Ut Melius Catholice Observemus

This passage from St. Thomas' commentary on John appeared in my reading for class today:

As Augustine says, the statements and precepts of sacred Scripture can be interpreted and understood from the actions of the saints, since the same Holy Spirit who inspired the prophets and the other sacred authors is the Spirit who drives the actions of the saints. As we read, Moved by the Holy Spirit holy men of God spoke (2 Pet. 1.21); and For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (Rom 8.14). Thus, sacred Scripture should be understood according to the way Christ and the other saints observed it in their practice.

(Quoted in Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Francesca Aran Murphy, 261)

In a simple and clear way, I think this passage explains what we mean as Catholics by 'Scripture and Tradition', and especially what Dei Verbum is getting at when it says that these form "a single deposit of the Word of God" whose life in the world is a mutual interconnection and intercommunication. (9-10)

This is why the Bible can only be properly interpreted from within the Church; to try to do so outside of her--as many do--is to divide God's single act of self-revelation and thus to arrive at conclusions that are incomplete and impoverished. Tradition interprets Scripture. This is not to say that 'traditional interpretations' are normative, in the sense of tradition as a species of human conservatism, but to say that the lives of the saints in the broadest sense of the revelation of the Holy Spirit in the concrete, historical sanctification of the baptized down through the ages is the interpretive key to the Scriptures which in turn are normative for the Church.

For us Franciscans, this helps us to understand that the statements of Francis at the beginning of the Rule and at the end of the Testament go together in a fruitful dialectic. "The rule and life of the Friars Minor is this: to observe the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ," which we then strive "to observe in a more catholic manner."

Padre Pio's Many Gestures

Our friary has a statue of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, which is no surprise given that we are Capuchins. What's funny about it is that his right hand attaches to his forearm with a square peg. Because of this, the friars being the friars, poor Pio might be found with his hand in any one of four positions:

The "nice to meet you"

The epiclesis

The collection

And finally, a favorite of somebody in this house, "The screwball"

What is Contemplation?

(This is a remix of an old post, which I have had occasion to clarify.)


Contemplation is the obscure knowledge that God has united the divine desire for our beatitude with our human desire for God. The ultimate identity of these two desires is the mystery we call the 'hypostatic union.'

Christ, then, in the perfect union of his two distinct natures, is perfect contemplation itself. The person of Christ is thus both the model and the object of contemplative prayer.

Baptized Into His Death

One time I asked a spiritual director where God was when I would fall into sin. He looked at me like I had missed some basic point along the way.

"He's suffering with you on the cross."

Sanctity is our vocation, because our happiness and beatitude consists in imitating the holiness of the Creator from Whom we have come and in Whom we live and move and have our being. But if we imagine (in a spiritually reduced and binary way) that God is with us in the joy of holiness and not with us in the misery of sin, we have missed the point of Christianity.

The good news of our faith is precisely that God has entered into the misery and unhappiness we have brought upon ourselves with our sins in order to blaze a trail out of it for humanity. That trail is called the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So in a state of sin we feel unhappy because we have touched, to some degree, the alienation from God that is the final and complete human suffering. But for us who have been baptized into the death and Resurrection of Christ, our liberation is the knowledge that this is just that, a feeling that does not accurately reflect our spiritual condition. For God in Christ has joined us in the suffering of our miserable alienation, and this knowledge is the faith that saves precisely because it reveals the path that Christ has walked from the death of sin to the new life of the Resurrection.

This is not to say that there is no such thing as the final impenitence that leads to hell or the possibility of truly unrepentant mortal sin that cuts off the soul from grace, but only to say that the basic question of the spiritual life is not whether to be good or bad, to be a sinner or a saint (that is, in the way the world thinks of saints.) The basic question of the spiritual life is to ask ourselves what sort of sinner we want to be. We can follow the wisdom of this world and become the sort of sinner who lets his sin make him ever more bitter and selfish, or let the tragedy of sin in our lives and the world break our hearts open into humility for ourselves and compassion for others.

That's how suffering and alienation come to be transformed into kindness and communion, and that's what the death and Resurrection looks like when its Mystery comes to make a home in our hearts.

Praying For Vocations

On Monday mornings I have the joy and privilege of offering Mass at the local monastery of Poor Clare nuns. When I arrive at the sacristy, stole and chasuble are laid out on the vesting table. They have a funny way of folding the stole so that it provides a little bump whereupon sits a little slip of paper that indicates the intention for the Mass. Today, as it does once in a while, it said, "for vocations."

I guess I never reflected much on what it might mean to pray for vocations. In the past I think I just prayed that God would inspire young women with a desire for this particular expression of the Franciscan life. But as I prepared for Mass today and formed my intention, I noticed that this isn't the only way one could think about it. Perhaps it's not that I should pray for God to inspire vocations, but that God has already done so, and I need to pray for those who already have a vocation, that they might be aware of it and have the courage to follow. It's a different way of thinking about praying for vocations, and it goes to some basic theological questions about how we understand the will of God for the individual human life.

I adduce two other examples of this latter way of thinking. When I was in the parish, there was one priest who wouldn't accept that there might not be someone to proclaim the first reading at a weekday Mass. If nobody got up to do it, he would just sit there and wait. Everyone would get annoyed and uncomfortable, and finally someone, not being able to take it, would get up and do the reading. Father was confident that if God had called us together to offer the Eucharist, he would also provide ministers for the assembly. Therefore, it must be that someone was resisting or failing to be aware of God's call to the ministry of lector. (Now I know that this behavior doesn't stand up to the GIRM, but you see my point.)

Another example is a young woman I once met who often prayed for a husband. She wasn't praying for just any old husband, however, but for the specific man whom she was meant to marry. She was convinced that God was calling her to the vocation of motherhood, and so it must be that God had also given some guy out there the vocation of being the father of her children. God would arrange for them to meet, she imagined, and she made sure she prayed for him, whoever he was to turn out to be. (Just a caveat on this procedure: I have heard of a couple cases of young women who prayed for a good husband and ended up 'brides of Christ,' as it were.)

It also raises questions for the so-called shortage of priests. When we pray for vocations to the priesthood, for what are we praying? Is it like my friend and the first reading? Could it be that God has provided the Church with all of the priestly vocations she requires, but the young men in question are perhaps unaware of it, or distracted, or hesitant? Could it be that we are praying for specific men already called when we pray for priestly vocations? Could we perhaps be praying and working for an environment that provides the conditions wherein such vocations are noticed and encouraged?

Sometimes I get into conversations with people in which they express annoyance that the Church hasn't provided a priest for their parish. I ask them why they think of the Church as someone else. Doesn't everyone bear the responsibility to encourage vocations? I remember once when a lady in the parish office was yelling at the poor kid who answered the phone later in the day because there weren't enough free Mass intentions available. I asked her if she had any sons. She said that she had three fine sons. "Did you ever encourage any of them to think about the priesthood? I asked. She replied that she hadn't, and with such a tone as to dismiss even the idea. "That's why there are fewer and fewer Mass intentions available."

So today at Mass I tried on this other way of thinking about praying for vocations. I prayed for the young women out there who had vocations to be Poor Clare nuns, those who were aware of it and those who weren't. I even prayed for the little girls to whom God willed to give this vocation one day, and even for the unborn. I prayed that all of them would have the graced people and situations they needed to become aware of and accept their vocations.

Nevertheless, I'm not sure about all this; as I say it goes to some basic claims and theological imagination around God's will and relationship to individual human lives. It's an interesting question, though.

Catholic Rules For Twitter

Such goes a hash tag with which folks have been having a lot of fun on Twitter in recent days. When I saw it, I couldn't help but think of the ninth chapter of the Rule.

"I also admonish and exhort these brothers that, in their preaching, their words be well chosen and chaste, for the instruction and edification of the people, speaking to them of virtues and vices, punishment and glory in a discourse that is brief, because it was in few words that the Lord preached while on earth." (trans. Armstrong and Brady)

140 characters certainly qualifies, and so it would seem that Twitter would be an eminently appropriate means for a Franciscan to preach. It's also a quote you can use on any friar you know who suffers from temptations to prolixity.

It's Just a Symbol

For some reason that I have never grasped, people think that just because something in the Bible might have a metaphorical or spiritual meaning, this automatically means that it can't also be a historical fact. Just because Adam and Eve, or Mud and Mom as I sometimes like to call them, are a symbol in various senses, doesn't mean they weren't real people. Just because the Lord's miracles have a spiritual meaning for us, and intended for us by the evangelists, doesn't mean that they 'didn't really happen.'

Finally I read where someone with some authority has made this point for me:

Hence some people interpret symbolically the entire episode of paradise itself, where, according to the truthful account of holy Scripture, the first human beings, parents of the human race, dwelt, and they turn those trees and fruit-bearing plants into virtues and ways of life. They assume that those details were not visible and material objects but were described as such in speech or writing for purpose of illustrating symbolically spiritual realities.

How absurd to maintain that there could not have been a material paradise because it can be understood also in a spiritual sense; as if it were an argument that Abraham did not have two wives, Hagar and Sarah, and from them two sons, one by the slave and the other by a free woman, just because the Apostle says that in them the covenants were illustrated; or, again, that there was no rock from which water flowed forth when Moses struck it because it can also be interpreted as a symbol of Christ in that passage, for, in the words of the same Apostle, 'The Rock, moreover, was Christ.'

(Augustine, City of God, XIII, 21, trans. Philip Levine)


It's all of one fabric, friends, because the the whole business, the natural world, history, revelation and everything else, are spoken into existence through the one Word of God.