Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 408

Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses on the pretext of the marriage he had contracted with a Cushite woman.
They complained, “Is it through Moses alone that the LORD speaks?
Does he not speak through us also?”
And the LORD heard this.
Now, Moses himself was by far the meekest man on the face of the earth.

A few years ago, I reflected on the word pretext in this passage from Genesis. Miriam had a quarrel with her brother and used his wife's Cushite origin as a way to attack him; and then she expanded her attack with the real challenge, “Is it through Moses alone that the LORD speaks? Does he not speak through us also?”

The challenge sounds familiar today as an apparent majority of German bishops have challenged Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis' teachings about the ordination of women to the priesthood. Echoing our tradition, the popes insisted that the Church does not have the authority to ordain women. 

The discussion is clouded by the bizarre idea that woman and man are interchangeable names, that with chemicals and surgery a man can become a woman; and a woman, a man. The same people would tell me, "You were assigned as a male when you were born." and I have been asked when I donate blood, "Do you identify as male or female?" "
I answer, "The last time I checked, I was male. I don't identify as anything but a Roman Catholic, Franciscan priest."

I'm sure the German bishops have their reasons for challenging Rome but I suspect that the rights and dignity of women is only a pretext for their true motives.  

In his essay, An Unfamiliar Faith, Fr. Benedict Kiely has described the deeper problem:

A major obstacle, of course, is that many of those charged with leadership in the Church, both clergy and bishops are, in fact, the ones most suffering from the “fatigue of familiarity.”  This fatigue was amply demonstrated during the COVID-19 outbreak. Only a deeply fatigued group of men would have rushed, at that crucial moment, to close churches and deny people the sacraments.

[During the worst days, Mount Saint Francis offered no Sunday Mass even to the friars living here, although they never missed a meal.] 

Suffering this fatigue of unfamiliarity, we can expect to lose the virtues of obedience, poverty, and chastity, followed by faith, hope, and love. 

Fortunately, there is another dynamic, something which American Protestant ministers have long recognized: "Children try to remember what their parents tried to forget." Father Kiely's essay concerns an apparent uptick in religious zeal among young people, both in Europe and North America. 

We can hope the present revival includes a rebirth of wonder in the virtue and vow of obedience, which Saint Francis lauded in his Praise of the Virtues: 

Holy Obedience confounds

every corporal and carnal wish,

binds its mortified body

to obedience of the Spirit

and obedience to one’s brother,

so that it is

subject and submissive

to everyone in the world,

not only to people

but to every beast and wild animal as well

that they may do whatever they want with it

insofar as it has been given to them

from above by the Lord.

Pope Benedict pointed to the marvelous cathedrals and basilicas of Europe and prophesied that these "Gospels in Stone" would draw many back to the Catholic faith. A few weeks ago, I saw thousands of people milling noisily through the Gothic cathedrals in Cologne and Strasbourg. At least some of them might want to know why they were built, by whom, and what drove them to make such efforts. 

With the same confidence we can expect the story of Saint Francis, who was "the meekest man on the face of the earth," to forget their pretexts and return to loyalty, obedience, and solidarity with the Roman Catholic Church.