A purely legal question

For several months now, I have wanted to write a post comparing the Roman Catholic Church to the Lutheran and Episcopal denominations, which in many ways were forms of "Reformed Catholicism."

I wanted to compare Vatican II's solutions to certain problems with Martin Luther's solutions to the very same problems, 500 years previous.

I wanted to write about Henry VIII's reasons for reforming the church, which went well beyond, "He wanted a divorce."

I wanted to write about both his and Luther's love of the sacraments and about their reverence for the best aspects of the Catholic liturgy.

I wanted to discuss the differences and – more interestingly – the similarities in the theologies of the Catholic, Lutheran, and Episcopal faiths.

I wanted to write about the benefits of running a church democratically without sacrificing the theology.

I maybe even would have gotten a little bold and written about the commonly held opinion that allowing female and married priests would, as a whole, produce a healthier crop of priests.

I wanted to write about all these things.

But I saw something in the paper today. Something disturbing.

And so now I have a new question. It is not a religious question, or a theological question, or a dogmatic question, or a spiritual question. It is nothing more and nothing less than a legal question.

Today – Thursday, March 25, 2010 – I looked at the news. And I read about the sex scandal in Wisconsin. And I read about Pope Benedict XVI's role in both keeping the matter away from the police and in putting the offending priest back in contact with minors.

When a similar issue came up with Cardinal Law, here in Boston, there was a straightforward legal course to be taken. You have a crime. You have an individual, in this case the Cardinal, who may or may not have borne some legal responsibility for said crime. You have a court proceeding to arrive at a verdict of either guilty or not guilty. Standard legal procedure in the United States or, indeed, most any modern nation.

This procedure never happened. Cardinal Law got sent to the Vatican, a state with whom the United States does not have an extradition policy. No trial.

Now, whether or not the Catholic Church decides to punish a wrongdoer or reward him – in this case, with a prestigious position at one of Rome's greatest churches – is its own business. Another alternative would have been to send him to a monastery in rural Wyoming, where in time he might have grown to understand the seriousness of his crime. (Hard to understand such things when you work in a patriarchal basilica and have 14 servants.) They made their choice. Fine. That is not my point here. My question is purely legal.

Here is my legal question:

I live in America. I have to follow American law. You live in America. You have to follow American law. Even if you don't live in America, if you bear responsibility for a crime that takes place here, you stand trial here and, if found guilty, will probably serve your sentence here – if the prosecutors are successful in physically bringing you here in the first place.

But here is an organization, the Roman Catholic Church. The organization is a non-profit corporation that receives and disburses money on our soil. The corporation has filled out the necessary paperwork so that it is allowed to conduct business on our soil. But members of this corporation – including the Cardinals and, sadly, now the Pope himself – have been implicated in crimes for which they cannot be prosecuted. If you think Cardinal Law was unprosecutable, how prosecutable is the Pope going to be?

Now the legal question:

Why is this corporation allowed to do business in the United States?

I'm actually dead serious. This isn't a hoax; it's an honest legal question that I have. Corporation X follows American laws. It is allowed to do business in America. Corporation Y breaks American laws but then shields itself from prosecution. It will thenceforth not be allowed to do business in America.

I would like to know, then, why this particular corporation is allowed to do business in a country whose laws it is not required to follow.

If there were ever a court hearing to determine if this corporation should be allowed or disallowed to transact business in the United States, I would hope that the prosecutors would request the corporation to explain the following phrase:

Huiusmodi causae secreto pontificio subiectæ sunt.

This sentence may be translated as:

"Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret."

The phrase appeared in the 2001 epistula, De Delictis Gravioribus ("On More Serious Crimes"). The author of this epistula was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later promoted to Pope Benedict XVI.

I will leave you this evening with a story, one of the saddest ones I ever heard.

A pastor with whom I once worked told me this story. It was about a friend of his. This friend was abused by a Catholic priest. Several decades passed. Finally, after holding in this secret for so many years, he found the courage – who knows how hard it was – to tell his mother what happened.

She slapped him across the face and exclaimed, "Don't ever let me hear you talk about a priest that way again!"

Thankfully, that generation of parents is dying off. The new generation is better educated and asks more questions. Questions might arise about the transubstantiation, or about original sin. The Catholic theologians can fend off those questions. But how will they fend off the legal questions? What will they do when these young Catholics start asking, "How can a corporation break our laws, evade prosecution, and still be allowed to conduct business here?" That is the legal question that I am now asking.

Musical Prejudice

Last week on PBS was an interesting documentary entitled "The Music Instinct: Science and Song." I caught very little of it (except to hear an excerpt of Mozart's K. 330 played so fast that it sounded like a cheap stunt, even by current standards of cheap-stunt Mozart playing. I don't know who the pianist was. I'm told he was blind; however, he was not deaf).

A point was made during the show -- not one of the salient points, but one that to me was very interesting.

To us Western Hemispherians, a minor scale sounds "sad." But what if that is merely cultural?

(The following, naturally, is my own expansion of this point. I do not wish to implicate the makers of the documentary for it!)

Clearly there are cultures where music in minor keys or modes is not experienced as being "sad" at all, while in our own culture, "classical music" is so often perceived as "dark," no matter how major the key or how joyful the mood. To many, the sound of an organ is "funereal," no matter how many sunny major chords the music radiates. Once I played a Saturday Mass at a Catholic church unaccustomed to anything bearing the slightest resemblance to "classical" music. I didn't play anything "heavy," but at one point I improvised, somewhat in the style of Mendelssohn, and in a major key. (There was not a profusion of minor or diminished chords. It was not "dark" music.) A parishioner stopped me afterwards and said that it sounded like a funeral. I realized that for people like that parishioner, no organ sound can be anything but gloomy.

Even my two-year-old demonstrated some musical subjectivity the other day. We were listening to a CD of Wladyslaw Szpilman, the fine Polish pianist whose life is portrayed in the outstanding movie "The Pianist." Szpilman was playing a composition of his own, the Concertino for Piano & Orchestra (1940). The piece has a jazzy element; it doesn't sound like Gershwin, but it mixes classical and jazz moods with the freedom that Gershwin did. My son said that the music was "scary." My wife opined, "No, it's not scary. I think it's mysterious." To me they were both wrong.

There are infinite examples of people's prejudicial reactions to classical music. Not long ago I played a funeral, and I played a piece by Ted Marier that I've always considered comforting. The celebrant said after that he felt it was "depressing." Yet at the very same funeral was sung Marty Haugen's "Shepherd Me, O God," which is firmly rooted in a minor tonality. What makes the Haugen "happier" if the harmonies are no less minor than the Marier?

Simply put, many people are allergic to "classical" music or anything that bears a resemblance thereof. There's no better way to put it: it's an allergy. At a shopping plaza in a neighborhood of Boston, there was once the problem of not-so-nice kids hanging around and causing trouble. So what did the plaza owners decide to do? Pipe in classical music! Now every time you walk through the plaza, you are treated to masterpieces of the symphonic repertoire. The kids are nowhere in sight. It repels them more effectively than any amount of armed policemen could have.

What causes a person to hate what is beautiful? The only explanation I can come up with is: it is like when you're sleeping, and someone turns on the lights in the room at 3 in the morning. At that moment, you hate the light. It doesn't seem possible that anyone could hate light, but in that instance you do just that. Our culture has become so dark that the light has become distasteful.

It's clear that no instrument of classical music inspires more aversion than the pipe organ. People who will happily go out to hear chamber and orchestral music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert wouldn't be caught dead at an organ recital. To Catholics, perhaps the organ subconsciously represents all of the beatings they received from nuns in parochial schools. It represents something that their parents and grandparents loved, something that belonged to them. Interestingly, many 20- and 30-somethings who are too young to remember the Latin Mass or the mean nuns are fascinated with the organ's technological ingenuity and sonic richness. The 50- and 60-somethings are the opposite. They are the ones who want Kumbaya played by guitars rather than Bach played by the organ. They are married to Vatican II -- for richer and for poorer.

The root of the problem is the connection that people make between the organ and the church. They cannot conceive of the organ as a musical instrument separate from the church. The organ becomes the church. And if people don't like church, they're not about to like the organ. The organ becomes paid indulgences. The organ becomes papal infallibility. The organ becomes the pedophilia scandal. The organ becomes the church. That is the association people subconsciously, or even consciously, make.

But for a millennium and a half, the organ was as secular instrument that no one would have dreamt of bringing into the church. In Roman times, the hydraulis (a small, portable organ) was used in amphitheatres, to accompany the lions' eating the Christians. In the Middle Ages, when the great Gothic cathedrals were being built, organs still weren't thought of for the church. That's why many Gothic cathedrals are difficult to retrofit with an organ, without causing visual or acoustical problems.

At some point during the Renaissance, someone decided to introduce the organ to the church. Churchgoers were scandalized. They passionately believed that the organ was a secular instrument unfitting for the church -- the exact same reaction that many people have today towards electric guitars and drums in the church.

Interestingly, in South Africa the organ is thought of as a secular instrument. (The theatre organ or cinema organ is more popular in South Africa than is the church organ.)

For some reason, music in Latin elicits particularly strong reactions. In my whole life, I have never been able to understand why many clerics fear Latin hymns like they would fear a glass of water during a cholera epidemic. What is it about the Latin language that elicits such trepidation? No Rabbi is afraid to have Hebrew spoken in his temple. Why the Catholic priests' antipathy? In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI gave priests permission to celebrate a Tridentine Mass without first having to consult a bishop. That's all he did. Latin Masses were already allowed, but a priest formerly needed a bishop's approval before holding a Tridentine Mass. Benedict simply eliminated that extra administrative step. But look at the firestorm that resulted! Benedict was accused of trying to "bring back" the Latin Mass (which didn't need to be brought back because it was there all along). And then when word got out that there was one sentence in the Latin liturgy that could be construed as Antisemitic (the sentence has been since taken out), Benedict was seen as some sort of racist, trying to take the church back into the Middle Ages. It was insanity, but Latin inspires such insanity for some reason.

I think, in the end, the clergy are afraid that parishioners will flee from organ music and Latin hymns, just as people at the shopping plaza flee from the piped-in classical music. But I hate to tell you: there will not be one penny less in the collection plate if you do the Latin Agnus Dei instead of the English Lamb of God at a 4 o'clock Mass. If anything they will give more, because people sense quality even when they can't explain it. A person says, "Wow, this is a beautiful church," without being conscious of the fact that the color scheme of the ceiling matches the color scheme of the stained glass windows, or what have you. They know it's beautiful, but they don't know why. For the same reason, people will always respond positively to good music. Almost 25 years in this business tells me that good music is preferred by the majority of congregants but the minority of clergy. It is a musical prejudice not at all unlike that of my toddler who thinks the Szpilman Concertino is "scary." Priests are scared. The difference is: my son will surely grow out of it.