[Note to Catholic friends: there is grace on the other side of the (wholly appropriate) Vatican-bashing.]
Joseph Forgives His Brothers
It is too good of a story to pass up, and so I won’t.
Monty Python may think no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, but everyone should expect the Vatican Inquisition, which now operates under a stealth title, The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This is the group of old men who have worked diligently to make sure that women know their place and homos are appropriately hated. They do this because they speak for God, because they are the gate-agents for divine grace, and you are not getting on the next flight to heaven without their permission. Or at least, so they think.
The Second Vatican Council, which created a more humane and human church, was quickly overwhelmed with a conservative backlash, spearheaded by the fervent anti-communist Pope John Paul II, and his top henchman, Joseph Ratzinger, who headed the Vatican Inquisition and would eventually become Pope Benedict.
But there are still wings of the Roman church that believe worship is the work of the people, maybe not quite the barefoot guitar masses of the ’70s, but certainly less clerical and a bit more humble, a Nuns on the Bus sort of spirituality, though they too have been targeted by the Inquisition.
I’m not sure he’d describe himself in that way, but Father Andres Arango probably fits well in the low-clerical tradition. So it was, for more than twenty years, he baptized infants with the words “We baptize you,” thousands of infants in heavily Catholic Arizona.
Except, in June of 2020, while the world around them, including Italy itself, was on fire with Covid-19, people locked in their homes, loved ones dying alone in hospitals, the Congregation issued a ruling that this phrasing, “we baptize,” is not only incorrect, but that it renders the baptisms themselves invalid. And because every other Catholic sacrament hinges on baptism, every subsequent sacrament received by those Catholics is also invalid, as the Diocese of Phoenix recently declared in regard to Father Andres. Every marriage. Every communion. Every confession.
By the logic of this group of church bureaucrats, there are certainly some people who are now in hell because, and pick any of these: a) their sins were not forgiven because their confession was invalid because they were not baptized, b) they were adulterers because their marriage was not valid because they were not baptized, c) they improperly received communion because they were not baptized, etc. etc.
Father Andres was certainly not the only priest in the world to use a more humble wording of the rite, to remove himself from the role of God-proxy, so there are likely millions more who are, according to the Vatican, damned.
An American Jesuit, Father Thomas Reese, warned that the decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was going to create this sort of chaos and pastoral crisis back in October of 2020, though no one that mattered listened apparently.
This is not the sort of publicity the Roman Communion needs right now, and contributes to the widespread perception that Christians generally are focused on the wrong things.
The good news is that most Catholics will just roll their eyes at this news, having realized long ago that the Church is not the old men that run it, and while we may want to push-back on that point, now might not be the best time, and besides, God’s grace is greater than human stupidity, in all of its infinitely creative forms, both the grace and the stupidity.
Still, we must have compassion for those who now agonize over their own souls and the souls of deceased loved ones. Real harm has been done, real pain inflicted, just not by Father Andres.
This all begs the question “Who is in? And who is out?,” not only of some maybe eternal heaven, but of the community on the Way of Jesus, of the table fellowship. How does one move into and out of the relationship of covenant, with God universally and with God particularly in the form of the beloved community we call church, that we describe as the mystical Body of Christ. We may reject the idea of priest as holy gate-agent in the confessional, but there is something to be said for a process of reconciliation that includes accountability and possibility.
Or do we need a gatekeeper at all? Since God is love and grace is endless, maybe we shouldn’t have any standards at all. Maybe we should be like Joseph welcoming his brothers in Egypt.
Except there’s this: Joseph messed with them a bit, some back and forth and planting what looked like a stolen cup on them.
And Joseph was operating from a place of incredible power, they were starving and he controlled all of the food. It is easy to seem gracious when you hold all the cards.
And this great hero Joseph we celebrate used that power in ways that are counter to any Hebrew or Christian notion of justice, for scripture tells us that Jospeh used the grain stores to dispossess the Egyptian people, transferring all of the land and all of the livestock to the Pharaoh except for that belonging to the priests. The despotism that allowed a later Pharaoh to turn on the Israelites begins with Jospeh’s own exploitative actions, profiting from catastrophe, much like America’s corporations today.
Back here in the real world, we have to figure out this in and out process, the realm of accountability and possibility, for ourselves, for while membranes evolved in nature, allowing necessary and healthy amounts to pass in and out of the cell, we’ve just got our brains, and seriously, some of those brains let in some pretty toxic stuff.
As a general rule, we’re way better at throwing out than bringing in, better at vengeance and punishment than at reconciliation and restoration, even though the two ends of our socio-political spectrum target different groups for expulsion, the right expelling anyone who challenges the power of white males and the ultra-rich while the left, with its circular firing squad, expels anyone deemed impure, which brings to mind a teaching about the speck in the neighbor’s eye…
Except, of course, for sometimes anxious and toxic organizations in an age of discontinuous change, like the PTA and so many small churches, organizations that feel powerless, where toxic behavior can go unchallenged and the poison that is killing the body is never expelled.
We forget and romanticize history, forget that before the new West Germany, that economic powerhouse of the second half of the 20th century, could be built, there was first a process of de-nazification. Even the forgiveness of South Africa’s post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, modeled on radical grace, required accountability, for those forgiven were forgiven on the condition that they were publicly truthful about their actions.
We love the phrase “when two or more are gathered in my name,” and always, always ignore the fact that the teaching is about holding someone who has strayed to account, is part of a teaching about this question of who is in and who is out.
Great, you’re generous and righteous, Jesus says. Now give the rest away. And Jesus lets the wealthy young man walk away. He’s out.
But the woman taken in adultery? I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more. She’s back in.
Community must be porous, must act as a sort of membrane that allows in what is healthy, what contributes to growth, that expels what is toxic. We can and should work on helping those outside of the community be restored to it where doing so is safe, ex-cons and addicts, and God-help-us, reformed neo-fascists.
As for God’s eternal and transcendent community, in all of its mystery and glory? I’m pretty sure She does not care what word started the baptismal formula or what some committee of old men decided.
Let’s let God be God, and try to be, in our own small way, agents of grace and restoration here on earth. Amen.