Kneeling and the selective “listening” of synodality

Amy Welborn recently penned a spot-on analysis of the recent missive from Cardinal Blase Cupich informing the members of his diocese that kneeling to receive communion is no longer permitted. Cardinal Cupich does not explicitly mention “kneeling”, but almost all agree that this is the clear target of his letter. As one has come to expect from Amy Welborn, the writing is both elegant and piercing, with a jeweler’s eye for nonsense.

Therefore, there is no need for me to rehearse again the issues she so ably dissects. But I would like to add some further theological and ecclesiological points in the light of her analysis.

First, this letter from the Cardinal shows us is that for all the talk about a more “inclusive” and “listening” and “synodal” Church, and for all the agitprop pontifications from folks like Cupich about how in a synodal Church the “people of God” are “finally” getting their say, all the rhetoric surrounding the Synod about listening to all voices is an empty sham. Welborn is more circumspect in her criticisms than I am (although, make no mistake, she is critical), but the blunt word “sham” is the only word I can find that accurately conveys the reality she describes.

And it is indeed a sham and the recent letter from Cardinal Cupich makes this clear, since all the chatter about a more inclusive synodal Church, when it comes to the liturgy, seems to be code for allowing liturgical innovators in a leftish register to do their thing, while severely circumscribing and hemming-in those whose “lived experience” is grounded in more traditional liturgical expressions.

Selective listening at the service of the Seventies

Where were the “listening sessions” before Cardinal Cupich issued the letter? Where was the attempt to accompany these “peripheries”? Therefore, for those of us old enough to remember the Seventies and the endless talk of the “spirit of Vatican II”—which was used to justify all manner of liturgical shenanigans, and which was largely a clericalistic imposition of the idiosyncratic tastes of an elite few all done in the name of “the people of God”—this latest version of post-synodal rhetoric from the Cardinal appears to be an act of rank plagiarism from that era.

All is putatively done in the name of the “people”, and yet what Cupich’s letter has done is little more than impose his own idiosyncratic tastes on the entirety of his flock with no discernible regard for the pastoral needs of a large segment of it. As in the Seventies, so too here again. What is happening is an open denigration for traditional forms of liturgical piety–no matter how popular and allowed by the GIRM–and their clericalistic suppression, in order to make way for a lock-step uniformity with one particular liturgical aesthetic. “All are Welcome” so long as they fit the mold and conform themselves to the crowd (or what the Cardinal thinks the crowd should be), otherwise they are encouraged to take a hike. In this context, the appeal to “lived experience” seems to have no room for a true grassroots pluralism of differing expressions of liturgical sensibility. There is only one “proper” way of receiving Communion: standing and in a straight line of conveyer belt efficiency.

Kneeling for Communion has been a practice in the Church for millennia. And it continues today as in my Anglican Ordinariate Church, where we all kneel at the rail and receive on the tongue with intinction. That this is allowed by the Church, there can be no doubt because it is explicitly allowed. So this letter from Cardinal Cupich has to be read as a not-so-subtle devaluation of the Church’s traditional liturgical piety in favor of a valorization and freeze-framing of Baby Boomer “Muskrat Love” spiritualities of saccharine superficialities. This is a nostalgic romanticizing of the era of lava lamps and eight-track tape players translated into liturgical form. It is the liturgical embodiment of corded avocado-colored phones that smell of cigarettes.

Why the superficialities of this Seventies style should be so elevated to a pride of place, Cardinal Cupich does not say. Nevertheless, what is abundantly clear is that if the good Cardinal is truly serious about extending a non-clericalist understanding of the importance of the lived experience of the laity then (as Welborn points out) the lived experience of more tradition-minded Catholics who find it deeply meaningful to receive Communion while kneeling should be a part of the “Todos! Todos!” Pope Francis has called for. But Pope Francis himself seems to embody a similar hypocrisy since the “Todos” of which he speaks apparently does not include those who prefer more traditional liturgy.

So, once again, this entire synodal regime of “listening to the people of God” is a complete sham and ruse, designed to deflect attention from the deeper agenda in play.

Furthermore, the meaninglessness of the Cardinal’s appeal to a uniformity of liturgical practice becomes all the more apparent when one realizes that although the “Todos” does not include the more traditional Catholic, it does include the Cirque du Soleil “liturgies” of Fr. Pfleger, LGBTQ rainbow flag liturgies, and a host of other therapeutic permutations of the Mass, all of which are not addressed (in his letter or elsewhere) by the Cardinal. “Synodal inclusion” means, in reality, a “no enemies to the Left of me” posture wherein the only lay people and clerics worth “dialoguing” with are those folks who are in full agreement with the prevailing secular Zeitgeist.

In other words, Cardinal Cupich has now made it clear that more traditional Catholics cannot sit at the “cool kids” table in the synodal lunchroom over which he is the lunch teacher overseer. He is that cool teacher who likes to hang with the cool kids, all the while silently approving of the table chatter amongst the adolescent cognoscenti as they cast aspersions at the nerds sitting alone over in the peripheries drinking chocolate milk and playing Dungeons and Dragons.

And this “cool kids” analogy is more than sarcastic, as it leads to the deeper ecclesiological point. Since it is all-together obvious at this point that “synodality” does not mean really listening to all voices, and since it is obvious that the so-called “listening” is in reality a curated audio file of prerecorded buzzword bilge, then we need to try to pin down what theological principles are really in play in the synodal lunchroom in order to better understand what is animating its chief ecclesial advocates.

Understanding the Conciliar context

Let us go back once again to Vatican II since the primary promoters of the synodal way all view it as a movement within the post-conciliar reforms. And most certainly the liturgical sensibilities of prelates like Cardinal Cupich are viewed by its supporters as somehow, however vaguely, embodying the theology of Vatican II.

Msgr. Thomas Guarino, in his excellent book The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II, points out that the Council fathers deliberately chose a more “analogical” theological path in its encounter with the modern world, rather than the more confrontational “dialectical” path that had been the norm up to that point. What Guarino means by this, in a nutshell, is that the “syllabus of errors” approach to the modern world had a tendency to simply reject all of modernity tout court as riddled with error and in need of some good old-fashioned Thomistic corrections. Its posture, therefore, was one of rejection followed by correction, hardly the stuff of a broad conversation with the world. Effective perhaps as a magisterial tool for clarity, it did not for all that clarity move the needle in favor of the Church as a real player in the reconstruction of postwar Europe.

By contrast, the Council fathers sought to find analogical points of contact with the modern world in order to identify those elements of modern culture that still contained the kernel of Christian truths, even if mixed now with error, in order to better evangelize that culture. Instead of saying, “No” to everything, what was sought instead was a qualified “Yes” followed by a Christian deepening of the truth in question. Think, for example, of Henri de Lubac’s book The Drama of Atheist Humanism as paradigmatic of this genre of theology. The concerns and questions of modern atheistic humanisms are duly noted, and their depths are plumbed with a profundity that steel-manned the atheistic arguments for them, only then to proceed to a Christological anthropology that creates a far deeper humanism.

In short, what the Council fathers sought was to “out humanist the humanists” by raiding the treasury of the tradition in order to show the modern world that the Church feared no truth wherever it is found and could actually double down on those truths in far more profound ways.

But it is important to notice that there remains in this analogical approach of folks like de Lubac a conservative “dialectical moment” where the encounter with the world must not only embrace what is true in the world but also to show how a deeper understanding of those truths requires certain secular distortions to be rejected and corrected.

However, there emerged at the Council as well a minority theological movement that came to dominate the entire post-conciliar landscape. It too sought points of analogical contact with the world, but instead of going on to view the encounter as an opportunity to bring Christian truths to bear in a new and creative way, viewed the encounter instead as an opportunity for the Church to enter into a dialogical posture with the world wherein the presumption is in favor of an open dialogue that can no longer assume the truth of the traditional Christian doctrines, all of which were now viewed as open to relitigation in the light of the “new truths” produced by modernity.

It is important to note here that this new “dialogical” approach argued for more than a simple open mindedness and a readiness to view old truths within a new depth in the light of new insights. This new approach was far more deconstructive of Church teaching and sought to reform the Church by changing her radically. And this change was always viewed in one direction: toward an ever-greater embracing of the cultural values of Western, liberal secularism and a downplaying of traditional norms and practices. Theologically, this was all justified by a distorted and runaway Rahnerianism that viewed the Holy Spirit as equally operative in the world as in the Church. In this view, the Church exists to give thematization to that which is merely latent and unthematized. But this eventually evolves into theologies of secularization that reverse that order and view secularization as the primary and most salutary effect of Christianity in the world.

Thus did “Church reform” come to be reductively viewed as little more than a series of compromises with the modern world. If a theologian wanted contraception, women priests, and a pluralism of religions model of truth, they were viewed as “reformers” and “in line with the spirit of Vatican II. If a theologian was against those things—even theologians like de Lubac and Balthasar, and philosophers like Maritain—then they were viewed as “against reform and against Vatican II”.

And most certainly, the liturgical debates and wars that raged after the Council fell into these neat categories as well. If you were in favor of maladroit octogenarians in diaphanous dresses dancing in the sanctuary with streamers, then you were in favor of liturgical “reform”. If you did not like such things, you were dismissed as an antiquarian crank. And on and on with every other liturgical innovation that came down the pike. The innovators were the “cool kids” who were the “reformers” and were granted wide latitude for their experimentation.

Cardinal Cupich’s latest letter, and indeed so much of what is now passing as post-synodal discussion, is in this school of thought. Theologically, it is to be situated, not with the ressourcement analogical thinkers including de Lubac, Wojtyla, and Ratzinger, but with the radical dialogical deconstructionists on some basic level. Viewed in this light, it becomes evident that “synodalism” for prelates like Cupich and his ally Cardinal Robert McElroy is simply a synonym for cool kid mimesis of the dominant culture. And by extension, as a subset of that, his mean-spirited and clericalistic attack on those who choose to kneel at communion is an expression of a preference for conformity to the horizontalist and anti-supernatural banalities of that culture.

At this point I know a lot of Catholics who are utterly demoralized by such moves and whose prayer has been reduced to a simple intercessory lament: “Please Lord, please make it stop.” I concur. But, for now, we need to better understand the background and the agendas in play.