Articles by Deacon Keith Fournier
Honoring St Benedict and the special role of monks in the Church
Jul 14, 2018 / 00:00 amOn July 11, the Catholic Church commemorates the great life and legacy of St. Benedict of Nursia. He was born around the year 480 in Umbria, Italy. He is a called father of Western Monasticism and co-patron of Europe (along with Saints Cyril and Methodius). The monk named Benedict was chosen as a patron due to his extraordinary influence on establishing Christianity in Europe and thus securing the Christian foundations of European civilization and the entirety of Western culture. As a young man, Benedict of Nursia fled a decadent and declining Rome for further studies and deep prayer and reflection. He gave his life entirely to God as a son of the Catholic Church. He traveled to Subiaco; the cave which became his dwelling, the place where he communed deeply with God is now a shrine called "Sacro Speco" (The Holy Cave). Right before his election to the Chair of Peter, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger traveled to the holy cave for a period of protracted prayer. In a General Audience on April 29, 2008, he spoke at length of Benedict whom he called the "Patron of His Pontificate." Now, he lives as a monk on the grounds of the Vatican, praying for that renewal to continue under the leadership of his successor, Francis. (add http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2008/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20080409.html to general aud.) St. Benedict of Nursia lived a life of prayer and solitude for three years and studied under a monk named Romanus. His holiness drew other men and women and soon, twelve small monasteries were founded. He later traveled to Monte Cassino, where he completed his rule for monks. From those Benedictine monasteries, an entire movement was birthed which led to the evangelization of Europe and the emergence of an authentically Christian culture. It can happen once again in the Third Christian Millennium. The ecclesial movement which we call western monasticism led to the birth and flourishing of the academy, the arts and the emergence of what later became known as Christendom. From its earliest appearance, the monastic movement was a lay movement. From the midst of the community men were chosen for ordination in order to serve the members and the broader mission as it participated in the overall mission of the Church. In this sense, the early monastic movement bears similarities to the ecclesial movements of this millennium which John Paul, Benedict and now Francis promote with enthusiasm. Increasingly the members of these lay movements, and the clergy which have grown up in their midst to serve the mission, are becoming one of the key resources the Holy Spirit is using for the new missionary age of the Church. Saint John Paul II gave an address in 1980, during the fifteenth centennial commemoration of the birth of St. Benedict, in which he affirmed the extraordinary contributions of the great father of western monasticism. He recalled St. Benedict's age as a time when "the Church, civil society and Christian culture itself were in great danger." He noted of the saint that "Through his sanctity and singular accomplishments, St. Benedict gave testimony of the perennial youth of the Church. He and his followers drew the barbarians from paganism toward a civilized and truly enhanced way of life. The Benedictines guided them in building a peaceful, virtuous and productive society." The contemporary West has rejected its Christian roots and embraced a new paganism. What Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI called the "dictatorship of relativism" is the bad fruit of a rejection of the very existence of any objective truth. Given the current state of moral decline, we need to view the West as mission territory. Over the years of Pope Emeritus Benedict's service, he regularly spoke of monks and their essential contribution to the Church. In an address given in 2007, he zeroed in on the monastic life as a gift needed for the whole church. I am what is often called a 'revert' to the Church in Catholic circles. I returned to the practice of the Catholic Christian faith after wandering away as a very young man, I spent 21 months in a Benedictine monastery shortly after "coming home" to the Church. There, I began what has become a lifelong journey of prayer and found my hunger for theology. I also studied the early fathers of the Church. I was taught by a wonderful monk. He was the first of several monks who have graced my life with their gift of holy presence, making Christ so palpable by their interior life - one which overflows in a genuine transfigured humanity. From my encounters with monks, living immersed as they do in their unique and vital vocation in and with the Lord, I learned that no matter how much formal theological study they have, it is their depth of prayer which makes them the best of theologians. So it should be with all theologians - one cannot give away what one does not truly have. It is out of the storehouse of grace that monks and theologians are able to help the faithful in their pursuit of the longing of every human heart, communion and intimacy with the God who has revealed Himself. We find, in the words of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the "human face of God" in Jesus Christ. What is necessary is to encounter him, contemplate that beauty and be transformed by the encounter. A part of monastic life and spirituality is also labor, immersed in prayer. Monks support themselves through hard work, dedicated to God and caught up in the ongoing redemptive work of Jesus Christ in and through his Church. They follow a "rule," a way of life. Yet, even in that, they peel back the deeper mystery and remind us that all work done in the Lord participates in his ongoing work of redemption. Too often, people mistakenly believe that the monk retreats from the world because of its "corruption". In fact, the monk retreats (in differing ways in accordance with their particular monastic response) precisely in order to transform the world by his prophetic witness and powerful prayer. The dedicated monk is an essential part of the Lord's plan for the Church. The Church is what the early fathers called the new world, being recreated in Christ. We who have been baptized never again leave the Church. We actually live in the Church and go into the world to bring all men and women home. Monasticism in the first millennium gave us the fountain of theological wisdom which still inspires the Church. Those who went into the desert became the great teachers, fathers, confessors and prophets. Their prayer and witness kept the Church in the divine embrace so that she could effectively continue the redemptive mission of the Lord. In the second millennium, their work and witness continued. Sadly, the Church had been torn in two with the first split, East and West. In the East, the monks continued to be a resource for the kind of theology which brings heaven to earth and earth to heaven. From their ranks the great bishops of the Church were chosen and the Church was continually renewed. In the West, the great monasteries of Europe became the beating heart of the emergence of Christendom. The extraordinary intellect exhibited in the emerging theological tradition birthed in the monasteries enabled the Church to contend with daunting challenges, welcome them without fear, contend for the faith and offer the claims of truth incarnate. Monks are a seed of the great renewals of the Church. That is because monks are prophetic seeds of the kingdom of God. They always seem to be around right when we need them the most. We need monks for the authentic renewal of the Church in this hour. Lord, send your Holy Spirit, send us monks for the renewal of your Church.
Come Holy Spirit! The whole Church needs a new Pentecost
May 25, 2018 / 00:00 amOn Pentecost the early followers of Jesus gathered as their Lord had instructed them, expecting the fulfillment of the promise he had made to send the Holy Spirit. We refer to Pentecost as the birthday of the missionary church for a good reason. Their encounter with the Holy Spirit in the upper room changed them. They were filled with the same Holy Spirit which raised Jesus from the dead. The Apostle Paul would later explain the experience. Even though he was not at that first Pentecost, he certainly experienced the same encounter, and came to know of its powerful, transformative effects! (Romans 8:11) The Holy Spirit capacitated the early followers of Jesus to go from being a frightened fraternity to a band of brothers and sisters of whom it was said "they turned the world upside down" (Acts 17:6). They were empowered to carry forward in time the ongoing mission of Jesus Christ until he returns to complete the work of redemption. Every year, this celebration of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost is an invitation to each one of us to have the very same encounter. It is the Holy Spirit which makes it possible for us to live lives of sacrificial love, holiness and service in a world that God still loves – a world into which he still sends his Son, through the Body of Christ, the Church – of which we are all members (John 3:16). We are, in this millennium, commissioned to carry forward the very same mission of those first disciples who gathered with Mary the Mother of the Lord. Jesus promised his followers, "Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these, because I am going to the Father" (John 14:12). That includes you and me! In these in words, recorded in that same chapter of John's Gospel, Jesus promised as well: "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows it. But you know it, because it remains with you, and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I live and you will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you." Among the readings read at the Catholic Liturgy on Pentecost Sunday is the account of that first Christian Pentecost: "When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together. And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were. Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim" (Acts 2). There is little doubt from their actions following that event, they were very different. They went forward and really did turn the entire world upside down with their preaching and the witness of their changed lives. Will we do the same in this new missionary age? The choice is ours to make. As I have regularly written and proclaimed, it is time for all Christians to stop bemoaning the collapse of the culture, stop using the language of "post-Christian" and look at this moment, our moment, as pre-Christian. It is time to get to work, empowered by the same Holy Spirit, today. In many respects, the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Blessed Trinity, seems mysterious to many Christians in our own day. When I consider this reality, I am reminded of one of the many missionary stories recounted in the Acts of the Apostles. Chapter 19 of Acts begins with these words, "While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul traveled through the interior of the country and came (down) to Ephesus where he found some disciples. He said to them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?’ They answered him, ‘We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit’" (Acts 19: 1, 2). Too often we live our lives like those disciples in Ephesus. We act as though we did not realize there even is a Holy Spirit, still at work, still pouring out gifts and still making it possible for us to bear spiritual fruit. The same Holy Spirit still changing each one of us, individually and collectively, into the Image of Jesus Christ. The same Holy Spirit calling us to make disciples of all the nations. An examination of the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament reveals the essential role of the Holy Spirit in the life and mission of the Church – and in the life and mission of every individual believer. A study of the tradition, the magisterial teachings of the Church and the Catholic Catechism underscores that this reality is meant to continue. It was not a onetime event. The purpose of Pentecost was – and still is – the empowering of the Christian Church, with the same power that raised Christ Jesus from the dead! The Holy Spirit draws us into communion with the Lord and a participation in his divine life and mission. That communion is lived in the Church. The Catholic Catechism, quoting St Augustine, affirms "What the soul is to the human body, the Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church" (CCC # 797). I am one of countless thousands whose life was profoundly changed by an experience, an encounter, with the Holy Spirit decades ago. I am old enough to remember when we who had this encounter were called "Pentecostal Catholics." That was before the more refined term "charismatic" took prominence. Pope Francis has taken to calling the experience a "Current of Grace." I do not really care for any adjectival description before the noun "Catholic." I am a Christian, standing by choice in the heart of the Catholic Church, which stretches back to the earthly ministry of Jesus and forward to his return. I stand reaching out, with all Christians, into an age which needs to hear the good news of Jesus Christ and be set free. In fact, it was an encounter with the Holy Spirit so many years ago which led me back home to the Catholic Church into which I had been baptized as a child. That same Holy Spirit which leads me to work with other Christians, across the confessional lines, in evangelistic and culturally engaging work and mission. Sometimes, people ask me, all these years later, when they hear of my earlier identification with that movement called the Catholic Charismatic renewal, "What Happened to those Pentecostal/Charismatic Catholics?" I guess my life is one of many answers to that question. I give them the following answer. The Holy Spirit continued to lead me into the heart of the Catholic Church. My hunger for more of God and my passionate love for the Word of God, led me to continued theological studies and to ordination as a member of the clergy, a deacon. My heart for evangelization led me to assist in the myriad of ministries, apostolates and works in which I have involved for decades. Do I still believe that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are available for ordinary Christians? You bet I do! I also hope that they assist us all in growing in the fruits of the Spirit and manifesting the character of Jesus Christ through living lives of real holiness. I do not identify with any particular "movement." Rather, I identify with the Lord Jesus Christ who has been raised from the dead and still pours out his graces through the Church which is his Body. My experience all those years ago was not about a specific movement – but about a new way of living in the Lord, by the Holy Spirit, in the Church, for the sake of the world. Over the years, the term "ecclesial movements” has become the term used to refer to the many movements within the Catholic Church which demonstrate that the Spirit of Pentecost is alive and well. Though each has a unique charism and mission, they all invite Christians to have a "personal" relationship, an encounter, with the Lord Jesus Christ. They proclaim that he has been raised from the dead and is alive in our midst in the Church. They call men and women to the encounter, to experience the Pentecost of the Holy Spirit he promised, right now. Pentecost is not about a onetime experience but about a way of living in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are led by the Spirit to live in the heart of the Church, for the sake of that world. The Church is meant to become the home of the whole human race. Within the communion of the Church we become leaven and seed in the loaf of human culture, in order to lead the world into the "new world," which is the Church. We are called to live a unity of life, where our Christian faith is not compartmentalized but rather informs and permeates our daily life. We are called to love the Church, recognizing that she is "some – one" not something – the Body of Christ continuing his redemptive mission on the earth until he returns. The missionary mandate extends to every state in life and every Christian vocation. They demonstrate that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are real and still available for all Christians. The purpose of Pentecost is the birth – and continued rebirth – of the Church. The Church is "Plan A" and there is no "Plan B." The notion of a Christian group being "para" Church is far from the purpose of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit was not poured out on the disciples so that they could form movements outside of the Church, or compete with one another in movements within her. Rather, so that they could become full members of Christ's Church living his life within her bosom for the sake of the world. Jesus told the disciples that he must ascend, to "my Father and your father, my God and your God" (John 20:17) because, in his own words "If I do not go I cannot send the comforter. And when he comes he will convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation: sin, because they do not believe in me; righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me; condemnation, because the ruler of this world has been condemned." And in the same Gospel "I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming" (John 16: 7-15). The Christian Church was empowered by the Holy Spirit to live differently in the midst of a world awaiting the fullness of redemption; to lead the world back to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Can we live this kind of transformed Christian life in the stuff of our own daily lives? Yes, by living them in the heart of the Church by the power of the Holy Spirit. There is a lot of "bad news" in our contemporary culture. However, this culture is not all that different than the cultures into which the early Christians were sent on mission; cultures such as the one which the Christians in Ephesus confronted. They needed the Holy Spirit to do their work and so do we. The answer for the malady of this age is the same as the answer of those early disciples for their broken and lost age, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Like them we are called to present the new culture which is revealed in the heart of the Church through the power of the Holy Spirit to our own age. As I continually proclaim, we are living in a new missionary age and we are called into the whole world to preach the Gospel in both word and deed. The Second Vatican Council in the Catholic Church began with a prayer for a "New Pentecost." The Holy Spirit was poured out on Pentecost and continues to be poured out on, in and through the Church, for the sake of her mission in the world. Pentecost was and is the birthday of the Church. The Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church and the source of her power for mission. We need to pray for a New Pentecost for the WHOLE Church in this hour! We need more of the Holy Spirit for the work of the New Evangelization within the Church so she can take the mission to the whole world. We need to be baptized afresh in the Holy Spirit in order to take our role as a member of the Body of Christ in this new missionary age. The Church needs to rise up in this hour with the same power with which she transformed the world of the first centuries. She can...by the power of the Holy Spirit! Whatever happened to those Pentecostal/Charismatic Catholics? We are everywhere these days continuing to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit by offering ourselves to the Lord in his Church and, through her, continuing the redemptive mission of the Lord until he returns.
At 91 years old, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI calls us all to contemplative prayer
Apr 18, 2018 / 00:00 amA book from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI entitled “Teaching and Learning the Love of God: Being a Priest Today” was released on June 29, 2016. It is a collection of homilies (sermons), focused on those called to priesthood. However, it reaches to all who are in holy orders, Bishops, priests and deacons, calling for a deep reflection on the essential role of prayer in ordained ministry. Pope Francis wrote a preface for the compilation. He explained why Benedict is such an extraordinary theologian, noting that Benedict lives his life “immersed in God” and practices “theology on his knees.” Francis affirmed that living lives fully immersed in God is a call that “deacons, priests and bishops must never forget.” I agree. And, I am so grateful for the continued witness provided to us by the Servant of the Servants of God, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. April 16, 2018 was his 91st Birthday. I must admit, I truly miss Pope Benedict XVI. He is such a holy man and one of the great theologians of the Church. His last act of public humility came on February 28, 2013 when he resigned his office to dedicate himself more fully to prayer. The announcement was made to a consistory of his brothers in the episcopate who had gathered in Rome when he approved over 800 causes for canonization. The connection was clear. The last Council of the Church reminded us of the universal call to holiness. That call is issued to all members of the Body of Christ and cannot be fulfilled without prayer. As I reflect on Benedict XVI, I am reminded of one of my favorite definitions of a theologian. It was offered by a monk of the fourth century named Evagrius of Pontus. He wrote in his "Mirror for Monks:" "The Knowledge of God is the breast of Christ - and whoever rests on it will be a theologian". The image evokes the beloved disciple St. John, the author of the fourth Gospel. He is often depicted at the Institution of the Eucharist, the "Last Supper," with his head on the chest of Jesus the Christ. His Gospel narrative was the last to be written and is the most theologically reflective. Clearly, John learned theology “on his knees.” So it is with our Pope Emeritus, Benedict. How fitting, indeed how fitting that he is now engaged in a form of monastic life within the walls of the Vatican. It moves me deeply to think that this holy priest is praying for the Church – and the world into which she is sent. And, that he is praying for you and for me. I remember a beautiful message he gave on March 6, 2012 during the Wednesday audience for the faithful. He explained that silence is necessary to hear the word of God, noting that "our age does not, in fact, favor reflection and contemplation; quite the contrary it seems that people are afraid to detach themselves, even for an instant, from the spate of words and images which mark and fill our days." He continued, "the Gospels often show us ... Jesus withdrawing alone to a place far from the crowds, even from His own disciples, where He can pray in silence." Moreover, "the great patristic tradition teaches us that the mysteries of Christ are linked to silence, and only in silence can the Word find a place to dwell within us." "This principle," Benedict explained, "holds true for individual prayer, but also for our liturgies which, to facilitate authentic listening, must also be rich in moments of silence and of non-verbal acceptance. ... Silence has the capacity to open a space in our inner being, a space in which God can dwell, which can ensure that his Word remains within us, and that love for Him is rooted in our minds and hearts, and animates our lives." He continued, "in our prayers, we often find ourselves facing the silence of God. We almost experience a sense of abandonment; it seems that God does not listen and does not respond. But this silence, as happened to Jesus, does not signify absence. Christians know that the Lord is present and listens, even in moments of darkness and pain, of rejection and solitude. Jesus assures his disciples and each one of us that God is well aware of our needs at every moment of our lives." "For us, who are so frequently concerned with operational effectiveness and with the results ... we achieve, the prayer of Jesus is a reminder that we need to stop, to experience moments of intimacy with God, 'detaching ourselves' from the turmoil of daily life in order to listen, to return to the 'root' which nourishes and sustains our existence. One of the most beautiful moments of Jesus' prayer is when, faced with the sickness, discomfort and limitations of his interlocutors, he addresses his Father in prayer, thus showing those around him where they must go to seek the source of hope and salvation." He pointed to the most profound point of the prayer of Jesus to the Father, the moment of his passion and death. Citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church (#2606), he explained that "his cry to the Father from the cross encapsulated 'all the troubles, for all time, of humanity enslaved by sin and death, all the petitions and intercessions of salvation history are summed up in this cry of the incarnate Word. Here the Father accepts them and, beyond all hope, answers them by raising his Son. Thus is fulfilled and brought to completion the drama of prayer in the economy of creation and salvation." Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI continues to live his life immersed in God. IN so doing he invites us all to join him - by his example and his teaching. This immersion is made possible by prayer becoming a way of life. He is a man of living faith; the kind that gets into the marrow of the bones of a man who truly walks with God, making him strong, steady and unafraid of any adversary. This is precisely because he is a contemplative. He calls all of us to the kind of conversion that comes only through lives immersed in God through prayer. No matter our state in life, vocation or career, we are all called to contemplative prayer. In its section on contemplative prayer (CCC #2709-2719) the Catholic Catechism explains: “Entering into contemplative prayer is like entering into the Eucharistic liturgy: we ‘gather up:’ the heart, recollect our whole being under the prompting of the Holy Spirit, abide in the dwelling place of the Lord which we are, awaken our faith in order to enter into the presence of him who awaits us. We let our masks fall and turn our hearts back to the Lord who loves us, so as to hand ourselves over to him as an offering to be purified and transformed” (CCC #2711). Only a Church of holiness, mystery, mission and majesty can accomplish the huge task that lies ahead of us in this new missionary age. The Church that was born from the wounded side of Jesus Christ, who stretched his arms out on the tree of our redemption to embrace the world, is now desperately in need of deep and profound conversion within. Prayer is the sure path to this much needed conversion, and it begins in our own heart. Prayer is an ongoing dialogue of intimate communion with God. Prayer is about falling in love with God, over and over again. Isaac of Ninevah was an early eighth century monk, bishop and theologian. For centuries, he was mostly revered in the Eastern Christian Church for his writings on prayer. In the last century the beauty of his insights on prayer are being embraced once again by both lungs, east and west, of the Church. He wrote these words in one of his many treatises on prayer: "When the Spirit dwells in a person, from the moment in which that person has become prayer, he never leaves him. For the Spirit himself never ceases to pray in him. Whether the person is asleep or awake, prayer never from then on departs from his soul. Whether he is eating or drinking or sleeping or whatever else he is doing, even in deepest sleep, the fragrance of prayer rises without effort in his heart. Prayer never again deserts him.” "At every moment of his life, even when it appears to stop, it is secretly at work in him continuously, one of the Fathers, the bearers of Christ, says that prayer is the silence of the pure. For their thoughts are divine motions. The movements of the heart and the intellect that have been purified are the voices full of sweetness with which such people never cease to sing in secret to the hidden God." Through his incarnation, saving life, death, and resurrection, Jesus opens the way to full communion with God for all men and women. He leads us out of the emptiness and despair that is the rotted fruit of narcissism, nihilism and materialism. When we enter into the dialogue of prayer, we can experience a progressive, dynamic and intimate relationship with God. He transforms us from within. We, as Isaac said, can "become prayer" as we empty ourselves in order to be filled with him. Through prayer, daily life takes on new meaning. It becomes a classroom of communion. In that classroom we learn the truth about who we are – and who we are becoming – in Jesus. Through prayer we receive new glasses through which we see the true landscape of life. Through prayer darkness is dispelled and the path of progress is illuminated. Through prayer we begin to understand why this communion seems so elusive at times; as we struggle with our own disordered appetites, and live in a manner at odds with the beauty and order of the creation within which we dwell only to find a new beginning whenever we confess our sin and return to our first love. Prayer opens us up to revelation, expands our capacity to comprehend truth and equips us to change. Through prayer we are drawn by love into a deepening relationship with Jesus whose loving embrace on the hill of Golgotha bridged heaven with earth; his relationship with his Father is opened now to us; the same Spirit that raised him from the dead begins to give us new life as we are converted, transfigured and made new. Through prayer, heavenly wisdom is planted in the field of our hearts and we experience a deepening communion with the Trinitarian God. We become, in the words of the Apostle Peter "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). That participation will only be fully complete when we are with Him in the fullness of his embrace, in resurrected bodies in a new heaven and a new earth, but it begins now, in the grace of this present moment, as we, in a real sense, “become prayer.” The beloved disciple John became prayer. He writes in the letter he penned in his later years: "See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure. Everyone who commits sin commits lawlessness, for sin is lawlessness" (1John 3:1-4). As we "become prayer" our daily life becomes the field of choice and we are capacitated to choose the "more excellent way" of love of which the great Apostle Paul wrote (1 Cor. 13). Pondering the implications of the exercise of our human freedom becomes a regular part of our life, as we learn to "examine our conscience," repent of our sin and become joyful penitents. Prayer provides the environment for such recollection as it exposes the darkness and helps us surrender it to the light of love, the living God dwelling within us. "Becoming prayer" is possible for all Christians, no matter their state in life or vocation, because God holds nothing back from those whom he loves. This relationship of communion is initiated by him. Our part is to respond. That response should flow from a heart that beats in surrendered love, in the process of being freed from the entanglements that weigh us down. The God who is love hungers for the communion of sons and daughters – and we hunger for communion with him – because He made us this way. Nothing else will satisfy. The early Church Father Origen once wrote: "Every spiritual being is, by nature, a temple of God, created to receive into itself the glory of God." Mother Teresa once wrote: "God is the friend of silence, in that silence he will listen to us; there he will speak to our soul, and there we will hear his voice. The fruit of silence is faith. The fruit of faith is prayer, the fruit of prayer is love, the fruit of love is service and the fruit of service is silence. "In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Silence gives us a new way of looking at everything. We need this silence in order to touch souls. God is the friend of silence. His language is silence. 'Be still and know that I am God.'" Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI calls us all to lives immersed in God through prayer. No matter what our state in life or vocation, his invitation awaits our response. It is the best way we can wish him a truly happy birthday.
Why I believe that Mary is the Mother of God, Mother of the Church and our mother
Jan 6, 2018 / 00:00 amI am what is often called a ‘revert” to the Catholic Church. Though raised as a Catholic, I fell away from the practice of the ancient faith when my family all but stopped participating in the sacraments. We were "cultural Catholics" but the faith and the savior had little to do with our life. My teenage search for meaning in life and the truth finally led me home to the Lord and his Church. However, the route was circuitous. Among the places it led was my reading of the “fathers” (early leaders) of the first centuries of the Church. In ancient Christian writings I discovered how the early Christians viewed their participation in the Church as integral to their belonging to Jesus Christ. The Church is fundamentally relational. After intensely questioning of many of the teachings of the Catholic Church in my journey home to the Church I came to see that the pronouncement of the early Church Council of Ephesus (431 AD) that Mary is “Theo-tokos,” Greek for Mother of God, was a profoundly Christological declaration – it speaks about Christ. It was spoken to confront and correct growing heresies in the Church which undermined the core proclamation of the Gospel about who Jesus is. The second person of the blessed Trinity, the Word made flesh, Jesus the Christ, was truly both God and man. The incarnation was central to the Christian claim. The one whom Mary bore was and is truly God and truly man. I studied the historic background of the proclamation and came to understand what was truly at stake. When I read this simple proclamation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church years later, “What the Catholic faith believes about Mary is based on what it believes about Christ, and what it teaches about Mary illumines in turn its faith in Christ,” (CCC #487), it all made sense. My study of early Church history revealed the presence of Marian piety and devotion, from the extraordinary frescoes in the catacombs to the reflections of the early church fathers on the significance of her role in salvation history and her continued role in the life of the Church. As my knowledge of the lives of the saints, and their prayer lives increased, I had to decide whether all of their writings about Mary reflected some kind of “bad theology” or, perhaps, I had missed something. Fortunately, I arrived at the proper conclusion. But, even after all that, Mary was still to me the mother of the Lord. I could accept in concept that she was a mother to the Church, but not yet “my mother.” The progression continued. It was only as I prayerfully reflected on the last hours of Jesus’ earthly ministry recounted in the fourth Gospel, the one attributed to the beloved disciple John, that this all began to unfold and become personal for me. “When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold your mother’” (John 19: 26-27). Throughout the Church’s rich history and tradition great theologians, mystics, popes and saints have all viewed John as representing you and me. The last gift Jesus gave before giving every drop of his sacred blood was his mother. We who are baptized are now “incorporated” into Christ. We live our lives now in his body (1 Cor. 12). The head and the body are eternally joined in a communion of love. St. Augustine – and countless Saints both East and West – writes concerning the “whole Christ” as both head and body (cf. Colossians 1:15 -23, Ephesians 4:15,16). Everything Jesus has he has given to his Church. That includes his Mother. She is also the mother of his mystical body, his Church and we are members of that family which he has formed called the Church. As the years unfolded I found that every one of the great influences in my Christian life from that communion of saints to which we are all joined was profoundly “Marian.” Francis of Assissi, Bernard of Clairvaux, the early fathers, St Jose Maria Escriva all the way up to my champion, Blessed John Paul II, all had a deep love and devotion to Mary as mother. I began to pray Blessed John Paul’s prayer of consecration, “Totus Tuus,” and made it my own. Then, the grace was given. This little Virgin from Nazareth whose “yes” brought heaven to earth and earth to heaven went from being the mother and a mother to – “my mother.” Our Catechism reminds us “What the Catholic faith believes about Mary is based on what it believes about Christ, and what it teaches about Mary illumines in turn its faith in Christ. ‘God sent forth his Son,’ but to prepare a body for him, he wanted the free co-operation of a creature. For this, from all eternity God chose for the mother of his Son a daughter of Israel, a young Jewish woman of Nazareth in Galilee, ‘a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary’” (CCC#487, 488). So, let us reflect on the Mother of God as mother of the Church and our mother. “Called in the Gospels ‘the mother of Jesus,’ Mary is acclaimed by Elizabeth, at the prompting of the Spirit and even before the birth of her son, as ‘the mother of my Lord.’ In fact, the one whom she conceived as man by the Holy Spirit, who truly became her Son according to the flesh, was none other than the Father's eternal Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity. Hence the Church confesses that Mary is truly ‘Mother of God’” (Theotokos), (CCC, 495,496; Council of Ephesus, 431 AD). From antiquity, Mary has been called "Theotokos," or "God-Bearer" (Mother of God). The word in Greek is "Theotokos." The term was used as part of the popular piety of the early first millennium church. It is used throughout the Eastern Church's Liturgy, both Orthodox and Catholic. It lies at the heart of the Latin Rite's deep Marian piety and devotion. This title was a response to early threats to 'orthodoxy,' the preservation of authentic Christian teaching. A pronouncement of an early Church council, The Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D., insisted "If anyone does not confess that God is truly Emmanuel, and that on this account the holy virgin is the ‘Theotokos’ (for according to the flesh she gave birth to the word of God become flesh by birth) let him be anathema" (The Council of Ephesus, 431 AD).
Learning how to live the call to Christian family life at the School of Nazareth
Jan 5, 2018 / 00:00 amDuring the Octave (eight days) of Christmas we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. The significance of the feast unfolds when we come to understand the deeper truths it reveals. It teaches us about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – and about each one of us and our own families. Through our baptism, we are invited to live our lives in Christ by living them in the Church – which is the risen body of Christ. The Church is the place where we learn, as the Apostle Paul reminded the Colossian Christians, to "put on love, that is, the bond of perfection." (Col. 3:14). The Gospel of the Liturgy is taken from the presentation of Jesus in the temple account in St. Luke and the beautiful canticle of Zechariah (Luke 2:22-40). However, upon leaving the temple to return to Nazareth, we read these words: "When they had fulfilled all the prescriptions of the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him." In a beautiful address on December 28, 2011, at his Wednesday audience, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI spoke of the life of the Holy Family in Nazareth. Here is a short excerpt: "The house of Nazareth is a school of prayer where we learn to listen, to meditate, to penetrate the deepest meaning of the manifestation of the Son of God, drawing our example from Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The Holy Family is an icon of the domestic Church, which is called to pray together. The family is the first school of prayer where, from their infancy, children learn to perceive God thanks to the teaching and example of their parents. An authentically Christian education cannot neglect the experience of prayer. If we do not learn to pray in the family, it will be difficult to fill this gap later. I would, then, like to invite people to rediscover the beauty of praying together as a family, following the school of the Holy Family of Nazareth." The Christian family is the first cell of the whole Church. It is the place where we begin the journey toward holiness and become more fully human. The Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, became one of us. He was born into a human family. That was neither accidental nor incidental. There, in what the late Pope Paul VI called the "School of Nazareth," we can learn the way of love. The late Pope's reflection called "The Example of Nazareth" is in the Office of Readings for the Liturgy of the Hours (the breviary) for the Feast of the Holy Family. Every moment of his time among us Jesus was saving the world, re-creating it from within. To use a word from the early Church Father and Bishop St. Ireneaus, he was "recapitulating" the entire human experience. There, in the holy habitation of Nazareth, he forever transformed family life. Now, he teaches us how to live in his presence, if we will enroll in the "School of Nazareth." From antiquity the Christian family has rightly been called a "domestic church." In our life within the Christian family Jesus Christ is truly present. However, we need the eyes to see him at work, the ears to hear his instruction and the hearts to make a place for him to dwell. In our family we can learn the way of selfless love by enrolling in the School of Nazareth. Jesus spent 30 of his 33 earthly years in Nazareth. Some spiritual writers have called these the "hidden years," because there is so little written about them in the Gospel narratives. However, they reveal the holiness of ordinary life and show us how it becomes extraordinary for those baptized into Christ. Every moment of his time among us Jesus was saving, redeeming, and re-creating the world. From his conception, throughout his saving life, death and resurrection, the one whom scripture calls the "New Adam" was making all things new. The fathers of the last great council of the Church put it this way: "The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of him who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear… He who is ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1:15), is himself the perfect man. ‘To the sons of Adam he restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from the first sin onward.’ “Since human nature as he assumed it was not annulled, by that very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too. For by his incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin" (Gaudium et Spes # 22). In the holy habitation of Nazareth Jesus transformed family life. Already blessed as God's plan for the whole human race and the first society, the Christian family has been elevated in Christ to a Sacrament, a vehicle of grace and sign of God's presence. The Church proclaims Christian marriage, and the family founded upon it, is a vocation, a response to the call of the Lord. In the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we learn the way of love in the School of Nazareth. The phrase "domestic church" was one of particular fondness to the great Bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom. It was a framework for the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on Christian marriage and family. Saint John Paul II developed this teaching in his "Christian family in the Modern World" and his "Letter to the Family." In these writings he invites every Christian family to, using his pregnant phrase, "become what you are," a domestic church. The Holy Family of Jesus, Joseph and Mary is not only our model, it is the beginning of the new family of the Church. Our Gospel story today tells us of a family trip which is packed with lessons for those enrolled in the School of Nazareth. In and through the ordinary stuff of daily life we find Jesus and in the encounter discover ourselves. Pope Paul VI wrote: "Nazareth is a kind of school where we may begin to discover what Christ's life was like and even to understand his Gospel. Here we can learn to realize who Christ really is. Here everything speaks to us, everything has meaning." We live in Church. We were baptized into the Lord and now live in his risen body as members. The Church is a communion, a relationship in Christ. The Christian family is the smallest cell of that Body of Christ. The extended church community is a family of families. This understanding is more than piety – it is sound ecclesiology, solid anthropology...it is reality. Family life is where the "rubber hits the road" for most Christians. It is here where the universal call to holiness, in all its real, earthy, humanness and ordinariness, is first issued. It is here where we learn the way of discipleship. Family is where progress in the spiritual life can find its raw material. Whether we choose to respond to grace – and develop the eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to accept the hidden invitations to learn to love beneath the surface of that daily "stuff" – is all wrapped up in the mystery of human freedom. Our choices not only affect the world around us, they make us become the people we will become. St. Paul exhorted the early Christians to "Have this mind among yourselves which was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself " (Phil. 2:5). The Greek word translated "emptied" in St. Paul's letter to the Philippians is "kenosis." This word refers to the voluntary pouring out-like water-of oneself in an act of sacrificial love. This "emptying" is the proper response of the love of a Christian for the one who first loved us. It is also the very heart of the vocation of Christian marriage and family. When the right choices are made in this life of "domestic kenosis," this life of domestic emptying lived in Christian family, we change. We are converted. We cooperate with the Lord's invitation to follow him by exercising our human freedom; we choose to give ourselves away in love to the "other." In this life of responding to the Lord's invitations we are gradually transformed into an image, a living icon, of Jesus Christ, as Pope Benedict XVI reminded the faithful. This way of holiness is not easy, as anyone who has lived the vocation can attest, but make no mistake; it is a very real path to holiness. It is also a wonderful one. The challenge lies in the choices we make, daily, hourly, and even moment-by-moment. Two trees still grow in the garden of domestic life. They invite the exercise of our freedom, which is the core of the Image of God within us. There is the tree in Eden where the first Eve said, "No I will not serve." Then, there is the Tree on Calvary where Mary, the "second Eve" stood with the beloved disciple John and, along with him, again proclaimed her "yes." Through those choices, presented to us from the moment we open our eyes every morning to the time we close them at night, we are invited to learn in the "School of Nazareth" and, in imitation of the Holy Family, become a domestic church. We are invited into a domestic kenosis, learning to love, pray and grow in holiness in the School of Nazareth. St. Paul wrote to the early Christians: "Brothers and sisters: Put on, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do. And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection" (Col. 3). The first school of prayer and practice, the place where we learn this new way of life called Christianity, is the first cell of the Church, the domestic church of the Christian family.
Behold I make all things new. Christians and New Years’ resolutions
Jan 4, 2018 / 00:00 amNew Year's Eve celebrations are staggered around the globe due to the different time zones, but we all have this in common, no matter where we live geographically – we welcome the end of one calendar year and the beginning of a new one. The manner of celebrating may differ, but we also share a common hope, that we can begin again. That hope can find its ultimate fulfillment by turning the one who can make all things new, Jesus Christ. Nations use different calendars, but the passing of one year to the next is universally marked by a deliberate period of reflection concerning the year that passed and a pledge to begin anew, to change, in the year to come. This is because we all hunger to be made new and, intuitively, we all know that means we must change within if we want to experience change around us. GK Chesterton once wrote: "The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. "Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven." Taking Inventory and Making Resolutions As we end one year and look to a new one, we pause to take inventory. In a rare moment of reflection and honest self-assessment, we admit our failures. We pledge to learn from them and move toward a better future. We all want to be better, to live our lives more fully and to love one another more selflessly. So, we make resolutions. Every New Year I read numerous articles about the questionable efficacy of these New Year's Resolutions. However, the fact remains, we all make them. The experience is universal. The question is – why do we do it? I suggest that they reveal something of our deepest longing. They present us with an invitation to exercise our human freedom and to choose a better way of life. But, we cannot do it on our own. We need God. In Little Gidding, the last of the four quartets written by T.S. Elliot, we find these often quoted words: "Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten And the full fed beast shall kick the empty pail. For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice. What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make and end is to make a beginning." Over the years, I have come to realize that every end truly can become a new beginning for the man or woman who has living faith in a living God who invites us to begin again, again and again. He alone makes it possible, by sharing his life with us. This gift is called grace - and through receiving this grace we become what the Apostle Peter called "Partakers of the Divine Nature" (2 Peter 1:4). As we repent for the failures of the past year, reflect on the gifts it brought with gratitude to God, and resolve to do better in the coming year, we are also facing the reality of our human condition and our fractured freedom. We face the reality of sin. We know that our resolutions to change often end in failure. We are prone to making wrong choices in daily life. Classical western theology speaks of this inclination as concupiscence. The Apostle Paul wrote about this experience to the early Christians in Rome in the seventh chapter of his letter: "For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if (I) do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me... Miserable one that I am! Who will deliver me from this mortal body?" Fortunately, he answered the question a few lines later in the letter, "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ!" Freedom and the Image of God Our human freedom reflects the Image of God. We are not determined. Our choices truly matter. However, our ability to always choose what is true and good and beautiful was fractured by the effects of the first sin. In the words of Saint John Paul II (The Splendor of Truth) "freedom itself needs to be set free." The good news is that freedom can be set free, through the saving life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. By his grace we are made capable of beginning to live our lives differently – and of choosing differently. Freedom is set free by the one who brings true freedom, Jesus Christ. In the words of the savior – “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). Jesus can make all things new within us – and then continues his work of making all things new through us. Even though our human freedom was fractured by sin, the splint of the wood of the Cross is the lasting and life changing remedy which brings healing to the wound. On the first day of the New Year Catholic Christians celebrate the Feast of the Solemnity of the Mother of God. They do so for a reason. This is no liturgical accident. She who beheld the face of the Savior invites us to hear the words of her Son and Savior Jesus Christ, "Behold I make all things new!" (Rev. 21:5). Jesus alone can fulfill the desire which is really at the heart of the New Year's celebrations, and help us, by his saving grace, to make them become reality. Mary is sometimes referred to in Catholic circles as the Mother of the New Creation because the one whom she held in her womb is the only one who makes all things new! Mary was the first disciple, the prototype, the symbol of the whole Church. We who are members of the Church, the body of her son, are invited to emulate her “yes” to the invitation of God and make it our own. We are called to make a place for him within us and become bearers of Christ to the world. For he alone can make us new. Millions will utter sincere words on New Year's Eve and Day, promising to do better this year. Lists will be compiled – and promises made – to oneself, to others and to God. Sadly, many will not be kept. These words attributed to Mark Twain too often ring true: "New Year's Day – now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual." But, this year can be different, if we turn to Jesus. When I was a young man, I would write my New Year's goal list first – and then, in a fit of self-generated enthusiasm, I would ask the Lord to bless it! I know better now. I need the light of the Holy Spirit to even comprehend what is needed if I ever really hope to change. Then, all my well-intended efforts are not enough! I need the grace of God. So now, I pray first. Then, my list becomes simple. Mary's Fiat (Latin word for let it be done) has become my prayer. I seek to make the meaning of it become the pattern of my life. The full phrase opens the door to beginning again and again and again, "let it be it done unto me - according to your word" (Luke 1:38). I pray that in the Year of Our Lord, 2018, we may all find the fullness of grace and the new beginning which comes through entering into a living relationship with the one who makes all things new, Jesus the Christ (Rev. 21:5). There is a universal longing in every human heart to be made new, to begin again, because the Holy Spirit prompts it. It leads us back to the one who created us - and who can re-create us - through Jesus Christ. In and through Jesus Christ, there is a path to being made new. He walked that path up the mountain of Golgotha, and through the tomb to the Resurrection. That promise of being made new, being born again, is at the heart of the Gospel, the good news! St. Paul reminded the Christians in the City of Corinth - and reminds every one of us - "whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come" (2 Cor. 5:17). New Year's Day is a global existential moment, ripe with anticipation and expectations. It invites a spiritually cathartic time of reflection, offers us hope for change and invites us to make new choices. Resolutions can become reality, when we turn to the one who makes it possible, the one who truly makes all things new, Jesus Christ the Lord. Our choices make us become the persons we become. In our choosing we not only have the potential to change the world around us, we change ourselves. In 2018, may we choose to live our lives in, with and for Jesus Christ. That is the way to turn those resolutions into reality and experience a real New Year. St Josemaria Escriva once wrote: "For a son of God each day should be an opportunity for renewal, knowing for sure that with the help of grace he will reach the end of the road, which is Love. That is why if you begin and begin again, you are doing well. If you have a will to win, if you struggle, then with God's help you will conquer. There will be no difficulty you cannot overcome.” (The Forge, 344). I Make All Things New In the third chapter of John's Gospel we read about an encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus. Jesus tells this devout Jewish leader, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God." The phrase born anew can also be translated born again or born from above, in the original Greek. Understandably, the leader, a devout man, was somewhat confused by these words. The encounter continues, "Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?’" (John 3:5). The same John who wrote the Gospel, also wrote the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, while he was imprisoned on the island of Patmos. He was given a vision of the ultimate fulfillment of the desire which surfaces during every commemoration of every New Year, that wonderful day when the Lord will return and make all things new. With those words I conclude: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away. And he who sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. (Rev 21: 1-5) Happy New Year! May the Lord bless you and your family in the Year of Our Lord, 2018.
Canada’s gender X passports and the denial of sexual difference
Aug 31, 2017 / 00:00 amOn June 19, 2017, Canada amended its Human Rights Act to protect “gender identity or expression.” On August 31, 2017, the nation took the gender identity revolution to a new level. They announced a new designation for those who consider themselves an “unspecified sex.” Those not sure of their “gender identity” can get an “identity x” passport. Compelling Society to Deny the Truth Supporters of the Gender Identity Movement claim we have the ability to choose our own gender. They have set in motion a huge cultural revolution. Using the courts and legislatures, as well as major media and Facebook, they seek to compel those who disagree to deny the truth. People who believe in the difference between the sexes face abuse and discrimination. Even prosecution. This is societal lunacy. Here’s one of the latest examples. A first-grade girl in a California charter school was sent to the principal’s office for “misgendering.” She called a little boy by his name on a playground. The boy was “transitioning” to becoming a girl. The teacher used him as a prop in class. She had him leave the room as a boy and come back dressed as a girl. She ordered them to call him by his new chosen name. Then she read them two strongly pro-transgenderism books. Several parents complained they were not told the teacher was going to lead the first graders in a discussion on “transgenderism.” They objected to not being allowed to opt out. The response from the school leadership: They did not need to be informed. They were not allowed to opt out. Misusing the Body What’s called “sex change” or “gender reassignment” surgeries is another example. Removing a person’s genitals and giving them artificially constructed ones does not change the reality of who they are. Men and women are designed to conceive children together. Women are designed to bear them. People with artificial genitals can’t do that. For example, a transsexual woman may look like a male, but she can’t generate sperm as a real male does. The appearance must be sustained by massive doses of synthetic hormones. Every human cell shows us whether we are male or female. That is a given. It is a gift. Removing the real genitals isn’t helping someone become who they truly are. It’s mutilating them. The American College of Pediatricians sees this. They strongly condemned such surgeries for children. They called on “healthcare professionals, educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality.” But for many of the most powerful groups in our culture, ideology determines reality. That ideology is the Gender Identity Movement. Ideology Determines Reality Western culture long ago accepted the notion that the instrumental use of the body of another is a form of sexual freedom. You can do what you want with your body, the way you can do what you want with a pencil or a car. It’s a thing to be used. That was bad enough. Now western culture has taken the next logical step. It sees the human body not just as an instrument, but as a machine. Because it’s a machine, you can change the parts if you want. It’s not just a thing to be used. It’s a thing to be reconstructed. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Roman Curia on this subject. We all deplore the manipulation of nature when we’re looking at the environment, he said. Now, our society sees manipulating our nature as “man’s fundamental choice.” “From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be,” he said. Among many losses, we lose the understanding of “man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human.” A healthy human society needs men and women to be who they are, to put their different gifts together for the common good. We also lose our knowledge of the family as “a reality established by creation,” Benedict noted. “Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.” God Created Male and Female The Gender Identity Movement rejects what the natural law and medical science tell us about male and female. The gender identity revolutionaries have determined they are the Creator. They want to force the rest of us to submit to their error. A Canadian “Gender X” passport will let you leave the country and come back again. But it will never change who you are.
A new coalition for Christian orthodoxy
Jul 25, 2017 / 00:00 amThere is a fierce struggle for Christian orthodoxy in the Catholic Church. It could have dire consequences for all Christians. It should prompt a serious and prolonged response of prayer from all Christians. But it needs more. It needs an active response. I propose what is needed is a new coalition for Christian orthodoxy. I use the word orthodoxy in the lower case, not referring to the Orthodox Church, which is a vital and wonderful part of the Lord’s loving plan. Rather, referring to the whole of Christianity. The word means “right teaching.” One of the strengths of the Catholic Church has always been its “Magisterium”, or teaching office. It used to be, you could always know what the Catholic Church taught. This clarity was particularly essential to the Catholic lay faithful. In an age infected by what Pope Emeritus Benedict referred to as a dictatorship of relativism, sound doctrine is becoming too hard to find. The Apostle Paul instructed Timothy to guard the deposit of faith. (2 Tim. 1:14) The Christian faithful need to have the deposit protected and regularly offered, without confusion. That is why the Magisterium is so essential. Especially when too many Catholics, and other Christians, are faced with a deacon, priest or bishop teaching errant doctrine. The Social Teaching of the Church is a part of Catholic Moral theology. It is doctrinal and not subject to change. It is revealed in the natural moral law, expounded upon in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament - and fully and definitively revealed in and through Jesus Christ. Jesus continues his redemptive mission through His Body, the Church, of which we are members. Jesus Himself is the Teacher of the Church. He instructs us through those to whom He has entrusted His authority. Yet, that instruction is not being delivered with clarity in an increasing number of places. This is a major problem which must be addressed. The rejection of Christian orthodoxy is most evident in two areas of the social teaching of the Catholic Church - the dignity of human life and the unchangeable nature of marriage. The right to life Relying on the Bible and the natural Law, the Magisterium of the Catholic Church teaches that all human persons are created in the image of God. Because of this, all human persons have an inherent dignity and a fundamental right to life from conception to natural death. This doctrine is infallibly taught by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. In other words, it is unchangeable. It must be embraced by all Catholic Christians, or they are being unfaithful in the practice of their Christian faith. Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit on the Church. One of the functions of the Holy Spirit would be to guide the Church in all truth. In the Gospel of John we read His promise, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). Catholic Christians affirm that one of the ways this happens is through the teaching office, the Magisterium. This truth concerning the right to life is also meant to inform the civil or positive law of every nation. Every human life, whether that life is found in the first home of the womb, a wheelchair, a jail cell, a hospital room, a hospice, a senior center, a soup kitchen or on a refugee boat, is to be respected and protected in the law. There is a natural moral law in which the positive or civil law is to participate in - and defer to. When the positive or civil law denies the natural moral law, or overtly rejects it, the resulting “law” is not a law at all. It is unjust. This position has deep roots in the Christian tradition and is affirmed in every great human rights struggle. Human rights are also goods of human persons. They are not ethereal concepts floating around in the air. When there is no human person to receive or exercise them, all the rhetoric extolling them is nothing but empty air and sophistry. Every procured abortion is the taking of innocent human life. Period. It is therefore always and everywhere intrinsically immoral and illegal, whether the civil and criminal law of a nation recognizes this fact or not. It is revealed by the natural moral law. Without recognizing this right to life and protecting it, there can be no other derivative rights. The entire infrastructure of human rights is placed at risk. The nature of marriage So too, when the very nature of marriage is rejected, the social order is placed at risk. The Catholic position on the nature of marriage is clear. Or, is should be. Marriage is solely possible between one man and one woman. Period. The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church explained it well in 2003. "The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose." "No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives." The role of civil government Marriage is the first and most fundamental social institution. It is a relationship defined by nature. It is protected by the natural law that is binding on all men and women. It finds its foundation in the order of creation. It is affirmed by Revelation and, in Jesus Christ, elevated to a Sacrament, a means of grace and sign of God’s loving plan for His Church. Civil governments must be just. They must recognize, respect and protect the natural law right to life. In addition, civil institutions did not create marriage. They cannot manufacture a right to marry for those who are incapable of marriage. The institutions of government should defend marriage and family. Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. For example, the ban on polygamy and age requirements were enforced to ensure that there was a mature decision at the basis of the marriage contract. Heterosexual marriage, procreation, and the nurturing of children form the foundation for family. Family is the foundation for civil society. It is the first vital cell of the social order and the first mediating institution of government. To limit marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory. Homosexual couples cannot bring into existence what marriage intends by its definition. To confer the benefits that have been conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual paramours is bad public policy. It will never serve the common good. Yet, that is the current state of Western Civilization. We have lost our way. Only a renewed Christian Church can turn this situation around. Infallibility Sadly, the clarity of Catholic moral doctrine on life and marriage has been eroded by lack of proper catechetical instruction. There is also poor teaching being given right within the Church. Too often, this teaching is given by some in authority. Finally, the truth about life and marriage is being disregarded by a growing number of the Catholic faithful. It has been rejected by some unfaithful Catholics in public office. However, none of that changes the truth of that doctrine. It is still taught infallibly by the Church and is not capable of being changed. Infallibility is a gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. The doctrine insists that the pastors of the Church, the pope and bishops in union with him, can definitively proclaim a doctrine of faith or morals for the belief of the faithful (Catholic Catechism #891). This gift is related to the inability of the whole body of the faithful to err in matters of faith and morals (Catholic Catechism #92). So, how do we explain the huge difference between what the Catholic Church teaches and what an increasing number of Catholics believe and practice? There is a great falling away occurring. Moral incoherence runs rampant among Catholic Christians. They have embraced a separation between faith and life. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church stated it succinctly, “This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age." Moral coherence Catholic Christians are called to be “morally coherent.” They are to live the faith they profess in the Creed in every area of their life. That phrase, moral coherence, was used in an instruction released in 2002 entitled a "Doctrinal Note on some questions regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life". Here is an excerpt, "The social doctrine of the Church is not an intrusion into the government of individual countries. It is a question of the lay Catholic's duty to be morally coherent, found within one's conscience, which is one and indivisible. Living and acting in conformity with one's own conscience on questions of politics is not slavish acceptance of positions alien to politics or some kind of 'confessionalism', but rather the way in which Christians offer their concrete contribution so that, through political life, society will become more just and more consistent with the dignity of the human person." The same congregation has repeatedly addressed the right to life. Here is one example: "The first right of the human person is his life. He has other goods and some are more precious, but this one is fundamental - the condition of all the others. Hence it must be protected above all others. It does not belong to society, nor does it belong to public authority in any form to recognize this right for some and not for others" (Declaration on Procured Abortion (1974), no. 11. I). A battle underway The bulwark that is the Magisterium of the Catholic Church is being ravaged by wolves. The attack is coming from both within the walls of the Catholic Church and without. The Church is in the wilderness. Jonathan Coe explained the core of the problem in one sentence, “The Church has, in many places, become the culture. The secularists have influenced us much more than we have influenced them.” Coe is correct. He further opines, “The good news is that, when you look at both the biblical narrative and Church history, in a time of profound spiritual and moral decline, God usually has a consecrated person (or a group) hidden away, whom he is preparing for the purpose of meaningfully engaging the people causing the decline and the institutions they have constructed.” Again, his prescription is the right one for the malady. We need to engage the people who are causing a decline in the Church. We must deal with errant teaching masquerading as some sort of acceptable “development.” Understanding the source of this errant teaching consists of is important. Some Helpful Distinctions The Catechism of the Catholic Church distinguishes between heresy, apostasy and incredulity. “Incredulity is the neglect of revealed truth or the willful refusal to assent to it. Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same; …apostasy is the total repudiation of the Christian faith “(Catechism #2089). It is increasingly apparent that the Church is afflicted with an outbreak of all three. There is widespread incredulity among many Catholics. There is also a growing apostasy within the Catholic Church. Both are occurring within other Christian churches and communions. The abandonment of the unchangeable truth concerning the dignity of human life and the nature of marriage is just the tip of the iceberg. Finally, there is a growing acceptance of false teaching or heresy. Christians are abandoning the teaching of the Bible and the Christian Tradition. That is heresy. This must be exposed and opposed. It is occurring in every segment of the currently divided Body of Christ. A response is needed What is needed is a new coalition of faithful Christians, formed across Christian confessional lines, and committed to defending what C.S. Lewis referred to as “Mere Christianity.” What Lewis meant by the phrase was not minimalism. Rather, basic Christian orthodoxy. The word orthodoxy, at its root, means right teaching. This rejection of sound teaching is not a new phenomenon in the 2000-year history of the Church. All one needs to do is look at the first few centuries of the Christian Church. The same struggles existed very early in the Church. Many of the epistles in the New Testament were addressed to the early Christians to assist them in staying faithful to sound doctrine (2 Tim. 4:3). The teaching of the Apostles continued beyond their death, through the bishops. Much of what they did in those early centuries was refute heresy and defend sound doctrine. For example, Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon, France, was born in Asia Minor in the year 125. His efforts are one example of the many early Church Fathers who contended for the truth - and pulled no punches in defending orthodoxy. His seminal work was entitled "Against Heresies." It was dedicated to exposing and opposing false teaching, to protect the Christians of his day from poison. His treatise is a refutation of the teachings of certain so called Christian Gnostics whose followers fell for similar errors as those which are reemerging in this hour. Irenaeus' goal, stated in the Fifth Book of the treatise, was to "reclaim the wanderers and convert them to the Church of God" and to "confirm at the same time the minds of the neophytes" (Preface, Book V). This should be the mission of this new coalition for Christian orthodoxy. A Christian response Irenaeus loved the heretical Christians enough to speak the truth. His goal was to lead them back to the faith which was taught, lived and demonstrated by Jesus and handed down to us from the Apostles. We must follow his example today. It now seems all too common that we read of new instances of priests, deacon, ministers, pastors, bishops and lay leaders falling away from the ancient yet ever new Christian faith. The positions being espoused by some contemporary Christians are heretical. The lifestyles affirmed by some Christians who claim to be “progressive” are a regressive effort to turn the clock back to a pre-Christian paganism. We are living in a new missionary age of Christianity. The mission field now includes people in the pews on Sunday morning. They need to hear anew the liberating message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in its fullness, without compromise or equivocation. Only a renewed Christian Church, orthodox in doctrine and empowered by the Holy Spirit, can change the culture of our day. A weakened Christian church, poisoned by heresy, will not be able to rise to the challenge of this hour. The mission to the culture It is not my intent to debate what stage we are in. But, the evidence is clear. We are losing the Christian influence in western culture It is the Christian vision of faithful, monogamous marriage, family, authentic human freedom, the dignity of every human person and the existence of objective truth from which we had derived a common morality to guide western civilization. That morality has also guided all true social progress. The message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and teaching of the Christian Church, has helped to free people from the bondage of disordered appetites and live lives of virtue, for centuries. The instruction offered by the Christian Church has helped to unshackle whole cultures from the tyrannies – personal and social – which are rooted in sin and lead to various forms of slavery. It has torn down the structures which sin fosters – and erected in their place solid foundations for authentic freedom. It was the Christian vision of the human person, the family, the just society and the true common good that helped to overcome the flawed pagan ideologies and superstitions. From its birth, the Christian Church has been sent into cultures filled with people who thought they were progressive, when they were anything but. Many of those cultures practiced primitive forms of abortion and infant exposure – a practice of leaving unwanted children on rocks to be eaten by birds of prey or picked up by slave traders. Ancient Christian manuscripts such as the Didache (the Teaching of the Twelve), the accounts of Justin Martyr and other early Christian sources espoused views which were radically counter-cultural. Those early Christians were culture warriors, in the best sense. They even shed their blood to set the captives free. That is our task in this hour. We are a new counter culture in a western culture awash and adrift. The early Christians exposed the evil in the cultures of their day – not unlike the one in which we live – where people were treated as property, freedom was perceived as a power over others and unrestrained license masqueraded as liberty. They did this by embracing, living and proclaiming truth. They believed the words of Jesus, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31). Contend for the truth The early Christians did not back down from contending with the pagans of old concerning truth. They knew then – and we must reassert in our own day – that what is really at stake are two competing visions of the human person, human freedom, human flourishing and human progress. The early Christians demonstrated the superiority of their truth claims by their compelling witness of life. They lived in monogamous marriages, raised their children to be faithful Christians and good citizens and went into the world of their age offering a new way to live. This way (which is what they first called the early Church) presented a very different worldview than the one the pagans embraced. As a result, they stirred up hostility. Some of them were martyred in the red martyrdom of shed blood. Countless more joined the train of what use to be called white martyrdom, living lives of sacrificial witness and service in the culture, working hard and staying faithful to the Gospel unto the end of a long life spent in missionary toil. Slowly, not only were the ancient pagans converted and baptized, but eventually their leaders and entire Nations followed suit. Resultantly, the Christian worldview took root and began to influence the social order, transforming the culture from within. A new culture emerged Christianity taught such novel concepts as the dignity of every person and their equality before the One God. The Christians proclaimed the dignity of women, the dignity of chaste marriage and the sanctity of the family. Christians insisted that freedom must be exercised with reference to an objective moral code, a law higher than the emperor or the shifting sands of public opinion; a natural Law which could be known by all men and women, through the exercise of reason, because it was written on the human heart. Christians presented a coherent and compelling answer to the existential questions that plagued the ancient pagans. Questions such as why we existed and how we got here? What was the purpose of life? Questions like how evil came into the world and why we could not always make right choices? What force seemed to move us toward evil and how we could be set free from its power? Christian philosophy began to flourish. The arts also flourished under the Christian worldview. Philosophies of government and economic theory began to be influenced by these principles derived from a Christian worldview. The Christian worldview offers the same genuine liberation to the contemporary age in which we live. However, it must be presented with doctrinal clarity. We need a coalition for Christian orthodoxy to protect sound doctrine within the Church so that the Church can do what she alone is capable of doing, bring conversion to men, women, children, families and whole cultures. Our missionary task Some say we live in a postmodern age; others call it a post Christian age. I contend it is a pre-Christian age, ripe for the missionary work of a renewed, dynamically orthodox Church. The future belongs to such a Church. Sadly, the Church is weakened. First, by our own division within. The Body of Christ was never meant to be divided. It is not God’s fault, He is without any fault. It is our own. But also, and this is the issue which I am addressing in this article, we are weakened because we are being ravaged by poor teaching. Jesus promised Peter “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (John 16:18). The gates of hell have not prevailed. But, they sure as hell have tried. And, they are trying in this urgent hour. It is time to band together in a coalition for Christian orthodoxy. When we do, the Church of Jesus Christ will rise from this seeming collapse of this moment, once again strong and powerful. The message and gifts she holds can still pave the road for real progress. Proclaiming the orthodox Christian faith is her great contribution to humanity and human history. The contemporary re-emergence of paganism has been embraced, even by some within some Christian churches and communities. It is not the path to freedom and flourishing but to misery and new slaveries. It must be exposed, opposed and rejected by courageous orthodox Christians. They exist across confessional lines. We need to pray for the faithful Christians within every Christian church and community in our day. Then, we must band together, across our divisions, to refute heresies by proclaiming the Truth which still sets all men and women free in a new coalition for Christian orthodoxy.
Living Liturgically as Catholic Christians
Jun 27, 2017 / 00:00 amOur Catholic liturgical year follows a rhythmic cycle which points us toward beginnings and ends. In doing so, it emphasizes an important truth that can only be grasped through faith. The last Sunday in the Western Church year is the Feast of the Solemnity of Jesus Christ the Sovereign King. Then, no sooner than we have celebrated the last Sunday of the Year, the Feast of Christ the King, we celebrate the first Sunday of Advent, and begin the time of preparation for the great Feast of the Nativity of Our Savior. Our Catholic faith and its Liturgical practices proclaim to a world hungry for meaning that Jesus Christ is the "Alpha," (the first letter of the Greek alphabet) and the "Omega" (the last letter), the beginning and the end. He is the giver, the governor and the fulfillment of all time. In Him the whole world is being made new and every end is a beginning. Our Liturgical seasons present a way to receive time as a continual gift and change the way we live our daily lives. Our choice to celebrate them helps us to grow in the life of grace as we say "yes" to their invitations. They invite us to walk in a new way of life which becomes infused with supernatural meaning: to enter the mystery of living in the Church as the New World and thereby become leaven for an age which has lost its soul. Human beings have always marked time by significant events. The real question is not whether we will mark time, but how we will mark time? What events and what messages are we proclaiming in our calendaring? What are we saying with our lives in an age which needs the witness of God's loving plan? For the Christian, time is not meant to be a tyrant, ruling over us. Nor is the passing of time to be experienced as an enemy, somehow stealing our youth and opportunity. Rather, time is meant to become a companion, a friend and a teacher, instructing and offering us a series of invitations to allow the Lord to truly become our King by reigning in our daily lives. Our conscious awareness of time makes it a path along which the redemptive loving plan of a timeless God is revealed and received. In Christ, time is now given back to us as a gift. It offers us a field of choice and a path to holiness and human flourishing. As we view time with this lens of faith, we discover that life is a pilgrimage to eternal life. The Lord invites us, beginning now, to participate in His loving plan through His Son Jesus to recreate the entire cosmos. Time becomes the road along which this loving plan of redemption proceeds. Those Baptized into Jesus Christ continue His redemptive mission until he returns to establish His reign. We do this by living in His body, the Church, and drawing the whole world into the new world beginning now. The Church is, in one of the early father's favorite descriptions, that "new world". The Christian view of time as having a redemptive purpose is why Catholic Christians mark time by the great events of the faith in our Liturgical calendar. Like so much else that is contained within the treasury of Catholic faith and life, the Church, who is an "expert in humanity," invites us to live the rhythm of the liturgical year to walk into the deeper encounter at the heart of Catholic Christian faith. As we learn to live liturgically, moving through life in the flow of the liturgical calendar we can find the deeper mystery and meaning of life. Christians believe in a linear timeline in history. There is a beginning and an end, a fulfillment, which is, in fact, a new beginning. Time is heading somewhere. That is as true of the history of the world as it is our own personal histories. Christians mark time by the great events of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are always moving forward and toward His loving return. The Church, to use the beautiful imagery of the early Christian fathers, was birthed from the wounded side of the Savior on the cross at Calvary's hill. This new family of the Church was then sent on mission, when, after the resurrection, Jesus breathed His Spirit into them at Pentecost. In our celebration of a Church year, we not only remember the great events of the life, ministry and mission of the Lord, we also celebrate the life and death of our family members, the Saints, who have gone on before us, in the worlds of the Liturgy, "marked with the sign of redemption" as we pray in the Liturgy. They are models and companions for the journey of life and are our great intercessors; that "great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1) whom the author of the letter to the Hebrews extols. This is the heart of understanding the "communion of saints". As St. Paul reminded the Roman Christians, not even death separates us any longer. (Romans 8:38, 39) They will welcome us into eternity. However, from that eternal now, living in the Communion of love, they now help us along the daily path of time through both their example and their prayer. As we progress through liturgical time we are invited to enter the great events of faith. So, on the last week of the year, through our readings and liturgical prayer, we are invited to reflect on the "last things" – death, judgment, heaven and hell. We do so to change, to be converted, and to enter more fully into the Divine plan. The Western Church year ends. On the Feast of Christ the King we celebrate the full and final triumph and return of the One through whom the entire universe was created – and in whom it is being "recreated" – and by whom it will be completely reconstituted and handed back to the Father at the "end" of all time. That end will mark the beginning of a timeless new heaven and a new earth when "He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death" (Revelations 21:4). As we move from one Church year to the next, we also move along in the timeline of the human life allotted to each one of us. We age. The certainty of our own death is meant to illuminate our life and the certainty of the end of all time is meant to illuminate its purpose and culmination in Christ. For both to be experienced by faith we must truly believe in Jesus Christ, the beginning and the end. When we do, death can become, as we move closer to it, a second birth. Francis of Assisi prayed these words in his most popular prayer “it is in dying that we are born to eternal life." He referred to death as a "sister" implying that he had a relationship with it. So too did all the great heroes our Church, the saints. So can we, that is if we choose to walk the way of living faith, be immersed in the life of grace? With a few exceptions, Christians celebrate the death of saints because death is not an end but the beginning of an eternal life with God. In the final book of the Bible we read: "Here is what sustains the holy ones who keep God's commandments and their faith in Jesus. I heard a voice from heaven say, ‘Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Spirit, ‘let them find rest from their labors, for their works accompany them.’ "Then I looked and there was a white cloud, and sitting on the cloud one who looked like a son of man, with a gold crown on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand. Another angel came out of the temple, crying out in a loud voice to the one sitting on the cloud, "Use your sickle and reap the harvest, for the time to reap has come, because the earth's harvest is fully ripe. So the one who was sitting on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested" (Revelations 14: 12-15). As the Apostle John recorded in the Revelation he received on the Island of Patmos, our "use" of time is meant to bear good fruit. We are called to bear a harvest which will accompany us into eternity. It will – if we have an intimate relationship with the One who both gives and governs time. Time is the opportunity for the Christian to bear that "fruit that remains" to which Jesus referred: "It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: love one another" (St. John 15: 16, 17). We decide whether we use time for the bearing of good fruit or allow it to become a tyrant who frightens us as we fruitlessly try to resist his inevitable claim on our perceived youth. This act of choosing rightly, daily, helps us to develop a disposition – a way of living that involves the proper exercise of our human freedom aided by grace. When time is perceived as a gift from God and welcomed as an opportunity for bearing the fruits of love and holiness, we learn to receive it in love and perceive it as a field of choice and an environment for holiness. We choose to fill our lives with love and pour ourselves out for the God of love. When we live this kind of life, Jesus can find a home within us from which He can continue His redemptive mission, in time. The ancients were fond of a Latin phrase "Carpe Diem," which literally means "Seize the day." For we who are living in communion in Christ Jesus, that phrase can take on a whole new meaning. We always journey toward the "Day of the Lord," when He will return as King. We should seize that day as the reference point for all things. Almost two thousand years ago the ancient Greek writer, Seneca, wrote: "It is not that we have so little time, but that we have wasted so much of it" St. Paul wrote to Greek Christians, centuries later in Ephesus: "Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise men (and women) but as wise making the most of the time" (Ephesians 5: 15ff). As we consider the timeline of God's unfolding plan, the redemption of the whole cosmos, the God who gives and governs time, invites us to re-dedicate ourselves to living differently. We are to live as though time really does matter. We are invited by grace to give ourselves away for others; to imitate the One who gave Himself for the entire human race. We are invited to pour ourselves out as Jesus did for us. If we live life this way, when we face Him on that final day, we will do so with our arms full of gifts borne in time. These gifts will have paved the way for eternity. There is no separation for the believer between the secular and the sacred. In the great event of the Incarnation and the fullness of the Paschal Mystery, all is made new. We do not bring God into time; He is the Creator of time. In the mystery of the Incarnation, the Eternal Word through whom the universe was created entered time to re-create it from within! We are invited by grace to come to acknowledge this mystery and then receive his creature time as a gift, a good, to be given back to Him through living our lives in Christ for the sake of the world. The Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus reminds us of our mission, in a culture which has forgotten God. We are called to love the world as God loves the world (John 3:16). Let us spend the month of June in prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, lifting our nation, indeed the whole world, to the One in whom we place all our trust. He will not disappoint; His heart still beats with mercy and love for the world. "Sacred Heart of Jesus, We Place our Trust in Thee."
Memorial Day calls us to reflection, prayer and conversion
May 31, 2017 / 00:00 amHonoring those who have died in service to the Nation on Memorial Day is a uniquely American custom. There are numerous cities which claim they were the first to celebrate the Day. There are multiple explanations of its history. On the last Monday of the month of May, Americans are invited to pause to remember the men and women who died while serving our Nation in the military. Their heroic witness should challenge us to live our lives differently. Americans visit cemeteries or memorials dedicated to the war dead. We reflect on the deeper questions of life and death. We call to mind the memories of those who died in service. There are community wide parades and picnics. The Holiday has become the unofficial start to the summer season in the United States. We pause for prayer and reflection. We summon a new resolve to live our first principles. I am drawn to these words of Jesus on this Memorial Day, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends” (John 15:13). Military service can lead to laying one's life down. Those who do so are heroes. We should reflect on their valor and virtue. We need saints and heroes. I am reflecting on a heroic Catholic Chaplain named Father Emil Kapaun today. He lived those words of Jesus on the battlefield, during the Korean Conflict. He poured himself out for the wounded whom he carried in his arms as he prayed for them. He lived those words even more fervently in a prisoner of war camp, where he died doing the same thing. You can read of his inspiring Christian witness here. Fr Kapuan is a saint, a holy one. All Christians are saints, in the sense of having been set aside for the Lord to live holy lives. We are all called into communion with Jesus. And in Him, into with one another. That communion is lived in the Body of Christ. We are called to bring Jesus Christ to others with word and witness. To be poured out for the sake of a world waiting to be born anew in Him. But there are some who excel in sacrificial Christian love. Fr Emil Kapuan is one. His cause for canonization is moving forward. In the Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches, there is a process through which holy Christian men and women are canonized. They are then declared publicly to be Saints, with a capital “S”. From the earliest centuries of the Church, those who demonstrated heroic virtue in life – or died as a Christian Martyr were given a special place of honor. This is where the practice of canonizing some members of the Body of Christ began. It continues in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches. The Catholic Catechism explains: By canonizing some of the faithful, i.e., by solemnly proclaiming that they practiced heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God's grace, the Church recognizes the power of the Spirit of holiness within her and sustains the hope of believers by proposing the saints to them as models and intercessors (CCC #828). As we continue to experience the ominous dark cloud of a growing culture of death – nothing less than a national spiritual revival can turn us back to the right course. As we witness the utter rejection of the truth about marriage and the family and society founded upon it, we need National repentance. Our Nation has lost its way. As we experience the continued erosion of liberty, and witness the disregard of the first freedom, we need saints and heroes as models. They call each one of us to sacrificial love. Christians in the United States should pray fervently for those who serve in the military. We should honor them and respect their sacrifice. We should also support them in every way we are able to do so. I live in Southeastern, Virginia where there are many members of the military. The parish I serve is filled with military families. Every day I witness the many kinds of sacrifices which military families make for our Nation. How to observe the holiday? Though considered a secular holiday, Memorial Day is profoundly spiritual. A national moment of remembrance takes place at 3:00 p.m. At that time, we observe a moment of silence and prayer. President Trump issued a Memorial Day Proclamation in which he set the entire day apart for prayer. He has asked all of us to unite in prayer with these words: Now, therefore, I, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim Memorial Day, May 29, 2017, as a day of prayer for permanent peace, and I designate the hour beginning in each locality at 11:00 a.m. of that day as a time when people might unite in prayer. I urge the press, radio, television, and all other information media to cooperate in this observance. I further ask all Americans to observe the National Moment of Remembrance beginning at 3:00 p.m. local time on Memorial Day. I also request the Governors of the United States and its Territories, and the appropriate officials of all units of government, to direct that the flag be flown at half-staff until noon on this Memorial Day on all buildings, grounds, and naval vessels throughout the United States and in all areas under its jurisdiction and control. I also request the people of the United States to display the flag at half-staff from their homes for the customary forenoon period. Let’s follow the President’s request. Memorial Day calls us to reflection, prayer and conversion. On this Memorial Day, I also ask you to consider a practice I was inspired to embrace years ago. Whenever you see a man or a woman in uniform, stop and shake their hand. Look them in the eyes. Thank them for their service to our Nation. Then tell them “God bless you.”
Pope Francis resets Marian devotion on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima
May 20, 2017 / 00:00 amOn the centennial of the Apparition of Mary, the Mother of the Lord, to the children of Fatima, Pope Francis spoke from a pastor’s heart to hundreds of thousands who had gathered. Francis has a deep love for Mary, the Mother of the Lord. He is a champion of popular piety as a strength for the faithful and a vehicle for a genuine renewal of devotion for the whole Church. However, after affirming that, along with them, he was there as a pilgrim, he used the opportunity to reset Marian Piety for Catholic Christians. In his characteristically plain spoken manner, he juxtaposed two approaches to Marian Piety. He cautioned against one. Then, he revealed the better way, the evangelical way, of practicing Marian Piety in a way which helps one draw closer to Jesus Christ. The Pope asked the faithful: Pilgrims with Mary ... But which Mary? A teacher of the spiritual life, the first to follow Jesus on the narrow way of the cross by giving us an example? Or a Lady unapproachable and impossible to imitate? A woman blessed because she believed always and everywhere in Gods words? Or a plaster statue from whom we beg favors at little cost? He continued: The Virgin Mary of the Gospel, venerated by the Church at prayer? Or a Mary of our own making: one who restrains the arm of a vengeful God? One sweeter than Jesus the ruthless judge? One more merciful than the Lamb slain for us? With a pastor’s heart, he steered the faithful away from a misguided response to some of the messages of Marian apparitions. He cautioned them against some of the more apocalyptic approaches to the messages, which leads to fear and alarm. He explained that they are loving calls to repentance, renewed faith and missionary activity. Francis explained: It is evident here that we should not surrender to catastrophes and visions that present Our Lady as sweeter and more merciful than God the Father and Jesus Christ. Great injustice is done to God’s grace... whenever we say that sins are punished by his judgment, without first saying – as the Gospel clearly does – that they are forgiven by his mercy! Mercy has to be put before judgment and, in any case, God’s judgment will always be rendered in the light of his mercy. Obviously, Gods mercy does not deny justice, for Jesus took upon himself the consequences of our sin, together with its due punishment. He did not deny sin, but redeemed it on the cross. That is why we are freed from our sins and we put aside all fear and dread, as unbefitting those who are loved. Thus, there is no faith based on fear, on chasing secrets and visions, but based on the gospel and love. This was Pope Francis at his best. A pastor in the Chair of Peter. When I read the accounts on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, I was drawn back to my own return to the Catholic Christian faith and rediscovery of the gift of Mary as the Mother of the Lord, the Mother of the Church and my Mother. My Journey Home to the Catholic Church I am what is often called a revert to the Catholic Church. I did not become a Catholic after having been a member of another Christian community. Though I was raised as a Catholic, I fell away from the practice of the ancient faith when my family stopped participating in the sacraments and living the faith as a central part of our life together. We became what could be called cultural Catholics. The Catholic Christian faith and the Savior had little to do with our life. My teenage years were spent searching for meaning in life. My hunger for the truth finally led me home to the Lord – and His Church. However, the route was a circuitous one. Among the places which it led to was my personal reading of the fathers (early leaders) of the first centuries of the undivided Christian Church. In those ancient Christian writings I discovered how the early Christians really viewed their participation in the Church as integral to their belonging to Jesus Christ. I discovered how the early church worshiped. How they understood Christianity not as some sort of add on to life, but a new way of life, now lived in Jesus Christ. A Way lived with one another, in Jesus Christ. That all happened by living in His Body, the Church, of which we are all members by Baptism (1 Cor. 12). In other words, the Church was not some-thing, but Some-One. The Church is Relational After intensely questioning many of the teachings of the Catholic Church, in my questioning journey home to the Catholic Church, including the teaching concerning even the role of Mary, I came to understand that the pronouncement of the early Church Council of Ephesus (431 AD) that Mary is Theotokos, Greek for Mother or Bearer of God. It was a profoundly Christological declaration. In other words, it speaks about Jesus Christ, and not really about Mary. It was an effort to correct the growing heresies in the early Church which threatened to undermine the core proclamation of the Gospel about who Jesus really is. The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Word Made Flesh, Jesus the Christ, was truly both God and Man. The Incarnation was – and is – central to the Christian claim. The One whom Mary bore was and is, truly God and truly man. I studied the historic background of the proclamation at that Council and came to understand what was at stake. When I read this simple proclamation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church years later, What the Catholic faith believes about Mary is based on what it believes about Christ, and what it teaches about Mary illumines in turn its faith in Christ (CCC #487). It all began to make sense. My study of early Church history also revealed the presence of Marian piety and devotion in the very early centuries of the Church. It was expressed in the frescoes found in the catacombs and espoused with the anointing of the Holy Spirit in the reflections of the early church fathers on the significance of her role in salvation history – as well as her continued role in the life of the Church through her both example and prayer. As my knowledge of the lives of the saints increased, I had to decide whether all their writings about Mary reflected bad theology? Or, perhaps, I had missed something. Fortunately, I arrived at the proper conclusion. Mother of the Lord, My Mother But, even after all that, Mary was still to me the Mother of the Lord. She was not yet MY Mother. The progression continued as I prayerfully reflected on the last hours of the earthly ministry of Jesus as recounted in the fourth Gospel, the one written by the beloved disciple John. Its meaning began to unfold and become personal for me. John records: When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, Woman, behold your son. Then he said to the disciple, Behold your mother (John 19: 26-27). Throughout the Christian Tradition great theologians, mystics, popes and saints have viewed John as representing you and me in that great exchange of love between Jesus and John. He spoke from the second tree, the Cross on Calvary. The last gift Jesus gave us, before giving every drop of His Sacred Blood to set us free from sin, was His mother. She is the mother of His family, the Church. All who are baptized are now incorporated into Christ and become members of that family. We live our lives in His Body, the Church (1 Cor. 12). The Head and the Body are eternally joined in a communion of love. St. Augustine – and countless Saints both East and West – wrote of the whole Christ, meaning both head and body (cf. Colosians 1:15 -23, Ephesians 4:15,16). That is the Church. Everything Jesus has – He has given to His Church. That includes His Mother. She is the Mother of His Mystical Body, His Church. We are members of that family which He has formed, called the Church. As the years unfolded, I found that many of the members of the communion of saints to which we are all joined, were profoundly Marian. My favorite saints, like Francis of Assisi, Bernard of Clairvaux, the early church fathers, St Jose Maria Escriva all the way up to my champion, Saint John Paul II, all had a deep love and devotion to Mary as Mother. Finally, the grace was given to me to see the beauty of this last gift given by Jesus from the cross. I received her as my own mother. This little Virgin from Nazareth – whose yes brought heaven to earth and earth to heaven, went from being the mother and a mother to – my mother. And, rather than distance me from Jesus, my intimate communion with Him grew deeper and deeper. The Catholic Catechism reminds us of the evangelical nature of what is taught about Mary in these words: What the Catholic faith believes about Mary is based on what it believes about Christ, and what it teaches about Mary illumines in turn its faith in Christ. God sent forth his Son, but to prepare a body for him, he wanted the free co-operation of a creature. For this, from all eternity God chose for the mother of his Son a daughter of Israel, a young Jewish woman of Nazareth in Galilee, a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary (Lk. 1:26,27). (CCC#487, 488). Some History The Catechism of the Catholic Church also explains: Called in the Gospels the mother of Jesus, Mary is acclaimed by Elizabeth, at the prompting of the Spirit and even before the birth of her son, as the mother of my Lord. In fact, the One whom she conceived as man by the Holy Spirit, who truly became her Son according to the flesh, was none other than the Father's eternal Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity. Hence the Church confesses that Mary is truly Mother of God (Theotokos), (CCC, 495,496; Council of Ephesus, 431 AD). The word in Greek is Theotokos, which means bearer or mother of God. The term was used as part of the popular piety of the early first millennium church. It is used throughout the Eastern Church Liturgy, both Orthodox and Catholic. This title was a response to early threats to orthodoxy. It was a defense of authentic Christian teaching. A pronouncement of the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D., insisted, If anyone does not confess that God is truly Emmanuel, and that on this account the holy virgin is the Theotokos (for according to the flesh she gave birth to the word of God become flesh by birth) let him be anathema. The Council's insistence on the title was to preserve the teaching of the Church that Jesus was both Divine and human. The two natures were united in His One Person. Not only was that teaching under an assault then, it is under an assault now. Failing to get it right has extraordinary implications. Again, the reason that the early Church Council pronounced this doctrine was Christological – meaning that it had to do with Jesus Christ. One of the threats in the fourth century came from an interpretation of the teachings of a Bishop of Constantinople named Nestorius. Some of his followers insisted on calling Mary only the Mother of the Christ. The Council insisted on the use of the title (in the Greek) Theotokos, (Mother of God or God-bearer) to reaffirm the central truth of what truly occurred in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. This has profound implications for you and for me. Mary as Model The rejection of the truth revealed in this title led to a diminution in the understanding of the role of Mary. It impeded some Christians from grasping the meaning of her “Yes” to God's Will. She is a model of who we are becoming – as we cooperate with grace! (See, the exposition on grace in the Catholic Catechism, CCC 1996-2003). This minimizing of Mary is a privation, a lack, and can lead to a reduced understanding of the call to every Christian to live our lives for Jesus Christ – just as Mary did. It can undermine our mission to bring the world to the new world, recreated in her Son, the Church. The Church is His Body on earth and a seed of the Kingdom which is to come. The Church, of which we are members through baptism, continues His redemptive mission until He returns. We can also miss the insight it brings to our personal calling. Every Christian is called to bear Jesus for the world as Mary did. We are invited into the relationship that she had with her Son. We can become God-bearers and bring Him to all those whom we encounter in our few short days under the sun. In addition, we should remember this – Jesus called her Mother. She was always there as His Mother. Mary, always with Jesus Mary was at the Incarnation, Birth, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of God Incarnate. She was there throughout the often-called hidden years in Nazareth. In the life of Jesus Christ every word and every act was redemptive, revealing the mystery of heaven touching earth – and the deeper purpose of our lives. Mary was present in moments whose impact is timeless. She was there on the day of Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. She was there as the first evangelist and disciple who gave the first Christian testimony to her cousin, Elizabeth. She won the first convert in utero in the person of John the Baptist. This event, called the Visitation, is recorded in the Gospel of St. Luke (Luke l: 39-45). This followed the visit of the Angel Gabriel to Mary (Luke 1:6-38). Her response was to the Angel was not a onetime reaction. It was a life of surrender. Her Fiat (Latin, let it be done) provides a pattern of life for us, if we choose to make it our own. It issued forth in a song of praise, her Magnificat. Mary humbled herself. She confronted her fears and entered a new way of living. All in a continued response to a gift initiated by a loving God. We are called to respond the same way to His calling in our own life. God is not an add-on to our life. He is its source and its summit. There is a way that all men and women are invited into – not just once, but daily – the Way of Jesus. Mary walked in this way with extraordinary humility. She shows us love surrendered to Love Incarnate. Justin Martyr and the early Christians found in her yes, the undoing of the no given by the first woman Eve. They called Mary the Second Eve, the mother of the new creation. In her womb, she carried the One Scripture called the New Adam. Jesus was born from her as the first born of a new race of men and women who find a new birth through His life, death and Resurrection. Bearing the Lord Jesus resides within and lives through all who respond to His invitation. Just as Mary did. Her free choice is an invitation to explore our own histories and write them anew in Jesus Christ by exercising our own freedom to choose the more excellent way (1 Cor. 13). When we allow the Savior Jesus Christ, to be, in a sense, incarnated within us, we become God Bearers. We become the tent and the ark in which God takes up His residence. Jesus comes to dwell through us, in an age desperately in need His salvation and presence. Jesus said “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him” (John 14:23). The Holy Spirit In the Annunciation the Spirit of God hovered over Mary. This is connected, through its symbolic language, to the creation account when the Spirit hovered over the waters (Gen 1:2). It also calls to mind the creation of Adam, the first man, who was fashioned out of clay. The Lord breathed the breath of life into him and the man became a living being (Gen 2:7). The encounter recalls the cloud of glory which covered the mountain when God gave Moses the Law on Sinai (Exodus 24). The cloud covered the Tent of Meeting (Ex 40), and no one could enter because the glory of God filled the tabernacle. Mary is a living tabernacle, an Ark of the New Covenant, a dwelling place of God Incarnate, a new temple of the Word Incarnate. Such images were freely used by the early Christian fathers. Such uses did not in any way deflect from the centrality of Jesus Christ. Quite to the contrary. They only deepened the mystery and opened the early Church up to a deeper encounter with Jesus Christ. The Christian Vocation Gregory of Nyssa (fourth century) once wrote: What came about in bodily form in Mary, the fullness of the Godhead shining through Christ in the Blessed Virgin, takes place in a similar way in every soul that has been made pure. The Lord does not come in bodily form, for we no longer know Christ according to the flesh, but he dwells in us spiritually and the Father takes up his abode with him, the Gospel tells us. In this way, the child Jesus is born in each one of us (Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity). The Catholic Catechism tells us: Since the Virgin Mary's role in the mystery of Christ and the Spirit has been treated; it is fitting now to consider her place in the mystery of the Church. The Virgin Mary is acknowledged and honored as being truly the Mother of God and of the redeemer. She is clearly the mother of the members of Christ since she has by her charity joined in bringing about the birth of believers in the Church, who are members of its head. Mary, Mother of Christ, Mother of the Church (CCC 963). We have a Mother in this eternal family called the Church. Mary, the Mother of the Lord Jesus. The pastoral admonitions of Pope Francis to the faithful who gathered to commemorate the centenary of the Apparitions at Fatima need to be heard by the faithful around the world. Mary points us to Jesus Christ, the One Savior of the World. True Marian Piety is always Christological – it leads us into a closer relationship with Jesus Christ. This column was first published on May 13, 2017 at Catholic Online.
Doubting Thomas and the Wounds that Heal Our Disbelief
Apr 25, 2017 / 00:00 amThe Second Sunday of Easter is Divine Mercy Sunday in the Roman Liturgical Calendar. The Gospel for the Liturgy (John 20: 19-31) recounts one of the Post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus Christ to His disciples. The glorified Jesus appears to his disciples, coming through locked doors and says “Peace be with you.” He breathes upon them the Holy Spirit, creating them anew. He also communicates His authority to forgive sins to the Apostles who will continue His redemptive mission through the Church, which is His body. However, Thomas was not present for this encounter. The beloved disciple John records this exchange between the risen Lord and Thomas which follows: Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Now a week later his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.” Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus bore His wounds, now glorified, in His risen body. Thomas touched those wounds - and so can we, by faith! This encounter led to Thomas being called doubting Thomas by some. Yet the tradition tells us that this so called doubting Thomas died a martyr for his faith. He became a messenger of mercy to India, a missionary who shed his own blood for the Master whom he encountered on that day. His insistence on touching the holy wounds presented the disciple John another opportunity to explain for all of us the implications of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thomas responds in his beautiful encounter with the risen Lord – “My Lord and my God!” That response reveals the heart of prayer. It also speaks to the essence of faith. His proclamation is a call to adoration and a living communion with God. His response has become the exclamation for millions, myself included, when faced with the mystery of mysteries, the Holy Eucharist at the elevation during every mass. I suggest that Thomas was not a doubter, rather he was a strong believer. And he is a model for all of us at every Eucharist which is always the Feast of Mercy. Pope St. Gregory the Great who occupied the Chair of Peter between 590 and 604 preached a marvelous homily on this encounter between Thomas and the risen Lord. In it he asked: What conclusion, dear brethren, do you come to? Surely it was not by chance that this chosen disciple, was missing in the first place? Or that on his return he heard, that hearing he doubted, that doubting he touched, and that touching he believed? It was by divine dispensation and not by chance that things so fell out. The Mercy of God worked wonderfully, for when that doubting disciple touched his Masters wounded flesh he cured the wound of our disbelief. So this doubting disciple, who actually touched, became a witness to the reality of the resurrection. We Are Instruments of Divine Mercy We are invited to become living witnesses in our own day to the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are instruments of Divine Mercy. Thomas touched the wounded side of the beloved Savior to heal the wounds of our own disbelief. This Sunday we join with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Pope Francis and Catholics throughout the whole world in celebrating the Feast of Divine Mercy. To Saint Faustina Our Lord said: I desire that the Feast of Mercy be a refuge and shelter for all souls, and especially for poor sinners. On that day the very depths of my tender mercy are open. I pour out a whole ocean of graces upon those souls who approach the fount of my mercy. We were invited to approach the throne of mercy and cry out with St. Thomas – “My Lord and my God” (John. 20:28). Those who do so are forever changed. Peter became a messenger of mercy through his encounter with the risen Lord. He was so filled with the Spirit of the risen Lord that the Lord could continue His redemptive mission through him, accomplishing miraculous deeds. In the Acts of the Apostles, the story of the early Church on mission, we read that even the shadow of Peter would affect merciful healing (Acts 5 12-16). Those who encounter the risen Jesus are changed, transformed by mercy made manifest. They then become bearers of mercy for others. The beloved disciple John was imprisoned on the Island of Patmos. We can read of his encounter with the Lord in the Spirit in the last book of the Bible (Rev. 1). He received a merciful vision from the risen Lord which became the Book of Revelation. In this encounter with the risen Lord He heard these words: Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, the one who lives. Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld. And then there was Thomas. Jesus turned Thomas' doubt into an event of mercy for generations to come. Out of a true repentance born from seeing mercy incarnate, touching the wounds of His divine love, came those wonderful words that have formed the most profound of personal prayers for millennia. “My Lord and My God” Pope St. Gregory was right, “Thomas' doubt healed the wounds of all of our doubts.” At the Liturgy of Canonization for Sister Mary Faustina Kowalski, Sunday, April 30, 2000, Saint John Paul II proclaimed: Before speaking these words, Jesus shows his hands and his side. He points, that is, to the wounds of the Passion, especially the wound in his heart, the source from which flows the great wave of mercy poured out on humanity. From that heart Sr Faustina Kowalska, the blessed whom from now on we will call a saint, will see two rays of light shining from that heart and illuminating the world: “The two rays”, Jesus himself explained to her one day, “represent blood and water” Divine Mercy reaches human beings through the heart of Christ crucified and Risen. “My daughter, say that I am love and mercy personified”, Jesus asked of Sr Faustina. Christ pours out this mercy on humanity though the sending of the Spirit who, in the Trinity, is the Person-Love. And is not mercy love's “second name” understood in its deepest and most tender aspect, in its ability to take upon itself the burden of any need and, especially, in its immense capacity for forgiveness? Jesus told St. Faustina: "Humanity will not find peace until it turns trustfully to divine mercy. St. Faustina Kowalska wrote in her Diary: I feel tremendous pain when I see the sufferings of my neighbors. All my neighbors' sufferings reverberate in my own heart; I carry their anguish in my heart in such a way that it even physically destroys me. I would like all their sorrows to fall upon me, in order to relieve my neighbor. At every Eucharist let us echo these beautiful words of Thomas – “My Lord and my God.” Let us ask the Lord of mercy for the grace to become true messengers of mercy to this age so desperately in need of it. Thank God for 'Doubting Thomas.' His doubts healed the wounds of our own disbelief. They also open up, for all who look with the eyes of faith, a deeper understanding of the redemptive effect of the wounds of Jesus - and the role our own wounds can have in our continuing call to conversion as we join them to His. Thomas the doubter became the Thomas the model believer, an example for each one of us. On every Feast of Divine Mercy we are invited to echo his marvelous proclamation – “My Lord and my God.” We also ask that through the intercession of Saint Faustina, that the Lord of Mercy give us each the graces we need to become true messengers of mercy to an age filled with despair and disbelief. This article was first posted on May 23, 2017 at Catholic Online.
More than a Day, Easter is a New Way of Life!
Apr 19, 2017 / 00:00 amLast Saturday I served the Easter Vigil at my parish in Chesapeake, Virginia. As we began, the new flame, representing the Light of Jesus Christ, was lit outside. Then, I joined Catholic Deacons around the world in carrying that Paschal candle into the dark sanctuary proclaiming The Light of Christ in an ancient and beautiful chant. The faithful drew light from that new Paschal candle inside a dark church and spread it to one another. The entire sanctuary was soon clothed in light as, one by one, men and women and children received the one light from the Paschal Candle which symbolizes Jesus Christ, the Light of the World. The symbolism speaks of our mission as Christians in the world. Candle by candle, the light of the Resurrection illuminates the world around us as He who is the Light of the World fills it with His radiance. As the Liturgy progressed, Deacons around the world sung that ancient hymn of the Church which captures the depth of the mystery we celebrate on Easter, the Exultet, Here is the beginning: Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven. Exult, let Angel ministers of God exult. Let the trumpet of salvation sound aloud our mighty Kings triumph! Be glad let earth be glad as glory floods her. Ablaze with light from her eternal King, let all corners of the earth be glad, knowing an end to gloom and darkness. Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice, arrayed with the lightning of His glory, let this Holy Building shake with joy, filled with the mighty voices of the peoples! The words to this ancient hymn offer us deep insights from the early Church into the meaning of what is called the Paschal mystery – the saving conception, nativity, life, death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ. The Easter Vigil Liturgy readings walk us through creation, salvation history, and the new creation in Jesus Christ. The Hebrew Scriptures and then the New Testament unfold for us the great plan of a loving God. The Father who loves us did not leave us in sin – but sent His only Son into the world to save us. Jesus has set us free from the chains of sin and the ravages of death! God still loves the world He created. (John 3:16) He still sends His Son, Jesus Christ, through the Church, His Body, of which we have all become members by our Baptism. We now live in the Church and go into the world in order to bring all men and women back home to the Church, which is the new world. Christians are not just saved from (sin and death), but saved for a New Way of Living. We are saved for participation in the ongoing ministry of Jesus Christ. The redemptive mission of the Lord Jesus Christ continues! This world which God created in love, through the Word, is now being re-created from within – through the Word which was made flesh. Through His Incarnation – the Saving Life, Death and Resurrection of that Word made Flesh – everything begins again, transformed by grace. That includes each one of us who bear the name, Christian. Jesus Christ is Lord! The One whom the Scriptures proclaim as the first born of a new creation has burst forth from the tomb to begin the New Creation. Throughout the world, the elect, those prepared through instruction in the faith for Baptism and the Easter sacraments, were Baptized, Confirmed and received the Holy Eucharist; the three Sacraments of initiation. Then, the candidates, Christians of other communities, whose Baptism the Holy Catholic Church already recognizes, have been prepared for the Sacraments of Confirmation and Eucharist, and are incorporated into the full communion of the Catholic Church. We are all joined together now, in the Risen Body of the One who conquers death and bathes the world in light! This beautiful Liturgy calls all who are present to renew their own baptism and give themselves afresh to the Lord Jesus Christ in an evangelical encounter. The Joy of Easter Joy fills Christians during this celebration. With the eyes of living faith, we witness the power of God, mediated through the Sacraments. Through the saving waters of Baptism, the pouring of the Oil of Chrism and the reception of the most Holy Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, we see and experience Jesus continuing His ministry among us. The cold hearts of many faithful are set ablaze in the great Easter Flame. In parishes around the world as the baptized came out of those saving waters, the entire Church erupts with Easter joy. As our priests and Bishops confirm them, pouring the Sacred Chrism on their Head – we are all reminded of the utter beauty and treasure of our own Christian faith! The celebration of these Easter mysteries always make the meaning of life so clear. I am profoundly moved by the beauty of the ancient yet ever new Catholic Christian faith as it is expressed in its Liturgical fullness during the Easter Vigil Liturgy. Jesus Christ is Alive! These new brothers and sisters we welcome into the Church know that Jesus Christ is not dead. They know that He has been raised from the dead and lives among us. That He walks among us now, in His Body, the Church. That gives Himself in love for the sake of the world. Do we know this? With hearts open to the Holy Spirit, we can know, deeply within us that nothing can separate us from that Love incarnated in the Crucified, Risen Son of the True and Living God. The light which filled that once dark cave fills the entire world with hope. The debt has been paid, the last enemy death has been defeated. Hell itself has been conquered. The captives have been liberated, Love has triumphed. Heavens gates have been opened wide. Jesus is Alive! Those who stand at the Altar of the Cross, in the light of the empty tomb, believing in His promise, shall live forever in Him, beginning now. The Octave of Easter With the Mass of Easter day we begin the Octave of Easter. Eight days of feasting on the readings which Holy Mother Church sets out on the table of the Ambo – and receiving the Risen One in the most Holy Eucharist. We are invited to become what we hear and consume. We hear the marvelous post Resurrection accounts in the Gospels. We follow the extraordinary change which occurred in the early Apostles – as the power of this Resurrection fashioned them into a living witness for the faith. We are reminded of our own calling to be the disciples of Jesus today! The Easter Season We celebrate Easter for fifty days – until we celebrate the next great Feast, the Feast of Pentecost. Alleluias will permeate our worship. They are meant to inform our lives. That is because, in the words of the great western Church Bishop, Augustine, We are an Easter people and alleluia is our song. Everything is different now because that Tomb is empty. We have been raised up with Jesus Christ. We have been made capable, by grace, through faith in the power of the Resurrection, to begin living our lives in a new way – beginning right now! Have you heard the old adage, He is so heavenly he is no earthly good. I suggest it misses the mark. We are called to be so heavenly – to live our lives so attractively – that we bring Goodness Himself to the earth and move the earth toward its eternal recreation in Him. Easter is more than a day; it is a way of living our lives in Jesus Christ, and with one another, for the sake of the world. Because Jesus has been raised! Heaven has come to earth and earth can now come to heaven. Because He has been raised, the new creation has already begun. The seed of the kingdom is manifested in the Church which is His Risen Body, the sign of the new heaven and new earth. His Church is the Holy Place of Habitation where all men and women can be set free from the Law of sin and death. In that Church, we live and graze, being fed on His Word and nourished on His Body and Blood, healed by His Oil of Mercy and prepared for eternity. As we follow Peter and John, whose story we hear proclaimed in our Gospel lesson for Easter Sunday Liturgy, we witness the power of the Resurrection at work in the lives of ordinary men and women who become extraordinary by living their lives in Him. No longer afraid, these witnesses of the Resurrection, in the words of the Acts of the Apostles, turn the world upside down with their preaching. They became so configured to the Lord that they lived and died like Him, for the sake of the world which is being re-born now, because he has been raised. So we are reminded that we can turn our own world upside down, right now, today, because the Resurrection makes all things new, beginning now! The implications of the Resurrection unfolded for them as they reflected on His saving life and death and yielded to the work of the Holy Spirit in their own lives. More than a Day, a Way They lived a New Way. So can we – as we come to realize that Easter is more than a day, it is a way. Time became for them a tutor, no longer a tyrant. They learned its lessons at the school of faith. Because the sting of death, sin, had been defeated, death was no longer to be feared but became for them a portal into eternal life and communion with the One who has been raised. So it is meant to be for each of us who now bear His Name. We are witnesses to the same Resurrection. Time invites us into a field of choice where we can progress in freedom and become configured to Jesus Christ, every day of our lives. The key is encountering Jesus. He awaits us, daily. The Victorious One whose Holy Resurrection we are celebrating, has taken up residence within us and wants to live in us as we learn to live in Him. He wants to live his life through us, reaching out to a world that is waiting to be born again! We are His messengers and missionaries. Easter is more than a Day, it is a Way; A Way of living our lives differently now in Him because we have been set free. We are invited to do that by living them daily in His Church. The Church is His Body. The Church is the new world, the world in the course of transfiguration. That world created through Him out of love, but which was lost due to sin, is now being made new! He came among us and began creation anew. That is why we celebrate this Feast of Feasts. Death has been defeated by His Saving Death. In His Resurrection, we now live no more to die. Darkness has been scattered by the Light which still breaks forth from that empty tomb and is meant to infuse our daily lives with the radiance of Resurrected love. Live the Easter Way! The Same Holy Spirit which Transformed the Early Church Can Transform You – and me – and all who Yes to the invitation of Jesus Christ the Lord. Let it happen and watch what the Risen Lord can do in you and through you, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Easter is more than a day. It is a Way. Choose to Live it today! Happy Easter.
Time to End the Death Penalty for the Innocent in the Womb and the Guilty in the Prison System
Oct 24, 2016 / 00:00 amOn October 10, 2016, the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops released a letter entitled “Capital Punishment: The death penalty does not fulfill justice.” In this summary of Catholic teaching concerning the death penalty, the Bishops of Texas have provided a service for Catholics and other Christians. After explaining Catholic social teaching, they summarized the current state of that teaching as it pertains to the death penalty. “Catholic teaching unequivocally states that 'if non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means' ...” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2267). The Bishops opined, “This simply means if alternatives to the death penalty exist that serve to protect society from violent criminals, society 'must limit itself' to these other means. There can be no doubt such means exist today in the United States, including in the State of Texas.” I oppose the death penalty. I used to say my opposition was a part of my effort to follow a consistent ethic of life. Unfortunately, that expression is now a loaded one. It has been co-opted by some who want to blur the distinction between absolute opposition to procured abortion and discouraging the use of the death penalty. There is no moral equivalence between these two positions. From my ministry and activism across Christian confessional lines, I know many Christians who do not share my opposition to the death penalty. Among them are some fellow Catholics. I have always been uncomfortable with being labeled politically. I am first, last and all in between, a Catholic Christian. I embrace what my Church teaches because I believe that it is true. I returned to the Catholic Church as a young man and stand in fidelity with her teaching office. In fact, I am grateful for that office. I think it is extremely important to clarify that current Catholic teaching opposing the death penalty is predicated upon a very different moral ground than the longstanding absolute opposition to procured abortion. Procured Abortion Procured abortion is intrinsically evil, meaning it is always and everywhere wrong. In his encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae, Pope St. John Paul II explained why: “The moral gravity of procured abortion is apparent in all its truth if we recognize that we are dealing with murder and, in particular, when we consider the specific elements involved. The one eliminated is a human being at the very beginning of life.” “No one more absolutely innocent could be imagined. In no way could this human being ever be considered an aggressor, much less an unjust aggressor! He or she is weak, defenseless, even to the point of lacking that minimal form of defense consisting in the poignant power of a newborn baby’s cries and tears.” “The unborn child is totally entrusted to the protection and care of the woman carrying him or her in the womb. And yet sometimes it is precisely the mother herself who makes the decision and asks for the child to be eliminated, and who then goes about having it done.” (#58) This emphasis of the innocence of the child in the womb followed upon the Pope’s explanation of the authoritative basis of this teaching, “Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. This doctrine, based upon that unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart (cf. Rom 2:14-15), is reaffirmed by Sacred Scripture, transmitted by the Tradition of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.” His impassioned defense of the right to life continued, “No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.” (#62) The Death Penalty Current Catholic teaching opposes the death penalty because it can no longer be justified. We are also not dealing, at least presumably, with the death of the innocent. This opposition is a relatively new development. In other times in history, and in other circumstances, the Catholic Church did not oppose the death penalty. It was supported as within the purview of the state in the exercise of its obligation to protect the public and preserve the common good. I am often asked my opinion as to whether the possibility exists wherein its use may once again be considered justified. I used to say it was highly unlikely. However, given the evil some of our Christian brethren are now suffering at the hands of the Islamic State in the Middle East and the North of Africa, the issue is more than a hypothetical question. The contemporary opposition to the death penalty by the Catholic Church is affirmed in the Catholic Catechism: "If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity with the dignity of the human person" (#2267). The Catechism was amended. The language surprised some in the Catholic Church and the broader Christian community. In Evangelium Vitae Pope St John Paul addressed government authorities charged with administering justice, "the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today, however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare if not practically non-existent" (#56). Other Concerns There is more at issue in the implementation of lethal punishment by the civil government. As a former prosecuting attorney, my experience informs my belief that there are many reasons to justify its elimination from both the federal and state criminal justice systems. The advance of the science of DNA continues to prove that we have made mistakes and convicted innocent people. Sadly, our history as a nation demonstrates a disparate application. Then there are the growing number of news reports demonstrating the errors which have been made in past prosecutions when the science of DNA testing was unavailable. The accounts from the Innocence Project should be enough to give us pause. I have also been cautious on the use of the death penalty, as a Christian. Remember the examples of significant leaders in both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament who could have been put to death for their offenses? Moses killed an Egyptian (Exodus 2). Saul of Tarsus stood by in what was arguably complicity at the death of Stephen, the first deacon/martyr of the nascent Christian Church. (Acts 8) In other words, people can and do change. Punishment can and does rehabilitate and offer opportunities for such change. Conclusion There is growing discomfort with the death penalty in America which crosses confessional and political lines. It is an issue where the political party labels have lost what little value they might have ever had. However, some Democrats and Republicans seem to be "out-toughing" one another on this issue. It is more than ironic that some political liberals or progressives who oppose the death penalty fail to see the extraordinary duplicity in their approach to inflicting it upon children in the womb. For example, some in the left wing of the civil rights community, like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, really know the complete hypocrisy of such an approach. He was formerly an ardent opponent of making procured abortion legal, until his political ambitions blinded him to the cry of the ones whom Mother Teresa called the "poorest of the poor", children in the womb. There are political conservatives who suffer from compassion confusion. They oppose the execution of innocent children in the womb but support the execution of convicted felons outside of it, without any reservation. On their right flank are libertarians who support both kinds of execution, though not all libertarians do. I am addressing my fellow Catholics who oppose both abortion and capital punishment, but fail to make the vital distinction necessary in explaining this opposition. This difference matters. The different moral grounds I have discussed for the Church’s opposition to the death penalty and her opposition to abortion are much more than semantics. The child in the womb is our innocent neighbor in the first home of the whole human race. Medical science confirms what our consciences long ago attested to: there is no justification for taking innocent life. Defending the fundamental human right to life of children in the womb is not simply a religious position. It is a fundamental human rights position. The natural moral law, written on every human heart and knowable through the exercise of reason, affirms this undeniable truth. Some still pretend to hide behind the Orwellian new-speak of the rhetoric of choice – but even they know that taking innocent human life is never a right choice. We surgically operate on our neighbors in the womb. We send their beautiful photos around on social media. We write scholarly articles about the value of playing music to them and speaking words of warmth over their first home while we await their arrival. Finally, there is no comparison between how procured abortions and capital executions are committed. The heinous and evil way in which our youngest neighbors are executed far exceeds the barbarism displayed by capital punishment. There was a joint editorial from America magazine, the National Catholic Register, the National Catholic Reporter, and Our Sunday Visitor on March 15, 2015. They stood together in opposition to the death penalty. I suggest it is time for another editorial from the four, and opened up to more signers, rejecting procured abortion as always and everywhere wrong and calling for an immediate end to the legal execution of children in the womb. It is time for a national discussion of the death penalty for many reasons. However, it is long past time to end legalized procured abortion. It is time to end the death penalty for the innocent in the womb and the guilty in the prison system.
Reaping the Whirlwind: In the wake of the Obergefell opinion, is legalizing polygamy next?
Aug 30, 2016 / 00:00 amIn June 2015, the United States Supreme Court issued their majority opinion in Obergefell v Hodges. Five lawyers manufactured out of whole cloth a faux “right” for two men or two women to do what they are incapable of doing; that is, to enter into a marriage. They claimed to have found such a new “right” in the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution, apparently next to the “right” to take the life of children in the womb through procured abortion for any reason throughout all nine months of a pregnancy. In the wake of that horribly written, unconscionable, and unreasonable opinion of five lawyers, activists within the LGBTQI community have been enforcing it as an edict across the nation. They are also using it to suppress free speech, free association, and the free exercise of religion. A tsunami has been unleashed, as cultural revolutionaries uproot the moral foundations of the social order by removing the unique role which the marriage bound family has long served as the first cell of civil society. These architects of a new cultural revolution are also hell-bent on compelling faithful Christians across the confessional spectrum to deny their deeply held religious conviction that marriage is solely possible between one and one woman. Failure to do so may soon bring punitive measures as the police power of the state is unleashed against those who refuse to bend the knee to a new Caesar. It is already bringing the soft persecution which accompanies such ideological pogroms once they are unleashed. I have written about the quagmire the Obergefell opinion unleashed. The classical Christian position concerning the nature of marriage and the objective truth concerning sexual difference as a gift and a given, is not simply a religious position. Classical Christians insist there is a natural moral law which can be known by all men and women through the exercise of reason which confirm these truths. Belief in such a natural law is woven throughout the founding documents of the American experiment in ordered liberty. That is because the founders stood on the shoulders of the giants of Christendom. It is also the source and support of every authentic human and civil rights movement. The natural law gives us the moral norms we need to build truly good societies – and to govern ourselves with equity. It must inform the civil and criminal law, or a nation soon devolves into tyranny and anarchy. To confer by a governmental fiat the benefits conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual or lesbian paramours is a radical social experiment which has now been foisted upon the West by social engineers. To use the police power of the state to punish those who disagree is not only unjust, it leads to a form of state sponsored oppression which is specifically anti-Christian. Faithful Christians cannot and will not ever deny the undeniable, that marriage is between one man and one woman, intended for life and open to life. I write as a Catholic Christian. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church explained it well in 2003: "The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose." The instruction from this Vatican watchdog over doctrine insists, "No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives." The hostility toward Christians in the West is increasing. Efforts to compel compliance with this social experiment are coming on multiple fronts. For example, Christians who seek to engage in the legal profession are now in the crosshairs of these social engineers. Mat Staver, the founder and chairmen of Liberty Counsel and I opined in 2015 that advisory opinions from state supreme courts could exclude Christians from serving on the judicial bench. The American Bar Association just proposed an amendment to Rule 8.4 of its Rules of Professional Conduct which could have the effect of accusing Christian lawyers who refuse to deny the nature of marriage or to affirm that gender identity is fluid, of committing professional misconduct. Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. Examples, such as the age of consent, demonstrate how proper regulation ensured the free and voluntary basis of the marriage bond. No civil institution, including the United States Supreme Court, has the authority to redefine marriage. However, those five lawyers sitting on the Supreme Court have done just that. I use the expression five lawyers in referring to the justices who wrote the Obergefell opinion not only to express my utter disdain for the opinion, but because Justice John Roberts used the phrase. In an independent dissenting opinion he wrote, “But for those who believe in a government of laws, not of men, the majority’s approach is deeply disheartening. ... Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law.”. I have been a lawyer for thirty-six years and appeared as co-counsel at the Supreme Court several times on constitutional cases. I have never heard one of the justices refer to his or her colleagues as a “lawyer”. I believe it was his way of underscoring the fact that the majority opinion had no basis in the law and rejected any claim to legitimacy. I suggest that in a post-Obergefell America, we are just beginning to reap the whirlwind. I was among those who suggested that manufacturing a faux legal framework to give the status of a marriage to homosexual or lesbian partnerships would open up a Pandora’s box, making it impossible to exclude any set of relationships from claiming the same legal status. Further, I contended that it would only be a matter of time before activists would use the Obergefell opinion to lift any other restriction on marriage. The Catholic Herald reports that Hamza Piccardo, a founder of the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy, recently insisted, “there is no reason for polygamy not to be legalized after the Italian government passed a law to recognize the union of same-sex civil unions.” There is an alliance being forged between some within the Islamic community and the new left, based solely in their joint desire to eviscerate the Jewish and Christian roots of the West. Crux News reported that Piccardo further opined, “If it’s only a matter of civil rights, then polygamy is a civil right… Myself and millions of people don’t agree with homosexual unions, and yet it’s licit and we respect them. Those interested in them are a minority, as polygamists would be. Society as a whole can accept everyone.” In the wake of Obergefell, is polygamy next? The Lord spoke to Israel through the Prophet Hosea concerning their rejection of His law. “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” (Hosea 8:7) In rejecting natural marriage, the Supreme Court of the United States certainly sowed the wind. A whirlwind is “a weather phenomenon in which a vortex of wind (a vertically oriented rotating column of air) forms due to instabilities and turbulence.” We are living in a whirlwind of instability and turbulence. May God give us the grace and the courage to rise to the hour and defend marriage and the family and social order founded upon it in the days ahead.
Will the next Synod of Bishops consider married men for ordination to the priesthood?
Aug 18, 2016 / 00:00 amIn an article entitled "Next Synod likely to Focus on Ordaining Married Men" in the August 12 edition of CRUX, the British journalist Austin Invereigh reported that the next Synod of Bishops could focus on the possibility of opening ordination to the priesthood to mature married men. The article was widely distributed and generated a slew of commentaries, opinions and additional articles. However, this topic has been speculated about for some time. In April of 2014, the Tablet featured a similar article entitled "Pope says married men could be ordained – if world's bishops agree." That article confirmed that in a private meeting with Brazilian Bishop Erwin Kräutler on April 4, 2014, the Pope and the bishop discussed a number of issues, including the shortage of priests in his large Diocese of Xingu, Brazil. The bishop is originally from Austria and gave his interview to an Austrian news source. Here are some pertinent excerpts: “I told him that as bishop of Brazil's largest diocese with 800 church communities and 700,000 faithful I only had 27 priests, which means that our communities can only celebrate the Eucharist twice or three times a year at the most. The Pope explained that he could not take everything in hand personally from Rome. We local bishops, who are best acquainted with the needs of our faithful, should be corajudos, that is 'courageous' in Spanish, and make concrete suggestions." “A bishop should not act alone," the Pope told Kräutler. He indicated that "regional and national bishops' conferences should seek and find consensus on reform and we should then bring up our suggestions for reform in Rome," Kräutler said. Asked whether he had raised the question of ordaining married men at the audience, Bishop Kräutler replied: "The ordination of viri probati, that is of proven married men who could be ordained to the priesthood, came up when we were discussing the plight of our communities. The Pope himself told me about a diocese in Mexico in which each community had a deacon but many had no priest. There were 300 deacons there who naturally could not celebrate the Eucharist. The question was how things could continue in such a situation. 'It was up to the bishops to make suggestions,' the Pope said again.” Bishop Kräutler was asked whether it now depended on bishops' conferences, as to whether church reforms proceeded or not. "Yes," he replied. "After my personal discussion with the Pope I am absolutely convinced of this." Similarly, in an interview that Archbishop Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, given to the Venezuela Newspaper, El Universal on August 31, 2013, mandatory celibacy as a prerequisite for priestly ordination in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church was also addressed. One of the comments which the Archbishop gave also generated a bevy of opinion pieces and articles. Archbishop Parolin explained that mandatory celibacy for priestly ordination “is not part of church dogma and the issue is open to discussion because it is an ecclesiastical tradition. Modifications can be made, but these must always favor unity and God's will. God speaks to us in many different ways. We need to pay attention to this voice that points us towards causes and solutions, for example the clergy shortage.” Given the growing interest in this story line, I felt it was an appropriate time to address the topic in a wider context. Married Deacons First, let us turn to an aspect of this topic which too many Catholics do not know: that there are already married clerics in the Western or Latin Rite of the Catholic Church. One example is found in the Order of Deacons. The restoration of the Order was promoted by the Second Vatican Council. Its ranks are open to both married and celibate men. However, the decision concerning state in life must have occurred before the ordination. Married men become clerics when they are ordained as deacons. They are no longer laymen. Thus the oxymoron lay deacons, still used by some, reflects a lack of good teaching - and is just plain wrong. Catholic deacons are ordained members of the Catholic clergy, ordained not to the priesthood but to the ministry. I have served as an ordained Catholic Deacon for twenty years and recently opined on the diaconate as a vocation on the Feast of St. Lawrence the Deacon. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes this order of Clergy in this way: "At a lower level of the hierarchy are to be found deacons, who receive the imposition of hands 'not unto the priesthood, but unto the ministry."' At an ordination to the diaconate only the bishop lays hands on the candidate, thus signifying the deacon's special attachment to the bishop in the tasks of his "diakonia." "Deacons share in Christ's mission and grace in a special way. The sacrament of Holy Orders marks them with an imprint ("character") which cannot be removed and which configures them to Christ, who made himself the "deacon" or servant of all." (See, CCC #1569-1571) The adjective “permanent”, often used to describe married deacons, does not change the nature of the ordination or what is sacramentally conferred with the imposition of the bishop's hands on the man called to the office. A deacon is a deacon. Rather, it denotes the intention of the deacon to remain in that rank of ordered service as a member of the clergy. A transitional deacon intends to be considered for ordination to the priesthood. Married Priests Second, we have a growing body of married men who have been ordained to the Catholic priesthood for the Latin Rite. For these men, the discipline of celibacy was dispensed by the Church prior to their ordination. Most come from other Christian communities. The most visible community of these priests have come to us through the Ordinariates established for groups of former Anglicans coming into full communion with the Catholic Church which was opened by the apostolic constitution of Pope Emeritus Benedict in 2009. My most recent treatment of this gift to the whole Church can be found here. However, there are others, who, through the prior pastoral provision established by John Paul II, were also invited to priestly ordination. Press reports, opinion pieces and editorials which cover the issue of whether married men may once again be admitted to the Roman Catholic priesthood often pose the question improperly. For example, by asking, "Should priests be allowed to marry?" That improper way of posing the question either reveals a complete misunderstanding of the issues and the history of the subject - or it can reveal an agenda to assert some perceived kind of pressure on the Church. None of the discussions over mandatory clerical celibacy for Latin Rite Catholic priests concern those already ordained and pledged to lifelong celibacy. That cannot and will not change. The only issue being raised any of the discussions concerning a change is whether already mature, proven, married men (viri probati) should be allowed to discern a possible vocation to the priesthood and, if chosen by the Church, be ordained to the priesthood? They can already be considered for ordination to the diaconate. In fact, that ordination always precedes ordination to the priesthood. If this were to happen it would NOT mean a diminution in the cherished role of clerical celibacy. Consecrated Celibacy and Consecrated Marriage Consecrated celibacy is a prophetic sign of the Kingdom of God and a gift to the whole Church. It was instituted and lived by Jesus, demonstrated in the lives of many of the Apostles, confirmed in the earliest witness of the ancient Church and affirmed in the unbroken tradition of the Church. (See, e.g., Matt. 19:12) Consecrated Christian marriage is also a prophetic sign and a gift to the Church. The Church is the bridegroom and Jesus the bride. This witness is increasingly important, especially in the current age preoccupied with rejecting marriage as solely possible between one man and one woman, open to life and intended for life. At the foundation of both chaste, consecrated celibacy and chaste, sacramental marriage is a call to live the nuptial or spousal mystery. The consecrated celibate is called to participate in the nuptial or spousal mystery in an immediate and prophetic way, forsaking one person to be married to all. While the married man participates in a mediated way, through chaste love with one woman - and then through the couple's openness to life which expand beyond the couple to family, the domestic church. Both responses have a prophetic dimension as well as a pastoral one. However, when love is perfected and complete in the Resurrection there will be no marriage. The teaching of Jesus on this is quite clear. In heaven there will be no marriage. (See, e.g., Mt. 22:30, Mk. 12:25) We will all be married to the Lamb and live in the eternal communion of Trinitarian Love where all love is completed and perfected. (See, Rev. 19:7-10) The prophetic witness of voluntary, consecrated celibacy has endured by God’s loving design and is revealed beyond the ranks of celibate clergy. It is present in the vowed life of monastic orders and the sacrificial witness of religious men and women in the numerous religious orders and communities which provide such a beautiful gift for the Church and her mission. In addition, in many of the ecclesial movements and associations of lay men and woman, consecrated celibacy is being freely chosen, not to avoid marriage, but to enter more fully into the very nuptial mystery that marriage also reveals, in a unique and prophetic way, and be more available for mission. I write with deep appreciation for the celibate vocation among the ordained ministers of the Church, the religious orders and the growing lay ecclesial movements. I have had the privilege of knowing some profoundly holy consecrated celibates in each of these vocational responses. To use an old cliché, some of my best friends are priests and deacons, both celibate and married. They are all living their vocation with dignity and holiness. Within that community of celibate and married priests, there are different kinds of ministry, in the one priesthood of Jesus Christ. Finally, and many Catholics are still unaware of this fact, in the Eastern Catholic Church there is an unbroken tradition of admitting both celibate and married men to candidacy for the order of deacon and priest. The men must have married before ordination as deacons. In the Code of Canon Law for the Eastern Churches we read: “Clerical celibacy chosen for the Kingdom of Heaven and suited to the priesthood is to be greatly esteemed everywhere, as supported by the tradition of the whole church; likewise, the hallowed practice of married clerics in the primitive church and in the tradition of the Eastern Churches throughout the ages is to be held in honor. Clerics, celibate or married, are to excel in the virtue of chastity; it is for the particular law to establish suitable means for pursuing this end. In leading family life and in educating children married clergy are to show an outstanding example to other Christian faithful. (Canons # 373-375) Thus, both married and celibate men are considered for ordination to the priesthood from the ranks of deacons in the Eastern Churches. The decision for marriage or celibacy is made before they were ordained as deacons and cannot be changed. Bishops are always celibate and monastic in the Eastern Churches. And, in the instances of married men ordained as deacons or priests, those ordained clerics pledge not to remarry should their spouse die. The Eastern Church, both Catholic and Orthodox, often assigns married priests to different types of ministry than celibate priests. Similarly, in the Latin rite of the Western Church, married men ordained to the priesthood serve in a manner that reflects and respects their state in life and offers its pastoral witness as a gift to the whole Church. What Does the Church Teach? So, what does the Catholic Church actually teach concerning this issue which has once again attracted so much attention - the possibility of the Latin Rite considering mature, proven, married men for ordination to the priesthood? Rather than rely on secondary sources which so often surround the discussion of this matter, let us turn to the Catechism of the Catholic Church for what the Church has to say. It should settle the matter for most, except perhaps a few of my traditionalist Catholic brethren who simply do not like the practice of allowing married men to be ordained at all. Some may also be suspect of what some of them still call the “new” Catholic Catechism. These paragraphs are taken from the treatment of Holy Orders in article six of the Official Catechism of the Catholic Church. I commend this entire section to everyone who wants to understand the issues surrounding the gift of ordained service to the whole Church. The Catechism contains important footnotes to sources of authority, drawn from the Scriptures and the sacred Tradition, which are well worth a more in depth study. Remember, if you want to know what the Catholic Church REALLY teaches, go first to the Scriptures, to the Catholic Catechism and to teaching of the Magisterium, not to the those who give you their opinion. Some even improperly use sources of authority as proof texts for pushing their own agendas to change the Church rather than be changed by lovingly embracing her teaching. Here are the words of the Catechism concerning clerical ordination: "Only a baptized man (vir) validly receives sacred ordination. The Lord Jesus chose men (viri) to form the college of the twelve apostles, and the apostles did the same when they chose collaborators to succeed them in their ministry. The college of bishops, with whom the priests are united in the priesthood, makes the college of the twelve an ever-present and ever-active reality until Christ's return. The Church recognizes herself to be bound by this choice made by the Lord himself. For this reason, the ordination of women is not possible." "No one has a right to receive the sacrament of Holy Orders. Indeed no one claims this office for himself; he is called to it by God. Anyone who thinks he recognizes the signs of God's call to the ordained ministry must humbly submit his desire to the authority of the Church, who has the responsibility and right to call someone to receive orders. Like every grace this sacrament can be received only as an unmerited gift. "All the ordained ministers of the Latin Church, with the exception of permanent deacons, are normally chosen from among men of faith who live a celibate life and who intend to remain celibate "for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Called to consecrate themselves with undivided heart to the Lord and to 'the affairs of the Lord,' they give themselves entirely to God and to men. Celibacy is a sign of this new life to the service of which the Church's minister is consecrated; accepted with a joyous heart, celibacy radiantly proclaims the Reign of God. "In the Eastern Churches a different discipline has been in force for many centuries: while bishops are chosen solely from among celibates, married men can be ordained as deacons and priests. This practice has long been considered legitimate; these priests exercise a fruitful ministry within their communities. Moreover, priestly celibacy is held in great honor in the Eastern Churches and many priests have freely chosen it for the sake of the Kingdom of God. In the East as in the West a man who has already received the sacrament of Holy Orders can no longer marry." (CCC #1577 - 1579) Conclusion and Personal Opinion For members of the media reading this article looking for news, please report this, Catholics already have married clergy - deacons and priests. In the Eastern Catholic Churches, the practice of admitting married men to the priesthood has existed for centuries. In the Latin Rite Catholic Church, the body of married priests has increased with the ordinariates established for former Anglican Christians who have come into the full communion of the Catholic Church. For Roman Catholic Christians reading this article, we must learn from all of this and trust that the Lord is behind it. If there is to be a change in the discipline of mandatory celibacy for men considered for ordination to the priesthood in the Latin Rite, the Lord will unfold it through those whom he has chosen to lead His Church. When I was invited to Holy Orders as a Deacon, I knew that it was a life altering vocation, not a weekend task. As a married man, I pledged to embrace celibacy if my wife should predecease me. My wife gave her consent. I soon came to understand the theology I had studied and have studied since; there truly is an ontological change which occurs at ordination. My life was turned upside down and has never been the same. I personally believe there is room in the Catholic Church, East and West, for a both celibate and a married clergy, deacons and priests. Both consecrated celibacy and consecrated Christian marriage are a response to the universal call to holiness. They are also a gift to the whole Church because they both participate in the one nuptial or spousal mystery revealed in Jesus Christ. However, what I personally believe is not the issue. It is what the Holy Spirit reveals in guiding the whole Catholic Church. For that, we should look to the teaching office, the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Is Pope Francis really considering opening the possibility of ordaining mature, proven married men to priesthood? Time alone will tell.
It is time to build a truly 'radical' Christian movement based on human dignity
Jul 7, 2016 / 00:00 amOn Saturday, December 7, 2013, Pope Francis addressed a delegation from the Dignitatis Humanae Institute gathered for a conference in Rome. Their motto is Promoting Human Dignity Based on the recognition that man is made in the Image and Likeness of God. The Institute was founded in 2008 and explains its global mission in these words: The Dignitatis Humanae Institute (Institute for Human Dignity) is a think-tank founded in 2008 whose goal is to protect and promote human dignity based on the anthropological truth that man is born in the image and likeness of God. Our primary aim is to promote this vision of authentic human dignity mainly by supporting Christians in public life, assisting them in presenting effective and coherent responses to increasing efforts to silence the Christian voice in the public square. We do this by coordinating affiliated parliamentary working groups on human dignity throughout the world. Each working group is based on the Institute's common philosophy: the Universal Declaration of Human Dignity . This enables such politicians to speak out more effectively in defense of the human person in all of life's stages. Like any other think-tank, the Institute also tries to keep others abreast of news and developments on human dignity issues through its own research, press releases, articles, and conferences. Furthermore, we are also building up a network of outreach partners - charities and non-governmental organizations offering practical help to the poorest and most vulnerable in society. This think tank rejects the politicized rhetoric which limits the explanation and application of the Social teaching of the Catholic Church. They offer a source for Catholics and other Christians who are tired of the politicized language of left/right/liberal/conservative/neoconservative/neoliberal to form a new vocabulary and build a new movement to effect change in the culture. It is time to drop the loaded political language and recapture the heart of our mission. We need to be radically Christian. I know, some of my readers will wince at the use of the word “radical,” especially given the rise of the evil jihadist Muslim movement which is currently being called “radical.” But, I use the word intentionally. The etymology explains my reasons. It comes from a latin word which means “going back to the roots.” Christianity needs to go back to its roots. We are living in a new missionary age akin to the first few centuries of the undivided Christian Church. We need to recover those roots and respond to this hour remembering the CHRISTIAN is the noun, the word which defines who we are and how we are called to live in this age. The Institute for Human Dignity recognizes the assault on Christians in the cultures which have rejected the anthropological truth of the human dignity of every person as the foundation of society. Here, this is expressed in their own words, “DHI is a direct response to a growing secularist intolerance to Christians of all confessions that has led to a myriad of attacks on human dignity. Just as many secularist groups have mobilized to create effective advocacy groups across the world, so the Institute plans on doing the same, pushing back the tide of radical secularism which is threatening the dignity of increasing numbers of people, especially the vulnerable and the weak.” I invite my readers to read the Universal Declaration of Human Dignity and sign the declaration . I did. The institute has established three working groups in the UK Parliament, the Lithuanian Parliament and the Romanian Parliament. They intend to keep building. What they affirm is that the only solid foundation upon which Christian social action can proceed is the dignity of every human person. The founder of the Institute, Benjamin Harwell, offers a welcome on the Institute's website which is well written. In addressing the representatives of the Institute, Pope Francis said, “Your institute proposes to promote human dignity on the basis of the fundamental truth about man, who is created in the image and likeness of God. So, there is an original dignity of every man and woman that cannot be suppressed, that cannot be touched by any power or ideology. Unfortunately, in our epoch, so rich in many accomplishments and hopes, there is no lack of powers and forces that end up producing a throwaway culture (cultura di scarto); and this threatens to become the dominant mentality.” “The victims of such a culture are precisely the weakest and most fragile human beings - the unborn, the poorest people, sick elderly people, gravely disabled people... who are in danger of being ‘thrown out,’ expelled from a machine that must be efficient at all costs. This false model of man and society embodies a practical atheism, de facto negating the Word of God that says: ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness’ (cf. Genesis 1:26). Instead, if we let ourselves be interrogated by this Word of God, we let it question our personal and social conscience, if we let it shake up our discussions, our ways of thinking and acting, the criteria, the priorities and choices, then things can change. The force of this Word poses limits on whoever wants to rule by abusing the rights and dignity of others. At the same time, it gives hope and consolation to those who are not able to defend themselves, to those who do not have access to the intellectual and practical means to affirm the value of their suffering, of their rights, of their life. The Church's social doctrine, with its integral vision of man, as a personal and social being, is our ‘compass.' Here there is a fruit that is of particular significance to the long journal of the People of God in modern and contemporary history: there is the defense of religious liberty, of life in all its phases, of the right to work and to decent work, of the family, of education. All initiatives such as your own are, therefore, welcome, initiatives that aim to help people, communities and institutions to rediscover the ethical and social importance of the principle of human dignity, which is the root of liberty and justice. In view of this purpose efforts at raising awareness and formation are necessary. “These will assist the lay faithful of every walk of life, and especially those who work in politics, to think according to the Gospel and the Church's social doctrine and to act consistently, dialoguing and collaborating with those who, with sincerity and intellectual honesty, at least share - if not the faith - a similar vision of man and society and its ethical consequences. There are not a few Christians and non-believers, who are convinced that the human person must always be an end and never a means.” We need to learn from this institute. We need to build a new form of radical Christian action for this new missionary age into which we are now sent by the Lord. A movement which rejects the current political labels entirely needs to be formed around true Christian social thought. The social teaching of the Catholic Church offers principles which can steer western culture away from self-destruction. It is not only for Catholics, other Christians, or even just religious people. It is for all people and all nations. It is offered to those who seek to build a truly human and humane society and promote the real common good. The teaching is called social because it speaks to human society and to the formation, role and rightful place of social institutions. Contrary to the relativism of our age which rejects any notion of objective moral truth, Catholic social teaching insists that that there are unchangeable truths which can be known by all men and women through the exercise of reason. They are revealed in the Natural Law (Catechism #1950-1960). This Natural Moral Law is “present in the heart of each man and established by reason.” This law “is universal in its precepts and its authority extends to all men. It expresses the dignity of the person and determines the basis for his fundamental rights and duties." (Catechism of the Catholic Church #1956) It is here we find the roots of authentic social action, those foundational human rights which must be recognized by the civil or positive law as rightfully belonging to all men and women. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church (#140) further explains: “The exercise of freedom implies a reference to a natural moral law, of a universal character, that precedes and unites all rights and duties. The natural law ‘is nothing other than the light of intellect infused within us by God.’ Thanks to this, we know what must be done and what must be avoided. This light or this law has been given by God to creation. It consists in the participation in his eternal law, which is identified with God himself. This law is called natural because the reason that promulgates it is proper to human nature. It is universal; it extends to all people insofar as it is established by reason. “In its principal precepts, the divine and natural law is presented in the Decalogue and indicates the primary and essential norms regulating moral life. Its central focus is the act of aspiring and submitting to God, the source and judge of everything that is good, and also the act of seeing others as equal to oneself. The natural law expresses the dignity of the person and lays the foundations of the person's fundamental duties.” This Natural Moral Law is more fully revealed through faith and revelation. However, foundational truths such as the dignity of every human person at every age and stage, the nature and ends of real marriage, our obligations in solidarity to one another - are all knowable through the exercise of reason. These truths provide a framework for structuring our social life and building a common home. We should acknowledge them together, agree upon them and then build a movement rooted in them. The social teaching of the Catholic Church offers principles to be worked into the loaf of human culture. Christian social teaching challenges any notion of human freedom which begins and ends with the isolated, atomistic person as the measure of its application. We are by nature and grace called to relationship. Only in communion can we become fully human and find human flourishing. This is the Christian vision of the human person which must inform a new movement. Human freedom must be exercised within a moral constitution. We currently mouth the word freedom while we build our own shackles, engaging in dehumanizing behavior. There is a moral basis to a truly free society. Freedom is not only about having a right to choose but choosing what is right and embedding within the polity the safeguards of a robust vision of freedom; it is not only a freedom from, but a freedom for. Freedom must be ordered toward choosing the good, respecting the truth about the human person, promoting marriage and the family and fostering the real common good. Our freedom must respect our obligation in solidarity to one another - because we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper. This is the principle of solidarity or social charity. The Catholic Church rightly reminds all men and women of our obligation to give a love of preference to the poor. This is the kind of love which the Lord Himself shows in his identification with the poor. The implications of our response to this command are expounded upon in the 25th chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew. This means incorporating in the social order a concern for their well-being. We can construct a system which includes them within its embrace and then expands the promise of full participation and advancement. Catholic social teaching does not propose a particular economic theory. Rather, it insists that every economic order must first be at the service of the dignity of the human person and the family and further the common good. In recent encyclicals and magisterial teaching the market economy has been recognized as having a real potential for promoting all of these goods - when properly understood and morally structured. The Catholic Church prophetically stood against the materialism of the atheistic Marxist system. She prophetically cautions nations which have adopted a form of liberal capitalism that there are dangers in any form of economism or materialism which promotes the use of persons as products and fails to recognize the value of being over acquiring. She reminds consumerist western culture that the market economy must be at the service the human person, the family and the common good, lest “capitalism” conflate its claims to offering freedom and become what St. John Paul II once referred to as savage in its application and encourage business practices which devolve into greed. The Catholic Church warns against and rejects collectivism, whether of the left or the right on the political spectrum. The Church's social doctrine holds that authentically human social relationships of friendship, solidarity and reciprocity can also be conducted within economic activity, and are not only outside it or after it. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote in his 1999 encyclical letter Charity in Truth, “The economic sphere is neither ethically neutral, nor inherently inhuman and opposed to society. It is part and parcel of human activity and precisely because it is human, it must be structured and governed in an ethical manner.” Contrary to what some wrote after that letter was published, it neither endorsed nor rejected capitalism. As the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church consistently has done in the past it simply did not use the term, preferring the phrases market economy or free economy. So it was with the apostolic exhortation entitled The Gospel of Joy released by Pope Francis. Markets can only be free when free people are engaged in them. Freedom is a good of the person. A free economy should also seek to continually expand by opening the way for the participation for as many people as possible, while promoting enterprise and initiative. Also, though we are to give what is called a love of preference to the poor, recognizing our solidarity with them, this call to solidarity is to be applied through the application of the principle of subsidiarity, rejecting all forms of dehumanizing collectivism, either of the left or the right. Subsidiarity in governance and economic participation rejects the usurping by a larger entity of participation which can be done at the lowest practicable level. The West, with all of its promise of freedom, flirts with an instrumentalist materialism devoid of any understanding that the market was made for man not man for the market. In this mistaken approach to a free market economic order the accumulation of capital can come to be viewed as prior to the flourishing of the person, the family and the common good. We cannot separate moral, social and economic issues in the body politic, just as we cannot separate the spirit, soul and body of a person. Human society is a form of corporate person. All of our political and economic concerns have some moral dimension because they concern the human person. The reason we care about expanding economic opportunity is because we respect the dignity of every human person and want to expand participation to as many human persons as we can. The reason we should care for all of the poor, in all of their manifestations, is because they all have human dignity, having all been created in the Image of God. This is where the Institute for Human Dignity has done a great service in formulating their declaration. This is at the heart of what Pope Francis not only writes about, but proclaims in prophetic word and deed. The Institute for Human Dignity is a resource for offering the material out of which we can shape a radical Christian action movement. In the Joy of the Gospel Pope Francis wrote that “among the vulnerable for whom the Church wishes to care, with particular love and concern, are unborn children, the most defenseless and innocent among us. Nowadays efforts are made to deny them their human dignity and to do with them whatever one pleases, taking their lives and passing laws preventing anyone from standing in the way of this. Frequently, as a way of ridiculing the Church's effort to defend their lives, attempts are made to present her position as ideological, obscurantist and conservative. Yet this defense of unborn life is closely linked to the defense of each and every other human right. It involves the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development. Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems. Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defense of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be. Reason alone is sufficient to recognize the inviolable value of each single human life, but if we also look at the issue from the standpoint of faith, ‘every violation of the personal dignity of the human being cries out in vengeance to God and is an offence against the creator of the individual.’ “Precisely because this involves the internal consistency of our message about the value of the human person, the Church cannot be expected to change her position on this question. I want to be completely honest in this regard. This is not something subject to alleged reforms or ‘modernizations.' It is not ‘progressive’ to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.” (Par. 213, 214; emphasis added) He was absolutely correct: It is not "progressive" to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life. A new movement should reject all the current political labels. If anything, it will be described as radical, again, if we consider the true meaning of that word. The word radical means returning to the root. That is what we must do, return to the root recognition that every single human person, at every age and stage of life, has human dignity because they are created in the Image of God. It is time to build a Radical Christian Action Movement.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI calls us all to lives immersed in God through prayer
Jun 25, 2016 / 00:00 amA new book from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI entitled “To Teach and Learn God’s Love” will be released on June 29, 2016. It is a collection of homilies (sermons) focused on those called to priesthood. Pope Francis wrote a preface where he shares the reason Benedict is such an extraordinary theologian. Francis explains that Benedict lives his life “immersed in God” through prayer and practices “theology on his knees.” He affirms that living lives fully immersed in God is a call that “deacons, priests and bishops must never forget.” I must admit, I truly miss Pope Benedict XVI. He is a holy man and was one of the great theologians of the Church. His last act of humility came on February 28, 2013 when he resigned his office to dedicate himself more fully to prayer. The announcement was made to a consistory of his brothers in the episcopate who had gathered in Rome when he approved over 800 causes for canonization. The connection was clear. The last Council of the Church reminded us of the universal call to holiness. That call is issued to all members of the Body of Christ and cannot be fulfilled without prayer. As I reflect on Benedict XVI, I am reminded of one of my favorite definitions of a theologian which was offered by a monk of the fourth century named Evagrius of Pontus. He wrote in his reflections entitled "Mirror for Monks": "The Knowledge of God is the breast of Christ and whoever rests on it will be a theologian." The image evokes the beloved disciple John, the author of the fourth Gospel, so often depicted at the Institution of the Eucharist, the "Last Supper", with his head on the chest of Jesus the Christ. His Gospel narrative was the last to be written and is the most theologically reflective. Clearly, John learned theology in the school of prayer. So it is with Pope Emeritus Benedict. How fitting, indeed how beautiful, that he is now engaged in a form of monastic life within the walls of the Vatican. It moves me deeply to think that this holy priest is praying for the Church - and the world into which she is sent. He is praying for you and for me. I still remember a beautiful message he gave on March 6, 2012 during the Wednesday audience for the faithful. He explained that silence is necessary to hear the Word of God, noting that "our age does not, in fact, favor reflection and contemplation; quite the contrary it seems that people are afraid to detach themselves, even for an instant, from the spate of words and images which mark and fill our days." He continued, "the Gospels often show us ... Jesus withdrawing alone to a place far from the crowds, even from His own disciples, where He can pray in silence". Moreover, "the great patristic tradition teaches us that the mysteries of Christ are linked to silence, and only in silence can the Word find a place to dwell within us." "This principle," the Holy Father explained, "holds true for individual prayer, but also for our liturgies which, to facilitate authentic listening, must also be rich in moments of silence and of non-verbal acceptance. ... Silence has the capacity to open a space in our inner being, a space in which God can dwell, which can ensure that His Word remains within us, and that love for Him is rooted in our minds and hearts, and animates our lives." He explained that at times, "in our prayers, we often find ourselves facing the silence of God. We almost experience a sense of abandonment; it seems that God does not listen and does not respond. But this silence, as happened to Jesus, does not signify absence. Christians know that the Lord is present and listens, even in moments of darkness and pain, of rejection and solitude. Jesus assures His disciples and each one of us that God is well aware of our needs at every moment of our lives." "For us, who are so frequently concerned with operational effectiveness and with the results ... we achieve, the prayer of Jesus is a reminder that we need to stop, to experience moments of intimacy with God, 'detaching ourselves' from the turmoil of daily life in order to listen, to return to the 'root' which nourishes and sustains our existence. One of the most beautiful moments of Jesus' prayer is when, faced with the sickness, discomfort and limitations of his interlocutors, He addresses His Father in prayer, thus showing those around him where they must go to seek the source of hope and salvation." He pointed to the most profound point of the prayer of Jesus to the Father, the moment of His passion and death. Citing the Catechism (Par #2606) he explained that, "His cry to the Father from the cross encapsulated 'all the troubles, for all time, of humanity enslaved by sin and death, all the petitions and intercessions of salvation history are summed up in this cry of the incarnate Word. Here the Father accepts them and, beyond all hope, answers them by raising His Son. Thus is fulfilled and brought to completion the drama of prayer in the economy of creation and salvation.'" Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI continues his life immersed in God and invites us all to join him by his example and his teaching. This immersion is made possible by prayer becoming a way of life. He is a man of living faith; the kind that gets into the marrow of the bones of a man who truly walks with God, making him strong, steady and unafraid of any adversary. This is precisely because he is a contemplative. He calls all of us to the kind of conversion that comes only through lives immersed in God through prayer. No matter our state in life, vocation or career, we are all called to contemplative prayer. In its section on Contemplative prayer (CCC #2709-2719) the Catholic Catechism explains, “Entering into contemplative prayer is like entering into the Eucharistic liturgy: we "gather up" the heart, recollect our whole being under the prompting of the Holy Spirit, abide in the dwelling place of the Lord which we are, awaken our faith in order to enter into the presence of him who awaits us. We let our masks fall and turn our hearts back to the Lord who loves us, so as to hand ourselves over to him as an offering to be purified and transformed.” (CCC #2711) Only a Church of holiness, mystery, mission and majesty can accomplish the huge task that lies ahead of us in this new missionary age. The Church that was born from the wounded side of Jesus Christ, who stretched His arms out on the tree of our redemption to embrace the world, is now desperately in need of deep and profound conversion within. Prayer is the sure path to this much needed conversion, and it begins in our own heart. Prayer is an ongoing dialogue of intimate communion with God. Prayer is about falling in love with God, over and over again. Isaac of Ninevah was an early eighth century monk, Bishop and theologian. For centuries he was mostly revered in the Eastern Christian Church for his writings on prayer. In the last century the beauty of his insights on prayer are being embraced once again by both lungs, East and West, of the Church. He wrote these words in one of his many treatises on prayer: "When the Spirit dwells in a person, from the moment in which that person has become prayer, he never leaves him. For the Spirit himself never ceases to pray in him. Whether the person is asleep or awake, prayer never from then on departs from his soul. Whether he is eating or drinking or sleeping or whatever else he is doing, even in deepest sleep, the fragrance of prayer rises without effort in his heart. Prayer never again deserts him.” "At every moment of his life, even when it appears to stop, it is secretly at work in him continuously, one of the Fathers, the bearers of Christ, says that prayer is the silence of the pure. For their thoughts are divine motions. The movements of the heart and the intellect that have been purified are the voices full of sweetness with which such people never cease to sing in secret to the hidden God." Through His Incarnation, Saving Life, Death, and Resurrection, Jesus opens the way to full communion with God for all men and women. He leads us out of the emptiness and despair that is the rotted fruit of narcissism, nihilism and materialism. When we enter into the dialogue of prayer, we can experience a progressive, dynamic and intimate relationship with God. He transforms us from within. We, as Isaac said, can "become prayer" as we empty ourselves in order to be filled with Him. Through prayer, daily life takes on new meaning. It becomes a classroom of communion. In that classroom we learn the truth about who we are - and who we are becoming - in Jesus. Through prayer we receive new glasses through which we see the true landscape of life. Through prayer darkness is dispelled and the path of progress is illuminated. Through prayer we begin to understand why this communion seems so elusive at times; as we struggle with our own disordered appetites, and live in a manner at odds with the beauty and order of the creation within which we dwell only to find a new beginning whenever we confess our sin and return to our first love. Prayer opens us up to Revelation, expands our capacity to comprehend truth and equips us to change. Through prayer we are drawn by Love into a deepening relationship with Jesus whose loving embrace on the hill of Golgotha bridged heaven with earth; His relationship with His Father is opened now to us; the same Spirit that raised Him from the dead begins to give us new life as we are converted, transfigured and made new. Through prayer, heavenly wisdom is planted in the field of our hearts and we experience a deepening communion with the Trinitarian God. We become, in the words of the Apostle Peter "partakers of the divine nature." (2 Peter 1:4) That participation will only be fully complete when we are with Him in the fullness of His embrace, in Resurrected Bodies in a New Heaven and a New Earth, but it begins now, in the grace of this present moment, as we, in a real sense, “become prayer.” The beloved disciple John became prayer. He writes in the letter he penned in his later years: "See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure. Everyone who commits sin commits lawlessness, for sin is lawlessness." (1John 3:1-4) As we "become prayer" our daily life becomes the field of choice and we are capacitated to choose the "more excellent way" of love of which the great Apostle Paul wrote. (1 Cor. 13) Pondering the implications of the exercise of our human freedom becomes a regular part of our life, as we learn to "examine our conscience", repent of our sin and become joyful penitents. Prayer provides the environment for such recollection as it exposes the darkness and helps us surrender it to the light of Love, the Living God dwelling within us. "Becoming prayer" is possible for all Christians, no matter their state in life or vocation, because God holds nothing back from those whom He loves. This relationship of communion is initiated by Him. Our part is to respond. That response should flow from a heart that beats in surrendered love, in the process of being freed from the entanglements that weigh us down. The God who is Love hungers for the communion of sons and daughters - and we hunger for communion with Him - because He made us this way. Nothing else will satisfy. The early Church Father Origen once wrote: "Every spiritual being is, by nature, a temple of God, created to receive into itself the glory of God." Mother Teresa once wrote: "God is the friend of silence, in that silence he will listen to us; there he will speak to our soul, and there we will hear his voice. The fruit of silence is faith. The fruit of faith is prayer, the fruit of prayer is love, the fruit of love is service and the fruit of service is silence. "In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Silence gives us a new way of looking at everything. We need this silence in order to touch souls. God is the friend of silence. His language is silence. 'Be still and know that I am God.'" Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI calls us all to lives immersed in God through prayer. No matter what our state in life or vocation, his invitation awaits our response. Image: Pope Benedict XVI Holds His Final General Audience, Feb. 27, 2013. Credit: Mazur/www.thepapalvisit.org.uk (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Why did Cardinal Sarah encourage priests to face east while celebrating the liturgy?
Jun 21, 2016 / 00:00 amOne of my heroes among the clergy of the Catholic Church is Cardinal Robert Sarah, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. His wonderful life story is offered through an autobiographical interview with Nicholas Diat in a beautiful book entitled, “God or Nothing.” I highly recommend this powerful book to my readers. The Cardinal recently gave an interview in which he discussed the beauty of the Catholic Liturgy. Along with offering many other great insights on liturgical worship, he recommended that priests “reorient themselves to the East” while celebrating the Divine Liturgy or Holy Mass. In other words, he is encouraging his brother priests and bishops to celebrate the Liturgy ad orientum, facing east. Contrary to a popular misconception, this has nothing to do with the priest somehow “turning his back” on the people. Rather, it is about the priest leading the faithful in facing the Lord. This posture is the more ancient practice of liturgical celebration. Further, it was never discouraged by the Second Vatican Council in its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium). The recommendation from the good Cardinal has received a lot of coverage, mostly in Catholic circles. One of the best summaries of the larger issue it raises sets the matter in its historical context in a very readable manner. It was written by Father Jay Scott Newman and can be read in its entirety here. I have been ordained as a Catholic deacon for twenty years. I am not a priest. However, as a deacon, I have the privilege of serving the Liturgy regularly in a designated role. I have served Liturgies in both the Latin and Eastern Catholic Church, receiving training to serve the Byzantine Catholic Liturgy. I have served liturgies where the celebrant offered the Mass in Latin and in English. I love serving all Liturgies, when they are properly celebrated in fidelity with the rubrics. But, I must admit, I recall with special fondness several years during which I served the Liturgy and the priest faced the East, with the People, toward the Lord. This took place before Pope Emeritus Benedict issued Summorum Pontificum, which opened the celebration of the liturgy in what is now called the “Extraordinary Form” to all priests. Back then, I served the Novus Ordo Missae, which was offered in Latin. I have not served the Extraordinary Form in the Latin Rite as a deacon. I would need instruction on doing so and such instruction is only offered by groups of Catholics who do not look favorably on those of us who are called “permanent deacons” and are married men. That attitude has been a source of sorrow for me, since a deacon is a deacon. However, in my experience, whether the canon is prayed in Latin or vernacular, the practice of facing East set the Liturgy in a transcendent framework which draws me even more deeply into the beauty and the mystery at the heart of the encounter. As the Council fathers noted with such spiritual eloquence in their document on the liturgy: “In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, a minister of the holies and of the true tabernacle; we sing a hymn to the Lord's glory with all the warriors of the heavenly army; venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them; we eagerly await the Savior, Our Lord Jesus Christ, until He, our life, shall appear and we too will appear with Him in glory.” It is an encounter with that foretaste of the heavenly Liturgy which is being discussed by this good Cardinal in this interview, the mystery at the very heart of the Divine Liturgy or, as Latin Rite Catholics call it, the Holy Mass. It is a beauty ever ancient and ever new. Ancient Liturgical Practice The practice of orienting both the liturgy - and the church building - toward the East, from where the Lord will return (Matt. 24:27), has ancient roots and should never be seen as somehow outdated. It is the norm in Orthodox Christianity and Eastern Catholic churches. In one of his reflections on worship, John of Damascus, also called John Damascene, wrote these words in the seventh century, back when the Christian Church was still undivided: “It is not without reason or by chance that we worship towards the East. But seeing that we are composed of a visible and an invisible nature, that is to say, of a nature partly of spirit and partly of sense, we render also a twofold worship to the Creator; just as we sing both with our spirit and our bodily lips, and are baptized with both water and Spirit, and are united with the Lord in a twofold manner, being sharers in the Mysteries and in the grace of the Spirit. “Since, therefore, God is spiritual light, and Christ is called in the Scriptures Sun of Righteousness and Dayspring, the East is the direction that must be assigned to His worship. For everything good must be assigned to Him from Whom every good thing arises. Indeed, the divine David also says, ‘Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth: O sing praises unto the Lord: to Him that rides upon the Heavens of heavens towards the East.’ Moreover, the Scripture also says, ‘And God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there He put the man whom He had formed: and when he had transgressed His command, He expelled him and made him to dwell over against the delights of Paradise,’ which clearly is the West. “So, then, we worship God seeking and striving after our old fatherland. Moreover, the tent of Moses had its veil and mercy seat towards the East. Also the tribe of Judah as the most precious pitched their camp on the East. Also in the celebrated temple of Solomon, the Gate of the Lord was placed eastward. Moreover, Christ, when He hung on the Cross, had His face turned towards the West, and so we worship, striving after Him. “And when He was received again into Heaven He was borne towards the East, and thus His apostles worship Him, and thus He will come again in the way in which they beheld Him going towards Heaven; as the Lord Himself said, As the lightning cometh out of the East and shines even unto the West, so also shall the coming of the Son of Man be.” This insight into the symbols of liturgical worship, as well as their continuity with the old while pointing us toward the life to come, needs to be recovered. With Cardinals like Robert Sarah, it will be. Too often, we settle for less than what we are offered by the liturgical patrimony of the Church. Of course, every Holy Mass, every Divine Liturgy, is beautiful. But, beauty can be experienced by us like an ant in a puddle or an elephant in an ocean. We need good liturgists to help lead us toward the ocean. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is one of the great liturgists of our age. His seminal book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, written when he was still Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, is required reading in most seminaries and should be read by every Catholic. In the last year of his service, before this humble, holy man voluntarily stepped aside and dedicated the rest of his days to a monastic vocation, he gave a beautiful series of instructions on the Liturgy. On October 3, 2012, he reminded the pilgrims in St. Peter’s square: "It is not the individual - priest or layman - or the group that celebrates the liturgy, but it is primarily God's action through the Church, which has its own history, its rich tradition and creativity. This universality and fundamental openness, which is characteristic of the entire liturgy is one of the reasons why it cannot be created or amended by the individual community or by experts, but must be faithful to the forms of the universal Church. “Dear friends, the Church is made visible in many ways: in its charitable work, in mission projects, in the personal apostolate that every Christian must realize in his or her own environment. But the place where it is fully experienced as a Church is in the liturgy: it is the act in which we believe that God enters into our reality and we can meet Him, we can touch Him. It is the act in which we come into contact with God, He comes to us, and we are enlightened by Him. “So when in the reflections on the liturgy we concentrate all our attention on how to make it attractive, interesting and beautiful, we risk forgetting the essential: the liturgy is celebrated for God and not for ourselves, it is His work, He is the subject, and we must open ourselves to Him and be guided by Him and His Body which is the Church.” The older I get the more I appreciate the profound gift and mystery that is at the core, the heart of the Eucharistic Liturgy, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. I understand the immense amount of time and catechesis spent in preparing the faithful for the implementation of the last Revisions to the Roman Missal. It has borne such good fruit. As one who has spent many years studying Catholic theology, I welcomed the revisions and I saw them as a kind but motherly act by the Church to set the ship on a straight course and raise the water level of all Catholic worship. The faithful deserve it. It was deeply distressing to me that some priests actually took it upon themselves to change the canon and the liturgical prayers of the Holy Mass. The Holy Mass does not belong to the celebrating priest; it belongs to Christ the High Priest in whom he stands. I am not opposed to spontaneity in its proper form and proper place. Just not in the canon of the Sacred Liturgy, the Holy Mass. The faithful have a Right to receive the Liturgy as Holy Mother Church has preserved it under the continual inspiration of the Holy Spirit. On April 15, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Bishops of Brazil in Rome. He told them that the Eucharist constitutes “the center and permanent source of the Petrine ministry, the heart of the Christian life, source and summit of the Church's mission of evangelization. You can thus understand the concern of the Successor of Peter for all that can obfuscate this most essential point of the Catholic faith: that today, Jesus Christ continues alive and truly present in the consecrated host and the chalice." He warned the Bishops that “Paying less attention at times to the rite of the Most Holy Sacrament constitutes a sign and a cause of the darkening of the Christian sense of mystery, such as when Jesus is not the center of the Mass, but rather a community preoccupied with other things instead of being taken up and drawn to the only one necessary: their Lord." Pope Benedict continued, “If the figure of Christ does not emerge from the liturgy, it is not a Christian liturgy. As Blessed John Paul II wrote, "the mystery of the Eucharist is 'too great a gift' to admit of ambiguities or reductions, above all when, 'stripped of its sacrificial meaning, it is celebrated as if it were simply a fraternal banquet.’” Toward the end of those beautiful remarks now Pope Emeritus Benedict summarized the heart of Liturgy in these words, “Worship cannot come from our imagination: that would be a cry in the darkness or mere self-affirmation. True liturgy supposes that God responds and shows us how we can adore Him. The Church lives in His presence - and its reason for being and existing is to expand His presence in the world." Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi I am a revert to the Catholic Church. I never officially left, but my practice of the Catholic faith grew cold when my family stopped practicing the faith when I was a child. In my youthful search for the meaning of life I was drawn back to living faith in Jesus Christ and home to the Catholic Church in which I had been raised. It was a circuitous journey which involved a teenage encounter with the Risen Lord, a serious hunger for prayer and bible study and finding the early Church fathers. I questioned my way all the way back home to the faith of my childhood. However, it was rediscovering truly heartfelt worship in the beauty of the Divine Liturgy, the Holy Mass - and the mystery which it makes present - which became the light for so much of my journey home into the heart of the Church. That light continues to illuminate my path as a Catholic Christian because Beauty is so very attractive for a reason. God is the source of all beauty. After all these years, the Divine Liturgy, the Holy Mass, is still the rich and fertile ground of my life of faith and my multi-faceted apostolate. As I mentioned before, I have served as a deacon for twenty years. Serving at the altar, where heaven touches earth and earth touches heaven, roots me in the heart of the Church and calls me into the world as a missionary. There is a Latin maxim that addresses the centrality of worship in the life, identity and mission of the Church; Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. The phrase in Latin literally means the law of prayer (the way we worship), and the law of belief (what we believe). It is sometimes written as, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi, further deepening the implications of this truth. How we worship reflects what we believe and determines how we will live. Worship is the beating heart of the Christian vocation. The highest form of Worship is the Divine Liturgy or, as we say in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, the Holy Mass. The Catholic Church has long understood that part of her role as mother and teacher is to watch over worship, for the sake of the faithful and in obedience to the God whom she serves. How we worship not only reveals and guards what we believe but guides us in how we live our Christian faith and fulfill our Christian mission in the world. Liturgical Worship is not an add on for a Catholic Christian. It is the foundation of Catholic identity; expressing our highest purpose. Worship reveals what we truly believe and how we view ourselves in relationship to God, one another and the world into which we are sent to carry forward the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ. How the Church worships is a prophetic witness to the truth she professes. Good worship becomes a dynamic means of drawing the entire human community into the fullness of life in Jesus Christ. It attracts - through beauty to Beauty. Worship informs and transforms both the person and the faith community which participates in it. There is a certain reciprocity between worship and life. Finding the Treasure I have spent decades working with Christians across the confessional spectrum. Perhaps that explains why I find it odd that right when many of our Christian friends in other confessions and communities are searching for a deeper encounter with the beauty of the Lord in formal liturgical worship, many Catholics succumbed to novelties. I have respect for my Christian brethren who are Protestants, in each of their various confessions and communities. I pray with them and stand in solidarity with them, rooted in our common Baptism, in so many of the efforts to which I have dedicated much of my work. However, I am not a Protestant Christian. I am a Catholic Christian by choice. I do not want a stripped down Catholicism whose worship seems more protestant then Catholic. I also do not want barren liturgy and symbol-less Catholicism. As our Christian brethren are experiencing the barrenness of some of their worship expressions, many in our Catholic Church are discarding the treasures that make her formal liturgical worship so beautiful, full of mystery, compelling and attractive to those seeking a deeper experience of worship and Christian life. Sadly, what may have begun as a sincere effort to simplify the Liturgy in the Catholic Church has often devolved into liturgical minimalism. It begins when you enter what is called the “worship space” in some church buildings. There are few icons or images reflecting heaven touching earth, drawing the worshipper into a transcendent encounter with the Lord we receive in the Eucharist and in whom we are invited to live and move and have our being. Over the last few decades, some purporting to be liturgical “experts” stripped the depth that draws so many to Catholic worship and life. They failed to grasp that, by nature and grace, human persons are symbolic. Man (and woman) is created in the image of God, and is a divine icon. There are still some who think that the symbols of our Catholic worship, faith, and life are a problem. When they stripped our sanctuaries and made our liturgical experiences barren, they thought they were helping us by somehow making the faith more “relevant", "meaningful" or "contemporary". They were sadly mistaken and have done the Church a disservice. It is the Church which makes human experience relevant, by revealing its full meaning and mystery. The Liturgy helps to bring heaven to earth and earth to heaven. Their numbers and influence are dwindling. Seminaries that are full (and their number is increasing) are filled with candidates who want the vibrant, symbolic, faithful, richly liturgical, devout fullness of Catholic faith, worship and life. This movement toward beautiful liturgy is not about going backward but going forward and toward eternal worship. The future of the Church is Tradition, rightly understood. The liturgical innovators are aging and their reign is fortunately coming to an end. There was a movement called Iconoclasm ("Image-breaking") in the eighth and ninth centuries in the Eastern Church. It became a full scale heresy. The term has come to be associated with those who rejected icons, but it speaks to a contemporary problem, liturgical minimalism and the loss of the Sacred in our Churches. Icons put us in touch with the transcendent mysteries of our faith. I pray with icons and have for many years. I cherish their liturgical role in the Eastern Church. In fact, one would never find an Eastern Church, Catholic or Orthodox, without icons. The contemporary iconoclasts are those who seek to de-mystify Christian faith, life, worship and practice. They are not the future of the Catholic Church, but the past. Jesus Christ is the Icon of the Father. Symbols touch us at a much deeper level than words or emotive or affective participation can. They touch us at the level where authentic religion and deep worship truly begins. It is there where we hunger the most for God. Why did Cardinal Sarah encourage priests to face east during the celebration of the liturgy? Perhaps to prompt the kind of discussion I have offered in this article and to help hasten the renewal of beautiful worship. Image: Cardinal Robert Sarah. Credit: Bohumil Petrik/CNA.
Will we dedicate June to the Sacred Heart of Jesus or to rejecting God’s loving plan for marriage?
Jun 2, 2016 / 00:00 amThe month of June is traditionally dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Catholic Church. On the Friday after the Feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ we even celebrate a Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Church, as mother and teacher, invites the faithful to spend the whole month reflecting on what it means to live our lives in such a way that we reveal the Loving Heart of a Merciful God to the whole world. The Catholic Church marks time by the great events of the life of Jesus Christ and the Christian Faith. In so doing, she invites Christians to enter more fully into the mysteries of that faith and actually live differently. She also keeps the truths of the faith ever present before a world which needs to be set free from sin and death. The early Christians referred to the Church as the world reconciled. They believed that the Church is meant to become the home of the whole human race. She is a seed of the coming Kingdom, making it present even now. Do we believe this? The Catholic Catechism affirms: "To reunite all his children, scattered and led astray by sin, the Father willed to call the whole of humanity together into his Son's Church. The Church is the place where humanity must rediscover its unity and salvation. The Church is "the world reconciled." She is that bark which "in the full sail of the Lord's cross, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, navigates safely in this world." According to another image dear to the Church Fathers, she is prefigured by Noah's ark, which alone saves from the flood."(CCC#845) Nations also mark time. In their special days and months, they send important signals to their citizens and to the community of Nations. For example, we recently celebrated "Memorial Day" in the United States of America by honoring those who gave their lives to protect our freedoms. In so doing, we affirmed values which join us together. The various proclamations of our Presidents setting months apart speak to what we as a Nation believe and value. The question is what our commemoration says about who we are and who we are becoming. By way of another Presidential Proclamation, President Barack Obama has once again declared the Month of June to be "Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Transgender Pride Month". The proclamation makes a point of hailing theObergefell v Hodges decision of 2015 wherein 5 unelected Justices decided they could redefine marriage, with no basis in the Natural Law, common sense, human history or legal precedent. In his proclamation this year, the President refers to “Last year's landmark Supreme Court decision guaranteeing marriage equality in all 50 States” as an “historic victory.” No-one should ever deny that all human beings have fundamental human rights and human dignity because they are human beings. However, that is not what this proclamation or the proclamations of the last several years from this Administration dedicating June as "LGBT Month" are really about. There is an accelerating effort to make homosexual and lesbian relationships the moral and legal equivalent of true marriage by Governmental coercion and use the Police Power of the State to enforce such a restructuring on the rest of civil society. When sexual behavior between two men or two women is viewed as the foundation of a newly minted "right" to marry - and those who oppose this counterfeit equivalency movement are characterized as being against the "freedom" to marry and "equal rights" - the revolutionary plan is exposed. The goal is obvious and its implications are to promote and unleash nothing less than a cultural revolution. To defend marriage is NOT to discriminate against any person, including those who define themselves as homosexual or lesbian or even "transgender". To limit marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory now, nor has it ever been. Homosexual couples cannot bring into existence what marriage intends by its very definition. To "confer" the benefits that have been conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual paramours is bad public policy and will seriously injure the common good. Marriage between one man and one woman, intended for life and open to the bearing and rearing of children is the fundamental building block of society. The family is the first cell of society. It is a relationship defined by nature itself, revealed and affirmed by the natural law that binds all men and women. Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they create a "right" to marry for those who are incapable of marriage. The institutions of a truly just government should defend marriage against those who would undermine it - not redefine it out of existence. Civil Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. For example, the ban on polygamy and age requirements were enforced in order to ensure that there was a mature decision at the basis of the Marriage contract. The truth about the nature and ends of marriage is not simply a "religious" construct. The Natural Law reveals - and the cross cultural history of civilization affirms - marriage is solely between a man and a woman, open to children and intended for life. Marriage is the foundation for the family which is the privileged place for the formation of virtue and character in children, our future citizens. The family is the first society, first economy, first school, first civilizing and mediating institution and first government. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church wrote these important words in 2003, "The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose. "No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives." On May 31, 1992 in Rome, Pope St. John Paul II canonized the Jesuit Priest Saint Claude de la Colombiere, the Spiritual Director of Saint Margaret Mary of Alocoque. She was the religious sister to whom the Lord gave a special revelation of His Sacred Heart, filled with redemptive and merciful love for the world. The priest shared Margaret Mary's devotion to the Heart of Jesus and helped to spread that devotion. This occurred at a critical time when the culture of Europe was steeped in darkness - and the Church staggered from corruption within - a time very much like our own. At the Mass of canonization, the late Pope proclaimed: "For evangelization today, the Heart of Christ must be recognized as the heart of the Church: It is He who calls us to conversion, to reconciliation. It is He who leads pure hearts and those hungering for justice along the way of the Beatitudes. It is He who achieves the warm communion of the members of the one Body. It is He who enables us to adhere to the Good News and to accept the promise of eternal life. It is He who sends us out on mission. The heart-to-heart with Jesus broadens the human heart on a global scale." The heart is the center of a person, the place from which he/she makes the choices which will affect the world within them and around them. The Catholic Catechism summarizes this truth in these words,” The heart is the seat of moral personality.” (CCC# 2517) Devotion to the Heart of Jesus reminds us that it is in the Sacred Humanity of Jesus that we find the pattern for becoming fully human ourselves. In His Incarnation, saving life, death and Resurrection, we receive both the pattern - and the means - to become more like Him. The leaders of the Second Vatican Council in their beautifully written Pastoral Constitution on the Mission of the Church in the Modern World wrote, "The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear." (GS #22) Two years before he became Pope, Karol Cardinal Wotyla (Pope St John Paul II) spoke to the Catholic Bishops of the United States. His frank observation was republished in the Wall Street Journal on November 9, 1978: "We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel and the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine providence. It is a trial which the whole Church must take up." We are living under what Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI called a "Dictatorship of Relativism" Relativism denies the existence of any objective truths which can be known through the exercise of reason and should govern our life together as a society. Divorced from norms to guide the exercise of human choice and govern our behavior, we are rapidly declining as a culture. When there is nothing objectively true which can be known by all and form the basis of our common life then there is no basis for authentic freedom. Instead, we teeter on the brink of anarchy. Marriage is the newest target in the advance of the tyranny of the social and cultural engineers. In his apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Charity, Pope Emeritus Benedict summarized the duty of Catholics when confronted with an assault on authentic marriage: "Marriage and the family are institutions that must be promoted and defended from every possible misrepresentation of their true nature, since whatever is injurious to them is injurious to society itself." We are living in a new missionary age. These very different visions of the human person, human love and the dignity of human sexuality, human flourishing, marriage and the family - and the society founded upon them - are contending for the heart, soul and future of the West. One will lead to true human progress, flourishing and freedom, the other to continuing human degradation, moral and cultural collapse. Let us choose to spend the month of June in Prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, lifting up our Nation, indeed the whole world, to the One in whom we place all of our trust. He will not disappoint; His Heart still beats with Mercy and Love for the world. "Sacred Heart of Jesus, We Place our Trust in Thee." Image: Lawrence OP via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)