The Twenty Mysteries of the Rosary?

The Apostolic Letter opens the door for a "pastoral approach" to the Rosary that is "positive, impassioned and creative - as shown by World Youth Days". In other words, a nod is given to a jazzed-up Rosary for the "youth".

"When one lives by novelty, there will always have to be a new novelty." - Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

On October 16, 2002, Pope John Paul II marked the 24th Anniversary of his papacy with the release of the Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae, in which he proclaimed a "Year of the Rosary" from October 2002 to October 2003. The document also contained a major innovation from a Pope whose Pontificate has been marked by a steady stream of novelties. He announced that he would add five new mysteries to the Rosary.

Word of the new mysteries was reported first on October 14 by various news agencies claiming that information was leaked from Vatican sources.

Father Richard John Neuhaus from First Things magazine found these early reports hard to believe, and told The Chicago Tribune that the Pope was not likely to alter the Rosary. "That he would suggest," said Neuhaus "or even declare some kind of official change to the Rosary is totally atypical, totally out of character." Neuhaus then said that the Pope does not have the authority to mandate changes in such a prayer.1

Father Neuhaus is correct that a Pope cannot mandate such changes, but he is mistaken to claim that the Pope's change of the Rosary would be "out of character" for this Pontiff of post-Conciliar aggiornamento. Even the secular press recognizes John Paul II as a man with a passion for setting papal precedents.

The New York Times' Frank Bruni wrote on October 15: "Time and again, Pope John Paul II has boldly gone where other Popes have not: a synagogue, a ski slope, distant countries with tiny populations. Tomorrow, he will apparently cross another frontier, making a significant change in the Rosary, a signature method of Catholic prayer for many centuries." 2

Bruni failed to mention that John Paul is also the first Pope to kiss the Koran,3 participate in rock'n'roll liturgies,4 allow Altar Girls, permit "lay ministers" to distribute Communion at his Papal Mass,5 suggest a "common martyrology" that contains Catholics and non- Catholics, praise documents that call the need for non- Catholics to convert to the Catholic Church an "outdated ecclesiology," 6 take part in "inculturated" ceremonies that includes pagan ritual,7 and convoke pan-religious prayer meetings that include Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Snake-worshipers.8

On the same theme, Rueters said, "Changing one of Christianity's most fundamental prayers after nearly a millennium will be a typical way for the 82- year-old Pope to crown 24 years of a pontificate marked by bold initiatives sometimes taken against the advice of aides." 9

The "new mysteries" of the Rosary took everyone by surprise. Thus I have postponed publication of Part III of my World Youth Day series10 in order to comment on this latest "bold initiative".

Two weeks previously, the pontiff announced he was preparing a document to stress the value of the Rosary. He urged the faithful to recite the Rosary, including together as families. John Paul said then that he wanted people to "rediscover the beauty and depth of this prayer".

The Pope, for a good part of the Apostolic Letter was true to his word. Much of Rosarium Virginis Mariae is praiseworthy, even edifying. How can one argue with the promulgation of a "Year of the Rosary" in order to revitalize practice of this Holy devotion? How can one find fault with the Pope's call to pray the Rosary for peace? How can one complain when the Pope laments that families are fragmented, that they often get together only to watch television, and that they should set some time aside to pray the Rosary together instead?

Also of interest was the Pope's frequent references to Blessed Bartholomew Longo (1841-1926) who was baptized Catholic, left the faith to become a satanic priest, and then repented, converted back to Catholicism and became an apostle of the Rosary. This is a beautiful lesson that conversion is possible even in apparently hopeless cases.

It is probable that the Letter will do much good in revitalizing Rosary devotion. Tens-of-thousands of Catholics who do not follow the details of Vatican events, will simply learn through the press, or from parish priests, that the Pope wants a renewed devotion to the Rosary and they will comply. I have little doubt that this Letter will produce its desired goal to inspire more Catholics in this holy exercise.

Yet at the same time, countless Catholics are baffled at the unnecessary addition of five new mysteries. What is this strange post-conciliar belief among today's Church leaders that Catholics will not find a traditional devotion interesting unless John Paul updates it? Why is it thought necessary to disfigure our devotions in order to capture a Catholic's attention? Why was it requisite for the Pope to put his personal stamp on the Rosary, rather than simply promote it as is: as did all the Popes before him, as did countless saints, and as did the Mother of God at Fatima?

The addition proposed by the Pope, called the Five Luminous Mysteries, also called the "Mysteries of Light," center on the public life of Christ. They are:

the Baptism of Christ in Jordan, the Wedding Feast at Cana, the Announcement of the Kingdom, the Transfiguration, the Institution of the Eucharist as the sacramental expression of the Paschal Mystery. These new mysteries, according to John Paul, are to be placed between the Joyful and Sorrowful Mysteries.

The Pope says that these additions are not mandatory, and explains his reason for the change. "I believe" he writes, "that to bring out fully the Christological depth of the Rosary, it would be suitable to make an addition to the traditional pattern which, while left to the freedom of individuals and communities, could broaden it to include the mysteries of Christ's public ministry between His Baptism and His Passion." 11

Do you know of any Catholic, any saint, any Pope who ever considered the Rosary "lacking" in Christological depth? Did not the saints and the Popes constantly speak of the excellence of the Rosary? Did they ever suggest a radical addition to alter the structure of the Rosary in order to "improve" what was already excellent?

Reaction to the new mysteries has been predictable: everything from traditional Catholics who call it an "outrage," to Medjugorje followers who claim it "bears all the hallmarks of Divine inspiration". Once again, the much-vaunted "Pope of unity" has launched a novelty that divides Catholics.

A constant characteristic of the pre-Vatican II Popes was to abhor novelty and to safeguard tradition, including traditional devotions.

Thus, if one could go back in time and ask any of the pre-Vatican II Popes why they never added "new mysteries" to the Rosary, the answer is easy to presume. "Because," the pre-conciliar Pope would say, "if I add 5 new mysteries, I will have to add 5 new decades. If I add five new decades, then the Rosary can no longer be called 'Our Lady's Psalter'. Now Catholic tradition, my holy predecessors and Our Blessed Mother referred to the Rosary as Her 'Psalter', because the 150 Hail Mary's of the 15-decade Rosary correspond to the 150 Psalms of David. It would be audacious of me to add 5 decades. This would be the decimation of the entire concept of Mary's 'Psalter', a term hallowed by centuries of usage, a term that explains the origin and essence of the Rosary, a term used by the Queen of Heaven Herself. Further, if I make this radical change to the Rosary, then what is to prevent more radical changes in the future?"

The entire history of the Rosary is bound up with the 150 Psalms of the Old Testament, otherwise known as the Psalter of David. From the dawn of Catholic history, monks and hermits prayed these Psalms as part of their daily liturgical life.

Saint Benedict, in his Holy Rule, explains that the monks of the desert recited the 150 Psalms every day. Saint Benedict arranged the Psalms for his monks so that all 150 would be recited in one week.12 This became the Divine Office (Breviary) that priests and religious recited every day until the post-conciliar aggiornamento revolutionized both Breviary and Mass.

The story of "Mary's Psalter" reportedly begins with the Irish monks in the 7th Century. These monks divided the 150 Psalms of David into a Na tri coicat format of three groups of fifty. Arranged in such a way, the "fifties" served both as reflective and corporal/penitential prayer.13

The people of the Middle Ages in their great love of Our Lady set to fashioning "Rosariums" in Her honor. They composed Psalms in praise of Mary to match the 150 Psalms of David. St. Anselm of Canterbury (1109) made such a Rosary. In the 13th Century, St. Bonaventure divided his 150 Marian Psalms into three groups. The first group commenced with the word Ave, the next with Salve, and the final fifty Psalms each commented with the word Gaude. Such Rosaries of praise took the name of Our Lady's Psalter.14

It was not long before the custom of reciting Hail Mary's became the substitute of reciting the Psalms in praise of Our Lady. "By the 13th Century" writes the Redemptorist Father James Galvin, "the number of Aves was set at one hundred and fifty to equal the number of the Psalms of David." 15

Saint Thomas Aquinas explains that the Psalter of David, composed as it is of one hundred and fifty Psalms, is divided into three equal parts of fifty Psalms each. These three equal parts represent figuratively the three stages in which the faithful find themselves: the state of penance, the state of justice, the state of glory. Likewise, explains Father Anthony Fuerst, "the Rosary of Mary is divided into three parts of fifty Hail Mary's each in order to express fully the phrases of the life of the faithful: penance, justice and glory." 16

Heaven itself declared the immeasurable value of this Psalter. In 1214, Our Blessed Mother told Saint Dominic to "preach My Psalter" in order to rekindle faith, to convert sinners and to crush stubborn heresy. Saint Louis de Montfort tells the story in his magnificent work, The Secret of the Rosary.

"Saint Dominic," writes Saint Louis, "seeing that the gravity of the peoples' sin was hindering the conversion of the Albigensians, withdrew to a forest near Toulouse where he prayed unceasingly for three days and three nights. During this time he did nothing but weep and do harsh penances in order to appease the anger of Almighty God. He used his discipline so much that his body was lacerated, and finally he fell into a coma."

Our Lady then appeared to him, accompanied by three angels. She said, "Dear Dominic, do you know which weapon the Blessed Trinity wants to use to reform the world?"

"I want you to know that, in this kind of warfare, the battering ram has always been the Angelic Psalter which is the foundation stone of the New Testament. Therefore if you want to reach these hardened souls and win them over to God, preach My Psalter." 17

She uses the language of the Church militant. She does not speak of the Rosary in a sentimental manner in order to achieve good feelings or pan-religious unity. No, She refers to it as battering ram against heresy.

She twice uses the term "Psalter", which is the Rosary designated as 150 Aves that link it to the Psalms of David. Regarding the Rosary's traditional structure, Msgr. George Shea writes, "Because its 150 Hail Mary's correspond to the 150 Psalms of the Psalter, the complete Rosary is sometimes called Our Lady's Psalter. In fact, the latter was its common designation down to the end of the 15th Century, while 'Rosary' was reserved for a part, i.e., a third, of Our Lady's Psalter." 18

As late as the last quarter of the 15th Century, Blessed Alaus de Rupe protested vigorously against the use of the terms "Rosario," "Chapelet" or "Corono," and insisted that the title of Our Lady's Psalter be retained.19 Msgr. Shea points out that the first indication from a Pope that the Psalter of Mary is commonly called "Rosary" is found in the Apostolic Constitution of Pope Leo X, Pastor Aeterni dated October 6, 1520, over three hundred years after Our Lady spoke to Saint Dominic.

The term "Psalter" of Mary, as a link to the 150 Psalms of David, is what we find consistently from the Popes throughout the centuries.

The Apostolic Constitution of Pope Leo X, Pastor Aeterni October 6, 1520, uses the term "Psalter of Mary" in connection to the Rosary.20

Pope Saint Pius V wrote in Consueverunt Romani of September 17, 1569, "And so Dominic looked to that simple way of praying and beseeching God, accessible to all and wholly pious, which is called the Rosary, or Psalter of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in which the same most Blessed Virgin is venerated by the angelic greeting repeated one hundred and fifty times, that is, according to the number of the Davidic Psalter, and by the Lord's Prayer with each decade." 21

Pope Leo XIII wrote "Just as by the recitation of the Divine Office, priests offer a public, constant, and most efficacious supplication; so the supplication offered by the members of this Sodality in the recitation of the Rosary, or 'Psalter of Our Lady' ..." 22

Pope Leo XIII later said, "The formula of the Rosary, too, is excellently adapted to prayer in common, so that it has been styled, not without reason, the 'Psalter of Mary'." 23

Pope Pius XI wrote in his Encyclical Ingravescentibus Malis. "Among the various supplications with which we successfully appeal to the Virgin Mother of God, the Holy Rosary without doubt occupies a special and distinct place. This prayer, which some call the Psalter of the Virgin or Breviary of the Gospel and of Christian life, was described and recommended by Our Predecessor of happy memory, Leo XIII ..." 24

Sadly, Pope John Paul II has made the term "Psalter of Mary" with its rightful connection to the Psalter of David, as obsolete as fund drives for Pagan Babies. Anyone who accepts the twenty-decade Rosary, and still refers to the Rosary as Mary's Psalter, will use the term divested of meaning. Why introduce this destabilization? Would not Pope John Paul show more respect to the pious sentiments of Catholics worldwide, to his predecessors and to the Mother of God by leaving Her Psalter at peace?

Catholicism In America and the Century Ahead (Part II):
(Guest Editorial Series by George Weigel)

Part I can be read HERE. Ahead (Part I):
(Guest Editorial Series by George Weigel)

No, George Weigel has no idea he is doing an editorial series here. But as I am in a

good mood after the elections, I am in the mood to post something which is positive

as we hear so little of it - about the Catholic Church in America. So I will run a

series on this throughout the week.

The following is the first part of a speech from George Weigel given in 1999. I hope

you find it interesting especially the part about over 150,000 new Catholics in 1997

excluding infants baptized. (And the excellent criticisms of the stupid

"liberal/conservative" categories whereby faith issues are framed in inadequate

political terms.) But without further ado, Mr. Weigel has the floor:

##################################

The Roman Catholic Church in the United States is the nation's largest and most

complex religious organization. Its 61.5 million members live in nearly 20,000

parishes, served by more than 400 bishops and 47,000 priests. “Religious

professionals” also include some 85,000 sisters, 6,000 brothers, and 4,500

seminarians; among the “para-professionals” are some 12,000 permanent deacons,

usually married laymen, who are reviving a ministry that had lain fallow in the

Church for many centuries. In 1997, more than a million infants and some 73,000

adults were baptized into the Catholic Church, while another 88,000 men and women

already baptized in other Christian communities were received into full communion.

The Catholic Church in the United States maintains an extensive health-care system

(some 600 hospitals), a large network of social-service agencies, and the world's

largest independent educational system (with roughly 240 colleges and universities,

1,300 high schools, and 7,000 elementary schools). These 61 million Catholics speak

dozens of languages and espouse the full range of political views on offer in the

American republic. They are probably the most varied, multi-hued religious community

in the nation. Yet for almost forty years, the Catholic story has been reported in

starkly black-and-white terms.

The story-line was set in the fall of 1962, when The New Yorker published a series of

“Letters from Vatican City” written by the pseudonymous “Xavier Rynne.” “Rynne”

described his New Yorker reports on the Second Vatican Council (later expanded into a

series of books) as “essays in theological journalism.” Their urbanity, wit, and

literary elegance, combined with what seemed to be the author's intimate familiarity

with the mysterious Vatican, made Rynne a literary phenomenon during the Council

years (1962–65).

On Rynne's reading, the Council was the Gettysburg of a civil war between “liberals”

and “conservatives” that had been under way in Roman Catholicism since the late

eighteenth century. For the first 170 years of that conflict, the forces of

“reaction” had been largely successful in controlling the Church, which they saw as a

fortress protecting the faithful from the onslaught of modernity. Now Vatican II had

been summoned by Pope John XXIII to change the terms of the relationship between

Catholicism and the modern world. The pope's blunt criticism of those “prophets of

gloom” who “in these modern times. . . can see nothing but prevarication and ruin”

signified that the forces of progress had been given a new chance.

Rynne (who turned out to be an American Redemptorist priest, Francis X. Murphy)

clearly favored the “liberal” forces of light over the “conservative” princes of

darkness. He provided a framework in which otherwise arcane issues—for example,

whether divine revelation proceeded from Scripture alone or from Scripture and

tradition—could be grasped by reporters and made intelligible, even fun, to a mass

audience. This was like politics. There were good guys and bad guys, and the division

ran along familiar liberal/conservative political lines.

Triumph of the Conventional Story-Line

By 1965, the “liberal/conservative” framework had become the matrix for reporting and

analyzing virtually everything Catholic. There were “liberal” and “conservative”

positions on worship, doctrine, church management, philosophy, spirituality, and

theology. There were liberal and conservative theories of mission, ecumenism,

preaching, religious education, inter-religious dialogue, priestly formation, vowed

religious life, marriage, sexual morality, and social ethics. Popes, bishops,

priests, dioceses, theologians, lay organizations, seminaries, newspapers, magazines,

and parishes were categorized as either liberal or conservative. When someone didn't

quite fit the categories—for example, when political radical Dorothy Day, founder of

the Catholic Worker movement, attended Mass wearing a black mantilla and praying from

a Latin missal—this was chalked up to personal eccentricity rather than to a possible

flaw in the taxonomy.

Now there was something to all of this. Vatican II—the Council itself, and the

processes of debate it set loose in the Church—was in fact the moment when the

long-delayed encounter between the Roman Catholic Church and modern intellectual,

cultural, and political life took place. Those who had urged the Church to leave the

fortress and sally forth to confront modernity did gain control of the Council's

machinery and agenda, and were largely vindicated by the Council's formal product,

its sixteen documents. And there were in fact forces of reaction at Vatican II that

fiercely resisted the Catholic encounter with modernity, deeming it lethal to the

maintenance of orthodoxy and institutional vitality. The problem was that the

liberal/conservative framework was thought capable of explaining everything, and it

could not do so.

Reporting within the standard account focused excessively on the Church as

institution. But the Church is, more importantly, a mystical communion of believers,

a “sacrament” of God's presence to the world, a herald making a proposal about the

truth of the human condition, a servant of suffering humanity, and a community of

disciples. The institution exists only to facilitate these other aspects of the

Church's life. Thus “the Church” cannot be identified exclusively or even primarily

with the ordained hierarchy; to do so is, in a word, clericalism. And although it is

usually thought a particular sin of Catholic conservatives, an intensified

clericalism in coverage of the Catholic Church has resulted from the dominance of the

standard account. The standard account also led to distorted analysis in other ways:

1. Once the liberal consensus in favor of incremental social change shattered (in

1968 or thereabouts) and political liberalism was radicalized, the

liberal/conservative taxonomy proved even more incapable of accurately describing new

ideas and movements in the Church. A prime example was the world media's coverage of

liberation theology. This complex intellectual and pastoral phenomenon was reduced to

a view of liberation theologians as the Latin American version of the “good” forces

of Catholic progress, doing battle for the future against the reactionary

conservatives who controlled the Latin American hierarchy in cahoots with repressive

Latin American regimes. There were, again, elements of truth in this analysis. For

far too long the Church in Latin America had been allied with local oligarchies and

had not been effective in empowering the poor, socially or politically. Vatican II

had rejected classic Iberian Catholic altar-and-throne (or, in the Latin American

variant, altar-and-junta) arrangements. This conciliar teaching did presage profound

changes, religious and political, throughout Latin America, and those changes were

indeed being resisted by the usual suspects.

But the standard account was hopelessly inadequate for grasping the more complex

truths of the situation. Among the distortions it induced were: (a) Liberation

theology was seen as an indigenous phenomenon, an authentic Latin American

“inculturation” of Vatican II. But in reality liberation theology was invented in

Louvain, Münster, and other Catholic intellectual centers where the European

fascination with Marxism and neo-Marxism was at its height, and then carried to Latin

America by Latin American theologians trained in those European centers. (b)

Liberation theology was seen as the Latin American expression of the liberal

reformism implied in the Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern

World. But in fact by 1969 virtually all liberation theologians had flatly rejected

liberal incrementalism and were openly committed to various radical reconstructions

of social, political, and economic life, usually Marxist in inspiration. (c)

Liberation theology was seen as the intellectual expression of a popular, grass-roots

movement throughout Latin America. But in fact liberation theology was an elite

movement that eventually had an impact on both popular and institutional thinking in

Latin American Catholicism.

2. A similar deficiency could be observed in coverage of the emergence of feminism in

the Church. Here, of course, the most visible issue was that of women and the

priesthood. As usually reported, this reduced quickly to another struggle between the

forces of progress and the forces of reaction. The real question, which was not

whether the Church would ordain women to the priesthood but whether it could do so,

was rarely considered. That there were profound issues about the Church, the ordained

ministry, and indeed the nature of created reality itself engaged in this debate was

almost never acknowledged. Further, the growth among Catholic feminist theologians of

a far more radical critique that opposed the very notion of a “hierarchy” was not

well understood; it didn't fit the conventional framework, any more than unabashedly

Marxist liberation theologians did.

3. The standard account has also proven seriously deficient for understanding the

pontificate of Pope John Paul II. For nearly two decades, reporters and analysts have

struggled to portray a pope who seems to occupy several positions along the

conventional spectrum. Much has been written about John Paul the “doctrinal

conservative,” who relentlessly underscores the most challenging aspects of the

Church's sexual ethic and refuses to ordain women to the priesthood; yet little has

been reported about the pope who describes marital intimacy as an icon of the

interior life of God, who teaches that the Church symbolized by the Virgin Mary is

more fundamental to the Christian reality than the Church symbolized by the Apostle

Peter, and who insists that, in making its case to the world, “the Church proposes;

she imposes nothing.” Then there is John Paul the “social progressive,” extolled as

the great defender of human rights, the reconciler of the Church with democracy, the

social democrat greatly concerned about the impact of a triumphant capitalism on the

post–Cold War world. But little has been reported about his empirically sensitive

approach to economics, his celebration of entrepreneurship, his affirmation of the

“business economy,” and his sharp critique of the welfare state. The attempt to

confine John Paul II within the conventional categories really short-circuits when

the great papal defender of democracy blasts the functioning of contemporary

democracies and warn gainst a “thinly disguised totalitarianism” (Centesimus Annus,

46).

In an attempt to resolve these seeming contradictions, analysts have portrayed the

Pope as an angry old man incapable of understanding a world he helped create, or as a

kind of uniquely Polish schizophrenic, doctrinally “rigid” but socially “progressive”

on at least some issues. In both cases, the tendency has been to set this pontificate

against Vatican II. But in fact the Pope, who played a significant role at the

Council and as archbishop of Kraków conducted one of the world's most extensive

implementations of Vatican II, sees himself as the particular heir of the Council.

4. According to the standard account, churches and movements that have identified

with the inevitable triumph of the “liberal” side should be prospering. But that is

not what has happened. In a striking parallel to the experience of world

Protestantism, liberal local Catholic churches are dying or struggling in prosperous,

free lands (such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and New

Zealand), while self-consciously orthodox Catholic communities are flourishing in

Africa, usually under conditions of poverty and sometimes under serious persecution.

In the United States, Catholic practice tends to be lower (and in some cases

dramatically lower) in self-consciously “progressive” dioceses than in “conservative”

ones.

A similar pattern prevails among religious professionals. The only communities of

nuns that are growing in the United States are communities that have broken ranks

with the liberal consensus among religious women, as embodied by the Leadership

Conference of Women Religious. The seminaries that are growing are replete with

candidates for the priesthood who identify with John Paul II. Dioceses that are

self-consciously “liberal” have a difficult time attracting candidates for the

priesthood.

Since Vatican II, world Catholicism has seen a historically unprecedented explosion

of lay renewal movements. Although considerable ink has been spilled on reporting

such activist organizations as “Call to Action,” “We Are Church,” and the fraudulent

“Catholics for a Free Choice,” the numbers involved in these “liberal” enterprises

are simply dwarfed by the numbers involved in renewal movements that identify with

the Church's center of unity, the Bishop of Rome.

Rerum Novarum, So to Speak

A good “model” suggests how to organize our understanding of a complex reality and

what to expect from that reality in the future. When a model cannot account for large

portions of the relevant data and cannot trace a plausible outline for the evolution

of what it attempts to describe, the time has come to discard it.

I have no substitute model to propose. Rather, what I would like to suggest is

something both old-fashioned and quite compelling: real reporting on the lived

experience of American Catholics, concentrating on those aspects that have been

under-reported or ignored and that bid fair to be major factors shaping the Church's

life and impact in the next several decades. Ten such “new things” suggest

themselves...

1. The New Catechism and its impact. Published in English in 1994, the new Catechism

of the Catholic Church is far more than a compendium of doctrine. It is a bold,

coherent, and compelling account of the hope that has sustained the Church for two

millennia. That in itself makes it worthy of serious reporting and analysis. But the

Catechism can also be called a major cultural event in the Western world. To those

who claim that plurality is an absolute in the modern world, the Catechism affirms

the unity of faith over time and the availability of God's word of truth to all. In a

culture convinced that there is your truth and my truth, the Catechism affirms that

we cannot live without the truth.. At an intellectual/cultural moment in which

incoherence is taken to be the bottom line of reality, the Catechism proposes

Christian faith as a coherent framework for understanding what is, how it came to be,

and what its future holds.

Although the Catechism was an international best-seller in the mid-1990s, only in the

future will its real impact become apparent. For the Catechism was a challenge to the

process-oriented approaches to religious education that had dominated Catholic

catechetics in the United States since the late 1960s, approaches that had produced

two sadly illiterate generations of Catholics. Tracking the influence of the

Catechism on the reform of Catholic religious education is one way to look into the

possible future of Catholicism in the United States.

The Catechism is also a powerful populist tool by which parishioners facing dubious

preaching and teaching can challenge claims that strike them as questionable. It is

thus a further antidote to the perennial problem of clericalism, and an instrument of

intellectual accountability of a sort not seen in Roman Catholic circles since the

Counter-Reformation.

2. A “Catholic Moment” in the New South? The rapidly changing demographics of the Old

Confederacy suggest that Catholicism might be on the verge of great advances in an

area where it has long been virtually invisible. While Roman Catholics make up only

3-5 per cent of the population of the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama,

Mississippi, Arkansas, and Virginia south of the Rappahannock, prosperous urban areas

of the “New South” are 15-20 per cent Catholic, and the percentage is growing, mainly

through immigration. Moreover, the Catholic population at the region's major state

and private universities is 20-25 per cent and increasing. At Duke, nominally

Methodist, Catholics are the largest religious group on campus, followed by Jews;

Methodists are third. Similar situations obtain at the University of North Carolina,

Wake Forest, The Citadel, and the University of Georgia. If a sizable portion of

these southern-educated Catholics remain to work in the South, the future

upper-middle-class and upper-class elites of the New South are likely to be

significantly, even heavily, Roman Catholic.

The booming economy of the New South and the region's increasing influence in

national politics also afford opportunities for the Catholic Church. Given the

decline of mainline-oldline Protestantism in the region (as elsewhere), the major

Christian options are Roman Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism of various

forms. And in the future life of the New South, Catholicism has a certain comparative

advantage. Catholic social doctrine is a well-developed approach to the tangled moral

questions involved in creating the free, virtuous, and prosperous society. Moreover,

its natural-law “grammar” gives it more public traction than evangelical

Protestantism has in an increasingly pluralistic (and secular) society, given the

tendency of some evangelicals to make public moral arguments in ways that seem to

preclude the participation of non-evangelicals in the debate. Catholic social

doctrine can be engaged by everyone. While evangelical political mobilization in the

Old Confederacy during the last two decades has been impressive, the kind of appeals

typically mounted by evangelicals may not remain politically viable in the New South.

3. Converts and the high culture. Gary Anderson of Harvard Divinity School, Elizabeth

Fox-Genovese of Emory University, Paul Griffiths of the University of Chicago, Robert

Louis Wilken of the University of Virginia, Dr. Bernard Nathanson (one of the

founders of the National Abortion Rights Action League), theologian and editor

Richard John Neuhaus, columnist Robert Novak, historian Thomas Reeves, New York

philanthropist Lewis Lehrman, Florida governor Jeb Bush—these are among some of the

more prominent men and women who have, in the past decade, been baptized or received

into full communion with the Catholic Church. Perhaps the most prominent “revert” is

Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court, who has returned to active

practice of the faith in which he was raised. It is surely significant for the

Catholic future in the United States that many prominent intellectuals and public

figures have in recent years joined themselves to a religious community that the

modern secular intelligentsia has often regarded as the great enemy of free inquiry.

It is also of interest that the ecumenical journal First Things, founded in 1989 by

Neuhaus (then a Lutheran pastor), has within a decade become the most widely read

journal of religion and public life in the country, with a paid circulation of over

30,000 and a core readership of perhaps 125,000. Many prominent converts and

“reverts” are linked to First Things as authors, editors, or board members.

4. The renewal of devotional life. In the implementation of Vatican II's renewal of

the liturgy, attention was so sharply focused on the Mass that more informal forms of

piety—the “devotions” that were once a vibrant part of American Catholic life—seemed

to drop by the wayside. But after many years of neglect, devotional life has been

revived.

a. Eucharistic piety. The devotional practices of perpetual adoration of the Blessed

Sacrament and “holy hours” conducted before the exposed Blessed Sacrament have

returned to the schedule of many parishes. These practices are intended to promote

deeper prayer during the Mass. Where before Vatican II Eucharistic piety was often

regarded as a thing in itself, its revival today is clearly linked to the deepening

of the Church's liturgical life.

b. Marian piety. The revival of many forms of devotion to the Virgin Mary is

doubtless due in part to the continuing phenomenon of reported apparitions of the

Virgin. But in many parishes the revival of traditional Marian devotions—communal

recitation of the rosary, for example—is unconnected to such paranormal phenomena.

Marian scholarship, influenced by John Paul II and by the Swiss theologian Hans Urs

von Balthasar, is also being revived. While Marian piety has generally been regarded

as a barrier to Catholic-Protestant ecumenism, the insistence by John Paul II that

“true devotion to the Mother of God is actually Christocentric” holds out the

intriguing possibility of an ecumenical dialogue that moves directly from Mary into

the heart of Christian faith.

c. New forms of devotional life. Perhaps the most prominent of these new practices is

the “Divine Mercy” devotion begun by Sister Faustina Kowalska, a Polish mystic who

died in 1938 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993. This has become the

vehicle by which many American Catholics have returned to a regular devotional

practice. The intensification of devotional life in the 1990s is both another

indicator of the inadequacy of the conventional story-line—which saw devotions of

this sort as a pre-modern practice that was bound to disappear—and a tale of populist

religion waiting to be reported.

5. A new ecumenism? Theologically intense bilateral ecumenical dialogues were one

important fruit of the Second Vatican Council and the Catholic Church's entry into

modern ecumenism. The Lutheran-Catholic, Anglican-Catholic, and Orthodox-Catholic

dialogues in particular were given ample coverage in the years immediately following

Vatican II. But the difficulties encountered by those dialogues in recent years have

not been so carefully reported. Neither has the “new ecumenism” that may surpass

these bilateral dialogues in importance in time.

The Lutheran-Catholic dialogue reached its apogee on October 31, 1999—Reformation

Sunday—when representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World

Federation signed a “Joint Declaration on Justification by Faith.” The

representatives declared that justification by faith can no longer be considered a

church-dividing matter, as the two communions share a common understanding of the

truths involved in that doctrine. In other words, the core issue that precipitated

the Lutheran Reformation of 1517 has been resolved. But ecclesial reunion is not on

the horizon, because other issues have emerged over the centuries.

Post–Vatican II hopes for a relatively rapid reunion between Anglicans and Roman

Catholics have also been frustrated, as the practice of ordaining women to the

priesthood and episcopate in certain Anglican churches has raised questions about the

Anglican understanding of apostolic tradition, ordained ministry, and the sacramental

nature of reality. Meanwhile, the leadership of world Orthodoxy has not been

receptive to the suggestion by Pope John Paul II that Rome and the Christian East

could restore unity by returning to the status that prevailed before the Great Schism

of 1054. And while there is widespread agreement on the need for some center of

Christian unity, Orthodox, Protestants, and Anglicans alike have been slow to respond

to the Pope's 1995 invitation to help him think through an exercise of the papacy

that could serve their needs.

But as these bilateral dialogues reached various forms of impasse in the 1990s, a new

ecumenism emerged, with Roman Catholics in active dialogue with evangelical and

Pentecostalist Protestants. This was pregnant with possibility, for evangelicalism

and Pentecostalism represent the “growing end” of Protestantism throughout the world.

Mainline Protestantism, at least in the developed world, seems to be on an inexorable

course of decline, while evangelicals continue to make great strides in North

America, Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia.

This new ecumenism is not aimed, at least in the short term, at ecclesial

reconciliation, but rather at mutual recognition and cooperation in public life. It

is in part an outgrowth of the pro-life movement, where evangelicals and Catholics

discovered each other as allies in the trenches. And while it faces profound

theological difficulties, the new ecumenism can point to some significant

achievements in the 1990s. It has been little reported—understandably so, for it is

hard to “find”; it operates more through informal structures than through church

bureaucracies. But it is likely to be one of the defining realities of American

cultural life in the first decades of this new century, and it could well have a

major impact on American politics as well.

6. Catholic intellectual life. This is no longer confined to the campuses of Notre

Dame, Boston College, and Georgetown. Several of the converts noted above hold senior

appointments at prestigious research universities, as do such other Catholics as Mary

Ann Glendon (Harvard Law School) and Robert P. George (Princeton). Perhaps the most

notable among the new Catholic intellectual centers is the Washington-based John Paul

II Institute for the Study of Marriage and the Family, which has granted 127

master's-level degrees and seventeen doctorates since 1988. The institute seems

likely to play a major part in American Catholic moral theology in the decades ahead.

A small Catholic college in Texas, the University of Dallas, is widely recognized as

one of the nation's finest liberal arts schools; it has been a pioneer in reviving a

demanding undergraduate core curriculum in the humanities as the foundation for any

professional vocation.

Viewed through the narrowing lens of the conventional story-line, the debate over

John Paul II's 1990 apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae and its attempt to

revitalize the Catholic identity of Catholic universities is yet another power

struggle between liberated Americans and authoritarian “Rome.” Viewed through a wider

lens, the debate is closely related to the revolt against political correctness on

campus, and against the secularist bias that has drained institutions of their

religious identities in recent decades. Moreover, the Ex Corde debate has forced a

shift of considerable consequence in the Catholic university world. During the 1970s

and 1980s, universities asked, “How do we disentangle ourselves from the

institutional Church?” Today, however confusedly, the question has become, “How do we

reclaim our Catholic identity?” Much more is afoot here than is usually reported.

7. An unprecedented encounter with Judaism. The Jewish-Catholic dialogue of the past

thirty-five years has been another of the great fruits of Vatican II. The Church has

condemned anti-Semitism and reformed its liturgical and catechetical practice to take

account of the Christian debt to Judaism; the Pope has called on the Church to

cleanse its conscience about historic anti-Semitic episodes and the Holocaust; Jews

and Catholics work together to promote inter-religious tolerance and a civil public

square in America; the Holy See has full diplomatic relations with the State of

Israel. That, it is sometimes suggested, pretty well completes “the agenda” as

imagined in 1962–65.

But John Paul II thinks that the real agenda is just now coming into view. That

agenda is theological, not social-political, and it goes beyond the achievements of

the recent past to raise questions that Jews and Catholics have not discussed for

over nineteen hundred years. What people? What is a “covenant”? How do Jews and

Catholics understand their common moral “border,” the Ten Commandments? What is the

common content of the messianic hope that Jews and Catholics share? If this new

agenda is addressed anywhere it will be in the United States, where the

Jewish-Catholic dialogue is most advanced by far, the Jewish population is secure

enough to engage in such a conversation, and there are Roman Catholic interlocutors

eager to build on recent achievements. Like the new ecumenism, the new

Jewish-Catholic dialogue is likely to be most intense in “off campus” settings rather

than in official dialogue groups.

8. Liturgy: reforming the reform. Most Catholics in the United States were

enthusiastic about the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The new

question is: is it time to “reform the reform” with a new emphasis on the

transcendent, the sacred, and the beautiful? Organizations promoting a “reform of the

reform” include the Society for Catholic Liturgy; Credo, an association, mainly of

priests, working for more faithful translations of the liturgy from the Latin; and

Adoremus, an association of clergy and laity. The way the new liturgical debate plays

out will have a major impact on Catholic life in America. Liturgical prayer is not

just something that Catholics happen to do when other Americans are reading the

Sunday morning papers. Lex orandi lex credendi—“what we pray is what we believe”—is

one of the oldest and truest theological maxims, and what American Catholics believe

in 2099 will have much to do with the way they pray, liturgically, between now and

then.

9. The movements. When theologians speak of the “charismatic element” in the Church,

they refer not simply to the “charismatic renewal” with its characteristic behavioral

elements (such as spontaneous vocalized prayer, speaking in “tongues,” and healings),

but also to renewal movements that have emerged through the leadership of gifted

individuals. Since Vatican II there has been an explosion of such movements in world

Catholicism. That largely unreported fact is beginning to reshape the face of

Catholicism in the United States, giving dedicated Catholics communal reference

points for the practice of their faith beyond their local parish and diocese.

Among the most prominent of these groups are Focolare, a movement of Italian origin

that takes the unity of the human race as its mission; Regnum Christi, a renewal

movement of lay leaders (most of them professionals) associated with the Legionaries

of Christ, itself a relatively new community of priests; Communion and Liberation,

another Italian-based movement with a marked capacity to attract intellectuals; and

the Neo-Catechumenal Way, which works with the unchurched and re-evangelizes the

poorly catechized. The Sant'Egidio Community, founded in Rome by left-leaning Italian

Catholic university students in the sixties, combines an active liturgical prayer

life with service to the poor and with conflict-mediation in the international

community; it is widely credited with brokering an end to the Mozambican civil war,

for example. Members of L'Arche Community, founded by the Canadian Jean Vanier, work

with and live with the mentally handicapped. Then there is the most controversial of

these movements, Opus Dei, which has its own unique status as a kind of worldwide

diocese.

These groups are pioneering forms of Catholic life that have never been lived before.

Some of them include lay men and women, unmarried, who have taken perpetual vows of

poverty, chastity, and obedience and who live in community, yet have an active

professional life in “the world.” Interestingly, some of the new lay renewal

movements have proven fertile recruiting grounds for candidates for the priesthood.

In his ease with this unpredictable charismatic element in the Church, John Paul II

stands in marked contrast to some local bishops (and some Vatican officials)

concerned about where these movements and communities fit in the organizational

flow-chart. How such groups will fare in the post–John Paul II church remains to be

seen, of course. But many of them seem to have achieved enough critical mass to be

ensured of a large role in twenty-first-century Catholicism.

10. The seminaries. Seminaries that have welcomed the attempts by John Paul II to

revitalize the Catholic priesthood tend to be doing much better than those that have

resisted this reorientation. But the story of the priests of the new millennium has

only begun to be told. How are these men being prepared, intellectually, for the

challenge of preaching and providing pastoral care to the best-educated generation of

Catholics in history? How will they help their parishioners cope with the temptations

of abundance? What does it mean for the future of Catholicism in America that many

dioceses now require seminarians to be at least minimally fluent in Spanish before

they can be ordained priests? Will the new immigrants to the United States—the

Vietnamese, for example—follow the pattern of previous generations of immigrants in

recasting the ethnic character of the Catholic priesthood?

A Culture-Forming Counterculture?

Each of these “new things” in the Catholic Church will have an impact on American

public life, for Christianity is an inherently public business. How Catholics pray,

how they regard other Christians, how they lead their intellectual lives, how their

priests are trained, and the terms in which they understand their dialogue with

modernity and whatever follows modernity will shape the Catholic presence in the

American public square.

One other aspect of that presence requires a brief look: the Catholic Church as the

possible agent of a renewal of American public moral culture. John Courtney Murray

raised this issue in 1960, in what remains the single most impressive analysis of the

Church's interaction with the American democratic experiment: We Hold These Truths:

Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Murray argued that democracy could

be sustained only by a “consensus” on the fundamental moral claims that made

democracy plausible, desirable, and worth defending. That consensus had been

sustained in the United States since the colonial period by the great churches of the

Protestant mainline: Anglican, Reformed/Presbyterian, Methodist. Yet as early as the

1950s, Murray detected cracks in the foundations. The mainline churches were

increasingly unable to articulate the “consensus” persuasively, particularly in the

face of the secularist/pragmatist challenge associated with Deweyan liberalism.

Moreover, these churches no longer formed a demographic critical mass in American

society.

Murray proposed that the Catholic community, long held suspect for its “foreign”

loyalties, was now best positioned to revive the consensus and thereby reconstruct

the foundations of American democracy, because it was the institutional bearer of a

way of political thinking—based on a natural-law approach—that was in touch with the

true moral philosophy and political philosophy that underlie the American experiment.

And those philosophical roots were to be found, Murray further argued, not in the

rationalistic individualism of the Enlightenment, but in medieval Christendom and the

common-law tradition to which it gave birth.

Some think Murray misunderstood the philosophical roots of the American Founding; and

the degree to which the Catholic Church still “possesses” the natural-law-based

political philosophy of its patrimony is certainly debatable. But Murray's diagnosis

remains prescient. Much of the clamor of current American public life (and no small

part of its degradation) has to do with the fact that Americans are losing the

ability to debate issues in the realm of the public moral culture in a civil way—a

point painfully illustrated by the vast moral confusions in the 1998–99 debate over

the impeachment of the President. Is there a “grammar” that can bring some discipline

back into this debate? If so, who is a likely public teacher of that grammar?

The Catholic Church may be. In the social doctrine of John Paul II it has what is

arguably the most comprehensive proposal for the free, prosperous, and virtuous

society on offer in the world today. That social doctrine has been articulated in

terms that are genuinely accessible to “all men and women of good will,” as the Pope

habitually describes the addressees of his social encyclicals. The interest shown by

the national press in the Pope's social teaching may well reflect a widespread

yearning for moral reference points as we face the uncharted territory created by the

sexual revolution, the post–Cold War world disorder, the cracking of the genetic code

and the subsequent explosion of biotechnologies, and the continuous American struggle

to build political community out of extravagant diversity.

Moreover, in its pro-life activism since Roe v. Wade the Church in the United States

has developed a considerable capacity for the kind of genuinely “public” moral

argument that can indeed be engaged by “all men and women of good will.” To say this

is to risk derision, for the Catholic position on the morality of abortion-on-demand

has long been labeled sectarian. Yet I would challenge anyone to find a single

developed Catholic statement on the abortion license whose moral arguments presume

belief in the Nicene Creed. The Church has marshaled publicly accessible and

adjudicable scientific arguments on behalf of the pro-life cause, and publicly

accessible and debatable moral arguments for the claim that there is an inalienable

right to life from conception to natural death. Moreover, in recent years, both the

Pope and the U.S. bishops have begun to link the abortion debate to the wider

question of the moral foundations of the American democratic experiment.

The U.S. bishops have made their pro-life case in moral terms strikingly similar to

those in which they challenged segregation during the 1960s. There, too, public moral

arguments rooted in a natural-law concept of justice were deployed—to general

approbation. The fact that many now find the same arguments “sectarian” when

Catholics address the abortion license (though entirely agreeable when deployed

against capital punishment) reinforces the sense that the capacity for serious moral

debate has been badly attenuated. Whether the Catholic Church can help lead the

country in the recovery of the lost art of public moral discourse at a time when the

Church is embroiled in the most divisive debate in the culture war is a serious

question.

Is a culture-forming counterculture a contradiction in terms? Not necessarily, as the

experience of the Great Awakenings and their subsequent impact on American history

suggests. The extent to which the Catholic Church acts as a culture-forming

counterculture in the twenty-first century is one of the great stories at the

intersection of religion and American public life. And grasping the inherently public

character of the Catholic proposal on the life issues is the first, essential step

toward covering that story adequately.

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