Catholics Should Be Embarrassed Episcopalians Understand the Symbolism of Ritual Better: A Priest’s Thoughts on Carter’s Funeral

 

Thoughts on the service for Jimmy Carter at the National Cathedral

 by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla

 

It might be said that that there is irony in calling the Episcopal cathedral in Washington, D.C, as the National Cathedral.  For the Episcopal Church is certainly not a State church, which would counter the very foundation of the United States on the principle of an absolute separation of Church and State.  In fact, the Episcopal Church, once known as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, is a distinctly minority denomination in the Protestant faith world in the United States, but, at least in the relatively recent past, was seen as the church of the rich and powerful and the church of “Good Taste.”

And the Washington Cathedral is a fine example of that very we good taste: soaring Gothic with even a rood screen, and if you look high enough, even a rood. For American Catholics who have forgotten or perhaps have never known what a rood is, it is a carving of Christ on the Cross, with Mary and John at his side, gazing at Christ. 

 

So today, in this cathedral, there was held the official State service for President James Earl Carter, who knew himself as and was known by most Americans as Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth President of the United States.  We learned that the former President and his beloved wife, Rosalyn, planned  this service many years ago as the formal goodbye to the nation. But the religious service, and the walk to the burial plot, would be in Plains, Georgia.  And so it was today.

 

What struck me most was the use of ritual in the long ceremony.  The military ritual with its precision and objectivity was most impressive. It was not made up for Jimmy Carter.  Its roots are in English state ritual, and even with an American twist, conveys in its very rigid form, rigid not in the sense of a corpse, but rather in its meticulous attention to detail, that the event in which they participate and honored went beyond the person of Jimmy Carter, and had much to do with courage, honor and truth.

 

The same is true of the church ritual at the service.  There was not much of it, but enough to convey the objective importance of what was going on.  Anglicanism, at least for perhaps the last two centuries, has exhibited a high taste for ritual. Each of the speakers was escorted by a verger, dressed in a proper verger’s gown, and carrying the virge, whose history goes back to crowd control, but now is the symbol of courtesy and pointing politely to the importance of the one whom the verger is guiding to the proper place. The music was tasteful. Even the obligatory “Amazing Grace” that calls us “wretches” was sung with beautiful power.  One lapse was including John Lennon’s “Imagine”.  The prayers by the Episcopal clergy were delivered well in good and even beautiful English with a sense of objectivity. All of this said what could not be said in words: that what was going on was important beyond those who were there or those who watched it on various media from afar. 

 

As a Catholic priest, as I watched this service, I could not help but be saddened by the abandonment and non-understanding of ritual in the Catholic Church today. A case could be made that the Catholic Church invented ritual in the West from the Mass and other Church services, but she also extended ritual to affairs of state and even to the family.  Much of the art and music of Western culture finds its origin in the Catholic Mass.  The deliberate de-ritualization of the Mass after the Second Vatican Council, an act which has no basis in the Council document on the Sacred Liturgy, has had a profound effect on the faith of the Catholic faithful, one result of which is that seventy percent of Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in Holy Communion, and that many Catholics in their thirties and forties have drifted away from the Church entirely. There is little to be done about this situation of the secularization of the Church at the present time.  Sitting around talking to each other with the amazing assumption that the Holy Spirit must be present at things called the Synod on Synodality is not helpful in the current situation. But the time will come when new generations of clergy and laity will recall the Tradition of the Church and will rediscover the power of ritual in saying what cannot be said.

My generation will not see this, nor the generation below me. But the Holy Spirit is in charge of the Church, and it is He who is in charge of the handing down of the Tradition and the traditions.

 

As for Jimmy Carter: Requiescat in pace.