Barry Hudock's Blog, page 28

Pope Francis’s Option for the Poor, Part 2: What is an “option for the poor”?

In that first audience with journalists, which I mentioned in the Part 1, Francis called for “a Church which is poor and for the poor.” This may be as succinct and effective a description of church teaching on the preferential option of the poor as you will find.

The idea of an option for the poor insists that people living in poverty need and deserve the special concern of the Church and society and that where there are social or political structures, practices, or attitudes that work against people living in poverty, the Church must take the side of the poor. A primary question in approaching all social, ecclesial, and personal decisions should be, “How will it affect the poor?”

The Christian option for the poor is, more than anything else, an imitation of the attitude and the behavior of God.  Throughout salvation history, God reveals God’s own preferential option for the poor, in a way that allowed Pope John Paul II to feel comfortable calling people living in poverty “God’s favorites.”

From the very beginnings of the story of the Israelite people, God chooses to work through the poor, the weak, and the marginalized, and God works in direct opposition to the indignities and the oppression that they face at the hands of the rich and powerful of the world and on behalf of their liberation. In the Old Testament, it is impossible to separate the theme of poverty from the theme of liberation from injustice and oppression.

With the coming of Christ, salvation history takes a dramatic new turn, but God’s option for the poor remains an unbroken theme of the story. Christ, the incarnate God, is truly God’s option for the poor made flesh. We see this expressed, for example, in the song of Mary, who proclaims after her initial encounter with the angel who announced the coming of the Christ that the Lord has “dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart./ He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones / but lifted up the lowly. / The hungry he has filled with good things; / the rich he has sent away empty” (Luke 1: 51-53). We see it in Jesus’s homily in the synagogue of Nazareth, when he says that he was sent to proclaim freedom to captives and let the oppressed go free (Luke 4: 18). We see it in his own Resurrection, a divine vindication in which he can be seen to stand in the place of all of the crucified people of the history.

An option for the poor, in other words, is absolutely christocentric. This is expressed well by of the Latin American Episcopal Conference, a document upon which then-Cardinal Bergoglio had a strong influence: “Everything having to do with Christ has to do with the poor, and everything connected to the poor cries out to Jesus Christ: ‘whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me’ (Mt 25:40)…. For in Christ the great became small, the strong became weak, the rich became poor” (n. 393).

Throughout the history of Christianity, people of faith have recognized and responded to this revelation of God’s love for the poor by loving and helping the poor, often in dramatic and heroic ways. Effective and important hospitals, schools, religious orders, and more – some prominent and well-known, but many more small and unnoticed — illumine the landscape of Christian history.

But there is more to the idea of an “option for the poor” than helping the poor, and what is new comes thanks to two important threads of development in the church and modern society.

First, the twentieth century brought some new insights about poverty. Poverty had been understood, through much of history, as the result mostly of chance, fate, blind luck, personal virtue, or even God’s plan. But we have more recently seen clearly that the experience of poverty — who is poor and who is not and their ability to avoid or overcome poverty – has a lot more to do with the way people have chosen to organize society. Pope John Paul II spoke of these social, political, and legal aspects of poverty as “structures of sin.” In the United States, we have seen — to name an obvious few — legal slavery, Jim Crow laws, “redlining,” and, more broadly, racism and sexism.

Second, the twentieth century also brought a new theological development that in turn had a big impact on church life in some parts of the globe. The 1970s saw the appearance in Latin America of liberation theology, a theological movement that understood Christianity through the prism of the poverty and oppression in the world and also in Scripture. Preferential option for the poor is one important aspect of liberation theology. More than just call to help the poor or acting on behalf of the poor, the option for the poor is also essentially

sharing experiences and life with the poor
opposing social structures and injustices that help make or keep many people poor
relating to the dominant powers of society with some suspicion and prophetic challenge

It is easy to identify each of these elements on the pages of the Bible itself. We also find it expressed in various ways throughout Christian tradition. But it took a new and central place in the work of liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru, Leonardo Boff of Brazil, and Jon Sobrino of El Salvador.

I want to note, finally, that there has at times been some conflict between liberation theology and Vatican authorities. Because of this, some people are under the impression that liberation theology as a project has been condemned by the Church’s teaching authority, which can easily lead to the conclusion that its most important ideas, including the preferential option for the poor, are to be avoided as heterodox or dangerous. Neither is true.

It’s true that the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did criticize some aspects of liberation theology in a 1984 document. The focus of its criticism was the way some theologians had at times incorporated Marxist theory too readily into their theological work and politicized the Christian faith. But a follow-up 1986 document from the same Vatican congregation took a much more positive approach and offered support to many of the most important elements of liberation theology.

It’s safe to say that the oppositional element of the preferential option, while it had some place in the teaching and the ministry of John Paul II, has been downplayed by the magisterium, perhaps especially by Benedict XVI. (But see this interesting article from John Allen a couple of years back, on “The lonely liberation theology of Benedict XVI.”) And yet many of its ideas are considered “mainstream,” orthodox Catholic doctrine today, including preferential option for the poor. In fact, we can note that Archbishop Gerhard Müller, appointed Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Pope Benedict in 2012, is said to be a student, friend, and supporter of Gutiérrez. The two even co-authored a book, the title of which could be translated, On the Side of the Poor. “The theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez,” Müller has said, “independently of how you look at it, is orthodox.”

In Part 3, we’ll consider Pope Francis’s preferential option for the poor.

Pope Francis’s Option for the Poor: Part 1

“Don’t forget the poor,” his friend admonished him at that moment of nearly unutterable gravity….

Seated in the long rows of red-draped tables set up in the Sistine Chapel to accommodate the election of a pope, the cardinals of the Catholic Church listened as the votes they had each just cast were read aloud solemnly. Among them was Cardinal Jorge Maria Bergoglio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Bergoglio had been a front-runner in the papal election of 2005, the one from which Joseph Ratzinger had ultimately emerged as Pope Benedict XVI. But it was eight years later now, and Bergoglio was an older man, 76 years old. Especially following Benedict’s surprise resignation for reasons of the decreased stamina that comes with age, neither Bergoglio nor anyone else his age had a place on almost any of the familiar shortlists of papabili that were so popular in the press in recent weeks.

And yet, here he was, listening to the votes being read aloud on the second day of voting, hearing his name repeated again and again. “Bergoglio…. Bergoglio…. Bergoglio….” Every man in the room knew that they would have a pope when a single name drew two-thirds of the vote – in this case, 77 votes.

Sitting beside Bergoglio as his name was repeated dozens of times – interspersed occasionally with the names of a couple of other men in the room – his longtime friend Cardinal Claudio Hummes squeezed Begoglio’s wrist gently. Then came the moment when his name was read for the seventy-seventh time. Bergoglio would be Pope. Applause broke out among the cardinals. With obvious emotion, as the reading of votes continued, Hummes hugged his friend and kissed him on the cheek. Looking Bergoglio in the eyes, Hummes said quietly, “Don’t forget the poor.”

Begoglio himself publicly recounted this moment just three days later, in his very first major papal audience. He did so in an address to the 6,000 journalists who covered the conclave, as he offered an explanation for the name he had chosen to take as pope. He recounted Cardinal Hummes’s warm and supportive gestures and the comment he made at the moment of his election. Then the new Pope Francis continued:

And those words came to me: the poor, the poor.  Then, right away, thinking of the poor, I thought of Francis of Assisi.  Then I thought of all the wars, as the votes were still being counted, till the end.  Francis is also the man of peace.  That is how the name came into my heart: Francis of Assisi.  For me, he is the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation; these days we do not have a very good relationship with creation, do we?  He is the man who gives us this spirit of peace, the poor man. How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!

In that handful of sentences, explaining a choice he knew would help define his pontificate, the Pope mentions several central elements of Catholic social teaching: the challenge of peace, care for the environment, and poverty. Even as he was being elected and certainly as he was making the first and foundational choice of his new ministry, these principles were very much on his mind. Since that day, he has shown himself to be very intentionally an apostle of Catholic social teaching, and it is precisely these words and efforts that have grabbed the attention of the world, even among many who would not know the meaning of the phrase “Catholic social teaching.”

But among the many facets of Catholic social teaching, it is the issue of poverty that has most clearly been on his mind. It is my conviction that an “option for the poor” has quickly taken a central place in the papal ministry of Pope Francis. That’s the point I intend to dig into in the occasional series of blog posts I introduce here. I will explore what exactly is meant by the phrase; how we see it expressed in the teaching, the decisions, and the daily life of Pope Francis; how what he is doing may be said to lack in some ways a full “option for the poor”; and its significance in the life of the Church and the world today.

I call this series of posts “occasional” because I will post them as I complete them. They may even get some revision after posting, if it seems helpful as I progress along. Though my plan may develop, what I have in mind now is a series of six posts:

Part one: these introductory remarks

Part two: What is an “option for the poor”?

Part three: Pope Francis’s option for the poor

Part four: The Pope on “savage capitalism”

Part five: Continuity and newness: the Pope’s option for the poor in the context of recent history and Catholic social teaching

Part six: Concluding comments and observations

Posting them once a week for six weeks would be ideal, but life has a way of throwing things in one’s way, so let’s see how it goes. Thanks for your interest.

Francis’s time with the poor at next week’s WYD

In this week’s coverage of final preparations for World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, based on public comments made by Fr. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, several details have been surprisingly buried in the reportage (and even more surprisingly, not even mentioned in John Allen, Jr’s NCR coverage of Lombardi’s comments). I’m referring to a few important events added to the schedule at the request of Francis himself, which bear his distinctive marks. The Associated Press reports:

Francis has a busy schedule in Brazil, including a one-day trip to the popular Marian shrine in Aparecida, between Rio and Sao Paolo, a visit with patients at a hospital for the poor and another with juvenile offenders. A highlight will be a walk-through of one of Rio’s slums, or favelas, where Francis is expected to stop inside one home and chat with a family, Lombardi said.

Italy’s La Stampa is reporting at its Vatican Insider website that the Pope personally “asked for [these] new events to be added to the schedule.” It is, to my mind, more evidence of the “option for the poor” that Francis has made an important part of his papal ministry.

“Moral theology with a fresh face”

Around this time last year, my wife and kids and I were on vacation back home in western Pennsylvania, visiting extended family. My vacation reading, which I sat with as we relaxed at my aunt’s backyard pool and took along on my early morning walks, was Maureen O’Connell’s If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice. I found it to be invigorating, challenging, highly engaging, and quite beautiful. (In fact, it later made my “Favorite Reads of 2012″ list.) It also made for some interesting poolside and breakfast table conversations with family during that vacation, two of whom later followed up asking how they could get a copy and one of whom gave a copy to a friend who, I subsequently heard, thoroughly enjoyed it.

I and my family are not the only ones who appreciated If These Walls Could Talk. Since last summer, it has won first place in the theology category in the 2013 Catholic Press Association awards, and the College Theology Society named it Book of the Year.

Now Boston College theology professor Stephen Pope has joined in the chorus. In a fine review published in this week’s issue of America magazine, Pope writes:

Moral theology is sometimes thought to be boring—preoccupied with how to deal with old rules or refining virtues or dissecting magisterial pronouncements. People who have this impression ought to read O’Connell. She gives us moral theology with a fresh face—culturally engaged with the grass roots rather than just with the academy, concerned with the real challenges faced by ordinary people, not text-book hypotheticals imagined by someone trying to get tenure….

O’Connell has produced a masterpiece in aesthetics, spirituality and political theology. Reading this book will make you want to spend a week in Philadelphia with a camera in one hand and a journal in the other. It will help you to see beauty and dignity in unexpected ways. If you take O’Connell seriously she will also help you look in a new way at your own city, and your own neighborhood. If you are committed to “finding God in all things,” this book is a must read.

Professor Pope puts it well. Seeing beauty and dignity in unexpected ways was precisely my own experience of the book.

The entire review is here. More info on the book is here. If you have any interest in social justice, moral theology, urban poverty, or race relations in America, you will not regret the time or money you spend on If These Walls Could Talk.

Donal Dorr’s “Option for the Poor and for the Earth”

Just finishing up reading Donal Dorr’s Option for the Poor and for the Earth: Catholic Social Teaching. This could well be considered the “gold standard” against which all other books on Catholic social teaching should be compared and judged.

Dorr first published his book Option for the Poor back in 1983. It was masterful summary of CST leading up to the centenary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Dorr’s volume rightly met with wide acclaim and appeared in a second edition in 1992. For this third edition, published last year, Dorr revised and added so much that it was judged appropriate to revise the title, too.

Make no mistake — this is not a crass attempt by the publisher to put a new cover and title on an old book to sell it again. The new edition has over 200 pages of totally new material and much of the older material has been revised and updated. Of the brand new material, there are basically three parts: a whole new chapter on the church’s teaching on women, three chapters taking account of Pope Benedict XVI’s contribution to CST, and a new chapter on concern for the environment. Of these the chapters on women and the environment are good but somewhat cursory and not nearly as analytical as those on Benedict. The chapters on Benedict’s teaching and reactions to it are thorough, insightful, and fascinating.

These adjectives can also be used to describe the rest of the book’s material, carried over with revisions from previous editions. Dorr provides an expansive and careful overview of the long tradition of CST, pointing out its most significant themes, turning points, and protagonists. Especially important is his unwillingness to mold the Church’s teaching to a preconceived ideology. He takes the teaching at face value, even where it challenges the presumptions of the political and ecclesial “left” (which are, of course, different things and to which, one imagines, he is rather sympathetic). He makes clear the many areas of strong continuity in the doctrinal tradition, but also the places of shifting, revision, and discontinuity. He is happy to point out CST’s strongest aspects, but also its weak spots and lacunae.

Having read the previous edition several years ago, reading this one cover to cover was still well worth the time (which was considerable at 500+ pages). One can’t help but wonder, in reading this 2012 book, what some future edition, taking account of the now mostly-yet-to-be-seen teaching, ministry, and example of Pope Francis will have to say.

Lumen Fidei: a “bleak view of modern society”?

Theologian Tina Beattie’s commentary on Lumen Fidei in The Tablet a few days ago is perhaps more critical than it needs to be (though not entirely so, calling the document “beautifully crafted and erudite”), but it does reflect a criticism that is probably worth making. In my own reading of the encyclical, I was struck and impressed by — as I noted in a previous post — its attentiveness to “secular” thinkers. But I also noticed that in most cases, reference to those thinkers (e.g. Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein) was made for the purpose of criticizing them or illustrating a negative point about the modern world.

Beattie notices it, too, and is particularly troubled by this. She criticizes the encyclical’s “bleak view of modern society,” writing:

Only in one short section which comes about half way through its 88 pages does it acknowledge the possibility that faith might be found outside the doctrines, magisterial authority and sacramental unity of the Catholic Church. This section, titled ‘Faith and the search for God’, is so different in tone that it leads me to suspect that here we detect the influence of a quieter, more pastorally sensitive authorial voice, and a hint of a different vision which is about to emerge. Apart from this one section, there is no suggestion that secular society and other religions might have something positive to contribute to the self-understanding of the Catholic faith, nor that people of faith come in many shapes and forms. The overall impression – apart from that one section – is that European culture is riven between faithful Catholics and godless relativists who have lost all concept of truth and meaning. For an encyclical so concerned with truth, this is not a true picture of the complex realities of the modern world.

This is a point well made about an otherwise strong and important encyclical. It is also almost surely the case that this aspect of the document, like many of its very positive ones, is a strong sign of the influence of Benedict XVI upon the text.

At Lampedusa, Pope Francis calls for solidarity with immigrants

We mustn’t fail to take note of the very first apostolic journey of Pope Francis’s pontificate, a dramatic one yesterday to the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa. It serves as an arrival point for immigrants making their way, often packed into rickety wooden boats exposed to the elements, from Africa to Italy by sea. Tens of thousands have made such a voyage in recent years.

For a good perspective on the significance of the location, John Allen has provided a helpful comparison:

To get a sense of its impact, imagine a newly elected president of the United States announcing that his first trip outside D.C. would be to the border to see for himself where people have died and to embrace detainees in an ICE facility. It would be taken as a bold way of proclaiming that compassion will be a hallmark of the new administration. That’s exactly how Italians, and Europeans generally, are reacting to Francis’ planned outing.

The Pope threw a wreath of flowers into the sea to remember the tens of thousands of migrants who have lost their lives while crossing the Mediterranean. He celebrated Mass with the islanders and met with some migrants. Most fascinating to me is that the Pope chose to wear purple vestments, Lenten colors, for this Mass on a weekday of ordinary time. He used the prayers from the Mass for the Forgiveness of Sins, and in his homily, he called the Mass ”a liturgy of repentance.”

Also fascinating, Catholic News Service’s Cindy Wooden reports:

The Mass was filled with reminders that Lampedusa is now synonymous with dangerous attempts to reach Europe: the altar was built over a small boat; the pastoral staff the pope used was carved from wood recycled from a shipwrecked boat; the lectern was made from old wood as well and had a ship’s wheel mounted on the front; and even the chalice — although lined with silver — was carved from the wood of a wrecked boat.

(Some of these details must be driving the liturgical traditionalists crazy.) And rather than being transported while on the island in the popemobile, he travelled — the L.A. Times reported – in a borrowed 20-year-old Fiat Campagnola.

Vatican Radio provides the full text of his remarkable homily here. Here are some snippets:

So many of us, even including myself, are disoriented, we are no longer attentive to the world in which we live, we don’t care, we don’t protect that which God has created for all, and we are unable to care for one another. And when this disorientation assumes worldwide dimensions, we arrive at tragedies like the one we have seen.

“Where is your brother?” the voice of his blood cries even to me, God says. This is not a question addressed to others: it is a question addressed to me, to you, to each one of us. These our brothers and sisters seek to leave difficult situations in order to find a little serenity and peace, they seek a better place for themselves and for their families – but they found death. How many times to those who seek this not find understanding, do not find welcome, do not find solidarity! And their voices rise up even to God!

***

In Spanish literature there is a play by Lope de Vega that tells how the inhabitants of the city of Fuente Ovejuna killed the Governor because he was a tyrant, and did it in such a way that no one knew who had carried out the execution. And when the judge of the king asked “Who killed the Governor?” they all responded, “Fuente Ovejuna, sir.” All and no one! Even today this question comes with force: Who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters? No one! We all respond this way: not me, it has nothing to do with me, there are others, certainly not me. But God asks each one of us: “Where is the blood of your brother that cries out to me?” Today no one in the world feels responsible for this; we have lost the sense of fraternal responsibility; we have fallen into the hypocritical attitude of the priest and of the servant of the altar that Jesus speaks about in the parable of the Good Samaritan: We look upon the brother half dead by the roadside, perhaps we think “poor guy,” and we continue on our way, it’s none of our business; and we feel fine with this. We feel at peace with this, we feel fine! The culture of well-being, that makes us think of ourselves, that makes us insensitive to the cries of others, that makes us live in soap bubbles, that are beautiful but are nothing, are illusions of futility, of the transient, that brings indifference to others, that brings even the globalization of indifference.

Of course, we also cannot fail to take note of the timeliness in the United States context, as the Senate has just passed an immigration reform bill and the House of Representatives considers doing the same.

Lumen Fidei: how does it respond to the “spiritual but not religious” crowd?

I have enjoyed reading through Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Lumen Fidei, over the past several days. It is quite accessible, blessedly free of the heavy and almost impenetrable verbiage of the most recent (and otherwise masterful) papal encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (which was, in fact, made public four years ago today!). And so someone coming to this in the mode of a questioner, a seeker, a doubter, could surely find a helpful answer to the question, “What is faith really about for these Christians?”

Lumen Fidei has four chapters. They are on

the “history” of faith, or central place of faith in the stages of salvation history
the relationship between faith and truth
the transmission of faith
the social/communal aspects of faith

That this text was formed under the influence of Pope Benedict is obvious. The most tell-tale signs, in my opinion, are the strong presence of St. Augustine throughout the text, the insistence on essential connection between faith and truth, and the similar attentiveness to the connections between faith and the other two theological virtues, hope and love. I will mention some other fingerprints left by Pope Benedict below.

Particularly interesting to me are the many references to “secular” writers, philosophers, and poets. These include Friedrich Nietzsche, Dante Alighieri , Martin Buber, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and T.S. Eliot. This is certainly not an encyclical that is disengaged from the broader context of (Western) culture and history.

Neither is it disengaged from modern concerns, doubts, and attitudes about faith. On the contrary, it faces these head-on and wishes to address them constructively. This is illustrated clearly, for example, by the quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche’s letter to his sister: “this is where humanity’s paths part: if you want peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you want to be a follower of truth, then seek.” Most of us know people who would see their own ideas about faith reflected in this comment.

Along the same lines, the text does a good job of responding to the prominent “spiritual but not religious” way of framing the question of faith today, without referring to the phrase specifically. There are probably two important elements to that response in what Francis has to say.

First, he insists on the personal aspect of faith — and here I do not mean simply that it’s personal to the believer, but rather that faith is a personal relationship. Faith — or authentic Christian faith, anyway – cannot be reduced simply to an awareness of a spiritual aspect of reality or a willingness to approach one’s life reflectively. In a passage that is quite characteristic of Joseph Ratzinger’s lifelong work, the encyclical says: “God is not the god of a particular place, or a deity linked to a specific sacred time, but the God of a person, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, capable of interacting with man and establishing a covenant with him. Faith is our response to a word which engaged us personally, to a ‘Thou’ who calls us by name” (8).

Second, Francis also insists (again, in a characteristically Ratzingerian way) on the communal and ecclesial aspects of faith: faith unites us with others and calls us to live out this unity authentically. I loved, for example, this passage from the encyclical’s fourth chapter: “Without a love which is trustworthy, nothing could truly keep men and women united. Human unity would be conceivable only on the basis of utility, on a calculus of conflicting interests or on fear, but not on the goodness of living together, not on the joy which the mere presence of others can give” (51).

Finally, another strong point of the encyclical is that at no point does it suggest faith to be something which draws us away from the world in introspective, exclusive contemplation of God or ourselves. On the contrary, Francis insists that faith must have real world consequences and demands an engagement with the concerns of this world. “Far from divorcing us from reality,” he writes, ”our faith in the Son of God made man in Jesus of Nazareth enables us to grasp reality’s deepest meaning and to see how much God loves this world and is constantly guiding it towards himself. This leads us, as Christians, to live our lives in this world with ever greater commitment and intensity” (18).

Shortcomings? Perhaps a few worth noting briefly.

Though Francis has made clear that this document will serve in a place of the apostolic exhortation that has been expected to follow the Synod on the New Evangelization held in Rome last October, its approach to that topic is, at the very least, subtle and downplayed. Certainly, there is a full chapter on the transmission of faith, but much of this addresses the transmission of faith through the sacraments, especially baptism. There is little here that could be said to be about the new ardor, methods, and expression that John Paul II said are what makes the new evangelization “new.”

Does this suggest that Francis will be downplaying the prominent place that the past two popes have given to this concept of “new evangelization”? I hope not. In fact, I was rather hoping to see him “purify” the concept, freeing it from the traditionalistic, neo-apologetic spin that many in the Church today have given it.

Finally, it is perhaps too easy to criticize a overly Western and masculine point of view here, but it’s worth mentioning. As I noted above, the encyclical, to its credit, engages the thinking of many “secular” thinkers. But the entire list is made up of white, Western men. “Okay, but the popes who wrote this are white, Western men, too,” some will say, “we should not expect otherwise.” But of course, the nature of an encyclical means that they’re speaking to the whole Church, the Church universal. (Fr. Z may have a good point, though he makes it somewhat snarkishly, when he notes that Francis presents himself here as the “Supreme Pontiff,” not the “Bishop of Rome,” since the latter is a job description he appears to prefer.) What more could we learn about faith from perspectives rooted in the Southern hemisphere (though it obviously is Francis’s place of origin, the content of this document clearly comes largely from Benedict), Asia, and from women?

All in all, Lumen Fidei is surely a gift to the church from two extraordinary popes.

Lumen Fidei: the breathless anticipation

PR wizards of the world, take heed. In anticipation of the very first encyclical to be promulgated by a brand new pope who has already embarked upon a historic pontificate, the Vatican PR machine has leapt into action. Pope Francis, as we all know, has the world’s attention. Not wishing to squander this well-deserved attention, the Vatican Information Service (the Vatican’s news agency) is offering tantalizing pre-publication hype this week.

In sentence #2 of a two-sentence notice at News.va, VIS quotes Holy See Press Office Director Federico Lombardi, who describes the new encyclical as — are you ready for it? — “not very extensive.”

This is not, you will note, one unfortunate phrase from an otherwise enthusiastic public relations effort. That’s the entirety of the description to be found in the VIS notice:

Vatican City, 1 July 2013 (VIS) – Pope Francis’ first encyclical, entitled “Lumen Fidei”, will be published on Friday 5 July. The document, described as “not very extensive” by the director of the Holy See Press Office, Fr. Federico Lombardi S.J., will be presented at a Press Conference by Cardinal Marc Ouellet, P.S.S., prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization.

Yes, Fr. Lombardi and VIS, you have us all waiting breathlessly. Masterfully played.

Coming soon: Andrea Grillo’s “Beyond Pius V”

Nearly a month since my last post — the longest pause since I started this blog, I think. Aside from the typical preoccupations of family and work, my “spare time” has been mostly taken up in the task of completing a translation of a fascinating book by the Italian liturgical theologian Andrea Grillo. That project is now complete!

Originally published in Italian a few years ago (as Oltre Pio V: La Riforma Liturgica nel Conflitto di Interpretazioni), this book will be published by Liturgical Press around the end of the year as Beyond Pius V: Conflicting Interpretations of the Liturgical Reform. Grillo is a highly regarded young scholar of liturgical theology in Italy, a professor at the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm. This will be the first of his books to appear in English.

This book makes, I believe, an important contribution to the conversation about liturgy in the Catholic Church today. It’s no secret that that conversation has been pretty heated and divisive at times, and I really think Professor Grillo manages to rise above all that in many ways. He argues adeptly that the twentieth-century liturgical movement was originally about forming Catholics to understand the rites they participate in, so that they might be more effectively formed by the rites. That transformed into a reform of the rites themselves because that was rightly seen as a good way of making them more accessible to Catholics, allowing them to be formed by them more effectively. But in the course of that, reform of the rites became everything and we forgot about forming Catholics to understand and live the rites. That, he says, is what has prevented the liturgical movement from bearing the sort of fruit that people 50 years ago hoped that it would bear. Now that the church has reformed its rites, we need to remember that original intention and allow the rites to reform the church. Only when we do that will the liturgy really be the source and summit of the church’s life.

Grillo strongly criticizes people who emphasize that participation in the liturgy is an “internal, spiritual” participation. He argues that was the pre-conciliar understanding, but it’s also minimalist and strongly clerical, and liturgical theology, especially the theology enshrined in Sacrosanctum Concilium, moved us beyond that. SC’s concept of participation in the liturgy is true to what came before, but it’s more developed in important ways, Grillo says, and . too many today wish to regress to the earlier understanding. Doing so risks losing the great advances we gained in understanding baptismal priesthood, participation of the assembly, the meaning of liturgical ritual-symbols, etc.

Grillo also addresses directly the publication of Summorum Pontificum. He is critical of it, and unfortunately that will mean that many will dismiss it without a thought. But that would be a mistake. His criticism is carefully reasoned, quite respectful, and even deferential at times.

One thing about Beyond Pius V that has pleased me is how real-life and practical he is, given the author’s heavy, academic, and philosophical bent. To be sure he is heavy, academic, and philosophical. But he’s also practical and real. He includes many real life applications of his thinking, and he says, for example, that every liturgist should spend ten years as a truck driver.

Beyond Pius V will be published by Liturgical Press late this fall. (Full disclosure: I work for Liturgical Press.)