Is there way out of this whirlpool of chaos that our ecclesial leaders have boxed the institution up in? Tom McMahon suggests today that there is if we can go back to the Beatitudes preached by Jesus. Do we have leaders who are capable of bringing that about though?

Clerical abuse worldwide … a waiting opportunity … this mysterious call called a vocation!

Forgive me if I savor a moment of joy at the same time amassing worldwide negative reports on clerical sexual abuse. In the midst of the chaos and my drowning in ugly sewer water I see a golden opportunity for the followers of Jesus to give life to the crushing tragedy. I see our new vocation, in reality the ever-standing summons by Jesus to his followers to follow him. I encourage the practice of the Beatitudes— the Jesus way of life so sorely needed in a spiritually wounded society.

Jesus asks us to be salt to give flavor. In America I see a deep-seated mean spirit, particularly among those who have become very materialistic The word laity means duty and what then are the responsibilities of the Catholic laity when evil is discovered within their religion? Let me ask a simple question; I first check out the servant lay priest in me, a litmus test of my own Christianity. I need search for the scripture text as Jesus presents them. It has been a long time since I have read the Beatitudes. I have in mind the gospel admonition to check for the possible beam in my eye while seeing clearly the speck in another's.

Eureka! I have found the Beatitudes in chapter five of Matthew's Gospel, a quick read bringing back many a youthful seminary memory and I see them sprinkled throughout my 81 years. I have a sense that I made an effort to abide by the Beatitudes in the days of my institutional ministry and that they were not the core thinking of some (many?) priest-pastors with whom I worked.

Blessed are you peace makers...

We are not accustomed in Western Culture to the word "blessed". Webster offers: "bringing comfort or joy", "enjoying great happiness", and (far distant) "an antidote to poison". Not bad. My Jerusalem bible merely uses the word "happy". I can use a blessing or two each morning particularly as I read the newspaper. For many years now I have become aware that Jesus invites us (vocation, a calling) to take up his yoke, assuring us his burden is light. Matthew's 16th Chapter tells us how one who follows Jesus loses his life only to find it. Interesting fellow this Jesus … maybe this is the time for us to take a look at his way of conducting life.

I realize that in the chaos of the Middle Ages an honest group of Christian bishops at the 1500's Council of Trent in attempting to revive Christianity put all their eggs in one basket, all spiritual life and sacraments being centered around priests and nuns as examples of living the way of Jesus. In seminary I often heard that the priest was another Christ. Trent's system cut off the so called "religious" from a wicked world; four hundred years later Vatican Two invites the People of God to be those other Christs working in a good yet wounded world. The isolated priesthood and convent did much good but failed to penetrate the core of humanity. The Jesus message is meant for all humankind in a simple non-complicated and non-structured manner, with a minimum of rules and regulations. The problem with my 1930's structured religion was too many rules that worked ok in a monastery but were meaningless to a fast growing and educated people. Vatican Two broke the spell and the call is out … follow me!

Up until Vatican Two the Roman Catholic religion was like a massive stage play under the direction of a special stage master (always male clergyman) who allowed only clergy the major roles and a few ordinary people got mini bit parts. The Roman stage has darkened and now the entire creation is welcomed by the Creator to audition for the million upon millions action roles (you and me and the whole kit and caboodle). Stagemaster-Creator-God entrusts creation to each one of us for safe keeping. (Break-in Bulletin: Our 4th grandchild Addison Phoenix McMahon, a little shy of nine pounds, entered on stage May 17, 2010; perhaps Addie may carry some of the rebel genetics of this 81-year-old granddad.) Being there was no middle class and the peasant world was illiterate and uneducated the laity was not in Trent's focus. The seminary system, under way by the 1600's is exclusively male and totally clericalized, my early days of priesthood an ersatz attempt to make a monk out of the priest living in a highly sexualized world.

In my seminary career I experienced high school, college and post grad — 12 years of all-male students, 1942 to 1954, never once choosing a subject to study nor choosing my teachers. We were trained to be on male auto pilot and this for the rest of our lives ... an impossible endeavour. Again, I repeat my clerical education was an all-male experience. Practice of the beatitudes in an all-male culture was a risky experience, expulsion around the corner for any expression of physical love or tenderness. Making a close friend was seen as dangerous, amacetia inmacitiae aka the friendship of enemies. We were trained to be rugged individualists, and to avoid the gentle sex. With Jimmy Durante I say we was robbed". During that 12 years "preparation" I experienced a constant removal from and distancing from people and the whole seminary process was contrary to nature.

Then Fr Josef Ratzinger and Yves Congar photographed long before Ratzinger came to wield the extraordinary power he does today.

Vatican Two and the likes of Yves Congar invited the clergy back into the real world and, oh, we were such novices at life. While working with a teen club and two months ordained I saw the folly of making the secular world into a monastic system. The first pastor I worked with was always seeking ways to break up our teen club and form a junior girls sodality.

I would spend the next 26 years working to get clerics to trust God's creation. The convent way of life began to open its doors to female education after World War 2 … slightly … and look today. I will close with a modern David and Goliath story, one I witnessed in my 40's, the brutish medieval church in deadly combat with modern Christianity. It's evil -vs- the beatitudes.

Evil -vs- The Beatitudes...

We find the two participants in the 1930's, one a Wall Street Banker soon to become a priest and the other a fulltime student in full holy habit at Stanford University. Vatican Two will initiate their ugly clash and Jesus will die again on a Los Angles cross.

Tom has located the book that tells the story of Sr Anita Gaspari and the Crisis faced by the Immaculate Heart Community of California. I've added the book to the Catholica marketplace and the Amazon site contains selected excerpts from inside the book.

As a Sister of the Immaculate Hearts of Jesus and Mary, Anita Gaspari in the 1930's attended Stanford University, graduating with honors. Anita was the head of the Immaculate Hearts during the Vatican Two Council, becoming one of the first American religious groups to heed the call of the Council to embrace the modern world. In modified habit Immaculate Heart sisters were able to perform their hospital duties with greater efficiency, as well as by-passing 6am morning prayers if they had been in surgery in the middle of the night. School sisters had greater freedom and access to parents. The group was alive with Christian activity, Jesus coming into the modern world. Cardinal Francis McIntyre, once the Wall Street banker and then head of the largest archdiocese in the United States, challenged Anita Gaspari and her order, demanding they return to full habit and old European convent rules. The cardinal's conduct was rude, disgraceful, boorish, and unchristian. (I'll make reference to Gaspari's book next week.) This old time tyrant would not budge, forcing the innovators out of the diocesan system. I know today numbers of these noble women who were forced out of their order. McIntyre is long dead but his sinful, criminal, materialistic spirit still infects the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. When Anita wrote her book little did any of us realize the horror that awaited the Roman institution so heavily infected with the mean spirit of McIntyre and his side kick Monsignor Benjamin Hawks. Surely neither powerful men followed The Beatitudes? The harm and damage they caused still infects the Archdiocese of Los Angeles as well a dozen other diocese now headed by bishops who were spawned from its seminary named Camarillo. McIntyre broke up the Immaculate Heart Order and Rome stood by in approval. The followers of Anita Gaspari are in diaspora, many married, fine Christian women. I know a number of them, brave and confident, each with a mission of spreading the Gospel of Jesus … And rarely using words.

So here we are, my friends, at the end of the page with sparse reference to the Beatitudes. Tune in next week and we shall look at each one separately: the clash over the way of Jesus and the old medieval Roman church is the very core of today's struggle. Do I hear the call of Jesus?

Tom McMahon in San Jose. Ca., feeling very blessed today with Addison three days old. (18/05/2010)

©2010 Tom McMahon

[Index of Commentaries by Tom McMahon]