Prayer as a Political Problem:
A Classic Reconsidered
by REGIS MARTIN
"The religious problem is not at all the problem of an elite."
Or sinners, for heaven sake. Surely the most salient feature of the human condition is that we’re all more or less mired in the muck. An evil worm having insinuated its poison into every apple, the fruit is no longer pure. And so if anyone were actually to find the perfect Church, its very perfection would diminish by one having joined it.
How fortunate, then, for fallen human beings that the Church’s criteria for admission are so wonderfully unexacting. Have you got a heart? Does it beat sufficiently to evince life? Well, then, what’s keeping you from being baptized?
There are no secret handshakes, or hidden insignia, to gain entrance to the Catholic Church. Nor are putative members required to turn over large sums of cash before signing on. Not only are there no walls to be breached in order to find God, but this mighty fortress of open windows and limitless spaces appears to be in constant motion to find us. So entirely delighted does God seem to be with the human race that he’s eager to enroll every member in the Kingdom. Especially sinners. Why else had he sent his Son if not to suffer and to die for them? He certainly didn’t come on the strength of anything we’ve got to offer him.
If the world then is to be made welcome in its worship of the one true God, it follows that the only exclusions will be self-inflicted. The door leading into hell is not locked from the outside. The Catechism is very direct on the subject, reminding us in Article One that, “at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church.”
But what is meant for all must somehow be within the reach of all. And so Christ fashioned the Church of the Poor, so that those for whom he most hungers, indeed, the generality of the human race—men and women not to be found among the chicand the stylish—might all the more easily find their way home to God. In order to facilitate that blessed moment, however, when mankind finds itself at last in the arms of God, transported to the precincts of the Celestial City, the Church must ask the City of Man that it not put roadblocks in the way. Indeed, she wants even the Earthly City to help signpost the way leading back to God. Prayers do not hinder or impede, the Church is saying, the effort to build a world where it is easier for men to be good; where, at the very least, the enticements to vice are not quite so many, nor so damnably hard to resist.
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PRAYER AND POLITICS
by Edward T. Oakes
Last Friday, on the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross (September 14), Pope Benedict’s motu proprio (a genre of decree indicating the pope is acting "on his own initiative") titled Summorum Pontificum took legal effect. I cannot predict at this early date how much of a demand there will be for the Mass of Blessed John XXIII (otherwise, and somewhat inaccurately, known as the Tridentine Latin Mass), or what beneficial effects this new legislation will have on the way the ordinary form is celebrated, officially known as the Mass of John Paul II (which is a modest revision of the much more significant changes to the Mass enacted after Vatican II by Paul VI).
But, however murky the future, this motu proprio can certainly tell us a few telling facts about the past. First (and on this I think both supporters and detractors of the document can agree), the drumbeat of requests that kept coming into the Vatican from Catholics (especially those with no other particular sympathy for the Lefebvrists) tells us that the implementation of the liturgical reforms has not been an unmitigated or universal success. Especially in countries where the vernacular translations have been clumsy or even inaccurate, dissatisfaction was bound to increase by the year, at least among those sensitive to the beauties of their native tongue. Further, moments and junctures in the rubrics that allow for more spontaneity by the celebrant have often been abused. Such abuse harms the Church, because unauthorized alterations in the rite only draw attention to the presiding priest and thus away from the Lord, who should be the focus of the worshiping gaze of the assembled community.
All these problems, and more, reminded me of a title of a book I had read long ago, Prayer as a Political Problem , by the French Jesuit Jean Cardinal Daniélou, especially these lines: "[T]here can be no radical division between civilization and what belongs to the interior being of man; there must be a dialogue between prayer and the pursuit and realization of public policy . . . . In other words, there can be no civilization where prayer is not its representative expression. Correlatively, prayer depends on civilization."
That connection between cult and culture binds all civilizations, Christian or otherwise (Cicero is explicit on this point). The contemporary problem, though, is that we live in a time characterized by what Nietzsche called Great Politics. Just about everything is "bleared, smeared" with political markers. By that I mean, for the most part, politics comes as a "package deal." Liberals are liberals across a range of issues, just as conservatives stay conservative on most matters (the war in Iraq being the major exception). This holds true especially nowadays in this era of the so-called culture wars, which are now raging just as much inside the Catholic Church as outside. So my question, in this unique setting, is: Will Catholics of different political persuasions now cluster toward one rite over another?
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