Catholic Caucus - Michael Brown's Appeal to Cardinals and Bishops

We wrote the American bishops a month ago. At that time we suggested (hopefully with adequate humility) that the current crisis in the Church could be resolved in large part by a return to tradition -- by a return to basic Christian holiness.

If you would so allow, we'd like to extend that argument. We write you again with what we hope is obedience. But we write with urgency. There is revolution in the air. Lay groups are forming. Radical nuns are expressing rage. The average Catholic wants an entire overhaul of some basic Church teachings, and the majority polled by secular media now even want women priests.

The only way to avert this -- the only way to prevent a deepening crisis, and perhaps even a split (at least ideologically) with Rome -- is to get back to the example of the apostles.

What we mean is that instead of a bureaucratic approach -- instead of the current aloofness -- our leaders should be evangelical. They should be mystical.

This is not a criticism; it is a plea. Please, bishops and cardinals, come out of the chanceries. Pray with us. Recite the Rosary. Adore the Blessed Sacrament in public. Heal. This will solve more than a dozen national meetings or trips to Rome or press conferences.

Dear cardinals, deliver us. You have the authority. You have the power -- as did the apostles -- to cast out demons and there are demons all around your flock. They engulf us. They engulf you. Cast them out. Send them away as Peter sent them away in the Acts of the Apostles -- a part of the Bible we all need to revisit. Cast evil spirits out of the priests and seminarians and theologians who have caused atrocities -- who have harmed our young.

Exorcise, dear cardinals. You do not have much time left. Deliver us. We are under assault and need the hand of your high anointing and this is what Christ left: the legacy of His Holy Spirit. As in Acts, show us the wonders, the miracles, the force of God. We know you can tap into that because you were chosen and have unusual gifts. Use them, dear prelates. Move with those gifts. This and only this will bring us above the crisis. Only with prayer and the special charisms you have can we heal the Church and prevent what may otherwise be a yet greater disaster. The Church will survive -- we have no doubt about that -- but it is going through a purification and during a purification there is the need, the urgency, of the Spirit. The media and the lawyers and the enemies of the Church -- so encouraged at this moment -- will never know what hit them!

It is what the apostles and disciples did: When they were in trouble they asked God to stretch "forth Your hand in cures and signs and wonders" (Acts 4:30).

Are we any different today? Has God changed? The apostles prayed so hard they sent demons out shrieking (Acts 8:7). They shook the place (Acts 4:31)! They went to the streets of Tyre and Derbe and Phoenicia as we need you now to come to the streets -- the homes -- of Boston, Los Angeles, Phoenix.

We look at Scripture and what we see is that the apostles were not bureaucrats or academics or politicians. They established the Church through signs and wonders and now we must re-establish it in the same way. We will come out of this not with intellectual dissertations, not legislative remarks -- but faith expressed with the love of Jesus.

We realize that in the modern structure of the world there may be the need for diplomacy and certain trappings of power but worry that in this regard modern chanceries (limos, palatial rectories) have become too worldly. It is in simplicity that we best convey the truth and in poverty that we find true power -- which will bring us out of situations that seem to have no exit.

This is the Church. This is what the earliest bishops -- the apostles -- did. This was the work of the disciples. Come out of the chanceries, dear cardinals, and pray with us into the night. Lay your hands on us. We need you! This month of May, pray the Rosary.

Dear cardinals, you have been at too much a distance. We need you as apostles. We need you to come among us. Heal us, Your Excellencies, Your Eminences. Pray with us. Lay your hands on us. Speak to us of the wonders of Jesus. If you do that, a new and vital Church will grow. If you do that, nothing can come against you. If you do that you will beats all odds and the Church will be saved (as it says in Acts 2:40) "from this perverse generation."

It is replacing St. Vibiana’s Cathedral which was condemned by the city of Los Angeles in 1996

ROFLMAO!!! Here's the story behind the "condemnation" from one of Mahony's staff.

In 1996, H.E. decided that he wanted to knock down historic St. Vibiana Cathedral, built in 1876. Maintaining that he could not afford the estimate ten million required to retrofit the cathedral against inevitable future earthquakes, he said that private donors had agreed to pay the supposed $40,000,000 needed to build a brand new one. In the months that followed, he was able to get the City Council to lift the historic designation from St. Vibiana's (something never done to a building once so marked before), and attempted to knock the old structure down on a weekend. The L.A. Conservancy was able to get a restraining order on his men before they could do more than remove the cupola. Meanwhile, at the same time the City Council was doing H.E's bidding in regard to St. Vibiana, they forbade the rabbi in charge to knock down the Breed Street Schul, an historic synagogue. Maintaining his continuing desire to get rid of St. Vibiana, H.E. nevertheless chose a nearby site to build the new cathedral, since he could not use the old one. The latter he wished to sell to the highest bidder. In the meantime, the Conservancy's survey revealed that retrofitting the old cathedral would cost a mere 4.5 million, even as the Archiocese's estimates for the cost of the new cathedral rose to $50 million. Even the sources of that money were called into doubt, as H.E.'s spokesperson Fr. Gregory Coiro, O.F.M. reveled that any money realised from the sale of the old site woul be used toward the new building.

Meanwhile, the fate of St. Vibiana, the virgin-martyr who had given her name to the Cathedral, remained in doubt. Her body, a gift of Pope Pius IX to the then frontier-town of Los Angeles, had been given with the strict proviso that a cathedral be built to house her relics, and bear her name. In deciding to name his new cathedral "Our Lady of the Angels," the Cardinal in essence removed her as patroness of the Archdiocese. She was removed from the old cathedral building, and interred in an unmarked niche in the chapel of the Archbishops at New Calvary Cemetery Mausoleum; perhaps she is the new patroness of underpaid cemetery workers. In any case, she is not receiving her due veneration here, and one might legitimately ask if she will soon be returned to Rome, since Los Angeles has broken her side of the bargain with Pius IX.

The more you look the worse it gets.

NO, NO, it's far worse than you think! Here are his liturgical plans for the new cathedral!

Fuzzy Ambiguity

Cardinal Mahony wants future citizens of Los Angeles to remember him not only for the monumental new cathedral he has commissioned but also for the updated liturgy he has designed for use there. Yet in contrast to the stark,hard-edged architectural plan for the cathedral, his liturgical proposals seem fuzzy and ambiguous. Beyond a few specifics--altar breads that "appear to the senses as bread;" a ban on normal use of hosts consecrated at previous Masses; much deliberate "eye contact" among members of the assembly and between "presider" and people; assumption of an "orans posture" during the Our Father--it is hard to guess just what the cardinal's "passionate" new liturgy might look like.

The sometimes inflated rhetoric of his letter remains much as it was in the draft version which had leaked into circulation this summer, but some of the particular passages which had provoked vehement criticism have been eliminated.

• Still present in the text is the order for "horizontal inclusive language, at least to the extent encouraged by the US bishops," but the statement that, "God is not male. But our exclusive use of male imagery risks a kind of idolatry" has been deleted.

• Gone is the statement that the "presider" can be thoroughly engaged in the ritual "only when we have left behind all magical notions of liturgy and priesthood."

• Gone too is the bewildering claim that "for centuries before the council, the 'right' of the baptized Catholic was to have an ordained person there to offer (or it was even customary to say, to 'read') the Mass. Vatican II freed us all from this misunderstanding."

• Where the draft explicitly urged worshippers to leave their pews and come up to stand around the altar during the Canon, the final version says vaguely, "the assembly is to be gathered round, if possible right around the altar"--which could merely mean choosing a front row seat.

• There is no mention of kneeling, and frequent mention of standing, but no direct order that all must stand, preferably in the sanctuary.

• Mercifully, there is no reference to liturgical dance, either. Nevertheless, those familiar with the liturgical tastes of chancery planners suspect such ideas form the letter's hidden skeleton. Its emphasis on "true" processions through the assembly at entrance, gospel, communion, and dismissal, will be taken at progressive parishes as demands for the kind of inculturating liturgical dance for which the annual Archdiocesan Religious Education Congress has long been notorious. Even at the Long Beach meeting, opening and closing prayer services featured half a dozen dancers, in pale tights under silky saffron draperies, swaying rhythmically through the assembly.

• Finally, in a bow toward orthodoxy, a footnote declares full compliance with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. That footnote is a clearer statement of doctrine than anything in the text itself.

Last winter Cardinal Mahony made a similar doctrinal disclaimer in his diocesan newspaper, the Tidings, and successfully deflected criticism of the archdiocese for consistently inviting heterodox speakers to the annual religious education congress. At the time (February 21, 1997), the National Catholic Reporter praised the cardinal's gesture as a clever ploy and a model for other bishops.

Hard work

In the cardinal's pastoral letter, some of the many references to liturgy as "hard work" come in passages addressing the need to make it clear the Eucharistic prayer is "the central moment of this Lord's Day gathering." He writes, for example: "It should be clear to all by the intense participation of the assembly that this is the central moment of the Sunday Liturgy." Later, he adds: "Great mystery is conveyed in the faces and postures, singing and silence, gesture and word. Everyone is attentive, bodies engaged as much as hearts."

What might this mean in concrete practice? The cardinal is referring to some condition which is left unstated, but is apparently too intense to maintain for longer than four minutes, the time prescribed for the Canon in the the pastoral. "No wonder," says the letter, "that when the great 'Amen' is concluded, one can sense a collective sigh."

Even if chanted, as the letter suggests, a four-minute Canon will almost inevitably be diminished by the uproar of multiple processions "around and through the assembly," a friendly all-around Greeting of Peace, or even a lively 15-minute homily.

"The way to help people see that the Eucharistic Prayer really is the 'central moment of the Sunday Liturgy' would be to use the Roman Canon, very solemnly, with all the saint's names, and have the worshippers on their knees where they belong, and ring the bells at the Consecration, and let it last maybe ten whole minutes," said grey, grandmotherly Barbara Lynch of Ventura, California, who said she came to the meeting to learn what changes may be coming to her parish.

The cardinal's letter continually identifies his directives for liturgical renewal as long-overdue compliance with the edicts of the Second Vatican Council, yet in the pastoral itself, the sole citation from Sacrosanctum Concilium is the reference (14) to "full, conscious, active participation." Before the council, Cardinal Mahony writes, "liturgical practice in the church had in many ways ceased to be a source for such rich formation." He even hints that today's choice is between his new style of worship and no worship at all.

The cardinal does not address the question of why Mass attendance fell so precipitously when liturgical revisionists took power. Certainly one reason it happened was the intellectual arrogance that dismissed all hesitancy as a sign of pathological rigidity and a rejection of the spirit of the Council. The same closed mindset was still in evidence at Long Beach.

"There's an implication that those who question or oppose the cardinal's plan for liturgical revitalization are somehow opposed to Vatican II. There's a climate of fear in the diocese," said "Father Jim Franklin," pastor of a vital, crowded parish in a minority neighborhood. "I thank God for Vatican II. But let's look at what it really said about the liturgy, not someone else's version of it."

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