Pope Francis & the Washing of Feet

[rug]

by Michael Sean Winters | Apr. 1, 2013

Last Thursday, I called attention to a comment by a young priest at one of the blogs for traditionalist Catholics. The young priest wrote he was bewildered by Pope Francis’ washing the feet of women as well as men during the Mandatum rite at the prison for young offenders where the pope celebrated the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. I noted that the priest’s comment was sad, but the tone of my post was snarky. I apologize for that. The issue here is quite serious and deserves better than snark.

There are really two issues at play here that warrant attention. The first is the power of symbols and the second the training of some young priests.

Among the great things about being Catholic and not Protestant is the emphasis we put on the symbols of our faith as opposed to merely focusing on the Word of God in the Bible. A symbol invites multiple meanings, not divergent meanings necessarily, but multiple meanings – though, of course, so do certain Scripture passages and I delight, too, in the fact that our Catholic tradition permits multiple interpretations of the texts. A symbol, especially the rich symbolism we find in our liturgy during the Triduum, conveys the idea that we are wrestling with a Mystery. In the washing of the feet, we see Jesus entering into a parable, teaching his disciples by example what it means to be the greatest by becoming the least, inverting the normal understandings of power and deference, making service the measure of greatness and linking the acceptance of grace to the purification of one’s life. All this could be written about or spoken of, but Jesus simply did it.

What was most sad about the young priest’s comment was that he seemed incapable of grasping all this because the pope had dared to wash the feet of women and, for this young priest, the rite involved apostles, only men were apostles, the rubrics indicate that only the feet of men should be washed, and so the pope was doing something very bad. Of course, the significance of rubrics is always a topic of debate and there are priests on both the left and the right who depart from the rubrics who shouldn’t, introducing vulgarizations into the liturgy. But, the rubric, like all Church rules, including canon law, is designed to serve the good of souls and so requires a pastor to apply the rubric or rule or law in a given situation. When the rules become so important that we miss their aim, we create the greatest vulgarization of all, reducing our worship to a kind of ideological statement, and a statement we make, not a listening to whatever statement God is trying to make.

http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/pope-francis-washing-feet

[No Vested Interest]

1. It sounds as though the young priest

was brain-washed in the seminary.
In other words, he parroting the lines he was given by his professors in the seminary.

[rug]

3. True, the seminary should be a place for thinkers, not parrots.

[demosincebirth]

2. It's very sad, to me, that many priests and fellow Catholics have this belief. For centuries and

centuries only a priest could touch the Consecrated Host.

[rug]

4. I remember that.

Once the whole school went to Mass for something or other and my friend was kneeling next to me at the rail for Communion. The priest dropped the host, the altar boy missed it with the paten. (How often does that happen? Whenever I served at Mass I spent more time looking at all the odd shaped tongues because the priest never dropped it.)

My friend grabbed the Host before it hit the floor. The nuns made an audible gasp and after Mass he had to go see the priest and say he was sorry for touching it. Those days should not return.

[demosincebirth]

5. six months ago I went to a funeral mass, for a friend that died, in Sonoma, Ca. I was very surprised

that at communion time one of the alter boys was using the Paten when the priest was doing communion. I hadn't seen that since the late sixties.