The Call to Self-Sacrifice

The author (r., hands on table) Ft. Dix, New Jersey, 1990

     A long time ago I was a mortarman in the United States Army Reserve, and later in the National Guard.  Everyone in the mortar section had his own role: the gunner, assistant gunner, ammo bearer, etc. I was a Fire Direction Center Computer: I didn’t actually have a computer, at least not until shortly before my discharge in 1991; I was the computer, using a plotting table, pins, pencil, and paper to generate the data that enabled the gun crews to hit their unseen target.  In order to fulfill the mission, everyone needed to know his own job and do it without hesitation when the time came.  This willingness to do what each man must, rather than what he might want to do, was particularly important in the case of the unexpected, such as in the case of a “hang fire”.

     A hang fire is a very dangerous situation in which a live round does not fire, presumably because it has become stuck in the cannon (the “tube”) before striking the firing pin at the bottom.  This happened to one of the 4.2 inch mortars in my New York Army National Guard unit during a live fire exercise in Ft. Dix, New Jersey in the spring of 1990.  We carefully followed the parts assigned to us by Army regulations: everyone moved back a safe distance for a minute or so in case the charge was just slow to go off; next the gunner went back and kicked the tube (yes, this was the proper procedure) to try to knock the round loose; after that, the assistant gunner lifted the back end of the tube while the gunner cupped his hands over its mouth to catch the live round should it slide forward; after all those measures failed, we called the base demolition team who blew the cannon to bits with plastic explosives (for years afterwards I kept a jagged, twisted piece of the steel cannon as a keepsake).  Everyone did his own job, and nobody got hurt.
     I mention this, oddly enough, in the context of the discussion of female altar servers that has been occurring not only on this blog, but around the Catholic blogosphere in recent days. The connection has to do with with a different gun crew, in a different part of New Jersey, in a different century; and this was not a training exercise, but the Battle of Monmouth, in 1778. It was an extremely hot day in June, and Molly Pitcher was bringing water to her husband and and his companions as they manned a cannon during the battle.  When her husband fell, Molly took his place, swabbing and loading the cannon for the remainder of the battle.  Molly is quite appropriately celebrated for her bravery and patriotism.  She also showed that a woman could work quite capably as part of an artillery crew.  But she remains an exception: the United States Army did not, and does not to this day allow women to serve in combat specialties (although, regrettably, that policy is slated to change by January 1st, 2016 - a discussion for another day).  It is not simply a question of whether a women could do it, but also whether, given all other considerations, they should.

Molly Pitcher

     My post a week ago about female altar servers generated a lot of commentary, as one would expect from an issue that has so many emotional connections for people (as of this morning there were two gentlemen who were still going at it in the comboxes).  Several readers mentioned what a wonderful experience serving Mass was for their daughters. I believe them.  I don't want to devalue anyone's service to the Church: your daughters have earned our thanks for their contributions (which are, may I say again, explicitly allowed). My argument, however, was that given our overall mission there are good prudential reasons to limit service at the altar to boys (and that was before news of a survey showing that 82% of new priests previously served as altar boys, here).  Let's return to my NYNG mortar platoon for a moment: I'm sure the gunner was quite as capable of lifting up the back end of the gun, and the assistant gunner equally capable of catching the live round sliding back out; if he had done so everyone would have been grateful (including the gunner, who would have been spared the risky task), and he would have had good reason to feel proud of himself.  But the mission was better served by assigning one task to the gunner, a different task to the assistant.
     Now, I know that the Church is not the Army, although there have been plenty of people over the centuries, like St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, who have seen fit to use military imagery to describe certain aspects of the Christian mission (and of course there have been actual military orders, such as the Knights Templar).  In any case, I'm looking at a more basic principle, and one that applies to much more than this relatively narrow issue: the need to subordinate our own desires, however understandable and even justified, to the greater good, and to accept the role we have been given.  The refusal to do so is at the root of so much that is wrong with our culture, but it is seen most starkly in the refusal to accept the fundamental reality of the sex with which we were created (do I need to mention the "58 genders", here, yet again?).  By keeping a clear and bright distinction between the complementary roles of male and female, we fulfill our Christian duty to be a Sign of Contradiction (as per Luke 2:34); the more we blur that distinction, the more we resemble the Wisdom of This World (1 Corinthians 3:19).
   

Evangelizing the Lukewarm

     On retreat the other day, I pulled a book off the shelf in the retreat house library, a book called The Secularist Heresy: the Erosion of the Gospel in the Twentieth Century.  It was a 1980 reissue of an original first published in the 1950’s, written by an Anglican gentleman named Harry Blamires (a student of C.S.Lewis, it seems). I opened it up at random and read the following thought-provoking passage:

     For the problem peculiar to our time is, not that large numbers of people are asking questions about life’s meaning and trembling uneasily on the brink of Christian self-committal, but that by far the largest section of our population is completely without interest in the religious issue at all.  They have not reached the stage of asking questions which the Christian apologist answers.  They have never truly recognized in themselves that deep discontent which only the peace of God can take away.  They have not arrived at that phase of uneasiness which is so often a fruitful time for the sowing of seeds.

Anyone who has tried to Evangelize in recent years knows that, if this was true sixty years ago, it is much more so today.  I’ve experienced it in teaching ninth grade religion in the Catholic high school in which I work, where I’ve seen first-hand what Blamires means when he says:

It may even be the case that, in our own age, the difference between the interested and the uninterested in the religious issue is more significant than the difference between believer and unbelievers.

Again, this sounds familiar.  I’ve found that I can carry on a discussion with the loud-mouth atheist student, and he will indeed listen to what I have to say.  Yes, it may be only because he wants to refute it, but he wants to refute it because at some level he wants to know the Truth; if he keeps searching, he may find it at some point.  The apathetic student is searching for nothing more than the end of the class period so he can go check his text messages; it’s hard to get any response out of him at all.  One begins to understand what Christ means when he says: "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:16).
     How to catch the interest of the apathetic, then, is the big challenge.  Blamires warns us against relying on the “relevance” approach to get their attention.  The main theme of his book is what he calls the corruption of the Church by the secular world [N.B., by “The Church” Blamires means institutional Christianity collectively, not a particular church, and certainly not the Catholic Church], and  he argues that an undue emphasis on the relevance of the Christian message (as opposed to the truth of the Christian message) is a large part of the problem,  because in doing so we subordinate the infinite to the finite.   He goes in to say:

If the Christian Church is sapped of its doctrinal virility and institutional sturdiness, Christianity itself may be perverted by some into an instrument of social and civilizational decomposition that has nothing to do with its proper call to self-sacrificial encounter with the world of materialism and unbelief.

     This dismal prophecy first published in the 1950's came to fruition with a swiftness and thoroughness in his own Anglican Church that shocked and saddened Blamires himself, as he admits in his introduction to the 1980 reprinting of his book.  Just a few years after its first publication we saw the same process at work in the Catholic Church: Pope John XXIII, with the best of intentions, “threw open the windows of the Church” to allow the Church to communicate the Gospel more effectively to the world; one does not have to be a Council-basher (which I am not) to notice that an awful lot of “the world” snuck back the other way through the open windows into the Church.  As John’s successor Paul VI famously said, “From some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”  And of course we have seen that what some of us more prosaically call "dumbing down" the content of faith not only corrupts the Church, but, ironically, makes it even less attractive to both non-believers and believers alike, if church attendance in the Age of Relevance is any indication.

        That leaves us, of course, with the question, what do we do?  I confess I don’t have the answers,  and if I did I’d need more than a blog post to provide them.  I do know, however, that at a minimum we need to lead as faithful a Christian life as possible (and I suspect I’m not the only one who often falls short in this regard).  Christ tells us not to keep our lamp under a bushel (Matthew 5:15), but if we’re not clear and joyful examples of living the Faith our example does more harm than good.  But we need to do more than just be an example, we must “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1Peter 3:15).  Mother Theresa of Calcutta is credited with saying: “God has not called me to be successful; he has called me to be faithful.”  While I’m at it, how about the quote often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “Preach always, and when necessary use words”.  The point is, if we live a life of fidelity to the Gospel, people will notice, and not only because we’re doing something different, but because they’ll see the joy in our lives.  Then they’ll be willing to listen, at which point we need to be ready to speak.

     I had such an opportunity recently when a co-worker contemplating her 4^th marriage asked how I managed to stay married to the same woman for 28 years: here was someone who was ready to listen. Needless to say, Faith in the Lord was front and center in my reply.

     There are some books that tell you things you never knew; others crystalize and bring into focus things you already knew, but hadn't yet worked out in your mind.  Blamires' book falls into that second category, and is doubly valuable because we can see the working out of his thesis over the past sixty years.  I can thank the Lord for a fruitful retreat.

Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival (18 May 2014)

From the Cumberland County Fair Fairbook

Today is the 5^th Sunday of Easter.  Welcome once again to “Sunday Snippets – A Catholic Carnival”,  in which a few of us Catholic bloggers hang out at This That and the OtherThing with our hostess RAnn and swap compilations of our posts from the previous week (find the whole gang [here]).  And when we call it “carnival”, don’t think of one of those wild carnivals with all sorts of unfortunate goings-on; picture instead an old-fashioned country fair, with a wide variety of wholesome offerings.  After all, we are all loyal to the Magisterium of the Church, high-minded, clean living (at least I am !) and, well, we don’t go in for that sort of nonsense.  So don’t get any ideas.

     Speaking of variety, we had a varied week at Principium et Finis:

Monday - Got riled up by something I saw on the ever-interesting Fr. Z’s blog.  What can I tell you?  I don’t go for altar girls distributing Holy Communion . “What will they think of next?” [here]

Tuesday – An article in American Heritage magazine fifteen years ago got me to thinking about the alleged inevitability of the so-called “youth counter-culture” and our current conventional wisdom concerning adolescence.  I’m still thinking.  “Teenage Werewolves and Other Mythical Beasts” [here]

Wednesday – At some point during the week between the Ascension of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentacost the nascent Church got together to select Mathias as successor to Judas.  When I read the account in the Acts of the Apostles, I had the feeling I’d seen it all somewhere else . . . “The Church’s First Decision: St. Mathias”  [here]

and – A lovely piece from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, it’s begins in lamentation, but rises to a soaring song of love and hope. “ Dove Sono – Carol Vaness (Le Nozze di Figaro)” [here]

Thursday – There are those who argue that it should be permissible to abort an “abnormal fetus”  Here’s why they’re wrong: “Abortion Myth #5 (Throwback Thursday Edition)”  [here]

That’s all for this week- y’all come back now, hear?

Abortion Myth #5 (Throwback Thursday Edition)

MYTH: “Most abortions are wrong, but they should be allowed in cases of abnormal fetus.”

TRUTH:

-         -People with disabilities are human beings, enjoying full human dignity and the same right to exist as the rest of us.

-        

  -Families who are expecting a handicapped child need support, not an abortion!  Studies indicate that women who abort for genetic reasons have a high incidence of suffering grief, guilt, shame, and depression.  The actual incidence of of depression following “selective abortion” for genetic reasons may be as high as 92 percent for mothers and 82 percent for fathers among those studied.  (The Post-Abortion Review, July-Sept. 2003, Elliot Institute, link)

-          -There are lists of families willing to adopt babies with any serious medical condition including spina bifida and down syndrome.

-          -The belief that society is better off without the “genetically inferior” was the credo of  Nazi Germany, where thousands of people were exterminated solely because they had disabilities.

-          -There are numerous support groups for families with special needs children, among them CHASK (Christian Homes and Special Kids) and NATHHAN (National Challenged Homeschoolers Associated Network); NATHHAN also provides a list of further resources (link)

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 

Dove sono - Carol Vaness (Le nozze di Figaro)

Countess Almaviva is married to a . . . well . . . a jerk.  What starts out as a lament for the loss of her husband's love swells into a soaring song of hope, that her fidelity and love might change "that ungrateful heart." From Mozart's magnificent Marriage of Figaro.

Teenage Werewolves and Other Mythical Beasts: A Catholic View

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.  Fifteen 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 (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 reign to the sort 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-eight 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 properly direct their formation (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.

What will they think of next?

          There’s always something interesting going on at Fr. Z’s blog.  Today an alarmed  reader wrote in [link] about a mass in an unnamed diocese in which teenaged, female altar servers doubled as Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion.  The reader wanted to know whether it was appropriate to write to the new bishop of the diocese about the situation.  The good father responded that, “Leaving aside the issue of females serving at all,” it was probably permissible (although one receives the impression that he thinks it’s a bad idea indeed), and that the bishop of the diocese in question has more than enough weightier matters to grapple with at present.  He recommended against complaining to the bishop, and instead relying on prayer.

G.K. Chesterton: not an advocate of being a child of one's age

      I have no argument with Fr. Z’s answer; he’s certainly more qualified to comment on dealing with the hierarchical Church than I am.  I will have a go, however, at the matter he is” leaving aside”, the issue of female altar servers.  Let me state at the outset that I recognize that the Church has authorized the use of girls as servers, and I’m not telling anyone that they’re “bad” Catholics or any such thing if they favor altar girls or have daughters who serve in this capacity.  I’m merely offering a few reasons why I think it’s better to have only males serving mass. 

      I touch on this topic briefly in an earlier post (“Where Have All The Fathers Gone”, here), and my main concern has to do with confusing the symbolism of the priest, who is present at Mass In Persona Christi, in the person of Christ. While we know that God is pure spirit and  is neither male nor female, he has chosen to relate to us in the role of “Father”, and in the second person of the Trinity in the form of the man Jesus.  I’m not getting into the rich theological meaning of all this: for that, see St. John Paul the Great's Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (here), and Inter Insigniores (here) from the CDF under Pope Paul VI. Taking that symbolic meaning as a given, however, this is what I said in that earlier post: 

Among the various other things that a priest does, he is an iconic representation of the fatherhood of God. When he is surrounded by women in the sanctuary, that image is diluted. As a more practical matter, the more something is dominated by girls, the less attractive it is to boys. That may be a regrettable reality, but a reality it remains. Over the last dozen years we have seen the male/female ratio among altar servers tip ever further in the female direction. Altar serving has historically been a first step for many men in discerning a vocation to the priesthood, so as fewer boys become servers we can expect fewer “father figures” to preside at Mass and consecrate the body and blood of Christ; also, more generally, the more the Mass is seen as a “girl thing”, the more religious belief and practice themselves will seem to be “unmanly” (lex orandi, lex credendi – “the law of praying is the law of believing”), and the fewer men will bother to show up at all. 

          The case from Fr. Z's reader raises even more concerns. For one thing, the sheer incongruity of altar servers distributing communion, which is likely to make people uncomfortable and draw attention away from the sacrament everyone is there to celebrate.  There are also more serious concerns.  For instance, here the girls are not merely in the sanctuary, they are performing a function that has historically belonged to the priest.  The Church has taught infallibly that women cannot be ordained (see the Magisterial documents cited above, and Cardinal Ratzinger's Responsum [here]; also, this excellent discussion here about the status of the Church's teaching).  If the mere presence of altar girls encourages the impossible  expectation that women might be ordained, how much more so when these girls in clerical clothing, who accompany the priest throughout the liturgy, are distributing Holy Communion?  In such a role they would look much more “priestly” than women in ordinary dress who come out of the congregation only to distribute Communion and then return.   Beyond its effect within the Church, what iconic  image is presented to us before we are sent out into the world? Instead of the complementary sex roles as intended by God ("Man and Woman he created them", Gen. 1:27), we see something closer to the spirit of an age that imagines 58 different self-determined "genders" (see here). That way lies madness.          

     This is the month of May, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mother, in which we are reminded that the Catholic Church honors a woman as the greatest saint of all; we esteem other women (Theresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Therese of Lisieux) as highly as any male saints: we don't need to take on the false ideas about gender that are currently fashionable out in the world.  G. K. Chesterton famously said that being Catholic "is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age."  Of course. As Christ says, "The Truth will set you free" (John 8:32), and where should we look for the Truth: in the conventional wisdom, or in  Christ's Church?

    l 

Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival (11May 2014)

     Welcome yet again to "Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival", a weekly gathering of Catholic bloggers who trade baseball cards . . . I mean, share their posts for the past week.  The main gathering takes place at This That and the Other Thing under the watchful yet benevolent eye of RAnn [here].
     It's been deja vu all over again here at Principium et Finis.  I seem to keep returning to the themes of freedom, responsibility and truth, and without planning it that way most of the posts below deal with those ideas, with the (possible) exception of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown".

 
Monday - A follow-up to last week’s “Traditional Marriage: The Liberty Argument” [link]  in this one I discuss the fact that in order to exercise freedom properly, we need proper formation, and what is the time-proven (not to mention God-given) best way to form children into successful adults? “Marriage and Liberty, part two” [link]

Tuesday - All right, so maybe I hyperventilate just a little bit in this one; still, things are getting kind of ugly out there, at least for those who question the party line . . . “Ice Cream Fascism” [link]

     And - The word “Yeehaw” says it all:  “Flatt & Scruggs: Foggy Mountain Breakdown” [link]

Wednesday - After all, only actual persons deserve the protection of the law, right? “Abortion Myth #12” [link]

Thursday - Where did those big churches come from?  And why are they so empty? “The New, New Evangelization?” [link]

Friday - You may be hungry, but no bowl of soup is worth that much: "Being a Christian in the Age of Esau" [link]

Finally, we give the last word this week to Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-Reply to the Governor, Nov. 11, 1755

Being a Christian in the Age of Esau

     One Old Testament passage that has stayed with me for a long time is the story of Jacob and Esau from Genesis (chapter 27). As a little boy I was fascinated by Jacob’s trick (well, his mother Rebecca’s trick) of using goat skins on his hands to fool his blind old father Isaac into believing him to be his hairy brother Esau, and so obtain the father’s blessing. Later, when I was a father myself, I was impressed by the obvious importance of the paternal blessing (which I have generously bestowed on all my children). But I was always troubled by the fact of Jacob’s dishonesty in obtaining it.  The Bible wasn’t condoning lying, was it?

     Of course, it’s  not; but how to explain the apparent contradiction?  There are many cases in Scripture in which apparently shocking details serve to grab our attention and direct it to a main point.  We see Jesus do this in the Gospels.  In Luke, for instance, when he says: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations.”  (Luke 16: 9) We know that Jesus can’t really mean that we should use “unrighteous mammon [wealth]” to make friends, or that such friends could possibly offer us “eternal habitations”.  We need to read on to see where he’s leading us:

"He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and he who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own? No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." (Luke 16: 10-13)

We are drawn into thinking about his point more deeply (which is that only God, not mammon, can save us), because we want to resolve the apparent contradiction.  We see something similar in the parable of the wedding guest who is “bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness” simply because he’s wearing the wrong clothes (Matthew 22:13) and in many other places as well.

     In the story of Jacob and Esau we need to look two chapters earlier to get the context for Esau’s loss of his father’s blessing:

Once when Jacob was boiling pottage, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. And Esau said to Jacob, "Let me eat some of that red pottage, for I am famished!" (Therefore his name was called Edom.) Jacob said, "First sell me your birthright." Esau said, "I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?" Jacob said, "Swear to me first." So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright. (Gen. 25:29-34)

Having read the earlier passage, we know that Esau doesn’t deserve his father’s blessing, because he “despised his birthright”; he willingly gave it away even before Jacob and Rebecca’s trickery.  He loses both birthright and blessing because he has his priorities reversed: he has given immediate material things priority over those things that are truly important. 

     We see this same basic message many times in Scripture, as when St. Paul says:

For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our commonwealth is in heaven . . .  (Phil 3:18-20a)

Esau and the people St. Paul speaks of are extreme examples; it is possible to fall into lesser degrees of the same problem, as we see in the case of the sisters Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42).  Martha is too distracted by the various details of hospitality to pay much attention to the Divine Guest in her house, while Mary, who sits at the feet of Jesus, “has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken away from her”.

     We know that in spite of what happens in this passage, Martha loved Jesus very much, and her example should be a warning to us: we don’t have to be an Esau to get our priorities reversed.  We all have causes that are important to us, but we can’t let them become our guiding principles: our actions in these causes should be an expression of our faith (see James 2:18), not the focus of it.  This failing is endemic to the “social justice” wing of Catholicism (the CDF document Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation”, here, explains beautifully; thank you yet again, Cardinal Ratzinger), but the rest of us are susceptible, too: it’s a rare Catholic indeed who has not been a Martha, or worse, on more than one occasion (mea culpa).  We need to be on guard all the more because we live in an Age of Esau that exalts Action and the Here and Now, and denies the Transcendent.

     So, what to do?  How to avoid falling into the trap?  Someone with much more experience in such things once directed me to this passage from the Gospel of Matthew:

And one of them  a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him.  “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment of 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 the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.  (Matthew 22:37-39)

We must always remember that the “great and first commandment” is to love God; that takes priority.  If we put loving our neighbor before, or instead of, loving God, then our actions will be disordered and won’t bear the intended fruit.  Therefore, we need to pray first, make sure our course of action is guided by the teaching of Christ through his Church and the Scriptures, and remember that "here we have no lasting city, but we seek the City which is to come" (Hebrews 13:14) if we wish to avoid being a Martha or, even worse, an Esau.

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The New, New Evangelization? (Throwback Thursday)

   

Basilica of St.s Peter and Paul, Lewiston, Maine

 Many a visitor to the old textile city of Lewiston, Maine, has been taken by surprise when, driving through a run-down neighborhood of shabby old New England triple-decker tenements, he suddenly finds an enormous and beautiful church looming over him.  This is the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, formally consecrated in 1938.  And its location is not at all as incongruous as it might at first seem: it was the most natural thing in the world for the inhabitants of those cheap apartment houses, mostly French Canadian immigrants who had come to Lewiston to work in the dark red-brick mills that lined the Androscoggin River, to put all their extra money and effort into building the most magnificent church possible.  And yes, it was those poor laborers, not wealthy benefactors or government grants that built the Basilica.   “Religion is the opiate of the people” is not the least of the foolish things Karl Marx said.  Opiates deaden the soul and weigh down the limbs: nobody pushes themselves to the limit to build monuments to those.  No, the Faith these humble workers brought with them from Quebec didn’t numb them into acquiescence, it gave them real assurance that they had something worth working toward: admittance to the presence of the living God.

     And so naturally it was a Church that they chose as the focus of their devotion.  Churches are much more than just buildings.  They are enormous sacramentals, consecrated objects that can help connect us to the Grace of a God who is pure Spirit; they are iconic representations that teach us at an unconscious level about an ordered Universe with God at the apex, or at least they used to be (see here and here).  They are also places closely connected to some of the deepest experiences of our lives, such as baptisms, weddings and funerals, as well as being places where communities gather.  Sometimes these connections are formed over the course of generations.  That’s why the closing of a church is so much more traumatic than the closing of a movie theater, for instance, or a department store.  The local church is, for most people, their concrete connection to transcendent realities.

     The Basilica of Peter and Paul, fortunately, is still going strong, but its community is no longer mostly drawn from the immediate neighborhood.  People have come from miles away to attend Mass in the Extraordinary Form every Sunday since then-Bishop Richard Malone designated it as one of two churches (the other being the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland) used by a newly-formed Latin Mass Chaplaincy in 2008.  There is also a Mass in the Ordinary Form celebrated with a reverence that draws worshippers from a wide area, and a French language Mass that is very well attended.   Many other churches, to the great sorrow of parishioners who have been orphaned, have not been so lucky.

     It’s in that connection that this post on Fr. Z’s blog (here), about parishioners in Buffalo who have enlisted the Vatican’s help in their attempts to keep their parish open, first caught my eye. I was sorry to see Buffalo Bishop Richard Malone, the same man who as Bishop of Portland helped keep the Basilica thriving, is cast as the Bad Guy of the piece.  For what it’s worth, many of us here thought he did a very good job as our bishop: one of his first decisions was to shut down a diocesan newspaper that had become a mouthpiece for dissenters, and he bravely and forthrightly defended human life and traditional marriage, often in the face of fierce public attacks [note: Bishop Malone has continued his strong defense of the faith in Buffalo, as here].  Still, there were many churches shuttered forever, which seems to be one of the first lessons they teach in Bishop School these days.  After reading the post linked above I can’t help but wonder: would it have made a difference if some of the parishes here had thought to appeal to the Pope?

     There are bigger questions, of course.  Fr. Z asks:

What sort of faith in an effort of “New Evangelization” do we evince if, while chattering about it, we are closing the churches we need to fill in the very places where the “New Evangelization” needs to be pursued?

That’s a good point.  Just as all those triple-deckers around the Basilica in Lewiston are still filled with

Holy Mass in the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul

people, but no longer (mostly) people attending the church that dominates their neighborhood, the same is true of the churches being decommissioned.  The areas around them, with perhaps some few exceptions, are just as heavily populated as they were when the churches were packed every Sunday.  And while bishops and their staffs around the country should certainly learn to think more like Evangelists and less like Administrators, we lay Catholics (I include myself) need to ask ourselves what more we can do invite all those people on the outside into the Church. If earlier generations with fewer resources but great faith could build the basilicas, could we not at least put enough people in the pews?