A Common Touch

Listen to a podcast of Chris interviewed about “Progressive Christianity” in the Dean’s Forum, Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland OH, March 10, 2013.

During the recent conclave at the Vatican, I prayed that the cardinals would choose another Pope John XXIII. He had a common touch that appealed to me as a Protestant just about to enter my teens. And he led the Roman Catholic Church into Vatican II, a hopeful sign of what the church could become.

So I was pleased by the new pope’s choice of name, Francis, after another soul of God with a common touch, Francis of Assisi. And since his selection, there have been so many reports that Pope Francis I has a common touch, endearing himself to many, beginning with requesting the crowd’s blessing in St. Peter’s Square before blessing them. My prayer now is that his “common touch” will come to include women’s ordination, married clergy, LGBT people, and those who stand up to dictators—even those within the church, Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox.

In response to a favorable review of Garry Wills’ new book, Why Priests?, a letter to the New York Times Book Review suggested that the church needed to adopt its hierarchical, corporate structure to demonstrate its worth to a culture whose institutions were based on such models. It reminds me of the children of Israel desiring a king like other nations in Hebrew scriptures, and God reluctantly agrees.

I’ve served churches that had members and leaders who wanted their congregations to follow a business model, and now many church growth models emphasize characteristics of growing a successful business, often featuring the notion that bigger is better, whether it comes to buildings, budgets, or membership.

During one such seminar I attended, the leader proudly described his staff constantly writing notes to church members and visitors during their staff and committee meetings, and I wondered how mindful they could be of the Spirit’s presence and leading in those meetings. He described a member coming to him one Sunday and telling him that he was the only person who remembered his birthday. The seminar leader smiled proudly and told us, “I didn’t know who the f--- he was, but he was grateful I had remembered his birthday.” Ah, that a churchgoer could meet Saint Francis and know, as G. K. Chesterton wrote, “that he himself was being valued and taken seriously and not merely added to the spoil of some social policy or the names of some clerical document.”

Jesus was attractive, I believe, because he had a common touch and took everyone and their troubles seriously. He associated with the poor and sick and judged and oppressed, and challenged those whose privilege distanced them from the people at large. He attracted multitudes, but failed to build membership, budgets, or buildings. And the first Christians were appealing, as Elaine Pagels and other scholars have written, because they were as compassionate as he, not because they were successful.

Though I believe that Jesus was a child of God and reminded us that we are all created and called to be children of God, I believe also that we Christians made a mistake making him “king,” or a part of the godhead, or the first CEO of the Christian corporation. In those capacities, he loses his common touch, and we can use his titles to excuse ourselves from following his spiritual path—after all, we’re not God like he was. Less is required of us. “His” work is “above our pay grade.”

But as the beloved child of God, you and I are blessed not only with God’s gracious love, but blessed, too, with Jesus’ calling to be compassionate toward all.  

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes. Past posts are available in the archive in the right rail on the blogsite. Tax-deductible donations welcome! Please click here. Thank you!

For those in north Georgia, Chris will be speaking during the 11 a.m. service of Georgia Mountains Unitarian Universalist Church in Dahlonega this Sunday, March 24, 2013, and after a light lunch, leading a workshop on “Claiming Blessings Anyway,” about finding blessings in unexpected, even unpleasant events.

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Et II, Benedict?

Thanking God Anyway

Et II, Benedict?

The 50^th anniversary of the promise of Vatican II prompts me to remember Pope John  XXIII with fondness, nostalgia, and reverence. His life experience, according to John W. O’Malley’s recent New York Times op-ed piece, helped him know “diversity, turmoil, sin and evil firsthand, but he also knew goodness as he found it in people of other faiths and no faith.” That’s among the reasons he initiated Vatican II, though he did not live to see it through to its conclusion, let alone its implementation.

I grew up with anti-Catholic sentiment preached from our Baptist pulpit, but a saving grace was my mother’s reading of Catholic alongside Protestant writers. As a young woman, she had enjoyed a positive relationship with nuns who cared for her frequently hospitalized mother in their small town Catholic hospital.

I was home sick from school when a news bulletin flashed the news of Pope John’s death on our Packard Bell television set in 1963. Though only 12 years of age, I immediately felt sad, knowing a unique light had left our world. In 1973 I visited his tomb in the crypt underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, noting fresh flowers. It moved me in a way no other gravesite on my first trip to Europe did; his was the only grave at which I cried. On my most recent visit to Rome, I was glad to see he had been promoted upstairs to the main floor, now in a glass coffin. At first I wasn’t sure it was him, so I asked a guard, “Is that Pope John XXIII?” “Most of him,” the guard replied with a wink. That same visit we also saw a living pope, Pope John Paul II, old and frail.

There was resistance to the changing nature of the church signaled by Vatican II, with its intended consultative collegiality among bishops, priests and laity, ecumenical emphasis, interfaith dialogue, vernacular liturgy, and other attempts at modernization that made it less of a dinosaur still breathing fire at the Enlightenment.

My friend, David Mellott, Dean of Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, suggests to me that Pope John could not have initiated reforms on his own had there not been a “sensus fidelium” in the Roman Catholic Church, “the sense of the faithful” that wanted change. It could be said that, had Pope John lived, that same “sensus fidelium” might have prompted even him to be more cautious in Vatican II’s application.  (Anyone who has served in ministry knows almost every congregation says it wants change until changes are actually implemented!)

In Vatican II, “The church validated for the first time the principle of religious freedom and rejected all forms of civil discrimination based on religious grounds. Thus ended an era of cozy church-state relations that began in the fourth century with Emperor Constantine,” the Georgetown professor, Jesuit priest, and author O’Malley observes. This is a very good time to be reminded of this in the United States.

In his 1986 autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest, diocesan priest and novelist Andrew Greeley tells of sneaking into the conclave of Vatican II with a faked pass and witnessing a battle between the conservative, turf-defending Roman Curia and the bishops who served the broader church, aided by more progressive theologians like Hans Kung and Karl Rahner. His analysis was that Vatican II irrevocably asserted that the church can change.

Greeley also mentions the present pope’s involvement in Vatican II, listing alongside Kung and Rahner “a much younger Ratzinger (who now conveniently forgets his contribution to the Council)…”—and Greeley wrote this before Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, when he was the Vatican watchdog for orthodoxy as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In a 1977 book that I used years ago for my morning reflections, Zen and the Bible,  Japanese Jesuit priest J. K. Kadowaki, lauding Vatican II, also refers to that much younger Ratzinger whom he met when doing research in West Germany:

While there I was invited by the Catholic theologian, Professor J. Ratzinger (now a cardinal), to lecture on “Zen and Christianity” to a group of his doctoral students.  … Toward the end of the seminar, Professor Ratzinger said, “How interesting it would be if we could compare the ideas of Zen with those of the Bible. If that could be done, it would be a great event, not only for the dialogue between Zen and Christianity, but also in respect to the ideological exchange between East and West.”

That’s in the spirit of Pope John XXIII and of Vatican II, though Pope Benedict might prefer to forget this too.  Now that Pope John has been beatified on his way to sainthood, progressive Christians might hope that he may intercede for the whole church—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant.

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal devotions, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.  Please click here to learn more about this ministry and/or make a donation!

Many thanks to Dr. David Mellott for reviewing a draft of this post and contributing his wisdom from his Roman Catholic training.

Check out Glaser’s latest article on The Huffington Post: “Flag Pins & Crosses: ‘Mine Is Bigger than Yours!’”