Over to Rocco at Whispers for two hierarchy things

Both of these from my dear friend Rocco over at the rightly venerated Whispers:

First, a chronicle from an event I would have happily imposed upon relatives in the Bay area to attend had I known about it sooner, A lecture, delivered at USF by Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco, the man who I am so happy to say ordained to me to the diaconate, "on the writer he termed 'a supreme artist'". Courtesy of Whispers and the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, here is the link to the entire text of Archbishop Niederauer's lecture.

Secondly, as I wrote my dear friend Jan, who lives in Sacramento, that diocese received a tremendous blessing today by having Bishop Jaime Soto named coadjutor to Bishop William Weigand, who was Archbishop Niederauer's predecessor as bishop of Salt Lake City. I had the pleasure, earlier this year of sitting next to His Excellency at a supper.

Twenty-seventh Thursday in Ordinary Time, Year I

Readings: Mal. 3,13-20b; Ps. 1,1-4.6; Lk 11,5-13

Why try? Why weary ourselves doing what is right, praying everyday, forgiving, even when we don’t feel like it, reaching out to others when they rarely seem to appreciate our assistance and when, despite our best efforts, nothing really seems to change? To summarize what the prophet Malachi is getting at in the beginning of our first reading: Despite all our efforts the wicked seem to prosper and the world remains, in many ways, a mess.

To approach life in this way, especially our life of faith, is to get it all wrong. Indeed, as our Psalm response indicates: "Blessed are they who hope in the Lord" (Ps. 40,5a). Of those who fear Him, God says through Malachi, that He "will have compassion on them" (Mal. 3,17). To fear God does not mean to be scared of God. Rather, it means to acknowledge God as God, to reverence God, and to submit ourselves totally to God, even when it seems difficult and when we are discouraged, or tempted to despair. What Malachi is saying is that being discouraged about the seeming lack of success of our own efforts is a kind of pride, a way of living that does not fear God, that does not let God be God, that does not trust God.

Nonetheless, in today’s Gospel Jesus teaches us to be persistent in prayer to the point of being, what would seem to us, a little annoying. In this our Lord encourages us to continue praying and acting, doing what we know God would have us do- loving God and our neighbor- even when it seems to us make little difference, or to have no effect. What Jesus encourages us to do is what He did, even to the point of death, trust God. We are to trust in the confidence that, as our loving Father, God wants to give us every good gift. Of course, the best gift God the Father gives us is His beloved Son, who we receive in the Eucharist, and so we pray with St. Faustina, "Jesus, I trust in you".

(Homily preached at Holy Family Parish)

Some Central Asian notes and references

Over on Clarity Daily, in addition to Sharon's stunning photographs, she has a number of really excellent posts. I want to link to two articles having to do with a part of the world in which I have been involved and about which I care a great deal. The first article deals with a little attended regional aspect of the destabilization of Iraq, the Turkish/Kurdish conflict, which, prior to 2003, had come to a kind of peaceful resolution after many years of violence. The second has to do the Turkish genocide of Armenians which took place between 1915-1917, during the years of World War I and preceded the establishment of the modern Turkish state. The third article, from the BBC, this morning is about the Turkish reaction to a vote by a US congressional committee recognizing as genocide the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.

Turkey Threatens Move Against Kurds

American Witnesses to Genocide

Turkey condemns US Armenia vote

This is a sad chapter in Turkish history and, while I love Turkey, its people, and have many friends there, it is time to acknowledge and repudiate this horror and to begin to allow ethnic and religious minorities the freedom to exercise the rights guaranteed them under the Turkish Constitution.

Eschewing violence as redemptive

With due acknowledgement to Alex, who, on his blog, Vitus Speaks, alerted me to this new article over on Godspy by Dr. Susan Windley-Daoust, I, too, wish to draw attention to Anger Management: Looking Back on the Amish School Shooting. Toward the beginning of the article, Dr. Windley-Daoust paints the horrific picture of what happened slightly more than a year ago in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania in a tiny Amish schoolhouse:

"A grandfather crouching by slain Marian Fisher, 20 bullets in her body—one of two girls who pleaded with Roberts to 'shoot me first'—and telling the other children, 'You must not hate this man.'

"The Amish community—including the parents of those who had died—visiting the killer’s wife and child, offering forgiveness and financial help. Many later attended a memorial service for Roberts.

"An Amish woman interviewed by CNN, stating quietly but confidently, 'Oh no no no, definitely not, we’re not angry. We just don’t do that here.'"

I do not mind pointing out that Susan is a professor of theology, who is never to be mistaken for a liturgist, with whom I have had the privilege of studying. She is a professor and a person who has taught me a lot, both in the classroom and out by her unfailing kindness, patience, and encouragement. Among many things, she is the person who introduced me to Dr. Cynthia Crysdale's book Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today, some of my classmates might say the book was inflicted on them (bad theology student insider joke). It was this book, along with another book recommended by her as a corrective to my being too uncritical of certain aspects of Crysdale's theology of the Cross, Archbishop Rowan Williams' Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, that formed the basis of my lecture delivered as part of our parish observance of the Feast of St. Mary Magadalene, our patroness. In Crysdale's lexicon, what Susan takes aim at in this article is something that is all too prevalent in current U.S. society- the myth of redemptive violence.

Twenty-seventh Wednesday in Ordinary Time, Year I

Readings: Jon. 4,1-11; Ps. 86,3-6.9-10; Lk. 11,1-4

There are two pillars of the Christian life: prayer and growth in holiness, or human flourishing. Holiness cannot happen, we cannot flourish, without prayer anymore than a flower can bloom without good soil, water, and sunlight. It is important to realize that prayer, in addition to talking to God, also means listening to God. Most contemporary writers on Christian spirituality define prayer as opening one's self to God. This point about listening to God in prayer is made in a rather comedic way in our reading today from the Book of Jonah.

Jonah was a prophet in Israel who was called by God to preach to the Ninevehites. Jonah resisted this call with all his might. He set out for Tarshish, which is on the western end of the Mediterranean, or ninety degrees out from where God called him. God had called him to go East to Nineveh. Of course, God's plan is not frustrated. First the ship was beset by a fierce storm, during which, upon the crew's realization that Jonah was the cause of their peril, the reluctant prophet was thrown overboard only to be swallowed by a very large fish and spit up on the shore near Nineveh. At this point Jonah realized that there was no escaping his call. So, he preached to the Ninevehites, who were renown for their wickedness, and they repented, one and all, and began to worship the Lord God. Was Jonah happy about this? No! He was angry. This is where today's reading picks up.

After the conversion of Nineveh, Jonah went from the city and built a hut waiting for and still hoping that God would visit punishment upon the formerly wicked city. You see, Jonah is a character representing one kind of Jew, the kind who believed that God's covenant with Israel was an end in itself, not a means to making all people, like the Ninevehites, God's people. To go off on kind of a tangent, it is necessary to point out that the author of the Book of Jonah does not record, or even pretend to record, actual events. Hence, instead of getting bogged down with silly questions, like how can a person survive inside a big fish for three days, we should focus on the divinely inspired message that the author is trying to convey through the telling of the story. After all, Jesus' parables were not about things that actually happened. Are they any less true, or applicable to life for that? Returning to the point, the author of this book is taking the other side, the side that the prophets tend to take, that through God's covenant, initiated with Abraham, "all the nations of the earth shall find blessing" (Gen 22,18). So, Jonah is a deliberately ridiculous figure who represents those we might call xenophobes. The Catholic analog to the xenophobe is the one who believes that the Eucharist is an end in itself in which only the privileged few get to participate, when it is the means through which God brings about the redemption and sanctification of the whole world, through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

God then makes a gourd plant grow to give Jonah shade, but then sends a worm to kill and eat the plant, leaving Jonah exposed once again to the blistering sun, about which Jonah complains. God takes this opportunity to rebuke Jonah for caring more about the plant, or, really about his own comfort, than about the people who came to believe through his preaching, who he now resents.

Isn't this often true in our prayer life, that we are so busy asking God for what we want that when God asks something of us we feel put upon, or even listening enough to know? We also see this in how we share our faith. Do we want others to experience the love of God, the love that is at the very heart of Blessed Trinity, or would we, like Jonah, rather see God's punishment visited upon them? The question is, if we share our faith at all, how do we share it, as an experience of love, truth, goodness, and beauty, or do we use it as a club with which to beat others? This is why, in our Gospel today, Jesus teaches us how to pray, which is simply. What the Lord's Prayer shows us is that prayer is more about accepting what God, our loving Father, gives that we need than asking for what we want.

Our antiphon, taken from St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, which we recited as part of our Gospel acclamation, reveals a further insight into the life of prayer, namely that through Christ we have received a spirit of adoption as daughters and sons of God, to whom we pray, in imitation of our Lord, Abba! Father (Rom. 8,23)! So, let us not fail to pray for the coming of God's Kingdom. Let us be attentive to God in our lives, trying to heed what God would have us do. Being open to other people is something our faith, something God, requires of us that we do not need to inquire about. Nonetheless, as the story of Jonah shows it is not always easy to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

(Homily preached at Holy Family parish)

Are the LDS Christians? The red herring that won't go away

The major theme of the LDS General Conference held over this past weekend was that the LDS are just Christians, like us. The question about whether Latter-day saints are Christians strikes me as one big red herring. Back in 2000 Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, in the journal he edits, First Things, wrote a very good essay on this very question entitled Is Mormonism Christian?. My comments will pale in comparison. It is my hope that what I have to contribute remains worthwhile.

If we are Christians on the basis, not only of our Baptism, but of our baptismal profession of faith, then the LDS, according their own beliefs, are the only Christians because they re-baptize all people who become LDS. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, readily acknowledges that there are Christians who are not Catholics. We do not re-baptize them, though we confirm them in their baptismal faith when they seek to be in complete communion with the Catholic Church, as their communion is partial even prior to becoming Catholic in light of their Baptism.

Of course, we re-baptize LDS people who become Catholic. Why? Because they have not professed the same faith that we profess. This amounts to their rejection of the Trinity on the basis of the Doctrine & Covenants, one of the three books, along with the Bible, that they revere as scripture. This comes out in a particular way in D & C 130:22, which states that "The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s", not to mention their rejection of original sin on the basis of their second article of faith, which is canonized in The Pearl of Great Price, another of the books revered by the LDS as scripture: "We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression." Before we even begin discussing these points, or enter into a dialogue about the pros and cons of believing one way or the other, which I have absolutely no intention of doing (I am not allowing comments on this post), we have to acknowledge these fundamental differences and respect them. In fact, what I posited above about LDS belief is right from their own sacred books, lest there be any doubt about whether this is what Latter-day saints believe. The link to the article on the Godhead, written by Daniel H. Ludlow for the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, was obtained from clicking on the "Additional Online Materials" link from this page on lds.org, the official website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Frankly, given the tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources the LDS Church devotes to proselytizing, it doesn't even make sense- If we're all already Christians, or the LDS are Christians like us, then why become LDS? Now, I know this same question can be asked of Christians who become Catholic, but since we reject proselytizing, people seek communion with the Catholic Church on their own initiative. I need look no further than my own experience of RCIA when year-after-year twenty to forty people come seeking such communion at our parish alone. Besides, if they are baptized Christians, they still profess the same Creed: faith in the Triune God, the salvific nature of Christ's death on the Cross, His resurrection from the dead, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, one baptism, forgiveness of sins, etc. They retain this faith, along with their understanding of this God who has claimed them, who has saved them, not some other god who was once a mortal human being. For more on that, in addition to D & C 130:22, see The Book of Abraham, which is also contained in The Pearl of Great Price, especially chapter three. Or you can rest content in this summary, spoken by LDS prophet Lorenzo Snow: "As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become". We read in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, a semi-official publication of the LDS Church: "This process known as eternal progression is succinctly expressed in the LDS aphorism, 'As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become'" (vol. 4, pg. 1474). This is before attending to the LDS belief in the so-called Great Apostasy, which is their belief that the early Church apostatized from the Truth that is Christ and, hence, could no longer be considered the true Church.

So, it was this so-called Great Apostasy, this falling away from the true Christian faith, that necessitated, according LDS belief, the need for the Gospel, neigh the Church, to be restored. According to LDS belief, God was able to do through Joseph Smith, Jr. what God was unable to accomplish in Christ Jesus, namely to establish the Church to last until the end of time. This LDS belief is based on what is recorded in Joseph Smith- History, again found in The Pearl of Great Price, when the young Joseph asked Jesus Christ, who he claimed appeared to him, along with God the Father, which Church he should join, "I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that [quoting the prophet Isaiah 29,13]: 'they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof'" (Joseph Smith- History 19).

Let us not forget, however, that there is a distinction to be made between orthodoxy and orthopraxis. Ideally one (i.e., orthopraxis) flows from the other (i.e., orthodoxy). If forced to choose, orthopraxis wins every time. There will be no theology test to get into heaven. Rather, we will be judged on the basis of what we do, or do not do. In St. Mark's Gospel we read this "John said to him, 'Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.' Jesus replied, 'Do not prevent him. There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can at the same time speak ill of me. For whoever is not against us is for us'" (Mark 9,38-40).

Blogging: An aided reflection

Last night I read an editorial in Christianity Today by Ted Olsen entitled The Death of Blogs: Well some of them, anyway. It is an insightful piece about how blogging can be an unhealthy obsession, especially when you write a blog that isn't part of your everyday work. Indeed, there are perils to blogging, like everything else. As Rodney Dangerfield, who in his old age married a much younger woman from my hometown, once said: "Thanks to jogging more people are dropping dead in perfectly good health than ever before."

People always ask me how I find the time to blog. I make time because I like blogging, most of the time these days I blog in the morning and in the afternoon immediately after work. This means that I blog before everybody else is up, or before everybody else gets home. Today, being Columbus Day, I am off work. Besides, I have always written a lot, plus it helps me think through issues and get my juices flowing of a morning. That being said, I rarely spend more than an hour pumping words onto blogspot.com this is because I usually write about something I have thought about, at least a bit. I do not watch television. So, I figure an hour a day blogging + zero hours watching t.v.= a far less encumbered life than watching t.v. two or three hours a night. Of course, I am an incurable reader!

I think back to this time last year when blogging was so new. I sometimes posted four times a day. Fortunately, that was just a phase. While I still post about everyday, I am far less obsessive about it. If I post nothing for a day or two, it is not a big deal. Part of this comes with being better grounded. As much as I enjoy maintaining this blog and contributing to The People of St. Mary Magdalene, I have no illusions that thousands, or even hundreds, or even dozens daily visit these sites. On the other hand, I know that people read what I have to write, just as I read several blogs myself. In addition to writing for others, blogging has become a bit of a conversation with others who blog and with people from my parish. My posts are often prompted by insights I gain on a subject after having taught on it, or a conversation I have had with a person, either in person or via e-mail.

Writing, discussing, challenging and being challenged also helps me connect the dots of my life. As an example, recently, while looking for free digital music of my favorite punk bands of the late '70s/early '80s, I discovered the blog of Alice Bag, one of the "courageous, intelligent and daring women back in the 1970's [who] decided to break the rules of society". She did so by founding the group The Bags. Her blog is called Diary of a Bad Housewife. Though she is, like me, now in her forties, she remains, as when she was younger, a very long way from being a bag in a certain colloquial sense. Nonetheless, I can appreciate very much Olsen's observation, which is a modified version of Warhol's comment about everybody being famous for 15 minutes, that due to blogging "everyone will be famous to 15 people for 15 minutes".


Citing research conducted by technocrati.com Olsen writes that it is estimated "that 3 million new blogs are launched every month". He also points out that technocrati's motto is: "Zillions of photos, videos, blogs, and more. Some of them have to be good" - images of the million monkeys typing (of which I am definitely one) in order to write Hamlet come to mind.

Olsen also cites research done by Gartner, Inc. to the effect "that 200 million people have given up blogging, more than twice as many as are active". So, while blogging has its perils, like most activities, even ones we view as healthy, it also has a sorting mechanism. As Christians our metric is "by their fruits you shall know them". As Catholics it is also important for bloggers to have some accountability. I am not writing about submitting everything I write for review and editing, but a commitment to telling the truth, to writing what is both appropriate and what builds up the Body of Christ, as well as being able to publicly acknowledge my public failures. There are many things about which I have opinions, even very strong opinions, even about some things I don't know enough about to be considered well-informed. Of course, I share my opinions daily, but not all of them. I am slowly learning to be prudent. I am thankful for the times I have been corrected and challenged. I try to cultivate an awareness that what I write and post to my blog is public. Therefore, I have to own it with no excuses, especially when I am mistaken, or when I have crossed a boundary. As Christians we are bound, because we freely choose to be, to cultivate a Christian witness on-line. As my 15 readers know, this does not mean posting pietistic pabulum. Personally, I would rather read something offensive!

Last fall, after I had been blogging for awhile, I would get really discouraged when it was not clear to me that people were reading these pearls of wisdom I daily dropped on them. This resulted in a number of pathetic posts seeking affirmation (the posts still exist- here is an example, both of my issue and the kindness of people). I had to step back and evaluate whether blogging had any intrinsic value for me. It does and while I would be lying to write that I don't care if anybody reads what I write, I can say that it does have value for me over and above who reads it. This was and remains an opportunity for growth and maturity for me. If nothing else, I hope to contribute in some small way to the growth and maturity of others. Growing in maturity also means grappling honestly with my immaturity. I have bucket loads of that! To quote Billie Joe Armstrong: "Nobody's perfect and I stand accused, for lack of a better word, and that's my best excuse."

Well, my hour is up . . .