Reform Vatican style and the Gospel

Readings for the 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Over 21 Centuries, the Church, like the people of Israel, has had a lot of ups and downs, decline and renewal.  The mission of the Church has been to help people reform their lives, but, itself, is often in need of reform. Here are some examples:

• In religious life, The Cistercians and Trappists are medieval reformations of the ancient Benedictine order, begun in the seventh century. During the long course of its history the Benedictines have had many regional reformations.

• In the 17th Century, the Carmelites underwent the reforms of St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. That is why we have two kinds of Carmelites in Tucson, the Order of Carmelites who minister at Salpointe and the discalced Carmelites who pastor Santa Cruz parish.

• The universal Church likewise has attempted major institutional reforms like the Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century, which imposed stricter discipline on the clergy, including mandatory celibacy, and secured the independence of the Church from secular control by asserting the right to appoint bishops.

• Other examples of reform in the Church are the councils, especially Nicaea and those in its wake that brought order to our Trinitarian theology.

False reforms have also played an important part in Church history. A false reform destroys the nature of the Church. Here are some examples:

• The Encratite’s, a 2nd Century sects with Puritanical instincts that forbade marriage because of sex and eating meat.

• The Donatists in the 4th Century reacted to the failure of persecuted Christians to keep the faith and die as martyrs by refusing forgiveness and communion to those that lapsed. The Donatist controversy was an essential element, ironically, of our development of the sacrament of Confession in its present form.

• The Waldensians in the 12th Century, the Spiritual Franciscans in the 13th Century, John Wycliffe and John Hus in the 14th Century were all attempts by zealous people to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

• The Conciliar movement in the 15th Century, in response to the Church corruption of the Borgia popes amongst others, was the attempt to turn the Church into a constitutional monarchy, more or less run by the nobility.  It ultimately ran afoul of the Catholic doctrine of papal primacy.

• Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, following the failure of the Fifth Lateran Council to reform the Church ultimately tore the Church apart in the name of restoring Christianity. That upheaval explains why we have Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the various Christian sects and denominations you know well.

The Protestant Reformation repelled Catholic reformers and from the 16th Century on, the Church was in a lockdown mode. Three centuries after the Council of Trent, the First Vatican Council was convened to counter much of the Enlightenment and Modernist agenda that we live with in secular society today. A century later, the Second Vatican Council was called which, much more so than Vatican I, attempted to renew and restore the Church. The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, declared, “The Church, embracing sinners in her bosom, is at the same time holy and always in need of being purified, and incessantly pursues the path of penance and renewal” (Lumen Gentium 8). The Church is human and divine. The human is in constant need of reform. But, this is a pre-Christian problem:

The Gospel of Matthew
The gospel today is Jesus’ call to the leaders of Israel to reform or destruction will follow. Why don’t they respond and reform? Ever try to lose 10 pounds? It is hard.

Here is the context for today’s parable. At the beginning of Chapter 21 of Matthew, Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey. He goes to the Temple and cleanses it by whipping and chasing out the money lenders. He is cleaning house and heads are rolling. He curses a fig tree by the side of the road because it does not bear fruit. When confronted by the Chief priest and the Scribes who ask, “By what authority do you do this?” that is, cleansing the Temple, he responded, “Where was John’s baptism from? Was it of heavenly or of human origin?” They responded,

But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we fear the crowd, for they all regard John as a prophet.”  So, they said to Jesus in reply, “We do not know.” He himself said to them, “Neither shall I tell you by what authority I do these things.* Mt. 21:26-27

First, reform requires an honest assessment of your true situation. Then Jesus told them the parable in today’s gospel. In this parable Jesus is doubling down and asserting that the leaders of Israel are like wicked tenants of a vineyard.  His audience are the chief priests and the elders of the people, not Galilean farmers. This parable is an allegory, a story with a hidden meaning. In this allegory, there are a few key characters.

• the householder — the owner of the vineyard, which, in turn is always a sign of Israel;

• tenants, they don’t own the vineyard, but they work there;

• servants who the master sent to collect the fruit of the vineyard, but the tenants refused and, instead, beat them, and finally

• The owner’s son who the tenants murdered.

Not hard to figure out the allegory and its application to Israel, the prophets and the crucifixion of Jesus.  Jesus reworked the same story told by the prophet Isaiah in the first reading. “Then he looked for the crop of grapes, but what it yielded was wild grapes.” Is. 5 The prophets were pretty much always resisted at best and usually treated badly.

• Isaiah was sawn in two by the wicked king Manasseh.

• Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern and, according to Jewish tradition again, was stoned to death in Egypt by other Jewish exiles.

What kind of father would send his son into danger? This is not an ordinary father or an ordinary son. In this allegory, God the Father sends Jesus, his son, to offer his life, knowing full well he is going to die for the sake of the sins of the world. Jesus is describing the Paschal mystery.

True and False Reform
We are a Church in need of reform. We are always in need of reform. When Catholics are concerned about reform, two opposite errors ought to be avoided.

1. Error 1: Assume that because the Church is divinely instituted, it never needs reforming. Our long history of reform belies that error. The Church is oh so human, also. Complacency is the enemy.

2. Error 2: Attack or undermine the essentials of Catholic Christianity. This would not be reform but dissolution. The Catholic Church is bound to her Scriptures, her creeds, her dogmas, and her divinely instituted hierarchical office and sacramental worship. To attack the pope or the councils, the highest teaching authority, is to commit the second error.

When you listen to the Gospel today, you have to ask yourself why they didn’t listen. Didn’t they see the need for reform. Same reason we don’t listen.

Reforming morals
If you have noticed, the Holy Father recently sacked one of the most powerful cardinals in the Vatican, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, sostituto for the Vatican Secretary of State under Popes Benedict and Francis. . We know all about it, not because Pope Francis gave us the information, but because that Cardinal Becciu l was so upset by his dismissal, that he called a press conference to explain why he was sacked.

“In our meeting, the Holy Father told me that I favored my brothers and their companies with money from the Secretariat of State,” Becciu said in a Sept. 25 invite-only press conference he organized the day after his resignation was announced. New Outlook Online,

He admitted he spent

1. $100,000 Euros on a charitable organization that his brother ran;

2. Second, Becciu was adamant at the press conference he called that he didn’t think it was a crime to pay his brother’s company about $230,000 for fixtures for the Vatican embassy in Cuba where he served as ambassador between 2009 and 2011. 

“Excuse me, but I didn’t know anyone else,” he said in a newspaper interview that came out Friday morning. “It was obvious I’d use my brother’s company. The work wasn’t even finished under me but the ambassador who followed me, who was so happy with the service he called the company again when he was later sent to Egypt.” “I don’t see a crime,” he said during the press conference. New Outlook Online

3. The trigger, possibly, is that he was being investigated for a shady real estate deal he was apparently involved in regarding property located in London.

Cardinal Pell, recently acquitted by the Australian Supreme Court of child abuse, said that he wondered if there was a link between his efforts at cleaning up the Vatican finances, his clash with the old guard, his clashes with Cardinal Becciu and the allegations he faced in Australia.

Pell said he did not have evidence of a link. But he suspected that a man who swore he had been sexually abused by Pell as a 13-year-old choirboy had been “used.” Pell again seemed to hint at a link in a statement last week in which he “thanked and congratulated” Francis for firing Becciu. “I hope the cleaning of the stables continues in both the Vatican and Victoria,” Pell said, referring to his home state of Victoria where he was convicted. New Outlook Online

Pope Francis has been on a roll for several years, but Becciu was the most surprising. You can’t get higher in the Vatican without being pope. But, it is not like he shouldn’t have seen this coming. Francis accepted the resignation of Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien in 2015 because of his sexual misconduct. He removed American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick following similar allegations. He forced the resignation of Cardinal Angelo Sodano who has been associated with coverups of the scandals in Chile and, possible, the McCarrick scandal. In May 2020 the Pope sacked Vatican administrators implicated in a London real estate scandal (without waiting for the end of the judicial process) which suggests he worked his way up the ladder to Becciu. Half the members that oversee Vatican finances are European finance big wigs. Oh, they are also women. He has forced the resignations of bishops, including Americans, and demanded and received the resignations of the entire episcopal college of Chile because of their inaction on the sex abuse scandal there.

Over the course of his papacy, Pope Francis has preached to the Curia, Bishops and Cardinals about reform. He has invited them to prayers. He has lectured them on sin. No apparent affect. No changes. Now, heads are rolling and criminal prosecutions are being ramped up, although the Vatican has no prisons and must rely on the Italian state. In response, Catholics have questioned the legitimacy of his papacy, the legitimacy of the Second Vatican Council and have charged that him as an idolater. Useful to those who resist reform.

Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote,

“The Church must be herself and must not strive to become what nonbelievers might like her to be. Her first responsibility is to preserve intact the revelation and the means of grace that have been entrusted to her. Her second responsibility is to transmit the faith in its purity and make it operative in the lives of her members. Her third responsibility is to help persons who are not yet her members, and human society as a whole, to benefit from the redemptive work of Christ.”  True and False Reform, by Avery Cardinal Dulles, First Things August 2003

False reforms, I conclude, are those that fail to respect the imperatives of the gospel and the divinely given traditions and structures of the Church, or which impair ecclesial communion and tend rather toward schism. Would-be reformers often proclaim themselves to be prophets but show their true colors by their lack of humility, their impatience, and their disregard for the Sacred Scripture and tradition.

The Pope it seems is patient, but he does have his limits. So, dust off your resumes, it looks like there are some new job openings in Rome.