All posts by twowingstogod@gmail.com

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.

Making Up Your Mind about Mindfulness

Anthropology, Culture, Devils, New Age, Paganism, , ,

As Christians we are somewhat conditioned to look east, for east has long been believed to be the direction that Our Lord’s triumphant return.  While we wait however there are some of us who have looked further east and sought to adopt spiritual elements from the religions in the Far East.  The latest practice to be pondered is Mindfulness.

One of the most vocal proponents of Mindfulness is Dr. Gregory Bottaro.  As a practicing clinical psychologist and Catholic, he has sought treatments to help his patients in ways that are consistent with the Catholic vision of man.  To that end, he has been using Mindfulness within a clinical setting and has even written a book called The Mindful Catholic defending its use.

Mindfulness finds its origins in modern Theravada Buddhism and purports to create within the practitioner an awareness and acceptance, without judgment, of what he or she is thinking or feeling.  Or, to use Dr. Bottaro’s simple definition, mindfulness is “paying attention to the present moment without judgment or criticism.”  It is this inherent connection to a “New Age” practice that has many people concerned about its use.

Dr. Bottaro believes, like the Church herself, that even if a technique is borrowed from a New Age religion, it does not automatically make it wrong.  Instead we must look to see whether the technique can be stripped of its spiritual elements so that it can be “baptized” and used and prescribed licitly by Catholics.  In the case of Mindfulness, Dr. Bottaro claims that it is possible and that Mindfulness is not just a therapeutic technique, but one that all Catholics should be practicing.  This, of course, has been met with serious opposition questioning whether or not it can be severed from its Buddhist roots, including a book written by Susan Brinkmann as well as those at EWTN.  We will not add another voice to that particular debate here, but instead will examine Mindfulness from a different angle, namely Catholic anthropology.

Mindfulness and Catholic Anthropology

In the opening line of Appendix I of his book, Dr. Bottaro makes the claim that “Catholic mindfulness is built on Catholic principles.”  It is not clear from the rest of the article which principles he has in mind.  He seems to spend the bulk of his time defending its use against New Age claims that he never gets around to discussing how mindfulness harmonizes with Catholic anthropology.  It is in this arena of Catholic anthropological principles that mindfulness fails.  Rather than leading to mental health, it can facilitate further mental illness.

In anticipation of an immediate objection, what qualifies me, a theologian, to answer the question as to whether Mindfulness can lead to mental health?  To ask the question is to admit just how steeped we have become in the empirical mindset.  There is a distinction of vital importance to be made between what I will call the philosophy of psychology and the science of psychology.  The philosophy of psychology is concerned with, to use Dr. Bottaro’s terms, “Catholic principles” while the science of psychology is concerned with the clinical application of those principles through various techniques.  The theologian or philosopher can ask whether a given technique can lead to mental health (i.e. it leads to actions in accord with human nature) while a psychologist, once he knows the answer to this question, can ask if a given technique does in practice lead to mental health.

Foundational to Catholic anthropology is the fact that each one of us, to greater or lesser extents, is mentally ill.  This is said not to make us all victims or belittle those who suffer greatly because of serious mental illness.  Instead it is to point out a fundamental flaw in that we have a tendency to embrace the brokenness that comes from the Fall.  We equate natural (what we are) with normal (what everyone around us is doing).  This means that mental health can only come about through practices that restore what is natural and not necessarily what is normal.

Man, by nature, is an intellectual creature.  This means that he was made to rule himself by right reason to do the good passionately.  In other words, the intellect in man was to reign supreme, guiding the will to the good which had full cooperation from the bodily powers including the emotions, memory and imagination.  Post-edenic man finds his intellect darkened by ignorance, the will weakened and the bodily powers running amok.  The Fall left man in disarray, but not beyond repair.  God, using supernatural means such as actual and sanctifying grace can heal us.  But there are also natural means at our disposal to heal these effects.  Primary among those means are the virtues by which we develop habits that overcome the effects of the Fall.  The virtues rescue what is natural from what is normal.

Secondly because man is (and not just has) body and soul, the soul depends upon the body for its operation of knowing.  It does this primarily through the imagination and memory.  They provide the “raw material” upon which the intellect works.  The intellect abstracts the contents of its thoughts from the image (called a phantasm) provided it by the imagination, an image it received either from the outside world or from the memory (or both).  It is not just productive, but also reproductive in that it exercises insight and control to produce images as reflections of ideas.  This puts flesh to concept so to speak.  When we think of a concept, say like God, some image comes into our mind, even though we have never seen Him.  The images we form greatly affect our thoughts.  Imagine a demon who looks like a terrible dragon.  Now imagine a demon wearing red tights with horns.  Which of these reflects right thought about demons?

Given the material prominence of the imagination and to a slightly lesser extent the memory, one can readily see how important they are to mental health.  Whether we like it or not, they affect not just what we think about, but also how we judge.  A trivial example might help.  Suppose I fall out of a chair because I wasn’t being careful.  The next time I see a chair that memory will be invoked and I may recall the pain of the fall.  Chairs (and not just that one chair) will become associated with pain and something to be feared.  My intellect must then make a judgment on the phantasm that the chair poses no danger.  If I do not make that judgment, or I judge wrongly that chairs are bad then the association becomes stronger causing fear each time the phantasm is present, reinforcing the idea that chairs are dangerous.  A feedback loop is created and mental illness is comes about.  This can only be corrected when the judgment that chairs are not harmful is adopted and the intellect “corrects” the phantasms attached to chair.  Until the imagination comes under the complete control of the intellect, the person will still be torn between reality and perception.

Quieting the Interior Chatter

Obviously the memory and imagination are necessary faculties for mental health and therefore we can’t simply shut them off.  Instead they must be schooled so that they do not, as Adolphe Tanqueray says in his classic book The Spiritual Life, “crowd the soul with a host of memories and images that distract the spirit” but fall under the control of the intellect and the will.

Although he never says so explicitly, it is these two faculties, memory and imagination, which mindfulness attempts to govern.  Dr. Bottaro says that the goal is to turn away from the “interior chatter.”  This interior chatter comes from overactive memories and imaginations that lead to wrong ways of judging reality.  He suggests that by focusing on the present moment through mindfulness exercises you can begin to bring these powers under the control of the “mind.”

In this regard Dr. Bottaro is no different from many of the spiritual masters who say that one of the best ways to mortify the interior senses of memory and imagination is by focusing on the present moment.  However, there is one important difference—none of them would say that you can learn to govern the interior senses by “paying attention to the present moment without judgment or criticism.”  Mental health consists in the right judgment of reality.  The remedy to judging incorrectly is not to cease judging.  Any exercises that promote this lead away from mental health and not towards it.

Why is this the case?  Because the mind judges “automatically.”  It judges because that is what it does.  The mind has three acts—understanding, judgment and reasoning.  Once the mind has grasped what a thing is (understanding), it immediately attempts to relate it to other things (judgment).  As Blessed John Henry Newman put it, “It is characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgment on the things which come before them.  No sooner do we learn that we judge; we allow nothing to stand by itself.”

Inevitable Path to Buddhism?

Dr. Bottaro says that “mindfulness does not meaning turning off the thoughts in your mind, but using them as a door to greater awareness of yourself.  This is actually one of the essential differences between Catholic mindfulness and Eastern-based forms of meditation.”  But one cannot simply turn off judging without doing violence to the natural process of reasoning.  In essence by trying to abort the second act of the mind, it shuts down the mind completely, precisely what the Eastern-based forms are proposing.  It seems the very thing he is trying to avoid, he inadvertently brings about.  Perhaps those who are concerned about the spiritual traps of Buddhist practices are right after all.  Mindfulness may be not just a practice that Buddhist use, but a Buddhist “sacrament” that brings about the desired outcome of emptying the mind.  This happens regardless of the intention of the practitioner.  Perhaps there is a “genius” in the technique that, by doing what a Buddhist does, it causes the person to think like a Buddhist.  And once they think like a Buddhist they begin to act like one.

This may explain why, given that the doctor is also a “patient” of mindfulness that his book has a number of New Age red flags in his book when he attempts to articulate some Catholic principles.  Under the sub-heading Finding Peace, Dr. Bottaro sounds more New Age than he does Catholic.  He describes Jesus as “the human person of God, Jesus Christ.”  As Nestorius found out in the 5th Century, Jesus is not a human person but a Divine person who took to Himself a human nature.  One might excuse this merely as a lack of theological precision except he goes further making the reader wonder whether the label Catholic can be applied.

In the same section he also says “You have heard that you are a temple of the Holy Spirit, but you are also more than that.  You exist in the form that God Himself would take if He were to enter into the created universe…”(emphasis added)  To say that we are more than temples of the Holy Spirit has a very Buddhist “feel” to it.  The only thing “more than” being a creature with the indwelling Holy Spirit is to be God Himself, something a Buddhist would readily accept.  Christ did not take to Himself a human nature because human nature was so great, but because He is so great.  In other words the doctor gets it backwards by putting man at the center instead of God.  We should not be surprised then when he says that “the central being that is consistently in your awareness in each present moment is you.  Therefore, mindfulness is a journey to find peace with yourself.”

Buddhism is a journey to find peace within yourself.  Catholicism, however, is a journey to find peace with God; peace that is only found outside of man.  The two are not compatible.   You will look forever, perhaps we might say eternally, for peace with yourself and you will never find it.   For Buddhists peace is found within because God is found within.  But for Catholicism the interior division that we experience is caused by our division with God and only when that is healed, can be even begin to experience the “peace with surpasses all understanding” (Phil 4:7 ).  Perhaps it is better not to let our gazes go any further east than Rome and leave Mindfulness to the Buddhists.

Gender Dysphoria and the Brave New World

Culture, Freedom, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Theology of the Body, , ,

After receiving an overwhelming thumbs-down from the LGBT community for her upcoming role as a transgender man, Scarlett Johansson has withdrawn from her participation in the film.  Initially she defended her casting by reminding the critics that actors in movies are not actually turning into the characters they play but instead are merely portraying them.  Never ones to fully grasp the distinction between imagination and reality, the transgender supporters continued to blast her until she finally relented telling Out.com that she had made a mistake.  In her official statement she said, “I am thankful that this casting debate, albeit controversial, has sparked a larger conversation about diversity and representation in film.”  While Ms. Johansson may be grateful that a conversation has been sparked, this particular group of people’s track record with actual conversation and debate is rather sketchy.  Adept at verbal sleight of hand and ad hominem (would they call it something different like ad et identify hominem?) arguments transgender activists avoid answering the tough questions.   But just in case they are in a talkative mood, there are a few questions that many of us would like to have answered.

The movie is supposed to tell the life story of a “transgender” man, Tex Gill.  I put the adjective in front of man in quotation marks not to be a contrarian but because my question has to do with the label transgender.  If he really is a man and not constructed to be a man, then why must that label appear at all?  Is he any less of a man than say a man who hasn’t transitioned?  It seems to me that by applying the modifier, you are admitting as much.  What if a man had been cast to play the protagonist?  Would we have seen the same response?

Why Must There Be a Label?

The label will always apply because the dirty little secret is that you cannot actually change someone’s sex to match their gender identity.  No amount of hormone therapy can change the biological reality, a reality that touches the entire person all the way down to the cellular level.  Some differences are not due to hormones but are a direct result of the genetic differences between the two sexes as numerous studies have shown. (like the ones detailed in Exploring the Biological Contributions to Human Health: Does Sex Matter?).  The best you can do is to give that woman some masculine characteristics.  Likewise, no amount of plastic surgery can turn that same woman into a man.  Perhaps you can remove breasts and construct something that looks like a penis, but it will never achieve true biological functioning completely like one.  This, and the exorbitant cost, is why most people opt out of genital reconstruction.

At best the person suffering from gender dysphoria can hope for artificial changes in their bodies in hopes of matching their gender identity.  How is it then that this will remedy the inner turmoil they experience?  In other words, how will they ever be able to remove the “transgender” label and live merely as a man or woman?  They will always carry some physical reminders of who they really are.  It is no wonder then that most of the evidence points to the psychological benefit being relatively minor given that they have only deepened their existential crisis by living in, as Dr. Paul McHugh says, “counterfeit sexual garb.”

St. John Paul II reminded us over and over that men and women only find true meaning in their lives by making a sincere gift of themselves to others.  In a fallen and wounded world this is far from obvious so that God has left our bodies as a sign of this path to happiness.  To mutilate this sign in hopes of finding your true identity only serves to lead a person further into darkness rather than light; unhappiness rather than fulfillment; transgender man rather than man.

One of the reasons why Johansson was hesitant to give up the lead in this film is because it has all the makings of an Oscar winning performance.  In fact it does not take much prognostication skill to predict that whomever ends up playing Tex Gill will be nominated for an Oscar.  We can be just as sure that Hollywood won’t be making any movies about the thousands of horror stories of those who at various stages of transitioning realized they were making a mistake and couldn’t sufficiently de-transition to undo the damage already done.  That is because these people do not fit the narrative that transgender activists are writing.

Thanks to the rise of radical feminism, all distinction between the sexes must be erased.  In her 1970 book called The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone added a Marxist twist to Simone Beauvoir’s idea that the female body (with its capacity for bearing children) is at odds with women’s freedom.  Enslaved to their bodies and victims of male privilege the only way out (synthesis in Marxist terms) is to erase all differences between the sexes.  Rather prophetically she calls for an end to “sex distinction itself” by any means necessary including the use of biotechnology.  Thanks to the invention of the term gender and Gender Studies programs her vision has become a reality.

The question however is how many innocent people must fall prey to the creation of a Brave New World in which rather than helping those with gender dysphoria come to grips with who they are, we must be coerced into agreement with them.  They outlaw “conversion therapy” saying it is cruel to help someone live in accord with their biological sex while they encourage actual conversion therapy that includes hormone therapy, puberty blockers and surgical mutilation.  They silence all those who disagree with them and bully actresses into passing on movie roles.  Welcome to the Brave New World!

The Myth of Moral Neutrality

Conscience, Freedom, Moralilty, Relativism, Sin, , , ,

There is an ongoing debate among philosophers and ethicists as to whether or not a man is capable of performing a morally neutral act.  Like all of moral philosophy this seemingly theoretical question has practical and, more importantly, eternal consequences for the rest of us.  In performing an impromptu poll among Catholics I know, most of them said “of course there are morally neutral acts” and then proceeded to list off a few, none of which were morally neutral.  In this post then I would like to address this question in hopes of not just solving a problem, but changing the way the reader approaches everything that he does.

In approaching this question there is an important distinction that must be made.  St. Thomas in his treatise on human actions (ST II-I q.6) reminds the reader that there are two “types” of actions in which a human being is the agent.  First there are what he calls “acts of man.”  These are natural acts of man that involve his vegetative and sense faculties such as digestion, growth, heartbeats, sensual perceptions (like seeing and hearing) and so forth.  These acts are performed without any movement of the intellect and will and are in no way voluntary.  Once they do become voluntary (such as when we choose to look at something) they fall into the second category; what St. Thomas calls human acts.  These actions, because they involve deliberation and choice, are voluntary actions.  Morality concerns itself only with human acts.

Just because acts of man are not voluntary does not mean that they are morally neutral.  Just as we would not say actions of an animal are morally neutral because they do not proceed from a voluntary action, so too we would not say that these acts of man are morally neutral.  They are not morally anything because they are not morally evaluable.

Human Acts

Once this distinction is made and we focus only on moral acts, we can begin to see why no action is morally neutral.  In evaluating the moral status of any given human act, St. Thomas suggests that one should look at four particular components; its genus, its species, the circumstances surrounding the act and its end (ST I-II, q.18).

It is the first two components, genus and species, that define the object of the human act.  The object of the act would be how one would define it if they were to witness the act.  These moral objects can be good, evil or indifferent based upon their relationship to reason.  It is the object that determines whether a given act can be ordered to the good or not (Vertiatis Splendor, 79).

Yes, I said that the moral object can be indifferent or neutral, but that does not mean that the action itself is morally neutral.  Because no human act takes place in a vacuum, it is also necessary to examine the circumstances surrounding the act.  In saying that the circumstances “surround” the act one is able to catch a glimpse into their relationship with the exterior action.  Circumstances are related to the exterior action as accidents.  This means that because they are truly exterior to the moral act they are not good or evil in themselves.  However some circumstances are morally relevant and thus add a character of good or evil to the action.  The morally relevant circumstances would be those that affect the relation of the act to man’s ultimate end according to reason.

We can imagine actions that are both indifferent in their object and in their circumstances.  Yet still this does not prove there are morally neutral actions because one needs to evaluate the act from the point of the view of the moral agent in considering the end that is intended.  While the external act and the circumstances may be morally neutral, no voluntary action can be considered neutral from the point of view of intention.  Every voluntary act is done for a purpose.  The purpose is either in accord with right reason and thus is a good act, or it is contrary to right reason and thus considered an evil act (ST II-I, q.18, a.9).

It becomes evident then that one can say there are two ends to each exterior act: the end of the act itself and the end which the agent intends.  How these two ends are related can be understood by relying on St. Thomas’ use of matter and form.  He says “(H)uman activity is defined formally by its goal and materially by its external object” (ibid).  This is an important point that follows from this.

The intention of the agent is more important than the end of the act itself in evaluating the act morally.  However, because the exterior action is the means to carry out the end the agent intends, it must be a good means for accomplishing that end.  That is there are some objects like murder for example that can never be ordered to a good end.  Secondly, although one can separate the two ends in theory, they both form a single act.  In other words for the act to potentially be good, both must be good.  Likewise, while a good intention may lessen the moral gravity of an objectively evil act, it cannot make the act itself good.  However, a bad motive can change the moral quality of an otherwise good action.

The exterior act itself is objective but to only emphasize this component is to fall into legalism.  The intent is subjective, but to only emphasize this principle is to fall into subjectivism.  Finally, the circumstances are relative, but to only emphasize this is to fall into moral relativism.

Clearing Up Any Confusion

A few examples may help to make all that has been said clear.  Suppose a man sees an older woman carrying a large heavy bag and looks like she is preparing to cross the street.  He decides to carry the bag for her (the object).  She really is going to cross the street (circumstances).  He wants to perform a kind act (intention).  This is a morally good act because all three components are good.  Now take the same object and intention, but now the woman tell him she does not want to cross the street.  This becomes a morally bad act because it is contrary to reason to carry a bag for someone across the street who is not going to cross the street.  Finally suppose that the object and the circumstances are the same as the original example but now the intention is to impress the woman’s daughter.  Now the act becomes morally bad because it is done with a bad intention.

That exercise is clear but what about something like eating lunch, or more specifically eating a sandwich for lunch?  The object is good—providing nourishment to your body, but the other two components are what determine whether it is a morally good act or not.  Have you already eaten enough?  Is it the last sandwich?  Are there other people that need to eat?  All of these circumstances have bearing on the moral evaluation of it.  What about the intention?  Are you eating because you are nervous or because you are hungry?  Are you eating because you want to keep someone else from eating or are you leaving half the sandwich because someone else needs to eat as well?  Each of the circumstances and intentions will determine whether it is a morally good or bad act, but none of them will make it morally neutral.  To eat when you are hungry is in accord with right reason and therefore a good action.  Eating a sandwich for lunch can be a morally good act!

Herein, I think, lay the confusion.  We think of morality in terms of breaking rules and not primarily as acting in accord with right reason.  There is no moral law against eating a sandwich for lunch therefore it is permissible.  Permissibility implies neutrality.  But once we slide into the realm of thinking in terms of permissibility and not in terms of right reason we only try to avoid doing anything wrong and lose our desire to do good all the time.  And this is why this question is completely practical.  Once we see right and wrong in this light and not necessarily as not breaking a rule, we begin to thrive as persons.  When we recognize that the good is always an option for us, we develop all the virtues at a faster pace.  When we begin to taste the sweetness of the fruit of virtue, we desire to have our reason rightly formed so that conscience may judge the good to be done at all times.  There are no morally neutral acts, indeed.

On Finding Wayward Shepherds

Bible, Church, Church Authority, Magisterium, Mercy, Pope Francis, , , ,

In the second chapter of his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul details his encounter with the first pope upon his visit to Antioch.  The Apostle to the Gentiles called St. Peter to task for withdrawing from the Gentiles and eating only with the Jews out of fear of offending the latter.  Knowing that their faith was weak, St. Peter did not want to scandalize them and so, out of a misguided sense of charity, he pretended to agree with them.  St. Paul was, of course, right.  St. Peter failed pastorally to shepherd his entire flock.  The truth can never be a source of scandal and it is no act of charity to water down the faith.

This event is favorite for non-Catholic apologists for arguing against the primacy of Peter.  After all, they reason, if Peter is the infallible head of the Church then how could Paul question him and find in him in error?  Therefore, the Apostles were all equals and the Catholic doctrines surrounding the papacy are false.  Of course, they read far beyond what happened.  Nowhere does St. Paul challenge St. Peter’s authority to rule, only his exercise of that authority.

Putting aside its apologetical value, this particular passage serves as a guiding light for Church management, especially in times when error is being propagated by those in authority.  One can see the great wisdom of the Holy Spirit in inspiring St. Paul to recount this event because it serves as an example for both prelates and their subjects.  From the perspective of the prelate, we are given an example of humility so as not to disdain correction from those who are “lower” than them.  From the perspective of the lay faithful it provides an example of both zeal and courage to correct those in the hierarchy.

What is Scandal?

First, a word about scandal.  In English this word tends to be understood as referring to an action that leads to public disgrace.  But in the theological sense the word has a more precise meaning.  The word comes from the Greek skándalon which means “a stumbling block.”  Specifically it refers to some action that creates a moral stumbling block for another person.  St. Thomas defines it as “something less rightly done or said, that occasions another’s spiritual downfall.”  The Angelic Doctor goes on to categorize scandal into two types: active and passive.  Active scandal, that which has as its reward a millstone, is “when a man either intends, by his evil word or deed, to lead another man into sin, or, if he does not so intend, when his deed is of such a nature as to lead another into sin: for instance, when a man publicly commits a sin or does something that has an appearance of sin.”  Passive scandal is when “one man’s word or deed is the accidental cause of another’s sin, when he neither intends to lead him into sin, nor does what is of a nature to lead him into sin, and yet this other one, through being ill-disposed, is led into sin” (ST II-II, q.43, a.1).

In short, scandal always pertains to an act that is in some way public in the sense that many people know about it.  One should never make public what was strictly done in private as the accuser would then be the cause of scandal rather than the perpetrator.  What happens in private should both remain and be corrected in private.  But in either case it is an obligation of charity to issue a correction.

The Obligation to Correct

Why is there an obligation?  By way of analogy, St. Robert Bellarmine, a Doctor of the Church helps to illuminate why this is:

“As it is lawful to resist the Pope, if he assaulted a man’s person, so it is lawful to resist him, if he assaulted souls, or troubled the state, and much more if he strove to destroy the Church.  It is lawful, I say, to resist him, by not doing what he commands, and hindering the execution of his will.”

While the saint mentions the Pope specifically, what he says applies to Bishops, Priests and Deacons.  If you saw a prelate beating a man physically you would stop it and you should do likewise if he is beating him spiritually.  St. Thomas Aquinas goes a step further saying that it is an act of charity not just towards the rest of the sheep but also towards the prelate as well because the scandalous behavior puts the prelate’s soul in great danger.  He, who has been given much, will have to answer for much.

St. Thomas says that “like all virtues, this act of fraternal charity is moderated by due circumstances.”  What he means by this is that we must not only be aware of our obligation, but also the manner in which we exercise that obligation.  While criticizing a prelate does not make you “more Catholic than the Pope” the manner in which you do it should make you just as Catholic as the Pope.  That is we should never forget that the operative word is charity.  This means that there are certain rules that ought to govern our interactions.

The Code of Canon Law (Canon 212) says that the faithful may legitimately criticize their pastors but that it must always be done “with reverence toward their pastors.”  This means that the criticism should first of all be done in private so that the pastor has an opportunity to correct himself.  This maintains the dignity of both their office and their person.

There are times however when the pastor does not correct himself or that meeting with him in private is not possible (not everyone can get a papal audience for example).  It may also be that the act or word poses such a danger to the faithful that a public rebuke is necessary.  In other words, it may be necessary like St. Paul to “withstand him to his face.”  St. Thomas says that if the faith were endangered a subject ought to rebuke his prelate even publicly on account of the eminent danger of scandal (ST II-II q. 43 a. 1 obj.2).  This is why it is important to understand what constitutes scandal and what does not.  In any regard it may be necessary to “correct” the pastor in public out of, not just fraternal charity, but justice because the faithful have a right to the content of the faith in a clear and undiluted manner.  But still it must be done with gentleness and reverence for his office.

Before closing a word about the response of pastors.  Augustine says that Peter “gave an example to superiors, that if at any time they should happen to stray from the straight path, they should not disdain to be reproved by their subjects.”  Very often pastors think themselves above criticism from mere lay persons regardless of how qualified those lay persons are.  They remove the emphasis away from the truth as spoken onto the one speaking the truth.  Unfortunately the fraternal charity is not likewise met with pastoral humility.  It is this spirit that causes many lay people to remain quiet not confident enough that they could defend the Church’s position, especially when they are likely to be met with hostility.

In Loss and Gain, Blessed John Henry Newman’s fictional account of the conversion of a man from Anglicanism to the Roman Catholic Church, the protagonist Redding was drawn to the Church by its consistency.   While he could ask ten Anglican Priests to explain a particular dogma and  get ten different answers, he would get the same answer from ten Catholic pastors.  Those days of consistency are no longer among us, a phenomenon that can only be corrected when the entire Church, lay and clergy, take ownership of the Faith and fear not to correct wayward Shepherds.

The American Athanasius

Creed, Culture, Defending the Faith, Freedom, Natural Law, Paganism, Politics, ,

Throughout her 2000 year history, the Church has confronted a number of great heresies that put Our Lord’s promise that she would not fail to the test.  The greatest of these may have been the first, Arianism.  It challenged the divinity of Christ, labeling Him as the greatest of all divinely inspired creatures.  The Arians taught that “He was”, as Hillaire Belloc put it, “granted, one might say (paradoxically) all the divine attributes but divinity itself.”  At its height, almost ¾ of the world’s bishops were Arian along with most of the army.  So widespread had the heresy become that there were many “rank and file” Christians who were Arians and didn’t even know it.  Swimming within the Arian waters, they were presumably orthodox even though they were, in truth, heterodox.  It was really the grace-filled insistence, mingled with plenty of personal suffering, of one man, St. Athanasius, that kept us all from becoming Arians (and not knowing it).  But rather than offering an account of how he did this, instead he is put before us as an example to be followed.  Many of us, wholly unawares, are swimming within the waters of a different heretical tank.  It is the heresy of Americanism.

This term, Americanism, may be vaguely familiar to some of us, but for the most part it is as foreign as the term Arian was to our 4th Century counterparts.  Although appearing under different guises such as Gallicanism, it is essentially a subordination of the spirit of Catholicism in favor of a nationalistic one.  In an 1899 letter to James Cardinal Gibbons called Testem Benevolentiae, Pope Leo XIII warned his American colleague of the danger confronting both the American Church and, because of its rising prominence, the Church universal.  It is, as one papal biographer of Leo XIII put it, “A spirit of independence which passed too easily from the political to the religious sphere.”

The Errors of Americanism

Pope Leo XIII attached four specific errors to Americanism.  First, all external guidance is set aside as superfluous so that all that is needed is the interior lights of the Holy Spirit.  It is the American ideal of rugged individualism, freedom of conscience, and a rejection of any authority that animates this error.  Second there is a higher regard for natural virtues than for supernatural virtues as if the latter are somehow passive and therefore defective.  This comes from the practicality of the American spirit that shuns philosophy in favor of the empirical and a do it yourself mentality.  Third there is a rejection of religious vows as somehow incompatible with the spirit of Christian liberty.  There is a certain irony here given how important religious communities like the Jesuits and Franciscans were in the beginnings of our country.  Finally, and perhaps the underlying principle of the entire heresy is that the Church should shape her teachings in accord with the spirit of the age.  To gain those who differ from us we should omit certain points of teachings so as to make the faith more palatable.

At the time the letter was written the US Bishops agreed that these would be a great problem if they were present in the American Church, but denied that they could be found and dismissed them.  This point is obviously historically debatable, especially given that Americanist tendencies can be found from the beginning in the actions and writings of the first bishop in the United States John Carroll who was a cousin of Charles Carroll (of Carrollton as he reminded the British in signing the Declaration of Independence) and was mostly American before he was Catholic.  But what cannot be debated in an age of “personally opposed but…” Catholicism Leo XIII was definitely prescient.

One of the reasons that Arianism had such great appeal was that at heart it was simply a clever attempt to save paganism by making Christianity more palatable.  For a pagan, a religion in which a creature was endowed with god-like qualities is easier to swallow than the truth that the Creator became man and suffered to redeem wayward mankind.  And so it is with Americanist Catholics who cleverly seek to focus only on those things that are easy for Americans to swallow.  As she grows older, America’s palate becomes increasingly limited.  For the Catholic the highest law is God’s law mediated through the Church.  For the American it is the Constitution mediated through the Supreme Court without any reference to a Higher Authority.  How long can these two things can co-exist without significant concessions by the Catholic?  Regardless of the timeframe there will come a moment of crisis for both the individual and the Church.  Simply agreeing to disagree and focus only on what unites us is not a solution.  The problem with this of course is that there is no reason then to convert to the fullness of the truth that is found only within the confines of the Barque of  Peter.  Why convert when you are simply promised more of the same?

Patriotism and the Catholic American

Why would I offer this reflection on July 4th of all days on the greatest of all secular holidays?  Could I be any more un-patriotic than to offer a criticism such as this on today, of all days?  To ask the question is to admit the problem.  We are not patriotic to the American ideal.  That is to treat America as a religion, which is at the heart of the problem.  To be sure we love America because it is our home, but it is our home only because we share it with people that we love.  We are patriotic because we follow Our Lord’s commandment to love our neighbor.  Those people who we share a home with are those that God has placed closest to us in order that His commandment might take flesh.  And there can be no greater love than to offer to them the Truth that has been handed on to us by preaching and living it unapologetically.

We find ourselves in a society that is coming apart at the seams and it is because what unites us is not greater than what divides us.  No matter how well the Founding Fathers framed the Constitution (and they did frame well) it was never strong enough to keep us united forever.  There is only one thing in this world that can keep a people united and it is the Church.  Only a reformation of Christendom can save this country and that begins with the Church being more Catholic not less.  For a Catholic resident in a non-Catholic country it is an act of true patriotism to want to convert his country—what we need is an American Athanasius.

 

The Metaphysics of Anxiety

Anthropology, Moralilty, Suffering, ,

In the United States alone, some 40 million adults suffer from an anxiety disorder.  Given our current cultural climate, that number is only expected to rise, reaching greater epidemic proportions.  What is the cause of this meteoric rise?  Many Christians would point to the coincidence of the rise of a Godless culture which is certainly a contributing factor.  Until you realize that Christians also suffer from it at alarming rates.  The Christians in the former group would say that the latter simply lack faith.  But is that necessarily true?

The Metaphysics of Anxiety

It is helpful to first develop a “metaphysics” of anxiety which will enable us to better understand it.  Fear is one of the five passions of the irascible appetite.   These passions arise because of some desired good being difficult to obtain or some evil difficult to avoid.  Specifically, fear is a forward-looking passion that arises with the awareness of an impending evil that cannot be avoided.  Because it is future-directed, it is aroused directly by the imagination and memory.  The imagination and memory make some evil present to the person and the passion of fear is stimulated.  One person may experience fear when going on a roller coaster because they imagine that it will crash.  Another person may experience fear because their memory reminds them of the time when one did crash.  The person then must engage their reason to determine whether the threat is real.  Some may choose not to ride because there is a strong actual likelihood it might crash, or they might not ride because the feeling of fear it is too strong, mitigating any pleasure they might get from the ride.

The most common type of fear is anxiety which is aroused because evil is often unforeseen, leaving a person wondering whether he will be harmed or not.  Being future-directed, the imagination must place before the person fearful images (called phantasms in Thomistic language).  There is a sort of feedback mechanism in which the imagination supplies an image, the body experiences fear, the imagination supplies another image because there is a sense of danger enforced by the body.  The fear then increases.  The only way to stop this loop is to change the phantasm in the imagination by an act of the will, choosing to turn the mind towards something else.  This is why distraction is often used to get the mind “off of it.”  This is also why people will turn to drugs and alcohol to either dull the imagination or overwhelm the passion with pleasure.  Either way once the image of the future evil is removed, the anxiety ceases.

Although this seems like common sense, it should be mentioned that oftentimes a person who has anxiety bore no moral responsibility for the onset of their condition.  Those of certain temperaments, choleric especially, feel the passion of fear more acutely and so may be prone to anxiety disorders.  The environment can also be a contributing factor.  You could multiply the examples, but suppose a child was repeatedly abused at a young age.  They begin to live in constant fear awaiting the next time the abuse will take place.  They become habituated to experiencing anxiety so that even after the actual threat is removed they are still awaiting some other future evil, one that they cannot even specifically name.  This loop may govern the rest of their lives unless they can cultivate some sense of security in their lives.

Faith and Anxiety

An expert in anthropology, it is this feedback loop that Our Lord has in mind when He tells us “do not be anxious about your life” (Mt 6:25).  He provides a series of images (“look”) to change the phantasm and invites us to engage our reason to combat the anxiety.  Our reasoning, illumined by faith, is that even though there is evil all around, “your heavenly Father knows what you need” (c.f. Mt 6:33).  Our Lord, understanding well our psychology, is teaching us that when the fear of the future arises we should turn to the present moment and call to mind that, as the word suggests, God’s Providence will provide all that we need (Mt 6:34).

Faith then is the antidote to anxiety and as faith diminishes anxiety will increase.  The truth is that we, using our own strength, are powerless in the face of many evils.  When we know that “all things work for good to them who love God” (Romans 8:28), it can help us to conquer anxiety.  But, and this is important, not all anxiety is caused by a lack of faith.  This is a mistake many Christians make, either chastising themselves for not being able to overcome their anxiety or chastising other Christians because they don’t have “enough faith.”

How to Alleviate the Suffering from Generalized Anxiety Disorder

As alluded to in the introduction there are many people who suffer from Generalized Anxiety Disorder.  As the name implies, it is a disorder in the imagination-irascible passion loop.  A person may have become so habituated to experiencing anxiety that they lack the volitional control to stop it.  That is, as St. Thomas suggests, the passion is experienced so powerfully that they are unable to engage their reason (ST I-II, q.77, art.2).  This is the “law of sin” that St. Paul reminds us that battles against the “law of the mind” and has the power to overcome the mind (c.f. Romans 7:23).  This is why anti-anxiety medication, even if it is often over-prescribed, is a valid remedy in that it helps to dampen the strength of the passion and enable the person to re-engage their reason.

Obviously, a person without faith lacks the intellectual data to truly combat the images, especially when this is combined with a lack of the ability to control their imagination.  But the point is that even the person with faith may experience the anxiety so deeply that they find it impossible to make an act of faith.  They may have the strongest faith in the world, but the anxiety is so flooding their system that their reason and will is unable to control it at times.  They remain trapped in the imagination-anxiety loop.  Add to this the guilt, likely reinforced by the demonic bully, and they end up sliding towards despair.

With the instances of this disorder on the rise, it is important for us to understand these mechanisms, especially those who are close to sufferers of Generalized Anxiety Disorder.  Telling them “you just have to trust” or “just pray about it” is not the most helpful.  This is their cross and it is not necessarily a self-inflicted one.  The weight of this cross is of course lightened by the weight of the Good News that God is sanctifying them and purifying their faith through it, but it is also lightened by the Simon of Cyrene’s that cross their path.  Loneliness is a great cause of anxiety and just the awareness that someone else “gets it” and they are not completely crazy can be a means of lessening that anxiety.  Being willing to act as reason for them and letting them bounce their anxieties off of you to help talk them down can also help them regain gain control.  This can be a heavy burden, but like Simon you too will be sanctified by it.

The “bodiliness” of Catholicism also offers unique sources of healing.  Confession, the place where guilt goes to die, is perhaps the most important ingredient.  The medicinal effects of the Eucharist are felt not only in the soul, but through the “the renewal of your mind” we are enable us to regain control of our passions. Likewise, the Rosary, not only because it invites the passionate Our Lady of Sorrows to pray with us, but also because it engages the entire person like no other prayer, is also a key ingredient to healing.

“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself” (Mt 6:34) Our Lord told us.  Many people experience tomorrow today and are crippled by anxiety.  By developing an understanding of the metaphysics of anxiety, we can better help them live for today.

Losing the Weight of Vice without Dieting

Fasting, Virtue, , ,

“Lose weight without dieting!”  In a culture that is obsessed with diet and weight loss, headlines like this immediately catch our eye.  Most of these are fads, just like the diets they pledge to avoid, except for the latest trend—fasting.  Fitness articles and health gurus are now proclaiming the power of fasting to help lose weight.    That fasting has incredible health benefits should not surprise us as Catholics.  These cutting-edge scientists are really just regurgitating what the humblest of monks in the 6th and 7th Centuries already knew—that the spiritual benefits of fasting spill over to the body.  What they don’t recognize however is why this is so.  And in truth, neither do most of us.

This maxim that spiritual benefits of certain acts like fasting can spill over into the body is important for us to grasp.  Not only does it witness to our hylomorphism, but more to the point it sheds light on the fact that acts of virtue are good for the whole person.  We tend to see virtue as “a spiritual thing” that really only leads to frustration of our bodily powers.  But properly understood virtues perfect our powers and restore the soul as rightful governor of the body, enabling us to more fully enjoy our freedom.

Fasting, Virtue and Freedom

An example might help us see the truth in something we may unconsciously already know.  All things being equal, a man who is patient is also a man whose blood pressure is lower than a man’s who isn’t patient.  The reason we don’t grasp it at first is because conquering a vice like anger is very difficult at the beginning and, rather than calming the body, can have the opposite effect.  The man not schooled in patience is going to be further frustrated by the fact that he is holding back his frustration.  It can be downright painful in proportion to our viciousness.  So painful in fact that modern psychology tells us it is unhealthy repression.  In truth, pain is vice leaving the body.  But once the virtue matures in us, its fruits are felt in the body.  And like the fruit from a mature tree, it brings us pleasure, a pleasure that will be reinforced in the body.

At this point the reader may feel they have become victim to a little “bait and switch.”  We started out talking about fasting but somehow moved to virtue, using the example of patience.  The analogy was made because most of us don’t fast and most of us don’t realize that fasting is a virtue.  Fasting as a virtue means, that when habitually cultivated, it actually perfects our nature.  Put another way, we will never be perfect unless we fast.  Thus St. Thomas Aquinas says that fasting is a precept of the natural law.

Fasting is a virtue because it perfects our will power especially with respect to our concupiscible appetites.  Recall that the concupiscible appetite or emotions are those that draw us to bodily goods like eating and sex.  Because these pleasures are so closely related, fasting not only governs our use of food but also, St. Thomas Aquinas says, is the guardian of chastity.  When we can habitually control our desire for food which is an absolute necessity, we can control the other desires of the flesh which are not.  Once our powers of eating are controlled by the will, we actually enjoy it more—we are able to feast without splurging and experience true joy.  In other words, eating becomes not just a bodily act but an act of the whole person.  We come to eat the right things, in the right way at the right time and thus increase our pleasure.  So too with the other powers of the flesh when the virtue of fasting comes full bloom.

Those experienced in fasting will develop a power of will that enables it to choose independent of the desires of the flesh.  Until that experience comes we should expect it to be hard and expect to fail.  The untrained body will rail hard against the spirit that attempts to bridle it.  But like a man trying to train a horse and not necessarily break it, it is always better to start at a level that is parallel to our starting point.  A bread and water fast for someone who does not fast will only lead to failure.  Instead begin by fasting at each meal, making one small sacrifice (leaving a bite on the plate, no salt, eating what is before you, etc.) each time you come to the table.

Additional Benefits of Fasting

Our intellectual powers also are perfected through fasting.  St. Thomas says that fasting enables the mind to “arise more freely to the contemplation of heavenly things.”  What he means by this is that through fasting our minds are freed from the day to day clutter that inhibits us most of the time.  Again anyone who has dabbled in fasting knows that all you can think about at first is how hungry you are.  But as time goes on you gain greater control over your thoughts and are no longer as concerned with the needs of the body.  Your body may be saying “I’m starving” but the will is telling it “stop whining, you are not starving.”  Eventually the will wins out and the body relents; creating a calmer atmosphere for thought.  Those schooled in fasting all can attest to a certain clarity in thinking that is not there when they are not fasting, but the habit of raising their minds above the humdrum remains even after fasting is over.

St. Thomas adds a third reason why we should fast and that is to satisfy for sins.  Catholics are well aware of the penitential value of fasting, or at least they ought to be.  But there is a related point that is worth examining because it goes to the heart of sacrifice in general.  Which is more pleasing to God, a fast that is hard or a fast that is easy?  I don’t mean hard or easy in the sense of rigor but more in how freely (without interior resistance) we are able to accomplish it.  Most of us would say that a sacrifice that is hard is more pleasing.  But that is not true.  The greater the person’s virtue, the greater their freedom in making the offering.  The person who does not yet have the virtue of fasting goes back and forth but the person with the virtue sets their will on fasting and never deviates.  The latter offers a greater sacrifice even if the rigor of the former is greater.

Want to lose weight without dieting?  Not just body weight, but also the dead weight of the vices of the “old man” (c.f Romans 6:6).  There is no better way than to develop a virtuous life of moderation that includes the virtue of fasting.  Like all the virtues fasting is hard at first, but with maturity it produces sweet fruits that are more enjoyable than the palatable pleasures passed up.  Why not begin today?

Who’s Afraid of a Little Sin?

Mary, Passion of Christ, Prayer, Sacred Heart of Jesus, Saints, Scripture, Sin, , ,

With the smoke still rising from the second great war, Pope Pius XII surveyed the moral landscape and declared that “the greatest sin today is that men have lost the sense of sin.” This theme, a loss of the sense of sin, has been a recurring one highlighted by each of the subsequent six pontificates.  In many ways it represents one of the greatest challenges to the Christian in the modern world.  Most of us still believe in sin, but living in the midst of a culture that laughs at any mention in it, we fail to see the ugliness of even the “smallest” sin.  The thought of achieving our freedom and conquering sin is nice, but not something we truly desire.  And so we simply live a stagnant life by merely avoiding the big sins, or at least that is how we reason.  After all, how could we grasp the gravity of sin when it is all around us?  Does a fish know that it is wet?  So how could we even hope to avoid the little sins and climb the heights of holiness?

When we examine the question more deeply we realize that the problem is hardly unique, even if it is more acute in our age.  Preaching a Lenten homily 175 years ago, Blessed John Henry Newman asked pretty much the same question:

“As time goes on, and Easter draws nearer, we are called upon not only to mourn over our sins, but especially over the various sufferings which Christ our Lord and Savior underwent on account of them. Why is it, my brethren, that we have so little feeling on the matter as we commonly have? Why is it that we are used to let the season come and go just like any other season, not thinking more of Christ than at other times, or, at least, not feeling more? Am I not right in saying that this is the case? and if so, have I not cause for asking why it is the case? We are not moved when we hear of the bitter passion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for us. We neither bewail our sins which caused it, nor have any sympathy with it.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 6, Sermon 4).

The Blessed convert hints at the reason in the framing of the question.  We do not recognize the seriousness of our sins because the Passion of Christ, not just the entire event, but the whipping, the scourging, the being dragged in chains, the carrying of the cross, the falling , the crown of thorns, the nails, and the suffocation, leaves no lasting impression on us.  We might as well be watching a movie.  Disturbing perhaps to think about, but quickly left aside as we move on with life.  It is not that we are uncaring, it is just way too abstract.  And why is this?  Newman again responds saying “For this one reason, my brethren, if I must express my meaning in one word, because you so little meditate. You do not meditate, and therefore you are not impressed” (ibid.).

Why Meditation on the Passion Saves Us

Newman is really reiterating something that all the saints have said.  Meditation upon the passion of Christ is necessary for both our salvation and our perseverance in the quest for it.  Echoing s similar theme, a contemporary of Newman’s, Blessed Columba Marmion said that he was “convinced that outside the Sacraments and liturgical acts, there is no practice more useful to our souls than the Way of the Cross made with devotion.  It is sovereign supernatural efficacy” (Christ and His Mysteries, p.309).

Why would Blessed Marmion make such a profound statement?  Because he realized that the Passion and Death of Christ is an eternal event and that it has lost none of its power to heal and transform us. In his words, “When we contemplate the sufferings of Jesus He grants us, according to the measure of our faith, the grace to practice the virtues He revealed during those sacred hours…When Christ lived on earth there emanated from His divine Person an all-powerful strength…Something analogous happens when we put ourselves into contact with Jesus by faith.  Christ surely bestowed special graces on those who with love, followed Him on the road to Golgotha or were present at His immolation.  He still maintains that power now.”

Faith enables us to participate in the Passion of Christ simply by bringing it before us in meditation.  It gives us the opportunity to draw directly from its specific, and very personal fruits.  At the root of discipleship is Christ’s command, “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me”().  And only by meditating on His Passion can we know what that cross looks like or to have the power to pick it up.  “Follow me” is meant literally by walking right behind Him during His own Passion, something that can only be done by putting ourselves there.

Two Examples

Scripture offers us two contrasting visions of disciples who did and did not meditate upon the Passion of Christ that serve as a caution and a model respectively.

The three-fold denial of St. Peter is well known.  His disavowal of Christ is one of the things that make him very relatable to all of us.  Because we can easily relate to him, we can also fall prey to his blind spot.  Why, exactly, did St. Peter abandon Our Lord?  In short it was an unwillingness to meditate upon the Passion.

Throughout Our Lord’s public ministry the theme of His Passion and Death was always looming in the background, even if it was shrouded in mystery.  He announced it to the Apostles three times (no coincidence) and each time it was denied by Peter.  We should not be surprised that his unwillingness to sit with the mystery of the cross then led to his fall.  It was his willingness to relive the Passion in his mind and his own share in it that gave St. Peter the grace of final perseverance (c.f. Jn 21).

Our Lady on the other hand is the ultimate model of meditation upon the Passion.  Each of the three times it was presented to her in Sacred Scripture, rather than denying it or allowing it to become abstract, “she kept these words in her heart.”  This habit of sitting with the mystery of Christ’s Passion enabled her to assimilate that same spirit and to walk with Jesus on the road to Calvary.  It was this habit, in other words, that won for her the grace of perseverance.  It is for this reason that she can serve as both a model and a guide in our own personal meditation of the Passion of Christ.  It is also one of the ways in which she intercedes for us to obtain the grace of final perseverance.

After one of her many encounters with Mercy Incarnate, St. Faustina reflected that Jesus was pleased “best by [her] meditating on His sorrowful Passion and by such meditation much light falls upon my soul. He who wants to learn true humility should reflect upon the Passion of Jesus. I get a clear under-standing of many things that I could not comprehend before” (Diary, 267).  The habitual meditation upon Our Lord’s Passion is a constant among all the saints and will become a source of unlimited spiritual growth for the rest of us as well.  When we intimately come to know the sufferings our sins cause we will no longer find them desirable, transforming not only ourselves but everyone around us relegating the “loss of a sense of sin” to the past.

On Not Walking the Extra Mile

Church and State, Culture, ,

As the archetype of all spiritual masters, Our Lord left a rule of life for His followers.  This rule of life finds the bulk of its content in the Sermon on the Mount.  There is hardly any aspect of life that isn’t touched by Jesus’ prescription for happiness.  The bar is set ridiculously high to prove both its practical impossibility and His power to transform us.  Those who set out under their own power quickly find His maxims unlivable.  But this is not the only reason why many find it unlivable.  It is also unlivable when, although with the best of intentions, Christians treat it not as a rule of life, but as a social blueprint.

An example may help better illustrate what I mean.  When addressing the issue of retaliation, Our Lord tells His followers: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on [your] right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.  If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well.  Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles.  Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow” (Mt 5:38-42).  There are a multitude of ways in which this new law manifests itself in the lives of individual Christians, but it all boils down to how we are to respond when we are victims of evil.  We may, like Our Lord (Jn 18:23) and St. Paul (Acts 16:22) choose not to turn the other cheek, but only if we are prepared to absorb the evil rather than respond in kind.  How this plays out in the day to day is left to the discernment of each Christian man and woman.

Our Lord’s Blueprint

What Our Lord was not offering a plan for social justice.  All too often these verses and others like them (except oddly enough the ones on divorce) are quoted in support of a political agenda.  These verses are meant to be a plan of life for the individual Christian.  This is not to imply that there is not a social dimension to living in accord with them, but it is not Our Lord’s blueprint for society, but His recipe for leaven.

A society made up of Christians who are willing to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile or lend without condition is a society that will be animated by charity and forgiveness.  But society itself has no cheek to turn.  It may be governed by men living out the Beatitudes, but their rules of governing must be based in service of the common good.

Jesus was not condemning “an eye for an eye.”  Many people go far beyond what Our Lord was saying.  In a qualified, that is a non-literal sense, there is nothing unjust about it.  The principle represents a sound basis for the foundation of any society.  Offenses must be punished and any punishment that is just must have the proper degree of proportionality to it.  A society that offers no resistance to evil is sure on the path to anarchy.  To attempt to apply Our Lord’s personal principle to society as a whole makes Christians look foolish no matter how well intentioned.  Non-Christians conclude then that the Gospel is not only unlivable, but unreasonable as well.

Punishment

There is a second aspect of this as well that is important to mention because it does apply to society.  We should never respond to evil with evil.  This is worth mentioning because, although punishment may be perceived as an evil by the one punished, it is not evil in itself.  In fact, it is a good for both society and the individual when it is carried out in a just manner.  In other words, to expect society to “turn the other cheek” in the face of evil is actually responding to evil with evil.

This habit of socializing the personal permeates much of the discourse of priests and prelates for hot button issues like the death penalty and immigration.  Jesus telling us to “turn the other cheek” is not an argument against the death penalty, no matter how Christian society is.  “Welcoming the stranger” may be the basis for allowing any immigrants, but it can never be used as an argument against specific policies.  The examples could be multiplied but each time they are invoked the power of the Gospel to be leaven is greatly minimized.

The Newest Teen Idol

Anthropology, Atheism, Church and State, Politics, , , , ,

To mark his 200th birthday, the self-styled “young person’s guide to saving the world,” Teen Vogue,wrote an article on Karl Marx—“the Anti-Capitalist Scholar.”  The article is worth reading, not necessarily because it is a work of serious scholarship, but because it represents a perfect example of the propaganda that many young people are fed regarding Marxism.  Avoiding the inconvenient truth that his ideology led to deaths in the neighborhood of 150 million people (according to The Black Book of Communism) and focusing instead on the abuses of capitalism that it allegedly rectifies, Marx is presented and an underappreciated genius.  This marks the latest in a long line of attempts to paint the intellectual founder of Communism and his theories in a positive light.  Of course this is a favorite tactic of Lenin himself who thought that targeting the minds of the young and teaching them to love Marx, hate any authority and  label anyone whose ideas differ from theirs as haters (notice how “bosses”, “rich people” and even Donald Trump end up in their sights) they could be won over to Communism.  The rest of the general public, living in a post-Cold War world, remains wholly ignorant to the tenets of Marxism, let alone its inherent dangers.

In his scathing condemnation of Communism (he calls it a “satanic scourge”), Divini Redemptoris, Pope Pius XI said that Communism spread so rapidly because “too few have been able to grasp the nature of Communism. The majority instead succumb to its deception, skillfully concealed by the most extravagant promises…Thus the Communist ideal wins over many of the better minded members of the community. These in turn become the apostles of the movement among the younger intelligentsia who are still too immature to recognize the intrinsic errors of the system” (Divini Redemptoris, 15).  His assessment of Communism remains to this day one of the best overall and succinct descriptions of the goals and errors of Marxism.  It should appear on every Catholic’s reading list, especially those who view Marxism as something relegated to the dustbin of history.  It is still very much alive in places like Cuba and North Korea and in its cultural form in many countries (including our own).

Marxism and Conflict

Rather than focusing in this essay on each of these errors, there is one particular aspect that draws our attention.  In the last paragraph of the Teen Vogue article, the author says “While you may not necessarily identify as a Marxist, socialist, or communist, you can still use Karl Marx’s ideas to use history and class struggles to better understand how the current sociopolitical climate in America came to be.”  This plea for open-mindedness towards Marxism is really a thinly veiled attempt to promote it.  It rests on an important assumption attached to Marx’s philosophy that paves the way for the whole package—his dialectical and historical materialism.

Marx’s interpretation of history is simple; it is a process that is driven inevitably forward by the law of dialectics.  In this vision of history, all social change comes about through class conflicts produced by economic causes.  As Marx put it, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1 ).  This growth occurs according to the pattern of the dialectic.  Thesis generates its own antithesis and from this conflict a synthesis emerges.  This synthesis becomes the new thesis and the process continues until it reaches its end—the Communist society.  For Marx, the rise of Capitalism had reduced society to only two classes, the Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.  What he proposed was a single world-wide revolution that abolishes the Bourgeoisie and puts an end to class conflict forever under the “dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

To organize the young around the view that all of history is oppression is the key to the spread of the Marxist revolution (or any revolution for that matter).  This is also at the heart of the challenge by cultural Marxism that we face.  The dialectic of oppression is the predominant social vernacular of our day.  The rich oppress the poor, men oppress women, white men oppress black men, religious majority oppress the sexual libertines and on and on.  We must see this for what it is—something the Holy Father warned about, “The preachers of Communism are also proficient in exploiting racial antagonisms and political divisions and oppositions” (DR, 15).

Marx’s vision of history is not historical but religious instead.  He offers no evidence to support his claim that all of history is conflict and accepts no explanation to the contrary.  In fact, if we look at history then there are plenty of examples of cooperative societies (including the family and apprentice/master relationships) that were not in perpetual conflict.  The Christian High Middle Ages were not a period of economic conflict either.  Historian Christopher Dawson has shown conclusively that history has been moved not by economic factors, but religious ones.  Of course there is some truth to the fact that when the cooperative elements broke down, conflict ensued.  But still that can hardly be the lens through which we view all history.

One could refute Marx based on his unproven assumption, but there is a more important anthropological assumption that needs to be challenged.  For Marx the goal is the perfection of society and thus each individual exists for the sake of the whole.  Each man becomes a cog in the machine of society and thus is expendable, leaving him without any true rights.  In the Christian conception of man, society exists for the individual; not in the liberalist sense of individualism couched in a social contract, but because each man only finds his individual perfection by contributing to the whole.   Man is social by nature because He is made in the image of God, Who, as a communion of Person, is social by nature too.

Conflict and Complementarity

This is ultimately why the conflict theory of history doesn’t fly.  Society is formed by men who are all made in God’s image, thus giving them a certain equality.  But this equality does not mean we are destined for a classless society.  The message is not one of conflict but complementarity in which each man and woman finds and is satisfied with their own station in life.  They are fulfilled only by finding this station and living out of it.  This place is predetermined only in the sense that it is part of God’s providential plan and not based upon the preconceived ideas of other men and women.  Richer and poorer depend equally upon each other for their own personal fulfillment.  Men and women, black and white, likewise are the same.  When done well without social agitation from cultural Marxists, this can become a reality.

Perhaps this sounds more utopian than Marxism itself.  This vision will not put an end to oppression because the problem is not in the social structure but in the human heart.  “The poor you will always have with you” because there will always be Original Sin and its accompanying oppression.  But it is not a social revolution that will put an end to that but a revolution of each man against himself.  But this revolution will never come about unless we live out of the truth.  The exterior must support the interior.  The revolutionary language of oppression will never bring about this revolution but only further alienates us from each other and from ourselves.  It’s time we pull the mask off Marxism and call it when we see it.

The Unforgivable Sin

Bible, Conscience, Divine Mercy, Holy Spirit, Last Things, Mercy, Sin, Spiritual Life, , , ,

If Jesus does not both shock and disturb when He speaks to us through the Scriptures, then we aren’t taking Him seriously enough.  Take as an example this Sunday’s Gospel when Jesus, Mercy Incarnate, returns to Galilee and accuses the scribes of doing the seemingly impossible—committing a sin that will not be forgiven.  “Truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mk 3:28-29).  These words ought to shake us, especially in an age of exaggerated mercy.  While Jesus leaves us clues as to the nature of this unpardonable sin, He does not really come out and tell us what it is.  Therefore, there can be great spiritual benefit in investigating this question more deeply.

St Thomas Aquinas found this to be a question of particular importance as well and includes it among the questions dealing with sins against faith.  Standing on the shoulders of his saintly predecessors, the Angelic Doctor says that there are three traditional ways in which this has been interpreted.

The First Two Interpretations

The first is the literal meaning based on the context in which Christ said it.  To utter a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (or God in general) is to ascribe to the devil that which comes by the power of God.  The best historical example of this is the Golden Calf in which an Egyptian god (which St. Augustine says was actually a demon) is said to have led Israel out of Egypt.  So clear was the action of God in rescuing them that the Israelites could not have acted out either weakness or ignorance.  Therefore there is no excuse in receiving punishment and the sin is unpardonable.  Returning to the passage however, Jesus is not condemning the Scribes per se, but instead issuing a warning.  Because Our Lord had yet to reveal His divinity, they acted out of ignorance, an ignorance He reminds the Father of from the Cross (c.f. Lk 23:34).

This is related to the second interpretation that Aquinas mentions.  He says it is a sin against the Holy Spirit specifically because it is a sin of malice.  Because power is appropriated to the Father, to sin against the Father is a sin of weakness.  Likewise, because wisdom is appropriated to the Son Who is the Word, ignorance is a sin against the Son.  And because goodness is appropriated to the Holy Spirit, then a sin against the Holy Spirit is a sin of malice.  With full consent and full knowledge, a sin against the Holy Spirit is a sin of malice, that is in essence saying “evil be my good.”  This particular sin is the eternal sin because it removes all of those things from us that might be a cure.  It creates a hardening of the heart like Pharaoh in which the grace of conversion cannot penetrate.

As a fruitful tangent, the doctrine of appropriation in which we ascribe to specific persons of the Trinity that which in truth is an action of all three is not only a way in which we learn more about the life within the Trinity, but also a way to develop a relationship with each of the Persons individually.  When we need strength we should pray directly to the Father, wisdom to the Son and power over evil the Holy Spirit.  This habit of prayer and personal relationship keeps us falling into the trap of believing the doctrine of the Trinity while not really believing in the Trinity.

A Third Interpretation

The third interpretation that Aquinas mentions is also the most favored today, although often in an overly simplistic way.  Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit can be viewed as final impenitence.  In this interpretation, the blasphemy occurs not necessarily in word, but in thought or deed.  It is against the Holy Spirit because it acts contrary to the forgiveness of sins which is the work of the Holy Spirit (c.f. Jn 20:22).  It is also the favored interpretation of the Great Mercy Pope, St. John Paul II.  In his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et Vivificantem he says that “the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit consists precisely in the radical refusal to accept this forgiveness, of which he is the intimate giver and which presupposes the genuine conversion which he brings about in the conscience” (DV, 46).

Standing on the shoulders of these saintly giants then, why is this most widely accepted answer overly simplistic?  Because there are two ways in which final impenitence can manifest itself.  First there is the obvious stubborn refusal even on one’s death bed, call it an impenitence of the will, to repent.  But there is a second, and for many of us more dangerous way, and that is through what we might call an impenitence of fact.  Although many of us envision our deaths being something we can plan for, the truth is that many of us die suddenly without much warning at all.  That means our temporal impenitence can become final impenitence.

This final impenitence in fact is not necessarily brought about by a hardness of heart, but we become victims to Aquinas’ insight that the sin “unforgivable by its very nature, insofar as it excludes the elements through which the forgiveness of sin takes place.”

In short, we simply a refusal to examine ourselves well and are blocked by presumption.  Fear of the Lord, through which we seek the forgiveness of sins is a certain (healthy) anxiety by which we recognize that in truth we are fugitives from hell and that it is only God’s mercy that saves us.  This is healthy not because we are morbid, but because each time we accuse ourselves of a sin, we are humbled and God is glorified in His mercy.  Each time we stir up sorrow for our sins, God is glorified in His mercy.  And ultimately this is why, no matter how we interpret the passage, we should take Our Lord’s warning to heart: to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit is to refuse God the glory of His mercy.

You Betcha

Freedom, Money, Moralilty, Virtue, ,

Last month the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited sports gambling, paving the way for states to fabricate their own legislation regarding sports betting.  What each of the states end up doing is still to be decided, but before political expediency takes over, we should take an opportunity to consider the morality of gambling.  The topic of gambling and games of chance is not foreign to the moral teachings of the Church.  It has been a part of her Magisterium from very early on.  And so we can look at the principles that have been articulated in order to shine some light upon the subject of betting.

Over the past century, the Church has seen a profound shift in her pedagogical methods.  Gone are the days of the manualists, paving the way for more positive virtue-based pedagogy.  Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange described the prevailing views of the two schools as “the science of virtues versus the science of sins to be avoided.”  Whether this change in emphasis is a good thing or not is a question for another time, but what is not questionable is the fact that the “science of the virtues” approach has brought with it an open antagonism towards the science of “sins to be avoided.”  The manuals were very useful at the time because of the manner in which they taught.  They would first articulate general moral principles and then give examples of applying those principles to concrete examples.  It gave the readers (who were mostly confessors and theologians) a moral vocabulary that enabled them to navigate the practical realm with greater ease.  These manuals still retain their use today, even if in a complementary way.

The point of this digression, and how it relates to gambling, is that one would be hard-pressed to find an adequate discussion of gambling in today’s moral theology books.  The emphasis may be on developing the virtue of temperance, but without concrete situations in which the virtue is formed leaves us without any frame of reference.  Even if half the story is positive, it is still only half the story.  Discussing the virtue without discussing how the stop the opposing vice from forming is not enough.  Virtue isn’t only formed by facing a temptation head on, but also in the speed in which we flee from those moments of trial.  In other words, virtues are positive things that are formed by avoiding the near occasion of sin, a concept we hear very little about today.

Moral Approach

With that being said, we have to return to one of the most popular manuals of moral theology (partially because it was the first that was written in English) to find a thorough discussion of gambling.  In his Manual of Moral Theology, Fr. Thomas Slater, S.J. briefly treats the subject of gambling and games of chance.  He says that gambling, when it is framed within the realm of recreation and entertainment, is morally legitimate with some obvious caveats.  First, on the part of the gambler he must be acting freely and betting what is at his free disposal.  This means that he is not betting money that would otherwise be necessary for living and providing for his family.  Likewise both parties must clearly understand the rules of the game and that the outcome of the game is uncertain.

The reason why it is helpful to examine this issue from the “old” schema of moral theology is that this is one of those situations where just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.  Gambling is fraught with moral danger because it is a highly addictive form of entertainment that very quickly gets out of control, paving the way for moral ruin.  Neuroscientists have recently discovered, what St. Thomas and the Scholastics already knew, certain behaviors by arousing our passions, can become addictive.  Specifically they have found that certain behaviors like gambling produce similar chemical responses in our brains as some of the most addictive drugs like cocaine.  These neurotransmitters (of which dopamine is the primary one) are produced in response to certain stimuli and produce a feeling of pleasure.  This release is not just in the actual winning of the bet, but in the anticipation of the winning.  This means the pleasure comes not so much in winning but in betting.  And like all physiological pleasures we must “up the ante:’ (pun intended) in order to reproduce the same response.  The stakes must become higher and higher to produce the same feeling.  We do not need to look to far to find examples of men (mostly) and women whose lives have been ruined because of this addiction.

We are Catholics and that means we do not flee from things simply because their abuse can lead to addiction.  As Chesterton once said, “In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe, and the Cross can all fit together.”  But recall that gambling was a morally legitimate means of recreation. Once it ceases to be that, either because we do as a source of income, or it becomes an addiction, it no longer serves its purpose.  In fact one must ask how exactly this type of recreation, even when engaged in as such, re-creates us especially given the obvious dangers.  Still it remains legitimate, even if I cannot personally see its merits.

Legal Approach

Chesterton’s quote also reminds us of a related historical failure in which laws were made to curb abuse by prohibiting all use—Prohibition in the 1920s.  At the time, drunkenness was a social problem that needed to be dealt with.  Unfortunately by prohibiting “the production, transport and sale of (though not the consumption or private possession of) alcohol” (18th Amendment), it opened the door to even greater social ills.  This was because they were not good Thomists, failing to recognize that you cannot outlaw every vice.  The Angelic Doctor thought that laws should only treat “the more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others…”  In essence, the Angelic Doctor is saying that when a law prescribes acts that are far beyond the virtue of the average person in society, then there ought to be no laws against it.  One of the reasons for this is that the law may become a pathway to further vice.  What instead should have happened at the time was further support of the Temperance Movement, even through legislation.  The law cannot create virtue, but it can clear the way for it.

The parallels to sports gambling are obvious, even if it does not quite effect the same percentage of society as Prohibition did in the 1920s.  There should be no laws prohibiting sports betting, but instead the aim should be towards forming and fostering the virtue of temperance, even if this requires oversight and rules that limit the amount of gambling a person may engage in.

The Worker

Anthropology, Economics, Redemption, The Life of Jesus, Theology, Virtue, Work, , ,

Was man made to work or was work made for man?  The modern answer, enlightened of course by the strange amalgam of Marxism and liberalism is that made was made for work.  The Christian, and therefore the true answer, is that work was made for man.  In the beginning God made man and placed him in an earthly paradise.  Despite declaring creation “good, very good” (Gn 1:31), God left it completely incomplete and commanded man to finish it, to “cultivate and care for it” (Gn 2:15), because man himself was completely incomplete.  God commands only what is for our own good so that it is natural for man to work because work is a means of perfecting him.  With the Fall, man became incompletely incomplete so that work, while still essential to his fulfillment, lost its sweetness and became labor (c.f. Gn 3:17-19).  The effects of this curse are still felt today—especially today—when man is plagued by compartmentalization leaving him alienated from himself.  Given the key role that work plays in the integrated life then we must strive to see it in its proper context.

If we are to be honest, absent the Christian message as a whole, the secular response is the best we can come up with.  Even the pre-Christian pagans thought that all men were made to work, or, at least some men were made for servile work so that others didn’t have to.  That is because all they can see is the bad news—the curse of the Fall.  But the Redeemer of Mankind came spending most of His earthly life as a manual laborer redeeming work itself.  He came preaching, as St. John Paul II reminded us, “the Gospel of Work.”  And just as His mother Mary received the first fruits of His redemptive act, it is His earthly father Joseph, the man who worked beside Him those many years, that first reaped the fruits of the redemptive gift of work.  It is for this reason that the Church puts forth St. Joseph as “The Worker.”  If we are to see work in its proper context then we should look to St. Joseph as the model.

First a word about the seeming necessity of compartmentalization.  Most of us spend more time at work than anywhere else.  It becomes a compartment because it seems to only be related to the material.  Man applies his labor and ingenuity on creation in order to produce something that he can use.  The emphasis really seems to be on the finished product so that we can stockpile just enough to take a break (even if indefinitely) and do the really meaningful things including the compartment of “religion and God.”  While we may hear niceties about “praying while you work,” avoiding compartmentalization seems a practical impossibility.

The Finished Product

But this is where the emphasis on work as made for man is important.  The finished product of him work is not just the material thing produced, it is himself.  Good work is that which makes us good men.  Work ought to be judged first and foremost on what it turns us into.  Work that helps us grow in virtue is good work regardless of the actual task.  Seeing work in this subjective sense, the person produced, rather than solely in the exterior production can free us from compartmentalization because it is a means of forming the whole person.  The interior fruits of our labor are carried throughout the rest of our life.

Still man is confronted with the challenge of integrating work with his relationship to God.  There is always a gravity of work that pulls man towards creation, even if it is towards his own virtue, and away from God.  And this is why we need St. Joseph as our intercessor and model.  He, quite literally, worked for and with God.

Working For and With God

All of the work that St. Joseph did was, even if indirectly, for Jesus.  The “righteous man” sought always to serve God especially through his work.  What this means for us is that we can redeem our work by setting our intention.  At the beginning of any of our work we should make of it an offering to God.  Then all that we accomplish becomes a gift to Jesus.  We can also willingly accept, like St. Joseph did, the toilsome-ness of work.  Because work became labor through mankind’s sin, our acceptance of the burdens is an offering for our sins.  It was in this way that St. Joseph shared in Christ’s redemptive act and so can we.

Work also helps us to pay the debt of gratitude to God for the gifts, especially the special skills, He has given us.  Gratitude, properly speaking, carries with it not just the obligation to say “thank you” but also the obligation to repay the benefactor.  The fruit of our labor then becomes a means by which we repay to God this great debt.

There also needs to be a paradigm shift in order to see our work as working with God.  We should see it as a means of not only completely creation, but also as distributing it to all of mankind.  Just because you are getting paid to work doesn’t mean it isn’t also an exercise of charity towards our neighbor.  All workplaces can be charities when we take upon ourselves the spirit of St. Joseph.  This desire not only to give someone what they have paid for but also to go “above and beyond” by making manifest the love of God can sanctify the most secular of work environments.

When Pope Pius XII instituted the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker in 1955 it was in response to the dehumanizing effects of Communism; offering an alternative to their May Day celebrations for workers. In the subsequent sixty-three years we have seen work became a source of further disintegration in the lives of mankind.  By seeing work through the eyes of the Church and the illumination offered by St. Joseph the Worker we can restore work to its rightful place in the lives of all of us.

St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us!

The Mediatrix of All Graces?

Church, Holy Spirit, Incarnation, Mary, ,

Since Pope Pius XII declared the dogma of the Assumption in 1950, Marian devotees within the Church have been championing the cause of a fifth Marian dogma. namely Mary as Mediatrix of All Graces.  Whether or not a formal declaration comes soon, Tradition up and through the Second Vatican Council supports this as a definitive belief, although the particulars still need to be worked out.  Yet most people’s response to this is that it simply goes too far.  We may be willing to concede that she intercedes for us or that she is a mediatrix of grace in some ways, but the title of Mediatrix of All Graces tips the dogmatic scales towards Mariolotry.  But before rejecting it wholesale, we might examine exactly what this doctrine means.

A mediator, in the sense we are using it here, is one who stands between God and man, taking the gifts from God and distributing them to men.  Christ as Mediator, in strict justice, is able to take as much grace as He wants and distribute it to mankind as He sees fit.  One of the ways in which He does so is through secondary mediators.  These mediators no longer act in strict justice but instead as friends of Christ.  When Christ sought to heal the paralytic who encountered Peter and John, He did so through the mediation of Peter (Act 3:1-7).  This, of course, is but one example of many throughout all of history that continues even down to our day when Christians still perform miracles and priests become mediators of grace through the Sacraments.   In this very broad sense Scripture and common sense testify that Mary is a mediatrix (Note: mediatrix is just the feminine form of mediator, like waiter and waitress) in a unique and wholly unrivaled way.  But to go any further we must first set a foundation upon which the doctrine of Mary, Mediatrix of All Graces can be built.

The One Mediator

The cornerstone of such a foundation is necessarily built upon the stone that the builders rejected—Christ—“Who is the one mediator between God and man” (1Tim 2:5).  Anything that we say from this point forward can never diminish or overshadow that truth.  Mary may have been supreme and unique in her co-operation with Christ, but it was He Who was the primary operator.  Mary’s mediation is always sub-ordinated to Christ’s and not co-ordinated.  She may be the branch from which all the fruit grows, but He is the Tree.   He is the one mediator between God and man, but through the designs of Divine Providence chose His Mother to share uniquely in His mission as the source of all grace and in a very real sense made His distribution of grace dependent upon her.  Her role as co-operator in His redeeming mission was entirely unique, for He made Himself dependent upon her “[N]ot only because she consented to make sacrifice for the salvation of men possible, but also in the fact that she accepted the mission of protecting and nourishing the Lamb of sacrifice, and when the time came led Him to the altar of immolation…” (Pope St. Pius X Ad Diem Ilium).

It is because Mary was predestined to be the Mother of God that she received a fullness of grace.  This fullness is exceeded only by Christ’s sacred humanity; hypostatically united to the second Person of the Trinity.  She who is “full of grace” is the pre-eminent beneficiary of Him from Whose “fullness we have received grace upon grace” (Jn. 1:16).  Her fullness of grace and its cause, namely the divine indwelling of the Holy Spirit, makes the Spirit more operative in and through her than all the other saints combined.  We shall come back to this point shortly but it is worth noting that anything that any of the saints can do in the supernatural realm, Mary can do better.

If the source of Mary’s greatness comes from her mission as Mother of God then anything we say about her can only serve to glorify God rather than to eclipse Him.  Many object to the very idea of the Mediatrix of All Graces because it seems to turn her into a goddess.  And if we didn’t know better we might agree because it is such a supreme calling.  But in truth it is meant to reveal the greatness of God’s saving act.  So powerfully did Christ trample sin and death that He is able to elevate a mere creature to an almost full participation in the life of God.  Rather than diminishing the work of Christ, Mary as Mediatrix of All Graces, reveals it more fully.  “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2).  Mary’s heavenly life is the realization of this promise and the Church presents her as such in order to stoke the fires of our faith, hope and charity.

All Graces?

With the necessary foundation in place, we may now begin to build the house.  When we say that Mary is the Mediatrix of All Graces what we mean is not just that Mary obtains grace from God by her prayers but that she also transmits them to us by her actions.  We must first admit its possibility based on what was mentioned above.  If angels and saints can be secondary causes of grace then Mary can do so to a greater degree.  This “greater degree” is not just some graces, but all graces.  As Pope Leo XIII, building on a line of tradition that traces all the way back to the Fathers of the Church, says, “no grace is given to us except through Mary, such being the Divine Will” (Pope Leo XIII, Octobri Mense).  We must not see this however as eliminating all other secondary causes of grace or making them “tertiary” causes of grace.  Instead what this means is, say for something like the Sacraments, that she would obtain for us the grace of a good disposition to receive them. In other words we should see her as the mother who nurtures us with the milk of docility to the grace of the present moment.  She is not the cause of our holiness, but she works behind the scenes to set us to receive its increase.  In this way we say that all graces pass through her Immaculate hands.

Before concluding there is one final objection worth examining.  If Mary truly is the Mediatrix of All Graces, then why would there be any prayers that do not invoke her?  As should be clear by now this objection does not fully grasp what it means to say that she is mediatrix of all graces.  But it also confuses our prayer to her with her prayer to God.  This doctrine does not mean that no grace is given without our asking her, only that she plays such an intimate role in our interior life that no grace is given to us without her asking God for it.  In fact, the only reason why we do ask her and not go directly to God is because she gives more glory to God in the asking than we do.  As God’s most perfect creature, whose soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, her asking is more pleasing to God and becomes an offer He can’t refuse.  This is why she is Our Lady of Mercy and never Our Lady of Justice.

On Church Authority

Church, Church Authority, ,

The Holy Spirit gives to the Church exactly what she needs just when she needs it.  No one could have predicted just how vital it was that among the few items that the Fathers of the first Vatican Council were able to finish was to secure a definition of Papal infallibility.  So important was it that He also guided the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council to take up the issue again so that clarity with relation to the Church’s Magisterium as a whole would emerge.  The eyes of divine Providence of course saw the coming of the information age and with it a mingling of the Chair of Peter and the soapbox through an unprecedented access to the Vicar of Christ on Earth via papal plane parleys, book long interviews and regular addresses to various groups, Catholic and not.  In this day and age clarity as to what constitutes a Magisterial act and what does not has become absolutely necessary for every Catholic in order to avoid stumbling into confusion and error.

To begin, it merits a brief mention what we mean when we use the term Magisterium.  Whatever image is evoked by that term, it should begin by seeing it as an organ of the Mystical Body of Christ; an organ that is living and whose object is the promulgation and preservation of the rule of faith.  Keeping with the image of an organ, it is in essence the mind of the Church.  When Christ issued the pedagogical mandate that the Apostles were to “teach all nations” (Mt 28:19), He likewise offered them divine guidance and protection to do so.  As successors to the Apostles, the Bishops under the headship of the successor of St. Peter, the Pope exercise the power to make the mind of the Church known.

The Mind of the Church

On the part of the Faithful, they must “put on the mind of Christ” by putting on the mind of the Church.  Each man is a member of the Mystical Body of Christ only insofar as he conforms his own mind to the thinking of the Church.  From this notion theologians have come up with the term assent.  Assent is an intellectual judgment that a particular proposition is true.  But there are two kinds of assent, notional and religious.  The former is more of an admission that a particular proposition is true, without it actually making any practical difference in the person’s will.  Meanwhile, religious assent, that is “submission of mind and will,” (Lumen Gentium, 25) not only judges that a particular proposition is true, but also leads to correspondence with the person’s actions.  Religious assent is the only possible response to authentic magisterial teaching.

Now we begin to see the scope of the problem—obedience is required of the Faithful to authentic magisterial teaching.  This of course assumes that we will recognize authentic magisterial teaching when we hear it.  But, as we said in the introduction, the validity of this assumption is highly questionable in our age, and unless we take the time to understand what constitutes an authentic magisterial act and what does not then we will likely end up lost.  Many books, as well as a magisterial document Donum Veritatis have been written on the subject, but for the sake of developing a “layman’s” understanding I will avoid getting too bogged down in the details.

First, there are the statements themselves which carry differing weights.  Avery Cardinal Dulles succinctly defines four categories of magisterial acts in his book Craft of Theology (Chapter 8 :The Magisterium and Theological Dissent”).

  1. Statements definitively set forth that all Catholics are to accept as divinely revealed, that is contained (at least implicitly) in Scripture and Tradition. We typically call these dogmas of which there are many but a few examples would be papal infallibility itself, the four Marian dogmas and the like.
  2. Definitive Declarations of non-revealed truth closely connected to revelation and the Christian life. Examples of this include those teachings of the Church “which concerns the natural law” (Donum Veritatis, 16).
  3. Non-definitive but still obligatory teaching of doctrine that contributes to a right understanding of revelation. Examples of this type of teaching would include encyclicals.—encyclicals falls under this heading and has a real, though not unconditional assent on all the faithful
  4. Finally there are prudential admonitions or applications in a particular time and place which would include things like Apostolic Exhortations.

Our Mind and Will

The response to the first three is real or religious assent, although for the third the assent is not unconditional.  In speaking of the fourth, Dulles says we are required to have “external conformity in behavior but do not demand internal assent” because “interventions in the prudential order, it could happen that some Magisterial documents might not be free from all deficiencies. Bishops and their advisors have not always taken into immediate consideration every aspect or the entire complexity of a question. But it would be contrary to the truth, if, proceeding from some particular cases, one were to conclude that the Church’s Magisterium can be habitually mistaken in its prudential judgments, or that it does not enjoy divine assistance in the integral exercise of its mission” (DV 24).  Any withholding of internal assent must be based not upon one’s personal opinion but instead based upon the rule of faith as found in Scripture and Tradition.  In other words, any disagreement one might have must be based upon the mind of the Church and not one’s own mind.

 

Prudential judgment in the application of moral principles to the temporal realm are not included in this grouping.  We should respectfully consider the opinion of the Pope and Bishops on the application of Catholic Social Teaching to specific political questions and things like the Death Penalty, but we owe them no further assent. That is because these do not constitute true magisterial acts in the sense we are defining it.  These are, as Cardinal Ratzinger put it, issues for which “there may be a legitimate diversity of opinion.”  It is when the “magisterial” statements don’t fall into one of these five categories (the four above plus the application category) that the voice of the magisterium becomes muffled.  With papal interviews, book-length interviews,

daily homilies and addresses to specific groups all figuring prominently in the last three pontificates there seems to be a six category.  While the Pope may have a specific audience in mind, mass communication makes everything he says in a way universal.  The Vatican insists that such statements are “non-magisterial” but there is some question as to whether magisterial-ness can be turned on or off.  It would seem that the path forward for right now is to check those things against the rule of faith.  If they contradict the rule of faith, then they can make no claim on our assent.  If they are in agreement with the rule of faith then they should be viewed as an exercise of the Ordinary Magisterium.  If they do not contradict the rule of faith (this is different than saying they are in agreement) then we do owe a certain level of assent which would depend upon their novelty, that is, how frequently they have been repeated by the Popes and Magisterium of the past.

As is clear by this last paragraph, the Holy Spirit is not yet done bringing clarity to this issue.  In the meantime the best way to part the clouds of obscurity is to learn the content of our faith—“to hold firm to the traditions that you were taught” (2 Thes 2:15).

The Natural-Supernatural Distinction

God's Will, Grace, Heaven, Spiritual Life, Virtue, , ,

In his latest Apostolic Exhortation, Pope Francis cautions the faithful to avoid what he sees as two re-emerging Christian heresies, Gnosticism and Pelagianism.  I will speak on the former another time, but today I would like to address the latter—Pelagianism.  Thanks to the hammer of over-correction, this whack-a-mole heresy is perpetually popping up within the history of the Church.  Now that Pope Francis fixed the crosshairs upon this heresy, we need to also guard against its over-correcting counterpart, Quietism.  In order to do this we must find the spiritual middle ground.

To begin, a few definitions are in order.  Pelagianism has a number of principal tenets but its essence consists in a denial of the supernatural order and the necessity of grace for salvation.  Despite condemnations from numerous Popes and Councils, it still persists to this day.  Likewise with the heresy of Quietism which puts forth the position that to become perfect one must be totally passive in the spiritual life waiting for God to act.  Quietism rejects not only prayers with any specific content (like acts of love, petition or adoration) but also sees mortification and the sacraments as useless.  Despite coming from a different starting point, notice how this heresy comes to the same practical conclusions of Pelagianism.  Left unchecked, these heresies leave us dangling on a pendulum mostly due to a failure to make a crucial distinction.  It is a failure to make what we might call the “Natural-Supernatural Distinction” that lay at the heart of the re-emergence of Pelagianism along with the seemingly endless “Faith vs Works” debate that has plagued Catholic and Protestant discussion for centuries.

The Important Distinction

This distinction comes into focus once we examine the following proposition—“Free will, without the help of God’s grace, acts only in order to sin.”  How should we respond to this?  In order to condemn Pelagianism, we want to accept the proposition.  The problem however is that the Church condemns this one as well.  Pope St. Pius V in his 1567 Papal Bull Ex Omnibus Afflictionibus anathematized this proposition as contrary to the Faith.  How can both Pelagianism and this proposition be false?  It hinges on what we mean by good when we ask the question, “can we be good without God’s grace?”.

A morally good act is one that is in accord with right reason and fulfills our nature.  Thus a man, without being under the influence of grace can act prudently by doing what is just, temperate, and courageous in specific situations. He may even do so habitually so that he grows in virtue and becomes a “good” man.  History is replete with examples of good pagans and other non-Christians so it seems undeniable to think one cannot be good without grace.  But no matter how many good things he does, a man cannot do a single thing that will merit him everlasting life.  In the face of that end, he is like a cow reading Shakespeare, utterly incapable.  But unlike the cow, man can have a super-nature grafted onto him that enables him to perform God-like actions.  Once he receives this nature, that is, once he becomes a “partaker of the divine nature” (c.f. 2 Peter 1:4) and is given sanctifying grace can he now do things that will fulfill his gifted supernatural end.

The Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us and brings with Him a new set of human powers.  First He brings infused virtues that enable the man to direct his actions to God.  No longer does he act for some particular good, His actions can be habitually directed towards the ultimate Good, God Himself.  And he is rewarded accordingly.  He is given the power to be moved directly by that same Spirit with His seven-fold gifts.  And he is rewarded accordingly.  He is, day by day, made not just good but holy.  No longer are his actions merely good in the natural sense but now they are supernaturally good.  St. Thomas sums it up well when he says “without grace man cannot merit everlasting life; yet he can perform works conducing to a good which is natural to man” (ST I-II q.109 a.5).

Becoming More Human

As the Supernature becomes more and more operative in the man, he becomes more human and not less.  “Christ came to fully reveal man to himself and make his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, 22).  Grace most certainly perfects nature, but only to the extent that we cooperate with it.  How do we nurture this super-nature?  By becoming naturally good.  Cooperation really means that remove the obstacles that we place in the way.  Growth in the infused virtue of prudence, for example, is directly related to growth in the acquired virtue of prudence.  This is not because the infused virtues are somehow grafted on top of the natural virtues, but because the natural virtues facilitates the removal of any obstacles to the infused virtue being completely operative.  This is why we must never forget the truth that we are capable on our own of growing in natural virtue.

This is important because we often remain rather passive in our attempts to grow in holiness.  Avoiding any traces of Pelagianism, we have a tendency to be rather passive in our attempts to grow in holiness and move towards an equally spiritually impotent habit of Quietism.  We wait for God to provide the growth but forget that we have the power to till and fertilize the soil in the meantime.  We should be at all times working diligently to grow in the natural virtues so that when the grace of growth comes, there is nothing stopping it.  And this is why the “Natural-Supernatural Distinction” is so important for us to grasp.  Naturally we cannot achieve any merit, but we can (naturally) remove the impediments by actively cultivating the acquired virtues.    We must constantly be at work fertilizing our soil.  No saint ever reached the heights of holiness without going through a stage of active purgation.  We are still fallen creatures so that our efforts at natural perfection will always fall short.  This is why each of the saints also went through a stage of passive purgation in which God, through the workings of Providence and actual graces, completes the growth in perfection.

The problem with most heresies is not so much that they are false, but that they tend to overemphasize one aspect of the truth at the expense of other aspects.  In this regard, Pelagianism is no different with its over-emphasis on human effort.  But the response is not then to become a Quietist, passively waiting on God to act.  Instead, we must live the “both/and” doctrine of the Faith in which we follow the rule of St. Ignatius, “pray as if everything depended upon God and work as if everything depended on you.”

The Darkness of Gethsemane

Passion of Christ, Redemption, Suffering, The Life of Jesus, , ,

There is a darkness, both in the literal and in the figurative sense, which hangs over the week preceding Our Lord’s Passion.  The Church tries to make this darkness present to her children throughout the liturgies marking Holy Week.  It moves from the darkness of Judas’ human heart to the darkness of the Agony in the Garden, culminating in the darkness of the crucifixion.  There is perhaps nowhere else that the theme of darkness is made more manifest that at the end of the Holy Thursday liturgy when the faithful silently watch Our Lord’s Eucharistic presence going out into the darkness.  More than just a mere liturgical gesture, it is an invitation for us to accompany Jesus in His forsakenness and to stand by Him.  It is our moment to participate in His Agony in the Garden as He goes to an altar of repose for us to watch and pray with Him.

Darkness had fallen upon Jerusalem by the time Our Lord entered the gates of Gethsemane with His inner circle.  All four of the Evangelists provide us details of His time of anguished prayer and yet, we find that this event, perhaps more so than any other aspect of the Passion, is shrouded deeply in mystery.  It would seem that Our Lord suffered more during these three hours than all the rest of His Passion combined.  How acute must a man’s suffering be in order to sweat blood?  We could overlook His sufferings here or give them a cursory nod of understanding, but this would be like Judas who, fearful of the darkness comes carrying a torch.  Or we could, as the Church is inviting us, enter into this darkness with Our Lord and, so, comfort Him by our presence.  That a mere creature could comfort the God man is in itself a great mystery.  Nevertheless Our Lord was comforted by having his three closest companions near Him and from the presence of an angel just before His arrest.  It seems that He pre-ordained that He would not suffer this alone.  Still, in order to be most fully present to Him we must begin to grasp the source of His suffering.

Our Lord’s Emotional State

There are few places in the gospels where the Evangelists point out Our Lord’s emotional state.  When they do, it can be quite illuminating for us because it gives a glimpse into the mystery of His interior life.  We know much about what He said and did, but we know little about what He truly thought and felt.  Because Jesus had perfect integrity in His soul, what He thought and felt always had a perfect correspondence.  What this means is that His emotions perfectly followed His reason and will.  When He felt an emotion it was only because He willed to feel it.  The Eternal Son of God knew the sufferings He would endure and His hour was always before Him.  Yet it is only when His hour comes that His suffering comes.  In other words, when the Word of God says “I will to suffer,” His suffering starts and not a moment before.  This suffering is expressed through the two emotions Our Lord describes Himself as having—fear and sorrow.

Immediately upon entering the Garden with Peter, James and John we are told that Our Lord “began to feel fear and to be exceedingly troubled” (c.f. Mark 14:33).  Fear as an emotion is always future directed; towards some evil that is difficult to avoid, but in truth is not yet present.  An obvious cause of this fear is awareness of the bodily sufferings and death that He is going to endure.  This is the natural human reaction to pain and suffering and Our Lord in His human will must choose to endure it.  But to stop there is to pluck the fruit before it is ripe.  He is no ordinary man, but the God-Man and thus He is able to foresee not only His own sufferings, but the sufferings of those whom He holds most dear because of His Passion.  He is able to see the effect His Passion will have upon His Mother whom He will crown as the Queen of Sorrows.  He sees the pain endured by the Beloved Disciple, the same man who slumbers beside Peter, the same man who will suffer a martyr’s death because of His Passion.  In fact it is not just Peter but all the martyrs that He sees.  He wills to endure all of their inner turmoil so that they go to the gallows laughing and without any trace of fear.  He will even endure the mental anguish of one particular martyr, St. Thomas More, who will write about Christ’s Agony in the Garden (The Sadness of Christ) as the real source of martyrdom while he joyfully and jokingly awaits his own execution.  Christ foresees the sufferings of the Church, His Mystical Body, and lives them in His physical body.  Although it is necessary that He drinks this cup, He is well aware of all the suffering that it will cause in the future because He drank it to the dregs.

The Sadness of Christ

All of those things are future directed but there is pain in the evil of the moment as well.  We know this because Our Lord also expresses His sadness—“And He said to them “My soul is sad, even unto death” (Mk 14:35).  Sadness as an emotion is always present-directed; towards a present evil that cannot be avoided.  So acute is Christ’s sadness that it threatens to kill Him right on the spot.  What cup is Our Lord already drinking?  It is the cup of our guilt.

Guilt is, or at least should be, a profound sorrow for having done something wrong.  It is a painful way to move us to make amends for what we have done wrong.  When properly experienced the pain bears a certain proportionality to the pleasure we have stolen.  The problem is that we find all kinds of ways to avoid it because it is painful.  Now think of a man who is genuinely trying to be good and he does something gravely wrong.  For him guilt is really painful.  The more sensitive the conscience the more acutely we can feel the pain of guilt.  Now take a man Who has never done anything wrong in His life and introduce an awareness of guilt such that He experiences it as if He has done something wrong.  Because of His innocence, the pain would be quite unimaginable.  Now, take that experience and multiply it by all the sins in the history of the world and only by a miracle of grace does the soul remain in the body of this man (“sorrowful unto death’).  Hard to imagine for sure, but it is enough to bring the God-Man to His knees and cause blood to mingle with His sweat as His body desperately clings to His soul.  One might think it is His soul that is bleeding.

Now He does this for His Father, Who has been offended not just by our sins, but our seeming incapacity for sorrow.  He does it for you and me not only to save us, but to win grace to have true sorrow for sin.  When this grace is accepted and we express sorrow it somehow lightens His load.  The field of His vision spanned across the unrepentant, the lukewarm and the truly repentant.  It was the vision of the latter that brought Him comfort in His afflictions.  And this is ultimately why we must journey with Him into the darkness of Gethsemane and remain there with Him.