All posts by Rob Agnelli

The Magic of the Sacraments

Sacraments

One of the common criticisms leveled at Catholics by other Christians is related to the Sacraments—how can grace actually depend upon matter?  They accuse the Catholics of superstition and magic.  While the Church can defend herself readily against such an accusation by referring to the Incarnation itself as the supreme example of grace depending on matter, her example of late suggests otherwise.  There are many, including those in the highest levels of the Church, who treat the Sacraments like magic.  The Church may have received these precious gifts freely, but that doesn’t make them cheap.  We may think that by opening the Sacraments to more and more people regardless of their situation we are saving more souls, but it is exactly the opposite.  In fact it is a liberality with the Sacraments that has led to a whole-new field of evangelization—“the baptized non-believer.”

Dietrich Bonhoffer, a Lutheran pastor who was instrumental in Hitler’s ultimate demise, coined the term “cheap grace.”  Cheap grace is “the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.”  This mindset of Gratis vilis only serves to decrease the cultural relevance of the Church.  If grace is something that we can bestow upon ourselves; something that requires little more than showing up, then why do we need the Church at all?  Eventually we realize that it really doesn’t matter how often or whether we show up   When I feel like I need a refill, I will go.

Witness these recent Sacramental trends.

Baptizing Children of Same Sex Couples

In 2015, Pope Francis told priests not to withhold Baptism from anyone, especially children of same-sex couples.  He said, “With baptism, you unite the new faithful to the people of God. It is never necessary to refuse baptism to someone who asks for it.”

The instruction came even though the Code of Canon Law stipulates that there are cases where Baptism should be delayed or withheld indefinitely.  In Canon 868 it states that for an infant to be baptized licitly two things must occur.  First, “the parents, or at least one of them or the person who legitimately takes their place must consent.”  Second, there must be “a founded hope that the infant will be brought up in the Catholic religion; if such hope is altogether lacking, the baptism is to be delayed according to the prescripts of particular law after the parents have been advised about the reason.”  To further clarify this second point as to what constitutes a founded hope, the CDF also issued the document Instruction on Infant Baptism.

Assurances must be given that the gift thus granted can grow by an authentic education in the faith and Christian life, in order to fulfill the true meaning of the sacrament.  As a rule, these assurances are to be given by the parents or close relatives, although various substitutions are possible within the Christian community. But if these assurances are not really serious there can be grounds for delaying the sacrament; and if they are certainly non-existent the sacrament should even be refused.

Is this merely outdated “law” or is there something more going on here, something to be protected?

Anointing of the Sick

According to Canon Law, the Anointing of the Sick is only to be bestowed upon those who are in reasonable danger of death and have reached the age of reason.  Its effects are to strengthen the person to face death and the forgiveness of sins.  Priests now treat it as a routine Catholic Pre-op procedure, regardless of how serious their illness is or their personal disposition.

Is this being more “inclusive” or is there a reason why this law is in place?

Confirmation

If you ask any DRE they will say that the majority of the “students” in the Confirmation Prep classes do not attend Mass regularly.  Once they “graduate” they are also just as likely to remain in the ranks of the unchurched.  They perform the Sacrament in the hopes that the grace will somehow “stick” if only for a few of them.

Eucharist for the “Re-married”, Confession and Matrimony

In one fell swoop these three Sacraments are included on our list.  Thanks to the ambiguity of Amoris Laetitia and a recent endorsement of the Argentine Bishops interpretation that paves the way for “some” living in irregular marriages to receive the Sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist.  Confession now forgives sins that you “can’t” express a firm purpose of amendment for and the Eucharist gives grace to a soul in an objectively sinful situation.  And the grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony is expanded to second-marriages (and even third and fourth).

houdini

In each of these cases there is a fundamental belief that the Sacraments magically bestow grace regardless of the person himself or herself.  But the Church has always understood the grace attached to the Sacraments in two dimensions.  First there is the grace attained through the sacraments ex opere operato.  This refers to the fact that the Sacraments are instrumental causes of grace.  This means that it is “from the work performed” (literal meaning of ex opere operato) alone grace is given by a Sacrament regardless of the faith of the recipient or the minister.

It is the second dimension however that is consistently ignored today and that is the grace available, ex opere operantis. This is the actual “amount” of grace received relative to the disposition of the receiver. It is this distinction that helps explain why the Eucharist contains enough grace to sanctify the world and yet the amount of grace varies from individual to individual.

It is the ex opere operantis character of sacramental grace which keeps the Sacraments from becoming magical instruments.  The Sacrament may objectively bestow grace, but only in the amount that the recipient has the capacity for.  Those who are not disposed at all, receive no sanctifying grace even though it is still present in the Sacrament.  As St. Thomas says, “whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver and not according to the mode of the giver.”  The Sacraments are beautifully adapted to human nature—both universally and individually.  They do not overpower man—that would make them magic.  Instead they are truly super-natural, building upon a man’s natural condition.

Those who think they are being “pastoral” by relaxing the “laws” around the Sacrament are doing more than just treated the Sacraments like magic.  As Pope Benedict said on a number of occasions; to be pastoral does not mean to change the truth but to help the other adjust his life to the truth.  The truth is that the Sacraments may be necessary for salvation (either absolutely or relatively), but they are not sufficient.  This gift requires the proper environment to grow in and when that environment is not provided the person may be worse off than they would have otherwise been.  While Baptism leaves an indelible mark on the soul, that mark becomes a bulls-eye for the evil one when it is not protected and nourished.  Likewise with Confirmation—we put on the soldier’s uniform we should expect to get attacked by the enemy.  Our Lord seems to warn us of this when He speaks of a man, who after being cleansed of an evil spirit finds himself inhabited by seven more because his house was empty and actually ends up worse off (Mt 12:44-46).  Somebody may have told the Corinthians it was fine to go to Communion, but St. Paul says there are dangerous consequences for the person in a state of grave sin.  One may have permission to go to Communion, but that doesn’t mean they should.  Likewise, a person may wrongly assume they are in a state of grace after going to Confession.  Is this person better off than the person who knows they are in sin?

Just so we don’t think this is just Pope Francis’ problem or some liberal Priest who gives Communion to whoever shows up at the Church, we should examine ourselves and see what our own mentality is.  How often do we approach the Sacraments as if they are going to magically heal us without the hard work of repentance?  Continually confessing the same sins in the Sacrament of Confession?  Perhaps we are waiting for God to magically heal us and not actively cooperating with Him.  Receiving the Eucharist regularly and yet not gaining a further share in Christ’s virtues?  Perhaps we are not preparing ourselves well.  Timid in witnessing to the Faith?  Perhaps we are doing something to stand in the way of the grace of Confirmation.

In summary, I turn to the Catechism which reminds us:

The assembly should prepare itself to encounter its Lord and to become “a people well disposed.” The preparation of hearts is the joint work of the Holy Spirit and the assembly, especially of its ministers. The grace of the Holy Spirit seeks to awaken faith, conversion of heart, and adherence to the Father’s will. These dispositions are the precondition both for the reception of other graces conferred in the celebration itself and the fruits of new life which the celebration is intended to produce afterward (CCC 1098).

Not magic, indeed.  Paraphrasing Augustine, “God will not save us, even by the Sacraments, without us.”  Grace may be free, but it isn’t cheap.

Modesty and the Freedom to Be Loved

Moralilty, Theology of the Body, Virtue

An assistant principal at a Texas High School recently came under fire for making comments that were “inappropriate and offensive to students.”  What did he say?  During an assembly he called out the young ladies in the school for wearing tight clothes and short shirts.  He went on to blame them for “the boys’ low grades” intimating that they are distracted by the clothes many of the girls wear.  While his comments may have been lacking in humor and mode of delivery, they were not lacking in truth.  He was challenging them to dress more modestly.  The problem is that many young people lack the necessary context to understand the value of modesty and therefore are “offended” when someone says something.

Before he was to become Bishop of Rome, Fr. Karol Wojtyla wrote what might ultimately become his most important work, Love and Responsibility.  In it, he examines the relationship between the sexes and lays out the foundations of what would become his Theology of the Body.  Perhaps if the Assistant Principal was familiar with the work, he would have been able to draw on Fr. Wojtyla’s lengthy discussion on the importance of modesty.

In the book he makes what many today would consider a radical assumption—that men and women are different.  This difference is not just skin deep but goes to the very depth of their being as man and woman.  In fact our bodies are simply expressions of these differences rather than the totality of these differences.  These differences even affect the ways in which men and women are attracted to each other.

When one speaks of being “attracted” to someone, it primarily means that there is a response to a perception of some value in that person.  But because the person is not just an object but also a subject, there is always the danger of treating the other as a “something” rather than a “somebody.”  To guard against this tendency, Fr. Wojtyla articulates what he calls the personalistic norm—“A person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.”

The sexual attraction (Wojtyla calls it the “sexual urge”) between men and women is a recognition of the sexual value of the other person.  It is experienced in two forms; sensuality and sentimentality.  Sensuality is the attraction to the body of the person of the opposite sex.  Sensuality is stirred when we encounter a person of the opposite sex and find value in their body as an object of personal enjoyment. Sentimentality is the emotional attraction to the sexual value residing in the whole person in the form of their masculinity and femininity.  Since sensuality is oriented towards the body as an object of enjoyment, it is generally stronger in men while sentimentality because it is more relational is strongest in women.

Because the sexual urge is so strong, there is always the danger that men and women will look upon the other person merely for their sexual value.  They then become an object of pleasure rather than a person to be loved.  In order for love to develop the entire “value” of the person must be seen and not just their sexual value.  What this means is that men and women must keep some of their sexual value hidden so that true love can blossom.

This, Fr. Wojtyla says, is the value in the experience of shame.  Shame arises any time that something which by its very nature ought to be private somehow becomes public.  Sexual shame arises when the sexual value of the person obscures their personal value.  Shame then acts like a protectant against use.  Most of us have experienced this.  A man instinctively will look away when he is caught staring at a woman he finds attractive.  A girl who is dressed immodestly will be forever adjusting her clothes.   Although they may not articulate it as shame, it is experienced by all but those who are shameless.  Modesty on the other hand is the “constant capacity and readiness to feel shame.”

pride-and-prejudice

As I mentioned sensuality is generally stronger in men.  This means that modesty and shame must be more pronounced in women.  The problem is that women are not primarily inclined to sensuality and so they do not intuit the need to conceal the body.  Modesty comes about when they gain an insight into male psychology

Even if it fell flat in its delivery, the Assistant Principal was trying to offer a much-needed insight into the male psychology.  Perhaps rather than being offended, what the students experienced was shame.  It isn’t just the boys’ problem for not focusing and it is not just the girls’ problem for dressing immodestly.  It is the self-perpetuating problem of use.  The girls dress immodestly, deliberately flaunting their sexual value, the boys respond by seeing only that.  The boys treat them as objects to be used and the girls accept this use.

The problem, I said, was one of context.  When we hear the word modesty we are immediately drawn to a Victorian encounter between men and women.  We must free modesty from this image.  Remember the goal is to keep sexual values from obscuring the true value of the person.  This does not mean that the person should hide all of their sexual value, only to the extent that they can be seen as a part of the value of the person.  The accentuation of sexual value by dress is inevitable and is not necessarily incompatible with modesty.  It is when the attire is chosen specifically to provoke a reaction that it becomes immodest.  As Fr. Wojtyla says, “What is truly immodest in dress is that which frankly contributes to the deliberate displacement of the true value of the person by sexual values, that which is bound to elicit a reaction to the person by sexual values, that which is bound to elicit a reaction to the person as to a ‘possible means of obtaining sexual enjoyment’ and not ‘a possible object love by reason of his or her personal value’.”

Most importantly, and this is what those young ladies needed to hear, modesty is more than keeping the boys from failing their classes and more than just protecting themselves from being gawked at.  “Sexual modesty is not a flight from love, but on the contrary the opening of a way towards it.”  Each of those young ladies desires to be loved and dressing immodestly, even if it garners attention, will never foster true love.  Only modesty frees love to blossom.

Creating the Missing Link

Bioethics

No stranger to the problem of radical Darwinism that presents man as nothing more than a “trousered ape,” GK Chesterton once quipped that “dogmatism of Darwinians has been too strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitur or dining with an undistributed middle.”  He condemned the Darwinian habit of looking at the history of prehistoric man (i.e. man before there was history) for the existence of a Missing Link.  What he probably could not have anticipated was that in some time in the future we might cease to look for the Missing Link in the past and begin to create it.

The NIH recently announced that it was in the process of making funding decisions for two areas of research in which:

  1. human pluripotent cells are introduced into non-human vertebrate embryos, up through the end of gastrulation stage, with the exception of non-human primates, which would only be considered after the blastocyst stage, or
  2. human cells are introduced into post-gastrulation non-human mammals (excluding rodents), where there could be either a substantial contribution or a substantial functional modification to the animal brain by the human cells.

Named for the Greek mythological fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head and a serpent’s tail called a Chimera, the research is focused on creating an organism that is composed of cells derived from human and non-human species.   The name alone ought to give us pause as to whether this is an avenue we ought to be pursuing.

To be fair, it is not the mingling of the cells that is problematic—technically all humans are chimeras in that they have many bacterial cells mixed in their bodies, but it is the type of cells that are problematic.  It helps to see the problem by cutting through some of the scientific jargon.

What exactly is a pluripotent cell?  It is a cell that has the capacity to develop into every cell type in the human body.  There are two main sources for these types of cells—embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells.

Gastrulation is an early developmental stage of an animal embryo in which three germ layers are formed—the ectoderm (by which the skin, nerves and brain are formed), the mesoderm (bone, connective tissue and muscle), and the endoderm (out of which the lungs, liver and digestive system form).

Blatocyst represents the stage in which a ball of cells forms just before implantation.

With these definitions in place we can clarify what is being proposed.

  1. Introducing human cells that have the potential to turn into any types of cells to an animal embryo at an early stage of development.

What researchers have discovered is that if they remove the nonhuman animal gene for the development of a specific body part in that animal and introduce pluripotent cells of another animal, then the animal will develop that body part.  A 2010 study in Japan showed that when researchers injected rat stem cells into embryos of mice that had been modified to not produce their own pancreas, the mice developed a healthy pancreas that was almost completely composed of rat cells.  The proposal is to do something similar with human stem cells that could develop body parts that would be composed of human cells.

2. At a later stage of development, human brain cells would be introduced into the                      animal brain.

This area of research would lead to “a substantial contribution or a substantial functional modification to the animal brain by the human cells.”

Even if we assume that the intention of the research is good, that is, therapeutic in nature, the creating of Chimeras is still morally problematic in ways that might not seem apparent at first.

Obviously the use of embryonic stem cells for research, because it is the result of the destruction of a child, creates a grave problem.  But even if adult stem cells are used, this still represents grossly unethical behavior.

First, the potential for the pluripotent cells to develop into any types of cells is a huge problem.  There is no way to know a priori which types of cells they might turn into.  Knocking out a particular gene may allow some control, but how do they keep them from developing into other types of cells?  In other words, the earlier the human stem cells are introduced during animal development the greater the chance for widespread integration. What would happen if some human cells made their way into the testes or ovaries and human sperm and eggs were grown?  Supposing two chimeric animals were to mate then it is possible that a human embryo could develop.

chimera-greek-mythology

Likewise with the brain.  One experiment took brain cells of developing quail and put them into developing brains of chickens.  The result was that the chickens exhibited vocal trills and head bobs like quails.  Should we expect anything different with the mingling of human and non-human brains?  The animals would begin to exhibit human behaviors.

This sheds light on the bigger issue and one that our society especially is in no position to navigate.  What exactly makes a person a person?  Where do we draw the line between a human and non-human?  The most obvious place to draw the line would be when the offspring has two human parents (we even have trouble doing this!).  When would the animals that have been integrated with human cells cease to be mere animals and instead become human?

This is not a question merely for philosophers but has legal implications.  When do we decide that the creature is worthy of the respect given to all human beings?  Does a humanzee have the same rights as other humans?  What are our obligations towards the Chimera?  When the research is done, can we simply destroy the chimeras or are we obligated to allow them to live?

It is this blurring between human and nonhuman ultimately that makes this type of research so dangerous.  While the researchers may have the best of intentions, there are dangerous consequences.  Fr. Tad Pacholczyk from the National Catholic Bioethics Center proposed the following guidelines when determining the licitness of particular Chimeric research:

  • The procedures must not involve the creation or destruction of human embryos.
  • They must not involve the replication of major pillars of human identity in animals, such as the brain system.
  • They must not involve the production of human gametes, meaning the basic building blocks of human reproduction.

One can easily see that what the NIH is proposing violates all three of these principles and therefore we have an obligation to oppose this.

We have been assuming good will on the part of those who are conducting the experiments, but the fact of the matter is that not all who embark on this work are looking for therapeutic applications.  In the 1920s, Josef Stalin tasked Russia’s top animal breeding scientist Ilya Ivanov to find a way to cross human beings with apes to create a super soldier.  Stalin may have died, but his dream did not die with him.  As CS Lewis said in his book Abolition of Man, “each new power won by man is a power over man as well.”  The power that man has to make himself what he pleases is really the power of some men to make other men what they please.

In conclusion, science offers great hope for the future of medicine.  However this requires a commitment to growth in our moral understanding as well in order to avoid the pitfall of confusing the technically possible with the morally permissible.  We would all be well advised to heed the warning of John Paul II when he said that once “the human body, considered apart from spirit and thought, comes to be used as raw material in the same way that the bodies of animals are used…we will inevitably arrive at a dreadful ethical defeat” (Letter to Families, 19).  We must stop the creation of the Missing Link.

Total Consecration to Jesus Through Mary

Mary

Are we living in the End Times?  Many people think the Second Coming imminent, finding signs of the Apocalypse everywhere.   One of those signs, according to St. Louis de Montfort will be a great number of souls who have been consecrated to Mary.  In True Devotion to Mary St Louis de Montfort says:

“that this will happen especially towards the end of the world, and indeed soon, because Almighty God and his holy Mother are to raise up great saints who will surpass in holiness most other saints as much as the cedars of Lebanon tower above little shrubs…These great souls filled with grace and zeal will be chosen to oppose the enemies of God who are raging on all sides. They will be exceptionally devoted to the Blessed Virgin. Illumined by her light, strengthened by her food, guided by her spirit, supported by her arm, sheltered under her protection, they will fight with one hand and build with the other. With one hand they will give battle, overthrowing and crushing heretics and their heresies, schismatics and their schisms, idolaters and their idolatries, sinners and their wickedness. With the other hand they will build the temple of the true Solomon and the mystical city of God, namely, the Blessed Virgin, who is called by the Fathers of the Church the Temple of Solomon and the City of God. By word and example they will draw all men to a true devotion to her and though this will make many enemies, it will also bring about many victories and much glory to God alone.”

If the great Marian saint is correct, then we should expect to see more and more people giving themselves to Jesus through Mary in consecration.  For many of us though, Marian consecration remains a mystery.  With that in mind, we will examine exactly what Marian consecration consists in.

The term consecration can lead to some initial confusion.  In the proper sense, to be consecrated means to be set aside and made holy.  Only God can make someone holy.  As a lover though God does not force anything upon us.  Instead He freely offers Himself to us and awaits our response.  This response is usually called Devotion.  It involves a decision to dedicate yourself to God and to allow this decision to give direction to all of your thoughts and actions.  This back and forth exchange between God and ourselves is usually described using the term Consecration.

Admittedly, the idea of consecration to anyone other than God, even to Mary seems antithetical to the Gospel.  We would be no better than the Israelites and their Golden Calf in that regard if our consecration were to anything other than God.  So to be clear, when we speak of Marian Consecration, we mean “giving ourselves entirely to the Blessed Virgin, in order to belong entirely to Jesus through her” (St. Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort, True Devotion to Mary, No. 121).  In other words, Marian Consecration is more about how this consecration to God can best be accomplished.

JPII and Mary

God consecrates us through Baptism.  By being baptized into Christ, we become partakers of the divine life.  He became humanly divine so that we might become divinely human.  As Scripture and the Church testify, the only means of consecrating ourselves to God is by giving ourselves to Jesus so that all facets of His life might be reproduced in us.  We must do as He said and do as He did.  We must become not just hearers of His word, but doers.  But nearly all the saints have testified that the surest commandment He gave was to “Behold your Mother.”

What Our Lord was doing was not merely making a plan so His Mother would be taken care of but setting up a relationship between His disciples and His Mother.  John, like the rest of her offspring has been entrusted to the Woman (Rev 12:17).

This relationship is a true relationship of mother and child and not merely a metaphorical one.  St. John Paul II, emphasizing how true motherhood always involves the child entrusting himself to the mother said:

“Of the essence of motherhood is the fact that it concerns the person. Motherhood always establishes a unique and unrepeatable relationship between two people: between mother and child and between child and mother. Even when the same woman is the mother of many children, her personal relationship with each one of them is of the very essence of motherhood…It can be said that motherhood ‘in the order of grace’ preserves the analogy with what ‘in the order of nature’ characterizes the union between mother and child. In the light of this fact it becomes easier to understand why in Christ’s testament on Golgotha his Mother’s new motherhood is expressed in the singular, in reference to one man: ‘Behold your son.’  It can also be said that these same words fully show the reason for the Marian dimension of the life of Christ’s disciples. This is true not only of John, who at that hour stood at the foot of the Cross together with his Master’s Mother, but it is also true of every disciple of Christ, of every Christian. The Redeemer entrusts his mother to the disciple, and at the same time he gives her to him as his mother. Mary’s motherhood, which becomes man’s inheritance, is a gift: a gift which Christ himself makes personally to every individual. The Redeemer entrusts Mary to John because he entrusts John to Mary…And all of this can be included in the word ‘entrusting.’ Such entrusting is the response to a person’s love, and in particular to the love of a mother” (Redemptoris Mater, 45).

So, while the method of consecration may be humanly instituted, Marian Consecration itself is divinely instituted. The Marian Pope’s emphasis on the word “entrusts.”  This sets up a special kind of relationship that is entirely personal.  Like all personal relationships, it requires a personal response, namely, “taking her into his own home.”

Summarizing, Pope St. John Paul II said that, “Consecrating ourselves to Mary means accepting her help to offer ourselves and the whole of mankind to Him who is holy, infinitely holy; it means accepting her help – by having recourse to her motherly heart which, beneath the Cross was open to love for every human being, for the whole world – in order to offer the world, the individual human being, mankind as a whole, and all the nations to Him who is infinitely holy” (Homily at Fatima May 13, 1982).

Practically speaking, how does one do this?  It starts with reading St. Louis de Montfort’s True Devotion to Mary.  Many saints (including John Paul II) read this book because it lays out the reasons why Marian consecration is vital to the Christian life, especially in the more troubling times.  After reading that, you pick a Marian feast day on which you wish to perform the act of consecration.  Then you should pick one of three methods of preparation.  You can use St. Louis de Montfort’s 33-day plan detailed with all the daily prayers in this link (see Step 3).  Fr. Michael Gaitley has simplified the 33-day preparation plan in a book called 33 Days to Morning Glory.  There is also a 9-day plan laid out by St. Maximilian Kolbe.  The main difference between the two sets of plans is that St. Maximillian’s is more apostolic and corporate in nature since it involves enrolling in the Militia Immaculata confraternity.

We close with one of the earliest consecration prayers—St. John Damascene’s Prayer of Consecration from 720 AD:

“We are present before you, O Lady, Lady I say and again Lady, binding our souls to our hope in you, and as to a most secure and firm anchor, to you we consecrate our minds, our souls, our bodies, in a word, our very selves, honoring you with psalms, hymns and spiritual canticles, insofar as we are able-even though it is impossible to do so worthily. If truly, as the sacred word has taught us, the honor paid to our fellow servants testifies to our good will towards our common Master, how could we neglect honoring you who have brought forth your Master? In this way we can better show our attachment to our Master.” (St John Damascene, First Sermon on the Dormition)

On Martyrdom

Martyrdom

The recent murder of Fr. Jacques Hamel by two Islamic jihadists while he was celebrating Mass has served as a stark reminder to those in the West the deathly reality that many Christians in the East face daily.  Nearly all the Catholic media covering the brutal act label him as a martyr.  While it is not unreasonable to think that he may in fact have been martyred, it is premature to proclaim him as one.  Not everyone who is killed for the faith is a martyr, but instead the Church has several conditions she checks before declaring someone a martyr.  In the mind of the Church, martyrdom is not something we can manufacture ourselves but instead is a vocation or calling by God.  This means that we must be patient and allow the Church to play her role as Mother in discerning the authenticity of the vocation before calling someone a martyr on our own.

In recognition that there were those who were loosely bestowing the title of Martyr, Pope Benedict XVI in a letter to the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints defined it as “(T)he voluntary enduring or tolerating of death on account of the Faith of Christ or another act of virtue in reference to God.”  He also reiterated the conditions for declaring a true martyrdom.

First there are the motives of the martyr himself.

“The martyrs of the past and those of our time gave and give life (effusio sanguinis [lit., ‘shedding of blood’]) freely and consciously in a supreme act of love, witnessing to their faithfulness to Christ, to the gospel and to the Church.”

The key to understanding martyrdom is connected to its literal meaning—witness.  A martyr accepts death voluntarily so as to witness to a good that is higher than life in the body.  He testifies by his actions the truth of the Gospel, most especially that Christ has definitively defeated death by His Resurrection.  Death has no sting for the martyr and therefore in steadfastness to his testimony of Christ, he is willing to endure it—“for to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

In this way Christian martyrdom is different from simply dying for a cause.  A martyr bears witness to the truth, and not just any truth, but a truth that is referred to God (i.e. we know He requires them of us and rewards us for them).  Faith requires both an inward belief and an outward expression and martyrdom becomes a supreme act of faith.

The reason why it is important to never lose sight of the fact that it is an act of witnessing is because death is not the goal.  Otherwise it would be akin to suicide.  In this way it is very different from something like Islamic “martyrdom” which usually consists in killing oneself (and taking others with you).  But Christian martyrdom is solely about witnessing even if that witness requires death.  This is why Peter and John after being chastised and beaten by the Jews were joyful in their witness to “obey God rather than men” even though they were not actually killed.

The second condition that Benedict XVI reiterated was related to the circumstances:

It is of course necessary to find irrefutable proof of readiness for martyrdom, such as the outpouring of blood and of its acceptance by the victim.

There is a certain amount passivity in the martyr that is akin to the passivity of Christ on the Cross.  Although the martyr is ready to suffer death, he does not seek it.  This ready acceptance of death in testimony of the Faith that is often the most difficult to establish.

Finally there is the intention of the persecutor.  He must show that it is a hatred of the faith that motivates him.

It is likewise necessary, directly or indirectly but always in a morally certain way, to ascertain the odium Fidei [“hatred of the Faith”] of the persecutor.

If we look at the case of Fr. Hamel specifically, it seems pretty clear that the killers were acting based on a hatred of the Faith.  Attacking a Catholic priest during Mass (assuming no other personal mitigating circumstances) would seem to be motivated primarily by a hatred of the faith.

Fr. Hamel

It is the other two conditions that would need to be established as well.  If the media reports of the incident are accurate, it appears that Fr. Hamel did in fact resist the attackers.  He apparently kicked at them just before they killed him.  An eyewitness named Sr. Danielle also said he resisted: “”They forced him to his knees and he tried to defend himself and that’s when the drama began,” said the nun.

This may seem as if this is just being a nitpick.  Clearly he was killed because he was a Catholic priest celebrating Mass.  Isn’t that enough?

In short, no, but it is important to understand what is being said.  If martyrdom is a vocation then to say that Fr. Hamel may not be a martyr is taking nothing away from him.  Nor is anything being said about his tremendous courage in facing his attackers and standing up to them.  There is nothing wrong with trying to defend yourself in that situation.  He should be lauded for his courage.

But, it is uncharitable on our part to refer to him as a martyr before the Church does.  It is akin to the habit of prematurely declaring someone a saint.  We should always act upon the presumption that the person is in purgatory.  Even if he is not, our prayers will have already been applied to him such that they will be part of the reason why he avoided it.  Because God is eternal, He knows of our prayers before we even pray them so that the merits can be applied retroactively.  Even if we are seeking his intercession, “our prayer for the dead is capable not only of helping them, but also of making their intercession for us effective” (CCC 959).

There is another reason why we should have a clear idea of what true martyrdom consists in and that is because the Sacrament of Confirmation marks all of us are marked for martyrdom even if we may not actually be called to it.  The sacramental grace that is bestowed on us in Confirmation is the “power of the Holy Spirit” by which we are enabled to believe firmly and profess boldly the Gospel (i.e witness).  When the Bishop lays his hands on the Confirmandi’s head,  he is setting them aside as a sacrifice to God the same way that the Levitical priests always laid their hands upon the head of victim of the burnt offering sacrifice to God, they always laid their hands upon its head (c.f. Lev 1:3 and Exodus 29:10, 15).  In Baptism we are made as “sons in the Son” and in Confirmation we are made to share His lot as a sacrifice.

Just like the solder who trains as if he is going to battle even if he may never make it on the front lines, we must train as if God will call us to martyrdom.  As Aquinas says “the virtue of martyrdom consists in a preparation of mind should the situation arise.”  We must know exactly what we are training for—to witness to an unwavering faith in the power of the Resurrection even if it means accepting death.

All too often we treat martyrdom as some shortcut or something we just fall into.  But every one of the true martyrs readied themselves long before the actual event.  They were in the habit of building their love for God through a total self-denial.  This is why the distinction between red martyrdom and white martyrdom is misleading.  There is only one martyrdom.  The material of the so-called white martyrdom is simply preparation for the real thing.  We may not all be called to it, but most certainly we are called to prepare for it.

Are you ready?

The Sacramental Habit

Sacraments

Call it whatever you’d like—looking for an opportunity to evangelize or eavesdropping (I’d prefer the former)—but the young couple at the table behind me and a Pastor of a home church were talking about why the couple was leaving the Catholic Church.  He was in full salesman’s mode, doing his best to “recruit” them.  They both felt that “there is no sense of community whatsoever and the sermons are really dull.  We just feel like we’re not being fed.”  “Sorry for interrupting,” I said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing how unhappy you are at your Parish.  Have you considered trying another Parish before leaving the Catholic Church altogether?  Maybe it’s the Parish and not the Catholic Church that isn’t a good fit.”  I learned about the couple—both grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school and actually knew the faith of the Church surprisingly well.  Sensing some momentum building from the nostalgia, I went for the kill (in the most charitable sense of the word), “Would you both be OK with walking away from the Sacraments and from the Eucharist?  That is the really cool thing about being Catholic—no matter how unfriendly the people are and no matter how bad the homily, we are absolutely guaranteed to have a real encounter with Jesus each week.  Nowhere else can give us that.”   And then I got…nothing.  “Well, the Sacraments are not really that important to us.  We just really want to worship in a place where we feel comfortable.”  I immediately realized I had grossly underestimated thinking that the Sacraments were a big deal to anyone who was Catholic.  My friends in the restaurant are not alone—a recent study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) found that despite a growth in the Catholic population world-wide, there has been an overall decrease in the Sacramental action of the Church.  And just like the couple in the restaurant, the problem may not be catechesis.  Instead what may be lacking is the necessary context of the entire Sacramental system.

The Christian conception of a Sacrament rests upon a certain pattern of viewing reality that is almost universally rejected in an age that has come to be dominated by rationalism and technology.  We speak in a language that reduces each thing as “nothing but X.”  Love is “nothing but a series of chemical reactions in the brain.” Human beings are “nothing but machines for propagating DNA.”  The universe is “nothing but a collection of atoms in motion” (all of these are direct quotes from nothing but Richard Dawkins’ vocal cords).  These atoms in motion may lead to an expanding universe, but it is a universe that is significantly smaller than when it started.

The lie of nothing but-ness is the belief that things can be known exhaustively once we have understood their chemical and physical properties.  Hamlet was right when he told Horatio, “there are more things in heaven and earth than are contained in your philosophy.”  Reality is more than meets the eye and we will only appreciate it when we see things not just as things but also as images pointing beyond themselves.  This is the sacramental worldview that is foundational to inviting the power of the Christian Sacraments into our lives

Our Lady on the Moon

To see how much this reductionism infects your thoughts, ask yourself the following question: why does the moon orbit the earth?  Most of us would say it is because of gravity.  Some might say so that there is some light at night.  But that only answers by what mechanism the moon orbits the earth or what makes it useful.  Both only lead to further questions—why gravity and not a giant pole?  Why the moon for light and not flashing lights across the sky?  The sacramentalist looks for the meaning of the moon as it is.  And what does he find?  That the moon tells us of the Blessed Mother, reflecting the light of Son on the darkened world.  She remains in our orbit because of the natural attraction of two bodies, namely love.

One might object that it is simply a matter of imagination that I see the moon that way.  Of course scripturally speaking this is not a stretch at all.  Revelation 12 presents Our Lady as having the “moon under her feet” showing off this connection.  But even on a human level we see both that things have meanings beyond themselves and we are not free to make them up.  Isn’t this exactly why Colin Kaepernick, the 49ers Quarterback who refused to stand during the national anthem is coming under so much scrutiny?  He is trying to attach a new meaning to the flag rather than the meaning that everyone else accepts as true.  The flag stands for the greatness of the American Spirit—one of courage, self-sacrifice and patriotism.  It not only symbolizes those values but also brings them about by its very presence.  Men literally have died defending the flag, not because the material is valuable, but because of what the flag is.  The flag is a sacrament.

CS Lewis compares these two ways of seeing, calling them looking at and looking along, in his essay Meditation in a Toolshed:

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. … Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

Everything is charged with meaning if only we are willing to look along and not just at.  This offers a way out of the profound boredom that so afflicts so many of us.  Rather than looking for distractions we find that the very things we are avoiding contain the meaning of life.  When we realize that meals are not “nothing but” the biological act of feeding, but instead a profoundly human and social activity by which life and the sources of life are shared among the diners then we will not be so apt to miss meals with our family.  When we see sex is not “nothing but” an urge but instead a fruitful and total giving and receiving of a man and woman then we will do nothing to violate its sacred character.  When instead of seeing our work as “nothing but” how we make money, but a call to complete God’s work of creation then our work will fulfill us, no matter how menial the task.

Oddly enough, it might be by listening to the favored secular mantra, namely “Respect for the Environment,” that we can restore the sacramental habit.  The word respect literally means to look again. Let us all develop this habit of looking again, this time along, our environments and see if our Sacramental lives don’t change for the better.

Encountering Jesus

Prayer, The Life of Jesus

Stunned silence—that is invariably the response when I ask what, at first glance, seems to be a softball for any Christian.  How do you know that Christ died, not just “for us”, but for you?  It is the classic head and heart problem.  The head can answer that Christ died for all of us and that includes me.  But only the heart can echo the confidence of St. Paul “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (Gal 2:20, emphasis added).  All of the Church’s doctrine and dogma is meant to feed the head with truths that are then realized in the heart of the believer.  But it is this very specific truth upon which the entire edifice of faith rests.

When the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” time and eternity met.  Everything that the Son of God did during His earthly sojourn does not merely remain the past as a single historical event, but “participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all times while being made present in them all” (CCC 1085).  Abstractly we can say that this means that the effects of the Cross and Resurrection are felt at all times (even those “prior” to the actual event).  We can move beyond the abstraction if reverse what is being said: at every moment during the Incarnation, all of history was present to the Son.

Sitting with this for a moment, something profoundly personal emerges.  If all moments of time were present to Him, then every moment of my life was present to Him.  In other words, there was not a single moment in time when I was not on Our Lord’s mind.  There was not a single moment of His life that He did not love me, not just affectively, but effectively.  At every moment He was actively working out my salvation for me and winning some very specific grace for me.

Now, I recognize that this may be very difficult to believe, not because it is unbelievable per se but because it is almost too good to be true.  That is why it helps to come at this truth from the darker side first.  Christ took on the burden of our sins during His Agony in the Garden.  The guilt of each and every sin of mankind was laid upon Him so that He could pay the price of our reconciliation.  While He saw each and every act of disobedience, there is a flip side of this as well; a side that Pope Pius XI points out in his encyclical on the Sacred Heart:

“For anyone who has great love of God, if he will look back through the tract of past time may dwell in meditation on Christ, and see Him laboring for man, sorrowing, suffering the greatest hardships, ‘for us men and for our salvation,’ well-nigh worn out with sadness, with anguish, nay ‘bruised for our sins,’ and healing us by His bruises… Now if, because of our sins also which were as yet in the future, but were foreseen, the soul of Christ became sorrowful unto death, it cannot be doubted that then, too, already He derived somewhat of solace from our reparation, which was likewise foreseen, when ‘there appeared to Him an angel from heaven’, in order that His Heart, oppressed with weariness and anguish, might find consolation. And so even now, in a wondrous yet true manner, we can and ought to console that Most Sacred Heart …” (Pope Pius XI, On Reparation to the Sacred Heart, 13).

More on the implications of this in a moment, but it reinforces the truth that what Christ did, He did very specifically for me.  How do I know this?  Because what I do now, effected Him then, both good and bad.  In other words, I know this because I was there with Him.  He willed to do what He did for me.  I can say that Christ would have still done what He did even if I was the only one who needed saving because in a very real sense, I am.  Each and every one of His acts is a personal act done for me.  It is not a single moment or act, but all of His moments and acts.

Conversion of Paul

Profound as this seems, this idea is not something new.  It has been part of the treasury of the Church and is summed up best by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical on the Mystical Body:

“[F]or hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love. O marvelous condescension of divine love for us! O inestimable dispensation of boundless charity! In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself” (Mystici Corporis Christi, 75).

Certainly our hearts are stirred when we grasp this, but we can realize in our lives in two particular ways.

Once grasped this truth takes flesh in our prayer lives; changing them forever.  St. Ignatius taught his followers to use their imagination in developing a composition of place when meditating on the life of Christ.  The reason why this is such an effective means to entering into dialogue with Our Lord is because we were actually in those places with Our Lord.  It is left to us to discover why Our Lord had us there.  In essence, we enter into those moments with Our Lord and ask Him what He wanted to give to us for our particular situation.  This also explains why when we meditate on the same event in Our Lord’s life at two different times, our experience is vastly different each time.  He didn’t just have a single grace to give us, but a particular grace suited to the very time we would approach Him.  It also keeps us from merely offering exegesis on Scripture during our prayer, but breathing it all in.  We will be exhausted long before we exhaust all that Our Lord willed to give us by His actions.

The second way is particularly appropriate during this Year of Mercy.  In Dives in Misericordia, St. John Paul II says that it is possible for us to show mercy to Jesus Himself.  He is referring not just to the Scriptural Works of Mercy of Matthew 25, but also acts of love that relieve the sufferings of Christ (DM, 8).  This follows directly from Pius XI’s teaching on Reparation to the Sacred Heart quoted above.  The idea of reparation may seem mechanical and cold, but once we look on it as “mercy” on Jesus it becomes a richly personal activity.  Mercy means to take on the misery of your friend as if it is your own.  So, for example when we genuflect before Him in the Tabernacle, we alleviate the pain of the mockery during His Crowning with Thorns.  When we have a bad night’s sleep we can offer it to Him who had nowhere to lie His head.  The instances could be multiplied, but the point is that in “offering it up” we are not mechanically writing in some spiritual ledger but personally entering into the Incarnation.

Pope Francis throughout his pontificate has spoken of the necessity for Christians to foster a “Culture of Encounter” by which we step out of ourselves to encounter other people.  This encounter is founded upon a very real encounter first with Jesus Himself—a response to His encounter with each of us during the Incarnation..

The Sign of Jonah

Mercy

Throughout His public ministry Our Lord was constantly giving signs of Who He really is.  Despite this, many around Him looked upon His signs for their entertainment value alone.  At one particular point a crowd had gathered around Him hoping to catch a performance.  Intuiting this, He told them “This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it, except the sign of Jonah” (Lk 11:29).  He promises that they too will be given a sign, but a very distinct sign—the Sign of Jonah.

In hindsight it is rather obvious, especially in His reference to three days and three nights, a reference to His Resurrection.  Our Lord certainly was predicting His Resurrection, but how this prediction was initially interpreted hinges on what actually happened to Jonah.  Many assume that he spent three days and three nights in the whale alive.  Taken that way, Our Lord would not necessarily be predicting His Resurrection.  One could easily assume that He was in fact denying His Resurrection because He would be denying His actual death.  Instead He only appeared to be dead like Jonah “appeared” to be dead in belly of the whale.

To properly understand the sign then we must examine the text.  It is reasonable to assume that if someone is thrown into the sea and swallowed by a whale that they would die.  So we would expect that the text would be explicit had he remained alive.  But Jonah’s prayer (Jonah 2:1-10 RSV translation) suggests He was dead.  His cry comes “out of the belly of Sheol” after his “soul” fainted within him (i.e. he died).  In response to Jonah’s prayer God gives a one-word response—“arise” (3:1).  God is calling Jonah from death to life.

So then just “as Jonah became a sign to the men of Nin’eveh” by his death and resurrection after 3 days leading to the repentance of the Nin’evites, “so will the Son of Man” through His death and Resurrection of Jesus lead to the repentance of the Gentiles.  In other words, it is meant to show the universality of the offer of salvation.

This sign is not only for that generation but for all generations.  Yet still there is a second Sign of Jonah that is particular appropriate for our generation.  Especially because we too appear to be living amidst an evil generation.  The second Sign of Jonah is the Sign of Mercy.

Dore_jonah_whale

The last three Popes have all placed great emphasis on now being the time of mercy.  This is at the heart of the Jubilee Year of Mercy we are currently celebrating.  Why this emphasis?  Because we are living in the midst of an extremely wicked generation.  But rather than being prophets of gloom, we can live with great confidence because “where sin abounds, grace abounds the more” (Romans 5:20).  While the temptation to become a prophet of woe is ever-present, we run the risk of falling into the same trap that ensnared Jonah.  And like Jonah, God is using this time to enroll us in His School of Mercy.

When Jonah is touched by God’s mercy and saved from the pit he rejoices.  When Nin’eveh receives His mercy he grows angry (Jonah 4:1).  Why would he be angry?  He is angry because God didn’t punish the Nin’evites.  In fact he even blames God saying that is the reason why he didn’t want to go in the first place.  He knew God was going to be merciful to them and his preaching would have been in vain.  He wanted to be a prophet of woe despite the fact that he had been the beneficiary of a greater act of mercy than all of Nin’eveh combined.  Nin’eveh was saved from destruction while Jonah was lifted up from the grip of death.

But there is a second dimension of mercy in which Jonah needs to be schooled and I would dare say that this is the one we too need to be schooled in; what we might call God’s “initial mercy.”  God takes away the shade that Jonah had found but because he does not realize that it was God’s mercy that gave it to him in the first place, he once again becomes distraught.  This is because he only connects mercy with sin.  God’s mercy is much richer than that.  It is God’s mercy that reaches down and not only forgives our sins but also preserves us from falling into sin.  In fact this is probably the greatest gift of His mercy—that which preserves us from falling.  That is why we speak of Our Lady as Our Lady of Mercy.  She had no sin to forgive, but instead “she has received mercy in an extraordinary way” (Dives in Misericordia, 99) through God’s preservation from the stain of sin.

If we were to pinpoint the exact snare that Jonah was trapped in we could say that although he received God’s mercy, he did not actually experience it.  This can be a dangerous pitfall for us as well.  We can only experience God’s mercy when we become aware of the ways in which He loves us from moment to moment.  Mercy is the way in which God loves His creatures, giving to them everything that they are and have.  Mercy is “love’s second name.”  When we begin to recognize this, we develop a radical trust in Him so that even in the midst of our sufferings we are confident and unafraid because we see them as real signs of His mercy.

This is why the Divine Mercy Image is such a key aspect  of this “time of mercy.”  Our Lord is shown with his left foot in front of the right, suggesting He is walking (or to borrow the image of the Prodigal Son running) towards us with His mercy flowing toward us not only in the cleansing power of the water but also from the life-sustaining blood.  And with that assurance, we can proclaim nothing else but “Jesus I trust in You!”

Jonah seems to become consumed with self-righteousness and condemnation of those outside the chosen people when he grows angry at the pardon of the Nin’evites.  We too will do the same sort of thing until we go from reception to experience.  Once I have tasted the mercy of the Lord (1 Pt 2:3) and glory in God’s mercy I will want to see it everywhere.  I will rejoice in the mercies others receive and will act with great urgency to make His mercy known.  I will hesitate to condemn and instead be quick to profess mercy.  I will practice the Works of Mercy as a visible sign of God’s mercy operating on all those in physical and moral misery.

When St. Faustina was given an image of the eventual celebration of the Great Feast of Mercy she was overcome with joy and peace.  When Our Lord asked her “What is it you desire, My daughter?” she responded “I desire worship and glory be given to Your mercy.”  Certainly this vision was a sign of the fulfillment of her vision.  But her joy was more complete than that.  It was in the experience that mercy brings good from evil and is more powerful than even the worst evil we can imagine.  Let the joy that is found in heaven over the one sinner who repents, spill over to the Church and her members.

A Proper Reading of Islam?

Islam, Pope Francis

In a previous post, I showed that despite frequent protestations to the contrary, Islam was both by nature and necessarily a religion of violence.  The reader is referred to the full argument in that post, but the gist of it centers on the truth that there are two forces by which men can be compelled through law.  The first is through the power of reason while the second is by the sword.  Now in the Islamic conception of God, there is no room for reason because Allah is pure will.  Therefore, Islam because it rejects the notion that man can be compelled by reason to follow the commands of Allah, will always gravitate towards the sword.  This argument is a rather straight-forward application of reason.  But a disturbing trend within the Church has arisen by which the grounds of argument have risen to the level of Faith.  Even the Holy Father Francis has on a number of occasions called Islam a religion of peace, even mentioning in his first encyclical Evangelii Gaudium  that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence” (EG, 253).

Those who study the life of Mohammad and read the Qur’an know that this assertion is patently false.  The debate over whether it is “opposed to every form of violence” is because the Qur’an is composed in a schizophrenic manner.  To clear up any contradictions, Mohammad was given the principle of abrogation (Surah 2:106—“Such of Our revelations as We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, we bring (in place) one better or the like thereof. Know you not that God is Able to do all things?”) to guide his followers.  In essence, because Allah is pure will, he may capriciously change his mind.  Therefore any one of his commandments may be abrogated or replaced by a new one.  According to the Qur’an and Islamic teaching, Muslims should follow his most recent commandment.

Because there is a clear line of demarcation in the life of Mohammad and the tenor of the revelations, there is little debate as to which parts of the Qur’an came first.  While Mohammad was peacefully (for the most part) coexisting with Christians, Jews and pagans in Mecca the parts of the Qur’an revealed to him were reflective of this peace.  But when Mohammad was violently expelled from Mecca in 622 and escaped to Medina (called the Hijiri), the revelations became increasingly more violent.  Because they are revealed later, these are the surah that are binding upon Muslims.

It does not take a Muslim scholar to discover these simple truths and come to the realization that what the Pope has been saying is untrue.  One might understand that Pope Francis wants to avoid inflaming radical Muslims any further, but it is best to keep silent rather than passing on politically correct nonsense.  But the fact that he has spoken as he has is problematic for two reasons.

pope-koran

First, when such blatant ignorance is shown it destroys his credibility and by extension the Church.  First and foremost it does great harm to the Church’s primary mission of making Jesus known.  One is less likely to listen to the Church on matters of the Catholic Faith when its face is wrong about something that takes little effort to clear up.  One has to wonder what else that he says and teaches is wrong.  It also further perpetuates the sharp division between faith and reason.  Reason may tell us one thing, but faith says we must profess something that our reason knows is false.  The result is a weakening of the Magisterium in the eyes of both those outside the Church as well as those inside.  He risks further cementing a cafeteria environment among Christian believers.

The second issue is, in my mind, a bigger deal.  There are many in the Church who perpetuate the false claims about Islam, not by arguing from the Islamic teachings themselves, but by appealing to the authority of the Magisterium.  The fact is that for most people, if the Pope says it, then it is supposed to be binding on Catholics.  Couple that with what has in essence become a media Magisterium where sound bite replaces sound doctrine and the result is mass confusion.

In order to clear up this confusion, it is necessary to answer the question as to whether what is being said about Islam is somehow binding on Catholics.  Must we throw away common sense and the tradition of the Church and assent to the sanitized version of Islam that is being offered to us?

To address this, we can return to the teachings of the First Vatican Council (Dei Filius(DF), Session 3, Chapter 3).  The faithful are obligated to believe those things:

  • which are contained in the word of God (either through Scripture or Tradition)
  • which are proposed by the Church as matters to be believed as divinely revealed
  • whether by her solemn judgment or in her ordinary and universal Magisterium

Once the principle is articulated we immediately see the problem with any argument that Islam is a religion of peace that is based on the authority of the Church.  According to the Church, she has no authority to speak on the question of Islam because it is neither “a matter concerning faith and morals” nor regarding “the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world” (DF, Session 4, Chapter 3).  Unless one is willing to concede that Islam is somehow divinely inspired, the Church has no competence to judge on the truth of statements regarding Islam.  So when Pope Francis speaks of Islam in the manner that he has, he is going beyond the competency of his office as Pope.  He might speak as to how an area of Islam is compatible or incompatible with the Christian faith, but he has no particular charism for speaking about the nature of Islam itself in a way that binds a Christian.

It is worth mentioning as well that even if we accept what Pope Francis has said as carrying some authority, it would contradict what previous Popes have said about Islam.  To take two examples:

 “… there is hope that very many from the abominable sect of Mohammad will be converted to the Catholic faith.” Pope Eugene IV, Council of Basel, 1434.

“I vow to… exalt the true Faith, and to extirpate the diabolical sect of the reprobate and faithless Mohammad in the East.” Pope Callixtus III.

To hear previous Popes call Islam abominable and diabolical and then Pope Francis to say it is a religion of peace certainly seems contradictory.  The essence of Islam has not changed since its inception so Francis’ position would certainly represent a rupture.

Scripture itself condemns Islam when it says “every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world” (1 John 4:3).

This is why a number of the saints, including St. John Damascene, have said that Mohammad was a type of the Antichrist.  In closing t is instructive then to read Mohammad’s own account of his experience of receiving the Qur’an:

“So I read it, and he departed from me. And I awoke from my sleep, and it was as though these words were written on my heart.

Now none of God’s creatures was more hateful to me than an (ecstatic) poet or a man possessed: I could not even look at them. I thought, Woe is me poet or possessed—Never shall Quraysh say this of me! I will go to the top of the mountain and throw myself down that I may kill myself and gain rest. So I went forth to do so and then when I was midway on the mountain, I heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘O Muhammad! thou art the apostle of God and I am Gabriel’” (A. Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad).

Why the Assumption Matters

Mary, Resurrection

Many well intending Christians will argue that the Catholic Church goes too far in honoring the Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  The Rosary, the Marian Dogmas, and the Brown Scapular all seem to take something away from Jesus and His act of Redemption.  In an attempt to protect themselves from falling into a Marian pitfall they reject it all.  After reflection however we find that it is the exact opposite that happens—every privilege that you take away from Mary actually diminishes Christ and ourselves.  This principle has been articulated with respect to the Immaculate Conception already, but in this regard, the Assumption is no different.

It is instructive first of all to speak of Marian dogmas in general.  Everything that we believe is based on the fact that she was chosen from all eternity to be the Mother of God.  When God calls, He equips.  In His Providence He had the redeeming mission of the Son depend upon her in a wholly unique way.  One could say that it would not have been accomplished without her in the same way that we would say that once a man decides to go to England it is necessary for him to take a boat or a plane.  She may not be absolutely necessary but God’s plan makes her relatively necessary.

We should then understand her to be the most necessary of all those who cooperated with Him.  When we say that among all Christians she is the most vital and therefore the most equipped, any detraction of her is really a subtraction of the Goodness, Power and Wisdom of God.  It was the “Almighty who did great things” for her precisely so that she might cooperate most fully with Him.  Therefore anything we say about Mary’s Assumption is first and foremost flows as a consequent of her mission of Divine Motherhood.  We can then offer reasons why it is fitting that the Church has always believed that Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven.

First, we can appeal to the greatness of Christ’s act of redemption.  With the Immaculate Conception Christ’s redeeming act is greater when He preemptively redeems at least one member than if He redeemed everyone after their fall.  Likewise we can say that His act of redemption is more glorious if at least one member shares in the fullness of His Resurrection now.  If Mary’s soul only is taken to heaven awaiting the general resurrection for its body then we have imagined at least one scenario where Christ’s act is greater.  The Assumption proves that His power over death is not limited in any way.  He could have reunited body and soul at death immediately for us all (because He did so in one case) but chose not to according to His Wisdom.  Again to take away the Assumption takes away from God the surety on our part that He trampled over death by His death.

Mary Assumption

There is also a just reason for belief in the Assumption (about Mary’s death you can read more here).  The “wages of sin is death” really means two things.  First, as a result of the first sin, man was rendered back to his natural state in which death was possible.  God preserved Adam and Eve from death as a preternatural gift only.  When Adam sinned this gift was forfeit for all mankind.    Technically speaking though the curse of the covenant is not death per se but corruption— “you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gn 3:19).  This means that one of the punishments for sin is bodily corruption.

Whether Mary was free from death or not is not theologically certain, what is certain however is that she would be free from the corruption of the grave because she was without sin.  Because she had total enmity with the devil (Gn 3:15) she was immune to his two weapons—sin and death.  He could have no power over her.  God, ever faithful to His promises would have to assume Our Lady, body and soul to heaven.  To deny the Assumption, is to deny that God is faithful (1Cor 1:9).

It is also her role as “the Woman” that merits consideration of the Assumption.  As the new Eve and Mother of all those alive in Christ, she must precede her sons and daughters on the new Earth.  To deny the Assumption is to deny her true motherhood and disobey Our Lord’s last will and testament for His disciples to “behold your Mother” (Jn 19:27).

In the introduction it was mentioned that when we subtract from Mary we end up with a reduced understanding of ourselves.  In this we can see God’s Providence in the Church operative once again.  Since the formal declaration of the dogma of the Assumption a cult of the body has arisen that has no historical precedent, not even in the most pagan of cultures.  While we spend untold amount of time and money to remove every spot and blemish, Mary’s Assumption reminds us that it is only in glory that we will be without spot and blemish (Eph 5:27).  It is the radiance of holiness that will make our bodies shine.  To deny the Assumption is to attack Our Lady who is “Our Hope.”  The Assumption is the seed of supernatural hope because we know that Christ really is the first fruit and not the only fruit.

It is also the false cult of the female body that the Assumption attacks.  We are literally bombarded with images of the perfect (mostly photo-shopped) female body trapping “ordinary” women in an imaginary world and men in the cult of pornography.  The Assumption is a reminder to us all of the dignity of women.  As John Paul II put it: “In the face of the profanation and debasement to which modern society frequently subjects the female body, the mystery of the Assumption proclaims the supernatural destiny and dignity of every human body, called by the Lord to become an instrument of holiness and to share in his glory” (GA, July 9,1997).

Justice and Mercy

Mercy, Year of Mercy

Shortly before his death, Pope St. John Paul II prepared a homily for the celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday.  As Providence would have it, he died on the vigil of the great feast of mercy and never actually gave the homily.  For this reason we can look at this homily almost like it was the  Saintly Pope’s last will and testament.  What was his last testament?  “How much the world needs to understand and accept divine mercy!”  Notice how the Pope didn’t merely say that the world needed to accept divine mercy, but also to understand it.  In essence, Saint John Paul II thought we both needed to engage both head (understand) and the heart (accept).  All of us want to have God’s mercy realized in our life, but according to the Divine Mercy Pope we first need to understand the truth of God’s mercy before it can be realized in our lives.

One of the reasons we do not understand it is because it gets caught up with God’s justice.  In what has become somewhat commonplace, the less traditionally minded have attempted to do away with God’s justice altogether and focus solely on His mercy.  On the other hand the more traditionalist leaning among us often can only see justice and mercy as two different sides of God.  As long as you stay on His good side and avoid His bad side, you will receive mercy rather than justice.

In truth these two are not in opposition to each other.  In a typically Catholic fashion—embracing both/and rather than either/or—we can say that God is both just and merciful at the same time.  Each of us, regardless of our eternal destination, receive both mercy and justice.

If we can make a distinction regarding God’s attributes then we can begin to gain insight into the relationship between justice and mercy.  St. Thomas distinguishes between those attributes which relate to God’s being (i.e. what He is) and those related to His operation (what He does).  Those properties belonging to His being are things like unity, immensity, goodness, etc.  With respect to His operations we have things like wisdom and love with its two virtues justice and mercy.  Since God is by nature good (or to be more theological accurate Goodness itself), He loves only one thing—goodness.  It is this love of the good that links justice and mercy in such a manner that they cannot be opposed to each other.

Justice is to render to each his due.  Because we recognize that God can be the debtor to no one, we tend to only equate justice with punishment.  But this is only a partial aspect of justice.  From all eternity God is just so “before” creation He was just and there was no one to punish.  This is because God is first and foremost just to Himself.  God in being just to Himself decreed that there should be fulfilled in creatures both what His will and wisdom require and what most makes His goodness known.  In other words, God is just towards His creatures by giving them all they need (c.f. Mt 6:25-34) primarily because He is acting justly towards Himself. While punishment is part of justice, it does not exhaust it.  Truth be told, it is only a fraction.

While Justice renders to each His due, God’s mercy is the foundation of the divine love of mankind.  To distinguish between justice and mercy, St. Thomas point out that when “a man’s love is caused by the goodness of the one he loves, then that man who loves does so out of justice but when loves causes the goodness in the beloved then it is a love springing from mercy. The love with which God loves us produces goodness in us; hence mercy is presented here as the root of the divine love.”  It is mercy that is the cause of all that is good in us.  So mercy is not only about forgiving our sins but a recognition that “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17).

It is not just in opposing justice and mercy that we err.  There is also a tendency to put justice somehow above mercy, when it is exactly the opposite.  First, mercy precedes justice.  Out of a superabundance of goodness, God made man and woman the crown of visible creation because of their innate capacity for friendship with Him. If He has to reward us for anything it was first because He was merciful in creating us.

Second, St. Thomas suggests that if we look at justice and its three acts we can see how mercy is what he calls “love’s second name.”  First, God’s justice consists in giving what is necessary for each creature to reach the end it was made for.  We have all that we need to reach our natural end of virtue.  But in His mercy He provides us with more—namely all that we need to reach the supernatural end He desires to give us.

Little Flower

Justice also rewards each according to his merits.  But our reward far exceeds what we our owed.  Being natural creatures we can never, no matter how good we act, reach the share in His divinity that God is offering us.  He must bestow this capacity upon us.  Even if Mary remained sinless throughout her life, if she did not have sanctifying grace that was given to her, she could never have been made Queen of Heaven.  Heaven is not a reward for the good people.  It is the true home of the holy people that God has made.  Only God is holy and only He can bestow Holiness on us.

Justice also has to do with inflicting punishment.  But mercy trumps justice.  This is where the head and the heart must meet.  Mercy is the “sorrow at the misery of another as though it were his own.”  This sorrow is not merely affective but effective.  Its effect is to endeavor to dispel the misery of the other.  And this is why Our Lord is truly Mercy Incarnate.  He took our misery at if it was His own in order to dispel it.

We may think sometimes that God could have merely “cooked the books” in sending His Son.  But there could be no mercy without justice.  Justice is not merely superfluous because of mercy.  Why?  Because they both have the same “source,” namely, God’s love for the Good.  If the created order is “very good” and sin has violated the order, then God’s love (i.e. mercy) demands its restoration (justice).  Despite our human efforts (especially recently) to the contrary, the misery must be acknowledged as such and its source must be repaired in order for the action to be merciful.  Mercy requires that there be some actual misery to be overcome.

The movement to the heart from here has been recently navigated by St. Therese and her Little Way and she can serve as our guide.

“I know well that it is not my great desires that please God in my little soul, what He likes to see is the way I love my littleness and my poverty; it is my blind hope in His mercy, this is my only treasure…. The weaker one is, without desires or virtues the more ready one is for the operations of this consuming and transforming love…. God rejoices more in what He can do in a soul humbly resigned to its poverty than in the creation of millions of suns and the vast stretch of the heavens.”

The Gospel is only truly Good News for the captives, namely the “little ones.”  Justice demands we acknowledge our misery so that mercy can be activated.  By trusting in His promise and never giving in to discouragement, we too can become great saints.  St. Therese, Pray for Us!

Keeping Your Hands to Yourself

Eucharist, Sacraments, ,

The irony is not lost on me that very often the Sign of Peace invokes a chaotic scene during the Mass.  A virtual love-fest breaks out as each member of the congregation must shake hands or hug anyone else within their immediate vicinity.  Adding to the chaos, the priest often leaves Jesus alone on the altar to shake hands with those in the congregation.  Because of its disruptive nature, there are those traditionalists who would want to do away with it altogether.  But the problem is not so much with the Sign of Peace itself.  Instead, it is with the gross misunderstanding of what is actually going on.

By way of reminder, the purpose of the Mass is to re-present the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the altar of the Cross so that we can each actively participate in it.  And because it is a Sacrament or sign of that Sacrifice, we need to wrap it in liturgical form that makes it clear as to what is happening before us.  Each part of the liturgy then must be carefully constructed so that these signs within the Sign act as beacons, pointing to the Reality.

In this regard the Sign of Peace is no different.  It is no mere practical greeting but instead a ritual exchange.  As members of His Body, we are turning to those around us in order not to wish them well, but as a sign of the peace and unity that Christ promised to the Church.  It is therefore meant to convey the truth that when the Body is united under the Head there is communion among the individual members.  There is order within the Body and peace, the tranquility of order, follows.  There may be strife between the members (“look not on our sins”), but the handshake of peace shows that reconciliation has happened.

The people sitting around us are not so much our nuclear family or friends, but representatives of the Body of Christ.  The Sign of Peace conveys the love that the members have for each other as members of Christ’s Body—a love that has its root in the Sacrifice that we have all offered to the Father and that we are preparing to receive.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons (although certainly not the only) we should not hold hands during the Our Father.  It detracts away from the meaning of the Sign of Peace.

Despite becoming a tradition in many churches, the habit of holding hands during the Lord’s Prayer is a rather recent innovation.  Although it is uncertain as to how it started (some say it is borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous or the charismatic renewal) and whether it is licit (in my own Diocese of Raleigh it is “strongly discouraged”), it detracts from the Liturgy itself.  Although we begin the Prayer with the words “Our Father” it is not primarily the unity of being “sons in the Son” that places the prayer here in the Mass.  Instead it is the eschatological nature of the Lord’s Prayer that bears emphasis.  Dr. Brant Pitre has an excellent and accessible article on how the disciples would have viewed the prayer itself as a prayer for the definitive coming of the New Kingdom.  You can read all the details here, but the point is that the Our Father is primarily a prayer we say as “we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Chaotic Sign of Peace

Once we have held hands praying the family prayer, the Sign of Peace seems superfluous and loses its nature as a sign.  We now are only able to see it as something practical.  Once we treat it as a practical greeting it loses its effectiveness as a sign and therefore so too does everything else leading up to the reception of the Sign.  It is the Eucharist in which the unity that is expressed in the Sign of Peace becomes a reality on the basis of the biblical principle that:  “Those who eat the sacrifices are partners in the altar” (1Cor 10: 18).  If however we have roamed around the Church for 3 minutes greeting everyone we can get near, we forget this.  The Sign of Peace becomes the basis of the Communion rather than something pointing to its real source.

There is one further practical problem that bears mentioning.  The chaotic nature of the Sign of Peace has gone on long enough that most people act out of ignorance.  Bearing in mind the sensitivity of those around us and not wanting to appear in any way unwelcoming, how can we turn this around?

It begins with a catechetical solution.  We should instruct our children as to its true meaning.  Priests and Deacons can also mention it during their homily.  A quick mention with a brief explanation for several weeks can change the culture within the Parish.  They can also help by staying on the altar and not roaming about, even to offer peace to the altar servers.

For those in the pews, the process of changing the chaos into true Peace means only turning to those directly beside us.  Obviously if someone else offers their hand we should take it.  Some may think you unfriendly, but that can easily be remedied by making it a point after Mass to speak to those around you (and no, not about why you didn’t shake their hand).  Catholic churches are notoriously unfriendly and cliquish places and this habit of making sure we talk to those around us after Mass can kill two birds with one stone.  Having a conversation with them will certainly dispel any whisperings in their mind that you are somehow unfriendly and they might even begin to wonder why (and even ask) you do what you do during the Sign of Peace.

As a kid, and anyone who has young boys has probably said this too, I was told to “keep your hands to yourself” by my Mom.  It seems Holy Mother Church needs to tell her children the same thing during Mass, especially during the Our Father and the Sign of Peace.

St. James and Apostolic Succession

Magisterium, Scripture

There are any number of reasons why non-Catholic Christians say they are not Catholic that range from the Church’s emphasis on Mary and the Saints to the Eucharist.  But in truth, they really only boil down to one and that is apostolic succession.  Regardless of one’s specific issue, if the authority of the Church is established then everything else will naturally fall into place.  Struggling with the Immaculate Conception?  Start with the given that the Church can and has spoken definitively on it and the personal objections will soon dissolve.  If we believe then we will understand.  As St. Augustine found out, it is nearly impossible to go the other way—to understand your way into believing.  As Catholics then we should seek to establish a firm understanding of Apostolic Succession so as to help our non-Catholic friends to enjoy the fullness of the Truth that Christ is offering to all mankind through the Apostolic Church.

A closer look at St. James, the saint whose feast we celebrate today, can be instructive in this regard.  One of the “Sons of Thunder” and brother of the Beloved Disciple John, James the Son of Zebedee was the first Apostle to wear the martyr’s crown.  As Acts 12:2 tells us, he was beheaded by Herod Agrippa in 44 AD.  A common objection to the belief in Apostolic Succession centers on him.  The claim is made that if there truly is Apostolic Succession, then why didn’t the Church appoint another Apostle to take his place?

Recall that shortly after the Ascension, the Apostles gathered to appoint another man to the vacant office of Apostle occasioned by Judas’ death.  God had ordained that just like the Israel of Old, the New Israel the Church would be constituted by twelve heads.  Therefore at its birth on Pentecost, there must be twelve Apostles.  However this does not mean that it would always have these twelve heads, only that they would serve as its foundation (Eph 2:20).  So to think that there would be Apostles present in every age of the Church is like thinking that the twelve sons of Israel would somehow live on forever.

The error really comes from a misunderstanding of what Apostolic Succession actually means.  When Our Lord instituted the office of Apostle (which literally means “one who is sent”), He constituted it as both itinerant and ubiquitous.  They were to go about from town to town to the ends of the earth proclaiming the Gospel.  This means that each of the Apostles sought to go into a particular region, preach the Gospel and instruct certain reliable neophytes so that they could be ordained to carry on a set of fixed tasks that were necessary for the daily life of the community.  In particular that meant administering Baptism and celebrating the Eucharist (as well as the other Sacraments), transmitting and guarding the teachings of the Apostles to the whole community and serving as administrators of the temporal affairs of the local ecclesial community.  To do this, the Apostles would anoint certain men as Bishops and in anointing them, bestow the same powers they were given by Christ upon the ordained.  Because they had the full power of the priesthood given to the Apostles, these Bishops could also ordain other Bishops as well as Presbyters (what we call Priests) and Deacons to assist them.

St. Clement of Rome summarizes what the Apostles sought to accomplish best:

“Through countryside and city [the apostles] preached, and they appointed their earliest converts, testing them by the Spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of future believers. Nor was this a novelty, for bishops and deacons had been written about a long time earlier…. Our apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office of bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect foreknowledge, they appointed those who have already been mentioned and afterwards added the further provision that, if they should die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry.” (Epistle to the Corinthians 42:4-5, 44:1-3 [80 AD])

But the Apostles were not in the business of ordaining other Apostles.  It is very clear from the story of Matthias that it is not Peter per se that appoints Matthias, but God Himself (Acts 1:24-26).  Likewise, it was God, Who, once the Church began to scatter from Jerusalem and into the Gentile world, appointed St. Paul as the Apostle to the Gentiles (Gal 2:8).  As his letters to Timothy illustrate, Paul had the full measure of Apostolic power including the power of episcopacy.  Timothy however was never an Apostle, only a Bishop.

St. James icon

As an aside, St. Paul is chosen as a thirteenth Apostle in order to show that the New Israel includes a tribe that was not included in the Old Israel, namely the Gentiles.  Once again we see an example of how God is both telling a continuous story with Israel and the Church, yet has “made all things new” (Rev 21:5) in the Church.

Therefore, we must understand that contained within the office of Apostle is the power of episcopacy.  But this obviously is not the full measure of the Apostolic office.  It is the power of episcopacy that the Apostles handed on and it is this power that we are referring to when we use the term Apostolic Succession.  St. James was fully an Apostle, even if he never exercised his episcopal power on a local Church the way that some of the other Apostles did.  He did not need to in order to be an Apostle.

God never intended for the office of Apostle to endure until the end of time.  But he did intend for certain powers contained within their office to be passed on, including the power of episcopacy.  This same power resides only within the Episcopal College of the Catholic Church, with the Pope as its head.

Holding onto Jesus

Saints, Scripture

Throughout the centuries, much ink has been spent by biblical scholars commenting on Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Jesus in John Chapter 20.  In particular, many have sought an explanation for verse 17 where Jesus says to Mary that she should “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” A number of possible interpretations present themselves and are worth examining.

An immediate question that arises is why Our Lord does not allow Mary Magdalene to touch Him, but when He encounters Thomas in the Upper Room, He allows him to touch Him?  One possible explanation relates to the way that a burnt offering was made to the Lord.  In the Old Testament, the priest must offer the whole lamb and burn it on the altar.  The offering was not acceptable to the Lord until it had risen to the Him as a pleasing odor.  Until the burnt offering was fully consumed and had ascended to God, it was only a priest who could touch it.  Likewise, it is Jesus who is the lamb that serves as a burnt offering to the Father and until He ascends to the Father, it is only a priest who can handle Him.  This of course relates to the fact that Jesus instituted a new priesthood in the Apostles.

It seems though that this particular difficulty is one that has been raised solely by biblical commentators.  This was probably not the intent of the author however.  The verbs that John uses in the two encounters are different, even if they are translated in English in the same way.  He uses haptō, which is translated as “cling” or “hold” in verse 17 and uses pherein and ballein in verse 27 for “examine” and “probe”.  Once we see that it was probably not the intent of the author to contrast the two encounters, two other possibilities present themselves.

First, it has been suggested that since the Greek imperative is used, we should translate it as: “Stop touching me!”  Essentially Jesus is telling Mary to stop clinging onto Him because He will go back to the Father in a short time and wants to meet with the disciples as often as is possible before that happens.  She should go and fulfill her vocation as Apostle to the Apostles by running and telling them the good news in haste.  Based upon Mary’s actions, this seems to be the way she understood what Jesus was saying.

Jesus appearance to ST. Mary Magdalene

Perhaps the more compelling explanation is the one that is suggested by Pope Benedict in the second installment of Jesus of Nazareth(p. 285).  Once Mary recognizes Our Lord she thinks that this is the fulfillment of the promise that Jesus gave during the Final Discourse when He said, “I shall see you again, and your hearts will rejoice with a joy that no one can take from you” (John 16:22).  The reader (and probably Magdalene herself) is surprised by Jesus’ response not to cling to Him.  Our Lord is telling her that the earlier way of relating to the earthly Jesus, who was her “Rabboni” (“dear Rabbi”), is no longer possible.  She is the first to experience what St. Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 5:16-17: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer.  Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.”  In essence, Jesus in telling her not to cling to Him is telling her that His permanent presence is no longer by way of appearance.  Now it is by way of the gift of the Holy Spirit that will come only after He ascends to the Father.

What makes this explanation particularly plausible is the fact that even though she saw the angels and the burial clothes, did not understand what Jesus meant when He spoke about His resurrection.  Certainly she is not alone, as Peter also looked in the tomb and did not come to belief.  It is interesting however that there was something about the condition of the tomb that led the Beloved Disciple to believe.  What Peter and Mary both overlook, but what John saw had something to do with the burial clothes themselves.

First, it should have been obvious that the presence of the burial clothes should have been an indication that the body had not been stolen from the tomb.  If Christ’s body had been stolen either by grave robbers or the disciples (as they had been accused of doing), they would not have removed the wrappings.  The myrrh and aloes would have essentially acted like glue so that the clothes could not be quickly removed.  The tomb was guarded and they would have needed to work fast and would have taken both the body and the clothes together.

The reason John gives the details about the burial clothes the way He does is because it clearly supported the truth of the Resurrection.  The Greek participle that is translated as “lying there” seems to suggest that the clothes were flattened in such a manner that the body had passed through them without being unrolled.  It is this fact, namely that the clothes were intact and not unrolled, that led John to fully believe in the Resurrection.

Like everything that John wrote, He is wont to point out the deeper meaning of all of Jesus’ actions.  By leaving the clothes behind, Jesus is pointing to the uniqueness of the Resurrection.  In the story of Lazarus, we see him emerge from the tomb with the clothes because he will need them again when he dies.  Jesus on the other hand leaves them behind because He will not use them again.   As St. Paul says, “Christ being raised from the dead will never die again.”

This ultimately is the lesson that St. Mary Magdalene still teaches us—the newness of life that was at the heart of the mission of the Son.  Although His relationship with the Father (“I ascend to My Father…”) is qualitatively different from our relationship with the Father (“…and your Father), nevertheless He is offering us a share in His natural Sonship.  This newness of life is as adopted sons and daughters of God.  Unlike our human experience of adoption where the adopted child is only a legal offspring of the father and does not share his blood, Jesus gives us His Body and Blood so that we might have the very Blood of God running through our veins.  St. Mary Magdalene, pray for us!

What Americans Hold

Church and State, Virtue

Anyone who has studied American history knows that keeping Americans united has been the greatest challenge.  The necessity of a “more perfect union” led to the abolishing of the Articles of Confederation and to the delaying of a remedy for slavery by the Constitutional Convention.  America is unique in the history of the world because it succeeded in bringing together men and women from different countries, cultures and even races.  Every other country is united insofar as they share a certain character.  Italy became a nation because all the smaller principalities were Italian, Greece because the city states were Greek, and France, French.  It is the reason why Scotland always fought becoming part of England and why, in modern times, the EU is ultimately doomed to fail.  But the United States is different because what actually unites its citizens is, as Chesterton observed, a creed.  It is the proposition that all men are “endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” that unites us as Americans.  To use another Chestertonian image, America may be a melting pot, but the pot itself is what holds it altogether.

This “unity in diversity” is precarious and the danger of dissolution is always around the corner.  But the danger does not come not from any external enemy but from within.  Lincoln, the Great Restorer of the Union, said this, rather prophetically in an 1837 speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield:

“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.  At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

As Lincoln entered office, the country was divided precisely because one of the fundamental elements of the American Creed, namely the equality of all men, was rejected by a large portion of the population.  Those who were trying to reform the melting pot were in danger of breaking it.

Lincoln--Carpenter

Without any danger of hyperbole, we could easily say that we are facing a similar danger today.  We are a country that is clearly divided and no longer merely along political lines.  This is obvious to all but the most myopic of our citizens (namely politicians), but no solution can be found until we treat the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence as more than quaint historical facts.  It is the self-evident truths, and only these, that has kept our country united for 240 years.  If it is to survive the next 20, we will need to return to these with greater clarity.

I have written in other places about the elements of the American Creed, but I would like to take this essay to a more foundational level.  No amount of clarity will help us if we continue to deny the roots of the tree from which the fruits of freedom and equality flow.  One can argue all day long whether or not the Founders were Christian or Deist or just children of the Enlightenment, but that ignores the fact that what they built was built on a Christian understanding of reality.  They were breathing Christian air.

Equality of mankind? 

Entirely unknown in the world until Christ came to save all mankind without distinction—“ There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).  Rich and poor, slave and free, Jew and Gentile all came together as one body to receive the one bread (1 Cor  ).  We are so used to this idea that we forget how revolutionary this idea was at the time.

Self-government?

Self-government rests upon the Christian understanding of the uniqueness of each individual person created by God and he is “the only creature that God has wanted for its own sake” (GS 24).  This power of self-government that is received from God can be transmitted to the governing party and taken away in dire situations.  As an aside, this was a foundational argument of Jefferson’s in the Declaration of Independence—“ But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

The point is that we cannot continue to take of the fruit of the tree while simultaneously digging up the roots.  This is why John Adams in reflecting on the Constitution said that it is “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  His point is that any attempt at self-government requires the ability for each person to govern himself.  It requires virtue (i.e. a moral people).  Only those who are virtuous can use their freedom well and in the manner it was intended, namely “the pursuit of happiness.”  But as history bears out (including the failed attempt of the French Revolution based on the similar founding principles), virtue is not enough.  Virtue requires religion.  While there may be individual exceptions in a given society, the beginning of virtue is the fear of the Lord.  Fear of judgment is not the end of virtue, but it is certainly the beginning.  One must believe that he will eventually have to answer for his deeds (i.e. a religious people).

While some of the Founders may have seen religion only from a utilitarian viewpoint, this will not do.  Our country needs not just “religion” but Christianity to survive.  It is instructive to reflect on Jefferson’s use of the term “Church” when he speaks about the “wall of separation between Church and State.”  Only Christianity has Churches.  Despite his own religious leanings he knew that America needed Christianity.  That means all of us need to be more Christian and not less.  The peace of our society and the salvation of souls depends upon it.

A society like ours that has become indifferent and even hostile in some ways to Christianity is cutting off its nose to spite its face.  The argument over which color lives matter presupposes the question as to why any lives matter at all—and only a Christian has an adequate response.  All lives matter because God has definitively said so in giving the life of His Son.  Why are we all dissatisfied with our choices for President?  Because we inherently know that character matters more than competence, another tenant Christianity has taught us.  In this great moment of division, who will lead?  It must be Christians willing to sacrifice themselves holding the pot together for a love a God and neighbor.

Watching without Seeing

Virtue

“Curiosity killed the cat,” the proverb goes, “but satisfaction brought him back.”  Throughout Christian history, from Augustine and Jerome to Aquinas, curiosity has been viewed as a serious vice.  In contrast, today, it represents little more than an annoying habit.  The problem is all the more acute in an age where we have access to endless hours of entertainment, social media, and the internet filled with information.  Far from being just a minor fault, curiosity represents a serious problem that, if left unchecked, can put our souls in just as must danger as the cat.  But rather than satisfaction, it is the virtue of studiousness that will bring us back.

It must first be admitted that because of our rational nature, we each have a great desire for knowledge of the truth.  As Aristotle said, “all men have a desire to know.”   Just as the body is fueled by food, so the intellect is fueled by truth.    Because knowledge of the truth leads to our fulfillment as rational creatures, it is a fundamental good.  This is why curiosity is such a temptation and ultimately harms us.

But like the natural desire for food, the desire for knowledge must be moderated by our reason.  This is where the virtue of studiousness comes in.  By fostering studiousness, or the habit of study, we will refuse to feed the intellect with the junk food of mere facts, but the nutrition of truth.  Just as a steady diet of junk food will leave us sluggish, a steady diet of facts leads to the sluggishness of curiosity.  If we recall that acedia or sloth is a spiritual laziness by which we see a spiritual good as not really worth the effort it takes to get it, we can see why St. Thomas thought that curiosity was a daughter vice of acedia.

Curiosity is the desire for knowledge simply for the pleasure that it brings as opposed to knowing for the sake of knowledge itself (which is the virtue of studiousness).   Gossip, which brings the pleasure of knowing something bad about someone else is a prime example of curiosity.  On the other hand, study is the keen application of the mind to something.  The studious person has no desire to gossip.

Gossiping women

But how can we know the difference, especially when the desire for knowledge is a good thing?  St. Thomas says the learning of the truth can be inordinate in four ways.  First, “when a man is withdrawn by a less profitable study from a study that is an obligation incumbent upon him.”   Although he did not live in an era of social media and the internet, St. Thomas is particularly prophetic here.  It is curiosity that drives the social media phenomenon.  A recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the average American spends almost an hour a day on Facebook.   To carry the food analogy further, this is about the same amount of time we spend eating each day.  While we are there, we are bombarded with facts—both news items and personal—but it is curiosity that drives us to scroll through the feeds.  That time could be better spent studying, especially given that the same study found that the average person spends less than 20 minutes a day reading.  Curiosity always leads to ignorance because we do not study those things we should be studying.  It is curiosity that has left us “educated” yet ignorant.

The second way in which curiosity manifests itself is through knowledge of things that are not licit.  St. Thomas gives the example of fortune telling.  Under the guise of harmless curiosity, many have been sucked unwittingly into the traps of the Evil One through fortune telling, Ouija boards and Tarot cards.  Many young men are sucked into pornography mainly out of curiosity—hearing about it from friends or wondering what the allure is for their dad and all the time he spends on it.

Aquinas also says that curiosity rears its head when we “study about creatures without reference to the due end namely God.”  By this he means that much of our modern scientific inquiry is rooted in curiosity.  All science has become mechanistic rather than teleological.  We collect facts through the scientific method, but do not study (or more accurately contemplate) the purpose.   Studiousness is needed for science because it requires the self-discipline to exclude frivolous pursuits and those that contradict the moral law.  Instead, we act without any reference to the moral law and equate the technically possible with the morally permissible.  Science when governed by studiousness allows us to see how all things are connected as part of a whole, a whole that is meant to reveal the Creator.

Finally Aquinas says curiosity seeks to know the truth above the capacity of our own intelligence.  All too often we fall into the Cliff Clavinesque habit of regurgitating facts merely to impress.  Curiosity is about replacing the desire for truth with empty shows.

What makes curiosity so soul-deadening is that it acts as a gateway vice, leading to worse things. Earlier we used the example of pornography, but it ultimately leads to an inability to love.  Recently, I witnessed a car accident when the driver hit the gas instead of the brake while pulling into a parking space and drove through a store front.  Rather than rushing to help the driver, nearly all of the bystanders stood there, phones in hand, taking pictures.  Deadened by curiosity, what else could they do but post photos of this poor woman’s misery to their social media accounts?  No compassion or even respect, just entertainment.

It is the stoking of curiosity too that drives the news media.  Each “major” event in the news cycle gets reported in painstaking details and then is quickly replaced with the next event.  Curiosity drives our consumption and it leads to a profound change in us.  It’s not just that we become desensitized to the suffering of others or that we waste time.  It is that we lose the ability to examine things deeply.  Life becomes episodic and we do not know how it all fits together because we watch rather than see.

“Curiosity killed the man and no amount of satisfaction can bring him back.”

A Right to Privacy?

Abortion, Church and State, Church Authority

During an interview on Meet the Press this past Sunday, Democratic Senator and possible Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Kaine, admitted to being a “Traditional Catholic” who “personally opposes Abortion.”  Despite his personal opposition however he has “taken the position, which is quite common among Catholics — I have got a personal feeling about abortion, but the right rule for government is to let women make their own decisions.”

The Senator is right that his is a position that is “quite common among Catholics,” especially politicians.  But what never gets said is why they are “personally opposed.”  That would seem to be the next logical question that gets asked anytime a seemingly reasonable person says they are opposed to something that other people accept.  Part of the reason why it never gets asked is because the answer is implied when they identify themselves as Catholic.  They are opposed because that is what the Church teaches.  In other words, it is a matter of dogma that Catholics should oppose abortion. As a “traditional Catholic,” Senator Kaine knows that the Church (and American constitutional law) says that religious dogma should not legitimately be enforced by the coercive power of the state. It is also politically convenient because by suggesting that abortion belongs only in the confessional realm, Senator Kaine is able to play both sides of the field.  He can be personally opposed (and thus satisfying those who are also opposed) while appearing to be very tolerant of other people’s beliefs.

Surely as a “traditional Catholic” who is personally opposed to abortion he would know that the Church does not teach that abortion and contraception are matters of revealed faith.  Just as surely a Catholic who is involved in public life would have read St. John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae.  If he had he would have known that “[T]his doctrine is based upon the natural law” ( EV, 62) and like all the precepts of the natural law, binding on Catholics and non-Catholics.  In other words, being Catholic has nothing to do per se with whether you think abortion and contraception are wrong.  Pro-life Catholic politicians are just as guilty in this regard of allowing the debate to center around their Catholicism and would do a great service to the movement if they avoided making that connection.

While the “personally opposed, but…” defense has been worn out, it is the second half of the Senator’s response that bears a closer look because it betrays a profound philosophical difference from what the Church has taught us:

“I deeply believe — and not just as a matter of politics, but even as a matter of morality, that matters about reproduction and intimacy and relationships and contraception are in the personal realm. They’re moral decisions for individuals to make for themselves. And the last thing we need is government intruding into those personal decisions.”

Again as a Catholic, the Senator could again turn to Evangelium Vitae and find that the Holy Father anticipated his response when he said:

“Finally, the more radical views go so far as to maintain that in a modern and pluralistic society people should be allowed complete freedom to dispose of their own lives as well as of the lives of the unborn: it is asserted that it is not the task of the law to choose between different moral opinions, and still less can the law claim to impose one particular opinion to the detriment of others.” (EV, 68)

If it is not from the Church that the Senator gets his “radical view” then where does it come from?  It comes from a distorted view of the human person that permeates the modern American landscape.  It has even found its way into our laws through the so-called “right to privacy.”

Tim Kaine

Man by nature is a social being.  He depends upon others for his fulfillment.  Operating under this paradigm, the role of government is to aid in the development of the total person.  A good government is one that helps to create morally good people.  Laws not only protect freedom from the outside but also from the inside by promoting virtuous behavior.  Certainly it is always preferable to foster virtue by non-legislative means since virtue requires voluntary rather than coerced actions, nevertheless law cannot remain indifferent to moral actions because of its pedagogical power.

Operating under this view, there is an emphasis on the freedom to fulfill one’s obligations.  The obligation to protect innocent human life leads to the outlawing of all offenses against human life.  Each man sees himself as his brother’s keeper to a limited extent.

This understanding of man as social by nature is rejected in modern-day America.  Instead man is an individual with absolute autonomy.  He only enters into social relationships by an agreement or contract. Each man enters civil society and gives up only so much of his personal liberty as to facilitate comfortable self-preservation.  Under this view, the role of government becomes protective—protecting freedom from outside interference and from infringement by others.  Anything is legal provided it doesn’t limit the freedom of others.  The emphasis now shifts towards rights rather than obligations.  When two rights claims such as the right to choose and the right to life clash, the government must step in with positive law.  It is always the louder (or stronger) asserter of rights that wins.

Within this atmosphere of radical individualism enters the right to privacy.  This becomes a fundamental right because one must be able to do what one pleases without any outside interference.  This right has been elevated within the annals of the Supreme Court to an unalienable right.  Although it remains rather elusive as to what exactly it means, the Court ruled that the right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman’s decision to have an abortion.

It is “deeply held belief” in the right to privacy that trumps anything else that the Senator might “feel about abortion.”  Accordingly while he thinks that an individual’s private choices regarding intimate and personal matters (like whether or not to bear a child) must have no government interference, this cannot be done without reference to the moral law.  In no other aspect of life do we treat the right to privacy as an absolute right except in contraception, abortion, and homosexual activity.  This suggests that it is merely a smokescreen for judicial (and in the case at hand Senatorial) fiat.

Can the Senator explain why the private use of recreational drugs is a problem?  What about prostitution?  The “right to privacy” remains unprincipled.  This is why the right to non-interference for abortion (Roe v Wade) quickly turned into a right to abortion (PP vs Casey).  The government now interferes by supplying the abortion.  This is why a “personally opposed but” stance does nothing except reveal a lack of personal integrity.  The Senator is far from the neutral observer that he pretends to be.

We need only look to Monday’s Supreme Court ruling as proof of its arbitrary nature and its impossibility to overturn.  Abortion may be a personal decision, but it is certainly not private and no amount of judicial gymnastics can make it so.

Jesus and the Telephone Game

History, Scripture

I once met with a prominent atheist and I asked him what it was that ultimately led to his conversion to atheism.  Naturally inquisitive, he had grown up in a marginally Catholic home and had found that nearly all of his questions as a child went unanswered.  He left home for a Methodist college known for its top basketball program and took a course in Scripture hoping to have some of his questions answered.  Instead he found that the professor was simply a “Scripture Scholar” who applied the Historical Critical Method to everything he taught and ended up destroying what little faith the man had.  One of the things he taught him was how unreliable the Gospels actually were.  He would compare the way the Bible’s accounts of Jesus were passed on with the children’s telephone game in which the children whisper a message from one person to another.  The message is corrupted and everyone has a good laugh in the end.  This analogy is applied so often that it bears a deeper look.

In order to avoid setting up a straw man, we will begin by looking at what one of the better known Scripture scholars, Professor Bart Ehrman, has to say about this:

“You are probably familiar with the old birthday party game “telephone.” A group of kids sits in a circle, the first tells a brief story to the one sitting next to her, who tells it to the next, and to the next, and so on, until it comes back full circle to the one who started it. Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh. Imagine this same activity taking place, not in a solitary living room with ten kids on one afternoon, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across), with thousands of participants—from different backgrounds, with different concerns, and in different contexts—some of whom have to translate the stories into different languages” (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 2nd Edition p.47).

In order to see why this is a faulty analogy, we must briefly look at the message.  The Gospel (not the books but the actual message) was an absolutely life-altering message.  If what was being said about the man Jesus of Nazareth was actually true then it would change the lives of everyone who heard it.  This is far different from the message of the telephone game which is really just a random (and sometimes deliberately confusing) one.  The magnitude of the message would lead to you wanting to hear it again and again to make sure you got it right.  In the telephone game you cannot ask for the message a second time.  Finally, the Gospel was not whispered in the ear, but preached out loud so that there is a social corrective as well.

While the argument suffers from the fallacy of a faulty analogy, there is a part of it that may in fact be true.  The reliability of the message depends completely on the reliability of the messenger.  Ehrman’s argument (and even the analogy itself) hinges on the lack of reliability of the messenger:

“It does not appear that the authors of the early Gospels were eyewitnesses to the events that they narrate. But they must have gotten their stories from somewhere. Indeed, one of them acknowledges that he has heard stories about Jesus and read earlier accounts (Luke 1:1–4). In the opinion of most New Testament scholars, it is possible that in addition to preserving genuine historical recollections about what Jesus actually said and did, these authors also narrated stories that had been modified, or even invented, in the process of retelling” (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 2nd Edition p.47).

Dr. Brant Pitre in his new book, The Case for Jesus, presents a well-researched argument against this that I present in summary below.  Although it seems like common sense, it bears mentioning that there were three stages in the writing of the Gospels.  First there is the life and teaching of Jesus to His disciples.  These disciples were not just students of Jesus, but like most disciples of Jewish rabbis sought to collect the dust from their Master’s feet because they were following Him so closely.  They spent every day for three years with Him.  They spent 40-grace filled days with Him after the Resurrection.  After Pentecost, the second phase began, namely their preaching of the Gospel.

This preaching was done by these same disciples, the ones who were with Him from the beginning.  They were not merely sharing incidental memories from their time with Him but instead like all preachers their message was rehearsed and rehashed.  In other words, we do not need to worry about their memory slipping them because they were constantly preaching the same message that would eventually be written down.

Francis whisper

These same preachers also acted as a corrective to the message as it spread.  This is the genius of the Church and its role in protecting the content of Revelation.  We find examples of this throughout Acts of the Apostles when it is the Church who sends out the non-Apostolic preachers.  Even St. Paul himself went to the Apostles in order to vet his message (Gal 1:18).  St. John also writes his letters as a means of correcting those Gnostics who had twisted and distorted the message.

A further aspect of this becomes clear when we ask an important question: why did Jesus only appear to certain people after the Resurrection (1 Cor 15:8)?  Couldn’t He have just appeared to all of the Jewish leaders and Pilate?  )?  It would seem that He would want to appear to a multitude in order to prove His words were true.  Instead, He appeared to only those who He deemed to be reliable witnesses.  He chose those (and we believe He also equipped) who were most qualified to spread the message.  This cannot be overlooked because each of these men ultimately gave their lives because they knew that the Resurrection was real.  They had no real fear of death because they had witnessed Jesus rise from the dead.

This is why it matters that it is these same witnesses who are responsible for the third stage, the actual writing of the Gospel texts.  The argument that the Apostles were ignorant fishermen and thus incapable of writing is not historically accurate.  First, not all of them were fishermen and certainly one of them, namely the former tax collector, would have been literate (especially in Greek).  It should not be surprising that of the 11 remaining Apostles then that Matthew wrote a Gospel.  Secondly, we need to make the distinction between author and writer.  While John may not have been able to write (Acts 4:13 seems to suggest this), this does not mean that he could not have used a scribe.  We have good reason based on their relationship that Mark wrote his Gospel based on the preaching of Peter (1Pt 5:12-13).  Likewise Luke knew many eyewitnesses including the Mother of the Lord.

There is historical evidence as well that does not support the telephone game hypothesis.  One of the most basic rules for studying biblical manuscripts is that you go back to the earliest and best copies and see what they say.  All of the early manuscripts attribute them to the same authors that we do today.  We find not a single copy that is attributed to someone else.  Likewise there is unanimity among the Church Fathers as to the authors.

It bears mentioning as well that the amount of time that passed between the writing of the Gospels and Pentecost is not as long as some scholars will try to say it was.  We know from extra-biblical sources that the destruction of the Temple occurred in August of 70AD.  This is important because the Synoptic Gospels contain accounts of Jesus prophesying its demise.  Matthew (Mt 24:20) and Mark (Mk 13:18) both portray Jesus as telling the disciples to pray that it not come in Winter which only makes sense if it had not already happened (since it happened in late Summer).  Luke also contains a warning not to “enter into the city” (Lk 21:21).  One would logically ask why if it had already been destroyed this warning would be necessary.

Furthermore we know that Luke wrote Acts after his Gospel (Acts 1:1).  Given that he ends the book with Paul’s arrival in Rome and makes no mention of his martyrdom, it is reasonable to assume that it was written sometime between 62-68 AD.  His Gospel, would have needed to been completed then sometime before 62 AD, less than 30 years after the Ascension.

Unfortunately, my atheist companion is not alone in having had his faith destroyed in the face of faulty scholarship led animated by bad logic.  Many of us are afraid to use historical research to support our faith because of the fate of many Scripture scholars today.  If we do not learn the historical facts surrounding our faith then that faith will ultimately be supplanted in many hearts—truth cannot contradict truth.