RIP, Pope Francis

 Francis has left us. A few thoughts:

• Popes are teachers, leaders, administrators. They wield enormous power. They are human beings and sinners, despite the majesty of the seat they hold. I never believed Francis was duplicitous, but I believed he was wrong about many things. As such, his passing affords an opportunity for a better future for the Church.
• Speculation always abounds when it's time to select a new pope. This site  provides a pretty good overview of potential successors, suggesting 22 names as papabile. The most familiar of these, by far, is Cardinal Raymond Burke, who grew up in Richland Center, Wisconsin and served as a bishop in LaCrosse and later St. Louis, among other places. He also became enmeshed in a significant feud with Francis and was essentially fired, although he maintained his rank as a cardinal. It would be a significant surprise if he were to be selected, but it would also be a welcome decision in my view.
• I have no idea who, or what, is coming next. I do know that while Francis did his level best to re-establish the Vatican II liberal/secular worldview to the Church, the energy within the Church lies elsewhere and signs are everywhere. Traditional Latin Mass is coming back all over and young people are the ones who are clamoring for it. The places where Vatican II was embraced are now falling to secularism and more energetic competing faiths, especially Islam. The Vatican may be situated on the European continent, but the future of the Church is elsewhere and we're already seeing that the traditional home of Christianity is now mission territory. The new Pope will need to recognize these trends and respond accordingly.

I haven't been writing much lately and I may not write a whole lot, but this moment does have my attention and we'll see if there is a renewal of this feature as a result.

Going back

It’s difficult to let go of a place, even when you already have done so officially. Mrs. D and I have not been members of St. Adalbert Parish in St. Paul since 2002. It will always be a big part of our lives. We were married there on this day in 1991, and both of our children were baptized there. The twin spires of the church have been a recognizable landmark in the Frogtown neighborhood for nearly 110 years. As the crow flies, it is closer to the State Capitol than the Cathedral is. The Polish immigrants who arrived in St. Paul around the turn of the 20th Century built the church, but they have long since moved on. These days, it is a parish that serves another immigrant community, the Vietnamese, who have been its primary parishioners for over 25 years.

St. Adalbert is at a crossroads. Its community is thriving, but the old church has seen better days and isn’t adequate to serve the needs of the community. The building would require millions to in repairs to ensure long-term viability for the building and there’s no way the congregation can do that. Frogtown has never been a glamorous address, but in recent years it has become an even more dangerous place than it once was, which complicates matters even more. The police blotter usually has numerous entries from the area just to the west of the parish, with drug deals, prostitution and murder often on the docket. And, while the church is where the community gathers to worship, many parishioners live elsewhere in town. While the Vietnamese are immigrants, some have been in Twin Cities for over 30 years and their children are moving away and finding a better life all over the metro area.

Given those challenges, it’s hardly surprising that the community is looking for a new home and recently the Archdiocese approached our sister parish, Corpus Christi in Roseville, about the possibility of providing a new home for the St. Adalbert congregation. Corpus Christi used to be in the St. Anthony Park neighborhood of St. Paul that houses the University of Minnesota, but the parish built a new church about a mile or two north in Roseville, moving there in the 1980s. Corpus Christi is a small congregation, but it has a modern church building and plenty of space to grow, in a prime location just to the south of the Rosedale Mall complex. It also has a well-deserved reputation as a welcoming community. It sounded like a good match.

It’s not going to happen, though. It can't really. The St. Adalbert community is larger than Corpus Christi and while the Corpus Christi church building is newer, it is far too small to accommodate everyone who would want to attend Mass. You simply can’t fit more than 400 people in the sanctuary at Corpus Christi, while a typical St. Adalbert gathering of Vietnamese parishioners would be almost double that number. For the parishioners at Corpus Christi, the proposal felt less like a merger and more like a takeover. That’s not how anyone intended it, but perceptions matter. We are all one Church, but we are also humans and we care about the temporal things, even though we know Jesus calls us to set those things aside.

We haven’t been back to St. Adalbert in many years. We’re going today, for 4:30 Mass. I am eager to see it again.

Sharks gotta shark

A judge makes a point that needs to be made:

The judge overseeing the bankruptcy of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis expressed concern Thursday over the legal fees being racked up in the case — about $15 million to date.

“It bothers me so much that all these attorney fees are being run up,” U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel said at a hearing Thursday, adding that legal fees are consuming funds that could be directed to survivors of archdiocese clergy sex abuse.

In an attempt to curb the spending, Kressel ordered that no expert witnesses be hired for the time being. He also ordered a tighter schedule for both parties to argue their legal objections to each other’s compensation plans.

Lawyers are expensive. And litigiousness is extremely expensive. Many moons ago, I worked for a law firm and I saw how bankruptcies are handled. You can rack up a lot of fees. Meanwhile, the victims wait.

Palm Sunday Bombs

Although we are often reminded of such things from the pulpit, the history of Christianity has been filled with martyrs. We now have more in Egypt, following two bombings of Coptic churches yesterday:

Egypt's president called for a three-month state of emergency Sunday after at least 44 people were killed and more than 100 more were injured in two Palm Sunday suicide attacks at Coptic Christian churches, each carried out by the ISIS terror group.

Sunday's first blast happened at St. George Church in the Nile Delta town of Tanta, where at least 27 people were killed and 78 others wounded, officials said.

Television footage showed the inside of the church, where a large number of people gathered around what appeared to be lifeless, bloody bodies covered with papers.

A second explosion – which Egypt’s Interior Ministry says was caused by a suicide bomber who tried to storm St. Mark's Cathedral in the coastal city of Alexandria -- left at least 17 dead, and 48 injured. The attack came just after Pope Tawadros II -- leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria -- finished services, but aides told local media that he was unharmed.

We prayed for our brethren yesterday during our own Palm Sunday Mass. I'm glad we did, but I wonder how much it really meant. We don't have much to worry about in our sanctuaries -- the bombers don't come to our suburban churches and while we name many of our churches in honor of those who paid the ultimate price for the faith, we don't spend much time thinking about the meaning of those sacrifices, even during Holy Week. Perhaps we should.

The Vatican II Rag

We went to a concert last night at our home parish, St. Rose of Lima. The concert featured three of the most important contemporary liturgical composers in the Catholic Church, David Haas, Marty Haugen and Fr. Michael Joncas. If you've gone to Mass in the last 30 years, chances are quite good you have heard the music these three men have created.

This is one of Haas's most well-known hymns, "We Are Called":

A representative example of Haugen's music is "All Are Welcome":

And for Joncas, there is the ubiquitous "On Eagles Wings":

It was fascinating to attend the concert -- the work of these three men is heard nearly every Sunday. It was, at times, thrilling to hear the music performed by the composers themselves. People came from all over to see the concert -- St. Rose has a pretty big parking lot and it was filled, with cars lined up for blocks on the side streets behind the church, and I saw license plates from neighboring states in the lot.

In the wake of Vatican II and the changes in liturgy that flowed from it, finding contemporary music was a challenge. Most of the hymns of my youth dated back hundreds of years and didn't mesh very well with the tone of liturgy in the 1970s, so the music of Haas, Haugen and Joncas was a welcome development.

At the same time, the relative age of the audience was, frankly, a little alarming. We saw very few young people there and I would peg the median age at somewhere north of 60. And while much of the music we heard last night was contemporary in sound, we're now 20-40 years past the date many of these hymns were first heard. We are at the point now where the renewal is becoming a bit long in the tooth. I don't know if we are reaching the younger generation.

No, that's not it

I saw this headline, or a variant of it, several times in recent days:

We've explained this before, but apparently people don't get it. The reason this priest is being dismissed isn't that he's gay -- he's being dismissed because he's not celibate. If he'd come out with a woman on his arm, the result would have been the same.