Articles by Rebecca Ryskind Teti
This land was made for you and me
Mar 6, 2012 / 00:00 amDuring the dusty, hot June of 1858, Abraham Lincoln addressed the Illinois Republican convention as their candidate for the U.S. Senate.
Citizens, not sheep
Feb 21, 2012 / 00:00 am“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”
Marriage: The other religious liberty issue
Feb 7, 2012 / 00:00 amLegislatures in Washington, New Jersey and Maryland are now considering whether to redefine what marriage is.
The Declaration: Our apple of gold
Jan 24, 2012 / 00:00 amBishops from the dioceses of Baltimore, Washington and Military Services were in Rome last week, making their requisite ad limina visit to Rome to pray at the tomb of St. Peter and renew their allegiance to his successor. It was a religious duty they were observing, but the Pope chose to speak to them not of prayer or sacraments, but about threats to religious liberty, the proper relations between Church and State and the role of the Catholic citizen in a secular nation.
Facial Recognition
Jan 10, 2012 / 00:00 amIt took all Advent and Christmas, but I’m finally accustomed to responding, “And with your spirit” each of the five times it’s required of us at Mass. On the whole I’ve settled in to the new English translation of the liturgy. One line still startles me each time I hear it, though. In the second Eucharistic prayer, when we intercede for the dead, the priest prays, “Welcome them into the light of your face.”
The Night of Las Posadas
Dec 13, 2011 / 00:00 amI slammed the door on Joseph and Mary the other night. That was after I threatened to slap them.
Ecstasy on the Cabin John Bridge
Nov 29, 2011 / 00:00 amIt was Advent fifteen years ago when I went to heaven.
Are we having fun yet?
Nov 15, 2011 / 00:00 am“Are we having fun yet?” has become a common means of asserting: no, we aren’t.
A friend in St. Francis
Oct 4, 2011 / 00:00 amOne steamy day the summer of my 12th year, I sought refuge in the cool basement of my childhood home and spent an afternoon devouring Felix Timmermans’ The Perfect Joy of St. Francis.
Your prayer life is your real life
Sep 20, 2011 / 00:00 amOur nation’s economic crisis has provoked some interesting commentary, and not only in the political realm. I’ve heard more than one pundit observe that the nation’s financial hardship has a silver lining. Comparative poverty is going to force us to re-evaluate our priorities. We’re going to learn not to be so materialistic.
From 'Fountainhead' to the Fount of Faith
Sep 6, 2011 / 00:00 amWe often hear stories of nice girls corrupted by Hollywood, but rarely of reversions to being nice girls.
The importance of sight-seeing
Aug 2, 2011 / 00:00 amShortly before Christmas one year, we took our kids to the battlefield at Yorktown.
Hollywood beauty
Jul 19, 2011 / 00:00 amWhere is beauty more likely to be encountered today: in a movie theater or in a Church?
Marriage matters
Jul 8, 2011 / 00:00 amIt might surprise the New York State legislature, fresh off its legalization of same-sex marriage last week, to know this isn’t our first national debate about marriage.
Solidarity & the Fourth of July (a suggestion)
Jun 21, 2011 / 00:00 amI made the command decision last month (Hubby was bound to his office, so he had no say) that the kids and I were neither going to the pool all day nor staying indoors lounging (the default holiday postures), but going to the National Memorial Day Parade.
All loves excelling
Jun 7, 2011 / 00:00 amMy fundamentalist Granny likes to tell a story on herself as a young wife. It seems she felt smugly superior to a little Catholic housewife she knew, on account of the exceptionally syrupy, hideous portrait of Jesus displayed prominently in the woman's living room. One day in conversation, the woman happened to remark she knew the painting wasn't an aesthetic treasure, but at least no one could doubt who was head of her household. That left an indelible impression on my grandmother, who often resented the materialism of the corporate bosses she and my grandfather entertained in order to maintain his career, and wrestled with her conscience over what she perceived as concessions she made against her own principles to “get ahead.” To my mind, these “compromises” of hers were more perceived than real, but that's another matter. She came to respect that tacky portrait as a bold, almost rebellious statement. “Christ reigns here.”From my grandmother’s description, the portrait was unquestionably a picture of the Sacred Heart. In his lovely essay, “Defending Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” Prof. Timothy O’Donnell defends this devotion, to which the entire month of June is dedicated, against the charge that it’s archaic, old-fashioned and saccharine.Truth be told, some of the art associated with the Sacred Heart is a little…unfortunate. Sentimental, rather than muscular, piety surrounding the devotion was already a problem in the 1950s, when Pope Pius XII wrote an encyclical on devotion to the Sacred Heart that urged the faithful to leave sentimentalism aside and discover the genuine depths of Christ’s love.Devotion to the Sacred Heart does not consist primarily in toleration of tacky representation of Him, fortunately. A succession of popes has recommended worship of Christ’s Divine Heart as a means of countering the increasing coldness and isolation of our age. Prof. O’Donnell highlights the recommendation of three popes: • “[Devotion to the Heart of Jesus] is the extraordinary remedy for the extraordinary needs of our times” (Pius XI, “Caritate Christi Compulsi,” May 3, 1932).• “Devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is so important that it may be considered, so far as practice is concerned, the perfect profession of the Christian religion.... It is no ordinary form of piety which anyone at his own whim may treat as of little consequence or set aside as inferior to others” (Pius XII, “Haurietis Aquas,” May 15, 1956).• “The cult rendered to the Sacred Heart is the most efficacious means to contribute to that spiritual and moral renewal of the world called for by the Second Vatican Council” (Paul VI, “Address to the Thirty-First General Congregation of the Society of Jesus,” Nov. 17, 1966).And we can offer two more: • In a discourse in 1988, John Paul II taught that “for evangelization to be effective today, the Heart of Christ must be recognized as the Heart of the Church."• Celebrating the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, Pope Benedict XVI once observed simply: “The very core of Christianity is expressed in the heart of Jesus.”Pragmatic beings that we are, even with the best intentions our practice of the faith can become cold and formulaic; Christianity is always at risk of being reduced by its own disciples to a list of rules to follow. This is no way to win over a skeptical world. As Pope Benedict XVI constantly reminds us, Christianity does not consist primarily in a set of moral strictures, but in the joy of a personal relationship with Christ. The effort to get to know Christ’s heart intimately, unite our own hearts to his, and imitate him in our own lives is the best means of assuring that our own hearts don’t grow cold.Prof. O’Donnell puts it nicely: “Coldness and hatred can be melted and overcome only by the fire of love.”
It’s not about the rules
May 24, 2011 / 00:00 amThe Catholic bishops of England and Wales are the latest to join the trend of returning to mandatory Friday abstinence from meat in their dioceses.Their reasoning is lovely: they hope a common penance will allow Catholics to strengthen each other and in turn offer a stronger witness in the world.Friday penance is only one of a number of Catholic practices which seem to be enjoying a resurgence. Younger Catholics and converts appear to be rediscovering the value of some old customs — leaving behind some of the baggage that an older generation perhaps associated with those practices. Pope Benedict XVI has been promoting recovery of the practice of voluntary penance for some time, but how do we recover it in the spirit with which the Church offers it, and not as one more item on a check-list of things to do? We do have an unfortunate tendency, we Christians, of sometimes losing the essence of the thing for the rule. For this reason I dread Catholic periodicals at Advent (It’s summer now, so I assume it’s safe for me to say this).The instant there’s even a whiff of Advent in the air, the whole Catholic world seems to go nuts worrying that the world is doing Christmas wrong. We get jeremiads lamenting commercialization and materialism and informative pieces about the precise right moment to begin singing carols or lighting trees.All of this is perfectly right, but sometimes the tone is just so…schoolmarmish. It takes the incredibly happy news of the birth of a baby whose coming puts heaven within our grasp and turns it into the message that God is mad at you because you put your Christmas decorations up too early. There are good reasons for living the Advent season, but they are for the sake of inviting others to the feast and entering into it more richly ourselves. The customs are made for man, not man for the customs. So it is with voluntary penance and Friday abstinence. Pope Benedict XVI has been urging contemporary Christians to rediscover these practices, not from the perspective of the joyless persecutor from Song of Bernadette who self-righteously proclaimed:“I know what it is to suffer. Look at my eyes. They burn, and they need rest and sleep, but I do not give them the rest. My throat is parched from constant prayer. My body wrecked in pain from stone floors. Yes, I have suffered because it is the true road to heaven.”Meanwhile, the genuinely holy Bernadette was racked with pain from cancer and had a beatific smile on her face because she understood that the doctrine of penance is a cause for rejoicing.St. Paul wrote to the Colossians: “I rejoice in my suffering for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the Church..."It’s not that Christ’s death & resurrection were somehow insufficient or that we can save ourselves. What is meant is that by grace, Christ is in us and we are in him, and so he allows every aspect of our lives to have merit. Amazing and merciful doctrine! A priest friend of mine describes us as little lamps. A lamp has no power to plug itself in. Once plugged in, however, it gives real light.Christ chooses each person in a state of grace as his friend and collaborator. God does not collect us like trophies on a shelf to gather dust (“Look who I saved!”). Rather, he puts us to work in the world, uniting himself to every action of our lives, imbuing each moment with real significance. This means that each of us, no matter how lowly or hidden our lives, matters. Our prayers, our daily duties accomplished faithfully, our acts of charity, our crosses and voluntary penances offered up: these have genuine spiritual power.When we see so much suffering in the world — sometimes truly unimaginable evils that we have no hope to affect directly — it is a joy to know that our prayer and sacrifice can and do bring grace into those situations.
Have you told your kids about marriage?
May 10, 2011 / 00:00 amWedding season is upon us, even on TV, where an awful lot of season finales seem to include weddings. On television, as increasingly in real life, marriage and the public commitment one to another that it entails is rarely considered the prerequisite for sexual intimacy between a man and woman. I can’t recall the last time I saw a TV wedding that didn’t assume the happy couple was not only sexually active, but living together prior to marriage.It’s not popular to bring this up, but sexual morality precludes any form of sex outside of the marriage bond. As Rev. Michael Sheehan, Bishop of Santa Fe, recently put it in a letter to his priests about the pastoral care of cohabiting couples: “when it comes to sexual union, there are only two lifestyles acceptable to Jesus Christ for His disciples: a single life of chastity, or the union of man and woman in the Sacrament of Matrimony. There is no “third way” possible for a Christian.”In spite of this, an increasing number of couples, including Catholic couples, choose to live together without the bond of matrimony. What’s sad is that living together before marriage is widely thought to be a good preparation for marriage, when in fact, setting the matter of sexual morality aside, it’s been shown over and over again that cohabitation is extremely detrimental to marriage.People who live together before marriage are close to 50% more likely to divorce once they marry. The longer they cohabit before marrying, the more likely the marriage will fail, and the more times they have lived with others, the less likely they will succeed at marriage. Why should that be so? It seems logical to assume that a couple who managed to stick together for a long time before marriage could make it work afterwards. It’s reasonable to think a person who has lived with different people at different times might have a better sense of what he or she is looking for in a spouse. Alas, no. It seems that living together without benefit of marriage may create one or more mental habits that make forming a marital bond more difficult. Resources available at foryourmarriage.org point out:• Only half of cohabiting couples ever marry. • Living together often creates an unhealthy dynamic where one partner is reluctant to marry and the other is hoping marriage will eventually result. There is a tendency on the part of the “weaker” partner to avoid real issues in the relationship to keep it together.• Alternatively, couples who live together because they “aren’t ready for marriage” often develop a “low commitment/high autonomy” dynamic. That means they may be so independent by habit that the transition to the truly committed marital relationship is difficult and slow, if it ever takes place.• Children in cohabiting relationships are at risk. They are more likely to be abused, and after five years, 50% of cohabiting couples have split up, as compared with 15% of married couples. In spite of the surprising amount of evidence against cohabitation as a relationship-builder, people persist in believing it will help. I’ve been involved in preparing couples for matrimony for some 15 years. When I started, cohabiting couples were less common, and those who made that choice at least knew they were defying Church teaching and were making a free decision.Today it’s far more common for almost every couple who comes to us to be living together — and completely ignorant that there’s a problem. No one has ever told them that it’s harmful to both their souls and their relationship to do so.They haven’t heard it in Church, and no parent, grandparent or teacher in a Catholic school has ever mentioned it. When we lay out Church teaching on marriage and sexuality in its fullness, it’s not uncommon for them to be both struck by the beauty of Church teaching and to feel profoundly cheated that they had never heard it before. If we want our kids to get married and for those marriages to be successful, we have to remember to teach them that living together before marriage is wrong.