Where is everyone?

Domenico Bettinelli was asked a question I suspect a lot of us have asked ourselves:

Where are all the 'progressive' Catholic bloggers?

While there are a few "progressive Catholic blogs" on Gerard's list -- Ono's Thoughts and Jcecil3's Progressive Catholic Reflections come to mind -- it's certainly true that the predominant perspective among the Catholic blogs I'm familiar with is opposed to the sort of things the National Catholic Reporter considers progressive.

I'm not as quick as some of Domenico's commenters to explain the disparity by an appeal to the particular vices of progressive American Catholics, tempting as that may be.

I think the first consideration should be any self-selection bias. Surely there are factors, independent of religious perspective, that make someone more likely to blog. Imitation, I think, may be one of the most important. Most or all of the most influential Catholic blogs in March 2002, just before the St. Blog's boom, were "conservative," so most of the blogs inspired by them would be conservative as well.

That, of course, raises the question of why most or all of the most influential Catholic blogs in March 2002 were "conservative," and I suspect part of the answer is, "Rod Dreher." The influence NRO and The Corner had on the nascent St. Blog's might explain, not only the predominance of "conservatives" among Catholic bloggers, but also the predominance of political conservatives among Catholic bloggers. And the influence of NRO would take us back to September 11 and its aftermath, which met the Boston clergy scandals like sodium meeting air.

There's also the self-selection of readership. If most of the blog readers are "conservative" Catholics, "progressive" Catholic bloggers won't get many visitors and so are (arguably) less likely to keep blogging. (Althogh, speaking of self-selection, if they did continue blogging I would be less likely to notice or to care.)

Then there's the question of age. If (and I don't know that it's so) "progressive" Catholics tend to be older, then they will tend to be underrepresented on the Web, regardless of other factors.

Finally, as a category, "Progressive Catholics" tends to be used in a well-defined sense to mean "favoring such things as artificial birth control, optional celibacy, women priests, acceptance of active homosexuality, and abolition of the death penalty." If "Conservative Catholics" is a category defined to mean "Not Progressive Catholics," then St. Blog's is almost entirely composed of "Conservative Catholics," but beyond opposition to "Progressive Catholicism" there is among Catholic blogs, as in the Church as a whole, a much greater variety of viewpoint than is typically credited by the casual observer.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

An unforgivable paraphrase

No one likes being misquoted.

Here are the synoptic Gospels on the "unforgivable sin":

Matthew: "Therefore, I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come."

Mark: "Amen, I say to you, all sins and all blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin."

Luke: "Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the holy Spirit will not be forgiven."

Notice a word none of the Evangelists uses? Like maybe "unforgivable"?

In comments on my post below, Rob wondered:

And if there is hope, then aren't all sins of that category just currently "unforgiven", rather than inexorably "unforgivable"?

And Kevin pointed out:

Might be worth noting that when Jesus speaks of this sin, it's in the context of his having been accused of casting out demons by the prince of demons....

All of which leads me to think that, CAUTION: AMATEUR THEOLOGY AHEAD! when Jesus said, "Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit ... is guilty of an everlasting sin," He wasn't speaking as our Teacher, but as a prophet. In other words, He was saying what will happen to the actual, specific persons who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, not what must, per se, be a consequence of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. (On this reading, the folks I quoted before explain why the sin is "everlasting," rather than literally "unforgivable.")

Meanwhile, Lynn beats me at my own game by quoting extensively from the Catena Aurea. To make things worse, I had looked at the Catena Aurea on Friday, without seeing anything I wanted to quote.

In reparation, I'll link to the Catena Aurea's chapter on Matthew 12, which has a few extended selections from St. Augustine, including a development on this idea:

The first benefit therefore of them that believe is forgiveness of sins in the Holy Spirit. Against this gift of free grace the impenitent heart speaks; impenitence itself therefore is the blasphemy against the Spirit which shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, nor in that to come.

There's also a point made by St. Gregory:

Hence we may gather that there are some sins that are remitted in this world, and some in the world to come; for what is denied of one sin, must be supposed to be admitted of others. And this may be believed in the case of trifling faults; such as much idle discourse, immoderate laughter, or the sin of carefulness in our worldly affairs, which indeed can hardly be managed without sin even by one who knows how he ought to avoid sin; or sins through ignorance (if they be lesser sins) which burden us even after death, if they have not been remitted to us while yet in this life. But it should be known that none will there obtain any purgation even of the least sin, but he who by good actions has merited the same in this life.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

"A corner office in the Kingdom of God"

That was a memorable phrase from my pastor's homily yesterday, in reference to the Apostle's expectations once Israel recognized their Master as the Messiah.

Nowadays, we seem to have more moderate expectations for ourselves: eternal and perfect beatitude, but not a particularly exalted beatitude, since after all we're good people but not holy or anything.


Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

On to Mark 3

Nobody likes an unforgivable sin.

Camassia, for example, writes:

Of all the sins out there, the unforgivable one is just something you say? I mean, religion doesn't have a first amendment, but this still seems like a very strange priority.

The idea that a sin is unforgivable also raises the scary possibility that once you do it, it doesn't matter what you do afterward, you're still doomed. As I understand it, the Catholic Church has resolved this by saying that you're doomed only if you die still in the sin; so long as you're alive, you can still be saved. That makes sense, although that caveat is rather conspicuously lacking in Mark's account.

The Catechism says of these words of Jesus:

There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit.

It refers to Pope John Paul II's Dominum et vivificantem, which includes a section dealing with "The Sin Against the Holy Spirit." The Pope writes:

Why is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit unforgivable? How should this blasphemy be understood ? St. Thomas Aquinas replies that it is a question of a sin that is "unforgivable by its very nature, insofar as it excludes the elements through which the forgiveness of sin takes place."

According to such an exegesis, "blasphemy" does not properly consist in offending against the Holy Spirit in words; it consists rather in the refusal to accept the salvation which God offers to man through the Holy Spirit, working through the power of the Cross. If man rejects the "convincing concerning sin" which comes from the Holy Spirit and which has the power to save, he also rejects the "coming" of the Counselor-that "coming" which was accomplished in the Paschal Mystery, in union with the redemptive power of Christ's Blood: the Blood which "purifies the conscience from dead works."

The idea of measuring sins by how easy they are to forgive, or how readily they are forgiven, and placing blasphemy against the Holy Spirit in the "impossible"/"never" range – of, more generally, understanding Jesus' statement to refer to God's attitude toward the sinner rather than the sinner's attitude toward God, seems to get things the wrong way round.

The Pope quotes St. Thomas in the middle of an analogy with disease:

[A] disease is said to be incurable in respect of the nature of the disease, which removes whatever might be a means of cure, as when it takes away the power of nature, or causes loathing for food and medicine, although God is able to cure such a disease. So too, the sin against the Holy Ghost is said to be unpardonable, by reason of its nature, in so far as it removes those things which are a means towards the pardon of sins.

A terminal disease is fatal, then, because if it weren't fatal it wouldn't be a terminal disease. Similarly, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable because if it were forgiveable, it wouldn't be blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

St. Thomas, by the way, goes on to add a caveat rather conspicuously absent in Mark's account:

This does not, however, close the way of forgiveness and healing to an all-powerful and merciful God, Who, sometimes, by a miracle, so to speak, restores spiritual health to such men.

If you think of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit as a discrete act, that would sound like a contradiction. Thinking of it as a rejection of the "convincing concerning sin" which has the power to save, though, the caveat is more of a complement.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

A few public service links

For religion journalists everywhere.

And a question: When did "abortion" first get slipped in between "birth control" and "married priests" in the list of things that show how retrogressive the Pope is?

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Ya gotta believe

I'm not a big baseball fan -- being from Philly and living between Baltimore and Washington can do that to you. I've followed the MLB playoffs closely this week, though, and I'm struck by how religious so much of the reporting is. And not just religious, but medievally Catholic, with curses and exorcisms and everything. (There was even a sincere call for an actual exorcism, Catholic priest and all, at Wrigley Field.)

Professional football is my spectator sport of choice (despite being from Philly and living between Baltimore and Washington). My impression is that football is covered in more of a Norse pantheon way: occasionally this or that god might zap somebody or guide a ball into the right guy's hands at the right time, but by and large what happens is a matter of good or bad fortune. (Kurt Warner's alleged deal with the devil may be the exception that proves the rule.)

But there's something about baseball, at least in a week with two Game 7s, that brings out the Christian hierarchy of spiritual beings. The players, of course, are religious (and, I'd guess, more Catholic percentage-wise than in the NFL); even the Marlin's manager asks for St. Therese's help.

What's striking, though, is that the sports columns -- at least in Boston and Chicago -- are filled with religious references. Just now, I was looking for something I read a couple of days ago, and I see a Boston Globe article that begins:

The reward for all that fidelity will surely come in another life.

This is Red Sox fans as anawim, sports columnist as minor prophet.

One Chicago writer quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins -- from a poem first published in 1918, a significant year for several reasons -- after the Cubs lost game 6. And today there's a piece at ESPN.Com imagining God's conversation with the spirit in charge of overseeing baseball:

"Our compliments on your work. Downright diabolical, you little torturer."

"Well, I tried."

"Nonsense. You were brilliant. You know how much we value the Cubs and Red Sox and the way they make their fans believe in Us. You have no idea how often they have told Us they would stop drinking, whoring, coveting and generally screwing around if only We would grant them a World Series."

"True, Sir and/or Ma'am, but aren't they likely to keep their promises and become better people if their teams ever do win?"

"Of course not, you naïve little ball of plankton. The minute either one of them wins, they'll be standing naked on cab roofs, drinking bad beer out of a policeman's boot and swearing like the entire Russian navy on leave."

And when was the last time you saw a priest with a halo in a newspaper cartoon?

I'd be interested in a poll that compares answers to the questions, "Does God care whether you get married in a church?" and, "Does God care whether Pedro Martinez keeps his slider from hanging too high?"

Maybe the difference is that football has a season, and its name is Fall. Baseball's season is so long, it's more like a lifetime. (Each game seems to last a lifetime, too, which is one reason I'm not a big fan.) And a lifetime is time enough to learn to do good and avoid evil, to develop virtues... like hope. And when this lifetime ends, to look forward to the next.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

A silverplate triolet

Pope John Paul the Great.
What man better matched his time?
Asked for heroes, simply state,
"Pope John Paul the Great."
"Totus Tuus" his one gate,
Petrus now as in his prime,
Pope John Paul the Great:
What man better matched his time?

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

My fifth secret of the Rosary

I don't know if anyone really bought my first secret, so this last one might fall flat as well, but the Rosary is a profoundly Marian devotion.

Yeah, I know: "No kidding."

But I mean something more than what is immediately obvious about the form of the prayer, and even more than what becomes obvious when you realize that to pray the Rosary is "to contemplate the face of Christ in union with, and at the school of, his Most Holy Mother."

I mean that, if you are devoted to the Rosary -- even merely committed to its regular recitation -- you are probably going to find yourself becoming Marian.

What does it mean to find yourself becoming Marian? In my case, I have in mind two major changes.

The first is the development of a personal, filial relationship with Mamma Mary, in place of the more impersonal, political relationship with the Queen of Heaven. Invoking and honoring Mary makes a great deal of practical sense, considering that never was it known that anyone who fled to her protection, implored her help, or sought her intercession was left unaided. But as you come to see her as your spiritual mother, given to you at Calvary, you find yourself turning to her simply because children turn to their mother when they need help. The personal relationship with Jesus the importance of which evangelical Protestantism reminds us of is reflected in -- strengthens and is strengthened by -- the personal relationship with His mother.

The second change, following on the first, is acting like a child of Mary in public. You join in others' praise of her, you feel brotherly toward those who consider themselves her children, you defend her from others' attacks. Marian dogmas become personal matters, in a way that, say, the question of St. Peter's arrival in Rome does not. When the goofball associate pastor makes a passing reference to his devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, you immediately and unreservedly forgive all his homiletic invocations of his hometown baseball team.

And the thing is, these changes are in no way intentional. They just happen. I firmly believe that, given the slightest opportunity, Mary is able (by God's grace and through His will) to make a place in your heart for herself, and therefore her Son, just as she did in Galilee and, later, at the foot of the Cross.

Her message, as always, is, "Do whatever He tells you." And He tells us, "Behold your mother."

Labels: My Secrets of the Rosary

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Ordered thoughts on detachment

A thought from St. Augustine:

For when you consider things beneath your53self to be admirable and desirable, what is this but to be cheated and misled by unreal goods? The man, then, who is temperate in such mortal and transient things has his rule of life confirmed by both Testaments, that he should love none of these things, nor think them desirable for their own sakes, but should use them as far as is required for the purposes and duties of life, with the moderation of an employer instead of the ardor of a lover.

A thought from St. Thomas:

Now the attachment of man's affections to earthly things is not only an obstacle to the perfection of charity, but sometimes leads to the loss of charity, when through turning inordinately to temporal goods man turns away from the immutable good by sinning mortally.

A thought from St. Teresa:

[I]f anybody is attached to any one thing, that is a proof 317 that he sets some value upon it; and if he sets any value upon it, it is painful to be compelled to give it up. In that case, everything is imperfect and lost. The saying is to the purpose here,--he who follows what is lost, is lost himself; and what greater loss, what greater blindness, what greater calamity, can there be than making much of that which is nothing!

A thought from Fr. Thomas Dubay, SM, via the Anchorhold:

It may be easier to see the point by explaining what attachment is in the pejorative sense. A handy and accurate definition is: a clinging or desiring of the will to do something created for its own sake.

There are three elements here: It is a willed desire, not a mere feeling; it concerns something finite, not God; "for its own sake" makes a mere means into an end, that is, something of an idol.

St. Paul puts the matter positively in 1 Corinthians 10:31: "Whether you eat or drink or do anything else, do all for the glory of God." All created goodness and beauty is meant to bring others and us to the unspeakable enthrallment of the beatific vision in risen body. To willingly cling to anything merely created for its own sake reminds me of Dostoyevsky's analysis: It is either idolatry or it tends in that direction.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

My fourth secret of the Rosary

I've mentioned this before, so even I can't pretend it's much of a secret, but the Rosary is an extraordinarily human prayer. By that, I mean the Rosary is extremely well-matched to the kind of being a human is.

It's a stock observation, when discussing the Rosary, that prayer beads are found in many different cultures and religions. I have my doubts about how similar the Rosary really is to the prayers Hindus count on their malas (despite "mala" meaning "rose" or "garland"), but I think the use of beads as a way of measuring prayers reflects the fact that we are creatures with both physical and spiritual existence.

The use of a rosary while praying the Rosary isn't necessary, of course, but it does get our bodies involved in our meditation and prayer. The same is true of vocal recitation; in my experience it's possible to pray the Rosary silently, but not satisfying, since getting the meditation and the silent "recitation" to happen in my mind at the same time is very difficult.

Posture and visual cues also add to the richness of the physical dimension of the Rosary, without interfering with its spiritual dimension.

A common analogy is that the vocal prayers compose the "body" of the Rosary, while the meditations compose its "soul." Certainly the prayers (along with counting them, and expressing them physically by kneeling, standing, or bowing) relate the Rosary to our bodies, while the meditations occupy our souls. But there's more to the humanness of the Rosary than the way it recognizes, and teaches, that man is body and soul.

The Rosary has been evolving ever since Our Lady's Psalter of 150 Aves (ending, as you probably know, with the words "blessed is the fruit of thy womb") was introduced a millenium ago. In its earliest form, there was no explicit "soul" to the devotion; it was a repetition, not even of prayers, strictly speaking, but of salutations. It may have been the "poor man's Psalter"; it was certainly a poor psalter.

Over time, meditations were attached to the prayers, one for each Ave. This is fine, but impractical for those with imperfect memory or without written lists of meditations. The Rosary would have died out outside of monasteries if it required prayerbooks for secular layfolk to pray it. The brilliance of the fifteen mysteries across fifteen decades is that it made it possible for nearly every Catholic alive to learn how to pray the Rosary, and then to actually pray it.

Furthermore, by giving the reciter three to five minutes to meditate on each mystery, the Rosary works in a naturally human way. A decade is neither too brief nor too long a time for such meditation. It allows a person to call the mystery fully to mind, to think on it or perhaps simply contemplate it, so that the mystery can subtly conform the person's soul to Christ -- and subtly conformity seems to be the natural human rule, with road-to-Damascus moments much rarer -- and then to move on, before the mind tires or the mystery gets too stale.

The rhythm of the mysteries -- from joy to sorrow to glory -- is also very human, as you'd expect of a meditation on the life, death, and resurrection of the One Perfect human. (I don't mean to slight the Luminous Mysteries here, I'm just thinking more in terms of the Rosary as it's been adapted through the centuries, and the new mysteries are quite new.)

And while I'm talking about how well the Rosary conforms to human nature, I should point out how well it conforms to the grace which perfects human nature. Joy and sorrow (and, for that matter, illumination) are constants of [fallen] human nature. Our Christian faith, though, teaches us that our end is not sorrow, nor illumination (as some philosophies more or less hold), nor even joy (as some uncareful Christians think), but glory. Moreover, glory isn't merely our eventual end; glory is ours today. The Kingdom of God is here, among us, even as we journey toward it. By praying the Rosary through to the end, we not only prepare ourselves for the glory that awaits us, but conform ourselves to the glory that is ours today. Our bodies have not yet been glorified, we have not yet been given our paper hats at the Bridegroom's banquet, but Christ's Resurrection and Ascension, His mother's Assumption and Coronation, are not simply pledges of future glory, but also signs of present glory.

Labels: My Secrets of the Rosary

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Happy Feast of St. Teresa of Jesus!

Stop by today for a little celebration.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

A couple of links

Every now and then, I remember that this site is a weblog, which is a regularly updated page containing links to other sites of interest.

You may have seen this page.

You may not have seen this page.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Assumption discussion, cont.

The Assumption assumptions discussion is continued at Minute Particulars. Mark writes a bunch of sensible stuff, concluding:

And so, again, I find the suggestion that Mary died prior to her assumption a bit problematic... It suggests that Mary, a human being who was without sin and who had been preserved from the stain of original sin, a person who had not assumed any defects of human nature that resulted from original sin (as Christ did, though without committing sin as Aquinas discusses above), still ought to be subject to death. Why?

In my opinion, characterizing the dormition of Our Lady as a "suggestion" does grave disservice to the importance of historical witness in the Church as a whole, as well as the dogma of the Assumption in particular. And so, again, I see the sort of arguments Mark advances as a case where, when given a choice between theory and fact, we discard the fact and keep our theory.

I think Mark's theory-centric question -- "Why ought Mary be subject to death?" -- comes at the issue from the wrong angle. Oughts are very difficult to establish when you're discussing graces, especially graces that are unique privileges.

A question that better expresses the fact of historical belief is, "Why would it have been fitting for Mary to die?" Here we can offer the standard answers, along the lines of Mary following in Jesus' footsteps. Such answers may not be convincing to some -- "Still, wouldn't it have been more fitting for her not to die?" -- but I think a grounding in historical assertion is stronger than one in theological speculation.

Mark finishes (practically speaking) with this point:

It just doesn't seem fitting that she suffer the greatest privation we encounter in this life, a privation that is the result of sin. It seems to dissolve somewhat the connection between sin and death and fracture the integrity of human nature unstained by sin. And, finally, by obliquely suggesting that death is a necessity of our human nature, it fails to face squarely the horrible death that Christ freely chose and that was integral to the saving act of a crucified God.

I have a feeling the Eastern "environmental" understanding of original sin would help address these concerns. The Blessed Virgin may be free from all stain of original sin, but the world she lived in was not. Did she need to eat? Did she stop ageing? Did she, a peasant woman of First Century Palestine, experience no lesser privation before completing the course of her earthly life? How did she relate, human to human, with the fallen people around her?

I do want to be as deferential as possible toward the traditional understanding of the Fall and its effects on human nature. At the same time, Mary is unique, and we can only extend prelapsarian human nature into a postlapsarian world in a very doubtful and speculative way. Moreover, we can still accept that Mary need not have died yet died anyway.

The larger question, as I've said before, is reconciling East and West on all matters touching on Original Sin, not by constructing a single composite understanding, nor by discarding one wholesale, but by invigorating and informing each by the other.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Three in One

Camassia (Greek for "one who asks questions we'd better be able to answer") writes:

I've been having a lot of problems with the idea of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and not just because of the problem of evil. So it makes me wonder: why do Christians insist on this point?

... What has triple-omni really brought to Christianity, except torturous metaphysics and a lot of Calvinist/Arminian/whatever factionalism?

Personally, I'd be satisfied with the answer, "Because it's true," but I suspect the more important point is, "Because it's revealed."

Scripture is full of claims that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. If these claims are false, Christianity has a much bigger problem than factionalism.

There's more to the "triple-omni" than a fact of revelation, of course. I've read a little about and by Christians who choose to drop one or more of these attributes from their understanding of God. Often they do this to resolve some immediate problem -- such as the problem of evil -- without thinking through the implications to see the brand new problems their decisions cause. You want really tortuous metaphysics, try a creation by a god who's making it up as he goes along.

Camassia makes one of my favorite points for me:

And to be perfectly honest, I don't think a lot of Christians I know really have that image of God [as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent] in their minds. They will say he's omnipotent if you ask, but move on to other matters and they'll depict a God who sounds really human.

Some evangelical atheists sneer at "imaginary sky gods," but such errors are easy to make when confronted by Christians whose faith is, essentially, in a Really Big Invisible Human. Language is a lousy way to communicate -- maybe that's why the angels simply sing, "Hosana!" -- and faithful Christians need to understand the limitations and analogies inherent in any language we use to communicate ideas of God to each other.

We might start, for example, by observing that when we say "God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent," what we really mean is God is not limited in power, knowledge, or love. This may be the easiest way of avoiding the kind of error that imagines some sort of love or knowledge not in or from God without noticing that sort of love or knowledge is logically impossible (see "Can God create a square circle?").

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

My third secret of the Rosary

Perhaps the most surprising and enheartening thing I've learned about it is that you can't finish praying the Rosary.

Sure, the pamphlets all imply the Rosary can be finished. After all, it comprises a finite number of vocally recited prayers, and even if you break it up into five-decade batches you can recite the whole thing over the course of a few days. An hour and a half tops, all told.

But that isn't how the Rosary really works.

I'd guess most of us know people -- and many of us are people -- who say, "I tried the Rosary, and never got anything out of it." In fact, they might feel a net loss, with frustration at wandering thoughts and a sense of failure to "pray well" outweighing any benefits received.

Their mistake is to think that, having gone through all fifteen decades (assuming they last tried the Rosary more than a year ago), they were finished. If, though, the Rosary is a meditation on the Gospel, a self-evangelization, why would they think they were finished?

No: the power of the Rosary lies not in its form but in its constancy. Its chief repetition is not in the Aves, but in meditating on each of the mysteries twice a week for the rest of your life. That is how it forms the devotee in the life of Christ from the perspective of the Blessed Virgin.

Of course praying five decades won't be very satisfying, especially if you sit in with the little old ladies speed-reciting after daily Mass. Who can conform his soul to Jesus in twenty minutes? But if you enter into the rhythym of the Rosary, day after day and week after week, the rhythym of the Rosary can enter into you, and by golly you just might get somewhere with it.

The first corollary of this secret is, "Don't worry about a distracted decade." If you get all the way through to the big bead without a coherent thought on the Visitation, so be it. I wouldn't say it's a positive good, but there's always Saturday, and next Monday, and next Saturday. The habit of the Rosary means that, two or three times a week, there will be a four-minute interval during which something wonderful may happen in your heart or your mind regarding each mystery. If nothing wonderful happens today, nothing wonderful happens today. Or are you on a fixed Return On Investment schedule?

Another corollary is, "The Rosary is a big commitment." It doesn't have to be, of course. You can dust off your beads for the occasional holy hour, relying on someone else to know which mystery comes next, and still get into heaven. You might even find the occasional five decades fruitful. But I think to really get the Rosary, to understand why there are so many books so gushing over it, you need to make it a daily habit. To be devoted to it, even if you aren't a leaving-literature-in-the-pews, "Have You Prayed the Rosary for Peace?"-bumper-sticker devotee.

That's not to say every temperament is or ought to be Rosarian. I never cared for commentary implying there is some lack or fault in a person who cannot stand to pray the Rosary. If someone has tried the Rosary and found it not to his liking, or even if he has never been interested enough to try it, that's fine by me. My only point would be that, possibly, he was asking too much too soon of himself or of the Rosary.

I am slightly more doubtful about certain claims to have outgrown the Rosary -- that is, to be spiritually advanced beyond the need for words and ideas (as opposed to being spiritually situated such that other forms of prayer are more fruitful) -- but then the spiritual life is richer and more diverse than I imagine it to be.

Labels: My Secrets of the Rosary

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

The Family that prays together

Many committees with the words "Dominican," "Peace," and "Justice" in their names have a tendency to generate documents that don't mention there was neither peace nor justice in Iraq prior to 1991. These pages give a good flavor of what Dominican Peace and Justice committees have been saying about the war.

As someone with doubts about the morality of the wars and sanctions against Iraq, I find this instance of historical blindness inexcusable, and I take the committees and their documents far less seriously than the subjects of peace and justice deserve.

A report of a recent letter from fr. Jean-Jacques Pérennès, OP, Vicar provincial of the Dominicans in the Arab countries, offers a much more balanced view of the current situation. After visiting Iraq with his provincial, Fr. Pérennès wrote:

Anyone can enter the country without visa since nobody checks who you are, and then nobody will protect you... These [U.S.] soldiers are not able to move easily in the country, and so, the reconstruction of Iraq seems to be left for the future... Because they really don't seem to be in control of the situation, I do think that now, other countries should accept to be involved in the reconstruction of Iraq, with a clear mandate of the UN, of course...

[It is important to note] the Iraqis are happy with their new freedom (150 daily newspapers now in Iraq, satellite antennas every where on the roofs - this was forbidden in Saddam's time), but they are very concerned about the insecurity, and one can understand it, given the violence which is going on (attacks of the UN building, on the Najaf mosque, etc). Also, this situation evidently doesn't help to give jobs to people. The black-market is flourishing; many devices are now being imported without any control at the borders. How can you rule a country like that?

A lot of U.S.-based discussions about Iraq take place at a theoretical or abstract level. Democracy. Baathism. Timetables. $87 billion. But nobody's life is lived at a theoretical level.

One of the Dominican mottoes is Veritas, and part of St. Thomas's legacy is the recognition of the relationship between the lesser truths of creation and the Truth Who Is. Seeing clearly what is -- before what should be, or what we want to be, or what we are afraid might be -- is essential to a successful Dominican apostolate. May the professional committee members and position paper writers -- and, for that matter, the vicars provincial and the lay bloggers -- see clearly what is.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

My second secret of the Rosary

You may have noticed that this whole "my secrets of the Rosary" business is just a cheap gimmick to dress up some commonplace observations in profundity suited for the Month of the Holy Rosary. A more accurate description would be "some things about the Rosary I didn't learn when I was eleven."

That said, my second secret of the Rosary, which may come as a surprise to the millions of people who have prayed the Rosary longer and better than I, is that the Rosary isn't a prayer.

(Okay, so yesterday I quoted the Pope writing that the Rosary "is at heart a Christocentric prayer." Obviously, then, saying the Rosary isn't a prayer is another cheap gimmick. But bear with me.)

If the Rosary isn't a prayer, what is it? It's a meditation on the Gospel. Not the "Gospel as a literary form" but the "Gospel as the Good News of Jesus Christ." When you "pray" the Rosary -- the standard Joyful/Luminous/Sorrowful/Glorious Rosary, at least, which isn't the last word in praying the Rosary -- you are calling to mind the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, framed by the experiences of His blessed mother.

I've heard a common criticism of the Rosary is that it is "vain repetition." But what really gets repeated is not the words of the Ave so much as the thoughts of the Nativity and the Scourging and the Ascension and so forth. I doubt many of the fiercest Bible-only fundamentalists would consider repeatedly calling to mind Jesus' life, death, and resurrection a vain endeavor.

If the Rosary isn't a prayer, why do we speak of praying the Rosary? Because many or most people do pray while reciting the vocal prayers of the Rosary. You can be aware of the meaning of the words you are saying, you can even pray the words you are saying -- and indeed, with such things as the Fatima Prayer there's little point in saying them if you aren't praying them.

The Rosary is in a way a variation on the four-step lectio divina, where the reading (step 1) is usually (though not always) from memory, and the meditation (step 2) and the prayer (step 3) usually (though not always) occur in a more structured order (e.g., I might plan on praying the Our Father and the first Hail Mary, meditate while reciting the next nine Hail Marys, then pray the Gloria and the Fatima Prayer). (The fourth step, contemplation, comes when it comes with the Rosary as with lectio divina.)

And what about "praying the Rosary for peace"? How do you meditate for an intention? Well, as I mentioned people do pray while reciting the Rosary; those prayers can be offered for some intention. But I think that, in addition, the act of reciting the Rosary -- which, after all, is indulgenced -- can be a votive act. It's a sacrifice (sometimes joyful, sometimes not) of time and effort, and that can always be offered to God for a specific intention.

One of the major points of this secret, though, is to remind myself not to assume that "praying the Rosary" meets my recommended daily allowance of prayer. It's not -- for me, at least -- twenty minutes of conversation with God. My "best" Rosaries give me some new insight into a mystery that hadn't yielded any new insights for a long time, but an insight isn't love. Once Jesus' life, death, and resurrection are called to mind, it's time to speak with Him about them, not just put away the beads until tomorrow.

Labels: My Secrets of the Rosary

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

My daily heresy

I'm thinking the act of voting is the least important act a Catholic can perform as a citizen. To put it another way, the importance of casting a vote is inversely proportional to the hand-wringing done over how to decide whom to vote for.

This, I'm told, is unthinkable by any decent American. Don't I know how many people have fought and died for my right to cast a vote for the people I want to represent me?

But consider:

Every election cycle, American Catholics like me start worrying about how to vote. We try to construct a heuristic guide:

1. If no candidate is opposed to all legalized abortion, go to step 4.
2. If one candidate is opposed to all legalized abortion, go to step 9.
3. If more than one candidate is opposed to all legalized abortion, go to step 17.
4. ...

Some Catholics live in districts where they can automatically start at Step 4. Others see voting a straight anti-abortion ticket as folly -- and not without reason; the major policy initiative of the only pro-life candidate on the ballot to represent me in the House of Representatives last election was to make the secret UFO technology the government was hiding available to the public.

In any case, a lot of us spend a lot of time essentially trying to construct -- or wishing our bishops or the Vatican would give us -- a manual of moral voting.

But you know what? I get one vote. So does everyone else. I have never been in an election for public office in which my vote determined the winner. And where I now live, the people I vote for rarely win at all.

So all of my "o is this material cooperation in evil" whinging is utterly disproportionate to the actual, observable effect of my vote -- which is at most to increment a handful of numbers by less than 0.05%, and often a couple of orders of magnitude less than that.

Meanwhile, letters go unwritten, politicians go unmet, rallies go unorganized, procedures go unreformed, governments go unpersuaded, political parties go unfounded, petitions go unsigned.

Voting is the lazy man's measure of citizenship. We're called to more, and people like me who spend all their political energy worrying about how to vote aren't answering the call.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Who then can be saved?

The story of the rich young man is coming up in this Sunday's Gospel reading.

Fr. Jude Siciliano, O.P., has a take on the young man's wealth I don't think I've heard before. The canonical homily teaches that there's something about worldly riches that so fill up a man it is impossible for him to be filled with God, which is necessary for salvation.

Fr. Siciliano mentions what we know of the common attitudes of Jesus' day (not so different from our own, if more frankly expressed back then):

Riches were considered a reward from God for good behavior. They were looked upon as a concrete sign that the one who owned much must be doing something right in their lives...

In addition, remember that Jesus is talking to disciples who were themselves poor and had left what little they had to follow him. If one were poor, in their way of thinking, then that person must have done something wrong, or not enough good things in their life to deserve good fortune from God. If they were poor, they were suffering the consequences of being lazy or having broken the commandments, or of being born to sinful parents... Thus, they had little "proof" they were blessed or favored by God since they had no material signs of that favor in this life.

When His disciples asked, "Who then can be saved?" they didn't mean, "Who is so poor as to be able to fit through that needle's eye?" People that poor were common enough. They were trying to work out how what Jesus said about the rich fit in with their understanding of the sinfulness of the poor. Jesus' answer -- "With God, all things are possible" -- wasn't just an explanation of how the rich (who, suddenly, were no longer guaranteed to be favored by God) could be saved, but of how the poor, too (who, suddenly, were no longer guaranteed to be out of His favor), could be.

This have some very unsettling implications for us today. I've been understanding this story as carrying the moral that I must not let material goods come between me and God. That's true, but it isn't the whole story. For the rich young man, his material goods weren't things that interefered with his love of God, they were proof of God's love for him. Jesus wasn't merely telling him to abandon physical comfort, He was telling him to abandon the spiritual comfort he had always drawn from his wealth.

If you wish to be perfect, Jesus is telling us, let go of everything that isn't Me, including the consolations and blessings you regard as proof of My love. It may be wealth, it may be a sense of accomplishment after a well-prayed Mass, it may be a feeling of closeness to Me. Then come, follow Me to the Cross, and beyond, to the place prepared for you by My Father.

Fortunately, such a radical emptying isn't demanded of all of us today. Just those who wish to be perfect.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

My first secret of the Rosary

I have a list of five secrets of the Rosary. They aren't what you'd call profound or mystical secrets. I think of them more as corrections to errors people have about the Rosary.

The first secret is the Rosary isn't particularly Marian.

One reason for not praying the Rosary is that it has all those Hail Marys and the pamphlets on how to pray it always have pictures of doe-eyed Mary statues on the front, and a lot of people simply aren't into Mary enough to find the Rosary appealing.

But if you actually pray the Rosary, you find that Mary isn't as central as she appears from the pamphlets. Starting from the first mystery, the Annunciation, she moves steadily off-stage, so to speak -- or up-stage is probably better -- until, following the Miracle at Cana, she is all but out of sight until, at the Third Glorious Mystery, she is filled with the Holy Spirit, then completes her role as the disciple par excellence in her Annunciation and Coronation. Throughout the Rosary, she is seen as receptive to the actions of God and responsive to her Son. You could say (if you weren't being too picky) that, in the Rosary, the drama of our faith is presented as a two-person play, with Jesus as the major character and Mary as the supporting character who frames, and thereby emphasizes, the actions of Jesus.

In short, to quote Rosarium Virginis Mariae, "The Rosary, though clearly Marian in character, is at heart a Christocentric prayer. In the sobriety of its elements, it has all the depth of the Gospel message in its entirety, of which it can be said to be a compendium."

Praying the Rosary, then, is not fundamentally an act of Marian piety, but of evangelizing yourself.

Labels: My Secrets of the Rosary

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

And when it comes say, "Welcome friend."

Just as a compress stops the bleeding, but does not heal the wound, so too the theology of the Baroque period kept the faithful from spilling into the errors of the day, but it did not heal the wounds caused by nominalism, voluntarism, and the rationalism of the early Enlightenment. For this reason, just as a bandage must be removed before the wound can fully heal, so too the perspective of the manuals had to be set aside before the wounds in moral theology could be healed.

If that doesn't make you want to read "Four Challenges for Moral Theology in the New Century," by Michael S. Sherwin, O.P., I don't know what will.

(The four challenges, by the way, are reintegrating moral theology back into the whole of theology; developing a new philosophy of nature and philosophical anthropology as a theological foundation for reflecting on the effect of God's love on human nature; renewing our understanding of growing, by grae, in relationship with Christ; and living a life that expresses the spirituality required of a moral theologian.)

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Reflexive errors

Here is my hypothesis for the day: "A is like B, and B is C, so A is C" is a very common error.

I even have a theory for one way this error propagates: Professional commentators are under deadline to generate a certain number of words per week or month. A technique that helps them meet their deadlines is to master the "B is C" argument, then keep an eye out for some A that is like B, then generate an "A is C" piece. Consumers of the work of professional commentators pick up this habit, and practice it in private or informal conversations.

A related situation is the argument, "A is like B, and B is C, so B is C." A professional commentator who uses this is a goldbricker. An amateur who uses it is a bore.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Corrupting influences

A final point on the Minute Particulars post. Mark writes:

The dispute is not about whether Christ died, versions of most creeds through the centuries squelch any such notions, but about whether his body corrupted at his death. This is important because it must be the same Christ who suffered, died, was buried, and rose. If Christ’s body corrupted then it would not be Christ in the tomb prior to the Resurrection, but decomposed matter....

Aquinas acknowledges this problem and explains in ST 3, 51, 3 that “Divine Power” prevented the corruption of Christ’s body. And elsewhere, in his Commentary on the Sentences, he explains that it is because of this divine intervention that it is accurate to say that it is the same Christ who suffered, died, was buried, and rose again.

This is a very subtle point.

After St. Paul died, his body was buried. One day, his soul will be reunited with that body, which will be glorified. It will be the same soul and the same body, hence the same Paul of Tarsus who once preached the Crucified Christ to anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn't).

I think St. Thomas's concern is how we can say "Christ was buried" when, strictly speaking, we can't say "Paul was buried," because Paul's body isn't Paul. If that isn't his concern, I'm not sure what is.

Still, he makes a curious claim in that Summa article:

Christ's body was a subject of corruption according to the condition of its passible nature, but not as to the deserving cause of putrefaction, which is sin....

If so, Christ's mother's body would also be a subject of corruption according to its passible nature but not according to the deserving cause of putrefaction. (Which leads us back to the problem of St. John the Baptist's relics, as according to tradition he was freed from original sin at the Visitation.)

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

It matters

As a follow-up, let me say that the question of whether Mary died is not a hermetically closed academic matter, like, "Were any of the Apostles left handed?"

If Mary did not die, then we need to deal with the fact that the historical basis on which the definition of the dogma of the Assumption was made was wrong, and with the fact that the Eastern Churches (and many in the Roman Catholic Church) continue to be wrong. Practically speaking, reunion with the Orthodox would be impossible.

And if Mary did die, then we need to adjust our theological understanding of original sin to account for that. If we have a wrong understanding of original sin, we have a wrong understanding of anthropology, which can lead to all sorts of errors all over the place.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

More on the Dormition

There is a line of reasoning popular in the Roman Catholic Church that runs like this: "Death entered the world through Adam's sin. But the Blessed Virgin was free from all stain of original sin from the moment of her conception. Therefore, she did not die prior to her assumption into heaven."

I've written about this before (check the August 2002 archives, if you'd like), but I think Mark of Minute Particulars misses the point when he writes:

Death is unnatural. It entered the world when humans turned from God. To insist that Mary undergoes death seems, to my mind, to undermine this important point and attenuate the significance of Mary’s life and her perfect response to God.

The question of whether Mary died before her Assumption is not a matter of competing theological arguments. To insist she did not undergo death is a theological argument; to say she did is simply to state the belief of the universal Church for more than a millenium.

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception -- and in particular to its definition in Ineffabilis Deus -- may seem to some to imply as a logical necessity that Mary would not die; to Mark, it implies her death would be an "extra" and "unnecessary requirement." Those implications, however, do not seem to have been drawn by the Church as a whole.

To pick two examples: Pope Pius XII approvingly quoted ancient liturgies referring explicitly to Mary's death in Munificentissimus Deus; Eastern Churches in union with the Roman Catholic Church, all of which accept the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, continue to celebrate the Feast of the Dormition of Mary. (I've encountered the claim that "dormition" means "sleep" rather than "death," but that's a feeble semantic argument that evaporates upon the slightest inspection.)

I wonder, too, what it would mean that the Blessed Virgin "completed the course of her earthly life" if, due to her preservation free from all stain of original sin, she were immortal. I need to read up on this, but I don't think anyone believed that had Adam not sinned, he would have completed the course of his earthly life and been assumed into heaven. So there's more going on than Mary being in a prelapsarian state.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Fly, Eagles, Fly!

Wait a minute. I thought McNabb was Irish!

It's hard for me to abstract a principle from the Rush Limbaugh/Donovan McNabb brouhaha. For one thing, I'm an Eagles fan. For another, I don't much like the word "brouhaha." But let me try:

There are a lot of commenters on Catholic blogs who like Limbaugh and don't much care for, or about, McNabb. These people, understandably enough, tend to support Limbaugh.

What bothers me -- apart from the stupid (and occasionally offensive) things said about McNabb, but then I'm an Eagles fan -- is the unthinking reflexivity of the support.

Mark Shea likes to say that people get in trouble when they "fail to observe the pieties" of the liberal media. Maybe so, and maybe failing to observe liberal pieties isn't a good reason to get in trouble with the media.

But it doesn't follow, contrary to what I infer many believe, that an act that fails to observe the liberal pieties is a good act. For that matter, not every liberal piety is a bad thing. "Anything that makes those liberals mad is good" is bad.

The thing about reflexes, whether physical or mental, is that they are reflexive. They occur without thought; "instinctively" is how it's often (and inaccurately) put. What occurs without thought isn't fully human, because what makes an act human is its rational basis, its intentionality.

Responding reflexively is great if you're playing football. (Being able to throw a touch pass from a five-step drop would be nice, too.) But a reflexive response in a cultural, social, political, or religious discussion is one that not only brings nothing new to the discussion, but also lacks the integrity of the full human person making the response.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Personal vocations

Germain Grisez, in a Zenit interview regarding his co-written book Personal Vocation: God Calls Everyone by Name:

We argue that there is no shortage of vocations -- the shortage, if you will, is a shortage of vocational discernment.

I think what Grisez talks about in the interview is among the most important challenges facing the Church today: to get Catholics to become disciples:

We define personal vocation as God's call and plan for one's entire life... Personal vocation is unique for each one, and it includes absolutely everything -- all the good choices God would prefer one to make, all the things he allows to come one's way and expects will be handled rightly...

Finding, accepting and faithfully fulfilling one's personal vocation is the way to respond to the universal call to holiness, for that means doing God's will in everything and accepting whatever comes as coming from, or at least permitted by, him....

It might help if I spelled out the three different but complementary senses in which the word "vocation" is used in the Church.

First, there is vocation in the sense of the common Christian vocation that comes with baptism...

Second, there is vocation in the sense of state in life. The clerical state, the consecrated life, the state of marriage, the single lay life in the world -- these are state-in-life vocations...

Third, there is vocation in the sense of personal vocation. This concretizes the common baptismal vocation and a Christian's state of life into the unique and unrepeatable part in God's redemptive plan that the Father calls each of us to play.

One point Grisez makes that I hadn't considered before is that the failure of Catholics in general to consider their personal vocations has lilely led to the failure of many Catholics in particular to recognize their personal religious or clerical vocations. The rise from "Do you go to Mass once a week?" to "Do you want to be a priest?" is pretty sharp without any intermediate steps.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Happy Feast of the Guardian Angels

I once asked what the difference was between a feast and a solemnity. Someone answered that, with a feast, you get salad and a dessert.

So I'm thinking: appetizer, main course, dessert. All served with a suitable beverage.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Wenn der Gegner schüchtern oder dumm ist

Steven Riddle provides a link to Schopenhauer's The Art Of Controversy.

It's full of great ideas, like a perverse Boy Scout manual for Usenet. Which means there's a lot of "been there, done that" to it as well.

The final paragraph, though, is worth quoting in full, even if I don't endorse it categorically:

The only safe rule, therefore, is that which Aristotle mentions in the last chapter of his Topica: not to dispute with the first person you meet, but only with those of your acquaintance of whom you know that they possess sufficient intelligence and self-respect not to advance absurdities; to appeal to reason and not to authority, and to listen to reason and yield to it; and, finally, to cherish truth, to be willing to accept reason even from an opponent, and to be just enough to bear being proved to be in the wrong, should truth lie with him. From this it follows that scarcely one man in a hundred is worth your disputing with him. You may let the remainder say what they please, for every one is at liberty to be a fool - desipere est jus gentium. Remember what Voltaire says: La paix vaut encore mieux que la verite. Remember also an Arabian proverb which tells us that on the tree of silence there hangs its fruit, which is peace.

I don't know how many in a hundred are worth disputing with, but those who are are to be cherished as one cherishes the truth.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Light of Patriarchs, pray for us

Having read the chapter on St. Joseph's assumption in the somewhat creaky prose of The Life and Glories of St. Joseph, reprinted from long ago by TAN Books, I am moving from "deep skepticism" to "no real opinion."

This belief is different from a belief in a particular physical gift St. Joseph might have possessed in that it's based on the explicit Revelation of Matthew 27:52-53:

...and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many.

These words must mean something, and I see no sound basis for denying that they mean what they say.

The Catena Aurea isn't much use here. St. Remegius is quoted as writing:

But some one will ask, what became of those who rose again when the Lord rose. We must believe that they rose again to be witnesses of the Lord's resurrection. Some have said that they died again, and were turned to dust, as Lazarus and the rest whom the Lord raised. But we must by no means give credit to these men's sayings, since if they were to die again, it would be greater torment to them, than if they had not risen again. We ought therefore to believe without hesitation that they who rose from the dead at the Lord's resurrection, ascended also into heaven together with Him.

This puts the teaching in general back to the Sixth Century.

It's no surprise that St. Joseph wasn't named as one of the "saints who had fallen asleep" in the Sixth Century. No one gave him much thought in those days (which also goes a long way to explaining the lack of venerated relics). But then, if he had been resurrected and assumed, wouldn't he have been given more thought? But then, none of the saints who had fallen asleep were given much thought, as far as I know. Does that suggest a non-historical reading of Matthew 27:52-53? Deep waters.

Still, I'm unpersuaded by the arguments that St. Joseph must have been raised and assumed. They tend to be phrased in terms like "it is unthinkable that," "we cannot entertain the supposition," "whose heart is so cold as to imagine," and so forth. As an empirical matter, I can think, suppose, and imagine St. Joseph is not in heaven body and soul. Some of the arguments, like those on the re-establishment of the Holy Family in heaven, I even find theologially dubious.

As for what I wrote yesterday about the uniqueness of Mary's Assumption: It occurs to me now that uniqueness may lie in the combination of death (which Enoch and Elijah, according to some, did not experience) and incorruption in the tomb (which the saints who had fallen asleep did not experience) prior to her Assumption (and, obviously, the incorrupt saints known to us have not experienced bodily assumption (and, for that matter, their incorruption seems to be somewhat different than Mary's)).

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Joseph most prudent, pray for us

My attitude toward the pious belief that St. Joseph was assumed bodily into heaven following Jesus' Resurrection hasn't changed much in the ten or so years since I first encountered it. It remains one of deep skepticism.

El Camino Real and And Then? have been discussing the belief, with the former defending the belief (as a legitimate opinion, at least) and the latter expressing deep skepticism.

The evidence in favor of St. Joseph's bodily assumption includes the opinions of St. Bernadine of Siena and Bl. John XXIII. The evidence against includes the lack of opinions of nearly everybody else.

My own skepticism is based on two points. First, there seems to be nothing about St. Joseph's assumption during the first millenium of the Church, and I've heard nothing about it from the East. That suggests the belief is based on theological speculation of a kind developed in the West not long before the Fifteenth Century.

Now, far be it from me to look unkindly on theological speculation of a kind developed in the West not long before the Fifteenth Century, but I think it's important to recognize that this particular speculation concerns a historical fact of which absolutely no hint of historical records exist. (In fact, the unimportance of St. Joseph throughout the First Millenium is evidence no one gave his assumption any thought.)

The other point is one that, to me, seems to trump the testimony of both St. Bernadine and Bl. John: namely, the stated or implied uniqueness of Mary's Assumption.

St. Bernadine lived long before the Assumption was infallibly declared a dogma, and I'd guess Bl. John's pious opinions were set well before 1950, so I don't see any competing authorities here. (For that matter, Bl. John's endorsement of St. Joseph's (and St. John the Baptist's) assumption as something "we can piously believe" came during a homily, an extremely weak exercise of teaching authority.)

But Munificentissimus Deus states (emphasis added):

What is here indicated in that sobriety characteristic of the Roman liturgy is presented more clearly and completely in other ancient liturgical books. To take one as an example, the Gallican sacramentary designates this privilege of Mary's as "an ineffable mystery all the more worthy of praise as the Virgin's Assumption is something unique among men." And, in the Byzantine liturgy, not only is the Virgin Mary's bodily Assumption connected time and time again with the dignity of the Mother of God, but also with the other privileges, and in particular with the virginal motherhood granted her by a singular decree of God's Providence. "God, the King of the universe, has granted you favors that surpass nature. As he kept you a virgin in childbirth, thus he has kept your body incorrupt in the tomb and has glorified it by his divine act of transferring it from the tomb." [MD 18]

Playing theologian, I suggest these two things are well attested in the Church:

1. The connection between Mary's virginal motherhood and her assumption.
2. The uniqueness of her assumption.

If St. Joseph (or anyone else) was assumed bodily, then both of these tenets fail...

Unless one suggests Mary did not die, but was assumed alive. But this suggestion is contrary to everything the Church said about Mary, excepting roughly the same times and places that people said St. Joseph was assumed bodily. Even the above excerpt from Munificentissimus Deus approvingly quotes the Byzantine liturgy's reference to Mary's "body incorrupt in the tomb."

I have the impression that the pious belief in St. Joseph's assumption is based on an intuition of what is "fitting" or "right" for God to do. I certainly do not want to toss out categorically all that has been written about the priviledges and special graces of St. Joseph over the past several centuries, but at the same time I think it's important to ask whether the intuitions by which they were written were themselves fitting or right, and what the implications are if they weren't.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

So much for disinfectants

The promised National Catholic Register article exposing the chancery rats of the Archdiocese of Detroit has been written.

Ned McGrath, director of communications for the archdiocese, is quoted as saying:

"We receive calls on all sorts of things... If they are from people within the diocese, we deal with them as best we can. They are responded to on a case-by-case basis. If they come in as part of an organized effort, we handle them as such."

I'd hope people who organize efforts to generate calls to chanceries consider what McGrath is telling them the policy in Detroit is. (It's also the policy I'd recommend.)

On to the University of Detroit Mercy where the nail-in-the-Church's-coffin conference was held (you felt the disturbance in the Force, didn't you, when the Same Old said the Same Old to the Same Old):

University president Sister Fay did not respond to Register inquiries.

"The communications department has received no phone calls or e-mails regarding the event," said Gary Lichtman, media director for the University of Detroit Mercy. "If there were people who had comments, this is the first we’ve heard of these people. I cannot speak for the president or anyone else."

Mark Shea chooses to snort at Gary Lichtman's ability to communicate, but he doesn't mention what is significant about these paragraphs:

People sent letters and emails to the president. People CC'd their letters and emails to the NCR, which was writing an article about them. What people didn't do was CC their letters and emails to the media director.

Sending an email to a media director isn't a grand and noble thing to do in this time of profound crisis for the Church in the United States. He's just a scurrying rat, right?

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Some thoughts from Eckhart

Robert J. Dobie has a challenging article in the July 2003 issue of The Thomist called "Reason and Revelation in the Thought of Meister Eckhart." His thesis is, roughly, that Eckhart believed one must read Scripture to uncover its mystical sense, which leads to "the birth of the Son in the soul[,] a process of illumination in which is revealed the inner truth not only of Scripture but of all the sciences."

The more common view, following St. Thomas, is that truth cannot contradict truth, so a scientific truth must be consistent with a revealed truth. Eckhart's view, if I understand Dobie correctly, was that all scientific truth is actually present in the inner sense of Scripture, and this must be true because God is truth and God is one.

Robie quotes Eckhart's claim

that detachment compels God to come to me in this way; it is because everything longs to achieve its own natural place. Now God's natural place is unity and purity, and that comes from detachment. Therefore God must of necessity give himself to a heart that has detachment.

To say "God must of necessity" do something sounds like presumption, but Eckhart doesn't mean someone can, by achieving detachment, "force" God to do something. Rather, he means (I think) that since nothing is one and pure but God, wherever unity and purity is God is. It's a logical necessity, not a causal necessity.

Furthermore, this religious understanding leads (Robie says Eckhart says) to a philosophical understanding of the Aristotelian concept of "natural place." It's common to "reason up" to God from philosophical observations; Eckhart insisted on doing it the other way around, since revelation is surer than reason.

What I thought was most interesting in this article was this idea of understanding the union of God and the soul (in Robie's words):

When God and the detached soul are united, then, it is in the same way that knower and known or perceived and perceiver are united in one activity.

Not everybody enjoys sentences like, "The knower as knowing the known knows the known as known by the knower," but for me this suggests a union that is intimate (there is nothing between the knower and the known but the knowing, and that knowing is not shared with any other knower), complete (like the circle of a wall illuminated by a flashlight), and timeless (any change in knower, known, and knowing is accidental to the relationship, and moreover impossible when knower and known do not change).

Robie goes on to write, quoting Eckhart:

In other words, it is not the case that the detached soul's dynamic union with God is a species of union of mover and the moved (or of the knower and the thing known) but rather these latter are merely species and imitations of the soul's union with God or, more fundamentally, of God's union with his Only-Begotten Son:

... And so the sense faculty and the sense object, the intellect and the intelligible object, though two in potency, are one in act. The one act belongs to both. The faculty of sight is actually seeing and the visible object is actually seen in the same utterly simple act.

Intellectually, it's interesting to think that Aristotelian realism is an imitation of the life of the Trinity. Spiritually, it's exciting to think that the "same utterly simple act" uniting the Father and the Son can, in eterninty, include us.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Happy Month of the Holy Rosary

To Catholics everywhere.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Happy Feast Day

To Carmelites everywhere.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

One, holy, catholic, apostolic ... and varied

Gerard Serafin repeats his criticism of the simplicity of Frederica Matthewes-Green's theological reflections. His point is that neither East nor West is as completely polarized on the Good Friday/Easter Sunday paradox as her articles suggest.

A related point is that, however the West as a whole might emphasize the mysteries of faith, there is great variety within the Roman Catholic Church, too. I've written before about "Easter people" and such, but more generally there are Easter spiritualities and even, to a certain extent, Easter religious orders all co-existing in the Latin Rite.

This diversity is more than a strength and almost a mark of the Church. The failure to see, much less appreciate, this diversity isn't limited to Orthodox observers, but is also common within Roman Catholicism.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Passive hypocrisy?

In a comment below, Rob suggests a certain action would be the sin of "hypocrisy of omission." I'm not entirely sold on the idea.

On the one hand, there is something deplorable about thinking along the lines of, "If I just don't do anything stupid, people will keep believing I'm actually chaste."

On the other hand, what do we expect someone who is secretly unchaste to do? Tell his gossipy neighbor?

A man has a positive right to his good name, even if he isn't a particularly good person; infringing on that right is the sin of detraction. In charity, we should assume whatever virtues are consistent with what we know of another. If I know my neighbor is married, I ought to assume he is faithful to his wife. Adulterer he may be, but he is not a hypocrite for not correcting my assumption.

The situation Rob suggested was a hypocrisy of omission featured a secretely fornicating minister who preached against unchastity. That's a slightly different case than of the ordinary neighbor. It's reasonable to infer that someone who insists on the importance of chastity is himself chaste, whether or not he makes any personal claims about himself.

Still, a minister ought to preach chastity, however poorly he practices it. There's a form of Donatism that crops up here and there, holding more or less that a priest is worthless unless he is blameless, but that's simply false. We should expect a minister to preach chastity, just as we should expect a judge to rule justly and a gardener to weed properly. A traffic judge who speeds isn't necessarily being hypocritical when he fines speeders.

There's the further point, made eariler in the comments, that sometimes we rail against precisely those sins of which we are most guilty, not out of hypocrisy, but in response to a desire (probably not well realized) to stop sinning. There's a saying that a preacher must preach first to himself -- which, I think, is related to the idea that what we can always give another is a good example.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

On the new cardinals

Here's some info no one else is reporting:

Cardinal eggs are glossy light green or dull gray, with reddish brown specks or blotches.

Fledgling cardinals can fly well within 20 days, but they seldom venture far.

The Dominican Order was honored by Pope John Paul II's appointment of fr. Georges Cottier, OP, theologian of the papal household, as a cardinal "for special service to the Church." In doing so, the Pope broke with tradition by not waiting until Fr. Cottier was tossed out of Rome on his ear to undergo a lukewarm and decades-long rehabilitation not completed until he lay on his deathbed.

I see a lot of people are commenting on the fact that Archbishop O'Malley of Boston was "passed over." You know what? I was passed over, too. See the related comments below about "withholding" grace.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Happy MichaelGabrielandRaphaelmas!

Of the three, who has lost the most?

St. Michael has to share his feast day, and they dumped his after-Mass prayer.

St. Gabriel lost his feast day, had to move in with St. Michael, and they've higher criticized his visits to Mary and Joseph into stylized theological representation.

St. Raphael lost his feast day, had to move in with Sts. Michael and Gabriel, and they've higher criticized his trip with Tobiah into a novel, and they've textually criticized his appearance in the Gospel of John clean out of the Bible.

Good thing they all enter and serve before the Glory of the Lord, or you might start feeling sorry for them.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Woe to us hypocrites

There's a discussion in a comment box below that's turned to the question of hypocrisy in Christianity.

It began with the question, "Can one be a Christian and a hypocrite?"

This soon became, "Can one not be a Christian and a hypocrite?"

To answer either question, we need to know (wait for it) what hypocrisy is.

St. Thomas, in discussing hypocrisy, quotes St. Augustine:

...in the Church and in every department of human life, whoever wishes to seem what he is not is a hypocrite: for he pretends to be just without being so in reality.

A hypocrite, then, is someone who habitually pretends to possess a virtue he doesn't possess.

So sure, a person can be a Christian without being a hypocrite. On the other hand, insofar as he is a hypocrite, he is not a Christian:

If we say, 'We have fellowship with him,' while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth."

Fortunately,

If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing.

The point is, though, that a "hypocrite" is one who pretends to have a virtue he doesn't have. The correct term for a person who demands other people exercise a virtue he doesn't have is a "nuisance."

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

More on faith

A post and comments on various ways of looking at faith, belief, knowledge, opinion, and trust.

I'll highlight one point here: Someone asked, "Why should I have faith in something someone tells me?"

As I use the word, "faith" is something you have in a person, not a thing. (You believe things are true; you have faith someone is truthful.)

So I'd say the real question is, "Why should I have faith in someone?"

My answer is, "You shouldn't, unless you do."

I don't think you can trust someone as an act of will. You can't will yourself to believe "This person is truthful" is true. You either believe it or you don't.

Now, you can choose to act as though you have faith in someone. In other words, you can will yourself to accept what someone says as true for the purposes of reasoning and deliberation. But that's not the same as believing what they say is true because you have faith in them.

I can't, then, blame someone who doesn't believe in Christianity for not believing in Christianity. If he asks me why he should believe in Christianity, I should try to explain its reasonableness, its attractions, its benefits on the natural level, and maybe why it's a better answer than the one he currently favors. But I can't give him faith. The best I can do is be a person worthy of his trust, and maybe live a life that makes him say, "I want a life like that!" In the end, though, it's God Who gives him faith, and he himself who must unwrap and use the gift.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Speaking of movies I haven't seen

Bill Cork, as a former Lutheran minister, has his own typically idiosyncratic review of the movie Luther.

One of his criticisms, which I haven't seen raised in any other review, is this:

The movie manages to present the Diet of Augsburg, and the Augsburg Confession, without mentioning the name of Phillip Melanchthon.

I am not surprised. I never mention the name of Phillip Melanchthon -- way too many consonants in a row -- and from what Bill writes the filmmakers had trouble pronouncing "papal."

The thing about a movie like Luther is how easily the reviews move from the plot of the movie to historical reality. If the story were a Western or some pseudo-historical Sir Walter Scott adaptation, talking about the bad guys and how obviously the hero is right wouldn't be questioned. When the movie villain is the Roman Catholic Church, though, it's very difficult to avoid realizing that the Roman Catholic Church actually exists. The secular reviews I've seen tend to assert that, as a matter of historical fact, the Reformers were right and the Church was wrong. The Catholic reviews, unsurprisingly, go the other way around.

I suppose that's always a problem when the hero of a movie isn't everyone's historical hero. I wonder what the reviews of Dubya will look like.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Speaking of loving the sinner

A lot of people hate George W. Bush. Some just feel the natural hatred a hefty number in any healthy democracy feels toward the one in charge; others hate hate hate George W. Bush, with the kind of spittle-flecked rancor that gets directed at the smirking rich kid who gets the part in the school play you wanted.

The New Republic has an article about Bush hatred on the Left, and an associated debate on its website. Bush-hating Jonathan Chait wrote something notable in his opening salvo:

The question that divides us is: Does Bush hatred have a rational basis, or is it an unreasonable prejudice?

... [L]et me briefly sum up the reasons why liberals hate Bush so intensely. First of all, he's conservative... Second, Bush ran for president as a moderate, and liberals (accurately) perceive his public persona as essentially a lie. Third, the country has rallied around Bush on two occasions--after he took office, and after September 11, 2001--in such a way that criticism of his qualifications and legitimacy was essentially driven out of mainstream discourse. Nothing feeds anger and bitterness like the belief that the media is ignoring your views.

Now, I don't have much of a political horse in this race (although hearing Wesley Clark describe himself as "pro-health" doesn't make me enthusiastic for the lastest Democratic front-runner), but let me try to abstract from the particulars and take a look at the principles Chait proposes.

First, he sees the question as whether venemous hatred focussed at this particular individual has a "rational basis." But what would the existence of a rational basis demonstrate? "He's richer than I am, he's always smirking, and he got the part I wanted" is a "rational basis" for hating the kid in your high school, but that doesn't make that hatred reasonable.

(And in fact, I'd say that's pretty much the basis on which people hate George W. Bush, although Chait has a different take.)

All hatred has some basis. Having a rational basis -- rather than an irrational, non-rational, or subrational one -- for your hatred is setting the bar mighty low. The question isn't whether I can rationalize my hatred for another person, but whether I can justify it.

Okay, next Chait gives his reasons for intense personal hatred of Bush:

1. Bush is conservative.
2. Bush is more conservative than he led voters to expect.
3. Criticizing Bush's qualifications and legitimacy has been very difficult since his election.

Nos. 1 and 2 are essentially the same reason. No. 3 is peculiar for two reasons: first, his qualifications and legitimacy are moot issues, since he's been sworn in as president; second, Chait actually considers this a defensible reason for hating Bush. It's understandable, of course, because humans are petty and vindictive and envious, but it isn't really much in the way of an excuse, any more than the wealth of the smirking kid who got your part in the school play is an excuse for hating him. Hate the press and the public, I can see; but is hating Bush for what the press and the public do actually reasonable?

So there's really only one rational reason for hating Bush: He's a conservative. Abstracting: He has opinions we find repugnant.

Hating Bush, then, is rationalized on the basis of identifying his person with his opinions. Is hatred therefore justified?

I don't see how it can be, when the rationalization is based on a false identity.

Of course, hatred is an emotion, and we can't directly choose how we feel; I don't think hating George Bush, or anyone else, is in itself wicked. But to establish that the cause of my emotion lies outside myself -- in, say, the slugbrained incompetence of the local power company, to pick an example at random -- is not to justify allowing that emotion to rule, direct, or even necessarily inform my actions.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

De fide

The canonical response to someone who says, "I have a hard time with that 'faith' thing," is to point out that almost everything he thinks he knows, he actually believes by faith in other people.

That's true enough, but of course what he has a hard time with isn't faith per se, but religious faith in a bunch of people who lived a long time ago in a distant place telling an incredible story. Believing that William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, died in 1907 and believing that Jesus Christ is the Way to eternal beatitude are acts that are different in kind, not just degree.

Skeptics like to say, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs," and few claims are as extraordinary as Christianity. But if someone is willing to believe that I had a donut for breakfast but unwilling to believe that God became man for our salvation, it isn't just that the latter strikes him as more extraordinary than the former. In the context of Christianity, "Faith is a gift of God, a supernatural virtue infused by him."

Believing that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God isn't simply hard, it's impossible... unless God grants us the gift of faith.

(That said, I suppose there may be people who believe in Jesus on a natural, but not a supernatural, level, in the same way there are people who believe Jesus was a space alien or angel or invention of St. Paul or whatever. I'm not sure what to make of that case, beyond pure coincidence.)

So pointing out that a skeptic has faith in the sports page isn't likely to move him far along the road to faith in Christ and Him Crucified. His intellectual objections to the demands of Christian faith seem to me to be perfectly reasonable. Christians shouldn't expect even perfect reason to overcome them.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

It's not the One True Set of Sense Data

Commenting on various understandings of a healing in the Gospel According to Mark, Camassia's brother-in-law shows he understands what Christianity is all about:

Either way, it requires that "faith" thing that I have a hard time with. It's the "I know what REALLY went down and if you want to get to heaven YOU'LL JUST HAVE TO TRUST ME!" reasoning that drives me crazy sometimes.

Faith really does mean "you'll just have to trust me."

I think a lot of Christians don't realize this. I've read things that suggested the writers believe that if you read the Gospels, you'll know what happened in First Century Judea.

But you won't. If you read the Gospels, you'll know what the Gospels say. Knowing what happened in First Century Judea is impossible for us today, unless we have faith in the Gospels. Even then, we don't know what happened, properly speaking; we believe it.

Mark has conveniently quoted Josef Pieper for me: belief is "a participation in the knowledge of a knower." Our faith in Jesus Christ is a participation in the knowledge of the people who knew Him in First Century Judea and environs, and in the knowledge of the people who knew the people who knew Jesus, mediated through the Church which recognized those books containing knowledge worthy of belief.

That's why people can listen to all the arguments, read all the commentaries, and say, "I am unconvinced." That's why the whole world accepts the wheel, but not Christianity. That's why they call it "faith."

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

A coincidental theme

Two unrelated posts:

1. On the subject of evaluating Catholic elementary schools, Rachel Watkins writes that, of all the textbooks used by the school, "the texts used for Religion are most important."
2. A friend writes the Pew Lady, "The other day my 11 year old A-student daughter was complaining about the heat, and I told her to 'offer it up for the poor souls in Purgatory.' She looked at me quizzically and asked what Purgatory was." This despite her attending a Catholic school.

The second example can be dispatched quicker: If an 11 year old A-student at a Catholic elementary school doesn't know what her parents think she should know about her faith, it's her parents' fault. The school may not have a decent religious ed program, but the school is not responsible for the child's religious education. It's evident that offering things up for the poor souls in Purgatory isn't much in evidence in that house; maybe the parents are otherwise exemplary, but they can hardly blame the school for this lacuna in their daughter's education.

When I read Rachel Watkins's statement that the most important textbooks are those used in Religion, I wondered why that would be true. The fact that their religious faith is the most important aspect of the students lives doesn't imply that the textbooks used for religious ed in their school are their most important textbooks. There are a few reasons why religious textbooks might not be the most important.

For one thing, religion is the one subject the Church explicitly expects parents to be the primary teachers of their children. Most households aren't, as a matter of course, going to be effective environments for teaching long division or American history. But every Catholic household should be an effective environment for teaching Catholic children what being Catholic means.

Another reason to think religious textbooks aren't uniquely important is that Catholicism isn't an especially bookish faith. (Certainly not Good Bookish, our beloved Protestant separated brethren mutter.) While learning from a text is valuable, it may be the least valuable way to learn about the faith. Learning by example (again in the home primarily, but also from faculty, administration, and the expectations students are held to), and learning by experience -- of Masses and paraliturgies and morning prayers and snacktime grace and religious art -- are two ways I suspect are better.

A third reason is that teachers use textbooks in different ways. A good teacher can teach well despite a poor text; a poor teacher will teach poorly despite a good text.

Finally, there's a matter many parents refuse to admit, which is that education is an art. I'm not sure how well prepared parents are to evaluate textbooks of any sort, including religious textbooks. Well, there might be positively harmful religious textbooks, but even then over the years I've seen a lot of cries of "Heresy!" directed at things that are not, objectively, heretical.

Supporting the idea that religious textbooks are the most important might be an argument that none of the other textbooks are all that important taken by themselves, so the religious ones win by being less unimportant. It may also be that there's a greater variety in religious texts than in math or social studies texts, so the religious texts are more likely to be deciding factors in choosing between schools.

On the whole, though, I think you can get a better sense of how important Catholicism is to the school from other factors -- what the school says about the importance of Catholicism, for example -- than from the textbooks. I happen to be fortunate (emphasis on "fortune," but what are you going to do) to live in a parish whose school thinks its commitment to Catholicism is quite important, and whose school principal seems very sincere about that commitment.

If my kids don't yet know what purgatory is, it's my fault. (I'll ask them when I get home this evening. We've been without power now for a week, so I shouldn't let the teaching opportunity pass. "Purgatory is where Daddy will be for what he's been saying about the electric company since Sunday.")

Most importantly, though:

Pray for the souls in Purgatory.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Wineskins old and new

Camassia suggests that Jesus' answer to the question of why His disciples didn't fast includes a cryptic segue:

People came to him and objected, "Why do the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?"

Jesus answered them, "Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.

"No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak. If he does, its fullness pulls away, the new from the old, and the tear gets worse. Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins are ruined. Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins."

It's easy to imagine the objectors weren't entirely satisfied with this explanation.

I would say that the parabolic references to the old cloak and the wineskins is another example showing that Jesus is not a simple continuation of the line of prophets, healers, exorcists, and teachers. What He is, what He has to offer, isn't a simple patch to an old problem, nor can it be contained within old assumptions.

But note also that He doesn't say, "Throw away the old cloak. Toss out the old wineskins." He is concerned about the tear getting worse and the skins being ruined. He comes not to replace the Law but to fulfill it; yet He fulfills it in terms of Himself, not in terms of the Law.

Moreover -- or perhaps more immediately -- Jesus is concerned for His disciples, who after all are the ones not fasting. To force them into the old customs would lead to their ruin, since they would be acting as though Jesus were not the Bridegroom. (This is cribbed from the Venerable Bede.)

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Everywhere that man can go

I'll react indirectly to Camassia's and Lynn's posts on Mark 2 by starting with something from Mark 1:

A leper came to him and kneeling down begged him and said, "If you wish, you can make me clean."

Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him, "I do will it. Be made clean."

The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean.

Here, in fifty words, is the Gospel of Mark. It tells us what Jesus can do for us, how we should approach Him, and what the results will be if we do. It even explains the motive of the Incarnation, and if we want to get fanciful with "he stretched out his hand," prefigures the means by which Jesus can make us clean.

Now the very next story, which is the first story of chapter 2, presents some men acting like the leper in 1:40-42 by lowering their friend through the roof to reach Jesus -- and it also shows, for the first time (is there a commentary on Mark 2 that doesn't use the phrase "for the first time"?), men reacting in the wrong way to Jesus. If a key question Mark's Gospel answers is, "How do I be Jesus' disciple?", the scribes of Mark 2:6-7 contribute to the "Not like this" part of his answer.

Mark presents a series of conflict stories, I think not so much because, chronologically, these conflicts are all that happened to Jesus between healing the leper and withdrawing to the Sea of Galilee, but to emphasize that what Jesus was doing was not more of the same. He was different, not just from the scribes and Pharisees, but even from the prophets up to and including John the Baptist.

Lynn suggests the plot to kill Jesus isn't credible because the things Jesus did were within the bounds of First Century Judaism as it was practiced. I suggest that Jesus Himself was not within the bounds of First Century Judaism as it was practiced. He taught "as one having authority and not as the scribes." He forgives sins. He claims His very presence should be treated as a wedding feast. He calls himself Lord of the Sabbath.

Moreover, He does all this while castigating the scribes and Pharisees, not as a prophet speaking truth to power, but as a master scolding erring servants.

What is clear through the second chapter is that -- and yes, it sounds a bit lame to say it, but it's true -- Jesus meets people where they are. He draws the sick out of illness, the sinners out of sin.

And the Pharisees?

They're different. The sick know they're sick. The sinners know they sin. The Pharisees, though, don't realize that Jesus is to be approached on bended knee, not analyzed through the lens of the Law.

But note that Jesus doesn't condemn them. Instead, he answers them in the very terms that they profess to understand, of reason and proverbial wisdom and the Law. Some indeed do understand him, although we may have to wait until chapter 12 to find one, but most of those Mark mentions do not. The reason is simple: "Those who are well do not need a physician," and the sick who think well of themselves do not seek a physician.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

An exercise of reason

As you know, Steven Riddle is the Politest Working Man in Blogbusiness. From this, it follows that he has several annoying habits, starting with his unfailing courtesy. I would mail him an ill-tempered cat for him to kick in the privacy of his own home if I thought it would do any good, but I'm sure it would only lead to thoughtful posts on how contemplation of ill-tempered cats can illuminate the Thérèsan way of holiness.

Another irritant is his habit of scattering compliments and kind words like candied nuts at Christmas. Not a month goes by that he doesn't say how much he admires my habit of using many words to arrive at a position most people grasp instinctively. (Of course, a lot of them instinctively fling the position as far away as possible immediately upon grasping it.)

Still, I'm not sure what it means to be regarded as an admirable reasoner (although, lacking the humility of motherhood, I will allow that reasoning is a skill I try to develop and exercise). In a widely-quoted sentence, St. Thomas wrote that, without divine revelation, "the truth about God such as reason could discover would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors."

It's an odd skill whose finest practitioners take a long time to do anything with it, and even then make many errors using it. (Put that way, it's sort of like golf.) Personally, I'd say singing is a more admirable skill -- the difference being that most people who can't sing know it and don't try to sing too loudly in public.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

A thought of wealth

It occurs to me that discussions on the role of wealth in Christian discipleship move too quickly to Matthew 19:24 --

Jesus said to him, "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come follow me." --

without paying enough, or any, attention to the preceding verses:

"If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments."

... The young man said to him, "All of these I have observed."

Speaking for myself, I haven't done such a good job at keeping the commandments. Which means that, if I went and sold what I have and gave to the poor, I still wouldn't be perfect.

And that means, for me, worrying about whether I am properly keeping the spirit of Matthew 19:24 is decidedly premature. It's like worrying about what the Gospel reading of my festal Mass will be. [Note to future postulator: I've jotted down some suggestions in the back of my Knox Study Bible.]

Which leads to this final idea: If I keep asking myself whether I am sufficiently poor in spirit, I am not sufficiently poor in spirit. Scruples are a sign of someone who isn't yet serious about sanctity.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

One more look

What if we get rid of conjunctions and definite articles?

"Love sinner, hate sin."

Everyone is a sinner, and "hate sin" is, so to speak, the imprint of "Love God" on a fallen world.

So we can translate the disputed saying to, "Love God. Love everyone."

If that's what we mean, fundamentally, when we say, "Love the sinner but hate the sin," then I think we're on the right track, even if we fall short of perfection.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Still more on that old saw

Those who regard the saying, "Love the sinner but hate the sin," with distaste often do so because of the behavior of the people they hear invoking the saying.

But is there anything wrong with the saying itself? That is, is there better advice for how one should relate to the sinner and the sin?

Some alternate possibilities:

• Love the sinner and love the sin.
• Hate the sinner and hate the sin.
• Hate the sinner but love the sin.

I want to believe no one thinks these are improvements over the original. For that matter, I suspect pretty much everyone agrees "Love the sinner" is the right way to begin the saying.

So what about this:

Love the sinner and ignore the sin.

This, I think, is closer to what people who don't like the original saying are after. I'd also guess lots of social conservatives would say this is one of the principles by which modern society, to its detriment, is organized.

But is this really an argument for relativism? "Ignore the sins of others" is a piece of advice given throughout the life of the Church, by the great spiritual advisors after the Counter-Reformation, by the monks of the Middle Ages, by the Desert Fathers, even in a way by Christ Himself. When does the speck in your brother's eye become an object of concern for you?

Well, when you love your brother, of course. It's no sign of love to leave your brother in sin that could lead to his damnation.

But remember, love seeks the good of another, and so must take a path that leads to that good.

If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well," but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it?

Just so, if a brother or sister has no salvific grace, and one of you says to them, "Go stop sinning, be reconciled to God, and live forever," but you do not give them the necessities of the soul, what good is it? The purpose of admonishment isn't admonishment, but the perfection of the one admonished.

So what is the appropriate relation to the sins of others? I think it can only be based on the appropriate relation to others. There are some people whom we must admonish, and some we must counsel, and we must pray for all. I suspect, too, that there are far fewer people whose sins we should even notice than whose sins we do notice.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Love and sin

The suggestion has been made that people who say, "Love the sinner but hate the sin," are generally hypocrites who don't, in fact, love the sinner.

That may well be true. Loving the saint is hard enough -- at least if the saint is still alive, and especially if he lives with you -- that I'd expect many people to fall short of loving the sinner. And hypocrisy isn't a strange and unusual occurrence among humans. If the suggestion were that people who say, "Love the sinner but hate the sin," are generally cannibals, I'd be less open-minded about it.

But the further suggestion is also made that loving the sinner while hating the sin is impossible. After quoting 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, Kynn Bartlett writes:

How can you love the sinner and hate the wrong they do, if love keeps no record of wrongs? How can you love, without self-seeking, if you seek those whose beliefs differ to become just like you? How can you love, without being rude, if you declare the second-largest faith in the world to be the enemy of America? How can you love if you are angry, if you are proud, if you boast in having found the only true path to God? How can you love if you hate?

I think Kynn's difficulty comes from trying to use a description of love to look at the issue rather than a definition of love.

To love someone is to desire good for them. If you believe that being just like you is good for another person, then seeking to make them become just like you can be an act of love. If you believe that a certain habitual act will cause someone to be damned, then counseling them against that act can be an act of love.

Humans being as they are, an act motivated by love is often motivated by other, less lofty things as well. I teach my children honesty because being honest is good for them, but having honest children also makes my life easier. I desire the good of accepting the Catholic Faith for all my non-Catholic neighbors, but I don't dwell on the fact that if everyone in my neighborhood were Catholic we could have some really great block parties on major feasts.

But the presence of selfish motives does not imply the absence of love. In fallen man, an imperfect love is generally as good as you're going to find.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Another principle:

Beware of making things too easy for yourself.

When I get into discussions about what God really expects of me, or of each of us, I try to be suspicious of answers like, "Why, He expects exactly what I'm already doing, and not a thing more!"

So I'm prepared to agree with anyone who suggests that, historically and right now, Christians as a class haven't overburdened themselves with attempts to give of their want.

As I implied below, I don't believe all Christians are obligated to sell all that they have and give the money to the poor. Even at a time when all Christians were doing it, St. Peter seemed to suggest it wasn't necessary when he told Ananias that the land he sold, and the money he was paid, was his to control.

But of course, it's not enough to say my money is mine to control. It isn't even enough to say my money is mine to give in charity. Paragraph 2246 of the Catechism is a sequence of three astonishing quotations, all of which say the same thing:

• "Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs." -- St. John Chrysostom
• "The demands of justice must be satisfied first of all; that which is already due in justice is not to be offered as a gift of charity." -- Apostolicam Actuositatem
• "When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice." -- St. Gregory the Great

So before I get around to asking whether I am sufficiently charitable with my excess, I must ask whether I even manage to be just.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---

Silence equals what?

A comment-box discussion below turned to the subject of what the Gospels and the Church teach about material wealth -- with, of course, the immediate follow-up question of whether the Church teaches what the Gospels teach.

One part of the exchange went like this (my comments are in italics):

Where does Jesus ever refer to money in a positive way, other than in a couple of parables in which money is used as a metaphor for spirituality?

I don't know that the absence of positive references implies too much. I assume you're going for something like having lots of money is in itself incompatible with being a Christian. Suppose, though, that it weren't incompatible; what would Jesus have to say about having lots of money in that case?

I'd like to suppose that it weren't incompatible. But I thought that I wasn't to "suppose", but to take the words of the gospel, plus the specific instruction of the Church as my infallible guide to conduct?

Let me try to clarify what I was trying to point out with my "Suppose it weren't incompatible" line.

An argument from silence can be expressed as a syllogism:

1. If X, then Y.
2. ~Y.
3. Therefore ~X.

Here X is something like "P believes W" and Y something like "P says Z." An argument from silence is a valid argument, but it's only as sound as its premise, "If P believes W, then P says Z."

In the discussion on Christianity and wealth, an argument from silence is used to support the conclusion that "Jesus had a particular disdain for money and material possessions." This is the ~X of the above syllogism. The ~Y is "Jesus never refers to money in a positive way." So the first premise works out to be something like, "If Jesus didn't have a particular disdain for money and material possessions, then He would have referred to money in a positive way."

Of course, we're at a disadvantage with Jesus, because we only have those words and actions of His recorded in the New Testament for the benefit of our salvation. The premise should really be more like, "If Jesus didn't have a particular disdain for money and material possessions, then the Gospels would have recorded Him referring to money in a positive way."

The truth of this premise is not immediately apparent. The Gospels are not complete records of everything anyone could remember Jesus ever saying; on a natural level, it's possible that Jesus said positive things about money that never got written down.

But without even moving to the supernatural level, I invite you to think about what positive things Jesus might have said about money if He didn't have a particular disdain for it. "I like money"? "Being rich is good, as long as you're good to your neighbor"?

And to whom would He have said such things? To the poor, who weren't much troubled by the moral issues of wealth? To the rich, taught from infancy that wealth itself was a sign of God's favor? To us (we're now at the supernatural level), by nature an avaricious and self-justifying species?

My point is that it doesn't do to point to Matthew 19:21 and say, "If Jesus hadn't meant that all Christians must sell all they have and give it to the poor, He would have said so." There's no hint that anyone thought He did mean everyone had to sell everything, and He seems not to have been in the habit of warning people against errors no one was making.

The underlying principle here is something like this: If your argument is that thing one is true because thing two never happened, make sure it makes sense for thing two to happen if thing one is false.

Link | John da Fiesole
|

---