9/27/06:
"What 'Catholic' Means to Me" - by Wolfgang Grassl
Good morning, my brothers and sisters. Welcome!
Bonjour, mes frères et soeurs. Soyez-les bienvenus!
¡Buenos días, mis hermanos y hermanas y bienvenidos!
Dobro jutro , moj braća pa sestra. Dobrodošao!
Guten Morgen, meine Brüder und Schwestern. Willkommen!
Buon giorno, fratelli e sorelle. Benvenuti!
Привет, мои братья и сестры, и добро пожаловать!
Boa manhã, meus irmãos e irmãs. Boas vindas!
صباح الخير, إخوتي و أخوات .! مرحبًا
Goedendag, mijn broers en zusters. Bent ze welkom!
Καλημέρα, οι αδελφοί και οι αδελφές μου. Υποδοχή!
Salvete, o fratres et sorores. Mihi gratissimi estis!
The attempt to greet you in a few languages should be a symbol – even though a badly pronounced one – for the universality of the Church. The last language was Latin. This, too, should be a symbol – for the unity of the Church in spite of all the diversity of her manifestations. I thank Campus Ministry for the invitation to share some thoughts with you today. I also thank my faculty colleagues who have agreed to share with us their own reflections on what ‘Catholic’ means to them.
Our music today is a testimony to this universality. We have just heard very beautiful and very old music: a Mozarabic chant from the 8th or 9th century, from Andalusia in Southern Spain when it was under Muslim rule and Muslims, Jews and Christians coexisted peacefully and influenced each other’s arts, crafts, and thoughts. In the music you may have heard oriental melodies of today, maybe the muezzin’s call to prayer. Indeed, this music comes from the very same oriental tradition, and yet it is profoundly Catholic. Later we will hear a short piece from the Missa Criolla, a contemporary mass set to the rhythms of Latin America. And then, a prayer by Saint Francis of Assisi set to a very meditative music by Francis Poulenc, a composer of the 20th century. Our gathering and parting hymns, too, express the universality and also diversity of the Church.I will engage you only in a few personal meditations on what it means to be Catholic. In so doing I do not belittle any other faith tradition, Christian or not. On a personal note, let me say that my wife is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church and a theologian by profession – I cannot afford narrowmindedness in matters of religion. I will claim that Catholicism may mean more than a particular faith tradition: it may also mean a way of looking at the world. Indeed, there have been artists, philosophers, writers that claimed no belief in God and stood distant from the Church and who yet considered themselves or were considered by others to be Catholic. “How can that be?” you may ask. “Must one not believe in the redemptive work of Christ, in the Trinity, in the power of the sacraments, in the role of the Church as the mystical body of Christ, in the Ten Commandments as the standard for moral conduct, and so forth?” Of course one must. I do not doubt a bit that the Catechism of 1983, which by any standards is a well-reasoned and powerful book, is the authority by which we should judge what it means to be a Catholic Christian. But what if the adjective ‘Catholic’ also refers to something broader than a set of religious beliefs? What if it refers to a vision of the world, a way of looking at our physical, social, and political environment, and at ourselves?
Have you ever heard somebody say: “I may be a bad Catholic, but I am a Catholic”? I am sure many of you have, or you have even said it yourself. I know that I have heard it often, and that I have thought and said it about myself. Now try to remember whether you have ever heard somebody say “I may be a bad Methodist, but I am a Methodist” or “I may be a bad Mormon, but I am a Mormon”? I would be surprised if you have. Somehow Catholicism is different. But how?Let me find a clue in Brideshead Revisited, a wonderful novel by the British author Evelyn Waugh. One of the protagonists, the agnostic Charles Ryder, contends that Catholics “seem just like other people,” whereupon Sebastian Flyte, his aristocratic and Catholic colleague at Oxford, rebuts this contention with the following words:My dear Charles, that's exactly what they're not (...) It's not just that they're a clique – as a matter of fact, they're at least four cliques all blackguarding each other half the time – but they've got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time. It's quite natural, really, that they should. But you see it's difficult for semi-heathens like (...) me.
The point here is a very general one: there exists a distinctively Catholic worldview in virtue of the beliefs it sustains, and even “semi-heathens” can share and at times passionately defend this worldview. The key to understanding the Catholic difference lies then in the unique universality of Catholicism.The Nicene Creed defines what have become known as the four ‘marks’ of the Church (of which I will only address two): Una Sancta Catholica et Apostolica Ecclesia – One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Here we have it: being Catholic, the Church – and I do not wish to engage in discussion about lower-case and upper-case letters here – is universal. It directs its message to all, everywhere, without regard to nationality, creed, race, gender, or social standing. It uses all languages to do so. It is of a mind-boggling breadth in including hundreds of partial traditions with distinct organizational cultures: different styles of liturgy in one Western and 22 Eastern rites; mass in the vernacular languages and in the traditional Latin; monastic orders and orders of canons such as our Norbertine Fathers; religious sisters devoted to everything from medical care to education; research institutions, schools, hospitals, charities, universities and colleges such as our own; and all this multiplied by some 200 countries and a few thousand ethnic groups and languages. More than 1 billion people around the globe, with about 5% of them living in the United States.
Indeed Catholica. And yet it is one Church: Una. The Church has been blessed by a remarkable stability over now nearly 2000 years. There have been heretical movements, there has been, in 1053, the Great Schism between the East and the West, and most of all, there has been the Reformation. Painful as these have been and still are, let me ask you: which other institution has ever shown such stability while at the same time accommodating so much multiplicity in its interior? As a professor of management, let me ask you: Do you know of any other organization that has been able to maintain its mission statement for 2000 years? An organization that has kept its products in ready supply – call them teaching, preaching, counseling, and the sacraments? An organization that has changed its strategies, and more often its tactics, but has been doggedly consistent in its objectives and values? And that has expanded in spite of a bewildering – and still growing – complexity in organizational cultures? Should we not at least entertain the possibility that the Church, despite all her human failings, may indeed be more than a religious club? A Church that hopes, prays and believes to be guided by the Holy Spirit and that knows that she is indissoluble until her Head decides to reassume her reins – such a Church can afford to open her doors to mavericks, rebels, and other difficult ones from whose midst have often emerged people with a most Catholic vision. Even the self-described “semi-heathen” Sebastian Flyte in Waugh’s novel passionately defended all things Catholic.Catholicism has indeed harbored its fair share of mavericks.
Let me only give you the example of the French philosopher Simone Weil. Born in 1909 into a Jewish and bourgeois family in Paris, and as the graduate of an élite university, she started her intellectual life as a communist and an agnostic until, in 1937, in the same church in which St. Francis of Assisi had prayed, she had a conversion experience. But she only hesitantly accepted baptism, fearing that the trappings of organized religion might impair her newly-found faith. Weil’s writings made significant contributions to philosophy in a Catholic spirit. They are difficult, for their author jumps with ease from long passages in Greek to even longer ones in Sanskrit. They are also highly idiosyncratic – characterized by an intense spirituality and a penchant for mysticism, and inspired equally by Hinduism and Buddhism as by the ‘mainstream’ Christian tradition. Yet overall Weil expressed some of the grandest themes of Catholic thought: incarnation as a natural extension of creation; beauty as evidence and celebration of the presence of God in the world; the necessity to unite thought and action; the human need for roots; the importance of a proper balance between rights and obligations in moral life and in society; the inalienable dignity and the calling of each human person; and the overpowering force of love. Simone Weil died in 1943 in England, at the age of 34, while working for the French Resistance. Her short life exemplifies a very Catholic fullness, and this includes what superficially may appear to be contradictions: teacher-scholar and social activist; member of the Parisian intellectual élite and factory worker; soldier in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War and yet convinced pacifist; Resistance fighter and mystic – dedicated in equal parts to the search for truth and to overcoming the inequities of the world, to contemplation as to action. And yet Simone Weil was hesitant to join the Church. Catholic she certainly was, and a Catholic intellectual of a great caliber. And she is only one of many, many, many: from St. Augustine in the 4th century to Blaise Pascal in the 17th century and to Dorothy Day in the 20th, the Church has harbored her share of doubters, protesters, sinners, difficult ones who nonetheless regarded themselves Catholic. We Catholics have inherited a great and noble legacy, and at places like St. Norbert College we must be its faithful stewards.
What, now, is my answer to the question of the Catholic difference? Actually, I have several answers. The most important one refers to the permanence and universality of the Church while preserving her unity. This allows for inclusiveness, it allows for mavericks, and it allows for a high degree of internal diversity. I know that for many this degree is not enough. And indeed: the Church must always be renewed. Let me remind you that St. Norbert founded the Premonstratensian Order in 1120 as part of just such a reform movement. Renewed the Church must be, but without compromising the mission she has been given. Therefore, if we want the Church to remain Catholic, we also must preserve her unity. This is the reason, for example, why I have, wherever I have lived in the world, advocated the use of Latin in mass in addition to the languages of the respective countries. Not for reasons of conservatism – I would shrug such designations off because they have become empty labels. Quite on the contrary: as a symbol and testament of universality, a neutral ground and spiritual bond for Catholics worldwide independently of national languages. I found it touching when, during the years of my university teaching in Jamaica, I was invited to a Latin class at Campion College in Kingston, a top-rated high school sponsored by the Jesuit Fathers, where I heard a room full of mostly black fourteen-year-olds not only do their conjugations but also sing the Veni, Creator Spiritus, maybe the most famous of all hymns that goes back to the 9th century. This betokens unity for me – universality, not segregation, and stability over time in spite of changing cultures. After all, neither theology nor Canon Law recognizes national churches: there is no Catholic Church of the United States, or of Jamaica, or of Austria. There are only Catholics in the United States and in other countries. This, too, is something that sets Catholics apart. The Catholic vision of the world can never be a national – and most certainly not a nationalist – one. It is by its very mission universal, inclusive, and must therefore be open. But it is also permanent.I hope that in my reflections you could feel my pride in regarding myself a Catholic, bad Catholic though I may be. I am a Catholic who belongs more to the camp of those whose understanding seeks faith than of those whose faith seeks understanding. And yet I am happy to declare my allegiance to and love for a Church whose actions I not always understand or share. For I have enough humility to say: what is my understanding against 2000 years of pretty successful trial and error, against the collective wisdom of some of the most brilliant minds in history, against some of the greatest beauty that has ever been created by man, against millions of dedicated people who place their lives into the service of their brothers and sisters, against two millennia of prayers for divine guidance and inspiration? Only extreme arrogance would make me stand up and say: it is all wrong.
I hope that many of you will join me in giving this Church a chance for becoming more accepting of mavericks, who after all may turn into a Simone Weil, for opening herself even to Catholic “semi-heathens” like Sebastian Flyte, for truly listening to the needs of her faithful, for standing up against injustice wherever it may arise, for becoming more ecumenical in embracing fellow Christians and in extending her hands to all people of good will. And I equally hope that you will agree that in order to live up to these challenges, the Church must resist all tendencies to splinter into numerous sects propelled by our several misgivings. Our experience with sectarianism in the history of Christianity has not been a happy one. This will be the lesson of the Reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians which we will hear in a minute. Let us therefore keep it with the Nicene Creed, please: One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Una and Catholica.I thank you for your kind attention. Or, let me say it in Catholic: Gratias ago vobis, fratres et sorores. I thank you, my brothers and sisters.
