Jesus, I trust in You

Jesus Christ is our hope we have no other.

Last night I went to the hospital with a priest of my acquaintance, who needed a ride. A man he had anointed, whose confession he heard, and to whom he gave communion a few days earlier passed away. The man's family arrived from out-of-state just before he passed. We walked into the room, nobody was there, except Father, myself, and the body of the deceased. I knelt as Father prayed. It was very peaceful. I rose from my knees and looked at the deceased. Just as I was thinking it, Father said, "He looks very peaceful because he is at peace." As we turned to leave the room and meet with the son of our departed brother, with such great serenity and as much quiet confidence as I have ever heard another person speak, with great trust and confidence in the Lord, Father said: "He went home."  His son was very visibly relieved to learn that his Dad died after receiving these sacraments. He needed no other comfort, no faltering and inadequate words, just the assurance that Christ came in the person of this priest to take his Dad home.

As we left the hospital I had the distinct sense that I was walking down the hall with the Lord. This is one of the more obvious ways He accompanies us through life to our destiny.

I challenge everyone who reads this to offer their penance and prayers on this Friday for the priest(s) of your parish and for vocations to the priesthood. When it is all said and done, they are Christ's presence among us.

"I've walked life's winding road..."

Tom Jones, who is more than a Καθολικός διάκονος favorite, sings Don't Knock from his recently released Praise and Blame album, thus showing that white Welshmen, in addition to possessing "the requisite Celtic spirit," have soul. It helps to be backed up on vocals by three angelic beings! This marks the end of 1980s Friday traditio. No themes for a awhile, we'll revel in eclecticism.

"I have no need to fear/He is always near/He knows my work is true..."

Without Christ you have not embraced reality according to the totality of factors

As Sts. Clare and Francis clearly knew, precisely from the change that occurred when they encountered Him, we must put all things at service of fulfulling our destiny, nothing held back. To do so requires letting go, which requires trust. Just as we don't have faith in faith, a mistake so many make (faith cannot be its own object anymore than can love and hope- it is the object of these that make them the theological virtues), we must place our trust, that is, our hope, in Someone.

So, when we say, sometimes thoughtlessly, "There is a reason for everything," that reason can be summed in two words, Jesus Christ. He is the One we must learn to trust totally. This trust often falters because we are childish: "He didn't give me what I want," we say (even if what I want seems a good, even selfless thing to me). Therefore, He doesn't exist, or, even worse, He doesn't care about me. As St. Paul tells us in that over-used and very often grossly sentimentalized passage on love in 1 Corinthians, we must put aside our childish ways in order to know as we are "fully known" (13:11-12- ESV). Sometimes, as Fr. Aldo Trento observed in a recent interview with Marina Corradi for Il Sussidiario, which is well worth checking out daily, somtimes there is a void, like St. Paul's thorn, in order "to provoke a more intense question.".

The Head of Christ, by Georges Rouault c. 1937

You may well ask "how" does Christ do this, especially when we apply this to ALL things? Green Day provides a better answer than I can: "It's not a question but an answer learned in time," that is, through experience, which is the instrument for our human journey, a journey that has a destination, a fulfillment, which is our completion. In other words, Christ works through reality, not over and above. He does so in a pervasive way.

To see this, to really live this, requires a method and the companionship of others. So, while I am seeking intercession today for a myriad of reasons, I look to Msgr. Giussani for guidance, not just from heaven, but also in The Religious Sense and in the Exercises.

Saint Clare, a day late, but a saint for everyday

While I am on the subject of women who are veiled for religious reasons, I am very distraught that I let yesterday's observance of the Feast of Santa Clara, one Chiara Offreduccio, pass without marking it publicly, but busy-ness prevented me from doing so. I would make the point that, as even the French law recognizes, there is a difference between taking the veil and having it thrust upon you. There is also a difference between taking the veil and living apart from the world and walking down le Boulevard des Capucines fully veiled. For all who asked me for my prayers yesterday, you were entrusted to the very reliable Saint Clare of Assisi, whom I love dearly. The picture below shows her intercession, when a mother prays to St. Clare to deliver her child from wolves. St. Clare, a companion of St. Francis, lived from 1193-1253.

Sixteen days after leaving her parents' house at age 18, joined by one Agnes, Clare began living a life centered on the evangelical counsels, a life of poverty, austerity and complete seclusion from the world. Her group was given a rule by St. Francis. At 21 she became abbess of her community and remained so until her death. She said of Christ her Lord: "Totally love Him, Who gave Himself totally for your love."

Since culture seems to be a pervasive theme these days for me, I encourage you to have a wonderful Francisan cinematic experience by watching closely together Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis, followed by Cavani's very existential take on the life of St. Francis, Francesco, featuring Mickey Rourke as Francis and Helena Bonham Carter as Clare. Cinematically, it works, as the below extended clip from the film shows:

Of course, St. Clare is the patron saint of television. I don't want to diminish her being designated as such by Pope Pius XII in 1958. However, we must be careful not to reduce her to this because by so doing we diminish her witness. This prompts me to think about when Dorothy Day said she didn't want to be a saint because she did not want to be dismissed that easily.

Sancta Clara, ora pro nobis.

Islam and the West: the wearing of the burqa

The current controversy surrounding the French parliament's decision to ban the wearing of the burqa in public is much misunderstood. Often people think that European governments are seeking to ban the wearing of all distinctively Islamic clothing, but such is not the case. For Islamic women there is the niqab and the burqa, which fully covers them (the burqa even obscuring their faces entirely, the niqab leaving open an area around their eyes), then there is the khimar and chador, both of which leave the face exposed from chin to forehead and from cheek-to-cheek. There is also al-amira and the shayla, as well as the hijab, the latter, often worn with otherwise Western clothing, is essentially a headscarf, while the former covers a bit more of the female form.

In France, for example, the only one of these being banned is the burqa. Recently, Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, an internationally recognized expert on Islam who focuses on issues concerning Muslims in the West, wrote an article for AsiaNews entitled French ban on burqa a welcome law! In this article he makes a very detailed and accurate case for the French law. It is most important to state up-front, as Fr. Samir does, that "there is not the slightest reference in the Koran or Islamic tradition (Sunnah) regarding this issue. Therefore it is not an Islamic norm. None of the Koranic scholars dare say so, but there are many who claim that it is a religious norm." Beyond that, we have to be aware that even "in many Muslim countries the burqa has been banned because (as in Tunisia) 'it is not part of our tradition', in Turkey it is forbidden in the name of secularism. In Egypt, in November 2009, the late Rector of the Islamic Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, the highest religious authority in Egypt, banned it, saying to students: 'The niqab is only a custom, it has no link with Islam, neither close or distant!' In February 2010, Egyptian Prime Minister Nazif, called it 'a denial of woman!'"

Most importantly, we have to understand what the law does and does not do. According to Fr. Samir, the French law "provides for six months of time [to] allow people [to] become used to the new rules, to allow reflection and evolution. The wording is very cautious: it does not talk about the full veil, rather it refers to the complete covering of the face. It explains exactly how and when it is forbidden, it also outlines exceptions (illness, medical bandages, carnival, etc ...). This law does not want to be anti-Muslim - even if the occasion was born of the full 'Islamic' veil - but a more general rule that applies to everyone, a standard of living together. The penalties are also interesting: a fine of 150 Euros or citizenship education, a kind of educational training for coexistence."

The French law wisely includes a sharp distinction between women who choose to wear the burqa, who will be fined €150 or be required to attend a state-sponsored intergration class, which I suppose to be bit like attending traffic school to eliminate points from your driver's license when cited for a moving violation, and a man who forces a woman to wear it. Men who force the veil on women will be fined €30,000 and be sentenced to a year in prison, two years if the female is a minor. The law "also explains [and] outlines the following types of cases: men or women (not just husbands or fathers) who by threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power, abuse of authority force someone to cover her face."

Peter Hitchens addresses the rise of ideological Islam in a recent article he wrote about his visit to Turkey earlier this month: The disturbing picture of growing repression at the heart of 'Eurabia'. It is no secret, except to Pres. Obama and Prime Minister Cameron, that Turkey is going backwards, moving away from the West and towards such allies as Syria and Iran. As Hitchens observes, "Those who think of Turkey as a relaxed holiday destination, or as a Westernised Nato member more or less 'on our side' need to revise their view." I wholly concur with his assessment that "there is a strong chance that we will soon lose Turkey to the Islamic world," if, indeed, this has not already occurred.

Peter Hitchens in Turkey, August 2010 (picture from Hitchens Daily Mail blog)

Hitchens sees in the willingness and even eagerness on the part of some Turkish women to embrace being covered as symptomatic of what is happening in Turkey, and to some extent among Muslims living in the West. He observes that while Iranian women "mock the headscarf" by pushing it "as far back as possible on the head, revealing as much bleached blonde, teased hair as piety will allow," effectively saying, "The law can make me wear this, but it cannot make me look as if I want to." While their Turkish sisters, by contrast, embrace the at least the hijab and increasingly the chador and even the burqa, making the statement "This is how I want to look, even if the law says I cannot." He makes the salient point that "while Iran is a secular country with a Muslim government, Turkey is a Muslim country with a secular government."

So, this is becoming in West not just a simple matter of religious freedom. I think Fr. Samir quite right in pointing out that in France and across the Western world "the full veil is worn by women who have never worn it before and also by converts. For this we can conclude that the choice to wear the full veil is not born of tradition or religious values, but a ideological spirit that preaches a return to the cultural tradition of seventh century Arabia, often in opposition to the West." This ideological Islamism, which in some parts of Europe is becoming an existential challenge, must be met.

Left unchallenged, we will inevitably start to see things like the case of the woman in Iran, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who was given 99 lashes for having "illicit" relationships with two men after the death of her murdered husband, in whose death she has now been implicated, who recently "confessed" her crime on Iranian state television (it ought to bother us all that iran can point to U.S. to justify the death penalty).  Don't think for one minute that I am panic mongering. It was but a few short years ago that no less a figure than the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, seriously suggested in public that Muslims in Great Britain might be allowed to implement some kind of attenuated form shar'ia, if only among themselves. Yes, what we need is a return to the juridcial system of the Ottoman Empire! Laws, such as France's, have as their purpose the preservation of equality and freedom. This challenge must also and even more importantly be met at the cultural level, which is a far greater challenge, but one made more difficult by the abandonment and outright denial of Europe's Christian heritage.

Literature is a great way to enter into the cultural challenge posed by the rise of ideological Islam. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, is a great guide, at least to contemporary Turkey. Two of his books are indispensable reading: Snow and his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City.

St. Lawrence

The Marturdom of St. Lawrence, by Valentin de Buologne, 1621-22

St Lawrence, a deacon of the Church of Rome, who was born in Spain, died a martyr in Rome in AD 258. St. Lawrence is one of the most venerated saints in the church's glorious history. Pope Sixtus II ordained Lawrence (a.k.a. Lorenzo) a deacon. Lawrence was martyred shortly after Sixtus, his bishop. When the pope was arrested Tradition has it that he told Lawrence to give the Church's treasures, for which he was responsible, away to the poor. When he was noticed by the Roman authorities for doing this, the Roman prefect ordered Lawrence to turn over the Church's treasures to him. So, Lawrence, pointing to the poor and sick around him, said, "Here are the treasures of the Church." As a result, he was condemned to death by being burnt on a gridiron. He endured this torture in good spirits, allegedly saying at one point, "See, I am done enough on one side, now turn me over and cook the other."

St. Lawerence, deacon and martyr, pray for us.

To see with the eyes of Christ is to see the full measure of our humanity

In speaking about freedom in this year's Spiritual Exercises, Fr. Carrón, citing T.S. Eliot to the effect that we must resist the temptation to design "systems so perfect that no one will have to be good." Warning against this kind of utopianism, which always has a scientistic (as opposed to scientific) tinge, is something that unites the truly human voices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, like Dostoyevsky, Orwell, Camus, Kołakowski, Giussani, even Kerouac, who, just as Camus wasn't just some generic existentialist (a moniker he despised), is not an idiotic Maynard G. Krebs-like beatnik, et. al. The pursuit of such utopias has been far more deadly for humanity than religion, a point frequently overlooked by the so-called New Atheists.

"If somebody wants to look to someone else to spare him his freedom (call him spiritual director, or boss, or friend - it's all the same), he has to clearly understand that he will not reach happiness in this way...if i don't understand this... I will always try to unload the drama of freedom onto someone else. This is the burden that the Grand Inquisitor...wishes to take off our backs, as he reproves Christ for the gift of freedom." The Grand Inquistor's objective "is to relieve man of this unbearable burden [his freedom] replacing freedom with authority. In this way mankind would be reduced to a happy flock of sheep, and happiness would be bought at the cost of freedom." Of course, this would be happiness. Perhaps the twentieth century's literary protagonist who shows us this, both be his resistance and his ultimate being brought to love Big Brother, is Orwell's Winston Smith, who was, as Orwell indicated with the original title of 1984, the last man in Europe.

The kind of scientifically reductive anthropology rejected by those mentioned above and many other astute observers of and contributors to a truly human culture arises from our collective loss of transcendence. Our loss of transcendence, in turn, begins with our tendency to give ontological status to the empirical findings of the social sciences, which is not to argue for one second that the social sciences make no contribution to genuine human knowledge, they certainly do. Applying the results of such research, as also happens when natural scientists, like Richard Dawkins, attempt to arrive at metaphysical conclusions from physical/material finding. Maslow's hierarchy of needs serves as a good example of this tendency because it is often applied in such an absolute way, both to one's person life and even more so to public policy. When applied as if Maslow had discovered some divinely revealed truth, it represents a reduction of our humanity because it actually inverts human need.

In Deus Caritas Est, the Holy Father wrote: "Going beyond exterior appearances, I perceive in others an interior desire for a sign of love, of concern. This I can offer them not only through the organizations intended for such purposes, accepting it perhaps as a political necessity. Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave" (par. 18).

Along these lines in his most recent Mail on Sunday column, the always provocative Peter Hitchens demonstrates the not infrequent Orwellian abuse of our absolute faith in scientistic humanism in a section entitled, Nanny knows true cost of having it all:

"Every few months, another successful career woman plunges into the debate about motherhood versus paid work. Now, the author Fay Weldon and the actress Emma Thompson are tussling over ‘having it all’. Neither of them has anything particularly interesting to say, because the truth cannot be spoken openly among such people.

"That truth is that children suffer terribly from the absence of mothers – and fathers – from their lives. Most of the social problems of our broken society stem from my generation’s selfish pretence that we can follow our own pleasures at the expense of our offspring, and nothing bad will happen. The lie is so pervasive that when research proves the hurt is genuine, new research has to be commissioned to contradict it. Hence the ridiculous American survey, much trumpeted by the Left-wing BBC last week, which says the damage done to young children by the absence of their mothers is outweighed by higher family income and better ‘mental health’ among their mothers. In other words, adult riches and pleasure cancel out childish loss and grief" (underlining emphasis mine). Hitchens is correct when he observes that this is "a repulsive calculation."