Term Limits

The American political concept of term limits makes it comfortable for me to write about the resignation of another Vatican prelate, Cardinal Robert Sarah. Sarah is 75, the retirement age for bishops. My discomfort is that as head of the worship office he is one of a very few persons of African ancestry visible in the Roman bureaucracy.

Yet Sarah’s leadership has been damaging to the Vatican II agenda that Pope Francis wants to implement. Every Catholic goes to Mass, more or less. (You understand the limits of that bold statement!) This universal experience should not be limited by traditionalist ideology, and it has been. Three examples: Sarah delayed Francis’ instruction to allow women’s feet to be washed on Holy Thursday for two years, and publicly criticized a papal motu proprio that allowed local bishops’ conferences to adopt translations of the liturgy without a  “detailed word-by-word exam” by the Vatican. He had to be corrected by Francis for advocating the priest facing East, with his back to the congregation.

Those actions matter to us, even in our liturgy-deprived pandemic year. What will happen on Holy Thursday this April in your parishes? When will you stop grimacing at salvation for the “many,” not the “all,” in the recent translation of the canon? Do you like seeing your everyone on your  Zoom Mass up close? While I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, there is a good translation of the Scriptures that has been worked on for years by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL); it is waiting to be implemented. 

Ironies abound around Cardinal Sarah. La Croix International examines his career, beginning as a “freedom fighter” in his native Guinea against Marxist dictator Sekou Toure. That experience may have hardened his convictions when confronted with another leader creating a vision with which he disagreed: Pope Francis. “He had put himself in an attitude of obedient dissent,” a Vatican observer says; yet he himself says, “Whoever is against the pope is outside the Church.” Where is Sarah?

The Tablet notes another irony. Brought to Rome to head the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, Sarah’s “position on migrants, suggesting that the west was opening its doors to ‘new, barbaric civilisations’ runs counter to the Pope’s welcoming stance to new arrivals.” He also “claimed that ‘Western homosexual and abortion ideologies and Islamic fanaticism’ were ‘almost like two apocalyptic beasts,’ comparing them to Nazism and Communism.” I feel a need to quote these extreme statements. Consider Francis’ visits to Muslim countries around the world as well as what he wants in the liturgy for indigenous cultures.

There’s no need to examine again the Amazon Synod’s call for an Amazon rite; I hope that is going forward as the regional bishops have organized themselves into Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon to implement the conclusions of the Synod. Francis supports it. He has led the new Zairean rite for liturgy in the Congo region, revised from one adopted decades ago, and he writes “that the celebration ‘resonates’ a culture and spirituality animated by religious song following African rhythm,” as Catholic News Service reports. It’s the only rite officially adopted since Vatican II, and I don’t know how Sarah responds to it. Known for his “mystical spirituality,” he has “exercised enormous influence on his brother bishops in Africa” to take a very conservative stance on pastoral questions ranging from family issues to clerical celibacy, according to America.

Last week I watched the Henry Louis Gates PBS special, “The Black Church.”  It’s available now on YouTube, and I recommend it for a spiritual and scholarly examination of various Protestant worship in the United States. And what should appear this week in America but the very question that occurred to me: “Should the Catholic Church have an African-American rite? This Black Catholic convert thinks so.” In a frank and informative interview, Nate Tinner-Williams, in priestly formation with the Josephites, describes the history of the effort going back to the Baltimore Plenary Councils and forward to his online publication, The Black Catholic Messenger. The lead review is a critique of the Catholic absence in the Gates documentary, a valuable analysis with questions that need to be answered. 

In both the interview and the review, Tinner-Williams examines the Black Catholic Church that exists today (see Amanda Gorman) and suggests that Black folks who left Catholicism might return if their culture and spirituality were more accessible – and if white churches were more welcoming, a point made by another author in America, Christopher Smith, “the only ethnically Black American Jesuit in formation in the world,” an interesting coincidence. 

In the interview, Tinner-Williams responds to two questions from Erika Rasmussen: 

What do you hope people understand about the idea of an African-American rite?

That it has nothing to do with segregation. Recognizing and even creating Black institutions, in America especially, is not segregation. Segregation was when white people were excluding Black people. Black people creating things for themselves is not segregation.

How do you understand the role and power of inculturation in the Catholic Church? What is the significance of cultural rites?

It shows that the church is truly Catholic, in the sense of being universal, which is evident throughout history. The diversity of the church is expressed when it says, “We recognize your culture and your culture in fact should be a part of your Catholicism, right down to the way you sing your songs, preach your homilies and overall celebrate and worship Jesus.” There are precedents for it because, as Catholics should know, there are 23 Eastern Catholic churches that do exactly that and that have done so for centuries or even millennia. For that process to continue to occur—there’s nothing “un-Catholic” about that.

So we’re right back to Cardinal Sarah, and I think that the term limit took effect just in time. Let a thousand flowers bloom!