There has, of course, been a good deal of controversy over Pope Francis’ decision to celebrate the Mass of the Last Supper at Casal del Marmo and to wash the feet of women and non-Christians. However, as with many things of this nature, much of the commentary has seemed to me to be knee-jerk reaction rather than keen analysis.
I offer here excerpts from two differing takes which, I think, deserve further reflection:
Fr. Joe Komonchak over at dotCommonweal raises an important question to many of the responses. Is the pope above (church) law?
Conservatives and traditionalists need not be the only ones to raise questions about some of Pope Francis’ liturgical innovations, whether it was his including women and Muslims among those whose feet he washed or in the reduction of the readings for the Easter Vigil. But shouldn’t we all be concerned when they are justified by the idea that, after all, the pope is the supreme law-giver and so is not bound by Church law. There is an old Latin legal term for this:princeps legibus solutus, which Black’s legal dictionary translates as: “Released from the laws; not bound by the laws. An expression applied in the Roman civil law to the emperor.” As the example given shows, it is a very dangerous principle to allow into ecclesiology.
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Would we not like to propose some conditions on what Pius XII’s claim that “the pope alone has the right to permit or establish any liturgical practice, to introduce or approve new rites, or to make any changes in them he considers necessary”? Can we be content with the view that the Pope is not bound by Church law when he does something we like, but ought to be bound by Church law when he does something we don’t like?
Komonchak is right, this is a dangerous precedent. Do the rubrics not matter? Do they not matter if your are pope? Do these rubrics not matter because they are not, strictly speaking, liturgical?
2) Father Francis and the Female Feet
Chris Baglow, though responding to some of the canonical criticisms which have come the pope’s way and not Komonchak offers an interesting and helpful perspective. After discussing canon lawyer Ed Peter’s thoughts Baglow responds:
I submit that the decision that Francis made to set aside law for the sake of persons actually ILLUMINATES and CONTEXTUALIZES the nature of liturgical law, which exists FOR persons: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27) A liturgical rite is a symbolic action. Think about what the washing would symbolize in a coed youth prison if a distinction was made between “male convict” and “female convict” when Christ’s vicar came into its walls to place himself before the prisoners as their servant. In that sad context, the primary realities are “guilty,” “captive,” “marginalized.” In washing the feet of 12, he showed them that Christ came to be a servant to them all. If Pope Francis had washed only the feet of males, what would that have signified for the young women prisoners, many of whom probably find themselves in the prison after suffering the abuse of men (e.g. pimps, absentee fathers, etc.)? It would have signified exclusion and alienation, which is already the very substance of their shattered lives, a dark solitude that the Pope came to invade and to illuminate, if only for a moment.In the Gospel of John the washing of the feet (see Chapter 13) is a multivalent symbolic action, one weighted with multiple meanings. Yet it primarily symbolizes not the apostolic band being washed, but the nature of the one who comes from the Father to wash them, humbling himself to serve them. That one is Jesus, who after washing his disciple’s feet immediately tells them of His Passion and of their need to believe in His divinity: “I am telling you before it happens, so that when it happens you will believe that I AM.” (John 13:19)
The meaning could hardly be clearer: the one who gets down on the ground and washes dirty feet, then goes further and offers himself up to his executors out of love for the persons attached to those feet, is the Divine Son. THIS is the great message of Christianity about divinity: God the All-Powerful Legislator of the Universe, whose very “logic” offers the intelligibility that makes the cosmos unsurpassable in symmetry and beauty, is so “high” that in love he can and does descend to the lowest. In the words of St. Ignatius of Loyola, “Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to be able to be encompassed by the smallest: that is divine.“Accordingly, a pope going into a prison and putting the priestly ordination symbolism in the foreground by making sure that only males were washed would have betrayed this primary symbolism, the REAL THING to which the foot-washing rite so beautifully gestures. Even the rich significance for priestly ordination with which Holy Thursday is nobly weighted would have been falsified had our good Pope Francis done that, because divine servitude to all prisoners (read: you and me) IS the more essential Christian reality in which Holy Orders is a unique participation. The Catholic priesthood is an exponent of Christ’s foot-washing in the original sense of that word: “an expounder or interpreter” of it. Ministerial priesthood is exalted in the Church precisely by being a qualitatively unique participation in the servant-hood of Jesus Christ. It exists for service. Pope Francis was never more priestly than he was in Casal del Marmo last Thursday.What about the rubrics? Law is important, but life more so. The only way for Pope Francis to have had both the law and life in the context of the Casal del Marmo was for him not to go there in the first place. Would any Christian prefer that to what he actually did? For what he did was to go down to the lowest place, to bring hope to captives, to break out of what he called “ecclesial self-referentiality” in a speech offered in a pre-conclave meeting. There he presented two models: one is the “evangelizing Church that comes out of herself” and another is “the worldly Church that lives in herself, of herself, for herself,” which he denounced as “theological narcissism.” The cardinals seem to have listened – they elected him. And on Holy Thursday he made good on what he told them, and I predict he will do so again and again. Breaking out of self-referentiality even when doing so flies in the face of custom has been the running theme thus far. But in the words of Tertullian, “Dominus noster Christus veritatem se, non consuetudinem cognominavit – Christ our Lord called himself truth, not custom.”The imprisoned female feet lovingly washed by our new Holy Father has offered to the Church and the world a better re-presentation of Jesus’ own symbolic action than the rubrics envisioned. Law certainly is necessary. But by placing life over legality, Pope Francis showed us more than law. He showed us the Lawgiver, who is Love.
I like Baglow’s take. Generally speaking, I think he is right. I want my pope, my bishop, my priest, and myself to feel free to break free from the customs and rubrics when the Gospel demands it. But that freedom opens up a large gray area that can quite easily be abused or at least exercised in ways uncomfortable to me, or to the pope, as the case may be. What do you think?
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