RBWords

     In this final parable in a long series, Jesus is clearly the householder who, in his teaching, has brought forth both the new and the old!  A concern for both showed especially in his image of the new and old wine and wineskins back in chapter nine.  Two thousand years later, our church is faced with the same responsibility and a considerable debate over what is new and what is old!  In 2005, in an annual address to the Roman curia, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of a tension between two "hermeneutics" in the church following the Second Vatican Council.  ["Hermeneutic" comes from a Greek word meaning "to interpret."]  One hermeneutic emphasizes, according to Pope Benedict, the discontinuity with what went before the council, and the other emphasizes continuity.  This has given rise to a considerable debate among theologians and bishops about the future of the church.  The pope is too good a theologian not to know that such a dichotomy requires considerable nuancing, but those who have seized on this speech are using it in a much cruder fashion.  

     Critics of the "continuity" hermeneutic point out that proponents are emphasizing continuity not with the "greater tradition" of the church which stretches back to the apostles, but rather with the monarchical and authoritarian style of the 19th century Roman Catholicism of Pius IX!  They call attention to the efforts of Pope Benedict to reach out to the schismatic Catholics who have been unable to accept the council's teachings and changes - efforts which include the "restoration" of the Tridentine Latin liturgy.  Parishioners are seeing younger clergy wearing cassocks and birettas (that hat with the pompom on top that my generation of altar boys learned how to handle) and surplices and "fiddleback" chasubles, etc.   Critics of the "discontinuity" hermeneutic believe that its proponents have abandoned the transcendent and perennial aspects of the church in favor of whatever is "trendy" or new.  

     One speech to the Roman curia does not equal an ecumenical council!  There is considerable evidence and scholarship to show that the council fathers considered themselves to be well within the greater tradition of the church.  I, for one, would not want to see the church "frozen" for the future in the time frame of any period of the past.  Yet I know that my identity as a Catholic includes my experience of the past and therefore my understanding of the church in the present.  There is no benefit to be gained in a kind of "amnesia" about what or where the church has come from.   I recognize it may be helpful to certain Catholics to go up to the attic of the past to find old clothes to wear and thereby "restore" or "recapture" a past memory (no matter how good or bad) to help with the present. Somehow those older things seem to represent a certitude they find missing in the present.   The storeroom of the church is very large.  The Catholic church as I knew it in the 1950's was vastly different from the church of the 1970's.  I would not want to live again in either period.  My hope is that we can all be responsible householders and give one another space in which to live our faith within that storeroom!  AMEN