The
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)
Dear brothers and sisters,
You have certainly heard by now
that Theodore Edgar McCarrick, onetime Archbishop of Washington, D.C. and
Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, has been dismissed from the clerical state
because he committed the ecclesiastical crimes of “solicitation in the Sacrament
of Confession, and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with
adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power.”[1] Without
going into detail about what Mr. McCarrick did, I want to speak with you today about what it means to be
dismissed from the clerical state; as a matter of great concern for the Church
and for individual members of the faithful, it is a most serious matter that
deserves our attention, in part, because so much of the media, both secular and
Catholic, do not quite get everything correct in their reports.
When a man is ordained
to the Sacred Order of Priests, he is configured “to Christ by a special grace
of the Holy Spirit, so that he may serve as Christ's instrument for his Church.
By ordination one is enabled to act as a representative of Christ, Head of the
Church, in his triple office of priest, prophet, and king.”[2] “[T]his share in Christ's office is
granted once for all. The sacrament of Holy Orders … confers an indelible
spiritual character and cannot be repeated or conferred temporarily.”[3] By virtue of this indelible mark, the
priest receives the sacred power to act in
persona Christi capitas, to act in the person of Christ the head, when he
celebrates the Eucharist and hears confessions. By virtue of his ordination,
every priest stands in the midst of the Church in the place of Christ, who is
the Head and Shepherd of the Church.[4]
Regrettably, we know
that not every priest is always faithful in carrying out the sacred duties
entrusted to him and to which he commits himself at ordination. Priests are not
always faithful in small matters and sometimes – fewer times, thanks be to God
– they are unfaithful in grave matters. By this we see that the
presence of Christ in the minister is not to
be understood as if the [priest] were preserved from all human weaknesses, the
spirit of domination, error, [or] even sin. The power of the Holy Spirit does
not guarantee all acts of ministers in the same way. While this guarantee
extends to the sacraments, so that even the minister's sin cannot impede the
fruit of grace, in many other acts the minister leaves human traces that are
not always signs of fidelity to the Gospel and consequently can harm the
apostolic fruitfulness of the Church.[5]
The grave infidelity
of a few priests – and even Cardinals - is disheartening and lamentable and
should serve as a reminder that each of us is daily in need of the Lord’s
merciful love and that we must each cooperate with his grace if we are to
attain salvation. We must always remember that “the Lord watches over the way of the just, but the way of the wicked
vanishes” (Psalm 1:6).
What, then, does it
mean to be “laicized”? The Code of Canon
Law views a priest in three respects: first, in terms of the Sacrament of Holy
Orders he has received; second, in terms of his faculties – his permissions, we
might say - to exercise his priestly ministry; and third, in terms of his
relationship to a diocesan Bishop.
As we have already
seen, once a priest is ordained his ordination cannot be removed or taken away;
he is a priest forever because the sacred character, the indelible mark, he
received is permanent (cf. Psalm 110:4). However, the faculties a priest
receives either from the law itself or from his local Bishop give him
permission to exercise his priestly ministry; these faculties can be removed,
either wholly or in part, and no priest can function without the approval and
support of his Bishop, whose extension he is. This second and third aspect
concerns the dismissal from the clerical state.
Dismissal from the clerical
state, sometimes called laicization and what the media often calls defrocking,
entails
a permanent separation from all ministry: [a
dismissed priest] loses all rights and faculties associated with the priesthood
and is not authorized to exercise ministry in the name of the Church; he is
also dispensed from all obligations arising from his ordination to the
priesthood, most notably the obligations of celibacy; and he loses his
"incardination," that is, the special bond or attachment to the
diocese or religious institute for which he was ordained.[6]
A priest dismissed
from the clerical state is still a priest, although he may neither function as
such, nor present himself as a priest; he is forbidden to exercise the sacred
power entrusted to him at his ordination.
The term “laicization”
is not meant as a derogatory statement toward the laity; it is rather a
statement of fact. There are two states of life in which all Catholics live; a
Catholic is either a cleric or a layman. A man who is dismissed from the
clerical state no longer lives as a cleric but as a layman, even though he is
still a cleric.[7] There is not a third state in which he
can live; for which reason this process is commonly called “laicization.”
What are we to say
then about the sacraments a dismissed priest performed? What of the baptisms he
administered, the marriages he witnessed, the Masses he celebrated? Are they
invalid? Was Christ not present in them? To say so would be to limit the power
of God. We know that even through a sinful priest
Christ's gift is not thereby profaned: what
flows through him keeps its purity, and what passes through him remains dear
and reaches the fertile earth.... the spiritual power of the sacrament is
indeed comparable to light: those to be enlightened receive it in its purity,
and if it should pass through defiled beings, it is not itself defiled.[8]
The power of the
sacraments is unaffected by the sinfulness of the priests who celebrated them,
which is a cause of hope for us.
Today, then, as the
sins of another are so publicly before us, let each of us look upon our own sins
and seek the Lord’s mercy through the sacrament of Penance. Let each of us fear
the name of the Lord, remembering that “cursed is the one who trusts in human
beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:5). Let us persevere
in humility, in faith, hope and love, so that we might each have “hearts that
are just and true.”[9]
This is, of course, simply another way of saying we need to let the Beatitudes
take deep root in our hearts.
The Lord Jesus
pronounced the eight Beatitudes after “raising his eyes toward his disciple” (Luke 6:20). Surely, he turns his eyes upon us today, who are also his disciples.
Indeed, we might say that
The
individual Beatitudes are the fruit of this looking upon the disciples; they describe
what might be called the actual condition of Jesus’ disciples: They are poor, hungry, weeping men they are hated and persecuted (cf. Lk 6:2off.). These statements are meant to list practical, but also theological,
attributes of the disciples of Jesus – of those who have set out to follow
Jesus and have become his family.[10]
As members of his family, as members
of his Mystical Body, we are each called to share fully in his life, to be his
disciples not simply by name, but also by act.
For this reason,
the
Beatitudes express the meaning of discipleship. They become more concrete and
real the more completely the disciple dedicates himself to service in the way
that is illustrated for us in the life of Saint Paul. What the Beatitudes mean
cannot be expressed in purely theoretical terms; it is proclaimed in the life
and suffering, and in the mysterious joy, of the disciple who gives himself
completely to following the Lord.[11]
Indeed, we know that “the disciple is
bound to the mystery of Christ,” a mystery displayed in the Beatitudes as “they
call us into communion with him.”[12]
As the world presents to us those
who failed to keep the Beatitudes in their hearts, Mother Church is beginning
to present to us one who, we think, did keep the Beatitudes in his heart: the
Servant of God Father Augustus Tolton. The Positio
on his life, a document that argues he lived the theological virtues of faith,
hope, and love, as well as the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude,
and temperance to a heroic degree, has been unanimously approved by the
Historical and Theological Commissions of the Congregation for the Causes of
Saints. His Positio is now with Pope
Francis. If he, too, finds that Father Gus imitated the life of Jesus and kept
the Beatitudes in his heart to a heroic degree, the Holy Father will name him a
Venerable, opening the way to Beatification and Canonization.
Father Gus was born a slave in
Missouri, but escaped from slavery when he just a boy, with his mother and two
siblings. Growing up in Quincy, he encountered some racism, but also fell in love
with the Catholic faith and desired to be a priest. After receiving numerous
rejection letters from seminaries and religious orders across the country, he
went to Rome to be ordained as a missionary. Once a priest, he was sent back to
Quincy where he quietly and patiently endured racist hatred from a brother
priest, and from some others. When it became too much to bear, Father Gus went
to Chicago, where he died of heatstroke at the age of 43 in 1897. He requested
to be buried in Quincy, where his body remains today. Above all, the witness of
his faith shows us that “Jesus brings joy into the midst of affliction.”[13]
Amen.
[1] “Holy See: McCarrick dismissed from the clerical state for abuse,” Vatican
News, 16 February 2019. Accessed 16 February 2019.
[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1581. Cf. canon 290.
[3] Idib., 1582.
[4] Cf. ibid., 1549.
[5] Ibid., 1550.
[6] Gregory Ingels, J.C.D., “Loss of the Clerical State.” Accessed 16 November 2007. Cf. canon 292.
[7] Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1583.
[8] Ibid., 1584.
[9] Collect for the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Roman Missal.
[10] Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the
Jordan to the Transfiguration (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 71.
[11] Ibid., 73-74.
[12] Ibid., 74.
[13] Ibid., 72.
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