“Our parish can get along without the school. But that school cannot get along without the parish.” That shocked the parish council. One gentleman gently chided the pastor, “Oh no, Father, the parish exists in order to serve the school.” Father shook his head. “No, it doesn’t.” Council members shook their heads. A new pastor came in a year later. He said the same thing. He got the same reaction. That’s why the Catholic Church in America is in trouble.
When the apostles started out, they knew they had work to do. The whole world needed conversion. Everyone was pagan. That is, the world looked very much like it does today. The apostolic approach to the problem differed from ours.
Peter, for instance, did not set up a single parochial school. Luke did not write a children’s Gospel. Not one of Paul’s epistles were decorated with yellow duckies. In short, according to the Scriptures and Church history the apostles didn’t bother teaching children the Faith. They taught only the adults. Why?
Because the apostles understood the principle of subsidiarity. Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno described the principle succinctly: “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.”
The apostles knew they could not replace parents. Through the sacrament of marriage, God endows parents with the ability to teach their own children about Him. The apostles only needed to teach the parents the Faith, it was the parents’ responsibility to teach their own children. So, what has changed in the last two millenia? The answer to that is simple. Nothing.
A child’s primary catechist is his parents. The bishop is the primary catechist of the diocese, but he is not the child’s primary catechist. The priest is the pre-eminent catechist in the parish, but he is not the child’s primary catechist. The Director of Religious Education (DRE), the CCD teachers, the parochial school teachers, all of these people are somewhat useful in passing on the Faith, but none of them are the primary catechists. The parents have the first and primary responsibility to pass the Faith onto their own children. No one else does.
The bishop does not delegate this responsibility to the parents. Neither does the priest or the DRE or the Catholic teachers. At the moment a man and a woman exchange vows in marriage, each consecrates the other as both spouse and catechist.
Let us be absolutely clear. The Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, God Himself, consecrates the bride and bridegroom to be the primary catechists to their own children. Canon law, the Catechism and the documents of the Church are all quite clear on this. Bishops, priests and their lay employees all exist to assist the parents, not to replace them. It is their job to make sure the parents know the Faith and know how to pass it on. It is the parents’ job to do the passing on.
But parents can’t teach what they don’t know. The Pope understands. In his very first encyclical, “Teaching the Faith Today” (Catechesi Tradendae), article #23 points out, for “instruction in the Faith to be effective, it must be permanent. It would be quite useless if it stopped short on the threshold of maturity.”
Quite useless. That means all the time, money and effort poured into the parochial school, the Catholic high school and the CCD program, all of it is money poured down a rat-hole if adults, if parents, are not taught the Faith.
Let me repeat that.
Without adult formation, the entire Catholic parochial and high school educational system is a complete waste, a total failure, an abject defeat, a colossal shibboleth, an empty shell, nada, nothing, goose egg, empty set, we keep knockin’ but there’s nobody home. It is useless.
This is especially true today. Lay teachers in Catholic schools are trained by secular humanists. Their last formal instruction in the Faith could easily have been their confirmation classes. They had zero college coursework showing them how to integrate Catholic Faith into the curriculum. Indeed, many lay teachers aren’t even Catholic. They may be otherwise fine teachers, but they have neither the knowledge nor the ability to integrate the disciplines.
Even if they were good enough, it wouldn’t matter. Children cannot absorb the whole of Catholic Faith. Only an adult mind has the capacity. So where should the bulk of our efforts lie? With teaching children or with teaching adults? Which is more important, the parochial grade/high school or the parish?
Bishops, priests, DRE’s, catechists, all of these people are supposed to be teaching the adults, not the children. After the parents are taught, the parents are meant to prepare their own children for the sacraments. The bishop, the priest, the DRE, the other catechists might give the parents pointers, advice, supplementary material, etc., on how to do this, but it is the parents who are supposed to prepare their own children for First Confession, Confirmation and First Eucharist. The bishop, the priest, their lay employees are required by canon law to verify that the child is indeed ready to receive the sacraments, but it is the parents who are supposed to prepare them for these sacraments. Others might teach other points of Faith, but sacramental preparation is the parents’ job.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly says this. Open it to article #2225, “Parents should initiate their children at an early age into the mysteries of the faith.” The Catechism is divided into four major sections. Flip back to the Table of Contents and read the heading to Section II. It is called “The Christian Mystery”. What are the contents of Section II? The sacraments. From the earliest days of the Church, the sacraments have always been called “mysteries of Faith”. Indeed, the Greek word for sacrament is still “mysterion”: mystery.
The American bishops know all this. The even wrote a letter, “Our Hearts Are Burning Within Us”, that says adult education is of central importance and that the bulk of parish resources are to be devoted to adult education. The bulk of parish resources. Hmmm….
Look at your parish. Consider how much time, money and effort is poured into your parish school, the physical plant devoted to it, the raw number of personnel. Now do the same for the adult formation program(s) in your parish. Hmmm…
Everyone agrees the family is under assault. Everyone fails to notice the local parish is often in the vanguard of the assault. Attempting to replace Catholic parents violates parental rights, violates the principle of subsidiarity, and attacks the family, yet the attitude of a significant number of DRE’s, priests and bishops is precisely this, “Parents are not qualified to teach their own children because they are ignorant of Catholic Faith, so it is up to me to do the job.”
To any bishop, priest or DRE who thinks this, let it be said as succinctly as possible, “No, it is not up to you to do their job. It is up to them to do their job. It is up to you to teach them to do it. Stop enabling their co-dependence. Start doing your job so they can do theirs.”
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Building the Wall
“Religion and politics makes a volatile mix,” or so many are in the habit of saying. That is, after all, the basic justification for Thomas Jefferson’s famed “wall of separation between Church and state,” a wall that was out of date almost from the New Year’s day in 1801 when it was proposed. To see why, let us consider our present situation.
Communism and socialism are the purest of economic theory, completely unencumbered by any hint of Christian fundamentalism. Yet, together, the rulers of communist and socialist nations have imprisoned, maimed and slaughtered more people than the last two world wars combined. According to the UN Genocide convention, Stalin alone killed 62 million people, slaughtering more Ukranians then his nearest mustache-laden rival.
Likewise, Mao tse Tung produced 3 million body bags, all opponents of his economic policies, in his first five years in power. The number who died in subsequent years, especially during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the economic policy that drove huge sections of the countryside to starvation and cannibalism, will probably never be known.
Pol Pot only killed a million, but he did as well on a per capita basis as either of his more well-known rivals. And, of course, we can’t leave out the most well-known economist of all, the national socialist Adolf Hitler. Though he started well, he was relatively ineffective, killing only 12 million in death camps during the war and several hundred thousand in the years leading to it.
It is, of course, unfair to limit ourselves to the 20th century. Essentially every European war since the mid-1700’s has been driven in whole or part by the science of economics. The French Revolution guillotined tens of thousands, millions more died during the Napoleonic wars that subsequently swept the whole of Europe. The American Civil War tested the economic viability of slavery. England killed tens of thousands of Chinese in the Opium Wars, a kind of reverse drug war. In that episode, the British trade imbalance with China was solved by forcing China to become a nation of opium addicts – the British controlled the opium trade, you see.
Clearly, we cannot be too careful. There should be a wall of separation between economics and the public sphere. After all, economics and politics are a volatile mix, as two centuries of decaying corpses illustrate. But wait. There’s more.
What about biology? Ignore the dissected frogs and newts, concentrate solely on severed human heads. Darwin published Origin of the Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, just a year after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. Most people don’t realize just how strongly Darwin’s work influenced European intelligentsia. In the dozen years between 1859 and 1871, the ruling class of Europe embraced the “survival of the fittest.” They spoke of the “French race”, the “British race”, and the “German race.” The Franco-Prussian war was seen on all sides as an expression of scientific principles, a necessary Darwinian struggle. Of course, that war led directly to World War I which itself led directly to World War II. Indeed, many historians refer to this three-fold slaughterhouse as the modern Thirty Years’ War, our hymn of praise to the science of biology.
John Dwyer, in his remarkable work War Without Mercy, demonstrates that World War II was just as much about race as the Franco-Prussian war. The Japanese saw the Chinese as inferior, Americans saw the Japanese as inferior, and Germans saw Jews and Slavs as inferiors. The rationale that allowed Auschwitz also allowed the US to build Japanese internment camps for West-Coast citizens and prompted FDR to suggest that the entire German people should be sterilized; separated by a wall of impotence from the rest of human kind.
Obviously, biology and politics are a volatile mix. Federal grants for biological research, like tuition vouchers, violate this much-needed wall of separation. The wars of biology have built a much higher pile of corpses than all the wars of religion combined, while the internal and external wars of economics dwarf them both. If religion is banned from the public sphere, can anyone really assert that the others can safely stay?
Why did Jefferson think this wall of separation was needed? Because the American Revolution happened two hundred years too soon. Thomas Jefferson, was a well-read man, but he was completely ignorant of evolutionary theory. How could he be otherwise? It wouldn’t be invented for another fifty years. He knew Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but knew not a thing of what Marx would write twenty years after Jefferson died. Besides, Jefferson was the man who re-wrote the Gospels by taking out all references to miracles. He didn’t believe in them, you see. He thought Jesus was a nice moral teacher, but not God. C.S. Lewis was not yet a gleam in his father’s eye, so Jefferson was unaware of the Liar, Lunatic, Lord argument, and he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out for himself.
Because economics was just barely becoming a science, Jefferson could not fully appreciate to what extent it contributed to the widespread carnage it wreaked even in his own day. Similarly, biology was not yet on a scientific footing, and its potential to promote slaughter was not appreciated.
Jefferson and his associates wanted a wall between religion and politics because religion was the only known cause of war. Take away religion and you take away reasons for conflict. They didn’t realize that religion was the language of war for the simple reason that it was the only mature system of thought Europeans possessed, the only language articulate enough to speak. No other system of thought had been sufficiently developed. Thus, when someone wanted to justify a war, a pillage, any sort of carnage at all, they used the only words available – religious words.
But here’s the interesting thing. As other systems of thought were developed, people had a choice: they could use religious rhetoric or they could use scientific rhetoric. As even a simple study of armed conflict since the Enlightenment shows, the ruling class has consistently used the language of science to justify their aggression, not the language of Christian faith. The reason is simple: Christian faith does not really lend itself to war. As soon as other languages were sufficiently strong to bear the burden, “Christian rationales” dropped away.
We should be clear. For whatever reason, the words of religious faith are still the preferred language for war in many parts of the world, but it is worthwhile to note that these rationales almost never employ words of Christian faith. Hitler invoked Wotan, jihadists invoke Islam, Indians invoke Hinduism, and the West uses the priests of science, but progressives who seek a firmer road towards mass murder have abandoned Christianity. For them, Jesus Christ is not the door. He is a wall that blocks their road.
Communism and socialism are the purest of economic theory, completely unencumbered by any hint of Christian fundamentalism. Yet, together, the rulers of communist and socialist nations have imprisoned, maimed and slaughtered more people than the last two world wars combined. According to the UN Genocide convention, Stalin alone killed 62 million people, slaughtering more Ukranians then his nearest mustache-laden rival.
Likewise, Mao tse Tung produced 3 million body bags, all opponents of his economic policies, in his first five years in power. The number who died in subsequent years, especially during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the economic policy that drove huge sections of the countryside to starvation and cannibalism, will probably never be known.
Pol Pot only killed a million, but he did as well on a per capita basis as either of his more well-known rivals. And, of course, we can’t leave out the most well-known economist of all, the national socialist Adolf Hitler. Though he started well, he was relatively ineffective, killing only 12 million in death camps during the war and several hundred thousand in the years leading to it.
It is, of course, unfair to limit ourselves to the 20th century. Essentially every European war since the mid-1700’s has been driven in whole or part by the science of economics. The French Revolution guillotined tens of thousands, millions more died during the Napoleonic wars that subsequently swept the whole of Europe. The American Civil War tested the economic viability of slavery. England killed tens of thousands of Chinese in the Opium Wars, a kind of reverse drug war. In that episode, the British trade imbalance with China was solved by forcing China to become a nation of opium addicts – the British controlled the opium trade, you see.
Clearly, we cannot be too careful. There should be a wall of separation between economics and the public sphere. After all, economics and politics are a volatile mix, as two centuries of decaying corpses illustrate. But wait. There’s more.
What about biology? Ignore the dissected frogs and newts, concentrate solely on severed human heads. Darwin published Origin of the Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, just a year after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. Most people don’t realize just how strongly Darwin’s work influenced European intelligentsia. In the dozen years between 1859 and 1871, the ruling class of Europe embraced the “survival of the fittest.” They spoke of the “French race”, the “British race”, and the “German race.” The Franco-Prussian war was seen on all sides as an expression of scientific principles, a necessary Darwinian struggle. Of course, that war led directly to World War I which itself led directly to World War II. Indeed, many historians refer to this three-fold slaughterhouse as the modern Thirty Years’ War, our hymn of praise to the science of biology.
John Dwyer, in his remarkable work War Without Mercy, demonstrates that World War II was just as much about race as the Franco-Prussian war. The Japanese saw the Chinese as inferior, Americans saw the Japanese as inferior, and Germans saw Jews and Slavs as inferiors. The rationale that allowed Auschwitz also allowed the US to build Japanese internment camps for West-Coast citizens and prompted FDR to suggest that the entire German people should be sterilized; separated by a wall of impotence from the rest of human kind.
Obviously, biology and politics are a volatile mix. Federal grants for biological research, like tuition vouchers, violate this much-needed wall of separation. The wars of biology have built a much higher pile of corpses than all the wars of religion combined, while the internal and external wars of economics dwarf them both. If religion is banned from the public sphere, can anyone really assert that the others can safely stay?
Why did Jefferson think this wall of separation was needed? Because the American Revolution happened two hundred years too soon. Thomas Jefferson, was a well-read man, but he was completely ignorant of evolutionary theory. How could he be otherwise? It wouldn’t be invented for another fifty years. He knew Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but knew not a thing of what Marx would write twenty years after Jefferson died. Besides, Jefferson was the man who re-wrote the Gospels by taking out all references to miracles. He didn’t believe in them, you see. He thought Jesus was a nice moral teacher, but not God. C.S. Lewis was not yet a gleam in his father’s eye, so Jefferson was unaware of the Liar, Lunatic, Lord argument, and he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out for himself.
Because economics was just barely becoming a science, Jefferson could not fully appreciate to what extent it contributed to the widespread carnage it wreaked even in his own day. Similarly, biology was not yet on a scientific footing, and its potential to promote slaughter was not appreciated.
Jefferson and his associates wanted a wall between religion and politics because religion was the only known cause of war. Take away religion and you take away reasons for conflict. They didn’t realize that religion was the language of war for the simple reason that it was the only mature system of thought Europeans possessed, the only language articulate enough to speak. No other system of thought had been sufficiently developed. Thus, when someone wanted to justify a war, a pillage, any sort of carnage at all, they used the only words available – religious words.
But here’s the interesting thing. As other systems of thought were developed, people had a choice: they could use religious rhetoric or they could use scientific rhetoric. As even a simple study of armed conflict since the Enlightenment shows, the ruling class has consistently used the language of science to justify their aggression, not the language of Christian faith. The reason is simple: Christian faith does not really lend itself to war. As soon as other languages were sufficiently strong to bear the burden, “Christian rationales” dropped away.
We should be clear. For whatever reason, the words of religious faith are still the preferred language for war in many parts of the world, but it is worthwhile to note that these rationales almost never employ words of Christian faith. Hitler invoked Wotan, jihadists invoke Islam, Indians invoke Hinduism, and the West uses the priests of science, but progressives who seek a firmer road towards mass murder have abandoned Christianity. For them, Jesus Christ is not the door. He is a wall that blocks their road.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Preparing for The Passion
We’ve all seen the advertisements and the reviews. Mel Gibson’s The Passion is an enormous event – if you’re like the rest of us, you’re actually looking forward to Ash Wednesday instead of Fat Tuesday this year. After all, Ash Wednesday, 2004, is the movie’s U.S. release date.
As we get ready to see Gibson’s masterpiece, we may be making lists of people we would like to take with us. Perhaps my semi-Christian next-door neighbor, or the atheist who helped the family so wonderfully last year. Or maybe my old high-school buddy, who is “spiritual, but not religious” - he doesn’t go to church anymore, but does believe in UFOs. Or, more likely, a brother or sister, father or mother, daughter or son who fell away from the Faith. We’ve been waiting to ask them, trying to figure out the best way, hoping they say yes.
Well, what if they do? Maybe you and I will actually convince such a friend or relative to accompany us, and we will see the movie with them - but what will happen after the movie? How will we answer the questions about God, about Jesus, that Gibson’s work is bound to raise? You know the questions:
“Why did God have to take flesh and die?”
“If the smallest drop of Christ’s blood is sufficient to pay for all the sins of mankind – past, present and future – wasn’t the circumcision enough? The scourging? Why that?”
“What is Faith, exactly? How do I know if I have it? What about Hope? Love?”
“How am I supposed to make sense of what happened?”
How do you answer questions like these?
The word “crucial” comes from the Latin “crux”, or “cross.” Questions like these are crucially important to Catholic Faith. These are questions about the folly of the Gentiles, and the stumbling block of the Jews; they are questions about the Cross. They must be answered.
Mel Gibson and the people associated with this film spent years of their lives and millions of dollars preparing this one magnificent spark of evangelization. If we don’t spend a few hours preparing ourselves to view it, we will have wasted their efforts. So, let’s think about how to prepare.
Before the movie
Pray. A half an hour in adoration, fifteen minutes, even a sign of the Cross as you drive past your Catholic Church on the way home from work. Do it. Ask God to prepare your heart, mind and soul to help someone else find Him.
Read. Start with the four Passion accounts. They aren’t very long. In the Gospel of Matthew, that would be chapters 26 and 27, Mark is chapters 14 and 15, Luke is chapters 22 and 23, John is chapters 18 and 19. For a quick overview, take a look at the free one-page Gospel concordance of the Passion, the Passion Timeline.
Read at least one good commentary on at least one of the Passion accounts: the Navarre Bible study series is excellent, and any of the Gospel studies would work well for this purpose. So would any commentary collection of the early Christian Father’s on the Passion narratives.
Learn one or two basic logical arguments supporting the existence of God. Memorize three Scripture passages that tell us why priesthood is necessary, or memorize three Scripture passages about suffering such as Heb 5:7-8, Gal 6:2, or 1 Cor 12:24.
Or, best of all, learn how to talk about the Passion using John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. One such book, Sex and the Sacred City, uses the enormous conversion power of the pope’s synthesis to describe who God is, why He took on flesh, and why He went through that enormous suffering. It describes the purpose of the Church, the sacraments, the family, even God Himself, through a serious study and deep understanding of the one thing we always have with us – our bodies.
The great virtue of this book lies precisely in its clarity and precision. A busy person can read it in a day or two, or read it twice in a week. Short, clear useful resources are the key to fanning an evangelistic spark into flame. In the days leading up to the movie, look for more gems like this.
After the movie
Be ready to listen. We cannot predict what questions will arise. It is important that we answer their questions, not simply parrot our answers. Give a hammer to a three-year old and suddenly, to him, everything looks like a nail. We are the same way. If we have only one bit of Catholic doctrine in our head before the movie, we may be tempted to trot that one answer out, no matter what the question is. Don’t fall into the trap.
Once you are consciously prepared to listen, ask your movie partner for comments. Listen carefully to questions, think carefully about whether or not you know the answer, and then answer honestly. “I don’t know,” is a superb answer, as long as it is followed up with, “but I would like to know as much as you do. Let’s find out.” Then go and do just that.
Summary
Locate deeper resources now. You don’t have to read them all right now. Just find books and people who can help steer you and yours in the right direction, take note of where you can lay your hands on those resources when you need them and be prepared to use them when the time is right.
There are other ways to prepare yourself as well, ways known only to you and to God, but this will give you a start. Buy your tickets, invite your movie partners, and get ready to handle the questions that are sure to come. Mr. Gibson has done an enormous amount of work just to give us the single spark – we must do at least a little work ourselves so as to be ready to feed the flame. Honor both the artist and the Artist who guided him. Prepare.
As we get ready to see Gibson’s masterpiece, we may be making lists of people we would like to take with us. Perhaps my semi-Christian next-door neighbor, or the atheist who helped the family so wonderfully last year. Or maybe my old high-school buddy, who is “spiritual, but not religious” - he doesn’t go to church anymore, but does believe in UFOs. Or, more likely, a brother or sister, father or mother, daughter or son who fell away from the Faith. We’ve been waiting to ask them, trying to figure out the best way, hoping they say yes.
Well, what if they do? Maybe you and I will actually convince such a friend or relative to accompany us, and we will see the movie with them - but what will happen after the movie? How will we answer the questions about God, about Jesus, that Gibson’s work is bound to raise? You know the questions:
“Why did God have to take flesh and die?”
“If the smallest drop of Christ’s blood is sufficient to pay for all the sins of mankind – past, present and future – wasn’t the circumcision enough? The scourging? Why that?”
“What is Faith, exactly? How do I know if I have it? What about Hope? Love?”
“How am I supposed to make sense of what happened?”
How do you answer questions like these?
The word “crucial” comes from the Latin “crux”, or “cross.” Questions like these are crucially important to Catholic Faith. These are questions about the folly of the Gentiles, and the stumbling block of the Jews; they are questions about the Cross. They must be answered.
Mel Gibson and the people associated with this film spent years of their lives and millions of dollars preparing this one magnificent spark of evangelization. If we don’t spend a few hours preparing ourselves to view it, we will have wasted their efforts. So, let’s think about how to prepare.
Before the movie
Pray. A half an hour in adoration, fifteen minutes, even a sign of the Cross as you drive past your Catholic Church on the way home from work. Do it. Ask God to prepare your heart, mind and soul to help someone else find Him.
Read. Start with the four Passion accounts. They aren’t very long. In the Gospel of Matthew, that would be chapters 26 and 27, Mark is chapters 14 and 15, Luke is chapters 22 and 23, John is chapters 18 and 19. For a quick overview, take a look at the free one-page Gospel concordance of the Passion, the Passion Timeline.
Read at least one good commentary on at least one of the Passion accounts: the Navarre Bible study series is excellent, and any of the Gospel studies would work well for this purpose. So would any commentary collection of the early Christian Father’s on the Passion narratives.
Learn one or two basic logical arguments supporting the existence of God. Memorize three Scripture passages that tell us why priesthood is necessary, or memorize three Scripture passages about suffering such as Heb 5:7-8, Gal 6:2, or 1 Cor 12:24.
Or, best of all, learn how to talk about the Passion using John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. One such book, Sex and the Sacred City, uses the enormous conversion power of the pope’s synthesis to describe who God is, why He took on flesh, and why He went through that enormous suffering. It describes the purpose of the Church, the sacraments, the family, even God Himself, through a serious study and deep understanding of the one thing we always have with us – our bodies.
The great virtue of this book lies precisely in its clarity and precision. A busy person can read it in a day or two, or read it twice in a week. Short, clear useful resources are the key to fanning an evangelistic spark into flame. In the days leading up to the movie, look for more gems like this.
After the movie
Be ready to listen. We cannot predict what questions will arise. It is important that we answer their questions, not simply parrot our answers. Give a hammer to a three-year old and suddenly, to him, everything looks like a nail. We are the same way. If we have only one bit of Catholic doctrine in our head before the movie, we may be tempted to trot that one answer out, no matter what the question is. Don’t fall into the trap.
Once you are consciously prepared to listen, ask your movie partner for comments. Listen carefully to questions, think carefully about whether or not you know the answer, and then answer honestly. “I don’t know,” is a superb answer, as long as it is followed up with, “but I would like to know as much as you do. Let’s find out.” Then go and do just that.
Summary
Locate deeper resources now. You don’t have to read them all right now. Just find books and people who can help steer you and yours in the right direction, take note of where you can lay your hands on those resources when you need them and be prepared to use them when the time is right.
There are other ways to prepare yourself as well, ways known only to you and to God, but this will give you a start. Buy your tickets, invite your movie partners, and get ready to handle the questions that are sure to come. Mr. Gibson has done an enormous amount of work just to give us the single spark – we must do at least a little work ourselves so as to be ready to feed the flame. Honor both the artist and the Artist who guided him. Prepare.
Monday, January 12, 2004
You Were Once Exiles
“You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt. I, the LORD, am your God.” (Leviticus 19:34)
Now, some people would find that kind of Scripture quoting offensive. Indeed, some would simply mutter “and the devil himself uses Scripture for his own devices.” And they would be right. A single verse does not an argument make. However, the debate about immigration is raging, and we have all heard from the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and independent quarters. It might be worthwhile to find out what the Catholic take is.
The Church has actually said quite a lot about immigration. The issue first came up in Scripture, with the migration of Abraham in the Old Testament and the migration of the Holy Family in the New. In the medieval period, the fourth Lateran Council (1215) began the first modern conversation on the problem: “Since in many places within the same city and diocese there are people of different languages having one faith but various rites and customs, we strictly command that the bishops of these cities and dioceses provide suitable men who will, according to the different rites and languages, celebrate the divine offices for them, administer the sacraments of the Church and instruct them by word and example.” Over the intervening centuries, as the Church has contemplated the movements of peoples, She has had time to reflect on what is just. Though She has written much in the last thirty years on the problem, these two millenia of reflection can be boiled down to essentially six principles:
1) There is a natural human right to migrate in search of a better life.
2) Although the right to migrate is not an absolute right, it can only be restricted for grave reasons related to the common good.
3) Immigration laws should be generous.
4) Immigration laws should not favor the most well off, skilled immigrants, and such people should not emigrate for selfish motives.
5) Immigration laws should favor the unification of families.
6) Immigration workers have a right to be treated equally with other workers.
Clearly, given post-9/11 America, good Catholics can disagree about how these principles might best be implemented. People who prefer stricter immigration controls would undoubtedly emphasize the “grave reasons” (terrorist concerns) of the second point, while those who prefer greater immigration would emphasize the first and third points. But it is in the fourth point that the trouble lies.
America’s immigration policy is weighted to keep “useless eaters” out. We look for the most well off, skilled immigrants; we intentionally siphon the best and brightest out of other countries in order to stay ahead in the world. It reflects our capitalist outlook – when a resource is limited, the price goes up. We limit how many people we allow in, so we demand that those who enter pay a high price in terms of marketable skills and intellect.
In this regard, the flood of illegal immigrants could be viewed is an interesting corrective to an unjust immigration policy. But putting it in these terms is really not very helpful. There is another way to look at it.
Whatever one may say about America’s history as either a Christian or a secular nation, one thing has always been true: America has always been anti-Catholic. The forms of anti-Catholicism in America have been many and various.
The Know-Nothing Party formed in the 1840's as a reaction to the heavy influx of Irish Catholics. When the Pope donated a granite stone in 1853 to be placed in the Washington Monument, a group of masked men, either Freemasons or Know-Nothings, threw it into the Potomac river. The 1915 formation of the Ku Klux Klan was the violent anti-Catholic response to a similar wave of immigration from Catholic Southeastern Europe.
The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment viewed Catholic immigrants as something lower than pond scum. The country violently divided over the possibility of having a Catholic president twice in sixty years, once in 1928 over Al Smith and again in 1960 over John Kennedy. Some of the country’s most prominent figures, fromAbraham Lincoln to Mark Twain to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black were virulently anti-Catholic. Today, Protestant anti-Catholicism has been replaced with secular anti-Catholicism. The opponents have changed, the sentiment has not.
Now consider another fact. Like the rest of the developed world, America is not replacing its own population. If it were not for both legal and illegal immigration, we would have a negative population growth. Alan Greenspan described the consequences: “[T]he aging of the population in the United States will have significant effects on our fiscal situation. In particular, it makes our social security and Medicare programs unsustainable in the long run, short of a major increase in immigration rates, a dramatic acceleration in productivity growth well beyond historical experience, a significant increase in the age of eligibility for benefits, or the use of general revenues to fund benefits.”
We are lucky. Europe faces an even worse situation, and her immigrants are primarily Muslim, not Catholic. Fifty percent of Dutch children, for example, will be born to Holland’s Muslim immigrants by 2020.
So what are Catholic Americans supposed to be upset about? America needs immigrants. U.S. immigrants, legal and illegal, are primarily Catholics with a strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin, a much superior translation of the Mass, and wonderfully rich Catholic devotions. Get an English translation of a Spanish hymnal or discover the origin of posadas and pinatas, for instance. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Sure, these immigrants pose a strong threat to America’s current Protestant-atheistic culture, but that’s a good thing, not a bad one. We get rid of a culture of death and replace it with a culture of life. We may have to add a second language (Spanish) to our skill set, but in return, we get a pension system that is much less likely to go bankrupt and a liturgy which is more accurately translated and richer than the one we have. Finally, we don’t have to face the prospect of living under the Muslim law of sharia within two generations, as the Europeans do.
In short, don’t panic. They’re Hispanic. Thank God.
Note:
My commentary on Abraham Lincoln was in error.
Abraham Lincoln on Catholics
Now, some people would find that kind of Scripture quoting offensive. Indeed, some would simply mutter “and the devil himself uses Scripture for his own devices.” And they would be right. A single verse does not an argument make. However, the debate about immigration is raging, and we have all heard from the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and independent quarters. It might be worthwhile to find out what the Catholic take is.
The Church has actually said quite a lot about immigration. The issue first came up in Scripture, with the migration of Abraham in the Old Testament and the migration of the Holy Family in the New. In the medieval period, the fourth Lateran Council (1215) began the first modern conversation on the problem: “Since in many places within the same city and diocese there are people of different languages having one faith but various rites and customs, we strictly command that the bishops of these cities and dioceses provide suitable men who will, according to the different rites and languages, celebrate the divine offices for them, administer the sacraments of the Church and instruct them by word and example.” Over the intervening centuries, as the Church has contemplated the movements of peoples, She has had time to reflect on what is just. Though She has written much in the last thirty years on the problem, these two millenia of reflection can be boiled down to essentially six principles:
1) There is a natural human right to migrate in search of a better life.
2) Although the right to migrate is not an absolute right, it can only be restricted for grave reasons related to the common good.
3) Immigration laws should be generous.
4) Immigration laws should not favor the most well off, skilled immigrants, and such people should not emigrate for selfish motives.
5) Immigration laws should favor the unification of families.
6) Immigration workers have a right to be treated equally with other workers.
Clearly, given post-9/11 America, good Catholics can disagree about how these principles might best be implemented. People who prefer stricter immigration controls would undoubtedly emphasize the “grave reasons” (terrorist concerns) of the second point, while those who prefer greater immigration would emphasize the first and third points. But it is in the fourth point that the trouble lies.
America’s immigration policy is weighted to keep “useless eaters” out. We look for the most well off, skilled immigrants; we intentionally siphon the best and brightest out of other countries in order to stay ahead in the world. It reflects our capitalist outlook – when a resource is limited, the price goes up. We limit how many people we allow in, so we demand that those who enter pay a high price in terms of marketable skills and intellect.
In this regard, the flood of illegal immigrants could be viewed is an interesting corrective to an unjust immigration policy. But putting it in these terms is really not very helpful. There is another way to look at it.
Whatever one may say about America’s history as either a Christian or a secular nation, one thing has always been true: America has always been anti-Catholic. The forms of anti-Catholicism in America have been many and various.
The Know-Nothing Party formed in the 1840's as a reaction to the heavy influx of Irish Catholics. When the Pope donated a granite stone in 1853 to be placed in the Washington Monument, a group of masked men, either Freemasons or Know-Nothings, threw it into the Potomac river. The 1915 formation of the Ku Klux Klan was the violent anti-Catholic response to a similar wave of immigration from Catholic Southeastern Europe.
The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment viewed Catholic immigrants as something lower than pond scum. The country violently divided over the possibility of having a Catholic president twice in sixty years, once in 1928 over Al Smith and again in 1960 over John Kennedy. Some of the country’s most prominent figures, from
Now consider another fact. Like the rest of the developed world, America is not replacing its own population. If it were not for both legal and illegal immigration, we would have a negative population growth. Alan Greenspan described the consequences: “[T]he aging of the population in the United States will have significant effects on our fiscal situation. In particular, it makes our social security and Medicare programs unsustainable in the long run, short of a major increase in immigration rates, a dramatic acceleration in productivity growth well beyond historical experience, a significant increase in the age of eligibility for benefits, or the use of general revenues to fund benefits.”
We are lucky. Europe faces an even worse situation, and her immigrants are primarily Muslim, not Catholic. Fifty percent of Dutch children, for example, will be born to Holland’s Muslim immigrants by 2020.
So what are Catholic Americans supposed to be upset about? America needs immigrants. U.S. immigrants, legal and illegal, are primarily Catholics with a strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin, a much superior translation of the Mass, and wonderfully rich Catholic devotions. Get an English translation of a Spanish hymnal or discover the origin of posadas and pinatas, for instance. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Sure, these immigrants pose a strong threat to America’s current Protestant-atheistic culture, but that’s a good thing, not a bad one. We get rid of a culture of death and replace it with a culture of life. We may have to add a second language (Spanish) to our skill set, but in return, we get a pension system that is much less likely to go bankrupt and a liturgy which is more accurately translated and richer than the one we have. Finally, we don’t have to face the prospect of living under the Muslim law of sharia within two generations, as the Europeans do.
In short, don’t panic. They’re Hispanic. Thank God.
Note:
My commentary on Abraham Lincoln was in error.
Abraham Lincoln on Catholics
Thursday, January 08, 2004
Harrowing Hell
“We anathematize [both] the inventors of the new error… [and the pope] who did not attempt to sanctify this Apostolic Church with the teaching of Apostolic tradition, but by profane treachery permitted its purity to be polluted.” With this statement, Pope Leo II affirmed the conclusion of a general council: Pope Honorius was condemned as a heretic.
In the early 600’s, Pope Honorius faced a heresy within the Church. When he was asked how to handle the heresy, he replied by forbidding discussion of the topic at all. Because he failed to teach the Faith, and because he forbad the use of both orthodox and heretical phrasing, the council found him derelict in his duties and condemned him as a heretic. His condemnation was confirmed by two ecumenical councils and the very liturgy of the Church, which for two centuries repeated the condemnation in the papal oath. The condemnation still stands.
Note well: he was not a heretic for having mis-taught. No Pope has ever mis-taught Church doctrine. Rather, his heresy lay in his silence.
Now, he was a good bishop in all other respects. He did much good for the people of Rome and for the Church as a whole. He died well-respected in most circles. But, his silence on one point of doctrine eventually condemned him.
From all the evidence, he was silent because he didn’t know what to do. That’s the problem with being infallible: infallibility means you won’t teach the wrong answer. Sadly, infallibility doesn’t mean you know the right answer, or that you are able to competently teach the right answer even if you do know it. Competent teaching is a skill like any other skill: use it or lose it.
As everyone knows, North American bishops have had a similar problem. Many of them dealt with actively homosexual priests primarily as if they suffered from a psychological problem instead of a sin problem. When the psychology Ph.D.’s treated these priests and told the bishops the priests were cured, the bishops believed the experts. They put the priests back in ministry.
Bishops don’t know anything about psychology. They had to rely on the secular experts. They had to rely on psychologists about sex because they had stopped teaching Church doctrine about sex. Since they weren’t regularly teaching sexual morality, they lost their ability to think clearly about it. They didn’t know the right answers anymore. That’s why they were stuck with the answers of lay Ph.D.s.
When did bishops stop teaching sexual morality? We in the United States can point to June 22, 1965 and Boston’s Cardinal John Cushing amazing statement, "I could not in conscience approve the legislation [supporting legalization of contraception, but] I will make no effort to impose my opinion upon others… I do not see where I have an obligation to impose my religious beliefs on people who just do not accept the same faith as I do."
Every bishop and every priest is responsible for the salvation of every person living within his diocese and/or parish. He is not just responsible for teaching and sanctifying the Catholics in his diocese, he is responsible for teaching and sanctifying everyone in his diocese. What would we say of a math professor who said, “I do not see where I have an obligation to impose my belief that 2 + 2 = 4 on students who just do not accept the same mathematics I do.” The Catholic Faith is more true and certain than the sunrise, indeed Catholic truth is the source from which the sun draws its ability to rise. But Cardinal Cushing reduced the eternal and divine Truth to the level of human opinion. He repudiated his responsibility to teach this Truth to the people of the world.
Pope Honorius was condemned simply because he forbad discussion of a doctrine. In a single statement, Cardinal Cushing denied both the truth and his own office. He labored under a materially heretical misunderstanding. The religious beliefs he held were not his anymore than the Mass he celebrated was his or the baptisms he conferred were his. These are all Christ’s, that is, they are all God’s. He did not hold beliefs, he held truths. We believe these things because they are true, and they remain true whether or not we believe them.
It is important that we fully understand this point. The Creed I repeat every Sunday is not a statement of what I believe, it is a statement that I recognize reality. The secular world has a somewhat similar practice: psychologists will sometimes ask a mental patient what year it is. If the patient answers correctly, it is likely he has at least some grip on reality. So it is with the Creed. I repeat the Creed at Sunday Mass to demonstrate that I am not yet theologically insane. I hold to the teachings of the Church because I am made for Truth, and this is it.
It is therefore somewhat disconcerting to listen to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). In the December 12th New York Times, Cathy Cleaver Ruse, the pro-life spokeswoman for the USCCB said, "When it comes to contraception as a policy issue - access, availability - the Catholic bishops do not get involved in that debate. But when it comes to abortion, that's a different matter. It's far greater than just a religious issue. It's a human rights issue."
The statement is breath-taking on several levels. Let’s consider a few.
First, every hormonal contraceptive acts as an abortifacient. The morning-after pill is the same damned thing (literally) as the birth control pill. Neither one really prevents ovulation, rather, all hormonal contraceptives keep the developing embryo from implanting in the uterus. That is, all hormonal contraceptives interrupt an existing pregnancy by causing a chemical abortion. Now, the bishops are no more embryologists than they are psychologists, so we can, perhaps, forgive their abysmal ignorance on this point.
But even if we ignore their ignorance of biology, it is certainly the case that abortion becomes necessary in any culture that sanctions contraception. The U.S. Supreme Court specifically recognized this fact when it upheld legal abortion in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey. Abortion is a necessary backup for contraceptive failure. The Pope understands and acknowledges this connection. So do secular American judges. Why doesn’t the USCCB?
And what on earth could the spokeswoman mean by implying that contraception is “just a religious issue”? As has been pointed out in an earlier column, religion binds back together what is broken. Part of what is broken in us human persons is our human rights. We are only fully human when we are free from sin. Thus our right and ability to be fully human is inseparable from religion, the binding together of the human nature broken by sin. Whenever we consider a truly religious issue, we are necessarily dealing with a human rights issue.
That’s why Cushing’s statement was material heresy, after all. He thought it was alright for the non-Catholics in his diocese to be slaves to sin, just as his American Catholic bishop predecessors prior to the Civil War heretically taught that it was sometimes alright for non-Catholics to be slaves to other men.
The Canadian bishops are scarcely better off. Consider the Winnipeg statement (http://www.therosarium.ca/winnipeg.html ) issued by those bishops in 1968. For nearly forty years, both secular and heretical Catholic commentators used this strangely worded statement as proof that contraception is acceptable for Canadian Catholics. For nearly forty years, the Canadian bishops have done essentially nothing to contradict this idea. They could elaborate, they could give a detailed explanation of the statement to demonstrate that it does not support the use of contraception. Instead, they are as silent as the USCCB, as silent as a condemned pope.
It is a matter of supreme irony that the Comstock laws, the American laws which made the sale or use of contraceptives in the United States illegal, were almost entirely the work of Protestant churches and politicians near the end of the 1800’s. These Protestant laws were overthrown by secular courts nearly a century later precisely because the Catholic bishops were silent at precisely the moment their voices were most needed. Many still are. Apparently, slavery loves company. It is not for nothing that St. John Chrysostom, a father and doctor of the Church, said, “The floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.”
But all hope is not lost. Nearly a decade ago, the bishops of the Philippines discovered their voices, saying:
"It is said that when seeking ways of regulating births, only 5% of you consult God. In the face of this unfortunate fact, we your pastors have been remiss: how few are there among you whom we have reached. There have been some couples eager to share their expertise and values on birth regulation with others. They did not receive adequate support from their priests. We did not give them due attention, believing then this ministry consisted merely of imparting a technique best left to married couples.
Only recently have we discovered how deep your yearning is for God to be present in your married lives. But we did not know then how to help you discover God’s presence and activity in your mission of Christian parenting. Afflicted with doubts about alternatives to contraceptive technology, we abandoned you to your confused and lonely consciences with a lame excuse: 'follow what your conscience tells you.' How little we realized that it was our consciences that needed to be formed first. A greater concern would have led us to discover that religious hunger in you."
A few bishops on this continent have also begun to re-join the eternal college of bishops and are now speaking out against contraception. Continue to pray for the bishops, to sacrifice for them, and to make your voices known to them. Commemorate the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. Write, phone, talk to your bishops, request private audiences throughout this coming year and personally insist on public orthodoxy and public teachings against contraception. This insistence on the part of the laity is a spiritual work of mercy towards the bishops, and God insists we be merciful.
In the early 600’s, Pope Honorius faced a heresy within the Church. When he was asked how to handle the heresy, he replied by forbidding discussion of the topic at all. Because he failed to teach the Faith, and because he forbad the use of both orthodox and heretical phrasing, the council found him derelict in his duties and condemned him as a heretic. His condemnation was confirmed by two ecumenical councils and the very liturgy of the Church, which for two centuries repeated the condemnation in the papal oath. The condemnation still stands.
Note well: he was not a heretic for having mis-taught. No Pope has ever mis-taught Church doctrine. Rather, his heresy lay in his silence.
Now, he was a good bishop in all other respects. He did much good for the people of Rome and for the Church as a whole. He died well-respected in most circles. But, his silence on one point of doctrine eventually condemned him.
From all the evidence, he was silent because he didn’t know what to do. That’s the problem with being infallible: infallibility means you won’t teach the wrong answer. Sadly, infallibility doesn’t mean you know the right answer, or that you are able to competently teach the right answer even if you do know it. Competent teaching is a skill like any other skill: use it or lose it.
As everyone knows, North American bishops have had a similar problem. Many of them dealt with actively homosexual priests primarily as if they suffered from a psychological problem instead of a sin problem. When the psychology Ph.D.’s treated these priests and told the bishops the priests were cured, the bishops believed the experts. They put the priests back in ministry.
Bishops don’t know anything about psychology. They had to rely on the secular experts. They had to rely on psychologists about sex because they had stopped teaching Church doctrine about sex. Since they weren’t regularly teaching sexual morality, they lost their ability to think clearly about it. They didn’t know the right answers anymore. That’s why they were stuck with the answers of lay Ph.D.s.
When did bishops stop teaching sexual morality? We in the United States can point to June 22, 1965 and Boston’s Cardinal John Cushing amazing statement, "I could not in conscience approve the legislation [supporting legalization of contraception, but] I will make no effort to impose my opinion upon others… I do not see where I have an obligation to impose my religious beliefs on people who just do not accept the same faith as I do."
Every bishop and every priest is responsible for the salvation of every person living within his diocese and/or parish. He is not just responsible for teaching and sanctifying the Catholics in his diocese, he is responsible for teaching and sanctifying everyone in his diocese. What would we say of a math professor who said, “I do not see where I have an obligation to impose my belief that 2 + 2 = 4 on students who just do not accept the same mathematics I do.” The Catholic Faith is more true and certain than the sunrise, indeed Catholic truth is the source from which the sun draws its ability to rise. But Cardinal Cushing reduced the eternal and divine Truth to the level of human opinion. He repudiated his responsibility to teach this Truth to the people of the world.
Pope Honorius was condemned simply because he forbad discussion of a doctrine. In a single statement, Cardinal Cushing denied both the truth and his own office. He labored under a materially heretical misunderstanding. The religious beliefs he held were not his anymore than the Mass he celebrated was his or the baptisms he conferred were his. These are all Christ’s, that is, they are all God’s. He did not hold beliefs, he held truths. We believe these things because they are true, and they remain true whether or not we believe them.
It is important that we fully understand this point. The Creed I repeat every Sunday is not a statement of what I believe, it is a statement that I recognize reality. The secular world has a somewhat similar practice: psychologists will sometimes ask a mental patient what year it is. If the patient answers correctly, it is likely he has at least some grip on reality. So it is with the Creed. I repeat the Creed at Sunday Mass to demonstrate that I am not yet theologically insane. I hold to the teachings of the Church because I am made for Truth, and this is it.
It is therefore somewhat disconcerting to listen to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). In the December 12th New York Times, Cathy Cleaver Ruse, the pro-life spokeswoman for the USCCB said, "When it comes to contraception as a policy issue - access, availability - the Catholic bishops do not get involved in that debate. But when it comes to abortion, that's a different matter. It's far greater than just a religious issue. It's a human rights issue."
The statement is breath-taking on several levels. Let’s consider a few.
First, every hormonal contraceptive acts as an abortifacient. The morning-after pill is the same damned thing (literally) as the birth control pill. Neither one really prevents ovulation, rather, all hormonal contraceptives keep the developing embryo from implanting in the uterus. That is, all hormonal contraceptives interrupt an existing pregnancy by causing a chemical abortion. Now, the bishops are no more embryologists than they are psychologists, so we can, perhaps, forgive their abysmal ignorance on this point.
But even if we ignore their ignorance of biology, it is certainly the case that abortion becomes necessary in any culture that sanctions contraception. The U.S. Supreme Court specifically recognized this fact when it upheld legal abortion in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey. Abortion is a necessary backup for contraceptive failure. The Pope understands and acknowledges this connection. So do secular American judges. Why doesn’t the USCCB?
And what on earth could the spokeswoman mean by implying that contraception is “just a religious issue”? As has been pointed out in an earlier column, religion binds back together what is broken. Part of what is broken in us human persons is our human rights. We are only fully human when we are free from sin. Thus our right and ability to be fully human is inseparable from religion, the binding together of the human nature broken by sin. Whenever we consider a truly religious issue, we are necessarily dealing with a human rights issue.
That’s why Cushing’s statement was material heresy, after all. He thought it was alright for the non-Catholics in his diocese to be slaves to sin, just as his American Catholic bishop predecessors prior to the Civil War heretically taught that it was sometimes alright for non-Catholics to be slaves to other men.
The Canadian bishops are scarcely better off. Consider the Winnipeg statement (http://www.therosarium.ca/winnipeg.html ) issued by those bishops in 1968. For nearly forty years, both secular and heretical Catholic commentators used this strangely worded statement as proof that contraception is acceptable for Canadian Catholics. For nearly forty years, the Canadian bishops have done essentially nothing to contradict this idea. They could elaborate, they could give a detailed explanation of the statement to demonstrate that it does not support the use of contraception. Instead, they are as silent as the USCCB, as silent as a condemned pope.
It is a matter of supreme irony that the Comstock laws, the American laws which made the sale or use of contraceptives in the United States illegal, were almost entirely the work of Protestant churches and politicians near the end of the 1800’s. These Protestant laws were overthrown by secular courts nearly a century later precisely because the Catholic bishops were silent at precisely the moment their voices were most needed. Many still are. Apparently, slavery loves company. It is not for nothing that St. John Chrysostom, a father and doctor of the Church, said, “The floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.”
But all hope is not lost. Nearly a decade ago, the bishops of the Philippines discovered their voices, saying:
"It is said that when seeking ways of regulating births, only 5% of you consult God. In the face of this unfortunate fact, we your pastors have been remiss: how few are there among you whom we have reached. There have been some couples eager to share their expertise and values on birth regulation with others. They did not receive adequate support from their priests. We did not give them due attention, believing then this ministry consisted merely of imparting a technique best left to married couples.
Only recently have we discovered how deep your yearning is for God to be present in your married lives. But we did not know then how to help you discover God’s presence and activity in your mission of Christian parenting. Afflicted with doubts about alternatives to contraceptive technology, we abandoned you to your confused and lonely consciences with a lame excuse: 'follow what your conscience tells you.' How little we realized that it was our consciences that needed to be formed first. A greater concern would have led us to discover that religious hunger in you."
A few bishops on this continent have also begun to re-join the eternal college of bishops and are now speaking out against contraception. Continue to pray for the bishops, to sacrifice for them, and to make your voices known to them. Commemorate the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. Write, phone, talk to your bishops, request private audiences throughout this coming year and personally insist on public orthodoxy and public teachings against contraception. This insistence on the part of the laity is a spiritual work of mercy towards the bishops, and God insists we be merciful.
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
The Morning After
It happens every time you open a bottle of cough syrup – a very long piece of paper folded dozens of times and covered with very small words flutters to the ground. It lists all the dosages, side effects, contraindications, and problems associated with the drug you are about to consume. Have you ever wondered how that little piece of paper came to be there?
Dozens of years ago, back in 1960, a radical feminist, a supporter of legal abortion and a woman’s right to control her own body, was given a new medication as she lay in the hospital following the birth of her first child. The medication was Enovid, and it was the first oral contraceptive on the US market.
This feminist, Barbara Seaman, discovered that the contraceptive her obstetrician was trying to shovel into her posed a major health threat. Within a year, the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle, the manufacturer of the drug, had in its secret files 132 reports of thrombosis and embolism and eleven reported deaths. How many women were injured and killed without ever being reported in the medical system is, to this day, not known.
Though the medical literature had scattered reports of the problem, nobody wanted to talk about it. The Nobel Laureate Frederick Robbins told the American Association of Medical Colleges “the dangers of overpopulation are so great that we may have to use certain techniques of conception control that may entail considerable risk to the individual woman.”
The FDA acknowledged that the drug was hazardous, but refused to pull it from the shelves, and eventually pulled even the acknowledgement of its hazards. The women using it didn’t realize that the manufacturer had watched women die during the drug trials, or that they knew it caused deaths after its release.
It took nearly a decade for Seaman to gather sufficient evidence about the side effects of the birth control pill to write one of the most famous books in the history of contraception, “The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill”. The books used medical reports to document the enormous health hazards posed by the contraceptive pill. Both the drug companies and Planned Parenthood tried to stop its publication. As a direct result of this book, a Congressional committee convened to investigate. The committee ordered drug companies to include warning information with oral contraceptives, and all other drugs they produced. That’s why we get those little pieces of paper in our cough syrup boxes – because oral contraceptives have a history of killing women.
The drugs turned out to be so hazardous that all high-dose birth control pills were eventually pulled from the market to avoid the lawsuits. Even the second and third generation low dose contraceptive pills remain hazardous. The FDA itself admits women on estrogen and progestin are at increased risk for “getting blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer, and gall bladder disease. For a woman with a uterus, estrogen increases her chance of getting endometrial cancer (cancer of the uterine lining).” The FDA also admits that these hormones increase the risk of dementia.
The first oral contraceptive were tested in the 1950’s on Puerto Rican women who were too poor and uneducated to afford lawyers. Several died during the tests. But Puerto Ricans eventually got more educated, so the drug companies moved their field tests.
The British Broadcasting Commission released a documentary in 1995 demonstrating that Norplant trials had likewise maimed and killed hundreds of women in Bangladesh and Haiti, the poorest countries in the world. Haiti alone is so unstable that it had 14 coups d'état and 8 changes of government in the ten years leading up the BBC report. Through USAID, our government helped the drug companies fund the studies that blinded, crippled and killed hundreds of poor black women.
The US manufacturer of Norplant became the subject of a class-action suit in 1994. The suit asserts significant health risks, menstrual irregularities and other side effects occur in women who use the Norplant contraceptive system, including prolonged or extended bleeding, spotting, amenorrhea, irregular cycles, frequent cycles and anti-cycles. Other side effects can include headaches, nervousness, nausea, dizziness, enlargement of the ovaries or fallopian tubes, dermatitis, acne, change in appetite, blood vessel abnormalities, weight gain, hirsutism or alopecia and skin discoloration. These disruptions can last for months or years.
Well, it’s the morning after in America. Now Preven B is the hot new contraceptive. It is argued that Preven B will reduce the number of abortions. No one has bothered to mention that countries like England, where the equivalent of Preven B has been available as an over-the-counter drug for two years, has exactly the same abortion rate it has always had.
Instead, we discover the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, one of the same groups who tried to shovel Enovid into Barbara Seaman back in 1960, supports over-the-counter sales of the high-dose birth control pill, Preven B. Now, Preven B has a higher drug dosage than the original birth control pill, the one which brought Congressional scrutiny and was pulled from the market because it killed too many women. And in a few weeks, any woman in the country will probably be able to self-medicate with it as often as she wants.
But we shouldn’t be concerned. After all, the experts recommending this work with the drug companies and the government. They’re here to help. Remember, ladies, what the gentleman did to you the night before bears no resemblance to what the drug companies will do to you the morning after.
Dozens of years ago, back in 1960, a radical feminist, a supporter of legal abortion and a woman’s right to control her own body, was given a new medication as she lay in the hospital following the birth of her first child. The medication was Enovid, and it was the first oral contraceptive on the US market.
This feminist, Barbara Seaman, discovered that the contraceptive her obstetrician was trying to shovel into her posed a major health threat. Within a year, the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle, the manufacturer of the drug, had in its secret files 132 reports of thrombosis and embolism and eleven reported deaths. How many women were injured and killed without ever being reported in the medical system is, to this day, not known.
Though the medical literature had scattered reports of the problem, nobody wanted to talk about it. The Nobel Laureate Frederick Robbins told the American Association of Medical Colleges “the dangers of overpopulation are so great that we may have to use certain techniques of conception control that may entail considerable risk to the individual woman.”
The FDA acknowledged that the drug was hazardous, but refused to pull it from the shelves, and eventually pulled even the acknowledgement of its hazards. The women using it didn’t realize that the manufacturer had watched women die during the drug trials, or that they knew it caused deaths after its release.
It took nearly a decade for Seaman to gather sufficient evidence about the side effects of the birth control pill to write one of the most famous books in the history of contraception, “The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill”. The books used medical reports to document the enormous health hazards posed by the contraceptive pill. Both the drug companies and Planned Parenthood tried to stop its publication. As a direct result of this book, a Congressional committee convened to investigate. The committee ordered drug companies to include warning information with oral contraceptives, and all other drugs they produced. That’s why we get those little pieces of paper in our cough syrup boxes – because oral contraceptives have a history of killing women.
The drugs turned out to be so hazardous that all high-dose birth control pills were eventually pulled from the market to avoid the lawsuits. Even the second and third generation low dose contraceptive pills remain hazardous. The FDA itself admits women on estrogen and progestin are at increased risk for “getting blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer, and gall bladder disease. For a woman with a uterus, estrogen increases her chance of getting endometrial cancer (cancer of the uterine lining).” The FDA also admits that these hormones increase the risk of dementia.
The first oral contraceptive were tested in the 1950’s on Puerto Rican women who were too poor and uneducated to afford lawyers. Several died during the tests. But Puerto Ricans eventually got more educated, so the drug companies moved their field tests.
The British Broadcasting Commission released a documentary in 1995 demonstrating that Norplant trials had likewise maimed and killed hundreds of women in Bangladesh and Haiti, the poorest countries in the world. Haiti alone is so unstable that it had 14 coups d'état and 8 changes of government in the ten years leading up the BBC report. Through USAID, our government helped the drug companies fund the studies that blinded, crippled and killed hundreds of poor black women.
The US manufacturer of Norplant became the subject of a class-action suit in 1994. The suit asserts significant health risks, menstrual irregularities and other side effects occur in women who use the Norplant contraceptive system, including prolonged or extended bleeding, spotting, amenorrhea, irregular cycles, frequent cycles and anti-cycles. Other side effects can include headaches, nervousness, nausea, dizziness, enlargement of the ovaries or fallopian tubes, dermatitis, acne, change in appetite, blood vessel abnormalities, weight gain, hirsutism or alopecia and skin discoloration. These disruptions can last for months or years.
Well, it’s the morning after in America. Now Preven B is the hot new contraceptive. It is argued that Preven B will reduce the number of abortions. No one has bothered to mention that countries like England, where the equivalent of Preven B has been available as an over-the-counter drug for two years, has exactly the same abortion rate it has always had.
Instead, we discover the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, one of the same groups who tried to shovel Enovid into Barbara Seaman back in 1960, supports over-the-counter sales of the high-dose birth control pill, Preven B. Now, Preven B has a higher drug dosage than the original birth control pill, the one which brought Congressional scrutiny and was pulled from the market because it killed too many women. And in a few weeks, any woman in the country will probably be able to self-medicate with it as often as she wants.
But we shouldn’t be concerned. After all, the experts recommending this work with the drug companies and the government. They’re here to help. Remember, ladies, what the gentleman did to you the night before bears no resemblance to what the drug companies will do to you the morning after.
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
Like father, Like Son
We often call St. Joseph a stepfather to Jesus, but that isn’t entirely true. While he was a stepfather in biology, he was a true father to Jesus in every other way. Now, when we think about that for a moment, it seems rather odd. After all, if we open the Catechism of the Catholic Church up at article #2221 and start reading through the duties of parents, we immediately run into this, “The fecundity of conjugal love cannot be reduced solely to the procreation of children, but must extend to their moral education and their spiritual formation. ‘The role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute.’”
Now, it’s easy to see how other step-parents can be true parents in every way but biology. As long as the parent is deeply involved in the moral education and spiritual formation of their adopted children, they are living the “fecundity of conjugal love”. That is, they are true parents. Every Christian parent understands what the CCC describes here: parenthood isn’t just about procreation. It’s about raising the child that has been conceived.
After all, we aren’t animals. Human beings don’t reproduce. We procreate. There’s an enormous difference between the two. Procreation means we take part in God’s divine act of creation, we participate in it as co-workers. We can do this because we are persons, called to image the Three Divine Persons.
Our ability to participate in the creation of persons is the highest form of creation, because it most closely images what happens within the Godhead. The Son and the Spirit are not created, but Son is begotten of the Father, and Spirit is breathed forth by the Father and the Son. That is, these two Persons of the Trinity find their origin in the Father. In a somewhat similar way, every human person finds his source and origin in his parents. Every created person is immortal, that is, while a created person has a beginning, he will have no end, he will exist beyond time itself. Procreation is participation in this eternally significant event.
But animals are not persons like men or angels or the Trinity, they are not in the image and likeness of God. They do not participate in the generation of persons. They do not procreate, they only reproduce.
Persons need to know about God so they can live out the communion with the divine Persons that they are called to. Angels are created with all the necessary knowledge already infused. Human beings are created without the necessary knowledge – we have to learn about God and be taught about God, we have to grow and mature, as a vine grows towards the sun. Thus, procreation creates a responsibility that simple reproduction does not.
A rabbit need not teach its young anything about God, for none of its young have an immortal soul as human beings do. They do not have an intellect or a will as persons do. But every human person has a soul, that is, every human person has a human intellect and a human will. That intellect and will need to grow and mature. The intellect must be fed with knowledge of God, so the will can choose Him. Thus, the act of procreation is an act that creates responsibility. By the fact that I have assisted in the creation of an immortal person, someone who is called by the Trinitarian Persons to live in intimate communion with Himself, I must teach that new immortal person about God, so that he knows Who he is made for, Who he is made to commune with. This is critical, because it is in this divine communion that the new, immortal person is given super-abundant life.
So, the fecundity of conjugal love, the life-giving capability of conjugal love, is not limited to biology, it necessarily has to include the spiritual as well. This is why Thomas Aquinas says parents are priests of the domestic Church, the family. A priest gives spiritual life through administering the sacraments, but a parent gives both biological life (through procreation) and spiritual life. Parents are the first heralds of the Gospel, and they are called to initiate their children into the mysteries of faith (CCC #2225).
This is why it seems odd to call Joseph a true parent. After all, Jesus is God. He possesses the divine intellect and the divine will. For all eternity before He wrapped Mary’s ovum around Himself and fertilized it, He knew He was God. As His Body grew from one cell to two cells to three cells to four, then eight, then sixteen, moving slowly down Mary’s fallopian tube, He knew He was God. As His embryonic body implanted in the lining of her womb, He knew He was God. During His birth, His life as a suckling babe through His entry into manhood, He always knew He was God. How could He not? He possessed the divine intellect.
So exactly what could Joseph teach God about Himself?
Keep in mind that Jesus not only took on a human body, He took on a complete human nature. That means He also took on a human soul: a human intellect and a human will. Now, Jesus is not, nor was He ever, a human person. Remember, we are persons because we are called into communion with God. He was already in communion with God before He entered Mary’s womb – He is the Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father. Thus, He was already a much more perfect Person than any human person could ever be, His communion with the Father is more perfect than any human person’s can be. So, although He possessed a human soul - human intellect and a human will - He is not a human person, He is always one of the Three Divine Persons. In Jesus’ Divine Person, two natures are united: the divine nature and human nature. That means Jesus possesses the one divine intellect and one divine will. It means He also possesses a human intellect and a human will. He has two intellects and two wills.
The divine intellect and divine will cannot be taught because there is nothing to teach Him. The divine intellect is the source of all knowledge, the divine will chose to bring all creation into existence. But, for human intellect and human will, it is a different story. Jesus’ human intellect needed to grow and develop. His human will needed to strengthen and mature. The capacities which are latent in every human being, and He was a human being, needed to come to their full power.
Now, God didn’t need Joseph in order to accomplish this growth and maturation. He could have done it completely on His own. But He humbled Himself, taking the form of a slave. So, in His divine humility, He permitted Joseph to do the work any parent would do in developing His human intellect. He permitted Joseph to help Him strengthen and mature His human will. This does not mean Jesus ever disobeyed His parents. Rather, in the very act of obeying every command Joseph or Mary gave Him, God’s human intellect and human will were trained.
Scriptures say that Christ learned obedience through suffering (Heb 5:8). Have you ever known how to do a thing, but held your tongue while your boss struggled to figure it out? Then you have a taste of what childhood was like for Jesus. He accepted this state of affairs joyfully. That is humility.
As a side note, we all need to keep this in mind when our priests and/or bishops do something impossibly silly. Humility is still a chief virtue. Now, there’s a fine line between commendable patience and damnable sloth when it comes to the spiritual works of mercy, especially works like admonishing the sinner, instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful and bearing wrongs patiently. Good Catholics may well disagree on exactly where that line lies in various situations. But, we should always seek to make sure we are on the right side of the line.
So, what did Joseph teach his Son? He taught Him the Scriptures. He taught Him how to live as an orthodox Jew. He taught Him how to love God and love His neighbor. Indeed, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that many of Jesus’ habits of speech or habits of life found their origin in Joseph’s speech and life, for it would be an unusual son who did not imitate his father in at least some way. We know Jesus does only what He sees His Father in heaven do, but it is certainly a pious thought to believe He endowed Joseph with many of the qualities He wanted to live, so that anyone who looked upon Him could say, “But is this not the carpenter’s son?” Indeed, the Church’s tradition concerning Joseph seems to verify that Jesus lived Joseph’s example to a superlative degree. Is St. Joseph not “the Terror of Demons”, “Protector of the Universal Church” and “Patron of a Good Death?” Jesus is all of these things, but even better. Like father, like Son. Gentlemen, perhaps we should take note.
Now, it’s easy to see how other step-parents can be true parents in every way but biology. As long as the parent is deeply involved in the moral education and spiritual formation of their adopted children, they are living the “fecundity of conjugal love”. That is, they are true parents. Every Christian parent understands what the CCC describes here: parenthood isn’t just about procreation. It’s about raising the child that has been conceived.
After all, we aren’t animals. Human beings don’t reproduce. We procreate. There’s an enormous difference between the two. Procreation means we take part in God’s divine act of creation, we participate in it as co-workers. We can do this because we are persons, called to image the Three Divine Persons.
Our ability to participate in the creation of persons is the highest form of creation, because it most closely images what happens within the Godhead. The Son and the Spirit are not created, but Son is begotten of the Father, and Spirit is breathed forth by the Father and the Son. That is, these two Persons of the Trinity find their origin in the Father. In a somewhat similar way, every human person finds his source and origin in his parents. Every created person is immortal, that is, while a created person has a beginning, he will have no end, he will exist beyond time itself. Procreation is participation in this eternally significant event.
But animals are not persons like men or angels or the Trinity, they are not in the image and likeness of God. They do not participate in the generation of persons. They do not procreate, they only reproduce.
Persons need to know about God so they can live out the communion with the divine Persons that they are called to. Angels are created with all the necessary knowledge already infused. Human beings are created without the necessary knowledge – we have to learn about God and be taught about God, we have to grow and mature, as a vine grows towards the sun. Thus, procreation creates a responsibility that simple reproduction does not.
A rabbit need not teach its young anything about God, for none of its young have an immortal soul as human beings do. They do not have an intellect or a will as persons do. But every human person has a soul, that is, every human person has a human intellect and a human will. That intellect and will need to grow and mature. The intellect must be fed with knowledge of God, so the will can choose Him. Thus, the act of procreation is an act that creates responsibility. By the fact that I have assisted in the creation of an immortal person, someone who is called by the Trinitarian Persons to live in intimate communion with Himself, I must teach that new immortal person about God, so that he knows Who he is made for, Who he is made to commune with. This is critical, because it is in this divine communion that the new, immortal person is given super-abundant life.
So, the fecundity of conjugal love, the life-giving capability of conjugal love, is not limited to biology, it necessarily has to include the spiritual as well. This is why Thomas Aquinas says parents are priests of the domestic Church, the family. A priest gives spiritual life through administering the sacraments, but a parent gives both biological life (through procreation) and spiritual life. Parents are the first heralds of the Gospel, and they are called to initiate their children into the mysteries of faith (CCC #2225).
This is why it seems odd to call Joseph a true parent. After all, Jesus is God. He possesses the divine intellect and the divine will. For all eternity before He wrapped Mary’s ovum around Himself and fertilized it, He knew He was God. As His Body grew from one cell to two cells to three cells to four, then eight, then sixteen, moving slowly down Mary’s fallopian tube, He knew He was God. As His embryonic body implanted in the lining of her womb, He knew He was God. During His birth, His life as a suckling babe through His entry into manhood, He always knew He was God. How could He not? He possessed the divine intellect.
So exactly what could Joseph teach God about Himself?
Keep in mind that Jesus not only took on a human body, He took on a complete human nature. That means He also took on a human soul: a human intellect and a human will. Now, Jesus is not, nor was He ever, a human person. Remember, we are persons because we are called into communion with God. He was already in communion with God before He entered Mary’s womb – He is the Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father. Thus, He was already a much more perfect Person than any human person could ever be, His communion with the Father is more perfect than any human person’s can be. So, although He possessed a human soul - human intellect and a human will - He is not a human person, He is always one of the Three Divine Persons. In Jesus’ Divine Person, two natures are united: the divine nature and human nature. That means Jesus possesses the one divine intellect and one divine will. It means He also possesses a human intellect and a human will. He has two intellects and two wills.
The divine intellect and divine will cannot be taught because there is nothing to teach Him. The divine intellect is the source of all knowledge, the divine will chose to bring all creation into existence. But, for human intellect and human will, it is a different story. Jesus’ human intellect needed to grow and develop. His human will needed to strengthen and mature. The capacities which are latent in every human being, and He was a human being, needed to come to their full power.
Now, God didn’t need Joseph in order to accomplish this growth and maturation. He could have done it completely on His own. But He humbled Himself, taking the form of a slave. So, in His divine humility, He permitted Joseph to do the work any parent would do in developing His human intellect. He permitted Joseph to help Him strengthen and mature His human will. This does not mean Jesus ever disobeyed His parents. Rather, in the very act of obeying every command Joseph or Mary gave Him, God’s human intellect and human will were trained.
Scriptures say that Christ learned obedience through suffering (Heb 5:8). Have you ever known how to do a thing, but held your tongue while your boss struggled to figure it out? Then you have a taste of what childhood was like for Jesus. He accepted this state of affairs joyfully. That is humility.
As a side note, we all need to keep this in mind when our priests and/or bishops do something impossibly silly. Humility is still a chief virtue. Now, there’s a fine line between commendable patience and damnable sloth when it comes to the spiritual works of mercy, especially works like admonishing the sinner, instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful and bearing wrongs patiently. Good Catholics may well disagree on exactly where that line lies in various situations. But, we should always seek to make sure we are on the right side of the line.
So, what did Joseph teach his Son? He taught Him the Scriptures. He taught Him how to live as an orthodox Jew. He taught Him how to love God and love His neighbor. Indeed, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that many of Jesus’ habits of speech or habits of life found their origin in Joseph’s speech and life, for it would be an unusual son who did not imitate his father in at least some way. We know Jesus does only what He sees His Father in heaven do, but it is certainly a pious thought to believe He endowed Joseph with many of the qualities He wanted to live, so that anyone who looked upon Him could say, “But is this not the carpenter’s son?” Indeed, the Church’s tradition concerning Joseph seems to verify that Jesus lived Joseph’s example to a superlative degree. Is St. Joseph not “the Terror of Demons”, “Protector of the Universal Church” and “Patron of a Good Death?” Jesus is all of these things, but even better. Like father, like Son. Gentlemen, perhaps we should take note.
Sunday, December 21, 2003
Hi, Mom!
Catholics have it great. We get to celebrate New Year twice: once on the first Sunday of Advent, and again on January 1, the feast of Mary, Mother of God. That title, Mother of God, has long been a point of contention for people. As far back as the 300’s, some Christians have argued that Mary couldn’t be the Mother of God. After all, Mary is just a human being. God existed before she did. She didn’t create Him. So how could she possibly be His mother?
It’s a darned good question. It requires some careful thought about the Incarnation to see how it is true. In the Christmas column, we saw that Jesus unites the one divine nature and human nature in His own Person. In order to understand the Incarnation, we have to know what a person is and what a nature is.
A person is that which possesses an intellect and a will. Together, the human intellect and the human will make up the human soul. So what are these two aspects of the soul? The intellect is that which knows, the will is that which chooses. The will is sometimes called the “appetite” or “hunger” of the intellect, because it chooses based on what the intellect finds to be good. How these two operate is rather important, for the things the intellect knows and the will chooses form the basis for relationships.
Read the next sentence very carefully. Persons are defined by their relations. This is critical. We may know God is all-powerful and all-knowing, but nothing in those attributes tells us that He is three Persons. We only discover the Divine Persons by discovering the relations within the Godhead. God the Father eternally begets God the Son, God the Son is eternally begotten by God the Father. God the Father and God the Son together breathe forth God the Holy Spirit. These relationships, the begetting, the breathing forth, these are the only things that distinguish the Three Persons of the Trinity. If we didn’t know these relationships existed, we wouldn’t know Trinity exists. Only relationships distinguish persons.
We are made in God’s image and likeness. If relationship is that critical to the Persons of the Godhead, it is going to be important to us created human persons. This is part of the answer to the question posed by the title “Mary, Mother of God”. But we need more.
We know about person now, but what about nature? What is that? Nature is the range of options available to an entity. Rabbits have a rabbit nature. They can hop, but they don’t have the ability to fly. Birds have a bird nature. They can hop and they can fly. Rocks have a rock nature. They don’t hop or fly. Not all things with natures are persons. Birds, rocks, rabbits – they have natures, but none of these are persons. There are only three kinds of persons: the uncreated persons of the Godhead, and the created persons, human and angelic.
Now, we are persons precisely because God calls us into relationship with Himself. We are persons because we are called into relationship with the three Divine Persons. That is, my mother and father did not give me my personhood, God did. My mother and father gave me my body, but God created my soul, He infused me with an intellect and a will, with a soul capable of direct communion with Himself. So, when any of us look at our mothers and try to discern exactly what makes her a mother, we can see that she gave me her ovum, and she gave me her womb to grow in. That’s it, and it is quite enough. She gave me my body, God provided me my personhood because God immediately created and infused my human soul. Even though my mother neither created my personhood nor gave me my personhood, God enabled her to conceive a person and give birth to a person.
Mary did exactly this for Jesus. According to Genesis 3:15, Mary gave “her seed” to God, she gave her ovum. She gave God her womb to grow in. God provided the Personhood. Instead of creating a human person, He actually gave His own Divine Person. Mary conceived a Person in her womb and gave birth to a Person. Both for our mothers and for His own mother, God provided the person. The major difference between her maternity and the maternity of any other woman lies only in this: Mary conceived a Person who existed before she did. She gave birth to a Person who existed before she did. The rest of the mothers who have ever lived conceived persons that God created fresh and new on the spot. But both Mary and our mothers gave exactly the same thing to the persons God helped both of them conceive and birth: each gave her own ovum and each gave her own womb. That’s motherhood. That’s why Mary is Mother of God. She did as much as any mother ever has. God did the rest, as He always does.
But let’s go further. Mary’s motherhood resonates even more deeply when we know something about both the inner life of the Trinity and the Theology of the Body. The Trinity has a quality that few people talk about: the interpenetration of Persons. The Interpenetration of Divine Persons is simply this: no matter which Person of the Trinity you may contemplate, the other two Persons of the Trinity are wholly contained within Him. This is a very important aspect of the inner life of the Trinity, for it is in Mary’s pregnancy that we first get a concrete example of a divine Person completely contained within another person. Mary is the first to live out the inner life of the Trinity in her own body. The Interpenetration of Persons she lived is something we are all called to live out, right here, right now.
Have you ever seen the medieval and Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation? The angel Gabriel is depicted in various ways, as is Mary, but one thing is constant. Nearly every rendition of the scene shows Mary reading the Scriptures as Gabriel approaches. Catechesis in Our Times, article #27, explains why: “…catechesis must be impregnated and penetrated by the thought, the spirit and the outlook of the Bible and the Gospels through assiduous contact with the texts themselves…” Look at the verbs the Holy Father chose: “impregnated… penetrated.” The Scriptures impregnate us, they penetrate us. Earlier generations knew what we have forgotten. We must be penetrated by, impregnated with the Word if we are to successfully pass on the Faith.
Why? Because “the Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord…” The 21st article of Vatican II’s dogmatic constitution on divine revelation makes the connection clear. The Word of Scripture and the Word of God are intimately linked. Mary had the grace to understand the centrality of Scripture to human life. She was impregnated, penetrated by the Word long before the angel Gabriel appeared. The angel drew together the strands of prophecy she had been studying and made a breath-taking connection: all the prophecies of Scripture could be fulfilled right here, right now. She had only to love God with her whole being. She had only to love Him as He desires each of us to love Him.
She whispered, “Yes.”
In that moment, God leapt across the chasm separating us from Himself, He leapt into her womb and gave her the first and most powerful experience of Eucharist that anyone would ever have. The continuous, physical presence of “God with us” began here: “God with her.”
Christ commanded us in John 6: we are to gnaw on His flesh if we want eternal life. When we receive Him in Eucharist, He empowers us with the grace to be like Him. He gives us the power, the ability to change, to transform ourselves into an imago Dei, an image of God.
But note very carefully: if we want to be an imago Dei, we can do so only by first being an imago Marie. The very act of worthily receiving Christ into my body makes me an image of Mary. In Eucharist, the flesh of the Bridegroom penetrates me, impregnates me with eternal life. It is only by becoming like the pregnant and most Blessed Virgin that God enables me to become like Christ. By receiving Christ into myself, I begin to live out the Interpenetration of Persons which is the inner life of the Trinity. I begin to live heaven on earth. And all of this happens because God empowers me, through the Eucharist, to image Mary, Mother of God.
On the first day of the year, on the Feast of Mary, Mother of God, the Church grants the opportunity for a plenary indulgence to anyone who participates in devout public recitation of the hymn Veni, Creator (Come, Creator Spirit). We are very much encouraged to spend this day contemplating the new creation Christ makes of us through His Mother, on this, the first day of the secular year. Receive Christ in the Eucharist, make yourself like unto Mary, then pray the Veni, Creator in her honor. You will have started the New Year well.
It’s a darned good question. It requires some careful thought about the Incarnation to see how it is true. In the Christmas column, we saw that Jesus unites the one divine nature and human nature in His own Person. In order to understand the Incarnation, we have to know what a person is and what a nature is.
A person is that which possesses an intellect and a will. Together, the human intellect and the human will make up the human soul. So what are these two aspects of the soul? The intellect is that which knows, the will is that which chooses. The will is sometimes called the “appetite” or “hunger” of the intellect, because it chooses based on what the intellect finds to be good. How these two operate is rather important, for the things the intellect knows and the will chooses form the basis for relationships.
Read the next sentence very carefully. Persons are defined by their relations. This is critical. We may know God is all-powerful and all-knowing, but nothing in those attributes tells us that He is three Persons. We only discover the Divine Persons by discovering the relations within the Godhead. God the Father eternally begets God the Son, God the Son is eternally begotten by God the Father. God the Father and God the Son together breathe forth God the Holy Spirit. These relationships, the begetting, the breathing forth, these are the only things that distinguish the Three Persons of the Trinity. If we didn’t know these relationships existed, we wouldn’t know Trinity exists. Only relationships distinguish persons.
We are made in God’s image and likeness. If relationship is that critical to the Persons of the Godhead, it is going to be important to us created human persons. This is part of the answer to the question posed by the title “Mary, Mother of God”. But we need more.
We know about person now, but what about nature? What is that? Nature is the range of options available to an entity. Rabbits have a rabbit nature. They can hop, but they don’t have the ability to fly. Birds have a bird nature. They can hop and they can fly. Rocks have a rock nature. They don’t hop or fly. Not all things with natures are persons. Birds, rocks, rabbits – they have natures, but none of these are persons. There are only three kinds of persons: the uncreated persons of the Godhead, and the created persons, human and angelic.
Now, we are persons precisely because God calls us into relationship with Himself. We are persons because we are called into relationship with the three Divine Persons. That is, my mother and father did not give me my personhood, God did. My mother and father gave me my body, but God created my soul, He infused me with an intellect and a will, with a soul capable of direct communion with Himself. So, when any of us look at our mothers and try to discern exactly what makes her a mother, we can see that she gave me her ovum, and she gave me her womb to grow in. That’s it, and it is quite enough. She gave me my body, God provided me my personhood because God immediately created and infused my human soul. Even though my mother neither created my personhood nor gave me my personhood, God enabled her to conceive a person and give birth to a person.
Mary did exactly this for Jesus. According to Genesis 3:15, Mary gave “her seed” to God, she gave her ovum. She gave God her womb to grow in. God provided the Personhood. Instead of creating a human person, He actually gave His own Divine Person. Mary conceived a Person in her womb and gave birth to a Person. Both for our mothers and for His own mother, God provided the person. The major difference between her maternity and the maternity of any other woman lies only in this: Mary conceived a Person who existed before she did. She gave birth to a Person who existed before she did. The rest of the mothers who have ever lived conceived persons that God created fresh and new on the spot. But both Mary and our mothers gave exactly the same thing to the persons God helped both of them conceive and birth: each gave her own ovum and each gave her own womb. That’s motherhood. That’s why Mary is Mother of God. She did as much as any mother ever has. God did the rest, as He always does.
But let’s go further. Mary’s motherhood resonates even more deeply when we know something about both the inner life of the Trinity and the Theology of the Body. The Trinity has a quality that few people talk about: the interpenetration of Persons. The Interpenetration of Divine Persons is simply this: no matter which Person of the Trinity you may contemplate, the other two Persons of the Trinity are wholly contained within Him. This is a very important aspect of the inner life of the Trinity, for it is in Mary’s pregnancy that we first get a concrete example of a divine Person completely contained within another person. Mary is the first to live out the inner life of the Trinity in her own body. The Interpenetration of Persons she lived is something we are all called to live out, right here, right now.
Have you ever seen the medieval and Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation? The angel Gabriel is depicted in various ways, as is Mary, but one thing is constant. Nearly every rendition of the scene shows Mary reading the Scriptures as Gabriel approaches. Catechesis in Our Times, article #27, explains why: “…catechesis must be impregnated and penetrated by the thought, the spirit and the outlook of the Bible and the Gospels through assiduous contact with the texts themselves…” Look at the verbs the Holy Father chose: “impregnated… penetrated.” The Scriptures impregnate us, they penetrate us. Earlier generations knew what we have forgotten. We must be penetrated by, impregnated with the Word if we are to successfully pass on the Faith.
Why? Because “the Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord…” The 21st article of Vatican II’s dogmatic constitution on divine revelation makes the connection clear. The Word of Scripture and the Word of God are intimately linked. Mary had the grace to understand the centrality of Scripture to human life. She was impregnated, penetrated by the Word long before the angel Gabriel appeared. The angel drew together the strands of prophecy she had been studying and made a breath-taking connection: all the prophecies of Scripture could be fulfilled right here, right now. She had only to love God with her whole being. She had only to love Him as He desires each of us to love Him.
She whispered, “Yes.”
In that moment, God leapt across the chasm separating us from Himself, He leapt into her womb and gave her the first and most powerful experience of Eucharist that anyone would ever have. The continuous, physical presence of “God with us” began here: “God with her.”
Christ commanded us in John 6: we are to gnaw on His flesh if we want eternal life. When we receive Him in Eucharist, He empowers us with the grace to be like Him. He gives us the power, the ability to change, to transform ourselves into an imago Dei, an image of God.
But note very carefully: if we want to be an imago Dei, we can do so only by first being an imago Marie. The very act of worthily receiving Christ into my body makes me an image of Mary. In Eucharist, the flesh of the Bridegroom penetrates me, impregnates me with eternal life. It is only by becoming like the pregnant and most Blessed Virgin that God enables me to become like Christ. By receiving Christ into myself, I begin to live out the Interpenetration of Persons which is the inner life of the Trinity. I begin to live heaven on earth. And all of this happens because God empowers me, through the Eucharist, to image Mary, Mother of God.
On the first day of the year, on the Feast of Mary, Mother of God, the Church grants the opportunity for a plenary indulgence to anyone who participates in devout public recitation of the hymn Veni, Creator (Come, Creator Spirit). We are very much encouraged to spend this day contemplating the new creation Christ makes of us through His Mother, on this, the first day of the secular year. Receive Christ in the Eucharist, make yourself like unto Mary, then pray the Veni, Creator in her honor. You will have started the New Year well.
A Tropical Christmas Season
We spent last week contemplating the celibacy of Mary and Joseph. Now we can spend it contemplating the relationship between celibacy and Eucharistic adoration.
“It is not good that man should be alone,” says Genesis 2:18. How many times have you heard someone quote that verse as the beginning of their attack on a priest’s vow of celibacy? They are right to quote this verse, because it lies at the center of the vow. As we saw last week, marriage is meant to be a divine training ground for life in heaven. Clearly, this training is necessary, since every person who has ever lived was created into a set of family relations: everyone has a mother and a father, parents and grandparents, although they may never have met. Most have brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, or nieces and nephews. No matter what your state in life as an adult, no matter what your knowledge of these things, these family relationships are there, making you what you are, either by their presence or their partial absence.
The existence of family is, therefore, as common as our experience of eating and breathing. Just as some of us have difficulty with the last two, some of us have difficulty with the first, but the relationship is there. And remember, relationship is key.
We can look at any aspect of God: His power, His omniscience, whatever it might be, but none of these things allow us to perceive the Trinity. Rather, the only thing that makes the Trinity of Persons clear is the relations within the Godhead. If the Father were not eternally begetting the Son, if the Son were not eternally begotten of the Father, if the Father and the Son did not eternally breathe forth the Spirit, there would be no Trinity. These three relations are what distinguish the Three Persons. If relationship is the defining characteristic of the Persons of God Himself, then we can safely assume that relationship is going to be of at least some importance to our own personhood.
In fact, our relations with God, with the angels, with man, these will be the only things that distinguish us as persons as well. As we saw from the Christmas meditation, these relationships depend not just on our soul, but on our flesh.
“Man is a person in the unity of his body and his spirit. The body can never be reduced to mere matter. It is a spiritualized body, just as man’s spirit is so closely united to the body that he can be described as an embodied spirit”. These words of John Paul II, in his Letter to Families, paragraph #19, tell us just how critically important the flesh is to us. God intended us to have relations with other persons not just as an intellectual exercise, but in the movement and press and sweat of our very flesh. This is why the Incarnation is so important to us, this is why “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist…” (1 John 4:2-3). The anti-Christ is described as the one who denies that God came in the flesh. The flesh is the key to discerning who belongs to God and who does not.
So, family is the divine training ground through which every living person must pass, and marriage is the divine training ground which the vast majority of people need in order to be prepared to enter heaven and participate in the life of the First Family, but what of celibacy? Celibacy only works when it is built on a relationship in the flesh, a relationship with a person. It is not good for man to be alone. That is why God gave us Himself in the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is the only thing that permits a celibate to be a celibate. Christ, substantially present in the Eucharist, is the Divine Person of the Son of God in the Flesh. He is present Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Every baptized person, whether male or female, is made a Bride of Christ by baptism. Why a bride? Because God is always the first principle, He is always the actor. Unless He penetrates us with grace, unless He sends us what we need, we cannot respond. He acts, we react, He moves, we respond. He is Bridegroom, we are Bride.
In the Mass, that is, in the Nuptial Feast, the Flesh of the Bridegroom enters the flesh of the Bride, and we are given life. We have, in that sacramental reception, one-flesh union. We live out the life of Trinity on a small scale, for the Son of God dwells within me, I am totally interpenetrated by Him.
Not everyone is given the grace to fully appreciate what this means. But, as Jesus said, some are given this grace (Matt 19:12). The men and women who choose celibacy because they recognize and want to constantly live the gift of heaven Christ gives us in the Eucharist have clearly chosen the highest possible way. Through their prayer life before the sacrament and in the reception of the sacrament, they live the ecstasy of heaven: they have a personal relationship with a divine Person in the flesh. We who are married need sex to help us understand Eucharist – celibates understand it directly.
But, for those who are unmarried and do not know or do not understand Eucharist, or who actively reject Eucharist, they fall under the sorrow implied in Genesis. It is not good for man to be alone. We are meant to be joined in marriage to another person: either we join ourselves to Christ through our union with an image of Christ, that is, a human spouse, or we join ourselves to Christ directly through a life of celibacy and Eucharistic adoration/reception. We can do both. We cannot refuse both.
Hell is being cut off from the communion of persons, being cut off from the Godhead. Just as Eucharist is a foretaste of heaven, so living the life of an unmarried person without knowledge of Eucharist is a foretaste of hell, for it is a life cut off from the in-the-flesh communion of persons.
If anyone wonders why fornication is so popular today, it is precisely because knowledge of Eucharist is so weak. We each know, instinctively, that we are to be in one-flesh communion with the divine Persons. But if we do not know the divine Persons, then we must settle for what we do know: human persons. If we cannot attain the sacrament of marriage, then we pretend to mimic it, because we know we are made for it, and we cannot live without it. If we cannot attain the ecstasy of heaven, then we settle for the pale sign of that ecstasy given here on earth in sexual communion. And, after having made so many concessions and after having cut so many corners, we remain unhappy and do not know why. We live the life of a walking corpse, with our hearts cut out of us, and wonder at how cold we have become.
Our God is a consuming fire (Heb 12:29). We often remark on the fact that God was born in a stable. We rarely remark on the fact that He was born at the coldest time of the year. To One who is Love, the fire of our love must be cold indeed. It was cold on the Cross, but it was cold in the stable as well. "I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” said the Christ (Luke 12:49). He walked among us, He and His mother the only living beings amongst a sea of walking dead and said, “Everyone must be salted with fire!” (Mark 9:49). He left the warmth of His mother’s womb for the cold welcome of the world. Now, He asks us to accept His warmth and find a place by the fire. Stay before the tabernacle today, and bask in the heat of the Son.
“It is not good that man should be alone,” says Genesis 2:18. How many times have you heard someone quote that verse as the beginning of their attack on a priest’s vow of celibacy? They are right to quote this verse, because it lies at the center of the vow. As we saw last week, marriage is meant to be a divine training ground for life in heaven. Clearly, this training is necessary, since every person who has ever lived was created into a set of family relations: everyone has a mother and a father, parents and grandparents, although they may never have met. Most have brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, or nieces and nephews. No matter what your state in life as an adult, no matter what your knowledge of these things, these family relationships are there, making you what you are, either by their presence or their partial absence.
The existence of family is, therefore, as common as our experience of eating and breathing. Just as some of us have difficulty with the last two, some of us have difficulty with the first, but the relationship is there. And remember, relationship is key.
We can look at any aspect of God: His power, His omniscience, whatever it might be, but none of these things allow us to perceive the Trinity. Rather, the only thing that makes the Trinity of Persons clear is the relations within the Godhead. If the Father were not eternally begetting the Son, if the Son were not eternally begotten of the Father, if the Father and the Son did not eternally breathe forth the Spirit, there would be no Trinity. These three relations are what distinguish the Three Persons. If relationship is the defining characteristic of the Persons of God Himself, then we can safely assume that relationship is going to be of at least some importance to our own personhood.
In fact, our relations with God, with the angels, with man, these will be the only things that distinguish us as persons as well. As we saw from the Christmas meditation, these relationships depend not just on our soul, but on our flesh.
“Man is a person in the unity of his body and his spirit. The body can never be reduced to mere matter. It is a spiritualized body, just as man’s spirit is so closely united to the body that he can be described as an embodied spirit”. These words of John Paul II, in his Letter to Families, paragraph #19, tell us just how critically important the flesh is to us. God intended us to have relations with other persons not just as an intellectual exercise, but in the movement and press and sweat of our very flesh. This is why the Incarnation is so important to us, this is why “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist…” (1 John 4:2-3). The anti-Christ is described as the one who denies that God came in the flesh. The flesh is the key to discerning who belongs to God and who does not.
So, family is the divine training ground through which every living person must pass, and marriage is the divine training ground which the vast majority of people need in order to be prepared to enter heaven and participate in the life of the First Family, but what of celibacy? Celibacy only works when it is built on a relationship in the flesh, a relationship with a person. It is not good for man to be alone. That is why God gave us Himself in the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is the only thing that permits a celibate to be a celibate. Christ, substantially present in the Eucharist, is the Divine Person of the Son of God in the Flesh. He is present Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Every baptized person, whether male or female, is made a Bride of Christ by baptism. Why a bride? Because God is always the first principle, He is always the actor. Unless He penetrates us with grace, unless He sends us what we need, we cannot respond. He acts, we react, He moves, we respond. He is Bridegroom, we are Bride.
In the Mass, that is, in the Nuptial Feast, the Flesh of the Bridegroom enters the flesh of the Bride, and we are given life. We have, in that sacramental reception, one-flesh union. We live out the life of Trinity on a small scale, for the Son of God dwells within me, I am totally interpenetrated by Him.
Not everyone is given the grace to fully appreciate what this means. But, as Jesus said, some are given this grace (Matt 19:12). The men and women who choose celibacy because they recognize and want to constantly live the gift of heaven Christ gives us in the Eucharist have clearly chosen the highest possible way. Through their prayer life before the sacrament and in the reception of the sacrament, they live the ecstasy of heaven: they have a personal relationship with a divine Person in the flesh. We who are married need sex to help us understand Eucharist – celibates understand it directly.
But, for those who are unmarried and do not know or do not understand Eucharist, or who actively reject Eucharist, they fall under the sorrow implied in Genesis. It is not good for man to be alone. We are meant to be joined in marriage to another person: either we join ourselves to Christ through our union with an image of Christ, that is, a human spouse, or we join ourselves to Christ directly through a life of celibacy and Eucharistic adoration/reception. We can do both. We cannot refuse both.
Hell is being cut off from the communion of persons, being cut off from the Godhead. Just as Eucharist is a foretaste of heaven, so living the life of an unmarried person without knowledge of Eucharist is a foretaste of hell, for it is a life cut off from the in-the-flesh communion of persons.
If anyone wonders why fornication is so popular today, it is precisely because knowledge of Eucharist is so weak. We each know, instinctively, that we are to be in one-flesh communion with the divine Persons. But if we do not know the divine Persons, then we must settle for what we do know: human persons. If we cannot attain the sacrament of marriage, then we pretend to mimic it, because we know we are made for it, and we cannot live without it. If we cannot attain the ecstasy of heaven, then we settle for the pale sign of that ecstasy given here on earth in sexual communion. And, after having made so many concessions and after having cut so many corners, we remain unhappy and do not know why. We live the life of a walking corpse, with our hearts cut out of us, and wonder at how cold we have become.
Our God is a consuming fire (Heb 12:29). We often remark on the fact that God was born in a stable. We rarely remark on the fact that He was born at the coldest time of the year. To One who is Love, the fire of our love must be cold indeed. It was cold on the Cross, but it was cold in the stable as well. "I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” said the Christ (Luke 12:49). He walked among us, He and His mother the only living beings amongst a sea of walking dead and said, “Everyone must be salted with fire!” (Mark 9:49). He left the warmth of His mother’s womb for the cold welcome of the world. Now, He asks us to accept His warmth and find a place by the fire. Stay before the tabernacle today, and bask in the heat of the Son.
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
What Heaven is Like
Merry Christmas! May God bless your day with a deep love for your family starting today, for the Church intends us to begin an extended meditation on the family today. From now until the Sunday following Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Family, we are given a marvelous mystery to contemplate. God refused to take on our flesh without also taking on all the family relationships that our flesh implies.
Sadly, these very feasts, the feasts of Christmas and the Holy Family, divide Catholics not only from pagans, but also from most other Christians. As soon as anyone, Catholic or not, begins meditating on the conception and birth of Christ or on the Holy Family, we encounter the Catholic doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, of Mary and Joseph’s married celibacy. This is not easy to understand. But if we spend time thinking about it, we will be richly rewarded. Let’s spend ten minutes together thinking about it.
The answer to the apparent problem lies in an understanding of who God is and how we reflect Him. In other words, the answer can really only be understood through the Theology of the Body. John Paul II began teaching the Theology of the Body even before he was consecrated Pope. He spent a large proportion of Wednesday audiences in his first five years explaining it. Since then, nearly every theological teaching he has brought forward has in some way expanded our understanding of it. So, what is the Theology of the Body?
Well, it is nothing new. The Church has taught this since the beginning. It resonates throughout Scripture, rings through the works of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, echoes in the mystical visions of the greatest saints. John Paul II merely synthesizes it, summarizes it, organizes it. The Theology of the Body is based on the idea that man and woman together are meant to live out God’s life in our own bodies, at the very root of our being.
It is built on essentially three concepts. God is a communion of persons, a family whose life is love (Eph 3:19). Man and woman are meant to live together in such a way that we live out the inner life of God in our own body (Gen 1:27-28). Christ is the Bridegroom (John 3:29) who marries together the divine nature and human nature in His own Divine Person.
We could summarize those three statements another way. God is the First Family, our families image His, and Christ marries us into His family. That’s it. That’s all there is to the Theology of the Body. Everything else one may say about the it is just a logical extension of these three ideas.
As you can see from the repetition of the marriage/family concept, the Theology of the Body is going to be rather important to understanding the infancy of God and the Feast of the Holy Family. Now, a lot can be said about this understanding - the Pope spent five years’ worth of Wednesday audiences explaining it. The vast majority of the encyclicals and apostolic letters from his incredibly long and productive reign extend the explanation. But to understand the Holy Family we need only to understand two key things.
First, God made a marriage between our body and soul, a marriage that is not meant to be dissolved, a marriage that is necessary for our happiness. Death is the separation of body and soul. It wasn’t part of the original plan. That’s why we get our bodies back on the day of Last Judgement. We need our bodies to be completely happy in heaven. Our bodies are part of who we are, they are necessary for us to image God. The people who are in heaven now are not as happy as they will be when they get their bodies back on the Last Day.
Second, God is the First Family of Persons, and we are made to participate in His Divine Family life, we are meant to share in the Divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Now, since we need our bodies to be happy, we need our bodies in order to fully participate in His Divine Family life. Jesus Christ, who joins the divine and the human together in His Person, makes this participation possible.
We could sum these two points up as well: we are meant to be in an intimate family relationship, in our flesh, with God, with the Three Persons of the Trinity.
Wow. That’s no small thing. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that most of us are not ready for this. God knows we are not. That’s why He gives us families to live in here on earth. Our family on earth is meant to give each of us an opportunity to train, to prepare to live out a family relationship with God in the flesh. That is why family is so important. Paul said, “I bow my knee before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.” (Eph 3:19). Every family is a family only insofar as it looks like God. Insofar as it does not look like God, it is not a family, it is just a bunch of people living at the same address. Every family is a training ground in which we are to learn how to live in heaven. Because of sin, every family is also a pre-eminent place for us to learn about our Cross and to learn how to carry it.
In fact, marriage consecrates husband and wife for this task: the task of imaging heaven. The husband is consecrated by marriage to become his wife’s servant, and to do everything necessary to help her get to heaven. Similarly, the wife is consecrated by marriage to become the husband’s servant, and to do everything necessary to help him get to heaven. Together, through their conjugal relations, they beget children, whom they are consecrated to serve together: they do everything necessary to help their children get into heaven. The fecundity of conjugal relations is meant to be an echo of the fecundity of God. God intends the pleasure between man and wife, the pleasure of the marriage bed, of the raising of children, of the joy of earthly family life, to be a pale imitation of the joy we will have in participating in the life of the Divine Family of Persons. All of these earthly joys imitate and point to our greatest joy: the joy of sharing in the Divine Family life of God in our own flesh.
Now we can see why Mary and Joseph were celibate. Mary and Joseph had Jesus as their child. They lived, in their own flesh, family life with God in the flesh. They had the most intimate union with God one can know, the intimacy of parent with child, of father and mother with little one. What man looks for water when he has the finest wine? Why would Mary or Joseph partake of a pale imitation of joy when they had the fullest joy possible, the very divine joy God intended them to experience from the beginning of time? No matter how rich our family life or the joy we take in each other as spouses, we parents can at most only vaguely imitate heaven on earth: because Jesus is their child, Mary and Joseph lived heaven on earth.
And now we can also see why we have such a hard time understanding Mary and Joseph’s celibacy: we have spent so much time fixated on pale earthly imitations, that we haven’t spent enough time contemplating heaven. For the octave of Christmas, do yourself and your family a marvelous favor. Kneel before the Holy Family and contemplate heaven.
Sadly, these very feasts, the feasts of Christmas and the Holy Family, divide Catholics not only from pagans, but also from most other Christians. As soon as anyone, Catholic or not, begins meditating on the conception and birth of Christ or on the Holy Family, we encounter the Catholic doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, of Mary and Joseph’s married celibacy. This is not easy to understand. But if we spend time thinking about it, we will be richly rewarded. Let’s spend ten minutes together thinking about it.
The answer to the apparent problem lies in an understanding of who God is and how we reflect Him. In other words, the answer can really only be understood through the Theology of the Body. John Paul II began teaching the Theology of the Body even before he was consecrated Pope. He spent a large proportion of Wednesday audiences in his first five years explaining it. Since then, nearly every theological teaching he has brought forward has in some way expanded our understanding of it. So, what is the Theology of the Body?
Well, it is nothing new. The Church has taught this since the beginning. It resonates throughout Scripture, rings through the works of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, echoes in the mystical visions of the greatest saints. John Paul II merely synthesizes it, summarizes it, organizes it. The Theology of the Body is based on the idea that man and woman together are meant to live out God’s life in our own bodies, at the very root of our being.
It is built on essentially three concepts. God is a communion of persons, a family whose life is love (Eph 3:19). Man and woman are meant to live together in such a way that we live out the inner life of God in our own body (Gen 1:27-28). Christ is the Bridegroom (John 3:29) who marries together the divine nature and human nature in His own Divine Person.
We could summarize those three statements another way. God is the First Family, our families image His, and Christ marries us into His family. That’s it. That’s all there is to the Theology of the Body. Everything else one may say about the it is just a logical extension of these three ideas.
As you can see from the repetition of the marriage/family concept, the Theology of the Body is going to be rather important to understanding the infancy of God and the Feast of the Holy Family. Now, a lot can be said about this understanding - the Pope spent five years’ worth of Wednesday audiences explaining it. The vast majority of the encyclicals and apostolic letters from his incredibly long and productive reign extend the explanation. But to understand the Holy Family we need only to understand two key things.
First, God made a marriage between our body and soul, a marriage that is not meant to be dissolved, a marriage that is necessary for our happiness. Death is the separation of body and soul. It wasn’t part of the original plan. That’s why we get our bodies back on the day of Last Judgement. We need our bodies to be completely happy in heaven. Our bodies are part of who we are, they are necessary for us to image God. The people who are in heaven now are not as happy as they will be when they get their bodies back on the Last Day.
Second, God is the First Family of Persons, and we are made to participate in His Divine Family life, we are meant to share in the Divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Now, since we need our bodies to be happy, we need our bodies in order to fully participate in His Divine Family life. Jesus Christ, who joins the divine and the human together in His Person, makes this participation possible.
We could sum these two points up as well: we are meant to be in an intimate family relationship, in our flesh, with God, with the Three Persons of the Trinity.
Wow. That’s no small thing. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that most of us are not ready for this. God knows we are not. That’s why He gives us families to live in here on earth. Our family on earth is meant to give each of us an opportunity to train, to prepare to live out a family relationship with God in the flesh. That is why family is so important. Paul said, “I bow my knee before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.” (Eph 3:19). Every family is a family only insofar as it looks like God. Insofar as it does not look like God, it is not a family, it is just a bunch of people living at the same address. Every family is a training ground in which we are to learn how to live in heaven. Because of sin, every family is also a pre-eminent place for us to learn about our Cross and to learn how to carry it.
In fact, marriage consecrates husband and wife for this task: the task of imaging heaven. The husband is consecrated by marriage to become his wife’s servant, and to do everything necessary to help her get to heaven. Similarly, the wife is consecrated by marriage to become the husband’s servant, and to do everything necessary to help him get to heaven. Together, through their conjugal relations, they beget children, whom they are consecrated to serve together: they do everything necessary to help their children get into heaven. The fecundity of conjugal relations is meant to be an echo of the fecundity of God. God intends the pleasure between man and wife, the pleasure of the marriage bed, of the raising of children, of the joy of earthly family life, to be a pale imitation of the joy we will have in participating in the life of the Divine Family of Persons. All of these earthly joys imitate and point to our greatest joy: the joy of sharing in the Divine Family life of God in our own flesh.
Now we can see why Mary and Joseph were celibate. Mary and Joseph had Jesus as their child. They lived, in their own flesh, family life with God in the flesh. They had the most intimate union with God one can know, the intimacy of parent with child, of father and mother with little one. What man looks for water when he has the finest wine? Why would Mary or Joseph partake of a pale imitation of joy when they had the fullest joy possible, the very divine joy God intended them to experience from the beginning of time? No matter how rich our family life or the joy we take in each other as spouses, we parents can at most only vaguely imitate heaven on earth: because Jesus is their child, Mary and Joseph lived heaven on earth.
And now we can also see why we have such a hard time understanding Mary and Joseph’s celibacy: we have spent so much time fixated on pale earthly imitations, that we haven’t spent enough time contemplating heaven. For the octave of Christmas, do yourself and your family a marvelous favor. Kneel before the Holy Family and contemplate heaven.
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
He Dwelt Among Us
Many people don’t realize that Advent is meant to prepare us for Jesus’ Second Coming in the Flesh even more than it is meant to remind us of His First Coming as a babe. Fortunately, many of the old Advent carols that are sung today resonate this understanding beautifully. Let’s take a look at one.
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel is a 12th century hymn set to the tune of a 15th century French funeral processional. John Neale translated it into English in 1851. These facts alone tell us something about how earlier Christians viewed the Advent and Christmas seasons. For them, death was not a stranger, nor locked away in special buildings, in hospitals or mortuaries. Instead, it was a somewhat dour acquaintance who visited every home from time to time to take family and friends on a long voyage. Everyone had to make the voyage eventually; some simply left before others. Putting Advent lyrics to a funeral hymn reminded all concerned that Christ came to judge the living and the dead, and the second group was a lot larger than the first.
The song’s name is, of course, drawn from the first line of its first stanza. This line is given to us on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, in the first reading: Is 7:14 “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel [God with us].” Not only does this verse remind us of the several captivities that Israel suffered, both to foreign rulers and to sin itself, it references a deeper failing. The reason the prophet speaks these words is precisely because the king doesn’t have the backbone to ask for a sign. We are often warned from the pulpit not to test God. We should remember this passage, when God demanded that we test Him. There is a lesson here: sometimes God insists that we ask for the impossible, just so He can deliver. We should not lose hope if He does not deliver as we expect, or on our timetable. The prophet who spoke these words nor the king who heard them lived to see them fulfilled. But they were fulfilled.
The second stanza reminds us of Proverbs 2:6-8, “For the LORD gives wisdom, from his mouth come knowledge and understanding; He has counsel in store for the upright, he is the shield of those who walk honestly, guarding the paths of justice, protecting the way of his pious ones.” When it comes to God, the path of knowledge always leads through a person. In this case, it is the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
The third verse is now the basis for the Christmas Vigil Mass Gospel reading. Though the reference itself is Isaiah 11:1: “There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse” Jesse was the father of David, David was Israel’s second and greatest king, and Jesus was his direct descendant, as the first half dozen words of Matthew’s Gospel point out. David won victories over every enemy who opposed him. Jesus won the victory over mankind’s greatest enemies, the devil and the death he administers. This verse reminds us that we are in a war, and the enemy has many prisoners of war. We need to free them.
The fourth verse begins with the prophecy made by John the Baptist’s father, as soon as he regained his voice. He had been struck mute for daring to question God’s ability to bring forth a son out of his marital relations. His first words after regaining his voice are not a complaint, but a glorious celebration of God’s wonders. When you sing this verse, think of a time that you questioned God’s ability to deliver, and He came through anyhow. Did you praise Him with anything approaching the beauty of Zechariah’s canticle?
The fifth verse refers to Isaiah 22:22, the verse traditionally used to demonstrate Christ’s gift of His own authority to Peter, “The key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder.” This verse in turn refers to Isaiah 9:6 “The government shall be upon His shoulder.” God established a Church, His Bride, to help us reach the land He won for us through His shed blood.
The celebration of prophecy fulfilled continues with the sixth verse’s reference to Exodus 19:17-19, “Moses led the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stationed themselves at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was all wrapped in smoke, for the LORD came down upon it in fire. The smoke rose from it as though from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The trumpet blast grew louder and louder, while Moses was speaking and God answering him with thunder.” Note the connection between the scene here and the scene on Pentecost Sunday, when the Fire of God swept down from heaven and engulfed the apostles, giving them the ability to communicate to all people. The Law is universal, the languages communicate it to all.
The seventh verse again calls us back to Isaiah, this time to verse 11:10, “On that day, the root of Jesse, set up as a signal for the nations, the Gentiles shall seek out, for his dwelling shall be glorious.” This re-iterates the resonance of the previous verse. Even the Gentiles are called, even secular rulers will acknowledge themselves subservient to the King of Kings, and all will seek His mercy.
The eighth and last verse is appropriate to the song. Christ died on the sixth day, lay in the tomb on the Sabbath, the seventh day, and rose the next day, which is the eighth. Throughout Scripture, the number eight resonates with the Resurrection. It is in this signal event that all our hopes lie. As Paul stated so succinctly, “If He is not risen, our Faith is in vain.” His Resurrection is the one thing all non-Christian heresies unite in denying. Yet it is exactly His Resurrection and the incredible gift He has given us through that Resurrection, which makes Isaiah’s words linger in our minds long after the hymn is done. “For a child is born to us, a son is given us; upon his shoulder dominion rests. They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace. “
May God grant a blessed Advent and a blessed death to us all.
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel is a 12th century hymn set to the tune of a 15th century French funeral processional. John Neale translated it into English in 1851. These facts alone tell us something about how earlier Christians viewed the Advent and Christmas seasons. For them, death was not a stranger, nor locked away in special buildings, in hospitals or mortuaries. Instead, it was a somewhat dour acquaintance who visited every home from time to time to take family and friends on a long voyage. Everyone had to make the voyage eventually; some simply left before others. Putting Advent lyrics to a funeral hymn reminded all concerned that Christ came to judge the living and the dead, and the second group was a lot larger than the first.
The song’s name is, of course, drawn from the first line of its first stanza. This line is given to us on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, in the first reading: Is 7:14 “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel [God with us].” Not only does this verse remind us of the several captivities that Israel suffered, both to foreign rulers and to sin itself, it references a deeper failing. The reason the prophet speaks these words is precisely because the king doesn’t have the backbone to ask for a sign. We are often warned from the pulpit not to test God. We should remember this passage, when God demanded that we test Him. There is a lesson here: sometimes God insists that we ask for the impossible, just so He can deliver. We should not lose hope if He does not deliver as we expect, or on our timetable. The prophet who spoke these words nor the king who heard them lived to see them fulfilled. But they were fulfilled.
The second stanza reminds us of Proverbs 2:6-8, “For the LORD gives wisdom, from his mouth come knowledge and understanding; He has counsel in store for the upright, he is the shield of those who walk honestly, guarding the paths of justice, protecting the way of his pious ones.” When it comes to God, the path of knowledge always leads through a person. In this case, it is the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
The third verse is now the basis for the Christmas Vigil Mass Gospel reading. Though the reference itself is Isaiah 11:1: “There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse” Jesse was the father of David, David was Israel’s second and greatest king, and Jesus was his direct descendant, as the first half dozen words of Matthew’s Gospel point out. David won victories over every enemy who opposed him. Jesus won the victory over mankind’s greatest enemies, the devil and the death he administers. This verse reminds us that we are in a war, and the enemy has many prisoners of war. We need to free them.
The fourth verse begins with the prophecy made by John the Baptist’s father, as soon as he regained his voice. He had been struck mute for daring to question God’s ability to bring forth a son out of his marital relations. His first words after regaining his voice are not a complaint, but a glorious celebration of God’s wonders. When you sing this verse, think of a time that you questioned God’s ability to deliver, and He came through anyhow. Did you praise Him with anything approaching the beauty of Zechariah’s canticle?
The fifth verse refers to Isaiah 22:22, the verse traditionally used to demonstrate Christ’s gift of His own authority to Peter, “The key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder.” This verse in turn refers to Isaiah 9:6 “The government shall be upon His shoulder.” God established a Church, His Bride, to help us reach the land He won for us through His shed blood.
The celebration of prophecy fulfilled continues with the sixth verse’s reference to Exodus 19:17-19, “Moses led the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stationed themselves at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was all wrapped in smoke, for the LORD came down upon it in fire. The smoke rose from it as though from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The trumpet blast grew louder and louder, while Moses was speaking and God answering him with thunder.” Note the connection between the scene here and the scene on Pentecost Sunday, when the Fire of God swept down from heaven and engulfed the apostles, giving them the ability to communicate to all people. The Law is universal, the languages communicate it to all.
The seventh verse again calls us back to Isaiah, this time to verse 11:10, “On that day, the root of Jesse, set up as a signal for the nations, the Gentiles shall seek out, for his dwelling shall be glorious.” This re-iterates the resonance of the previous verse. Even the Gentiles are called, even secular rulers will acknowledge themselves subservient to the King of Kings, and all will seek His mercy.
The eighth and last verse is appropriate to the song. Christ died on the sixth day, lay in the tomb on the Sabbath, the seventh day, and rose the next day, which is the eighth. Throughout Scripture, the number eight resonates with the Resurrection. It is in this signal event that all our hopes lie. As Paul stated so succinctly, “If He is not risen, our Faith is in vain.” His Resurrection is the one thing all non-Christian heresies unite in denying. Yet it is exactly His Resurrection and the incredible gift He has given us through that Resurrection, which makes Isaiah’s words linger in our minds long after the hymn is done. “For a child is born to us, a son is given us; upon his shoulder dominion rests. They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace. “
May God grant a blessed Advent and a blessed death to us all.
Monday, December 08, 2003
Indulge yourself
Ever since the Jubilee Year indulgences promulgated by the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, interest in the doctrine of indulgences has been rising. Unfortunately, few people today knows what an indulgence is or how indulgences work. In order to understand this teaching, we have to have a good understanding of how grace works in our lives and how sin affects the workings of grace.
First, we must realize that grace is power. Grace is the power that keeps the world working the way it should. When I sin, I remove grace from the world. As a result, the world doesn't have the necessary grace, the necessary power, to work the way God intended it to.
So, let's say I am engaged in a very private sin, which no one knows about. I get drunk secretly. In fact, I get drunk secretly on a regular basis, but I go to work sober, so no one can tell. However, because I regularly get drunk, that is, I regularly sin, I remove grace from the world, I remove grace from myself.
Now, grace is the power to be joyful, the power to treat others as true images of God. Because I threw away grace through my sin, I no longer have the power, I no longer have the ability, to treat you the way you should be treated. Though no one knows about my secret drinking, everyone knows I'm a pain to work with. I'm mean, maybe not a lot mean, but mean nonetheless. I treat you badly when I see you.
When I treat you badly in the morning, you will be tempted to treat someone else badly later in the day as a result. I have taken grace out of our relationship by the very fact that I removed grace from myself through sin. In fact, I've removed grace from every relationship I'm in - everyone I meet the day after a drunk is not going to be treated as well as I should treat them. Even my relationship with God is harmed, because I am not giving Him proper respect either, since I am not treating the gifts He gave me - like my body and my mind - with the honor they deserve. I am supposed to treat myself like a temple of the Holy Spirit, and instead I throw the Spirit out and replace Him with spirits.
So, all of the people I interact with during the day are tempted to be mean to everyone they meet because they are simmering about the injustice I have inflicted on them. The effects of my sin are rippling out into the world, more grace is being stripped away with every interaction, and I'm at least an indirect cause of every loss of grace.
Now, when I Christ sends me the grace necessary to drive me to the confessional and I respond to it, Christ absolves my sins in that sacrament and restores to me the grace that I threw away. But, even if I go to confession immediately after having mistreated you, I have a problem. Though I am restored to a life of grace, there's a rippling circle of sin out in the world. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people are mistreating one another because I encouraged them to do so: I mistreated them first. This rippling could go on for a very long time. Indeed, this mistreatment could reverberate for quite some time after I'm dead. I am supposed to live my life on earth so I bring joy to everyone I meet. I haven’t. I sinned.
And, even though my sins are forgiven, the consequences of those sins need to be cleaned up. But I can't clean them up. This situation can only be healed by an infusion of grace, of power, an infusion of the very thing I stripped out of the world. I can’t restore the missing grace. I am not a source of grace - only Christ is. But I am supposed to be an image of Christ. Christ brought nothing but grace into the world. And even though I am now in a life of grace and look like Him in respect to myself, I have stripped grace away from the world, and am totally unlike Him in respect to his interaction with the world. What to do?
Well, we are God's coworkers, according to Scripture. God's work is the healing of the sins of the world, both temporal effects and spiritual effects. Thus, you and I also have the work of healing the sins of the world, both temporal and spiritual effects. What God commands us to do, God provides the grace to accomplish.
My act of sin was an act of arbitrary disobedience. Christ invites me to heal the consequences of my sin by giving me the grace to do arbitrary acts of obedience. I arbitrarily chose to strip away grace and ignore Him before. Now that I am in a state of grace and again conformed to His image through reconciliation, Christ establishes arbitrary acts of obedience that He rewards with even more grace. In this way, I can heal the world and restore it to what it would have been like if I had not sinned.
The grace that He makes available to the world through an indulgenced act is drawn from “the treasury of merit.” It is the infinite ocean of grace won by Christ on the Cross, and won by all the saints who lived in perfect conformance to Christ. Just as Peter wiped away his three-fold disobedience on the night of the trial with a three-fold act of love on the seashore, so I must make similar acts of love to wipe away my acts of disobedience. Christ established for Peter the acts he needed to take, the Church establishes for me the acts I need to take. Just as Peter's ability to affirm his love for Christ came from the Crucifixion, so the graces which heal the world of the effects of my sins come only from the Crucifixion, the infinite treasury of grace won by Christ on the Cross. He allows me to imitate Him by allowing me to win graces for the world in a way somewhat similar to the way He won graces for the world. He did it first, and He rewards my pale imitation by passing the graces onto me, so I may look like Him.
Thus, when I perform an indulgence for myself, all the people who find themselves living out grace-deficient relationships because of my sin will, because I do these acts of arbitrary obedience out of love of Christ, suddenly find the grace I had taken out of their relationships restored to them. In this way, Christ empowers me to become His co-worker, doing His work on earth. In this way, it is no more I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.
Now, Christ expects each one of us to heal the world and clean up our own mess. That means I can’t do an indulgence for another living person; the only living person I can only do them for is myself. As Paul tells us in Hebrews, obedience always involves suffering. If I don't get this mess cleaned up here, if I don’t get these acts of obedience/suffering finished while on earth, then I have to get them done before I can enter heaven. Only the perfect enter heaven, only those whose life left the world a better place get to see God. As long as any part of any one of my sins still afflict the world at the moment of my death, I have to do what is necessary to clean that mess up. This creates a problem.
My body was made to carry the load of suffering. When I die, my soul is separated from my body. Death separates me from the very tool I need most in order to do my work of obedience/suffering. This means the suffering of Purgatory has to be tremendously greater if it is to accomplish the same amount of clean-up work that could have been done while I was alive on earth. Because the souls in Purgatory don’t have their bodies with them, and are therefore at a distinct disadvantage in getting their work done, the Church permits we who are living to do indulgenced works for the dead, as a way to help them. In this way, 1 Corinthians 12 is fulfilled: those parts of the body that can carry the load help those that cannot.
This, in a nutshell, is an indulgence. Once Reconciliation has conformed me to Christ, I must then do indulgences to conform all my relationships in the world to Him as well. If I get this work done on earth, I leave the world a better place, with none having been harmed by me. That means I am a saint. So, at my death, I enter directly into heaven.
For more information on indulgences, click here
First, we must realize that grace is power. Grace is the power that keeps the world working the way it should. When I sin, I remove grace from the world. As a result, the world doesn't have the necessary grace, the necessary power, to work the way God intended it to.
So, let's say I am engaged in a very private sin, which no one knows about. I get drunk secretly. In fact, I get drunk secretly on a regular basis, but I go to work sober, so no one can tell. However, because I regularly get drunk, that is, I regularly sin, I remove grace from the world, I remove grace from myself.
Now, grace is the power to be joyful, the power to treat others as true images of God. Because I threw away grace through my sin, I no longer have the power, I no longer have the ability, to treat you the way you should be treated. Though no one knows about my secret drinking, everyone knows I'm a pain to work with. I'm mean, maybe not a lot mean, but mean nonetheless. I treat you badly when I see you.
When I treat you badly in the morning, you will be tempted to treat someone else badly later in the day as a result. I have taken grace out of our relationship by the very fact that I removed grace from myself through sin. In fact, I've removed grace from every relationship I'm in - everyone I meet the day after a drunk is not going to be treated as well as I should treat them. Even my relationship with God is harmed, because I am not giving Him proper respect either, since I am not treating the gifts He gave me - like my body and my mind - with the honor they deserve. I am supposed to treat myself like a temple of the Holy Spirit, and instead I throw the Spirit out and replace Him with spirits.
So, all of the people I interact with during the day are tempted to be mean to everyone they meet because they are simmering about the injustice I have inflicted on them. The effects of my sin are rippling out into the world, more grace is being stripped away with every interaction, and I'm at least an indirect cause of every loss of grace.
Now, when I Christ sends me the grace necessary to drive me to the confessional and I respond to it, Christ absolves my sins in that sacrament and restores to me the grace that I threw away. But, even if I go to confession immediately after having mistreated you, I have a problem. Though I am restored to a life of grace, there's a rippling circle of sin out in the world. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people are mistreating one another because I encouraged them to do so: I mistreated them first. This rippling could go on for a very long time. Indeed, this mistreatment could reverberate for quite some time after I'm dead. I am supposed to live my life on earth so I bring joy to everyone I meet. I haven’t. I sinned.
And, even though my sins are forgiven, the consequences of those sins need to be cleaned up. But I can't clean them up. This situation can only be healed by an infusion of grace, of power, an infusion of the very thing I stripped out of the world. I can’t restore the missing grace. I am not a source of grace - only Christ is. But I am supposed to be an image of Christ. Christ brought nothing but grace into the world. And even though I am now in a life of grace and look like Him in respect to myself, I have stripped grace away from the world, and am totally unlike Him in respect to his interaction with the world. What to do?
Well, we are God's coworkers, according to Scripture. God's work is the healing of the sins of the world, both temporal effects and spiritual effects. Thus, you and I also have the work of healing the sins of the world, both temporal and spiritual effects. What God commands us to do, God provides the grace to accomplish.
My act of sin was an act of arbitrary disobedience. Christ invites me to heal the consequences of my sin by giving me the grace to do arbitrary acts of obedience. I arbitrarily chose to strip away grace and ignore Him before. Now that I am in a state of grace and again conformed to His image through reconciliation, Christ establishes arbitrary acts of obedience that He rewards with even more grace. In this way, I can heal the world and restore it to what it would have been like if I had not sinned.
The grace that He makes available to the world through an indulgenced act is drawn from “the treasury of merit.” It is the infinite ocean of grace won by Christ on the Cross, and won by all the saints who lived in perfect conformance to Christ. Just as Peter wiped away his three-fold disobedience on the night of the trial with a three-fold act of love on the seashore, so I must make similar acts of love to wipe away my acts of disobedience. Christ established for Peter the acts he needed to take, the Church establishes for me the acts I need to take. Just as Peter's ability to affirm his love for Christ came from the Crucifixion, so the graces which heal the world of the effects of my sins come only from the Crucifixion, the infinite treasury of grace won by Christ on the Cross. He allows me to imitate Him by allowing me to win graces for the world in a way somewhat similar to the way He won graces for the world. He did it first, and He rewards my pale imitation by passing the graces onto me, so I may look like Him.
Thus, when I perform an indulgence for myself, all the people who find themselves living out grace-deficient relationships because of my sin will, because I do these acts of arbitrary obedience out of love of Christ, suddenly find the grace I had taken out of their relationships restored to them. In this way, Christ empowers me to become His co-worker, doing His work on earth. In this way, it is no more I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.
Now, Christ expects each one of us to heal the world and clean up our own mess. That means I can’t do an indulgence for another living person; the only living person I can only do them for is myself. As Paul tells us in Hebrews, obedience always involves suffering. If I don't get this mess cleaned up here, if I don’t get these acts of obedience/suffering finished while on earth, then I have to get them done before I can enter heaven. Only the perfect enter heaven, only those whose life left the world a better place get to see God. As long as any part of any one of my sins still afflict the world at the moment of my death, I have to do what is necessary to clean that mess up. This creates a problem.
My body was made to carry the load of suffering. When I die, my soul is separated from my body. Death separates me from the very tool I need most in order to do my work of obedience/suffering. This means the suffering of Purgatory has to be tremendously greater if it is to accomplish the same amount of clean-up work that could have been done while I was alive on earth. Because the souls in Purgatory don’t have their bodies with them, and are therefore at a distinct disadvantage in getting their work done, the Church permits we who are living to do indulgenced works for the dead, as a way to help them. In this way, 1 Corinthians 12 is fulfilled: those parts of the body that can carry the load help those that cannot.
This, in a nutshell, is an indulgence. Once Reconciliation has conformed me to Christ, I must then do indulgences to conform all my relationships in the world to Him as well. If I get this work done on earth, I leave the world a better place, with none having been harmed by me. That means I am a saint. So, at my death, I enter directly into heaven.
For more information on indulgences, click here
Saturday, December 06, 2003
Faith of Our Fathers
In late November, George W. Bush inadvertently entered an old controversy. When a reporter asked him if Moslems worship the same God as Christians, he replied in the affirmative. President Bush joins Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in this opinion. Sadly, he has angered many evangelical and fundamentalists who heatedly deny the proposition.
Not all Muslims are keen on the comparison either. Ingrid Mattson, professor of Islamic studies and Christian-Muslim relations at Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Conn., says "[If Christians assert] God is Trinitarian and that God includes Jesus, then Muslims do not in fact believe in that God." Islam portrays Allah, the Arabic name for God, as a single whole who cannot be divided into multiple parts.
How should a Catholic respond to this?
Well, we can begin by pointing out that the Muslims are right: God cannot be divided into parts. In fact, the doctrine of the Trinity emphatically denies that God has any parts or that He can be divided into parts. If divinity could be separated or divided, there would be three gods, not one. The idea that the Three Persons are “parts” of God, or are separable, or capable of being divided is, therefore, a Christian heresy. Rather, the three Persons of the Trinity can be distinguished only by the relations within the Godhead. In short, the divine Persons can be distinguished, but not divided or separated.
But this begs the question. It is most certainly the case that the Muslims do not accept the idea that the Godhead contains three divine Persons. It is likewise the case that they deny Christ’s divinity. Doesn’t that mean they worship a different God?
We have to be careful here. The Muslims are not alone in rejecting those two propositions: the Jews reject them as well. If we want to use this rejection to charge that Muslims worship a different god, then we’re going to have to lay the same charge at the door of the Jews as well. Yet no one has ever argued that Christians and Jews worship different gods.
There are two reasons for this. First, Christians understand that Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism. Jews are our elder brothers in the Faith. That means we must be worshipping the same God. If Jews and Christians aren’t worshipping the same God, then Christianity has had a serious misunderstanding about Judeo-Christian relations since at least the time of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Second, both St. Paul and the Catechism of the Catholic Church insist that the Second Coming of Christ, which Christmas anticipates, “is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition by ‘all Israel’, for ‘a hardening has come upon part of Israel’ in their ‘unbelief’ toward Jesus.” (CCC #674). That means that Christ’s second coming is dependent on the fact that Jews and Christians worship the same God. Thus, the rejection of Trinity and Christ's divinity doesn’t necessarily mean their object of worship is different than ours. If that is true for the Jews, than it would likewise be true for the Muslims.
But let's cut to the heart of the matter and stop mincing words. There is only one God. Jews, Christians and Moslems are all monotheists. This has certain implications that cannot be avoided in casual conversation. When one monotheist charges that another monotheist “worships a different God”, the first is saying, in a pleasant way, that the second worships demons. That’s a fairly significant charge, and a good Christian would want to make sure of his facts before making it.
The Second Vatican Council, moving under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, recognized that this charge wouldn’t stick. The fathers of the Council wrote:
So, what exactly is the relationship between the three faiths? In order to understand the problem, we have to recognize a few simple truths about divine revelation. There are two types of divine revelation: natural and supernatural.
Natural revelation definitely teaches us things about God. “The heavens are telling the glory of God” says David, and every pagan knows it. Only a very small percentage of people are so intellectually and spiritually impoverished that they can look at the natural world and not see God’s handiworks.
All of creation was made by, through and for Christ, so all of creation tells us about Him. This is why pagan religions exist - pagans understand that God exists and that He rewards those who seek Him (Heb 11:6). This is, incidentally, the minimum necessary for salvation, which is why even pagans can be saved. The natural law, written on their hearts, might be enough to save them on the Last Day (Rom 2:14-16).
Still, though God reveals Himself through nature, not much of His revelation comes through clearly by that route. God is Three Persons, Persons are distinguished only by relations, and nature does not contain any visible created persons besides us human beings, so the medium of nature simply isn’t conducive to revealing much about God. That’s why pagans tend to be so wildly divergent in their faiths. They don’t have much to work with, and they have to make up the rest as they go along.
This is also why God revealed Himself to Abraham and the prophets directly. Persons have relationships; persons can reveal themselves much more fully through relationships than they can through inanimate objects (present essay excepted, of course).
Thus, when God revealed Himself directly to Abraham, He could make Himself much better known. But even so, He could not reveal Himself entirely. Even Moses, who alone was humble enough to see God face to face and talk with Him as a man talks with a man, even he had to veil his face after each encounter, because his encounter with divinity caused his face to glow with the divine light. Apart from John the Baptist, he was the best-prepared Old Testament prophet, and it still wasn't enough.
It is only through Christ that God fully reveals Himself, and even then, the full revelation comes only through the Paschal Mystery - the Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension. In short, even Christianity didn’t have a real shot at absorbing the full revelation of divinity until about the beginning of Acts 2.
Now, no matter what the source of the supernatural visions Mohammed had, he clearly obtained at least some accurate information about God. He knew God is both just and merciful, that His mercy triumphs over His justice, that prayer and almsgiving are powerful before the throne of God, and that Mary is to be honored. These are not trivial things, and in these details, they know is as much or more than even today's Jews know. Certainly, if every Catholic paid the same level of attention to prayer and almsgiving that many Muslims do, the sacramental graces God showers on us would be much more visibly evident, and the amount of schism and heresy in the world would be correspondingly reduced.
Just as clearly, however, Mohammed was not given the full revelation of God. How could he have been? He doesn’t even pretend to assert that he had direct conversations with God, as Abraham and Moses did, or as any number of the inhabitants of first century Jerusalem did. He says he just talked to an angel. As a result, his understanding of God’s covenant with man is radically impoverished compared to that of Abraham or Moses or any of their descendants. It is certainly nothing like as full as St. Peter’s or St. Paul’s knowledge of the divine covenant.
In this, the Muslims are much worse off than the Jews or the Baptists. Muslims understand that a covenant exists, and they understand many of God’s divine attributes, though not all of them, as they themselves readily admit. So, we may summarize by saying that, like anyone without an adult understanding of Catholic Faith, the Muslims have a partial revelation of God. It is a much more sophisticated understanding than 99% of the faiths that have ever existed, though it is not as sophisticated as the Jewish understanding, which in turn, is not as sophisticated as a non-denominational Christian’s understanding, which, in turn, is not as sophisticated as Catholic understanding.
This does not mean Christian relationships with Islam are likely to be all tea and crumpets. Indeed, converting followers of Islam to Christianity has long been noted as one of the most difficult feats to accomplish - even St. Francis of Assisi made essentially no headway in this area. If nothing else, that fact should give both Catholics and American presidents pause.
Not all Muslims are keen on the comparison either. Ingrid Mattson, professor of Islamic studies and Christian-Muslim relations at Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Conn., says "[If Christians assert] God is Trinitarian and that God includes Jesus, then Muslims do not in fact believe in that God." Islam portrays Allah, the Arabic name for God, as a single whole who cannot be divided into multiple parts.
How should a Catholic respond to this?
Well, we can begin by pointing out that the Muslims are right: God cannot be divided into parts. In fact, the doctrine of the Trinity emphatically denies that God has any parts or that He can be divided into parts. If divinity could be separated or divided, there would be three gods, not one. The idea that the Three Persons are “parts” of God, or are separable, or capable of being divided is, therefore, a Christian heresy. Rather, the three Persons of the Trinity can be distinguished only by the relations within the Godhead. In short, the divine Persons can be distinguished, but not divided or separated.
But this begs the question. It is most certainly the case that the Muslims do not accept the idea that the Godhead contains three divine Persons. It is likewise the case that they deny Christ’s divinity. Doesn’t that mean they worship a different God?
We have to be careful here. The Muslims are not alone in rejecting those two propositions: the Jews reject them as well. If we want to use this rejection to charge that Muslims worship a different god, then we’re going to have to lay the same charge at the door of the Jews as well. Yet no one has ever argued that Christians and Jews worship different gods.
There are two reasons for this. First, Christians understand that Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism. Jews are our elder brothers in the Faith. That means we must be worshipping the same God. If Jews and Christians aren’t worshipping the same God, then Christianity has had a serious misunderstanding about Judeo-Christian relations since at least the time of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Second, both St. Paul and the Catechism of the Catholic Church insist that the Second Coming of Christ, which Christmas anticipates, “is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition by ‘all Israel’, for ‘a hardening has come upon part of Israel’ in their ‘unbelief’ toward Jesus.” (CCC #674). That means that Christ’s second coming is dependent on the fact that Jews and Christians worship the same God. Thus, the rejection of Trinity and Christ's divinity doesn’t necessarily mean their object of worship is different than ours. If that is true for the Jews, than it would likewise be true for the Muslims.
But let's cut to the heart of the matter and stop mincing words. There is only one God. Jews, Christians and Moslems are all monotheists. This has certain implications that cannot be avoided in casual conversation. When one monotheist charges that another monotheist “worships a different God”, the first is saying, in a pleasant way, that the second worships demons. That’s a fairly significant charge, and a good Christian would want to make sure of his facts before making it.
The Second Vatican Council, moving under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, recognized that this charge wouldn’t stick. The fathers of the Council wrote:
“[The Muslims] adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself, merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth (5), who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes great pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgement when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting. “
On Non-Christian Religions, #3
So, what exactly is the relationship between the three faiths? In order to understand the problem, we have to recognize a few simple truths about divine revelation. There are two types of divine revelation: natural and supernatural.
Natural revelation definitely teaches us things about God. “The heavens are telling the glory of God” says David, and every pagan knows it. Only a very small percentage of people are so intellectually and spiritually impoverished that they can look at the natural world and not see God’s handiworks.
All of creation was made by, through and for Christ, so all of creation tells us about Him. This is why pagan religions exist - pagans understand that God exists and that He rewards those who seek Him (Heb 11:6). This is, incidentally, the minimum necessary for salvation, which is why even pagans can be saved. The natural law, written on their hearts, might be enough to save them on the Last Day (Rom 2:14-16).
Still, though God reveals Himself through nature, not much of His revelation comes through clearly by that route. God is Three Persons, Persons are distinguished only by relations, and nature does not contain any visible created persons besides us human beings, so the medium of nature simply isn’t conducive to revealing much about God. That’s why pagans tend to be so wildly divergent in their faiths. They don’t have much to work with, and they have to make up the rest as they go along.
This is also why God revealed Himself to Abraham and the prophets directly. Persons have relationships; persons can reveal themselves much more fully through relationships than they can through inanimate objects (present essay excepted, of course).
Thus, when God revealed Himself directly to Abraham, He could make Himself much better known. But even so, He could not reveal Himself entirely. Even Moses, who alone was humble enough to see God face to face and talk with Him as a man talks with a man, even he had to veil his face after each encounter, because his encounter with divinity caused his face to glow with the divine light. Apart from John the Baptist, he was the best-prepared Old Testament prophet, and it still wasn't enough.
It is only through Christ that God fully reveals Himself, and even then, the full revelation comes only through the Paschal Mystery - the Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension. In short, even Christianity didn’t have a real shot at absorbing the full revelation of divinity until about the beginning of Acts 2.
Now, no matter what the source of the supernatural visions Mohammed had, he clearly obtained at least some accurate information about God. He knew God is both just and merciful, that His mercy triumphs over His justice, that prayer and almsgiving are powerful before the throne of God, and that Mary is to be honored. These are not trivial things, and in these details, they know is as much or more than even today's Jews know. Certainly, if every Catholic paid the same level of attention to prayer and almsgiving that many Muslims do, the sacramental graces God showers on us would be much more visibly evident, and the amount of schism and heresy in the world would be correspondingly reduced.
Just as clearly, however, Mohammed was not given the full revelation of God. How could he have been? He doesn’t even pretend to assert that he had direct conversations with God, as Abraham and Moses did, or as any number of the inhabitants of first century Jerusalem did. He says he just talked to an angel. As a result, his understanding of God’s covenant with man is radically impoverished compared to that of Abraham or Moses or any of their descendants. It is certainly nothing like as full as St. Peter’s or St. Paul’s knowledge of the divine covenant.
In this, the Muslims are much worse off than the Jews or the Baptists. Muslims understand that a covenant exists, and they understand many of God’s divine attributes, though not all of them, as they themselves readily admit. So, we may summarize by saying that, like anyone without an adult understanding of Catholic Faith, the Muslims have a partial revelation of God. It is a much more sophisticated understanding than 99% of the faiths that have ever existed, though it is not as sophisticated as the Jewish understanding, which in turn, is not as sophisticated as a non-denominational Christian’s understanding, which, in turn, is not as sophisticated as Catholic understanding.
This does not mean Christian relationships with Islam are likely to be all tea and crumpets. Indeed, converting followers of Islam to Christianity has long been noted as one of the most difficult feats to accomplish - even St. Francis of Assisi made essentially no headway in this area. If nothing else, that fact should give both Catholics and American presidents pause.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)