Dionysius the Areopagite: a Believer Among The Sceptics

Icon of Dionysius the Areopagite

Today (October 9th) is the feast day of Dionysius the Areopagite.  We know very little for certain about this Saint, who is often confused with St. Dionysius of Paris (St. Denis), Patron of France, and also with a mystical writer living half a millennium later known as the Pseudo-Dionysius.  We do know that today’s Saint was among a handful of listeners converted by St. Paul when he spoke in Athens (Acts 17:16-34).  The title “Areopagite” which Luke gives him suggests that he was one of the legal scholars or philosophers who frequented the Athenian assembly place known as the Areopagus (Hill of Mars), which is where he heard St. Paul speak.  

    As such he was an unlikely convert, and the fact that he heard St. Paul at all was the result of a string of (seemingly) random events.  As Luke tells it in Acts, Paul doesn’t seem to have intended to go to Athens at all: he went there fleeing from hostile crowds in Thessalonika and Beroea.  Once he was there, the Apostle went about doing what he usually did:

Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the market place every day with those who chanced to be there. (Acts 17:16-17)

Athens being Athens, there were some who took a professional interest in what St. Paul had to say:

Some also of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers met him. And some said, "What would this babbler say?" Others said, "He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities"--because he preached Jesus and the resurrection. And they took hold of him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, "May we know what this new teaching is which you present? For you bring some strange things to our ears; we wish to know therefore what these things mean." (Acts 17:18-20)

    The traditional designation of what comes next as the “Sermon on the Areopagus” can be misleading.  The greek word translated “took hold of him”, ἐπιλαβόμενοι, comes from a word that means to “seize” or “arrest”. Paul was not so much invited to come share his views as he was brought in for questioning.  However he got there, he saw an opportunity to evangelize, and he made the most of it.  Like any good teacher, he starts out with some praise to put his audience in a receptive frame of mind:

"Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.” (Acts 17:22)

He quickly uses this opening to bring them in the direction he wants to go, using their own religious observance to introduce Jesus Christ:

For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To an unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you (Acts 17:23).

He goes on to tell the Athenians that this God who is “unknown” no longer is the Creator of the Universe and, in contrast to the Olympian gods of the Greeks, is completely apart from and beyond His creation; that he has made us to seek him out; that we are fashioned in his image, as opposed to pagan idols that we model after ourselves; that he forgives our previous worship of these false divinities because we knew no better, but now that the full truth has been revealed, we will be held responsible, and that he has given us a sign of all these things by raising Jesus Christ from the dead (Acts 17:24-31).

St. Paul On The Areopagus, by Mariano Fortuny

    This last point proves to be a little too much for some of his listeners, who “mocked” when “they heard of the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 17:32); others seemed at least to keep an open mind, saying "We will hear you again about this"(Acts 17:32).  A small number went further:

But some men joined him and believed, among them Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them (Acts 17:34).

A small beginning, it seems, but Jesus tells us in another place in Scripture that small beginnings often lead to something much greater:

"The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." (Matthew 13:31-32)

    It’s not difficult to see in the learned sceptics of the Areopagus the forerunners of today’s cultural leaders and opinion makers.  As we saw above, St. Paul finds a way to respect his listeners without watering down his own message, even when most of them seem to reject the Good News, just like those in John’s Gospel who say “This is a hard saying.  Who can listen to it?” (John 6:60).  And just as Jesus allows those doubting disciples to walk away, Paul doesn’t try to change his message to win back the scoffers.  And of course not all of them turn a deaf ear: Dionysius, Demaris, and a few others will be the seed of a much greater Christian community in Athens.

    The spirit of our age would probably look familiar to the crowd on Athens’ Mars Hill, an age sceptical of everything except its own cleverness.  We can take heart from St. Paul’s boldness in proclaiming the Gospel and St. Dionysius’s courage in the face of the hostility or indifference of his peers.  May God grant us all their steadfast Faith.

Truth Is On The Side Of Life

“We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.”  Thus spake Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority in the U.S, Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision in January, 1973.  And so the era of virtually unlimited abortion in the United States burst upon the nation in a flurry of obfuscation and falsehood.  There never was, in fact, any question of when “life begins”, certainly not on scientific grounds (I defy you to find a biology text that does not agree that life begins at conception): the only question was whether all human life was deserving of protection, or only certain lives.  For more than four decades now, the abortion industry and its apologists have relied on verbal smokescreens like Justice Blackmun’s to provide just enough cover that Americans can avoid the ugly truth about abortion.

     It’s getting harder all the time to keep the charade going.  In 1973, ultrasound was not yet commonly used by obstetricians in the United States, and so for the vast majority of Americans unborn babies remained invisible, out-of-sight . . . and therefore fairly easy to dismiss.  Not anymore.  Virtually all expectant mothers have pictures of their babies in the womb long before the birth, pictures that have become increasingly clearer and more life-like.  If it looks like a baby, squirms like a baby, gives a “thumbs up” like a baby (see photo above), well, what can one conclude?  Of course, women who go to abortion clinics are unlikely to be offered such pictures, even if an ultrasound is performed, because women who see an ultrasound of their unborn baby are much less likely to abort (see here).

      Howard Slugh, an attorney, addresses the ultrasound issue in an article [here] in National Review Online called “The Life-Affirming Power of Ultrasound”.  He discusses in particular the growing number of state laws in the U.S. that require the abortionist to perform an ultrasound and to show the images to the mother of the unborn baby.  There are some interesting features to the legal battles over these laws.  First of all, even though abortionists deny that ultrasounds change minds, they “in fact have conceded the point in lawsuits challenging mandatory ultrasound laws”, which they have been fighting tooth-and-nail to stop.

     That’s not the only revealing thing about the abortionists’ legal arguments.  “No one” Slugh tells us, “asserts that the images are misleading or that the laws require additional pro-life commentary.”  The abortion providers can only argue that simply requiring them to show truthful, unaltered pictures of what (which is really, as the images show, who) is being aborted will dissuade some of their customers.  A federal court, in striking down one of these laws in North Carolina, said in its decision that the law “explicitly promotes a pro-life message by demanding the provision of facts that all fall on one side of the abortion debate.”  Notice that the law does not require the suppression of “facts” that fall on the other side of the debate: it simply requires that the mother know all the facts before undergoing abortion, and the facts happen to be pro-life.  And so the abortionists are reduced to asking the court to help them hide the truth.  As Slugh notes:

All these sources agree that the more a mother knows about her child, the less likely she is to abort him.  This is not because ultrasound images are misleading or politicized; it is because they supply a mother with truthful information necessary for making an informed choice.

It’s good to bear this in mind as we work to protect life: truth is our ally.  We should continue to publicize the truth by educating and informing our fellow citizems, by participating in pro-life events, and by supporting pro-life laws such as the ones mentioned above that give women more access to full and accurate information. But more than that, we should also be sure to pray to the Lord of Truth, that He continue to open our eyes and hearts, and those of our fellow people, to the Truth of the humanity of the unborn, and to the sanctity of all human life.

Teenage Werewolves And Other Mythical Beasts

(This Worth Revisiting post was first published on May 13th, 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.)

Enter The Teenager   

        We tend to take the environment in which we live for granted, to unthinkingly assume that the way things are now is how they are always supposed to be. For instance, I was born just a couple of weeks before the Cuban Missile crisis, and grew to adulthood in a world overshadowed by the Cold War and a seemingly intractable rivalry between the West and the Communist Bloc.  Those of a certain age will identify with my sense of amazement when the apparently permanent Communist Bloc simply vanished in the space of a few short years.  Our tendency to think of the contours of the world we know as fixed and eternal can blind us both to current problems and to future possibilities, but even worse than that: as Catholics we should know that the things that really are fixed and eternal are beyond this world, and they alone give us the context in which to consider worldly things in their true perspective.   

      Consider, for instance, the curious creature we know as "The Teenager", a term that does not simply mean an adolescent (with all the interesting quirks that go along with that stage of development), but a distinct "identity" with its own Teen Culture.  Some years ago I read an article by Thomas Hine called “The Rise And Decline of the Teenager” (here) that crystallized for me something that I should already have known from studying history: that our understanding of the teenager, and what it means to be one, even that there is such a creature, is a very recent product of our historical circumstances.  Hine says:

Most adults seem to view this conflicted, contradictory figure of the teenager as inevitable, part of the growth of a human being.  Yet many people now living [in 1999] came of age before there was anything called a teenager.

A Failed Adolescent

     Hines writes from a secular perspective, and I don’t go along with all of his conclusions, but there is quite a lot of valuable information in his essay.  He traces the birth of “the teenager” back to the Great Depression (the word first appears in print in 1941 in Popular Science magazine), when for the first time a majority of adolescent Americans were actually enrolled in high school; previously, most young men at this age would already be working full time, and most young women would have been married or working in their parents’ home.  The teenager, as Hines plausibly tells the tale, is largely the product of universal (mostly public) high school attendance.

     The article is more concerned with the development of teenagerdom than with exploring its ramifications (he may do more analysis in his books and on his website, which I have not explored), but he does offer some interesting insights.  For instance:

Indeed, the teenager may be, as Edgar Z. Friedenberg argued in a 1959 book, a failed adolescent. Being a teenager is, he said, a false identity, meant to short-circuit the quest for a real one. By giving people superficial roles to play, advertising, the mass media, and even the schools confuse young people and leave them dissatisfied and thus open to sales pitches that promise a deepening of identity.

The word "adolescent" means "becoming an adult", but teenhood is presented to young people as a destination in itself, directing adolescents away from their true mission of preparing to take their place in the grown-up world (hence the "failure"). Hines goes on to say:

We stopped expecting young people to be productive members of society and began to think of them as gullible consumers.  We denned maturity primarily in terms being permitted adult vices, and then were surprised when teenagers drank, smoked, or had promiscuous sex.

Boys To Men?

     There is a lot to think about here.  While there are and have been certain natural features of adolescence, such as impulsiveness, emotionalism, and (dare I say it) a certain arrogance, the idea of a “youth culture”, distinct from (or even in rebellion against) the adult culture is a new and, I would argue, destructive phenomenon. Adolescent males in particular had traditionally exhibited their youthful “spiritedness” in an impatience to join their fathers and participate in the World of Adult Men. Their eagerness to enter this august company, to take on the “identity” of a grown man, was their impetus to integrate productively with the rest of their society. Its markers were not just work, but marriage and fatherhood, and therefore taking on responsibility was the public proof of Manhood.  Now, as Hines points out, the young are encouraged to see adulthood as a time to give free rein to the sort of self-indulgent irresponsibility that is so attractive to adolescents.  One might add that the near-universality of college attendance seems to be extending Teenhood even further into adulthood, with the result that we are seeing ever more Perpetual Teens.

What Are They Teaching in These Schools?

Michael Landon in the film I Was A Teenage Werewolf

     It seems clear to me that we don’t want our adolescent children to self-identify with the secular “youth culture.” When I first read this article our oldest child had just turned three, and we had already decided to teach him and his siblings at home.  We were primarily concerned with the formation of character and instruction in the Faith, and homeschooling seemed the best way to avoid the pitfalls of the teenage peer culture.  At the same time I understand that homeschooling is not going to be the answer for many, probably most, Catholic families. Good Catholic schools are a much better option than the public schools (not all Catholic schools are “good” ones, unfortunately), especially schools that take the faith seriously.  In the best Catholic schools you won’t find sexual morality being taught by Planned Parenthood, there will be less left-wing indoctrination (much will depend, of course,  on individual teachers) and the Catholic faith will not only be taught, but be a living reality in the school.

     On the other hand, any institutional school, however good, will inevitably contribute to some of the negative outcomes noted above. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone; I have taught full-time in Catholic schools for the past twenty-nine years, and I would have quit long ago if I didn’t think they were, on balance, a good thing. Nonetheless, there will be a powerful attraction to the peer culture, and many, probably most, of your sons’ and daughters’ classmates will have been influenced much more by secular values and the consumer culture than by traditional Christian belief and practice. 

Parents Are The Primary Educators

     Whether we send our children to Catholic school or teach them at home, we are their primary educators, and God has given us parents, not the schools (and certainly not the popular culture) the graces to direct their formation properly (see St. John Paul II's Letter to Families).  If we do send our sons and daughters to school we need to make an extra effort to help them form their identity as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, of their family, and of society, not their peer group. One way is to see that they are involved in activities outside of school that involve people of different ages.  For example, when my sons were younger we took part in a Catholic ConQuest group with a lot of boys of different ages, but also a number of fathers who not only directed activities but also participated along with their sons, the adult men acting as guides and role models for the boys.  Also, however good the religious instruction may be at the school, it’s not sufficient; the parents must take a direct role in the instruction of their children and offer an example of living a Christ-centered life (and it’s vitally important for fathers to be the high-priest of the domestic church: see here).  If we who are concerned for the well-being and eternal salvation of our children don’t take the lead, then the secular culture, which cares for neither of those things, will step in.

     Too often I have seen parents throw up their hands in the belief that there is nothing they can do.  But there is: teenagerhood, unlike biological sex, is not an immutable fact.  At the age when young men and women should be well along in the task of conforming themselves to the responsibilities of adulthood, it is unhealthy for them and corrosive of a healthy society to be accustoming themselves greater irresponsibility and self-indulgence. While each of us all must go through his or her teens, none needs to be a Teenager.

Abortion Myth #2

MYTH: "Abortion is safer than childbirth."

TRUTH:

- A government funded study in Finland in 1997 found that women were four times more likely to die in the year following an abortion than in the year following childbirth.  More recent studies in Canada and California reached similar conclusions.

- Since the 1950’s dozens of studies around the world have shown a significantly greater risk of breast cancer for women who have had abortions.

- Women who have had abortions are also at greater risk of cervical, ovarian, and liver cancer.

-Women who have had abortions are at higher risk of complications in subsequent pregnancies, including: complications of labor, placenta previa, ectopic pregnancy and handicapped newborns.

-10% of women undergoing elective abortion will suffer immediate complications, of which approximately one fifth (2%) are considered life threatening.

-Women still die every year from legal abortions (see Gosnell, Kermit [link]).

(figures courtesy of the Elliot Institute, www.afterabortion.org)

DON’T BUY THE LIE!

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)

To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

"O God Beyond All Praising" - From Pope Francis's U.S. Visit

Pope Francis leading Vespers service at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York

    I have to confess that I'm not a big fan of the early twentieth century English composer Gustav Holst.  It's not that he wasn't a gifted composer; it's just that his music, for the most part, is a little too angular for my tastes (as is the case with other composers of his era as well).  His most famous work, for instance, The Planets, has some very moving passages, and some that can even be called brilliant, but little I would consider really beautiful . . . except for one soaring, melodic passage that shines out from the “Jupiter” movement.  Holst later set this tune to the words of a patriotic poem called “I Vow To Thee My Country”; the hymnist Ralph Vaughn Williams (a friend of the composer) shortly thereafter included his setting of the melody in a volume of church music. It has since provided the musical background for a large number of Christian hymns.

    One of the better known of these, “O God Beyond All Praising” with words by Michael Perry,  has become one of my favorite hymns.  Here it is the closing song of a Vespers service with Pope Francis last weekend in New York.   I have had a hard time finding a good Catholic performance of this hymn on YouTube, and the sound quality on this one isn’t the best, but it certainly seems to be Catholic.

    One of the ironies of this tune, by the way, is that Holst’s inspiration for The Planets was not astronomy, but astrology: this tune was supposed to represent the “joviality” to be found under the Sign of Jupiter.  How wonderful that when people hear it today, it is instead almost always as a song of praise to the True God and Creator of the Universe.

St. Therese of Lisieux, Spiritual Warrior

   What can one say about St. Therese of Lisieux?  I almost didn’t say anything, expecting that the blogosphere would be filled with an abundance of inspiring and insightful commentary on this wonderful Saint, an expectation that has not been disappointed.  St. Therese, however, has a way of getting what she wants, and she is very reluctant to take "no" for an answer (just ask Leo XIII), so who am I to refuse?  I can at least add a brief comment or two to the (well-deserved) tributes to The Little Flower.

     One thing that strikes me is how well St. Therese complements St. Ignatius of Loyola, whom I have been discussing with my adolescent Theology students.  St. Ignatius urges us to “Find God in All Things”, which is one of the major themes of his Spiritual Exercises and Ignatian Spirituality in general.  St. Therese, it seems to me, takes that a step further and asks us to then serve God in all things.  That is the essence of her Little Way: we can do even something as (apparently) trivial as, say, sweeping the floor “For The Greater Glory of God” (Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, or AMDG, a favorite motto of St. Ignatius and the Jesuits).

     It is in this way that St. Therese is a soldier.  Not a literal soldier, of course, as St. Ignatius had been; rather, with her Little Way she is a strategist, a general, for each one of us in the Spiritual War that rages in our heart and mind between the Spirit of Christ and the Spirit of Satan.  The Devil is in the details; inattention in little things can lead to self-centeredness in little things and, given just how many little things there are, can mean a lot of time focused on ourselves.  Self-immersion leads to selfishness, which is an invitation to the Evil One to move in.  It’s best not to yield an inch of ground to the Enemy and, as The Little Flower has shown us, save it all for Jesus.  Perhaps then, God willing, we can, like St. Therese, spend our Heaven doing Good.

    

     

What's Latin Got To Do With It?

   Thus the Roman tongue is now first and foremost a sacred tongue, which resounds in the Sacred Liturgy, the halls of divinity, and the documents of the Apostolic See.  In this same tongue you yourselves again and again address a sweet salutation to the Queen of Heaven, your Mother, and to your Father who reigns on high.  This tongue is the key that unlocks for you the sources of history.  Nearly all the Roman and Christian past preserved for us, in inscriptions, writings and books, with some exceptions of later centuries, wears the vesture of the Latin tongue.

 - His Holiness Pope Pius XII's Address to the Student Youth of Rome, January 30, 1949   

     Over the last couple of days I have been watching two gentlemen going back in forth in the comboxes about the Pope’s decision not to use Latin as the official language of the upcoming Synod of Bishops.  They both make some interesting points about the place and importance of the Latin language in the life of the Church. Their spirited discussion has got me thinking not just about Latin, but about some of the distinctive features of Catholicism. 

The Pagan Roman Vergil guides the Christian Dante on his way to Paradise

A God of the Particulars . . .

     Don’t get me wrong, I have some definite opinions about Latin (after all, teaching it has been my main source of income for the past three decades), both in general and in a Church context, but I’d like to use the discussion of the language as a springboard to a broader topic.  And, really, it’s something of a paradox.  I agree with Chesterton when he says: “It [Catholicism] is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”  Catholicism gives us an allegiance that is infinitely larger than those other things that try to make a claim on us, such as political parties and ideologies, nations, athletic teams and any number of false gods, including The Conventional Wisdom; and it is not just something larger, but something truer, something that is infinitely true, because it is our connection to the Infinite Omnipotent Creator.  At the same time, one of its unique features among the world’s religions is its interest in particulars, following the lead of its Lord, of whom I wrote in another post:

. . . He is a God of particulars.  He chose a particular people to whom he first revealed himself in order that he might incarnate himself among them in the person of the God-Man Jesus of Nazareth; he carefully chose and prepared Mary as the human mother of Jesus; he likewise chose and prepared particular individuals such as Peter and Paul to carry forward the mission of Jesus.

The Church has carefully preserved, in Scripture, in creeds, and in the broader tradition these names and the names of many others: and not only Saints, but Sinners such as the various Herods and Pontius Pilate.  The Gospels usually don’t simply tell us that Jesus entered a town, but that he entered, say, Tiberias, or Betheny.  We are told about real, individual men and women in well-known places that you can see, where you can walk down the same streets.  And it doesn’t end with Biblical figures and events: the Catholic Church has carefully preserved not only the names and stories of thousands of Saints over the past two millennia, but actual pieces of their bodies as tokens that they were real people, not myths or abstractions. 

. . . And Yet Universal

     It may seem like a contradiction that Catholicism is at the same time the only truly Universal Religion and one uniquely focused on individual people and concrete things. But the living center of it all is the Incarnation, where the Second Person of the Trinity, the Eternal Word, becomes the Man Jesus of Nazareth: Infinite God in a finite body.  It is the glorified body of the Risen Christ that I find most telling here, particularly the passage where Jesus shows himself to the “doubting” Apostle Thomas: 

St. Thomas examining the wounds of Christ

Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:27-28) 

Who would have expected the Glorified Body, the eternal perfected Body, to include the horrible wounds inflicted on the first body here on Earth?  

     It seems to me that the Church, Christ’s Mystical Body on Earth, follows the model of the Master in incorporating into itself many of those things that happen to it along the way.  As St. Paul says:

  

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28) 

I’m not saying that the various experiences and traditions (including liturgical languages) that have been part of the history of the Church enjoy the same status as Christ’s Wounds. Rather, in the passage about Thomas we see a supreme example of a pattern that is reflected in lesser things as well. It does seem that God doesn’t want anything to go to waste, and that He can use those things to join us more closely to Himself and to each other.  Just look at how the stories of the Saints, from the very earliest days of the Church, have been incorporated into her liturgical life, and how devotion to them has brought countless Catholics closer to their Lord.  The same can be said of many devotional practices. 

What’s Latin Got to Do With It?

     This is where the discussion of Latin comes in.  It’s true that it wasn’t the first liturgical language of the Church (and for much of the Church never has been).  In the Western Church, however, the Latin Church, it replaced Greek within the first few centuries, when there was still a Roman Empire.  For the past fifteen centuries Latin was the language in which great theologians (St. Augustine, St. Thomas) formulated their thoughts, and the medium through which Catholics, including most of the greatest Saints, prayed to their God and heard His Word.  

St. Augustine of Hippo, last of the Romans

     That common language, on a purely human level, is a tangible way that we share in their experience.  I often relate to people, when discussing the study of Latin in a purely secular context, my experience studying English as a graduate student.  I found that in the work of authors writing in English prior to the mid-twentieth there always seemed to be a sort of substrata of allusions and knowing nods to the literary tradition of the Greeks and Romans, and a rich admixture of Latinisms; most of this was invisible to the vast majority of students who had never studied Latin (never mind Greek) or classical literature.  There was an entire dimension to the literature they were reading that they simply missed.  Consider how much more profound a loss that is in the context of the Church, whose traditions an institutions go back to a time before any language we could call English existed.   

     Of course, the Church is not merely an institution, and our predecessors in the faith are not merely our forebears: they are our fellow Christians, participants right now from their eternal heavenly home in the same Church, which is the Mysticum Corpus of Christ our Lord. If we venerate bits of their bone and tiny snips of their clothing, surely we must derive some spiritual benefit from praying the same prayers, not just the same thoughts but the exact same words, and singing the same songs as they did?  We are both body and soul, and we need tangible things to help us understand spiritual realities.  We can’t survive on abstractions: that’s why Our Lord has given us Sacraments.  The Latin language has been one of those tangible things for most of the history of the Western Church, one of the most prominent of those things (sociologists call them “identity markers”) that help us understand who we are and with whom we belong.

Look Before Leaping

     As I said above, this is not merely about Latin, because the gentleman is correct who said that the Church has changed her liturgical language in the past, and may do so again.  No human language is essential for Salvation, and the Church will go on with or without it (Matthew 16:18); also, she continually needs to assess whether the things she has picked up on the on the way are really helpful for her mission (Ecclesia reformans et semper reformanda, if I may indulge in an antique tongue). At the same time she must also consider long and hard before jettisoning things that have a long history of uniting those of us in the Church Militant with our predecessors who are now in the Church Triumphant, and beyond them to "Our Father who reigns on high," as Pope Pius XII reminds us.  Whatever happens in the upcoming Synod (things being what they are, it makes sense to conduct the proceedings in some other language), we would be unwise to abandon completely the Language of our Fathers (Lingua Patrum) too quickly.

(This Throwback was first published in January of this year.)

Quick! What's The Summit And Source Of The Christian Life?"

(This Worth Revisiting post was first published on August 27th, 2014, and was inspired, in part, by a post by fellow Worth Revisiting blogger Michael Seagriff. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.)

 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him.”Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”  And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  -Matthew 22:35-39

We have Company

Pope Francis at Easter Mass, 2014

     Years ago when I taught at a Catholic high school in New York State I was the faculty moderator of the student newspaper.  On one particular occasion I had brought some of the students on the newspaper staff on a trip to another school, which had at one time been a convent school, and still had a number of the good sisters in residence.  We were casually conversing in a hallway when an elderly nun began furiously shushing at us as she pointed to an open doorway.  Looking through the door I noticed, for the first time, a tabernacle on the far wall with a red presence lamp glowing next to it.  We were standing in front of the chapel, and sister wanted us to quiet down out of respect for Christ in the reserved Sacrament.  When I recounted the incident to my lovely bride, she told me that the exact same thing had happened to her a dozen years or more before when she had visited the same school as a student.  Whether it was a sort of tradition there, or the same sister had made a life’s mission of hushing boisterous guests in front of the chapel I don’t know, but the incident has stuck with me.

     I was reminded of this incident yet again the other day, in fact, when I saw this post [here] on Michael Seagriff’s blog, in which he recounts his sadness at the disrespect shown Our Lord at a Church he attended while travelling.  He says:

The loud chatter and laughter before and immediately after the end of Mass each day made silent prayer an enormous challenge if not an impossibility.  The conduct of those present gave no visible evidence that His Presence among and within them was of much importance.

I think he hits the nail right on the head here. If we knew that an important man or woman were in the room with us – the President of the United States, for instance, or some other high-ranking official – would we carry on as if he weren’t there?  And wouldn’t he command at least as much of our attention as our friends? Surely when the Lord and Creator of the Universe is in the room with us (as He is in the consecrated Eucharist), we should show even greater deference.  In fact, shouldn’t we by all rights fall to our knees in awe-struck silence? And yet what Michael Seagriff describes above is all too common; he could have been describing a church I know near me, but the same thing happens, often to a lesser degree, just about everywhere I know of (to a much lesser degree, I must admit, where the Mass is being offered in the extraordinary form).

Maybe sometimes we should "sweat the small stuff"

     I’m not just being the President of the No-Fun Club here (although I do bear that title, and proudly); the issue of reverence before the Holy Sacrament, and at Mass in general, is no small matter.  We’ve all heard some variation on “God doesn’t care what I’m wearing/ doing, etc. . . .  He just wants me to be there . . . He’s a big Guy, he can take it  . . ." blah,blah,blah.  God’s not the problem: no amount of irreverence, in fact nothing we can do at all, can harm Him.  The problem is that it’s bad for us to disrespect God, we are not honoring and obeying our Heavenly Father, the One who told Moses “Take off your sandals, the place where you’re standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5).  It’s right to behave differently in the immediate presence of God.

     There’s also another problem, as Michael indicates when he says “The conduct of those present gave no visible evidence that His Presence among and within them was of much importance.”  If you asked them, I’m sure the chatterboxes from the back of the church would insist they had enormous respect for the Divine Presence in the Tabernacle, and they would probably mean it.  We Catholics know, however, that mind, body, and spirit all work together.  “The Word became Flesh” (John 1:14) John the Evangelist tells us, and the Apostle James assures us that “Faith apart from deeds is dead” (James 2:26). We cannot separate what we do from what we believe, and if our behavior says, not just to others but to ourselves, that being at Mass is no different than being at a business meeting or a cocktail party, sooner or later we’ll believe it.  And that is why, after all, we have all the “smells and bells”, beautiful churches and colorful vestments, because we flesh and blood mortals need tangible signs in order to absorb spiritual realities.  Why else should the Word become Flesh? Why else have sacraments?

Summit and Source

     The spiritual reality we’re meant to absorb when we’re at Mass, of course, is the True Presence of Jesus Christ.  The first commandment is to love God (see the quote from Matthew's Gospel at the top of the page); loving our neighbor is similar to that, but subordinate. Our purpose in going to Mass, then, is not to meet our friends but to meet God Himself, face to face, and even to take him physically into our bodies.  That’s a big deal, bigger than anything else we can imagine.  We need to know it, to feel it, and to live it.  The Vatican II fathers tell us that the Mass is the “summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; and at the same time, it is the fountain from which all her powers flow” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 10). Isn’t that worth asking your friends to wait a little while?

     I don’t doubt that most of the natterers in the pews intend no disrespect.  Most have been mislead by an elite group of liturgical ideologues who really do want to de-emphasize the Divinity of Christ, and have been acculturated to a societal ethos that has made a fetish out of informality.  We all need to do our part to model appropriate reverence, and educate others (recall that “Instructing the Ignorant” is one of the Spiritual Works of Mercy; this definitely qualifies).  We should also encourage our priests, many of whom apparently think that lay people are put off by reverence, formality, and the like.  Share with them resources like this post [here] from Fr. John Zuhlsdorf on ways to improve the celebration of the Ordinary Form of the Mass; I’m willing to bet that any church that followed Fr. Z’s advice from this article would be bursting at the seams.  The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and our profound encounter with Him in the Mass, is too big to ignore.

 

Archangels, St. Jerome, Morality, And God's Law

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

nor stands in the way of sinners,

nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

but his delight is in the law of the LORD,

and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree planted by streams of water,

that yields its fruit in its season,

and its leaf does not wither.

In all that he does, he prospers.

The wicked are not so,

but are like chaff which the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,

nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;

 for the LORD knows the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wicked will perish. (Psalm 1)

  

   The first Psalm gives us an interesting account of God’s law.  It is explained primarily in descriptive terms: if you follow God’s Law, and take it to heart, you will be happy, but if you choose wickedness, well, then your wages will be death.  Here is one of many indications in Scripture that while God allows us to conduct our own affairs, both on an individual and societal level, he wants to be involved, and he has created us in such a way that we in turn desire his presence in our lives (yet another occasion to quote St. Augustine: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you”).  And so he has created a variety of means for communicating with us without controlling us.

     We see God’s desire to communicate reflected in different ways in our obsevances over the next two days.  Today is the feast of the Archangels: our word “angel” comes from the Greek ἄγγελος, which simply means “messenger”.  The function of angels, at least as far as they concern us, is as carriers of God’s messages to us.  In addition to that, tomorrow is the feast of St. Jerome, who is known primarily for creating the first complete and reliable Latin translation of the Holy Scriptures, making the Bible available to all those inhabitants of the Roman Empire who did not know Greek. We honor St. Jerome because he made the word of God available to so many people.

      I couldn’t help thinking about the Archangels and St. Jerome the other day when I was reading this column [here] by Star Parker.  Parker is reporting on a recent survey by the Pew Center showing that: 

Over the last 12 years, the percentage of Americans that think religion is losing influence in American life has increased dramatically.  In 2002, 52 percent of those surveyed said religion is losing influence.  In 2014, 72 percent of Americans said religion is losing influence. 

Star Parker

     At the same time, Parker says, “fifty-six percent say that the waning of religion is a bad thing compared to 12 percent that say it is a good thing”, and she points to a Pew poll from 2012 that found that 58 percent thought religion was “very important” against only 12 percent who believed the opposite.

     What are we to make of these figures?  One would think that the large majority decrying the decline of religion must nonetheless play some part in that decline.  I suspect that we are seeing, at least in part, the struggle between our willing spirits and weak flesh within our restless hearts: “Lord give me chastity . . . but not yet” (St. Augustine has all the bases covered).  There are also more concrete considerations.  Parker, who was at one time a single mother on welfare, and who credits the welfare reforms of the 1990’s with rescuing her from a life of dependency on government largesse, sees the baleful moral consequences of such dependence as an important proximate cause.  Most Americans, largely out of a sense of Christian Charity, supported the enormous expansion of government assistance programs starting in the 1960’s.  

Who appreciated that the program would undermine the very religious, traditional values that keep families intact, essential for the work ethic that leads people out of poverty?  Massive increases of government in the lives of low-income black families were accompanied by a tripling of single parent households and out-of-wedlock births, laying the groundwork for intergenerational poverty. 

Now it’s happening in the whole country.  As we’ve gotten more government telling Americans how to save for retirement, how to deal with their health care, how to educate their children – American families have been damaged and out-of-wedlock births have increased six-fold from 1960 to 42 percent today.  Government has displaced family.

But it’s not simply about government.  In fact, Parker finds fault with both the Statists on the left and the Libertarians on the right who see the government per se as the issue, as if adding more government or radically cutting it will alone solve our social problems.  No, “you can’t have a free society that is not also a virtuous society”, and “we can’t separate our fiscal and economic problems from our moral problems.”  And where does morality come from?  Of course . . . God’s Law.

     I want to be clear that I’m not pushing some kind of “Gospel of Prosperity”, but the discussion above does offer an example of how God knows the truth about us, and that living by that truth leads to happiness, while denying it brings on ruin.  We know it from the messages carried by his Angels, the Scriptures he inspired, and the Church he established.  As the Lord Himself tells Moses:   

For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off.  It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.  "See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil.  If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you this day, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it.   (Deuteronomy 30:11-16)

  

Progressive Catholicism, The Spirit of Vatican II, and Humanae Vitae

A Blast From The Past

   Some years ago, as part of a staff spiritual development project, I was asked to read and comment upon a number of excerpts from a book called A People Adrift: The Crisis Of The Roman Catholic Church In America by a fellow named Peter Steinfels.  I didn’t know much about the author at the time except that he and his wife had some connection with the leftish quasi-Catholic publication Commonweal.  I soon ascertained that he was very 

much of the “Spirit of Vatican II” school of Catholicism, in which the teaching and tradition of the Church often appears to serve as little more than window dressing for whatever enthusiasms are fashionable among the cultural elite.  It seems that it’s hard to maintain this stance if one is too particular about that doctrine and tradition, as I pointed out in one of my responses to the assigned reading:

Steinfels typically uses vague generalities when proposing his heterodox positions, as when he fails to cite any of the documents of Vatican II in his discussion of the council and the reform of the liturgy. Other times he simply ignores factual evidence that doesn’t fit his theses, as when he omits the scriptural background and the teaching of the Fathers in his discussion of contraception, and in his discussions of the current state of the Church he never mentions the ecclesial movements or some of the vibrant new publications spearheaded by lay Catholics.

I couldn’t possibly respond to every omission, distortion, and non-argument in his book, but still my comments grew longer and more elaborate with every chapter assigned, until finally, after reading his chapter on Humanae Vitae and contraception, I submitted a thirteen-page critique of Steinfels' argument and a defense of the Church’s centuries-old ban on contraception, with attached documentation of at least equal length.  It was an exhausting (and tiresome) exercise.

    The Catholic Left, however, never seems to tire of discussing Humanae Vitae and contraception.  Mr. Steinfels continues to opine on the topic in public, most recently just a couple weeks ago in the Washington Post [here], where he takes advantage of the publicity surrounding the Pope’s visit to the United States and next month’s Synod on the Family in Rome to renew his campaign to persuade the Catholic Church to abandon its condemnation of contraception.  

The More Things Change . . .

    As for Steinfels’ arguments, well, not much has changed over the past ten years.  To begin with, he tries to minimize the Catholic teaching on contraception with the usual red herrings and non-sequiturs:

The church’s sexual norms were woven out of the Old Testament, apostolic injunctions and classical doctrines such as Stoicism, which held passion suspect and condemned sexual acts not directed toward procreation as “against nature.”

But unlike, say, adultery or fornication or defining the conditions of a valid marriage, contraception was a relatively marginal issue until the 20th century, when reliable methods replaced a brew of folk remedies. Before that, birth control was associated with prostitution or illicit sex and decried by virtually all Christian denominations . When Anglican churches broke that pattern in 1930, followed by many Protestant denominations, Pope Pius XI reacted with a stern encyclical reasserting the condemnation. Opposition to birth control soon became a kind of identifying mark of Catholicism.

So, the implication is that a centuries-old doctrine can be done away with because 1) it’s based on the Bible, the teaching of the Early Church, and Classical moral philosophy, 2) we can accomplish the proscribed activity much more effectively now than we could in the past, 3) said activity was formerly associated with prostitutes, but now, apparently, behaving like a prostitute is no longer a big deal, and 4) the Anglicans and other Protestant bodies changed the teaching, and they’re doing just fine, aren’t they? . . .  At least the ones who are left. This last point is especially funny, given the massive decline of those ecclesial bodies after their acceptance of contraception, when the the main point of Steinfels’ essay is that banning contraception is driving decline in the Catholic Church.  In fact, along with points 1 through 3, this actually sounds more like an argument for maintaining the prohibition on contraception, doesn’t it?

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

    There is also the usual unspoken assumption among the “progressive” set that Catholics can somehow vote to repeal unwelcome moral teachings.  He trots out the the notorious “600 theologians” who, in the best traditions of theological discourse, published a full-page ad in the New York Times the day after Humanae Vitae was promulgated in order to proclaim their opposition (one wonders when they found the time to study its arguments, or whether, in fact, they read it at all).  We are asked to accept uncritically the thoroughly unbiblical, uncatholic, and ahistorical notion that, on matters of faith and morals, academics in university theology departments can overrule the Successors of the Apostles.

    We also hear from the voice of the supposedly faithful laity:

Approximately 80 percent of U.S. Catholics, including the thoroughly devout, disagree with that stance [i.e. the prohibition of contraception] (support for changing the ruling is nearly as high around the world). And the vast majority ignore the teaching altogether — one study suggests that 68 percent of sexually active American Catholic women have used birth control, sterilization or IUDs.    

Blessed Paul VI, author of Humanae Vitae

This last quote is a good example of just how slippery these statistics can be: what precisely does “thoroughly devout" mean? Who gets to decide who falls into this category? How can one be “thoroughly" devout if one rejects the teaching of the Church to which one is supposedly devoted? Notice also the careful parsing of “68 percent of sexually active American Catholic women have used birth control.” First of all, I’m surprised the percentage isn’t higher, because we live in a culture where contraception is the norm, where doctors routinely prescribe birth control pills to teenaged girls without a second thought.  That makes it easy to distort the real situation: by including all women who have used birth control, Steinfels is putting in the anti-Humanae Vitae camp the growing number of women who, on the contrary, have embraced the encyclical's teaching after trying the current conventional wisdom and finding it sadly wanting.  Quite a few of the public promoters of Humanae Vitae's teachings today, in fact, are lay people who have gone this route.  More importantly, it doesn't matter how unpopular it might be, Doctrine isn't made, or unmade, by popular opinion: it's Doctrine because the Magisterial Church to which Christ gave the power of binding and loosing (Matthew 18:18) has determined that it's the truth.

The Truth

    That, finally, is the fundamental problem with the Steinfelsian approach, not only in regard to Blessed Paul VI’s encyclical, but to everything.  There is no sense of coming to terms with The Truth: everything is put in terms of a battle of opinions, as if this were a wrangling over a political platform, where whoever can concoct the more persuasive argument "wins". For instance, Steinfels writes:

At last October's Synod on the Family . . . the discussion of contraception was perfunctory.  The bishops simply called on the church [sic -lower case in original] to do a better job of propagating "the message of the encyclical Humanae Vitae." In other words, the rejection of the birth- control ban is simply a messaging problem.

Well, no, it doesn't necessarily follow that the bishops consider it a "messaging problem", which is political jargon for not “selling” your position in a way that appeals to voters. I suspect the bishops were more concerned about the fact that the Church, in the person of its bishops and priests, virtually never mentions the topic at all (for more on that point, see here).  For Steinfels, however, and for "progressive" (another political term) Catholics in general, politics seems to be the prism through which they view everything, including their faith.  Instead of the traditional definition of theology, "Faith seeking Understanding", we have merely "policy preferences seeking justification". That’s not the sort of thing that inspires ordinary people to become saints.

   And yet, saints is what we are called to be.  St. John Paul the Great used to exhort us to embrace the “Adventure of Orthodoxy”, and “Set Out Into the Deep”; Mr. Steinfels is willing to settle for “give the people what they want”.  Which one sounds like he’s talking about the Church of Jesus Christ?