Choosing the better part

Christine of Christus Victor writes, of those in vowed religious life:

The religious life is the training towards self-mastery, and thus, true freedom. In a world filled with the violence and cruelty of unrestrained passions, the religious life offers the way of peace, joy, fulfillment through the continual exercise of restraint. Such lives of simplicity and poverty are truly the most profound, the most beautiful, and the most to be envied. While the rest of us remain in the world, pulled by competing interests, constantly under the subjugation of our passions and jealousies and fears, concerned with the opinions of the world and of man, these others who have forsaken all to live for God alone draw from the depths of His peace and His joy--depths that are barred to us who cling to our reputations, to our own glory, and refuse to forsake all for Him.

To me, this sounds too romanticized, like copy for a pre-conciliar vocations advertisement.

Self-mastery, true freedom, peace, joy, continual exercise of restraint, simplicity, poverty: are these denied to those living secular lives? Competing interests, passions, jealousies, fears, clinging to reputation and glory: are these absent in religious lives?

Her post concludes:

... it is no accident that the vast majority of the canonized have been those who have abandoned everything--including the solace of marriage and children, of money and property--to cling wholeheartedly to Him.

Here I think Christine certainly overstates her point. Canonization implies holiness, but holiness doesn't imply canonization. It is no accident that the vast majority of the canonized have been those who belonged to enduring organizations with vested interests in obtaining their canonization. Lay heroic virtue tends to be less evident, and its evidence less historically durable, than religious or clerical heroic virtue.

Is it, though, in some sense "easier" to be holy as a vowed religious than as a secular layperson? I think that might be an ill-formed question. Holiness isn't a quality amenable to statistical analysis. We become holy only be responding to God's grace, which is as present on a city street as in a rural cloister. Personally, I think I have a much better chance of becoming a saint -- and, for that matter, of helping others to become saints -- living in the world than in a monastery. And "personally" is the only real way to speak of holiness.

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A fist or an open hand?

Neil Dhingra wrote a comment to the post below that I think is too interesting not to promote to its own post:

I have heard two 'conservative' explanations for the decline in episcopal authority in present day American Catholicism:

1) American Catholics, by virtue of living in a democratic and largely Protestant country, are anti-hierarchical and will always tend to have too much respect for private judgment and too little respect for authority. Catholic bishops in the United States must be self-consciously countercultural and should focus on inculcating discipline rather than working for consensus and cooperation.

2) American Catholics have been misled by a 'new class' of catechists and theologians into being suspicious of hierarchy and authority. Catholics in the 1950's had a high degree of coherence with little dissent, a rich devotional culture, and the ability to convert Walker Percy and Thomas Merton. American Catholics will naturally gravitate towards this if bishops simply free them from the liberal interlopers. Catholics bishops in the United States can trust their flocks and work for consensus and cooperation with them, as well as with the positive aspects of American culture (political conservatism and evangelicalism, for instance).

Are these two analyses mutually exclusive? And, if so, is it disingenuous for 'conservatives' to move back and forth between them?

My answer: I think there's some truth to both analyses. As for what the bishops should do, I'll cop out with an appeal to that fine Dominican custom of "balance": a true disciple of Christ is disciplined; a true brother in Christ is trustworthy.

More generally, though, I don't think a bishop should trust his flock, or his own iron fist, so much as trust Christ. In practice, that means to trust the Gospel. It has the advantage of being true, and therefore naturally attractive. It is also difficult, and therefore naturally both repulsive and attractive (people don't like to change, but they like to be challenged). If a bishop gives his flock the Gospel, and they accept it, they become true brothers and sisters in Christ, and can be trusted, liberal interlopers notwithstanding.

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Papa don't teach

Lately, Mark Shea has been arguing that American Catholics have the kind of bishops they desire -- viz., "bishops who will leave them alone and not bother them about their sex lives."

It seems to me, though, that American Catholics don't want bishops who will teach them anything. Not just not sexual morality, but also not social morality, political morality -- nor, God help their excellencies, economic morality.

And I think this desire to be left untaught covers everything the bishops might teach. It isn't that "progressive Catholics" don't want to be taught sexual morality, while "conservative Catholics" don't want to be taught economic morality. When we agree with the bishops, it is just that: agreement. Just as we might agree with our neighbor that Barry Sanders was the best pure running back in the NFL but disagree with him about Joe Montana, so we might agree with our bishops about sexuality (or church-and-state matters), but disagree with them about economics (or the death penalty).

When we want the bishops to teach, it seems, we want them to teach other people things we already know or accept.

I suppose you could say American Catholics, by and large, want their bishops to confirm them, then go.

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And you welcomed me

I've noticed a lot of Catholics, and more than one blogging Catholic, seem to treat U.S. immigration law as sacrosanct: an illegal immigrant is by definition a criminal and therefore deserves whatever punishment the law imposes.

While remaining comfortably ignorant of the specifics of U.S. immigration law, I don't think uncritical reverence is prudent. I would point out that the American bishops seem to agree with me, but among Catholics who treat U.S. immigration law as sacrosanct, episcopal endorsement counts as a strike against you.

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The satisfying discomfort of trust

Camassia and Telford Work move on to the second chapter of The Meaning of Jesus, written by N.T. Wright. From the selections they quote, I approve of their approval.

They both quote this passage, which confirms my extremely limited experience with contemporary Biblical scholars:

If two ancient writers agree about something, that proves one got it from the other. I fthey seem to disagree, that proves that one or both are wrong. If they say an event fulfilled biblical prophecy, they made it up to look like that. If an event or saying fits a writer's theological scheme, that writer invented it. If there are two accounts of similar events, they are a "doublet" (there was only one event); but if a single account has anything odd about it, there must have been two events, which are now conflate. And so on. Anything to show how clever we are, how subtle, to have smoked out the reality behind the text.

I think it's worth noting that both Borg and Wright begin by pointing out that they are, essentially, rejecting what has been given them for what they can make sense of on their own. In Borg's case, it seems to me, he rejects childish notions for sophomoric notions. In Wright's case, he rejects a lot of the sophomoric notions Borg endorses -- principally, the up-front assumption of a radical distinction between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith" -- for ... well, I'm not sure for what, exactly, but from what I've read it's a lot closer to orthodox Christianity than many Biblical scholars embrace.

I get the sense that a major difference between the two men is intellectual honesty. Borg thinks he's being honest by throwing away tradition, when he's actually swapping one for another. Wright, at least in principle, seems to have been prepared to wind up wherever his studies led him, while at the same time recognizing that his faith was affecting his studies, just as his studies affected his faith. Telford Work writes that Wright is on "a quest that trades the empty comfort of convention for the satisfying discomfort of trust," which strikes me as the sort of journey everyone has to make when it's time to grow up.

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Metametablogging: Guess who's been playing with Adobe Photo Deluxe

I try to avoid blogging about blogging. Disputations is basically a what you read is what you get site. I think the behind-the-curtain stuff should, for the most part, stay behind the curtain, so I don't bother pointing out when Blogger was down, or I made changes to the junk in the left-hand column, or I was thinking about upgrading the comments server, or whatever.

Still, I want Disputations to be an enjoyable and distinctive reading experience. Two of my concerns about it is that it isn't particularly attractive visually, and that it has occasional runs of wordy, abstract posts on theological minutiae that a reader might find wearisome.

To address both of these concerns, I decided that what Disputations needs is a mascot. A mascot will add visual appeal to an all-but-completely text-based blog, and I may also be able to use it to help make some of my convoluted arguments more accessible to people who don't want to spend the time and energy to figure out what I'm rambling on about.

And so, allow me to introduce Disputations's new mascot, Reginald the Tiger Quoll:

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That's what I'm talking about

Unless I missed something, I can endorse pretty much all of Telford Work's commentary on the first chapter (written by Marcus Borg) of The Meaning of Jesus:

Borg is constructing a public Jesus and a private Christ. How convenient for a liberal Protestant living in pluralist America! We can talk to each other about the crucified Jesus of history, then if we like withdraw to pray to the risen Jesus of personal faith. How polite of Jesus to bifurcate himself so that we can remain in conversation but stay out of each other's way. Now that's class.

I'm not sure I'd call the commentary, critical as it is -- when Borg is quoted, "[!]" and "[!!]" are inserted to show where Work's jaw hit the floor -- an example of applying the Parvus Error In Principio method. (Actually, I'm sure I wouldn't, because I'd never heard of it before yesterday.) The error Borg begins with isn't a small one that will be magnified by the end, but a large one that will (presumably) be carried throughout the book.

Frankly, there's not much I find interesting about Borg or what he apparently has to say. I knew him only as a named benchmark for bad theology, only spending a little while looking into exactly what his theology was after I overheard a Catholic priest reverently mention his Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. I suspect the only reason to take Borg seriously is that a tremendous number of Catholics, not all of them priests, agree with what he writes.

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Further on today's liturgy

The following is one of this morning's intercessions:

Help us to show reverence for those who are weak in faith,
-- may we never be hard or impatient with them, but always treat them with love.

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Novena of the Ascension, Day 8

Hernán González goes to the trouble of looking up what St. Thomas wrote about the advantage of Christ's ascending rather than remaining on earth.

Much of St. Thomas's lengthy reply to objection 3 ("it would have been more beneficial for men if He had tarried always with us upon earth") was scratched out in the discussions on this over the past week. St. Thomas, though, elegantly frames the benefits of the Ascension according to how they serve the virtues of faith, hope, and love.

As I write, Easter was almost two months ago; the Ascension is behind us, and Pentecost is upon us. Yet the prayers in the Liturgy of the Hours for today reach back before Easter, to Good Friday, and the reason I'm writing this today. We have received the Holy Spirit because Jesus has sent Him to us from Heaven; Jesus is there, exalted at God's right hand, because He is risen; He is risen because He hung upon the cross for us. (See Acts 5:30-32, the reading for Morning Prayer.)

Our faith includes the whole sequence; we can't be "a Resurrection people" or "a Spirit-filled people" if we aren't also a crucified people. We can turn a jewel to study its different faces, but it's all a single jewel. If you try to remove one of its faces, you will destroy the jewel.

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The Baltigrondomena Catechism

Mark at Minute Particulars suggests an answer to the question, "Yeah, but why did God make me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven?":

God made us because He wanted to zorbidoo the fragligs and hargmarglin the rostulations while keeping the gimblonies in weltonsingflees....

Who can dispute that?

I think the idea that there's some purpose behind creation is somewhat misguided. Certainly God has a plan for creation, but I don't think His intention is to accomplish anything with it. Jesus' many parables of banquets seem to me to capture the idea of, not just the Kingdom of God, but all of creation: Creation is the party God throws to celebrate Himself.

This doesn't sound quite right to a lot of people, because it's hard for us to think of doing something for the sheer joy of doing it. Who hasn't heard the complaint that God must be awfully petty if He wants us to worship Him? The reality, though, is that in worshipping Him, we are filled with His joy. We don't -- we can't -- make God any happier by serving Him in this world and being happy with Him for ever in heaven.

I've read that St. Thomas explains creation this way: goodness is fecund by its very nature. Goodness begets goodness; goodness creates goodness. As infinite Goodness, God overflows heaven, so to speak, into creation, as a spring pours water down a hillside. Creation is the smile on God's face, the song of joy sung as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love each other.

Sometimes the idea of however many billions of galaxies there are makes us seem awfully small and awfully unlikely candidates for God's Son to be born among. But apart from whatever personal contacts God may have elsewhere in creation, it only makes sense that God's love would be manifested in a very big way.

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Not quite contrary

I recently finished Mary, Called Magdalene, a historical novel by Margaret George that was enthusiastically recommended to me.

Alas, I can't enthusiastically recommend it. At just over 600 pages, it's one of those long novels that goes down easily but doesn't really satisfy, particularly the more you think about it too much. Like a slice of cream pie at a chain family restaurant.

There are instances of poor writing and discontinuity -- something Mary learns when she is 90 we later find she was told when she was 60, for example -- and George seems to go out of her way to rebut several Catholic doctrines (the primacy of Peter, Mamma Mary's perpetual virginity and assumption, probably the Virgin Birth). More positively, she implies some form of Real Presence and treats Jesus' mother with great reverence (by Protestant standards).

In a reader's guide printed at the back of the book, the author answers a question on her "own spiritual background":

A long pilgrimage that has led me from my family backgrounds of Quaker and Baptist, to the traditions of the Episcopal and Catholic churches. I am married to a Jewish man, and now am discovering New Age spirituality.

The pilgrimage to the Catholic Church seems to have been brief; elsewhere in the interview she refers to the sixty-six books of the Bible. So going in, it's safe to say she wouldn't write a book that would please me in all particulars.

Mostly, though, I think the problem with the book is that it attempts to novelize the Gospels, and the Gospels are not really novelable. Not that it's blasphemous or sacriligious, but that (as I've been suggesting this week) they are purposefully terse and episodic, and that each Gospel is intentionally distinct from the others.

The novelist, then, attempts to write or rewrite various scenes from the Gospels into a coherent story that presents Jesus as a psychologically believable character. Her job is to make the reader believe that the events she describes could have happened, and if they did they could have led to the written Gospels as we have them.

That's a chore.

In Mary, Called Magdalene, the result is a Jesus who is just making it up as he goes along (or rather, as the Father reveals it to Him, sometimes with the assistance of Mary Magdalene). He's charismatic, easygoing, and deeply mysterious. As he talks with his disciples, he'll suddenly let loose with a whopping mouthful from a modern Bible translation. The effect is almost like a Regency romance hero suffering from Heavenly Tourette Syndrome.

It's not impossible to do a good job adapting the Gospels (or at least a Gospel) to other art forms. Jesus of Nazareth was pretty good, and I thought the script for Dorothy L. Sayers' The Man Born to be King was excellent.

But when an adaptation tries to fill in the intentionally parabolic nature of the Gospels with psychological, social, or even religious explanations -- to, as it were bend the parabola into a circle -- then I think it will fail. The reader or viewer won't only say, "This is not Jesus as I know Him," but, "This is not a Jesus interesting enough to die for."

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The fully human person is divine

Camassia and Telford Work are biblogging their way through The Meaning of Jesus, written (in alternating chapters) by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright. I know almost nothing about Borg, and none of it I find favorable. I know very little about Wright, and most of it I find favorable.

In the very first paragraph by Borg (who wrote the first chapter of the book) Camassia quotes, he loses me. His intent is to draw the already shopworn distinction between the "protoplasmic [historical] Jesus" and the "living [post-Resurrection] Jesus." Borg thinks this distinction is necessary for the historical Jesus to be human:

A person who knows himself to be the divinely begotten Son of God (and even the second person of the Trinity) and who has divine knowledge and power is not a real human being. Because he is more than human, he is not fully human ...

Borg's assertion of this last idea -- that he who is more than human is not fully human -- tells me two things. First, little or none of his Christology will be consistent with the Christian faith of the first nineteen centuries after Christ's death. Second, little or none of his Christology will be correct -- not just because it is contradicted by Christian faith, but because it is based on a falsehood.

To be human is to possess human nature, to have a human soul. In one sense, to be "fully human" is redundant; you either are human, or you aren't. In this sense, clearly, having a divine nature as well as a human nature does not make a person less than fully human, any more than a clock radio isn't a radio (if I'm allowed such a humble analogy).

In another sense, though, a person becomes "more fully" human the more his life expresses the fullness of human nature. A person incapable of thought is said to be in a "vegetative" state. A person incapable of love is said to be "inhuman." Such people aren't, of course, non-humans, but I think the language does indicate a true notion that incapacities like these mark people who do not live "full human lives," which is to say lives that fulfill all aspects of human nature.

The concept of human nature itself is debatable, still more the concept of the fullness of human nature. The message of Jesus Christ, though, is that through Him we can become children of God. "Not by nature," as the formula goes, "but by adoption." The Christian faith is that we, who are human if anything is, can become God's sons and daughters.

How do we become this something "more than human"? By the grace of God. Do we cease to be human when we become this something more than human? No: grace perfects nature, it doesn't replace it.

So if our own destiny is to be both fully human and more than human, how can it be that Jesus could not be both?

Some say (and I think Borg is among them) that the weaknesses and limitations of human nature are of such central importance that, if Jesus was able to overcome them in His divine nature, He cannot be said to have been human in a truly meaningful way. I don't see why this is true. I think -- and again, it's a crude simile, but it works -- this is like saying a radio only reports the time when someone announces it on the station to which the radio is tuned, so a clock radio isn't a radio in a meaningful sense.

St. Paul wrote that Jesus was a man like us, not that He was just a man, like us. To insist He was is to insist the hypostasis of His divine and human natures is impossible. And that, obviously, is something that needs to be proved, not simply asserted.

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You can't tell the players without a program

Robert Gotcher dispels ignorance over what a dogmatic theologian is, quoting the old Catholic Encyclopedia.

I use simpler definitions:

• Fundamental theology: God is.
• Dogmatic theology: God was here.
• Mystical theology: God is here.
• Moral theology: You are God's.
• Speculative theology: God is more.

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Clubbing it

Bill Cork welcomes me:

Disputations is in trouble now. He's dared to criticize Catholic World News.

For what it's worth, I didn't criticize CWN itself, I criticized its blog. I know essentially nothing about it as a news provider, I only know it sponsors a website that purveys rumor, scandal, and detraction, much of it pseudonymous. I suppose it's possibly they are able to wipe their fingers clean when it's time to type up the news.

I think journalists have a strong personal sense of "what counts," of what needs to meet some standards of journalistic conduct and what doesn't. Blogs, clearly, don't count. I'm not sure, though, that Internet readers make the same distinction.

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Misnomers

Karen Marie Knapp informs us that today is Gerard Serafin's birthday.

Coincidentally, Hernán González links to an article about an apparently common error of calling Jorge Luis Borges "José Luis Borges." Borges didn't much mind, since he thought "José Luis Borges" was easier to say.

For reasons unknown to me, people often refer to Gerard as "Gerald." I don't know if "Gerald Serafin" sounds much more euphonious, but at least others aren't claiming he writes poetry as bad as some claim "José Luis Borges" wrote.

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Deep into Saintly Salmagundi territory

I blame Amy Welborn for this.

Suggested captions:

• "Okay, now turn left at the second light for the best barbecue this side of heaven."
• "You know, when you do that I can hear the tree crying. Just kidding."
• "So this is that important meeting you told your secretary about, huh, Phil?"
• "Hey, Pastor Chrysostom, Mr. Portefoy in the back row's about to fall asleep. Again."
• "No, don't tell me. You got your hair cut? New earrings?"
• "You have no idea what that thing's called, do you?"
• "Now hit control-alt -- ah, nuts, I can't figure out MS Access, either."
• "Say, this reminds me of the time Peter and Andrew --" "Quiet. You're scaring the fish."

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Like a broken record

A couple of times a week, I wander over to the Catholic World News's blog Off the Record.

"Just to see," I tell myself. Just to see what the professional dung-slingers are up to.

And what do you know, they're slinging dung.

I think Karen Marie Knapp has the right call on this sort of thing. The accuser of the Brethren is having a hell of a good time these days.

At my blog, too? In my heart?

It's time I get serious about maintaining custody of the keyboard.

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J'acuse! Mais, qui?

Ron Moffat doesn't think the American laity gets a better grade over recent decades than their bishops:

...I would say that, indeed, the laity bears, by far, the greater portion of guilt for the sorry state of the society we live in....

According to the Catechism, it is the laity that has the vocation to bring the Kingdom of God to the world. We are the ones charged with making the society we live in Christian, not the clergy. The duty of the clergy is in service of the Church -- to support our efforts in bringing Christ to the marketplace. I would also say that, based on this definition, we the laity have failed miserably.

A fair indictment, I'd say.

But it also calls to mind a tangential question: When did the bishops become such a big deal?

No, I don't mean ecclesiologically. I mean practically, in the life of the common or garden Catholic tootling through life in these United States.

My personal experience of bishops is extremely limited. I probably haven't attended a dozen liturgies led by a bishop in my life -- and that's counting a papal Mass and the occasional touring bishop who winds up at the same church at the same time I do. Prior to January 2002, I would have said the direct impact of the bishop on a significant percentage of his flock was limited to irritating them by replacing beloved priests with martinets and promulgating fund-raising-by-guilt-trip programs. He said the right things at Christmas and Easter, posed for pictures at groundbreaking ceremonies, and went about doing Confirmations in the Spring. In terms of lived faith, though, he wasn't much of a figure. If I wanted guidance beyond what my priest could give, it was the Pope or nothing.

Then, when the scandal broke, all of a sudden (from my perspective) bishops were important. And not just my bishop, either. Now I'm supposed to keep abreast of the actions and behaviors of bishops in dioceses I've never heard of before. I'm told which one(s) to praise and which ones (all the rest) to damn.

I have to doubt that we, the American laity, can sustain the interest. When it comes down to it, our experience of our bishops is not, "Here is the Church, spotless yet in need of reform." It's, "Here is the guy who decides whether we can build a parish hall." Whether the fault lies with the bishop, with us, with the ex-nun lesbian cabal running the chancery, with the modernists in the Vatican, with the troglodytes in the Vatican -- or whether no one's to blame, I don't think the relationship between bishop and faithful is very well understood, much less lived out, in this country (although there are exceptions). And I'm not sure the current scandal (or the next one, for that matter) provides an adequate context in which this relationship can become what it is supposed to be.

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Continuing the speculative novena

TS O'Rama contributes some more Ascension thoughts:

The Resurrected Jesus in the flesh is very obviously a display of power. Faith, like charity, is a big denomination of currency in the spiritual realm. By being present to us, He would perhaps be obstructing our faith by taking away some of our free will, thus lessening the currency we would have to spend in heaven.

And if faith be that much less meritorious when we see Jesus -- so much so, TS suggests, that "[t]hose visited by supernatural events ... suffer proportionately the greater for it" -- how much more damnable would lack of faith be? Suppose Jesus were alive and well and living in Jerusalem, and you made a pilgrimage to see Him, but when you saw Him all you could say is, "Eh."

Mr. O'Rama also raises a disputed question:

There is speculation that our Blessed Mother didn't receive a post-Resurrection visit from Jesus because she didn't need it. It's certainly possible that He did appear to her and it just isn't recorded, but some say that such appearance would be extraneous given Mary's great faith, and miracles aren't for gratification - they serve a purpose.

I think the most important point to be made on this is that it wasn't recorded. If Jesus did appear to His mother -- which I think is at least moderately probable -- it was to meet no public need of the Church.

I'm beginning to think there's more to the minimalism of the Gospels -- all the elided details! all the unanswered questions! -- than the stock explanation that they were written to fill specific needs in specific communities by men writing in specific literary traditions. Jesus spoke in parables in public, only explaining Himself in private to those who were close to Him. The Gospels, too, are parabolic: they invite us to fill in details, to draw conclusions, to search out connections. They (all Scripture, but the Gospels especially) are no more brute facts we passively accept than is the Resurrection. Just as the Ascension demands that we see the Resurrection through the eyes of faith, so the Gospels demand we see the whole life of Jesus, not just with our eyes as we read, but with our faith as we ask the Holy Spirit to help us.

This is an extraordinarily inefficient way of forming disciples, but it seems to be typical of the way God reaches out to man.

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More fun with four-letter words

Jesus went to the Father. Jesus is with His disciples always. Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to His disciples. Jesus gave them the Holy Spirit. Jesus is God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God.

What do all these little words actually mean? What do they tell us about the Trinity? About our relationship with the Persons of the Trinity?

I don't know.

But here's a quick check at the words used by the NAB at the ends of the Gospels.

Matthew ends with Jesus' words:

"And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."

Jesus remains with His disciples; the Ascension and the reception of the Holy Spirit go unmentioned.

Luke makes up for this with two versions of the Ascension. In Luke 24:49, He tells His disciples, "And (behold) I am sending the promise of my Father upon you." In Acts 1:8, Jesus says, "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you." Then follows the dramatic events of (what Catholics somewhat ignorantly refer to as "the first") Pentecost.

According to John, Jesus appeared to His disciples the evening of His Resurrection, "breathed on them and said to them, 'Receive the holy Spirit.'" Jesus explicitly gives the Disciples the Holy Spirit, just as He sends them out into the world as the Father sent Him. John records no Ascension; indeed, though His movements are mysterious, Jesus seems in no hurry to leave the Earth.

Mark's Gospel, of course, ends at 16:8.

No, seriously, Jesus sent the Eleven "into the whole world [to] proclaim the gospel to every creature," then, with typically (if not actually) Markan lack-of-fanfare, He "was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God."

I'm not really going anywhere with all this, beyond noticing that each Gospel ends with an emphasis on a different aspect of the Christian's experience of God's presence. Matthew stresses Jesus' personal presence. Luke insists on the full process of ascent-descent, and (in Acts) on the presence of the Holy Spirit in Christ's faithful. John acknowledges the presence of both Jesus and the Holy Spirit, although it is the person of Jesus on Whom his attention is directed. Mark (deutero-Mark?) mentions neither Jesus nor the Holy Spirit as personal companion; rather, it is Jesus's power with which the Christian is invested to preach the Gospel.

All of these are valid perspectives, of course. And, importantly, they're all sharp perspectives. When we mash all the Gospels together, the picture we get of Jesus -- and of the relationship He offers us -- gets a little blurry. "Jesus is with the Father and Jesus is with me" sounds like a neat trick, the sort of paradox by which you convince yourself your mind isn't too shrunken to function. "Jesus is with the Father. Jesus is with me." demands, I think, to be taken a little more seriously.

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Handling snakes and Scripture

Last week, Video meliora... wondered about these verses from the Gospel of Mark:

And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.

Since these words appear in the Gospel for the Assumption, Fr. Keyes quotes a passage from St. Gaspar, as well as his own homily.

I was going to crib something from a commentary on Mark I picked up, but it's too contemporary to even discuss anything past Mark 16:8. (As a side note, I wonder how modern Scripture scholars can be so certain the Gospel was originally intended to end there. Granting that the rest of the chapter was written by others, how do we know they weren't written to replace an original ending that got lost?)

Anyway, the upshot of this passage, according to St. Gaspar and Fr. Keyes and St. Gregory and others, is that, while these signs were worked literally and materially by the Apostles, they continue to be worked spiritually by Christians today.

I'll buy that, as far as it goes, but it doesn't mean demons aren't still driven out, nor sick people healed. The need for these as public signs is largely past, but they remain, here and there -- in numbers, I bet, that would surprise many faithful Christians -- as personal signs given by the Holy Spirit according to the wisdom and providence of God. Or so it seems to me.

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Why ascend?

Chris Burgwald wonders why Jesus ascended to Heaven instead of remaining on Earth:

It seemed to me that this would have solved a lot of problems, like belief in Him, and the governance of His Body, the Church.

There are a number of possible answers to this question, but there is one in particular which I personally find most satisfactory: Jesus ascended and no longer dwells with us as He did 2000 years ago because He wants us to raise our minds to spiritual things. Because Jesus is not visibly present to us as He was to the first disciples, we are forced to ponder the invisible and the eternal; we cannot remain focused solely on the here and now, but must regularly turn our gaze Heavenward, where our Lord and Savior now dwells.

I think we shouldn't overlook to significance of the problems Chris says would have been solved if Jesus had remained on Earth.

As Jesus told St. Thomas, "Blessed are those who do not see, but believe." Faith in Jesus is more of a blessing for those who can't see the wounds in His hands and feet. If He were alive today, who of us wouldn't do all we could to go see Him? As it is, all we need do is go to the nearest Catholic church to see Him with the eyes of faith He so praises in the Gospels.

I take the Ascension to be, among other things, the sign par excellence of how His Body the Church is to be governed: by us. Again, who would dare to ordain a bishop without getting personal approval from Jesus, were He living somewhere today? The Body of Christ would be paralyzed with fear of making a mistake. We still, of course, appeal to Jesus for approval and guidance, but it is up to us vessels of clay to hear His word and apply it.

But Jesus Himself provides the primary answer to the question of why He ascended to Heaven: "But I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you."

If Jesus did not return to the Father, the Holy Spirit would not have been sent upon the Church -- the Holy Spirit, by which we are moved to think of the things above, by which we have faith in Jesus, by which the Church is governed.

We can then ask why Jesus had to go to the One Who sent Him in order for the Advocate to be sent to the Church. That's a question for which I have no ready answer, beyond the purely semantic one that you can't "send" someone from a place where you aren't. Only if He is in Heaven can Jesus send the Holy Spirit from Heaven to Earth. Having returned to the Father, Jesus intercedes for us as High Priest from within the Holy of Holies, the very heart of the Triune God. Through such intercession from such a place is the Holy Spirit sent upon the Church.

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On a related note

A fondness for Wodehouse is just one of the threads of union that runs through St. Blog's. I now learn I am not the only blogger to have played that most fiberglass of brass instruments, the second alto of the marching band: the Sousaphone.

I played it -- along with the tuba, whichever they had in the closet, no snob I -- off and on from junior high through college. If you want to know what it's like to stare into the abyss, and have it stare back, try oompahing "Pomp And Circumstance" for twenty minutes straight on five hours' sleep while a thousand hungover business majors file into a Brobdingnagian auditorium.

Our college concert band was simply dreadful, possibly because there was usually a higher good to pursue than rehearsal. My girlfriend (now wife) once attended one of our concerts, poor thing. Of the four pieces the conductor had us play, I had never seen the music for two of them before sitting down on stage. Afterward, I asked my girlfriend to guess which pieces I was sight-reading (well, sight-skimming; I never did learn the fingering for some of the lesser-used sharps and flats). She guessed wrong.

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Boxing day

In a comment below, the Kairos Guy expresses mystification at what he sees as my "need to draw a box around the Infinite." He responds to the Flos Carmeli Guy's suggestion that my need is rather to try to "clear away a great many theological cobwebs" by saying "the cobwebs are often themselves a result of drawing boxes around things."

My own reply was that "I'm trying to draw a box around the finite -- and to make it the biggest box possible."

Of course, boxing in the finite amounts to boxing out the infinite. That's a difficult thing to do, when the Infinite is the mystery of participation in the life of the Trinity.

But let me redraw the distinction between a problem and a mystery. A problem is a question that, at least in principle, can be answered. A mystery is a question that, by the nature of what it ponders, cannot be answered.

The fact that I can't answer a question doesn't make it a mystery, properly speaking. Even the fact that there is no way anyone can answer a question (short of Divine revelation) doesn't make it a mystery. How many comets are there in the universe? Assuming we can agree on a definition of comet and on the moment relative to which the question is asked, we still can't answer it because obtaining the answer is beyond our human ability. But the answer itself is not beyond the ability of human reason to understand. A number like 14,293,335,493,110,394 may beggar the imagination, but it's still intelligible to us.

Similarly, a question like, "Do all who die unbaptized but without personal sin experience the Beatific Vision?" is a problem, not a mystery. The Beatific Vision itself is a mystery, in a sense the mystery, and not even an angel could explain it to us.

An angel could, however, say, "Yes." In principle, so could an ecumenical council. While we still wouldn't really comprehend what the unbaptized were experiencing, we would at least know they were in a similar relationship with God as the Christian saints. Knowing that, we would be in a position to revisit what Scripture and Tradition say about relationships with God, which in turn would not only help to focus the Church's evangelical message but also help sharpen our own relationships with God and each other.

I'll also note that the Kairos Guy himself gave an unqualified answer of "Yes" to this very question a couple of weeks ago. (Literally, it was, "Most of the people God has invested with life have taken the express lane to the Beatific Vision.") I don't see why my answer of, "Well, let's think about this," is any more of a box around the Infinite.

Finally, this discussion has brought some mirth to at least two others (and counting). If that doesn't make something worthwhile, I don't know what does.

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Can you feel the groundswell?

Yes, it's the first day of the Novena to the Holy Spirit, and the vigil of the Visitation, and (in the Czech Republic, at least) the Memorial of St. Zdislava, but it's also the day when P. G. Wodehouse finally takes his place in the pantheon of people who unite us even apart from religion. (Come to think of it, it's also the day the pantheon of people who unite us even apart from religion gets established, but someone else will have to blog about that.)

Mark Shea calls him, "Hands down the funniest writer of English prose ever." Hernan Gonzales has a gallery of Jeeveses & Woosters through the years. Kathy the Carmelite was enthusing over Wodehouse some weeks back, drawing dylan to add something fresh as well.

There is, of course, a Wodehouse Society -- or rather, a whole lot of Wodehouse Societies. There is also a group called The Clients of Adrian Mulliner, comprising the intersection of Wodehouse Society types and Baker Street Irregular types. (Adrian Mulliner is a private detective appearing in a few of Wodehouse's short stories.)

It seems to me St. Blog's should have something like a Sodality of St. Valentine (Wodehouse's great theme was star-crossed romance, and he died on February 14), or the Great Sermon Handicappers (after a story about a betting ring on which church would feature the longest sermon; "The Great Sermon Handicap" has, out of pure whimsy, been translated into more than a dozen languages). Then we could ... well, I suppose we wouldn't actually do anything, except maybe slap an icon on our blogs someplace. Can anyone gen up an image of a black pig on a red heart? Like this, only better:



Ah, a touch of style, courtesy of the Video Meliora, Proboque; Deteriora Sequor Guy:

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Reverent agnosticism?

There is at least one Dominican with the temerity to take the Catechism to task for its [non-]treatment of limbo. In the commentary The Service of Glory: The "Catechism of the Catholic Church" on Worship, Ethics, Spirituality, Fr. Aidan Nichols, OP, writes:

[A] pronounced reverent agnosticism afflicts the Catechism when it comes to speak of the destiny of unbaptized children, for in their case there would seem to be no human act which God could regard as an act of conversion. Rather than speak, in their connection, of a possible limbus puerorum, a kind of happy attic, with restrictive prospect, in the house of heaven whose windows look out on the vision of God (an analogy, fundamentally, with the limbus patrum, the antechamber of that house where the just who lived before Christ awaited the advent of the Redeemer), the Catechism prefers more simply to entrust these babes to the mercy of God.

For a fuller treatment of Fr. Nichols' thoughts about the inhabitants of the house of heaven, see "Catholicism and Other Religions," a chapter from his book Epiphany: A Theological Introduction to Catholicism.

[Full disclosure: I clipped the above paragraph from a book review I was browsing, and found the book chapter via Google. I haven't read any of Fr. Nichols's books, although I keep coming across his name in good contexts.]

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Out of limbo

In thinking further on the question of what we can know, guess, hope, or believe about the destinies of the unbaptized who die without personal sin -- which, again, is perhaps more important for how that knowledge, guesswork, hope, and belief affects our other opinions and beliefs -- I am struck by how very little has been said authoritatively about this. Like a wart on your boss's nose, it's a subject people might talk about a lot, but it's rarely mentioned in formal settings.

I suspect this goes back to the admirable practicality of First Century Jews. People didn't come to Jesus with metaphysical questions; they asked, "What must I do to be saved?" When the Sadducees did bring up a speculative situation, involving a woman with seven husbands, His reply didn't encourage further such questions.

My guess is the primary motivation of the first generations of disciples and believers was, "What are the implications of the Gospel for me?," not, "What are the implications for a class of persons to which I do not belong?" This, I think, is the way to understand the literal meaning of Scriptural passages that state or imply some positive act of faith on our part for salvation. They are meant to teach the person who hears them about the choice he faces, not about the complete economy of salvation.

(That doesn't mean such questions never came up. Perhaps they were related to the lost custom of baptism for the dead?)

I think this is shown in the words used in the Catechism (assuming this is a reliable translation; I added the emphasis): we are allowed "to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism." [CCC 1261] Notice our hope isn't simply that these children are saved; we must first hope that a way for them to be saved exists. This tells me that the existence of that way is not explicitly taught by the Church, which suggests it is not explicitly taught in Scripture.

Ah, but is it implicitly taught? Scripture may not directly address a subject yet still not be entirely silent. Steven Riddle (along with the Catechism) finds a basis for hope in the words of Jesus, "Let the children come to me; do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these."

For me, though, the question isn't whether Jesus loves children. This I know. If I were looking for Scriptural implications of another way of salvation, I would look to passages like these:

I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd. [John 10:16]

In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. [John 14:2a]

The first suggests some will be saved whom Jesus' disciples never considered salvagable; this is a clear reference to Gentile Christians, but not necessarily only them. The second passage could be interpreted, I think, to mean that Heaven will be experienced by different people in different ways -- qualitatively different, not just quantitively.

This is the point I reached before reading Kevin Miller's comment below that de Lubac demonstrated, pace St. Thomas, "purely natural happiness" is metaphysically impossible. Frankly, I'm glad to hear that, for reasons I'll save for another post.

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Not sympathetic to magic

I'm not too interested in the Great Harry Potter As Gateway to Satanism Debate. On the one hand, the resolution that the books are a gateway to Satanism strikes me as a non-starter. On the other hand, I don't think the books are good enough to warrant a particularly impassioned defense.

John Granger, one of J. K. Rowlings leading hagiographers, has interested me, though, with a suggestion posted on Catholic and Enjoying It:

A helpful distinction that may clear some of the smoke and heat from these exchanges is the one between incantational and invocational magic. Revealed traditions all condemn invocational magic; the Faustian bargain is a bad deal necessarily because the principalities and powers 'called in' (hence 'invocational') always have their own agenda. No one that I know thinks invocational magic a good idea, in real life or in literature - outside of say, Faust, where the consequences are evident.

Incantational magic, however, 'singing along with' or 'harmonizing' contranaturalism, is the foundation of Christian faith. It only appears in literature as abacadabra spells, the Lives of the Saints, and the Book of Acts (the miracles of our Savior cannot be called incantational because He is the music or Word with Whom we strive to sing). Only our ability as images of God for such harmonization (by means of our receptivity to God's graces and the mysteries of the Church) make our hope of Theosis possible.

As I commented there, I doubt his writing "Incantational magic...is the foundation of Christian faith" will convince many of Granger's opponents that he knows appropriate use of magic when he sees it. Someone then suggested an exercise for the reader: "explain the difference between an incantation and a valid Eucharistic prayer or Baptism."

It seems to me John Granger's position depends on what is meant by "magic." In the Church, magic is customarily defined to be a means to an end that either ignores God's actions or denies His freedom. By that definition, magic is not the foundation of faith, but its debasement. [Get it? Not de foundation, but de basement. Ha!]

By a broader (sociological?) definition of magic -- as, say, a means to an end for which the physical actions performed are an inadequate cause -- Baptism might be considered magic. Even here, though, the Church's understanding of the operation of Baptism bears no significant similarity to, say, a pantheist's understanding of how a healing chant attunes him to the healing powers of the cosmos. To say gazing into a crystal and baptizing a baby are both instances of magic is to give the term magic a uselessly broad meaning. It's like defining the word "Pennsylvanian" to mean "a resident of either Pennsylvania or Transylvania;" you can do it, but it's not a very useful concept.

Be that as it may, I would have thought Baptism is an example of an invocation, not an incantation: "I baptize you in the Name of the Father...." There is not some cosmic harmony of regeneration to which we attune the baptized through form and matter. There is a Trinity of Persons, Whom we invoke, asking for Their graces based on the promise of the Son. The fundamental difference between Christian prayer and magic is the same as the fundamental difference between Christianity and everything else: a participation in the life of a community of Divine Persons.

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An idea in limbo

The question of the destiny of those who die without committing serious sin -- in particular, of infants and young children -- has long been pondered by Christian theologians. It's not a purely academic exercise, either; habits of thought affect habits of act, as I've argued before.

According to the old Catholic Encyclopedia, before St. Augustine it was generally agreed that the unbaptized who die without personal sin do not suffer. They simply do not experience the vision of God, which they don't naturally expect anyway.

St. Augustine came to believe that surely even the personally innocent must suffer a little bit. The West followed him up until the time of Abelard, when theologians began rejecting the idea of material suffering for unbaptized children. St. Thomas took it further back to the pre-Augustinian teaching that there was neither material nor spiritual suffering, teaching finally that the unbaptized innocent wouldn't even have knowledge of the supernatural good they were lacking.

Ninety years ago, the no-suffering "limbo" opinion had won the day against the Augustinian position. The Catechism, though, advances the state of the question far beyond what the early Greek Fathers taught:

As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children which caused him to say: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them," allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. [CCC 1261]

We are allowed, not merely to believe these children don't suffer, but to hope they may experience the Beatific Vision.

This hope is, I think, another example of the softening of the heart Catholic theology has undergone in the last century. Eternal natural beatitude is no longer the best we can hope for; it's now nothing less than a participation in the Divine Life.

That's all fine, of course [the writers of the Catechism breathe a sigh of relief]; God is not bound by the Sacraments, so His gift of salvation need not be limited to them. But to the extent this is a new idea, or at least a new way of putting things, there are still a lot of issues to be shaken out. Does hope in the possibility become faith in the necessity? Is limbo -- a state without positive suffering and without supernatural happiness -- still a viable opinion? What exactly are the consequences of Original Sin in the light of Jesus' sacrifice? Is the hoped-for way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism available for adults who have died without Baptism? For adults who have died with Baptism, later repudiated? As a last chance for me?

My concern is not to keep the riff-raff out, to reserve Heaven for those of us who have earned it. It's rather to know the truth, insofar as it's knowable, and to appreciate its implications. Neither to reject an idea because it complicates a pet theory, nor to accept an idea because it has sentimental appeal.

In all of this, too, I try to keep in mind that a hoped-for means of salvation available to others doesn't directly affect me, since the means of my salvation have been openly preached for nearly two thousand years.

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Speaking of which

As you are no doubt aware, St. Zdislava of Lemberk's dies natalis (the "day of birth" into eternal life, a saint's natural feastday) is January 1. Since that conflicts with the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, her feast in the Dominican calendar has been moved to January 4. January 4 is also the feastday of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, who (for sound if partisan reasons) trumps St. Zdislava in the United States, so Americans have no real opportunity to celebrate St. Zdislava's feast liturgically.

The Czechs, however, honor their patron saint on May 30.

If you're looking for a good excuse for an extraliturgical donut this Friday (assuming you don't observe a fast for the Vigil of the Visitation), have one in honor of St. Zdislava, a medieval wife and mother who became a saint without first becoming a nun. (You might want to check out her litany, too.)

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Thank you for patronizing our sponsors

A new Catholic person asks:

Exactly what are one's options regarding one's patron saint's feast day? How are we to honor our patron saints on those particular days?

Generally, I eat a donut.

Okay, an extra donut.

I think it is good and wholesome to celebrate our patron's feast days. And I mean, literally, celebrate with a feast.

The old customs can be found in books, but I don't see anything wrong with starting a new custom. Like a S(t. Thomas )More Pie, or a Fra(A)ngelico Cheesecake, or an Assumption Swizzle, or Archangelfood Cake. (Yes, it might be more appropriate to celebrate the feast of St. Raphael by cooking up fish guts, but what kind of a celebration is that?)

(Which reminds me: look for a recipe for I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Cookies at St. Blog's Cookbook in time for the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle July 3.)

In terms of religious observance, I do try to go to Mass, although optional memorials generally go unoptioned in the parish churches I can get to. The Liturgy of the Hours provides commons and some propers for most of my patron saints. There are numerous litanies out there, perfectly suitable for private use. A few saints even have their own "little offices," and there are some more or less standard novenas for many saints as well.

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"Especially do we need her witness of trust in God."

Amy Welborn (among others) has linked to the Boston Globe article about the cause to canonize Servant of God Rose Hawthorne (Mother Mary Alphonsa, O.P.). I assumed no one would comment on this, since it wasn't scandalous and didn't give anyone a target to sneer at. I was mistaken.

Those who might happen to find news of a possible American saint an occasion for joy can learn a lot more about Rose Hawthorne here.

Lord God, in your special love for the sick, the poor and the lonely, you raised up Rose Hawthorne (Mother Alphonsa) to be the servant of those afflicted with incurable cancer and with no one to care for them. In serving the outcast and the abandoned, she strove to see in them the face of your Son. In her eyes, those in need were always "Christ's Poor."

Grant that her example of selfless charity and her courage in the face of great obstacles will inspire us to be generous in our service of neighbor. We humbly ask that you glorify your servant Rose Hawthorne on earth according to the designs of your holy will. Through her intercession, grant the favor that I now present (here make your request).

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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The human view

Flos Carmeli features "a special pleading based on limited human understanding" for hoping that all men are saved.

I have grave reservations about his statement that the Reformation "represent[s] the maturing of faith through rebellion and reexamination." Lutheranism is not a maturation of Catholicism. Henry VIII was only interested in reexamining the faith if and when the reexamination concluded that he had the right to do whatever he wanted.

But even if we take the broader point that the Counter-Reformation Church fixed a lot that was broken in the Pre-Reformation Church, I remain troubled by the idea that the Church's faith matures. It implies, not only that the faith changes, but that it improves. Faith-wise, the first Christian martyrs were babies, the Desert Fathers little kids, the medieval scholastics precocious pre-teens. Only now are there Christians with a grown-up faith -- and guess who those Christians are! Us! What are the odds?

I'm sure this isn't what Mr. Riddle meant, but there are enough people who do mean this that I think the Church-as-a-growing-human metaphor causes more problems than it solves. Somehow "development" seems like a better term than "maturation" to describe the way the Church today differs from that of the First Century AD.

But all that's largely a question of semantics.

The key to the post is, I think, "the human view--what would it take to alienate us from our own children":

Early on our vision of God was of the Great Just Judge and Father. We love our Father, but we are frightened of the Judge that He is. One slip and we could be plunged into exile into Hell forever. Yes, we could repent and get another chance, but still and all, we constantly walk the precipice of his tolerance. And one could certainly support this view from scripture and from the words of Jesus. However, our human hearts tell us that this cannot be the truth. In our own parents, who are imperfect, justice does not trump love and compassion. They may be combined--but it is a rare parent who will permanently exile his or her child. It may become necessary for one reason or another and may happen--but it seems more likely to be a rare event. To use the tautology Jesus so aptly put--"If we who are corrupt and imperfect know how to do good things, how much more Our Father in Heaven does so."

I have to say that my human heart doesn't tell me it cannot be true that one slip can plunge me into exile into Hell forever. Not that my human heart is a reliable guide of what is true, but I'm pretty sure it's Catholic dogma that one mortal sin can plunge me into eternal exile from God. It may be that the life of grace is more stable than it's often conceived; maybe committing a mortal sin isn't as easy as some say it is. But, once I commit one, I have no life in me.

In this post, Mr. Riddle seems to assume that we are saved unless we do something to mess things up. The doctrine of original sin, though, seems to imply that we are damned unless we do something to clean things up (not, dear non-Catholic readers, that our salvation is due to anything we do). "One wrong move and you're out isn't plausible," Mr. Riddle writes. Which assumes you're in to begin with. I think he's missing a distinction in the ways in which God is, or can be, our Father.

As creator and sustainer, God is our Father in what could be called a natural way, in the same caregiving way He is Father to the birds of the air who neither sow nor reap. Of course, bearing God's image and likeness, we are better than the birds of the air, and God loves us more.

But God is also Father to Jesus Christ, as Begettor to Begotten. Through faith in Jesus, we become adopted children of God -- actual children, not just in some juridicial or metaphorical way.

Humans are capable of a life of nature, a life of grace, and a life of glory. Each of these lives is given us, obviously, by our Heavenly Father, but our relationship with Him is different in each life. We are born into a life of nature; we are given a life of grace through baptism and faith in Jesus (that's the something we have to do to clean things up). The life of glory is simply the fulfillment of the life of grace.

Looking again at Matthew 7:11 -- "If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask Him." -- notice those last words: "to those who ask Him." Those living a natural life may well ask God for a life of grace, but they need not. Those living a life of grace may ask for the things they need to sustain their life of grace, but they may not. In either case, a person can receive from God all he asks for and still not be saved. It's not a question of the lengths God will go to on our behalf -- that was answered on Calvary -- but of our choosing Him instead of something else.

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Speaking of the kind of bishop I'd like to have

Theodore Cardinal McCarrick of Washington has released a pastoral letter called "The Fullness of Hope" (PDF file here), on the Church's response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

It's a good letter, I think, presenting the Church's teaching with clarity:

It is because our Church has a total vision of human dignity, which begets a deep love for all people and a respect for their well being in all dimensions -- physical, psychological, moral and spiritual -- that it rejects the false promises of condoms. Instead, we encourage people to embrace chastity, fidelity and sexual abstinence outside of marriage, behaviors that protect the physical and spiritual integrity, preserve their true dignity and promote true responsibility.

Our critics often claim that chastity and sexual abstinence programs cannot work alone or at all. They claim that people cannot change their behavior, while at the same time they call for exactly that -- for people to use condoms consistently and correctly every time they engage in sexual activity. If society is going to seek to modify conduct, then would it not be better and more effective to encourage behaviors such as chastity and abstinence that eliminate the risk of disease while promoting human dignity and a healthy life in all dimensions, rather than behaviors that do not eradicate the risk of disease and lull people into a false sense of security?

There's even something to irritate small government/free market cultists and others who get offended at the thought of a Catholic bishop deigning to speak about government or economic matters:

Even beyond the context of HIV/ AIDS, we affirm the right to healthcare for every person. We recognize that many nations lack basic medicines to fight many diseases, much less the more costly drugs to combat HIV infection and, therefore, we call upon our government and other governments to help ensure that the appropriate medicine is accessible, affordable and available to all. We stand in solidarity with the Holy See as it calls for pharmaceutical companies to work together to overcome the burdens of costly research and development so these urgently needed drugs may be available at affordable prices and to urge nations to build stronger healthcare infrastructures, to provide emergency relief assistance and to work to eliminate poverty and other factors that contribute to HIV infection.

The only questionable parts are when Cardinal McCarrick seems to imply that I, personally, have some sort of duty or responsibility:

...we make this call for a culture of solidarity with people who are living with HIV/ AIDS and with their families....

All of us should be convinced and convincing in this matter. Our lives, our work and our witness must testify to the fullness of life in Jesus Christ.

In our own local Church of Washington, let us commit ourselves to providing a more loving and compassionate response to the reality of HIV/ AIDS, not only by caring for those infected and affected by the disease, but also by promoting the truth about human sexuality.

Other than that, though, he quotes Scripture, Pope John Paul, and St. Thomas Aquinas, and for good measure throws in a recommended reading list of nineteen magisterial documents.

The letter leaves me with two questions. First, why a pastoral letter on HIV/AIDS now? It's Cardinal McCarrick's second pastoral letter since coming to Washington, and I'm not sure what prompted him to choose this topic.

Second, why are pastoral letters such a big secret in this archdiocese? I don't pay particularly close attention to the archdiocesan newspaper, but I do try to listen to what is said in church. The letter came out four weeks ago, and the first I heard of it was when the link to it turned up on the archdiocesan home page Friday. If I'm going to be out of the loop, I wish someone would tell me, so I could at least enjoy it.

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Forward from Big Sky Country

After rooting through the Diocese of Helena's website, I decided Bishop Robert Morlino was the kind of bishop I'd like to have: honest, plain speaking, and centered in Christ. Now I see he's headed for the See of Madison, which is good for Madison but kind of tough on Helena, where he's been less than four years.

On the whole, I'm against moving bishops like this. Or at all. In fact, I'm not even keen on "assistant bishops." Retirement? Modernist rubbish! I don't recall St. Charles Borromeo retiring.

Anyway, in a brief letter to the Helena diocese, Bishop Morlino gives a good description of the nature of the Church:

Cardinal Avery Dulles has written: "in our time Christians, and perhaps Catholics more than others, are haunted by the fear of loving the Church too much. They find it hard to share Christ’s own love for the Church (Eph 5: 25) and to accept the maxim of St. Augustine, quoted by Vatican II, that 'one possesses the Holy Spirit in the measure that one loves the Church of Christ'" (Avery Dulles, The Shaping of Catholicism, pg. 152).... The Church of Christ, whom we are called to love, is of course that mystical communion, the Body of Christ which is the Church Universal. The Church Universal is very visible in terms of her teaching, her sacramental celebrations, and her governance through our Holy Father and the bishops with him. The Church of Christ that we are called to love is not some church that we might imagine, but the concrete Universal Body of Christ which is a mystical communion in the world. That Universal Church is at the very core of the life of all particular churches, of all dioceses, including the Diocese of Helena. It is our loving communion with the Church Universal that makes us truly to be a local Church. Thus our experiences as Church in Montana should in no way contradict or take exception to what is of the Universal Church, the source from which our life as local church emanates.

He went on to write that he is "surprised and stunned" at his new appointment, in a diocese he has only visited once in his life.

(For those keeping score, Bishop Morlino was educated by the Jesuits. In fact, he was a Jesuit until 1981, when he became a diocesan priest in Kalamazoo.)

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Moral idiocy at Kairos

Permalinks aren't working, so you'll just have to go there to see what I'm talking about.

Personally, I try to use the word "idiot" to refer to a person who is talking about something he doesn't understand without realizing he doesn't understand it. That makes many of us idiots, at least some of the time, but very few of us idiots all of the time. Which sounds about right.

Now, calling someone an idiot is not necessarily pastorally prudent; you can win an argument and lose a soul, as they say. But not calling someone an idiot doesn't mean he isn't an idiot. The emperor would have been just as naked if the little boy hadn't said a word.

I believe circumstances do arise in which it is prudent to say, "This is idiotic." The shock (assuming there is a shock, which of course there won't be if the person speaking always calls everything idiotic) might be enough to startle others -- perhaps even the idiot himself -- into thinking and judging, a risk sometimes worth taking.

One of my favorite online resources is Luiz Jean Lauand's article "Fools in Aquinas's Analysis," which looks at the "catalogue of all types of fools" found in the writings of St. Thomas:

Asyneti, cataplex, credulus, fatuus, grossus, hebes, idiota, imbecillis, inanis, incrassatus, inexpertus, insensatus, insipiens, nescius, rusticus, stolidus, stultus, stupidus, tardus, turpis, vacuus and vecors.

There is no "Whether fools are legion" article in the Summa, alas, but St. Thomas seasoned his works with observations of the many ways men fall short of wisdom. For him, the idiota (literally, someone who only knows his native language) is the one who fails to cultivate his intelligence, and who assumes anything he doesn't understand isn't true.

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Each follows the other

Minute Particulars puts the historical fact of the Resurrection in context:

That God would become fully human and dwell among us, that He would enter into personal relationship with us, that He would suffer at our hands, die, and overcome death is a far more profound set of facts than anything suggested by creation ex nihilo, apart from the obvious fact that none of these could have taken place outside of God's act of creation. In this sense, then, the question of the fact of the Resurrection, while temporally preceding its implications for us, is trivial when set down beside the question of the effect of the Resurrection on each of us personally.

For the Apostles, the fact of the Resurrection established its implications. For Christians today, the implications of the Resurrection establishes its fact.

As a truly dreadful analogy, if a baseball player hits a solo home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to break a tie, the game is won at the moment he touches home plate (if I've got my baseball rules correct). A fan reading about the game in the newspaper the next day will hear about the game-winning run, and be able to infer that the hitter must have touched home plate, but the fact of touching home plate is, so to speak, of accidental interest compared to the fact the game was won in such a dramatic fashion.

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Too late

Sparki, new to the whole "praying to the saints" wheeze, finds out that there's something to it after all:

And then, last night I had this sense of...well, it's kind of hard to describe. It was almost like somewhere in my peripheral vision I could sort of see a door to Heaven open, and the Glory streaming out. And there in the doorway was Mary and Joseph and two of the other Saints I was praying to, and I knew that they were praying for me, but exactly me, not just me in a category with a whole bunch of other people who are facing the same sort of thing.

Please don’t think I'm a nutcase or some freak who has illusions of becoming some sort of mystic.

Who wants to tell her she's already a mystic, and that it's neither nutty nor freakish, but rather common?

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Strawman arguments

Flos Carmeli ponders the meaning of St. Thomas's famous declaration, "All my words are straw."

Josef Pieper expresses himself well on this (even in translation):

The last word of St. Thomas is not communication but silence. And it is not death which takes the pen out of his hand. His tongue is stilled by the superabundance of life in the mystery of God. He is silent, not because he has nothing further to say; he is silent because he has been allowed a glimpse into the inexpressible depths of that mystery which is not reached by any human thought or speech.

If we're led to wonder about this, imagine how St. Thomas's friend Brother Reginald of Piperno felt when, one day, he simply stopped writing. "I can write no more," was all the explanation given.

After a time, and more prompting, St. Thomas added, "All that I have hitherto written seems to me nothing but straw."

It wasn't until a subsequent visit to his sister, who couldn't help but notice the change in him, that St. Thomas finally completed his thought, "All that I have written seems to me nothing but straw... compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me."

As Steven points out, it's not that all he wrote was straw; another friar reported that Jesus told St. Thomas he had written well of Him. Rather, it was wholly inadequate compared to the reality it was trying to describe.

But we should keep in mind that what was revealed to St. Thomas was precisely what St. Thomas was writing about. The Summa Theologica is not an encyclopedia or a collection of doctrines or arguments about Catholicism. It's a description of what is, and what is is God, man, and the Christ who brings man into the life of God.

They say that, with An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman wrote himself into the Catholic Church. Maybe we can say that, with the Summa, St. Thomas wrote himself into glory.

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A cry for help

Prayers -- for what, exactly, I'm not sure -- are clearly needed, not just for Victor Lams, but for his enablers as well.

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Meet the new priests

Not entirely the same as the old priests.

Draw your own conclusions, but I expect in the years to come the country will hear more homilies involving movies than woodworking.

I see priests still do the bulk of the work of inviting young (or not so young) men to consider the priesthood. Parents -- fathers especially -- don't seem as likely to think of their sons as potential priests. (Of course, the pastor doesn't hear what the kid says at home when it's time to go to Mass.)

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An unsolicited testimonial

One of the ways my enthusiasm for St. Thomas (which far outstrips my knowledge of his thought, and let's not even bring up my comprehension) expresses itself is by making me subscribe to The Thomist.

The Thomist describes itself as "a speculative quarterly review" of philosophy and theology in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. It runs articles with blocks of untranslated Latin in the main text and untranslated Greek in the footnotes. It reviews books written in German and French. Heck, it reviews books written in Latin... by St. Thomas Aquinas!

As someone whose complete academic exposure to philosophy and theology in the tradition of anybody consisted of a ten-week elective "Introduction to Philosophy," I should not be reading The Thomist. I am largely unprepared to understand the arguments I read, much less critique them. A few months ago, I blogged something based on an idea I got from reading a Thomist article. Someone made a polite suggestion of where I should look if I wanted to correct my fatheaded thinking; it was the same article.

Despite all that, though, I really enjoy the journal. The current issue is particularly wonderful:

• "Theological Principles That Guided the Redaction of the Roman Missal (1970)," by Lauren Pristas, which compares, with unencouraging results, the Latin of several prayers from the new Missal and the Latin of the sources the redactors used.
• "Christ in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae: Peripheral or Pervasive?," by Jean-Marc LaPorte, S.J. It sounds like a yawner, but it's a wonderful look at the many organizational principles that can be found in the Summa. Contrary to one popular impression, the discussion on Christ is not tacked on like an extra car at the end of a train, but exactly where it belongs as the center or culmination of all that precedes it. The table of contents of the Summa becomes a spiritual lesson in union with the Father in the Son by the Holy Spirit.
• "Applying Aristotle in Contemporary Embryology," by Kevin L. Flannery, S.J. This is a response to a response to an article arguing that, applying Aristotle's philosophy (rather than his biology), an embryo cannot become human until after a finite period (at least until after the twinning window closes). Of course, I've never heard of any of the writers involved, nor of the earlier articles, but I have heard people use St. Thomas's Aristotelian embryology in support of at least first term abortions, so it's not a completely academic question. And while all the Greek words slid past me like so many patronymics in a Russian novel, I did get the gist of the argument that reconciling Aristotle's philosophy with the claim that we are human from the moment of conception is entirely possible.
• "Truth or Transcendentals: What Was St. Thomas's Intention at De Veritate 1.1?," by Michael M. Waddell and "The Augustinianism of Thomas Aquinas's Moral Theory," by Thomas J. Osbourne. I haven't read either of these yet, and I couldn't tell De Veritate 1.1 from Decameron Day 1, Story 1, but I'm unduly interested in truth, transcendentals, Augustine, and moral theory.

Even the book reviews are great, with insights into understanding St. Thomas, Meister Eckhart, and Heidegger (who, apparently, was not just a boozy beggar).

The best part of subscribing, though, is that, for an extra five dollars (or five dollars less, if you don't want print copies), you get web access to all of the issues of The Thomist from 1979 through the present (starting with the January 1979 issue dedicated to a study of Karl Rahner). But wait, that's not all! They've also put the archives from the first two years, 1939-1940 online (with articles by Garrigou-Lagrange, Adler, Congar, and Farrell, among others). They have teasers for the years 1941-1953, too. As far as I can tell, they're going to continue to add back issues to the web service as time and tide permit.

By the way, many of the book reviews are available to everyone, subscriber or not.

If you're the kind of person who would subscribe to The Thomist, you probably already do. But if you are and you don't, I think you should.

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You can't kill what isn't alive

From the very beginning, the Church has had to face slanderous and false attacks. I mean, literally from the very beginning; before 9 a.m. on the day the Church first publically preached Jesus as the Crucified Messiah, the Apostles were called public drunkards.

The particular falsehoods told and retold ebb in and out of fashion, but I suspect many of the lies generated during the Protestantization of England will always have currency, at least in the English Protestantized United States. Killing any untruth is hard enough, but killing these is even harder, because they were never alive to begin with.

One old canard being revisited here and there is that the Roman Catholic Church fought like mad to keep the Bible from being translated into the vernacular before the Reformation. It's a simple matter (okay, maybe not that simple for Blogger) to construct a chart like this to refute the charge:

Dates Bible (or Significant Portion of it) First Printed in Various Languages

	Italian	German	French	Spanish	Dutch	English
Catholic	1471	by 1477	1478	1478	1475	1582
Protestant	1562	1522	1535	1543	1526	1525

You can note that Italy, Germany, France, and Spain all had vernacular Bibles before Luther or Tyndale was born. You can estimate the fraction of a population that could read in the vernacular but not in Latin, and the fraction of that fraction with the money to buy a vernacular Bible, and question how realistic [the Catholic priest] Erasmus's longing "for the plowboy to sing [the Gospels] as he follows his plow" really was in the Sixteenth Century.

But all that's beside the point. The charge was originally created to be used as a club against Catholicism, and it's no less effective for being false. It's a zombie canard, a corpse intentionally animated for one purpose, and it can't be stopped.

The other day, I found out the primary meaning of "zombie" isn't the corpse, but the spirit animating it. Looked at that way, it's easy to see fact and argument will never destroy the spirit of hatred animating even the dumbest of anti-Catholic lies.

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Can anyone tell me...

...when the feast of St. Philip Neri is? I've been wondering whether it's coming up soon.

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Does it matter?

Jeffrey Collins of of U. Blog's theology department has some questions about David Heddle's Reformed beliefs on predestination:

Last week, David Heddle again addressed the issue of predestination. I was laying in bed tonight and was struck by a thought, (one that I occasionally find myself asking about doctrinal issues); suppose David is 100% correct about predestination? So what? To put it another way, what are the ramifications of the doctrine itself? What are the ramifications of accepting or rejecting the doctrine? In the long run, does it really matter?

Once you get past the "There's not Dogmatic Theology entrance exam in heaven" arguments, you're still left with the question of whether there's any intrinsic value in being "theologically correct."

The answer to that question, and to Jeffrey's last question above, is yes.

We become what we love. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination says something about God. If we accept the doctrine and we love God, we will become like God as described by the doctrine -- in a word, Calvinists. Here, "Calvinist" doesn't refer to something we believe, but to something we are, something that informs the way we act and think. Similarly, accepting a Pelagian doctrine of salvation will make us Pelagians -- not people who believe thus and so about human free will, but people who live as though it were true. Accepting the Catholic doctrines makes us Catholics -- not because we confess the same faith as the Pope, but because we live it.

Now, does living one of these versus living another make any measurable difference? I think it does, once we get past the mistaken notion that the only measurable difference is whether you are saved. God, and therefore creation, has a subtly different quality for a Calvinist than for a Catholic. Habits of thought and action will develop and evolve, and in moments of weakness or fatigue or passion, these differences will show up sharply.

Since vices are bad habits and virtues good habits, the wrong belief leads to vice where the right belief leads to virtue. That's enough of a difference to make it matter.

(Link via blogs4God.)

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So a Pharisee and a publican walk into the Temple....

And Then? has posted a very useful letter to the Dallas Morning News's least favorite bishop. I say "useful," because (pending Michelle's permission) it can be reused again and again, changing only the names of the bishop, the diocese, and the investigative blogger.

I think a lot of the criticism by Crabby Catholics is paradoxical. On the one hand, the Church in the United States is about three months and one more bad episcopal appointment away from utter apostasy. On the other hand, the Crabby Catholics themselves are so radiantly holy -- judging by their towering rage against the imperfecti around them, even unto the ends of the USCCB -- they ought to be able to suck the rest of us along into heaven in their wake.

The truth within the paradox is, I think, a sort of Donatism that invigorates a lot of Cranky Catholicism. When you hear people talking about how others "aren't real Catholics," or egging them to "go ahead and become an Episcopalian," or bemoaning the "AmChurch" stranglehold on chanceries, you may well be hearing the voice of a post-conciliar Donatism, one less concerned with its own spiritual worthiness than with the unworthiness of others. Some seem genuinely excited by the thought of an apocalyptic remnant (of which, obviously, they're members), finally free of all that deadwood of damned souls. That's why their personal holiness can coexist with the general vitiation in the Church in America: they're preparing to jettison the Church in America from the Catholic Church, if they haven't already done so, and let it go its own unholy way.

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Parochial thinking

Kathy the Carmelite points out an important difference in how Catholic churches and many Protestant churches are organized:

...unlike many Evangelical protestant churches, which are congregational in nature, the Catholic Church is parochial; that is, it is accessible to all baptized believers in a given geographical area. Most evangelical churches have little patience with what they call "carnal Christians"; instead of making allowance for them to come along at their own pace, evangelicals tend to throw down the gauntlet from the pulpit....

Groups of believers who hear Biblical exhortation publicly in this way tend to want to conform.... Furthermore, congregational-type churches tend to attract like-minded groups; people who cannot or will not conform (like the Christmas-and-Easter "Carnal Christians") are soon winnowed out.

The parochial Catholic Church, however, follows the Biblical model of the wheat and the tares. Knowing that the Holy Spirit chooses a different timetable for each individual, the Church offers The Mass and the Sacraments for all the baptized.

The wheat and the tares: that's a phenomenon encountered at every scale in the Church Militant, from my own heart up through the worldwide communion. A Catholic Church with no patience for tares is unthinkable, at least outside the fevered atmosphere of St. Blog's comment boxes.

The way I see it, any religious confession that admits members in infancy is not likely to be a spotless image of its founder.

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A cheap dig at a holy man

Some people think
Peter Maurin's "Easy Essays"
are works of genius.

He takes a simple idea
which others make complicated
and makes it simple again.

I find it irritating,
and maybe a little patronizing,
to be told when to breathe.

That probably says more
about me
than about Peter Maurin.

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Evangelical counselors

In a comment on my Catholic Worker post below, Kat writes, "I've heard the focus of the organization has changed quite a bit since Day and Maurin ran the show."

"Organization" may not be the mot juste for the Catholic Worker movement, from what I understand.

One of Peter Maurin's easy essays is called "What the Catholic Worker Believes":

1. The Catholic Worker believes
in the gentle personalism
of traditional Catholicism.

2. The Catholic Worker believes
in the personal obligation
of looking after
the needs of our brother.

3. The Catholic Worker believes
in the daily practice
of the Works of Mercy.

4. The Catholic Worker believes
in Houses of Hospitality
for the immediate relief
of those who are in need.

5. The Catholic Worker believes
in the establishment
of Farming Communes
where each one works
according to his ability
and gets according to his need.

6. The Catholic Worker believes
in creating a new society
within the shell of the old
with the philosophy of the new,
which is not a new philosophy
but a very old philosophy,
a philosophy so old
that it looks like new.

I don't see much there to dispute. By itself, this might lead some into romanticism, but I think Dorothy Day was effective at correcting excess romanticism in the movement.

A more modern and extensive statement, "The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker," was published a year ago. The criticism of American society is, in my judgment, an exaggeration, but it's neither entirely wrong-headed nor based on bad anthropology.

There's a sense of hysteria in some of what I've read from Catholic Workers about the American Empire and the ravenous maw of technology, but I don't really look to Catholic Workers for political governance. I see the movement, not as an invitation to join in establishing a nonviolent distributist utopia, but as an evangelical sign of contradiction to cause me to check my capitalist bourgeois inclinations against the common good of a society ordered to the life of glory.

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