How Catholics Read the Bible

The idea had arisen that Scripture is complete; everything is found there; consequently there is no need for Tradition, and so the Magisterium has nothing to say. At that point Pope Paul VI transmitted to the Council fourteen formulae for a phrase to be inserted into the text on Revelation and he gave the Council Fathers, the freedom to choose one of the fourteen formulae, but he said that one of them needed to be chosen in order to complete the text. I remember more or less the formula "non omnis certitudo de veritatibus fidei potest sumi ex Sacra Scriptura", in other words, the Church’s certainty about her faith is not born only of an isolated book, but has need of the Church herself as a subject enlightened and guided by the Holy Spirit. Only then does the Scripture speak with all its authority.

This phrase is decisive, I would say, for showing the Church’s absolute necessity, and thus understanding the meaning of Tradition, the living body in which this word draws life from the outset and from which it receives its light, in which it is born. The fact of the canon of Scripture is already an ecclesial fact: that these writings are Scripture is the result of an illumination of the Church, who discovered in herself this canon of Scripture; she discovered it, she did not create it; and always and only in this communion of the living Church can one really understand and read the Scripture as the word of God, as a word which guides us in life and in death.

Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – There are such fine distinctions and careful reflections in this short passage that it merits careful close reading. Protestants reject this, of course, holding in their classical theology to the principle of sola scriptura – the Scriptures alone as the source of divine revealed truth. It must be said in response to that assertion that sola scriptura is simply not a Scriptural doctrine—nowhere in the Bible does it say that only in the Bible does God reveal himself. Indeed the ending of John’s Gospel explicitly says the opposite (Jn 21:25), and Jesus Himself says that the Holy Spirit would be with his disciples to teach them everything else they needed to learn (Jn 16:13).

Meanwhile, though, we do not exactly say that the Church ‘made’ the Bible. Benedict is clear here: we discovered it, we did not create it. Revelation is a gift from God, not a human product, but it is a gift He gave to His Church who received it, cherishes it, reads it, understands it in the light of all God’s other revelation in Tradition, and passes it on through the millennia.

We tend to think of things in terms of competitive opposites: Scripture or Tradition, the Word of God or the teaching authority of the Church. The more we can understand that God is the primary actor in the life of the Church and of salvation history, the more we can move out of this strange quasi-Marxist power struggle view of revelation and ‘who is in charge, who gets the last word’ being the most important question.

God reveals Himself to a body of believers, giving them a written inspired text and a living Tradition, and above all his Holy Spirit to abide with them to condition and guide their reception and interpretation of the revealed truth. It is a messy process, imperfect because sinful human beings are imperfect, but nonetheless that is our Catholic understanding of it.

And this understanding saves us from so many pitfalls in mis-reading of Scripture. One example, which is commonplace today. The exegete Rudolph Bultmann famously said that it is impossible to believe in miracles in the age of radio waves and antibiotics. Hence the miracle stories in the Bible are symbolic or legendary or something: at any rate, not to be taken literally. The dead cannot be raised, nor the blind healed, nor the lame walk, nor bread and fish multiplied. Of course not: we are modern scientific people, and know better.

Except… the Church has 2000 years of experience of, well, miracles performed by saints all over the place. Bultmann was a contemporary of Padre Pio! Lourdes is a place of ongoing miraculous healings. I personally know of instances of food being multiplied in soup kitchens for Christ’s poor. Miracles are not commonplace events of course—they wouldn’t be called miracles if they were. But if Bultmann was doing his exegesis within the catholic communion, he would never have written such a silly sentence.

 

That’s one example, and there are many others. It is the Church and its long experience of the ways of God in the world that conditions our reading of Scripture to keep it true to God’s Spirit. And that is how God’s revelation of love and saving power is passed on from one generation to the next, for 2000 years and counting.

Talking to Clever Ducks

Even more hotly debated was the problem of Revelation. At stake here was the relationship between Scripture and Tradition, and it was the exegetes above all who were anxious for greater freedom; they felt themselves somewhat – shall we say – in a position of inferiority with regard to the Protestants, who were making the great discoveries, whereas Catholics felt somewhat "handicapped" by the need to submit to the Magisterium.

So a very concrete struggle was in play here: what sort of freedom do exegetes have? How does one properly read Scripture? What is the meaning of Tradition? It was a multifaceted struggle which I cannot go into now, but the important thing, for sure, is that Scripture is the word of God and that the Church is under Scripture, the Church obeys God’s word and does not stand above Scripture. Yet at the same time Scripture is Scripture only because there is the living Church, its living subject; without the living subject of the Church, Scripture is only a book, open to different interpretations and lacking ultimate clarity.

Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – OK, so I’m back as of yesterday in my own bed in my own bedroom in my own priest house in my own Madonna House in Combermere. Whew. While England was great and I loved it there… well, as Dorothy said, ‘There’s no place like home!’

Now just to remind everyone that before all this kerfuffle of the last month or so in Rome we were having something called a ‘Year of Faith’ (remember that?). Incidentally, I think this whole business of papal resignation and the historic election of Pope Francis has been a vital part of the Year of Faith, among other things calling everyone to truly deepen our faith in the Church’s origin and sustenance in God and not in human beings.

But part of the Year of Faith has been the call from Pope (Emeritus) Benedict to study and re-embrace the legacy of Vatican II in truth and in depth. And since this talk to the Roman clergy is virtually the last public statement we have of Pope Benedict on that or any other subject, I’m going to spend the next few days—perhaps until Holy Week or so—blogging my way through it. So… back to Life With a German Shepherd for a few days.

So here we have the thorny issue of Revelation, Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium and their inter-relation. It seems to me, and here I of course defer to the great scholars of the Church who have been far more immersed in these matters than I, that the whole field of critical Scripture scholarship developed primarily in a non-Catholic setting, and its development, methodologies and pre-suppositions reflect that.

Catholic Scripture scholars who wish to work in that field on an equal level with their Protestant colleagues have more often than not simply done their Scripture scholarship on those terms, and in consequence have had to compartmentalize their scholarship and their faith, to the detriment of both and to themselves above all.

It seems to me that, far from stifling the work of Scripture scholarship, the integration of Scripture and Tradition guided by the rightful authority of the Magisterium enlivens it and gives it depth and direction. So often, in my admittedly minimal exposure to historical-critical exegesis, the terminus of the work seems to be this one scholar’s speculative re-construction of the composition of this one text and its original historical intent and meaning. All very speculative—the next scholar promptly comes along and writes a completely different re-construction—and all rather fruitless.

I mean, we get to see what a clever duck Dr. Whositby is and how effectively he debunked Dr. Wheresitfrom (although the radical scholarship of Dr. Wassitmean is coming right behind to debunk him in turn), but what good does their work do in drawing out the deep meaning of the Word of God in a creative spiritual way for the Body of Christ? Especially since most of them cannot write coherent and lively prose to save their lives.

Meanwhile, Scripture scholarship can be done in a lively creative tension with the whole tradition of the Church, an approach and a method that actually takes us somewhere. Pope Benedict’s own Jesus of Nazareth books are precisely his effort to teach by showing us how to do it. My own belief is that this approach rescues Scripture scholarship (and indeed, the Scriptures) from the dusty dry hegemony of the academics and saves it from many of the outright errors and distortions it too often falls into… about which I will blog tomorrow, God willing and the crick don`t rise. See you then.

New Book On the Way, Hurray, Hurray!

Hurray, hurray - the 'mock-up' of my new book cover arrived this week. Coming soon from Justin Press. I always like what Mark Shea says about such things - this is the writer's version of baby ultrasound pictures. Anyhow, stay tuned to this station - the book (which I've been working on, one way or another, since 2009) is coming soon.

Unfinished Business

Somewhere in our hearts there are always dead ends of human relations: something forgotten, something we have put away on the shelf or in the cavern of our soul. It may not show all the time, but it does come forth. All those dead ends have to be swept away into the lap of the Lord, or at his feet. We cannot enter radiantly into [Easter] unless we have forgiven.

Christ expects of us a peaceful approach to the other, no matter how hurtful that other has been, an approach like his own: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” I remember when the Communists shot a priest in Russia [during Mass], an old man with a thin, reedy voice said, “Father, forgive them, even if they do know what they do.” I understood then what total forgiveness could be. We can only understand forgiveness through Christ forgiving us. Christ who forgave his enemies while he lived, and telling us to forgive “seventy times seven”.

The greatest thing I can do for anybody is to pray for them and really mean it. If I just say, “Lord, I have forgiven her; please look after her”, that is not enough. The person has to be in my heart, in my mind, for a little while. Then I hand him or her over to God, clad in the white garment of my forgiveness. I forget them in the sense that I have forgiven them, but I remember them in the uniqueness of their person. Now they are just as they were before. It can be done. I think such love can do what is almost impossible.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Season of Mercy

Reflection – Catherine has a way of coming at things from a slightly different angle than other writers. Here it is the whole business of forgiveness and the Gospel call to same. This is a tough one, and there’s no question about it. Besides the somewhat petty level of daily annoyances and small injustices, almost all of us have at least somewhere in the back of our histories someone who did us a great injury, or who injured someone we dearly love.

Both on the petty level and on the grand, forgiveness is hard. But Catherine is quite right, of course. We may not be feverishly plotting revenge against our enemies, but we all have a tendency to simply park these dead ended relationships somewhere back in the caverns and shelves of our mind. To simply write it off and move on.

But we cannot write it off and move on, not if we are Christians. Because the ‘it’ is not an ‘it’ – it is a he or a she—a person. And we are accountable for every human relationship and how it ends—not in the outer realm which is beyond our control—but in our hearts.

Until we forgive this person and love them, the relationship has not ended rightly, and is unfinished business for us. We might need to leave it as such for a time, especially in the bigger injuries and deeper hurts, but if we are Christians we cannot leave it at that forever.

Essentially, Christianity means being called to live the life of Christ in the world in our frail fallen flesh. And so God so loved the world that He died for the salvation of everyone. Our living his life in our own flesh means we simply cannot leave anyone outside of our love. Not the person who hurt you worst (I know that as you read this you have someone in mind – I certainly do as I write it!), and not the person who bothers and frustrates you every day (you probably have someone in mind for that position, too!).

Challenging? Yes. But the world as we see it today is filled with the opposite attitude: hatred and revenge or cold indifference and contempt. And where does all that take us? Our biggest contribution to a culture of life and love is to this day extend the hand of forgiveness through the prayer of our heart, through carrying that person today in our thoughts and minds, asking God to bless them and, in a sense, giving our lives for that blessing. Christ gave his life for you; you can give today for ‘that person’. And that’s how love conquers in our world.

 

I'm not being too simplistic, am I? I don't think so. It's hard, no question, and the emotional realites can be complex enough, but I think the thing itself is extraordinarily simple. To desire, and to ask God, that hatred and anger and indifference be eradicated from our hearts so that love can flow outward to everyone, and in a particular way to our enemies, whoever they may be.

The Memory of Mankind

The radical detachment of the Enlightenment philosophy from its roots ultimately leads it to dispense with man. The spokesmen of the natural sciences tell us that man does not possess any liberty—in total contradiction of the starting point of the whole question. The more advanced spokesmen of a philosophy that is clearly separated from the roots of the historical memory of humanity tell us that man ought not to imagine that the is something different from all other living beings. And it follows that man ought not to be treated any differently from them…

The real antagonism typical of today’s world is not that between diverse religious cultures; rather, it is the antagonism between the radical emancipation of man from God, from the roots of life, on the one hand, and the great religious cultures, on the other. If we come to experience a clash of cultures, this will not be due to a conflict between the great religions, which of course have always been at odds with one another but, nevertheless have ultimately always understood how to coexist with one another. The coming clash will be between the radical emancipation of man and the great historical cultures.

Joseph Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 42-44

Reflection – See, it’s quotes like this which got me started on this blog, and which are why Pope Benedict’s resignation from the papacy and public life do not mean his writings will vanish any time soon from my blogging and, I hope, from the interest of the public.

It is this whole business of the ‘historical memory of mankind’ that is so central in his writings and reflections. There is a fundamental core of truth—or at least, to be fair, what has always been taken to be true by the vast mass of humanity—that is shared between traditional cultures and it is precisely this core that is rejected by modern secularism.

What is this core of truth? That there is a divine spiritual realm above the human and the earthly material one. That everything comes from the divine, from God in some sense, and is under the authority of God. That there is a moral law which is binding on every human being and that does not change from one generation to the next (for how could it be a binding moral law if it always changes?). That the life of humanity is one part, perhaps a central part as we Christians understand, in a drama that we did not initiate and whose final outcome and meaning is not ours to determine.

Some might argue that the moral law varies widely from place to place, culture to culture. C.S. Lewis answered that one long ago in his writings by pointing out that… well, it really doesn’t. There has never been a culture that valued cowardice or oath-breaking or indiscriminate killing. There is vast overlap in the actual content of the moral law among cultures; most of the real variance lies in who the moral law gets applied to, and who is left outside its protection.

At any rate, secularism is the true radical variant here, casting out any sense of a moral law, a divine origin, meaning, and goal to life, and any real connection with the vast traditions of humanity. We have been assured that all this is vitally necessary if humanity is to climb out its tragic barbaric past into a glorious and truly civilized future. And what secularism has delivered has been abortions by the tens of millions, euthanasia on the immediate horizon in most of the Western nations and already present in some, the ever-increasing degradation of human sexuality in ever-increasing corrosively  explicit displays of obscenity, and a casual contempt for human freedom and dignity that shows up in all manners and forms, in social media and government policy, in the light entertainments of music and TV, and in serious academic discourse.

 

Enough. Secularism has had its day, and its promises have proven false. Let us return to the wisdom of our mothers and fathers going back to the dim recesses of human memory, which has been cast aside so lightly, of so little account to us. It is the feast of St. Joseph today, patron of Canada and of the universal Church. A good feast day to ponder this clash of cultures, perhaps, and to choose wisely the path of life and freedom, which is the path of God in the world, of love and of the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God.

English Reflections

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is smeared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights of the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs--

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur

Reflection - So I depart today from Robin Hood's Bay, North Yorkshire, U.K., hopping on the train in Scarborough to Manchester, and flying out tomorrow morning for Toronto. It has been just three weeks since I made the trip in reverse. (On a practical note, blogging may be a bit sparse the next couple days - I'll do my best, but travel does make it difficult).

I want to begin this post by apologizing in advance to any English readers - I know there is nothing more galling than someone coming to spend three weeks in your home country and then making all sorts of learned ponderous statements about it, on the Internet no less. I will try to avoid that particular brand of folly (having plenty of my own specialized brands). I am well aware that I have spent a mere 21 days in a very small corner of North Yorkshire with vast stretches of England on all sides, unseen, unknown to me.

That being said, what I have experienced is best put precisely in this famous poem of Hopkins. Simply, I have experienced beauty, and a sort of ineradicable goodness here that took me (just a bit) by surprise. England gets a bad press, you know. The global picture of England on the whole is not a positive one: football hooligans and ASBO-laden re-primitivized slum dwelling yobs, all presided over by a Nanny State government doling out benefits with no thought of the future. This, and more negative pictures yet that I won't go into on this blog, is the general picture one picks up of England in the global media consciousness.

Well, all that may have some foundation in truth - after three weeks, how would I know? But what I experienced was beauty. Beauty of the land, which I expected - the North Yorkshire coast is spectacular, the moors lovely, the North Sea imposing and entrancing. Beauty of architecture, which I also expected - the stone houses, the ancient churches, the unique harmony born of a long co-existence between God's created beauty and man's, the blending of human craftsmanship with the divine architecture.

But there is beauty in England itself - the people, I mean. And in the English spirit, the soul of England. 'There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.' And I touched that freshness many, many times. I touched the holiness of the heart of Christian England in Durham Cathedral, praying at the tombs of St. Bede and St. Cuthbert. It is hard to go much further back into the mists of English Christianity than that... and the freshness of their holiness is there still, deep down, radiant.

And then the strange and painful beauty that came out of the English Reformation. I touched that in York, at the Bar Convent where Mary Ward and her sisters kept the faith in the most difficult circumstances imaginable. I saw the priest hole there, and the hidden chapel, the altar disguised as a bed board, the vestments disguised as a bolt of cloth. And Margaret Clitheroe's shrine, remembering this woman crushed to death with a stone at her spine for the crime of hiding priests. All very dark and painful and sad... but the Holy Ghost broods over the world in such places, and those bright wings can be felt, if not exactly seen, if you know what I mean.

But there is a goodness, a beauty, a light here - for all the problems, all the falling away from faith and church life and practice, all the social-political-economic troubles. Nature--and even more, super-nature--is never spent. There has been a Christian spirit, a Christian culture in England for over a millennium, the light and freshness of which will not quickly be spent indeed. And my reflection in all this is that it is our Christian task in general, wherever we are, to bear witness to this, to look earnestly for this, and to honor and welcome it when it is found.

Too often, Christians can seem like global scolds, continually bemoaning the failures and evils of the world and of their neighbors. This may be exaggerated, but there is a thread of truth in it at least. We can be a bit mopy at times, if we're not careful. The good Lord know there's enough to be mopy about - the problems are real, and serious. But we really should be so attuned to any stirring of goodness, any and all traces of beauty, and and all shining forth of truth and light in our brothers and sisters, since any and all of it comes from God and is His in source and in essence.

To bear witness to beauty, goodness, and truth wherever it lingers in this bent world of ours, and to foster and encourage it to grow to the fullness of its divine life - this is key to the mission of Christianity in our poor neo-pagan, apostasized world. And this is what I have touched in my little English experience, and what I carry in my heart as I return to Canada where that dearest freshness is deep in things, too.

As we move through these next weeks of Passiontide, when beauty and goodness, truth and light assume strange and appalling forms in the face of the Crucified One, let us call on the Spirit to show us where love is present and where love is winning in the hearts and souls of men, and our own hearts as well.

The God Who Strips Himself Naked

God could give no greater gift to men than to make his Word, through whom he created all things, their head and to join them to him as his members, so that the word might be both Son of God and son of man, one God with the Father and one man with all men.

The result is that when we speak with God in prayer we do not separate the Son from him, and when the body of the Son prays it does not separate its head from itself: it is the one Savior of his body, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who prays for us and in us and is himself the object of our prayers.

He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our head, he is the object of our prayers as our God. Let us recognize both our voice in his, and his voice in ours. When something is said, especially in prophecy, about the Lord Jesus Christ that seems to belong to a condition of lowliness unworthy of God, we must not hesitate to ascribe this conditon to one who did not hesitate to unite himself with us...

Our thoughts then must be awakened to keep their vigil of faith. We must realize that the one whom we were contemplating a short time before in his nature as God took to himself the nature of a servant; he was made in the likeness of men and found to be a man like others; he humbled himself by being obedient even in accepting death... Himself unchanged, he took to himself our created nature in order to change it, and made us one man with himself, head and body.

St. Augustine, Office of Readings, Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

Reflection - One thing I do want to do with this new blog is to periodically include snippets from the Office of Readings of the Church. Daily the Church offers a rich banquet of patristic and other writings in the divine office; it is a constant offering of wisdom and light that sadly goes unused by the mass of Catholic Christians.

I include this today since we are heading with this evening's opening of the Fifth Sunday of Lent into Passiontide, the final two weeks of Lent when the Church turns its gaze more and more intently to the figure of the humiliated Christ, the lowly one, the poor man who is God from God, Light from Light, the God who strips himself naked before us, the very fount of all joy and beauty who embraces pain, sorrow, disfigurement for our sake, the Deathless One who dies for us.

In the face of this Face, there are only two appropriate responses. Ultimately, we are to forsake all else to follow this man, this God wherever he leads us and to have no other concern but to live in his will and his love. But to get there, to grow to love Him that much so that we can do this, the Church has always known that we need to simply behold him. And Passiontide is all about beholding the Lamb of God, beholding the man (ecce homo!), beholding the wood of the cross.

To not turn away, to not shrug it off with a casual 'whatever', to not be blithe or heedless of it. God died for us. God became man and died for us. God united himself to us that totally - marvel of marvels. The poverty of Christ, the humility of God, the astounding path God chose to walk to save and redeem the world is our intense focus these next two weeks. There is little to say about it (not that that ever stops me from trying), little to say to God in response to it except a weak and shaky 'Thank you'.

But it seems to me that this is precisely the direction Pope Francis is guiding us towards, in his life-long focus on poverty and simplicity of life, reflected in his words and deeds of these first days of his papacy. We see a world, and a Church, beset with problems and anguish and sin. Our human tendency is to take control, to get all clever and efficient and smooth, to whip those bishops and priests and politicians into shape, goshdarnit, and then we'll have a Church or a nation worth belonging to!

Jesus stripped himself naked, was beaten up, flogged, and nailed to two pieces of wood. And that's how the world got saved, and the how the Church was born, in the first place. So... the path of renewal and restoration must follow this same path, don't you think? This same Christ is living in us, living for us, and seated at the right hand of God the Father in the heavens. Let us pray in him, with him, and to him, then, as wise St. Augustine counsels, so that we may discern the path of love and brotherhood in our own lives and our life together as the Body of Christ in the world.

Marvelling at Forsaken Cornfields

The Father said, 'That is a stone.' The Son would not say, 'That is a loaf.' No one creative fiat shall contradict another. TheFather and the Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what His Father had made one thing.

 There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before... there was in these miracles, and I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God times in not what it is with us.

He makes it... Nor does it render the process one whit more miraculous. Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going forth at once - immediately - than throught he countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield.

George MacDonald,  Unspoken Sermons, Vol 1

Reflection - Well, after all the papal excitement of recent days, let's settle back into something different. I just plucked the above book, or rather an anthology of selections from it, off the shelf of the MH England library. I had read MacDonald's fairy tales, which are delightful, and knew of his influence on C.S. Lewis, which was profound, but had never experienced his prose style.

It seems to me that this sermon from the late 19th century could have been given in the year 2013 without much need for change. The whole modern world is dedicated to turning stones into bread - to making something God made one thing into something quite other.

For example, human beings are persons, not medicine. So embryos can not be harvested for stem cell research. A person is one thing; medicine is another. This is roughly the same argument used for why cannibalism is wrong - my brother is my life, not my lunch. I suppose in time, having pursued the use of embryos for medical research, we will come around to using them as appetizers.

Sorry to be distasteful, but the distastefulness is not mine, after all. Underneath this modern attitude which is so prevalent, this rejection of God's created order, this utter incapacity to distinguish between one thing-making something injured or ill well-and another-making something to be what it is not-is a fundamental rejection of God the Creator, God the Father, and a terminal inability or refusal to trust Him as such.

Meanwhile, besides holding out the Son's total acceptance of the will of the Father as our model, MacDonald calls us to a whole-hearted delight in the actual force of life and wholeness that is inherent in creation itself. The cornfield does burgeon and blossom and produce the full ear, the mature plant heavy with nourishment and life. There are, in fact, medical advances with adult stem cell therapies, which simply use the potentialities of the patient's own body to speed or strengthen the healing process, something our bodies are designed to do by their own created power.

God's created order is good, and the deep solutions to our difficulties and sorrows lie within a joyful acceptance of it and embrace of its true goodness and life. And even though death is inevitable, and suffering may proceed it, even there God comes to meet his creature and lead us into a fuller yet reception of life and beauty. The passage through suffering and death, when it comes to us and cannot be withstood by our godly use of intellect and will, is a passage into Christ's own life, death, and resurrection.

I like this MacDonald fellow, and will be adding him to my rogue's gallery on the side when I get back to Combermere, along with that new pope fellow in Rome whassisname. Meantime, let us spend the day marvelling at the forsaken cornfields and their lovely, miraculous fecundity.

Francis, Rebuild My Church

Well, that was... unexpected! Here's a few first thoughts on the election of Pope Francis and what was truly for most of us our first encounter with this man last night on the balcony of St. Peter's. Like many, I knew almost nothing about him before last night, and of course the real getting to know our new Holy Father will occur in the weeks and months ahead.

First... enter a pope, leave a cardinal! The saying for conclaves holds true. Jorge Bergoglio (I had to look up the spelling of his last name just now) was on no one's list. What are the chances that at the next conclave the media and pundits will remember this and be a bit less cocksure? Yeah, I don't think so either.

Second, I was moved very deeply by his beginning his papacy by leading us in prayer. Let us pray for Pope Emeritus Benedict... Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be. Simple, childlike prayer, gathering the people of God around the throne of God and under the protection of the Madonna. What more can we ask a shepherd to do?

Third, I was also deeply moved--to the point of tears, truth be told--at his bowing down humbly to ask for our prayers as he begins this daunting task. Again, so simple, so childlike, so poor--'I want you to do something for me.' And how many millions of Catholics around the world at that point were united in praying for this man bowing before us to ask for the alms of our prayers? What a beautiful, gentle way to begin his papacy.

Fourth, and finally, the choice of name. This is deeply symbolic, deeply meaningful. Francis of Assisi, the poor man who rebuilt the Church, not by political games or five-year pastoral plans, but by an example of holiness and voluntary poverty, of prayer and simplicity of life. Or maybe it is Francis Xavier, the heroic Jesuit missionary, the martyr who gave his life to spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Or there is Francis de Sales, the great evangelizer of apostate Europe. And the mischievious side of me has to mention St. Francis Borgia, the great Jesuit saint, just for the sake of getting 'Borgia' and 'pope' in the same sentence.

But really, it is Francis of Assisi who I believe he is invoking in his choice of name. Francis, rebuild my Church. The Church today is in terrible disarray, terrible disrepair. It needs rebuilding, desparately. Ecclesia semper reformanda - the Church always needing to be reformed, this is the theme that comes to me in all this.

But this path of reformation must come from holiness of life, purity of prayer, and deep poverty and simplicity of spirit. Let us pray for Pope Francis that he may faithfully follow the Lamb of God in love of the Father and service to God's people, as the Spirit of God leads him to do.

Pope Day

O God, eternal shepherd,

who govern your flock with unfailing care,

grant in your boundless fatherly love

a pastor for your Church

who will please you by his holiness

and to us show watchful care.

Collect, Mass for the Election of a Pope or Bishop

Reflection - Well, here it is - Pope Day! Well, probably, anyhow - the first ballot yesterday evening and four ballots today certainly is a good start on the process. If not today, almost certainly tomorrow.

As I mentioned yesterday here, I offered the Mass for the election of a pope here in our England house. I was deeply struck by the prayer (above) which the Church offers for this occasion. This is the mind and heart of the Church as we approach this solemn moment of welcoming the successor of Peter onto the chair of Peter with all the awesome responsibility that comes with that. It is no joke that the room the newly elected Pope is ushered into and vested with the robes of his office, the room where he 'becomes' the Pope, so to speak, is called the Room of Tears. We really need to pray for this man, whoever he may be.

But this Collect tells us how to pray for him, I would suggest. And it is a fine corrective to the endless punditry that has come from all sides of the punditocracy, the pundit-sphere (Punditeria? Punditistan? The People's Democracy of Punditia?).

Ahem. Sorry - punning (pun-dit-ing?) is my ongoing untreated addiction. But really, from all sides of the equation has come ceaseless analysis and chatter about just what we need from a Pope. We need a reformer of the Curia. We need a charismatic evangelical presence. We need someone who can finally deal with the sex abuse scandals. We need a non-European. We need someone who will change every Church teaching to bring the Church into the 21st century for crying out loud. (OK, that last one is from the New York Times, who don't really count).

But how about... we need a pastor who will please God with his holiness? Because really... I kind of like that! A Pope who God will like! A Pope who will earnestly seek the will of God in all things and unite himself in prayer and in love to God's holy will, which is what holiness consists of. A Pope pleasing to God--please God that the cardinals will elect such a man for us!

And to us show watchful care. I like that, too. Not 'and solve every problem of the Church.' Not, 'and never make a mistake.' Not, 'and be all things to all people and thrill us all with his awesome charismatic popetude.' To show us watchful care. To do, as we say in Madonna House, the duty of the moment of the Bishop of Rome. To do little things exceedingly well... and in light of the truly divine actions of God, of Christ, of the Spirit in the world, the Pope spends his days doing little things. May he do them well out of love for God.

You know, as we've all been moving through the days and weeks since all this started, I have been pondering much the whole business of the papacy, not in its doctrinal and structural realities, which as a faithful Catholic I accept unreservedly, but in its current cultural expression--the host of expectations and attitudes we tend to adopt towards the current office-holder of the See of Rome.

I think we are out of balance on this front. The Pope is one man, with one job to do, and it is an important job, no question. But he is not the whole Church, he is (certainly!) not Jesus or God, he is not the entire magisterium or the whole of the episcopacy. He is one man, and he has one job to do, and that is to faithfully serve God as shepherd of the universal church to the utmost extent that a single human being can do that.

He cannot run every diocese or every parish. He cannot solve every problem. He cannot personally evangelize your disbelieving co-workers or bring back to Church your rebellious children or siblings. He cannot make every priest shape up, or even every bishop. He is one man, with one job to do, and that job is so huge that our best prayer is that he be a holy man who listens to God with ardent care and zeal.

So today is 'pope day'... I hope! Let us surround this poor man with our prayers and love, and ask God to lavish his graces and blessings on him, so that he can be a true servant of the servants of God who are us, and faithfully and nobly fulfill the great calling in life which God has given him.

Conclave Thoughts

Trusting another means taking one’s stand on some one else’s intelligence and embracing as true what one has not decided for one’s self… it implies a recognition by the mind of its own limits, an acceptance of dependence, a surrender of my absolute sovereignty.

Jean Danielou, The Scandal of the Truth

Reflection - I have very little time indeed to blog today, as I prepare for a parish mission tomorrow. Anyhow, the conclave begins as I write this, and perhaps it is best to be silent and prayerful rather than chattering and nattering on about whatever.

In relation to the conclave, this quote on truth and surrender seems relevant. A bunch of men, most of whom are total strangers to me, are preparing to make a decision in Rome that will affect the whole Church in a radical fashion.

This is daunting, is it not? I certainly find it so. We pray for them. We have various levels of trust in their good judgment, based on our experience and knowledge. We have no control whatsoever in what is going to happen in the next two days.

So... we are all feeling our limits, and this is not a bad thing. We all cast them, the Church, and our own selves on the merciful love of God, or at least that is what we are called to do. And that is a very good thing indeed.

Well, I have to go say Mass now, offering the Mass for the election of the pope. Enough of my words; time for Jesus to have his way with me and with us all. Amen.

Into the Sheepfold

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me

All the days of my life

In the Lord's own house shall I dwell

For the rest of my days.

Psalm 23

Reflection - So, here I am, back from giving the MH England staff a retreat in nearby Filey, just south of Scarborough, right on the North Sea. The retreat was beautiful, but the weather was ghastly - cold arctic winds continually blowing off the sea with rain and sleet and snow mixed in with it. So much for an English spring!

 

Fortunately, the Lord's goodness and mercy were not thrown off the track by all that, and followed us there through all the storms and nastiness. And that is the point of these first lines of the poem: no matter what, no matter what difficulties, problems, conflicts, tensions, even sins we are bedevilled with... God is with us. 

 

This was true for the inspired writer of the psalm, whoever and wherever he was. How much more true it is for us, now that Christ has come. God became man, and man has never been alone since, not really. Oh, we don't always feel that way. Maybe we don't 'feel' it often at all. But it is so. Emmanuel has come, God is with us.

The second last verse of the psalm is all about this never-failing fidelity of God. Goodness and mercy follow us all our lives long. Goodness--that in every situation, in any circumstance, there is a good choice to be made, a way of righteousness through it. It may be (usually is) difficult; it may involve sacrifice, may even involve martyrdom, but there it is.

And mercy -- when we fail (often), there is mercy from God, compassion from heaven, help given to stand up again when we stumble and fall. Our whole life is bound up with goodness and mercy, the constant call to do the right thing, and constant succor when we fall woefully short of that right thing. All of this is God's shepherding of us, and Christ the Good Shepherd leads us on our way.

But the last verse of the psalm is where it opens up to an even deeper 'shepherding'. In the context of the original psalm and its time, it probably meant having access to the temple of God in Jerusalem always, being able to enter in and offer worship, and never being deprived of this to the point of death. There was little awareness of eternal life in early Judaism.

But for us... the Lord's house has a different meaning, and 'the rest of our days' has a slightly longer scope now. The Good Shepherd is leading us, not to a happy earthly life, not even to a godly virtuous earthly life, but to heaven. We are living in the Lord's own house even now (the life of grace and ecclesial communion) but will experience that house as a true house, a visible tangible home, a genuine way of life and love that we cannot imagine now, but has been assured to us by the Lord.

This is the point of the whole affair, of God's shepherding work, the deep meaning of the sheepfold God leads us towards. All the rest of the psalm - the dark valleys and cool pastures, the still waters and right paths, terminate here. We are going to heaven... at least, if God has anything to say about the matter. Seek his goodness, ask for his mercy, and keep following Him no matter what... and we'll be all right. We really will be, you know.

Blog on Hiatus

Sorry for the two posts in a row here - my next installment on Psalm 23 is immediately below. However, I am off with the staff of our house in Robin Hood's Bay, England, to give them a retreat in nearby Fighly, so will be off the blog from Friday-Sunday. Back Monday, God willing, to finish up the psalm, and then we'll see what's next.

Any Takers?

You have prepared a banquet for me

In the sight of my foes

My head you have anointed with oil

My cup in overflowing

Psalm 23

Reflection -  You know, I should have mentioned yesterday that the psalm shifts in the previous verse in a very significant way. The first half of the psalm has been all third-person statements - 'the Lord... He gives... He leads...' But with the whole prospect of the valley of the shadow of death and evil and not being afraid, something interesting happens.

Suddenly, we're not talking about God - we are talking to Him. It is not enough, it is never enough, simply to talk about God, to have all the right ideas about Him, to have perfect theology and perfect verbal expression of that theology. We have to know God; just knowing about Him will not do.

Meditation, in other words, must lead to prayer. Prayer--talking to God, expressing to Him our love, our gratitude, our total need and total confidence in that need--is the end of meditation--discursive thought about God and his ways with us. Meditation leads to prayer, and prayer leads to contemplation, where we behold God with the eyes of faith and rejoice in His beauty in peace and in love.

You have prepared a banquet for me in the sight of my foes - So God takes care of us, right? God is laying out a banquet for us continually. The Eucharist, for sure - this is the utter center and most lavish earthly experience of that banquet. God Himself feeding us with Himself - what banquet could be greater, this side of heaven?

But of course there is more - after all, we don't consign all non-Catholics and non-Orthodox to the starvation bunkers of the world. God feeds his people - the invisible feeding of grace. The lavishness of creation itself - the bounty and beauty of the earth. The mysterious and most hidden and delightful action of love in the world, flowing in and out of human hearts and minds. So much food, so much God is giving us. Our meal ticket, so to speak, is total surrender to Him, total abandonment to His will. He can and does feed us as He can when this is absent, but when we utterly give ourselves to Him, it is like planting ourselves right at the head of the buffet line and getting all the choice cuts and best savory dishes.

What about these enemies? Well, the devil and the disbelieving world, of course. But I have to admit - my own worst enemy is my own disbelieving heart. And it seems like God delights in setting a banquet before me in the sight of that foe above all. God delights, in his great fatherly love, in putting me to shame in my disbelief and rebellion. And may He continue to do so until faith is put to flight in the vision of His face.

My head you have anointed with oil, my cup is overflowing - again we see the two levels of the psalm here. On the basic level, it is just another way of saying how God lavishes a banquet on us - the anointing of the head, the cup brimming with wine, all that good stuff.

But... we know that anointing with oil is something quite more than just a symbol of rich abundance. Messiah or Christ means 'anointed one'. Kings and priests and prophets were anointed in the old covenant; the whole people of God are anointed in the new one. Anointing is with the Spirit, not with rich oil. The Spirit is upon us, and the cup overflowing is filled with the love of Christ poured into our hearts by that same Spirit.

And so the banquet God gives us is not just or mainly 'all kinds of nice goodies'. We may actually live in great poverty and affliction - many people of deep faith do, as we all know. It is the gift of the Spirit that is God's banquet set before us each day. And this gift of the Spirit means the capacity to live and love as God lives and loves. To be liberated from the boundaries of our finite humanity to enter a truly divine sphere of life and action. To be divinized as a free gift of grace from our Father in heaven who in the Spirit makes us sharers in his Son's life and being.

That's the gift God offers us. Any takers?

Walking the Right Path

He guides me along the right path;

He is true to His name.

If I should walk in the valley of darkness,

 no evil would I fear.

You are there with your crook and your staff;

With these you give me comfort.

Psalm 23

Reflection - I'm taking a few days to look at Psalm 23, this most beloved and familiar of the psalms. My contention is two-fold: that it contains a whole summary of our Christian faith, particularly because Jesus took it into his own self-revelation by calling himself the Good Shepherd; that it can be read on a simple level of childlike trust and faith, but also at a very deep mystical level.

I think this two-fold level is nowhere more visible than in this stanza of the psalm. There is an obvious reading of these words that is quite true and very lovely... and then look again, look deeper, and it pulls you into this other level of reality, this profound reflection on the ways of God with us.

He guides me along the right path - Well, God teaches us the moral law. This would have been, and doubtless still is, the clear reading of this passage for a Jew. God's law is the path of life, the path of righteousness. And we have to remember that in Jewish thought this is not especially tinged with sanctimonious self-righteousness. The path of the law, the way of righteousness, truly is a way of life and of joy. To live morally is to live a good happy life, and God makes this possible by teaching us this way.

But of course it goes deeper. We never leave morality behind, never become 'free' wrongly of the demands of just behavior, but we do transcend it. And God leads us on this right path, too. This path into communion with Him in Christ by the Spirit. The path that leads us, not simply to a good human life, but into the very heart of the Trinity. The path walked by the saints, by Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, by Francis and Dominic and Kolbe... moral life, yes, but that path terminates in mystical union.

He is true to his name. God is faithful. God is God, and that means goodness, justice, truth, love. Such is our core basic faith--and don't we have to struggle with it sometimes! But there it is. But then, this name... for Christians it is not simply YHWH, but 'Father.' 'Jesus.' A personal love, a personal salvation. There is a depth here again that the psalm leads us into. What is God's name, and what is his 'trueness' to it? 

If I should walk in the valley of darkness, no evil would I fear - oh, we do love this verse, don't we? We all have our time to go down into the valley, to enter into darkness. Times of tribulation and affliction, times of deep uncertainty and confusion, times of immense sorrow and grief. Darkness--and it awaits us all. Praying this verse has been for countless millions of Christians a grace and a strength to confront the pain and sorrow of life - no evil would I fear.

But... again, there is more. The valley of darkness in Hebrew is 'the valley of the Shadow of Death' - the good old King James version was literal in its rendering. And this is, in a certain sense, our human condition. We live in the shadow of death continually. I could die today; you could, too. We don't really know, do we? And so the psalm beckons us to a way of life that is truly fearless, to live in an awareness of death that is not morbid but intensely real, to live knowing the fraility and transience of our life here and march forward through this valley with unshaking faith and fearless love.

You are there with your crook and your staff; with these you give me comfort. Again, I guess it is natural for me to hear 'the Church' here. Bishops use crooks as symbol of their shepherding role, and it truly is the Church itself which shepherds us and ushers us through this valley safely. Do you know what a crook is for, and why it is shaped that way? It is to snag the sheep when they run away - the curvy bit is designed to catch the sheep's hind leg and drag it back to the shepherd. We go running off in all sorts of directions; it is our choice to stay in the Church, in communion with the apostles and their successors that catches us up and stops us from getting too far away from the Shepherd.

But of course we are living in a most painful age of ecclesial failure and scandal, and so this reading of the psalm is somewhat anguished for us. It certainly is for me. But, beholding the 'sins' of bishops and of priests and the shame of our failures, we are called to a deeper mercy yet, a deeper forgiveness, a deeper faith. And this is truly God's 'crooking' us, his pulling us to Himself in a strong, even violent way. Comfort today comes from God, but this comfort does come as we struggle and strive to live our Catholic lives in fidelity and loyalty to His Church. And that's quite enough to ponder for one day - it's time for me to go get ready for Mass.

Places Fresh And Green

The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want. Fresh and green are the pastures where he gives me repose. Near restful waters he leads me, to revive my drooping spirit.

Psalm 23

You know, I'm finding my way on this new style of blogging, and certainly not quite sure of myself in it. One thing I may try to do from time to time is reflect on Scripture. I did that little series on the Lord's Prayer a few weeks ago, and people seemed to enjoy it. Certainly, if we are talking about the 'Ten Thousand Places' where we find the face of God, the Word of God provides more like ten million such.

And so I would like to take this most familiar of psalms and spend a few days with it. It is the one psalm that, if a person knows any Scripture at all, they probably know it, or at least the first lines of it. I believe this psalm is a sort of summary of the whole of the Bible. Certainly Jesus takes it up into his own mystery and the very depths of the Christian revelation by calling Himself the Good Shepherd and linking his shepherding work to his dying for his sheep.

It seems to me timely that, as we have lost (sort of) our German Shepherd, and wait with bated breath for the cardinals to select a new shepherd to serve in that capacity, meanwhile confronted again with the painful spectacle of Church leaders falling prey to sin and failure, that a good long contemplation of Christ the Good Shepherd is timely.

The Lord is my shepherd - there is nothing I shall want. Now, that's a statement of faith for you. Do you want anything? Anything at all? Got all you need? Faith answers that question one way; our frail and faithless humanity answers something else entirely.We seem to ourselves to need all kinds of things: if not food and drink, then friendship and love. If not shelter and clothing, then financial security and a decent job prospect.

Need, need, need... well, we have to choose ultimately, what we really believe about all this. If the Lord is our shepherd, then we shall not want. Indeed, we do not want - in Hebrew, the verb tenses are indeterminate, to say the least. God is giving me what I need right now. God is giving you what you need right now, even if what you need may apparently look like a whole lot of things that are unpleasant and mysterious. Who needs cancer, or unemployment, or a bad relationship, or mental illness? Maybe you do... for reasons far from clear to you or to me.

Fresh and green are the pastures where he gives me repose. This is a question of our prayer, I believe. Sometimes God gives us very tangible pastures, overtly beautiful resting places. But more often than not he opens those pasture gates for us in the interior recesses of our being, the pastures of the heart which, if we truly surrender to his leading, become the gateways to the pastures of His Heart. And sometimes it is in trackless wilderness or choking desert or frozen wastelands where those hidden pastures can bloom most verdantly. It is a question of trust, of surrender, and of ceaseless prayer.

Near restful waters he leads me, to revive my drooping spirit. The sacraments have been described using that language many times over the centuries. This whole business of life coming into us from without us - the whole reality of grace, of gift, of refreshing streams penetrating our souls from without, from the great Without which is the true Within - the heart of the Trinity.

I love Psalm 23 because it uses language and image that a child can understand and commit to memory, yet ushers us into mystical heights and depths that are boundless. We will pray this Psalm in heaven, I am sure, and understand it all the better there. Meanwhile, on earth, let's see where the next days take us with it.

What Power Do We Have?

In the meantime, in the quest for a complete theological vision of ecclesiology, a certain amount of criticism arose after the 1940’s, in the 1950’s, concerning the concept of the Body of Christ: the word "mystical" was thought to be too spiritual, too exclusive; the concept "People of God" then began to come into play… In the text of the New Testament, the phrase Laos tou Theou… means… the ancient People of God, the Jews, who among the world’s peoples, goim, are "the" People of God.

The others, we pagans, are not per se God’s People: we become sons of Abraham and thus the People of God by entering into communion with Christ, the one seed of Abraham. By entering into communion with him, by being one with him, we too become God’s People… Only through Christology do we become the People of God, and thus the two concepts are combined. The Council chose to elaborate a Trinitarian ecclesiology: People of God the Father, Body of Christ, Temple of the Holy Spirit.

Yet only after the Council did an element come to light – which can also be found, albeit in a hidden way, in the Council itself – namely this: the link between People of God and Body of Christ is precisely communion with Christ in Eucharistic fellowship. This is where we become the Body of Christ: the relationship between People of God and Body of Christ creates a new reality – communion. After the Council it became clear, I would say, that the Council really discovered and pointed to this concept: communion as the central concept. I would say that, philologically, it is not yet fully developed in the Council, yet it is as a result of the Council that the concept of communion came more and more to be the expression of the Church’s essence, communion in its different dimensions: communion with the Trinitarian God – who is himself communion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit – sacramental communion, and concrete communion in the episcopate and in the life of the Church.

Address to the Roman Clergy, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Reading this as a member of Madonna House, I cannot help but hear Catherine Doherty’s voice in the background. She had her own rather strong views on the whole subject of ecclesiology. The Mystical Body of Christ was, for her, the image that spoke most deeply to her, and she never really warmed up to ‘People of God’ as an image.

Her mystical body ecclesiology was anything but ‘spiritual’ (in the wrong sense of the word) or ‘exclusive’ – for her, it meant that she, you, I were deeply connected to the whole of humanity, that in Christ our actions and choices, our prayers and sacrifices, our daily fidelity to the duty of the moment were made efficacious across the face of the earth and could be applied to the needs of the poor, the suffering, the struggling sinners—the whole need of the world for succour and support.

A commentor asked me yesterday what ‘power’ women have in the Church today. I said there, but will say here on the front page of the blog, that the only power any of us have, really, is this power of being a cell in the Mystical Body. Of throwing our tiny humanity, with all its stumbles and staggering, onto Christ and His Power to save, heal, raise up. Power to issue an encyclical, to preach a homily, to enact this program or promulgate that doctrine—well, it’s not that all that is nothing, of course, but the real power is the power of Christ moving through our human weakness.

And the sacraments are the great sign and the great effectiveness of this power. I am glad that Benedict fills out the ‘people of God’ image by linking it to communion in the Eucharist. Catherine didn’t like the image because she saw it being used in a too humanistic and sociological way. So often the phrase became a slogan advocating for more democracy in the Church or ‘empowerment’ of the laity, understood as their being in some kind of zero sum competition with the clergy.

Rather, we are the People of God insofar as we gather around the Lord at His table, and unite ourselves to His sacrifice of praise to His Father. This, and this alone, makes us ‘God’s people’.

And so we are in this ‘time of the Church’ for the next few weeks, called to pray together and truly take hold, I would suggest, of our deep Catholic identity in all the media firestorms, scandals and rumors of scandals, and all that stuff. To know that we are in Christ and Christ is in us, and all we are asked to do is to unite ourselves with Him in the Spirit and surrender our will to His, as Mary did, knowing full well that only thus is Christ brought to the world, and that only Christ brought to the world can heal the world and raise it up to new life.

The Most Beautiful Thing in the World

To how many does Christianity really seem ‘something big, something growing, to which we can give ourselves up completely with joy and enthusiasm’? Do… unbelievers… observe on our brows the radiance of that gladness which, twenty centuries ago, captivated the fine flower of the pagan world..? In a word, while we are fully alive to the blasphemy in Nietzsche’s terrible phrase [that God is dead] in its whole context are we not also forced to see in ourselves something of what drove him to that blasphemy?

Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism

Reflection -  This is a quote from my thesis research, not by Joseph Ratzinger. The book cited is one of the truly great books of the twentieth century, and great in not being toooo long and technical, either.

I always cherish, if that's the right word, the saying attributed to Nietzsche that he would be persuaded of the truth of Christianity a bit more readily if only Christians looked more redeemed. There is truth to that. Do we look happy that Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead and has brought us the sure and certain promise of eternal life and bliss is we should only believe in Him and follow Him in the obedience of faith?

Does our faith, in fact, make us happy? This sentence I just wrote above - what effect does it have on you? Just empty words on a computer screen? Or the very center and substance of life, a transforming fact that all your days center around and that is the constant refrain of your mind and heart.

God loves us. Love has been poured out in Jesus Christ. This love is saving, transforming. It pulls us out of the death trap of the world, of our broken and battered humanity, and lifts us up to the very heart of God, to the very heart of life and love and splendor of glory.

Do we believe this? Then... why is there so little joy in our lives, in our countenances, in our voices, in our homes? I'm not trying to lay a guilt trip on anyone - God knows I only have to look in the mirror if I want to see a lousy Christian! But we have to be clear that the world, so badly in need of conversion, is mostly not going to be converted by logical arguments, certainly not by angry harangues, and not even by really good social justice programs or other forms of political advocacy, good and proper as those might be.

The world is converted by beauty, and beauty starts, not with painting a magnificent icon, composing a gorgeous chorale, or carving a sculpture from ivory or marble. Most of that kind of beauty is beyond most of us most of the time.

The most beautiful thing in the world is a human face, radiant with joy. It is the joy shining from a face of one who actually believes that Jesus is who Jesus says He is, and really did what we say He did, and really is present in, with, around us continually. This is the most beautiful thing in the world, and it is a beauty within all our grasp. It is this beauty, and the love, the friendship, the genuine charity that accompanies such a beauty, that will re-Christianize our world.

God is not dead... but we can act at times as if He is. We can keep God pretty firmly hid away in our heads, our hearts, the 'place of the skull' where the dead Christ lay.

Well, He cannot be confined there. He bursts forth from there, every time. Even in Lent, Christ is risen from the dead (a***lu**). And it seems to me that a great prayer of Lent, and of life, is that we truly do believe in all this stuff we say we believe, and that we have the grace and courage to show it forth in how we live, how we carry ourselves, what we show forth to the world.

Really, do we have any idea of our own greatness? Of the thunderous, splendiferous, magnificent reality of what it is to be a baptized Christian. Do we not know that we are God's temple? It is so very amazing to be what we in fact are, and the world really does need to know about it. Let's think about how our face can be one of those ten thousand faces that show the Father's love to the world.

It's All So Very Messy

I would say that theological discussion in the 1930’s and 1940’s, even in the 1920’s, was entirely conducted under the heading Mystici Corporis. It was a discovery that brought so much joy at that time, and within this context emerged the formula: We are the Church, the Church is not a structure; we Christians, all together, we are all the living body of the Church. And naturally, this obtains in the sense that we, the true "we" of believers, together with the "I" of Christ, are the Church; every single one of us, not a particular "we", a single group that calls itself Church.

No: this "we are Church" requires me to take my place within the great "we" of believers of all times and places. Therefore, the primary idea was to complete ecclesiology in a theological way, but also in a structural way, that is to say: besides the succession of Peter, and his unique function, to define more clearly also the function of the bishops, the corpus of bishops.

And in order to do this, the word "collegiality" was adopted, a word that has been much discussed, sometimes acrimoniously, I would say, and also in somewhat exaggerated terms. But this word – maybe another could have been found, but this one worked – expressed the fact that the bishops collectively are the continuation of the Twelve, of the corpus of Apostles. We said: only one bishop, the Bishop of Rome, is the successor of a particular Apostle, namely Peter. All the others become successors of the Apostles by entering into the corpus that continues the corpus of the Apostles. Hence it is the corpus of bishops, the college, that is the continuation of the corpus of the Twelve, and thus it has its intrinsic necessity, its function, its rights and duties.

To many this seemed like a power struggle, and maybe some were thinking of their power, but substantially it was not about power, but about the complementarity of the different elements and about the completeness of the corpus of the Church with the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, as structural elements; and each of them is a structural element of the Church within this great corpus.

Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – Well, I warned you that, new blog or no new blog, Pope Benedict would not be too far away from my reflections. Especially in this time when we are so very focussed on the Church, on the bishops, on the Cardinals in a particular way, it is good to hear his thoughts on the movement towards collegiality at Vatican II.

Whenever we start thinking about the structural elements of the Church, which if we are using the imagery of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ could be likened to the skeletal system, the bones that keep the body configured in a way that makes life and movement possible, we have problems. Because of course, those ‘bones’ are not just bones, they are men. And as men they are prone to the same sins and failures we all fall into. As men they can be wrong about things, or wicked, or foolish, or weak. As men they can hurt and be hurt.

Oh, it’s all so very messy! Why did God do it this way? Why did He make His Church so dependent on these people, who (it is so easy to say) are so messed up, so wrong, so infuriatingly human, so much of the time?

Well, why did God make the Church reliant on you and me, either? And… it is, you know. The bishops and Cardinals may be the ‘bones’ of the Church, so to speak, but you and I are the muscles, the cells, the organs, all of it together. And they can be either wise and holy or foolish and sinful, but if you and I are not alive in Christ, passionate with love of God and neighbour, what difference does it make, anyhow?

We’re all in this together, in other words. Yes, the bishops have power of a sort and can do great harm or great good in their ministry. But so can you. So can I. And we do. Ecclesial communion is not served by finger pointing, by sneering, by snark and invective against the leaders God has currently given us, or by engaging in whatever sort of power struggle we think will move our agenda forward. We need to pray for them. We need to pray for one another. We need to preach the Gospel with our lives and love one another with sincerity of heart and firmness of purpose.

This is what makes the Mystical Body healthy, vigorous, alive. And this is the call of Christ to us always, but especially in this time of transition in the Church.

Lovely in Limbs and Eyes

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; _myself_ it speaks and spells,
Crying _What I do is me: for that I came_.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

G.M Hopkins

 

Reflection - So, a new day, a new month, a new era in the Church, and (least importantly of all) a new blog to go with it. I wanted to start with returning to this poem by Hopkins which I quoted last week to you, explaining the title of the new blog.

 

Hopkins' poetry is both very beautiful, and very convoluted to read at times. This is one of his easier ones, actually. The whole sense here is that each created thing perpetually speaks its own name, tells its own truth, 'deals out that being indoors each one dwells.' The whole beautiful theology of the true is in this. We are not isolated fragments floating in a meaningless cosmic soup, bumping up against each other randomly.

 

Rather, every particle of being is communicating itself to every other, and we rational creatures have the awesome capacity to receive this communication. We have room in our minds, and so in our hearts, for all of creation. We can know, and knowing, love everything that is.

 

Hopkins says more, though. And that is this whole sense that all creation, but most especially the human creation, and most especially of that, the good, just man or woman of creation is not only speaking his or her own name, but Christ's. It is this whole sacramental sense of life I hope to bring forth on this blog at least some of the time. Whatever in reality is good, is true, is beautiful, is at least a reflection of Christ, and quite often is a true sharing in Christ's life and love.

 

Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limb and eyes. And in the perception of this -- and don't forget, we have to look for it, or we miss it! -- we come to the Father through the features of men's faces. And so in my new design for the blog, which I will doubtless be tweaking and adjusting in days to follow, I have faces, faces, faces running down the side. These particular faces are ones who have touched my life and shown me the Father, at least a little bit. No doubt I will be adding more as time goes on.

 

It is this whole beautiful reality that God comes to us in other people. Other people are not 'God', exactly - God is God alone - but there is a sacramentality that is very real and very important. Each of us is meant to be a sacrament of sorts - we do not only speak our own name, but His. Our lives are not only about our own truth, but His. Our faces are not our own, but are mirrors of His. And this is what I will try to look for and reflect on in the blog ahead.

 

Otherwise... meet the new blog, same as the old blog. I still have lots of material from Joseph Ratzinger and have no intention of keeping it to myself. No doubt the new pope's face will adorn the blog shortly, and I will delve into his writings and public addresses. And... well, we will see. And I hope you will all continue to join me as I throw my little bit into the social media maelstrom, doing my best to show God's face in this strange digital world.