By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
When you ask for “vanilla” ice cream, you don’t specify shades of the flavor, such as strong vanilla or weak vanilla, old vanilla or new vanilla; you just ask for vanilla. Granted there are slight variations, such as vanilla bean ice cream where you can see some of the natural evidence for the flavor in the nearly microscopic brown shavings that guarantee a natural source. All the same, everybody knows what everybody else means by the word vanilla, and that when you ask for vanilla you aren’t interested in strawberry or chocolate unless you require all three flavors simultaneously in what is called Neapolitan ice cream.
Although I lived in Naples for two years I never saw anybody eating “Neapolitan” ice cream so I’m still at a loss as to where the name came from. Italians sometimes put two or more flavors of gelato together into a cup or on a cone at the same time. Perhaps returning GIs after World War II remembered that and gave the name to ice cream when the flavors are combined ahead of time at the factory.
Somewhere along the way, most likely in the wake of Vatican II, the plain old vanilla “Catholic” flavor went missing in the imagination of the faithful and in the resulting confusion the word doesn’t any longer mean what is used to. Now, instead of plain old Catholic flavor, or the term orthodoxy which means “right teaching,” we have at least two new alternatives: conservative Catholic and liberal Catholic.
I suspect that the great fault line formed primarily over the ground separating those who longed for the “old” or Traditional Mass and those who jumped with both feet into the “new” version put together from various sources including, but not limited to, the old Mass.
For evidence of this, I point to a mostly glowing tribute for recently deceased Mother Angelica by John L. Allen Jr. on his K of C-owned Crux website. Mixed in with the accolades we find this terminology when he calls Mother Angelica part of a “conservative wave” of Catholics, evidence that many think the Church is now divided like cold war Germany into East and West.
Many of us for some time now have insisted that there is no such reality as liberal or conservative Catholic, as if the word Catholic can mean at the same time “strawberry” and “chocolate.” I responded by tweeting in response to Allen that Mother Angelica was certainly not conservative: no, she was plain old “Catholic.”
Allen claims Mother’s greatness is based on the fact that as a woman and the head of a lay-led organization she “stood up to the official Church.” This also misses her plain old “vanilla” Catholic identity. No, I respond to such a hijacking, it was heresy that Mother Angelica stood up to wherever she found it, whether in the halls of chanceries or in parish committees.
Mother’s eyes were opened in 1993 after World Youth Day organizers in Denver staged a Passion play in which they cast a woman in the role of Jesus. In a now legendary TV segment still available in video online, she excoriated “you liberal Catholics.”
Mother didn’t have the heart to call them heretics, although that is certainly a fair description of anyone who mixes enneagrams, horoscopes, and the other methods of false worship that she named with the Catholic faith. In an undeniable sign that she had awakened to the warfare being waged against orthodoxy, she immediately changed the modified compromise habit of her order back into the traditional Poor Clare version worn by her sisters today.
Allen also categorically denies the possibility we shall ever “look upon the likes of Mother Angelica again.” That hyperbole might garner attention for one’s online journalism, but it’s basically untrue. We shall until the end of the world look upon any souls who, like Mother Angelica, heroically swim in the image of Christ against the social tide and tilt at windmills, usually solo, in order to follow God’s will wherever it leads.
Even before she was laid to rest in this earth that she trod for 92 years, social media users were manipulating her biography to enlist her aid in their personal agendas. I tweeted imploring such persons to “Stop the social media ‘spiritual hijacking’: Mother Angelica didn’t believe in power, she believed in God.”
It is Christ Himself we will never look upon until we enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In the meanwhile, we can certainly pray that in the new and extraordinary challenges we face as a Church we may see His image and likeness anew in many heroic orthodox Catholics who will overcome adversity and blaze new trails — like Mother Angelica.
We have seen many saints throughout the history of the Church canonized for the heroic virtue we laud in Mother Angelica. We have witnessed it in our own time with Pope St. John Paul II, Mother Teresa, and certainly with Mother Angelica, now departed. She nearly single-handedly started a global TV station out of a garage when hundreds of U.S. Catholic bishops failed to start one up. By the strength of prayer and virtue, she kept the network faithfully Catholic.
Recent reports warned that a shortage of plain old vanilla may soon affect the price of goods like ice cream. We thank the Lord that there will never be any shortage of the Holy Spirit and thus also there will never be lacking the resource of grace for saints to live heroic virtue through, like Mother Angelica, the plain old Catholic Faith.
For this I reason I implore Almighty God, with many others, on her behalf, “Santa subito”! Thank you for reading. Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
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(Visit Reverendo Padre-Kevin Michael Cusick on Facebook and @MCITLFrAphorism on Twitter.)
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