All posts by Rob Agnelli

Justification and the Friendship of God

Grace, Theology,

Any discussion surrounding the issue of justification ought to, like all fruitful discussions, begin with defining our terms.  The first act of the mind is apprehension and intellectual grasping of what is being discussed.  We must first agree on the meaning of the terms we are going to be using before we can argue about them.  In my experience, Catholics and Protestants use the term justification without actually saying what they mean by it.  They proceed to argue operating under the assumption that they are using the terms univocally.  Often, however, this is not the case.  A clear definition at the outset goes a long way in helping the two sides not argue past one another.

Justification

Justification only makes sense when we properly recognize what amounts to, according to Aristotle, an insurmountable obstacle.  He thought friendship with the gods was impossible because it can only occur between equals.  Man as a mere creature is incapable of true friendship with God unless he is somehow made equal with God.  He can never enter into a personal relationship with God unless He freely elevates man.  The term justification has a juridical tone to it, but in truth this is not essentially a legal problem.  It has nothing do with sin per se, but really is just man’s default position as a creature.  Sin has just complicated the issue for sure, but the problem would exist even if sin didn’t.  Thus the Council of Trent, in response to the Protestant teachings on justification, said that one is changed by justification “from an unjust person into a just person and from an enemy into a friend of God.”

Elevation from man’s natural state to a supernatural state that makes him capable of friendship with God is a free gift.  That ought to be obvious from what has been said.  We call this gift grace.  But there is a problem with using this term; namely that grace is a broad term that requires a modifier.  This is where it is helpful to have a strong Catholic vocabulary.  Grace, broadly speaking, falls into two categories: actual grace and sanctifying grace.

Grace

Actual grace is the interior assistance that God confers upon mankind in order to render him capable of supernatural acts of the soul.  In other words, it is God’s help to us in doing works that make us worthy of eternal life.  These works can be antecedent in the sense that when a man is in need of conversion or returning back to God from sin, he is given supernatural assistance in doing so.  They can also be consequent, a topic we will return to in a moment.  What actual graces do is enlighten the mind to recognize the true Good that is friendship with God and/or strengthen the will to move to repentance.  What is equally important is that these graces require man’s cooperation—friendship can be offered but never coerced.  God is responsible for bestowing them, but man is still responsible for responding to them.

Sanctifying grace on the other hand “is a habitual gift, a stable and supernatural disposition that perfects the soul itself to enable it to live with God, to act by his love. Habitual grace, the permanent disposition to live and act in keeping with God’s call, is distinguished from actual graces which refer to God’s interventions, whether at the beginning of conversion or in the course of the work of sanctification” (CCC 2000).

pope-and-lutheran-pastor

It is, once again, a free gift but it is this free gift that renders us capable of friendship with God.  By making us “partakers of the divine nature,” sanctifying grace infuses the divine life into our souls and elevates us to a supernatural plane.  In other words, we truly become like God.  Our first parents were created with this free gift (made in the image and likeness) but lost it during the Fall (thus only in the image of God).  Now, rather than having it bestowed on us in birth, it is bestowed on us in re-birth.  The ordinary way that it is given to us is through Baptism.  We are “born from above” (Jn 3:7) in Baptism and adopted as true children of God.  Baptism gives to us a likeness to God—like Father, like son.

It bears mentioning as well a word about Heaven.  We tend to treat Heaven as “other-wordly” and simply as a reward.  That is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t necessarily go far enough.  Heaven is really the place where the friends of God see Him face to face.  It is only those who have remained His friends that are capable of seeing Him as He is (1 Jn 3:2).  This is why we speak of the necessity of remaining in a “state of grace.”  Only those who die with sanctifying grace in their soul can avoid being destroyed by God, “Who is a consuming fire” (Heb 12:29).  In other words, only those whom God has made holy, not just imputed holiness to, but who actually are holy, can endure His presence.

Merit

Despite the fact that we speak of justification as a free gift, we also speak of merit.  This term seems to imply a debt on God’s part.  This sounds suspiciously like “we can earn our salvation” and so people tend to shut down when we use the term.  An important reminder helps to clear up some of the confusion.  Naturally good acts remain just that, natural.  They remain in the natural realm and have their reward here and now.  We are capable of doing many good acts on our own.  What we are incapable of doing are supernatural acts.  Even those who are in a state of grace cannot do these action.  They require actual grace and must proceed from a supernatural motive.  Christ says both “without Me you can do nothing” (actual grace) and promises reward for the works that are performed for His sake (c.f Mk 9:40 “Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ, amen, I say to you, will surely not lose his reward.”).

Although we require the assistance of actual grace in performing these supernatural acts, God still imputes them to us as though they were done by us.  He rewards our cooperation in them because it shows our desire to love Him and in so doing actually increases that love within us.  This is what St. Paul is referring to when he tells the Corinthians that “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God [that is] with me” (1 Cor 15:10). It is not unlike a father who gives his son money so that he may buy a Christmas present for his father.  He is pleased not because of the gift but because of the heart from which the gift came.

Merit again is not just a legal term but a way to describe how we grow to be more like God.  These acts are completely outside of our natural capacity, but once elevated to the supernatural realm, we become capable of doing them.  God is the initiator, we are the secondary instruments.  Notice how this explanation helps to sidestep the whole faith and works controversy which quickly develops into a conversational wormhole.  Knowing these terms can help us avoid this apologetical pitfall.

How the Angels Fell

Angels, Devils, Heaven,

As Dante journeys to the center of Hell, he learns why it is so cold.  The devil is trapped in the pits of hell in a pool of ice that is constantly cooled by the flapping of his wings.  In other words, he would be free to rise to God if only he would stop trying to raise himself.  Dante is smuggling theology into his literary masterpiece in order to tell us how some of the angels fell and why they will always remain that way.

First of all, how can we possibly know what happened before the creation of mankind (i.e. no human witnesses) and about which there is no explicit divine revelation?  We know that they were tested prior to the creation of mankind (Gn 1:4), some angels fell, but the majority of them of them remained faithful (Rev 12:4), that after they failed their testing they were thrown down to the earth (Rev 12:9) and that their ultimate destination is hell (Mt 25:41).  There are also few Magisterial pronouncements (see CCC 391-395) on the fallen angels, none of which speak of how they fell only that, as the Fourth Lateran Council declared, “The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing.”  With only these few theological data points in hand, what can we say?

Why Specualtive Theology Matters

As a preliminary aside, many people will simply throw up their hands and say we cannot know anything more.  To speculate, in their minds, in theology is dangerous.  But when we allow revelation and the Church to set the boundaries, speculative theology can be an extremely fruitful exercise.  In fact I would say contemplating such questions (which is really all that speculation is) actually serves the purpose of moving what might seem to be abstract theological truths into the practical realm.  It helps us to see more fully the implications of our beliefs and show us how they actually relate to our Christian lives here and now.  It also helps strengthen our faith because it reveals the inner connectedness of all that we believe and how, even though many beliefs could not be known by reason, once they are known, just how reasonable they are.  As Clement of Alexandria once said, those who have “received these things [revelation] fortified by reason, can never lose them.”satan-wings-of-fury

With that said, let us begin with the declaration of the Fourth Lateran Council given above, namely that angels were created by God and insofar as they are created by God and reflect His beauty and wisdom are good.  Yet through a free decision of their own, they became morally wicked.  Reflecting on this, we see the first practical question emerge regarding the nature of reality.  In order to avoid falling into a dualistic understanding of reality—one in which good is equally pitted against evil—we must be able to explain angelic sin.

How Angels were Created

Like any artist, God created in order to reveal something of Himself.  In His plan, all of creation exists in a natural hierarchy.  The higher up the ladder of being, the more the creature naturally images God.  At the top of the ladder, sit the angels and man.  Angels are pure spirits incapable of making errors in the natural order.  All of their knowledge is given to them by God directly at their creation (we call this infused knowledge) and thus they are a rule unto themselves in the natural realm.  They exist in a natural hierarchy of power.  The highest of these angels has been always understood to be Lucifer, who was after his fall to become Satan or the devil.

We encounter here what might be an objection—the impeccability of the angels.  If the angels are incapable of making an error, then how could 1/3 them make such a grievous error of turning away from God?  I was careful to add a key modifier that many people overlook.  The angels are impeccable in the natural realm.  Like man, because angels are intellectual creatures, they have the natural capacity to live a supernatural life.  Like man prior to his fall, they were created in a state of grace that “activates” this natural capacity.   In other words, to truly be like God, they must receive the life of God directly from Him.  Otherwise they will merely remain His image.

What this means practically speaking is that they didn’t fall from “heaven” in the sense we might think.  We tend to think of Heaven as the place where the Blessed see God face to face.  Prior to their test, the angels were not in Heaven, but instead in some place of testing.  Properly speaking we might say they fell from the heavens in that their fall brought them from outside the material realm into it.

The angels in the supernatural realm are no longer a rule unto themselves.  They must now submit to the higher rule of God.  It is only in this supernatural state that they are vulnerable to error.  Thus we find that they are tested and not in some superficial way.

This distinction between the natural and the supernatural state is very important.  Understanding this distinction puts the faith vs works controversy to rest.  No natural act can get us to heaven.  It is only supernatural acts, namely those good acts that we do animated by sanctifying grace, which activate our “heaven capacity.”  So many fail to make this distinction and spend time thinking it is either faith or good works that will get you to heaven.  But it is supernatural works that get us to heaven.

The First Sin

With this distinction in place we see that the supernatural state or the “order of grace” as it is called is a great equalizer.  It puts everyone on a level playing field regardless of their natural endowment.  Instead it depends upon God’s gracious dispensation.  We find that it is often those who have the greatest natural endowment of gifts that has the hardest time accepting this.  And now we are able to see the sin of Lucifer.  Because he was the one who had the highest natural endowment, he preferred to remain in his singular position as God’s greatest creature rather than associate with the “common folk” who were elevated (maybe even to a place higher to him) by God.

This is why the Church has insisted that the first sin was pride.   As Abbot Vonier, summarizing Aquinas’ teaching says, it is clearly a sin of pride in the sense that it is a love of one’s own proper excellency in opposition to another’s.  For the prideful to admit the other’s excellence would end the singularity of one’s own excellence.  In other words, Satan’s sin consisted in the steady refusal of Satan to enter into communion with other beings because he sees it as a loss of his own excellence.  It shows also why his will remains fixed on his decision.  He is not under the delusion that he will somehow become God, he already knows that.  Instead he really wants to be utterly unique like God.

Practical Matters

There are two practical implications that follow from what we have said.  First, that in the fall of the angels there is nothing like concupiscence. St. Thomas says the fallen spirits did not lose either their intellectual privileges or suffer a weakening of their will.  Their place in the universe remains unchanged and thus their natural capacities far exceed anything we can do.  These are our enemies, not so much because they hate us, but because they hate the grace of God and in jealousy (always the second sin) they seek to prevent man from possessing or keeping God’s grace.  We must never forget their innate power and realize the devil and his minions should not be treated lightly.  We must do all that we can to protect ourselves from their attacks, but ultimately our protection and power rests only in putting on “the full armor of God.”

Second, it helps us to more clearly see the motives behind our own sin.  We tend to look upon the fall of the angels with some disbelief.  How could a creature as smart as Lucifer make such a totally insane decision?  That question is quickly put away when we realize we are no different when we choose to sin.  We know it is insane and yet we do it anyway.  This is because sin is not a matter of knowledge but of the choice of the will.  We cannot know God as He is in this period of testing.  The only way to draw near to Him is through love.  The commandment is to love the Lord, not to learn about the Lord.  This is not to poo-poo learning the Faith, but to constantly be on guard that our knowledge is leading to more reasons to love God and not merely know more about Him.  The former leads to true love, the latter to pride.

Awaiting the Prince of Peace

Advent, Virtue,

Each day during Advent, the readings focus on the coming of the Messiah, a coming that promised to usher in among other things, peace.  It is a peace that is anticipated by the prophets (c.f. Is 11:8), proclaimed by the angels who announce His birth (Lk 2:14), part of His endowment to the Apostles at the Last Supper (Jn 14:27) and the first gift given the Apostles celebrating His Resurrection (Jn 20:19).  It is also a peace that, despite being part of our Christian inheritance, remains elusive for many of us.  As we prepare to welcome the Prince of Peace, it is an opportune time to reflect on peace as the characteristic mark of Christians.

Definition of Peace

St. Augustine offers us the best definition of peace as “the tranquility of order.” It is an effect of having order in one’s life.  As an effect, it is end in itself. While we all desire peace, no one desires it as a means to something else.  It is simply part and parcel to a happy life.

Although we might struggle to come up with a definition as succinct as St. Augustine, we all intuitively know that peace has something to do with order.  One of the main ways that people cope with anxiety is by seeking to manufacture order.  For example, many people will clean when they are anxious in an attempt to create order in their environment.  The disorder that is actually causing the anxiety will not actually go away, but they will find some semblance of peace in creating order where there was previously disorder, even if it is short-lived like most coping mechanisms.

Where Peace is Found

This definition of peace also helps us to more deeply understand a famous quote from Thomas Merton in which he says that, “we arenot at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.”  Any attempt at socially engineering peace has the problem backwards, literally outside in.  Peace cannot come from the outside but must come from within because the well-ordered society only comes about through the work of well-ordered men.  It only comes about through the work of well-ordered Christian men, because only Christians have the capacity for true peace.

sassoferato-madonna-and-child

The narratives of the Old Testament orbit around man’s futile attempts to create peace for himself.  It becomes obvious that it was a practical impossibility and that only a miraculous intervention by God could bring peace.  As fallen creatures we find that there is a war within our members (Romans 7:23).  In other words, we lack the internal order that creates tranquility.  We find that the “flesh lusts against the spirit” (Gal 5:17)—our passions and our wills are constantly battling for control.

The path to order is paved by the moral virtues, those habitual dispositions that enable us to bridle our passions and ride them to the Good with intensity.  But even that road is marked by sinkholes until we put on Christ and take our rightful share in His virtues.  The Prince of Peace exercised all the virtues so that we might finally be empowered to be delivered from this handicap once and for all.  In other words, by making peace with God, the Word Made Flesh also empowers us to make peace within ourselves.

First Obstacle: Sin

No amount of coping mechanisms can help us avoid the truth that we do not have peace because we have sin in our lives.  When I say this, it is not so much the actual sins that cause the disorder, but the reason we commit them.  In other words, the disorder is caused by our predominant fault, with our actual sins just being manifestations of this fault.  It is not enough to recognize that I get irrationally angry at my family, but I must get to the root cause of my anger.  Perhaps I do it because I crave comfort and do not want to be disturbed.  Or, perhaps I do it because I am vain and do not want to suffer the embarrassment of being opposed.  Or, perhaps in my pride I am attempting to control other people’s actions.  It is the same sin, blowing up at my family, but its root cause can be vastly different—pride, vanity or sensuality.  I may learn to control my anger, but until I attack the predominant fault of pride, vanity or sensuality, the disorder will remain.  This is why we always use the principle of overcoming evil with good—we are habitual creatures.  You can only overcome one habit (or vice) by replacing it with a new habit (virtue).

The Second Obstacle: Lack of Trust

Sin is not the only obstacle to peace.  In order to see this, we must avoid the pitfall of assuming that the solution to a lack of peace is to be more “spiritual” by looking upon the world with indifference.  Peace may not come from the outside, but the things that threaten our peace do.  This is why peace is only found in those who have a radical trust in God.  Life is full of difficulties and contradictions—in other words disorder.  That is a reality that cannot be merely overlooked.  But what is also real is that God uses those difficulties and contradictions to bring about what is good for us. God’s Providence is not merely universal, but personal.

Advent and peace go hand in hand.  Advent is a time to “stay awake” so that we can hurry up and wait.  It is a time to cultivate patience as we reflect on those things that threaten our peace and begin to see that God is at work in them.  This is not something we will see all at once, but only grow in this conviction with repeated experience.  He brought order out of chaos in creation and will do so in our re-creation in Christ.  Peace is distinctly Christian because it is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.  Like all fruit, not only does it have a certain sweetness to it, but it also is a sign of a mature tree.  May this Advent be a time of maturity so that we may welcome the Prince of Peace into our hearts in a most profound way.

Thanksgiving and Gratitude

Virtue,

We might call it the “Black Friday creep”—for years the start time for Black Friday has crept closer and closer to Thanksgiving Day.  This year many retailers will be open for longer hours on Thanksgiving Day, threatening to make the holiday little more than a drive-thru meal.  The tug of war really is between two outlooks on life—one based on envy with the need to get the best deals on the latest things and gratitude at being satisfied with what you already have.   Thanksgiving Day is about gratitude and therefore is celebrated best when we have worked to cultivate this virtue.  Therefore it seems fitting to offer a reflection on this virtue.

black-friday-riot

 

To begin, a word about the celebrating of secular holidays like Thanksgiving.  As Christians who believe in a God who acts within human history (i.e. within the secular), we should not object to the celebration of these holidays.  What we should object to however is when they become infused with a secularized mentality.  Gratitude by its nature must have an object toward which one is grateful.  To say “I am thankful” is the same as going into a restaurant and simply saying “I order.”  Just as you need to identify the food you want to eat, you must also identify a person you are thankful to.  In the United States, the Person towards which we are thankful to is God.  Even Barack Obama, no friend of religion, echoes the sentiments of Washington and Lincoln in his own Thanksgiving Day proclamations calling for gratitude to “Almighty God.”  Without this acknowledgment, Thanksgiving becomes just another day to “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you will die.”  As GK Chesterton may once said (quoting another author), “the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful, and has nobody to thank.”  No one ultimately can be grateful to “the processes of history.”

Just knowing who we are grateful to however is not enough.  To keep Thanksgiving from becoming “Thanks-taking” we need to make sure we are exercising the virtue of gratitude properly.

Fr. Hardon’s Catholic Dictionary defines gratitude as the “virtue by which a person acknowledges, interiorly and exteriorly, gifts received and seeks to make at least some return for the gift conferred.”  Gratitude is both affective and effective.  The affective element consists in both “thanks-reflecting” and “thanks-saying.”  The effective element consists in “thanks-giving.”  Most of us only associate gratitude with “thanks-saying” and therefore miss the virtue in its fullness.

“Thanks-reflecting” consists in, as St. Thomas says, the “recollection of (divine) benefits.” It is this first part that in many ways is the most important.  It is the time when we count and name our blessings.  If you read the first Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of George Washington, he enumerates the things for which the country should be grateful— “the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.”  In other words, it is not enough to say who we are thankful to, but we must also say what we are thankful for.  There is great benefit to doing this because it only strengthens our gratitude.  As we begin to enumerate all the ways in which God has blessed us we will grow to thank Him for everything, including our sufferings, able to “give thanks in every circumstance” (1 Thes 5:18).

When St. Thomas discusses gratitude in the Summa (S.T. II-II, qq.106-107), he treats it as a sub-virtue of justice.  What St. Thomas is emphasizing is that when we speak of the “debt of gratitude,” it means that we owe something in return for the favors that are done for us.  We certainly owe the words of thanks, but we must also be prepared to repay our benefactor.  This is why we speak of “thanks-giving” and not just “thanks-saying.”  This notion of a “debt of gratitude” is often lost on us and we assume that merely saying thanks is enough.

There is a danger of seeing gratitude as being about quid pro quo—like sending Thank You notes for Thank You notes.  But it is something much more than that.  When given a gift, there are two things that should be considered—the affection of the heart of the giver and the gift.  It is the affection that should be returned immediately (that is we should express our thanks) and then the gift itself in a timely manner.  This applies not only to our human relationships but especially when we begin speaking of God’s gifts to us.

God gives out of sheer gratuity.  He does not benefit at all from the gifts He bestows and He bestows them simply because He is love.  And, most importantly He is a joyful giver.  While we may not be able to return the affection to God directly, it is with joy and sheer gratuity that we celebrate Thanksgiving with those God has placed in our lives.

What about the gifts?  How can we return to God anything that is proportional to the gifts He has given us?  The psalmist gives us a clue when he asks the same question:

“How can I repay the LORD for all the great good done for me? I will raise the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD.  I will pay my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people.” (Ps 116:12-14)

 

Anyone reading this will immediately recognize the Eucharistic connotation of the “cup of salvation”   and recall to mind that the word Eucharist (or Eucharistia) is Greek for “thanksgiving.”  What the Spirit is telling us through the voice of the Psalmist is that the person who wants to repay his debt of gratitude to God will faithfully, actively and regularly participate in the Mass.  Thanksgiving Day will not be complete unless you start the day with Mass.  The Eucharist is man’s greatest gift back to God.

Gratitude is so important because it makes the hearts of the giver and the receiver the same.  This happens really and truly when we receive the Eucharist.  Our hearts become united to the Sacred Heart.  It is from the human heart of Jesus that God gives us the Eucharist and it is this heart that is meant to be formed in all of us.  The formation of the Heart of Jesus in us begins with gratitude.

As I have said any number of times, one of the ways that Catholics can recapture the culture is to celebrate holidays like only Catholics can.  We are not so other-worldly that we do not see the goods God has placed in this world for our enjoyment.  We do not merely thank God for His spiritual benefits, but also the freedom He has given us to use the material gifts in the way He intended when He bestowed them upon us.  This shatters the delusion about Christianity that many people operate under.  When we put the joy of being Catholic on display, holidays like Thanksgiving can be a powerful means of evangelization.  As Hillaire Belloc once said, “Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, there’s always laughter and good red wine.  At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!

The Keys of the Kingdom

Church, Magisterium, ,

Pope Pius XI thought that the best way to protect Christian culture was to promote the Kingship of Christ.  With that in mind, he promulgated the Feast of Christ the King in 1925 so that Christ would be venerated as King over all mankind. Certainly the Holy Father was attempting to stem the rising tide of secularism.  But he also had great concerns that many would lose sight of His Kingdom in our midst.  One cannot honor the King while at the same time ignoring His Kingdom.  But what exactly does this Kingdom look like?

Sacred Scripture acts as recorded history of God’s progressive revelation of His Kingdom.  Therefore we should expect an internal coherence that makes it unlike any other book.  This means is that the Old Testament should not be isolated or seen as somehow opposed to the New Testament.  It is the same God, progressively revealing Himself to mankind within a given historical context, until in the “fullness of time” He takes on flesh to fully reveal Himself.  The reverse is also true—no interpretation of the New Testament should be made without reference to the Old Testament.  The Catechism lists this principle, which it calls being “attentive  to the content and unity of the whole Scripture,” first among “three criteria for interpreting Scripture in accordance with the Spirit who inspired it” (CCC 111-112).  It is this same principle that Luther had in mind when, in his commentary on the Psalms, he said “the Bible is its own interpreter.

If, when we encounter difficult passages, we allow Scripture to interpret itself by examining it for parallels, then we will find the passage interpreting itself.  In this regard, Matthew 16 is a great Kingdom text.  The passage commends to the astute reader two very important Old Testament texts.  Unless we are aware of them, we are likely to miss what Jesus was actually doing when He declared Peter to be the Rock upon which He would build His Church.Peter Keys

First, it must be admitted that Jesus intended to form a kingdom.  St. Gabriel announces Him to Mary as a king, “the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk 1:32-33).  Likewise, it is the accusation of kingship that is leveled against Jesus and against which He defends Himself against Pilate saying although He is a King, His Kingdom “did not belong to this world” (John 18:36).

Even though it did not belong to this world, anyone who reads the Kingdom parables of Matthew 13 knows that knows that we should expect to find the Kingdom of Heaven present in this world.  St. Gabriel gives us the interpretive key to recognizing the Kingdom in the world when he tells us that He will inherit the throne of David.  In other words, the Kingdom of God is prefigured by the kingdom of David.  The Davidic monarch was “the Lord’s anointed” (the literal meaning of the word Christ) who is the adopted son of God (Ps 2:7) and is the only human kingdom to enjoy the privilege of being founded upon a covenant (2 Sam 7:8-16); all of which point to Jesus.  But the Davidic Kingdom also has roles of administration in it for both the Queen Mother (1 Kings 2:19-20) and the Royal Steward (1 Kgs 4:6).  If Jesus really is the King, sitting on the throne of David, then we should expect those administrative roles to be filled.

How would one recognize the royal steward or “over the household” in the Davidic Kingdom? He would be the one on whom the king had bestowed his keys.  In Isaiah 22:15-22, we find an example of this:

Thus says the Lord GOD of hosts, “Come, go to this steward, to Shebna, who is over the household, and say to him: What have you to do here and whom have you here that you have hewn here a tomb for yourself, you who hew a tomb on the height, and carve a habitation for yourself in the rock?  Behold, the LORD will hurl you away violently, O you strong man. He will seize firm hold on you, and whirl you round and round, and throw you like a ball into a wide land; there you shall die, and there shall be your splendid chariots, you shame of your master’s house.  I will thrust you from your office, and you will be cast down from your station.  In that day I will call my servant Eli’akim the son of Hilki’ah, and I will clothe him with your robe, and will bind your girdle on him, and will commit your authority to his hand; and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah.  And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David; he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open.

The royal steward, Shebna, is being thrust from his office and is being replaced by Eliakim.  Eliakim will be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah and will be given the key to the house of David as a sign of his authority.

One cannot help but see the parallels between this passage and Matthew 16:19 where Jesus tells Peter, “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”  As the rightful heir to the Davidic Kingdom, Jesus is appointing His royal steward by bestowing upon him as a sign of investiture the keys to the Kingdom.  These keys are no mere symbol but carry with them an authority (binding and loosing are legal terms) to act on behalf of the King.

joseph_reunited_with_his_brothers

What were the limits to the authority of the royal steward?  Turning to the second important text,  Genesis 41:40, we can see that Joseph, Pharaoh’s royal steward, is given absolute power with only the limitation of the throne itself.  He was not the King and all his authority came from the King, but still his authority was absolute.  Christ the King likewise gave Peter such authority when He said whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”  The difference of course is that in the case of the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus offers divine protection to Peter against making any errors which is why we say that Peter was infallible in his office as royal steward or “father to the inhabitants” of the Kingdom of Heaven (the title Pope or Papa is just Italian for father).

Although this seems obvious from what has been said so far, it bears mention that the power rested not with the person holding the office of steward, but with the office itself.  This means that there was succession in the office.  Recall that Shebna is being replaced in his office by Eliakim and the keys that symbolized the office were passed along as well.

In short, it is the Church that is the Kingdom of God in our midst.  The Second Vatican Council calls the Church “the kingdom of Christ now present in mystery” and “strains toward the completed kingdom” (LG 15).  It is Christ who rules from His Eucharistic throne and the successor of Peter, the Pope that acts as His royal steward.  You cannot have the King while simultaneously rejecting His kingdom.

The Primacy of Conscience

Church Authority, Conscience, Freedom

Could it be that the” primacy of conscience” will lead to its ultimate demise?  With Church leaders like Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago saying things such as: “If people come to a decision in good conscience then our job is to help them move forward and to respect that. The conscience is inviolable and we have to respect that when they make decisions, and I’ve always done that” one has to wonder if it already has.  As Pope Benedict XVI once said, the greatest danger facing the West is the “self-destruction of conscience.”  Conscience is being destroyed from within because we no longer understand what it is.  Therefore it is instructive to look at conscience and see why those who profess the primacy of conscience are misguided.

Thanks, in no small part to the magic of Disney, Conscience is often spoken of as a thing, like the proverbial angel on one’s shoulder or Jiminy Cricket guiding Pinocchio.  Conscience is not, however, a thing but an act of the intellect.  More specifically it is a judgment reason.  Conscience is not just any judgment like whether I should bring along my umbrella or not, but a moral judgment about what one ought to do in a certain situation.  The Catechism, succinctly defines conscience as “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (CCC 1777). Rather than being something outside of us, conscience is as Gaudium et Spes defines it, “the most secret core and sanctuary of a man” (GS 16).

Before looking more closely at the idea of the so-called primacy of conscience, it is helpful to examine the underlying cause for its unquestioned adoption.  The moral life seems to present us with a Catch-22.  Either one sacrifices their freedom by obeying an authority or embraces that freedom and becomes one’s own authority.  In other words, there seems to be a great divide between authority and freedom and we must choose one or the other.

Those who embrace the “primacy of conscience” have decided to assert their freedom.  One would be hard pressed to find a single mention of this phrase in any magisterial document.   Those who refer to it often cite the same passage from the Catechism that the author did — namely, a “human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience.” While this does put an emphasis on the necessity of following one’s conscience there is a key modifier that can’t be overlooked.  Advocates of the primacy of conscience consistently omit the modifier “certain.”  The Catechism says that we must obey a “certain” conscience so that if we are to speak of a primacy of conscience it is a primacy of a certain conscience.

Fr. John Hardon in his Modern Catholic Dictionary defines a certain conscience as “a state of mind when it has no prudent fear of being wrong about its judgment on some moral issue and firmly decides that some action is right or wrong.”

In other words, a certain conscience has two components.  It is a judgment that follows from sound deliberation and second it refers to the moral law.  It is not a mere moral opinion based on a superficial assessment of a situation nor is it looking for reasons why what we want to do can be justified.  We call that rationalizing.  Instead it is principled reasoning as to how the moral law applies to the situation at hand.

Interestingly, those who appeal to the primacy of conscience rarely ever actually refer to whether they are right or not.  All that matters is whether or not the person acted in accord with it.  Think of Archbishop Cupich’s respect for the fact that the individual has been true to themselves.  Conscience trumps truth. So embedded in our language is this understanding of conscience that we even refer to St. Thomas More as a “martyr for conscience.”  It is as if he merely made up his mind that the Church was right and Henry VIII wrong and dug in his heels.  But St. Thomas More died not as a “martyr for conscience” but, like all martyrs, as a witness to the truth. Herein lies the problem for those who hold the mistaken idea of “primacy of conscience.”   By their logic, both St. Thomas More and someone like Adolph Eichmann who said during the Nuremburg trials that he was only being true to his conscience were equally laudable

Within the Catechism’s definition of conscience, we find the blueprint for the bridge between freedom and authority. Recall that conscience is “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act.” By what standard does one determine the “moral quality of a concrete act”? Before we can answer that question, we must clarify what we mean when we speak of “morality.”

Morality, simply put, is the relationship between a human act — i.e., one done with knowledge and freedom — and the use of man’s nature in fulfilling his ultimate purpose, communion with God.  Some acts are in accord with the proper use of man’s nature and lead us to thrive (we call these good) and some are not and cause us to become slaves (we call these evil). Because human nature and its fulfillment are objective, certain goods are common to all men. Reason recognizes these goods as true goods, and commands that they be protected, preserved, and promoted. These commandments of reason comprise the moral law. Therefore, the “moral quality of a concrete act” can be determined by how it measures up to the moral law.   The moral law acts as a bridge between freedom and authority.

archbishop-cupich

It remains to investigate where the moral law comes from.  How can we see obeying a law as not somehow inhibiting our freedom?  The word for conscience in Latin, conscientia, gives us a clue. It is translated literally as “knowledge with.” Conscience is literally the “co-knowledge” that man shares with God.   This shared knowledge about reality shows why conscience has authority.

God governs all of creation by His Divine Providence.  Because He always acts in accord with reason, all things participate in His eternal law.  He has made all things with natural inclination towards those things that will fulfill its purpose or end.  Think of how a tree naturally grows towards the sunlight.  But unlike the tree, man, because he has an intellect and will, can know and choose to participate in this eternal law.  According to St. Thomas Aquinas, it is our participation in the eternal law of God that is called the natural law. Therefore, the natural law comes from within insofar as it is mediated by God through reason. But because it is a participation in the divine law, it has its source outside of man, in God Himself who is the Author of human nature.

It is in light of this understanding that St. Paul refers to the Gentiles, “who have not the law,” as a “law unto themselves” because they “do by nature what the law requires” (cf. Rom. 2:12) without any contradiction of either their freedom or the objective moral law.

The moral law comes to us through our intellect, but because of our fallen condition we also share in the “knowledge of good and evil.” Although our innate desire for the good cannot be extinguished, the darkening of the intellect that accompanied the Fall causes us great difficulty in discovering the good. Our reason, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, must now be “suffused with the light of God’s truth. In fact, when human reason humbly allows itself to be purified by faith, it is far from weakened; rather, it is strengthened to resist presumption and to reach beyond its own limitations.” The light of God’s truth flows through the Church. The Church informs conscience in much the same way the soul informs the body — giving it life and making it what it is.

St. Thomas teaches that we need revelation in the practical order for two reasons. First, since we are fallen creatures without revelation, the truth “would be known only by a few, and after a long time, and with the mixture of many errors.” Second, because man has a supernatural end, there are certain truths that surpass human reason. The Church, as described in Veritatis Splendor, is at “the service of conscience, helping it to avoid being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine proposed by human deceit (cf. Eph. 4:14), and helping it not to swerve from the truth about the good of man, but rather, especially in more difficult questions, to attain the truth with certainty and to abide in it” (no. 64). The Church does not impose the truths of man’s proper use of his nature from the outside, but instead proposes those truths to man’s reason so that he may recognize them as true internal values and accept them as his own.  Conscience indeed is primary, but only a conscience that is animated by a desire to become what we were made to be—saints.

Sola Scriptura and Logic

Church Authority, Scripture

Halloween marked the 499th Anniversary since Martin Luther fired the first theological shot of the Protestant Revolution by presenting the Bishop with his Ninety-Five theses.  Since then, Christians have remained divided, even among those that would identify themselves as Protestants.  But one thing that they all agree upon is that the Bible is the sole rule of faith.  Many Protestants are quite vocal in their opposition to the Church on this one point.  For example, Pastor John Piper recently posted to his website, desiringGod.com, an interview he gave in which he addresses the following question from a listener named Dan:

“Dear Pastor John, several of my Evangelical friends have converted to Roman Catholicism in recent years. One key issue has been over whether the Bible is our sole rule of faith. After reviewing some of the Catholic arguments, I’ve come to appreciate their persuasive force. As I’ve engaged Protestants, however, I have not yet found an equally persuasive defense of the Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Pastor John, I was wondering if you could please help persuade me.”

Dan had to be somewhat disappointed by Pastor John’s first response because it is one that appears in one form or another anytime the subject is broached.

“If the Bible is God’s word, by definition no human authority or human institution can serve alongside the Bible with equal authority. Neither the pope nor any human counsel or any scholar or priest or pastor or human tradition has the authority of the Bible if it is God’s word. And it is.

Not only that, but the Bible itself nowhere grants to any person or ecclesiastical office an authority equal to its own. There are pastors and teachers which Christ gives to the church (Ephesians 4:11). Their job is not to impart revelation, but to stand on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. And Paul makes plain in 1 Corinthians 14:38 that the authority of those in the church must always give an account to the Scriptures, not themselves. That is the first response.”

When confronted with this or similar arguments, the Catholic will almost always respond with 1 Tim 3:15, “the Church is the pillar and bulwark of the truth.”  What normally ensues is a back and forth of different passages with no ground gained on either side.  What I would like to suggest is that the Catholic take a different approach, one that is outlined in the opening chapter of Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Exhortation, Verbum Domini, beautifully.

luther-95-theses

Pastor John opens his response by saying “If the Bible is God’s word…”  As Catholics we would not dispute this.  However, as the rest of his response seems to indicate, he is assuming that God’s word is the Bible.  What I mean by this is that, like nearly all his Protestant brethren, Pastor John assumes that the Word of God and Sacred Scripture are the same thing; that Sacred Scripture somehow exhausted all God has to say.

Anyone who carefully reads the Prologue to John’s Gospel will reject this.  John speaks of the “word of God” in various ways.  He is eternal, “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1).  God’s Word took “flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) in the Person of Jesus Christ.  His word has been expressed through creation—“the world came to be through him” (John 1:10).  Turning to other books we find that His Word has been expressed “in partial and various ways through the Prophets” (Hebrews 1:1) and through angels (Acts 7:35).  His Word is expressed through the word preached by the Apostles (Mk 16:15).  We could multiply the examples, but what should become clear is that Pastor John and friends are making not so much a theological error, but a logical one.

When we use any two terms, they may equivocal, univocal or analogical.  Equivocal terms are those that have completely unrelated meanings (such as a river bank and a bank where we store our money).  In contrast to this we may use them univocally where the two terms express the same essential meaning.  Between these two poles there is also the opportunity to express the set of terms as having an analogical relationship.  An analogy is where you take two things which are different, but have a certain proportionality to them.  We use analogies with the hope of gaining knowledge of the latter which you don’t know by looking at how it is like a thing you do know.  For example, when we say that “Pastor John is good” and “God is good” we don’t mean exactly the same thing.  But we can gain a knowledge of God’s goodness which we don’t know fully by looking at Pastor John’s goodness which we do.

The Protestant error consists in using the terms “Word of God” and “the Bible” univocally, rather than analogically.  Each of the places we find the “Word of God” expressed throughout salvation history represent degrees or proportions.  The Word of God is eternal and yet is always expressed to man through a limited human language.  This is even the case with the Word Made Flesh.  Our Lord is the fullest expression of the Eternal Word, but not the Eternal Word expressed fully.  Pope Benedict XVI expresses it succinctly when he says that, “[A]lthough the word of God precedes and exceeds sacred Scripture, nonetheless Scripture, as inspired by God, contains the divine word” (Verbum Domini, 17).

benedict-bible

The Word of God has always been mediated through the words of men through the working of the Holy Spirit.  In this way, we can see that all the ways in which God spoke are analogates of the Word Made Flesh.  It is always the Divine Word spoken using human instrumentality.  That is why you cannot pit human authority against God the way that Pastor John attempts to do.  Men who speak the Word of God, speak with the same authority, because the authority comes from God Himself Whose Word is spoken.

This is where Pastor John and many of his Protestant brethren set up Catholic strawmen only to knock them down.  No Catholic believes, nor does the Church teach, that the Pope or any man is above the Word of God.  The Church, as the Body of Christ extended through time, is like Christ’s earthly body, at the service of the Word.  Like Christ’s Incarnated Body, the Church also can speak the Word of God.  To think that the Word of God only is spoken in a book is to deny that it is living and active.

Protestantism doesn’t just differ in its view of authority but in what it means to be a disciple.  Pastor John and many of his friends believe Christians are a “people of the Book.”  But Christians are “people of the Word of God” that is incarnate and living (VD, 7).  It is living because He is alive and has never ceased speaking through the Holy Spirit.  He did not dwell among us temporarily but “with you always, until the end of the ages” (Mt 28:20).  The Incarnation did not cease with His Ascension, He simply took on a new body with a new voice on Pentecost.  It is not mere men who speak in the Church, but mere men whom Christ uses as His voice (c.f Lk 10:16).  He may have nothing new to reveal, but He still speaks.

Before closing, I want to mention briefly a hidden danger of a sect of Christianity that defines itself the way Protestantism does.  Protestantism is obviously broad, but it is essentially defined as “not Catholic.”  With this comes not only a tendency to protest all things Catholic, but it also leads to a giant blind spot that causes one not to actually take the time to learn what it is that Catholics believe.  Pastor John’s second paragraph is a good example.

Not only that, but the Bible itself nowhere grants to any person or ecclesiastical office an authority equal to its own. There are pastors and teachers which Christ gives to the church (Ephesians 4:11). Their job is not to impart revelation, but to stand on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.

There is a self-refuting quality about this argument.  On the one hand, he says that no ecclesial office has an authority equal to that of the Bible, but then mentions that pastors and teachers are “not to impart revelation, but to stand on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.”  What are apostles other than ecclesial officers (1 Cor 12:28)?  He is describing what Catholics actually believe.  We already believe that public revelation is closed but must still be handed on (or in Latin tradere from which we get the word Tradition).  Therefore, we believe that Scripture and Tradition, both of which are guarded and handed on, “form one sacred deposit of the Word of God” (Dei Verbum, II, 10).

Idolizing the Saints

Saints

One of the earliest accusations leveled against the Church by the Protestant Revolutionaries was that, by their veneration of the Saints, Catholics were guilty of idolatry.  While there is no real threat of this for anyone with a proper understanding of the role of the Saints within the Church, there is a danger for all of us of idolizing them in such a way that they are no longer real.  As we celebrate the Feast of All Saints today, it is a good time to examine this tendency in greater depth.

Hagiography is by nature sensational.  The biographies of the saints, like the biographies of all great men and women throughout history, tend to focus only on those defining moments of their lives.  There is nothing wrong with this per se, provided that we always keep in the back of our mind their ordinariness.  God may have done something extraordinary with them, but it was only because they sought him in the ordinary.  Like their Master, they had “no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him” (Is 53:2).  Studying the lives of the saints is part of a healthy spiritual life, but we must always protect ourselves from the spiritual pitfalls that, if we are not careful, can ensnare us.

By idolizing them and forgetting their ordinariness, a golden maxim of the spiritual life can slip our mind.  In a fallen world, becoming a saint is messy.  It is never as clean as the Lives of the Saints makes it appear.  The Lives of the Saints regale us with their extraordinary penances, vigils, and wonders, but spares us the boredom of their daily lives. Saints had to deal with difficult people, even in their own family, and they didn’t always convert them.  The children of saints were not always angels, sorely trying their patience.  Saints had bad days.  This seems obvious but still is easy to forget.  Forget this and we will either live a life of virtual holiness or give in to discouragement.

all-saints

When we read the lives of the saints we are awed by their extraordinary lives of holiness as we should be.  We cannot help but to desire to imitate them.  But we should never try to imitate them in any of their habits until we have mastered one.  The Saints never ran ahead of Grace.  They always ran with it.  All the initiative that they took was in response to God’s grace.  They are proof not of human greatness but first and foremost of God’s greatness and how grace makes us into something we could never be otherwise.  If we are running ahead of grace we will see what they did, imitate it and live a life of virtual holiness.  Virtual holiness means living someone else’s vocation and not your own.  It may look good from the outside, but it is not real holiness.

Likewise, discouragement is also always lurking, especially when we realize that our lives don’t look like the idealized versions of the saints.  It finds its mark when we compare ourselves to those who are living the life of simulated holiness, pretending their lives are something other than they really are.  Many Catholics I know avoid social media precisely because they are discouraged by the apparent perfection of other Catholics who share only idealized versions of their lives.  I have often wondered whether 100 years from now when we read the writings of the saints of today whether there will be any Facebook posts or Twitter feeds among them.

How do we know the saints lived messy lives?  Because the means by which we are made into saints, i.e. the Cross, is messy.  It is heavy and we will sweat while carrying it.  It has splinters and is rough against our backs, causing us to bleed.  We will fall carrying it and very rarely look graceful doing so.  It is ugly and public, even if in an intimate way.  Jesus didn’t advertise His cross to everyone, but neither did He hide it from those “who looked upon Him Whom they had pierced” (Zech 12:10).  The Cross was for Christ something tangible and real, not something that He simply “spiritualized.”  The Cross for the Saints and those of us wannabe saints is also something tangible and messy.

This is why we should look to the Saints.  They are the ones who picked their crosses back up and kept going.  They ran the race and now sit as a Cloud of Witnesses spurring us on to carry our own.  And they kept going for one reason and one reason only—they trusted the One Who handpicked it for them.

The Son of God had no reason to endure what He endured except that He loved each one of us.  Everything He touched and did was made holy.  He picked up His cross so that our own crosses would be sanctified and sanctifying.  His Cross touches every other cross.  He kept going because He was sanctifying my cross and yours, knowing with joy that we would gain glory because of the path He set out.

rubens-simon-cyrene

Our crosses are participations in His Cross.  Like Simon of Cyrene we are invited to carry His Cross with Him.  It was only when Simon accepted the messiness of the Cross—the humiliation of carrying a criminal’s cross publicly, the worry that he might somehow be lumped in with the criminal or mistaken to be a criminal by someone he knew—that he found its sweetness.  Through his encounter with the Cross he wanted to be yoked to that criminal and even shared it with his sons Alexander and Rufus.

There is one further obstacle that bears mentioning and that is the distinction between what God wills and what He permits.  This is a very important distinction on the theological level, but if the Cross is any proof, it is a distinction that should remain on that level.  What He permits and what He wills are both part of His Providential plan.  He has foreseen all the evils and decided how He would use them.  God is so good that everything that comes in contact with Him, even evil, is put to good use.  Therefore on the practical level we should not be so quick to make this distinction but instead to see all has having passed through His hands.

Once we concede that holiness and messiness can coexist we can only conclude that it is actually the mess that makes us holy.  Whether the mess is one we have made ourselves or one that was imposed on us, it is what God has chosen for us here and now.  Because He wills at all times for our sanctification (1 Thes. 4:3), we should not try to avoid it, hide it, or pretend it doesn’t exist.  Instead “not my will but Thy will be done.”

This doesn’t mean that we passively resolve to take our licks, but amidst all our efforts to clean up the messes we have a continual Yes to God for our current predicament.  This clears the path for a true and lasting peace.  If I have done all I can to resolve the mess and it is still there then I can rest in the knowledge that God has given it to me.  If despite my best efforts, my son with Autism has a meltdown at the most embarrassing time then I can accept it with peace, knowing that God will not let that moment go to waste.  St. Paul was right, we can give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thess 5:18).

Christ did not come to take away our messes, but to sanctify them.  Life is messy and God is good.  This is the lesson we learn from the Saints.  Saints embraced their messes, drawing all that God had for them in it.  We would be blessed to do likewise.

Happy Feast of All Saints!

The Dirtiest Word

Theology

What is the longest dirty word in the English language?  For many Catholics, it is theology.  I am often left speechless when I am invited to speak and told that the talk needs to be “practical and not be filled with theology.”  The last word is always said in a tone of disdain.  I nod knowingly and then set out to prepare a talk that will be filled with theology.  If I had the courage I would ask what exactly they are expecting when they invite someone trained in moral theology to speak.  That would probably ensure that I would not be invited back, but the fact is that all Christians should study theology.

Augustine defined theology as “reasoning about God.”  Based on this definition it becomes readily apparent that man is a theological animal.  What I mean by this is that we are all theologians to one degree or another.  The questions surrounding God are so linked to what it means to be human that one cannot help but to apply reasoning to God.  Even atheists are theologians who operate under certain understandings of God.  Therefore I am not saying that everyone should seek an advanced degree in theology, but certainly it is necessary for all of us to develop an adequate theological toolbox.

St Thomas Studying

The Universal Doctor of the Church, St. Anselm’s motto was fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”).  Contained within this short motto is the reason why theology is so important.  Properly speaking the gift of faith is a share in God’s knowledge of Himself.  On our part it is merely intellectual assent to the truth of what He has revealed.  Faith may be a form of knowledge but it is an imperfect knowledge.  Its goal is to develop certitude.  That is why it will pass away when we see God face to face.   Then we will have certain knowledge.  As pilgrims our goal ought to be to grow in certitude.  This only happens with an increased understanding.  With greater understanding we grow in love because we have more reasons to love.  This is why theology is so important—it enables us to grow in understanding.  It gives us a science and a vocabulary in which to speak and deepen our understanding.

An example might help to see what I am driving at.  Revelation tells us and we accept on faith that Christ is true God and true man.  What we do with these facts can have a profound effect on our love for Christ.  We will not love Him merely based on this fact.  It is our understanding and the implications of this fact that changes us.

Let’s look at one of the places where we see the two natures of Christ most operative—in the Garden of Gethsemane.  We know that Christ experienced fear in the face of sin and death to the point of sweating blood.  Now everyone has their own interpretation of how this was possible (remember we are all theologians), but a solid understanding of theology allows us to penetrate it and understand its true meaning.  Recall that Jesus was not fallen like the rest of humanity.  What this meant is that His emotions were perfectly under the control of His human reason and will.  Anything that He felt, He willed to feel.  He could have remained absolutely a stoic and not willed to feel fear in the Garden.  He could have greatly tempered it so that it was only a little.  But instead He willed to feel fear beyond a level we can even conceive—to the point of shedding blood.  No one would will to feel that horribly except for one He loved.

Our response?  We ought to be more in awe of the depth of His love (He could have left this unpleasant experience out) and love Him in return ever more deeply.  But without a cursory understanding of theology, in particular, what happened to man when he fell, this level of understanding and love is not possible.  With a misguided understanding of theology we might even think that He could not help being practically crippled with fear and that He was a mere victim of circumstances or whim of a vindictive Father.  And maybe He wasn’t yet God’s Son.  Maybe that came after the Resurrection.  Bad theology leads not just to heresy but away from the One Whom my heart desires.  Good theology leads me more deeply into His grasp.  Why would I ever avoid teaching theology?  What could be more practical than chasing someone into the wounded hands of Jesus?

Trained theologians bear some of the responsibility for why theology is treated as a dirty word.  According to Cardinal Ratzinger, the theologian’s “role is to pursue in a particular way an ever deeper understanding of the Word of God found in the inspired Scriptures and handed on by the living Tradition of the Church. He does this in communion with the Magisterium which has been charged with the responsibility of preserving the deposit of faith” (On the Ecclesial Role of Vocation of the Theologian, 6).  What he means is that the task of the theologian is to explain what we already know to be true.  That means theologians are not an authority unto themselves but merely teachers of Divine Revelation even if they have unique teaching styles.  Their approach cannot be merely academic but should be the fruit of a prayerful understanding of their vocation in the Church.  It should be preferred (for all of us) that we study theology on our knees rather than at a desk.  Avoid reading known dissenters and pray for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, particularly understanding.  This gift allows us to develop a “Catholic nose” that sniffs out things that are wrong, even if you can’t fully explain why.  So often I hear someone start a question with “so and so said this, but it just didn’t sound right.”

There are two other reasons why it is treated as a dirty word—one internal and one external.  The internal is one of the seven deadly sins, sloth or acedia.  St Thomas defines it as “sadness in the face of a spiritual good.”  It is marked by a certain indifference towards what is truly important and is pervaded by a spirit of “whatever.”  Dante describes the slothful as suffering from lento amore or “slow love.”  It is hard work to understand revelation.  If it were simple then it wouldn’t be God.  A slothful generation is marked by a plethora of “seekers” who never really settle on anything.  Finding often requires something of us and there is a certain comfort in merely seeking.  We are OK with a fuzzy Jesus, but the true Jesus can often make us uncomfortable.  Sharp theology brings Him (and His demands) into focus.

The external reason is a cultural obsession with practicality.  We demand that all things have practical value.  But nothing is practical without principles underneath it.  The wheel may be the most practical thing man has ever made, but in order to be made, the first man had to understand many principles of mechanics, friction, etc.  The practical follows from the theoretical and if we disdain the theoretical then we will lose the practical as well.  This is hard for us to grasp when our society suffers under the “tyranny of the expert” (including the theologian).  Experts can cripple us because they make us reduce our personal understanding because we just simply rely on their knowledge without developing our own understanding.  Soon we just assume that they have that area covered and do not even attempt to learn the principles of reality under which the experts operate.   The rest of us just operate as experts of practicality.  But as Chesterton said, “[T]he man who is theoretically a practical man…will never believe in anything long enough to make it succeed.”  What I do practically as a Christian depends upon my theological understanding of what it means to be a Christian.

The best argument for studying theology is found in Frank Sheed’s book, Theology and Sanity, “…a virtuous man may be ignorant, but ignorance is not a virtue.  It would be a strange God who could be loved better by being known less. Love of God is not the same thing as knowledge of God; love of God is immeasurably more important than knowledge of God; but if a man loves God knowing a little about Him, he should love God more from knowing more about Him: for every new thing known about God is a new reason for loving Him.”  Theology gives us more reasons to love God, what could be more practical than that?

A Complaint Against Grumbling

Virtue

Pope St. John Paul II often avoided the use of the term “free will” when he was describing man’s moral life.  Instead he preferred to speak of “self-determination.”  What he hoped to emphasize in doing this was that our actions have an effect on us.  What we do does not simply remain outside of us, but make up who and what we are.  In other words, our actions turn us into something.  Even our speech reveals this to be true:  we call a person who lies repeatedly a liar, a person who steals a thief, a person that repeatedly shows courage a hero and a person who repeatedly gives of himself a saint.  This theme is central to his encyclical on Moral Theology, Veritatis Splendor.  Rather than commending what many consider JPII’s most difficult encyclical, I would like to point out the smuggled moral theology contained in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce.  In this deep meditation on good and evil, Lewis’ pilgrim meets people somewhere between heaven and hell and finds that even if someone were given the option to choose between heaven or hell in the afterlife, they are already fixed as heavenly or hellish people.  Lewis himself cautions the reader not to read the book as a theological commentary on heaven, hell and purgatory.  Instead he calls it an “imaginative supposal” which offers insights into the moral life.

One of the more puzzling characters that the pilgrim meets along the way is a woman who seems to have a nearly endless list of complaints.  After listening to her “shrill monotonous whine,” the Pilgrim asks his guide how it is even possible that she is in danger of damnation.  She seems to have gotten into the habit of grumbling, but it is a mostly harmless thing that a little change in environment would remedy.  The Guide (George MacDonald) replies that:

“That is what she once was. That is maybe what she still is. If so, she certainly will be cured. But the whole question is whether she is now a grumbler…Aye, but ye misunderstand me. The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman-even the least trace of one-still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there’s one wee spark under all those ashes, we’ll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear. But if there’s nothing but ashes we’ll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up.”

Given the current level of discontent of most Christians with the direction the culture is taking, I think there is a grave danger than many of us may in fact become grumbles.  Grumbling and Christianity have become somewhat synonymous.  We may have grown so accustomed to it, that we fail to see its dangers.  What I would like to offer today then is a complaint against grumbling.

Sacred Scripture is consistent in its condemnation of grumbling (or murmuring).  In fact, it even goes so far as to say it is useless.  The Book of Wisdom tells us to “keep yourselves from grumbling, which profits nothing” (Wisdom 1:11).  St. Paul suggests that it is by doing things without grumbling that the Christian distinguishes himself when he tells the Philippians to “[D]o all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation” (Phil 2:14-15).

If grumbling really profits nothing and we risk blame over it, how can we become grumble-free?  To answer that question, we must attempt to define it.  The Greek word for grumble is goggýzō which means “to express smoldering discontent.”  This is why Lewis expressed the lady’s situation in terms of ashes and flames.  Something that is smoldering, even if it never reaches a full blown flame, will eventually be consumed.  Grumble enough and we become grumbles.

At the heart of grumbling is a general discontent for life.  One who finds little joy in life grumbles.  This is why it is so antithetical to a truly Christian existence—Christians should be marked by their joy.  Left unchecked, this discontent becomes the seedbed of hell.  Lewis also says that, in the end, “the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’‘: and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”   We have all met people (we usually call them saints) who carry heaven with them.  We have also all been unfortunate enough to meet those who carry hell with them as well, and they are almost always if not other things, grumblers.  As Lewis says, “[H]ell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others… but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God “sending us” to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

CS Lewis Writing

By saying that grumbling has no point, the author of the Book of Wisdom means that absolutely no good comes from it.  Christians are in the world because they are meant to redeem it.  With The Master as his model and his inspiration (in the truest sense of the word), the Christian transforms all things by drawing the goodness out of it and bringing into being good that otherwise would not have existed.  Evil is a parasite, it always feeds upon a good.  In the midst of personal suffering, social evils and secular culture, the Christian is called not simply to complain but to draw those goods that are present out.

Grumbling tends to make mountains out of molehills.  More accurately, we allow molehills to serve as stumbling blocks to True Mountain.  To overcome this tendency we must develop a radical trust in Divine Providence.  Note how Jesus responds to the grumbling of His disciples in the Bread of Life discourse.  He tells them to stop grumbling and then calls them to faith (Jn 6:41-43).

The faith that He invites us to is not one of resignation but one that is completely active.  When confronted with either a Mountain or a Molehill, we should ask how the situation can be redeemed.  Why is it that God allowed this to happen?  We are not attempting to write our own version of the story but to draw the good that God intends out.  Faith tells us there is good to be found, grumbling says there is none.

The reality is that we often do not have the power to eradicate a particular evil.  This is usually when grumbling sets in.  We must fight this temptation.  Instead we should seek to find the goods that are revealed and celebrate those.  When GK Chesterton suffered an ankle injury, he wrote an essay called The Advantages of Having One Leg.  It wasn’t that he was optimistic so much as the fact that losing the use of one of his legs became an occasion to praise God for the gift that up to that point he had taken for granted.  Evil has this strange quality in that it often allows us to see goods we would normally never have noticed.  If an evil persists, despite our best efforts to fight it, perhaps we need to look for those goods we were previously overlooking.  Summarizing, Chesterton wrote, “This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment. If you wish to realize how fearfully and wonderfully God’s image is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realize the splendid vision of all visible things–wink the other eye.”

Finally, grumbling blocks patience.  Of all the spiritual works of mercy, bearing wrongs patiently is the one that is most tied to the Cross.  We imitate Christ most perfectly when we silently bear wrongs.  This is not to suggest that Christians are doormats, only that there are times when confronted with evil that we must be silent.  Christ responded to the high priest servant’s blow by speaking, but there are also times when we must turn the other cheek.  Wisdom will help us know the difference.  But when by complaining I will bring about no good, no conversion of heart, perhaps the best approach is to bear it with patience.  The Cross always acts like a wrench in the gears of evil.

Anyone who has read The Great Divorce would immediately see the influence that Dante’s Divine Comedy had on Lewis.  As he climbs Mount Purgatory, Dante finds each of the remedies to the deadly sins has a Marian solution.  If he were to include the grumblers, then they would be purified by Our Lady’s habit of “keeping these things in her heart.”  She never grumbled because she always pondered.  May we too imitate her spirit.

 

Fools for Christ

Evangelization

The latest round of leaked emails from the Clinton campaign captures an email exchange between the Clinton campaign Director of Communications Jennifer Palmieri, John Halpin as senior fellow at the Center for American progress and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta:

From:jhalpin@americanprogress.org

To:  JPalmieri@americanprogress.org, john.podesta@gmail.com

Date: 2011-04-11 21:10

Subject: Re: Conservative Catholicism

Excellent point.  They can throw around “Thomistic” thought and “subsidiarity” and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they’re talking about.

Jennifer Palmieri <JPalmieri@americanprogress.org> wrote:

I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion.  Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.

—– Original Message —–

From: John Halpin

To: John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com>; Jennifer Palmieri

Sent: Mon Apr 11 18:55:59 2011

Subject: Conservative Catholicism

Ken Auletta’s latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the WSJ, are raising their kids Catholic.  Friggin’ Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus.

Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the SC and think tanks to the media and social groups.

It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith.  They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.

In an age of over-sensitivity, the response has not been surprising; Catholics are “offended” at the “bigotry” of the Clinton campaign.  The latter is most certainly true, but the speed at which Catholics found themselves “offended” shows that something is missing within the American Catholic vision.

During his third missionary journey, St. Paul found that a similar issue was facing the Corinthian Church.  The Church was under constant pressure from the surrounding pagan environment and was experiencing division because of it.  But rather than advising them to “take offense,” he gives them a very important reminder, one that we would do well to heed as well: “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18).

In other words, a Christian should not be surprised when the world views them as foolish.  Only a fool would believe that a man who died a fool’s death is God.  Only a fool would believe that rather than coming as a mighty conqueror, God would come as a baby.  Only a fool would believe that God could be this foolish.  And the world would be right except for one thing—the Fool overcame death validating all that He said and did.  This same Divine Fool is gathering those interested in joining His band of fools.  We need reminders such as these because we are made in the image of a Fool and thus must be comfortable being foolish too.  There is a grace of becoming “fools for Christ.”

What these emails also reveal is the difficulty “those who are perishing” have in imagining someone acting for anything but political motivation.  Everything is framed in terms of politics—“Christian democracy” and “the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion.”  They “are perishing” not in the sense that they are going to hell per se, but that they put all of their hope in the State.  They will go the way of their redeemer, just as the fools will go the way of their Foolish Redeemer.

This, by the way, is why the same group consistently associates terrorists with “radical” Islam.  It is entirely inconceivable in their view for someone to act out of religious motivation.  It is also why the Church will always come into conflict with the unbridled secular state.  The Church claims a law above all human law, the secular state admits no law above the Constitution (as a challenge find a single mention of natural law in a Supreme Court decision in the past 50 years).  We should also then not be surprised when they plot to infiltrate the Church to destroy her from within.

st-andrew

This problem is nothing new in the life of the Church.  As the Roman Empire was crumbling around him, St. Augustine wrote what has become the best explanation of the Christian world view, The City of God.  The Doctor of Grace distinguishes sharply between two cities—the City of Man and the City of God.  This is not meant to be a distinction between the Church and State, but between a society founded on the love of God and a society founded by a group of thieves based on self-love.  Given that one of the two large party candidates has to win, it should be obvious which City the United States has become.

Rather than lobbing charges of bigotry or being offended our response ought to be Augustinian.  Anyone who reads City of God is instantly struck on how uncompromising he is to dialogue with Rome.  At the risk of being seen as foolish, he is confident that in all ways the Christian way of being is superior.  He doesn’t look for ways in which Christianity can be fit into the Roman system but instead takes it to task for its inherent injustice.

This is not to suggest that Catholics renounce their citizenship and move to Vatican City if either Trump or Clinton win the election.  Instead a solution can be found by applying one of those Catholic words —subsidiarity.

Our country has been plagued by two tendencies in the last 50 years, individualism and a strong centralizing tendency in government.  They really are two sides of the same coin.  As we grow more and more atomistic, the only thing that can hold us together is a stronger State presence.  As the State tries to maintain social cohesion, it will seek to eliminate smaller institutions like the family, civic associations and Church because they do not conform to the social norm they are imposing from above.  As inherently divisive, these groups are accused of “discrimination” or “severely backward gender relations.”  The groups can either dissolve, conform or risk being redefined from above.

Just so we know “what the hell” it is, subsidiarity is the principle by which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good” (CC1883).  Why it matters is because it is a protection against the State that Clinton ( and all evidence suggests Trump seems to have no problem with it either) wants to form.  Yuval Levin in his book Fractured Republic says that nothing short of an effort to re-form mediating institutions based on the principle of subsidiarity will save our country.  As the largest “mediating institution” in the Country, the Catholic Church obviously plays a prominent role.

What we need is, not a Church that whines about being attacked, but fights back.  We are not defending ourselves, but defending the Truth.  We are not just defending the Church, but fight knowing that those “who are perishing” have a right to hear the Good News.  This comes from below, not from above.  Why haven’t Jennifer Palmeiri and John Podesta heard the real truths of Catholicism?  It isn’t because some Bishop didn’t tell them, but because those Catholics whom they encounter on a regular basis didn’t tell them.

What we need is, not so much a Church guided by strong Bishops who do not fear being foolish, but a Church filled with foolish laity.  What if Bishops started calling the laity out the way we have grown so accustomed to doing to them?  Subsidiarity applies within the Church as well as without.   The Church is a clerical domain, the world is ours.   It is time we took back our domain.  There is no clericalism within the City of God.

What we need most of all is, not a Church that is divided along liberal/conservative lines, but a Church that evangelizes from within and is Conservative in doctrine and liberal in love.  That is a Church that cannot be infiltrated.

May we all have the courage today to be fools!

It Takes Three

Devils, marriage

Marriage is by its very nature Trinitarian.  Venerable Fulton Sheen once wrote a book called Three to Get Married that highlights the many ways that married love is Trinitarian—lover, beloved and God who binds them.  Unfortunately, God is not the only “third” who wants access to a marriage.  If God is the one who binds the couple, it is Diabolos (which literally means “one who tears asunder”) who is constantly trying to rip them apart, often in hidden ways.  As St. Ignatius said the devil is like a lover who tries to seduce a young girl or another’s wife; once his machinations are revealed the evil one is vexed and flees.  It is only by exposing him that we can actively engage in spiritual warfare and be free to live the high ideal of Christian marriage.

It is important to recognize that the Devil had his sights set on marriage from the beginning.  He insinuates himself between Adam and Eve.  Not only did Eve disobey God, but she also did not trust Adam when he relayed to her God’s command not to eat from the Tree.  By using the second person plural in the original Hebrew, the author of Genesis is telling us that Adam was silently standing beside Eve while she battled the Serpent.  In many ways the battle was already won because the Serpent had come between them.

Why marriage in particular though?  In Hell, there is no love; only competition.  Everything is done out of self-interest.  Marriage is the cradle of love and represents a great threat to hell.  It is the place where spouses have their love purified.  It is the place where children from an early age learn they were created out of an act of love.  They learn that love is not competitive, but self-giving.  If the Devil wants to bring the competition of hell to earth, then he will naturally target the school of love.

Knowing that marriage has a particular bullseye on it, what are some of the ways we can protect it?  First it is important to understand something about demons in general.  They are extremely legalistic.  They only operate in those places where they have a “right” to be there.  They establish this right when someone who has authority abdicates that authority or someone rejects the God-given authority over them.  Returning to the Garden, we can see what is meant.

God gives Adam the command to “keep” the Garden.  “To keep” in Hebrew is more accurately translated as “guard.”  In other words, it is Adam’s duty to protect the Garden and all its inhabitants from the Evil One.  So too, Eve has a right to be protected by Adam.  Adam abdicates his authority and stands by while the Serpent attacks Eve.  By failing to exercise his spiritual authority over Eve, he opened her up to attack.  He failed to shield his bride.

This unwillingness of a man to shield his family is a perennial problem and one that is particularly acute in our time, accounting for the near collapse of marriage and family.  With Christ as his model, the man must be prepared to exercise his spiritual authority over his wife and children.  He must be willing to undergo trials and temptations for his family in order that they be protected from the snares of the Evil One.  He does this knowing that he has God-given authority over them and that his grace of state that came from the Sacrament of Matrimony empowers him.  Likewise the wife and children must be willing to be subordinate to him.  The man may be the shield, but those under him must be willing to stay behind the shield.

tasmanian-devils-marriage

When one of our boys was three, he would often wake up in the middle of the night screaming.  I would always be the one to go to him, pick him up, ask for St. Michael’s intercession, and he would fall back to sleep.  One night it happened several times so the next night I was very tired.  My wife went to him instead that night and he cried out, “Daddy help me!”  This made me shoot straight up in bed, not only because he cried for help, but because he has autism and was non-verbal at the time.  Once again I took him and prayed and back to sleep he went.  Knowing now exactly what was going on, I spent the next night on the floor at the foot of his bed knowing that whatever was after him would have to go through me first.  And for the first time in a while, he slept through the night.  Once my God-given authority was exercised, the demonic attacks were ineffective against him.  Men must be willing to shield their wives and children regardless of the cost to them personally.

As an aside, I should mention that we had the house exorcised the next day.  Within two days my son began to speak because someone in the house had bound his tongue.  If you have not had your house exorcised then I would absolutely recommend it.  You never know what went on in the house before you moved in.  In our particular case, there were three previous occupants all of which ended up divorced.  Clearly someone was at work in the house.

Most of his attacks are more subtle than this and so it is important that we are on the watch for them because of their cumulating effect.  The “ordinary” ways in which the devil tends to attack a marriage fall into two main categories: division and discouragement.

First, the Evil One uses division.  It usually starts with an accusation that we latch onto.  Once we are hooked on it, he then supplies us with reasons why they do it.  For example, a man is driving in the car and his wife is telling him to pass the car in front of him.  The devil is quickly there to point out to the man “she always does that when I am driving.”  Notice the absoluteness (“always”) of the statement so that there is an implication that she has a serious problem.  Once the man agrees with this, the devil then gives him reasons such as “she is so controlling.”  Now the man gets angry that his wife doesn’t trust him.  Meanwhile, the demon is acting in unison with another demon planting the same sort of accusation the mind of the wife; “He always blows things out of proportion.”

The antidote to this weapon of division is what I like to call “compassion in small things.”  It is an attempt to see things from other people’s perspective.  Returning to our example, the man might simply say “No she doesn’t always do that.  In fact she usually only does it when she is worried about being late.  She must be worried.  Let me reassure her.”  Likewise it is helpful to tell your spouse when you hear that voice because they are probably hearing something too.  All too often once he is exposed, the demon flees.

Finally, there is discouragement.  Marriage often suffers because of the quirks and character flaws of each of the spouses.  Being “stuck” with a person who has serious flaws that you find annoying (at the least) can lead you to discouragement.  “This just isn’t what I expected when I fell in love with you” or “For better or worse.  Yes, but this is the worst.”

He can also tempt us to discouragement by getting a comparison game going in our mind.  When we are at our lowest, he will point out other (seemingly) perfect marriages.  In this regard, Facebook and other social media is a tremendous weapon.  People tend to handpick the good news they want to post.  Because that is all we ever see, we assume that everyone’s life is better than ours.  This is not to point out the inauthenticity of most people of Facebook, but to recognize that if you are discouraged or are finding yourself discouraged when you are on Facebook, you should log off immediately.  Discouragement never comes from God.

We also have to remember that love is a two way street.  It does not just require self-giving, but also other-receiving.  We must renew our commitment daily to receive our spouse, warts and all.  The second antidote to discouragement is to dwell on the positive characteristics of our spouse and to practice forgiveness.  For marriages that are heavily burdened, gratitude that God has given you someone to suffer with can often lift us out of discouragement.

It is no accident that St. Paul’s great hymn to married love in Ephesians is followed by a call to arms in spiritual warfare.  Marriage, in our fallen world, is a battleground.  The only question is whether we will identify the real enemy.  It may take three to get married, but no doubt it also takes three to destroy it.

Defenders of History

Crusades, History

History is central to Christianity.  Christians believe, not in some distant God, but a God Who acts from within mankind’s history.  But in order to see His hand, it is absolutely necessary that true history be preserved.  There are no mere events, but instead the very actions of God in time.  In many ways, to be Catholic is to be a historian.  We should not then be surprised that His enemies attempt to alter the stories.  The Church often finds herself on the defensive against the revisers of history and so her members must become defenders of history.  There is perhaps no area that has been so bombarded by revisionist historians as the Crusades.  Therefore it is instructive to look at some of the common myths in order to be better prepared as Crusaders of Truth.

Myth 1: St. John Paul II apologized to Muslims for the Crusades

This is an important myth to debunk from the outset because, if John Paul II apologized to Muslims, then anything else we say on the matter would be moot.  It is also a pretty widely held belief, even Wikipedia mentions it.  But the fact of the matter is that he never did apologize to Muslims for their treatment by the Crusaders.

As the Church entered the Third Millennium, the Pope wanted to thoroughly examine her conscience and seek forgiveness for all the wrongs done by her.  On March 12, 2000 he declared a “Day of Pardon” to acknowledge the Church’s sins.  There was no mention of Islam or Muslims among the list of those the Church sought pardon from.  The Crusades also are not mentioned.  The closest that he came that day was during the homily when he said “We cannot fail to recognize the infidelities to the Gospel committed by some of our brethren, especially during the second millennium. Let us ask pardon for the divisions which have occurred among Christians, for the violence some have used in the service of the truth and for the distrustful and hostile attitudes sometimes taken toward the followers of other religions.”  This is clearly not an apology for the Crusades however.

Likewise with the Second Vatican Council.  In the Council’s document on other religions, Nostra Aetate, there is specific mention of Islam.  While the Council Fathers conceded that in the past there was much quarreling and dissension on both sides and made a plea to “forget the past,” there is no asking of forgiveness or mention of regret.  Instead the Council recommends that both sides “work sincerely for mutual understanding.”  Only in light of this can the many centuries of hostility be replaced with a genuine understanding (NA, 3).

John Paul II did seek pardon from the Greek Orthodox in 2001 for the actions of the Crusaders during what came to be known as the Fourth Crusade.  This is mentioned because this crusade is often used as “proof” of just how misguided the crusading spirit was.  It is also a humbling reminder that not everything that happened is something we should be proud of.  In this particular case the Crusaders got involved in local political intrigue rather than focusing on their mission.

One of the practical problems that the Crusaders faced was the fact that they could find no local and permanent government to put in place in Jerusalem.  The Crusaders would often have to stay behind and form their own government in the region.  This left them isolated and extremely vulnerable to Muslim attack.  This is why Richard the Lionheart refused to take Jerusalem during the Third Crusade.  He thought it a political liability and instead secured, via treaty, safe passage for unarmed pilgrims.  The Fourth Crusaders had hoped that the Byzantine Empire would take control of the area because they were in a better position to defend it.  But there was a great deal of political instability in Byzantium during the years of the Crusades.  They sought to put a more Latin-friendly leader on the Byzantine throne and  found it in Alexius IV (son of the deposed emperor Isaac II).  He agreed to pay 200,000 Silver marks, supply provisions for expedition against Egypt, submit the Greek Church to Rome and then station 500 Knights in the Holy Land for its permanent defense.  This was exactly the solution they were looking for, but when Alexius IV gave in to pressure from his subjects and ceased supplying the crusaders, war ensued.  The Crusaders eventually sacked Constantinople and placed Baldwin of Flanders on the Byzantine throne.  It was hardly the bloodbath that revisionist historians like to paint it as, but still about 2000 of the 150,000 residents were killed.  Pope Innocent III immediately condemned their actions and declared the Fourth Crusade a failure because they did not recapture the Holy Land and turned on fellow Christians.  Despite this condemnation, it still deepened the rift between the East and West.  This is the rift that John Paul II was hoping to heal by addressing this wrong.

Myth 2: The Crusades were unprovoked; mostly about making a land grab and increasing wealth of the Church

As we learned from the folly of the Fourth Crusade, there are situations in which Crusaders could go awry in their mission.  There also were some that went for less than noble reasons.  However what is really at question here is the principles behind the Crusades.

The Crusades start in earnest in the Seventh Century as a response to Muslim expansion into Syria and Persia (modern day Iraq and Iran).  Jerusalem soon followed in 638, although Christians were not cast out of the city.   Pilgrims from the West into Jerusalem were mostly left unmolested because of their contributions to the local economy. In 1071 this changed drastically.  The Turks (who were Sunni) invaded the Holy Land and attacked the “heretical” Shiite.  They began to kill and enslave the resident Christians and any pilgrims who attempted to enter the Holy Land.   In response to this, Blessed Urban II called for the First Crusade.

This myth is quickly debunked by reading Blessed Urban II’s speech to the assembly at Clermont calling for the Crusade.  He told them that by taking the Cross “[U]nder Jesus Christ, our Leader, may you struggle for your Jerusalem, in Christian battleline, most invincible line, even more successfully than did the sons of Jacob of old – struggle, that you may assail and drive out the Turks, more execrable than the Jebusites, who are in this land, and may you deem it a beautiful thing to die for Christ in that city in which He died for us.”

He defines the twofold purpose; first the release of Christian captives and second the liberation of the city of Jerusalem.  His use of the word pilgrimage  also reveals motives because it showed that the aim was not to conquer the region, but to make pilgrimage to the Holy Land and return home.

A careful study of the history also shows that the intention of the successful Crusaders matched that of the Pope.  To go on Crusade was incredibly expensive and it left many of its leaders in financial straits.  Most Crusaders had to secure 4-5 times their annual income to go on pilgrimage.  This not only renders absurd claims about the Crusaders seeking to secure wealth but also the myth that they were mostly landless younger sons.

In truth we have difficulty imagining the culture of the early second millennium.  While we look for secular motivation, there were many men who were in fact driven by faith.  The men who took the Cross were often great warriors and were far from saints.  Yet they saw the Crusades as a means to make amends for their sins and gladly sought the indulgence attached to it so that they could become the saints they desired to be.  In short, the fact that wealthy men risked their fortunes to take the Cross with the intention of returning home after the pilgrimage makes the “motivated by personal gain” hypothesis untenable.  Those who did remain in the Holy Land after the Crusades did so at great peril and only out of the necessity of defending it.

Myth 3: The Church slaughtered all the inhabitants in Jerusalem

In October of 2001, just one month after the attacks of 9/11,  former President Bill Clinton offered this explanation for the attacks:

 “Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless…Indeed, in the First Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with three hundred Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees.”

Now putting aside the fact that the “contemporaneous descriptions” that he is referring to were using a biblical literary device (Rev 14:20—“blood came out from the wine press, up to the horses’ bridles”), he is promoting the myth that the Crusaders were overly brutal.  While it is true that many people were killed, we cannot impose the rules of the Geneva Convention because it was a different time.  The Rule of War of the time was different.  When attacking a city, the aggressors always offered peaceful surrender as an option.  When this was rejected, it was often the case that all a city’s inhabitants were put under the ban.  This was meant mainly to be seen as a deterrent to other would be enemies.

This is not to say what they did was right, only that they were following the conventions of war at the time.  Any combatants, Christian, Muslim or otherwise would have done the same thing.  To judge by this standard leaves almost all victors of wars fought in history guilty of the same thing.  It is not until we get to the 18th Century that we see anything similar to Christian (note the emphasis on the word Christian) Just War principles being consistently applied.  This unfortunately is another case where attempts to condemn Christianity using Christian principles falls flat.   All it ends up proving is another Christian doctrine—Original Sin.  We often fail to live up to our Christian principles.  Guilty as charged.  But don’t pretend that the principles are something that weren’t given to the world by the Church.

How did these myths arise?

Like many clubs used to beat the Church, it gained teeth during the Protestant Reformation.  Because the Crusades were so closely tied to the doctrines of papal authority and indulgences, they served as a great polemical tool for Martin Luther to conclude that the Crusades were nothing but a ploy by a power-hungry papacy.  He even claimed that “to fight against the Turks is to resist the Lord, who visits our sins with such rods.”  However he soon changed his mind when it began to get too close to home when Suleiman and his armies began to invade Austria.  At that point however the foundation for attack was already set.  First the Crusades were viewed through a confessional lens and, once the Enlightenment thinkers came along, it was viewed as “religious violence.”

What is difficult to determine is exactly when it was picked up by Muslim sympathizers.  It may be that it is just a logical conclusion from the wide-scale acceptance of the three myths above.  If those things are true then truly Muslims were the victims.  They also paint current Muslim aggression as being retaliation for brutal colonization by the West.  But to those who follow the tenets of Islam, the jihad never ended and won’t end until all are under the reign of Islam.  Interestingly enough, that is precisely how all of this started.

 

St. Francis and the New Age

Eucharist, New Age, Saints

Despite the fact that the Church marks the life of Francesco Bernadone by a “mere” Liturgical Memorial, he remains one of the most beloved saints.  Better known as St. Francis of Assisi, he has grown in popularity because he seems to be a saint belonging not to his own times, but ours.  As Chesterton says in his great biography “that St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and even of property.”  Francis was a great lover of nature but he was also “spiritual.”  Because he was an ecclesiastical rebel, he was not particularly religious, or at least his modernized version wasn’t.  He became the patron saint of the New Age and like many believers in the New Age he was, “spiritual but not religious.”

To keep the beloved saint from being hijacked by the New Agers, it is important to point out that St. Francis loved those things because he loved the Person who made them.  He loved the poor because Jesus was poor and God is close to those who are poor.  In other words, St. Francis loved those things because he found God in all those things.

At this point, the New Ager might respond “Exactly.  St. Francis found that God is in everything.  That is why we don’t need religion.  We can find Him anywhere.”  And in this, we find the fundamental error in the New Age view of reality.  The New Age view is based upon a profound misunderstanding of what it means to say that God is in everything.  We need an understanding of this not only to refute New Age philosophy but to also develop a deeper understanding of Who God is for ourselves.  St. Thomas thought this idea so important for understanding Who God is, he tackles it at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae (Book I question 8).

To understand this, it is first important to define precisely what we mean by the term essence.  The essence of a created thing is what that thing is; what makes it to be that particular type of thing and not something else.  What the New Age believer says about God is that He is part of the essence of all things.  But because God is simple (i.e. cannot be divided into parts), then everything contains God they argue.  This is where the Church differs from the New Age believer.  Relying on the teachings of Aquinas, the Church says that God is in created things “but not as part of their essence.” Everything is not God.  When we say that God is in everything what we mean truly is that He is present to all things.

We must also make clear what we mean when we say that a spiritual substance is “in” something.  For example, what do we mean when we say that the soul is in the body?  It does not mean that it is found inside the body, but that it acts upon the body.  Death is when the body degrades to the point that the soul no longer can act upon it.  So too with God, we say that God is in something in the sense that He is acting upon it.  When we say that God is in everything what we mean truly is that He is present to all things.

francis_eucharist

He is present in two ways— as efficient cause in that He is Creator of all and as an object of operation in that He acts on them, holding them in creation.

An analogy will help.  When a man builds a chair, we often say that he put his heart into it.  In that way the builder is in the chair.  This analogously is what we mean by God being in creation in the first sense as the creator.  Now suppose that the chair breaks and he glues it together.  Suppose further that in order for the glue to set properly he has to apply weight by sitting in the chair.   This is the second sense in which we mean that God is in all things holding them together.

In both cases though, the man is not part of the chair itself.  This is very important.  He is not part of the chair’s chairness or essence.  He is in the chair as its creator and as the one holding it together.

In short, the Church teaches that God is transcendent in His nature and immanent in His Presence.  He is wholly other because He is God, He is wholly present as Being itself (“I AM WHO AM”).  In fact, it is only because He is transcendent in His nature that He can be present to all things at all times.  The difference between God and the world is not a spatial one, but modal.  God doesn’t occupy another space but His way of being is qualitatively different than creation.

Furthermore, God is not equally in all things.  To reject this doctrine is ultimately a rejection of the Incarnation and Christianity itself.  Christianity is founded upon the belief that God was most fully present in the created humanity of Jesus Christ.

Because man is an intellectual creature, God is more in him than the rest of visible creation.  Man is the only being in visible creation who has the capacity to know and love God.  In that way God is “in” man as an object known is in the knower and the desired object is in the lover.  This presence is not as perfect as the presence of God in man when he is in a state of grace; for grace is the very life of the Trinity and “adheres” to the human soul.  Sanctifying grace means that God acts directly upon the human soul, making all of its actions God-like.

Above it was mentioned in passing that God is most fully present, in the Incarnation.  He is really and truly present in the Person of Jesus Christ.  His human nature was the one thing in visible creation that contains the very essence of God.  The Eucharist, as the extension in time and space of Christ’s personal sacrifice on the Cross, also makes Him fully personally present.  While in the Incarnation His divinity remained hidden within the human nature of Christ, in the Eucharist not only His divinity remains hidden, but His humanity hides under the appearances of bread and wine.  Although hidden under these signs, He is no less present than He was when He walked the Earth.  This is what we mean when we say that the Eucharist contains the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ.

Herein lies the problem with the effort to associate the New Age with St. Francis of Assisi—the Eucharist.  He may be remembered most for his love of animals and evangelical poverty, but his writings show his greatest love among all of Creation was for the Eucharist.  He believed in the Real Presence, not just intellectually, but with a heart that burned to adore Our Lord in the Eucharist.  In his Letter to All the Friars he implored his spiritual sons to “show all reverence and all honor possible to the most holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in whom the things that are in heaven and the things that are on earth are pacified and reconciled to Almighty God.  I also beseech in the Lord all my brothers who are and shall be and desire to be priests of the Most High that, when they wish to celebrate Mass, being pure, they offer the true Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ purely, with reverence, with a holy and clean intention, not for any earthly thing or fear or for the love of any man, as it were pleasing men.”

The Little Way and Purgatory

Divine Mercy, Saints

When the Church canonizes a Saint it is not only their witness of life that is being acknowledged, but the Church is also canonizing their teachings as well.  In other words, the Saints are recognized as credible witnesses in both deed and word.  This makes perfect sense when we admit that sanity breeds sanctity and sanctity breeds sanity.  The Saints show us how the unchanging Gospel is to be understood and lived in ever-changing times.  In this regard, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose feast day we celebrate tomorrow (Oct.1 ) is no different.  When he canonized her in 1925, Pope Pius XI said that “the Spirit of truth opened and made known to her what he usually hides from the wise and prudent and reveals to little ones; thus she enjoyed such knowledge of the things above… that she shows everyone else the sure way of salvation.”

When he declared her a Universal Doctor of the Church, Pope St. John Paul II said that her emphasis on the Gospel message of the Little Way gives her an “exceptional universality.”  Her Little Way is based on an equally radical trust in God’s goodness and her own nothingness.  She saw within herself a great desire for holiness that she insists God would not have placed there unless He planned to give it to her.  Her response was not so much to try harder, but to trust more that He would achieve His purposes in her.

The Little Way is really just the Gospel in a thinly veiled disguise.  The message is the same—trust.  It is a lack of trust in God that leads to the Fall.  “Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of.  All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness” (CCC 397).

Every sin reveals a lack of trust in God.  God, Who made us as creatures to be loved, knows best what makes us lovely.  We don’t entirely trust that what He tells us is actually what is best for us and so we try to do it our own way.  If we trusted Him, then we would do what He says.  Once that trust is restored however we are willing to do everything He says precisely because we know He has our best interest at heart.  No matter how vexing or how hard it appears, we will do it because our Father has told us it is what is best.

This perspective of sin’s relationship to the Divine Fatherhood was a favorite of John Paul II’s.   “Original sin attempts to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man only with a sense of the master-slave relationship” (Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p. 228).  The Father’s solution is not simply to say “trust Me,” but shows us how trustworthy He is.  It is Our Lord’s radical trust in His Father that establishes the truth of God’s Fatherhood once and for all.

Little Flower

Based on her own radical trust, Thérèse offered herself as an oblation to God’s merciful love, composing a beautiful Act of Oblation as a Victim of Divine Love

In order that my life may be one Act of perfect Love, I offer myself as a Victim of Holocaust to Thy Merciful Love, imploring Thee to consume me unceasingly, and to allow the floods of infinite tenderness gathered up in Thee to overflow into my soul, that so I may become a very martyr of Thy Love, O my God! May this martyrdom, after having prepared me to appear in Thy Presence, free me from this life at the last, and may my soul take its flight–without delay–into the eternal embrace of Thy Merciful Love!

This prayer is often a stumbling block to those who would put the Little Way into practice.  How can she offer herself as a victim of holocaust to Divine Love?  Why must this offering involve becoming a victim (i.e.suffering)?  As Theresa of Avila once said, “Lord if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.”

To answer this we have to, like Thérèse, recognize our nothingness or littleness.  This is not so much about humility but an acknowledgment that we are fundamentally broken.  We entrust ourselves to the Divine Physician to heal us.  Like any good doctor we trust, we know that God will often first have to wound us in order to heal us (Job 5:18).  He will choose the least invasive procedure, but He will never be so cruel as to stop the surgery in the middle.

Could God heal us without first wounding us?  While I think we will all be surprised when we find out all the hidden ways God has healed us, the answer no, not completely.  This is because He wants to re-establish that relationship of trust.  To give us everything without us knowing the cost builds, not trust, but mistrust and jealousy.  This is especially true considering how He distributes His gifts unevenly among His children.  The only way to show Himself as Father is to truly father us—raising us as sons and daughters in Christ, disciplining us, and never allowing us to become spoiled.

There is nothing passive in the Little Way.  St. Thérèse offers herself as a living sacrifice, but she knows that like most living sacrifices they tend to crawl off the altar.  Trust takes effort because we are pre-disposed to the lack of trust that comes with our condition as fallen creatures.  Trust is difficult because there is always a voice telling us why we shouldn’t trust.  But small acts of trust bring about larger ones until we are capable of absolute trust.

In Thérèse’s mind there are practical implications of the Little Way; one of which seems shocking at first.  She thought those who practiced it could avoid Purgatory altogether.

Thérèse was deeply distressed by the resignation that most people had (and still have) that they will need Purgatory after death.  In a letter to Sr. Maria Philomena she said

You do not have enough trust. You have too much fear before the good God. I can assure you that He is grieved over this. You should not fear Purgatory because of the suffering there, but should instead ask that you not deserve to go there in order to please God, Who so reluctantly imposes this punishment. As soon as you try to please Him in everything and have an unshakable trust He purifies you every moment in His love and He lets no sin remain. And then you can be sure that you will not have to go to Purgatory.

Notice that she is not saying that Purgatory is unnecessary, but that it can be avoided.  She even says that God is grieved over souls going to Purgatory because they are kept from Him.  The Little Way preaches that God will give us all the means we need to be purified in this life.  To the extent that we trust He is at work, then it will be effective in us.  To the extent that we resist, we will need other means (up to an including Purgatory).  The soul that completely trusts in God knows He is at work and so they abandon themselves to His Providential care.  In other words, she says the infallible way to avoid Purgatory is to graciously receive it here on earth.

St. Thérèse was well aware of the profundity of her understanding of God’s love and her role in preaching the Little Way as a means of sanctification.  She begged God to give her a legion of “little souls” that were follow her.  “I beg You to cast Your Divine Glance upon a great number of little souls. I beg You to choose a legion of little Victims worthy of Your LOVE!”  Through her powerful intercession, may we make of ourselves an oblation to Divine Love.

Finding Joy

Virtue

Prior to becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger addressed a group of Catechists in Rome on the topic of the New Evangelization.  He commented that one of the greatest obstacles to the Gospel is poverty.  The greatest poverty, the future Pope commented, is the inability of joy.  All of us seek joy and yet it remains elusive for many of us because we are unable to receive it.  Why might this be?

Joy remains elusive for the simple reason that we do not know what it is and therefore fail to identify it when it comes.  Joy, according to Blessed Paul VI, is the satisfaction that occurs when we possess a known and desired good [Gaudete in Domino (GD), 1].  Because joy is related to a “known and desired good,” and specifically man’s highest faculties of knowing and willing, we can say it originates within man’s spirit and not from within the body.  It may spill over into the body and be experienced as bodily pleasure, but that is not always the case.  To help us separate joy from pleasure St. Thomas says “we take delight both in those things which we desire naturally, when we get them, and in those things which we desire as a result of reason. But we do not speak of joy except when delight follows reason.”  Identification of the good as truly good and a love of it then are key components of joy.

An ever-present danger is to think that joy can only be found in the possession of God.  What this leads to is compartmentalization and an “over-spiritualizing” of our lives.  Joy finds its fullness in the possession of God as Goodness itself, but there is such thing as natural joy.  In fact supernatural joy assumes that we are capable of natural joy.

At each stage of Creation, God took delight (“it was good”) and upon its completion He rested delighting in the whole as “very good” (Gn 1:31).   In other words, God found joy in Creation.  Mankind, made in His image, is given a share in that joy.  Certainly if God finds joy then we should too.

We might find joy in a beautiful sunset or an incredible landscape, but in truth joy mostly comes in “smaller” ways.  Natural joy comes when we do those things that fulfill our nature— our work, our duties, and our relationships.  All of these things are true goods that fulfill us and thus sources of joy.

Why was it that God chose shepherds tending their flock as the first recipients of the message of great joy (Lk 2:11-12)?  Was it because they were particularly pious?  There is nothing to indicate that.  Was it because they were breathlessly awaiting the Messiah?  Again, nothing indicates this.  Instead the angels appear to them because they were open to supernatural joy.  They had found natural joy in watching their sheep by night.  They saw the good of their work and the fruits that it provided them and they delighted in them.  Supernatural joy, in the Person of God Himself, found them and He came to find us too so that our “joy might be complete” (John 15:11).

This is why supernatural joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.  Just as fruit only comes to a tree when it is mature, once a man has a certain spiritual maturity he finds the fruit of joy from his possession of the Holy Spirit.

joy-and-sadness

St. Thomas says that “no man can live without joy” so the Devil is always lurking trying to steal our joy.  We must also then be aware of the obstacles to joy.

Recall that joy comes in the recognition of a good thing as truly good.  If we are loaded down by our “responsibilities” and do not allow silence to speak to us about these goods, we may not recognize them as good.  We can only love what we know, so until we truly see them as good we cannot delight in them.  By cultivating silence in our lives as a time of reflection of the good things in our lives, we can develop the capacity for joy.  Rather than gratitude, the culture attempts to instill envy in us.  You will never find joy in keeping up with the Joneses.  As Paul VI said, “in a fast-moving world, too often men are prevented from enjoying daily joys. Nevertheless such joys do exist. The Holy Spirit wants to help these people rediscover these joys, to purify them, to share them” (GD, 5).  No prophet of gloom, the Blessed Pontiff left us with an antidote—developing a Marian spirit who “mediates on the least signs of God, pondering them in her heart” (GD, 5).

Paul VI also mentioned that “technological society has succeeded in the multiplying of opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty generating joy” (GD, 1).  Technology (which literally means “the study of technique”) offers us efficiency, but there are no efficient ways to find joy.  In addition to silence, joy also takes work.  Technology is meant to reduce work.  This is a good as long as it doesn’t reduce man at the same time.  Even though it may create a temporary high, you can never derive joy from a thousand “likes” on Facebook.  But joy can come from a single smile from your child even after a trying day.  It might feel good to make one-handed catch in Madden ’17, but it will never bring the joy that comes from running a route until you have perfected it and then having the ball right on your hands when you turn around.

St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians says “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake because I make up for what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ” (Col 1:24).  At first glance it seems that only a sadist would find joy in his sufferings, but there is something more at play here that is worth investigating.  This is especially true because suffering appears to be the one insurmountable obstacle to joy.  How is it possible to find joy in the midst of suffering?

Joy is not the same thing as giddiness.  Those who find joy in suffering still feel the pain of it.  They still suffer.  That is because it is not the suffering that causes them joy but the thing that they possess because of the suffering.  When suffering comes upon us, we know that we have God’s personal attention.  He has handpicked our suffering because it is the gentlest way for us to be made perfect like Jesus, the Suffering Servant.  We can rejoice because we are being perfected, like gold tested in fire.  We can rejoice because someone else through our participation in the Cross is being perfected.  The point is that we rejoice like St. Paul because we find the meaning of our suffering.  For those of us who have suffered we find joy in the goods that the Almighty Father attached to the suffering (for my own testimony read here).  The Cross really is the Tree of Life.

A Perfect Marriage?

Family, marriage, Mary, Saints

In a letter to the Italian Cardinal Carlo Caffara, the Fatima visionary Sr. Lucia prophesied that “the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family.  With marriage and the family under attack from so many fronts, her words are truly prophetic.  But it is her commentary on the prophecy that is worthy of consideration.  She added, “Don’t be afraid because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue…however, Our Lady has already crushed its head.”   What she was implying is that it is Mary, specifically in her marriage with Joseph, that crushed the Devil’s head.  To put it more succinctly, it was Christ Who redeemed marriage and the marriage of His parents shared the first-fruits.

In order to see their marriage as the prototype of a redeemed marriage, it is necessary to clear up some misconceptions regarding the Holy Family, most of which have arisen more recently.  The most common misconception is that Mary was an unwed mother, her child somehow being conceived outside of wedlock.

Mary and Joseph were already married at the time of the Incarnation.  Our Lady was not an unwed mother.  For proof of this, we need only look at the words of the angel to Joseph when he tells him not to fear to take his wife into his home (Mt 1:20).  A divorce does not break off an engagement.  Joseph’s consideration of divorce is because they are already married.

If Joseph and Mary share what would be the prototype of marriage, then why would Joseph consider divorcing her in the first place?  When Joseph considers divorcing Mary, the angel appears to him and tells him that the child has been divinely conceived and that he should not fear to take her as his wife.  Some have taken Joseph’s decision to divorce her as a sign that he thought her to have been guilty of adultery, but that he did not want to expose her to the shame publicly.  However, this does not really fit with Joseph being a “righteous man.”  A righteous man would have followed every precept of the law of Moses including the requirement that if a wife was found in the act of infidelity by her husband then he was forced to divorce her and make her crimes known.  Anyone who hid the crime was also guilty (see Lev 5:1).  Therefore, if Joseph did not denounce her then it is because he did not suspect her.

Instead the more compelling explanation is the one that is offered by Aquinas.  He contends that Mary told Joseph what had happened and out of a sense of religious awe he thought himself unworthy to serve as the earthly father of the Son of God and husband of Mary.  Aquinas says “Holy Joseph pondered in his humility not to continue to dwell with so much sanctity.”  This explains the angel’s response to Joseph that he should not “fear to take Mary his wife into his home.”  It is the angel who affirms Joseph’s vocation as head of the Holy Family.

Establishing that they were married at the time of the Annunciation is also important for another reason.  Properly understood we should say that Jesus was given not just to Mary but within the marriage of Joseph and Mary.  God always respects the nature He has created and children are to be given as a fruit of marriage.  Therefore St. Joseph and Our Lady had a true and valid marriage.  There was never any suggestion that Our Lord was illegitimate, despite what some contemporary theologians may say.  The Incarnation was to be brought about through the Holy Family and not just through Mary.  It has been the constant tradition of the Church that prior to their marriage that both Joseph and Mary had taken a vow of perpetual virginity, but in their humility chose to keep it hidden.

This leads one to ask how if the marriage was never consummated that they could have a valid marriage.  Pope St. John Paul II addressed this question in a General Audience in 1996 (21 July) when he said:

“Precisely in view of their contribution to the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, Joseph and Mary received the grace of living both the charism of virginity and the gift of marriage. Mary and Joseph’s communion of virginal love, although a special case linked with the concrete realization of the mystery of the Incarnation, was nevertheless a true marriage.”

For a marriage to be valid, consummation is not necessary.  All that is necessary in matrimony is mutual consent and fidelity—both of which is found in their marriage.

st-joseph-and-mary-marriage

This non-consummation presents a further obstacle in that it makes it seem like the marriage was a mere façade.  After all some might say, if they were lacking a sex-life, then it was missing something that is a fundamental part of all healthy marriages.  It is this pattern of thought that reveals exactly why our perception of marriage has gone awry.

Sexual love is not the same thing as genital contact.  Sexual love may include that, but it does not exhaust it.  As proof of how narrow our thinking about this has become, Professor David O’Connor points out in his book Plato’s Bedroom that a modern reader would be scandalized to read a 19th century novel in which a man and woman are “making love” in a room full of other people.  The term “making love” would have referred to the couple creating intimacy through conversation and planting the seeds of enduring love.  Modernity however have taken this much broader meaning and reduced it to nothing but a physical act.

To be clear, this is not meant to imply that the marital embrace is just like conversation and all the other ways in which married couples “make love.”  It is most assuredly a part, but it is a foundational part.  That is why, even if it is not strictly necessary, consummation is an important part of marriage.  But, and this is a big but, it is important not in itself but because of its inner meaning.

The marital embrace is a sacrament—a sign of the couple’s total gift of self to each other.  Because we are fallen, we are unable to make a total gift of ourselves to each other in marriage.  All of our efforts at “making love” will always be tainted, even if in diminishing amounts, with self-love.  The marital embrace is an expression of the desire to make this gift by making a complete and total gift of ourselves physically to our spouses.  This is why contraception is so damaging to marriage—it obscures this sign.

Mary and Joseph on the other hand were capable of making this total gift of self.  In other words, they didn’t need the sign because they were already capable of the thing signified.  Certainly they could have expressed their total gift to each other through a marital embrace, but they didn’t need to like the rest of us do.  As if to offer proof of this, they share the fruit of a consummated marriage, a child.  This child comes about without the act itself.  In other words, their unity of hearts which is shown by the sign of consummation in all other marriages is actually given in the sign of Our Lord.  Summarizing, Mary and Joseph share the fruit of consummated marriage without the act itself.

While the sacrament of marriage had yet to be instituted, the marriage of Our Lady and St. Joseph remains a perfect sign or type of the union of Christ with the Church because it is the Church as a virginal bride wedded to the Virginal Christ.  This is why some Church Fathers have referred to Joseph as the “Virginal Father of Christ.”  This is an especially apt title given that God could not deny Joseph the paternal right to the fruit of his wife’s womb.  Joseph was no mere figurehead, but a husband and father in the truest sense, even if not biologically so.

Looking around society today it seems Sr. Lucia is right—Satan has set his sights on marriage and the family.  This is what makes the Feast of the Holy Family such an important celebration within the Church and serves as an opportunity for us to consecrate our family life to the Holy Family.

Mary and St. Joseph, pray for us!

The Church, Contraception and the UN

Contraception

Today, the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, will present a report at a UN-hosted meeting calling upon “the Catholic hierarchy to reverse their stance against so called ‘artificial’ contraceptives.”  While they have not yet made the full report available, a Summary report is presented on their web site.  Although a cursory glance shows that none of their arguments are particularly new, their platform is.  To present the report in such a prominent setting is sure to garner attention, especially in our culture of sexual liberation.

In examining their arguments, one can see that they readily acknowledge the reason Humanae Vitae presents such a strong defense against anyone who would seek to reverse the Church’s teachings.  It is because it relies on both reason and faith.  Because very few people accept arguments from authority any longer, it is instructive to examine their “Assessment of the Objections to the Natural Law.”

  • 3.1. HV’s argument is that because the biological “laws of conception” reveal that sexual intercourse has a “capacity to transmit life” (HV §13), each and every act of sexual intercourse has a “procreative significance” (HV §12) and “finality” (HV §3), and an “intrinsic relationship” to procreation (HV §11).

This misinterprets the biological evidence. The causal relationship between insemination and, on the other hand, fertilization, implantation, and ultimately procreation, is statistical, not necessary. The vast majority of acts of sexual intercourse do not have the biological “capacity” for procreation, and therefore they cannot have procreation as their “finality” or “significance.”

Blessed Paul VI may have been an old, celibate man locked away in the Vatican, but he knew enough that not to say that every sexual act necessarily ends in pregnancy.  If he did then there would not have made any mention to having “Recourse to Infertile Periods” (HV 16).  They are twisting his words in an attempt to make the Church seem behind the times.

It is still worthwhile addressing the fact that “procreation is statistical, not necessary.”  On a biological level, the purpose of sexual intercourse is pregnancy.  Two organisms come together for the purpose of becoming a single reproducing organism.  Whether pregnancy actually occurs is outside the control of the two organisms. Because man has an animal nature the end of sexual activity in nature is reproduction (its finality).  But because man also has reason that enables him to discover the laws of God from within the laws of nature, he knows that he ought not to interfere with the natural end of the marital embrace.  There are other factors outside the direct control of the man and woman that determine pregnancy (timing, fertility, etc.), but the basis of the natural law argument is that we ought never to interfere with those things which by nature cause us to flourish (for a more thorough argument against Contraception using the Natural Law, see this entry).

  • 3.2. Secondly, it is mistaken to derive a moral prescription directly from a factual description, i.e. a judgment of value (about what morally ought to be) directly from a judgment of fact (about what is).

However, this is what HV does when it infers that people engaging in sexual intercourse must always be open to the possibility of procreation from the (incorrect) fact that each and every act of sexual intercourse has a procreative finality.

For the same reason, it is also incorrect to deduce a divine command directly from the existence of a law of nature, contrary to what HV does when asserting that the above mentioned moral prescription is God’s will.

It is interesting that they chose to hide this argument here since it would be sufficient (if it were true) to dismiss all of Humanae Vitae’s appeal to reason based on natural law.  By invoking the Humean principle that you cannot derive an “ought from an is”, the authors are hoping the entire argument crumbles.  In essence they are saying that there is no connection between what a thing is and how it ought to be treated.  The problem with this is that it leads to a rejection of all morality and reduces everything to merely subjective wishes.  From the fact that a creature is a human being, we derive that they ought to be treated in a certain way.  This is the very basis of human dignity, something I am not sure that the even UN would be willing to deny since it is at the foundation of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

francis-at-the-un

  • 3.3. The affirmation that human beings may not interfere with the biological laws regulating human reproduction because they have been established by God is in contradiction with observational evidence on how human beings interact with the created order.

As agents of reason, human beings have a unique capacity to intentionally alter the schedule of probabilities inherent in the physical, chemical and biological laws of nature. This is a reality of daily life: for instance, any sort of medical intervention, from something as insignificant as taking pain-killers to something as consequential as performing cardiovascular surgery, affects probabilities – of healing, survival, death, etc. Furthermore, the decision not to intervene in natural processes also affects those probabilities, just as choosing to intervene does.

The moral question is not whether to alter the schedule of probabilities within natural processes, but rather whether, when, and how doing so is conducive to human flourishing and the flourishing of all creation.

The pill (or any other act that renders us sterile) is unique among all medical interventions.  It actually stops a process that is considered to be healthy from occurring.  All of the examples that they gave actually restore healthy functioning to various organs.  In other words, this argument is one of a false analogy.

Furthermore, no doubt, as “agents of reason, human beings have a unique capacity to intentionally alter the schedule of probabilities inherent in the physical, chemical and biological laws of nature,” but that does not mean that they should.  Just because it is technologically possible doesn’t mean it is morally permissible.  This is precisely what is at question here, whether we ought to.

  • 4. Furthermore, it is contradictory to affirm, on the one hand, that as a general principle “sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive [is] intrinsically wrong,” and on the other that it is morally legitimate to practice NFP with the “intention to avoid children and [the] wish to make sure that none will result” (HV §16).

Although he did not sign the document, Machiavelli is there in spirit.  This is a common argument that falls under the principle that the end justifies the means.  In the case of the couple using contraception and the couple practicing NFP, the end is the same—avoiding pregnancy.  But it matters how this end is brought about.  I may have a million dollars that I stole or that I worked for.  The end is the same, but the means in the first case are immoral while in the second they are praiseworthy.

This mistake flows from something that appears further down in the document:

  • 7.The morality of any human action is determined by the motives and intentions of the agent, the circumstances of the situation, and the consequences of that action.

They left out an important moral determinant, mainly the object itself.  The object of the act would be how one would define it if they were to witness the act.  There are some objects that regardless of the intention or circumstances, can never be made good (like killing an innocent person).  We call these actions intrinsically evil, a term they rejected because they conveniently left out the moral object itself.

When the famous Spanish fencer Inigo Montoya read the statement, he commented “Open.  I don’t think that word means what they think it means.”  The authors refer to the marital act being “open” but show a confusion as to what it means.  The Latin term per se destinatus refers to the marital act itself that must remain open (the object).  It does not refer to the couples’ subjective openness to procreation (intention).  There are just reasons why they may not want to be pregnant.  The authors themselves mention that there are morally good “motives for sexual intercourse include pleasure, love, comfort, celebration and companionship.”  Setting aside pleasure (because of its attachment to use), this is true and can even be the primary subjective reason for engaging in the marital act.  The point though is that those intentions must always accord with a moral object that can be ordered to the Good.

Before closing, an important subtlety bears mention as well because it shows how the two acts are different.  The contracepting couple acts so as to render the sexual act infertile.  The couple practicing NFP does not act at all, they simply abstain from the marital embrace during those days in which they may be fertile.  It is like the woman who maintains her weight by not eating as much versus the one who has an eating disorder—one respects the natural human process of digestion and weight gain, the other is dis-ordered because it acts against it.

Once word leaked that the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research was going to release a document, Professor Janet Smith set out to release a countering document in an attempt “to piggy-back on the extensive publicity they are likely to get.”  This is one of the few times the Faithful have had a response prepared at the same time a harmful document has been released.  Please support Professor Smith in any way you can, including distributing her document as widely as possible.