I found Catholica on the internet http://www.catholica.com.au/ -- knew I had found a journal to rank with The Tablet, America, Corpus Reports, Mirabile Dictu, and especially much more about a Catholic Church in that far-off country, which gave us Bishop Geoffrey Robinson.
I signed up for frequent email news items from it. Today’s is down below, and the article by Professor Kania on The Eastern Churches is at: http://www.catholica.com.au/andrewstake1/089_ak_260808.php.
If you go to the URL and if you have VISTA, you can save that webpage in Microsoft Word format. Saves a lot of picky, picky, keyboard sleight of hand to get a document off a website and into a hard drive. That article is being published by The Tablet, as well.
Please click on it. Then, please read it. Give the Church a chance.
Why The Eastern Churchs?
There are deep, lifelong urges in me about being a Catholic. Not a Roman Catholic, just a Catholic in my own country, my own neighborhood, my own culture, where I was born, of the earth. All that is called Autochthony. What an awful awe-ful word! It's started being pronounced lately, getting around, becoming a word, a real word. Could become our Church.
A Bunch of Urges in Bullets
1. Kaiser sees the Eastern Churches as role models for autochthony. They are autochthonous and in union with Rome. I am attracted to his way of talking Church in the 21st century, about people and their cultures, their being bound to the earth where they were born and their religion being a binding with God. He talks autochthonously.
2. Attraction? At first, because anything that wasn’t Roman had to be good in my disgusted and frustrated awakening to the antics of papal and curial primacies. The sex abuse crisis blew off the tabernacle veil shrowding Rome’s abuse of power, absolute power and absolute corruption.
3. Also, as a second, I guess, because I was always that way. At age 8 or so, I got whacked by our pastor for a little boy’s wisdom: “Not. Not. I am not a Roman Catholic. I am a Boston Catholic.”
4. Another close friend – I am blessed -- is the Right Reverend Robert F. Taft, SJ, an Archimandrite -- sort of a Bishop; see footnote at the end, -- of those Eastern Catholic Churches, professor emeritus of the Pontifical Institute of Oriental Studies. He is one of the finest theologians in our Church – I am prejudiced.
We were Jesuit novices together and went on the month-long hospital trial to the Boston City Hospital in the late winter/early spring of 1951. I told the story before. We were preparing a corpse for the morgue, just the two of us, in a frightening, horrible room, etched in memory. Bob looked up from the body’s feet, “Paul, I wonder what we’ll be doing 50 years from now.”
5. 50 years ago, I had finished three years of teaching as a Jesuit scholastic at Sophia University in Tokyo. As an insular, narrow-minded Boston Boy, rarely outside of New England, I saw Church, the Catholic Church, not the Roman one, nor the Boston one either. I stood knee-deep in a culture so different from my own Eurocentic-Hibernian-Yankee hodge-podge of plastered- on inculturations, that I could not, at first, believe there were such human beings on earth as Orientals.
All of a sudden I was no longer the superior, gifted, cultured, self-sacrificing missionary from the Athens of America, sort of a 20th century Francis Xavier Jesuit, fired up, eager to baptize. Just a stupid, illiterate, uncultured aborigine “from away.” To my students there, I was a hairy, smelly, ape-like gaijin – Japanese for what we denigrate as an alien immigrant. They told me that Japanese look down on non-Japanese as monkeys, apes, baboons, because of the body hair and the awful smells.
That was no prejudicial caricature. It was for real. They aaw us that way. Think. How do we see Black Americans? Mexicans? American Indians? Eskimos? Muslims? Al Quaedists? In Japan, I was one of them.
One day in class I was extolling America's culture. A young man interrupted, "Sensei, excuse, please, how old your country?"
Thinking quick: 1775 to 1955, "Almost two hundred years now."
"Ah! So! Sumimasen Sensei. Nihon is thousands of many years."
Japan's Sophia University gave me Church. There were about 40 Jesuits on the faculty. From 26 different countries. And cultures. So, I lived Church, in-house, too.
6. Today, I am very much aware of the FABC, Fellowship of Asian Bishops Conference, which is saving Church in Asia, as authochthonous. The failure of Rome to bless The Chinese Rites will not be allowed to happen again.
Take Back Our Church
Kaiser has helped found an organization working for Ecclesia Semper Reformanda -- Church Always To Be Reformed. Think: Renewing Our Church in This 21st Century. Think: Saving It. Go to: http://www.takebackourchurch.org/
For those who scoff at autochthony and scream at Kaiser, in an effort to belittle him, and for those who may never have worked on a corpse with a brother novice who, 50 years later, had become an Archimandrite, and for those of us who cannot see, hear, touch Church out of Rome’s Vatican, please read what Professor Kania of Oxford has written about the Eastern Churches.
His article might, just might, soften pre-judgmentality, a curse to which all of us -- all of us -- give so much allegiance from the hardness of both heart and mind. It might even cool our initial hostility to autochthony – what an awe-ful word! We prejudge too much, too often, too readily, because we are so set in our ways, because we got used to it, and because we let bishops and cardinals and popes get away with their abuse of power. We now know that. They do, too. We have begun to stand and speak truth to that power.
The Roman version of church is holy, at times. It is apostolic. It is not, however, one, nor is it catholic, i.e. universal. It is what it has always been, Eurocentric.
Some people are Eurocentric. Most on this planet are not. The Roman church may very well follow the Roman Empire onto which it latched, one thousand, seven hundred years ago, and from which it hoped never to be separated. The emperor’s name was Constantine. He joined state and religion, although religion is supposed to be the joining of people with God.
The Roman Empire rose and fell. The Church cannot rise or fall. Not like the empire it took on as a role model for control by Three Ds: Dogma, Doctrine, Discipline.
Why not? Because, he told us that wherever two or three gather in his name, there he is. And he sent us a Paraclete.
If we want to, really want to, Take Back Our Church, well . . . let’s stand bound in our cultures and bind ourselves to God. Church does that. For us. With us. By us.
Autochthony, a Lodestar for The Eastern Churches
Autochthony means union with Rome, the link to our traditions in the Gospels, Jesus Christ, apostles, disciples, early Catholic Christians, apostolic succession, a bishop as Primus inter pares –First among equals. Pares means Equals, not Subordinates.
We are the people of God, where we are born, where we grew up, where we live now. And so is everybody else in our world, which itself is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. The world is most of those. So should be our Church.+++++
Today's Email From Catholica
From: editor@catholica.com.au [mailto:editor@catholica.com.au]
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2008 3:20 AM
To: epkelly1@comcast.net
Subject: [Catholica] Can the Eastern Catholic Churches offer us anything?
TODAY'S e-BULLETIN FROM CATHOLICA AUSTRALIA
EDITOR'S ROUND-UP
Tuesday, 26 August 2008
Can the Eastern Catholic Churches offer us anything?
Dear Friends,
Today is one of those days where it is a little invigorating again to wake up as a Catholic in Australia. The news overnight from St Mary's Parish in Brisbane is hopefilling and exciting. Here we have an archbishop, a priest and a community seeking to work together in a cooperative way each respecting the dignity and responsibilities of the other and seeking to formulate a response that builds our Church in Australia rather than diminish it. Congratulations to all involved. You provide a sense of hope and vigour far beyond your own backyard.
We also have a lead commentary on Catholica today that I hope will turn out to be extremely hopefilling and invigorating. It is probably the most detailed and lengthy commentary we have published at over 6,000 words and I will be publishing it progressively over the next few hours. Part I is already on line and that should give you a good taste for the full article.
In summary what it's about is a lengthy argument from Andrew Kania that we have much to learn from the Eastern Churches. The article is not new but this is the first time we have published it on Catholica. I suspect Andrew is correct in what he writes although I have to confess that in my dealings with Eastern Rite Catholics — which is quite limited apart from Andrew — some have been extremely conservative and reactionary. They are people who have not given me the impression that the Eastern Churches have much to teach us at all. Rather they have offered a huge dose of everything that is precisely going wrong in the Western or Latin Church. My views in that regard have been slowly changing and some of the thanks for that I do attribute to Andrew Kania. Check out for yourself what he has to write today and let us know your perspectives. We are publishing the article partly as a prelude to a major article Dr Kania has coming up in this week's The Tablet which explores this territory further.
Wishing you a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life and in our world.
Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher
Catholica34 Martin Place, LINDEN NSW 2778, Australia
tel: +612 4753 1226
email: editor@catholica.com.au
++++
Footnote
Archimandrite. From Wilipedia,to show us how many traditions there are in our Church and about which we know so little.
Good Church. Shame to lose it, because the word Autochthonous sounds strange to our American ears. Archimandrite sounds strange, too, but when we get to know it, it's part of our traditions. Let that happen to Autochthony.
The title Archimandrite (Greek: ἀρχιμανδρίτης - archimandrites), primarily used in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Eastern Catholic Churches, originally referred to a superior abbot whom a bishop appointed to supervise several "ordinary" abbots (each styled hegumenos) and monasteries, or to the abbot of some especially great and important monastery.
Today, the title is also used as one purely of honor, with no connection to any actual monastery, bestowed on clergy as a mark of respect or gratitude for their services (this honor is only given to those priests who have taken vows of celibacy — "monastics" — while married clergy may receive instead the title of "archpriest.")
The term derives from the Greek: the first element from ἀρχι archi- meaning "highest" or from archon "ruler"; and the second root from μάνδρα mandra meaning "enclosure" or "pen" and denoting a "monastery" (compare the usage of "flock" for "congregation").
The title has seen common use since the 5th century, but occurs for the first time in a letter to Epiphanius, prefixed to his Panarion | Panarium (ca. 375), but the Lausiac History of Palladius may evidence its common use in the 4th century as applied to Saint Pachomius.
When the supervision of monasteries passed to another episcopal official — the Great Sakellarios ("sacristan") — the title of "archimandrite" became an honorary one for abbots of important monasteries (as opposed to an ordinary abbot, a hegumenos).[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimandrite]
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