Cardinal Schönborn: ‘Some of You Feel Abandoned by Your Bishop’

 

Sermon of Archbishop Christoph Cardinal Schönborn at the Chrism Mass

St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, Monday of Holy Week 2012. Translated by Sancrucensis.

[Introductory note: the following sermon is only intelligible in the light of a recent decision of the Cardinal’s to allow a man living in sin with another man to serve on a parish council in Stützenhofen, which has caused great consternation. I admire Cardinal Schönborn greatly. He is a wonderful teacher of the Faith and a pastor filled with zeal for souls, who has done much good for the Church in Austria, and indeed the whole world. But sometimes he does things that simply make no sense at all. In the following sermon, preached at the Chrism Mass on Monday, he tried to address the concerns of many priests about the  Stützenhofen decision. I shall post some reflections on the sermon after Easter. For now I shall only say that I think the sermon makes many good points, but that the part that tries to explain the Stützenhofen decision doesn’t make sense. I have translated from the prepared text, which differs slightly from the sermon as recorded in the video embedded above.]

Dear Brothers in the Priestly Ministry,

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Fat Tuesday 2: Mozart’s Bad Taste

Sancrucensis is not the sort of blog that gets upset about a bit of fun at Carnival time, but we must say that the bad taste of W.A. Mozart’s latest effort upsets us– even if it is Fat Tuesday. Here is the young composer conducting his latest “hit”:

Now, Mr. Mozart entitles his piece “A Musical Joke”. News flash to Mr. Mozart:

Friedrich Wessely on Confession I

I have begun a translation of Friedrich’s Wessely’s pamphlet on Confession which I shall be using for a retreat that I am to give soon. Wessely’s pamphlet was given to me by my own confessor, and I have found it helpful indeed. I shall be posting each chapter separately as well as adding them to a static page.

The Rev. Friedrich Wessely (1901-1970) was a priest of the Archdiocese of Vienna and professor for Spirituality at the University of Vienna. He brought the Legion of Mary to Austria and was and inspired the founding of the Vienna Oratory.

Wessely begins his pamphlet on Confession by noting that while many are convinced of the efficacy of this Sacrament in leading us toward holiness, nevertheless their actual experience of frequent Confession is that they seem to make little or no progress; at each Confession they confess the same sins, and they cannot see that their last Confession has made them any holier.

On Jokes and the Difference between Austria and Prussia

I think that the carnival is an irrational institution, and that St Philip Neri was entirely right to try to abolish it. The irrationality is mostly limited to February, but in German-speaking parts it “officially” begins on the 11th of November. This is because of the confusion of the “little” pre-Advent carnival with the “big” pre-Lent carnival to form one giant “carnival Season”. Various rationalizations have been attempted for the carnival. What interests me about them is that they fall into basically two types, which correspond to the two accounts of the nature of jokes that I referred to in my last post as the Prussian and the Austrian view.

Jokes as Common Goods

Surely Advent of all seasons is the time when one ought especially to remember St Benedict’s warning against “speech provoking to laughter,” (Regula Benedicti, VI) and yet seldom have I heard such uproarious laughter in the monastery as at chapter the other day. We were discussing the fact that during the recitation of the rosary some people omit the “Amen” after the Our Fathers. Now, in German the last petition of the Our Father runs “erlöse uns von dem Bösen. Amen”. (deliver us from evil. Amen.) One of my confreres (the venerable old man pictured above) recounted that as a child he always heard it (an therefore prayed it) as,  ”erlöse uns von den bösen Damen”. (Deliver us from the evil ladies).

Why is it that on hearing really good jokes one immediately wants to tell them to others?

Precondition to the Beginning of Wisdom

I was struck the following passage from Cassiodorus on Psalm 94:

‘Come, let us adore and fall down before him: let us weep before the Lord that made us.’ At the beginning of the psalm he invites the people to show jubilation; now he urges them to seek the safety of repentance—and rightly, because earlier the people he invited to exult were novices, and he did not seek to impose on them a possible source of fear when they were still apprehensive. But after the glory and power of the Lord has been recounted, he appropriately imposed tearful confession, for the spirit when instructed could not reject that most wholesome medicine.

There is an apparent paradox here. We know that fear is the beginning of wisdom. How can Cassiodorus say that the Psalmist did not seek to impose a source of fear on the people while they were beginners? But Cassiodorus’s point fits exactly with my catechetical experience.

Archduke Otto of Austria, 1912-2011

Yesterday I was in Vienna for the funeral of His Imperial and Royal Highness, Archduke Otto of Austria, Royal Prince of Hungary etc., eldest son and rightful heir of Bl. Charles of Austria, the last Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary.

One of the the most striking things about the solemn and elaborate ceremony was how joyful it was. From whence came that joy? What could be more calculated to plunge us once again into all the piled-up sadness of the 20th century – that most ruinous of all periods in the history of Central Europe – than the funeral of the head of the House of Austria who lived through practically all of it? Otto von Habsburg was still a child when the the World War shattered the “clay pot” of Austria-Hungary into dozens of unstable fragments, but he was then quite an active behind-the-scenes player in the following decades which saw the Anschluss, the Second World War, the establishment of Marxist dictatorships in almost all of the former crown lands, and the astonishing spiritual and moral decline of the West.

Pontificate of Hope

My confrere Pater Johannes Paul and I went to Rome with a group of pilgrims for the beatification of Pope John Paul II. It was tremendously moving and all that sort of thing, but the trip was also kind of exhausting and so I actually fell asleep during the sermon at the Beatification Mass. Reading the sermon when I got back, I was struck by the following passage, in which Pope Benedict gives a remarkably pithy summary of the center of his predecessor’s teaching:

All Times Are Bad Times

Gloriosus apparuisti inter principes Austriae, sancte Leopolde, ideo diadema suscepisti de manu Domini; ora pro nobis ad Deum qui te elegit. (Magnificat Antiphon for the Feast of Saint Leopold)

Earlier this month the Austrian Bishop’s Conference met here in Heiligenkreuz. By some chance the first day of the Conference coincided with the Feast of Saint Leopold, the great Margrave of Austria and founder of Stift Heiligenkreuz (November 15th). These are, shall we say, challenging times for the Church of Austria, and one could not but be struck by the contrast between our times and those of Saint Leopold. But perhaps there is more illusion than reality in the contrast.

Certainly the impression that one gets from the liturgical texts etc. for Saint Leopold is of a kind of golden age in which everything went right for the Holy Prince. The antiphon for the Dixit Dominus at vespers goes, “Dominus confregit in die belli inimicos Leopoldi”! But this impression must be largely mistaken. Man is fallen from Paradise so it is natural to look back to a pre-lapsarian age, but one is inclined not to look back far enough and to project pre-lapsarian perfection on very lapsarian times. Saint Leopold’s greatest contemporary, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, thought that his own times were the worst times in the history of the world. To us they only seem great because the people we remember from them are the great exceptions: SS. Bernard, Leopold etc. The extreme example of this is of course the time of Our Lord, the fullness of time, but the generation which our Lord Himself says will be condemned on the Day of Judgment by Sodom Gomorrah.

The opposite error is equally natural: to look forward to a coming generation which will set everything right. This is all very well if one looks forward to the Second Coming, but I’m afraid even Catholics have the tendency not to look forward far enough. How many times have we heard so-called “conservatives” say that soon the present unfortunate generation of “liberals” will die off and their places be taken by the rising generation of “traditionalist” churchmen who will reverse the excesses of the past decades? But every generation of churchmen is full of heresy, pride, cowardice, envy, and folly; all we can hope for is a occasional saint to keep our hopes up till the eschatological solution to all problems.

Lying to Children; or Edward Feser at the Battle of Solferino

In an excellent series of blog posts Edward Feser has been defending (against a surprising amount of protest) Saint Thomas’s teaching that lying is always contrary to the natural law. Since words are natural signs of what is in the mind it is perverse to use them to signify what is contrary to one’s mind. Now while speech itself is natural, the particular meaning of speech is established be convention, and, Feser points out, this can mean that, depending on the context, certain speech, which might seem to be a lie if one took it literary, is not in fact a lie:

Fictional stories and jokes do not count as lies […] because circumstances make it clear that they are not intended to be taken to communicate what the speaker really thinks is true. Similarly, given circumstances and the conventions of English usage, utterances like “Fine, thanks” are widely understood to be mere pleasantries, the sort of thing one will say out of politeness however one is actually feeling. In typical circumstances, they are simply not conventionally used to express a meaning like “I am completely free of anxiety, physical pain, or difficulty of any sort.” Hence it is […] silly to classify them as “lies”.

The question of how speech is conventionally meant to be taken becomes particularly complicated in the case of speaking to children, because children often have an imperfect understanding of the conventions of speech. The most hotly contested post in Feser’s lying series is one on Santa Clause. Telling your children that Santa is real, Feser argues, is a lie. He quotes Fr. Thomas Higgins:

A child can distinguish between fable and fact. When we purport to tell him things “for real” he does not expect a fairy tale. An example in point is the Santa Claus legend. We obtrude the story upon his belief, insisting that we are not weaving tales and commanding his acceptance – it is nothing but lying.

But Higgins is making the case simpler than it really is. A child is still in the process of learning how to distinguish between fable and fact. Depending on the child and how old it is etc. this process can be at very different stages. In fact children often take fables as fact, this is true even of fables that they themselves have invented. They slowly learn to distinguish between “pretend” and “real”; as they grow older they realize that their dolls are pretend persons whereas their brothers and sisters are real. Now I think that there are probably ways of telling the Santa Clause Myth that really make a lie out of it and harm the process of sorting out real and pretend in the child, but I think there are probably ways of telling it as what it is, namely figurative speech, which is not a lie. The child will initially take it literally but gradually learn to take it figuratively. My parents did not do the Santa thing, but they did have Saint Nicholas fill our shoes with chocolates on his Feast Day, and my experience was that we gradually came to see that it had been meant figuratively—there was no rude awakening, because our parents never said “this is not pretend;” they simply told the story and left us to develop the correct interpretation.

What is the point of such a procedure? Wouldn’t it have been better to tell the children from the start that it was not “really” Saint Nicholas who was filling the shoes? I don’t think so. It is important that children learn the different shades of speech, the conventions that determine when speech is taken literally and not. One has to guard against the naively priggish literalism of Belloc’s schoolmate:

There was a sturdy boy at my school who, when the master had carefully explained to us the nature of metaphor, said that so far as he could see a metaphor was nothing but a long Greek word for a lie.

There is a wonderful portrayal of the whole problem in the first chapter of Joseph Roth’s novel Radetzkymarsch (to take an example from Austrian literature for a change). Trotta, an infantry lieutenant, saves the Austrian Emperor’s life at the battle of Solferino by the rather un-romantic means of knocking His Apostolic Majesty down. Trotta is a Slovene, and (in stereotypically Slovenian fashion) a pusillanimous, miserly prig. He is covered in honors by the grateful monarch, and everything goes well till he reads an account of the Battle of Solferino in one of his son’s school books. Trotta’s heroic act has been turned into an exciting cavalry charge. Trotta is outraged. “It’s a lie!” he bellows, but everyone just answers him, “It’s for children.” “Children need examples that they can understand,” one of his friends says, “they will learn the real truth (die richtige Wahrheit) later.” Poor Trotta writes to the Imperial and Royal Ministry of education. The minister writes back in hilarious bureaucratic German, explaining “Euer Hochwohlgeboren” (Trotta is the son of a hedge-clipper) that in school books historical events have to be described in a way proportioned to the the imagination of children, “without changing the truthfulness of the events described.” So who is right the courageous but plodding Trotta or the imaginative minister? His Apostolic Majesty seems to side with Trotta when that noble officer takes his complaint all the way to the Imperial and Royal Throne:

“Your Majesty” said the captain, “it’s a lie!”

“There’s a great deal of lying goes on,” agreed the Emperor.

“Es wird viel gelogen:” that’s one thing we can be certain of!