"Sacramental Slapstick" and Ecclesiological Banana Peels

 In a recent comment on my review of CM Gschwandtner's Welcoming Finitude, Joseph Charles noted a preposterous story appearing in the Associated Press, which reported the possibility that some infants might not have validly received the sacrament of baptism because of an anomaly in the form of the sacrament ministered by a certain deacon who altered the language "I baptize" to "We baptize." Joseph appropriately dubbed this hilarity with the hilarious phrase, "sacramental slapstick." Now while Joseph's critique of Catholicism runs very deep and sharp, far more deeply and sharply than his detour through a modicum of levity (indeed, he might find more "slapstick" in what follows), it does serve to underscore what's been afoot in Catholic circles these days.

First, a little reassurance for the worried well: unless the deacon was a malicious and evil person---intending to defraud the church---then the sacrament is valid (even if liceity is put into question). To keep things simple, a review of the basic tenet of sacramental theology: a sacrament has a hylomorphic structure, that is, it is constructed of a form, in this case the words used in the ceremony/liturgy, and the matter, in this case, water. In the sacrament of baptism, the core of the form is "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," not "I/we" (which are always ambiguous). Moreover, any baptized Christian can baptize, so long as she does what the Church has always intended to do. Now if the deacon deliberately intended to do otherwise than what the Church has always done, there could be a problem with validity. The first-person pronoun's use here would not invalidate the sacrament in and of itself.

So just what has turned sacramental theology into low comedy's banana peel in the path of everyday Catholics? My surmise is the appearance of the ugly head of ultramontane fundamentalism slowly creeping into the life of the church. One needn't look too far to find well-meaning but misguided Catholics who have lost faith in Pope Francis because of his human frailties, as if the pope were himself the Church. When such fundamentalist Catholics put all their faith in a particular personage, it is easy to see how fragile such faith can become. Such faith has recourse only to dogma, and closes itself off to the living, breathing Catholic faith.

Such Catholics find reassurance in "knowing" just how many people are in hell, for example, and shiver in their boots at the suggestion that humans on earth cannot know the judgement of God at the end of any human life. It seems such people cannot have faith in their own 'heavenly reward' unless the reward of bad people is clearly stated, known and an incontrovertible fact. For such people, there can be no beatific vision without the music of the sizzling flesh of the damned.

Many such Catholics identify themselves as "traditional," and as such, embrace many Catholic devotions, such as the Tridentine Rite of the Mass. Truth be told, I personally have great admiration for the beauty and majesty of that rite; it is the rite of my own childhood. There is nothing in the 1962 missal that warrants the fundamentalism that slips on the banana peels of the "I/we," or the reluctance of a pope who is slow to judge. 

Whatever happened to the notion of the indefectability of the church? Popes come and go, but nothing can militate against the abiding presence of Christ in the church. The 1962 missal has become a stumbling block, a wedge between Catholic and Catholic, a scandal that threatens to reduce ritual and liturgy to "slapstick," and fertile ground for the work of the devil's divisiveness. The blinding zeal of fundamentalism will undoubtedly lead to a blindness to banana peels. When did the likes of Jerry Lewis become papabile?

What's in a Scandal? Let's Not Lose the Face of the Victim

While this thing was always scandalous, we cannot continue to call it a scandal, though we will forever be scandalized. We really must call it what it is: systematic, institutional criminality. The victims of rape and other sexual abuses by the hierarchs of the Church dissipate under the cloak of the merely scandalous. The face of the victim recedes behind the veil of scandal. Survivors must be seen so that evil comes to light. Scandal. The only scandal here is that anyone refers to the irrevocably diabolical as a scandal. Enough.

That evil can rock the Church is one thing, but that it can destroy it is another. Christ himself indemnified the Church, stating definitively that the gates of hell will not prevail against it; but that of course assumes that good people will not simply stand by and be amazed, disgusted, violated, appalled, etc. Catholic action must now accuse the shepherds, and rid the Church of all the agencies of violence, sin, crime and other movements of evil in the flesh. It's really not a matter of not 'going to church', or withholding donations or other kinds of giving. Catholics must give the Church its blood back, its spine and its conviction, all of which has been lost. We have all, clergy and laity alike,  known too long about this cancer within the body of Christ, and we have let it metastasize. 

It's all well and good that the civil authorities now move legally to identify and prosecute criminals masquerading as leaders of the church and shepherds of the faithful, finally lifting the corporate veil covering up the most egregious sinfulness and criminality; but only lay Catholics have the moral authority to accuse systematic evil and wrest the Church from its clutches and exorcise the malignancy that threatens to undo the people of God.

No adequate sacramental theology can retain holy orders in the pedophile or ephebophile; God does not bless the devil. The Church does not breed pedophiles and ephebophiles, but it apparently attracts them, harbors them, protects them, and enables them to infiltrate the trust of the faithful, and then destroy that trust. This horrific and obvious impediment to reception of orders renders the sacrament automatically annulled, in a way analogous to the impediments that might make the reception of matrimony automatically annulled. An indelible mark cannot be etched into the soul of the violent, criminal sexual predator; and what makes matters worse is that he knows it, and pretends to that which is unattainable to him: holiness, service, love. There is simply no role for the niceties of the work worked (ex opere operato), or the work of the worker (ex opere operantis) here. We simply no longer know who or what is working what and why. To give sanctuary to sin and erase the face of the victims is to nourish the virulence of the malignancy.

From time to time, some people suggest that celibacy, with or without the complexities of a single sex environment, leads men to transform from normal and healthy sexual beings into predatory monsters. Celibacy arguably pertains only to those of superlative ascetic being, but does a choice for celibacy as part of an authentic sexuality committed to service to the other unencumbered by commitments to family necessarily lead to sexually poor health? Too many good and loving celibate clergy witness against that conclusion. Perhaps, then, an authentic celibacy might be part of the solution to part of the problem. Nonetheless, celibacy cannot be visited upon those who vicious predations have brought the rectory to its knees. The voraciousness of the predator laughs at the prospect of an authentic commitment to the other, whose sole purpose is to slake its thirst for violence. Nonetheless, and irrespective of the sexual orientation of one whose vocation to the priesthood is from the Spirit,  an authentic celibacy remains at least a possibility. Of course, the possibility that a true vocation moves a married man to the service of sacerdotal priesthood cannot be excluded, and the Church, in its reception of married clergy from other Christian traditions as Catholic priests, attests to this admission.

 The delusions of sacramentality must dissolve under the work of the Spirit. And the Spirit beckons all Catholics (indeed all Christians, if not all people of good will) to act in service to the victims of the hierarchs' horrors. What is Canon Law to the face of the human other? Canon Law wilts in the face of the other, for within the face is the trace of God. The Spirit calls us to absolute solidarity with the victims of the hierarchical church.