Schola Regina Pacis - Stabat Mater (J. Rheinberger)

I had never heard of of the composer Joseph Rheinberger (1839-1901) unlike very recently.  Even though he is not known to most of us, to those more knowledgeable than me he is well-known and highly-regarded as both a composer and an organist (see biography here).  In his time he composed twelve Masses, and also this lovely setting for the Stabat Mater:

Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival & Hands Around the Capitol 2015

     Ah yes, another Sunday, another Sunday Snippets (A Catholic Carnival, don’t you know).  This is the first Sunday in a while that hasn’t been a solemnity of some sort, but that doesn’t mean that it’s just another Sunday: every Sunday is a commemoration of the Resurrection, a Little Easter . . . but I was talking about Sunday Snippets, wasn’t I?  It’s a weekly gathering of Catholic bloggers who gather here, at This That and the Other Thing (home of the esteemed RAnn) to share the fruits of their bloggery from the previous seven days.

Red roses representing years since Roe vs. Wade

     Before I get to my snippets from Principium et Finis, however, I’d like to share a little about where I was Saturday.  This coming Thursday will be the 42^nd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious Roe vs. Wade decision, which wiped out the abortion laws of all fifty states and created de facto abortion on demand in the United States; there have been an estimated 57 million legal abortions since that time.  Here in Maine we observe this sad anniversary with an event called  Hands Around the Capitol on the Saturday prior,  in which we hold a rally at the St. Michael’s (formerly St. Mary’s) gym, followed by a march to the State Capitol. Here, as participants hold hands in a ring around the entire building, one person rings a replica of the Liberty Bell on the Statehouse grounds once for every year since the Roe decision, while another places one rose beneath the bell at each tolling; this year 42 red roses lay in the snow at the end.

     A highlight of the rally this year was the return of pro-life governor Paul LePage.  When he spoke last year, he was a conservative, pro-family, anti-abortion governor seeking an unlikely re-election in a state dominated by the political left.  Seemingly oblivious to his tenuous political situation, he gave an impassioned speech denouncing abortion and praising the traditional family (see my account here).  He came back this year after winning more votes than any governor in Maine history, but he didn’t sound any different: abortion, LePage said, was robbing us of our future in a state where “more people are dying than are being born”, and the key to solving social problems like poverty is “getting the family unit back together”, to which the first step is “a man and a woman to take care of the children.”  Obvious, maybe blindingly obvious, but how many politicians have the political courage to come out and say it?

Governor LePage greeting rally participants

     Something new this year is that we have, in the words of Maine Right to Life Executive Director Theresa McCann Tumidajski, “the first United States Representative from Maine to call himself ‘proudly pro-life.’”  That would be Bruce Poliquin, newly elected congressman from the 2^nd District.  Poliquin also gave a heartfelt defense of human life, even though he serves in a state where left-wing and pro-abortion groups have tremendous clout, and despite the fact that the Democratic leader in the U.S. House, California’s Nancy Pelosi, was hard at work trying to bring about his defeat in the next election even before he was sworn in (see here).

     Now, some will say that politicians will talk, but that it really doesn’t make any difference in the end.  When it comes to the right to life, pro-life laws and government officials do, in fact, make a difference, as I will show later this week in "Abortion Myth #17".  Also, the fact that these two men have been elected at all (in addition to a growing number of like-minded state senators and representatives) shows that there is hope for life.

   More photos from Hands Around the Capitol are posted below; meanwhile, here are snippets from the past week at Principium et Finis:

Monday – In the opera Don Giovanni, Mozart’s Don Juan enjoys some music from a couple of the composer’s contemporaries before he is dragged off to take up a well-deserved residence in Hell; one of those other composers, Giuseppe Sarti, had just arrived in Russia where he composed some beautiful music that looked to a much better place: “Giuseppe Sarti – ‘Now The Powers of Heaven’ & Russian Icon Painters” [here]

Tuesday – Planned Parenthood tells us that they mostly provide vital “health care” to women, such as mammograms, and abortion is just an afterthought - and if you believe that one . . . “Abortion Myth #16” [here] 

Wednesday –  Interesting news on the marriage front “Marriages Are Made in Heaven” [here] 

Thursday – This Ratzinger fellow sounds familiar . . . has he done anything since?  “Fr. Ratzinger’s Prophecy, 45 Years Later” [here] 

Friday – A picture’s worth a thousand words – and worth a human life: “The Truth Will Out” [here] 

Saturday - Hands Around the Capitol:

Brothers Jamie & Jared McCabe present a "Chalk Talk" at the rally

Governor LePage and young pro-life constituents in St. Michael's gym.

Pro-life Mainers gather at state capitol building

"Hands Around the Capitol"

Knights of Columbus with Blaine House (governor's mansion) in the background

The Truth Will Out

“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, the 42^nd anniversary of which will be observed next Thursday (January 22^nd).  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: 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 over this next week, 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 those of our fellow people to the Truth of humanity of the unborn, and to the sanctity of all human life.

Fr. Ratzinger's Prophecy, 45 Years Later

Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI 

     I have often heard mention of a remark by Joseph Ratzinger, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, anticipating a “smaller, purer church”.  I was reminded of the this remark last week as I was wrapping up my post on St. Julia of Corsica [here], and reflecting on the fact that we seem to need to suffer many smaller defeats on the way to enjoying Christ’s final victory over sin and death.  I was curious to find out exactly what the future Pope said, and when and where he said it.

     I found that the original statement came as the last of a series of radio addresses that Fr. Ratzinger, at that time a professor of Theology, delivered over the radio in Germany in 1969 [full text here].  His prophetic vision of a “smaller, purer Church” (someone else’s paraphrase, I think, because I don’t see that wording in the original text) was broadcast on Christmas day.  It makes interesting reading 45 years later.

     Fr. Ratzinger starts out saying that “The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and live from the pure fullness of their faith.”  Ah yes, personal holiness: that sounds good. “It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods . . .”  Hmmm, sounds like time for some self-examination.  “nor will it issue”, he says

from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves. To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality.

Got it.  The future of the Church lies with those who are ready to make a deep commitment to self-sacrifice, who aren’t looking for easy answers.  But how does this lead to a smaller Church?  He goes on to explain:

We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist; who does not stand on the sidelines, watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of men, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.

In other words, the corporal works of mercy may be an essential part of Christianity, but they can’t be the sole or primary focus of the Church (“I’ll show you the faith that underlies my works” James 2:18), since there are secular agencies and individuals who can perform them just as well.  Who needs the Church, if you can get the same somewhere else?  The thing that only the Church can provide is the encounter with Jesus Christ through his sacraments.  Everything else, Fr. Ratzinger says, will be burned away, but much like the man St. Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 3:15, who “will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire”, what remains will be pure metal:

From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge - a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so will she lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members . . . But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.

     This fire-tempered, more faithful Church, Fr.  Ratzinger says, will stand as a refuge for those driven to “horror” by the spiritual poverty of a now Godless world.

     The future Pope wraps up with a peroration that is both grim and hopeful:

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

It isn't easy to follow Christ's Standard

      Fr. Ratzinger’s “prophecy” can be misunderstood.  Some commentators seem to believe that he is advocating a much smaller Church.  Not so.  He is looking at the “Signs of the Times” and extrapolating from that, tempering his predictions with the knowledge that Christ has promised that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against his Church (see Matthew 16:18).  The past four and a half decades have certainly developed just as Fr. Ratzinger suggested they would.  Church attendance has fallen as the weakly committed no longer feel the social pressure to attend Mass, the number of priests has plummeted, and most religious orders have shrunk dramatically.  At the same time, religious orders grounded in a traditional understanding of the doctrines and disciplines of the Church are growing, and we have seen an explosion of lay evangelization unlike anything the world has seen in a long time.

    It seems to me that Fr. Ratzinger’s vision of the near future of the Church, much like Paul VI’s admonitions in Humanae Vitae [here], has been more than confirmed by events since, and should serve as a serious warning of what is to come.  Christ’s final victory is guaranteed, but individuals and whole nations can be lost before its consummation.  We all still need to choose whether we’ll follow Christ’s Battle Standard, or Satan’s.

(An earlier version of this post was published on May 26th, 2014)

Marriages Are Made in Heaven

 

   Marriage is our oldest human institution, and the indispensible foundation for any successful society, and hence is a perennial topic of discussion.  Just this past week I’ve run across two different articles, one from a positive perspective, the other from the negative; together, they say a lot about marriage today, which is to say that they say a lot about the challenges facing our world.

     First, the good news.  This is a feature article from Foxnews.com called “Seven ways to stay married” [full article here].  The author starts out by explaining that he wanted to know, “What can people do to have a happy, fulfilling, lifelong marriage?”  Rather than ask the so-called experts (“psychologist or self-help gurus”), he went to the real experts: “older Americans who have been married 50, 60, 70 years and more.”  What he found turns out to be not that surprising, at least the first six points (not all are really presented as “ways”): “ 1. Marriage is hard . . .  2. But marriage for a lifetime is worth it . . . 3. Marry someone a lot like you . . . 4. Think small . . . 5. Talk, talk, talk  . . . 6. Stop trying to change your partner.”  Number 7 looks like a new one at first: “Are we hungry?”  “The elders”, our author tells us, recommend stopping to eat when a big fight is in the offing.  As it turns out, the food is just a way of buying some “cooling off” time, which is another tried and true technique.

     The good news about the good news is that all of these things are commonsensical and accessible to anyone, once you know them.  My lovely bride and I have benefited from them (sometimes, it is true, after learning them the hard way) in our own experience over twenty-eight years of marriage.  The bad news is that such obvious things, most of which would have been conventional wisdom passed on from mothers and fathers to their children a couple generations ago, are now presented as revelations.  But it makes sense: how many newlyweds today can turn for advice to parents who are still married to each other?  The number is shrinking all the time.

     Which brings us to Exhibit B: a lifesitenews.com article called “Young men giving up on marriage: ‘Women aren’t women anymore’” [hat tip to Fr. Z; full article here].  The article draws on a survey from the Pew Research Center detailing attitudes about marriage among various people from various age groups.  One section focuses on data showing that young men are growing less interested in marriage: only 29% say that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things, a six-point drop since 1997, while the number of women saying the same thing rose nine points to 37% over the same period (perhaps a reflection of the fact that women and their children suffer the brunt of family erosion more directly).  There are plenty of other frightening statistics in the article; I found this one particularly alarming:: “Just 20 percent of those aged 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59 percent in 1960.”  In other words, four out of five people in their prime child-bearing years are unmarried, which means they are either denying their children the enormous advantages of married parents who are committed to each other and to the family, or they are having no children at all.  Those who do get married after thirty will have much less time for building a family (fertility starts declining sharply after 35, here), but a surprisingly large number of them will never marry at all, according to Pew’s own updated summary [full summary here] of their survey:

                In 1960, some 12% of adults ages 25-34 had never been married.  After 10 years, when that group was between the ages of 35 and 44, 7% of them still hadn’t wed.  By 1980, when they were in their mid-40s to -50s, only 5% had still never married.  The next cohort starting in 1970 followed a similar trajectory.  However, each new cohort of young adults since then has had a higher share of never-married members than the cohort that came before it.  If current trends continue, 25% of young adults in the most recent cohort (ages 25-24 in 2010) will have never married by 2030.  That would be the highest share in modern history. (Pew Research: “Record Share of Americans Have Never Married” – bold mine)

We are headed into uncharted waters.  In most western countries we are not producing enough babies to replace our current population as it dies, and an increasing proportion of those children who are being born are being raised outside of the framework of the traditional family, with all the well-documented implications for their own well-being and the health and stability of society as a whole.  And, it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better soon: the Pew report also tells us that 67% of those aged 18-29, the prime family-building years, are off the opinion that “society is just as well off if people have other priorities than marriage and children”. This is a recipe for societal suicide.

     And yet . . . I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet.  Let’s return to the first article for a moment, on the Seven Ways to Stay Married.  We are told that marriage is hard, “both because of the range of stresses and problems that confront all couples, but also because of the fundamental difficulty of merging two separate and different people into one single life.”  Nonetheless, for those who persevere, “It is a sublime experience, a connection to another person unlike any other relationship.  The elders describe it as the experience of a lifetime.” 

     Now, I’m not privy to the author’s private notes, but I can’t help but suspect he’s left something out.  Where do people find the strength and perseverance to stay at it long enough to merge themselves ”into one single life” with another person?  In effect, to sacrifice themselves? I find it very surprising that none of these long-married couples seem to make any mention of Faith, or relying on the help of God.  Most of the couples I know (not all, it is true, but most) would put those things at the very top of their list.  Surely many of those who spoke to this author did the same. In any case, we know, as Psalm 127 puts it, “If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor”, and also “Truly sons are a gift from the Lord, a blessing, the fruit of the womb”.  Not only that, Jesus Christ provides us with both a model of self-sacrifice, and help in bearing our own burdens. 

     Just as God is the only sure foundation for individual marriages, so he is for society as a whole.   Scripture tells us to be ready with reasons for the Hope that is within us (1 Peter 3:15), which means we need to be prepared to speak out on the importance of marriage and family; we also know that those who are not amenable to reason can often be swayed by the power of example, and so we need to show by our actions we honor and support marriage and family life, and that we find it a joyous, "sublime" experience.  Above all, we need to pray for marriage, families, and for our society, and ask the Lord to yet again “turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6) and heal our wounded culture.

Abortion Myth #16

MYTH: “Abortions make up only 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services; cutting government funding to Planned Parenthood would mean depriving women of services that include life-saving mammograms.”

TRUTH:-   Planned Parenthood itself provides no mammograms whatsoever; it simply refers women to other providers who do, and who would still perform them without the referral. [link]

-          Planned Parenthood’s claim that Abortions comprise only 3% of its “services” is also a deliberate falsehood.  Former PP clinic director Abby Johnson says:

Planned Parenthood’s claim that abortions make up just 3 percent of its services is also a gimmick. That number is actually closer to 12 percent, but strategically skewed by unbundling family planning services so that each patient shows anywhere from five to 20 “visits” per appointment (i.e., 12 packs of birth control equals 12 visits) and doing the opposite with abortion visits, bundling them together so that each appointment equals one visit. The resulting difference between family planning and abortion “visits” is striking. [link] 

-          In the case of women who arrive at Planned Parenthood already pregnant, abortion comprises 98% of services [link]: Planned Parenthood’s own annual report for a recent year (2009) shows that in that year it performed 332,278 abortions, providing prenatal services to only 7,021 women, and referring a mere 977 women for adoption services.

-          40% of Planned Parenthood’s income comes from abortion (and another third from government sources, i.e., you the taxpayer) [link]

-          No amount of other services can outweigh the fact that Planned Parenthood is the world’s largest killer of unborn human beings, performing over 300,000 abortions annually in the United States alone (nearly one third of the national total). [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 

Giuseppe Sarti - 'Now the Powers of Heaven' & Russian Icon Painters

"The Holy Trinity" by Russian painter Andrei Rublev

   Those of us in the West who have heard of the Italian composer Giuseppe Sarti  most likely know about him through the tribute paid by another composer: in Mozart's  Don Giovanni Don Juan listens to an air from  Sarti's opera Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode as the old rake enjoys his final dinner before being dragged off to Hell.
     Many of our Orthodox brethren know Sarti more directly: in 1785, the year before his music was show-cased in Mozart's opera, Sarti took up residence in Russia at the invitation of the Empress Catherine the Great.  There he composed not only operas, but also some magnificent sacred music for use in the Russian Orthodox Church.  The video below combines one of his best known sacred works, the breath-taking "Now The Powers of Heaven", with beautiful images of Russian icons:

Sunday Snippets - A Catholic Carnival (Baptism of Our Lord 2015)

The Baptism of Christ by Tintoretto

     Happy Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord!  Welcome to Sunday Snippets – A Catholic Carnival: this is a weekly convocation of a varied mix of  Catholic bloggers who share their posts from the past week.  The main gathering (the “mother ship”, as it were) is here, at This That and the Other Thing, under the auspices of our fearless leader RAnn.

     Today is the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and so on the last day of the Christmas Season we celebrate the first event in the Public ministry of Jesus.  All four Gospels tell of John’s baptism of Jesus, but all present a slightly different view.  Mark’s description (which we hear in today’s Mass) is the sparest description; in Luke, the Baptist describes Jesus as the judge at the end of time, separating the wheat from the chaff; John’s Gospel recounts John the Baptist hailing Jesus as the Lamb of God.  They all tell of John’s recognition of himself as a merely the forerunner to Jesus, to whom he is inferior, but only Matthew records his reluctance to baptize the Lord:

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him.  John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”  But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. (Matthew 3:13-15)

John knows that Jesus, being sinless, requires no Baptism, but Jesus seeks it out in order to show his commitment to being one of us.  In this account we see Jesus acting out what St. Paul tells the Phillipians:

. . . though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. (Phillipians 2:6-7)

In all the Gospels, we see the Holy Spirit descend upon Jesus and the voice of the Father proclaim him to be the beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased.  And so Christ’s Public Ministry begins with an image of all three Persons of the Trinity working together, and an image of Grace in action.  This scene sums up the meaning of the Nativity we have just celebrated, and tells us something about the agenda for the ministry that is begun.  And in Matthew’s Gospel, we are reminded that it is all Grace, a word for which the Latin root gratia means not just favor, but favor freely bestowed (hence related English words “gratuity” and “gratis”); Grace is completely, absolutely, free. God needs nothing, nothing is necessary for Him: He does it all for us, He gives us a share in His own life, as a completely unnecessary gift.  Because He loves us.

     Well, then, what about the past week at Principium et Finis?  Here’s what we have been up to:

Monday – We close out the Twelve Days of Christmas with one of the great Christmas songs, song by a truly great singer: “12^th Day of Christmas – Adeste Fideles (Luciano Pavarotti)" [here] 

Tuesday – on the Feast of Epiphany we see the Magi and little reminder (in Psalm 117) that the New Testament, as St. Augustine tells us, is concealed in the Old: “Praise the LORD, all nations!”   [here]

Wednesday – Are we pro-lifers really just religious fanatics imposing our views on everyone else? “Abortion Myth #15” [here]

Thursday – A few thoughts on the problem of spiritual apathy, sparked by an unexpected book:  “Evangelizing the Lukewarm?” [here]

Saturday – In which I make a plea for thinking good and hard before throwing out the experience of the last fifteen or so centuries:  [here]

. . . and A SONG for today's Feast:

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 especially 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 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 many 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. 

Evangelizing the Lukewarm?

(An earlier version of this Throwback was first published in May of last year)

 We can never tell when, or from where, we will find a valuable new discovery. I was at a staff retreat the other day, for instance, and I made an unexpected find.  I pulled a book (more or less at random) 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 somewhere in the middle and read the following thought-provoking passage:

Harry Blamires

     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 on 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, because she saw in the longevity of my marriage something she really wanted.  Which gave me the opportunity to connect that desired result with the life of faith: "Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain" (Psalm 127:1).

     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, for me, 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.