A recent survey by the Pew
Research Center found that almost 1/3 of all Americans have had some paranormal
encounter with human spirits after they have died. This, coupled with nearly half of all
Americans admitting to “believing” in ghosts, makes the existence of ghosts a
fairly common topic of discussion, especially in our increasingly superstitious
culture. What does the Church have to
say about ghosts?
To begin, there are a few preliminary
points that will serve as a foundation for the discussion. First, when we use the term ghost, we are referring specifically to
human spirits who have died as distinct from angels or demons. Second, although Christians often dismiss the
question as absurd, there are Scriptural reasons to believe that ghosts do
exist. The most well-known example is
when King Saul conjured up the ghost of Samuel and spoke to him (1 Samuel 28:12-18).
Our Lord too spoke of ghosts during His earthly ministry, twice, in
fact. On both occasions (Mt 14:34, Lk
24:39) the Apostles thought He was a ghost.
Rather than saying “ghosts do not exist”, He reassures them that He is
not a ghost because ghosts “do not have flesh and bones as I do.” Our Lord tells us that ghosts not only exist,
but that they are in a spiritual state in which they do not have material flesh
and bones.
Why There Are Ghosts
If ghosts
are, at least theoretically, a possibility, then what practical purpose might
their manifestation serve. In short,
they are meant to communicate some message to the living, although this
statement needs to be seriously qualified.
For this, we can rely upon St. Thomas who himself was visited at least three
times by ghosts in his lifetime. We
should not be surprised then that he treats this topic in his Summa Theologiae (Supp. Q.69, art. 3).
St. Thomas
asks whether it is possible for souls in heaven or hell to be able to appear on
earth. His response is thorough enough
that it enables us to come up with guidelines for understanding the purpose of
these visitations. First of all, we are
judged immediately upon death. This
means souls are either in Heaven or in Hell, with some making a temporary stop
in Purgatory before settling in to their final destination in God’s
presence. There is no such thing as a
soul that is doomed to wander the earth or anything like that. While this might make for a good Dean Koontz
book, it is not rooted in reality.
It is the
natural state of these souls then to be cut-off from their communication with
the living, but according to God’s will they may miraculously appear to men on
earth. This is also noteworthy because
it helps us to understand the Biblical injunction about conjuring spirits of
the dead in order to make inquiries of them (c.f. Lev 20:6, Deut 18:3). It is only according to the designs of God’s
Providence that these visitations might occur and not through human manipulation. To try to invoke spirits of the dead is to
usurp a power that only God, as the God of the living and dead, can use.
The saints in
heaven can appear to the living whenever they will because their will is always
aligned with the Divine will. They
appear so as to instruct men on earth in a similar manner to St. Paul appearing
to St. Thomas when he was stuck in his interpretation of a particularly
difficult passage in Romans. The souls
that are damned too can appear to men “for man’s instruction and intimidation,”
although they would not do so willingly.
Those souls in Purgatory appear in order too seek prayers and suffrages. St. Thomas was visited by his sister Gui from
Purgatory and she asked him prayers and masses to be said in her memory.
The last group,
those in Purgatory, bear further discussion.
These are probably the most common type of “ghosts” because they come as
members of the Church Suffering in need of the help of the Church Militant. Their appearance, at least according to most
demonologists and exorcists, are usually gentle and they limit their
communication to a request for spiritual help in the form of prayers and
Masses. For that reason they are also
the easiest to discern their authenticity.
In fact it might be said that there is no discernment necessary—if one
has a ghostly encounter then they should simply pray for the dead person and have
seek no further interaction.
Ghost and Demons
The ghostly elephant
in the room is the action of the demonic.
This is an area, especially because people are in an emotionally
vulnerable place, that the devils are particularly active. They are bullies that like to prey on the
weak. It is for that reason that we need
to have our understanding clear about this.
Demonologist Adam Blai says that the demons usually come to places where
souls have previously communicated with the living asking for prayers so that
they might manipulate the living. That
is why we should never seek information from the dead other than the need for
prayer. Any messages we do receive we
should submit to a thorough process of the discernment of spirits, including
asking God to verify it in other ways.
In truth, we
should be very suspicious of paranormal communications to the point of
rejecting them whole cloth. This is not
because we don’t believe in them, but because our capacity to be deceived is
very high. We can do no wrong in praying
for the dead but can easily get pulled into something more through extended
conversation. Better to reject it out of
humility and obedience, two virtues particularly pleasing to God, than to succumb
to the tricks of demons. Once we have
opened the door for them and inviting them in, it can be very difficult to
chase the legalistic demons away.
Ghosts
continue to remain a fascination for many of us. There are good reasons for Christians to
believe in their existence, but they should avoid encouraging any interaction with.
“Playing house” is a common
children’s make believe game where the children take on adult roles usually
centering around family life. What
happens when adults, armed with enough technology to make believe believable
still like to play the game? Something
along the lines of what happened in Nebraska recently where a
“61-year-old Nebraska mom has become a grandmom after giving birth herself —
acting as the surrogate for her adult son and his husband.” Even Aldous Huxley would find this truth
stranger than fiction, despite being only half-way down the slippery slope into
which our culture is descending.
Imagine little baby Uma, when she
is much older Uma, looking at her birth certificate, the one that “looks really
creepy for us.” On it, she will find the
name of one of her fathers, Matthew Eledge.
Under the heading of Mother, she will find the name of her
grandmother. Now this permanent public
record will look like a case of incest.
Uma may know better, but is it better that she knows better? In truth she will know that she was pieced
together in a laboratory from various interrelated parts. She will know she was a “product” of
conception that originated with her father’s sperm and her other father’s
sister’s egg.
Straight Out of A Brave New World?
As the origins of life grow to more
closely resemble Huxley’s decanter than nature, it is increasingly difficult to
point out this injustice. Justice
requires that equals be treated as equals.
When a child is conceived in a manner such as this, the relationship
between parent and child is not truly a communion of persons but one of
producer and product. In essence this is,
as Donum Vitae points out, “equivalent to reducing the child to an object of
scientific technology.”
No one can measure the psychological
effects of knowing this upon the person, and, interestingly enough, no one has
attempted to study it. Children of
divorce often face an identity crisis even though they are told that their
parents “love them very much.” That is
because it is not enough to know you are loved, but you must also know that you
came from love, that is, you are not an accident. Likewise children conceived in a laboratory
could face a similar identity crisis.
If you doubt the person-product
connection, re-read the linked article and notice the description of the
process they went through, including a quality control measure called “preimplantation
genetic testing which would help determine the embryos most likely to develop
into a healthy baby.” If you are going
to spend all the money (again described in detail in the interview) then you
want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck. Meanwhile six other children, Uma’s brothers
and sisters, were set aside as byproducts of conception. The article doesn’t say what happened to
these six children but they were likely frozen or test subjects for human
experimentation. At least there was some
semblance of a human decency when the men decided that choosing the sex of the
child was too much “like playing God.”
Procreation and the “Right to
Make Life”
Perhaps the clearest indication of
where this slippery slope leads is revealed in the form of a question. After laying out all of the specific costs of
the procedure and a complaint from the two men that IVF is cost prohibitive for
most “couples”, the author asks, “should citizens have a right to make life?” And this is, the battleground over which must
fight if we are to rectify this injustice.
Humans do not reproduce, they
procreate. This is more than a mere
semantical distinction. Reproduction is
a closed activity. It simply requires
two material creatures to exchange their genetic matter to produce
offspring. Human procreation is different
however. Like other material creatures,
humans exchange genetic matter. But they
lack the capacity to exchange or create the spiritual element within their
offspring. This must be created by Someone
else and requires His intervention. Because
procreation requires the intervention of a Third, the child must always be
received as a gift and not as something that the couple is owed. Couples receive children rather than grasp at
them.
The biological limitations that God
has written into nature are there for our own good and for our own
thriving. Seizing what should otherwise
be a gift, perhaps the greatest gift that God can bestow on us in the natural
realm, leads to spiritual ruin for the parents.
But it need not be so for the children.
Even though the children
conceived in this manner face an existential crisis and appear to be a mere product
of technology, in truth they are not. They
are still persons of inestimable value because despite their immoral beginnings,
God, as the ignored Third, still chose for this child to exist. He still loved them into existence, even if
their parents chose to hide that love behind scientific techniques.
One way to put a halt to the skid
down this slippery slope is to change our rights language. Even if the State grants them, there are no
such thing as “reproductive rights” and not just because humans don’t, properly
speaking, reproduce. As proof of this,
notice how they have little connection to actual duties towards other people
connected to these rights. In fact, they
render children’s rights obsolete. What
people do have are procreative rights.
These natural rights are always in reference to their duties to children
and ensure the dignity of children both born and unborn.
In closing, there is one more thing
that needs to be said regarding giving up on gay marriage as a battle already
lost. This is no mere “playing house”
precisely because of stories like this.
In order to keep the game up, six children had to be condemned to death
or a frozen existence. This couple may
be the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last. The demand for procedures like this (as well
as the demand to develop lower cost alternatives) will continue to increase
unless we do something to protect these children.
The Governor
of Georgia, Brian Kemp, has until May 12th to either sign or veto a
bill that would ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. Until then we should expect that the heat
from human rights advocates in Hollywood will continue to increase. They have threated to boycott the state if HB
481 becomes law because it is a dangerous bill that threatens “to strip
women of their bodily autonomy.” Whether
it is the pithy “my body, my choice” or this principle of “bodily autonomy”,
the idea is often invoked to defend abortion.
Therefore, it merits a discussion in order to insert some sanity into
what is otherwise an insane defense of abortion.
Hidden and Not-So Hidden Assumptions
To refute this
position, we must first understand the assumptions upon which it rests. First notice that by invoking this type of
argument they are admitting that the fetus is in fact a person. Otherwise their position is absurd in that it
contradicts both science and common sense.
From the moment of conception, the fetus is an independent biological entity
that is self-directed with its own DNA. Now only thing necessary for growth and
development is the same thing we need—water, food, oxygen and a healthy
interaction with its natural environment.
So then it is not a “part” of the mother’s body. This would also lead to the absurd conclusion,
that a woman who is carrying a boy has a penis and if she is carrying a girl
she has two vaginas and four breasts. Perhaps
though, this is not as absurd as it used to be.
Interestingly
enough, this concession actually gives too much, at least according to Roe v
Wade. As Justice Harry Blackmum put it “(If
the) suggestion of personhood [of the preborn] is established, the [abortion
rights] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then
guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.” Nevertheless the argument they are making is
that the right to bodily autonomy trumps (or at least carries the same moral
weight as) the right to life. In fact to
listen to them, it would seem that the right to bodily autonomy is absolute and
eclipses all other moral claims.
The bodily
autonomy argument rests upon a certain metaphysical presumption of what it
means to be human. This presumption
reveals itself when we examine the definition—“bodily autonomy is defined as
the right to self-governance over one’s own body without external influence or
coercion.” If we remove the veil of the “rights
language” we immediately realize that while this could be a legitimate right,
it can never be absolute. You simply
cannot govern your own body without external influence or coercion in all cases
because there are other people around.
To grant this right to everyone would inevitably lead to chaos. That is because man is social by nature and
thus there are certain obligations that arise as members of society. One such obligation is the obligation that a
mother has towards her child.
As the usage
of the term autonomy suggests, the abortion defender assumes that there are no
such things as obligations, or at least to be an obligation it must be voluntarily
accepted. All relationships and the
obligations attached to them contain an opt-out clause because autonomy
dictates that there be ongoing consent.
We can see that in certain relationships this is true, but in others the
obligation exists. A mother and a father
came into a relationship with each other and with a child voluntarily and thus
they bear the obligation to nurture that child.
A mother is a mother whether she consents to be or not.
The Principle of Consent
This last
statement, namely that a mother and father came into relationship with each
other and with a child voluntarily, ought to be obvious, but it bears some
explanation anyway. One of the reasons
why abortion has become so prevalent is because the connection of sex and
babies has been virtually divorced. I
say “virtually” because this disconnect can only be mental and never real. The fact that we even have something like birth control and abortion admits to
this fact. Consent to any given activity
is also consent to all the natural consequences attached to that activity, even
if it is only implicit. The trapeze
artist who jumps to another midflight consents not just to being caught but to
falling. He may take many precautions so
that he doesn’t fall, but if he does then no one would call it unexpected but
an accident. In fact, this intrinsic connection
to falling is what makes the activity so exciting. In a similar manner consent to sexual
intercourse is consent to a child because children are a natural consequence of
that particular activity. Like the trapeze
artist, a couple might have an “accident” but it would never be unexpected
because it is an activity that is ordered towards that outcome. We may attempt to alter that outcome by being
“safe” but that does not change the intrinsic connection.
But not all children are conceived as a result
of a consensual act, so what can we say about cases of rape. We must first call the abortion supporter to
task for attempting to argue from exception.
Even if we were to say that abortion is permissible in the case of rape,
this is not really what they are after.
They want abortion on demand and when they are pressed on the case of
rape they will reveal that. Nevertheless,
what we have said also applies to the hard case of rape.
Recall that in
order for this line of argument in favor of abortion to proceed, they must be
willing to concede that the fetus is a person.
Otherwise the argument crumbles and the rape exception is a red
herring. As social beings, we are our
brother’s keepers. We have an obligation
to protect the life of the most vulnerable among us, even though it might be at
great personal cost. This obligation is
a social one, meaning that everyone must do their part. Some play a part, even if only temporarily,
that no one else can play, but that does not remove the obligation. This might be called the argument of common
decency. It simply means that a woman must endure the
labor of delivery, but not necessarily the labor of raising the child. For that, there are other members of society
who are willing to step up. To the issue
at hand, it is not without irony that the number of abortions yearly in our country
is almost identical to the number of people seeking to adopt.
Under closer
inspection then it appears that the argument of bodily autonomy falls flat. There can be no such thing as unlimited
bodily autonomy without destroying not just babies in the womb, but society as
a whole.
April 2nd of each year
marks a day of recognition of the millions of people worldwide who live with
Autism. It is meant to raise awareness
of the incredible challenges that people on the Autism Spectrum face and to
increase understanding of this disorder.
Insofar as it does that, it is most certainly a good thing. But that can never be enough. Instead the enlightened among us who advocate
that we should just all accept our brokenness, have decided that it should be
renamed “Autism Acceptance Day.” Gone is
the symbol of the Autism Puzzle Piece, sacrificed to the gods of political
correctness, and replaced by the rainbow infinity symbol for neurodiversity. What has always been recognized as a disorder,
is now celebrated as being “differently ordered” (Fr. James Martin would be
proud). Despite the best of intentions, this will only result in the worst of outcomes
for people with Autism and someone must set the record straight.
Normalizing the Abnormal
The movement to normalize the
abnormal and naturalize the unnatural is one of the most pernicious evils of
our time. Autism is not natural nor is
it just “different.” It is, as the clinical
name suggests, a disorder. It is the
cause of a great deficit in the person’s life, handicapping their ability to give
and receive love, communicate with other people and to see the world
accurately. Not only that, but it is
usually accompanied by a whole gamut of other medical and mental health issues
including sleep disorders and anxiety. Only the most cold-hearted of people would be
willing to “accept” Autism knowing that people with Autism suffer greatly,
often in silence, solely because of it.
Perhaps the fact that they want acceptance of Autism says more about
them than it does about Autism.
It is so much easier to tell
someone they are OK than to get involved in making them better. This is why I find professional therapists
who advocate for “Accepting Autism” particularly puzzling. If Autism is something we should accept, then
why do we give them any therapy at all?
Why would we teach them social skills, help them with their sensory
challenges, and improve their communication if they are just fine? It is apathy at best. Just one more thing for us to show faux concern
about and drop a pinch of incense to the Twitter god.
It might be the case that what they
really mean is that we should be more accepting of people with Autism. Of that, there can be no disagreement. Because Autism is often out of sight, it is
out of mind so that people fail to recognize that the person in front of them
is afflicted with it. Having a general awareness
of how it manifests itself and habitually giving people the benefit of the
doubt constitutes an act of compassion.
But the approach of “accepting” Autism actually has the opposite effect.
The more you paint it with the “normal”
brush, the more you open the door to intolerance. For society to properly function, it must
operate under a set of norms to facilitate cooperation and communication. Norms keep us from descending into
chaos. Those who are capable of following
those norms, we label as normal and we set our expectations likewise. When an otherwise normal person does not
adhere to the norms we must not tolerate it.
Now, when a person is unable to adhere to the norms, like say if they
have Autism, then they must be met with compassion. If you were to remove the “label” of
disability, what is naturally expected of the other person rises and far from
acceptance, the person finds nothing but rejection. What our innovators are suggesting then harms
way more than it helps in the long run.
A New Movement
And this is why rather than accepting
“Accepting Autism”, we should start a
counter movement “Tolerating Autism”. No
matter how hard we try, we have to admit that Autism is a bad thing. We should never accept bad things, only
tolerate them. We can never accept Autism
but only tolerate it because the person who labors under the Cross of Autism is
a beautiful and uniquely unrepeatable thing.
There may have been good things that came about because of their
encounter with this disorder, but that is never a reason to accept it. People who suffer from cancer often
experience positive personal growth, but that would never mean we should accept
cancer. And just like we do with cancer,
we should continue to work to eradicate Autism.
Despite protestations to the contrary, our culture is absolutely obsessed with labeling people. We label according to race, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, you name it. The label then becomes the identity rather than something that forms who the person is. People often rail against the notion that Autism is a bad thing because they see it somehow as a personal attack. But that is to fall into the trap of defining a person by a label. There are no autistic people, only people with Autism because Autism can never fully define who a person is. They are so much more than simply repetitive behaviors and compromised social skills. This is also why people advocate for the removal of the puzzle piece symbol because “I am not a puzzle piece.” Well, in truth, you are not a rainbow infinity sign either. The symbol is only a label for the person if you identify them with their condition. Otherwise it is simply a symbol for a thing.
Tolerate Autism? For the time being. Accept Autism? Never.
Just in time for the Feast of the Incarnation, the New York
Times published
an opinion piece written by Professor of Philosophy Peter Atterton that
purposes to refute the idea of “deity most Westerners accept” because it is not
coherent. His approach is the same
approach is the same tri-lemma that was the topic of a recent post: pitting God’s
omnipotence, omnibenevolence and omniscience against each other. It is worthwhile to examine his argument,
well at least part of it, not because it is particularly compelling, but
because it was featured in one of the country’s largest fish wraps. In fact, his argument overall falls rather
flat as we will see.
A Stone too Large,
Really?
First he experiments with the “stone too large to lift
argument” to attack God’s omnipotence. This
seems rather easy to resolve once we define what we mean when we say that God’s
omnipotence allows Him to do anything and not anything. Provided that the thing is an actual thing,
that is something that could be done,
then God can do it. The rock too heavy
to lift is a sophist word game because it is simply a logical contradiction
akin to saying that God can also square a circle or make right left (which
everyone knows only Lightning McQueen can do).
This is a classic attack (the author even cites Aquinas who addressed
it) but it really stems from a misunderstanding of God’s nature. Those who posit such a thing normally think
of the voluntarist God of the Calvinists and Muslims rather than the God Who is
Reason and has revealed Himself in the Logos
or Word that became flesh.
Professor Atterton may have been trying to set up an attack
on God’s omnibenevolence by even mentioning the ersatz dilemma of the stone
that can’t be lifted. He seems to think
that a world in which evil does not exist, at least from the Christian point of
view, is among those logical impossibilities.
That is certainly not something that Christians believe. God could have made (and even possibly did)
such a world, but for reasons we may not understand (because we are not God) He
chose not to. The point however is that
He could have done otherwise, but had a reason for doing it the way He
did.
As far as this part of the tri-lemma, I will refer the reader
to the aforementioned post that deals with God
and the Problem of Evil. The part of
the argument that bears the most attention is the “conundrum” of
omniscience. In short, his argument is
that “if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we
know. But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His
perfection… if
God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust
and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them.
But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God
cannot be morally perfect…Therefore, God doesn’t know what it is like to be human. In that case
He doesn’t know what we know. But if God doesn’t know what we know, God is not
all knowing, and the concept of God is contradictory. God cannot be both omniscient
and morally perfect. Hence, God could not exist.”
God’s Omniscience
One must first admit that this has a diabolical ring to it, “for
you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (c.f. Gn 3:5) and so we should immediately
intuit that it contains a falsehood. The
diabolical delusion is unmasked once we challenge the Professor’s contention
that “if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as
much as we know.”
The problem is not that it is wrong, but that he is
equivocating on the term “knows”. The
way we know things is vastly different
from the way God knows things. In
truth, God knows only one thing—Himself—and this knowledge of Himself embraces
everything actual and possible. Our
knowledge comes piecemeal and only after discursion. His knowledge embraces all things at once
without any reasoning out all the possible details of each individual thing. His knowledge is eternal and unchanging and
thus He must come to know all things in light of their cause, Himself. If this were not so, then there would be an
imperfection in God, namely that His knowledge would depend on created things.
God’s knowledge is not determined and measured by things like
ours, but is the cause of things. God’s
knowledge in relation to things then is a creative knowledge that gives
existence to things. Ours is an
experiential or connatural knowledge.
This point seems to be missed when the Professor speaks of God having to
know “lust and envy.” This train of
thought is important because it keeps the Professor’s moral argument from
leaving the station.
Evil is foreign to God, but, according to St. Thomas, God can
still know evil “through the good of which it is a privation, as darkness is
known by light.” His point is that evil,
like darkness, can only be known in contrast to the thing that is lacking. God is not the cause of the lack, but man is,
even if God has permitted it. In other words,
God can know about evil, but only because it is affront to the good of which He
has creative knowledge. But St. Thomas
goes even further when he says that “He would not know good things perfectly
unless He also knew evil things” (ST I, q.14 a.10). His
point is that to speak of “full” knowledge is to imply degree. In short, to have full knowledge means one
must also be able to know when it is lacking.
In recent years the New York Times has come under intense
scrutiny for its lack of journalistic integrity and a decidedly partisan slant with
little regard for truth. They seem to
now be setting their sights on Truth Himself.
Of course, if they are going to succeed in placing God in the Dock, they
are going to have to find better arguments than Professor Atterton’s elementary
attempt. Maybe some news isn’t really
fit to print.
In a recent homily
on the Biblical narrative of the Flood, Pope Francis challenged those gathered
to have a heart like God’s, especially in the face of human suffering. The Holy Father said that “God the Father…is
able to get angry and feel rage…suffering more than we do.” So common has this assertion that God suffers
become that it is practically becoming an assumption. But upon closer inspection we come to find
that there are a number of faith altering and faith destroying consequences
that follow from this false view of God.
Therefore, it merits further reflection why it is that God does not
suffer.
The Need for Analogy
We must first admit that our
language inevitably fails us when we attempt to speak about God. In fact, we can say nothing positive about
Him. This is not because we are
pessimists, but because we can only speak definitively about what He is not. He is omniscient because there is nothing He
doesn’t know. He is omnipotent because
there is nothing He can do, etc. To
speak of what He is, is impossible because He transcends our categories. This linguistic limitation can be partially
overcome once we allow for the use of analogy.
For example, God reveals Himself as Father because His fatherhood is
something like the human fatherhood that we are all familiar with.
The problem with this approach of analogy is that we often get it backwards. Properly speaking it is human fatherhood that is like God’s fatherhood. Keeping the primacy of God’s fatherhood in mind keeps us from assuming that it is just like human fatherhood and making God in our image instead of us in His. Human fatherhood is only true fatherhood to the extent that it images God’s fatherhood as St. Paul is wont to remind the Ephesians (c.f. Eph 3:15).
More closely related to the topic of God’s suffering is the dictum that God is love. To say that God is love is to say that God loves fully and for all eternity. He cannot love any more than He does because it is His nature to love. We speak of different “kinds” of love from God such as mercy, compassion, kindness, etc. but in God there is no distinction. He loves fully. We, however, cannot receive His love fully. “Whatever is received,” St. Thomas says, “is received according to the mode of the receiver.” To the sinner, God’s love is received as mercy. To the suffering His love is received as comfort. Yet, from God’s perspective it is a completely active and full love.
To say that God suffers with us reverses
the analogy. The assumption is that
because compassionate human love includes suffering, then Divine love must
also. But the fact that it includes
suffering does not mean that it must include suffering. It is the love that is given that makes it
love, not the suffering. In fact you
could remove the suffering, the love would still be love. In fact, it would be a purer love because
there would be no need on the lover’s part to succor his own suffering. Instead it would be a completely free love
with no compulsion towards self-interest.
Rather than being somehow cold and indifferent, it is complete and free. So God, by not be able to suffer, actually
loves us more than if He could suffer. To
insist otherwise makes God love us less, the very thing that they think they
are avoiding by positing that He must suffer.
As Fr. Thomas Weinandy puts it, “what human beings cry out for in their
suffering is not a God who suffers but a God who loves wholly and completely,
something a suffering God could not do.”
God is compassionate not because He suffers with but because He is able
to fully embrace those who are suffering
Further Consequences of the Suffering God
If reversing the analogy was the
worst part about this, then we might simply chalk it up as a
misunderstanding. But the fact that it
represents an attack on God’s nature eventually leads us into a theological
pitfall that destroys our faith in God.
God, in order to suffer must be capable of change. But we believe in a God who is
immutable. His immutability comes about
not because He can’t change, but because as the fullness of being there is
nothing for Him to change into. No
change would make Him more than He is because He is already “I AM WHO AM”, pure
act. He fully alive. To posit that He can suffer is to posit that
He can change and to posit that He can change is to say that He is not the one
true God.
He must also be incapable of
suffering, that is, impassible for a subtler reason as well. Suffering is caused by a lack of some good
that ought to be there. If God, in
Himself is lacking some good, then He is not All Good. If the suffering comes about because of the
lack of some good in creation, then He becomes a part of creation itself and is
no longer transcendent. As part of
creation He is no longer Creator. Evil
and suffering must be seen as having real existence (rather than a lack of some
good) since nothing is immune to it. Our
new God is the god of pantheism or process theology and an ontological dualism
becomes the result.
The suffering God hypothesis
ultimately means the destruction of the Christian God. If God is not free from suffering, then no
one is. And if no one is, then there is
no possibility of redemption. God simply
becomes one being among many striving for perfection. If He cannot save Himself from evil, then how
can He save anyone else? The Incarnation
becomes totally incomprehensible. The
God-Man cannot offer redemption, nor can He sanctify suffering. In truth, a suffering God need not stoop to
our level because He is already there. The
truth that He could love fully without suffering, yet still chose to add
suffering carries the assurance of His total love for each one of us. If He could already suffer, then it looks
like little more than masochism.
In short, ideas have consequences. Serious ideas have serious consequences. The idea of divine passibility has nothing but negative consequences. Therefore, despite its present popularity, the assertion that Divine suffering is possible must be wholly rejected in favor of the Traditional teaching of the Church so that the Faith may remain intact.
For anyone who has read either of
St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summas, it is patently obvious that he took objections to
the Catholic Faith seriously. Put more
precisely, he felt obligated to address serious objections fully. So keen was his understanding that he often
made his opponents’ arguments more precisely and succinctly than they can. One can often learn more from the objections
and their responses than from the substance of his response. Christians of today could learn much from the
Angelic Doctor in this regard, especially when it comes to the existence of
God. There are most certainly motives of
credibility that honest atheists
must take seriously if they are genuinely interested in discovering the
truth. But these can often be
overshadowed by what might be called “a motive of discredibility”, namely the
problem of evil and suffering, that Christians must also take seriously.
When St. Thomas tackles the
existence of God in the Summa Theologiae, he finds this to be the only real objection. This was not to suggest that other objections
don’t matter, but that they begin to fade away once this objection has received
a sufficient answer. St. Thomas
articulates the objection like this: “It seems that God does not exist; because
if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed.
But the word ‘God’ means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God
existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world.
Therefore God does not exist” (ST I, q.2 art 3, obj. 1).
The Dilemma of Suffering and Evil
Notice that the objector has set up
what is essentially a dilemma revolving around God’s infinite goodness. If God is omnibenevolent then evil cannot
exist. Many have added to this argument
by suggesting that the problem is really a tri-lemma in that God could not be infinitely
wise, good and powerful if evil exists.
Either he cannot stop the evil (omnipotence), wills the evil (omnibenevolence)
or doesn’t know how to stop it (omnisapience).
St. Thomas, in a certain sense,
anticipates the expanded objection when he quotes St. Augustine who said “Since
God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works,
unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil”
and adds his own comment that, “This is part of the infinite goodness of God,
that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good” (ST I, q.2 art
3, ad. 1).
What St. Thomas doesn’t say, but
that remains just beneath the surface of what he did, is that evil, once
properly framed, actually presents an argument for God. Evil in the metaphysical sense does not
exist. This does not mean it is not a
reality or that it causes suffering in people, but this suffering is not a
result of the evil per se, but of the deprivation of a good that should
otherwise be there. Blindness is a
deprivation of the good of sight and therefore is an evil. Moral evils like sins and vices are nothing
but a lack of the moral good that should otherwise be in and flow from the
human heart.
This distinction, although well
known, is important for two reasons.
First, it refutes any dualistic ontological explanations. Second, and more closely related to our point,
is the fact that when good comes from evil, it is always a creation ex nihilio. Good that does come comes from absolutely
nothing. Only a being Who is all
powerful can create out of nothing so that the problem of evil presents no
difficulty to the principle of God’s omnipotence. In fact, a God who allows evil and suffering
and brings good out of it is more powerful than a God who simply erects a divine
Stop Sign to stamp out any evil beforehand.
Neither does evil or suffering present
a difficulty to God’s omnibenevolence.
Especially when we add the principle that God only allows evil to occur
when it is the only manner in which a particular good can come about. Certain goods such as self-sacrifice can only
exist in a world in which evil and suffering are possible. One could see that the world with evil and suffering
in it actually manifests God’s goodness more than a world without it (if it
didn’t He wouldn’t have allowed it that way).
Christ Crucified and God’s Wisdom
Once we grasp the preceding two
points we see that only a God Who is all-wise could navigate these waters. And this is why it is Wisdom Incarnate Who ultimately
“dwelt among us” in order to prove this point.
When Christ healed the man born blind, the disciples ask Him what the
man (or his parents) did wrong to deserve this.
He tells them that his blindness and his healing was so that God’s goodness
could be made manifest. Christ did not
alleviate the suffering of everyone He met.
He did not heal those who deserved it either. He healed only those, like the man born
blind, that would glorify God and be better off without it. There were many people He didn’t heal, but
that wasn’t because He didn’t have time or didn’t care. He was consistently applying His
principle. Those who were left to suffer
were glorifying God in their suffering and were better off because of it.
Those who suffer know that the problem
of evil is no mere intellectual problem.
But the Christian must proclaim that there is no mere intellectual
solution. The answer to evil and
suffering is not a philosophical proof but Christ crucified. Christ is the final answer to this problem,
because in truth, only by way of participation in His Cross is God’s goodness
made manifest to the individual person.
Through suffering and evil God brings the greatest Good, Himself. Suffering becomes a treasure that never
ceases to give a return on investment.
Rather than an obstacle it becomes a launching pad. Christians who grasp this and live it out become
the most effective argument against those who have yet to see it.
One of the ironies associated with the proliferation of Protestant sects is that it has been marked by a certain antiquarianism in which the various groups try to return the style of worship that marked the early Church. Often lampooned as a “dude starting a church in his garage”, the number of “house churches” in various forms continues to multiply as they try to recapture the spirit of the early Christians. But none of them can quite get it right, partly because in rejecting Tradition, they can find no touchpoint from which to launch their liturgical crusade. Their nostalgic zeal is certainly laudable, but once we look closely at the early Church we find that the early Christians themselves would most certainly have shunned these new “house churches”.
According to Acts 2:42, early
Christianity was anchored by two buoys: “the teachings of the Apostles and the
breaking of the bread and the prayers.”
These two elements really formed a single whole such that they could not
be put asunder. Those who tried were
branded heretics. Writing in 107AD, on
his way to be martyred in Rome, the disciple of John the Evangelist, St.
Ignatius of Antioch told the Philadephians (4), “Take heed, then, to have but
one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to
the unity of His blood; one altar; as there is one bishop, along with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants: that so, whatsoever you do, you may do it according to [the will of] God.” This theme of unity, founded on the connection to Apostolic teaching (one bishop) and the breaking of the bread (one Eucharist), is merely a recurring theme that started on that same day of Pentecost described in Acts. We find it repeated in St. Clement of Rome’s letter to the Corinthians (c.f. Ch. 37, 44) and St. Paul’s first letter to that same church in Corinth (c.f. 1 Cor 10:17, 11:17-28). These two anchors were exactly what set Christianity apart from Judaism in both belief and practice.
Orderly Worship
The Church Fathers of the
first and second centuries, those who still had “the voices of the Apostles
echoing in their ears” firmly believed and taught that communal worship of God
was to follow a certain form. Anyone who
has attempted to plod their way through Leviticus and Numbers would have to
admit they had a point. This certain
form, “this reasonable worship”, was given to them by God because it was
pleasing to Him (and thus sanctifying for them). This orderly worship did not cease with the
New Covenant (as the Last Supper shows us) but continued in a new form. The call to order in worship is at the heart
of St. Clement’s letter to the Corinthians as a response to their liturgical
revolution. He told them “We must do all
things that the Lord told us to do at the stated times in proper order”(Letter
to the Corinthians,40). He who knew the
Apostles personally firmly believed that the ordering of the liturgy was
something revealed to the Apostles and therefore ought to be passed on. It is this “proper order” that the various sects
are trying to capture.
This spirit is praiseworthy
even if, ultimately, they fail for reasons we shall see shortly. Praiseworthy because most Protestants and
many Catholics who want to hijack the liturgy see worship as a form of communal
self-expression. This attitude is
entirely misguided. As Pope Benedict XVI
puts it, “real liturgy implies that God responds and reveals how we can worship
Him. In any form, liturgy includes some
kind of ‘institution’. It cannot spring
from imagination, our own creativity—then it would remain just a cry in the
dark or mere self-affirmation.” Worship
is always both reflective and formative of belief. For God to reveal what to believe while at
the same time leaving worship up to man is to risk losing revelation.
To illustrate his point, Pope
Benedict XVI uses the example of the golden calf. He points out that there is really a subtle apostasy
going on. It is not that they are worshipping
a false god, but that they have made their own image (something they were
prohibited from doing) of the True God. “The
people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God. They want to bring Him down into their own
world, into what they can see and understand.
Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one’s
own world” (Spirit of the Liturgy,
22). If we are to approach the
unapproachable, then we must be given the path by which we might mount Jacob’s
ladder. This, my Catholic readers, is
why you must never muck with the liturgy.
This my Protestant friends is why you should rethink the form of your “praise
and worship” services. How do you know
they are acceptable to God?
The Early Mass
That being said, what did the
first Christian worship services look like?
St. Justin Martyr, writing in the mid-second century, gives us an
outline in two places in his First Apology (65,67). Rather than quote it in full, we can look at
it in outline form:
Lessons
from Scripture of indeterminant number
Sermon
Dismissal
of Non-Christians and Prayers
Kiss
of Peace
Offertory
Eucharistic
Prayer
Memory
of Passion including words of institution
Great
Amen
Communion
under Both Kinds (Deacons take to those absent)
Collection
for the Poor
Fr. Adrian Fortescue in his
book, The Mass: A Study of the Roman
Liturgy, offers some details of each of the elements which are summarized
below. First, it is worth mentioning
that at certain times, what they called the synaxis and we would call the
Liturgy of the Word (elements 1-4) and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (5-10)
would be celebrated at different times. But
it wasn’t long before it was a single celebration. Because the Church thought it was always
fitting to preach the Gospel, elements 1-4 were always open to anyone. But once the community began to pray
together, the non-Christians were dismissed.
This was done both out of reverence to the Eucharist and because to the
uninitiated it would have been very difficult to understand and easy to
mock.
With very minor differences,
mostly with respect to the Kiss of Peace, a Catholic of today would feel at
home in such a liturgy. Likewise a
Catholic in the first Century would feel at home in ours. There is a certain corollary that is attached
to this and it is the fact that all the liturgies of the early Christians were marked
by uniformity. They looked the same
whether you were in Rome, Antioch, Alexandria or Jerusalem. And this was because they believed the form
was directly from the Apostles. There
was nothing like a GIRM, but when we find liturgical manuals in the 4th
Century from the various Churches they are almost identical even in the text of
the prayers. There is of course a
practical reason for this. The Church began in Jerusalem. Every Church that was a missionary Church of
Jerusalem would follow the rubrics of the Jerusalem Church. By the middle of the 1st Century,
every Church is connected directly to one of the four patriarchies—Rome,
Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria. If
there is uniformity in those four then you would expect it to occur in all the
missionary Churches as well. As a young
bishop succeeded an older bishop, he would be expected to follow the way the
older bishop did things.
There is a second aspect as
well that follows from the desire for order.
The liturgy was uniform and orderly because it allowed for the laity to participate. They knew when to respond and how. They knew when it was time for the Great Amen
and when it was time for Communion. The
Church Militant was a well-disciplined and well-practiced army.
Finally, just as in Israel,
Scripture was first and foremost a liturgical book. They drew many of the prayers and forms of
those prayers directly from Scripture. The
early Christians, even those who were not literate, regularly imbibed Scripture
in the liturgy and were far from ignorant.
This connection between Scripture and the Liturgy is often overlooked,
even though down to our own day we are exposed to it throughout the Liturgy (and
not just in the readings).
The Breaking of the Bread,
what the Latin Church would later call the Mass, stood at the center of the
Church’s early life. This legacy, rather
than covered in the dust of history, is found in the Mass of today, a fact that
becomes obvious once we study the early Church.
If there is
one virtue that plays an integral part of Lent, then it is perseverance. Forty days isn’t forever, but it is long
enough that our ability to sustain spiritual intensity greatly determines how
receptive we are to the graces of Lent. Perseverance
is vital if we are to run all the way through the next seven weeks. So, it makes sense as we are going to examine
the obstacles to developing the proper spirit of Lent that we look at the
obstacles to perseverance. According to
St. Thomas then we should examine one of its opposing vices, effeminacy (c.f.
ST II-II, q.138, art.1).
In the previous
post in the series, we called this second obstacle “luxury” rather than
effeminacy. This is partly because in modern
parlance luxury connotes an almost addictive fascination with comfort. We no longer speak in terms of vices but
instead must use psychological terms like addiction. Secondly, because of political correctness we
must flatten our language to remove any words that at least give the impression
that they are sexist or homophobic. Effeminacy,
because it sounds like the word “feminine” and because it connects
homosexuality with vicious behavior, has fallen into disuse. Nevertheless, the Scholastic tradition has a
perfectly good word that captures the exact vice we are trying to describe so
that we can at least rely on its description even if we must call it by a less
threatening name. Whether we call it effeminacy,
luxury, or even “softness” the threat to our spiritual well-being remains the
same.
St. Thomas
gives us a very good image to help us see just how harmful luxury is. He says that perseverance is praiseworthy
because through it a man will not forsake some good thing just because it is
hard. Now a man may actually yield when
things get too hard. That is not effeminacy.
The effeminate man does not yield because the thing is too hard, but because he
is too soft. He is not beaten, but
instead is a pushover. It isn’t the heavy blows to which he yields,
but the slightest touch.
What Makes Us Soft
Who can deny
that modern men and women are incredibly soft?
Compared to men and women from even two or three generations ago we are
chumps. But that is not the point
here. The point is how we are to reverse
the trend. St. Thomas says there are two
causes of this vice. The first is an
addiction to comfort. We are, without a
doubt, the most comfortable generation to ever walk the face of the earth. We spend the bulk of our days in climate-controlled
environments, sleep in comfortable beds, bath regularly in lukewarm water, have
access to painkillers for even the slightest headache, indulge in low calorie
sweets, etc. These are all good
things. But they are not unquestionably
good. In fact, they often are lulling us
to sleep and we need a cold shower or two to wake us up. If we are going to do the hard work of Lent,
we must first become hard ourselves.
St. Francis de
Sales once said, “I am never more well than when I am not well.” What he meant by this is that a certain
amount of discomfort, even self-inflicted discomfort is good for us. Talk about counter-cultural. But that attitude spills over to us in ways
you don’t realize. Try watching yourself
for the next 24 hours and see how many times you choose something just because
it is comfortable. We should choose not
based on comfort but based on strengthening virtue. And just as no one ever grew stronger bodily without
resistance, neither did anyone grow spiritually.
The second cause of the vice is what St. Thomas calls inordinate fondness of play. He mentions this so that we don’t rationalize effeminate behavior by labeling it relaxation. This is, by far and away, the greatest obstacle for younger people (especially men). They have grown up with constant entertainment at their fingertips. They find easy and virtual adventures in video games. The result is a generation that is sure to be softer than all the previous generations combined. And they will be all the more ignorant of them because it will feel like they have accomplished hard things—winning the Super Bowl, landing in far away lands and winning the Battle Royale, responded to the Call of Duty and defeated evil Zombies—even though they have in reality only done so virtually. Only those who unplug from The Matrix and are hard enough to fight the real fights really live.
To avoid becoming
effeminate many of the saints developed a mortification plan. They would examine themselves to identify
those things (all of which were good in themselves) that were making them
soft. Then they would adjust themselves accordingly. Lent seems to be an excellent time to develop
such a plan if you do not have one.
Cardinal Mercier, the 19th Century Belgian Cardinal collected
a bunch of the mortification practices of the saints and included them in his
mortification plan that I have included for your Lenten consideration below.
THE PURPOSE OF CHRISTIAN MORTIFICATION by Cardinal
Mercier
The aim of
Christian mortification is to counteract the evil influences which original sin
continues to exert on our souls, even after Baptism has regenerated them. Our
regeneration in Christ, while completely wiping out sin in us, leaves us, none
the less, very far indeed from original rectitude and peace. It was recognized
by the Council of Trent that concupiscence, which is to say the triple
covetousness of the flesh, the eyes and the pride of life, makes itself felt in
us even after Baptism, in order to rouse us to the glorious struggles of the
Christian life*. It is this triple covetousness which Scripture calls sometimes
the old man, as opposed to the new man who is Jesus living in us and ourselves
living in Jesus; and sometimes the flesh or fallen nature, as opposed to the
spirit or to nature regenerated by supernatural grace. It is this old man or
this flesh, that is to say the whole man with his twofold, moral and physical
life, that one must, I do not say annihilate, because that is an impossibility
so long as our present life continues, but mortify, which means to cause it to
die, to reduce it almost to the powerless, inactive and barren state of a
corpse; one must prevent it from yielding its fruit, which is sin, and nullify
its action in all our moral life.
Christian
mortification ought therefore to involve the whole man, to extend to every
sphere of action in which our nature is able to operate. Such is the purpose of the virtue of mortification;
we shall explain its practice by running through, one after another, the many
forms of activity in which it is manifested in our lives.
Mortification of the body
1-In the
matter of food, restrict yourself as far as possible to simple necessity.
Consider these words which Saint Augustine addressed to God: ‘O my God, Thou
hast taught me to take food only as a remedy. Ah! Lord, who is there among us
who does not sometimes exceed the limit here? If there is such a one, I say
that man is great, and must give great glory to Thy name.’ (Confessions, book
X, ch. 31)
2 -Pray to God
often, pray to God daily to help you by His grace so that you do not overstep
the limits of necessity and do not permit yourself to give way to pleasure.
3-Take nothing
between meals, unless out of necessity or for the sake of convenience.
4-Practise
fasting and abstinence but practice them only under obedience and with
discretion.
5-It is not
forbidden for you to enjoy some bodily satisfaction, but do so with a pure
intention, giving thanks to God.
6-Regulate
your sleep, avoiding in this all faint-heartedness, all softness, especially in
the morning. Set an hour, if you can, for going to bed and getting up, and keep
strictly to it.
7-In general,
take your rest only in so far as it is necessary; give yourself generously to
work, not sparing your labor. Take care not to exhaust your body, but guard
against indulging it; as soon as you feel it even a little disposed to play the
master, treat it at once as a slave.
8-If you
suffer some slight indisposition, avoid being a nuisance to others through your
bad mood; leave to your companions the task of complaining for you; for
yourself, be patient and silent as the Divine Lamb who has truly borne all our
weaknesses.
9-Guard
against making the slightest illness a reason for dispensation or exemption
from your daily schedule. ‘One must detest like the plague every exception when
it comes to rules,’ wrote Saint John Berchmans.
10-Accept with
docility, endure humbly, patiently and with perseverance, the tiresome
mortification called illness.
Mortification of the senses, of the imagination
and the passions
1 -Close your
eyes always and above all to every dangerous sight, and even-have the courage
to do it-to every frivolous and useless sight. See without looking; do not gaze
at anybody to judge of their beauty or ugliness.
2-Keep your
ears closed to flattering remarks, to praise, to persuasion, to bad advice, to
slander, to uncharitable mocking, to indiscretions, to ill-disposed criticism,
to suspicions voiced, to every word capable of causing the very smallest
coolness between two souls
3-If the sense
of smell has something to suffer due to your neighbor’s infirmity or illness,
far be it from you ever to complain of it; draw from it a holy joy.
4-In what
concerns the quality of food, have great respect for Our Lord’s counsel: ‘Eat
such things as are set before you.’ ‘Eat what is good without delighting in it,
what is bad without expressing aversion to it, and show yourself equally
indifferent to the one as to the other. There,’ says Saint Francis de Sales,
‘is real mortification.’
5-Offer your
meals to God; at table impose on yourself a tiny penance: for example, refuse a
sprinkling of salt, a glass of wine, a sweet, etc.; your companions will not
notice it, but God will keep account of it.
6-If what you
are given appeals to you very much, think of the gall and the vinegar given to
Our Lord on the cross: that cannot keep you from tasting, but will serve as a
counterbalance to the pleasure.
7-You must
avoid all sensual contact, every caress in which you set some passion, by which
you look for passion, from which you take a joy which is principally of the
senses.
8-Refrain from
going to warm yourself, unless this is necessary to save you from being unwell.
9-Bear with
everything which naturally grieves the flesh, especially the cold of winter,
the heat of summer, a hard bed and every inconvenience of that kind. Whatever
the weather, put on a good face; smile at all temperatures. Say with the
prophet ‘Cold, heat, rain, bless ye the Lord.’ It will be a happy day for us
when we are able to say with a good heart these words which were familiar to
Saint Francis de Sales: ‘I am never better than when I am not well.’
10-Mortify
your imagination when it beguiles you with the lure of a brilliant position,
when it saddens you with the prospect of a dreary future, when it irritates you
with the memory of a word or deed which offended you.
11-If you feel
within you the need to daydream, mortify it without mercy.
12-Mortify
yourself with the greatest care in the matter of impatience, of irritation or
of anger.
13-Examine
your desires thoroughly; submit them to the control of reason and of faith: do
you never desire a long life rather than a holy life, wish for pleasure and
well-being without trouble or sadness, victory without battle, success without
setbacks, praise without criticism, a comfortable, peaceful life without a
cross of any sort, that is to say a life quite opposite to that of Our Divine
Lord?
14-Take care
not to acquire certain habits which, without being positively bad, can become
injurious, such as habits of frivolous reading, of playing at games of chance, etc.
15-Seek to
discover your predominant failing and, as soon as you have recognized it, pursue
it all the way to its last retreat. To that purpose, submit with good will to
whatever could be monotonous or boring in the practice of the examination of
conscience.
16-You are not
forbidden to have a heart and to show it but be on your guard against the
danger of exceeding due measure. Resist attachments which are too natural,
particular friendships and all softness of the heart.
Mortification of the mind and the will
1 -Mortify
your mind by denying it all fruitless imaginings, all ineffectual or wandering
thoughts which waste time, dissipate the soul, and render work and serious
things distasteful.
2-Every gloomy
and anxious thought should be banished from your mind. Concern about all that
could happen to you later on should not worry you at all. As for the bad
thoughts which bother you in spite of yourself, you should, in dismissing them,
make of them a subject for patience. Being involuntary, they will simply be for
you an occasion of merit.
3-Avoid
obstinacy in your ideas, stubbornness in your sentiments. You should willingly
let the judgements of others prevail, unless there is a question of matters on
which you have a duty to give your opinion and speak out.
4-Mortify the
natural organ of your mind, which is to say the tongue. Practice silence
gladly, whether your rule prescribes it for you or whether you impose it on
yourself of your own accord.
5-Prefer to
listen to others rather than to speak yourself; and yet speak appropriately,
avoiding as extremes both speaking too much, which prevents others from telling
their thoughts, and speaking too little, which suggests a hurtful lack of
interest in what they say.
6-Never
interrupt somebody who is speaking and do not forestall, by answering too
swiftly, a question he would put to you.
7-Always have
a moderate tone of voice, never abrupt or sharp. Avoid very, extremely,
horribly; all exaggeration.
8-Love
simplicity and straightforwardness. The pretenses, evasions, deliberate
equivocations which certain pious people indulge in without scruple greatly
discredit piety.
9-Carefully
refrain from using any coarse, vulgar or even idle word, because Our Lord warns
us that He will ask an account of them from us on the day of judgement.
10-Above all,
mortify your will; that is the decisive point. Bend it constantly to what you
know is God’s good pleasure and the rule of Providence, without taking any
account either of your likes or your dislikes. Be submissive, even to your
inferiors, in matters which do not concern the glory of God and the duties of
your position.
11-Look on the
smallest disobedience to the orders or even the desires of your superiors as if
it were addressed to God.
12-Remember
that you will practice the greatest of all mortifications when you love to be
humiliated and when you have the most perfect obedience towards those to whom
God wishes you to be subject.
13-Love to be
forgotten and counted as nothing; it is the advice of Saint John of the Cross,
it is the counsel of ‘The Imitation of Christ’: speak seldom either well or ill
of yourself, but seek by silence to make yourself forgotten.
14-Faced with
a humiliation, a reproach, you are tempted to grumble, to feel sorry for
yourself. Say with David: ‘So much the better! It is good that I should be
humbled.’
15-Entertain
no frivolous desires: ‘I desire few things,’ said Saint Francis de Sales, ‘and
the little that I desire, I desire very little.’
16-Accept with
the most perfect resignation the mortifications decreed by Providence, the
crosses and the labors belonging to the state of life in which Providence has
placed you. ‘There, where there is less of our choice,’ said Saint Francis,
‘there is more of the good pleasure of God.’ We would like to choose our
crosses, to have a cross other than our own, to carry a heavy cross which would
at least have some fame, rather than a light cross which tires us by being
unceasingly there: an illusion! it is our cross we must carry, not another, and
its merit is not in what sort of cross it is, but in the perfection with which
we carry it.
17-Do not let
yourself be troubled by temptations, scruples, spiritual dryness: ‘What we do
in time of dryness has more merit in the sight of God than what we do in time
of consolation,’ says the saintly Bishop of Geneva.*
18-Do not fret
too much about your imperfections but humble yourself because of them. To
humble oneself is a good thing, which few people understand; to be troubled and
vexed at oneself is something that everybody knows, and which is bad, because
in that kind of distress and vexation self-love always plays the greater part.
19-Let us
beware alike of the timidity and despondency which sap our courage, and of the
presumption which is only pride in action. Let us work as if everything
depended on our efforts, but let us remain humble as if our work were useless.
Mortifications to practice in our exterior
actions
1-You ought to
show the greatest exactitude in observing all the points of your rule of life,
obeying them without delay, remembering Saint John Berchmans, who said:
‘Penance for me is to lead the common life’; ‘To have the highest regard for
the smallest things, such is my motto’; ‘Rather die than break a single rule.’
2 -In the
exercise of your duties of state, try to be well-pleased with whatever happens
to be most unpleasant or boring for you, recalling again here the words of
Saint Francis: ‘I am never better than when I am not well.’ * Saint Francis de
Sales (1567-1622), who is so frequently quoted in this essay, was Bishop of
Geneva.
3 -Never give
one moment over to sloth: from morning until night keep busy without respite.
4-If your life
is, at least partly, spent in study, apply to yourself this advice from Saint
Thomas Aquinas to his pupils: ‘Do not be content to take in superficially what
you read and hear, but endeavor to go into it deeply and to fathom the whole
sense of it. Never remain in doubt about what you could know with certainty.
Work with a holy eagerness to enrich your mind; arrange and classify in your
memory all the knowledge you are able to acquire. On the other hand, do not
seek to penetrate mysteries which are beyond your intelligence.’
5-Devote
yourself solely to your present occupation, without looking back on what went
before or anticipating in thought what will follow. Say with Saint Francis:
‘While I am doing this I am not obliged to do anything else’; ‘let us make
haste very calmly; all in good time.’
6-Be modest in
your bearing. Nothing was so perfect as Saint Francis’s deportment; he always
kept his head straight, avoiding alike the inconstancy which turns it in all
directions, the negligence which lets it droop forward and the proud and
haughty disposition which throws it back. His countenance was always peaceful,
free from all annoyance, always cheerful, serene and open; without however any
merriment or indiscreet humor, without loud, immoderate or too frequent
laughter.
7-He was as
composed when alone as in a large gathering. He did not cross his legs, never
supported his head on his elbow. When he prayed he was motionless as a statue.
When nature suggested to him he should relax, he did not listen.
8-Regard
cleanliness and order as a virtue, uncleanness and untidiness as a vice; do not
have dirty, stained or torn clothes. On the other hand, regard luxury and
worldliness as a greater vice still. Make sure that, on seeing your way of
dressing, nobody calls it ‘slovenly’ or ‘elegant,’ but that everybody is bound
to think it ‘decent.’
Mortifications to practice in our relations
with our neighbor
1 -Bear with
your neighbor’s defects; defects of education, of mind, of character. Bear with
everything about him which irritates you: his gait, his posture, tone of voice,
accent, or whatever.
2-Bear with
everything in everybody and endure it to the end and in a Christian spirit.
Never with that proud patience which makes one say: ‘What have I to do with so
and so? How does what he says affect me? What need have I for the affection,
the kindness or even the politeness of any creature at all and of that person
in particular?’ Nothing accords less with the will of God than this haughty
unconcern, this scornful indifference; it is worse, indeed, than impatience.
3-Are you
tempted to be angry? For the love of Jesus, be meek. To avenge yourself? Return
good for evil; it is said the great secret of touching Saint Teresa’s heart was
to do her a bad turn. To look sourly at someone? Smile at him with good nature.
To avoid meeting him? Seek him out willingly. To talk badly of him? Talk well
of him. To speak harshly to him? Speak very gently, warmly, to him.
4-‘Love to
give praise to your companions, especially those you are naturally most
inclined to envy.
5-Do not be
witty at the expense of charity.
6-If somebody
in your presence should take the liberty of making remarks which are rather
improper, or if someone should hold conversations likely to injure his neighbor’s
reputation, you may sometimes rebuke the speaker gently, but more often it will
be better to divert the conversation skillfully or indicate by a gesture of
sorrow or of deliberate inattention that what is said displeases
7-It costs you
an effort to render a small service: offer to do it. You will have twice the
merit
8- Avoid with
horror posing as a victim in your own eyes or those of others. Far be it from
you to exaggerate your burdens; strive to find them light; they are much more
often than it seems; they would be so always if you were more virtuous.
In his message for Lent, Pope
Francis exhorted the faith not to let “this season of grace pass in vain!” The Holy Father is echoing a sentiment that
we have nearly all experienced. We have
all had the experience of letting Lent pass us by and many of us, despite the
best of intentions, will suffer the same fate this Lent unless we do something
different. We need not just encouragement
but a paradigm shift to see Lent and its purpose differently than ever before.
This paradigm shift begins
with an understanding of the history of Lent.
This does not mean that we need to look at how the Church has
classically celebrated Lent, but to understand where it comes from. Like all the events within the Liturgical
Calendar, the season of Lent is given to make the specific mysteries of Christ’s
life present to us. The particular
mystery attached to Lent is Christ’s forty days in the desert. Christ was driven by the Spirit into the
desert for 40 days of prayer and fasting with one of the purposes being to obtain
all the graces for all the Lents of all Christians for all time. He did this not in any generic way, but in a
very specific way because each member of the Faithful individually was there
with Him. As Pope Pius XII reminds us, “In
the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the
members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer
and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her
breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself” (Mystici Corporis Christi,75). Lent then is the time where we go to Christ in
the desert to lay claim to those graces He had merited for us. We go not just in spirit but in truth because
we are already there.
How We Should “Do” Lent
This understanding not only
changes how we view Lent, but also how we do Lent. Our typical approach is to see it as
something primarily done by us. We come
up with a plan to “give up X” or “do this thing X” for Lent and then try to
white-knuckle our way through it. But if
what we said above is true, then the proper way to look at it is that Christ is
doing Penance through us. The oft
misquoted and equally misunderstood Scholastic maxim that grace perfects nature is apropos here. Grace does not “build on nature” as if we do
a little (or as much as we can) and God will do the rest. It is all done by Christ—“I live no longer I,
but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Lent
is no different.
This might sound passive or
even quietistic, but it is the very opposite.
All grace requires our free response, but it first requires that we remove
those impediments that keep us from adopting the true spirit of Penance that
Christ won for us. We often forget this as
our primary role. And this is why many
of us struggle through Lent. We try to
do Penance without having the grace of Penance.
Therefore our first acts
should be to obliterate the obstacles.
These obstacles are not only interior but come from those unquestioned
beliefs we have adopted from the spirit of the world. These obstacles, two in particular, are the
focus of this article and the next. We will
not fully receive the graces of Lent until we remove the spirits of self-esteem
and luxury.
The Problem of Self-Esteem
Who could possibly have a
problem with self-esteem? To ask the
question is to reveal that we have been infected with the spirit of the
world. For the spirit of the world
always sends us mixed messages, locking us firmly in no-man’s land. It takes some truth and twists it just enough
that it blinds us to the implications of that truth. It usually starts by baptizing it with a new
name. Then the new term, piggybacking on
the old term, is given value by fiat. “Self-esteem”
is a prime example of this.
Self-esteem or “confidence in
one’s own worth” is a psychological replacement for a theological term, dignity.
That a human being has worth is unquestionable. But what has to be questioned is why a person has worth, that is, why a
person should have any confidence in their worth. The world would have us believe that the
currency of “self-esteem” is valuable simply by fiat. But it is not. It is valuable currency because it rests upon
the God-standard. Human persons only
have value because they are made in the image of God and because God has made Himself into the image of a man in Jesus
Christ. Our confidence lies in both of
these things—our inherent God-imagedness and our offer of God-likedness in
Christ. The first can never be taken
away, while the second must be achieved.
The problem with self-esteem
is that it overemphasizes the first and totally ignores the second. The odd thing is that many in the Church have
tried to “re-theologize” self-esteem through the language of “Temple of the
Holy Spirit”. This term is thrown around
as an attempt to convince someone of their own worth. But that is not how either Scripture or
Tradition has understood it. When St.
Paul uses the term it is meant as a corrective to live up to the supreme gift
of redemption (which includes the Divine Indwelling). Tradition has taught that only those in a
state of grace, that is those who have kept themselves unstained by serious
sin, that are Temples of the Holy Spirit.
The language also betrays itself because a Temple, while it is the
earthly home of Divinity, is also, and one might say primarily, the place of
sacrifice. In other words, you cannot
say someone is a Temple of the Holy Spirit while not also calling them to make the
necessary sacrifices within that same Temple.
This leads us now to why the
spirit of self-esteem is an obstacle to the spirit of Lent. It always causes us to overvalue ourselves and
destroys our spirit of sacrifice and penance.
If you don’t believe me, then let me propose a hypothetical. Suppose, to use a seemingly trivial example,
you are waiting for a parking space in a crowded shopping center and someone
steals the space from you. Now suppose
you told me about it and I said “you deserved it.” What would be your response?
I would bet that you would be
angry with me and maybe even accuse me of being unjust. But in truth, I would infallibly be right no
matter what the situation was. How do I
know this? Because God in His Providence
thought you did. Otherwise He wouldn’t
have allowed it to happen. This seems
crazy until we follow out the line of reasoning.
Returning to our hypothetical,
did God know the person was going to steal the space and did He allow it to
happen? Without question, but the
important question is why. And the answer
ought to be “so that I could willingly accept it as penance for something I did
wrong.” In other words, you may not have
deserved it this time, but you never got what you deserved last time. The only thing that stops us from seeing this
is our self-esteem. “The space was mine
and he had no right to take it.” True,
but that is not the point. The point is
that he did you a favor. He gave you an
opportunity to undo the harm you did to yourself when you sinned
previously. You offended God and all you
have to endure is finding another space?
Yes, because your measly sacrifice when united to Christ in the desert
becomes powerful. Or you could just get
stuck in how poorly treated you were and “pay down to the last penny” later
(c.f. Mt 5:26). Purgatory now
is always better than Purgatory later.
So free from the false myth of self-esteem were the saints that they could even practice this for the big things. Not that they became doormats per se, but because they “humbly regarded the other person has more important than yourself” (Phil 2:3) that the only reason they put a stop to it is because of the harm the other person was doing to himself. In other words they would speak up not because of self-esteem but because of charity. In the spiritual life why we do what we do matters just as much as what we do.
The extreme cases obviously
are far harder said than done, so we ought to just start developing the wisdom
for the less extreme cases; not just because they are easier but because they
are far more common. This Lent let go of
your self-esteem and see if there isn’t real growth in the spirit of
Penance. After all, these are the best
kinds of Penance because they are not self-chosen, but come from the Provident
hand of God. When you meet with some
slight during Lent, even if it seems like a big deal, say “I deserve this” and
thank God for forming a spirit of Penance in you.
Next time, we will examine the
second worldly obstacle: luxury.
History, some will have us
believe, is riddled with myths of dying gods who in their rising, restore life. The renewed popularity of these myths is but
a thinly veiled attempt to debunk the truth of the Resurrection of Our
Lord. The implication is that Jesus is
just one more in a long line of these myths and therefore most certainly
false. So common are these attacks,
especially among adherents to the cult of the New Atheists, that it is
important for us to have a ready defense.
We need not go into specific
examples, but it is worth mentioning that whether it is Osiris (who became king
of the underworld and didn’t actually come back to life) or Dionysius, the
Christian concept of Resurrection is something that is totally foreign to Pagan
mythology. Witness the response to St.
Paul’s preaching of the Resurrection in the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-34). The wise men of Athens have never heard of
the Resurrection and thought it another god that should be added to their
pantheon. So nonplused are they by the
mention of it that they blow St. Paul off to hear of it another time. Christ’s resurrection is not a resuscitation
in the manner of some of the Pagan myths, a mere return to life, but an
introduction of a profoundly new way of life.
This way of life was not just for Christ, but something that could be
communicated to all mankind.
There is also a gap in the
logic of the argument as well. Just
because there are other things that are similar to a given thing does not mean
that the new thing is simply derived from those other things. This is especially true when there are
important distinctions that render the two things very different such as afore mentioned concept of
Resurrection. But it may suggest some
deeper connection than mere plagiarism.
The Flip Side
It is this flip side cannot be
easily dismissed. If Jesus Christ truly
is God incarnate and by His resurrection, He offers to all mankind salvation
and life everlasting, then why should we be surprised that there are hints of
it found throughout all times and places?
A message that is meant for all mankind from an omnipotent God would be
expected to be delivered to all mankind, even if the method of delivery is
different. In other words, this is exactly
what we should expect. If God’s offer
really is for everyone in every age, then He would leave traces of it in nature
and in human reason so that men would come to know the saving truth.
In fact, this is not only what would be expected, but is what Divine Revelation tells us to expect. As the sun was setting on Adam and Eve’s Edenic abode, God made clear to them what the consequences of their actions were. These consequences and knowledge of them would be passed down from one generation to the next. No doubt they would be distorted at times, but they would never be wholly forgotten. This includes both the bad news of division within and without as well as the Good News. The last thing that God tells our first parents before shutting the gates of their earthly paradise is that He will redeem them. In other words, mankind would never live under a regime devoid of hope. And just as the bad news is in “our genes” the Good News would be as well. They are a package deal because God has ordained them as such to suit His purpose of drawing all men to Himself. If sin cannot change His plans, then neither can something as accidental as time and place.
Of course without continuous
revelation to remind them of the meaning of the “hope that is in them“ along
with the continued presence of the Serpent, the tree of hope can become twisted
and gnarled. Man, in speaking from the
depths of his hope will make up myths to fit the true story as he comes to
understand it. Believers are accused of
wishful thinking, but that merely glosses over the question as to why the wish
is there to begin with. The wishful thinking
is the residue of the hope that is simply a consequence of God’s promise.
Therefore this plan of
attacking the truth of Christ is ultimately false. There are no myths that precede the “myth become
fact” as CS Lewis once called it. For this true myth is found throughout salvation
history. It is a “tale as old as time”
because it was “in the beginning.” The
Chosen People simply kept the facts straight, but they lived with the same hope
as the pagans. It is no mere story, but
history. God promised it over and over
and then delivered “in the fullness of time”.
The power of prophecy, this calling of His shot long before the actual
event, is ultimately what sets Christ aside and renders all the other
resurrection myths as weak prophets at best.
It is time we finally bury the myth of the resurrection myth to
hopefully never arise again!
St. Paul would often close his
letters with a personal touch, mentioning those that held a special place in
his heart. His letter to the Philippians
is not unique is that regard. What is
unique about this particular letter however is the man whom he mentions and
what he says about him. St. Paul, under
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, speaks of a man named Clement “whose name
is listed in the book of life” (Philippians 4:3). It is rare that the canon of Scripture
canonizes a saint, but St. Clement is just such a man. He was predestined to become a saint and
therefore he did. This Clement, according
to Eusebius, became the fourth man to occupy the Chair of St. Peter. In fact, next to St. Peter he may be the most
influential of all 266 of them.
When the two pillars, St. Peter and
St. Paul, were both martyred in 67AD the Church barely skipped a beat. For any other human endeavor, to lose men of
this relative importance so close in time (some say it was on the same day),
would have signaled the death knell.
Instead the Church kept going and growing because the Apostles had
formed the next generation the way that Jesus had formed them. This next generation, whom we call the
Apostolic Fathers, still “had the voice of the Apostles ringing in their ears”
(St. Irenaeus’ description of Clement in Against
Heresies). Of these men, St. Clement,
as a disciple of not only St. Paul, but also St. Peter, was one of the most
prominent. Although we do not know much
about his history, Tertullian tells us he was both baptized and ordained a bishop
by St. Peter himself. He eventually became
the fourth bishop of Rome in around the year 91, reigning for 9 years before
being martyred during the persecution of Trajan.
A Monumental Letter
The fact that he had both seen and
been acquainted with the Apostles gave him a great deal of credibility, but his
influence has spread beyond his own time because of a letter that he wrote to
the Church in Corinth around the year 96AD.
This letter has been passed down through posterity completely intact
with many known copies. Not only does it
give us a glimpse into the life of the early Church, but it gives us the
earliest known exercise of Papal Authority outside of Sacred Scripture (c.f.
Acts 15).
St. Paul himself once had to deal with schismatic groups forming within the Church of Corinth. Some 50 years later, they are at it again. This time a dispute arose over the liturgy arose and a schismatic group arose trying to expel the Bishop and the Presbyters. When and how long this went on, we do not know. What we do know is that it was brought before the attention of the fourth Pope. He was unable to address it immediately because of a new round of persecutions spearheaded by the Emperor Domitian. But once the Emperor died in the year 96AD, Clement turned to the issue at hand by writing them a letter.
The letter should be read by all of us, but there are a few points worth noting. First, he opens with an apology for not addressing the issue sooner (because of the persecution). This means that he saw it not just as an exhortation, but as a duty. Second, Corinth is about 240 miles from Ephesus, the home of St. John the Apostle. Rome is about 600 miles away. St. John does not deal with the issue, but St. Clement does. Third is that, the only reason why we have the letter to this day, is because it was received and read as an authoritative statement. That is, after the letter is received, the schism is put to rest. Again, how long it took, we do not know. But we do know that it was. In fact, the entire Church saw it as an authoritative document as it was read throughout the entire Church. It was even read in the liturgy in many of those Churches leading many to lobby for its inclusion in the Biblical canon. Finally, we can not forget what was said at the beginning—Clement’s name is written in the Book of Life. If he is disobeying God’s plan for the Church and setting it down a divergent path then we must explain how he is still infallibly among the future blesseds.
Although intended specifically for
the Church in Corinth it was relevant to all Christians of the time, and even
in our own day, because it clearly demonstrates that the Church hierarchy including
Papal primacy was in place before the close of the first Christian century.
The Fundamental Problem
For St. Clement the source of the problem in Corinth is an unwillingness to accept the hierarchy as ordained by God. He reminds them that the hierarchy of Bishops, Priests, Deacons and Laymen was instituted by the Apostles. He says that,
“the Apostles have preached the Gospel to us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ [has done so] from God. Christ therefore was sent forth by God, and the apostles by Christ. Both these appointments, then, were made in an orderly way, according to the will of God…preaching through countries and cities, they appointed the first-fruits [of their labors], having first proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe.”
Letter to the Corinthians, (LC) 42
We find a similar structure enunciated in the first century Church manual The Didache (c.f. Chapter 15).
He then goes on to show why a hierarchy is fitting by pointing out that God had ordained such a hierarchy in the Old Covenant which is fulfilled (not abolished) in the New Covenant. There can be no novelty in worship or in structural hierarchy. The hierarchy is based not on subjection but mutual dependence. St. Clement says,
“[T]hese things therefore being manifest to us, and since we look into the depths of the divine knowledge, it behooves us to do all things in [their proper] order, which the Lord has commanded us to perform at stated times. He has enjoined offerings [to be presented] and service to be performed [to Him], and that not thoughtlessly or irregularly, but at the appointed times and hours. Where and by whom He desires these things to be done, He Himself has fixed by His own supreme will, in order that all things, being piously done according to His good pleasure, may be acceptable unto Him. Those, therefore, who present their offerings at the appointed times, are accepted and blessed; for inasmuch as they follow the laws of the Lord, they sin not. For his own peculiar services are assigned to the high priest, and their own proper place is prescribed to the priests, and their own special ministrations devolve on the Levites. The layman is bound by the laws that pertain to laymen.”
LC, 40
The tone of Clement’s letter is
very pastoral as he attempts to appeal to them in charity and faith. But this means only that he waits until the
end of the letter to remind them of their duty to obey him. In fact, it is these latter paragraphs that
make it abundantly obvious that Clement is exercising his prerogative based
upon his primacy.
In language very reminiscent of St. Peter’s language at the Council of Jerusalem, St. Clement reminds them that the Holy Spirit speaks through him and to disobey will put them in spiritual danger—
“Accept our counsel, and you will nothing to regret. For as God lives, and as the Lord Jesus Christ live and the Holy Spirit…as surely will he that humbly and with equanimity and without regret carries out the commandments and precepts given by God, be enrolled and chosen among the number of those who are being saved through Jesus Christ…If anyone disobeys the things which have been said by Him through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in transgression and in no small danger.”
LC 58-59
Given the clarity with which St. Clement
wrote, it becomes very evident that the Pope is not a late Catholic
invention. In fact, to deny Papal primacy
and the hierarchy of the Church is to say that the Church went off the rails even
before the death of the last Apostle. A
very dangerous proposition, especially when the Scriptural canon was not even
complete yet (John’s Gospel still wasn’t written). For it is quite clear from Clement’s Letter
to the Corinthians that Christians everywhere understood that the Bishop of
Rome enjoyed a place of primacy and that each local Church, in union with the
Bishop of Rome, had a hierarchy of its own.
And this is why both reading and
knowing the Church Fathers is very important for Catholics.
The story of St. Ignatius of
Antioch is well known. Martyred in the
early second century, the disciple of John the Evangelist turned himself over
to the Emperor Trajan while the latter was visiting his diocese of Antioch.
Why he turned himself over, whether for an opportunity to preach the
Faith to the Emperor or as a ransom for his sheep that were being attacked by
gnostic wolves or even both, is not known.
What is known is that the Emperor had him sent to Rome to be a part of
the “entertainment” of the Roman Circus.
Along a truly prolonged Way of the Cross from Antioch to Rome, the
Bishop of Antioch wrote seven personal letters to the churches that he passed
through including a moving letter to the Romans asking them not to hinder his
martyrdom in any way. His letters have
been preserved in their entirety for us and offer us an important glimpse into
the life of the early Church. But even
more valuable is the spiritual patrimony the sainted Bishop left in what each
of these exhortations have in common—a
deeply moving Eucharistic spirituality.
Ignatius’ Faith
St. Ignatius offers us one of
the earliest professions of faith in the Real Presence. In his letter to the Smyrnaens he declares
that “the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for
our sins and which the Father in His loving-kindness raised from the dead”
(7). While statements such as these
abound throughout the each of the letters, it becomes clear that this is no
mere intellectual assent on the part of St. Ignatius. Instead it is a real faith; a faith that sees
Jesus in the “breaking of the bread” and knows Him through it. For Ignatius, the Eucharist is simply the
visible presence of the Son of God, no less real than His presence as Jesus of
Nazareth was some 70 years prior.
How do we know this? Because he repeatedly expresses his desire to
be martyred in Eucharistic terms.
Summarizing his desire in his last letter to the Romans he says, “I
write to the Churches, and impress on them all, that I shall willingly die for
God, unless you hinder me. I beseech of you not to show an unseasonable
good-will towards me. Allow me to become food for the wild beasts, through
whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of
God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found
the pure bread of Christ” (4). In short
St. Ignatius desired to imitate Christ—not just His bodily crucifixion—but in
the manner he knows Him, the Eucharist.
And in this regard, the Saint offers us a stirring example of how to
imitate Christ.
The
Imitation of Christ
At the heart of the Christian
life is the imitation of Christ. We are
to “put on Christ” and to be more and more conformed to His likeness by
imitating His virtues. The problem
however is that we did not witness His specific acts of virtue. We know of them, but we do not necessarily
know what they looked like, making imitation difficult. Imitation without sight is very difficult, if
not impossible. Perfection is found in
the details. It is impossible except for
one thing. We do witness Christ’s virtues. We witness them each and every time that we
encounter Him in the Eucharist. And this
is what St. Ignatius found. He did not
see Christ in His human nature, but he did see the same Christ in His
sacramental garb. He didn’t just see
Him, but He witnessed His actions. He
did not see the Eucharist as a poster of Jesus, but a living and acting
Person. And seeing Him this way,
Ignatius desired to imitate Him.
St. Peter Julian Eymard, the great saint of the Eucharist, writing centuries later summarizes what Ignatius intuitively grasped.
“This Eucharistic manifestation must be the starting point of all the actions of our life. All our virtues must come from the Eucharist. For instance, you wish to practice humility: see how Jesus practices it in the Blessed Sacrament. Start with this knowledge, this Eucharistic light, and then go to the Crib if you wish, or to Calvary. Your going thither will be easier because it is natural for the mind to proceed from the known to the unknown. In the Blessed Sacrament you have our Lord’s humility right before your eyes. It will be much easier for you to conclude from His actual humility to that of His birth or of any other circumstance in His life…Let our sole spiritual concern be to contemplate the Eucharist and find in it the example of what we have to do in every circumstance of our Christian life.”
St. Peter Julian says we start
with the known, Christ’s virtues in the Eucharist, and then proceed to the
unknown, His virtuous acts throughout His earthly sojourn. In a very real way, the Eucharist is given as
a display of those virtues so that we may imitate them. Not only that, but through the Eucharist, we
commune with Christ and His same virtues are infused into us. So it is not just that we imitate Christ
under our own impulse, but the Eucharist empowers us to do so. And this is why St. Ignatius saw himself not
just as imitating Son of God made man, but Son of God made man made Eucharist.
All of Christ’s virtues are on
display and available to us, but there are three that are most manifest and
worthy of particular mention. It is not
an accident that these three are the same three upon which the spiritual life
hinges: humility, meekness, and poverty.
Just as Our Lord made Himself
subject to the laws of human nature in order to come to us, He now makes
Himself subject to the laws of food in order to do the same. He is the absolute model of humility in the
Eucharist. He suppresses His divinity
even more than He did during the Incarnation; for who could believe that the
God of the Universe would make Himself food!
He becomes lifeless and motionless. He allows Himself to become a prisoner and
makes Himself so tiny that He becomes “trapped” in even the smallest
particle. He does not shout out His
presence and allows Himself to be completely forgotten, even by those closest
to Him. He can be carried away wherever
someone else wills, even to places where He does not will to go. See for yourself if Our Lord does not put
flesh to the Litany of Humility
in His Eucharistic abasement!
It is His humility that yields
the fruit of His meekness. “The meekness
of Jesus,” St. Peter Julian says, “scored its greatest triumph in His virtue of
silence.” He “suffers” in silence as He
is ridiculed and mocked. The “bruised
reed He will not break” when He suffers sacrilege by those who receive Him
unworthily or by those Prelates who allow or even encourage repeated
sacrileges. The “smoldering wick He will
not extinguish” when the King of the Universe is met by indifference and laxity
in approaching Him. He waits patiently
inside dark and empty churches for visits from those who love Him.
The Eucharistic Poverello appears with absolutely nothing but
Himself. He suppresses all the powers of
His glorified humanity and paralyzes His human powers. He chose what was poorest and most simple,
bread and wine, for His garb. Then He
“traps” His divinity inside their appearance. His throne is tiny, so much so that many
people don’t even acknowledge it. He is
not just poor because He has nothing, but because He shed it all to make us
rich. He gives us something of our “own”
so that we have something to give to God.
That is true poverty.
The imitation of Christ is the
summation of the spiritual life. Let us
learn to imitate Him by imitating Ignatius imitating the Eucharistic Jesus!
If it is possible to describe
a book that has survived for nearly eight centuries as a “hidden gem” then St.
Thomas’ other Summa, the Summa Contra
Gentiles, qualifies. As the name
suggests, St. Thomas wrote it as a response to the re-emergence of non-Christian
philosophy and the rise of Islam. It is
by far his greatest work of apologetics for the Christian faith and in that regard,
it remains a preeminent work and an
untapped resource for the Church. In the
first book, he sets out to show both the existence and nature of the Christian
God. In his usual thorough-going manner,
he begins by showing how reasonable belief in the Christian God actually is.
Catholics, even down to our
own day, are often accused of fideism.
Fideism is the view that religious beliefs are settled only by faith and
unsupported by reason. To be clear, faith
deals with claims that transcend human reason.
But they must still be grasped by human reason without doing violence to
the human mind and way of thinking. They
cannot be “proven” in the scientific sense, but this does not mean there are no
objective reasons why we should believe them to be true. In an important early question, St. Thomas
declares “that to
give assent to the truths of Faith is not foolishness even though they are
above reason”.
Objective vs Subjective Reasons
St. Thomas uncovers the
objective motivations for belief, that is, why someone should believe, and not
so much why an individual does believe.
This distinction is rather important because Christianity is often
attacked on the basis of subjective motivations for belief. Whether it is Freud’s father longing or Marx’s
opium of the masses, St. Thomas has little interest in uncovering why someone
believes (as an aside, you will be hard pressed to find another author, who is
as prolific as St. Thomas, that uses personal pronouns less). Instead he gives four motives for belief in
the truth of Christianity.
First, he speaks of the witness of miracles. Whenever God has spoken those truths that “exceed natural knowledge, He gives visible manifestation to works that surpass the ability of all nature.” St. Thomas is simply repeating the Johannine principle that miracles should be seen as signs. Our Lord and the Apostles would preach a message, and to confirm that message came from God, they manifested a physical sign in the form of some miracle. Public miracles were a regular occurrence in the Early Church because of the need for their strong testimonial power. In our age, St. Thomas says, miracles are not as necessary and so therefore are not as commonplace. Nevertheless, “God does not cease to work miracles through His saints for the confirmation of the faith.” Think of when the Church was an infant in the New World, and how the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe resulted in the conversion of 10 million people in less than a decade. Or think of the Miracle of the Sun and the promise of protection to Portugal. Or even the Shroud of Turin, the Eucharistic Miracles or the incorruptibility of some of the saints. All of these defy scientific explanation (and not from a lack of trying) and yet serve as great signs of the truth of the Catholic faith.
The second motive of
credibility as the Catechism calls them (CCC 156) is the mass conversion to
Christianity. In order to be intellectually
honest, you must wrestle with the question of how, despite unbelievably humble
beginnings, Christianity spread to such epic proportions. To chalk it up to good fortune is not only
too hasty of a dismissal, but also unhistorical for four reasons. First, it grew “in the midst of the tyranny
of persecutions.” Christianity was
illegal for most of its first two and a half centuries. Why would anyone sign up for it, unless it
were true? Better yet, why would
everyone sign up for it? Conversions
came not just from Jews or slaves, but even from the upper classes—“both the
simple and most learned, flocked to the Christian faith” St. Thomas says.
Human nature being what it is,
there is a tendency to spurn truths that surpass the human intellect. That St. Thomas makes a defense of revelation
shows just how true this is. Men are
very quick to dismiss those things that they cannot grasp. Not only that, but Christianity teaches that “the
pleasures of the flesh should be curbed” and “the things of the word should be
spurned.” This is, according to St.
Thomas, “the greatest of miracles.”
In an “enlightened” age such
as ours, one dominated by the hubris of chronological snobbery, this is most certainly
underappreciated. There was no worldly
advantage whatsoever to accepting the truths of the Faith. Many men and women gave up everything in
order to live as Christians. Perhaps a
few would be gullible enough to believe these things, but the Church grew 40%
per decade for its first 300 years. We
must take seriously the “democracy of the dead” and not think ourselves wiser
than the men upon whose shoulders we stand.
The Miracle of the Church
St. Thomas says that the third
motive of credibility is related to the first and the fact the need for
miracles in our age has been diminished.
It has been diminished because the greatest miracle (next to the
Resurrection) is the Church herself. One
must wrestle with the historical fact of the enduring presence of the
Church. Or, as St. Thomas says, it is
not necessary that the miracles “be further repeated, since they appear most
clearly in their effect,” namely the presence of the Church. Lawrence Feingold makes an argument in the
form of a dilemma that further illuminates this point. He says that either the Church spread by
miracles, in which case God has confirmed her mission, or it spread without
miracles. Even if the latter is true, it
would be no less miraculous to have lasted 2000 years. Anyone who immerses themselves in Church
history and is unafraid to confront the messy human elements, must quickly
conclude that the Church as a merely human institution should have failed long
ago. I fear that our own time may, in
hindsight, feed this motive of credibility.
The “longevity” argument is
often countered by the example of Islam.
St. Thomas, mostly by way of anticipation, shows how it is precisely in
lacking the motives of credibility, that Islam is shown to be a false
religion. Muhammad, St. Thomas says “did
not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly
gives witness to divine inspiration.”
Secondly, it was spread not by the force of truth, but by the
sword. This is not to whitewash Christian
history and say that there weren’t any forced conversions, but that it spread despite
being at the wrong end of the sword.
Islam (again even if there are individual Muslims who sincerely choose Islam)
has always spread mainly by force which are “signs not lacking even to robbers
and tyrants.” Finally, Muhammad lacks
the final motive of credibility, prophecy—”Nor do divine pronouncements on
the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness.”
The growth of the Church was
prophesied both in the New Testament (c.f. Mt 13, 16) and Old Testament (c.f.
Dan 2). But most striking is the fact
that the Old Testament, a collection of books written over the course of hundreds
of years, predicted the coming of Christ.
This, if we are to be intellectually honest, cannot be easily dismissed. His arrival was even predicted within a very
specific window of time (c.f. Daniel 9).
In closing, we would be remiss
if we did not make an important distinction.
These motives of credibility are reasons why we should believe in
Christian revelation. They clear the way
for the infusion of divine Faith, by which we assent to everything God has
revealed. Like all of God’s gifts, there
is always give and take. He gives, but
we must take, and we take not by grasping but by removing the impediments we
have erected to the reception of the gift.
The motives of credibility help to remove those impediments.
One of the recurring themes of
the Second Vatican Council was a commitment to return to the sources of the
Catholic faith. Whatever the Council
Fathers had in mind by this repeated stressing of the need for ressourcement, the Holy Spirit had His
eyes upon the turmoil that was to follow.
Not only would there be a continued proliferation of Protestant sects,
there would also be widescale dissent within the bounds of the Catholic Church
as well. Add to that sciences like the
Historical-Critical method and the recipe for confusion was complete. As we approach the 60th year since
the calling of the Council, it is time that we take their recommendation to
heart and begin to study one of the major fonts of Christian wisdom, the Church
Fathers.
Knowledge of the Church
Fathers is woefully lacking among most Catholics and, what little is known, is
mainly in the form of apologetical snippets.
Some think it sufficient to admire
the Fathers from afar seeing them as a “great cloud of witnesses”, but not
really sure what it is that they witness to.
But, more than just satisfying our nostalgic longings, the Church
Fathers, like our human fathers, are vital to our identity as Christians. A person who has no history, or has forgotten
it, is in a very real way less goes through an identity crisis. Like the amnesiac, they are lost, and, more
relevant to the concern here, they are malleable to the suggestions of others
who will tell them who they are.
Christians are so easily manipulated into believing falsehoods about the
Faith because they do not know their history.
Studying the Church Fathers is the only remedy when Christian identity
as a whole is threated.
Revelation as Give and Take
Why is this the case? Because Revelation is a two-way street. God is always the Great Initiator, but His
communication, to be true communication, must be received. A message that is neither received nor
understood is no message at all. A
second, related principle, is articulated St. Thomas Aquinas, who says that “whatever
is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver.” With respect to the Church Fathers, we must
look at them as the ones who truly received the fullness of God’s
Revelation. It was spoken to them in a
manner that they could receive it. It is meant for us too, but it must, in a
sense, pass through their hands. If we
want to receive that same message, a message that was given directly to them, then
we should look at the way they understood
the message. Their role, as one author
has put it, is to issue the “Church’s great Amen” to Revelation. They received it and said Amen, which means
“I agree” or “I got it.” By tracing what
they believed revelation to be saying, we can then give our own Amen.
Now to be clear, we should not
expect our beliefs to be the same as theirs.
Revelation wasn’t given to them as a dead letter. We should expect it to be made more explicit
as it is “received according to the mode of the receivers” in each generation. As both wisdom based on Christian patrimony
and human knowledge grows, we become in a certain sense more receptive to the
fullness of God’s revelation. What they
received in seed form, we receive as a sapling or a full-grown tree. All that we believe explicitly, they believed
implicitly. They give us an unbroken
chain to the Apostles enabling us to trace the path from implicit to explicit. So, rather than trying to go back to what
they believed exactly (as some antiquarianizers do), we should make sure we can
trace what we believe back to what they believed.
It is the fact that the Church
Fathers had the “voices of the Apostles echoing in their ears” (St. Irenaeus)
that gives them an authoritative voice in the Church. They are not infallible like Scripture or the
Church, but their authority is more in a constitutive sense. They tell us what the Apostles meant. All that we believe today must be traced back
through their voices because they link us to the Apostles. If what is believed today contradicts what
they say, then it is most certainly a false doctrine.
An Example
Take for example the Canon of
Scripture (for a more detailed explanation of the forming of the Canon read this previous post). We see as early as 96AD in Clement’s Letter
to the Corinthians authoritative quotes from 13 New Testament books along side
many Old Testament quotations. He seems
to put them both into the category of inspired Scriptures. Fast forward 50 years and there is almost
universal agreement on which books are to be treated as inspired and used in
the liturgy with a few exceptions. By
the fourth century we have an official list of the books of Sacred Scripture
that was reaffirmed several times since then.
This example is illustrative because, if we want to know which books the
Apostles were handing on and constitute true Revelation, then we should go to
the men whose hands were open to receive it and not a former Augustinian monk some
1500 years after the event.
The Church does not maintain
an official list of Church Fathers, but if such a list did exist, it would
likely contain the names of about 100 men.
She identifies a Father using the criteria that St. Vincent of Lerins, himself
a Church Father, articulated in the 5th Century. He said that the Fathers are “those alone who
though in diverse times and places, yet persevering in the communion and faith
of the one Catholic Church, have been approved teachers.” They are marked by four qualities: sound
doctrine, Church approval, antiquity, and holiness of life. The latter, holiness of life, can never be overestimated. Saints not only walk the walk, but also talk
the talk. They live rightly because they
believe rightly. Each Father may have
made mistakes because they speculated on questions that had not yet been
answered, but when they reliably pass on what was unquestionably believed at
the time they wrote. We know this, not
because just one of them wrote it, but because many of them did. They showed the unanimous consent of the
Church in her beliefs. This is why the
First Vatican Council said “it is not permissible from anyone to interpret Holy
Scripture in a sense contrary to this, or indeed against the unanimous consent
of the Fathers.”
It is with more than a little
irony that the prevailing “Spirit of Vatican II” has rejected the Fathers even
though the real spirit encouraged revisiting them. For those who want to defeat that Spirit they
would do well to ad fontes!
Truth be told, we really don’t
like thinking about sin, let alone even talking about it. But ignoring it is like trying to deny the
existence of death. We can pretend that
it doesn’t exist for only so long before we must face the facts. And just as a healthy spiritual life consists
in regularly confronting death, so too, despite the vociferous objections of
psychologically (as opposed to spiritually) trained clergy, does it include
regularly pondering our sins. Not to
relive them, but to relieve the damage we do to ourselves because of them. So rather than avoid thinking about them, I
would like to suggest we spend some time thinking about our sins of thought.
That we can sin in our
thoughts is something many of us unconsciously reject even though we confess
publicly that “…I have greatly sinned in my thoughts.” Our Lord too chastised the Pharisees many times
for their thoughts—“why do you think evil thoughts in your hearts?” (Mt
9:4). We tend to think of sin as
something external, something that must be consummated if you will. We absolve ourselves saying “I can’t help
what I think, but I would never do it.” But
to even think it is, in a certain sense, to “do it”. As the Book of Wisdom tells us “perverse
thoughts separate us from God” (Wis 1:3).
Our will may not be fixed strongly enough to actually carry through or
we may not do it because we fear the consequences or we may just lack the
opportunity. But to think it is to want
to do it.
To Think It is to Want to do It
This may seem extremely old
fashioned or overly rigid until we realize that the terrain over which
spiritual combat with the devil is fought is our minds. Think of the battle between Satan and Our
Lord in the desert—the Tempter wanted to change Our Lord’s mind. This is a perfect image because the ongoing
battle is between which mind we will garb ourselves in—the mind of Satan or the
mind of Christ. And so, we must explicitly
make known what we mean when we say “to think it is to want to do it.”
This battle is one that is
fought in fog and confusion. Not all of
our bad thoughts are equally bad nor are all of the thoughts our “own”. This makes it hard to tell the difference. But in order to lift the fog we must let the
Son shine on our thoughts. To help us in
doing this, St. Alphonsus Liguori puts before us three moments by which to evaluate what is going on.
First there is the
suggestion. This is where the evil
thought is presented to the mind. Where
it “comes” from is not really that important.
The devil can suggest bad thoughts by manipulating our memory and
imagination or it can arise “spontaneously” by following a train of thought or our
memory running amok. There is obviously
no sin at this point, although it is knocking at the door. Next there is the delectation “when the
person stops,” St. Alphonsus says, “to look at the bad thought, which by its
pleasing appearance causes delight.” We
are still not at the point of sin, unless we reach the third moment, consent.
Reversing the Moments
Working backwards we must
admit that the exact point of consent is often difficult to decipher. It almost has a “how far can I go” type
quality to it. That is why we should
flip this around and look at evil thoughts not as a near occasion of sin, but
as an opportunity for merit. In doing
so, we enter into the workings of Divine Providence in capturing the grace that
God made available when he allowed the temptation to arise. This is the mind of Christ Who practiced
temptational judo in meriting for us salvation.
Ultimately, this is why we do not so much worry about the source of the
temptation and see it as coming from the Providential hand of the Father.
It is a relatively short
journey for the evil thought to pass from temptation to sin because it is
linked by the delectation. The bait
covering the hook of sin is always some pleasure and in this regard sins of thought
are no different. There is something
pleasing in the evil thought—some aspect of revenge, venereal delight, or other
guilty pleasure. That is why we cannot
remain passive. Sin ultimately is a
willingness to pay the price of evil to buy the pleasure attached to it. Therefore we can never be passive in the face
of a temptation. Once we have moved to
pleasure we have already, in a certain sense gone past the point of no
return.
Vigilance then is the key. We must, at the moment the temptation arises,
reject it completely. Call it what it is
and pray for the grace of perseverance.
Go to Our Lord in the desert and capture the grace He won for you for
this very moment. Let it not be won in
vain.
And this, then, is why reflecting
on our sins of thought is so much a part of a healthy spiritual life. These temptations of thought are the building
blocks of holiness. Each time we say ‘No’
we are conformed more and more to the image of the Son in the desert. St. Francis de Sales thought that mortifying
our thoughts and imagination was one of the keys to holiness. He thought it absolutely necessary to kill
any daydreaming or useless trains of thought because it gives us the power to
control our own thoughts and recognize temptations for what they truly are the
moment they arise.
History, it is said, is
written by the victors. Whether this
dictum is absolutely true or not can be debated. What cannot be debated is that history is always
rewritten by those seeking victory. Historical
rationalization allows the combatants to demonize their enemies, therefore justifying
the annihilation of the culture. Who can
doubt that this has been a weapon in the arsenal of the Church’s enemies throughout
the last few centuries? As of late the
enemies of the Church have attempted to rewrite the annals of history in order
to paint the Church as indifferent, if not positively in favor of slavery. In order to show this to be a lie, we must
arm ourselves with the truth.
We must first set the stage by
examining the world into which Our Lord took flesh. Christianity arose. Approximately 1/3 of the population of
Ancient Rome were slaves. All manual
labor was performed by them. In the
fiefdom of the paterfamilias they were viewed as human property, essentially chattel,
and held no rights. In this regard Rome
was no different from any culture prior to the arrival of Christ, including
those encountered by the Jews (more on this in a moment). Slavery was always viewed as acceptable and
absolutely no one questioned the institution.
The only places it wasn’t practiced were those places that could not
support it economically because the cost of maintaining the slaves was greater
than their output. This is an often
overlooked, but nevertheless very important, point for two reasons.
Ending Slavery as a Practical Problem
First, given that slavery was ubiquitous, ending it as an institution would take power—either physical or moral. This is why when Moses gives the Law to ancient Israel it says nothing condemning slavery but only how slaves were to be treated (c.f. Exodus 21:26-27, Deut 23:15-16). And how they were to be treated was far greater than any other ancient culture. This does not make it right or whitewash the immorality of it, but it does see how God was setting the stage for a moral revolution that would eventually topple slavery in the Christian world. To condemn it would have been to shout into the wind. He chose not an ethic, but to form an ethos. And some of the different Jewish sects like the Essenes caught the ethos sooner than others and refused to practice slavery.
Those who often try to change
history forget that Christianity is a historical religion. What this means is that God acts within
specific cultures and in specific times.
Without understanding the cultural context, we will fail to miss the
principles upon which His commandments are founded. Any criticism of St. Paul for example must
first include the cultural context in which he wrote. To label his household codes (c.f. Col
3:18—4:1; Eph 5:21—6:9) as anything other than revolutionary is to trivialize
what he is saying. He demands that the
slaves be treated justly (implying they are people with rights and not property)
and that they will have to answer for how they treat their slaves. While it might be implied that just treatment
would include freeing them, he does not explicitly call for this. This may insult our modern sensibilities
towards anything other than absolute freedom, but it is because if the slaves
were treated well by their masters, especially in the harsh Roman culture, then
they might actually be better off remaining with their masters. Many of them would have had nowhere else to
go.
There is one particular case
in which St. Paul did call for the release of a slave because he did have a
better place to go (see Philemon 8-14).
Onesimus was a slave who stole money from his master, Philemon, and
escaped to Rome. When he ran into hard
times in Rome, he found Paul whom he met at his master’s home in Colossae. They developed a friendship and Onesimus was
baptized. At this point, Paul tells him
he must return to his master and gives him a letter to present to his
master. This is the point where we must
read the letter carefully to see what St. Paul was saying. He tells Philemon that “although I have the
full right in Christ to order you to do what is proper, I rather urge you out
of love”. Paul is saying that he could order
Philemon to release Onesimus because it is “proper” (i.e. slavery is wrong). But instead he wants him to release him out
of love for his Christian brother. The
only reason he sends him back is so that “good you do might not be forced but
voluntary.” He wants to give him the
opportunity to do the right thing for the right reason based upon a fully
Christian ethos.
And based upon the history of
the Church, Philemon responded just as St. Paul had hoped. First, because the letter was saved for
posteriority, that is, Philemon would not have saved a letter and distributed
it if he did not comply with it.
Secondly because we find in the Constitutions
of the Holy Apostles that Onesimus was ordained by St. Paul as the bishop
of Macedonia. Onesimus is the first
beneficiary of the revolutionary view of mankind set in motion by the God made
man.
The Impossibility of Judging Christianity by Its Own Principles
The second reason why we
cannot overlook the fact that slavery was ubiquitous in the ancient world is
that, in truth, without Christianity slavery would never end. If we flash forward 1000 years to the end of
the first Christian millennium we find that slavery is non-existent in the
Christian world. This condition continued
through the Middle Ages so that by the 15th Century all of Europe is
slavery free except for the fringes in the Iberian peninsula (under Islamic
control) and in certain areas of Russia.
The Muslims were indiscriminate as to who they enslaved—black or white
it did not matter. Once they were run
out of Spain and Portugal they went to Africa and joined in the already
indigenous slave trade, that is, Africans enslaving and selling into slavery
other Africans. Again, another often
overlooked fact that the African slave trade was already an institution long
before the Europeans arrived in the late 15th Century.
With slavery practically eradicated
in Christendom, then how did slaves end up in the New World? The Spanish and Portuguese Christians, living
under an Islamic regime for nearly 700 years, had grown accustomed to it. So when labor proved itself both lacking and
necessary in the New World, the Spanish, Portuguese and eventually English
turned to chattel slavery once again. They
did this against the very clear and repeated condemnations from the Church. Beginning in 1435 with a bull Sicut Dudum, Pope Eugenius IV demanded
that Christians free all enslaved natives of the Canary Islands within fifteen
days or face automatic excommunication.
Over the next 450 years, the Popes unequivocally prohibited the
enslavement of any peoples (see this link for a
complete list). With fists full of mammon
covering their ears, many of the so-called Catholics simply ignored the Church’s
teachings, especially because there was no real way of enforcement.
And herein lies the reason why
the facts cannot be overlooked. The
Church’s teaching on slavery as intrinsically evil has been and always will be
unchanging. St. Paul’s Magna Charta of
Christian brotherhood in Col 3:26 is forever established. In this regard Christianity cannot be judged
because to judge it, is to judge it based on its own principles. Put another way, only Christianity taught the
evil of slavery and so you cannot judge the principle by the principle
itself. What you can judge and
absolutely should judge is Christians themselves for failing to live up to
these principles. For that, many
Christians themselves have failed miserably to protect the dignity of their
fellow men. Parents sometimes are blamed
for the actions of their children when there is a bad upbringing, but the
clarity and insistence of the Church on this issue makes it clear that it was
the children themselves who went astray.
What must be absolutely clear is that without the Catholic Church, millions,
if not billions of people, would be in physical chains today. No matter how the usurpers of our
post-Christian society may try to paint the issue of slavery, that is a truth
they must ultimately contend with.
In a previous post, the
logical and theological necessity of the Development of Doctrine was
discussed. One of the points made was
that corruption of doctrine, normally what we label as heresy, always leads to
a dead end and ends up destroying the very doctrine it was trying to
explain. But there is a sense in which
heresy also can be an impetus for the development of authentic doctrine by “forcing”
the Church to elaborate more fully on the doctrine in question. History is replete with examples, but we are faced
with a prime example today in the attack within the Church on the Sacrament of
Marriage.
We do not need to go into the
details of the attack specifically other than to say the widescale acceptance
of contraception, remarriage, and even gay marriage within the Church all signal
an attack on the Sacrament itself. Part
of the reason why the response has been so slow is that there is still a lack
of clarity within the theology of the Sacrament of Marriage. St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body was a
beginning, but it remains just that—a beginning. His teaching is so dense that there remains
much work to be done to clarify and expound on what he hoped to
accomplish. This essay is an attempt to
move the discussion forward by clearing up some common misconceptions.
Natural
Marriage vs Sacramental Marriage
The first distinction is
between natural and Sacramental marriage.
Marriage by its very nature is something sacred because it is ordered
towards the co-creative action of procreation.
Even in its natural state it acts as a sacrament (note the small s)
pointing to God’s covenant with mankind.
But this natural state of marriage is different not just in degree but
in kind from Sacramenta Marriage. So
often people see the Sacrament as something added on to natural marriage but in
truth it is a different reality. It is a
different reality because it has a different end. Natural marriage is for the propagation of
the species, Sacramental marriage is for the propagation of the Church. Natural marriage is for the mutual help of
the spouses, Sacramental marriage is for the mutual sanctity of the spouses.
Because natural marriage and Sacramental
Marriage (for ease we will call it Matrimony moving forward) are distinct
realities we must resist the temptation to lump them together. It would be akin to not seeing bread and wine
as essentially different from the Eucharist.
They may look the same from the outside, but the interior reality makes
all the difference in the world.
Matrimony is not just a Catholic way of getting married, but instead its
interior life becomes a cause of grace in the souls of the spouses. In other words, its sacramentality is a
direct participation in the mystery of Redemption.
The
Fruits of the Sacrament
Failing to grasp this and
thinking that something like divorce is possible is not just to disobey a
commandment of Christ. Instead it is a
denial of the Sacrament and threatens the entire Sacramental structure. Matrimony, like all Sacraments has specific fruits. The first fruit is the unity of the
spouses. Rather than trying to “hold it
together”, Matrimony is a cause of their unity.
They are bound together as Christ is bound to the Church and their union
continually approaches this ideal. And
in so doing, it brings about the thing it signifies by uniting them closer to
Christ as members of His Church.
Secondly, the Sacrament also
bears the fruit of indissolubility. As St.
John Paul II puts it in Familiaris Consortio, “the indissolubility of marriage
finds its ultimate truth in the plan that God has manifested in His revelation:
He wills and He communicates the indissolubility of marriage as a fruit, a sign
and a requirement of the absolutely faithful love that God has for man and that
the Lord Jesus has for the Church” (FC, 20).
The Church uses the term fruit very purposefully. For fruit comes about when a tree is matured and it is always sweet once it is ripe. The fruits of Matrimony are felt more deeply as the marriage matures. Lacking this maturity, the fruit often tastes bitter. In other words, the gifts of unity and indissolubility do not guarantee that things will be easy, even if they guarantee they will be possible. Before the fruits are matured the couple will have to have their faith purified. His commands—“you shall not divorce and remarry another”—are not made in a vacuum, but instead ought to be read as promises—“because of the power of the Cross you shall not divorce and remarry another.” As an they grow in faith in God, their faithfulness to each other increases likewise. The fruit day by day matures until it becomes sweet.
Even tolerating divorce and
remarriage is not just a practical issue but has theological consequences as a
denial of the power of the Sacrament. It
says that the Sacrament really doesn’t do anything and ultimately Matrimony is
no different than natural marriage. To
deny this ultimately is to deny the power of the Cross to save. And this is ultimately why we are facing a
heretical crisis. Marriage in all
appearance is impossible. Matrimony however
is not because “nothing is impossible for God.”
It is, as JPII put it, “permanent reminder to the Church of what
happened on the Cross” (FC, 13). The
Church is facing a great modern heresy about the Theology of Marriage and the
Faithful must respond in both their living and understanding of Matrimony as a
Sign of Contradiction.
Very few men have changed the world as much as Francesco di Bernadone did. While in prayer one day in a run down chapel in Assisi, Italy, he received a Divine mandate to “rebuild my Church.” After a false start by literally rebuilding the church he was standing in, he set out to reform the crumbling Church. In the process, St. Francis as he is better known, became one of the most beloved saints for his radical commitment to Christ and His Church. But the rebuilding of the Portiuncula was not his only “blunder”. He also thought he could win the martyr’s crown once by visiting the Sultan and trying to get him to convert. He failed on both accounts, winning the Sultan’s esteem but not his soul. Francis may have been called to be a great saint, but not a martyr, mainly because he misunderstood martyrdom.
When pressed, most of us would
say that martyrdom consists in dying for the faith. That of course is part of it, but it is not
really the primary part. The primary
part is in the literal meaning of the term martyr. A martyr is a witness. And not just any witness,
but is a certain type of witness that may end in death, but it need not per
se. That is why we refer to Our Lady as Queen of Martyrs and her spiritual son St.
John the Evangelist as martyrs even though they did not die by the sword. They both attest to the fact that death is
not the end or the goal, but a means by which the martyr witnesses to Christ. Otherwise we would not be able to
differentiate it with dying for a cause.
As noble as that might be, it is not the same thing as Christian
martyrdom.
Martyrs as Witnesses to What?
The key in grasping the
distinction is understanding what it is that a martyr is witnessing to. He is witnessing to the truth of the
Resurrection of Christ and his own personal share in it. His Master too was once put to death, but by
His own power He destroyed death’s hold over Him and all those who are in
Him. “O death where is your
victory. O death where is your sting”
(1Cor 15:55). The Christian martyr may
fear the pain leading up to death, but has no fear of death itself. In fact, her eyes are fixed on the prize, so
much so that she is willing to undergo any amount of pain to obtain it.
The hagiography of the martyrs
is full of stories of incredibly painful deaths that the martyrs suffered at
the hands of their persecutors. But
hardly a single story describes the pain, only the joy. We might be tempted to think it is merely
omitted for the sake of the reader.
Tempted, that is, until we realize that the descriptions of their
countenance seems to suggest the exact opposite. They seem to feel nothing. They don’t sweat while they are being boiled
alive (St. Cecilia), their bodies are riddled with arrows and spears while they
continue preaching (St. Edmond), they sing Psalms for 15 days in a starvation
bunker (St. Maximilian Kolbe) and they joke while being roasted alive (St.
Lawrence). You might think they felt no
pain at all based on the descriptions.
And herein lies the important
truth of martyrdom—they most probably didn’t feel pain. Or at least, if they did, it was way out of
proportion to what was actually happening.
And that is because martyrdom is a gift from God so that the merits of
witnessing even to the point of death are given to the martyr. They are witnessing not to their faith in the
Resurrection, but to God’s power that was made manifest through the
Resurrection. The martyr is tried so far
beyond human capacities that it becomes so blatantly obvious that it is only by
the power of God that a human being could endure these things. The martyr then is both a witness and an
instrument. Martyrdom is not really
about the martyr at all but about God.
It is a very public witness to His power over death as shown by how hard
it is to actually kill the martyr. The
witnesses to the martyrdom are left without a doubt that something supernatural
has happened, even if they later choose to deny it.
Why St. Francis was Wrong…and Right
St. Francis wasn’t wrong in
thinking that martyrdom would fulfill his vocation to rebuild the Church. He was wrong by not seeing it as the means
God had chosen for him to do it. It was
a gift that he tried to seize. But he
was absolutely right in his assessment that it would rebuild the Church. This is why Tertullian uttered his famous
dictum that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
God never gives up on man so
that when the world goes deaf, He simply speaks in sign language using
martyrs. Trapped in paganism and
hedonism, Rome was transformed by the Christian martyrs who witnessed to the
power of their God over death (no other god had that) and no fear of pain and
suffering. Roman soldiers thought they
were brave until they watched a young girl march to her death with a smile on
her face. After trying to kill her they
knew something Divine was happening.
They saw a way out of the maze of their Godless existence. And the Church grew at 40% per decade into
the middle of the fourth century on the preaching of the martyrs.
Martyrs have been and will
remain an integral part of the preaching of the Church. In some times and places they used only words
to preach and in other ages, especially those in which the world grew tone deaf
to Divine invitations, the preachers were the martyrs.
One can’t help but see the
parallels between our own decadent society and the decadence of Rome that is
leading to widescale deafness. The public
witness of many Catholics is falling upon deaf ears so we should expect that
God will raise up a generation of martyrs soon.
Our role is to prepare ourselves and the next generation for this
eventuality. Like in all the previous persecution
it will come with little warning and those who have prepared well for it will
be able to respond to the gift. Those who
haven’t won’t. But either way, we should
expect that they will be coming soon.
The great 19th
Century Catholic convert from Anglicanism, Blessed John Henry Newman, once
pronounced that “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” The Beati was describing his own path to the
Catholic Church based on historical study.
But his point was not just that once you study the Church Fathers you
will necessarily turn to Catholicism, but that there is an “utter incongruity
between Protestantism and historical Christianity.” He thought the “safest truth” in the
centuries old debate between Catholic and Protestants is that “the Christianity
of history is not Protestantism.” A
“safe truth” because the sola scriptura
of Protestantism is, in principle, a rejection of history (which is just
another word for Tradition) in favor
of the Bible alone. Protestantism turned
Christians into a “people of the Book.”
Of course, Protestants will
counter that this is the only way to protect against the corruption of God’s
saving words. Catholics have added to
these words, something that is explicitly condemned in Scripture (Rev
22:18). For Newman and for Catholics as
a whole, they would plead guilty as charged.
Otherwise Scripture is doomed to become a dead letter. But if it is “living and active” then to be
living means, according to Newman, “to change, and to change often.” In other words, Newman is not only defending
what Catholics call “the development of doctrine” but is saying it is an
absolutely necessary component of Christianity.
To come to this conclusion,
Newman looks at the nature of ideas and the human mind. Ideas when they pass before different human
minds are considered under different aspects.
These different minds will draw different truths from these ideas. So for an idea like “the sky is blue” two
different minds may run along the tracks of different trains of thought and
come to two different, though equally true, doctrines. One may turn to the “color” of the sea and
conclude that water is merely reflecting the sky. Another may turn to the composition of the
atmosphere and conclude that it filters light such that it turns the black of
space into blue. Living ideas, that is,
ideas that are constantly “carried forward into the public throng” will constantly
have new lights shed upon it. Relevant
to the point at hand, if Scripture presents ideas, and these ideas are living
in the sense that they are consumed by public minds then you should expect that
there be development.
A Bridge Too Far?
That last statement might seem
like a bridge too far until we observe the behavior of Catholic and Protestant
alike. They argue about
interpretation. Neither side says “the
Bible says this” and leaves it at that.
They argue about the meaning
of what the Bible says. The Biblical ideas
meet two separate minds and two separate doctrines emerge. It is inevitable. In other words, if you even begin to argue
about the interpretation of Scripture then you are already admitting the
principle of development. This is why I
said that without development Scripture becomes a dead letter. It simply says something like “Christ was
born in Bethlehem” and says only that thing, not allowing us to draw any
conclusions. Scripture becomes
collection of “God facts” of which we simply intellectually assent and then summarily
ignore.
Otherwise, once the ideas of Scripture pass before our minds, we will make judgments upon them and thus develop them in our minds. Or, as Newman says, “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.” It is human nature for ideas to have consequences. Divine ideas, spoken to man, are no different in this regard.
All of us have had the
experience of encountering a certain passage of Scripture and each time that we
do realizing completely different things.
That is because no single term can exhaust all the contents of an
idea. This is especially true of God Who
has the power to use an economy of words to convey more content than mere human
words can. As St. Justin Martyr said of
Christ, “His sayings were short and concise; for He was not rhetorician but His
word was the power of God.”
Moving from Implicit to Explicit
Take for example Hebrews 11:6,
what St. Thomas calls the credibilia—”But without faith it is impossible
to please him, for anyone who approaches God must believe that he exists and
that he rewards those who seek him.” In
this one sentence all Christian doctrine is contained implicitly. Everything we believe, all that is in
Scripture and Tradition, is connected to this waiting to be made explicit.
It is this movement from explicit
to implicit that is described by the theory of the development of
doctrine. In truth Scripture leaves many
important and vital questions unanswered.
In other words, Scripture is not wholly explicit. There are always further implicit truths
contained in every explication. Newman
uses the example of the fact that Baptism is necessary for the forgiveness of
sins. But what happens to those who sin
after Baptism? If that question is to be
answered then there must be either additional revelation or development. Our Lord Himself came to fulfill and not
abolish the law and the prophets implying a rate of gradual growth in doctrine. At what point can we say that growth
ceased? At Pentecost, at the Council of
Jerusalem, on Patmos with John the Apostle, at Chalcedon when the Biblical
Canon was closed, at Wittenberg, or what?
The development of doctrine
itself is a biblical principle.
Christianity is not some esoteric philosophy but instead a historical
religion. The Bible itself reveals a
plan of progressive revelation. As an
illustration Newman points to the seemingly unimportant meeting between Abraham
and Melchizedek and the importance placed upon the ancient priest and his
sacrifice of bread and wine in the Letter to the Hebrews. Does this development cease in that letter or
does it continue to progress down to our own day in the doctrine of the
Eucharist?
Once we establish that
development is necessary then there is a strong antecedent argument in favor of
an authority checking those developments.
To give Revelation without securing it against corruption is not to
really have given it at all. This is his
argument in favor of the authority of the Catholic Church as the guardian and
preserver of Revelation. St. Paul and
St. John show that heretics, like ravenous wolves, were active in the
Church. As the ideas of Scripture
develop over time we should expect more heresies, not less, than the Apostles
did. How can Revelation be protected without further doctrinal development,
development that not only condemns but clarifies? The moment you admit the development of
doctrine, you must admit an authoritative Church.
The question then, is not
whether there will be development, but how to decipher between authentic
development and corruption. A living Church,
guided by the Holy Spirit, is the only possibility for doing this. After all, revelation that has been corrupted
is not revelation at all. It is lost to
history. And this is why Newman thought
that Protestantism suffered not only from being unhistorical, but also untrue.
