What is a charism?

I remember last fall walking with my friend Greg down a Seattle street on a lovely evening. Even though we are not friends on Facebook, we are companions and so our discussion turned to charisms in the church. The context of the topic of charisms was our talking about the charism given by the Holy Spirit to Msgr. Luigi Giussani, which is known as Communion & Liberation, or CL. CL is the umbrella for the manifold dimensions of his charism; it includes GA- the Adult Group, GS- the high school students, CLU- the university students and, of course, Memores Domini- an order of men and women who live vowed lives of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but in the world, usually in Memores Domini houses. Finally, there is the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo, a religious order of men. Giussani was also the co-founder of the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption. Part of the nature of the charism shared by members of the Fraternity of CL is to use words and terms that are familiar to people in these late modern times. For example, instead of using charism to describe what has been vouchsafed to us by the Holy Spirit through Msgr. Giussani, we often use the term method. We use method because the charism is about answering the question Is It Possible to Live This Way? in the affirmative; "this way" meaning in the Christian way, living intentional lives of discipleship which arises from our own personal encounter with the risen Lord. Living this way does not permit us to exclude any part of our experience. Hence, experience is the method we use to verify the Christian fact, which is nothing other than the Paschal Mystery of Christ's Incarnation through the Blessed Virgin Mary, his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Spirit. Living "this way" requires the recognition up-front that I cannot do it alone, even that I do not want to do it alone. So, I seek companionship along the road to destiny. CL is a companionship.


We talked about the fact that so few people know what a charism is, how they have operated in the church, and the relevancy of certain charisms in the church and for the world today. This represents no defect in any body's person, it is a matter of education, or lack of it. This is why I really like what Fred has posted over on la nouvelle théologie: What Do We Mean when We Refer to Charisms of Orders or Movements in the Church?, which consists of a few salient parts of a conversation that took place between the late Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Angelo Scola, who has since gone on to become the cardinal Patriarch of Venice. It is a good catechesis on charisms.

I would also draw your attention to another post by Fred on la nouvelle, in which he develops something I briefly alluded to in my homily last week, virtue and the role that habit plays in acquiring them: Habit of Awareness I.

Hierarchy update

In his fifth U.S. episcopal appointment of the new year, the Holy Father appointed Fr. James Wall of the Diocese of Phoenix as the bishop of the Diocese of Gallup, New Mexico. Bishop-elect Wall is 45 years old and was ordained a priest in 1998.

With the appointment of Wall there are now six vacant dioceses in the U.S.: Biloxi, Mississippi; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Duluth, Minnesota; Oakland, California; Owensboro, Kentucky; St. Louis, Missouri.

One final note on a troublesome matter

Mauthausen Concentration Camp

It seems somehow appropriate on a day in which the Secretariat of State of the Holy See declared that Richard Williamson, in order "to be admitted to episcopal functions in the Church, must also distance himself in an absolutely unmistakable and public way from his position on the Shoah, which was unknown to the Holy Father in the moment of the lifting of the excommunication" that we learned about the fate of Dr. Aribert Heim, known more accurately as "Dr. Death".

What might interest Williamson is what this man, who died in 1992 in Egypt under the name Tarek Hussein Farid, was guilty of, among other atrocities, "performing operations on prisoners without anesthesia; removing organs from healthy inmates, then leaving them to die on the operating table; injecting poison, including gasoline, into the hearts of others; and taking the skull of at least one victim as a souvenir." Of course, most, if not all of these prisoners were Jewish, imprisoned and tortured for no other reason than being Jewish.

According the twisted rationale of that walking contradiction, known as the Christian anti-Semite, the Jews are God's enemies, guilty of deicide, and opposed to God. According to the SSPX, "the status of this opposition must be universal, inevitable, and terrible." What is terrible are atrocities committed by people who hold such evil beliefs. It is important to take note of what the Lord says himself: "No one takes it [his life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father" (Jn 10:18 ESV). He laid down his life of his own free will in obedience to the Father, whose love for us caused him to not spare his only begotten Son (Jn 3:16). Through his only begotten Son, by means of our rebirth through the waters of baptism, we are adopted daughters and sons of God, children of Abraham, our father in the faith because his trust in God's promise and ours. To paraphrase Pope Pius XI, the Jews are our elder brothers in the faith and, spiritually, we are all Semites. This is more consistent with what St. Paul writes in those vital of chapters of his Letter to the Romans, chapters 8-11.

I have to be honest, I dislike the terms Holocaust and Shoah, using these terms give this horror a certain theological legitimacy and/or mystical credibility. I prefer to call it what it is, to face reality squarely, it was mass murder. Given certain situations in the world today (i.e., Darfur), this shows forth the hollowness of our recitation of the slogan Never again!.

Statement of Cardinal Francis George, President USCCB, on recent SSPX events

Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the personal penalty of excommunication incurred by four schismatic bishops belonging to the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, founded by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. This gesture on the part of the Holy Father was an act of mercy and personal concern for the ordained and lay members of this Society and was meant to coincide with the fiftieth commemoration of the convening of the Second Vatican Council.

The Holy Father's lifting of the excommunications is but a first step toward receiving these four bishops, and the priests who serve under them, back into full communion with the Catholic Church. If these bishops are to exercise their ministry as true teachers and pastors of the Catholic Church, they, like all Catholic bishops, will have to give their assent to all that the Church professes, including the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

As is now widely known, one of the four bishops, Richard Williamson, has recently made some deeply offensive and utterly false statements about the Holocaust of the Second World War. Bishop Williamson has denied historical facts about the Shoah, in which six million Jews were cruelly annihilated, innocent victims of blind racial and religious hatred. These comments have evoked understandable outrage from within the Jewish community and also from among our own Catholic people. No Catholic, whether lay person, priest or bishop can ever negate the memory of the Shoah, just as no Catholic should ever tolerate expressions of anti-Semitism and religious bigotry.

I make my own the words of the Holy Father spoken at the General Audience on January 28, 2009: "[May] the Shoah show both old and new generations that only the arduous path of listening and dialogue, of love and forgiveness, can lead peoples, cultures and religions of the world to the longed-for goal of fraternity and peace, in truth. May violence never again humiliate man's dignity." We Catholic bishops in the United States are as committed as ever to building bonds of trust and mutual understanding with our elder brothers and sisters, the Jewish people, so that together with them we may be a blessing to the world.

Francis Cardinal George

Acedia, me, and Kathleen Norris

It is no secret to people who know me that the end of last year was a struggle for me. I owe writer Kathleen Norris, and deceased poet W.H.Auden, enormous debts of gratitude for helping to rescue me from myself. I posted something from Auden that so beautifully captures the anti-climactic feeling that end of the Christmas holiday always brings, even from the time of being very young.

More than Auden's poetry, Norris' book Acedia & Me was a life raft. At a very human level it helped to me to realize, yet again, that my situation is not as unique as I like to flatter myself by thinking that it is. I was familiar with some of her other books, like Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace. I have not read either book. I almost read Cloister Walk after reading about it in Donald Miller's lovely book Blue Like Jazz, but did not. I still have a copy on my shelf. I came across Acedia & Me quite providentially.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon I was listening to the radio, to the program To The Best of Our Knowledge. The title of this installment is Alone Time. It was a remarkable show and I especially liked the interview with John Cacioppo, author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, wherein he explores how prevalent loneliness has become in the U.S. In the interview he discussed the distinction between solitude and loneliness.

The program also includes an interview with Kathleen Norris about acedia, which is well worth your time. It is in Realplayer format.

Year B 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

My homily this week is the synthesis of number of things I have posted over on Is It Possible?. What prompted this synthesis was a phrase from the second reading, taken from 1 Corinthians 7:35 wherein St. Paul is instructs the Corinthians about the necessity of "adherence to the Lord without distraction".

Readings: Deut. 18:15-20; Ps. 95:1-2.6-7.9; 1 Cor. 7:32-35; Mark 1:21-28

In our second reading today, St. Paul gives to the church at Corinth what might seem to us at first glance some very odd advice. Of course, the primitive church lived in the expectation of Christ’s imminent return. It is important to understand this in order for what Paul wrote to make sense to us. This understanding does not mean that what the apostle wrote is rendered meaningless to us who are still awaiting the Lord’s return in glory some 2,000 years later. What we have to attend to in this reading is why, even when understood in context, he wrote this advice, which he gave "not impose restraint" (1 Cor. 7:35). He wrote it in order to communicate the importance of adhering "to the Lord without distraction" (1 Cor 7:35).

To adhere means, literally, to stick to. Stated more clearly, and perhaps a bit more theologically, it means to bind oneself to observance. We, every bit as much as members of the ancient Corinthian community, need to adhere to Christ without distraction. We all know from our personal experience that this is no small task because we live in a world that is full of distractions, or so it seems.

Being a Christian does not allow us to live as if our faith is something added on to life, that extra little something that gives us a sentimental and religious basis for being nice. Rather, to have faith means to recognize our destiny in the person of Jesus Christ, to recognize the very reason that we exist, as well as for whom we exist. If faith is to recognize our destiny in Christ Jesus, then hope is the result of this recognition. Hope is nothing less than certainty about our future, a certainty that arises from our recognition of the Lord’s all-pervasive presence, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the circumstances of life. In other words, faith and hope are experiences before they become theological ideas.

It is the Holy Spirit who enables us to understand that the circumstances of our lives are not distractions. Hence, it is in everyday experience, in all our actions and inter-actions that our adhering to the Lord is made real. This not only includes trials and difficulties, but is really verified through trials, as gold and silver are refined by fire. However, we must remember that life’s trials are means, not an end. If we permit trials to define life, then life becomes just one damn thing after another. Our destiny, the reason we exist, is what defines life. When we lose sight of this fact, the whole of reality becomes distorted.

The Holy Spirit, who is the way that the resurrected Christ remains present to us, is "always present on the path through all our trials" (Is It Possible To Live This Way: An Unusual Approach to Christian Existence, Vol. 2 Hope, pg. 32). It is the Spirit, observed Msgr. Luigi Giussani, who "teaches us the great word on the road of hope: patience"” (ibid). Our word patience comes from the Latin word, patior, meaning "to carry" (ibid). Enduring trials requires patience. Being patient in trial is an indispensable part of what it means to adhere to the Lord. It is certainly what it means to trust him.

Patience, being a natural virtue, is acquired through habit and habit, in turn, requires experience. We have experiences every day, all day long. Patience requires the cultivation of another virtue, courage. Courage is what enables us to reject nothing from our experience, including our failures, defeats, humiliations, and insecurities It is important to note that virtue, even natural virtues, like patience and courage, in addition to our indispensable efforts, are aided by grace. The grace involved here, again, is the theological virtue of hope. Therefore, certainty about the future does not mean the ability to predict, or even to anticipate, what will happen to us next. Rather, it is to have faith in Christ and to face every circumstance confident that he is with us. In this way, circumstances become secondary.

It is important for us to come to the realization that Christian hope, which is certainty about the future, does not permit us to either duck or jump over experience, to evade or avoid trials. After all, we are saved through our humanity and not despite it. The hope, borne from our faith in Christ, enables us to face reality in a new way, as new people, recreated by our rebirth in baptism. Rejecting no aspect of reality is what enables us to verify the presence of Christ in all the circumstances of our lives. Adhering to the Lord means nothing other than to live in the awareness of the fact that he is always present to us in every circumstance, no matter how painful or threatening. Certainly there are times when we have a hard time discerning his presence, but we have to come to know that he is there and that his presence is not dependent on our perception. Otherwise, he becomes a genie, someone we conjure up from our imagination, a fantasy.

Jesus Christ is real. He is the fulfillment of the prophecy given by Moses in our first reading today. He is not merely the one into whose mouth God put his words; he is the very Word of God, the sole Mediator between God and humanity. Jesus is also the “kin” of those who were led out of bondage in Egypt. So, in his humanity, which can neither be divided nor separated from his divinity, the Lord is indisputably Jewish. The realization of and adherence to this fact makes any form of Christian anti-Semitism, of which we have heard far too much this past week, not only incomprehensible, but a denial of the humanity of Jesus Christ, as well as a repudiation of the indispensable role of Israel in God's plan to reconcile to the world to himself.

In order to adhere to the Lord we must believe his promise that he is with us always and not view our lives, the things that happen to us, as distractions. Believing in a promise requires trusting the one who makes it. Trust only comes through the experience of the reliability of another. In today’s Gospel, those who witness the casting out of the unclean spirit ask, "What is this?" only to answer their own question with the words, "A new teaching with authority" (Mark 1:27). It is possible to give all kinds of examples of God's trustworthiness, but in order to really believe his promise, we, too, must experience his goodness, his power, his authority, which are all made manifest through his self-emptying love in and through the ordinary and every day circumstances of our lives, which constitute our unique path to destiny.

More from the anti-Semites

I wish had seen this item posted by Deacon Greg Kandra over on The Deacon's Bench before my post yesterday. I remain dismayed and a bit distraught over what seems to be a much too hasty reconciliation. Deacon Greg's post is SSPX website: "Judaism is inimical to all nations in general". From this article, entitled The Mystery of the Jewish People in History, which is still posted as of this morning on the SSPX's American website: "If the unrepentant Jewish people are disposed by God to be a theological enemy, the status of this opposition must be universal, inevitable, and terrible."

If the Jewish people, even the so-called "unrepentant" ones, have been "disposed by God to be a theological enemy," then God is capricious and unreliable, which, of course, He is not. One cannot twist what St. Paul writes to mean that God has disposed the Jewish people to oppose him. Anti-Semitism inevitably leads to theological error, known as heresy, as the quote above indicates, but more troubling is that it is simply racist, which is gravely sinful.

Seán Cardinal O'Malley, the archbishop of Boston and a Catholic blogger, puts this controversy in proper perspective in his post It is never too late to Arise!