All posts by Rob Agnelli

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

Anthropology, Dialogue, Theology, , , , , , , ,

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

Church and State, Church Authority, Defending the Faith, Politics, ,

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

Bible, Church Authority, Scripture, , , , ,

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?

Abortion, ,

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

Anthropology, Bible, Heaven, Last Things, marriage, Mary, Sacraments, The Life of Jesus, ,

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

Bible, Virtue, , , ,

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

Divine Mercy, Grace, Heaven, Last Things, Purgatory, Suffering, , ,

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

Anthropology, Bible, Fatherhood, marriage, Mary, Scripture, Theology of the Body, , ,

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.

Light in the Darkness

Church, Church Authority, Prayer, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, , , ,

At the close of the Great Jubilee Year of 2000, Pope St. John Paul II drafted a blueprint for the Church in the next millennium in his Apostolic Exhortation Novo Millennio Ineunte.  Through his Petrine office, the Pope played the prophet by emphasizing that the Church must  “shine ever more brightly” in the third millennium.  Not prone to echo merely pious sentiments, the Holy Father’s words are a clarion call to us Catholics living in dark ecclesial times especially by reminding us that Church’s luminosity is nothing more than a reflection of the light of the face of Christ in every historical period.  Darkness sets in then when we have “not first contemplated His face.”  Confronted with scandalous silence piled upon scandalous actions, many Catholics feel abandoned by the Church.  But once we allow the prophetic character of JPII’s program for restoring the Church’s luminosity to invigorate our lives we realize that it is not the Church that has abandoned us, but we the Church.  By failing to contemplate the face of Christ we are incapable of “letting our light shine before men”(c.f. Mt 5:16).  But if we listen to what the Successor of Peter told us almost 20 years ago, we can find a path back to the light.

Before outlining his program, we would be remiss if we ignored an important point that the Holy Father makes: “We are certainly not seduced by the naive expectation that, faced with the great challenges of our time, we shall find some magic formula. No, we shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person, and the assurance which he gives us: I am with you!” (NMI, 29).  Notwithstanding, the program is not something new but a revitalization of those practices that are at the heart of the Christian life.   These things are pathways to the face of Christ.

The Plan…

The first is a commitment to a holiness that is devoid of any mark of “minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity” (NMI, 30).  We must each strive to attain a “high standard of ordinary Christian living” by which we judge everything on a scale of sanctity.  What I mean by this is that we live in a detached manner asking whether each and everything we do is contributing to our holiness.  God is, by His loving Providence, is providing at each and every moment means to grow in holiness.  We need only say yes and fully embrace what He has planned to give us from all eternity.

The “scale of sanctity” is related to the second pillar of the saint’s program: grace.  Fidelity to grace is the key to growing in holiness.  The pursuit of holiness is not enough because it is not something we can ever obtain on our own.  It depends solely upon how much sanctifying grace we are given.  As the word grace (gratis) suggests it is pure gift.  What that means is not that we must sit back and wait for it, but that we must be active in receiving the gift.  Receptivity and passivity are not the same thing.  We must have the docility to receive it in the manner in which God intends to give it to us, but also seeking out those encounters in which God bestows those gifts.

The remaining three pillars are related to those encounters.  The first is the rediscovery of the face of Christ in the Sacrament of Penance (c.f. NMI, 37).  Mercy is for the contrite and it is through the Sacrament of Penance in which our contrition and Christ’s mercy meet.  In an age in which sin remains bound by self-appointed victimhood, freedom is found by approaching the mercy seat of the One Who became a willing victim for us.  These true encounters with Christ, mediated by a Priest, should be frequent enabling us to see them as necessary even when our sin is not grave.

Likewise, the Sacrament of the Eucharist must be restored to a primacy of place.  The Pope “insist[ed] that sharing in the Eucharist should really be the heart of Sunday for every baptized person” (36) but we should be willing to go further and make the sharing of the Eucharist the heart of every day.  By contemplating the face of the suffering and resurrected Christ in the Eucharist, we are being conformed to Him Mass by Mass.  If we really believe that Christ is present and the source of all life, “where else would we go” but to Mass?  Our Lord will not be outdone in generosity so that when we generously make ourselves available for Daily Mass, we find it harder and harder to stay away.

Marked by the communal prayer of the Eucharist, we must also contemplate the face of Christ in prayer.  Prayer, especially mental prayer, is the ordinary means God uses to gift us with His grace.  Reading the signs of the times, especially the “widespread demand for spirituality,” the Pope called upon the Faithful not only to pray, but to be educated in the art of prayer.  This meant going the great spiritual masters of the Church like St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.  More explicitly the Holy Father is saying that rather than looking elsewhere, especially in New Age spirituality, for “methods” of spirituality, that we should all re-connect with the mystical tradition of the Church.  All too often Catholics are told to pray, but in truth do not know how to.  Therefore parishes should become not just places of prayer, but schools of prayer where prayer is taught.

…And the Difference it Makes

While this plan will help individual Christians, it isn’t immediately apparent how it will help the Church.  Holier lay people aren’t going to fix corrupt prelates, especially when those prelates sit in the high places of the Church.  To see things this way however is to make a very worldly mistake, namely, seeing the Church as an institution and not as an organism.  The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is the extension of the Incarnation throughout time (c.f Mt 28:20 and this previous post).  The Church is holy because Christ is the Head.  The Mystical Body is holy because it has the Holy Spirit as its soul.  All those who share the indwelling of that same Spirit are members of that body.  But it also has members that have become diseased and are no longer capable of acting as parts of that same body. And just as a body has varied means to heal diseased parts of the body, so too the Church has the same power because it is always the Person of Christ who acts, even if He uses other members of the body as instruments.

Holy Members of the Church, both Militant and Triumphant, are healthy members of the Body that act to heal the diseased members of the Body.  They represent the true hierarchy of the Church.  The hierarchy of the Institutional Church, a hierarchy that will disappear, is meant only to be a sign of the true hierarchy.  Sometimes it fails as a sign and that’s when it is incumbent upon the true hierarchy to step up—not to lead the Institutional Church per se, but to be translucent members allowing the light reflected from the face of Christ to shine through them.   And if we put St. John Paul II’s plan into action and seek his intercession, that will be enough to heal the Church and be a light to a desperately dark world.

The NFP Lifestyle

Bioethics, Conscience, Contraception, Culture of Life, , ,

In recent years there have been a number of sociological studies linking marital happiness/success with methods of birth regulation.   Most of them show positive differences between those couples who practice NFP and those who use other methods of birth control, although not always to the degree that NFP Catholics like to advertise.  This is mostly due to the fact that couples practicing NFP fall into two categories—those who do so with a contraceptive mentality and those who live an NFP lifestyle.  It is the latter group which would likely show a significantly higher marital satisfaction.

I called it a “lifestyle” because it is about so much more than just family planning.  NFP reinforces the one flesh union of marriage even when the couple is not engaged in the marital embrace.  At the risk of pointing out the obvious, I will mention that, unlike woman, man’s fertility is non-cyclical.  He is fertile all the time.  This means that the burden of self-mastery often falls upon him.  In fact one could say self-mastery is at the heart of being a man.  The man, as he finds stamped into his body, is made to make a gift of himself.  But to give oneself away, you must first own yourself, that is, have total self-mastery.  Your yes only means something when you are free to say no.  Without this requisite self-mastery comes the constant temptation to “lord it over the woman” (c.f. Gen 3:16).  When you do not have control over yourself, you will attempt to control other people, especially those that are close to you.

The Burden of Fertility

While man does not experience his fertility as a burden per se, the woman does.  This doesn’t mean that it is a bad thing, only that it carries with it “labor” even if that labor is joyfully and willfully endured.  She is the one who, ultimately, must bear the consequences of fertility.  Family planning and birth control often fall upon her.  As proof of this, despite all the nasty side effects, a woman is willing to take a birth control pill.  This is also the arena in which NFP can facilitate a true one flesh union by enabling the man to help carry the load of her fertility with her.

The most obvious time of her cycle is during menstruation.  The man experiences his constant fertility as a burden so as to be united bodily with his wife during a particularly painful period of time.  The burden of fertility that she is feeling can also be felt, albeit in a different way, in his body too.  He literally is practicing compassion, that is suffering with.  When borne with love and patience he is making a bodily gift of himself to his wife.

Most men already do this, although perhaps in not such a deliberate way.  But for those men who practice NFP and have experienced the “disappointment” of the arrival of an early period, this can enable them to see how the one flesh giving might continue.  Likewise, when for “just reasons” the couple is using NFP to avoid pregnancy the man puts aside the drive of his constant fertility so as to share in and through his body her fertility.  This is where real manhood, that is manhood founded upon self-mastery, is particularly felt because he feels an increase in the burden of his fertility because of the inviting presence of her pheromones signaling her fertility.  Even in abstaining from the marital embrace the couple is experiencing a type of one-flesh union when they join their wills together in postponing pregnancy.

NFP’s Effect on Family Life

An NFP lifestyle also makes for a happier home life in general in the relationship between the parents and children.  Schooled in self-mastery by NFP the parents are better able to love their children in a disinterested fashion.  As John Paul II, in a defense of Humanae Vitae once said:

“[parents that are contracepting] cannot sacrifice their egoism to the good of their spouse, will likewise lack generosity, patience, serenity and calm assurance in their relations with their children.  They will love their children to the degree to which their children bring them joy—that is selfishly and not for their own sakes; they will cajole them and teach them self-indulgence and self-love.  Instead of the peace given by self-mastery, unrest will reign in the family, because the state of tension created by a truncated sexual act surrounded by precautions, an act that is to be an unreserved gift of self, must in the long term be communicated to the children.  It seems that the increasing prevalence of anxiety and even certain neuroses results in large part from contraceptive practices.”

For the better part of the last half-century, the teaching Church has been (at best) silent promoting her teachings on birth control.  It is time that the rest of the Church step out into the void and preach the freedom that comes from ditching contraception.  The one flesh union within marriage is a daily lived experience.

 

The Currency of Eternity

End Times, Faith and Reason, God's Love, Grace, Heaven, Last Things, Mercy, Spiritual Life, , , ,

“This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town and beats high mountain down.”  What is it?  Fans of The Hobbit will recognize this riddle as the last riddle that Gollum asked Bilbo during their inquisitorial skirmish in the dark.  The riddle is met with panic on Bilbo’s part because he has no clue as to the answer and his opponent is growing increasingly impatient and hungry.  In an effort to delay the inevitable, Bilbo blurts out “time!” Gollum is furious because time is the right answer.  Bilbo eventually escapes from his ravenous captor but the readers are left with the inescapable fact that time is not just the answer to the riddle, but a riddle in itself.  St. Augustine once waxed philosophic when he asked, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know” (Confessions, XI).  But the fact that he included the question within his great spiritual biography shows that this question is more than just a philosophical question.  It has practical applications.

Like Augustine then we must grapple with what time is before we look at how we should best spend it.  Aristotle had what is probably the most succinct definition when he said that time is “the numbering of motion according to before and after.”  His definition captures three important elements.  First, time is a measure of change or motion.  Where there is no change, there is no time.  Second, because it is a “numbering” it must be measured relative to some standard.  We use the movement of the sun as the standard.  But it is the third element, “according to before and after” that merits the most attention.

Before and After

“Before and after” do not exist in external reality.  All that exists is the present moment.  But time refers not just to the present moment, but also past and future.  Past and future, or before and after to use Aristotle’s classification only exist within some measuring consciousness.  In fact, it is only this measuring consciousness that is able to hold time together in a unified whole.  Time then is founded in reality, but only exists formally in the mind.

This helps us to grasp why two people can experience the passage of an hour very differently.  It is a relative measure to their consciousness of time that enables it to slow down or speed up.  Our psychological attention span is made up of the immediate past that is held in memory, the present moment passing before us and our psychic projection of the anticipated next moment.  This explanation of time also clarifies why time speeds up as we get older.  As our vivid memory of past events “thickens” our experience of time is more past-centric causing us to focus more on time past rather than the present and future.  Time then seems to be moving faster because the perspective is of looking back.  For children the experience is the exact opposite as their perspective is more future oriented and time appears to move more slowly.

All that being said, and admittedly only skimming the philosophical surface, we can begin to examine how this definition of time helps us to better spend our time.  “Spend our time” is more than a mere colloquialism—it reveals an important truth.  Time is the currency in which we buy our eternal destiny.  It is the talent that the demanding landowner bestows upon us and then asks for an account of our return of investment (c.f Mt 25:14-30).  Unless we stir up this sense of urgency no amount of philosophical musing is going to help us.  The great mystery confronting our modern culture is that no one seems to have any time anymore.  It is as if time is disappearing.  The truth however is that we are living in a culture that is particularly adept at wasting time and so it is easy to get caught up in it.  We surround ourselves with diversions that steal from us our eternal currency.

Spending Time

Time—past, present and future—is meant to prepare us for eternity when all three elements blend into one.  The past and the future will give way to the eternal present.  The past will be a blur of mercy.  Mercy in the sins forgiven and sins avoided.  Mercy in the unmerited gifts given and for the Divine friendship that elevated us.  The past simply becomes a measure of mercies received.  By way of anticipation then our past “now” should be measured through the lens of mercy. This is time well spent—in contrition and in gratitude.

Likewise the future which should be spent in hope.  Hope is the virtue that enables us to steadfastly cling to the promises of God.  We should spend our time setting our eyes on the prize and stirring up our desire for it.  A strong hope resists the time thieves and keeps account of time spent.  If you think time is moving too fast, fix your eyes on Heaven.  That is almost certainly going to slow time down to a crawl.

Mercy and hope both pass with the passage of time (but not their memory and effects).  But the one thing that will remain—charity.  And that is what we must do in the present moment.  Charity, that is the love of God and the love of neighbor for God’s sake, is the only way in which we may profit by the time.  At each moment we can gather eternal treasures by giving that moment to God.  Never put off an act of charity for later—do it now.  If what you are doing can’t be offered to God—stop.  Started something without offering it to God?  Offer it now.  Waiting in line?  Offer acts of love and praise to God.

Time may devour all things, but only when it is not well spent.  Let us learn from St. Alphonsus Liguori, the great moral Doctor of the Church, who once asked for the grace to never waste a moment’s time and then pledged never to do so. “Son, observe the time” (Eccl 4:23).

Scaring the Hell Out of Us

Heaven, Last Things, , ,

“Wide is the path to heaven and narrow is the path to hell.”  Count this among the things that Jesus never said, but many of us Christians act as if he did.   The primrose path to heaven is paved with, at best dismissal, at worst open mockery of “fire and brimstone” preachers.  Give us the Good News they say and let’s not focus on childish fears like hell.  In our satirical heave-ho however we might easily overlook the fact that we would also see the most famous Preacher Who ever walked the face of the earth as a fire and brimstone guy.  For all of our avoiding of the topic, Jesus spoke an awful (in the truest sense of the word) lot about hell.  Perhaps then it is time to examine just how much we should focus on hell.  This post is not about going around threatening everyone with hell.  Most people carry enough hell around with them currently that they really do need to hear the Good News—at first.  But at a certain point we must all maturely face the eternal Bad News in order to grow in our spiritual lives.

“Mature” Christians and Hell

Herein lies part of the problem—we think that mature Christians need not think much of hell.  Even if that we true, which it is not, we conclude that since mature Christians need not think of hell, then we can skip that step.  But an examination of the spiritual lives of many of the saints reveals that a number of them received visions of hell.  St. Faustina, St. John Bosco, St. Catherine of Siena, and even the great mystical Doctor of the Church, St. Theresa of Avila all were given mystical experiences of hell.  The latter described her visitation in stark terms:

I felt a fire in my soul…My bodily sufferings were unendurable. I have undergone most painful sufferings in this life… yet all these were as nothing in comparison with what I felt then, especially when I saw that there would be no intermission, nor any end to them…I did not see who it was that tormented me, but I felt myself on fire, and torn to pieces, as it seemed to me; and, I repeat it, this inward fire and despair are the greatest torments of all…I was so terrified by that vision – and that terror is on me even now while I am writing – that though it took place nearly six years ago, the natural warmth of my body is chilled by fear even now when I think of it.

Since the saints are the healthiest of all Christians we must then admit that turning our gaze towards hell is a healthy thing to do.  We must admit that it is only our immersion in modern psychology which insists that guilt is the greatest evil that keeps us from doing so.  Guilt is natural and thus a tool God has given man for his perfection.  It is meant to stimulate sorrow for sin, the principle of all of our growth in holiness.

The journey of the spiritual life can be summed up as a journey of love; a journey from a love of self to the love of God.  We may love God, but until we are honest enough to admit that we still love ourselves more, we will never progress.  We must grow to the point where we love God more than self.  For most of us, this journey will take a lifetime.

The standard Act of Contrition reflects this as well—we tell God that we are sorry because we fear His just punishments (love of self, leading to a fear of hell) and most of all because we have offended Him Who is All Good and worthy of all our love (love of God, leading to filial fear, that is the fear of offending His goodness).  Until we are free of inordinate self-love, that is, love of self more than love of God, we “need” the fear of hell to keep us moving.

Meditating on Hell Regularly

This healthy fear of hell comes about, in imitation of the saints, by meditating on hell itself.  In an age where most sin is “normal” it becomes especially important so that we can grasp the horror of sin.  This is why Our Lord uses such descriptive language.   It is not just that it “scares the hell out of us” but that, in catching a glimpse of the horror of what we deserve, we can fall more deeply in love with the Giver of eternal life.  Fear of hell then is a necessary foundation for the filial fear that follows.

Obviously not all of us will be given visions of hell like the one from St. Theresa described above.  Those descriptions, especially St. John Bosco’s, are helpful for us.  Dante’s Inferno can also be very helpful.

Before closing it is worth examining one of the intellectual obstacles to meditating on hell—its eternity. If we are not careful, we can allow this intellectual obstacle to lead us to conclude hell is not really that bad.  The occupants of hell suffer most because they have lost their true good—God Himself—and they hate Him for it.  They know the truth that it was their choice that put them there, but because their will is fixed they can never repent.  They simply go on hating.  They also suffer other torments as well.  The point however is that all of these torments are eternal.   Quite obviously we have nothing in our experience that maps back to eternity.  But we can begin to grasp its eternal horrors when we think about our pains and sufferings in this life.  No matter how much pain and suffering we are experiencing, we always have in the back of our minds that they will be over eventually.  This awareness brings with it a certain hope and its accompanying comfort, perhaps the only comfort we have at a given time.  Now, imagine that hope being removed and you become aware of the fact that never, ever, will the pain end.  This would lead to perpetual despair without any hope of relief.  Even the most minor of irritations would be unbearable if it never ended.  This is why Dante affixes a sign at the entrance of his Inferno that reads “Abandon all hope ye who enters here.”  Please God that living in this time of hope, we will be spurred to love Him and desire to see Him face to face.

 

How Do You Talk to an Angel?

Angels, Devils, , , , , , ,

When the Son of God came down from heaven and became the Son of Mary, He did not come alone.  He brought many of His friends, the angels, with Him.  Throughout His earthly sojourn we find the angels playing a pivotal role.  Whether it be in glorifying God at His birth, ministering to Him in the desert, strengthening Him in the Garden or joyfully announcing His resurrection, the angels were His constant companions.  He did this not because He “needed” their help, but because we do.  He wanted to reveal to us just how vital angels are to our eternal well-being.  It seems fitting then that we take an opportunity to reflect on our relationship with them.

In a very real sense we were made for friendship with the angels.  Any time that Our Lord mentions the eternal reward He is promising, He always mentions the angels in the same breath (c.f. Luke 12:8-9, Mt 25:31-46).  But this friendship begins now; the angels are “all ministering spirits sent to serve, for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” (Hebrews 1:14).  But this community with the angels can remain entirely abstract unless we have a means to communicate with them.

Talking with the Angels

Our side of the communication is rather straightforward.  We can invoke the angels and speak to them directly, knowing that they hear us.  How we invoke them however is also important.  We should never invoke an angel by name.  The Church has cautioned the Faithful about this and in recent times the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has spoken against the habit of asking your Guardian Angel his name:

“The practice of assigning names to the Holy Angels should be discouraged, except in the cases of Gabriel, Raphael and Michael whose names are contained in Holy Scripture.” Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy, 216

This can be a dangerous spiritual practice as you have no assurance that the name you have discerned is not, rather than your Guardian Angel, a demon.  Once you repeat the demon’s name, you are inviting him and giving him a certain power over you.  In fact, because the Church, whose authority binds even those in heaven, has spoken definitively you can be sure that the name you “hear” is either the result of an over-active imagination (hopefully) or the name of a demon.  It is most assuredly not the name of your obedient Guardian Angel.  Better simply to address him as “Guardian Angel.”  The only exception to this rule are the names of the angels revealed in Scripture—Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.

Of equal greater interest to us is how the angels communicate with us.  To answer this question we must first look at how it is that man receives any communication.  When words are spoken to us or read by us, the words themselves are merely symbols that are meant to invoke concepts.  We hear or see the words and then we form images (or phantasms as St. Thomas calls them) in our imagination, supplement those images with other images from our memory, and abstract the concepts from the images with our intellect.

A similar thing would obviously happen if an angel was to audibly speak to us (either by gathering matter together to make a body) or by simply moving air to make sound waves that form the spoken words or even writing us a message.  But this would not be the normal way in which they would communicate with us.  The angels’ normal mode of communication, that is when one angel communicates with another, is to simply place the idea they want to convey in the mind of the other angel.  They do this because of the manner in which angels naturally come to know things—the infusion of ideas directly into their minds.

There is a principle of with Scholastic philosophy that “whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver.”  What this means is that when angels communicate with us, they use not their mode of receiving communication, but ours.  They do not infuse ideas directly into our minds, but instead they move our imagination and memory with certain images that will set off a chain of thought.  The angels, especially our own personal guardian angel, know us well enough to know what images it will take to move our intellects in a certain direction.

A Hidden Corollary

This is, by the way, is why we have difficulty knowing that the angels have communicated with us.  We would tend, because it is so “natural” for our imaginations to actively provide images that come out of nowhere, to think it was just the result of our own thinking.  But there is an important corollary to this as well.  The fallen angels retained this power to move the material faculties of the imagination and memory and thus they too can set us off on a train of thought of their design.  Again, this is why we do not always know whether a particular temptation comes from us or from a demon.

In the information age, we spend a lot of time and resources making sure our personal data is secure.  We would not want hackers to get access to highly sensitive material.  The demons are like hackers.  They can easily hack into our memory and imagination and pull up particular memories or images to tempt us with.  This means we must constantly guard against putting any images there ourselves that could be used against us.  Many men report being able to remember a single pornographic image from 20 years ago and this is part of the reason why.

But we are not left unprotected.  Our Guardian Angel, whose main role is to protect us from the demonic invaders can guard our imagination and memory.  We should regularly seek their help so that the moment one of these images arises, we turn it over to them.  As this habit grows, we will reflexively turn them over and the demonic will seek another means of attacking us.

In a sermon he wrote for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, Blessed John Henry Newman articulated one of the dangers of an “educated age” such as our is that we take little account of the angels.  When all thoughts are explained as simply the result of the firing of various synapses we can ignore that our friends the angels are still there and desiring to communicate with us.  Let us not fall into this sin of the educated age and rely ever greater on our heavenly ministers.