All posts by Rob Agnelli

United on Marriage

July 1, 2015marriageRob Agnelli

As the Church prepares for the fallout from the Obergefell decision, it is vitally important that she presents a united front. But it seems that rather than a willingness to fight for marriage, many have greeted the decision with either indifference saying, “how does what they do affect my marriage?” or with scapegoating, usually blaming the “culture,” “Cafeteria Catholics” or “liberal bishops.” I would like to address both groups because I think they make the same fundamental error, even if they end up in different places.

The Indifferent

One of the clarion calls of the gay marriage movement has been that gay marriage is between two consenting adults, doing no harm to anyone else and should be legal. Therefore we should remain indifferent to the laws surrounding it as long as they do not discriminate. The assumption is that marriage is a private affair and should have no outside interference. This, of course, ignores the fact that the law is a great moral teacher. As St. John Paul II reminds us, laws “play a very important and sometimes decisive role in influencing patterns of thought and behavior.” (Evangelium Vitae, 90). Succeeding generations will grow up assuming that homosexuality is morally acceptable. Beliefs shape behavior.

It is this interest in the succeeding generations that forms the basis for the State’s interest in marriage. The State is only interested in marriage because it is where the next generation is raised. They should show concern that the rights of children are protected and children have a natural right to being raised by both parents. Even the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child have recognized this right.

This is a natural right because “[M]arriage is the fundamental pattern for male-female relationships. It contributes to society because it models the way in which women and men live interdependently and commit, for the whole of life, to seek the good of each other. The marital union also provides the best conditions for raising children: namely, the stable, loving relationship of a mother and father present only in marriage” (USCCB, Marriage and Same-sex Unions, 4).

Now that same-sex marriage is legalized, there will be a significant change in our society, the fruit of which we will not necessarily see in our generation. We have codified the assumption that the primary purpose of marriage is to validate and protect a sexually intimate relationship. All else is secondary including the rights of the other members of the family.

The Scapegoaters

On the other hand there are those who normally label themselves as “conservative” Catholics who are on the lookout for someone to blame. It is always those people who aren’t Catholic enough—bishops, priests, laity—who are to blame for the current plight in the world. They usually measure the Catholicity of those around them by counting the number of kids they have. We have all met them—they define themselves by how many kids they have and they speak of other people in the same terms. They hold those with two kids in contempt. They are also marked by a joylessness that usually stems from the demands of having four kids within six years of each other. It never crosses their minds that the couples with two kids may be looking at them not because of how many kids they have but with how unhappy they seem.

Now let me be absolutely clear what I am saying here. Large families are a beautiful gift and there are many of them who live with a great joy and make it look so appealing. They are living out their vocation in the manner God has called them. But not everyone is called to have a large family. There are grave reasons why having more children temporarily or permanently is imprudent or even impossible. Certainly it matters morally how we accomplish this. That is not what this is about. It is about those couples who show no discernment and assume marriage is simply about baby making. Because they are operating out of the same set of assumptions as those who are indifferent and bear just as much responsibility as them in creating this atmosphere.

To understand the assumption that is being made, it is first necessary to clarify the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental goods. An intrinsic good is one that is good for its own sake and is an end in itself. An instrumental good is one that is a means to some intrinsic good. If we classify marriage as a good, is it intrinsic or instrumental?

St. Augustine was the first to hold that marriage is an instrumental good. He said “we must see that God gives us some goods which are to be sought for their own sake, such as wisdom, health, friendship; others, which are necessary for something else, such as learning, food, drink, sleep, marriage, sexual intercourse.” (St. Augustine, De bono coniugali, 9.9). This notion of marriage as merely an instrumental good is still in vogue today. However, marriage is an intrinsic good. As John Paul II pointed out in Veritatis Splendor, the communion of persons in marriage is a fundamental human good upon which all human goods are built.

If we define marriage as “a union between a man and a woman who, by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons” (CDF, Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons, 2) then we see that only in light of marriage as an intrinsic good do the ideas of permanence and exclusivity make sense. If marriage is not an end in itself then there is no reason to abide by these ideals in the face of the nearly inevitable trials that come with every marriage. If marriage is an intrinsic good, then it is written into the very nature of man. This means that it is fixed and not open to redefinition. However, when it is treated as an instrumental good, many begin to see it merely as a social construct. This means that it may be defined in any manner that a given society sees fit in order to meet the needs of the members.

It is because of the instrumentalist view that the push for same-sex marriage gained traction so quickly. This is because few people, unfortunately, noticed the radical change in the definition of marriage that began nearly fifty years ago. Thanks to the “sexual revolution”, sex became separated from procreation. Once that intrinsic connection was lost, sex within marriage became an instrumental good. The rest of married life followed suit; marriage became a means of personal fulfilment instead of mutual fulfilment, and when one of the spouses no longer felt “personally fulfilled”, he or she felt free to terminate the contractual agreement. That this occurred seems self-evident, but it may not be so obvious that the occurrence represented a vast change from the traditional understanding of marriage.

Catholic Rabbits

Out of this rose the reactionary group that sees marriage merely as a means instrumental to the founding of a family. This temptation is something that the future Pope John Paul II recognized. He taught that “the inner and essential raison d’etre of marriage is not simply eventual transformation into a family but above all the creation of a lasting personal union between a man and a woman based on love” (Love and Responsibility, p.228). In other words, the family is a fruit of marriage that is founded on the communion of the spouses, but it is not the purpose of marriage itself. The fact that society feeds on that fruit should not obscure this either.

I think this what at the heart of what Pope Francis was saying when he cautioned against becoming Catholic rabbits. The point is that the vocation of marriage is a calling to healthy family life which may or may mean a large family. Many Catholics today would have scoffed at Mary and Joseph for having one kid (and some of their Jewish neighbors probably did). And yet they serve as the model for all of family life because of the three signs of a healthy marriage—(1) mutual sanctity of the members (2) greater concern for the perfection of their spouse than their own (3) joy.

The point is that large families are not the solution to the marriage crisis as some seem to think. The solution is holier families. This means a commitment to the sanctification of each of the members individually. Large families can turn the eyes of the world for two reasons—the first is that they appear to be a freak show or second because of the great joy of their members. Only in the second case does the freak show aspect fade and the beauty of marriage well lived shine forth. The world looks at the joyless family and sees the mom as nothing more than a baby-making machine and in some respects they are right. Marriage has to be so much more than that.

We have no one to blame for the marriage crisis but ourselves. If Marriage is an intrinsic good then it is written in all of our hearts to live out God’s plan for it in our lives. In other words, the witness of a beautiful marriage speaks volumes to the hearts of those in the world. This cannot be stamped out because we are made for it. When the law says marriage is something that it is not, then one of the weapons to fight it is to live more clearly what it is. The problem has been that we have not lived it out well enough to show this. If you want to change the culture, start in your own house. The culture war will be won one family at a time. We have to always remember this and not be surprised or discouraged when things like this happen. As the Fatima visionary Sr. Lucia told Cardinal Carlo Caffara,

“the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid, she added, because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. And then she concluded: however, Our Lady has already crushed its head.”

Idols and the Supreme Court

June 29, 2015Contraception, Culture of Life, marriage, ScriptureRob Agnelli

In the minds of many people, the SCOTUS decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was inevitable. What comes next in many Christians’ minds is the four horseman of the apocalypse as God pours His chastisement upon our country. But what if the decision itself is the chastisement? While this may sound strange initially, anyone who reads the first chapter of St. Paul’s letter to Romans will find that God often chastises mankind for their sins by turning them over to them.

Here is what St. Paul says specifically,

“The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness. For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened. While claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes. Therefore, God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. Therefore, God handed them over to degrading passions. Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper. They are filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are gossips and scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know the just decree of God that all who practice such things deserve death, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” (Romans 1:18-32)

If we follow what St. Paul is saying, we can trace four steps in the degradation of man.

Step One: Idolatry

He says that it all begins with idolatry—“They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator.” The turn is away from God to material reality in some way.

Pope Francis has spoken often about the danger of idolatry in today’s world and has challenged all of us to examine ourselves regularly to see the idols in our lives. Anything that we put in the place of God is an idol. However, I think there is an idolatry that is unique to Americans of which we are now reaping the fruit—equality.

When Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America he found that for Americans, “equality is their idol.” While this drive for equality “excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored” and “tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great” there is always a danger lurking, namely that “there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom” (Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter 3).

But isn’t equality a good thing? How can Tocqueville call it an idol? Aren’t we all equal in the eyes of God? Certainly we are all equal in dignity, but the fact of the matter is that equality is a man-made legal fiction. God, for His part, has made everything with varying degrees of perfection. We are not all equal in God’s eyes. He has made each of us to be perfect in one particular way, but not in all ways, much less for us to be equally perfect in all things. We bring glory to God by achieving this perfection. Whether we achieve this perfection or not does not change our value in God’s eyes—we are all still individually worth dying for. But to try and change this important aspect of reality is to set ourselves up as God. In other words, the fixation to create equality where there isn’t one is an attempt on man’s part to usurp God. The gross manner in which it has been enforced from above in our country in particular has forged it into an idol. Tocqueville identified it almost 200 years ago and it is no less true today.

CS Lewis encapsulates the idolatrous nature of equality in his book That Hideous Strength in a dialogue between Jane and the Director.

Jane: “I thought love meant equality.”

Director: “Ah, equality! Yes; we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”

Jane: “I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”

Director: “You were mistaken; that is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes- that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.”

Think of all the ways in which we attempt to create equality where there isn’t. We try to make men and women identical. We award trophies to everyone. We attempt to make the rich poorer and the poor richer by governmental fiat. Now we have said all loves are equal—“love is love”—and has been recognized as such by the highest court in the Land.

Step Two: Sexual Immorality

What follows from idolatry according to St. Paul? It is sexual immorality, namely “God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies.”

The move from God to material reality as its god leads a God-sized void in man’s heart. He turns to the closest thing that offers what he longs for with God (interpersonal communion), namely sex. It starts as the “old fashioned” kind, namely fornication. But for Americans it is pays homage to the idol of equality. Based on the false notion of equality of men and women, we have attempted to make women into men through the wholesale promotion of contraception.

Men could always, for the most part, have sex without consequences. If men and women are equal then women should be able to do that as well. To make this possible, chemical contraception came on the scene. Now men and women could engage freely in all the sexual activity they wanted. To make this even more possible, we should have our government provide the means to securing these pills. But there is a hidden assumption in the promotion of chemical contraception. The assumption is this. Women are inferior to men and so in order to be seen as equal they must either have a surgery or take a pill. Now I personally don’t believe this for one minute, but I grieve for the millions of women who have never questioned this assumption that they are making.

Step Three: Sexual Perversion

In step three in the descent of man, God hands them over to even “more degraded passions.” Not satisfied with unlimited sex, we must turn up the volume and get more disordered and depraved. Thus homosexuality becomes more widespread. In the name of equality, society must “give approval to those who practice them” through its laws. After all if a heterosexual couple can engage in an act they have deliberately rendered unfruitful, why can’t two people engage in an act that is by nature unfruitful? They are equal, especially when they love each other.

Step Four: Societal Chaos

Once it has been given the governmental seal of approval, God’s final punishment is to “hand them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper.” What follows is societal chaos, “[T]hey are filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are gossips and scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” God may not have forced Americans to drink this chalice to the dregs, but we can see signs of it all around.

The purpose of writing all this however is not to be a prophet of gloom, but to suggest a path out of this. If one listens to the arguments surrounding Gay marriage you find that they are irrational. This is only more obvious when one reads the Obergefell v. Hodges majority opinion. This is because one of the punishments is that “their minds are darkened”, as in not able to reason clearly. Sin makes us all stupid. To continue to engage in argument as the main point of attack is fruitless, especially if we view all of this as God handing us over to the idol of equality.

If we want to be free from the punishments of the sin of idolatry we must repent of that sin. What I am proposing is for Christians across the United States to fast on July 4^th as an act of Penance for the sin of idolatry. Only by repenting of that sin can we break the cycle of chastisement. Just as Our Master did, we as the Body of Christ, have the role to perform acts of Reparation to God for the sins of mankind. We can voluntarily fast now, or we can offer reparation later when the effects of the legalization of Gay marriage are felt keenly by all Christians. It might require both

Will you join me? If so, I would like you each to invite five other people to offer a fast of some sort this Saturday. Imagine the effect on our culture we could have by offering our “bodies as a spiritual sacrifice” (Romans 12:1), especially on Independence Day and First Saturday. Our Lady, Queen of the Americas, pray for us.

The Keep Fit Sacrament

June 26, 2015SacramentsConfession, Healing, Mercy, Reconciliation, SinRob Agnelli

What do you call the Sacrament by which we confess our sins to a priest and through the power given by Christ to the Church, he offers us absolution? Very often, you can learn a lot about someone by the answer they give. Someone who wants to emphasize the positive aspects of the Sacrament will call it “The Sacrament of Reconciliation.” Those who go regularly tend to call it “The Sacrament of Confession.” And then those who have more legalistic tendencies call it “The Sacrament of Penance.” Yet the Church refers to the Sacrament using all three terms and she does so in order to highlight something very important about the effects of sin and the power of the Sacrament.

While sin is first and foremost a transgression against the law of God, its effects always lay in three dimensions. First it alienates us from God and thus we need the Sacrament of Penance to correct this. Second it separates us from our neighbor and therefore there is a need for Reconciliation to reunite with the community. Finally, by sin we ultimately harm ourselves and therefore the need for Confession to accuse ourselves before our conscience.

Interestingly enough, it seems that in today’s climate the emphasis is on calling it Reconciliation even though we often fail to see how our sin hurts the Church. We’ve all heard that there is no such thing as a private sin, but we do not really understand how this is so. It might be easy to see how a mortal sin cuts you off from the Church, but what about just a tiny venial sin (if such a thing exists)? Why is reconciliation necessary?

Looking at what we actually forfeit when we commit a venial sin makes it clearer. Each time we fall, we deprive ourselves of sanctifying grace. But this is not just about our own personal holiness. As members of the Church, we have an obligation towards the other members of the Church to be as holy as possible. Each grace that we forfeit is a grace that God intended for everyone to benefit from. By not being as holy as we should be, we deprive others of the grace that we were to be channels of. In fact not only do we have an obligation, but the other members of the Church have a right to demand we be as holy as we should be. This is why petty jealousy has no room in the Church—the holier each other member is, the holier I will be.

This is what makes the image of the Church as the Body of Christ so instructive. When an organ is not as healthy as it should be, then it hurts the whole body. It even hurts the functioning of some of the other parts as well. An organ that is healthy adds to the health of the other members.

To remain healthy, organs need continual nourishment. This comes to the members of the Mystical Body through the Eucharist. But nourishment is not enough to maintain optimal health. Our organs also are prone to decay and need tonics in order to remain healthy. So too the members of the Mystical Body need to regularly receive the tonic of frequent confession in order to remain healthy. How can we receive this tonic fruitfully?

With this background in mind, Pope Pius XII in his encyclical on the Church, Mystici Corporis Christi, recommended to the faithful the practice of frequent confession. Speaking specifically against those who said there is no benefit to the frequent Sacramental confession of venial sins he said “[T]o hasten daily progress along the road to virtue we wish the pious practice of frequent confession to be earnestly advocated. Not without inspiration of the Holy Spirit was this practice introduced into the Church…By it genuine self-knowledge is increased — Christian humility grows — bad habits are corrected — spiritual neglect and tepidity are countered — the conscience is purified — the will is strengthened — a salutary self-control is attained — and grace is increased in virtue of the sacrament itself” (Mystici Corporis Christi, 88).

To be clear, if you are conscious of having committed mortal sin (or even if you are questioning whether it is or not) then you should go to Confession immediately. But what the Pope is advocating is frequent confession as a means to fight venial sins and climb the heights of sanctity quickly.

This obviously requires a paradigm shift. Many of us (perhaps because of a bad experience or our own hang-ups) look upon Confession as a wholly bad thing, rather than a holy good thing. We should see the Sacrament of Confession as a positive thing rather than as something to be dreaded. All Sacraments are encounters with the Risen Christ and therefore we should not fear to encounter Him there. There is necessarily some shame because sin is always shameful, but that shame is healthy. It can also be offered to the Sacred Heart for the shame and humiliation of being scourged and crowned with thorns. We also should experience some nervousness. Who wouldn’t be nervous coming into the presence of the One Who is Goodness to accuse ourselves of failing in our own pursuit of goodness? But both these quickly are washed away in the Blood that is poured over us during the words of absolution.

confessional

It is also worthwhile to highlight some of the benefits that Pius XII mentions. So often we fall into the trap of thinking that the Sacrament is merely about accusing ourselves before God. But that is truly a small part of it where frequent confession is concerned. In fact for the Sacrament to be valid we need only confess a single venial sin for which we are sorry. Instead the focus ought to be to stir up contrition. Contrition is the sorrow of soul for sin committed and a firm purpose not to commit it again and grow in the virtue of penance. By the sacrament our wills are strengthened and our purposes of amendment firmer. This all comes from the grace of the Sacrament.

This is also why we should not grow discouraged when we continually have the same sins to confess. Each time we confess it, it makes our contrition more perfect. This is what makes Confession such a beautiful gift. It is impossible for us not to commit sin in this life (Council of Trent) but it is possible for us to have perfect sorrow for those sins we do commit. If it is true that “there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than the righteous man who is in no need of repentance” then we know that the God of Mercy takes great pleasure in bestowing the gift of contrition upon us.

It was mentioned that you need only confess a single venial sin (again assuming no mortal sin) in order for the Sacrament to be valid (meaning all our venial sins are absolved, confessed or not). This leads to another important thing to consider in drawing the optimal fruit from the Sacrament as to what we should confess. We should not come to the Sacrament with a laundry list of sins, but instead those faults that we are actively trying to conquer. This is warfare 101. Our enemies, the world, the devil and the flesh, will never be conquered if we fire scatter shot over their lines. Instead, like every good soldier in battle, we should take a divide and conquer approach. Once we have conquered the dominant vice and replaced it with its opposing virtue, we can then move on to the next one. Included in the things we should confess as well are things that we are particularly sorry for and those things that we had previously conquered and have moved back into our lives. Even the sins of our past life that have already been confessed but still hold some appeal to us can be material for confession. Again, if one of the fruits is to stir up contrition then we can more fully express our sorrow for those sins.

This brings up one final point and that is the necessity for a methodical approach to our daily examination. We should focus on one thing in particular and see how we did for the day. Then we can look at the rest of our day. Writing what we discover down in a small notebook will enable us to see our patterns more clearly and also give us the material to make a good confession next time we go. Unless you have not been in a while or are making a general confession, we should avoid using Examination of Conscience material found in prayer books. All too often this leads us to examine someone else’s conscience and not our own. As Pius XII mentioned with the fruit of increased self-knowledge that comes from regular confession we will also be able to examine ourselves better.

In closing, let us all take advantage of this Keep Fit Sacrament and invoke the aid of St. Gemma Galgani for a good confession this weekend:

My crucified God, behold me at Your feet. Do not reject me, a poor sinner, as I appear before You. I have offended You much in the past, my Jesus, but in the future I resolve to sin no more. My God, I put all my sins before You. I have considered them and realize they do not deserve Your pardon. But I beg of you to cast one glance upon Your sufferings and see how great is the worth of that Precious Blood that flows from your veins. My God, at this hour close Your eyes to my want of merit and open them to Your infinite merits. Since You, dear Jesus, have been pleased to die for my sins, grant me forgiveness for them all, that I may no longer feel their heavy burden, which presses me to the earth. My Jesus, help me, for I desire to become good, no matter what it may cost. Take away, destroy, root out completely all that You find in me that may be contrary to Your holy Will. At the same time I beg You, O Jesus, to enlighten me, that I may be able to walk in Your holy light.

John Paul II and Chick Flicks

June 25, 2015marriage, Theology of the BodyRob Agnelli

The man who would become Pope St. John Paul II, Fr. Karol Wojtyla, devoted much of his pastoral work as a priest to the study of love between man and woman. His reflections grew to full maturity during the series of Wednesday Audiences that would become the Theology of the Body. Although, as George Weigel describes it, Theology of the Body remains “a theological time bomb set to go off some time in the twenty-first century,” it is one of his earlier works, Love and Responsibility, which is most culturally relevant. It offers a remedy to the wounding effects of the portrayal of love between the sexes in movies and television shows. Fr. Wojtyla devoted a significant portion of his discussion examining the anatomy of attraction. If we perform a “Psychological Analysis of Love” with the future John Paul II, we will understand how Hollywood exploits this attraction and better defend ourselves from its soul crushing effects.

When one speaks of being attracted to someone, it primarily means that attraction is a response to the perception of some value in the other person. This attraction initially involves the senses, emotions and desires (or collectively, the passions), but in order to be integrated into an authentic human response it must involve the mind and the will as well. Only when this happens can the emotion that we refer to as love be drawn up into a truly human love in which one wills the good of another.

The natural attraction that men and women have toward each other is governed by what Fr. Wojtyla refers to as the “sexual urge.” This tendency to seek out the opposite sex is experienced specifically as a bodily and emotional attraction to a person of the other sex. While the other person is the object by which these attractions are stirred, they are also a subject. If they remain on the level of object then the risk of using the other person as a “something” rather than a “somebody” is ever looming. For Fr. Wojtyla the opposite of human love is not hate, but use. In order to avoid falling into the trap of using other people he posited that all human interaction, especially between the sexes, ought to be governed by the principle that “a person is a kind of good which does not admit use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end.” In its positive form, the “Personalistic Norm,” is stated as a “person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love”

Fr. Wojtyla used the terms sensuality and sentimentality to refer to each of the physical and emotional attractions respectively. Because these attractions are on the material level, they do not occur in the abstract but are always directed towards a particular human person. Because the object of these attractions is also a subject to whom the only “proper and adequate attitude is love,” these responses only serve as the raw material for love and are intended to be integrated into a love that involves a total gift of self to the other that is unique to married love. The manner in which the media operates makes the road to this integration treacherous at best. The producers in Hollywood seek to stir these responses in viewers and manipulate the viewers into thinking them authentic experiences. By examining each of the two attractions and the manner in which they are manipulated this essay attempts to serve as a roadmap to point out the pitfalls that the media consistently places in the path of true love.

Sensuality is the attraction to the body of the person of the opposite sex. Sensuality is stirred when we encounter a person of the opposite sex and find value in their body as an object of personal enjoyment. Because this is a passive response on our part, it must be drawn up into the intellect and the will. At that point we can choose to continue to see that person only as an object of sexual value or choose to raise the value to the personal level. The habit of raising the emotional response to the personal level is the virtue of chastity.

Nearly every prime time television show and movie have as one of their goals to stir sensuality. Through the use of gratuitous “love scenes” the actors deliberately allow themselves to be viewed as objects with the intent of stirring up sensuality in the viewers. On the other hand, when sensuality is stirred in the viewer it is impossible to integrate the emotion into a truly human love. There is only the object and no subject present. Obviously this happens most perniciously in pornography, but even so-called “soft-porn” that now can be found regularly in prime-time television does this. With repeated exposure we become conditioned to love the feelings that are stirred within by sensuality. Even if we encounter real flesh and blood persons of the opposite sex a “consumer orientation” leaves us with only the ability to see them as an object to stir sensuality. We become blind to the truth of the other person as a subject to be loved. Well aware that chastity arms the viewer against the abuse of sensuality, Hollywood mocks those who show it. How many “coming of age” dramas are produced each year with exactly this intent?

Sentimentality is the emotional attraction to the sexual value residing in the whole person in the form of their masculinity and femininity. It seems at first that this is a much “safer” emotion than sensuality because it attaches value to the whole person. Because of the intensity of the feelings attached to sentimentality there is a tendency to avoid the truth about the other person by idealizing the person “out of all proportion” to whom he or she is in reality. Love then becomes directed at the idealized values imputed to the others and the other is used for the emotional pleasure derived from idealizing him.

Nearly every “chick-flick” (and there is no shortage of them) is accurately marketed as the “feel-good romantic comedy of the year” because they are meant to stir sentimentality. The movies rarely deviate from the same theme—a lonely girl meets a masculine guy who is a real jerk, she finds herself surprisingly attracted to him (because she has idealized him), he reveals the truth about himself and they split up, they get back together because he shows traces of the reason she idealized him in the first place and they live happily ever after.

As promised, the viewers “feel good” during the movie, but they often leave the theater more empty and disillusioned than before. They begin to think that the ideals they value will never be found and instead think that they should settle for someone with whom there is “chemistry” like the girl in the movie.

Fr. Wojtyla suggests that men are often more sensual than women and women more sentimental than men. Although the prevailing culture insists there are no differences between men and women, when it comes to Hollywood they are quick to exploit this fact. According to a 2010 study released by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, women in the movies are 7 times more likely to be seen in sexy clothing and 3.5 times more likely to be partially naked than men. Likewise as the name suggests, “Chick-flicks” are marketed specifically to women because of their sentimental tendencies.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen once commented that “if the human heart does not have enough love in it, it seeks out those who are in love.” For many people the place they turn first is to the movies and TV. Because of the manner in which Hollywood manipulates both sensuality and sentimentality, it leads to a culture that has forgotten how to find true love between the sexes. Only with a proper understanding of these two emotions based on the teachings of John Paul II in Love and Responsibility can we begin to hope to heal the wounds the culture has inflicted on the relationship between men and women.

Finding the Thread

June 24, 2015Eucharist, SacramentsRob Agnelli

In its Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council presented an integrated vision of the two fonts of Revelation, namely Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. For many Catholics however, the font of Sacred Scripture has been reduced to a steady drip. In a cultural milieu in which we have grown accustomed to deferring to the “expert,” Christians have left the reading and interpretation of Scripture to so called “Scripture Scholars.” But Scripture is not just the ramblings of an absent God sending (now outdated) messages to His people. Instead it is meant to play an active role in the life of every believer. God’s plan of salvation is by no means complete and through His Providential care the Scriptures remain “living and active” (Heb 4:12). In order for us to turn the trickle into a torrent, we must commit to engaging the Scriptures with regularity. To this end, I find no more important interpretive key to unlocking the Scriptures than the idea of Covenant.

We need look no further than how we divide the Bible to see the importance of covenant to the plan of salvation. The word “Testament” is an imperfect rendering of the word “covenant” (Hebrew berit, Greek diatheke). Despite the difference in terms, it should not obscure the fact that the concept of covenant is central to biblical thought.

Although you will not find the term “covenant” defined within Sacred Scripture itself, recent research into ancient covenants in the biblical world has led to scholars defining covenants as “a widespread legal means by which duties and privileges of kinship may be extended to another individual or group” (Protestant scholar Frank Moore Cross’ definition). Although similar to a contract in its nature, a covenant is distinct. As Scott Hahn is fond of saying, “a contract involves an exchange of goods, whereas a covenant involves an exchange of persons.” In essence, covenants form families. This is why marriage, until recently, was viewed as the primordial covenant by most people. In exchanging vows in a covenantal marriage ceremony the spouses are exchanging themselves and thus form a family that cannot be dissolved. A contractual view of marriage merely agrees to share everything while they are married and split it equitably upon dissolution—unless there is a pre-nup. It is also why God uses the imagery of marriage for His relationship with mankind (c.f Is 62.5, John 3:22) and the Church herself is so solicitous to protect a true understanding of marriage.

How a covenant was made is also important. The central act of the covenant making was the swearing of an oath by the parties. The oath invoked God (or the gods) to inflict some curse on its swearer if he does not uphold his obligations. It also called upon God for his help in keeping it. It was usually followed up with a common meal to seal the new relationship. The meal is meant to signify a sharing of life together because food is a source of life. As an aside, we see why families eating meals together is so important. They are truly sacramental (small ‘s’) in that they bring about what they signify—the sharing of food as a source of life leads to the strengthening of that shared life.

A good example of a covenant is found in Genesis 26:27-31. Here Isaac is approached by a supposed enemy Abimelech and the two make a covenant not to do harm to each other (vv28-29). They share a meal (v.30) and swear the sacred oaths (v.31) before taking leave of each other. But this covenant is meant only to be a type of the divine Covenant that God makes with mankind.

Divine covenants act as threads that weave all of the Books of the Bible together. All total, God makes seven covenants with mankind, each mediated by a different person. Not coincidentally, the number seven in Hebrew literally means to swear an oath (c.f. Genesis 21). Each of these covenants contain a liturgical form around their swearing and extend God’s family to more of mankind. Each contains blessings and curses and each contains a sign that acts as a renewal.

Although the word “covenant” is never used explicitly in the Creation account (Hos 6:7 says “Like Adam, Israel transgressed the covenant”), God makes a covenant with all mankind through Adam. Once the stipulations of that Covenant are broken (refrain from the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil—Gn 2:16-17), God re-establishes a covenant with Noah (c.f. 6:18). This covenant He then renews that covenant with Noah (Gn 6:18) and his family. From there he extends the covenant to Abraham and his descendants (there are two covenants here) and then to Israel through Moses and David. Each of these covenants should be viewed as cumulative, each building on the previous one and inviting more people into the familial bond. Finally, there is the final or “New” Covenant that is Christ, including all mankind through the Church.

Notice that I didn’t say that the New Covenant is mediated through Christ but instead that the New Covenant is Christ. It certainly is mediated through Him, but not in the same way as the others. He brings all the blessings of the covenants to the new People of God which is the Church (we are a new creation because of the new Adam Gal 6:15) and takes all the curses of the previous covenants upon Himself (e.g. Israel deserved death for breaking the covenant in Ex 24:8 when they worshipped the golden calf in Ex 32:14 but the price was paid by Christ Himself for Israel in Heb 915). It is in His name that all mankind is saved. He, Who is the true Son of God, turns us into adopted sons.

That Christ was instituting this New Covenant at the Last Supper is obvious to anyone who reads the Institution narratives (c.f. Luke 22:20, 1 Cor 11:25). But I do not think the implications of it are as obvious unless we understand some of the above covenantal theology. In my opinion a greater understanding of the covenantal nature of salvation history points to an important truth about the Catholic Church as the one true Church formed by Christ.

daVinci-Last Supper

If Christ was making a new covenant between God and mankind then one must be led to the question of how one enters into this Covenant. To enter into the Old Covenant, a man must have been circumcised (women were Jewish by birth). St. Paul tells the Colossians that Baptism is the “Circumcision of Christ” (Col 2:11-12). This points to the necessity of baptism to enter into a covenant with God and explains why Catholics universally advocate infant baptism. By being baptized, one enters into the New Covenant by putting on Christ. We literally enter the family of God by being sacramentally conformed to His Son.

But there is an even more important tie to the Eucharist. Recall what Christ said over the chalice—“this chalice is the new covenant in my blood.” It isn’t His death on the Cross, but the chalice that is the new covenant in His blood. Now certainly His death and resurrection are necessary to make His blood efficacious for giving new life, but it is the chalice itself that is the new covenant.

We now begin to see why the Church sees the Eucharist as the “source and summit” of the Christian life. The Church ratifies the Covenant with God each time the Eucharist is consecrated and establishes her power to invite others into this covenant family through baptism. It also is more than a mere sign. In human covenants a non-material consanguinity is established between the partners. While this creates a communion between the parties, they still do not have the same blood flowing through their veins. But in the Eucharist a true communion greater than any human covenant is created. God and man now truly have the same blood flowing through their veins. We partake of the blood of Jesus and have the blood of true sons within us. As Pope Benedict said in his Holy Thursday homily in 2009, “Can we now form at least an idea of what happened at the hour of the Last Supper, and what has been renewed ever since, whenever we celebrate the Eucharist? God, the living God, establishes a communion of peace with us, or to put it more strongly, he creates “consanguinity” between himself and us. Through the incarnation of Jesus, through the outpouring of his blood, we have been drawn into an utterly real consanguinity with Jesus and thus with God himself.”

Herein lies the profound truth and necessity of the Catholic Church. Where else does one find all the means necessary to enter into and renew the New Covenant? Notice how the Mass fulfills all the aspects—liturgical, familial and legal—of the covenant-making ceremony outlined in Exodus 24. It is the liturgy in which the sacrifice is offered while invoking the Lord. The familial bond is shown through the shared meal between God and His people. The oath is expressed in each of our Amens and the pouring out of the blood.

May the Blood of Jesus, poured out for me, flow through my veins!

Where’s the Beef?

June 17, 2015FastingRob Agnelli

For many Catholics, especially in the US, the practice of abstaining from meat on all Fridays of the year has been relegated to pre-Vatican II Catholicism. They assume that the obligation has been done away with and so is no longer binding upon them. But an examination of the Code of Canon Law presents a different, although nuanced picture, of our obligations. Because this is a source of confusion for many in the Church, it is instructive for us to examine exactly what the Church law says about abstinence.

To begin, it is important that we remind ourselves that the law of God commands that man does penance. The first words out of Our Lord’s mouth when He began His public ministry were to “repent (literally “do penance”) and believe in the Gospel” (Mk 1:15). This followed a long Scriptural tradition commanding acts of penance (c.f. Jer 18:11, 25:5; Ez 18:30, 33:11-15; Joel 2:12). While, Scripture does not enunciate all the ways we might practice penance, it is commonly spoken of in terms of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Jesus addresses the penitential spirit in which each of these acts is to be performed in a number of places (c.f. Mt 6:1-6, 16-18) and commands that His followers to fast once He departed (c.f. Luke 5:35). So in practice, we are all obligated to perform acts of prayer, fasting and almsgiving.

There is another important, although somewhat obvious, point that needs to be made. To fail to perform any of the Lord’s Commandments is objectively sinful. This means that when we fail to practice penance, we increase our guilt. Why this is important for the discussion at hand will become obvious in a moment.

The 1983 Code of Canon Law says the following:

Can. 1249 The divine law binds all the Christian faithful to do penance each in his or her own way. In order for all to be united among themselves by some common observance of penance, however, penitential days are prescribed…

Can. 1250 The penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent.

Can. 1251 Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday…

Can. 1253 The conference of bishops can determine more precisely the observance of fast and abstinence as well as substitute other forms of penance, especially works of charity and exercises of piety, in whole or in part, for abstinence and fast.

Notice how the language may have changed, previously the Church had spoken of the “law of abstinence” being binding “under the pain of sin” but that the principle remains the same—all Christians are bound to do penance. Just because there is no mention of the “pain of sin”, does not mean that it is still not sinful to omit penitential practice. That is assumed. What has changed however is that the Church has sought to adapt this teaching to her universality. Abstaining from meat does not have the same sacrificial weight upon all. There are areas of the world where they do not have much meat at all and so to abstain from meat is no sacrifice. Likewise in places where meat is found in abundance, abstaining on one day represents little more than an inconvenience. This is why the Church has left it to the individual Bishop Conferences to decide how best to practice the penitential days given the economic and social conditions of their region.

Why not just leave it up to the individual? Why should we have any law at all? The Church, because she has binding and loosing authority, has sought to make it easier for the faithful to fulfill this obligation. By setting aside a specific day of the week and a specific practice, it becomes an easy way to cultivate the virtue of Penance. As St. Thomas says, all laws ought to have as their end to cultivate virtue so that these particular laws when followed will lead to virtue.

So what exactly is the law in the United States? In 1966, the National Conference of Bishops in the United States issued a document called the Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence. In this document they removed the obligation of abstinence saying:

Every Catholic Christian understands that the fast and abstinence regulations admit of change, unlike the commandments and precepts of that unchanging divine moral law which the Church must today and always defend as immutable. This said, we emphasize that our people are henceforth free from the obligation traditionally binding under pain of sin in what pertains to Friday abstinence,except as noted above for Lent. We stress this so that “no”scrupulosity will enter into examinations of conscience,confessions, or personal decisions on this point. (number 26, emphasis added)

The point is that they recognized that times had changed and “abstinence from meat no longer implies penance, while renunciation of other things would be more penitential” (No. 20). Ever concerned for the spiritual health of the flock, they recognized that Penance that represented such a small sacrifice, becomes little more than following a law. The penitential spirit that ought to accompany the sacrifice was endangered and so they raised the bar.

Unfortunately, many only saw the abrogation, but missed the most important point. “[l]et it not be said that by this action, implementing the spirit of renewal coming out of the Council, we have abolished Friday, repudiated the holy traditions of our fathers, or diminished the insistence of the Church on the fact of sin and the need for penance” (No. 28). In other words, the removal of the obligation for abstinence was meant to invite Catholics into a deeper spirit of penance. It was not meant to remove the binding necessity for doing Penance on Fridays. But in most cases, the reverse happened and now confusion reigns. Instead of accepting the Bishops’ invitation to undertake abstinence freely, most have omitted Friday penitential acts completely thinking that there is no binding obligation on them.

Although the ecclesiastical laws throughout time have changed, the Church has sought to use her laws to make our obedience to the Divine laws of penance easier. Still the requirement remains, namely: “unless you do penance, you shall likewise perish” (Lk 13:5). Although no longer required, Friday abstinence is still a salutary and recommended practice. Therefore, in this month dedicated to fostering our love to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, let us take to heart the need to do penance and heed the Church’s instructions on these most pleasing acts. Strive to make this Friday and all Fridays days of Penance offered to Our Lord to ease His suffering and to share more fully in His love of the Father.

Loving the Sacred Heart

June 11, 2015Sacred Heart of JesusRob Agnelli

The necessity of Penance and acts of Reparation has, for the most part, been ignored in the last fifty years. This stems from a theological confusion as to the relationship between the punishment for sin and Christ’s redeeming sacrifice. Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross was meant to take away the eternal punishment for sin, but the temporal punishment for sin remains. United to Christ, we are given the currency by which we are able to pay to Divine Justice our temporal debts. Not only is this a matter of justice, but more importantly, without an eye of reparation, our love for God grows cold. In fact, this is at the foundation of the words of Our Lord to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque when He revealed to her the need for a special devotion to His Sacred Heart. He told her, “Behold this Heart which has loved men so much and has loaded them with all benefits, and for this boundless love has had no return but neglect, and contumely, and this often from those who were bound by a debt and duty of a more special love.” With her eyes on this “debt and duty of a more special love” the Church offers us the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus which we celebrate tomorrow.

In his 1928 encyclical, Miserentissimus Redemptor, Pope Pius XI reminded the faithful of “the duty of honorable satisfaction which we all owe to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus” and attempted to dispense with the most common difficulty associated with making acts of reparation to the Sacred Heart; namely “if Jesus offered His once and for all sacrifice and is now seated in heaven, how can we console His Sacred Heart?”. In order to “stir up” the Church to put this into practice, the Pope offered two theological explanations as to how this is possible.

The first is based upon a sort of retroactivity. Our Lord, because He is God, during His Passion received consolation for all the acts of reparation He foresaw we would make to Him. We accept unquestionably that the intense agony that Our Lord suffered during His prayer in Gethsemane was due to taking on the guilt for all the sins that He could foresee. But there is a flip-side of this as well that we all too easily overlook. He could also see all the acts of love and reparation that would flow from His suffering. It was this fruit that the angel offered to Him as part of His consolation (c.f. Luke 22:43). Each act of reparation allows us to participate more fully in the angel’s act of love and mercy to God Himself.

The second has to do with Christ’s relationship with the Church. The Passion of Christ is “renewed and in a manner continued and fulfilled in His mystical body, which is the Church” (Miserentissimus Redemptor, 14). Many of us take this to mean that when the Church suffers, Christ too suffers vicariously. But this does not truly capture the mysterious relationship between Christ and the Church revealed in His words to Saul when He asks him “why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:5). Instead what it means is that “when persecutions are stirred up against the Church, the Divine Head of the Church is Himself attacked and troubled” (MR 14).

In a mysterious manner, despite “being in Heaven” Christ can still be troubled. This flows from the fact that Christ is still fully human. With a human nature, He must be capable of the full gamut of emotions. Certainly the emotions share in the glorified state of His humanity and are in some manner fuller, but this does not mean they no longer exist. This is why He reveals His Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary. It is meant to remind us that He is fully human and capable of loving us both as God and man (with emotions as well as intellect and will). That He experiences some form of distress when those He loves are suffering on earth should go without saying. That is what love does—suffers with those they love. Christ’s human nature allows Him to mysteriously suffer even now. Our Lady in her apparitions at Fatima spoke as well of the sorrow of her Immaculate Heart which shows that she too suffers in some way.

In my mind this is why devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary is so vitally important for us. Chronologically removed from the great acts of love of Our Lord and Our Lady on Calvary, we can easily treat them as mere historic facts that somehow affect us. By acknowledging that they still are capable of “feeling” our acts of love, it enflames us with an active charity. With that in mind, we ought to actively seek to console them for the wounds they suffer because of mankind’s collective acts of ingratitude.

Through the mouth of the Psalmist, Our Lord complains “My Heart hath expected reproach and misery, and I looked for one that would grieve together with me, but there was none: and for one that would comfort me, and I found none” (Ps 68:21). Transformed in our way of thinking of reparation, let us offer ourselves to Jesus as living sacrifices to battle the evils which grievously injure the majesty of God and the welfare of souls. Let us offer the prayer that Pope Pius XI gave to the Church during this month dedicated to the Sacred Heart:

O sweetest Jesus, whose overflowing charity towards men is most ungratefully repaid by such great forgetfulness, neglect and contempt, see, prostrate before Thy altars, we strive by special honor to make amends for the wicked coldness of men and the contumely with which Thy most loving Heart is everywhere treated. At the same time, mindful of the fact that we too have sometimes not been free from unworthiness, and moved therefore with most vehement sorrow, in the first place we implore Thy mercy on us, being prepared by voluntary expiation to make amends for the sins we have ourselves committed, and also for the sins of those who wander far from the way of salvation, whether because, being obstinate in their unbelief, they refuse to follow Thee as their shepherd and leader, or because, spurning the promises of their Baptism, they have cast off the most sweet yoke of Thy law. We now endeavor to expiate all these lamentable crimes together, and it is also our purpose to make amends for each one of them severally: for the want of modesty in life and dress, for impurities, for so many snares set for the minds of the innocent, for the violation of feast days, for the horrid blasphemies against Thee and Thy saints, for the insults offered to Thy Vicar and to the priestly order, for the neglect of the Sacrament of Divine love or its profanation by horrible sacrileges, and lastly for the public sins of nations which resist the rights and the teaching authority of the Church which Thou hast instituted. Would that we could wash away these crimes with our own blood! And now, to make amends for the outrage offered to the Divine honor, we offer to Thee the same satisfaction which Thou didst once offer to Thy Father on the Cross and which Thou dost continually renew on our altars, we offer this conjoined with the expiations of the Virgin Mother and of all the Saints, and of all pious Christians, promising from our heart that so far as in us lies, with the help of Thy grace, we will make amends for our own past sins, and for the sins of others, and for the neglect of Thy boundless love, by firm faith, by a pure way of life, and by a perfect observance of the Gospel law, especially that of charity; we will also strive with all our strength to prevent injuries being offered to Thee, and gather as many as we can to become Thy followers. Receive, we beseech Thee, O most benign Jesus, by the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Reparatress, the voluntary homage of this expiation, and vouchsafe, by that great gift of final perseverance, to keep us most faithful until death in our duty and in Thy service, so that at length we may all come to that fatherland, where Thou with the Father and the Holy Ghost livest and reignest God for ever and ever. Amen.

Working on Our Feelings

June 4, 2015AnthropologyRob Agnelli

In what is perhaps his most prophetic work, The Abolition of Man, CS Lewis predicts the inevitable demise of mankind once moral relativism takes hold of society. He opens the short book with a chapter entitled Men Without Chests where he shows how once we lose sight of objective values, our emotional lives become meaningless as well. He cautions against the tendency to dismiss our emotions completely because it too can lead to the abolition of man as we know him. He says that “[B]y starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.” In the interest of softening our hearts, I would like to discuss the value of emotions in our moral and spiritual lives.

It is important at the outset to state clearly what a proper attitude towards our emotions ought to be. Prior to the Fall, mankind was perfectly integrated. What this means is that his highest faculty, reason, governed the soul of man. Man always acted according to reason. The intellect identified the good, the will chose the good, and the emotions (or more broadly passions) followed the intellect and will enabling man to do the good with intensity. In other words, the emotions only arose when they were willed according to reason. The emotional life of Our Lord provides a good example for our understanding. When He cleansed the Temple, Jesus was both justified in feeling anger and He willed it. His anger followed from His reason and His will and enabled Him to tenaciously defend the purity of His Father’s House. Because His emotions always followed from His intellect and will He felt them more intensely, not less, than we do. Because He was unfallen and incapable of sin, every emotion was the right one to be feeling at a given time.

The Fall left man’s intellect darkened (the good no longer appeared clearly as good), the will was weakened (“I do not do the good that I know to be good” Romans 7:19) and the passions were able to run amok, no longer following reason and will absolutely. But this does not mean that our emotions suddenly became completely unreliable and somehow bad. Instead they still are able to serve their original purpose, even if we must work to bring them back under control.

In order to help us better understand the effects of the Fall on our passions, St. Thomas makes the distinction between two types. There are the antecedent passions, which precede the action of the will and the consequent passions, which are caused by the action of the will. Someone might step on my toe and my initial emotional response to the pain is anger. Once I gain the use of my reason, I now can make a judgment as to whether I am justified in my anger (it was done on purpose) or not (done by accident). If it is the latter then I must directly will to not be angry.

This is why it is a little misleading to say that “emotions are not sinful, it is what we do with them.” Certainly when it comes to antecedent passions this is true. But when it comes to our consequent passions it is more nuanced than that. This is because even though I may not act externally on my anger of having my toe stepped on, I might still remain angry. By willing to be angry even after reason has judged it to be an accident, I am stoking the fires of my thoughts of revenge which only in turn feed the anger more.

This is an important thing for us to understand and is at the heart of a healthy emotional life. Our emotions are passive (that is why we refer to them as passions) in that they need to be acted upon. Once they cease being acted upon, the emotions themselves cease. Once we recognize that an emotion is irrational, we should will it away by directing our thoughts in another direction. The great spiritual masters offer us two means to do this. The first is pursue the opposite object. When I am angry about my foot being stepped on, I could hug the person rather than hitting them for example. Secondly they suggest mortification. Once pain and difficulty are presented to the passions they become quiet.

While this is very difficult initially, we train our bodies to respond differently the next time they are stimulated similarly. When I fight the anger that arises when my foot is stepped on, I train the antecedent passions to respond less vehemently next time it happens. Likewise with mortification. It causes the cogitative powers (the parts of our bodies where we make associations) to associate the object with pain rather than with the pleasure the antecedent passions initially responded to.

Herein lies the issue in my opinion—most people think the emotions are something to be completely rejected. I hear so many well-meaning Catholics speak of emotions as something to be wholly mortified (literally means killed). While we should be suspicious of them, this approach is very dangerous. Truly there is nothing scarier than someone who does something out of charity and shows no emotion in doing it. Certainly we should do the good even when we cannot get our emotions to follow, but we should always strive to love God and neighbor with our whole hearts (in the Scriptural sense of the word “heart” as the seat of the will and emotions).

St. Thomas provides a great image to help us understand the role our emotions play in our moral and spiritual lives. He likens the emotions to a wild horse. A rider can patiently and gently meek the horse or he can beat it. But the rider is only free to go where he wants to go when the horse is a willing servant and neither allowed to continue roam free or become a slave. So too with our emotions. We live a fuller life when we do everything with both our heads and our hearts in the right place. We learn to govern our emotions through our growth in moral virtue. In fact, Augustine says that virtue is the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is given the kind and degree of love that is appropriate to it (City of God Bk 15, Ch 22).

There is a psychological principle pertaining to governing the emotions that says one must “name it, claim it and then tame it.” We have covered the last two steps, namely recognizing that emotions are a necessary, although damaged, part of our lives and taming them through virtue. But no discussion would be complete without identifying the emotions themselves.

Emotion represents a response to the value we perceive in a given object. They are essentially motors for movement as the name emotion (or Latin ex-motus) suggests. We perceive something as a good or an evil to be avoided and our emotions act as bodily forces moving us toward or away from the object. Not only that, but our emotions also are given in recognition of the fact that the good is arduous and evil is difficult to avoid. With this in mind, St Thomas divides them into two main groups—the concupiscible and the irascible.

Love (St. Thomas uses amor to distinguish from love in the will) is the primary emotion. It is the good that is the cause of all our action and love is the primary motivator. Love really does “make the world go round” as the song goes. All the other emotions flow from this. Because love seeks to possess the object, desire flows from it to move towards the object. Once the object is possessed pleasure or joy ensues. The end of all emotion is pleasure (in accord with reason). In recognition that is also that which in some way contradicts the good, each of these three emotions has an opposite: love—hate, desire—repulsion, and joy—sorrow. These six comprise the concupiscible passions.

The irascible passions are those that are reactions to good or evil regarded as involving some difficulty. In this way they are subordinated to the concupiscible passions and always follow from them. The five irascible passions are hope, despair, audacity fear and anger. We hope to attain that which we love. Oppositely, we despair of attaining that which we love. Audacity causes us to be made bold in pursuing that which we love, while fear is a result of doubts of attaining that which we love. Finally, anger, which has no opposite, arises because we perceive a threat to what we love.

Many spiritual writers have commented on the difficulty of moving our beliefs from our head to our hearts. This journey is made that much more difficult without understanding our emotions and their role in our lives. Only Men with Chests, can have a heart.

Angels and Us

June 2, 2015AngelsRob Agnelli

It seems that regardless of whether or not someone considers themselves a believer, there is a universal fascination with the angels. This is even truer for those who profess belief in Christ because they know how important a role these spiritual creatures play in God’s plan for mankind. Yet the average Christian knows very little about the angels. The Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps more than any other man, has shaped the Church’s teachings on the angels. In order to foster greater devotion to our heavenly ministers, we ought to familiarize ourselves with his teachings.

Nearly all of his teachings appear within a fifteen questions in the first part of the Summa Theologiae (ST I, qq. 50-64). He puts them at the very beginning of his section on creation because they are the most perfect of God’s beings. What makes his teachings so profound is that they really all naturally follow from one of the very first thing he says, namely that “the angels have not bodies naturally united to them” (ST I, q.51, a.1). From this he traces all the implications of being a spiritual substance that is not united to a body. For our purposes, there are three very important implications that pertain directly to our interaction with them.

First, each angel has a wholly unique nature and represents its own species. What I mean by this will become clear when we look at what makes each of us unique. Both author and reader have a human nature. What is it that actually makes us different persons? It is the matter that is “attached” to that human nature. Philosophically speaking it is said that matter is the individuating principle. All human beings have identical human natures, but what makes them separate is their material part. Now if there is no matter, then there is no individuating principle. So all the angels must have different natures.

That being said, how is it that angels sometimes appear with bodies? St. Thomas says that angels can sometimes assume bodies for the purpose of ministering to mankind. These bodies however are not true human bodies in that they do not have souls united to them, but are simply the material parts that make up a body. While we do not know where the material that they use comes from or where it goes when they are done, it is still a material body and not something like a hologram. The material itself is selected so as to make “the intelligible properties of the angel known” (ST I, q.50, a.2, ad. 2). To see what he means specifically, let’s look at an example from Scripture.

In the Book of Tobit, Tobiah meets a young man (the angel Raphael in human form) who volunteers to accompany him to visit his kinsman in Medina. After providing the means for both Sarah and Tobit to be healed, Raphael reveals himself to Tobit saying that “God sent me to heal you and your daughter-in-law Sarah” (Tobit 12:14). St. Thomas’ point is that Raphael reveals himself as a man in order to reveal his intelligible properties—namely that he is God’s healing angel (Raphael—“God heals”). As an aside this is why most of the Church Fathers think it is also St. Raphael stirs the waters in the Pool of Bethesda by which those entering it are healed (c.f. John 5:1-8).

It is important to mention a further aspect of this idea that the matter the angel takes on is meant to reveal something about the angel. Whenever an angel appears, it always appears as a man. Why is that? It is the same reason why we refer to God as “He”—it is the masculine that reveals the fact that the angels come from the outside of visible creation. This is also why exorcists warn about angelic visitations in which the angel presents itself as a woman.

The second implication has to do with the manner in which angels know. Because we are a composite substance, we come to know things in and through our senses. An object of knowledge first presents itself to us through our senses and our intellect abstracts the essence of the thing. Our knowledge grows through repeated contact with material things. Angels on the other hand must have all of their knowledge infused directly by God in their creation. This means their ideas are both universal and concrete. The angel’s infused idea of the lion, say, represents not only the nature of the lion, but all individual lions that either actually exist or have in the past been objects of the angel’s intellect. In other words, angelic ideas are direct participations in God’s own creative ideas.

This is why angelic knowledge is so superior to our own. They comprehend the object of their knowledge fully. But their knowledge is not unlimited. Angels cannot know the future in itself. So like us they can only know it by cause and effect. Certainly their knowledge is greater and they can “guess” the future more accurately than us, in its cause but because they know more excellently they can know the future more acutely but knowledge of the future, which depends on the free will activity of human agents, belongs only to God.

Likewise they cannot know things in the order of grace, unless God reveals it to them. The traditional interpretation of Psalm 24 (especially vv 7-10) shows that when the angels accompany Our Lord in His ascension and meet the angels of the gates of Heaven, the latter do not recognize Him until the guardian angels tell them. The Son, in being made visible to man was made invisible to the angels who do not see His glory as one Church Father has said.

In an attempt to understand the third implication, the Scholastic theologians asked the question “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” This was not meant to be an esoteric and speculative theological question, but meant to understand how angels act. In particular, if an angel does not have a body, how do we say he is “present?”

An angel is spiritually present at whatever place in physical space happens to be occupied by the body on which it acts. As opposed to the fact that when a body occupies a physical place it is said to do so by taking up space with its bulk, an angel occupies a place by surrounding it with its power. An analogy might make this clear.

Suppose you are in a dark room and you open the shades on the window. The room is now filled with light. But this light cannot be trapped in the room by pulling the shade back down. The light was merely operating in the room while the shade was open. This is the same manner in which angels operate. Where there power is in operation, they are said to be occupying that space. This means that two angels cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Therefore only a single angel could dance on the head of a pin.

How do they act specifically? They can act on any material thing simply by willing it (assuming God permits it). This is how our guardian angel can be both at our side and in heaven simultaneously. It is not as if when we call upon them, they must leave heaven, but instead they will to be acting in both places.

There is a further aspect of this that has great implications for our spiritual life. If an angel can act on any material thing simply by willing it then they can greatly aid us in our battle against the flesh. When our imagination runs amok, our anger or lust is out of control, or our memory fails us (all of which are part of our “material” powers), we can invite our guardian angels to assist us in regaining proper use of these corporeal faculties. Because only one angelic being can operate on a given material substance at a time, they can chase away any demonic powers that may be vying for control of those powers. This is one of many reasons why we need to come to develop a deeper relationship with our guardian angels and regularly thank and praise God for the tremendous gift that they are to us.

Angel sent by God to guide me, be my light and walk beside me. Be my guardian and protect me, on the path of life direct me.

Catholics Saying Yes to Birth Control?

May 29, 2015Contraception, marriageRob Agnelli

As the debate continues to rage on regarding the HHS mandate requiring religious institutions provide access to contraception as part of their health coverage, there has been renewed discussion regarding the Church’s teaching on birth control. Since there has been no single issue that has been more controversial and caused more widespread dissent and confusion than the Church’s teaching on artificial birth control, it is instructive to look at the reasons why she teaches as she does.

To begin, it is necessary to define precisely what we mean when we speak of artificial birth control. In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI defines it as “every action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible” (HV 14).

Because there is much confusion on the issue, it is equally important that the Church be precise in her language. The Church is not opposed to birth control per se, but instead she is opposed to artificial birth control. This is an important distinction and one that is often not understood. The Church does not call married couples to “breed like Catholic Rabbits.” Instead she calls upon spouses to exercise “responsible parenthood” by prudently and generously deciding to have more children or for serious reasons, deciding not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time. It is important then to establish that there is nothing necessarily wrong with the intention of spouses not to have a child when engaging in the marital act. The Church is merely proposing to spouses that they respect the nature of the sexual act itself.

This brings us to a second important distinction and that is what the Church means when she uses the terms “nature” and “natural.” For many people what is natural is what is normal and nature refers to what happens in the world of nature. Some might refer to certain drugs and devices such as a chart of one’s fertility cycle as unnatural. But the Church uses these terms in a more philosophically precise way. Nature refers to the essence of a thing and that which is in accord with nature is said to be natural. Drugs and devices are said to be natural if they work in accord with nature or restore something to its natural condition.

In examining human nature, one finds that man has a natural inclination to the good. As I have mentioned before, there are four intrinsic goods in which man is naturally inclined. First, all men have an inclination to conserve their being. From this inclination every man naturally does those things which preserve and enhance his life and avoid those things which would be harmful to it. Secondly, man possesses the natural inclination to marriage and procreation (including the raising and education of children). Thirdly, because man is a rational creature he has a natural inclination to know the truth, especially about God and finally to live in society. Whatever pertains to each of these inclinations belongs to the natural law. In other words, whatever promotes these goods leads to true human thriving and ought to be promoted and whatever is contrary to one of these goods is wrong and ought to be avoided. It is also important to note that something is wrong not simply because God said so, but because ultimately because it is harmful to us. That is why Aquinas insisted that we offend God only by acting contrary to our own good.

Notice further that in the list of intrinsic goods, marriage and procreation appear as a single good. That is because they are linked and anything that harms either of the two aspects harms both. Contraception is intrinsically wrong because it harms the good of marriage and procreation.

Many question how these two aspects constitute a single, inseparable good. If we understand marriage in the traditional sense to mean the one-flesh, communion of persons in which the spouses unite on all levels of their personhood (body and soul) and we examine the conjugal act on a biological level we can illuminate the inseparability principle (i.e must be both unitive and procreative). Professor Germain Grisez articulates this well when he carefully explains this based on the following principle:

“Though a male and female are complete individuals with respect to other functions — for example, nutrition, sensation, and locomotion — with respect to reproduction they are only potential parts of a mated pair, which is the complete organism capable of reproducing sexually. Even if the mated pair is sterile, intercourse, provided it is the reproductive behavior characteristic of the species, makes the copulating male and female one organism.”

Professor Grisez’s point is that destroying the reproductive function of the act, also destroys its ability to unite the spouses. The couple is only one “organism” when they engage in natural intercourse. His argument also shows that it is not a bunch of celibate men in Rome who came up with the Church’s teaching against contraception, but human reason.

While I said above that the laws of nature are not the same as the Natural Law, these laws can serve as a reliable guide in discovering the good. Because nature is intelligible, to act in accord with nature is to act in accord with reason and therefore to act morally. Conversely we can say that which is not natural is not in accord with reason and therefore is immoral. One can readily see based on this principle why there is an insistence against “artificial” methods of birth control and something like Natural Family Planning is in accord with the Natural Law. It is not because they are artificial per se but because they are unnatural. They do not restore the reproductive facilities to their natural state but instead render them defective.

There are many who question why contraception is morally wrong and practices such as Natural Family planning are deemed morally licit. They reason that because both the contracepting and the NFP couples have the same intention—to avoid pregnancy—that they are simply using different means to make this happen. But as we have seen it is not the intention that necessarily makes birth control morally illicit, it is the means by which this is done that can be problematic.

This also betrays a certain misunderstanding of what is actually being done (or in this case not done) when couples practice NFP. By abstaining from the marital act during periods of fertility, the couple is not falsifying the act in the way a contracepting couple does.

A straightforward way of seeing why NFP is morally permissible is through a simple three step argument. If there is nothing wrong with spouses’ choosing to avoid pregnancy for just reasons and there is nothing necessarily wrong with a couple choosing not to engage in the marital embrace then there can be nothing wrong with not having sexual intercourse with the intent of not getting pregnant.

What’s in a Name?

May 27, 2015RedemptionRob Agnelli

One of the biggest challenges for parents to be is selecting a name for their child. A whole library has been written on selecting the perfect name with advice ranging from selecting the name you would want to represent you if you were starting out your life today to naming them after your favorite city. Choosing a name is mostly about what the parents happen to like. A name ends up being a mere convention that distinguishes one person from another. This is in direct contrast to the ancient world, where the name was believed to shape the destiny of the person. Judging by the fact that among the Top Ten names for boys and girls born in 2014 included names like Mason (which means “one who works with stone”) and Mia (“rebellious”), one would assume that this is no longer the case. But unless we reacquaint ourselves with this idea, we may not grasp that “everyone’s name is sacred” because it is found on the “lips” of God when He calls each of us by name (see CCC 2158). To help see this more clearly, it is helpful to look at the great importance Sacred Scripture places on names.

The Catechism says that the name is an “icon of the person” (CCC 2158). What this means is that knowing a person’s name gives you access to the person and opens the door to a personal relationship with them. Knowing a person’s name carries the power of the person with it. In essence it gives you a power over the other person because you can invoke their power.

The best example of this principle is found when Jacob wrestled with the angel (Gn 32:22-31). After “grappling with God” Jacob receives a new name (Israel) and asks the angel for his name. The angel refuses to give Israel his name but instead blesses him. This is because Jacob could have no power over the angel, including invoking him at another time.

In general, mankind cannot have power over the angelic world and so we should learn the lesson of Jacob and not seek the name of angels. Adam was given the power to know the name of all material creatures (see Gen 2:20) but not the angels. While Sacred Scripture reveals the names of three Archangels—Michael, Gabriel and Raphael—we should never give our Guardian Angels names. Instead the Church tells us in a 1984 CDF document, bearing the signature of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, that we should only invoke them by their title (i.e. Guardian Angel). In response to those that encourage us to ask our guardian angel for his name, the future Pontiff says the names of our guardian angels are unknowable and we should never invoke them under a specific name because of the danger it poses. He says it is dangerous because one can never know whether it is a good angel or a bad angel that is responding to you. In fact, because a blessed angel would never disobey God’s dictates through the Church of which they are members, you can guarantee that the name you received either came from your imagination or from a demon. By invoking that “revealed” name, you may be inviting the demonic. This is also what makes the social media hyped “Charlie-Charlie Challenge” so dangerous.

This notion of a name giving power over another is still recognized today. This is why people in the “service” industry wear name tags. It allows the customer to call upon the person to supply them with what they need. It is also why many people naturally recoil having a name tag on in a social setting. It assumes a relationship with everyone else who sees it that does not yet exist. It is also why some people are constantly “name-dropping”—it is meant to somehow reveal that they share in the power or celebrity of the person they are naming (whether they actually do or not).

Scripture also shows how a name reveals the person in its treatment of those whose names it records and those it obliterates. Notice how at the beginning of the Book of Exodus (which has the Hebrew title “The Book of Names”) it lists the names of the Patriarchs of Israel and mentions how Pharaoh did not know Joseph. Given Joseph’s role in preserving Egypt during the famine it is not likely that Pharaoh did not know about him. Instead it shows a refusal to recognize him and attempts to blot out his name from history. It is actually the opposite that happens. While the book tells the names of the midwives responsible for saving the children of Israel, it never mentions Pharaoh’s name as a form of judgment against him. It is meant to show that his name is blotted out from the book of life (see Exodus 32:33). It also explains why John never mentions the name of the anti-Christ in the Book of Revelation even though he clearly had his name revealed to him (Rev 13:18). He too shall be blotted out of the Book of Life.

With this in mind, we begin to see why the Commandment was given not to take the Lord’s name in vain. In revealing His name to Moses, God not only revealed Himself personally, but also gave the speaker a share in His power. Moses is the first man in Salvation History to perform miracles because He was able to invoke the name of God. To call upon the name of the Lord is to somehow make Him present.

I am convinced that this it is the Second Commandment that is the one that is most often broken. Certainly this occurs when the name of God is used as part of a curse, but more commonly when we “say” our prayers without reflecting on what we have done by calling upon Him. He has given us the power to call upon Him anywhere, anytime and He will come. Unfortunately we are often too dull of heart to realize how awesome a gift this is—Almighty God comes to me sitting down to pray simply by calling His name.

To use God’s name in vain is to say it and then essentially ignore Him. If we are driven by love then we ought to take this Commandment seriously and stay away from movies and music that use His name in vain. Likewise when we encounter someone who regularly says OMG and GD we should not idly stand by. We may not always be in a position to fraternally correct them but we can certainly make sure that He is not called upon in vain by adding “Blessed be His Name.”

The reverence that Israel had for the name of God was what ultimately led to the charge of blasphemy against Our Lord. To use His name not only invoked His presence but because of the nature of His name made the speaker equivalent to Him. Because God’s name contains the first person singular (“I AM” or “I AM WHO AM”) to even say His name was to say you are Him. That is why there should never be any confusion as to whether Jesus knew He was God. No faithful Jew would have said that name otherwise.

Names are also associated with a change in mission. When God gives Abram a mission, He gives Him the name Abraham to identify him with his mission (“father of many”). When Simon identifies Jesus as God, he is called Cephas to identify him as the rock upon which the new Israel will be built (as compared to the pillar of stone where Jacob received his new mission and name—Gn 35:10). In this way names are viewed as sacraments—tangible signs of the mission of the person.

This sacramental quality of names is most obvious in the case of Jesus. The Catechism captures this well in the section on Prayer sayin, “…The divine name may not be spoken by human lips, but by assuming our humanity The Word of God hands it over to us and we can invoke it: ‘Jesus,’ ‘YHWH saves.’ The name ‘Jesus’ contains all: God and man and the whole economy of creation and salvation. To pray ‘Jesus’ is to invoke him and to call him within us. His name is the only one that contains the presence it signifies…”( CCC 2666).

Let us call upon the name of the Lord and be saved!

Living Between the Ascension and Pentecost

May 18, 2015Redemption, ScriptureRob Agnelli

One of the great gifts that the Church gives us is the Liturgical Calendar. Its purpose is not only to remind us of the marvelous plan of salvation, but also for us to be present in each of the saving mysteries of Christ. With this in mind, the Church is inviting us during this time to go to the Upper Room with Our Lady and the Apostles and to await the Gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. During the Church’s first Novena from the Ascension to Pentecost, the Apostles must have found themselves reflecting deeply on the mystery of Our Lord’s Ascension and why it was necessary for Him to go so that He could send the Holy Spirit (John 16:7). While we join them in prayer, it is expedient that we too meditate on this necessity.

To begin, it is helpful to point out that when Our Lord says it is of necessity He does not mean that both He and the Holy Spirit could not both be present on the earth at the same time. It is not as if it would create some rift in the space-time continuum to have two Persons of the Blessed Trinity present on earth–especially since They have a single Divine nature. This means that when one of the Persons of the Trinity acts outside the Trinity, it is all three that act. It is necessary in the sense that it was a means by which Christ could more fully reveal the Godhead and our relationship with God in Heaven.

To see how this is so, we should recall that the Torah (see Leviticus 1-7) required five main types of sacrifices—the cereal offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, the guilt offering, and the burnt offering. It was the last one—the burnt offering that was meant to be a sign of Christ’s offering on the Cross. In the holocaust or ascending sacrifice (see Lev 1:3-7, 6:8-13) the animal was drained of its blood and the pieces of the carcass were laid upon the altar hearth from which it ascended to God in the form of smoke. Unlike any of the other sacrifices, no part of it was given to the worshipper. Instead it was considered a total gift to the Lord and was fully consumed in the fire. Its effect was atonement for sin.

Christ’s ascension then is the completion of His sacrifice on Calvary in which He was both Priest and Victim. This helps to explain why Christ does not allow Mary to touch Him when she meets Him on the day of the Resurrection because He had “not yet ascended” (Jn 20:17). His offering for sin was not yet complete. A first Century Jew reading John’s Gospel would have recognized in Jesus’ saying that He considered Himself as a holocaust offering for atonement.

But saying that Christ had to ascend because He was completing the ritual of the Burnt Offering is like putting the cart before the horse. The Burnt Offering described in the Torah required the whole sacrifice to rise in smoke because Christ was to ascend into Heaven, not the other way around. Instead there was a deeper reason.

To understand this deeper reason, it is necessary to grasp a basic understanding of Trinitarian theology. When we speak of a “personal” God we mean specifically that God has (more accurately, He is) a rational nature. This means that He has both an intellect and a will. Because He is a pure Spirit both of these powers of intellect and will must be operative at all times. This means from all eternity He is knowing and loving. What is it that God knows? He knows Himself perfectly.

One of the perfections is existence. So in order to have perfect knowledge of a person that person must actually exist. This becomes clear if we look at an analogy. You may have knowledge of your dream lover, but if that lover is not a real flesh and blood person then they are not perfect. They must actually exist as real person. So in order for God’s knowledge of Himself to be perfect, He must exist as a distinct Person. This Person is the Son or Word.

Likewise with the divine Will whose object is love. The measure of love is to be fruitful and the perfect love between the Father and the Son bears the Fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Why does this deep theology matter? Isn’t it all just speculation of what is otherwise a mystery? In a way, yes, there is some speculation involved in any explanation of the mystery of the Trinity. But it is this life that we are being invited into when St. Peter says we are to become “partakers of the divine life” (2Peter 1:4). The blessed in heaven will spend their time not merely looking at God, but actually participating in the life of God. Heaven is not “resting in peace” in the way we tend to think of it, but is extremely active living in the life of God. But this is not just reserved to heaven. Those who have sanctifying grace in their souls participate in the life of God now. That is what sanctifying grace is—a participation in the life of God. This understanding of the life of the Trinity has effect on our life in the here and now. Eternal life begins at Baptism and those who persevere to the end merely have the veil removed.

How is it that we participate in the life of God? We enter into the life of God by “putting on Christ” (Romans 13:14). In essence, we participate in Christ’s “place” in His communion with the Father. This is what it means when St. Paul says we are “in Christ” (c.f. Gal 3:27).

Now the link between the Ascension and Pentecost becomes clearer. The Son, in keeping His human nature for all eternity, has brought human nature directly into the life of the Trinity. By ascending to the Father, Jesus reveals that mankind now has the capacity to share in the divine Nature. This is how He lives forever to make intercession for us (Hebrews 7:25).

What happens when mankind has a direct communion with the Father? The fruit of this communion leads to the Holy Spirit. It is of the very nature of God from all eternity that the union between the Father and the Son yields the Holy Spirit. If mankind is caught up in this through the Son’s human nature, then the Holy Spirit comes to mankind. Without this communion, the Holy Spirit cannot come (John 16:7). Pentecost is a direct result of the Ascension.

To conclude I want to return to the difficult verse regarding Our Lord’s admonition to Mary Magdalene not to touch Him because it helps to bring to light a necessary distinction. Our Lord tells her that He is “going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17). The point is that while we participate in the life of the Trinity, we do not become God. It is not as if we are substituted for the Son. There remains a distinction between His relationship with the Father (“my Father”) and ours (“your Father). He “participates” in God by Nature, we only participate by grace. As long as we maintain this distinction, we are able to pull back the veil ever so slightly. Certainly it enables us to better understand Our Lord’s words and the causal relationship between the Ascension and Pentecost.

Who’s the Boss?

May 15, 2015marriage, SacramentsRob Agnelli

If I was to pick one absolutely unique American principle, it would be a disdain for authority. It seems almost to be at the heart of the American founding. While this has led to some of the things that made our country great, when taken to an extreme can lead to its downfall. It seems this anti-authoritarian attitude permeates nearly every aspect of society. There is perhaps no other area where it has done more damage than in the family. In ceremoniously rejecting anything traditional as outdated, we may unwittingly be causing the downfall of society as a whole. If we are to stop this downward spiral we must restore a proper understanding of authority in marriage.

In order to see this as anything more than a sentimental longing for a patrimony long obsolete, we must be convinced that authority within marriage is necessary. To see its necessity we should recognize the family (of which marriage is the foundation) as the primordial society. It is the society that all further societies presuppose. All societies have as their aim the good of their members (or common good). In order to achieve any particular good, all the members must be acting towards it (or at least not against it). This only happens in two ways. Either “everyone is on the same page” as to what is good or there must be an authority figure whose judgment is final. There is no other way if anything is ever to get done because the judgment about a particular good has two aspects—whether the thing itself is good and what good things to use to bring it about. In other words it is not enough to merely agree on whether the end is good, you must also agree on the means you will use to get there. Short of agreement on every aspect of a particular action, any society needs authority (even if it is somehow exercised democratically).

The family is no different. There must be an authority structure for the sake of the common good. Parents must have authority over children and the husband must have authority over the wife. An example will help to clarify. Suppose both a husband and a wife agree on the good of education for their child. Suppose further that after much discussion they are locked in disagreement as to which school to send the child to. Both have good and valid reasons for their choices that the other does not agree with. How can they proceed? If this was an isolated incident then certainly they could come up with a compromise or even draw straws. But the fact of the matter is that in marriage there are a lot of ties to be broken. No matter how good and holy two people are, they cannot always agree as to how to accomplish something good. That is the nature of good things—there usually is more than one way to achieve them, one of which may be better than another. They have to have a principle by which they can “break the tie. One person having the authority breaks the tie always.

Why does it have to be the husband that “wears the pants”? To see why the husband has authority we have to be willing to submit to the authority of Sacred Scripture. This means we have to stop running away from the difficult section of Ephesians 5 and confront it head on. Specifically, “[W]ives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church…” (Eph 5:22-23). No matter how we attempt to twist these by substituting different translations for the word “subordinate” we are still stuck with the command that the husband is head of the wife. This means that just as Christ has authority over the Church so too the husband over the wife. This is the divinely ordered nature of the family—the husband is head of the wife.

It is also important that we understand what is not being put forth here. This is not meant to say that men have a natural authority over women in general. There is nothing in the Church’s teaching that says that. This model of authority is only for the sake of the family and does not apply to other societies. They have their own authority structures that allow women authority over men and vice versa. Although this has been used as justification in the past for men to lord over women in general, that was never the intent. And even if it was ab-used doesn’t mean we throw out its proper use in marriage.

But it has also been abused within marriage as well. This is why marriage is a Sacrament, even for those who do not believe it is a Sacrament (as an aside two people who are baptized and exchange valid consent become ministers of the Sacrament of Matrimony) because fallen man has a tendency to “lord it over his wife” (Gn 3:16). Christ came to undo all the effects of the Fall and through the Sacrament of Marriage He infuses the grace needed to live out this otherwise impossible situation. In other words the husband is given a grace of office as husband to exercise his authority in the same way that Christ does. In the same way one of the graces of the office of wife is obedience to her husband. This is no mere blind obedience due to her “urge for her husband” (Gn 3:16) but because she knows he is truly exercising his authority under the inspiration of grace.

The abuse of authority I think only gets worse in a culture of divorce. Most obviously there are many people who are not validly married, even if they live as though they are. They miss these necessary graces to live out Matrimony according to Christ’s model. But the ease of divorce also causes us to not discern the call to marriage well. If it is easy to get out of a mistake, then we are more likely to make the mistake. But when it is difficult, we discern better. Specifically women will better ask themselves whether the man they are about to marry is the type of man she would want to obey because she knows he is always going to have her best interest at heart. Likewise men will ask the question that I was advised to ask by the priest who did our Pre-Cana, “is this the women that you can spend the rest of your life making a gift of yourself to?”

The most important thing to consider is what this authority actually looks like. When St. Paul speaks of the husband and wife subordinating themselves to each other, he means they should view each other as equals. This means first and foremost that the husband’s authority is not paternal. He does not treat her as one of his children or discipline her the way a father does a child. His authority should be exercise mainly through service (again remember Christ is the model). He should lead by being the first to serve even to the point of exhaustion.

It should not be arbitrary and should be exercised with great reverence for the wife. It also needs to be used prudentially and with great caution. It should never be played like a trump card that in essence says “we can talk about this all you want, but ultimately it is my decision and I have already made it.” It should truly only be exercised when it is the last means to “breaking a tie.” To micro-manage your wife’s behavior under the pretense of authority is an abuse of it. The wife for her part should expect this from her husband and she must respect the times when he does exercise it necessarily. She needs to be faithful to her own vows to obey her husband. Although this is less common today, the wife also needs to act like a full partner and not look to her husband to make every decision for her.

Perhaps after all this, one might say, “I see the point, but what we do works for us.” I contend that one of the reasons why family life has suffered so greatly in recent decades is because we have ceased to live out the divinely planned ordering for the family that includes the authority of the husband and father. It may appear to “work for us” but appearances can be deceiving especially because authority has a spiritual component to it as well. The husband must also be the spiritual head of the household. When he does this through charity, prayer and suffering for his wife and family, he merits great graces for them. Also, by accepting the God-given order of the family, he opens the flow of grace for the whole family. Likewise the wife when she is willing to obey merits great graces for the family because she accepts God’s plan. The children too in obeying both of their parents equally do the same.

When this natural ordering of the family is upset, this makes room for the demonic to enter. This is because demons are very legalistic and where they find a vacuum in God-given authority they have room to operate. Husbands and wives, either individually or both, who fail to submit themselves to Christ’s plan open the family up to the demonic. The wife has a right to spiritual protection from her husband and when either fails in authority/obedience (rightly) that protection is lost. The husband is not just the physical protector of the family but also meant to be the spiritual protector as well—in fact more so. The number of exorcisms that are being performed on wives and children is on the rise and so, at least empirically, the rejection of this model is doing great spiritual harm. The only solution is the “traditional” one—“As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her.” Ultimately, there is no other way.

Living the Message of Fatima

May 13, 2015MaryRob Agnelli

In the midst of a terrible world war that locked most of Europe in death and destruction, Pope Benedict XV sought to end the conflict of World War I by beginning a novena to Our Lady, Queen of Peace on May 5, 1917. On the ninth day, Our Lady herself responded by visiting three peasant children in Fatima, Portugal on May 13. This would be the first of six consecutive apparitions, each occurring on the13^th day of the month each, in which Our Lady preached a message of penance and peace. The most famous of these apparitions occurred on October 13, 1917 when 75,000 witnesses saw the sun dance across the sky and Our Lady identified herself as Our Lady of the Rosary to the visionaries. But it is the third apparition that contains the heart of the message of Fatima. This is where Our Lady revealed the so-called “three secrets of Fatima,” the second of which predicted war, famine, and great persecution of the Church. These dire circumstances could be prevented provided that two conditions were fulfilled, namely consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart and the Communion of Reparation. Specifically she told the children, “[T]o prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.” As the Church celebrates the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, it is a fitting time to reflect on these two conditions Our Lady set forth.

As most of us know, public revelation closed with the death of St. John the Apostle which means that “…no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Yet even if Revelation is already complete, it has not been made completely explicit; it remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the course of the centuries” (CCC 66). This is the mission of the Church as Mother and Teacher; to aid us in grasping its full significance. One of the tools she has at her disposal is what is commonly referred to as private revelation (e.g. the apparitions at Fatima).

Private revelation has the purpose of not revealing new doctrine but guiding humanity in its efforts to incorporate more fully the truths of the Gospel already contained in public Revelation. This distinction is conveyed by Pope St. John XXIII during an address at Lourdes in which he said that private revelation is“…not proposing new doctrines but to guide us in our conduct.” In general the Church deems that the messages of some apparitions as worthy of belief. Therefore we are not strictly bound by them as we are other matters of faith. But because the Church has declared their messages to be truly of God we are bound to them by reason, the way we are to all truths sufficiently proven. In other words, even though we are not bound by faith to the messages of Fatima, we ought to take seriously its message because the Church has approved its message. This is especially true when a cult arises around an apparition with the naming of a universal feast day like today—how we worship, reveals what we believe, “Lex Orandi, lex credendi.”

What makes the message of Fatima so remarkable is that Our Lady called for action by the Holy Father and he complied. While it is debatable as to which Holy Father actually fulfilled the requirements of the Consecration of Russia fully , the fact that a private revelation caused the Pope (or even several Popes) to respond is incredible. When he renewed the consecration in 1984, Pope St. John Paul II went a step further and consecrated the whole world to the Immaculate Heart. Given that private revelation cannot add to public Revelation, this act must then be in accord with something already found in divine Revelation, especially considering that the Holy Father took the demand so seriously.

It seems that a great many people, Catholics included, recoil at the idea of consecration to Our Lady. After all, no one can consecrate himself and only God can consecrate (i.e. make someone holy). However, the common usage in the Church is that it means making a sacred commitment. To say we are consecrating ourselves is to say that we are entering into this partnership in a solemn way.

But still, why would we be consecrated to Our Lady? Shouldn’t this just be something we enter into with Jesus? The short answer is that we consecrate ourselves to Our Lady precisely because we have already given ourselves to Jesus. Those who love Him, keep His commandments. Specifically, we are keeping His commandment to entrust ourselves to His Mother.

To see this more clearly, we turn once again to Pope St. John Paul II, this time by quoting from his encyclical on Mary, the Mother of the Redeemer:

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

I include this rather long quote not just because it proves that Marian Consecration is divinely instituted at the foot of the Cross, but also because of this great Marian Pope’s emphasis on the word “entrusts.” This sets up a special kind of relationship that is entirely personal. Like all personal relationships, it requires a personal response, namely, “taking her into his own home.”

What about the second request, namely, the Communion of Reparation? One of the Fatima visionaries, Lucia, became a member of the Sisters of St. Dorothy. One day, she was taking out the trash and there was a little child in the garden. She asked him if he knew the Ave Maria and he said he did. She then invited the child to pray it so she could hear it and he refused. So she told Him to go to the church in town and ask the Heavenly Mother for the Child Jesus. He later returned and she asked Him if he did what she said. He replied, “And have you spread through the world what the heavenly Mother requested of you?” She quickly realized that the child was Jesus Himself and He explained to her that the Communion of Reparation was specifically needed due to the five kinds of offenses and blasphemies against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Specifically they are: blasphemies against her Immaculate Conception, against her perpetual virginity, against the divine and spiritual maternity of Mary, blasphemies involving the rejection and dishonoring of her images, and the neglect of implanting in the hearts of children a knowledge and love of this Immaculate Mother.

Not surprisingly like any good Son, Jesus Himself is offended when His Mother is offended. So Mary promised to asked Jesus to forgive those who “had the misfortune of offending her” if those devoted to her would practice the devotion of Five First Saturdays (one for each of the offenses Jesus mentioned). This devotion consists in doing the following on five consecutive first Saturdays:

Confess and receive Holy Communion. Confession can be made within 8 days prior to or 8 days after the First Saturday.
Recite the Rosary.
“Keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on a mystery of the Rosary.” In other words, mental prayer on one of the mysteries.
Do all this with the intention of making reparation for the offenses against the Immaculate Heart.

In this month of Mary, shouldn’t we all consider consecration to Our Mother and committing to showing her great love by compassion to her Immaculate Heart?

Rules of Engagement

May 11, 2015EvangelizationRob Agnelli

In discussing the Kerygma as the first component of Evangelization, it was mentioned that we should all have a somewhat “canned” presentation of it in our evangelization tool belt. This was in order to help us simply and succinctly present the Good News as it truly is. While this is certainly the first step, it is not the only. We must also be prepared to engage the difficulties in the hearts of others that arise as a result of this encounter with the Gospel. Today, I would like to mention some other tools that are essential in doing this.

First, I would like to address two things that often arise around any discussion like this. The first is that “it is the Holy Spirit who converts, not us.” The second is like it and centers around a quotation mistakenly attributed to St. Francis of Assisi—“preach the Gospel and use words when necessary.” While both of these principles have some truth to them, they ultimately lead to what I call “evangelical mimes” who attempt to passively evangelize others and not active preachers of the Gospel. This happens because we tend to treat these rules in an absolute sense rather than in the spirit they are intended.

It is the Holy Spirit that converts men, but He does not act directly and in a vacuum. Instead He acts in and through us. If it is the Holy Spirit alone then why does He use a Church? Could He do it without us? Yes. Will He? No. Our job is to make ourselves as sharp of instruments as humanly possible. Grace perfects and elevates nature and so the Holy Spirit will use these already sharpened human instruments to save souls. It is both incredibly humbling and incredibly scary that He entrusts us with souls whose salvation may hinge upon our actions. It also means that our salvation might depend upon theirs. As I tell my wife and kids regularly, if you all don’t get to heaven, then I am probably not going to either. If we reflect on this long enough, we will never approach someone haphazardly again or simply dismiss them as “lost.”

The second principle, “preach the Gospel and use words when necessary,” also has some merit but we fail to live it properly when we treat it as absolute. The truth is that words are always necessary. Besides, and maybe this is more of a self-indictment than anything else, for most of us our witness of life is lacking the Gospel clarity that St. Francis had. That principle may have worked for St. Francis, but for the rest of us we will need to use words as well.

The first pope in his first encyclical also stressed the need for preaching in words when he exhorted the faithful to, “[A]lways be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who defame your good conduct in Christ may themselves be put to shame” (1 Pt 3:15). He thought that once they witnessed through their faith and hope-filled suffering, they ought to be ready to explain why they acted like they did. “Being ready” meant that they had given it some prior thought and planning as to how they would explain it all. He also recognized that winning the battle for souls occurs on two fronts, the head (“a reason for your hope”) and the heart (“with gentleness and reverence”). With this in mind we can develop some simple rules of engagement that will help us serve as more effective agents of evangelization.

In engaging the head we can begin by looking three acts of the mind—understanding, judgment and reasoning. The first act, understanding, is perhaps the least recognized when we engage others. It consists in making sure that we understand the terms we are using and that anything that might be ambiguous we define clearly. All too often we jump to judgment and reasoning too quickly and so end up arguing past each other. This happens because the two parties will be using the same terms in very different ways and end up missing each other completely. In order to avoid this, every time I engage an atheist I begin by asking them what their definition of God is. I want to know the God they are rejecting. Not surprisingly, I find that it is not anything resembling the Christian conception of God and I begin by telling them I do not believe in that God either.

The other important aspect of this step is to check the assumptions that are being made. Very often we will make no progress until we challenge incorrect assumptions. For example, we are often confronted with non-Catholic Christians who will say “Where is X in the Bible?” and we will respond by trying to argue from the Bible. It is important to be able to point to the basis of our beliefs in Sacred Scripture, but we ultimately want to lead them to the totality of God’s Revelation so that they will know Him more fully. In order to do this, rather than pointing out where X is in the Bible, we should challenge the assumption that everything we believe must appear explicitly in the Bible. Where do we find this principle in the Bible? Instead we can lead them to the Catholic principle that Revelation has two fonts—Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition and that, while not everything we believe is found explicitly in Scripture, nothing in Scripture can contradict our beliefs either.

The second manner in which we engage the head is to take the approach that God does with man—“God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, in successive stages and despite human resistance.” (Pope Benedict, Verbum Domini, 42). This progressive revelation or “plan of divine pedagogy” as St. Thomas calls it, consists in God giving His spiritually immature children knowledge of Himself that is perfectly adapted to their needs and their ability to receive it. For example, He allows Israel to persist in henotheism or monolatry. This belief system acknowledges the existence of multiple gods with one that is supreme and worthy of worship until He fully reveals Himself in Christ. To give them the Trinity from the get-go would only have served to confuse them since they were surrounded by polytheists on all sides.

We call this principle gradualism. For example, all too often we go to the hard teachings first and end up losing them. To try and get someone to understand the Church’s teachings on contraception when the whole world is doing it is difficult enough. But if they have not yet understood the self-giving love of Christ on the Cross or even a proper understanding of marriage then it will seem completely crazy. It doesn’t mean we ignore the hard teachings or encourage them to live against them, but that we might simply avoid discussing them directly until the foundations are properly laid. We may have to consistently back them up to the real sticking point before trying to progress. As most of us can attest, once some of these preliminaries fall into place, the hard teachings come rather easily.

To engage the heart, I have likewise found two principles that are particularly helpful. With respect to the gentleness that St. Peter commends, we must always remember what the purpose is. The purpose is not to win an argument but a heart. This means charity trumps all and our goal must be to show them the beauty of the truth. Once I forget this and I make it about being right or winning an argument, I have always failed. When I make it about the other person coming into a fuller understanding of reality for their own good, then I can be a docile instrument. We must seek to build trust, especially since people only believe something as true if they trust the source. We have to show that we have their best interest at heart. Pope St. John Paul II captured this necessity of trust in receiving the truth well in Fides et Ratio, “[I]n believing, we entrust ourselves to the knowledge acquired by other people. This suggests an important tension. On the one hand, the knowledge acquired through belief can seem an imperfect form of knowledge, to be perfected gradually through personal accumulation of evidence; on the other hand, belief is often humanly richer than mere evidence, because it involves an interpersonal relationship and brings into play not only a person’s capacity to know but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others, to enter into a relationship with them which is intimate and enduring.” (Fides et Ratio, 32).

Treating the other with reverence involves a respect for human psychology. One of the largest obstacles to the truth in our lives is that we are naturally jealous of our own ideas. When we find ourselves challenged we begin to go into defensive mode and shut ourselves off from the truth. The best way to disarm this defense mechanism is through the Socratic Method.

Personally, I have found that the Socratic dialogues serve as excellent resources for evangelization techniques (Euthyphro might be the best). Socrates never actually tells them anything directly, instead he asks questions and gently leads them to the truth. Sure they are leading questions, but his interlocutor always is left with the impression that he came to the realization on his own. This method of asking questions also fulfills the second important psychological aspect—to sense that you have been understood. Very often once someone thinks they have been understood their defenses come down. Understanding of the other person, even when they are wrong, is a fruit of reverence and absolutely vital to getting them to trust and understand Christ.

Looking at Rights Rightly

May 8, 2015Catholic Social TeachingRob Agnelli

As the debate continues over the use of free speech to draw cartoons of Islam’s prophet, it appears that both left and right will be arguing about this for a long time. Like nearly all civil discourse in our day it has become a battle of rights—the right to free speech versus the right not to be offended. One would think that with all this rights talk, we would have a clear understanding of rights—what they are, what they are for and what they come from. But because our thinking about rights is muddled it just becomes a battle of wills. Before we lose our heads (both figuratively and literally) over this issue of freedom of speech any further, it seems absolutely necessary that a clearer understanding of what rights are in general must emerge. Otherwise we will continue to argue the merit of “my rights” versus “your rights.”

In his encyclical Caritas en Veritate, Pope Benedict reflected on the great ambiguity when it comes to rights language and calls for a “renewed reflection on how rights presuppose duties.” . He mentions the appeals to “alleged rights” that are “accompanied by the demand that they be recognized and promoted by public structures” severely muddies the waters. This makes it necessary to understand the distinction between natural rights and civil rights. Natural rights stem from our common human nature and are predicated of all men while civil rights (like the right to vote) are granted by some authority that are obtained by contract or convention to citizens. The State may grant civil rights, but it only serves to promote and protect natural rights. It acknowledges them, but is not the one who grants them. These duties that the Pope Emeritus is referring to come from our obligation to seek those things that are perfective of us as human beings. This is the basis of the natural law.

In his examination of human nature, St Thomas Aquinas described four goods by which man is perfected. Because man is naturally inclined towards these goods he has a duty to obtain them and a corresponding right arises to pursue these goods. First, all men have an inclination to conserve their being. From this inclination every man naturally does those things which preserve and enhance his life and avoid those things which would be harmful to it. Second, because man is a physical creature he possesses the natural inclination to procreation and education of children. Third man is by nature a political or social animal and therefore lives in society. Finally because man is a rational creature he has a natural inclination to know the truth, especially about God (see Summa Theologiae I-II, q.94, a.2).

Whatever pertains to each of these goods directly would be considered a natural right. Because life is an intrinsic good there is a right to life. Because marriage and the rearing of children is a single intrinsic good, there is a natural right to marriage and children have a right to be raised by their biological parents which are bound together by the oath of marriage. Since man is by nature social, each person has a right to contribute to the common good. Finally, from the duty to seek the truth the natural right to freedom of speech follows.

Freedom of speech is a natural right and should be both promoted and protected through civil and positive law. But it is only a natural right insofar as it serves the truth. This means that freedom of speech does not mean I can say whatever I feel like saying, whenever I feel like saying it, to whomever I want to say it. It must always be in service of making the truth known to those that need to know it. This means that freedom of speech is not an absolute right and has limits.

This is an important point that needs to be further fleshed out. We speak of freedom of speech as a Constitutional right and it is. But that seems to imply that right comes from the Constitution. The Constitution merely protects and promotes our exercising of this natural right; a right that we would have regardless of whether it was acknowledged by the Constitution. American jurisprudence in the last one hundred years has forgotten this and we have all suffered morally because of it. The Supreme Court has refused to acknowledge any law (i.e. natural law) above the Constitution and made itself in essence the only authentic interpreter of the natural law. This of course will always lead to a clash between the State and the Catholic Church, who really is the only authentic interpreter of the natural law. This is why the totalitarian state will always see the Church as its opponent. While we see glimpses of this already in our own society, what is more pressing is the fact that we require more and more civil laws governing our behavior. We should not need laws declaring what is offensive and what is not—our consciences should serve as a law telling us not to deliberately offend someone. Of course, once we are divorced from the interior force of the natural law, we require the exterior force of more laws and more police.

Do we have a right not to be offended? This of course is a loaded question especially coming from a Catholic, who is a member of a group regularly in the crosshairs as part of the last acceptable prejudice in the United States. The truth in and of itself is offensive. It is meant to offensively (think in terms of offense and defense in sports) change me when I am not in conformity with it. While that is true, I think as a matter of civility we should always make sure that it is the truth itself that is offensive and not our actual presentation of it. Your next door neighbor may be offended if you tell her she is fat, but invite her to walk with you in the evenings so she can feel better and have more energy and you may not offend her at all. I think we do have an obligation to present the truth in a way that it is going to be best received, although we cannot have civil laws (even unwritten politically correct ones) that govern how we do this.

Now, let’s see if we can frame the current issue in terms of what was said above. Is it the case that Pamela Geller and friends are properly exercising their rights of free speech or should they be somehow censored for being offensive? They may be labeling themselves as crusaders for freedom, but I don’t think that helps to address the question. The question is whether or not they are acting in service of the truth and I would say they are. But could it be done in a less provocative way? This seems to me to be the foundational question and one that the focus should be on.

In my mind, there is a certain spirit that surrounds Islam such that it beguiles people into labeling it a “peaceful religion.” But anyone familiar with it knows that is not the case. The only peace that it promotes is when everyone is subject to the Islamic state. In the meantime it is meant to be a system of war. To see this beguiling spirit at work, look at this example: why are Catholic priests who were convicted as pedophiles not labeled as “misrepresenting” Christianity while terrorists are labeled as misrepresenting Islam? If you return to the sources of Islam you find it is the individual Muslims who are of good will and seeking peace that are the ones who are misrepresenting Islam.

It seems then that what they are doing is an attempt to shake us free of this beguiling spirit and see that Islam is not compatible with the American way of life. But provoking radical groups in a way that you are reasonably sure will result in a violent and disproportionate response is imprudent at best. Their point is well founded that “radical” Islam has declared war on us but the approach needs to be how best to respond in a manner that is in accord with the Just War Theory (see CCC 2309 and Geller’s interview with Time where she said “We are at war“). In particular, provoking Islamic elements to respond on American soil puts many non-combatants at risk. The response this time was two armed gunmen, the next time it could be a dirty bomb. There are other elements of the Just War Theory as well that should be examined such as whether a group of citizens, rather than those who have responsibility for the common good, even have the right to provoke Islam in a manner that they view as an act of war, but I will leave that for another time.

Knowing God’s Will

May 6, 2015God's WillRob Agnelli

Aside from its self-refuting character, one of the reasons that I find the position of Sola Scriptura untenable is because there are so many places in the Bible where we find seeming contradictions. Without an authoritative interpreter of Scripture we are left, at best, scratching our heads. The best interpretive method in this case then is to simply ignore either passage or both. Most heresies are a direct result of not finding a way to hold two apparently contradictory things in tension. But it was not the will of God that we should not understand His Revelation even if we might have to wrestle with it. With the idea of knowing the will of God in mind, I would like to address one of these apparent contradictions today; namely, how it can be that God “wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” (1Tim2:5) and yet “there are many who enter the gate to destruction” (Mt 7:13).

To begin it is necessary to frame the question properly because people often try to solve it by merely referring to man’s free will. That is certainly as aspect of it, but we need to make sure we keep man’s free will properly situated within the mystery of God’s Providence. The mistake comes about in equating our own free will with God’s free will. But they are different—our free will is contingent upon the good that is present, God’s is not. In other words, if God is omnipotent then He depends on nothing outside of Himself. What He wills, happens. He might will that they be brought about by free will decisions (that He already knew) or He might use other causes, but God is not in any way be dependent on our free will decisions. A God who is dependent is not really God.

While this keeps us from taking a short cut around the problem, it does not address it. To address the problem we need to make a further distinction with respect to God’s will. We can really on St. Thomas to help us with this because as he routinely shows in the Summa Theologiae, he was a master of making distinctions that explained away what many viewed as contradictions. When he addressed the question at hand he made the distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will.

Antecedent will is an expression of one’s will prior to considering all the circumstances and facts surrounding a particular situation. Once those facts are taken into account, a judgment is expressed through the consequent will. Aquinas offers an analogy to help us better understand by presenting a just judge who wills that men should live freely. However once an individual man is found to be a murderer, the judge wills the good that the person should be justly punished. It is the judge’s consequent will that all men live freely while it is his antecedent will that a particular man should suffer punishment. This analogy helps us examine St. Paul’s words in that we understand that he is expressing God’s antecedent will rather than His consequent will, which allows some men to be eternally punished.

This distinction allows us to go a little deeper and examine the problem of evil. God’s antecedent will is what He wills for a thing in isolation. He considers only individual parts of His plan (individual men) and not the entire plan. While it is true that God creates out of love is true, it is more accurate to say God creates to share His goodness. It is His goodness that He finds in us that makes us lovable. Therefore His consequent will for creation is to produce the most goodness as a whole and not as sum of individual parts.

What does this have to do with evil? God will permit evil only in order to manifest His goodness to the greatest extent. Without the presence of evil, much goodness would be lacking in the universe. This is so foundational to our faith that we can often overlook it. Without the evil of Adam’s fall, the greatest good of the Incarnation would never have happened. “O happy fault, that gained us such a Redeemer!”(*see note below)

This has practical implications for us all. In the presence of suffering and evil we will find good. We all know this, but I think we don’t realize that it is not just generic “good” but very concrete and specific goods. These very specific goods for us would not come about any other way. That is the only reason why any evil is allowed to be there—because there is a particular (more accurately many) good attached to it. If we truly believe this then we do not need to shy away from it but instead look straight at the Cross so that we might pluck the fruit from it. This is not optimism but the very truth of reality. Optimism says “it could always be worse. I could have XYZ instead.” The realist says “this could be worse. I could miss this fruit.” In truth the only truly evil thing is to miss the good that a particular evil has attached itself to. Embrace the Cross and taste the sweetness of the fruit that Our Savior has left attached to the true Tree of Life for you.

**NOTE: I realize there has been debate between Franciscans and Dominicans as to whether the Incarnation would have still happened without the Fall, I would lean towards the Dominican view that the Incarnation would not have happened because everywhere in Sacred Scripture (e.g. Lk 19:10, 1Tim 2:15) suggest that the Incarnation happened solely because man sinned. It may be a speculative question but by speculating on it we see the great love of God Who seeks out the lost sheep while explaining the very reason He allowed us to be lost to begin with.

May: The Month of the New Eve

May 4, 2015MaryRob Agnelli

Each year the Church sets aside the month of May as a time to honor Mary. This pious practice began in the 13^th Century, but has been especially promoted by the Popes of our age (beginning in1830 with Our Lady’s gift of the Miraculous Medal to St. Catherine Laboure). In his 1965 encyclical, Pope Paul VI said that May ought to be a time of “moving tribute of faith and love which Catholics in every part of the world [pay] to the Queen of Heaven. During this month Christians, both in church and in the privacy of the home, offer up to Mary from their hearts an especially fervent and loving homage of prayer and veneration. In this month, too, the benefits of God’s mercy come down to us from her throne in greater abundance” (Month of May, 1). To many both in the Church and out, Marian devotion remains a great mystery, if not an absolute blasphemy. If we are to receive “the benefits of God’s mercy come down to us from her throne in greater abundance” available to us during this month, then it is necessary for us to understand the Scriptural roots of Marian devotion.

Different forms of Marian devotion have been present in the Church since the beginning. But one form in particular was found early on that serves as a foundation for all true Marian devotion that follows. It is the idea that Mary is the New Eve.

In order to enable a firmer grasp on the idea of Mary as the New Eve, it is helpful to discuss an important principle for understanding salvation history—typology. Typology is a method for interpreting divine revelation based on the principle that God providentially shapes the course of human events and fills those events with prophetic significance. In essence, God uses persons and events in salvation history (called types) to foreshadow greater persons and events that are to come (called archetypes). Reading the Salvation history using a typological lens can greatly enhance our understanding of God’s saving actions. The goal of typology is not merely to draw parallels, but also to enable us to understand the archetypes more fully by always remembering the movement is always from lesser (type) to greater (archetype). If we say something about the type is true then what we say about the archetype is always greater. As an aside, this does not mean that the archetype is like the type is every conceivable way (Moses may be a type of Christ, but Christ did not murder someone). Relevant to our discussion we can say that in calling Mary the New Eve what we really mean is that Eve is a type of Mary.

To see where this idea comes from, we can draw on a number of biblical passages. The best place to start is “in the beginning” right after man fell. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gn 3:15). This well-known passage, known as the Protoevangelium, contains God’s promise that He will ransom mankind. But if we read it the passage carefully we see that God is not merely promising a Redeemer. Instead He is promising a new Adam (Christ) and a new Eve (Mary). Both the “woman” and “her seed” are linked together in crushing the serpent.

This is where typology becomes important. God made the First Covenant with Adam and gave him Eve as a “helper” in fulfilling this covenant. Even if Eve’s role is secondary in the First Covenant, she still plays an essential role in it. St. Paul himself uses typology to identify Christ as the New Adam (see 1 Cor 15:45, Romans 5:12-21). To refer to Christ as the New Adam without Him having a New Eve makes St. Paul’s analogy senseless. In Christ, the New Adam, God makes the new and definitive covenant and Mary is to be His “helper.” Everything that Eve was (in the good sense), Mary was and more. If it was not good for Adam to be alone in fulfilling his mission then even more so would it not be good for Christ to be alone in fulfilling His. If Eve is the “flesh of my flesh” of Adam then the New Eve too would be of the same immaculate flesh of the New Adam. And most strikingly, if Eve was the “mother of all the living” then Mary must be that and more. To see that “more” we need to look at the Gospel of John.

Although never explicitly said, St. John sought to highlight the Adam/Eve and Christ/Mary connection. If you read his gospel, there is an obvious connection with Genesis. He moves from “in the beginning” (day 1), to the next day ( Jn. 1:29—day 2), to the next day (Jn. 1:35—day 3)and finally to the third day (day 6—Jn. 2:1) where a wedding is mentioned. The parallel is obvious for anyone who is familiar with the Creation account because a wedding occurred on the sixth day there as well. In John’s account of the New Creation we see that there is a wedding in which the bride and groom are not mentioned but “the mother of Jesus” and Jesus are. When asked to provide wine, Our Lord refers to His Mother as Woman. With the parallel to Genesis we realize that in calling her Woman, Jesus is calling her the New Eve. He is reminding her that once His mission as the New Adam begins with His first public miracle, her mission as the New Eve will begin as well. She reveals the purpose of her mission—telling everyone to “do whatever He tells you” (Jn. 2:5).

It is no literary accident that the last pre-Resurrection “whatever He tells you” is the command to “Behold your mother” (Jn. 19:27). We know the divine commandment is not merely for John because Jesus once again invokes the name “Woman” to connect her to Eve, the mother of all the living. This New Eve would serve as the mother of all the living, that is those who are alive in Christ as Beloved Disciples.

John shows us what it means for the individual believer to do this—“take her into his home” (Jn. 19:27). What this means for the individual believer may be different, but it certainly starts by showing her the proper reverence. Treating her as if she is somehow in competition with your affection for Jesus or as irrelevant certainly is not included in this. The fact that Jesus entrusts Mary and the Beloved Disciple to each other means that there must be a personal relationship of some sort. Later in the month I will discuss what this relationship should look like, but for the time being we need to spend time reflecting on Mary as the New Eve. Everything that the Church believes about Mary flows from this most important doctrine.

Solving the Pope Francis Riddle

May 1, 2015EvangelizationRob Agnelli

For many people, both Catholic and not, Pope Francis remains an enigma. This is partially fueled by the fact that he often speaks vaguely on Church teachings. What he has not been vague about however is his call for the Church to re-establish itself as an evangelizing force. Evidence his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, where he calls upon the faithful to rediscover “the fundamental role of the first announcement or kerygma, which needs to be the center of all evangelizing activity and all efforts at Church renewal” (EG, 164). If the kerygma serves a fundamental role in both evangelization and Church renewal then it is important that we examine what this important term means.

What does it mean to evangelize? Most people would respond with “to preach the Good News.” That is certainly true, but what exactly is this Good News? You are most likely to get one of two responses; either something really simple like “God loves you” or “Jesus died for our sins” or a launching into apologetics and catechesis. Both responses are true and important, but neither fully capture what it means to evangelize. “God loves me” or “Jesus died for my sins” are both good, but don’t capture the “news” part of the Gospel. Apologetics and Catechesis involve teaching but this assumes a fuller understanding of the News. This is where the idea of the kerygma comes in.

The word kerygma comes from the Greek word keryssein which means “to proclaim.” It is used in a number of places in the New Testament but most often in the letters of St. Paul when he says things like. “I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling, and my message and my proclamation were not with persuasive (words of) wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Cor 2:4-5). Simply knowing what it means is not enough—we must examine its content.

I said above that “God loves me” or “Jesus died for my sins” was insufficient for capturing the “News” part of the Gospel. This merits an explanation, especially in a culture that is inundated with 24-hour news channels. Real news is an announcement that something significant has happened that will leave reality as we know it forever changed. Think about the news events surrounding 9/11. Once everyone heard the news, they knew life afterward would be forever changed. It may take time for that new world to be fully realized, but the fact that the event has happened has already set the wheels in motion on a trajectory that hitherto was completely different. As evidenced by the historical impact of the life of Jesus Christ, the Gospel too qualifies as a life-altering news event (the fact that I am writing this in 2015 AD or 2015 CE doesn’t change the fact the world views the birth of Christ as somehow setting us out on a new reality).

We need to remember this aspect of it because a news event is discussed in a different way than a question of religion. Either it happened or it didn’t; and if it did, then it has a very specific meaning attached to it. It is this meaning and its background that makes us the content of the kerygma.

There are at least eight places in the Book of Acts where we find a kerygmatic expression (see Acts 2:14-36, 3:12-26, 4:8-12, 5:29-32,10:34-43, 13:16-41,14:15-17, 17:22-31). Reading these, we assume either it is an exaggeration or something has been left out because of the amount of fruit that they bear. But this is precisely the point. The message itself contains power. The name of Jesus Christ contains a power all its own and so when we preach it things happen.

We all have experienced this power even if we are not preaching the Gospel per se. Mention any other leader of religion in history during a casual conversation and people will continue to comfortably converse. Bring Jesus into the conversation and suddenly a certain amount of discomfort emerges and the whole exchange is in jeopardy. Christ gave a command to preach the Gospel and therefore we should expect that with it comes a hidden power. He never commands something and then leaves us alone to follow it.

What is common to each of these speeches serves as an outline to the content of the kerygma. Here are the seven essential elements:

God, Who is perfectly happy from all eternity, created man with freedom for no benefit of His own but only as someone to share His love with.
Love requires sacrifice and testing
Mankind failed the test and became enslaved to sin and death
God did not abandon man but promised a Liberator
This Liberator was God Himself in the man Jesus Christ (historical event). He appeared and ransomed mankind from sin and death by overcoming them with power in His Resurrection (what makes the event newsworthy).
Because this Jesus cannot die, it is possible to meet Him today. I have met Him and here is why I have never been the same (i.e. witness of your own personal encounter with Jesus).
Invitation to be a part of this new reality by rejecting all imitations of freedom (repentance) and accepting Christ’s invitation to live in true freedom by following Him (to follow Him means to abide with Him through Faith and personal encounter in the Sacraments He has given His Church).

Certainly we may not preach all of this at once. It may come in time and repeated meetings with someone. But the person must have heard all seven points to have fully received the Good News. As an aside, number 6 is vitally important because all kerygmatic preaching is based upon being a credible witness. This means you must have “eye-witness” knowledge of the person you are preaching like the Apostles did in each of their speeches. If you are not living in the new reality of the Good News, then how can you invite another to be a part of this new world?

In a verse we are all familiar with, St. Peter commands the Church “[A]lways be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence” (1Pt 3:15). What this means is not so much that you need to be so well-formed that you can defend the Church against every argument. Instead what it means is that when called upon to give an explanation we should be prepared to say “My hope is from Christ and let me tell you about it.” Whenever I am complimented for being patient in public when my son with Autism has a hard time, my response is always the same: “see the difference Jesus makes?” I may launch into a larger discussion and give them the whole Gospel or I might simply leave it at that. The point is that I must be prepared to give them the entire kerygma which means I have thought it out and rehearsed it. This doesn’t have to be filled with deep theological explanation (in fact the simpler the better), but it should capture most of the seven points depending on where the person is in relation to knowing Jesus. What it should be filled with however is love for Jesus and for the person you are meeting. Think of it as the introduction of two mutual friends that you have been wanting to meet each other.

Now we begin to see that there is a method to Pope Francis’ apparent madness. He does not merely wish to catechize the world but instead to first introduce them to the person of Christ. This includes many within the Church—especially since he mentions the kerygma as the “center of Church renewal.” As I have said so many times in the past, once you have met the person of Christ and become His disciple, catechesis naturally follows. The desire to listen to the Teacher who has “the words of everlasting life” naturally flows from this most important encounter. The role of the Church is to introduce the world to the person of Christ, invite them to follow Him and nourish their relationship through the Sacraments and ongoing catechesis. She then sends these newly formed disciples out into the world to continue the process. The Christian life involves two commands—“come follow me” and “go make disciples of all nations.” The “going” must always follow the “coming” or else the Church simply becomes another NGO filled with activists. All of the Church’s action must proclaim Christ, both in word and deed, which does not happen unless each member is personally connected to the true vine.

Now on your own, put flesh around the kerygmatic outline I gave above. What would you say specifically? Do you think I left anything out? Share below…

To Forgive is Divine?

April 27, 2015Divine MercyRob Agnelli

Last week, I wrote an essay on the importance of praying the Creed during Mass with greater intentionality. This week, I would like to build upon this theme by reflecting upon one specific article of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe… in the Forgiveness of Sins.”

Recall that the notion of the Creed as Symbol or Symbolon was also discussed along with the importance of looking at each of the articles of the Creeds not as a bunch of different articles haphazardly put together, but as a whole that is organically linked. With this understanding in mind one can readily understand why the belief in the Forgiveness of Sins follows from the belief in the Holy Spirit and the Holy Catholic Church. In His first post-Resurrection appearance to the Apostles in the Upper Room, Jesus gives the Church the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins (c.f. John 20:22-23). This same gift of the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins is also invoked in the formula of absolution during the rite of Confession—”God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” This article then is tied up with the Sacrament of Confession as the ordinary means that God has put in place for the forgiveness of sins.

On the other hand though, it seems almost self-evident that Christians should believe in the Forgiveness of Sins, especially given all that is said in the Creed about the Incarnation. One might begin to wonder why this should be included except perhaps to serve as a reminder of this often overlooked gift. I am not just speaking of the gift of the Sacrament of Confession (we will cover that another time) but the overall gift of the forgiveness of sins. I think most of us would rather have a different gift instead—the excusing of our sins. We may not openly profess this in a Creed but our actions bear it out. We have a really vicious habit of trying to make excuses for our faults rather than admitting them. We would rather be excused than accept responsibility. With a moment’s reflection however we can see that this is sheer insanity and yet another proof that sin makes us stupid.

Why do we spend so much energy and useless anxiety with making excuses when God gives forgiveness so readily? Certainly if there are extenuating circumstances then God will be quick to excuse us for the role these played. But ultimately the fact that we rationalize shows that we do not believe this doctrine. Our Lord recognized that there would be a temptation to a lack of faith in this doctrine and so He repeatedly emphasized the “joy in Heaven” that comes when God exercises His mercy. We should not seek to be absolved of responsibility but to be absolved of our poor use of responsibility. In many ways excuse-making traps us in perpetual chains of victimhood, while seeking forgiveness frees us. This desire for the freedom that only forgiveness offers cannot be stamped out regardless of how much we deny it and label it as “Catholic guilt.” We can either exercise it in the manner that God intended—through the Sacrament of Confession—or by treating therapists as the new priests and thinking nothing of the “tell-all” interview on Oprah. Either way, the desire has to be expressed. So, who is the wise man building on rock?

This idea that forgiveness brings freedom is no trivial point. First it is freeing from the perspective of God’s forgiveness of us. It is only when I readily admit my sins that grace begins to transform me. To “firmly intend with the help of Your grace to sin no more” changes us. God needs no laundry list of our sins—He already knows everything. He wants us to see both our complicity and our total weakness so that He can grant to us the freedom we are truly seeking. One of my favorite prayers of St. Philip Neri captures this perfectly: “Lord, look out for Philip today, he may betray you!”

The second dimension in which forgiveness leads to freedom is our own forgiveness of others. When someone is stuck in unforgiveness they unwittingly give power to the person whom they refuse to forgive. They harbor grudges and ill-will toward the other person and likely will not be satisfied even with their downfall. Nearly every Exorcist will tell you the same thing about unforgiveness—it is the number one way that the Devil keeps people in his clutches (especially through Oppression, Obsession and Possession). It may not be the way that he initially gains entry, but he is able to continually pick at the wound of unforgiveness and keep the person enslaved.

That our forgiveness of others is vitally important seems obvious from the teaching of Our Lord in the Lord’s Prayer and from the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Mt 18:21-35). But we must first make sure we understand what He is really saying before we can begin to understand how we can forgive. Jesus is not saying that God’s forgiveness somehow depends upon the manner in which we forgive others. In other words, our forgiveness is not the cause of God’s forgiveness, but the other way around. His forgiveness is the cause of our own. The reason why we pray this petition in the Lord’s Prayer is because we are seeking the awareness of God’s forgiveness in our own lives so that we forgive others. The same thing in the parable—the King first forgives the man, but then because of his unawareness of true depth of the forgiveness he has received, he fails to exercise it.

I find that most people struggle with unforgiveness because they do not understand what forgiveness means. Like forgiveness from God, forgiving others from our perspective cannot be confused with or substituted with excusing others. Christian forgiveness does not mean we are to become doormats. Jesus may have told us to “turn the other cheek” (Mt 5:39) but when He was struck by the High Priest’s servant He asked Him “Why did you strike Me?”(Jn 18:23). Christ may have forgiven the servant, but that does not mean He should simply take the abuse.

To understand forgiveness on a human level, we have to understand the goal. The goal is to restore the relationship back to the level of justice. Justice is a necessary part of love even if it not the most complete form of it. Often “loving our neighbor” simply means ensuring they are justly treated.

Recalling from St. Thomas that justice consists in “rendering to each his due,” we see that it is governed by a principle of reciprocity. This also means that we can treat someone justly while they may treat us unjustly. When we understand this, we can make the important distinction between forgiveness given and forgiveness sought (or received). Christ’s commandment is for us to forgive the other. What they do with that forgiveness is up to them. It can only be offered. But in order to be received they must attempt to restore what is due to us. A sincere apology is certainly a starting point but it usually involves more than that. In justice we have to set out to restore something of what was lost. Teaching children this part of forgiveness is very important from an early age. We do them a grave disservice by teaching them that saying “I am sorry” is always enough. They come to expect forgiveness as a right. It is better to teach them to ask, “will you forgive me?”

Forgiveness offered consists in willing the good of the other person and ensuring they are treated justly. What would it mean to forgive someone who murdered a family member? At a minimum forgiveness would consist in willing that they receive a just trial and fair punishment. It might even mean defending them against the death penalty since it would be an unjust penalty. Christian forgiveness would mean praying for their repentance and conversion so that God would be given His due. Forgiveness would not mean simply forgetting what they have done and pretending it didn’t happen.

If we should not merely “forgive and forget” then we should finish by discussing a key aspect of relationships and that is trust. Forgiveness does not mean that we should instantly operate on the same level of trust as before the offense. Forgiveness may be divine, but it does not absolve us from being prudent in our relationships. While Jesus may have said that Peter should forgive his brother a practically infinite number of times, He was not saying that Peter should set himself up allowing the same thing to happen over and over (Mt 18:21-22). If someone is not trustworthy then we should enter into relationships that require trust with them. This would be excusing and not forgiving.

Two Wings to God

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth" – Pope St. John Paul II