Restoring the Kingdom

Church, Church Authority, Holy Spirit, , , ,

Just prior to Our Lord’s Ascension, the disciples ask Him about the coming of the Messianic Kingdom; “Lord, will you at this time restore the Kingdom to Israel?” He responds rather cryptically, saying “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samar′ia and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:7-8).  Many people read this answer as a non-answer, a dismissal of sorts because the Apostles were asking the wrong question.  It is usually followed up by a comment as to just how clueless the Apostles still were even after spending their 40-day bonus round with Our Lord.  But it is not the Apostles that were clueless, but us.

Notice first, that the Apostles were expecting Jesus to restore the kingdom to Israel.  Having had “their minds opened to understand the Scriptures,” (Luke 24:45) the Apostles understood that the Christ would restore the kingdom to Israel.  Their question is not if, but when.  This is no dodge or redirection, but about the most direct answer He can give.  The restoration of the kingdom to Israel will occur when they “receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” that is, on Pentecost.

The Meaning of Pentecost

For us to grasp this, we need to first understand the meaning of the Jewish feast of Pentecost.  Fifty days after the first Passover, the People of Israel “came into the wilderness of Sinai” (Ex 19:1).  It was there that Moses ascended Mt Sinai and brought the Torah to the people.  This giving of the law that governs Israel marks the birth of Israel as a People.  The Feast of Weeks, as it was known, was instituted to mark this event and was one of the three great Jewish feasts, when “all males shall appear in the sight of almighty God” (Ex 34:23).  This feast was also known by its Greek name, Pentecost.  This is what St. Luke was referring to when he mentions that the disciples were all gathered in one place “When the day of Pentecost had come” this is the feast that he is referring to” (Luke 2:1). 

The Feast of Weeks was also the Feast of Reaping (c.f. Deut 16:9-11) to offer to God the first fruits of the Wheat Harvest.  This helps to explain the abundant harvest of the 3000 souls that the Apostles reaped on that day, 50 days after the Divine grain of wheat became standing grain (c.f. Deut 16:9).  The harvest of 3000 souls also ties back to those who, while God was giving Moses the Law, worshipped the Golden Calf and were punished by death (Exodus 32:28). 

Pentecost then is the “time the Father has fixed” for the restoration of the kingdom to Israel.  This restoration occurs when the Jewish Feast of Weeks finds its fulfillment in the Christian Pentecost.  Jesus, the New Moses, ascended to Mount Zion, and God gives the New Law.  This New Law is not written on stone, but on our hearts by the Finger of God’s Right Hand (i.e. the Holy Spirit, c.f. Veni Creator Spiritus).  Just as in the giving of the Law to Moses, it is accompanied by a mighty wind and flashes of fire (c.f. Ex 19:18 and Acts 2:2-3). 

Because the Jews were obligated by Divine precept to travel to Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks, “there were devout Jews from every nation” (Acts 2:5) to show the universality of the restored Kingdom.  But it also has unity as reflected by the fact that all present heard Peter in their own tongue.  God undoes the disunity that was created at Babel by uniting all mankind under the Tower of Peter, the house built upon the Rock.  This restored Kingdom then bears four marks: Unity, Holiness, Catholicity, and Apostolicity.

Therefore, Just as the People of Israel found its birth at Sinai on the 50th day after Passover, the People of the New Israel finds its birth on Pentecost, on the 50th day after the new Passover.  Our Lord restored the Kingdom to Israel on that day, the same day that we celebrate the birth of the Church.  This link created by Our Lord in his response to the Apostles’ question between the Ascension and Pentecost helps to maintain the inseparable link between Israel and the Church.  The new Israel formed from a remnant of the Israel of Old (c.f. Is 10:20-22) will be gathered together by the Messiah.  All such promises made to Israel are taken up and fulfilled in the Church.  This connection also maintains the necessity that the Church be both universal (catholic) and united from within a visible structure.   

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The Rehabilitation of Chastity

Anthropology, Contraception, marriage, Moralilty, Sexual Ethics, Theology of the Body, Virtue, , , ,

In his book Love and Responsibility, the future Pope John Paul II lamented the demise of virtue, and in particular, the virtue of chastity.  A spirit of resentment has emerged in the modern psyche towards high moral standards and anyone who practices them.  What was once admirable, even if very few people could master it, is now met with scorn and rationalization.  Chastity is viewed as repression and psychologically harmful, especially in young people.  But in truth, without chastity there can never be any true love.  That is why John Paul II thought modernity needed a “rehabilitation of chastity” and set out a program in Love and Responsibility for accomplishing it.

An Elusive Definition of Chastity?

Part of the reason that such a rehabilitation is necessary is because chastity is rarely defined in positive terms.  St. Thomas Aquinas defined chastity as a sub-virtue of temperance, the virtue that controls the concupiscible appetite.  He points out that chastity “takes its name from the fact that reason ‘chastises’ concupiscence, which, like a child, needs curbing” (ST II-II, q.151, a.1).  Of course, modern sensibilities being what they are, any whiff of restraint, is seen as an assault against freedom. If chastity is to be revived then we must expand our view of it as “a purely negative virtue. Chastity, in this view, is one long ‘no’” (L&R, p.170).  What Fr. Wojtyla hoped to accomplish then is to see chastity as “above all the ‘yes’ of which certain ‘no’s’ are the consequence” (ibid).

Chastity’s alleged violation of freedom really seems like an assault on love.  But this is only because our view of love, especially between the sexes, is far too narrow.  When the love between a man and a woman is viewed as primarily based on the subjective emotional and sexual experiences of the individuals then chastity will always be something negative.  This is not love, but use.  The two people use each other in order to “feel” like they are in love.  They do not love the other person but they love the feeling of being in love.  And they will be “in love” with the other person only so long as they are able to cause the emotional response. 

As opposed to its counterfeit, love is something objective because it is based not upon on an emotional and sexual response that the other caused, but on the objective value of the other person.  Love must always be directed towards the person and the value that they have as persons.  As good and as powerful as the sexual value of a person is, it does not exhaust their value.  Love between the sexes incorporates that sexual value into the total value of the person as a person.

When use is substituted for love, then chastity “feels” like it is holding love back and keeping it from blossoming.  In truth, chastity is an indispensable ingredient for love because “its function is to free love from the utilitarian attitude” (p.169).  Chastity is not a ‘No’ to sexual pleasure but a ‘No’ to treating the other person as an object of sexual gratification.  It is a steady and habitual refusal to use the other person.  It is a habitual readiness to affirm the full value of the other person.  Returning to JPII’s words, “only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love. For chastity frees their association, including their marital intercourse, from that tendency to use a person” (L&R, p. 171).

Pleasure Freed by Chastity

The traditional definition of chastity, true as it is, does not exhaust its full meaning.  Chastity does not just moderate our sexual desire, but “liberates love from the attitude of use.”  It is then both a ‘No’ and a ‘Yes’—no to use, yes to love.  No longer under the sway of unbridled emotion, sexual desire is liberated to roam free and be directed towards the full value of the person.  Only the chaste man and woman experience true pleasure of sexual desire because it is governed by reason and directed towards its natural end. 

This is the great lie of those who would have us believe that chastity is mere repression.  Sinners always love company and seek a way to rationalize their own vices.  On the surface, and at least initially, it is easier to yield to sexual desire.  But pleasure is always fleeting and when chosen as an end always operates under the law of diminishing returns.  But John Paul II encourages his readers to persevere because virtue takes time and suffering because of our fallen nature.  Once it matures pleasure is restored to its natural place and, surprising to our untrained minds, actually increases.  The “in-between” time in which chastity feels like repression is certainly difficult, but once it grows, like a fully mature tree, it provides the sweet fruit of pleasure.  This reality only comes about however when chastity is seen as worthwhile.    

Fully rehabilitated chastity enables us to see that it is, like every decision that we make, both a no and a yes.  It is a no to a utilitarian relationship and a yes to the full blossoming of both spousal love and friendship.

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Religious Liberty and the Coronavirus Quarantine

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One of the more closely related issues to the Coronavirus Quarantine is Religious Liberty.  Some have argued that the State demanding the shutdown of Church’s infringes upon the right to religious freedom.  Arguments have but put forth, at least from a Constitutional perspective, that in general the demand that churches be shut down is not unconstitutional.  We will set the constitutional question aside for the time being and examine it from the Church’s traditional teaching on religious freedom.

From the outset it must be admitted that examining religious freedom from the standpoint of traditional teaching is not without controversy.  Ever since the Second Vatican Council this teaching has been contested thanks to what amounts to a document plagued by ambiguity.  This despite the fact that the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, makes it clear that “it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ” (DH 1).  This “traditional Catholic doctrine” can be summarized as follows.

The Traditional Teaching on Religious Liberty

Man has an obligation to worship God, not just in any manner that he wishes, but according to the religion that God has revealed.  More to the point, man has an obligation to be a member of the Catholic Church.  This membership however must be voluntary.  No one can be forced to embrace the True Faith against his will.  Two corollaries follow from this.  First, no one may be forced from acting against his religious conviction in private or in public.  Vatican II affirms this teaching when it says that religious “freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.” 

In a discourse in 1953, Pope Pius XII said ‘That which does not correspond to truth or to the norm of morality has objectively no right to exist, to be spread or to be activated.”  Because “error has no rights”, the public exercise of religion is another issue.  Only the true religion has a right public expression and thus a person may be kept from publicly acting upon their religious convictions.  To summarize, a man can’t be forced to act against his conscience but can be kept from acting on it.  The second corollary then is that the State, because it is the custodian of the Common Good may prohibit public expression of false religions.

In Catholic countries the State may tolerate some public expression of false religions only for proportionate reasons in order to protect the Common Good.  St. Thomas gives two reasons in general—to avoid civil unrest or avoid prejudicing non-Catholics toward the Church.  What is clear is that this must be viewed merely as tolerance and not a right.  No one has right to be tolerated.  Either way a non-Catholic religion must not be given the space to flourish and propagate itself. 

In non-Catholic States the obligation to protect and promote the true religion still remains in place, but the level of tolerance of false religions obviously increases because of the Common Good and the threat of civil unrest.  This is where Dignitatis Humanae seems to veer from the traditional teaching of the Church saying both that “religious communities…have the right not to be hindered in their public teaching and witness to their faith, whether by the spoken or by the written word”(DH 4).  It seems to confuse true rights from mere tolerance.  How this can be reconciled with the traditional teaching remains to be seen.

The traditional understanding then differs from the American Model.  The American Model treats all religions as equal.  This is contrary to justice however.  As Leo XIII put it:

“Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness-namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engravers upon it.” 

Pope Leo XIII, Libertas 21

This also means that the Church cannot be treated as merely one other social organization.  This means that the constitutionality defense, namely that religious congregations have not been singled out, of the religious quarantine does not fly.  The Church not only should be treated differently than other religious groups, but also from all social groups.  Lumping it in with other “large gatherings” is unjust and does great harm to the Common Good.

Religious Liberty and the Power of the Church

The confusion regarding religious liberty has led to a grave misstep when it comes to the quarantining of the Church’s public worship and Sacraments.  To be clear, the issue isn’t about whether Bishops should comply with the order of the State regarding not gathering.  That question is best left up to the prudential judgment of the Bishops and their charism as Shepherds.  But any compliance must be shown to be voluntary.  It must be “we will comply” and not “we must comply”.  Very few Bishops (if any) have made it clear that this is a voluntary cooperation, “signal proof of her motherly love by showing the greatest possible kindliness and indulgence” (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei 15) in cooperating with the State.

The Church has an obligation to repeatedly tell the State to stay in its lane and this situation is no different.  Leo XIII, always aware of State encroachment upon the Church, said “Whatever, therefore in things human is of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls, or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church. Whatever is to be ranged under the civil and political order is rightly subject to the civil authority” (ibid).  This is because the spiritual common good always has precedent over the temporal common good.

When the transition back to normal life happens, the question is who decides when the Church may resume Masses?  Is it the State or is it the Church?  The way this has played out so far it appears that it will be the State which sets a dangerous precedent and gives the Church’s enemies great leeway in performing a “soft persecution” in the name of public health.  The Shepherds of the Church must defend religious freedom and not cede any power over to the State.

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The Power of Sacramentals

Church, Grace, Prayer, Sacramentals, Sacraments, , , ,

As Jesus entered the town of Bethsaida, some people there brought to Him a man who was born blind and asked Him to heal Him.  Jesus took some spittle and rubbed it in his eyes, but it effected only a partial healing.  The man could only see shapes.  It was not until He laid His hands upon the man that the man was able to see clearly (c.f. Mark 8:22-27).  This event has often plagued Biblical commentators who have struggled to interpret it.  At first glance it appears that Jesus was somehow limited in His power to heal, having to do it in stages.  But those who are familiar with the Catholic practice of using Sacramentals will recognize it for what it is, an institution of sorts of the practice.  The man receives the grace of healing after the man has been properly disposed after coming in contact with a consecrated object. It is with this in mind, that we shall discuss the Church’s use of Sacramentals.

Theology of Sacramentals

Any discussion of Sacramentals must begin with making an important distinction between Sacramentals and Sacraments.  As the Catechism puts it, “Sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the Sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (CCC 1671).  Sacramentals do not work ex opere operato the way Sacraments do, but instead their efficacy comes from the intercessory power of the Church.  In short they do not bestow sanctifying grace but only aid in disposing the person to receive them.

Because the efficacy rests upon the intercessory power of the Church, unlike Sacraments which were instituted by Christ, Sacramentals are instituted by the Church.  By bestowing a prayer of consecration over the object, it becomes a means by which those who use them become disposed to the infusion of sanctifying grace.  The specific grace of the Sacramental depends upon the prayer itself, a prayer that is said by a Priest but has the entire Church.  The consecrated object is given a power to effect a certain blessing, although it is not infallible as with the Sacraments.  Nevertheless, Sacramentals are a powerful help in the pursuit of sanctity.  This is what makes Sacramentals so powerful.  But they are also made powerful through the intercessory power of the whole Church.  In this way they are different from having someone pray for you.  If, as St. James says, “the prayer of a righteous man is indeed powerful and effective” (James 5:16), then the prayer of the whole Church, the spotless Bride of Christ is much greater.

St. Thomas in his Theology of the Sacraments says that the existence of Sacramentals is fitting because none of the Seven Sacraments “was instituted directly against venial sin. This is taken away by certain sacramentals, for instance, Holy Water and such like” (ST III q.65, art.1, ad.8).  This “supplementary power” placed upon some Sacramentals is a key point to grasp in their use so as to keep us from treating them like good luck charms.  They each contain a certain power that comes from the prayer of consecration by which they were made to be Sacramentals.

Some Examples of Sacramentals

Using St. Thomas’ example, this power to take away venial sins is bestowed upon Holy Water because it was specifically consecrated for that purpose by the prayer of consecration:

Blessed are you, Lord, all-powerful God, who in Christ, the living water of salvation, blessed and transformed us.  Grant that, when we are sprinkled with this water or make use of it, we will be refreshed inwardly by the power of the Holy Spirit and continue to walk in the new life we received at baptism.  We ask this through Christ our Lord.

A blessed crucifix is effective in providing both bodily and spiritual protection, especially “against the cruel darts of the enemy” (1962 Rituale Romanum).  Likewise, sacred images, be they of Our Lord, Our Lady, St. Joseph or any of the saints make available the merits and intercession of those who are depicted when a person pays devout homage to them.  In a very real way they make the person in the image immediately present to the person who seeks to speak with them.

Another important Sacramental, especially relevant to Lent is Palms.  As Dom Prosper Gueranger describes in his book The Liturgical Year, palms are blessed using “prayers that are are eloquent and full of instruction; and, together with the sprinkling with holy water and the incensation, impart a virtue to these branches, which elevates them to the supernatural order, and makes them means for the sanctification of our souls and the protection of our persons and dwellings.”   The palms act to give protection to houses and the people in them when they are kept there.  This is a reason why if palms are being offered, even if you can’t get to Mass, that you should seek them out.

Obviously then the efficacy of Sacramentals depends upon the blessing that has been bestowed upon them by the Priest.  When we ask for an object to be blessed then, we are not just asking to make it somehow holy but to have it set aside for a specific purpose.  We should always ask that the proper blessing be said over the object so that it can be used for the purpose that the Church puts forth.  Similarly, we should listen to the words of blessing so that we can learn exactly what the objects do.

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The Tyranny of the Hopeless

End of Life, Grace, Heaven, Last Things, Virtue, , , , , , ,

Around the year 251, the Roman Empire began to be ravaged by a plague.  Historians estimate that up to 5000 people died per day in Rome alone.  As Eusebius recounts, the pagans of Rome ran, quite literally, for their lives, shunning “any participation or fellowship with death; which yet, with all their precautions, it was not easy for them to escape” (Book VII, Ch. 22).  It was the Christians that stepped forward and were “unsparing in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ. And they died with them most joyfully, taking the affliction of others, and drawing the sickness from their neighbors to themselves and willingly receiving their pains. And many who cared for the sick and gave strength to others died themselves having transferred to themselves their death…Truly the best of our brethren departed from life in this manner, including some presbyters and deacons and those of the people who had the highest reputation; so that this form of death, through the great piety and strong faith it exhibited, seemed to lack nothing of martyrdom” (ibid).  Despite being viewed as the scourge of the Roman Empire, the Christians were the only ones who stepped forward when Rome was scourged.  This event was no historical accident but instead a blueprint for how Christians should respond in a time of plague.  Throughout history, we find similar responses.  Whether it was Justinian’s Plague of the late 6th Century plague in Rome that Pope St. Gregory expelled with some help from St. Michael and friends or the Black Death in which the mortality rate for priests was 47%, the Church has always viewed plagues as a time to let her light shine before men.

One might be quick to dismiss these historical precedents as irrelevant to our own times.  Society is structured such that plagues and their treatment are very different.  Christians are no longer needed to be de facto First Responders.  The State provides those.  Instead Christians should get out of the way and let the professionals do their job.  It is time to put said light under the bushel basket so that the contagion not spread.  But this would be a misreading of the events and a misunderstanding of what it means to be a Christian.

The Christian Response

Playing armchair epidemiologists, we might comment that the Christians probably made the problem worse.  That many of them died along with the sick would naturally support this fact.  And herein lies the problem.  A natural reading of these events reveal them to be failures, but a supernatural reading of them changes everything.  It is precisely in times of calamity that Christians need to become supernatural storytellers, not primarily by their words, but in their actions.

What made the Christians during those catastrophes exemplars was not that they ran to the front lines and tended to the wounded, but that they were beacons of hope.  They were beacons of true hope, not the optimism of only “two more weeks” but the hope that says “death is not the end”.  The light that they shone was Christian hope, a light that enabled everyone in society to realize that dying well is the meaning of life.  They tended to the spiritual wounds, they were really a Field Hospital and they remained open. 

They didn’t just talk about Christian hope, but they showed it by their actions.  The difference between true Christians and those who are not comes down to one thing—fear of death.  It is the fear of death that keeps people trapped within the clutches of the devil.  But it is Christ Who “freed those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life” (Hebrews 2:15).  Each one of the cornerstones upon which the Church has been built did not fear death and each stone that is added to the edifice is free from the same fear.  The Apostles had seen their Teacher and Lord die, but then He was alive.  Freed from death, He promised them the same power.  That was the basis of their hope and it was the source of their freedom to live for the Glory of God and the salvation of souls even if it cost them their lives.

The Cost of Hope

Like the Apostles and Martyrs, sometimes witnessing to hope cost the Christians living in the times of plague their lives.  That too was necessary because it testifies to the fact that the world can offer no fountain of youth, no immortality.  Still its inhabitants remain locked in fear of death.  Only the Christian is truly free from the fear of death and it is this that sets them apart.  But it wasn’t that they “visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually,” but also that they “held fast to each other.” 

In short, hope was made manifest by the fact that they continued to meet with each other.  They showed no fear of death because spiritual death is far worse.  The danger of spiritual death is ever-present, plague or not.  They met because they needed to constantly feed the hope that was in them.  Only a hopeless lot would give up the Sacraments or treat that only as a life insurance policy. 

You might think they were naïve, but they were far wiser than we; they knew that if Christians were going to rebuild society after the plague, they would need to build up the spiritual strength now.  They knew they would only build as reservoirs of grace, filling up society with the overflow of divine life they received from the Church and her Sacraments.  With greater knowledge they may have taken more precautions, but they would have ultimately thrown caution to the wind because of the value of a single soul. 

Living as we now do under, what Bishop Schneider has dubbed, the “dictatorship of the sanitary” the Church needs to shine forth as a beacon of hope.  What this might look like once prudent precautions are taken isn’t entirely clear, but it has been made abundantly clear both by history and the present moment what it wouldn’t look like.  When the Church responds exactly the same way the world does to a crisis then something is wrong.  The tyranny of the hopeless shuts down everything, the liberality of hope opens wide the doors.  Christians must be witnesses to hope, especially in ages such as we are living.

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God’s Authority and the Modern State

American Founding, Church and State, Protestantism, , , , , , , ,

Pope St. Pius X once said that all errors in the practical and social realm were founded upon theological errors.  The Saintly Pontiff’s maxim seems almost common-sensical, so much so that, we can easily overlook it.  Ideas have consequences and bad ideas, especially bad ideas about Who God is and who man is, have bad consequences.  As a corollary then we might say that it is impossible to fix the bad consequences without rectifying the bad thinking.  One such bad idea, namely that all authority in the political realm comes from the people, has had the devastating consequence of erecting a “wall of separation between Church and State” leading to the loss of many souls.

The Source of Secular Authority

The properly Christian understanding about the source of secular authority is that it comes from God Himself.  This is made clear by Our Lord during His trial in which He tells Pilate that “You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above” (John 19:11).   In his usually blunt manner, St. Paul echoes the same principle when he reminds the Christians in Rome to “Let every person be subordinate to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been established by God” (Romans 13:1).  God as Creator and Sustainer of all Creation is also its supreme authority.  All authority is exercised in His name and flows from Him.  Kings, emperors and presidents all derive their power to rule from Him and it is only for that reason that they also have the power to bind consciences for just laws. 

Summarizing the Church’s understanding of secular authority, Pope Leo XIII instructs the faithful that “all public power must proceed from God. For God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the world. Everything, without exception, must be subject to Him, and must serve him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern holds it from one sole and single source, namely, God, the sovereign Ruler of all. ‘There is no power but from God’” (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 3).

This view of authority flies in the face of countries such as the United States.  Rather than authority from above, it is based on authority from below.  Known as popular sovereignty, this founding principle is first articulated in the Declaration of Independence where Jefferson told the King that legitimate governments are those ‘‘deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.’’ 

Luther’s Error and Its Modern Consequences

So ingrained in the modern mind, we might not even realize that it is opposed to the correct understanding of the source of secular authority.  It would be easy to blame this on the Enlightenment, but the error pre-dates even the Enlightenment and Social Contract Theory.  Instead the error is rooted in Luther’s revolution in which he rejected the authority of the Church.  Leo XIII points this out in his encyclical Diuturnum  by drawing a line from the so-called Reformation to Communism and nihilism: “…sudden uprisings and the boldest rebellions immediately followed in Germany the so-called Reformation, the authors and leaders of which, by their new doctrines, attacked at the very foundation religious and civil authority; and this with so fearful an outburst of civil war and with such slaughter that there was scarcely any place free from tumult and bloodshed. From this heresy there arose in the last century a false philosophy – a new right as it is called, and a popular authority, together with an unbridled license which many regard as the only true liberty. Hence we have reached the limit of horrors, to wit, communism, socialism, nihilism, hideous deformities of the civil society of men and almost its ruin” (Leo XIII, Diuturnum, 23).

If we follow the logic we will see why this is a necessary consequence.  Animated by a Protestant mentality, each person treats directly with God without any intermediary.  Each person becomes an authority in himself and therefore any authority that is to found in a social body is by his consent.  In essence then it eliminates the Kingship of Christ in the temporal realm and completely privatizes religion. 

This helps to explain why most Protestants see no problem in the current belief in a “Wall of Separation” between Church and State. It was Luther himself that was the intellectual predecessor: “[B]etween the Christian and the ruler, a profound separation must be made. Assuredly, a prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought to govern. As a ruler, he is not called a Christian but a prince. The man is a Christian, but his function does not concern his religion. Though they are found in the same man, the two states or functions are perfectly marked off one from the other, and really opposed.”  Both the Christian Prince and the Christian citizen were to live their lives in two separate realms and, ironically enough, not submitting to God in either since they also rejected His Kingship in the Catholic Church.  Once the divorce is complete, all types of political errors begin to take hold.  Luther’s insistence on individual and private judgement leads directly to Locke, Rousseau, and Marx.  One theological error leads to many political errors. 

The Church then will always find conflict with the modern state until this error is corrected.  The modern State hates the Catholic Church because it is an existential threat because it seeks, or at least ought to seek, to acknowledge God’s authority in the temporal realm.  It is also the reason that Catholics ought to make the best citizens.  They see no conflict between Church and State because both have their authority rooted in God Himself and to obey either is to obey God.

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Devotion to the Mother of the Eucharist

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When St. Luke wrote his account of the human origins of Our Lord, he wanted to make an important connection to Our Lady as the Ark of the New Covenant.  Likewise, St. John saw the need to make this connection more explicit in the Book of Revelation when he describes seeing the Ark of the Covenant in heaven and then describing it in terms that could only apply to Our Lady (c.f. Rev 11:19-12:5).  It was during Our Lady’s fiat at the Annunciation that she embraced her vocation as the true Ark of Covenant.  The Bread of Life, the True Bread Come Down from Heaven, was baked within her womb.  Her womb then became the first tabernacle as she embraced her title as Mother of the Eucharist.

Our Lady is Mother of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, who took His body and blood from her, created a soul for Himself and united it to His divinity in her womb.  In this way, the title is not surprising.  For that same Divine Person in an analogous way repeats the act on the altar during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Each time Christ takes flesh on the altar, an echo of Our Lady’s fiat is heard as the Church gives birth to Our Lord in His Eucharistic presence. 

Mary, Model of the Communicant

Mary’s Annunciation then is the model for all of us in receiving the Eucharist.  With her Amen, Our Lord took flesh in her womb.  In so doing, she received an abundance of sanctifying grace.  Because she was perfectly disposed she received not just a spiritual but a physical participation in the divine life of the Trinity.  The difference is not just one of degree however.  According to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, Christ gives Himself so that we might live by Him, but in Mary He not only did this but also deemed to live by her and receive life from her. 

We ought to imitate her disposition as Christ seeks to unite His flesh with ours.  We ought to conceive in our hearts the “Son of God the most high” (Lk 1:32).  The Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55) is the template of after Communion  thanksgivings.

Mary, the Perfect Communicant

Our Lady is more than just a model Communicant through the Annunciation.  She is the perfect communicant because she received Our Lord most perfectly in the Eucharist.  We can often abstract Mary’s life so much that we forget that she lived as a Christian just as we did.  After the Ascension, she lived with a priest and would have received the Eucharist regularly from the hands of St. John.  It is her reception of the Eucharist, first prepared for by her fiat at the Annunciation, that was perfected in Ephesus with St. John.  It is this we must study and seek the grace to imitate.

Not all receptions of the Eucharist are the same.  The Eucharist contains ex opere operato sanctifying grace.  In fact, because it contains the source of all grace, Christ Himself, it contains enough grace through a single reception to perfectly sanctify the communicant.  What stops this from happening is the personal disposition of the recipient.  The more fervently one hungers for the Eucharist, the greater the infusion of Divine life through sanctifying grace. 

Having actually participated in the sacrifice on Calvary, she knew more than anyone what was being offered, even if in an unbloody manner, on the Altar.  Having made the oblation with Christ, she could continually make that same oblation in a spirit of adoration, thanksgiving, reparation and thanksgiving (the 4 principal purposes of the Mass according to Pope St. Pius X).  Furthermore, as Venerable Mary Agreda tells it in Mystical City of God, after being told by Our Lord about His enduring presence in the Eucharist,

“she burned with the desire of seeing this Sacrament instituted, and if She had not been sustained by the power of the Almighty, the force of her affection would have bereft Her of natural life…Even from that time on She wished to prepare Herself for its reception, and asked Her Son to be allowed to receive Him in the holy Sacrament as soon as it should be instituted. She said to Him: ‘Supreme Lord and life of my soul, shall I, who am such an insignificant worm and the most despicable among men, be allowed to receive Thee? Shall I be so fortunate as to bear Thee once more within my body and soul? Shall my heart be thy dwelling and tabernacle, where Thou shalt take thy rest and shall I thus delight in thy close embrace and Thou, my Beloved, in mine?’  The divine Master answered: ‘My beloved Mother, many times shalt thou receive Me in the holy Sacrament, and after my Death and Ascension into heaven that shall be thy consolation; for I shall choose thy most sincere and loving heart as my most delightful and pleasant resting place.’”

In short, the Eucharistic Presence of Our Lord would have been one of those things “she held in her heart”, especially because she knew what a great consolation it would be.  You can imagine how difficult it would be for Our Lady having spent every day save three with Our Lord for 30 years, having seen Him often during His three years of public ministry, to no longer have Him present with her.  With that in mind her hunger to receive Him the Eucharist must have exceeded all the saints throughout history combined. 

Likewise when Our Lord “earnestly desired” to give the Church the Eucharistic sacrifice, He was expressing a great desire to unite Himself to each one of us individually, but none so much as His Mother.  He knew that the Eucharist would not only sustain her, but would unite Him to her in a deeper and deeper way with each fervent reception.

This is why Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange says that “Each of Mary’s Communions surpassed the preceding one in fervor and, producing in her a great increase of charity, disposed her to receive her next Communion with still greater fruit. Mary’s soul moved ever more swiftly Godwards the nearer she approached to God; that was her law of spiritual gravitation. She was, as it were, a mirror which reflected back on Jesus the light and warmth which she received from Him; concentrated them also, so as to direct them towards souls” (Mother of the Savior and the Interior Life).  It is this same habit, the habit of receiving Our Lord with greater love and devotion at each Mass, that we must strive after.  Let us sit at the foot of Our Mother Mary and ask that she obtain for each one of us this most important grace.  As Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange put it, “In everything she was the perfect model of Eucharistic devotion. If we turn to her she will teach us how to adore and to make reparation; she will teach us what should be our desire of the Blessed Eucharist. From here we can learn how to pray at Holy Mass for the great intentions of the Church. and how to thank God for the graces without number He has bestowed on us and on mankind.”

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Suffering and Reparation

Church, Divine Mercy, Redemption, Suffering, , , ,

In his 1928 Encyclical, Miserentissimus Redemptor, Pope Pius XI exhorted Catholics to consider their obligation to offer reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the many sins of mankind and to practice it fastidiously.  By in large his call was ignored then and has long since been forgotten.  With the Protestantization that has occurred within the Church in the last half century the notion that a Christian is obligated to offer reparation seems quite foreign, even bordering on blasphemous.  Our Proto-Catholic reasons that if Christ’s once for all sacrifice has been accepted, then there is no reason why a Christian would need to perform acts of reparation.  Nevertheless, the obligation remains so that now is the time to make this a regular practice for all Christians.

Any discussion of reparation will necessarily need to begin by conquering the already-mentioned objection, namely that Christ already offered all that was needed for sin.  The problem with this view is that it contains only a half-truth in that misunderstands what it means to say that Christ has redeemed us.  Most simply view Redemption as simply “getting to go to heaven”, but that is way to general.  Redemption truthfully means that Christ, through the infinite merits of His Divine Personality, came to repair His work that sin has ruined.  In short, Christ came to make reparation.  This work could have been done alone, but He instead willed to have accomplices in His work of reparation. 

Becoming Accomplices of Christ

Those accomplices are not just His Mother or the Apostles, but every Christian.  Every Christian is grafted onto Christ, not as individuals but as members of His Mystical Body, the same Body of which He is the Head.  What happens to the Head then likewise happens to the body.  If the Head performed acts of reparation, so too then must the body, for They are the Whole Christ.  This intimate union of Head and Body means that the members continue His acts of reparation.

This helps us to understand what is often viewed as a confusing statement by St. Paul, namely that he is “adding to what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col 1:24).  The lack is not in Christ as Head, but in His Mystical Body.  The Body must too be afflicted by participating in the acts of reparation of the Head.  Only then can the Head and Body be truly one.

We see then that reparation is obligatory because it creates a unity between Christ and Christians.  This obligation extends not just to Reparation itself, but also to the way it is made—by suffering.  It is the will of God that Reparation occur through suffering because Christ chose that as the proper means.  A true Christian, while he may fear suffering, must see it for what it truly is, Divine currency.  Christ’s suffering is the gold standard that gives value to the currency of suffering, but we must nevertheless spend it, or more accurately be spent by it, ourselves.  He has raised Christians to such an immense dignity that they become other Christ’s, not by being nice to other people, but by suffering with Him.  If we suffer with Him, then we shall reign with Him (2 Tim 2:12).  Suffering is the glue that holds the Mystical Body together.

What happens when this obligation is ignored or forgotten?  The answer is much unnecessary suffering, or, to put it more accurately, useless suffering.  Because suffering is the currency by which the obligation of Reparation is purchased, it is an inevitability.  But not just any suffering will do.  It is only suffering that is willingly accepted can buy Reparation.  This is why living in the unique time that we find ourselves, we must put all of this suffering to good use, namely Reparation.

When Christians fail to offer Reparation then things like the Coronavirus happen.  God never will give up on uniting us with His Son so that we can share in His glory.  He will even allow things like plagues to grip the world so that Christians might recapture their roles as Reparators.  That is why all of us should be focused on making acts of Reparation right now.  Everyone is going to be called on to make sacrifices in the coming weeks, but only those who submit to the Provident designs of God will make Reparation.  It does not require us to understand the whole plan, only to say “Thy will be done” each time we are called upon to suffer.  No one knows how long this will all last, but we can say that it will be shorter when Christians embrace the obligation of Reparation.

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The Second Greatest Saint

Communion of Saints, Fatherhood, Mary, Resurrection, , , , ,

Over the course of 13-plus centuries, the Roman Canon (what we call Eucharistic Prayer I) remained virtually unchanged and is practically the same prayer that was written during the time of Pope Gregory I with one notable exception—the addition of the name of St. Joseph.  On November 13, 1962, Pope John XXIII inserted his name into the prayer, an act that was carried forward into the other three Eucharist Prayers of the Mass of Paul VI and officially completed by Pope Francis in 2013.  The recurrence of the number 13 conjures up October 13, 1917, the date of the last apparition at Fatima and the Miracle of the Sun.  Just prior to the sun hurling towards the earth, the children, according to Lucia, “beheld St. Joseph with the Child Jesus and Our Lady robed in white with a blue mantle, beside the sun. St. Joseph and the Child Jesus appeared to bless the world, for they traced the Sign of the Cross with their hands.” The message is obvious—Jesus wants to bless the world through St. Joseph—and confirmed when he was added as a direct liturgical intercession.  We are entering period of great emphasis on reliance upon the great saint and human father of Jesus. 

Next to Our Lady, he is the greatest and most powerful saint in heaven.  The time is ripe for this great power to be unleashed upon the Church.  To receive all of the blessings that God wants to bestow upon us through the hands of St. Joseph we must first grasp his greatness.  This starts with a proper theology of St. Joseph, a Josephology if you will, that puts forth the reasons for his greatness.

There are good reasons for his pre-eminence, reasons that will be easy to grasp once we make clear an important principle.  St Thomas said that “an exceptional divine mission calls for a proportional degree of grace.”  This principle is most clearly affirmed with Our Lady.  All of her greatness, her fullness of grace, her immaculate conception, her glorious assumption and queenship, is because of her predestination to Divine Maternity.  She is great because God made her so and He made her so because she was eternally predestined to be linked to the Incarnation of the Son.   When God determined to become Incarnate, He also determined who His Mother would be.  She is most perfect then because it was God Who is infinitely wise that appointed her and equipped her for her indispensable role in the Incarnation.  Jesus could have appointed other Apostles, He could have chosen a different precursor than John the Baptist, but He could not have chosen another mother.  She is not alone among men in being tied directly to the Incarnation such that it quite literally was determined to depend upon her.  This is where St. Joseph comes in.

St. Joseph was predestined to serve as the earthly father of Jesus Christ.  Many theologians hesitate to call him “foster father” precisely because a man becomes a foster father of a child because of some accident, but St. Joseph was eternally predestined and therefore given a father’s heart despite, as Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange says, nature never making him a father.  It was, according to Bossuet, the same hand that gave “Joseph the heart of a father and Jesus the heart of a son.”

The Mission of St. Joseph

Joseph’s mission then is twofold.  The first is the one that has most often been attributed to him as being in support of Mary’s maternity.  It is this regard that he is often given an “also run” status as though he were merely a figurehead or just tagging along.  Probing a little deeper however we are forced to conclude that there is more than initially meets the eye.  He is, first and foremost, the protector of Mary and not just in the physical sense.  He is also the guardian of both her chastity and perpetual virginity.  St. Joseph as validly married to Our Lady had conjugal rights over her.  Nevertheless through grace he was able to not only refrain was marital relations, but to be her “most chaste spouse.”  Likewise, as head of the Holy Family, he had authority over a sinless wife.  In order to exercise that authority God would have given him the grace proper to such a high calling.

The second aspect of his mission is likewise revelatory in that he was also, not only responsible for protecting Our Lord, but also to contribute to His human formation.  This mission would have carried with it a proportional amount of grace.  He was also in a very real sense the savior of the Savior by protecting Him from harm, especially when Herod sought His life.  Like with Our Lady, St. Joseph would have exercised authority over Our Lord requiring that he be not only infallible in his commands, but impeccable in his example. 

The Privileges of St. Joseph

Given this exceptional role in the Incarnation, St. Joseph would have been given a relative fullness of grace that enabled him to carry out his mission.  This is why many saints and theologians throughout history have posited that he was completely sanctified.  When this happened however we can only speculate.  We know that it was not at his conception as Pius IX said the Immaculate Conception was a “singular grace” and utterly unique to Our Lady.  Some have said it was during the nuptials that he exchanged with Our Lady mostly because that is the last moment at which such a redemptive act on God’s part would have occurred.

In a homily given for the Feast of the Ascension, the aforementioned “Pope of St. Joseph”, John XIII, claimed that that it may be piously believed that St. Joseph was bodily assumed into heaven at the time of our Lord’s ascension.  This belief finds it foundation in Matthew’s assertion that at the resurrection of Jesus many saints came forth from their tombs and entered the holy city (c.f. Mt 27:51-53).  Reasoning that he being the highest of the saints and thus worthy of a first-fruits share in the Resurrection and Ascension saints such as Bernadine of Siena and St. Francis de Sales have claimed that Joseph indeed lives in heaven with both body and soul united.  The latter even went so far as to say that “We can never for a moment doubt that the glorious saint has great influence in heaven with Him Who raised him there in body and soul—a fact which is the more probable because we have no relic of that body left to us here below!  Indeed it seems to me that no one can doubt this as a truth, for how could He Who had been so obedient to St. Joseph, all through His life, refuse him this grace?” (quoted in Fr. Donald Calloway, Consecration to St. Joseph).

Building on the logic of St. Francis de Sales of Jesus’ obedience to St. Joseph, we can begin to see why St. Joseph is such a powerful intercessor.  That obedience did not cease but remains because Jesus remains forever his son.  This power has lain dormant for many centuries, but now is the time for the silent witness of Christ to finally be heard.

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Catching Zeal

Apologetics, Evangelization, God's Love, God's Will, Grace, The Life of Jesus, Virtue, , , , , ,

In summarizing His mission to the Apostles, Our Lord tells them plain and simply that He “came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled” (Luke 12:49).  He came to set the world ablaze with divine charity and, so ardently does He desire the conflagration that He would offer Himself as tinder.  To set the world aflame with a single kindle would take a highly combustible fuel, a fuel mixed with equal parts of the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  In fact, we could say that everything Jesus said and did was for those two ends.  It drove Him to clean the Temple and it drove Him up the hill of Calvary.  When it was bottled up, it erupted out of the tomb and propelled Our Lord to ascend into Heaven.  It is this fuel that drove Himself in the Eucharist (c.f. Lk 22:15) and it is this fuel that shines forth from all the monstrances on the earth. 

This fire can never be extinguished.  When asked by St. Catherine of Siena what His greatest pain was, Our Lord said it was the pain of desire:

“My child, there can be no comparison between something finite and something infinite. Consider that the pain of My body was limited, while My desire for the salvation of souls was infinite. This burning thirst, this cross of desire, I felt all My life. It was more painful for Me than all the pains that I bore in My body. Nevertheless, My soul was moved with joy seeing the final moment approach, especially at the supper of Holy Thursday when I said, ‘ I have desired ardently to eat this Pasch with you, ‘ that is, sacrifice My body to My Father. I had a great joy, a great consolation, because I saw the time arrive when this cross of desire would cease for Me; and the closer I felt Myself to the flagellation and the other torments of My body, the more I felt the pain in Me diminish. The pain of the body made that of desire disappear, because I saw completed what I had desired. With death on the Cross the pain of the holy desire ended, but not the desire and the hunger I have for your salvation. If this love that I have for you were extinguished, you would no longer exist, since it is only this love that maintains you in life.” 

This habitual desire, this “predominant virtue” of Our Lord as Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange describes it, is zeal.  Our Lord was not only meek and humble, but also zealous.  And it is this zeal that sets the world ablaze.  But we must be absolutely clear on how the fire of Christ’s zeal is spread. 

Christ’s Zeal

We might initially think that it is spread via imitation of Christ.  We would, of course be correct, but only in a secondary way.  Christ’s virtues are not primarily taught to us, but caught by us.  His Messianic mission was not simply to shed His blood on the Cross, but to have that blood touch every aspect of human life.  Messiah was not just a mission, but an identity and His act of redemption is continuous.  He came not just to show us how to live, but to empower us to live that way.  He does not give us an example, but a share in all of His virtues so that if Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange is right, then He wants us to predominantly share in His zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

We have spoken previously on what zeal is and isn’t  so rather than revisiting that, we should examine how by true zeal we already are.  The Church has long taught that one of the distinctive marks of Catholics is the practice of the Works of Mercy.  But there is always a danger in examining ourselves against these because they can easily be animated by a humanitarian spirit.  When this is the case, they become merely signs of activism rather than evangelism.  Therefore we must examine the spirit in which we perform these acts.  To be truly acts of mercy, they must be zealously done for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  When we feed the hungry we must do so for the glory of God and the salvation of the hungry man’s soul.  Any other reason is superfluous and draws us towards humanitarianism.  This remains a serious temptation because activism often masquerades as zeal. 

Fr. Jean-Baptiste Chautard in his book The Soul of the Apostolate calls this the “heresy of good works” and describes “activistic heretics” as those who, “for their part, imagine that they are giving greater glory to God in aiming above all at external results. This state of mind is the explanation why, in our day, in spite of the appreciation still shown for schools, dispensaries, missions, and hospitals, devotion to God in its interior form, by penance and prayer, is less and less understood. No longer able to believe in the value of immolation that nobody sees, your activist will not be content merely to treat as slackers and visionaries those who give themselves, in the cloister, to prayer and penance with an ardor for souls equal to that of the most tireless missionary; but he will also roar with laughter at those active workers who consider it indispensable to snatch a few minutes from even the most useful occupations, in order to go and purify and rekindle their energy.”

Catching Zeal

If it is not in external works that we catch Christ’s zeal, then how do we catch it?  Fr. Chautard tells us that we become infected in prayer.  All of our exterior works are simply overflow from our interior lives.  The more time we spend in prayer, close to the Heart of Jesus, the greater will be our love for Him.  The greater our love, the more we will desire what He desires—the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  An apostle without an interior life is no apostle at all but simply a social worker.  We must first be committed to a deep prayer life before we should set out into the world to save souls.  Only in slaking our thirst for Jesus can we quench His thirst for souls.

As Fr. Chautard puts it, “I must seriously fear that I do not have the degree of interior life that Jesus demands of me:   If I cease to increase my thirst to live in Jesus,  that thirst which gives me both the desire to please God in all things, and the fear of displeasing Him in any way whatever. But I necessarily cease to increase this thirst if I no longer make use of the means for doing so: morning mental-prayer, Mass, Sacraments, and Office, general and particular examinations of conscience, and spiritual reading; or if, while not altogether abandoning them, I draw no profit from them, through my own fault.”   

It is this principle in action that has left the Church with a co-Patroness of missionaries that never left the convent.  St. Therese of Lisieux is, along with the great missionary St. Francis Xavier, the co-Patroness of Missionaries.  Her great zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls was formed and then poured out in prayer.  In fact, it was revealed to St. Therese that through her prayer she had converted as many souls as St. Francis Xavier, the great missionary to the East.  The point is that zeal must always be formed first in prayer and then exercised in the manner in which God chooses.

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On Divine Judgement and the Coronavirus

Culture of Life, Suffering, , , , , ,

As punishment for their idolatrous worship of the Golden Calf, God sent a plague among the Israelites (c.f. Ex 32:30-35).  Serving as a bookend to this event, St. John tells us that the fourth rider of the Apocalypse brings with him plague “by means of the beasts of the earth” to punish mankind.  And between these two instances, Scripture is replete with many cases in which mankind suffers a plague in punishment for sin.  The point is that it is a common means that God uses in order to punish wayward mankind and, we ought not be surprised that in our age of decadence that we are once again witnessing the rise of a new plague.

At the outset it must be admitted that the notion that anything that happens is associated with Divine retribution is hardly ever discussed.  It is usually embarrassingly glossed over so that only those “fire and brimstone preachers” animated with a punitive view of God that speak of it.  Nevertheless true Christians must see it and call it what it is. 

Calling it what it is

It is helpful first to examine why we are so hesitant to call something like the Coronavirus a tool of Divine punishment.  This reticence is rooted in a grave misunderstanding of punishment in general and God’s punishment in particular.  For us, punishment is always viewed as an evil, a lack of some good that becomes a penal act inflicted on us when someone in authority is fed up.  For God punishment is only a relative evil deprivation of some good. 

For men, good comes in three forms—external goods, the good of the body and the good of the soul—that form a hierarchy in which a lesser good may be sacrificed for a higher good.  The evil of punishment then is always relative because it contains a medicinal value.  A man may give up his money (external good) in order to feed his body (a good of the body).  That same man may later fast and deprive himself of food so as to grow in virtue (a good of the soul).  Whenever God punishes then he will allow the deprivation of some lower good for the good of the soul.

Here again we bump into a profound conflict with the spirit of the world.  All of this only makes sense if you believe in the hierarchy of the manifold goods of man such that every punishment has a specific meaning.  It is never inflicted haphazardly or indiscriminately but always with some good in mind.  Justice and mercy are never separated.  The good includes not only a repayment of the debt to justice, but also contributes, when willingly accepted, to the healing of the person. 

For each sin not only offends God, but also warps our souls in some way by turning us away from what we were made to be.  Each time we sin, we do so by abusing some good, by taking pleasure in something the wrong way.  To fix the damage that is done, we have to submit to the deprivation of some pleasure that would result from the correct use of some good.  By accepting punishment as a means of repaying that stolen pleasure, it actually heals us as well.

In short if we do not call it what it is, then the only other option is to conclude that it is completely meaningless.  If plagues like the Coronavirus are not punishment then they are just accidental occurrences without any real meaning.  This ultimately makes life itself meaningless and thus suffering becomes an absolute, rather than a relative, evil.  By not calling it a punishment we are depriving the world of its meaning and it becomes in a very real sense useless suffering.

Admittedly we are also reluctant to call it a punishment because it feels like we are being judgmental.  And this is the unforgivable sin of our age.  But again it is Christ who judges the living and the dead that is being judgmental.  And His judgment is not definitive but instead a call to repentance and healing, a call to peace and joy.  His judgment is that “you are going to wrong way, turn around now because you are headed into an abyss.”  Or, using His own words, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mt 10:28).  If no one echoes that call, then many souls will be lost, including those whom He has called to speak His truth.

What It Means

We should be slow to say how the punishment applies to each individual man, but quick to point out how it applies to mankind as a whole.  It seems that the meaning of the Coronavirus as a punishment for all of mankind is relatively clear.  For Rome, the Coronavirus appears to be a Divine Judgment upon the sin of the idolatrous attachment to Pachamama.  They must receive their deprivation of the Eucharist and offer it in reparation for the sin of idolatry.  Setting that unique situation aside, the Coronavirus also offers an opportunity of reparation for our treatment of the most vulnerable among us.

The full effect of the virus is still unknown, but what is clear is that it is particularly deadly for the most vulnerable among us.  In this way, the Coronavirus is not much different than the sins of abortion and euthanasia which attack those same people.  It is because of the most vulnerable that all of the rest of us must now suffer.  This suffering may be as simple as remaining in isolation for a fortnight or as devastating as losing a fortune.  The point is that we are being made to make sacrifices in order to keep those same people we want to throw away safe.  All of us can accept those sufferings and offer them in reparation for those grave sins.

In a Twitter post a couple of days ago, Conservative pundit Ann Coulter said that Americans were being manipulated by stories of the deaths in Italy.  She made a point to say that the average age of the victims was 81.  In essence she was saying “you shouldn’t be scared because it is just a bunch of old people dying.”  Now most people wouldn’t so callously say that, but many people are thinking along the same lines.  We shouldn’t fear because it only attacks the vulnerable.  This survival of the fittest mentality is exactly why we need to Coronavirus right now—as an opportunity to make reparation for so savagely treating the very ones we should be protecting as mere useless beings.  Fear not the one who gives you the Coronavirus, but instead fear the one who can destroy both body and soul.

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What Happens to Aborted Children?

Abortion, Martyrdom, , , , , , ,

At the heart of the Pro-Life movement is the overwhelming concern not just for the temporal well-being of members of society, but for their eternal salvation.  Christians are, by definition, Pro-Life because they desire that society at its core be built upon conditions that are conducive to the salvation of souls.  That is what makes abortion and particularly pernicious offense against life—it puts not only the soul of the mother and those who cooperate with her in jeopardy, but the eternal destiny of the child in danger as well.  Many Catholics are quick to declare these children martyrs and assume that they are in heaven because of it.  However, this belief is by no means definitive and there are good reasons to think that this might not be the case.  Once our gaze is turned towards these innocent victims and the question of their eternal destination, we find that our zeal for souls drives us to eliminate abortion all the more.

To grapple with this issue, we must start with what we can say with assurance.  Despite not being healed from Original Sin and its wounds, these children are not necessarily destined for hell.  Original Sin is not a condition of guilt but one of deprivation.  Mankind is deprived of the gift of sanctifying grace, a necessity for entrance into the Beatific Vision, at their conception.  This does not make the child guilty, only unequipped.  Hell is a punishment for actual sin, and with no actual sins committed, the child does not merit hell.  This is why Pope St. John Paul II said in Evangelium Vitae that mothers can entrust their aborted children “with sure hope [to] the Father and His mercy” (EV, 99, Acta Apostolicae Sedis version).

In the Summa, St. Thomas draws a very important distinction in this regard that is worth discussing.  He says that often “children are punished in temporal matters together with their parents, both because they are a possession of their parents, so that their parents are punished also in their person, and because this is for their good lest, should they be spared, they might imitate the sins of their parents, and thus deserve to be punished still more severely” (ST II-II, q.108, art.4 ad.3).  The “good” that St. Thomas is referring to presumptively would refer to not just towards their temporal welfare but their eternal as well.  But this could refer not only to the good of reward but also the good of receiving less of a punishment than a person might otherwise.

So we can say that the child is not destined to hell per se, but this does not mean that they are destined for heaven either.  There is still the open question of Limbo as an option.   Assuming that John Paul II’s comment about a “sure hope” means hope in the theological sense then the eternal salvation of the child is at least a possibility.  In other words we can now turn to the question about how it is that a child might be equipped for Heaven through the infusion of sanctifying grace.

How then might their salvation be possible?  The first would be through a special miracle akin to the sanctification that is presented in Scripture.  Our Lady, St. John the Baptist, and the prophet Jeremiah whom St. Thomas said were sanctified “outside of the common law as though miraculously in their mother’s wombs” (Commentary on the Sentences, dist.6, q.1).  Although this means it is theologically possible, the acts of sanctification were extraordinary and a result of the mission of the three children.

Deprived of the ordinary means of salvation through baptism, it is also possible to posit that they received a Baptism in Blood.  In short, the children would be classified as martyrs.  Scripture once again offers us an example in the Holy Innocents.  In adults martyrdom occurs when a person dies for some supernatural reason such as in defense of some Christian virtue or as testimony of faith.  Despite being deprived of the use of reason, the Holy Innocents have long been considered to be martyrs because they died in defense of Christ.  This consideration is based upon both Divine Revelation and the Church’s binding and loosing authority.  The Church may have the authority to declare martyrdom, but it cannot be without reason.    It is not clear that the children are being put to death for a supernatural reason as in the case of the Holy Innocents.  Either way though the Church would need to officially declare them as martyrs in order for us to consider them to actually be martyrs.

There is a third option.  Because “God wills that all men be saved” we might assume that prior to death each child is given an opportunity to be saved.  This would include infants in the womb.  We can posit then that they are each tested in some way and given a chance to accept the gift of sanctifying grace.  The problem with this view is that it would require cooperation with actual grace and the ability to use their reason.

Given the inherent difficulties which each of these the solutions, we can begin to see why Limbo remains as a theological possibility not only for unbaptized children, but children in the womb.  What is clear however is that we need to treat the issue of abortion as a real threat to the eternal salvation of the child in the womb and continue to fight for its elimination in our society.   

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Celibacy and the Priesthood

Holy Orders, , , , , ,

Throughout the history of the Church, one of the distinguishing marks of heretical movements has been the relaxing or abolishment of the requirements of clerical celibacy.  Whether it was the Arians, the Lutherans, or the Anglicans, the abandonment of this “hard teaching” has been a common thread.  One might even say that it is a tell-tale sign that it is the spirit of man at work rather than the Spirit of God.  And in this regard the current Germazonians who are lobbying for the Church to abandon the requirement for a celibate priesthood are no different.

To see why it is such a giveaway as to the presence of merely human solutions, we must first admit to the supernatural origin of the priesthood.  It is the “Lord of the harvest that gives the Church her priests” and when He doesn’t respond as expected, it is up to men to pray Him to send more laborers.  It is not up to men to move to harvest from different fields.  Put another way, the celibate priesthood is a sign of the Divine origin of the priesthood.   It was Our Lord Himself who told us that “Not all can accept this word [continence for the priesthood], but only those to whom that is granted” (Mt 19:11).  It is the priest who is an alter Christus, another Christ, who offers His same sacrifice.  As a sign of his authority to do so, the priest is given the supernatural ability to conform his own life to Christ’s celibate gift of Himself.  In short, celibacy is the mark that can’t be faked.  The power to maintain continence is the sign that Christ has put His stamp of approval on the Priest and is the distinguishing mark of the Priesthood of the Order of Melchizedek. 

What About Peter and the Other Apostles?

While Christ Himself was celibate, didn’t he call His future priests, the Apostles, from among married men?  Of this we can at least be sure that St. Peter, Our Lord’s first High Priest, was married.  We hear of Jesus’ healing Peter’s mother-in-law in Mark’s Gospel (c.f. Mk 1:29-34).  In fact St. Paul also mentions that the Bishop should only have been married once (1Tim 3:2).  How do we reconcile this with what was said above?  Perhaps more to the point, doesn’t this simply mean that celibate priesthood is merely a discipline that can be exercised and relaxed according to circumstances?

In order to avoid such a superficial interpretation of the evidence, we must dig a little deeper.  When we do, we find that in the early Church there was actually a two-pronged obligation for the cleric.  He was either not to marry, or if, being married when he was called, he would need to renounce the rights of marriage and live as a celibate.  When Peter is gaging the price of following Christ, He tells Our Lord that the Apostles have “given up our possessions and followed you.”  Our Lord then tells the Apostles that they must also renounce marriage, and if married, the rights of marriage: “Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God who will not receive back an overabundant return in this present age and eternal life in the age to come” (Lk 18:28-30).

The Law of Continence

The law of continence is found to be part and parcel of the priesthood in general.  Even the Levitical Priests during their time of service in the Temple were required to practice temporary continence.  Because the priesthood of the New Covenant essentially offers daily sacrifice their time of service is perpetual.  The Apostles would have known this and practiced it as evidenced by the fact that the Church consistently affirms that the practice has its origin with the Apostles:    

“When at the past council the matter on continence and chastity was considered, those three grades, which by a sort of bond are joined to chastity by their consecration, to wit bishops, presbyters, and deacons, so it seemed that it was becoming that the sacred rulers and priests of God as well as the Levites, or those who served at the divine sacraments, should be continent altogether, by which they would be able with singleness of heart to ask what they sought from the Lord: so that what the apostles taught and antiquity kept, that we might also keep.”

Council of Carthage Canon 3

During these first few centuries, men could only renounce the use of marriage with the consent of their wives.  But abuses of the requirement continued until the Gregorian reforms of the Church in the 11th and 12th Centuries.  It was not until the Council of Trent that the Church ceased calling candidates to the priesthood from married men.  By creating a system of seminaries, most of which began educating the candidates at a young age, the floodgates of celibate men entering the priesthood were opened.

Calling married men to the priesthood then is not unprecedented, even if it has not happened in a long time.  But in no time in history has the celibacy requirement been relaxed because it is believed to be of Apostolic origin.  If married men of the Amazonian region are to be called to the priesthood then they must be willing to renounce the rights of their marriage.  This would likely mean no longer living with their wives, even as “brother” and “sister”.  This aspect of renouncing the rights of marriage was not mention either in the Final Synod document or in Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation.  It would seem that in keeping with Apostolic Tradition that this would be an important detail to discuss.

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