Why the World Does Not Believe Us

Christ, the Messiah, is not merely the Redeemer who breaks apart the bond, and cleanses us from sin. He is also the dispenser of a new divine life which shall wholly transform us and turn us into ‘new men’… Though we receive this new life in Baptism, it may not flourish in us unless we cooperate.

A strong desire must fill us to become different beings, to mortify our old selves and re-arise as new men in Christ. This desire, this readiness to ‘decrease’ so that ‘He may grow in us’ is the first elementary precondition for the transformation in Christ. It is the primal gesture by which man reacts to the light of Christ that has reached his eyes: the original gesture directed at God.

It is, in other words, the adequate consequence of our consciousness of being in need of redemption on the one hand, and our comprehension of being called by Christ on the other. Our surrender to Christ implies a readiness to let Him fully transform us, without setting any limit to the modification of our nature under his influence.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ

Reflection – A new author on the blog, the great lay theologian of the 20^th century who had such an influence on Popes John Paul II and Benedict, who wrote that “When the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time.”

This quote comes from the beginning of his great work Transformation in Christ, and lays out a principle thesis of his work—that Christ came not merely to work an external change of redeeming us or wiping away our guilt, but to work a complete change in the whole person, a complete transformation from being one sort of being to another sort of being altogether.

We can miss this quite easily, can’t we? Especially since (let’s be honest) the behavior, the actions of so many Christians are not measurably different from the actions of non-Christians. The transforming effect of the sacrament of baptism is a doctrine we have to, alas, take on faith much of the time. We see little of this effect in our communal church life. It’s not that Christians are any worse than the mass of humanity—we’re not—but really, we truly are supposed to be better.

We have the Holy Spirit of God living within us. We have Christ himself daily attending us to shape us, form us, teach us, and communicate his life to us so that we can live as Jesus lived and lives. All of this by the will and gracious love of God the Father. We really should be better than we are.

It does in fact come down to our willingness to change. God is a gentleman; He doesn’t coerce us, doesn’t force Himself upon us. Indeed, He can’t, since the whole transformation He is offering us is a matter of us becoming lovers in the pattern of Christ the Lover of Mankind. Love that is coerced is not love; it is literally a contradiction in terms to speak of ‘coerced love.’

So, what’s the holdup, anyhow? God is offering us all sorts of gifts and new life and abundance of grace, poured out freely in Jesus Christ, in the sacraments of the Church, a gift and grace sure to transform our lives and make them glorious. What’s the holdup? Oh yeah… it will hurt, a bit. It will be hard, somewhat. It will take us beyond what we think we can do, just a little… like a few trillion miles little.

I am reminded of an interview Catherine Doherty gave to Radio Canada, the French language TV network (yes, our TV network is called ‘radio’ – you gotta problem with that?). At one point she explained it very simply, that everyone was afraid, and that was the problem. Afraid of what, the interviewer asked her. “De la peine, mon cherie!” she immediately answered. Of pain, my dear… and she has the most luminous smile on her face as she says it.

Christ wants to transform our life, and the promise of Scripture is that this will make our life radiant and beautiful. But we look at a crucifix and we know that too is part of the process… and we’re not sure. We vacillate, we hesitate, we say yes, we say no, we say later, we say let me think about it some more…

And Christians go on, for the most part, being fairly indistinguishable from the general population, and the world remains deeply unconvinced that there’s anything especially true or compelling about the Gospel, because they don’t see anything especially true or compelling about the way we are living.

Sorry to be a bit of a downer today. But there’s no reason to be downhearted about it. The answer is as close as turning to Jesus right now and saying, ‘please, Lord, let’s do this! Change me, and let’s start today! How can I love more, today, be more like you, today? Show me, Lord, and make it happen.’ It’s pretty much that simple. So… let’s all do that, OK?

The God Who Talks To Us

The prime characteristic of Christian faith is that it is faith in God. Furthermore, that this God is someone who speaks, someone to whom man can speak. The Christian God is characterized by revelation, that is, by the words and deeds in which he addresses man, and the goal of revelation is man’s response in word and deed, which thus expands revelation into a dialogue between Creator and creature which guides man toward union with God.

So prayer is not something on the periphery of the Christian concept of God; it is a fundamental trait. The whole Bible is dialogue: on the one side, revelation, God’s words and deeds, and on the other side, man’s response in accepting the word of God and allowing himself to be led by God. To delete prayer and dialogue, genuine two-way dialogue, is to delete the whole Bible.

Joseph Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, 16

Reflection – It is October, of course, and in Catholic tradition this month is dedicated to a religious theme, as each month of the year is. October is dedicated to the Rosary, and I hope to have posts dotting the month that relate to that theme. Posts on Mary, and posts on prayer, perhaps posts on the specific mysteries of the Rosary. That’s the plan, anyhow (I'm making it up as I go along...).

This excerpt from a very fine book by Ratzinger brings out the central nature of prayer in our faith. The whole revealed picture of God we get from the Bible and taken up in the tradition of the Church is a God who wants to be in conversation with us, a God who talks to us and wants us to respond. Our God, the God of Christianity, is not some enigmatic cloudy figure up there somewhere, not some energy field or faceless voiceless ‘ground of being’, or some philosophical axiom or the answer to a metaphysical or ethical puzzle. He may well be all those things in some fashion or other, but ultimately, He is a Father who wants to be in relationship with his children.

And so, prayer. At the very heart of Christian faith is Christian prayer and Christian worship. We are made, not simply to be in good order with one another, not simply to work for a humane, kind, just way of life as a human community. We are made to open up this human life and community to something altogether other, altogether transcendent from ourselves, and to live not only on good terms with one another but in communion with this Other, this One, this God.

And this is not, as it is in some religious traditions, a task reserved for some elite class of ‘professional religious’. Even in our Catholic tradition, the corruption of elitism has entered in, and true union with God has at times been reserved to the monastics or rare elect souls. But that is not a view consistent with Catholic theology—it is a corruption, a distortion.

Our Catholic sense is that God wants to be in union with all of us, with every human being, and all of us together as a body, a community of persons. This is consistent with the whole Bible, where God comes to individuals but then fashions them into a people of his own. And so the deepest realization of communion with God comes, not on a mountain top or in a lonely hermitage or in a trance, but… well, at Sunday Mass.

You know, that place with the crying babies, the bored teenagers, the crabby old people, the priest who is a total doofus, the sour judgmental holier than thou types, the nightmarishly bad music… or whatever your current beef might be about your parish. That’s where heaven comes down to earth, God speaks to His people, gives Himself to them most fully this side of heaven and asks us to respond, individually and communally, by pledging our lives and our hearts to Him.

Prayer, but prayer always understood in that biggest context, that call to communion that draws us first to God but then to the community, the body of the Church. And it all goes together—our life long seeking of God and His love, His presence, His voice, and our life long struggle and joy of loving our neighbor as ourselves.

It’s all part of the same picture, and that picture is that the God who speaks to us and wants us to speak to Him is Himself a Communion of Love, a  three-personed unity that utterly exceeds our understanding. It’s a good thing we have Mary to help us in all this, and that the Rosary has been given to the Church as such a simple way of being with Mary. It’s all a bit too much for us, but she seems to get it, and helps us get it a little better each day as we turn to her for help. So, happy October to you.

At This Point, What Difference Does It Make?

Christ’s death discloses the utter reliability of God’s love above all in the light of his resurrection. As the risen one, Christ is the trustworthy witness, deserving of faith (cf. Rev 1:5; Heb 2:17), and a solid support for our faith. "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile", says Saint Paul (1 Cor 15:17). Had the Father’s love not caused Jesus to rise from the dead, had it not been able to restore his body to life, then it would not be a completely reliable love, capable of illuminating also the gloom of death.

When Saint Paul describes his new life in Christ, he speaks of "faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal 2:20). Clearly, this "faith in the Son of God" means Paul’s faith in Jesus, but it also presumes that Jesus himself is worthy of faith, based not only on his having loved us even unto death but also on his divine sonship. Precisely because Jesus is the Son, because he is absolutely grounded in the Father, he was able to conquer death and make the fullness of life shine forth.

Our culture has lost its sense of God’s tangible presence and activity in our world. We think that God is to be found in the beyond, on another level of reality, far removed from our everyday relationships. But if this were the case, if God could not act in the world, his love would not be truly powerful, truly real, and thus not even true, a love capable of delivering the bliss that it promises. It would make no difference at all whether we believed in him or not. Christians, on the contrary, profess their faith in God’s tangible and powerful love which really does act in history and determines its final destiny: a love that can be encountered, a love fully revealed in Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.

Lumen Fidei 17

Reflection – ‘Tuesdays with Francis’, now on a new day for this week only (in all the disruption of travel, I forgot about it yesterday). I was talking recently to a man of deep faith and prayer who was lamenting somewhat the religious indifferentism of some of his family and loved ones, that what for him was the key question of all of life—God, the meaning of it all, Jesus Christ—was a matter of supreme indifference and irrelevance for them.

It does seem to me that this is what Pope Francis (although honestly I hear Pope Benedict’s typical style loud and clear in this paragraph) is saying here. God is somewhere else, or on some other level of reality, or not really acting in the world, or just a big cryptic question mark that cannot possibly be resolved, encountered, entered into a real relationship with. If I thought that about God, I too would conclude that the God question is an irrelevant distraction from the business of life, and just get on with it.

The Christian faith is that God has come very close to us, has indeed entered right into the deepest stuff of our life—the questions that do exercise every human being who has not descended into utter insensibility. Life, death, pain, joy, love, hatred, family, the past and its successes and failures, the future and its uncertainty—surely every human being with any degree of interiority is concerned with these matters.

It is our belief that God has planted Himself squarely on the ground of His creation called ‘man’, the place of our humanity and its most urgent and universal longings, questions, concerns. And it is Jesus Christ, his life, death, and resurrection, that provide the surest guidance and most beautiful divine answers to all these riddles that have presented themselves to mankind from the beginning.

What is becoming more and more clear to me, though, is that as necessary as a lucid presentation of our beliefs are, as much as we have to find words to explain to people just how it is that Jesus and the testimony of the Gospels makes our humanity shine forth with divine radiance and opens a door in our finite mortal nature to a sharing in the infinite eternal glory of God, words are not enough for this.

We live in a world sated with words, bloated on words, and in which words have too often been reduced to instruments of manipulation and control rather than servants of truth and wisdom. We need, not only words, but witness.

We need love—Christians who will not just talk about the faith but practice it with ever growing generosity and fidelity, who put their skin into the game, who go out from the parish and their own homes into the streets and alley ways, the town centers and the obscure outskirts, to make the love of God poured out in Jesus visible to the world. This is really what Pope Francis is calling all of us to do, or if we are already doing it, to redouble our efforts, to never say ‘Oh, I’m doing enough for God’, but to earnestly ask what more we can do.

It seems to me that the witness of Christian love is the only thing that will move people out of religious indifferentism and spark a renewed hope that maybe there is a way to God in the world, a way out of death and futility into hope and joy. I also believe that the world is heading into truly tough times and, frankly, Christians are going to need to be ready to love generously and take care of people’s material and spiritual needs. Are we ready for that? If not, let’s get praying and earnestly seeking the Lord’s help. And with that… time for this little Christian to go to community prayers!

The Diaconate: A Call to Service

Well, I'm still in transit, planning to get back to Combermere this evening, and meanwhile enjoying the peace and quiet of my cousin's house in Ottawa. Since I'm not quite back in the saddle yet at MH, I thought today I would reflect one last time on some of my Roman experience. Tomorrow, God willing, on to other things.

Specifically, I wanted to talk a bit about this:

l-r: Dina Lingard, myself, Deacon Mike Weitl, Joanne Dionne, Fr. Murray Kuemper

Namely, the reason I went to Rome in the first place, which was the diaconate ordination of the guy in the middle, Mike Weitl. Now, I have a firm policy on this blog of not writing about my MH brothers and sisters, and I don't plan to break that policy on this post. Just because I have chosen to blog and thus surrender something of my privacy and personal space in doing so, they haven't, and so I pretty much leave my MH community out of the blog. So of course I won't talk about Michael here, or the members of MH who came from various directions to be present at the ordination.

But I do want to talk about this reality of 'diaconate', specifically of the so-called transitional diaconate that men preparing for the ordained priesthood receive. Strictly speaking, there is nothing 'transitional' about it, as every sacrament of Holy Orders leaves a permanent character on the soul of the recipient. Every priest is also a deacon, and every bishop remains both priest and deacon.

I think there is great theological meaning in the Church's bestowing the sacrament of Orders in the way it does. 'Deacon', of course, means 'servant' in Greek--diakonos. The sacrament of Holy Orders is all about the man, who is just an ordinary guy with the same mixture of virtue and sin, strength and weakness as any other guy, receiving a certain configuration to Christ for the sake of His Body the Church.

The fullness of this ordained configuration is the bishop, deputed to govern, sanctify and teach the Christian people in truth and in love, a mission impossible for man unless Christ permanently configures him to do this by a special unique grace. The priest is ordained to assist the bishop in this mission, particularly in the day to day administration of the sacraments to God's people and the preaching of the word.

But all this ministry rests upon the call to diakonia, to service, to being a servant as Christ was a servant. And I think this is where there is great wisdom and theological meaning in the 'transitional' diaconate. Before the 'sacred powers' are given to the man, the power-in-Christ to confect the Eucharist or forgive sins, he is configured to Christ the servant. Before he is given a measure of authority or governance in the Church, he is given the mandate to serve, to wash the feet of his brothers and sisters, to use whatever power or position he has been given as a ministry, a service and not abuse it for his own dominance and advantage.

The tri-partite structure of the sacrament of Holy Orders calls the ordained bishop and priest to a constant reflection on the nature of the 'gift and mystery' we have been given. We are called to be servants of all and to exercise our ministry as a constant act of love and humility for the good of others.

Oh, I know, we all know, that this does not always work out so well in practice. Just like every person who is baptized and confirmed does not go on to become a great saint, just like every married couple does not go on to manifest the faithful fruitful love of Christ for His Church to the world, just like we can receive Eucharist and Reconciliation and still struggle on in mediocrity and compromise, so the ordained man is not guaranteed by his ordination to pour out his life in service to the Church. The sacraments are not magic tricks that rob us of free will, but are the assured presence and action of God in His Church to make possible what is humanly impossible.

As I sat in St. Peter's Basilica during the magnificent rite of ordination, my eyes continually went to a statue in my line of vision, this one, in fact:

Yes, back to St. Francis of Assisi, the poor man of Christ, the deacon who chose to remain a deacon. I found myself simply lifting up Michael and his 40 classmates to the prayers and care of St. Francis, asking him to help them and help us all to take hold of the heart of the Gospel, which is a heart of service, of humility, and of love. It is this and this alone which will allow us to find God's path through this difficult and complex time in our world, this and this alone which will open us to the grace we need to love one another as Christ loved us and show forth that love to a world that so badly needs it.

I'm Ba-aack! With Final Thoughts on Rome

OK, whew! After almost 24 hours of continuous travel yesterday, counting from when we left the hotel at 8 a.m. Rome time (2 a.m. EST) to when I landed at my cousin's house in Ottawa at 11 p.m., I'm back in business. I have a day or so in Ottawa to have a bit of a visit with my family--the only one I'm going to have this year--and then back to MH and regular life Tuesday evening.

Final thoughts on Rome - no photos, though, as at a certain point I just gave up on the camera. If there was a way to make that thing take non-blurry photographs (and I'm sure there was) it exceeded my non-existent skill level. I am just not a photographer, which I suppose to anyone who knows me well is no great surprise - I have the visual sensitivity and observational abilities of a man in a coma as a matter of general life.

Now, when last I wrote you all we had just gotten back from Assisi, I believe. To sum up the remaining trip and its itinerary, Wednesday morning was the general audience with the Holy Father in St. Peter's Square, the text of which I will be blogging about shortly, as it was quite magnificent. I was amazed, actually, at how much of the Italian I could understand - Pope Francis enunciates very clearly, and of course I knew what he was likely to say on the subject, which is 'the holiness of the Church'. Wednesday afternoon was free (zzzzz.....), and the evening included a prayer vigil for the deacons-to-be and a festive supper.

Thursday was the diaconate ordination itself, in St. Peter's basilica, at the Altar of the Chair, followed by a reception at the college and magnificent celebratory supper in the evening. Friday we went to the catacombs of St. Priscilla, the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel. Saturday we had the Lateran Basilica, the Sacred Stairs (traditionally, if not quite historically, the stairs Jesus climbed to stand before Pontius Pilate), and the Church of Sancta Croce de Jerusalem, where the relics of the True Cross are housed. A final Mass at the North American College and one more blowout Italian meal wrapped up the week.

So that was what we did. Now, what to make of all this? I'm still thinking about it quite intensely. Rome is overpowering on every level - the degree of beauty, history, theological depth, traditional piety, human and divine expression of church life that is present on every level, at every turn of the road and vista of landscape is beyond the capacity of the normal human being to take in. It is breathtakingly immense in scale, and very, very beautiful indeed.

And... I want to express this carefully here. I am not an iconoclast, or a Philistine, nor do I have any desire to see Rome be anything but what it is. But I have to be honest - what I keep coming back to in my mind and my heart is the bones of the fisherman under the high altar at St. Peter's. The bones of the martyrs and the crude but evocatively beautiful frescoes in the catacombs of St. Prisicilla. And the poor man of Assisi, this man who was no martyr, but who poured his life's blood out in love and praise and imitation of Christ.

This is the heart of the Church. The Church is built not on a foundation of marble and stone, but on the blood of the saints and their love, which itself is a direct sharing in the blood of Christ and the love of the Father. The beauty of the Church, at its heart, is not in mosaic and fresco, stained glass and arches, domes and baldacchinos and apses, as truly and genuinely beautiful as all that is.

The beauty of the Church is the beauty of holiness, of all the poor little people (some of whom are cardinals and popes!) who have somehow, against all human possibility and in every possible manner of human circumstance, picked up their cross and followed Christ to the end. This is the splendor and majesty of Christian life--not exactly the splendor and majesty of sculpture and architecture, but God's sculpting, God's building, God's great work of art which is the redeemed and divinized flesh of man, and beside which all the outpouring of beauty of Bernini and Michelangelo pale into insignificance.

I guess all this is another way of saying that (in case any of them are reading this) I was just as impressed and moved by being with the family and friends of Deacon Michael Weitl, Michael himself, and my MH brothers and sisters who joined us for the celebration, as I was with Rome. A single human being who is even in the process of being built into this temple of God which we call a 'saint' is more magnificent and glorious to me than the whole city of Rome and its splendour.

So what is Rome, then? To me, Rome is an icon of the Church. It is good that so much work and genius and (yes) money has been poured into making this place happen over the millennia. It is good that we have city like Rome that reflects the true beauty of the Church, that shows that our faith is glorious, is magnificent, is the most precious and breathtaking reality that exists, and is worth all the marble and glass and stone and artistry we can give it.

Rome is an icon, ultimately it is an icon of you and me and what we are called to become. We are meant to make our own lives, by the grace of God and through, with, and in Our Lord Jesus Christ, something like that, something beautiful, something that takes our breath away. And that is ultimately and really and only about love, service, surrender, passion, joy, peace, prayer--the whole life of the Christian. Rome calls us, if we look at it rightly and understand what we are looking at, to live up to its beauty and in fact to outshine its beauty with the beauty of a life poured out for God and for neighbour, to manifest God's beauty in our towns and cities, our parishes and families. To be saints, in short. And that's what I think about Rome!

Not Blogging Much Right Now

As you all may have noticed, the blog has gone a bit silent the last couple days. The reason is simple and short-term - I am just totally overwhelmed with the last days of my Roman pilgrimage experience. My heart is full, my mind is full, my days are full and, yes, my stomach is full of mighty good Italian food.

Anyhow, just too much to be able to write about it just now. Hopefully I will be able to share something as I travel back over the weekend, and resume normal blogging as I return to Combermere early next week. Until then, ciao, bambinos.

What Holds Up the Church

OK, so yesterday we went there:

Assisi

And that's about it for my own photography of this place (great heaving sighs of relief are heard among my readership. Tales of the Blurred has been cancelled. Sorry my blogging has been so unfocussed lately.)

Besides my lack of skills with a camera, it is also the case that virtually all the interesting bits of Assisi are within the churches, where no photography is allowed. I did get to con-celebrate Mass in the basilica with a number of other priests in Italy for the diaconate ordination, and offered my Mass for a beloved directee of mine who succumbed to cancer just after my arrival here - that was a great blessing, joy, and consolation for me.

The real treasure of Assisi is, of course, the man himself, Francis, and Clare and the mighty band of poor men and women who followed after them. It is hard for me to know what to say about it all - I was intensely happy and peaceful my whole time in Assisi (sadly, just a few hours), and felt utterly at home there. There is so much of Franciscan spirituality in the Madonna House life and spirit that it felt very much like being in another expression of my own vocation.

Meanwhile, I arrived back to hear that Pope Francis (who I saw again today at the General Audience - stay tuned!) gave another media interview that is causing some distress and anxiety among at least some  Catholics. I am not going to address all that right now (I'm on holidays here, folks! Mind you, from my little reading, it sounds like another case of 'Pope says more Catholic stuff, and people are shocked'), but wish to give the following gentle reminders from Giotto, found on the walls of the Basilica there,  as to what it is that upholds the Church, what the constant stream of life and love is that runs through the life of the Church that is the perpetual renewal and restoration of it from century to century.

Dream of Pope Innocent, showing St. Francis holding up the Lateran cathedral in Rome

So, there's that. I am reminded forcibly of the words of Pius XII to Catherine Doherty: "Persevere, Madam, for on groups such as yours rests the fate of the Church and of my own person."In other words, it is holiness, personal and communal, which comes down to the daily choices we make to do God's will or not, love and serve or not, pray and fast, or not. The Pope, the bishops, the clergy all have their proper job to do, and it is an important one. But the lifeblood of the Church is the holiness of God coursing through the souls of its members. Remember that.

Pope Innocent approves the Franciscan rule of life

This fresco shows us the Pope doing his proper job! That is, to respond to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the members of the Church when he sees it, and to give institutional solidity and continuity to it by 'housing' it within the great house of God which is the Catholic Church. The Pope's job is not to be that movement of the Spirit (although he too is one member of the Church, and is called to respond personally to the Holy Spirit), but to bless, to support, to encourage, and to guide the baptized in their personal following of Christ as his disciples. To correct them when they go off course, which means going against the deposit of faith handed on through the living memory of the Church, and to protect and strengthen them as they strive to become the saints of God they are called to be. That striving is your proper job and mine.
Which looks something like this, perhaps:

Francis preaching to the birds

Francis receiving the stigmata

Francis is such a fantastic figure in the life of the Church. We see here two, perhaps of the greatest dimensions of Franciscan holiness: his tender love and concern for all God's creation, and his passionate flaming love of Jesus Christ and identification with Him.

This is holiness - love of God and love of neighbour. Identification with Christ, and the profundity of gentleness and tender mercy that flows from those wounds, those stigmata. It is this--which of course is nothing else than the living presence of Christ flowing through his redeemed flock--that upholds the Church, gives it life and joy and constant renewal. It is this which should be our primary focus, as we strive to serve God in whatever way He has asked us to do.

Which reminds me: tomorrow is the big event that I'm actually here for, the diaconate ordination of Michael Weitl. I will not blog tomorrow, then, but will talk to you all again (God willing!) on Friday.

It's Supposed to Be Overwhelming

Well, today was loaded - a trip to Assisi which left Rome at 7.30 a.m. and got back at 7.30 p.m., followed by the (now) typical lovely Roman restaurant supper. Sometimes it's just so darn tough being me!
However, that means I didn't have time to tell you about yesterday, when I got to have a nice day-long visit with this guy:

Not as blurry in real life

Yes, St. Peter. Did I mention what a lousy photographer I am? Yes, yesterday morning was spent in the largest church in the world, the mother church, in a certain sense, of all Western Christianity. The afternoon was spent underneath it.

I am not a good enough writer (frankly) to do anything resembling justice to St. Peter's. It is overwhelming on every level -- size, aesthetics, history, art. Bernini's altar and baldacchino, Michaelangelo's Pieta and dome... oh my. The mosaics are on a level that I have never seen before; the most moving one for me personally, is the mosaic depicting the slaying of Ananias and Sapphira from Acts 4, who lied about money promised to God and were struck down. It greets the priests--the Altar of the Lie--as they come out from the sacristy to celebrate Mass. Sobering, challenging, serious--perfect. Priest of God, do not do one thing and live something else, or you will indeed, one way or another, be struck down.

(not my photo...)

But I am not an art historian, nor am I gifted with any great writing ability of description. I am a theologian (if I am anything much as a writer), and so it is this afternoon, which I have no photographs of at all because they are not permitted, that I wish to reflect on.

The dome of St. Peter's has, at the very top, a depiction of God the Father. A plumb line drawn down from the center of that dome would hit the dove which is at the top of Bernini's baldacchino, symbolizing the descent of the Holy Spirit. A plumb line from that dove would hit the center of the high altar--God the Son made incarnate in Jesus Christ, made a physical living presence at each Mass.

A plumb line descending from the altar through the floor down to the earth would hit the bones of a man, age 65-70, a strong man who worked hard most of his life, whose bones were found at the level of the soil consistent with AD 60s, and whose bones at some later date were wrapped in imperial purple and gold.

Technically, we do not know whose bones these are. But we have a 2000 year tradition that St. Peter was crucified and buried on Vatican Hill, that a small monument was erected there by the early Crhsitians of Rome, and that the emperor Constantine, after the Battle of Milvian Bridge in the early 4th century, built the original basilica over the site, taking care to place the high altar on the actual site of Peter's grave, marked with that monument.

It was only in the 1970s, after a 30 year project of excavations under St. Peter's, that these bones came to light and were identified with almost certain probability as those of the fisherman from Galilee, this rough man, impulsive with an odd mixture of weakness and strength, cowardice and courage--a man, in other words--upon whose life and death the Church's mission, from God the Father through the Spirit in Christ, was established and passed on to the world. That means that this:

Chair of Peter (blurriness added)

rests on this:

Sampling of the bones of St. Peter

There is deep theological matter here. History matters. God entered history. A man was born, who was God. He lived and died, and before He died He chose men to be his apostles, to be the 'sent ones' of the 'Sent One', the One sent by the Father by the overshadowing of the Spirit of the Virgin. And this one man, chief among the apostles, Simon who is called Peter, lived and died, really, and the place of his dying has become this vast monument to the life and death and life again of God in the world, and the living embodiment of the Church's commission by Christ to teach the Gospel to the nations.

It is overwhelming, on every level. I said that to our seminarian Michael who is to be ordained day after tomorrow. His response: 'It's supposed to be!' Amen to that. Tomorrow (God willing) I'll tell you about my day in Assisi!