Pornography, Confession, and Amendment of Life

Recently I saw online a video of a priest preaching about folks who go to confession over and over with the same sin—in this case, pornography—and how they may be 'abusing' God's mercy.

Certainly pornography is a serious issue. Any priest who hears confessions knows that it has become a serious public health crisis. It has the potential to deform imaginations and consciences and to weaken and even destroy real relationships.

And it’s true enough, to go to confession without any contrition or willingness to ‘amend my life’ (as we say in a common version of the Act of Contrition), would be something sacrilegious and a sin of presumption on God’s mercy.

But is that what is going on when people come to confession over and over, especially in the case of this particular problem? In my estimation, no. Or at least it must be rare. I think what is usually the case is that someone wants to make a change, to find freedom from the emptiness and ennui of this problem, but doesn’t know how to begin to succeed.

They want to make amendment of life, but fail. Why?

Priestly Vocations Ramble/Rant

Me: Have any sons?
Angry lady: Yes
Me: Did you ever suggest priesthood?
AL: No!
Me: That's why there aren't more Mass intentions to schedule

— Charles, OFM Cap. (@FrCharles) November 17, 2016

That tweet is from the other day. Given responses, it seems to have hit some particular nail on the head. In thinking about it I decided it needed some follow-up for fairness sake.

Rant Follow Up

I received a couple of bits of salutary feedback on yesterday's post; I won't say 'fraternal correction,' just fraternal thoughts.

Though we can't always agree with or support certain choices of our brothers and sisters in religious life--or in the faith, for that matter--we can try to understand them and of course we are commanded by the Lord to love them. Probably just as many us around my age find some of the choices of our fathers and mothers in religious life hard to understand, so probably they found their spiritual forebears difficult as well. And probably when I get even older there will be younger friars who think I'm crazy and that my priorities are out of order.

To one degree or another, we are all conditioned by our experience and our historical moment in the world and in the Church as she exists in time (the Church Militant, if the traditional term is still retrievable), and this can have a great effect on the particular things we care about as well as our blind spots. I know well enough that there are aspects of the religious life at which I don't excel because of my deficits and the injuries of my own story.

I am proud of my resistance to the abuse of the liturgy and my unwillingness to participate in it. Once or twice I have had the happy occasion to suffer humiliation for it. But this doesn't mean I don't love or perhaps very much respect my brother. I understand that our choices arise in part from the complex places we come from. And I am grateful for all the ways I am sure that the brothers make similar allowances for me in the areas where my religious life is deficient and less than coherent.

(Franciscan) Liturgical Abuse Rant

Recently I've had some occasions to think about liturgical abuse.

Some of it, I think, is just pride and vainglory on the part of clergy. I need to do things my way. I need to get my theological or, horribile dictu, political tagline or slogan into the Mass, etc. But like most expressions of clerical vainglory and pride, these are often more laughable than dangerous.

But there's another form of liturgical abuse I've encountered in my Catholic life, in certain religious houses, schools, and parishes. It's the liturgical abuse that derives from the intuition that the liturgy as the Church presents it does not properly express who we are as a community, and therefore has to be adjusted or changed to fit our needs and identity.

Perhaps my experience of life as a Franciscan friar provides an example.

Prayer Ramble Lament for the World

In these days I have been mourning with the world. So many attacks, so many murders.

When I first came to Rome you could walk right into three out of the four major basilicas in Rome: the Lateran, St. Mary Major, and St. Paul's. And I did so, pretty often. Since the attacks in Paris last year, you have to go through security. It's a reminder of the world we live in and those who have been murdered in it.

How do I pray? What is my lament to God?

Amoris laetitia: Priestly Formation

Seminarians should receive a more extensive interdisciplinary, and not merely doctrinal, formation in the areas of engagement and marriage. Their training does not always allow them to explore their own psychological and affective background and experiences. Some come from troubled families, with absent parents and a lack of emotional stability. There is a need to ensure that the formation process can enable them to attain the maturity and psychological balance needed for their future ministry. Family bonds are essential for reinforcing healthy self-esteem. (203)

Arriving at this paragraph in Amoris laetitia made me happy.

Priests don't fall out of the sky fully formed. They are people who have a background and a family of origin just like the rest of humanity. And as the Pope notes, these backgrounds--like everybody else's--can have their troubles and dysfunctions.

This isn't a bad thing. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to transform suffering and alienation into compassion; this is one of the ways that the pattern of the Lord's paschal mystery of his passion, death, and resurrection comes to take form in our lives. And so it makes sense that many vocations to service, the priesthood included, can have roots in situations of difficulty and personal suffering.

Laudato Si': My Ranty Examination of Conscience

Here is the part of Laudato si' which has hit me the hardest:

This [lack of "awareness of problems which especially affect the excluded"] is due partly to the fact that many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population. (49)

Is this me? Is this us as religious? Is my 'holy poverty' as a religious such that it shields me from contact with the poor? Do I 'live and reason'--and pray--from a 'comfortable position' and live 'a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world's population'?

Sometimes I'm afraid I have to say yes. And if I have to say yes, my Franciscan vocation, as I am living it now, has become meaningless.

It's not supposed to be that way. A few quotes from our Capuchin Constitutions:

Poverty, chosen in order to follow Christ, makes us sharers in his filial relation towards the Father and in his state as brother and servant in the midst of people, and leads us to solidarity with the littlest of this world. (61,2) 

Those friars are to be praised who in particular situations, living with the poor and sharing in their conditions and aspirations, encourage them in social and cultural progress and in the hope of eternal goods. (63,2) 

Called the gospel path of poverty, let us accustom ourselves to suffering privations after the example of Christ and the memory of St. Francis, who wanted thus to be poor and to entrust himself, having abandoned all things and free from bonds of the heart, to the Father who cares for us. (77,1) 

And let us not be numbered among those false poor, who love to be poor on the condition that they lack nothing. (77,2)

Do I put myself in a place where I share the aspirations of the poor? Do I have to suffer any privations for the love of Christ and his poor? Do I love to be poor in such a way as to lack nothing? Laudato si' has brought me the torment of these questions. But I have to trust it as a good, a graced torment.

The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty. (Luke 1:53) I pray that line every evening in Our Lady's Magnificat. And I worry that I am the rich, not the hungry. And if so, how do I dare to hope for any grace from God?

In one of the presentations this past week at the New Provincials' Workshop, one of our General Councilors spoke on the embourgeoisement of religious obedience. I will agree to do this or that, I will take up this or that life, so long as it serves my goals of self-realization, of amassing my own moral capital within the organization, etc.

Has religious life as I have found it served to help me to become one of God's poor or has it served my embourgeoisement? I worry that the answer may be the latter.

So what do I do? I pray. I pray you Lord, for the courage to go where my consecration leads me. I pray for the grace of giving you permission to do what you have to do to make me the poor man I have professed to be before you, the Church, and the world. 

The Redefinition of Marriage

I've started versions of this post a couple times. I guess it's part rant, part examination of conscience, and part lament for the trials that await the Catholic faith in our time.

I remember one of the catechetical books I was given when I was taking 'convert instructions.' I don't remember what it was called but I do remember that it was blue. What I remember most from the content was the section on the Church's teaching on artificial contraception and how it had an extra little paragraph that basically apologized for the teaching.

For the world, sexual relationships and openness to the generation of new life are two different things. They are separate and separable. That's why something like same-sex marriage is a no-brainer for the world, and anyone who might be against it can only seem like a bigot. For the world, to use the terms of Humane vitae, the unitive and procreative aspects of sex are readily separable. Sex is something between two people, graced and beautiful, but without any necessary connection to the gift of procreation.

From what I understand--it was before my time--the pastors of the Church didn't do a very good job standing up for Humane vitae. And I put myself with them, in a sense. I've never preached a sermon on artificial contraception. In the context of marriage preparation, did I ever challenge a couple on their cohabitation? No. As a priest, I too have acquiesced to the redefinition of sexuality, the so-called sexual revolution.

When the Church didn't stand up for Humane vitae, that's when sexuality was redefined, not now with same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage is only possible as an idea given the redefinition of marriage afforded by artificial contraception, that is the redefinition that takes the separation of the unitive and procreative graces as a given.

This is why, and I hate to say it, I don't have much pity for the leaders of our Church on these questions; for it seems to me that they already made the decision to tolerate the redefinition of sexuality a generation and a half ago.

Activism and Sobriety in Rome

Next month I will mark three years in Rome. That's half of my assignment, at least as it stands right now on paper. And after these almost three years, I think I may have arrived at my first fully-formed criticism of 'Rome.'

This past week I spent a couple of days interpreting between Italian and English for a small international meeting. The brothers were about preparing a working document for a larger international meeting on the way. Of course the document is written in Italian, and will then have to be translated into the other languages of the participants.

There was a little tension in the meeting regarding the translation of the document from Italian to English. For example, it was said, probably rightly, that the Italian terms attivismo and sobrietà cannot be correctly rendered into English by their obvious cognates, activism and sobriety, respectively, but rather other words that approximate the Italian meanings must be chosen. Approximate. Every translation is a betrayal, of course. Omnis traductor traditor and all that.

All of which got me thinking. If every translation is a betrayal to one degree or another, as indeed they are, and it is just such misunderstandings and failures in communication that lead people to reject documents that come from 'Rome,' why would a Roman institution (like the General Curia of the Friars Minor Capuchin, for example) insist on using as its base language a language that is very small in terms of general international use and increasingly small in the international use of the Church, namely Italian, and thereby multiply such opportunities for misunderstanding and miscommunication in translation? In other words, according to Wikipedia for example, Italian is the twenty-fifth most spoken language in the world. Is it thus the best choice for the base language of documents for an international organization?

In this I see what must have been the powerful utility of Latin. Why not make Latin the base, working language again? Why shouldn't the international working language be a challenge that unites instead of a small property that insists upon the pitfalls of translation? Yes, translation would still have to be made back at home. But at least the document in the 'typical edition' would be in a language that was nobody's property in particular.

I remember one eminent friar saying that back when international meetings themselves were conducted in Latin, they took much less time, because friars only said what they really needed to say. Everyone likes shorter meetings. And they're cheaper too.

And if Latin is too radical a proposition, sending religious and priests as it does into anaphylaxis, why not make English the base, working language, as many other international organizations have done? At least then the 'typical edition' of documents would be in the single largest language group with regard to the constituency.

All of this is why, when I'm General Minister (may God forbid it!), the working language of the General Curia will be English and the liturgical language will be Latin, which is after all the ordinary language of the liturgy anyway (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 36.1) That way, respectively, the inevitable misunderstandings in communication are minimized, and the language of the liturgy becomes nobody's property, but a challenge that can be shared by all.

Novelties Ironic and Blessed

At this point in my little journey, going on twenty-one years since I was baptized according to the rite of the Roman Church, I find myself living in Rome herself. And how funny Rome seems today as the brothers and I celebrate a liturgical day unknown to our mothers and fathers in faith, namely the Thursday of the Sixth Week of Easter.

Black Smoke Rant

Maybe it's a random thing to rant about, but I was disappointed with the first black smoke of the Conclave last night. Not that I expected it to be anything but black, but it just seemed to be a little over the top in its volume and blackness, billowing away long after everyone had gotten the point.

Reading 'The Infancy Narratives'

I've been reading Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives on the Sundays of Advent and finished it this morning. The first thing I would say about it is that the reader does well to take seriously what the author says about the nature of the book, that it "is not a third volume, but a kind of small 'antechamber' to the two earlier volumes." It's a sweet little book of just a few chapters, but shot through with the sort of reflection that reveals a real devotion to the events recorded by Matthew and Luke. Particularly touching in this sense is the thoughtful section on the Virgin Birth:

It seems natural to me that only after Mary's death could the mystery be made public and pass into the shared patrimony of early Christianity. At that point it could find its way into the evolving complex of Christological doctrine and be linked to the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God--yet not in the manner of a story crafted from an idea, an idea reformulated as a fact, but vice versa: the event itself, a fact that was now in the public domain, became the object of reflection--understanding was sought. The overall picture of Jesus Christ shed light upon the event, and conversely, through that event, the divine logic was more deeply grasped. The mystery of his origin illuminated what came later, and conversely the developed form of Christological faith helped to make sense of that origin. Thus did Christology develop.

Another section that makes a similar point in a more general way:

The two chapters of Matthew's Gospel devoted to the infancy narratives are not a meditation presented under the guise of stories, but the converse: Matthew is recounting real history, theologically thought and interpreted, and thus he helps us to understand the mystery of Jesus more deeply.

How refreshing that is for us who absorbed so many brittle doctrines about history and fact and meaning and God--e.g. 'yes, it's just a myth' or 'yes, it's just a symbol,' 'but that means it's more true!' or 'yes, the Bible is all true, and some of it really happened'--all of these doctrines that when they are heard by unbelievers convince them more deeply that we religious people are self-deluded and full of nonsense. More and more I tend to consign such teaching to the large category of things that seemed liberating to our parents in the faith but have not delivered on such hope.

It is said by some that the Church needs to be updated according to the times, in order to be more relevant, more comprehensible, and set free from her doctrines that are offensive to the cherished ideas of contemporary society. But what they forget is that the world doesn't hate the Church because of her teachings; the world hates the Church because it hated Jesus Christ first. And those are his words, not mine.

And why should Benedict's assertions seem strange? Do we not in just the same way work out our spiritual understanding of ourselves? It is a historical fact that in the early afternoon on August 29, 1992, I walked up and out of the basement of Freeman dormitory and down the street to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Quaker Hill, Connecticut, where a deacon of the Roman Catholic Church poured some water on me and invoked the Blessed Trinity. It really took place. You can go to the church and find a historical record of it in their office. But to know and understand what happened that day requires some theological reflection. That's how our spiritual lives work, history coming to be understood in light of God's eternity. Why should the Sacred Scriptures be any different?

I also enjoyed a little jab at academic theology delivered by the old professor. He is discussing the beginning of Matthew 2, in which Herod, following up on the inquiry of Magi, asks the chief priests and the scribes where the Messiah is to be born. Despite giving a learned and complete answer, Benedict notes that this knowledge does not prompt them to actually do anything:

The answer given by the chief priests and scribes to the wise men's question has a thoroughly practical geographical content, which helps the Magi on their way. Yet it is not only a geographical, but also a theological interpretation of the place and the event. That Herod would draw the obvious conclusion is understandable. Yet it is remarkable that his Scripture experts do not feel prompted to take any practical steps as a result. Does this, perhaps, furnish us with the image of a theology that exhausts itself in academic disputes?

Vocation and Pathology

From time to time I'll see something ranting against celibacy, saying that it's a pathological choice or at least can't be healthy, etc. It seems to me that these usually fall into the kind of black and white thinking that doesn't take seriously the work of grace.

Sure, some people take up the celibacy of religious life or the priesthood for imperfect reasons, and even from pathology. And, of course, some celibacies end in disaster and suffering not only for the would-be celibate, but also for others, as we know all too well in our time. In religious life one has the joy of seeing old celibates for whom the charism has worked as advertised, having broken them open to a chaste and non-exclusive love for the world which reflects the love of God in its own particular way. But one also gets to see the celibacies that have gone wrong, leaving celibates dried up in an affective dead-end.

One can say the same things, mutatis mutandis, of marriage, or of any vocation we enter into with every good intention, but as the wheat and weeds of our blessed and broken selves.

The danger is to think that reasons and motivations are all good or all bad. We are mysterious messes, made of the goodness in whose image we are created together with the festering and rotten injuries left by the effects of sin. Can God call us to the vocation he gives us for our salvation--and for our chance to participate in his salvation of the world--as this total person? In other words, can God call us to our vocation with both our good reasons and bad for our attraction to the choice, with both our sanctity and our pathology at work? Yes. It's called redemption.

When it works, when someone succeeds in surrendering to this work of salvation, it's a truly blessed and amazing thing. Pathologies are flipped, turned inside-out--pick your metaphor--by the opportunities for grace and growth that the vocation brings and become gifts given for the encouragement of others and their salvation. Just because it sometimes doesn't work when we don't succeed in surrendering to grace, just because sometimes pathology swallows up what would have been sanctity and uses it for its own rotten and meaningless ends, that doesn't make it the fault of the vocation.

Thinking Inside The Box

To have an integrity as a religious person, one must be engaged in a continual struggle against the tendency of religion to domesticate God. Part of giving oneself to a life in community is the willingness to take up the sacrifice and difficulty of doing this not just against the background of one's own distraction and sin, but the cocktail of the collective distraction and sin of a group of Christians.

As if that weren't enough metaphors for one day, in reflecting on this I've been playing with another one: the box.

Religion is like a box into which we are supposed to put ourselves. It is a set of boundaries and definitions, practices and behaviors revealed by the Holy Spirit and built up by sacred tradition. Placing ourselves in this box helps us to hold on to the salvation we have received by providing practices that keep us mindful of the economies of grace around us and of the ways God wills us to be useful for the salvation of others. The boundaries and limits of the box help us to avoid the errors and confusions that lead us back to our former way of life, that we may be daily delivered from the misery of the vain way of life bequeathed to us by the legacy of brutality that is original sin, the vana conversatione a patribus tradita. (1 Peter 1:18. I love that phrase; it's one my favorite Easter slogans.)

Things turn around all too easily, however. Religion becomes not the box into which we put ourselves for our safety and in order to remain attentive to God, but the box into which we put God in order to domesticate him and protect ourselves from him. We can  use religion to make God into a safe and intelligible commodity, perhaps a nice resource that we as religious people are privileged to possess and even share with others (aren't we nice!) or a bean-counting judge who is happy with us and unhappy with everyone else. Or perhaps he is unhappy with us too! That's something one notices a lot as a confessor; how easily an idea of God is instrumentalized by human self-hate. Or we think that because we are religious people, we know exactly what God wants and what is expected of us. Perhaps this makes us into Pharisees, but sometimes it also makes us domesticate God by making him the nice and 'pastoral' mascot of our relativism, protecting ourselves from the discomfort and political incorrectness of ever having to say that anybody else is wrong or that their behavior is unacceptable.

The world and the flesh, in their infantile arrogance, want a God who can be safely stored and who will not challenge their rule over our lives. Of course the world and the flesh are wily; they will help us to think that we are being 'stretched' and 'challenged' even when we are growing ever more safe and comfortable with ourselves and the 'God' we have put in a pretty box.

Let us put ourselves in the box instead, the box of true religion that is God's means of freeing us for the salvation of our brothers and sisters.

Ranty Ramble on the CDF to the LCWR

Reading the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's "doctrinal assessment" of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, I found it to be an encouraging document. Many of the concerns it notes are issues that have been troubling to me at times in my own experience of religious life: a "diminution of the fundamental Christological center," a sense of moving beyond the Church or even Jesus Christ, and a presumption of dissent from the Church's teachings on the sacraments and sexuality.

When I was first in religious life I found such things terribly confusing. In my innocence I had presumed that Catholic teaching would be a given in Catholic religious life. I learned, with much anguished confusion, that this wasn't always the case. My confusion was so bad that it contributed to my having to leave my first entrance to religious life after a year and a half.

After that, I confess that I gave in a little bit. My first experiences of religious life had taught me to disregard my instincts somewhat. In my second attempt at religious life, I think I sometimes conformed to the madness in order to have this vocation that I wanted. In studying for ordination, I'm sure I many times said and wrote the politically correct thing instead of the right thing. When we were made daily to recite texts from a feminist prayer book, I probably should have been praying Morning and Evening Prayer from some proper edition of the Liturgy of the Hours on my own, but I wasn't.

It's taken me a while to recover my senses again, but I think I have, more or less, and I'm grateful to God and to many who have given me good example.

But as we are grateful for a document such as this, and pray for our bishops in such difficult and delicate ministries, we have to be very careful. In praying through all this a scene from the past came into my heart. It was during the days when I was discerning my return to religious life. I had gone to spend time in the house of temporary vows of a certain community. On the same day I arrived to hang out and pray and observe for a few days, the brothers in formation were just returning from some workshop. That evening at recreation their fun was the unmerciful mocking of the woman who had been the presenter. The guy who was the ringleader in this, utterly self-righteous in his orthodoxy, kept repeating with derision how this presenter described herself. I can't remember the whole thing, but I do remember that it ended with 'ecofeminist process theologian.' Pompous, yes, but the way these guys were mocking this person, it really turned me off.

The devil is very happy for us to be right, so long as he can use our rightness for his own ends. And many times we fail to take seriously how good he is at doing just that.

I write this post from a room in a building that used to be a convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph. They taught in the building across the street. It used to be a school, but now the school is closed and the building is mostly empty and unused. The sisters who prayed and slept in this room where I sit today probably worked harder for those kids than I have ever worked for anything. They were the force of one of the most glorious and successful movements of social uplift that human civilization has ever seen, the Catholic school system in the growing United States.

As a religious, am I part of anything that could compare with that?

Or am I, and mainstream male religious life in general, more concerned with my comfort, security, and lifestyle expectations than with the mission of Jesus Christ? May that thought pierce my conscience each time I find myself watching TV with a beer and box of Cheez-Its in the room where sisters would have labored at laundry either before or after a long day of teaching and service.

Therefore, and on this day when we celebrate the anniversary of the election of our holy father Benedict XVI, let us be grateful for a Church that is recovering her bearings in the truth of her faith, but let us also let God heal us from the lukewarmness and decadence that keeps us from letting God make something of it.

Peter's Example and Unregenerate Pastoral Care

(Another rant today, I guess. I must have been saving them up inside.)

St. Peter is one of my favorite players in the telling of the paschal triduum. In him we witness a remarkable transformation; in the reading of St. John's Passion on Friday, Peter denies Jesus three times. Then, at the Mass of Easter Sunday, we hear the bold confession and speech he makes in the house of Cornelius. This post-Resurrection Peter is quite a different character than the fearful and bumbling Peter who was a disciple of Jesus in his historical life; now we see Peter the Apostle, the bold preacher on whom the apostolic ministry of unity is founded, and who will soon enough go to his own martyrdom.

But here's the funny thing: in many homilies I've heard and spiritual advices I've been given along the way, it's not the latter Peter who is adduced as an encouragement, but the former.

For sure, the dullness and 'not getting it' of the disciples in the gospels is always a helpful reflection; it's easy enough for us to be like that too, just as it is very easy to slip into the misplaced religiosity of the scribes and Pharisees as the gospels describe it. We must always remember, and the Scriptures constantly needle and encourage us in this regard, that it's easy enough to call yourself a Christian, or to do religious stuff, without actually being a hearer and disciple of the living God.

On the other hand, I find it increasingly sad and annoying when I hear the example of the pre-Resurrection disciples adduced as an excuse for bumbling and mediocrity. Imagine a scene: I confess to some teacher or elder my struggles against the world, the flesh, and the devil, and ask how I might make progress in holiness and faithfulness to God. And so I am told: 'Don't be so hard on yourself. Look at Peter. He struggled to understand, he didn't always get it, and he even denied Jesus three times.' To that I want to say, 'Yes, let's look at Peter; he fearlessly preached that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ constituted him as the Risen Lord and Judge of all, and he went humbly to his own crucifixion.'

Are we not people who live in these last days inaugurated by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ? Should not our models and examples be the disciples in their transformation by that same Resurrection, rather than their confusion and dullness before they understood?

The Unprecious Blood

Recently I went to a church to offer a Mass. That's the itinerant life of the 'help out,' of the mercenary priest. I arrived during the communion procession of the Mass scheduled before the one I was to celebrate. I entered by a side door to the sacristy. While I was sitting there saying my prayers, a minister of Holy Communion rushed in. He showed me an empty cup, and asked me if there was any way I could get him a "refill." Now usually in situations of this type I'm able to deflect my annoyance with some kind of humorous recollection of the wine crisis at the wedding at Cana, but this time, as I realized that the man thought I would know where the wine was kept so that he could have more for his cup, all I could manage--in my horror--was, "That's not how it works."

Several times over the course of my life in the sacred ministry I have had experiences with certain ministers of Holy Communion that reveal that they do not understand that the consecrated sacred species is a different thing than the altar breads and wine in the sacristy. I have caught well-meaning folks trying to top off pyxes and ciboria of the Blessed Sacrament from the supply of altar breads in the sacristy. When confronted, almost all of them acted perplexed at my concern.

I guess it's a failure of catechesis and formation. But underneath I always ask, why bother then? If the Eucharist isn't really the Body and Blood of Christ, what's the point? If it's just an idea, I'm staying home. I can have ideas by myself without all this hassle, thank you very much. I need the Church because that's where the sacraments are. And if the Lord isn't risen into the sacraments and into his sacramentally renovated people, what's the big deal about the Resurrection? Then it's only some optimistic miracle from history. But I don't need the Church for optimism either. If all we preach is optimism and activism, then it's only a testament to people's good sense that they decide the Church is irrelevant.

Our generalized irreverence for our Lord's Presence as the sacred species exists in a mutually reinforcing relationship with the erosion of our assent to the truth of this teaching. The more irreverent we are the more we will take Him lightly in our minds, but the more reverent we try to behave, the easier it will be to believe.

I don't mean to single out extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion in this rant; many that I have worked with put us ordinary ministers to shame by their reverence and the gravity with which they take their ministry. We priests are sometimes just as guilty, if not more, by the casual way we handle the Body and Blood of Christ. In fact, I include myself in the accusations of this rant. On Holy Saturday morning I was asked if I would restore the Blessed Sacrament to the tabernacle that night. I intended to do so when I returned home from the Easter Vigil at the Poor Clare monastery. But, after the Mass, having broken the fast with one of the brothers with the traditional Chinese food and beer and then going to sleep, dutifully not saying Night Prayer, I totally forgot. Having just preached to the nuns about our Lord risen into the Eucharist and ourselves as his body, I totally forgot to restore him to his tabernacle after his Friday and Saturday of exiled repose.

May God grant me the grace to repent of my impiety and irreverence before I face him as my beloved Judge. And may I know how to help others recover from our confusion, irreverence, and ignorance. Amen.

Theological Study and Crises of Faith

The study of theology often produces crises of faith. In a certain sense, this is what it is supposed to do. True knowledge tends to upset all the subtle ways that we have made gods in our own image. The presence of the living God, especially as he subsists in the rational creature by our knowledge of him, always means the smashing of idols and the burning of pagan sanctuaries. Therefore, just as it is a tragic error to cling to forms of prayer that give us sensible consolation when the Spirit is inviting our hearts into the 'uninteresting wilderness' of contemplation, so it is a fatal error to cling to the way we have always understood the propositions of a catechism or manual as a way to fend off the crises of faith induced by theological study.


Births are hard and dangerous and painful. That's one of the basic effects of original sin. And so it is when God wishes to bring to birth deeper understandings and purer acts of faith in the minds of students. We have to consent to the vertigo and often to the letting go of ideas we didn't even know we cherished so much.


All that being said, not every crisis of faith occasioned by theological study is salutary. Some are pointless, and some are even evil. For these, we must take the Lord's advice and be careful what we hear.


Pay close attention to your teachers. Sometimes teachers of theology can be angry at the Church or at God. This doesn't mean that one can't learn from them, but the student must be careful. Anger and bitterness have their own proper contagion. Always pay attention to what's at stake in the doctrine you are being given. More than anything else, reject any idea of a God that would put an earnest soul in an impossible existential dilemma and thereby assure its misery.

Also, be very careful of any teacher of theology who advocates sin either by word or public example. All of our efforts to think clearly are hampered and darkened by the injuries of sin within us. Even if we are living a prayerful, sacramental life in an honest and ruthless effort to eliminate sin and its occasions in our lives, this will be still be the case to one degree or another. This is especially true in theology. As Augustine says at the beginning of the De Trinitate, nowhere is the work more laborious or a mistake more dangerous than in theology. If someone encourages sin, he has no reasonable hope of not being confused.


Finally, examine carefully the doctrine you are taught. This is not untrusting suspicion; a true teacher will rejoice to have his students do so. If what you are taught does not eventually--and the adverb is critical--help you to make a fuller intellectual assent to the truths of the faith and a more complete surrender to God, you may reject it. If the 'theology' you are given is finally reducible to political philosophy, sociology, psychology, or anthropology, or has no Christian specificity, you also ought to reject it. It's a 'post-Christian' world out there, and to our shame, our so-called theological reflection is sometimes complicit with it.


Above all, pray as honestly and devoutly as you can. That's the most important thing.

Ignoratio Christi Est

Often when I read the Church Fathers or the great medieval theologians I can't help but notice how immersed they were in the Sacred Scriptures. The vocabulary, the theological imaginations therein, these writers seem to just swim in it.

Why am I not like that?

I think about it sometimes. Of course it's primarily my own fault and my own failure to let myself be absorbed by the Bible instead of clinging to the noise and nonsense of the world.

But I've come to think that we in our time are also subject to a set of mistakes and errors that keep us from living as deeply in the Scriptures as we could.

First, for some crazy reason that I've never understood, we have decided that all Christian doctrine is relative while certain other systems of doctrine are raised to an unassailable, dogmatic status. There are certain forms of psychology, for instance, and the anthropology and teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous, to take two common examples. Questioning these is often far more 'heretical' than leaning toward a genuine heresy. I imagine that most religious could name the seven sacraments. But I wouldn't be surprised to find out that more could list the Twelve Steps than could name the Ten Commandments, and I would be willing to bet on it for the mysteries of the rosary or the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Now I don't mean to say anything against the recovery movement itself, which has done a lot of good for a lot of people, but just to say that we religious are often confused and uncritical about what are and what ought to be the axiomatic foundations of our thinking and practice.

Second, I think our poor practices of liturgy contribute to the poverty of our relationship to the Scriptures. Since we have accepted as a norm, for example, the option of  substituting the ordinary texts of the Mass with songs and hymns, we receive the scriptural language and imagination of the Mass in a much more processed and derivative way in this regard than we would if we just sang the proper chants. That's really the lovely thing about chant on the theological level; the music conforms itself to the actual words of Scripture. In the offerings of the big music publishers, it's often more like the other way around; the scriptural theme conforms to the music.

Our practice of the Divine Office, too, represents certain missed opportunities to embed ourselves in the Sacred Scriptures. The Liturgy of the Hours is more or less made out of Scripture and provides an opportunity to return our hearts and imaginations to them five times each day. Unfortunately, I don't think we say our prayers. I know that I miss them sometimes, in my distraction and to my shame. This is bad enough for us as religious, but even worse for us who are clerics who have publicly promised the people of God that the Liturgy of the Hours would be celebrated fully and daily in our individual persons. In my own institute, because of our lukewarmness but also for good reasons regarding our ministries and good things we need to be about, we tend to celebrate in common the minimum of the Hours that our Constitutions demand. This leaves the rest to be prayed in private. Unfortunately, I don't think we do it. As one of my confreres once said, the 'saddest sound in religious life' comes from chunks of breviary pages being flipped forward in the chapel, not having been looked at it since the last time we prayed in common. Now I also think that some of this problem comes from an uncriticized and impoverished sense of liturgy as a community activity rather than the worship of God, but that's another rant. Today I only wish to rant about how we rob ourselves of the power of the Word by our failure to say our prayers.

Therefore, let's repent of all these errors. Let's say our prayers, sing the Mass instead of substituting something else, and recover the Sacred Scriptures as the true foundation of our thinking about ourselves, our spiritualities, and the world.

Credo

O.k.; this is a little ranty. I apologize in advance.

At one of the places where I celebrate Mass these days, the folks don't like the new translation of the Creed, in particular how one now says 'I believe' where it used to be 'We believe.'

I, on the other hand, am grateful for it, not just because it's a more proper translation, but also because I feel like I've been subjected to so many liturgically abusive first-person plurals over the years. Maybe that's a bad reason, I don't know.

In the most direct case, how many times have I been at Mass, only to begin saying the Creed with 'We believe,' only to hear others around me changing other parts, leaving things out, and adding other things in? In that case I'm grateful that others are now saying 'I believe.' Their version of the Creed--because they know better than constant, conciliar tradition--can be their own, and I don't have to be implicated in it.

In the broader sense, though, so many times have I been at a Mass and had the presider say things 'We gather for...' or 'We break the bread for...' or something like that. Often I felt like speaking up and saying, 'I don't.' If you're going to make up your own Mass and need it to be about you, leave me out of your 'we' thank you very much.

Some of this reflection comes from my thinking in these days on my recently deceased teacher, Fr. Stanley B. Marrow, SJ. He once told me about walking out of a certain Mass. The presider had introduced the Penitential Rite by inviting the assembly to seek pardon for 'faults and imperfections.' Stanley walked out. 'I follow St. Paul and boast of my faults and imperfections. I came here for forgiveness of sins.'

Perhaps it's wrong for me to see the 'I' of the new translation of the Creed as a blessed relief and refuge from the oh-so progressive clericalisms of the liturgical abusers. Nevertheless, I'm grateful for it, and I pray that God will use whatever is in me to make me a more faithful and obedient steward of the sacred mysteries.