Pope Francis, the U.S. bishops, and the environment

It's been a long time since I last posted three times in a day. But a piece in the New York Times by Laurie Goldstein, "Pope Francis May Find Wariness Among U.S. Bishops on Climate Change," prompted me to write something about it.

First, I don't know that Pope Francis' encyclical, Laudato sii (i.e., "praised be"- in Italian, not Latin) is going to be exclusively about climate change per se as much as it will be about a genuine ecology that arises from humanity's God-given stewardship of the earth with an emphasis on this affects the poor and dispossessed of the earth.

Reading Goldstein's piece made me wonder if anybody at the NY Times (except, perhaps- and only perhaps- Ross Douthat) will ever really understand the Catholic Church. I think it's more a question of ideology than it is of a desire to understand.

Taken by me at Cheese Park Bountiful, Utah, February 2015

Contra Goldstein, I really don't think there are an appreciable number of U.S. bishops (I doubt there are any) who are not in favor of better environmental stewardship and who are not eager for Francis' encyclical. Waiting to read it before commenting on it strikes me as simply prudent. The collective witness of the U.S. bishops, going back decades, gives us a decisive record of their insistence on our need to care for the environment, to establish a true ecology. Besides, being good stewards of the environment does not hinge decisively on some of the more controverted issues surrounding human-caused climate change. Environmental stewardship is just another case of reason and revelation working together.

As to the idea expressed in the piece that a significant number of U.S. bishops are worried that environmental stewardship conflicts with the Church's teaching on contraception, how about things like the fact that that orally-taken hormonal contraceptives, in addition to being carcinogenic, is now a measurable source of water pollution? Was it not Pope Francis, back in January, while on his way home from the Philippines, who railed against the ideology of the "neo-Malthusians? (see "The predictable provocations of the Pope of Rome"

All one needs to do is look at what I call the triptych of Bl Paul VI's papal magisterium- Populorum progresso, Humanae vitae,' and Evangelii nuntiandi - to see how integrated all of this already is in Catholic teaching.

As Mark Shea noted in his blurb for Radically Catholic in the Age of Francis: An Anthology of Visions for the Future-"To be radically Catholic in the Age of Francis is, therefore, to be rooted in the whole of the Catholic tradition. That is emphatically what Francis is..." I seriously doubt that Laudato sii will be any departure from Catholic tradition, even as I expect it to be provocative for many.

Unsurprisingly, Kevin Jones writing for the Catholic News Service strikes what I believe will prove to be a much more accurate note in "Here's what the US bishops expect from the Pope's new encyclical". Jones, in his article, makes mention of the U.S. Bishops' “Renewing the Earth,” issued in 1991, and their document specifically on climate change “Global Climate Change, a Plea for Dialogue, Prudence and the Common Good,” issued in 2001.

Notre Dame Center for Liturgy 2015 Symposium

Apart from live-blogging the keynote addresses and panel discussions on Facebook, which was a lot, I didn't post anything here from my participation in this week's Notre Dame Center for Liturgy's Symposium. Among the many wonderful experiences packed into three and-a-half days, was the privilege of serving at the altar during the Symposium's Mass, which we celebrated in the university's Basilica of the Sacred Heart. I assisted the main celebrant, Fr Michael Wurtz, CSC. Courtesy of one of the Symposium's other participants, Michael Bayer, here is a photo of that event:

I am on the far left of the photograph, to Fr Michael's right. Later that evening, I was able to enjoy drinks and fellowship with Fr Michael at Dr Patrick Deneen's house, where, with great humility and in a fraternal spirit, I poured some water into his Laphoraig. Fr Michael and I also had a fairly in-depth discussion on deacons in parish life. It is a good and important that we have places where these conversations can occur and that they do occur.

Below is a picture of those of us who gathered a bit early for Morning Prayer on Tuesday morning in the Duncan Hall chapel. Michael also took this picture. I am at the back on the right in the light blue shirt.

Finally, a photo taken by the Notre Center for Liturgy Director, Dr Tim O'Malley, during the first day of the two-day Seminar I led, "The Deacon in the Life of the Church."

What can I really say apart from "What a great experience both in and outside the classroom and lecture hall"?

Deacons are evangelizing disciple-makers

For many different reasons I have been thinking a lot recently about evangelization. More specifically, I have been pondering ways I can be a better evangelist in my own diaconal ministry. As ministers of the Word, sacrament, and charity, there can be no question whatsoever that evangelization is inherent to being a deacon. This is what two of the original seven men set apart by apostles and, taken from at least the time of St Irenaeus of Lyon, to be the first deacons, show us, especially Stephen and Philip. In addition to their witness, the diaconate has a long and illustrious history of evangelists: Ephrem the Syrian, Lawerence, Francis of Assisi, Nicholas Ferrar, to name several of the most prominent.

But I am a little ahead of myself. What is evangelization? Stated most simply, evangelization is proclaiming the Gospel. It is from the Greek neuter noun εὐαγγέλιον, transliterated as euaggelion, that we derive our English word "Gospel," which simply means, as does euaggelion, "good news." It is with the important understanding that because Jesus, in His person, makes the kingdom of God a present reality, described in the writings of Origen by his reference to the Lord as autobasileia, we can point to Jesus' words on evangelization: "I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose" (Luke 4:43).

Jesus gave His apostles (apostle meaning one who is sent) what we call the Great Commission (see Matt 28:16-20). It seems to me that we often skip over the first part of our Lord's commission in order to more quickly get to the second part, which is to baptize people in name of the Holy Trinity. What part is that? "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations" (Matt 28:19a).

So, the question is, in our parishes are we "making disciples" or just baptizing? Yes, the sacraments confer grace. Baptism, in a particular way, infuses the baptized with sanctifying grace, thus restoring the one baptized to the state of original grace, which is communion with God, with each other, and with creation. In our dying, being buried, and rising with Christ in and through Baptism (see Rom 6:4) we are not only to see, but to experience firsthand, that eternal life is not life that begins after mortal death, but starts now. In baptism we are reborn as children of God through Christ by the power of the Spirit, thus making what is implicit explicit. But because the sacraments do not work and were not instituted by our Lord to work like magic, preparation is required in order to live this new life freely given.

Whether it is preparing adults through RCIA - "The [year-long] catechumenate is an extended period during which the candidates are given suitable pastoral formation and guidance, aimed at training them in the Christian life. In this way, the dispositions manifested at their acceptance into the catechumenate are brought to maturity" (RCIA par. 75) - or preparing parents and godparents to keep the solemn promises they make when having infants and children who have not yet reached the age of reason baptized, we must be mindful that we are engaging in disciple-making. It is useful here to point out that the Christian initiation of children is modeled on that of adults, not the other way around.

Considering the above, an important question arises, In all of these "ordinary" parish activities are we rushing to baptize or taking seriously Christ's mandate to "make disciples"? In other words, are those being baptized, along with those having their children baptized, being formed in the disciplines that constitute Christian discipleship, the way of Christian life, which was initially known as "the Way" (see Acts 9:2)? Judging by the often truncated nature of RCIA (i.e., the school year September to Easter model, which frequently does not include a Period of Evangelization and discernment called "Precatechumenate"), coupled with the lack of a truly mystagogical approach to the periods of catechumenate and purification and enlightenment (the approach is usually didactic- it needs to be formational, not merely informational), along with the very often cursory nature of baptismal preparation for parents and godparents (being a godparent is usually reduced to an honorary and titular role), which, at least in my experience tends to be quite didactic, sometimes consisting of watching a video and being handed a booklet, I'd have to say that with regard to disciple-making we have much work to do.

During a panel discussion this past week at the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy's annual Symposium on Formation for Marriage and Priesthood, one of the panelists, Msgr Bill Schooler, pastor of a large parish in Indiana, stated simply, "Marriage preparation, more than anything else, is evangelization." As indicated above, so is baptismal preparation and RCIA. It seems to me that this would also hold true for funerals. Evangelization is not just proclamation, but also consists of formation. While catechesis and evangelization can be distinguished one from the other, there is a rather large overlap between them. After all, don't both fundamentally consist in handing on the good news? Just as evangelization refers to the proclamation of the good news, which is nothing other than proclaiming the great Paschal mystery, to catechize is to "resound" (to fill a place with sound loud enough to make it echo) the teaching of Christ and the apostles (i.e., to unpack the good news). The content of evangelization and catechesis are the same, the Paschal mystery, only the methods differ. So, while distinct, these two activities are inextricably bound together. The result of our recognizing how bound together evangelization and catechesis are, as well as recognizing they are oriented to (they flow out of and back to) the Eucharist, is a mystagogical approach.

How does this tie back to deacons? In addition to preaching, which, at least when done well by expounding the Scriptures, deacons exhort by both evangelizing and catechizing. Deacons preach both in the context of the Mass and other liturgical celebrations, like graveside committal services, funeral vigils, the funeral rite that takes place outside of Mass, and Rites of Marriage outside of Mass, which are usually between a Catholic and a non-Catholic, increasingly between a Catholic and a non-Christian. Deacons are usually deeply involved in marriage and baptismal preparation and very often in RCIA. How the deacon engages in his secular work is yet another way he evangelizes, by the sacramental grace he received in ordination, he makes the Church present, as a cleric, in a wholly unique and singular way. For the married permanent deacon, this extends to living out marriage and family life according to the good news. In a similar way single, never married, deacons serve as a powerful sign by providing support and encouragement for lay single Christians; widowed deacons to the widowed; the divorced deacon (there are some) to those who have suffered the pain and anguish of a divorce.

In his address to permanent deacons in the Jubliee Year of 2000, Pope St John Paul II said, "Whoever believes that Christ the Lord is the way, the truth and the life, whoever knows that the Church is his continuation in history, whoever has a personal experience of all this cannot fail, for this very reason, to become fervently missionary. Dear deacons, be active apostles of the new evangelization. Lead everyone to Christ! Through your efforts, may his kingdom also spread in your family, in your workplace, in the parish, in the Diocese, in the whole world!"

Another avenue worth some exploration, along with the renewed and restored diaconate as a successful and concrete example of the primary goals of the Second Vatican Council (i.e., ressourcement and aggiornamento), is the relationship of the three-fold service of the deacon that consists of Word, Liturgy, and Charity to what Pope Benedict XVI, in his first encyclical Deus caritas est, insisted were expressions of the "Church's deepest nature," which is also three-fold: "of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia)" (par 25a). "These duties," Benedict explained, "presuppose each other and are inseparable" (par 25a). In his life and ministry, in his very person, the deacon is to be a concrete sign of the inseparability of these expressions of the Church's deepest nature.

Hence, the very essence of being a deacon is to be an evangelist, or, to use the phrase so central to Pope Francis' teaching, a missionary disciple.

My return and our anniversary

The dip in blogging this week has been due to my participation in the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy's annual Symposium on campus in South Bend, where I led a 2-day seminar on "The Deacon in the Life of the Church." I did make it home in time for my twenty-second wedding anniversary, which is today.

How wonderful it is to have the anniversary of the day we began living out the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony fall this year on the Solemnity of the Sacred of Jesus! All of this made choosing a Friday traditio a bit more complex than I would care for it to be, which only shows that, a per usual, I take all of this way too seriously.

Since it is a long-standing traditio for us to watch the movie "So I Married an Axe Murderer" on our anniversary each year, I'll go with this:

So, to my still lovely bride, whose seemingly effortless and never-failing love for me, because I do not deserve it, is a great grace and a sacramental sign of Christ's love both for me and our children:

There she goes
There she goes again
Pulsing through my veins
And I just can't contain
This feeling that remains

After 22 years and six children, I know very well that love that lasts not only a lifetime but forever cannot be reduced to a mere feeling. The truth is, if that were the case it's highly unlikely we'd celebrating our marriage today. And so while it should not and, in fact, cannot be so reduced, to insist that feeling, that affectivity, plays no role at all, only serves to reduce love and marriage to a white-knuckled act of the will, a view that strikes me as equally disastrous. Married love is multi-faceted and multi-layered, the layers built struggle-by-struggle, grace-by-grace over the years. Deo gratias!

Corpus Christi: The Eucharist "makes" us

Readings: Ex 24:3-8; Ps 116:12-3.15-18; Heb 9:11-15; Mark 4:12-16.22-26

The second reading for this Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi) is one of the passages that I think best demonstrates the reality of the hypostatic union. Hypo...stat...ic what?, you may ask. The "hypostatic union" is theological shorthand for the uniting of the divine and human nature in the one person of Jesus Christ.

This reality was defined at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451:

One and the Same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten; acknowledged in Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis; not as though He were parted or divided into Two Persons, but One and the Self-same Son and Only-begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ

Why I think the ninth chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews serves as great scriptural evidence (inspired, and so, revelatory evidence) is that in order to suffer, bleed, and die, Christ Jesus had to be fully human.

One of the earliest heresies, one we see being combated in the pages of the New Testament, was docetism. The word docetism, or docetic, is derived from the Greek verb dokeĩn, meaning "to seem." This heresy held that Jesus only seemed to be human, but was really a spirit, a kind of phantom. This is very probably one of the reasons why the resurrection accounts in the Gospels go to great lengths to demonstrate that, even after His rising from the dead, Christ was embodied.

In order for His death to cleanse our flesh and our consciences "from dead works to worship the living God" (Heb 9:13-14), Christ had to be fully divine. If our Lord was not fully divine, then His death is just that of another peasant killed by the Roman imperium.

Offering sacrifice is what priests do, even in the New Covenant. The sacrifice now offered is not a bloody sacrifice, but a participation in the once-for-all efficacious sacrifice our Lord made on the Holy Cross. We will participate in this until He returns in glory. This is exactly what St Paul wrote in his First Letter to the Corinthians: "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes" (11:26).

Our participation in the Eucharistic sacrifice is what makes us together what we are, the ekklesia, the Church, the veritable Body of Christ. By our gathering at Mass to be formed and informed by the Word of God and by our participation at the table of the Eucharist the Holy Spirit also transforms us into who we are individually: priest and prophets, a royal people. It is here that we are conformed more and more, by the grace of God and our worthy participation (our "worthiness" is also effected by God's grace in the sacraments of Baptism and Penance), into what and who God created, redeemed us, and is now sanctifying us to be. It has been noted more than once that "the Eucharist makes the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist."

Rather than comment on today's Gospel, I will give our dear Lord, whose institution of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood insures that He remains not merely with us, but in us by the power of this Sacrament, the last word:

While they were eating, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, gave it to them, and said, "Take it; this is my body." Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. He said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many" (Mark 14:22-24)

Angelic Bread

Depending on where you live and whether or not you worship in the Extraordinary Form, Corpus Christi was either yesterday or it is Sunday. For the vast majority of Roman Catholics in the United States, who worship according to the Ordinary Form of the Liturgy, including your humble scribe, Corpus Christi, or the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood Christ is this Sunday.

From the Preface for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ:

Nourishing your faithful by this sacred mystery, you make them holy, so that the human race, bounded by one world, may be enlightened by one faith and united by one bond of charity

Our Friday traditio is Cambridge's King's College Choir singing the beautiful hymn, composed by the Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas, Panis Angelicus (i.e., "The Bread of Angels," or "Angelic Bread").

In Eucharistic I, the Roman Canon, we encounter this beautiful part of the epiclesis:

In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God:
command that these gifts be borne
by the hands of your holy Angel
to your altar on high
in the sight of your divine majesty,
so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar
receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son,
may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing
Through Christ our Lord. Amen

In facing reality, we're protagonists or nobodies

This morning I am aware of very many things, which sounds good, but such awareness is not really good for me. It usually causes me to be anxious and run the risk of falling, again, into depression. I remember gaining this kind of what I call "universal awareness" at about the age of 9. I don't mind saying that it results in a most unwelcome and exhausting struggle.

In the midst of my struggle this morning, which began early, I came across this on Facebook:

Given the incontrovertible truth of Malcolm Muggeridge's observation - "The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact" - I can't grasp believing in any religious or philosophical schema that does not provide some explanation for this human predisposition, what Francis Spufford, in his book Unapologetic, denoted as the HPtFTU (i.e., "Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up"), let alone in a religion, claiming to be Christian, that explicitly denies original sin.

Just before seeing Fr McCabe's meme, I prayed the Office of Readings (I prayed this office because one can pray it at any time during the day and I missed the window for Morning Prayer). The Scriptural reading for today was Job 11:1-20. This passage is a discourse by Zophar the Naamathite giving his "take" on Job's afflictions. Zophar's disquisition includes this: "An empty head will gain understanding, when a colt of a wild jackass is born human" (Job 11:12).

But what really resonated with me in light of McCabe's insight was the responsory to the reading from Job, taken from the fourth chapter of St Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians:

"We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body" (verses 8-10)

In light of the many things that prompted my anxiety today, it occurred to me that, as Christians, we have to face our difficult and painful cultural/societal/political situation in the West and elsewhere head-on. This means we need to stop acting defeated.

We're not defeated. The hope that comes from being a Christian, which can never arise from being merely a cultural Christian, is precisely that in Christ Jesus we are always, already victorious no matter what. We need to live in and engage from this perspective.

Evangelization is not some defensive, rear-guard action. If I am not mistaken, I think this the most urgent message Pope Francis is trying with all his might to convey. Let's face it, no matter what happens, we will never return to the status quo ante.

I have to say I would not be able to cope without what I have learned from Msgr Giussani and what I am reminded of and have reinforced by reading and re-reading what he wrote and said, along with following the charism given him, even if in my own, distant way. According to Don Gius our choice is clear: We're protagonists or we're nobodies. Our protagonism does not depend on living in circumstances that we find favorable. To engage reality according to all the factors that constitute it is always a provocation (Pro+vocaton= "for your call"). This is what Paul constantly emphasized in light of his lived experience.