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Articles tagged with Cardinal George

On Christian Leadership: Jottings

August 8, 2016

My apologies for the prolonged silence. Lots of traveling and the like…and monastic listening.

Rod Dreher, one of the few bloggers I read from time to time, asks, “Can Christians Afford the Leadership We Have?” In the post, he seems to assume that leadership in Christianity is clear. The only leader he mentions by name is Pope Francis. When he writes about “Christians,” I think he means, “American Christians,” and to some lesser extent “Western European Christians (he makes reference to recent slaying of Fr. Jacques Hamel).” The underlying message is that things are much worse for such Christians than most seem to think, and it’s the job of leadership to sound the alarm and prepare Christians for the coming assault on religious freedom, etc.

A number of thoughts, still disconnected:

  1. How much is a problem of leadership and how much discipleship? Cardinal George could hardly have been clearer about the possible coming struggle. What has the Chicago Church done in response? And who is responsible for responding if someone does sound the alarm? I don’t have clear answers to these questions, but focusing on leadership, and on a very narrow sampling of it, certainly raises them.
  2. Another point the late Cardinal made: when the Holy Spirit wishes to renew the Church, he sends saints. This seems appropriate on the feast day of the one the greats, St. Dominic. Innocent III, one of the most powerful popes ever, didn’t think up St. Dominic nor St. Francis of Assisi when faced with heresies, the fraying of society due to economic changes, and so on. “Where are the saints?” Cardinal George asked me once. I think that they are around, but we are still, in my opinion, at too early a stage of change to know what precisely is called for. All we can do is strive for holiness and be prepared. That preparation may include preparing to give our lives for the faith.
  3. I must confess that it is difficult for me to sympathize with the widespread assumption that we don’t live in an age of martyrs, at least in “civilized” places like the United States. The world is still the world, and will always be a source of hostility to the faith. Preachers may not have stressed this enough in recent decades, that is true. And, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, where we used to celebrate more frequently the very unworldly sorts of saints like martyrs and monks, we’ve more recently populated the liturgical calendar with figures who didn’t have to give their lives for the faith, at least in the obvious way involved in red and white martyrdom. But any familiarity with the early church, Nero, Diocletian, and..ahem..the Cross, really offers us no excuse for imagining that Christian faith will never, ever make hard demands of us. I get why people avoid that, but again, is this a failure in leadership (who wants to hear this?) or a more general failure of imagination?
  4. Another failure of imagination takes the general peace and prosperity that many of us have enjoyed in our country for many decades to be normative for life in general. Having worked in inner cities, and having siblings and close friends who have done social work and ER duty in big cities, I can say that we live in an extraordinarily violent country, and this isn’t about guns. It goes much deeper, and the use of guns is just a symptom. Curbing access to guns will not change the spiritual poverty of our land, which cuts across all groups [it is not politically expedient to care too much about inner cities, since the residents of the areas don’t fund campaigns, for example, so it’s a calculated sacrifice not to look at the ways in which the whole culture contributes to this violence]. The United States military/industrial complex is a force for widespread destruction and bloodshed in numerous places. And, of course, we kill a million babies in the womb each year. So the idea that anybody is safe is, in my opinion, pretty thin.
  5. A long string of excellent popes has been a mixed blessing for Catholics. On the one hand, who can object to the remarkable leadership we’ve enjoyed at that level for a century or more? On the other hand, as Abbot Philip Lawrence once said to me, we can get lazy in our faith and practice if we imagine that we can depend on there being good popes. The current Catholic habit of reading everything the Holy Father writes and says, and interpreting this to maximal effect is a dangerous one, even if you think the pope is completely orthodox. He is the bishop of Rome, the guarantor of Church unity, and has many other important functions. But he is not, and can never be, pastor to every Catholic on the planet.
  6. And what we need are pastors, and masters of the spiritual craft. As I’ve hinted, the problems in our culture are very deep and hidden. In my experience in the monastery, especially for the past twelve years as superior, I’ve come to the conclusion that things are, indeed, a lot worse than people might imagine, but this is not so much because of scheming by human beings who appear to be enemies of the faith. Rather, the practice of genuine virtue and theology has been replaced by an extremely subtle ersatz form of the same. A widespread recovery will take time. But it is certainly possible. God has allowed this for a purpose, and so we might as well get to work repenting and reforming our lives. And any of us can do this; it doesn’t require a leader giving us marching orders, unless we understand that this leader is, of course, Jesus Christ.

This last point should not be heard as making the best of a bad situation or putting on a brave face by another beleaguered hierarch. If God can find a way to get me into a monastery and help me to see the parameters of the challenge that we are facing, there is surely hope for everyone. If you knew me twenty-five years ago, you’d know what I mean. Pray that I finish the memoir I’ve started. It will explain. In any case, God is so much more powerful than we are, and loves us so much more than we love ourselves or others, that we should have all the confidence that we need to place our lives in His hands and go forward, even in this means suffering. Especially, and gloriously so, if this should mean suffering. And it will in one form or another if we care about our souls and the souls of others.

In Memory of Francis Cardinal George 1937-2015

April 18, 2015

Until this past November, I had served my entire monastic life under one bishop. We Chicagoans have been blessed with unusual stability in our leadership. The careers of Cody, Bernadin and George spanned the half century since the closing of Vatican II, and their three careers, in some ways, illustrate how the Church has gradually come to grips with the challenges issued by the Council Fathers.

Cardinal George won me over when, in his first interview with the Chicago press, he said (I paraphrase), “The faith isn’t liberal or conservative, it’s true.” And he continued to generate a wealth of penetrating insights throughout his time as Archbishop. He may best be remembered for his ‘martyrdom’ quote:

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.

Behind the many bon mots was someone who did not set out to be a wordsmith or copy writer. I had the pleasure of spending time with him in various contexts, usually big meetings, but occasionally just visiting, catching up on things, discussing the needs of the Church and especially religious life (it is often forgotten that he was a religious). Cardinal George was a man of deep faith, and this faith informed all of his thinking and gave it a marvelous consistency, a thoroughness that was quite rare. His sayings had solidity because they were deeply rooted in the conviction that the Faith is True. There were few ‘loose ends’ to the weave of his wide ranging thoughts. His homilies were frequently short, diving directly into the heart of the matter, connecting the gospel and current events. At the annual Archdiocesan meetings with religious leadership, he always set aside the last ninety minutes for a free-form question and answer period. He was not afraid of tough questions and in this forum at least, he never gave the ‘political’ answer (he learned from hard experience that this dodginess was unfortunately needed when dealing with a hostile media). He was amazingly well informed and prepared. Almost no questions took him by surprise. There was again no fear or defensiveness in this preparation: he paid attention to developments at all levels of the Church because he cared about her members.

This is the aspect of his life that will almost certainly arise in the media coverage and the reminiscences that we will be able to read in the coming days. He was a genuine pastor, who laid down his life for his sheep in imitation of the Lord Whom he served. He made a point of reaching out to our community when we went through some difficult times. He agreed to celebrate Mass here when I was installed as Prior three years ago, and he gave a fantastic homily in which he used the readings and the Rule of Saint Benedict to connect the monastic life and evangelization (when did he have time to read through the Rule in preparation?).  One of my favorite memories of him came about quite accidentally. We happened to be in an elevator together leaving some kind of fund raising event. Thinking like the introvert that I am, I asked him if he ever got worn down by having to visit with big groups of people. “No,” he said thoughtfully, “I love being with the people. It’s the two hours of paperwork I have to finish before going to bed that tires me out.” This was at about ten at night.

Time and again, though, I saw the truth in his claim that he loved to be with the people. This was especially impressive because standing for long periods of time could be painful for him, and one rarely saw evidence of this as he smiled and asked questions. He frequently made a point of thanking others for their service to the Church, however humble that service might appear. And he was genuine in this gratitude.

A final part of his legacy that has received a bit more attention of late is his love of the liturgy, and the steps he took to make sure that the style of celebration was congruent with the realities celebrated. In this, our community felt very close to him. Our founders spent several years in the missions, during which time they recognized the necessity of a well-celebrated liturgy to the goal of evangelization. Had he had a similar experience in his years as a missionary? However it came about, one of his first big decisions upon arriving back in Chicago was to found the Liturgical Institute. He was also instrumental in seeing through the new English translation of the Roman Missal. He was criticized for making his preferences known to individual priests, but this is part of the job description of a bishop–he is the high priest of the diocese, and the presbyters are merely his assistants, authorized to celebrate the sacraments in his absence. His own presidential style was consistent with his character: reverent, understated, but confident.  This confidence derived not from his famous intellectual gifts, but from the conviction that Jesus Christ is our Savior, that He loved us and gave His life for us, and continues to transform our lives and be with us through the sacraments.

May our God be praised for the gift of the Cardinal’s time with us, for his many sacrifices on our behalf, and for always raising up shepherds for His Church! And may our departed shepherd enter into the joy of his loving Master.

   
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