By PAUL LIKOUDIS
(Editor’s Note: We welcome Paul Likoudis back to our pages for this commentary on Francis Cardinal George, OMI, whom Paul covered extensively as The Wanderer’s news editor. Paul continues his battle with cancer; the prayers and the support of Wanderer readers are greatly appreciated.)
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Francis Cardinal George, OMI, archbishop of Chicago, died April 17 after a long battle with cancer.
Appointed bishop of Yakima in 1990, archbishop of Portland, Ore., in 1996, and then archbishop of Chicago a year later, Cardinal George was the towering intellect in the U.S. episcopacy, and a prelate whom Pope St. John Paul II could rely on to reorient the Church in Chicago with its notoriously “independent” clergy and the equally notorious Americanist hierarchy “hanging loose” from Rome.
There have been many tributes to the late cardinal testifying to his kindness, generosity, and incredible stamina as he served his 2.3 million-member flock, and also to his service to the Holy See as a member of many key curial offices; this tribute looks back to some of his enduring words.
Shortly after his arrival in Chicago, the dissident clergy dubbed their new archbishop “Francis the Corrector,” but George, named a cardinal by John Paul II on January 18, 1998, would live up to the name, especially as a leader in the ten-years-plus “liturgy wars” where he was the Holy See’s greatest advocate in implementing the necessary liturgical reforms which John Paul had set as a priority early in his pontificate, and which encountered enormous opposition in this country.
Cardinal George was a pivotal character in the history of the Church in the United States, and his appointment to Chicago can be viewed as the end-post for the Americanism condemned by Pope Leo XIII a hundred years earlier in the encyclical Testem Benevolentiae.
A day before the Holy See announced that George would be named to the College of Cardinals, he delivered a talk to a meeting of the National Center for Laity in Chicago in which he pronounced liberal Catholicism an “exhausted project.”
“We are at a turning point in the life of the Church in this country,” he said. “Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project. Essentially a critique, even a necessary critique at one point in our history, it is now parasitical on a substance that no longer exists. It has shown itself unable to pass on the faith in its integrity and inadequate, therefore, in fostering the joyful self-surrender called for in Christian marriage, in consecrated life, in ordained priesthood. It no longer gives life.
“The answer, however, is not to be found in a type of conservative Catholicism obsessed with particular practices and so sectarian in its outlook that it cannot serve as a sign of unity of all peoples in Christ,” he continued.
“The answer is simply Catholicism, in all its fullness and depth, a faith able to distinguish itself from any cultures and yet able to engage and transform them all, a faith joyful in all the gifts Christ wants to give us and open to the whole world He died to save. The Catholic faith shapes a Church with a lot of room for differences in pastoral approach, for discussion and debate, for initiatives as various as the peoples whom God loves. But, more profoundly, the faith shapes a Church which knows her Lord and knows her own identity, a Church able to distinguish between what fits into the tradition that unites her to Christ and what is a false start or a distorting thesis, a Church united here and now because she is always one with the Church throughout the ages and with the saints in Heaven.”
George, with two doctorates, in philosophy and in theology, was assigned the unenviable — and nearly impossible — task of carrying out the Holy See’s project to restore sacred language to the Church’s prayers, especially the Roman Missal, a project that would take ten years due to the obstructionism from key members of the English-speaking hierarchies who resented Rome’s interference in liturgical “translations” by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL).
What was at stake in this long-running “liturgy war” — which The Wanderer had been waging since the first translation of the Roman Missal in the early 1970s — was the right of the Holy See to exercise oversight over translations, to determine if translations into English were “faithful” to the Latin originals.
While ICEL and its influential episcopal backers insisted on their independence from the Holy See, Cardinal George and officials of the Holy See were denounced as “Gestapo” by an entrenched liturgical “establishment” headquartered in Chicago, home of the Liturgical Training Publications headed by Gabe Huck, who declared that George “brings no expertise” in liturgical matters.
George alluded to these “liturgy wars” in a commencement address to graduates of Thomas Aquinas College in June 2001, in which he explained that the success of the liturgical renewal called for by Vatican II can be judged by how well Catholics carry their faith into their daily lives.
“[W]hile the Church has made much progress in liturgical renewal in some ways, to establish the necessary connection between liturgy and life remains still the continuing challenge to Catholics everywhere,” he said.
“Full and active participation in the liturgy leads people to embrace the truth, to take up the cross, and to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, throughout every dimension of their lives.
“The pastoral problem,” he said, “that the priests and others involved in the ministry of the Church often meet is the kind of segregation of the Sunday Eucharist from everything else that follows the other days of the week. That means, however, if that happens (and it does happen) that the Eucharist has not been celebrated as the Church wants us to celebrate it. The liturgy invites us to a new life and shapes our attitudes toward this life. The liturgy does not merely express who we are and what we believe, but helps us to discover who we are and what we can become in Christ Jesus, our Lord. . . .
“One cannot have full, active participation in the liturgy unless there is full, active participation in the Church. And one of the great sadnesses of the postconciliar world in the Catholic Church is that we have yet to see the new Pentecost prayed for by Pope John XXIII. We cannot rejoice in the fact that two-thirds of the baptized Catholics of this country do not participate in the liturgy.”
The new faithful translation of the Church’s prayers, especially the Roman Missal, were necessary, George explained to the graduates, because “English has become something of a field for ideological warfare in the past 30 years. Recognizing that the language we speak does shape the way we think and the world in which we live, advertisers and politicians work to create phrases and words that influence people to buy products and to make choices.
“As a public language — and this is important — as a public language, American English has self-censored many references to God in the past generation or these references to God have been deleted from public discourse by court order….
“Celebrating the liturgy makes us not only more self-conscious about language, liturgy also moves us to express in action what it is that unites us to God and therefore to one another, and what it is in our action that either permits us or prevents us from living joyfully the mission Christ gives His people here and living most joyfully with Him forever. . . .
“You should see yourselves,” Cardinal George told the graduates, “as a result of this experience, as a priestly people, committed therefore, by that very prayer to bringing Christ’s own healing and reconciliation to all the world. . . .
“Our Holy Father, in speaking so marvelously about the vocation of Christ’s faithful in the world, tells us precisely that our action in the world follows from our action in the liturgy. Our words in the world follow from our words in the sacred liturgy. Our conversation in the world follows from and is integral to our conversation with God from within Christ’s Body, the Church.
“Only if, like a good liturgical translation, we are faithful to the original, to the image of God, stamped in us through Baptism so that we are like Jesus Christ, and yet understandable to everyone we meet, only if, like a good celebration of the liturgy, our actions are witnesses to God’s own transcendence and to our own future eschatological banquet, only then is liturgy good and are our lives holy.”
While Cardinal George was doing yeoman’s work for the Holy See in the matter of liturgical language, in Chicago he was dealing with priests who accused the Catholic hierarchy of using “violent language” against gays and lesbians.
In December 2003, a group of Chicago priests issued an open letter calling on bishops “to enter into earnest dialogue with gay and lesbian Catholics instead of talking at them.”
“In the recent past,” the priests’ letter objected, “individual bishops, bishops’ conferences, and the Vatican have assumed a tone of such violence and abusiveness toward these sons and daughters of the Church; we can no longer remain silent. Has any other group of people within the Body of Christ been so assaulted and violated by such mean-spirited language? Examples from the most recent Vatican document show all too clearly the demonization of these children of God, referring to homosexuality as a ‘troubling moral and social phenomenon,’ ‘a serious depravity,’ ‘the spread of the phenomenon,’ ‘approval or legalization of evil’. . . . Does anyone consider this vile and toxic language invitational?”
The cardinal responded, in part: “Your concern that language can make it difficult to welcome people is one I share. The Church speaks, in moral and doctrinal issues, a philosophical and theological language in a society that understands, at best, only psychological and political terms. Our language is exact, but it does not help us in welcoming men and women of homosexual orientation. It can seem lacking in respect. This is a pastoral problem and a source of anxiety for me as it is for you. It would be good to discuss it together.
“Pastoring any group of people, however, means more than welcoming them. It also means calling them to conversion in Christ. This dimension of the pastoral life is absent from your letter. God is all-loving and all-forgiving; but He knows the difference between right and wrong, and He expects us to know it, to live accordingly and, as ordained priests, to preach the demands of the Gospel with integrity to every group and all people on their journey to holiness.”
In his biweekly column in the archdiocesan newspaper, the Catholic New World, Cardinal George addressed some of the thorniest problems he faced as archbishop of Chicago, such as problems in Catholic education at every level.
Typical of his view, and forthrightness in addressing a problem, was a January 21, 2007 column titled “Schools of Spirituality,” and the confusion among many Catholics about what it means to be Catholic.
He observed: “Many of the more external signs of Catholicism, the practices people associated with life in the Church, were abandoned 30 or more years ago. The disappearance of external protections left the internal life of faith exposed to error and confusion.”
It seems, he said, that “we’re back to the Protestant Reformation. At the time of the Reformation, when the visible unity of the Church was broken for doctrinal reasons, the Mass became a memorial service for most Reformers, its unity with Christ’s sacrifice at Calvary became purely ‘spiritual’ and the objective, sacramental, substantial re-presentation of that sacrifice was denied. With the disappearance of the sacrifice of the Mass, the ordained priesthood was reduced to ministry, a function or service based only on Baptism.
“The Sacrament of Holy Orders was lost to the life of the Protestant faith communities. With the loss of ordained priesthood, the Sacrament of Penance or Reconciliation became unnecessary, for neither the Church nor the priest mediated the penitent’s relationship to God’s mercy. Nor did the bond of marriage continue to enjoy the character of sacramentality, opening that tie to the contemporary reduction of marriage to an external, legal permission to have sex between two consenting adults….
“Catholics assimilated to American culture, which is historically Protestant, are now living with great tension between how their culture shapes them and what their Catholic faith tells them to hold.
“This is not surprising. Many writers who claim to be Catholic make names for themselves by attacking truths basic to our faith. Without the personal integrity that would bring them to admit they have simply lost the faith that comes to us from the apostles, they reconstruct it on a purely subjective, individualistic basis and call it renewal.
“The Second Vatican Council wasn’t called to turn Catholics into Protestants. It was called to ask God to bring all Christ’s followers into unity of faith so that the world would believe who Christ is and live with Him in His Body, the Church. The de-programming of Catholics, even in some of our schools and religious education and liturgical programs, has brought us to a moment clearly recognized by the bishops in the synod of 1985 (when the Catechism of the Catholic Church was proposed as a partial solution to confusion about the central mysteries of faith) and acknowledged by many others today….
“If we are to propose to the world our faith, we need to be better grounded in it. Proposing, as Pope John Paul II often said, is not imposing. Any proposition should be respected because of the person proclaiming it; but it should also be contested when it is false. In matters of faith, truth and falsity depend on theological warrants from history.”
In a column, “The Wrong Side of History,” October 21, 2014, Cardinal George warned of the growing danger of a radicalized secularism and what it meant for the Catholic faithful.
Reflecting on Fatima and the month of the Most Holy Rosary, George wrote:
“Communism imposed a total way of life based upon the belief that God does not exist. Secularism is Communism’s better-scrubbed bedfellow. A small irony of history cropped up at the United Nations a few weeks ago when Russia joined the majority of other nations to defeat the United States and the Western European nations that wanted to declare that killing the unborn should be a universal human right. Who is on the wrong side of history now?
“The present political campaign has brought to the surface of our public life the anti-religious sentiment, much of it explicitly anti-Catholic, that has been growing in this country for several decades. The secularizing of our culture is a much larger issue than political causes or the outcome of the current electoral campaign, important though that is.
“Speaking a few years ago to a group of priests, entirely outside of the current political debate, I was trying to express in overly dramatic fashion what the complete secularization of our society could bring. I was responding to a question and I never wrote down what I said, but the words were captured on somebody’s smart phone and have now gone viral on Wikipedia and elsewhere in the electronic communications world. I am (correctly) quoted as saying that I expected to die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.
“What is omitted from the reports is a final phrase I added about the bishop who follows a possibly martyred bishop: ‘His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history’. . . .
“The unofficial anthem of secularism today is John Lennon’s Imagine, in which we are encouraged to imagine a world without religion. We don’t have to imagine such a world; the 20th-century has given us horrific examples of such worlds.
“Instead of a world living in peace because it is without religion, why not imagine a world without nation states?…Every major war in the last 300 years has been fought by nation states, not by the Church. In our own history, the re-conquest of the secessionist states in the Civil War was far bloodier than the re-conquest of the Holy Land by the now despised Crusaders. The state apparatus for investigating civilians now is far more extensive than anything dreamed up by the Spanish Inquisition, although both were created to serve the same purpose: to preserve a government’s public ideology and control of society, whether based on religion or on modern constitutional order.
“Analogies can easily be multiplied, if one wants to push a thesis; but the point is that the greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making ‘laws’ beyond its competence. Few there are, however, who would venture to ask if there might be a better way for humanity to organize itself for the sake of the common good. Few, that is, beyond a prophetic voice like that of Dorothy Day, speaking acerbically about ‘Holy Mother the State,’ or the ecclesiastical voice that calls the world, from generation to generation, to live at peace in the Kingdom of God.
“God sustains the world, in good times and in bad. Catholics, along with many others, believe that only one person has overcome and rescued history: Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of the Virgin Mary, Savior of the world and head of His Body, the Church. Those who gather at His cross and by His empty tomb, no matter their nationality, are on the right side of history. Those who lie about Him and persecute or harass His followers in any age might imagine they are bringing something new to history, but they inevitably end up ringing the changes on the old human story of sin and oppression. There is nothing ‘progressive’ about sin, even when it is promoted as ‘enlightened.’
“The world divorced from the God who created and redeemed it inevitably comes to a bad end. It’s on the wrong side of the only history that finally matters.”
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