5/6/2025

 Tuesday, May 6, 2025

D+181/106

2001 During a trip to Syria, Pope John Paul II became the first pope to enter a mosque

In bed at 9, up at 5, body all achin' an a-wracked wid pain.'  47°, high 67°.

Prednisone, day 357; 2 mg., day 19/21; Kevzara, day 8/14; CGM, day 4/15; Trulicity.  Prednisone at 5:20 a.m.  Other meds at 6:20 a.m.

Thoughts on the conclave, Conclave, faith, and the Faith.  Overall, I enjoyed the movie Conclave, especially the roles and the acting of Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence and Stanley Tucci as Cardinal Bellini.  I enjoyed the depiction of fierce political infighting and what it suggested, to me at least, about the myth of the Holy Ghost guiding the process.  I enjoyed the depiction of high Church officials with scandals in their pasts.  I enjoyed the nearly smothering excess of tradition, history, and customs in everything from the uniforms worn by the prelates, the lesser clergy and religous, and the Swiss Guard, to the site of the deliberations in the Sistine Chapel, to the very word 'conclave,'  with its suggestions of secrecy, mystery, and exclusivity.  I enjoyed, though only in a perverse way, the Vatican's ubiquitous suggestions of royalty, a kingdom, and of Rome's imperium.  Mostly, however, I enjoyed the never-developed mention of Cardinal Lawrence's religious doubts about the Faith and the Church, the Holy Ghost guiding and presiding presence, and about God Himself.  Two thoughts came to mind.  The first was of the mainstream Protestant minister who was in the Marine Reserve unit I worked with in Philadelphia.  He told me he was an atheist and that many clergymen didn't believe in God, or at least in the conventional, traditional God believed in by most of the faithful.  The second was of my friend Tom St. John, a 'fallen-away' Catholic and Jewish convert, who picked me up after Mass one Sunday for a golfing outing.  When I got into his car, he asked me: "You don't really believe in all that shit, do you?"  I wrote that Cardinal Lawrence's dubeity was never developed as a theme in the movie, but perhaps it suffosed the entire plot, i.e., seeing how and through whom the papal selection process works, can anyone really believe that the whole process is somehow divinely-guided, or that it has anything to do with God, or with the relationship, if any, betwen God and humankind, 'made in his image.' Gen. 1:26-28. 1 Cor. 11:7.  Indeed, must we not wonder: if we are made in the image of God, what does that say about God?

 

The Prince of the Church in cardinal red is Raymond Burke, a native of Richland Center, Wisconsin, ordained a priest in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where he served as its bishop before being promoted to Archbishop of St. Louis, and then again to the rank of cardinal in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI.  He is a right-wing traditionalist, champion of the Latin Mass, and opponent of Pope Francis.  He is the biggest fop in the Vatican, as one might guess from the ridiculous length of the train of his robe he is wearing in this photo.  Until he was demoted by Pope Francis, he was the prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial authority in the Catholic Church.  Francis also evicted him from his elegant, subsidized Vatican apartment.

From my memoir:

There is a story about Jesus in the gospels of Mark and Luke that receives too little attention from the professional Church, the priests and nuns and eminences with satin beanies and palatial residences.  Mark tells it like this:

People were bringing little children [or toddlers] to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them.  But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.  Surely whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

Luke has the disciples even more authoritarian and off-putting than Mark: “when the disciples saw them, they sternly ordered them not to do it . . .”

It’s a great tale of Jesus’ warmth and physical affection – “he took them up in his arms . . .”   The aspect of the story that I am focusing on here, however, is that it is the disciples of Jesus, the ‘true believers,’ the ‘in crowd’ that stood between the children and Jesus.  It was the people closest to him who built a wall around him, attempting to fence Jesus in and fence the innocents out.  I reveal my hostility toward clericalism in admitting that I can’t help thinking of those disciples as the ecclesial ancestors of the Church’s clerical caste, the professional God-guys, or at least the pharisaical ones, of whom I have known a good many.

With our home life on the Good Ship Clausen so precarious and sometimes stormy, my mother’s stabilizing keel notwithstanding, the major influence on Kitty and me other than our family was the Catholic Church.  This influence was exercised mainly through parochial schooling at St. Leo’s Grammar School for both of us and Leo High School for me and Visitation High School for Kitty.  The grammar school was run by the Sisters of Providence headquartered outside Notre Dame, Indiana.  Leo was run by the Irish Christian Brothers and “Vis” by the Sinsinawa Dominicans with their motherhouse south of Platteville,  Wisconsin.  

As volatile as things could be at home, there was no visible volatility in the Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, especially the Irish American version that ruled in Chicago and in St. Leo Parish.  The Church taught us that it was infallible, immutable, incorruptible and, in its view, specially commissioned by God Himself to lead us little children to Jesus.

The Clausen kids were religious citizens of the great Archdiocese of Chicago, an ecclesial jurisdiction that covered almost 1,500 square miles in Cook and Lake counties.  There were 4,200,000 people living in those counties in 1950 and 1,691,681 were officially Catholics, almost 40%, 80% of whom resided in the City of Chicago.  The diocese was divided into 393 parishes, 341 of which had parish elementary schools runs by nuns.   There were 75 Catholic high schools.   There were almost 1,200 diocesan priests and another 1,000 religious order priests, 1,000 religious order brothers, and about 8,000 sisters.  Running this vast operation was Samuel Cardinal Stritch who became archbishop of Chicago in 1940, promoted from his post as archbishop of Milwaukee.

Cardinal Stritch, like his predecessors and successors, lived in splendor in an elegant Victorian mansion at 1555 North State Parkway on the “Gold Coast” of Chicago.  The three story, 19 chimneyed mansion occupies a city block on the southern border of Lincoln Park and is probably the most valuable and desirable living quarters in the City of Chicago.  It is a dwelling fit for a feudal lord, which is what the Archbishop of Chicago was and is.    

In English feudalism after the Norman Conquest, all land was considered ultimately owned by the King.  The king distributed the land to vassals who promised always to render him loyalty, often to pay him money and other things of value, and usually to provide troops to him for his wars.  The top vassals, barons and earls, subdivided their tenures to subvassals who made similar promises of loyalty, rents, military service, or other ‘incidents of tenure’ in return for protection of their tenures by their immediate overlord.  From the king to the barons though layers of ‘subinfeudation’ down to the lowest freeholder there exisited a system of reciprocal rights and duties between lords and vassals.

This kind of system is still in play in the Catholic Church.  The Pope has the role of King or more aptly Emperor, the ultimate owner of the Church’s dominions and principalities (in trust for God, of course.)  He has his imperial court or curia.  He divides the imperium into geographical and jurisdictional dioceses (much as the Late Roman Empire was divided into dioceses) in which the usual vassal is the local ‘ordinary’ or bishop, who owes fealty, obedience and a share of his revenues from the diocesan holdings to the Pope in return for the Pope’s loyalty and protection (witness the Pope’s cushy treatment of Bernard Cardinal Law after his resignation in disgrace from the Boston archdiocese.)  The diocese in turn is subdivided geographically and jurisdictionally into parishes controlled by pastors who owe fealty, obedience and a share of the revenues from their parochial holding to the bishop in return for the bishop’s loyalty and protection (witness, as but one example, the bishops’ disgraceful protection of criminal priests in America, Ireland, Austria, and elsewhere.)  It is all very feudal, based on personal power and loyalty relationships between lords and vassals.  It is not mere tradition that causes the bishops to kneel before the Pope and kiss his ring or that calls for new priests and deacons to lie prostrate before their bishop during the Litany of Saints in the ordination liturgy in which they vow obedience to him, or that has the Pope addressed as “Your Holiness.” cardinals as “Your Eminence,” archbishops as “Your Grace,” and bishops as “My Lord.”  These practices and many more have their roots in the imperial courts of the Roman Empire and in European feudalism.  The Church’s feudal power structure was very much in force in the Chicago in which the Clausen children grew up.  Our parish priests were accountable to our pastor, our pastor was accountable only to the archbishop who was accountable only to the Vatican.

 How the Church operated internally, e.g., how it handled its finances and its personnel, was kept secret from the “laity,” a term whose only meaning is negative: those who are not priests.  How much money did the parishes provide to the archdiocese?  How much did the archdiocese provide to Rome?  How were bishops selected?  How were pastors and curates selected?  How were priests with alcohol or worse problems handled?  These were not matters for the ‘laity,’ but rather for ‘the Church,’ i.e., the priestly caste.  The Church was the clergy; the role of the laity was to pray, pay and obey.  As Pope Pius X wrote in his 1906 encyclical  Vehementer Nos.

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.  So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end  of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.