or in his term, Great Politics...
...This is not a call to sloppi-ness but to precision, and the criterion is precisely what is not "self-serving," but rather what reveals the mind of Christ...
...More probing liturgical reform would ask questions about the cosmic story that it portrays from an ancient worldview: sinful humanity hopelessly lost without a savior from heaven, a Jewish Jesus who was early on transformed into the God-redeemer who saves us from sin by dying on a cross to placate a patriarchal God (sorry, but that atonement theory still lurks in the liturgy), a male priestly group with uniquely special powers to do Eucharist and sacraments...
...If belief in such truth declines in general, then that species of art can never flourish again which-like the Divine Comedy, the paintings of Raphael, the frescoes of Michelangelo, the Gothic cathedrals-presupposes not only a cosmic but a metaphysical significance in the objects of art...
...Blame the bishops for failing to teach and for ceding their authority to therapists, etc...
...Even the best modern church architecture, like Le Corbusier's famous Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, seems too deliberate, too studied-in short, too gimmicky-to convince worshipers that the building in which they are worshiping is worshiping with them (precisely because the builders themselves were worshipers, hardly an assumption we can make today...
...it is not instinctive or automatic...
...Why can't we just agree that there is good and bad organ music as well as good and bad guitar music in our churches...
...As for "self-serving message," I want to communicate just the opposite: the church needs to engage in the difficult task of discernment concerning what is essential and what is accidental in its teaching and practice...
...dennis haugh Greenwood Village, Colo, By his fingertips Thank you for publishing Luke Johnson's "Sex, Women & the Church...
...Humanae vitae' When I was a young priest in East Africa (I am no longer young and no longer a priest) we would, once a month, visit a tea plantation in our parish, meet with the workers (we were all Young Christian Worker devotees at the time), celebrate the Eucharist, and then go and have dinner with the manager and his wife...
...If that incident is any indication, I don't see much chance for the Sacrament of Unity becoming any less a catalyst for disunity than it has been in the past thirty-five years...
...Have I offended the God of the Roman Catholic Church...
...Cataclysmic changes of recent decades"-I take that to mean the way Catholics since the 1960s view the church...
...GEORGE S. ALMASI Katonah, N.Y...
...The main reason I subscribed to Commonweal many years ago was to keep informed by intelligent commentary on what's current with the church I love and feel blessed to be a member of...
...Whenever I start thinking or acting as if I am a god, I have a wife and children who are quick to arrest such folly...
...God does not force it upon anyone...
...Perhaps he could tell his readers in what conceivable sense these men are "highly suspect gay activists...
...Defined this way, we tend to get hung up in futile questions about the sexual orientation of the clergy...
...Mark D. Jordan, formerly a colleague of Cunningham's at Notre Dame, is the Asa Griggs Can-dler Professor of Religion at Emory University and author of at least a half dozen scholarly books published by Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, among other presses, including The Ethics of Sex, which received high praise in the March 2003 issue of that not very suspicious journal, Theological Studies...
...These and other dimensions of the old story tend to shape an external form of spirituality: things done to us or for us from without...
...Don't blame the church I cringe when the secular media discuss the Catholic Church, but now I groaned with dismay after reading "Sex, Women & the Church...
...I trust that the Holy Spirit is with the pope and the magisterium when they teach...
...This doesn't exactly qualify as prophecy...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSONN...
...Of course I do not share Nietzsche's conviction that Christian dogmas have become inherently incredible, but the culture thinks so, and that this has destroyed the basis of Christian art seems to me irrefutable...
...it is not the result of evolution...
...He also notes that American Catholics are now, in effect, the biggest mainline Protestant denomination in the country...
...They didn't cede their authority...
...Robert j. egan, s.j...
...Good liturgy surely needs good preaching, presiding, and singing, but these characteristics do not make good liturgy...
...I liked Cozzens's earlier book but thought that this one was a paste up job and still think so...
...The hierarchy's rationale for a celibate clergy and their admonition against the ordination of women, most contraceptives, and homosexuality fail the test of observation of external reality...
...Above all they need to make access to the Eucharist easier, not more difficult, so that it can become a source of grace, healing, and strength rather than a prize for keeping the rules...
...He calls this measured and beautifully lucid book "overheated" and "highly rhetorical...
...The church has a monumental task on its hands...
...He rightly observes that "only to the degree that moral teaching is expressed by the attitudes and actions of Catholics themselves can it challenge anyone...
...Catholic lay people fell into the secular culture surrounding them because they failed to nourish their faith through thoughtful prayer and the study of their faith...
...Hanson, with a Ph.D...
...I have mixed feelings about in vitro: I oppose the destruction of unused blastocysts, but don't have an alternative...
...Johnson and practically all other commentators talk about a "sex-abuse scandal...
...Cozzens defended I found Lawrence Cunningham's flippant remarks about Donald Cozzens's incisive and important new book, Sacred Silence, offensive and intellectually dishonest (Religion Booknotes, June 6...
...The desired result of its teaching is human beings developed to their fullest spiritual and moral potential...
...Further, if the spiritually effete evaluate liturgy, how worthwhile will the evaluation be...
...The author replies: Francis X. Maier says that my essay recycles "the same tired, self-serving message," and declares that "the illness at the heart of the church in the United States is a lack of faith and a lack of zeal...
...Does the second X chromosome disqualify...
...In fact, for a generous and deeply thoughtful discussion of Jordan's work on gay and lesbian issues and that of others, see James F. Keenan's "The Open Debate" in the same issue...
...While I would quibble about parts of his history, more important, I believe that his analysis can and must be extended...
...Steinfels seems basically to accept the cosmo-(Continued on page 33) (Continued from page 4) logical and theological underpinnings of the present liturgy, calling on us to tweak it a bit this way and that for greater participation...
...I am clinging to the institutional church by my fingernails...
...I do blame homosexual persons, however, for failing to keep their vows, just as I blame heterosexuals for failing to keep their vows...
...Finally, we need a liturgy that gives away perhaps half of its time to teaching Christians how to meditate, how to enter the stillness that opens to mystery, how to find the divine within the soul as well as in community...
...He speaks only of poor execution and craftsmanship, and of listless congregations...
...rev...
...Spiritual transformation takes place in freedom, in the drama of God's offering a covenant to us in Christ...
...They made themselves above the law...
...In fact, pace Steinfels's optimistic and upbeat conclusion, I predict things will only get worse...
...Johnson scratched the itch that nags at the vestiges of my Roman Catholic conscience: 1. What kind of God would establish seven sacraments for humans with an XY chromosomal pattern, but only six for an XX pattern...
...I am a seventy-four-year-old lifelong Catholic, the mother of seven and grandmother of twenty-two...
...playing on the emotions of fragile teenagers and widows, leading to sexually executed relational abuse), and theologically executed relational abuse (demanding servile obedience to a bishop only because he is "the successor to the Apostles...
...highhanded spending practices...
...It will accomplish nothing without the power of the Holy Spirit...
...We laypeople own those deficits through our daily choices...
...And while, on rare occasions, I have heard sappy songs like the one lampooned on your cover (on both organ and guitar, by the way), the vast majority of songs in the widely used compilation put out by Oregon Catholic Press, for example, use texts that come directly from the Psalms or some other part of the Bible, and can result in some very lovely, inspirational, and reverential examples of old wine in new skins, with a very high degree of participation by the congregation...
...The Latin liturgy had the merit of not placing on the presider any temptation to attract attention to himself...
...More of the same-a more (not less) thoroughly and flexibly American approach to sex, authority, and church structure...
...MARY BARBARA AGNEW, C.PP.S...
...The old liturgical mythos was written for a time long gone, except for fundamentalists of various stripes...
...Johnson shows us that U.S...
...from Princeton, is a member of the distinguished Cornell University English Department whose books have been published by Harvard and Duke...
...Sometimes it is clearly taking hold: with the faithful involved in Cursillo or other renewal movements...
...Its effects are tragic...
...Most Christians have never been helped to develop a taste for contemplation...
...In fact, I admire it even more...
...I accept Cozzens's analysis of the unhappy tendency of some church officials to cavil about, dodge, or otherwise paper over ecclesiastical failings...
...A CEO, for example, is assumed to be in a position of such power vis-a-vis her personal assistant, that any sexual relationship between them is considered to be the responsibility of the person with a higher status and to be forced on the person with lower status...
...5. What do I say to my friends and patients who have been living for many years in stable, monogamous, and "covenanted" homosexual relationships...
...I went through an obligatory phase of apostasy from age twenty-four to thirty-four...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON despite everything, trust that the Holy Spirit continues to breathe through this body...
...Organ bigot Articles on the liturgy that use "guitar" as a dirty word are usually the work of an old-fashioned organ bigot, and Peter Steinfels seems to be one...
...Moreover, a lack of knowledge and understanding of sexual deviance clouded the bishops' judgments, resulting in horror...
...Do I deny patients referral to infertility specialists who will respond to their request for treatment commensurate with their personal beliefs...
...Only those who do not believe in the Spirit's involvement could make such a statement...
...Are we sure inner transformation is really taking hold in our parishes...
...Finally, it appears to me that Johnson's main agenda here is power and power sharing...
...How can we alert people who have bought into the materialistic values of the world that something is amiss...
...A moving tale will one day be told how there once existed such an art, such an artist's faith...
...A careful reading of her letter suggests that this may not be exclusively my failing...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...demanding absolute fealty in all matters under threat of loss of job), emotionally executed relational abuse (any "hell fire and damnation" sermon...
...People renewed in the Holy Spirit make good liturgy...
Vol. 130 • August 2003 • No. 14
