Inculturation at Papal Masses; next, Poland and St. Faustina

Press coverage of John Paul’s July 30-August 1 trip to Mexico turned mostly on his statement of support for the “legitimate aspirations” of indigenous persons, putting it in the context of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, as well as inroads among indigenous groups in Latin America by Evangelical Protestants. The media focus was thus political and inter-religious. This is entirely proper, but I confess that my optic was more intra-ecclesial. I was in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe for both the July 31 canonization of Juan Diego, to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have appeared, and the beatification August 1 of two Zapotec Indians, Juan Bautista and Jacinto de los Angeles, martyred in 1700. What struck me in both cases was the startling degree to which both liturgies were “inculturated,” meaning that they drew heavily upon the sacred traditions of the native cultures involved.

When the pope pronounced the words of canonization for Juan Diego, conch shells began to blow, and the hundreds of indigenous persons present began to shake rattles they had brought for the occasion. Then native music began to thump out, as 11 dancers in Aztec costume slowly twirled their way down a specially prepared runway. As they snaked their way towards the pope, incense was burned and candles lit, while flower petals were strewn in their path. Finally red confetti was fired over our heads. It was an electrifying moment, and left the people inside the basilica cheering like it was Game Seven of the NBA finals.

As we were filing out to catch the press bus, a colleague from one of the American TV networks, a non-Catholic, said to me: “Hell, if they did Mass like this all the time, I’d come!”

The next day was a repeat performance. The Nahautl, Zapotec and Mixtec languages, all spoken in the martyrs’ southern hometown of San Francisco Cajonos, were used during the liturgy. When the pope formally beatified Bautista and los Angeles, once again native dancers appeared on the runway, this time accompanied by a welter of indigenous brass bands from Cajonos and other nearby towns. Thousands of indigenous persons clapped, sang and swayed in time, as the dancers made their way toward John Paul.

Perhaps most remarkably, Indian women bearing smoking pots of incense brushed branches of herbs on the pontiff, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera and other prelates in a limpia, or purification, ceremony. The common Indian blessing is believed to cure spiritual and physical ailments by driving off evil spirits.

Anyone who follows the Vatican knows that one of its most protracted internal tensions is between Bishop Piero Marini, responsible for the papal liturgies, and Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez, who runs the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. The latter makes the rules; the former sets the tone through what happens when the pope himself celebrates. Medina tends toward a traditionalist, by-the-book stance, while Marini is more reform-minded.

The Mexican celebrations, with their unapologetic embrace of elements of native worship, reflected the Marini imprint. But the $64,000 question is, whose side is John Paul II on? He signs Medina’s documents and yet celebrates Marini’s liturgies, so some accuse him of trying to have it both ways.

As a general rule, I suspect John Paul tolerates this tension as an exercise in pendulum governance, giving a little bit here and a little bit there, never letting any wing of the church feel too alienated. On this theory, the pope sees not a contradiction but a dialectic.

While such inconsistency can be maddening to observers trying to figure out what the church stands for, I dare say if you look closely, most pontificates embrace seeming contradictions. It was John XXIII, the beloved reformer, whose 1959 Roman synod forbade priests from driving cars or going to the cinema, and who decreed in his 1962 apostolic constitution Veterum sapientia that only Latin be used in seminaries. It was Paul VI, the “pope of the council,” who gave us both the new Mass as well as HumanaeVitae. How to explain this? John XXIII once quipped that he had to be pope both of those with their foot on the accelerator, and those with their foot on the brake. Such a view of papal responsibilities sometimes makes for a muddled approach to policy, but perhaps also for a kind of balance over time that prevents the whole thing from spinning apart.

On the issue of indigenous elements in Christian worship, however, I have two bits of datum suggesting the pope’s heart is with Marini — one theological, the other anecdotal.

The theological reason is the way John Paul has developed the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) on other religions. Vatican II for the first time spoke positively of other religions, saying that not infrequently they contain “elements of truth and grace.” Yet the Council did not resolve the question of how those “elements of truth and grace” got there. As Karl Rahner wrote, “The precise theological value” of non-Christian religions “was left open.”

The question at the close of the council was: Are the truths of other religions simply evidence of a universal human yearning for God, a kind of “natural religion?” Or are they inspired by God’s Holy Spirit as part of a salvation history more complex than we had previously imagined?

John Paul II has answered this question, defending the second, more progressive hypothesis: that God, through the person of the Holy Spirit, “inspires” at least some elements of other religions.

Consider this line from a radio address to the peoples of Asia, Manila, Feb. 21, 1981: “Even when for some he is the Great Unknown, He nevertheless remains always in reality the same living God. We trust that wherever the human spirit opens itself in prayer to this Unknown God, an echo will be heard of the same Spirit who, knowing the limits and weaknesses of the human person, himself prays in us and on our behalf.” Or this, from the pope’s annual address to the curia on Dec. 22, 1986, this time defending his inter-religious summit in Assisi in October of that year: “Every authentic prayer is called forth by the Holy Spirit, who is mysteriously present in the heart of every person.”

One could go on multiplying examples (by one count there are at least 50 such statements). As Jesuit theologian Jacques Dupuis writes in his recent book Christianity and the Religions: From Conflict to Encounter: “The peculiar contribution of Pope John Paul II to a ‘theology of the religions’ consists in the emphasis with which he affirms the operative presence of the Spirit of God in the religious life of the ‘non-Christians’ and in their religious traditions.”

That’s the doctrinal reason I believe John Paul liked what he saw in Mexico. He believes those sacred dances, rites and gestures come from the Spirit and hence have a place in Christian worship.

I had a pair on binoculars with me, and I kept my eyes on John Paul on day two as the native dancers and mariachi bands did their thing. There was little response at first, but as the performance built up a head of steam, I saw the pope smiling broadly and tapping out the rhythm of the music. As papal endorsements go, it was indirect — but unmistakable.

Speaking of the Mexico leg of John Paul’s journey, one bit of subtext was whether Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, would be present. Maciel is a Catholic celebrity in Mexico, and on John Paul’s four previous journeys he has been a leading actor. This time, however, Maciel faces highly public charges of sexual abuse from several former members of the Legionaries, and there was speculation as to whether he would be exiled from the papal orbit.

On the day of Juan Diego’s canonization, I tried asking local organizers if Maciel were present. They had no idea. I asked four Mexican journalists, each one of whom proffered a different opinion. After attempts to spot him through binoculars failed, I tried a different tack, calling a Legionary friend in Rome. He declined to respond.

That night I headed off to a press conference at the Inter-Continental Hotel scheduled for 6:00 p.m., to ask Monsignor Guillermo Ortiz Mondragón, the designated spokesperson for the papal visit. 6:00 p.m. came and went, and no Ortiz. I enlisted the help of several very polite young men who had been stationed in the hotel to help journalists. After a half-hour, one came back with the news that his sister “swore” she had seen Maciel at the basilica. When I informed him this was not sufficient, he returned to the hunt.

Eventually they produced Ortiz. I put my question to him, and he responded: “I have heard nothing about Maciel being here, and I’m sure I would have heard if he were.” It was a curiously non-definitive response.

The next morning, I rode to Mass in the company of a member of the papal entourage. I asked about Maciel, and he was finally able to resolve the question: “Maciel was in the front row yesterday,” he said, referring to the Mass for Juan Diego. “I said hello to him myself.” I then asked if Maciel had greeted the pope, and my source, who was in a position to know, said he had.

However low profile, I believe Maciel’s presence at the Mass, and his greeting of John Paul, can only be seen as a show of support from the pope.

A major newspaper recently printed a story saying that Maciel was “expected” to travel in the papal party. I don’t know exactly who held this expectation, but I was on the papal plane and Maciel was not there. Just to be sure, I asked Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Vatican spokesperson, on August 5, and he confirmed that Maciel did not travel with the pope.

Second, about those helpful young men … it turns out they were students at Legionary schools. The press operation for the pope’s trip was run by prominent Mexican members of the lay branch of the Legionaries, called Regnum Christi.

If you were tuned into the Italian press for coverage of the Mexico trip, you would have been following a dramatic “assassination attempt” against the pope.

What happened is this. A fourteen-year-old Mexican, Erick Angel Hernandez Gomez, fired a BB-pistol out the window of his family’s apartment on the afternoon of July 31, along the route John Paul was to take from the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe to the papal nunciature. The shots were fired well before the pope went by. One pellet slightly grazed a Mexican police officer, though it did not cause a wound. The boy was briefly arrested, then released into his parents’ custody when it became clear he hadn’t meant to harm anyone. (The judge called the boy’s action “a stupid joke”).

An Italian news agency, however, reported that the pope had been fired upon and that a Vatican security agent had been hit. With that, the chase was on. Italian reporters on the trip got urgent calls from their editors, demanding accounts of “panic in Mexico City” — despite the fact that a couple of steps out the hotel door was enough to prove that there was no such panic.

The lesson is not to be seduced by dramatic news flashes in the middle of a breaking story until confirmation emerges. This time it was the Italians, but it’s hardly a geographically limited temptation.

John Paul’s next journey outside Italy will take place August 16-19 in Poland. Fans of the papal resignation hypothesis have long been licking their chops over this trip. Why go now? Why for only three days? Could it be to announce John Paul’s long-rumored exit from the papal stage, then spirit him off to a monastery?

In fact, there is a precise motive for the visit, with a deep resonance in John Paul’s spirituality. He is going to dedicate the new Sanctuary of Divine Mercy at Lagiewniki, outside Krakow. It is named for a devotion to God’s mercy launched in the early 20th century by a Polish nun named Faustina Kowalska, whom the pope canonized on April 30, 2000 (making her the first saint of the new millennium).

Faustina believed that Jesus had appeared to her in 1931with a message of mercy for all humanity. Her spiritual director commissioned an artist to render a painting of Jesus as he appeared in her visions, which has become the well-known image of Jesus with two rays of light streaming from his heart. (The red ray represents the blood that flowed from Christ’s side when struck with a spear on the cross, the white the water). Her 600-page diary of the visions is known as Divine Mercy in My Soul. She devised various prayers and spiritual acts to support this devotion before dying in 1938.

Faustina has long been an important figure in the life of John Paul II. As an underground seminarian during World War II, he was influenced by Kowalska’s diary. When he became archbishop of Krakow, he began the process of her beatification, which he brought to fruition as pope.

John Paul’s devotion to Faustina has critics. Some see her quasi-apocalyptic insistence on human unworthiness as excessive. Others object to the way the pope placed the divine mercy feast on the second Sunday after Easter, hence “disrupting,” according to some liturgists, the Easter season. (Especially given that Easter is supposed to be about the joy of resurrection, not our constant need for mercy). Still others say the pope shouldn’t use his office to foist his personal spirituality on the rest of the church.

Those may all be valid points, but I still think there’s something to like about the Faustina story.

For almost 20 years, from 1959 to 1978, Faustina’s diary and her divine mercy devotion were officially banned by the Holy Office, today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Working from what is today recognized as a faulty Italian translation of her diary, the Holy Office decided that Faustina’s private revelations were quirky and effectively silenced her movement.

It was thus a minor bit of defiance for Archbishop Karol Wojtyla to open canonization proceedings on October 21, 1965, for someone whose lifework was still officially censored in Rome. The Vatican’s ban on Divine Mercy Devotion was finally lifted on April 15, 1978, and in short order Wojtyla became pope. His 1980 encyclical Dives in Misericordia is heavily influenced by Kowalska’s thinking, in its own way reminiscent of how certain documents of Vatican II were inspired by figures censured under Pius XII.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has argued that its documents and disciplinary decisions participate in the “ordinary and universal magisterium,” which over time becomes the infallible teaching of the church. This may be, but as the case of Faustina shows — as did that of Padre Pio, also canonized by John Paul after having been disciplined several times during his life by Rome — only time can tell whether any given decision of the congregation really reflects that magisterium or not. In other words, even the Holy Office nods.

Two weeks ago, I described an interview I conducted with Fr. Peter Gumpel, the man responsible for the sainthood cause of Pius XII, about the book The Popes Against the Jews by David Kertzer.

Professor Kertzer was kind enough to respond, and among other points he boiled down the argument of his book into one paragraph. I asked his permission to reproduce it here. Kertzer wrote:

“The Nazis were behind the Holocaust, and the Nazis were also anti-Christian and anti-Catholic. But their ability to carry out the Holocaust depended on mass grass-root hostility to the Jews, and as I try to show, the Catholic Church played a significant (though far from exclusive) role in fueling these hatreds.”

Stated that way, there perhaps is not as much distance between Kertzer and Gumpel as one might imagine, since Gumpel allowed in our interview that anti-Jewish sentiments expressed in organs such as L’Osservatore Romano and Civilità Cattolica may have reinforced prejudices against Jews in early 20th century Europe.

I suppose the real argument (not necessarily between Kertzer and Gumpel, but among students of the issue in general) is not whether the church played a role in shaping anti-Semitism, but whether it has sufficiently acknowledged that role, repented for it, and insured that it does not recur.

More on "Inculturation" in the real world sinkspur:

Human Life International reported yesterday that some South African's are calling for ancestor worship and animal sacrifices to be included in the liturgy of the Mass. According to Archbishop Buti Tlhagale of Bloemfontein, plans to include African pagan rites during the Mass is in response to the Vatican's invitation to "inculturate" Catholic rites.

Hearing that both priests and lay people were making such plans, an outraged Father Richard Welch, President of Human Life International, steamed, "In the letter to the Hebrews, Saint Paul discussed the Sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross with the following words: 'For it is impossible that with the blood of oxen and goats sin should be taken away…Sacrifice and oblation thou would not…Behold, I come…He takes away the first, that he may establish that which follows…we are sanctified by the oblation of the body of Jesus Christ once.'"

"This means that all animal and other such sacrifices to God ended with the sacrifice of His Son on the Cross. To distort and change that perfect oblation of the body and blood of Jesus Christ is an abomination," said Father Welch. "The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that superstition, idolatry, divination and magic are perversions of the virtue of religon. It is a sacrilege to profane the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and it is an especially grave sin when committed against the Holy Eucharist."

UNIVERSAL PAGAN ORIGINS

In Mardi Gras and Rio Carnival owe soul to Dionysus, Raiders News Update pointed out that Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and revelry, was believed to be "the craving within man that longs to 'let itself go' and to 'give itself over' to the baser earthly desires." Such Dionystic abandonment included animal sacrifice, ancestor worship, and corruption of the concepts of Holy Communion.

Like those hoping to join animal sacrifices with the Mass, followers of Dionysus resisted every effort to control paganism. They believed that Dionysus visited a terrible madness upon those who tried to deny him his free expression. Conversely, people who gave themselves over to the will of Dionysus were rewarded with unlimited psychological and physical delights.

Mythical systems of mental punishments and physical rewards based on resistance and/or submission to Dionysus, were both symbolically and literally illustrated in the cult rituals of the Bacchae, as the Bacchae women (Greek women who participated in the mysteries of Dionysus) migrated in frenzied hillside groups, dressed transvestite in fawn skins and accompanied by ritual sacrifices, screaming, music, dancing, and licentious behavior.

When, for instance, a baby animal was too young and lacking in instinct to sense the danger and run away from the revelers, it was picked up and suckled by nursing mothers who participated in the hillside rituals. But when older animals sought to escape the marauding Bacchae, they were considered "resistant" to the will of Dionysus and were torn apart and eaten alive as a part of the fevered ritual. Human participants were sometimes subjected to the same orgiastic cruelty, as the rule of the cult was "anything goes," including bloodletting, beastiality, etc. Later versions of the ritual (Bacchanalia) expanded to include male revelers, and perversions of sexual behavior were often worse between men than they were between men and women. Anyone daring to resist Dionysus was subjected to sparagmos ("torn apart') and omophagia ("consumed raw").

In B.C. 410, Euripides wrote of the bloody rituals of the Bacchae in his famous play, The Bacchantes:
...the Bacchantes....with hands that bore no weapon of steel, attacked our cattle as they browsed. Then wouldst thou have seen Agave mastering some sleek lowing calf, while others rent the heifers limb from limb. Before thy eyes there would have been hurling of ribs and hoofs this way and that, and strips of flesh, all blood be-dabbled, dripped as they hung from the pine branches. Wild bulls, that glared but now with rage along their horns, found themselves tripped up, dragged down to earth by countless maidens hands.
Euripedes went on to describe how Pentheus, the King of Thebes, was torn apart and eaten alive by his own mother as, according to the play, she fell under the spell of Dionysus.

SUPERNATURAL COMMUNION THROUGH BLOOD SACRIFICE

The tearing apart and eating alive of sacrificial victims may refer to the earliest history of the cult of Dionysus. An ancient and violent cult ritual existing since the dawn of paganism stipulated that, by eating alive, or by drinking the blood, of an enemy or an animal, a person might somehow capture the essence or "soul-strength" of the victim. The earliest Norwegian huntsmen believed in this idea, and they drank the blood of bears in an effort to capture their physical strength. East African Masai warriors also practiced omophagia, and they sought to gain the strength of the wild by drinking the blood of lions. Human victims were treated in this way by Arabs before Mohammed, and head-hunters of the East Indies practiced omophagia in an effort to capture the essence of their enemies.

The Maya and the Toltecs practiced similar ritual human sacrifice, cutting the heart from tens of thousands of living victims and drinking their blood.

[Photo inset: August Le Plongeon christened the reclining Maya figure at the summit of the Temple of the Warriors a "chacmool," a ritual figure believed to be a messenger to the gods. The dish on its stomach held the heart of the sacrificial victim.]

Today, omophagia is practiced by certain Voodoo sects as well as by cult Satanists. Such modern omophagia illustrates a continuing effort on the part of Satan to distort the original revelations of God. Eating human flesh and drinking human blood as an attempt to "become one" with the devoured is, in many cases, a demonization of the Eucharist, or Holy Communion.

But sparagmos and omophagia, as practiced by the followers of Dionysus, was not an attempt of transubstantiation (as in the Catholic Eucharist), nor of consubstantiation (as in the Lutheran communion), nor yet of a symbolic ordinance (as in the fundamentalist denomination), all of which have as a common goal the elevating of the worshipper into a sacramental communion with God. The goal of the Bacchae was the opposite: The frenzied dance; the thunderous song; the licentious behavior; the tearing apart and eating alive; all were efforts on the part of the Bacchae to capture the essence of the god (Dionysus) and bring him down into an incarnated rage within man. The idea was not one of holy communion, but of possession by the spirit of Dionysus.

When one recalls the horrific animal and human sacrifices made by the followers of Dionysus, it's easy to understand Father Welch's outrage: "…if a Greek bishop requested permission to unite Easter Mass with a sacrifice to Demeter [see Raiders News Update article on Easter], he would be an object of mockery. This is a blatant contradiction of the first commandment hiding in the sheep's clothes of diversity. These practices were begun in the worship of false gods."

Father Welch concludes, "The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is a hidden treasure of graces obtained for us by Jesus Christ with His Death at Calvary. As we begin the Lenten Season and commemorate the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, we must pray that the people of South Africa, and all those who dissent from the Church, will return to the one true and eternal faith."

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