Still Fighting Last Year’s War

Let your minds be at rest. The battle to keep sexual predators out of Catholic seminaries is going well. Of course, the shepherds and moral guardians of the Catholic Church were apparently not up to the task of judging the moral integrity and sexual maturity of young men who applied to enter the seminaries — by all reports, the selection process had to be bureaucratized and modernized by retired FBI agents and other advisers. Apparently, there are few Father Browns (of Chesterton’s mystery stories) who can see deeply inside a man by hearing even a false confession. Apparently, few have read G.E.M. Anscombe’s warning that a society is in deep trouble indeed if it needs resumes (let alone lie-detector tests) to identify good men. A Church, or a church, is in far greater trouble in those circumstances given the role of clergymen even in a non-sacramental branch of Christianity.

We shouldn’t worry. The bishops and their bureaucrats are honestly admitting that the selection of candidates for the priesthood was botched in past years and the American Catholic bishops sat quietly and humbly as Pope Benedict reminded them of this, as if they were likely to forget with all the days they spend with lawyers and victims’ advocates, not to mention the ongoing flow of money out the door.

But the battle is going well and now there are record numbers of Catholic baptisms in the United States and the pews aren’t so emtpy as some would have feared even a year ago. What’s that you say? Those who are baptized and catechized and confirmed rarely show up at Mass the Sunday after being confirmed as adult members of the Catholic Church? They feel they’ve done their duty, having satisfied some sort of imaginary requirement for being married in a Catholic Church. Grandma handed them a nice card with a small wad of cash in it. The envelopes from aunts and uncles, family friends and Dad’s business partner, have been opened and the cash spent or deposited. There doesn’t seem to be much point in wasting part of a Sunday in Mass.

You want your children to grow up into practicing Catholic Christians? Well, you increase the odds of that happening if you move to Mexico to raise them. You have a much better chance of seeing them as knowledgeable Catholic adults if you raise them as Evangelical Proestants and hope for a conversion process that will lead to a serious effort to educate themselves.

You don’t really want your children to grow up to be serious Catholics knowledgeable about their own faith? It’s easy enough to meet that goal as well. Just raise them in a typical American parish, send them to CCD, and coach them through their confirmation. By that time, they’ll be well-innoculated against any idea that the Catholic faith has much to do with the real world or intelligent efforts to understand that world. Heck, even if you send them to Catholic schools, you don’t have to be discouraged by any signs of faith when they’re young. That will wash out very quickly with just a year of public school or, for that matter, a year of working in the real world. And, so, tomorrow’s battle is already well under way and being lost with resounding success as those on the losing side gather regularly to pat each other on the back and give each other awards as Catholic educators and humanitarians.

The Catholic faith isn’t being competently nurtured in young American Catholics nor are others being evangelized. There are a huge number of casualties in this war for minds and souls and the ordained hierarchy of the American Catholic Church is working hard to do what they did so well with the problem of sexual predators in the priesthood: they’re covering up the problem as long as possible. They spoke to Pope Benedict publicly of the large number of baptisms and the need for more priests. The diocesan newspapers will soon be giving us tallies of young adults being confirmed. To be sure, outside of the Hispanic parishes, the number of adults who are baptized or received into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil isn’t so impressive and isn’t so conducive to self-congratulation, but, all told, statistics can be quoted out of context to prove that the American Catholic Church isn’t so sick as rumor would have it. And no one in the pews of a Catholic Church is reading the reports of the Pew Foundation which paint a very bleak picture of Catholic demographics and forecast even worse over the next generation or more.

“Guys, we might be lucky. We might make it to retirement before anyone notices we’re not very good at doing our primary work: teaching and evangelizing.”

I Wish I’d Said That…

Actually, I have said some things very similar to some of Pope Benedict’s gentle but firm admonitions on his visit to the United States. Let me provide a couple of quotes. A Catholic news-site, Catholic World News, quotes Pope Benedict in his talk to the American Catholic bishops:

America’s brand of secularism poses a particular problem: it allows for professing belief in God, and respects the public role of religion and the Churches, but at the same time it can subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator. Faith becomes a passive acceptance that certain things “out there” are true, but without practical relevance for everyday life. The result is a growing separation of faith from life.

and also:

Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death? Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted.

I’ve made similar statements, but I’ve gone far beyond Pope Benedict in arguing that a lot of the problem comes from inadequate Catholic responses to modern empirical knowledge and sheer Catholic ignorance about the simple fact that a human theological system, even when built to explain revealed truths, includes a lot of human speculation and also includes — implicitly or explicitly — a lot of the content of empirical knowledge during the time when that system was first built. Far too many Catholics, scholars and priests and laymen, are lazy even when hardworking. That is, they want to just coast on fundamental matters and not have to think hard about those fundamental matters. They want to believe that God created a world which was fully understood in all important ways by men who lived centuries ago. God’s story ended a long time ago and we only have to finish off by celebrating the Sacraments for a few centuries longer. Such thinkers learn by way of textbooks the thoughts of St. Augustine and those of St. Thomas Aquinas. Such a way of reading profoundly creative thinkers distorts their thoughts so that even the word ‘the’ in those works becomes a lie. As a specific example, it has a way of converting complex human speculations, such as Augustine’s understanding of man’s sinful state, into ‘revealed truths’, such as the doctrine of ‘original sin’.

How can an ordinary laymen, or even the ordinary priest, live his life in the secular aspects of his life when he can’t make sense of that longer part of his life in terms of his Christian beliefs? If the Catholic Church and her separated sisters have no anthropological or moral teachings that make sense of our evolutionary heritage or our various genetic or cultural constraints, what is that ordinary layman or non-scholarly priest to do when he has to make sense of the pain of the good son who claims he feels like a woman? What sense can Satan-mongers make of all that is known of the relationship between specific brain structures and addictions or even the plausible possibility that obsessions — including those to kill or rape — might involve brain-seizures? What is there in the talk from the pulpits or in those CCD books or those books by or about ancient saints that can make sense of a claim that a microscopic hunk of cells should be treated with the respect to a human being?

If we can’t express our beliefs in the language we speak during our hours outside of churches and prayer-group meetings, then the domain of those beliefs will begin to seem more like dreams or fairy-tales than reality.

Easter Sunday: March 23, 2008

The Easter celebrations continue on Sunday, though the Masses aren’t nearly as elaborate as the Easter Vigil Mass held after sunset on Holy Saturday. For the most part, Easter Sunday Masses are very similar to Masses on any other Sunday but for the larger attendance and the greater number of new dresses and pretty hats. In the Roman Catholic Church, it’s a requirement that the priest lead the congregation in a renewal of baptismal promises but some priests use that form rather than the Profession of Faith on other Sundays as well.

Most of us are with family or will be soon. We struggle to pay attention to the Mass but our stomachs and heads anticipate ham and deviled eggs and far too much chocolate.

It’s a wonderful day and hard to understand why the baptized don’t all come to church, hard to understand why so many have never sought to be baptized. And then while we bask in the glow of our anticipated Easter feasts followed by our entry into Heaven, many years from now we hope, we who are Catholics find ourselves crossing our heads, our lips, and our hearts and the deacon begins to read from the Gospel of St. John:

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So, she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Peter then came out with the other disciple, and they went toward the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first; and stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb; he saw the linen cloths lying, and the napkin, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. [John 20:1-9]

As we hear those words for the umpteenth time, we can ask ourselves if we’ve ever really listened. Have we sunk into complacency?

Mary Magdelene saw the empty tomb and thought someone had stolen away the Lord’s body. The other disciple, almost certainly St. John, admitted that he and Peter had not even thought of Jesus rising from the dead until they saw the empty tomb. In fact, some of the translations leave matters unclear: did they believe when they saw the empty tomb or did that merely start the thinking process that led to the realization that the Lord Jesus Christ had risen from the dead?

We should enjoy the celebrations of Easter, in church and at the dinner-table and on the front porch watching the children play.

The Lord Jesus Christ has risen.

Yet again, we should ask ourselves if our faith has come by our good luck. Some of us were raised by devout Christian parents and some had friends who had spoken the Good News to us, lovingly and aggressively or lovingly and gently. They had loved us and the Lord enough to try to bring us to Him.

When we have a few quiet moments, we should ask ourselves if we’ve done our part. The pews are noticeably empty of young adults. Have we done our part to impart a love of God to our children and the young adults in our families? The pews rarely have strangers in them and most of those strangers seem to be already practicing Christians judging by their awareness of liturgical practices. Have we ever brought a friend or acquaintance to church with us? Have we ever spoken to a lost soul about God’s love?

What have we done to pass on the Gospel, the Good News, we celebrate so joyfully on Easter Sunday?

So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.” [Luke 17:10]

Have we even done so well as those unworthy servants? I know I’ve not done so well as those unworthy servants.

Easter Vigil: March 22, 2008

[As is my custom, I use the RSV rather than the translation used in the missal used for the Roman Catholic Mass in the U.S.]

The Easter Vigil Mass is celebrated after sunset on Saturday of Holy Week. It begins with a lighting of a fire which is used in turn to light the Easter candle. The Easter candle is carried to the altar at the front of the church in a solemn procession during which the Exsultet is sung, beginning with the verse:

Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God’s throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!

After the Easter candle is set in a place of honor, the mass moves on to the Liturgy of the Word, the reading and hearing of appropriate chapters or verses from Sacred Scripture. There are seven Old Testament readings followed by a reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and then Matthew’s account of the Resurrection.

The first Old Testament reading, [Genesis 1:1-2:2], is the account considered by some to be a description of God’s Creation of this world. There’s a reason why this reading is important on this night. The Lord of Creation has been resurrected. If we don’t know what Creation is, we can’t know what that means. If we don’t know what Creation is, we certainly won’t be able to have a rational idea of Heaven. And, in this modern world, where we know the empty reaches of space from documentaries and sci-fi movies, we don’t know where we might find Heaven, the world where Christ waits for those who belong to Him.

Let’s see if a meditative journey can help us to find the world of the resurrected as our Christian ancestors once found it in the heavens that we now know as outer space. Then we’ll have rational terms for discussions and descriptions of Heaven as those earlier Christians did.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. [Genesis 1:1-2]

Stanley Jaki, a Benedictine priest and scholar with wide-ranging knowledge and credentials, has shown in Genesis 1 Through the Ages [Thomas More Press, 1992] that the word translated as ‘created’ in the above verses actually means ‘cleave’ in the sense of separate. For most purposes, we can mentally translate the word ‘create’ in the book of Genesis as ‘shape’ or maybe ‘organize’.

We Christians believe God did create from nothing all that is not Him, but we can’t see or describe that event, even in our imaginations. Science tells us the same though some individual scientists would like to find an equation to describe a creation event — logically impossible since mathematics doesn’t describe existence as such. The so-called Big Bang is not a creation event but rather a transition from some prior state of being.

God shaped this world out of some very strange stuff which He had created as the basic stuff of all Creation. That basic stuff lies on the other side of the Big Bang, though maybe far on the other side. Many other phases might lie in between the rawest levels of Creation and our universe. If God shaped this world out of that stuff, we can have faith that He can shape Heaven — the world of the resurrected out of that same stuff.

In the beginning, God shaped this world from the basic stuff of Creation. God had created the basic stuff of Creation from nothing. God has also shaped a world in which Christ and those who belong to Christ will live with Him for time without end. We know this world of the resurrected exists because the risen Christ has visited this mortal world and given marvelous signs of His perfected body, a body St. Paul called a ‘spiritual body’ in 1 Corinthians 15, a wonderful discussion of these issues. Those who belong with Christ, those who will live with Him for time without end, will have spiritual bodies, much like that of the resurrected Christ. It’s perhaps even more fitting to say that our resurrected bodies will be us in the most complete sense.

Christ is the Lord of Creation. So long as we have faith in Christ and in His God, we can be confident that Christ’s promises will be kept. But we need a vision of the world in which those promises will be kept, else those promises will become no more than feel-good illusions to us and our children. We can gain such a vision if we have the courage and faith to mediate upon Holy Scripture in light of what we modern human beings know about this universe, this phase of Creation.

Rules of Life: A Return to Tradition

Christ in the Desert, is a monastery in New Mexico that once was struggling as hard as most religious institutions in this modern age. In more recent years, they’ve been blessed with more vocations than they can easily handle but they’ve been able so far to admit all serious applicants who seem to have a valid calling to the monastic life. They’ve started a new house in the Archdiocese of Chicago and they’ve sent several monks to help St. Benedict’s Abbey, a once struggling and now recovering monastery in Pietersburg, South Africa. Now, the monks of Christ in the Desert have tentative plans to set up a monastery for Vietnamese monks.

When Abbot Philip visited South Africa recently, he wrote a newsletter in which he discussed the liturgy of the hours and the blessings he saw coming to a Benedictine monastery which returned to the one-week psalter from the four-week psalter prayed by far too many houses in recent decades. (See the newsletter at return to tradition.) That four-week psalter is appropriate for pastors or other priests in the world, for members of active orders (such as teaching orders), and for the laity, but the Rule of St. Benedict mandates the much more demanding one-week psalter. Praying all 150 psalms each week, along with hymns, antipons, readings, intercessionary prayers, and other prayers requires the monks to spend at least 3 hours a day in just that liturgy of the hours. (See General Instructions for Liturgy of the Hours for the general instructions for praying the Liturgy of the Hours. For those interested in the history of the Liturgy of the Hours, here’s an Essay on Historical Development.)

In addition to praying the Liturgy of the Hours in community, Benedictines have to celebrate daily Mass, more elaborate than the daily Mass at a parish. They also have to earn a living, maintain their property, manage their community, and so forth. It’s not an easy life and not a life for someone like me who has a calling to specific work — this was a matter I discussed with the superior of St. Mary’s more than 15 years ago and he confirmed a monk has to have a calling to that life and not to a specific work. Not an easy life but few worthwhile lives are. My current life is harder than a monk’s life in some ways and easier in others.

Life in a monastery is for those who are called and who respond wholeheartedly. Despite the uniformity in their clothing and their schedules, monks are more free to develop their God-given personalities than we who live in the outside, where we modern human beings have maintained peace and some measure of coherence in our societies for centuries by way of a frightening uniformity of opinion and of taste. The gods of the marketplace have digested our innards so that there can be no high barriers between public and private life.

The monastic rules reflect a practical, hard-earned wisdom that can handle the gods of the marketplaces as well as the gods of disorder who rule when barbarians storm the cities of man — though there is still the price to be paid for pursuing justice in an age that glorifies the expedient. During very bad times, monasteries have protected the treasures of not only Christian thought and liturgy but also those of practical knowledge in engineering and agriculture and even the treasures of secular literature and pagan philosophy. We may well be entering an era when monasteries will once again act as storehouses for many human treasures which are not directly convertible into gold.

Rules of Life: The Benedictine Life

I’d considered the possibility of a call into monastic life about 15 years ago. I was attracted to many aspects of the life but was also quite aware that the monastic life wasn’t what many imagine it to be. There’s quiet but it’s sometimes an external quiet that makes the inner struggles all the louder. And even the best of monasteries can go through turmoil such that the external quiet also disappears. The world follows you into the cloister.

On the whole, there’s order in Benedictine monasteries, those that survive for more than a few years, but that order can itself be disturbing. We modern men don’t deal well with the death of the self by humility and discipline even when we know that death leads to our rebirth in a Christ-like form. Even the most highly motivated young monk has to struggle to accept the rules of a life he’s not yet made his own. There’s maybe a chance for personal study but only after years of studying Latin and chant, the Rule of St. Benedict and the lives of Benedictine saints. There’s maybe a chance to carve out one’s own niche in the way of a woodworker or ale-brewer or bee-keeper if study is of little interest, but that also will be years in the future. Until then, you do humbler work to support the established routines of the monastery.

If things work out for me, I’d like to start a house of studies as a Benedictine oblate community. And I’d like to start it near, or even proximate to, a good monastery such as St. Mary’s Monastery in Petersham, MA. It seems to me to be a potentially effective way to continue my efforts to understand God’s Creation in light of Christian revelation. This may not ever happen. I might spend the rest of my life feeling the frustrations of being in a place and a situation which are not mine.

Sometimes, devout and traditional Catholic that I am, I feel I’d like to live near an Amish or Mennonite community. There are lessons in the Rule of St. Benedict which apply to the life of Christian laymen in a form much mitigated from the monastic original. The Amish and some Mennonites live as if they were following a rule of life for laity based upon the Rule of St. Benedict. Wendell Berry. farmer and poet and essayist, writes of morally proper lives of farmers as if he’d studied the Rule of St. Benedict and absorbed its wisdom so deeply that he can adjust it to different circumstances as a matter of course. Then again, a morally well-ordered life is what it is, whether it comes from a Benedictine tradition or the agrarian traditions of Kentucky.

Visiting a Region of Peace

Fourteen years ago, I’d made my break with the corporate world, forced by a bit of incompetence in my last position to be sure. Barely escaping bankruptcy because of a drop in real estate values, I’d moved up to Petersham, MA, renting a small apartment in an antique farmhouse owned by a young couple. I chose to rent that apartment because it was a 5 to 10 minute walk from the brother-sister Benedictine communities of St. Mary’s Monastery and the Priory of St. Scholastica. I’d been visiting those communities on occasional weekends for a year or so.

After moving to Petersham, I participated in the prayer and worship of those Benedictine communities as a lay visitor. I attended Lauds some days (at 6:00AM or so), Vespers most days (at 6PM or so), and daily Mass often. I also attended Sunday Mass at St. Mary’s rather than going to one of the parish churches in Athol — there was a mission church in Petersham with no resident priest and a limited Mass schedule.

When I had to leave Petersham, I fell away from the practice of my Catholic faith for nearly nine years. About five years ago, I began my slow return to practice of my faith and have now become very active in my parish.

Almost two years ago, I returned for a visit to St. Mary’s, attending Mass with a friend but that was more of a field trip and included a long hike through the Harvard University forest a little down the road from St. Mary’s.

About a month ago, I went up with some other friends and had a very unusual experience. The Superior is a Visitor for the Subiaco Congregation of the Benedictines and goes to inspect monasteries in various places around this globe but most of the monks stay put most of the time. After all, they even take a vow of stability. Yet, my friends and I arrived to find that all but one of the monks had left for a visit to a relatively new monastery of their congregation that was near Chicago. A parish priest came in and celebrated a very nice Mass but it was a regular new Mass in English. We’d gone up to see that new Mass celebrated with Gregorian chant in Latin. But we didn’t give up. We returned for Vespers just about a week ago as I write. And we stayed for Compline.

Putting First Things Last: What to Do?

In terms of the Christian worldview I’ve developed, our duty can be stated clearly: we must learn how to move with the grain of Creation. We can’t do so by way of simple recipes, but there are some guidelines, though there is one major problem that few recognize and for which there is no proposed solution. I’ll discuss that last.

First, we have to re-gain a proper Christian perspective of our own minds. We have to develop those minds, not just use them to recycle prejudices which were once plausible but no longer are in light of modern empirical knowledge. By advocating systems in which revealed truths are mixed with ancient and no longer valid forms of knowledge, we cast doubt upon those revealed truths. We most certainly don’t want to pick up the newer and quite impious prejudices which are held by the modern secularists who have all the intellectual and spiritual vices and few of the virtues of their Enlightenment fathers, but we can’t let ourselves be chased out of God’s world into some sort of illusory fairy-world. We have to learn how to think creatively and how to think in a properly disciplined manner. We have to be willing to honestly confront the new knowledge coming from quantum mechanics and astrophysics, evolutionary biology and neurobiology, history and economics. We have to remember that these are modern developments within the very sciences which St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas — among others — tried to integrate within what I call a worldview. There is no special piety attached to fifth century biology or thirteenth century astronomy nor even to the speculations based on those ‘specific sciences’ as Aquinas labeled them though there is great value even in the world-oriented speculations of Augustine, Aquinas, and other Fathers and Doctors of the Church as there is in the similar speculations of the great Hellenistic philosophy.

We have to remember that faith is necessary for understanding, but we must make that effort to understand Creation as well as God’s self-revelations. Otherwise our faith will leave us strangers in God’s world. We will be disoriented ourselves and our children may well drift away. We claim to have a special relationship with a God we proclaim as the Creator of this world and then we’re indifferent about that world, but more and more we’re also indifferent about God Himself. We care little about science, history, mathematics, and other forms of human knowledge which have expanded so much in recent centuries. We expound systems of theology based upon ancient systems of thought which aren’t wrong so much as they’re far too small to be useful in describing God’s Creation as we can now see it.

The Importance of the Liturgical Calendar

In this modern age, we maintain constant levels of activity and production by smoothing out or eliminating the effect of seasons. In doing this, we create various disturbances in our bodies and minds and souls — but we assume our unnatural manipulation of our schedules and life-styles to be natural just because it’s what we’re born into. As a consequence, those who have natural rhythms to their energy and alertness levels will think there is something wrong with them when they feel lethargic and a little depressed during winter. In most cases, the lower energy and alertness levels are part of our natural rhythms. Our ancestors, from whom we receive our traits and tendencies, had shorter workdays in winter and spent much time in low-key activities, such as repairing tools or clothing, and also resting or telling tales or teaching and playing with children. Farmers who follow traditional ways, such as the farmer-poet Wendell Berry will follow this sort of a schedule, lessening their physical activities in winter, perhaps to pick up a pen to write poetry or a Bible to refresh their soul.

The liturgical calendar is not something imposed upon us. Our modern schedules are imposed on us because we’ve built societies and economies which require constant high levels of activity or else they will collapse. We have not the option of satisfying our needs and some additional desires and then settling into a period of leisure, which would include not only rest but also important activities requiring lower energy or energy of a different sort — catching up on all those good books we’ve been meaning to read or making music with the children or making wooden toys for the grandchildren. Maybe even praying or reading the Bible.

The liturgical calendar of Sacramental Christianity moves along with the natural rhythms of life, as did the calendars of ancient peoples, Hebraic and pagan, and also the calendars of modern Jews.