St. Charles Challenges

As they do each year, the words of St. Charles Borromeo hit me hard in the Office of Readings this morning:

One priest [or anyone] may wish to lead a good, holy life, as he knows he should. He may wish to be chaste and to reflect heavenly virtues in the way he lives. Yet he does not resolve to use suitable means, such as penance, prayer, the avoidance of evil discussions and harmful and dangerous friendships.

That's the story of my own Christian mediocrity. I think that I desire holiness and to devote myself to God, but when it comes to the innumerable little unglamorous, daily decisions to use the "suitable means" to get there, the project falls apart. And so the flaw is revealed: it is not God or sanctity that I am in love with, but the idea of being holy. Oh yes, sanctity and the image of oneself as devout can be as much of an idol as anything else, and perhaps even more insidious because of the inherent dishonesty.

When we fall in love with someone, we make it our constant aim to seek the company and the good pleasure of the beloved. So it must be with God. All of the plain and unnoticed decisions about our speech, our schedule, our work and recreation must be arranged around our desire to be with and to please Him.

For the saint preaches sermons by the way he walks and the way he stands and the way he sits down and the way he picks things up and holds them in his hand.

(Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 193.)

Judas Maccabeus vs. Gaudium et Spes

At the beginning of this thirty-first week of Ordinary Time we arrive at one of the oddest and most challenging counterpoints in the whole of the liturgy: the two day juxtaposition, in the Office of Readings, of 1 Maccabees and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World of Vatican II. I didn't catch much of it this year, yesterday having been All Souls and opting for John XXIII's beautiful homily for the canonization of Martin de Porres today, but I did the readings anyway because they strike me so strongly each year at this time.

In the reading from Maccabees today, the great Mattathias is so filled with zeal to follow the Law that he not only kills the messenger bearing the king's demand of cultural assimilation, but even another Jew who was going to comply. He and his fellow zealots, after having left the city in order to protect the purity of their religious observance, go about destroying pagan altars and forcibly circumcising any uncircumcised boys they find.

After having meditated on all of this, one then turns to Gaudium et spes and is exhorted to "cooperate, willingly and wholeheartedly, in building an international order based on genuine respect for legitimate freedom and on a brotherhood of universal friendship." We are to "cooperate actively and constructively with other Christians" and to share resources "without being uniform and inflexible."

It's the classic question of how people of faith who value religion are supposed to relate to the unbelieving, persecuting, or lax world around them. Do we separate ourselves so as to protect the purity of our life, or do we assimilate to the world a little so as to include more souls in what really matters? What is our duty to the lapsed or unobservant among us? Do we come at them honey or vinegar, with cooperation or separation, with 'relevant,' 'updated' activities or a bomb?

Is it good to have a Catholic politician, even if they don't seem to believe and work for everything the Church teaches? Or is it an unacceptable scandal?

Christians have always enjoyed the right of 'plundering the Egyptians;' we may take the tools of the unbelieving world and use them for the benefit of the Gospel. (What else does it mean to be a Catholic blogger?) But in our relationship to the world, how willing are we to risk allowing its errors to infect the purity of our faith? It's a hard question, to know where to draw the line. If we run up into the mountains and refuse any relationship to the earthly city, we will fail to be the missionaries that we are called to be. But if we live in too close a spirit of cooperation with the unbelieving world, we will soon find--as we have!--that the faith becomes distorted by those of us who start to accept and support the world's crimes and absurdities, like abortion and various other things.

There have always been Christians firmly planted all over the map on this question, and it remains a challenge for each individual and community.

Appreciating Generational Differences

Much has been written about the generational conflicts we are going through in the Church and in religious life; it's the "70s priests" against the "neo-cons," the "John XXIII Catholics" against the "John Paul II Catholics," the so-called "spirit of Vatican II" against the so-called "reform of the reform," etc.

I was discussing these questions with an astute older priest yesterday, and he put it something like this: 'We grew up in a culture that valued conformity and was overly defined and regimented. So when the reforms of the Council came, we found our spiritual identity in our liberation. Guys your age, on the other hand, grew up after the Vietnam war and other events took away our moral clarity about our nation, after some of the darker sides of the sexual revolution began to appear. You attended educational institutions in the grip of the 'dictatorship of relativism,' as Benedict calls it, and just as we reacted against strictness and found our spirit in our liberation, you came to find your 'liberation' and spiritual identity in the struggle to have something solid and structured to stand on in the midst of the moral and cultural vertigo.'

Of course all this has been said before. I only rehearse it again because I thought that Father's articulation was particularly clear, and especially because I think we need to appreciate the source of each other's spirituality. We can argue about liturgy or canon law or whether to wear a religious habit until the end of time, but it won't help us at all unless we can appreciate and give thanks to God for the spiritual place in which someone else found their God.

Mass in the Friars' Cemetery

A group of us decided to offer one of the Masses of All Souls in the friars cemetery.

Here's Fr. Walter, 97 years old and still praying strong

Br. Michael proclaims the first reading.

The gifts are prepared.

Orate Fratres!

The Doxology

Special thanks to our photographer!

Metanoia

From a thank you note from a newlywed whose marriage I witnessed:

"You made me change my mind and views about the Catholic religion."

That could go either way!

The Welfare of the Dead

You can say what you want about how the faith is faring in our time, but an observance like today reveals the fundamental human concern for the welfare of our beloved dead. People come out for Mass, stuff money into All Souls' Novena envelopes, write the names of their deceased into books of intentions, and visit cemeteries.

It's just a basic thing; just as we could not have understood someone telling us about the breadth and sights and sounds of this world before we emerged from the womb, so we can barely understand the new life into which we will be born at our bodily death. We pray for those who have preceded us into this mystery as an act of care, charity, and concern. We hope in Christ for their peace and rest.

Today at the early Mass I proclaimed St. Luke's account of the miracle at Nain:

Jesus journeyed to a city called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd accompanied him.As he drew near to the gate of the city, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. A large crowd from the city was with her. When the Lord saw her, he was moved with pity for her and said to her, "Do not weep." He stepped forward and touched the coffin; at this the bearers halted, and he said, "Young man, I tell you, arise!" The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, exclaiming, "A great prophet has arisen in our midst," and "God has visited his people." This report about him spread through the whole of Judea and in all the surrounding region. (Luke 7: 11-17)

For me this gospel reveals so much of the personality of God. The miracle Jesus performs is not for the sake of the one who seems to receive it--the young man--but for his mother, who was going to be alone and vulnerable in the world without him. "Jesus gave him to his mother." The miracle is performed in order to preserve a human relationship. Jesus is unwilling to allow the bodily death we have brought into the world with our sins to interfere with human love. This good news always comes out for me in one of my favorite prayers from the entire liturgy, which comes from the beginning of the wake service:

"We believe that all of the ties of friendship and affection which knit us as one throughout our lives do not unravel in death."

Because God has emptied himself into our humanity in Christ, human love is lifted up as a revelation of divine Love in the world. God would not allow divine Love to simply evaporate from the creation just because of something as meaningless as our bodily corruption and death! Rather, the good news for the dead and for us who mourn is that upon our death and final purification, God harvests to himself all of the love and care we were in this life and makes them indestructible in eternity. Salvation is preservation in the sense that God does not allow the revelations of Love whom we become in this life to be lost.

All Souls Day

Visit those cemeteries! A plenary indulgence, applicable to the souls in Purgatory, is offered today and each day of the octave of All Souls, for those who do so, devoutly praying for the departed and the intentions of the Holy Father. The normal conditions apply, of course, namely confession and Holy Communion, plus or minus a week from the visit. On today itself, the same indulgence is offered for the same when visiting a church or oratory.

Don't forget that later in the week the first Thursday indulgence for the Year of Priest is available as well!

Here I am, ready to fulfill the apostolic constitution Incruentum altaris: