Sober Intoxication

It is the Holy Spirit who teaches us to sing—first David and then, through him, Israel and the church. Yes, singing, the surpassing of ordinary speech, is a ‘pneumatic’ event. Church music comes into being as a ‘charism,’ a gift of the Spirit. It is the true glossolalia, the new tongue that comes from the Holy Spirit. It is above all in Church music that the ‘sober inebriation’ of faith takes place—an inebriation surpassing all the possibilities of mere rationality.

But this intoxication remains sober, because Christ and the Holy Spirit belong together, because this drunken speech stays totally within the discipline of the Logos, in a new rationality that, beyond all words, serves the primordial Word, the ground of all reason.

Spirit of the Liturgy, 140

Reflection – The issue of liturgical music and what it should sound like is one of those cans of worms that bloggers open at their peril. Rock music vs. Gregorian chant, folk music vs. Palestrina and Byrd, Haugen vs. Handel—the fault lines open up quickly and deeply and everyone’s emotions quickly get stirred up. Charity and tolerance get left in the dust all too often.

In the interest of full disclosure, my own journey as an amateur liturgical musician took me from the Glory and Praise school of guitar hymns, where as a youth God did in fact meet me and began to stir up in me the first movements of faith and prayer, through to immersion in the choral tradition of the Church. I have, by God’s grace, Palestrina-ed and Byrd-ed and Mozart-ed and loved it, and my own liturgical sensibility favours that style, mixed in with hefty doses of chant and good quality, theologically sound hymnody.

So I find myself unable to dismiss or scorn the more primitive musical styles of ‘praise and worship’, for the simple reason that I know my own adult faith life truly was nourished by that kind of music in its early stages. I am also aware of the very real limitations of time, money, talent, and training in many parish music ministries. We do what we can, right?

At the same time, I am well aware that the solemnity and sublime nature of the liturgy calls for something better than rock/folk/Broadway inspired musical forms, and that we should at least be trying as a Church to move towards that ‘something better’, as and when we are able.

Ratzinger is one of the most thoughtful and balanced writers about this need for something better in Church music. Himself a classically trained musician, he knows very well what music is, what its challenges are, and where it can take us. In the above passage, he strikes a very good balance: music is intoxication, elevating us above the prosaic and the plain, but it is a sober intoxication, never losing its connection to the Logos, the rational nature of our faith rooted in the rationale of God which is Christ.

The joy and abandonment we experience in truly successful music, that sense of beautiful release, of something carrying us beyond our own horizons and thoughts, must be at the service of the proclamation of the Gospel. Rock music, which is by nature a sub-rational release of raw emotion, Dionysian abandonment to the sensual level, does not belong in liturgy. It is an intoxication that is not sober, not ordered to the Logos.

The phrase ‘sober intoxication’ is, I think, a good one to ponder as we evaluate this or that piece of music. Does it elevate us? Or is the quality of this piece too mediocre to achieve that (cough-PeaceisFlowingLikeaRiver-cough)? Does the music raise our minds and hearts to God, or does it draw too much attention to the choir, the soloist, the ‘band’? Are the lyrics theologically sound and substantial or not (cough-GatherUsIn-cough)? Bad theology truly does not serve the proclamation of the Gospel, right?

It all is a bit complex, and of course all the limitations of time, talent, personnel, and money will come to bear on this. But it behoves all who love music, love the liturgy, and wish for music to serve the liturgy to ponder these things, weed out the worst items in our repertoires, and strive towards the ‘sober intoxication’ that truly beautiful and fitting liturgical music can contribute to the worship of God.

I Will Rise and Go to My Father

The exitus, or rather God’s free act of creation, is indeed ordered toward the reditus, but that does not mean the rescinding of created being, but rather… the creature, existing in its own right, comes home to itself, and this act is an answer in freedom to God’s love. It accepts creation from God as his offer of love, and thus ensures a dialogue of love, that wholly new kind of unity that love alone can create. The being of the other is not absorbed or abolished, but rather, in giving itself, it becomes fully itself. 

Spirit of the Liturgy, 32-33

 

Reflection – The terms exitus and reditus, perhaps unfamiliar to some of this blog’s readers, have a venerable theological pedigree. The ‘going out from’ and ‘returning to’ of all created reality vis a vis God is a strong (some would argue central) theme in Thomas Aquinas, who himself inherited it from the neo-Platonic thread of Christian thought found in such writers as Pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine.

 

However, enough of that. I have limited interest and energy to give the history of theology, and I imagine most of you have even less. The key question is: Whassit mean? And, what’s it to ya? What’s it got to do with anything?

 

Well, it means we come from the mind of God and return to the heart of God. This is the whole meaning of… well, everything. The whole movement of the world’s life, human life, my life, your life, is summed up in the words spoken by the prodigal son in Luke 15: “I will rise and go to my Father.”

 

This is the whole point of the exercise. God sends us out, real creatures with our own true possession of being, like the father in the parable giving his son his share of the estate. But all of this genuine possession of being, this genuine freedom, this genuine subjectivity and (in a certain limited sense) autonomy, is meant to bear fruit in a true ‘dialogue of love’, a true returning to Him to abide in his love.

 

And in this going out and returning of the creature to God, we become like Him in his Triune nature. The Father already and eternally has a Son; the Father and the Son continually go out and return One to the Other in a communion of love that is beyond anything we can conceive. But our little human pilgrimage, then, of exitus and reditus becomes a sharing, an imitation, a following, a reproduction of this Triune life in ‘the key of humanity’, the ‘key of creation.’

 

Now we know that the road from and to the Father has gotten a little twisted, a little bent, a little foggy. We know that pigs have entered the picture at some point. It’s all a bit smelly and nasty. And that is the tragic dimension of life—at some point we all rebelled from the path of reditus.

 

But it does not change one bit that this is still the path open to us, the path we are made to tread. And the whole substance of Christianity is that the Son of God has come after us. He is not like the elder son in the parable who sulks and glowers and wraps himself in his own righteousness; He is a True Son of the Father, and so comes running out to us to find us and carry us home.

 

Exitus and reditus, and the way of reditus is the way of following the Son of God become Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Mary, the man. This is Christianity, and this is the key to understanding what happens at every Mass, in every sacrament, and out of that, in every moment of our lives.

 

Freedom With a Side Order of Cheeseburgers

Self-will is in reality a subordination to the schemes and systems of a given time, and, despite appearances, it is slavery; the will of God is truth, and entering into it is thus breaking out into freedom.

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 118

Reflection – This is one of those classic Ratzingerian passages, and indeed passages of general Christian discourse, that can seem to non-believers like some kind of Orwellian word game. Self-will is slavery! Obedience is freedom! 2+2=5! We have always been at war with Oceania!

This can certainly seem like what he, and the Church, is doing here. Just playing with words and concepts to get people doing what we want them to do… namely, obey the Church in its presentation of what we claim to be God’s will. I suppose in this understanding we derive some thrill of power from this or monetary gain or plot for world domination or something.

OK, so that’s my little inner skeptic talking. He’s a very little skeptic, indeed—I give the poor mite just enough food and water to keep him alive, so he can tell me how big skeptics might think about all this.

Now of course Ratzinger doesn’t just utter this above sentence in a vacuum in the book; it is part of a longer and very developed argument. And, the blog being what it is, I will probably get around to the rest of his argument on the point soon enough.

It is all a question of what is our deepest self, anyhow, and how do we get to the level of our deepest self to live out of it, which is what is really meant by the word freedom.

On the immediate superficial level of life, we are a bundle of desires and dreams, ideas and possibilities. But a little clear reflection on this shows us that a great deal of our immediate desires, dreams, ideas, and possibilities are in fact derived from one of two places: basic animal instinct and physical drives; socially constructed norms and ideals. And these are inter-related, of course

We have basic desires for food, warmth, sexual gratification, and the means to satisfy these desires are mediated to us by the norms and models given to us by our society. And this is generally true of all of us, insofar as we remain on the superficial level of our being. At the end of the March for Life yesterday, I was very hungry and cold, and my sole desire at that point (I must admit) was for a bacon cheeseburger and fries. The hunger and cold were basic physical realities; the bacon cheeseburger was a social construct. A delicious, juicy, social construct… with mushrooms… and a pickle… and bacon… mmm…

OK, enough philosophizing about last night’s supper. Now I’m all hungry again. I think basic reflection shows the truth of what Ratzinger is saying. The bare expression of exclusive self-will is in fact an illusory or at best very shallow form of freedom, because on that superficial level of our being we all find ourselves to be largely products of our society and its norms and quite limited in our self-expression by those norms.

This is where God comes in to liberate us. Because there is, truly, more to us than that superficial, socially constructed level of immediate consciousness. His will, expressed to us first in the moral law He has given us through the mediation of Scripture and Church, and then deepened in our life through the whole dynamism of prayer and dialogue, listening and contemplation, takes us deep below the surface level of desire to the place where our real selves, our true selves are in encounter with the true God, and with Truth itself.

Freedom is a dialogue, an encounter, a dance of my real self with Reality, my true individual personhood with the person of Christ. My own desires and devices may dance in and out of this encounter, this dialogue—it was indeed a nice bacon cheeseburger last night—but they are not the boss, not running the show.

As long and devices and desires are running the show, our freedom is an illusory parody of liberty; when we live out of the dialogue, the encounter, the bowing before God in obedience and the receiving of Wisdom, Light, and Life from his hands, then we are in true freedom, the true exodus of our being from slavery to self-will into the promised land of love, of a life lived in justice and mercy and total gift of self to God and the world. And that is what Christians mean by freedom.

There Are No Small Murders

‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image’ (Gen 9:5-6). With these words, God claims the life of man as his own specific possession: it remains under his direct and immediate protection. It is something ‘sacred.’ When a man’s blood is shed, it cries out to him (Gen 4:10), because man is made in his image and likeness. The authority of society and the authorities in society are instituted by him precisely in order to guarantee the respect of this fundamental right, which is endangered by the wicked heart of man.

It follows that the recognition of the sacred character of human life and of its inviolability—a principle admitting of no exceptions—is not some trivial little problem or a question that may be considered relative, in view of the pluralism of opinions we find in modern society… There are no small murders. The respect of every human life is an essential condition is a societal life worthy of the name is to be possible… when man’s conscience loses respect for life as something sacred, he inevitably ends by losing his own identity.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 59-60

Reflection – ‘There are no small murders.’ Well, tomorrow I won’t be blogging, because I will be marching and praying in Ottawa at the March for Life. Ottawa is a two-hour-and-then-some drive from Combermere, so it’s going to be a long day of traveling, praying, listening to speeches, visiting with people (the pro-life movement in Canada is small, and you tend to run into old friends at these events!), marching, more listening, traveling… anyhow, a bit of a marathon.

There are no small murders. That’s the underlying point of the march. And that legalized abortion negates ‘societal life worthy of the name’ – that this reality in our post-modern world is a hidden corrosive acid silently eating away at the very foundation and core of our social order. If the right to life is not respected and protected by the law, then no other human right—speech, assembly, religion, living wages, decent housing, medical care, civil rights—has any real rational basis, and each is subject to the whim of the state.

If society can decide that some human beings must die to protect a certain social order of sexual expression and gender equality, then society can decide that some human beings should be enslaved, or impoverished, or jailed, or silenced, or euthanized, all to protect some other social good.

It’s not rocket science, really. There are no small murders.

You know, I’m really not a ‘marching’ kind of guy. My own response to all this is much more to pray and fast in a poustinia somewhere than to man the barricades waving a sign. But in Canada there is such a pressure to be silent, to put the abortion issue behind us because ‘history has moved on’ (that’s a quote from a Conservative cabinet minister), to pretend that it’s all OK and nobody cares about abortion and what’s the big deal anyway…

It’s a big deal because it is the destruction of 100 000 human beings in Canada every year and (oh yeah) the social order and our claim to being a human civilization. So I march, even though really I would prefer to pray, fast, and perhaps weep in a cabin in the woods somewhere.

There are no small murders. We have to say this. And we have to keep saying this until ‘history’ comes to its senses, until society realizes its primary duty to protect human life, until people repent of this monstrous crime, this evil at the heart of our civilization.

Hard Heads and Soft Hearts

Our task as Christians today is to contribute our concept of God to the debate about man… God himself is Logos, the rational primal ground of all that is real, the creative reason that gave birth to the world and that is reflected in the world. God is Logos – meaning, reason, and word, and that is why man corresponds to God when his reason is open and he pleads the cause of a reason that is not allowed to be blind to the moral dimensions of existence.”

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 112

Reflection – G.K. Chesterton once said that we should strive to have hard heads and soft hearts. We need to be clear, disciplined thinkers, on the one hand, and tender merciful lovers, on the other. He went on to say that the modern world was characterized by soft heads and hard hearts—full of lots of sentimental guff and fuzzy headedness about ending suffering or caring about this or that vulnerable group—and the end result being heaps of corpses piled up to the heavens, a civilization steeped in blood and carnage.

‘Sentimentality leads to the gas chamber.’ I don’t remember right now who said that, but it is quite true. When we lose our hard heads—our sharp, clear, rigorous adherence to human dignity and rights and the absolute moral principles that flow from that rigor—we end up bathed in blood.

All of this is related to contributing ‘God to the debate about man’ which Ratzinger says is our task today. Of course the context in which he writes about this task is the field of political and cultural engagement. Hard heads and soft hearts, because God is both Logos (reason) and Love.

God enters in here necessarily for two reasons. First, as Creator He assures us that both our reason and our love, our hard heads and soft hearts, are grounded in the deepest reality. It is not just advisable or practical to think things through carefully; if we don’t, we have stepped outside of reality. It is not just ‘nice’ to be loving; to live without love is a living death. That both reason and love flow from the Center, Source, and Heart of reality establishes the deep necessity of these human actions.

Second, we need God’s help to be reasonable and loving! Sin darkens our intellect and warps our will back onto ourselves. God’s revelation establishes us in truth; His grace establishes us in love.

There’s much more to be said about all this, of course. My thoughts this week, though, are drawn (as my faithful readers may have noticed) to the March for Life in Ottawa this Thursday, and to the whole tragic situation of abortion in our society.

I find it difficult to write about abortion, you know, and rightly or wrongly tend not to ‘go there’ on this blog too often. The horror and utter evil of it makes it difficult to write about without descending to the level of less-than-helpful rant and screed.

In relation to this whole Logos business, it seems to me that legal, socially sanctioned abortion is safeguarded in Canada by a whole cloud of obfuscation, equivocation, euphemism, and smokescreen. At all costs we must keep the bare physical reality of what happens in an abortion from being made clear and plain. At all costs we must hide the reality of abortion behind closed doors and a conspiracy of silence.

This is why I consider the work of SilentNo More to be one of the most important pro-life initiatives out there. For women (and some men) to speak plainly and clearly about what they have experienced in their encounter with abortion, what happened to them, to their children—painful as this is, it is truth, and it must be expressed. I am very glad that they have become such central figures and leaders of the March for Life both in Canada and in the States.

God is Logos and God is Love. Truth and Love are one and indivisible. Hard heads and soft hearts are both needed to turn our society away from its ruinous course. We need to think clearly and love deeply—there are, literally, lives at stake.

Evangelical Politics

Man can never be redeemed simply from outside. Francis Bacon and those who followed in the intellectual current of modernity that he inspired were wrong to believe that man would be redeemed through science. Such an expectation asks too much of science; this kind of hope is deceptive. Science can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it.

On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced with the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task—even if it has continued to achieve great things in the formation of man and in care for the weak and the suffering.

Spe Salvi 25

Reflection  - Now this is some deep stuff here. This quote from Pope Benedict is worth a slow and careful reading and long pondering. I know that’s true of lots of things the man has written, but this one stands out.

‘Man can never be redeemed simply from outside.’ This, of course, implies that we see a need for redemption. The word may be problematic to some: what do you mean, ‘redemption’. I don’t need to be saved! As Haze Motes, the anti-hero of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood says, “Any man with a good car doesn’t need to be justified.” There is a modern/post-modern rejection of salvation as a meaningful relevant category.

So first there is the sense of a need in man to be saved, justified, redeemed. That the human project, taken individually or collectively, is a perilous one, and that we are capable of being destroyed or destroying ourselves. Few would argue with that, I think. ‘Redeemed’ means ‘ransomed’ – the sense of being captive, in bondage, not wholly free, not wholly ourselves.

And the Pope asserts that no entirely external force can liberate us. Not politics, not science, not social justice, not chemicals, not money. All of these have their effects; all of these have a proper place in the human world, but none of them can secure our freedom, our redemption. The principle issue is our own disordered hearts and wills; external forces enable us to act in certain ways, but cannot make our actions good and loving.

Christ, who is our salvation, who does heal our disordered being, is not, then, wholly external to us. That’s worth pondering, eh? Christ penetrates into the core identity of the person, Christ acts not on external structures or circumstances, but primarily on the interior being of the person, to make us lovers of Him and of one another, a process He cannot do without our free cooperation. OK, so that’s clear enough. Deep, but clear.

But then the Pope pushes us even deeper, and into a difficult and rather uncomfortable place. The Church has ceded the field of social structuring to science and technology, and limited itself to the individual and his or her salvation and succor, and this is wrong, this is inadequate.

Well, this is a very challenging passage indeed. There is, then, a need for the Church (aka you and me, according to our capacities and state of life) to plunge into the shaping of the world and its structures. There is a need to plunge into the messy, chaotic and oftentimes ugly world of politics, economics, business, to bear witness to the ultimate realities and do what we can to shape the world, society and its laws, according to those realities.

It is not a question of politicizing faith, as the Church is often accused of doing these days (especially by those who would prefer its voice to be silenced). It is a question of evangelizing politics and culture, of doing all in our power to shape the kingdom of the world into a conformity with the kingdom of heaven, a question of taking the Our Father seriously as a programme of action.

Oh, it’s a messy business, a perilous business indeed. One that requires those engaging in it be men and women of deep prayer and deep communion with God, the Church, and a community of believers. But it does seem to be what the Pope is saying here.

Deep stuff, complex stuff. Lots here to read carefully and ponder. So let’s do that. In Canada, the March for Life is happening on Thursday – a tiny effort by the Canadian pro-life movement to keep the issue of abortion before the minds and hearts of our lawmakers and fellow citizens. I hope my Canadian readers are taking part in it, if and as they can, and I ask my readers from elsewhere to remember Canada in your prayers this week. We need them.

Sexual Authenticity

... is the title of a book by Melinda Selmys subtitled "An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism." She was the guest speaker at Madonna House this past Friday, and is a faith-filled, funny, and deep thinker on issues of gender, sex, and faith.
Utterly Catholic and utterly original, provocative and passionate, I recommend this book highly, and her blog, which can be found at this link.
And... that's all I have time for today!

Legislating Morality

Every generation has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs; this task is never simply completed. Yet every generation must also make its own contribution to establishing convincing structures of freedom and of good, which can help the following generation as a guideline for the proper use of human freedom; hence, always within human limits, they provide a certain guarantee also for the future. In other words: good structures help, but of themselves they are not enough.

Spe Salvi 25

Reflection – OK, maybe this seems a wee bit dry (voice from the peanut gallery: “Like toast!”). Let’s see if we can juice it up a bit.

Same-sex marriage. Abortion. Contraception. Pornography. Divorce. Murder. Law and Order (the concepts, not the TV show).

We cannot legislate morality! What difference does it make if gay people can marry (each other, that is!)? If we outlaw abortion, it will just be driven into the back alley! Divorce laws should be lax and permissive to make it less traumatic and easier for everyone! You cannot force people to be good!

OK, juicy enough? That’s what this rather dry passage from Spe Salvi is alluding to, among a host of other questions. Namely, the place of structures (i.e. laws) in society to shape the public and common understanding of the good use of human freedom. In other words, legislating morality.

Those who claim we cannot legislate morality are talking nonsense, usually about abortion and pornography. Because we do this all the time, and in fact cannot not do it—the very nature of a law is that it is what society determines people ‘ought’ not to do. ‘Ought’ is the key word of morality, right?

Even if we dress our legal theory up in phrases like  ‘preserving public order’ or ‘serving the common good’, we are nonetheless legislating morality. Because of course those are moral ends. Public order and the common good are perceived as what we ought to have, and so laws are passed to punish those who imperil them and protect those who serve them.

What difference does it make if same-sex marriage/pornography/no-fault divorce/ abortion is legal? People will do these things anyhow! Of course. And people commit murders, rob banks, molest children, beat their spouses and domestic partners, defraud others. Why not legalize all these things—criminalizing them hasn’t done any good, apparently!

Law is a teacher, and what it teaches is what behaviors a given society rejects as destructive uses of human freedom for the good, and which ones are morally permissible. By making pornography freely available with almost no limits to it, society says that this is a fine way to present, express, and form people in the nature and meaning of human sexuality. And we all see just how wonderfully well that is working out for us.

By making divorce (legally) easy, society says it doesn’t really matter if married couples stay together or not – no compelling social interest is at stake in protecting the marriage bond. And we all see just how wonderfully that has been working out, too.

By making abortion legal, and by making same-sex marriage legal, society says that the creation of a new human being, human life itself, is an accidental by-product of sexual activity, and possesses no particular value in itself. Human beings are only ‘real’ and ‘valued’ once they attain a level of functionality, and (since gay sex and hetero-sex are precisely identical in law) human beings themselves—every single one of us—are in our very being and origin incidental to some other activity in which we are neither sought, loved, nor considered.

So it does matter what laws we pass, as each law expresses a social value and passes on to the next generation an understanding of the true, the good, and the beautiful in human life.

Now law is a teacher, and every teacher must exercise prudence in her or his pedagogy. For various practical reasons, not every immoral act can be made illegal, and if it cannot be practically made illegal, it should not be. But the law-as-teacher always has the mission and duty of presenting, promoting, and (yes) enforcing those basic human goods which are necessary for a functioning human society.

It cannot ‘force’ people to be good, any more than a teacher can ‘force’ students to learn. But it can and must present the good and the true, and do all in its power to preserve and protect human life, its dignity and its meaning.

And oh yeah, on a related topic, to all you Canadian readers—hope I see some of youse guys at the March for Life in Ottawa on Thursday!

Hoisted on Their Own Petard

Intellectual honesty and humility in the face of the unknown seem to recommend agnosticism rather than an explicit atheism, since the latter, too, claims to know too much about these things and clearly has a dogmatic element of its own. No one can claim to ‘know’, strictly speaking, that God does not exist. One can at most take his non-existence as a working hypothesis, on the basis of which one then tries to explain the universe. Modern science basically takes this line.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures,  84-5

Reflection – Well, back to philosophy! I’ve had quite a long stint on the blog with theology and spirituality (and rightly so), but it’s good to have the bracing clarity of logical reflection and philosophical rigor once in a while.

I’ve blogged this section of this book quite a bit, Ratzinger’s long exposition of agnosticism, atheism, and religious faith, and his argument in favor of the latter. Here, of course he is not so much critiquing agnosticism (that comes later in the essay), as pointing out atheism’s inherent epistemological overreach.

Episte… what? Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, processes, and limits of human knowledge. What can we know and how do we know it are the basic questions of epistemology.

So the atheist critiques religious belief as a claim to knowledge based on insufficient evidence. We cannot ‘know’ there is a God in the same way that I know I am typing on a lap-top computer right now and you know you are reading these words right now. We have no such direct immediate and inarguable experience that corresponds to the reality ‘God’.

But of course the converse holds true as well. To claim absolute knowledge of God’s existence and to claim knowledge of his non-existence are equally specious. And so, at least at this juncture of the essay, agnosticism seems to be the more credible choice. Ratzinger goes on to show that this is not a satisfactory resolution to the matter, and you can click on the ‘agnosticism’ label at the bottom of this post to examine his reasoning on the subject.

Meanwhile, however, the atheist and the theist seem to be in the same boat (neither of them liking it much), claiming knowledge of things we have no right to. Epistemological overreach—it’s like the common cold! Everyone’s got it.

But is this true? While atheism is a big subject, as is theism, a little bigger and more complex than this wee blog post can exhaust, it seems to me that atheists are hoisted on their own petard on this matter, while theists have a way of resolving the conundrum. Atheism, strictly speaking, if it is going to argue for God’s non-existence as opposed to simply assuming it (a la Sartre or Comte), is committed to argument by strict logical positivist or scientific methods. Direct observation, experimentation, and verification under laboratory conditions—that kind of thing.

But by those criteria, God cannot be disproved. The most one could say, strictly logically, is that evidence for God has not been furnished by these methods. But then, neither has evidence for love, friendship, patriotism, justice, and a host of other crucial and invaluable human goods that few atheists and fewer yet theists would want to discard. If we do not discard these ‘unprovable’ human goods, then we cannot (by strict logical consistency) discard the notion of God, either.

Theists, meanwhile, will grant freely that God’s existence is not ‘known’ in the same immediate direct way that we know sensible objects. But we are not committed to a theory of knowledge that limits us to that kind of direct knowledge. Theists are not logical positivists, nor do we grant for one minute that such logical positivism is the only or even the most credible epistemological theory.

It is well beyond the scope of a blog post (and my own philosophical credentials, to be strictly honest!) to untangle and expound all the issues surrounding this.

Final word: atheism sets a theory and a threshold for knowledge which excludes atheism itself as an acceptable stance, and so collapses into, literally, nonsense. Theism does not advance a theory and threshold of knowledge that excludes its own claims, and so remains standing as a credible position. And that’s enough philosophy for one day…

Love is Stronger Than Death

Did hope die [on the Cross]? Did the world remain definitively without light, and life without purpose? At that moment, deep down, you [Mary] probably listened again to the word spoken by the angel in answer to your fear at the time of the Annunciation: “Do not be afraid, Mary!” (Lk 1:30). How many times had the Lord, your Son, said the same thing to his disciples: do not be afraid! In your heart, you heard this word again during the night of Golgotha. Before the hour of his betrayal he had said to his disciples: “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (Jn 16:33). “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (Jn 14:27). “Do not be afraid, Mary!” In that hour at Nazareth the angel had also said to you: “Of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk 1:33). Could it have ended before it began? No, at the foot of the Cross, on the strength of Jesus's own word, you became the mother of believers. In this faith, which even in the darkness of Holy Saturday bore the certitude of hope, you made your way towards Easter morning.

The joy of the Resurrection touched your heart and united you in a new way to the disciples, destined to become the family of Jesus through faith. In this way you were in the midst of the community of believers, who in the days following the Ascension prayed with one voice for the gift of the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14) and then received that gift on the day of Pentecost. The “Kingdom” of Jesus was not as might have been imagined. It began in that hour, and of this “Kingdom” there will be no end. Thus you remain in the midst of the disciples as their Mother, as the Mother of hope. Holy Mary, Mother of God, our Mother, teach us to believe, to hope, to love with you. Show us the way to his Kingdom! Star of the Sea, shine upon us and guide us on our way!

Spe Salvi 50

Reflection – ‘Do not be afraid!’ Pope Benedict says it four times in this passage. Do not be afraid – this is the ‘major key’ of Christian life in the world, if I can put it that way. We do not live in fear. We may live with some amount of suffering, some burden of love and care for the world (perhaps that would be the ‘minor key’ of Christian life), but we do not live in fear.

The reason we do not live in fear is that we have a God who has descended to the depths of suffering and death and even Hell, and has been victorious. The world, the flesh, and the devil have thrown everything they’ve got at God, at Jesus, and at his Church, 2000 years ago and every year since.

God is victorious. God is bigger. Love is stronger than death. I don’t have much more to say about it.

Mary, next to Jesus, knows all about this victory, this love, and this capacity (therefore) to live wholly without fear, to live a bold courageous life in the world. That’s why we go to her – she lived that way, and she walked the path of Christ in the world into the full glory of his kingdom. So she helps us believe, and learn, that God is victorious, God is bigger, and love is stronger than death.

Happy May to you.

When Reality Hits

But alongside the joy which, with your Magnificat, you [Mary] proclaimed in word and song for all the centuries to hear, you also knew the dark sayings of the prophets about the suffering of the servant of God in this world. Shining over his birth in the stable at Bethlehem, there were angels in splendor who brought the good news to the shepherds, but at the same time the lowliness of God in this world was all too palpable.

The old man Simeon spoke to you of the sword which would pierce your soul (cf. Lk 2:35), of the sign of contradiction that your Son would be in this world.

Then, when Jesus began his public ministry, you had to step aside, so that a new family could grow, the family which it was his mission to establish and which would be made up of those who heard his word and kept it (cf. Lk 11:27f). Notwithstanding the great joy that marked the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, in the synagogue of Nazareth you must already have experienced the truth of the saying about the “sign of contradiction” (cf. Lk 4:28ff).

In this way you saw the growing power of hostility and rejection which built up around Jesus until the hour of the Cross, when you had to look upon the Savior of the world, the heir of David, the Son of God dying like a failure, exposed to mockery, between criminals. Then you received the word of Jesus: “Woman, behold, your Son!” (Jn 19:26). From the Cross you received a new mission. From the Cross you became a mother in a new way: the mother of all those who believe in your Son Jesus and wish to follow him. The sword of sorrow pierced your heart.

Spe Salvi 50

Reflection – From joy to sorrow – this is the movement in this section of the encyclical! And it’s not exactly a foreign one in our lives is it? Yesterday, Jesus was being conceived in Mary’s womb, and the joy of the coming of God into the world was apparent. Now, Mary sees what that coming of God looks like and what it will demand of her. And a sword of sorrow pierces her heart.

Well, this is not alien to our lives, not at all. There is the joy of the wedding – wasn’t that a great party! And then… the marriage. Misunderstandings. Sacrifices. Problems. Children. All the demands and difficulties and honest-to-goodness pain that enters into life with the nitty-gritty demands of married life.

A priest is ordained, and that too is a great moment of joy. Parish life—well, not without it joys, but great challenges, too. Opposition, loneliness, crushing burden of work, swamped by worries over finances and administration, the call to enter the pain of one’s flock. From joy to sorrow.

And consecrated life, in all its forms, too – great joy, great gladness in the taking of vows or promises, and then the reality hits: monotony or uncongenial obediences or the irritation of living in community.

From joy to sorrow! From the happy beginnings of a life to the realization of what you must do to persevere in it and what that will cost you. The picture is not one of unrelieved grimness, of course. There is joy and laughter and beauty present in any life at any point. But we all know the movement described by Mary and Jesus, the movement through the sorrowful mysteries of life. It comes to all of us.

And it is here that the need for hope and the call to hope is especially acute, when reality hits and may even bite. It is here that we need to hang onto Jesus and Mary with particular urgency. It is here that so many people falter, so many are tempted to leave their commitments, and do in fact leave their commitments. It didn’t work out like a Hollywood movie with the happy ever after over the closing credits—something must have gone terribly wrong here!

We need Jesus and Mary to help us know that nothing, absolutely nothing, is wrong with this picture. That from joy to sorrow and through sorrow to glory is the absolute necessary norm of human life, of any human life lived in serious commitment to the task of love and the path of truth and goodness. And that hope, even in the darkest hours, breaks through and makes it possible for that sword to pierce our hearts, too, not easily, not without great cost and travail.

But with their help, we can do it, and doing it, come to see the light of glory breaking upon our lives. And that is our true and lasting hope.

A Path Has Been Opened

So we cry to her: Holy Mary, you belonged to the humble and great souls of Israel who, like Simeon, were “looking for the consolation of Israel” (Lk 2:25) and hoping, like Anna, “for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Lk 2:38). Your life was thoroughly imbued with the sacred scriptures of Israel which spoke of hope, of the promise made to Abraham and his descendants (cf. Lk 1:55). In this way we can appreciate the holy fear that overcame you when the angel of the Lord appeared to you and told you that you would give birth to the One who was the hope of Israel, the One awaited by the world. Through you, through your “yes”, the hope of the ages became reality, entering this world and its history. You bowed low before the greatness of this task and gave your consent: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). When you hastened with holy joy across the mountains of Judea to see your cousin Elizabeth, you became the image of the Church to come, which carries the hope of the world in her womb across the mountains of history.

Spe Salvi 50

Reflection – ‘C’est le mois de Marie…’ The old, old hymn my French-Canadian grandmother used to sing to me resonates in my heart this morning. ’Tis the month of Mary, the month of May – happy May to you all!

I thought I would spend the next few days on a Mary theme in consequence of that (with all due respect and love to St. Joseph the Worker today). As it turns out, when I looked at this concluding paragraph to Spe Salvi I noticed that Pope Benedict divides up the theme of Mary and hope into three rather obvious divisions. Namely, the hope of Mary in her joy, in her sorrows, and in her glory. Hmmm, for some reason that three-fold division sounds familiar… now wait a minute, it’s a bit of a mystery to me still… it’ll come to me one of these decades… I just have to get a bead on it…

Oh, yeah.

And so here we contemplate with Mary the joyous fact that through her and in her maternity, hope entered the world. This child, this baby, this embryo, this fetus, this zygote, this microscopic organism buried deep in the heart of this little girl in Nazareth—hope entering the world.

What kind of eyes of faith did she need to see that? What kind of faith-eyes do we need to see that? Who is this woman, and who is this child? Oh, we all know our catechism (I hope!) and can give the right answers when prompted. But really… who are these people? And how are they ‘hope’ for us?

The world is falling apart. Really, when is it not falling apart, but boy in 2012 it sure seems to be REALLY FALLING APART, MAN!!! (Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to shout…) Well, I guess we’ll see just how ‘apart’ it’s all going to end up falling. But where is hope today? How does this zygote, this fetus, this baby, this child, this man provide hope for you and me today? Can you give an answer to that question, if someone asks you? Can I?

Well, let me try! This child is hope for us, a hope that Mary bore witness to and came to know intimately as no one else ever has (which is why she is so important in our lives, by the way), because He is God. And because God came into our humanity, because he united himself to our humanity in this strange and mysterious event of the Incarnation in Mary’s womb, there is a divine path opened up in the heart of the human condition.

We are all of us born, we live, we suffer, we die. We have moments of joy and beauty, and times of darkness and woe. And then we die. The human condition. But God in Jesus opens up another path in that human condition, one that does not end with suffering and death. One that encompasses all our humanity in all its light and shadows, and at ever moment, every turn, every possible form and shape and movement of human life opens up a path to true and lasting good future.

It is not a question of being absorbed by the divine into some sort of depersonalized nirvana. It is not a question of becoming ‘gods’ in a some kind of Mormon/Gnostic/New Age apotheosis. It is a question, in our Catholic Christian understanding, of our humanity, of you and me in the deep truth of who we are as human beings, being taken up in this divine communion of persons, of being drawn into this Dance, this Life, this Celebration which we call the Trinity, and ourselves becoming in this ‘being drawn’ all dance, all life, all celebration—forever. That’s our Catholic faith.

And this is what that zygote, that fetus, that child, that man Jesus makes possible for us. This is our hope, and Mary knows all about it. That’s why we go to her for help on the way there. C’est le mois de Marie – let’s hope it’s a good one for us all!

Mystagogy or Madness?

Believing is not an act of the understanding alone, nor simply an act of the will, not just an act of feeling, but an act in which all the spiritual powers of man are at work together. Still more: man in his own self, or of himself, cannot bring about this believing at all; it has of its nature the character of a dialogue.

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 24

Reflection – ‘I will believe in God when sufficient evidence is given to me to prove it is true.’ ‘I will make myself believe, even though I understand nothing and my emotions are nil.’ ‘I believe because I feel in my heart that God is real and Jesus is real.’

These are the three isolated approaches to faith that Ratzinger critiques here. Faith as strict intellectual assent to a credible hypothesis, or as a teeth-gritted, knuckles clenched act of will to what we neither understand nor feel to be true, or as a joyful plunging into a tide of emotionalism and enthusiasm.

All three fall short, and even any two of the three taken together fall short. And as he points out quite insightfully, even all three together fall short of the full reality of faith.

It may well be for most of us that we experience faith more in one or two of these aspects than the others. For me, faith is strongly an act of will with a heavy dose of intellectual understanding. My emotions play little role in my faith life, not because I don’t have them but because I know how unreliable they are!

Others may have very little intellectual capacity for theological understanding, but have strong emotional attachments to God and to Jesus, and deep will to believe. I suppose some may have strong emotional and intellectual faith, but have to battle against their weak will, although I have never encountered that particular configuration.

Our whole humanity, though, is taken up into the act of faith. It is our whole person that is engaged in the task of belief. We will to accept what we have been given; our minds seek to understand it as best we can; our emotions dance in and out of this relationship of faith; and even our bodies are called to faith, as what we believe is lived out in concrete actions of worship and charity, and this commitment to action strengthens and builds the faith we have.

But as Ratzinger points out, there is something more here. Rather, there is Someone Else involved in this faith dynamic. The very nature of faith is not ‘I believe this,’ but rather ‘I believe you.’ There is this strange and mysterious Other who we encounter… how? Where? Those who do not have faith begin to suspect the mental health of us who do have faith at this juncture. Do we have an invisible friend? Are we hearing voices? What is this Other who we have chosen to believe?

Well, there is Scripture and the strange Presence we encounter there. And there is Sacrament and the mysterious Action done to us thereby. And there is personal prayer—not a matter of hearing voices, but for me at least of insight being given, understanding and direction received, not achieved. Something that happens that I, anyhow, cannot account for by my own human capacities.

There is this… Other. For those who don’t have faith, this will always sound like mystagogy or madness. For those who do have faith, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. For those who don’t have faith, but maybe would like to have it, I recommend a simple course of action: every day for the next six months, ask ‘God’ (if He, you know, exists) to show Himself to you in some way you can receive it, and every day for the next six months, read a short passage from the Gospels.

In six months, you will have faith. Will it come on a cloud of emotion, a piercing moment of intellectual insight, or simply a shift in your will? Or will this Other simply communicate to you that He is Real, and that He is Present? Any and all—faith is a total meeting of the total you and Totality Itself. And it is ours for the asking, ours for the seeking.

The Indestructible Power

All serious and upright human conduct is hope in action. This is so first of all in the sense that we thereby strive to realize our lesser and greater hopes, to complete this or that task which is important for our onward journey, or we work towards a brighter and more humane world so as to open doors into the future. Yet our daily efforts in pursuing our own lives and in working for the world's future either tire us or turn into fanaticism, unless we are enlightened by the radiance of the great hope that cannot be destroyed even by small-scale failures or by a breakdown in matters of historic importance.

If we cannot hope for more than is effectively attainable at any given time, or more than is promised by political or economic authorities, our lives will soon be without hope. It is important to know that I can always continue to hope, even if in my own life, or the historical period in which I am living, there seems to be nothing left to hope for. Only the great certitude of hope that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then give the courage to act and to persevere.

Spe Salvi 35

Reflection – What are you hoping for right now? What are the 'lesser and greater hopes' that fill your mind and heart? It’s good to consider that question, isn’t it? And of course, the answer can be found by looking at what we are doing, what we are working at, where our serious efforts are being expended. ‘All serious and upright human conduct is hope in action.’

So right now I’m hoping that the book I wrote which is being published in October finds a readership, so I’m working on the final editing and other arrangements for it; I’m hoping that the book I’m just starting to write is a good book, so I’m working hard on the research for it; I hope my directees, those who come to me for spiritual direction, become saints, so I work (and pray) to help them move God-wards; I hope Madonna House flourishes in every good way, so I work each day towards that flourishing.

Those are my hopes. And you could easily identify your hopes in a similar fashion. What do you work towards each day?

But then, what if my books bomb, all my directees walk away from God/the Church/my direction, and Madonna House falls apart? Any of which could happen, of course. We are not in a world where everything just works out lovely all the time, to put it mildly.

This is why this other greater hope has to run through all our lesser hopes. This strange hope, wholly supernatural in origin and goal, this theological virtue of hope which holds and perfects all our human hopes. The Pope puts it so very well here: “It is important to know that I can always continue to hope, even if in my own life, or the historical period in which I am living, there seems to be nothing left to hope for. Only the great certitude of hope that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance.”

Our lives and our actions in life are held by the indestructible power of Love. So if I am at least trying to love, if I am trying to do something because it is a good thing to do, a service to my brothers and sisters, an offering to God, then even if the immediate action ‘fails’ according to my human observation and reckoning, the love within it does not fail.

Love never fails. Not because human love is some all-powerful force, but because human love is met by divine love. God comes to us, to each of us, and wants to take up our little human efforts and works and plans into His divine, perfect, and eternal plans and works.

This is the whole path of faith in the world. Faith that God is real, present, active and alive and faithful; faith that God desires our happiness; faith that bears fruit, then, in hope that our lives will not fail, not fall short, not end in tragedy and despair. And so we can keep loving, keep going, no matter what is happening in our lives. God is with us, and so we always have hope, even if the sky should fall and everything around us crumble into dust, even if our hearts are broken and all our dreams shattered.

We have hope, because God is with us and His heart has already been broken, and out of that broken heart flows streams of light, love, and mercy renewing the whole universe from His broken heart. Christ is risen from the tomb, and so no ‘tomb’ of human failure can hold us, so long as we hold onto Him.

An Easy Game and a Hard Road

The last keyword that I should like to consider is “zeal for souls”: animarum zelus. It is an old-fashioned expression, not much used these days. In some circles, the word “soul” is virtually banned because – ostensibly – it expresses a body-soul dualism that wrongly compartmentalizes the human being. Of course the human person is a unity, destined for eternity as body and soul. And yet that cannot mean that we no longer have a soul, a constituent principle guaranteeing our unity in this life and beyond earthly death.

And as priests, of course, we are concerned for the whole person, including his or her physical needs – we care for the hungry, the sick, the homeless. And yet we are concerned not only with the body, but also with the needs of the soul: with those who suffer from the violation of their rights or from destroyed love, with those unable to perceive the truth, those who suffer for lack of truth and love. We are concerned with the salvation of men and women in body and soul.

And as priests of Jesus Christ we carry out our task with enthusiasm. No one should ever have the impression that we work conscientiously when on duty, but before and after hours we belong only to ourselves. A priest never belongs to himself. People must sense our zeal, through which we bear credible witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Let us ask the Lord to fill us with joy in his message, so that we may serve his truth and his love with joyful zeal. Amen.

Homily, Chrism Mass, 2012

Reflection – And so the Pope, as he wraps up the Chrism Mass homily, calls his brother priests to this very high standard: the zeal for souls that is to consume us and make us lay down our lives for Christ, his Gospel, and his people.

Well, you know, I know, and the Pope knows that we priests are a pretty ordinary bunch of guys for the most part. And, as a bunch of ordinary guys, some of us work harder, some of us less, some of us (seem to) care more, some less, some are bursting with enthusiasm and energy, some lag. Just the ordinary range of human virtue and weakness, capacity and incapacity, sprinkled here and there with genuine examples of holiness and supernatural virtue and love.

One of the great temptations of Catholics, I have noticed over my years as one, is to find faults with whatever priests one has been given. Let’s face it, it’s an easy game to play. It’s not exactly “Where’s Waldo?” Most priests have pretty glaring flaws, one way or another.

But we (and, yes, I do mean ‘we’ – once you’re ordained it’s not like that particular habit stops), need to ask ourselves why we do that. For that matter, why do we criticize anybody? Why this delight in finding faults, in tearing down, in pointing fingers?

Every one of us, priest or lay, is called to a very high standard of Gospel love and zeal. Every baptized Christian is called to ascend a very steep and high mountain, a path filled with perilous cliffs and dizzying heights. Is it to be wondered that all of us stumble, hesitate, turn back, falter on this path?

Are priests called to an even higher ascent? I’m not so sure about that (holiness is holiness, after all). Certainly our ministry makes us more visible, more prone, therefore, to the critical view of others.

But why do we criticize? Why not… oh, I don’t know, pray? Or… help one another? Pray for your priests. If you don’t see the zeal for souls you would like to see in them, pray for them. If they are not preaching the Gospel as you would like it preached, pray for them. If they seem to you to be living lives not in accordance with the way of Christ, pray for them.

And be a friend to your priests. It can be a lonely life, and is getting more so as the numbers diminish and the responsibilities increase. Help them. Have them over for supper. If you can help in the parish, do so. If you can’t, find some other way of expressing your support and care.

And pray for us. The priesthood is a wonderful vocation, a rich rewarding joyous way of life. But it is challenging, as is any real commitment to Christ and the Gospel. Let’s help one another to do it, and not tear each other down with judgment and criticism and gossip. Sound good to you? It sounds good to me.

Will I Die For Her?

All our preaching must measure itself against the saying of Jesus Christ: “My teaching is not mine” (Jn 7:16). We preach not private theories and opinions, but the faith of the Church, whose servants we are.

Naturally this should not be taken to mean that I am not completely supportive of this teaching, or solidly anchored in it. In this regard I am always reminded of the words of Saint Augustine: what is so much mine as myself? And what is so little mine as myself? I do not own myself, and I become myself by the very fact that I transcend myself, and thereby become a part of Christ, a part of his body the Church. If we do not preach ourselves, and if we are inwardly so completely one with him who called us to be his ambassadors, that we are shaped by faith and live it, then our preaching will be credible. I do not seek to win people for myself, but I give myself. The Curé of Ars was no scholar, no intellectual, we know that. But his preaching touched people’s hearts because his own heart had been touched.

Homily, Chrism Mass, 2012

Reflection – So what if you disagree with the Church? What then? What if you have carefully considered a matter (say, contraception), have looked into it to the best of your ability, and have concluded that the Church is wrong? What then?

If you are a priest, in a sense the answer is relatively simple, if not easy. We promised at our ordination to teach not our own opinions but the teaching of the Church. When I stand up in a pulpit, the people of God have a right to hear from me the Catholic faith, not Fr. Denis Lemieux’s opinions about the Catholic faith. I do realize that many of my brother priests struggle mightily over this (I honestly do agree with the Church’s teachings on all matters), but for us clergy it is a question of the right of the our people to receive Catholic doctrine from their priests, and our solemn promise to repect that right.

But I realize that priests make up a small percentage of my blog readers. What about the rest of you good people? What if you don’t agree, really and sincerely do not agree, with this or that Church teaching? Is the right attitude to just chuck it, then? Become an Episcopalian/Anglican, or perhaps just do whatever you think is right and show up in the communion line regardless?

These are not simple questions—I do realize this. While I consider the Church’s teachings in matters of sexual morality to be beautiful and life-giving reflections of God’s Eternal Wisdom (and by the way, let’s face it – most of the dissent from Church teaching is around sexual issues), many and possibly most Catholics in North America do not see it that way.

I have no wish to excommunicate or anathematize people. I am not, temperamentally, an Inquisitor. No thumb screws in my desk drawer! My whole formation in Madonna House is to seek and work towards unity and community of love.

It seems to me that the current state of division and disunity in the Church is a call to all of us, whatever our own ‘private opinions’ are, into the passion of faith. We are all called, the ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ alike (oh, how I loathe those labels!), to really ask ourselves how much we belong to Christ.

To what extent am I not my own? To what extent have I allowed Christ to truly be my Lord and Master, to truly have access not just to my theological opinions but to my inmost heart? To what extent am I living, not out of my calm-or-not-so-calm assurance that I am right and they are wrong, as if that matters, but out of the mercy of God, a mercy that calls me into such a depth of mercy that my own heart is broken open by love?

I don’t agree with Joan Chittister. But am I willing to die for her? I really don’t agree with what those priests in Austria did with their ‘Call to Disobedience.’ But am I willing to kneel down before them to wash their feet?

It seems to me that there is not going to be a quick resolution to the current crisis of theological dissent and disunity in the Church. Am I willing, not to get mad, not to get all arrogant and superior, but to weep for my own sins and the sins of my brothers and sisters? To listen to the woman who feels called to be a priest, not with scorn or contempt, but really listening to her, meeting her with love, even if I sincerely believe her sense of call is misguided? Am I willing to do that? Are you?

And is the ‘liberal’ Catholic willing to listen to the ones who they might be tempted to reject—the rosary-clacking, baby-foot-pin wearing, Pope-loving traddy types, to bring that same compassion and true listening spirit to the ones they may dislike and certainly disagree with?

If we cannot—well, the Church will just go on being a big disunified and disedifying mess, and so much of the energy we should use to preach the Gospel to the nations will be dissipated in quarreling and wrangling. There is indeed a need for real dialogue, real education, real theological exploration and expounding of Church doctrines. But there is a much deeper need for mercy, for listening, for tears of repentance and compassionate hearts. Without this, we can be as ‘orthodox’ as we please or as ‘progressive’ as we desire and it will avail us nothing.

So, with that I will suspend my current theme of ecclesial obedience and leave it all in the deeper call to obedience to the Good Shepherd, to the one who lays down his life for his sheep and calls us to lay down our life for one another and for the world in that deepest unity of all, the unity of the martyrs and confessors, the unity, the communion, of the saints.

Doing Our Little Bit to Help

Dear friends, I would like briefly to touch on two more key phrases from the renewal of ordination promises, which should cause us to reflect at this time in the Church’s life and in our own lives. Firstly, the reminder that – as Saint Paul put it – we are “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor 4:1) and we are charged with the ministry of teaching, the (munus docendi), which forms a part of this stewardship of God’s mysteries, through which he shows us his face and his heart, in order to give us himself.

At the meeting of Cardinals on the occasion of the recent Consistory, several of the pastors of the Church spoke, from experience, of the growing religious illiteracy found in the midst of our sophisticated society. The foundations of faith, which at one time every child knew, are now known less and less. But if we are to live and love our faith, if we are to love God and to hear him aright, we need to know what God has said to us – our minds and hearts must be touched by his word. The Year of Faith, commemorating the opening of the Second Vatican Council fifty years ago, should provide us with an occasion to proclaim the message of faith with new enthusiasm and new joy. We find it of course first and foremost in sacred Scripture, which we can never read and ponder enough.

Yet at the same time we all experience the need for help in accurately expounding it in the present day, if it is truly to touch our hearts. This help we find first of all in the words of the teaching Church: the texts of the Second Vatican Council and the Catechism of the Catholic Church are essential tools which serve as an authentic guide to what the Church believes on the basis of God’s word…

All our preaching must measure itself against the saying of Jesus Christ: “My teaching is not mine” (Jn 7:16). We preach not private theories and opinions, but the faith of the Church, whose servants we are.

Homily, Chrism Mass, 2012

Reflection – Now the Pope is talking to priests here, remember. The Chrism Mass homily is traditionally thus: as the priests there present and priests around the world prepare to renew our commitment to our calling, the Holy Father offers us a word of encouragement and counsel.

But as I said a few days ago, don’t you laity tune out on that account! The life and commitment of the ordained priest is ordered to and at the service of the common priesthood of all the baptized. Therefore the specific commitment and shape of ordained priestly life actually illuminates what this common priesthood is about. What I am called to do at the altar, in the confessional, and at the pulpit is deeply connected to and sheds a powerful light on what you are called to do at the office, around the dinner table, and on the subway.

So here it is the solemn obligation of the priest to know his Catholic faith, love his Catholic faith, and proclaim his Catholic faith through the teaching office entrusted to him that is front and center. The catechetical failure of the past 40 years has indeed engendered a depth of religious illiteracy that we are all too familiar with.

Every year at Madonna House we offer our guests two courses: the Fundamentals of the Spiritual Life in the fall, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church in the winter. And we offer these courses because they are needed: the young people who come here are wonderful people, quite often deeply sincere in their commitment to being Catholics already when they get here… and they know very little about the faith, mostly.

So we do our little bit to help. And I do my little bit on this blog to help. And I hope every priest out there is doing his little bit of what he promised to do, which is teach the Church’s teachings and not his own private opinions. We all know that doesn’t always happen (to put it mildly) but that’s what we promised to do when we were ordained.

But the crisis of knowledge is so severe right now, and considering the vast numbers of people who are estranged from the Church and won’t come near a priest in consequence,  the munus docendi truly lies with all of us right now, according to what we are capable of. We all need to ‘up our game’ here, to learn more, to be more secure in our possession of our Catholic faith.

And in this we need to not just be immersed in the controversies, the ‘cut and thrust’ of debates and hot button issues. Often people can have the impression that all Catholics care about is abortion, women priests, and contraception. There is more to our faith than those issues, you know!

We need to really have a grasp of God’s truth, coming to us in His Word, His Tradition, and through the teaching office of the Church. The depths of ignorance and misunderstanding are profound right now; we all need to take on the great spiritual work of mercy of ‘instructing the ignorant’, according to our talents and opportunities.

Tomorrow I will return to a slightly more controversial vein, as I will look at this last paragraph at more length—teaching not our own private opinions, but Jesus Christ. But teach we must—the world is perishing for lack of knowledge.

Obedience and Renewal

Let us ask again: do not such reflections serve simply to defend inertia, the fossilization of traditions? No. Anyone who considers the history of the post-conciliar era can recognize the process of true renewal, which often took unexpected forms in living movements and made almost tangible the inexhaustible vitality of holy Church, the presence and effectiveness of the Holy Spirit. And if we look at the people from whom these fresh currents of life burst forth and continue to burst forth, then we see that this new fruitfulness requires being filled with the joy of faith, the radicalism of obedience, the dynamic of hope and the power of love.

Dear friends, it is clear that configuration to Christ is the precondition and the basis for all renewal. But perhaps at times the figure of Jesus Christ seems too lofty and too great for us to dare to measure ourselves by him. The Lord knows this. So he has provided “translations” on a scale that is more accessible and closer to us. For this same reason, Saint Paul did not hesitate to say to his communities: Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. For his disciples, he was a “translation” of Christ’s manner of life that they could see and identify with.

Ever since Paul’s time, history has furnished a constant flow of other such “translations” of Jesus’ way into historical figures. We priests can call to mind a great throng of holy priests who have gone before us and shown us the way: from Polycarp of Smyrna and Ignatius of Antioch, from the great pastors Ambrose, Augustine and Gregory the Great, through to Ignatius of Loyola, Charles Borromeo, John Mary Vianney and the priest-martyrs of the 20th century, and finally Pope John Paul II, who gave us an example, through his activity and his suffering, of configuration to Christ as “gift and mystery”. The saints show us how renewal works and how we can place ourselves at its service. And they help us realize that God is not concerned so much with great numbers and with outward successes, but achieves his victories under the humble sign of the mustard seed.

Homily, Chrism Mass, 2012

Reflection – The idea often is out there that obedience to the Church means turning your brain off, becoming passive, relapsing into a kind of ‘pay, pray, and obey’ mode where all the power and initiative of the Church lies with the clergy, while the laity are supine and essentially inert.

This is simply not the case. For example, the Church’s teaching about the male human being the necessary matter for the sacrament of ordination (i.e. ‘no women priests’), far from relegating women to the sidelines of the Church’s ministry, is sparking a whole new intellectual and spiritual movement of Christian feminism that is enlivening the faith and discipleship of many women, and challenges all of us to both develop and live out of a whole rich understanding of gender and its theological meaning. There is nothing passive about it.

At the same time, the Church’s sexual teachings, so difficult and painful for so many people I realize, have sparked in the past thirty years one of the greatest theological revivals of our history. Blessed John Paul II’s ‘theology of the body’ presents the eternal vision of human sexuality in the light of Christ in a way that has renewed and deepened the faith of millions. And this theological renewal is largely driven by lay theologians and evangelists, for the most part married men and women.

And of course what Pope Benedict is referring to here is precisely the new movements and communities (MH being one of them, and among the oldest!) that have re-vitalized Christian faith and culture all over the world. These are little-known in North America for the most part, but their influence is huge in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Obedience and its challenges provoke growth, not passivity. I said yesterday that I would never have come up with the ‘no sex outside marriage’ law on my own. And this is true: I am child of the sexual revolution, and left to my own devices would have gone down that road, not exactly happily, but certainly with alacrity.

The strange intervention of God in my life (which is another story) which put me on the path of ecclesial obedience and obsequium fidei has really forced me to deepen my understanding of God, the human person, the body, the passions, the mystery of love, the theology of the Cross and the eschatological hope of resurrection. Sexual libertinism (which is where I would have ‘naturally’ gone) is banal and shallow and takes us nowhere but to the wasteland of self-indulgence; the call to chastity has pushed me into spiritual and human depths I would never have reached otherwise.

Obedience is renewal and evangelization and deepening of faith and life, in other words. And this is what Pope Benedict means as he invokes all these saints and their example. The renewal of the Church has never come from political activism and agitation; it always comes from men and women who plunge into the passion of faith and the imitation of Christ, the obedience of the Son and the way of the Cross.

And again, this is plenty for one day’s blog post. I realize that keeping these posts to a manageable length while treating such complex issues may mean that I raise more questions than I can answer. But we have to start with the basic call to obedience and the basic foundation by God and by Christ of his Catholic Church as teacher and guide to us. If we don’t start there, we are not starting from a Catholic place at all. We will continue to discuss this tomorrow, God willing.