Monday, 4/11/16
The men who put St. Stephen to death were known as members
of the Synagogue of Roman Freedmen. And, in a way, we cannot blame them for
killing Stephen. We must look at who they were, and at what prompted them.
Th Roman Empire had tricks that enabled them to endure for
five hundred years. One of their tricks had them taking young Jewish hostages
from every Jewish settlement on the Mediterranean. They treated these boys well
in Rome as long as their families back home obeyed Rome in everything.
In their home ports those boys might not have been very
devout Jews, but since they were kept captive for their Jewishness, when they
were released, instead of going home, they formed their own conservative
synagogue in Jerusalem. They then turned against Stephen because he and Jesus
had taken meals with Gentiles whom conservative Jews saw as unclean.
In a way, their insistence
on keeping their religious rules to the letter is like the insistence of devout
people that Catholics who are not married by priests and Catholics who use contracepti[TS1] ves
stay away from Communion.
Pope Francis, in his Exhortation last Friday, said the
situation is not always so cut and dried. He urged pastors around the world to
examine each case. He said,
“Factors may exist
which limit the ability to make a decision. Therefore, while clearly stating
the Church’s teaching, pastors are to avoid judgments that do not take into
account the complexity of various situations, and they are to be attentive to how
people experience and endure distress because of their condition.”
Catholics generally have been disappointed with the Pope’s
exhortation in that he did not use his authority to issue new guidelines for
Catholics everywhere. But he might have been doing us a big favor in asking
pastors everywhere to take a hand in deciding.
We grew up in a Roman Catholic Church that was ninety-five
percent Roman, and only five percent catholic. Let me mention two matters in
which I have seen us hurt by Rome’s reserving all decisions to itself.
In St. Louis where I come from we had an Archbishop Peter Kenrick
who in 1852 got in trouble at the First Council of Baltimore by insisting that
all dispensations should not be reserved to Rome. Then, in 1870, when he walked
away from the First Vatican Council rather than vote for papal infallibility he
was removed from his office.
There is another case with which I am familiar. In the sixteen
hundreds the Emperor of China invited the Jesuit Matteo Ricci to come tutor his
son. And Ricci, at the capitol, often took part in the yearly feasts by which
each family honored their ancestors. But, when other missionaries who didn’t know
the Chinese language witnessed those feasts a century later, they got Rome to
ban them as pagan forms of worship.
The Korean Catholics with whom I worked with for twelve
years thought it would be good to take part in those same yearly feasts. But Rome’s
ban on them was still on the books.
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