Late last month I went to a Requiem Mass. An All Hallows mother had died, one of the many All Hallows ladies who was mother to us all as children.
When I started All Hallows as a First Grader in 1962, our new church was only two years old. But built in the last days before Vatican II changes were to strike, our church was built in the old way. A nave that was shaped like a cross. A formal baptistry as you entered from the side. And a grand marble altar where the priest said Mass, all of us — priest and congregation — facing the same direction.
In 1962 that Mass would be said in Latin. So it was poetic that the funeral I attended last week would also be in Latin, seeming to punctuate my lifelong relationship with this particular lady and her generation of All Hallows mothers who I first came to know in First Grade when our language of worship was Latin.
The Requiem Mass – the priest celebrant made a point to tell us this was a REQUIEM MASS – was said in near silence. No microphone. Just the faint Latin chants of the Mass. Of course I knew the responses. Of course I remembered them. Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. We learned those as First Graders. And here I was years later putting those lessons to use in this Latin Requiem Mass for a mother I’d known all my life.
Something struck me. A key unlocked. The Latin — nearly a whisper — was calling out for deeper reflection. It was me, the Mass, the divine reality above, and the surrounding reality in that church that day at this Requiem Mass.
I was surrounded by families.
Young families.
Families with many children.
I counted 10 in the two pews ahead of me. Oldest to youngest, each reverent, the olders helping the youngers. As I looked across the aisle to the other side of the church, and then up the sides, and across the front? Young families. Plentiful children. Reverence. Solemnity. A church packed full of these good people.
All young. All reverent. All solemn. And in their faces, the tranquility of joy, calm and faith. It was a miraculous moment. I felt I was being let in to another consciousness, where my awareness was drawn from the harshness of the world to the calmness of the divine, there in St. Stephen the First Martyr Church, 44th Street, Sacramento during the whispered cadences of the Mass in Latin.
With odd suddenness, I realized that here before me were all of the reasons Pope Francis harbors such contempt for the very beautiful things I was seeing.
Could I dare think that here were forms of holiness that would spectacularly threaten one whose life had been given over to failure? Francis is a Jesuit ordained in 1969, which as the observant among us can attest was not a good time in church history. By 1969, Vatican II had unleashed its torrents and suddenly our churches, schools, and convents were emptying, setting in motion a trajectory that has only gotten worse.
Is it any shock at all to realize that social crisis has now followed the church’s crisis?
The good and reverent people at St. Stephen the First Martyr and millions like them remind Francis of the failures of his era, the failures of his Order, the failures of his generation of priest and prelate, all these failures to contain the furies let loose in the very same decade he was first ordained a priest.
What vocation could his possibly be? Ascend to the highest heights of Church life and on arrival penalize those who stand tallest against the tides of ruin? Besiege these plentiful young families by seeking the elimination – no, the destruction – of their form of worship? Can there be any more hideous assault on pastoral life than a papacy that targets modest people dedicated to family, to living modestly, dedicated to selflessness?
Francis in his failed weakness MUST target them. Their modest holiness is too visible to be tolerated.
Now we understand you, Francis.
_______
Epilogue:
If the papacy of Benedict or John Paul had come out with the same form of blessing, I think many would have been more receptive because we trusted those Popes.
However, Francis — in his absence of scholarship, his deference to Maoist China, his high tolerance for scandalous priests — has given us no reason to trust him, and in fact, has acted chaotically on virtually all topics (possibly excepting abortion).
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