Feast of the Holy Innocents, martyrs

Readings: 1 John 1:5-2:2; Ps 124:1-5.7-8; Matthew 2:13-16

It's interesting to the point of fascination that three of the first five days of Christmas are days we celebrate martyrs: Stephen on the Second Day, the Holy Innocents on the Fourth Day, and Thomas Becket on the Fifth Day of Christmas. In a homily for Stephen’s Feast, Fulgentius proclaimed: “And so the love that brought Christ from heaven to earth raised Stephen from earth to heaven.”

Indeed, we are saved by love. One of the best-known verses of scripture is John 3:16- “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…” It is only through Jesus Christ that anyone is saved.

Indeed, we are saved by love. One of the best-known verses of scripture is John 3:16- “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…” It is only through Jesus Christ that anyone is saved.

Herod unleashed lethal violence against the children of Bethlehem to kill a potential rival the magi told him had been born there. He was fearful that this rival would take his kingdom from him. Maybe he called to mind the prophet Samuel anointing the boy David, the youngest of Jesse’s sons, to become king, replacing the equally jealous Saul.

David, too, came from Bethlehem. Saul’s efforts to kill David all failed. David, even when he had the chance, refused to harm, let alone kill, Saul. Just so, Jesus posed no threat to Herod. In the end, Herod was the enemy of Herod.

On the Fourth Day of Christmas, the Church celebrates the holy innocents. Specifically, we remember those children of ancient Bethlehem, who were killed on Herod’s order. Today, we should also call to mind those innocent children who have suffered terribly throughout the ages, including those children who even now are victims of violence, abuse, and war.

Saint Quodvuldeus, in a sermon delivered on this feast, declared: “The children die for Christ, though they do not know it. The parents mourn for the death of martyrs. The child makes of those as yet unable to speak fit witnesses to himself.” This is “the kind of kingdom” Jesus came to establish. It is a kingdom of the meek and lowly, of the vulnerable and defenseless. This is why the Lord teaches we must become like children to enter God’s kingdom.

In Stephen and the Holy Innocents, we see how God’s deliverance works and how Jesus saves. These witnesses show us in a stark and dramatic way the central paradox of Christian faith, taught by Jesus later in Matthew’s Gospel: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Herod and the Magi

Now, let’s be clear, God did not cause or will the violent death of innocent children either then or now. Neither was the Father complicit in or responsible for the death of his beloved Son. As theologian Owen Cummings observed:

God did not predetermine that Jesus would have to suffer on the cross, just as God does not predetermine that any of us has to suffer on our own crosses. That would turn God into a cruel tyrant [and us into something like marionettes acting out a script]. What God did in the whole event of Jesus, in the incarnation and crucifixion, was to enter into the messy details of our world, a world marked by arbitrariness and unpredictability. The God who is nothing but unconditional Love, embodied and made visible in Jesus, lets the consequences of being Love in our flawed human world happen without evasion or avoidance

This why even though God did not predestine it, the scriptures from the beginning taught that the Messiah would suffer, die, and rise. And so, it was Herod who willed and caused the massacre of the infant boys in Bethlehem. In his infinite love and mercy, God can and often does bring good from our evil. What else can resurrection be about?

Bringing good from evil is what our first reading, taken from 1 John’s, is about. To receive forgiveness for your sins, you must acknowledge and confess them. The inspired author calls our all-too-human bluff by boldly stating that if you deny you are a sinner you are a liar. Such a denial, all too common today, may be the worst sin.

By contrast, if we acknowledge our sins, through Jesus Christ, God mercifully forgives us. By definition, a sin is a deliberately willed thought, word, action, or inaction that is contrary to the love of God and love of neighbor. Because sin is wrong, when confessing it, we must make “a firm purpose of amendment,” which is why we say in confession, “I firmly intend, with [God’s] help, to sin no more and to avoid whatever leads me to sin.”

Herod’s heart was proud, vain, and fearful. As a result, he became wicked. You put your own heart at risk when you deny your sins and refuse to examine your conscience. This is nothing less than to reject your need for God’s grace given through Christ. This, too, smacks of vanity, pride, and perhaps fear. Someone who insists that her/his sins are greater than God’s mercy, whether they know it or not, far from being humble, is prideful on a rather grand scale.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn learned from his experience of the Soviet Gulag: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts.” This is why you should examine your heart regularly, even daily.

Keep in mind the theses and antitheses from Jesus’ teaching collected in the Sermon on the Mount, also found in Matthew’s Gospel. Here’s the first one to jog your memory: “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.”

Often we like to think our anger is if not righteous then at least just. Most of the time, my friends, it is not. If Jesus and Stephen could not be angry with those who murdered them for doing God’s will, then what justification do you have? You can disapprove of something someone has done and not be angry with that person. You are supposed to even love your enemies. An enemy is someone who actively seeks to injure you. “Do not be overcome by evil,” Saint Paul teaches, “but overcome evil with good.”

As Jesus shows us over and over, it is always a matter of the heart. We need to look to his Sacred Heart, pierced but still on fire with love, lest we too fall into the habits of jealousy, pride, and vanity, like Herod.

Feast of Saint Stephen, first martyr

Readings: Acts 6:8-10; 7:54-59; Psalm 31:3-6.6.8.16-17; Matthew 10:17-22

By long tradition and practice, the Church celebrates the Feast of Saint Stephen, the Church’s first martyr, the day after Christmas. This is only incongruent to people who do not really understand the meaning of Christmas. From her earliest days, the Church has identified the wood of the manger with the wood of the altar.

It was Saint Francis of Assisi, also a deacon, who also gave us the Christmas creche or Nativity scene, and who identified the wood of the manger with the wood of the cross. This is set forth nicely in a contemporary Christian song by Michael Card, in a tune entitled “The Final Word":

He spoke the Incarnation and so was born the Son
His final word was Jesus, he needed no other one
He spoke flesh and blood, so he could bleed and make a way divine
And so was born the baby who would die to make it mine¹

As Christians, we must always bear in mind what the resurrected Lord said to the dejected disciples as they made their way from Jerusalem back to Emmaus: “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”² He then proceeded, as he accompanied them, to explain how the scriptures teach this front-to-back.

Saint Stephen, on the day after our celebration of the Lord’s Nativity, stands as a stark reminder of the Risen Lord's teaching. He also gives us a wonderful example of what is set forth this morning in our Gospel, taken this morning from Saint Matthew. In worldly terms, salvation is often a dirty, gritty, and at times terrifying affair. But the hope we have in Christ trumps this.

Hope is not optimism. Standing on the threshold of martyrdom, a martyr is not optimistic. Stephen knew the trajectory of what was happening to him as the result of his bold preaching of Jesus as Messiah and Lord. He was not optimistic that his brethren, incensed at what they perceived to be not only heresy but blasphemy of his proclamation, would drop their rocks and let him walk away.

It was genuine hope that theological virtue- a gift from God- that enabled Stephen not only to stand firm in his testimony of the one who died and rose, thus becoming the gate to eternal life, but to forgive and pray to God to forgive those who were going to kill him.

To push the second part of our first reading from Acts a bit further, after declaring to the hostile group his vision of the risen Lord sitting in glory at the righthand of the Father, falling to his knees from the impact of the stones, Stephen prayed: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”³

The Stoning of Saint Stephen, by Giovanni Battista Lucini, 1508

Irenaeus, it seems to me, was quite correct in his identification of these men as deacons. Along with episcopacy, the diaconate is the oldest major order of ministry in the Church, older than the presbyterate. Indeed, we see in the lives of Stephen and Philip, another of those seven men, the threefold munera of diaconal ministry: word, liturgy, and charity. Philip, who fled the persecution the earliest Church was experiencing in Jerusalem, went to Samaria with his daughters, where he continued to boldly preach the Gospel. Thus, Philip survived the persecution. Stephen did not survive the persecution. He triumphed over it!

It also bears noting that Paul, under his Hebrew name Saul (Paul, or Paulus, being his Latin, or Roman, name), makes his first appearance in Sacred Scripture at the stoning of Stephen. He was likely the one who incited the synagogue members to drag Stephen outside the city and kill him. I believe the faith, hope, and love exhibited by Stephen eventually helped facilitate Paul's conversion.

I think the Intercessions from the Church's Morning Prayer today can serve as an exhortation on this Second Day of Christmas:

Your martyrs freely embraced death in bearing witness to the faith,
     -give us true freedom of the Spirit, O Lord.
Your martyrs professed their faith by shedding their blood,
     -give us a faith, O Lord, that is constant and pure.
Your martyrs followed in your footsteps by carrying the cross,
     -help us to endure courageously the misfortunes of life.
Your martyrs washed their garments in the blood of the Lamb,
     -help us to avoid the weaknesses of the flesh and worldly allurements.⁴

Saint Stephen, holy martyr, imitator of the Infant of Bethlehem, pray for us, that we, too, may come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.

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1 Michael Card. The Final Word (album). “The Final Word” (song).^↩
2 Luke 24:26.^↩
3 Acts 7:60.^↩
4 Liturgy of the Hours. Proper of Saints, December 26- Saint Stephen, first martyr- Feast. Intercessions.^↩

Urbi et orbi- Christmas 2023

URBI ET ORBI MESSAGE
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
FRANCIS

Christmas 2023

Dear Brothers and Sisters, Merry Christmas!

The eyes and the hearts of Christians throughout the world turn to Bethlehem; in these days, it is a place of sorrow and silence, yet it was there that the long-awaited message was first proclaimed: “To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord” (Lk 2:11). Those words spoken by the angel in the heavens above Bethlehem are also spoken to us. We are full of hope and trust as we realize that the Lord has been born for us; that the eternal Word of the Father, the infinite God, has made his home among us. He became flesh; he came “to dwell among us” (Jn 1:14). This is the good news that changed the course of history!

The message of Bethlehem is indeed “good news of great joy” (Lk 2:10). What kind of joy? Not the passing happiness of this world, not the glee of entertainment but a joy that is “great” because it makes us great. For today, all of us, with all our shortcomings, embrace the sure promise of an unprecedented gift: the hope of being born for heaven. Yes, Jesus our brother has come to make his Father our Father; a small child, he reveals to us the tender love of God, and much more. He, the Only-Begotten Son of the Father, gives us “power to become children of God” (Jn 1:12). This is the joy that consoles hearts, renews hope and bestows peace. It is the joy of the Holy Spirit: the joy born of being God’s beloved sons and daughters.

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Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day

Readings: Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98:1-6; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18

Unlike Easter, when the main liturgy is the Easter Vigil, which is the main liturgy of the entire liturgical year, the main Mass of Christmas is Mass During the Day, this Mass. Apart from preparing for Christmas by observing Advent, I can think of no better way to “keep Christ in Christmas” than by assisting at Mass on the Nativity of the Lord.

Jesus Christ is the full revelation of God. As the Christian singer-songwriter, Michael Card sang:

He spoke the Incarnation and so was born the Son
His final word was Jesus, he needed no other one
He spoke flesh and blood, so he could bleed and make a way divine
And so was born the baby who would die to make it mine¹

This is really the message of the Church’s readings for this main Christmas liturgy taken as they are from Isaiah, the Psalms, Hebrews, and John’s Gospel.

“And the Word became flesh…” For us and for our salvation, God became human through the Virgin Mary. It has been noted that the Incarnation of the Son of God is an event “so earth-shattering that it enacts something akin to the psychoanalytic concept of trauma” on the world.²

This traumatic impact isn’t only the result of God becoming human in the person of Jesus, but the manner in which he did it. To wit: the Son of God was not born into the world as the emperor of Rome, who were thought by the Romans to be divine, sons of God. Rather, the Lord was born a marginal person to a marginal people in an out-of-the-way but troublesome part of the lands conquered and occupied by Rome.

As to why God became incarnate in the manner he did, Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians provides a convincing answer: “God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something.”³ Jesus himself is chief among “the lowly and despised of the world.”

The Word becoming flesh is not static, merely an historical event. It is the dynamic of the whole of reality, of God’s creative and redemptive work. It is the Spirit-driven dynamic of what occurs in the Mass. Hence, every Mass is a Christ-Mass.

Of necessity, the Liturgy of the Word precedes the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The culmination of the Liturgy of the Eucharist and, indeed, of the whole Mass, is the Communion Rite. What happens or what is supposed to happen in and through this sacrament is that the Word is made flesh in us and, as we are sent forth, through us.

Toward the end of the offertory, the deacon pours a few drops of water into the wine. As he does so, he quietly says words almost identical to those found in our Collect, or opening prayer, for this Mass: “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”⁴

This happens after we listen to the proclamation of God’s word, the scriptures. We make a huge mistake when we conceive of Christmas only or mainly as something that happened a long time ago in a land far away. We also miss out when we reduce Christmas to a sentimental journey, trying to create or recreate something we never had but wanted, or something we feel we’ve lost, or, worse yet, a scene out of slick advertising.

While looking back can be useful for looking ahead, you can’t live life in reverse. Christ beckons you ever forward, forward to the realization of your destiny, which is “to become children of God,” born, “not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God.”⁵ For this to happen, Christ must be born in you.

Hence, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, you must give your own fiat to God, saying, in effect, “May it be done to me according to your word.”⁶ Those born of God are those who experience that the mystery of life in Christ is that Christ can live you.⁷ This is the message of Christmas, which comes in so many layers of cultural and commercial wrapping and packing. I don’t know about you, but I find Santa Claus to be pretty thin gruel.

When you are born of God, as the Word becomes flesh in you, you become one who bears the glad tidings we heard about in our reading from Isaiah. Our birth as children of God, like natural birth, involves pain and travail. Sanctification, being ever more conformed to the image of Christ, takes time and unfolds, unevenly, in and through the circumstances of your everyday life.

The life of grace into which we are born through the waters of baptism is nourished by the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. It was Saint Augustine who preached

that the Eucharist gives us is unity. This means that after we have received Christ’s body and become his members, we are what we have received. Only then does the Eucharist really become our daily bread⁸

Augustine continued, noting the link between word and sacrament,

what I preach to you is also your daily bread. The same holds true for the hymns that you hear and pray… When, however, we have reached our destination… we will see the Word himself, eat, hear and drink him⁹

And so, my dear friends, the Word made flesh still seeks to make his dwelling not only among us but in and through us. The Spirit of Christmas is the Spirit of Christ, that is, the Holy Spirit, who, in a few moments on this altar will transform our humble gifts of bread and wine (not quite gold, frankincense, and myrrh) into the body and blood of Christ. “May we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”¹⁰

A Happy Christmas to all!

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1 Michael Card. The Final Word (album). “The Final Word” (song).^↩
2 John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, Creston Davis, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, 7.^↩
3 1 Corinthians 1:28.^↩
4 Roman Missal. The Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day. Order of Mass, sec. 24.^↩
5 John 1:13.^↩
6 Luke 1:38.^↩
7 Colossians 1:27.^↩
8 Saint Augustine. Sermon 57,7,7.^↩
9 Ibid.^↩
10 Roman Missal. The Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day. Order of Mass, sec. 24.^↩

Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Night

Readings: Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-3.11-13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

O Holy night! The stars are brightly shining
It is the night of our dear Savior's birth
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
'Til He appears and the soul felt its worth
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn
Fall on your knees

So goes the first verse of my favorite Christmas carol. A carol differs from a hymn in that a carol is a festive song, generally religious but not necessarily so. By contrast, a hymn is a solemn song of worship.

What is lovely about the best Christmas carols, like O Holy Night, is they are memorable and theologically dense. In other words, they convey the revelation of God in Jesus Christ simply by being beautiful. Their message goes from our heads to our hearts through our voices. This is why it said that the one who sings prays twice.

Far from being the end, tonight marks the beginning of the Christian festival of Christmas. Traditionally, Christmas lasts twelve days- the twelfth night being Epiphany on 6 January. For Roman Catholics in the United States, Christmas goes until the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which we usually celebrate, as we will this year, on 8 January.

There is a lot of concern about keeping Christ in Christmas. As Christians, the best way to keep Christ in Christmas is by observing Advent. Celebrating the Annunciation on 25 March should help us keep in mind of the fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph observed a nine-month Advent as they prepared for Jesus’ birth.

It is also telling that, despite his parents’ preparations, the Lord was born during their sojourn to Bethlehem and not at home in their native Nazareth. This lends some credibility to the saying, “We plan, God laughs.” But the preparation required for Christmas is not all the busyness we tend to engage in this time of year. It is not all the shopping, decorating, socializing, cooking, fretting, and fussing. It is preparing your heart so that Christ can be born in you. This requires prayer and meditation, which leads to contemplation.

Like Mary and Joseph, we need to prepare our hearts and our souls to receive Christ. We do so not knowing exactly when or how he will come to us. We wait in hope, trusting that he will come. Christ almost never arrives in an expected way and often not in the ways we want him to show up.

Jesus did not come to deprive you of your freedom or to take away your humanity by his overpowering divinity. Rather than get you out of jams, the Lord accompanies you through them, even those of your own making. Therefore, when you’re struggling, going through a difficult time, or facing daunting circumstances, it is important not to jump to the conclusion that God has abandoned you. It is precisely through those kinds of circumstances that you can come to realize Jesus Christ is Emmanuel, God with us.

The disconnection between the manner of Christ’s appearance and our expectations is a sure sign of what O Holy Night indicates with the lyrics: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining.”

Like his birth in an out-of-the-way place in a nowhere town in a marginal part of the Roman Empire, Christ’s coming now as then is quiet and simple. Think about the “sign” the angel told the shepherds to look for: “you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”¹ This is the sign that “Christ the Lord” is born? Yes! And therein lies its message and power.

As Pope Benedict XVI noted in a Christmas homily years ago- the Lord of the Universe

does not come with power and outward splendor. He comes as a baby – defenseless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child… God made himself small so we could understand him²

As inauspicious as it is, Jesus’s advent, his arrival, his coming dispels the darkness, as our reading from Isaiah indicates. We know has arrived when, to quote the carol again, the soul feels its worth. The Lord’s quiet presence brings peace in the midst of chaos, inspires hope when you are tempted to despair, and enables you to see through and beyond “this present darkness.”³

From the earliest Church, the manger has served as a symbol for the altar, on which we consecrate the bread that, by the Spirit’s transforming power, the same power that made the universe- the power of divine love, “becomes Christ himself: the true food for our hearts.”⁴

To relegate Christ’s coming or arrival to a highly sanitized scene set a long time ago in a land far away is to do nothing more than engage in sentimentalism. As nice as it is at times, sentiment has no transformative power. A remedy for this is found in the teaching of that great Doctor of the Church, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who noted that the Lord arrives three times.

Advent prepares us not just or even primarily for our celebration of the Lord’s first coming but is preparation for his second coming at the end of time. Christ’s third coming happens or potentially happens (if we open ourselves to receive him), between the first two.

Occurring as it does between the other two, Christ’s third coming is like a path we walk as pilgrims from his first arrival to his second coming. As our reading from the Letter to Titus indicates, our pilgrim path is the way of faith, hope, and love, making it the path of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. This is how we “live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ.”⁵

My dear friends in this Holy Mass, from which the term Christ-Mass comes to us, you can experience for yourself God becoming small. So small that he can fit in the palm of your hand. As you open yourself to welcome Christ you can’t help but experience for yourself the thrill of joy that accompanies the in-breaking of that new and glorious morning: the light of Christ.

At the end of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens gives us, in his description of the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge, a wonderful example of the transformation wrought by receiving Christ. In the wake of his supernatural encounters with the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, Ebenezer Scrooge, Dickens wrote:

became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him⁶

And so, as Dickens ended his A Christmas Carol, “God bless Us, Everyone!”⁷ Merry Christmas.

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1 Luke 2:11-12.^↩
2 Pope Benedict XVI. Homily for the Solemnity of the Nativity of Our Lord: Midnight Mass: 25 December 2006.^↩
3 Ephesians 6:12..^↩
4 Pope Benedict XVI. Homily for Midnight Mass: 25 December 2006.^↩
5 Titus 2:12b-13.^↩
6 Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol. “The End of It.”.^↩
7 Ibid.^↩

Year B Second Sunday of Advent

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-5.9-11; Psalm 85:9-14; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

Despite being a short liturgical season, Advent has a twofold character. Extending from the Feast of Christ the King, which is the final Sunday of each liturgical year, Advent begins by focusing on Christ’s Second Coming and the final judgment. Hence, during the first two weeks of Advent, we are exhorted to repent and live in readiness, to be watchful because we know neither the hour nor the day of the Lord’s return.

In human terms, two thousand years seems like an awfully long time. As our reading from Second Peter reminds us, for God a thousand years is like a day. This reading also bids us to be mindful that one way God makes his mercy manifest is through patience. God gives us time to repent. While God is infinite, by its very nature, time is not.

God graciously gives you time to acknowledge your sins and, moreover, to endeavor, with his help, to change. This scripture passage not only tells us that repentance makes you ready for Christ’s coming (Advent means to come or to arrive) but that it hastens “the coming of the day of God.”¹

A Christian, that is, someone who repents and believes, far from living in fear of Christ’s return, eagerly awaits, anticipates, even longs for this day. This is why the one-word Aramaic prayer Maranatha was often on the lips of the earliest Christians. Translated it means something like “Come, Lord.” As Christians living nearly two millennia later, we should make this prayer our own.

Discussing the hypothetical, “What would you do if you knew the Lord was returning tomorrow?” is often telling. Of course, the first problem is, you will never know the hour or the day of his return- this is precisely the point made over and over in the New Testament by Jesus himself and a variety of inspired authors. But the answer is usually something like a laundry list of things you should already be doing and know you should be doing but perhaps aren’t and then feverishly doing those things in the brief time you would have.

Advent reminds us that, since Christ’s Ascension, it is always the end of time until the end of time.

The call to repent and to be repenting is not a rebuke. Rather, it is a generous invitation, an offer of genuine hope. It is, as our reading from Isaiah says, “good news.”²

Our Gospel today is the first eight verses of Saint Mark’s Gospel. In this passage, the inspired author identifies John the Baptist as the messenger from Isaiah sent to herald the coming of the Messiah, to prepare the way for Jesus’ earthly ministry.

Throughout most of the Church’s history, along with the Blessed Virgin Mary, John the Baptist has been highly revered, much more so than he is today. Sadly, he is often relegated to a minor figure. But he is a major figure in salvation history and should be venerated as such. During each year of the Sunday cycle of readings, on the Second Sunday of Advent, we hear the Baptist’s call to repentance.

So, the question is not “Have you heard the call to repentance?” Rather, have you listened to it and heeded it? Hearing is different from listening. I can hear someone speaking without listening to what s/he is saying. In other words, I can relegate someone’s voice to something like that of Charlie Brown’s schoolteacher, or I can pay attention to what s/he is trying to tell me. The Baptist’s cry is as urgent and necessary now as it was when he first made it on the banks of the river Jordan. Listen to him!

Saint John the Baptist, by Alvise Vivarini, ca. 1475

A few verses on in the first chapter of Mark, after being baptized himself by John and emerging from his desert sojourn, Jesus’ message echoes the Baptist’s: “Repent, and believe in the gospel.”³ Translated more literally, the words of Jesus as handed on in this Gospel are “Be repenting and be believing in the good news.” Note the present active tense, which gives these words a dynamism and an urgency the standard English translation lacks.

There are two things worth noting in both John's and Jesus’ call to conversion in Mark. First, it is a mode of life, not a one-off event. What emerges from this is a dialectic: you are both always already saved, and every day is the day of salvation- no "once saved always saved," which relegates salvation to a static past event instead of what God is always doing right here, right now. Second, repenting comes before believing. It was Saint Anselm of Canterbury, the same one who noted that theology is faith seeking understanding, who pointed out that one does not know in order to believe; one believes in order to know.

Christianity is not a philosophy or a theory but a mode of existence, a way of being in the world. Christ leads you, via the Paschal mystery and the events that constitute your daily life, into the very heart of reality.

This is dramatically illustrated a bit later in the first chapter of Mark, which is without doubt one of the densest chapters in the New Testament, when Jesus calls his first disciples: Peter and his brother Andrew. Seeing them fishing, Jesus says to the brothers, with no greeting, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.”⁴ The following verse simply says, “Then they abandoned their nets and followed him.”5

Jesus did not say to the brothers, “I‘d like for you to follow me. So, go home and give it some thought and get back to me.” Neither did he lay out for them an irrefutable argument as to why they should drop their nets, all their commitments, everything and follow him.

As the Gospel According to Mark, which we will be reading during this liturgical year, unfolds, it becomes clear just how much Peter, Andrew, and the rest of the twelve had to learn and how slow they were to grasp it both in whole and in part. This is what repenting and believing looks like existentially. To follow Jesus is just that, following him without knowing the twists and turns along the path all the while trusting him to lead you to your destination, to the realization of your destiny, that for which you are made and redeemed.

And so, my dear friends, let us heed the exhortation found in the reading for Morning Prayer for this Second Sunday of Advent, taken from Paul’s Letter to the Romans:

…it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep. For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed; the night is advanced, the day is at hand6

Or, if you prefer- “Be repenting and be believing in the good news!”

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1 1 Peter 3:12.^↩
2 Isaiah 40:9.^↩
3 Mark 1:15.^↩
4 Mark 1:17.^↩
5 Mark 1:18.^↩
6 Romans 13:11bc-12a.^↩

Hope is expectation

Well, with Evening Prayer yesterday, we ushered in a new liturgical year, a new year of grace, the Year of Our Lord 2024. Think about it, 2,024 years! That's a long time!

Towards the beginning of his short text, The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days, philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out that in many respects the Church of Christ has lost its eschatological edge. Over time, many Christian sectarian movements have sought to sharpen, to regain this edge by making predictions about the end times, about Christ's return. Those sects that survive the disappointment of the failure of their initial predictions, like the Mormons, find ways of attenuating the original end-time emphasis and subsequently tamping down eschatological expectations.

Martin Heidegger, prior to writing Being and Time, delivered a phenomological lecture on Saint Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians (as well as lectures on Galatians and 2 Thessalonians- these, along with lectures on figures such as Augustine, Kierkegaard, Luther, etc., are collected in a volume The Phenomenology of Religious Life).

For those who may not know, written about AD 50, 1 Thessalonians is very likely the first book of our uniquely Christian scriptures to be written. 1 Thessalonians has a very sharp eschatological edge, as does 2 Thessalonians. It is the eschatological edge of these texts that drew Heidegger. His take on these texts was big step on Heidegger's path on his quest to recover the question of being. His quest, in turn, is about living life authentically and, given the limits of our mortality, living life with urgency.

Christian living that takes on a dull eschatological edge easily becomes just another philosophy of life. When this happens, Christianity not only looks but actually becomes exhausted, tired, one option among many and maybe even not a very interesting option. What seems to me the root cause of this dullnes is the lack of the theological virtue of hope.

Waiting requires hope. Samuel Beckett's play, the work for which he is best remembered, Waiting for Godot, is an advent play. In this play, the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting for Godot. They wait in the hope that Godot, who said he would come, will show up at some point.

As we all know, the difficult thing about waiting for someone for a lengthy period of time is the fear we will miss their arrival. Think of the old jokes about the cable guy- he will arrive sometime between 10am and 4pm. Well, you're trapped for up to six hours. The minute you decide to pop out for some reason, that is when the cable guy will inevitably come leaving a note on your door indicating that he came.

Advent means arrival. Due to its being the first season of the liturgical year, advent can also mean beginning- "The season of Advent is the advent of a new year of grace" or "The advent of Spring Training," etc.

Waiting implies expectation. I think hope is more akin to expectation than it is to wishing. Nonetheless, we often use wishing and hoping synonymously. As our Gospel (Mark 13:33-37) for this first Sunday of Advent shows, waiting for a long time for an expected arrival we tend to grow weary. It often seems to me that Christians have grown weary in our waiting. Our expectation, that is, our hope is waning.

Our weariness causes us to employ different tactics. One tactic is to point out something that, at least on Christian terms, is true, namely that Christ remains present and has never left. Indeed, the Holy Spirit is the mode of Christ's resurrection presence- until he returns. What is then urged is for us to "look" for Jesus in the here and now. Don't get me wrong, this is not terrible theology and it is a good exhortation but it is existential as opposed to eschatological.

Another tactic is to point out that we don't the hour or the day of our own death, neither do we likely know how we will die. So, be ready for death! This is certainly true regardless of whether or not you are a Christian or otherwise believe in God. As we heard last Sunday in our reading from 1 Corinthians 15 (verses 20-26. 28), at Christ's return all will be raised from the dead. According to Christian teaching, whether dead or alive, you will experience the parousia, Christ's second coming.

When looked through the lens of salvation history, beginning with ancient Israel, it is easy to see that most of human history is advent, waiting expectantly for God. Think of the first verse of the Advent hymn we sing every year throughout the season of Advent:"O come, O come Emmanuel/And ransom captive Israel/Who mourns in lonely exile here/Until the Son of God appears." One reading of this is that Emmanuel, which means "God with us," came and ransomed Israel, thus ending this mourning, lonely exile.

In light of this (here comes the oft-repeated alright/not yet dialectic), taking our cue from the embolism- the short prayer said by the priest during the recitation of the Lord's Prayer said between "...but deliver us from evil" and "For the kingdom, the power, and the glory..." "as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ." Hence, our waiting is joyful expectation, not mourning loneliness. After all, even now, God is with us.

Maybe it makes a difference that as Christians we are waiting for someone specific, someone who has already come and has promised to return. We know Him and He knows us. Hope, then, is not only expectation but trust. Trust is the issue Vladimir and Estragon face- Godot said he coming. Is he coming or not? They're not sure. The play ends with them deciding to end their waiting and leave but as the curtain falls they remain where they are.

We need to make the prayer of some of the first Christians our prayer: Maranatha. It is an Aramaic word, the precise meaning of which is difficult to determine. It means something like "Come, Lord."

Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Readings: Ezkl 34:11-12.15-17; Ps 23:1-3.5-6; 1 Cor 15:20-26.28; Matt 25:31-46

In the Creed we profess that Jesus Christ “will come to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.”¹ That Christ will return as King to Judge the world and definitively usher in God’s Kingdom remains, nearly two thousand years later, an article of Christian faith. It isn’t difficult to see that over the centuries the Church has lost a bit of its eschatological edge.

Eschatology is the word used to describe the study and explanation of ultimate things. As Christians and as Catholics, in addition to Jesus’ return, eschatology refers to the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Purgatory is not included because, like mortal life, it is transitory. Set forth more formally,

Immediately after death, each person comes before God and is judged individually (the particular judgment) and enters heaven, Purgatory, or hell. Yet at the end of time, a final judgment will occur when all are assembled before God and their relationship to God is made public (the general judgment)²

In our day religion is not, as Karl Marx insisted, the opiate of the people. Rather, the opiate of our day is living one’s life as if there is no God as if there is no day of reckoning. It stands to reason that if there is no day of reckoning, there is no need to repent, no need to change, no need to be converted.

While a necessary part of or, more accurately, a preamble to, sorrow for one’s sins is insufficient for repentance. When we make the Act of Contrition in the Sacrament of Penance, we pledge “to sin no more and to avoid whatever leads me to sin.” This is a pledge of repentance.

Before stating our firm intention “to sin no more” when making an Act of Contrition, we acknowledge our need for God’s help to make this more than merely an intention: “I firmly intend, with Your help, to do penance, to sin no more and avoid whatever leads me to sin.” Another name for God’s help is grace. It is this same grace, given us through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, that will enable you to survive the day of reckoning, not your own righteousness.

This is heavy-duty stuff. The kind of thing we are told turns people off. I believe what many people find off-putting is the prospect of self-examination. Because, as the apostle Paul points out in his Letter to the Romans, “all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God.”³ In any honest self-examination, you are bound to come up short. This might seem like bad news. It certainly is bad news if one ignores the good news.

The first bit of good news is that death is not the end for anyone. Because of Jesus Christ, all will be resurrected from the dead. Especially in our very medicalized time, we often speak of and worry about our “quality of life.” Rather than merely being an earthly concern, quality of life should be an eternal concern as well. Wisdom bids us to live sub-specie aeternitatis, that is, to live life under the aspect of eternity, to live as if there is a merciful and just God.

Christ the judge at the National Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.

Rather than causing us to turn a blind eye and/or a deaf ear to life in this world, living this way bids us to pay closer attention to the quality of life of those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned. To live sub-specie aeternitatis is to live mercifully, to live tenderly, to live like Christ. This means practicing the works of mercy. There is a simple calculation to this, one for which our Gospel today gives us the formula: if you want mercy, be merciful.

But calculation is too cold, too formal, too impersonal, too transactional. We must never forget, “God is love.”⁴ God is agape. God is self-giving, self-emptying, self-sacrificing love. Here is the good news: “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”⁵ The inspired author continues: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another.”⁶ Bearing witness to God’s love is evangelization. But this does not mean

adopting the sentimental reductionism that marks so much contemporary Christianity, characterized by a spiritualism that replaces Christ with love, an approach that, echoing Feuerbach, says not that God is love but that love is God⁷

Hence, we do not propose Christianity “first of all, as a doctrine or a moral law but… as a reflection of the attitude with which Christ relates to the world.”⁸ Christ relates to the world through tenderness and mercy, not through harshness and condemnation. Any self-examination that would yield the fruits of repentance needs to be done by gazing on yourself with the same tenderness with which Christ gazes on you. In such a self-examination, you must seek not only to discover what you need to be forgiven, but who and what you need to forgive.

Only God is God. Being God trumps being a king. Christ can only be King because he became human. Through the Incarnation, God, to quote Pope Francis, “gets involved and meddles in our miseries.”⁹ Jesus, now by means of the Holy Spirit,

gets close to our wounds and heals them with His hands… It is a personal work of Jesus. A man made sin, a man comes to cure it. Closeness. God doesn’t save just because of a decree, a law; he saves us with tenderness, he saves us with caresses, he saves us with his life¹⁰

Jesus Christ is a King unlike any other king, no matter how benevolent. He establishes his kingdom not by through politics, nor by force, not through threats and coercion, nor through laws and decrees, but through tenderness and mercy, which require patience and forbearance. Jesus Christ is the triumph of grace over karma. This is why, in the major discourse of Saint Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus teaches: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.”¹¹ The merciless have no need of God’s judgment. They judge themselves.

---

1 Roman Missal. The Order of Mass, sec. 18.^↩
2 USCCB. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults (p. 161).^↩
3 Romans 3:23.^↩
4 1 John 4:8.16.^↩
5 1 John 4:10.^↩
6 1 John 4:11.^↩
7 Borghesi, Massimo. Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis (p. 241). Liturgical Press. Kindle Edition.^↩
8 Catholic Discordance (p. 240).^↩
9 Catholic Discordance (p. 241).^↩
10 Ibid.^↩
11 Matthew 5:7.^↩

Thanksgiving Day

Readings: Sir 50:22-24; Ps 145:2-10; 1 Cor 1:3-9; Luke 17:11-19

Lift up your hearts.
We lift them up to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right and just.
It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks. Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God

So, begins the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer.

“Eucharist” is a verb and it means to give thanks. Giving God thanks is always and everywhere both our duty and our salvation. What specifically do we thank God for always and everywhere? In short, for everything: for creation, for existence, most especially for salvation through Christ our Lord. This morning we gather around the table of the Lord's word and body to celebrate together the Thanksgiving feast of all Thanksgiving feasts.

It is more than fitting that we gather for Eucharist on the day our country has long since designated as Thanksgiving Day. As Christians, everyday should be a day of thanksgiving. While all of this makes sense and is surely the kind of thing you expect to hear at Church, like many things we hear at Church, this is easier said than done. We must constantly battle forgetfulness and the vicissitudes of life.

At least for Christians, being thankful cannot mean being smug, smacking our lips and rubbing our bellies in a self-satisfied way. True thanksgiving, as our Collect for today indicates, requires us to be mindful of others, particularly those who might feel they do not have much or maybe even anything for which they can be thankful. In short, just as faith gives blossom to hope, which, in turn, bears fruit in love, genuine thanks results in giving of ourselves and of our resources.

Today’s Gospel is about thanksgiving. Jesus healed ten people of leprosy instantaneously on the spot. In other words, these ten people were very visibly afflicted with an illness, and, with a word, Jesus healed them. In the blink of an eye, they no longer had leprosy. Can you imagine?

Jesus told them to go show themselves to the priests. This was important, at least for the presumably nine Jews, so they would be ritually pure and able to participate in Israel’s worship. As they went, they suddenly noticed that they were cured. But only one of the ten, 10% of the total, came back to thank Jesus. The Greek word translated into English as “thanked” in this passage is euchariston.

I snap I took with my phone today that seems to illustrate what giving thanks often looks like

It is significant that the one who returns to thank Jesus is a Samaritan. Translating this into our context, it would be like Jesus healing ten people in Bountiful, Utah, nine of whom are Catholics while one is a Mormon. And in the end, only the Mormon comes back to thank him. Rather than overly dramatizing this episode from Luke, it probably under-dramatizes it significantly. But it is only the “stranger,” the non-Jew, the unorthodox one who thanks the Lord. Jesus himself loudly points this out. His point would not be lost on those who heard him.

As Brother David Steindl-Rast observed, “The opposite of gratefulness is just taking everything for granted.” While you can’t be grateful for everything, you can be grateful in every moment. Yes, every moment, even painful and distressing moments, maybe even particularly in painful and distressing moments. At times, being thankful takes some work and no little grace. But, as Christians, it is always and everywhere our duty and our salvation so to do, as Jesus himself and so many holy women and men have shown and continue to show us.

You can’t wait until you’re happy to be thankful. Thankfulness is not produced by happiness. Rather, happiness is the result of being thankful. It isn’t incidental or accidental that the Eucharist, or, using it as the verb it is, simply eucharist (i.e., giving thanks) is the central act of Christian worship. This is why it isn’t just nice but necessary for all of us to take an active part in the liturgy. We give thanks in worship by singing the songs, taking the postures (standing, sitting, kneeling, bowing), making the gestures, and saying/singing the responses, etc.

Perhaps the biggest mistake we can make when engaging Scripture, especially when reading the Gospels, which constitute the heart of God’s word, is to understand them as stories told or events that happened a long time ago in a land far away, in a culture not our own. The question today’s Gospel poses is not whether you’re a leper. Rather, the question is whether you’re a grateful or an ungrateful one. The fact that you’re here on Thanksgiving Day indicates the former.

As Brother David also observed: “Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefulness, and gratefulness is a measure of our aliveness.” Jesus came that we might not only have life but that we have it in abundance (John 10:10). In this Eucharist and every Eucharist, he gives us life in abundance by giving us himself.

Like the grateful leper, we come to give God thanks and we are sent forth to continue giving him thanks. By fulfilling our duty to give God thanks always and everywhere, we realize that our salvation lies in our lives becoming continual thanksgiving, eucharist. Besides, I can only imagine how eager the healed Samaritan was to tell others what Jesus had done for him.

Repenting, changing, believing

Readings: Wisdom 6:12-16; Psalm 63:2-8; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-23

From some reports I read, an interesting discussion took place at the recently concluded Synod and synodality, at least in some English-speaking and Spanish-speaking groups. What was this discussion about? It was about Christ's call and how any genuine response to his call is an acknowledgment of one's need to repent. It should go without saying that Christ calls everyone and accepts everyone who responds to his call. We must not forget that a significant part of responding to Christ's call is the desire and determination to repent.

No doubt this discussion arose in the context of other discussions about the Church being for everyone. Again, Christ calls everyone, bar none. But, as the Lord himself expressed, not everyone responds to the call and even some who say "Lord, Lord" are not committed to repenting. And so, from the beginning, the Church has had hypocrites. Even hypocrites can and do repent.

To repent is to change, to be converted, to commit yourself to being more and more transformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ. This is nothing less than committing to dying in the hope of being reborn.

Contrition, being sorry for one's sins, is necessary but insufficient for repentance. To repent is to change. The fruit of the third Luminous Mystery of the Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary is Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom, which occurs after his 40 days in the desert fasting, praying, and being tempted by the devil. If we translate Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom literally, at least according to the Gospel of Mark, his message is in the continuous tense: "be repenting and be believing" (see Mark 1:15). I don't believe it is mere happenstance that repenting comes before believing. On this view, seeing isn't believing, doing is.

Life ends with death and not necessarily with Christ's return. This is what Saint Paul reminds the Christians of ancient Thessaloniki in our New Testament reading. They are dismayed because believers are dying and Jesus has not yet returned. He reminds them that while life ends with death, death ends with resurrection. In the meantime, this requires us to wait in joyful hope. What interests the Apostle ought to interest us. He is not interested in "the last day," in the end of time. Rather, he is interested in the time of the end. What's the difference?

In his short booklet The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days, philosopher Giorgio Agamben, referring to the above difference, writes what interests Paul is "the internal transformation of time that the messianic event [Christ's birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension- the Paschal mystery] has produced once and for all, and the consequent transformation of the life of the faithful" (pg 14).

The Fourth Wise Virgin, from the series The Wise and Foolish Virgins, by Martin Schongauer, 1470-1491

Whether we're talking about the mystery of iniquity or the Paschal mystery, which are inextricably related and together comprise one mystery, in Greek a mysterion is a dramatic action, not something unknown and unknowable. This why the Greek word for sacrament is mystery. The liturgy is certainly dramatic action. The dramatic action of the mysterion is an apocalypse, an unveiling, a revelation that unfolds mystagogically we might say. It is a cosmic unfolding on an existential scale.

Today's readings are all about the transformation of our lives resulting from "the messianic event." According to the parable, as believers, we are all virgins waiting for the Bridegroom, who is Christ. Therefore, the question becomes whether you are a wise one or a foolish one. As regards the oil, I think perhaps this is an opportunity to consider grace.

Grace isn't magic. Even practicing the spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving does not magically make you holy or even necessarily holier, at least not in some idealistic or hagiographic way. But even when your practice serves the end to which these disciplines are the means, it isn't usually noticeable to you.

For most people what happens when you fast is that you get hungry. The question is what are you really hungry for? Perhaps more to this point is what happens when you abstain: you want that from which you are abstaining. I remember a number of years ago, two friends of mine who live near New York City met up to walk in the huge Way of the Cross that transits the Brooklyn Bridge each Good Friday. Good Friday, of course, is a day of fasting and abstinence. As they were making their way across the bridge, one friend said to the other, "I've never wanted a hamburger worse than I do right now."

Grace requires cooperation, consistent, persistent cooperation. This cooperation is an act of hope, hope that what I am doing or not doing is good and will bear fruit for the Kingdom. No matter how you want to parse it, faith without works is dead. Remember repenting before believing? Remember Jesus from last week's Gospel, do what they say and not what they do because they don't do what they say?

One way to view the virgins is that the foolish ones operate on the presumption of God's grace, which presumption bids them do nothing, whereas the wise virgins do not wait in that way.

As we near the end of one liturgical year and look forward to a new year of grace, it's important for each of us individually and for us as a Christian community to examine our consciences and our lives and recommit ourselves to following Christ, to letting the Holy Spirit transfigure us (the fourth Luminous Mystery of the Rosary is Jesus' Transfiguration and the fruit of that mystery is to desire holiness), recreating us evermore into the image of Christ, our Lord, whose Kingship we acknowledge.

Deacons in the Synod Synthesis Report

The past few days I have had the opportunity to start reading XVI General Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops Synthesis Report- A Church in Mission. It is a synthesis of the first of two gatherings in Rome. The second is scheduled for next October. I have not yet had the chance to read through the entire report. As you might guess, my attention immediately went to that part of the report that deals with the diaconate.

I will start by mentioning that I found it somewhat gratifying to see in
PART I- UNDER SYNODALITY: EXPERIENCE AND UNDERSTANDING Proposals

n) There is a need to find ways to involve the clergy (deacons, priests, bishops) more actively in the synodal process during the course of the next year. A synodal Church cannot do without their voices, experiences or contributions. We need to understanding [sic] better the reasons why some have felt restraint to the synodal process

My gratification, however, is tempered by a critical observation: At least as it pertains to deacons and to priests serving as pastors (i.e., parish priests), more or less excluding them from the Roman Synod needs to be seen as a lost opportunity. Therefore, at least a partial answer to how the Church can involve parish priests and deacons is to, well, involve us in every phase of the process, not to the exclusion of others but being included along with others. It seems that a Francis-led gathering of this sort would prioritize pratictioners over theoreticians.

The diaconate is taken up in PART II – ALL DISCIPLES, ALL MISSIONARIES 11. Deacons and Priests in a Synodal Church (pages 24-26). My comments on this part of the Synthesis track along the same lines as the comments I made for an Our Sunday Visitor article by Maria Wiering: "Permanent deacons have 'unique perspective' to offer at synod, they say" published last summer.

The absence of deacons is evident in Part II section 11 g-i. These sections dealing with the diaconate are more or less a catalog and rehash of known issues and seem to be set forth with little or no awareness that significant work has been and is being done in all of them. It really breaks no new ground whatsoever but repeats what we see over and over again when it comes to the present state of the diaconate as addressed in Church documents.

I feel quite certain that the perspective of knowledgeable and experienced deacons would have resulted in a much better treatment. A better treatment would set the table for a fruitful year of discussion between now and the gathering in Rome next autumn.

I also see II. 11.h that states the need for the Church to see "permanent deacons" as the diaconate's "primary form" in an effort "to understand that diaconate first and foremost in itself" as a reason for hope.

But in light of this, I have to ask, where is the consideration of the need to divorce a Catholic understanding of the sacrament of orders from the cursus honorum, the origins of which lie in the Roman imperium? The Council's recommendation that the Church ordain married men to permanently serve as deacons and Paul VI's acceptance of this recommendation was a big step in this direction. In my mind, this issue needs to be seriously engaged, at least in the Latin Church, before there can be a meaningful consideration of admitting women to the diaconate.

Building on the above, how does a "transitional" diaconate, which is only a canonical (as opposed to sacramental) category, hinder any understanding of the diaconate "in itself" and not reduce it to "a stage of access to the presbyterate"? Does the transitional diaconate contribute to an understanding, even sometimes a self-understanding, of permanent deacons as holding either a truncated priesthood or being a highly visible lay person?

In addition to deacons being absent from the Synod, parish priests were not really represented either. In light of the ironic comment about finding ways to involve us, it's important for us not to see this as something someone "up there" dreamt up that we will need to implement. This is an important if pedestrian observation. I am aware that, ideally, this isn't how synodality works. But programs aren't how evangelism works either, but look how many of them there are! Trust me, there will be programs.

This also brings up the important question as to what instruments of synodality already exist. It seems to me that one outcome of this excursion into synodality is that dioceses should really focus on developing well-functioning pastoral councils, liturgy committees, and finance committees at both diocesan and parish levels, school boards for Catholic schools, etc. These are instruments of synodality and, when done correctly, in co-responsibility. While formally these are "advisory," it seems that pastors and administrators should more or less bind themselves to what these committees recommend unless there is a really good reason not to do so in a specific instance.

Circling back to the diaconate in particular, section II.11.g of the Synthesis betrays what I can only call ignorance of what constitutes the heart of the diaconate according to the Second Vatican Council. This the Council set forth in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium sec. 29. According to this magna carta of the restored/renewed diaconate, diaconal ministry is constituted by the threefold munera of liturgy, word, and charity. Part II, 11.g of the Synod Synthesis Document seems to reduce diaconal ministry only to the munera of charity.

In II.11.g. the Synod seeks to make a fairly valid point- deacons aren't [just] substitutes for a shortage of priests. What it neglects is the concrete situation in many local churches that makes this all but inevitable. So, while deacons are not exclusively substitutes when enough priests aren't available, we certainly can and do help fill that gap. Further, it is appropriate for us to do so. To suggest otherwise is to put some kind of abstraction over current and future pastoral reality and the needs of people as well as unduly squelch the diaconate.

At least on my reading, what this section winds up doing is reducing and unduly restricting the ministry of deacons by positing a dichotomy between diakonia/munera of liturgy and charity leaving out altogether the ministry of the word. This strikes me as quite a fundamental misapprehension, one that will not help clarify or build a solid theology of the diaconate and may well serve to harm the many efforts underway.

Speaking of my own personal experience as a deacon for 20 years, I grow weary of what I have taken to calling the "Hegelian approach" to the diaconate. What does that mean? It means always defining the diaconate by what it is not. More often than not this boils down to either a misunderstanding of the restored/renewed diaconate as intended by the Council, which means either being ignorant of or simply ignoring the extensive and deep pre-conciliar positive case for the diaconate as a permanent order of sacred ministry, or, sadly, animus towards the diaconate, or, as you might guess, a combination of the two.

Next up, a brief post the Synod Synthesis Document and clericalism.

Malachi & Jesus against clericalism & a Pauline solution

Readings: Malachi 1:4b-2:2b.8-10; Ps 131:1-3; 1 Thessalonians 2:7b-9.13; Matthew 23:1-12

Our readings for this Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time are very harmonious. Fundamentally, they are about pastoral leadership among God's People. It is actually our New Testament reading, taken from 1 Thessalonians, that gives us the model for pastoral leadership. Likely written about AD 50, it bears noting that in addition to being an authentically Pauline letter (i.e., it was written by Saint Paul), 1 Thessalonians is probably the first book of the New Testament to be written- its only rival for this distinction is 1 Corinthians.

I also want to point out that, like Jesus, Paul lived the words he preached. He pioneered what today we call "bi-vocational ministry." In other words, in addition to his apostolic ministry, wherever he went, Paul supported himself as a "tent maker," the proprietor of a canvas and awning business.

In light of something I posted on another platform this morning, it's interesting that these are the readings for today. Or, perhaps, it was these readings coupled with an experience I had this past week that drove me to post what I posted. It's a chicken and egg scenario. It would be easy, oh so easy, to address these readings in a way that ignores the elephant in the room.

What is this elephant? The elephant is clericalism. Clericalism is something that Pope Francis has been addressing since the beginning of his pontificate (see Daniel P. Horan's "Pope Francis reminds us — again — to reject clericalism"). So, it's been a focal point in the Church for more than a decade. The most likely way to ignore the elephant is to fast forward to the end of the Gospel and apply it to the assembly at large. But the target of these readings, if I may use that term, or, less stridently, those to whom these are directly addressed, is clearly those in Church leadership. This would be a great Sunday for a member of the laity to share a reflection on the readings!

Sadly, I would have to say, on the whole, clericalism is on the rise in the Church in the U.S. Hence, I think in many dioceses a reckoning will occur. I can't say with any certainity what this might look like anywhere, let alone everywhere, but it will happen. Venturing a guess, taking my own twenty years of pastoral experience as the starting point, I think it will look like more of what we already see: steady attrition.

Let's face it, most disaffected people just quietly slip away. Given that it's unlikely their presence is missed and so no one will reach out to them, I think that will be the way it continues to go down. I doubt that most people who leave will reaffiliate. They will probably personally retain vestiges of Catholic belief and practice but it's unlikely these will be handed down to the next generation. Unlike some countries, the United States does not have a deeply Catholic culture, so there aren't many opportunities to participate in public processions and the like.

In thinking about retaining vestiges of Catholic belief and practice, I recalled reading about John Waters' (Irish writer) Dad, an Irish postal worker. His Dad didn't go to Church and was, understandably for anyone of his generation in Ireland, quite anti-clerical. Nonetheless, he prayed the Rosary every night. Another example that comes to mind is Edith Piaf's lovely devotion to the Little Flower, which followed this same contour.

A mosaic in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome depicts Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. Shutterstock

While there are other factors that contribute to clericalism, a leading one is current programs of priestly formation. It seems to me that in many seminaries formation in priestly identity has regressed to a largely pre-Vatican II understanding. The trend now is for men to enter priestly formation younger than was the trend for several decades. This is neutral in and of itself, but this makes seminarians much more impressionable, thus making what they're taught more important.

A friend of mine, who is not a priest and who teaches in a seminary, told me about the seminary having a visiting professor several years ago for a semester. The visiting professor was a priest-theologian from France who had done a lot of work on theology and cinema. All of the students in the seminary's theologate had to take his seminar on theology and cinema. At the first seminar, one seminarian protested, asking why he had to take this "stupid" class when they should be studying weightier matters. The visiting Prof. responded calmly, "My dear boy, in France nobody goes to Mass but everyone goes to the movies."

A priest friend of mine, someone who embodies the kind of priesthood we should be creating, shared his experience of studying some years ago in Spain. He noted that, especially during Holy Week, huge crowds turned out for public processions and exhibited great piety and faith, Christian faith, but on Easter Sunday the churches are as empty as ever. In speaking with his Spanish professors, he learned that it was because people didn't trust the hierarchy of the Church due to their support of Franco. He described this as a "priestless Catholicism" in the streets. You know what? I think that probably sounds really good even to a lot of faithful Catholics right now.

In today's Gospel, Jesus does a total takedown of clericalism. Make no mistake about who both today's Old Testament reading and Gospel are talking to and about. How many Catholics are aware that calling priests "Father" is a relatively recent development? So many clerical honorifics! Jumping down to verse 11 of the twenty-third chapter of Saint Matthew's Gospel, Jesus repeats what for him, according to the Synoptics, is a common refrain: "The greatest among you must be your servant."

In Greek, the last word of Matthew 23:11 is diakonos. So, "the greatest among you must be your deacon." Probably the best title the Pope bears, one Francis seems to take seriously, is "Servant of the Servants of God"- Deacon of the Deacons.

One reason for the restored/renewed diaconate, being at what Lumen Gentium calls "the lower level of the hierarchy," is to work in this gap (sec. 29). I often think we're not doing this as well as we might. At least in some instances, because we're not allowed to. At a more theological level, in the Latin Church, the restored and renewed diaconate certainly rocked the cursus honorum, a huge shift that has yet to fully resonate theologically, that is, ecclesiologically.

God helps the helpless, not those who help themselves

Publish or perish! This axiom is not just true in academia. It also applies to the now relatively old-fashioned world of blogging. As I've mentioned more than once this year, I miss blogging regularly. To that end, I have set my sights on the new Year of Grace, which begins Sunday, 3 December- actually, it starts with Vespers on Saturday, 2 December.

Heaven knows there are no lack of things to write about. I find myself micro-blogging on other social media platforms instead using this medium to develop things a bit more. While I certainly hope that there are people who find what I write interesting enough to read, long from writing is a way think through things.

Today, for example, I saw a meme on another platform that really provoked me. I was provoked by it because it was posted by a Catholic entity. Prudently, I am not going to mention either the entity or the content of the meme. It was basically more self-help pabulum.

I grew up in a religious tradition that more or less teaches human perfectability. This is the idea that you make yourself perfect by trying really hard. Talk about banging your head against a wall! While I don't reject the need to both desire and strive for holiness, I believe that it is God who has begun His good work in me and only God who can bring it completion, sometimes despite myself- God is that good (see Philippians 1:6).

Spiritual life is not a steady, linear movement to a desired point. In the best of times, it is two steps forward and one back. At other times it is no steps forward and five back. While this can make us frustrated with ourselves, it doesn't and cannot frustrate God in that way.

Anyway, apart from writing about this cyberspace moving forward, I wanted to post what I wrote as something of a response to the meme that provoked me:

What I grow very tired of is Christianity as self-help. It's a betrayal of the Gospel. If it really does boil down to all that nonsense, then you don't need to be a Christian because you don't need a Savior. Just follow the lame ass advice and, supposedly, you'll flourish.

The Gospel is for people who realize the vacuousness of such trivialities and who reach their realization through experience. Optimism is not hope. Hope lies beyond optimism.

Far from achieving worldly success, following Jesus is largely about eschewing that in order to live the Kingdom as a present reality. While that sounds lovely, it is difficult in many ways, not least of which is that it renders your incomprehensible to virtually everyone. Kinda like Jesus.

These words from the Prayer of Saint Francis are ones we probably pass over too lightly: "O Master, let me not seek as much... to be understood as much to understand." When I think about it, much of Pope Francis' teaching is rooted in this petition, which is to pray for something quite difficult, like Padre Pio asking for the stigmata.

"You shall know the truth and the truth will make you odd"- Flannery O'Connor

In a comment, I added:

I don't know how valid this still might be, but in a study, I believe by Pew, a number of years ago, an alarming number of U.S. Christians identified "God helps those who help themselves" as their favorite Bible verse. At least for them, we are not our brother's keeper. The Gospel According to Cain

Jesus' response to the Pharisees who complained his calling of a tax collector to follow was to say: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:31). Or, perhaps more appropriately if a bit out of context: "Physician, heal yourself" (see Luke 4:23).

Solemnity of All Saints

Readings: Rev. 7:2-4.9-14; Ps 24:1bc-2-4ab.5-6; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12a

Last night we celebrated what has become one of the biggest secular holidays- Halloween. While it may seem obvious to some, I doubt that most people in the current cultural milieu get that "Halloween" is a contraction of "Hallows Eve." Of course, we use "hallow" as a verb everytime we celebrate Mass. Just before receiving communion, together we pray the Our Father, which begins: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...

To "hallow" something or someone means to treat her/him/it as something very precious (in the non-pejorative sense), as someone/something holy. The second of the Ten Commandments enjoins us "not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain.”¹

In addition to being a verb, "hallow" is also a noun, as in "All Hallows." A "hallow" is someone or something worthy of one's respect and even veneration- someone or something that is hallowed is holy. The communio sanctorum, remember, is the holy communion of people and things.

Essentially, Halloween marks the beginning the Church's annual festival that occurs at the beginning of November, the month during which we contemplate the end of the world as we know it and so the time when we call to mind in a very explicit way those who have gone before us. Spiritually, November is the month of momento mori (i.e., remember death).

Why, if all the saints the Church officially recognizes have their own memorial or feast day, do we celebrate All Saints? Well, today’s celebration is mostly about those holy women and men who are not officially recognized by the Church. These are ordinary people who, during their earthly life loved Jesus and their neighbor. As Pope Francis noted in his Apostolic Exhortation "On the Call to Holiness In Today's World," Gaudete et Exsultate, “The Holy Spirit bestows holiness in abundance among God’s holy and faithful people.”²

During his more than twenty-six year pontificate, Pope Saint John Paul II canonized nearly 500 saints. He was sometimes criticized for this, despite the lives of these women and men being posthumously subjected the Church's rigorous canonical process that precedes anyone being raised to the altar. Like Pope Francis in his Apostolic Exhortation, John Paul II wanted to show that holiness is not as rare and unattainable as we often suppose it to be. I daresay, most of us have encountered holy people in our lives.

In our first reading from Revelation, we heard about “a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue.”³ Who are these nameless people? They are those who live their lives for the love of God and their neighbor.

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a Jewish convert to Christianity, whose name before becoming a Carmelite nun was Edith Stein and who died during the Shoah in Auschwitz wrote:

The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night… [I doubt she wrote this in the awareness that she would be of these great figures] Certainly the most decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed⁴

I have already mentioned the Ten Commandments. Just as the Ten Commandments are the “charter” of the Law God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai, the Beatitudes are our Christian charter.

To live by the Beatitudes- to be meek, to desire righteousness, which is to desire to be like Jesus, to be merciful, to be a peacemaker, even to the point of enduring wrongs patiently and without seeking revenge. The Beatitudes are the ingredients for the recipe of holiness.

Living the Beatitudes is hard because it runs against so much of our cuntural conditioning. Living this way may even, as the lives of many saints teach us, cause you great distress. For example, it isn’t easy to bless and to pray for your enemies. As Rich Mullins sang quite a few years ago:

Lord it's hard to turn the other cheek
Hard to bless when others curse you
Oh Lord it's hard to be a man of peace
Lord it's hard ~ oh it's hard
You know it's hard to be like Jesus⁵

Elsewhere in 1 John, the same book of the Bible from which today’s New Testament reading is taken, we learn “This is the way we may know that we are in union with [Jesus]: whoever claims to abide in him ought to live [just] as he lived.”⁶ It is by living in this way, the way Jesus not only taught but the way that he lived, that we are revealed as God’s children now.

Returning to Rich's song:

And it's hard to step out on them waves
Hard to walk beyond your vision
Oh Lord it's hard to be a man of faith
Oh Lord it's hard to be like Jesus⁷

Being like Jesus is so hard that you can’t do it by yourself. The good news is you were never meant to! God made us to need each other. Hence, “no one is saved alone.”⁸ In addition to one another, we need Jesus, the One who brings us together in this Mass and who, through our holy communion, unites us not only himself but to one another as well as those who have gone before us.

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1 See Exodus 20:7.^↩
2 Pope Francis. Apostolic Exhortation. Gaudete et Exsultate [Rejoice and Be Glad], sec. 6..^↩
3 Revelation 7:9.^↩
4 Edith Stein. From "Hidden Life and Epiphany."^↩
5 Rich Mullins. A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band, “Hard.” 1993.^↩
6 1 John 2:5-6.^↩
7 "Hard."^↩
8 Gaudete et Exsultate, sec. 6.^↩