Note: This piece was published in the October 8, 2004 edition of the Pittsburgh Catholic
At the opening of the triennial clergy convocation at the Oglebay Resort and Conference Center in Wheeling, W.Va., Sept. 27, Bishop Donald Wuerl addressed the challenges of serving the faithful as the number of priests declines.
The diocesan church, he said, must “re-dimension” the ministerial responsibilities of the priest in response to the circumstances of the present day.
“Re-dimensioning,” he said, will not involve radical change but rethinking the priest’s role in parishes based on church teaching, pastoral experience, the wisdom of the faithful and a deep devotion to the Eucharist.
Priests have always had to juggle expectations from parishioners, society and even themselves, Bishop Wuerl said. The current challenge for priests in Pittsburgh is finding new ways to balance those expectations while respecting the needs of priests during a time of change.
“We need to minister to our people, but we also have to care for one another,” he said. “We love our ministry, and we must recognize how we may best carry out our ministry while respecting our own human needs.”
The diocese has projected that only 240 of priests currently serving in the diocese will be in service in 2009. In 2010, there will be as many diocesan priests as the diocese has parishes.
The condition is unlikely to improve. Though four men were ordained in 2004 and 22 are in various stages of seminary formation, the ratio of priests to parishioners will continue to expand dramatically, increasing the pressure and stress on priests to meet ministerial needs.
As he urged continued prayer for vocations to the priesthood, Bishop Wuerl said the practical matter is meeting the needs of the faithful, which exist regardless of the number of priests. “Fewer priests,” he has emphasized, “does not mean less ministry.”
The diocese’s priests agree. Basic pastoral needs — like Masses and hospital visitations — are at the top of their priorities. The question is how those needs will be met, priests say, and this is where expectations may need to change.
One area of change is in priest assignments. The era of parishes with plenty of priests to go around is over, and priests in Pittsburgh are currently spread thin. In the diocese’s 215 parishes, 152 priests are solo pastors, with six priests assigned as administrators of multiple parishes. Of the remaining parishes, 47 have a pastor and parochial vicar, and only nine have a pastor and two parochial vicars.
Having fewer priests in parishes requires new expectations for priests and parishioners. Priests are incredibly busy, and parishioners have to recognize this fact. But priests also need to be free to move to where the need is greatest.
This past summer, the Priest Council recommended to Bishop Wuerl that no policy be enforced regarding how long a priest needs to be ordained as a requirement for becoming a pastor. Current policy states that a priest should be ordained at least eight years before receiving a pastorate. Changing that policy will give Bishop Wuerl more flexibility in determining when a priest is ready to become a pastor.
In a pastoral message in August, Bishop Wuerl said these changes mean priests may have to change assignments frequently, sometimes with little notice.
A larger area of change lies in meeting pastoral needs. In his address to the Sept. 27-30 clergy convocation, Bishop Wuerl said priests will need to transition from a purely pastoral into a more supervisory capacity.
Instead of handling ministry needs directly, he said, priests in the future could delegate pastoral responsibilities to an expanded pool of people. Laity, through the Institute for Ministries and other diocesan offices, could be equipped to take on more of the organizational and pastoral functions of parish life, as they have already done in catechetical, educational and youth ministries.
In the future, he said, parishes could also work together more, finding ways to share resources, hire personnel or coordinate Mass and confession schedules to ease the burden on priests.
Another source of help will be the permanent diaconate. Once the Vatican promulgates the new norms on the permanent diaconate, Bishop Wuerl said, the diocese will begin to call another class of deacons to share pastoral responsibilities with priests.
In his pastoral letter, “Envisioning Ministry for the Future,” published Sept. 17 in the Pittsburgh Catholic, Bishop Wuerl announced that through early 2005 parishes and deaneries throughout the diocese will be asked to recommend ways to meet pastoral needs with fewer priests.
Parishes and parish clusters will most likely use a combination of approaches depending on their unique ministry needs. They will need time to decide the direction they will take.
In addition, forming and training lay leadership takes time, and the ordination of a new class of deacons is still years away.
The diocesan-wide consultation will emphasize finding ways for priests, religious and laity to work together.
Though Bishop Wuerl emphasized the purpose and value of the priesthood in teaching and leading the church and in celebrating the sacraments, he also has been clear that religious women and men and laity will also have vital roles to play and vocations to discern.
Following the consultation, Bishop Wuerl intends to publish a pastoral letter providing direction for the future. In the meantime, the diocese will continue to communicate with the faithful through bulletin announcements and regular articles in the Pittsburgh Catholic.
Though the bishop does not dismiss the diocese’s challenges, his message is one of hope.
“This is our moment. In every age in the life of the church it has fallen to the faithful and clergy of that specific time to respond to the issues and circumstances of the hour,” he wrote in his September pastoral letter.
“Out of this will come, with God’s grace, a fruitful development that will only enrich this diocesan church and those whom we serve now and in the future.”
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Monday, September 27, 2004
Luther and the Arrogance of Books
In 1539, Martin Luther was asked to write the preface for a compilation of his German writings. Luther met the request, but reluctantly. As a matter of fact, he opposed the project altogether, in the hope, he said, of relegating his entire body of work to history’s dustbin.
The most obvious reason for Luther’s concern is that he was worried his followers using his writings to develop a theological system codifying his message of grace alone, in effect creating a system about giving up systems. Yet, his statement also could be helpful in understanding what it means for Christians to write and the place writing should have in Christian intellectual life.
Luther was not the first to raise concerns about writing. Such reflection begins, as so much else, with Plato. In the middle of his Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates spin a tale of two Egyptian gods, Theuth and Thamus. Socrates begins his tale with Theuth, a Prometheus-like figure, bragging about writing, his latest invention for the benefit of humanity. Thamus, though, isn’t impressed. “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories,” Thamus warns. “You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
As Eric Havelock has argued, Thamus reflects the uneasiness Plato felt as Greek society adopted the written word. Plato understood the benefits writing brought. Writing offered people the ability to think deeply, permitting high philosophy. It made Plato possible.
However, Plato also believed that writing had a cost. Since they could write things down, people wouldn’t need to remember anything. For the first time, knowing could be severed from the human body. Knowledge would be “out there” on the page, not in the knower’s mind. The text would take on a life of its own, and people would forget any other way of understanding.
The late Jesuit scholar Walter Ong’s history of the transition between speaking and writing, Orality and Literacy, echoes Plato’s concerns. Ong noticed disparities between cultures that primarily wrote and cultures that primarily spoke. Oral cultures know by feeling; literate cultures by reason. Oral cultures understand; literate cultures explain. Oral cultures are defined by their community; literate cultures by their isolation. And, like Plato, Ong suggested that for all writing’s benefits, something irreplaceable was lost in the transition from speaking to books: A different way of knowing that Western literate society, in its hubris, forgot ever existed.
Luther stood at the beginning of another chapter of the age of text. Less than a century before Luther wrote his preface, Gutenberg had invented the printing press. Now, for the first time, the Bible could be put into the hands of everyone. Mass movements could develop. Reformations could happen. If writing made Plato possible, printing made Luther possible.
The ability to print books, though, created an expectation to write books and, in turn, the lure of mass literary success. Writers could become “authors,” original thinkers who “owned” their ideas like property. There could be reputations, cash advances and tenure. Theologians in Luther’s day found the temptation too difficult to resist. Soon, they preened themselves over intellectual minutiae and reputations and wrote snarky reviews of anyone who dared contradict them. The act of writing became an end unto itself. Christian writers could, to borrow Thamus’s phrase, have a show of faith without the reality.
Luther couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy. Such writers, he wrote in the heat of early years of the Reformation, tortured believers with their petty systems and regulations. “The majority deals only with tomfoolery, teaching canon law, papal laws, human teaching, and their own statutes,” he wrote in 1521. “To these things they cling, these they keep, these they teach daily; and they no longer have an opportunity to know the truth.” Libraries became silent Towers of Babel. It would be better, he believed, if they stopped writing altogether.
Luther’s words could expose him to a charge of hypocrisy. Here he was, writing books about the dangers of writing books. However, Luther, like Plato, was after a different sort of understanding than writing alone could give, though he ended in a different place than Plato. Like Calvin, Luther believed that reading scripture correctly was a process guided by the Holy Spirit. “This Spirit can never be contained in any letter. It cannot be written, like the law, with ink, on stone, or in books,” he argued. “Instead, it is inscribed only in the heart.”
Scripture, Luther believed, gives witness to a Truth that lives in everything that exists, a Reality that transcends the marks on the page. We cannot confuse the text with the truth it reflects. No matter how glorious the prose, no matter how authoritative the argument, written words are but traces of a greater truth. For Luther, as for Plato, there was something else than the text, but writing constantly threatened to overstep itself. To forget this would make writing an idolatrous vanity, a flippant academic exercise of epigrams, posturing and twiddle over twaddle.
To resist these temptations, and for the sake of the Gospel, Luther urged his readers to disabuse themselves of their pretensions. “The longer you write and teach the less you will be pleased with yourself,” he concluded in his preface. “When you have reached this point, then do not be afraid to hope that you have begun to become a real theologian, who can teach not only the young and imperfect Christian, but also the maturing and perfect ones.” Christian writing, Luther believed, must never be about personal glory—about selling books and ruling churches—but about the Word itself, which both transcends every word the Christian writer pens.
Luther’s advice is potentially painful for Christian writers, yet also potentially liberating. In today’s publishing world, polemics have become commodities. Everywhere, we find Thomists and Chestertonians, Tillichians and Augustinians. As writers, we fall prey to the same temptations, stalk the same sorts of ideological territories and write the same snarky reviews our predecessors did. And the Gospel suffers for our arrogance. In Christian writing, Luther reminds us, only the Word is necessary. Everything else is so much dust.
My consolation is that, in time, my books will lie forgotten in the dust anyhow, especially if I (by God’s grace) have written anything good. … There is especially good hope of this, since it has begun to rain and snow books and teachers, many of which already lie there forgotten and moldering. Even their names are not remembered any more, despite their confident hope that they would eternally be on sale in the market and rule churches.Where others might have indulged in one last swipe at their critics, Luther’s summation seems more like a denouement. Some may detect a note of mock humility here, but Luther was expressing real—but rather odd—concerns about his writings. He wasn’t concerned about what they said. He was concerned that they existed at all.
The most obvious reason for Luther’s concern is that he was worried his followers using his writings to develop a theological system codifying his message of grace alone, in effect creating a system about giving up systems. Yet, his statement also could be helpful in understanding what it means for Christians to write and the place writing should have in Christian intellectual life.
Luther was not the first to raise concerns about writing. Such reflection begins, as so much else, with Plato. In the middle of his Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates spin a tale of two Egyptian gods, Theuth and Thamus. Socrates begins his tale with Theuth, a Prometheus-like figure, bragging about writing, his latest invention for the benefit of humanity. Thamus, though, isn’t impressed. “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories,” Thamus warns. “You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
As Eric Havelock has argued, Thamus reflects the uneasiness Plato felt as Greek society adopted the written word. Plato understood the benefits writing brought. Writing offered people the ability to think deeply, permitting high philosophy. It made Plato possible.
However, Plato also believed that writing had a cost. Since they could write things down, people wouldn’t need to remember anything. For the first time, knowing could be severed from the human body. Knowledge would be “out there” on the page, not in the knower’s mind. The text would take on a life of its own, and people would forget any other way of understanding.
The late Jesuit scholar Walter Ong’s history of the transition between speaking and writing, Orality and Literacy, echoes Plato’s concerns. Ong noticed disparities between cultures that primarily wrote and cultures that primarily spoke. Oral cultures know by feeling; literate cultures by reason. Oral cultures understand; literate cultures explain. Oral cultures are defined by their community; literate cultures by their isolation. And, like Plato, Ong suggested that for all writing’s benefits, something irreplaceable was lost in the transition from speaking to books: A different way of knowing that Western literate society, in its hubris, forgot ever existed.
Luther stood at the beginning of another chapter of the age of text. Less than a century before Luther wrote his preface, Gutenberg had invented the printing press. Now, for the first time, the Bible could be put into the hands of everyone. Mass movements could develop. Reformations could happen. If writing made Plato possible, printing made Luther possible.
The ability to print books, though, created an expectation to write books and, in turn, the lure of mass literary success. Writers could become “authors,” original thinkers who “owned” their ideas like property. There could be reputations, cash advances and tenure. Theologians in Luther’s day found the temptation too difficult to resist. Soon, they preened themselves over intellectual minutiae and reputations and wrote snarky reviews of anyone who dared contradict them. The act of writing became an end unto itself. Christian writers could, to borrow Thamus’s phrase, have a show of faith without the reality.
Luther couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy. Such writers, he wrote in the heat of early years of the Reformation, tortured believers with their petty systems and regulations. “The majority deals only with tomfoolery, teaching canon law, papal laws, human teaching, and their own statutes,” he wrote in 1521. “To these things they cling, these they keep, these they teach daily; and they no longer have an opportunity to know the truth.” Libraries became silent Towers of Babel. It would be better, he believed, if they stopped writing altogether.
Luther’s words could expose him to a charge of hypocrisy. Here he was, writing books about the dangers of writing books. However, Luther, like Plato, was after a different sort of understanding than writing alone could give, though he ended in a different place than Plato. Like Calvin, Luther believed that reading scripture correctly was a process guided by the Holy Spirit. “This Spirit can never be contained in any letter. It cannot be written, like the law, with ink, on stone, or in books,” he argued. “Instead, it is inscribed only in the heart.”
Scripture, Luther believed, gives witness to a Truth that lives in everything that exists, a Reality that transcends the marks on the page. We cannot confuse the text with the truth it reflects. No matter how glorious the prose, no matter how authoritative the argument, written words are but traces of a greater truth. For Luther, as for Plato, there was something else than the text, but writing constantly threatened to overstep itself. To forget this would make writing an idolatrous vanity, a flippant academic exercise of epigrams, posturing and twiddle over twaddle.
To resist these temptations, and for the sake of the Gospel, Luther urged his readers to disabuse themselves of their pretensions. “The longer you write and teach the less you will be pleased with yourself,” he concluded in his preface. “When you have reached this point, then do not be afraid to hope that you have begun to become a real theologian, who can teach not only the young and imperfect Christian, but also the maturing and perfect ones.” Christian writing, Luther believed, must never be about personal glory—about selling books and ruling churches—but about the Word itself, which both transcends every word the Christian writer pens.
Luther’s advice is potentially painful for Christian writers, yet also potentially liberating. In today’s publishing world, polemics have become commodities. Everywhere, we find Thomists and Chestertonians, Tillichians and Augustinians. As writers, we fall prey to the same temptations, stalk the same sorts of ideological territories and write the same snarky reviews our predecessors did. And the Gospel suffers for our arrogance. In Christian writing, Luther reminds us, only the Word is necessary. Everything else is so much dust.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Co-Opted
From the 1860s to the early 1920s, Camilla Gray writes in her history of the Russian avant garde art community, a debate raged over what art should be, whom it should serve and where the artist should fit into society. There were two general positions on the matter. On one side, a crimson thread beginning with the group known as "The Wanderers" and ending with the Constructivists just after the Revolution believed that art existed for something beyond itself, that it should speak to and live within the context of human life. The opposite perspective, a white thread beginning with the wholistic artistic vision of a group known as the "World of Art" community and ending with the abstract Supremacists, believed that art was spiritual and that the artist's job was to bear witness to these highest ideals.
The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1992 (Thames and Hudson, 1986, 324 pp.) tells the story of how the crimson thread won. This edition, revised and enlarged from Gray's original 1962 manuscript, tells a story of how art in the modern world took its place in social change, then lost it in the agit-prop of Socialist Realism. Artists dropped their easels--and the idle speculation that took place there--to become industrial designers, creators of a futuristic aesthetic that melded people to machines.
The Marxist overtones in Gray's narrative, though unexplored, are clear. Marx believed that simply creating art for art's sake was unproductive labor because the artist would be simply a merchant of his or her produce and would exist outside the relationship of capital. The artist needed a job that would connect him or her to the material facts of economic life. The Constructivist aesthetic was a materialist aesthetic, which means that it dealt with the materials first and then explored the consequences of those materials. It created art from the bottom-up, using the mundane aspects and motifs of common life as the substance of expression and making stoves, coffee pots, buildings, clothes sites of artistic creativity. It explored the concrete functions of life and the relationships between flesh and steel. But ultimately, it required that the artist have something to do.
In a way, Gray's work suggests that the appeal of Communism among artists was not just ideological but existential. In the triumph of Communism, artists throughout Russia and the West found a purpose again.
The times were heady. Just after the Revolution, during the period of heroic Communism, artists were grasping at ideas that were beyond their reach. Vladimir Tatlin's proposal for a Monument to the IIIrd International was perhaps the most expansive:
Dealing with the material facts of existence did not mean relinquishing imagination, but channeling it towards revolution. And revolution, it seems, lay at the core of what these artists were about.
The fact that Gray begins her history two years after the liberation of the serfs in 1861 is important. The idea of a modern Russia seemed to be in the air, but no one seemed to know what it meant. A 1907 painting by Valentin Serov, Peter the First, seems to capture the spirit. This painting, drawn in a traditional representational style, shows the tzar striding against the wind as his retinue struggles to keep up. One gets the sense that Russia was--perhaps always has been--struggling against an invisible force pushing it back from the modern West, which it seems to want to be but never can be. The artists Gray depicts are similarly passionate, striking out against the world and themselves. Artists starved to death and engaged in fisticuffs. There is something passionate and violent here, a self yearning to break free. One can see Ayn Rand happening.
Though she died in Russia of hepatitis in 1971, Gray's book is important because of its comprehensive treatment of a period of Russian art history that is little understood. It is not without its defects, though some of these were beyond Gray's control. At the time, few good color images existed of many of the works she discussed, and little about the period has been published. As it admirably perseveres against these issues, however, Gray's brisk prose sometimes moves too briskly. She fails to offer a proper intellectual context, such as the relationship with Marxism, that would make the artists more intelligible.
In addition, the rejection of Constructivism in favor of Socialist Realism and the effects of that rejection on the artists who saw Communism with hopeful eyes is also neglected. This is an important question, because it speaks to the arts in our own time, when artists of all kinds have been incorporated into the relations of capital. What happens to art when it becomes a commodity, when it must become "useful"? What happens to artists when they face censorship, no matter how noble the reason? And human creativity? In finding a purpose and a paycheck, the artist runs the risk of losing her soul.
The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1992 (Thames and Hudson, 1986, 324 pp.) tells the story of how the crimson thread won. This edition, revised and enlarged from Gray's original 1962 manuscript, tells a story of how art in the modern world took its place in social change, then lost it in the agit-prop of Socialist Realism. Artists dropped their easels--and the idle speculation that took place there--to become industrial designers, creators of a futuristic aesthetic that melded people to machines.
The Marxist overtones in Gray's narrative, though unexplored, are clear. Marx believed that simply creating art for art's sake was unproductive labor because the artist would be simply a merchant of his or her produce and would exist outside the relationship of capital. The artist needed a job that would connect him or her to the material facts of economic life. The Constructivist aesthetic was a materialist aesthetic, which means that it dealt with the materials first and then explored the consequences of those materials. It created art from the bottom-up, using the mundane aspects and motifs of common life as the substance of expression and making stoves, coffee pots, buildings, clothes sites of artistic creativity. It explored the concrete functions of life and the relationships between flesh and steel. But ultimately, it required that the artist have something to do.
In a way, Gray's work suggests that the appeal of Communism among artists was not just ideological but existential. In the triumph of Communism, artists throughout Russia and the West found a purpose again.
In Communism they saw the answer to the sad isolation of the artist from society which the capitalist economy had introduced. In Russia, under this new-born regime, they felt a great experiment was being made in which, for the first time since the Middle Ages, the artist and his art were embodied in the make-up of common life, art was given a working job, and the artist considered a responsible member of society.
The times were heady. Just after the Revolution, during the period of heroic Communism, artists were grasping at ideas that were beyond their reach. Vladimir Tatlin's proposal for a Monument to the IIIrd International was perhaps the most expansive:
Tatlin's Monument was to be twice the height of the Empire State Building. It was to be executed in glass and iron. An iron spiral framework was to support a body consisting of a glass cylinder, a glass cone and a glass cube. This body was to be suspended on a dynamic asymmetrical axis, like a leaning Eiffel Tower, which would thus continue is spiral rhythm into space beyond. Such "movement" was not to be confined to the static design. The body of the Monument itself was literally going to move. The cylinder was to revolve on its axis once a year: the activities allocated to this portion of the building were lectures, conferences and congress meetings. The cone was to complete a revolution once a month and to house executive activities. The topmost cube was to complete a full turn on its axis once a day and to be an information centre. It was constantly to issue news bulletins, proclamations and manifestoes--by means of telegraph, telephone, radio and loudspeaker. A special feature was to be an open-air screen, lit up at night, which would constantly relay the latest news; a special projection was to be installed which in cloudy weather would throw words on the sky, announcing the motto for the day--"a particularly useful suggestion for the intemperate North."
Dealing with the material facts of existence did not mean relinquishing imagination, but channeling it towards revolution. And revolution, it seems, lay at the core of what these artists were about.
The fact that Gray begins her history two years after the liberation of the serfs in 1861 is important. The idea of a modern Russia seemed to be in the air, but no one seemed to know what it meant. A 1907 painting by Valentin Serov, Peter the First, seems to capture the spirit. This painting, drawn in a traditional representational style, shows the tzar striding against the wind as his retinue struggles to keep up. One gets the sense that Russia was--perhaps always has been--struggling against an invisible force pushing it back from the modern West, which it seems to want to be but never can be. The artists Gray depicts are similarly passionate, striking out against the world and themselves. Artists starved to death and engaged in fisticuffs. There is something passionate and violent here, a self yearning to break free. One can see Ayn Rand happening.
Though she died in Russia of hepatitis in 1971, Gray's book is important because of its comprehensive treatment of a period of Russian art history that is little understood. It is not without its defects, though some of these were beyond Gray's control. At the time, few good color images existed of many of the works she discussed, and little about the period has been published. As it admirably perseveres against these issues, however, Gray's brisk prose sometimes moves too briskly. She fails to offer a proper intellectual context, such as the relationship with Marxism, that would make the artists more intelligible.
In addition, the rejection of Constructivism in favor of Socialist Realism and the effects of that rejection on the artists who saw Communism with hopeful eyes is also neglected. This is an important question, because it speaks to the arts in our own time, when artists of all kinds have been incorporated into the relations of capital. What happens to art when it becomes a commodity, when it must become "useful"? What happens to artists when they face censorship, no matter how noble the reason? And human creativity? In finding a purpose and a paycheck, the artist runs the risk of losing her soul.
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