All posts by Rob Agnelli

Know Thy Temperament

Moralilty, Virtue

In 2014, Americans spent over $10 billion on self-help books, CDs and seminars.  Although these techniques promise change, very often they fail to make any lasting impact on our lives.  The problem oftentimes is that the programs themselves have a different definition of happiness or perfection and so we end up dissatisfied even when we reach our goals.  More often however is that we lack the self-knowledge necessary to really affect change in our lives.  When we begin to confront our shortcomings, a certain amount of sadness arises in us.  In order to avoid this sadness, we develop blind spots to our true faults.  We then embark on some self-help program to fix faults we don’t really have or ones that are minor at best.  This is not to say these programs have no use in our lives, after all, only that they will be entirely ineffective unless we have self-knowledge.  Placing ourselves before God in prayer by which we come to know ourselves as He knows us is remains the most effective way to grow in self-knowledge and to heal those defects that we have.  But many people may not be aware that in the Catholic tradition there are other objective means to growing in self-knowledge, namely by relying on the knowledge of our temperament.

Fr. Jordan Aumann defines a temperament as, “as the pattern of inclinations and reactions that proceed from the physiological constitution of the individual. It is a dynamic factor that determines to a great extent the manner in which an individual will react to stimuli of various kinds.”  Within this definition we can see two factors, namely that our temperaments are based on our material makeup (physiological constitution) and represent a pattern or a natural way to reacting to a given situation.  These reactions can be quick or slow and short in duration or long lasting.  Each of these four combinations maps to a specific temperament.

What makes knowledge of one’s temperament extremely helpful when it comes to self-knowledge is that it enables us to see both are natural strengths and weaknesses.  It also makes some virtues easier while others are harder.

There are two caveats that are important for us to understand as well.  First we must never use our temperament as an excuse for our bad behavior or as a way to minimize our faults.  We use it to understand our tendencies and as a means to view our weaknesses—but this is always done so that we can open the windows of our souls and allow the transforming light of Christ to shine on them.  Second, just because it is a natural tendency does not mean that we are stuck with our temperament.  As Aumann’s definition suggests, temperaments are dispositions which means they can be molded and changed.  Our goal ought to be to for the perfection of all four temperaments rather than thinking we are stuck with our own.

In looking at each of the four temperaments, we begin with the choleric.  The choleric temperament is easily and strongly aroused, and the impression lasts for a long time.   Because of this, the choleric tends to show great zeal for whatever he sets his mind to.  He tends to be strong willed and highly emotional and a man of principles.  The virtues of perseverance and justice tend to come rather easily and this temperament naturally lends itself to leading others.

On the other hand, the choleric because he is highly emotional often acts quickly and is imprudent in his haste.  He must actively work to cultivate patience, prudence, and humility.  Because he is principle based he tends to put principles ahead of people and rarely does things just to be nice.  So, on a natural level they need to practice charity in dealing with others.

The passionate partner of the choleric is the melancholic.  The melancholic reacts slowly but once aroused the impression is strong and long lasting.  By nature the melancholic is inclined to reflection, piety, and the interior life. They are compassionate toward those who suffer, attracted to the corporal works of mercy, and able to endure suffering to the point of heroism in the performance of their duties. They have high ideals and a commitment to perfection.  They also tend to analyze their projects thoroughly.

The melancholic tends to be overly critical of themselves and others, dismissive and overly judgmental.  They lack self-confidence and often have difficulty starting tasks.

Those with a Sanguine temperament tend to react quickly and strongly to almost any stimulation or impression, but the reaction is usually of short duration.   The sanguine is optimistic, sometime overly so and are usually fairly outgoing. This means that compassion usually comes rather easily to them, but they have trouble being impartial because their feelings are so strong.  They tend to be impulsive as well.

Because the deep passion in their initial response quickly fades they tend to lack perseverance.   Vanity can be a great temptation for the sanguine as well as envy. One of the greatest challenges that a sanguine faces is making impulsive decision.  One way to overcome this is by striving to cultivate the virtue of prudence.  They also need to cultivate the virtue of perseverance since they can easily lose focus on tasks that require long commitments.

Finally, we have the phlegmatic temperament.  The phlegmatic is rarely aroused emotionally and, if so, only weakly. The impressions received usually last for only a short time and leave no trace. The fundamental disposition of the phlegmatic is that he is reserved, prudent, sensible, reflective, and dependable.  He is not easily provoked to anger or prone to exaggeration.  Phlegmatics are well known for their easy going nature.  They also tend to be clear and concise in their speech.  The phlegmatic however does not like conflict and will avoid it at all costs.  In fact they have a tendency to avoid not only conflict but anything that is physically or mentally demanding.

four_temperaments

Because they tend towards laziness and even sloth, the root sin of the phlegmatic is most often sensuality.  Other ways that sensuality manifests itself in the phlegmatic person include anger and impatience in the face of anything hard, disorganization because they seek whatever is immediate, and the consistent tendency to put off prayer.  The phlegmatic then needs to cultivate fortitude and temperance.

Hebrews 10:24 says, “We must consider how to rouse one another to love and good works.”   If we reflect on this for a moment we realize that knowledge of our own temperament and of others can be used to help motivate others.

As we set out on the journey of self-knowledge, we quickly realize that, like St. Paul, we do not do the things we want to do but what we do not want to do.  There is an execution gap in our lives.  Not only that, but understanding the temperament of those around us helps to overcome a great deal of conflict in our lives, especially those we live with and work with.

In accomplishing any task, there are four key areas to consider.  They are

  • Setting the Right goals
  • Getting Started
  • Overcoming Obstacles
  • Persevering to the End

Each of the temperaments then has a characteristic weakness associated with one of these areas.  Understanding how to strengthen these weaknesses and the proper way to approach the person will help anyone’s motivation.

As I mentioned earlier, the choleric is a self-motivated leader who is driven to complete his objectives.  However because the choleric is quick to respond and slow to receive advice, he often sets imprudent goals or no real goals at all.  The choleric then needs to learn to take the time to choose goals properly.  The key then as a choleric is to be patient, and set the right goals.  In dealing with a choleric, motivation is normally not the key but we need to slow them down.  We can ask them if they have buy-in from others on their ideas or help brainstorm with them.  We must also help them to remain charitable because they often see others as stumbling blocks and will try to steamroll over them.

The melancholic, due to his naturally reflective nature, does not have trouble setting proper goals.  Instead, he will often struggle with actually getting started.  This manifests itself also by being overly focused on the small details because they want everything to be perfect.  The key for a melancholic is to prioritize goals.  In working with them they need a kick start—but this cannot be in the form of you doing it for them.  Instead ask what you can do to help them get started or ask them for a solution to specific problem you are having.  If you can keep them focused on the individuals steps they won’t get bogged down in the details.

Sanguines, like Cholerics, tend not to have any problems getting started.  They are usually eager to get going.  Instead they struggle with persevering to the end.  Their optimistic nature causes them to overlook true difficulties or minimize them.  The best thing for a Sanguine is to set and schedule.  They can be helped by regularly following up with them to see their progress.  Setting interim goals will keep them from getting bored.

The Phlegmatic is perhaps the most difficult to motivate because of their laid back nature.  They struggle with setting goals like the Choleric, but the main struggle for them is overcoming obstacles.  They need both encouragements throughout the process and to be held accountable at all stages of the process.  It also helps to remind them of past successes.

In conclusion, it bears repeating that the purpose in understanding temperament is to grow in understanding both of ourselves and others.  This is much more than mere self-improvement on the natural level—it should have as its goal to fulfill God’s will as a loving and joyful spouse, parent, and friend.  Understanding temperament not only helps us become more capable of controlling our emotions and moods, it helps us identify the most effective means to grow in virtue and obedience to God’s will.

***If you are interested in taking a temperament test for yourself, here is a link to one that is contained in the book The Temperament God Gave You***

Surrounded by Tragedies

Islam

In his famous essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell lamented how the English language has becomes “ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts…. prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”  We select certain vague words or phrases that are intended to hide the truth rather than express it.  One overused word that has suffered the fate of obfuscation is tragedy.  We even attempt to dress up the word by attaching “senseless” to it, rendering what is being said nonsense.  Tragedies are by nature not random acts, but instead should be seen as the almost unavoidable consequence of the decisions of the tragic hero. There may be some fate as to how it actually plays out, but the hero always bears responsibility for the calamity.  The tragic event always comes about because of some serious flaw in the hero’s character.

Last week, the city of Orlando was rocked by two unrelated calamities that have both been called tragedies.  Despite the fact that the sheriff called the drowning of the child after being attacked by an alligator a “very unfortunate tragedy,” he was simply the victim of an unfortunate accident.  No one could have anticipated what happened and neither the child nor his parents bore any culpability in the attack.  The “national tragedy” that occurred at the Orlando nightclub was something vastly different.  It bore all the marks of a tragedy in the true sense of the word.  There was nothing random about the slaughter of forty-nine people by the tragic hero, Omar Mateen.  If the little evidence that we have been made aware of is to be believed, then it was clearly a thoroughly premeditated act.   It does not take much reflection to see that these two events are not in the same category, yet the secular press and the government would have us believe that they are.

In calling them both a tragedy it allows us to simply chalk them up to fate.  In one case it was that the alligator just happened to be in that part of the water while in the other he just happened to pick that particular club. This is like saying that Macbeth’s demise at the hand of Macduff was because the witches said he was invincible and not because of Macbeth’s lust for power.  In other words, by grouping all calamities together as tragedies, it allows us to gloss over the tragic flaw of the principle actor.

The flaw in Omar Mateen was that he had been to Saudi Arabia and been taught by a radical element within Islam; or so we are told.  And here we have yet another attempt at verbal gymnastics to avoid the deep thinking necessary.  We think by attaching the adjective “radical” to the noun Islam that we are saying that he has somehow gone beyond what is true Islam.  The base of the word radical is literally “forming the root” meaning that it is a thorough application of Islam.  It is Islam at its root.

shariah-law-picture

Anyone familiar with the teachings of Islam will know that what Mateen did was what his religion dictates.  There are a number of places in the Qur’an where homosexual activity is condemned one of which is the seventh surah:

“And [We had sent] Lot when he said to his people, ‘Do you commit such immorality as no one has preceded you with from among the worlds?  Indeed, you approach men with desire, instead of women. Rather, you are a transgressing people.’  But the answer of his people was only that they said, ‘Evict them from your city! Indeed, they are men who keep themselves pure.’  So We saved him and his family, except for his wife; she was of those who remained [with the evildoers].  And We rained upon them a rain [of stones]. Then see how was the end of the criminals.” (7:80-84).

Recall that to the faithful Muslim, the sayings of Muhammad or hadith are binding upon them, especially when applying what the Qur’an teaches to concrete circumstances.  What should a faithful Muslim do to those who engage in homosexual behavior?  Muhammad is quite explicit as to what the punishment should be:  “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done.” (Sunan Abu Dawud 4462).

It is not so much then that Mateen had been “radicalized” as that he was acting in accord with what his religion teaches.  There are some differences in the various schools of Islamic jurisprudence as to the number of strikes a suspected homosexual gets, but all of them allow for execution.  Accordingly, there have been an estimated 4000 executions of suspected homosexuals under Sharia law in Iran since 1980.  It is one thing to think homosexual behavior wrong like Christians do; it is another to treat it as a crime, punishable by death.

Obviously then we have to make the attack about what it was about.  Mateen certainly targeted Americans because they are Americans, but to think he picked this particular group of Americans for any other reason than what his religion teaches is naïve.  One could scour the media for the Islamic teachings and never find them.  The government will never assign that as his motivation.  Why is that?

First, those who have been thoroughly secularized cannot imagine anyone acting based on strict religious convictions.  Their version of religion is that which makes us comfortable, but makes very little in the way of demands.  Anyone so committed to religion that they would actually follow the tenets of that religion is clearly a fanatic or a radical.

Second, it seems very strange at first glance that two diametrically opposed world views, namely LGBT and Islam, could remain unchallenged media darlings.  That is until you factor in the idea that one of them, namely Islam is also a religion.  From a secular viewpoint, all religions are the same.  Islam is no different from Christianity, Judaism or Buddhism.  They are all just flawed man-made attempts to reach God, if there even is one.  It is all just “different strokes for different folks” and as long as we can coexist, then everything is fine.  But the minute they actually investigate Islam and find out that it calls for the killing of homosexuals, they would have to admit that this religion has something false in it.  Not only is that repugnant to a relativist, but it would force them to admit that they are not all equal.  Some are actually better than others.  This is dangerous territory because it could lead to something like dogmatism—insisting that religion is actually a source of truth.

Instead they merely stick their heads in the sand and deny such dangerous elements in the religion exist.  They instead label anyone who believes such things as “radical” and accuse them of taking it too far.  But the proof is in the religion’s founding documents that no one seems to know how to read.  Meanwhile, ignorance is not bliss.  People are being killed because of the steady refusal to admit reality.  Orlando may have been a great tragedy, but like all tragedies there is a sense that it could have been averted had we been willing to acknowledge the tragic flaw.

The Circumstances of the Passion

The Life of Jesus

Even in the midst of Ordinary Time, all of the spiritual masters of the Church recommend that we create a spiritual rhythm to our prayer.  Obviously this pattern centers on the weekly feast of the Resurrection that we celebrate each Sunday.  In order to live the Sabbath to the fullest though, it is necessary to journey through Our Lord’s experience on Good Friday as well.  This is why Fridays have always been marked by contemplation of Our Lord’s Passion.  In one of her many encounters with Our Lord, St. Faustina records that Jesus was pleased “best by meditating on His sorrowful Passion and by such meditation much light falls upon my soul. He who wants to learn true humility should reflect upon the Passion of Jesus. I get a clear under-standing of many things that I could not comprehend before” (Diary, 267).  The clarity of understanding comes about by striving to fill in the concrete details of His sufferings.  As we do this, we are filled with a new awareness of the incredible depths of God’s love.  It takes merely an intellectual assent to say that Christ died on the Cross for each one of us.  But when we are forced to sit with the circumstances of just how that death came about, our hearts are engaged in a whole new way and filled with a desire to be nearer to Our Lord.

Before examining some of the specifics of Christ’s Passion, it is fitting to repeat a point that St. Thomas makes in his treaty on the Passion of Christ in the Summa Theologica (ST III, q.46, art 6).  One of the questions that he seeks to answer is whether the pain of Christ’s Passion was greater than all other pains.  He does this in order to help us to avoid the trap of seeing the Passion of Christ as somehow just an act of divine willpower.  What this leads to is the habit of somehow seeing Christ as somehow stoic in the face of His sufferings.  Instead it is meant to remind us that the Divine Son took to Himself a human nature so that He Who was by nature incapable of suffering, could suffer.

But this human nature was not one that was marred by the stain of Original Sin and thus capable of feeling pain and suffering in a way that the rest of us can hardly imagine.  Because His body suffered from no defects, He felt the wounding all the more.  His sense of touch and the constitution of His nervous system were also perfect and thus each wound would have been felt with a force we could only speculate upon.  The physical wounding would have been accompanied by an incredible sadness at being wounded through the hatred of those He loved.  Because His will was fixed on undergoing the Passion, He did nothing to mitigate the suffering.  He did not distract Himself or allow anything that would have numbed the pain.  Instead “He permitted each one of His powers to exercise its proper function,” as Damascene says.

Also, being keenly aware of how justice needed to be fulfilled, He would have embraced “the amount of pain proportionate to the magnitude of the fruit which resulted therefrom,” namely, that He might most perfectly accomplish His mission as the redeemer of men.

Given this, when we look at some of the individual circumstances surrounding the acts of the Passion then we should know that the pains we imagine are multiplied in Our Lord.  It bears mentioning as well that some of these will seem to contradict traditional iconography, but each of them does accord with experimental truth.  Interestingly enough the evidence found on the Shroud of Turin (a doctor in the 1950s named Pierre Barbet investigated this) also agrees with what we know both historically and experimentally making a forgery very unlikely.

Shroud of Turin

Crucifixion is perhaps history’s most brutal form of execution.  In the “fullness of time” Christ came to a Roman ruled Israel where Rome had perfected this practice they borrowed from Carthage.  It was not only the particular sufferings of being crucified, but the duration of the sufferings.  Crucifixion led to a very slow death.  Relatively speaking though, Christ’s death was rather quick.  So quick in fact that when Joseph of Arimathea goes to Pilate, the latter is surprised that Jesus that the man he condemned to death just three hours before is already dead (Mk 15:44).  This is not however because of Jesus somehow checking out early, but because of the depth of His sufferings prior to the Crucifixion.

Of the four evangelists, only Luke mentions the “agony” that Christ suffers in the Garden.  Being a doctor himself, he is very precise in how the agony manifested itself namely that “His sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground” (Lk 22:44).  Luke uses very specific medical terms, Jesus sweat (idros) become clots of blood (thromboi).  What St. Luke is describing has since come to be known as hematidrosis which is a medical condition by which the capillaries in the sweat glands rupture.  Given the surface area of the skin, this could have led to a great loss of blood, but even if it was localized it causes the skin to become very sensitive to pain.

Dr. Barbet also found that the wounds on the Shroud are consistent with someone who had been scourged.  The Shroud shows the markings of a man with more than one hundred wounds from scourging.  We should keep in mind that this would include only those that broke the skin so that actual bruises would not show up.  This means that he was scourged probably 200-300 times.  It also showed a man who was naked because the ones in the groin area are just as deep as anywhere else and had his hands bound overhead as there are none on the forearms.  Regardless of whether this is the actual burial shroud of Christ, this gives us an idea of what a typical scourging would have been like.

The further weakening of Christ occurred in the carrying of the Cross.  Historically speaking, a cross was made in two distinct pieces in order to make the process more streamlined.  The vertical piece (“stipes crucis”) was affixed to the ground and the horizontal was movable (“patibulum”). Most of the crosses were rather low for ease of attaching the two pieces and to allow for the wild beasts to attack the crucified.  Only in rare cases was the crucified lifted higher to be on display.  The condemned man then would not carry the entire cross but just the patibulum.  It was placed on the man’s shoulders and both arms outstretched and then bound by cords to the chest, arms and hands.

When Our Lord arrived at the crucifixion site, His arms would have been nailed to the Cross.  As Dr. Barbet pointed out, crucifixion in the palms is an impossibility.  They could not have held the weight and the hands would have torn.  Instead it was done with a nail in the bend of the wrist.  This would have been extremely painful because it would have injured the median nerve each arm.  Once the “patibulum was raised up and connected to the stipes, they would have nailed His feet as well, one foot over the other (if the Shroud is to be believed it would have been left over right rather than vice versa as most artists depict it).

Finally we come to the actual cause of death.  Asphyxia was always the cause of death in Crucifixion.  With the arms affixed spread out, cramping would begin to set in and the contracted muscles would make it impossible to exhale. The only relief would be to relieve the dragging on the arms by “standing” on the stipes.  This would bring about cramping and fatiguing in the legs and lead to a dragging on the arms again.  This back and forth would continue until He was too weak to stand.

While Our Lord would have been able to speak while He was standing, that would have been extremely difficult.  This ought to give us pause as to the profundity of the Seven Words spoken by Him, especially the last where He stands to say “it is finished “ and returns to the hanging position (bowing His head) and turns His spirit over to mankind (John 19:30).

In the third week of his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius invites the retreatant to meditate on the Passion of Our Lord.  Given the Ignatian reliance on the imagination, we can gain much fruit by allowing history and medical science to inform our reading of the Gospel accounts of the Passion.  St. Ignatius, pray for us!

Circumstantial Sainthood

Virtue

There is a familiar spiritual maxim that goes something like this—“the saints all know they are sinners, but the sinners all think they’re saints.”  The lesson of the saying is one of humility and like all things related to this most necessary virtue we tend to like pithy sayings like this.  But if we are honest, we will admit that we don’t actually believe this to be true.  Perhaps compared to the great saints, our sins are great, but our sins are relatively small compared to most people.  Also, could it be true that all the saints knew they were sinners?  For example, Chesterton tells of St. Thomas Aquinas and how the priest “listening to the dying man’s confession, he fancied suddenly that he was listening to the first confession of a child of five.”  We could multiply the examples of saints with similar confessions, but the point is that if they were honest they could hardly label themselves as sinners.

The confusion comes in the use of the term “sinners.”  It is not so much in their actions that the saints see themselves as sinners, but in their capacity.  In other words, they are absolutely convinced that they are capable of committing any and all horrible acts.  Not only that, they are convinced that given different circumstances they would in fact do so.  It is only by the grace of God that they did not.  And therein we find their great humility.

This is why the most humble people are also the most merciful and slowest to judge.  When they meet someone who is in the depths of sin, they realize that the situation could very easily be reversed.  In fact they realize that given the concrete circumstances of the other person’s life, they probably would have done worse.  An honest person would see that it is by chance that it is the way it is.  A person who is striving for holiness will realize that it was God’s grace that kept them from being in those circumstances and it is He who has preserved them.  By repeatedly recognizing this, the saints come to be more and more dependent upon God’s grace and less and less “capable” of sinning.  This is Chesterton’s point about Aquinas’ confession—it was the confession of a five year old because the Dumb Ox was humble.

Aquinas--Chasing prostitute

In a world marked by the cult of celebrity, we are scandalized regularly by the actions of politicians, athletes and actors.  We like to read about their indiscretions and downfalls.  But I wonder how quick we would be to do so if we were truly humble.  These are real people who live in a vastly different world than the rest of us do with a set of temptations that most of us cannot even begin to imagine.  Are we absolutely sure that given the power politicians have, that we wouldn’t actually do worse things than them?  Are we absolutely sure that given the number of women who throw themselves at professional athletes that we could remain chaste?  Instead we often sit in judgment based upon our own situation.  It is easy to say you wouldn’t be corrupted by power when you have none.  It is easy to say you would be faithful to your spouse when the worst you deal with is a neighbor who is a little flirty.  It is only humility that will save us from the glamour of the world so much so that we will thank God for preserving us.  This is why all the saints also desired to be hidden—they saw how easy others were trapped and knew they would easily get pulled in as well.

The key then to humility is the recognition of this capacity for depravity.  But it is not just in moments of honesty about our situation that we realize this.  It can also be in moments when we are able to glimpse the depravity in our own hearts that usually comes about through suffering some humiliation.  For many years, I would sit in judgment of other people about the behavior of their kids.  Thanks be to God it mostly remained an interior attitude, but there were many times when I asked “why won’t they control their kid?”  It never even occurred to me that there were, in fact, times when you can’t control your kid.  It never occurred to me, until that is, I was on the receiving end of that and actually had a child of my own that at times simply could not be controlled.  Now there are a lot of people who are supportive and understanding, but for the most part I receive stares, direct judgments on my parenting, and parenting advice.  It is hard not to experience that as hatred and see them as an enemy.  I could even lash out at them, but I know they are merely expressing what was in my heart for many years.  It took being unfairly judged for me to stop condemning in my heart.  It took humiliations for me to grasp that without humility I would never be free from the trappings of my own heart.

The point is that until we learn humility and see it as truly good for us we will never experience true spiritual growth.  We will never become saints without it.  Humility is the habit of recognizing our total dependence upon God to save us from ourselves.  It is the only weapon we have with which to fight ourselves and our own pride.  For many of us, the daily cross that we must pick up and carry is our own weakness.  Humility is the fulcrum by which we raise this cross and carry it.

It doesn’t just take moments of humiliation to grow in this virtue.  St. Thomas says that humility is truth and what he means by this is that our growth in humility is proportional to our love of the truth.  This idea is captured perfectly in Adam Smith’s companion to The Wealth of Nations, called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  He centers the treatise on what he calls the moral judgements of an “impartial spectator” which is really the virtue of humility.  According to Smith the key to happiness is to be loved for being truly lovely.  His point is that while we may seek the esteem of others, we should do so based only upon the truth of what we are.  We should not seek to be praised for those things that we are not, but only for the things that the impartial spectator of ourselves would say we are.

How easy it is then to grow in humility simply by ceasing to pretend to be what we are not; to accept praise graciously, but only for those things that are true.  We don’t need to blow trumpets for our faults, only cease to pretend they are not there.  To love the truth so much that you don’t want others to believe good things about you that are false.

Of course it is this relation to the truth that ultimately causes the devil to flee in the face of humility and thus it is a great spiritual weapon.  But in order to use this weapon we must first understand how it works.  To quote CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters in which Screwtape tells Wormwood that the key to destroying humility is to:

…make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy’s strategy, we must consider His aims.

Holiness really is circumstantial, but humility is the only path we can take to set those circumstances in our favor.

Why ad Orientem Matters

Eucharist

In what has become a controversial interview with the French Catholic magazine Famille Chretienne, Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Cardinal Robert Sarah, encouraged the practice of priest and people facing east (ad Orientem in Latin) together during certain parts of the Mass.  Unfortunately, his repeated calls for a return to the constant practice of the Church until the Second Vatican Council, like those of Cardinal Ratzinger before him, have mostly been ignored.  This is because the idea of the priest “turning his back on the people” signals an antiquated liturgical practice that was left behind with the reforms of Vatican II.  To dismiss this practice solely base on this, misses the  point of the point entirely and so it will be highly beneficial for us to investigate why the Cardinal is right.

It is helpful to begin by looking at some of the recent history.  The Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, is silent on the issue of orientation.  What the Constitution does emphasize is “active participation” of the laity during the Mass.  In order to supposedly facilitate this active participation, the instruction for implementing the Constitution Inter Oecumenici mentions a celebration versus populum (“facing the people”) as a possibility but does not prescribe it.  In the General Instruction for the Mass that followed in 1975, said that:

In every church there should ordinarily be a fixed, dedicated altar, which should be freestanding to allow the ministers to walk around it easily and Mass to be celebrated facing the people, which is desirable whenever possible.

This translation was interpreted by many to mean that Mass facing the people was desirable.  But the phrase “which is desirable whenever possible (‘quod expedit ubicumque possibile sit)’ refers to the provision for a freestanding altar and not to the desirability of celebration towards the people.

Very often liturgical purists will argue that celebration versus populum came out of nowhere.  Certainly there was enough vagueness to open the door for its widespread practice, but the Church did very clearly and validly offer it as an option.  The desire to have Mass offered ad orientem must not be based on a mere love for antiquity.  We must avoid the trap Pius XII warned of related to the “liturgy of the early ages..[It] must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity. . . . [I]t is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device” (Mediator Dei, 61).  The point that the Cardinal is making is a more balanced one in that he thinks this experiment was a failure and that we need to change it.

In his book Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, Abbot Vonier calls the sacrifice of the Mass a “profoundly human thing.”  What he means by this is that despite the fact that it is centered upon a divine act, what surrounds that divine act is done by men and under their control.  More to the point, the Church is the custodian of the Sacraments and she has the power to add to the institutional signification and adorn the action making it a celebration that adds a certain clarity to the divine action.  While the Church cannot change the Sacraments themselves because they are divine instituted, she can and should surround them with meaningful liturgical forms.  These liturgical forms are sacraments of the Sacraments in that they are meant to more fully reveal what is actually happening, always with the goal of making it easier for men in a given culture and time to enter more fully into the mystery of the Sacrament.

This is why we can say that the liturgy is organic and can change based on a given culture and time.  But it cannot just simply be any change that people want to see, but instead each new development must be tested by whether it is in harmony with the essence of the liturgy or whether it detracts from it.  It is only in this light that we can evaluate whether the change in which has been deemed organic enhances the understanding of the Mass or detracts from it.  It is most assuredly the latter for several reasons.

The principle of “active participation” of the faithful requires that first and foremost there be an understanding of what they are actively participating in.  What is primarily going on during the Mass is a sacrifice.  This topic has been covered in other places, but it bears repeating that what is actually going on is Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross being made present to the Church so that the members can personally and actively participate in it.  But most Catholics would associate the Mass with a community meal.  Where would they get this idea?

Francis_Ad_Orientem

With priest and people facing each other, it certainly looks like a closed in community with the priest at the head of the table.  This closed in community has come together to share, like all meals do, the sustenance of life.   But the Eucharist is not a community meal in the strict sense.  First of all, not everyone present shares in it.  Second it is based on a misunderstanding of the Sacramental nature of the Mass.  While it was instituted in the context of a Jewish festal meal, what Christ commanded the Apostles to repeat in memory of Him was not the meal, but the new reality He created.  Even if it were viewed in terms of that particular meal, the circumstances of the Last Supper were vastly different.  As was custom, the diners reclined on couches arranged in a semicircle, with small tables being used for holding food and dishes.  In other words the meal had an open orientation with all the diners facing the same direction.

Furthermore, that meal that Jesus shared cannot be understood without the notion of sacrifice.  The Jewish Passover meal was one that centered on the sacrifice and eating of the Passover Lamb.  The meal Jesus shared with the Apostles was marked by the fact that the victim of the sacrifice was Himself.

How would restoring the orientation of the priest change this?  When the priest and people are facing the same direction, there is no question as to the nature of what is going on.  The community is making the offering of the Son to the Father.  The priest serves as representative of the people, conformed sacramental to Christ the Priest and the altar is raised above the people to show the upward motion of the sacrifice.  The liturgy with priest and people facing the same direction then makes evident not just the sacrificial character of the Mass but also the Real Presence.  It is not accidental that in the years since the implementation of versus populum that a belief in the Real Presence has steadily declined—lex orandi, lex credenda—how we worship affects what we believe.

A quick word on the use of the term ad orientem (Latin “to the east).  The reason this term is emphasized is so that we do not fall into the trap of thinking the priest is turning his back on the people.  Like all Sacraments, the Eucharist has not just a past and present orientation, but a future as well.  We are to celebrate the Eucharist “until You come again.”   We are to be on the watch for His return.  To emphasize this connection between the liturgy and the cosmos, our watching ought to be towards the east (or at least towards the apse which represents a “liturgical east” in those churches not suitably oriented).  According to Origen, this eastward direction of prayer is something that has marked Christian prayer from antiquity and was handed on from Christ and the Apostles.  St. Thomas says the facing east during prayer is fitting because

the Divine majesty is indicated in the movement of the heavens which is from the east. Secondly, because Paradise was situated in the east according to the Septuagint version of Genesis 2:8, and so we signify our desire to return to Paradise. Thirdly, on account of Christ Who is ‘the light of the world’ [John 8:12; 9:5, and is called ‘the Orient’ (Zechariah 6:12). Who mounteth above the heaven of heavens to the east (Psalm 67:34), and is expected to come from the east, according to Matthew 24:27, ‘As lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be’” (ST II-II, q.84, art.3, ad.3).

Cardinal Ratzinger made the common sense observation that ordinarily when we speak to someone we face them so that when we speak to God in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, priest and people is one voice.  Therefore they should be facing the same direction.  This is also why the Pope Emeritus makes a sharp distinction between the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  During the Liturgy of the Word, there is a certain dialogue that goes on and thus it is fitting that the priest and people face each other.  But in the Liturgy of the Eucharist the direction changes, something that ought to be revealed in the liturgical form (with the exception of the few times of dialogue).

We can see then that with a proper understanding of an ad orientem posture it helps to more fully reveal what is happening at Mass.  This is at the heart of Cardinal Sarah’s repeated protestations of the current practice.  If our goal is conversion and turning to the Lord, we ought to seriously consider changing our position.

Voting and Conscience

Church and State, Conscience, Natural Law

As the primary season comes to a close and clear candidates begin to emerge, we should expect to hear more and more about how to vote as Catholics.  The discussion will center on “voting according to conscience.”  If we are not careful however, we will fall prey to the vague notion of conscience that has plagued the Church in the last 50 years.  Instead we should strive to vote according to an informed conscience.  In an age in which fact is often equated with truth it is necessary to speak of what we mean when we say that a conscience is informed.  We don’t mean that it is full of information or data, but instead it is alive in the way that a soul informs or brings life to the body.  An informed conscience is a conscience which is fully alive.

An informed conscience is able to recognize that not all goods and evils are equal.  An informed conscience has no room for a seamless garment approach to morality.  Instead it recognizes that there are certain acts that are intrinsically evil and cannot be ordered to the good no matter what the intention of the person.

To aid us in discerning how these evils present themselves in political life, the Church for her part has listed the so-called five non-negotiables.  The first four are related to the protection of life at its most vulnerable stages including abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and human cloning and the fifth is support for so called “same-sex marriage.”  These are non-negotiable not because we are stubborn but because they are aligned so closely to the intrinsic goods of man that form the basis of the natural law.

It is grave matter to vote for candidates that support policies that promote these.  When we vote for these candidates, even when it is not our intention to support those particular policies, we still cooperate in the evil.  Certainly our level of cooperation may be remote, it is still true that without our votes these evils could not be promoted by civil law.

It would seem based on this then that the Catholic position is that we should be single issue voters.  The response to this is rather nuanced so that an example should make the distinction clear.

Suppose I take you in my time machine parked outside to Berlin in 1932 and ask you to cast a vote for or against Hitler.  How would you vote and why?

Despite all the robust economic policies that brought Germany out of the ashes of World War I and the restoration of German military might, you would hopefully vote no.  Why?  The reason is simple—no matter how much good he may do in those other realms you would not vote for him because his platform advocated mass murder of innocent people.  This means a single issue would cause you to withhold your vote.

It is the same with us today.  We should not vote for a particular candidate based on their stance on a single issue, but their stance could be a reason to disqualify a candidate from consideration.  Even if a candidate is pro-life for example, this does not mean that we should vote for them.  That just means they can be in the running.  We must then also look at his other policies and see how they promote and protect the common good.  In this way we are not single issue voters.

Flag and Crucifix

This principle is summarized well in a document that then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that deals with when Catholics may receive Communion:

“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia”

What about voting for candidates that may be in favor of one of these non-negotiables but whose office has no effect on policies related to these non-negotiables?  Even though these issues may seem tangential, they are still important indicators.  The first virtue we should look for in a candidate for any office is prudence.  A person who cannot identify something that is intrinsically evil shows a lack of prudence.  Secondly, these offices are often stepping-stones into higher and more influential offices.  It is better to stop their ambitions before they get any steam going.

An informed conscience is an uncompromising conscience.  All too often someone will say something like “since there is no hope of overturning Roe v Wade we should not even worry about whether someone is pro-choice or pro-life but instead focus on the candidate whose social programs will also reduce the number of abortions.”  This position however amounts to a compromise with evil and in fact is untenable upon closer inspection.

Pope John Paul II spoke of what he termed the “art of the possible” in Evangelium Vitae.  He said that in some societies it may not be possible to completely overturn laws that support intrinsic evils such as abortion in one fell swoop.  Instead we might need to enact legislation in pieces that seek to limit the number of abortions while moving the social consciousness towards laws that abolish it altogether.  This sounds similar to the position of “social programs to reduce abortions” with an important exception.  The legislation that the Holy Father speaks of must have the intention of reducing the number of abortions and not just as a mere side effect.  Social programs that may reduce poverty may also have the side effect of reducing the number of abortions, but that is only accidental, especially when the overall policy is to promote and even provide them.

An uncompromising conscience is one in which the Catholic will call an evil for what it is and not simply attempt to make the evil “safe and legal.”  Still an uncompromising conscience may have recourse to the “art of the possible” and fight intrinsic evils piecemeal if necessary.

During the Vice Presidential debate in 2012, Congressman Ryan gave us an example of how an uncompromising conscience uses “the art of the possible.”  He was even criticized for it—but he has been very clear from the outset that abortion is always gravely evil.  Still he was part of a ticket which would not make the so-called abortion “hard cases”—rape and incest—illegal.  This is not because he was capitulating but because he recognizes that making abortion illegal in 99.9% of the cases will not only significantly reduce the number of abortions but lead to a greater awareness that abortion is always wrong even in the cases where the mother was a victim of a violent crime.

There are many who will argue that the best approach when confronted with two candidates, both of whom support an intrinsic evil, is to refrain from voting at all.  This ignores the fact however that one of those candidates will in fact win the election.  One should vote then consistent with their judgment as to which candidate will do the least amount of moral harm.

Imagine if you can, an America in which the nearly 70 million Catholics voted as a single block.  Imagine how far candidates would be willing to go to cater to 22% of the voters.  This is why we must understand these principles and be able to clearly articulate them and present them to our friends.  It starts now, not in October and November when everyone has made up their minds.  St. Thomas More, pray for us!

Why Devotion to the Sacred Heart is Necessary

Sacred Heart of Jesus

In a 2006 letter addressed to Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, the Superior General of the Jesuits marking the 50th Anniversary of Pope Pius XII’s encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Haurietis Aquas, Pope Benedict XVI said that devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus “remains indispensable for a living relationship with God…It cannot be considered as a passing form of worship or devotion.”  Not one prone to hyperbole, the Pope Emeritus was simply drawing upon the tradition of his recent predecessors.  For example, when faced with some of the fallout from the Second Vatican Council regarding the devotional life of the Church, Blessed Paul VI spoke about the Sacred Heart often.  He said that “it is absolutely necessary that the faithful venerate and honor the Sacred Heart in the expression of their private piety as well as in the services of public cult, because of His fullness we have all received” (Investigabiles Divitias Christi, 1965) and also reminding the Faithful that “the cult rendered to the Sacred Heart is the most efficacious means to contribute to that spiritual and moral renewal of the world called for by the Second Vatican Council” (Address to the Thirty-First General Congregation of the Society of Jesus,1966).  Clearly the Popes of the last 60 years are unanimous in their assessment of the importance of devotion to the Sacred Heart, but it is in reading the aforementioned Pius XII’s encyclical that we are able to see that it should hold a certain primacy.  He speaks of the obligation that Christians have toward devotion to the Sacred Heart, cautioning against treating it as we do other private devotions: “There are some who, confusing and confounding the primary nature of this devotion with various individual forms of piety which the Church approves and encourages but does not command, regard this as a kind of additional practice which each one may take up or not according to his own inclination.”

In order to fully grasp why this devotion is obligatory, Pius XII challenged us to a “more earnest consideration of those principles which take their origin from Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers and theologians and on which, as on solid foundations, the worship of the Sacred Heart of Jesus rests.”  Before looking at the devotion itself, it is instructive to consider two of the most important principles, namely the Biblical notion of Heart and the Hypostatic Union.

Because the heart was viewed as the vital center of life in the body, it was also used as a metaphor for the very core of a person.  It is considered the seat of the soul where intellect, will and passions meet.  It becomes synonymous with the interior of the person so much so that Scripture repeatedly speaks of judging man’s heart.  Even a secularized understanding of the heart captures its connection to love.  It is so closely associated with love that when we love a person and long for a response to that love, it is their heart that we want to call our own.

There has often been a criticism of devotion to the Sacred Heart (increasingly so even inside the Church) that it is a subtle form of idolatry or worshipping of an image.  But once we recall the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union we can quickly set those objections to rest.

The early Church was confronted with a number of heresies regarding the Person of Christ.  There was a need to adequately explain how the man Jesus Christ was both human and divine.  It was the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) that declared that the two natures of Christ are joined “in one person and one hypostasis.”  What this meant was that the Divine Person of the Son took a complete human nature.  Because this union is in the Person, it is the closest possible union between the human and divine.  What this means that all the parts of that human nature were also united to the Person so that even His human heart is united to Him.  What this means is that devotion to the Sacred Heart is based on the fact that where the human heart of Christ is, God is found.  In other words, the worship that we give to the Sacred Heart is directed to God Himself.  In this regard there is certainly a biblical foundation.  When St. Thomas the Apostle puts his hand into the side of Christ and touches the Sacred Heart, he worships Him as “my Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28).

While devotion to the Sacred Heart is directed to the Person of Son because of the Hypostatic Union, it is also as a symbol that it merits the greatest of devotion.  This is particularly true for our times in particular because many Christians trapped in a world dominated by various “isms” see Christianity as just one potential worldview (even if they think it to be true).   But Christianity is not primarily about embracing a form of belief or accepting a doctrine but accepting and receiving a Person.  It is first and foremost about having a real encounter with a man who was once dead and is now alive—Jesus Christ.  Ideas don’t have human hearts, but Persons do.  Devotion to the Sacred Heart always protects us from falling into this dangerous trap. It serves to remind us that what we are to study is not primarily a doctrine, but a Person.  What makes this devotion so powerful is that in studying the Sacred Heart, it not only reveals the Person but also all we know about Him.  You can tie almost every doctrine back to the Sacred Heart (the Incarnation, the Resurrection in His own body, the Church, the Sacraments, etc.)  Pope Pius XI seems to summarize it best when he calls devotion to the Sacred Heart “the summary of our religion.”

SacredHeartJesus

While the Heart of Jesus is the ultimate symbol of God’s love, it is unlike any other symbol used in popular piety.  It is no imaginary symbol but a real symbol, which represents the source from which love for all mankind gushed forth.  It is like a sacrament in that it brings about the two things it symbolizes, namely the love of God for mankind and mankind’s love for God.

When Our Lord appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque He invited her to “”Behold the Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, in order to testify Its love.”  The Sacred Heart reveals to us the extreme depth of God’s love for each one of us.  It is a Heart that was emptied of all that was in it through Christ’s outpouring on the Cross.  It is a love not just of giving, but like the greatest loves it leads to communion.  When His Heart is pierced by the lance, He gave us the power of adoption in the water.  But unlike any merely human adoption where the child’s blood is different than the rest of the family, He transfused the same blood that flowed out into our veins.  In this way the Sacred Heart is the source of the Sacraments.

All too often people speak of love as an act of the will, as though it should be detached from our feelings.  But love that is only in the will is somehow incomplete.  It is not loving with our entire soul and the person who only loves in the will is often very scary.  In order to be complete, human love must be both in the will and the emotions.  And this is the love that is made possible by the Sacred Heart.  God loves us with a human heart and this realization helps us to avoid seeing God’s love as somehow detached and impersonal.

It not only signifies the love that God has for each one of us, but also it is representative of mankind’s perfect love of God.  God now is loved most perfectly by a human heart.  Not satisfied with a love that is closed in on itself, He empowers each of us (through the blood and water) to love God with His Heart.  It brings about what it symbolizes.  Summarizing, Pius XII says: “It is altogether impossible to enumerate the heavenly gifts which devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has poured out on the souls of the faithful, purifying them, offering them heavenly strength, rousing them to the attainment of all virtues …Consequently, the honor paid to the Sacred Heart is such as to raise it to the rank — so far as external practice is concerned — of the highest expression of Christian piety. For this is the religion of Jesus, which is centered on the Mediator who is man and God, and in such a way that we cannot reach the Heart of God, save through the Heart of Christ.”

The Sacrifice of the Mass

Eucharist, Sacraments

One of the great advantages that the early Christians had over those “who have not seen and yet believed” is that they questioned many of the things that we merely accept as givens.  This might explain why they were able to endure great persecution; it allowed them to more fully assimilate the Christian message.  If we are to share their deep faith, then we can benefit greatly from questioning our assumptions.  One such assumption that seems foundational is the habit of speaking Our Lord’s action on the Cross as a sacrifice.  Yet, a disinterested observer (either Jew or Gentile) would have seen it merely as an execution carried out in the cruelest manner possible.  How then did the early Christians (and how do we) know it was a sacrifice?

In a culture that is removed from the idea of animal sacrifice, it is first necessary to say a few words about sacrifices in general.  It must be viewed as more than worship owed to God by offering something precious to Him through its death or destruction.  If we use the example given to us in the Old Testament we find that the sacrifices are not some arbitrary slaughtering of the herd, but a pre-arranged transaction between God and man.  Only certain types of sacrifices are pleasing to God and it is not just because of the “heart” of the person offering the sacrifice.  God seems to control nearly all the rubrics of man’s sacrifices.  This is not because He is the Divine control-freak, but because all the ancient sacrificial rites were meant to point and prepare for the definitive sacrifice.  Each sacrifice prescribed in the Old Testament is meant to serve as a type of this definitive sacrifice.  Therefore each of these types of sacrifices served to add clarity to and more fully reveal the definitive sacrifice when it occurs.

What this means specifically is that unless Christ’s death on the Cross was done in a ritualistic manner, then no one would say it was a sacrifice at all.  It is not enough for it to have obvious parallels to the Passover sacrifice such as none of His bones being broken, the time of His death being the same time the Passover lamb was slaughtered, and the blood and water after His death flowing out of His side as it did from the side of the Temple after the Passover sacrifice.   Any number of circumstances can always be explained away, especially when so much is at stake.  What makes it recognizable as the Sacrifice is the Institution of the Eucharist the night before.  It is God who institutes each of the covenantal sacrifices and gives them their meaning.  He is the One who appoints the priest, the victim and the manner of sacrifice.

Sacrifice of the Mass

Therefore it is the Eucharist that gives the sacrifice on the Cross its meaning and the sacrifice on the Cross gives the Eucharist its power.  The two are intrinsically linked and if we reject one, then we are apt to reject the other.  Herein lies the reason why Protestantism is necessarily false in all its forms—it rejects the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Catholics bear some responsibility for this rejection because we do not adequately understand this connection nor explain it accurately.

To understand the link, we must begin by making a very important distinction.  Within visible creation, God has created two orders—the natural and the Sacramental.  While they operate in parallel, they do not follow the same set of laws.  The natural realm consists of those things that our ordinary powers may operate upon.  The Sacramental realm operates on the level of signification.  But they are not like “natural” signs pointing to a thing but are instead perfect signs in that they contain and bring about the thing that they signify.

This principle is helpful because it allows us to add clarity to the notion of the “unbloody” Sacrifice of the Mass.  The essence of a sacrifice consists in the separation of the blood from the body the victim by the priest.  Experience tells us what this looks like in the natural realm.  But in the Sacramental realm it “looks” different and can only be seen through the eyes of faith.  Namely, the element of destruction that is found in natural sacrifices is absent.  Still the essence of the total separation of body and blood of the victim remains the same.

Operating in the Sacramental realm, the Body of Christ is really present through the words of consecration.  So too the Blood of Christ is made present.  And yet because they appear under two separated elements, one can rightly call it a sacrifice.  Recall that in the Sacramental realm the signs contain the thing they signify so that the Body of Christ is truly present separate from the Blood.  The sacrifice that occurs then also contains the historical event in which the natural Body and Blood were separated, namely the death on the Cross.  His sacrificial death is the separation of His Body and Blood and no less than this happens on the Altar during Mass.  But it happens in the Sacramental Realm so that it would be incorrect to say that Christ’s natural Body and Blood were separated again and that He is somehow sacrificed anew.  This Sacramental Sacrifice re-presents Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, but does not cause it to occur again.

There is a danger in all that I have said to think that the belief in the Real Presence is something of an add-on, but it too follows from grasping the difference in the natural and Sacramental realms and calling to mind the Hypostatic Union.  As human creatures, we have complete human natures and at the moment of creation we become persons.  This is not the case with the Incarnation.  The Eternal Son of God who was already a Person, took a complete human nature to Himself.  In that way He is a Divine Person with two natures, human and divine.  Related to the matter at hand, when Christ died on the Cross, His soul separated from His body.  Yet, both of these parts of His human nature remained united to Him.  When His soul descended to the Hades, it was the Person Who performed the action.  While His Body lay in the tomb, it was still united to Him and He is said to have rested in the tomb.  What this means for our investigation is that when Christ’s Body is made sacramentally present, the Person is made present along with it.  They cannot be separated.  So too with the Blood.  This means that the Person of the Son is really present in the Eucharist under both kinds.  But He does not appear as in his natural state with a body, but instead in His Sacramental state under the appearance of bread and wine.  Still, and this bears repeating, His Presence is just as real as when He was with God in the Beginning, walked the face of the earth, rose from the dead, etc.

Seeing the Eucharist as simultaneously Sacrament and sacrifice has a direct bearing on the current debate regarding Remarried and the Eucharist.  By looking at it only as a Sacrament, there appears to be little benefit to those in irregular marriages.  However when we emphasize its sacrificial character we realize it is a benefit not only to the one receiving but to all present (more specifically in the Church).  This is why protecting its sacred character helps not just those receiving but all those in the Church.

In conclusion, it seems that there is a greater need to preach the link between Calvary and the Mass not just for apologetical purposes, but also because it has a great effect on personal devotion.  The Eucharist is the “source and summit of our faith” because the Cross too is the source and summit.

Legislating Morality

Natural Law

“You cannot legislate morality.”  We have all heard it said at one time or another and hopefully have never said it ourselves.  But in a democratic culture that is plagued by relativism, many people accept this as a given.  For them morality is just a regurgitation of some outdated religious dogma and the role of government is to give the people what they want.  We no longer want puritanical religious dogma in our courthouses and so we need to do away with it.   Our country after all is founded on the principle of a government that is “for the people, by the people.”  So common is this position, that it is instructive for us to look deeper into it so that it can finally be put to rest.

When we speak of “law” what do we mean?  St. Thomas Aquinas defines a law as ““an ordinance of reason made for the common good by the one who has care of the community and is promulgated (made known).”  Based on this definition, we see that law is connected to the (common) good and therefore there is an intrinsic link between law and morality.  The very purpose of law is to prescribe what ought to be done (i.e. morality).  Despite objections to the contrary, we cannot help but to legislate morality.

But what about Martin Luther King’s famous quote that “morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless”?  While on the one hand it is true that morality has to do not just with actions, but inner dispositions, Dr. King ignores a key aspect of law.  Law, because it is viewed as an ordinance of reason has a formative character.  When confronted with a moral question, very often one will look to what is legal with the assumption that legality equates to moral goodness.  The immediate result of the change in the segregation laws that King fought to put in place may have been restraint, but one can see in hindsight that it also changed hearts as well.  In other words, as the Pro-life movement is finding out, it is very hard to change minds and hearts without also changing laws.

One might be tempted to say then, that yes you can legislate morality, but only based on majority rule.  How else could we possibly agree on whose morality we would use?  This eventually leads to the type of soft-despotism that Tocqueville thought a very real possibility in the democracy of the United States because it misunderstands what “self-government” means.  Since the right to self-government proceeds from the Natural Law, the exercise of that right must be in accord with Natural Law.  If Natural Law is sufficiently valid to give this basic right to the people then it must be valid to impose its precepts on this same right.  Whatever rights the people want to exercise must be in accord with Natural Law.  No matter how hard you try, you cannot run away from the natural law by invoking the right to self-government.

Ten Commandments Courthouse

Despite a resistance in recent Supreme Court rulings to refer to anything above the Constitution, it is the natural law that must ultimately be the determination of whether a given action is right or wrong (for a fuller treatment of the natural law and what belongs to it, click here).  In the mind of the Founders, all legislation should proceed and be judged not solely by the Constitution, but by the “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” (Declaration of Independence).  This is a key argument that Martin Luther King Jr. makes in his manifesto against segregation, A Letter from a Birmingham Jail—“An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”

But there is a limit on the role that civil law ought to play in legislating morality.  The civil law can only go so far in monitoring actions while morality goes to the inner person.  St. Thomas Aquinas thought that not all vice ought to be outlawed.  Instead he thought only “the more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others…”( ST, I-II, q.96, a.2) should be outlawed.  In essence the Angelic Doctor is saying that when a law prescribes acts that are far beyond the virtue of the average person in society then there ought to be no laws against it.  One of the reasons for this is that the law may become a pathway to further vice.  For example, suppose you outlaw contraception and not everyone has the level of virtue to follow the law.  Now you can create a situation where a black market arises and further, more serious crime occurs.

This does not mean that contraception (or some other vice) is a necessary evil and that nothing can be done.  Classically understood, a good government is one that helps make the people morally good.  This is especially true of a democracy which depends on a “moral and religious people” to survive as John Adams said.  While laws may not seek to outlaw all vices, they certainly should not promote them.  Therefore, governmental policies such as Title X that actually supply and pay for contraception should not be in place.  One can tolerate certain vices, but toleration should never lead to promotion because this leads to an implied judgment that the action is good.

In his book We Hold These Truths, Fr. John Courtney Murray makes an astute observation about Americans.  Because of the country’s Puritanical roots, our thinking has often been muddled in our thinking about the relationship between law and morality.  This leads to a fundamental error in our thinking, namely that by beginning with the assumption that whatever is moral ought to be legislated, it is inevitable that one will think that whatever is legislated is moral.  This works well when the country remains tied to its foundation in Natural Law, but once that is severed by moral relativism it leads to mob rule.  Only in returning to our roots in the Natural Law will we become a morally good people.

Turning the Other Cheek

Sports

Mixed Martial Arts or MMA is one of the fastest growing sports in the United States and its popularity since its inception in the early 1990s has grown to the point where one fighter recently took home a million dollar purse.  With such a large following, it is not uncommon for the winner of a fight to express gratitude to God for helping in a win.  While we have addressed the question of whether God cares about the outcome of a sporting elsewhere, MMA deserves a closer look because it is decidedly an unChristian activity by its very nature.  No one is questioning the sincerity of belief of the fighters, but what needs to be called into question is whether one can bring glory to God doing something which, ultimately, is wrong.

To begin, it bears mentioning that the fact that MMA is wrong is not because it is violent, per se.  The fact that two fighters are engaged in a “friendly” fight that involves a degree of physical violence is not the problem.  The problem is the goal—to knock the other opponent out.  In this regard we would pass the same moral judgment on boxing, but not on wrestling or most martial arts.  In the latter the goal is to use grappling or sparring techniques to pin or score points against your opponent.  As proof of the intent, the head is almost always off limits.  In MMA the goal is to deprive your opponent of consciousness and therein lies the moral problem.  It is always wrong to deliberately deprive another person of consciousness violently without a proportionally grave reason.

One may say that there are ways for an MMA fighter to win other than by knockout but those are merely accidental.  It is the knockout that is the primary goal of the fighters, promoters and fans.  The fighters are not just known by their win-loss records, but by their number of knockouts.  No fighter sets out to win by decision or submission, but wants to knock their opponent out.  Obviously not all matches end in a knockout–while significant less than boxing (7.1 % of the time), a knockout still occurs in about 5% of the MMA matches.

It is also important to mention that when examining the morality of a given act that we look to the intention of the moral actor not at whether they are successful or not.  So even though there is a knockout in only 5% of the matches, it is most certainly the case that in 100% of the matches both fighters are intending to knock out the other.  It may change the moral gravity of the act itself whether they are successful, but it is still an objective wrong.  A person who sets out to kill someone by putting a bomb in their car is still guilty of attempted murder even if the bomb does not go off.

It bears mention as well that it is the goal of the fighter that sets it apart from something like football, even though there are more concussions than in MMA.  While football players regularly receive head injuries and concussions, it is not a goal of the football player to knock the other player out.  Certainly there are some players who do try to, but these players are labeled as “dirty” evidence by the NFL’s Bountygate scandal from a number of years ago.

For the sake of clarity, it is also helpful to understand what it is that makes it wrong.  When we speak of something as a sin or wrong against our neighbor we mean that we are deliberately depriving him of some good without a proportionate reason to do so.  In the case at hand, the fighter intends to deprive his opponent of the use of his reason, the highest and most uniquely human faculty that he has.  In other words, it is contrary to his dignity because it attempts to make him into something less than human.  As an aside, drunkenness is wrong for the same reason—it deprives us of our proper use of reason.

Only recently have we begun to see the danger of repeated head trauma and that concussions (which is what happens when someone is knocked out) cause permanent brain injury. Because of its lasting effects, no amount of money or fame is enough to be considered a proportionately good effect to inflicting (or even receiving) permanent brain injury. All of us have an obligation to maintain bodily integrity and thus a right to do so.  A fighter has, then, no just reason for harming a neighbor in his rights to bodily integrity or well-being by inflicting wounds which will most certainly lead to long term impairment of his body.

Presumably the fighters themselves are freely engaging in the fight and thus bear full responsibility for their actions.  What about the fans?

MMA fans, by their presence and enthusiasm, participate in the wrongs of the contestants.  Certainly we would not have seen the growth in the MMA without the support of the fans.  Therefore we need to first examine the fans’ role through the moral lens of cooperation in sin.

The principle of cooperation recognizes that a number of people directly and indirectly participate in bringing about an evil action.  To understand this principle of moral philosophy, it is important that the distinction be made between formal and material cooperation.  It is meant to assess how closely one aligns their will with the intention of another to carry out evil.  Formal cooperation assumes that one aligns their will with the evil intention of the principal moral agent.  Material cooperation presumes that one does not directly align their will with the principal moral agent.  Material cooperation may be of two different kinds. If one cooperates in an evil act by performing something that is essential for the performance of the evil action, then it is immediate material cooperation. If one cooperates in an accidental or nonessential manner in the evil action, then it is called mediate material cooperation.
Returning back to question of MMA fighting we can certainly see that there is immediate material cooperation.  Just by paying to see the fight, the spectator contributes financially to the contest; the fighter fights primarily for the purse supplied ultimately by the spectators. But in almost all cases the spectator’s cooperation is formal.  They too have come to see “a good clean fight” in which one of the participants is knocked out.  In many ways the fans are no mere spectators to the wrong in that they are encouraging the fighters by cheering them on.

Engrossed in what is in essence a brutal culture, we can easily miss the bigger issue.  What makes prize fighting like MMA wrong for people to watch is that it is based on deriving pleasure from the injury of another person.  This is so obviously wrong that we often overlook it. “A man who is angry without being injured or with one who has not offended him” is according to St. Thomas “not to be cruel, but to be brutal or savage.” For all the supposed sophistication of our culture, it is marked by a brutality or savagery that takes pleasure in the unnecessary sufferings of other men.  It is the same thing that led Romans to watch the gladiators fight.  It leads to an overall insensitivity to the sufferings of others that is a defining tendency of our culture.  We should feel pity and compassion in the injury of another person and not cheer it.  To pay money for such a thing only shows how depraved we have become.

 

 

Who is the Holy Spirit?

Holy Spirit, Trinity

The week between Pentecost and the Feast of the Holy Trinity is an excellent time to meditate on Who the Holy Spirit is.  Because He is the Person of the Trinity that we seem to know the least about, He is also the one Who is the most likely to suffer at the hands of revisionist theologians, especially those with misguided feminist sympathies.  All too often He is referred to as “she.” Given how confused we are as to who man is, it is not surprising that we easily fall into error as to who God is.  If we are made in the image and likeness of God then we must understand exactly who God is in order to understand who we are.  Despite the fact that the Trinity is a great mystery of our faith, we can apply reason to revelation in order to develop a deeper relationship with the Holy Spirit.

To know the Holy Spirit, we must first begin with some foundational Trinitarian theology.  Revelation speaks of man unique in all visible creation as being made in God’s image.  Specifically, it is the spiritual powers of our soul, the intellect and will that make us so.  We can conclude that God, Who is pure spirit, has these powers of knowing and loving.  Because He must have the perfection of all-being (in order to be God) we know that He is all-knowing and all-loving.  Because He is eternal, He must have both an eternal object to know and an eternal object to love.  If God is all-knowing then His knowledge, even of Himself, must be perfect.  If God is all loving, then His love must have an object for all eternity and because He is God, He loves this object perfectly.  Are you with me so far?  This is as deep as I am going to go, but there is a key concept from here that must be understood in order to go any further in this.  It is the concept of perfection.

What does it mean to be perfect?  Existence itself is the most basic kind of perfection.  In other words, I can create the perfect wife in my head, but if she doesn’t actually exist then she is not perfect.  What does this have to do with God?  Well, if God has perfect knowledge of even Himself then to be perfect that knowledge must exist as a Person.  This is the second Person of the Trinity, the Son.  He is the “Word Made Flesh”, the Logos.

This Second Person then is the object of the love of the First Person, the Father, for all eternity.  Because the Second Person is also God, He loves the First Person for all eternity.  This love between the Two Persons is also perfect.  This means that the Love exists as a Third Person, the Holy Spirit.

To summarize, God the Son is everything that God the Father knows about Himself.  This means that God the Father pours out all of Himself into God the Son, holding nothing back.  This perfect exchange is then a Person Himself, the Holy Spirit.

So why go into this Thomistic explanation of the Trinity?  Because some will avoid the gender problem of the Holy Spirit by simply gender neutralizing Him.  To call Him an “It” or “Sanctifier” takes away one of the most important aspects of the Trinity—the fact that He is a person.  It puts Him on the level of function and values Him only for His utility.  That is why the Church has from very early on fought this heresy known as Modalism which says the different names for the Persons of the Trinity emphasize the different aspect of the one God.  In other words, the names of Jesus and God simply identify different modes of the same individual.

Along the same lines, some will identify the Trinity as the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier.  But this speaks of what the Persons do (more accurately what we attribute to them) than Who each Person is.  It is like calling the server in the restaurant “Waitress” or calling her by her name.  One reduces her to her function, the other addresses her as a person.

Holy Spirit Stained Glass

So, if we must give Him a personal pronoun when referring to Him, why must it be He and not She?  In addressing this, we must make an important clarification.  God is not male or female.  That is, the terms “male” and “female” refer only to the biology of God’s creation.  Animals are both male and female and they are not made in God’s image.  What I am saying though is that God, and specifically the Holy Spirit, is fundamentally masculine.

Returning to the question, why must the Holy Spirit be a He?  The short answer is the same one that we swear to every Sunday during the Creed.  The Holy Spirit is masculine because He is the “Lord and giver of Life.”  To see what this means we need look no further than our own bodies.

The man is the giver of life in that he is the initiator and source in procreation.  The woman is receptive and the receiver of life.  In an analogous way, God comes from outside of creation and brings life.  So in order to be the giver of life that comes from without, the Holy Spirit must be referred to as He.  This Divine masculinity is revealed when the Holy Spirit was able to overshadow Mary at the Annunciation and the Word became Flesh.

There is another, more fundamental reason why we refer to the Holy Spirit as He and not she.  In John 15:26, Jesus reveals to us that “when the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, He will testify to me.”  Christ is the fullest revelation of God and He reveals to us how we are to understand Holy Spirit as He.  To argue otherwise denies the central dogma of the Christian faith that Jesus is the full disclosure of God to man.

But it is also important to acknowledge that there must be femininity in God because there is femininity in creation.  None of what I have said should be interpreted as denying this obvious truth.  And it seems that it is the Holy Spirit Who also reveals this more so than the other two Persons.  Cardinal Ratzinger, echoing the teachings of the Church Fathers said: “Because of the teaching about the Spirit, one can as it were practically have a presentiment of the primordial type of the feminine, in a mysterious, veiled manner, within God Himself.”  In the primordial family of the Trinity it is He Who reveals the aspects of motherhood by serving as the bond of love between Father and Son.  He reveals these most especially through both the bridal and maternal actions of the Church and His unique relationship with Mary (whom St. Maximillian Kolbe calls the “quasi-incarnation” of the Holy Spirit).

Bishop Bruskewitz seems to summarize the issue well: “Unfortunately, in our time, the devil is not only in the details, but also in the pronouns. Because of the onslaught of radical feminism, and other ideologies that are not compatible with the Catholic Faith, there is a great sensitivity to the kind of pronouns used for the Persons of the Most Blessed Trinity.”  Nevertheless we should be faithful both to what is revealed to us by Our Lord in His choice of pronouns in John 14-17 and faithful to the truth of man and woman who are made in God’s image.

Where’s the Conflict?

Faith and Reason, Science

In the first of the thirty-two correspondences between a junior tempter and his devilish uncle Screwtape “discovered” by CS Lewis, the latter cautions his nephew Wormwood not to “use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see.”  Yet, to most people science is a great enemy of Christianity.  It seems that Satan has taken the exact opposite approach to Lewis’ discovery by using what is seen to debunk what is unseen.  But he always operates under illusions and half-truths, especially when it comes any supposed conflict between science and religion.  The two can never conflict even if, at first sight, there are apparent contradictions…[because] we know, in fact, that truth cannot contradict truth” (St. John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October 22, 1996).

In addressing why any conflict is not real and only apparent, we must begin by recognizing the dependence that science has on faith.  All of science rests upon two fundamental assumptions.  Like most first principles they cannot be proven, but instead require faith on the part of the person.  The scientist is no different in this regard because he believes first of all that the world itself is intelligible.  It is the assumption that there is a law behind what is being studied that drives us to discover the law.  No reasonable person would set out to discover something that he believed was truly random in the statistical (as opposed to the scientific) sense.  This leads to the second point, namely that the scientist assumes that the human mind has the power to accurately grasp that which he is seeking to discover.  Intelligibility requires intelligence to measure it.  Every scientist bases assumes his instruments can provide accurate measurements and depends on this.  The mind, as the instrument of the scientist, too must have the capacity to grasp reality.  Both are necessary for science and both must be taken on faith.  As Chesterton says, the “Materialist cannot explain why anything should go right, even observation and deduction.  Why good logic should not be as misleading as bad logic, if they are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape.”

What does the faith of the scientist have to do with religion?  The intelligibility of the universe is a religious assumption because it necessitates an Intelligence behind it.  In other words, it requires a God, and not just any kind of God, but the Judeo-Christian God.  Only He is a God of reason or Logos.  Historically speaking it was no accident that modern science arose when it did—in the midst of a Christian culture. In fact, it is certain Christian fundamental ideas that allowed the emergence of scientific thought to begin with.  The study of science arose because of a belief in a transcendent Creator who endowed His creation with orderly physical laws.  Scholasticism was responsible for the rejection of the pantheistic approach to nature.  Christian belief debunked the idea that created things have a mind of their own and but instead followed fixed physical laws.   In fact, the pioneers of modern science, such as Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, and Newton thought that by pointing out the wonders of creation they would lead people to the praise of the Creator of those wonders.

Gregor Mendel

Why is it then that scientists are often the ones leading the way of the New Atheist movement?  Chesterton hinted at the answer in his quote regarding the Materialist, but it is because they use science as a smokescreen for their philosophy.  While Science and Christianity cannot conflict, Christianity and Scientific Materialism are natural enemies.  The Materialist believes all reality is only matter (or at least ultimately derived from matter).  It is easy to prove that this philosophy is true when you assume it to be true.  Not surprisingly, when you use instruments that are designed to measure matter to measure the immaterial, you will never find them.  It is like walking around with a calculator looking for a cell-phone signal and denying its existence to the people talking on their phones.

In many ways modern scientific materialism is no different than ancient paganism.  The pagans saw the supernatural everywhere.  Things were gods or the playthings of the gods moving at the whim of the gods.  The Judeo-Christian religion demolished all such superstition.  The two Creation accounts in Genesis are mainly written to debunk the superstition of the Babylonians by showing that their gods were actually made by the True God and in fact were not gods at all.  So it is ironic that the materialist now comes along and accuses the Christians of superstition by debunking the Creation accounts.  The materialist sees his mission as one of freeing mankind from superstition.

But superstition by definition is an irrational or unfounded belief.  The reason why Christianity was able to free the pagans from superstition was because it is a religion that is reasonable and with a belief in the natural world.  Christians may believe in the miraculous, but they view it as a supernatural act.  In other words, the miracles of the Christian faith rest upon the natural world.  You cannot have the supernatural without the natural.  It is precisely the understanding that men naturally die that allows us to see the Resurrection for what it is.  The very foundation of Christianity is rooted in an unwavering belief in intelligibility and predictability of the natural world.

This is why the First Vatican Council in its first canon said ““If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema.”  In other words it is an article of faith that you don’t need faith to believe in God.  To believe in God is the most reasonable thing one can conclude based on the intelligibility of the universe.

It is not without irony then that the Materialist accuses Christians of superstitions when in fact it is they who are superstitious.  For their claim is most certainly not a scientific but a religious one.     What they actually believe is irrational.  They are just as superstitious as the most superstitious of the ancient pagans.  As Stephen Barr has pointed out, the ancient pagan thought that his actions were controlled by the orbits of the planets while the materialist says they are controlled by the orbits of electrons in his brain.  Rather than speaking of fate like the pagan, he speaks of determinism.

In the nearly three centuries since the rise of modern science, mankind has learned more about the workings of the universe than in all the previous centuries combined.  We know more about how things work with each day.  This ought to lead us to deeper wonder and awe and we learn more about the Designer Who made all things to reveal Himself to us.  This is why Screwtape was so vehement with Wormwood about staying away from true science.  But once philosophy is masquerading as science, we run the risk of it drawing people from God in a way that Lewis’ characters would have reveled in .

Shattering the Delusion

Autism, Natural Law, Virtue, ,

One of the hardest things for people on the Autism Spectrum Disorder is coping with the speed at which the world comes at them.  Hyper-sensitive to stimuli most of us can ignore, they will try to control the world around them by inventing their own explanations of reality.  Our youngest son does this often.  Usually he starts off on the right track, but at a certain point he will go off the rails.  We might indulge him a little, but once he hits a certain point, we have an expression to help bring him back—“you are now orbiting Mars.”  Some may think us cruel for not sharing his delusions, but it is love that refuses to leave him in an alternate reality.  By steadily refusing to join him in his delusions he is better able to cope with the world and his Autism.

There is a similar point to be made regarding people who identify themselves as transgender that unfortunately has been lost amidst the long drawn out debate over which bathrooms they should use.  The Family Policy Institute of Washington state released a video  that quickly went viral.  In this video, they interview a number of University of Washington students about their stance on Transgenderism.  They then try to make a reductio ad absurdum argument when the 5’9 male interviewer asks them whether they would agree that he is a 6’5 Chinese woman.  One gets a sense from the video of the inner struggle of the young men and women because they felt trapped by their own logic to the point that they are willing to agree to the absurd.

Certainly it is entertaining to watch, but what is most disturbing is their reasoning for agreeing with the interviewer—“No, that wouldn’t bother me,” “Um sure, I don’t have a problem with that.”  Put more pointedly, “it doesn’t affect me, so why should I care?”  Herein lies the underlying problem to the whole debate—mass indifference.  If a man wants to say he is a woman, then who am I to judge?  When I detect no harm to myself or those I actually do care about, then why should I object?

Miriam Webster defines a delusion as “a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.”  Now read the Human Rights Campaign definition of Transgender: “one whose gender identity and/or expression is different from cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at birth.” In every other aspect of life, we would label someone delusional who says that their inner belief as “identifying” themselves as one sex when all of the objective biological evidence suggests otherwise.

When confronted with a person who is delusional, you can do one of two things.  You can either shatter the delusion in an effort to bring them back to reality or you can share the delusion with them.  As is the case with my son with Autism, it is much easier to share the delusion with the person than to actually step into their mess and help them sort it out, especially when I see their delusion as presenting no harm to me.

Bathroom Sign

But, can we even begin to imagine the inner turmoil of someone who looks like a boy, but feels like a girl?  Or is it simply easier to help their gender feelings visible?    There is a lot of data (see here and here for two studies) suggesting that something like gender reassignment surgery doesn’t actually make them feel any less conflicted.  The American College of Pediatricians has recently said that Gender Ideology does great harm to children.  In fact individuals who undergo gender reassignment surgery are 20 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population.  When a person realizes that the surgery that everyone said would help doesn’t, they can only conclude one thing—that they are beyond help.

This argument from apathy spreads like wildfire.  We can mutually agree to your delusions provided they don’t cost me that much personally—“to each his own.”  First it was gay marriage.  Now it is transgenders in the bathroom they identify with.  What will be next and when will the insanity stop?  When people are actually willing to stand up and help others wrestle with their brokenness instead of agreeing to embrace it.  When your ideology conflicts with biology, it is your ideology that needs to change.  Anyone who tells you differently is really apathetic.

Christians are often met with contempt as “haters” by LGBT supporters.  Hate in many ways is better than indifference.  In fact, hate is not the opposite of love—indifference is.  To love or hate someone means that they matter in some way.  Even hate recognizes the other as a person.  Apathy says the person does not matter and that they are on the level of a mere thing.  We tolerate things only as long as they do not present a real obstacle to my well-being.  Certainly we should not hate them, but hate is much easier to convert to love and compassion than apathy is.

Often when I confront my son with reality, it is met with hostility and name-calling.  In pointing out an alternate view to his reality, I have become a threat.  I know this, and yet I am willing to help him to come to grips with reality as it is.  Is this easy?  Absolutely not, but it is necessary for his own well-being.  Similarly we need to let those people suffering from gender dysphoria know that we oppose these bathroom bills not just because it opens the door for sexual predators and not just because it can create a great deal of personal confusion and angst for our children when they have to use the bathroom or change in front of a stranger of the opposite sex (even if there is no malice on their part).  We need to let them know we oppose it because we want to help keep them rooted in reality.  The shame they feel in using the bathroom can be good—it can help them recognize their true identity, the one that God gave them and stamped into their very being.  On our part we have to be willing to take the hostility and name calling.  That is the only real way to fight apathy—through self-giving love, which is what they most desperately need anyway.  We are now orbiting Mars, who will bring us back to reality?

What’s so Funny?

Virtue

In the days leading up to the eventual execution of his former chancellor, Henry VIII would daily send a courier to St. Thomas More asking him over and over to change his mind.  One evening the Saint finally said, “Yes, I have changed my mind.”   The King told the courier to return to find out the particulars of his change of heart, to which the eventual martyr replied “I have changed my mind in this sense: whereas yesterday I intended being shaved before execution, I have now changed my mind and intend that my beard shall go with my head.”  Because of his mirth, his friend Erasmus called him the “one of the happiest men I ever met” and he is by no means unique among the saints.  St. Francis (de Sales and of Assisi), St. Philip Neri, St. Theresa of Avila and the Little Flower are all known for a lively sense of humor.  To look around at Christians today, however, we would say that the virtue that St. Thomas (borrowing from Aristotle) called eutrapelia or “wittiness” has been forgotten.

As to why this might be, GK Chesterton offers an explanation in his book Heretics.  A master of paradox and witty one-liners, he was often accused of not being a “serious” writer.  He defended himself by reminding his critics that the opposite of funny is not serious, but instead “not funny.”  The opposite of serious is frivolous so that you can be both funny and serious in telling the truth.  A man can tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes just as he can choose to tell the truth in French or German.  Chesterton was serious in telling the truth, even if he chose to do it in a funny way.  There is nothing frivolous about using humor to tell the truth.  Point of fact this is often a powerful way to present something as serious as the Gospel because humor tends to gently disarm people.

Although we might have an “apostolate of the funny”, we should not look upon a sense of humor as merely an ad-on to an evangelical tool belt.  St. Thomas calls it a virtue and therefore something that every serious Christian ought to cultivate.  A Christian is naturally light-hearted, not taking things of this world too seriously and so it is fitting that he should have a sense of humor.  Humor  at its core consists in pointing out incongruities in reality.  Who better than a Christian, who knows reality as it is, can truly laugh in this vale of tears?  True laughter is a foretaste of eternal joy.

There is a philosophical maxim that applies here, namely that “the Good diffuses itself.”  When something is truly good, it tends to spread out.  The funny is part of the Good in that when we witness something funny, we look for someone to tell about it.  In fact in most social settings, it is the man who can look upon events with a sense of humor who draws the most people towards him.

JPII acting silly

If the funny is part of the Good, then this means that the devil is active in trying to pervert it.  In CS Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape cautions Wormwood about using humor to his advantage because it is so closely related to joy.  Nevertheless, Screwtape tells him that once he turns the patient to flippancy the battle will be won. Flippancy takes what is inherently good (like virtue) and makes it seem ridiculous.  Think of all the jokes we have around virtue today, like a “goody two-shoes” or calling a chaste person a “prude” and we see that virtue has now become a source of mockery.

In the Summa (ST II-II, q.168, a. 2-4), St. Thomas guides us in how this virtue is to be practiced.  Interestingly enough, St. Thomas says that playful conversation is absolutely necessary for relaxation of the soul.  It is the mean between the buffoon who cannot resist a joke and the stoic who is of no use in playful conversation and takes offense at everything.

The buffoon is one who “employs words or deeds that are injurious to his neighbor.”  This is the person who is funny at other people’s expense.  Because there is an inherent pleasure in humor, we must always be careful that those who share in the conversation also share in the pleasure.  Our playful conversation ought to not only bring us pleasure, but pleasure not at someone else’s expense.   We should laugh with and not at someone else.

St Thomas also cautions about using the indecent as a source of humor.  This is not because he is some high minded saint, but because there is also the danger of using humor to mask cynicism.  Because the cynic is not enchanted by reality, they will often resort to vulgar (or even blasphemous) language to invoke humor.  Again this is like Screwtape’s flippancy in that rather than pointing absurd things found in reality, they make reality itself absurd.  This only leads to further cynicism and discontent.  Just because you can laugh, doesn’t make it funny.

At the other extreme is the stoic.  This is particularly appropriate for our age where people take offense at everything.  The stoic doesn’t so much take reality too seriously, but themselves.  Again nearly all the saints (and therefore most happy people) laugh at themselves and don’t mind when others share in it.  St. Thomas says this type of stoicism is contrary to reason (i.e. sinful) because it is burdensome to others by not offering pleasure to others or hindering their enjoyment.

In the Gospel, we find Christ angry at the money changers and crying at the death of His friend Lazarus, but we never find Him laughing.  We should in no way take that to mean He never laughed.  I am sure that He was not accused of being a “drunkard and a glutton” because of His stoicism.  The Redeemer of Mankind is also the Redeemer of Laughter.  As Christians we should share in His mirth.  Venerable Fulton Sheen summed it up well: “The only time laughter is wicked is when it is turned against Him who gave it.”  Let us learn how to laugh again.

Why is Penance Needed?

Mercy, Sin

During the Year of Mercy, the Church has placed great emphasis on not only our great need for forgiveness, but God’s desire to always welcome us into His loving arms.  This necessarily leads to a discussion of repentance and penance.  While most people understand the need for repentance, penance remains somewhat mysterious.  Given that, a reflection upon penance and its necessity can lead to an increase in grace during this Jubilee Year.

In order to understand the logic of penance, we must first understand the nature of sin.  When Adam and Eve ate from the tree, it was an act of disobedience.  But that is not all.  They also found pleasure in eating the forbidden fruit (c.f. Gn 3:6—finding “that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom”).  So that when we speak of sin we must always remember that there is a double element; the act of disobedience and the pleasure of the forbidden fruit.  In justice both must be restored through repentance and penance.  If we look to the natural order, we see why this makes sense.  If we do not follow a map and go the wrong way, then we must first turn-around (i.e. repent).   But turning around is not enough if we are to get back to the right path; we must also we must retrace those steps (penance).

This distinction is made especially clear when we look at King David’s act of adultery with Bathsheba and the consequent murder of her husband Uriah.  When David expresses his repentance, Nathan tells him that “For his part, the LORD has removed your sin…” (2 Samuel 12:14).  But this is only the forgiveness of the act of disobedience.  God imposes a penance as well “since you have utterly spurned the LORD by this deed, the child born to you will surely die” (2 Sam 12:15).

From God’s perspective the distinction leads to the two “punishments” for sin—eternal and temporal.  By keeping them connected it will help us to avoid the temptation to see these two “punishments” as vengeance inflicted upon us by God but instead as a natural consequence of sin (CCC 1472).  Christ’s act of atonement cleared the way for the forgiveness of the eternal punishment for sin, but not the temporal.  Instead He invites us to participate in our own redemption through penance.  Failing to realize this leads to great spiritual confusion because it fails to answer a fundamental question—if Christ came to remove all punishment for sin, then why do those who are justified suffer?

In other words, when I sin, it comes from me insisting on having my own way.  In suffering I receive something I don’t want and thus there is a cosmic balance of sorts that is restored.  But because the original act was one I freely chose, I must also freely accept the suffering as satisfaction for my sins.  This not only restores justice without but order is also restored within me.

Accepting temporal affliction imposed on us in loving patience is one of the ways that we make satisfaction for our sins according to the Council of Trent.  The Council Fathers call these “the greatest proof of love” (Council of Trent, 14th Session, Doctrina de sacramento paenitentiae).  Why are these the greatest proof of our love?  Because God’s will comes to us moment by moment and we can be sure that we are submitting to His will by submitting to the moment.  This habit of accepting difficulties with love and patience is what develops in us the virtue of penance.  This is exactly David’s response after the child he conceived with Bathsheba died–patient acceptance.  And the servants are all puzzled by his response (2 Sam 12:19-23).  Penance begins and ends with the attitude of mind that God sends all things our way for our good and that we must respond with generosity.

In this way we see they are also great proofs of God’s love for us.  Each affliction “is producing for us an eternal weight of glory,” (2 Cor 4:17) meaning that they have been hand-chosen by a loving Father for our sanctification.  To live with this conviction is where we find peace and joy in the midst of suffering; knowing that God has chosen the most gentle way for us to be sanctified through penance.  Even the suffering that God allows for us is an act of Divine Mercy.

This passive penance also does not always “feel” like we are doing penance and so it further conforms us to what all appearances was Christ’s great failure in the Crucifixion.  This is why we can examine the “success” of our penitential lives by looking for the fruits of humility and charity.  Penance then properly understood is a not an act of giving (or giving up) per se, but of receiving.  It would be fair to say that penance is the means by which we lay hold of the graces missed the first time round.

Scourging at the Pillar

This is also why we must be careful in selecting our means of active penance.   These are activities that are voluntarily undertaken as penance like fasting, giving up something otherwise good, mortification, putting a rock in your shoe, etc.  These too are necessary, but they come with a strong temptation as well especially if we do not have a positive view of penance.

Penance is discouraging for most of us because we approach it from the angle of it being a disagreeable hardship rather than a turning wholly to God.  There is something inherent in self-imposed and exterior penances in that we tend to look at the disagreeable portion and then try for something that is not too bad.  This in turn only makes us feel that there are parts that are not willing to undergo suffering for God, when, what we might really be experiencing is just the natural recoil at suffering.

We will also always have a tendency to choose those penances which are in some way agreeable to us and thus end up doing nothing but feeding our self-love.  Again the key is to look for the fruits of charity and humility.  Even with these temptations, it would be a mistake to avoid all forms of active penance especially since the devil will often trick us into avoiding them out of fear or by appealing to a misconceived humility.

In his book, Spirit of Penance, Path to God, Dom Hubert Van Zeller offers an extended commentary on Jesus’ commandment regarding our appearance when we are fasting.  He says that  “we must show washed and shining faces when we fast, indicating to the world that penance is not such a terrible burden as it is made out to be, and that if only people went in for it more, they would find they need lose nothing of their happiness.”  Likewise our passive penances when borne with peace and joy show them for what they truly are.  During this Year of Mercy let us go forth and preach the Mercy of God through Penance.

The Holy Catholic Church–Really?

Church

Of all the distinguishing marks of the Church, the Church’s holiness is perhaps the hardest to reconcile with reality.  The Church’s history is riddled with scandals and scoundrels.  Even to this day, the enemies of the Church use this as a weapon to discredit the Church.  Those who might otherwise be open to the Truth found only in the Catholic Church cannot seem to get over the scandals.  Yet, the Church’s members profess boldly that we believe in “the Holy Catholic Church.”  Are we merely delusional or is there something more to this belief than meets the eye?  If we are to both profess and defend this mark of the Church, then it is necessary that we understand exactly what this means.

Sacred Scripture describes the Church in a number of ways, two of which are especially helpful in understanding the holiness of the Church.  The first is the Kingdom of God.  So important is this concept that Jesus speaks about perhaps more than any other topic in His preaching.  In describing His Kingdom He anticipates the problem of scandals that would come from the community of His disciples (such as good wheat growing with tares, etc.).  Even His handpicked Apostolic College contains Judas, so we must view scandals and scoundrels as somehow part of the Divine plan for the Church.

It is St. Paul’s image of the Church as the Body of Christ that helps us to best see how the Church is holy.  The Church has attached the term “Mystical” to it in order to distinguish it from Christ’s physical body.  It is the richness of the notion of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ that helps us to view the Church in the manner Christ intended.

At the close of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus makes a rather puzzling promise to the Apostles.  After commissioning them to make disciples, baptize and teach, He says “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Mt 28:20).  What Matthew omits is just as important as what he does say.  He makes no mention of the Ascension like the other Synoptic Gospels.  To make this promise and then present Jesus as leaving would make Jesus’ presence very difficult to believe.  Instead Matthew wants to emphasize that Jesus remains until the end of time.

This enduring presence is no mere spiritual presence.  Instead, it is a physical presence just like the Incarnation.  As proof of this, when St. Paul meets Our Lord on the road to Damascus, He asks the Apostle to the Gentiles “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4).  He does not ask why Saul persecutes His followers, but His Person.  One cannot persecute a “spiritual person” but only one that is physically present.

Carvaggio Saul

It is no wonder then that St. Paul in his letters (especially to the Ephesians) uses this metaphor of the Church as the Body of Christ in a way that suggests it is more than a metaphor.  For the Church is the extension of the Incarnation “until the end of the age.”  The Eternal Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, took to Himself a new body on Pentecost.  This body, like the first one, is something physical and tangible.

To understand this more fully we have to see that the human nature He took to Himself was merely an instrument.  Making the invisible reality of God in our midst, visible, His human nature acted as a sign of this.  Just as He used the physical body to win our salvation, so too He will use His Mystical Body to extend the fruits of salvation through all time and space.

With the Church as the extension of the Incarnation through time and space, we can see that it suffers from the same problem that Our Lord did while He walked the earth in His flesh.  Many people saw Jesus as one man among others, even if they thought He was somehow special or wise.  So too some may view the Church as a merely one human institution among many; one Church among many.  Some saw Him as a prophet able to exercise great powers, yet they could not understand where He derived those powers from.  Likewise there are those who view the Church as an instrument of God, but still a merely human institution.  Finally there were those who looked upon Him with supernatural faith as the “the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16).  So too there are those who see the Church through the eyes of faith as a profound mystery.

In other words, we err because we see the Church primarily as an institution and not an organism.  The Church is holy for the same reason the physical body of Christ was holy—because the Person who inhabits that body was holy.  Christ is the head of the Church not as a CEO, but as the head that sits upon a body, leading it around.  As an organism, there must be a bond between the head and the body which is a living soul.  That living soul in the Church is the Holy Spirit, Who is intrinsically holy and thus the “Lord and Giver of Life.”

Seeing the relationship between the Incarnation and the Church helps not only see the intrinsic holiness of the Church, but also how to deal with the sinful members.  During the Incarnation, Christ took upon Himself all human weakness but without any personal sin on His part.  The body He assumed to Himself was plagued by fatigue and thirst, collected dirt, and bled in the Garden.  It is therefore natural to assume that He would also allow weakness in the members of His Mystical Body.  He allows this weakness precisely for the same reason that He did during the Incarnation—by identifying Himself with sinners, He was able to comfort the afflicted.  It is the weakness in the members of the Mystical Body that allows Him likewise to eat with sinners in our day.

As an aside, we can also begin to see why the Church only considers those who have been baptized as members.  By sharing the soul of the Mystical Body through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, a person becomes a member and instrument of Christ’s Body (1Cor 12:13).  Just as parts of a physical body may succumb to disease and no longer be able to properly act as members of the body, members of the Mystical Body may succumb to sin and no longer act as members.  And just as no one would attribute the actions of a diseased part of the body to the person, we do not attribute the sins of the members to the Personality of the Church.  Finally just as a body has varied means to heal diseased parts of the body, so too the Church has the same power because it is always the Person of Christ who acts, even if He uses other members of the body as instruments.

In conclusion we can see why someone who says the Church stands in the way of a relationship with Christ is just as wrong as the Jews who could not accept that God would take on weak human flesh.  The Church is Christ Himself, made visible, even in the weak members of His Body.  Just as in the Incarnation the actions of the human nature of Christ were attributed to God, so too in the Church because of the oneness with Christ, its actions are His actions.  The human elements, as weak as they are act as merely the instruments with which Christ continues to teach, govern and sanctify just as the human elements were instruments in the Incarnation.  As a true body, not only is the body visible, but it must have a visible head in the person of Peter and his successors. A living person does not merely speak through writings of the past but as proof of existence He must have the ability to speak now.  The Mystical Body of Christ is no mere metaphor, but the very definition of the Church.

“‘Who are you, sir?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.’”(Acts 9:5)

On Being Judgmental

Mercy, Sin

“Do not judge, lest ye be called judgmental.”  In a world that has lost a sense of sin, there remains one unforgivable sin—being judgmental.  Many who are biblically illiterate can readily quote Jesus’ admonition “Stop judging, that you may not be judged” (Mt 7:1). According to the mainstream media, even Pope Francis is on board, citing his famous five word answer to a reporter’s question about gay priests—“Who am I to judge?”  Of course the Pope was deflecting a question that the reporter already knew the Church’s response to especially since he has repeatedly reaffirmed the perennial understanding of the Church that we are to “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”  Still the fear of being perceived as judgmental is real and causes many people to merely keep to themselves.  Is it possible to judge without being judgmental?

An important clarification is necessary at the outset.  When we examine the moral quality of any action, it must always be done from two perspectives.  First there is the object itself.  This is the objective act itself and it is what the action “looks like” from the outside. Then there is the subjective intention of the act or the end the person has in mind when choosing a particular action.

The object itself can and should always be judged according to reason, using the criteria of whether it can be ordered to the good or not.   The subjective intention on the other hand cannot always be judged.  And when it can’t, the judgment must left to God.  In other words we may objectively label an act as good or evil, but we cannot judge the subjective guilt of the person who performed the act.  But to be clear, while a good intention may lessen the moral gravity of an evil act, nevertheless a good motive cannot make the act itself good.  A bad motive however can make lessen the good of an otherwise good action.

An example might help us to see how this applies.  Suppose a young girl becomes pregnant and her parents “force” her to abort the child.  She decides that rather than being abandoned by her parents (with a baby) she will abide by their wishes.  The object, an abortion, is always a gravely evil action regardless of the circumstances.  There is never a good reason to justify getting an abortion.  However if we are to look at the subjective guilt it becomes obvious that judgment is difficult, if not impossible.  Certainly she was being coerced, but maybe she really wanted to abort the child anyway.  Or perhaps she didn’t want to but lacked the moral courage to stand up to her parents.  We can see that in both these scenarios there is some level of subjective culpability, but in truth there is no way to know by simply looking at the action.  She is guilty of something that is wrong, but she may not be fully guilty of the abortion.  And in truth, only God can really know the full extent of her guilt.  But again, even if somehow she were to have no culpability, the abortion would still be an objectively wrong act.

If we turn to St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae (ST II-II, q.60) we can glean some practical principles to live by with respect to judging others.  He begins by defining judgment as nothing more than a determination of what is just .  In other words it is related to the virtue of justice.  One of the requisite conditions for a judgment to be truly just is that it must be pronounced according to the right ruling of prudence and not proceed rashly from a judgment on some doubtful or hidden matter.  Herein lies the problem with making a judgment regarding the subjective intention—it is hidden from us (unless we are somehow told) and therefore we are guilty of making a rash judgment.  St. Thomas says that it is precisely rash judgment that Jesus condemns in the oft-quoted text “Judge not…”

Soapbox

It is not just that the other’s intention remains hidden that causes us to judge rashly.  In explaining why Jesus says one should remove the plank in one’s own eye before pointing out the one in your neighbor’s, St. Thomas says that only those who have a virtuous habit can justly judge whether a given act is good or bad.  Only one who knows truly what chastity “looks and feels like” can detect it in someone else.  And because they know the struggle in obtaining chastity, they can offer both understanding and encouragement to those who struggle with it.  So too with all the other virtues meaning that only a truly virtuous person can render a just judgment on the virtue of others.

The point St. Thomas is trying to make is that we will always judge according to our own way of looking at things.  We fall prey to what Pope St. John Paul II called the “Hermeneutic of Suspicion.”  One who lies, will tend to distrust everyone else and always think they are lying.  One who is disloyal, will look upon every disappointment by someone else as a deliberate betrayal.  As Ecclesiastes says “Even when walking in the street the fool, lacking understanding, calls everyone a fool” (Eccl 10:3).  We also are more readily apt to judge someone rashly whom we don’t particularly care for.  We are simply looking for validation as to why we shouldn’t like them.  The point though is that whenever we judge someone rashly (even if in the end we turn out right), we do harm to them.

Of course as a spiritual practice we can learn a lot about our predominant fault by simply watching what we accuse others of.  With this in mind, St. Thomas also has another practical suggestion for us regarding the habit of thinking well of others.  Because we do harm to a person by judging him rashly, “we ought to deem him good by interpreting for the best whatever is doubtful in him.”  While this may mean that we are deceived more often, it is still better to err in the direction of thinking well of a wicked man than to err by having an evil opinion of a good man.  In other words the cost of a false negative is greater than a false positive—both of us are harmed when I judge a good man wicked, but only I am harmed when judging a wicked man good.  In one case I am the perpetrator of evil, in the other I am more like Our Lord and the victim.

It goes without saying that everything Our Lord was teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and St. Thomas’ explanation pertains to making rash judgment.  But despite the world’s obsession with judgmentalism, there is a hidden truth there.  If we are willing to examine ourselves carefully we really are prone to be judgmental.  This is not a call to abandon judgment, but to participate in the Church’s mission that the Holy Father so clearly articulates in The Name of God is Mercy:

“The Church condemns sin because it has to relay the truth: ‘This is a sin.’ But at the same time, it embraces the sinner who recognizes himself as such, it welcomes him, it speaks to him of the infinite mercy of God.”

On Petitionary Prayer

Prayer

To the outsider, Christian doctrine gives the appearance of having many contradictions.  A common example concerns the Christian practice of petitionary prayer.  The objection goes something like this, “If God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then why would we pray to Him?  If something is good and part of His plan, isn’t He going to do it anyway?  How could a mere creature ‘suggest’ to God what He should do?”  We must admit from the outset that this line of thinking is a slippery slope.  It turns out not to be an argument against prayer per se, but an argument against us doing anything since God will do it anyway.  Nevertheless, the question about petitionary prayer is a good one, especially when asked in a true spirit of inquiry (rather than merely trying to “debunk” Christianity).  Therefore this question deserves a well formulated response.

If we turn to the teachings of Our Lord, the spirit of our interlocutor appears to be something that He had in mind during His preaching.  While giving the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, when addressing petitionary prayer says that “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Mt 6:8).  Despite the knowledge God has of what we need, Jesus still commands His followers to “[A]sk and it will be given to you…If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him” (Mt 7:7,11).  Based on this, we can conclude definitively that God both knows what we need and that we must ask.  It remains then for us to understand why this might be so.

Jesus Praying

We might begin our inquiry by looking at the principle of causality with respect to God Himself.  Because God is omnipotent, we can say that God is the primary cause of all that is.  This manifests itself through His Providence, that is, He has a plan and the power to carry out His plan in exactly the manner He intends.  Despite this power, He will everywhere throughout creation use secondary causes to bring about the desired effects.  This includes not only using something like the law of gravity to bring about His will, but also the wind or even free will decisions of His creatures.  He might intend to heal someone from illness and rather than miraculously intervening, He uses the skill of a doctor in aiding the body to heal itself.  While we clearly differentiate between the miraculous healing and the natural healing, both have God as their author.  It is only in the miraculous is He also an actor in the drama.  It is also helpful to point out that when there is a “natural” healing of the patient God used not only the doctor but also the body’s natural healing faculties.  Therefore God uses not just single secondary causes but multiple causes to bring about a given effect.

What does this have to do with petitionary prayer?  Prayer simply is another cause in bringing about an effect.  In other words when a given person is sick, God has ordained that the cause of his healing is not just medicine and the body’s natural healing faculties, but prayer as well.  It is those three causes (at least) that bring about the effect.  Each is built into God’s plan as a singular cause and therefore all three are necessary for the healing of the patient.

It is not just the outsider that struggles with seeing the use of petitionary prayer.  Many Christians look upon it as a lower form of prayer and therefore as something to be left behind.  But very often what they are really questioning is the purpose.  There is nothing “spiritual” about setting petitionary prayer aside because you don’t think it works.  No matter what level of prayer you have achieved, petitionary prayer is never something that can be left off.  With growth in the levels of prayer, there will be a corresponding increase in the role petitionary prayer will play.  One of the fruits of mental prayer is to “put on the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16) so that we develop the habit of asking for exactly the right thing at the right time in the right way.  This is why St. James can confidently assert that the “prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much” (James 5:16).

Prayer, even petitionary prayer, is primarily about relationship.  God wants us to ask so that we know where it came from.  He does this not so that we will pat Him on the back, but so that we will concretely experience His love for us.  He wants us to know how much He loves us and there is no better way than for Him to give us something after we ask for it, especially when we ask boldly for things that seem impossible.  Gratitude, while it is directed to God, is primarily for our own benefit.  The more often we are aware of God’s action in our life as an experience of His Fatherly care, the more convinced we are of His love.  If things just appeared without ever being asked for, we would begin to forget about the Giver.  It is not without accident in a culture of such material wealth that petitionary prayer has fallen into disuse.

As a necessary tangent it is worth mentioning that there is nothing noble about not praying for yourself.  It really betrays a hidden sense of pride—“I have everything I need and therefore I will pray for others.”  At the very least, if God really does know what we need before we ask, shouldn’t we ask Him what it is that we really need?  In other words, perhaps our greatest need is to know what we need so that we can ask for it and so that He may give it to us.  We should pray for ourselves because very often what others need more than anything else is that we become holier.

Some of this is also caused by our own thinking that there is a limitation on the number of Divine withdrawals we can make each day.  With this limit in place, we want to make sure others are taken care of.  But we aren’t somehow limited as to the number of things we can ask for.  God is beyond generous and so “we should put all our cares before the Lord” (1 Pt 5:7).

There is also the habit of thinking that we should only pray for those things that we need; for the things we might like or want, we are on our own.  Certainly there is a hierarchy of sorts related to what we should ask God for so that we do not lose sight of the heavenly treasure.  But God wants us to ask for the things we want as well.  He cares about our temporal happiness too, especially when we acknowledge Him as the benefactor.  When Jesus turned the water into wine, it was not based on any absolute need.  Instead He produced a superabundance of 520 liters of wine for a private party to help us to see the depth of His generosity, even of temporal goods.  While this is in no way an endorsement of the “health and wealth Gospel” which creates an unhealthy attachment to temporal goods, material things beyond mere biological needs can be a good.  I can remember a number of years ago one of my sons wanted a pet frog.  I didn’t want him to have a pet frog so I foolishly told him to pray for it.  He did and when we came home there was a huge frog sitting in the driveway.  When he got out of the car, the frog started hopping toward him.  He had a pet frog like he asked and there was no question where it came from—Deo Gratias.

Pascal once said that “God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.”  In other words prayer raises our dignity by allowing us to share in God’s power of being primary cause.  In this way it is our most potent work because by exercising it we are most like God.  God speaks and things happen.  His words are His actions.  So too when we speak in prayer, things happen merely by our words.  We hold great power in our tongues, especially when our prayers are uttered in the name of Jesus.