Sacred Heart

Understood in the light of the Scriptures, the term "Sacred Heart of Jesus" denotes the entire mystery of Christ, the totality of his being, and his person considered in its most intimate essential: Son of God, uncreated wisdom; infinite charity, principal of the salvation and sanctification of mankind. The "Sacred Heart" is Christ, the Word Incarnate, Savior, intrinsically containing, in the Spirit, an infinite divine-human love for the Father and for his brothers.  

Devotion to the Sacred Heart is a wonderful historical expression of the Church's piety for Christ, her Spouse and Lord: it calls for a fundamental attitude of conversion and reparation, of love and gratitude, apostolic commitment and dedication to Christ and his saving work.

Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy: Principles and Guidelines, (Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, 2001) nn. 166, 172

The Holy Family

Holy Family, C

The good news of Christmas continues to unfold; the mystery of the incarnation continues to reveal itself. Today we are given to contemplate Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, as a member of a family – the Holy Family – together with Mary and Joseph.

And we see that Jesus as a child in the Holy Family is part of the mystery of the incarnation. When we say that the Word of God assumed our human nature, this includes being a member of family, for it is part of our human nature to be members of a family, to be children of parents, parents of children, brothers and sisters. And given that the mystery of the incarnation in Jesus Christ not only reveals God but also our human nature as God sees it – and things only really exist in the way God sees them – perhaps this revelation of the Holy Family is important for us in our time, in which we see how forgetfulness of God quickly leads to much confusion – and the suffering that follows – about the nature and purpose of the family.

Eating in a Hurry

Yesterday there came around in the Office of Readings the instructions for the Passover in Exodus chapter 12.

This is how you are to eat it: with your loins girt, sandals on your feet and your staff in hand, you will eat it in a hurry. It is the LORD’s Passover. (Exodus 12:11)

The Passover is eaten like those in flight,  fleeing from the oppression and slavery of Egypt, reeling with God's plagues, into the long journey that will one day bring God's people into the Promised Land.

God's Dwelling

I think I have about six more posts on Amoris laetitia still to come, but for today a break from it.

Here in my Roman life I only preach on Sundays once in a while, but yesterday was one of those days. I focused on John 14:23.

Jesus said to his disciples: “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him."

This 'making of a dwelling' is the fruit of the Easter mystery and the whole good news of our faith.

Cantalamessa on Athanasius

Today we had Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa for the conventual Mass. He summed up St. Athanasius's contribution to the faith in three lines:

"The problem wasn't whether Jesus Christ was God; this everyone conceded. Athanasius's contribution was to say that Jesus Christ was not God 'in some sense' but in the strongest and fullest sense that 'God' has in every culture."

The Basics

For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. (Apostles Creed)

The first and foremost duty of all religious is to be the contemplation of divine things and assiduous union with God in prayer. (Can. 663 §1)

The rule and life of the Lesser Brothers is this: to observe the holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ by living in obedience, without anything of one’s own, and in chastity. (the Rule)

Priests, as co-workers with their bishops, have the primary duty of proclaiming the Gospel of God to all. (Vatican II, Decree on Ministry and Life of Priests)

The Holy Spirit

I got caught up in the readings on the way up to Pentecost, especially Jesus' prayer at the Last Supper as it comes to us in John.

"I made known to them your name, and I will make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." (John 17:26)

To me this is the heart of Christianity; that the love with which you have loved me may be in them. Our communion with the humanity of Jesus Christ draws us into the love of the Father and the Son. And this is what we call the Holy Spirit.

Jesus Christ reveals that 'God' is not a static 'supreme being' nor a philosopher's abstraction, but a relationship, a Lover and Beloved in the perfect unity of Love. That Love conceives the Beloved in time, within the creation, so that the human creature may also enjoy and be renovated by the creative relationship that is the Father and the Son. This historical event we call Jesus Christ.

As the Spirit conceives Jesus Christ through the loving consent of Mary, so the same Spirit conceives each Christian soul, made Christ-ian by communion with the humanity of Christ, empowered to confess that "Jesus is Lord." (1 Cor 12:3) Just as Christ is raised from the dead, so the Christian gains new life from the Spirit dwelling within, (Rom 8:11) enabling him or her to leave behind selfishness and fear and to "seek the things that are above." (Col 3:1)

The Spirit does all this precisely as the Love of the Father and the Son, drawing the person who consents into the very life of the Blessed Trinity, into the overflowingly creative love from which everything that has being has come.

Each of us is a unique and unrepeatable creation. Since, as we say, 'grace builds on nature,' this means that each of us has the potential of being the bearer of a unique and unrepeatable grace for the world. Indeed, God wills it. St. Paul says as much to the Corinthians: "To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good." (1 Cor 12:7) Let us then let go of anything that holds us back, and consent to be conceived as Christians, as members of the mystical Body of Christ, that we might become the particular grace God wills and delights for us to be for each other.

Spy Wednesday

Today it was my turn to preside at the community Mass. It was my turn on Wednesday of Holy Week last year as well, and I think this was the first time I presided the second time on a liturgical day in Italian.

In thinking about what to say--for I thought it only right to preach, it being Holy Week--I took the brief and simple approach that the brothers seem to appreciate, noting the parallel between the words of Judas in Matthew 26:15 and that of the disciples in general in verse 17. The disciple-traitor asks how much he can get from men, while the faithful disciple asks the Lord what he can do for him.

That was the best I could do in Italian, challenging myself to preach in Italian without notes for the first time. Four phrases. Perhaps I ought to be more advanced than that as I start to approach two years in Italy.

But here in my own language, I confess that there's more to it. Judas intrigues to hand Jesus over to his trial, condemnation, and Passion. The disciples ask where they can prepare for him to "eat the Passover." But what does it mean for Jesus to "eat the Passover" but to enter into the mystery he will reveal in parallel at the Last Supper and on the Cross, becoming himself the Passover Sacrifice such that, as John Chrysostom will remind us in the Office of Readings on Friday, his blood on our lips saves us from death just as the blood of the Passover sacrifice on the doorposts of the Hebrews' homes saved them from the Tenth Plague, the death of the first-born?

It all enters into the mystery of how God means to save us: the betrayal of Judas, without whose treason the Spirit is not handed over to us from the Cross, and the solicitude of the disciples, without whose devout preparation of the Passover we do not have the living memorial of the Passion that is the Eucharist.

Presentation of the Lord

Thus says the Lord God:
Lo, I am sending my messenger
to prepare the way before me;
And suddenly there will come to the temple
the LORD whom you seek,
And the messenger of the covenant whom you desire.
Yes, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts.
But who will endure the day of his coming?
And who can stand when he appears?
For he is like the refiner’s fire,
or like the fuller’s lye.
He will sit refining and purifying silver,
and he will purify the sons of Levi,
Refining them like gold or like silver
that they may offer due sacrifice to the LORD.
Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem
will please the LORD,
as in the days of old, as in years gone by.
(Malachi 3:1-4)

I love the feast of the Presentation of the Lord. It's one of those days that just seems so mystical. Falling on the cross-quarter between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, it recalls that the Light, born at Christmas and adored by the wise men, born away from any home, now arrives in his historical home, his Temple.

His Birth, Our Rebirth

(This is the little homily I gave to the remnant of the brethren this morning.)

"This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about...his mother Mary...was found with child through the Holy Spirit." (Mt 1:18)

The Church was born in the same way, when the same Spirit filled the house where the apostles were gathered after the Ascension.

And every Sunday, even every day, the Church--we as Church--are regenerated right here by the Eucharist.

Just as God opened the side of Adam to form Eve, mother of all the living, so with the water and blood flowing from the side of Jesus--opened by our violence--all those brought back to life come to be fed.

This is the good news of our faith; in Christ crucified, God has transformed the violence of sin into the source of salvation. We, reborn in the same Christ conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary, filled with the same Spirit, come to be washed and fed from the wounds of the Son become man. This is why we pray in today's Collect--the same prayer we pray three times a day in the Angelus--that the Passion and Cross of the Lord would bring us the glory of the Resurrection.

In these days, when we celebrate with joy the birth among us of the Son of God, we celebrate in the same way our regeneration in the Holy Spirit as the Church--the Body of Christ--as well as our daily and eucharistic rebirth, as John says, "not by water alone, but by water and blood." (1 Jn 5:6)

His conception in the womb of Mary is the dawn of our regeneration, his birth our rebirth.

Fleshly Religion vs. Christianity

There is an idea of religion that is preached by the flesh, and it says--among other things--that religion is a sort of binary project, a choice between being a saint or a sinner. 'Saint' in this case means somebody 'holy'--given an idea of holiness as something that is accomplished or possessed, a sort of spiritual capital analogous to social, cultural, or political capital. Being a 'sinner' in this scheme is then the opposite: being impure, dirty, unacceptable, without value.

The God of this fleshly religion is at best a sort of cosmic landlord, a deity that allows us to live in the fleshly security and comfort of something like a 'state of grace,' so long as we pay the dues of our successful efforts to be 'holy.' Those who succeed in this holiness may approach their god with the rotten satisfaction of being his favorites, the children he likes best, knowing that they are better than the lazy, unholy remainder of humanity whom they imagine their god despising as much as they do.

Christianity liberates us from the tyrannical binary of this fleshly religion, revealing that holiness isn't like that at all. For the choice given to the Christian isn't whether to be a 'saint' (that is, according to some pre-conceived idea of sanctity we have woven out of our vanities) or a 'sinner,' but a choice that clusters around what sort of sinner we want to be. We have all sinned, and we continue to be sinners. Our choice is whether to be the sort of sinner for whom the misery and suffering of sin hardens the heart and spirit, or the sort of person for whom the experience of sin becomes a path to humility and gentleness.

We live in a world broken by sin, a world scarred by all of us who have taken the easy path of allowing suffering and violence to reproduce in ourselves, responding to hurt with more hurt. And this continues to happen because this broken world is inhabited by all of us broken-hearted people, folks whose ability to make good choices has been injured by the legacy of brutality to which we are heirs.

But the good news is that Jesus Christ, in his Passion and Resurrection, has taken all of the misery and suffering that we insist on for ourselves, all that we are at worst, disregarding, torturing, and killing each other, and has given nothing back but blessing and new life. In this Mystery he has blazed a new path for the humanity he borrowed from us through the consent of our Blessed Mother. This is the path of letting our broken hearts break open instead of closed, of allowing our experience of ourselves as broken and sinners to teach us the humility and gentleness of the Kingdom of God rather than the bitterness and disregard of the world and its culture of death.

The One Mediator

Yesterday someone challenged me on Twitter with regard to devotion to the saints, asserting that such amounted to necromancy. In the course of things she or he adduced 1 Timothy 2:5,

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

Much in Many

Melito of Sardis is wonderful in the Office of Readings today:

Here he is who bore much in many; here is the one who was killed in Abel and in Isaac had his feet tied, who roamed, a foreigner, in Jacob, was sold in Joseph, exposed in Moses, had his throat slit in the lamb, was pursued in David, and in the prophets dishonored.

God's response to a broken and violent world is not to magically remove the suffering we have insisted upon for ourselves and each other--and thereby take away also the freedom which is his likeness--but to identify himself with it, that, if we consent to the salvation he is just dying to give us--literally--all the death we have purchased for ourselves might be destroyed from the inside by the divine humility joined to our humanity in the person of Jesus Christ.

notam facio excellentiam tuam

What a striking thing it is--in this curious moment in the pilgrimage of the Church Militant--to celebrate today the feast of the Chair of Peter, knowing that by this time next week that chair will be empty, sede vacante, as they say.

The Funny Feast of Christ the King

I woke up this morning thinking about today, the last Sunday of Ordinary Time, the solemnity of Christ the King. In a way that it hadn't before, it struck me as an odd day. I'll try to explain how.

The most powerful doctrines are the ones we hold as assumptions, moods, 'interpretive keys,' 'lenses,' and the like. The less they are explicitly taught and simply absorbed from one's surroundings, the more powerful and normative they become. One such doctrine I learned early on in my Catholic journey and theological education was a certain way of understanding the relationship between history and eschatology.

It was said that in the past there was too strong a focus on an other-worldly salvation, on an eschatology which was reduced to the four 'last things' (death, judgement, Heaven, hell). This absolved Christians of taking seriously enough the need to serve the salvation and well-being of people in the here and now. But since we modern Christians knew well that we would be judged according to our never-questioned reading of the Judgment scene in Matthew 25, our work was less in preaching, catechizing, 'making disciples of all nations,' but in serving the needs of the 'least of our brothers and sisters.' Our ancestors in the great modern flowering of apostolic religious life did this by finding new forms and building new institutions to serve the needs of people. For us it wasn't to do such things ourselves, but to try to make civil authorities do them instead. This was called the shift from 'charity' to 'justice.' It was one of the great dogmas of my Catholic upbringing.

Now maybe I make a caricature of these things and thus a straw man, but the theological insight behind them is solid; eschatology isn't about a far-away world that renders the current reality less important, but about a Kingdom that is transcendent, always and everywhere present, available, and inviting history into its beatitude.

To reiterate the the basic doctrine: we used to talk about other-worldly salvation, but now we are about peace and justice in the here and now. But here's the funny thing about Christ the King; as an observance, it has journeyed along the opposite trajectory.

The reformed liturgy presents the feast of Christ the King as a celebration of the rule of the cosmic Christ, the alpha and the omega. The day crowns the apocalyptic theme of the last days of Ordinary Time and makes us ready for the similarly apocalyptic first Sunday of Advent. The readings for the Mass and the Divine Office seem to emphasize Christ the King as a day to reflect on the end point of time, history, and God's purpose, without a lot of interference of the messiness of the 'here and now.'

It's funny because the feast of Christ the King used to be a lot more pointed toward the current moment, with much heavier political overtones. Here are a couple of quotes from the encyclical Quas primas of Pius XI, which established the observance:

In the first Encyclical Letter which We addressed at the beginning of Our Pontificate to the Bishops of the universal Church, [Ubi arcano Dei consilio] We referred to the chief causes of the difficulties under which mankind was laboring. And We remember saying that these manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations. (1) 

Nor is there any difference in this matter [i.e. the "empire of our Redeemer"] between the individual and the family or the State; for all men, whether collectively or individually, are under the dominion of Christ. In him is the salvation of the individual, in him is the salvation of society... If, therefore, the rulers of nations wish to preserve their authority, to promote and increase the prosperity of their countries, they will not neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to the rule of Christ. (18) 

When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony. (19)

That's 1925. Kind of shocking, isn't it? Somewhere along the forty years between Quas primas and Vatican II, the Church decided to make friends with the project of European modernity, and with it the idea of secular, pluralistic, modern democracy. And so, as we turned from other-worldly salvation to justice and peace, the funny feast of Christ the King had to take the opposite path and be changed from a politically-charged observance to a work of awe and wonder at the world to come. The politics of Christ the King went out of style, but since you can't just get rid of a feast day instituted by a Pope, the best thing you can do is to make it mystical.

But now, another fifty years on since Vatican II, perhaps the concerns of those who made such a fuss about 'modernism' are looking a little less stuffy and reactionary, as the happy friendship between the Church and modern liberal democracy starts to show some signs of stress.

Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat

The Veil

A part of the new mosaic reredos in the church here at the International College 'San Lorenzo da Brindisi' by Marko Ivan Rupnik, SJ.

Moses' veil protects him from seeing the the full glory of God, namely the incarnation, the motherhood of Mary in the burning bush.

There seem to be different feelings about the image. One the one hand, it brings forth the mystery of the incarnation in its foreshadowing and inchoate revelation in the old covenants; the burning yet unconsumed bush as a type of the virginity of Mary, the revelation of the divine name in its relation to the procession of the Word from the Father and the human conception of that same word by the Holy Spirit.

On the other hand, it brings up Paul's sometimes uncomfortable interpretation of the veil in 2 Corinthians 13, wherein the veil remains to this day, keeping the Jews from understanding the scripture when Moses is read.

To me, whatever one makes of it, the striking nature of the image invites contemplation of the Mystery who is the hope of our gaze, as we pray for our transformation "into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is the Spirit." (Cf. 2 Corinthians 3:18)

Prayer Before Mass

Most High and Glorious God, I am unworthy to approach you in any way. But my trust in your mercy softens my fear of your judgment.

From the very knowledge of my sins and my wretchedness, those things which render me unfit to offer you sacrifice, comes the awareness of my need for the healing and strength that flows from your Sacrament. And my consciousness of this dire need overcomes my fear of committing sacrilege by presuming to offer the Sacrifice.

For the Sacrifice I offer you isn't my own, but the Sacrifice of your Son, who, through the consent of our most Blessed Mother, has joined to his divinity my humanity, letting it be baptized in the Jordan, broken on the Cross, and raised into the new creation of the Resurrection.

By this Mass that I offer to you, and by the Holy Communion with which you nourish me, may this sick old man--already drowned in baptism--die more definitively, and may the new creature be born anew, again for the first time, ready to give his body, his self, for your people.

Apis Mater

This little candle nub used to be about two feet long.

It was one of the beeswax baptismal candles prepared for the clergy at the Easter Vigil of our cathedral here in Boston. One of the friars brought one back for me that night. I've been burning it as a prayer candle in my room. I was hoping that it would make it to Pentecost, but it wasn't to be.

Prayer consumes. Prayer immolates. In offering the Paschal Candle to God at the Easter Vigil, it was presented as "the work of bees and of your servants' hands." There's the logic of the incarnation; the Word of God having become flesh in Christ renders creation fit to be transformed through immolating sacrifice to God. My little Easter candle was consumed in its work as a symbol accompanying my moments of prayer. The substance of bread and wine, as both created matter and a product of human work, is immolated in the Sacrifice of the Mass so as to re-present the one Sacrifice such that we might receive its victory over sin and death into our bodies and our lives.

This is the paschal mystery. In his own high priestly sacrifice, Jesus Christ carries in himself a disfigured creation that it might be transfigured in his victory. Abandoning ourselves to the immolation of the same Sacrifice, we find ourselves reborn for the great Easter slogan: sursum sunt quaerite, "seek the things that are above."

The Ascent of the Holy Spirit

This is a little window at one of the places where I celebrate Mass regularly. I find it fascinating and like it very much.

The dove rises from the fire, a double image of the Holy Spirit. It's almost phoenix-like, isn't it? (Does one say, 'phoenician'?) Beneath the fire is the Holy Name 'IHS' and then the label: "Resurrection."

And yet, it's not an image of the Resurrection, but of the Holy Spirit. It reminds me that when we talk about, pray on, and find ourselves invited into the mysteries of the Resurrection, the accounts of the appearances of the Risen Lord to the apostolic generation, the various handings over of the Holy Spirit as they are recorded in the New Testament, it is actually quite difficult to know just how it is we are talking about different things.

The sacrifice of the Cross, the Lord's death and descent to the dead, the passing of his divine humanity into the new life beyond history but now erupted backwards into it, and the handing over of the Spirit who is the abiding presence of this Event among us and the animating principle of the Church, all of this is the one Paschal Mystery of Christ.

Theological Re-Flection

In the ferial gospel for today we hear St. Mark's version of Jesus' word on the lamp and the lampstand. Nobody lights a lamp to hide it away somewhere under a bed or a basket, but instead puts it on a stand, so that, as St. Matthew puts it, it may give light to all in the house.

This word is a good example of how we sometimes miss the richness of the scripture because we jump too quickly to a shallow moral sense. As soon as we hear the word, we go immediately into an examination of conscience, asking ourselves if we have hidden away the light of grace that God has given us, or whether we have sufficiently shared it with others. Before we know it, we miss the good news of the gospel because we are beating our breasts and saying Acts of Contrition.

Not that this is our fault; preachers too often do this on our behalf, as they throw in some vague and shallow encouragement to bolster the shallow exegesis.

Sitting with the word, we realize that is a word first of all about God. It is the eternal God who has lit a lamp from himself in the generation of the Son from the Father. In the incarnation of this only-begotten Word, the Holy Spirit conceives this Light on the lampstand of the humanity of Christ, from which all creation is bathed in divine light. From every Mass at which he is offered and from every tabernacle where he rests, the Light-lampstand who is the risen Christ shines out to anyone willing to become a little mirror, re-flecting and re-presenting the gospel light to others.

From here it is safer and more fruitful to turn to the moral demand of the word. The Light is already on the lampstand; it is only ours to join in its work of enlightening all in the house by cleaning the dust of distraction and the grime of sin from the little mirror that is our soul.