The Sunday Obligation

The Lord Jesus appeared to the Apostles on Easter Sunday. Then He appeared to them again on the following Sunday. We can read something into this.

If believers are not to be overwhelmed, they must be able to count on the support of the Christian community. This is why they must be convinced that it is crucially important for the life of faith that they should come together with others on Sundays to celebrate the Passover of the Lord in the sacrament of the New Covenant. (Pope John Paul II, Dies Domini 48)

I think we can all feel the page turning on the coronavirus. Praise God. Which means that all of us Catholics must now consider again the duty of attending Mass on Sundays.

On the one hand…

The Last Supper did in fact happen. The God-man Jesus Christ did in fact establish the Most Holy Eucharist and the sacred priesthood. He did offer His Body and Blood for us on the cross; He did die; He did rise again, and then ascend into heaven. He does abide with His people in the Holy Mass celebrated by ordained priests on our Catholic altars.

None of this involves a conspiracy of disinformation. These are all solid facts that anyone can take to the bank. The Holy Mass is–at its invisible, burning core–Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ living, loving, gathering, sustaining, carrying us to heaven.

Christians need each other. Christians need the grace of the sacraments. Sunday Mass gives us hope, support, and the chance to love our brothers and sisters, and to be loved. We need it.

On the other hand…

How can self-respecting, conscientious people participate in the rituals of an institution that so manifestly lacks integrity? Doesn’t that make me an accessory to the crime?

Theodore McCarrick stood in front of the cameras on behalf of the American bishops, precisely when the credibility of the institution hung completely in the balance, in AD 2002. He lied through his teeth.

Popes and fellow Cardinals knew it. For decades they did what they always try to do: sweep the criminal case under the rug. Sixteen years later, the truth came to light, no thanks to the Church mafiosi who knew about it before then.

The Vatican then produced a “report” that exonerates every living Catholic official of any responsibility. The worst betrayal of trust by Church leaders since the sixteenth century occurred right before our eyes. But according to the Vatican, no one is really responsible for it.

McCarrick’s victims still have pending cases. The victims of thousands of other priest pederasts still have pending cases. Dioceses routinely conduct “reconciliation programs,” then declare bankruptcy–all for one reason: to keep the criminal cases safely under the rug. All this continues apace.

The Boston Globe did its Spotlight investigation–which itself came over a decade after an earlier investigation in Louisiana. Then, over a decade after the Globe reports, they made a movie about it, which won the Best-Picture Oscar. Now, a half a decade after that–well over a generation since this problem emerged–nothing in our lost and clueless Church has really changed.

Yes, we have criminal background checks for everyone who works or volunteers at our parishes. Yes, we have on-going “safe environment” education. But where the rubber actually meets the road, in the adjudication of actual individual criminal cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, things have not gotten better. If anything, they have gotten worse.

In the “old days,” the bishop would deal with you personally to orchestrate the cover-up of crimes committed against you. Now, the lawyers run the whole show, and the bishop treats you as if you don’t exist.

Meanwhile, the pope sends carefully crafted communiques to conferences and symposiums. He makes promise after promise. And criminal cases by the hundred languish, under the rug–where the pope himself clearly believes they belong.

Seminarians say, “We want to be part of the solution.” Brothers: that’s what we said. Twenty years ago. The mitered mafia was living a lie then, and they are living a lie now, too. Don’t comfort yourselves with the idea that things will be better in twenty years. I comforted myself with that idea, too.

…How can a decent person be a party to all this? Isn’t it actually more religious, more genuinely honest, to disassociate oneself from this perpetually benighted Catholic mess?

—

I find myself in an unusual situation, when it comes to confronting this question of conscience. Because of the bishop’s decree, the only way I can participate in Mass is to celebrate by myself.

I’m like a husband whose wife has been taken away from him by some cruel twist of fate. I keep living our married life, but alone. I come to the table, but my companion is no longer there.

I don’t say, “The Lord be with you,” when I celebrate the Eucharist. Because there’s no one there to say, “And with your spirit.”

—

I don’t pretend to have the answer to the “being Catholic now” dilemma. But I think we can eliminate these two possible solutions:

1. “Screw the Catholic Church. It’s just an empty cult, fit only for sex-abuse enablers.”

No. It’s the religion of Jesus.

2. “The institutional problems in the Church are above my pay-grade. I’ll just live my little Catholic life, in my personal spiritual cocoon.”

No. The Church belongs, above all, to Christians of conscience who live in solidarity with the desperate. The Church doesn’t belong to chancery bureaucrats, or Vatican bureaucrats, either. It belongs to the brokenhearted souls who cling to Christ for dear life, and love Him in the wounded neighbor.

We have to act. We have to lead. We have to own this screwed-up situation and do our best to improve it.

Book about the Crisis, Reviewed for Profiles in Catholicism

The on-line/print publication asked me to review Papal Policies on Clerical Sexual Abuse: God Weeps by Jo Renee Formicola. They also published my review of the book on their “Clerical Sexual Violence Against Minors” page.

—

Papal Policies on Clerical Sexual Abuse: God Weeps by Jo Renee Formicola. Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2019. Reviewed by Father Mark White

Five years ago, Pope Francis visited the U.S. On a lovely late-summer afternoon, the pope celebrated Holy Mass on the east portico of the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of bishops and priests concelebrated, including your unworthy servant. Thousands of Catholics prayed with us, spread across the elm-lined university quad. The city and the nation tuned-in on tv. The Catholic Church in America came together, smiling with hopefulness, in the sunshine. Jo Renee Formicola puts it like this, in the opening pages of God Weeps:

I can attest to the excitement, the love, and the palpable respect for Pope Francis during all those events I helped to cover when he was in the United States.

There was a snake in the garden of excitement and optimism, however. As Pope Francis preached his homily, a concelebrating Cardinal sat immediately behind him, fitting innocuously into the scene. Theodore McCarrick.

Formicola takes the title of her book from one of Pope Francis’ speeches during that visit to the U.S. At the seminary in Philadelphia, the pope said, “God weeps for the sexual abuse of children.” Formicola approaches the problem of sexual abuse as an expert in Church-state relations. She focuses on the policies that the popes have developed to deal with the crisis, and she analyzes those policies for their organizational effectiveness.

Formicola brings her expertise to bear by first clearly defining the sex-abuse crisis, and identifying the steps needed to take to deal with it. Her chronology begins with the case of Father Gilbert Gauthe, in the diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana. This has become the standard frame of reference for students of the history of the crisis. The journalist Jason Berry chronicled the Gauthe case thoroughly, and Gauthe’s attorney, Ray Mouton, worked with Father Thomas Doyle to produce a report for the American bishops. That report set on the table most of the necessary questions for Church leadership.

Papal Mass in Washington, September 2015

Formicola goes on to outline the process of competent crisis management. Recognize the focusing event or events. Respond with an appropriate apology for the harm done. Investigate thoroughly. Develop a comprehensive strategy that ensures accountability for wrongdoing. By following these steps, leaders regain trust, and a crisis ends. Formicola systematically outlines how three popes have failed to work their way through these steps successfully.

John Paul’s responses to the tragedy were basically non-existent. They were not public, aggressive, or compassionate. Indeed, for all his pastoral and political action to protect the unborn, the marginalized, and others forgotten by society, John Paul did not provide the same sense of righteous outrage, protection, justice, or solidarity with the victim survivors of clerical sexual abuse… In policy terms, John Paul’s leadership failed every test of what policy analysts describe as positive and successful responses to institutional crises… He could not grasp the gravity, scope, or civil ramifications of clerical sexual abuse; or the personal, psychic, or spiritual damage that it caused… He fueled perceptions of secrecy and fed a narrative of complicity… He blamed an ‘irresponsibly permissive’ American society, ‘hyper-inflated with sexuality.’

In 2001, things changed somewhat. Formicola writes, “John Paul was starting to suspect the ability of the American hierarchy to deal with the festering crisis.” In April, the pope required all cases involving the sexual abuse of minors be reported to the Vatican.

A year later, the pope met with all the American cardinals, including McCarrick, to try to deal with the Boston Globe Spotlight scandal. The meeting produced a ‘Vatican communiqué,’ which framed the Church’s response to the crisis. Formicola trenchantly criticizes the communiqué:

It ignored the serious civil policy implications of clerical sexual abuse… It avoided an official institutional apology. It did not set out a means to investigate the workings of the internal Church, its procedures, or its processes to handle clerical sexual abuse… It did not cede any power to civil authorities to investigate or punish the clergy… It continued a lack of policy coherence and consistency. It represented a policy position in which the Pope protected the role, mission, and reputation of the Church.

Over two decades earlier, during his brief tenure as a diocesan bishop, Joseph Ratzinger followed what we now know was the world-wide standard operating procedure. In 1979, Ratzinger knowingly received into his Archdiocese—Munich, Germany—a priest abuser of minors. The priest began psychiatric treatment, and, within days, the Archdiocese assigned him to pastoral work, with the Archbishop’s knowledge and tacit permission. None of the restrictions recommended by the priest’s psychiatrist were put into place. The priest went on to victimize other children, over the course of the subsequent three decades. Meanwhile, Ratzinger went on to head a Vatican department, then became Pope Benedict XVI.

Formicola summarizes the German theologian’s work with the sex-abuse crisis:

From the epi-center of adjudicating grievous sins as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981 until his retirement from the papacy in 2013, Benedict was in a central position to create and implement policies to deal with clerical sexual abuse for thirty-two years. But he was unable or unwilling to punish, contain, remediate, or make a significant policy change in how the Catholic Church dealt with the greatest crisis to its credibility, legitimacy, and existence in modern times.

Many who had long been dealing with the sex-abuse crisis desperately wanted to believe that Pope Francis would find a way to deal with the problem successfully. When he assumed office in 2013, Francis immediately identified with the poor, and urged the entire Church to do the same. Formicola asks, “Can this theological commitment to the poor serve as a basis for a broadened definition, to include the victims of clerical sexual abuse?”

In 2014, the United Nations severely criticized the Vatican’s handling of child sexual abuse. Pope Francis responded to one of the U.N. recommendations and established the Papal Commission for the Protection of Minors. He appointed the clerical sex-abuse survivor Marie Collins, of Ireland, to the commission. Collins soon resigned, however. The Vatican’s zero-tolerance policy, she recognized, was much more an empty slogan than a practical reality, and the pope failed to establish a tribunal to judge bishops who covered up for predatory priests.

Formicola’s historical survey ends with the waning days of 2018, after the McCarrick revelations, the Pennsylvania Grand-Jury Report, the Viganò memo, and the Vatican intervention at the U.S. bishops’ meeting (which prevented any concrete action on the part of the bishops). Formicola summarizes the situation at that time:

The cautious optimism that accompanied Francis’ election continues to erode… Attempts to ensure transparency and accountability for the punishment of priests and members of the hierarchy are disappearing with each new instance of Vatican cover-ups. The expected desire to develop corrective changes in personnel and policy is now being overwhelmed with the existential threat to papal power and the increasing possibility that the Church could simply implode from the weight of its own sins… The laity’s patience is at an end.

Formicola’s calls her final chapter, “God Still Weeps.” She writes:

The needed reforms represent an existential threat to the recognized religious and administrative leadership of the Popes, to the continued functioning of the institutional Church as the world knows it. Strategic change would require dynamic, persistent, and systematic policy solutions… But the Papal responses, instead, were ad hoc, ineffective, often without compassion, and deeply divisive within the Church… For more than three decades, predatory priestly behavior festered as an open, religious sore—as well as a political, economic, and legal wound for the modern Catholic Church. Even now, the largest religious institution in the world remains without an official, systematic diagnosis of the causes of clerical sexual abuse or a prescription to end the victimization of children by priests.

Formicola submitted her book for publication shortly before the February 2019 meeting at the Vatican, dedicated to the problem of child sexual abuse. She writes near the end of the book that the situation actually requires the calling of an ecumenical council. Vatican III should convene—to deal with the sex-abuse crisis.

During Easter week of that year, Formicola taped an appearance on Newark NJ PBS’s “Think Tank” program, to discuss her book. It gave the author the opportunity to discuss the Vatican meeting that had occurred since she finished writing. The interviewer asked, “What happened at the meeting?” Formicola responded, “Nothing. It’s like asking someone to watch after themselves, and you really can’t have that. I don’t know that [the pope and bishops] necessarily are capable of doing anything.”

God Weeps could have used another edit; it has some passages that are difficult to follow. Chapter Five re-develops a historical narrative that has already been extensively covered in previous chapters, which causes the reader some confusion.

Also, Formicola outlines the three popes’ theological principles in a manner that seems cursory and shallow. I think it is necessary to understand the three men first as Christian pastors, in order to begin to grasp the complexity of the issues they have faced. Formicola repeatedly laments that the popes have seen clerical sexual abuse as a sin, rather than as a crime. From a pastor’s point-of-view, those are not mutually exclusive things. That said, Formicola is absolutely right about the catastrophic consequences of the popes’ inability to recognize the crime of child sexual abuse for what it is. And the book’s attempt to synthesize theology with public policy introduces a very helpful approach to the problem.

We owe Dr. Formicola a debt of gratitude for assembling a large amount of research into a painful, but refreshingly realistic, analysis. With God Weeps, she has given the Church a gift, applying her expertise to help us see the enormity of the unsolved problem we have on our hands.

Vatican Spills the McCarrick Beans, Part II

Anyone watching the work of the American bishops meeting in Baltimore three weeks ago knows that they voted on this:

Be it resolved that the bishops of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops encourage the Holy See to release all the documentation that can be released consistent with the canon and civil law regarding the misconduct of Archbishop McCarrick.

The bishops voted that resolution down.

Meanwhile, laughter in Rome. Why? Because Rome had already released all the info. By talking secretly to two journalists. The book was published November 6.

“Don’t these silly Americans understand how we do things here?” the Roman cardinali thought to themselves. (Among the Roman cardinali, I include Donald Wuerl, certainly one of Tornielli & Valente’s anonymous sources.)

Meanwhile, we Americans wonder: Really? Talking off the record to a sympathetic journalist counts as “accountability?”

Anyway, click Part One of my summary of the book, if you haven’t read it already. We continue now with:

Facts about Theodore McCarrick revealed by the unwitting accountability team of Vigano-Tornielli-Valente…

In December 2005, Pope Benedict XVI knew that McCarrick had abused seminarians.

McCarrick turned 75 in July, 2005, still healthy and energetic. I remember it as if it were yesterday; all us Washington priests had to attend a 75th birthday party held in a fancy new dining hall at Georgetown University.

Even though canon law requires the resignation of all bishops at 75, sitting Cardinal Archbishops generally serve at least two extra years, if not four or five.

But McCarrick did not. Having concluded that McCarrick posed a grave danger to the good name of Holy Mother Church, Pope Benedict rushed the replacement process, hastily naming Donald Wuerl as McCarrick’s successor. Well before McCarrick turned 76.

Meanwhile: two things…

1. Everyone knew that Pope Benedict was embarrassing Theodore McCarrick. But we all thought it had to do with a fast one that McCarrick had pulled on then-Card. Ratzinger in 2004. Ratzinger had explained that priests could and should withhold Holy Communion from politicians who voted in favor of abortion. McCarrick did not communicate that instruction to his brother American bishops.

We priests in the trenches thought McCarrick got relieved early because of that. Little did we know…

2. The second settlement of an abuse claim against McCarrick ran its course during 2006. Rome got the word.

Vigano wrote about “sanctions” against McCarrick. Vigano supposed that the sanctions began in 2009, after Dr. Richard Sipe published selections from the McCarrick abuse-claim settlement documents.

But the ‘sanctions’ actually began in December of 2006.

Vigano wrote that Pope Francis “lifted” them in 2013.

He did not. Because they had never been enforced at all.

The history recounted in this book–of nuncios and cardinals trying to enforce Pope Benedict XVI’s order that Theodore McCarrick live a retired life of prayer and penance–it reads like the slapstick farce that it was. McCarrick outmaneuvered them all.

Tornielli and Valente document it, in excruciating detail. They propose to contradict Vigano, insisting that Vigano painted an inaccurate picture of a McCarrick effectively punished by Benedict XVI, then liberated by Francis.

But: I don’t remember Vigano insisting that Benedict’s sanctions were effective. As Tornielli and Valente point out, Vigano himself proved utterly inadequate to the task of enforcing them.

Tornielli and Valente try to cast doubt on Vigano’s utterly crucial assertion that he told Pope Francis about McCarrick’s abuses in June of 2013. But Card. Ouellet, prefect of Bishops, has already acknowledged that Vigano probably did tell the pope about McCarrick. (Oullet preposterously claimed that we could hardly expect the pope to focus on such information).

And even if Vigano never told Pope Franis anything about McCarrick, Tornielli and Valente effectively inform us that they all knew anyway–all the Cardinals around the pope. Pope Francis didn’t need Vigano to tell him that McCarrick was a ticking time bomb of scandal that could explode and destroy them all. The pope already knew. He just did not appear to care.

The picture from this hit-piece book against Vigano is manifestly not: Vigano wrong. The picture that emerges is: The people who run our church really, really do not know what they are doing.

I will likely have more to tell you about what I have read, dear reader, but let me close now with:

My Analysis

In 1994, Bishop Hughes of Metuchen, NJ, could have insisted on a church trial of his predecessor, even though that predecessor was his ecclesiastical superior. Trials are ugly, but they do attain the kind of certitude that we can have in this life, about an accused man’s guilt or innocence.

It would have taken a great deal of courage for Hughes to denounce the Archbishop of his province. But the alternative was: Slip into the shadow world of the mafiosi…

In 1999, Cardinal O’Connor could have insisted on a trial of Theodore McCarrick, for violations of the Sixth Commandment with his own seminarians. But he did not. O’Connor wasn’t hung up about guilt or innocence, either; he only cared about whether or not McCarrick got promoted.

(Even the good guys among the mafiosi are still mafiosi, my friends. O’Connor was convinced that McCarrick had preyed on defenseless young men. But still O’Connor never suggested that McCarrick had no business remaining in the throne in Newark–and had no business saying Mass at all.)

John Paul II could have, and should have, conducted a trial. But he preferred to think the best about the charming snake-oil salesman.

Benedict XVI absolutely had to conduct a trial. But he did not do so. He assumed McCarrick was guilty. Meanwhile, McCarrick regarded Benedict’s attempts to closet him in a monastery as a “persecution.” Because McCarrick denies to this day that he did anything wrong.

There’s no getting around this: Pope Benedict XVI is guilty of covering up for Theodore McCarrick. The pope worried about scandal. He did not appear to understand that McCarrick’s victims needed justice. Nor did he understand that more victims would surely come forward.

But we can well imagine that Benedict is suffering his punishment right now. He himself made the choice that leaves him in the impossibly painful position that he now occupies. He knows everything about all this. He knows he made a terrible mistake, out of weakness of will.

And he can say nothing. He has information that could help resolve the problem–The Problem, that he knows has released termites into the very foundations of the Church. But he cannot say anything. Because of the choice that he himself made, to live as the “contemplative ex-pope.”

Pope Francis inherited a nightmare situation in which one of his Cardinals (an unusually prominent one) stood accused of grave abuses. But his guilt had never been proved; it had never even been put on trial, by anyone.

Pope Francis absolutely, positively had to conduct a trial, to establish McCarrick’s guilt definitively and remove him from the clerical state.

Instead, Pope Francis blew the whole thing off completely.

Until a man came forward accusing McCarrick of abusing him while he was still a minor. And this apocalypse we have lived through, and continue to live through, began.

75th Anniversary of a Holocaust Death

Exactly seventy-five years and two weeks ago, the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands issued a statement condemning the Nazis for deporting all Jews from the country.

Seventy-five years ago today, the Nazis killed a German Jewish philosopher in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, as an act of retaliation against the bishops’statement.

Now, how’s that? Kill a German Jewish philosopher to retaliate against Dutch Catholic bishops? Well, this Jewish philosopher had become a Catholic nun. Edith Stein had become Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

The sisters of her convent had escaped Germany, and made it to the Netherlands. But the Nazis caught up with them. And when the Dutch Catholic bishops had the gall to call the Nazis the vicious racists they were, the Nazis proceeded to arrest and deport all Jewish converts to Catholicism. As we know, the Nazis were efficient. They only needed two weeks to get their revenge, in the gas chamber.

Pope St. John Paul II declared that we must remember the Holocaust on St. Teresa Benedicta’s feast day. Nazi racism justified the systematic killing of millions of innocent people—racist killing carried out with scientific coldness. My departed grandfather participated, as an American G.I., in rescuing people from one of the concentration camps. What he saw horrified him so much, he could never talk about it.

But we must. We must acknowledge the fact that man can, and does, inflict such evil upon man—and for no good reasons other than his own profound spiritual delusions.

On the other hand, man can, and does, also love his fellow man. St. Teresa Benedicta died for love. “Come, let us go for our people,” she said to her sister, who had also become a nun, as they walked to the gas chamber.

Pope St. John Paul II put it like this, when he canonized St. Teresa Benedicta, “We must stand together for human dignity. There is only one human family.”

Eleventh Anniversary, April 2

Some memorable things occurred shortly after the vernal equinox in 2005. Good Friday fell on Annunciation Day, a very rare occurrence. (Many ancient Fathers held that Christ’s crucifixion took place on March 25.) And Easter Saturday fell on April 2. With sunset, the Feast of Divine Mercy began. And Pope John Paul II died.

For the first time since that day, the calendar date and the liturgical days align today.

“Should we obey men, rather than God?” To be humble, submissive to legitimate authority, pleasing to one’s neighbors—these are all virtues, to be sure. It’s not as if Pope John Paul II wasn’t every bit as good a politician as Ronald Reagan was. They both had been actors, after all.

But for all his avuncular charm, Pope John Paul had a deeper compass. The whole world knew that his interior life and his intense studies guided him. Yes, he pleased us. But: a politician, fundamentally Pope John Paul II was not.

“Go to all the world and proclaim the Good News!” To proclaim anything to anyone requires relating to them. For people to relate to each other, some common ground must be found.

I think it’s fair to say that Pope John Paul II was the greatest genius for finding common ground that any of us will ever share the earth with in this life. His skill at connecting with people arose, of course, from his total intimacy with the New Testament. When you furnish every room of your soul with pages from the gospels and epistles, then you expand towards others constantly, by the sheer power of the Holy Spirit.

Americans tend to think of America as the center of the world. And we have a myth of the Vatican as some kind of walled-in warren of creepy Italians in effeminate-looking cassocks.

John Paul II made the Vatican the crossroads of all peoples. My first visit there changed my life, in the spring of the Jubilee Year 2000. Americans—northern and southern—Africans, eastern Europeans, southeast Asians, coming and going, talking constantly, united in a common purpose. The best and wisest, most well-informed and most connected man in the world was our pope.

When we lose a parent, the first part of life ends, and a second part starts. My own dad and John Paul II died a year apart from each other. Eleven years ago, the first part of my life ended, and a second began.

But: why do we gather together at the holy altar to celebrate Mass every day, for God’s sake? Lord Jesus rose from the dead! Death does not separate us from each other. Life has a Part III, and it involves more intimacy, more love, more joy—and it never ends.

Abortion…

…involves taking an innocent and defenseless life.  Many women who have had abortions never did so with full awareness and deliberation.

God forgives, when we cry out to Him with sorrow. He pours out grace to heal us.

The Church loves her children. So she sternly warns us against doing things that will destroy us from within. One very effective form of warning: “You will be punished severely if you do this…”

Any priest in good standing can absolve any sincere penitent from any sin.

Committing the crime of abortion means excluding oneself from the life of the Church. But I daresay very few, in any, of the mothers who confess abortions have in fact committed the crime. Because to commit the crime you have to understand the full picture of the evil you do.

Now, that doesn’t mean evil of the gravest kind hasn’t been done; it has. And the remorse she feels means that the mother bears some guilt. But the crime has been committed by the abortionist. Only the one who commits the crime incurs the excommunication

That said, it’s a moot distinction in most of the dioceses of the United States, anyway. Almost all American priests have been granted the authority to lift this excommunication. I have–and all the priests I know who have been ordained anytime these past 20 years–all of us have always had the authority that the Pope granted to all priests in the world for the upcoming Holy Year.

Which is not to say that we don’t love the Holy Father for opening the door of mercy even wider–I guess in countries where the bishops have not generally granted priests the faculty to lift censures for the crime of abortion.

—

The report that I heard by Sylvia Poggioli on NPR lacked the following:

1. A sober recognition of what abortion involves.

2. Any sympathy–even remote sympathy–for what going to confession is actually like.

3. Any background knowledge regarding the discipline of this matter in the dioceses of the United States (on National Public Radio, when the nation in question is the United States).

Ms. Poggioli states: “Until now it’s been a difficult and complicated process for a woman who repents to get absolution…”

This is utterly and totally false in the United States (or, I think it’s fair to say, anywhere else.)

All the sympathy which our Holy Father has expressed towards women who have had abortions was originally expressed by Pope St. John Paul II, in Evangelium Vitae, twenty years ago. During the Holy Year in honor of the Redemption in 1983, Pope St. John Paul II extended the authority to lift the excommunication for the crime of abortion to all priests. I am not a historian, but I think it is highly likely that his having done that over thirty years ago is what led to the perpetual concession of that faculty to so many confessors.

Poem for Pope St. John Paul II

The Thin Black Line

Early dusk. A little flock of daws
cuts the crisp air, heading south.
Advent has arrived, and the nights
for the Immaculate-Conception Novena.

The year has grown old, as have I.
(Or middle-aged, at least, and a little tired.)

The Church in America: a brown-paper parcel,
wrapped-up with thin black twine.
Do not open until Christmas.
Christmas 2018, or -19, or -20, or -25.

But I won’t let go—not yet—of the moon-lit dusk
when I said totus tuus to the Virgin, on younger knees.

You had carried us there, Holy Father,
on those ski-sculpted shoulders,
spinning the twine with your hands.

You chugged like a rail engine
through the passes of the Dolomites.
Another country opened up before our eyes.

So, if I am a strand of the black twine,
or a billow of the smoke flowing from the stack
into Christ’s third millennium:
it’s because I knelt under your wings.

JPII Feastday

on my way down to kiss the ring of the fisherman

36th anniversary of the inauguration of his papacy.

First liturgical Memorial of St. John Paul II.

Ora pro nobis!

Civilization of Love

Lord Jesus ascended into heaven.

We might well wish that He had not. We might prefer that He had remained on earth, with us, so that we could see Him. We might think that God being visible on earth would make the Christian faith considerably easier to sustain.

But St. Thomas Aquinas explains in the Summa Theologica why we should, in fact, rejoice that Christ ascended into heaven–even though, for now, it is beyond our sight. St. Thomas gives a number of reasons. One of them is this: We rejoice in Christ’s Ascension because it directs our fervor toward the invisible Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, which Christ gives us from heaven, is, to quote St. Thomas, “love drawing us up to heavenly things.” The Holy Spirit is nothing other than “love drawing us up to heavenly things.”

In other words: God is; our religion revolves around; the meaning of life is: love drawing us up to heavenly things. I would say that this may be the key concept for our spiritual lives in AD 2014, fifty years after Vatican II.

Popes from the Same Cloth

Three years ago, we heard the same readings, and celebrated the same Feast of Divine Mercy, after a late-April Easter.

Three years ago, my mind turned to St. Peter’s Square in Rome, because my hero was being beatified. And my mind turns to Rome again, of course, because he is being canonized.

Actually, can we go back to the year 2000?