Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Cardinal Raymond Burke: ‘Feminized’ church and altar girls caused priest shortage






(RNS) Cardinal Raymond Burke, a senior American churchman in Rome who has been one of the most outspoken critics of Pope Francis’ push for reform, is roiling the waters yet again, this time arguing that the Catholic Church has become too “feminized.” Burke, who was recently demoted from the Vatican’s highest court to a ceremonial philanthropic post, also pointed to the introduction of altar girls for why fewer men are joining the priesthood.
“Young boys don’t want to do things with girls. It’s just natural,” Burke said in an interview published on January 5. “I think that this has contributed to a loss of priestly vocations.
“It requires a certain manly discipline to serve as an altar boy in service at the side of (a) priest, and most priests have their first deep experiences of the liturgy as altar boys,” the former archbishop of St. Louis told Matthew James Christoff, who heads a Catholic men’s ministry that called the New Emangelization Project. “If we are not training young men as altar boys, giving them an experience of serving God in the liturgy, we should not be surprised that vocations have fallen dramatically,” Burke said.
The Catholic Church dropped its ban on girls assisting the priests during Mass in 1983, and today it is common to see more girls than boys helping on the altar. Only one U.S. diocese, in Lincoln, Nebraska, still bars altar girls, though a number of individual parishes have barred them in hopes of encouraging more boys and men to consider the all-male priesthood.
In the interview, Burke also blamed gay clergy for the church’s sexual abuse crisis, saying priests “who were feminized and confused about their own sexual identity” were the ones who molested children. Researchers have disputed that claim, and experts note that the reported rise in the number of gay men entering the priesthood since the 1980s coincided with a sharp drop-off in abuse cases.
Burke, 66, spoke to Christoff in December during a visit to La Crosse, Wisconsin, where Burke served as bishop in the 1990s before being named archbishop of St. Louis. In 2008, then-Pope Benedict XVI called Burke to the Vatican to head the church’s top court and made him a cardinal. That prestigious position lent weight to his increasingly sharp and direct criticisms of Francis, who succeeded Benedict in March 2013.
In an unusual move, Francis effectively demoted Burke in November, shifting him from his job in the Roman Curia to a largely ceremonial post as patron of the Order of Malta, a global Catholic charitable organization based in Rome. Vatican observers suspected the switch would actually give Burke more freedom to speak his mind, and in this latest interview the cardinal doubled down on themes he has often struck: that liberalizing changes in both society and the church, especially “radical feminism,” have gravely undermined the Catholic faith since the 1970s.
Burke said he recalled “young men telling me that they were, in a certain way, frightened by marriage because of the radicalizing and self-focused attitudes of women that were emerging at that time. These young men were concerned that entering a marriage would simply not work because of a constant and insistent demanding of rights for women.”
He said that “the radical feminist movement strongly influenced the Church” as well.
The focus on women’s issues, he said, plus “a complete collapse” of teaching the faith and “rampant liturgical experimentation,” led the church to become “very feminized.” That turned off men who “respond to rigor and precision and excellence,” Burke said.
“Apart from the priest, the sanctuary has become full of women,” he said. “The activities in the parish and even the liturgy have been influenced by women and have become so feminine in many places that men do not want to get involved.”
Burke, a liturgical traditionalist as well as a doctrinal conservative who is renowned for wearing elaborate silk and lace vestments while celebrating Mass, also said that “men need to dress and act like men in a way that is respectful to themselves, to women and to children.”

Baptism of the Lord


Image: Baptism of Christ
Cappella Palatina di Palermo,
mid 12th century, from Art in the Christian Tradition
a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN

January 11, 2015


Have you ever seen the struggle of will between a small child and his mother at the dinner table?
The child wants to eat only macaroni and cheese.
The mother insists that the child must also eat vegetables, fruits, bread, and meat.
The child balks stubbornly.
The mother knows what is best for the child, but getting him or her to do what is best is no small task.
It takes great patience, doesn't it parents?

How do you get someone to do what is best for them when they do not want to do it?
Our text today is another such struggle of wills.
This time it is Simon Peter who is struggling against God.
You know, the man who was made head of the church!
Is there a more stubborn disciple than Peter in the gospel story?
If so, I do not know him.
Fortunately God reacts to stubborn disciples the way a good parent reacts to stubborn children-
God corrects without rejection.
God is patient.
God strives to mold the will, using that strength for good, rather than to break the spirit.

What can we learn from Peter in this story?
I. To embrace the wideness of God's mercy, we must release our fantasy that God loves us better than other people.
In the book of Acts, Peter is about to be placed at the forefront of a radical breakthrough of the Church-
the acceptance of Gentiles into Christian faith.
But Peter is an unwilling leader in this movement at first.
He wants to cling to exclusive theology, the way a child clings to a diet of macaroni and cheese.
Peter was raised to believe that Jews, and Jews alone, were God's people.
Just as some present day Christians claim that only their brand of Christianity is kosher.
Yet God challenged Peter to move beyond the narrowness of this sense of privilege.
God chose the Jews, yes.
But God chose the Jews as a sign that God had chosen all people.
It was never meant to be a sign of exclusive love.
Rather, God's election and grace are the first signs of the inclusiveness of love.

Children learn the song, which is not quite politically correct these days:
Jesus loves the little children, All the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, They are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.
This was a difficult lesson for Peter to learn.
And truthfully, many of us who know the words of that children's song have not learned to believe its message in our hearts.
Right?
II. The wideness of God's mercy can be learned, and it makes all the difference in the way we see the world and live our lives.
Even Peter could be taught.
that should give us all hope
God repeated his vision three times to Peter before Peter began to catch on.
But that's all right.
God is patient.
You should know that God has not given up on you and me yet, either.

And when Peter finally learns his lesson, he is a new man.
Suddenly he discovered sisters and brothers where he had previously seen only foreigners.
He found companions where he had only found competitors before.
This chapter of Acts tells not just the conversion of the gentile Cornelius to Christianity.
It also tells the continued conversion of Peter into the Christian God always knew he could be.

What would happen if you and I learned to see our world as God sees it?
What if boundaries between countries, and barriers of language, and invisible walls of zoning and economic class became meaningless-
or better, if they became offensive to us?
What if color of skin, and political persuasion, sexual orientation and type of occupation became less important than character and potential?
Imagine a place where everyone, and I mean everyone, felt valued and loved on an equal basis?
There is a name for such a fantasy place.
A place where the vision is – even if it’s not sometimes the reality – but the vision is that all people are accepted equally.

Let me name it for you.
It is called the Church.


Thursday, January 8, 2015

Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God


January 1, 2015



On this day every year we celebrate a World Day of Peace and also have a solemn celebration in honor of Mary Mother of God. 
How are these two commemorations related to one another? 
We name Mary Queen of Peace. 
What does the Gospel story tell us about her that inspires us to consider her the patron saint of the peace we long for? 
A good place to begin is with the song that she sings in her meeting with her cousin Elizabeth, the song we call Magnificat from its first word in Latin. 
This song is the longest speech of Mary or of any other woman in the Gospels.  What can we learn from it 

The Magnificat proclaims a new world order in which people meet on the same level.
The proud are scattered, so they are everywhere. 
Is this so that they might come face to face with the lowly? 
Proverbs says, "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble" When the proud are scattered, do they discover this amazing blessing of the lowly? 
Is that what confuses and confounds their thoughts? 
Perhaps being scattered is a blessing in disguise. 
When mighty rulers are brought down from their thrones are they confronted with the powerful goodness of the common people? 
Are the lowly raised to high places as Mary has been raised, so that they can speak without fear to those who appear far above them? 
If Mary has been so exalted, is there not hope for all the lowly? 
When the rich are sent away empty, do they realize their true hunger?  Does this hunger not only for food but for God bring them back to accept humbly the food their brothers and sisters will share with them?   Mary's song can only be good news if its message is not "reversal" but mutuality.
If she proclaims simply that the oppressors will become the oppressed, then there is no hope for us. 
What she proclaims is not this "no-win" situation but true shalom.  Shalom is not only peace, as we often assume. 
Shalom is that situation in which everyone has what is necessary for a full life. 
Those who thought they had to trust in their own power and lord it over others discover that the One who has all power has come down to meet them in their lowliness. 
Those who hoarded material goods out of fear that they might someday not have enough discover that God truly gives us our daily bread and that we are meant to share it with one another. 
The arrogant who relied only on their own gifts realize that true blessedness comes through working together. 
This is the message of Mary's Magnificat. 
This is the blessedness that Elizabeth proclaims. 

But this shalom is not easily accomplished. 
Fear is a powerful deterrent. 
Today we are plagued by a culture of fear. 
We think the way to eradicate it is by making war against terrorism.  We live in suspicion of one another and of any stranger. 
We gate our communities and search our travelers. 
We hunker down and hope for better days. 
But Mary's song is not a song of fear but of freedom. 
Imagine what the world would be like if the "world powers" offered to meet smaller, weaker nations humbly,
offering their resources in exchange for the wisdom these other peoples have to share? 
Imagine what would happen if we used all our technological wizardry to distribute the food we are well capable of producing so that no one went hungry and no one was overfed? 

I wonder: Can we allow ourselves to imagine?  

The Epiphany of the Lord



Image: He, Qi. Adoration of the Magi
from Art in the Christian Tradition,
a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

January 4, 2015



With the feast of the Epiphany of the Lord, the reality and significance of Christmas have come full circle.
The birth that we celebrated just an octave ago is now being universally acclaimed,  and the repercussions of that great moment in time must also be universally experienced.
In a sermon on today's feast, Baptist minister, educator and author Peter J. Gomes compared what he refers to as "epiphany business" to a stone that is dropped into the water;
there it produces a series of concentric ripples that grow larger and wider until the entire surface imperceptibly is witness to the initial movement of that stone.

What began on the very private annunciation of an angel messenger to Mary and what was made manifest to the shepherds
will be made increasingly clear to an ever expanding audience of witnesses.
Slowly but surely, the concentric circles of "epiphany business" reach out to touch and embrace more and more witnesses, until all are included and illumined.
From now through Easter Sunday, every aspect of the Christ event should be understood as an epiphany of Jesus that engages not only our attention but also our faith and our hope.
Through these manifestations, we will grow in that knowledge of Christ that invites us to deeper, fuller and firmer commitment.

To put it another way, Epiphany is at once a celebration of Christ and a challenge for the People of God.
By virtue of the reality of Christ, manifested as light and life for the world,
we who belong to Christ are to live lives that are similar manifestations of light and life.
Moreover, the challenge of Epiphany also requires that we be willing to see, hear, touch and attend to the presence of God
that is made manifest in predictable places and people as well as in those people and places where it is least expected.
The concentric circles of "epiphany business" reminds all of us together,
with our differences and diversities, our various languages, cultures, customs and traditions
all of us are to bring a diverse light to a world darkened by human sin.

Recall the mandate of Jesus to his own: "you are the light of the world ...your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify God".
In his book entitled Psalms for Zero Gravity, Edward Hays gave voice to the difficult challenge of being light in one of his poignant prayers:

"O God, how lonely it is to be the light of the world,
to be your justice and love in a world devoid of them,
to be kindness and compassion in a world of competition.
Yes, I find it lonely being luminous.
As all alone as our solitary sun, at times,
that's how I feel, Radiant God.

How hard to be the light of the world,
to hold a glowing warmth in a world so cold.
So, forgive me, Beloved,
for being just a momentary shooting star in the darkness of my world."

Lonely or not, momentary or not, hard or not, this is the challenge of Epiphany.
No doubt, Jesus must also have experienced the loneliness and difficulty of being the light of the world but he did not relent in his struggle.

Today we celebrate him both as sun that enlightens the world as well as the Son who redeemed it from the darkness of sin and death.
Today we are also called to renew our resolve to be like Jesus, a sun that lights the world despite the loneliness and the struggle.
Hays suggest that 99 percent of disciples prefer to be moons that only reflect the light of their Savior Sun.
Rather than be enflamed with love for God, their light only faintly mirrors the light of Christ.


However, Jesus did not say "You are the moon of the world."
He said, "I am the light,"
"You are light.
"Therefore, each of us must choose today what we should be for the world,
a sun (if only a momentary shooting star)

or a moon.