Editorial


Choice is needed

The Chestnut Hill Local is a weekly newspaper that has been published by the Chestnut Hill Community Association since 1958. We are considered a forum where ideas on how to better the community are shared and as a means to communicate news regarding politics, education, cultural events, religion and social causes. Our readership reaches beyond Chestnut Hill’s 19118 zip code to include readers in other neighborhoods of Philadelphia and nearby suburban communities, as well as regions across the world where former Chestnut Hillers now live.

It was therefore distressing to me that the executive committee approved a motion from the membership committee prohibiting the Chestnut Hill Local from selling subscriptions to the newspaper without membership to the Community Association. As a forum established by a democratic organization, we must offer options that can be considered by everyone. The $10 difference between the Chestnut Hill Local’s current $20 subscription fee and the $30 Community Association membership fee is a lot for some people. Subscribers in the suburbs and in Mt. Airy are interested in reading the advertisements and keeping up with news of area organizations.

I must question why the powers-that-be hired a full time business manager for the Local to market the newspaper and build its circulation, and then decided to disallow him from doing that.

I will always be in favor of joining the Chestnut Hill Community Association — it works hard to make Chestnut Hill the pleasant community we know — but a choice must be offered.

Katie Worrall

Opinion:

by MICHAEL CARUSO

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia officially has a new spiritual leader. Although it was nearly three months ago that His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, announced his appointment of Justin Francis Rigali (at the time the Archbishop of St. Louis) to succeed the retiring Archbishop Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua, it wasn't until the afternoon of Tuesday, October 7, in the Cathedral-Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, that Cardinal-designate Rigali officially took over the reins of the seventh most populous diocese in the United States.

The precise moment of the empowerment occurred when the Pontiff's personal representative, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo (the Apostolic Nuncio), escorted Archbishop Rigali to the "cathedra," the bishop's ceremonial seat, and handed over to him the "crozier," the "shepherd's staff" that symbolizes his pastoral authority throughout the archdiocese. The more than 1,600 in attendance acclaimed this act of transfer by singing the hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus," the traditional Latin plainsong invocation of the Holy Spirit.

It was a moment that powerfully resonated with the two-millenia history of what is officially called the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ at Rome, and it revealed what is perhaps the most seminal characteristic of the Catholic Church, that which differentiates it from other Christian denominations, wherever it exists in the world: the communion between every bishop or archbishop in the world and the See of St. Peter, the Holy or Apostolic See, the Bishop of Rome.

When one thinks about Philadelphia's new Catholic Archbishop, it's important to consider how Pope John Paul II defines the office, itself. Early on in his pontificate, he delivered an address to the Catholic bishops of the United States. During that speech, he called all bishops to be "a living sign of Jesus Christ...a sign of the love of Jesus Christ...a sign of Christ's compassion...a sign of fidelity to the doctrine of the Church...a teacher of prayer...a living sign of the praying Christ...a sign of the unity of the universal Church...a sign of hope for the People of God...a living sign of the Risen Christ."

This focus on the person of Jesus Christ, believed by Catholics and all Christians to be the Eternal Son of the Living God, is reinforced in Archbishop Rigali's own personal motto, taken from the Gospel According to St. John: "Verbum caro factum est" (And the Word was made flesh). The quote continues, "et habitavit in nobis" (and dwelt among us) in what would seem to be a phrase that the new Archbishop has decided to take seriously, as he has already embarked on a series of parochial visitations that will take him to all corners of his new archdiocese.

Archbishop Rigali comes to Philadelphia not so much from St. Louis as he comes from the Vatican. Between his graduate studies and his service, he spent more than three decades in Rome, having been born in Los Angeles in 1935 and ordained a priest in 1961. He was appointed the eighth bishop and seventh archbishop of St. Louis in 1994. He becomes the twelfth bishop, the eighth archbishop of Philadelphia, and the fifth to be named a cardinal.
The Archdiocese of Philadelphia is a vast domain, both geographically and spiritually.

It was created a diocese by Pope Pius VII in 1808 and raised to an archdiocese by Pope Pius IX in 1875. Its first bishop was Michael Francis Egan and James Frederick Wood was its first archbishop. It encompasses 2,182 square miles in the counties of Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery, and it is the Metropolitan See of Pennsylvania. Its membership stands at nearly 1.5 million. It is divided into 279 parishes with 206 parochial elementary schools, 22, archdiocesan high schools, and five special education schools. It is staffed by 555 active priests, 391 order priests and brothers, 3,211 active women religious (nuns), 204 permanent deacons, 157 seminarians at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary (50 of whom are studying for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia), and has a total of 99,812 students in all its schools.

It is an archdiocese that is in both good and not-so-good health. Without question, Cardinal Bevilacqua has effectively presided over it for the past 15 years, having come to Philadelphia as the previous Bishop of Pittsburgh. In perhaps the most glaringly public of all the difficulties currently facing the Catholic Church in America -- that of the scandal of priests' sex abuse of minors -- the Archdiocese of Philadelphia has come through this trial by fire virtually unscathed.

Over the past half-century, there have been no more than 50 local cases brought forward, and all have been dealt with reasonably efficaciously -- or at least as much so as is possible under the circumstances of the terrible damage done to the victims. It would be unfair, to say the least, not to give credit to the administrations of all of Archbishop Rigali's recent predecessors: Cardinals Dougherty, O'Hara, Krol and Bevilacqua. If they've done nothing else, they've run a tight ship.

And, of course, they've done far more than that. Starting with Cardinal Krol, the Archdiocese has dealt with the migration of vast numbers of its membership from the city to the suburbs. It has established new parishes and built countless churches and schools. It has also been forced to either close or consolidate older parishes and schools. Not surprisingly, this has caused great anguish among those parishioners and alumni who have lost their churches and schools -- a loss often made all the more painful considering the great architectural beauty of so many of the older church buildings in comparison with the catastrophic hideousness of nearly all of the newer structures. And the trend has not abated. Whereas suburban Catholic parishes are exploding in numbers, city parishes and schools are often barely limping along, particularly in those neighborhoods of the city that are most blighted.

Archbishop Rigali will have to face the ongoing question of the Church's responsibility to the metropolitan center in which it lives: "Should limited financial resources be directed from the suburbs to the city in order to guarantee the Catholic Church's ability to proclaim the Gospel of Christ in the city?"

And those financial resources are, indeed, limited. The notion of the Catholic Church's vast stores of hidden wealth is nothing more than a myth, and any Catholic (such as myself) who has long been intimately involved in all the activities of his or her parish can and will substantiate this claim: there is very little money to spare. This was made abundantly clear only recently when the Archdiocese announced the purchase of a fairly large building on the 300 block of Walnut Street in Society Hill to be renovated into a museum of Catholic history in Philadelphia. The revelation of the project's multi-million-dollar price tag elicited howls of protest from every corner of the Archdiocese.

So intense was the opposition that the Archdiocese has quietly dropped the entire project and will probably sell off the unnecessary property in favor of establishing numerous museums in buildings it already owns. Similar opposition sprang up when it was proposed that a $350,000 home would be built on the grounds of St. Charles Seminary for Cardinal Bevilacqua to use in his retirement -- almost within a week of announcements of further parish closings and consolidations. This project was also withdrawn in favor of the Cardinal's decision to live in the existing facilities at the Seminary. Perhaps, in a physical statement of solidarity with the city, he might consider establishing his residence in a downtown rectory such as that of St. Patrick's Church just off of Rittenhouse Square?

Archbishop Rigali, along with every other bishop in North America and Europe, will need to face the continuing problem of too few vocations to the clerical and religious life to sustain the Church in the world of the future.

There are going to be fewer and fewer priests, brother and nuns unless the religious life is somehow made more appealing to the vast number of Catholics out there sitting in the pews. It's not enough to frighten the faithful with the prospect of not enough priests to staff the parishes or nuns and brothers to staff the schools, colleges and universities. We know it's not enough because it hasn't worked.

And vocations don't just appear out of nowhere. They reveal themselves in the life of the individual parish and in the part the parish plays in the life of the entire diocese. With guidance from above and support from his auxiliary bishops and brother priests, Archbishop Rigali will need to encourage some young men to view celibacy as a gift rather than a burden and others, who do marry, to consider consecrating their lives to the permanent deaconate. He may even want to consider pushing for the revival of a separate permanent deaconate for both married and unmarried women.

If it is true, as it is always maintained, that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the best breeding ground for priestly vocations, then Archbishop Rigali needs to look toward a full-fledged liturgical revival in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia -- and the desperate need for such a movement was never more apparent than it was in his own Mass of Installation.

The wretched condition of Catholic liturgy in America was evident during the Mass once the "Presentation and Reading of the Apostolic Letter" occurred. From that moment onward, all the potential majesty of the Roman Rite pretty much disappeared from sight and sound. That's no easy task when you consider two points.

Here we have a ritual that invokes the local diocese's communion with the Papacy -- the only major and ongoing institution in Western civilization that predates by several centuries the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire in 476 AD -- and that was attended by nearly 600 priests, 70 bishops, 15 archbishops, six cardinals and 30 ecumenical leaders -- and yet the whole event only rarely rose above the pedestrian, perhaps because the Cathedral-Basilica's magnificent choir and organ were prohibited from making any substantial contribution to the Mass, itself, and were only effectively employed before the Mass began. Why wasn't Handel's splendidly appropriate anthem "Zadok, the Priest" used for the Processional?

And why didn't the choir sing either Palestrina's "Missa Ave Maria" or "Missa Beata Virgine" or Victoria's "Missa Ave Maris Stella" in honor of the Propers of the Day for Our Lady of the Rosary? And the typical, tired rejoinder that "the documents" prohibit the use of polyphonic settings of the Ordinary of the Mass is absolutely null and utterly void since "the documents" of Vatican II do no such thing.

And yet there was majesty last Tuesday afternoon -- and parts of the Mass were moving to many of us who were there. I hope never to forget one sight I saw. As the Gospel Reading of the Annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin Mary was chanted by the seminarian deacon, Rev. Mr. Lawrence
Kozak -- beautifully, I hasten to add -- I saw standing there a few yards in front of me a young African American man using both hands to wipe away the tears that were streaming down his face.

For me, that image was a profound affirmation of the undimmed power to touch the very soul of humanity that the Holy Church of Rome calls the true deposit of faith. If Archbishop Justin Francis Regali remains true to that faith, then the Archdiocese of Philadelphia will truly be blessed.