Laetitia

I have a Franciscan priest friend who is a scholar and professor of theology and particularly interested in the 19th century priest and theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman.  I emailed him that he should leave behind the idea of a gentleman and bring out the inner punk. He will not understand what I mean by punk and you do not either, do you? 

Punk rock started in the 1970s in the UK and US, that though anti-establishment they wanted to react against the sentimentality of the 1960s flower-power movement. They rejected the idea of dropping out of society and favored a more aggressive and confrontational reaction. Much of the punk rock movement can be summed up as minimalist, concerned with speed, and anti-establishment. However the term punk was a deliberate choice of terms as they realized that “punk” was what the cops on the cop shows called the young kid who got into trouble.  

I bet you want to know how punk rock really my friend is. The truth is not at all, especially since he is especially faithful to all the teachings of the Magisterium and fiercely loyal to the writings of the Councils including the Second Vatican Council. Though tall, he sits very compactly crossing one leg gently over the other. He talks earnestly about John Henry Cardinal Newman inspiring sincere seekers of truth, one hand strategically held in mid-air for a touch of drama when appropriate.  Though in the States, I picture him sipping tea while sitting in an English garden somewhere in Oxford, where an ivy covered tower peeks out into the distance. He muses over Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Duns Scotus’Oxford”, smiles gently, and ponders how he will use it in the next homily he will write after his daily constitutional along a favorite meandering path he has found.   

How far from punk can you get? And yet, he is my favorite punk. It would be perhaps too easy to dig no further than the superficial, as my Oxford picture does, but that would miss how his work is a force to be reckoned with. He breathes Newman, but he is more concerned with applying Newman’s thought for the modern Church. Applying any work is much more difficult than remaining wrapped up within the work itself, because to apply means making that work relevant and useful for others. My friend would have it no other way. But this only proves that he is an excellent scholar and teacher. How is he punk? 

He teaches Newman and sometimes he has young seminarians in his class. He encountered a particularly difficult young seminarian interested in neo-scholasticism. More concerned with remaining within neo-scholasticism, he commented to my friend that he had no interest whatsoever in seeing how Newman speaks to the world today. The sense I got was that this seminarian had neither an interest in the world we live in nor the church as we have it. This was evident when my friend told me that these seminarians were eager to say the Latin Mass. While both he and I would never criticize anyone of sincere faith who participates in a Latin Mass, I think the concern here are those who have other more worrisome motivations for wanting to “bring back” the Latin Mass. My friend tells me with arms crossed and a twinkle in his eye he said to them, “I have no interest whatsoever in ever saying a Latin Mass.” And to put a fine point on this, he not only can speak Slovak, Italian and German fluently, he is able to say Mass in any number of other languages. This comment of his was pure punk. 

He is reacting to motivations that are a far cry from pastoral: the preference for theatre, smoke and mirrors, than the actual sacrament itself; the stance that wishes to create an insular, “pure” church, to the exclusion of anyone who does not neatly fit; the re-creation of God who is bent low in love into a Gnostic alternative; the privileging of the power and glory of Institution and Hierarchy over love, mercy and justice for all persons. Let me be clear: those who prefer the Latin Mass do not necessarily subscribe to any of these attitudes. But it seems my friend was reacting to these anti-pastoral sentiments when he said he would not say a Latin Mass.  And by being minimal with his words and concerned with bringing down that kind of an idea of hierarchy, he was punk all over. In a single brief comment, he kicked over the motivations dripping with the trappings of authority and power so that others could participate in the Eucharist with love in order to to re-build and repair the world.  I imagine in my mind that when my friend said what he did, John Henry Newman and Francis of Assisi gave each other a high five saying, “Now that was punk!”

I talked yesterday about wanting violins and getting Nero. Although full of Monty Python like folly, I did not get Nero exactly in last night’s Latin class.I studied Latin my senior year in high school. I took it as an elective. Yes, of all the electives I could have taken, I took Latin. I felt it was the mark of erudite education. I was 17. I went to Le Moyne to pursue a Jesuit education and continued with Latin. Magister Flavius had a passion for the language and for Wheelock’s Latin. He was a tough grader but his enthusiasm was contagious. Full of myself at 19, I decided to shake the dust off of my feet and I headed to Cornell to be a Classics major.

Cornell was an experience like dropping yourself in the middle of an unknown island (perhaps the Bermuda Triangle) and trying to ascertain how to get back home. My first Latin class was with Professor Mick (he looked like a much more attractive Mick Jagger), who had a habit of rolling his own cigarettes and then consuming the butt in its entirety (not exactly attractive when I think of it). With an arrogance he could only have developed at Oxford, he asked me in my first day how I could not understand something as simple as the second declension. I got emotional and defensive. He had the look of utter confusion. I stayed on with the semester and eventually took an intermediate Latin class with him, but I lost all hope of becoming a classicist. That was a singularly bright move.

I did take a Latin reading group class at Cornell. I want to say we read Ockham. That was a delight because the Latin was easier. Medieval Latin is easier in one sense to be sure. The translating becomes less of a problem and the content becomes more of the issue. How many angels would fit on the head of a pin? It is this kind of a question that eludes my feeble brain.I buried Latin at Cornell. Or so I thought. When I began looking at Bonaventure in translation, I noticed that all the good ones incorporated Latin in the footnotes. I realized quickly that I needed a refresher course. Fortunately, I got a hold of one such class.

I went in expecting something as serious as Professor Mick’s class. Because I am a hopeless case, I did not anticipate roll call taking half of the class. I did not expect a commentary on the difference between an “authoritarian” and a “democratic” language. Nor did I expect to be told that word order matters completely not — it easy without dictionary keep help the (see word order DOES matter). Nor did I anticipate just breezing through the actual Latin grammar with no explanation. But perhaps my favorite line summarizes the folly: when the good professor explained that “cogito ergo sum” meant “I think therefore I am”, she commented that she guessed someone thought that was smart.

10 years later, I am still pursuing this folly. ME SERVA!