Joys and concerns, part three

After vacation I was able to do a little more research about the churches I had visited in Vermont. St Francis of Assisi is staffed by the missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette, of whom I had never heard, so I started there.

La Salette is a small village in France where two children saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1846. First they spotted a beautiful lady sitting on a rock, crying. She wore a rather unusual crucifix: it featured, in addition to the body of Christ, a hammer, a pincer, and a skull and crossbones. She was also wearing a yellow pinafore, “more brilliant than several suns put together.” I love that pinafore! It made me wonder, for the first time, about the possibility of fashion in heaven.

The lady stood up and gave the children a message to deliver to the world. It mostly consisted of warning them against sin and threatening them with punishment if they persisted in evil. She told them that she was trying hard to hold back her Son’s arm, but it is very heavy and she might not be able to protect them much longer. (By the way, I dislike these depictions of the Holy Dysfunctional Family.)

In addition, the Virgin predicted that the next harvest would fail, which it did (European famine in 1847 led to the death of more than one million people). Finally, she confided a secret to each child before she disappeared.

One thing that always puzzles me about Marian visions is that Mary seems to be the only unhappy person in Paradise. These visions often feature a sobbing Virgin, which seems unfair. She suffered enough during her earthly existence, and ought to be enjoying some beatific peace now.

News of the apparition spread quickly, and pilgrims began trekking to the spot. People began to report miraculous healings. In 1847, only one year later, 50,000 pilgrims celebrated the anniversary of the vision. An investigative commission was set up to look into the situation.
The children wrote down their accounts of everything they had seen and heard, including the secrets Mary had communicated, and these documents were sent to the Pope. In 1851 the vision was officially approved by the church. A sanctuary was erected at La Salette, and in 1852 the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette were established.

However, there were doubters. Some French priests and bishops denounced the vision as a hoax. The controversy became entangled in French politics, and following the ins and outs of the controversy is quite difficult unless you understand a lot more about French religious and political history than I do.

In the meantime, Melanie, one of the two children who had had the vision, grew up and became a Carmelite nun. She lived for a while in a convent in England, where she wrote down the secret given to her by the Virgin, and sent a copy to Pope Pius IX. Unfortunately, the text seems to have become lost in the Vatican archives, and has not yet been rediscovered. However, that doesn’t seem to matter, as other written versions of her secret were circulating. In fact, gradually various accounts of the secret(s) proliferated.

The secret given to the other child who had the vision, Maximin, was that England would convert to Catholicism during the final phase of the apocalypse. But the real bombshell was Melanie’s secret. After the First Vatican Council, in the late 1960s, Melanie revealed the secret once more. I guess either she expressed it more clearly than in the past, or else it was the first time a version was made public, because this time the response was more heated. She said her secret was that “Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.” As you might imagine, this was disheartening news for lots of Catholics. There ensued a kind of war of the secrets, in which people began to investigate all the stories about the secrets, as well as the various versions that had been printed over the years. (There are at least ten different editions of the secret, nine preserved and one lost in the Vatican archives.)

The Superior General of the Missionaries of La Salette wrote to the Pope about this latest publication of the secret. He noted, in a tremendous example of understatement, that “it has not pleased the Holy See that the above mentioned work has been released to the public,” and asked that every copy be withdrawn from the hands of the faithful. The Vatican agreed, and put the secret on the Index of Prohibited Books. However, recently many of the documents related to the vision were released from the Vatican Secret Archives.

When I read that, I was momentarily taken aback. Secret Archives? On the one hand, that sounds incredibly cool. On the other hand – huh?

The rationale behind the Secret Archives is actually pretty mundane. Plenty of organizations have time restrictions on when their documents may be read by the public. The Vatican has a general policy of not making any documents available until 75 years have passed.
The Archives are enormous – more than 52 miles of shelving – and the oldest document goes back to the 8th century. (By the way, there are special, more secret archives within the Secret Archive, including the Apostolic Penitentiary, which contains records of indulgences, absolutions, and excommunications. These are never released to the public, of course. It is interesting to think about old files containing the sensational confessions of kings, queens, and emperors – a kind of repository of really, really good historical gossip.

Well, I didn’t expect my first visit to a Roman Catholic church during this year of church visiting to open up such a fascinating bit of history. The story of Our Lady of La Salette seems to me a cautionary tale about endorsing visions of young children who might grow up to become troublesome adults.

Of course, belief in visions are not required of Catholics; they can believe or not, as they choose. I should mention that many notable Catholics have been devoted to Our Lady of La Salette, including Jacques Maritain and at least six popes, so even though this story doesn’t seem particularly edifying to my Protestant sensibilities, there is likely something here that I’m not getting. (A whole lot that I’m not getting, I’m sure Catholics would say.)

The fact is that you could pick out a piece of the history of any denomination that sounds just as odd as this bit of history about Our Lady of La Salette sounds to me. I’d hate to have to defend the entire history of any church group, and the Catholic Church happens to have a whole lot more history, in terms of years and numbers of adherents, than anyone else in the church business – so it makes sense that they would have more wild and colorful stories, like these Marian visions, than anyone else. But peculiarities are probably fairly evenly distributed, per capita and over time, among the entire church. Heck, last week I visited a group that believes that an angel named Moroni appeared to a nineteenth-century New Yorker and told him where to dig up golden tablets full of prophecy, and then visited a group that is responsible for the Left Behind books.

Next I tried to learn a little more about the Congregational Church.

The distinctive belief of congregational churches is that each church runs its own affairs independently, which would seem to make it difficult to make blanket statements about the denomination.

Congregationalists tend to believe that the church operated as local congregations without central authority for roughly the first thousand years of Christendom, although bishops in Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Byzantium, and Jerusalem constantly tried to bring local congregations under their influence. At some point around 1000 AD the bishop of Rome had gained control of most of the western churches, and the Patriarch of Constantinople had gained control of most of the rest of the world’s churches, according to this line of thought.

By the 16th century, though, reform movements in Europe championed by people like Martin Luther, John Hus, John Calvin, and John Wycliffe (were most men named John at that time?) gained momentum, and independent, congregational-style churches were once again, gradually, able to survive – although many of them had to operate as underground, semi-secret societies, and suffered quite a bit of persecution (from both Catholics and Protestants).

Congregationalists are very important in American history. About 35 of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower were Congregationalists fleeing persecution, and this group became known as the Pilgrim Fathers. Jonathan Edwards, often thought to be the most influential theologian in American history, was a Congregationalist (I found this surprising; I had assumed he was Presbyterian, possibly because one of the first things Neil and I did when he entered Princeton Theological Seminary was visit Jonathan Edwards’ grave in the Princeton cemetery).

In 1931 groups came together to form the Congregational Christian Church. They had various styles of worship and some differences in belief, but were united in a belief in local autonomy and rejection of creedal authority. It seems a shaky basis for union, to me – let’s unite as people who agree not to have to agree on anything!

There were a few other shifts in organization; a more conservative group of churches set up their own organization in 1948. In 1957, the Congregational Christian Church merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form a new group, the United Church of Christ.

In the United States today the United Church of Christ has a little over a million members, and about 5,500 congregations. It emphasizes freedom of individual conscience and local church autonomy. Although it doesn’t require belief in the traditional creeds, the United Church of Christ “looks to” confessions such as the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, the Heidelberg Catechism, and Luther’s Small Catechism.

The denomination gained a little bit of notoriety in 2004, when it aired (or tried to air) some commercials that showed a “bouncer” admitting a white family into a church but refusing entrance to an African American woman, a Latino man, a gay couple, and a person using a wheelchair. After this, the text on the screen read “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” There was also a commercial in which people are shown being shot out of church pews equipped with ejector seats: an African-American woman with a crying baby, two men holding hands, an Arab-American man, and a man using a walker. The tag line for that commercial was “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” (UPDATED: The commercial is on YouTube.)

I don’t remember ever seeing these commercials. They sound a little silly to me, though, because I’ve never seen a church refuse entrance to anyone (such places may very well exist, but I’ve never encountered them). It would take something awfully extreme to get churches to refuse to let someone in the door – brandishing a knife and shouting obscenities might do the trick, but short of that there’s not much you could do to get kicked out. I know of more than one urban congregation that welcomes some bad-smelling, delusional street people into their High Church liturgical services week after week, even though these people are disruptive and sometimes downright alarming. And yet every week the regular members greet them, talk to them after the service, and sit near them. (True, the nearness is precautionary, so that someone will be at hand to intervene should the visitor lose control of his or her shaky hold on reality.)

Of course, the ads were designed to illustrate churches metaphorically turning people away, but even then I’m skeptical. I’ve read that old saying about Sunday morning being the most segregated hour in America, but it doesn’t seem to be so true anymore – at least, not in the churches I’ve seen, and certainly not in the ones I’ve been visiting over the past few weeks.
And though I’m sure there are churches where openly gay couples aren’t welcome, there are also quite a few where they are more than welcome. As for churches turning away people with crying babies – most churches positively cater to young families (even if they prefer that you take noisy kids to the well-equipped nursery during the service). And refusing entrance to people who use walkers – good grief, that group forms quite a substantial bloc in most churches!

There’s one other thing about the Congregational Church that I noticed after my visit. Barack Obama was, until the big controversy over his pastor’s statements in mid-2008, a member of Trinity United Church of Christ. That church was established in 1961 (only four years after the denomination itself had been created). Trinity first met in a school gymnasium, with the goal of founding an integrated urban church – they planned to later merge with a white church, and have two co-pastors, one black and one white. However, this never happened (because of disinterest on the part of local white congregations, according to most observers). Trinity’s congregation languished, reaching a low point of about 250 members (100 of them active) in 1972.

At that time Chicago was a center for militant black religious groups such as The Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrew Israelites (many members of this group considered themselves the only authentic Jews, another surprising take on religious identity). Militant groups tended to argue that Christianity is “the white man’s religion,” and that proud black people should have no part of it. Trinity’s leaders felt that their quest to be a black church within a mainline white denomination was rather quixotic in this environment. Also, they wanted to let people know that it was okay to be both black and Christian.

The interim pastor in 1972, Rev. Reuben A. Sheares II, coined a new motto for the congregation: Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian. (Again with the church slogans! But this one is pretty interesting.) Theologian Martin Marty has weighed in on this slogan, noting that being “unashamedly black” does not mean being “anti-white.” Rather, it is a repudiation of the debilitating legacy and shame of slavery and of segregation in church and society.

Jeremiah Wright interviewed for the position of pastor on December 31, 1971, and got the job. Church historians report that he saw a main part of his job as convincing people that Christianity is not inherently racist, and not for whites only. He wanted to adopt some of the positive aspects of the Black Power message that was attracting so many adherents at the time, but at the same time reject its ideas of separation and of black superiority. The church flourished with Wright as pastor, growing to more than 8,000 members.

It’s a fascinating story. Like most white Christians, I’m not sure how a person gets from trying to show that Christianity is not inherently racist to proclaiming “God damn America” from the pulpit (the video clip that was shown repeatedly when the Jeremiah Wright story broke during the 2008 primary season). But I don’t know the whole story.

What I have been thinking about, though, while doing this little bit of poking around into the history of Our Lady of La Salette and the Congregational Church, is how weirdly often people start out with one goal in mind and end up doing something, or proclaiming something, that seems utterly at odds with their original intention. Those pious children in the French countryside and their supporters surely wished to strengthen and promote the Church, not to create a public relations nightmare for it. And a church founded with the explicit purpose of promoting racial harmony became a symbol of racial strife.

It’s almost enough to make a person believe in some version of those French literary theories about how there is a layer of meaning under each text that runs contrary to the author’s conscious intention. Every text contains its own opposite, and every sign points to its negative doppelganger.

Churches are certainly heavily loaded with signs and significations. Most of us see or hear these signs every Sunday in a sort of uncomprehending fog, partly because there is so much going on there that we just can’t take it all in. According to some theorists, we would also be absorbing the reverse messages at the same time.

Hey - applying this half-formed half-thought to myself, are my efforts to visit and understand and empathize with many strains of Christianity a sign that I’m not very tolerant?

Nah – that’s crazy talk. Couldn’t happen. I’m the most open-minded person in the world.

I just like some ideas and places more than others.

Really.

No prejudice here. Nothing to see on that score.

Let’s just move along.

Photo courtesy Flickr user cogdogblog