Faith & Culture: Recent Episodes
Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce, Editor of Faith & Culture magazine, has weekly interviews with well-known Catholic authors, speakers, and academics on a variety of topics related to Catholicism.
“’All these things shall be added unto you’ ‘He knoweth that ye have need of these things.’ St. Teresa of Avila says we should not trouble our Lord with such petty trifles. We should ask great things of Him.
So I pray for Russia, for our own country, for our fellow men, our fellow workers, for the sick, the starving, the dying, the dead.”
These words from Dorothy Day’s On Pilgrimage (a collection of her writings from the Catholic Worker) follow a list of her everyday struggles and needs. She reminds herself, and by extension her readers, never to tire of bringing to the Lord the most daring prayers, because he is the Lord of all things. Dorothy Day’s words seem more timely now than ever, as we see so much division in our world and so many problems that seem insoluble. But Dorothy lived through times even more tumultuous than our own—through two world wars, the great Depression and then finally the Cold War. She was imprisoned for protesting in favor of the women’s right to vote and put in solitary confinement—the women went on a hunger strike. She was arrested on a number of other occasions for championing the causes of the poor. Her movement struggled financially. And yet she tells us: “Ask great things of Him.”
As attested in the above passage, she followed her own advice. A former communist, Day was influenced by Russian authors and spirituality, and continued to pray for the conversion of Russia from the time of her conversion until her death in 1980. In other words, having prayed for Russia her entire life, she died four years before the Berlin wall fell. Her example, then, has an important lesson for us, one that many saints have also taught—that we may not live to see the fruit of our prayers and our efforts. Quite often saints die uncertain of their own legacy and, in many ways, as failures. St. Augustine, for example, died praying the penitential Psalms while the Vandals sacked the city of Hippo where he lived. The Roman empire and the culture as he knew was coming to an end, and he could have had no sense of the endurance of his the Church, let alone his own legacy.
It can seem fruitless to keep our vigils for the end of abortion, to pray for peace and healing in this country, to pray for the renewal of the Church. And so it must have appeared to Day that it was futile to pray for Russia. So let us follow her example, knowing that we may not live to reap the harvest that we sow: pray for our world, for our own country, for our fellow men, our fellow workers, for the sick, the starving, the dying, the dead.
In the present time of trial, Catholics need examples of piety and of the critical exercise of reason. These two complementary excellences are on display in the late Fr. Marvin R. O’Connell’s Telling Stories That Matter: Memoirs and Essays (St. Augustine’s Press, 2020).
O’Connell (1930-2016) is best-known for his narrative histories, among which loom large The Oxford Conspirators (1969), John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (1988), and Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (1994). The reader of these monumental books will find them to be “reconstructions of the past by the mind from sources,” for such was O’Connell’s conception of history. It was a definition he received from his mentor, Msgr. Philip Hughes (1895-1967), author of one of the most compelling historical narratives penned in the last century, The Reformation in England (1951).
Telling Stories that Matter, edited by William G. Schmitt and introduced by O’Connell’s long-time friend and colleague at Notre Dame, Fr. Bill Miscamble, C.S.C., contains a memoir and a selection of book reviews, historical essays, and transcripts of lectures. Each of these documents preserves a precious example of O’Connell’s voice, which was characterized by understated piety, precise observation, and a restrained eloquence that was never exactly romantic but just as surely never prosaic.
O’Connell was an empiricist. His narratives were the result of the careful sifting of circumstance, motive, end, achievement, and failure, all as they could be revealed by the documents, his sources. His memoir bears the imprint of his life-long method. It is certainly about himself; there is no other center to the narrative. Yet he placed himself against the backdrop of his family, his education, and the early years of his priesthood and professorial life in such a way as to produce something quite different from a conventional memoir, something more like a reliving of certain episodes of his life with himself as spectator and, yes, critic.
There is self-criticism, sometimes mild, sometimes not. As a newly-ordained priest, he was smitten with the optimism of the burgeoning post-war American Church. By his own admission, piety and humility were not then his strong suits. He had, apparently, an edge of Irish-American middle class resentment to his character. And he had a certain ambition—a desire to write and to publish—a drive for which O’Connell himself said he could not account. Yet he testified to his deep admiration for his father, who was at least for a time a journalist, and that may suffice to explain it, together with a nod to the extraordinary verbal gifts with which he was endowed.
The memoir was unfinished at the time of Fr. O’Connell’s death. If it has an incipient storyline, then it would seem to be that he presents his own development—from a devoted reader of Commonweal to an even-more devoted reader of National Review—as a path not trodden by the majority of American Catholics. Would the Church in America today be facing our current travails better had more priests followed O’Connell’s trajectory? We are left to supply our own judgment, having been given the evidence to make one in the form of vignettes about ecclesial life in Minnesota, Indiana, New York, and abroad.
By placing O’Connell’s memoir in conversation with his friend Fr. Miscamble’s biography of Theodore Hesburgh, we can better appreciate the criticism of the post-war American Church that is arguably implicit in his narrative. Miscamble’s book—required reading for anyone who would understand the University of Notre Dame, but also the Church in America—is primarily a story of externals. Fr. Hesburgh’s very public talents and achievements are on display; his inner virtues and suffering are not. There was an interior poverty in Hesburgh—and not of the kind praised in the beatitudes. O’Connell’s tales from the Church of the 1950s point in the same direction. In his memoir, we meet churchmen distracted by the world and lured by the flesh, and thus—unwittingly we hope but nonetheless tragically—ensnared to one degree or another by the devil.
Yet like any memoir worth reading, O’Connell’s manifests not merely his awareness of his own and others’ folly, but also of their goodness. There is much piety here. It is expressed at some length towards Msgr. Hughes, but also, if briefly, towards O’Connell’s priest-professors in minor seminary and colleagues at the University of St. Thomas, where he taught from 1958 to 1972. And throughout, we see glimpses of his close friends, Eugene Clark and Ralph McInerny. These sketches and remembrances are fitting reminders that the faith has indeed been passed down successfully to our generation by the previous ones, even if much of the legacy of the last century is otherwise of questionable merit.
One of the worst episodes of Twentieth Century Catholic life was the reception of Humanae Vitae. Fr. O’Connell’s discussion of the topic leaves much to be desired. “I had never been comfortable,” he wrote, “with the Catholic Church’s total condemnation of any form of artificial contraception.” He testified to an ambivalence about the encyclical’s teaching: “I do not believe I ever preached on the subject.” And he seems to have persisted in that ambivalence: “Humanae vitae has long proved its value as a beautiful evocation of married love. But I didn’t believe then, and I don’t believe now, that it presents the only possible evocation.” To say the least, these statements are deeply regrettable. Perhaps a partial explanation of them may be found in O’Connell’s admitted lack of interest in the speculative disciplines. He allowed his empiricism freer rein than he should have.
In addition to presenting his memoir, Telling Stories that Matter brings together some of Fr. O’Connell’s more memorable shorter works. If it contained only his twin review of books by Eamon Duffy and Fr. Richard McBrien, it would be well worth its reasonable price. The review’s title says it all: “Not Infallible: Two Histories of the Papacy.” Of special value is the text of the speech O’Connell delivered at the annual meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in 1990. Beneath its plain brown wrapper—“An Historical Perspective on Evangelization in the United States”—the lecture offered a sweeping vision of the Church in America, a vision with a surprising moral: that Catholics should “return to the ghetto.” Thirty years later, O’Connell’s proposal reads like prophecy.
In his sermon “Learning in War-Time” (1939), C. S. Lewis insisted on the value of historical learning in terms that may be most fittingly applied to O’Connell. “The scholar,” Lewis said, “has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.” Over a long and distinguished career, Fr. Marvin O’Connell’s piety and sharp, critical faculties held him in good stead amidst a century rivaled in its nonsense only by our own.
Faith&Culture offers this selection from St. Francis de Sales’s Treatise on the Love of God (1616) as part of its ongoing reflection on the nobility of the human face.
In a delightful and admirable way, Solomon describes the love of the Savior and the devout soul in that divine work called the Song of Songs. And so that we might more easily consider the spiritual love brought about between God and us when the movements of our hearts correspond with the inspirations of his divine majesty, Solomon employs the metaphor of the love of a chaste shepherd and a modest shepherdess. Making the spouse or bride to speak first, as though surprised by the shepherd’s love, he has her exclaim: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” (Song 1:2) Notice how the soul, in the person of this shepherdess, has but one aim: a chaste union with her spouse. She protests that it is her only goal, the one thing for which she longs. What else would this sigh mean? “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!”
In every age and as by natural instinct, a kiss has been employed to represent perfect love, that is, the union of hearts, and not without good reason. We express and make known our thoughts and emotions by our eyes, eyebrows, forehead, and the rest of our countenance. “A man is known by his appearance” (Sirach 19:29), says the scripture. And Aristotle explained why ordinarily it is only the faces of great men that are painted in portraits: it is, he said, because the face shows who we are.
Yet we do not pour out the thoughts which proceed from the spiritual portion of our soul—the part we call reason, which is what distinguishes us from the beasts—except by words, and thus by means of the mouth. Indeed, to pour out our soul and to open our heart is nothing else but to speak. “Pour out your heart before him” (Ps 62:8), says the Psalmist, that is, express and pronounce the affections of your hearts by words. And when she had been praying so softly that one could hardly discern the motion of her lips, Samuel’s pious mother explained, “I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord” (1 Sam 1:15).
We kiss in order to show that we long to pour out one soul into the other, to unite them in a perfect union. For this reason, at all times and among the saintliest men of the world, the kiss has been a sign of love and affection, and such use was universally made of it amongst the ancient Christians as St. Paul testifies, when, writing to the Romans and Corinthians, he says, “greet one another in a holy kiss” (Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20). And as many declare, Judas in betraying our Savior made use of a kiss to manifest him, because the divine Savior was accustomed to kiss his disciples when he met them—and not only his disciples but even the little children whom he took lovingly in his arms, as he did the child by whose example he so solemnly invited his disciples to the love of their neighbor (see Mark 9:36).
Faith&Culture offers this selection from St. John Paul II’s Letter to Families (1994) in homage to the incomparable gift that was his pontificate.
The universe, immense and diverse as it is, the world of all living beings, is inscribed in God’s fatherhood, which is its source. This can be said, of course, on the basis of an analogy, thanks to which we can discern, at the very beginning of the Book of Genesis, the reality of fatherhood and motherhood and consequently of the human family. The interpretative key enabling this discernment is provided by the principle of the “image” and “likeness” of God highlighted by the scriptural text (Gen 1:26). God creates by the power of his word: “Let there be...!” (e.g., Gen 1:3). Significantly, in the creation of man this word of God is followed by these other words: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26). Before creating man, the Creator withdraws as it were into himself, in order to seek the pattern and inspiration in the mystery of his Being, which is already here disclosed as the divine “We”. From this mystery the human being comes forth by an act of creation: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).
God speaks to these newly-created beings and he blesses them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28). The Book of Genesis employs the same expressions used earlier for the creation of other living beings: “multiply”. But it is clear that these expressions are being used in an analogous sense. Is there not present here the analogy of begetting and of fatherhood and motherhood, which should be understood in the light of the overall context? No living being on earth except man was created “in the image and likeness of God”. Human fatherhood and motherhood, while remaining biologically similar to that of other living beings in nature, contain in an essential and unique way a “likeness” to God which is the basis of the family as a community of human life, as a community of persons united in love (communio personarum).
In the light of the New Testament it is possible to discern how the primordial model of the family is to be sought in God himself, in the Trinitarian mystery of his life. The divine “We” is the eternal pattern of the human “we”, especially of that “we” formed by the man and the woman created in the divine image and likeness. The words of the Book of Genesis contain that truth about man which is confirmed by the very experience of humanity. Man is created “from the very beginning” as male and female: the life of all humanity —whether of small communities or of society as a whole—is marked by this primordial duality. From it there derive the “masculinity” and the “femininity” of individuals, just as from it every community draws its own unique richness in the mutual fulfilment of persons. This is what seems to be meant by the words of the Book of Genesis: “Male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). Here too we find the first statement of the equal dignity of man and woman: both, in equal measure, are persons. Their constitution, with the specific dignity which derives from it, defines “from the beginning” the qualities of the common good of humanity, in every dimension and circumstance of life. To this common good both man and woman make their specific contribution. Hence one can discover, at the very origins of human society, the qualities of communion and of complementarity.
The family has always been considered as the first and basic expression of man’s social nature. Even today this way of looking at things remains unchanged. Nowadays, however, emphasis tends to be laid on how much the family, as the smallest and most basic human community, owes to the personal contribution of a man and a woman. The family is in fact a community of persons whose proper way of existing and living together is communion: communio personarum. Here too, while always acknowledging the absolute transcendence of the Creator with regard to his creatures, we can see the family’s ultimate relationship to the divine “We”. Only persons are capable of living “in communion”. The family originates in a marital communion described by the Second Vatican Council as a “covenant”, in which man and woman “give themselves to each other and accept each other”.
The Book of Genesis helps us to see this truth when it states, in reference to the establishment of the family through marriage, that “a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). In the Gospel, Christ, disputing with the Pharisees, quotes these same words and then adds: “So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder” (Mt 19:6). In this way, he reveals anew the binding content of a fact which exists “from the beginning” (Mt 19:8) and which always preserves this content. If the Master confirms it “now”, he does so in order to make clear and unmistakable to all, at the dawn of the New Covenant, the indissoluble character of marriage as the basis of the common good of the family.
When, in union with the Apostle, we bow our knees before the Father from whom all fatherhood and motherhood is named (cf. Eph 3:14-15), we come to realize that parenthood is the event whereby the family, already constituted by the conjugal covenant of marriage, is brought about “in the full and specific sense”. Motherhood necessarily implies fatherhood, and in turn, fatherhood necessarily implies motherhood. This is the result of the duality bestowed by the Creator upon human beings “from the beginning”.
I have spoken of two closely related yet not identical concepts: the concept of “communion” and that of “community”. “Communion” has to do with the personal relationship between the “I” and the “thou”. “Community” on the other hand transcends this framework and moves towards a “society”, a “we”. The family, as a community of persons, is thus the first human “society”. It arises whenever there comes into being the conjugal covenant of marriage, which opens the spouses to a lasting communion of love and of life, and it is brought to completion in a full and specific way with the procreation of children: the “communion” of the spouses gives rise to the “community” of the family. The “community” of the family is completely pervaded by the very essence of “communion”. On the human level, can there be any other “communion” comparable to that between a mother and a child whom she has carried in her womb and then brought to birth?
In the family thus constituted there appears a new unity, in which the relationship “of communion” between the parents attains complete fulfilment. Experience teaches that this fulfilment represents both a task and a challenge. The task involves the spouses in living out their original covenant. The children born to them—and here is the challenge—should consolidate that covenant, enriching and deepening the conjugal communion of the father and mother. When this does not occur, we need to ask if the selfishness which lurks even in the love of man and woman as a result of the human inclination to evil is not stronger than this love. Married couples need to be well aware of this. From the outset they need to have their hearts and thoughts turned towards the God “from whom every family is named”, so that their fatherhood and motherhood will draw from that source the power to be continually renewed in love.
Fatherhood and motherhood are themselves a particular proof of love; they make it possible to discover love’s extension and original depth. But this does not take place automatically. Rather, it is a task entrusted to both husband and wife. In the life of husband and wife together, fatherhood and motherhood represent such a sublime “novelty” and richness as can only be approached “on one’s knees”.
“Why does opium make us sleep? Because of its soporific power.” So ran Molière’s send-up of self-important Parisian physicians. Sohrab Ahmari’s “The Trouble with Christian Leftism” invites a similar question-and-answer. By taxing progressive Christians with having succumbed to the opium of the intellectuals—Marxism in its various forms—Ahmari invites us to ask what is its hidden power. Why are we so prone to be always looking for the next social-scientific solution to our problems? Because we pine for a knowledge that will take away the burden of living by practical reason.
Aristotle sized up prudence with his customary brevity: “the reason must be true and the desire must be correct, if indeed the deliberate choice is to be an excellent one.” That is an imposing task. For our practical reasoning to be true, we need an adequate understanding of the common good; for our desire to be correct, we must yearn for the common good as our personal good. Shallow or flighty reasoning undermines prudence, and so does selfishness in its various forms. And we have not yet begun to try to convince others that our prudential judgment is the right one, but we must eventually labor to do so because our problems can only be solved through consensus and common action.
It would seem to be easier if we were to set aside the troublesome work of perfecting our own understanding and desire and counting upon the virtue of others and instead were to reach into human nature for some other lever to pull. That is the perennial attraction of a social or political science: it offers to replace the vocabulary of the good, reason, virtue, and free choice with a new language that will capture human action in more effective terms.
Machiavelli was the prophet of just such a new science. He and his many followers tell us that the passions and interests of men and women are the levers that we must pull, rather than continue ineffectually to appeal to their understanding of and love for the good. Mandeville, Smith, and countless others offered similar accounts: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher . . . .” Kant was the one who solemnly announced that what we were awaiting was not another Moses, but another Newton, and in his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (1784), he sketched a social science in impeccably Newtonian terms of attraction and repulsion. Like Smith’s account in the Wealth of Nations, Kant’s theory was individualistic, perhaps better, atomistic. Each human being is moved by a “propensity to enter into society” that is matched by an equal and opposite “propensity to individualize.” The action and reaction of these two forces shapes history. Kant grasped the nettle of that antagonism with the same gnostic confidence that we have seen at the heart of modern ideologies ever since: “Thanks be to nature, therefore, for the incompatibility, for the spiteful competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess or even to dominate! For without them all the excellent natural predispositions in humanity would eternally slumber undeveloped. The human being wills concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species: it wills discord.” Small wonder that the next thirty years of European history would be a bloodbath. If we were to follow Kant’s prescription, we would seek to hasten the coming age of perpetual peace by adding counter-protest to protest until the blood flows freely in our streets.
Karl Marx’s Hegelianism and romantic rhetoric are so beguiling that it is easy to overlook that he, too, was a Newtonian in his essential metaphor. Instead of considering the individual atom, he looked at them in groups. It is as though his imaginative lens was not the magnet, the Leyden jar, or the telescope—the Newtonian toys of the eighteenth-century philosophers—but the steam pump and its piston. The “wheel of history” is spun by the release of pressure in a “revolution” brought about by the “increase in number” and “concentration in masses” of the proletariat. The terms of his metaphor should bring Boyle’s Law to mind. To be sure, Marx’s votaries in the nineteenth century and after have typically been motivated by their experience—or at least their perception—of injustice and by their identification with a group of persons who have been similarly mistreated. That is a strong motivator, usually much stronger than the passions and interests of the individual seeking to amass and to protect his own property. Yet while acknowledging the motivation, we should not lose sight of the metaphor that cloaks it with the guise of social-scientific impartiality and righteousness. Social science always trades in metaphors, even when it presents us with curves that are to be flattened.
Today, we have refined our metaphors. In place of Kant’s Newtonian forces and Marx’s pressure-cooker, we can claim to be attending to data that is more empirical, more directly measurable. The problem, however, is that we are constantly appealing to metaphors at the same time as we tell ourselves that we are talking about nature—even human nature—directly. We seem to think that the words we are using are not metaphorical at all. Increasingly, we consent to be ruled by models without stopping to wonder just what a model is. We bow to the authority of curves without asking what the axes of the graph are attempting to capture or what they are leaving out. Our increasing reliance on social science is tragic because we lack a salutary habit of methodological criticism.
“We’re following the science.” “Ours is a science-based response.” These phrases should ring hollow to us not because there is nothing to know about viruses but instead because they are masks for the uncritical application of a limited understanding of some feature of the non-human world to problems that we ought to face as free and intelligent beings pursuing common goods. There may be trustworthy biology out there, but it is hard to disengage from the layers of unacknowledged assumptions about human action that obscure it.
Secular modernity is addicted to the placebo of social scientific claims to impartial certitude because it lacks a shared understanding of the human good. There is nothing too surprising about such a state of affairs. We should be gripped with sorrow, however, that the same addiction should characterize so much religious utterance, even official pronouncements of the Catholic Church. There is, after all, something diabolical about the temptation to absolutize social science: it is a grasping after a knowledge appropriate to God alone. What we most need today, in the Church and in America, is the courage to exercise practical reason and to stand by the best prudential judgments we can muster. Should we seek to bolster our practical reason by learning as much as we can from scientists? Yes. Should we also learn from careful students of human action in the aggregate? Certainly. But we need to do so in air that has been cleared of the soporific vapors of intellectual narcotics.
Ave, gratia plena.Hail, full of grace.Luke 1:28
Throughout the whole world, the ancient Church was of one mind, always addressing the Mother of God in the words of the angel: Ave Maria, gratia plena. Our immediate ancestors, joining their elders in devout harmony, sang the Ave Maria always and everywhere, thinking themselves to be pleasing the King of Heaven by reverently honoring his Mother, and not seeing a more proper way to honor her than by imitating the respect that God himself had decreed that she be shown on the day when his Divine Majesty honored all mankind in this Virgin by becoming man himself. O what a holy greeting, what true praise, what rich and decorous honor! God dictated the words, the archangel pronounced them, the evangelist inscribed them, all antiquity treasured them, and our parents taught us them.
Yet here is something strange. Do you not remember that when David played on the lyre, “the harmful spirit departed” from Saul, as though vanquished by the sweet melody (1 Sam 16:23)? And now, that same evil spirit, the sworn enemy of harmony and concord, having come into the possession of certain lightheaded persons, has through their mouths uttered a thousand insults and blasphemies against the use of this holy greeting.
In his Harmony of the Gospels, Calvin calls us superstitious for greeting someone who is not in our presence and taxes us with meddling in the affairs of others. He also accuses us of using magic, saying that we show ourselves to be poorly instructed when we use this greeting as a prayer, when it was nothing other than words of congratulation. All this blame comes to three points: first, that it is an unlawful usurpation of the office of the angels for us to make use of the Angelic Salutation; second, that it is superstitious to greet an absent person; third, that it is stupid to think that we are praying when we say it. O these wretched people! They would have done better simply to have said that it is wrong to pray the Angelic Salutation because it is the Church that recommends us to do so, for nothing the Church does is according to their liking.
Now, with the Church, I say that to address and to honor the Blessed Virgin with the Angelic Salutation is a holy thing to do, and that the Angelic Salutation contains a beautiful and devout prayer. I will not let myself wander into a discourse about the custom of greeting in general or the true Christian practice of greeting the brethren. Scripture is full of the handsome greetings of the angels by the patriarchs and of the patriarchs of one another, indeed at every meeting. And I do declare that not to greet a person when he is known to you is to signify one’s disdain and even hatred for him. I leave aside the example of Haman, who was “filled with fury” that Mordecai would not greet him, because even then he wished to be adored (see Esther 3:1-5). Yet consider the beloved St. John: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting” (2 Jn 10). He takes it to be an insult not to greet someone and to refrain from saying “Ave.” What, then, should we say about those who refuse to greet Mary other than that they hate her? Similarly, St. Paul tells the Philippians to “Greet every saint in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:21), as though he wanted them to understand that a greeting is owed to holy and virtuous people.
If Mary never taught anything other than good doctrine and never said anything in the Gospels that was not holy, why do they wish to prohibit us from greeting her? If she is holy, and more than holy, why should we not greet her? Is this the doctrine that Our Lord taught us by saying “Peace be with you” so many times or by saying “Greetings!” when he met the two Marys (Mt 28:9)?
But, the heretics say, you are greeting people who aren’t there. Response: what danger is there in that? Does not St. Paul in all of his letters send greetings to people far distant from him? And what of his saying to the Philippians that “the brothers who are with me greet you” (Phil 4:21)? And what of St. Peter: “She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings” (1 Pet 5:13)? They are saying that they are present by letter and by messenger. But Our Lady is present to Christians by her attention. As, for instance, St. Paul says to the Corinthians: “though absent in body, I am present in spirit” (1 Cor 5:3). And as Elisha said to Gehazi, “Did not my heart go when the man turned from his chariot to meet you?” (2 Kings 5:26)
Now, having thus shown that it is a holy practice to greet the Virgin, I ask you what greeting could be found more holy than this one? The author is holy; the words are holy. Should you wish to honor her, say the Hail Mary. Should you have any doubt as to how she should be honored, say the Hail Mary.
And what shall we say about the affections with which the devout heart is moved by this holy greeting? The Angelic Salutation represents the holy mystery of the Incarnation, which is why the Church adds to them the words of St. Elizabeth, “and blessed is the fruit of your womb” (Lk 1:42), that this mystery may be represented to us all the more profoundly.
“And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him.”
St. Thérèse opens her Story of a Soul with a reflection on this verse. She says that the verse contains the mystery of her own vocation, meditating on the words “those whom he desired.” It seemed to Thérèse that Jesus had simply chosen her out of desire for her, not because she was worthy, but simply because it pleased him to do so. This fact troubled Thérèse: “I wondered for a long time why God has preferences, why all souls don’t receive an equal amount of graces.” Specifically, she wondered why God chose people who seemed even to have offended him – like St. Paul or St. Augustine. We might add to her list the disciples being called in Mark 3:13, many of whom do not seem well suited to Jesus’ mission, and one of whom betrays him.
Thérèse has a lovely little analogy for helping us see how she resolved this problem in her own mind, writing that “Jesus deigned to teach me this mystery.” She says that she came to see how a field has many kinds of flowers, all different in size, color and scent and that she “understood that if all flowers wanted to be roses nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wild flowers.” We are the little wild flowers in Jesus’ garden “and just as in nature all the seasons are arranged in such a way as to make the humblest daisy bloom on a set day, in the same way, everything works out for the good of each soul.”[1]
[1] Summary by Elizabeth Klein with the use of Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, 13–14.
“And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’”
Mother Teresa became well known for speaking about “the Gospel on five fingers,” or “the five-finger Gospel.” With her ever luminous smile, she would hold up her hand and count off each word with a finger: “You. Did. It. To. Me.”
It can seem like a radical oversimplification of the Christian faith, but the saint, with her graced wisdom, is on to something here. In Matthew’s gospel, the five-finger moment occurs in the twenty-fifth chapter and it’s a moment unique to the Matthean account. The importance of the words are heightened by their placement within a passage about the final judgment. Consequently, the importance of doing is brought out with emphasis: “As you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.” We will not be measured by vague intentions, positive thoughts, or sympathetic emotions; no, we will be measured by our actions and the character that is formed by those actions and gives rise to them.
But the most important word of this phrase is not “did” but “me,” because, as Mother Teresa makes clear, it refers to Jesus. “[Jesus] makes Himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the sick one, the one in prison, the lonely one, the unwanted one, and he says: ‘You did it to me.’ He is hungry for our love.” The Gospel is not about any old kind of doing; indeed, it is not even about merely doing good. Rather, it is about loving. It is, firstly, about loving Jesus and, secondly, loving others for his sake. Mother Teresa detects a beautiful pedagogy at work here: “His ways are so beautiful.—To think that we have God almighty to stoop so low as to love you & me & make use of us—& make us feel that He really needs us.” Jesus humbles himself by taking on the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor, and when, for his sake, we love and serve those in need—the unseen, the unloved, the unclaimed, the unborn—we become instruments of his love in the world. [1]
[1] Summary by Scott Hefelfinger with the use of Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light, ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (New York: Double-day, 2007), 291 and 273.
As we approach the fifteenth anniversary of the Augustine Institute, it might well occur to readers of Faith and Culture to ask: why is St. Augustine the patron of an Institute dedicated to the New Evangelization? St. John Paul II, after all, is the man who coined the phrase “the New Evangelization” and there are many other saints who are known for their evangelical work more than St. Augustine. Nevertheless, to the founders of the Institute, St. Augustine was the obvious choice.
The Augustine Institute is an educational apostolate, dedicated to helping Catholics at every level to understand, to live and to share their faith. As much as Augustine is now known as the great doctor of the Western church, responsible for such formidable tomes as The City of God, he was a teacher at his very core. Prior to his conversion to Christianity, Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric and a pagan speaker at the top of his profession, even being commissioned to give a speech in honor of the emperor while he was resident in Milan. When he became Catholic at age thirty, he did not leave those skills behind him, but turned them to the Lord’s use. Augustine was a preacher and pastor, and due to the diligent work of his scribes and friends, he left to posterity about three hundred homilies, in addition to his homilies on 1 John and on every Psalm. Augustine’s daily work was caring for the souls at Hippo, and he excelled at communicating profound theological truths to every audience, something we attempt to emulate in all we do here at the Augustine Institute. Augustine even wrote a manual for aspiring preachers, explaining how to understand the language of Scripture and how to interpret it effectively and clearly (this work is called On Christian Doctrine). Augustine was an educator, one of the best the Church has ever seen.
Augustine, however, is not only a wonderful patron for an educational mission, but he also shares many cultural challenges in common with us. We might tend to think of Augustine’s era as being a Christian one; he lived after emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the religion of the Roman empire. Nevertheless, Christianity was still largely considered to be the religion of the uneducated and unsophisticated during Augustine’s time, and he himself as a young man looked down on what he saw as the simple piety of his mother Monica. Augustine preferred the more sophisticated writings of Virgil and Cicero to those of the Bible, which seemed to him to be below his standards in terms of style, and which had many passages that offended the sensibilities of a liberally educated Roman. We might, then, think of Augustine as living in a pre-Christian society as we are living in a post-Christian one. Although Christian ideas were certainly current in Augustine’s time, they were not seen as being especially persuasive, and more urbane Romans left Christianity to the unlearned masses. Christianity today is likewise often dismissed out of hand as a religion which is not populated by the most clear and forward-thinking in our society.
Augustine, as our patron, therefore, has a lot to offer as an exemplar when faced with a culture that is hostile to the Bible and even to the central message of the gospel. But Augustine serves as a patron specifically for the New Evangelization because he also worked tirelessly for the conversion of those who had one foot in secular Roman society and one foot in the church – many such people populated his own congregation. The New Evangelization also seeks to reach a similar audience, those who have heard the gospel, but need to hear it anew; those who might have been raised Christian but never took that for their own identity. Augustine, in fact, wrote many of his works as much for lukewarm Christians as for his Roman opponents, and in his preaching sought to set the hearts of his flock alight for love of God, when many of them were practicing pagan religion on the side.
Augustine is a great patron from our times and for our mission – St. Augustine, pray for us!
“But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you.”
Luke 14:10 is a verse taken from the end of one of Jesus’ parables about a wedding feast. He warns us against coming into a wedding feast and taking a spot at the head table (so to speak), because we may suffer public disgrace when we are asked to move. Rather, Jesus recommends taking the lowest spot and then if the host decides to promote us, we will be honored rather than humiliated.
St. Teresa of Ávila reflects on the radical call to humility found in the parable. In this story, she sees the Lord’s desire that we “recognize our uselessness.” Teresa’s language may seem harsh, but she explains that when we truly see that we are nothing without God, only then we can allow Christ, who is the host of the wedding feast, to be our Lord and judge; “God is more careful than we are, and He knows what is fitting for each one.” We must assume the lowest position and trust God to decide how to distribute his blessings. She also uses an analogy to help us see how futile it is to try and determine our own place: “if individuals have bad voices, the effort to sing does them no good no matter how hard they try.” We must not think ourselves capable of seizing the highest place by sheer effort.
But perhaps what is most striking about Teresa’s insights is that she is not speaking here of material or worldly blessings primarily–but spiritual ones. The seat closest to the Lord, as in the parable, is his to assign. Sometimes we may be frustrated in our prayer life, or feel that God has given greater peace or consolations to other people, even though we are pursuing him as best we can. But Teresa tells us that God’s people “must walk along this path in freedom, placing themselves in the hands of God. If His Majesty should desire to raise us to the position of one who is intimate and shares His secrets, we ought to accept gladly; if not, we ought to serve in the humbler tasks.” Because the good news, according to Teresa, is that if we surrender ourselves to the Lord we will always “remain at the feet of Christ,” no matter what seat we find ourselves in.[1]
[1] Summary by Elizabeth Klein, with the use of Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life 22.12, 197.
“There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores.”
In this powerful parable, Jesus draws a distressing contrast between an unnamed rich man and the poor Lazarus, who sat by the rich man’s gate begging daily. St. Bonaventure, who himself lived out the practice of poverty in his Franciscan vocation, meditates on this scene to reveal its spiritual lessons: that in possessing many things we can come to be possessed by them and that we can find true freedom in embracing the spirit of poverty.
He describes how the rich man is called “rich” not just because he had many possessions, “but also because of his love of them.” His love for things entraps him in the lure of riches which in themselves cannot satisfy our deepest longings. As Bonaventure puts it, “For through its love for earthly things the spirit grows fat and is weighed down, so that it cannot travel into the higher realms of heaven.” False love for money, possessions, comfort and security prevent us from rising to the true love of God. We end up being owned by the things we own.
The rich man wore fancy clothing and feasted every day. His sin of greed was thus accompanied by gluttony, which led to his lack of mercy for the poor man at his gate. It is hard to understand hunger when our bellies are always full. While Bonaventure rejects gluttony of the flesh, he commends us to a different sort of enjoyment: “Note that there is a splendid nature to spiritual feasting, which produces wisdom.” He warns us against the dangers of over-indulging our bodily appetites, but directs us toward the satisfaction of our spiritual hunger in word and sacrament.
Bonaventure regards the rich man’s lack of mercy as particularly egregious given that Lazarus was not only poor, but lonely, sick and hungry; “these circumstances show that the poor man was worthy of mercy and consequently that the rich man was merciless and impious.” The rich man was “more generous to the dogs than to the poor man, and the dogs were more tender to the poor man than the rich man was” since they licked his sores. The contrast between the poor man’s desperate need and the rich man’s sumptuous lifestyle reveal his hardness of heart. He could have easily helped this man whose need was so obvious and so extreme.
In the end, the poor man was welcomed into glory while the rich man was condemned. The poor man was truly free, while the rich man was burdened by his many possessions. Their story serves as a warning to us not to give in to selfish desires which leave us cold toward the needs of others, but to give generously to those and in need and so feast at the table of Wisdom that we might be welcomed “into the eternal dwellings” (Lk. 16:9) by the righteous poor.[1]
[1] Summary by Mark Giszczak with the use of Bonaventure, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke: Chapters 9–16, 1516–26.
Faith&Culture offers this selection from Benedict XVI’s General Audience Address of January 16, 2013 as part of its ongoing reflection on the nobility of the human face.[]*
I would like to dwell on the phrase: “reveals God’s face”. In this regard St. John records for us a significant event. When he was approaching the Passion, Jesus reassured his disciples, asking them not to be afraid and to have faith; he then begins a conversation with them in which he talks about God the Father (cf. Jn 14:2-9). At a certain point the Apostle Philip asked Jesus: “Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied” (Jn 14:8). Philip was very practical and prosaic, he even said what we ourselves would like to say: “we want to see him, show us the Father.” He asks to “see” the Father, to see his face. Jesus’ answer is a reply not only to Philip but also to us and it ushers us into the heart of Christological faith. The Lord affirmed: “he who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). These words sum up the newness of the New Testament, that newness which appeared in the Bethlehem Grotto: God can be seen, God has shown his face, he is visible in Jesus Christ.
The theme of the “quest for God’s face”, the desire to know this face, the desire to see God as he is, is clearly present throughout the Old Testament, to the extent that the Hebrew term pānîm, which means “face”, recurs 400 times, and refers to God 100 times. One hundred times it refers to God. The wish to see God’s face is expressed 100 times. Yet the Jewish religion absolutely forbids images, for God cannot be portrayed as, on the contrary, he was portrayed by the neighboring peoples who worshipped idols. Therefore, with this prohibition of images, the Old Testament seems totally to exclude any “seeing” from worship and from devotion. Yet what did seeking God’s face mean to the devout Israelite, who knew that there could be no depiction of it? The question is important. There was a wish on the one hand to say that God cannot be reduced to an object, like an image that can be held in the hand, nor can anything be put in God’s place. On the other, it was affirmed that God has a face — meaning he is a “you” who can enter into a relationship — and who has not withdrawn into his heavenly dwelling place, looking down at humanity from on high. God is certainly above all things, but he addresses us, he listens to us, he sees us, he speaks to us, he makes a covenant, he is capable of love. The history of salvation is the history of God with humanity, it is the history of this relationship of God who gradually reveals himself to man, who makes himself, his face, known.
At the very beginning of the year, on 1 January, we heard in the liturgy the most beautiful prayer of blessing upon the people: “May the Lord Bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord uncover his face to you and bring you peace (Num 6:24-26). The splendor of the divine face is the source of life, it is what makes it possible to see reality; the light of his face is guidance for life. In the Old Testament there is a figure with whom the theme of “the face of God” is connected in a special way: Moses. The man whom God chose to set his people free from slavery in Egypt, giving him the Law of the Covenant and leading him to the Promised Land. Well, in Chapter 33 of the Book of Exodus it says that Moses had a close and confidential relationship with God: “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (v. 11). By virtue of this trust, Moses was able to ask God: “show me your glory”, and God’s response was clear: “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name”…. But he said “you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live.… There is a place by me.... You shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen” (vv. 18-23). Thus, on the one hand, there was the face-to-face conversation as between friends, but on the other, the impossibility in this life of seeing the face of God which remained hidden; sight is restricted. The Fathers said that these words, “you shall see my back”, meant you can only follow Christ and in following him you see the mystery of God from behind. God can be followed by seeing his back.
Something completely new happened, however, with the Incarnation. The search for God’s face was given an unimaginable turning-point, because this time this face could be seen: it is the face of Jesus, of the Son of God who became man. In him the process of the Revelation of God, which began with Abraham’s call, finds fulfilment in the One who is the fullness of this Revelation, because he is the Son of God, he is both “the mediator and the sum total of Revelation” (Dei Verbum, 2), the content of Revelation and the Revealer coincide in him. Jesus shows us God’s face and makes God’s name known to us. In the Priestly Prayer at the Last Supper he says to the Father: “I have manifested your name to the men... I made known to them your name” (cf. Jn 17:6; 6, 26). The phrase: “name of God”, means God as the One who is present among men and women. God had revealed his name to Moses by the burning bush, that is, he had made it possible to call on him, had given a tangible sign of his “being” among human beings. All this found fulfilment and completion in Jesus: he inaugurated God’s presence in history in a new way, because whoever sees him, sees the Father, as he said to Philip (cf. Jn 14:9). . . .
The desire to know God truly, that is, to see God’s face, is innate in every human being, even in atheists. And perhaps we unconsciously have this wish simply to see who he is, what he is, who he is for us. However, this desire is fulfilled in following Christ, in this way we see his back and, in the end, we see God too as a friend, in Christ’s face we see his face. The important thing is that we not only follow Christ in our needy moments or when we find a slot in our daily occupations, but in our life as such. The whole of our life must be oriented to meeting Jesus Christ, to loving him; and, in our life we must allocate a central place to loving our neighbor, that love which, in the light of the Crucified One, enables us to recognize the face of Jesus in the poor, in the weak and in the suffering. This is only possible if the true face of Jesus has become familiar to us through listening to his word, in an inner conversation with him, in entering this word so that we truly meet him, and of course, in the Mystery of the Eucharist. In the Gospel of St Luke the passage about the two disciples of Emmaus recognize Jesus in the breaking of bread is important; prepared by the journey with him, by the invitation to stay with them that they had addressed to him and by the conversation that made their hearts burn within them, in the end they saw Jesus. For us too the Eucharist is the great school in which we learn to see God’s face, we enter into a close relationship with him; and at the same time we learn to turn our gaze to the final moment of history when he will satisfy us with the light of his face.
[*] http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2013/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20130116.html
“Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’ He said to them, ‘Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.’”
St. Thérèse of Lisieux interprets this saying of the Lord in a surprising way. In the gospel, the disciples have just failed to perform a healing, and they are asking Jesus why they failed. It would seem that, at least at some level, Jesus is telling his disciples that they need only a little faith to do great things. But Thérèse wonders what the verse might tell us about those with great faith, and about the times when Jesus seems to deny us even the little things. She has cause to reflect on the meaning of this verse when God refuses her something that she wanted, and which she believed she would receive with ardent faith.
Thérèse says that this verse reveals that miracles are often granted to those of little faith, in order to strengthen them and to help them to grow. However, in order to perfect the faith of those who are not beginners, Jesus does not always work signs as readily: “for his intimate friends, and for his mother, he works no miracles before having tried their faith. Did he not allow Lazarus to die even after Martha and Mary told him he was sick?” Thérèse also gives the example of Mary at the wedding at Cana (Jn. 3): “when the Blessed Virgin asked Jesus to come to the help of the head of the house, didn’t He answer her that His hour had not yet come?”
The sisters at Bethany and the virgin Mary had great faith, but they had to wait on Christ. After the testing of their faith, however, they were rewarded: Lazarus was raised from the dead and water was turned into wine. Thérèse tells us, therefore, that although mustard seed faith may be rewarded with a sign, deeper intimacy with Christ requires even greater faith still; “thus Jesus acted towards his little Thérèse: after having tried her for a long time, he granted all the desires of her heart.”[1]
[1] Summary by Elizabeth Klein with the use of Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, trans. John Clarke (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996),142.
“And he said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.’”
Jesus launches his disciples on a mission with an encouragement to pray that even more laborers be sent out to reap the harvest of souls. It is telling that the harvest begins with prayer, not work, because prayer is the foundation of the harvest. In commenting on this verse, St. Bonaventure highlights the need not just for laborers, but for good ones. He says, “Those who practice what they preach are laborers and are to be rewarded by the Lord.” Hypocrites are not eligible. To be the true laborers for which Jesus urges us to pray, we must be sincere. Our conduct must reflect the principles that we proclaim.
Bonaventure presses the point, and reports on the state of things among the workers: “few are industrious laborers, but many are malicious.” Even more, “many are slothful.” We should never discount the danger of laziness and selfish intent invading our spiritual life and ministry efforts. Rather, we must be on guard against such temptations in order that we might be good, industrious laborers in the harvest.
Bonaventure identifies the means of harvesting as “the sword of the divine word,” as if the proclamation of the gospel were a sickle by which grain could be cut down. He explains that a sword, “unless it is held in the hand, does not strike fear in the adversary.” We must be ready for spiritual combat. He aligns this idea with Nehemiah’s contested rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, where the Jewish workmen were under such threat that they had to work with one hand and hold a sword with the other.
Despite all the warnings he offers, Bonaventure acknowledges that God does grant us laborers—saints, priests, sisters, evangelists, witnesses. So we pray. We pray for vocations to the priesthood and religious life. We pray for God to grant authentic witnesses to the gospel, industrious laborers in the harvest of souls who are truly devoted to him and who hold the sword of the Word at the ready.[1]
[1] Summary by Mark Giszczak with the use of Bonaventure, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke: Chapters 9–16, trans. and ed. Robert J. Karris, Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. VIII, Part II (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2003), 927–928.
Faith&Culture offers this selection from St. John Paul II’s apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte (January 6, 2001) as part of its ongoing reflection on the nobility of the human face.
“Your face, O Lord, I seek” (Ps 27:8). The ancient longing of the Psalmist could receive no fulfilment greater and more surprising than the contemplation of the face of Christ. God has truly blessed us in him and has made “his face to shine upon us” (Ps 67:1). At the same time, God and man that he is, he reveals to us also the true face of man, “fully revealing man to man himself” (Gaudium et spes, 22).
Jesus is “the new man” (cf. Eph 4:24; Col 3:10) who calls redeemed humanity to share in his divine life. The mystery of the Incarnation lays the foundations for an anthropology which, reaching beyond its own limitations and contradictions, moves towards God himself, indeed towards the goal of divinization. . . . The Church has no doubt that the Evangelists in their accounts, and inspired from on high, have correctly understood in the words which Jesus spoke the truth about his person and his awareness of it. Is this not what Luke wishes to tell us when he recounts Jesus’ first recorded words, spoken in the Temple in Jerusalem when he was barely twelve years old? Already at that time he shows that he is aware of a unique relationship with God, a relationship which properly belongs to a “son.” When his mother tells him how anxiously she and Joseph had been searching for him, Jesus replies without hesitation: “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s affairs?” (Lk 2:49). It is no wonder therefore that later as a grown man his language authoritatively expresses the depth of his own mystery, as is abundantly clear both in the Synoptic Gospels (cf. Mt 11:27; Lk 10:22) and above all in the Gospel of John. In his self-awareness, Jesus has no doubts: “The Father is in me and I am in the Father” (Jn 10:38).
However valid it may be to maintain that, because of the human condition which made him grow “in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man” (Lk 2:52), his human awareness of his own mystery would also have progressed to its fullest expression in his glorified humanity, there is no doubt that already in his historical existence Jesus was aware of his identity as the Son of God. John emphasizes this to the point of affirming that it was ultimately because of this awareness that Jesus was rejected and condemned: they sought to kill him “because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God” (Jn 5:18). In Gethsemane and on Golgotha Jesus’ human awareness will be put to the supreme test. But not even the drama of his Passion and Death will be able to shake his serene certainty of being the Son of the heavenly Father.
In contemplating Christ’s face, we confront the most paradoxical aspect of his mystery, as it emerges in his last hour, on the Cross. The mystery within the mystery, before which we cannot but prostrate ourselves in adoration.
The intensity of the episode of the agony in the Garden of Olives passes before our eyes. Oppressed by foreknowledge of the trials that await him, and alone before the Father, Jesus cries out to him in his habitual and affectionate expression of trust: “Abba, Father.” He asks him to take away, if possible, the cup of suffering (cf. Mk 14:36). But the Father seems not to want to heed the Son’s cry. In order to bring man back to the Father’s face, Jesus not only had to take on the face of man, but he had to burden himself with the “face” of sin. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21).
We shall never exhaust the depths of this mystery. All the harshness of the paradox can be heard in Jesus’ seemingly desperate cry of pain on the Cross: “‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Mk 15:34). Is it possible to imagine a greater agony, a more impenetrable darkness? In reality, the anguished “why” addressed to the Father in the opening words of the Twenty-second Psalm expresses all the realism of unspeakable pain; but it is also illumined by the meaning of that entire prayer, in which the Psalmist brings together suffering and trust, in a moving blend of emotions. In fact, the Psalm continues: “In you our fathers put their trust; they trusted and you set them free ... Do not leave me alone in my distress, come close, there is none else to help” (Ps 22:5,12).
Jesus’ cry on the Cross, dear Brothers and Sisters, is not the cry of anguish of a man without hope, but the prayer of the Son who offers his life to the Father in love, for the salvation of all. At the very moment when he identifies with our sin, “abandoned” by the Father, he “abandons” himself into the hands of the Father. His eyes remain fixed on the Father. Precisely because of the knowledge and experience of the Father which he alone has, even at this moment of darkness he sees clearly the gravity of sin and suffers because of it. He alone, who sees the Father and rejoices fully in him, can understand completely what it means to resist the Father’s love by sin. More than an experience of physical pain, his Passion is an agonizing suffering of the soul. Theological tradition has not failed to ask how Jesus could possibly experience at one and the same time his profound unity with the Father, by its very nature a source of joy and happiness, and an agony that goes all the way to his final cry of abandonment. The simultaneous presence of these two seemingly irreconcilable aspects is rooted in the fathomless depths of the hypostatic union. . . .
As on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the Church pauses in contemplation of this bleeding face, which conceals the life of God and offers salvation to the world. But her contemplation of Christ’s face cannot stop at the image of the Crucified One. He is the Risen One! Were this not so, our preaching would be in vain and our faith empty (cf. 1 Cor 15:14). The Resurrection was the Father’s response to Christ’s obedience, as we learn from the Letter to the Hebrews: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear. Son though he was, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (5:7-9).
It is the Risen Christ to whom the Church now looks. And she does so in the footsteps of Peter, who wept for his denial and started out again by confessing, with understandable trepidation, his love of Christ: “You know that I love you” (Jn 21:15-17). She does so in the company of Paul, who encountered the Lord on the road to Damascus and was overwhelmed: “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Phil 1:21).
Two thousand years after these events, the Church relives them as if they had happened today. Gazing on the face of Christ, the Bride contemplates her treasure and her joy. “Dulcis Iesus memoria, dans vera cordis gaudia”: how sweet is the memory of Jesus, the source of the heart’s true joy! Heartened by this experience, the Church today sets out once more on her journey, in order to proclaim Christ to the world at the dawn of the Third Millennium: he “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8).
“Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the Law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, ‘Lord now you are letting your servant depart in peace…’”
Men and women who have grown old in friendship with the Lord sometimes say that they are ready to “go home.” We might be reminded of St. Paul who “would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). Such eagerness for death would be perverse were it not for “the Lord’s Christ,” who is “the consolation of Israel.” Why is it, Origen wonders, that Simeon “held [Jesus] in his arms, and kept rejoicing and exulting”? Because Simeon knew that “the little child he was carrying had come to release captives and to free Simeon from the bonds of the body,” and Jesus alone could do this “with hope of life to come.”
Origen goes further. We are all, he suggests, Simeon. Death comes for us all. But, says Origen, if someone wishes “to go forth and reign” after this life, he too “should enfold [Jesus] in his arms, and fully grasp him in his bosom. Then he will be able to go in joy where he longs to go.” But how can we hold Jesus like Simeon? The same way as Simeon did: by following the Spirit into the temple. The temple, Origen explains, is the Church. But just coming physically to church is not enough. We must walk by the Spirit so that our way of life becomes “worthy of the title ‘church.’” Origen concludes the homily with the first known prayer to the infant Christ: “let us pray to Jesus himself, the little child. We long to speak to him and hold him in our arms, to whom is glory and power for ages of ages. Amen.”[1]
[1] Summary by John Sehorn with the use of Origen, Homily 15 on Luke, in Homilies on Luke, trans. Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J., Fathers of the Church 94 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 62–64.
In 1899, Pope Leo XIII issued an apostolic letter, Testem benevolentiae, in which he expressed concern regarding the development of “those views which, in their collective sense, are called by some ‘Americanism.’”[1] The issue was complicated, but at its root was Leo’s concern that certain American cultural norms—in particular the Protestant privileging of the authority of private judgment and of equality over hierarchy—were infiltrating and corrupting the Church in America. The recent celebration of Independence Day gave occasion to reflect on this issue. Over Fourth of July weekend, I experienced two very different patriotic sermons: one that nearly presented the Founding Fathers as crypto-Catholics, the other that reminded us that while love of country is a virtue, Catholic patriotism must be tempered by the acknowledgment that America was founded on the Enlightenment principle of autonomous reason. Historically, the second view is undeniably the accurate one: “Nature’s God” is not the Triune God of Christianity. This should not trouble us. The Church has a long history of Christianizing pagan political structures; think no further than the Roman Empire and Germanic feudalism. Our unique challenge today is the inability of many American Catholics to see that our political structures and traditions need Catholicizing—either due to a misguided understanding of disestablishment or, worse, a misguided belief that they are in some sense already Catholic. Leo’s fears of American cultural norms corrupting the Church may have been unwarranted in the late nineteenth century but proved prophetic of what was to come.
The struggle over Americanism in the late nineteenth century actually revealed the strength of a distinctly Catholic life within America. The Protestant and egalitarian influences that Leo feared were at most the dalliance of a small elite; the real battle lines of Americanism were drawn in the areas of ethnicity and parochial schools. “Americanist” bishops such as John Ireland of St. Paul feared that the persistence of ethnic cultures among Catholics in America and the maintenance of a separate parochial school system set Catholics apart from mainstream America, marking them as foreign, subversive, un-American. These bishops were in some sense correct, but most Catholics preferred to be American on their own terms rather than have those terms dictated to them by anti-Catholic bigots.[2] The passage of immigration restriction in the 1920s dealt a blow to ethnic Catholicism, yet parochial schools continued to sustain a distinct subculture: patriotic, within the limits of Catholicism. This subculture found its greatest support in the simple geographic fact of Catholics living together in tight-knit, urban parishes. The Catholic politics of this period had very little to do with The Spirit of ’76 and everything to do with political “machines” distributing patronage and other material benefits that often stood as the only difference between mere working-class poverty and life-threatening destitution. This type of local city politics only reaffirmed the sense among non-Catholics that Catholics were a people apart, not to be trusted.
Post-World War II Catholics aspiring to national political power sought to move beyond this local model by appealing broader political principles. Two strategies converged by about the year 1960: in We Hold These Truths, the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray argued that American political traditions are compatible with Catholicism because they are rooted in natural law; in the same year, the Catholic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy assured the nation that his Catholicism would have nothing to do with how he conducted himself as president.[3] These two somewhat contradictory principles—America is pretty close to Catholic on its own terms or has nothing to do with Catholicism at all—have set the boundaries for most mainstream Catholic engagement with American politics. Kennedy’s strong words—striking for the sharpness of their separation of private faith and public life—were perhaps even more significant for the lack of controversy they generated among most American Catholics in 1960. Catholics at the time were too caught up in the thrill of seeing one of their own elected as president. Kennedy’s assassination three years later seemed to seal the deal: a martyrdom that forever put to rest all the old doubts about the rightful place of Catholics in America. Two years later, the Vatican itself seemed to confirm this victory with the guarded endorsement of religious liberty expressed in the Vatican II document Dignitatis humanae (drafted in large part by none other than John Courtney Murray himself).[4]
This marriage turned out to be no more than a honeymoon—and a short-lived one at that. For a hundred years, America deemed the Church un-American due to its failure to endorse democracy; following St. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae in 1968, America would once again judge the Church deficient, this time for its failure to approve of artificial contraception and, by implication, abortion. This time, however, the assault on Catholicism came as much from within the Church as from outside it. American Catholics overwhelmingly rejected Humanae vitae and sided with the external critics of the Church. Certain Catholic theologians invoked the theological principle of conscience as justification for their dissent from the encyclical. Most Catholics never ventured into theological abstractions; their visceral rejection instead grew out of their prior embrace of a middle-class family ideal predicated on small families, the aberration of the Baby Boom notwithstanding. Theologians tend to view the battle over Humanae vitae as one between orthodoxy and heresy; this historian views it more as the first post-Kennedy test-case as to how Catholics would deal with a conflict between Catholic faith and American culture. On the issue of birth control, American Catholics sided overwhelmingly with American culture. It was a harbinger of things to come, not only in private faith but in public life.
The decades following Humanae vitae would see Leo XIII’s fears of “Americanism” realized, though on terms he could not have anticipated. Democracy did not re-make the Church in the image of congregationalism, but American politics succeeded in making American Catholics indistinguishable from other Americans. Liberal Catholics follow liberal non-Catholics in promoting social justice in the name of the common good while supporting abortion and a radically privatized understanding of sexual freedom that undermines the common good; conservative Catholics follow conservative non-Catholics by opposing abortion yet promote a radically privatized understanding of economic freedom that likewise undermines the common good. Liberal and conservative Catholics differ on specific issues but share the same tendency to view their faith through their politics. It is by now a commonplace that the social teachings of the Church are, by American political standards, economically “liberal” and culturally “conservative.” American Catholics have failed to promote this unified vision in mainstream American politics for fear of seeming un-American—in the sense of failing to conform to the prevailing ideological alignments of mainstream American politics.
Efforts to unify Catholics through the metaphor of the “seamless garment” of Catholic social teaching have only met with partisan responses. Liberal Catholics interpret the unity in terms of equivalency, as if caring for the poor absolved one of responsibility to defend the un-born; conservative Catholics interpret the unity in terms of hierarchy, as if defending the unborn absolves them of the “lesser” good of caring for the poor. Efforts to close these loopholes through the idea of a “consistent life ethic” have failed to correct liberal and conservative inconsistencies.[5] Perhaps Leo was more prophetic than he knew: this partisan, politicized Catholicism reflects nothing if not the triumph of “private judgment,” the freedom to fashion a Catholicism to suit our own personal preferences. This is the triumph of Americanism in our own time.
So what, to the Catholic, is the Fourth of July? Looking back, it is a day of gratitude to a country that provided a home for millions of uprooted immigrants and enabled them, for a time, to recreate authentic Catholic communities in America. Looking forward, it is gratitude for the freedom to recreate communities of faith once again—different communities under different circumstances, but part of a tradition of Catholic life ever recreating itself in continuity with the enduring truths of the faith. In America, this recreation will inevitably be, in part, a political task, for communities are never purely private. The forces undermining Catholic culture have never been only cultural, but always also political, social and economic; they must be met with appropriate counterforce. Catholics capable of seeing beyond our current political polarization should also be able to see that if American political freedom means anything it means the ability to envision and enact political alternatives, even alternative political parties. As we contemplate the Fourth of July, it is time for Catholics once more to declare their independence.
[1] Pope Leo XIII, “Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae: Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace, with Regard to Americanism, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo13/l13teste.htm.[2] For an excellent account of the complicated twists and turns of this controversy, see Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), especially Chapter 4, “The Grand American Catholic Compromise.”[3] See John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960); John F. Kennedy, “Address to the Houston Ministerial Association, September, 1960” in Steven M. Avella and Elizabeth McKeown, eds., Public Voices: Catholics in the American Context (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1999), 361-364. [4] For the text of Dignitatis Humanae, see http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html[5] For a good account of these concepts, see John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003), 285-87.
Our earliest literary record of Christianity in North Africa is a court record. It is very short and straightforward. On July 17, 180, Publius Vigellius Saturninus, the proconsul of Africa, was saddled with the irksome duty of interrogating a group of seven men and five women from the obscure town of Scilli. They stood before him in Carthage accused of “living as Christians”—literally, “living by the Christian rite” (ritu Christiano…vivere). According to policy set by the Emperor Trajan in 112, this was a capital offense, and the twelve Scillitan martyrs—Speratus (the Christians’ spokesman, perhaps a member of the clergy), Nartzalus, Cittinus, Veturius, Felix, Aquilinus, Laetantius, Januaria, Generosa, Vestia, Donata, and Secunda—were all summarily beheaded.
It did not have to end that way. Trajan had also stipulated that Christians who recanted their Christianity and proved it “by praying to our gods” (supplicando dis nostris) could be granted “pardon for their repentance” (veniam ex paenitentia). Saturninus was quick to remind the Scillitans of this: “You can gain the indulgence of our lord the emperor if you come back to your senses.” Saturninus even seemed open to glossing over the bit about renouncing Christ. All Speratus and his companions had to do was to swear an oath by the emperor’s genius (his personal divinity) and pray for his wellbeing. Saturninus was prepared to wink at the rest. But the recalcitrant bumpkins refused to budge.
Saturninus was obviously annoyed with the whole proceeding. The gesture of goodwill toward the emperor that he demanded was a very small thing, an everyday thing, routine as purchasing wares or paying taxes—which the Christians admitted they did. These obnoxious people were also strangely inconsistent. One of them, Donata, openly said that they paid “honor to Caesar as Caesar, but fear to God” (cf. 1 Pet. 2:17). Well, that is really all Saturninus was asking for: a simple token of honor to Caesar. Surely there was some misunderstanding. These folks were worked up, maybe overexcited by their ordeal in the big city. They needed time to cool off and get a grip. But they just kept saying, again and again, “I am a Christian.” Saturninus tried to give them a thirty-day grace period to think things over. Speratus repeated, “I am a Christian,” and all the rest agreed.
Reluctantly, Saturninus passed his sentence. Absurdly, the Christians reacted with joy: “We give thanks to God!” “Today we are martyrs in heaven! Thanks be to God!”
Parts of Tertullian’s Apology, written within two decades of the Scillitans’ martyrdom, read almost like a theological commentary on these events. A Carthaginian who had likely trained in law, Tertullian was surely aware of the Scillitans’ appearance before Saturninus, whom Tertullian identifies as the first Roman official to put Christians to the sword in North Africa (To Scapula 3). Tertullian explains that Christians refuse to swear oaths by the emperor’s genius not because they wish the emperor harm but because the genii are in fact demons (Apology 32). Christians do pray for the emperor’s welfare, as well as for imperial security, for the emperor’s household, for a valiant military, for a loyal senate, for an upstanding citizenry, for world peace—only they offer such prayers to the one true God who providentially appointed the emperor (Apology 30, 33).
Tertullian’s assertion that Christians recognize the divinely ordained legitimacy of the emperor seems at loggerheads with Speratus’s protestation, “I do not acknowledge the Empire of this world … I acknowledge my Lord, the Emperor of kings and of all nations [cf. Rev. 1:5].” But the context is one in which Saturninus has insistently equated honoring Caesar with swearing by his genius. He has rejected the distinction Tertullian and other Christians observed between the emperor and the demon to whom pagans sacrificed on his behalf. In the person of its proconsular representative, the Roman Empire has thus aligned itself with “the Empire of this world [huius seculi]”—that is, of “the world” whose prince is the evil one (2 Cor. 4:4) and which is at enmity with God (Jas. 4:4).
All this, naturally, was lost on the inconvenienced Saturninus, who was not interested in being lectured by rural religious fanatics. To him, this was madness. He referred to it, literally, as dementia. So it would have appeared to most Romans. With the eyes of faith, the martyrs and their Christian brothers and sisters could recognize martyrdom as a glorious victory over the power of darkness. Sometimes the martyrs’ comportment was an occasion of grace leading to the conversion of onlookers. But most of the time non-Christians simply found the martyrs pathetically obstinate. Pliny observed to Trajan that, even if the fantastic rumors of Christians committing horrible crimes were false, their uncivil stubbornness was reason enough to eliminate them from society. Many who watched martyrdoms taunted and jeered. Others must have just shaken their heads at such tragic folly. They did not see praiseworthy heroism but foolish, unnecessary suffering.
I do not know whether Christians in the West will be faced with state-sanctioned red martyrdom in the future. What I do know is that when Christians are called upon either to betray their Master or to give up their reputation, liberty, property, or life, they should not expect to be applauded by neutral public observers. They should not expect to be widely congratulated on social media for their unwavering adherence to principle. They should not seek praise from men (John 5:41, 44). They should expect to be reviled and mocked. That is what the Lord himself promised.
There is an opposite danger as well. Some zealous believers might take the lesson of the Scillitan martyrs and others as an invitation to make themselves a nuisance. This too is a mistake. St. Paul taught us to pray “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Tim. 2:2). Early martyrdom accounts condemn the theatrics of hotheads like a certain Quintus, who turned himself in voluntarily, thinking to make himself a hero, then buckled under the pressure and apostatized (Martyrdom of Polycarp 4). Jesus blesses, not self-righteous provocateurs, but whose who are slandered falsely on his account (Matt. 5:11).
May the holy Scillitan martyrs pray for us, that we might serve our Lord, “the Emperor of kings and of all nations,” with undivided hearts, so that we can announce with them, in all our words and deeds, with simplicity and humility, “I am a Christian.” If we do, when we are called upon to suffer for the Name, we, like the Scillitan martyrs, will rejoice and be glad (Matt. 5:12).
With this lovely poem by Belloc in honor of Our Lady, Faith&Culture begins a series of reflections upon the nobility of the human face.
Of Courtesy, it is much less
Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,
Yet in my Walks it seems to me
That the Grace of God is in Courtesy.
On Monks I did in Storrington fall,
They took me straight into their Hall;
I saw Three Pictures on a wall,
And Courtesy was in them all.
The first the Annunciation;
The second the Visitation;
The third the Consolation,
Of God that was Our Lady’s Son.
The first was of Saint Gabriel;
On Wings a-flame from Heaven he fell;
And as he went upon one knee
He shone with Heavenly Courtesy.
Our Lady out of Nazareth rode—
It was Her month of heavy load;
Yet was Her face both great and kind,
For Courtesy was in Her Mind.
The third it was our Little Lord,
Whom all the Kings in arms adored;
He was so small you could not see
His large intent of Courtesy.
Our Lord, that was Our Lady’s Son,
Go bless you, People, one by one;
My Rhyme is written, my work is done.
“And he came to her and said, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you!’ But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.”
In reflecting on Gabriel’s salutation to the Virgin Mary, St. Bonaventure, the Franciscan Doctor of the Church, explains how the angel’s message reveals her “threefold excellence” and how her response displays her commendable nature.
First, the angel’s greeting shows her “dignity, virtue and charity.” Bonaventure teaches us that the angel “shows her to be commendable because of the fullness of goodness, and therefore lovable; to be commendable because of her great dignity, and therefore venerable; to be commendable because of the grandeur of her praise, and therefore honorable.” The angel, who speaks as a messenger of God, shows to us that Mary is lovable, venerable and honorable. Bonaventure shows how she is implicitly compared with Esther in her “incredible beauty,” and how she is worthy of veneration because the Lord dwells within her. Indeed, the Virgin Mary, who carries the Christ child in her womb, is foreshadowed by the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple, where the presence of God dwelt in a special way. Bonaventure also compares her to the heroines of the Old Testament—Abigail, Jael and Judith, who are all called “blessed” and who thus prefigure Mary in her blessedness.
Second, Bonaventure reflects on the Virgin’s response, commenting that she is “triply commendable, namely, in hearing, affection, and thought.” She listens to the message from the Lord with docility and silence, demonstrating a prompt obedience. Her affective response of being troubled by the angel’s words reveals her modesty. Her thinking on the message shows her sound judgment—the Seat of Wisdom herself thinking about Wisdom.
In these two short verses, we find so much to reflect on. The character of the Virgin Mary is shown to us. Her virtues are made manifest and we begin to see how God prepared her for this heroic moment for which she was destined. This scene should console us when the world seems to be spinning out of control, that the Lord is sovereign over history. He has a plan even when we do not. In addition, the Virgin Mary shines through in this moment as worthy of our veneration and imitation. We ought to imitate her dignity, virtue and charity in the moral life and her hearing, affection and thought in the spiritual life. [1]
[1] Summary by Mark Giszczak with the use of Bonaventure, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke: Chapters 1–8, trans. and ed. Robert J. Karris, Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. VIII, Part I (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2001) 64–68. Text of Lk. 1:28 ESVCE modified slightly to reflect Bonaventure’s commentary.
This selection is taken from chapters 33-34 of The Life of Saint Benedict by Gregory the Great. St. Benedict (d. 547) is considered the founder of Western monasticism, and many forms of religious life find their root in The Rule of St. Benedict. In this beloved story from near the end of his life, Benedict’s sister Scholastica shows him (and us) that charity is the end of the rule, and sometimes even trumps the letter of the rule.
GREGORY:What man is there, Peter, in this world, that is has found greater favor with God than St. Paul, who yet three times desired our Lord to be delivered from the prick of the flesh, and obtained not his petition (cf. 2 Cor. 12:8)? Concerning such a point I must also tell you, about one thing which the venerable father Benedict would have done, and yet he could not.
For his sister called Scholastica, dedicated from her infancy to our Lord, used once a year to come and visit her brother. The man of God went to her at a place that belonged to the Abbey not far from the gate, and entertained her there. And when she came there at her accustomed time, her venerable brother with his monks went to meet her, where they spent the whole day in the praises of God and spiritual talk: and when it was almost night they supped together, and they were still sitting at the table, talking of devout matters, and darkness came on, the holy Nun his sister entreated him to stay there all night, that they might spend it in discoursing of the joys of heaven. But by no persuasion would Benedict agree to that, saying that he might not by any means stay all night out of his Abbey.
At that time, the sky was so clear that no cloud was to be seen. The Nun, receiving this denial of her brother, joining her hands together, laid them upon the table: and so, bowing down her head upon them, she made her prayers to almighty God: and lifting her head from the table, there fell suddenly such a tempest of lightning and thundering, and such abundance of rain, that neither venerable Benedict, nor his monks that were with him, could put their head out of door: for the holy Nun, resting her head upon her hands, poured forth such a flood of tears upon the table, that she drew the clear air to a watery sky, so that after the end of her devotions, that storm of rain followed: and her prayer and the rain did so meet together, that as she lifted up her head from the table, the thunder began, so that in one and the very same instant, she lifted up her head and brought down the rain. The man of God, seeing that he count not, because such thunder and lightning and great abundance of rain, return back to his Abbey, began to be heavy and to complain of his sister, saying: "God forgive you, what have you done?" to whom she answered: "I desired you to stay, and you would not hear me, I have desired our good Lord, and he has granted my petition: therefore if you can now depart, in God's name return to your monastery, and leave me here alone."
But the good father, being not able to go forth, stayed there against his will, where willingly before he would not stay. And so by that means they watched all night, and with spiritual and heavenly talk did mutually comfort one another: and therefore by this we see, as I said before, that he would have had that thing, which yet he could not: for if we respect the venerable man's mind, no question but he would have had the same fair weather to have continued as it was, when he set forth, but he found that a miracle did prevent his desire, which, by the power of almighty God, a woman's prayers had brought about. And it is not an incredible thing, that a woman who had not seen her brother for a long time, could do more at that time than Benedict could, according to the saying of St. John, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Therefore, rightly she did more who loved more.
PETER:I confess that I am wonderfully pleased with that which you tell me.
GREGORY:The next day the venerable woman returned to her convent, and the man of God to his Abbey: who three days after, standing in his cell, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, beheld the soul of his sister (which was departed from her body), in the likeness of a dove to ascend into heaven. He rejoiced much to see her great glory, with hymns and lauds gave thanks to almighty God, and did impart the news of this her death to his monks, whom also he sent presently to bring her corpse to his Abbey, to have it buried in that grave which he had provided for himself. Therefore it happened that as their souls were always one in God while they lived, so their bodies continued together after their death.
Translation from Tertullian.org (in the public domain), with minor modifications by Elizabeth Klein.
“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
St. Thérèse of Lisieux uses this gospel passage to help her interpret one of the most dramatic events in her young life. In her The Story of a Soul she tells of how she went to Rome at the age of fifteen and was granted an audience with pope Leo XIII. While there, she begged the pope that he would allow her to enter religious life with the Carmelites despite her young age. Because Luke 12:32 had been the gospel reading at Mass that day, she felt sure that the pope would grant her request. Instead, the pope told her to obey her superiors, saying “go… go … you will enter if God wills it.”
This experience led her to interpret Luke 12:32 in light of Luke 22:28-29 (“You are those who have stayed with me in my trials, and I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom”). Thérèse comes to understand that the kingdom that God wishes to give is the kingdom won on the cross. Or as she puts it: “in other words, I reserve crosses and trials for you and it is thus you will be worthy of possessing the kingdom after which you long; since it was necessary that Christ suffer and that he enter through it into his glory.” God, through the words of the pope, wanted to give her the kingdom by presenting her with the chalice of the Lord’s passion, the suffering of obedience.
But Thérèse does not thereby interpret the words of Jesus as having only a kind of abstract or future fulfillment. She really does receive the earthly kingdom she was seeking, which she understood as the “kingdom of Carmel.” She later came to see the pope’s parting words as prophetic and as revealing the true meaning of that gospel passage: “in spite of all obstacles, what God willed was really accomplished. He did not allow creatures to do what they willed but what he willed.” The Father’s good pleasure was for little Thérèse to receive both the kingdom of Carmel and the kingdom of heaven, but by way of the cross.[1]
[1] Summary by Elizabeth Klein with the use of Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, 133–136.
In 1864, Frédéric Le Play published his magnum opus, Social Reform in France, which offered a comprehensive response to the progressive social theories of the Enlightenment rooted in his extensive sociological studies of multi-generational families in Eastern Europe. The following selection is reprinted from Critics of the Enlightenment (ISI Books, 2004), which is due to be released later this year in a second edition by Cluny Media.
I shall refute two theories—mutually opposed and equally erroneous—that would compromise social reform either by giving us exaggerated confidence or by casting us into despair.
According to the first opinion, man is naturally led to the good, and it suffices to leave human societies freely to follow their propensities for progress to occur. And because the facts thwart this theory, it is supplemented by declaring the government to be the source of evil and always inclined to pervert the individual tendency to good. This view concludes by declaring that we can throw ourselves confidently into those revolutions that remove the popular masses from the influence of the ruling classes.
The two connected ideas on which this first theory is founded—the original perfection of individuals and the beneficent influence of revolutions—seem to me to be refuted by the observation of human nature and the events of the past two centuries. Evil is not introduced to the world only by governments, for the people who are best preserved from evils are precisely those who have had the least recourse to revolutions. Evil is born chiefly in the ignorance and depraved instincts of the younger generations. It is incontestable that the nations in whom the movement of progress is the most marked in our day are those whose social organization permits them effectively to combat this permanent source of corruption through education and the ascendancy of the mature and the elderly. Progress can only be obtained under these conditions. Surely it is slowed or compromised when the ruling classes cede to the causes of corruption brought on by prosperity, especially the influence of wealth, and do not rest upon the heights of their mission. Yet this is impossible in any society in which the new generations are abandoned to their natural propensities. The state of nature, so highly extolled at the end of the last century, is a chimerical idea conceived outside of all methodical observation. As to revolutions, they can be a heroic remedy for the people when the ruling classes have fallen into corruption. But they are only fruitful upon the condition of being immediately followed by a long period of good morals and stable government. This truth is to be seen in the success that the English have attained since 1688 and by our hard trials since the end of the last century.
Unlike the first, the second opinion does not spring from a false principle, but it deduces false consequences from a true principle. Accepting that the propensity to evil is inseparable from human nature, it infers that the nations are, in the long run, condemned to decadence and destruction as fatally as our individual lives are bound to decrepitude and death. According to the common expression, there are young nations with a long future before them, and there are old ones that have accomplished a certain mission in the work of universal civilization and must now be extinguished. The former have firm religious beliefs, leadership by elders, frugal and simple customs, physical strength and martial courage, and, finally, a power of expansion that makes their race overflow its native region through conquest or colonization. In the latter, the opposite characteristics are found: religious indifference, disdain for elders and relaxation of family bonds, the abuse of luxury and wealth, sterility and the physical weakening of the race, and the inability to populate its colonies and recruit for its armies. A fatality that man cannot master obliges nations to pass successively through these two states, just as water from a spring must travel past all the banks of the river until it reaches the ocean. This image is frequently reproduced in our common language to affirm that no nation can swim against the tide of civilization.
While at first sight this theory is more in conformity with history than the first, it is nevertheless falsified by reason and experience. In the first place, it is evident that the equation made between individuals and societies cannot be adopted in its literal sense, because societies do not age, but remain in absolute conditions of stability so far as the age of their members is concerned. Yet the state of equilibrium that is spontaneously produced in physical organization always tends to be upset in the moral and intellectual order. For death harvests the mature and elderly, and therefore constantly deprives society of the treasures of wisdom and experience, while birth tends constantly to infuse these same societies with original barbarism. This cause of decadence acts equally upon all peoples, while the first weighs especially upon the most advanced. How many times have those of us who have lived a half-century had to groan to see extinguished by death those good men who are the principal vital forces of the country! The most perfect societies are evidently those which, under this double influence, have the most to lose and the least to gain; they are, consequently, the most exposed to decline. Yet this difficulty is not insoluble, and it does not increase with the number of centuries in a nation’s history. To the extent a people elevates itself, it is more exposed to decline, but it will find in its successes new forces by which to resist corruption and thus preserve itself from decadence. Many populations without histories or recently implanted upon a virgin soil cannot escape barbarism, while the oldest European nations are able to keep themselves in the first rank. Others, such as Spain and Italy, after having languished for centuries, give new testimonies to their youth and vitality. The possession of a glorious past, far from being a cause of weakness in them, is, on the contrary, a source for renewal. The special object of this work is to seek the forces that allow nations to progress and reform, and I will prove that these are especially found in those social regimes in which each citizen has the power to overcome the original vice of his children and to transmit to them the habits of work and virtue created by their elders. For the moment I will merely note that this task is no more difficult for the old imperial nations than it is for their newest colonies.
In conclusion, nations, like individuals, enjoy freedom. They are fatally bound neither to good nor to evil, and we cannot discern in the history of any nation the necessary succession of youth or progress by old age or decadence. Whatever their past may have been, they remain the masters of their own future. They may always expect success, even after a long period of abasement, if they once again observe the moral laws, while their prosperity will come to an end as soon as they let these laws fall into neglect.
The life of St. Francis of Assisi has produced some of the most colorful and inspiring stories in the Catholic tradition. One of the most famous recounts his mystical experience at the chapel of San Damiano. As he had looked for Christ among the ruined humanity of lepers, so he looked for Christ among the ruined structure of an abandoned chapel. Asking for guidance on how best to serve the Lord, Francis heard Jesus speak to him from a tattered, Byzantine-style crucifix: “Francis, do you not see that my house is falling into ruins? Go, then, and repair it for love of me.” Francis set about rebuilding the chapel and eventually established a convent for women religious adjacent to it. Early commentators such as St. Bonaventure were quick to see in Christ’s words to Francis a broader, spiritual metaphor: “the Church that the voice was pointing out to him was the one that Christ purchased for himself by his blood.”[1] Bonaventure was no doubt correct to see in Francis something much more than an amateur stone mason, but his gloss points to a persistent tension between theology and culture, a tendency for universal theology to overpower the particularity of culture. That St. Francis wrote so little and fulfilled his mission by having the wounds of Christ written on his own body stands as the most powerful rebuke to theological abstraction. We moderns, alas, tend to be more comfortable with abstractions, a theology of the cross rather than the cross itself. San Damiano is a metaphor; it is also stones. Catholic culture today needs fewer metaphors and more stones.
Catholics in America once grew up surrounded by stones. The stones of their churches, the stones of their schools, the stones of the industrial city. That this Catholic life coincided with what is now often referred to as “pre-Vatican II Catholicism” should not lead us to confuse it with the life-style of those who currently claim to defend “pre-Vatican II Catholicism.” Those longing for the supposed certainty and unity of the past rarely know anything of the life lived by urban Catholics in the decades before the Council. The relative lack of popular theological conflict during that period reflected less theological uniformity than the priority of an alternative source of faith. Let us call this source, in a word, stones: the physical, geographic life of living in a neighborhood where all of one’s material and spiritual needs were met within walking distance, where churches rubbed up against factories, schools against grocery stores, libraries next to movie theaters. And bars, bars everywhere.
The concentration of so much of life in a small space indeed fostered insularity, even a kind of tribalism; the sociologist Herbert Gans titled his early 1960s study of a neighborhood of Italian Catholics in Boston, The Urban Villagers. Still the geographic dislocations of American life since World War II have not diminished tribalism so much as forced its migration to other locations, most especially “social media”—virtual “communities” possessing all the vices of the tribe with few of the virtues of authentic community.
The world of the Catholic urban village rarely makes it into the debates that animate contemporary Catholic cultural commentary. Sadly, so many of those best able to tell the story of this world, especially those who came of age in the 1960s, left the Church as adults. I was, nonetheless, pleasantly surprised recently to find unsought evidence for the enduring hold of this world on at least one famous ex-Catholic, Bruce Springsteen. A couple of years ago, I found myself watching the Tony Awards. Just at the point when I believed I had fulfilled my obligation to be aware of the current state of Broadway’s cultural depravity, the stage cleared, leaving only a man and a piano. Bruce Springsteen performed an excerpt from his Tony Award winning one-man show based on his memoir, Born to Run. Over a simple, hypnotic chord progression, Springsteen spoke:
I grew up on Randolph Street with my sister Virginia, she was a year younger than me, my parents Adele and Douglas, my grandparents Fred and Alice, and my dog Saddle. We lived spitting distance from the Catholic church, the priest's rectory, the nuns’ convent, the Saint Rose of Lima Grammar School, all of it just a football's toss away across the field of wild grass. I literally grew up surrounded by God. Surrounded by God and all my relatives. We had cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, great grandmas, great grandpas, all of us were jammed in five little houses on two adjoining streets. And when the church bells rang, the whole clan would hustle up the street to stand witness to every wedding and every funeral that arrived like a state occasion in our neighborhood. We also had front row seats to watch the townsmen in their Sunday suits carry out an endless array of dark wooden boxes to be slipped in the rear of the Friedman's Funeral Home long black Cadillac for the short ride to Saint Rose cemetery hill on the edge of town. And there all our Catholic neighbors, all the Zirillis, and the McNicholases, and all the Springsteens who came before, they patiently waited for us. Now when it rains in Freehold, when it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets the whole town with the smell of moist coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafe plant on the town's eastern edge. You know, I never cared for coffee, but I loved that smell. It was comforting, it united our town just like our clanging road mill in a common sensory experience. It was a place here, you could hear it, you could smell it.[2]
There is no moral to this story. There is, simply, presence. Springsteen would never be so naïve as to imply that people were better in the Freehold of his youth than they are today; the tone of lament in his recitation simply affirms that people were, for better or for worse, more connected. For Catholic culture, connection is itself a kind of virtue—necessary, not optional, not discretionary.
Still, Springsteen’s loss of faith speaks to the limits of community. As post-World War II American Catholics emerged from their urban enclaves, the communal faith of their childhood simply could not withstand the onslaught of alternative messages—really, alternative faiths—relentlessly promoted by an all-pervasive consumer culture. The experience of American Catholics since the Second Vatican Council shows the need for something deeper than a merely communal faith.
It also reveals the limits of a rigorously internalized, individual faith. Poor catechesis alone cannot explain why so many American Catholics find so little to attract them to the life of the Church. The evangelization of culture must avoid falling into the trap of intellectualism, as if it can be achieved by setting Catholic books, movies, and websites against their secular counterparts. Catholics will, for the foreseeable future, be outgunned in such a battle; more seriously, they will have allowed the secular world to set the terms for the fight. The early Church Father Tertullian famously observed that Christians set themselves apart from the world most powerfully through their way of living. Pagans looked on with amazement and gasped: “See how they love one another.”[3] The post-Christian West has appropriated the word “love” beyond all usefulness as a way to communicate the distinctness of the Christian message. The word “community” may face similar challenges, but the experience of urban Catholicism in America offers correctives to the dangers of abstraction or sentimentality. Would that one day our modern pagans will look on Catholics and say, “See how they live together.” For that day to come, we need to talk less about the Church and more about churches: built to last, built with stones.
[1] These quotations come from Ivan Gobry, Saint Francis of Assisi (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 42-43.[2] Bruce Springsteen, “We Lived in the Shadow of the Steeple,” Tony Awards Performance, 11 June 2018, Radio City Music Hall, New York City, USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3E2ajPN0Wo[3] Quoted in Meg Hunter-Kilmer, “Let People Say of Us, ‘See How They Love One Another!’” https://aleteia.org/2016/06/19/let-people-say-of-us-see-how-they-love-each-other/
“And they went and woke him, saying, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!” And he awoke and rebuked the wind and the raging waves, and they ceased, and there was a calm. He said to them, “Where is your faith?” And they were afraid, and they marveled, saying to one another, “Who then is this, that he commands even winds and water, and they obey him?”
In this scene from the Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are in a boat crossing the lake of Gennesaret. On the journey, the Lord falls asleep. Luke vividly describes the storm they encounter: “a windstorm came down on the lake, and they were filling with water and were in danger” (Lk. 8:23). Speaking to his congregation, St. Augustine spiritually interprets the passage, reminding them that each detail in the story is symbolic. The boat represents both the Church and the soul of a Christian who has Christ dwelling interiorly. So then, what do the wind and the raging waves signify in the story? Augustine tells his audience and, by extension, us: “you have heard an insult – it’s a high wind; you’ve got angry – it’s a wave. So as the wind blows and waves break, the boat is in peril.” There is a real danger for us here, just as for the disciples, for “your heart is in peril, your heart is tossed about.”
Augustine points out that often our initial reaction to these accusations and insults is to retaliate and seek revenge. Yet he warns that if we give in to these thoughts it will lead to shipwreck in our spiritual lives. The doctor of the Church diagnoses that our desire for reprisal is “because Christ is asleep” in us; we have “forgotten Christ.” The solution to our ailment is to “wake Christ up, remember Christ; let Christ stay awake...” When we experience temptation to sin, symbolized by the biting wind and the buffeting waves, Augustine tells us that this is the moment to awaken Christ. Christ is the one whom the winds and water obey; he is the one who can still our hearts in the midst of trial and protect us from danger. To successfully navigate the sea of life, let us not despair but “let’s wake up Christ, and so sail in on a calm sea, and reach our home country”[1]
[1] Summary by Ben Akers with the use of Augustine, s. 63 in Essential Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 2007), 101–102.
“Jesus said, ‘Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.’”
This saying of Jesus about forsaking the world for his sake and receiving great rewards in return appears in three of the gospels (see also Matt. 19:29 and Lk. 19:29-30). St. Teresa of Ávila focuses her attention on the claim worded most emphatically in Mark’s gospel that those rewards will not only be in eternal life but “now in this time.” Teresa clings to Jesus’ promise with confidence, urging us: “let us not cease to believe that even in this life God gives the hundredfold.”
But what does Teresa mean by this statement? Is she a sixteenth-century version of the prosperity gospel, telling us that God is going to give us every material comfort in this life? Certainly not! Her reflection on this gospel passage comes from her own experience of knowing the sweetness of God even in the midst of many hardships. She explains that what the Lord means by saying that we will obtain the hundredfold in this life is that those who detach themselves from the things of this world dispose themselves to receive God more and more fully. She uses the following analogy to describe how those who make progress in the spiritual life can receive the hundredfold even though the gift God gives of himself is always the same: “since what is given to those who are further advanced is totally the same as that given to them in the beginning, we can compare it to food that many persons eat. Those who eat just a little are left only with a good taste in their mouth for a short while; those who eat more, receive nourishment; those who eat a great deal receive life and strength.”
Teresa’s reflection on this gospel passage should help us share her confidence. When we sacrifice for the sake of the gospel and give up the things of this world to follow Christ more closely, then we work up an appetite for God’s love, to use her analogy. We move from having only a taste of God’s goodness, to a full course meal that can sustain us. According to Teresa, the hundredfold of which Jesus speaks is the Lord himself, given to us more and more as we make room to receive him.[1]
[1] Summary by Elizabeth Klein with the use of St. Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life 22.15–16, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Ávila vol. 1 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1987), 199.
“And they came and said to him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone’s opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?’ But, knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, ‘Why put me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.’ And they brought one. And he said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?’ They said to him, ‘Caesar’s.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ And they marveled at him.”
St. Augustine in a short homily gives us a succinct interpretation of this passage, which highlights the wisdom of Christ in answering his opponents. The question put to Christ, says Augustine, was meant to trap him. If he denied that taxes should be paid, then he would be branded an instigator, someone who was bent on causing trouble for the established authorities. However, if he affirmed that taxes ought to be paid, he would be deemed a traitor to Jerusalem and a friend of Rome.
Jesus avoids this political conundrum by pointing his opponents towards a deeper truth, one beyond the realities of worldly power. By drawing attention to Caesar’s image on the coin, Jesus asks a question about belonging and about the ordering of our priorities – these men are worried about a coin bearing Caesar’s image, but not about their own souls which ought to bear God’s image. According to Augustine, it is as if Christ had said “if Caesar can look for his image in a coin, is God not to look for his image in a man?” Augustine adds an additional dimension to the analogy: just as Caesar’s image on a coin is worn down with improper use, so also the image of God in our souls is worn down and effaced by sin. Jesus, in avoiding his opponent’s snare is also showing that he is “the master of the mint” who has come to “strike the coins afresh … by pardoning sins with grace; and he will show you that God is looking for his image.”[1]
[1] Summary by Elizabeth Klein with the use of Augustine s. 229W in Sermons vol. 6, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1993), 342.
In 1817, Louis de Bonald published a slim volume written in imitation of Blaise Pascal, Pensées Divers, or Thoughts on Various Subjects. The following selection from Bonald’s Thoughts is reprinted from Critics of the Enlightenment (ISI Books, 2004), which is due to be released later this year in a second edition by Cluny Media.
The cry “Liberty, equality, fraternity or death!” was much in vogue during the Revolution. Liberty ended by covering France with prisons, equality by multiplying titles and decorations, and fraternity by dividing us. Death alone prevailed.
Even after the example of France, Europe lacks one last lesson. Woe to the people destined to give it to her!
The most beautiful monuments executed in Paris under Bonaparte’s orders are the rue de Rivoli, the rue de la Paix, and la place du Carrousel. For these he had only to demolish, and he was in his element.
Revolutions have proximate and material causes that capture the attention of the less attentive. These causes are really only occasions. The true causes, the profound and efficacious causes, are moral ones, which small minds and corrupt men fail to see. A shock, they say, a sudden storm has toppled the edifice: doubtless true. Yet the walls had long since lost their stability. You believe that a financial deficit was the cause of the Revolution. Dig deeper and you will find a deficit in the very principles of the social order.
Happy England, she has preserved her old sentiments alongside, or rather in spite of, her institutions. In France, we labored to remove our sentiments before changing our institutions. The English Revolution was an accident; ours was a system.
In olden days in France, our manners were lighthearted and our minds serious. The Revolution changed all that. It made our minds superficial and our manners grave. Today we have neither reason nor joy.
Our tone of voice in conversation has become lower and our expression less frank and more studied to the point that we now have less good faith in our opinions and less strength of character. One might say that we not only fear to be understood, but even to be heard.
In a time when only graceful manners and charm are praised, one only finds strong characters, manly virtues, and steady minds by chance.
Wherever there are many machines to take the place of men, many men will be mere machines. The effect of machines, in sparing men, must be to diminish the population.
In every society there are more domestic sorrows to the extent that there are more public pleasures. In olden times, there was less pleasure and more happiness.
A mind employed to corrupt is nothing other than force employed to destroy.
It is difficult for the father of a family not to regard as a personal enemy the author of a bad book that brings corruption into the heart of his children.
A man must read many books to furnish his memory, but when he wants to form solid taste and good style, he should read few of them. The immense quantity of books makes us read more, and, among the society of the dead as among that of the living, an overextended acquaintance does not leave enough time for good friendships to form.
Fashions change ceaselessly in a people that no longer has morals, in the broadest sense of the term.
He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”
In the first scene of the fourth gospel, John the Baptist is questioned by the priests and Levites as to his identity and his mission. To answer them he employs an image from an important prophecy from the book of Isaiah (cf. Isa. 40:3): he is the voice preparing the way of the Lord. This passage declares the good news that Israel has been longing to hear. A messenger in the desert will signal that this is the appointed time of consolation and comfort. This is the moment that God is coming to visit his people (cf. Isa. 40-66). To draw out the meaning of this image of the “voice,” St. Augustine asks us to reflect on the relation between the voice and the word in our everyday speech. The message or word that is spoken by us first begins in the heart of the individual. The person then seeks to communicate it to another “so that what is already in my in my mind may also be found in yours,” as Augustine phrases it. What makes this exchange possible is the sound of the voice. Although the sound dissipates once the word is uttered, the spoken truth remains both in the heart of the one who speaks and in the hearer. Augustine sees this reality as symbolic of the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus. John is the voice and Christ is the Word. John’s ministry is the voice of one breaking the silence so that Christ, the Word, might be received in the hearts of believers. Despite this exalted ministry, the Baptist’s work is one of humility. At the height of his apostolic activity, John does not seek to grow his own ministry apart from the Incarnate Word. He is content directing others to Christ. He aims to make Christ known as he himself fades into the background. Augustine praises John’s clarity in mission: “he identified himself, he pointed out the difference between the Christ and himself, he humbled himself.” In our Christian life, we need to imitate St. John the Baptist. Whether it be on our lips or in our hearts, we echo the words of the Baptist: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn. 3:30).[1]
[1] Summary by Ben Akers with the use of Augustine, s. 293.3 in Sermons vol. 8, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1994), 150.
Could it be part of a Catholic’s duty to read works of sociology? As a professor of theology most of whose students work as evangelists and catechists, I believe that I should. As St. Paul taught, it belongs to the work of the evangelist to “become all things to all people” and to “do it all for the sake of the gospel” (1 Cor 9:22–23). It is as true today as it was in the thirteenth century that quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur—“whatever is received, is received after the manner of the recipient.” The evangelist must know something about those he hopes to evangelize, and sociology promises insight into their views. Mindful of that duty, and having benefited greatly in the past from the work of sociologists such as Christian Smith, I turned to Tim Clydesdale and Kathleen Garces-Foley’s The Twentysomething Soul: Understanding the Religious and Secular Lives of American Young Adults (Oxford, 2019).
At the same time, the limitations and potential pitfalls of sociology were also on my mind when I read the book, due to two occasions in 2019 when reports of survey results concerning religion sent the media and Catholic opinion into convulsions. In the spring, it was announced that the 2018 General Social Survey (GSS) had revealed that the religiously unaffiliated, popularly known as “Nones,” now make up 23.1% of the population of the United States. This figure appeared consistent with the Nones’ meteoric rise over the last three decades. The Nones had seemingly caught up with Catholics and Evangelicals. Some, however, questioned mainstream interpretations of this data. It was pointed out that some journalists had erroneously equated Nones with atheists (most Nones do not self-identify as atheists). It was also observed that although there is good reason to recognize ours as a period of religious decline, there is little evidence of a major drop-off in fervor among the fervent. In other words, the new Nones are largely not yesterday’s committed believers but instead yesterday’s nominal box-checkers—those who had vaguely identified with their grandparents’ religious tradition despite its irrelevance to their way of life. It would be wrong to dismiss the GSS finding as a non-story, but it does seem that its significance was widely misconstrued.
Late summer saw another apparently momentous study hit the headlines. According to Pew Research, fewer than a third of US Catholics believe the Church’s teaching on transubstantiation. If accurate, this would seem—based on earlier studies, whose accuracy may themselves be questioned—to indicate a drop of nearly 30% in a mere eight years. Once again, however, close examination of the data gave good reason to suspect that the findings were being misinterpreted. Mark M. Gray of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) noted that the wording of the survey was potentially misleading. In addition, the “US Catholics” in question are all “self-described Catholics.” That would include those who rarely or never attend Mass. It would thus be wrong to conclude, as some did, that the study meant that only 31% of Catholics at Sunday Mass believed in the Real Presence. It is evident, then, that if evangelists are to profit from sociological studies, they must look beyond the headlines and ask careful questions about data and methods.
Both of these sensational findings and the considerations that rendered them questionable were fresh in my mind when I began reading The Twentysomething Soul. In differing ways, the book confirmed my misgivings about popular reporting on sociology. Near the beginning, the authors summarize the “major claims” they wish to make. The most interesting of these have to do with religious stances that prove unstable over time. Some Nones are proponents of “philosophical secularism.” Yet it turns out that philosophical secularism tends to atrophy outside universities and urban centers. Journalists often use “None” as if it meant atheist or principled agnostic. In fact, Nones are most likely to be “Indifferent Secularists,” who simply devote little attention to religious or philosophical questions (54%). Another third of Nones are either “Unaffiliated Believers,” who think there is a personal God but do not identify with any religious tradition, or “Spiritual Eclectics,” who find “spiritual growth” important but do not belong to a faith community (17% apiece). Only 12% of Nones qualify, on Clydesdale and Garces-Foley’s telling, as “Philosophical Secularists.” It is also noteworthy that Clydesdale and Garces-Foley confirm something we might have intuited: those who are only “tepidly affiliated”—who attend services inconsistently, who pray sometimes but not regularly—tend to slide over time towards disaffiliation. The center does not hold (see Lk 11:23).
Both insights from The Twentysomething Soul—the minority status among Nones of philosophical secularists and the fragility of nominal religious affiliation—confirm the need for circumspection over breathless headlines about the rise of the Nones and the decline of religious faith. The Twentysomething Soul is thus a salutary corrective to popular interpretations of the GSS finding mentioned above.
Nonetheless, The Twentysomething Soul suffers from some of the methodological difficulties that beset the Pew study on Catholics and the Eucharist. First, categorization of religious identity is among the thorniest problems that sociologists of religion face, and Clydesdale and Garces-Foley’s admirably transparent “Methodological Appendix” shows that this task presented an enormous obstacle to their project. Second, the wording of several of the survey items in the National Study of American Twentysomethings (NSAT), the centerpiece of the authors’ data collection, raises doubts about their validity—that is, their success in measuring exactly what they are intended to measure.
Finally, the usefulness of The Twentysomething Soul may be diminished by the age of the data. The volume was released in August 2019, but the data that inform it were collected between 2006 and 2014, with the NSAT being administered in 2013. Many of the individuals whom the authors studied, and whom they present in the book as “today’s twentysomethings,” are in fact by now thirtysomethings, and a few are likely in their forties. The rapidity and volatility of cultural shift in the 2010s was considerable, to say the least, and 2020’s foot seems to be firmly planted on the accelerator. Data as fresh and precise as possible are a special desideratum in such times.
Shortcomings of the present volume aside, it is an example of the kind of work that evangelists and catechists may find it useful to read for the sake of the gospel, provided they are prepared to sift what they read patiently and judiciously.
Now, one should note that many things are set down here about the beatitudes. . . Yet one should know that all complete happiness is included in these words: for all men desire happiness, but they differ in their judgments about happiness, and for this reason some men desire this, others desire that.
But we find four opinions about happiness. For some believe that it consists only in exterior things: namely, in an abundance of temporal things; “they have called the people happy, that have these things” (Ps 144:15). Others, that perfect beatitude consists in the fact that a man fulfills his own will; hence we say, blessed is he who lives as he wants. “And I have known that there was no better thing than to rejoice, and to do well in this life” (Eccl 3:12). Others say that perfect beatitude consists in the virtues of the active life. Others, that it consists in the virtues of the contemplative life, namely of divine and intelligible things, as Aristotle says.
But all these opinions are false, although not in the same way. Hence the Lord condemns all these.
He condemns the opinion of those who say that it consists in the abundance of exterior things: hence, he says, “blessed are the poor” (Matt 5:3) as though to say, the wealthy are not happy.
And he condemns the opinion of those who place beatitude in the satisfaction of appetite when he says, “blessed are the merciful” (Matt 5:7).
But one should know that there are three appetites in man. The irascible, which desires vengeance on enemies, and he condemns this when he says, “blessed are the meek” (Matt 5:5). The concupiscible, whose good is to rejoice and be delighted; he condemns this when he says, “blessed are they who mourn” (Matt 5:4). The will, which is twofold, according as it seeks two things: first, that the will be forced by no higher law; second, that it be able to bind others as subjects: hence it desires to command, and not to be under another. But the Lord shows the contrary regarding both. And regarding the first, he says, “blessed are they who hunger and thirst after justice” (Matt 5:6). Regarding the second, he says, “blessed are the merciful” (Matt 5:7). Therefore both those who place beatitude in the abundance of exterior things and those who place it in the satisfaction of appetite are wrong.
Those, however, who place beatitude in the actions of the active life, namely, in moral acts, are wrong, but less so, because that is the way to beatitude. Hence the Lord does not condemn them as though evil, but shows the ordering to beatitude. Because the virtues of the active life are either ordered to oneself, such as temperance and others of this kind, and their end is cleanness of heart, because they enable one to conquer the passions; or they are ordered to another, and so their end is peace, and of this kind: “the work of justice will be peace” (Isa 32:17). And therefore these virtues are ways to beatitude, and not beatitude itself; and this is “blessed are the clean of heart: for they will see God” (Matt 5:8). He does not say, “they see,” because this would be beatitude itself. And similarly, “blessed are the peacemakers” (Matt 5:9) not because they make peace, but because they tend toward something else: “for they will be called children of God.”
Now, the opinion of those who say that beatitude consists in the contemplation of divine things is condemned by the Lord only as to the timing, for otherwise it is true; because the last happiness does consist in the vision of the best intelligible, namely God; hence he says, “they will see.”
And one should note that, according to the Philosopher, two things are required for the contemplative act to make one happy: one has to do with the substance, namely, that it be the act of the highest intelligible, which is God; the other has to do with form, namely love and delight, for delight perfects happiness just as beauty perfects youth. And therefore the Lord sets down two things, “they will see God” (Matt 5:8) and “they will be called children of God” (Matt 5:9) for this pertains to the union of love. Behold what manner of charity the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called, and should be the sons of God (1 John 3:1).
Commentary on Matthew, 5.2.404–408. Cited from https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~Matt.C5.L2.n404
“And Jesus went with them. When he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends, saying to him, ‘Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Therefore I did not presume to come to you. But say the word, and let my servant be healed. For I too am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, “Go,” and he goes; and to another, “Come,” and he comes; and to my servant, “Do this,” and he does it. When Jesus heard these things, he marveled at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, said, ‘I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.’”
The story of the centurion and his sick servant is full of meaning on several levels, and usually when we read this story we tend to focus, and rightly, on the centurion. His faith is remarkable, and even more remarkable is what Jesus points out: this Gentile’s faith exceeds that of God’s chosen people.
St. Thomas Aquinas helps to draw our attention to a detail that might otherwise go under appreciated: “When Jesus heard these things, he marveled” (Lk. 7:9). The Greek word for marveled can be also be translated as “was amazed” or “was filled with wonder.” This reaction is a beautiful one, not only for highlighting the centurion’s faith, but also for redirecting our gaze to the figure of Christ. As St. Thomas points out, “We experience wonder in the face of those things whose causes we do not know.” Wonder is a distinctly human phenomenon, precisely because it involves the combination of knowing something and being ignorant of the reasons for it, and this combination is only possible for the finite intellectual capacity that human beings possess.
By attributing this phenomenon of marveling to Christ, Thomas sees the gospel affirming that Christ really was human and, just like us, experienced that quintessentially human experience of wonder. Moreover, by affirming the true humanity of Christ, the gospel also affirms our humanity and can help us recall what we are made for: we are made to stand before the truth and to pursue it ever more deeply, and it is wonder that arouses us to this pursuit, leads us to persevere, and awakens in us the delight that only wisdom can bring.[1]
[1] Summary by Scott Hefelfinger with the use of Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV.33.5, trans. Charles J. O’Neil (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1975 [1957]), 162.
Recently, while reading through the book of Exodus, I came to the passage that describes the Israelites receiving the manna from heaven during their desert wanderings. I must have read this verse a hundred times before, but something new caught my eye:
Now the house of Israel called its name manna. It was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey (Ex. 16:31).
As a novice gardener, the detail that the manna was like coriander seed suddenly stood out to me. Coriander seed, the seed of the herb cilantro, is not special in any way that I could think of at first blush. A small, brown and wrinkly seed of spherical shape, it does not have any characteristic that would seem to fit nicely into the biblical narrative. The taste of the food being likened to honey seems significant enough; honey was a delicacy in the ancient world (one of the only sweeteners) and the manna was also to be a foretaste of the promised land to which the Israelites were travelling, a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Ex. 3:17). But why is the manna said to be “like coriander seed”? And if the manna tasted like honey, in what way was it “like” coriander? Not in color, it seems, as the book of Numbers tells us:
Now the manna was like coriander seed, and its appearance like that of bdellium (Num. 11:7).
Bdellium is white, unlike the brown coriander seed (the relationship between manna and a white stone also appears in Rev. 2:17). It seems, therefore, that taking Exodus and Numbers together we can conclude that the manna was like coriander neither in taste (which was like honey) nor in appearance (which was as bdellium). What, then, can we make of this strange reference to coriander? Searching through commentaries, much to my chagrin, it seemed that this detail is usually passed over without a comment. But how could it be that the reference to honey was considered to be a noteworthy detail, and yet the coriander was deemed irrelevant? Following my curiosity about coriander, as it turned out, was an instructive lesson in biblical translation and about the effort we must make to access the world of the Bible and its images.
Reading further into scholarship on the plants of the Bible, one option presented itself: to suggest that the translators have simply misidentified the seed. Despite the seemingly smooth translation of the passage to English readers of the Bible, scholars of the Old Testament often have to make an educated guess when it comes to plants, animals and agricultural terms that might only appear once in the whole Old Testament and that are references belonging an agrarian society thousands of years old. The word coriander, in fact, appears only in the passages cited in Exodus and Numbers. Having no comparison for the word in Hebrew, then, translators must rely on the early Latin and Greek translations to corroborate the meaning of the word.
This option appears most logical to German scholar Immanuel Löw, who wrote a veritable magnum opus in German on the plants of the Bible (called Die Flora der Juden, in four volumes). He argues that the Hebrew word refers not to coriander, but to “tamarisk manna.” Tamarisk manna is a secretion left on the tamarisk tree by insects, which solidifies into a thick, sweet substance. He provides a long linguistic case for why this confusion might have taken place, and the theory that the biblical manna is related to tamarisk manna seems to have gained some traction, despite the fact that tamarisk manna does not have many of the features of biblical manna (perhaps, most notably, it cannot be ground and made into cakes; cf. Num. 11:8).
To me, however, the possibility of a mistranslation does not seem very likely. Unlike many other plants or agricultural words, all of the early sources we have – the Septuagint (an early Greek translation of the Old Testament), the Vulgate (an early Latin translation of the Bible) and the Samaritan Pentateuch (an alternate attestation to the Old Testament in Samaritan characters) all report that the manna was like coriander. In other words, there does not seem to have been any debate among ancient translators about the term. Moreover, coriander was certainly present in Israel and its environs during the time period in which the Old Testament was taking shape, in fact, the oldest known coriander seeds were found there. Whether or not tamarisk manna has some relationship to the manna the Israelites ate in the desert, it still seems that the biblical authors wished to liken it to coriander.
There are other options to make sense of this reference to coriander, and perhaps the most obvious is to suggest that the shape of the manna is like that of coriander. Coriander is round, almost a perfect sphere, and few seeds have this nice, globular shape – which might be why this particular seed is invoked to describe the manna. Fourth century author Sulpicius Severus takes the reference to coriander to refer to the physical form of the manna – that it was “a sort of pod…a coriander-seed of snowy whiteness.”[1] There is also at least one rabbinic source (which identifies the seed with flax) that emphasizes that the manna was round.[2] If indeed the shape (and perhaps size) of the manna is indicated by the reference to coriander, it could help to explain the seemingly grain-like quality that allows the manna to be ground into meal.
If the key point of comparison between coriander and manna is roundness, then perhaps the reference can also shed light on the form the Eucharist has taken in the Western tradition. Even in the writings of some of the earliest Christians, the manna is seen as a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. For example, Cyprian of Carthage (3rdcentury bishop) writes: “we see the sacrament celebrated in Exodus, when the manna flowed down from heaven, and, prefiguring the things to come, showed forth the nourishment of the heavenly bread and the food of the coming Christ.”[3] If, then, manna was understood as white, wafer-like and round, and also as the most important type of the Eucharist in the Old Testament, we can also see how those elements could have informed the appearance of the Eucharist in the West. Certainly many artistic representations of the Israelites gathering manna would bring to the mind of a modern Catholic Eucharistic hosts raining down from heaven.
In the end, I was somewhat disappointed that I did not come to some revelation about the deeper significance of the coriander-like manna. But whatever the case may be – whether coriander is a mistranslation, whether it indicates the shape and size of the manna or its preciousness (like that of a fine spice) – the biblical account is not nearly so straightforward or unsophisticated as it might seem at first glance. If we want to understand the Scriptures, which God ordained to be written at particular times and in particular places, we too have to commit ourselves to the particulars and to the discovery of what God has hidden in his word.
[1] Sulpicius Severus, Sacred History, 1.16. Translation from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series, vol. 11[2] See Immanuel Löw, Die Flora der Juden, vol. 1,444.[3] Cyprian of Carthage, ep. 75. Translation from the Ante Nicene Fathers Series, vol. 5.
We need to understand the marvel of the Eucharist—what it is, why it was given, and what is the profit of its celebration: we become one Body, and members of His flesh and of His bones. Let those initiated into the Sacraments follow what I say.
In order then that we may become one Body not only in love but in lived reality, let us be blended into that flesh. This blending is accomplished by the Food which He has freely given us, desiring to show the love He has for us. On this account He has mixed up Himself with us. He has kneaded up His body with ours, that we might be a One thing, like a body joined to a head—for this belongs to those who love strongly. That is why Christ has done this: to lead us to a closer friendship, and to show His love for us. He has granted to those who desire Him not only to see Him, but even to touch, and eat Him, and fix their teeth in His flesh, and to embrace Him, and satisfy all their love.
Let us then return from that Table like lions breathing fire, having become terrible to the devil, thinking about our Head, and about the love which He has shown for us. Parents often entrust their offspring to others to feed. “But I,” He says, “do not do that. I feed you with My own flesh, desiring that you all be nobly born, and holding forth to you good hopes for the future. For He who gives Himself out to you now, will do so much more in the future. I have willed to become your Brother. For your sake I shared in flesh and blood, and in turn I give out to you the flesh and the blood by which I became your kinsman.”
This Blood makes the image of our King flower brilliantly within us, produces unspeakable beauty, and keeps the nobility of our soul from wasting away, watering it continually, and nourishing it. The blood we derive from our normal food does not turn into blood at once, but something else. This Blood does not work that way, but right away waters our souls, and works in them a certain mighty power. This Blood, worthily received, drives away devils and keeps them far away from us, while it calls to us Angels and the Lord of Angels. For wherever they see the Lord’s blood, devils flee, and Angels run together.
This Blood, poured forth, washed clean all the world. This Blood is the salvation of our souls. By it the soul is washed, is made beautiful, and is set on fire. It causes our understanding to be brighter than fire and our soul more sparkling than gold. This Blood was poured forth and made heaven accessible.
Awe-inspiring indeed are the Mysteries of the Church. Awe-inspiring indeed is the Altar. A fountain went up out of Paradise, sending forth physical rivers. From this Table springs up a fountain which sends forth spiritual rivers. By the side of this fountain are planted not fruitless willows, but trees reaching even to heaven, bearing fruit always ripe and unfading. If anyone is scorched with heat, let him come to the side of this fountain and cool his burning. For it quenches drought, and comforts all things that are burnt up, not by the sun, but by the fiery darts of the devil. For it has its beginning from above, and its source is there, from which also its water flows. Many are the streams of that fountain which the Comforter sends forth, and the Son is the Mediator, not holding mattock to clear the way, but opening our minds. This fountain is a fountain of light, spouting forth rays of truth. By it stand the Powers on high looking upon the beauty of its streams, because they more clearly perceive the power of the Eucharistic offerings, and the flashings unapproachable.
For as when gold is being molten if one (if it were possible!) dipped his hand or tongue in it, he would immediately render them golden, so also—but in much greater degree—do the Eucharistic offerings work upon the soul. Fiercer than fire the river boils up, yet it does not burn but only baptizes whatever it lays hold of.
This Blood was ever prefigured of old in the altars and sacrifices of the righteous. This Blood is the price of the world. By this Blood Christ purchased the Church for Himself. By this Blood He has adorned her entirely. Christ has purchased us with His Blood and adorned us with His Blood. Those who share this Blood stand with Angels and Archangels and the Powers that are above, clothed in Christ’s own kingly robe, and having the armor of the Spirit. But I have not yet said the greatest thing: they are clothed with the King Himself.
From St. John Chrysostom, Homily on John 46.3–4, adapted from the NPNF translation by John Sehorn.
A true sacrifice is every work which is done that we may be united to God in holy fellowship, and which has a reference to that supreme good and end in which alone we can be truly blessed. And, therefore even the mercy we show to men, if it is not shown for God's sake, is not a sacrifice. For, although made or offered by man, sacrifice is a divine thing, as those who called it sacrificium meant to indicate.[1] Thus man himself, consecrated in the name of God, and vowed to God, is a sacrifice in so far as he dies to the world that he may live to God.
For this is a part of that mercy which each man shows to himself; as it is written, “Have mercy on your soul by pleasing God” (Sir. 30:24). Our body, too, is a sacrifice when we chasten it by temperance, if we do so as we ought, for God's sake, that we may not yield our bodily members to be instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but to be instruments of righteousness unto God (Rom. 6:13) Exhorting to this sacrifice, the apostle [Paul] says, “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service [i.e. sacrifice]” (Rom. 12:1). If, then, the soul uses the body, which is inferior, as a servant or instrument, and it is a sacrifice to God when it is used rightly, how much more does the soul itself become a sacrifice when it offers itself to God, in order that, being inflamed by the fire of his love, it may receive of His beauty and become pleasing to Him, losing the shape of earthly desire, and being remoulded in the image of permanent loveliness? Indeed, the apostle [Paul] exhorts us to do this, saying, “And be not conformed to this world; but be transformed in the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God” (Rom. 12:2).
Therefore, true sacrifices are works of mercy done to ourselves or to others, and done with a reference to God. And, since works of mercy have no other object than the relief of distress or the conferring of happiness, and since there is no happiness apart from that good of which it is said, “It is good for me to be very near to God” (Ps. 73:28), it follows that the whole redeemed city, that is to say, the congregation or community of the saints, is offered to God as our sacrifice through the great High Priest, who offered Himself to God in His passion for us, that we might be members of this glorious head, according to the form of a servant. For it was this form of a servant that he offered, and in this he was offered, because it is according to it that he is Mediator, in this he is our Priest, in this the Sacrifice.
Accordingly, when the apostle [Paul] had exhorted us to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, our reasonable service, and not to be conformed to the world, but to be transformed in the renewing of our mind, that we might prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God, that is to say, the true sacrifice of ourselves, he says, “For I say, through the grace of God which is given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, according as God has dealt to every man the measure of faith. For, as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another, having gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us” (Romans 12:3-6). So this is the sacrifice of Christians: we, being many, are one body in Christ. And this also is the sacrifice which the Church continually celebrates in the sacrament of the altar, known to the faithful, in which she teaches that she herself is offered in the offering she makes to God.
[1] In Latin, this word literally refers to a sacred action. Excerpt from City of God X.6. Translation taken from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series, with minor modifications by Elizabeth Klein.
“While they were eating, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and giving it to his disciples said, ‘Take and eat; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins.’”
In his famous work, Against Heresies, St. Irenaeus wrote against the heresy of Gnosticism, which denied the goodness of the material creation. To demonstrate the error of the Gnostics, Irenaeus turns to the Eucharist. First, he points out that Jesus gave “directions to His disciples to offer to God the first-fruits of His own, created things” so that “they might be themselves neither unfruitful nor ungrateful.” He goes on to explain: “[Jesus] took that created thing, bread, and gave thanks, and said, ‘This is My body.’ And the cup likewise, which is part of that creation to which we belong, He confessed to be His blood.”
Further commenting on this passage, Irenaeus insists that the Church’s eucharistic celebration fulfills the oracle of the prophet Malachi: “For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be great among the nations, and in every place incense will be offered to my name, and a pure offering” (Mal 1:11). The eucharist—which employs material things—constitutes a “pure offering.”
For Irenaeus, then, Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist directly contradicts the false teaching of the Gnostics, since the sacrament underscores the inherent goodness of the physical world. As Irenaeus would say elsewhere, “Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking.”[1]
[1] Summary by Michael Barber with the use of Irenaeus, Against all Heresies 4.17-18, in Ante Nicene Fathers vol. 1, ed. Alexander Robertson and James Donaldson(Peabody, MA: Henrickson Publishing, 2012 [1885]), 484.
Faith & Culture presents an interview with Fr. Daniel P. Moloney, Ph.D., chaplain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Mercy: What Every Catholic Should Know (Augustine Institute & Ignatius Press, 2020).
FAITH & CULTURE:This book seems wonderfully timed given the Coronavirus crisis. What led you to write it?
FR. DANIEL P. MOLONEY:I wrote the book because I’m convinced that most people don’t understand the concept of mercy. Since mercy is basically the virtue we turn to when things aren’t right, and this fallen world has a lot of imperfection, getting mercy wrong is a big deal. For one thing, it means that we also misunderstand justice, even though we talk about ‘justice’ nonstop in our politics (social justice, economic justice, environmental justice, gender justice, racial justice, etc.). Most people think that justice and mercy are opposites. But if justice is the opposite of mercy, then mercy is unjust! A lot of people believe that there’s something wrong with mercy, especially in those political movements that promote a vision for a more just version of society (a phenomenon which I call in the book “justice-only politics”). But a theory of justice that doesn’t have a coherent account of mercy soon becomes inhumane.
What’s more, the same mistake happens in the Church. People frequently oppose God’s justice to God’s mercy. Sometimes that involves the ancient heresy of Marcionism, which claims that the Old Testament God is justice-only, and the New Testament introduces the merciful Jesus. Of course, that gets the bible wrong: God is called merciful throughout the Old Testament, even when he’s punishing Israel or its enemies; meanwhile the concept of Hell as an eternal punishment for sinners is developed for the first time… in the Gospels by Jesus himself. One of the themes of the book is that we have to be merciful as God the Father is merciful (Luke 6:36), and so we need to start to see how the Father is both merciful and just.
In the book I also talk about a third common mistake, in which Catholic spirituality over the centuries has divided into a spirituality of strictness as opposed to a spirituality of laxity. The advocates of strictness tend to disparage mercy, while the advocates of laxity tend to disparage justice (and occasionally, they also disparage truth, as when people argue that “for pastoral reasons” or reasons of mercy, we should not teach certain controversial doctrines or form people in them). A healthy Catholic spirituality includes both—a great ambition to be holy along with a great spiritual support system to pick us up when we sin or fail.
I wrote the book because I want people to understand that mercy is actually ordered towards justice and holiness, rather than opposed to them.
FAITH & CULTURE:You explain that we can rightly say ‘God is love’ but should not say ‘God is mercy’: why is that distinction important?
FR. DANIEL P. MOLONEY:Mercy is a virtue that responds to something wrong, some privation that those in need of mercy can’t fix on their own. The poor are in need of alms, because they can’t give themselves the money they need; the homeless can’t give themselves a home, so they need someone else to help them; sinners can’t make themselves into saints without God’s help. As I say in the book, if you’re asking for mercy, it’s a sign that you’re having a bad day. And yet, before the Fall, everything was perfect, and so there was no need for mercy. God saw that the world He had created was good, and loved it.
There are a lot of things that we can say about God that are always true because they describe what God is essentially and eternally—those would be things like “God is Justice” “God is Goodness” and “God is Love”. On the other hand, there are some things we can say about God that are true because of God’s actions in creation, and these aren’t eternally true—before God created, one couldn’t say that He was “Creator,” for example, and so to be Creator isn’t part of God’s eternal essence. Mercy is in that second category. If it were the case that God were eternally merciful, then He’d have to be eternally responding to something wrong. But before the universe was created, there was only God—and there’s nothing wrong with God.
Truths about God in that second category, even though they don’t characterize God’s essence, do reveal to us something about God’s essence—after all, God does what he does because of who he is. And so mercy tells us some important things about God. For many people, the experience of God’s mercy confirms to them that God loves them and that God is good and that God is powerful enough to help them when they’re in need. So, yes God is merciful, but no, He’s not mercy itself the way He’s Love itself.
FAITH & CULTURE:Why does Mercy: What Every Catholic Should Know begin with an examination of mercy as a virtue or prerogative of a ruler?
FR. DANIEL P. MOLONEY:Mercy today is often thought to be a religious idea only. But originally the idea came from politics. Julius Ceasar was famous for his clemency towards his political opponents. Augustus Ceasar had the word “clementia” on his shield. The Roman senator and Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a treatise On Mercy to counsel the young emperor Nero on how to be a great ruler like the emperors before him (it must be said, Nero wasn’t a great student). In this older view, good rulers had humane and merciful policies for when things went wrong, while tyrants punished mistakes and failures severely. The ruler who was known for his mercy earned the love of his people, while the tyrant could only rule by fear.
The religious concept of mercy borrows from this political concept—obviously, if God is the greatest king, He would also rule with mercy. But not with a mercy that is opposed to political reality or is something utopian. God’s rule over fallen human persons has many of the same challenges as for anyone who tries to rule over fallen human persons. He cannot govern by fear alone, and He cannot allow leniency to lead to general disorder. I argue that certain lessons we learn from our own social and political lives can help us to understand why even some of the harsher aspects of God’s government in the Old Testament are consistently described as an aspect of His mercy.
That’s why the book goes back and forth between mercy in politics and mercy in God’s plan for salvation. There’s a sense in which mercy is part of the natural law, so that if our policies get mercy wrong, nature—human nature—will resist and we’ll see those policies fail. In the mid-20th century, there was a movement to replace criminal punishment with psychiatric therapy (as depicted in the book A Clockwork Orange). The reformers thought this was a more merciful way of dealing with criminals; however, they got mercy wrong. They assumed that the criminals never had bad wills, but just needed to deal with some problems from their youth—and the crime waves of the 1970s and 80s followed as a consequence. Mercy is supposed to lead to a more just society, a more politically stable and humane society that is well-ordered and that people support willingly. If some conception of mercy doesn’t do that, it’s probably not real mercy.
FAITH & CULTURE:How does the devotion to Divine Mercy relate to the theology of God’s mercy?
FR. DANIEL P. MOLONEY:Devotions are very important in the Catholic Church, in part because they often pack a lot of solid theology into a practice that anyone can adopt. The ancient slogan lex orandi, lex credendi captures this—how we pray reflects and reinforces what we believe. St. Faustina’s devotions to Divine Mercy, as promoted especially by St. John Paul II, have made many people interested in mercy when the culture at large barely talks about it. In my own pastoral practice, I’ll often assign as a penance the chaplet of Divine Mercy, which is especially effective spiritual medicine when someone confesses anger towards a particular person or group. By entering into God’s mercy towards sinners or towards our enemies, we start to look on them with God’s loving eyes, separating the sinner from the sin all the while growing in solidarity with the person—and we grow in mercy towards them as well.
Some people go overboard with St. Faustina’s revelations, elevating them to the level of Scripture. In the book I mention a former parishioner of mine who would claim that, since St. Faustina had visions of Jesus in her prayers, we should treat her Diary as the word of Jesus himself—more important than the catechism, more important than the pope. Pope Benedict XVI addressed this sort of argument in an interesting reflection on the Third Secret of Fatima. He says that part of the problem comes from calling such supernatural visions “private revelation,” which seems to put them on the same level as the deposit of faith, which was closed at the death of the last apostle. He suggests that the visions of the sort received by St. Faustina, or St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, or St. Bernadette, or the children of Fatima shouldn’t be called ‘revelation,’ but rather modern-day prophecy. That points their supernatural origin, but also makes clear that they aren’t the same as the Word of God becoming Incarnate. One characteristic of prophecy, even from the Old Testament, is that the prophets see more than they can understand. St. Matthew’s Gospel tells us that Isaiah’s prophecies applied to Jesus and Mary, but Isaiah himself didn’t completely comprehend what God was telling him about events hundreds of years in the future. Likewise, the children at Fatima didn’t fully understand what our Lady was telling them about Russia, because they didn’t know enough about world politics. The Church has investigated these prophetic prayer experiences and declared that they don’t contradict the deposit of faith, that the faithful can accept them with prudence, but that they aren’t something that one has to accept to be a good Catholic. The focus of the devotions should be God’s mercy itself—and for most people most of the time, they are.
I speculate in the book that God might have sent us the devotions of these modern-day prophets (St. Faustina, as well as St. Margaret Mary and the Fatima visionaries all introduced devotions focused on God’s mercy) in response to the angry, justice-only political climate that characterizes our day. Rather than wanting to destroy our enemies or the enemies of justice, these devotions teach us to pray for them and call God’s mercy down upon them. This teaches us to think about those who fall short of God’s standards in a Christian fashion, as those most in need of God’s mercy.
“Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place.”
In John 5, Jesus heals a man who is unable to walk and then quickly slips away, disappearing into the crowd of people in Jerusalem. Why does Jesus so quickly vanish from the scene? In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Thomas Aquinas offers two sets of reasons for Jesus’ actions. He begins by offering an explanation based on the literal meaning of Scripture. He says that Jesus faded into the crowds “to give us the example of concealing our good deeds and of not using them to seek praise. Here he quotes from the Sermon on the Mount: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 6:1).
St. Thomas also explains that Jesus knows that by our deeds we can stir up the envy of others. There were those present who were already opposed to Christ. Jesus knew this and withdrew in order not to flame the fire of their hatred for him. Aquinas writes, “in all our actions, we should leave and avoid those who are envious, so as not to feed and increase their envy.” He here cites the teaching of the book of Sirach: “Do not be provoked by one who speaks evil of you, so he will not trap you by your own words” (Sir. 8:14).
Going on, however, St. Thomas also draws out what he describes a “mystical reason” Jesus slipped away quickly after his miracle. He writes, “First, it teaches us that Christ is not easy to find in the midst of men, or in the whirlwind of temporal cares; rather, he is found in spiritual seclusion.” St. Thomas cites the book of Eccelsiastes to make his point: “The words of the wise heard in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools” (Eccl. 9:17).
To properly hear Christ—the one who is Wisdom Incarnate—it is necessary for us to spend time with him in quiet prayer. Withdrawing from the erratic pace of modern life to pray is not simply advisable, it is necessary in order for us to fully encounter Jesus. Like the man healed in John 5, Christ invites us to follow him away from the crowds and the noise of the world to find him in the solitude of silent meditation. [1]
[1] Summary by Michael Barber with the use of Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, trans. Fabian Larcher and James A. Weisheipl, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 1:265 (#728).
Paganism: Fr. Dwight Longenecker and Joseph Pearce discuss paganism, what it is and what it isn't.
The story of Joan of Arc is preposterous. In what reality could a teenage girl approach the would-be king of her country with an account of angelic and saintly visitations and persuade him to give her troops to fight against a vastly superior army – and, after he agrees, she wins? It’s the stuff of myth and legends, but not history.
Except that it is history. In fact, it is one of the most well-documented cases of its time, with detailed eyewitness accounts of everything that happened with, and to, the “Maiden of Orleans,” the peasant girl of Domremy. There are transcriptions of her two trials. The first declared that she was a heretic, allowing her to be burned at the stake; the second posthumously declared that she wasn’t. In her story we see bravery and cowardice, political intrigue and ecclesiastical subterfuge, loyalty and betrayal, vision and blindness, hope and despair, the best and worst of our human condition.
Little wonder, then, that a glance at the artistic record shows the many ways the preposterous peasant-girl-who-became-a-warrior story has quickened the imaginations of artisans across all spectrums of creativity. Paintings, sculptures, operas, musicals, plays, films and television productions have all attempted to capture and reinterpret the story of Joan.
Apart from short paragraphs in books about the saints, or prayer cards, many of us know about Joan through Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Some consider it the best novelization of her life. Surprisingly, Twain himself considered it his finest work. Many other authors have attempted to tell her story through fiction, myself included, though her character is often filtered through sensibilities that were not of her time. For some, she is a feminist. For others, a representative of a working-class heroine along a Marxist vein. For Protestants, she is as a foreshadowing of a type of Martin Luther.
Voltaire wrote a satirical poem about her, which received a rebuttal fifty years later by German poet Friedrich Schiller.
Joan is no stranger to theatrical productions. William Shakespeare gave her a prominent place in his Henry VI series. Saint Therese of Lisieux wrote two small dramas about her, focusing on her visions, to be performed on various feast days for her religious community (St. Therese herself initially played Joan). George Bernard Shaw directed his particular style to her in Saint Joan, which later became the basis for Otto Preminger’s 1957 film version, scripted by the so-called “Catholic novelist” Graham Greene.
Playwright Maxwell Anderson gave his own interpretation of the story through Joan of Lorraine, leading to a Tony Award for its star Ingrid Bergman, and opened the door for her to portray the saint in a big-budget film version of the play a year later. Directed by Victor Fleming, known for The Wizard of Oz, critics have called it the best film version of Joan. Curiously, Ingrid Bergman would appear as Joan on film in 1954 for her then-husband Roberto Rossellini, the Italian director.
Some would argue that the most powerful film rendering of Joan came during the Silent Era from Danish film-maker Theodor Dreyer. His The Passion of Joan of Arc, released in 1928, blends a harsh realism with stylistic imagery to show Joan, not as a victorious girl on the battlefield, but a young girl enduring torturous interrogations. Long, lingering close-ups of her face give us an intimate view of a saint-in-the-making as she attempts to reconcile the attacks of her tormentors with the calling of God that led her to them. The effect is oppressive and claustrophobic, until she is finally taken out to be burned at the stake (which is seen in its raw brutality).
Not surprisingly, the last year of the 20th century gave us two opposing views of Joan. A television mini-series featured LeeLee Sobieski presented a straight-forward telling of Joan’s life, with an all-star cast and the latest special-effects to highlight the battles. It won multiple awards but, alas for me, Sobieski’s performance was unconvincing. She seemed more like a modern girl dropped back in time than a girl from the time itself. Meanwhile, French director Luc Besson presented Joan as a woman whose visions were not God-given, but merely the result of mental instability.
Another French director, Bruno Dumont, created two unusual films about Joan in 2017 and 2019. The first was an odd musical, integrating heavy-metal styles with the story of Joan as a young girl. Its star, Lise Leplat Prudhomme, was the right age and had the right look for Joan. The second film departed from the musical format and gave us the now-teenage Prudhomme as Joan after her capture. The actress’ performance was praised by some critics, but the overall film left most viewers flat. The main complaint was that the director could not seem to decide if he was producing a drama, a comedy, or a tragedy.
Against that artistic backdrop, I wondered anew about Joan as I began to write The Warrior Maiden (the second novel in the Virtue Chronicles series from the Augustine Institute). I opted to return to the original transcripts from the two trials, hoping to let her speak for herself. I was surprised to encounter a young woman, very much a teenager in her sensibilities and occasional emotional outbursts, but mature in the simplicity of her convictions. There was no artifice or guile in her determination to accomplish what God – through His messengers – had told her to do. If she was impatient, it was because she couldn’t understand why those in power did not share her vision. Sadly, her political naivete put her at the mercy of unscrupulous men, even while her determination gave those same men military unimaginable victories. She succeeded in the impossible: seeing the estranged Dauphin officially crowned as king and driving the English army out of long-held areas of France. She obeyed her God and, like her Lord, was betrayed by men. The whole thing was preposterous.
This excerpt is taken from the ninth chapter of St. Basil the Great’s (c. 330-379) On the Holy Spirit. St. Basil is a doctor of the Church and this work is one of the first to meditate at length on the third person of the Trinity. It was written partly in defense of the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which was denied by some in Basil’s time.
Let us now investigate our common ideas concerning the Spirit, those which have been gathered from Holy Scripture concerning him, as well as those which we have received from the unwritten tradition of the Fathers.
First of all we ask, who upon hearing the titles of the Spirit is not lifted up in soul, who does not raise his mind to the supreme nature? He is called “Spirit of God” (Mt 12:28), “Spirit of truth which proceeds from the Father” (Jn 15:26), “right Spirit” (Ps 50:12), “a leading Spirit” (Ps 50:14). His proper and peculiar title is “Holy Spirit;” which is a name specially appropriate to everything that is without a body, everything that is purely immaterial and indivisible. So our Lord, when teaching the woman [at the well] – who thought that God is an object of local worship – that what is without a body cannot be confined, he said that God is a spirit (Jn 4:24).
When we hear of a spirit, then, it is impossible to think of a nature which is confined, subject to change and variation, or at all like a creature. We are compelled to advance in our conceptions to the highest, and to think of an intelligent essence, in power infinite, in magnitude unlimited, unmeasured by times or ages, generous of his good gifts, to whom turn all things needing sanctification, after whom reach all things that live in virtue, as being watered by his inspiration and helped on toward their natural and proper end; perfecting all other things, but in himself lacking nothing; living not as one needing restoration, but as supplier of life; not growing by additions; but straightway full, self-established, omnipresent, origin of holiness, light perceptible to the mind, supplying, as it were, through himself, illumination to every faculty in the search for truth; by nature unapproachable, apprehended by reason of goodness, filling all things with his power, but communicated only to the worthy; not shared in one measure, but distributing his energy according to the proportion of faith (Rom 12:6); in essence simple, in powers various, wholly present in each and being wholly everywhere; impassively divided, shared without loss of ceasing to be entire, after the likeness of the sunbeam, whose kindly light falls on him who enjoys it as though it shone for him alone, yet illumines land and sea and mingles with the air. So, too, is the Spirit to everyone who receives it, as though given to him alone, and yet he sends forth grace sufficient and full for all humankind, and is enjoyed by all who share him, according not to the Spirit’s power, but to the capacity of our nature.
Now the Spirit is not brought into intimate association with the soul by nearness in place. How indeed could there be a bodily nearness to the incorporeal? This kinship results from our withdrawal from the passions which, coming afterwards gradually on the soul from its friendship to the flesh, have alienated it from its close relationship with God. Only then, after a man is purified from the shame whose stain he took through his wickedness, and has come back again to his natural beauty, and as it were cleaning the Royal Image and restoring its ancient form, only thus is it possible for him to draw near to the Paraclete. And the Spirit, like the sun, will by the aid of your purified eye show you in himself the image of the invisible, and in the blessed spectacle of the image you shall behold the unspeakable beauty of the archetype. Through his aid hearts are lifted up, the weak are held by the hand, and they who are advancing are brought to perfection. Shining upon those that are cleansed from every spot, he makes them spiritual by fellowship with himself. Just as when a sunbeam falls on bright and transparent bodies, they themselves become brilliant too, and shed forth a fresh brightness from themselves, so souls wherein the Spirit dwells, illuminated by the Spirit, themselves become spiritual, and send forth their grace to others. Hence comes foreknowledge of the future, understanding of mysteries, apprehension of what is hidden, distribution of good gifts, the heavenly citizenship, a place in the chorus of angels, joy without end, abiding in God, being made like to God, and, highest of all, being made God. Such, then, to name but a few, are our ideas concerning the Holy Spirit, which we have been taught to hold concerning his greatness, his dignity, and his actions, by the sayings of the Spirit themselves [i.e. the Scriptures].
Translation taken from the Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers Series, with minor modifications by Elizabeth Klein.
“Jesus answered him, ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.’”
John 14:23 is short and sweet. St. Gregory the Great explains this sweetness in more detail: “the Holy Spirit is love, and so John says ‘God is love’ (cf. 1 Jn. 4:16). A person who desires God with his whole heart already possess the one he loves; no one could love God unless he possesses the one he loves.” Gregory expounds on the beauty of this verse by teaching us that anyone who loves Jesus will already possess the love of the Father and the Holy Spirit, because we believe that God is in himself an eternal exchange of love, that God is Trinity. We do not merely love God, therefore, but since God is love, he is also the means by which we love him. The wonderful sweetness of this verse comes not only from knowing that God loves us, but that God is love itself, dwelling within us, making our heart his home so that we may love him and others.
But this verse also helps us resist the idea that the love of God is just a good feeling or sentiment. When we hear the verse we likely respond as Gregory suggests: “if any one of you should be asked if he loved God he would answer with entire confidence and complete conviction, ‘I do.’” But is that “I do” just empty words or is it really love? The “I do” in a marriage means in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, it means doing not just feeling. The same is true of our “I do” to God. Gregory reminds us of this fact: “you heard at the beginning of the reading what Truth said: ‘if anyone loves me, he will keep my word.’ The proof of love is its manifestation in deeds.” If someone were to tell you that they loved you, but then they never talked to you, never helped you, and never spent time with you, you would say that their words were a lie. So likewise, let us not just confess the love of God with our lips but act in love as the Lord commands. [1]
[1] Summary by Elizabeth Klein with the use of Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies 30, 236–238.
His times were such as the Church has never seen before nor since, and such as the world must last long for her to see again; nor peculiar only in themselves but involving a singular and most severe trial of the faith and love of her children. It was a time of sifting and peril, and of “the fall and resurrection of many in Israel.”
He had been fifteen years in Rome before he was ordained; and then at length, on his receiving faculties for hearing confessions, he began, at the age of thirty-five, his real mission—that long course of ministry, which, carried on for years three times fifteen, down almost to the hour of his death, has gained for him the title of Apostle of Rome.
You know what is commonly meant by an Apostle of a country. It means one who converts its heathen inhabitants to the Christian faith, such as St. Augustine of England; accordingly, his proper function is Baptism. This was the office to which St. Philip wished to minister in India; but it was his zeal and charity that urged him, not his mature judgment; for the fierce conflicts, and the pastoral cares, and the rude publicity of such exalted duties, were unsuited to his nature; so he was kept at home for a different work. He was kept at home, in the very heart of Christendom, not to evangelize, but to recover; and his instrument of conversion was, not Baptism, but Penance. The Confessional was the seat and seal of his peculiar Apostolate. Hence, as St. Francis Xavier baptized his tens of thousands, Philip was, every day and almost every hour, for forty-five years, restoring, teaching, encouraging, and guiding penitents along the narrow way of salvation.
We are told that “he abandoned every other care and gave himself to hearing confessions.” Not content with the day, he gave up a considerable portion of the night to it also. Before dawn he had generally confessed a good number. When he retired to his room, he still confessed everyone who came; though at prayers, though at meals, he broke off instantly, and attended to the call. When the church was opened at daybreak, he went down to the Confessional, and remained in it till noon, when he said Mass. When no penitents came, he remained near his Confessional; he never intermitted hearing confessions for any illness. It was this extraordinary persevering service in so trying, so wearing a duty, for forty-five years, that enabled him to be the new Apostle of the Sacred City. Thus it was, as the lesson in his Office says, that “he bore innumerable children to Christ.” He was ever suffering their miseries, and fighting with their sins, and travailing with their good resolves, year after year, whatever their state of life, their calling, their circumstances, if so be that he might bring them safe to heaven, with a superhuman, heroic patience.
It is not surprising that, with this tenderness, with this prudence, and with the zeal and charity to which both were subordinate, his influence increased year by year, till he gained a place in the heart of the Roman population, which he has never lost.
There are those whose greatest works are their earliest; there are others, who, at first scarcely distinguishable from a whole class who look the same, distance them in the long run, and do more and more wonderful works the longer they live. Philip was thirty-five before he was ordained; forty, before he began his exercises in his room; fifty, before he had a church; sixty before he formed his disciples into a congregation; near seventy, before he put himself at the head of it. As the Blessed Virgin’s name has by a majestic growth expanded and extended itself through the Church, “taking root in an honorable people, and resting in the Holy City,” so the influence of Philip was, at the end of many years, paramount in that place which he has so long dwelt in as an obscure, disregarded stranger. Sharp eyes and holy sympathies indeed had detected “Philip Neri, as a saint living in caves,” when he was a youth; but it required half a century to develop this truth to the intelligence of the multitude of men. At length there was no possibility of mistaking it. Visitors to Rome discerned the presence of one who was greater than Pope and Cardinals, holy, venerable and vigilant as the rulers of the Church then were. “Among all the wonderful things which I saw in Rome,” says one of them, writing when Philip was turned fifty, “I took the chief pleasure in beholding the multitude of devout and spiritual persons who frequented the Oratory. Amid the monuments of antiquity, the superb palaces and courts of so many illustrious lords, it appeared to me that the glory of this exemplar shone forth with surpassing light.”
It required to live in Rome to understand what his influence really was. Nothing was too high for him, nothing too low. He taught poor begging women to use mental prayer; he took out boys to play; he protected orphans; he acted as novice-master to the children of St. Dominic. He was the teacher and director of artisans, mechanics, cashiers in banks, merchants, workers in gold, artists, men of science. He was consulted by monks, canons, lawyers, physicians, courtiers; ladies of the highest rank, convicts going to execution, engaged in their turn his solicitude and prayers. Cardinals hung about his room, and Popes asked for his miraculous aid in disease, and his ministrations in death. It was his mission to save men, not from, but in, the world. To break the haughtiness of rank, and the fastidiousness of fashion, he gave his penitents public mortifications; to draw the young from the theatres, he opened his Oratory of Sacred Music; to rescue the careless from the Carnival and its excesses, he set out in pilgrimage to the Seven Basilicas. For those who loved reading, he substituted, for the works of chivalry or the hurtful novels of the day, the true romance and the celestial poetry of the Lives of the Saints. He set one of his disciples to write history against the heretics of that age; another to treat of the Notes of the Church; a third, to undertake the Martyrs and Christian Antiquities—for, while in the discourses and devotions of the Oratory, he prescribed the simplicity of the primitive monks, he wished his children, individually and in private, to cultivate all their gifts to the full. He, however, was, after all and in all, their true model—the humble priest, shrinking from every kind of dignity, or post, or office, and living the greater part of day and night in prayer, in his room or upon the housetop.
And when he died, a continued stream of people, says his biographer, came to see his body, during the two days that it remained in the church, kissing his bier, touching him with their rosaries or their rings, or taking away portions of his hair, or the flowers which were strewed over him; and, among the crowd, persons of every rank and condition were heard lamenting and extolling one who was so lowly, yet so great; who had been so variously endowed, and had been the pupil of so many saintly masters; who had the breadth of view of St. Dominic, the poetry of St. Benedict, the wisdom of St. Ignatius, and all recommended by an unassuming grace and a winning tenderness which were his own.
First preached at the Oratory, in Birmingham, on January 15 and 18, 1850 and published in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.
Favourite Poems: In the fourth and final part of a series on a few of Fr. Dwight Longenecker's favourite things, Joseph Pearce asks him about his favourite poems.
“And behold, a man came up to him, saying, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?’ And he said to him, ‘Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.’ …The young man said to him, ‘All these I have kept. What do I still lack?’ Jesus said to him, ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’”
When the rich young man approaches Jesus and poses him the question, “What good deed must I do to have eternal life?” it can sound coarsely transactional—okay, if I do this, God, will you give me that? It seems as if God is a giant gumball machine and we are sleuthing out the right token to insert in order to have eternal bliss dispensed into our eager palm.
St. John Paul II helpfully dispels this idea: “For the young man, the question is not so much about rules to be followed, but about the full meaning of life. This is in fact the aspiration at the heart of every human decision and action, the quiet searching and interior prompting which sets freedom in motion.” In other words, the rich young man takes up a fundamental question of human life—a question that lies on each one of our hearts—and brings it before the good Teacher: what good must I do to find ultimate fulfillment?
To this question, Jesus offers a twofold answer: keep the commandments, and come and follow me. Regarding the commandments, John Paul II makes clear that although the question of morality is not firstly about rules, it is not therefore entirely unconnected with them. “A close connection is made between eternal life and obedience to God's commandments: God's commandments show man the path of life and they lead to it.” It is one and the same divine wisdom that created us and set forth for us the path of life in the commandments. In this way, the commandments serve and foster our good, rather than constrain it.
But obeying the commandments only makes up the starting point. “Perfection demands that maturity in self-giving to which human freedom is called,” writes John Paul. The commandments ultimately offer a training in self-giving love, for God first of all and then for our neighbor; but this training is perfected in following Christ—“come, follow me” (Mt. 19:21). Christ gave up everything out of love for us, and thus we are called to do the same. In this light, Jesus’ words to the young man, “Sell what you possess and give to the poor,” follow the logic of giving up everything to follow Christ. We follow him, forsaking any and all loves that might vie for our affection, in order to become like him, as an apprentice becomes like the master and as a disciple becomes like the crucified and resurrected Lord.[1]
[1] Summary by Scott Hefelfinger with use of John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Veritatis splendor (1993), 7–17.
Froh erfülle deine Pflicht. It was twenty years ago that I saw this German phrase in needlepoint in an antique shop in the Shenandoah Valley. “Do your duty cheerfully” is close enough to its literal meaning. I remember thinking at the time that it was a charming relic of Pennsylvania Dutch Lutheran culture.
As is true of many in my generation, my thinking about the moral and spiritual life has been shaped by the teaching of the late Servais Pinckaers, O.P., who did so much to recover a synthetic vision in which natural inclinations, human freedom, and divine grace work in concert. Together with St. John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor, Pinckaer’s Sources of Christian Ethics helped to reset Catholic discourse. Rather than a rear-guard action against the latest infidelities proposed by dissenters, moral theology in the past two decades has often been an inspiring sapiential discipline, true to the high call that the Lord gave to us in his Sermon on the Mount.
As is well known, one of the features of this renewed moral theology is an emphasis upon the end, variously spoken of as divine friendship, divinization, or, simply, charity. The result has been deep and sustained reflection upon the life of Christ, the graces offered by the sacraments, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And this wisdom has not remained in scholarly journals and classrooms; it has been heard from the pulpit and in the privileged spheres of spiritual direction and the sacrament of penance. It has, however, often been noted that the renewal of moral theology needs to maintain contact with the pre-conciliar tradition of speaking about the moral life in terms of the Ten Commandments. And, in the third part of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we see just such a synthesis, at least in its broad outlines.
From time to time, however, one is reminded of the importance of the Commandments and their specification in the law of the Church. This is one of those times. As we return to our parishes for Sunday Mass, we have an occasion for thinking about what the First Commandment requires of us.
The Catechism presents the First Commandment as an over-arching principle of submission to the Divine Will, a command the response to which is adoration, prayer, and, in sum, creaturely obedience, together with the avoidance of any form of idolatry that would supplant that submission. It may be asked, however, whether we should hear an echo of the First Commandment in the First Precept of the Church: “You shall attend Mass on Sundays and on holy days of obligation and rest from servile labor.”
There are two difficulties here. The first is that the Precept evidently refers to the Third Commandment. Yes, but surely the command that the Mass which we are obliged to attend is the one offered on the Lord’s Day is a specification of the First Commandment’s more general lesson about the debt of worship we owe to God (see CCC 2135). The second difficulty is that the Precept is positive law, and even after decades of good Thomism, we remain skeptical of the pedagogical function of law. If the Church insists upon our duty to worship God in this way—by the regular attendance at Sunday Mass—then we may worry that we are confronted with a demand for social conformity that serves the rulers rather than the ruled.
In order to appreciate the full bearing of the First Precept of the Church upon human character, it needs to be rightly situated. It is a claim upon the will. At stake is whether we love rightly. “Charity,” the authors of the Catechism explain in their treatment of the First Commandment, “leads us to render to God what we as creatures owe him in all justice. The virtue of religion disposes us to have this attitude” (CCC 2095).
It is, of course, not enough for us creatures merely to have benevolent thoughts about God or to wish that our relationship to him were right. As in the case of any other exercise of justice, the proof is in the deed. And the First Precept of the Church has just such an action in view, the right public worship of God—worship that is “in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:23) and a very “work of God” (Jn 6:29) because it is a public manifestation of our belief in Christ.
In recent weeks, we have heard many cries of anguish at the deprivation of the sacraments, most especially the reception of Holy Communion. And rightly so. But the topic of the duty of the laity to worship God has mostly been conspicuous by its absence. It seems fair to say that much of what has been heard during the quarantine has focused upon the spiritual growth of Catholics during a time of trial. Of those statements and discourses, many have been edifying, but some have bordered on the therapeutic.
Certainly, attendance at Sunday Mass may involve the reception of Holy Communion and personal spiritual growth—one hopes that both are normally attained. What it always (or almost always) involves, however, is the subordination of the desires of the individual Catholic to the good of the whole parish. Sunday Mass is offered at set times, in a set place, with a certain group of people. At any given parish and at any given liturgy, there will be traffic jams, icy sidewalks, crowded seating, insufficient ventilation, crying children, maudlin music, rambling homilies, and now perhaps even the demand that a facemask be worn. These little slivers of the Cross are not what make attendance at Mass virtuous, but they are the proper signs of the truth that when we attend Sunday Mass at the parish we do so as parts of a larger whole, the Body of Christ. And we do so in fulfillment of a solemn duty—dignum et justum est—not merely from some private search for interior betterment, however exalted that may be. Given that the prevailing idolatry of our age is the worship of the self, it seems entirely appropriate that the regular attendance at Sunday Mass often involves setting aside personal preference in favor of common duty.
The law-abiding practice of regularly attending Sunday Mass is also deeply formative of our character. In a world overwhelmed by sins against temperance, it is easy enough to overlook the importance of justice. Yet it is the exercise of justice that makes a man or a woman good. And the offenses that most trouble us in other people are injustices of one kind or another, such as lying, failure to return something owed, acts of disordered ambition, unjust expectations by employers, and other such deeds or omissions. St. Augustine memorably held that we ought not to consider an irreligious man to be just because such a man fails to repay the deepest and most solemn debt that he owes, his debt to God. Now, to be sure, we owe our entire lives to God. And our greatest models of Christian life, as Veritatis Splendor and Fr. Pinckaers were keen to point out, are indeed the martyrs, those who “gave their lives rather than perform this or that particular act contrary to faith or virtue” (VS 76). Few of us, however, will be called to martyrdom; all of us are rightly subject to the First Precept of the Church. And we should be grateful for the rule, for the imposition of the duty, because it tethers us to God and to his service in a concrete way that keeps us on the right path through life. From that vantage, then, we can say that the character of Catholics is deeply shaped by the obligation to worship and, concretely, by the practice of attending Mass every Sunday, one hopes, in the cheerful fulfillment of duty.
Provenance/Rights: Museum Wolmirstedt [RR-F]
Favourite Novels: In the third of a series on a few of Fr. Dwight Longenecker's favourite things, Joseph Pearce asks him about his favourite novels.
“Hereby do we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments” (1 Jn 2:3).
To know God and Christ seems to mean to live under the conviction of His presence, who is to our bodily eyes unseen. It is, in fact, to have faith, according to St. Paul’s account of faith, as the substance and evidence of what is invisible. It is faith, but not faith such as a Heathen might have, but Gospel faith; for only in the Gospel has God so revealed Himself, as to allow of that kind of faith which may be called, in a special manner, knowledge. The faith of Heathens was blind; it was more or less a moving forward in the darkness, with hand and foot. But the Gospel is a manifestation, and therefore addressed to the eyes of our mind. Faith is the same principle as before, but with the opportunity of acting through a more certain and satisfactory sense.
We recognize objects by the eye at once; but not by the touch. We know them when we see them, but scarcely till then. Hence it is, that the New Testament says so much on the subject of spiritual knowledge. For instance, St. Paul prays that the Ephesians may receive “the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Christ, the eyes of their understanding being enlightened” (Eph 1:17-18), and he says, that the Colossians had “put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge, after the image of Him that created him” (Col 3:10). St. Peter, in like manner, addresses his brethren with the salutation of “Grace and peace, through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord” (2 Pet 1:2), according to the declaration of our Lord Himself, “This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent” (Jn 18:3).
It is plain what is the object of spiritual sight which is given to us in the Gospel: God manifest in the Flesh. He who was before unseen has shown Himself in Christ, not merely displayed His glory, as (for instance) in what is called a providence, or visitation, or in miracles, or in the actions and character of inspired men, but really He Himself has come upon earth, and has been seen of men in human form. In the same kind of sense, in which we should say we saw a servant of His, Apostle or Prophet, though we could not see his soul, so man has seen the Invisible God; and we have the history of His sojourn among His creatures in the Gospels.
To know God is life eternal, and to believe in the Gospel manifestation of Him is to know Him; but how are we to “know that we know Him?” How are we to be sure that we are not mistaking some dream of our own for the true and clear Vision? How can we tell we are not like gazers upon a distant prospect through a misty atmosphere, who mistake one object for another? St. John says, “Hereby do we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.” Obedience is the test of Faith.
Thus the whole duty and work of a Christian is made up of these two parts, faith and obedience: looking unto Jesus, the Divine Object as well as Author of our faith, and acting according to His will.
To know Christ is to discern the Father of all, as manifested through His Only-begotten Son Incarnate. In the natural world we have glimpses, frequent and startling, of His glorious Attributes; of His power, wisdom, and goodness; of His holiness, His fearful judgments, His long remembrance of evil, His long-suffering towards sinners, and His strange encompassing mercy at times when we least looked for it. But to us mortals, who live for a day, and see but an arm’s length, such disclosures are like reflections of a prospect in a broken mirror; they do not enable us in any comfortable sense to know God. They are such as faith may use indeed, but hardly enjoy. This then was one among the benefits of Christ’s coming, that the Invisible God was then revealed in the form and history of man, revealed in those respects in which sinners most required to know Him, and nature spoke least distinctly, as a Holy yet Merciful Governor of His creatures. And thus the Gospels, which contain the memorials of this wonderful grace, are our principal treasures.
Turning from Him to ourselves, we find a short rule given us, “If ye love Me, keep My commandments” (Jn 14:15). “He that saith he abideth in Him, ought himself also so to walk, even as He walked” (1 Jn 2:6). “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God” (Col 3:1). This is all that is put upon us, difficult indeed to perform, but easy to understand; all that is put upon us, and for this plain reason, because Christ has done everything else. He has freely chosen us, died for us, regenerated us, and now ever lives for us; what remains? Simply that we should do as He has done to us, showing forth His glory by good works. Thus, a correct (or as we commonly call it), an orthodox faith and an obedient life, is the whole duty of man. And so, most surely, it has ever been accounted. Look into the records of the early Church, or into the writings of our own revered bishops and teachers, and see whether this is not the sum total of religion, according to the symbols of it in which children are catechized, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments.
The essence of Faith is to look out of ourselves [by] putting self aside and living upon Him who speaks in the Gospels.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Having resolved from all eternity to give us Jesus through Mary, God was not content to make use of her as an instrument. Rather, he wished her to cooperate in this great work. This is why he sent his angel to her to propose the mystery. The great work of the Incarnation could not be achieved until Mary’s consent had been given. It was necessary for mankind that she desire our salvation.
God calls us, justifies us, and enables us to persevere. Vocation is the first step; justification is the progress we make; perseverance is the journey’s end. In these three stages, the work of Christ is required. Yet we see in the Scriptures that the charity of the Blessed Virgin is joined to them as well.
Consider what happened to John the Baptist while he was in his mother’s womb, and you will see an image of sinners called by grace. John is in darkness: he can neither see nor hear. Jesus comes to him without his knowing it. Jesus approaches, he awakens and draws to himself this insensible heart. This is how the Son of God treats the sinners whom he calls, but he shows us in John’s case that the Virgin’s charity worked together with him. What made Jesus come to John if not the charity of the Blessed Virgin? If Jesus acted in John’s heart, was it not at the sound of his mother’s voice? In the case of John the Baptist, we see Mary as the mother of those whom Jesus calls.
Let us now consider those whom he justifies: the disciples of the Son of God, at the wedding at Cana in Galilee. They had already been called, but they are not yet justified because they do not believe in their Master. Listen to the Evangelist: “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” Could he have expressed himself in clearer terms about their justification by faith as a consequence of this miracle? Nor could he have better explained the part played by the Blessed Virgin. For who does not know that this great miracle was the effect of her charity and prayers?
Let us also consider how Mary effects the holy perseverance of the children of God. Here is the Beloved Disciple of our Savior to represent us at Calvary: he is the figure of those who persevere, for he followed Jesus even to the Cross and attached himself so firmly to the mystical wood that he was ready to die with him. He is therefore the figure of those who persevere, and we see Jesus give him to his Mother: “Woman, behold, your son.” Those who understand how full of mysteries are the Scriptures will understand from these three examples that the charity of Mary is a general instrument of the operations of grace.
Let us rejoice in our protector. The night with its terrors has passed; the day approaches, hope comes, and we see a first ray of it shining in the protection of the Blessed Virgin. She was born to bring us aid; it would not be possible to choose a better advocate. Let us pray that she will speak for us to the heart of her Son. We readily grant requests when we are already conquered by affection. It is for this reason that Mary always speaks efficaciously, because she speaks to the heart of a son. Let her speak boldly on our behalf to the heart of Jesus.
What grace shall she ask for us? What do we desire from her intercession? Does not her charity inspire you to desire to be strengthened in charity? It is this that we ask. Without the desire to be charitable, what good does it do for us to call upon the name of Mary? Go on your way with these thoughts in mind: it is Mary who tells you. Do not let the day end without leaving behind some mark of her charity.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
May the venerable intercession of Blessed Mary ever-Virgin come to our aid, we pray, O Lord, and free us from every danger, so that we may rejoice in your peace. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
IMAGE: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Adoration of the Shepherds, c.1650, Oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Nature and grace together establish an immutable necessity of dying. It is a law of nature that all mortal things owe their tribute to death, and grace has not exempted mankind from this common necessity. The Son of God, having resolved to defeat death by dying, promulgated this law for us, so that we must pass through the hands of death in order to escape its grasp, we must enter the tomb in order to be reborn, and we must die once in order to strip mortality of its power. And so the death of the Blessed Virgin was a necessary part of her triumph: she had to submit to the law of death in order to leave behind her mortality.
We must not suppose, however, that in submitting to the common law, she did so in an ordinary way. Everything about Mary is supernatural: a miracle gave Jesus Christ to her, and her life, full of miracles, came to an end by a death that was entirely divine. What was the principle of this admirable death? It was her love, maternal and divine, that brought it about. It was love that carried off Mary’s soul and which, breaking the bonds of her body, the bonds that were keeping her from rejoining her son, at last reunited them in heaven.
Mary’s love was made by a flowing forth of the heart of God into her own heart, and the love that she had for her son came from the same source which gave her that son. What can human reason say in the face of this mystery? Do we pretend to comprehend the union of Mary and Jesus? We should not even attempt to explain the nature of a maternal love from so exalted a source, which is a participation in the love of the Father for his only-begotten Son. If we cannot understand its force or strength, how shall we imagine the emotions it generated? All we are able to understand is that there never was so great a human emotion as Mary’s longing to be reunited to Jesus, nor any violence like the one her heart suffered from their separation.
We need seek no other cause for her death. This love was so ardent that one of its sighs alone would have sufficed to break the bonds of its mortal body. One of its regrets was sufficient to disturb the harmony of her being. A single desire sent heavenward was enough to draw forth Mary’s soul. Mary’s death was less of a miracle than the continual miracle of her remaining alive while separated from her beloved.
Let us learn from her love to desire Jesus Christ, who is infinitely desirable. And what does Jesus desire? Will he find a heart that pines for him? Such a chaste longing is rarely found in this world, and it is a sure mark of the paltriness of our desire for Jesus if we are content to enjoy the good things of the earth. When fortune smiles upon us, and when we have all the wealth that we require for pleasure and health, do we nonetheless wish for another paradise? Do we imagine that there could be another happiness? If we let our heart speak to us, will it tell us how content it is with this life? If this be our condition, we may be assured that we are not Christians. And if we wish to be Christians, we know what we must do. We must believe that everything is lacking to us, though the world thinks that we have all that we need. We must groan in prosperity, and we must hope for rest only when we will be with Jesus. Otherwise, the words of St. Augustine will apply to us: “If you do not groan like a pilgrim, you will not rejoice like a citizen.” That is to say that you will never be an inhabitant of heaven because you wished to be one of the earth. Refusing the labors of the journey, you will not enjoy the repose of the fatherland, and resting when you should have been marching, you will never arrive at your destination. This is why Mary always wept in remembrance of Zion: her heart could have no peace as long as it was separated from her beloved. At last her desire took her to him, by means of a happy death.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
O God, who, looking on the lowliness of the Blessed Virgin Mary, raised her to this grace, that your Only Begotten Son was born of her according to the flesh and that she was crowned with surpassing glory, grant through her prayers, that, saved by the mystery of your redemption, we may merit to be exalted by you on high. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
IMAGE: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Assumption of the Virgin, 1670, Oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
On the eve of his death, the Son of God trembled and shook, so terrible did the expectation of his punishment appear, but in the very grip of his sorrow he seemed to change, and the torment then seemed as nothing to him. His words to the good thief were measured and calm; he distinctly recognized those who were his own at the foot of the Cross, and he spoke to them and consoled them. Afterwards, knowing that in the prophets it was written that a bitter drink was to be prepared for him, he asked for it, tasted it without disgust, and, having said that everything he had to do had been accomplished, gave up his soul to his Father. He accomplished these things so freely, so peacefully, that it is easy to verify what he said: “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”
The reason why we see him so peaceful on Calvary, while he had been so troubled on the Mount of Olives, is that on the Cross and on Calvary he was engaged in the work of his sacrifice. Sacrifice is the action by which we give homage to God. We know from experience that the actions by which we show respect require a composed and controlled countenance. It is the very character of respect. Yet God sees to the very depths of our hearts, and therefore our souls must be composed in order to offer respectful worship. The priest must offer sacrifice with his soul at peace. O Jesus, my divine Priest, this is why you were so peaceful during your agony. It is true that you were moved on the Mount of Olives, but that was a voluntary anxiety by which you took on the posture and character of a victim. As soon as you were at the altar, and you began to fulfill the function of the priest, as soon as you raised your innocent hands to offer the victim to heaven, you had no more anxiety, nor would you any longer appear fearful, because to have done so would have manifested repugnance for the act. This was so that we would understand that you are a merciful priest who sacrificed yourself willingly, urged on by your love for our salvation.
This is a great mystery, but it was not accomplished in Jesus Christ alone, for he inspired the same sentiments in his holy Mother, who had to take part in this sacrifice. She also had to offer her Son, which is why she was as peaceful as he was, why she stood upright at the foot of the Cross, to manifest a most deliberate action, and, in spite of her sorrow, to offer him with her whole heart to the Eternal Father. From her we must learn constantly to sacrifice to God all that is dearest to us. Here is Mary at the foot of the Cross, who rips out her own heart in order to deliver her only Son to death. She offers him, but not only then. She had not ceased to offer him from the day that the good Simeon had predicted the strange contradictions that she would suffer. She had offered him at every moment of her life, and she brought her oblation to its completion at the Cross.
What a horrid sight it was for a mother! O God, he belongs to you. I consent to all of it. Your will be done. Is not my consent required for my Son to be handed over unto death? I am ready to agree to all of it. My deeds will prove my readiness. Unleash all your anger upon him. Do not be content to strike him. Take up your sword to pierce my soul. Tear out my heart. It is Mary who speaks to us, telling us that we must give to God all that is dearest to us. Is that a spouse? Is that a child? You will not lose anything by putting what you most prize into his hands. He will restore it all to you, and a hundredfold besides. Mary received far more than she gave. God soon restored her beloved Son.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
O God, who willed that, when your Son was lifted high on the Cross, his Mother should stand close by and share his suffering, grant that your Church, participating with the Virgin Mary in the Passion of Christ, may merit a share in his Resurrection. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
IMAGE: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Crucifixion, 1675-1682, Oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“And he went down with them and came to Nazareth.” We must not lose a single word of this holy text; the Evangelist says that he “went down” with them to Nazareth. After having strayed for a while to do the work of his Father, he returned to his ordinary conduct, to the ways of his parents, to obedience. And this is perhaps, in a mystical mode, what accounts for the phrase “he went down,” but in any case it is true that he placed himself between their hands until his baptism, that is, until the age of almost thirty years, and did nothing other than obey them.
We should be astonished by the word: was that then the whole work of Jesus Christ, the Son of God? His entire duty was to obey two of his creatures. With regard to what did he obey them? In the lowest of activities, in the practice of a mechanical art. Who are they who weep and complain when the work they are assigned does not correspond to their talents, or rather to their pride? Let them come to the home of Joseph and Mary and let them see Jesus at work there. We do not ever read that his parents had domestic servants; like other poor folk, they had only their children, their child, to serve them. Jesus himself said that he came “to serve.” When he went to the desert, the angels were obliged to come and serve him, for we never see him with servants at his beck and call. What is known is that he himself worked in his father’s workshop. And that he lost his father well before the time of his ministry. At his Passion, he left his mother in the care of his Beloved Disciple, who received her into his home, which would not have happened if Joseph had still been alive. From the beginning of his ministry, we see Mary together with Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana, but there is no mention of Joseph. Mary often appears elsewhere, but after what is said about Jesus’ education under the guidance of Joseph, we do not again hear about this holy man. This is why at the beginning of his ministry, when he comes to speak in his own country, the people said, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” We see him, without shame, supporting a widowed mother by his own labor, and undertaking the petty commerce of his trade that allowed the two of them to live. “Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brethren James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?” They do not speak of his father, because, it seems, he had already died. Jesus Christ served him during his final illness. Happy the father who had such a son to close his eyes! Truly, he died in his arms and, as it were, with a kiss from the Lord. Jesus stayed with his mother to console her, to serve her: this was the whole of his employment.
O God, what a moving spectacle! O Pride: down on your knees! Jesus, the son of a carpenter, a carpenter himself, was known by his trade, without anything else being said about him. Let those who live by such an art be consoled and rejoice: Jesus is one of them. Let them learn from him to praise God while they work, to sing psalms and holy songs, and let them know that God will bless their work, and they will be like other Christs.
The Gospel sums up thirty years of the life of Jesus in these words: “and he was obedient to them,” together with these, “the carpenter, the son of Mary.” In the obscurity of John the Baptist there is something more imposing, for he never appeared among men and “he was in the wilderness.” Yet Jesus, in so ordinary a life, was, in truth, known, but by his lowly work alone. Could he have been any better hidden than he was? What shall we say, what shall we do to praise him? There is in truth nothing for us to do but to admire him in silence.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
O God, who were pleased to give us the shining example of the Holy Family, graciously grant that we may imitate them in practicing the virtues of family life and in the bonds of charity, and so, in the joy of your house, delight one day in eternal rewards. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
IMAGE: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Holy Family with the Little Bird, 1650, Oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
An angel of the Lord was sent to Joseph and said to him: “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.” How calm are those words. What astonishment and what humility were Joseph’s! If we are to have any understanding at all of these things, it is for God alone to give it to us.
“She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.” Why “you”? You are not the father. He has no father but God. But God has transferred his rights to you. You will stand as a father to Jesus Christ. Formed by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the one who belongs to you, he also belongs to you. With the authority and rights of a father, then, have also a father’s heart towards Jesus. God, “who fashions the hearts of all,” today places a father’s heart in you. How blessed are you, for at the same time he gives Jesus the heart of a son toward you. You are the true spouse of his holy Mother; you share with her this beloved Son and the graces that flow from his love. Go then and at the proper time name the child, giving him the name of Jesus—both for you and for us—so that he will be our Savior as well as yours.
After his dream and the angel’s words, Joseph was a changed man. He became a father and a husband in his heart. The effect of his marriage was the tender care that he had for Mary and the divine child. He began this blessed ministry by traveling to Bethlehem, and we know all that followed from it.
What is it that you do, you princes of the earth, who set all the world in motion to perform an accounting of the subjects of your empire? You wish to know their productivity, their revenue, and the size of the army that can be assembled, and so you declare a census. This was what you thought you were doing. Yet God had other plans, which you were carrying out without having any idea of it. His Son must be born in Bethlehem, David’s humble home. He had made his prophet predict it seven hundred years before (cf. Micah 5:2), and now the whole world is bestirred so that the prophecy may be fulfilled.
When they were in Bethlehem—to obey the prince but also to obey the order of God—“the time came for her to be delivered,” and Jesus, the Son of David, was born in Bethlehem, “the village where David was.” The public registers attested his origin. The Roman Empire bore witness to the royal lineage of Jesus Christ, and Caesar, unknowingly, carried out the orders of God.
Let us also be enrolled at Bethlehem. Bethlehem, the house of bread. Let us go there to taste the bread of heaven, the bread of angels become human food. Let us consider all our churches to be true Bethlehems, true homes of the bread of life. This is the bread that God gives to the poor in the birth of Jesus. If with him they love poverty and come to adore him in the manger, then they shall find true wealth, then the “poor shall eat and be satisfied.”
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Grant, we pray, almighty God, that, as we are bathed in the radiance of your incarnate Word, the light of faith, which illumines our minds, may also shine through in our deeds. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
IMAGE: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Marriage of the Virgin, 1665–1670, Oil on mahogany panel, The Wallace Collection, London, UK
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Sent into the world to be its light, Jesus Christ began to teach men from the moment of his coming. While still in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, without a word and, it seems, without any movement, he spoke. He is the Word of the Eternal Father, and so it is not only all that he does and all that he suffers that speaks, but also all that he is, and in a manner that those who are attuned to the divine mysteries can understand. John the Baptist understood him and leapt for joy. Jesus’ mute eloquence was able to move the heart of a child still in the womb. Let us be attentive to this preaching that does not strike our ears but speaks so powerfully to our spirit.
Grace is never given to us because we have done good works, but rather so that we may do them. Grace is so much in harmony with our best desires that it anticipates them. Grace extends throughout our entire lives, and, over the course of our lives, it always remains grace. It never shows itself to be what it is—that is, grace—more than when it comes to us unlooked for: as when Mary comes to Elizabeth and when Jesus comes to John the Baptist.
We see how Jesus anticipates his precursor; we must also see how he takes the initiative in the life of grace. Our zeal for the salvation of souls is the sign that we have been called. Jesus comes to John, the liberator to the captive. Jesus visits John, because the physician must go to visit the sick. Yet Jesus is in the womb and so is John: it seems that the physician is just as infirm as the patient. Jesus has taken on our infirmities in order to provide the remedy. In a similar way, it is our duty to make ourselves weak with the weak in order to cure them. “Who is weak, and I am not weak?” asks the Apostle, “Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?” If we wish to know just how far the Apostle descended in order to make himself weak with the weak, we must remember that he lowered himself to the point of giving milk to children: “We were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children.” Just as a nurse or a mother kneels down to be near the child and modulates her voice, departing from her normal way of speaking so that the child will be comforted, so also should we dispose of our eloquence in the service of our neighbor.
Mary and Elizabeth embrace and greet one another. The Law honors the Gospel by predicting it, the Gospel honors the Law by fulfilling it: this is their mutual greeting. Let us listen to their holy conversation. “Blessed are you among women.” O Church, O society of the faithful, assembly blessed among all those of the earth: you are singularly blessed because you were uniquely chosen. “Blessed is she who believed,” said Elizabeth to Mary, and with good reason, for faith is the source of all graces.
We must therefore confess that we are a work of mercy: our sacrifice is Eucharistic, a sacrifice of thanksgiving. This was the sacrifice offered by John the Baptist. In leaping for joy, he gave thanks to the Liberator. If he caused John to leap for joy by means of his presence alone, what will it be like in heaven when we shall see him face to face? John was in his mother’s womb and was able to sense Jesus who was in his mother’s. Jesus comes to our very selves; let us not be unaware that he is with us.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Almighty ever-living God, who, while the Blessed Virgin Mary was carrying your Son in her womb, inspired her to visit Elizabeth, grant us, we pray, that, faithful to the promptings of the Spirit, we may magnify your greatness with the Virgin Mary at all times. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
IMAGE: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Holy Family (The Seville Virgin), 1665–1670, Oil on canvas, The Louvre, Paris, France
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Among the infinite means God has at his disposal to establish his glory, the most effective is joined to humility. This we see in the mystery of the Annunciation. God wrought this great and glorious miracle when “Christ Jesus,” as St. Paul said, “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.”
We do not meditate on this subject to satisfy a vain curiosity; we do so that we may come to love holy humility, the fundamental virtue of Christianity, by learning of God’s love for it. The Son of God became man so that his Father might see in him a submissive and obedient God.
Let us see how much God loves humility. O divine act of obedience by which Jesus Christ began his life, new sacrifice of a submissive God, in what temple will you be offered to the Eternal Father? Where shall we see for the first time the marvelous spectacle of a humiliated and obedient God? It will be in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. This will be the temple, this will be the altar on which Jesus will consecrate to his Father his first vows of obedience. And how does it come to be, O Divine Savior, that you should choose this Virgin to be the sacred temple in which you will adore your heavenly Father with such profound humility? It is because this divine temple is founded upon and sanctified by humility. The Word, emptied and abased, willed that humility should prepare his temple. There was no fit dwelling place in the world for him except within the one that had been consecrated by humility.
The angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive the Son of the Most High, the King and Liberator of Israel. Who would think that a woman would be troubled by such good news? Could she receive a more glorious hope or a more magnificent promise on better authority? An angel told her of it on God’s behalf. Nevertheless, Mary was troubled. She was afraid. She hesitated. Then she replied: “How can this be, since I have no husband?” She was anxious for the purity of her virginity. If I should conceive the Son of the Most High, it would truly be a great glory for me, but what shall become of my holy virginity? I cannot consent to lose it. O marvelous purity, you are not only proof against all human promises, but also against the promises of God! For what do you wait, O Divine Word and chaste lover of pure souls? When shall you come to earth, if this purity does not attract you? But you must wait, for your temple has not yet received its finishing touch. The angel responds to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you.” He will come, that is, he has not yet come.
Let us now attend to the Blessed Virgin’s next words: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” It is apparent that her humility is speaking here; this is the language of obedience. Mary does not exalt herself in her new dignity as Mother of God. She does not allow herself to be transported by joy; she declares only her submission. And immediately the heavens open, torrents of grace fall upon Mary, the floodwaters of the Holy Spirit cover her, and the Word makes himself a body from her most pure blood. “The power of the Most High will overshadow you,” and this Son that he eternally engenders in his being, he now engenders in the womb of the Blessed Virgin. How can such a great miracle occur? It is because of your humility, O Blessed Virgin, that you are the first to receive, and within your very self, the One who is destined for the whole world. You become the temple of the Incarnate God, and the humility that fills you has made this dwelling place agreeable to him, so that, by a particular grace, he has willed that for nine whole months you should possess as your very own the common good of the entire universe. How true it is that humility is the source of every grace, and that it alone can attract Jesus to us.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
O God, who willed that your Word should take on the reality of human flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, grant, we pray, that we, who confess our Redeemer to be God and man, may merit to become partakers even in his divine nature. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
IMAGE: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Annunciation, 1655–1660, Oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is holiness itself, and although he is pleased to see at his feet the sinner who has returned to the path of righteousness, he nevertheless loves with a stronger love the innocent one who has never strayed.
Shall he not have the satisfaction of seeing someone like unto himself, or who at least approaches his purity from afar? Must Jesus, the innocent one, be always among sinners, without ever having the consolation of meeting an unstained soul? And who would that be, if not his holy mother? Yes, let this merciful Savior who has taken upon us all of our guilt spend his life running after sinners, let him go and seek them in every corner of Palestine, but let him find in his own home and under his own roof what will satisfy his eyes with the steady and lasting beauty of incorruptible holiness!
It is true that this charitable Savior does not cast off sinners, and far from sending them away from his presence, he does not disdain to call them the most honored members of his kingdom. He set the conduct of his flock in the hands of Peter, who denied him; he placed at the head of his evangelists Matthew, who was a tax collector; he made the first of his preachers Paul, who had persecuted him. These are not innocent men; these are converted sinners whom he raised to the highest ranks. Yet you should not therefore believe that he would choose his holy mother from the same lot. There must be a great difference between her and the others. What will that difference be?
He chose Peter, Matthew, and Paul for us, but he chose Mary for himself. Those whom he called for others, he drew forth from sin, so that they might the better proclaim his mercy. His plan was to give hope to those souls beaten down by sin; who could more effectively preach divine mercy than those who were themselves its illustrious examples? Who else could have said with greater effect, “the saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” than a St. Paul, who was able to add, “and I am the foremost of sinners”?
Yet if he treated in this way those whom he called for the sake of us sinners, we must not think that he did the same for the dear creature, the extraordinary creature, the unique and privileged creature whom he made for himself, whom he chose to be his mother. In his apostles and ministers, he brought about what would be most useful for the salvation of all, but in his holy mother, he did what was sweetest, most glorious, and most satisfying for himself, and, consequently, he made Mary to be innocent.
We must not persuade ourselves that to distinguish Mary from Jesus we must take away her innocence and leave it to her Son alone. To tell the morning from midday, there is no need to fill the air with storms or cover the sky with clouds: it suffices that the rays of the morning sun should be weaker and their light less brilliant. To distinguish Mary from Jesus, there is no need to put sin into the mix. It suffices that her innocence be a weaker light. That light belongs to Jesus by right, but to Mary by privilege, to Jesus by nature, to Mary by grace and favor. We honor the source in Jesus, and in Mary a flowing forth from the source. What should console us is that this flowing forth of innocence shines for the benefit of us poor sinners. Innocence normally reproaches the guilty for their evil lives and seems to pronounce condemnation upon them. Yet it is not so with Mary. Her innocence is favorable to us, and why? Because it is only a flowing forth of the innocence of the Savior Jesus. The innocence of Jesus is the life and salvation of sinners, and so the innocence of the Blessed Virgin serves to obtain pardon for sinners. Let us look upon this holy and innocent creature as the sure support for our misery and go and wash our sins in the bright light of her incorruptible purity.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Impart to your servants, we pray, O Lord, the gift of heavenly grace, that the recollection of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin may bring deeper peace to those for whom the birth of her Son was the dawning of salvation. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
IMAGE: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Madonna and Child, 1655–1660, Oil on canvas, The Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In order to understand the role of the Blessed Virgin in the work of our salvation, we must look back to the origin of all things. There we see just how considerate God is: in the work of regenerating our nature he employed all that had once contributed to its ruin. It is certain that God could have delivered mankind without becoming a man. Yet it pleased him to redeem us by becoming a man so that the same nature that had been enslaved by the demon could win the victory over him and his overbold companions. Even when the Son of God had resolved to come to earth and to clothe himself in human flesh, he could have made himself a body and a soul without the assistance of his creatures, and thus been spared the shame of belonging to a criminal line. Nevertheless, his incomprehensible Providence disposed otherwise. It pleased him that grace and blessing should find its origin in this accursed race. Our Lord wanted to be the son of Adam so that his blessed birth would forever sanctify the race that had been infected by sin.
Since both man and woman participated in the despoiling of our nature, they would also participate in its restoration. If the corruption of sin had dishonored both sexes, it was necessary that the Redeemer of man should honor them both. That is why Jesus Christ, a man, was born of a woman. And because mankind was cast into eternal damnation by a man and a woman, it was fitting that God should have predestined a new Eve as well as a new Adam, so as to replace the old line that had been condemned with a new line sanctified by grace. We may, therefore, conclude that just as the first Eve was the mother of all those condemned to die, so the new Eve, Mary, is the mother of all the living, that is, the faithful.
Let us compare Eve and Mary. The work of our corruption began with Eve, the work of our regeneration with Mary. An angel of darkness spoke to Eve, an angel of light to Mary. The angel of darkness wished to raise Eve to the false dignity of pretending to be divine, saying to her, “You will be like God.” The angel of light identified Mary’s true dignity as her friendship with God, saying, “The Lord is with you.” The angel of darkness, speaking to Eve, sought to incite her to rebellion: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?’” The angel of light, speaking to Mary, persuaded her to be obedient: “Do not be afraid, Mary . . . with God, nothing will be impossible.” The word of death was spoken to Eve, the word of life to the Blessed Virgin. Eve believed the serpent, Mary the angel. Thus, as Tertullian said, “a pious faith erased the fault of an audacious credulity, and Mary repaired by her belief in God what Eve had ruined by believing the devil.” Eve, led astray by the demon, was forced to flee the presence of God, while Mary, instructed by the angel, was made worthy to bear God, so that, as the holy martyr Irenaeus said, “the Virgin Mary became the advocate for the virgin Eve.”
It cannot be doubted that Mary was the Eve of the new covenant and consequently the mother of a new people. And Mary will be your mother, if you live in Our Lord Jesus Christ. She will be Eve, that is, in the Hebrew tongue, the living one. Adam gave this name to his wife because she was the mother of all the living. Yet it is not Eve who is the mother of all the living; she is, rather, the mother of those who will die. In fact, the first Eve received her name as a prefigurement of the Blessed Virgin, whose dignity she represents. The Blessed Virgin is the true Eve, the true mother of all the living. Live, then, and Mary will be your mother. But live in and through Jesus, because Mary herself has no life except in and through Jesus.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
O God, who through the fruitful virginity of Blessed Mary bestowed on the human race the grace of eternal salvation, grant, we pray, that we may experience the intercession of her, through whom we were found worthy to receive the author of life, our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
IMAGE: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Birth of the Virgin, 1660, Oil on canvas, The Louvre, Piazzetta Room, Paris, France
Favourite Music: In the second of a series on a few of Fr. Dwight Longenecker's favourite things, Joseph Pearce asks him about his favourite music.
Our Lord seems to have found this world a cluttered place. Luke 2:7 says that there was no room for the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem. Thirty years later, the same Evangelist tells us, there would be no room for Jesus in Nazareth, either (Lk 4:23–30), and the Son of Man would have nowhere to lay his head (Lk 9:58). In many human hearts, his Word would find “no place” (Jn 8:37).
Yet there were some who made room for him. We might think of Simon and Andrew’s house in Capernaum, which St. Mark can call Jesus’ “home” (Mk 2:1), or of Martha of Bethany who “welcomed him into her house,” as would Zacchaeus in Jericho (Lk 10:38; 19:1–6). This hospitality never came without a cost. Simon and Andrew’s house would be overcrowded and sustain roof-damage (Mk 2:2–4), Martha would be admonished to adjust her priorities (Lk 10:39–42), and Zacchaeus would make expensive restitutions for his earlier malpractice (Lk 19:8).
Above all, the Virgin of Nazareth incomparably offered her whole self as a gift to make space for Jesus, “with love beyond all telling,” as the Roman Missal puts it. And the Blessed Virgin’s gift was honored and protected by another, that it might bear fruit. “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit,” said the angel, and Joseph humbly obeyed (Mt 1:20). In the early second century, St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote that Mary’s virginal motherhood was a mystery concealed from the prince of this world.[1] Precisely by accepting his role as husband and father, St. Joseph made room in this world for the mystery of Jesus and Mary, keeping it safe from the prideful, prying eyes of the devil, to whom humility and self-giving love are incomprehensible.
Making room for Jesus and Mary—or for anyone, for that matter—does not mean backing off, getting out of the way. In Joseph’s case, quite the contrary: he created space by not backing off and getting out of the way, even when he would have preferred to (Mt 1:19–20). Space, as the context for authentic flourishing, is not about anchorless indeterminacy of meaning or unfettered libertarian choice. Space entails order. St. Joseph made room for Jesus precisely in the context of a divinely ordained Plan. “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet…” (Mt 1:23). That Plan sweeps across the centuries of Israel’s glorious and heartbreaking sacred history, coming to an unlikely culmination in “Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ” (Mt 1:16). It is Joseph who was “son of David.” But by naming and thus claiming Mary’s Son (Mt 1:21, 25), Joseph made room for Jesus at the climax of the royal genealogy that opens St. Matthew’s Gospel. He created space in this world for Jesus’ messianic identity.
Joseph thereby also made room for Jesus’ saving mission. It is often repeated, and it is perfectly true, that Scripture records not a single word of Joseph’s—at least not directly. But Scripture does strongly imply that he said at least one specific word: “And he called his name Jesus” (Mt 1:25). The one word we can be confident that Joseph uttered was “Jesus,” a name that sums up the mission of Joseph’s Son: “for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21; see CCC 432, 2666).
The sole episode that Scripture recounts from Jesus’ childhood shows that Joseph did not always fully grasp his Son’s mission. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Jesus asks his parents, but “they did not understand the saying that he spoke to them” (Lk 2:49–50). This unsettling sign reminded Joseph “that he was a guardian of the mystery of God.”[2] But that guardianship would be lived in an apparently normal family life. “And [Jesus] went down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them” (Lk 2:51). What did that mean for Joseph? Nothing more glamorous than the ordinary work of a craftsman to provide for his family. In the Litany of St Joseph, he is invoked as Almae Familiae praeses—“head of the Holy Family.” His was a real authority. Yet, as Pope St Paul VI observed in 1966, it was an authority that he used only “in order to make a total gift of self, of his life and work,” to Jesus.[3] It was an authority he used not for himself, but for others. And with it he made space for the ineffable mystery of the Incarnate Word to flourish in this cluttered world: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Lk 2:52).
Jesus’ submission to his earthly father adumbrates his total fidelity to his heavenly Father (Jn 5:19; 8:28). The saints have therefore called St. Joseph the “shadow of the Father.” Joseph’s shadowing-forth of the Father extends to his work. As St. Joseph would work to make space for the Second Adam, in the beginning God worked to make space for the First Adam. He not only created but also arranged and adorned the universe to be a place of order and meaning rather than a chaos “without form and void” (Gen 1:2). He prepared the garden for the man, appointing it with all he would need to flourish (Gen 2:8–9). And he invited the man to the dignity of imitating his maker by working and keeping the garden (Gen 2:15). We are no longer in Eden, but this invitation is still extended to all workers. No matter how “menial” the labor might seem, work that is done in love participates in the dignity of the Father’s work of making space, of establishing order, of pursuing the common good.
Based on Joseph’s absence after Jesus’ childhood, Christian Tradition has reasonably concluded that he died before Jesus began his public ministry. Protected by Joseph, the “shadow of the Father,” Jesus was prepared for his great work: “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (Jn 5:17). He came, he told his disciples, to accomplish the work of the one who sent him (Jn 4:34; 5:36; 17:4). That work, the work of redemption, was to be completed in his Paschal Mystery. This too was a task of creating space.
“In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (Jn 14:2). The Father’s house—the new and definitive Temple—is Jesus’ own body (Jn 2:21). Where, then, is the “place” that Jesus prepared for us? When Christ’s side was opened, blood and water flowed out, symbols of the Sacraments of salvation that draw us in, bringing us into union with him. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth,” Jesus had solemnly predicted, “will draw all people to myself” (Jn 12:32).
Accordingly, patristic and medieval interpreters saw the wound in our Lord’s side as a portal. For St. Augustine, it was the door of the Ark of salvation.[4] For St. Ephrem, it was the gate through which we return to Eden.[5] A millennium later, Christian mystics expanded on the image. In the 1330s the Flemish priest Blessed John van Ruysbroeck wrote, “The open wound in his side will be your door to eternal life and your entranceway into that living paradise which he is himself.”[6] Just a few decades later, Julian of Norwich saw that same wound as “a beautiful and delightful place, large enough for all mankind that will be saved to rest there in peace and love.”[7]
Coming into this cluttered and inhospitable world, our Lord has made room for us in his Body. He has made room for us in his own identity as Son of the Father (Jn 1:12). This divine gift was made possible by the quiet righteousness of Joseph’s ordinary work, by which he made space for Mary and for Jesus, and thus guarded the mystery through which the Lord would make space for us all. Through Joseph the Worker’s intercession, and in imitation of his faithful work, may we too create space for those around us to flourish in accord with God’s plan. Above all, may we make room in ourselves for Jesus’ Word (Jn 8:37), that he and his Father might come and make their home with us (Jn 14:23).
[1] Ephesians 19.1.[2] St John Paul II, Redemptoris Custos 15.[3] Quoted by St John Paul II, Redemptoris Custos 8.[4] City of God 15.26, drawing on Gen. 6:16.[5] Hymns on the Nativity 8:4.[6] A Mirror of Eternal Blessedness, introduction; trans. J. A. Wiseman.[7] Revelations of Divine Love 24; trans. B. Windeatt.
“And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, ‘Which commandment is the most important of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The most important is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’”
In the twelfth chapter of Mark’s gospel, a scribe confronts Jesus with a question that prompts one of Jesus’ most well known teachings: “Which commandment is the most important of all?” to which Jesus replies, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart… You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk 12:28–29).
There are a lot of loves wrapped up here: love for God, love for self, and love for neighbor. Three distinct loves, but they are all interconnected, and St. Catherine of Siena helps us to see how. She records what Jesus said to her in prayer about this very passage: “It is your duty to love your neighbors as your own self. In love you ought to help them spiritually with prayer and counsel, and assist them spiritually and materially in their need—at least with your good will if you have nothing else.” Up to this point, she basically restates the gospel teaching and unpacks in more detail what this means: we should care for others both spiritually and materially, as we are able, and we are always able to will the good to the other, especially in prayer.
But she goes on, again in Jesus’ voice: “If you do not love me you do not love your neighbors, nor will you help those you do not love. But it is yourself you harm most, because you deprive yourself of grace. And you harm your neighbors by depriving them of the prayer and loving desires you should be offering to me on their behalf. Every help you give them ought to come from the affection you bear them for love of me.” The source of loving others truly and rightly is loving Jesus, because if we do not know and love Jesus, we will be unable to offer our neighbor the very greatest good: Christ himself. And if we cannot offer this greatest good, we cannot truly love them, for love wills the good of the other. Beyond this, Catherine flips our usual understanding of this passage by teaching that as we love our neighbor, so we love ourselves; consequently, in failing to love our neighbor, we also fail to love ourselves and we deprive ourselves of grace, as she writes.
Favourite Films: In the first of a series on a few of Fr. Dwight Longenecker's favourite things, Joseph Pearce asks him about his favourite films.
“And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.’”
In Mark 8, Jesus delivers the first of three predictions of his passion, death, and resurrection found in the Gospel (Mk. 8:31). Upon hearing this, Peter rebukes the Lord. Jesus immediately chastises Peter and commands him to “get behind” him. With these seemingly harsh words Jesus echoes his initial invitation for Simon Peter to follow him, to “get behind” him as his disciple (cf. Mk. 1:17). For the disciple is called to follow the Master closely; this is where one learns the Christian life. The Lord makes it clear that being his disciple entails doing what he does, not telling him what to do. Jesus tells those gathered around him—apostles, disciples, and the crowd—that each and every one of his followers is called to take up the cross and follow him. Pope St. John Paul II, in a Wednesday audience, acknowledges that with these words “Christ proposes a narrow way that demands sacrifice and total self-giving.” It remains clear as the gospel unfolds that the path of following Christ “includes the thorns of suffering and persecution.” John Paul II concludes, “discipleship, then, is not an easy journey on a level road.” It is the path of imitating Christ in all things, including the journey up the hill of Calvary.
From the gospel we know of Peter’s harsh reaction to hearing his friend predict his suffering and death. Imagine, for a moment, what everyone else thought when they heard the prophecy of what their own vocation would demand. These words are difficult for us to hear. In fact, they might be too much to bear if the Lord did not attach a promise of salvation to them. It is on that promise that John Paul II encourages us to fix our gaze, for the “ultimate goal of discipleship is glory.” This is the paradox of the personal cross that the Christian carries behind Christ. The Cross, an instrument of death, becomes a means of life because of Jesus’ own death and subsequent Resurrected glory. The suffering we experience in our lives, then, is an opportunity to bear our cross as the Lord commanded. We prove our fidelity to him by self-sacrificial acts of love. This is how we become more like him. Through faithfully and lovingly carrying our cross, we look forward to the reward he promised. St. Paul reinforces this logic stating, “for if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5). John Paul II reminds us to look to the “Cross, sign of love and of total self-giving” because it is “the emblem of the disciple called to be configured to the glorious Christ.”[1]
[1] Summary by Ben Akers with the use of Pope John Paul II, Wednesday Audience, 6 September 2000.
“But he would withdraw to desolate places to pray.”
This short verse only appears in the Gospel of Luke, but not in the other gospels. It gives us a profound insight into Jesus’ earthly life and his habit of solitary prayer in seclusion. So often we think of him as surrounded by lots of people, preaching to them and healing them, but his outward ministry was fueled by the inner life of prayer to His Father in secret.
St. Bonaventure notes that unlike most of us, Jesus “didn’t seek human glory or fame, but fled from these.” His habit of prayer “gave us the model of going away from the world and approaching close to God.” To be effective evangelists, we must be authentic witnesses in this regard. And what we do in secret reveals what we really care about. When we pray in secret, all alone with God, we do not gain the approval of other people, influence in the world, financial security or any other material gain. Instead, we prove our love for Him to be genuine.
Bonaventure says, “for prayer to be pleasing to God, it must not be public in the open market, but hidden in the desert.” While we might not be able to go to a literal desert for our prayer time, we can seek out a quiet corner, a hidden nook, a private place to spend time conversing with God alone. Jesus set the pattern for us by seeking out “desolate places” away from the crowds, away from his disciples, so he could be undistracted and fully engaged in prayer.
We can follow his example by setting aside quiet time in a quiet place on a daily basis just for Him. In addition, we can make our prayer “pleasing to God” by seeking out special opportunities for private prayer like weekend retreats, silent adoration and the occasional moment to step in the back of a dimly lit church when no one is around. If we find a way to do these things, we will taste the sweetness of communion, the joy of intimacy and the depth of His love.[1]
[1] Summary by Mark Giszczak with the use of Bonaventure, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke: Chapters 1–8, 411.
The Screen and Reading: Can watching movies be a substitute for good reading? Can images on the screen convey deep truths as well as great literature does? Fr. Dwight Longenecker and Joseph Pearce delve deeper into these questions.
“Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, ‘Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.’”
St. Gregory the Great, in commenting on this passage from Mark, asks some important questions: why did some of the disciples at first deny the resurrection when they were told about it (by Mary Magdalene and others)? And, why does the command to preach the gospel to the whole creation come directly after Christ’s rebuke? The one (preaching the gospel) does not seem to follow from the other (unbelief). To the first question, Gregory answers that we should not criticize the weakness of the apostles too quickly, but realize that their doubts have yielded great benefits to us, because Christ “showed them in their doubt many proofs of his resurrection.” When we see these proofs and put ourselves in shoes of the apostles “we are strengthened as a result of their doubt,” says Gregory. In particular, of the story of St. Thomas, who asked to put his hand into the Lord’s side (cf. Jn. 20:25), St. Gregory comments “while doubting, he touched the scars of the wound, and cut out of our hearts the wound of doubt.”
But what of the second question? Why does Jesus rebuke his followers for hardness of heart, but then immediately afterwards commission them to preach? Jesus scolds them, Gregory explained, “in order to fix his parting words more firmly in the hearts of his hearers.” In other words, the disciples received the correction of Jesus so that he could strengthen them, not just in their own personal faith life, but for the proclamation of the gospel.
We might sometimes be tempted to think that we need to have everything figured out, that we need to be completely faithful and sure of ourselves before we can open our mouths and speak of Jesus to others. But Gregory reminds us that part of the process of healing our vision so that we can truly see the resurrection is to act: to share our faith and to preach it “to the whole creation,” as Mark says. Preaching to the whole creation does not mean that we preach to rocks and to trees, says Gregory, but to every single person everywhere, because on this universal preaching the meaning and beauty of the whole creation rests.
Summary by Elizabeth Klein with the use of Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies 29, trans. David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 226–229.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
St. Augustine cites John 1:1 more than any other gospel passage. This passage is fundamental for his understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity and the identity of Jesus Christ. The passage means that Jesus is God the Word–not identical with the Father (since the Word is with God) and yet at the same time fully God (since the Word is God). As God, the Word is also said to be the creator of all things.
Augustine reiterates these points not just in his theological writings, but frequently in his homilies, encouraging his audience to plumb the depths of this mystery even though they cannot fully understand it: “It says and the Word was God (Jn. 1:1). We are talking about God; so why be surprised if you cannot grasp it? I mean, if you can grasp it, it isn’t God.” Nevertheless, our eternal happiness is to be with God and to know him, since “we human beings are made blessed by our hearts just brushing against that which abides always blessed; and that is itself eternal blessedness.” Therefore, contemplating God and the Trinity is essential for every Christian. Augustine explains why: “God does not increase thanks to those who know him, but those who know him do, thanks to their knowledge of God.” To know God better is to grow in the spiritual life and finally to know God is blessedness, it is our destination in heaven.
Augustine gives an analogy to help us understand how important and beautiful it is to strive to know God. He says that John 1:1 tells us that the Word is above all created things, and thus the Word is what we should want to acquire above all created things. Normally, when we want to acquire something we have to give something else away. We have to give money to buy bread. We have to give time to earn money. But what could we give to gain the Word, which is above all? What could we possibly trade in hopes of gaining something of such great value? Augustine says that we can only give everything, that is, ourselves. However, unlike in the case of giving away money to buy goods, when we give away our whole selves to Christ we, in the end, find we have in fact lost nothing: “now if you want to buy this Word, if you want to have it, don’t look for something outside yourself you can give; give yourself. When you have done that, you don’t lose yourself as you lose the price when you buy something. So the Word of God is set before us all. Let those buy it who can; all those who devoutly wish to can do so.”
[1] Summary by Elizabeth Klein with the use of Augustine s. 117 in Essential Sermons, 195–203.
A Conversation with Mark GiszczakFaith&Culture welcomes the Augustine Institute’s Professor Mark Giszczak for a conversation about the Augustine Bible, which is the first American edition of the new ESV-CE Bible.
Faith & Culture:So, just what is the ESV-CE anyway?
Mark Giszczak:It is a new Catholic translation of the Bible. In 2018, the Catholic Church in India approved this new translation: The English Standard Version, Catholic Edition (ESV-CE). This new translation is a modified form of the ESV Bible, which was translated by evangelical scholars and first released in 2001. The ESV is an update of the trusted Revised Standard Version (1952, 1971). It was reviewed by a team of Catholic scholars in India, who modified the translation to ensure it adhered to Catholic teaching. Now the translation is required for liturgical use throughout India. The translation is essentially literal and as transparent as possible to the original languages.
Faith & Culture:Is the ESV-CE translation approved by the Catholic Church?
Mark Giszczak:Yes. Under the Code of Canon Law, 825 §1, only the Vatican or a national bishops’ conference can approve a Bible translation for publication. In accord with canon law, the ESV-CE was approved by the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India on February 4, 2018 and granted the Imprimatur by Cardinal Oswald Gracias, a member of Pope Francis’ top advisory team, the Council of Cardinals. The translation explicitly adhered to the Vatican’s translation principles prescribed by Liturgiam authenticam (2001). The Vatican approved the ESV-CE Lectionary on December 9, 2019, and it is mandated for liturgical use throughout India as of Palm Sunday 2020.
Faith & Culture:Were any Catholic scholars involved in the preparation of the ESV-CE?
Mark Giszczak:The team of scholars which the Catholic Bishops of India entrusted with the task of revising the ESV for Catholic use included: Rev. Dr. Lucien Legrand, MEP, Rev. Dr. Assisi Saldanha, CSsR, Rev. Dr. Govindu Rayanna, Rev. Dr. A. Alfred Joseph, Rev. Dr. David Stanly Kumar, Sr. Dr. Prema Vakayil, CSST, Rev. Dr. Shabu Joseph Thottumkal, SDB, Rev. Dr. Stanislas Savarimuthu.
Faith & Culture:Will the translation sound familiar or foreign?
Mark Giszczak:If you have ever read the King James Bible or its twentieth century update, the Revised Standard Version, the ESV will sound familiar. As an intentional update of the RSV, the ESV removes archaic-sounding words and phrases, while trying to improve on the translation and changing about 60,000 words in all. It is close enough to the RSV to sound familiar, but different enough to feel fresh.
Faith & Culture:Does it include the deuterocanonical books?
Mark Giszczak:The ESV-CE includes all the deuterocanonical books and additions. The original ESV from 2001 was a Protestant publication and so did not include the deuterocanonical books and additions (1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Wisdom, Baruch, additions to Esther, additions to Daniel). The 2018 Catholic Edition of the ESV includes all of the books held to be canonical by the Catholic Church.
Faith & Culture:Isn’t the ESV a Protestant translation? Doesn’t that pose problems for Catholics?
Mark Giszczak:The ESV was originally translated by a team of evangelical scholars under the auspices of Crossway Books, a Protestant publisher. It was, however, adapted by Catholic scholars and only then approved by the Catholic Church in India in 2018 as the ESV-Catholic Edition. In this way, the ESV is much like the RSV before it. The RSV was originally released in 1952 as a Protestant translation and only later approved by Catholic bishops in 1965-66. Both the RSV and the ESV are valuable ecumenical efforts that allow Protestants and Catholics to read Scripture together.
Faith & Culture:Who translated the ESV?
Mark Giszczak:The 2001 ESV translation effort was headed up by the Translation Oversight Committee brought together by Crossway Books. That original twelve-member team of evangelical scholars included Dr. Clifford John Collins, Dr. Lane T. Dennis, Dr. Wayne A. Grudem, Dr. Paul R. House, Dr. R. Kent Hughes, Dr. Robert H. Mounce, Dr. William D. Mounce, Dr. J.I. Packer, Dr. Leland Ryken, Dr. Vern Sheridan Poythress, Dr. Gordon Wenham, and Dr. Bruce Winter. A group of Catholic scholars in India updated the translation before the 2018 release of the ESV-CE.
Faith & Culture:When was the ESV-CE released?
Mark Giszczak:The ESV-CE was first released in India in 2018 by the Asian Trading Corporation. The ESV-CE was released in the United States in 2019 by the Augustine Institute.
Get your copy of the ESV-CE Bible today at Catholic.Market.
Myth and the Bible: What are myths? Are they lies or do they tell the truth? What relationship is there, if any, between myths and the Bible? Joseph Pearce and Fr. Dwight Longenecker tackle these contentious questions.
“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.”
With these words we find ourselves at the foot of the Cross with Mary, the mother of Jesus and John, the beloved disciple of Christ. We also discover that we are at the center of a profound mystery of our faith. The exchange between these three comprise an important “message of the cross,” according to Pope St. John Paul II, for they are “supreme words of love.” Mary’s presence at the cross is more than just the natural love and affection a mother has for her suffering child, although it does involve that. John Paul II observes that “Mary’s presence at the cross shows her commitment to total participation in her Son’s redemptive sacrifice.” Mary freely and fully accepts, “with Christ, the mysterious plan of the Father.” Her position indicates that the mother of Jesus “forever remains the perfect model of all who would accept to associate without reserve with the redemptive offer.” Christ’s mother, then, teaches us the art of uniting our minds and hearts with the will of God especially in times of suffering.
The suffering of Christ in which we have a share is often not what we would choose for ourselves. Mary would never have wanted her Son to suffer and to die in this way; yet, she trusts in God’s plan. This offers us a chance to reflect on crosses in our own life. When suffering enters our life, as it does in every person’s life, what is our response towards it? Jesus’ entrusting of his mother to the disciple’s care illustrates his “testament of love” for all his followers throughout the ages. The experience of having received Mary’s “motherly love” in his own life is something Jesus “wanted his disciples to also enjoy … as part of the relationship with him throughout the development of their spiritual life.” As we grow in our life of discipleship to Christ we should also nurture a relationship with his mother. Having Mary as a mother is something Jesus wants for us as well. As we consider our Christian lives, Pope John Paul II invites us to have affection for the Blessed Mother and to allow “her to form us in true docility towards God, in true union with Christ, in true charity towards neighbor.” Pope John Paull II asks each disciple to “welcome Mary into his home, in his life” and to strive to “appreciate more and more the gift that the crucified Christ has given us, leaving us his own mother as our mother.” 30
[30] Summary by Ben Akers with the use of Pope John Paul II, Wednesday Audience, 23 November 1988.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me.”
The Fathers of the Church bear powerful witness to early Christian belief in Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist. Perhaps less often appreciated is their rich teaching about why Jesus would give himself to us in this way. In his commentary on this passage, St. Cyril of Alexandria largely takes the fact of Christ’s Real Presence for granted. He focuses instead on our reception of the gift of divine life through the Eucharist. This gift turns on the mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of God becoming man in Jesus Christ. Cyril explains that, since he is the divine Word, Jesus is “life by nature, inasmuch as he was begotten of the living Father. And his holy body too is no less life-giving, since it is in some way brought together and ineffably united with the Word who gives life to all.” Because Christ’s flesh is perfectly united to his divinity, “when we taste of it” in the Eucharist, “then we have life in ourselves, since we too are united to that flesh just as it is united to the Word who indwells it.”
Cyril is also anxious to guard against a possible misunderstanding of the last sentence of this passage, which could be taken to mean that the Son receives life from the Father in the same way as we do, that is, by grace rather than by nature. There are several good reasons why this question is important. Let us consider just one. Cyril points out that Jesus says that he is “the life” (Jn. 11:25). The “life” we receive from Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, then, is the very life that he is by nature as the Father’s only-begotten. This means, in turn, that our share in the eternal Father’s life is not given to us at one remove. As the “one mediator between God and men” (1 Tim. 2:5), Jesus does not stand between us and the Father as a barrier as well as a bridge. Rather, he mediates by sharing with us his very own relationship of eternal life and love with the Father. That relationship is his by nature, ours by participation through the grace of adoption. But it is the very same relationship. And we receive it, astonishingly, under the form of bread and wine. 26
[26] Summary by John Sehorn with the use of Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John 4.2-3 in Commentary on John, vol. 1, trans. David R. Maxwell, Ancient Christian Texts (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 236–243.
As we trudge through the Lenten season, heading towards Good Friday, the cross casts a long shadow over us. And perhaps during these penitential days, or on Good Friday itself, you will hear something like this coming from a preacher (or from a blog post): “The cross was the most horrific, most painful death possible.” Your homilist may even go on to describe the extreme suffering of Roman crucifixion, the death by asphyxiation, the agony of enduring the elements, and so on and so forth. And, at first glance, this may appear to be a persuasive piece of rhetoric, because it turns us towards the horrible reality of the cross and it humbles us before the tremendous suffering of the Lord. Only, this claim – that the Roman crucifixion suffered by Jesus is the most painful death possible – is false.
Now, the point I am trying to make is not that the Lord could have suffered more than he did or that he should have suffered in a different way, nor is it to downplay the horror of crucifixion. Rather, I believe that if we make the erroneous claim that Christ suffered the worst death conceivable in some kind of objective or abstract sense, we will fail to understand the true perfection that was Christ’s suffering. God is not a film director in the sky who had planned to direct a comedy, but due to a catastrophic series of events, had to direct a horror film instead. Christ did not come to earth saying, “well if I am going to suffer, it might as well be the most violent death ever conceived!” And, if one reflects on the claim for a moment, one will at once realize its shortcomings. If Christ had hung on the cross for thirty seconds longer, would his pain not have been greater? If he had hung on the cross while being burned with scalding water (as the Japanese martyrs of the seventeenth century were), would that pain not have been greater?
Let there be no mistake: Christ’s suffering was perfect, and it was the greatest suffering ever endured – but Christ’s pain was of the worst sort in a subjective sense (because of the subject of that suffering), we might say, not an objective one. Understanding this point helps us to see that Christ did not suffer for his own sake, as a kind of suffering achievement, but for our sake. Christ did not suffer the worst death that he could possibly have come up with from all eternity, but he suffered the worst death that we could come up with in the time and place when Christ walked the earth. Athanasius in his famous work On the Incarnation makes a similar point. Against Christian detractors who would argue that if Christ was God then he should have arranged for a more honorable death, Athanasius responds:
“even this [an honorable death] would have given ground for suspicion that his power over death was limited to the particular kind of death that he chose for himself; and that again would furnish excuse for disbelieving the resurrection. Death came to his body, therefore, not from himself but from enemy action, in order that the Savior might utterly abolish death in whatever form they offered it to him. A generous wrestler, virile and strong, does not himself choose his antagonists, lest it should be thought that of some of them he is afraid. Rather, he lets the spectators choose them, and that all the more if these are hostile, so that he may overthrow whomsoever they match against him and thus vindicate his superior strength” (DI 24).
Christ not only suffered death, but, as Paul says, he “was obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8). If it was Adam’s chief sin to desire to be master of his own fate, Christ reverses this sin by handing his fate over into the hands of others, even though as God he rules the universe. Christ’s suffering is perfect because only he is able to suffer perfectly, having no fault of his own for which he ought to suffer. He suffers perfectly because he accepts suffering perfectly, he understands his suffering perfectly and sees the horror of sin perfectly (see Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologia 3.46.6). However, by his obedience and submission in a marvelous turn of events, as Athanasius points out, Christ wins an even greater victory, because he conquers by means of his enemy’s own malicious plans. The cross, which was meant for Christ’s humiliation and defeat, has become the universal sign of Christian salvation.
The lesson for us in this time of turmoil is profound. We would often like to invent a more heroic form of suffering for ourselves, or we would like to pick a kind of suffering other than the one we are undergoing. But following Christ’s humility, we must be obedient unto death, whatever death the Lord has called us to die. We must pick up our cross and follow him, as the Lord himself demands. This call means that we must now give up things that we never even dreamed of having to give up, and suffer in ways that might be humiliating, or worse yet, hidden and seemingly without meaning. Suffering is not an achievement, but the cure for our pride and the means of unity with God. If we, like Christ, suffer whatever we are given, our victory will likewise be all the more glorious, because it will be to share in the resurrection.
Joseph Pearce and John Sehorn discuss the meaning of "peace" and the difference between the peace of Christ and the sort of peace the world offers.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language.George Orwell
In an article entitled “Valuing Vocabulary”, Cherie Harder, President of the Trinity Forum, connects the state of modern politics with lessons to be learned from George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In Orwell’s ominously prophetic novel, the all-powerful government limits the ability of the people to think for themselves through the debasing and dumbing-down of the language. The institution by Big Brother of a politically “correct” vocabulary, known as Newspeak, flattens and constricts the language so that words which express moral, aesthetic or analytical distinctions are removed from the lexicon, rendering precise or nuanced discussion of moral or ethical issues effectively impossible.
“Newspeak”, writes Miss Harder, “was a means of not only controlling the public conversation, but also private thought”.
Orwell is right and Miss Harder is to be praised for reminding us of the fact. The effective prohibition on certain politically “incorrect” words, causing them to fall out of usage so that new generations will have no knowledge of them, will ultimately render any dissident thought literally unthinkable. We think with words and therefore the removal of words removes our ability to think about the things that they signify. The less that we are masters of a rich and vivid vocabulary the easier will we be mastered by the thought police of political correctness. Take, for example, the effective removal of words such as “sin” or “virtue” from political debate or polite conversation. Without such words it becomes increasingly difficult to discuss issues of morality in any objective sense. If the thought police are successful, future generations will not even know these words and will, therefore, not even be able to think about issues of morality in any objective sense. Such a scenario, should it come to pass, would be the triumph of the Big Brother of relativism.
Miss Harder laments that “our public vocabulary is changing—not only dwindling, but also shifting in focus and content.” She points to several studies which show how the spoken vocabulary levels of presidential candidates in the last election campaign was “hovering around a middle school level for most candidates … with a leading presidential candidate consistently speaking at a third- or fourth-grade level”. More striking than the shrinkage of vocabulary is, however, the change in word use itself. Whereas terms of abuse against one’s opponents had increased markedly, along with the use of the personal pronoun, the focus on real issues had been lost. In the last presidential election campaign, as distinct from previous campaigns, there was a conspicuous absence of speeches focusing on compassion, children, education, hope, growth, tax reform and budget-balancing. Miss Harder suggests, quite correctly, that “the silence on these subjects is telling”. Needless to say, the political rhetoric of the campaign has also been devoid of any discussion of the necessity of virtue and, of course, any suggestion that sin might be an issue is strictly taboo.
Referring to David Brooks’ book, The Road to Character, Miss Harder quotes Brooks’ research into the way that “public language has become demoralized”. Over the past few decades there has been a sharp rise in the usage of individualist words like “self” and “personalized” and a sharp decline in words like “community,” “share,” “united,” and “common good.” The language of morality and character building is also in decline, with the usage of words like “character,” “conscience” and “virtue” all declining over the course of the twentieth century. Usage of the word “bravery” has declined by 66 percent over the course of the past century. “Humbleness” is down 52 percent and “kindness” is down 56 percent.
Something is clearly rotten in the state of language.
One completely practical way that we can stop the rot and fight back against the thought police of narcissism is to encourage the reading of great works of literature. In these treasure troves we not only rediscover the virtue that our self-deifying culture has lost but also the freedom of a rich vocabulary with which to liberate ourselves from the slave language of Newspeak.
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Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) holds a unique place among American painters. Firstly, although considered a realist painter, painting many realist paintings, e.g. The Banjo Lesson (1893) and The Thankful Poor (1894), he also stands as one of the leading painters of sacred art during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, e.g. Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1895) and The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896). Secondly, Tanner was African-American and might well be the premier painter of African descent in all art history.
Henry Tanner was blessed to be born in Pittsburgh to a minister who ensured that he received an excellent education. He was also blessed to be born at a time when Thomas Eakins had begun to encourage women and blacks to study art seriously. Art historians consider Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) to be not only America’s leading realist artist of the 19th century, but also one of the most important American artists of all time. For example, in The Gross Clinic, Eakins depicts–in exacting detail–Dr. Samuel Gross as he oversees an operation to remove a diseased bone from a patient’s thigh. In addition to his work as a painter, Thomas Eakins joined the staff of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1876 and became its director six years later.
In 1879, Henry Ossawa Tanner enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy and quickly became one of Thomas Eakins’ best students as well as his friend. Unfortunately, however, late 19th century America did not present the best opportunity for an African-American artist. Seeking better prospects, Tanner journeyed to France in 1891 where he spent the remainder of his life and became an internationally celebrated artist.
For a realist painter, creating a vision of something supernatural presented innumerable problems, which is why almost no realist painters created sacred art. Realist artists embraced Positivism and Empiricism. As a result, they depicted only those events that they themselves could directly observe. Thus, although an artist might use a young woman as a model for a painting of an angel, a realist would never even consider painting an angel. As Gustave Courbet, the leading realist artist said, “I cannot paint an angel because I have never seen one.” Yet Tanner, raised in a religious home by a minister, could not deny his heritage. Like Courbet, he had never seen an angel, but he believed nonetheless in their existence. Thus, he posits the question: what would the Annunciation have really looked like?
Drawing on his roots as a realist, Tanner portrays Mary as he imagines she would have looked at the moment the angel Gabriel appeared to her. First, he knows that Mary was a teenage Jewish girl from Israel. Thus, ethnically she is Middle Eastern. Tanner portrays her with dark hair and Middle Eastern skin tones, not as a blonde woman from Northern Europe as so many prior artists had done. Not being wealthy, Mary would be dressed in the clothes of a poor person and her room would reflect her humble status. Thus, she sits on her simple bed with its rumpled sheets, in a room with rough plain walls with fissured plaster, and a cracked, cobblestone floor. She has almost no possessions, with the exception of a lamp with its low burning flame and a jug, perhaps filled with water. Like William Holman-Hunt before him, Tanner had visited the Holy Land where he had made sketches and drawings which enabled him to lend a great deal of authenticity to his work.
Tanner’s Mary is not the regal queen so often portrayed by Renaissance painters like Botticelli and Leonardo. This poor girl does not even have sandals for her feet. In all of Tanner’s religious paintings, he emphasized the humanity of his subjects. Moreover, while Mary seems anxious in the presence of the Angel, she does not seem afraid. With her hands folded in her lap in prayer, she gazes at the angel with peace and serenity. She seems to listen intently to all that he has to say to her.
Of all Tanner’s divergences from tradition, his depiction of Gabriel as a pillar of light must rank as the most imaginative. Yet, who, not having seen an angel can dispute his interpretation? The traditional artistic depiction of angelic beings with wings presents no more accurate a depiction of a supernatural being than does Tanner.
Historically, artists had portrayed angels as winged-beings to express their ability to travel. God the Father sends them as messengers from the Heavenly throne to men and women on earth. Theologically, artists realized that angels do not “fly” like birds, but artists employed creative license in order to convey movement and the sense of swiftness with which angels could journey from Heaven to Earth.
Tanner, as a realist, cannot accept the notion of angels as birds. Like Gustave Courbet, Tanner had never seen an angel, but he knew what angels were: supernatural beings. Thus, he attempted to depict the manner in which a supernatural being might appear to a young woman. Would the being not appear as a form of bright light, that is, a pure spiritual energy? Perhaps.
However, despite whatever theological statement he tried to make in the Annunciation, Tanner remains first and foremost an artist. By depicting the angel as a being of pure light, the angel becomes the sole light source in the painting. Gabriel illuminates Mary in his Heavenly glow. Note also how the shelf behind the pillar of light intersects with him, thus forming a cross. Note as well how the three pots, the one on the shelf, the one at Gabriel’s “feet,” and the one on the far right behind Mary form a triangle around her. These three pots symbolize not only the Trinity but also her future as the vessel that will bear Our Blessed Lord.
Henry Ossawa Tanner has broken with realist teachings as well as traditional Annunciation iconography to create a truly inspiring and memorable masterpiece. He has taken his Christian beliefs and combined them with the best of realist ideas to create something unique. As one looks at this painting, one might wonder what Our Lady might have thought of it and Tanner’s portrayal of her. Of course, this question lies far beyond the scope of simple artistic analysis. However, perhaps a hint lies in Our Lady’s own words:
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
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I stood agape beneath a side-wall crucifix that seemed to appear out of nowhere. I had been watching the sanctuary at the front and only saw Jesus on the Cross after entering deeply enough for a parallel gaze once I turned. Dully illuminated, the body affixed to the wood at its usual three points was pulling downwards in the fashion of a true suspended corpse. He had the same pallor mortis I saw when my grandfather died under the frosty window in his bedroom, the skin greyed and tending toward greenish white. This Jesus wore a wig of human hair that hung to his shoulders, jet black and filthy with dust and cobwebs. Had I been in some less-developed corner of the world, I may not have been so taken aback. As it was, though, this was Germany, and I was thoroughly shocked by the unexpected sight––Jesus looked as dead as those who had made this hideous memorial.
In the years following this encounter, I have often reflected on that crucifix and the countless others like it in little villages. How old was it? Had a man or woman really dedicated their hair to complete the look? Did the people, especially the children, of that village have only this singular image of the Savior? Was it wrong for them to make an object of veneration look like a cadaver? My guess was that the crucifix had been around for centuries and yes, some pious soul must have frozen one winter after dedicating his beautiful long hair to this grotesque manikin. Although there were likely additional images of Jesus in the stained-glass windows or at the Stations of the Cross, I was sure that the body hanging on the Cross had been the object of reflection for generation upon generation. And given that for most of its existence, the people of this village likely never travelled more than a few miles from home, the Jesus on this Cross was their Jesus. Admittedly, this crucifix, even in memory, stood for some time as both a scandal and foolishness to me.
Recently, I have begun to reflect more deeply on the relationship between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. In so doing I have been struck by the fact that if Jesus really Resurrected, he had to first really die. This is obvious enough, however, the lingering memory of that cold crucifix has returned to my thoughts. No doubt the villagers who saw the corpse on the Cross every week also believed in the Resurrection. “It was this Jesus,” they must have thought, “this tortured and lifeless body that rose on the third day.” Something in seeing a body on the Cross which really looks dead could, I presume, make the miracle of the Resurrection even more poignant. It is the same inversion as found throughout the Gospels, that the last shall be first, the least the greatest, etc. An encounter with the reality of the death strengthens the miracle of the Resurrection.
St. Paul surely apprehended this in his first encounter with the risen Lord who addressed himself to the baffled pharisee as the persecuted (Acts 9:3-7), the same Jesus whom Saul-turned-Paul subsequently preached to the Corinthians. “For I judged not myself,” he said, “to know anything among you, but Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). In turn, he evoked one of the earliest Christian creeds when reminding the Roman Christians that Christ’s resurrection was from the corpses––resurexione mortuorum (Rom. 1:4). The creed makers did not choose a collective noun signifying “the dead” but much more vividly and literally they had apprehended the Resurrection as being from dead bodies. Jesus shared, they make clear, in the same death that all are bound for. The Cross, perhaps most pointedly in its most graphic details, is foolishness to those who are perishing, but is the power of God for us who are being saved (1 Cor. 18).
It is a curious thing to consider that the Resurrection did not heal Jesus of his wounds. Jesus, having been killed, is the one who is also now living, and each time he appeared to his disciples he was such––the crucified one who now lives. As the visionary of the Apocalypse proclaimed, he is the lamb slain since the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). This is the opposite of a fairytale resurrection where the one killed returns completely transformed and lacking the death-wounds. When Jesus ascended into heaven, he brought his humanity with him, including the stamp of his death. The same is true for his return. It will be the appearance of Christ crucified, bearing his wounds and all, when, as the visionary proclaims, “...every eye shall see him, and they also that pierced him” (Rev. 1:7).
The truth of this is made apparent in the Latin text of the Easter Preface number III in the Roman Missal:
Agnus qui vivit semper occisus
The normal translation is:
The lamb once slain who lives forever
But something is lost in that translation, which could just as accurately be rendered:
The lamb, who having been killed forever, lives
Neither English rendition does justice to the original, which uses the adverb “always” or “forever” for both “has been killed” and “lives”. Bringing this mystery into a comfortable vernacular seems to force a choice, and the Latin nuance is lost. And lost on me, while scandalized by the corpse crucifix, was the truth about the Resurrection––Jesus who is slain forever lives forever.
The focus is often placed so highly on the miracle of the Resurrection, which seems to affect the Crucifixion, making the death merely useful as a temporary vehicle, a setting of the stage for Easter. And yet that moment, the moment of death, is the moment captured on Crucifixes since the beginning of the Church. By ascertaining meaning in this fact, that the most human image of devotion has always been the image of human mortality, we can more readily appreciate the mystery of the Resurrection as a part of our human destiny.
So instead of reminding ourselves from the other side, like men casting lights on the dark sea from the Resurrection lighthouses, we can also suffer in the waves, perhaps even sinking to death with Christ. Meditation upon the death of Jesus, his final words, his abandonment to the ultimate moment of “Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani” and then to the death––when God incarnate became a corpse; meditation upon the reality of his death could, in my opinion, not be wrong. It is far easier to embrace the Resurrection, which dulls the blow of his death. Yet, if we can watch with him this one hour, and if we can remember for him the way he looked as he expired on the Cross, then the miracle of the Resurrection, having been longed for and seen from this tragic position, is elevated and made greater. A crucifix, especially a strikingly graphic one, is a lens into the most agonizing moment the world has ever known. Perhaps it was love of immortality that led the villagers to create so mortal a Jesus for their devotion.
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“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.”
In Matthew 12, Jesus explains that a person freed from the power of Satan can end up in a worse state than he was in the first place. Why is the person in this analogy so much worse off after having already been “cleansed”? St. Augustine provides an insightful spiritual commentary on this passage that explains what this can look like in a concrete way.
The Bishop of Hippo explains that “when someone falls away from righteousness, he will also pretend to be virtuous. For when the lust of the flesh has been driven off from its usual actions by penance and does not find delights in which to rest (Matt. 12:43), it returns with greater desire and again occupies the mind of man...” According to Augustine, the seven demons that return with the original demon represent vices that are contrary to the theological virtues (faith, hope, love) and the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance). The once converted person will now be hypocritical and only “pretend that he has the virtues…”
Augustine explains that this is what happens to the one who “becomes negligent after [evil] has been driven out, so that the word of God may not be brought in as the inhabitant of a house that has been cleansed by sound doctrine.” In other words, this is a passage that exhorts us to be faithful to God’s Word so that we will not be corrupted by false doctrine. It is not enough to drive evil out–we must also let God in. Otherwise, we may continue to appear a Christian, but, in reality, we will undo what God has done in purifying us. Instead of remaining “empty, swept, and put in order,” our souls will become cluttered, dusty, and disordered.[1]
[1] Summary by Michael Barber with the use of Augustine, Questions on the Gospels 2.8 in The New Testament I and II, The Works of Augustine, ed. B. Ramsey (New York: New City Press, 2014), 364–365. Permalink
Joseph Pearce asks theologian John Sehorn what friendship with God really means and what it costs.
I’ve just completed the sixteen-hour marathon, run over three consecutive Tuesday evenings at a friend’s house, watching all three extended editions of Peter Jackson’s movie magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings. I’ve already shared my impressions of watching The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers for the first time in possibly ten years or more, perhaps longer. Now, on the morning after The Return of the King, I’m processing my impressions of the third and final film.
Once again, and to my surprise, it was the extramural interpolations of Jackson and his co-writers which caught my attention and stole the show. The interwoven subplot of Aragorn’s betrothal to Arwen was handled dexterously and decorously, centred on the question of whether Arwen would choose to depart for the Undying Lands with her elven kinsfolk, thereby leaving Aragorn, or whether she would choose “death”, to use her father’s words, by remaining in Middle-earth, in the realm of mere mortals, exiled forever from her kin but united with Aragorn in marriage until Aragorn’s inevitable death parted them. This “will she or won’t she” subplot added emotional depth to the story and heightened the viewer’s awareness of Aragorn’s loyalty and chastity, particularly in the manner in which he conquered his evident attraction to the infatuated Éowyn, remaining loyal to his love for Arwen in spite of his belief that she had chosen to depart for the Undying Lands.
The most powerful of these extramural moments was Arwen’s vision of an older Aragorn playing joyously with their future son, a son who would never be given the gift of life should Arwen choose to leave Middle-earth with her kinsfolk. The moment when the unborn child looks directly at the mother who might choose to refuse to conceive him is one of the most striking pro-life images that I’ve ever seen on screen.
A further extramural aspect of The Return of the King is the wonderful Pre-Raphaelite cinematography with respect to the manner in which Arwen’s dilemma is presented. In one particular scene, she looks strikingly like Sir John Everett Millais’ Mariana, robed in mediaeval dress, amidst gloriously golden autumn leaves, looking longingly for the love from whom she is separated. Whether this was intentional on Jackson’s part, the intertextual connection between Arwen and the character depicted by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure and by Tennyson in his poem, “Mariana”, which had inspired Millais’ masterpiece, is striking, though the roguish man to whom Mariana is betrothed is almost the antithesis of the noble and chaste Aragorn.
If the subplot between Aragorn and Arwen is handled well, the same cannot be said of that between Aragorn and Éowyn. Whereas I had very much enjoyed the way that Éowyn’s role is depicted in The Two Towers, the sexual tension or “chemistry” between the yet-to-be-crowned king and the infatuated shieldmaiden of Rohan is often clunky and even verging on schmaltzy in Jackson’s The Return of the King. Particularly noticeable is the absence of the dignitas, gravitas and restraint that Tolkien employs in the dialogue between these two characters, an aesthetic sin of omission, which is truly reprehensible. Take, for instance, Tolkien’s handling of the moment when Aragorn informs Éowyn that he intends to take the Paths of the Dead. Éowyn stares at him “as one that is stricken”. Believing that Aragorn was going to certain death in taking such a path, she asked nonetheless, her eyes “on fire”, whether she could ride with him.
“Your duty is with your people,” Aragorn replies.
“Too often have I heard of duty,” she exclaims bitterly. “May I not now spend my life as I will?”
“Few may do that with honour,” says Aragorn.
What a perfect response! Indeed, what a perfect riposte to all those who demand their rights over their responsibilities, doing their “own thing” to the detriment of the common good.
Then comes one of my favourite parts of the whole book. When Aragorn tells her that Éowyn has “no errand to the South”, she replies that neither do the others whom Aragorn has permitted to accompany him. “They go only because they would not be parted from thee – because they love thee.” She then turns and vanishes into the night. We know that what she has just said, without actually saying it, is that “I would go with thee because I would not be parted from thee – because I love thee”. The power and the glory, and the repressed passion and tension, is in what is not said but which we know she is saying. This would have made for a perfectly marvelous and poignant scene in Jackson’s movie but, instead, we are given dialogue between the two which is relatively trite and poorly written compared with the literary strokes of the master storyteller.
Whilst I’m griping, succumbing to the spirit of invective, it must be said that Jackson overdoes the cliffhangers, literally. There are far too many scenes of hobbits hanging precariously from cliffs. Such scenes have power in moderation but become mere melodrama when employed too liberally. The same can be said of the use of computer graphics, which very quickly become the most dated aspects of the film; the up-to-date quickly becoming out-of-date as newer technology supplants its antiquated forebears. One example is the ridiculous episode in which Legolas singlehandedly takes down an Oliphaunt in a manner that looks more Mickey Mouse than Middle-earth.
Such reservations aside, The Return of the King deserves its status as a movie masterpiece, alongside the other two films.
Let’s conclude with the joy of the happy ending, or what Tolkien called the eucatastrophe, which is not the departure of Frodo and Bilbo to the Undying Lands, a scene which is tinged with melancholy, but with Sam’s return home to the Shire. As he gets home, his daughter runs to greet him, and she is soon joined by his wife, Rosie, who is holding their baby son in her arms. They would go on to have thirteen children. The film ends therefore with the happy family smiling at the camera, a pro-life tableau which shows, as Sam tells us himself in one of the darkest moments of the story, that “above all shadows rides the sun”.
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For this centenary year of the birth of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), StAR has chosen to devote another issue to the great writer and “freedom fighter.” The last issue of StAR to focus on Solzhenitsyn was the July/August 2007 issue, a year before Solzhenitsyn’s death at 89. At that time I contributed a piece on Solzhenitsyn’s good friend (and fellow freedom fighter) Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007), the esteemed cellist and conductor.[1] In this issue I intend to examine another great Russian musician of the twentieth century, the prodigiously gifted but enigmatic composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975).[2] Historical and personal events were intertwined in such a complex manner that even today Shostakovich’s political allegiances and opinions are not crystal clear. Interestingly, there is a Catholic connection, although somewhat tenuous. Two generations earlier the family had been Polish and Roman Catholic, but when the composer’s grandfather, Bolesław Szostakowicz, was exiled to Siberia, he settled there after his sentence was over. His son, the composer’s father, became Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and eventually moved west to Saint Petersburg.
Shostakovich was the oldest of these three Russian geniuses; he was barely eleven years old when the Russian Revolution occurred and propelled the country into seventy years of Communism. Dmitri’s family were liberal in their politics, so they welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution and the boy was enthusiastic about political changes following the “October Revolution.” Dmitri was the first Russian composer of note to be entirely educated musically within the Soviet system, and this education began in 1919 when he began studies at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He immersed himself in his studies of piano and music composition and apparently was not very interested in politics, as in 1926 he did not pass—on his first attempt—the final examination in Marxist methodology. Dmitri’s musical idols at this time were Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev, which did not please his composition professor, Maximilian Steinberg. During his conservatory years, too, Shostakovich saw the premiere of his Symphony No. 1, his “senior thesis.” This symphony caught the attention of Bruno Walter in 1927; Walter gave the Symphony No. 1 its Berlin premiere later that same year. Leopold Stowkowski was another world-renowned conductor who saw the merits of Shostakovich’s First Symphony, and not only did he conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in its United States premiere (1928), he also made the very first recording of it. The young composer’s next two symphonies were more experimental in style, so they did not receive the popular acclaim of the First. The Symphony No. 2 was also a paean to Communism; it was subtitled To October.
Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich worked on his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which premiered in 1934. Initially, the opera was a great success, both with the people and the government, but two years later a famous—or rather, infamous—event occurred. On 26 January 1936 Joseph Stalin attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Shostakovich, who was present at the performance, was horrified to see how Stalin and his cronies were reacting negatively to various aspects of the opera. Several days later Pravda published an unsigned article, “Muddle Instead of Music,” which described the opera as a “deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds … [that] quacks, hoots, pants, and gasps.” Now pressure to recant was put on all those critics who had earlier praised the opera. Even so, some brave souls continued to support Shostakovich. Another attack from Pravda appeared soon after, on February 6th, this time denouncing the composer’s humorous ballet, The Limpid Stream. Shostakovich was pressured into admitting that he was in error for not composing the ballet in a more accessible musical style. This campaign of slander resulted in a large loss of income for Shostakovich, and the December 11th premiere of his Symphony No. 4 was cancelled by government officials.[3] 1936 also marked the beginning of Stalin’s Reign of Terror.
Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony did receive its premiere in 1937, and this work is traditionally considered to be the composer’s riposte to Stalin’s condemnation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the 4th Symphony. The music of the 5th Symphony was more accessible, and a newspaper statement purporting to be by Shostakovich described the work as “a Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism.” This seeming capitulation of the composer to the party, and his public statements praising the Soviet government, led to his being discounted as a serious, bona fide composer. For instance, Harold Schonberg, music critic of the New York Times, would write: “Shostakovich rehabilitated himself in 1937 with his Fifth Symphony. But to all intents and purposes, he was ruined as a composer … He was to write nothing but safe music, repeating old formulas, imitating some of Prokofiev’s mannerisms.” Shostakovich composed many patriotic works, including film scores, and he wrote reams of patriotic essays in official Soviet jargon. So it seemed that Shostakovich was a mere mouthpiece of the Communist party; or was he?
In 1979, a sea change occurred with the publication of Solomon Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. Volkov claimed to have published interviews and personal conversations he had had with the composer. This was a new, hitherto unknown Shostakovich. Instead of being a willing collaborator with the Soviets, the composer revealed his hatred of Stalin and indicated that his compositions were full of coded references to Stalinist Russia. Terry Teachout remarks: “Testimony had the same effect on Western musicians that the first volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago had on Western intellectuals: some embraced it, some deplored it, but everybody read it.”[4] In fact, one Western intellectual, the American musicologist Laurel Fay, wrote an article criticizing Stasov’s Testimony.[5]She showed that Testimony contained significant plagiarism, with eight sections having been taken from previously published articles by Shostakovich. However, even though scholars like Fay argued over its authenticity, Volkov’s Testimony was positively received by musicians and the concert-going public, “who thereafter ‘read’ Shostakovich’s works as a Solzhenitsyn-like chronicle of life under totalitarianism.”[6] Many friends of the composer maintained that although Volkov’s book had its weaknesses, still it was true in many of its essentials.
In 1994, however, a book was published that corroborated to a great extent Volkov’s portrait of Shostakovich as dissimulating in his official words, but revealing his real thoughts in his music. Elizabeth Wilson, a cellist who had lived in Russia from 1964-71, published Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, which contained many reminiscences of the composer by friends and associates who, now, in the post-Soviet era, were able to speak honestly. The Soviet regime was so horrific that Shostakovich evidently followed every order merely to survive. He commented about Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: “[I]t’s reality varnished over, it’s reality varnished over. The truth was ten times worse than that.”[7] Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered reveals that Shostakovich despised himself for his public dissimulation, including when he signed an official letter denouncing Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. Knowledge of Shostakovich’s double life caused many to re-evaluate his music and to listen to it with new ears. Another British writer, Ian MacDonald, opined that knowledge of the historical context is essential for understanding Shostakovich’s music when he wrote that “listening to Shostakovich’s music without knowing The Gulag Archipelago is equivalent to listening to spoken Russian without a translation.”[8]
Shostakovich and Solzhenitsyn, then, both hated Communism, but each man responded to the tyranny in his own way. Solzhenitsyn, through his novels, openly and explicitly represented his own sufferings and the sufferings of others. Shostakovich, on the other hand, allowed himself to present a public face of acceptance of Communism while silently suffering. His music, in its non-verbal, symbolic way, represents that same suffering. Whether or not one accepts Shostakovich’s response to life under the Soviet regime, his best music has a depth (and even humor) which identify him as one of the great twentieth-century composers.
Recommended Recordings Shostakovich, Symphonies 1-15, various symphony orchestras conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. Warner Classics 2564 64177-2
Shostakovich, Cello Concertos 1 & 2: The Russian Years, Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky; USSR State Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov. Warner Classics 0190295892227. This is a vintage mono recording remastered for CD.
Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Vishnevskaya, Gedda, Petkov, London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. Warner Classics CD1: 77.50, CD2: 77.03
[1] “Mstislav Rostropovich: Friend of Solzhenitsyn, Friend of Freedom,” StAR (July/August 2007), 26-28.[2] Rostropovich studied with Shostakovich at the Moscow Conservatory and Shostakovich composed his two cello concerti for Rostropovich.[3] It finally received its premiere on 30 December 1961.[4] Terry Teachout, “The Problem of Shostakovich,” Commentary (February 1, 1995), accessed online.[5] Laurel Fay, “Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?” Russian Review 39, no. 4 (1980): 484–93. Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2000).[6] Teachout[7] Teachout[8] Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (London, 1990) Permalink
We used to keep death close, even stare it in the face: the skull on the desk beside the book, the graveyard right next to the church, crypts under the floors where we knelt. We kept death close to remind us that we must die. There was a fear of death, but it was a very healthy fear. It made us live better lives. By watching the dead we watched ourselves. By contemplating the mystery of the next life, we took an active interest in the mystery of this life.
“For some strange reason,” says G.K. Chesterton, “man must always plant his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead.”
But Chesterton saw us losing our fruitful fear of the morbid. Now we have hidden away our cemeteries, and, what's more, as Chesterton predicted, we have returned to the pagan habit of cremation. We have scattered our ashes, and the wind has blown away the memory of the dead. We have stopped thinking about the brevity of this life, and in the process have also stopped thinking about the breadth of eternity. And a strange loss of balance has occurred, even a loss of sanity, which is what happens when there is a loss of mental and spiritual balance. We used to fear death. Now we fear life instead. We used to fear abnormal things, like sexual perversion and slaughtering babies in the womb. Now we fear normal things, like the weather.
We no longer throw the meaningful shovelful of dirt on the coffin because now the dirt has become more sacred than the dead. We mutilate our bodies in the most unnatural ways, yet we wring our hands about using too much air or too much water or too much bread. We do not worry that we are destroying our individual homes with adultery and divorce and contraception and abortion, but we are obsessively worried that we are destroying our shared home the earth by turning on lights, growing corn, eating meat, driving cars. We have grown afraid of the primal and primary tools of civilization – fire and farming and the wheel – because they might interfere with the earth and sky. We are afraid of the normal, human things because we have forgotten the dead. We don't read them, we don't remember them, and we have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten that we are civilized. Civilization has always interfered with the forest. As soon as the plow breaks the soil, man declares his lordship over nature. But now we cower before the climate.
Chesterton says, we can predict the stars, but we cannot predict the clouds. Amazing how he continues to be right about that one. In spite of our sophisticated meteorological equipment, we still can't predict the clouds. We still cannot infallibly forecast sunshine or rain tomorrow. That won't stop us from checking the weather report. It is harmless when planning for a picnic. But it is a grave matter when we have chosen to follow into the wilderness the most consistently wrong prophet in all of history: the weatherman.
Here is Chesterton talking about the weather: “On the bright blue day my spirits go slightly down; there seems something pitiless about perfect weather. On the clear cool day, my spirits are normal. In the fog, my spirits go up; it feels like the end of the world, or better still, a detective story.”
Paradoxical and profound as expected. Good weather brings him down, bad weather lifts him up. And he sees the end of the world in the weather. He also sees a mystery. The fog is full of riddles. But the finality at a certain point is certain.
Now we have the weatherman telling us it's the end of the world. He is not the first prophet to make this prediction. As Chesterton reminds us, “It is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us.”
And yet, one of these times it really will be the end of the world.
For the Christian, the final revelation is a good thing, the apocalypse, the unveiling, the solution to the mystery, the explanation not only of all things, but of that most mysterious thing: ourselves. Chesterton cannot help but anticipate what, in truth, we have all been waiting for: “No men will ever know each other till the end of the world.”
But here's a thought. What if the climate change alarmists are absolutely right? And what if we do not heed their warnings? What if we proceed on this path to destruction? What if there is nothing they can do to stop us? What if we are all going to burn up, if not quickly, then slowly and surely?
Will those who will have lost their hope about saving the earth have any concern to save their souls? Will they consider Jonah and Nahum and Nineveh? Will anyone ever repent?
Instead of the thundering hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, perhaps the Judge will come riding in at a plodding pace, maybe even on a donkey, but without fanfare, without trumpets. Perhaps he will quietly dismount and silently switch off the lights. The heat will be eternal, but the stars will all go out. Just a thought.
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“Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven…’”
The similarities between the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai in Exodus and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7 are striking. Comparison of the two, however, also reveals important contrasts, and St. Gregory of Nyssa begins his preaching on the Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus teaches during the Sermon on the Mount, by pointing these out. Whereas the people of Israel at Sinai underwent bodily ritual purification in preparation for God’s appearance on the mountain, we are to purify our thoughts and desires by faith and repentance. Whereas Moses alone drew near to God on the mountain, Jesus leads us all “not to a mountain but to Heaven itself, which He has rendered accessible to men by virtue.” Even more amazing, Jesus tells us to call God “Father.”
For Gregory, this invitation should make our jaws drop. God, after all, “is absolute goodness, holiness and joy, power, glory and purity, eternity that is always absolutely the same.” For us to call him “Father” indicates that Jesus has brought us “to kinship with the Divine Nature.” Christ is the only Son of God, yet, as Gregory quotes, “to all who did receive him…he gave the right to become children of God” (Jn. 1:12).
With this right, however, comes tremendous responsibility. Just a few verses before teaching the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus tells us to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). To call God our Father is to commit ourselves to live as his true children, seeking his holiness. Gregory makes it clear that he is not demanding some sort of self-achieved perfectionism apart from God’s grace, but at the same time, he writes, “He who has commanded us to say Father, has not permitted us to pronounce a lie.” We must not let our prayer become empty words. Rather, when we pray to “our Father,” we should remember and give humble thanks for the dignity of being called to be the children of God.[1]
[1] Summary by John Sehorn with the use of Gregory of Nyssa, Sermon 2 on the Lord’s Prayer in The Lord’s Prayer, The Beatitudes, trans. Hilda C. Graef, Ancient Christian Writers 18 (New York: Paulist Press, 1954), 35–44. Permalink
Joseph Pearce in conversation with John Sehorn about references in Scripture to the Eucharist.
I’ve just enjoyed the second of the three movie nights at a friend’s house watching the full extended editions of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. As I stated in last week’s essay describing my experience of watching The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time in many years, it’s intriguing to see how my judgment of Jackson’s films has changed or mellowed with time. This is especially true of The Two Towers, which is the film I enjoyed least of the three and the one which deviates most drastically from Tolkien’s book. I still suspect that this will be the one I consider the least good of the three, though I’m avoiding calling it the worst because such a word-choice would imply that it was bad, which it most definitely is not. In fact, it struck me as very good and much better than I’d remembered it being.
I was particularly struck that the things in the film that I considered bad when I originally watched it are not as bad as I’d thought. Take, for instance, the Ents who are largely employed by Jackson as comic relief. This violated my literary sensibility because Tolkien treated them with the utmost seriousness, bestowing a great deal of gravitas on them as the oldest rational creatures in Middle-earth; oldest, that is, except for the enigmatic Tom Bombadil, whom Jackson had omitted completely from The Fellowship of the Ring. Treebeard is possibly my favourite character in the whole book, and Quickbeam, who is used by Tolkien as light relief, is positively Chestertonian or Hopkinsonian in the sheer joy that he displays in the presence of the goodness, truth and beauty of Creation.
In Tolkien’s work, the Ents embody Tolkien’s understanding of Tradition, linguistically and ecclesiologically, which is to say that they evoke his philologist’s understanding of the rootedness of language and his Catholic understanding of the rootedness of the Church in those doctrines, tried and tested by time and enshrined dogmatically, which form the living body of the Church’s teaching tradition. It takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish because each word is not merely a label, signifying some up-to-date fashionable sense, but is a genealogical etymological tree of living meaning, stretching back to the roots of meaning itself. The ecclesiological dimension is connected to the longevity of the Ents, who live for countless generations of men, transcending and outliving the transient ages of history, much as the Church has done and is doing. An Entmoot, like a Council of the Church, is a rare occurrence in history because Ents, like the Church, have no need to be “hasty” in coming to decisions, even in times of crisis, because most crises resolve themselves through the mutually destructive collapse of the secular forces that cause them. And yet when the Ents, or the Church, do come to a definite decision or resolution the consequences are binding and have seismic ramifications.
All of the foregoing is lost in Jackson’s film adaptation, a fact that irritated me immensely when I first saw the film. How could something with such gravitas be treated with such levitas? How could Jackson be flippant about such things? How could he make a joke of the Ents and all that they signify? It was almost sacrilegious! But that was then, and this is now.
Now I see things differently.
I see them differently because I am no longer trying to see them through Tolkien’s eyes. The film is not Tolkien’s work. It is Peter Jackson’s. It is not a re-presentation of Tolkien’s work but an adaptation of it in a different storytelling medium. The thing that is essential to a bona fide adaptation, i.e. an adaptation done in good faith, is that it stays true to the spirit of the work it is adapting. Jackson does this, for the most part, even if he feels constrained to exercise artistic license in excising some characters and adapting others to the demands of storytelling in a different medium. When I see Peter Jackson’s Ents through Peter Jackson’s eyes I see them as playing their part in the film with the degree of levitas that the story, as a film, demands. In ceasing to compare chalk and cheese, i.e. literature with film, I can enjoy the cheese as cheese and not be disappointed that it’s not the chalk I was expecting or demanding.
This criterion of judgment is equally applicable to other manifestations of Jackson’s artistic license which had irritated me when I had first seen The Two Towers. I found myself enjoying the interpolation of Arwen into the story, reminding us of Aragorn’s betrothal to her and of their self-sacrificial love and loyalty towards each other, and serving to heighten the romantic tension between Aragorn and the wonderfully portrayed Éowyn.
Gandalf’s exorcising of the demonic spirit of Saruman from the possessed Théoden works very well, even though I had disliked this scene intensely upon my initial viewing, because it adds a much-needed supernatural dimension to the story, as do the occasional scenes when characters, such as Aragorn, appear to be praying.
All these things are well and much better than I remembered but all’s not well in the absolute sense. I still feel that Jackson is too enamoured of computer-generated special effects, using them well in the case of the characterization of Gollum but using them excessively in the excessively long battle scenes. The scene in which Legolas uses his shield as a surfboard in the midst of battle is as ridiculous as ever, and the characterization of Faramir as Boromir’s clone and not as his more virtuous brother impoverishes his crucial role in the drama as a much-needed counterpoint. These are, however, mere quibbles. The Two Towers is nonetheless a masterpiece.
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The work never stopped. I thought things would ease up after the first six months, but the pace at work only increased. Managers changed direction on what seemed like a monthly basis, which required total rework of processes and tools. I began to see that whatever I was working on today, would be gone by the next quarter. I was working seven days a week from morning ‘till night. My international assignment outside Dublin, Ireland had become not a dream job but a nightmare sweat shop.
Chaos reigned in my life. For the first time in my career as a project manager in a large information technology company, I felt that work was consuming me. I found myself drowning in an endless stream of meetings, spreadsheets and process documents. I felt trapped in an inescapable prison of impossible deadlines. I no longer had the direct support of my wife and children, as they remained in the United States continuing their homelife and schoolwork. Even though I was surrounded by coworkers, I felt isolated. There was no end in sight.
It was in the midst of this overwhelming workload that my prayer life began to change. In a type of quiet desperation, I began to see God not as a distant deity who controlled the universe, but as the one person whom I could turn to at any time of the day or night with my pain. Prayer became not just an expression of my devotion to the distant, albeit knowable God, but more of an intimate encounter with my Lord. My morning Rosary changed from the simple recitation that I had known for almost 30 years to a sacred rendezvous with my Blessed Mother, which gave me the strength to face the day.
Soon, I began to steal a little more time before starting my day to contemplate Christ on the cross. I would kneel before a small, two-inch crucifix in my apartment and try to simply gaze upon our Lord for just five minutes. Have you ever tried to just stop everything and look at a crucifix for five minutes? I was astounded at how little patience I had, as I turned my head towards the clock to see if the time had passed. However, it was during these moments that I saw Christ’s suffering more intensely. What must it have been like to feel the crown of thorns on his head? What of the excruciating pain, as his shoulders got pulled from their sockets while hanging on the cross? These were unthinkable pains. Yet he endured them.
These brief moments in front of the cross helped me to understand more clearly the words of St. Teresa of Calcutta, who started her life as a nun in Ireland: “The beginning of prayer is silence. If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.”
Sunday Mass had been a duty. Joyful, yes. Spiritually refreshing, of course. But now, it became something else. It was an emotional sanctuary. It felt much more like an intimate meeting with a treasured friend. Even my preparation for Mass was no longer simply putting on a suit. It was a time filled with anticipation before what was sure to be a truly special event. I arrived early to join some parishioners who said a Rosary before Mass. I would stay afterwards to gaze at the statues and study the stained glass windows. I was spending more time with our Lord.
One day after Mass, on the bulletin board in the back of the parish, I noticed a simple white sheet of paper on which was typed an invitation to Sunday night Eucharistic Adoration. At first, I thought how odd it was to have Adoration on Sunday, but I decided to try it anyway. I could not have imagined the impact this devotion would have on the rest of my stay in Ireland.
From then on, I found myself drawn back to this oasis of grace each week. The dread of Monday morning was transformed by Christ into a peace I had never known. In fact, a fundamental change occurred in my attitude toward work. I found that my worries about day to day activities ceased. I was no longer shaken by the often-raised voices of my co-workers. The frantic pace felt somehow manageable.
Years later, as I reflect back on my international assignment, I see that those turbulent times were actually a gift. In that seemingly unbearable pressure, I found that turning to God in prayer is the antidote to our chaotic life. Although work may seemingly never stop, it does. What does not stop, is God’s love.
Our Lady Queen of Peace pray for us!
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The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism
By Father Thomas White OP
Catholic University Press, 2017
329 pp., $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-8132-2971-3
Father Thomas White OP, has written a book on the Catholic Church that is destined to be a classic. It is erudite yet written in an engaging style making it accessible to the educated layperson—which is the intended audience. And as Father White states in the introduction, the book is meant to be a companion to the faith, not an argument to convince. But, after reading it, even non-Catholics may be convinced that the Catholic Church is indeed the light of Christ.
Father White has already established himself as a known Catholic writer and thinker, with several books, many articles and an internet presence, including video presentations. He became interested in the Catholic Church while in college at Brown University and converted at age 22. He joined the Dominican order in 2003 and completed his master and doctoral work at Oxford. Father White is also one of the youngest members of the Pontifical Academy of the Immaculate Conception. He currently resides at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC.
The Light of Christ is a comprehensive overview of Catholic theology, with chapters on revelation and reason, the Trinity, Creation, and the Incarnation. The book concludes with chapters on the institution of the Church— the Mass, sacraments, priesthood, Holy Mary, social doctrine and Last Things. All topics are treated thoroughly and clearly without academic jargon or excessive footnotes. Father White’s skill as a writer and theologian come together nicely throughout the book. He always provides new and different insights on the topics he covers. This is his particular talent. That is what makes this book so good.
In the beginning chapters, he describes ancient Greek and Roman religions. These peoples accepted various gods because they were “multicultural” societies. As such, the ancient goal was not the pursuit of truth but rather social unity. Father White states that if there was one “truth” for ancient Rome, it was glory. This sounds much like the secular world today with its focus on tolerance and diversity, yet with an overarching goal of material wealth. It was the Jews and Christians (and heroic ancients like Socrates) who challenged this.
The author also emphasizes that secularism and materialism are not new. Rather, they are a return to ancient skepticism. Like the secularism of today, ancient skepticism is concerned with the world. Both are mundane. The other side of skepticism is credulity—unexamined faith. This was present in the past and is also present today in Islam and some Protestant fundamentalist sects. Father White argues that the Catholic faith has always avoided these extremes. Faith and reason are always in harmony; one does not subvert the other.
Father White also criticizes the “dictation theory,” the belief that sacred writings are directly composed by God. Again this is found in Islam, Mormonism and certain Protestant fundamentalist sects. The author argues that the dictation theory does not allow for any intellectual scrutiny or inquiry. Catholics have always challenged such rigid scriptural interpretations. And again we see the balance between reason and faith. This approach to scripture is why the Catholic faith is the most intellectual of all the world’s religions.
Father White also explains why Catholics cannot accept the Bible as the sole basis of faith, as do Protestants. The Bible alone cannot stand up to the living (and mercurial) intellect of man. Understanding the Bible requires the Church, a unified authoritative Church that can maintain the living stream of Christian tradition in every age. That church is the Catholic Church.
Father White does not delve deeply into the debate over evolution in his section on Creation. He accepts many scientific premises and theories. That is not his focus. He shifts ground and makes the point that too much is written about how the world came into being, but little is said about its very existence. For Catholics, this is far more important. He states that “[t]he created character of all that exists is more fundamental than anything we can quantify or study in math or science.” The world we are given must be our spiritual focus.
The multiplicity of earthly life is itself remarkable. It begs for explanation and meaning. To the author, the meaning of Creation is already obvious in that this multiplicity is hierarchical, with humans at the apex. This is crucial to understanding our existence. Humans are different from all other life forms because they possess reason and will. And these are different not in degree, but in kind from any other earthly thing. What truly sustains our existence, our being, is the quest for human freedom which is essentially spiritual. This is what the Catholic Church—more than any other political or religious creed—has represented throughout all of its history.
Humans, unlike other living things, are also motivated by what is good. This goes beyond animal instinct—even our own. Humans again reveal their spiritual nature by pursuing goods that transcend the senses. It is this spiritual aspect to the human being that is key to understanding Creation and is something that eludes scientific explanation. That is why the book of Genesis should be treated as a metaphysical event. It should not be compared to or scrutinized by scientific theory.
To Father White, human beings are the bridge between the physical and spiritual realms. And humans are unique on earth in that they can commune with both realms. Humans are also a dynamic species, creative, restless, and always striving for perfection (God). This is through the pursuit of both knowledge and love. Here he sees a different type of evolution than a purely biological one. There is an “evolution” towards spiritual perfection (God). This is the great lesson of human history. It is a ceaseless effort to elevate the human condition despite original sin and constant setbacks.
This process has only accelerated with the birth of Christ—who is the essence of freedom—and has been maintained by the Catholic Church. Father White’s orthodoxy comes through clearest in his discussions of the Church. There is only one Church and that is the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, there can be no new religions (Islam, Mormonism) or reformation of the Church (protestantism). The deposit of faith was given at one time in history to the apostles. And it has been safeguarded by one church ever since.
Father White stresses the importance of the Mass and the sacraments to human salvation. The sacraments are both spiritual and material. Moreover they are patterned on normal stages of human life and on natural phenomena. Sanctification is another key element of Catholic life. It is the slow spiritual growth toward sainthood. And this also requires the sacraments and certain habits—namely the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity. This takes time and naturally requires grace.
The author clearly shows how Catholic social teaching is also informed by natural reason. Key issues like war, capital punishment, abortion, and sexual behavior are all intrinsically moral issues. As such, widespread secular opposition to these positions can be expected.
Father White examines the perennial opposition to the Catholic Church throughout history. This is because the Church challenges authority—that of the state and now the individual. He openly admits that the Church has used violence to promote its authority, as in the Inquisition. But he reminds the reader that for most of history (including now) it is the Church and its members that have been persecuted.
On the Last Things, Father White explains heaven, hell and purgatory with his usual clarity and insight. He notes how all these doctrines existed since the early days of the Church and all have reasonable explanations. Heaven, the ecstatic union with God, the fulfillment of the Beatific vision, is articulated more clearly in Catholicism than in other religions. And similarly, purgatory is also a reasonable understanding of this life and how it determines our place in the afterlife. Purgatory is already begun on earth and so is the descent into hell, which Father White emphasizes is real as is, of course, damnation.
The author’s Thomistic vision—the importance of natural reason and law—comes through throughout this splendid book. Yet there is also the more subtle influence of John Henry Newman and his articulation of the illative sense. This is that type of reason that brings together many human experiences and creates a unified belief—for Newman, a belief in God. Father White makes this case with his book as one clearly sees how the Catholic Church—its institutions, practices, and beliefs—has always articulated and defended the illative sense. That is why it remains the Light of Christ.
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“Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”
Like many ancient and medieval Christian interpreters, Pope St. Leo the Great saw the beatitudes as laying out a program of spiritual growth. Poverty in spirit, therefore, means detachment from worldly things. This “magnanimous poverty” frees us to be generous to others and so, St. Leo asks, “What is richer than this poverty?” Since the poor in spirit have this heavenly perspective, they do not “mourn” over earthly setbacks, but over their own and others’ sin. But Leo’s focus on heaven is not a rejection of bodily things, as is clear from the way he interprets the fourth beatitude: the “earth” that the meek shall inherit “is the very flesh of the saints.” He explains further that in the resurrection, our bodies will enjoy “the harmony of perfect unity with the will of the soul.”
The next two beatitudes refer to “righteousness” and “mercy.” Here Leo draws on the fact that God himself is supreme righteousness (or “justice”) and mercy. These beatitudes thus call us to reflect God in ourselves: “Mercy wants you to be merciful; justice wants you to be just. In this way the Creator will appear in his own creature, and ‘the image of God’ [Gen. 1:27], expressed through the paths of imitation, may shine in the mirror of the human heart.” When our hearts have been made “pure” by imitating God, reflecting the divine goodness, we in turn will come to “see God.” This loving union with God, finally, spills out into love for and unity with others, making us “peacemakers” and true children of God.[1]
[1] Summary by John Sehorn with the use of Leo the Great, Sermon 95 in Sermons, trans. Jane Patricia Freeland, C.S.J.B., and Agnes Josephine Conway, S.S.J., Fathers of the Church 93 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 394–400. Permalink
The Hero's Quest: Why do we all admire heroism and what is heroism any way? Are we all called to be heroes? Joseph Pearce and Fr. Dwight Longenecker discuss these questions.
It is probably at least ten years since I last saw The Lord of the Rings movies. I own all three of the special extended DVD editions of the films but they sit on the shelf in their virgin state, unopened and untouched, gathering dust. The reason is that I share my home with my children which means that I can’t watch anything that I don’t want them to see, or at least that I don’t want them to see yet. My daughter is eleven, with a very visual imagination. An early 1970s episode of Doctor Who gave her nightmares. Clearly she is not ready to be affronted with orcs, the Uruk-hai, black riders and cave trolls.
Considering my protracted exile from Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth (as distinct from Tolkien’s of which I am a regular inhabitant), I was delighted when a friend suggested that we have a movie night at his house on three consecutive Tuesdays to watch all three of Jackson’s films. Last night we watched The Fellowship of the Ring in all its full extended glory. For almost four hours, including “pause” time for visits to the bathroom or to the refrigerator for ale replenishment, we basked in the splendor of the first part of Jackson’s magnum opus. Memories of my earlier viewings of the film flashed back to me but my long period of exile meant that it was all once more remarkably fresh.
After the back story is recounted, showing how the One Ring was forged and became Isildur’s Bane, we find ourselves in the Shire and feeling very much at home. Jackson really captures the true spirit of Tolkien’s idyllic depiction of the agrarian simple life, captivating us and thereby releasing us, albeit all too briefly, from our own captivity in a “real” world which resembles the reckless wantonness of Isengard. The beauty, and the power and the glory, of Tolkien’s Shire is rooted in the way that it feels like home even though we have never been there. Perhaps it rekindles childhood memories of uncluttered and untroubled innocence; perhaps it touches those primal and primeval parts of us that still long for the lost Eden; perhaps it prefigures that other home to which we’re all called, the desire for which animates every healthy soul. Whatever the reason, Tolkien’s Shire presents us with an icon of idyllic community, which is inspirational and aspirational, and which Peter Jackson revivifies magnificently. It is indeed so much alive that we feel that we are less alive when we leave it, either with Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin on their journey into the dark, or when we return to our workaday lives.
But leave it we must (alas!) as we follow the hobbits to Bree, skipping past Tom Bombadil, whom Jackson chooses to excise from the story, exercising poetic license and his producer’s prerogative. Although Tom Bombadil plays a crucial part in Tolkien’s book, which is discussed in my own book Frodo’s Journey in a chapter entitled “The Enigma of Tom Bombadil”, I don’t have a major problem with Jackson’s decision to leave him out of the movie. The multifarious characters and multi-layered plots with which good authors construct their fictional works is not as easy to accomplish in the medium of film. Compromises are demanded because they are necessary. For this reason, I can sympathize with Jackson’s decision to drop not only Bombadil (and therefore the equally delightful Goldberry) but also Glorfindel, whose small but significant part in Tolkien’s book is taken in the film by Arwen, thereby magnifying the role of Aragorn’s love interest and accentuating the female presence within the movies, both of which enhance the quality of the film, as a film.
Perhaps I am mellowing with age, or finding it easier to separate the literary purist from the movie critic in my engagement with Jackson’s film, but I found myself much more tolerant of those aspects of the film which had irritated my literary sensibilities when I had first watched it. I recall my discomfort with the way that Jackson had turned Aragorn into a confused and conflicted modern man, unwilling or unable to accept and embrace the duties and responsibilities of his calling. I remember accusing Jackson of conflating James Dean and Jesus Christ in his characterization of Aragorn. On this more recent viewing, I saw less of James Dean and more of Christ, especially in the close-up shots in which Viggo Mortensen looks uncannily like Max von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told or Jim Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ or, indeed, like the naturalistic romanticized portraits of Christ in pious and particularly Protestant art. Similarly, Jackson is unabashed in his iconographic depiction of Galadriel as a Marian figure, her grotesque and monstrous transfiguration when tempted by the Ring notwithstanding. Our last view of her, as the Fellowship departs Lothlórien, is reminiscent of classic images of Our Lady of Fatima or Our Lady of Lourdes.
The film version of The Fellowship of the Ring culminates with the death of Boromir, differing from Tolkien’s book in which Boromir’s death comes at the beginning of The Two Towers. It’s a scene that has great sacramental significance in Tolkien’s original work, the final exchange of words between Boromir and Aragorn reflecting the formal aspects of the sacrament of penance, in which the repentant sinner must have contrition for the sins he has committed, confessing them and making satisfaction in terms of an act of penance. Boromir’s final words contain all three of these prerequisites for a good and holy confession: “I tried to take the Ring from Frodo [confession]. I am sorry [contrition]. I have paid [satisfaction].” Aragorn’s role is that of the priest, acting in persona Christi, who forgives the sin and bestows “peace” upon the penitent. Jackson deviates radically from Tolkien in this scene, replacing the sacramental “confession” with Boromir’s fraternal “confession” that he would have followed Aragorn, proclaiming him to be “my brother, my captain, my king”. Thus the allusive allegorical confession to God in Tolkien’s original story is replaced with an explicit literal confession in Jackson’s adaptation, expressive of Boromir’s final reconciliation with the man (and king) whom he had wronged. The effect lacks the nuanced subtlety and the depth of theological applicability of Tolkien’s original but it has great power nonetheless in terms of its cathartic effect upon the viewer. Had Jackson chosen merely to reiterate Tolkien’s words, it is very unlikely that the literary subtlety of the original text would have been grasped by the viewer, the allegorical significance being lost in the fast-paced medium of film, weakening the scene and depriving it of the catharsis that Jackson’s reworking of it provides. As I pondered the artistic license that Jackson had granted himself in this most important of scenes from Tolkien’s book, I realized that a film adaptation of a literary work should not be expected to follow the literal letter of the original but should seek faithfully to encapsulate and project its true and essential spirit because, and to co-opt the words of St. Paul, “the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life”.
In his 1436 treatise On Painting, humanist theorist and architect Leon Battista Alberti writes that the painter must “make all the parts true to his model but also add beauty.” He goes on to explain how the painter is to “add beauty” not through abstraction, but by integrating the most beautiful parts he has observed into a single composition. This is why Alberti and Renaissance artists in general studied anatomy from the bones out, and also why Alberti emphasized the study of geometry. As a student of anatomy, the artist learns the relationship between the parts of a figure and how the parts cooperate to produce movement, so that he can integrate the most beautiful parts into a convincingly realistic figure. As a student of geometry, the painter can situate figures in a convincing illusion of space. The result is a work of art that portrays ideal beauty through the particulars of nature.
This approach—perfecting nature through anatomy and geometry rather than abstraction—perfectly communicates the religion of the Incarnation and Resurrection. To paraphrase the Christmas Preface, we are borne up to the love of the invisible God through His visible incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. Grace perfects nature. The glorified body is not an abstraction. I see the hand of Providence in the development of philosophy and art in the Christian West. Giotto, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Rubens, Bernini, Velázquez—despite their differences, all participated in the fecund tradition of perfecting the natural by “adding beauty.” Yet few are working within this tradition today.
That is why I am dedicated to researching and reviving Renaissance and Baroque practices, and trying to communicate those techniques to young artists. You cannot go to art school or an atelier and study from a Renaissance master. You have to cobble together an education from a variety of sources—books, classes, mentors, direct engagement with works of art—it is not unlike crafting a painting through the integration of beautiful parts. I am grateful to have a background in mathematics. Studying and teaching the theory and beauty of number and proportion trained me to appreciate order in nature, and to construct order on a canvas. I learned some anatomy from books, but I also needed life drawing classes because capturing a living, three-dimensional body is much harder than copying a static, two-dimensional image. And you need to get under the skin too. In art school, I took a class in anatomy for artists in which we built up the ligaments, muscles, and tendons of a knee joint with clay. Only then could I really see the subtlety of the underlying forms through the veil of skin. I learned to see light and color by studying with Boston School master Paul Ingbretson. And I have copied master drawings from books and master paintings in person.
Standing before a Ribera or a Zurbarán and trying to copy it is invaluable. You start to recognize all the practical choices the artist made—the size of brush, the overlaying of pigments, the adjustment of the composition—and you can then incorporate those choices into your own original works. It is also invaluably humbling. The brush fumbles to retread the paths of the original. It overworks some, elides others, loses its place, but sometimes stumbles into the strokes of the master. Perhaps a seminarian feels something similar when learning the Mass.
… & Other Brief Philosophical EssaysThis series of essays forms the concluding work of the long and illustrious career of Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. The late professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University, Fr. Schall authored over thirty books and hundreds of smaller works, articles, pamphlets, and the like. As a priest, teacher, writer, and philosopher of singular quality, Fr. Schall influenced many and his recent passing has left a noticeable void in the company of those who seek to instill sanity, perspective, and balance in this world of ours.
As the Foreword indicates, Fr. Schall takes as his model and inspiration the work of Hilaire Belloc, particularly the latter’s stylistic approach as an essayist. Belloc authored numerous volumes of short essays, such as his On Everything, On Anything, On Something, On Nothing and Kindred Subjects, all of which covered a vast array of topics, and cultivated a simple and engaging style that appealed to the general reader as well as the scholar. Many who have taken the time to get to know Belloc well have found him to be quite humorous, witty, and surprisingly profound. The same could easily be said of the work of Fr. Schall in general, and this last volume of essays in particular. Some of the essays are quite dense theologically, while others treat of more light-hearted subjects like novels, beer, sports, comic strips, and P. G. Wodehouse. However, most focus on more metaphysical questions regarding the world at large, such as those dealing with the particulars of epistemology, justice, education, and history, as well as more generic topics of theological import such as the nature of truth, the meaning of life, happiness, virtue, and the problem of evil. The style throughout is whimsical and lightsome, yet deeply insightful and provocative at the same time. A warning to the reader in this regard: like Belloc, the essays are indeed aimed at the general public, yet unlike those of the Englishman from Sussex who lacked a formal clerical education in philosophy and theology, a number of Fr. Schall’s essays, particularly those dealing with the more metaphysical questions of life, presume something of a working knowledge of basic philosophical principles.
A particularly driving theme that runs like a thread throughout the essays is Fr. Schall’s continuous insistence on the importance of a positive ontology; in other words, a deep appreciation of the simple reality of what is. He notes in his Afterword that a formative teaching on his own thinking in this regard is that of St. Thomas, wherein the latter, in his Summa Contra Gentiles, taught that the universe, in order to be complete, requires a knowing subject from within who can comprehend it. As Fr. Schall goes on to note, this presupposes the further notion that the universe is not empty, but rather is full of things that are, and it is the business of the rational mind to come to a knowledge of these things and, through them, come to rest in the knowledge of their ultimate Cause. It is this pursuit that lies at the source of true happiness in the intellectual life of man, that is, to rest in the truth of things that are, recognizing through such an act, their essential nature as gifts. This means that the world outside of the mind is recognized as a distinct objective reality and not a mere mental construct, and hence, is able to convey very real truth about itself to the rational intellect. This metaphysical premise forms the foundation upon which to appreciate the rest of Fr. Schall’s essays, and indeed, his life’s work. The recognition of the world as an objective gift, one that is meant to be known and loved and which points, so to speak, towards a knowledge of its Maker, accounts for Fr. Schall’s fascination with all the varied aspects of humanity, the life of the mind, as well as the infectious humor and joy that characterize his writings. Put simply, Fr. Schall’s literary work is imbued with an unequivocal realist philosophy, and recognizing this enables the reader to appreciate the distinctive optimism as well as the various points of emphasis and insight found throughout his writings.
In terms of the essay format, given the ever-decreasing attention span of the wider reading public today, this form of writing would seem to be particularly apropos. For those who might only have a few moments here or there to read a quick essay of a page or more, such a book is to be highly recommended. Throughout, one is constantly made aware of the enormous learning of Fr. Schall, combined with his extraordinary powers of synthesis. Given the enormous range of topics covered, such an achievement of concision is no mean feat. For this very reason, some have argued that the essay, in some ways, presents difficulties that surpass the composition of the monograph, wherein great prolixity is allowed, often at the expense of precision and clarity. Should the reader find enjoyment in this work, I would suggest, and it would seem Fr. Schall would agree, that they go to Belloc. Much of the spirit and voice that animates the writings of the latter can be found in the pages of the former, and it would seem to be a particularly needed one in our times.
On the Principles of Taxing Beer & Other Brief Philosophical Essays
James V. Schall
St. Augustine’s Press, 2019
195 pp., $24.00
ISBN: 978-1-58731-615-9
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“Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.”Ash-Wednesday, I
I discovered the poetry of T.S. Eliot at the age of thirteen, a skinny kid in small town Montana who had, for some strange reason, a love of poetry, the novels of Dickens, the music of Mozart, and the art of Andrew Wyeth. All of these are an inter-mingled mystery, even in hindsight, and I suppose they really remain so, as the attraction of great literature and art is a mystery bound to The Mystery. I’m quite certain that my first Eliot poems were The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hollow Men—the former darkly exotic (“the yellow smoke that slides along the streets”) and the latter oddly apocalyptic (“This is the dead land”).
The attraction, first and foremost, was the language, the beguiling and strangely captivating flow and rhythm, followed by the stark, immediate, and elusive images: “Like a patient etherized upon a table” and “We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men”. There was also the raw but measured anxiety, both deeply emotional and quietly contained. In those earlier Eliot poems I heard a voice I could relate to, especially as I often struggled with my Christian faith, which was Fundamentalist, rather anti-intellectual, and impatient with mystery and musing.
In my fourth year of college, my second year at Bible college, I finally read—that is, really read—Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets. (I’ll have to quickly confess to spending far less time with The Waste Land.) Both were revelatory, but Ash-Wednesday became something of an obsession, and I ended up writing a paper on it for a literature class—out of my depths in many ways, but quite happy to try to enter a bit more deeply into a poem that is, I think, filled with rich intimations and profound paradoxes.
Ash-Wednesday, as is widely acknowledged, is a far more simple and immediate poem than, say, The Waste Land, but it is a deceptive simplicity, which proves increasingly elusive with repeated readings. There is a focus on stillness that is not only expressed directly—“Teach us to sit still”—but conveyed in a number of scenes, if you will, that involve a lady and three white leopards, bones in the desert, rocks and a yew tree, and a stair of ascent and trial. Yet there is also a finely constructed restlessness, a spiritual yearning and tension evident right from the start:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
Hope. Turning. Desire. Striving. Not striving. Some immediate context is found, of course, in the title, to that first day of Lent in the Western liturgical calendar, and thus to Christ’s forty days in the desert and our own fasting, penance, and contemplation of sin, mortality, and salvation. The “turning” refers to repentance, as the two are closely intertwined throughout Scripture: “Repent therefore, and turn again...” (Act 3:19). Eliot, in a June 1930 letter to Paul Elmer More, stated that his poem “is really a first attempt at a sketchy application of the philosophy of [Dante’s] Vita Nuova to modern life,” and the influence of Dante can be seen throughout.
But the theme of repentance comes, in many ways, from the Anglican bishop and scholar Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) who, in his 1602 Ash Wednesday sermon—and Eliot studied his sermons closely—asked, “shall I continually ‘fall’ and never ‘rise’? ‘turn away’ and not once ‘turn again’?” Eliot’s 1926 essay on Andrewes reveals just how much Eliot’s post-conversion poetry was shaped by those sermons, which Eliot praised as having three “conspicuous qualities” of style: “ordonnance, or arrangement and structure, precision in the use of words, and relevant intensity.” Put another way, Eliot revered Andrewes as a mystic possessing both remarkable powers of communication and spiritual discipline, and those characteristics are certainly two that Ash-Wednesday aims to contain or embody.
Turning is repentance, then, and so it is also conversion, which in turn requires humility. Conversion is an essential theme—a reality—in Eliot’s life and work, and not just in the obvious way, as in his entrance into the Anglican Communion in June 1927. In October 1929, in a letter to his brother, he said, “I have begun life three times: at 22, at 28, and again at 40; I hope I shall not have to do so again, because I am growing old.” He was referring, respectively, to leaving America as a young man, getting married, and then becoming Anglican. All three acts were of deep and lasting importance; there is a reason, then, that this poem begins with “Because … Because … Because...”
The six sections of the poem (three published as stand-alone poems before 1930) are like acts in a play, and the entire poem moves quickly—paradoxically, considering its sense of stillness. “From node to node of its own structure,” wrote Hugh Kenner in The Invisible Poet (1959), “from zone to zone, the poem moves swiftly like a swallow, and without flutter. Arrived in each zone, it circles and searches before passing on....”
The scene in Part II, for instance, is a riveting vignette that combines the prophetic starkness of Ezekiel 37 and its valley of the bones with the deeply Dantean Lady who “honours the Virgin in meditation”. There is a palpable sense of both eros and agape here, bringing to mind the “Romantic Theology” of Charles Williams, whose own interest in Beatrice and Dante paralleled that of Eliot. Most striking to me three decades ago was the litany-like song to the Lady:
Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most hole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
By the end of Ash-Wednesday, this mystical ardor, tinged as it is with conflicted and earthly longings, will have achieved some plane of purification:
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
This is, ultimately, Marian in nature: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). Such an impression—and, really, this is a poem of successive impressions—flows from Part IV, which is a sort of commentary on the Prologue to the Gospel of John:
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
The silent Word, of course, being both the Christ child and the beckoning Savior, whose invitation to those “those who walk in darkness” is not accompanied by coercion but by the promise of struggle and continual tension. That struggle is captured in the short and rapid-fire Part III, where the three turnings of the stair correspond to Dante’s hill of Purgatory:
Now I petition you, by that kind Power
Escorting you to the summit of the staircase,
At the appropriate time, recall my pain. (Purg. XXVI, 145-57)
Kenner writes that the “function of the journey” described in the poem “is to arrive at a knowledge of the modes and possibilities of temporal redemption sufficient to prevent our being deluded by a counterfeit of the negative way.” As I see it, Eliot avoids a shallow, pietistic (and false) asceticism that fails to admit the inherent, rich goodness of creation. He also avoids a sort of equally shallow skepticism that rejects the hard demands of renunciation for the sake of beatification: “Where all love ends.”
In fact, Eliot manages to give a captivating glimpse of robust Catholic spirituality “When the apophatic and cataphatic integrate,” notes David W. Fagerberg in Consecrating the World (2016), “emptiness is fullness.” That is the paradox Eliot understood and struggled to convey, even while he consistently downplayed the merits of Ash-Wednesday, telling one friend, “I don’t think the poem is really first rate, but I do think that it just does escape insincerity, somehow.” To another friend he explained that he believed “there is a very important field still very unexplored by modern poets—the experience of man in search of God, and trying to explain to himself his intenser human feelings in terms of the divine goal. I have tried to do something of that in Ash-Wednesday.” I am forever thankful he did so.
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Julie Musselman takes the microphone and asks Joseph Pearce to discuss his role at the Augustine Institute as Director of Book Publishing and Editor of Faith & Culture.
The highlight of a pilgrimage to Rome is to join Liz Lev for one of her increasingly famous tours of the Vatican Museums. Her high-energy presentation, vast knowledge, and enthusiasm are matched by her warm welcome, sense of humor, and genuine faith.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” In her book, How Catholic Art Saved the Faith – The Triumph of Beauty and Truth in Counter Reformation Art, Liz Lev draws the two together to present a powerful argument for the importance of art for evangelization and education in the faith.
I spoke with Liz Lev about her work, her life, and an upcoming tour celebrating the 500th anniversary of the death of the artist Raphael.
DWIGHT LONGENECKER:How long do your tours of the Vatican Museums take?
LIZ LEV:There was a period when I did six hour tours of the museums! That was before the tsunami of tourism and everything was open and every day felt like going to an endless emporium of artistic delights! Today my tours take about three and a half hours but might stretch to four when people have a lot of questions and have great museum stamina.
DWIGHT LONGENECKER:Rome seems busier than ever. How does one avoid the long lines of tourists?
LIZ LEV:There is a lot of strategy in touring the Vatican these days. If you go online, you can get reservations early in the morning or late in the day. If you take time to study the map of the museum, plan to hit the smaller sections that are less travelled, then visit the major areas once the first wave of crowds have passed through.
DWIGHT LONGENECKER:What are the top five “must sees” for a first-time pilgrim to Rome?
LIZ LEV:After the Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s Basilica, I think the catacombs are an essential witness to the early Christian community. The excavation under St Peter’s, known as the “scavi” combines two fascinating threads of Christian history: the martyrdom of St Peter and his burial and the amazing story of the secret excavation and eventual rediscovery of the bones of the Prince of the Apostles. Remember! You must book tickets to tour the Scavi in advance.
St John Lateran should be on the list as well as St Mary Major—Pope Francis’ favorite church. Most pilgrims will also want to venerate the relics of the crucifixion at Santa Croce in Jerusalem and St Paul’s Outside the Walls—close to the site of St Paul’s martyrdom.
DWIGHT LONGENECKER:What are the best kept art secrets in Rome?
LIZ LEV:The best kept secrets are the multitude of wonderful art works that are waiting in the churches free of charge. Besides the famous “Caravaggio crawl” you can see dazzling Baroque sculpture in the Jesuit church, The Gesu. Breathtaking sculptures by Bernini, amazing illusionistic ceilings in Sant’Ignazio and fourth century mosaics in Santa Pudenziana are all there to enjoy. Explore, explore, explore! Rome is a trove of artistic treasures.
DWIGHT LONGENECKER:What’s so great about Raphael?
LIZ LEV:Raphael embodies three essential virtues that are worth cultivating today. This will be the focus of my “Divine Raphael” tour from April 23 to May 1. We’ll be traveling to key sites across Italy to admire Raphael’s work and learn about his amazing life. The three virtues are:
- Raphael’s art is graceful, subtle, and harmonious. Our world is strident and aggressive. Raphael creates quiet spaces with peaceful people that invite careful meditation and peace.
- Team building. Raphael ran the equivalent of a Fortune 500 company by the age of 30, employing as many as 50 artists in his studio. He wasn’t afraid to delegate or share his knowledge and contacts, so that many of those who worked with him emerged as great artists in their own right.
- Grace under Pressure. Raphael shot into the spotlight at age twenty-five, when he was put in direct competition with Michelangelo. In this ultimate heavyweight championship of painting, it was clear that Raphael was the underdog, yet he successfully faced the tremendous pressure of Michelangelo’s completely innovative style. During our tour, I can’t wait to bring people into the Raphael rooms and the Sistine chapel and recount the incredible story of this clash of titans!
DWIGHT LONGENECKER:For you is it Michelangelo or Raphael? Why?
LIZ LEV:Michelangelo lived to be eighty-nine and had a lifetime to produce art, architecture, and poetry. Raphael died at thirty-seven, so he doesn’t seem as complex as the older artist. Yet Raphael loved art in a way that Michelangelo didn’t. Raphael would try any medium, study any new discovery. He worked in textiles, experimented with the Venetian style, researched ancient techniques, and learned to paint in oil.
DWIGHT LONGENECKER:Is fine art integral to the Catholic faith? Why?
LIZ LEV:Of course it is! The New Testament says Christ is “the image or icon of the unseen God.” The Incarnation, God made visible, cries out for fine art! What could be more beautiful than salvation, salvation that walked among us, as one of us? Why would we not try to bring our greatest talents, to turn our imaginations to the greatest beauty our limited minds can muster to represent him? Look at the Gothic cathedrals, the mosaics of Ravenna and the painting of Raphael—the True and the Good are best expressed through beauty!
DWIGHT LONGENECKER:Can modern art be Catholic?
LIZ LEV:There are many wonderful modern artists out there. However, the tricky part lies in the strain in modern art towards abstraction and cynicism. Too often the modern artist presumes everything around us is unredeemable and that ugliness is the reality of the human condition. That attitude is incompatible with Catholic art.
Also, to be honest, abstract art, with very few exceptions, strikes me as incompatible with the aims of Christian art. We worship a God who became man, not a squiggle or a blotch. Catholic art is beautiful on its own, but it also has a function. It should help to teach and uphold the faith. This is what I tried to communicate in my book about Baroque art. During the counter Reformation, Catholic artists used their talent powerfully to help promote the faith.
DWIGHT LONGENECKER:Give five tourist tips for Americans visiting Rome.
LIZ LEV:That’s easy….
- If you can, come in slow season—late November to end of February.
- Make reservations ahead of time for the coliseum, Sistine chapel, and galleria Borghese.
- Get off the beaten track, visit a special site like the Domus Aurea, or the Bernini/Borromini walk along the Via XX Settembre. Go out to Ostia antica or Tivoli and explore.
- Try something new. A spritz, crostini toscani, truffle anything . . . the variety and wealth of Italian creativity is astonishing—art, architecture, dialects, food, wine—you’ll keep coming back to discover more!
- Try to write, or draw something on your trip. Crazed picture taking with your iPhone results in a lot of unidentified pictures and little actual visual time. If you see something lovely, try to sketch it or describe it in words—it will stay with you better.
Learn more about Liz Lev’s Divine Raphael Tour here and be in touch at her website here.
This conversation first appeared in The Imaginative Conservative and is published here with permission.
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Good literature must have enough subtlety to engage the reader. Information is explicit, as it should be. The telephone directory, cooking instructions, and traffic signs are not examples of literature. I used one of my philosophy classes some time ago to see if any of my Canadian students could make the transition from the barrage of information they encounter on a daily basis to the subtle world of literature.
I used the blackboard to inscribe a simple and elegant verse from a Chippewa love song:
A loon I thought it was
But it was
My love’s
Splashing oar.
A poem of thirteen words would not impose a hardship of my 25 students’ attention span. I asked them what anyone thought it meant. To their credit, my students were responsive. Their enthusiasm, however, was not accompanied by any degree of enlightenment. The poem remained a conundrum for them. One student had a Freudian interpretation of the oar. Was someone bird-watching? Was the person handling the oar an amateur at his task? I reminded my class that the poem is of Chippewa origin and should not be interpreted according to Canadian cultural assumptions.
I asked, “What time of day does the story in the poem take place? One student suggested daytime and a sharp bend in the river prevented one Indian from seeing the other. To my question, “How many people are in the poem?” one student believed there were three or more. I urged them to try to situate themselves in the poem, mindful that it is reflective of a woodland Chippewa culture.
I suggested that there must be something to this little verse to explain why it has survived, and has even crossed over to other cultures. Therefore, there must be something universal about it. But it is a piece of literature and not a cryptogram. I was accused of reading too much into it. I envisioned a Chippewa woman waiting for her loved one to return. She could not rely on the telephone or emails. She had to rely on her senses, specifically her ears because the night obscured her vision. She waited and waited for her loved one as she stood somewhere on the bank of a river. At long last, she heard a splash. But it was not a sign that her Brave was returning because the splash did not recur. It was but a single splash, attributed to a loon. Frustration and fear mounted for this Chippewa woman. She was beginning to lose hope. Time passed. Despair began to cloud her judgment when she dismissed the next splash she heard as belonging to another loon. But then, another splash, and yet another. This time it was not a loon, but her Brave coming back to her. The rhythm of his oar matched the beating of her heart. They would soon embrace. As the splashes became nearer and louder, her heart beat faster. He is safe and soon she will be in his arms.
Obviously I was hallucinating. The class ended without my having convinced any of the twenty-five that this thirteen-word verse was really a beautiful love story. My would-be disciples returned to their world of explicitness and to their next class.
Poetry has its roots in the familiar world, but thanks to figures of speech, such as the metaphor, is able to lift our awareness to a higher plane. We should not want to be trapped in the prison house of the mundane. At the heart of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas is the notion that the natural order participates in the supernatural order. The mere natural is not complete unless it is fulfilled by the supernatural.
Hilaire Belloc tells of a colleague from schooldays who failed to see the significance of the metaphor. A metaphor, he said, “was nothing but a long Greek word for a lie.” A metaphor is certainly not a lie, but a light. It is a light that illuminates the path that takes us from one plane of reality to a higher one. We remain impoverished when we reduce religion to ceremony, marriage to convention, love to lust, education to information, and poetry to prose. Life is broader and richer than it may appear at first glance. Poetry has wings. We are all travelers at heart.
Dr. DeMarco’s latest book is Why I Am Pro-life and Not Politically Correct.
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Sometimes it is a little too easy to ask questions. It is especially easy when we expect someone else to do all the work in answering them. Then the questions seem to fuel themselves. A child can keep asking “Why?” until the only real practical response is to stuff an old sock in his mouth.
This sort of questioning does not represent a true thirst for knowledge but rather a willful reluctance to accept the knowledge that has been offered, and an unwillingness to think for oneself. It is always easier to let someone else think for us. Children are usually genuinely curious, of course, but at times they can also be obstinate past all parental patience. In other words, there is a difference between child-like wonder and childish stubbornness. “Child-like” is usually a virtue. “Childish” is generally a vice.
G.K. Chesterton, who never failed to adore the innocence and wonder of children as a quality we should all imitate and aspire to (for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven), also warned us to avoid the very different characteristic of childishness. Modern philosophy, for instance, is childish, and, according to Chesterton, is as stubborn as a donkey, “which wants kicking to make it go on.” The modern mind is just clever enough to take things apart but is not able to put the pieces together again. “No one, therefore, does any good to our age merely by asking questions - unless he can answer the questions.… The note of our age is a note of interrogation. And the final point is so plain; no skeptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon. ‘Am I a boy? - Why am I a boy? - Why aren't I a chair? - What is a chair?’” Chesterton says that a child can ask these questions for hours, but modern philosophers, who should know better, have been asking them for the last few centuries.
What they haven’t bothered doing is answering these questions. There are answers, but the modern world does not really seek them. We hide behind our questions. Chesterton, however, reminds us: “The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty.”
All questions are spurred by a separation from truth. The answer is always a communion with truth. And the ultimate answer is the ultimate truth: it is Jesus Christ. Sin has separated us from God. It has also clouded our thinking. Christ has reconciled us with God. And he has given us the Church to clarify our thinking.
Here is the amazing thing. The Catholic Church has answers. It is a reliable guide. The only difficulty comes when we decide we do not trust its guidance.
For the Catholic Church proclaims the truth and defends the truth. The first is evangelization, the second is apologetics. Evangelization is preaching the Gospel. Apologetics is giving an answer to the attacks on the truth. Evangelization is offensive. Apologetics is defensive. Evangelization is the sword of the spirit. It conquers. Apologetics is the shield of faith (and reason). It protects.
For those who are troubled that proclaiming the Gospel is offensive, I can only answer with the words of Christ: “Blessed is he who takes no offense at me.” (Matthew 11:6)
Being offended is not an intellectual response; it is emotional. The intellectual challenges to the Faith are not the greatest barrier to believing. In the end, it is the stubbornness of the will. We address the intellectual objections only to clear the ground for the work of the spirit. We get the head out of the way of the heart. That is when an actual decision has to be made.
The problem, however, is that most of us are afraid either to proclaim our faith or defend it. G.K. Chesterton says, “We are children of light, and yet we sit in the darkness.” Why is that? I think one reason is that we do not avail ourselves of the fullness of the Catholic Faith. We neglect the sacraments. We neglect the straightforward moral teaching of the Church. We neglect prayer. We neglect to do good to our neighbors. We even neglect to do good to ourselves. If we don’t fall into bad behavior we fall into dull behavior. We let someone else do our thinking for us.
Lent is a time to draw closer to God. Deeper prayer. Deeper spiritual reading. A time to get rid of all those things that prevent us from enjoying a fuller communion with God. Usually, in order to get rid of those things, we have to do penance. Penance is an act of separating ourselves from the things that have separated us from God.
Lent is a time to fill ourselves with truth so that we can proclaim the truth and defend the truth. So we can answer questions and not just ask them.
I have often been called a luddite. It’s not a very nice word and it’s not a very nice thing to be called. For those who have no idea what the word means, the original luddites were workers during the early years of the industrial revolution who smashed machinery in factories because they believed it had caused the loss of their jobs. In modern parlance, a luddite is a retrogressive thinker who doesn’t like or trust new technology. To be labeled a luddite is to be consigned to history’s waste-heap, just like the original luddites who failed to prevent the rise of the machine and the “progress” it heralded.
Although I resent and reject the luddite label, I do refer to myself sometimes as a technoramus because, as a techno-minimalist, I do not even try to keep up with the latest technology, nor do I spend much time with social media. I’d rather read a book, dine with friends, or watch the sunset. I am beginning to think, however, that it is not I who am a technoramus but those techno-addicts who are no longer able to engage with reality because they are constantly ensnared by technology.
A series of recent studies highlights how techno-addiction is leading to a new barbarism; how it is creating a whole generation of students who are incapable of study.
A University of Nebraska-Lincoln study illustrates that 80 percent of college students send text messages during class. A professor at the University of Waterloo placed a postgraduate at the back of the lecture hall to observe his students. More than 85 percent of them were using their laptops for things unrelated to class. A Cornell University study confirms that most students engage in some form of high-tech extra-curricular communication during class.
Considering that students are meant to be paying attention to their professor, the only valid argument for using laptops in the classroom is for the taking of notes. Since we can type faster than we can write, this would seem to make sense. Yet a study from Princeton University shows that we process information better when taking notes by hand precisely because writing is slower than typing. Since handwritten notes help students learn and retain the material being taught in class, the only real reason for the use of laptops in the classroom disappears.
Another study illustrates that people better comprehend what they’re reading if it’s on paper rather than on the screen. A study from the University of Stavanger in Norway revealed that readers on Kindle struggled to remember plot details in comparison with those who read printed books. Another study discovered lower levels of comprehension in those subjects reading PDF versions of texts.
I now realize that being a techno-minimalist does not make me a technoramus. On the contrary, I now know that my techno-minimalism prevents my becoming a technoramus. A technoramus is not one who is ignorant of technology but one who is ignorant of everything except technology.
Joseph Pearce continues the conversation with Julie Musselman about the work of the Augustine Institute's Parish Emissaries.
Joseph Pearce in conversation with Julie Musselman about the work of the Augustine Institute's Parish Emissaries.
The Legitimacy of the Humanby Rémi Brague
St. Augustine’s Press, 2017
177 pp., $26.00
ISBN: 9781587314605
Reviewed by Kenneth Colston
If you think the Church is hurting, then read Rémi Brague about mankind. In the second chapter, after an historical “opening movement” of the “rise and fall of humanism,” this erudite French classicist follows the most perceived threats (environmental collapse, nuclear catastrophe, and demographic implosion) with a catalogue of less-obvious philosophical horrors: the replacement of classical learning with statistics, the schizophrenia caused by the non-verifiability of particle physics, the rejection of final cause, the rupture of morality from reality, and the replacement of human work and intellection by technology. Man looks more than embattled and diseased: he seems obsolete, and some philosophers call for his eradication.
But man has often been embattled. Brague’s third movement begins with a look back at the ancients to expose “the myth of joyous paganism,” which he calls a Romantic invention. Thinkers from Sophocles to Quoholeth to Pseudo-Diogenes took a dim view of our species; even the Talmud wonders whether God did well when he created man. Classical philosophy attributed human dignity only to the aristocratic élite, which offers no grounding for our democratic age. Brague then shows that the question of man’s legitimacy has been denied in three domains: of man’s relation to nature, where he has been seen as a shedder of blood by angels in the Koran and a predatory nomad by Hermes Trimegistus; of man’s presence on Earth, where his bodily creation is seen as evil by Gnostics and Platonists; and of man’s mixed nature, where man as the middle being in creation between angels and beasts has been lost to such a degree that young academic philosophers can write books with a title like this one by David Benatar: Never to Have Been. The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Taking up man’s relation to nature, the fourth movement reveals Brague’s virtuosity. An accomplished Arabist, he unearths a medieval text by an anonymous Islamic sect, the Brothers of Purity, in which animals enslaved by men engage in a formal debate for manumission judged by an objective Jinn. Men tout their superiority, but animals refute each claim. A Syrian Jew advances that only man practices religion; the nightingale responds that birds praise God in song but, being sinless, not as expiation. A Persian boasts about man’s division of labor; a parrot replies that animals too admit a pecking order, with nothing demanded in exchange for leadership. A Muslim from Hejaz (the region of Mecca and Medina) says man can achieve paradise; the wise parrot adds that he can also suffer eternal fire. Mohammed then steps in to calm the audience with the promise of salvation for all Muslims, irrespective of sin. Brague ends with a question that adds suspense to his exegetical, historical, linguistic, and philosophical symphony: “Is human life truly livable without the promise of an absolute joy?”
In an interlude, Brague hunts down the first appearance of the word “anti-humanist,” by the Russian poet Alexander Blok, just after the Great War, following also a prior apocalyptic movement that saw civilization as sick and decadent and that looked forward to the music of the “more vigorous barbarous masses.” (The assaults on our ears today make that prophetic!) The “new man” to emerge from this preserver of culture will be the artist, and Brague lets it go without saying where that contemporary paragon has led.
Brague then takes up Foucault as the arch anti-humanist who still dominates the academy by breaking down a little-known interview in 1971 with high school students in which he is singularly lucid and direct about his project to overturn traditional ideologies. Foucault’s text is worth quoting, for it is the vademecum of the activist academy that drives away the search for truth and goodness and the real in its lecture halls and in the courts:
I understand by humanism the set of discourses by which Western man has been told: “Even if you do not exercise power, you can still be sovereign. Even better: the more that you renounce the exercise of power and the better you are subject to the one who imposed on you, the more you will be sovereign.” Humanism is what successively invented these subject-sovereignties: the soul (sovereign over the body, subject to God), consciousness/conscience (sovereign in the order of judgment; subject to the order of truth), the individual (sovereign possessor of rights, subject to the laws of nature or the rules of society), liberty as fundamental (inwardly sovereign, externally consenting and in accord with its destiny). In short, humanism is everything by which the West blocked the desire for power—forbade the desire for power, excluded the possibility of taking it. At the heart of humanism is the theory of the subject (in the dual sense of the word). That is why the West rejects with so much insistence everything that could spring this bolt. This bolt can be attacked in two ways. Either by a “desubjectification” of the will to power (i.e., by political struggle understood as class struggle), or by the effort to destroy the subject as pseudo-sovereign (i.e., by cultural attack: the overcoming of taboos, of sexual limitations and divisions; the practice of communal existence; getting rid of inhibitions towards drugs; breaking down all the interdictions and boundaries by which normative individuality is constituted and directed). Here I am thinking of all the experiences that our civilization has rejected, or admitted only in the element of literature.
Welcome, brave new post-sixties world, with its casualties glaringly obvious now! While Brague scrutinizes the terms of Foucault’s interview, his real concern is to expose Foucault’s claim about God in a parallel text from his introduction to Kant’s Anthropology: “The death of God, did it not make manifest, in a double murder, that by putting an end to the absolute, at the same time man himself was killed?” How? Since man is in God’s image, then the divine—or the special, the distinct, the higher—in man disappears when God leaves the intellectual stage. Conceptually, man becomes a mere animal when he doesn’t look up to live beyond himself. Brague proposes instead that man’s obedience to God not be seen as an alarming submission but a means of freedom with responsibility: as a plenipotentiary, “invested with a task, and thus granted full powers that allow him to fulfill, but at the same time responsible for its execution.”
Thus, the major motif of Brague’s symphony is resolved in the final movement of the last three chapters. To make man legitimate, the transcendent must be found, but not in Foucault’s God, “an archaic representation from which the Bible broke in decisive fashion.” Brague rather shows how a little-known German thinker, Hans Blumenberg (1920-1976) demonstrated that Gnosticism, by an overemphasis on fallen creation and a suspicion of intellect, lingered in medieval thought and that modernity is trying to exorcise it through blind faith in man’s ability to know and control nature through science. Instead, Brague urges a restoration of creation as good and of Providence as “the indispensable condition of the continuation of the human adventure.” Neither the self-affirmation God of existentialism, nor the elimination of mankind by Gaia-worshippers, nor the “blackguard” God of the will to power and of Gnosticism, nor the blind evolutionary God, can legitimize man: their paths are bleak with suicide. Where might such a God of “freedom,” “Providence,” and “goodness” be found? In Genesis, Brague concludes, but there is one huge problem: “no has ever seen God” (John 1:18). How can the hidden God be a model?
Brague’s solution is brilliant and requires his full scholarly powers as historian, linguist, philosopher, exegete, and even Arabist. He finds in a close reading of the Pentateuch, including Talmudic and Islamic commentaries, that man’s legitimizing task is the primal mitzvah of being. God is Being and commands being. In Hebrew grammar, the first command to be is in the jussive rather than the imperative mode because nothing is prior to receive and follow the command. Divine creation simultaneously implies action: “Follow what called your nature into being.” The divine Logos of John is simply a reissuing of this primal command. Perhaps some readers will find this concluding tour de force paradoxically too simple and abrupt. Once man’s being is commanded, Brague has a certain French intellectual’s optimism: “Men are perfectly capable of grasping what allows them to lead a harmonious and peaceful existence. For that they do not need a reference point.” He is doubtless talking about knowing and following the natural moral law with Thomistic confidence. It would be interesting to see what Brague would do with the darker passages of Augustine and Pascal. He is surely correct, however, that man’s hardest task is finding a final reason for living. That reason, which affirms “that it is good that we are,” comes only from the God of Genesis and John. Since Brague is so heavy in diverse theistic and philosophical traditions and so light in Christian sources, this God has a chance even with hard-bitten atheistic secularists.