matching tracksuits

There’s a revival of the practice of exorcism in Poland.

One of the recruits is the Rev. Wieslaw Jankowski, a priest with the Institute for Studies on the Family, a counseling center outside Warsaw. He said priests at the institute realized they needed an exorcist on staff after encountering an increase in people plagued by evil.

Typical cases, he said, include people who turn away from the church and embrace New Age therapies, alternative religions or the occult. Internet addicts and yoga devotees are also at risk, he said.

“This is a service which is sorely needed,” said Jankowski, who holds a doctorate in spiritual theology. “The number of people who need help is intensifying right now.”

Jankowski cited the case of a woman who asked for a divorce days after renewing her wedding vows as part of a marriage counseling program. What was suspicious, he said, was how the wife suddenly developed a passionate hatred for her husband.

“According to what I could perceive, the devil was present and acting in an obvious way,” he said. “How else can you explain how a wife, in the space of a couple of weeks, could come to hate her own husband, a man who is a good person?”

I guess gone are the days, by and large, of attributing demon possession only to cases of people with spinning heads who spew pea soup, or at the very least, speak in tongues unknown to the victim new a husky, gravely voice. But there are still cases of Regan-esque possession:

Exorcists said the people they help can be in the grip of evil to varying degrees. Only a small fraction, they said, are completely possessed by demons — which can cause them to display inhuman strength, speak in exotic tongues, recoil in the presence of sacred objects or overpower others with a stench.

In those cases, the exorcists must confront the devil directly, using the power of the church to order it to abandon its host. More often, however, priests perform what some of them refer to as “soft exorcisms,” using prayer to rid people of evil influences that control their lives. (Washington Post)

Prayer is so much less dramatic than burning holy water, though.

What’s troubling about the article is that there is no representation of the opposing viewpoint. Not all Catholics believe that internet addiction can be cured with holy water and prayer. Not all Catholics attribute mental illness to Satan. Not all Poles think that Yoga leads to possession.

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Last week, Pope Benedict has authorized increased use of the traditional Tridentine Mass (i.e., Mass in Latin). There are some concerns because the traditional Latin liturgy has a prayer for all Jews to be converted.

Still others talk about “turning back the Catholic clock,” fearing that Benedict is on a mission to turn back the now-forty-year-old reforms of the Vatican II conferance.

And still others talk about the silliness of using an ancient, dead language for Mass, a language that most parishioners and probably all visitors will find unintelligible.

What to make of all this?

For all the disadvantages of using Latin, a sense of mystery is a definite advantage. Catholic theology is filled with mysteries

• the Rosary includes meditation on “Mysteries” (their term, not mine);
• at the end of the consecration of the host, the priest and parishioners into “the Mystery of faith.”

The candles, the architecture, the liturgical music — it’s all there to invoke a sense of the mysterium tremendum. The Latin — if parishioners understand what they’re saying — can only heighten that sense.
I have limited experience with Catholic Mass, but since K is Catholic, I do have more experience than I did ten years ago. Most of my Mass-going experience was in Poland, and when I came to the States, I found it odd to hear the liturgy in English. Odd, and demystifying.

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K and J went to pre-Easter confession last week. As with every single thing when you have an infant, it was well planned well in advance.

“Yet J doesn’t speak English,” I reminded K earlier in the week, when she told me about the plan. “How exactly is this going to work?”

“Well, I’m going to translate.”

Some, when reading “This is supposed to between the priest and the individual”, might have injected, “Um, no — it’s between the individual and God.” More information about the Catholic view of forgiveness can be found here.

“Do you think the priest will let you? After all, this is supposed to between the priest and the individual, and anonymous at that. That’s why there’s all the elaborate screens and confessional booths and such.” (I’ve never confessed — my imagery of it is pretty much straight out of movies, and watching from a distance.)

“We’ll see.”

What actually transpired was a somewhat amusing solution to the problem. The priest instructed K, “Tell your mother to say what she needs to say in Polish, then give me a sign that she’s finished.”

J found it both amusing and touching.

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I sometimes go to mass with K for companionship, and today, I was certainly glad I did. Before I get into the reason why, some theology.

Catholics of course believe in something they call the “Real Presence,” which is the belief that the bread and wine are the actual body and blood of Jesus. It’s based on an Aristotelian concept of accident and essence — what a thing looks like and what it really is. So the Catholic explanation of why it still looks suspiciously like bread and wine is that the outward appearance has remained, but the essential reality has changed.

This is why there’s all the genuflection in churches and especially before monstrances, because if that really is God in the flesh flour, then it only makes sense to bow.

This also goes a long way in explaining the controversy about how a parishioner can take the host: standing, kneeling, on the tongue, on the palm of the hand. I think the variety is strictly American. In Poland, the issue is vastly simplified: stand or kneel. There’s no way a priest will give it to your hand in Poland. (K’s highly religious aunt is completely shocked and offended that anyone could think of taking the host standing”¦)

“Real Presence” also explains why some might be a little uneasy with the idea of anyone other than a priest handing out the host. In the States, members of the congregation hand out the blood and wine (though the priest has consecrated it and all that). Again, this is probably a completely American thing.

All this is to explain the significance of why I’ve always wondered what would happen if someone tripped and — whoosh — there’s God, all over the floor.

At this morning’s mass, my question was answered.

An elderly woman, serving as Eucharistic minister, was heading back up to the altar (and so her chalices were probably almost empty) when suddenly there was a stumble, shuffle, and crash. I saw the whole thing out of the corner of my eye, and I immediately directed all my attention there — as did everyone else in the basilica.

The priest kept right on going, but not many people were giving him their undivided attention. Everyone was looking at the aisle, watching the lady pick up the hosts as another Eucharistic minister helped her. Then a deacon came with a cloth that had been dampened, I’m assuming with holy water, and wiped the spot.

The woman was obviously quite shaken. She said some words to the priest, and he sympathetically comforted her. Returning to her seat, she muttered something to her husband, and that was that.

It highlights how atypical Catholicism is in modern culture, where all sense of the scared has disappeared. “And so much the better” many of us would add, but sacredness fosters a certain respect that I’m not sure you can get any other way. It’s simplistic to explain it, “Well of course it’s respect — born out of fear, a terror that some deity will toast you.” There’s certainly an element of truth in that.

Communism tried to foster some sense of the sacred — the working masses were the vessels for salvation. The working man is the communist messiah. Marches, songs, flag waving, speeches — all these things to foster a sense of the sacred in the people. Yet it didn’t work. My wife grew up in that culture, and it was all a joke for everyone. Why?

It lacked mystery.

Without mystery, without an element of the unknown and inexplicable, nothing can be sacred. Indeed, sacredness could be defined as a sense of mystery about something thought to be of divine origin. If you see the little old man putting together the wizard show, hanging the curtains, preparing the control panel, it is only through an act of supreme wishful thinking that you can put your faith in the Wizard.

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Poland produces a revolution every five hundred years, and it’s always the same revolution: a man comes along and challenges the way we all look at the universe, challenges us to stop thinking we’re the center of the universe and that all things circle around us.

Copernicus was the first, at least in the western world, to suggest that the Earth was not the center of the universe. He dethroned the heady notion that literally everything revolved around us, and modern science has pushed us to the point of virtual cosmic insignificance.

Karol Wojtyla, with his famous words, “Do not be afraid,” challenged us to stop thinking of ourselves as the center of our own worlds. Love is the greatest of all these, said Saint Paul, and John Paul, in his insistence on the universal recognition of human dignity and freedom, showed how to put that into practice.

“Nie lekajcie sie!”

Don’t be afraid.

Fear not.

How can we not fear? Look at the world, and the injustice that hounds it, and it seems the only thing we can do is be afraid. How can that possibly work? Perhaps when we start following John Paul’s example and love others more than ourselves, we will stop fear. After all, what is fear? It’s fear of what will happen to me. When I start loving others more, I stop thinking of my self so much, and I stop fearing.

John Paul in that sense was a Copernicus for the soul.

Smoke and Mozart

We were in Adam’s bar with Johnny, Kucek, and Marta. I was playing chess with RafaÅ‚, and I heard Mozart’s Requiem and though I didn’t consciously think it, I knew what had happened. After a few moments, Kinga called my name (they were sitting behind me) and told me. I turned to Rafal‚ and told him, then suggested we put the chess away.

I went back to the table where everyone else was sitting, and we just sat there quietly for about ten minutes. No one was saying a word. I can’t remember who initiated it, but someone said, “Idziemy?” and we all got up and left the table covered with full beer glasses and extinguished, half-smoked cigarettes.

Without saying, we all began walking up to the church. No one said, “Let’s go to the church,” we all just headed there. As we were walking, the fire station’s siren began wailing. It was strangely and peacefully quiet other than that.

We got to the church and it was locked. It had been open all day, and the night before, for prayers, but it was closed. “They’ll come open it,” I told everyone confidently.

“There’ll be a mass going within half an hour,” I said. But we stood waiting, and nothing.

After some time a nun walked into the church, and the bells began ringing, but the front door never opened. We walked around to the door to the sacristy to ask the nun if they were going to open the church. We stood there waiting, and just as she was coming out, another group of three young people — two girls and a young man of about nineteen — came up.

“Is the church going to be opened?” he asked.

The nun’s reply was somewhat surprising, and completely disappointing: “It was open all day. It was open all night last night. It was open until nine this evening, and no one was here,” she said in the tone of voice that’s so known to me know — it was the tone of a bureaucrat annoyed that you’ve come to require services of him. It was the tone of voice I encountered every time I went to the regional court offices while getting the official permission to marry a Pole. It was the tone of voice that I’ve heard in post offices, shops, busses — everywhere.

The young man would not be put off, though. “I know, I know. But not to open the church now?! At this moment?!”

The nun again: “The proboszcz said to ring the bells. He didn’t say anything about opening the church,” she said, locking the lower of three locks on the sacristy door.

“Let’s go,” said Johnny, starting to walk away.

“No, no! Don’t go!” said the young man. And he just repeated to the nun again, and again, “Not to open the church?! At this moment? At this moment?”

Reluctantly, she opened up the sacristy and we filed into the church quietly.

We knelt in the first row, with our three companions simply falling on their knees once they were in front of the tabernacle. All heads bowed, not a sound — I even prayed. “If you’re up there, God, I sure hope you’re welcoming such a great man into your presence now, because if a man like that isn’t with you now, no one else has a chance.”

The five of us had just come from a bar, so we reeked of cigarettes, and probably the smell of alcohol was noticeable, but none of us were even buzzed (we’d drunk perhaps two beers each), but Kinga felt very awkward about it the more she considered it. We left after only about ten minutes.

Kinga and I went back home and made some tea and listened to the radio.

They’ve been playing nothing but classical music on several of the stations. Last night they played Gorecki’s “Amen,” interspersed with quotes from the pope.

A Country of Orphans

“Poor country,” Kinga said. We sat up late talking about John Paul’s life, and his philosophy, and his love of fellow humans.

“If Poles lived by his words, I’d never want to leave this place,” I said. “It would be a paradise.”

Poor Poland — wracked now with increasing corruption in every part of the government. A country with more than 18% unemployment, a country that must be the richest country in the world, as my father-in-law says, because everyone steals and there still remains something for others to pilfer.

And now, broken-hearted Poland. Kinga’s grandmother spent Sunday crying. Masses are pouring into churches and staying. It is a country of orphans.

Lech Walesa said that it was like losing a mother, “for the pope looked after Poland like a mother over her children.”

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Last night I began reading Oskar i Pani Róza, which is originally Oscar et la dame rose (Amazon.com) and in English would be Oscar and Ms. Rose. It’s about a ten-year-old dying of cancer and a volunteer he makes friends with, named Ms. Rose. When Ms. Rose suggests that Oskar write to God, he replies that he doesn’t believe in God. She suggests that perhaps he should write anyway:

“Maybe you would feel less lonely?”
“Less lonely with someone who doesn’t exist?”
“Why not check if he exists?”
She bent down close to me and said, “Every time you believe in him, he’ll exist a little more” (15, my translation).

Believing in something makes it more real? Is that what she’s saying? Of course it is, and of course it’s true. Does that mean that God exists only in our heads, that we create him by believing in him? Not quite, I think, but strangely enough, taking a leap of faith and just believing seems to make it more believable.

Czeslaw Milosz wrote in The Captive Mind (Amazon.com),

The Catholic Church wisely recognized that faith is more a matter of collective suggestion than of individual conviction. Collective religious ceremonies induce a state of belief. Folding one’s hands in prayer, kneeling, singing hymns precede faith, for faith is a psycho-physical and not simply a psychological phenomenon.

Doing leads to believing. Believing is, in a sense, encapsulated in this “doing,” and so paradoxically, as Ms. Rose seems to be saying, believing leads to believing.

This is also the question in Life of Pi, though much more directly than in Oskar. I remember the quote, something like “If you stumble at believability, what is there left to live for?” Or something like that.

I was making a sandwich or something last night — perhaps pouring a brandy, I can’t remember — and I thought, “It would indeed be nice to believe in something out there, something bigger than us that we can count on to help us when we need it.”

The trouble with that is simply that I don’t see help where help is most needed — in the suffering of a child. If there’s a heaven, or an afterlife, then the death of a child, course though this may sound, is not that big of a deal.

What is a big deal is the painful and incomprehensible suffering that child might have to endure before dying, and that’s the “problem of evil” as I frame it. Not just any evil — incomprehensible evil.

All evil can be understood on some level by adults.

Incomprehensible evil is that which attacks children, like children in Rwanda who were hacked to death with a machete because of their ethnicity when the notion of “ethnicity” is so foreign to them that it would be difficult to explain it to them.

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A tent revival is something that is particularly American, and conjures up images of snake-handling believers and wheezing, beet-faced preachers who can stretch the name of Jesus into four syllables, who preach hell fire and damnation, the dangers of card playing, and the outright evil of dancing.

It doesn’t seem to go with the ordered liturgy of a Catholic Mass. And yet, for the week of 9–18 October, that’s exactly what the parishioners of Lipnica Wielka were getting.

The techniques used in the construction of the church are among the best and most expensive. — Three Times Superlative.

Entitled “Misja Swietych” (“Mission of the Saints”), it featured multiple, daily Masses with a particular focus: the family, the mystery of the Stations of the Cross, the sick. It was a fairly big thing, as it happens only once every five years or so.

This year it was led by Wojciech Chocól, a rector of a parish some hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of here, near Tarnów.

Chochól is a short, somewhat paunchy man who appears to be in his mid-forties and who, it seems, stepped directly from the 1950s into the twenty-first century. He believes in what some American Southerners might call “old time preaching.” Translation: he yells at people about their sins.

The Polish- and Italian-granite entry stairs to the new church cost so much that, says Father Wojciech, “for that kind of money, you could frame an entire, new church.” — Three Times Superlative

I suppose there’s nothing really wrong with that. Such “soul-pastoring” (a direct translation of the Polish term for the verb “pastor”) treats the parishioners as children and has a particularly humiliating feeling, but perhaps some feel at home being humiliated in church. They might refer to it as “being humbled.”

I heard him preach when I went to church Sunday afternoon (10 October) for the special “Men’s Mass.” Kinga didn’t want to go alone, and I was curious what the priest would say to a room full of men.

“Everything here that glistens is gold plated,” adds rector [Chochól] , taking the time to show all the internal marble [ . . . , ] the same marble that is in the walls and the entrance to the bathrooms. Marble also rules in the cemetery’s chapel. — Three Times Superlative

I wasn’t disappointed, though somewhat provoked. Some of the highlights:

• suggested people throw out television and unplug the “Satanic Internet;”
• castigated people who have only one or two children, saying that children are only “normal” when there are three of them (One child is a little god in the house; two kids are two hysterics; only when you have three can you expect to have normal kids in the house);
• said people should be worried about money with their kids (“They don’t have to have a gold watch right way. They don’t have to have a car or a mountain bike right away.”);
• advised fathers to look in their fifteen-year-old children’s pants pockets to look for narcotics or “swinska gumeczka” — “filthy condoms”;
• told of a little two-year kid who at Mass was lying in the floor, crying, waving his arms and such — being a fairly regular two-year-old. “And I thought, ‘You’ve got a little bin Laden!’” he told everyone. And they laughed — that’s the most disturbing part about it
• said a child’s salvation lay in the fathers taking a fence board and “lay on as much as fits” (A child’s salvation = beating the daylights out of him);
• recommended that fathers no let their daughter’s boyfriends sleep in the house;
• pondered what sons who came home late at night or early in the morning were doing (“And later, three of them come to the altar for a wedding,” he concluded.);
• told the story of a boy who came in to the parish house to use the phone, calling the police and life saving crew because his father had come home drunk again and began beating his mother. “I don’t know how much longer we can stand this hell,” he exclaimed, then left money on the priest’s desk for a Mass to be said the following day in their intention. And Chochól left the money hanging — didn’t say, “I gave the mone yback to him and said, ‘You all need this more than I do.’”

All in all, it was the usual, backward, uneducated tirade that, were it to take place in a clapboard building in Appalachia or in a mosque in Cairo, would be labeled fundamentalism: railing against the evils of modern society and the need to return to a Godly life, as defined by the priest, of course. Chochól showed that he knew nothing about children and even less about contemporary society. He showed his disrespect for parishioners by refusing to treat them as adults but screaming at them as if they were children

“The church is being built slowly, but also as expensively and as beautifully as possble.” — Wojciech Chochól quoted in Three Times Superlative.

Covering the usual litany of religious anti-modernism, yelling at people about their sinful indulgence in modernism and their material mindset, is one thing.

It’s an entirely different story when the priest is guilty of the very things himself.

It turns out, there might have been a reason he referred to the Internet as “Satanic,” for a few keyboard clicks at Google, and I found “Trzy Razy ‘Naj,’” an interesting article from 2002 about a then–new church being built in Chochól’s parish, with some choice quotes (which appear in the side inserts).

The picture we end up with by combining the sermon and the article is that of a hypocrite. In his sermon, Chochól anecdotally mentioned several times the churches “he’s built,” and so it is obviously a matter of pride to him, which he probably crows about whenever he can. Others derive their pride and self-esteem from what they own; still others from what they’ve built, I guess.

When village priests come caroling and collecting money, they don’t schedule a particular time, but tell their parishioners simply they day they might come — and expect them to wait around all day. Kids miss school for this; parents miss work. If a priest suggested this in a city, such as Krakow or Warsaw, he would be laughed out of the church.

Contrast that with a friend who lost her father when she was still a young girl. “Not once,” she said, “Did any priest come by to ask if everything were okay, to see if they needed anything.” They came about as is the Polish custom during the Christmas season for caroling, which is accompanied by (guess!) a collection. So they came to get money, and nothing else.

As a non-Christian, I find this particularly offensive, and I can think of a few things I might like to say:

• Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world — James 1.27, New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
• Jesus said to [the young rich man], “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” — Matthew 19.21 (NRSV)
• All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. — Acts 2.44, 45 (NRSV)
• [Jesus said,] “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” — Matthew 19.24 (NRSV)

The second sermon I heard from this jerk was the next Sunday. Highlights from that one:

• Without priests, you will not go to heaven.
• Priests are a second Jesus.
• A wife of a communist official who’d refused permission to build a church came to Chochól when her husband died to ask him to anoint his body. Chochól’s response: “Well, now you can go anoint him with lard.” And this by his own admission.
• He criticized the church in Lipnica, saying it was old and dirty. He wondered how priests could work in such an environment “without granite, without marble.”
• He told a couple of stories of people who’d died shortly after criticizing priests.
• Priests are hated just as Jesus is hated — for their holy example.
• He whispered to the children in a sickeningly sweet voice, “Don’t say anything bad about priests.”
• He said that when people go on pilgrimages without a priest, “it’s just an outing.” (“Wycieczka” was the Polish he used.)
• He said that if you criticize a priest, then you’ll die without a priest (i.e., You’ll go to hell.).
• He told people don’t send money to other parishes but keep it here. But just earlier, he’d thanked everyone for the donations given to his parish.

The irony: it was labled a “children’s Mass!”

The general reaction of parishoners after this joker wen home: “What beautiful preaching!”

Well, I’m criticizing him, so let’s see how long I last before God kills me for my blatantly Satanic attitude.

(An interesting thread at Catholic.com’s form about this, started by yours truly.)

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