Καθολικός διάκονος: Last post of 2021

I try hard not to blog (if I may use that as a verb) about blogging. I think it's okay at the end of the year. While I didn't mark it at the time, 19 July 2021 was my fifteenth anniversary of blogging in earnest. Of course, I started this little virtual endeavor on 16 August 2005. Again, for perhaps the one reader who does not know the story, this blog began life under the title Scott Dodge for Nobody. This title was shamelessly stolen from a late-night radio program here in Salt Lake, which aired on KRCL, a community radio station, called Tom Waits for Nobody. From the end of August 2005 until mid-July 2006, this cyberspace lay fallow.

The title of my 19 July 2006 post was "How Occasional?" Well, for the next eight years I posted on many, many occasions. Initially, the answer to the question was "Quite frequently." For the last five years, my blogging, while still quite frequent (about 10 times per month, on average), has tapered down to a much more manageable level of effort.

It's funny how important cultivating this small cyberspace has become for me. Do I sometimes think about hanging it up? Sure. As I tell forlorn deacons on occasion: If you don't think about quitting the ministry and walking away once in a while, you don't really care. After all, the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. Far from being indifferent about what I do here, virtually speaking, I remain quite passionate about it.

I don't blog for popularity. Over the years, the popularity of Καθολικός διάκονος has ebbed and flowed, waxed and waned. I figured out in the early years of blogging when my posts were really not read by anyone, that blogging is a vehicle of personal growth for me. If you were to read Καθολικός διάκονος start-to-today (something I definitely don't recommend), hopefully you would see steady growth and evolution. That alone is enough to make blogging worth the effort.

I am grateful that there are people who find value in what I post. This certainly encourages me to continue blogging. After all, I do see my effort on Καθολικός διάκονος as something as an extension of my ministry.

At the end of past years, I have selected and posted links to what I think have been the best posts of each month. Especially given that besides the Friday traditio, reflections on the Sunday readings, and my homilies, I haven't posted much this year, I am going to post links to all my posts that aren't any of those three.

January- "Not being afraid because God is with us"
               "Anniversary reflections on being a deacon"

February- "Addendum: angelic ministry is diaconal"
                "Evening notes for the Second Sunday of Lent"

March- "Jesus on the Cross: facing our fear of death"
             "Faith is decisive"
             "Talk About the Passion"

June- "Belated thoughts on Corpus Christi"

July- "Thoughts for a Saturday"

August- "Deacons Are Catechists"
             "Keeping God's Law"

December- "Pooping in St. Paul's and the Incarnation"
                   "Traditionis custodes and deacons"

I don't mind saying that 2021 was for me a far more difficult year than 2020. Without a doubt, the most painful aspect of this year was the loss of some dear friends, people my age, who seemed and still seem far too young to die. These are people whose absence from the world makes me more than a little anxious, more than a little sad. I have tears in my eyes writing about this.

In trying to explain 2021 to my wife last week, the best description I could come up with was that it felt like I was walking uphill all year. No wonder my knees hurt.

While I realize that how we reckon time is somewhat of an arbitrary imposition, years matter to me. I always find some hope in the dawning of a new year.

Last night, we went to the grocery store at dusk. The skies here along the Wasatch Front have been gray. It's been cold and snowy for the past two weeks. An actual winter! I am enjoying it a lot. As we walked through the parking lot toward the store, out on the Western horizon, just above the mountains that rise to the West of the Great Salt Lake (such as it is now- not so "Great"), there was a streak of bright orange. Above and to the sides of the glowing streak were incredibly black clouds. Catching a glimpse of that sunset, quite unconsciously, I said out loud: "That's what hope looks like." Hearing me say something, my wife, asked what I'd said. I replied with "Oh, nothing, really. Thinking out loud."

Happy New Year, dear reader! I will catch you on the other side. May 2022 be all you want it to be and more. I give you my humble, diaconal blessing.

Year C Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, & Joseph

Readings: Sir. 3:2-6.12-14; Ps. 128:1-5; Col. 3:12-21; Luke 2:41-52

In Jesus’s day, it was Jewish practice for every observant male to go to Jerusalem to make an offering in the Temple three times a year: on Passover, which commemorates Israel’s deliverance from Egypt; Shavout, or, in Greek, Pentecost, which recalls God’s giving the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai; Tabernacles, which marks Israel’s forty-year sojourn in the desert. In today’s Gospel Jesus had just reached the age at which he was required to fulfill this obligation.

Like the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, eight days after his birth, Saint Luke uses this episode to highlight the Holy Family’s fidelity to Torah. Like so many episodes in his life, this observance results in a surprise: an early manifestation of Jesus’s messianic and divine identity. What is surprising about this narrative is what appears to be our Lord’s impertinent answer to his mother’s question, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety,” an anxiety that any parent would feel upon realizing a child was missing or lost.¹ For those of us who are parents, just think about what goes through your mind when you lose track of a child at a busy store.

But Jesus responds, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”² Finding Jesus in the Temple is the fifth Joyful mystery of the Holy Rosary.

Our Lord’s seemingly impertinent response to his mother leads us to consider our reading from Sirach, which is seen by many scholars as a commentary on the fourth commandment, which enjoins us to honor our father and our mother. This commandment serves as something of a bridge between the first three commandments about loving God and the final six about loving your neighbor. In this schema, parents are rightly situated between God and other people. This unique place parents occupy in our lives entails mutual responsibilities. We should honor our parents because they gave us life and our elders because they are the repositories of life’s wisdom. Very often it is their hard work and selfless sacrifice that earned the benefits we enjoy.

There is much said and written today about the Church’s magisterium, her teaching authority. Most of this speaking and writing focuses on the authority of the papacy or the episcopacy. On this feast, we are reminded that parents, because their authority is also divinely derived, constitute part of the Church’s authentic magisterium because, as we read of the Compendium of the Catechism: in “Christ the family becomes the domestic church because it is a community of faith, of hope, and of charity.”³

With authority comes responsibility. Hence, the responsibilities of parents exceed the duties of their children. When presenting their children for baptism, after requesting the sacrament for their children, Christian parents willingly accept “the responsibility of training [them] in the practice of the faith.”⁴ They assume the “duty” of bringing their children “up to keep God’s commandments as Christ taught us, by loving God and our neighbor.”⁵ Parents are the primary catechists of their children. And so, faith must be lived, practiced, taught, and handed on at home.

Much of every child’s image of God is derived from his/her parents. Therefore, Christian parents must be mindful that their authority, like that of the Church, “is not above the word of God, but serves it.”⁶ In order to serve the word of God, parents must listen “to it devoutly.”⁷

In our second reading from Colossians, we are given a list of values that are to be nurtured in God’s family, the Church, and in our families, the domestic Church. More fundamentally, the family has a value that itself needs nurturing. As Pope Benedict XVI observed some years ago: “The family is the indispensable foundation for society and a great and lifelong treasure for couples.” The family, he continues, is also “a unique good for children, who are meant to be the fruit of love, of the total and generous self-giving of the parents.”

Total, generous self-giving is a tall order. It sounds good at Church but presents difficulties in life. It is one that can be fulfilled by Christian parents, strengthened by sacramental grace, as the seek to live matrimony as a holy state of life, a sacrament, that is, a visible and tangible sign of Christ’s presence in and for the world.

It’s important to keep in mind that, along with holy orders, holy matrimony is a sacrament at the service of communion, which two sacraments Owen Cummings has called “diaconal” because of their service-oriented nature. This seems fitting on the day that would otherwise be the Feast of Saint Stephen, whom the Church reveres as one of the first seven deacons and who is the Church's first martyr.

Getting back to Jesus’ response to his mother, on closer examination, we see that Jesus is not being impertinent or disrespectful. While he is and will always be the son of Mary and was beholden to Joseph as to a father, he is most profoundly the Son of God. His words, therefore, are a reminder to Mary and Joseph bear in mind the reality of who he is, as they daily encounter the great mystery of God-made-man for us. It is also a subtle reminder that the Holy Family is not a “traditional family,” in the strictest sense. As Christians, we need to remember that the water of baptism, through which we are reborn, is thicker than the blood of hereditary relation.

Our Gospel ends with a portrait of family life that gives us some insight into the life of Jesus between the ages of twelve the beginning of his public ministry:

He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man⁸

By humbly submitting himself to the parental authority of Mary and Joseph, Jesus made known to them what they were not able to understand that day in the Temple. It is by our humble obedience to the Father that we make the Lordship of Jesus Christ known to those who do not understand. As you continue to enjoy your celebration of Christmas, may all of you enjoy the sweetest fruit of all, which fruit we contemplate as that of the fifth and final Joyful mystery of the Rosary: the joy of finding Jesus, who is Christ the Lord.

---

1 Luke 2:48.^↩
2 Luke 2:49.^↩
3 Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 456.^↩
4 Rite of Baptism for Several Children, sec. 39.^↩
5 Ibid.^↩
6 Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation [Dei Verbum], sec. 10.^↩
7 Ibid.^↩
8 Luke 2:51-52.^↩

Urbi et Orbi- Christmas 2021

URBI ET ORBI MESSAGE
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
FRANCIS

Christmas 2021

Dear brothers and sisters, Happy Christmas!

The Word of God, who created the world and who gives meaning to history and to humanity’s journey, became flesh and came to dwell among us. He came like a whisper, like the murmur of a gentle breeze, to fill with wonder the heart of every man and woman who is open to this mystery.

The Word became flesh in order to dialogue with us. God does not desire to carry on a monologue, but a dialogue. For God himself, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is dialogue, an eternal and infinite communion of love and life.

By the coming of Jesus, the Person of the Word made flesh, into our world, God showed us the way of encounter and dialogue. Indeed, he made that way incarnate in himself, so that we might know it and follow it, in trust and hope.

Sisters and brothers, “what would our world be like without the patient dialogue of the many generous persons who keep families and communities together?” (Fratelli Tutti, 198). In this time of pandemic, we have come to realize this more and more. Our capacity for social relationships is sorely tried; there is a growing tendency to withdraw, to do it all by ourselves, to stop making an effort to encounter others and do things together. On the international level too, there is the risk of avoiding dialogue, the risk that this complex crisis will lead to taking shortcuts rather than setting out on the longer paths of dialogue. Yet only those paths can lead to the resolution of conflicts and to lasting benefits for all.

READ THE ENTIRE ADDRESS

The Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Night

Readings: Isa 9:1-16; Ps 96:1-3.11-13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”¹ These words, written some seven centuries before the Lord’s birth describe well what his coming into the world meant and continues to mean. “[U]pon those dwelt in a land of gloom a light has shone,” the oracle continues.² Didn’t entering into the Church this evening, coming into this warm, bright, welcoming place from a cold dark night, give you an inkling as to what these words mean?

It is easy to lose sight of the wonder of the Incarnation, of the birth of the Father’s only begotten Son through the Virgin Mary in the humblest of circumstances. Jesus’s birth did not happen in a warm, well-lit place. It happened in a cave that served as a barn. After his birth, he was cleaned, wrapped in rags, and laid in a feeding trough. The phrase "swaddling clothes" is just a sophisticated way of saying "rags."

Jesus, son of Mary, was born a marginal man, among a marginal people, in a marginal, if troublesome part, of the Roman Empire. This is what the kenotic hymn, found in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, alludes to when it tells us the Son of God, Jesus Christ, “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness.”³

As Pope Francis said this week: “the mystery of Christmas is the mystery of God who enters the world by the path of humility.”⁴ Saint Luke’s Nativity portrays, the Holy Father continued, “a scene of poverty and austerity, unsuited to sheltering a woman about to give birth.”⁵ Nonetheless, God enters the world not by creating a huge spectacle, “but by causing a mysterious pull in the hearts of those who feel the thrilling presence of something completely new, something on the verge of changing history.”⁶

Humility, the Pontiff insisted, is the doorway through which God enters the world. On Christmas, Christ invites us through the doorway of humility. Because pride plays some role in nearly every sin, it is impossible to advance spiritually without humility. Being humble means knowing how to be human. It’s been observed: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less.”

Humility requires that we accept our frailty, our need, the poverty that constitutes our humanity. Refusal to do this is tantamount to insisting that you do not need a Savior. Humility, noted Pope Francis, means

to look upon our poverty with the same love and tenderness with which we look upon a little child, vulnerable and in need of everything. Lacking humility, we will look for things that can reassure us, and perhaps find them, but we will surely not find what saves us, what can heal us⁷

The Nativity, by Sandro Botticelli, ca, 1473-1475

Our reading from the Saint Paul's Letter to Titus, which is quietly slipped between Isaiah’s great oracle, the ending of which puts many of us in mind of that glorious passage from Handel’s Messiah, and Luke’s wonderful telling of Jesus’s birth, puts some flesh on the bones of what it means to “have seen a great light.”

This passage from Paul's Letter to Titus focuses our attention not on Jesus’s birth or his passion and death, but on his glorious return and, by implication, his resurrection, and our ultimate destiny. He refers to Jesus Christ as “God’s grace.”⁸ Indeed, Jesus is grace in the flesh. Jesus saves us. As Catholics, we believe that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit (the seven fruits of the Holy Spirit can be summed as the virtues that make one humble), the Lord trains

us to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ⁹

Living temperately, devoutly, and justly in this age with an eye on the age to come is the spirit of Christmas. The true spirit of Christmas is the Spirit of Christ, that is, the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

After being visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, a humbled, if not humiliated, Ebeneezer Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’s most Christian of books, A Christmas Carol, swears to the Ghost of Christmas Future: “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.”¹⁰ Essentially, Scrooge vows to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, who humbly came to us as a child in Bethlehem, who comes to us now in word, sacrament, as well as in our neighbor, especially the person in need, and who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

The final paragraph of A Christmas Carol reports that Scrooge “knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”¹¹ To this Dickens adds, “May that be truly said of us, and all of us!”¹² May we all accept the Lord’s summons to enter through the door of humility, the passage to life eternal.

---

1 Isaiah 9:1.^↩
2 Isaiah 9:1.^↩
3 Philippians 2:7.^↩
4 Pope Francis, "Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia." 23 December 2021^↩
5 Ibid.^↩
6 Ibid.^↩
7 Ibid.^↩
8 Titus 2:11.^↩
9 Titus 2:12.^↩
10 Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol, Stave IV, “The Last of the Spirits. Project Gutenberg.^↩
11 A Christmas Carol, Stave V, “The End of It.”^↩
12 Ibid.^↩

Monday Fourth Week of Advent, Year II

Readings: Isa 7:10-14; Ps 24:1-6; Luke 1:26-38

It is both fitting and wonderful that Monday of the last week of Advent features once again the Annunciation. In a real sense, it is back to the beginning of this holy season. Our first reading is from the beginning of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, from that part of that book known as “Proto” or “First”-Isaiah. Judging by its use in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, this passage has been understood by Christians practically from the beginning as a prophecy about Jesus Christ.¹

In context, however, this passage was an attempt to dissuade King Ahaz, who ruled the southern kingdom, which included Jerusalem, from joining with the northern kingdom and Syria to rebel against the Assyrians. What is going on is that the prophet instructs the king to ask for a sign that what the prophet is saying is what the king should do. But the king refuses, saying one should not tempt God. “Therefore,” says the prophet, “the Lord himself will give you a sign; the young woman, pregnant and about to bear a son, shall name him Emmanuel.”²

It is not clear who the woman or the child are. In the context of the prophecy it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the span of time: by the time the child is conceived, born, and learns the difference between good and evil, the two kingdoms Ahaz is considering joining in rebellion will be defeated.

It is also important to note that the word in the Hebrew original often translated as “virgin,” almah, simply means “young woman.” “Virgin” comes into play because the author of Matthew, taking his text from the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, uses the Greek word parthenos, which does mean “virgin.”

It is easy to see why this verse is seen as a prophecy of Christ. Jesus is, in word and in deed, Emmanuel, God with us. This one word can be used to sum up Christianity, at least in its essence, in its existential reality. Sometimes God's word is just that: one word.

The Annunciation, by Andrea Solario, 1506

In our Gospel, Mary is puzzled at the greeting given her by the archangel Gabriel. She is puzzled because it is such an exalted greeting. Why would anyone, let alone a glorious heavenly being, greet a marginal person, a poor young woman in backwards village, in such a way? The answer to this question lies at the end of the passage, when, after hearing what God has in store for her, Mary says: “May it be done to me according to your word.”³ This affirmation and acceptance of God’s will, we call Mary’s fiat.

Fiat is something like the Latin equivalent of the Hebrew “Amen.” But it means more than merely “so be it,” it means to willfully create something. In this moment Mary’s will was God’s will and vice-versa. As we heard about Christ in our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews yesterday, “I come to do your will, O God.”⁴

Doing God’s will is the way Christ is born in and through you. As Mary, who is the model disciple, shows us: doing God’s will isn’t always easy. It is often the case that successfully doing God’s will looks like failure. How can doing God’s will result in a young woman turning up pregnant with a child not conceived with her betrothed? How can God’s will result in the cross, or in the many different experiences of Christian martyrs throughout two millennia?

We know that it is God’s will that we gather around this altar and listen to his word. Through the Eucharist we are strengthened to live according to what we’ve heard. At the end of Mass, we are sent to do it.

As we prepare for a New Year, just as we constantly hear talk about evangelization, most of it quite fuzzy, we also hear rumblings about a “Eucharistic revival.” But just as evangelization consists of telling others what Jesus has done for you, what difference knowing Jesus makes in your life and how you live it, what a Eucharistic revival needs, to borrow the words of Michael Sean Winters, is “those who claim to follow the Lord to follow him, to empty themselves as he emptied himself, to take up their cross as he did, to cling obediently to the Father's will."⁵

---

1 Matthew 1:23.^↩
2 Isaiah 7:14.^↩
3 Luke 1:38.^↩
4 Hebrews 10:7.^↩
5 Michael Sean Winters. “US bishops lost about how to engage a culture they don't understand,” in National Catholic Reporter online. 19 November 2021^↩

Traditionis custodes and deacons

I finally had the opportunity to read the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments's Responsa ad dubia, its response to questions posed as a result of the motu proprio Traditionis custodes. This motu proprio, issued last 16 July, was promulgated for the purpose of restricting celebrations done according to liturgical books promulgated prior to the Second Vatican Council.

The Congregation's response to questions asked by bishops from throughout the world with regard to Traditionis custodes was published last Friday, 18 December.

Of note for deacons is the response to this question (i.e., dubia): "Do Deacons and instituted ministers participating in celebrations using the Missale Romanum of 1962 have to be authorised by the diocesan Bishop?" The Congregation's response is "Affirmative."

I assume "instituted ministers" refers to those who have canonically been instituted into what are now called the "lay ministries" of lector and acolyte. These ministries may now, according to the revised Canon 230 § 2, which revision was made by Pope Francis motu proprio in January of this year (see Apostolic Letter Spiritus Domini), be conferred on men and women. These were formally known as "minor orders" because they were reserved exclusively for men moving towards ordination (i.e., major orders- deacon and priest). I appreciate a brother deacon reminding of this change, thus prompting my revision of this paragraph.

Regarding deacons, being clergy and, as such, participating in the sacrament of orders, this is quite clear. Deacons serving at celebrations according to the Extraordinary Form, must be specifically authorized by their bishop to do so.

I understand that many dioceses are still in the process of figuring out some of the hows and the whens of implementing Traditionis custodes. I know mine is. Hence, many bishops are permitting the status quo ante. I think with the publication of this Responsa ad dubia, things become clearer. As ordained ministers, it is important for deacons to keep up with what is going on in this regard in our dioceses or jursidictions.

Spirit of Christmas

My approach to today's readings is going to be quite casual. Among other reasons, I have a pretty heavy preaching schedule over Christmas. I want to note, again, that this year Advent is almost as long as it can possibly be. Therefore, if you haven't yet, set aside some time over the next few days to quietly contemplate the mystery of God-made-man-for-us. Who knows, perhaps what you find here may be useful for that.

Before coming to the readings, it seems significant to me that the Collect, or Opening Prayer, of the Mass for the Fourth Sunday of Advent is the same prayer we say at the end of the Angelus:

Pour forth, we beseech you, O Lord,
your grace into our hearts,
that we to whom the incarnation of Christ your Son
was made known by the message of an Angel,
may by his Passion and Cross
be brought to the glory of his Resurrection

Apart from exempting the whole of his life (something that seems a constant in these matters), this is a pretty good summary of the Paschal Mystery, into which the liturgy seeks to immerse us. Noting this lacuna is what led Pope Saint John Paul II to promulgate the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary in his 2002 Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae.

Our Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent in Year C of the Sunday lectionary is a primer on the second mystery of the Joyful Mysteries of the Virgin Mary's Rosary. By way of reminder, this mystery is Mary's Visitation to her kinswoman, Elizabeth. The fruit of this mystery is love of neighbor. Of course, it is the Holy Spirit who is operative in the encounter between Mary and Elizabeth.

Because it comes from The Letter to the Hebrews and this letter, which many New Testament scholars believe is actually an extended sermon of sorts, is the longest "book" in our unquely Christian scriptures apart from Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans, and because it is a book I personally find fascinating, I want to focus on it.

Too often, Hebrews, as it is abbreviated, is dismissed as some kind of Platonistic anomaly. In fact, it is a great treatise on Christian life and discipleship, especially in adverse circumstances. In its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council, turned to the Letter to the Hebrews for its image of the Church as the Pilgrim People of God.

While, like the Collect, our reading from Hebrews seems to jump from birth to sacrificial death, skipping Jesus's life and ministry, I think there is significance in the opening lines from our passage: "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me" (Heb 10:5). While a body is certainly a prerequiste for being nailed to the cross, at this point in the passage, the reason for being incarnated, as it were, is to do God's will (Heb 10:7). A body is necessary for enacting, incarnating, making concretely "real," the will of God.

We need to tread lightly when insisting it was the Father's will that his Son should suffer and die. If nothing else, this lets us off the hook far too easily. By his Incarnation, life, passion, and death, Christ accomplished in his own person what Israel, or any group of human beings, could not accomplish in/through its history: to fulfill the Law of God in letter and in spirit, thus accomplishing God's purpose in/through/for creation.

Christ fulfilled the Law, thus doing away with the need for "Sacrifices and offerings, holocausts and sin offerings" (Heb 10:8). A further effect of this is opening the one covenant God seeks to establish to all people. Hence, joining God's Pilgrim People is open to anyone who is up for the journey. As Michael Card so beautifully sings, "There Is a Joy In the Journey."

As Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (a most Christian story) reminds us year-after-year, Christmas is a time of conversion, a time to turn around and follow Jesus. May we, like Mr. Scrooge, come to realize the saving effects of the Incarnation in and through the circumstances of our own lives. I think this gives some reality to the petition asking God to "pour forth" his grace into our hearts. God's grace, as our Gospel shows, once poured into our hearts flows out to others. This is the "Spirit of Christmas."