THE
CRISIS IN THE CHURCH: IS THERE A WAY OUT?
"Where sin abounds, grace super abounds" (Rom.5, 20) ,
Saint Paul assures us. There certainly is a way out of the crisis in the
Church today. If the Holy Spirit can "renew the face of the
earth", with much greater reason can the Spirit renew the Church.
What then is the solution? "Turn ye to me, saith the Lord of
hosts, and I will turn to you" (Zac.1 , 3) . "Be
converted to me with all your heart" (Joel 2, 12) .
"It has always been the habit of Catholics in danger and in
arduous times", writes Pope Leo XIII, "to fly for refuge to Mary, and
to seek peace in her maternal goodness, which shows that the Catholic Church
has always and with justice, put all her hope and trust in the Mother of God.
She who is associated with Him in the work of man's salvation has favor
and power with her Son greater than any other human or angelic creature has
ever obtained or ever can obtain." Again the same Pope
teaches: ". . . Of the great treasury of all graces given to us by Our
Lord - 'for grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (Jn. 1, 17) ' - nothing
comes to us except through the mediation of Mary, for such is the will of God.
Thus, as no man goes to the Father but by the Son, so no one goes to
Christ except through His Mother". "Among her many other titles
we find her hailed as . . . our 'Mediatrix', . . . 'the Dispenser of all
Heavenly Gifts'." "From her, as from an abundant spring, are
derived the stream of heavenly graces. 'In her hand are the treasures of
the mercies of the Lord' (St. John Damascene) . 'God wills that she be
the beginning of all good things' (St. Irenaeus, Contra. Valent.) ".
"Now, among the various devotional ways of paying honor to
the Blessed Virgin", Pope Leo taught, "some are to be preferred,
inasmuch as we know them to be most powerful and most pleasing to our Mother.
For this reason we especially mention by name and recommend the
Rosary." "The prayer which in Mary's honor Saint Dominic, with
God's guidance and help, was the first to compose by putting the mysteries of
Redemption together in set order", Leo explains, "has rightly
been called the Rosary." "The history of the Church bears
testimony to the power and efficacy of this form of prayer."
Pope Leo XIII in yearly encyclicals on the Rosary outlined its
long history, the testimony of numerous Popes, Saints and Doctors of the Church
in its favor, as well as the many extraordinary blessings showered upon the
Church and the Christian faithful by its devout use.
The history of the Rosary, indeed, reached an epochal
crescendo in the middle 19th century and the first part of the 20th century
with the apparitions of Lourdes and Fatima. At Fatima the mysterious
vision would reveal herself as "Our Lady of the Rosary" and repeat at
each of the apparitions the plea to "Say the Rosary every day".
The credibility of these apparitions was sealed by an almost
unprecedented public miracle witnessed by as many as 70,000 spectators,
including members of a secular anti-clerical press.
Mons. Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII was consecrated a
Bishop, in what appeared to some as a coincidence not without significance, on
the very day Our Lady first appeared to the three children of Fatima. Two
week later, on the feast of Pentecost, the first codification of Canon law, of
which Pacelli was a principle architect, was promulgated. This Code
prescribed for all clergy the daily recitation of the Rosary. From Pope
to curate this was the practice. Angelo Roncalli, first as a parish
priest, later as papal legate in Bulgaria and France, then as Patriarch
of Venice and finally as Good Pope John, would lead his household in the
Rosary three times daily.
We have to be struck here by the amazing concurrence between the
wisdom of the Church and a rare celestial message of divine origin, similar to
what was seen a half century earlier when just 4 years after Pope Pius IX
declared Mary to have been immaculately conceived, Our Lady, appearing to
Bernadette, told her, "I am the Immaculate Conception".
The great prayer crusades of the forties and fifties tirelessly
spread the Family Rosary, under the motto: "The family that prays
together, stays together". Many parishes throughout the Catholic
world held a public recitation of the Rosary before or after the daily Mass,
often times led by the pastor himself, a custom to this day still maintained in
Italy.
It was therefore totally mystifying that no mention of
the Rosary was made in the numerous documents of the Second Vatican Council.
Lamentable enough would this be, were it an oversight, however glaring
and unexplainable; but unfortunately it was deliberately left out. How
was the mere mention of the prayer which Pope Leo XIII had called "the
greatest prayer after the Holy Mass", completely omitted from the Council
documents? It was not easy and, in fact, it was only done with great
effort. Many Council Fathers allowed themselves to be persuaded by subtle
behind-the-scenes argumentation. In a message to his fellow priests, St.
Louis De Monfort forewarned, "I beg you to beware of thinking of the
Rosary as something of little importance - as do ignorant people and even
several great but proud scholars. Far from being insignificant, the
Rosary is a priceless treasure which is inspired by God".
There was an attitude afoot at the time - at first just
sheepishly whispered among a few, but then gradually put forward in the open,
later boldly argued by its partisans and finally even proclaimed almost as
doctrine - that an exaggerated devotion of Catholics to the Blessed
Mother was hurting the efforts at a reconciliation with the Protestant
denominations. That the faithful should hide or curb the feelings of
love and gratitude which they hold for their heavenly Mother, Advocate and
Protectress, is an attitude deeply foreign - hostile in fact - to the whole of
Catholic thought and tradition. With the gradual spread and
solidification of this new thinking, the previous harmonious
synchronization between the the wishes of heaven and the practice of the Church
was to come to an abrupt halt.
Actually, even though a special council decree on the Blessed
Virgin was originally planned, it never materialized or rather, in truth, it
was intentionally scratched; to be substituted by a marian chapter at the end
of the Constitution on the Church. The best possible face, of course, was
placed on this reduced plan, but, as if to belie the unconvincing explanation,
the opposite reasoning prevailed regarding the Eastern Churches, whose special
place was signified by a distinct conciliar document. If it had
been sincerely the wishes of the Council Fathers to include the Mother of Jesus
within the context of the theology of the Church, then the teaching on Mary
would not have come as an addendum artificially tacked on at the last minute to
the end of Constitution on the Church, but rather would have been deeply
integrated throughout the document. The Blessed Mother, after all, is the
pre-eminent "type" or figure of the Church and theological progress
elucidating the Church, as Pope Paul VI explained (Nov. 21,1964) , is greatly
helped by a deeper understanding of the place and roll of Mary in salvation history.
This should have been, indeed, Our Lady's Council. Was this
not in fact the moment to which the Lady of Fatima mysteriously alluded
when she requested that the Pope together with all the Bishops of the World
consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart? And if there could be any
doubt about it, should it not have been dispelled, when as the Council opened
its first session, the perilous "Cuban Crisis" erupted in a near
nuclear confrontation originating out of communist Russia, just as the ominous
words of Our Lady had warned of decades earlier?
Is it possible that, in attempting to read "the signs of the
times" , as was the repeated promise of the Council Fathers, they
tragically failed to see the "Signum Magnum", the "Great
Sign" of the Apocalypse that Paul VI, on the 50th anniversary of the first
apparition of Fatima, would, in papal teaching, identify as Virgin Mary.
The "new theology" regarding the Virgin Mary in the life
of the Church went against the entire Catholic heritage and experience.
The successor of Simon Peter certainly would have intervened in the case of
error, as in fact, on occasion he did, but, otherwise, Paul VI, was
reluctant to impose, through papal authority, his own inspirations and
instincts upon the Council Fathers. Nevertheless conscious of the novel
departure from tradition, he attempted to fill in the conspicuous lacuna with
his own marian interventions. On Nov. 21, 1964, at the end of the third
session of the Council, he proclaimed Mary, "Mother of the Church", a
title to which the Bishops, in the document on the Church, alluded but stopped
short of declaring. It was almost as if the Blessed Mother asked the
Council: "Whom do men say that I am?" And they said:
"Some say a woman who might not have had a virginal conception"
(Brown); others: "Someone not to be placed on a pedestal"
(Rahner); and still others: "an ordinary woman or an interpolation of a
pagan goddess" (various sects). "But whom do you say that I am?"
and the Council Fathers kept silent until Pope Paul VI responded: "
You are the Mother of the Church". This example of the marian debate
points out why, according to the unsearchable Wisdom of God, Christ gave to the
Church a pope. It is amazing how so many Bishops at the Council were,
with little timidity, prepared, if that were possible, to water down into a
vague collegiality, the primacy of Peter, but yet were too hesitant to declare
Mary, the "Mother of the Church"; something that, moreover, had in
some way even already been done by Pope Leo XIII: "She (Mary) was, in very
truth, the Mother of the Church, the Teacher and Queen of the Apostles, to
whom, besides, she confided no small part of the divine mysteries 'which she
kept in her heart' (Lk. 2; 19, 51), (Encycl. Adiutricem populi, 1895)".
Later in 1974, the Pope would publish his own document on devotion
to Mary, "Marialis Cultus", in which he would attempt to re-ignite
the practice of the Rosary (and that of the Angelus), but by now the custom of
family prayer, already, to be sure, suffering independently from
various societal trends, had, by the widely evangelized "downplaying of
the Rosary", lost too much momentum to be able to be revived by a papal
exhortation. The alternative idea, propounded at the time, of large
numbers of the faithful reciting the breviary, as the clergy are suppose to do,
never took hold and this plan of human conception stands in clear contrast to
the divine Wisdom so evident in the devotion of the Rosary.
Just at the time when the world, even then already being engulfed
into a maelstrom of unprecedented assault by the devil of impurity, so much
needed the intercession of the Virgin Mary, human reasoning, by a tragic lapse
of judgment, prevailed over centuries of inspired and carefully enunciated
marian teaching. As Saint Maximillian Kolbe explained: "It has not
been given to men, no, not even the cleverest, to crush the head of the ancient
serpent; this task has been reserved by Divine Wisdom for the pure and
immaculate Mother of God".
Many teachings of the Church's tradition, the Second Vatican
Council did not take up, others, it took up only in a partial way, and still
others, it took up even though these teachings have been better expounded by
Popes who have come before, during or after the Council. Although
obviously a present day reference point, the Council documents are by no means
a complete self standing compendium of Catholic Truth, much less a complete or
accurate reflection of Catholic Tradition, and it would be a mistake to treat
them as such.
In the years following the Council, Paul VI, better than anyone
and not without a certain sad frustration, chronicled the dissolution of faith
and morals that was rapidly taking place in the Church, but true to his natural
temperament, seemed to have an aversion for intervening with disciplinary
measures. Then again, the immediate experience in Italy itself, where
episcopal, priestly and clerical discipline in general were still relatively
taut, did not reflect what was happening in the world.
The drift away from traditional marian devotion continued after
the Council as well. With the promulgation of the new Code of Canon Law
in 1983, the former duty of the Clergy to recite the daily Rosary was dropped.
"Care must be taken", exhorts Pope Leo XIII, "in
these days of sadness for the Church, to preserve the holy custom of reciting
the Rosary of Mary." "Nor may We permit to pass
unnoticed", he adds, "the special providence of God displayed
in this devotion. For through the lapse of time religious fervor has
sometimes seemed to diminish in certain nations, and even this pious method of
prayer has fallen into disuse; but piety and devotion have again
flourished and become vigorous in a most marvelous manner when, through either
the grave condition of the state or through some pressing public necessity,
general recourse has been had to the Rosary, so restoring it to its place of
honor."
Pope John Paul II has a deep personal devotion to the Rosary.
In the days following his election especially, the marian beads could be
seen constantly in his hand. He has expressed many times the desire that
both clergy and faithful take up the habit of the daily Rosary. It would
be good to think that all or at least most would respond to this desire, but
the urgent and often times spectacular nature of the heavenly messages by which
the Rosary has been favored, lead one to believe that its use, if not a
"necessity of end", in the terms of theology, is all but "a necessity
of means" and should therefore be made obligatory for all the clergy.
If the thought of priests saying the Rosary in merely a formalistic way,
without the accompanying feelings of the heart, is not attractive, no less so
is the thought of priests saying the Holy Mass in a state of grave sin.
This indeed may be the alternative to a neglect of the Holy Rosary.
In reflecting upon today's scandal plagued Church, not without irony is
the popular post-conciliar mantra usually declared with the boldness of a Bastille
Day battle cry: "WE are the church". A Church of humans that
leaves out the one creature who pleased the most high God can have no reason to
expect divine blessings.
The Old Testament figure of Judith is seen by the Church as a
foreshadowing of Mary's place in Redemption: "The Lord has blessed you by
his power, because by you he has brought our enemies to naught. Blessed
are you, O daughter, by the Lord the most high God, above all women upon the
earth. Blessed be the Lord who made heaven and earth, who has directed
you to the cutting off the head of the prince of our enemies, because he has so
magnified your name this day, that your praise shall not depart out of the
mouth of men who shall be mindful of the power of the Lord forever; for that you
have not spared your life, by reason of the distress and tribulation of your
people, but have prevented our ruin in the presence of our God. You are
the glory of Jerusalem, you are the joy of Israel, you are the honor of our
people" (Judith 13, 22-25; 15, 10).
(There are many false solutions to the present crisis in the
Church and even some attempts to manipulate the situation in a vain attempt to
bring about changes in the Church which the Holy Father has already repeatedly
rejected. One site worth visiting has been offering a close analysis of
the problems raised by one currently popular solution:
(Cruzada.net editorial -
Aug. 8, 2002)
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