Twenty-Seventh
Sunday of Ordinary Time
October 3, 2004
On
a scale of 1-10, how open are you to being taught/changing your views about
an issue?
Fr. Bob Coerver was a formidable teacher
in the seminary. Though he had mellowed quite a bit by my generation, there was
still a fire and a passion in him about moral theology. Lo, the student who came
unprepared, or with spurious reasoning over some moral issue. He could quickly
make your life miserable. I had reason to think of him, during our retreat two
weeks ago at the Lake of the Ozarks. You see, Fr. Coerver lived through the changes
wrought by Vatican II as a TEACHER of moral theology in the seminary. It was a
huge responsibility that weighed heavily on his shoulders. And it was a huge shift
in thinking about the nature of moral law, the identity of the church, and his
identity as a priest within that understanding of church.
Ironically, I thought of him, not because of any changes in moral law, but over
a change in liturgical practice. At the first mass we celebrated together, they
brought up every chalice that would be used for the distribution of communion
and placed them on the altar. They were already filled with wine. And so now,
we had this somewhat small altar, filled with 11 chalices, including the Archbishop’s,
two ciboria for the Body of Christ, and the Sacramentary that didn’t quite
fit on the altar because of all the clutter. “What in the _____ was this,
I thought?” And I confess, I was angry because I thought it was the particular
tastes of the conservative priests who were in charge of liturgy trying to be
foisted upon the rest of us. (It turns out, it is the result of applying the new
GIRM to the Liturgy.) Even before I knew WHY they were doing that, I was against
it. Even before I had heard anything about the practice, I had closed my mind
against it.
It was then that the ghost of Fr. Bob Coerver reared its formidable head. A group
of us asked him one day about his memory of the council and of the changes. He
started to give us the party line. Then in a moment of honesty, he stopped. “All,
hell,” he said. “I was a living hell for me. I wrestled and I struggle
and I fought and I prayed. For months. And I kept studying and kept wrestling
until finally I understood what the Council was trying to say to me.” Fr.
Bob was living testimony of a man who, as we heard in the letter to Timothy: “Guarded
the rich trust” left to him “with the help of the Holy Spirit. In
regards to this issue, I realized I could not do any less…
On a different but related track, before anyone had read the text of the Archbishop’s
pastoral letter, published for the first time on Friday in the St. Louis Review,
I had received two e-mails about it. Before even having read it, they were expressing
views about it. One was flat against it. The second was concerned that in the
Archbishop’s defense of the primary life issues of Abortion, embryonic research,
euthanasia and defense of marriage, the Seamless Garment of Life view would be
lost. They wondered where the ‘ranking of the life issues’ came from,
as they had never seen that in documents/teachings before. I felt the ghost of
Fr. Coerver close by asking: ‘Will you close your mind before you even read
it, Kempf?” Which is the challenge I leave before you this day.
Paul to Timothy invites us to “Stir into flame the gift of God you have…”
Part of that gift is our freedom in the United States to vote as thinking, praying,
reflecting people. Please study the Archbishop’s document as a Fr. Coerver
did the documents of Vatican II – open to hear what God was trying to say
through them. If you go the Archdiocesan Website, and look up the St. Louis Review,
you can get a full copy of the text there. I’ll have a Question and Answer
summary of the document at the Newman Center by Tuesday. That has a link listed
to the USCCB document “Responsible Citizenship”, which puts all the
“Life Issues” before us in a nuanced way.
I think there might be a better way to address the concern about spilling some
of the Precious Blood when pouring from the flagon to the communion cups than
what the new GIRM suggests, one that will keep the “noble simplicity”
of Vatican II. But I’ll keep praying about it and reflecting on it and asking
the Spirit to stir into flame the gift of God given to me, and wait to see how
the Archbishop asks us to implement that here in our Archdiocese. As we approach
the voting booth in a months time, I pray that we all will do the same with that
most important choice…