All posts by twowingstogod@gmail.com

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.

Marriage as the Ultimate Act of Human Freedom

marriage, , ,

Modern sensibilities find arranged marriages to be utterly repulsive.  They represent a great affront to human freedom and harken to a time of patriarchal repression of women.  Nevertheless, for much of human history men and women came together in marriage, not through courtship, but through some prior arrangement.  I am not suggesting that we return to those days, but instead to admit that given the glass house of marriage that we are living in, we should not be so quick to throw stones of subjection and patriarchy without first grasping the wisdom in the practice.  In particular, we can look to see how both love and freedom were actually protected and promoted by this practice so that we can apply these principles to the decrepit institution of marriage today.

In order to begin, we must put aside our gut reactions in order to see why, at least in principle, arranged marriages could work.  A father, when he truly loves his daughter, sees her as a gift and wants her to be fulfilled in the truest sense of the word.  That fulfillment includes the time when she must join herself to a husband.  Because of his great love, he wants to make sure that she will be yoked to a man who has a sense of responsibility of the great gift that has been bestowed upon him.  And so, in arranging the marriage, he was vetting his future son-in-law to make sure that he was worthy of such a priceless gift.  Did it always happen like this?  Of course not.  But the principle which animated it is wholly lacking in today’s culture and so bears some further examination.

Attraction in Marriage

What if the woman was not attracted to the man or vice versa?  Attraction, both sensual and emotional, is very important, but only in the sense that they contain the seeds of love.  But love is not the same thing as attraction.  Attraction is about the pleasure your presence brings to me.  In other words, it is a love of the feelings that you stir in me.  It draws me towards you, but I must decide whether you have more value than the mere trigger of pleasant feelings.  It is ironic that we recoil at the idea of our parents arranging our marriages while we have no problem submitting to the genetics of our passions, the same genetics we have received from our parents.

Attraction should serve to spur me towards love to see if the good that I detected is a real good for me.  When it does, love emerges in which my consciousness of the fact that you are gift (“a good for me”) stirs me to make a gift of myself (“to be a good for you”).  This is a solid foundation of love in which the couple sees each other as a gift and takes responsibility for the well-being of the other.  Once love emerges then genuine attraction roams free because it is directed towards the full value of the person and not just some attributes that I happen to like.  When a relationship never grows past attraction, then true love never develops—infatuation, lust, cupidity, yes—but not true love.  This seems to be one of major obstacles facing marriage today; an inability to move past attraction.  Marriages end because “I just don’t love you anymore,” which really means “I never really loved you, only the feelings you stirred in me.”  They put too much stock in the laws of attraction and when the market crashed they were left with nothing.  Arranged marriages may not have been the solution to this problem, but at least they recognized that attraction was only a seed of love and not a foundation; a lesson we would do well to learn.

Freedom and Marriage

The modern distaste for arranged marriages also sees them as a great affront against freedom.  We are right to think we should be free to marry whomever we choose, but we fail to see that true freedom comes not in choosing who to marry, but in being married.  What this means is that marriage truly is the ultimate sign of human freedom.  When a couple says “I do” it constitutes the greatest act of human freedom.  Why is that so?  Because they are saying that no matter what happens, nothing will change their will to be yoked to the other person.  They are free from any feelings that come or go—their freedom is stronger.  They are free from any person who might come or go in their life—their freedom is stronger.  They are free from any external circumstances that might happen—their freedom is stronger.  In fact, far from diminishing their freedom, holding onto the “I do” and making it an “I am” they are actually increasing it.  To give in to any of the thousands of temptations to call it quits is not freedom, but slavery.

Unlike the marriages of today, arranged marriages emphasized the freedom through the permanence of their consent.   We on the other hand emphasize the “I’d like to” even going so far as to cohabitate on a trial basis.  With no real emphasis on the “I do” we find it just as easy to say “I no longer like to.” To say “I do is to say “I will” and it shows that the human will is stronger than any other compulsion or external circumstance.  Marriage is the great sign of human freedom.

The Glory of God

beauty, Devils, God's Love, God's Will, Grace, Heaven, ,

Within the Christian vocabulary there are a number of terms that are regularly bandied about, but cry out for definition.  Grace immediately comes to mind as one of the most common.  A close second however is the term glory.  We know it is something that we are supposed to give to God in everything we do (1Cor 10:31).  Short of that however we are hard pressed to describe what this actually entails.  For something so important then it behooves us to reflect on exactly what we mean when we speak of the glory of God and how it is possible that we could actually “give” it to Him.

Because we cannot know God as He is in this life, we spend time contemplating His attributes—His goodness, His power, His wisdom, His omniscience, His Immutability, and so on.  But God Himself “spends His time” contemplating only one—His beauty.  That is, His beauty captures all of His attributes in their wholeness, proportionality, and radiance.  Sacred Scripture has a word for this undiminishing beauty, glory.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Glory

In theological terms God’s beauty, that is, what He is eternally contemplating, is referred to as His intrinsic glory.  From a human perspective this might seem the very height of narcissism, until we call to mind that all goodness and truth are found in God.  The Father, in gazing upon (or knowing) His perfection generates the Son.  From the mutual love of the Father and the Son for the Divine Perfection proceeds the Holy Spirit. Basking in the light of His infinite perfection, God has no need for anything other than Himself and yet, still He created.  Without any need, the only reason for creation must be found in Himself, that is, it must be because of Who He is.  Out of love of His own goodness, He desired to communicate that goodness to creatures.

No finite creature could ever “hold” the infinite goodness and so He makes a multitude of creatures, each with the purpose of reflecting His goodness, even if to a lesser or greater degree.  Or, as St. Thomas says, “the entire universe, with all its parts, is ordained towards God as its end, inasmuch as it imitates, as it were, and shows forth the Divine goodness, to the glory of God” (ST I, q.65, a.2).

From this notion, theologians develop the term extrinsic glory.  This is the reflection of the intrinsic glory that is found in creatures.  The Psalmist proclaims “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1) and St. Paul reminds the Romans that “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (Romans 1:20).  Simply in existing, all things reflect God’s glory.  But He also willed to make creatures who not only reflected His glory, but could bask in it with Him.

The proof of this is within the story of creation, as elucidated through the scholastic dictum, “first in the order of intention is last in the order of execution” sheds further light on this.  The last act of creation, that is, the first act of the Seventh Day, is God’s “command” for man to bask in it by joining in God’s rest seeing all things as “good, very good” in reflecting the glory of God.  Man is invited to set aside this time specifically for basking in the “after burn” of God’s glory as a perpetual reminder of his purpose.

Man, then, among all visible creation is the only creature with the capacity to “give” God glory.  Like the rest of visible creation he reflects it, but with his unique powers of knowing and loving he can also give it back by acknowledging it and willing his participation in it.  This is what we mean when we say that man gives glory to God—not that God doesn’t already have it, but that through adoration and praise he may willingly return it to God.

Glory as a Temptation

Man is constantly confronted with two temptations.  The first is to see only the glory and to forget the One Whom it points to.  God has put just enough traces of His glory in creation so that man will seek out the true source.  But even these mirrors are so beautiful that there is always the temptation that they eclipse the One whom they were meant to image.  We can fall in love with the creatures and forget the Creator.

While this temptation is ever-present in our fallen world, it is the second temptation that is the more serious of the two.  With the capacity to give God glory comes the (seeming) ability to keep it for ourselves.   This is the sin of Lucifer and his minions and forms the seeds of pride within us.

Now we see that St. Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians to do all for the glory of God is no pious sentiment, but a program of life.  Every thing that we think, do, and say should find its reference point in magnifying God’s glory.  Our Lord too wanted this to be our program of life.  He told His disciples that their light, that is their reflection of God’s glory, should so shine that when other men see what they are doing they know immediately that it is not their own work, but a manifestation of God’s glory (Mt 5:17).  This constant referral of all things to God’s glory increases our share in it both now and in eternal life—“ whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.”

Our Lady, Queen of Martyrs

Mary, Suffering, , ,

Today, the Church celebrates the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.  Although this liturgical celebration goes all the way back to the late 15th Century, there are still many people who do not know about the powerful intercession of Our Lady under this title.  To foster a devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows, we need to begin by asking why a devotion to Mary is not enough.  Why must there be all these different titles for her and why do we have different feast days attached to the various titles?  Certainly it serves the practical purpose of introducing us to her.  But there is more to it than that.  Once the Church promotes a particular title for Our Lady, it gives the Faithful a right to call upon her under the specific title and to expect her to act.  This is why the four Marian dogmas, namely her Divine Motherhood (Mother of God), Immaculate Conception (Immaculata), perpetual virginity (Virgin of Virgins Our Mother), and Assumption (Queen of Heaven and Earth), each carry a title with them.  By invoking Our Lady under those particular titles we can expect her to act on our behalf in very specific ways.  In this regard Our Lady of Sorrows (Queen of Martyrs) is no different.  What makes her specific intercession under this title so important is the fact that living in this “valley of tears”, we are in need of her constant compassion.

There are some very important implications that flow from the Immaculate Conception and help us to know Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows more fully.  Recall that Mary in the Immaculate Conception was preserved from the stain of Original Sin.  Put another way, because of the grace Our Lord merited on the Cross, he redeemed His Mother before her birth.  One could then assume that the Immaculate Conception made Mary immune from pain and death since they are consequences of Original Sin.  Now this is partially true in that the pain and death that Our Lord and Our Lady suffered were not a result of Original Sin but stem from human nature itself.  It was only by grace that Adam was exempt from pain and death in the state of Original Innocence.  Both Jesus and Mary voluntarily accepted suffering and death—He in his vocation as Redeemer, she in order to unite herself with Him in her role as the New Eve.

The fact that suffering and death were in a sense voluntary for Our Lady is something we should not overlook.  By reflecting deeply upon this truth, we will fall more deeply in love with the Lord’s most precious gift to us.  It actually made her more sensitive to suffering than we could possibly imagine.  As fallen creatures we suffer from a darkening of our intellects, a weakening of our wills and our passions have the capacity to run wild.  By not inheriting a fallen human nature, Mary had perfect integrity of soul.  Her soul was perfectly ordered so that she had no ignorance, her will was always ordered to love of God, and her passions were always under the control of reason and will.  This means her emotions were more intense than ours, not less.  She was never ignorant of the evil of sin.  As the “handmaid of the Lord” her heart was always consumed by a love of God.  Our imperfection often makes us insensible to evil and our hearts are consumed by love of self.

Hidden in this is a great law in the spiritual life.  Suffering is always proportionate to one’s sanctity.  Being holy one naturally feels all things more acutely, including the evil of sin.  Mary, as the holiest of God’s creatures then carried a great weight of sorrow.  With such a perfect love of God as the One offended by sin and love of her Son Whom sin crucifies she suffered immensely. So too because she had no ignorance her sorrows were also proportionate to her intellectual enlightenment.  When we suffer we hardly know half our misfortune and in a sense become numb, whereas she was flooded with a light that was painful.

It is not without purpose that the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows follows liturgically upon the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.  Because of all we have said about Mary’s immaculate condition we can say that no one, with the exception of Our Lord could have grasped darkness of the Passion or its horrors more completely than her.  While the immensity of her suffering is virtually unimaginable, it is clear that without being given a singular grace, Mary would have died from them.  All that is required for martyrdom is the willful acceptance of suffering sufficient to cause death even if God preserves the martyr through a singular grace.  As an aside this is why the Church has revered St. John the Evangelist as a martyr even though he did not die in the caldron of boiling oil.  So too the Church considers Mary a martyr as St. Bernard says “Mary was a martyr not by the sword of the executioner, but by bitter sorrow of heart.”

This is no mere “white” martyrdom but as Queen of Martyrs her martyrdom was greater than all the “red” martyrs.  In the first place, the martyrs all had to endure sufferings of body.  Mary’s sufferings were primarily of the soul, a perfect soul whose sufferings would have spilled over into her body.  While all the martyrs suffered the torments inflicted upon them, the love of Christ made their sufferings somehow sweet.  We read in story after story of the martyrs how they were martyred in a sense of bliss.  There was none of this in Mary’s martyrdom.  She had to watch her only Son suffer—the same Son she knew to be most innocent and lovable and God incarnate.  Because of His role as Redeemer she also knew that she could do nothing to alleviate His suffering, but instead she was to suffer with Him.  We often will hide our sufferings from those we love because we do not want them to suffer watching us suffer.  This means that Mary was keenly aware that her presence on Calvary only made Jesus’ suffering worse, which in turn increased her sadness all the more.

Our Lady of Sorrows

In commenting on the anguish endured by the mother of the Maccabees who witnessed the martyrdom of her sons, St. Alphonsus Liguori says that anyone can understand that the sufferings of children are also borne by their mothers who witness it.   So Our Lady suffered all the scourges, thorns, nails and cross in her heart.  He says that “the heart of Mary became as it were a mirror of the Passion of the Son.”

Her martyrdom was also greater because it lasted the longest.  He begins not in the Passion, but in the prophecy of Simeon when he promised that a sword would pierce her soul (Lk 2:35).  From that moment on, she knew that Our Lord would be contradicted in all things.  So while Abraham suffered great anxiety for three days knowing his son was to die (Gn 22) and David for seven days (2Sam 12:14-31), Our Lady suffered in silence for 33 years knowing that her Son what to die and ignominious death.  She submitted herself to the will of God and bore all these things in the silence of her heart (Lk 2:51).  In fact when Our Lady revealed herself to St. Bridget she said there was not a moment after that point in which this knowledge did not pierce her soul—“As often as I looked at my Son, as often as I wrapped Him in His swaddling-clothes, as often as I saw His hands and feet, so often was my soul absorbed, so to say, in fresh grief; for I thought how He would be crucified. My eyes filled with tears, and my heart was tortured with grief.”

Her martyrdom did not end at the Resurrection either, but continued after as well.  Given the horrors that she witnessed she would not have wanted to see any of His Passion go to waste.  Each time she encountered someone who rejected her Son and His Church she would relive the ugliness of His Passion because the suffering for those souls would have been in vain.  This is why she is also the Mother of Mercy wanting to see the fruits of the Passion applied to as many people as possible.

Given all this, the Church gives us this day devoted to Our Lady of Sorrows so that we might show our gratitude to Our Lady by meditating upon her dolors and showing pity for her in her sorrow.  There are two principal fruits that come from this.  The first is that those who call upon Our Lady of Sorrows shall grow in true self-knowledge.  This flows directly from Simeon’s prophecy that through her sufferings “the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Lk 2:35).  Secondly, by meditating upon her sorrows we will grow in sorrow for our own sins.  Finally through our growth in the knowledge of Our Lady’s share in the sufferings of Our Lord keeps her from being seen a mere instrument but a true Mother and co-Redemptrix.

Our Lady of Sorrows, cause of our joy, pray for us!

 

On Hurricanes and Divine Judgment

God's Will, Mercy, Purgatory, Redemption, Suffering, , ,

Preparations are under way throughout much of the East Coast of the United States for the arrival of Hurricane Florence.  Houses are being boarded up, supplies are being purchased and evacuation plans are being executed.  Meanwhile “fire and brimstone” preachers throughout the country are preparing their sermons about Florence bringing with her the strong winds of Divine Wrath.  These foreboding missives usually greatly miss their mark and bring with them not fear, but mirth, as both the world and Christians alike laugh at them.  Hilarity, that is, until they realize that these prophets of gloom might actually have a point, even if they have failed typesetting their message in its proper context.

We cannot be too quick to dismiss these preachers of peril.  Be it earthquakes (c.f. Ps 17:8, Is 13:13), droughts (c.f. Jer 3:2), floods or calamities in general (c.f. Is 24:5), Scripture is unambiguous in its account of God using natural calamities in order to punish sinners.  Plus, we find a similar echo among the preaching of the saints.  St. Basil said, that “No one troubles himself about inquiring why drought, lightning, hail, are sent down upon us; they are sent us on account of our sins and because we preserve an impenitent heart.”  St. Anselm meanwhile suggested that “By offending God we not only excite His anger but the anger of all creation.”  We could multiply the examples, but the point is that there is an important truth that needs to be heard.

Setting the Proper Context

The problem then is not that what they are saying is untrue, it is that it lacks the proper context.  At the heart of the Christian message is a point that is so foundational that we can easily overlook it.  Death, although considered an evil in itself, is not the worst thing that can happen to you.  The worst thing that can happen to you is that you end up in hell.   But there is, of course, the flip side of that coin.  The best thing that could possibly happen to you is to enter into Eternal Life with God.  What this means for the question at hand is that there really can be no meaningful discussion about “innocent children” who are killed.  They will get their reward.  A reward that, when they look back on their suffering and untimely death, will make those things seem so disproportionately small compared to the bliss they are enjoying.  They will even be grateful it happened because it was the doorway into their present state.  No sane person would ever complain that their liberator was too rough in granting them free from captivity.

Likewise those who die in unrepentance also receive what they deserve.  But even their death is a mercy.  God knows that they will continue to go on sinning only increasing their sufferings in hell.  So, in His abundant mercy, He puts an end to it so that they do no further harm to themselves.  He also puts an end to not only their offense against Him, but their offense against their neighbors whom they invite into sin with them.  Both justice and mercy at all times.  But we must also look to the survivors, both “innocent” and guilty alike.  How can we reconcile this aspect of punishment with the tremendous sufferings that they will have to endure?

Just as our imaginary interlocutor makes the distinction between the dead and the survivors, so too must we mark the difference between the living and the dead.  For those that die, their punishment or lack thereof is eternal.  But temporal punishments are wholly different.  God issues those for the express purpose of leading to the individual to conversion.  As the Doctor of the Church St. Alphonsus Liguori put it,  “my brethren, let us convince ourselves of what I have undertaken to show you today, namely, that God does not afflict us in this life for our injury but for our good, in order that we may cease from sin, and by recovering His grace escape eternal punishment.”   As the tolerant and loving Messiah once told us: the path to destruction is wide so that He must at times give a foretaste of this destruction in order that people will rebuild on the narrow path (c.f Mt 7:13).  Comfort in this fallen world rarely leads to comfort in the next.

The Good News and the Bad News

Denial of what has been said so far amounts to a denial of another foundational element of the Christian message—the Good News is really that includes the bad news.  Sufferings are inevitable in this world, but Christ liberated us from, not suffering, but useless suffering.  But it is only useful when it is accepted in a spirit of penance.  Otherwise it does have an air of cruelty about it, but only in our steady refusal of reality.  United with Christ however it carries with it the fragrance of freedom.

This is why the objection that these natural disasters seem rather indiscriminant won’t do.  They are part and parcel to God’s Providence.  Contained within the chaos of the calamity, are personal invitations to penance.  Penance that comes from the hands of God not only pays a debt to Divine justice, but heals the effects of the sin within each individual person.  The sufferings are only to the degree that they are needed for this purpose and no more.  There is both justice and mercy, neither of which can exist without the other.

For those outside the path of the hurricane, I close with a quote from gentle Jesus.  When His disciples asked him about the fate of a group of calamitous Galileans, He warned them “unless you do penance, you will likewise perish” (Lk 13:3).  The circumstances are different, but the invitation remains the same—do penance so that you can enter into eternal life.  The Hound of Heaven will not cease to hunt you until you are safely within the room of His Father’s house.

Power Play

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Human Dignity, Magisterium, Theology of the Body, , ,

As the Church marks the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, much has been said regarding the prophetic character of Blessed Paul VI’s controversial encyclical.  In particular, the Pope predicted that four things would happen as contraceptive use spread throughout a society.  There would be an increase in marital infidelity, a general lowering of moral standards, a loss of reverence for woman as she is reduced to an instrument for the satisfaction of a man’s desires and governments would use coercive power to implement “family planning” policies.  In reading the signs of the times, the Pope saw the consequences clearly, but why he was so easily able to see this is just important.  For these consequences were just symptoms of a deeper mindset that the Holy Father feared would ultimately conquer the hearts and minds of men, a mindset that was just as soul-killing as the contraceptive mentality to which it was linked.  After uttering his prophecy of consequences, the Holy Father tells us the root cause is man’s unwillingness to “accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go” (HV , 17).

On the one hand this is nothing new.  One can even say that Original Sin itself is the mark of man’s unwillingness to accept his creaturely limits.  Man in his Edenic bliss can eat from every tree in the Garden, save one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (GN 2:16-17).  Made in the likeness of God, he is confronted with the choice to be “like gods who know good and evil” (Gn 3:5).  That is, he has a choice between conforming himself to the limits of reality, or shaping reality to his liking.  He quickly finds out that his decision was never a real option.  He passes his confusion on to his progeny along with a proclivity for choosing likewise.

Confusing Limits

Because man is now in a state of confusion, he must set out to discover reality as it really is.  To enter into a relationship with reality he must also (re-)discover himself as he really is (including his limits) as well.  At first, because of his confusion reality appears rock solid and he discovers many limitations in himself.  But as the field of discovery expands, he finds that he has the power to manipulate reality more and more.  His limitations become blurred except when he asks a simple question: does this new power over reality include power over myself?  If so, then it is actually a power within reality, which is the only true power.  Otherwise it is a grasping and remaking of reality.

In many ways chemical contraception represents a paramount example of this principle in play.  In the past contraception usually involved changing the act, but with the Pill and the like came the power to alter the reality of a woman’s reproductive system.  But this is no mere biological alteration, but an alteration to a person’s biology.  Therefore it has to be viewed through a personalistic lens.  Does the power the Pill gives over a woman’s cycle carry with it the power of the woman to master herself?  And, because a woman’s reproductive system is a relational system, does the Pill give the man in whom she enters into a reproductive relationship with a power to master himself?

Power

The wisdom of Blessed Paul VI’s condemnation of contraception begins to emerge, especially when we add a second principle.  With the emergence of new technology comes new power over reality.  This power is given at the service of controlling men.  The question is which men will be controlled.  Will the new power be used to control man himself?  Or will the power be used to control other men?  Or as CS Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means…the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

Blessed Paul VI was so accurate in his predictions because he knew that the Pill wasn’t really a medicine to control births, but a poison to control other people.  His forecasts are really about the power of one person over another.  More to the point, the Pill is about men exercising their power over women.  It tells women in order to gain her rightful share in society she must act like one of the big boys.  But because woman is a “misbegotten male” she must take a pill to do this.  But in truth it is a ploy in which man, who is fertile all the time, can find partners who are infertile all the time.  It absolves him of all responsibility and creates an injustice in which women are treated as inferiors.  What is so puzzling is that many of them, in the name of equality, swallow the pill anyway.  Shouldn’t society have to change and adapt to the feminine genius and not woman herself?  As then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (the future St. John Paul II) said ,

“Contraception makes no contribution to the woman’s personal rights.  Since it is a process that makes it possible to satisfy the ‘needs of the sexual instinct’ without taking on any of the responsibility for the consequences of sexual activity, it primarily benefits the man.  This is why, once accepted contraception leads to sanctioning his erotic hedonist behavior.  In this situation, inevitably, the man benefits at the expense of the woman.  He ceases to regard the woman in the context of transmitting life.  She becomes for him simply the occasion for enjoying pleasure.  If one adds to this the fact that it is inscribed in the very structure of man to take initiative in the sexual realm and that the danger of being violated is a threat primarily to the woman, then one must admit that the more constitution of the woman appears grim indeed.  Therefore, when contraception is used, the woman faces not only inequality but also sexual slavery.”

In his opening paragraph of Humanae Vitae, Blessed Paul VI recognized that technology, especially reproductive technologies, were a force that the Church was going to need to confront.  Unfortunately she has not been up to the task and many women have suffered because of it.  As the Church continues to celebrate this Golden Anniversary of Humane Vitae, let’s work towards a rediscovery of the golden wisdom contained within this prophetic document.

A Boring Holiday?

Leisure, Virtue, Work, , ,

Each year, from sea to shining sea, our nation sets aside the first Monday of September as a day of great festival.  People gather together by the tens and celebrate Labor Day, a day that “constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country” (Department of Labor History of Labor Day).  Labor Day is remarkable indeed, but not for the reasons for the Central Labor Union first envisioned when they celebrated the first Labor Day back in 1882.  Instead, Labor Day is significant because it serves as a sign of a different achievement of modern man—the erasure of what Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper once called the “Festive Principle.”

This festive principle is written into the nature of mankind.  One might even say that it is festival that man is made for.  At the end of the first creation account, the seventh day, God invites man to celebrate a festival with Him, a time to not just to reflect and rest but to revel in the fact that all that is, is good.  Therefore, each man and woman finds buried in his and her heart a desire to celebrate the eternal festival; a desire that is fanned into flame by the great feasts of this life.

This desire cannot be wholly stamped out, but it most certainly can be squashed.  We can and, in fact, have become most un-festive, a truth marked by the “celebration” of Labor Day.  An experiment that began with the founders of the French Revolution has failed because, as Pieper says, “while man can make the celebration, he cannot make what is to be celebrated, cannot make the festive occasion and the cause for celebrating.  The happiness of being created, the existential goodness of things, the participation in the life of God, the overcoming of death-all these occasions of the great traditional festivals are pure gift. But because no one can confer a gift on himself, something that is entirely a human institution cannot be a real festival” (In Tune with the World, p. 46).

Labor Day, like the other National Holidays including Thanksgiving where no one will name Whom it is we are thanking, are about celebrating gifts we have bestowed upon ourselves.  As the Department of Labor reminds us, “It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.” Dramatic pause aside, the fact that there is a most of suspense as we mention not the real Creator of those things, but man, is most telling.  Once God is removed from our festal vocabulary our festivals naturally fall flat.  Labor Day is a completely flat holiday.

Labor Day in a particular way ends up in the orbit of the absurd because it is a celebration based upon something wholly material.  It no longer has the eternal festival in view.  It loses its sacramental meaning and therefore is boring.  Because of its materiality (along with Thanksgiving and secular Christmas especially) its “celebration” also has an interior spirit of competition.  Men and women cannot unite around a common material good.  The limited nature of material things leads away from unity and always end in competition.

If we peel back the layers of secularization, then we can see why Labor was chosen as worthy of festivity.  Along with procreation, it is the way in which we most image God.  In both cases we image God the Creator.  So it should not surprise us that the Fall, in bruising the image of God in mankind, turned these two things into labor.  The work of Christ the Laborer was to dial back these effects so that work now becomes a source of grace.  Now that is something that is worthy of festival.  That the One Who simply speaks things into existence should allow mere creatures to use their strength and freedom to co-create with Him.  Worker bees have no dignity, man the worker has dignity because and only insofar as he works as the image of God.  To flatten Labor Day out also flattens each one of us making us mere cogs in an economic machine.  Celebrate Labor Day in a spirit of awe and thanksgiving to God the Creator and each man is elevated to his rightful place in the cosmos.

Nietzsche, who was no friend of transcendent values, once said that “the trick is not to arrange a festival but to find people who can enjoy it.”  For all of the reasons above, Christians should enjoy Labor Day and truly celebrate it for everything that it should be.  “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice in it.”

God’s Choice?

Church, Church Authority, Divine Mercy, End of Life, Fasting, God's Will, History, Magisterium, Pope Francis, Prayer, Sin, Spiritual Warfare, , ,

As criticism continues to mount against Pope Francis amidst this time of ecclesiastical turmoil, a growing number of peacemakers have emerged, who, in an attempt to diffuse the situation, are quick to offer the reminder that “he was chosen by the Holy Spirit.”  One can certainly appreciate the attempt to maintain unity.  Especially because the Pope is the most visible sign of Catholic unity.  But this path to peace is a theological dead end.  The Pope is not “chosen by the Holy Spirit”, at least in the sense that the peacemaker means it.  Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI was once asked whether the Holy Spirit is responsible for the election of a pope to which he replied:

I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the Pope. . . . I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined…There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!

In his usual pedagogical succinctness, the Pope Emeritus gives us several important reminders, not only on the election of the Pope, but also on the nature of the Church, especially in times of crises such as we are currently facing.

The Holy Spirit and the Conclave

As Benedict is quick to point out, one need only study history to see that this hypothesis is highly questionable.  History is rife with scoundrels who came to occupy the Chair of Peter.  It is always a good idea to study Church history and remind ourselves of this, especially because most of us have lived under the reign of popes who became saints.  It is only with great intellectual dexterity that we could admit that the Holy Spirit “picked” both these saints and someone like, say, Pope Alexander VI.

One might object that, even if it is a highly informed one, Cardinal Ratzinger was just offering an opinion (“I would say so…”).  The tradition of the Church would suggest otherwise.  Lex orandi, lex credenda—as we worship, so we believe.  The Church, among her various liturgies, has a Mass for the Election of the Pope.   The Church Universal prays that the Conclave will be docile to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.  This implies that they can also operate under the promptings of mixture of other spirits as well.

Free will of the Cardinal electorate then is operative and “anyone” can be chosen.   Yet we are also treading on the horizon of free will and Divine Providence.   The man chosen to be Pope will be God’s choice, but only in the sense that the papal election, like all things, falls under God’s Providence.  We may be certain that the Holy Spirit directly wills the election of a given man as Supreme Pontiff, but through the mystery of Providence will allow another to take his place.

Our Lord told St. Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church.  What He meant by this was that no matter what, the Church would not fail.  The Barque of Peter may take on water, but it will never sink.  The Holy Spirit will allow the Church to take on water, but will always keep her afloat.  That is the extent of His protection.

This however is not the end of the story because of God’s Providence.  Regardless of whether it is a good Pope or bad, the Church will always get the Pope it needs.  Providence dictates that God will always provide the People of God with what they need.

Reading the Times

There may be a mutiny on the Barque of Peter and the Holy Spirit will pick a strong captain to lead a counter-mutiny, stopping the flow of the water.  Or, He may allow another man who joins the mutiny and ignores the water that continues to flow onto the boat.  Eventually all the compartments are flooded, washing the mutineers overboard.  The end result is the same, the corruption has been washed away and the Church was given exactly what she needed.

In a very real sense then the Pope is always God’s choice but only as an instrument.  As a type of the Church, Israel shows us this.  History continually moved in the direction towards the coming of the Messiah, the only question was whether the king and the people would cooperate.  Israel would flourish, grow fat, play the harlot, be chastised, and continue through the remnant.  This pattern is revealed so that we will come to recognize and expect it in the Church.  Either way history will continue to move towards the Second Coming.

In turbulent times this ought to serve as a great comfort.  The infestation of corruption in the Church is finally coming to a head and God is going to root it out.  He will use Pope Francis as his instrument.  The only question seems to be which type of captain Pope Francis will be.  Either way these scandals should not push us towards despair, but should instill hope into us.  God will not be mocked for sure, but neither will He ever abandon His people. He is always on the lookout for co-redeemers—those people who will pick up the Cross with Jesus and lay down their lives for the Church.  Only acts of reparation will repair the Church and each of us has an obligation to do this.  Every man must come on deck, stem the mutiny and start bailing water or risk being carried overboard.  “Penance, penance, penance!” the Angel of Portugal told us through the children of Fatima.  The time is at hand.  Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

Standing Firm in History

Church and State, Culture, History, , , , , ,

The attendant clatter of a silent statue falling on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was loud enough to be heard throughout the country.  Loud, not just because of the coverage it received in the main stream media, but also because it was joined in chorus by the death knell of one historical vision and the triumphal melody of its replacement.  Although Confederate statues have been toppling over with great regularity, this one is different.  Different because it occurred on the campus of an institution of higher learning, an institution that prides itself on its department of history whose “primary goal is to foster the creation and communication of historical knowledge.” History as it has been understood up until now is, well, history.

We must first admit that there is no such thing as merely communicating historical knowledge.  The essence of history is not found in facts, but in interpretation of specific historical events.  Good historians always allow the data of facts to drive them, but in the end how they view reality itself is always going to color their communication.  Events never occur within a vacuum so that the context itself also matters.  As the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson once quipped, an alien may witness the Battle of Hastings and have more facts than we do, but this knowledge would not be historical because it lacked both an understanding of reality and a context.

The Two Views of History

What are these two views of history that have been grappling for the Western Mind?  What we might call modern history has won out strictly because it is modern.  It is modern because it feeds off of the two great modern ideologies—communism and liberalism.  In the communist view, all of history is marked by a conflict between oppressor and oppressed.  History for liberalism is only subtly different in that it documents the struggle at various stages pitting those who fought against for freedom against the enemies of freedom.  Either way, a reduction occurs in which history is driven by conflict with the bad things always left in the past.  This inevitability of progress assumes everything in the past was backwards and that those who do not see this are evil, ignorant or both.

In this way history parallels the theory of evolution in that there is always progress towards a time of enlightened peace.  Progress will save us.  And like its intellectual counterpart, the evolutionary view of history also suffers under the weight of materialism (even if there is some lingering Deism).  With conflict as the only thread, there is a sit-com-like disconnect of events from each other.  History is simply one episode after another, with very little reference to the previous episode.  Retaining a historical memory really has no value, because, as the great historical student Henry Ford once said, “all history is bunk.  The only history I care about is the history I am making.”

The toppling of Silent Sam gives us a prime example of this viewpoint of history.  The Civil War was a battle between the white oppressors in the South and the Union proxies of the oppressed slaves.  Even the great Karl Marx saw it that way.  Sure there are other things that happened, but it all really comes down to this one thing.  Freedom, of course, won the day and the United States marched on in its messianic mission as the instrument of liberal progress.  Because the statues harken back to those days of un-freedom, they must be literally dumped in the dust bin of history.  Anyone who sets his hand to the handle of the bulldozer and looks back can have no part in progress.  History, like our favorite sit-com, has nothing to do with here and now so why would we need reminders of it?  If you do not understand that then you are, at best, an ignorant fool, or just as likely, a racist xenophobe who wants to put other people in chains.

This view of history has finally eclipsed its previous contender; what one might call the Christian view of history.  Christianity is by definition of historical religion because its Divine Founder “in the fullness of time pitched His tent and dwelt among us.”  Whether you use BC/AD or BCE/CE, the fact still remains that the Incarnation is the center of history.  It is the center of history because it proves once and for all that history does not merely have a direction, but a Director Who regularly makes cameos in His story. History now becomes the field in which the redemption of Creation plays out.

Knowing this, history must always leave room for the supernatural.  There are no accidents.  Where would the world be if St. Joan of Arc was blown off because she merely “heard voices”?  What if St. Pius V hadn’t pleaded with the Queen of Victory at Lepanto?  Or what if Pius VI when imprisoned by Napoleon in France had not prayed while the Emperor mocked him (Napoleon is purported to have said “does he think the weapons will fall form the hands of my soldiers?” which is exactly what happened in Waterloo)?  What if the steady handed, trained assassin had not encountered the hand of God in the chest of John Paul II?

The exemplar of all Christian historians is the great St. Augustine.  His City of God is a synthesis of human history read through the lens of Christian principles.  History for Augustine, and for us as Christians, is not a record of events but the revelation of a divine plan that embraces all ages and peoples.  He also shows that history, in order to be truly history, must be continuous.  There are no episodes or seasons, but a continuing story.  Memory is a key component of identity.  Both liberal democracy and Communism create regimes for forgetting the past.  Fans of the Jason Bourne series know the dangers of forgetting the past—not that you are doomed to repeat it, but that an amnesic people is defenseless and malleable.

What About the Statues?

Through the lens of the Christian notion of history, what place do Confederate Statues have as tokens of history?  In an age in which the conflict theory of history prevails they are very important.  When we think we have moved on, it is easy to think we should sanitize all versions of the past.  When we see history as the revelation of God’s plan of redemption for mankind however we need statues.  Statues, as the name suggests, are not symbols of honor but signs of someone who stood firm.  They may have stood firm for bad things like slavery.  Or they may have stood firm for good things like the courage to defend your homeland.  Or, as in the case of many of the Confederate statues, it was both.  But as tokens of history they teach us to choose carefully those things we are going to stand firm in.  They also teach us through real life examples that our actions, good and evil, endure.  They will not be erased.  Finally, they remind us that even the greatest of men is still flawed.  We wonder how courageous young men like those depicted in the Silent Sam statue could have such a blind spot and hopefully wonder where our own blind spots are.  Finally, it keeps our hubris in check in thinking we can build some messianic kingdom.

Let the statues stand—if for no other reason that they keep history from falling into the dustbin.

On Being a Jerk

Sin, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, Virtue, , , ,

One of the funniest scenes in one of the funniest all-time movies is from The Jerk.  The protagonist , Navin R. Johnson, played by Steve Martin, gets into an argument with his wife (played by Bernadette Peters) and tells her “Well I’m going to go then.  I don’t need any of this, this stuff and I don’t need you.”  As he leaves the room he eyes an ashtray and says “except this ashtray.”  As he plots his course out of the room he picks up several more exceptions (including a chair) until his hands are completely full.  What makes this scene particularly funny is not that Johnson is acting like a jerk, but that it makes all of us look like jerks.  Creating our own list of exceptions to what we truly need is at the root of most of our unhappiness.  That is why it takes a truly wise man like St. Thomas to tell us that there are really only two things we need to make us happy, neither of which is a chair or an ashtray.  In the midst of describing the perfect political regime in his treatise On Kingship, the Angelic Doctor reminds the reader that only  virtuous action and “a sufficiency of material goods, the use of which is necessary for virtuous action” are needed for a good life.

The reason for the first one, virtuous action, is rather easy to grasp.  Only the man who is capable of truly governing himself has the power to use his freedom to pursue goodness, truth and beauty.  The virtuous man is a free man.  The vicious man is a slave—to his pride, his vanity and his passions.  Enslaved to the egotistical trinity, he is easily drudged to other men.  Profound unhappiness ensues.

Becoming a Jerk?

But even if we get the first one right, there is always a risk that we will get the second one wrong.  It is the second one that keeps us from becoming jerks.  Given that the good life consists in virtue, then everything else is evaluated by its capacity to foster the life of virtue.  To be fair, St. Thomas does not say this exactly.  Absent the rare man who has the capacity to practice heroic virtue, most men truly need material support to become virtuous.  These things include food, water, clothing, and shelter for the man and those in his care.  In St. Thomas’ day and age the scant material condition of many men made it extremely difficult to become virtuous.  He thought that it was the King’s job to foster an environment in which men were able to obtain these things with relative ease.  That is his point.

But there is an important corollary to what the Dumb Ox is saying.  What St. Thomas did not envision however was a time when material conditions had changed so drastically that a “regular” man’s virtue would be threatened because of an excess of material goods.  We live in such an age where the material comforts of even the poorest are beyond the wealthiest aristocrats of earlier ages.  Virtue now is threatened not so much by a lack of needs, but because of an excess power to obtain our wants.

We might be tempted to a knee-jerk reaction and think that the response is to only focus on those things we absolutely need.  To be clear, there is nothing wrong with wanting things we do not absolutely need.  It is not a matter of either/or.  A rich life includes wants as well as needs.  The problem is that the jerk wanders about grabbing what he can.  He wants things for the wrong reason.  What are the wrong reasons?  All of them, save one, that the thing helps him in some way to live a life of virtue.  Virtue causes in us the habit of wanting the right things.

True Wisdom of the Saints

The wisdom of St. Thomas is perennial.  He has given us a rule to live by in both lack and plenty.  In this age of plenty there are many Christians struggling not to get caught up in the economic materialism of the age.  This rule guides us in deciding what we will buy and what we won’t.  It keeps us from falling prey to the trappings of the world that are meant to lull us to sleep.  And, most importantly, it gives us a rule to pass along to our children.  Life is about wanting the right things for the right reasons and avoiding becoming a jerk.

St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises introduces the concept of indifference which serves as a perfect complement to St. Thomas’ principle.  We should, according to the saint, be indifferent to the means that God uses to make us holy.  All that we care about is that a thing is making us holy.  Everything else in this world is just a means—instruments used for our growth.  When they cease to serve that purpose, we let them go.  Lacking something?  Thank divine Providence because your need for virtue is being filled in that lack.  It is this holy indifference that also keeps us from becoming attached to things we already have.   St. Paul likewise tells the Philippians that this indifference is a key to unlocking joy: “Now I rejoice in the Lord exceedingly, that now at length your thought for me hath flourished again, as you did also think; but you were busied. I speak not as it were for want. For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, to be content therewith. I know both how to be brought low, and I know how to abound: (everywhere, and in all things I am instructed) both to be full, and to be hungry; both to abound, and to suffer need” (Phil 4:10-13)

The Gatekeeper said that only those who live out the evangelical command of poverty can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  And herein lies the great value in the teachings of the three saints—it gives us a means to live a life contrary to the anti-poverty of the age.  Might it take heroic virtue to turn away from the excess material pleasures our world offers?  Perhaps. One of the conditions of sainthood is heroic virtue.  And in the end, that leaves us with a true either/or; either we will be saints or we will be jerks.  Don’t be a jerk.

On Eucharistic Miracles

Eucharist, Faith and Reason, Sacraments, Sacred Heart of Jesus, The Life of Jesus, , , ,

One of the earliest documented Eucharistic miracles occurred in the 8th Century in Lanciano, Italy.  A priest who was said to be experiencing doubts about the Real Presence was witness to the consecrated species turning into human flesh and blood. The flesh and blood were gathered and the Church declared that a miracle had occurred.  After more than a millennium, pilgrims still journey to the Church of St. Francis in Lanciano, Italy to offer adoration to the miraculously transformed Eucharistic species, which have been scientifically verified to be human cardiac flesh and fresh blood.  Lanciano was probably not the first, nor was it the last.  The Church continues to witness (and verify) Eucharistic miracles in our own day.  They are among the most “common” miracles; so common, in fact, that St. Thomas even developed a theology around them in order to help the faithful draw fruit from these miraculous gifts of the New Tree of Life.

Miracles

To approach the tree of Eucharistic faith, we must begin with a few important explanations.  The word miracle is often misused making it necessary to offer some clarifying remarks.  We often hear someone speak of the “miracle of life” when what they really mean is how wonder-full it is.  Within the divine plan, life is the natural end of procreation.  It is amazing and awesome, but not a miracle.  There may be miracles that occur that leads to individual conceptions or individual births, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.  Instead, a miracle occurs when the laws of nature are somehow suspended or altered.  There must be a natural ordering that is understood in order for us to even begin to recognize that a miracle has happened.  The supernatural assumes the natural.

Related to the topic at hand, the Eucharist itself is not a miracle.  Within the Sacramental realm it is exactly what is supposed to happen.  It may be a mystery of unbelievable depths, but it is still governed by a set of laws.  When those laws, which we call form and matter, are obeyed the Eucharist is the “natural” result.  The Bread of Life is an act of God’s omnipotence and omnipresence that has no parallel in the natural order, but still it is the norm within the sacramental order.  Through the proper matter and form, the Son is really and truly present under the appearance of bread and wine.

Eucharistic miracles are no different in this regard.  It is only when the appearance deviates from bread and wine that we can recognize a miracle has happened.  Many saints (St. Catherine of Siena and St. Faustina come to mind) received a personal apparition of Christ’s true body (at various stages of His life) which were miraculous but eventually vanished.  These are personal and the Church does not examine these.  The Church is more interested in the more “permanent” apparitions when the species are transformed into actual flesh and blood such as was seen in Lanciano.  These are miracles properly speaking because the Eucharistic presence of Christ “normally” appears as bread and wine, but through Divine intervention the sacramental law is suspended.

St. Thomas says that the change in the outward appearance has a distinct purpose—to show that Christ’s body and blood are truly in this Sacrament.  It is on faith that we know that, what looks like to all appearances bread and wine, is really the body and blood of Christ.  In order to bolster that faith, God miraculously intervenes and changes the appearance.

Our Lord’s Natural Body

At this point it is important to mention a key aspect of Christ’s Eucharistic presence.  Our Lord’s natural body in its glorified condition has only one natural, spatial presence; heaven.  But through God’s omnipotence His body also has a sacramental dimension that gives it a supernatural non-spatial power of presence enabling it to transcend any physical limits and be present wherever His Eucharistic presence is made manifest.  This power also enables Christ in His humanity and His divinity to be truly present even under the smallest particle of the Eucharistic species.

What this means is that the cardiac muscle in Lanciano is no more an actual piece of Christ’s heart than the Eucharist itself is the natural body of Christ.  The cardiac tissue and drops of blood miraculously preserved in Lanciano only “appear” to be flesh and blood just as the Eucharistic species only appear to be bread and wine.  The miracle is in the change of the accidents and nothing more.  There may be ways to scientifically tie them to the humanity of the God-Man such as blood types and DNA connecting it to the ancestry of Our Lord, but they are not actually parts of His natural body.

Some might balk at this thinking that God is deceiving us.  This is why having an understanding of the Eucharistic theology is important.  But St. Thomas also makes an important point (ST III q.76 art. 8) that “this is not deception, because it is done to represent the truth, namely, to show by this miraculous apparition that Christ’s body and blood are truly in this sacrament”.

In essence the flesh and blood become sacraments verifying the Sacrament.  Like the many miracles that Our Lord performed during His earthly ministry there will always be those who flock to simply see the miraculous.  For the faithful however they should flock because they desire to see the signs themselves.  Because no change in the substance occurs with these miracles, the flesh and blood truly contain the Real Presence of Christ.  That makes them worthy of our adoration so that many pilgrims, confirmed in their faith, adore Our Lord in this miraculous Blessed Sacrament.

The Fatima Example

Grace, Heaven, Mary, Mercy, Sin, , , ,

On the morning of August 13, 1917, an enormous crowd, numbering in the thousands, gathered in the valley of Cova da Iria in Fatima, Portugal expecting to encounter something supernatural. The crowds had continued to grow since Our Lady had appeared to three shepherd children on the 13th day of the previous three months. This time was different however. The children never appeared and the people began to grow restless, wondering what had happened to them. They soon learned that the little visionaries had been kidnapped by the local administrator, an avowed Mason and enemy of the Church, named Arturo de Oliveira Santos. As the crowd grew angry, lightning flashed and a small white cloud floating down from the sky and settled over the same oak tree that the previous apparitions had occurred. Everything began to shimmer with the colors of the rainbow and the cloud then returned from whence it came. Despite the abbreviated supernatural visit and the children being absent, this event was more than just a mere detour on the path to the great Miracle of the Sun during the final apparition on October 13, 1917. It turns out, that once we understand the overall message of Fatima, this event is an essential part of Our Lady’s mission to the small Portuguese village.

One of the constant temptations to those who encountered Jesus was that they were more interested in being amazed by His mighty deeds than anything else. Just as those who witnessed Our Lord’s miracle of the loaves and fishes were mostly interested in simply witnessing His mighty deeds (c.f John 6:26), there is always a danger that we can get caught up in the Secret of Fatima or the Miracle of the Sun and miss the purpose of Our Lady’s visit. That is, we can forget that miracles are not just supernatural events, but signs. The miraculous events at Fatima are each meant to be signs reinforcing the overall message.

The Message

What is the overall message of Fatima?  Our Lady came to call the children (and us) to do penance and pray the Rosary for the salvation of souls. This is at the heart of each of the messages she spoke to the children and the so-called Three Secrets that had been revealed during the July 13th visit.

By all appearances the August 13th “apparition” was a false start of sorts. But viewing the events through the overall message, we can see how they helped advance Our Lady’s mission. It was the aforementioned Three Secrets that generated the interest of the anti-Catholic authorities and caused the children to be kidnapped.

When Santos kidnapped the visionaries by promising them a ride to the Cova da Iria on that August 13th, he first brought them to his house where he attempted to play “good cop” to coax the secret message from the children. While this served to relieve some of the children’s initial fear, they would not break their promise to Mary to keep the contents of the secret to themselves. Once he was convinced this approach would not work, he took the children to local prison and put them in a cell with some other prisoners. He began to interrogate them separately, threatening to boil them in oil if they did not reveal the secret. The children remained steadfast, prepared to become martyrs rather than cave in the face of the administrator’s threats. Eventually the children were released and taken home on the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15.

When we apply the lens of Mary’s overall message of Fatima—penance and the Rosary—to the events of those 3 days, we can see how they fit into Mary’s plan. The harrowing events of those three days serve as a model of what it actually looks like in practice to live the message of Fatima. Our Lady wanted to make the children a model for all of us.

When Santos locked the children up in the jail with a group of prisoners, they were obviously quite afraid. According to Lucia’s memoir, it was her cousin Jacinta who was the most afraid. Her brother, Francisco, reminding her of their mission, told her “Don’t cry, we can offer this to Jesus for sinners.”  In the face of great fear and suffering, the children were faithful to the message of Fatima, looking at their suffering as a means to save souls. They were most certainly afraid, but also willing to cooperate with Our Lord and Our Lady to “lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of mercy.”

The Message Lived Out

This call for penance should resonate in our ears. God wants to bestow upon His children adopted through Baptism the graces won by His natural Son to be co-redeemers with Him (c.f. Col 1:24). While many of us will not face an ordeal as momentous as the little shepherds did, our daily trials can be a source of sanctification for ourselves, but also when borne with patience and love for souls, can be united to Christ’s. When confronted with two choices, we can always choose the one with more of the Cross in it and, like the Little Flower, strive to never miss an opportunity to offer a sacrifice for the salvation of souls.

Our Lady also wants us to use the events of those three days to remove the main obstacle we often face when doing penance for others—fear. These were mere children and there is no natural explanation as to why all three of them were able to remain steadfast when faced with the prospect of being boiled in a cauldron of oil. But they did not conquer their fear, it was grace that worked in them. The willingness to be martyred is always a grace and Our Lady wants us to know that we should not let our fear stop us. By selecting little children, Our Lady wanted to make it abundantly clear that we should not despair of the help of grace in the midst of our trials.

The children also modeled the power of prayer, specifically the Rosary in the conversion of sinners. The children began praying the Rosary in their prison cell and the other prisoners soon joined them. This changed the entire atmosphere of the prison and even one of the thieves began to pray his concertina while the others began to sing and dance with the children. Trusting in the power of the Rosary, Lucia said, “We only hope that Our Lady has had pity on his soul and converted him!”

Our Lady rescheduled her appearance to the children to the 19th of August. At about 4 0’clock on the afternoon, Lucia sensed Mary was about to appear while they were out grazing their flocks at a place called Valinhos. When Lucia asked her usual question as to what Mary wanted from her, she replied “I want you to continue going to the Cova da Iria on the 13th and continue praying the Rosary every day. In the last month I will perform a miracle so that all may believe.”  The location may have changed, but the message rang familiar. As this centenary year marking the apparition of Our Lady in Fatima nears its conclusion, the message of Fatima remains relevant. As Pope Benedict XVI when commenting on the contents of the Third Part of the Secret once said, “the exhortation to prayer as the path of ‘salvation for souls’ and, likewise, the summons to penance and conversion” remains ever new. May we take this to heart and live the message of Fatima every day.

St. Catherine of Siena and the Latest Church Scandal

Church, Dialogue, Divine Mercy, Fasting, Mercy, Saints, Sin, Spiritual Warfare, Suffering, , , ,

For anyone who thought that the clergy sexual abuse scandal was something that was left in the past, the recent revelations regarding former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick have shown that the cancer has metastasized.  Round two promises to be uglier than round one, especially since the former Cardinal’s actions were widely known throughout the American Church and beyond.  The laity could be excused for harboring a feeling of déjà vu, especially given the overall weariness with feeling like sheep without a shepherd.  They might even be excused for looking for looking for ways to take matters into their own hands; might that is until they read the writings of one of the Doctors of the Church.

St. Catherine and the Dialogue on the Clergy

Best known for her ecstatic dictation of a dialogue with God the Father, St. Catherine of Siena lived in an era marked by clerical corruption.  In fact, she was instrumental in reforming the Church by executing some of the very things the Father dictated to her.  There are large sections in her Dialogue in which God tells Catherine what must be done about sinful clergy.  These words, rooted deeply in the Gospel message are particularly relevant for lay people today and merit special attention given the state of the Church today.

The Father begins His dialogue with Catherine reminding her of the great dignity of priests and prelates regardless of their personal sin.  He tells her that “it is impossible to have a greater dignity than theirs” because He has made them “My Christs” (Dialogue, 113).  This dignity attaches to the office and thus cannot be wiped away no matter how often the clergy attempts to deface it through personal sin.  He is well aware that with this dignity comes a great responsibility and that “by sinning they are abusing the souls of their neighbors” and will one day have to answer for it; “Their dignity in being My ministers will no save them from My punishment…they will be punished more severly than all the other because they have received more from My kindness.  Having sinned so miserably they are deserving of greater punishment” (121).  But from the perspective of the laity there is always a certain dignity such that “To Me redounds every assault they make on My ministers.”  He goes on to say that “a person can do no worse violence than to assume the right to punish My ministers” (116).  What the Father is reminding us is that it is the Church’s role to punish the sinful clergy and not the laity (unless appointed by the Church to do so).  This applies even when the Church seems to ignore it or turns a blind eye.  This, as we shall see in a moment, does not mean the laity need to act like sheep led to the slaughter but that they have an active role in bringing about justice.

This role is revealed to Catherine by the Father when He begins “to show her the wretchedness of their [the sinful clergy] lives” (121).  First He describes how the sin is made manifest in their unwillingness to correct others.  The ministers “let My members grow rotten for want of correction…because of fear of losing their rank and position or because they themselves are living in the same or greater sins.”  It is as if they are blind leaders of the blind (117).

The Sins of the Clergy

And what, besides human respect, are these “same or greater sins”?  The Father “reveals these miserable sins of theirs,” the “stench which displeases not only Me…but the devils as well.”  These sins are the sins which are so hateful to Me that for this sin alone five cities (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Zoar) were struck down by My divine judgment.  For My divine justice could no longer tolerate it, so despicable to Me is this abominable sin…So you see, dearest daughter, how abominable this sin is to Me in any person. Now imagine how much more hateful it is in those I have called to live celibately” (124).

These words may have been spoken in the 14th Century, but they are as relevant today as they were then.  The parallels to our situation today are uncanny so that through St. Catherine God the Father has left us a blueprint for how the laity ought to respond .  Catherine grasps that these sins are revealed by Providential design.  The Father says, “Sometimes I reveal these miserable sins of theirs to My servants (just as I did to you) so that they may be even more concerned for their salvation and hold them out to Me with greater compassion, praying for them with sorrow for their sins and the insult they are to Me ”(124).  God the Father wants the laity to bring these sinful clerics before Him in merciful prayer so that He might be further glorified in His mercy.  Of this response, many of our contemporaries have already spoken.  But Catherine knows the Father is asking for more from us when she pleads, “O eternal Father, be merciful to Me and to these creatures of yours!  Otherwise take the soul from my body, for I do not think I can stand it anymore. Or give me some respite by showing me where I and  Your other servants can find refuge so that this leprosy will not be able to harm us or deprive us of our bodily and spiritual purity” (124).  She begs the Father how it is that she might escape this leprosy that is infecting the Body.  The Father tells her, “charity will make you put up with your neighbors with true patience by enduring pain, torment, and weariness no matter what their source. In this way you will flee and escape the leprosy” (124). In short, the Father is asking St. Catherine and each one of us not only for prayer, but for penance.  He is calling upon the laity in a very specific way “to fill up in their flesh what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, which is the Church” (Col 1:24).

From within the context of the renewed universal call to holiness, God has providentially arranged for the outward show of sanctity of the Church to depend in a very particular way on the laity.  In an age infected with clericalism this is a most important message.  If the laity are truly to be God’s other “Christs” as well, then they must continue His mission of reparation.  This trial by fire is a clarion call in an ecclesial environment that has shunned penance for generations.  Now the future of the Church depends upon it.  The Holy Spirit may have promised it would not fail, but a renewed laity can make it thrive.  That renewal begins with lives dedicated to penance and reparation.  St. Catherine of Siena, pray for us!

The Mystery of the Transfiguration

beauty, Creed, Grace, Incarnation, Passion of Christ, Resurrection, Scripture, The Life of Jesus, Theology,

One can hardly begin to imagine the amazing things that the Apostles, especially the inner trio of Peter, John and James, saw during their time with Our Lord.  But if you were to ask which event stood out above the others, the answer might surprise you at first.  You might think for St. Peter it would have been the event of the miraculous catch or walking on water, but instead he mentions only one—the Transfiguration.  Given nearly three decades to reflect upon it, the Vicar of Christ in his second encyclical still finds it to be the most formative event in His life, describing himself as receiving honor and glory from God the Father when he was an eyewitness of the majesty of Christ on the holy mountain (c.f 2Pt 1:16-19).  It is this truly awe-inspiring event on the mount of Transfiguration that the Church invites us to celebrate today.

To set the tone, it is worth mentioning that the Transfiguration is one of the few events in the life of Christ which is found in all three Synoptic Gospels.  The Holy Spirit thought that this episode was not only formative in the life of the Apostles but ought also to be for the Christians that were to follow.  For each of the mysteries of Christ’s life are recorded within Sacred Scripture not only for our knowledge but as invitations for our participation.  The Church reminds us of this invitation by including this feast with the liturgical calendar because, as Pope Pius XII reminds us, although these historical events occurred in the past, “they still influence us because each of the mysteries brings its own special grace for our salvation” (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 165).  It is then the Church’s hope that we will lay hold of the special grace attached to the Transfiguration.

What the Transfiguration Reveals

Grasping what made this experience so monumental for St. Peter will help us to drink more fully of the mystery ourselves.  In this single event we find a compendium of Christology.  The Transfiguration reveals the fullness of the Person of Christ—true God and true man.

When asked, most Christians would say that Ss. Peter, John and James witnessed His divinity.  This is true to a certain extent, but what they saw was the glory of His sacred humanity.  A moment’s reflection on the accounts will make this clear.  First, their reaction betrays this belief.  They are clearly awed by the fact that “His face shone like the sun and His garments became white as light” (Mt 17:2), but they are not at any pains to look away.  Instead when the Divine presence is manifested in the cloud, they “fell on their faces” because they know that “man shall not see me and live” (Ex 33:20).  It is the word spoken by the Father that reveals Christ’s divinity to them—“This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased.  Listen to Him” (Mt 17:6).

His divinity, according to St. Thomas, was also made known to the Apostles in His power over the living and the dead.  Elijah was(and still is) among the living.  He has never died and lives within some heavenly realm until his return to defeat the Antichrist as one of the two witnesses (c.f. Rev 11:3-12).  Christ had power to summon him.  Christ also was the Lord of the dead, able to bring forth Moses from the realm of Abraham’s bosom.  It was to preach to them of His Exodus, that is His Passion, Death and Resurrection, that He brought them forth.

One suspects that the profundity of the Transfiguration for Peter was not just because it revealed Christ’s divinity to Him, but because it also put flesh around the divinity.  It is the foundation for what has since been explained as the Hypostatic Union.  Although it would take the fullness of Christ’s mission and the gift of the Holy Spirit to realize it, the Apostles now knew that this was a man, but no mere man, that was walking around with them.

The Second Person of the Trinity, the “Beloved Son” is God.  In the fullness of time, He took to Himself a human nature without setting aside His divine personality.  He remained and remains a divine Person that used a human nature (not a human person) as His instrument for our salvation.  In the natural course of events, when a body and soul are fused together in conception, a person is formed.  But in Christ, the body and soul united to the Second Person of the Trinity so that He supplied the personality.  This is why we can accurately say that God became man and not that a man became God.

This uniting of the human nature with the Eternal Word is called the Hypostatic Union.  This union means that the body and soul of Christ enjoy special privileges.  One of those privileges was the Beatific Vision.  This is the direct vision of God that all the blessed in heaven possess; each being able to see all things in their divine relationship.  It is a source of constant joy and glory so that this beatitude overflows from the soul into the body, making it shine like the sun.  This effect, one of the four qualities of a glorified body, is called Clarity.

It is a miracle that is, a suspension of what naturally happens that the effects of the Beatific Vision did not flow into all the regions and powers of Christ’s soul allowing Him to suffer and sorrow.  Otherwise He could not be the “Man of Sorrows.”  Likewise it is a miracle that His Glory did not overflow into His body.

The Transfiguration is a result of God “suspending” this miracle so that the natural clarity of Christ’s body shines forth.  He suspends this miracle to reveal the other three qualities of the glorified humanity at other points in His public ministry.  He shows His natural agility by walking on water, His natural subtlety by passing from Mary’s womb, leaving her virginity intact and His impassibility when He was unharmed by the Jews attempts to stone Him.  But because clarity is perceptible to the human eye, the Transfiguration becomes a testimony to the full humanity of Christ.  It is the testimony of the fullness of divinity and humanity in this single event that leaves the indelible mark on St. Peter’s mind.

The Transfiguration and Us

The Hypostatic Union plays into this in a second way as well.  In Mystici Corporis Christi, Pope Pius XII says “[F]or hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love.” (75).   It was the Beatific Vision that made each one of us present at the Transfiguration.  He performed this miracle then not just for the Apostles, but for each one of us individually.  He simply awaits our active participation in this mystery so that He can give to us the graces He has already won.

Like all of His mysteries, there are personal graces to be found for each one of us; graces we discover through personal meditation upon the mystery itself.  There are also the more “generic” graces attached to the mystery of the Transfiguration as well.  Blessed Columba Marmion articulates a three-fold grace that Christ wants to give us when we ascend the summit of Tabor.  The first is the grace of increased faith.  We can re-echo the Father’s declaration by proclaiming, “Yes Father that is Your Beloved Son.  I believe.  Help my unbelief.”  Secondly, there is the grace of hope.  The Transfiguration reveals to us our destiny.  By sharing the Sonship of Christ, we come to share in His blessed reward.  Finally, there is the grace of charity won by doing whatever He tells us.  The commands of God are always supplemented by the power to fulfill them.  And in this regard, the Transfiguration becomes a great source of salvation here and now.

The End of the Death Penalty?

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

Today the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had approved a change to the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the use of the death penalty.  The specific paragraph in the Catechism, no. 2267, had included an important qualifier admitting that the State may validly have recourse to its use: “the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty.”  The modified version has removed this important qualifier and now says the death penalty is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”  While this may seem like a relatively small change, at least doctrinally speaking, it is more important than one might think.

The Snowball Effect

First, it means that the preceding paragraph (no. 2266) also will need to be modified.  Legitimate public authority no longer has the right and duty to inflict proportionate punishment to the offense.  I have written about this in greater detail earlier this year, but to summarize, by saying that there are no crimes deserving of death, you ultimately invite injustice through arbitrary punishment.  As I put it back in March, “To say that a mass murderer deserves the same punishment (life imprisonment) as say a rapist is to ultimately destroy the principle of proportionality.  That a mass murderer gets only life imprisonment would suggest that a rapist who, “at least didn’t kill someone” should get less.  This leads to a sort of arbitrariness in punishment, including excess or even no punishment at all.”

This one change creates a snowball effect that can only become an avalanche of change.  The Church’s divinely inspired teachings can be likened to a seamless garment so that if you tug at the smallest string of doctrine the entire thing unravels.  Necessarily the Church’s teaching will then have to change regarding the rights and duties of the State, followed by the rights and duties of the individual and so on.  Before long we are left with a pile of string.

More importantly, the change also signals to the Faithful that the Pope is wrong.  Mind you, I am not saying this particular Pope is wrong (yet) but the Vicar of Christ is, in a very real way, one voice throughout the centuries.  Numerous Popes have taught that there are valid applications of Capital Punishment (including Pius V and his Catechism of the Council of Trent, Pius XII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and all the Popes who, as head of the Papal States, exercised their right and duty in executing criminals as a means of retributive justice), even if they exercised prudential judgment as to when it should be applied.  Now we begin to see why this is about more than just the death penalty.  Either all of these Popes taught error or this particular Pope is now teaching error by abolishing the death penalty.

In what now appears to have been a prophetic utterance, the future Pope Benedict XVI, as Prefect for the Congregation of Divine Faith under St. John Paul II, once said:

“[I]f a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment… he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities… to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible… to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about… applying the death penalty…”

Given this and the fact that the new version appears to be literally wiping out tradition (recall the paragraph in question makes reference to “the traditional teaching of the Church”), we should be inclined to side with the litany of saints and previous Popes who thought that Capital Punishment could be a just, and therefore licit, means of punishment.  In short, by calling the death penalty “inadmissible” the Pope is contradicting Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture.  Rarely used? Fine, that is a prudential matter.  Absolutely immoral or inadmissible?  This is too far, contradicting Tradition and leads to injustice.

It IS all about the Dignity of the Person

The Scriptural justification is particularly relevant in this case because it directly contradicts the wording of the new No. 2267.  While setting up His covenant with Noah, God says “Anyone who sheds the blood of a human being, by a human being shall that one’s blood be shed. For in the image of God have human beings been made” (Gn 9:6).  Obviously it is problematic (at best) to say that God has commanded something that the Pope is now calling immoral.  But that is not really the biggest problem with the now “inadmissible” nature of the death penalty.

Vatican spokesman Greg Burke when speaking of the new wording said “the key point is really human dignity.”  But dignity is a two-edged sword of sorts.  Notice that the Lord tells Noah that it is because murder is an affront to man’s dignity as made in the image of God that men should have recourse to the death penalty.  In other words, rather than being an attack on the dignity of the person, the death penalty affirms it.  It affirms the dignity of the victim.  You cannot speak of the dignity of the offender while at the same time ignoring the dignity of the victim.  Eventually you do violence to the notion of human dignity until it becomes a term devoid of any real content.  To say that a human person is so valuable that the only proportionate punishment for killing him is to forfeit your own life (the most valuable thing you own) is a great testament to the dignity of the human person.

Perhaps not as obvious is the fact that the death penalty also affirms the dignity of the offender as well.  Edward Feser goes into more detail on this in his book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, but his point is rather salient.  Capital punishment treats the offender not as a victim of his own rage, but as a free moral agent (i.e. made in the image of God).

Mr. Burke is right, the key point is human dignity, but not in the way he meant it.  To fully take the death penalty off the table ends up degrading the value of human life.  It is false then to deem the death penalty inadmissible in all cases and contrary to the Gospel—the power to take the life of a criminal comes from above (c.f. Jn 19:11).  Anyone who says otherwise is contradicting Sacred Scripture and Tradition.

Catholics Slinging the Ink?

Moralilty, Theology of the Body, ,

The tattoo taboo which kept many people from even getting inked in the past has been lifted causing many Christians to ask whether they should join the growing trend.  This seemingly harmless form of self-expression coupled with silence from the Church renders us subject only to our personal inclinations.  But is this really the case?

Before addressing the question directly, a digression is necessary.  In an age where “freedom of conscience” is over-emphasized, we can fall into the trap of thinking that if the Church has nothing to say about a given topic then we are free to decide for ourselves.  But this type of thinking can be morally harmful.  What the Church does for us is to provide moral principles by which we can freely (in the truest sense of the world) govern our own lives.  She will teach those principles through specific instances, especially where the application might not be very clear or the offense is particular egregious, but in general we should not expect the Church to speak on every single topic.  Nor should we simply assume that all is well because the Church has been silent.  We instead must see what moral principles are involved in our decision.

Secondly, we have to admit, especially in an age of exaggerated Gnosticism, that we are both body and soul.  Something permanent like a tattoo is not just a change to our body, but a change made to our person.  In this way permanent tattoos are different than something like a temporary tattoo, drawing on our skin or even wearing a particular outfit.  A permanent change, being a different moral object, likewise carries a different moral weight than a temporary change.

Biblical Prohibition?

Turning, then, to the question of tattoos, we have to ask what moral principles are in play. Within Evangelical circles, these moral principles are clearly laid out in Sacred Scripture. Leviticus 19:28 says that “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks on you: I am the LORD.”  Many other Christians are quick to point out that this particular precept is not binding upon Christians because it belongs to the Jewish ceremonial law.  I will leave it to more erudite biblical scholars to argue this particular point without weighing in, but it seems this approach could lead us into an unnecessarily deep Scriptural rabbit hole.  What can confidently be asserted however is that specific prescriptions are given for specific reasons, at specific times and in specific places.  But the underlying principle remains intact.  Christ did not abolish the law, but fulfilled it.

Tattoos were used as marks to show who the bearer belonged to.  Slaves bore the marks of their masters, soldiers the marks of the general and worshippers the sign of their deity.  Because the Jews were told from “the beginning” that they bore in their very person the image of their Deity, they were prohibited from getting tattoos.  They already were marked with the sign of their Master, their General and their God and to bear a mark of another would be tantamount to a lie.

It is this fundamental principle, namely, that man bears the image of God in his person that motivates the proscription in Leviticus and also motivates the Church’s teaching on the immorality of any bodily mutilation.  The principle of totality and integrity says that we may not modify the body of a person except in the case of medical necessity or to restore proper functioning, including necessary cosmetic changes (like when a person is burned or physically deformed in another way).  Put in more religious terms, those things that make the sacrament of the body reflect the image of God are good while those things that mask the image of God are not.

This is why something like makeup would be in a different moral category than tattoos.  Makeup, when modestly applied, should enhance the beauty that is already present in the person.  It draws attention to the image of God in the person.  Too much makeup on the other hand only serves as a mask and hides the reality of the person as she really is.  A woman who wears makeup that modestly draws attention to her eyes bears no moral fault, while a woman who attempts to hide her wrinkles by applying a ton of makeup is trying to cover up more than the wrinkles (in essence lying about her age).  It is a question of enhancement versus alteration.

Tattoos and Bodily Mutilation

Returning now to the question of tattoos, the meaning of tattoos may have changed so that they are no longer marks of ownership, but the underlying principle remains valid.  It also seems very obvious that someone who covers themselves with tattoos has mutilated their body.  But what about the person who wants a single tattoo?  We return to the question of whether the one tattoo is an enhancement, namely, it helps to see the image of God more clearly, or is it an alteration?  It seems, rather unavoidably, that it amounts to a bodily alteration and therefore is a form of bodily mutilation.

There are many who will object that bodily alteration is perfectly fine.  Isn’t that what we do when we go to the gym?  These are fundamentally different however.  Changing your body through working out cooperates with a natural process.  Tattoos do not.  They are more like the man who gets pectoral implants than the man who spends his time bench pressing.

Most people would not go through the moral calculus we just did. Instead they view tattoos as a form of self-expression, like the person who wears mismatched socks or only one color shirt.  This however falls back into the Gnostic/Dualist trap.  The body is not something I merely wear, but is me.  That I have to add something to my person so that I can express myself seems like an oxymoron.  We have been given many natural powers by which we express ourselves.  Plus in the majority of cases the meaning of tattoos is hardly obvious.  That is, they fail as a means of self-expression because they do not adequately express their meaning.

There is one last reason why someone should avoid tattoos and it is based on a principle of St. Francis de Sales.  The saint thought that there were many things that on the surface seem to be morally permissible, but once we examine them we realize they are fraught with moral danger.  While I don’t think tattoos pass the first test, even if they do, they fail the second as well.  So much of the moral life is about why we do what we do and there are not a lot of good reasons to get tattoos.  Most of our personal reasons center on our own vanity.  After all, why would we have them except to draw attention to them?  There is also the temptation to dress in a way that shows them off, which can also lead to immodesty and unchastity.

There was a time not too long ago where tattoos were considered taboo—signs of being a fringe dweller in society.  But in recent times they have gone mainstream with some estimates of 1 in 5 Americans having one.   Despite their popularity however, Catholics should think twice before slinging the ink.