Into the Dominion of Caesar

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective?

Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

Consequently, unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions, in the light of the principles We stated earlier, and in accordance with a correct understanding of the "principle of totality" enunciated by Our predecessor Pope Pius XII.

Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, 17

Reflection – Yesterday I argued that the Pope was basically right in his predictions of the effects of contraception on sexual mores and relations in general. Here he points out that the normalization of contraception places creates a terrible risk of placing power over this most intimate and personal aspect of human life into the hands of governments who may have their own reasons and agendas to pursue.

This is hardly fanciful or paranoid. China, for example, has done precisely, exactly this in its one child policy. When there are legal penalties attached to having more children than the state says you may have, what else can this be but a giving “ into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.” Once again, Pope Paul VI was right – funny, that, eh? One might start to suspect the man knew a thing or two, he has a habit of being right about so many things.

I find it a rather bitterly ironic fact that the so-called ‘pro-choice’ movement has never uttered so much as a peep about China and its policy, even though it is a total violation of the freedom of the woman to choose to conceive or not. China’s policy has even extended to forcing women to have abortions, and yet somehow this does not seem to concern NARAL and Planned Parenthood. One might suspect that their concern is not so much ‘choice,’ ‘freedom’, ‘rights’, or (for that matter) ‘women’, but rather the promotion of abortion, simply put.

Besides China, we have seen in the past decades tremendous pressure brought on the poor nations of the world by the rich to promote and propagandize contraception and abortion services, whether those nations wanted it or not. Financial aid has been linked to this agenda, in a truly vile example of neo-colonialist bullying and a sort of crypto-racism. ‘Just the right number of white people—way too many brown and black people’, has been virtually the guiding policy goal of the UN and its agencies. This group provides detailed investigations on all these matters.

All of this flows from the violation of the limits to our ownership over human life, our own bodies, the claiming for ourselves of a dominion over creation that is not ours, but God’s. Once human beings take this dominion from the hands of God into their own hands, it is no great leap for more powerful human beings (the state) to take it from the hands of less powerful ones (the family). It has already happened in the places I have mentioned; there is no particular reason it could not happen anywhere.

It is the great paradox of our faith that the only way to stay in true freedom is to stay in the lordship of Christ in all things. Spurning the dominion of God over our bodies we pass, not into freedom, but into the dominion of Caesar--so it has always been, so it always will be.

Making a Mess of Things

Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control.

Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law.

Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, 17

Reflection – Oh, is it the weekend already? I guess it’s time for another thrilling installment of ‘weekends with Humanae Vitae’ then! My posting will be a bit wonky the next couple of days, as I am going to Ottawa to give a talk on Saturday. It’s just a day thing, so I will be posting, just not at the normal times.

Now we come into the part of the document where people reading it start throwing around the word ‘prophetic’, in other words, the part where Pope Paul VI seems to have anticipated pretty well the developments of the subsequent decades following upon the widespread acceptance of contraception. I don’t know about prophetic exactly—it’s not a word I use lightly—but certainly the Pope was right in his predictions.

It is important to note here, though, that the truth or falsehood of the Church’s teaching in no way rests on whether or not he got this part right. We are not consequentialists, deciding that things are good or evil depending on their results; contraception is evil because it denies the divine-human nature and meaning of human sexuality—evil in itself, not just evil in its effects, in other words. That is important, as people will start quibbling with this section of the encyclical and then claim that they have debunked the encyclical’s argument. Well no, you haven’t, and if you think you have it just proves that you really don’t understand the Church’s teaching.

That being said, I don’t know how anyone can seriously argue that HV 17 does not describe the state of affairs in the year 2014 fairly accurately. Internet pornography use is pandemic, and the average age of exposure to online sex for boys is 12, with many viewing their first images much younger. A university study that tried to measure the impact of pornography use on young men had to be abandoned because they simply couldn’t find any young men at all who had not used it.

And is this anything, can it be anything, besides an expression of sexuality in which men “forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection”?

Meanwhile, IRL, divorce rates hover somewhere around 50%, falling somewhat of late mostly because people aren’t bothering to get married in the first place, and the hookup culture is still strong in the young adult population, in which sex is completely detached from relationship, caring, let alone commitment and mutual responsibility for one another. What else is this but an opening “wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards”? The Pope was right about what would happen, and we are all reaping the fruits of it.

The idea behind contraception was that, by separating sex from procreation, we could more strongly express sex and its link to love. It was a utopian and somewhat unreal picture of humanity, leaving out of consideration entirely the capacity of human beings to be selfish and exploitative.

Sex is a very good thing, created by God and blessed, a power for love and life in this world that is very strong. But fragmented into its component parts, which is exactly what contraception does—the physical pleasure over here, the expression of love over there, the creation of a new life somewhere far, far away—all that inherent power within sex runs amuck, is turned in on itself, and does great harm. Not because sex is bad, but because (to put it baldly) we are bad, or at least somewhat so.

But, good news! Or rather, Good News. The way back is always there, the way to living out sexuality in a manner that is life-giving and love-creating is always there. It requires repentance, which is never easy, but the grace of God is not withheld from those who choose to embrace chastity and sexual integrity in our world today. We have made a mess of things, as the Pope said we would, but we can clean up that mess, with God’s help.

This Week in Madonna House - May 15-21

This week in Madonna House saw the end of the directors’ meetings, with most of the local directors of our various missions leaving today to return to their houses. It was, as always, a graced time, reflective, encouraging about the work of God in our midst.

At the same time, it is a good thing the meetings end, because that work of God is ongoing, and not getting any slower-paced. The farm is kicking it up into high gear right now, with the major planting going on. We have about seven acres of vegetable garden, all of which is planted, weeded, and harvested for the most part by hand without use of chemicals or heavy machinery. It is a massive labor of love, out of which comes a large percentage of our food for the year.

Meanwhile, other summer work goes on. I think I mentioned we are building a new cabin at our summer family camp Cana Colony, to better accommodate the needs and numbers of families wanting to come to that program. As construction projects go, it is relatively simple; the Cana cabins do not have plumbing or electricity and are a single room shared by the whole family (and yes, we have a waiting list each year for Cana, which is why we’re building a new cabin!). Last I heard, the floor and walls are up, and only the roof is needing to go on yet. Meanwhile, all the other work going into getting that camp set up is happening around the construction.

By far, though, the biggest event of the week was our celebration of the 50^th anniversary of our MH mission shop, and I would like to talk more about that aspect of our apostolate. It is such a simple concept, yet the fruits of it are so super-abundant.

It all started when we had an invitation to go open a house in what is now Bangladesh. We ended up being there for only a few years, but in the process of accepting that invitation and opening the house, Catherine Doherty came up with a novel idea for how to fund such missions, and other mission work in what was then called the ‘Third World’. It happened to be a time of economic prosperity in Canada in general and in the Ottawa Valley in particular, and so items were coming in donation that we had never had to deal with before: collectibles, antiques, jewelry. 

At the same time a number of gifted artists had all joined MH in a short span of time and were producing beautiful works of art and handicraft. Catherine’s genius was to put the two together—have a gift shop in which all these beautiful (but ultimately luxury) items could be sold, and send all the proceeds to the poorest parts of the world, to fund schools, orphanages, clinics, and so forth.

And so it has been for the past fifty years. We early on established a policy of giving money only to individuals we could have personal contact with, people working directly with the poor who we could trust to use the money directly in their work. And over the past fifty years, hundreds of thousands of dollars have flowed through the shops (we later opened a smaller shop which now sells lower end items, and a used book shop which is a whole apostolate in its own right), like a sort of holy money laundering scheme, where the excess funds of the haves of the world spent on lovely things could go to buy food and clean water, books and bricks and mortar and medicine and so forth for the have nots.

And so we had a grand celebration of all this last weekend, with a special ceremony of blessing for the shop on Friday evening followed by a social time for the MH community, and a gala opening on the next day. Musician friends came from Ottawa to give a touch of class to the affair.

Accompanying the 50^th anniversary celebration was the opening of an art exhibit, Radiant Light, in one room of the shop which is a small art gallery, of paintings by one of our MH artists, Patrick Stewart. His paintings can be found here, and are exquisitely beautiful renderings of our valley.

There is so much more that can be said about our shops—I think ultimately only God really knows the full scope of how much good they have done in the world. They have been an incredible incentive for MH members to develop artistic and handicraft skills, and the whole front room of the shop is dedicated to selling those crafts: pottery, rosemaling, knitting and crocheting and needlework of all kinds, felting, wood carving, jewelry, and I don’t know what else.

The middle room of the shop is all the precious items that come in donation, from crystal and china to jewelry and antiques. It is a place of beauty and light. And then there is the art gallery, already mentioned, where higher end works are sold.

We often hear from the staff who work there that a whole other aspect of the apostolate of the gift shop is towards the customers who come there. People who might never walk into MH itself, because they are not ‘religious’ or simply not interested, go to the shops and experience something more than just a nice gift shop. There is a quality of peace and silence in the shops, a friendly welcome and a certain spiritual atmosphere that is hard to describe. Catherine always said it is Our Lady’s shop, and she is the buyer of the goods sold there. Perhaps She likes to hang around there and make sure everything is as it should be, and it is Her our customers are meeting. Fanciful? Perhaps, but then again, who knows?

At any rate, the shops are launched on their busy summer season, as is the rest of MH, and we rejoice in the work of God going on amidst all our human working.

Buffet, or Buffeted?

The Eucharist is never an event involving just two, a dialogue between Christ and me. Eucharistic communion is aimed at a complete reshaping of my own life. It breaks up man’s entire self and creates a new ‘we’. Communion with Christ is necessarily also communication with all who belong to him: therein I myself become part of the new bread that he is creating by the resubstantiation of the whole of earthly reality.

Joseph Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 78

Reflection – Then Cardinal Ratzinger packs quite a lot of weighty content into a very few words here. Something of a gift he had—his writings have the quality of being both seemingly simple and accessible, yet with depths of meaning that require careful reading and thought.

Here, it is about the relationship of the reception of the Eucharist and belonging to the Church. This is the primary theme of this entire book, which is superb. In our hyper-individualistic, subjectivist, and consumerist world, we tend to think of the Eucharist as something we just go to ourselves, so that we can each get this thing from Jesus that we need or want to get.

It’s rather like lining up in a buffet line to get the food we crave, and indeed in an extremely subjectivist view of the Eucharist, it is rather like a buffet, isn’t it? I am going up there for healing; another is going up for consolation; a third is going for strength; a fourth, for fellowship. Maybe someone in the line is going up for the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ which is the life of the soul, but another is going up for something quite different.

Well, that’s all well and good in the all-you-can-commune buffet line of the soul. The Eucharist means something very different to each one of us, and as long as we are true to the meaning it has for us, it doesn’t really matter. This would only be true, of course, if the Eucharist has no meaning in and of itself, but is a sort of blank screen on which we can project whatever our personal spiritual ‘truth’ is at this time.

This of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the Catholic or Orthodox doctrine of the Eucharist, nor for that matter with any of the Eucharistic theologies that came out of the Protestant Reformation. It is entirely novel, a product of the post-modern, atomized, consumerist culture of our day. For that matter it is such a vapid and ultimately meaningless view of the Eucharist that the only way it can be seen as persuasive is under the influence of a sort of Hegelian historicism, whereby any new idea is a priori superior to any old idea, however silly and unfounded it may be.

Ratzinger offers here, in very few words, the much deeper traditional doctrine of the Eucharist. In entering into this depth of encounter with Jesus, with the real, living resurrected and ascended Christ, we do not simply remain at the level of the individual and ‘my’ need for Jesus.

Rather, Jesus breaks us open to the much bigger, broader, deeper level of engagement with the whole body of believers, with the whole world, radically redefines what it means to be a ‘self’, actually, a person, into a Christological and Trinitarian mode. Not so much a buffet line, but being buffeted into an entirely new mode of being a person.

We, in our fallen and broken condition, define personhood of selfhood as something fundamentally opposed or at least in sharp distinction from other selves, other persons. We may get along with others or be in conflict with others, but at any rate we do see that the fundamental identification of ourselves as ‘self’ is that I am not you, you are not me, and each of us is precisely, only, and ultimately the self we are.

The Eucharist blasts all that out of the water. Because the Eucharist configures our whole self around the indwelling presence of Christ, and Christ is God, and God is Trinity, and the persons of the Trinity are defined by their relations to one another, when we receive the Eucharist our whole self becomes defined by relation, relation to God and then in that mutual relation to God, relation to one another, to the body of believers, to all those who are incorporated into Christ.

And this is precisely what we mean in our Catholic tradition by the word ‘Church’. The Eucharist makes the Church, and it is the direct immediate effect of the reception of the Eucharist that it makes us fully and totally engaged in this membership, in the incorporation, the becoming fully and totally ‘of the Body’ of the Church.

Nor is it some vague spiritual abstraction—again, that is a wholly novel idea of the Church, unheard of until our modern disincarnated age. The Church is a visible entity on the earth, even if its precise borders cannot be wholly known this side of the parousia.

The negative aspect of this is that this is why we insist that communion can only be taken by those who are fully members of the Body, who are fully incorporated into the visible Church. But the positive aspect of this is far more important than the negative ‘rule’ we have to insist on. Eucharist breaks me open and plunges me into a depth of union with my brothers and sisters that demands the whole of me, mind, heart, spirit. And in that union, “I myself become part of the new bread that he is creating by the resubstantiation of the whole of earthly reality.”

In truth, we do not turn anyone away from the Eucharistic table. But we insist that this table be what it is, and what it is demands by its very nature a total commitment to the life of Christ lived out in the communion of the Church. All are welcome at our table, but that means that all are welcome to become members of the Body which is the Catholic Church, the active and living force for the resubstantiation of earthly reality through, with, and in Jesus Christ.