Ecclesia, Mater et Magistra- The Church, Mother and Teacher

In my view, what makes the Catholic "blogosphere" go round, as I think it does many other "spheres" of the "blogosverse," is the posing of inchoate questions (i.e., questions that are deliberately formed in a partial and imperfect way- Yes, I was looking for an opportunity to use the word "inchoate"). The most dramatic recent case-in-point of this phenomenon was the silly flap over something Pope Francis said in one of his daily homilies about everyone being redeemed. The response to this perfectly sensible and non-controversial statement was almost unbelievable and demonstrated the truth, asserted so forthrightly by Barbara Nicholosi recently, about how ignorant many Catholics are concerning even the basics of our faith (i.e., like knowing the difference between redemption and justification). It was just this kind of ignorance I dealt with in my last post about marriage, "Marriage: seeking to ecclesially clarify".

Just today I came across something in The National Catholic Reporter that implied that one bishop's assertion that there is only one Catholic viewpoint on the nature of marriage was dismissive of other "Catholic" viewpoints. The author of the article, Michael Clancy, also appealed to the fact that "the majority of Catholics now support same-sex marriage"

Clancy's appeal to the majority brings up two issues. The first has to do with the graph of the poll he cited. If there is no distinction made between those who practice their Catholic faith and those who do not, especially as measured by the frequency of Sunday Mass attendance, such research demonstrates nothing shocking or earth-shattering. Especially when it comes to hot-button social issues, the views of the majority of practicing Catholics are usually 180 degrees out from those of the majority of non-practicing Catholics. The second is a philosophical/theological point that the truth about such matters, especially when it arises from natural law and revelation (in both modes Scripture and Tradition), is not overturned by popular vote.

The occasion for Clancy's implication that there is more than one legitimate Catholic viewpoint concerning the nature of marriage was an exchange that took place in Phoenix last weekend between Bishop Joseph Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, IL and Sr. Jeannine Grammick, who has been the subject of formal Church discipline regarding her stance on this and other issues surrounding homosexuality.

Let's get beyond the equivocation about what constitutes a Catholic view on the nature of marriage. It is certainly true that individual Catholics hold more than one view concerning the nature of marriage. This brings up some rather fundamental issues that go to the heart of what it means to be a Catholic. Because it invokes such fundamental matters, a few bishops have urged those who dissent from what the Church teaches regarding marriage to refrain from receiving Holy Communion. Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit put it this way: "For a Catholic to receive holy Communion and still deny the revelation Christ entrusted to the church is to try to say two contradictory things at once: 'I believe the church offers the saving truth of Jesus, and I reject what the church teaches.'"

While I certainly have my opinion, as a deacon it is not my place to issue public statements about who is, or is not, to receive communion. But all of this brings to the fore two fundamental questions: Who speaks for Christ? The Catholic answer is, The Church. Who authoritatively speaks for the Church concerning matters of faith and morals? The Catholic answer is the Roman Pontiff and the bishops, who are the successors of the apostles, in union with him. While individual Catholics undoubtedly hold differing views concerning the nature and purpose of marriage, Bishop Paprocki is correct to assert that there is "only one authentically Catholic" view of marriage.

The Blessed Virgin Mary, by El Greco

You can agree or disagree with the authentically Catholic view of marriage, but you are not free to assert a different view and insist that it is Catholic.

Looking at this matter through a pragmatic lens, many would assert that by changing her position on the nature marriage (if such a thing were even possible- it is not), or soften its teaching on contraception, co-habitation between the unmarried, pre-martial sex, etc. many people who have left would return. This is not the experience of various mainline Protestant denominations who have done these very things and yet continue to shrink, several to the point of extinction in the near term.

More importantly, if one believes the Church's teaching authority, given to her by Christ, can be so badly mistaken about such an important matter, how could that person trust the Church's authority at all on any matter? Some may respond by saying the credibility of the Church's hierarchy, who possess Christ's teaching authority, is already shot. While I understand this argument, I am not convinced by it. Those areas where the Church's witness has been compromised, as with the sexual abuse of children and the horrible way it was mishandled in far too many places, are instances wherein members of the Church, including cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and priests, miserably failed to live up to the Church's constant teaching. Hence, one cannot point to a defect in Church teaching, but a massive, horrendous, and sinful failure to live up to it, to apply the Church's discipline, to seek justice for the victims, and to protect the innocent.

My point was summarized well by Stuart Reid, writing about Mel Gibson for the U.K.'s Catholic Herald newsweekly three summers ago, when, referring to Mel's alleged, but unproven, sedevacantism, he wrote that he could find no evidence that Gibson had either questioned or rejected "any part of Catholic teaching." As an example, he compared that with the fact that "most Catholics in the comfortable West do not accept" Church teaching with regard to contraception. Most notably he points out, "They don’t just ignore it – the way we all ignore moral teaching from time to time – they believe the Church is in error." To believe such a thing should bring up the issue Archbishop Vigeron sought to invoke, which is not about adhering to rules externally imposed, but about one's own conscience and integrity.

In my estimation Msgr. Luigi Giussani was correct when he asserted that the crisis of authentic Christian faith in today's Western culture is not due to formal atheism but to secularism, in which the human being becomes the measure of all things (hearkening back to the invocation of polling data and how secularized the view, even of many Catholics, has become regarding marriage and a whole host of other issues). This results in moral freedom becoming untethered from objective truth, making freedom, the multiplication of choices, an end in itself rather than a means to the very end for which we exist. In effect, many Catholics are content to stand, as did Pontius Pilate, asking, "What is truth?" Or, worse yet, simply assert their own "truth."

I would like to take this opportunity to draw your attention, dear reader, to yet another very well-done post by Francis Phillips: "How do we combine love and truth in the same-sex marriage debate?"

Maria, Mater Ecclesia, ora pro nobis

Corpus Christi- a day later

Due to ministry commitments I was unable to post anything yesterday, the day that Roman Catholics in the United States celebrated the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, or, in English, the Solemnity the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. More important than posting anything, I was able to participate in the worldwide Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament called for by Pope Francis, to assist at Mass, and to baptize the baby boy of a young couple of my acquaintance. Truth be told, I did consider just posting a large picture of a lovely monstrance, but decided not to.

I have been negligent of my attempted re-reading of Von Balthasar's theological aesthetics for awhile, but tonight I was able to pick it up again after finishing Robert Hugh Benson's novel Lord of the World, a book known to be liked and often cited by Pope Francis.

This is passage that I read when I first picked up Balthasar-

The Biblical experience of God in both the Old and the New Testaments is characterized as a whole by the fact that the essentially 'invisible' (Jn. 1:18) and 'unapproachable' (1 Tim 6:16) God enters the sphere of creaturely visibleness, not by means of intermediary beings, but in himself. He who is formless takes form in the world and in history, and can be encountered and experienced by the whole man in this form which he himself has chosen and put on. This structure of Biblical revelation should neither be sold short or overplayed. It could be sold short by the view that the God who reveals himself in creation and in salvation history is not really God himself, but, rather, that, as the Gnostics held, he remains in his higher world and deals with creation only through intermediary beings. And it could be overplayed by the view that all that God has instituted for our salvation, culminating in his Incarnation, is in the end only something preliminary which must finally be transcended by either a mystical or an eschatologico-celestial immediacy that would surpass and make superfluous the form of salvation, or, put concretely, the humanity of Jesus Christ

The Incarnation is a necessary precondition for the Eucharist and, hence, the Church. Christ's Real Presence in the consecrated bread and wine can also be sold short and overplayed. It can be sold short by attempting to turn it into a magic trick, wherein the physical structure of the elements are changed by a spell cast by the priest. I am amazed at the number of people who hold this view, even in a very explicit way. It can be overplayed in way similar to that described by Balthasar with regards to Christ's Incarnation: by insisting on the need to apprehend it by means of a mystical immediacy (the fact that it is a sacrament indicates it is a mediation, or, in more traditional sacramental terms, "an efficacious sign") that, as those who take the magic trick approach try to do, seeks to eliminate the need for faith, which is often an attempt to evade the uncomfortable truth that the evidence for what we believe is the lives of those who partake of it with faith, which leads us to see that, in the end, the Church, the mystical Body of Christ, His spotless Bride, only consists of the saints, redeemed by Jesus Christ and justified by their faith in Him.

During Vespers, which brought our day of Adoration to a close, I was struck by this verse of the lovely hymn Pange Lingua: The Word as Flesh makes true bread into flesh by a word/and the wine becomes the Blood of Christ/And if sense is deficient to strengthen a sincere heart/Faith alone suffices.

Blessed Pope John XXIII, who passed into eternity 50 years ago today, pray for us!

"Whatever happened to time?"

Welcome June, the sixth month of the year. However, we won't officially mark the middle of the year until noon on 1 July. How time flies! Time flies when you're busy, which is why being overly busy is no good. I don't believe in killing time, but in savoring it. Frantically running from one thing to another is no way to savor time. Sadly, these days, most people don't understand that because if they hold still, time becomes a heavy burden, the weight of existence begins to fall, which causes you to struggle to get out from under it.

The above is a metaphor, of course, but one that makes the point about the necessity and even importance of having nothing to do, nothing that "needs" doing. It was the philosopher Martin Heidegger who gave boredom its most thorough treatment. The text of his lecture The Fundamental Concept of Metaphysics, which he delivered during the 1929/30 semester at the University of Freiburg, having been selected for the professorship of his teacher Edmund Husserl, whom he would later treat shamefully as a result of his becoming Rector of Freiburg University and enforcing Nazi laws against Jews teaching in universities, he analyzed boredom extensively.

Heidegger insisted that "being bored" forces the human being to confront life's big and inevitable questions, the ones about meaning and purpose, or, stated negatively, as Heidegger was won to do, meaninglessness and purposelessness. Either way, "boredom" produces what can be called "existential anxiety," or "existential angst," what I called above "the weight of existence." Here's how Heidegger puts it in What Is Metaphysics?: "Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole."

Perhaps it is Schopenhauer who employs boredom to make the salient point and issues us the provocation we need: "...for if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, there would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfill and satisfy us."

Here is precisely where Giussani comes in. Hearkening back to something I posed back in September 2011, Despair arises "from the images of appearing" that do not appear, taken from page 73 of his book The Religious Sense, where he takes aim at Theodor Adorno's concept of "the ambivalence of sadness." Adorno asserts that what keeps us alive is being able to renew our sense of false hope. He insists, as Giussani states it, that all we can do is "patiently redraw new approaches to and images of the ambivalence of sadness: the truth is not separable from the obsession that salvation emerge from the images of appearing without appearing." I am not going to rehash my previous post. It's not that long and so I encourage those who are interested to it read for themselves.

This reflection would not be complete without sharing that it was the boredom I experienced as an introverted young man in my teens and into my early twenties, especially during the summer as a teenager, that led me to recognize my own longing, to experience for myself the weight of existence, and to begin to engage reality at this level. It is hard work, a work most of us would rather avoid, which explains why we gravitate so easily to distractions and seek, to paraphrase words made famous by Neil Postman, to amuse ourselves to death. We do this whenever we find ourselves "killing time." An idle mind is, indeed, the devil's workshop, which is why "being bored" can serve as a provocation. Perhaps it is seeing boredom as a provocation and responding positively that turns it into solitude.

I was led by various ways and means to the One who says to me, in the depths of my heart, "Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light" (Matt. 11:28-30), which is why, when I feel close to despair, I can simply say, "Jesus, I trust in You."

"Blessed is the fruit of your womb"

Today we end of May, a month dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, by observing the the Feast of the Visitation:

During those days Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled” (Luke 1:39-45)

So what can we put up as our traditio? How about the Magnificat by Arvo Part?

Memorial Day in a more personal key

In order to keep a promise made some weeks back, my lovely wife took three of our children to "Mummies of the World: The Exhibition" today, the last day it is Salt Lake City. In the meantime, the Snack (our 4 year-old son) and I made our way up to the Clinton City cemetery to pay tribute to my Dad.

Stephen R. Dodge was a veteran of the U.S. Navy. He was in the submarine service and did his duty as a crew member on-board the U.S.S. Blue Gill (S.S. 242) between the years 1956-1960. My Dad was always very proud of his honorable service to our nation.

I have to admit that I have always found it a little awkward to visit cemeteries, especially on Memorial Day when so many people are around. I find it awkward because I don't really know what to do. Usually I go on my own, during lunch, on a regular weekday, when I am almost always the only one in the cemetery. As we made our way across the cemetery I saw people doing all kinds of things. One family was sitting on a bench that was part of the memorial to their loved one. Another family, closer to my Dad's grave, brought lawn chairs and were sitting around the grave enjoying some beverages and visiting. It looked like they were going to be there for awhile. Frankly, I found this a little intimidating, again, because what does one do?

Snack on Memorial Day, remembering his Grandpa, my Dad

Snack and I went to my Dad's resting place and removed our hats. I had my son place the flowers we brought (one you can later retrieve and plant) on the upper left-hand side of the headstone so I could take his picture. Then we said a few prayers and just sat there for a few minutes. I asked Snack if he missed his Grandpa. He said he did and was glad Grandpa Al (my wife's Dad) was still alive. I am too.

Even after two and-a-half years, it's still weird think my Dad isn't around anymore. It also forces me to face my own mortality. Back in my early 20s I had a dream in which my Dad had died and I was at his viewing. It was so real and normal that it took me a few minutes after waking up to realize it hadn't happened. When it happened for real about 25 years later, it seemed like a dream and it still kind of does.

I'm grateful for my one-on-one time with my son. I love the simplicity of children. So, please excuse me, our time today isn't yet up.

Memorial Day, the day we gratefully remember

It wouldn't be right not to post something for Memorial Day. While for most of my fellow citizens it is a day to remember our beloved dead in general, let's not forget, even as we do that, the primary purpose of Memorial Day is to remember those who gave their lives in the service of our great nation.

Since he was just awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, I am thinking today of Fr. Emil Kapaun, who served as a U.S. Army chaplain during the Korean War. Fr. Kapaun was executed while being held as a prisoner-of-war. Before and during his captivity, during which he was beaten many times by his captors, Emil Kapaun never ceased ministering to those the Lord, in His infinite wisdom and unfailing care, had put in his pastoral charge, Catholic or not. There is a growing ground-swell of support for his canonization, which I support. Please visit the website. Really, this is how canonizations should happen, start with the acclamation and veneration of a holy man or woman by the faithful and bubble up.

Here are some words of Fr. Kapaun's from one of his homilies delivered at his parish in Kansas, Saint John Nepomucene: "Saints were much different than the ideas we have from worldly things. Their values were true and lasting values, not the passing, trivial things of this world."

As relayed in the book The Miracle of Father Kapaun: Priest, Soldier, and Korean War Hero, by Roy Wenzl and Travis Heying, as it became clear Kapaun was going to be taken and executed, he exhorted his comrades not to fight and stir-up more trouble for themselves on his behalf. He handed his gold ciborium, his stole, and the holy oils to Lt. Walter Mayo and told him, "Tell them I died a happy death." To another, Ralph Edwards, he handed over a prayer book and said, "You know the prayers, Ralph, keep holding the services, don't let them make you stop." One soldier grabbed Kapaun by the arm and said, "I'm terribly sorry." Emil Kapaun looked at him and said, "You're sorry for me? I am going to be with Jesus Christ. And that is what I have worked for all my life... You should be happy for me." To another soldier he had counseled he said, "When you get back to Jersey, you get that marriage straightened out, or I'll come down from heaven and kick you in the ass." To yet another grieving soldier he said, "Don't take it hard Mike, I'm going where I always wanted to be. And when I get up there, I'll say a prayer for you all."

Fr. Emil Kapaun

Echoes of the Last Supper, n'est ce pas? A priest acting in persona Christi captis in a most transcendent and luminous way!

My friends, this is the victory we have in Jesus Christ. To my mind, this is how it looks this side of heaven. Christ strengthens us in our abject powerlessness, using our powerlessness to show His glory. In one of his homilies, given back in Kansas, Fr. Kapaun said, "First of all we must be humble enough to acknowledge that we are too poor to help ourselves and are in great need of help."

Praising God under the worst circumstances #winning!

St. Paul, in what may well be the first book of the New Testament to be written, urges the Christians in ancient Thessaloniki- "See that no one returns evil for evil; rather, always seek what is good [both] for each other and for all. Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus" (1 Thess. 5:15-18). Even a man as holy as Emil Kapaun struggled with this, struggled with loving his captors, those who mercilessly beat him and ultimately killed him, but, by the grace of God, he succeeded, which is why we can say, I believe, "Emil Kapaun, pray for us!"

Just think of how many gave their lives heroically and whose stories are lost to us. But nothing is lost to God. Above all, today is a day of gratitude, or thanksgiving, which is what Eucharist means.

Year C Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Readings: Pvbs 8:22-31; Ps 8:4-9; Rom 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

For those who might be unaware, today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, known more simply as Trinity Sunday. While the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, which is best summarized as one God in three divine Persons, sits atop the hierarchy of truth, we do not start from the top and work our way down. Rather we begin at the bottom and work up. Our starting point is the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ.

To acknowledge Jesus as Lord requires a revelation (Matt. 16:17; 1 Cor. 12:3). We make a mistake to think that revelation is something that always crashes in from above. Very often revelation is something that happens in the here and now that is unveiled before our eyes. Explaining the rationale for writing his book At the Origin of the Christian Claim, Msgr. Luigi Giussani wrote- “I have tried to show the evidence for the reasonableness with which we attach ourselves to Christ, and then are led by the experience of the encounter with His humanity to the great question about His divinity. What makes us grow and broadens our mind is not abstract reasoning, but finding in humanity a moment when the truth is reached and spoken.”

A good example of what Giussani describes is Jesus walking with the Twelve on the road to Caesarea-Phillipi. As they’re walking along, Jesus asks them who people are say He (Jesus) is. They tell Him all the rumors, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets” (Matt 16:14). He then asks the Twelve the only question that really matters: “But who do you say that I am?” It is Peter who steps forward and boldly proclaims, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:15-16). This prompts the Lord to say, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father” (Matt 16:17). Now plenty of people had witnessed Jesus doing and saying the things Peter saw Him do and heard Him teach, but not everyone was able to reach the conclusion Peter reached concerning Jesus’ identity.

Sunday after Sunday, when we come to Mass, we enter a moment when the truth is spoken. While this is true of the entire Eucharistic liturgy, this happens in a very specific way during the Liturgy of the Word, when the Scriptures are proclaimed out loud in and to the assembly. Hearing the Scriptures proclaimed is a moment when, as in the consecration of Eucharistic elements, Christ is made really and truly present by the power of the Holy Spirit, who, as the Lord tells His disciples in our Gospel today, does “not speak on his own,” but speaks only what he hears (John 16:13).

What the Holy Spirit speaks glorifies Christ Jesus. As the Lord told the Twelve, the Spirit “will take from what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:14). He further tells them that everything the Father possesses He gives to the Son. The Son, in turn, gives it to the Spirit who, as St. Paul tells us in our second reading, pours it into our hearts (Rom. 5:5).

As Blessed Pope John Paul II said, “The Father who begets loves the Son who is begotten. The Son loves the Father with a love which is identical with that of the Father. “The Father and the Son,” John Paul II further stated, “are not only united by [their] mutual love as two Persons infinitely perfect,” but “their reciprocal love… proceeds,” to use the word from the Creed, “from them as a person.” Hence, the Father and the Son “spirate,” or breathe, the Holy Spirit, who is “consubstantial with them” (General Audience 20 November 1985).

To be “inspired” is to be breathed into. This is why St. Paul tells us that “the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5). It is God’s whole purpose to share this divine life with us, to draw us into the very life of the Most Holy Trinity. This is the end for which we are created, redeemed, and for which we are being sanctified, in no way more than our participation in this Eucharist, which itself is a participation, a foretaste, of life everlasting, which can only be divine life.

When we gather for Mass, we witness the dynamic of the Most Holy Trinity for ourselves. One way that this unfolds before us is when priest pronounces the epiclesis, a Greek word meaning “to call down from on high,” over the gifts on the altar, saying something like, “You are indeed Holy, O Lord, the fount of all holiness. Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dew-fall, so that they may become for us the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eucharistic Prayer II).

But how does this look in so-called “real” life? How do we start out from below, from what is right in front of us and so move to what is above? Well, just this past week a very dear friend of mine from high-school, a committed Evangelical Christian from her teen years, who lives in Florida and is now in the process of becoming Catholic, was having a lovely day off. As a registered nurse and busy mother of several teenagers, she was taking a day for herself. She’d visited the beauty salon and was headed to get a massage. As she stopped for a light, “Boom!” Someone had rear-ended her. I am quite certain that something like, “Oh great, the end of my well-planned ‘me” day,” was what went through her mind.

She soon discovered that the person who hit her was a woman in her 80s, someone who had never been in a car accident before, and who felt terrible about what she had done. As my friend spoke to her, she discovered that she was a widow, who never had children, owned no pets, who had moved to Florida to take care of her ailing brother, who passed away four years ago. She was pretty much all alone. My friend, who started out angry, soon realized that she was keeping an appointment God had set up for her. I have to admit I choked up when I received this “tweet” from my friend concerning her new friend: “We will be going to lunch soon. Ah The Lord and His mysterious ways!”

It is fitting that Trinity Sunday is always the Sunday following Pentecost because it gives us an opportunity to synthesize the great Paschal Mystery we live so intensely over the fifty days of Easter. Today we are urged to continue living out this great mystery of love in which, by God’s grace, we participate. So, in the concrete circumstances of our everyday lives, let’s bring God’s love to bear wherever we may find ourselves, and so play our part in showing forth how wonderful is God’s name throughout all the earth.