Persecution, Pentecost, and St. Julia of Corsica

 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.  And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.  And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. (Acts 2:1-4)

Tongues of Fire 

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     This Sunday we celebrate one of the greatest Christian feasts, the Solemnity of Pentecost, which is sometimes called "the birthday of the Church."  We see the central event of Pentecost in the passage from Acts above: the Apostles, along with the Blessed Mother, "the women", and other disciples, were staying together in Jerusalem where we are told "All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer." (Acts 1:14)  Up to this point the small band of Jesus's remaining followers were keeping to themselves, largely avoiding the hostile public atmosphere in the aftermath of their leader's crucifixion and awaiting the arrival the Spirit which he had promised (Acts 1:4-5).

   And what an arrival it was!  Along with the rushing wind came tongues (γλῶσσαι) of flame which enabled them "to speak in other tongues" (γλώσσαις ). The disciples" immediately put this newly bestowed power to work by rushing out of the house where they staying and enthusiastically preaching the Gospel to the crowds who had come to Jerusalem from all over the known world to celebrate the Jewish feast of Pentecost (the name comes from the Greek Πεντηκοστή, fiftieth, occurring fifty days after Passover). They continued preaching, and publicly living out their Christian faith, in the face of often violent opposition . . . 

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Feed My Sheep: Love, Forgiveness, and Grace

 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." He said to him, "Feed my lambs." A second time he said to him, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." He said to him, "Tend my sheep." He said to him the third time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep.”    (JN 21:15-17)

It's Greek To Me

 

"The Denial of St. Peter", Caravaggio, 1610

   You’re probably familiar with the beautiful passage above, which is from the end of John’s Gospel .  As he sits with the Risen Christ at a charcoal fire on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Peter has the opportunity to redeem himself for what he did the last time we saw him at a charcoal fire.  On the night of Holy Thursday, when Our Lord had been arrested, he denied Jesus three times: here, Jesus invites Peter three times to tell his Lord, face to face, that he loves Him.

      I wrote an earlier version of this post as one of my first excursions into bloggery.  There was something about the language in this passage that caught my attention: I was intrigued by the fact that, in the original Greek text . . . 

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The Church's First Decision and The First Successor to the Apostles: St. Mathias

      Not everyone, it would seem, is pleased with the current Roman Pontiff.  If that hadn't been clear to me already, it would certainly be apparent in many of the comments some of my recent posts (this one and this one, for instance) have received in various online venues.  Who would have thought it?

     Happily, I'm not writing today to discuss the worthiness (or lack thereof) of Pope Francis for his current job.  Instead we're looking at St. Mathias, whose feast we are celebrating. I mention the current Pope because our discussion of St. Mathias will necessarily involve the papal office, if not the papal personality.

    St. Mathias was the thirteenth Apostle, chosen to replace Judas Iscariot after Judas betrayed the Lord then took his own life. It's interesting that our scriptural sources actually tell us very little about St. Mathias himself.  The only place he is mentioned by name is the passage is the Acts of the Apostles that describes his election:

In those days Peter stood up among the brethren (the company of persons was in all about a hundred and twenty), and said . . .

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Has Pascal's Wager Really Been "Debunked"?

 Who Will Debunk the Debunkers?

     The totalitarian subjugation, debasement, and enslavement of language foreseen by prophets of dystopia such as George Orwell is in full flower.  I need not point out recent examples like "peaceful protest", "court-packing", and the like to show how many previously clear and serviceable expressions have been made to mean something other than what they purport to mean, sometimes even their exact opposite.  

Blaise Pascal

    One such term with a long history of abuse is "debunk".  This word originally meant to disprove, to show that a particular statement or argument was "bunk", i.e., nonsense.  For some time now, however, I've seen certain people employ the term when they have made no serious effort to refute something, but have simply stated their disagreement. They often seem to think that if they simply invoke the word without actually making an argument, debunk will, through some numinous power of its own, refute an unwelcome assertion.

     Debunk has become something of a red flag for me because of this history of abuse.  It's what caught my attention a few years back when I saw a reference to an article claiming to debunk Pascal's Wager.  When I looked at the article in question I found that, to their credit, the authors did in fact make the effort to present arguments in support of their positions; the problem was, their arguments were themselves largely bunk.  But don't take my word for it: I make my case below in an article I first published six years ago this month, "Has Pascal's Wager Really Been 'Debunked'?" . . . 

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What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part II)

   In my prior post, "What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part I)" we saw that the true Church is not reducible to the people who occupy its offices at any particular point in time, not even to those in the highest positions of authority.  The true Church is the Mystical Body of Christ extending through time. We depend upon that Church for our salvation, and we can't abandon it because of the malfeasance of its temporary caretakers, whether they are priests, bishops, or even (if you can believe it) popes.

Bad popes: "Pope Formosus and Stephen VII"
by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1870

 At the same time, while the immorality and infidelity of bad clerics can't unmake the Church itself, it can do a lot of damage to members of the Church, and Church institutions, in particular times and places.  It can cause souls to be lost.  That was in fact the concern of the original comment that led to these posts.  A father was afraid that the bad example and erroneous teaching of certain prominent churchmen (including some at a decidedly higher pay grade than his parish priest) would damage the faith of his children, and that he might need to leave the Church for their protection . . . 

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A Tertullian for our Time: Merton for Better and for Worse

 "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church"

    You’re probably familiar with the quote above, a favorite of Pope St. John Paul II.  It’s author is Tertullian (c. A.D. 160 – c. A.D. 220), one of the foremost Christian writers and apologists of his age, who also gave us such essential terms as “Trinity” (Trinitas) and “Three Persons, One Substance” (Tres Personae, Una Substantia).  Despite his enormous achievements, however, and his lasting influence, Tertullian is not considered a Father of the Church; we don’t even call him “Saint” Tertullian:  he chose, sadly, to follow his own judgment rather than that of the Apostolic Church, and fell into heresy in the latter part of his life.

 

     I first wrote this post six years ago, as a follow-up to my essay "Merton's Parable of the Trappists and Icarians".  I had been reminded of Tertullian by several things I read at that time about the Trappist monk Thomas Merton who, if he had still been with us, would have been celebrating his 100^th birthday at the time (January 31^st 2015).  I don’t mean to suggest that Merton was a figure on a par with Tertullian: the late Trappist made no lasting contribution to the development of Catholic Doctrine, and added no new words to our vocabulary, although he was quite influential in his time (and still is, to a degree).  Like Tertullian, however, he didn’t stay the course: while he never considered himself to have left the Church, his growing involvement with Zen Buddhism in his last years appeared to be carrying him outside the bounds of Christian belief and practice . . .

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What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part I)

"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68)

 

Is this your parish priest?

  We live in scary times.  It looks like our secular institutions in the West are collapsing, to be replaced by mob rule (which really means, as always, a tyranny of the elite who manipulate the mob).  More frightening still for Catholics, the institutional Church appears to be experiencing a parallel slide.  A commenter on my post about the Trappists and Icarians  expressed his unhappiness at attending Mass where, as he put it, the priest "preaches communism."  He was not just concerned, however, that many Catholic clerics, from parish priest on up, are abandoning the Faith for a poisonous brand of politics, but also, on a more practical level, that the Catholic Church itself was not a safe place for his children.

    The commenter raises some valid and important points, which deserve a better answer than I can give off the cuff in a social media combox . . . I was thinking about how to approach this topic Friday morning, when I received some timely help from the daily Mass readings.  . . . 

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Merton's Parable of the Trappists and the Icarians (Spes in Domino)

Thomas Merton at Gethsemani

Thomas Merton is a name that can provoke a reaction from all manner of Catholics . . . all manner of reactions as well, depending on whether you invoke the Merton of the 1940's, a doctrinally orthodox convert to Catholicism who was enamored of his new life in a Trappist monastery, or the Merton of the 1960's who, although still a monk, seemed more interested in anti-Vietnam politics and Buddhist mysticism.  This article, an update of a post I first published six years ago at the time of Merton's hundredth birthday, is about an illuminating story in one of his early (i.e., orthodox) books.  I'll publish a follow-up post about Merton himself next week.

       Although vowed to silence in his everyday life in the Trappist abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Thomas Merton was a gifted writer whose literary work was first permitted, and then encouraged by his superiors.  His first and best book is The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography he published in 1948.  It's a  beautifully written, compelling story of his conversion to Christ and to Catholicism.  He was not without his failings, however, some of them rather serious. Not only that, but toward the end of his life in the mid to late 1960’s he became increasingly drawn to Zen Buddhism.  It was not clear that he could still be truly considered a Catholic at the time of his unexpected death in Thailand in 1968 . . . 

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