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The End Times and the Anti-Mary

Advent, Devils, End Times, Family, Mary, Spiritual Warfare, The Life of Jesus, , , , ,

Christians of every age have wondered whether they were living in the End Times.  Each of these ages had their own reasons to believe that Our Lord’s return was imminent.  In that regard our own age is no different.  But our times are unique in a very specific way, one that is not often spoken of.  The Second Coming of Christ will be like a negative photographic image of the first.  He came in weakness, He will come in power.  He came in silence, He will come with trumpet blasts.  He came as Redeemer, He will come as Judge.  He came as Lamb, He will return as Lion.  Just as this principle of photographic negative applies to the New Adam, it also applies to the role the New Eve will play as well.  And in this, we find signs that the end is near.

Mary’s First Coming

The future Queen of Heaven and Earth was the Queen of the Hidden Life during her earthly sojourn.  She “kept all these things in her heart” rather than shouting them to the housetops.  The only time she “let loose” of both her mission and her Son’s was in the privacy of her cousin Elizabeth’s home.  And even after the Resurrection she remained in prayer, preferring not to speak and to avoid any chance that a cult were to rise up around the Mother of God.  She who was a true wonder of the world, lived in the temple of her heart in ancient Ephesus while the pagans streamed to the Temple of the virgin goddess Diana in that same city.  She was not only humble, but silent with only a single spiritual counsel—“do whatever He tells you.”

As Queen and Universal Mother she has not abandoned her children.  Throughout the ages she has left her throne in Heaven and appeared to her children to give them an urgent message.  These apparitions have been a regular part of the life of the Church over the past millennium.  In the last few centuries however, they have grown in both frequency and publicity. She is no longer the silent maiden, but the regal Mother voicing her concern for her children.  When we view this in light of the “photographic negative” principle, this makes sense.  If she played a primary, albeit silent, role in the First Coming, we should only expect that she play a more visible and vocal role in the Second Coming.  And the messages of her apparitions seem to suggest that the time is short.  We may not know how short is short, but it is safe to say that she is clearing the way for His second Advent.

Reading the signs of the times and seeing the Marian apparitions in this light means we should treat the messages, especially at Fatima where the most visible public miracle ever occurred, with the utmost seriousness.  But there is another sign that is related to this that ought to give us pause.

The Spirit of the Anti-Mary

We know that one of the signs of the Second Coming is the reign of the Antichrist.  We aren’t told when but we are told how long he will reign (42 months).  Throughout history there have been types of the Antichrist that gave us a glimpse of just how dark those days will be.  But they have all passed.  Eventually the true antichrist will rise and I would like to suggest that this eventuality is closer than we may think.

The Devil is the great ape of God, trying to “be like god” and mimic what He does.  The Antichrist will be his greatest facsimile of the true Christ, for he will dupe many people into thinking he is the real thing.  But being the great counterfeiter, we should expect that he will try to replicate the life of the true Christ is every way, but especially in a specific way—by having the anti-Mary precede him.

Who can doubt that the spirit of the anti-Mary is already rearing its ugly head among us under the guise of feminism?  But only Mary is the true feminist, receptive in everything God has to give.  Feminists reject femininity as receptivity and try to seize everything for themselves, including masculinity.  The “handmaiden of the Lord” was the most liberated woman who ever lived, finding freedom in living out her feminine calling.  The anti-Mary must liberate herself from even her own feminine nature, ending in absolute slavery.  Mary modestly hid her beauty behind a mantle and veil, anti-Mary wears little except a pink cat hat on her head.  Mary humbly “ate the bread of dependence” provided by Joseph at Nazareth and was filled, anti-Mary is gluten free and looks out only for number one.  Mary loved God and submitted to Him in her Jewish religion, anti-Mary hates God for making them a woman and sees religion only as a weapon in the hands of oppressors.  Mary prophetically whispered, “this is my body given for You,” anti-Mary shouts “my body, my choice.”  They speak only of women’s rights, but Mary speaks of a woman’s unique duties.

The diabolical fraud has been perpetrated, clearing the way for the reign of the anti-Mary.  And this is what makes our times utterly unparalleled.  Other times may have had their shadows of the Antichrist, only our age is animated by the spirit of the anti-Mary.  It is this uniqueness that suggests we may be entering into the time of the final battle.  There is a great battle being waged between Mary and the anti-Mary and we must fly to the foxhole of her mantle.  It was with this in mind that St. Louis de Montfort spoke of the Apostles of the End Times as having a particularly Marian spirit and devotion.  It is also why Our Lady has reminded us that even though the anti-Mary is seemingly everywhere, that, in the end her Immaculate Heart will triumph.

Faith in Christ

Bible, Church, Defending the Faith, God's Love, God's Will, Heaven, , , , ,

One of the more controversial teachings of the Second Vatican Council deals with the salvation of non-Christians.  Summarizing the teachings of the Council Fathers, the Catechism says “’Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery.’ [GS 22] Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved” (CCC 1260).  The controversy arises not so much in the letter, but in the spirit that followed.  It was interpreted as a softening of the Church’s traditional stance that salvation comes only through faith in Christ.  Once softened, the way became clear for a belief in universal salvation.  While this clearly goes beyond the text, nevertheless the evangelical aftershocks have left the Church’s missionary zeal in the rubble.  In an age where exceptions, rather than proving the rule, become the rule, a certain amount of clarity surrounding this issue will help to reignite the evangelical fires of the Church.

It must be admitted at the outset that like many of the statements of the Council, the teachings surrounding this issue suffer from a certain ambiguity.  That the ignorant can be saved does not mean that they will be saved nor does it even make it probable.  It simply opens a door, something that only the most hard-hearted fundamentalist would refuse to admit.  For nothing is impossible for God.  It is not salvation, at least according to St. Thomas Aquinas, that is improbable but ignorance.

What is Faith?

A few preliminary points are in order at the outset.  First when we speak of faith, we must make the distinction between the object of faith and the act of faith.  The object of faith is a statement about reality and the act of faith is an assent to the reality that has been opened by the statement.  Belief requires an object of belief—no one just believes, he must believe something.  When we speak of having “faith in Jesus” we can only mean that we believe that “there is no other name under heaven and earth by which man can be saved” (Acts 4:12).  So when St. Paul declares we are justified by faith (c.f. Romans 3:23-25), he means that we believe the reality that was opened to us by the Incarnation of the Son and by our assent conform our lives to it.

The saving power of faith illuminates a second necessary point.  The author of the Letter to the Hebrews says that “without faith it is impossible to please Him for anyone who approaches God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6).  St. Thomas is pointing out what he sees as the content for a “minimum” of faith.  He calls these two fundamental dogmas, that God exists and that He rewards those who seek Him, the credibilia because they contain, at least implicitly, all that God has made explicit through revelation and the Church.

Once he has drawn attention to it, he combines it with the belief that God wishes all men to be saved and concludes that the credibilia have been offered in one way or another to all mankind that has lived apart from Judeo Christian revelation via either the ministry of angels or direct illumination (c.f ST II-II, q.2 art 7).  But he doesn’t stop there because he says that implicit faith is not enough.  It is only an explicit faith in Christ that saves.  The Angelic Doctor says that once the person responds to the credibilia through the workings of Providence He leads the new believer to explicit knowledge of Christ.  With the interior assent to the credibilia and the gift of faith, comes the gifts of the Holy Spirit which perfect that faith.  In other words, ignorance is improbable because, as the Thomist Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, “if anybody were to follow the guidance of natural reason in the pursuit of goodness and flight from evil, God would by an interior inspiration reveal not only the prime credibles but also the redemptive power of the Incarnation.”

Salvation and the Man on the Remote Island

St. Thomas rejects the “man on a remote island” narrative because it is too natural of an explanation.  Faith is a supernatural gift by which God, who desires all men to be saved, saves us.  He uses the example of the conversion of Cornelius to demonstrate the principle:

“Granted that everyone is bound to believe something explicitly, no untenable conclusion follows even if someone is brought up in the forest or among wild beasts. For it pertains to divine providence to furnish everyone with what is necessary for salvation, provided that on his part there is no hindrance. Thus, if someone so brought up followed the direction of natural reason in seeking good and avoiding evil, we must most certainly hold that God would either reveal to him through internal inspiration what had to be believed, or would send some preacher of the faith to him as he sent Peter to Cornelius (Acts 10:20).”


De Veritate q.14 a.11 ad 1

In short, if God wills all men to be saved then He would not allow ignorance to get in the way.  Faith comes from hearing, but sometimes it is God Who does the talking.

There is an important corollary to this that, despite not being ecumenically correct should not be overlooked.  Bear with me on this one.  If God moves each and every man from implicit to explicit faith then there are men who, if they remain within certain religions that openly reject Christ as Redeemer, will not be saved.  Push always comes to shove because you cannot both implicitly accept Christ and simultaneously explicitly reject Him.  God’s invitation, for it to be truly accepted, must come with full knowledge and full consent.  Love would have it no other way.  That is why I say this not from a judgment seat but bedside to put to rest the prevailing mentality that non-Christians are “just fine”.  It is time we stoke the embers of the evangelical fires and enter the fray and fight for souls.  We need to stop apologizing for being Christians and start apologizing again for Christ.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Bible, Church, Ecumenism, Magisterium, Redemption, Scripture, , , , ,

A mega-church pastor in Atlanta named Andy Stanley has written an article in Relevant magazine asking why Christians persist in protecting monuments to the Ten Commandments when, in truth, they no longer apply to us.  Although keeping up with the ramblings of various mega-church pastors could be a full-time job, this particular article merits attention because it is demonstrative of heresies in general and how they seem to persist, especially when believers are cut off from the preservative protection of the Catholic Church.

A native of Sinope in modern day Turkey, Marcion was a shipbuilder who rejected the Old Testament.  He desired to strip Christianity of anything Jewish and any connection to the Old Testament.  In his view, Christ came to undo the work of the Creator.  He even went so far as to produce his own set of Scriptures, removing the Old Testament along with any references to the Old Testament in the New Testament and any suggestions that we would be judged by God.  Within the plan of Divine Providence, Marcion of course moved the Church along by encouraging her to make explicit the role of the Old Testament in the life of the Church.

The Law and Historical Christianity

Pastor Stanley and the second century ship builder are, in a very real sense, kindred spirits.  For truly, there is “nothing new under the sun” when it comes to heresies.  They are simply recycled throughout the ages.  That is why Blessed John Henry Newman’s maxim rings true—“to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”  Pastor Stanley’s error is not just theological but historical.  He claims that “the blended model began as early as the second century when church leaders essentially kidnapped the Jewish Scriptures and claimed them as their own.”  This is simply rehashing what Marcion said and he interprets the Church’s clarification as “kidnapping” the Jewish Scriptures.  In other words, he is saying that Marcion was right. 

Interestingly enough, many German Lutherans became Marcions under the Nazi regime for obvious reasons.  To be clear, Pastor Stanley is not suggesting anything like this (he does in fact condemn it).  But his doctrine necessarily leads to that no matter how unwittingly he proposes it.  This is the nature of heresies, they always lead to a dead, and sometimes even deadly, end.  Given enough time, what is implicit will always be made explicit.

The Law and the New Covenant

That is why it is instructive to cut off his error at its roots, especially because it is a common one.  In essence, his thesis comes at the end of his essay—“While Jesus was foreshadowed in the old covenant, he did not come to extend it. He came to fulfill it, put a bow on it, and establish something entirely new.”  The error really comes in equating the Old Covenant with the Law.  There was not a single “Old Covenant” but instead God made a series of covenants with man, beginning with Adam and ending with David, all of which culminated in the New Covenant that is sealed in Christ’s blood.  Nowhere in Scripture does it suggest that Jesus was “establishing something entirely new.”  The new wine and new wineskins are like the old wine and wineskins, even if they are new. 

The question, and it was one that the early Church had to wrestle with (c.f. Acts 10-20), was what role the Jewish law would play in this New Covenant.  That it was to play a role was clear when Our Lord said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” (Matthew 5:17-18).  For Pastor Stanley and many like him Jesus came precisely to destroy the Law.

St. Augustine in his famous treatise on the Sermon on the Mount said that to “not abolish the law but to fulfill it” can be taken in two ways, both of which are applicable to Christ’s words.  First to fulfill means to add what is lacking.  Augustine says, “he who adds what is lacking does not surely destroy what he finds, but rather confirms it by perfecting it.”  For Pastor Stanley, addition comes by way of subtraction.  You need only one commandment—“love one another as I have love you”— but he would have this commandment demolish the foundation of the Law rather than building on it.  No wonder he calls out Chick-fil-A for closing in observance of the Sabbath.  His one commandment says nothing of loving God, a commandment that surely requires more than keeping the Sabbath sacred but most certainly not its exclusion.

Christ also fulfilled the Law by doing everything that was in it.  He did this not just to show it was possible, but to make it possible for us as well.  In Christ, the impossible becomes possible.  Ethics becomes ethos as the Divine Stonemason moves the law from the stone of Sinai to the stone of our hearts.  The Ten Commandments cease mere laws, but prophesies.  Christians “shall keep the Sabbath” and “shall not kill, lie or steal.”

As further proof that Christ does not want to abolish the law, He devotes much of His Sermon on the Mount to how it will be fulfilled.  He does this by precisely using the Ten Commandments as the model.  “Moses said, but I say to you…”  So clearly He has no intention of abolishing the Ten Commandments.  But what about all the other Old Testament precepts?  Some of them, particularly the ceremonial aspects will find their fulfillment in the rites of the New Covenant.  Other precepts, especially some of the moral ones will remain in place.  Still, if we examine the issue honestly, there is still not enough guidance.  This reveals the larger error that Pastor Stanley makes and, unfortunately, many other Christians with him .

The aforementioned quote of Newman is really an indictment that Protestantism is not the Christianity of history.  Sola Scriptura necessitates that view because they are rejected a historical explication of Christian dogma in favor of one based solely on the Bible.  The problem with this however is that it is a dead Christianity because much of the Bible only makes Revelation implicit.  Which aspects of the Mosaic Law are binding and which are not is never explicitly told to the Biblical reader.  Instead what is implicit in Christ’s words must be made explicit.  This explication must happen under the guidance of the Church, led by the Holy Spirit “who guides us to all truth” through the Church.  Once a Protestant turns to the Church Fathers and sees the unbroken line of belief to what the Apostles taught, errors such as Pastor Stanley’s are never made.  Christ did not make something entirely new, he added the necessary ingredients to Judaism to make it Catholic.  But if you reject the Catholic Church outright then you necessarily will think He must have started something new.

Being closing we would be remiss in neglecting Pastor Stanley’s fundamental question as to why Christians should insist on the presence of monuments of the Ten Commandments instead of the Sermon on the Mount.  Perhaps Pastor Stanley’s suggestion is a little self-serving in that he is looking for a place to actually read and study it.  But in theory there is no particular reason why we could not use the Sermon on the Mount instead, although it is, admittedly, a little long.  But the Ten Commandments, especially in a post-Christian culture can be very effective for the same reason that God gave them first.  The law was given so that the people became aware of their inability to keep it and would cry out to God for redemption.  Sometimes the bad news is just as effective as the good news.

Spiritual Combat and the Mass

Devils, Eucharist, Family, Grace, Prayer, Sacraments, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, The Life of Jesus, , , ,

As Christ panned the landscape from His throne upon the Cross, He saw both friend and foe.  The foes included not just the Roman and Jewish leaders that wanted Him dead, but the demons who had incited them to carry out His execution with the maximum amount of cruelty.  Likewise he saw not just His Mother, St. John and the holy women, but also all of His friends throughout the ages that would willingly join Him.  From the vantage point of the Cross, He saw a great battlefield forming before Him.  He saw very clearly who His real enemies were and asked for forgiveness for their pawns.  The spiritual combat that had begun in the Garden with Adam and Eve reached its zenith when the New Adam and the New Eve finally crushed the head of the Ancient Serpent.  A new weapon, the Cross had been introduced.  For the Cross was a key not only heaven’s opened not just Heaven’s gates but a portal into hell.  No longer outgunned, the Christian grasps the Cross like the hilt of sword and chases the demons back into hell.  Calvary is the terrain over which all spiritual combat traverses.  This truth is almost self-evident.  It is perhaps the “almost” that causes us to miss a very important corollary.  Just as the demons were actively engaged on the field of Mount Calvary, they are still actively engaged in the Mystical Calvary, that is, the Mass. 

Active and Conscious Participation and Spiritual Combat

The Second Vatican Council exhorted Christians to “active and conscious participation” in the Mass.  The “activity” is not on the part of more ushers, lectors and extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, but in the hand to hand combat begun on the hill of Calvary and continues over the pews of our little parish churches.  If the Mass is what we profess it is, the sacrifice of Christ made present to us explicitly so that we might participate in it, then it also demands that we take a side in the great battle and engage.  This is the activity of the Mass.  The “conscious participation” is the awareness of what we are actually entering into.  The Mass is a great battlefield in which each and every Christian engages in spiritual combat—not just in some abstract sense, but in actual hand to hand combat.  And, as in all spiritual combat, knowing you are engaged in a battle is, well, half the battle.  Once we become aware of it, we realize how we have known it all along.  Obviously there is a great ideological battle that has taken place that has obscured this truth and so we must begin by setting our minds and hearts firmly upon this truth.

Hand to hand combat is never just a “spiritual” thing but something real and practical.  First there is the battle that occurs remotely.  The great enemy of mankind hates the Mass and will do anything he can to keep us from being there.  Obstacles are thrown up left and right to leaving on time.  Otherwise peaceful families suddenly experience strife.  Family members experience agitation and begin to quarrel.  Accusations are thrown back and forth.  The difficult child becomes more difficult while the impatient parent becomes more impatient.  Clothes and keys can’t be found.  The battle lines have been drawn and Pilate is reminding you that he has the power to make it all go away.  Many will fall by the wayside because, after all, “what is truth?”  Then there are those who, having their peace stolen, will set out on the way, leaving the Cross behind.  Calling to mind what the Divine General did, the true soldier of Christ embraces the Cross and sets out on the Way.  Knowing that he is headed to the Front is not enough however.  He will serve as Simon of Cyrene by offering his cross for those in the first two groups who may not have the strength to carry theirs.

Once the Christian arrives at the Front, he is confronted with a new temptation—“to come down off the Cross” (c.f. Mk 15:30).  In fact this is the primary weapon that the demons use against us.  He will throw every distraction he can before our imagination.  “What are they wearing?” , “Look at her!  Look at him!”, “why doesn’t she pay attention to what her kid is doing?” “What do I need to do after Mass?”, “What is Father talking about?”.  The demons coordinate their attacks, tempting one person to do something and then setting the judgment in the mind of another.  You may have made it to the Front, but they can neutralize you through distraction.  Again in recognizing it for what it is we have won half the battle.  And with recognition, we derail the train of thought and hop back on the Cross with Christ Who has been waiting there for us from all eternity.    This is a battle and each time we join Christ on the Cross we not only draw deeply from the fruit of the Tree of Life but are dealing a blow to the Evil One. 

Take note Pastors, Liturgical Coordinators and Music Directors.  This is why the liturgy should be completely devoid of any novelty.  A well-disciplined army, one that has drilled so often that the battle itself becomes second nature, is a successful army.  The war may be over, but we are trying to limit casualties in the mop-up operation.  Novelty on the part of priests and coordinators only serve to distract and cause the army to fall from formation.  So too with the music, it should be chosen not for its entertainment value, but for its ability to keep us engaged in the battle.

In all that was said so far it might seem then that the whole purpose of us going to Mass is to avoid distraction so that we can focus on what is going on.  That is to see the battle only in terms of defensive tactics.  The primary purpose of the Mass is to enable each one of us and all of us (that is the Church as a whole) to make the sacrifice of the Cross our own by way of participation.  And this participation involves three different postures, each one based on those found at the Foot of the Cross on Calvary.

The Three Postures

The first posture is the Marian posture.  Those who unite themselves with the Mother of God and adopt this posture are those for whom Mass involves personal suffering.  Think for example of the special needs parent and child.  Or think of the person who had great difficulty in crowds.  Or the person who is undergoing a great personal crisis.  Or even the parents of young children for whom 60 minutes sitting still in one place is a great challenge.  These people are actively suffering with Christ

Those with the Marian stance are not only suffering with Christ, they are in a very real sense, suffering for Christ.  They could just as easily decide that it is simply too hard to go to Mass and skip it.  They may even be justified in so doing.  But their love for Him precludes it.  That is why the second posture, that of the holy women, is also necessary.  The holy women at the foot of the Cross were there not only because they loved Christ, but because they also loved His Mother.  It was not just His suffering that moved them, but hers as well.  Their offering to Christ was one of prayer and support for Him and His Mother.  The holy women (and men) of the Mystical Calvary, rather than giving in to the temptation to judge the Liturgical Marys in their midst, they support them through their understanding glances and prayers. 

Finally, there is a Johannine posture.  Motivated by a deep friendship, the Church’s first mystic was moved to great sorrow for his sins and a loving contemplation of the events unfolding before him.  The Liturgical Johns work hard to remain in this posture throughout the entire Mass, moving from sorrow to thanksgiving as they try to penetrate ever deeper into the Mystery unfolding before them.

Before closing, it is important to mention that although the three postures are mutually exclusive, it does not mean you must select one each time you go to Mass.  Very often God makes it abundantly clear which role you are to play in a given Mass and, even, during a particular part of a given Mass.  In other words, you will always be playing one of those parts, but not always playing the same part.

Who were the Magi?

Christmas, Church, The Life of Jesus, , ,

Throughout history there has been a universal fascination with the event of Epiphany.  One cannot help but wonder about the experience of the Magi as they traveled a great distance to meet the King of Kings.  But why did they come?

Explanations of the Star

There have been a number of possible explanations offered as to what drew the Magi to Bethlehem.  We know of course that they were following a star, one that they had been looking for.  The first explanation is the one that has been offered by several Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church (such as St. John Chrysostom and St. Thomas Aquinas for example).  We could categorize theirs as wholly supernatural.  From the perspective of faith, the description of the star in Matthew’s Gospel, especially how it stops and starts again, sounds eerily famililar—almost like the description of the shekinah cloud as Israel left from Egypt.  The Star went before them the whole of their journey, so bright that it was even visible in the daytime.  It also traced a rather odd course for a celestial body.  First it went from east to west but then stops over Jerusalem (where it disappeared).  It then moves from north to south as it guides them from Jerusalem to Bethlehem and remains over the house where Our Lord was to be found.

In more recent times, some scientists have put forward a more “natural” explanation as an alternative.  In his book, Star of Bethlehem, astronomer Konradin Ferrari d’Occhieppo says that around 7-6BC there was a great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign of Pisces which would have been bring enough to merit consideration for the star.  It would have captured the imagination of the Magi because Jupiter was the star of the highest Babylonian deity and it was lined up alongside Saturn which was the cosmic representation of the Jewish people.  Other scientists have offered similar explanations including a great movie called The Star of Bethlehem.  What is left unexplained in these natural accounts is how the “star” disappeared and reappeared in the same spot and how it suddenly changed its course.

There might be a tendency to reject the natural in favor of the supernatural because it seems take away from the miraculous event it was foretelling.  In either case though it is the same God Who is guiding the star.  All creation finds its meaning in Christ so that God, when He set the world in motion, could have set the heavenly bodies in such a manner as they would converge to form a bright appearance at the moment of Our Lord’s birth.  All of history is His story.

The Meaning of Epiphany

God is omnipotent in His Providence because He reveals Himself to the world through events.  If we examine the meaning of the star as revealing the God Who became man, then the most plausible explanation is one that combines both explanations.  The scientific explanation (either the conjunction of the two planets or another explanation) would have led the Magi to Jerusalem.  They would have gone as far as they could by human reason.  To find the King of Kings they would need revelation.  So, they had to consult the Jews who were the keepers of God’s revelation.  With the star’s reappearance, they were guided by some visible supernatural sign. This explanation would enable us to read literally the text that says that the “star stopped over the place where the child was” (Mt 2:9).  For a star to lead them to a specific house one would imagine that it would have had to be very close; something akin to the Miracle of the Sun witnessed by 70,000 people in Fatima, Portugal 100 years ago.

There is a second meaning of the event as well that comes to the front when we ask who these Magi were.  They were either astrologers or astronomers, although there was not necessarily a distinction between the two in the ancient world.  The planets are named after their deities because they believed that the heavenly bodies ruled over the events of man.  They studied the heavens in order to divine what was to happen on earth.   With or without the knowledge of Balaam’s prophecy in Numbers 24:19, (“there shall come a Star out of Jacob”), they would have considered the bright star to mean something significant.  Once they witnessed the extraordinary action of the star, they would have realized that it was the child himself that was directing it.  As Pope Benedict puts it, they would have come to realize “[I]t is not the star that determines the child’s destiny, it is the child that directs the star.”

The Magi embarked as pagans, but they return Christians.  The seeds of truth found in their pagan religions have led them to the fullness of God’s revelation.  God may have left traces of His truth in creation and in the minds of men, but that all changed at the coming of Christ.  As St. Gregory Naziazen says, astrology came to end because all stars from that point on followed an orbit traced by Christ.  God has personally come to meet man and from that point forward man would be able to approach Him.

Christ is the great demythologizer.  The world is no longer governed by forces in the heavens but instead by the God Man.  They approach a little baby who looks like every other human baby, and yet this little child can move everything within creation to suit His purposes.  Their gods, if they existed, would have to obey this infant.  They are not disappointed when they meet this child without any stately appearance but instead pour expensive gifts upon Him.  The Magi come pagans and leave Christians.

The Myth of Santa Claus

Advent, Christmas, Family, Incarnation, , , ,

As children enter their second decade, they enter a yuletide game of cat and mouse with their parents who are trying to stretch out their belief in Santa Claus.  As they grow wiser in the ways of the world, learn how to search order history on Amazon and find their parents’ secret hiding place, it is only a matter of time before the ruse is up.  Or, at least, a ruse is what it feels like.  Parents must grow increasingly clever and deceptive as their child’s hunger for the truth of Santa Claus grows.  Labeling the whole thing a lie, many parents opt to forgo the visit from Father Christmas in order to remain truthful with their children.  Others argue that it is no lie, only a myth meant to convey the deep meaning of Christmas to children.  Just in time to make or break Christmas, we will enter the debate.

A word first about myths.  In an age where we are besieged by facts, there is a tendency to equate facts with truth.  Truth, while it may include facts, transcends mere facts.  It is the conformity of thought with reality.  Reality, in order to be explained and understood, often requires more than mere facts.  This is where myth comes in.

Because of our fascination with facts, we see myths, because they are “made up”, as lies.  They may be, as CS Lewis once said, “lies breathed through silver,” but lies nonetheless.  But myths are not fabricated prevarications but word-sacraments that act as signs pointing to some aspect of reality that would otherwise remain obscure.  The best myths are like flashlights focusing their beams on truth.  But myths can also be false.  In fact, those myths that act as clear signs pointing to something obscure in reality we would call true myths.  Those whose signs point away from the truth or remain so obscure themselves we would call false myths.

The Myth of Santa Claus

Santa Claus then, just because he is made up, is not necessarily a lie. He may be a myth.  But if he is a myth then the question really is whether the myth is a true or a false one.  More to the point, what does Santa Claus as a sign point to?

To answer this we must begin with a little history of the myth itself. His association with the real St. Nicholas of Myra is well known.   But in truth he is only remotely associated with the cult of the 3rd Century saint.  The real St. Nicholas was known for his generous gift giving especially bestowing upon poor families dowries for their girls to get married.  The cult around him emerged as Christians sought his intercession for large purchases and when getting married, some even choosing his feast day, December 6th, as the day to exchange their nuptial vows.  Other than the obvious fact that he is a Christian, there is nothing in his history nor in his cult specifically that would associate him with Santa Claus.

The connection with Christmas came when the Episcopal Minister Clement Moore wrote a poem in 1822 entitled “An Account of a Visit with St. Nicholas” or, as we know it today, “The Night Before Christmas.”  Sentimentality aside, when one reads the poem you get the sense that the children who had hung their stockings in anticipation of St. Nicholas’ arrival (perhaps related to the saint himself filling shoes with gifts in his lifetime) got more than they bargained for when Santa Claus appeared as “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf” with a sleigh full of toys, eight reindeer and magical powers that allow him to travel up and down the chimney.  Advertisers loved Moore’s Santa Claus because thanks to other literary giants of the day like Washington Irving, gift giving became an important part of Christmas.  By the 1840s stores were already using his image to advertise Christmas sales.  Stores began to have men dress up like Santa Claus so that children could visit and tell him what gifts they would like while their parents shopped for said gifts. 

Treating Santa Claus as a myth leaves us with the conclusion that he is not a mythical representation of St. Nicholas of Myra.  It seems that his creation myth repudiates the simple and holy saint, rejecting him as simply not enough.  He obscures rather than makes us better understand the great saint and the intercessory power of saints in general.  Saints do intercede for us and get us things that we ask for, but they are not supply chain experts who manufacture the things themselves nor do they employ little elves as their helpers.  They distribute God’s manifold gifts.  Rather than determining whether we have been naughty or nice to bestow gifts upon us, they give according to whether the gifts themselves will make us naughty or nice.  In fact the True Gift of Christmas came to save the naughty and not the nice who had no need of Him.  Rather than using magic to travel up and down chimneys or ride in a sleigh of magical reindeer, they are “like the angels” and share in the powers of Christ’s resurrected body.  Rather than residing in the North Pole, they look upon the face of God in heaven. 

In short, a child looking upon Santa Claus would conclude very little about St. Nicholas or saints in general.  But perhaps the myth is not really about St. Nicholas but about Christmas itself.  After all, St. Nicholas is really a sign himself pointing to Christ.  Unfortunately, this explanation, while fulfilling our nostalgic longings, also falls flat.

The problem is not so much a battle between material versus spiritual gifts.  When Israel was a child, God bestowed material benefits on them in order to point towards the spiritual gifts He wanted to give them.  The Divine Pedagogy uses things that are seen to reveal things unseen.  Likewise the problem is not that it is only for children.  Signs pass away as one approaches the thing signified.  If we reverse this relationship and start with the thing signified we can then see why Santa Claus is a false myth.

No child will make the connection between Santa Claus and Christ.  Parents have to tell them.  But the meaning of a true myth as a sign should be obvious, otherwise it is a terrible sign.  Sure, the parents may have to remind them, but the sign ought to be enough.  The fact that we struggle to “keep Christ in Christmas”, but have no trouble “keeping Santa Claus in Christmas” shows that the myth has eclipsed the truth.  As further evidence, once the sign passes away and gives way to the thing signified, the children have gotten the message loud and clear: Christmas is about giving gifts.  Otherwise, the gift giving would cease (or at least the felt obligation of it) once the person grasped that Christmas was about the gift of Christ.

Is Santa Claus a Lie?

And this is why Santa Claus ultimately is not just a false myth but also a lie.  True myths may be confused for facts, but they never fabricate the facts.  Fabricating facts is simply a nice way to say lying.  Parents must make up the fact of gifts under the tree to support the myth of Santa Claus.  But, as we said, a true myth does not need the support of facts.  Its truth stands on its own foundation.  Intuitively parents know this because they universally speak about whether their children know the “truth about Santa Claus” or not.  No one speaks of a true myth in those terms.

But what’s the harm?  Maybe it isn’t true, but it creates a nice holiday that everyone seems to enjoy.  No child ever felt betrayed by his parents for playing the Santa Claus game.  But this ignores the fact that lies are wrong, not just because they harm other people, but because they are an offense against God. 

Lies ultimately are an attempt on our part to alter reality.  We try to speak or act a different reality into existence.  They are an offense against God then because they usurp His right to determine reality.  This is why a false myth like this is also a lie—it tells a falsehood about reality and tries to make reality other than it really is.  God could very easily have given St. Nicholas the power to visit homes each year.  As proof of this, St. Nicholas brings gifts of healing and consolation to thousands of people who apply his manna, the mysterious substance that seeps from his bones every year and has been the source of many miraculous cures.  But He didn’t do it because, ultimately, it wasn’t for the benefit on mankind.  If we trace the fruit that has come from Santa’s arrival in the 19th Century, we must admit that He was right.     

The Idolatry of Marriage

Bible, Church, God's Love, Grace, marriage, Sacraments, , ,

In a society that finds its foundation, marriage, crumbling, one can’t help but ask why so many marriages fail.  There is no shortage of theories—a search of the internet yields close to 22 million hits and counting.  They usually boil down broadly speaking to a few categories related to economics, communication and emotional availability.  While these may be the reasons listed, they are mere symptoms of the real cause.  Marriages fail when marriage itself becomes an idol.

As Christians, we believe marriage is sacred, not just because it was instituted by God, but because it was instituted to serve as the primordial sacrament.  Marriage, for anyone with even a modicum of Biblical knowledge, is the primary image that God uses to describe His relationship with mankind.  He proposes throughout the Old Testament (c.f. Is 62:5), marries mankind in the Incarnation, consummates it on the Cross (John 19:30) and invites all of creation to the wedding feast (Rev 19:7).  All of this however is prefigured in the opening words of Genesis.

Marriage in the Beginning

When Adam is made, he is given dominion over all the earth.  He has everything at his disposal, and yet He is alone with no one to share it with.  He looks at the animals, and, despite them being bodily creatures like himself, he is unable to find a suitable mate to share those things with.  Then God puts Adam into a deep sleep and from his rib He creates Eve.  When Adam looks upon her he knows he has found that mate because, even though she has a body like the animals, there is something different about her as well.

What is it that is different?  Through her body, he discerns two things.  First that she is a person and no mere animal—a person made in the image and likeness of God.  Second, that because she is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” he is made for communion with her and vice versa.  In seeing the image of God, the image that sets her apart from the animals, and knowing that he is made for communion with her, he knows that he is ultimately knows that his communion is an image of the communion that he is to have with God.  It is considered the “primordial sacrament” because it is a sign of the ultimate communion that is to come—the one flesh communion of God and man in the Incarnation and the communion of saints with the communion of the Trinity. 

This natural desire that Adam experienced, this same natural desire to unite in marriage that we all experience, is meant to serve as a signpost to the infinite desire to be united to God.  But living outside of Eden the sign has faded.  Now two fallen people come together and are mostly just trying to get along.  Getting along even though they came into the nuptial pact expecting that infinite desire, the same desire that drove them to marriage in the first place, to be fulfilled.  This is why Our Lord saw the need to elevate it to the status of a Sacrament and repaint the sign in his Blood.  Now the Sacrament brings about the thing signified, union between the spouses in Christ begets union with Christ.

 

 

But even when it is not received as a Sacrament it is still a sacrament.  And herein lies the problem.  Whenever an image is confused for the real thing, the image becomes an idol.  When marriage is entered into with the expectation that it will lead to ultimate fulfilment it is doomed to fail.  The image/idol disorientation is what has lead many people to give up on marriage completely.  Once it becomes an idol it is emptied of its meaning.  Even those who decide to get married are in a precarious position because in idolizing it they are expecting their spouse to fill the God-sized whole in their heart.  When the emotional newness and excitement wears off, or their spouse turns out to be less than they were expecting (and how could they not have been?) or when someone else stimulates that excitement, they blame their spouse for not fulfilling their needs.  They are expecting their spouse to bear an infinite weight and are ultimately disappointed when they can’t.  The failure to see this is why most people who get divorced once do so multiple times afterwards.    

Raising Expectations

To think everything that has been said so far is simply a summons to lower expectations is to miss the point.  In fact it is the exact opposite.  Again as the primordial sacrament it still points to the thing signified—the union between Christ and the Church.  Instead marriage must be modeled upon that.  What does that mean practically?  First that the spouses must be willing to give of themselves completely to each other.  We only find meaning in life by making a sincere gift of ourselves (Gaudium et Spes, 24).  We only find ourselves by giving ourselves away and marriage is the place where this happens for most of us.  Marriage as an idol is focused merely on what we get out of it and when the ledger goes into the red it is time to move on.  But marriage as a sign means giving.

Marriage is not only giving, it is also taking—as in “do you take X to be your lawfully wedded …?”  Christ not only gives but receives.  Marriage requires not just a gift of self, but a reception of the other person’s gift.  This means seeing the other person as a gift and receiving the gift, brokenness and all.  Christ receives His Bride the Church with all her blemishes so that she might be made holy and spotless (c.f. Eph 5:25-30).  It is this receiving of the other that is usually the most difficult in practice.  And it is only when you see marriage as a sign, a faded and blurry sign at times, and not as an idol, that it is even possible. 

Christians unfortunately have failed to live marriage as a sign to the world.  It began when Luther de-Sacramentalized marriage making it essentially a secular institution.  The Church still recognizes all valid marriages between Baptized Christians as a Sacrament precisely so that the grace of the Sacrament can overcome the secularizing weight.  This secularizing of marriage has even crept into Catholic circles and is really at the heart of the push for giving Communion to those in irregular unions.  Now the sign must become a counter-sign to the world and we must, as Catholics, let the truth of marriage shine forth.

Revisiting Our Sins

Conscience, Freedom, Grace, Sin, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, , ,

One of the most committed sins is to re-commit our past sins—at least that is what many of the spiritual masters say. What they mean by this is not that we habitually fall into the same types of sins, but that we habitually call to mind the details of our past sins. What makes this practice so spiritually carcinogenic is that by hitting the play button we are opening ourselves up to a great temptation to reignite the pleasure of the sin. In a very real sense we can “re-commit” the sin by consenting to the pleasure it brought (and still brings) us. For this reason, they say we should never rehash the details of our sins, even if our goal is to stir up sorrow, once we have confessed them. Scripture tells us that God forgets our sins so that we do too.

We may not even be aware that we are doing this because of an ingrained habit of making “look but don’t touch” moral calculations. We reason that as long as we don’t actually “do it” then merely fantasizing about it is not a sin. But sin is an act of the will so that whether or not there is any external expression of the sin is really secondary. We can commit a sin merely by consenting to thinking about something sinful. This is precisely what Our Lord is getting at when He tells His followers that they can commit “adultery in the heart” (Mt 5:28).

Revisiting the Details

By rehashing the details of past sins, we always run the risk of taking pleasure in them, that is, in taking pleasure in something that is sinful. So rather than rehashing the details, we should only recall vagaries about them. The pleasure is in the details, the sorrow is in the offense. So when we dwell upon our sins, it should always be only to recalling the offense. St. Augustine up to the time of his conversion lived a famously reprobate life. But notice that we he speaks in the Confessions of his actual sins that he provides what seems to be a rather absurd example of stealing pears. What little detail there is, focuses not on the details, but on the offense itself. And for all the rest of his sins, he is silent on the details.

Augustine’s approach is also instructive in another key way. One of the evangelical devices that is often employed is the “witness talk.” Often, rather than modeling it on Augustine’s Confessions, they treat it like a Confession. The convert will go into great detail to show just how degenerate they had become, usually pointing to specific acts. The focus then is not on God’s mercy, but their sin. The speaker may no longer take pleasure in the details, but the details satisfy a certain curiosity of the listeners who have been conditioned by the world to take pleasure in the salacious details of other men’s sins. Instead of edifying the audience however they end up scandalizing them. Better to take Augustine’s approach and focus only vaguely on the sin.

Augustine in the Garden

This is especially relevant in the ecclesial climate, rocked by scandal, that we find ourselves in. There are many bloggers/podcasters who devote entire episodes that detail the particular sins of particular men involved in the scandal. By so doing they are simply expanding the reach of the active scandal of the men who have done these horrible things. Not only are they feeding their curiosity but by providing all the gory details they may be leading others away from the Church. Again, it is not that we should be silent in the face of great evil perpetrated by clergy, but there is no need to include specific details. You can get your point across by simply saying a priest engaged in homosexual behavior without telling all the gory details surrounding the acts themselves. This is sensationalism and only further glamorizes the evil. We should avoid listening to these tabloid approaches to the scandal.

Opening Up to Grace

Jesus’ admonition to avoid “adultery in the heart” was not only an appeal to try harder, but a call to embrace the freedom He paid so dearly to secure for us. This should not be seen as an accusation but an invitation to remove the impediments to grace. Our memory and imagination are a battlefield in which we are engaged by the enemy of our soul. Because they are material faculties the demons may be granted access to them in order to tempt us. The demons can call upon our memory banks and stimulate certain images in an attempt to get us to go down a particular train of thought. This is an attempt to gain control of our will. Simply being aware of this can help us go a long way in the spiritual battle.

But we absolutely must learn to mortify our memory and imagination. This is why the saints all caution us against what would seem like otherwise harmless daydreaming. By giving attention to every image and memory that pops into our minds we become conditioned to being controlled by them. Same also with a constant barrage of images that comes through modern technology. We crave (even chemically as many studies are coming to show) the constant stimulation and lose all control of our imagination. In this state, the demons can run roughshod over us because we do not even see them coming. They are simply cooperating with the process and leading us away from the harmless to the harmful.

By training ourselves to ignore these random images and memories our bodies become habituated to only producing them when they are willed. This makes us less susceptible to the attack of the demonic because we know immediately when they are acting. The memory and imagination, the source of all of our distractions in prayer, now become prayer’s servants and grace becomes completely operative. We are free from the tyranny of the imagination and memory and free for Our Lord to fill us with His life. Our past sins no longer have any power over us.

Going to the Chapel

Church and State, Ecumenism, marriage, Moralilty, Sacraments

Living in what is a predominantly non-Catholic culture, one of the most common questions that faithful Catholics are confronted with is whether they should attend a non-Catholic wedding or not.  One can certainly appreciate the moral difficulty of such a decision especially when there is a question as to the validity of the marriage and the chance that such a decision could permanently alter their relationship with the bride and bridegroom.  Complicating the issue is that the Church has not spoken definitively but instead has left the Faithful to exercise their own prudence in coming to a decision. Prudence requires knowledge of the principles involved so it is instructive to examine the principles involved.

The Scandal to Evangelization Ratio

For most people there is a certain moral calculus that comes into play.  They attempt to discern what might be called “a scandal to evangelization ratio”. They may intuit that their attendance at the wedding has the opportunity to create scandal but attempt to balance that with the opportunity to show them the love of God (i.e. evangelize).  This type of calculation however is fraught with problems.

First, it represents an equivocation of the theological understanding of scandal with the worldly version of it.  Scandal in the worldly sense means some behavior that causes public outrage.  Scandal in the theological sense is much broader than this and can occur even when there is no “public outrage”.  St. Thomas says that scandal really has two dimensions to it—what he calls active and passive scandal.  Active scandal is when 
a “man either intends, by his evil word or deed, to lead another man into sin, or, if he does not so intend, when his deed is of such a nature as to lead another into sin… something less rightly done or said, that occasions another’s spiritual downfall ”  Passive scandal on the other hand, is the reception of “another man’s word or deed actions such that it disposes him to spiritual downfall”  (ST II-II, q.43). 

For the sake of the discussion at hand, the focus is on active scandal.  Before we set aside passive scandal though a further distinction needs to be made.  A man may be guilty of active scandal even if the person who witnesses the word or deed is not actually led into sin. This is why St. Thomas calls it a “deed of such a nature as to lead another into sin.”  It is the type of the action and not its consequences that determine whether someone has committed a sin of active scandal.  A scandalous action may still be scandalous even if there is no “public outrage.”  The reason why this matters is that even if no one else knows about it (except the bride and groom of course), because a wedding is a public act it would still be the type of act that causes scandal and thus a scandalous act.  

Returning to our scandal/evangelization calculator we see why this approach would not work.  Negative precepts like “thou shall not commit active scandal” are binding at all times.  Positive precepts like “preach the Gospel” are still an obligation, but their fulfilment depend on the circumstances.  Setting aside the inherent contradiction that we could somehow preach the Gospel while at the same time sinning personally, there still would be no proportionality between the two.  Avoiding sin is one of the circumstances in which the positive precept of evangelization is set aside. Even if we label this quantitative tradeoff  as “discernment” it is still not possible.  Nor, as an aside, could we appeal to the principle of double effect because of the same lack of proportionality.

St. John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio warned about confusing the “law of gradualness,” that is the gradual way in which the ethos of the Gospel takes hold in a man’s heart, with the “gradualness of the law.”  There are not different degrees or forms of God’s law that apply for different individuals in different situations.  But in an effort to be “pastoral” or “charitable” people will try to lighten the load of the law by issuing personal abrogations instead of working with the person openly so that they may make their life conform with the life-giving ethos of the Gospel.  Sometimes the most loving and just thing to do is to tell a person the truth and then to continue working with them (even if virtually through prayer) to help them conform their lives with that truth.  You might not see immediate conformity, but you must always (hopefully gently) spur them on to living out the truth.  Otherwise you rob the Cross of its power by trying to make it easier on them.  This might also require some redemptive suffering on your part as you are scorned by them because you spoke truthfully. 

Other Moral Reasons

Scandal is not the only thing at play here, and, in fact, may not be the largest issue.  Weddings by nature are public events precisely so that the community can witness to the union. Practically speaking a witness is not just someone who attends a wedding, but someone who consents to it. Traditionally speaking this explains the tradition of asking whether anyone objects.  Just as St. Paul, bywitnessing to St. Stephen’s stoning was complicit in it (c.f. Acts 7:58, 8:1),witnesses at a wedding are cooperating formally in the exchange of vows.  That is, their attendance (and forever holding their peace) implies consent.  Based upon everything you know about the bride and groom, you will that they should be married.  To not align your will with the spouses and still attend the wedding would be a lie.  This goes for any other moral “short-cuts”like only going to the reception, not going and sending a gift, or even saying “congratulations.”  All of these, using the language of the body, tell the couple and everyone else that the marriage as something to be celebrated is a good thing.   

All that having been said, can we come up with a rule by which we can operate?  I think a general rule of thumb would be that it is morally permissible to attend a wedding in which there is a reasonable presumption of validity.  This can include marriages of Catholics, so-called mixed marriages, marriages between non-Catholic Christians, and non-Christians. The first two are governed by Canon Law and relatively easy to discern(canon 11-08-1133).  It is not like you have to form your own pre-Cana Tribunal to determine whether the wedding will be valid, but that you have good reason to believe that it is.  A wedding involving, for example, a couple who were previously married to other people, would be a clear-cut example of one that we would have to avoid.

What About Gay Weddings?

We have a great deal of freedom to exercise good judgment with only a few obvious exceptions.  There is one other exception that bears some closer examination and that is same-sex weddings.  All that we have said so far including scandal and formal cooperation would disqualify a Catholic from attending.  But those are not the only reasons.  Same-sex marriages are an intrinsic evil because they can never be ordered to the good, regardless of the intention or circumstances.  To witness and explicitly or implicitly imply consent to such a union is itself an evil. 

One might question the designation of it as an intrinsic evil, but in truth it attempts to “solemnize” a sacrilege.  From the beginning, marriage was meant to be a sacred union that reveals Christ’s nuptial relationship with the Church (c.f. Ephesians 5:21-33).  Even non-Sacramental marriages bear this mark and in this way marriage as a sign is considered to be the “primordial sacrament” (c.f. JPII Theology of the Body, 06 October 1982).  Same-sex marriage is a sacrilege because it attempts to falsify the sign.   Therefore a Catholic knowing this would participate in the sacrilege by attending a gay wedding.

Before closing it is worth revisiting something said above about having the hard discussion.  It can be extremely difficult to disappoint other people, especially people you love.  There is a real risk of damaging relationships.  That is why it is important keep an eternal perspective on these types of things.  When we generously strive to avoid disappointing God first, He always outdoes us in generosity by blessing both us and the other people involved.  While it may strain the relationship here, it paves the way for the only real relationship in the Communion of Saints.  Bearing this in mind, can help to ease some of the difficulty here and now.

The Gift of Advent

Advent, Christmas, Fatherhood, marriage, Sacraments, The Life of Jesus, Theology, , , ,

In what became an international best-seller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope, St. John Paul II summarized Original Sin as “above all” an attempt “to abolish fatherhood”.  When Adam and Eve seized the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they didn’t just disobey, but epically failed to see that God in His fatherly love was offering everything they would ever need or want as a pure gift.  Instead of receiving the gift they attempted to appropriate it for themselves.  They wanted to “be like God” on their own terms and not as beneficiaries of the Divine Goodness.  That Satan tempted them to do so should not be all that surprising because these are the same conditions under which he too fell.  Rather than receive the gift from God, he decided he would grasp his greatness as his own.  Satan would “be like God”, but only on his own terms.

There is a flip side of this that can easily be overlooked but is something worthy of deeper reflection.  The abolition of fatherhood really comes about not by outright denial of it, but through a usurpation of sonship.  Lucifer was not so foolish as to think he could somehow eclipse God.  Instead he thought he could eclipse the Son by usurping His throne and ruling with God.  Lucifer’s transition to Satan was when he identified himself as only begotten son and not creature.  Thinking that equality with God was something to be grasped (c.f. Phil 2:6) rather than received, he, according to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, tried to “usurp a similitude with the Most High that was the Son’s by right.”

“You are My Beloved Son…”

Sonship, St. Paul’s great ode to the humility of Christ tells us, is not something that can be grasped but something that the Son must share with us.   Even the Son Himself does not grasp His Sonship but receives it from the Father.  And all that belongs to Him as Son, He gives to us by way of participation.  The Son did not shed His humanity when He ascended on high but instead took it with Him to affirm that mankind was made for this.

Notice that I didn’t say that the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us simply to redeem us.  That He did, but to stop there is to confuse the means with the end.   God redeems us so that He can give Himself to us.  This is a recurring theme in Scripture, but nowhere does it shine forth more brightly than in St. Paul’s canticle to marriage in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians (5:21-33).  In it, the Apostle to the Gentiles draws an analogy between the marital relationship of man and woman with Christ’s relationship to the Church.  Marriage is a Sacrament precisely because this analogy is real.

But St. John Paul II says that we can actually illuminate Christ’s relationship with the Church by looking at marriage (see Theology of the Body, 18 August 1982).  In other words, he suggests that we reverse the analogy by closely examining the spousal imagery.  The Divine Bridegroom wishes to remove every imperfection in his spouse by cleansing her in the “bath of water with the word” so that she is without spot or wrinkle or any blemish (Eph. 5:26-27).  This nuptial bath is an obvious allusion to Baptism, but that is just the beginning.  What the Bridegroom really wants is his bride to be spotless, so that He who is also spotless can unite with her in a one flesh communion (Eph 5:30-32).

The Great Mystery

Within marriage the gift that the spouses give to each other is first and foremost themselves—“I take you…”  So too with Christ.  In Baptism, He claims each one of us for Himself and says “I take you…”  Yes, He gifts us with the fruits of redemption, but the real Gift is Himself.  As John Paul II puts it in one of his addresses from the Theology of the Body “In him, We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses…’ (Eph 1:7). In this manner men who through faith accept the gift offered to them in Christ, really become participants in the eternal mystery, even though it works in them under the veil of faith. According to the Letter to the Ephesians 5:21-33, this supernatural conferring of the fruits of redemption accomplished by Christ acquires the character of a spousal donation of Christ himself to the Church, similar to the spousal relationship between husband and wife. Therefore, not only the fruits of redemption are a gift, but above all, Christ himself is a gift. He gives himself to the Church as to his spouse” (15 September 1982).  It seems as if the Saintly Pontiff, despite his Thomistic roots, thinks that the Incarnation would have happened even if man had no sinned.  God, for all eternity, planned to become one flesh with mankind.

If we take this theme and shine its light on the Parable of the Prodigal Son then we can begin to examine our own relationship to this truth.  The younger son wants to appropriate his sonship and take his father’s gifts by fiat.  But when “he comes to his senses” and returns contritely to the father, he bestows the gifts of sonship on him.  The older son on the other hand also rejects his sonship.  He is simply looking for his father to provide for his needs, like those who go to God only for redemption.  That is non-trivial of course, but to stop there is to never see the generosity of the father who says “everything I have is yours.”  It is servile rather than filial.

If divine sonship cannot be grasped but only received then we ought to dedicate this Advent to meditating upon this truth.  We should study the life of Our Lord and learn from Him so that we might take our place with Him upon His throne.  If we truly are sons in the Son, then we need to act like it.   Likewise we would do well to prepare ourselves for His second coming when He will initiate the Wedding Feast of the Lamb by allowing Him to cleanse us of every spot and blemish.  Light your lamps and go out and meet Him!   “Jesus is the reason for the season” indeed.

The Unmovable Straw Man

Atheism, Faith and Reason, Theology, , , ,

Richard Dawkins opens his chapter on surveying arguments for God’s existence by quoting from Thomas Jefferson that “a professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.”  Instead of demanding proof for this statement, Dawkins turns his gaze towards the proofs of another Thomas, St. Thomas Aquinas.  With amazing brevity he is able to debunk the first three of Aquinas’ five ways in a mere two paragraphs.  Three quarters of a millennium is swept aside by a Professor of Public Understanding in Science at Oxford in a mere two paragraphs relegating one of the greatest philosopher’s arguments to the dustbin of history.  Unfortunately, upon even a cursory examination the Professor’s rebuttal falls rather flat.  In fact, for those who have actually read and studied Aquinas’ five ways you get the impression that Dawkins is talking about a completely different argument.

Dawkins might advocate removing theology from the standard course of study, but he has also thrown the philosophical baby out with the theological bathwater.  He and his “New Atheist” friends may be competent scientists, but they are terrible philosophers.  Revealing hubris more than truth, they are particularly adept at knocking down straw men. Rather than putting forth the intellectual effort to grapple with the real argument they dismiss it with a healthy dose of acerbic wit.  So despite the fact that they are a loud gong signifying nothing, they make enough noise that they get the attention of many people who thoughtlessly regurgitate their arguments.

Dawkins and the First Way

Here is how Dawkins describes Aquinas’ first way:

The Unmoved Mover.  Nothing moves without a prior mover.  This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God.  Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.

Candidly, if this did accurately describe Aquinas’ proof, then he would be warranted in his criticism when he says, “They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God Himself is immune to the regress. Even if we alow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness…”

Of course this is not at all what Aquinas was arguing in what he called the “more manifest way of the argument from motion” (ST I, q.2 art.3).  When Aquinas speaks of “motion” or “movement” he is not talking about physical bodies moving from one place to another specifically.  Dawkins is not alone in his linking this argument with what he calls a “big bang singularity” or anything like a cue ball hitting one ball that then knocks another ball into the pocket.  Rather than locomotion (i.e. motion though space), Aquinas is concerned with motion in the broader sense of change.  Change for Aquinas is the actualizing of some potential.  This is why this particular argument is the most obvious for Aquinas—we see change everywhere we look.  All change requires a changer, that is some actualizer to a given things potential.  Lukewarm water is potentially cold, but in order to become cold, it must come into contact with something that is actually cold.  This is nothing other than the principle of causality, a principle that a scientist like Dawkins must readily accept.

“All change requires a changer” sounds like just a rewording of what Dawkins said, except by examining change more broadly Aquinas is concerned not of a linear change like tracing the Big Bang to a Big Banger (that would be just locomotion) but having a vertical understanding change in the here and now.  An example might help to understand this.

The keyboard on this computer has the potential to put the letter R in a document.  But in order for that potential to be actualized, it must have someone type it.  But for someone to type it, it must be open and on a desk.  In order for the desk to hold it, it must be sitting on a floor.  In order for the floor to hold the desk holding the computer it must rest on joists that rest on a foundation that rest on the ground.  The earth is held in place by the sun which in turn is held in place by the other heavenly bodies and so forth.  Each link in the chain reveals another actual being that was only potential until something else actualized it.

Notice that the regress then is not backward in time, but here and now.  Notice also that no infinite number of desks, for example, could support the computer.  Each desk cannot derive its power to support the computer on its own.  It must borrow that power from something else.  In short, even an infinite number of desks must sit upon something unmovable, or an “unmoved mover.”  No number of desks can support themselves.  So, rather than making the “entirely unwarranted assumption that God Himself is immune to this regress” Aquinas shows the necessity of some being that has no potential and is pure activity.  Dawkins has failed to even address the argument but simply labels it “an unwarranted assumption.”  It is not an assumption but something that Aquinas has proven.  Perhaps he is mistaken, but you must deal with the argument as it is.  You have to disprove the principle of sufficient reason, which would also throw science as a discipline out with it.  Dawkins and many of those who repeat what he says instead takes the intellectual high road and mocks what is a very serious challenge to his worldview.  Rather than relying on reason as he purports to do, Dawkins instead prefers faith in his unprovable assumption that God does not exist.

But Must We Call It God?

Reading between the lines of what Dawkins says it might be that he rejects calling this necessary being God.  He mentions that “there is no reason to endow the terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God.”  This again reveals his unwillingness to actually engage the argument and instead prefers to play silly games like pitting omniscience and omnipotence against each other.

Certainly there are limits to what reason can tell us about God.  To fully reason to God would make us God.  For those invited to divine participation they must rely on Divine Revelation to know that He listens to prayers and forgives sins (two that Dawkins mentions).  But once reason tells us that He exists and that He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent then faith can tell us the rest.

Rather than having “no reason to endow” God with these attributes, we have good reason from what has already been said.  Because He is the source of all change or motion, He must be all-powerful.  Since the principle of sufficient reason tells us that the effect must be in the cause and that the thing known must be in the knower, the nature or essence of all things must be in the cause of them.  Therefore God is omniscient.  Finally, because He lacks nothing (i.e. having no potential) and the actualizer of all things He must be omnibenevolent.

Aquinas closes his first way with the statement, “therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God”( ST I, q.2, art. 3).  Everyone?  Perhaps Aquinas was wrong.  More likely though is that there are many who refuse to acknowledge God’s existence by doing the intellectual leg work to confront challenges to their worldview.

The Philosophical Roots of Protestantism

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Philosophy, it has been said, is the handmaiden of theology.  “It is,” Pope Leo XIII said, “the bulwark of faith and the strong defense of religion” (Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris (AP), 4).  Form the seminal moments of the Church, great theologians like St. Paul and Justin Martyr relied on philosophy to bring the revealed truths down to a level that was intelligible to mankind.  For this reason the Church has always encouraged the study of philosophy, submitting each of the various schools to her wise judgment according to “the excellence of faith, and at the same time consonance with the dignity of human science” (AP, 2).

The Church has long held that Scholasticism, put forth most prominently by St. Thomas Aquinas, is the most useful of all the philosophical schools for understanding and defending the Faith.  While the Church may not have an “official” philosophy, the philosophy of St. Thomas is as close as it comes.  It is his moderate realism that forms the Church’s foundational understanding of the knowledge of God, the Trinity, the Sacraments, the Incarnation, Sanctifying Grace, and much else.

The Problem of Universals

Moderate realism is a school of thought that treats the question of universals.  In our quotidian experience we encounter many individual things—a car, a smartphone, a cat, a neighbor.  Yet in encountering those things we also see that they relate to other things that are like it.  We call it a car, for example, because it belongs to some species of cars that all share some particular nature.  They may have differences such as color and body shape, but we still recognize them as cars.  We do this because we posit there is some universal essence that makes them all cars.  Through the power of abstraction, the mind is able to separate the essence of the thing from the individual instance of it.  One of the perennial problems in philosophy is where exactly this universal essence exists.

A realist, like Plato for example, would say that the universal does exist outside the mind.  It exists in some world of universals (this is the allegory of the cave) and that all the cars, phones, cats and people we see here are mere shadows of that universal.   Many early Christians were affected by Platonic thinking.  It also led to many heresies because of its sharp separation between the material and non-material realms.

Like Platonic realism, Thomistic moderate realism says that the universals do exist outside the mind, but they exist in the things themselves.  In fact these universals give form, that is, they make the individual thing what it is.  The form is one thing, but what makes it individual is its matter.  All of the sensible properties of things are the product of matter limiting form.  With its matter/form distinction the Church is able to develop her entire understanding of the Sacraments, most especially the Eucharist.

There is a third approach to the problem of universals that is mostly a reactionary position to the moderate realism of the Scholastics and this is nominalism.  Nominalists posit that universals do not exist.  These universals or ideas are merely sense impressions that we group together for convenience.  Only individual things exist.  So, rather than examining esoteric questions like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, these medieval philosophers said there was no such thing as pins and angels.  What practical import could this have?

Nominalism was not just a reaction against realism, but a reaction against reality.  If there are no universals then there is no power of abstraction in man.  If there is no abstracting power then sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge become redundant, both grasping the same object—the individual.  This leads to both the angelism of Descartes and the materialism of Locke.

With nothing to be abstracted, the outside world has nothing to tell us.  The universe is just a collection of individual things with no real relation to each other.  The focus of philosophy, where it still existed, was towards interpreting man’s interior convictions (“I think therefore I am”).  With no natures there is no good or evil in the leading to voluntarism.

Still, even if we grasp some of the unintended consequences, what does this have to do with theology?  Natural theology, that is what can be know about God using human reason alone, ceases to exist as a field of inquiry.  The book of creation is closed leaving faith and Divine revelation as the only means of knowing about God.  Fideism and agnosticism rule the day.  God Himself becomes distant and capricious, no longer being the Logos but instead pure will.

A Famous Nominalist and His Legacy

One can begin to see just how profoundly nominalism has infected modern thought.  Nevertheless, it is instructive to examine just how nominalism escaped the medieval classroom and was smuggled into everyday thinking.  It was through the most famous nominalist, a man who was more famous than the founder William of Ockham, Martin Luther.  It was, as Fr. Louis Bouyer says in his book The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, through the Reformation that nominalism escaped from the theoretical playground into the pulpit and the public square.

Luther’s early efforts at reform were based on some positive principles that the Church would readily agree with—sola fide and sola gratia for example.  It is when these principles were fertilized by the manure of nominalism that they became revolutionary.

Recall that nominalism posits that there are no real relations between things.  God is completely Other and although He might give us gifts, they cannot really be ours.  Faith, which Catholics believes comes as a gift in Baptism (thus the necessity of Baptism), when seasoned with nominalism becomes something we have on our own.  As long as we believe we are saved then we are saved.  Right belief, according to this view, in order to be truly ours must come from the heart and nothing from the outside (like Baptism) can possibly bestow that upon us.

So too with sola gratia.  Catholics believe that we are saved by grace alone.  Sanctifying grace is infused into our souls making us “partakers of the divine nature” (c.f. 2Peter 1:4) so that we share in Christ’s sonship and truly become children of God (1John 3:2).  Nominalism poisons sanctifying grace making it an impossibility.  Participation in God’s nature is not possible because grace that produces a change in us, while still remaining the Grace of God is non-sensical.   The conclusion is that although salvation is a free gift, it is only insofar as God declares us righteous rather than actually making us so.

Understanding the philosophical roots of Protestantism can help us to bridge the gap with our separated brethren.  We are separated because we are living in different realities.  The Reformation, to be a true reformation should have swept away nominalism.  Instead we are living among its intellectual progeny and need to understand that although we often use the same vocabulary, we mean very different things.  Pointing out the errors of nominalism should be a start to any ecumenical dialogue.

Christ the King and Theocracy

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In the opening lines of his letter to the Roman Christians, St. Paul reveals to them how the wrath of God is being revealed in the decadent Roman society in which they are immersed.  It is not through powerful astronomical events, famines or plagues (although it could be) but instead God “gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error…They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.  Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them “(Romans 1:26-32).  Sometimes the punishment for sin is, put simply, the sin itself.

Only the man who willingly choses to wear blinders would miss the obvious parallels to our own day.  The punishments listed by St. Paul match up perfectly with the primary social ills that plague us today.  The fact that these act as punishment for sin might explain why so many are enslaved and very little headway is made towards eradicating their widespread practice through moral reasoning.  These are the grounds upon which the so-called “culture wars” are fought.  Thus it is especially important to pay attention to the root sin that causes it all.  St. Paul says that the Gentiles were being punished “since they did not see fit to acknowledge God” (Romans 1:28).

At the heart of culture, is cult.  Liturgy both forms and redeems culture.  This seems to have been forgotten, but it was something that Pope Pius XI was keenly aware of.  In his 1925 encyclical Quas Primas, the Pope acknowledged that “the chief causes of the difficulties under which mankind was laboring and the manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations” (Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas, 1).  By instituting a solemn feast, the Pope was calling down from heaven particular graces upon the Church in order to help her fulfill her mission in today’s world.

Christ the King and the Mission of the Church

And what exactly is that mission?  To keep clear the path for the reign of Christ.  But this mission is often eclipsed by an irrational fear of creating a “theocracy”.  A theocracy is exactly what must be created.  Or, perhaps to use a word less charged with meaning, a confessional state.  The delegation of the authority, because it is given to fallen, yet presumably redeemed men, will be diffused between Church and State, but there should be absolutely no opposition between the two.  Christ is both king of Church and State because all power in heaven and on earth was given Him (c.f. Mt. 28:18).  It is His power that the Church wields, and it is that same authority by which the State draws its legitimacy.

That Christ must rule even the State has been forgotten so immersed have we become in the error of “Separation of Church and State”.  Unaware of the waters we are swimming in, Pius XI thought it helpful to develop the “logic” of Christ’s Kingship.

Within an ethos of individualism, we often think of Christ as ruling individual men.  While that is true, it does not go far enough.  Man is by nature a social animal and thus you cannot rule over individual men while not also ruling over those individual men when they come together in society.  One might concede this to be true and then say “that is why we have the Church.”  Again, true, but again, not far enough.  While his spiritual reign has a certain primacy, His reign is also temporal.

Likewise, when we speak of the Kingship of Christ, we often refer to Him ruling over the hearts of mankind.  It impossible to rule over the hearts of men without ruling over their worldly affairs.  We are not disembodied angels, but men, body and soul composites.  Finally, while the consummation of His reign will not reach fruition until the end of time, all of time should see it growth in that direction.  Once the Feast was moved to the end of the Liturgical Year, rather than in October as Pius XI first promulgated it, there was a tendency to associate His Kingship with the end of the world.  This led to a lowering of the bar so that the goal became for Christ only to rule over the hearts of men.

What Separation of Church and State Has Wrought

It is the separation of Church and State that has led to society’s forgetting God.  In other words, the separation of Church and State is a denial of Christ’s Kingship.  The only way to win the culture war then is to restore the rightful King to His throne.  Again, there should be a separation of powers, but they must be pulling in the same direction.  In this model the State becomes a means to the salvation of mankind as it removes every temporal impediment within its sphere of influence.  By recognizing His Kingship, a Kinship that is His by right as Redeemer, He acts upon those temporal things that positively aid men’s salvation and sanctifies them.  By sharing in His temporal Kingship, the temporal leaders earn a grace of state that empowers them to rule more justly.

The Church, with Christ as King, rules the spiritual realm, answering only to Christ Himself.  The civil authority is subject to the Church but only insofar as the Church issues judgment upon those temporal things that could hinder the progress in the supernatural realm. This is the basis of what was called the “indirect power of the pope” by which the Church can intervene in temporal affairs in order to safeguard the interests of the divine life.

In short, recognition of Christ’s kingship means that Church and State have a unified goal—the salvation of men.  When a wall of separation is erected, the State, because it has rejected the True King and is governed solely by men, will always attempt to keep the Church out.  It does this by offering salvation to its citizens through utopic solutions.  Short of that it will offer them “bread and circuses” to but a wall of separation between their bodies and spirits.

Pius XI was not the only Pontiff to recognize this problem.  In his Encyclical on the Constitution of Christian States, Leo XIII said “The authority of God is passed over in silence, just as if there were no God; or as if He cared nothing for human society; or as if men, whether in their individual capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing to God; or as if there could be a government of which the whole origin and power and authority did not reside in God Himself… it follows that the State does not consider itself bound by any kind of duty toward God ”(Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 24-25).  And his solution?  “The people have heard quite enough about what are called the ‘rights of man’. Let them hear about the rights of God for once” (Pope Leo XIII Tamesti Future).  The Feast of Christ the King is the constant reminder of that exhortation.

Where We Got the Bible

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In an age marked by an exaggerated ecumenism, there is a tendency to paper over important differences that, once argued and resolved, could readily become a means of true unity.  Take for example the question of “how many books there are in the Bible?”  This question is not really one of personal faith, but historical fact.  Still it tends to be largely ignored because the facts are not really known on either side.  For this reason it is instructive for us to examine the history of the canon of Sacred Scripture.

To properly speak of a “canon” of Scripture, there are some necessary distinctions that need to be made.  First, the word canon is a theological term that was first used in the Fourth Century AD.  Prior to that the term Scriptures was used to distinguish those books that were inspired from those that were not.  This is important because, as Vatican I taught, the Church in recognizing the canon, was not bestowing inspiration upon certain books, but acknowledging that those books contained in the canon were inspired.  So properly speaking the Church did not “decide” the canon but merely recognized that the books contained in it were inspired and was tasked with preserving and protecting them.

Judaism and the “Canon” of the Old Testament

Second, there was no set canon within Judaism at the time of Our Lord.  Judaism was not a monolithic religion and different sects had different beliefs as to which books from the Hebrew Scriptures were inspired.  The Sadducees, for example, believed only that the five books of Moses were inspired (which is why Our Lord reprimands them for not knowing the Scriptures when they denied the resurrection in Mt 19).  The Pharisees on the other hand included other books, but disputed over the status of Ecclesiastes, Esther and the Song of Solomon.  The Essenes, the group from whom the Dead Sea Scrolls have been excavated, accepted even more, including some that are not found in any of the Christian Scriptures.

The point is that there was no accepted central authority within Judaism that could canonize the Scriptures.  This is one of the things that they thought the Messiah would do (c.f. John 4:25).  This dispute over which books were considered Scriptures lasted well into the second century and beyond.  This point is also important to consider because of a popular myth, perpetuated mainly by Protestants (especially Norman Geisler) that there was a Jewish council at Jamnia around the year 100 that closed the Jewish canon.  The end result was a canon of 22 books; the same set found in most Protestant Bibles.

If they did not recognize the Messiah whose role it was to discern the Scriptures, then by what authority could they have declared a fixed canon?  Furthermore, there is absolutely no historical evidence for such a formal council.  It appears that this was made up by H.E. Ryle as a defense of the Protestant subtraction of books from the Christian canon.  More on this in a moment.

What the Jews did begin to do, although in nothing like a formal way, was create a wall around their Scriptures in order to fend off the evangelization efforts of the Christians—Greek speaking and Greek Bible-reading Christians specifically.  So naturally one of the ways they would do this was to de-emphasize or even accept those books written in Greek.  It was for this reason that Christians, starting with St. Athanasius began making distinctions between what he referred to as “canonical” and what he called “other books.”  The “other books” were simply those books, that though considered to be inspired by the Christians, were not useful for evangelizing and argumentation with Jews.

How do we know that these books were considered inspired, even though not listed among Athanasius’ canon?  Because they were all approved to be used within the liturgy.  This is an important point that cannot be overlooked.  Books that were used in the liturgy were considered to be sacred and authentically the Word of God; lex orandi, lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of belief.  In an age where literacy was low encounters with the Scriptures happened regularly in the liturgy.  Even if they were not able to read, they were still well versed in the Word of God for this reason.

It was the usefulness of the two groups of Scriptures that led St. Jerome to wrongly make the canon-deuterocanon distinction, positing that the latter were not inspired.  This conflating of usefulness with inspiration was an error that persisted even into the Middle Ages.  There are no degrees of inspiration, it either is or it isn’t.  But there are degrees of usefulness.  It is clear that Genesis has greater use than Tobit, but that does not mean the latter is not inspired.  It was in light of this that the Church spoke definitively as to which books were canonical and could be read in the liturgy at the Council of Carthage in 418.  This same list, which included the so-called deuterocanonical books, was reaffirmed throughout the centuries including at the Council of Florence almost 80 years before Luther drove the nail into his 95 theses.  The “Counter Reformational” Council of Trent merely reaffirmed the list and declared it to be a belief that was to be definitively held.  A solemn declaration had become necessary because for the first time since the third Century someone had challenged the contents.

Luther’s Role

Martin Luther did not actually remove books from the Bible as is commonly thought.  To do so would have been far too radical.  What he did do though is revive the canon-deuterocanon distinction.  His German translation reformatted the Bible so that the books in question appeared in the back of the Old Testament texts. Eventually he labeled them Apocrypha, prefacing them with a note that these were“books which are not held equal to the holy Scriptures and yet are profitable and good to read.”  The logical question is why he would have included them in the Bible to begin with unless they were actually in the Bible.  Why not remove them altogether?  Instead he pulled a little bait and switch by a common heretical trick that remains down to our day—gradualism.

This highlights the difficulty with the “Jewish Council” defense or anything like it.  Why would you remove books from the Christian Bible based upon Jewish authority?  Given the choice between 1500 years of Christian practice and dubious Jewish authority, why would you choose the latter?  For Luther and his progeny that was a red herring.  Books, in his view, should be included in the Bible only insofar as they confirm his authority.  He is very clear about that.  At first he quoted the books of Wisdom and Sirach in his own apology against indulgences.  But when those books were shown to reveal other things he didn’t agree with, he did not argue but instead questioned their authority.

Blessed John Henry Newman once quipped that to be steeped in history is to cease to be Protestant.  While he meant that once we study the Church Fathers it becomes clear that they were Catholic.  But his dictum can be taken in a deeper sense in that once we study the history of the Bible we come to see that the Protestant position regarding the contents of Scripture is wrong.  For a group of Christians who believe only in the authority of Scripture this is highly problematic to say the least and Catholics in charity owe it to them to set the record straight.

A Pro-Life Video?

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For obvious reasons (all of which are bad), abortion advocates tend to play their intellectual hand close to the vest.  Instead, they choose to hind behind emotivism and the smokescreen of the “right to choose.”  Every once in a while, however, their sinister logic escapes and their unvarnished train of thought escapes.  This is exactly what happened recently when a self-described “left-wing” advocacy group called the Agenda Project released a pro-abortion ad in support of Planned Parenthood.  The ad, dubbed “The Chosen” opens with video of a cooing baby shortly followed by a caption “she deserves to be loved.”  Flashing back to the baby, now smiling and laughing, a second caption follows, “she deserves to be wanted.”  Then a third time, “she deserves to be a choice.”   And there you have it, abortion logic untwisted and devoid of all verbal gymnastics.

Now, it is first worth noting that this particular video committed a capital sin when it comes to defending abortion.  Never, ever, equate the “fetus” or “embryo” or even a “clump of cells” with a child.  Usually their arguments are fatal, but not in this way.  Inadvertently or not, they made a very Pro-life argument by featuring a little baby.  That very same baby was at some point in her development an embryo or fetus just like she will be a toddler, a teenage girl and an adult.  And the video makes this very clear. Perhaps that is the point.  To drop all the ridiculous pretexts and simply finally admit what abortion really is.  Perhaps abortion advocates are “coming out” and finally admitting what they are exactly defending.  Maybe they are not actually talking about abortion but are now lobbying for infanticide.

Revealing the Logic

Maybe, but probably not.  More likely is that they tried to make a “reasonable” argument and ended up revealing just how unreasonable their position really is.  In an age where we often argue by meme, it is helpful to lay out the logic of an argument  piece by piece and see where it leads us.

The first line of the argument is that “she deserves to be loved.”  Some would say this is self-evident, but let’s state the reason why in order to connect the dots.  Borrowing from St. John Paul II we can say “She deserves to be loved” because a person “is a good toward which the only adequate response is love.”  In essence the first statement recognizes that persons have a unique value, not based upon anything they do, but solely because of what, or more to the point, who they are.  I think we can all agree that this is true.

Adding the “why” to the first statement helps to see why the second declaration, “she deserves to be wanted,” logically follows from the first.  Admittedly “want” is a rather vague word, especially when applied to a person.  We usually “want” objects but as premise 1 of their argument states, we should love subjects.  Nevertheless we can look at this as adding on to the first premise by saying that “because a person should be loved, then she should also be wanted.”  This too logically follows.

The fact that a child deserves to be wanted is not actually saying anything other than children are by nature “wantable.”  Unwanting adults are the real problem and this is because they see the subjects as objects that they can use to accessorize their life.  It is beginning to a “planned” parenthood feel to it.

Finally we get to the third premise—“she deserves to be a choice.”  This logically follows from the other two premises if all the caveats above are made.  Love requires an act of the will and a child has a right to be brought into existence through an act of love between the parents.

The Pro-Life Argument

The problem of course is that they are leaving out a hidden premise along with the conclusion.  Now if we trace out the line of argument we find a big problem

  1. A child, because she is a person, deserves to be loved.
  2. Because she is a person, they deserve to be wanted.
  3. Because she deserves to be wanted, she deserves to be conceived as an act of the will (i.e. chosen).
  4. (Hidden) But if she is not wanted, then the mother can choose to kill her.

But this is a contradiction with (1) since the right to be loved would include a right not to be deliberately torn apart in the womb and therefore by reductio ad absurdum we can conclude that the child has a right not to be killed.

And now we see why the pro-abortion people never resort to reason—it leads away from their position.  They almost distracted us with the cute baby and the lullaby music, but reason prevailed.  So perhaps rather than vilifying them, we should hire the Agenda Project.

 

Marriage in Heaven

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Matthew the Evangelist relays a conversation that Jesus once had with the Sadducees in which they tried to trap Jesus into admitting that the resurrection of the dead was absurd.  They present Him with a case study of a woman who was married seven times, each ending in the death of her husband.  They ask Our Lord, “Now at the resurrection, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had been married to her.”  If Our Lord said all of them, then He would be admitting there was polyandry, thus rendering the resurrection of the body a sinful state.  Instead Our Lord utters words that have shocked many Christians throughout history: “because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God.  At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven” (c.f. Mt 22:28-33).  For some of those who are married, newlyweds and those happily married especially, these words cause much angst.  For the rest, relief.  But for all of us they are relevant because they give us a momentary glance at our promised destiny.

This ought to go without saying, but it has been uttered enough that it bears mention.  When Our Lord says that they “are like the angels” He does not mean that they become angels.  “For angels have not bodies” as St. Thomas says.  Therefore, it makes no sense to speak of resurrection, that is the re-unification of body and soul, if there is no body.  Instead Our Lord is describing the qualities of the resurrected life.  They will have the powers of the angels in thought, movement and glorification, but they will still be embodied spirits.  They will also, like the angels, not marry.

Seeing Marriage for What It Is..and Isn’t

Part of the struggle to grasp what Our Lord is saying stems from the fact that we live in an age in which the definition of marriage remains elusive.  That is, we are unclear what marriage is and what it is for and so endeavor to see how, if at all, it could fit into the scheme of eternity.  Marriage is the one flesh union of spouses tending towards the communion of their persons.  This union is of the whole person, physically, emotionally and spiritually, and not just an emotional bond as is commonly thought today.  This unbreakable personal union also is the foundation of the family which is the natural domicile for the procreating and raising of children.

As the instrument for the procreating and raising of children, obviously marriage is unnecessary in the next world.  While it served this purpose here below as the place where man lived out the command to “be fruitful and multiply,” once the harvest comes there will be no need for more fruit.

As a Sacrament marriage too will pass away in the eschaton.  In fact, all the Sacraments will pass away.  As signs, the Thing signified will be unveiled and made fully present.  Gone will be the need to see Our Lord veiled behind the appearances of bread and wine and it will pave the way to see Him face to face.  Likewise Marriage as a sign will no longer be necessary because the reality will be fully present.

Marriage as a Sign

The nature of marriage as a sign that points to a very specific reality is vitally important.  Specifically, marriage, as an earthly reality tending towards the communion of the spouses points to a parallel heavenly reality.  First, in its bond of love and fruitfulness it points to the Communion of Persons which is the Trinity.  But that is not all.

As a complete gift of self, it signifies the mutual gift of self between God and each man and woman.  As proof that this union is real, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  The Incarnation is the definitive marriage of mankind with God.  The Son is forever united to a human nature.  As if further proof were needed, Christ also raised Marriage to a Sacrament by which He bestows sanctifying grace.  This sanctifying grace not only cements the bonds of the spouses, but more importantly it truly unites each of the spouses to God.  In this way it becomes not just a sign, but the thing signified, “the great mystery in reference to [the bond of] Christ and the Church” (Eph 5:32).

There is also a third reality that is signified in marriage and it is this one that ought to bring relief to those who despair no longer being united to their spouse.  It is this reality, says St. John Paul II, that is the reason why we are not simply “laundry listing” what we believe in the Creed but implying an intimate connection between the truths and reality.  More to the point, the Saintly Pontiff says that we link the Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints in the Creed.

We are embodied creatures and our bodies too are a sign.  They are a sign that we are made for communion, not just with God, but with one another.  But these signs do not pass away because they bring about the thing signified, that is our bodies are who we are.  In this life we are limited in our capacity of self-giving to the point that we can only give of ourselves fully to one other person.  When time ceases, this limitation will be lifted so that we will be able to give of ourselves fully in all our relationships.  Put more succinctly we will participate fully in the Communion of Saints, a communion of self-giving and receiving of the entire redeemed community.  This is why, by way of anticipation, Our Lady, although only a creature, can have a personal relationship with each of the members of the Church Militant.  It is this redeemed community that is wedded to God, a communion with a communion as John Paul II said.

This is the Good News for spouses.  All in their relationship they have built upon and centered on Christ will endure.  The true intimacy, in Christ, they experienced will not be forgotten but instead will be the foundation of their relationship with each other in the Communion of Saints.  They will experience a level of intimacy beyond anything they could imagine.

And this is ultimately why Our Lord refused the Sadducees trap of treating marriage and the resurrection as some theological theory.  It is also why we shouldn’t treat this as some “pie in the sky” musings.  It ought to inform our relationships here and now.  If only those aspects of our relationship that were built on Christ will last, then we know which ones we should focus on.  If everyone did this in living out the consequence of Marriage as a Sacrament, then there would be peace in many homes.  And that, truly is the Good News.

In Defense of Fanaticism

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It is perfectly OK to be a fan, but not a fanatic—especially a religious fanatic.  Better to be moderate than to be zealous.  At least that is what the spirit of the world tells us.  But if we trace the contours of salvation history, especially in the low spots marked by corruption, it was always the zealots that brought about health and reform.  The Old Testament gives us numerous examples.  Moses, Phinehas, Samuel, David, Elijah, Jael, and Judas Maccabeus are but a few.  Though times changed, these men and woman’s jealousy for God drove them to heroic perseverance in restoring God’s glory among the peoples of the world.  So deep was their hatred of all things opposed to God’s glory being made manifest that they were even willing to take up the sword (or even a tent spike).  They were fanatics in the truest sense of the word.

“Killing in the name of God”—that is exactly the reason why fanaticism is a bad thing.   But that misses the point completely.  These stories were “written for our admonition and our learning” (Romans 15:4) so that we would stir up the same zeal, even if it is to be made manifest differently.  When Peter zealously picked up the sword to defend Our Lord he was rebuked not for the zeal, but for the use of the sword.  Armed with the “sword of the Spirit” it is no longer necessary to wield an actual sword.  The thickness of the Blood of Christ makes the enemies of God nothing more than potential friends. It may be true that “those who live by the sword die by the sword” but this does not absolve us from the duty to become fanatics.

What is Zeal?

St. Thomas defines zeal as an effect of intense love (ST I-II q.28, a.4).  An intense love seeks to remove everything that opposes it.  The more vigorously we love, the more vigorously we oppose resistance to that thing.

We can imagine then that zeal is a most necessary virtue in times of corruption.  When there is much that opposes a good, it takes an intense love of that good to fight against the obstacles to that good being made manifest.  In fact, we could say that it is only men and women of zeal who can lead to true reform.  Church history is marked with fanatics, moved by intense zeal, for God’s glory to shine through His Church.  Our time is no different.  We can look back in time and see figures like St. Athanasius, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Alphonsus Liguori who were consumed with zeal for God.  But for every one of these saints, there were many more who were consumed with a false zeal.  The temptation is ever-present, St. Paul even cautioned the Romans about synthetic zeal, that is, “zeal for God but without discretion” (Romans 10:2).   In order that we not succumb to this counterfeit, it behooves us to make the distinction between true and false zeal.

Drawing on a distinction made by St. Thomas can help us clarify the distinction.  The Angelic Doctor says that zeal comes about according to the type of love we bear.  First there is the love of concupiscence or self-love.  He does not necessarily mean “self-love” as in selfishness but in the sense that we desire our own good.  Zeal manifests itself in two ways: jealousy and envy.  Jealousy is the zeal we experience when something hinders us gaining the object of our love.  We tend to think of jealousy as an exclusively bad thing, but it is not necessarily so.  A husband may jealously protect his wife from other suitors (assuming they are actually trying to take her from him otherwise his jealousy is a bad thing).  Likewise, God is said to be a “jealous God” because there are enemies that are trying to take His beloveds from Him.  The zeal of envy is always bad in that we are moved to envy those who seem to excel and by doing so seem to hinder us from excelling.

Love of friendship on the other hand seeks the friend’s good and zeal in this regard seeks to remove anything that opposes that friend’s good. Aquinas says that, “a man is said to be zealous on God’s behalf, when he endeavors, to the best of his means, to repel whatever is contrary to the honor or will of God.”

True and False Zeal

It is the zeal motivated by the love of God that marks true zeal.  God’s will, put simply, is that His glory be made known.  Anything that acts as an obstacle to this, especially evil and sin, is zealously opposed.  The zealot hates sin first and foremost because it is an offense against God.  Aquinas again: “a man is eaten up with a good zeal, who strives to remedy whatever evil he perceives; and if he cannot, bears with it and laments it.”

Notice that when Aquinas’ man is unable to remedy an evil, he tolerates it, but he also laments  it.  The man of good zeal, in imitation of Christ, takes the sin as if it was his own, grieves over it, and, united with the Passion of Christ, offers the Father penance for it.  He does not attack the other person, but instead wields the sword of the Spirit which penetrates into the evildoer’s heart.  This is a sure test as to whether you have true zeal or false zeal—are you willing to do penance for the person simply because you do not want God to be offended?  False zeal would rather “flame” the person because it is always tainted with self-love.

The true fanatic also knows zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls are two sides of the same coin.  God is never more glorified than in the conversion of sinners.  We usually utter trite sayings like “hate the sin, love the sinner” to remind us of this, but sinners are nearly impossible to love.  Instead it should be “hate the sin, but love God who wants to redeem the sinner.”  This is the discretion that the Israelites lacked and St. Paul warns about.  We must love our neighbor for God’s sake first knowing that even the most unrepentant of sinners is powerless against the flood of the Precious Blood.  It is fanatics that open the floodgates.

Believing in Purgatory

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There was time, especially during the Late Middle Ages, when Purgatory was an intrinsic element within popular Christian piety.  The popularity of Indulgences and their subsequent abuse went hand in hand.  Not so any longer.  Purgatory seems to belong to a superstitious past, part and parcel of a piety of fear.  A doctrine more than a belief, it is more like a Catholic punchline to a joke tinged with false humility.  Why it became this is a long and complicated story, but why it shouldn’t have, or more to the point, why we should make this doctrine one of our core beliefs in the here and now, is worth reflecting upon.

God always anticipates various attacks upon belief by raising up saints to counter them.  Very often these saints appear before the attack.  In this regard, Purgatory is no different for God inspired St. Catherine of Genoa, who died just before the start of the Protestant Revolution, to be the Prophetess of Purgatory.  The saint was given a vision of Purgatory and the tremendous suffering of its inhabitants.  But rather than focus on their pains, St. Catherine instead was struck by the joy of the suffering souls.  Rather than feeding the piety of fear, she places Purgatory in its proper context.

The Mindset of the Holy Souls

The fires of Purgatory are the flames of Divine love.  All that is not pure is being burned away in the fire of Christ’s love.  This of course is very painful, but everyone there knows that it is necessary.  In fact, the members of the Church Suffering “can remember nothing of themselves or others, whether good or evil, which might increase the pain they ordinarily endure; they are so completely satisfied with what God has ordained for them, that He should be doing all that pleases Him, and in the way it pleases Him, that they are incapable of thinking of themselves even in the midst of their greatest sufferings.”

While their pain is great, they find it nearly impossible to focus on it.  That is because all the ways in which they loved themselves more than they loved God is being purified.  They can only focus on what God is doing in them and they are “completely satisfied” with it.  They trust that moment by moment, no matter how acute their suffering is, they are approaching the fulfillment of all their desires.  So they choose to focus only on that and not the pain.  They have learned the lesson that would have served them well during their earthly sojourns, the same lesson the saint wants us to learn now as well: that each and every suffering we experience is a gift of Divine love meant to purify us.  We simply need to trust that is what God is doing and will to focus on that.  All too often we see suffering as an end, where God sees it as a means to our purification.  If we can take our eyes off ourselves long enough, then this becomes easy to grasp and it actually makes suffering easier.  This is the power of the Cross and we should never empty it of its power.

But it is not just a matter of trust.  The Holy Souls also see the sufferings as necessary.  They realize that even if it wasn’t purifying them, they still deserve it.  This is a lesson for us as well.  All too often we cannot see how a particular suffering is sanctifying us until later.  Our perseverance wavers.  This is because we don’t grasp that we deserve the punishment.  And this doesn’t mean just the big things like sickness, the loss of a loved one, or the loss of a job, but the little contradictions that we wrestle with every day.  The annoying habits of coworkers, our children and our spouses, the ones that we grumble against regularly, were sent to us by God to sanctify us.  But we must will them as such and therefore bear with them, knowing that they are necessary.  We must be convinced that not only do we need them, but we also deserve them.  The souls in Purgatory are satisfied because they are paying their debt to Divine justice.

The Joy of the Holy Souls

Many people think the belief in Purgatory in merely fear based.  But St. Catherine wants us to know it is the exact opposite.  “I do not believe it would be possible to find any joy comparable to that of a soul in purgatory, except the joy of the blessed in paradise—

a joy which goes on increasing day by day, as God more and more flows in upon the soul, which He does abundantly in proportion as every hindrance to His entrance is

consumed away.”  Rather than Purgatory being backed up to the Gates of Hell, it is the Mudroom of Heaven.  The souls there, even though they suffer, they still experience an unimaginable joy because they know that suffering is the gravitational force of Paradise.  Each moment they are approaching God’s orbit and they are increasingly joyful.  They are so joyful, in fact, that their joys, according to St. Catherine, are second only to the blessed saints in heaven.

The saint is revealing to us the secret of being joyful amid suffering—to see each suffering, big or small, as producing in us “an eternal weight of glory” drawing us ever closer to our deepest desire.  She wants us to be aware of the plight of the suffering souls so that we will in charity do all we can to alleviate their suffering, but she mainly speaks so that we will have the courage to embrace our Purgatory now.  This is the difference between a doctrine and a belief.  Purgatory is more than an idea, because ideas have consequences.  The consequence is that we learn from the actions of the suffering souls to joyfully accept all our sufferings now, knowing that they are necessary, not in any generic sense, but as coming from the purifying fire of Divine love.

 

The Roots of Feminism

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Whenever we want to understand the cause of human behavior, it is usually instructive to return to the “beginning.”  The divinely inspired words of Genesis 2 gives us a valuable glimpse of human psychology.  In this regard, the roots of modern day feminism are no different.  The reverberations from the Fall were felt not only in relation to God, but man and woman also experienced a rupture in their relationship with one another.  Rather than living in domestic bliss, man and woman are destined for conflict.  With the entrance of fig leaves, complementarity is threatened by competition as man rejects his role of protector and instead is met with the temptation to rule over woman (c.f. Gn 3:16).

Competition and Complementarity

It is important to add that while the Fall left man and woman with relational myopia, it did not doom their relationship.  It is strained, but not irreparably so.  The path to reconciliation, at least according to Our Lord, passes through “the beginning” (c.f. Mt 19:4).  Man and woman were made to live in harmony.  But this harmony was (and still is) contingent upon harmony with God.  In fact, it was meant to be a sign of it.    This helps us to grasp why we say they were cursed.  It was not because hell hath no fury like a God that has been scorned, but because God refuses to give up on mankind.  His cursing of man and woman and their relationship is meant to awaken within them an innate sense that reality is not quite what it seems.

The lie hidden within the serpent’s temptation was that God was withholding something from Adam and Eve.  Up to this point, man’s fundamental stance was one of receptivity.  They saw everything as a gift from the God Who desired nothing more than to father them.  But with satanic sophistry, the woman is tempted to change her stance to one of appropriation rather than receptivity.  Rather than receiving a gift, she is tempted to seize it.

This tension between receptivity and appropriation helps us to understand why it was woman who was tempted by the serpent.  Femininity, properly understand, was meant to be a sign of mankind’s receptivity of the gift.  In fact this receptivity is stamped into her body.  Eve, in seizing the apple, rejects not only God but her femininity.  By attacking the woman Satan is able to distort both man and woman’s signpost for their relationship to God.  Woman is now cursed to experience the consequences of the new paradigm.  She will become an object of appropriation as man no longer views her as a gift but instead as something to be seized and controlled.

With the threat of appropriation always looming over woman, she is keenly aware that something is fundamentally wrong.  She experiences desire for man, yet that desire is often met by a lust for domination.  This experience then also carries with it a temptation for her. The desire and the lust are precisely because of her femininity.  The temptation then is to reject her femininity.  Thus we find the genesis of modern feminism in Genesis.

Grasping Masculinity

This helps to explain why ersatz feminists, rather than embracing all those things associated with authentic femininity, attempt to grasp masculinity.  And because they are grasping they grasp a counterfeit version of it.  They set fake masculinity on a pedestal and then try to imitate it by taking a pill that enables them to indulge all their desire for man (even though the Pill actually robs them of that desire) and lord it over everyone they meet.  They come to loathe their own and other’s femininity and hate any man who portrays authentic masculinity, mostly because they cannot seize it on their own.

The curse may haunt the woman, but it does not have the final say.  The path out is by embracing her femininity.  Eve may have set the tone, but the New Eve gives the escape route.  Mary is the archetype of femininity.  She is totally receptive—“be it done to me according to Thy word” (Lk 1:38).  She is the archetype not just because she is the perfect wife and mother, but because she is the perfect disciple of her Son.   She is the model of receptivity, praising “the Almighty Who has done great things for me.”

The tug of the curse cannot be overcome by trying harder—that too is the appropriated masculinity revealing itself.  Instead the solution is to submit to Christ Who offers the grace to embrace her true femininity.  The true feminist is one who demands of men around them that they be authentically men.  She knows that masculinity is not something she can grasp but must come as a gift from a man who is able to give it.

Adam fell in not guarding Eve’s femininity.  The New Adam, because He “handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish empowers men to guard the femininity of woman” (Eph 5:25-27), restores man’s masculinity and empowers him to guard the femininity of woman.  Rather than seeing her as a threat to his own masculinity, he gifts himself to her.

Many of today’s feminists trace their ideological roots back to the 1960s.  If they were to dig further then they would find they extend back much further.  Failing to see this, they apply false solutions only exacerbating the problem.  Instead they should submit themselves and their femininity to Christ, the only One Who can fulfill their deepest desire.