St. Ambrose, Father of the Church

Today the Church commemorates and celebrates the life of an often over-looked Father of the Church, St. Ambrose of Milan. Usually Ambrose is remembered for being instrumental in the conversion and baptism of St. Augustine. Along with Saints Gregory the Great, Jerome, and Augustine, Ambrose is considered one of the Four Great Doctors of the Western Church. The Church in Milan to this day is not ritually Roman, but celebrates the liturgy according to the Ambrosian Rite.

During his life and ministry, St. Ambrose composed several works. Perhaps most notable among these is his catechetical work on the sacraments, De mysteriis ("On the Mysteries").

Given all of the heated commentary generated by the so-called economic paragraphs of Evangelii gaudium, it bears noting that in Pope Paul VI's penultimate encyclical (Humanae Vitae was his ultimate), Populorum progresso, the Pontiff turned to one of Ambrose's letters to make a particularly provocative point: that the right to private property is not absolute.

Everyone knows that the Fathers of the Church laid down the duty of the rich toward the poor in no uncertain terms. As St. Ambrose put it: "You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich." These words indicate that the right to private property is not absolute and unconditional (par. 23)

I am not shy about once again noting that together Populorum progresso and Humanae vitae, Evangelii Nuntiandi forms a triptych of Pope Paul's papal magisterium.

Early mosaic of Ambrose that might be an actual portrait

If you're interested in reading more on this, I direct you to a paper of fairly recent vintage, one I recently read, by Siegfried Van Duffel and Dennis Yap, entitled "Distributive Justice before the Eighteenth Century: The Right of Necessity."

Apparently anticipating Pope Francis by more than 1,600 years, it was St. Ambrose who wrote: "It is a better thing to save souls for the Lord than to save treasures. He who sent forth his apostles without gold had not need of gold to form his Church. The Church possesses gold, not to hoard, but to scatter abroad and come to the aid of the unfortunate."

St. Ambrose, blessed doctor, pray for us.

"They say they want the Kingdom, but they don't want God in it"

I am baptizing you with water, for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire (Matt 3:11-12)

It is part of our liturgical praxis to hear the words of St. John the Baptizer, who receives far too little due these days in the Latin Church, on the Second Sunday of Advent. Are we ready for the Lord, or do we want to skip all that and get to the party?

John the Baptist Points to Christ, by Bartolomé Estéban Murillo, ca 1655

One can make a pretty strong argument these days, especially given our proclivity to practically blow off the season of preparation in order to just get to the Christmas party, that most Christian spirituality, at least in the United States, has its foundation, not in prayer, fasting, and alms-giving (i.e., watching and waiting, readying ourselves for the day He returns), but in a kind of lazy presumption concerning God's mercy (i.e., "Whoops, there it is"). It's as if in the minds of many, God's gracious mercy cancels justice out entirely. Implicit in this view is a failure to grasp God's irreproachable holiness and the harm even our small sins do to the order of grace God seeks to establish through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Following the axiom of lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi (Latin shorthand for- how you pray forms what you believe, which, in turn, shapes how you live), this failure too, in my view, arises in large proportion from how we worship God in the Holy Mass.

In his far-too-little read and discussed encyclical on the theological virtue of hope (hope, which we must be careful not to conflate with mere wishing, is the focus of Advent, both prior to the "turn" that occurs on Gaudete Sunday, as well as afterwards), Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI addressed this in his remarkably cogent and clear way. I know I have cited this a few times before, but due largely to my own weakness and forgetfulness, I need to be reminded:

To protest against God in the name of justice is not helpful. A world without God is a world without hope (cf. Eph 2:12). Only God can create justice. And faith gives us the certainty that he does so. The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope. Is it not also a frightening image? I would say: it is an image that evokes responsibility, an image, therefore, of that fear of which Saint Hilary spoke when he said that all our fear has its place in love. God is justice and creates justice. This is our consolation and our hope. And in his justice there is also grace. This we know by turning our gaze to the crucified and risen Christ. Both these things—justice and grace—must be seen in their correct inner relationship. Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not make wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything away, so that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of equal value. Dostoevsky, for example, was right to protest against this kind of Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal banquet beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing had happened (par. 44)

Last year when posting my annual series on the O Antiphons, it struck me that Johnny Cash's song "The Wanderer" is very appropriate for these (still) early days of Advent, capturing its "spirit" well:

St. John the Baptist, seal of the prophets, clearer of the way of the Messiah, of whom the Lord Himself said "among those born of women there has arisen no one greater" (Matt 11:11), pray for us.

Seeking to rescue St. Nicholas of Myra

It seems that for many Catholics today, 6 December, the day the Church honors St. Nicholas of Myra (270-343), has become mostly an opportunity to play the comedian and persistently joke, according to the logic, "if it's funny once, it's funny 1,000 times," that we observe "Punch a Heretic Day." Why punch a heretic today in honor of St. Nicholas? It seems that while participating in the Council of Nicea in 325, during an intervention of Arius, also a bishop, but one who taught a heresy that became known as Arianism, which held that the Son, at some point prior to the creation of the physical universe, was "created," that is, "made by" and not "begotten of" the Father, that Nicholas became so enraged that he stood, crossed the room, and slapped Arius in the face.

What gets left out of this weird attempt at being funny (in my opinion, this "meme" jumped the shark awhile back) is what happened afterwards: Nicholas was punished with imprisonment and banned by his fellow bishops from further participating in the Council. Most importantly, Nicholas came to feel guilty for and then to repent of the sin of slapping his brother bishop (even a heretical one- read a fuller version here).

While I realize that it is mostly meant tongue-in-cheek, it seems to me (personal opinion alert) that over the course of the past few years this regrettable incident in the life of St. Nicholas has kind of perverted this wonderful day. Saints are redeemed sinners, true. This means they had sins from which they needed to repent and for which they needed to be forgiven. They only achieved sanctity by the grace of God. Nonetheless, we don't celebrate their sins, we celebrate their sanctity, their overcoming of sin through Christ Jesus. To jokingly suggest that we observe "Punch a Heretic" day in honor of St. Nicholas makes as much sense to me as joking about celebrating "Call Someone Who Does Not Venerate the Blessed Virgin a 'Hooked Nosed Bastard'" day on 30 September, when the Church honors St. Jerome. Why keep it tame? Let's ramp it up (reductio ad absurdum alert) and start joking around about observing "Sleep With a Random Stranger" day on 3 April, the Memorial of St. Mary of Egypt.

In light of the many wonderful traditions handed on to us that we can use to celebrate this lovely Advent feast, it seems to me that we can do better than abject and persistent silliness. The communio sanctorum is holy and, therefore, should be treated, not with Puritanical strictness (i.e., made no fun), but celebrated with a sense of awe that inspires us to walk our own path towards holiness with more trust and to call upon the saints, imploring God, through Jesus Christ, to apply their merits to us and to the souls in Purgatory.

If nothing else, take pity. Poor St. Nicholas has already suffered the indignity of being made into the highly secularized Santa Claus!

UPDATED Mandela: "until I changed myself, I could not change others."

Since I've posted nothing since putting up my homily for the First Sunday of Advent back on 1 December, I have a lot of ground I feel that I need to cover. So, where to begin? Well, let's see, I'll start with this: because I have been on a serious listening-to-The-Smith's jag for the past few weeks, I intended to put up one of their songs as our Friday traditio (I had it narrowed down to 3), but due to the death of Nelson Mandela, I decided on Paul Simon with Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes."

Nelson Mandela was not a perfect man and the African National Congress to which he belonged had far from clean hands during the struggle against the terribly unjust apartheid regime in South Africa. However, when he was elected president in 1995, Mandela wisely saw reconciliation as integral to achieving anything approximating justice. Not content to dictate reconciliation, he reached out to his former enemies, seeking to be personally and publicly reconciled with them. He voluntarily chose to serve only one term as president. His personal modesty and modest lifestyle were also things that set him apart from so many other world leaders.

I firmly believe that the 27 years he spent imprisoned changed him for the better. In his autobiography, he wrote, "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." In his memoirs, he also observed, reflecting on his release from prison, "As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison."

Here's part of what Pope Francis conveyed to the people of South Africa in a telegram sent to their current president, Jacob Zuma:

Paying tribute to the steadfast commitment shown by Nelson Mandela in promoting the human dignity of all the nation’s citizens and in forging a new South Africa built on the firm foundations of non-violence, reconciliation and truth, I pray that the late President’s example will inspire generations of South Africans to put justice and the common good at the forefront of their political aspirations

UPDATE It does not surprise me that many fail, or refuse, to grasp the dynamics involved in the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Perhaps this exchange from the New York Review of Books from earlier this year will help set out those complexities in bolder relief.

It's easy to forget that the U.S. strongly backed South Africa's apartheid regime almost to its end. It can be argued that we did this to the detriment of both our short and long term interests (something similar can be said our support for many brutal South American regimes who maintained our support by convincing us that all of their opponents were communists, which, we now know- many knew then- was false). In terms of South Africa, in some ways, we forced the ANC into the arms of the Soviets.

Hence, the quote making the rounds by Mandela praising Cuba, while certainly something that should not be covered up, or glossed over, like all quotes, has a context. I think people forget the conflict in Angola, which featured a U.S.-backed military intervention in that country by South Africa and Zaire. In response, and likely at the behest of the Soviets, Cuba sent troops to fight there. Angola was Cuba's "Vietnam."

As noted by veteran journalist Bill Keller, Prof Stephen Ellis, who has conducted the most extensive research on this topic, noted "Mandela’s brief, expedient membership in the [South African Communist] Party 'does not detract from his historic stature.' Mandela, Mr. Ellis told one interviewer, 'wasn’t a real convert, it was just an opportunist thing.'"

It's easy to forget that there were a lot of opportunistic "communists" during the Cold War, that is, people who were committed to their own causes, like Mandela, who were able to obtain help and assistance from the Soviet Union. Is this right? I don't believe so. But we have to be careful drawing far-reaching conclusions from scant evidence. I am certainly not promoting the sainthood cause of Pres. Mandela.

I think Keller, who also points to some of the terrible things done by the ANC, grasps the reality, which, as reality tends to be, is quite complex:

Nelson Mandela was, at various times, a black nationalist and a nonracialist, an opponent of armed struggle and a practitioner of armed struggle, a close partner of the South African Communist Party and, in his presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists. In other words, he was whatever served his purpose of ending South Africa’s particularly fiendish brand of minority rule. I should not have been so categorical in saying Mandela was not a Communist. But he was not a Communist in the values he upheld, the politics he practiced, the constitution he negotiated, or the presidency he held

People who are shocked by these facts and who, upon learning them, will either deny them outright, or emotively move from one extreme to the other as regards Mandela, need to both wake up and grow up. Many were surprised at the time apartheid crumbled that South Africa, which is still far from a wholly healed country, did not erupt into a violent, bloody civil war (the struggle to end apartheid was not bloodless, far from it) is a great credit to Nelson Mandela, as well as others. But it was his presidency that proved crucial in the early years of majority rule. UPDATE END

Year A First Sunday of Advent

Readings: Isa 2:1-5; Ps 122:1-9; Rom 13:11-14; Matt 24:37-44

“Whatever happened to time? It doesn’t come around anymore. The last time I saw time, it was walking out the door,” so goes an old Smothers Brothers song. The fact that many of you are asking yourselves, or those around you, “Who are the Smothers Brothers?” is proof enough of this thesis: times passes quickly. Moreover, it is an article of our Christian faith, that is, a dogma, that time will end with the glorious return of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Whether it’s Christ’s return in glory, or the end of your mortal existence, your time is limited. This is exactly what St. Paul was fervently pointing out to the Roman Christians some 2,000 years ago. While it’s true that Christ has not yet triumphantly returned, it is true that all of those to whom the apostle originally addressed this missive, and even Paul himself, who met his death in Rome at the hands of an imperial executioner a short time after writing this, have all passed into eternity.

As regards the apostle, it seems that Paul thought he was going to Rome in chains in order to be acquitted by the emperor and to then to use Rome as a staging area for his planned mission to take the Gospel further west. But as he learned, God had other plans for him, better plans. In his second letter to the Christians in Corinth, the apostle wrote:

So we are always courageous, although we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yet we are courageous, and we would rather leave the body and go home to the Lord. Therefore, we aspire to please him, whether we are at home or away. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive recompense, according to what he did in the body, whether good or evil (2 Cor 5:6-10)

In our Gospel today, the Lord Himself takes up the same theme as St. Paul. Be prepared, He tells His listeners, “For you do not know on which day your Lord will come” (Matt 24:42).

In his Advent message for this year Bishop Wester asks each of us to take some precious time between now and our celebration of the Lord’s Nativity to pause and to reflect upon these questions:

What are the crooked ways on which I sometimes get lost, or I take a detour? What are the crooked ways that need to be made straight in my life? What are those mountains that are blocking my spiritual path? What are the obstacles to finding Christ more fully in my life? What are the obstacles to me leading a more faith-filled life, a more trusting life?

Let’s face it sisters and brothers, sometimes we need to get out of our own way. Our own hearts can be a bigger obstacle than any mountain. Hence, these Advent reflections are not about “taking control” of things, but about relinquishing control to the One who sets out to find the lost and put him on the right path, the One who can straighten your crooked paths, who can even level mountains, who wants to show you, precisely through the circumstances you face, that He is more than worthy of your complete and total trust. In response, at the beginning of this New Year of grace, resolve to avail yourself fully of the means He gives you to do just this: pray, fast, read Scripture, selflessly serve others, and celebrate the sacraments, especially Penance and Eucharist.

None of this said in order to make you afraid, to scare you into being good, which, in addition to being wholly undesirable, I do not believe to even be possible. It is said in order to enable you to live in a happy, fulfilling and satisfying manner. Indeed, as Scripture elsewhere teaches, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love. We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:18-19).

In the old Baltimore Catechism, the answer to the question, “Why did God make you?” was, “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.” It’s hard to beat the simplicity of that answer, an answer that has not changed. To dress this up a bit, perhaps making it more fitting for us grown-ups, we can say, yet again, that we are to live sub specie aeternitatis, which means, “under the aspect of eternity.

In a kind of reversal, which is fitting for the endlessly fascinating season of Advent, the season during which we bring to the forefront our living the dialectical tension between the already and not yet, which we cheat ourselves by not observing fully, choosing instead to follow the crowd by rushing into Christmas, it is our Old Testament readings that set hope before us. Looking beyond the Lord’s first coming, the prophet Isaiah foretells the fulfillment of God’s plan for us. My dear friends in Christ, as we embark on this new year of grace, let’s start off by preparing ourselves to “go rejoicing to the house of the Lord” (Ps 122:1), which is to do nothing other than to live in the light of the very end for which you were so lovingly made.

Surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses

Know that the Lord is coming and with him all his saints; that day will dawn with a wonderful light, alleluia.

Having written so much this month on sin, death, and Purgatory, which I don't regret in the least as November, the final weeks of the liturgical year, is a more than appropriate time to consider such things, that is, ultimate things, I want to bring it all to a close the way November began, by focusing on the saints, a literary technique known as "framing."

A short quote I came across some years ago now, words spoken by Fr. Tonino Lasconi, the author of numerous volumes on the renewal of catechesis in Italy, sticks with me: "Without the saints, the faith vanishes." But their vanishing, nonetheless, seems to continue apace. I sincerely hope that one of the ways my blog fosters "Christian discipleship in the late modern milieu in the diakonia of koinonia" is by writing often about the communio sanctorum (i.e., the communion of holy people and things).

Lately, I have been re-reading large portions of Romano Amerio's Iota Unum, which is his far-ranging critique of the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath. I believe it is important reading for anyone who is truly interested in the Council, its effects, and our continuing search for a "hermeneutic," a quest that arises, Amerio insists, from the ambiguous nature of many of the main conciliar texts. While very critical, this book was for Amerio a work of love.

Just this week, I came across this passage about the post-conciliar diminishment of the cultus sanctorum, which appears in the midst of a phenomenon he calls "Circiterisms." A circiterism, according to Amerio, "consists in referring to an indistinct and confused term as if it were something well established and defined, and then extracting or excluding from it the element one needs to extract or exclude" (104). In discussing the subject of this post (i.e., the saints), he discusses "hiding one truth behind another so as to be able to behave as if the hidden truth were not only hidden but simply non-existent":

When the Church, for example, is defined as the People of God on a journey, the other side of the truth is hidden, namely that the Church also includes the blessed who have already reached the end of the journey, and that they are the more important part of the Church, since they are the part in which the purpose of the Church and of the universe has been fulfilled. In the next stage, the truth which was still part of the message but which has been put in the background will end up being dropped from the message altogther, through the rejection of the cult of the saints (105)

I am not sure what the Italian word Amerio used is translated into English as "rejection" is, but it seems to me that "neglect" might be the more operative term. Having recently led a 12 week study on the Letter to the Hebrews, I cannot recommend that book of sacred writ highly enough, dealing with these twin realities in a perfectly balanced manner.

The discomforting fact is that, in the end, the Church will only consist of the saints, after the great day of reckoning, known in Catholic theology as the General Judgment, when the wheat is separated from the tares. So, when we hear and repeat things like Bloy's famous, "There is only one sadness, and that is not to be saints," or, "Be a saint what else is there?" we should be convicted, provoked, spurred, inspired. This should cause us to turn to the saints in light for their help and assistance as well as to assist the souls in Purgatory.

There is one post from this past year to which I want to draw attention: "Saints are theologians par excellence." If you remain unconvinced, I refer you to this post about Bl. Rupert Mayer, SJ, by my friend, Fr. Peter Nguyen, SJ.

Know that the Lord is coming and with him all his saints; that day will dawn with a wonderful light, alleluia (Antiphon 2 of Evening Prayer I- First Sunday of Advent)

A creed is only as persuasive the person professing it

A wonderful "old" song by Sting, "All This Time," is our Friday traditio for this last Friday of this year of grace. The release of Pope Francis' post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, earlier this week, plus the advent of the Friday dubbed "Black," is what prompted me to choose this song (well that and the fact I heard while working out on Wednesday, exercise, especially running is a great source of synthesizing thoughts for me).

The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose

This is nothing new. As evidence for proof of this assertion, I offer- Rerum novarum, Quadragesimo anno, Populorum progresso, Centesimus annus, a document that was badly distorted by several leading Catholic thinkers in the U.S. shortly after its promulgation, Caritas in veritate, which began as an update of Populorum progresso 40 years on (in the manner of Quadragesimo anno to Rerum novarum), but was delayed in order to weigh in on the 2008 global financial meltdown, and now Evangelii gaudium. There are not merely threads, but thick-gauge cables that pull these documents of the past 100+ years of papal social teaching together.

While it is true that Pope Francis' exhortation is not primarily about economics, but evangelization, it is also true that evangelization is not first and foremost about preaching, especially in our day and age. As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote in his final piece for The Atlantic, which was a review of Ian Ker's biography of G.K. Chesterton, "The Reactionary": "we are all fully familiar with the religious practitioner who can’t or doesn’t live up to the merits of his creed. There’s nothing innately paradoxical in that. Any solution, however, is a bit like the Golden Rule: the creed is only as morally strong as the person who happens to be uttering it."

Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth/
Better to be poor than a fat man in the eye of a needle/
And as these words were spoken I swore I hear/
The old man laughing/
'What good is a used up world and how could it be/
Worth having'