The Critical Edition

Padre Pio’s body will be displayed in Italy.

Among the stories that surround the monk, who was born Francesco Forgione and died at the age of 81, is one that he wrestled with the devil one night in his monastery cell.

Some believers also say Padre Pio was able to predict future events, was seen in two places at once and could tell people their sins before they confessed them to him.

Pope John Paul II made him a saint in 2002 at a ceremony attended by one of the biggest crowds ever in the Vatican after the Church said it had found evidence that the miraculous cure of a sick woman was the result of intercession by the dead monk.

However, he was dogged during his life and after his death by accusations that he was a fraud.

A new book last year suggested he was a self-harming man who might have used carbolic acid to cause wounds in his hands mimicking those of Jesus when he was nailed to the cross.

Church officials have denied that he was a fake. (Faithful await display of Catholic mystic’s body)

It’s odd how people so want to see the earthly remains of those regarded as saints, from Lenin to Pio.

I sometimes go to Mass with my wife for companionship, and today, I was certainly glad I did. Before I get into the reason why, some theology.

Catholics of course believe in something they call the “Real Presence,” which is the belief that the bread and wine are the actual body and blood of Jesus. It’s based on an Aristotelian concept of accident and essence — what a thing looks like and what it really is. So the Catholic explanation of why it still looks suspiciously like bread and wine is that the outward appearance has remained, but the essential reality has changed.

This is why there’s all the genuflection in churches and especially before monstrances, because if that really is God in the flesh flour, then it only makes sense to bow.

This also goes a long way in explaining the controversy about how a parishioner can take the host: standing, kneeling, on the tongue, on the palm of the hand. I think the variety is strictly American. In Poland, the issue is vastly simplified: stand or kneel. There’s no way a priest will give it to your hand in Poland.

“Real Presence” also explains why some might be a little uneasy with the idea of anyone other than a priest handing out the host. In the States, members of the congregation hand out the blood and wine (though the priest has consecrated it and all that). Again, this is probably a completely American thing.

All this is to explain the significance of why I’ve always wondered what would happen if someone tripped and — whoosh — there’s God, all over the floor.

At this morning’s Mass, my question was answered.

An elderly woman, serving as Eucharistic minister, was heading back up to the altar (and so her chalices were probably almost empty) when suddenly there was a stumble, shuffle, and crash. I saw the whole thing out of the corner of my eye, and I immediately directed all my attention there — as did everyone else in the basilica.

The priest kept right on going, but not many people were giving him their undivided attention. Everyone was looking at the aisle, watching the lady pick up the hosts as another Eucharistic minister helped her. Then a deacon came with a cloth that had been dampened, I’m assuming with holy water, and wiped the spot.

The woman was obviously quite shaken. She said some words to the priest, and he sympathetically comforted her. Returning to her seat, she muttered something to her husband, and that was that.

It highlights how atypical Catholicism is in modern culture, where all sense of the scared has disappeared. “And so much the better” many of us would add, but sacredness fosters a certain respect that I’m not sure you can get any other way. It’s simplistic to explain it, “Well of course it’s respect — born out of fear, a terror that some deity will toast you.” There’s certainly an element of truth in that.

Communism tried to foster some sense of the sacred — the working masses were the vessels for salvation. The working man is the communist messiah. Marches, songs, flag waving, speeches — all these things to foster a sense of the sacred in the people. Yet it didn’t work. My wife grew up in that culture, and it was all a joke for everyone. Why?

It lacked mystery.

Without mystery, without an element of the unknown and inexplicable, nothing can be sacred. Indeed, sacredness could be defined as a sense of mystery about something thought to be of divine origin. If you see the little old man putting together the wizard show, hanging the curtains, preparing the control panel, it is only through an act of supreme wishful thinking that you can put your faith in the Wizard.

Poland produces a revolution every five hundred years, and it’s always the same revolution: a man comes along and challenges the way we all look at the universe, challenges us to stop thinking we’re the center of the universe and that all things circle around us.

Copernicus was the first to suggest that the Earth was not the center of the universe. He dethroned the heady notion that literally everything revolved around us, and modern science has pushed us to the point of virtual cosmic insignificance.

Karol Wojtyla, with his famous words, “Do not be afraid,” challenged us to stop thinking of ourselves as the center of our own worlds. Love is the greatest of all these, said Saint Paul, and John Paul, in his insistence on the universal recognition of human dignity and freedom, showed how to put that into practice.

“Nie lekajcie sie!”

Don’t be afraid.

Fear not.

How can we not fear? Look at the world, and the injustice that hounds it, and it seems the only thing we can do is be afraid. How can that possibly work? Perhaps when we start following John Paul’s example and love others more than ourselves, we will stop fear. After all, what is fear? It’s fear of what will happen to me. When I start loving others more, I stop thinking of my self so much, and I stop fearing.

John Paul in that sense was a Copernicus for the soul.

Smoke and Mozart

We were in Adam’s bar with Johnny, Kucek, and Marta. I was playing chess with Rafal, and I heard Mozart’s Requiem and though I didn’t consciously think it, I knew what had happened. After a few moments, [my wife] called my name (they were sitting behind me) and told me. I turned to Rafal‚ and told him, then suggested we put the chess away.

I went back to the table where everyone else was sitting, and we just sat there quietly for about ten minutes. No one was saying a word. I can’t remember who initiated it, but someone said, “Idziemy?” and we all got up and left the table covered with full beer glasses and extinguished, half-smoked cigarettes.

Without saying, we all began walking up to the church. No one said, “Let’s go to the church,” we all just headed there. As we were walking, the fire station’s siren began wailing. It was strangely and peacefully quiet other than that.

We got to the church and it was locked. It had been open all day, and the night before, for prayers, but it was closed. “They’ll come open it,” I told everyone confidently.

“There’ll be a mass going within half an hour,” I said. But we stood waiting, and nothing.

After some time a nun walked into the church, and the bells began ringing, but the front door never opened. We walked around to the door to the sacristy to ask the nun if they were going to open the church. We stood there waiting, and just as she was coming out, another group of three young people — two girls and a young man of about nineteen — came up.

“Is the church going to be opened?” he asked.

The nun’s reply was somewhat surprising, and completely disappointing: “It was open all day. It was open all night last night. It was open until nine this evening, and no one was here,” she said in the tone of voice that’s so known to me know — it was the tone of a bureaucrat annoyed that you’ve come to require services of him. It was the tone of voice I encountered every time I went to the regional court offices while getting the official permission to marry a Pole. It was the tone of voice that I’ve heard in post offices, shops, busses — everywhere.

The young man would not be put off, though. “I know, I know. But not to open the church now?! At this moment?!”

The nun again: “The proboszcz said to ring the bells. He didn’t say anything about opening the church,” she said, locking the lower of three locks on the sacristy door.

“Let’s go,” said Johnny, starting to walk away.

“No, no! Don’t go!” said the young man. And he just repeated to the nun again, and again, “Not to open the church?! At this moment? At this moment?”

Reluctantly, she opened up the sacristy and we filed into the church quietly.

We knelt in the first row, with our three companions simply falling on their knees once they were in front of the tabernacle. All heads bowed, not a sound — I even prayed. “If you’re up there, God, I sure hope you’re welcoming such a great man into your presence now, because if a man like that isn’t with you now, no one else has a chance.”

The five of us had just come from a bar, so we reeked of cigarettes, and probably the smell of alcohol was noticeable, but none of us were even buzzed (we’d drunk perhaps two beers each), but [my wife] felt very awkward about it the more she considered it. We left after only about ten minutes.

We went back home and made some tea and listened to the radio.

They’ve been playing nothing but classical music on several of the stations. Last night they played Gorecki’s “Amen,” interspersed with quotes from the pope.

A Country of Orphans

“Poor country,” [my wife] said. We sat up late talking about John Paul’s life, and his philosophy, and his love of fellow humans.

“If Poles lived by his words, I’d never want to leave this place,” I said. “It would be a paradise.”

Poor Poland — wracked now with increasing corruption in every part of the government. A country with more than 18% unemployment, a country that must be the richest country in the world, as my father-in-law says, because everyone steals and there still remains something for others to pilfer.

And now, broken-hearted Poland. [My wife's] grandmother spent Sunday crying. Masses are pouring into churches and staying. It is a country of orphans.

Lech Walesa said that it was like losing a mother, “for the pope looked after Poland like a mother over her children.”

A tent revival is something that is particularly American, and conjures up images of snake-handling believers and wheezing, beet-faced preachers who can stretch the name of Jesus into four syllables, who preach hell fire and damnation, the dangers of card playing, and the outright evil of dancing.

It doesn’t seem to go with the ordered liturgy of a Catholic Mass. And yet, for the week of 9–18 October [2004], that’s exactly what the parishioners of Lipnica Wielka[, Poland] were getting.

The techniques used in the construction of the church are among the best and most expensive. — Three Times Superlative.

Entitled “Misja Swietych” (“Mission of the Saints”), it featured multiple, daily Masses with a particular focus: the family, the mystery of the Stations of the Cross, the sick. It was a fairly big thing, as it happens only once every five years or so.

This year it was led by Wojciech Chocól, a rector of a parish some hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of here, near Tarnów.

Chochól is a short, somewhat paunchy man who appears to be in his mid-forties and who, it seems, stepped directly from the 1950s into the twenty-first century. He believes in what some American Southerners might call “old time preaching.” Translation: he yells at people about their sins.

The Polish- and Italian-granite entry stairs to the new church cost so much that, says Father Wojciech, “for that kind of money, you could frame an entire, new church.” — Three Times Superlative

I suppose there’s nothing really wrong with that. Such “soul-pastoring” (a direct translation of the Polish term for the verb “pastor”) treats the parishioners as children and has a particularly humiliating feeling, but perhaps some feel at home being humiliated in church. They might refer to it as “being humbled.”

I heard him preach when I went to church Sunday afternoon (10 October) for the special “Men’s Mass.” [My wife] didn’t want to go alone, and I was curious what the priest would say to a room full of men.

“Everything here that glistens is gold plated,” adds rector [Chochól] , taking the time to show all the internal marble [ . . . , ] the same marble that is in the walls and the entrance to the bathrooms. Marble also rules in the cemetery’s chapel. — Three Times Superlative

I wasn’t disappointed, though somewhat provoked. Some of the highlights:

• suggested people throw out television and unplug the “Satanic Internet;”
• castigated people who have only one or two children, saying that children are only “normal” when there are three of them (One child is a little god in the house; two kids are two hysterics; only when you have three can you expect to have normal kids in the house);
• said people should be worried about money with their kids (“They don’t have to have a gold watch right way. They don’t have to have a car or a mountain bike right away.”);
• advised fathers to look in their fifteen-year-old children’s pants pockets to look for narcotics or “swinska gumeczka” — “filthy condoms”;
• told of a little two-year kid who at Mass was lying in the floor, crying, waving his arms and such — being a fairly regular two-year-old. “And I thought, ‘You’ve got a little bin Laden!’” he told everyone. And they laughed — that’s the most disturbing part about it
• said a child’s salvation lay in the fathers taking a fence board and “lay on as much as fits” (A child’s salvation = beating the daylights out of him);
• recommended that fathers no let their daughter’s boyfriends sleep in the house;
• pondered what sons who came home late at night or early in the morning were doing (“And later, three of them come to the altar for a wedding,” he concluded.);
• told the story of a boy who came in to the parish house to use the phone, calling the police and life saving crew because his father had come home drunk again and began beating his mother. “I don’t know how much longer we can stand this hell,” he exclaimed, then left money on the priest’s desk for a Mass to be said the following day in their intention. And Chochól left the money hanging — didn’t say, “I gave the mone yback to him and said, ‘You all need this more than I do.’”

All in all, it was the usual, backward, uneducated tirade that, were it to take place in a clapboard building in Appalachia or in a mosque in Cairo, would be labeled fundamentalism: railing against the evils of modern society and the need to return to a Godly life, as defined by the priest, of course. Chochól showed that he knew nothing about children and even less about contemporary society. He showed his disrespect for parishioners by refusing to treat them as adults but screaming at them as if they were children

“The church is being built slowly, but also as expensively and as beautifully as possble.” — Wojciech Chochól quoted in Three Times Superlative.

Covering the usual litany of religious anti-modernism, yelling at people about their sinful indulgence in modernism and their material mindset, is one thing.

It’s an entirely different story when the priest is guilty of the very things himself.

It turns out, there might have been a reason he referred to the Internet as “Satanic,” for a few keyboard clicks at Google, and I found “Trzy Razy ‘Naj,’” an interesting article from 2002 about a then–new church being built in Chochól’s parish, with some choice quotes (which appear in the side inserts).

The picture we end up with by combining the sermon and the article is that of a hypocrite. In his sermon, Chochól anecdotally mentioned several times the churches “he’s built,” and so it is obviously a matter of pride to him, which he probably crows about whenever he can. Others derive their pride and self-esteem from what they own; still others from what they’ve built, I guess.

When village priests come caroling and collecting money, they don’t schedule a particular time, but tell their parishioners simply they day they might come — and expect them to wait around all day. Kids miss school for this; parents miss work. If a priest suggested this in a city, such as Krakow or Warsaw, he would be laughed out of the church.

Contrast that with a friend who lost her father when she was still a young girl. “Not once,” she said, “Did any priest come by to ask if everything were okay, to see if they needed anything.” They came about as is the Polish custom during the Christmas season for caroling, which is accompanied by (guess!) a collection. So they came to get money, and nothing else.

As a non-Christian, I find this particularly offensive, and I can think of a few things I might like to say:

• Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world — James 1.27, New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
• Jesus said to [the young rich man], “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” — Matthew 19.21 (NRSV)
• All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. — Acts 2.44, 45 (NRSV)
• [Jesus said,] “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” — Matthew 19.24 (NRSV)

The second sermon I heard from this jerk was the next Sunday. Highlights from that one:

• Without priests, you will not go to heaven.
• Priests are a second Jesus.
• A wife of a communist official who’d refused permission to build a church came to Chochól when her husband died to ask him to anoint his body. Chochól’s response: “Well, now you can go anoint him with lard.” And this by his own admission.
• He criticized the church in Lipnica, saying it was old and dirty. He wondered how priests could work in such an environment “without granite, without marble.”
• He told a couple of stories of people who’d died shortly after criticizing priests.
• Priests are hated just as Jesus is hated — for their holy example.
• He whispered to the children in a sickeningly sweet voice, “Don’t say anything bad about priests.”
• He said that when people go on pilgrimages without a priest, “it’s just an outing.” (“Wycieczka” was the Polish he used.)
• He said that if you criticize a priest, then you’ll die without a priest (i.e., You’ll go to hell.).
• He told people don’t send money to other parishes but keep it here. But just earlier, he’d thanked everyone for the donations given to his parish.

The irony: it was labled a “children’s Mass!”

The general reaction of parishoners after this joker wen home: “What beautiful preaching!”

Well, I’m criticizing him, so let’s see how long I last before God kills me for my blatantly Satanic attitude.

(An interesting thread at Catholic.com’s form about this, started by yours truly.)

McCarthy admits up front, in his foreword, that both he and Waiss had one aim: to convert the other. That the book is published by an evangelical publishing house testifies to the fact that Waiss failed; that the book is not titled “Letters that Converted a Catholic Priest” testifies to the fact that McCarthy failed.

Who won the debate is more a question of readers’ preconceptions than anything else. Catholics will be unconvinced by McCathy’s arguments, and few Protestants will be moved by Waiss’s somewhat bland presentation.

Of the two, McCarthy is much more aggressive, and in many ways, much more rational. But there is a mystical element in Catholicism that doesn’t mix well with pure rationalism. Recall that after consecrating the host in Mass, priest speak of the “Great mystery of faith.”

At the heart of the book is the question of authority: both accept the Bible as an authority, but evangelicals stop there, where as Catholics see Tradition and the Church as on equal footing as the Bible, comprising together the Word of God. Much of the book, then, revolves around Waiss trying to show how the Church’s extra-Biblical notions (i.e., those not specifically detailed in the Bible, such as the papacy, Mary’s Immaculate Conception, etc.) are, in some way, Biblically based while McCarthy chips away at Waiss’s arguments. The tables turn from time to time, especially discussing “sola scriptura,” but by and large, it’s a game of “Prove it from the Bible.”

As such, McCarthy and Waiss toss one phrase (or a derivative) at each other quite often: “No where in the Bible do we find X.” McCarthy fills in the variable with Papal authority, Marian devotion, the importance of Tradition; Waiss replaces “X” with the notion of “sola scriptura,” the Trinity, and a couple of other ideas. With the exception of “sola scriptura,” Waiss’s contention seems to be that McCarthy and evangelicals are essentially “guilty” (my term, not his) of the same thing they accuse Catholics of: incorporation of extra-Biblical doctrines. Waiss could have pushed McCarthy a bit harder on this point, I think, for he doesn’t even mention a host of non-Biblical based notions that “sola scriptura” evangelicals accept: Sunday worship, non-observance of Jewish holidays (i.e., no where in the Bible does it explicitly say that followers of Jesus are to stop observing the Jewish festivals), Easter, and Christmas come to mind.

This shows the Protestant notion of wanting to have its theological cake and eat it, too. Protestantism accepts the early Church councils’ decisions about the New Testament canon, the proper day of Christian assembly, the appropriateness of celebrating Jesus’ birth and resurrection, but most denominations (especially evangelicals) are unwilling to accept the Catholic Church’s continuing authority. This is one of the paradoxes of the Protestant movement, which necessarily implies that the Church started off correctly, but somewhere got tangled up in a mess of legalism and false belief. Sadly, questions like “At which point?” and “Why would God let such a thing happen despite his promise to the contrary?” aren’t mention in the book. It leaves me feeling that Waiss pulled some of his punches.

On the other hand, McCarthy demolishes some Waiss’s arguments in support of Catholic theology. His handling of whether Jesus had half-brothers (i.e., whether Mary remained a virgin her whole life and whether “brothers” in the New Testament should be translated “cousins,” as the Church maintains) is well done, for example.

As I mentioned earlier, who won the debate depends on readers’ preconceptions. As a non-Christian skeptic, I found the debate to be a draw. This is because “Letters” is a debate about the tenants of a religion based on a self-contradictory book, a notion neither McCarthy nor Waiss would take into account. For example, is one saved by faith alone or by faith and works? It depends on where you look in the Bible. Did Saul/Paul’s traveling companions on the road to Damascus hear a voice or not? It depends on which chapter of Acts you read. Does the bread and wine become Jesus’ actual body? It depends on how you read a couple of different NT passages. With such a flawed starting position, a draw is the best outcome either participant could hope for.

When such contradictions arise, the great literal/figurative differentiation arises. Indeed, much of the book also seems to be an argument as to whether or not to interpret this or that passage literally or figurative, with each side accusing the other of taking the passage out of context.

On the other hand, it is refreshing to see debate that doesn’t often (though sometimes, to a slight degree) slip into personal insults. While many Protestants (and this almost always includes fundamentalists, and often includes evangelicals) think the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon and the Pope the Anti-Christ and many Catholics regard Protestants as heretics, McCarthy and Waiss keep things civil the whole time.

One final criticism: the length precluded truly in-depth discussion, and many of McCarthy’s and Waiss’s comments go unanswered.

Overall, I would say it’s an interesting read for the simple fact of seeing to opposing views clearly (though perhaps too succinctly) presented.