Golly! Just imagine how shocked the parishioners of the Most Precious Blood Catholic Church in Denver will be when they read books by a few obscure writers named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. (James, Peter, and Paul will have entered the chat at some point, too.) Or say the Nicene Creed during Mass, for that matter.
In fairness, the congregation that asked the archdiocese to yank Father Daniel Ciucci from his post knows about hell. They apparently don’t like hearing about it, though, and claim that Ciucci’s “fire and brimstone” homilies have damaged their “psychological safety,” according to the Denver Post (via Twitchy):
When the Rev. Daniel Ciucci stands before his Denver parish to deliver a homily, he looks out onto a congregation divided over whether he’s fit to lead.
A rift within the Most Precious Blood Catholic Church parish fueled a petition with more than 750 signatures calling for Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila to address Ciucci’s leadership, accusing the pastor of eroding a vibrant, welcoming faith community with “fire and brimstone,” dogmatic messaging and a refusal to listen to parishioners.
The petition apparently uses Ciucci as a target while reserving its real criticism for Bishop Aquila, whom the petitioners claim appointed Ciucci to bring more discipline to the church. One former parishioner called Ciucci the “symptom” and Aquila the “problem,” claimed that a “liberal schism” existed in the Denver archdiocese, and that Aquila wanted to impose his own “personal philosophy” about the Catholic faith.
Er … yeah. In the Catholic Church, bishops are the apostolic successors and the heads of their churches; parishes are subordinate expressions of the ‘church’ in a diocese/archdiocese. The bishop is the authority, only answerable to the Vatican, not the parishioners. Their shepherd-crook croziers serve to remind them of their mission to follow the example of Christ to not lose any of their ‘sheep,’ but also not to lead them into temptation and eternal damnation.
So what sins has Ciucci committed, other than reminding them of those consequences in a sermon Ciucci titled “Why Hell Is Welcoming”? Let’s hear from both sides:
The petition, addressed to Aquila and archdiocesan leadership, lists concerns that include a “sharp and sustained decline” in morale at the parish and its school; dramatic turnover in faculty, staff and ministry leaders; a significant drop in school and parish enrollment; and “a growing lack of trust and transparency between parish leadership and the wider community.”
The petition and dozens of public comments supporting it describe a culture of retaliation and a loss of “psychological safety” under Ciucci’s leadership for the past four years.
In a video Ciucci posted earlier this month to address the petition, he said Most Precious Blood needed to change to better align with true Catholic teachings, such as ridding the parish of certain “unsuitable” songs, ensuring people were not taking the Eucharist home and abolishing “feminist art” in the Catholic school.
Hold. The. Ever. Loving. Phone. People took the Eucharist home? Why? The Eucharist must be consumed immediately during the Mass, with exceptions only for home-bound parishioners served by extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion. That is not a conservative/liberal philosophical difference, but an absolute canon based on the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist. If the people of this parish felt free to cart around a transubstantiated host for their own convenience, it makes the name of their parish something of an irony, and goes a long way to explaining why Aquila assigned Ciucci as the pastor.
The other issues Ciucci mentioned in his video do fall more into the arena of practice than rubric, but it’s interesting to note the nature of these friction points. Why does the Catholic school need “feminist art” in the first place? To the extent that art in a Catholic school sends messages, should not the message be Catholicism? There certainly are plenty of female Catholic artists that the school could feature. The songs at Mass are a more common friction point in parishes throughout the country, one which most parishes avoid by using broadly accepted hymnals such as Journeysongs, Gather, the St. Michael Hymnal, and others. The latter provides the most traditional of liturgical music, while the other two lean more toward the modern (especially Gather), but all of the music in these collections are well accepted and provides plentiful opportunities for truly reflective and worshipful prayer music. (NB: I sing from all three in my parish in central Texas; my favorite is the St. Michael Hymnal for its emphasis on tradition and harmony.)
Is it possible that Ciucci and Aquila have overdone any needed corrections? Of course, but the nature of this contretemps makes it look more like a backlash from a parish that took ecumenical impulses too far, perhaps far enough towards outright secularization. It also sounds as though the laity in this parish has been allowed to assume liturgical leadership for long enough that they have tipped over into a kind of congregationalism that is sometimes called the Americanist heresy. If nothing else, the decision to wage a petition campaign via Change.org to challenge the authority of a bishop makes that conclusion nearly irresistible. In what way do these activists think that the Catholic Church is a democracy, anyway? They would have been better advised to form a representative group that approached Aquila for a meeting to discuss their concerns, rather than a public campaign better designed for political pressure than a dispute between the members of the body of Christ.
Perhaps we can hope and pray for that approach to be adopted at this point. In the meantime, those who wish to protect their “psychological safety’ at the expense of eternal salvation have a plethora of securalized faith communities to select. Let’s also hope they think better of that, and take Father Ciucci’s offer to comtemplate the ‘welcoming’ nature of the alternative.
The front-page image is a detail from “Appearance on the Mountain in Galilee,” Duccio di Buoninsegna, c. 1308-11. On display at the Museo dell’Opera Metropolitana del Duomo. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Editor’s note: We live in dangerous times for people of faith, more so than most Americans realize. Relentless secularization has eroded even the religious institutions on which we and the world have relied for moral guidance, and the Gomorrow-esque consequences can be seen all around us. We need to remind ourselves of the foundations on which our institutions are built — both religious and constitutional — and act to halt their erosion, and hopefully help strengthen them.
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