Folded Into Time: A Call To American Catholics

Folded Into Time

© 2022 John Moynihan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-66786-798-4

eBook ISBN 978-1-66786-799-1

For Kay

my love beyond time

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Inextinguishable Family

Chapter 2 Dawn of the Electronic Age

Chapter 3 Ethics in Long Pants

Chapter 4 Splashdown on the Irish Riviera

Chapter 5 Winds of Denial

Chapter 6 Sunrise and Sunset

Chapter 7 Table of Trust

Chapter 8 Pregnant with Eternity

Chapter 9 The Transformative Path

Chapter 10 In the Mornings of the World

Chapter 11 Facing History and Ourselves

Chapter 12 The New Pentecost

Afterword

Development Photographs

In Memoriam

Introduction

Strangers to the Reality of Life

[T]he Lord’s Prayer can bring about a real transformation:

Our Father who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. A Buddhist would understand this as touching the ultimate dimension and realizing that the ultimate dimension and the historical dimension are one. It is like the wave touching the water, which is its own nature. This touching removes fear, anger, anxiety, and craving. Heaven and earth become one. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. The Lord’s Prayer shows us that loving God is loving the living beings we see and touch in our daily life. If we can love them, we can love God.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Living Buddha, Living Christ

There is an anecdote, significantly altered for the purpose of this book, about a prelate who after walking for miles through the lush farmlands of Cortona in Tuscany, rested on a low wall near neatly trimmed shrubs at Le Celle, a retreat for Franciscans dating from the thirteenth century. It sets up the theme for Folded into Time . The prelate told the Italian gardener working the grounds, You and God have done wonders with all this property. It is beautiful! The gardener looked around at his labors for a moment and then said, You should see the place when He is working it by Himself.

The old fellow saw God as an involved and constant Presence, as well as a fellow artisan or partner in tending the garden. He viewed the polemics of patronizing prelates as outside commentary and therefore saw them as strangers to the reality of work. Chi non sa fare, non sa comandare (A bad worker is a bad commander) is something that has always been known in the Tuscan hills, but in the age of instantaneous oracular global information technology, even those lucky to live the slow life under the Tuscan sun are up to date. They now talk back to hooded strangers. Walls that have separated workers from the popes and saints roaming these hills for centuries have become meaningless barricades between those engaged in interactive performance and those doing second-hand reviews. The significance for the Catholic Church is this. Humanity has arrived at that climatic moment in the evolution of information technology when the Eurocentric Church of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc has to be folded respectfully into time. Oracles of wisdom, solemnity, and obscurity rely on second-hand, written culture to slow the dynamics of interactive engagement with the reality of a pluralistic world. The onrushing tide of a global, electronic spoken vernacular has made the formal control needs of the ghetto Church absurd in an increasingly pluralistic and communicative world. If the work of human development and human solidarity is not the immediate responsibility of a cosmopolitan Church, then the rational arguments for love and justice have become detached from reason and reality. They are worthless and, as every gardener knows, the evolutionary destiny of things that are worthless is extinction.

The story of the housing ministry in Boston starts with the happy days of Richard Cardinal Cushing, when the Church in Boston had won recognition as a force for good in the world, and it concludes during the days of Sean Cardinal O’Malley, when that is no longer the case. As 2007 begins, a highly confrontational Church is being met everywhere with matching confrontation. Eventually, the archdiocese and those opposing the archdiocese will resolve their differences, but that will not address the fundamental, perplexing reality for the laity about how their Church became a stranger to the reality of life.

Almost a half century ago, when Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council into session, the Catholic Church was moving swiftly on the brisk winds of reality. What happened? A Catholic Church that was involved in every aspect of human life at the time of Vatican II and Cardinal Cushing suddenly doesn’t have a clue about the reality of life? The council theologian, Karl Rahner, called the great council the first official self-actualization of Catholicism as a ‘world’ Church.¹

Recently, Father John O’Malley, SJ, put Rahner’s world Church depiction of the council into a historical frame: Of all the affective needs felt by Catholics at the time the council, few were more urgent among Europeans and Americans than the recognition that the Catholic cultural ghetto had to be terminated, and a new attitude toward the world had to be assumed.² O’Malley makes the key historical point explaining why the brisk winds of reality have entered such a deathly calm. Unfolding the world Church of reality requires folding the illusion of Church as proposition into time. The failure to realize that perfection is a constant quest, rather than a proud boast, has left the faithful—without any awareness of this difference—juxtaposing furious lament with undying love for an antiquated and obsolete image of Church. It is as if the current failures of the Church are making Catholics citizens of a mismanaged country that they still call home. The Church of certainty and nostalgic imagination made it simple and clear. It refuted error and called for confrontation with the forces of evil. The Second Vatican Council came along and complicated everything by recognizing that moral maturity means the capacity to embrace complexity by recognizing historical reality. Coming up to the half-century mark after the reformation of the Second Vatican Council, it is time to decide. Are Catholics going to continue to be strangers to the reality of life?

The council recognized that the perfect Ecclesia that stands apart from the rock-smashing, stump-removing toil that goes into ending human deprivation fails to meet the standard of acting justly. In the words of scripture, "This, Oh humankind is what Yahweh asks of you, only this: that you act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with your God.³ Acting with justice, loving tenderly, and walking humbly is the process of the interactive artisan—not the combative style of the controversialist and the theological warrior. Interactive means what Tom Groome calls bringing life to faith and faith to life.⁴ In place of simply being an ecclesiastical framework of unchanging neo-Scholastic architecture to be imposed, the post-Vatican II Church is the living architecture of God’s unfolding design. I am the bread of life" (John 6.35).

The Second Vatican Council was a distinctive and historic accomplishment for the Church because it was about this reality of a living, historical Church, rather than the fixed dogma and doctrines basic to Church identity. The expressed need for aggiornamento or accommodation with the constructive forces of humanity shifted the focus of the faith away from the mesmerizing concern about a changeless Church identity to the reality of life itself. Vatican II was convened to adapt the Church to the need for learning how to converse with the incarnational God made evident in each epoch through the reality of life on the street and how we treat each other.

Throughout this book I refer to the pre-council Church as the European or Eurocentric Church, and the Vatican II Church as the world Church. The Eurocentric Church sees itself as infusing the world with its truth. Prior to Vatican II and the age of nuclear power, it was assumed that Catholicism and the European hegemony over the rest to humanity were destined by God. Vatican II introduced a different concept of the Church as one that recognized the reality that it was historically constituted and that the enormous diversity of the real world beyond Europe, combined with the potential nightmare of nuclear annihilation, required that the Church needed to work for world solidarity rather than world domination. This was a major reformation for Catholicism that even forty years later is still working itself out. One result has been that those who have embraced the reformed vision of Church find themselves in conflict with those who still cling to the pre-reformation Church. There are many ways to describe this divide, but the most helpful for the purposes of this book is to look at the distinction between toleration of differences and accommodation of differences. Toleration is a hands-off response to diversity that anticipates eventual domination or conversion, while accommodation is an interactive approach to diversity producing a new pluralism. Our task is complicated by the fact that both views of Church are essential and yet seemingly contradictory.

Since there are those who feel that the council changed nothing, it is necessary to reestablish its reality. It happened! Pope John XXIII announced his intention to call an ecumenical council on January 25, 1959. By late December 1961, Vatican II was formally summoned by the apostolic constitution Humanae Salutaris, and the first session of the ecumenical council met from October 11 to December 8, 1962. The second session took place after the death of Pope John XXIII on June 3, 1963. It went from September 29 to December 4. The third session met from September 14 through November 21, 1964, and the fourth and final session took place from September 14 to December 8, 1965. Vatican II was a massive worldwide undertaking that introduced a flood of new documentation—more than most other councils combined. Two of these documents were issued on December 8 of 1965 at the end of the council and had special significance for Cardinal Cushing and the Church in America. These were Dignitatis Humanae (the Declaration on Religious Freedom) and Gaudium et Spes, ("Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World").

The People of God

In Cardinal Cushing’s day, the cultural order of Catholicism in Boston was tied to the dignity and freedom of an immigrant Church in the New World. Like all Americans, Catholics found strength not in lockstep conformity of thought, but in the realization of unity despite diversity. Americans were people who dealt with the reality of historical complexity and the human pluralism. It was a rich environment, because beyond the reality of historical change and emerging pluralism there was, for American Catholics, the ever-deepening mystery of God. The People of God, taken from the central document of Vatican II—Gaudium et Spes—was the working image of the faith. At that time, the call for co-responsibility throughout the entire Church simply echoed Ezekiel (37:26-27): My dwelling place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they will be my people. The Vatican II reaffirmation of this was seen as a refreshing new spirit in the Church rather than as a confrontation with integralists. The spirit of freedom coming out of Vatican II was no problem for American Catholics because this was the land where freedom was found within the individual rather than being something bestowed by either government or Church.

Yet Joseph Komonchak, co-editor of the five-volume History of Vatican II, claims that the council’s call for co-responsibility at all levels of the Church, from the hierarchy to the grass root ministries, has not yet been realized almost half a century after the council. The failure of the Church is the same as the misanthropic failure of backward and uncivilized nations that do not accommodate the basic needs of their citizens because they do not respect human dignity, human freedom, and human rights.

Co-responsibility is common sense and on the working side of the wall. Adjusting or adapting to the reality of life is induction from fact and known as common sense. It was hardly imagined therefore that the term aggiornamento, or accommodation, would be a problem. It is a relatively mild Italian term that Pope John XXIII used to describe the need for the Church to update or renew itself by accommodating the Church to historical reality. It called for translating the truths of the Church into the vernacular of time and place.

Within a decade, however, aggiornamento became a theological war zone. Communio, a quarterly started in 1972 by Father Joseph Ratzinger and Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, took the position that developments during the aftermath of the council were not reflective of the reform intended by the council. They viewed renewal as ressourcement, a return to the sources of authentic tradition, rather than aggiornamento, an accommodation to ongoing history. The French term ressourcement is a common sense substantialist concern for safeguarding the deposit of faith. It is an effort to renew, invigorate, and rejuvenate through a return to communion with the spirit of early Christianity by rediscovering the riches at the headwaters of the Christian tradition that are a sacred trust to be protected as the essential identity of the Church. It is similar to pruning a lilac bush by cutting away dying stems to make way for the new growth. It has the intent of getting back to the original vitality of the root. The truth of the Church vanishes if the vitality of the root is co-opted through amalgamations that compromise this essential conscious truth. Ressourcement is an Augustinian emphasis premised on the divine basis for order and the disruption of that order by sin, and it establishes a permanent dualism based on the conviction that the adversarial forces of good and evil are in never-ending confrontation.

It may be a distortion of the true meaning of the word, but the image of ressourcement operational throughout this book is similar to the rehabilitation of a building that has architectural significance. It is quite common to have the process of architectural restoration awaken a new appreciation for the value and significance of architectural genius that has been hidden over the years by less worthy additions, and is restored not only to its rightful beauty, but to a state meriting an esteem and awareness of value never before appreciated. The foundational question of true progress is always, what has to be preserved?

Aggiornamento, because of its prioritization of contemporary, historical concerns, was seen as suggesting that things outside the Church were essential for completeness, and that the integral Church would only be realized in time. The sharpness of the divide between the advocates and opponents of change can be seen in Karl Rahner’s interpretation of integralism. He says that integralism confuses the unity of the cosmos in God with the subordination of all human development to the Church by holding that human life can be unambiguously mapped out and manipulated in accord with certain universal principles proclaimed by the Church and watched over by her in the manner in which they are developed and applied.⁵ The integralist concern is that the free flow of ideas in history will dilute the faith with relativism.

The Vatican II theme of aggiornamento was a recognition that the Church exists historically in a world of emerging facts and pluralistic values. Aggiornamento means reading the signs of the times in order to accommodate or update the Church through the incarnational moment of constructive interaction. It is premised on Aquinas’s emphasis on order based on a hopeful use of reason and calls for a positive-sum accommodation with the good that lies both within and beyond the Church. It is an increasing pluralism, or a unity of complexities, that seeks understanding through reasonable discernment in those situations where events are inherently ambiguous, rather than debilitating confrontation with everything that is new or different. Reading the signs of the times, however, suggests a spirit of change, of open-mindedness, and modernity that indicates destabilization to neo-Scholastic theologians who view the Church as unchanging perfection. Aggiornamento is Italian from aggiornare—to update. It calls upon the Church to take inductive knowledge seriously, to listen and consider changing circumstances, and to discover that there can be virtue beyond the Church, and sin within.

Both ressourcement and aggiornamento emerged from the same dynamic theological explosion that took place between 1930 and 1970. They appear to be opposed but are similar to the pooling and flow concepts found in feng shui. In the dynamic years leading into Vatican II, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Louis Bouyer and Karl Rahner, among others, responded in different but productive ways to the urgency of the increasing complexity of both human advancement and the threat of unprecedented systemic and structural deprivations that enslaved huge segments of humankind. They moved Catholic theology away from the sterility of neo-scholasticism and returned the Church to the inexhaustible heritage of the faith by viewing that tradition anew. Social justice ministries exist because theological giants in the last century updated and civilized the rigidities of the neo-scholastic Church. It was a search for the original spirit of the Church to invigorate the twentieth century.

Folded into Time is a case study of one small Vatican II ministry in Boston, but it speaks to the urgent need of the Church in America as it sets about reconstructing the Church in the aftermath of the child abuse crisis. The genius of Vatican II was that it recognized that human development and individual spiritual growth hinge on one another. Unfortunately, the Church that is uncovered in these pages is a mean-spirited Church that is light years away from the love and hope of Vatican II and the breathtaking brilliance of Congar, Daniélou, Lubac, Küng, Schillebeeckx, Balthasar, Bouyer, and Rahner.

As the talk about the future of the Catholic Church continues—with its monotonous focus on organizational and cultural issues, from new financial practices to married clergy and women priests—those of us in the trenches of justice ministries believe that it is time to put the crucial insights of the Vatican II theological giants back into play. The reformation of Vatican II must come alive in the Church and in the world. The need for unity and solidarity in the age of al-Qaeda is even greater than it was at the midpoint of the last century, making the key commandment that much more urgent. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. . . . Love therefore is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:9-10; cf . John 4:20)

The Signs of the Times

The path to unity outlined at Vatican II was accommodation, or aggiornamento. The key document giving birth to aggiornamento is Gaudium et Spes, and the critical phrase in that document is reading the signs of the times—a call for the Church to own up to inductive reality. If Vatican II was an epoch-making event, this was the epoch-making phrase highlighting the reality that Catholicism is an incarnational Church that makes Christ present in every epoch. Those who see the Church in Saint Augustine’s view of perfection infusing a sinful world necessarily back away from the decades of anthropological theology that gave rise to the Vatican II reformation. Those who see the church as historically constituted lean towards the Thomist view of an end of time, eschatological victory through human freedom and the grace of discernment available to all.

In the reformed view of Church, God mediates his divine presence or incarnation through human interaction and historical events, bringing on the need to read the signs of the times. We converse with God not over the distant ages but here and now, in the next person in our lives. God is not a Him or an It, God is a Thou. The Church is the wave touching the water, the historical dimension touching the ultimate dimension. A Vatican II interactive ministry therefore is about the simple but profound dignity of the people in the street. As Jane Jacobs would express it, it is the reality ballet of the urban street—God’s design in process. It is not about externalities or the novelties of history, it is about deepening spirituality through nourishing relationships that enrich. Progress consists in becoming what one is.⁶ Interactive ministry is about enabling others to become who they are. That is the basic model of the interactive program described here. It is a Vatican II ministry that emphasizes the need to see God’s continuing presence in history manifested by what we do—by how we treat each other. We preach the faith by living it through discerning choices that keep the faith alive.

It is not a contradiction to say that, at the same time, there is a realistic awareness of ressourcement, or the need to return to the basic dogma of the Church as the essential self or identity of the Church that cannot be compromised. Historical change without this preservation of self is not change—it is co-option. Aggiornamento emphasizes that Catholics can’t remember what they fail to live, but ressourcement emphasizes that Catholics can’t live what they fail to not only remember but remember accurately without tapping the life-giving wellsprings of the root. There are two rather important aspects to the reality of life. One is that living requires accommodation to historical reality by growing and changing, and the other is the vital ressourcement awareness that staying alive is what it is all about. To fail to safeguard this central imperative of retaining the essential identity of the Church would put Catholicism on a never-ending path of deliberation leading to ambiguity. This is what neo-scholastics fear as the dictatorship of relativism. The Church becomes part of a human philosophical food chain.

The Planning Office for Urban Affairs Inc. (POUA) described in Folded into Time is a small housing ministry formed before aggiornamento became controversial. Old organizational rigidities vanished with the altar rail. Suddenly, the Church (we thought) was a living, responsive organism rather than a lifeless, sterile bureaucracy. The housing ministry described in Folded into Time was formed by the popular Cardinal Cushing when he returned from Vatican II as one aspect of the new aggiornamento. Cushing’s choice for implementing Vatican II was seeking justice in residential housing, and it was an inspirational choice.

The story of his ministry doesn’t offer new insight into the unresolved theological divide that has emerged since Vatican II, but rather brings to the attention of those who deal with the academic debate the reality that beyond the politeness of debate there are ongoing Vatican II ministries of justice struggling to survive. These days we experience the integralist resistance to the Vatican II reformation as a take it or leave it choice between submission and apostasy.

That choice, of course, is only seen from the perspective of those of us at the bottom of things, and explaining the polite theological debate from this perspective requires a vernacular suitable to the reality. Looking upward, it is like describing the underside of the bird of paradise restricted to the hermeneutics of biology. At the top, the Church is imagined as flawless perfection. From our point of view, all that can be seen from down here are the dishonorable deceits common to petty bureaucracies, such as the absence of transparency, shielding information, and making all decisions in small power groups of the like-minded. This non-inspirational Church, instead of bringing the message of eternal life, has lost the respect of reasonable people and needs to be folded into time.

Why Housing?

While the housing industry of this nation has provided more home ownership than any other residential development system in history, it is premised on the Godless and unjust contractual model of Thomas Hobbes. It prioritizes the freedom of the individual over the responsibilities of human relationship and the common good. It happens that the sterile contract base of the residential development industry in this nation excludes the poor and ignores the covenantal reality of human inter-connectedness. In this individualistic and narcissistic culture, housing is primarily a consumer product where the seller has the power, through political and economic control, to inflate the price by keeping the product rare. This means that the disparity between salaries and housing prices keeps increasing. Simple, dignified, safe housing becomes a luxury, leaving more and more people housing-deprived. It doesn’t change because, for those who have power and money, it works.

For almost forty years, the Planning Office has had the pragmatic point of view inherited from Cardinal Cushing and the founder, Father Michael Groden, that the Hobbesian contract view of human relationships left the poor out as a matter of pragmatic judgment. The realization of human freedom and human dignity for everyone required something beyond the callous view of Hobbes. As they saw it, it was the job of the Church to reframe the nature of human relationships based on the dignity and solidarity that proceeds from being the children of God. It was tough to do but simple to understand. We didn’t need to bother with either Aquinas or Augustine. The presence of God within and the recognition of God in every other person was what Christians had to offer to the human quest for meaning and purpose. The only question was, how? That was our job, not theology. We were not attentive to any theological nuances between Balthasar and Chenu, because who was going to argue against doing the right thing? Well—you’d be surprised!

The Planning Office for Urban Affairs pioneered concepts that go against the grain of individualism. In doing so, it made a significant contribution to the equally valid goals of human solidarity and justice. First of all, it introduced the concept of cooperative ownership. This is a system where people do not own the individual units, but own limited equity shares. It isn’t highly popular with either banks or with the affluent, but it extends the reach of affordability downward to make it possible for more people at the lower income levels to share in ownership. Secondly, it prioritized the need for mixed-income housing to end the stigmatization of lower-income working people through housing isolation. And finally, it went against the prevailing bias of residential development by making regional affordability a primary goal. There was and is a continuing need to provide affordability in affluent neighborhoods and suburban communities, rather than concentrating all affordable housing in urban centers. This is an aspect of the story that takes the ministry beyond simplistic and easily accepted