RIP: Fr. Stanley Marrow, SJ

(Original post from 2012)

Today there was news of the death of one of our favorite teachers, Fr. Stanley Marrow, SJ. A seemingly cantankerous but really very gracious old Iraqi, every student he ever had is full of his sayings.

The last time I saw Stanley, on a visit to the old Jesuit home, he showed me a manuscript that he had just completed. A commentary on 1 Corinthians, I think it was. He remarked how nobody would publish it. Not the conservative presses, he said, because his exegesis proved the non-existence of the sacrament of penance, and not the liberal ones, because he insisted on calling God 'Father.' In this, as in everything else, he was the consummate iconoclast. He was very insistent on the God the Father thing. When he thought our more progressively-styled school Masses were ashamed of it, he declined to attend, saying that he worshiped a different God. I remember once when he did come to a school Mass, he remarked that the music sounded like "something from a Moroccan whorehouse."

During the same visit that I mentioned above, Stanley told me that he was praying for death. But, he said, the answer to his prayers thus far had only been, "Please stay on the line; your business is important to us." 

Underneath all the humor, though, was a very serious scholar of the Scriptures, and that's something we younger folks sometimes forget. You don't just get to be an iconoclast. You have to work for the privilege, and work long and hard.

When I was a new priest, Stanley sent me one of the most beautiful and encouraging notes I have ever received:

Before all else, congratulations! One of my fellow-ordinands, a man of extreme emotional reserve, remarked after the ceremony, "Now I know what Rahner means when he speaks of the 'physical redundancy' of grace." I shall offer my Mass for you some day this week, and ask the "author of our calling" to make your priestly ministry the unfailing source of your peace and joy. God has blessed you with an abundance of gifts, and the great beneficiary of that abundance will be those he entrusts to your pastoral solicitude. May you find in your selfless service of them the infinite satisfaction of saying, "We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty."

The quotes could go on and on. But I always respected how he responded when he was asked how he saw his work as a professor of Sacred Scripture: he said that it was his mission to minimize the damage his students were going to do to God's people.

Requiescat in pace.

2025 UPDATE: I missed this until now, but the manuscript mentioned above was published. In the foreword, Fr. Thomas Stegman, SJ (may he also rest in peace), alludes to the difficulties.

Paul for Today's Church: A Commentary on First Corinthians

"I Know Nothing Due To Holy Obedience"

An Irish priest sent me this gem of a footnote on Capuchin ignorance from Ulrich L. Lehner's Monastic Prisons and Torture Chambers: Crime and Punishment in Central European Monasteries 1600-1800.

(click to enlarge)

Cooperatores veritatis

Today I finished Last Testament: In His Own Words. To be honest, I didn't find it as interesting as Seewald's other interview books, but if you appreciate Benedict XVI very much, as I do, you will enjoy it. Particularly interesting is the material about Joseph Ratzinger's younger life, especially the time around the Second World War.

Begotten in the Only Begotten

I always appreciate when St. Irenaeus's Against Heresies comes up in the Office of Readings; it's one of a handful of books given me to read in theology that I think improved my understanding of Christianity in a basic way. The passage given for Pentecost begins this way:

When the Lord told his disciples to go and teach all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, he conferred on them the power of giving men new life in God.

Reflecting on that, I found myself, as I do sometimes, praying for all of those who have been my spiritual parents along the way.

Trees, Horses, and Crayons

One of the curious things about praying the Scriptures in a new language is that you are constantly reminded of questions of translation. Today there were two big ones.

First, this morning I started my week as lector for Mass. Practicing and then proclaiming the first reading for today (Acts 5:27-32, 40B-41) I was a little thrown each time by the Italian of verse 30, which translates xulon as croce, 'cross.' I'm much more accustomed to the word 'tree' here, as it is in the RSV or as it is heard in the American lectionary today:

The God of our ancestors raised Jesus, though you had him killed by hanging him on a tree.

It makes a difference whether you say 'tree' or 'cross' there, doesn't it?

Second, something else reminded me a fun story.

Today in the Office of Readings we have, in the book of Revelation, the opening of the first six seals. I took a course in Revelation back at the former Weston Jesuit School of Theology, one of a handful from which I emerged feeling like it had helped me understand Christianity better at a basic level. As we progressed through the book, for a little fun, but also, I think, to help us keep in mind the visual nature of the narrative (it is, precisely, a vision after all) the professor would hand out photocopies of pictures of Albrecht Dürer's famous woodcuts of the various scenes. One of the students began to return to the following class, having colored in the Dürer with her crayons. It was very amusing to me to see her trying to show her coloring to the professor. It seemed to me like the good Jesuit, a distinguished scholar of the New Testament, didn't know whether to be charmed or appalled. Or maybe that was me projecting.

In the course of the coloring project, a problem eventually arose when we came to the opening of the fourth seal and the appearance of the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse. The first three Horsemen had been easy enough to color: white, red, black. But the fourth, the chlóros horse, had presented a difficulty. In English, it's often rendered as 'pale,' but chlóros might also suggest something like green. Not knowing what to do, the poor student had left the horse empty of color, but had brought her box of crayons along to class hoping that the professor might, in his expert opinion, choose for her the one that most approximated chlóros. I don't remember if a decision was made.

Perhaps the old pale/green/pale-green question of the fourth horse is further complicated by the fact that nowadays we associate the color green with life and flourishing, not with the identity of the fourth Horseman, Death. If we didn't keep our dead in refrigerators or put makeup on them, maybe it would make more sense to us.

I was reminded of all this during the Office of Readings because in Italian the fourth Horseman is said to be verdastro, a word I'm sure I didn't know before this morning. My most valued dictionary says it means, 'greenish, greeny.' I didn't know that 'greeny' was a word, so I guess I've made progress in two languages today.

Feast of the Subtle Doctor

Today is the first time I ever remember celebrating the feast of Blessed John Duns Scotus. I'm not saying that he's not on the most recent Franciscan calendars at home, but we certainly don't have any propers and I don't remember ever observing his day. In any case, he seems to be an obligatory memorial for us here in Italy, and here's his collect in the 2011 Santorale Francescano: Collectio Missarum (Padua: Editrici Francescane):

Father, source of all wisdom,
who in blessed John Duns Scotus, priest,
believer in the immaculate conception
of the Virgin Mary,
have given us a teacher of life and of thought,
grant that, illuminated by his example
and nourished by his doctrine,
we might hold fast to Christ.
He who is God, and lives and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
for ever and ever.


From the Martyrology:

At Cologne in German Lotharingia, blessed John Duns Scotus, priest of the Order of Friars Minor, who, born in Scotland, taught the disciplines of philosophy and theology as an illustrious master at Canterbury, Oxford, Paris, and at last, Cologne, with subtle genius and wonderful fervor.


Pray for us.

UPDATE: I notice that The Smithy has posted the actual collect.

The Historical Mauro

A month ago a certain important friar gave a short homily on a certain important occasion. I heard it myself. A few weeks later I was given the brother's text to make a translation into English that could be published within the Order. This written text, of course, was not exactly the same thing as the homily I heard when it was given. There's nothing strange about that; when I was a parish priest I would always write out my Sunday homilies, but mainly just to consider structure and length; the homily I would actually deliver on Sunday (without my text) would be more or less the same thing, but not exactly.

Since then, for other purposes, I have twice been given parts of this same homily to translate, quotes which presumably derived from someone else's hearing and/or transcription, because they didn't match the written text I had previously seen. Nor did these other transcribed sections match up exactly to my own memory of the homily I had originally heard, though the idea was more or less the same. More or less.

Again, this homily happened only about a month ago. And it has passed through just my experience in four variations, three of which are doubled by translation into another language. So what was really said? And what does such a question mean? What assertions, hopes and grievances are embedded in the question?

And what if we were talking about a homily given two thousand years ago?

It reminds me of one of my favorite teachers at Weston Jesuit, when she was talking about the 'quest for the historical Jesus.'

"My siblings and I can't even agree on the historical grandma Mooney."

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.

Epitaphs and Frijoles

I was quizzed today, with mixed results. I was read this (apparently) famous epitaph, and asked if I knew whose it was:

Petrus eram
quem petra tegit
dictusque Comestor
nunc comedor.

Of course I guessed without too much trouble that this was the epitaph of the great Petrus Comestor. When the quiz then continued to his dates, my luck ran out.

"I was Peter, whom this stone covers, called the 'Eater,' now I am eaten.

"Comedor," in Latin, as a present passive indicative, makes the sense of 'I am eaten.' "Comedor" in the sorts of Spanish with which I'm familiar, usually means a dining room or a casual restaurant.

So now when I go out in the neighborhood here to eat Dominican food, I'll have to be reminded of the dissolution of old Peter's mortal remains.

It is said that they called him Peter the Eater because of his ability to devour books and knowledge, which he certainly did. But knowing how nicknames work among the clergy, I have strong suspicions that there may have been other senses.

High Praise

One always feels somewhat anxious preaching in a Sunday assembly that includes an eminent scripture scholar. The encounter after Mass is approached with some trepidation, especially when one is well aware that his homily was scatter-shot and somewhat shticky.

"Happy new year, Professor."

"Charles! You know, I have to tell you..." Oh no, here it comes.

"You really got through the new Roman Canon well!"

What a relief. Especially because then I could bring up some of my recent questions on the new translation of the Canon, like ors that I think should be alsos and such.

Learn some Latin

From Fr. Finigan's blog I learn today of a conference for the fiftieth anniversary of John XXIII's apostolic constitution Veterum sapientia, which urged the study of Latin as a requirement for priestly formation. The same requirement is echoed by the decree on priestly training of Vatican II, Optatam totius. My experience, however, at least where I studied for priesthood and where our men continue to do so, is that no Latin is required. So much for the spirit of Vatican II.

I had to get myself a little Latin because I took an extra year in studies for priesthood and completed an STL, and I have to say that it was one of the best things I ever did for myself as a Catholic Christian. Even a little bit of Latin opens up tremendous vistas in one's awareness of the traditions of western Christianity.

It's too bad that Latin gets so wound up with our factions and disagreements, as if the only reason a seminarian might learn Latin would be so that he could put on a maniple or black vestments or do some other, equally horrifying thing. Latin is a matter of our tradition, not of so-called traditionalism.

When I was at Weston Jesuit it was joked that, in the theological vision of the school, nothing of note had happened in Christianity between the death of St. Paul and the birth of Karl Rahner. Perhaps that wasn't quite fair, but the jab did get at something. But you have to say that without any Latin, those who would be Catholic priests and theologians do cut themselves off from their ancestors in a certain way.

And when it comes to the ministry of sacred orders and the practice of theology, ancestors aren't just ancestors, but the communion of saints. They are worth conversing with in their own words. So learn some Latin.

Advice to Theology Students

Here's how it goes in one of your courses: You are assigned a textbook or two and a bunch of articles to read. If you're lucky, you are also made to read some primary sources. Then you hear some lectures and participate in some discussions, which might or might not be illuminating.

Then you have to write papers or even give a presentation. But here's the thing, if the papers you write or the presentations you give only serve to reproduce the lines of argument and theological assertions of the textbooks and articles you were assigned, or the lectures you heard, you are not receiving an education. You are only allowing yourself to be socialized.

The textbooks you are assigned often do a marvelous job of summarizing and serving up centuries of theological reflection on divine revelation and reasoned reflection of God's action in the world. But in doing so they all have embedded in them very certain choices of theological opinion. This is even more the case with articles. Even the primary sources you are assigned have been selected from various possibilities.

This isn't about the tedious old divisions of liberal and conservative, progressive and traditional, etc. Being socialized into learning to utter the slogans and pet concerns associated with any of these labels is boring and beneath your intellectual dignity when you can have a real theological education instead.

So, do your homework. Read the things assigned to you. But when it comes to a chance to reflect upon theological questions yourself, go further and deeper. First, pick up your Bible. What do the Scriptures say about the question or topic at hand? Second, read your Catechism. Or better, read your Catechism alongside your Denzinger. Don't have one of those? Click here and order one. Not later, now.

Don't settle for being socialized into the 'theological imagination' of your school or the 'correct' opinions of the authorities in your life, whatever camp these fall into among the factions of this tired world. Stay close to the Scriptures, stay close to the living tradition of the Church's teaching. Be empowered, and be educated.

Quod fratres non recipiant pecuniam

The other day I was out taking care of the friary banking. At the bank I ran into one of my teachers, and not just any teacher, but the one who had helped me very much with the portions of my licentiate thesis that concerned Franciscan history.

She had some complaints about the practices and fees of the particular bank, so I joined in with my own annoyances.

In protest against all the various aggravation, I eventually proclaimed, "I am going to invent a form of religious life marked by the renunciation of the use of money!"

She laughed.

On Being a Student of Theology

"And Christ has granted us His Friendship so that he may in this manner enter our hearts and dwell in them as a personal presence, not an an object, not as a "what" but as a "Who." Thus He Who is, is present in the depths of our own being as our Friend, and as our other self. Such is the mystery of the Word dwelling in us by virtue of His Incarnation and our incorporation in His Mystical Body, the Church. (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 154)

"God is not some inert object that can be passively spied upon and encompassed by a creaturely knowing but an active subject who can only be encountered in relation to his own self-presencing." (Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 230)


There is nothing to God apart from himself as his own self-presencing Act. Thus there is nothing to know about God apart from the actuality of the divine missions in the world which are the temporal expression of the eternal processions which constitute the divinity.

The Holy Spirit, the Love proceeding from the Father and Son, conceives the humanity of Jesus Christ, as we pray in the Creed. In the same way, the Spirit continues to conceive the baptized as the Mystical Body of Christ, drawing our humanity into the eternal, mutual Delight that is the Blessed Trinity.

Theology, as a project of the striving human mind, is not separable from the knowledge of the divine missions imparted by revelation and the experience of them we call spirituality. Nevertheless, this truth is easily forgotten and even more readily not taken seriously much of the time.

Therefore, just as the divine revelation contained in the Sacred Scriptures cannot be simply abstracted from the temporal, salvation history which it describes and the historical cultures in which it is embedded, so our study of theology is bound up with the personal history of our own conversion to Christ and assimilation to God, and nor should it or can it be otherwise. God is only his Actuality, and is not subject to study as anything else.

Theology and Unspeech

In trying to write the paper that will finally persolve the spring semester for me, I'm reviewing some old notes from a most brilliant course I took back in the fall of 2005 on the development of trinitarian doctrine.

This passage from my notes says a lot about the nature of theological speech:

"Begotten, not made"...note that this distinction is totally made up, to protect, theologically, what we need to say...the distinction is invented, in an apophatic way, simply opposed not to something we grasp, but to another proposition. The same goes for homoousious--we don't know exactly what it means, but we use it to to protect, precisely, what we don't mean.

From Confusion to Understanding and Back

It's a funny thing about the Trinity. Before you study any theology, it's a pretty confusing idea. After you study a little, you think you get it. But after you study a little more, you're confused again.

Without solid catechesis or serious study, the Trinity is hard to understand. He's three, He's one. How can that make any sense? A lot of preaching on the Trinity doesn't help much either. My experience of Trinity Sunday homilies is that they take something of this form: 'God is one, God is three, it's a mystery, please stand for the creed.' Too often mystery becomes an excuse for mystification. But that's another rant.

A lot of folks keep themselves from these troubles and cognitive dissonances by being functional unitarians, modalists, or Arians, often unknowingly. And it's usually not their fault; such departures from Christian orthodoxy are sometimes taught by our catechists and theology teachers. I've done it myself. As a volunteer religious education teacher I once gave some kids a lovely and catchy analogy for understanding the Trinity. Trouble was, it was very modalist in implication.

So, if you were in the multi-parish Confirmation prep program that met at St. Lawrence in West Haven, CT in the late 90s, where you had the young, cool teacher, and you now find that your prayer life is inexplicably confusing, or you find yourself in marriage preparation (the kids would be about the typical age now) with a priest with whom you seem to have theological differences that you can't put your finger on, feel free to blame me.


When you study a little theology you are delivered from all of this confusion, emerging into the clarity of claims about the self-diffusive nature of goodness, the necessity of the social Trinity, or the necessity of opposition and comparison for any distinction in being. You are comforted as your pious mind swims in the clear, living water of 'it's all about the overflowing nature of goodness' or 'it's all about the self-diffusion of love' or 'it's all about relationship, in a perfect communion of persons without coercion or domination' or 'it's all about the opposed relations which we imitate by the creative tension of human community life.' Your reflections wax sublime as you realize how original and mutual generativity structure the whole of both created and uncreated being, and so realize how happiness lies in making our own relationships and generativity imitate God himself.

But then you keep going, drilling deeper into the sources of these reflections and the theologians and other sources from which they have come. Cracks start to appear. You start to notice that each effort at a theological articulation of the great Mystery succeeds in taking some of the data of revelation and some of the orthodox confession of faith seriously, but not all of it. Each approach succeeds in avoiding modalism on one side and Arianism on the other, but you realize that this feat alone doesn't mean every problem and question has been resolved.

So you're back where you started, wondering and confused. But perhaps with a greater and more prayerful appreciation of the Mystery Himself. And maybe that's the point.

Some Favorite Franciscan Theology Fails

Any scholarly drivenness I might have--and I have precious little, unfortunately--clusters around my desire to know what it means to have a Franciscan approach. What is a Franciscan theology? A Franciscan pastoral stance? Commonplaces abound, but I have never arrived at a rigorous and satisfying account. But since it's Friday and it's late, it's better just to tell funny stories from various points along the maladventure of this personal quest. As Dean Ween put it, "When it's time for bed you shouldn't think about that stuff."

In between my religious lives I had a bumper sticker on my car that said, "Perfect Joy Is Being Franciscan." (I removed it before going to my first interview with the Capuchins, for fear of appearing presumptuous.) One time a lady on the street questioned me about it. "Perfect joy is being Franciscan? Franciscan...is that related to the Melchizedekian priesthood?"

A lady on the subway asked me if I was a Franciscan. I said that I was. "What's the Franciscan position on the three and a half year period prophesied in Daniel?"

A man carrying a large amount of art supplies intervened in a conversation I was having with a young woman who was a religion student at BU. She had thought I was a Jesuit. "He's a Franciscan. Jesuits read books, Franciscans talk to birds."

A man was telling me about how his dog had died. "Now the Franciscan position is that dogs have immortal souls, right?"

quasi stillam parvam ad nos descendentem

"As Thomas sees it, the seat of his vocation as a theologian is to perform a 'contemplative' exercise, the purpose of which is to take a 'small sip' of the divine knowledge which is communicated in revelation."

--Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 30. (trans. Francesca Aran Murphy)

Laetare Ierusalem, et Conventum Facite

By chance or Providence I have been called to offer Mass this coming Sunday for a weekend gathering of our candidates for the Order. I've had far too long to incubate this homily, and it's edging towards the outrageous in how I imagine it.

It includes, so far:

The story of my Dad imitating and mocking the homily given at my temporary profession of vows

A famous insult from one of our friars, which bitingly plays on the distinction between being a 'poor religious' in the sense of evangelical poverty and a 'poor religious' in the sense of having delusions of adequacy

An amusing and telling complaint of a former girlfriend about my entrance into religious life


Fortunately for readers of this blog, this isn't the kind of homily that gets written down, in the spirit of the sage advice of one of my Jesuit teachers:

"It's best not to think.

"If you think, don't speak.

"If you speak, don't write.

"If you write, don't be surprised."

Ad Obj. 1

O.k.; this is when you know you've been reading too much scholastic theology.

This morning I go downstairs for breakfast and look in the bread box. When I see the package of 'Everything' bagels, something like this thought immediately comes to mind:

To the objection that it is impossible that a single bagel could subsume everything, we must say that 'everything' is understood in multiple ways.