Policy Suggestions for the Church
Introduction
In what was perhaps his last public lecture, given at the Nassau Community College Center for Catholic Studies, in Garden City, New York, on March 29th, 2003, Monsignor George A. Kelly started his talk on the reasons for the founding of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars by declaring bluntly that “sometime after Vatican II, the Church went to hell.” Perhaps the bluntness of Monsignor Kelly on this occasion could be explained by the fact that his presentation was not written in advance and his remark was extemporaneous and not as nuanced as it could have been. Or perhaps it can be partially explained by the disappointment and exasperation on one who has tried to hard for so long to right the direction of the Catholic community during his era but perceives that his efforts have been mostly for naught. Or perhaps it is the declaration of an older man who has, finally, lost his patience. Or perhaps the good Monsignor was just “calling it as he sees it” and seeing it pretty clearly at that. Even allowing for a certain amount of hyperbole on the part of the good and colorful Monsignor Kelly, I would argue that this judgement made by one of the true heros of the Catholic Church during the post-Vatican II debacle is not too far off the mark. As I see it, the picture of the contemporary Catholic Church in the United States isn’t pretty. It most certainly is uglier than many of those committed to maintaining, for whatever reasons, a certain image of a faithful and functioning religious community would be willing to admit publicly.
I will start my deliberations rehashing some of the pertinent facts about the present state of the Catholic Church in this country, facts that many from even disparate worldviews would agree on in terms of their simple veracity. I will then address the issue of how these accepted facts are interpreted and what policy conclusions naturally flow from such divergent analyses. Finally, I will propose solutions that are consistent with my own analysis of the state of the contemporary Church.
Institutional and Social Failure: Some Facts
The failure of contemporary Catholicism can be discussed in terms of two necessarily overlapping categories, those that are internal to the Church institution and those referring to the Catholic population at large. These categories are necessarily overlapping because there exists a dialectical or mutually shaping relationship between Church and society. This is a relationship heavily weighted, at the moment, on the impact of society on the Church and not the other way round due precisely to the weakened condition of the latter.
Regarding institutional failures, the most important one is the seeming inability of the Church to effectively pass on the essentials of the faith to its own membership. Sociological studies comparing pre-Vatican II, Vatican II, and post-Vatican II generations clearly show a general trend downwards in terms of, most basically, knowledge of, and derivatively, assent to, Church teachings. Of paramount importance here is the overwhelming fact that the majority of the current teachers of the Catholic faith in the Church’s official education programs simply do not pass on the Catholic faith correctly and effectively because they themselves do not possess the faith. The members of what Monsignor Michael Wrenn and Kenneth Whitehead have referred to as the present day “catechetical establishment” have themselves been trained by dissenting theologians who have consciously misinterpreted the theology of the Second Vatican Council into a vision that, practically speaking, falsely baptizes as Catholic the secularizing developments of the outer American and modern culture. In this regard, I cannot think of a more depressingly central indicator of contemporary widespread religious illiteracy than the recent research indicating that a high percentage of communicants are not aware that they are receiving the body and blood of Jesus Christ when administered the sacrament of the Eucharist. Related to this is the significant increase in the unworthy reception of the sacrament. This religious illiteracy is at least one key factor in explaining the growth of the selective “picking and choosing” of the essentials of the faith both described and advocated by sociologist Father Andrew Greeley through his discussion of a “communal Catholicism” (which actually was predicted as a general religious trend last century by the liberal Protestant theologian and sociologist Ernest Troeltsch through his own discussion of what he saw as the inevitable rise of a “mystical” appropriation of religion). For both Troeltsch and Father Greeley, it is both inevitable and desirous that the locus of religious authority reside with the individual and not with received or organically developing tradition. Such a radical individuation of religion is quite consistent with the worldview of liberal Protestantism and a Protestantizing Catholicism and its effects quite in line with sociologist Peter L. Berger’s observation that, inevitably, a liberal religiosity is a self-liquidating enterprise.
Compared to a baseline of the mid-twentieth century Catholic Church in the United States, mass attendance is down. The abandonment of the priesthood and religious life after almost 40 years now seems finally to have stabilized but, at the moment, at inadequate levels of replacement. A substantial and well-placed “middle management “ of progressive Catholics intent to “update” the faith at all costs and unsympathetic to the Catechism of the Catholic Church is still, for the most part, in charge of catechesis and the other functions performed by the Church’s various organizations and bureaucracies. Too many seminaries allow or even encourage dissent and some have become enclaves for an active homosexual movement. Too many Church administrators and pastors view the Catholic high school and parochial school system not as an opportunity to evangelize and as a non-negotiable aspect of their ministry but as an unnecessary headache. The sacrament of penance has almost disappeared, priests themselves go to confession less, and when the sacrament is celebrated, it oftentimes serves as an opportunity for priests to deny the objective reality of sin and promote in its place an undemanding “therapeutic mentality.” The incredibly large number of annulments granted in the Catholic Church in America breeds suspicion, at the very least, of the possible misuse by marriage tribunals of psychological analysis. The implementation of Ex corde Ecclesiae has effectively been obstructed and the secularization of Catholic higher education, for the most part, continues unabated. Finally, and as a result of this institutional defilement, financial contributions are down as serious Catholics refuse to throw good money after bad and progressive Catholics have more “important” liberal and secular causes to support. Regarding the latter, many leaders of the misnamed group, “Voice of the Faithful,” are quite up front in urging their followers to withhold donations subject, presumably, to the “structural” changes they want instituted in the Catholic Church. Far less honestly, however, this group claims that their desired changes are not intended to violate the essentials of the faith. For one thing, it is a contradiction for a group of laity to demand to oversee the Bishops who are, after all, the official “overseers” of the Catholic Church set up by Christ himself. Put another way, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is the non-negotiable foundation of the faith not subject to being subverted by democratic forces, whether those forces are actually authentically democratic or not.
Regarding the Catholic population at large, the percentage of both Catholics who are married, and married validly in the eyes of the Church, has dropped. Relatedly, the size of Catholic families has decreased to, more or less, the national norm. Similarly, Catholic acceptance of the use of artificial means of birth control, pre-marital sex, and abortion are generally indistinguishable from the American population at large. The Catholic population overwhelmingly seems to be innocent of the realty of, the logic behind, and the empirical evidence supporting the salutary effects of, both the natural law and Catholic social doctrine. As a result, too many Catholics, especially from the middle classes upward, have followed the mental lines of least resistence embracing various forms of neo-paganism as their “ultimate concern” (referring to Paul Tillich’s term) such as the soft socialism of cultural elites in academia, the mass media, the arts, government, and the Democratic Party or the soft capitalism of corporate America and the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party. That which is of paramount importance for many other Catholics, especially from the working class and immigrant populations, remains an essentially pagan attachment to such essentially pre-modern allegiances as the family, ethnicity, and the local community/neighborhood.
An Important Qualification
An important qualification about the facts hitherto presented is in order. This qualification moves in the direction of modifying, a bit, the bleak picture thus far displayed. This caveat is that the portrayal presented thus far doesn’t make a basic distinction between practicing and non-practicing Catholics. When asked by my students which is America’s largest denomination, I answer, “the Catholic Church.” When students naturally follow with the question as to which group is the second largest denomination, I respond, only half-facetiously,“nominal Catholics.” Sociologist Father Joseph Fichter’s categories, based on participation in the Church and developed before the unintended impact of Vatican II was felt, are here useful; utilizing a concentric zone framework, he speaks of “nuclear,” “modal,” “marginal,” and “dormant” Catholics. Religious illiteracy, by definition, is obviously higher for marginal and dormant Catholics. If these baptized Catholics were, sociologically, not defined as members of the Catholic community but as the targets of Catholic missionary activity, the illiteracy rates would not look quite as bad as they do when all the four categories are combined.
The issue of religious dissent, however, is a little more complex. In the immediate pre-Vatican II era, one could usefully assume that “nuclear” Catholics meant Catholics who were religiously orthodox in both belief and practice. Sociologically at least, this is not the empirical case today as many outright dissenters have accepted the advice of people like the radical feminist Rosemary Radford Reuther not to leave the Church but to stay active and fight from within. The latter figure is alleged to have responded to the question as to why she stays in a Catholic Church that she views as inherently sexist as follows: “In order to win the revolution you need xerox machines and the Church has the xerox machines.” Many such dissenters have demanded what Joseph Sobran has referred to as “squatter’s rights” in the Church; while they defile the vision and violate the practice of the Church’s teachings, they nonetheless do not abandon the institution; they are “nuclear,” at least sociologically, to the institution and its activities and programs and stand in combat with the religiously orthodox “nuclear”core for the soul of the Church. Indeed, as James Hitchcock and others have argued, a religiously heterodox “new class” of intellectuals, bureaucrats, activists, combined with some misinformed and misguided “church mice,” now constitute a vast “middle management” of Church run, or better yet, mis-run, institutions.
It is important to point out that the dissent of the religiously illiterate differs significantly from the dissent of the religiously heterodox core. The former is a form of “soft dissent,” not based on codified and articulated knowledge and critical reflection, and most times the issues involving dissent are merely of passing interest or outright indifference to the individual in question. And precisely because this form of “dissent” is soft, it is subject to being corrected by vigorous evangelization and re-evangelization efforts. Does the marginal or dormant Catholic really care, for instance, about the issue of the ordination of women or whether or not Bishops should be democratically elected? And even the marginal or dormant Catholic woman, shorn of any hardened secular ideological commitment, who approves of abortion rights and actually has willing consented to abortions herself is far more susceptible to admitting eventually to the evil of the act as the dysfunctions –spiritually, bodily, and socially–of abortion manifest themselves as they inevitably do. The same could be said of Catholics who have experienced the disastrous consequences of rejecting the Catholic ideal of the intact traditional family. It cannot be stressed enough, however, that successful conversions to the state of thinking and acting with the Church require more than just disenchantment with the status quo. In any intellectual and moral migration, there must be more than just a “push” factor; there must also be some sort of “pull” factor. The Church must capitalize on the present day experience of disenchantment by many by offering simultaneously a compelling alternative vision, a vision that Karl Adam has referred to as “the spirit of Catholicism.” Regrettably, given the massive dissent that has been allowed to be institutionalized within the Church over the past forty years, the Catholic vision has not been presented whole, with integrity, and in all its majesty and therefore has failed to convert as many of the disenchanted, the searchers, the ambivalent, and the open-minded as was, and is, possible.
The “hard dissent” of the religiously heterodox, on the other hand, emanates far more out of some secularized ideological commitment and is oftentimes buttressed by sets of material, power, and status interests (as they have no desire to lose their jobs, bully pulpits, and influence). This dissent is disproportionately influential within the Church precisely because it is so well placed. However, the numbers involved are not vast, at least not as a proportion of the total Catholic community. Literally speaking, a policy of “decimation” would do wonders for the health of the Catholic Church. To be perfectly clear, what I am calling for is not the classic Roman decimation leading to the execution of Roman soldiers picked randomly from legions who have been judged not to have performed their duties. Rather, what I am calling for is a Roman Catholic disciplinary policy regarding all baptized Catholics that ranges from excommunication in those cases in which Church insiders and members of civil society have notoriously and scandalously rejected Christ and His Church, to the firing of dissenters from Church-based employment, to the never relenting and public correcting of those who themselves have manifestly denied Catholic doctrine. Such a policy regarding the decimation of dissent would quickly take care of the issue of making it clear to all just what Catholic teachings are and what they aren’t. To quote the phrase of one of the more famous general managers of baseball, Branch Rickey, institutionalizing such a policy would represent a case of “addition through subtraction,” in terms both of personnel and worldview. To sum up: the present disarray in the Church could be improved substantially if proper Church officials would use, respectively, their authority against the hard dissenters and their evangelization resources for a massive outreach to the marginal and dormant Catholic.
Differing Interpretations of What to Do
As one wag has allegedly commented, “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” The point here, regarding the second purpose of my presentation, is to show that “the facts never speak for themselves,”i.e., to demonstrate how factual information about the state of the Church is capable of being transformed by various theoretical or interpretative spins and by the ability of human beings to rationalize what they perceive, many times incorrectly, to be in their self-interest. Regarding Catholics in American society, for instance, the apparently clearer and ever more indisputable “fact” that human life exists within the womb will not necessarily convince all abortionists to stop their barbaric practices; rather it is quite possible, following the claim of James K. Fitzpatrick, that elaborate or, for that matter, home spun, defenses of infanticide will emerge. Likewise, the overwhelming “fact” that more and more upper middle class married couples consciously decide not to have children will not automatically “wake up” feminists to the dangers and limitations of submerging oneself into a self-absorbed, hedonistic, and materialist upper-middle class American lifestyle; so-called “quality of life” arguments similarly have multiplied.
Regarding issues of religious dissent and illiteracy that are internal to the institution, many progressive Catholics would merely shrug off their acknowledged reality by claiming, incorrectly, that Vatican II’s positing of conscience as the “supreme subjective norm” is an endorsement of the value and reality of an autonomous individualism and, practically speaking, means that, short of murder and transgressing the politically correct, Catholics can believe anything and do anything and still call themselves faithful members of the religious community. Again, Father Greeley’s advocacy of a “communal Catholicism” is here relevant. Or, similarly, other progressive Catholics will make the claim— like the liberal Baptist thinker, Harvey Cox, does in his The Secular City— that the evolving, broader, and ever more secular culture is “out in front” of organized religion, the Catholic Church most especially included, and that all would be well is only the Church would marry the zeitgeist. Dissent, from this perspective, is viewed not merely as just an option but actually as a valuable and required contribution to the Church.
Another progressive approach that tries to neutralize the negative statistical information previously laid out is to argue that all religion, including Catholicism, is, at base, a matter of “experience” and not, conversely, doctrine. Such an approach is labeled by the Lutheran theologian, George Lindbeck, an “experiential-expressive” one. It is an approach that argues that all doctrinal statements are merely non-essential reflections of some alleged universal religious experience. The goal, presumably, of the religious seeker is to try to bask in the presence of, or perhaps even merge into, the “numinous,” what Rudolf Otto referred to as the “totally other” than human. Doctrinal issues (e.g. that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ) including, social doctrinal issues (e.g. that abortion is the destruction of a child of God) are best of secondary importance and usually viewed as a matter of opinion and taste.
Some traditional religionists, for their part, acknowledge, (as I do), that all the religious and social indicators previously discussed are negative and deleterious but view them, (as I do not), as out their or anybody’s control, usually attributing them as the inevitable consequences of broad cultural and social trends. All that can be done, so this logic goes, is to take a basically passive counter cultural stance and try to keep the religion alive in the nooks and crannies of society waiting for a more propitious circumstance from which Catholicism can re-emerge as a potentially society shaping force. There is yet another interpretation that believes both that the Church in the contemporary United States is in a bad way but that the goal of “restoring all things in Christ” in this civilization is not only necessary but possible–the interpretation that I support and that will be presented momentarily. However, the point summarizing this overall section is that, even granting some consensus reached on the mere existence of specific factual developments occurring within the Church and society will not, in and by itself, lead to a consensus about the health and welfare of the Church and society and their necessary and desired directions.
Reorienting the Catholic Church Back in the Right Direction
The claim, accepted by almost all non-Marxist sociologists, that human beings are “cultural creatures” is one similar but not identical with the Church’s understanding that human beings are “moral beings” subject to the internal conversation between the natural law “written into the heart” and the surrounding environment. The sociological and Catholic understandings are not identical because of the deterministic leanings of some (not all) cultural sociologists who portray the individual as a prisoner of culture and hence cannot incorporate into their models the reasoning capability and free will that are constitutive of a Catholic philosophical anthropology. However, the sociological and Catholic traditions are, indeed, similar in that they both acknowledge the important role for what sociologists call “socialization”— or the internalization of culture—in shaping the thoughts and activities of individuals. The relevant point here is that the key concern in reorienting the Church back in the right direction involves what sociologists call “socialization,” what religionists term “evangelization,” and what the man in the street simply refers to as “education.” What, then, can Catholic social policy suggest that can lead to more nominal Catholics, and potential non-Catholic converts, “thinking and acting with the Mind of the Church?”
The most basic and essential proposal geared to reorienting the Catholic Church back in the right direction is the rebuilding of what the distinguished Lutheran sociologist, Peter L. Berger, calls its “plausibility structure.” For Berger, any belief system requires a structural base that reaffirms, through constant interaction and exposure, its “realness” to the individual, that provides what the psychologist William James refers to as a necessary “accent on reality.” The Church’s plausibility structure consists of those “intermediate” (and potentially “mediating”) institutions (e.g. parishes, seminaries, schools and colleges, hospitals, mass media outlets, professional and academic associations, libraries, museums, art galleries, etc.) that stand between the individual and what the classical French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, called a society’s “collective conscience” or, more simply, central value system. A plausibility structure, if its various parts are internally consistent with each other, is capable of producing either subcultures or, if need be, countercultures capable of dialoguing with and critiquing the messages of an American society that was, originally, characterized by a Protestant cultural, economic, and political hegemony and now by a secular monopoly in the public square. Without an effective Catholic plausibility structure consisting of a comprehensive set of mediating institutions, what socializes those baptized in the Church is not the Catholic worldview but whatever system of ideas that, at the moment, is socially dominant.
Legitimated by a false and selective understanding of Vatican II, what has occurred in the Catholic Church of the United States over the past forty years or so is a defilement of its plausibility structure though what Peter Berger has referred to as a “secularization from within.” The latter refers to an empirical situation in which traditional religion survives in society as a hollowed out, ineffective reality, little more than providing a thin veneer for what is actually and effectively non-religious belief and activity. The processes of a “secularization from within” has occurred at almost all but Magisterially defined and controlled levels of the Church, including what passes for a general religious worldview in too many Church bureaucracies. The end result is a cutting down of an authentic worldview to the contours of American liberalism and autonomous individualism with predictable and disastrous results in the formation, knowledge, and behavior of a vast percentage of the Catholic population in the United States. For those interested in an elaboration of this thesis, I refer you to my volume, Bright Promise, Failed Community: Catholics and the American Public Order.
Some More Concrete Suggestions
The most basic concrete suggestion is that the Catholic Church in this country should radically change priorities, in terms of its ministries and apostolates, which would entail a change in its allocation of personnel and spending priorities. Outside of the administration of the sacraments, there must be an almost exclusive emphasis given to Catholic education, with the ultimate goal being to offer all interested Americans, Catholic or not, a free K-12 education for their children that is shaped by an authentic Catholic worldview. The basic idea was first suggested by, of all people, Father Andrew Greeley over a decade ago. Father Greeley was making the claim that the single greatest service that the Catholic Church can offer to minorities and the poor would be a first rate and free Catholic elementary and high school education geared to both body and soul. I think his suggestion should be expanded to include the whole American population, given my expressed belief that it is possible to restore major sections of the total society to Christ. It surely is the case, however, that such a proposal would be seized upon with most enthusiasm by those most disenfranchised in our society. The possibilities for the saving of souls and the promotion of human dignity among the minority populations in the Archdiocese of Detroit, for instance and to underplay the point, are both palpable and realistic. Related to this, all parishes must emphasize, much more than they do now, catechetical instruction in the essentials of the faith not only for their parishioners but for any potentially interested citizen, Catholic or not. Related to and supporting this general catechetical thrust would be efforts—via such instruments as cable television, radio programming, and free continuing education courses — presenting the Catholic worldview on a wide range of topics and issues through discussions of theology, philosophy, the popes, the saints, social thought, social science and history, and social and public policy. Diocesan newspapers must be transformed into more serious religious, intellectual and moral vehicles both promoting and explaining the Catholic faith and what it has to offer the individual and society.
Such a radical change in priorities would naturally impact on the degree and nature of support that the faith offers other aspects of its internal ministry and social apostolate. All other aspects of the Catholic social apostolate, if it wants labor intensive and financial support, should be an activity that the secular State does not fund for whatever ideological reason (e.g. natural family planning, pregnancy care, Project Rachel and the caring of those suffering from post-abortion syndrome, settlement or hospitality houses addressing the needs of the homeless including those who are mentally and physically ill, etc.). While, ideally, it is important for all social welfare activity to be performed simultaneously in conjunction with the presentation of Catholic social doctrine, the present weakened condition of the Church does not allow the Church to do everything for everybody. If the State can perform some social welfare function without violating the natural law, let it do it, at least until the Church’s financial resources and, more importantly, number of orthodox personnel increases.
It is no secret that the state of Catholic higher education, judged by authentic Catholic criteria, is close to abysmal. The number of smaller orthodox colleges, either started over the past few decades or that have come home to the bosom of Mother Church, while heartening, is not an adequate response. At least some of the sacred Catholic soil that has been occupied by the secular pretenders to the thrown of Catholic education during the past decades must be recaptured. Another concrete suggestion is to create a nation wide Catholic educational agency composed of orthodox Catholic scholars from groups like the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, the Cardinal Newman Society, and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists which is designed to help and serve those Bishops concerned with the renewal of Catholic higher education. The religious and intellectual argument must be made to the Bishops, and at least a core must accept such an argument if the proposal has any chance of even limited success, that any college that wants to call itself Catholic must be willing to be evaluated by this agency which will offer its professional judgement to the presiding diocesan Bishop about whether or not, or to what degree, and where and where not, the Catholic scholarly, religious, and moral tradition is being effectively and faithfully presented. If Catholic colleges and universities submit, in certain respects, to secular accrediting agencies, they should understand that they logically and necessarily bear the burden of being judged simultaneously from a Catholic framework legitimated by Magisterial authority. Catholic universities and colleges who are unwilling to submit to this evaluation–and there will be many of them— could be designated by the complying local ordinary of the diocese in which the institution is located as no longer a “Catholic institution” and thereby must not be able to advertize itself as such. Obviously, a diocesan based Catholic institution of higher education, like Seton Hall University which is ultimately under the outstanding and very orthodox leadership of his Grace, Archbishop John Myers, should be more easily reconverted than others under the direction of religious orders that, practically (although not theoretically) speaking, have some greater degree of autonomy.
As is well known, His Eminence Adam Cardinal Maida of the Archdiocese of Detroit was one of the key proponents of the creation of the magnificent John Paul II Cultural Center based in Washington, D.C. which serves as a key depository of the Catholic faith and as an agent of evangelization. Cardinal Maida and all the Bishops in charge of Catholic dioceses should strongly consider the creation and dispersion of similar entities within their own jurisdictions, i.e., what I’ve previously referred to in the Newsletter of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars as “Catholic religious and cultural centers.” These centers can effectively evangelize by representing both the universal message of the Catholic faith and the specific needs, gifts, and applications of each individual region.
Another suggestion is to increase the scope of educational and evangelization activities that take place at Catholic seminaries which are under, very clearly and without ambiguity, the authority of orthodox Catholic leadership. There is, of course, a certain danger in this proposal. By their very nature, seminaries are designed to meet the need of generating and cultivating that most central calling, the priesthood. Again, however, it must be pointed out that these are not normal times within the Catholic Church in the United States; our functioning institutions must, of necessity, be asked to bear extra responsibilities and tasks that they were not originally intended to master. Alas, we must “go into battle” with what we’ve got and what we’ve got are a few institutions, like Sacred Heart Major Seminary, which are fast heading back to Catholic orthodoxy. Such seminaries must be quickly expanded into developing liberal arts colleges and must also serve as “hotbeds” of Catholic intellectual and evangelistic activity where faithful groups (e.g. Catholics United for the Faith, Opus Dei, the Legionaries of Christ, etc.) must be invited to run their programs. Given the present unreliability of most colleges that call themselves Catholic, faithful seminaries should be locations offering the community various educational outreach programs both situated at the seminary and, through technology, geared to an national audience. The focus, therefore, of Catholic institutions during this period of crisis should not merely be to serve some local community (e.g. the Archdiocese of Detroit) but should be oriented also to what is best for the Church, both nationally and universally. The motto should be something like “One for all and all for Jesus Christ.”
(Joseph A. Varacalli, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology and Director for the Center for Catholic Studies at Nassau Community College-S.U.N.Y. This essay is based, in part, on his volume, Bright Promise, Failed Community: Catholics and the American Public Order (Lexington Books, 1-800-462-6420; www.lexingtonbooks.com or www.barnesandnoble.com or www.amazon.com. The author would like to express his thanks to both Kenneth Whitehead of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and the Very Reverend Steven Boguslawski, O.P., Rector and President of Sacred Heart Seminary, for the critical feedback they offered my initial presentation. I accepted some, but not all, of their suggestions. It should be made perfectly clear that the author assumes total responsibility for the line of argumentation offered in this essay.)
(*An earlier version of this paper, under different title, was presented at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit, Michigan, November 3rd, 2003)This item 6161 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
