All posts by Rob Agnelli

How Much Did Mary Know?

Mary, Scripture, The Life of Jesus, ,

One of the most popular Christmas songs this past year was Mary Did You Know.  While the lyrics of the song may not be theologically sound, the song asks a most important question for us to meditate upon on this Feast of the Annunciation: What did Mary know when she consented to the angel?

In asking whether Mary knows that the Son she was soon to deliver, would one day be her Deliverer, the lyrics gloss over the Immaculate Conception.  Through a singular grace, Our Lady was redeemed pre-emptively her Son from the Fall.  But the Immaculate Conception is also important in answering the question because of its effects.  Our Lady was untouched by Original Sin and any of its effects.  Ignorance, properly speaking, is a lack of knowledge of something that one should know and is an effect of the Fall.  Our Lady, immune to this effect, would have lived her life in what, Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange describes as, a “dark brightness, the darkness arising not from human error and ignorance, but from the very transcendence of the light itself.”  In other words, she would have known all things that were humanly knowable at the time about the mystery of the Messiah and the Incarnation.  Many of the Church Fathers thought she also was given a plentitude of infused knowledge that was directly related to the Incarnation.  Either way, she would have known more about the Mystery of the Messiah than the most learned of the Jewish scholars.  The rest would have remained in the darkness of faith.

How Mary Knew

For certain, Mary would have known all the prophecies of the Old Testament.  She would have known that the 70 weeks of years prophesied by Daniel were expiring in her day.  She would have understood that the Suffering Servant prophecies in Isaiah referred to the Messiah.  She would have known that the child she was to carry was both her Savior and her God.  There was no doubt in her mind as to the identity of the Child she was to conceive.  As Fulton Sheen says, “Mary’s mind was filled with the thought of Divinity in the stable.”

Rather than being surprised by the content of the message of the Angel at the Annunciation, instead she is surprised that St. Gabriel was speaking to her.  She did not know her mission prior to it being revealed, but once it is revealed to her she is fearful.  She is fearful because she knows what it means for her.  Like her husband Joseph, she believed in God’s Redemption through the Messiah, but because of her profound humility thought herself unfit to fulfill any role in it.  She knows her own nothingness and yet has no doubts that “nothing is impossible for God.”

Two Examples Among Many

We can point to two instances among many that show her specific knowledge of the mission of her Son.  The first is so subtle, that we can easily miss it.

When Our Lord is born, Mary wraps Him in swaddling clothing and lays Him in a manger.  At first glance this seems so common place that we even wonder why it was included in the account.  But then we realize that most mothers would not have placed their children in a hard manger with straw.  Instead, they would most certainly have kept the child comfortable by holding him.  But Our Lady knows her Son’s mission and that each and every act of suffering is redemptive.  There is never a time when He is not the Messiah, but there is a time when because of normal human limitations, He relies upon His Mother to complete His mission.  For her part Mary must always put the mission first, even though she could easily remedy His pain.  Her suffering at seeing Him suffer, not just on the Cross, but even in the manger, merited her the title of Our Lady of Sorrows.

The second “moment” is at Cana.  Here the connection with the Fall, Adam and Eve and redemption with the New Adam and the New Eve is made most explicit.  But notice that it is Mary who initiates Our Lord’s public ministry.  It is as if He once again asks her if she is willing to go with Him to His hour.  The Annunciation and the Miracle at Cana are inexorably linked.

Mary’s Freedom and Knowledge

There is also a more fitting reason Mary must have known what was to transpire.  The Angel Gabriel comes to Our Lady not with a demand, but with a request.  God has sent him because He seeks Mary’s cooperation.  He will not initiate salvation without her say-so.  It is God’s “dependence” on Mary and her unique role in His saving mission that has earned her the title of co-redemptrix.

Eve may have had no choice in becoming the mother of all the living, but the New Eve would have a choice.  God wanted a free cooperator.  The will as a blind faculty can only choose based on knowledge.  As knowledge grows, the freedom with which we act increases.  If Mary’s fiat was total, then her knowledge must have been as well.

God could have defeated sin in the beginning by limiting human freedom.  Given He chose the greater good of human freedom, why would He circumvent it when finally defeating sin?  Instead He secured salvation through a supreme act of human freedom. If Eve freely and with full knowledge cooperated in mankind’s downfall, then the New Eve would untie the knot freely and with full knowledge.

This is not to say that Mary did not need faith.  She did not know everything and she had to make an act of faith in order to jump from seeing that what God “does to me” (Lk 1:38) is really the thing that the “Almighty does for me” (Lk 1:49).   Nor was it all Mary—although it was a free act, she who was “full grace” cooperated fully with it.  Mary needed both faith and grace, but God did not want to pull the wool over her eyes.

“Mary, did you know?”  Yes, she most certainly did.

Our Lady of Fatima and Gay Marriage

Church and State, Contraception, Homosexuality, marriage, , ,

When Our Lady appeared to the children of Fatima, she warned that without conversion, Russia would continue to spreads its errors throughout the world.  The “errors” to which she was referring were mainly those of Communism, rooted in the philosophy of Karl Marx.  More than an economic theory, Marxism views all of history as the conflict between oppressors and oppressed and seeks to do away with all division, natural or not.  Marx himself presented it as a conflict between capital and labor, but those categories can readily be adapted to any two groups including gender, race or sexual orientation.  While the fruit of the Marxist tree that is Communism may be dying, the Marxist roots are alive and thriving within our own liberal democracy, a society that is deeply (and deliberately) divided.  This makes Our Lady’s words all the more prescient and ought to give us pause as we mark the 100th anniversary of her appearance at Fatima.

All of the prior Marxist attempts to remake human nature and society have met one almost insurmountable obstacle—the Family.  Marx himself envisioned this obstacle and called for the abolition of the family in the Communist Manifesto saying, “Abolition of the family!  Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”

As long as the foundation of society remained strong and in place, any attempt to change society as a whole would ultimately fail.  But weaken the foundation and society will fall with it.

Not surprisingly, the Communist Party USA has been one of the most vocal supporters of the push for gay marriage.  They knew that by subverting marriage, the Family would ultimately be laid waste.  Ultimately this is why those who oppose Gay Marriage cannot give up the fight.  By removing one of the means by which the Marxist spread their errors, we are hastening the reign of the Immaculate Heart.

Thinking Clearly about Marriage

Pascal said that our first moral obligation is to think clearly so that before we do anything we must understand why Marriage and the Family are intrinsically linked.  Without marriage, the Family ceases to exist.

Amidst all the debate in the past decade about redefining marriage, neither side could actually define either the classical definition or the revisionist version.  In order to see why the family and marriage are linked, we must begin by offering a definition of marriage.  Marriage is the complete union of two persons.  It is the total union of their persons at every level of their temporal being—spiritual, emotional and bodily.  The conjugal bond is what makes marriage unique in comparison to any other relationship or community of persons.

What revisionists have tried to do is to remove one of the elements.  They would almost certainly call it an emotional and spiritual bond.  Although it may seem surprising it is the bodily union that they must remove; not because it isn’t a sexual relationship but because it is not a conjugal relationship.

Men and women are capable of performing all biological processes on their own, save one, procreation.  To perform this process they need a complementary other.  In other words, in performing acts that may lead to procreation, they become a single “organism.”  It is not just any sexual activity that unites them, but only sexual activity that is intrinsically ordered to procreation.  In order to be unitive, sexual activity must also be the kind that is procreative.  Any other sexual activity (including contracepted) simply becomes the exchange of pleasure and does not unite the two people physically any more than a handshake, a back rub, or putting one’s finger in another’s ear.  Only in the marital embrace can two spouses be physically united, an act that same-sex couples cannot perform.  Marriage, under the revisionists’ definition must therefore no longer be a complete union of two persons since the couple is unable to become one flesh.

A word of explanation as to why I have been careful about calling them acts that are “ordered to procreation.”  As a biological process, procreation has aspects that are under control of the person and aspects that are not.  One may choose to breathe, but one cannot choose to get oxygen into the blood.  Provided the conditions are right, that happens “automatically” and is outside the direct control of the person.  So too with acts ordered to procreation.  A couple can engage in the marital embrace, but whether conception occurs or not, happens after the fact and is outside of their direct control.  In other words, it is not the actual conception of the child that causes the act to be unitive.  It is unitive because it is a procreative act.  Grasping this helps us to see why an infertile couple may still be married (because they are capable of procreative acts even if they do not lead to conception) and a same-sex couple may not.

Marriage and the Family

It also helps us to understand what it means when we say that children are the end of marriage.  They are not the purpose of marriage—the purpose is the total union or communion of the persons—but they are the fruit of marriage.  In short, they are a natural result of the communion of persons in marriage.

With all that has been said, we can understand that the Church is not being old-fashioned when she defines the family as “born of the intimate communion of life and love founded on the marriage between one man and one woman” (Gaudium et Spes, 48).  The family as the first society a person belongs to forms that person in his vision of reality.  Each child learns that he or she was generated from an act of love and was quite literally loved into existence.  It is the school of love where the child learns both how to love and be loved.  In short, “a society built on a family scale is the best guarantee against drifting off course into individualism or collectivism, because within the family the person is always at the center of attention as an end and never as a means” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 213).

Joining the Battle

If the goal is to destroy the family, then get rid of marriage.  Erotic love is too powerful to destroy it altogether, but modifying it to the point that it becomes unrecognizable is sufficient to destroy the family.  Not surprisingly with a change in marriage we are seeing a change in what people call a family.  A “family” that is not founded upon marriage as the communion of persons is built on sand.  It is only the complete bond of the spouses to each other that keeps the family together.

Since the Obergefell decision almost two years ago, many Catholics have disengaged from the battle for marriage.  It is time to pick up the battle once again, especially considering what Sr. Lucia, the Fatima visionary once said.  “The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid because anyone who operates for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be contended and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. However, Our Lady has already crushed its head.”  Let us re-engage and fight for marriage and the family!

St. Gianna Molla and the Principle of Double Effect

Abortion, Moralilty, ,

Since her canonization by Pope St. John Paul II on May 16, 2004, St. Gianna Beretta Molla has become the Patroness of the Unborn Child.  Faced with serious complications during the pregnancy of her fourth child, St. Gianna bravely put the needs of her child ahead of her own.  Pro-lifers often point to her heroic witness as a model to be followed.  They are right in doing so, but maybe not for the reason they often cite.  Most portray her situation as an all or nothing—they say she was faced with having life-saving treatment and an abortion or no treatment at all.  The problem is that this is not actually what happens.  The details of St. Gianna’s dilemma matter greatly in the retelling of her story, especially because it helps illustrate a moral solution for mothers who are faced with serious medical problems during pregnancy.

St. Gianna’s Story

While pregnant with her fourth child, St. Gianna developed a large fibroid; a benign tumor of the uterus.  In the normal course of events when these tumors are found during pregnancy they are unobtrusive enough that they may be left be.  In St. Gianna’s case, the tumor was large enough that it was likely to cause serious complications during the pregnancy that ultimately could threaten the development of the child and put her in considerable pain and risk for a serious infection.  There are additional medical details of her situation (detailed here) but for the sake of our discussion this should suffice.

When St. Gianna learned of the fibroid tumor, she was, according to her husband, presented with three options by her doctors.

  1. Terminate the pregnancy via direct abortion and remove the fibroid
  2. Have a hysterectomy that removed her uterus. This would also result in the death of the 2 month old preborn child.  For her personally this was a low-risk approach and was also the standard of care at the time given the lack of medical technologies (such as ultrasound machines) that we have today.
  3. Remove the fibroid and continue her pregnancy. This option could result in the spontaneous miscarriage of the child because of the irritation to the uterus.  It also carried with it serious risks for herself.  The blood loss from a pregnant uterus can be excessive and difficult to control.  It might also be that the wound could re-open during any point in the pregnancy.

Notice that not receiving any treatment was not one of the options as the story is often portrayed.  This was not a real option as to not do anything would have placed the child at great risk.

Examining the Moral Principles

Before examining her decision, it is helpful to make some distinctions and define some moral principles.  This is what makes knowing the details of her case very instructive.  It is a real-life, concrete example of what someone did and it contradicts the abortion or nothing approach that many people often assume.

The first point to look at is why (1) is morally problematic and (2) is morally permissible.  Looked at superficially, the two acts look to be the same—in both scenarios the child ends up dead and the mother lives.  But how we end up there matters, even if we end up in the same place.  Despite Machiavellian protestations to the contrary, one may never do evil so that good may come about.  The end does not justify the means.  Abortion, that is the direct killing of an innocent human being is always wrong regardless of whether the mother’s life is in jeopardy or not.

In scenario (2), the death of the child, although foreseen, is not directly willed even if it is permitted.  What is willed is the preservation of St. Gianna’s life.  Notice too that the preservation of her life does not come about as a result of the child’s death, but as a result of the removal of the uterus.  That same removal of the uterus also has the “side-effect” of killing the baby, even though it was not chosen for that reason.  Finally, there is a certain proportionality involved in the moral calculation in that both mother and child’s life are of equal value and by not acting you are placing one or both of their lives in jeopardy.

Option (2) demonstrates an important moral principle called The Principle of Double Effect.  This principle recognizes that none of our acts occur in a moral vacuum.  Each of our actions are complex with a mixture of goods and evil attached to them.  Thus, even if the will chooses some good, there can often be an evil associated with it.  This is why when we make our moral calculation, we must look not just to the external act but to the underlying choice of the will.  With this in mind, there has classically been the need for the distinction between two types of will—the direct will and the permitting will.  We may never, morally speaking, directly will an evil.  However, we may permit it.

The Principle of Double Effect

The Principle of Double Effect says that it is morally allowable to perform an act that has at least two effects provided all four of the following conditions are met.

  1. the object to be done must be good in itself
  2. the intent of the agent must be to achieve the good effect and to avoid the evil effect as much as possible. The evil effect must not be directly willed but only permitted.  This is the case even if the evil effect is foreseen.
  3. the good effect is proportional to the bad effect and there is no other way to achieve the effect.
  4. the good effect must follow directly from the action and not as a result of the harmful effect.

St. Gianna would have been morally justified in choosing option (2), but instead she chose option (3).  Although under no moral obligation to do so, this decision flowed from her desire to put the life of her child first.  She was a mother and a holy one at that, so this decision came somewhat second nature.  It is not the reason she is saint, but she made this decision because she was on her way to sainthood.

Most of us know that she eventually lost her life after delivering a healthy baby.  But there is not direct evidence that she died because of her decision.  The cause of her death was an infection in her abdomen that was brought about as a result of the Caesarian section that was performed.  Why this detail matters again speaks to how we present her as a witness.  She knew that her health was in jeopardy by choosing (3) but there was no reason for her (she was a doctor) to think it may end up leading to her death.  She made a courageous decision, but also one based on prudence.  It is her courage and prudence that made her a saint and makes her a great Pro-life witness.  It wasn’t her unwillingness to do something evil, but her willingness to love her children at great personal cost.  Saints are praised not because they didn’t choose evil, but because of their witness of heroic virtue.  Knowing the details enables us to let her witness speak clearly to a very confused age.

Catholics and the Seder Meal

Eucharist, Lent, Sacraments, The Life of Jesus, , , ,

In recent years, one of the more popular Lenten practices of Catholics has become to participate in Seder Meals.  Their popularity is driven mostly by a desire to express a solidarity with the Jewish people and to understand the Jewish roots of our Faith.  While it may seem harmless to participate in them, there are some serious reasons why Catholics might want to avoid them all together.

In an age where the morality of a given act is mainly subject to our intention, it is important to begin any discussion on whether Catholics should participate in Seder Meals with a fundamental principle.  St. Thomas puts the principle this way—“external worship should be in proportion to the internal worship” (ST I-II q.103, a.3).  What the Angelic Doctor means by this is that our external acts of worship must always reflect our internal beliefs.  If our act of worship does not reflect our internal beliefs then we are guilty of superstition, that is giving worship to God in, what St. Thomas calls, an “undue mode” or in giving worship to a false god.

Trapped in a dualistic mindset, many of us would think that our external acts are just that—external—and there is no harm done if you do not really mean them.  But intuitively we all seem to think otherwise, especially when we reflect on the witness of the Martyrs.  Many martyrs refused to offer a pinch of incense to the pagan gods because they knew this would be an act of worship, even if they may not have believed in what they were doing.  Likewise there are those who have been tempted to desecrate an image of Christ in order to avoid martyrdom.  All too often the tempters would simply say, “It’s just an image.  All that matters to you is what you believe.”  Those who desecrated the image were considered apostates regardless of what they may have believed.  Not having our exterior acts reflecting our interior beliefs is a form of lying.

The Seder Meal and What it Means to Participate

Returning to the topic at hand, namely Seder Meals, it is without a doubt a religious act.  Many of these are sponsored by different Jewish Synagogues or, when done “do it yourself” follow the existing Seder liturgy.  A Seder Meal is one of the primary means by which the Jewish people hand on their faith.  It also reflects an act in faith in the coming of the Messiah.

For a Christian, that is, one who has faith that the Messiah has come, to participate in a Seder Meal is a false declaration of faith.  It is, as St. Thomas said, an act of worship of God in an “undue mode.”  While our faith in the Christ with the Jewish people may be the same, that faith must be expressed in different ways.  The Jews reflect the faith of Abraham, that is the Messiah to come, through circumcision.  The Christian expresses his faith in the Messiah who has come when they share in His life and death in Baptism.

St. Thomas says that all of the legal ceremonies of the Old Law, including the Passover meal, have passed away because each found their fulfillment with the coming of Christ.  Each of the ceremonies of the Old Law expressed the expectation of the coming Messiah, those of the New Law reflect His having already come.  In the mind of Aquinas, to continue to participate in these ceremonies is a lie and constitutes, at least objectively speaking, a grave sin.  Regardless of what one believes, by participating in a Seder Meal, the Christian is professing through his actions that Christ is yet to come.

The ceremonies of the Old Law were mere “shadows” (Col 2:17) of the Sacraments to come.  The Seder is but a foreshadowing of the Mass.  Why would one participate in shadow when the real thing is available?  Catholics are already participating the True Seder Meal, the Mass.

What if I Just Want to Learn More About Our Roots?

What about those who only do so out of curiosity or as a learning exercise to help them better understand the Mass?  Certainly their intentions do not change the fact that it is objectively wrong to participate, but still it may change their culpability.  This approach is worth unpacking further for a different reason as well.

The problem with this approach is that it denies an important historical fact.  Those who have studied the Passover meal that Our Lord celebrated with the Apostles are quick to point out that it differs from the first Passover as described in the Book of Exodus and not just because Our Lord added the elements of fulfillment.  At the time of Our Lord only the Levitical priesthood existed and thus all sacrifices occurred within the Temple.  What did not change however was that the Passover was not just a meal but also a sacrifice.

Once the Temple was destroyed, Judaism underwent a profound change.  Prior to 70 AD, Judaism was much like Catholicism in that they had priests who lead the worship which was centered upon sacrifice.  After 70 AD it became much like Protestantism in that the emphasis was placed on worship without sacrifice.  Judaism today is not the same Judaism of Our Lord and the Apostles.

In short, the Seder Meal that Jesus participated in the first 32 years of His life is profoundly different from the Seder Meal as it is celebrated within Judaism today.  The key element, the sacrifice of the Lamb, is missing.  With the sacrificial character removed it now bears little resemblance to the Mass which retains its sacrificial meaning.  A Seder Meal, as it is celebrated today, has little value for the Christian for learning the roots of the faith.

Certainly studying (without participating) the Seder Meal as it was during the time of Our Lord has value for us as Christians.  Studying the type or the sign helps us to better understand the archetype or thing signified.  Rather than spending your time organizing or attending a Seder Meal, you would be better off studying Dr. Brant Pitre’s Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist or listen to Scott Hahn’s Fourth Cup.  Although there are more, I have found these two resources invaluable for deepening our understanding of the meaning of the Mass and its relation to the Jewish Passover Meal.

Donald Trump and the Witches

Devils, Spiritual Warfare, ,

At Midnight on February 24th, a group of witches cast on spell upon President Donald Trump.  The ritual must be repeated at Midnight on the date of every waning crescent moon during his presidency.  Witchcraft is nothing new; they have been casting spells on men and women for many centuries.  What makes this mass spell unique is that it has taken on a “viral” quality with the rite being posted online with an attempt to take it to a wider community.  For most of us, the thought of witches in black hats around a bubbling cauldron with broomsticks in hand casting a spell on Donald Trump is somewhat ridiculous.  But for those who are actively engaged in spiritual warfare they know how serious this can be.  In openly declaring their intent to cast a spell, battle lines have been drawn and Catholics must step into the breach to engage in this spiritual battle.

Regardless of whether one is a card-carrying member of the Donald Trump Fan Club, as Christians we have an obligation to pray for him as the leader of our country (1Tim 2:2).  In other words, we should bless him rather than, as the witches propose, curse him.  These prayers of blessing protect him both from harm and from doing harm.  Despite protestations to the contrary that the witches merely wish to “bind him”, the intent of any spell or curse is to do evil to the person.

Curses and Divine Providence

Whether the curse is effective or not is left up to Divine Providence.  God may allow it to happen or He may actively oppose it.  Not recognizing this can often be an obstacle in understanding how someone becomes “infected” by the demonic.  Most of us understand that by dabbling in the occult we can open ourselves up to falling victim to demonic activity.  It does not happen in 100% of the cases, but the likelihood increases as the frequency of contact increases, especially for a person who has fallen out of a state of grace.

What is often not understood however is that it is possible, through no fault of the person, that they come under the control of the devil and his minions.  We can become spiritually sick in much the same way that we can become physically sick.  It may be that we do things that jeopardize our physical health (like drug abuse, overeating, etc.), but this is no guarantee that one becomes sick.  Likewise, many people become sick with some disease through no fault of their own.  Certainly, suffering in the innocent, especially at the hands of the demonic, stretches our capacity to understand, but it is still possible for it to occur.

Satan: The Great Ape

One of the most common ways in which this can happens is through the invocation of a curse.  Satan is the great ape, constantly trying to mimic God’s power.  Think of the curse as an “anti-grace.”  Grace seeks to aid a person through divine intervention, while a curse, according to the recently deceased Chief Exorcist of Rome, Fr. Gabriele Amorth, is defined generally as “harming others through demonic intervention.”  Satan apes God’s power that He exercises through the Sacraments by creating curses.

Like the Sacraments, curses usually require a minister.  This is where witches and wizards enter the picture.  They act as ministers once they are commissioned and perform a ritual on a given material object that is somehow connected to the victim.  In this case, there are several objects including an image of the President.

Not all people who practice or commission witchcraft are consciously worshipping Satan.  What they are consciously doing is invoking a supernatural power.  There is no denying this.  The source of that power does not require them to acknowledge him and may in fact prefer that they don’t.  Still, they are acting as his ministers and, in borrowing from his power, will end up falling under his power.  Access to that power comes with a price.  This is why the viral nature of the spell placed upon the President is so dangerous.  It may never touch the President personally, but most assuredly it will do harm to those who dabble in it.  This is a win-win situation for the evil one.  He is sure to gain power over someone because of this.

What to Do

The Church as the custodian of the Real Thing—the Thing that blesses and never curses—has an obligation to act in this case.  The problem is, as Fr. Amorth pointed out, priests do not take curses and witchcraft seriously.  They are not alone as most of the Faithful also see witchcraft as some antiquated superstition rather than a real threat to souls.  If they did, then both clergy and laity would be offering Mass for the protection of the President and for those who act out of ignorance in performing the rite.  They would have recourse to the Rosary and its inherent power to crush the head of the serpent.  They would go to the Sacrament of Sacraments, that is the Precious Blood of Jesus, and seek protection there.  The Litany of Precious Blood is perhaps one of the most effective prayers against curses and demonic activity in general as most Exorcists will attest.

Human Origins and the Transgender Person

Anthropology, Human Dignity, ,

“Where did I come from?”  What parent doesn’t cringe hearing those words come out of the mouth of their young child?  The parent’s mind goes to the birds and the bees while the mouth quickly intervenes saying “God put you in Mommy’s tummy.”  Although it is uttered by a mere babe, we cannot help but be struck by the profundity of the question.  Where do we come from and how are we made?  It is a question that touches deeply on both philosophy and theology and the answer can only leave us echoing the marvel of the Psalmist—“I praise you, because I am wonderfully made” (Ps 139:14).

The Platypus and Us

From our perspective, the platypus seems to be the strangest of all God’s creatures.  If we were able to step outside of ourselves, we would quickly realize that in truth humans are the oddest of His creatures.  Formed from the “dust of the ground” and “the breath of God,” we are the only creatures in which matter and spirit are wedded together.  We are neither wholly material or wholly spirit, but a morph of the two.  We must understand this point if we are to understand our origins.  We are not souls trapped in a body nor are we really smart apes.  We are both a body and a spirit.  Although this seems like common sense, it seems to have been greatly forgotten in a culture that tends to look at man in a dualist fashion.  Although the soul enjoys a certain prominence, the person is not just their soul.

What follows from this is that man is really capable of three different kinds of actions.  As a bodily being, he can operate on an animal level by which he experiences hunger and growth and the like.  As a spiritual being he can perform acts of pure spirits like abstract thought.  Man can know that 2+2=4.  What is entirely unique to man as a composite creature is that he can also perform a third type of act—one that only man can do such as appreciating beauty, proving a mathematical theorem and experiencing conjugal love.

The Origin of the Soul

Thanks to modern biology and embryology, we know where the body comes from.  But where does the soul come from?  It is created directly by God at the moment of conception.  There is no material power that can create a spiritual soul.  Being immaterial and having no parts, it cannot come from the parents the way the body does.  This leaves only one alternative, a sort of process of elimination, that leads to the conclusion that it must come directly from God.

It is not, as is often thought, as though the soul exists prior to the body.  How do we know this?  In short, it is the law of heredity that reveals this.  Children can inherit bodily traits from their parents.  A son can be the spittin’ image of his father.  But it is not just bodily traits, but also some of those traits that fall into our third class of actions that children tend to inherit.  Artists and musicians tend to rear children with the aptitude for the same.  Those gifted in mathematics tend to raise children with mathematical minds such that no mere environmental explanation exists. So widespread and common is this that it is easy to overlook the implication of it.

In short, we have to offer an account of our origin that factors in the hereditariness of these spiritual/material acts.  The only plausible explanation for this phenomena is that the soul is made for the body.  When the body is created, thought St. Thomas, God fuses a soul to it to match the body.  In that way our souls are entirely unique and thus when separated from the body (after death and prior to the General Resurrection) they still remain our soul.  He doesn’t just fuse a soul into my body, but He infuses my soul into my body.  They are a perfect match.

Now all human souls have the same essential qualities such as being capable of abstract thought, knowledge of first principles, and the capacity to love.  But each soul may differ in some of its accidental qualities such as taking spiritual delight in certain intellectual pursuits which coincidentally may coincide with those same bodily, hereditary tendencies that make the practice of art, music and mathematics easier.

This also confirms on one of the key concepts of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, namely that the body reveals the soul.  If the soul is made to fit that particular body then this seems intuitive.  But this also means that one of the accidental qualities of the soul is sex.  In other words, gender or sex (or whatever we are now calling it) is not just a physical difference but a spiritual one too (see CCC 2332-2333).

The Transgender Soul

And now we begin to see why these philosophical musings are relevant.  There are many who claim that transgenders were born with the wrong bodies.  They claim that God “makes no mistakes” and that the biology was wrong.  But if the body is primary and God matches the soul to it, then this cannot be so.  If the body is biologically male then the soul is also spiritual masculine.  The soul is matched to the body and God “makes no mistakes.”

Further, to make biological changes to the body in the cases of someone who is conflicted will only serve to make matters worse.  They may not “feel comfortable” in their skin, but those changes will not touch their souls and will lead to an even deeper conflict.  How does a masculine soul express itself through a female body?  They will never be able to fully express themselves and thus will be forever wounded in their ability to give and receive love.  Instead we must be willing to help them discern the true source of their inner conflict without taking what amounts to a short-cut solution.

Our Lady of Fatima and the First Saturday Devotion

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In the popular devotion of the Church, Saturday has long been a day set aside to honor the Blessed Mother.  It was the 8th Century Benedictine monk and Carolingian liturgical reformer, St. Alcuin, who first composed Votive Masses to honor Our Lady on Saturday.  These masses were so popular among the faithful, that they eventually became accepted into the Missal as the Common of the Virgin Mary.

It was no accident however that Alcuin chose Saturday, for there are deep theological reasons for doing so.  The Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy  explains that Saturday is set chosen as a memorial of the Blessed Virgin as “a remembrance of the maternal example and discipleship of the Blessed Virgin Mary who, strengthened by faith and hope, on that great Saturday on which Our Lord lay in the tomb, was the only one of the disciples to hold vigil in expectation of the Lord’s resurrection; it is a prelude and introduction to the celebration of Sunday, the weekly memorial of the Resurrection of Christ; it is a sign that the ‘Virgin Mary is continuously present and operative in the life of the Church.’”

This devotion to Our Lady has been sorely tried in recent centuries, beginning with the Protestant Revolution.  Rather than being met with indifference, she was treated with contempt.  It was within this setting that a practice of receiving Communion in reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary arose.  This devotion spread, catching the attention of Pope St. Pius X who attached an indulgence to the practice in 1904.  This practice was expanded when on June 13,1912 he offered additional indulgences for “All the Faithful who, on the first Saturday or first Sunday of twelve consecutive months, devote some time to vocal or mental prayer in honor of the Immaculate Virgin in Her conception gain, on each of these days, a plenary indulgence. Conditions: Confession, Communion, and prayers for the intentions of the Sovereign Pontiff.”

Fatima

Five years to the day, Our Lady appeared to the Fatima visionaries, showing them the Immaculate Heart surrounded with thorns.  Sr. Lucia would later say that she understood that the vision was “was the Immaculate Heart of Mary, outraged by the sins of humanity, which demanded Reparation.” It was also during this appearance that Our Lady told the children that Jesus wished to “establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” Our Lady promised Lucia that she would return to explain the practice of the first five Saturdays.

Fast forward eight years and Lucia is now a postulant in a convent in Pontevedra, Spain.  Our Lady appeared to her and said “Look, my daughter. My Heart is surrounded with thorns that ungrateful men pierce unceasingly with their blasphemies and ingratitude. You, at least, try to console me and announce that for all those, who for five consecutive first Saturdays, confess, receive Holy Communion, pray the Holy Rosary and accompany me for15 minutes by meditating the mysteries of the Holy Rosary with the intention to do reparation, I promise to assist them at the hour of death with the graces needed for salvation.”

About a year later, she was taking out the trash when she encounters a little child.  She told the child to pray a Hail Mary which He refused to do.  So, she tells him to go to the Church and ask the Heavenly Mother for the Child Jesus.  When the child returns, she asks him if he did what she said to which He replied “And have you spread through the world what the heavenly Mother requested of you?”  She replied, knowing it was Our Lord, that she had met many difficulties in spreading the devotion.  He told her to rely on His grace and to “have compassion for your Mother’s Heart. It is surrounded with thorns that ungrateful men pierce at each moment, and there is no one who does acts of reparation to remove them.”

Our Blessed Lord appeared once again to now Sister Lucia on May 29, 1930. He explained that the devotion involved five consecutive first Saturday because it was five kinds of offenses and blasphemies against the Immaculate Heart of Mary that required reparation, namely: blasphemies against her Immaculate Conception, against her perpetual virginity, against the divine and spiritual maternity of Mary, blasphemies involving the rejection and dishonoring of her images, and the neglect of implanting in the hearts of children a knowledge and love of this Immaculate Mother.  Mary had asked Jesus for this to forgive those who “had the misfortune of offending her.”

Why does it Matter?

Why do all these details matter?  Because we are now closing in on the 100th anniversary of Our Lady’s appearance to the visionaries in Fatima.  The world has changed in ways the Fatima visionaries could hardly have conceived.  But many of the advances that have been made have left us less human.  Our Lady appeared in order to warn us of this and offered us a remedy to protect us from ourselves—“Penance, penance, penance.”  Many within the Church has chosen to focus on the consecration of Russia as the primary message, but it seems to me that any debate on whether that has actually been accomplished (Sr. Lucia herself said it had) misses the point when we fail to implement the simple call to do Penance.

Our Lady’s instructions are a reminder to all the Faithful of the communal dimension of sin and our obligation to make reparation. Christ came for no other reason than to make reparation.  A Christian is meant to continue His work throughout time and space.  Sure, He could have done the work Himself had He so willed, but He did not will.  Sure, His participation and ours differ immeasurably but He asked for our participation in it when He called upon us to take up our Cross.  We cannot be Christians while at the same time striving to live a comfortable life.  Christians must act redemptively by consciously making acts of reparation, not just for our sins but for the sins of others.  Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more, provided we are willing to act like other Christs.  Our Lady’s very specific instructions to Sr. Lucia offers us a concrete means to make this happen.  She is ever the spiritual mother teaching us.  Can we not give to her Son, the First Five Saturdays in honor of His holy Mother?

Separation of Church and State?

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In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association written on New Year’s Day in 1802, President Jefferson wrote what, especially in recent times, has become his most often quoted words.  In offering an interpretation of the First Amendment he said,

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State” (emphasis added).

The Catholic Church invents the Separation of Church and State

Jefferson was offering nothing novel.  Christians have been preaching the separation of Church and State for millennia.  If we look at the great cultures throughout history, the idea of a separation between the State and Religious powers was anathema.  Whether it was Egypt or Rome, the Emperors were believed to be gods themselves and religious veneration was due to them.  When Christ uttered His famous “render unto Caesar,” He did so in a culture in which Caesar thought himself divine and the High Priest or Pontifex Maximus of the official Roman pagan religion.  This was the norm throughout the ancient world, except for a single country—Israel.  In Israel, the role of king was distinct from either the priests or the prophets.  The first king, Saul, was anointed by the Prophet Samuel (1Samuel 10) and even King David himself was beholden to the Prophet Nathan who accused him of murder.

Christians have always interpreted Christ’s admonition to “render unto Caesar” as a call to keep this Jewish tradition of separating the governance of the State from the governance of the Church.  On the one hand, we can see why Our Lord thought this necessary simply by looking at man’s nature as both spirit and body.  We live two distinct, although related lives—temporal and eternal.  His utterance baptizes these two distinct powers to govern each of the lives.  Like the body and soul, there is a certain precedence of the spiritual governance over the temporal governance, but still the two should work in a complementary fashion.

Why We Need the Separation

Why the Church and State should remain distinct is not entirely clear until we add into the mix man’s fallen nature.  As an effect of man’s prodigious fall, the body tends to drag the soul down and corrupt it.  When the Church and the State are essentially one, it is the Church bears the brunt of it.  History reveals this repeatedly, especially if we look to the Middle Ages, culminating in Henry VIII’s foundation of the Church of England.  The circumstances may change but the Church always becomes corrupt when it gets too closely tied to the temporal power.

To use an American parlance, the Church/State distinction is a form of checks and balances.  The temporal authority, because he is first and foremost is trying to save his own soul in addition to his subjects, is always subservient to the Church.  The Church would, in turn, make itself the servant of the Imperium in her conduct of temporal affairs.  Each serves to keep the other in line—when the Church oversteps her bounds and gets too caught up in temporal affairs, the State is there to remind her of her mission to souls.  When the State oversteps its bounds and puts the souls of its residents at stake, the Church is there to remind it of its proper place.  While this practice may have been abused, the power of the Pope to excommunicate a rogue Christian King was very effective in bringing about conditions that were good for the soul.

When the two function in this way the citizens of the State thrive and are holy.  The culture becomes Christian, rather than a mere State that happens to have a majority of Christians in it.  The Church recognized the importance of building a Christian society—one in which being a Christian is made easier by the culture—and therefore worked out her understanding of Church/State relations shortly after the time of Constantine.  Pope St. Gelasius I (492-496) who is often credited with “inventing” the separation of Church and State said:

“Christ, mindful of human fragility had discerned between the functions of each power… His reason for so doing was twofold. On the one hand, it is written that no one warring for God should be entangled with secular things. The raison d’être of the royal power was to relieve the clerics of the burden of having to care for their carnal and material wants. For the temporal necessities the pontiffs indeed need the emperors, so that they can devote themselves to their functions properly and are not distracted by the pursuit of these carnal matters, but the emperors, Christian as they are, need the pontiffs for the achievement of eternal salvation.”

The Jefersonian Distinction

Even if Jefferson did not invent the notion of the Separation of Church and State, he did endorse an important twist to it.  What was new about Jefferson’s position—which was subsequently read into the Constitution by Justice Hugo Black—was his belief that a wall of separation had to be erected.  In other words, he thought Church and State should remain completely separate.

Returning to the analogy of the human person, you can no more put a wall of separation between the Church and State than you can between the soul and the body.  To sever the one from the other leads to death—be it the death of the person or of society as a whole.

When the complementary role of Church and State is denied, the State will go unchecked in its power.  When the State finds no authority above it then it simply does as it sees fit without any regard to the moral law or the eternal salvation of its citizens.  In order to pull this off though the State needs to promote “bread and circuses” to keep the populace from focusing on their souls.  The “bread and circuses” can take various forms, but the form of choice today is sexual license.  It is not as if the Church merely disappears in this setting.  The State sets up a new Church, one that is merged with the State.  In other words, when you set up a “wall of separation” it will always end up merging the two.

 

Return of the Church-State of Paganism

Much of the West is returning to paganism in the form of liberalism, worshipping the god of freedom.  Like all pagan gods, it demands child sacrifice, even if is cleaner this time because it is done in utero.  Its churches are universities (really all public schools) and its high priests are the judges.  The State will “tolerate” other religions and grant “freedom of worship” but any public expression, especially when it comes in conflict with the State Religion, will not be tolerated.   The Little Sisters of the Poor may have ultimately won their lawsuit, but that is only a harbinger of things to come.  The next battle will likely come for not complying with the demands of the law for gay marriage.  You must be willing to profess the new pagan creed which many Catholics, even bishops and priests, have shown themselves willing to do.

This is really a project of the Enlightenment, it simply took a few centuries for the Christian roots of Western society to actually die out.  Those roots are now, for all intents and purposes, dead.  We are living in Rome in reverse and the only way we can act redemptively is the way of the Church—martyrdom or an appearance by Our Lady.  Throughout history those are the only two ways that a society has been saved from the clutches of paganism.  Let us pray that as we ready ourselves for the 100th Anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima that it is the latter.

Spiritual and Religious

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“I am spiritual, but not religious.” It has become the fastest growing religious affiliation.  So popular is it, that it now has its own acronym—SBNR.  Its appeal is that it supposedly frees its adherents from the trappings of organized religion so that they may become more “spiritual.”  What it means to be more “spiritual” remains a mystery because any formal dogma or Creed would signal its death knell.  Usually it is about “connecting to God within.”  Although the popularity of SBNR has grown, it is not something new.  In fact one could say it is the second oldest religion in the world, beginning when Lucifer decided that he too would spend eternity as spiritual but not religious.

Ultimately the fall of Lucifer and his minions was a permanent refusal to have any obligations towards God.  The eternal cry of the demons is “non serviam”—“I will not serve.”  They desire to be like God, but shun religion.  Although their fall was instantaneous, many of the adherents to SBNR slide in the same direction—many not realizing what they are agreeing to when they recite the SBNR mantra.

What is Religion?

Without a doubt, some of the issue has to do with vagaries surrounding the word religious.  The English word religion is derived from the Latin religare, to tie, fasten, bind, or relegere, to gather up or treat.  First and foremost, religion is the moral virtue that consists in giving to God the worship and service He deserves.  It is part of the virtue of justice which consists in rendering to each his due.  Because He is the Creator of all things and has supreme dominion, God in a singular way has a special service due to Him.  This service is worship.

Herein lies a source of confusion, namely why God creates us and then commands that we worship Him.  This is worth investigating because it is often an obstacle for the SBNR congregants.  We offer worship to God, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, not for His sake but for ours.  We cannot give to God anything He doesn’t already have.  Instead He creates us as rational creatures not just because we manifest His goodness or glory, but because we, among all visible creation, have the capacity to appreciate it.  In other words, we worship to both show our appreciation and to grow in the pleasure that His goodness brings to us.

The SBNRer may willingly concede that they do owe something to God in terms of worship, but they prefer to connect to God privately “in their souls.”  This ultimately stems from a denial of what we are as human beings.  As body/spirit composites, we are capable of both internal and external acts of religion.  In a certain sense the internal take precedence, but these internal acts can never be wholly free from the external and must be guided by them.

As human beings, our bodies and our spirits act in unison with each other.  That which is in the mind, must first have been in the senses.  You cannot perform a wholly interior act without also affecting the exterior.  Just the very thought of God or Jesus, invokes an image in our material imaginations.  We worship both from the inside-out and the outside in.  Our external acts of devotion effect our internal acts of devotion.  One is more likely to have increased devotion in their heart to God kneeling (an external sign of supplication) in front of a Crucifix than if they are staring at a blank wall sitting on a bed.

The implications of this are obvious.  There are some external acts that are better than others at increasing devotion.  This is certainly true in the subjective sense—we all have our favorite environments in which to pray—but it is also true in the objective sense.  God is equally present in the bathroom as He is in the chapel, but it is the chapel that has been consecrated (i.e. set aside) as a place of prayer that is objectively better than the bathroom.  This is why praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament is called Adoration.  You can adore God anywhere in spirit, but in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament that Adoration occurs in “spirit and truth.”

SBNR and Organized Religion

As you probe more deeply into the motives of the typical SBNRer, you will find that really what SBNR means is that “I am spiritual, but I loathe organized religion.”  They view religion as something wholly personal and subjective.  But if it is really true that we owe God worship and that certain forms of worship are better than others, then a loving Father would teach us what those forms are.  The history of mankind outside of, first Judaism and then Christianity, has been man groping for these forms.  Some of the forms were innocuous like offering incense to the local god, while others commanded human sacrifice.  God commands definitive forms of worship to keep us from falling into two equally dangers traps—one of defect and one of excess.

There is the trap that once we realize that worship is really for us, we will worship in a way most pleasing to ourselves.  This has not only led to the Non-denominational denomination with their mega-churches and “praise and worship services” worthy of a pep-rally, but also the pop music masquerading as liturgical music in Catholic churches.  The second trap is that of excess.   The truth is that no form of worship will ever feel adequate because no merely human form of worship is.  So we keep upping the ante so to speak leading to some of the religious atrocities we still see in certain cults and Middle Eastern religions.  We need God to tell us what is acceptable and what is not.

God does not merely tell us, but He comes and shows us.  Through the sacrifice of His Son, He shows us the most pleasing form of worship—the one act that is enough.  He gives us the power to make that sacrifice our own—both through Faith (subjective) and through the perpetuation of that same Sacrifice in the Sacrifice of the Mass (objective).  The One True Religion is the one that offers that Sacrifice because it is not just any organized religion but the Religion organized by the Holy Spirit Himself.

The Catholic Response to SBNR

SBNR is really a protest movement against religious tolerance. Properly understood, religious tolerance assumes that there is a true religion and that we are willing to tolerate some people who hold only part of that truth. Tolerance respects human freedom to discover the truth. But religious tolerance has come to mean that all religions are equal. If all religions really are the same, then why should I have anything to do with any of them? But, if one of them is different because it is true, then it does matter. As the One True Religion is only the Catholic religion that can lead the SBNR away from sliding down the Luciferian slope.

This claim to be the One True Faith may seem arrogant, but it is no more arrogant than the claim that 2+2=4.  It is a statement of truth and it is a truth that has been handed down to us.  I am not the inventor of my religion, but its grateful recipient.

The Inventor died to give this religion to me.  Before dying He deeded it to its caretakers.  As proof, notice the first time that Jesus mentions His suffering on the Cross—it is only after setting up the Church upon Peter the Rock that He tells of His redemptive death (c.f. Mt 16:18-21).  Those same caretakers wore martyrs’ crowns rather so that the Faith was passed on to me.  Thousands upon thousands of martyrs and confessors boldly preached that religion so that I would have it.  Now it is my turn and your turn to pass it on to the next generation.  We cannot hide our light under a bushel.  We should not apologize for being Catholic, but we should apologize for not being Catholic enough.  Only we can show SBNR what it means to truthfully and joyfully be spiritual AND religious.

What is the Pro-Life Movement?

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When thousands gather today in Washington to march to the steps of the Supreme Court, the Pro-lifers will be confirming what has in many people’s minds become a stereotype.  Pro-life has become synonymous with “anti-abortion.”  There are those who are trying to rebrand the Pro-life movement by imaginatively calling it the New Pro Life Movement by providing a more “consistent-life ethic” to other issues, especially those related to abortion.  Whether or not the rebranding of the movement will be better only time will tell, but they may not be addressing the larger issue.

Pro-life might be the only positive word (the Pro part) that has a negative definition.  The Pro-life Movement is more like a protest group defined by what it is against.  The problem is that when you define yourself solely as against something, the enemy of your enemy becomes your friend.  As we are learning with the new administration it can make for interesting bedfellows.

The anti-X label follows Pro-lifers wherever they go and they self-identify with those labels.  They might like the sound of Pro-life better than “anti-abortion” from a public relations standpoint, but can they define themselves positively?

Pro-lifers could say “we are for life.”  But their work doesn’t necessarily set them apart from any other group that is concerned with the just treatment of society’s most vulnerable, including those in the womb and approaching death.  Pro-lifers define themselves as against abortion, euthanasia, abject poverty, and the like.  Anyone who is Pro-life should oppose those things.  But you don’t need to be Pro-life to oppose them so much as pro-justice.  A just society may eliminate all those things and yet still not be Pro-life.  Pro-life must mean more than just obtaining justice for the weak, even if it most definitely includes those things.

Catholic Pro-lifers often speak more generally in terms of the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death.  Pro-lifers favor the former over the latter.  Over the past few weeks leading up to the March for Life I have heard these terms, Culture of Death and Culture of Life, invoked any number of times in Catholic circles.  But I have yet to hear them described in the manner that John Paul II did—namely as a battle between   a culture that is designed to encourage spiritual death and one in which earthly life is “a penultimate reality entrusted to us, to be preserved with a sense of responsibility and brought to perfection in love and in the gift of ourselves to God and to our brothers and sisters” (Evangelium Vitae, 2).

Being Pro-life means first and foremost about caring about the spiritual welfare of each person in society.  They are not only concerned about the welfare of the child in the womb, but the spiritual well-being of the mother.  They are not only concerned with the life of the elderly, but that they are given an opportunity to die in a manner that increases their dignity.  They are concerned not just with the plight of the destitute, but the spiritual dangers faced by the rich.  In other words, Pro-life means caring about the eternal welfare of all those involved—both victim and perpetrator.

In a society that is marked by its materialism, Pro-lifers often forget this and only focus on the material well-being of the person without any reference to their spiritual health.  Without making this distinction, the Pro-life movement could ultimately get burned.  For example, how many people identify themselves as Pro-life and still support contraception?  Whether or not availability of contraception reduces the number of abortions is an ancillary consideration.  They are both fruits plucked from the tree of the Culture of Death.  This is not to say that they carry the same moral gravity—only that they equally have the ability to kill the soul.

“Kill the soul?”  I mean this not so much in the sense of judgment and heaven and hell (although that may be part of it) but in their innate capacity to kill men and women interiorly by wounding their ability to give and receive love (i.e. in JPII’s words above, “brought to perfection in love”).

This is also why Pro-lifers must be slower to hail President Trump as some sort of long awaited Messiah.  This is where the distinction between pro-justice and Pro-life is important.  We can applaud his working for justice for the unborn, but that does not make him Pro-life.  He will have to show himself to be concerned with promoting an atmosphere in which he makes being the “pursuit of happiness” (happiness in the classical sense that that Jefferson meant—namely a life of virtue) easier.  The best measure of a good leader of men is always how morally good the people are that he leads.

All of this is not to reduce the work of things like the March for Life.  They are a vital part of what it means to be Pro-life.  You cannot change laws or change hearts, but change hearts to change laws and change laws to change hearts.  Think of how the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was a vital piece of the Civil Rights Movement.  The law is a great moral teacher and it forms the minds and hearts of the citizenry.  Good laws make it easier to take things like the value of human life for granted and then form your opinions based on that.  Roe v Wade did not invoke the Culture of Death, but was a sign of its presence already among us.  Removing it would not mean that the Culture of Death was in its final throes.  Overturning Roe v Wade would be victory but only of a battle and not the war.  If Pro-lifers are to be active participants in that war, then we must make sure we have our marching orders correct—“to build a culture that is designed to encourage the pursuit of eternal life.”

Self-Help and the Spiritual Life

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Is there anything more demonstrative of the true American spirit than the self-help industry?  From How to Win Friends and Influence People to Tools of the Titans, America has always been a ripe market for self-help.  It has grown into a $10 billion industry.  Part of the appeal is that they appear to fit a primal need—each of us is haunted by an awareness that we are not what we are supposed to be and need some outside help. Always pragmatic, Americans assume that there must be a technique to fix the problem and buy the latest “life-changing” self-help book.  Even after reading the best ones, we are still plagued by a nagging sense that all is not quite right inside.  Off we go to the next book.  But one has to wonder, with over 630,000+ self-help books  on Amazon offering different techniques, is the problem really a technical one at all?  What if the problem is in our constitution such that no amount of self-help will completely fix it?

Within the Christian tradition we have a name for this fundamental flaw and we call it Original Sin.  We used to all know this, but many of us have forgotten it.  As Chesterton said, Original Sin is “the only part of Christian theology that can be proved.”  In an age where we abhor theory and demand practicality, all men agree on the doctrine of the Fall regardless of whether they profess it or not.  What they deny it in theory, they find in practice—each of us “do not do the good they want to do” (Romans 7:19).

Most of us are familiar with the term Original Sin but struggle to articulate exactly what it is.  Adam and Eve were created by God with supernatural gifts including the very life of God which we call sanctifying grace.  Adam and Eve had perfect integration of their faculties.  They could see the Good clearly in their intellect, they were able to will it and carry it out with a bodily intensity in the passions.  The passions followed the will which followed the intellect which followed God, the Supreme Good.

Falling from such a height, not only removed the supernatural gifts, but left the human nature they would hand on to their progeny damaged.  Their souls were no longer integrated.  The intellect was darkened, the will weakened and the passions ran amok, no longer obeying intellect and will.  In other words, Adam and Eve’s offspring were not just worse off because they lost sanctifying grace, but also because human nature itself was damaged.  Naturally, this leads to the question why God allowed man to Fall from grace, leaving him worse off than if He had never graced him to begin with?

The Self-Help Trap

God left man worse off to protect him from a bigger fall, that is, plunging into the self-help trap.  Without this inner brokenness we could actually help ourselves.  The only problem is that we would help ourselves to become something less than we were meant to be, namely “partakers of the Divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4), “God’s children now” (1 Jn 3:2).  With the stain of Original Sin, we are always aware of a lack that cries out ultimately for God.

The self-help trap denies not only Original Sin, but the height from which we fell.  It is meant to help us “improve,” but what does this mean?  Progress is only progress if we know where we are going.  We must know our purpose or destination before we can say whether something has improved our chances of reaching it.  Each self-help program promises “success” but success is highly dependent upon the author’s definition.

One of the other post-Fall pitfalls is that we are prone to self-deception.  We begin to look at what is normal (what everyone else is like) and the norm (what we were made for) and think “I am mostly OK, just need to work on few things.” Self-help only feeds this.  We will always choose to improve in areas that either require the least amount of work or based on some idol we have set up.

In the minds of many well-meaning Christians, Christianity is the self-help program that actually works.  Pope Benedict XVI pointed out this trap Christians can fall into in his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est  when he said “[B]eing Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (DCE, 1).  There are a number of evangelists that present the Gospel as a self-help program that actually works.  The danger in doing this however is that it doesn’t work when it is lived as an ethical system.  Christianity morality is hard and all but impossible without first having an encounter with the living Christ.  To the world, Christian morality makes no sense. It only makes sense once we trust Christ completely.  With trust comes the willingness to do whatever He tells us.

Christianity and Self-Help

The opposite of Christianity is not atheism but radical self-help.  They both start at the same place—a willingness to change.  But it is there that they part ways.  Self-help says “you can do this, all you need to do is approach the problem differently,” Christ says “pick up your Cross and follow me.”  If I take it from the wounded hands of Christ, it will make me whole.  Every virtue I am lacking is found in the crosses God sends me.  All I need to do is allow them to do their work on me.  It has a proven track record winning friends and influencing people—the Saints always make more Saints.

All that being said, this does not mean that self-help books and techniques do not have value in the spiritual life.  Grace perfects and elevates nature so that the books which acknowledge the good of virtue over selfishness can be the raw material for change in our lives.  But their proper place is always after the invasion of grace has occurred in our lives.  A recent book written by Jeff Goins called The Art of Work is one worth commending to you.

The subtitle of the book reveals just how compatible it is—A Proven Path for Discovering What You Were Meant to Do.  Although he does not specifically mention Christianity, it assumes that God’s Providence is an active force in our lives.  He offers practical advice on how we are to respond to our call (without reference to Who it is that is calling), how service fulfills us, suffering is a friend dressed like an enemy because all things work for good for those who have a calling and nothing we do is wasted.  He also recognizes God’s law of gradualism in which we do not so much leap from one cliff to another but build a bridge gradually across the chasm.  Throughout the book he gives tells stories to demonstrate his point (even at one point referring to St. Theresa of Calcutta.  All in all it reads like an instruction manual for fulfilling all aspects of your Christian vocation, especially when he talks about living what he calls a “portfolio life.”

Psychological or Demonic?

Devils, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, Suffering, Virtue, , ,

As followers of Christ, true God and true man, it is hard to avoid the truth that we inhabit two worlds—the seen and the unseen.  This is so basic a tenet of Christianity that we easily forget it and gravitate towards one or the other, the natural or the supernatural.  We have all met people who supernaturalize everything, referring all that happens in our world to the angelic and demonic.  On the other hand there are also those who tend to only accept natural explanations for what happens.  Our Lord however taught us to keep one foot in each of those worlds.  There were the sick whom He healed and those whom He exorcised.  There is perhaps no arena where this dichotomy is more obvious than mental illness.

On the one hand there are those who think that the remedy is simply to pray the problem away.   Prayer must always be part of anyone’s therapy (more on this in a moment) so this is a difficult point to contend.  But for most people prayer isn’t enough.  Or, more accurately, the answer to their prayer is found through the help of therapists.  God rarely acts in a vacuum.  He always uses secondary causes when they are available to carry out works of His Providence.  We may pray and pray for healing, but only receive it when we go to the doctor.  Does this mean that God did not deliver?  Of course not.  He simply wanted to share His power of healing with one of His creatures.

Removing the Stigma

Within Christian circles, mental illness is stigmatized.  Mental health problems are not just problems because someone’s faith or trust in God is not strong enough.  That can always be the case, but it need not be the direct cause.  There are people of incredible faith that nobly carry the cross of mental illness.  If anything, those who think this way are the ones who do not understand the Faith.

An authentic Catholic understanding of the human person, as both body and soul, leads to the recognition that because of our fallen nature, defects in our bodies can spill over into the way we see reality.  Think about the person who is drunk—their judgment is impaired.  Did the alcohol somehow drip into the seat of judgment, the intellect?  No, but when our senses are impaired we cannot judge correctly.  That which is in the intellect, was first in the senses as the Scholastics were fond of saying.

So too with the person with mental illness.  They may have a bodily defect which causes them to judge reality incorrectly.  Or, their early experience or exposure to a trauma may have hindered their ability to judge reality properly.  Perhaps they need a medication to restore the body back to its proper function so that it can send clean data to the intellect.  They may additionally need counseling on how to judge reality correctly.

As an aside, many Catholics fear receiving counseling because the counselor may not be Catholic.  This is a reasonable fear, but just because they are Catholic doesn’t make them good therapists.  What one should look for is someone who has a correct definition of mental health.  Mental health consists in the ability to judge reality correctly.  This means they have an understanding of man as a body/soul composite with a purpose outside of himself.  Only once this is established would you assess their clinical capabilities.  In this regard, it is no different than choosing any other kind of health care provider.  If a cardiologist thinks that a healthy heart is one in which only one ventricle is functioning, you would not choose him, even if he was the most clinically gifted doctor in the world.  Simply asking the therapist what his or her definition of mental health is, can often protect you from wasted time and doing more harm.

Psychology and Catholicism have been in conflict since the advent of modern methods, but this need not be the case.  Anyone who reads St. Thomas’ Summa on human nature and the virtues realizes he would have made an excellent psychologist.  This is because of his correct anthropology.  There has been a rediscovery of sorts of St. Thomas’ works and many schools are teaching them to those training in psychology.

It used to be that anyone who was mentally ill was thought to be possessed.  In this regard the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme where everyone assumes that the problem is clinical.  However, just because there were cases in the past where a supernatural explanation was sought when there was a natural one, doesn’t mean that they weren’t right some of the time.  Supernatural explanations still remain valid.  While not everyone who is mentally ill is demonically tormented, this does not mean nobody is.  In short, sometimes when someone claims to be hearing voices, they actually are.

A Third Way?

This opens up a third possibility—one in which we acknowledge that we are standing in two different worlds.  This is the one that most people overlook because they fall into an either/or mentality, when in many cases it is both/and.   The person can be suffering from some natural mental illness which is only exacerbated by the presence of the demonic.  The devil is a bully and loves to kick people when they are down, especially when he can hide within some natural illness.

One of my boys suffers from Autism and this has made him a target of the diabolical bully.  It was his condition that attracted the evil one and made it easy for him to hide while he tormented my son.  The demonic oppression got so severe that we had to seek the prayers of an Exorcist.  Through the prayers of Exorcism, he was freed from the oppression.  But, and this is a very important but, he was not healed of his Autism.  His symptoms were greatly reduced and his response to therapy since then has been overwhelmingly positive.  But the clinical condition remained—for that God is using natural means.  For the supernatural problem, He used the supernatural solution of the Rites and Authority of the Church (as a side not, for those of you interested in hearing about my son’s story, I did an interview with my friend Pete for his podcast in which this among other topics related to Spiritual Warfare).

The point is that there are many cases where the problem is really both natural and supernatural.  For the good of the person we need to recognize this as real and likely option.  In the majority of cases it will not be necessary to seek out an Exorcist, but still spiritual remedies will need to be applied.

This is where the “just pray and it will go away” folks have a point.  There is almost always a mixture of the natural and supernatural causes involved and it is always good advice to apply spiritual medicine to all mental health problems.  Prayer alone may not be sufficient, but it is always necessary.  Psychotherapy should always be accompanied by an intense prayer life and an active Sacramental life, including regular Confession and Communion, along with a healthy dose of Eucharistic Adoration.  When someone has been in therapy for a long time, making minimal progress adds these practices to their regular therapy they usually begin running towards mental health.

A New Asceticism

Virtue, , ,

Living in an age of unprecedented material prosperity and comfort, the practice of asceticism is a relic of ages past.  The word itself invokes images of emaciated monks wearing hair shirts and living in the desert.  Asceticism is still a foundational element in a healthy Christian life however and something that is foundational to the Christian life.  With this in mind, it is instructive to examine this practice with twenty-first century eyes.

What Is Asceticism?

Crippled in practice by misconceptions, a definition of asceticism is in order.  It is derived from the Greek word askētikós which means subject to rigorous exercise and hard work in the pursuit of virtue.  Simply put, asceticism is the strenuous effort one makes to overcome the deep division within his nature.  Asceticism is never done for its own sake, but always as a means to an end.  Forget this and it becomes more an exercise of ego than a Christian practice.  Christian asceticism is a means to greater freedom.  It is always done so as to live with the freedom of the children of God.  The more control we have over ourselves, the more grace is able to penetrate and transform us.  Grace perfects nature.

Never forgetting that we are earthen vessels, there is a vast difference between what we might call a heathen asceticism and Christian asceticism.  The heathen attempts to simply beautify the body the body while Christians attempt to bring it under control and train it for the glory of Heaven.  The heathen attempts to avoid death, the Christian lives looking forward to the Resurrection of the Body.

Asceticism is fitness training for the glory of heaven.  This training is approached from two angles.

The first is the classic approach in which we refuse to the body all that can weaken our soul’s union with Our Lord.  We know that, as fallen men and women, we are uncomfortable in our own skin.  Our bodies seem to have a mind of their own and so we must consciously forgo things that are good for us.  This training is not so much meant to bully the body but to prepare it to serve the higher goods of the soul.  In our resurrected state, the body will be under the command of the higher faculties of intellect and will—asceticism of this sort looks forward to that day.  We do what we can and wait for grace to do the rest.

The New Asceticism

On his death bed, St. Francis of Assisi had one regret—that he had been more gentle with Brother Ass, the moniker he gave to his body.  It is in this spirit that we view the second approach of actually taking care of our bodies.  A “new” asceticism might consist in doing all of those things and only those things that are necessary for our union with Our Lord.  In the old asceticism, the practice often overshadowed the purpose.  Subduing the body is not the end.  We subdue the body so that we may live fully in the freedom of the children of God.

Why this is “new” is because it reflects the times we live in.  Some of the poorest among us are surrounded by material comforts that only nobility would have enjoyed in the past.  With access to so many comforts, abstinence remains an option, but the harder path (i.e the path of virtue) is to practice moderation.  It allows us to use the material gifts God has provided with a greater freedom—the freedom that only comes when we use things according to the use that God intended.

In a vicious man, the body is a danger to his spiritual health, but in the hands of a virtuous man, a healthy body becomes a great spiritual weapon.  Rather than dragging themselves around by severe fasts, they abound with energy for winning souls to the Kingdom of God.  The beauty of their soul is matched with a certain beauty of body.  Holiness has a beauty all its own, a beauty that ought to radiate to the body even if it will never be matched in this world.

I have seen numerous articles floating about with regards to New Year’s Resolutions for Christians.  Almost all of them poo-poo “bodily” resolutions like getting back in shape because they suffer from a dualistic view of man that somehow puts the body and the soul at enmity with each other.  We may not be trousered apes, but we also are not angels.  A Christian knows that she is both and soul—she does not have a body and soul, but instead is a body and soul.  Those things that are truly good for the body redound to the soul and vice versa.  In other words, things that are good are good for the whole person.  As form of the body, the soul has a certain precedence, but nevertheless exercising the body is something that holy people do.

I would like to suggest that many Christians fail in their New Year’s resolutions precisely because they fail to see the need to train the whole person.  They may make resolutions to pray more, read Scripture more, etc, but then lack the bodily discipline to get out of bed to do these things.  They may be too tired because of poor health.  On the other hand they may promise to work out X number of days, but fail because they do not have the necessary virtue to persevere.  They fail to grasp that for the Christian, working out can be a spiritual practice (c.f.   ), or more accurately a practice done by a perfectly integrated Christian.

Asceticism in Practice

What would this new form of asceticism look like?  For starters we should have some regular form of moderate to intense exercise—always with its proper end in mind so as to keep us moderated.  From an ex-competitive bodybuilder I can tell you that physical exercise can become addictive especially as you begin to see positive body changes and so we must always remember why we are doing it.

There are other, more common sense things we can do as well—especially when it comes to food.  In God’s goodness, eating, because it is necessary for life, brings with it some pleasure.  But pleasure is not its purpose.  Its purpose is to produce health and strength.  It is in this spirit that we should always approach food and avoid snacking between meals and overeating.

This approach also helps us to rediscover the difference between merely eating and a meal.  A meal is meant to be a sign of a shared life together as they share something that cannot be lived without.  There may be a lot of eating, but very few meals.  In writing about gluttony, St. Gregory the Great describes the dangers of falling into the deadly sin of gluttony not only by eating too much, but also too expensively, too daintily prepared, too quickly and too often.  When our meals are more focused on who we are with and then the food, we are protected against this vice that acts as a gateway to the more serious sins of the spirit.

One other way the new asceticism is lived out is regarding getting enough sleep.  Often this simply means avoiding mind-numbing activities that typically keep us from falling asleep at a good time.  But it can also be an act of humility recognizing our own limitation and the number of things we can reasonably get done on a given day.  Most people find that when they set a hard and fast bed time, they not only feel better but waste less time during the day.  This is not to rule out vigils which are an important ascetical practice, but to say that these are an exception to what is otherwise an ordering of our lives that is patterned after God’s design.

Before closing, a point of clarification regarding the two approaches.  They are equally applicable to all stages of our Christian life.  It is not as if you graduate from the first approach and adopt the second.  We will never fully conquer the effects of original sin and so we will need to first approach.  Likewise, we are redeemed and ever-growing in our freedom and so the second approach will also be necessary.

St. Paul tells Timothy that “while bodily training is of some value, Godliness is of value in every way” (1Tim 4:8).  Christians, especially in our day, tend to ignore the first part and wonder why they are not as Godly as they could be.  Embracing asceticism once again, will go a long way in accomplishing this.

Love is Love isn’t Love

Friendship, Homosexuality

In the battle to normalize homosexuality there must be some collateral damage.  Lies are like parasites to the truth—always doing harm and ultimately killing their host.  The truth that homosexuality preys upon is not just erotic love, but the love of friendship.  The push for gay marriage may have done great harm to the love between a man and a woman in marriage, but ultimately it will not be the only casualty.  In the end it will have also destroyed the ability for two men or two women to develop healthy friendships.

One might quickly dismiss all of this as homophobic hate speech.  But I assure you homophobia is alive and well in the hearts of many young people today—just not in the sense we usually use the term.  They may not have a problem of someone else being gay, but the fear of being gay themselves, or at the very least appearing to be gay, lurks in their hearts.  How could it not be, given what they have learned?

Love is Love and the Harm it Does

“Love is love” they are told.  Hard to believe that a tautology could do so much damage.  Given that it has become a battle cry for a gay agenda, it doesn’t take much logic to conclude that love is about sex.  It is only love when it is expressed sexually.  What is not expressed sexually is not love.

Now enter into the heart of a young person.  They search and realize that they too indeed are drawn to certain members of the same sex.  They find themselves attracted to them and may even want to show affection towards that other person.  They may go so far as to realize that they enjoy that particular person’s company over another person’s or even look forward to seeing them.  All of this is natural.  Ages upon ages, men have loved other men and women have loved other women with a love of friendship.

Now, dear reader, when you read my description above, where did your thoughts go?  Were you thinking “wait, is he saying it is natural to wrestle with feelings of homosexuality”?  Or did you immediately think “he is merely describing friendship”?  The answer can reveal to us how much the culture has infected us and how deeply we need to see friendship in its proper light.

Notice that I called it natural and not normal.  In substituting normal for natural we have created a culture that embraces its brokenness.  Natural, or that which fulfills us as persons, is always good.  “Normal” is what everyone else is doing and usually has a nicer ring to it than rationalizing.  Normal is how we can keep up with Mr. and Mr. Jones.

Returning back to the inner workings of our young man or young woman.  They now begin to apply what they have learned to their feelings.  They are left with two alternatives.  They can think that what they are feeling may be some homosexual tendency and maybe experiment.  Or, and this is more likely, they will feel a sort of revulsion towards that other person because they equate the love they are feeling as something sexual.  Ickiness will win out and that other person will remain at arm’s length.  The chance for an authentically fulfilling friendship will pass them by.

Here is what they won’t do.  They likely won’t seek help to work through this from their parents, teachers, coaches or mentors.  They have been told that homophobia is the unforgivable sin and would never want to appear to say there is anything wrong with it.  They may look to the same people as models and find that they too do not have anything akin to true friendship.  The sages don’t know what true friendship is and are too busy for something so useless anyway.  As a father, a High School Baseball Coach, and a mentor to College Students, I see this as a theme across the board.  It affects kids who have been homeschooled just as much as Catholic school kids and public school kids.  They have no idea what friendship is or why it matters they have them.

An Alternative Explanation

We may quickly blame technology for the dearth of friendships in the young, but what if that is the effect rather than the cause?  What if our entire society has been so damaged in its ability to form meaningful friendships that technology actually offers us an escape from the emotional turmoil brought about by the feelings of friendship?

Obviously, modeling proper friendship is important to redeeming friendship, but it has been lost mostly on an ideological front.  We need to be prepared to challenge the notion that “love is love.”

Love is love, but not all loves are equal.  Some loves are higher than others and their differences are not in degree, but in kind. Classically the Greek classified them into three categories—affection (which they called storge), friendship (philia), and love between the sexes (eros).  As Christians, we would add a fourth, namely the love of God (agape).

I have written other places about these four loves and their differences.  In this essay I would prefer to focus on another important aspect, namely the belief that true love is always expressed sexually.

Love is love but each of the loves has its own proper expression.  Affection, especially as between family members is expressed through hugs, kisses, tickling and the like.  The love of friendship is expressed with hugs, handshakes, high fives and the like.  Eros usually includes those expressions of affection, but also those expressions that we would call intimate and sexual.

What is important in this is that we help to identify that each of these loves has a proper form of expression.  We intuitively know this and it is why we make incestuous relationships illegal, give actresses a hard time for kissing their children on the lips, and make movies about the destruction of friendship when two people become “friends with benefits.”

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi has done a great deal of research into some of the causes of homosexuality.  While he has found that there are a number of causes, a common one, especially in men, is the proper expression of love by the father.  He found that a number of the fathers themselves had terrible relationships with their own fathers and did not have significant male friendships.  They would fail to show their sons what one man loving another man actually looked like.  The spirit of the world, when those children went out into the world, was only too happy to give them an acceptable model.  This is probably why there has been so much backlash against reparative therapy and why we must be prepared to fight this ideological battle.

A Defense of Name Dropping

Prayer,

Is there a habit that is met with great disdain today than name-dropping?  Most of us hate when others do it, but have a hard time avoiding it ourselves.  In an age of “networking” it is practically unavoidable—who you know is often more important than what you know.  Your contacts bestow status.  Christians are not exempt from this practice.  In fact our eternal status is based on our contact with one Person—Christians should constantly be dropping His name—the Holy Name of Jesus.  We are admonished that “there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12) and told “whatever you ask in My name, that I will do” (John 14:13).

Traditionally, January has been set aside as dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus and in 2011, Pope St. John Paul II restored the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus to January 3rd.  Therefore it seems an appropriate time to reflect upon the name that should be the cause of every knee to bend (c.f.Phil 2:10).

The Power of a Name

A word first about names.  St. Thomas says that names “should answer to the nature of a thing” (ST III, q.37, a.2).  Building upon this, the Catechism says that a name is an “icon of the person” (CCC 2158).  What is meant by this is that someone’s name is a sacrament of the person.  Although this may have become obscure when names are often selected simply based on novelty, St. Thomas says that names ought to be “taken from some property of the men to whom they are given” (ST III, q.37, a.2).   The names may be given with respect to a saint (either one to whom the parents have a particular devotion or whose feast day the person was born on) or some blood relation or even based on some quality of the person (like Esau whose name means red).  The point is that the name reveals something of the person either relationally or personally.

When God gives a name it is always to signify some gift He has bestowed on them.  Abraham is made the “father of nations”, Peter is made to be the “rock upon which the Church is built” and Mary identifies herself as “the Immaculate Conception” to St. Bernadette.  In this regard, Jesus which means “God saves” is so named because “He will save the people from their sins” (Mt 1:21).

Our Lord’s name denotes the essence of Who He is because it reveals His mission.  He cannot be separated from His mission; He is never, as Pope Benedict XVI says, “off-duty.”  Everything that He did and said from the moment of the Incarnation until it was finished on the Cross was to save me and save you.  The power flowing from those actions touch me and you here and now.  Jesus saves me right here and right now and you as well.

It was said that the name is like a sacrament of the person not just because it is a sign of the person, but also because it carries with it a power to bring about the one it signifies.  This is why we name-drop—it is as if the person is present testifying for us.  It also gives as the actual power to make the person present.  In a loud and crowded restaurant I have the power to call the waiter to me immediately when I know his name.

This power is amplified when it comes to the name of Jesus.  Eternally God, He is present at all times and always.  But when I call upon His Holy Name, He is present to me not just as the source of my existence but as the source of eternal life.

This is what makes using the Lord’s name in vain so soul-deadening.  God commands that the name of Jesus is holy and to be revered at all times, but not because He is somehow disrespected by us when we abuse it.  The commandments are for our benefit, not God’s.  He gives us this commandment so that we never forget or take for granted the privilege we have in calling upon God by name.

The power attached to the knowledge of another’s name is why the Jews in the Old Testament would not utter the name of God.  Jesus’ very name (God saves) contains God’s name and thus we cannot say His name without also uttering God’s name.  The Catechism captures this well in the section on Prayer saying, “the divine name may not be spoken by human lips, but by assuming our humanity The Word of God hands it over to us and we can invoke it: ‘Jesus,’ ‘YHWH saves.’  The name ‘Jesus’ contains all: God and man and the whole economy of creation and salvation. To pray ‘Jesus’ is to invoke him and to call him within us. His name is the only one that contains the presence it signifies…” (CCC 2666).

If the name invokes the Person and the Person sanctifies by His presence, then we ought to make a regular habit of invoking Jesus’ name.  The Church has offered a partial indulgence attached to the recitation of the Litany of the Most Holy Name of Jesus.

The Jesus Prayer

As many people look to Eastern Spirituality and non-Christian forms of prayer in the West, I would like to commend to you a practice with roots in Eastern Christianity called the Jesus Prayer.  While no one knows exactly when it started, it has been in the tradition of the Eastern monks back to at least the 6th Century.  In an attempt to “pray without ceasing” the monks began to repetitively say short prayers invoking the name of Jesus.  The most common of these prayers was “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”  Rather than being a merely a mantra that seeks to empty the mind, the Jesus Prayer was meant to engage the whole person—body, heart and mind.  One exhales the name of Jesus and inhale His mercy while forming a mental picture of His presence and making acts of love towards Him.  Those who practice this with regularity will find it to be a powerful means of drawing closer to Our Lord by invoking Him and opening yourself up to the gift of higher levels of prayer.

In The Way of the Pilgrim, the master describes the prayer to the pilgrim saying:

 

“The continuous interior prayer of Jesus is a constant uninterrupted calling upon the divine name of Jesus with the lips, in the spirit, in the heart, while forming a mental picture of His constant presence, and imploring His grace, during every occupation, at all times, in all places, even during sleep. The appeal is couched in these terms, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ One who accustoms himself to this appeal experiences as a result so deep a consolation and so great a need to offer the prayer always that he can no longer live without it, and it will continue to voice itself within him of its own accord. Now do you understand what prayer without ceasing is?”

Make us, O Lord, to have a perpetual fear and love of Your holy name, for You never fail to govern those whom You establish in Your love. You, Who live and reign forever and ever. Amen

 

 

Mary Mother of God

Mary

The essential activity of the Church’s teaching office, its reason for existence, is to keep and protect the contents of divine revelation.  It is only when there is a threat to the integrity and purity of the deposit of faith that she defines and exercises her Spirit-given gift of discernment.  Her powers of discernment were taxed during the first few centuries because of a string of challenges to her beliefs about Christ, true God and true man.  This came to a head in the early fifth Century when the Council of Ephasis (431) was called to address the question how Christ could have two natures (human and divine) and yet be a single Divine Person.  To address this, the Church developed the most important Christological dogma of the Hypostatic Union.  The Divine Son of God took to Himself a complete human nature and was incarnate of the Virgin Mary.  Closely linked to this belief was the title given to Mary as “Mother of God.”  Many worried that calling her Mother of God, or Theotokos in Greek, would imply that she was the originator His divine nature.  Instead they proposed that she be called Christotokos or Mother of Christ.  The Church reasoned however that a woman is never a mother of a nature, but instead a mother of a person.  In this case, the Person is God and so it was proper to refer to Mary as the Mother of God.  The Council declared “If anyone does not confess that the Emmanuel is truly God and therefore that the holy Virgin is the Mother of God (Theotokos) (since she begot according to the flesh the Word of God made flesh), anathema sit” (Council of Ephesis, June 22, 431).

The “anathema sit” stems from the fact that referring to Mary merely as the Mother of Christ, a fundamental truth of the Incarnation is threatened.  It is a perfect illustration of the principle that everything the Church believes about Mary follows from her predestined role as Mother of God.  Put another way, anytime we detract from Mary, we ultimately subtract from Christ.  In short, the Marian dogmas are the great protectors of Our Lord’s humanity.

The Roots of Mary’s Greatness

Everything that we say about Mary with respect to her greatness stems from her office as Mother of God.  It is this Marian dogma around which all the other Marian dogmas revolve.  It is like the center of a wheel in which everything we say about her connects back.  For example, in declaring the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Pope Pius IX refers to her office of Mother of God as the reason for her greatness—“And indeed it was wholly fitting that so wonderful a mother should be ever resplendent with the glory of most sublime holiness and so completely free from all taint of original sin that she would triumph utterly over the ancient serpent” (Ineffabilis Deus, 1854, emphasis added ).

Keeping in mind her office as Mother of God also helps us maintain a balanced view of Mary.  When God calls, He always equips.  Being called to the greatest of roles—Mary also received the greatest gifts.  As St. Thomas says, all the glory and grace given to her was to make her the worthy Mother of God (ST III, q.27, a5, ad2).

God permitted man’s fall to bring about the greater good of the Incarnation.  The Bad News was followed immediately by the promise of the Good News to come (Gn 3:15).  This promise yoked the Redeemer with His Mother—the seed and the offspring were a package deal.  In other words, it was by the same eternal decree that the Son was to take flesh, that Mary was predestined to give birth to the “Son of the Most High.”  Everything we say about Mary, redounds to God and His plan to manifest His goodness—her soul always “magnifies the Lord.”  To mark this predestination, the Church has always viewed Proverbs 8:22-35 as referring to Our Lady—“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His ways, before He made anything from the beginning.  I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made…when He prepared the Heavens was present…when He balanced the foundations of the earth, I was with Him…”

It is God who makes her worthy to be the Mother of God, but only so that she would be empowered to perfectly unite her will to His.  Therefore we cannot look upon Mary simply as consenting to the use of her womb for nine months and little else.  She had first conceived the Son in her soul through a perfect union with the divine will and then conceived Him in her body as St. Augustine said.

Mary’s Divine Motherhood

Mary is no mere figurehead to make Our Lord look “normal.”  He was obedient to her as all children are to their parents.  Unlike all parents however, she was preserved from the possibility of making an error and leading her child into sin.  One can readily see why the singular grace of the Immaculate Conception flows from her calling as Mother as God.  She must be infallible in her decisions and impeccable in her moral example if Our Lord was to submit to her as Mother.  As an aside this is also why some theologians have posited (although the Church has not spoken definitively one way or the other) that St. Joseph too must have at some point been freed from the effects of Original Sin.

One might argue that Our Lord was not obedient to her when He was left behind in Jerusalem.  But the exception proves the rule.  Our Lady was quite perplexed as to why He would do such a thing because she knew Him to be obedient to her in all things.  Our Lord reminds her that when His divine mission came in conflict with His natural sonship, He must always “be about His Father’s business” (Lk 2:49).  Nevertheless, it was still a shock when He appeared to not obey His parents.

The Blessed Mother’s relationship with Jesus is entirely unique and is worthy of our admiration.  He is truly flesh of her flesh and her flesh alone.  All who are in Christ enter into a spiritual or mystical relationship with Him.  Only Our Lady has a relationship based upon a consanguine relationship with Our Lord.  The divine maternity imposes upon God obligations of justice upon Him which confers upon her the natural rights that accompany motherhood.  In other words, she is the only one who God “owes” something to.  Even if  the obligation is self-imposed because of His divine plan, still it is an entirely unique relationship based upon this plan.

This is why we ultimately cannot be in Christ while simultaneously remaining indifferent towards Our Lady.  He extended her motherhood from the natural Son of God to all the adopted sons of God (Jn 19:27).  We cannot be sons of the Father while rejecting the one Whom He chose from all eternity to be our mother.  It is why the Church closes the Octave of Christmas with the great Feast honoring her as Mother of God.  As the Second Vatican Council affirmed, “Redeemed by reason of the merits of her Son and united to Him by a close and indissoluble tie, she is endowed with the high office and dignity of being the Mother of the Son of God, by which account she is also the beloved daughter of the Father and the temple of the Holy Spirit” (Lumen Gentium, 53).

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Running Through the Finish Line of Advent

Advent, Fasting, Prayer, ,

Within Church tradition, Advent has been viewed as a “little” Lent.  Lent, because it involved a prolonged period of preparation marked by the spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving.  “Little,” because it was a shorter time period (4 weeks vs 40 days) and because it lacked some of the rigor normally associated with Lent.  For many of us, despite the best of initial intentions, Advent has had any rigor at all.  The commercial trappings of Christmas can ensnare all of us to some degree, something we do not necessarily have to combat at Easter.  We may easily be tempted to give up and try again next year.  But there is still a week left in the season and the Church has the perfect prescription within her traditions to recoup some of the spiritual fruit that may have fallen off your Advent tree. It may be that Advent has been very good so far and you are looking for a way to stretch to gather the fruit from the top.  Either way, we can finish Advent by turning to the Church’s tradition of “little Advent.”

In the spirit of always acting with the end in mind, a brief reminder about the purpose of Advent.  All too often Advent and even Christmas can feel like a game of make believe.  We know that God has already come in the Incarnation.  We know that He is here in the Eucharist.  Sure we are awaiting His Second Coming in glory, but that is something that we are always waiting for.  Why do we need a special season of waiting?

It is precisely that reason that the Church gives us Advent leading up to the theophany of Christmas.  We may always be, as the embolism of the Mass says, waiting “in joyful hope for the coming of Our Savior.”  But Advent offers us a special time to focus solely on this waiting so as to stir up love in us and to awaken our otherwise dormant hope.  God’s promises really do come to fruition, not just “spiritually” but as history.  Not just once upon a time, but “in the first enrollment (of the census ordered by Caesar Augustus) when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”  God made good on His promise to be Emmanuel, God with us and He will continue until He has ransomed all of captive Israel.

This waiting is especially acute in Advent and ought to be our primary focus.  We do the things that waiting people do—pray, fast and give alms.

Prayer

Beginning on December 17th, the Church has traditional marked seven days with a series of special antiphons known as the O Antiphons.  These antiphons frame the Magnificat in each evening’s Liturgy of the Hours.  Not only are these antiphons tied to the official prayer of the Church, but are also well known to most of us as they comprise the verses of O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

Within the Liturgy of the Hours, antiphons are short verses that are sung (or recited) prior to and after the Psalm or Canticle that provide an interpretive key to the mystical meaning of the passage or the feast day.  This is what makes the O Antiphons perfect material to recharge or redeem Advent for us—they are short reflections that capture the meaning of the season.  The O Antiphons allow us to make present the expectation of Israel and ignite within us any aspect of hope that has lain dormant in our hearts.  And because they are appended onto the Magnificat, Mary’s great prayer of expectation and thanksgiving, they unite us with her as well.

Each of the Great Antiphons as some have called them, invokes the name of the Messiah under his various Old Testament titles and closes with a proper petition.  The medieval church masters say there are seven as a reminder of the miseries of our fallen condition; each of which the Messiah came to rescue us from.  On the first day we recall how it is the Wisdom from on high that can free us from ignorance.  On the second day, we beg for the coming Redeemer who will save us from eternal punishment.  On the third day, longing for our heavenly homeland, we invoke the promised Root of Jesse to hurry to us.  Imprisoned in sin and death, on the fourth day, we plead for the Key of David to unlock our chains and guard us.  Trapped in darkness, we beg for the Dayspring to enlighten our way on the fifth day.  Because we are enslaved under the terrible reign of the devil, we invoke the King of Nations on the sixth day.  Finally, separated from God, we invoke Emmanuel, God with us.  In short, each of the seven days we should meditate upon our fallen condition and God’s remedy as outlined by that day’s antiphon.

Fasting

At this stage of Advent, our longings ought to be felt, not just spiritually, but also bodily.  This is why the last week is a time to fast.  In teaching His disciples, Our Lord associates fasting with waiting for the Bridegroom (Mt 6:16).  It is a spiritual discipline that has fallen into disuse, but this last week of Advent offers a great time to get back into the practice.  Fasting allows us to truly experience longing for something we simply cannot live without.  By going without that which is necessary, namely food, we express our desire for the One Thing that is most necessary.  One would be hard pressed to come up with a better way to express the true meaning of the banquet most of us will partake of on Christmas Day than to have first fasted.  Feasts are only meaningful when we have had the experience of fasting.

Pope Benedict XVI often said we are living in the “already, but not yet.”  What he meant is that Christ has come and is with us really and truly, but we have not yet seen His glory.  It is in this spirit that fasting should always be accompanied by Daily Mass and reception of the Eucharist.  By having our actual hunger temporarily satisfied by the Bread of Life, we will again experience in our bodies the truth of what happens in our souls.

Almsgiving

In a season marked by a spirit of  giving, it seems that almsgiving plays a large part already.  But we often miss the real point of almsgiving which is to give until it hurts.  We do this not because we are nice, but because we love God and want to give in the way that He gives—until it hurts.  Almsgiving should always flow from a supernatural motive that is based on a love of God and a desire for Him to spread His love through us.

There is also the tendency to give only from our surplus, especially for those of us who have families to support.  It seems wrong to take from what the family needs in order to help another family.  This was my own thinking for many years until I came across a quote from Pope Francis in which he said “we would do well to ask ourselves what we can give up in order to enrich others by our poverty.”  What I took the Holy Father to be saying is that, and this is especially true for parents, we should look to see what we can sacrifice personally.  Then there is no conflict with our obligations to our children and spouses.  As a father I may not be willing to have one of my children forgo a thick winter coat, but as a man I might be willing to forgo one myself so that someone else can be warm.  By personally going without something of importance, I can enrich others.  These “others” include not just the direct beneficiary of your charity but your children as well who catch the spirit of sacrifice so inimical to our Christian spirit.

There is another aspect of our almsgiving that should be a focus during Advent which can be a time of great loneliness for many people.  The greatest poverty is often a lack of being loved.  Too often we are tempted to take a “I gave at the office” type mentality that removes us from actual contact with the poor.  Giving money is a good thing, but the problem with it is that, as Pope Benedict XVI said, we have a tendency to give too little of ourselves.  What the other person needs most is the knowledge that they are loved, a knowledge that is only acquired by our face to face contact with them.  Our almsgiving should not just be focused on meeting material needs, but should always leave the person spiritually enriched as well.  Christians are not social workers, but manifestations of Christ’s self-giving love in the world.

Entering the home stretch of our Advent journeys, there is still plenty of time to seize the graces God had planned from the beginning of time to give to us.  By returning to our Catholic roots—through Prayer, especially the great O Antiphons, fasting and almsgiving—we can with great joy welcome Christ the newborn babe.

Then or Now?

Virtue,

It is always the questions with the obvious answers that cause the most problems.  Case in point, what if I were to ask whether you would rather live now or 200 years ago?  Allowing for the exception of a troglodyte or two, every one of them would, without hesitation, say “now.”  The reason seems obvious—the quality of life today is far beyond anything that could have been imagined two centuries ago.  Not only do we live longer today, but we are healthier and more people have access to more wealth.  Even the poor enjoy access to luxuries that only the very richest had in the past (if at all).  Think for example of our access to entertainment, entertainment filled with enough depravity that only the likes of Nero could enjoy in his day.  With that we realize that we may have answered the question too quickly and perhaps even looked at it the wrong way.  Sure we are enjoying an unprecedented material prosperity, but man does not live on bread alone.  Can we say that we are also enjoying an unprecedented spiritual prosperity?  Before throwing away the key to our time machines, we should reframe the question and ask “in which time period would being virtuous easier?”  Suddenly the answer does not seem so cut and dry.

The Question of Technology

We might be tempted to put the question down completely at this point.  We are when we are and there is no going back.  That is certainly true and the answer is only valuable insofar as it helps us in the here and now.  But rather than killing investigation, it ought to motivate it.  Volumes could be written on the differences in the time periods, but they could be summarized neatly in one word—technology.  At least that is the main difference according to CS Lewis who wrote:

“[F]or the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.  For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both in the practice of this technique are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.”

Summarizing Lewis’ point we can say that there are two kinds of men—those who subdue themselves to reality and those who will have reality subdued to themselves.  We call those in the first group virtuous and the second vicious.  This is a “problem” that is at the heart of man’s fallen existence.  Adam’s reality was that he had a single limitation—not eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Rather than subjecting himself to this reality, Adam chose to subject reality to himself.  In this regard he is no different than any one of us—sin is, at its core, an unwillingness for each of us to submit himself to reality.  We are like God in many ways, but not in the way that we can define for ourselves what is good and what is evil.

This is not a new problem for sure, but what is new is that in the past the average person lacked access to the power necessary to subdue reality to his wishes.  Now with so many technological solutions (techniques to use Lewis’ term) that give us power over reality, the temptation to subdue reality is much greater.

Technology and Power

Technology and power go hand in hand.  This may not be as obvious as it seems when more people have access to instruments of power, but it is true nonetheless.  Power in the hands of a few tends to corrupt only a few, power in the hands of many corrupts many.  With technological power comes the capacity to destroy ourselves.

We may have fallen victim to the belief that an increase of power mean “progress” but that is only true when the strength of character for using that power has kept pace.  We are now all like the superhero who wakes up one morning discovering he has superpowers and is confronted with whether we will use our powers for good or evil.  With greater command over the world, we need greater command over the self.

Progress in technology then is only truly progress when it makes us more human.  And this ought to be how we evaluate any advances in technology or our use of existing technologies.  Technology may be morally neutral, but how we use it is not.  Our guide as to its use is whether it leads to a more virtuous life or less, whether I am more human because of its help or less because of its substitution.

Efficiency

What often blinds us to seeing our use of technology more clearly is an obsession with efficiency.  Modern technology, the argument goes, increases efficiency making work easier and freeing us up for higher things.  But it seems that in the majority of cases the exact opposite has happened.   Labor saving devices may have replaced the slave labor of the past, but these devices often have enslaved otherwise free men.

The men of 200 years ago were freer than we are today.  Of that, there is no question.  The average man was more capable of taking care of himself and his family without significant outside help.  They could farm and hunt, they could build their homes and repair them, they knew how to navigate when lost in the woods, etc.  We, on the other hand, have specialists (farmers and homebuilders) or special machines (GPS) to do that for us now.  The average man 200 years ago would be far from average today.

The point is not that efficiency is bad, only that we should not treat it as an absolute value.  There is value in work done with our hands and simple tools.  It helps us to grow in the virtues of prudence, patience and perseverance.  In other words, we are better men for having done the work, no matter how menial it seems.  Labor saving technologies are only good and should only be used insofar as they help make us better men.

Another example might help to illustrate the point further.  Take a simple technology that is near and dear to my heart, the calculator.  Having a calculator has freed me up from doing the time consuming work of crunching numbers and enabled me to do the higher and more theoretical work in statistics.  However, when doing simple mathematical calculations, I will never use a calculator because it will reduce my distinctly human ability to do this.  I am somehow less human when I cannot do percentages in my head and have to rely on a calculator for a tip.  The point is that when the technology actually frees us up for higher things then it is a good, but this can never be at the expense of the loss of the ability to do the lower things.

Paradigm shifts always come abruptly.  We may pine for simpler times.  Frankenstein is already out of the cage and is not going back in.  While we may prefer to have lived in a previous age of morally better men, the reality is that we live in a technological age and we must find ways to use that power to make us better men.  Virtue itself may be harder, but this also means they will be stronger.