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Deacon Douglas McManaman

After all these years, some people still speak about evolution and creation as though the two stand face to face on a level field, so to speak, and that the two are mutually exclusive. Many also have a tendency to think that stochastic processes and creation are incompatible and thus irreconcilable, insofar as creation is planned, while randomness appears to be unplanned. The following is an attempt to show that this is a misconception.

Evolution and creation are two ideas that belong to two different orders, if you will. Evolution belongs to the essential order while creation belongs to the existential order. Allow me to explain. We speak of the essence of a thing, and the essence describes “what” a thing is, and this includes how it acts and thus how it manifests itself, that is, how it reveals its nature (science is a study of the natures of things). For example, an organism is a living kind of thing, because it self-ambulates, and presupposing evolution we can say that organisms are the kinds of things that evolve via a process of random mutation and natural selection. We can say more about specific organisms than this, but whatever we accurately say about them along scientific lines simply allows us to understand “what” they are more deeply. 

However, we can know “what a thing is” (essence) without thereby knowing “whether or not it exists” (existence). The very act of existence of a being is not included in that thing’s essence–we can know what a dinosaur is without apprehending its existence outside the mind. This is true because whatever belongs to a thing’s nature or essence belongs to it necessarily. For example, the ability to reason belongs to the essence of a human being, and so if there is a human being on the other side of this door, then we can say that he or she necessarily has the ability to reason, at least to some degree. If the act of existing belonged to the essence of a being, such as the being behind this door, then we’d have to say that this being, whatever it is, exists necessarily, and thus could not not exist, and thus would have always existed. We would then say that such a being is a “necessary being”. But if we are talking about a being whose essence is really distinct from its act of existing, then such a being need not exist and can indeed “not exist”, such as this cat, or that person, or that tree, etc. We refer to such beings as contingent (may or may not be), as opposed to necessary.

Aquinas argues that even if we suppose that the universe always existed, it would still require a creator, and the reason is that the universe is the sum of the contingent beings that make it up. In other words, every being in the universe is a contingent being, a being whose essence is really distinct from its act of existing. Furthermore, no contingent being can bring itself into being, for that would require that a being exist before it actually exists, which is absurd. And no contingent being can impart the act of existing on what simply does not exist (creation ex nihilo) because a contingent being can only act within the limited powers of its nature, and existence does not belong to the nature (essence) of a contingent being–otherwise it would not be contingent, but a necessary being (eternal and having always existed). And so it follows that only a non-contingent being, that is, a necessary being, can impart the act of existing and thus bring into being what simply does not exist. 

To impart the act of existing is not the same as reproduction or generation. In order for an organism or two to reproduce or generate offspring, that organism must exist, and it must be sustained in existence–for a contingent being (i.e., an organism) cannot perpetuate its own act of existing any more than it can impart the act of existing. To perpetuate or sustain the act of existing is not the same as sustaining one’s life; I can sustain my life by eating and drinking, but in order to eat and drink, which are activities, I have to first exist and be sustained in existence. Only then can I act. 

This is why creation is not to be thought of as something that occurs at the beginning of time, and thus at the beginning of a horizontal timeline. The evolutionary process began at some point on a horizontal timeline, but not creation. Creation is to be thought of vertically, not horizontally. For example, I decide to run from point A to point B, and that can be depicted horizontally. But in order for me to complete the change from point A to point B, I must first exist and be sustained in existence throughout the change, because activity presupposes being or existence, for it is always a “being” that acts. So too with evolution. In order for an organism to evolve–which tells us something of the essence of the thing–, it must first exist, and an organism is not its existence; rather, an organism “has” a received act of existing. And so evolution requires creation (essence depends on existence). An evolving organism is a contingent being that is a determinate kind of thing (essence), but one which also has a received act of existing, an act of existing that does not belong to that thing’s nature.

Finally, stochastic processes belong to the essential order, not the existential order. For example, popcorn is a certain kind of food, but think of a bag of popcorn kernels spread out on a table. It is not possible for you or me to know which kernel is going to pop first, which one second, third, etc. Their popping is going to be entirely random. However, randomness is order–it is only a disorder relative to us (epistemic disorder, not a real disorder). The reason we say this is that real disorder is unintelligible; it cannot be the object of study, but the random popping of the kernels will follow a normal frequency distribution, which is an ordered and intelligible distribution, and so although we do not know which popcorn kernel is going to pop at any one time, we do know that there is a 68% chance that it will pop within a certain time span, and a 95% chance of popping within a slightly larger time span, etc. Or, we can put it like this: 68% of the kernels will pop within this specified time frame, 95% of the kernels will pop within this wider time frame, etc.[1] If the whole bag of popcorn is nothing other than the sum of its parts and the behavior of the whole is ordered, then the parts are also ordered, but in a way that exceeds our ability to understand at this point–perhaps even forever. 

And so it is perfectly coherent that God (the Necessary Being) would bring into being a universe that includes organisms that evolve as a result of stochastic processes. There is nothing disordered in this. The difficulty in conceiving this results from regarding the two orders, essence and existence, as mutually exclusive or merely on the same plane. The two orders are simultaneous, with the one depending on the other–essence depending on existence. 

Notes

1. If we listen to popcorn popping, we can hear the distribution, which when plotted on paper, looks like a bell curve. After a short time, one kernel will pop, then another, then two others in rapid succession, then three, four, and soon it will begin to sound like machine gun fire, and then it will slowly die down in the same way it began. The standard deviation is calculated using the following formula: √ [∑ (X1 – X)2  +  (X2 – X)2 + (X3 – X)2 + …..  /n], where X stands for the mean (i.e., 73 seconds), while X1, X2, X3, etc., stand for each observed result; for example, X1 is the first popcorn kernel that popped, and this took place at the 30 second mark. So, (X1 – X)2 is (30 – 73)2 + (30 – 73)2 + (35 – 73)2 + etc.,. /173. The standard deviation is the square root of the sum of each observed result minus the mean squared, divided by the total number.    

Deacon Douglas McManaman

The very notion of the development of Catholic doctrine is of course very much in discussion today and will be for a long while yet, but it seems to me that the concept itself is a bit messier than is typically depicted. To illustrate what the development of doctrine looks like, analogies from the realm of art are often employed. Here, the artist begins with a general background and proceeds towards increasingly greater detail and precision; similarly, the Church’s formulated teaching goes from the general and more certain to greater detail and precision as new questions and problems arise throughout the Church’s history.

This is certainly true as far as it goes, but this picture might in some small ways be too neat and thus not entirely true to the facts; an artist will often go back and erase or paint over parts of what he drew or painted, because as it stands, a particular part of the unfinished product will not, if left alone, help to express what the artist intends, and it is only afterwards that he recognizes the incongruity.

Our own individual self-understanding is always, for the most part, imperfect, vague and lacking precision, more or less correct, and it is in time that our self-understanding becomes more explicit and truer to what we are at our most fundamental level. This growth in self-understanding often involves discarding elements of that self-understanding that are inconsistent with our fundamental orientation–I eventually come to the realization that “this is not me”, at least not entirely so. Similarly, the Church is a living organism, and living organisms are self-correcting. This self-correction occurs in history, and it may take centuries for this living organism that is the Church to correct herself with respect to a particular matter, but this self-correcting process can and often does involve erasures of certain parts that distort and thus fail to express or articulate the Church’s deepest self-understanding, which becomes more explicit as time goes on.

For example, consider the following excerpt from the Council of Florence (15th century):

The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes, and proclaims that those not living within the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics cannot become participants in eternal life, but will depart “into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels”, unless before the end of life the same have been added to the flock. The unity of the ecclesiastical body is so strong that only to those remaining in it are the Church’s sacraments of benefit for salvation, … and that no one, whatever almsgiving he has practiced, even if he has shed blood for the name of Christ, can be saved, unless he has remained in the bosom and unity of the Catholic Church.

There is here a clear ruling out of the further qualification of a person outside the visible borders of the Catholic Church who sheds his blood for Christ. However, let us compare this with the Second Vatican Council, section 15 of Lumen Gentium:

The Church recognizes that in many ways she is linked with those who, being baptized, are honored with the name of Christian, though they do not profess the faith in its entirety or do not preserve unity of communion with the successor of Peter. For there are many who honor Sacred Scripture, taking it as a norm of belief and a pattern of life, and who show a sincere zeal. They lovingly believe in God the Father Almighty and in Christ, the Son of God and Saviour. They are consecrated by baptism, in which they are united with Christ. They also recognize and accept other sacraments within their own Churches or ecclesiastical communities. Many of them rejoice in the episcopate, celebrate the Holy Eucharist and cultivate devotion toward the Virgin Mother of God. They also share with us in prayer and other spiritual benefits. Likewise we can say that in some real way they are joined with us in the Holy Spirit, for to them too He gives His gifts and graces whereby He is operative among them with His sanctifying power. Some indeed He has strengthened to the extent of the shedding of their blood. In all of Christ’s disciples the Spirit arouses the desire to be peacefully united, in the manner determined by Christ, as one flock under one shepherd, and He prompts them to pursue this end. Mother Church never ceases to pray, hope and work that this may come about. (LG 15)

So, although a person may not be in communion with the successor of Peter, he or she is nevertheless united to the Church by virtue of baptism, grace, prayer, love of scripture, even martyrdom, etc. The possibility of salvation is even extended to the unbaptized, to non-Christians (Jews, Muslims, and certain so called “atheists”):

Finally, those who have not yet received the Gospel are related in various ways to the people of God. In the first place we must recall the people to whom the testament and the promises were given and from whom Christ was born according to the flesh. On account of their fathers this people remains most dear to God, for God does not repent of the gifts He makes nor of the calls He issues. But the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind. Nor is God far distant from those who in shadows and images seek the unknown God, for it is He who gives to all men life and breath and all things, and as Saviour wills that all men be saved. Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience. Nor does Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life. Whatever good or truth is found amongst them is looked upon by the Church as a preparation for the Gospel. She knows that it is given by Him who enlightens all men so that they may finally have life. (LG 16)

The various and subtle ways that a person can be related to the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ the Head, had not, at that point in time, dawned on the fathers of Florence; that will take another 500 years—unless of course there is buried somewhere textual evidence that shows otherwise, in which case the Florence fathers would have been the worst of communicators. It is easy to imagine that had they been given these two sections of Lumen Gentium in writing, the parchment would have ended up in the fireplace rather quickly.

This, I believe, is an example of a genuine development, which involves more than a greater attention to detail, but an erasure of sorts, a restating with parts left out, a “painting over” of a section whose formulation did not quite express the mind and heart of the Church, which was much better expressed at Vatican II. The fathers of the Council of Florence would not have recognized the value of these distinctions at the time, but the mind and heart of the Church is always much larger than the mind of an individual cleric or group of clerics, who although they possess a charism and as a whole constitute the organ of the charism of infallibility, are always limited by matter, geography and time.

Furthermore, the current self-understanding of the Church and her teachings are not solely communicated to us through conciliar texts. We all know the expression: “Actions speak louder than words”. We act on the basis of what we know and profess, and so not only do we often regret what we said in the past, which articulates what we thought was fundamental and true at the time, we also regret what we did in the past. Actions are a universal language. As Christ said: “You will know them by their fruits” (Mt 7, 16). This implies that fruits are indicative; they reveal. The Church does not sanction torture and killing as she once did (i.e., heretics), nor slavery, nor would the Church tolerate a Johann Tetzel today; a modern-day Luther would not fear for his life and would gladly visit Rome to explain himself, and Rome would listen. Every teacher knows that we teach first and foremost by our actions, because actions are words. Every person looks back on his own life and regrets what he or she said at one time or another, or how it was said, and this is true of the Church in the world. Further qualifications are a kind of erasure, that is, an instance of painting over an earlier brush stroke that was heading in the wrong direction.

Piet Fransen S.J. points out that a council is the Church in action at a given time and place in history, and that a dogma is not so much an endpoint as it is a starting point, a new beginning, and that it ought to be interpreted and reinterpreted in dialogue with the sensus fidei. Similarly, a brush stroke is not an endpoint, but a beginning. Dogmas are not free from historical evolution, and conciliar texts, like scripture, must be subject to the same kind of literary criticism, that is, the distinction between assertion and proposition is just as important for conciliar texts as it is for scripture.

In this light, it is a bit more difficult to articulate precisely what infallibility means. It is indeed a charism that belongs to the Church as a whole, and the magisterium is its organ. But, as Piet Fransen writes: “We are also profoundly conscious of the precariousness of human truth. This is all the more so with “divine truth”, since any human formulation of it necessarily falls short of the richness and fullness of the divine reality. If it is permissible to talk of infallibility in relation to man, it must first be a qualification of an activity, and not of a proposition, and that under the guidance of the infallible God. Infallibility is a property of a free person; never of a sentence, since any sentence as such, without its context, can be understood and read in many different ways. Whenever we are allowed a participatory form of infallibility, then this infallibility does not lie so much in the formulation itself but in the concrete intention, the affirmative direction, the so-called “significance” of this particular formulation” (See “Unity and Confessional Statements. Historical and Theological Inquiry of R. C. Traditional Conceptions”, in Hermeneutics of the Councils and Other Studies. Collected by H.E. Mertens and F. De Graeve. Leuven University Press, 1985. P. 279-280).

How this charism works on the ground is thus historical and dialectical, often a struggle that involves the faithful and everyone who is united in some way to the Church, and so it involves dialogue, an ability to observe the Church as a whole and listen, including those who are invisibly united and related to the Church, which in turn requires an openness to the world, a model of the Church hinted at by Pope John XXIII. This dialogue, Fransen writes, “should spread in four concentric circles over the entire world. The first dialogue is with the “members of the household of the faith” (Gal 6, 10), the members of the Church. In the second place, the dialogue with those who sincerely believe in Christ, but are still standing outside the unity of the Church. Next, the dialogue with those who believe in God but have as yet no knowledge of Christ. Finally, the dialogue with all men of goodwill, whatever their persuasion—provided they are sincere and have pity on “man and his woes”. (The New Life of Grace, translated by George Dupont, S.J. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1971, p. 187)

Many of the faithful, however, are afraid to bend, because they believe that if they bend, they will break, i.e., lose their faith, and that everything which belongs to my faith will now potentially make its way to the sewer. But this is a serious misconception. We have to allow God to bend our faith; for we believe in the gospel and through the gift of understanding we apprehend to some degree, through the light of faith that gives rise to that gift, the gospel that we embrace, but we do not apprehend it in its fullness. There are theological implications to what we choose to believe that have yet to be drawn out, and these implications, which make for a much richer understanding, may not be drawn out in our lifetime. But it cannot be denied that all our thoughts and dogmatic formulae fall short of the divine fullness, the inexhaustible mystery of God.

This question refers more to severe and never ending suffering, such as an infant born with a disability, or severe mental health issues, or the extreme tragedies of war. 

Deacon Doug McManaman

This is the great question, and I deal with this all the time in my ministry to the sick, and there is no simple and straightforward answer. There are two levels on which to deal with this question: on the concrete level, and on a more abstract level. The more abstract the level of discourse, the greater the certainty we possess. As we move to the concrete level of everyday life and individual persons, the less certainty we possess.

So, when I have a person in front of me who is suffering from PTSD as a result of a tragic event (i.e., vehicle accident that ended in the death of a young child), or a person who has been battling depression all her life and has suffered terrible abuse throughout her life, and I am asked: “Why does God allow all this suffering in my life”, my answer is: “I don’t know”. And I’d be a fool to attempt to answer her question, for “Who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor?” (Is 40, 13; and quoted by Paul in Romans 11, 34). On this level, things are buried in mystery, and mystery has to be revered, not solved.

But, let’s move to a more general level. This is what we can be certain of: First, the God we worship is all-powerful, which means he can do whatever he wills–nothing limits his power. Secondly, God is Love (1 Jn 4, 7), which means he wants your greatest happiness. 

If God was all-powerful, but not pure Goodness Itself (Love Itself), then God could very well bring about your greatest happiness, but he would not necessarily desire it (because God does not necessarily love you, that is, will what is absolutely the best for you). If, on the other hand, God is Love, but he is not all-powerful, then he wills your greatest happiness, but he simply does not have the power to bring it about. Parents typically know this feeling–we want the best for our children, but we are so limited in what we can do for them. However, the God we worship is both all powerful and absolute Love. This implies that whatever God chooses to allow to happen to you and to me in this life, he allows it ultimately for our greatest happiness. That is a conclusion that follows necessarily, but on a very abstract and general level. 

However, why he allowed you to suffer this or that particular trauma, or why he allowed this child to be born with a severe disability, is entirely, completely, and utterly beyond my ken. I have no idea, and because I have no idea, I should not attempt an answer. But I can say that you and I will understand at some point, when we stand before God at the end of time. In fact, we can often look at our own past (retrospection) and discern something of the truth of this, for example, I often look back at my life and notice that my greatest disappointments in life have turned out to be my greatest blessings. I didn’t see that at the time, but I see it now. And so, it is important for us to remember these moments, especially during times of present day disappointments. God is all powerful and he can draw greater good out of the evils that plague us than had these evils never occurred. We know this is true in the case of our redemption. God became flesh in the Person of Christ; God the Son dwelt among us, and we crucified the Son of God. The tragedy of Good Friday was our salvation. As we hear during the singing of the Easter Vigil: “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!”

It’s just not possible for me to know all the factors involved in God’s decision to allow this or that to have happened in this or that person’s life. Human knowledge is profoundly limited. We can’t predict the future, and even trained meteorologists are unable to predict the weather beyond 7 days; the weather is a chaotic system, and so is life (a chaotic system is ordered, but too complex for us to grasp in all its details). 

There is another angle from which we can look at this question, and this is more theological. Christ did not redeem us from sin through his preaching, i.e., his sermon on the Mount, nor did he redeem us through his miracles. He redeemed humanity through his suffering and death (the Paschal Mystery). The greatest gift he gives us is the gift of faith, which is the gift by which we are given the capacity to believe him, to know him, to surrender to him, to follow him, and following him is always a sharing in his “way of the cross”. So the greatest gift we can be given is to share in his saving work; we participate in his “saving of the world” through our sufferings. This is hard to explain to people–impossible to explain to those who have little or no faith. But consider the life of any saint in the history of the Church–their lives are filled with suffering, frustrations, set backs, obstacles, and in many cases, the suffering is the result of the actions of the Church–this is true of St. Padre Pio and the sufferings he underwent as a result of the clerical envy of his brother priests of the surrounding diocese of Foggia, who should have known better, or as a result of opposition from the Vatican, who were often misinformed about Padre Pio. He, like other saints, shared in the saving of souls, and he did so to a certain degree through his words and his miracles, but primarily through his sharing in the sufferings of Christ. There are people among us who suffer, and we often know nothing about it, and there is great prosperity in parts of the world, and it is very possible that this prosperity is the fruit of their sufferings, at least in part. Some priests from Africa have said to me that they believe certain African nations, torn by war and constant civil strife, have been chosen to share, in a unique way, in the redemption of the world today. To see this and embrace this requires faith, however. 

The sufferings of this world are all rooted in human sin, i.e., selfishness, the desire for power, hatred, unforgiveness, anger, the inordinate desire for pleasure and ease, indifference to those who are without, individualism, indifference to injustice, etc. So we are the cause of suffering in the world, but as Mother Teresa pointed out, there are innocent sufferers. That’s what sin does, it afflicts the innocent who get swept away in the tide caused by human sin, i.e., children who suffer sexual or emotional abuse from parents or relatives, who in turn abuse because they were abused by their own relatives who suffered from stress related illnesses, and so on and so forth, children born in poverty, children caught in the crossfire, etc. Man is the source of suffering, but God is the source of redemption and healing, and God is “in history”, he acts in history, and God is in control of history’s movement, and we know from the resurrection, which is Christ’s definitive victory over death, that suffering and death do not have the final word over your life and my life. Christ was victorious over evil, sin, and death, and his victory is universal. So, although it seems that evil is victorious here and there, we know through the light of faith, that these are just moments in a larger movement and that in the end, life, grace, and the unimaginable joy of victory will be ours.

Deacon Douglas McManaman
(Originally published: October 26th, 2018 by the Oblates of Japan)

All of us, Christians and Muslims, live under the sun of the one merciful God. We both believe in one God who is the Creator of Man.… We adore God and profess total submission to him. Thus, in a true sense, we can call one another brothers and sisters in faith in the one God.
Pope John Paul II. 

Whenever I speak or write about our Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh brothers and sisters in the context of a talk on Catholic spirituality or quote one of the great Sufi or Jewish mystics in the course of a homily, inevitably someone from the congregation or group of listeners will afterwards pose a question or series of questions at the root of which is a presumption, namely, that these religions really have nothing to offer us that we don’t already possess. There seems to be a suggestion that quoting thinkers of other religious traditions implies relativism, the position that every religion is fundamentally the same as any other. I believe that at the heart of these claims is a knowledge problem. What follows is an attempt to explain this contention.

Generally speaking, we can discern throughout history roughly two ways of conceiving knowledge production. One way – still very much alive today – is to begin with a grand idea and then proceed to implement that idea, either on a multitude or on the society at large; in the process, all corroborating evidence is noticed, collected, and cited in support of the idea. The other way is to begin not on the level of the idea, but on the level of the facts, the data, the evidence of a problem in which we are interested, and to proceed to account for that evidence by putting forth the best or most plausible estimate.

The latter approach is messy, labor intensive, and characterized by uncertainty, because, as the very logic of this method shows, nothing more than a plausible conclusion is guaranteed – i.e., typically, there are many alternative hypotheses that at first glance can, to some extent, account for the same facts in evidence, which is why each one must be tested. This, of course, describes the basic logic of the scientific method. The former approach on the other hand is characteristic of the literary mind, the artist, the poet, etc.; the novelist is inspired by a vision of the entire plot at a glance, and it is later on that the details are filled in to give concrete expression to that idea.

It has always been interesting to witness the reaction of some of my colleagues to grand ideas introduced by school administrators who were former English, Drama, or Art teachers, ideas peddled as panaceas, grand solutions to the problems teachers have been confronting for centuries: it is typically those in the hard sciences who wonder to what extent these ideas have been tested or who will challenge the ideas by citing evidence that strongly suggests these ideas have not produced what was claimed they would inevitably produce.

We see this methodological tension between grand but untested ideas typically supported by anecdotal evidence on the one hand and a more empirical/pragmatic, evidence-first approach on the other in the lives of our religiously diversified student body. I have taught for 20 years at a school with very devout Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Catholics, Protestants, etc., and what is particularly interesting is that many of these students have come to conclusions at odds with the religious ideas (dogmas) of their parents, or uncles, grandparents, etc. The data they receive on a daily basis as members of a religiously diverse population does not corroborate the “idea” that a good number of them received from the older generation, namely “we have ‘the truth’, while they walk in darkness”. The young Muslim discovers that the devout Hindu (or Catholic, or Sikh, etc.) sitting next to her or behind her or in front of her is not the infidel, pagan, or miniature monster she was somewhat led to believe he was, and vice versa. The data simply does not support the “idea” (the dogma). And the students realize the reason for the discrepancy is “degree of exposure to information” – the students have data their parents tend not to have, because many of the latter came from religiously homogeneous backgrounds. It is simply not necessarily the case that the “others” (i.e., the non-Catholics or Catholics, depending on who you are) are living in darkness because they have not been baptized, confirmed, or do not profess the Shahada, etc.

I believe the myth of the conflict between “science and religion” perpetuated over the centuries is one of the reasons that many devoutly religious fail to appreciate the logic of the scientific method and are unaware of just how much theology depends on it – biblical hermeneutics is methodologically inductive; it is a matter of plausible reasoning. Moreover, inductive conclusions are never “money in the bank”; the truths that we are committed to and which are the result of a theological reasoning process that is investigative in nature are tentative. For the most part, we are dealing with theses having only a degree of plausibility, and one’s conclusion is only as strong as its weakest link in the chain of premises. Moreover, new data can and often does cause us to discard theses that are inconsistent with the new and more plausible data. Science is an evolutionary process (we speak of the scientific revolution), and so too is theology and philosophy.

There is no escaping our epistemic limitations. Each person is born into a specific tradition; man is a social, political, rational, linguistic, economic and religious animal, among other characteristics. At any given moment, each person understands himself and the world through a conceptual framework made up of epistemic conditions, a host of cognitive data, i.e., first principles, perceptions, deductions, uncertain inferences, ideas embodied in a particular and ever evolving language, the science of the day, cultural myths, biases and prejudices that both blind us to some things and open us up to other things, etc. And so not only is science subject to an evolutionary process, so too is our own personal “knowing” – not even the stubborn dogmatist who refuses to open himself to anything new that would threaten the stability of his comfortable worldview can put a complete stop to his own cognitive development.

So how do we explain the theological aporia that 1) Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and 2) there are Muslims, or Hindus, or Sikhs among us who are holier and wiser than I, who am a baptized Catholic? A fundamental axiom of philosophical method is: “Never simply abandon. In the face of insuperable difficulties, introduce distinctions and qualifications that enable you to save what you can of your commitments” (Nicholas Rescher). I believe John Paul II provides a possible avenue to explore this problem credibly: “When we penetrate by means of the continually and rapidly increasing experience of the human family into the mystery of Jesus Christ, we understand with greater clarity that there is at the basis of all these ways that the Church of our time must follow, in accordance with the wisdom of Pope Paul VI, one single way: it is the way that has stood the test of centuries and it is also the way of the future. Christ the Lord indicated this way especially, when, as the Council teaches, “by his Incarnation, he, the Son of God, in a certain way united himself with each man” (Redemptor Hominis, 13).

The Son of God, the Word, is present to every man, because he has united himself in a certain way to each man, and a person does not have to be a member of the visible Catholic Church to respond to that presence, which is a “redemptive presence” within the deepest nature of the human person: “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Behold, here it is!’ or There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17, 20-21). The evidence is clear to anyone who lives among faithful Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, etc., that one may respond to that redemptive presence and love that presence without being completely or even explicitly aware of who it is – as a child can love his mother without a properly scientific knowledge of who or what she is (Cf. S.T. I-II, q. 89, a.6).

At a very profound level, the devout Muslim, Sikh, Jew, and Hindu, etc., is our brother, our sister; for it is not possible to love Christ except through the power of the Holy Spirit, so if you, a Christian, live in Christ and Christ lives in you, if you carry in your body the death of Christ so that the life of Christ can be made manifest through you (2 Co 4, 10), and the devout Muslim for example likes what he or she sees in you, or better yet loves what he or she sees in you, that is, your deepest identity, then they love Christ without necessarily being aware of it – given that Christ really does live, act, and speak through you. One day I asked a good friend of mine, a priest of a nearby diocese, to tell me where in the Old Testament can one find the following words: “How can I describe the Greatness of Your Name, O Lord? If I had a hundred of thousands of stacks of paper, and if ink were never to fail me, and if my pen were able to move like the wind, and if I were to read and recite and embrace love for the Lord–even so; I could not estimate Your Value. How can I describe the Greatness of Your Name?”

My friend responded: “The book of Wisdom? One of the Psalms?” No, so I continued: “So many endure distress, deprivation and constant abuse. Even these are Your Gifts, O Great Giver! Freedom from slavery comes only by Your Will. No one else has any say in this. If some fool should presume to say that he does, he shall learn, and feel the effects of his folly. He Himself knows, He Himself gives. Few, very few are those who acknowledge this…Speak of Him continually and remain absorbed in His Love.”

He was sure it came from one of the wisdom books, such as Sirach or Ecclesiastes. Before telling him the answer, I asked him to tell me which mystical theologian in history would have said the following:

Does anyone think that the ocean is only what appears on its surface? By observing its hue and motion the keen eye may perceive indications of that ocean’s unfathomable depth. The Lord’s mercy and compassion are an ocean with no shore, providing endlessly varied vistas for those who sail its surface; but the greatest wonderment and fulfillment is reserved for those “creatures of the sea” for whom that mercy has become their own medium.

The Lord beckons us through a divine love and attraction that has been implanted in our hearts, a love that may be understood and felt consciously as divine by some, and only indirectly as love for His creatures or creation by others. In either case the pull of our heartstrings draws us to those Mercy Oceans, just as our physical bodies feel drawn to a warm and gentle sea.

By means of the revelation of the Scriptures and through the example set by prophets and saints, all human beings have been brought in contact with those oceans. For humankind at large, these revelations serve as vessels, or as “instruction manuals” for building and maintaining vessels that ply those most spacious seas, but for those who have the means to read between the lines, a great revelation emerges: that we are of that sea, that our place, our home is in the depths of that sea, not on its surface.

My friend’s list of possibilities included Meister Eckhart, one of the desert fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Gertrude, St. Hildegard of Bingen, etc. But the first piece of writing was from the Sri Guru Granth Sahib and the latter is an excerpt, with some modification of vocabulary, from modern Sufi writer Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kibbani.

Consider the image of a pyramid that is upside down. On the top and widest level represents the level of articulated religious belief (doctrine); here there is a wide range of diversity and difference. But as we approach the “mystical” level of each of these religions, the two sides gradually converge toward one another, so much so that at its deepest level it is very difficult to distinguish them on the basis of the specific religion; they all seem to be speaking the same language; in other words, there is a significant unity at this level. Hindus speak of the need to become aware of the distinction between the unchanging “I” and the passing events of our everyday lives, which they see as Maya, and the need to detach the “I” from that which is fleeting, and we encounter, in Islamic mysticism, the idea of Allah as the ocean that dissolves the individual ego, if we permit such a thing. Christian mystics speak of the death of self, the need to die to oneself in order to rise to new life, a regenerate life, and Islamic mysticism has similar ideas with only slightly different vocabulary. Buddhism speaks of the thickening of the ego and the need to drop all desire, but so too do Christian, Jewish, and Muslim mystics. Hinduism speaks of Atman at the center of the human person, and according to the Vedanta school, Atman is Brahman. But according to Islamic Sufism, Allah is both immanent and transcendent; as immanent, God is that eternal and necessary ground of all being at the very depths of the human soul, and our goal is egoistic annihilation. Kabbala speaks of God as nothingness, the fullest and purest mode of being; Buddhism speaks of the emptiness that is the fullness of Nirvana, etc.

On the most profound level of human religious existence, there is a sense in which we are all brothers/sisters; for we may be operating out of the same subterranean world, if you will, a world in which is present a Person, the Word, who gives us his undivided attention at every moment of our existence. When we begin to understand that “doctrine” (the explicit articulation of what is believed) proceeds from that deepest level of religious experience, it becomes increasingly evident that we need to carefully interpret each other’s doctrine in the light of that mystical understanding, otherwise we run the risk of misinterpreting one another. If we do not possess a mystic sense, we are sure to misinterpret one another, understanding the ‘other’ on our terms, not on their terms.

Individual human beings are continually growing in knowledge and understanding. This is because experience provides us, on an ongoing basis, with new information, and it is in the light of this new data that we re-interpret our current body of knowledge. It often happens that we discover that what we thought was absolutely and definitively true is not so after all, at least not completely. But it is very difficult to know whether our current body of knowledge suffers serious deficiencies – that tends to happen retrospectively. In other words, truth is an idealization. What we possess at any one time is often and for the most part a matter of putative truth. Our information is always incomplete, and new information has a way of changing the plausibility of our current data, causing us to make finer distinctions and to revise our estimates. As we learn from one another, we begin to see the world from a different angle, that is, within a new cognitive framework containing additional information. This angle is not necessarily any better, at least not in any absolute sense, but often we discover that much of that “different perspective” sheds light on what we already know, enabling us to distinguish where we failed to earlier, and enlarges our current body of knowledge, often refining it in some ways. The resulting hybrid is usually better.

From a statistical point of view, if the vast majority of our knowledge at any one time has undergone tremendous revision, enlargement, expansion, serious editing, etc., then it is reasonable to expect this trend to continue; in fact, there are no signs that this is slowing down. But for some reason, many people find it difficult to acknowledge the implications of what they already know implicitly. Uncertainty seems to give rise to fear, perhaps a fear of losing one’s identity. Raimon Panikkar writes:

In the West identity is established through difference. Catholics find their identity in not being Protestant or Hindu or Buddhist. But other cultures have another way of thinking about one’s identity. Identity is not based on the degree to which one is different from others. In the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity), people seek God in difference – in superiority or transcendence. Being divine means not being human. For Hindus, however, the divine mystery is in man, in what is so profound and real in him that he cannot be separated from it, and it cannot be discharged into transcendence. This is the domain of immanence, of that spiritual archetype that is called brahman. In the Hindu system, people are not afraid of losing their identity. 

They can be afraid of losing what they have, but not of losing what they are.

Being afraid is always a bad sign. Christ says, “I give you peace” and “Do not be afraid.” Contemporary Christians feel surrounded and are afraid of being dissolved. But what does the gospel say? “You are the salt of the earth.” The salt has to be dissolved in order for the food to be more tasty. The leaven is there to make the bread rise. The Christian vocation is to lose oneself in others (Eruption of Truth: An Interview with Raimon Panikkar – Religion Online: https://www.religion-online.org/article/eruption-of-truth-an-interview-with-raimon-panikkar/).

The irony here – if what Panikkar says is true – is that the truly “Catholic” approach, in the sense of international or universal, is the latter. As Panikkar writes: 

The whole history of Christianity is one of enrichment and renewal brought about by elements that came from outside itself. Do not Christmas and Easter, and almost all the Christian feasts, have a non-Christian origin? Would it have been possible to formulate the basic Christian doctrines without the hellenic tradition, itself pre-Christian? Doesn’t every living body exist in symbiosis with its external milieu? (Ibid.) 

The authentically Catholic approach to the uncovering of truth is integrative. Nothing good is discarded, but appropriated. Catholics believe Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Jn 14, 16), “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2, 3). But this Scripture is very clear; it is in him that are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, not in me. My appropriation of Christ is always deficient, that is, my response to his redemptive presence in the world and within me is profoundly imperfect, and thus my knowledge of him is always deficient. But the more perfect that this appropriation becomes, the more will I be able to recognize him outside of myself, and that is why the more I will discover the treasures, that is, the truths or aspects of the Logos dispersed in the lives and the wisdom of those who truly love him and who are outside the visible contours of the Church.

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_408reflectionmarriagebeauty.html

Deacon Douglas McManaman

I’d like to begin this reflection with an analogy. I’m an amateur artist. I love colors, and I’ve always appreciated talented artists and their work. I’m not, however, a talented artist, nor have I been formally trained. The reason I paint is that my spiritual director, in the year of my ordination, told me I should paint. I did not want to at the time, but I decided to follow his instructions–after all, he has a rather extraordinary “word of knowledge” charism. I went out to the dollar store and purchased some cheap pastels and a pad of paper and began to draw and color a picture of some houses in the neighborhood. It was not that good, of course, but I felt as though I had a two-week holiday, just after coloring for an hour. So, I kept at it. I then moved on to chalk pastels, then eventually to pastels on sandpaper, then to acrylics on canvas, and eventually iconography. 

During my pastel phase, I took a workshop with Dave Becket, renowned Canadian pastel artist from Orillia, Ontario. What he would do is paint a picture in front of all of us, so we’d see the work develop and unfold before our eyes. I was rather amazed that throughout the process, at any given stage, the painting looked rough and was not all that pretty, nothing for which any special talent was required. But he kept at it, and at it, and eventually, in the end, we saw the work suddenly come together in all its beauty. 

A marriage can very much be compared to the production of a work of art. A marriage is a process, not a finished product. The product can only be judged at the end, as Aristotle would say of a good life: “for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy” (NE, 1098a18). If one were asked to judge the quality of a marriage at any given time, like the work of art in progress, one might very well say that it is nothing extraordinary, that it is rough and unrefined, certainly not very pretty. We have a tendency to regard marriage within a static frame of mind, as though a marriage is a thing the quality of which one can measure, as in the rather jejune expression “joy-filled” marriage. Anyone reading this who has ever worked on a painting or a sculpture is certainly aware that it is not always a joy, but often tedious; it is work. Similarly, in a marriage, there are moments of great joy, of course, and challenging moments, darkness and struggles; but the joy is really at the end, when we contemplate the work of beauty, as God does at the end of the six days of creation, looking at everything he had made “and indeed, it was very good” (Gn 1, 31). And one only makes it to the end by staying the course, paying attention to details, persisting, refining, and doing the little things the importance of which experience reveals.

This brings me to another point to draw out from this analogy. I have two unfinished paintings in my art room. They are of two beautiful scenes of Uxbridge, Ontario during the fall season, one of a farm and large field below a beautiful sky, the other of a railway crossing in the country. Now, I also studied iconography, but interestingly enough, I do not have any unfinished icons. When writing an icon, one begins with certain prayers, and when finished, it remains unsigned and is blessed with holy oil. The icon is considered a sacramental, not merely a painting. It is a window into the saint who is depicted, a point of contact, and so it is a holy object. I had to ask myself: why don’t I have any unfinished icons, but two large unfinished paintings? I think the reason is that the purpose was different in both cases. My purpose in painting the two that remain unfinished was my own enjoyment. I wanted to capture the enjoyment of those scenes, for myself. The purpose in writing each icon I’d ever done, however, was devotion to the saint depicted, i.e., an angel, Theotokos, or Christ Pantocrator, etc. I certainly finished paintings that were not icons, both acrylics and pastels, but I don’t have them; they were painted for others, for friends and colleagues. I was able to successfully finish them, to persist through the midpoint tedium, because they were not done for me primarily, but for them.

Again, this lends itself well to highlighting an important aspect of married life. When a couple gets married and the purpose is first and foremost their own enjoyment or convenience, the marriage will almost always end in a separation and eventual divorce–like an unfinished work of art. The two simply cannot sustain it. It’s very much like doing a painting so that I may enjoy it: after a time, the labor is often just not worth it, so I stop and move on to more interesting projects. But when it is for another, when it is an icon that I am doing for the sake of satisfying a person’s desire for religious inspiration and devotion, or simply a beautiful scene outside that I want another to enjoy as I did when I saw it originally, I am able to endure and persist. 

The problem is that the vast majority of people, since the early 1960s, sees marriage as primarily an arrangement, one ordered to the pleasure, convenience, and enjoyment of the individuals involved. But marriage is first and foremost about the decision to love another for the other’s sake, completely and totally in all its implications, one of which is that divorce is never an option on the table. One should know that such a decision is not going to be easy, not always a joy, but it is a work in development, a work of beauty. It is not merely a sacramental, but a sacrament, an institution brought into being by God on the basis of the intention of the two involved. It is a sacred sign in motion.

I believe a significant factor in our lack of awareness of the deeply paschal significance of marriage has been a misreading of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 7: 

“Brothers and sisters: I should like you to be free of anxieties. An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But a married man is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided. An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord, so that she may be holy in both body and spirit. A married woman, on the other hand, is anxious about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. I am telling you this for your own benefit, not to impose a restraint upon you, but for the sake of propriety and adherence to the Lord without distraction” (32-35).

Because it is a small portion of the entire chapter, taken out of its larger context, it is very easy to misinterpret and come away with the impression that the celibate or consecrated life is genuinely religious, while the married state is not. Such an interpretation, however, would run contrary to Paul’s overall teaching on marriage. In the larger context of this chapter, we see that Paul believes we are in the last period of salvation history. He refers to his own time as a time of distress, which in apocalyptic literature, is said to precede the time of the Second Coming of Christ. Paul writes: “So this is what I think best because of the present distress: that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a separation. Are you free of a wife? Then do not look for a wife…. I tell you, brothers, the time is running out” (26-27; 29). 

Today we would not advise single young people not to look for a spouse “because time is running out”, so what Paul says about those who are married and those who are not must be read in this context, otherwise we come away with the impression that marriage has nothing to do with serving the Lord. And of course, that would contradict what Paul teaches in Ephesians, where he speaks of the mystery of marriage as a sign of the love that Christ has for his Bride, the Church.

Christ’s love for his Bride is a conjugal love, and the love of a baptized husband for his baptized wife is that very same love, and vice versa. Marriage is just as religious a vocation as is the priesthood and consecrated life. Unfortunately, it has not always been understood that way by the faithful, but marriage is a sacred sign that contains what it signifies, and it signifies the paschal mystery. For just as God called Abraham to leave the land of Ur and “go to the land that I will show you” (Gn 12, 1), and just as God called Israel to leave Egypt behind with its pantheon of false gods, and just as Jesus leaves this world behind in order to go to the Father (Jn 17, 19), so too in matrimony, two people are called to leave behind a world closed in upon itself; they are consecrated, that is, set apart, for they are called to leave behind their comfortable world of independence and self-sufficiency, to be given over to another, to belong completely to one another, in order to become part of something larger than their own individual selves, namely, the one flesh institution that is their marriage. The couple relinquish their individual lives; they are no longer two individuals with their own independent existence; rather, they have become one body, a symbol of the Church, who is one body with Christ the Bridegroom.

The lives of genuinely married couples are a witness of the Church’s response to Christ’s love for his Bride; they witness that love in their sacrificial love for one another and for the children who are the fruit of that marriage–and raising children well demands a tremendously sacrificial love. In giving themselves irrevocably and exclusively to one another, without knowing what lies ahead, a young couple die to their own individual plans, they die to a life directed by their own individual wills. In doing so, they find life; for they have become a larger reality.

But when a couple enters a marriage as though this is primarily about their own enjoyment, they inevitably become disillusioned. “Christ, what have I done? What have I done?” said Lynn Johnson, of the Up series, a year after her wedding. She readily acknowledged that her husband probably said much the same thing. She was disillusioned and had to make a decision, thankfully the right one.

When a generation has lost the sense of life as having a transcendent end and has settled for a purely intramundane existence of an epicurean nature, marriage simply makes no sense. It makes far more sense to simply cohabitate and maintain a level of freedom in which one can move on rather easily when things get difficult. It is no coincidence that marriage began to decline in the late 1960s, the age of individualism, which devolved into the hedonism of the 70s and 80s, and the nihilism of the 90s. In a postmodern culture, it continues to decline. But if young people were given a proper vision of the overall work that a married couple are called to create and the heroic virtue required to achieve this end, we might eventually begin to see a reversal. 

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Christ heals on the sabbath. But isn’t the sabbath rest a symbol of eternity? We are in the 6th day, the day on which God created man in the image of himself (Gn 1, 26-31). In fact, all of human history is the 6th day, and the days prior to this day (days 1 to 5) represent the evolution of the universe and the world, leading up to the 6th day. When history comes to an end, when man’s work is done, we enter into the 7th day, the sabbath rest, or God’s rest (Heb 4, 10). But Jesus says: “My Father is still working, and I also am working” (Jn 5, 16-30). 

The Father is unchanging activity, and activity and rest coincide in God. He does not stop working on the sabbath, and neither does the Son. Even in eternity, of which the sabbath day is a symbol, God is unchanging activity (contemplation). He is still saviour, and his Son is saviour (Jesus: “Yahweh is salvation”), because whatever the Father does, the Son does: “The Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing” (Jn 5, 19). And so, the Son heals on the sabbath. Is not this a mirror reflection of what will continue in the eternal (aionios) sabbath? The Greek word ‘aionios’ does not mean eternal in the sense of ‘never ending’, but ‘other worldly’ (not this temporal world, but where God dwells), or ‘ages of ages’. In Christ, eternity is joined to the world of matter and time. 

But who needs healing on the aionios sabbath? The forsaken do. Just as in the time of Christ on earth, the sick, the lame, and the poor were regarded as forsaken by God, in the aionios sabbath, there are those who “rise to their condemnation” (Jn 5, 29), because they did not believe in the Son of Man. Are they not the object of the divine mercy? They are indeed because they are the object of his justice, and the divine justice has been revealed as mercy. Does God, who is unchanging, suddenly change after the 6th day? Divine chastisement (kolasis) must, if it be truly a chastisement, come to an end; it cannot be forever–no one prunes a plant forever, for there would be nothing left. Pruning (kolasis) takes place for the good of the plant. 

Jesus came not to condemn the world, but that the world may have life through him, but some will rise to their condemnation. This condemnation is not the final word, rather, life has the final word: “I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (Jn 5, 25). Holy Saturday is the realization of this promise. Christ descended into hell, as we profess in the creed (the word ‘dead’ was changed to ‘hell’ in the Roman liturgy). What does Christ do in hell? He is himself in hell, that is, he is “Jesus” (Yahweh is salvation); he is life. He does what he sees the Father doing–he proclaims the good news of salvation, and he freed all who were imprisoned therein: 

Death, unwilling to be defeated, is defeated; corruption is transformed; unconquerable passion is destroyed. While hell, diseased with excessive insatiability and never satisfied with the dead, is taught, even if against its will, that which it could not learn previously. For it not only ceases to claim those who are still to fall [in the future], but also sets free those already captured, being subjected to splendid devastation by the power of our Saviour.… Having preached to the spirits in hell, once disobedient, he came out as conqueror by resurrecting his temple like a beginning of our hope, and by showing to [our] nature the manner of the raising from the dead, and giving us along with it other blessings as well (Cyril of Alexandria, Fifth Festive Letter, 29–40 (SC 372, 284). Quoted in Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell, p. 78).

Does God turn his back on anyone, even on those who reject him? Certainly not forever: “The Lord’s acts of mercy are not exhausted, his compassion is not spent; They are renewed each morning–great is your faithfulness… For the Lord does not reject forever (Lam 3, 22-23; 31).

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_407dchristredemptionforteachers.html

Deacon Douglas McManaman

The word ‘redemption’ comes from the verb ‘to redeem’, as in to buy back, to repurchase at a price. In the context of the Old Testament, redemption is the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian slavery. Christ is redeemer, and this means that just as through Moses, God delivered the covenant people of Israel from Egyptian slavery, Jesus delivered humanity from the slavery of sin and its consequences, namely death. What was the means of exchange through which he bought us back? His own blood, that is, his life. 

But what exactly does this mean? How does this work exactly? As a teacher, I was inclined to employ a “quantitative” or juridical model to explain this to adolescents, one that has its roots in St. Anselm. The reason is that the adolescent mind finds this easy to grasp, and making sense out of mystery is attractive to them. The basic idea is that sin creates an infinite debt, that is, a debt of infinite weight, and man, who is finite, cannot make up for a sin that is of infinite gravity or weight. Only God can do so. But God is not in debt–we are, and so it is up to man to make reparation for his sin, not God. But man cannot do so, because everything he offers is of finite value. Since man cannot make reparation, he simply cannot save himself. In short, our situation is hopeless. 

God, however, provides a solution. The second Person of the Trinity joins a human nature; Jesus is fully God and fully man, two natures, one Person. As man, he can go before the Father and offer a sacrifice of reparation on our behalf; as God the Son, his offering has infinite value and can cancel our debt.

This is an attractive way of explaining Christ’s redemption, because it “makes sense” out of what is otherwise profoundly mysterious. Although some of what is said within this model has some truth, it is, however, a deficient model. It is far too juridical, and mystery really cannot be explicated using such narrow terms without serious consequences.

It is indeed the case that man is a slave to sin. Just as we inherit talents and dispositions from our parents or distant relatives, not to mention trauma undergone by relatives three or so generations back, we also inherit negative proclivities and sinful dispositions. This is what is meant by the wound of Original Sin called concupiscence–an inclination to sin and self-seeking. What this underscores among other things is man’s profoundly social nature. Original Sin is an inherited addiction, a proclivity. The first parents of the human race made a radical decision to be their own god, sufficient unto themselves (symbolized in the image of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that stands independent and tall). We are the offspring of the first parents, and we are born into a concrete and universal situation they created. We are affected by their sin. We are born into a situation characterized by the loss of interior grace; for man was originally created in a state of grace, in the state of original justice (with the gift of bodily immortality, freedom from concupiscence, and a sense of the divine rooted in grace). We are not born “deified” by grace, and so we are deprived of the light of grace. We cannot free ourselves from that proclivity to sin and self-seeking, for it is a genuine slavery, and no slave can free himself or herself–otherwise it is not slavery. 

But God the Son drew close to us. He joined a human nature to himself and dwelt among us. The light entered into the darkness: 

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God (Jn 3, 17-21).

We crucified the Son of God. Christ is Light from Light, true God from true God, and so the light entered into the darkness of our death, injecting it with his light and life. He destroyed our death, making it a means to eternal life. In joining himself to a human nature, God the son joined himself to every man/woman, as it were. The Word (logos) is present at the deepest level of our being. This does not mean that we all exist in a state of sanctifying grace. Rather, he is there, and he offers us sufficient grace to move towards him, to allow him into our lives, to reign over our own mind and heart. His death was an offering to God the Father on our behalf, an act of religion, and his offering is an acceptable one, since it is a perfect offering, rooted in a perfect divine love for the Father and for us, who come from God. 

Some years ago my daughter, my wife and I went to Italy with a friend of ours, who is Italian. And he took us north, and south, and in the middle, and my daughter loved it, and she was focused primarily on shopping. I hated going into shops to look for purses or dresses, I just wanted to explore the narrow streets and old churches. It was hot, always watching out for pickpockets, not enough time to visit the places I wanted to visit, so for me it was a very unpleasant trip. The following year, however, I had the opportunity to go again, this time without my wife and daughter, just a priest friend of mine and a good friend who is also a teacher. His parents own an apartment in Rome, so we spent two weeks there. What I found fascinating upon reflection was that I spent so much time visiting the fashion district, Via Del Corso, clothing shops, looking for purses, etc. I was doing a lot of shopping for my daughter, to bring things back for her, and I was enjoying it. I wanted to visit the places that she loved. I started to love these places, because there was something of her that was left behind. I couldn’t care less about the Trevi Fountain or the Spanish Steps, but because she loved those places, I had a very real desire to visit them again, but only because I was looking to recapture her presence. These places were dear to her, so they became dear to me.

I think this is a useful illustration of a profound theological truth. As was said above, God the Son joined a human nature to himself (Christ is two natures, but one Person). God the Son enters into human suffering because he loves the Father, desires his glory above all, and since we belong to God, he loves us and will not allow us to suffer alone. And that is why when God the Father sees humanity, he sees his Son. He delights in the individual human person because Christ does. The Father loves us because the Son loves us. “The kingdom of heaven is among you” means that the redemptive presence of the Second Person of the Trinity permeates this world, through the power of the reconciling Spirit. 

We are redeemed by the Incarnation of the Son of God, by his entire life, which of course includes his death. God sees each one of us when he beholds his Son, and so the Son’s entire life and his offering of himself in the end redeems us, buys us back from darkness to light, from alienation from God to proximity to God in him, in Christ. And all of this was pure gift, pure grace. And so a better model for understanding something of our redemption is the story of Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus.

He came to Jericho and intended to pass through the town. Now a man there named Zacchaeus, who was a chief tax collector and also a wealthy man, was seeking to see who Jesus was; but he could not see him because of the crowd, for he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus, who was about to pass that way. When he reached the place, Jesus looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house.” And he came down quickly and received him with joy. When they all saw this, they began to grumble, saying, “He has gone to stay at the house of a sinner.” But Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house because this man too is a descendant of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost” (Lk 19, 1-10).

Perhaps we can look at Zacchaeus as an image of humanity. He climbs the sycamore tree, as Adam (humanity) aspires to be more than what he is by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Jesus approaches Zacchaeus, not the other way around, and tells him to descend, for the Son of God descended and took the form of a slave, becoming obedient to death, death on a cross (Phil 2, 1-11). In Christ, we descend from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and embrace our status as “children”, dependent upon God. Christ was not invited into Zacchaeus’ home; rather, he invited himself. And the result was a complete change of heart in Zacchaeus (metanoia). He was redeemed, bought back from the slavery of sin, all as a result of the approach of Christ.

Without the Incarnation, the suffering, death and resurrection of the Son of God, we would still be in our sins, still in darkness, still slaves of sin. We simply cannot save ourselves. Christ is savior. He came to save. And the gospel is a message of salvation. That is redemption.

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_404homily3.07.2024lent4.html

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Dear __________:  I read the article you sent, as well as a couple of others on the same event (the funeral for Cecilia Gentili at St Patrick’s Basilica, NY). The problem I have with these articles is that they are too easy. The one article you sent by a professor of biblical studies contains insults, and it ends with a “finger wagging” (“Desecrating the cathedral is not the only thing they should be ashamed of”). What conservative Catholic reader of that particular journal needs to be persuaded that what happened at the Basilica in New York was a bad thing? But no one I’ve encountered so far has regarded this event as an opportunity. Allow me to explain. The writing style of a number of these articles is very much like the typical conservative political pundit. Whenever I drive to the US and listen to talk radio, I’m always struck by how polarized American society is. Those on the political left utterly demonize those on the right, but an hour or so later the left are thoroughly demonized by the right on another station. That kind of polarization characterizes many of the conservative Catholic journals as of late, especially with regard to this funeral at St. Patrick’s. 

An effective pastoral approach is very different and requires more than the intellectual virtues to be successful; those who are so busy being offended, outraged, incensed, completely miss it. A good pastor would have to be quick on his feet, for one, and he’d have to see this as an opportunity, a tremendous opportunity. The Basilica was filled with adults who have the spiritual maturity level of children; they are a broken and messed up lot, and they are all together in one place, with a priest at the front. What an opportunity to proclaim Christ and him crucified and risen, and what that means for each one of us. It would require tremendous patience, like an experienced grade school teacher would have in dealing with an out of control class of grade two kids, but many of those writing on this issue can be compared to the university professor who finds himself in front of that grade two class–they’re at a loss. And tone is everything. Anger will ruin it, finger wagging would tune everyone out. One would have to have the ability to speak to them in a way that would connect with them, appeal to their reason which, despite appearances, they have not entirely lost. It’s not about affirming their lifestyle choices, but affirming them (the person), seeing them a certain way, very much like visiting a seriously ill mental health patient–you first have to see them from God’s point of view, that is, see in them a genuine goodness and be able to mirror that goodness to them. But not everyone, certainly not every pastor, is capable of seizing the moment in this way. The default position of many conservative writers is to counter with a moralizing outrage and not to regard this as an opportunity, that is, an opportunity to proclaim Christ, the crucified and risen one who loves each one of us as if there is only one of us.

Proclaiming Christ is not the same thing as moralizing—those who reduce the gospel to personal morality miss the mark as much as those who reduce the gospel to social justice. The gospel is the good news of the resurrection, that Christ has destroyed death and restored life. These people in the Basilica are searching for that which is going to bring them rest; the problem is they think they’re going to find it in the perfect orgasm. The response of a good pastor is not to confront them with a giant “No”, but to appeal to them and get them to hear you when you tell them that behind their “yes” is a much larger and better “YES”, that what they are searching for will never be found in an intimate sexual relationship, no matter what kind it is. Cecilia Gentili was a seeker, but one with a tank full of octane and no steering wheel. She was devoted to a cause, devoted to justice, however deficient and misinformed she might have been. What was she searching for? It should be obvious. What these people are searching for but are oblivious to is right there on the first page of Augustine’s Confessions: “O Lord, You created us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” There is no doubt that each person in that Church feels the emptiness of their lifestyle choices. We can respond by showing them the door and wagging our finger, or we can think of a way to proclaim Christ. But conservative Catholicism seems to have embraced a model characteristic of American politics, and many are stuck in a “culture warrior” mentality, and with that mentality, we cannot for the life of us proclaim Christ in a way that will win anyone over. There’s no doubt the Basilica was not treated as a sacred space, but you need faith to do that, and these people don’t have that faith, which is why it was so important to take advantage of the opportunity to proclaim Christ with zeal, wit, and a profound reverence for these broken people. There’s no need to convince the rest of us that this was a bad thing that happened, but what is the point of outrage? These articles are for the most part a matter of preaching to the choir. What do they accomplish in the end? Do they help us to know how to better respond to something like that in the future?  Hardly. Often it is just some academic flexing his intellectual muscles.

Fulton Sheen believes that the reason Paul did not have much success when he preached the Areopagus sermon is that he did not preach Christ crucified. The power is in the cross, not clever zingers and pointing out logical inconsistencies and ironies. The latter approach just keeps the world divided, but the cross changes hearts and lives. 

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Also published at Where Peter is: https://wherepeteris.com/the-myth-of-the-ontological-superiority-of-the-priest/

The priest is not an angel sent from heaven. He is a man, a member of the Church, a Christian. Remaining man and Christian, he begins to speak to you the word of God. This word is not his own. No, he comes to you because God has told him to proclaim God’s word. Perhaps he has not entirely understood it himself. Perhaps he adulterates it. Perhaps he falters and stammers. How else could he speak God’s Word, ordinary man that he is? But must not some one of us say something about God, about eternal life, about the majesty of grace in our sanctified being; must not some one of us speak of sin, the judgement and mercy of God?  
Karl Rahner

Anyone familiar with Pope Francis is aware that a recurring theme of his papacy is his challenge of clericalism in its varied forms—I.e., seminarians purchasing cassocks, lace, and birettas, even well before the day of ordination, the pastor as “little monster”, the dictatorial and know-it-all posture, treating the parish as his own little kingdom, the sanctuary as stage, little sense of the priestly and consecrated role of the laity, the elite clerical boys club, etc. I often wonder whether the necessary conditions are there for some clergy in particular to understand just what it is he is talking about. Some do, but there are more than a few who have no clue. 

It would be interesting indeed to study the rise of this particular phenomenon in the Latin West, to attempt to account for the factors that gave rise to it and that make it such a difficult disease to eradicate. But one idea that I do believe might very well be a factor in the institutionalization of clericalism is the notion that the priest is ontologically superior to the faithful. 

I am going to argue that the notion of priest as ontologically superior to the rest of the faithful is a myth. The word “ontological” refers to that branch of philosophy that studies being not insofar as it is physical, or psychological, or logical, etc., but being insofar as it exists. The principles of this science are essence and existence. An animal, such as a dog or a horse, is ontologically superior to a rosebush or a watermelon. The reason is that animals have superior faculties that plants lack. A human being is ontologically superior to a brute animal; for the human person is capable of an activity that transcends sense perception, namely intellectual activity. Moreover, an angel is ontologically superior to a human being, and of course God is ontologically perfect (His nature is to exist). 

Now, the argument for the ontological superiority of the priest is grounded in the principle that agere sequitur esse, that is, action follows upon being. Activity is the realization of a potentiality or power, and we only come to understand the nature of a thing through its activity, for a being acts according to its nature: plants grow and reproduce; animals enjoy the specific powers of external and internal sensation which plants lack; human beings possess all of these but they are able to think and choose freely. At ordination, a person is given the power to transubstantiate, that is, to change ordinary bread and wine into the substance of Christ’s body and blood, an act that is outside the natural capacity of a human being as such. Hence, it is argued that the priest is ontologically different from–and superior to, since it is a superior action–those who are not priests.

But this is not quite right. For it is Christ who transubstantiates, for the priest is acting in persona Christi, and for the same reason it is Christ who forgives sins, just as it is Christ, not the charismatic healer, who heals: “Peter said to him, “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you. Get up and make your bed.” He got up at once (Acts 9, 34; cf. Ps 44, 4-9). The priest remains ontologically a human being, of the same nature as every other human being. He is ordained to a specific end, marked for that end, but he is not ontologically different, much less superior. Acting in persona Christi does not render him ontologically superior to the faithful; for he depends entirely on Christ’s action. But an ontologically superior creature does not depend on any being in order to exercise his essentially superior faculty, like sense perception, imagination, or intelligence as in the case of man. As St. Thomas points out: “…the nature of an instrument as such is to be moved by another, but not to move itself” (ST, III, q. 63, a. 5, ad 2.). The priest depends on Christ as an instrument depends on the agent in order to carry out what it was recruited to carry out. In section 1551 of the Catechism, we read: 

This priesthood is ministerial. “That office . . . which the Lord committed to the pastors of his people, is in the strict sense of the term a service.” It is entirely related to Christ and to men. It depends entirely on Christ and on his unique priesthood; it has been instituted for the good of men and the communion of the Church. The sacrament of Holy Orders communicates a “sacred power” which is none other than that of Christ.

The language around the discussion of priesthood is instrumental and functional, and higher or lower function does not necessarily amount to ontological difference. In other words, although ontological difference implies an essentially different function, it does not follow that an essentially different function implies ontological difference (all a is b, but it does not follow that all b is a). For example, a human being can carry a heavy load and walk a number of miles down a long and winding road that requires familiarity with the terrain and an ability to reason by inference. However, he can also recruit a donkey to carry that same load for him and walk the same number of miles in the same direction, under the necessary guidance of his intelligence. The donkey does not thereby become ontologically superior to his fellow donkeys–he’s still a jackass. One could say that its actions are ennobled, for they require a faculty the animal lacks, namely the ability to inference, but properly speaking, its acts on the whole are the acts of the human being that owns, recruits, governs, and employs the donkey as an instrument. 

The charismatic healer does not know whether or how a miraculous healing has taken place, nor is she aware that she is the agent of such healing–because she isn’t the agent, but the instrument through whom Christ, the agent, heals. She simply believes that her prayer is being heard, but she cannot account for the healing. Similarly, the priest cannot in any way account for what we believe is happening on the altar (the changing of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of Christ’s body and blood). He is not even aware that it has happened, because he is not the agent of the change; rather, he believes, like everyone else, that what he is distributing is in fact Christ’s body and blood. The artist knows precisely how to paint or sculpt; and she is aware of what is happening through her hands, for the work is unfolding through her own agency. But transubstantiation does not occur through the agency of the priest as such, but through the agency of Christ, just as my sins are forgiven not through the agency of the priest as such, but through Christ, whose visible instrument the priest is. The priest is no greater, ontologically speaking, than any other human being. That his unworthy hands are used by Christ is a sign of Christ’s humility, not the cleric’s supposed ontological superiority. 

It is Christ who is ontologically superior, because Christ is both human and divine, in one hypostasis, that is, one Person, the Person of God the Son. Jesus is not a human person, although he has a human nature; he is not two persons, but One, the Person of the Son. The ministerial priest is an instrument, Christ’s instrument, who in very specific situations acts not in his own person, but in the person of Christ (in persona Christi). Christ is both priest and victim in the Mass; not the ministerial priest. In other words, it is Christ who offers himself (Priest), and it is Christ who is offered (Victim). What takes place in the Mass is happening by virtue of the agency of Christ and through the instrumentality of the ministerial priest (CCC sec. 1548). 

The sacramental character conferred in Baptism and Confirmation does not “ontologically” change the baptized or the confirmand, rendering him or her ontologically superior to the unbaptized. The baptized are indeed changed, elevated, made children of God, because parent and child have the same nature, and a baptized child is filled with divine grace, which is a sharing in the divine nature. But, as Father Pieter Fransen writes: “grace sets our deepest humanity free, precisely because it restores our most authentic humanity to us and by this means humanizes us to an eminent degree” (Divine Grace and Man, 173). Later scholasticism began to give the sacramental character an ontological status, but no counsel has ever affirmed that theology. He writes:  

There is no common doctrine of the character in theology. The most restrictive definition makes it simply the impossibility of re-ordination, while the tendency to enhance it has produced a sort of complex metaphysical superstructure, due, as we think, to a very jejune theology of grace….The tendency in question has promoted a mythic theology of the priesthood which places it on a higher level of being than the rest of the faithful, a metaphysical clericalism which is responsible for barring the way to many reforms at the present time….The character is a “signum quoddam spiritale et indelebile; unde ea iterari non possunt” [a certain spiritual and indelible sign; hence they cannot be repeated] (DS 1609; cf. 1313; D 852, 695). But the scope of Trent’s definition is different from that of Florence, though the enunciation is the same. Trent was concerned above all with defending the reality of the ministry against certain reformers who wished to suppress the distinction between the community and the minister. But it would be an abuse of the text and a disregard of the intentions of the Council to take this definition as a dogmatic crystallization of scholastic speculation. (Encyclopedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi. S.v. Orders and Ordination, p. 1146-1147).

The word Aquinas employs within this discussion is “deputed” (deputamur), which means to appoint, to delegate, which includes the conferral of a degree of authority. It is by these sacraments (Baptism, Confirmation, and Ordination) that a person is delegated, and they are given the power to carry out what they have been delegated to carry out. 

Aquinas writes: 

The sacraments of the New Law produce a character, in so far as by them we are deputed to the worship of God according to the rite of the Christian religion. …Now the worship of God consists either in receiving Divine gifts, or in bestowing them on others. And for both these purposes some power is needed; for to bestow something on others, active power is necessary; and in order to receive, we need a passive power. Consequently, a character signifies a certain spiritual power ordained unto things pertaining to the Divine worship (ST, III, q. 63. A. 2.).

This character, whether conferred in Baptism, Confirmation, or Holy Orders, is instrumental. As Aquinas writes: “… it must be observed that this spiritual power is instrumental of the virtue which is in the sacraments. For to have a sacramental character belongs to God’s ministers: and a minister is a kind of instrument, …” (ST, III, q. 63, a. 2). Those who are marked by the sacramental character (of Baptism, Confirmation, or Holy Orders) are marked as being ordained to some particular end, as “soldiers are marked with a character as being deputed to military service”. A soldier marked with a character as being deputed to military service is changed not ontologically, but accidentally. These characters are essentially participations in Christ’s Priesthood, and so the supernatural actions made possible by them arise not from the very being or nature of the baptized, confirmand, or ordained minister, but they flow from Christ Himself: Aquinas writes: 

…each of the faithful is deputed to receive, or to bestow on others, things pertaining to the worship of God. And this, properly speaking, is the purpose of the sacramental character. Now the whole rite of the Christian religion is derived from Christ’s priesthood. Consequently, it is clear that the sacramental character is specially the character of Christ, to whose character the faithful are likened by reason of the sacramental characters, which are nothing else than certain participations of Christ’s Priesthood, flowing from Christ Himself (ST, III, q. 63, a. 3).

Again, the principal agent of the instrumental power is not the official priest. If it were, he would indeed be ontologically different and thus superior: “But an instrumental power follows rather the condition of the principal agent: and consequently a character exists in the soul in an indelible manner, not from any perfection of its own, but from the perfection of Christ’s Priesthood, from which the character flows like an instrumental power” (ST, III, q. 63, a. 5, ad. 1). 

Those who hold that the priest is ontologically superior are careful to stress that the state of priesthood does not justify clericalism. The obvious question, however, is why not? Clericalism is its logical outcome, if it were true that the rite of ordination renders him ontologically superior. The notion is fraught with dangers on all sides. There is no justification for putting in the minds of young men studying for the priesthood the notion that upon their ordination they will be rendered ontologically special, especially if we do not wish to see a return of the old clericalism. The result cannot be anything but an intolerable Phariseeism so contrary to the movement of the spiritual life, which is always a movement towards a deeper recognition that “I am no better than anyone else”. To be fair, it is argued that “better” and “ontological superiority” are distinct and that the one does not imply the other–i.e., Mary is “better”, that is, holier than the angels, who are ontologically superior. But let us grant this for the sake of argument; that would mean that although a scandalously sinful priest is ontologically superior to Mary, she is superior in her very moral identity (character), for she possesses superior holiness, superior humility and charity, and a superior place in heaven. What, then, does ontological superiority mean in the end? That he is used by Christ to make present the sacrifice of the cross? But it is far from clear how this implies a superiority that is ontological as such, especially if ontologically he is a human being, but less humanized by virtue of his sinful lifestyle (i.e., a double life, a sexual predator, etc.). If it does not indicate essential superiority, nor existential superiority, nor moral and spiritual superiority, then what does it mean? The sacramental character means that he underwent the rite of ordination, an unrepeatable rite, and has become an instrument “set apart” for a specific end. The sacramental character means, as Cardinal Louis Billot pointed out, “the right to the actual graces proper to the sacrament” (Encyclopedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi. S.v. Orders and Ordination, p.1147)  

The enduring nature of the sacramental character is interesting to consider. Aquinas writes: 

Although external worship does not last after this life, yet its end remains. Consequently, after this life the character remains, both in the good as adding to their glory, and in the wicked as increasing their shame: just as the character of the military service remains in the soldiers after the victory, as the boast of the conquerors, and the disgrace of the conquered (ST, III, q. 63, a. 5, ad. 3).

It is hard to conceive how something that renders a person ontologically superior can in the end be a source of shame, for the devil is not ashamed of his ontological superiority; but it would be a source of shame in that he is not at all ontologically superior to anyone, but was freely chosen by God for a highly noble service, given the actual graces and charisms to fulfill that end, of which he fell short.  

If Aquinas is correct, it would appear then that the sacramental character does not remain qua instrument; for it endures differently in the end than it does “on the way” to the end. On the way, it is an instrumental power dependent upon Christ the agent; afterwards, it endures as an identity, like the identity of a parent which can never be erased, or the identity of a soldier long after the war is over. 

In no other case does a being, ontologically determinate (human) act in the Person of some other ontologically superior being (the Person of the Son), such that it is the latter who is acting (is the agent), not the former. Appealing to agere sequitur esse to argue for superiority leaves too much out of the discussion. In that light, I believe it is safe to conclude that there is simply no reason not to jettison this rather dubious–not to mention dangerous–idea of an alleged clerical superiority. The line that should always be at the forefront of the mind of the cleric is John the Baptist’s “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3, 30).

Or, Read this version from Where Peter Is

Deacon Doug McManaman

Recently while visiting the sick I spent some time in a section of the hospital for dementia patients waiting to be transferred to a nursing home. It is one of my favorite sections to visit. On this particular day, a group of nurses were gathered around talking to one patient with a heavy British accent, while I began to chat with an older man from Iran, using my newly downloaded google translate. Suddenly, the British lady leans over, looks at me and says “Father, do you realize how much damage your Church has done over the centuries?” Why she referred to me as “Father” is uncertain–for I was not wearing any kind of clerical attire. But I said to her: “I certainly do”. She immediately replied: “Well, I’m glad to hear you agree with me on that one”. 

I was immediately reminded of the time my priest friend asked me to speak to his RCIA group on Church history. I said I would, but that I’d have to prepare, which I did, over the Christmas holidays of that year, doing my best to include the most important aspects of that history. But I did eventually ask him: “Father, are you sure you want me to do this? There’s a lot of sin in our history; there’s no hiding it. I’m afraid I might scare someone away from becoming a Catholic”. But he insisted. 

Studying Church history can make a person dizzy, because of how often we find ourselves shaking our heads at the sin and stupidity that we find therein. And of course, things have changed, but in some ways they have not–we’ve all heard the old adage: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Since ordination to the diaconate, I’ve been shaking my head more than I did prior to that, because I see more than I otherwise would have seen–bad behavior from clerics who should know better; nothing criminal, mind you, but rather profound immaturity, clerical envy and jealousy, inordinate need for control, a sense of self-importance, stubbornness, condescension, audacity, and an inability to engage in healthy conflict resolution, etc. I’ve always said to my students that Catholicism is not about us, it is about the Person of Christ. Unfortunately, not every cleric really believes this, at least not on a practical level. 

There is no doubt in my mind that things have improved tremendously since the 1950s and 60s, but I’ve been reading Med Kissinger’s While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence, which also gives us a peek here and there into the Church of the early 60s, and there is a great deal in this book that has me wondering once again what factors account for some of the behavior that drove so many people away from the Church. She writes:  

“My father, Bill Kissinger (we called him Holmer), sold advertising space to companies that manufactured tranquilizers and other so-called ethical pharmaceuticals to harried mothers of the baby boom. Business was brisk, especially in our North Shore Chicago neighborhood, where women, a great number of them Irish Catholics like my mother, were expected to fill the pews with as many children as they could bear, whether they had the stamina or not. “Something is definitely wrong when the best that the average American couple can do over a fertile period of twenty-five years is to give only two or three children to the Kingdom of God,” Monsignor John Knott of the National Catholic Welfare Conference said in his directive to the faithful. The Catholic Marriage Manual that my mother and her friends read religiously cautioned, “When parents consciously choose the small family as their way of life, they are expressing their ambition for material luxury as opposed to the spiritual pleasures which child rearing can give. It is no coincidence that the ‘spoiled little brat’—the selfish monster of popular fiction and newspaper comic strips—is usually an only child.””

Reflecting on the night her sister jumped in front of a train, Meg recalls her father’s fear that the bishop would not allow the family to have a funeral Mass for her or bury her in the family’s Catholic cemetery plot. She writes: “His best friend’s son had died by suicide the year before, and the family was heartbroken when the pastor refused to allow the boy’s body inside their church. On the night of Nancy’s wake, a nun from our school walked into the funeral parlor, pointed to my sister’s casket and croaked, “She’s going to Hell, you know.”” (When my siblings died by suicide, the church failed us. Now, it’s finally listening).

Thankfully, very few clerics think or talk like this anymore. Nonetheless, one has to wonder what it is that accounts for such audacity, such overconfident boldness that has not entirely disappeared. I know enough about investigative reasoning to know that the causes are far too complex to be reduced to a single factor, but I can think of two factors that are an integral part of the equation. The first is prosperity. Human beings are at their moral worst in times of prosperity. We see this repeatedly throughout the Old Testament, as well as in the history of any nation. When times are prosperous, we gradually become cocky, ungrateful, and we forget the limitations that constrain us, both moral and cognitive. The 1950s and 60s were a very prosperous time in the Church’s history. On the other hand, human beings, individually and collectively, are at their best in times of suffering, difficulty, and adversity. Perhaps things are somewhat better today because for the Church at least, times are not as prosperous. Difficulties, adversity, struggles, persecution, conflict, etc., cause a person to face his or her own limitations, the limits of his patience, the limits of his own knowledge and ability to acquire knowledge, his moral limitations and the delusions he’s harbored about himself over the years, his limited ability to relate to others in a way that does not put them off, etc., and so the easier life is, the less likely it is that a person will acquire the skills to be a perceptive, prudent, and compassionate pastor who relates well to the average person, especially those not so well off financially or psychologically.

The other factor is ignorance. There is not a great deal that can be done about this, because all of us suffer from deficient information. There is always so much we don’t know at each moment of our existence, and this was especially the case in the 1950s and 60s when it came to mental illness, among many other things. And so, although there isn’t much we can do about the fact that we are always information deficient, a deeper appreciation for the tentative nature of truth and the difficulties of acquiring knowledge can help us to learn to speak with less of a rhetoric of certainty and confidence. As Bertrand Russell once said: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt”. A more updated epistemology and an appreciation for plausibility theory will go a long way to help young clerics not to fall into the same mistakes that were made decades earlier, when it was much easier to believe that one’s understanding of the world was far more comprehensive than it actually was in reality. The fact is our grasp on things is tiny and narrow, for our conclusions are formed on the basis of very limited data, but everyday brings new experiences that translate into new data, which, if we are reflective enough, cause us to make revisions to the views we held onto at one time. When we become more explicitly aware of how often this happens, it is much easier to see that there is a significant difference between speaking in a spirit of fearlessness, which is rooted in perfect love and humility (1 Jn, 4, 18), and audacity rooted in a condescending spirit made possible by an inordinately comfortable existence with very little opposition.

It should also be said that there is a glorious thread running through our history, and that is the history of the lives of the saints. But these are who they are in part by virtue of great suffering. When we immerse ourselves in this history, our head indeed spins, but with exhilaration and inspiration. In short, ours is a fully inclusive Church in that it contains saints and sinners, and everything else in between. 

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_403homily1.29.2024ordinarytime4.html

Deacon Doug McManaman

It was very difficult to discern an underlying thread in the readings for the 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time, so I will settle upon making just two points. The first point bears upon the second reading taken from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 7: “Brothers and sisters: I should like you to be free of anxieties. An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But a married man is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided. An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord, so that she may be holy in both body and spirit. A married woman, on the other hand, is anxious about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. I am telling you this for your own benefit, not to impose a restraint upon you, but for the sake of propriety and adherence to the Lord without distraction” (32-35). Because it is a small portion of the entire chapter, taken out of its larger context, it is very easy to misinterpret; one can easily come away with the impression that the celibate life or the consecrated life is genuinely religious, while the married state is not. Such an interpretation, however, would be contrary to Paul’s overall teaching on marriage, not to mention all the developments in the theology of marriage over the centuries, especially the more recent theology of the body of Pope John Paul II. In the larger context of this chapter, we see that Paul believes we are in the last period of salvation history. He refers to his own time as a time of distress, which in apocalyptic literature, is said to precede the time of the Second Coming of Christ. Paul writes: “So this is what I think best because of the present distress: that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a separation. Are you free of a wife? Then do not look for a wife…. I tell you, brothers, the time is running out” (26-27; 29). What he says about those who are married and those who are not must be read in this context, otherwise we come away with the impression that marriage has nothing to do with serving the Lord. And of course, that would contradict what Paul teaches in his letter to the Ephesians, where he speaks of marriage as a sign of the love that Christ has for his Bride, the Church. 

Christ’s love for his Bride is a conjugal love, and the love of a baptized husband for his baptized wife is that very same love, and vice versa. This is what we try to get across to couples in Marriage Prep classes, namely, that marriage is just as religious a vocation as is the priesthood and consecrated life. It hasn’t always been understood that way, unfortunately, due to a kind of clericalism that Pope Francis has spoken out against so often in his papacy. But marriage is a sacrament, a sacred sign that contains what it signifies, and it signifies the paschal mystery. For just as God called Abraham to leave the land of Ur and go to the land that He will lead him to, and just as God called Israel to leave Egypt behind with its pantheon of false gods, and just as Jesus leaves this world behind in order to go to the Father (Jn 17), so too in matrimony, two people are called to leave behind a world closed in upon itself; they are consecrated, that is, set apart, for they are called to leave behind their comfortable world of independence and self-sufficiency, to be given over to another, to belong completely to one another, in order to become part of something larger than their own individual selves, namely, the one flesh institution that is their marriage. The couple relinquish their individual lives; they are no longer two individuals with their own independent existence; rather, they have become one body, a symbol of the Church, who is one body with Christ the Bridegroom. The lives of a married couple are a witness of the Church’s response to Christ’s love for his Bride; they witness that love in their sacrificial love for one another, and for the children who are the fruit of that marriage–and raising children well demands a tremendously sacrificial love. In giving themselves irrevocably and exclusively to one another, without knowing what lies ahead, a young couple die to their own individual plans, they die to a life directed by their own individual wills. In doing so, they find life; for they have become a larger reality. 

The second point I’d like to make has to do with the Authority of Christ in the gospels: the people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes. I am reminded of a former principal of mine. She retired, but she has been called a number of times to take over a few schools when the principal was off for whatever reason. I know the staff morale at one school in particular was quite low, due to a lack of good leadership, which students perceive quite readily. My friend was called to that school to take over for a few weeks. I asked a former colleague at that school: “How did the students receive her?” My colleague replied: “Instant respect”. And this is just what I expected; she walks and talks with authority. But what does that mean exactly? It means she is a person that the students respect, because she is respectable. Just having a position of authority does not mean a person speaks or acts with authority; most people in positions of authority today, including ecclesiastical positions of authority, have very little authority; they’ve lost a great deal of their credibility and moral authority. Authority comes from within; it has to do with the kind of person that you are, and young people can discern rather quickly what kind of person that is. Authority comes from a spirit of charity, holiness, humility, and perfect love casts out all fear, so it involves a spirit of fearlessness, which is very different from a spirit of audacity or boldness. Boldness is rooted in arrogance, in a condescending spirit, but fearlessness is rooted in holiness and charity. The holier a person is, the greater is their authority, and it is an authority that others recognize. And by holy I do not mean sanctimonious. Jesus was the “Holy One of God”, the Scribes and the Pharisees were not holy, which is why they taught without authority. They were sanctimonious, that is, hypocrites, which in Greek means “actor”. For them it was about appearances and having others fawn all over them, lording it over others, but as Christ said, they neglected the poor and the suffering. The demons were terrified of Christ because he came with the authority of God the Son, who humbled himself and came among us, to deliver us from the Satan’s dominion. The more we grow in true holiness, in the power of charity and humility, the more we will be empowered by his authority. 

Homily for the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.

Deacon Doug McManaman
https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_402marytheotokos.html

As I was going over the gospel reading (Lk 2:16-21), I was struck by one thing in particular, namely, Mary says nothing. She just listens. She listens to the Shepherds, who “made known the message that had been told them about this child. All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds. And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.”

Mary was one of those who was amazed at what had been told by the Shepherds. You would think that the Mother of God would be the one with the words to amaze them, to enlighten them, that she would be one or two steps ahead of them such that their message would be superfluous. But this is not the case. The good news was told to the shepherds, and what was proclaimed to them was proclaimed to the one who conceived the good news himself, in her womb. She was not eager to speak; rather she listens, and ponders all that was said to her, reflecting on them. 

Mary is theotokos, which means “God-bearer”. And our purpose in this life is to become a theotokos, a God-bearer. And we know through Mary’s example what it means to be a theotokos, at least in part. It means first and foremost to be full of God, pregnant with God. The result of bearing the mystery of God within is that we become disposed to listen; we become disposed to ponder, to reflect upon what is happening both within us and around us. When we are filled with God within, everything around us appears in a new light. The world becomes more beautiful and mysterious. 

Everything is subject to the providence of God, but the entire meaning of the events of providence, all that God permits to happen in this world, is always beyond us. Our understanding of what is going on in our world is always deficient; there’s always more to know. I am generally wary of people who offer grand and comprehensive explanations of the state of the world in which we are living, because this world is just far too large and complex for us to understand adequately as a whole. But this point is hard to appreciate when we are young. Everything seems clear when we are young, and the result is we tend to speak a lot, and we speak with a rhetoric of confidence. But as time goes on, experience provides us with much more information, and that new information allows us to see that things were not as simple as they once appeared–but this will happen to the degree that we are silent and reflective, and we will only be silent and reflective to the degree that we allow ourselves to become a theotokos, a God bearer.  

The life of John the Baptist holds some clues as to what it means to become what we are called to become, namely a theotokos. He refers to himself as the best man at a wedding, “who stands and listens to the bridegroom, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice”. The bridegroom of course is Christ. John says: “This joy of mine has been made complete. He must increase, I must decrease”. This life is about learning to listen to Christ the Bridegroom and getting to that point where his voice becomes our joy. And that joy moves us to want to decrease so that he may increase. We no longer want to increase in the eyes of others. Our joy, our deepest desire, is that he, Christ himself, increase—and that we get out of the way. 

But it all begins when we learn to listen to the Lord who dwells in our deepest interior. And that’s the highest kind of prayer: the prayer of quiet listening to God. Not saying anything. Just adoring the Lord in silence. The Lord that we adore is the Word, the Logos. The Word eternally spoken by the Father is noiseless; it is full and inexhaustible, because the Word is everything that the Father can say about himself. That spoken Word, uttered eternally, is silent, and that silence speaks and is inexhaustible in content. The highest kind of prayer is listening to the Father’s silent Word, and listening to the Word breathe his eternal love for the Father. 

This may sound rather easy, but it is very difficult to get to this point in our prayer life; for there are many distractions that occur when we spend time, in the presence of God, in silence. Our mind is like an untrained dog that pulls this way and that. But when this happens, all we have to do is bring ourselves back to the presence of God and leave these thoughts behind. 

This kind of prayer brings real joy and healing to the unconscious mind, because many of the thoughts that come to the surface during this time of silence are often unhealed memories that have been stored in the subconscious. Learning to leave them behind eventually brings about profound healing and peace. 

As I mentioned last week, for those who do not have an interior life, who have not cultivated the habit of prayer throughout their lives, old age will slowly and inevitably become a very unpleasant ordeal, for our ability to cover up our own spiritual emptiness becomes increasingly difficult as the body deteriorates and circumstances change. But for those who have a rich interior life, those who pray and who know the joy of the Bridegroom’s voice, who know the rich and subtle joy of hearing that eternal silence of the Word, growing old only creates the conditions for this joy to increase.

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_401homosexualitydemands.html

Deacon Doug McManaman

Many of the articles coming out against Fiducia Supplicans are interesting to read, but most of them seem to assume the point the author needs to prove in the first place–the fallacy of begging the question. Moreover, what they all seem to have in common is a complaint of ambiguity. I am going to argue that when dealing with pastoral matters, ambiguity is inevitable. The reason is that the more general the level of discussion, the greater the clarity; but as one moves towards a more concrete or less abstract level of discourse, things become rather murky, because they have become more complicated. 

This is a basic philosophical principle. For example, I can estimate the height of the tree in my neighbor’s front yard: between 1 inch and 300 meters. That estimate enjoys the benefit of absolute certainty. I can estimate the price of the house that’s for sale across the street: I’d say it is between $100 and 10 million. Very broad, very general, but certain. My estimates, however, are also relatively useless; they are useless to a tree cutter (in terms of what tools he’s going to need), and they are useless to a potential buyer of the house. To make the estimates more useful, I have to become more precise. However, there is a trade-off; the greater the precision, the more vulnerable to error my estimates become. So, let me say that the house across the street is $950,000. That’s a more useful estimate, but it is much less certain, for it is more vulnerable to error—the house may just as well be $900,000, or $875,000, etc.

We have a great deal of clarity in the Church when it comes to certain theological and moral questions, but pastoral questions bearing upon individual persons are full of ambiguity, unlike general moral questions like abortion or euthanasia. The Church is clear that sexual activity outside of marriage, that is, sexual activity that is not an expression of marital union, is morally deficient. It’s not terribly difficult to show that. But that really doesn’t help me much when I am dealing with someone struggling with loneliness, sexual passion, self-acceptance, addictive propensities, doubts about faith, etc. It’s not enough to simply say: “Sex between two people of the same sex is a sin! Can’t bless sin!  Have a good day!” 

There is a myriad of factors outside of a free-will that account for a person’s character traits, foibles and idiosyncrasies, factors that mitigate a person’s degree of responsibility and which demand from a counselor a certain course of action, tone of voice, things to say and not say, etc., and a good pastor must be able to intuit this rapidly. It is supernatural charity and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as counsel, as well as the charism of discernment, that enable him to achieve this to some degree. Adults should have far more patience and typically provide more room for error for children than for their fellow adults. Similarly in the spiritual life, but very few adults have reached spiritual adulthood, and a pastor who consistently fails in such discernment and treats a person accordingly gives rise to needless suffering and conflict, like a bad parent would. 

The spiritual life of a person is a movement, a process, and a good pastor is in many ways like a good teacher who is able to determine students’ various learning styles and the level at which they currently operate, in order to begin at that point. The problem with education in former times was that this preliminary determination was for the most part neglected; for it was assumed that everyone learns the same way, so those who fell behind were simply regarded as less intelligent–these latter were left to deal with confusing and painful emotions to which this isolating state of affairs gave rise. All such students really needed were teachers who understood that not everyone learns the same way, at the same pace, nor begins with the necessary conditions for success at the expected time. Teaching is an art, and so too is the work of a genuine pastor, and it requires much more than the knowledge of general principles.

There are priests–and Pope Francis is fully aware of this–who have as much pastoral sense as a monkey wrench and seem to think pastoral counsel is all about issues, doctrine, teachings, sections of the Catechism, etc., and that once we have clear answers to general moral questions, dealing with people is a straightforward and easy matter. But life is full of ambiguity, precisely because it is so complex. Papal critics are demanding certainty and lucidity on a level at which certainty and lucidity are not possible. Fiducia is without a doubt vulnerable to abuse and misinterpretation, because the discussion takes place on a lower level of abstraction, as pastoral questions always do. But there’s no getting away from that. I bless prospective married couples all the time, most of whom are living together. Am I blessing their sin? No. Am I condoning their living together? No. Should I pry into their lives to get details regarding their living arrangements, before giving them a blessing? No. If two men or two women approach me for a blessing, I have to be able to determine what it is they want from me, without prying, without turning them off completely, and I have to make them feel welcome, etc. If I know they are gay, do I assume they are having sex? Perhaps it is more likely than not, but I don’t think I should assume anything; for there are chaste gay couples whose relationships are not principally about sex. And what do I say in my prayer of blessing? I can ask the Lord to grant them the grace to live in a way that is pleasing to God, among other things. Fiducia is clear that this should not take place in a liturgical or formal setting, since that would lend the impression that we see this as akin to marriage, and we do not. So, what should we do when two people of the same sex approach for a blessing? Do we just say no? It seems to me that a good pastoral approach will for the most part consist in blessing both persons, blessing their friendship, their commitment to one another, calling upon God to impart to them the grace to want to do what God wants them to do, and leave it at that.

A Church that operates on a very general level in order to avoid ambiguity becomes relatively useless (like the useless estimates of the tree height or housing prices). If the Church is to become more useful to the faithful in the modern world, ready to deal with new matters that are of importance to people today, she’ll have to take risks and pronounce on such matters, knowing that given the ambiguity that is part and parcel of this level of discussion, her teaching will be subject to abuse and misinterpretation, sort of like the aftermath of Vatican II. We are dealing here with a trade-off. Would it have been better had the Second Vatican Council not happened, keeping things “simple, clear and unambiguous” as things apparently were prior to 1962? Many traditionalists think so, but how can we know what the Church today would look like had that been the case? Perhaps society would be paying as much attention to the Catholic Church as they do now to the Amish. 

There is no doubt that there are legitimate arguments on all sides of this debate, but I always thought there is an advantage to being a Catholic–we don’t have to spend our days studying all the arguments to determine the right course of action, for we have a Magisterium that has a teaching charism and we are called to be loyal to the Holy Father:

This loyal submission of the will and intellect must be given in a special way to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he does not speak ex cathedra, in such wise, indeed, that his supreme teaching authority be acknowledged with respect, and that one sincerely adhere to the decisions made by him, conformably with his manifest mind and intention, which is made known principally either by the character of the documents in question, or by the frequency with which. a certain doctrine is proposed, or by the manner in which the doctrine is formulated. (LG 25)

Many liberal Catholic moralists had no use for this section of the Lumen Gentium; today it seems the tables have turned–it is conservatives who seem to be tossing this out the window when the Pope begins to take us down a road that is new and uncomfortable. I’ve been told that obedience is the hardest counsel of the three, and rightly so. Bishops typically demand obedience and deference from the faithful and their priests, but how can those who have shown anything but loyal submission of mind and heart in recent months evade the charge of hypocrisy? They can dissent, but I can’t? 

I’ve been asked how necessary Fiducia was at this time, that is, just before Christmas (2023). I have no idea, but how necessary is all this fuss about it? I have faithfully taught Catholic sexual ethics for close to 40 years, but I don’t particularly understand the current preoccupation with this issue. I’m not gay, and so I don’t see things from that perspective, but if I were gay and trying to be a faithful Catholic, I might be rejoicing over this document and might take it as a great Christmas gift. Basically, I have to trust that the Holy Father has the charism of office and is moved by the Holy Spirit to address what needs to be addressed in this highly complex world whose complexity escapes the comprehension of any individual as such, including an individual pope–which is precisely why he requires a charism that I simply don’t have. 

(400th article on Lifeissues.net)

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_400praywithoutceasing.html

Deacon Doug McManaman

We’ve heard so much recently about Advent being a preparation for the Second Coming of Christ, and the readings throughout the season certainly reflect that. But how do we prepare for Christ’s Second Coming? What is Advent preparation? The answer to that question is in the Second Reading, in Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians: “Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks.”

How does one do that? How do we pray without ceasing? We understand what it means to pray before Mass, or pray before meals, or pray before we go to bed, but how does one pray without ceasing? The great spiritual classic The Way of a Pilgrim, written by an unknown 19th century Russian peasant, tackles that very question. This work focuses on the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”. Those in the Eastern rite say this repeatedly using a prayer rope, which is like a rosary, but it has 100 or 200 knots, some have 300 knots. Obviously, one cannot be constantly saying that prayer, when we are talking to someone, or in a meeting, or working on some project, etc. So how does this work? The purpose behind this constant repetition of that prayer is to create a habit in the soul, a disposition. Let me compare it to someone who has a musical disposition; those who are musically gifted almost always have a song playing in the back of their minds, perhaps a song they’ve heard on the radio, or a song they’re working on, if they are musicians. The song is not at the forefront of their minds, but at the back.

Similarly, to pray without ceasing is to pray in the back of one’s mind, constantly. A proclivity to prayer has been developed as a result of the constant repetition of this prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. But the same thing can occur for those who pray the rosary very often. What happens is that eventually the actual words are no longer necessary because the very meaning that the words express have become a habit imprinted in the subconscious, and so although the mind may be preoccupied with some matter, such as paying a phone bill or shopping or taking an important phone call, the soul is praying in the background, without words, like a candle that is burning constantly. That’s when we have begun to pray without ceasing. We begin with words, but eventually we go beyond words.

There are different kinds of prayer: the prayer of petition, prayer of intercession, prayer of thanksgiving, prayer of praise, and prayer of adoration. The highest kind of prayer that each one of us is called to achieve is the prayer of adoration. In the words of Father Gerald Vann, this is the “prayer of wonder: the still, wordless gaze of Adoration, which is proper to the lover. You are not talking, not busy, not worried or agitated; you’re not asking for anything: you are quiet, you are just being with, and there is love and wonder in your heart.”

This prayer is much more difficult than we might tend to believe. It is about placing oneself in the presence of God, in silence, focusing all our attention on God. This is difficult, because what soon happens is that we are distracted by all kinds of thoughts, and our attention will be pulled this way and that way, without our being aware of it. Once we do become aware of it, however, we just have to refocus our attention on God, dwelling in his presence. But, within a minute, the mind will be drawn away again, distracted by thoughts. This is where short prayers are so important and helpful, like the Jesus prayer, or a short phrase from the psalms, like “God come to my assistance, Lord make haste to help me”, or “Into your hands I commend my spirit”. These short phrases repeated will help us to return to that interior dwelling place within. With constant practice, one eventually is able to dwell in silence, in the presence of God within, for a long time without distraction. This is also a kind of prayer that brings tremendous healing to the subconscious. Many of the thoughts that come to the surface during this time are often unhealed memories that have been stored in the subconscious, and learning to leave them behind brings about profound healing and peace; for much of our day to day lives is driven by these unhealed memories in the unconscious, which is why there is typically a great deal of turmoil in the interior lives of the faithful. 

There are two types of people in this world: those who believe that this life is a preparation for eternal life, and those who believe that this life is all there is and that everything we do is only a preparation for life in this world. I’ve seen a lot of people in the hospital these past few months, people who have lost their mobility, who have had to spend months in a hospital bed, many of whom died after a long period, especially within these past 3 weeks. For those who do not have an interior life, who have not cultivated the habit of prayer throughout their lives, these final years and months are often very painful, very unpleasant, which is why euthanasia is becoming more popular. But those who have a rich interior life, those who have used the time in their lives to prepare for eternal life by learning to pray without ceasing, their final months or years, perhaps in a hospital bed, are not unbearable, and visiting these people is often a joy, because there is a deeper peace within them, and they are thankful. And the wonderful thing about them is that they are not asking to be euthanized. Instead of making their final act an act of rebellion and murder, their death becomes their final prayer, a final offering, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for all they’ve received throughout their lives.

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_398divinegraceforteachers.html

Deacon Doug McManaman

One of the most important concepts in Catholic theology, without which the Catholic faith will make very little sense to our students, is divine grace. Although the religion curriculums I worked with over the years certainly covered many important topics, I did not think they covered the subject of grace adequately, which to a certain degree would keep students from seeing the faith as a coherent and interrelated whole. What follows is a concise treatment of the fundamental idea of divine grace.

This topic begins with the distinction between nature and grace. To understand this more fully, consider that science is the study of the nature of things, i.e., the nature of inorganic substances (inorganic chemistry), or the nature of living things (biology), or the nature of the human person (psychology), etc. Philosophy too is the study of the nature of things, but philosophy pursues the “ultimate” nature of things, for it deals with questions that science cannot answer, questions that cannot be resolved empirically, but through reason alone, such as: “What is time?”, or “What does it mean to be a human being?” or “What does it mean to exist?”, or “What are the properties of being?”, etc. In short, the object of human intelligence is the natures of material things. 

The next point I’d like to stress is that we really only come to understand the nature of a thing through its activity. Hence, the nature of a living thing is essentially different from the nature of a non-living thing in that living things are capable of self-motion (i.e., growth, reproduction, and nutrition), while non-living things (such as a rock) are moved by virtue of an extrinsic cause (i.e., a person throwing the rock). Also, we know that both animals and plants are living, but animals are essentially different from plants in that animals are capable of an activity that plants are not capable of, namely sense perception. A rose bush cannot see or hear anything outside of itself, but a cat is able to see, smell, hear, taste, and touch things. Human beings, on the other hand, have much in common with plants and animals, for human beings grow, reproduce, eat and drink as plants do, and they see and hear things outside of themselves, but human beings are essentially different from animals and plants in so far as they can reason and make free choices–as opposed to being simply governed by instinct, as animals are. Hence, human nature is essentially different from canine nature, which is in turn different from feline nature, etc. There are a number of powers (faculties) that belong to human nature, two of which do not belong to the nature of a cat or dog or any other brute animal, namely intellect and will. 

A power is really a potentiality to a specific activity. We infer the existence of these powers by observing the specific activity. For example, we infer that plants have the power to grow because we observe that plants actually grow (activity). We infer that the human person has the power to imagine, because the person imagines (activity); it is evident that many animals too have this power of imagination. Moreover, each of these powers or faculties has an immediate object. For example, the immediate object of the sense of sight is color, whereas the immediate object of the sense of hearing is sound, etc. The object of the imagination is the image, which is a material singular, such as the concrete image of an apple or triangle, etc., in the imagination. The object of the human intellect, on the other hand, is the universal idea, which exceeds the power of the imagination. For example, the idea of truth, or the concept of goodness, or the idea of “architecture”, or the idea of “biology”, etc., cannot be pictured in the imagination, and yet each of us knows what is meant by “biology”, “architecture”, “goodness” or “truth”. But an idea or concept is not an image in the imagination; for what does the idea of truth look like? What color or shape is the idea of architecture? They don’t have sensible qualities; ideas don’t look like anything, for they are not sensible, rather, they are intelligible.[1]

Our knowledge begins with sensation, and following upon sense perception is sense appetite, for example the desire for the apple we perceive. Our knowledge, however, is not limited to sense perception, nor are our appetites limited to sense appetites-there is also an intellectual appetite (the will). Intellectual knowledge exceeds the limits of sense perception, and so the will (intellectual appetite) is a different power than the sense appetites; for example, although I desire to eat a tasty meal (sense appetite), I can choose to fast for 12 hours or more for the sake of a blood test. In this case, my sense appetite inclines me to eat, but my will can rise above that sense appetite so that I actually will (intend) to fast for health reasons. 

Human nature, however, is limited. We can only know the natures of material things; for our knowledge begins with sensation and observation of a thing’s activity. It is true, however, that we can reason to the existence of a being that we cannot perceive, a being that is not material, namely God.[2] However, we cannot know the nature of God directly and immediately, as we know material things. We can know, through reason, that there exists an absolutely first cause of all that has existence, that such a being is the Necessary Being that cannot not exist, that always existed, and is unchanging and eternal, supremely good, etc., but we cannot directly know the nature of God–for we only know the natures of material substances, and that knowledge, as we said above, begins with sense perception and observation of their activities, and God is not a material substance that can be perceived and observed. Indeed, it is truly exhilarating to reason to the existence of a first existential cause, but the knowledge we are left with is very abstract and indirect. 

The bottom line is that the divine nature is beyond the capacity of the human mind to apprehend; all we can know naturally are material substances. Now, it is true that we have a natural and preconscious knowledge of God, which is the reason why we are forever searching for the causes of things and why we desire perfect happiness, but demonstrating that we have this knowledge is not easy, and this natural but preconscious knowledge of God is just that, natural, not supernatural, and very limited.[3] 

The only way the human person can know God directly and immediately, that is, to know something of God that exceeds his natural limits, is through the power of the divine nature itself. God must grant the human person a share in his divine nature, thereby elevating the human being so that he or she becomes more than human without ceasing to be human. Only then are we able to believe what God has revealed about himself, for what he has revealed about himself will “ring true”, for it will be congruent with something within us. And this is precisely what divine grace is: a sharing in the divine nature. 

Consider the following analogy. You have a dog, which has a canine nature with very specific powers, i.e., five external senses, internal sensation such as instinct, imagination, sense memory, etc., as well as sense appetites, such as desire, aversion, pleasure, sorrow, anger, hope, daring, etc. Imagine you had the power to infuse your human life into your dog, so that the dog becomes more than canine without ceasing to be canine–hence, your dog, participating in your human nature, is both canine and human simultaneously. Your dog would then have certain capacities that it otherwise would not possess, powers that exceed the limits of canine nature, such as the capacity to possess universal ideas, carry on a conversation with you, and choose an intelligible course of action (fast for 24 hours). This of course is pure fiction, but this is what happens with divine grace. God infuses his divine life into the soul, granting it a sharing in the divine nature. The result is “deification”, as the Greek fathers would say. A human being in a state of grace is more than human without ceasing to be human. 

By virtue of that union between human nature and divine grace, the human person has capacities that exceed the limits of human nature. For example, God knows himself naturally, and so with the infusion of divine grace, which is a participation in the divine nature, the human person knows God with the very knowledge of God himself (the divine light), that is, he or she knows God supernaturally. Of course, this supernatural knowledge is not the fullness of the divine light, but is analogous to the light of the sun at dawn–although one cannot see the sun yet, one can see the rays of sunlight on the horizon as the sun slowly begins to rise. The light of those rays is the same as the light of the sun that is still hidden but rising. Similarly, the light that results from the state of grace is the very same light of glory that will enable the human being to see God as he is in himself, in the beatific vision. This light is the theological virtue of faith-the saints, such as St. Catherine of Siena, speak of the light of faith. Faith is a theological virtue, not a natural virtue. What this means is that one cannot give oneself faith; it is a gift. Although a person can cultivate natural virtues such as patience, honesty, or temperance, one cannot cultivate the supernatural virtue of faith. That is a gift, a grace. One must possess a degree of divine light in order to genuinely believe truths that exceed the capacity of human reason to determine, such as: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three Persons in one divine nature, or that Jesus is the incarnation of God the Son and that he came to save us from eternal death, that his death on the cross reconciles humanity to God, that he rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, that through baptism we enter into his death and rise to the new life of grace, that in consuming the Eucharist, we consume his body, blood, soul and divinity, not symbolically but really and truly, etc. That light of faith exceeds the limits of natural human knowing; the knowledge that faith imparts is dark and obscure, but it is a real sharing in the divine self-knowledge and thus has to be freely given by God. Similarly, grace imparts a certain hopeful confidence in God and his promises, such as “…everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day” (Jn 6, 40). This is a real hope that is grounded in that dark but supernatural knowledge that is the light of faith. And finally, God loves what he knows, namely himself, and so a sharing in the divine nature includes a sharing in that supernatural love of God, which is the theological virtue of charity.

Now, activity implies power, for example, if I am thinking, then I have the power to think. A power that belongs to the nature of a thing is a faculty (i.e., intellectual activity in man implies an intellectual faculty, which in turn belongs to the nature of the human person). So too, the supernatural activities of faith in what God has revealed about himself and hope in the promises that God has made in his historical relationship with Israel as well as in the Person of Christ, and the intimate love and friendship of God, imply supernatural faculties rooted in “supernature”. 

Sanctifying Grace and Actual Graces

The more we think about grace, the more we realize how very mysterious it is. For example, we cannot procure grace on our own power; it is given gratuitously, without our having earned it; to earn grace would require that one perform a supernatural act that has supernatural merit, but one must be elevated by grace first in order to perform such an act. However, God does not compel. Grace saves, but we are not saved without our consent, that is, without our cooperation. However, my free cooperation with the movement of God’s grace is itself a grace. Although I cannot do anything to earn grace, I am capable of rejecting the impetus of divine grace. This means that if I make it to heaven, it is by virtue of God’s grace; if I do not make it to heaven, it is as a result of my own choosing, my own refusal to cooperate with the movement of grace. 

Sanctifying grace is the state of grace; it is habitual. A habit is an enduring quality, an enduring disposition. Thus, sanctifying grace is a habitual and interior state of supernature. But to get to this point, however, requires my cooperation, and yet I cannot cooperate without grace, as we said above. And so there must be a grace that precedes sanctifying grace, what the Church refers to as prevenient grace. Section 2001 of the Catholic Catechism puts it this way: 

The preparation of man for the reception of grace is already a work of grace. This latter is needed to arouse and sustain our collaboration in justification through faith, and in sanctification through charity. God brings to completion in us what he has begun, “since he who completes his work by cooperating with our will began by working so that we might will it” (St. Augustine, De gratia et libero arbitrio, 17: PL 44, 901).

Another important point is the distinction between sanctifying grace and actual graces. Actual graces are divine interventions, or momentary helps that precede conversion or are offered throughout the course of one’s spiritual life. These graces are a supernatural impetus that allows us to avoid sin or inspires us in some way; they could be a source of strength, or an illumination of some sort. Prevenient grace is an actual grace that is an impetus towards conversion, but it is not habitual grace. It is possible for the human person to shatter this divine impetus, sort of like a child that refuses to allow himself to be moved in a certain direction and so chooses to sit dead weight on the ground. Another term to become familiar with is sufficient grace. The latter is available to everyone, for it is a general term that refers to actual grace that is offered to everyone to a sufficient degree, that is, sufficient for a person to choose in a way that leads to the state of sanctifying grace.

Further Implications 

Parents and children are always of the same nature. The divine nature, however, is infinitely different from human nature. It follows that human beings are not, by nature, related to God as a child is related to a parent. In other words, although human beings are creatures of God, created in the image of God (the image of mind and heart), they are not naturally “children” of God. Sanctifying grace, however, elevates human nature to participate in the divine nature; thus, sanctifying grace makes us sons and daughters, sharers in the sonship of Christ; for he referred to God as “Abba” (Father), for the Son is of the same nature as the Father (divine nature).

Furthermore, children possess a right of inheritance. Similarly, in a state of grace, there is a right to inheritance; what belongs to God becomes ours. To die in a state of grace is to die saved–we inherit eternal life. In a state of grace, one inherits supernatural gifts, namely, the gifts of the Holy Spirit–one shares to a certain degree in the divine wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. One also receives the gift of counsel, fortitude, piety, and fear. These gifts are a sharing in the sonship of Christ himself: “The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, a spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the Lord, and his delight shall be the fear of the Lord” (Is 11, 2).

We also distinguish between mortal and venial sin. Mortal sin kills the grace of God within the soul, while venial sin only weakens the effects of divine grace in the soul. Grace, like fire, illuminates and exudes warmth, but venial sin dims that interior illumination, as a cover placed over a fire diminishes its light and warmth. 

Although we cannot merit divine grace, a person in a state of grace can merit an increase in grace. Hence, the more one prays with faith, hope, and supernatural charity, and the more one engages in works of mercy rooted in that charity, etc., the more one merits an increase in grace. As we can see, however, this is a matter of cooperation with the movement of divine grace, which is itself a grace. In other words, no matter which way we look at it, no credit or glory is ours, but all is his. Section 2008 of the Catechism puts it this way: 

The merit of man before God in the Christian life arises from the fact that God has freely chosen to associate man with the work of his grace. The fatherly action of God is first on his own initiative, and then follows man’s free acting through his collaboration, so that the merit of good works is to be attributed in the first place to the grace of God, then to the faithful. Man’s merit, moreover, itself is due to God, for his good actions proceed in Christ, from the predispositions and assistance given by the Holy Spirit. 

Christ, who is the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, is the source of grace for humanity. He is God the Son who joined a human nature, and in doing so, he has joined himself to every man and woman. This does not mean that everyone is in a state of sanctifying grace; that requires cooperation with sufficient grace, and not everyone cooperates, that is, not everyone allows Christ the king to reign within and have dominion over his or her life, but that is what we pray for in the Our Father: “…who art in heaven, may your name be made holy. May your kingdom come, may your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”. In Christ, heaven and earth are joined; hence, the kingdom of God is among us (Lk 17, 21), but we pray for the fullness of the kingdom, when God will be “all in all” (1 Cor 15, 28). 

Notes

1. The object of the intellect is also the very act of existence of a thing, which is distinct from a thing’s nature, but unpacking this would take us too far afield at this point. 

2. There are elaborate philosophical proofs, but the shortest and simplest is that offered by G. W. Leibniz: “If the Necessary Being is possible, then the Necessary Being exists”. 

3. The following is my own attempt to account for our natural and pre-conscious knowledge of God: consider that each person experiences his or her own contingency–that I exist, but I need not exist; my existence is not necessary, that is, I need not be here. This experience is one of radical dependency. I am aware that I am not sufficient unto myself, that I depend radically on someone or something; my whole existence depends not on me, but on someone or something ‘other’. I recognize my finitude and limited capacity, and I recognize the finitude of others, including my parents on whom I depend in many ways. Everyone and everything in my experience is limited and dependent. I also know intuitively and pre-consciously that an infinite regress of dependents is unintelligible and cognitively insufficient. In other words, I intuit an “Independent” upon which all contingent things depend. And if I intuit my own finitude, I also intuit in some way, simultaneously, “infinitude”. Moreover, if I experience my own contingency, I intuit “necessity” (non-contingency) as a backdrop, so to speak. I know, at some level, that all contingent things depend on a non-contingent, that is, “the Necessary being” that is without limits, who is absolutely independent. This Necessary being that is independent and first, and absolutely without limits, without beginning and without end, is unknown to me; it is intelligible as a complete and utter darkness, one that is real and knowable nonetheless, as a condition for the possibility of knowing my own finitude and contingency. I only know it, however, as yet unknown. But the entire universe proceeds from that Necessary being, because the universe is the sum of the contingencies (beings, events, activities, changes, etc.) that make it up. There is also a sense in which the universe reflects the Necessary being in some way, is an image of it, a distant image (because everything in the universe is contingent and finite), but the universe as a whole is experienced by me as inconceivably larger than me and without spatial limits, and has secrets that are revealed to me only gradually. 

Some of us experience a certain awe before this mystery. There is an “Other” that is totally unlike me upon whom we all depend. It is large, infinitely so, it is unknown, mysterious, necessary, and eternal. I am naturally inclined to seek relationship with this mystery, just as I naturally seek relationship with other human beings and other things in my environment. In fact, the drive for science may very well be a fundamentally religious quest. 

To continue this from a slightly different angle, I know from within that I have a desire for completion; thus, I experience my incompleteness and finitude. I desire happiness, or fulfillment. Specifically, I desire a happiness that endures, that does not come to an end, one that is complete, and one that is independent or sufficient unto itself, that is, a happiness that is not precarious, not dependent upon unforeseeable and contingent factors. But there is nothing in my direct experience that answers to this desire. Moreover, I cannot desire what I do not know. It follows that at some level at least, I know that there is an “Other” that answers to this desire, otherwise I would not desire it, for I cannot desire what I do not know. In other words, there is a “self-sufficient” (independent), an eternal, and there is a completeness that completes me, which is why I look outside of myself for completeness. Now, when I say I look outside of myself, I do not mean spatially outside. I look to something “other than” myself, but that “Other” is not me but is within me in some way, because I know it at some pre-conscious level, and knowledge is “in me”. It is within me and at the same time other than me.  

(Talk given to the Catholic Teachers Guild Teacher Formation Series, De La Salle College, Toronto, Ontario, Nov. 2023)

Deacon Douglas P. McManaman 

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_397virtueofprudence.html

Prudence is an interesting virtue; it is both an intellectual virtue and a moral virtue. Typically, the intellectual virtues can be possessed without the moral virtues. A person can have philosophical wisdom without being morally virtuous, or the virtue of science, even moral science, without being morally good – knowing the good does not guarantee that you’ll do the good. One cannot have prudence, however, without being morally good. If you are prudent, you are morally good.

Prudence is the mother of virtue, or the form of the moral virtues. The form in classical philosophy is that which determines a thing to be what it is (the form of chair determines the wood to be a chair). Prudence determines the virtues, i.e., temperance, fortitude, justice, etc., to be what they are, namely virtues, that is, habits that make their possessor good. 

What’s interesting about this is that 1) one cannot be good without prudence, and 2) one cannot have prudence without being good. So, there’s an interesting circularity here. It’s an interesting problem. Is this a vicious circle? One needs the moral virtues to be prudent, but one needs prudence to be morally virtuous. How does that work?

Perhaps we can come back to this later. I think I really began to understand prudence after watching a friend of mine who was our vice principal and later, our principal at a school I taught at for many years. It was actually when she became principal that things began to click into place for me. She often encouraged me to take the principal’s course in order to become an administrator (a vice-principal), but I resisted that. The reason is that I love ideas; I love learning new things and bringing them into the classroom to discuss with students. I don’t believe I have a mind for administration. She would argue with me, reminding me that “You have to train your mind for that”, and I’m sure she was right, but I didn’t really want to train my mind for administration, to re-dispose my mind away from contemplation towards a more concrete level, which is what I think it would involve. But what really impressed me about this woman was precisely the kind of mind she had. She had very good foresight. I’d bring up an idea to implement, and she would immediately see the many possible repercussions of that idea. And of course, the word prudence is related to foresight, from the Latin prudentia, which means “a foreseeing, foresight, practical judgment.” The word is a contraction of providentia from which is derived the word ‘providence’ (foresight). Her foresight was a result of a great deal of experience. My mind operated on a more general level, while she operated on a less abstract and more concrete level. 

The virtue of prudence is a very complex virtue, because it includes both levels: the universal and the concrete. It is defined as “the intellectual virtue that rightly directs particular human acts, through rectitude of the appetite, towards a good end.” And of course, here’s that interesting circularity again. You need rectitude of appetite in order to have prudence, but how does one know what constitutes right appetite without prudence? In any case, the bottom line is that one may be brilliant and learned without being morally good–because one does not have a good will, or one has disordered appetites–, but it is not possible to be prudent and not morally good. The prudent man is one who does the good, as opposed to one who merely talks about virtue, perhaps writes eloquently about virtue. I know some who write brilliantly and eloquently about virtue, but I’m not entirely sure I’d say they are virtuous, at least not to the extraordinary level of their writing abilities. Can one be virtuous without humility? Not at all, and humility is a matter of appetite (the moderate love of one’s own excellence). Excessive love of one’s excellence is pride, which is a vice. A proud man is not a prudent man. So it is very important that we not identify being a good moral philosopher or good moral theologian with prudence. He may not be prudent, but only a good moral problem solver, that is, good at solving moral dilemmas, or good at dealing with relatively abstract moral problems, but prudence is a different thing altogether. It is far more complex, and the reason it is far more complex is that it presupposes right appetite, which means a rightly ordered will and rightly ordered sensitive appetites, from which the eleven basic emotions proceed. Hence, emotional well-being or emotional stability is a pre-condition for prudence, and of course having a good will, a just will, is a necessary condition for prudence. 

Prudence is also complex in that it bears upon not merely general actions, but actions in the here and now, that is, the realm of the contingent, the concrete, the variable. This is where things become interesting. Prudence is the ability to apply universal principles to particular situations, and because it deals in both universal matters and particular, concrete, contingent matters, a number of other virtues that make up the integral parts of prudence are required, not just the general science of ethics. 

And so, in order to apply universal principles, one must have an understanding of universal moral principles, the first principles of natural law, the precepts of natural law and the more specific moral principles, like the principle of double effect, for example. And because prudence is an intellectual virtue, one must be able to reason soundly, which implies the ability to think logically. Aquinas includes conjecture as part of prudence. What we are dealing with here is inductive reasoning or plausible reasoning, which is a form of reasoning that was not very developed in the High Middle Ages. Being able to reason with plausible data is going to become a very important part of prudence. I will return to these towards the end.

Let’s turn now to the parts of prudence that bear upon contingencies, concrete circumstances that vary. These are the following:

Memory
Docility
Foresight
Shrewdness
Caution
Circumspection. 

For me, it is these integral parts that make prudence so interesting. Moreover, you can’t acquire these virtues in a classroom. You can’t really teach them like you can mathematics or logic, or universal moral principles. You can teach ethical theory, but you can’t teach foresight, caution, shrewdness, for example. These come with experience.

Memory

Memory is really experience. You have to have something to remember, and so the more experience you have, the more a good memory will be useful to you, especially in practical matters. The object of memory is past experience, and experience is information. The more you’ve traveled, the more information you have. The more diversified your experience, for example, the more varied your experiences in the schools, the more information you have. The more diversified your positions in the schools over the years (teacher, vice-principal, principal, superintendent), the more information you will have at your disposal. 

But this is the problem with being young. Young people typically make imprudent decisions. The reason is that they lack experience. They don’t have the information. Part of the vocation of those who have retired, those who have the gift of years, is to reflect upon their rich experience over the years, experience that young people just don’t have. Those in their 90s, or 80s, even 70s, have a vast reservoir of experience, and because they are retired, they have the time to reflect upon that vast experience, which is why spending time in silence and reflection, especially before the Blessed Sacrament, is so important. Those who are young are acquiring experience every day that is very important, but they don’t have the time to reflect upon it, and what they reflect upon is typically a very limited selection. It’s sort of like reading Scripture. When you read Scripture in your 20s, you pick up certain things, but when you read it in your 30s, or 40s, or 50s, you notice things that you missed when you were 20, because you now read it in a new light, in light of two or three decades more of experience, or more information. That new information allows us to revise certain conclusions we held earlier, the result of having a larger picture, so to speak. It’s very much like an adolescent who can’t stand his parents and thinks they are just not too bright and have no clue about parenting, until years later he becomes a parent and is making the same decisions that he condemned years before in his adolescence. He begins to realize that they are not so dumb after all. Experience, which brings new information, allows us to see things we couldn’t see earlier. 

I’m reminded of my friend Major General JR Bernier. He was the former surgeon general of Canada and NATO. His special area is public health, infectious disease management, etc. During the pandemic, I would try to get him to respond to all sorts of conspiracy claims that friends of mine were making. At one point, he wrote this to me: “When I commanded a hospital, I ascribed conspiratorial motivations to many decisions and policies from Ottawa that I considered incompetent or sinister. When I later had to make those decisions myself or advise Cabinet or other authorities in their decision-making (with the benefit of knowing all the relevant factors and information), they were usually the same decisions that I had previously condemned in my ignorance.”

What I also found interesting – and very relevant for a discussion on prudence – was his refusal to evaluate the decisions made by the Ford government with respect to the pandemic. The reason is that the information that experience provides and that prudence requires is very specific, and not general. He said: “I’ve studied and worked in infectious disease, immunology, vaccinology, epidemiology, public health, etc. most of my life, led infectious outbreak investigations and managements, led Canada’s most complex public health agency, was one of the 16 national governors of health research in Canada, was chair of the health research committee of the world’s largest research network, was the chief medical adviser to the alliance of western nations, led development projects all the way to licensure for vaccines and other infectious disease pharmaceuticals, and am now one of the governors of Ontario’s health system. Despite that (or because of that), I know how many thousands of situation-specific medical, epidemiological, treatment capacity, economic, political, financial, etc. factors that must be considered and balanced in local/regional decision-making, hundreds of which change day to day. Not knowing the status of each of these thousands of factors for each locality, I know that I’m consequently completely unqualified (despite my background) to second-guess the region-specific decisions of those who do know this information. I would, of course, be free to confidently express dogmatic opinions with great certainty if I knew nothing about the subject.”

I’ve seen a similar pattern in education over the years. When a teacher becomes a vice principal, they are suddenly opened up to a vast amount of information, the result of the new position, they are given a new perspective, and that new perspective provides a truckload of new information which they previously did not have of course. Those who are honest and reflective enough regret the arrogance of their youth. 

Docility

Docility is the ability to be taught. It describes a readiness to learn. Docility requires a degree of openness, that is, a degree of humility. And of course, this above all means the ability and willingness to learn from those with more experience, who have been down a certain road before and are more familiar with the territory. 

What’s interesting about experience is that we can only take away from it very limited content. Let me try to explain it this way. Think of the taxonomy of the sciences, the various branches of a science that there are, i.e., branches of chemistry, such as biochemistry, organic chemistry, synthetic organic chemistry, or branches of psychology, such as cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, humanistic psychology, etc. In 1911, there were only two branches of Astronomy, and two branches of Optics. In 1970, however, that grew to 10 specialties of Optics, and 26 specialties of Astronomy. And currently, there are so many more branches of psychology than there were when I began to study: social psychology, forensic psychology, clinical neuropsychology, positive psychology, abnormal psychology, clinical psychology, evolutionary psychology, industrial psychology, and the list goes on.

How does this happen? How is it that the sciences become increasingly complex, with more and more branches and specialties? I think it all begins with the kinds of questions we are inclined to ask. The word question comes from the Latin querrere, which means to quest, or to journey. To pose a question is to position oneself for a journey, an avenue of inquiry. If I decide to go down this avenue rather than that avenue, I will discover things, houses, types of trees perhaps, whatever, that I would not have discovered had I taken a different avenue. What happens in the sciences is that an individual scientist asks a different kind of question, because he’s interested in a different problem to solve, perhaps as a result of the situation he finds himself in. And posing a different question takes one down a different avenue of inquiry, and that opens up a whole new world to discover. And so, we have forensic psychology as well as positive psychology, both rooted in two different problems that two different psychologists wanted to solve: the criminal mind for one of them, the problem of happiness for the other. What we are interested in determines what it is we notice. For an everyday example of this, I think of the times my daughter and I walk through a shopping mall together. At the end of that hour or two, she will have noticed things that I had no clue about. She’ll say that she saw this many people with a Louis Vuitton purse, and that lady is wearing very expensive high-end shoes, and that parishioner we met is rich, because that sweater she is wearing is high-end, etc. I’ve noticed nothing like that – I noticed there’s a new bakery in the Mall. Interest plays a similar role in the sciences. One physicist is interested in solving certain problems, and so asks different questions, which lead to a whole new branch of that science.

That is why docility is so important. Our experience is not universal, but very circumscribed. There’s more data in our experience than we are able to process; we process what is relevant for us, and what is relevant has everything to do with what you are interested in, the problems you want to solve in your life. And so, you have insights that I don’t have, and so I need to learn from you. There’s no doubt in my mind that there is something to Immanuel Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena, that reality as it appears to us is, to some degree at least, determined by something in us. 

Getting back to docility, if I lack it, I will make mistakes, the same mistakes that others have made in the past. I repeated them only because I was ignorant, and I was ignorant because I did not open myself to learning from others. And that too is often rooted in disordered passion – impatience, or perhaps pride, which is excessive love of one’s own excellence.

Foresight

As I mentioned, this was the quality that a friend of mine possessed that helped me to begin to understand prudence. Foresight is not about making predictions, like political talking heads. It’s interesting to study predictions made in the past and how wrong they always are, and yet it does not stop these people from continuing to make predictions with the same level of confidence and certainty. James Fallows, the national correspondent for The Atlantic, wrote: “Donald Trump will not be the 45th president of the United States. Nor the 46th, nor any other number you might name. The chance of his winning the nomination and election is exactly zero.” That’s prediction, not foresight. 

Foresight is certainly a kind of prediction, but it involves thinking about what’s in place now, and anticipating problems, difficulties, quagmires, that are likely to occur. It is practical, not speculative, so it requires experience, and it involves effort and moral concern. And so, the lazy minded tend to lack foresight. I wanted to have a certain comedian come to our school to entertain the students, but my friend got me to consider how many Asian students we have and what the chances are that he will perform that routine in which he speaks in that Asian accent; all we need is one student to feel shame about his own cultural identity. Do we want that? Are we willing to accept that? Although he may be funnier and more popular than the other guy who is available, we can foresee potential problems.

Shrewdness

The shrewd can size up a situation rather quickly. They are able to rapidly determine the best means to achieve their end. A shrewd person is also highly intuitive with respect to the reading of people’s character. Intuition is, I am convinced, a matter of rapid inference, as a result of experience. The Parable of the Dishonest Steward is an illustration of shrewdness (Lk 16): 

A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’

The steward said to himself, ‘What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg.

I know what I shall do so that, when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.’

He called in his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, ‘How much do you owe my master?’

He replied, ‘One hundred measures of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.’

Then to another he said, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘One hundred kors of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.’

And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.

Verse 8 of this chapter is also very interesting: “The children of darkness are more shrewd than are the children of light”. My spiritual director would often repeat that verse. I think he meant that we are not strategic, as are the children of darkness, who plan strategically and patiently. We’re kind of reckless in our inactivity and complacency. Although we have the light, the enemies of the Church have the heat. They are prepared to wait and to act, and the result is that they’ve gained tremendous ground over the past 50 years. We haven’t really taught goodness. It’s as if we’ve forgotten that there’s an enemy out there and that we have to make sure that young people and the faithful in general understand goodness. Forgiveness is one thing, but it seems we did not want to pursue the rigorous teaching of goodness, because we were afraid that someone was going to be offended by that. And so we fell asleep, while the enemies of the Church worked diligently and patiently, sowing darnel. 

The situation today is that Catholic teachers are afraid to teach certain things, because they are afraid to offend: “What parent is going to come after me if I say this or that?” How did we get to that point? Our lack of careful assessment of the situation within these past 40 years, not to mention a lack of foresight. 

Now, however, we find ourselves in a very different situation. We have to re-strategize, and a shrewd strategy will look very different than it would have 50 years ago. This is not the 1960s or 70s, so how do we achieve our goal in this situation? How do we teach morality in the schools without getting canceled? Or better yet, without having the students tune us out completely. I have friends who would adopt what I would argue is a reckless and imprudent approach: just go in and hit them over the head with a dogmatic two by four, and let the chips fall where they may. I would argue, instead, that we need to begin with a thorough discussion of divine grace. Never begin with law, the law does not save; begin with divine grace. Students need to see the entire picture, from creation, the fall of man, the covenant with Abraham, to the Incarnation and the divinization or deification that results from grace. What does it mean to be a new creation, to share in the divine nature. Without that background, Catholic morality will only leave a very bad taste in their mouths.  

Circumspection

Circumspection involves being wary and unwilling to take unnecessary risks. It involves a careful consideration of all circumstances and possible consequences, so it includes foresight, as well as caution, which is also an integral part of prudence. 

I remember walking into Costco and seeing a stack of computer printers for $60, on sale. I bought one, thinking what a deal. Until a few months later when it was time to replace the ink cartridges. They are more expensive than the printer. After 2 years, you’ve paid out what it would have cost you to buy a laser printer in the first place, and the ink on a laser printer does not dry out if you don’t use it for a few months. This was a lack of circumspection on my part. I should have asked the right questions: “Why are these printers so cheap?” “Isn’t this too good to be true?” But once again, all this comes with experience.

Conjecture (Inductive reasoning) 

A very important part of prudence is the ability to reason on the basis of plausible data. What we are referring to here is the process of drawing conclusions on the basis of incomplete information. In short, inductive reasoning. The old Aristotelian deductive logic that we were brought up on is fine as far as it goes, but if any of you studied it, you remember that the premises were not that important. 

All men are rational
John is a man
Therefore, John is rational.

No one argues with the premises. The point of this logic was to become familiar with the valid form of the argument. 

All animals are sentient
Fido is an animal
Therefore, Fido is sentient.

In real life, however, the premises that we have to manage are rarely quite as certain and easy to agree on. It is evident to everyone that a dog is an animal, but what about the claim that Tiger Woods is the all-time greatest golfer (many would say Jack Nicholas), or Bobby Orr is the all-time greatest hockey player (some would say Wayne Gretzky). Or Mark Furman planted evidence to convict OJ Simpson – how plausible is that, given his background in the LAPD?. These claims have a degree of plausibility, either minimally plausible, somewhat plausible, moderately plausible, or highly plausible. The information or data that we have to support our claims are incomplete. How then do we draw out the maximally consistent and most plausible conclusion on the basis of plausible and incomplete data? That’s what plausible reasoning is about (See my Introduction to Plausible Reasoning). 

Now, what often happens is that when young people become more familiar with the process of plausible reasoning, they tend to become a bit more cautious in terms of their conclusions. In other words, they are more tentative and less certain, that is, less dogmatic. When we study the history of science, for example, we see plausible reasoning in action. On the basis of the information we have, we draw the most plausible conclusion on the basis of the most consistent set of data we have in our possession at the time, but with more information, that conclusion is typically revised. What can often happen is that a conclusion that was earlier based on a set of data that had much less plausibility is suddenly raised to the level of maximum plausibility, and what was held to be the most plausible conclusion on the basis of the information we had at the time is now relegated to a very low position of plausibility.

We see this when we follow an investigation of a crime, such as a murder. Sometimes all the evidence points to a particular suspect, and we are convinced of his guilt. But as new information comes forth, that person is removed from the pool of suspects, and a new person comes to the fore. 

Years ago, I saw an interview with Prosecutor Sam Millsap Jr., former Bexar County district attorney who charged Ruben Cantu with capital murder, who was eventually executed by lethal injection for a crime he did not commit. Journalist Lisa Olson years later confronted Millsap with the evidence, fully expecting Millsap to defend himself at all costs. But he did not. He readily acknowledged his mistake. He said: “I was always proud of the fact that I was a district attorney when I was 35 years old, but the thing that I realized was that there was value to experience. I didn’t know enough to realize that you shouldn’t place the kind of weight that we placed on the testimony of a single eye-witness.” 

When we become familiar with plausible reasoning, it soon becomes evident how much of our day-to-day reasoning is a matter of reasoning on the basis of plausible data, and the more we become familiar with that, the less dogmatic we become. One of my favorite lines about epistemic overconfidence is from Bertrand Russell: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt”.  It is very important to teach our students the importance of epistemic humility – and of course we do that by example. The arrogance of youth is almost impossible to uproot; only time and hope will achieve that, but we need to at least remind them that in the end, we really know very little. When I was in my early 50s, I would often tell my students that I have 53 years of experience in being wrong, while you have only 17 years, and in those 17 years, you have not paid too much attention to those times you were wrong; it feels much better to discover you are right than discovering that you were wrong. And the only reason I started paying close attention to my mistaken inferences is that I would use them as examples in my theory of knowledge course. 

There’s so much to do in this area, and so much has been written on this. Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow is a classic. Moreover, becoming familiar with basic induction biases goes a long way, such as the availability heuristic bias, confirmation bias, belief perseverance, base rate neglect, the narrative fallacy, etc. 

Understanding Universal Moral Principles

Universal moral principles can be taught, unlike circumspection, caution, docility, or memory – all we can do is hope that a person eventually acquires the latter. But teaching moral principles is the easy part in all of this; it is easy because it is more general, that is, we are operating on a higher level of abstraction, and on this level, it is much easier to achieve certainty. It is like estimating the height of a tree; the broader the estimate, the more certainty we enjoy. I can say that oak tree outside is between a foot and a mile high; we can all be quite certain that this is the case, but the more precise – and more useful – the estimate, the more vulnerable it is to error: “The tree outside is 38 ft high”. It’s likely wrong, for it could be 37 ft, or 40 ft. Mathematics has greater certainty than does history, for example, because mathematics operates on a high level of abstraction. The more we descend to the level of the contingent, the more uncertainty there is. 

So very general moral principles are easy to agree on and they are easy to teach. And this is why it is very imprudent to get into moral issues at the start of a course. Always begin with the general, always begin with universal principles. It is much easier to come to an agreement on these. But if we begin with moral issues, students will certainly get excited and jump right into the discussion, and that’s fun, but they will lack the principles, and so they will take a position on issues that are relatively unprincipled, and once that happens and they make their views public, they will often just dig in their heels all the more so afterwards when their position is challenged. General principles must be laid down first, and from that foundation we should carefully construct the edifice. For example:

• Good must be done, evil must be avoided
• One ought not to harm anyone.
• One ought not to treat human persons as a means to an end (persons must be loved, not used).
• One ought not to destroy a basic intelligible human good for the sake of other basic human good.
• One ought not to treat anyone with a preference, unless the preference is required by basic human goods.
• In order for an action to be good, each element of the human act (moral object, motive, circumstances) must be good. If one element is evil, the entire act is evil.
• Etc.

Of course, not all precepts are absolute. Consider some very specific precept, such as: One ought to keep one’s promises. This is a precept based on the more general precept of fairness: One ought not to treat others with a preference, unless that preference is required by basic human goods. If I am an unfair person, I treat myself with a preference. My will has primacy. If I am a just person, then I will see that I do not like it when others fail to keep their promises to me, so I will to keep my promises to them, because I refuse to treat myself with a preference. However, sometimes preferences are required by basic human goods, such as human life or health. Should I keep my promise to my friend to come over and watch the baseball game next Friday night? I have come down with the flu. I decide to break my promise, but I do so on the basis of the more fundamental precept of justice: the golden rule: I would not want my friend, who has the flu, to come over and give me the flu. 

Breaking my promise does not constitute a violation of the more general precept that I ought not to act with a preference, unless the preference is required by basic human goods (in this case the human good being my own health and well-being, as well as my friend’s health and wellbeing). Aborting a child, however, or actively euthanizing a patient, does involve the violation of a basic precept. I am willingly destroying a basic human good, for the sake of some other state of affairs. 

Consider the more specific moral principle of double effect. There are situations in which performing a certain action will result in an undesirable side effect. The principle of double effect is a more specific principle that allows us to navigate through these situations in order to determine whether or not the act is permissible. The important point about this principle is that a true double effect scenario allows us to perform a certain action without positively willing evil. 

And so, there are indeed intrinsically evil actions that are never permitted, but sometimes there are situations that change the nature of the action. Willingly destroying a developing fetus cannot be justified, because it involves the violation of a basic precept of natural law: One ought not to willingly destroy a basic intelligible human good for the sake of some other state of affairs or some other human good. But performing a genuinely medical action that results in the death of the fetus may possibly be justified, depending on how the conditions attached to the principle of double effect fare in this regard. One of the conditions is that one may not will or intend the evil effect, only permit it. The surgeon removed the fallopian tube to prevent hemorrhage, but he did not will or intend the death of the embryo, he merely permitted it. And the fourth condition is that the good effect must be sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the evil effect. 

Active euthanasia is intrinsically evil. One may not adopt a proposal that includes the death of the patient. To do so involves me in willing the death of the patient. Of course, I can reject a seriously burdensome treatment and accept my death, but this is morally different from willing my death, or intending it.

All this can be taught. However, there is a danger in teaching morality from an exclusively natural law point of view that focuses on moral issues and problems. Early on in my teaching career I had spent a great deal of time teaching the fundamentals of natural law, universal moral principles, and applying them to specific moral issues. At the end of a semester, a student asked: “Is there anything we are allowed to do?”

I was very frustrated with that question. I became angry, in part I think because I knew his question revealed a deficiency in my approach. The study of Ethics should be a study in the good life, that is, how to achieve the good life. That’s what Aristotle’s ethics is primarily about. It is really the study of what we ought to be doing, not just avoiding. Knowing what to avoid – what not to do – is very important, however. But we have to know the destination. I’m going to Florida, and I have my directions, and I’m looking forward to getting there. But part of my instructions should include: Do not turn off at this exit, and stay on 75 when you are in this or that area, it is easy to find yourself on the wrong highway heading west, etc. But these negative directions only make sense when you know where you are going. Our destiny is heaven. Our fundamental purpose is to know God, love God, and serve God. Our fundamental obligation is to grow in divine grace, to grow in supernatural charity. We have to discern our vocation and discover the charisms that God has given us for the sake of that vocation. As a teacher, God is calling me to cultivate patience, justice, compassion for my students, and prudence in the life of a teacher is going to be a matter of knowing the best means to fulfill the obligations of a teacher – how to draw the best out of my students, how to speak to them, how to look at them, how to relate to my colleagues and to administration, how to become a better teacher for the sake of my students. So, the moral life is primarily about “what to do” in the context of my vocation as a teacher. 

It is possible to be so focused on moral issues, moral problems, on what not to do – why we should not fornicate, or contracept, or abort, or artificially inseminate – and pay little attention to what we ought to do every day at school and how we ought to relate to others. 

Concluding Thoughts

So, prudence is not a matter of simple calculation. One has to grow in prudence, and one cannot do so alone. Prudence is communal and historical. Some moral decisions are easy, while some are more difficult to determine. This is not to suggest that truth in prudential matters is relative or purely subjective. Knowledge of the moral truth in these cases is a real possibility because truth is real, but it is more often than not difficult to achieve and requires input from others with experience, docility, listening, openness, caution and learning from experience (time), and a profound understanding of moral principles.

But how does one resolve the apparent circular nature of our claims about prudence? My best response is the following. The first choices that we make in our lives are the more general or universal choices (just as the first truths we apprehend are the most universal or general), and it is in the context of these universal choices that we make more particular choices, as a novelist conceives the whole novel very generally, and only later begins to fill in the particular parts, chapters, paragraphs, and sentences, that give expression to the original idea. The writer knows where he is going from the start. In other words, the whole is prior to its parts. Now the more universal the decision, the less motivated it is by sensible goods, and thus the more free and self-determined it is. But particular decisions motivated by strong passion can mitigate personal responsibility. For example, place a Hershey bar and a carrot in front of a young boy with a sweet tooth and ask him to make a choice. It is more likely than not that he will choose the Hershey bar. But the more universal an idea is, the more abstracted it is from matter. So too, the more universal the choice, the more it exceeds the influence of matter.

Now, at some point or within a certain period of time in our lives, we make a very general choice about ourselves. We choose to be a certain kind of person. This choice does not take place in a vacuum, but within an environment containing many different kinds of people. Very early on we choose to be like him, or like her, or not like this person or that person. The actions that we choose constitute that certain way of being. For example, a child might want to be a person who is always kind, who cares for people, seniors for example, tends to their needs, etc. It is on the basis of this more general decision that other alternatives become more appealing, that is, in accordance with the kind of character that I originally chose for myself. Conversely, certain alternatives drop out of consideration because they are inconsistent with the kind of character I have chosen for myself (I do not choose this action, because I don’t want to be that kind of person). It is possible for a person to choose to always look out for himself first, to make himself the very center around which his life will revolve; in other words, my own well-being is more important to me than the well-being and rights of others. In this case, I accept that this is the kind of person I have become, that is, one with a less noble identity than that of a person who has made a more generous choice. There are certain choices that are consistent with that general decision of mine, and there are choices that are inconsistent with it, and these latter tend to lose their appeal, such as doing volunteer work or giving generously to charitable causes, or watching certain kinds of shows or applying for certain courses of study, etc. 

It is not necessarily possible for us to determine exactly when this very general choice was made by a particular person, but some of us remember moments in our own childhood when we became conscious of having made a simple and general decision to be “like this person” or to strive to be “like that person”, or to be “a good person”, or “a more powerful person than all others”. There is no need to attempt to search for the cause of this decision. The choice is self-determined, or self-caused. The power to choose freely is really the power to “make oneself”. And what is made is more intimately yours than anything else that you might own. You are the kind of person that you are because you willed that to be. 

So, a certain kind of appetite, referring to the will or the rational appetite, is established, and thus a person who has a right appetite can grow in prudence, in moral wisdom. He or she has the beginnings of a connatural knowledge of what is right and wrong, as a musically talented child will quickly learn how to play the piano or some other musical instrument. A person who has not established a very general appetite in the right direction will not grow in a knowledge of what is morally good, but instead a knowledge of how best to achieve his ends, which are ultimately ordered to himself. 

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_396dawkinssimplicitycomplexity.html

D. McManaman

Recently I watched part of Piers Morgan’s 2023 discussion with Richard Dawkins on Piers Morgan Uncensored. There wasn’t much that was new in Dawkins’ presentation, but he did introduce an idea that I’d never heard him articulate before. At around the 6 minute mark, Dawkins says: “…it doesn’t help to postulate something very complicated at the outset, because what we’ve got is primeval simplicity, and from that stems everything; and what science does is it starts with simplicity, which is relatively easy to understand, and from that it develops into the whole of the universe and the whole of life. It doesn’t help to start with complexity, and a creator has to be complex.”

This is very interesting, and it is probably the most philosophical claim I’ve ever heard Dawkins make. There is a sense in which he is entirely right about this, but the principle is not inconsistent with the notion of a divine creator, but entirely consistent with it. I believe the reason Dawkins cannot see it is that the conceptual framework in which he operates is fundamentally empirical or empirio-metric. He has a mind for science. The evidence we need to grasp this point is not empirical evidence, but rational data, that is, rational evidence that is gathered as we move the discussion to the level of the philosophy of being, which is the only level on which we can talk rationally and meaningfully about God, unaided by faith, that is. 

Basically, God is entirely, completely, and utterly simple. Every being other than God has a degree of complexity. But understanding this depends on an understanding of the real distinction between essence and existence. A being is a habens esse (that which has an act of existing), and any being whose essence and existence are distinct is a contingent being (a being that may or may not be, that is, need not be). But a being whose essence is its existence, that is, identical to its act of existing, is completely and utterly simple, for such a being is Being Itself. It does not “have” being, but it is its own “act of being”, and there is nothing simpler than “being”.

The things around us have a degree of intelligibility. They can be known to some degree or another. In fact, their intelligibility always seems to exceed what we currently know about them–there’s always more to know about the phenomenon in question. But the scientific endeavor begins with the desire to know “what something is”, that is, the nature of the thing. However, there is an intelligibility that is distinct from the intelligibility of a being’s nature, and that is the intelligibility of its very “existence”. I can know “what” something is, without knowing whether or not it is. Of course, in order to really grasp something of the nature of a thing, it must first exist; but the being before me–whatever it is–has a two-fold intelligibility. I grasp its “whatness” (what it is), at least to some degree, but I also apprehend that “it is”. My apprehension involves two distinct acts of the intellect. The reason is that existence does not belong to the nature of any material thing; for what belongs to the nature of a thing belongs to it necessarily, and so if “existence” belongs to the nature of a being, then that being exists necessarily, not contingently–that being would be “the necessary being”, which is a being that “cannot not be”, and therefore always is. 

After 30 years of teaching, I came to more fully appreciate the simplicity and soundness of Leibniz’ modal argument for the existence of God: “If the Necessary being is possible, then the Necessary being exists” (If MLp, then Lp). Those who attempt to refute the argument always seem to indirectly assert the distinction between essence and existence. It is typically pointed out that because the very idea of something (i.e., the necessary being) is possible, it does not follow that it actually exists. Of course, that is true in the case of contingent beings (one cannot establish the existence of a unicorn, or a flying horse, etc., on the basis of its definition, which expresses or attempts to express what the thing is essentially). However, there is only one case in which one can posit the existence of a being on the basis of the definition or idea, and that is the case of God, who is the Necessary being, who cannot not exist, but who exists necessarily. If such a being is possible (namely, the Necessary being), then such a being exists, and the reason is that such a being is necessary and cannot not exist. 

Not everyone is convinced by the argument, and the reason seems to be traced back to an understanding that “essence and existence” are not the same, that one cannot go from an apprehension of “what” something is to the conclusion “that it is”. 

There’s no need to defend Leibniz’s argument here. The point is that those who take issue with it typically end up distinguishing between “what a thing is” (essence) and “whether or not it is” (esse). Each contingent being is a composite, which is a degree of complexity, namely a composite of potentiality and actuality (essence and existence). An existing contingent being is a potential being that is actual–but it need not exist, that is, it can “not exist”. A human person, such as Abraham Lincoln, is a contingent being, a mosquito is a contingent being, a carbon atom is a contingent being or thing, etc. 

The argument for the existence of God that starts with contingent beings–as opposed to beginning with the very idea of a Necessary being–will begin by pointing out that no contingent being contains within itself the sufficient reason for its own act of existing. A thing cannot give what it does not have, thus an existing nature cannot receive its act of being from its own nature, which is distinct from its being, because contingent beings do not contain existence by nature–otherwise that contingent being would be the Necessary being. Nor can a contingent being receive its own act of existence from another contingent being, because a contingent being can only act within the limits of its nature, and existence is outside the nature of a contingent being–that is why we cannot bring something into being from nothing, only from already existing things. Hence, the cause of the received act of existence of a contingent being is a non-contingent being, that is, the Necessary being. And this is what we mean by God, namely, that Being that is Being Itself, or pure Act of Existence–demonstrating that there is and can only be one Necessary being would take us too far afield at this point.

God, who is pure Act of Existence, is not complex. The reason is that outside of being is non-being, or nothing, therefore whatever is in God is identical to God’s act of existence. Whatever perfections we find within the realm of contingent beings exist in God, but differently. In God, they are identical to “his” act of existence. Hence, knowledge in God is not distinct from his being, but is his being. Thus, God is his knowledge, and his knowledge cannot not be, but is eternal and unchanging. Also, good is a property of being (whatever is, is good insofar as it is), and so God is Goodness Itself–he does not “have” goodness as one property among other properties. So too, beauty is a property of being, and so God is Beauty Itself, and truth is a property of being (a being is true insofar as it is), and thus God is Truth Itself. 

And so Richard Dawkins is correct: “…it doesn’t help to postulate something very complicated at the outset, because what we’ve got is primeval simplicity, and from that stems everything”. God is that simplicity, and nothing in the universe can be that simple without being God. What Dawkins overlooks here is that science begins with a different kind of simplicity, a very impoverished kind of simplicity–for example, the electron is simpler than the atom, the atom is simpler than the molecule, the molecule is simpler than the organism, etc. The simpler something is from this angle, the poorer it is–a human being is richer in intelligibility than a molecule, and a molecule is richer in intelligibility than is an electron, etc., just as an automobile is richer in intelligibility than a gasket. The simplicity of God is not the simplicity of a material substance or its smallest part; it is the simplicity of Being Itself. Such a simplicity is inexhaustibly rich in intelligibility–not complexity–, and the variety and diversity and complexity of contingent beings that make up the universe is a parable that speaks of the inexhaustible beauty, goodness, and intelligibility of God, who is absolutely simple, because he is pure Being Itself. 

But,” said Moses to God, “if I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what do I tell them?”

God replied to Moses: I am who I am. Then he added: This is what you will tell the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.

(Exodus 3, 13-14)

Homily for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Deacon Doug McManaman

“The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example.”

This is an interesting passage from today’s gospel reading; what it shows is that Jesus makes a distinction between what the scribes and Pharisees teach, and the example they set before us. Embrace and observe what they tell you, but do not follow their example. The reason is that they are hypocrites, they are egoists. Their religious leadership is all about them and how they appear. 

The reason this reading is so relevant can be summed up in that old expression: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Hypocrisy has not died out; it’s still here in the Church, there are still clerics who are opportunists, who think priesthood is about them, who are envious and love to be the center of attention, and so on and so forth. Jesus established a Church on the twelve apostles, choosing Peter as the head of the Apostles, and yet he knew they would scatter and that Peter would deny knowing him. But he chose them anyway.

That’s the humility of Christ. He continues to be present among us, to forgive our sins and to give himself to us in the flesh, through the unworthy hands of sinful human beings. There’s no getting around that. Catholicism is not about us; it is about Christ.

Christ’s directive here can be very difficult to live out: do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. Even among the clerical ranks, there are some who are somewhat pharisaical. So if you encounter a priest or bishop who is annoying, immature, perhaps thinks it is all about him, when you are stuck with a cleric who has as much compassion and diplomacy as a steak knife, the temptation can be to walk out, turn your back on the Church and never look back. Some people have done so. But it is at this point where we have to keep our eyes on Christ, not his instruments. 

The fact is we are all hypocrites. None of us really practice what we preach, at least not perfectly. I don’t know about you, but whenever I look back at my own life, when I see old pictures or videos of myself and am reminded of things I did or said that are now forgotten, I often don’t like what I see. I often say to myself: “Gosh, I can’t believe I said that back then, or I can’t believe I did that. What an idiot I was”. And although we may not see anything wrong with us now, 20 years from now we may look back at this time and shake our heads at what we can’t see now, but will see later. And yet Christ still works through us. He still gives us a sharing in his divine nature, even though we are very imperfect and unworthy vessels. We still have charisms that he has given to us for the building up of the Body of Christ, and yet we remain defective vessels. 

So when a person turns his back in anger at the Church for some clerical imperfection–and I am excluding criminal behavior here, that’s a different matter altogether –, when it is merely a matter of annoyance or something he said or his personality, or something more serious such as genuine egoism or condescending moralizing, one is cutting oneself off from the sacraments, which are channels of divine grace. It’s what the expression “cutting off your nose to spite your face” means in this context. 

This life is about learning to forgive one another, and all those who refuse to forgive, who choose to harbor unforgiveness against the Church as a whole or against another person, really end up condemning themselves. In the Our Father, we pray: forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us. We are instructing God to forgive us only to the degree that we forgive others. If we don’t forgive, we block God’s forgiveness of our sins. And so we need to pray that God will give us the strength to get past whatever wounds we carry, and this could take a long time for some of us to get to that point, but if we hope for the Lord’s forgiveness, we have to be willing to forgive all those in our lives who need to be forgiven. 

Deacon Doug McManaman

When I was teaching, I would often tell my students that there are two subjects that should be mandatory for all high school students in the province of Ontario, and both begin with the letter “E”: ethics, and economics, neither of which are mandatory in the public schools. Economic illiteracy has rather serious repercussions, not to mention ignorance of the fundamentals of ethics. 

One thing that economists will often point out is that “there is no such thing as a free lunch”. Well, I love economics, but the gospel reading (the Parable of the Wedding Banquet) suggests that there is one important exception to that principle, namely the kingdom of God, the fundamental content of Christ’s proclamation, the subject matter of almost all the parables. It is more than a free lunch; it is a free and eternal banquet. All are invited to this eternal banquet, without exception, but mysteriously, not everyone accepts the invitation. 

Now there’s a very subtle but important point to this parable, and it is something that many religious people can often forget. The point is this: There is nothing that anyone has done to earn an invitation to this banquet. It is pure gift; pure grace. This is an eternal banquet, a banquet not of this world, but of the “other world” (aionios), and the joy of that feast is beyond our ability to conceive. And it is a banquet that will last forever, but it begins in this world. We begin the feast here, and the joy of that feast is also to begin in this world. It is sheer gift. 

But we have a hard time accepting that which is given gratuitously, without our having earned it in some way. A neighbor of mine is an electrician, and I asked him if he has time to look at an electrical outlet for me. After a long day, he came over, looked at the problem, got it working again, but it took some work. He even put in new parts. I asked him how much I owe him, but he wouldn’t accept any payment. I insisted. He just wouldn’t do it. I found that difficult, and I thought about that difficulty of accepting what is offered as a pure gift. There seems to be a need to earn it in some way, a need to pay for it, to balance the scales. This can be transferred to the sphere of religion. When this happens, what we end up doing is very subtly we make our religion a matter of law. We reduce it to a morality, a set of precepts and rules to follow, that is, we reduce our religion to a conditional: “If, then”: “If you do this, then reward will follow”, “If you do not do this, that, and the other thing, then you won’t get this…etc.”. We develop a legalistic mindset. 

St. Paul battled this mindset in his letters, especially Romans. We are not saved by the law, but by grace. We are saved by the grace of faith. Our invitation to the eternal wedding banquet was not conditional: “…invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet. …they gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests”. All we have to do is believe that this gift is ours, offered to us, and is ours for the taking. Just accept this gift.

Law and morality come after, and they do so out of gratitude for this sheer gift. A good illustration of this is the story of Zacchaeus, who climbed a sycamore tree to see Jesus passing by. He was a hated tax collector, which means he was considered a traitor. What happens? Jesus approaches him, calls him by name, and says: Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house. He came down quickly and received him with joy. That’s it. What took place afterwards? Zacchaeus said: “Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over.”

Jesus didn’t tell him to do that. That certainly was not a condition for Jesus staying at his house. That was the result of Jesus approaching him, calling him by name, and actually intruding on him so to speak. “Today I must stay at your house”. Why? Sheer gift. Zacchaeus received that gift with great joy, and what followed was a moral transformation. Sort of like heliotropic plants, such as the sunflower, that move in the direction of the sun. The sunflower was not told from outside to move in that direction, rather, the sun shines on it first, and in response it moves. People were scandalized when they witnessed this—”he’s staying at the house of a tax collector”, they said. 

Devoutly religious people have a tendency to put morality first as a condition. Perhaps in this way we feel that we have earned our salvation in some way, that the Lord has entered into my life because of something that I have done, some good that the Lord sees in me. Far from it; there is nothing we can do to merit the kingdom of God, nothing we can do to earn an invitation to the wedding banquet. It is pure grace. And that eternal wedding banquet begins now, in this life. The invitation is, here and now, offered to each person, good and bad. All we have to do is receive it, accept it, say yes to it, and the joy of that banquet will begin today. 

The first letter of John, 4, 10, says the following: “This is how God’s love was revealed among us: God sent His one and only Son into the world, so that we might have life through Him. And love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” And St. Paul says the same thing in his letter to the Romans: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

It’s not about us. We don’t have to earn it, nor pay for it; Christ paid the debt already, a debt we were unable to pay, and his blood was the means of exchange. All we have to do is believe him and allow ourselves to be loved by God, and then our life will change, but it will be a joyful change. A good number of Catholics see the Church’s moral teachings as a burden, and they resent the imposition of that burden. And yet, when law is placed first, it is indeed a burden, too heavy to carry; for we are inclined to sin, and we cannot rise above that inclination without his grace. But he said: “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. My yoke is easy, my burden light”. The yoke is a wooden crosspiece that is fastened over the necks of two oxen. Christ invites us to be attached to him by his yoke. Plowing is much easier when there are two oxen pulling instead of one. Yoked to Christ, living morally virtuous lives is no longer burdensome, but a joy, even if it is a struggle. I remember after my return to the Church when I was 17 years old, one thing I could no longer do was to take the Lord’s name in vain. Swearing in the true sense of the word–not foul language, but taking God’s name in vain in situations of anger. That, I noticed, was the first change that took place in my life. Other things took a bit more work to reform, but I was determined to correct them in my life, out of gratitude to God for intervening in my life. 

Grace must always be first, and then the moral life follows afterwards. And that’s why the gospel must never be reduced to a morality, not even a social justice morality. The good news of the gospel is that Christ died and rose from the dead, he died for you and for me, and eternal life is yours and mine for the taking, no need to earn it, we can’t. All we have to do is believe it. Faith, and then the joy of new life in Christ will change us in this world, as it did Zacchaeus. And then we will see that nothing in this world compares to being in a state of divine grace. Everything in this world comes to an end, fizzles out, our money, our property, our business, our health, it’s all temporary. But the life of divine grace, symbolized by the wedding garment, is a sharing in the divine nature, and that divine nature does not come to an end, and as long as we are clothed in it, it will blossom into unimaginable joy in eternity.

Deacon D. McManaman

We’ve heard some negative press about Pope Francis’ responses to the recent Dubia. One person I know thought it was an instance of “giving scandal” and believed that now every wayward pastor and every same sex attracted couple will take it as an endorsement to continue in sin. I do not share these beliefs. What follows are some thoughts on why I believe such sentiments are not quite on point.

The responses to the Dubia are, I believe, rather brilliant. There is no doubt in my mind that the entire response is a “prudential matter”. It is also undeniable that wayward priests and anyone with questionable honesty will abuse what is written there and use it to justify many things that were not said therein. We know this from experience, i.e., the aftermath of Vatican II. The only difficulty with questioning prudential judgments is knowing what would happen if a different decision were made. For example, what would be the state of the Church had Vatican II not taken place? We simply don’t know–there are myriads of possibilities. What would have happened had the U.S not toppled Sadaam Hussein? Would he have finally achieved nuclear capacity? Very difficult questions that require tremendous learning. So it is a prudential matter, the application of principles to a concrete situation with innumerable factors to consider, and which require other intellectual virtues besides a knowledge of general principles, such as memory, docility, foresight, circumspection, caution, and shrewdness (Cf. Aquinas, S.T., II-II, q. 48). Memory requires experience, and the experiences we have are not universal, but are very much circumscribed. I am an experienced high school teacher; I am not and never have been a principal (administrator). Nor have I been a pastor of a parish, nor have I been a bishop of a diocese, nor an Archbishop, nor a Cardinal. And I certainly have no idea what it means to be a pope. That is why after a while, I stopped “second guessing” our school administrators’ decisions. I came to see that they have information that I don’t have. My friend became a vice-principal and a principal, and over the years he shared with me things that I otherwise would have missed. I only had the four walls of my classroom to deal with and the information that comes via that limited channel. That too is the reason that my friend, Major General JR Bernier (former Surgeon General of Canada and NATO) refused to “second guess” the medical advisors of the Ford government–because he lacks the situation/region specific political/economic/viral/medical etc., data that he would need to make such decisions, data that changes every day. 

But here is my theological point. We are each given certain charisms to fulfill the duties of our vocation, and a bishop is given the charism of office. The Pope especially is given the charism of office (“Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift each of you like wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith will not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers” Lk 22, 32). Not only does he see what we in our very limited situation do not see, but he has a charism that you and I do not possess, because we don’t need it–God has not called us to govern the universal Church. Your charisms and experience are specific to your unique vocation.

It is true that if we simplify everything to a “black and white” level, those at the very bottom of the intellectual and moral ladder will have clarity (whether or not they obey is another matter), but those higher up that ladder will see that things are just not that simple, because they understand that reality is very complex (as does Pope Francis), and so on their end, the Church will lack credibility as an institution capable of dealing intelligently in a highly complex world, and so the Church will lack relevance to a good portion of the world. So, it’s like squeezing a balloon. The problem just gets transferred from one level to another. But a decision has to be made. The decision must be grounded in the truth, and if the truth is complicated, so be it. What is the best decision to make in the circumstances? We have to know all the factors involved, which requires a great deal of experience, and we need that specific charism, because experience is still not enough. The Pope has that charism, I don’t. As for the Pope’s theological responses to the Dubia, they are, from an epistemological point of view, absolutely right on point. Is now the opportune time to introduce such distinctions? He seems to think so. We have to trust that the Lord has given him the charism to discern, that he is the vicar of Christ and that “he who hears you hears me” (Luke 10, 16).  

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_399growingold.html

The following essay was written in 2022, as part of a book of essays on Catholic Education, by a Canadian Catholic Publisher. I had this essay removed from that collection because I did not wish to have it associated with another essay that constituted an unfair and inaccurate depiction of Catholic Education in Ontario. There are so many good Catholic teachers and administrators trying their best to bring the good news of the gospel to the students, and navigating through today’s waters is not always easy, but alarmist and hyperbolic screeds do nothing to further Catholic Education in this province.

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_395educationdoctrinalvacuums.html

Chapter 14 of Some Fundamentals of Catholicism

Latest book:

Hello my friends: Here is my latest book that I wrote for teachers on teaching the parables. I hope it will be a useful resource. Order here.

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_394transfiguration.html

Deacon D. McManaman

In the first reading (Dan 7, 9-10, 13-14), Daniel sees the One who is Ancient of Days taking his throne. Of course, Ancient of Days refers to God, who has lived throughout the entire course of human history; for he is not subject to the passing of time. And his throne is fiery flames, and a “stream of fire issued and flowed out from his presence”. In Scripture, fire is a symbol of the divine love; for our God is a consuming fire (Heb 12, 29). And the first reading tells us that ten thousand times ten thousand attended him, and a thousand thousands served him, which are symbolic ways of expressing a number beyond counting. 

But then Daniel sees one like a ‘son of man’ coming with the clouds of heaven, who was presented before the One who is Ancient of Days, and to him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. And his dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not be destroyed. 

This is a fascinating vision, because it is a vision of the First and Second Persons of the Trinity, which isn’t revealed until the coming of Christ who reveals God as a Trinity of Persons. And of course Jesus is precisely the “son of man” referred to in this vision. In the New Testament, Jesus refers to himself so often as the Son of Man. For example, he asks: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”, or, “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he said to the paralytic…”, or, “the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath”, and so on and so forth. This title “Son of Man” refers back to this vision in the book of Daniel. 

But what is interesting is that in this vision, the One who is Ancient of Days transfers his glory to the son of man; to him is given dominion and glory and kingship. What happened to it? Why don’t we see it? St. Paul provides the answer to this in his letter to the Philippians:

… though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.

Jesus divested himself of the glory that was his in eternity. He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness, and he was executed as a messianic pretender. And in the gospel reading today, Jesus, the Son of Man, takes only Peter, James, and John with him and he is transfigured before them. They are given the privilege to see him in his glory, “the glory as of the Father’s only Son” (Jn 1, 14). And Peter actually writes of this experience: “We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain” (2 Pt 1, 16). And he refers to this as a lamp shining in a dark place. And of course the voice they heard said: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” 

This is an interesting set of readings for me because I just returned from a trip to London and Paris, my daughter’s graduation gift, which had been interrupted by the pandemic in 2020. And of course she had us going everywhere, especially the royal palaces: Kensington Palace, Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London,and the Chateau de Versailles outside of Paris, etc. And if you’ve visited any of these, you know what they’re like: huge ornate rooms with large neo-classical paintings on the walls, another large chamber with the king’s royal bed, a dining hall with a very long table where guests are entertained, displays of crown jewels, diamond studded dresses, etc. So I’ll be fine if I never see another palace again in my life. But what struck me walking through these royal palaces is the glory that was bestowed upon human beings who in the end are just limited, flawed, sinful human beings subject to death like everyone else. We don’t have divine glory by nature, but human beings seek it for themselves. They desire it, usurp it, and the kings and queens of history were glorified with an earthly glory that feigns divine glory, and yet there was nothing in any of these kings, queens, or princes that would demand such extraordinary treatment and worship.

With Christ, we have the very opposite. He is the Son of Man that Daniel saw in a vision, to whom has been given glory, dominion and kingship by God the Father, Ancient of Days. He is God the Son, the 2nd Person of the Trinity. All things came to be through him; he is before all things, and he has one predominant love: the will of the Father, the glorification of God the Father. And so he entered into our darkness, which is a realm of darkness because humanity has lost its way. Instead of seeking to love, worship and glorify God, we have a proclivity to seek our own glory. The human heart longs to be treated like royalty. We find this tendency even in the Church throughout her history. It’s a very difficult proclivity to overcome, even for clerics. But it is this that brings darkness to this world. 

The true king of the universe emptied himself of his proper divine glory and came among us as a slave, a servant, in ordinary human likeness, revealing it momentarily only to Peter, James, and John, to strengthen them for what is to come. He chose to descend. This king does not compel us to worship him; we must do so freely. And since he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, our ascension to true glory is a descent. We ascend by descending in the Person of Christ. 

We speak of life as a learning process; the spiritual life is a descending process. With every day that passes, we are 24 hours closer to the grave than we were the day before. Every day, the heart must die to itself, to its aspiration to self-glorification, and empty itself further, and the aging process helps us with this. We slowly lose certain abilities, physical abilities, mental abilities, we can’t remember as well, we are increasingly dependent upon the help of others, the illusion of independence is gradually being dispelled, and if we have not stopped learning, we realize more and more as the years go on that we know virtually nothing. The aging process makes humility much easier, but we have to “go with it”, surrender to it, allow it to show us what we really are in the end: dust and ashes. But that’s our glory, not intellectual brilliance. Intelligence is not the glory of man. Intelligence is the glory of the angels, who are inconceivably more brilliant than the most brilliant human being. Intellectually we are very slow and sluggish, including the most brilliant human beings. The glory of man, on the contrary, is humility. We cannot outdo angels in terms of knowledge or intelligence, but we can outdo them in humility if we are willing. The problem is that very few are willing. But that is our glory, and that’s why Mary is the Queen of Angels, higher than the angels. She is inferior in her nature, her human nature compared to the angelic nature, but she outdoes them in humility. In her magnificat, she says: the Lord has looked upon the “nothingness” of his handmaiden. She has no clue as to her uniqueness; she saw herself as ‘nothing’. That’s why she was a fitting vessel for God the Son to become a son of man. Her queenship is real, authentic, because it corresponds to a real glory hidden within her, which is the glory of her humility. 

A Homily for the Confirmation Candidates of St. Lawrence the Martyr and Blessed Trinity Church, Toronto, Ontario, 2023

https://lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_393joyinwiderness.html

Deacon Doug McManaman

Some people refer to Confirmation as a rite of passage, as we find in Judaism (the Bar mitzva), or the ancient initiation rituals of the Indigenous peoples. A rite of passage is a passage into adulthood. I don’t know how good that comparison is, but having Confirmation at this age would easily suggest that it is. But the indigenous rite of passage was a very uncomfortable affair. The boy would be snatched from his mother, covered in paint or blood, and sent out into the wilderness for a few months, to learn to survive all on his own. Those who did not, died in the wilderness; those who survived, returned to the tribe and were given a new name; they were no longer children. 

Well, our Confirmation preparation classes were hardly comparable to this. However, although we might not send you out into the wilderness, the realm of chaos, there is a sense in which God does. The society in which we live is in many ways a chaotic wilderness. It is no longer a society congenial to Catholicism, as it was in the 1950s. It’s very difficult to be a Catholic today, especially if you are a teenager. 

There’s a lot of good things going on in the world today, but there are also a lot of things that are so contrary to everything we believe in. This is especially the case in the realm of morality, especially issues of sexuality, marriage, the life issues, such as abortion and euthanasia. It’s very difficult for a young teenager to make it through his or her teenage years while remaining faithful to Christ and his Church. But if you do, you are a hero in many ways. This is something that a priest from Washington D.C said to me years ago. I met him while hitchhiking to Nashville, Tennessee back in 1979, when I was 17 years old. He picked me up on the highway just outside of Columbus, Ohio and took me to Kentucky. He was such a joyful priest that I had made the decision to return to the Church that my family had left when I was in grade 3. It was his joy that really struck me. He was celibate, he couldn’t get married, burdened with all sorts of duties and responsibilities, and here I was young and free, I could get married, and yet he was clearly happier than I was. What was the key to his joy, I’d wondered. Well, I figured it out when he asked me whether I go to Church. I said no, I haven’t seen the inside of a Church since the 3rd grade. “Do your parents go to Church?” I said no, not at all. And much to my chagrin, he was so disappointed. I said why do you have to go to Church. And he yelled out the answer: “To receive the body of Christ! And you know, I hadn’t heard those words since grade 3 when I would attend Mass and hear the priest say: Take this all of you and eat of it, this is my body which will be given up for you. That whole world came back to me at that moment, and I knew that this was the way into that world that I once knew, a world I wanted back into. That was the key to his joy. The body of Christ. The Eucharist. And that is what is going to bring you stability during your teenage years ahead. 

The happiest teenagers and those with the greatest mental health, according to studies in Britain, are those teenagers who practice their religion faithfully. Even my university students that I teach now, the ones who radiate joy and who show the greatest resilience and who write with such depth, are the religious ones who are quoting scripture here and there. Their lives are immersed in the Scriptures. They feed off of the word of God. 

Furthermore, the holier you become, the more interesting your life becomes. I don’t know if I told you this story during one of our classes together, but my best friend is a priest of the Hamilton Diocese, and over the years I’d visit him often, stay the weekend, preach for him to give him a break. And I’m an early riser, so I went down one Saturday morning, about 5 in the morning, and I said my breviary. After the Office of Readings and the Morning prayer, I looked up and saw a large bookshelf at the other end of the living room. I noticed Butler’s four volume lives of the saints, the newest version. So, I went up and decided that I would close my eyes and pick a volume at random, open it and put my finger down, at random. Wherever my finger landed, I would read the life of that saint. So, I got some 3rd century unknown saint. Never heard of her before. It was about 3⁄4 of a page in length. When I finished reading, I felt exhilaration. It really woke me up. I thought, what an interesting life. Then I did it again, picked a volume at random. This time I got a 7th century saint, and I read about his life, completely different from the previous, and again, I could feel it in my body, it was like I drank a glass of orange juice. His life was so different from the one before, but so interesting. 

And this is the lie of Hollywood. We’ve been told over and over again that goodness is boring, and evil is interesting. And it is really the other way around. Evil is terribly boring. It is empty. There’s nothing to it. It’s all the same. But goodness is so diverse, rich, and interesting. 

The more you give your lives over to God, the more interesting your life will become. You will no longer know the meaning of the word boredom. Give yourself to God and He’ll take you on a journey that will be full of surprises. There will be difficulties, struggles, challenges, but He’ll provide you with the graces and the fortitude to overcome all these obstacles, and struggle is what makes life rewarding. A life without struggle is soon intolerably boring. A teaching colleague of mine won the Lotto 649 and he decided to quit, to leave teaching. Another colleague of mine met up with him years later, and he said that he looked lost, without purpose. There’s another Hollywood lie, that labour and struggle bring discontent, while rest, leisure, and an easy life is a happy life. Absolutely false. When you are doing what God is calling you to do, you are happy, joyful. 

So, I encourage you to continue down this road. Be faithful to the graces that you are going to receive today in Confirmation. Don’t waste them. Cooperate with God and let Him lead you to where He wants to take you. 

The following two questions were addressed to me by a local bible study group.

Why is Mary’s perpetual virginity so important to the Catholic faith?

This is a good question, and difficult to answer. What is the significance of Mary’s perpetual virginity? Sexual union is a marital act, and in marriage, the two (male and female) give themselves entirely and completely to one another. Marriage is a one flesh union, and the sexual act is expressive of that one body union. The sexual act has a twofold goodness: 1) it is an expression and celebration of marital union, and 2) it is procreative. 

Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit overshadows Mary, who says: “Let it be done to me according to your word”. She offers herself, but her offering is complete and total. She gives her body, so to speak, and the result is the conception of the Son of God in her womb. So there is a kind of marriage here (something like a marriage). There is a union between Mary and the Holy Spirit, and that union results in the conception of the Messiah. Mary’s virginity expresses the fact that she belongs completely and totally (which includes her body) to God the Holy Spirit. And so, it is fitting that Mary was not “married” in the complete sense (which would involve sexual consummation). Joseph was the husband of Mary, but we really don’t have a consummated marriage here. But it is interesting because there is a sense in which the Holy Spirit is a kind of Motherhood in the heart of the Trinity (there is a feminine element in God, so to speak). The Holy Spirit is the Uncreated Immaculate Conception, while Mary is the created immaculate conception (St. Maximilian Kolbe). In fact, St. Maximilian Kolbe pointed out that if the Holy Spirit were to become flesh (as God the Son became flesh), we would see no difference between that incarnation and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary is not God, she is not divine, but she does reflect the feminine that is in God. 

So Mary’s perpetual virginity has nothing to do with the false notion that sex is dirty or impure, etc. In marriage, sexual union is a sign of fidelity and complete belonging. When you belong entirely to another, it means that the self-giving was not partial, but total. So married love is undivided love. Mary’s virginity signifies that she belongs not partially, but completely and totally to God. This is not to suggest that married people cannot belong entirely to God. Matrimony is a sacrament, and it is a sign of the love that Christ has for his Bride, the Church, so it is very much a way of belonging to God completely. But Mary conceived Christ as a result of her complete and total surrender to the Holy Spirit, which is a kind of marriage; for it is a union that results in a conception. Her perpetual virginity signifies that perpetual belonging.

If God is almighty, why take 6 days (plus one day of rest) to create the world? Why not do it in one? For that matter, why does He need a day off?

The story of the 6 days of creation is not meant to be taken literally. This story does not mean that God literally created the world in 6 days and literally rested on the 7th. The story is an allegory, and an allegory is a story that contains a deeper meaning besides the literal meaning. In Hebrew, the word ‘seven’ is ‘saba’, which is derived from the root word ‘seba’, which means ‘to swear, as in swearing an oath’. To swear an oath is to enter into a covenant, and a covenant is a sacred family bond. The depiction of God creating the world in 6 days and resting on the 7th day is meant to convey the fact that creation is a covenant. God enters a covenant with humanity. Covenant means ‘family bond’, and the Hebrew word for family is be’tab, which means ‘my father’s house’. Notice that in the first story of creation, God is building a house (my father’s house). We have the creation of time (1st day), space (2nd day), a foundation, and then he furnishes the house. Creation is God’s house or family. Creation is a covenant. God ‘sevens’ a covenant, or ‘swears an oath’ (seven). 

That family or covenant is shattered in Genesis 3, and the entire history of Israel is really the history of the restoration of that covenant.  

But creation is not something that happens in time. God is not “producing” as we produce things like tables or houses. God creates temporal beings, brings them into being from nothing and sustains them in being. This includes bringing into being beings that can cause other things, i.e., material things that can cause other things to move, or material substances that can react with other substances, resulting in entirely new substances (sodium and chlorine, which become salt), etc. The kind of universe God has brought into being is a material universe in which things evolve, move, and develop. But a thing cannot move and develop unless it is brought into being by God and sustained in being by God. Thus, evolution presupposes creation. So, we think the universe is 13.6 billion years old, and the earth is 4.6 billion years old (or thereabouts). What we have today is the result of billions of years of evolution. The creation story, on the contrary, is an allegory that contains a deeper meaning besides the literal meaning. The deeper meaning being conveyed through the vehicle of the story is theological (about God, not about science or the facts of the universe). The truths communicated through the vehicle of the story is that God is the creator, God is one, God is outside of time and space (He is eternal and incorporeal), man exists in the image and likeness of God, creation is good, everything God creates is good, etc. 

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Easter

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_392homily2023easter5.html

Deacon Doug McManaman

Currently I am teaching prospective teachers at Niagara University (Toronto Campus). I taught for 32 and a half years as a classroom teacher and did not move up at all, but my friend who joined me this year to teach teachers became, early on, a vice principal, then a principal, a superintendent, and then assistant director of education. Every week we discussed what and how we were going to teach these prospective teachers. One of his suggestions was that we should have the students read the Gospel of Mark (the shortest gospel) straight through. Of course that’s a great idea; for I always insisted on this for my grade 10s; the goal was to have the students become familiar with the character of Christ; for we often hear only pieces of the gospel here and there, but to read a gospel straight through is very important; it gives us a deeper sense of Christ, his life, his personality, and his mission. So we put together an assignment for them to do that was not too demanding. Anyone can read the gospel of Mark in two sittings, but we got them to read just two or three chapters a week, and all we wanted them to do was to take informal notes on things that struck them. No need for in depth research.

That assignment was easily the most enjoyable assignment to mark. So many of them were nothing short of excellent. It was obvious that actually reading the gospel affected them significantly. 

There is tremendous power in the word of God. There is tremendous power in reading the life of Christ as it is laid out in the gospels. And it needs to be powerful, because darkness also has some power. Falsehood has some power. It has the power to deceive. Christ said that the children of darkness are more shrewd than are the children of light (Lk 16, 8). That hasn’t changed. The children of light often lack shrewdness. They look to the surface of things only. If it glitters, if it sounds good, it must be good. 

But how does a person get to that point where he or she can become more shrewd, less gullible, not so easily taken in by popular trends that sound good on the surface, but on closer inspection reveal a dangerous rot? The answer is to become more rooted in the truth. But, what does it mean to be rooted in the truth? Whose truth? “What is truth?” as Pontius Pilate famously asked Jesus. The irony is that the truth was standing right there in front of him, and he crucified the truth, because he was not rooted in the truth.  

In our gospel today, Christ provides the answer: Thomas said to Jesus: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also.”

To be rooted in the truth is to be rooted in Christ, because it is not that he possesses the truth or knows the truth, rather, he is the truth. He is the way, the truth, and he is life itself. All life comes from the Father, through the Word, through the Son; for all things were created through him and for him. He is the source of life and truth. It’s all about Christ. It’s not about us. 

This is the wonderful thing about Catholicism. So many people who have left the Church think that Catholicism is fundamentally about us. They leave the Church when they hear news of the disgraceful behavior of the clergy in the past, or they hear of sinful bishops, or corrupt popes in our history, the Residential schools, abusive nuns or clergy, etc. My friend asked me, years ago, to do an RCIA class on the history of the Church, and I remember preparing for it, going over that history, trying to condense it into an hour. I think it was a rather boring session, I’m sorry to say, but I do remember asking him: are you sure you want me to talk about the history of the Church to these candidates. It might scare them away. There’s a lot of sin in our history. Clearly, the Catholic faith is not about us. If our goal is to get people to look toward us, all they are going to be is disappointed. No, just like the icons of John the Baptist or the Blessed Virgin Mary, our hands must point away from ourselves and point to the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. It’s all about Christ. Everything speaks of Christ. Every rose speaks of his crown of thorns and his blood poured out for us, every tree speaks of his cross, which is our salvation and stability. Winter speaks of his death, spring speaks of his resurrection, the endlessness of the universe speaks of his divine infinity, the movement of the sun from sunrise to sunset speaks of Christ the bridegroom, coming from his tent, going out to meet his bride, the Church, to redeem her and prepare her for the eternal marriage banquet in heaven. It’s all about him, not us. 

Many of us are like Philip; we spend our lives in the Church, we’ve had 12 years of Catholic education, and yet we turn to Jesus and say to him: “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied”. Jesus replies to us the same way he replied to Philip: “Have I been with you all this time and you still do not know me?”

The Father is in Jesus and Jesus is in the Father. To see this, we need to be rooted in the scriptures, for we need to become familiar with the personality and character of Christ. The more we are rooted in him, that is, the more we look to him, think about him, study him, look to him to guide us, spend time in silence with him, the more our eyes will be opened. The more shrewd we will become. We won’t be as easily deceived by false prophets and dangerous but trendy ideologies that are constantly popping up every few years. We’ll be able to see through the facade. If we are not rooted in the truth, who is Christ himself, if we allow ourselves to remain ignorant of his life, we’ll fall for anything that sounds good. Cardinal Collins gave a talk to Catholic trustees a few years ago, and I was struck by an image he employed; he spoke of “the meringue Jesus”, a Jesus that is made up of sweet and light meringue, the stuff you put on a lemon pie. It’s a Jesus that has no substance but is all sweet. The reason many people have the meringue Jesus in their heads instead of the real Jesus is that they don’t read scripture; they don’t pray the scriptures; they don’t contemplate the life of Christ in the reading of the gospels. But when you start to focus on Christ as he is revealed in the gospels, you see that he is not so sweet. For example, he is very offensive to the Pharisees, calling them “whitewashed tombs full of the bones of the dead”, a first century way of saying “You’re full of it”. He called them hypocrites. He spoke hard truths; for he condemned lying, fornication, adultery, murder, theft, greed of all kinds. He spoke of damnation. He even referred to certain people as pigs and dogs: Do not throw your pearls to swine, or feed holy things to dogs. He wasn’t talking about actual pigs and dogs. He knew that not everyone is genuine. There are people in this world who love evil. 

But we won’t have the eyes to discern who these people are if we are naive. He said to us: be shrewd as serpents, but innocent as doves (Mt 10, 16). Many of us have the innocence part, but we lack the shrewdness. The children of darkness lack the innocence part, but they are shrewd. Immersed in Christ, we get both parts: shrewdness and innocence. 

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_391imageofshepherd.html

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent

Deacon Doug McManaman

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_389tragedytoglory.html

This gospel reading, the raising of Lazarus, is so important, because it reveals Christ’s power over death. Only God has the power to open the grave, as we read in the first reading from Ezekiel: “Thus says the Lord God:  O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them” (Ez 37, 12). Jesus opens the grave of Lazarus and has him rise from it. In other words, Jesus is God. He is divine. And this miracle announces what is to come, namely, Jesus’ own resurrection. Lazarus, although he rises from the dead, will also die again, so this is not a complete victory over death. That will take place on Easter Sunday, when Jesus rises from the dead, never to die again. And that is the good news of the gospel: the resurrection. Death has been defeated. 

This is such an important point to grasp. There is so much suffering in this world, so many people whose lives are beset by a tragedy of one sort or another. And tragedy, which has many different origins, is always connected in some way with death. At the root of tragedy is often human error, or incompetence, or worse, human sinfulness and malice. Sometimes the root of tragedy is not human error or sin at all, but the course of nature. Nature’s disasters, however, often lead to human loss and death, and so they are designated as tragedies–without human loss, we would not refer to such events as tragedies. 

But tragedies rooted in human error are more difficult to deal with, and these are tragedies which often are in turn rooted in human sin, such as laziness or overconfidence or arrogance–think of the sinking of the Titanic. But then there are tragedies that are simply rooted in malice, such as the senseless murder of a loved one, a life cut short. Parents can suffer such loss, the loss of a child for example. Such tragedies leave wounds that stay with them throughout their lives, and their lives are practically defined from that point onwards by that very tragedy. 

But here is the point. The word gospel means ‘good news’, and the good news has gravitas. It is weighty and has real consequence. Christ’s death destroyed death. The good news is that Christ has power over death; he conquered death. If we really believe this, then it is the case that whatever tragedy has befallen us, it need not define our very existence. It no longer has the power to crush and deprive us of light and hope. We can allow it to crush our lives and redefine our entire existence, shrouding our lives in darkness, if we so choose. But because Jesus rose from the dead, and because he raised Lazarus, not to mention a twelve-year-old girl and the son of the widow, it need not do so. Death does not have the final word over our lives. Resurrection does. 

All those whom we have loved and who have died, some even in the most tragic circumstances, we will see and touch them again. The resurrection was for us. The Second Person of the Trinity joined a human nature to himself, uniting himself to every human person, as it were; he died and rose in our humanity, joined to his divinity. If we live our lives in him and die in him, he will raise us up as well: “For if we have been united with Him in a death like his, we shall also be united with him in his resurrection” (Rom 6, 5).

And that is why those who have suffered a terrible tragedy as a result of the sinfulness and malice of another person are able, in time, to forgive that person, because they know, through faith, that tragedy is relative. That is what Christ’s death and resurrection has accomplished: he has reduced tragedy from the absolute to the relative. The crucifix, once a symbol of horror, has become a symbol of power, victory, and glory. Death is no longer absolute and final. And so despair is no longer absolute and final, but relative and temporary. 

Those who have no faith in the resurrection of Christ, who do not live out of that faith, will be unable to rise above the tragedy that besets them, and so they are hardened and imprisoned in unforgiveness. But the power of the risen life of Christ is revealed in those who choose to believe in him and in the one who sent him, and they will not allow tragedy to imprison them in the darkness of perpetual resentment and unforgiveness. These are the people who know the risen Christ, whose lives have been illuminated by the hope of resurrection, by the good news of Christ’s victory over tragedy, sin, and death. 

Deacon D. McManaman

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_390indigenousreligionandmass.html

            It is always inspiring to teach a World Religions course. What becomes obvious to anyone studying the religions of the world is that man is naturally a religious animal; he has always aspired to seek a relationship with his origin, the very source of his being, either God, or the gods, or both. Particularly fascinating are the myriads of creation myths of the indigenous peoples around the world, from Australia to Africa, to North America and the Amazon basin. For the indigenous, life itself is religion, that is, life is ritual, and ritual is ordered to joining the realms of the sacred and the profane. The more one becomes familiar with indigenous myths, the more one understands the essence of ritual as precisely a joining, for the day-to-day activities of the indigenous peoples are really an emulation of the gods of these myths, which is the way to making the past present. Everything they do, i.e., hunting, cooking, giving birth, basket weaving, etc., is sacred to the degree that it imitates the acts of the gods or ancestors whose deeds are recounted in myths and legends. 

            The indigenous believe that the great sky god created lesser deities, who in turn created the earth, mountains, rock formations, trees, rivers, man, and the basic pattern of his daily life. All this took place in what the indigenous refer to as the creation period (or the dreaming), a period of time that is sacred, for it is a time that measures the very work of the gods. This sacred time is of an entirely different dimension than ordinary time. To get a better understanding of this notion of sacred time, consider C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When the children pass through the wardrobe, they enter a different world, the world of Narnia, and many years in Narnia amount to about a minute or two of earth time. Similarly, for the indigenous, there is earth time, which is profane time (our time), and there is sacred time in which the gods dwell, and the two are not perfectly parallel. Ritual is precisely the way that the indigenous bring sacred time into contact with profane time. In performing ritual, such as an elaborate initiation ritual—which may require an entire season to complete—, they imitate the ancestors or lesser deities, and in doing so, sacred time is made contemporary with profane time. The two different realms are in contact, all as a result of ritual. In other words, the acts of the gods are made present, in the here and now, through the ritual acts of the indigenous, and it is by virtue of this contact that they are renewed, strengthened, and made holy. 

            There is one feature of indigenous myths and legends, however, that I have always found particularly striking, and this feature is found all over the world, in the myths of the Australian, African, South and North American tribes. In these myths, there is very often an account of a murdered god. It is often an unjust murder of an innocent deity or ancestor, and from the body of this murdered deity arises vegetation of all kinds, i.e., beans, melons, corn, tobacco, or a certain tree from whose wood are made flutes that produce enchanting sounds, like the archetypal flute that was played by the murdered god in sacred time. To create such a flute out of the wood of this particular tree is a ritual that makes present the murdered deity. And to harvest the crops in the fall is a ritual act that includes sacrificial offerings to the deity and festivities, since it is from his sacrificed body that the fruits of the earth come to us year after year. Even the headhunting and cannibalism of certain tribes can only be understood in light of the tribes’ myths, for these acts are always offerings to the murdered god, a re-enactment of the myth carried out for the sake of the blessings that will inevitably follow upon such ritual. 

Consider the following excerpt from an ancient legend, “A Boy’s Vision and the First Corn”. 

A young boy on his guardian spirit quest sees a handsome young man coming down from the sky and advancing toward him. Every movement of his body was graceful. “I am sent to you, my friend, by that great and good spirit, the Master of Life, who made all things in the sky and on the earth. He knows your motives in fasting. He sees that you have a kind and unselfish wish to do good to your people, to seek some benefit for them. He knows that you do not ask for strength in war or for the praise of warriors. I am sent to instruct you and to show you how you can do good for your people. Arise now, young man, and prepare to wrestle with me. Only in that way can you hope to accomplish what you want to accomplish. And so they wrestled until the boy was exhausted; the handsome young man returned the following day; for they wrestled on three consecutive days. Finally, on the third day, the heavenly stranger stopped. “I am conquered,” he declared. “Let us sit down, and I will instruct you.” So the two sat together in the lodge, and the visitor began to speak. “You have won what you desire from the Master of Life, my friend. You have wrestled manfully. Tomorrow will be the seventh day of your fasting. Your father will offer you food to strengthen you, but as it is the last day of trial, you will prevail. I know this, and I will tell you what you must do to benefit your family and your tribe. Tomorrow I shall meet you and wrestle with you for the last time. As soon as you have conquered me, you will strip off my garments and throw me down. You will clean the earth of weeds and roots, make it soft, and bury me in the spot. Leave my body in the earth. Do not disturb it, but come occasionally to visit the place, to see whether I have returned to life. Be careful never to let the grass or weeds grow on my grave. Once a month cover me with fresh earth. If you follow my directions, you will accomplish your object of doing good to your fellow creatures by teaching them what I have now taught you.

At sunset, the visitor from the sky returned, and the two wrestled for the last time. In spite of the fact that the boy had refused the food his father had brought, he felt that new strength had been given him and that his courage was greater than ever. He grasped his opponent with supernatural strength, threw him down, took from him his beautiful garments and plume. Finding him dead, the boy buried him on the spot, following all the directions that had been given the day before. He was confident that the stranger would come to life again, as he had promised. 

Throughout the spring he visited the grave, pulled out the grass and weeds, and kept the ground soft. Soon he saw the tops of the green plumes coming through the ground. The more carefully he followed the directions to keep the ground soft, the faster the green plumes grew. But he did not tell his father or anyone else about his vigil or about the grave. Days and weeks passed. One day when the summer was drawing to a close, he [Wunzh] invited his father to follow him. Together they walked to the quiet, secluded place of the youth’s vigil. He had removed the lodge and had kept the weeds from growing on the circle where it had stood. In the center of the spot the father saw, for the first time, a tall and graceful plant with bright-coloured silken hair. It had long green leaves and on every side were golden clusters. Nodding plumes seemed to grow from its top.

“It is my friend, the friend of all people,” explained the boy. “It is the friend who came to me here–Mondawmin, the spirit of corn. We need no longer depend upon hunting and fishing only. As long as this gift of the Good Spirit is cherished, as long as it is taken care of, the earth itself will give us a living.” (See E. E. Clark’s Indian Legends of Canada. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1960, p 46 – 49) 

            What is it in the human subconscious that can account for this universal theme found in the creation myths and legends of tribes separated by oceans and thousands of miles? The Church may have an answer for that, and the clues are in the first reading from the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ: 

Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine. He was a priest of God Most High. He blessed Abram with these words: “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, the creator of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who delivered your foes into your hand.” Then Abram gave him a tenth of everything.

            How do we explain this reading in which the ancient king of Salem and priest of God the Most High, Melchizedek, brings bread and wine to Abraham, with a blessing? Melchizedek, a pre-Israelite, prefigures the priesthood that Christ established, and of course Melchizedek knew nothing about this foreshadowing or prefiguring, nor did Abraham. And well after Abraham, at the time of the Exodus, the Passover feast was established. The Seder plate prefigures the Eucharist as well. Here the original Passover lamb is sacrificed, and it is the blood that marks the doorposts of the Israelites that is their deliverance. 

            To share in the Seder meal is to be part of that Exodus; for the Jews, to share a meal is to enter into communion with all who are at table, because all share in the one food, which is a source of life. When they celebrate the Passover, they believe that what is past is made present, in the here and now, and so each time the Passover is celebrated throughout the centuries, Moses is present in their midst; Jews who celebrate Passover believe they leave Egypt with all of Israel at the time of the Exodus. 

            In the gospel reading for that same Solemnity (Corpus Christi), the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish also prefigures the coming reality of the Eucharist. We see this prefiguring of the Eucharist not only in the New Testament, and not only in the history of Israel, which includes a small account of the pagan king Melchizedek, but it goes back further, as far back as the indigenous peoples of the world. God leaves clues throughout history, in every continent and in every people, clues about where He will be found. In the Person of Christ, myth becomes reality. All that the indigenous dreamt of, believed in and articulated is affirmed by God and is brought to reality. We (Catholics) worship a murdered God, a crucified God, and from his body come the fruit of the vine and the work of human hands, the bread of life and the cup of salvation. To partake of this thanksgiving sacrifice is to enter into him, to live in him. And just as the indigenous regard ritual as the way of making sacred time contemporary with ordinary time, a way of making it touch profane time, thereby renewing it, sanctifying it, and healing it, so too has this come to reality in the Eucharist, because to be present at an ordinary Mass is to be just as present at the foot of the cross as Mary and John were two thousand years ago. The sacrifice of Good Friday, which took place 2000 years ago, is made contemporary, that is, re-presented in the here and now. It is not this or that priest who is offering the sacrifice, it is Christ who is the priest who offers the sacrifice, and Christ is the victim, the murdered God, who is being offered. The individual priest is only acting in the Person of Christ (in persona Christi).

And Catholics believe that Christ is the new Passover lamb, whose blood frees us from the slavery of sin and death, and of whose flesh we partake, making us one with that sacrificial offering. And so to eat of this Eucharistic meal is to become one not only with every member of Christ’s mystical body, past and present, but it is to become intimately one with all the faithful of Israel, as well as the indigenous peoples who knew something of this sacrifice, however obscure that understanding might have been. 

One year as I was explaining to some students that the Eucharist is truly the body and blood of Christ, not merely a symbol of his body and blood, a girl raised her hand and said: “It can’t be. That would make us cannibals”. And of course, she had no idea the religious significance of ancient tribal cannibalism. She saw primitive man with the condescending eyes of the western world, that is, as backward and unintelligent. But it is not that we cannot be like them; rather, when we understand the significance of indigenous myth and the rituals that enact them, we begin to see that we can be like them, we are like them, and indeed they are like us. They yearned to participate in the life of the gods, that is, they yearned for the sacred to repeatedly touch their ordinary existence and make it holy and complete, as we do now. They yearned for the deification of the earth, the deification of creation. God answers man’s deepest longings and aspirations in the mystery of the Incarnation, and ultimately in the Eucharist, which is ultimately the source that heals all intergenerational trauma. God reveals His mercy and humility in joining a human nature and entering into human suffering, and dying on a cross. Like every child, God loves to play hide and seek, and like a good player He hides Himself in unexpected places, under a humble disguise of one form or another. He continues to hide in our midst under the ordinary and humble appearance of a wafer of bread. After consecration, it is no longer bread, although it looks like bread, tastes and feels like bread; it is the substance of his murdered and resurrected body. The sacred has joined itself to the profane, matter is made holy, the food which is creation itself has become the Bread of Life, the bread of angels. Had we in the west paid more attention to the deeper significance of indigenous myth and allowed indigenous knowledge to open our eyes to what has always been present but hidden in our own theology, we would have become more fully cognizant of the deeper brotherhood that unites us all.  

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_388necessityofbattle.html

Deacon D. McManaman

As I reflect back upon the more than thirty years I spent as a teacher, I realize that out of all the school principals I had worked with over those years, only two were brave and relatively exemplary Catholic leaders. One was a man, a priest of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, the other a strong and bright Trinidadian woman. In between these two were a number of men whose leadership style emboldened the enemies of the school, i.e., drug dealing thugs, who, as a result of the timidity they witnessed, eventually gained a level of control over the fearful students of the schools.

I will never forget the day this Trinidadian principal came on the PA and instructed everyone in the school to put down their pens and to listen up very carefully. Her message was specifically addressed to the drug dealers in the school who had begun to provide free marajuana to some of the younger grade nine students, as a way of increasing their clientele. She was incensed at the news that this was happening. With great indignation in her voice, and after instructing everyone to stop what they were doing and listen, she said: “All you drug dealers out there, know this: your days are numbered at this school. I’m coming after you, and I’m your worst nightmare.” She went on for another minute or two chastising them, reiterating her foretelling. All I could think of were all the male principals I worked with in previous years and how they would react if they were to hear such an announcement; without question, every single one of them would have insisted that this woman had lost her mind, that she was a fool for initiating a battle she could not win.

But before her announcement was over, the “kingpin” of the school had been nabbed, for during it, he was out of class wandering the halls and at one point began to jump up and down crying out: “Catch me if you can! Catch me if you can!” At that very moment, a vice principal turned the corner and witnessed it all: “You’re caught”, he said.  He was sent home and expelled the next day. By the end of June, every drug dealer was caught and expelled. At the end of the year, I overheard a vice principal saying to a colleague: “We don’t know how it happened, but we always found ourselves at the right place at the right time”. 

I had to shake my head at this man’s dull witted remark; for it was obvious to anyone with faith how it happened. This woman loved the students enough to enter a frightening battle for them; she had the faith, the trust, and the intensity of love to take the first step in that battle, and when that happens, the Lord takes the next step and battles on our side: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (Ja 4, 8); for “the Lord is a warrior, Lord is his name” (Ex 15, 3). When a person in a leadership position steps out in faith to do what in fact he or she has an obligation to do, to protect the vulnerable and engage in the battle that life in Christ fundamentally is, the Lord joins us: “But during the watch just before dawn, the Lord looked down from a column of fiery cloud upon the Egyptian army and threw it into a panic; and he so clogged their chariot wheels that they could drive only with difficulty. With that the Egyptians said, “Let us flee from Israel, because the Lord is fighting for them against Egypt.” (Ex 14, 24-25). 

I remember the year my best friend, a priest of a nearby diocese, was assigned to a new parish. On his first day, a group of women introduced themselves to him, referring to themselves as “the bitches of St. Basil’s”, assuring him that “we’re here to give you a run for your money”. These were women who saw themselves as catalysts of true progress; needless to say they did not like the straightforward, back to the basics preaching of my friend. They opposed him at every turn. But my friend too was a “warrior” who loved the congregation enough to actually preach with substance and grit. I recall the Sunday he actually called the ladies out, publicly, loudly and clearly telling them: “If you don’t like it (i.e., the principles and fundamental teachings of the Church), get out!” A few days later, my friend received a call from the bishop, who insisted: “You can’t be telling them to get out”. My friend simply replied, “Well, I have been telling them to get out, and the more I do, the more people come, and the collections are steadily increasing”. In time, my friend even moved the tabernacle to the center of the Church, and just as he began to call the congregation’s attention to the change on the sanctuary, a thundering applause erupted. The ladies never returned after that, and the collections continued to increase. 

What is it that accounts for the increase in Church attendance, not to mention collections? Although determining the causes and factors that explain a phenomenon like this is more complex than intuition would suggest, who can doubt that a significant factor is courageous leadership and a challenging kerygma, as opposed to the innocuous and insipid preaching they were subject to for years, a style of leadership that typically does not appeal to men?

There are many anomalies in our lives, but struggle is not one of them; on the contrary, a life without struggle would be truly anomalous. I recall one principal I worked with who typically identified a good day with a smooth day; conversely, a bad day was one beset by frustrations, conflicts, and difficulties–in short, a struggle. Most people make that identification, but a smooth day is not necessarily a good day, and a day full of frustrations, confrontations, and difficulties might very well be the best and most fruitful day of the week. Many of our leaders today typically identify good days with smooth days, and doing so causes them to regard setbacks, conflicts, uncomfortable confrontations and challenges as anomalies. When this occurs among clergy, Catholic leaders will employ strategies designed to avoid battle altogether. The result is that the Lion of Judah is slowly tamed, and preaching becomes mind numbingly innocuous. However, one cannot win a battle that one refuses to fight, and a lion tamed is not the Lion of Judah (Christ), but an imposter. Moses directed Joshua, both of whom prefigure Christ, to go to battle:

At Rephidim, Amalek came and waged war against Israel. Moses, therefore, said to Joshua, “Pick out certain men, and tomorrow go out and engage Amalek in battle. I will be standing on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand.”

So Joshua did as Moses told him: he engaged Amalek in battle after Moses had climbed to the top of the hill with Aaron and Hur. As long as Moses kept his hands raised up, Israel had the better of the fight, but when he let his hands rest, Amalek had the better of the fight. Moses’ hands, however, grew tired; so they put a rock in place for him to sit on. Meanwhile Aaron and Hur supported his hands, one on one side and one on the other, so that his hands remained steady till sunset. And Joshua mowed down Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword. (Ex 17, 1-16)

Moses with raised hands prefigures the crucified, the sign under which we are always victorious. But the decision of a “king” to siesta while his army is at war makes himself vulnerable to a serious fall, as we see in king David:  

At the turn of the year, the time when kings go to war, David sent out Joab along with his officers and all Israel, and they laid waste the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. David himself remained in Jerusalem. One evening David rose from his bed and strolled about on the roof of the king’s house. From the roof he saw a woman bathing; she was very beautiful… (2 Sam 11, 1-2)

The Christian is not called to a life of peace, rest, and tranquility: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man ‘against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household’” (Mt 10, 34-36. See also Eph 6, 10-12; 2 Cor 10, 3-5). Peace and tranquility are only moments of reprieve in a long war; they are gifts from God, and although we would like that state of affairs to endure perpetually, as did Peter, James, and John on the Mount of Transfiguration, the Lord assures us we don’t know what we are talking about and directs us to come down from that mountain to continue the struggle. 

The decision to face conflict for the sake of the gospel is rooted in a love of God that extends to our neighbor; on the other hand, the decision to avoid all conflict is a decision to avoid battle. Immediately following these verses, Christ points out that “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me”. In other words, whoever loves his own peace of mind more than the division and conflict that life in the Person of Christ inevitably brings about is not worthy of Christ, for such a love amounts to a refusal to fight under the sign of the cross: “…and whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me” (Mt 10, 38). The follower of Christ has to be willing to lose his life in battle if he is to find life: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 10, 39). 

The effeminate, which includes both males and females, are characterized by an unbecoming delicacy or overrefinement. They tend to confuse an argument with a quarrel. If these people are teachers, they often discourage debate; disagreement with his/her point of view is often taken as a personal affront. The more “manly” among us, which includes strong women as well as real men, tend to enjoy a good debate. Such people appreciate the fact that the other was willing to act as an obstacle. In this light, cancel culture is fundamentally a phenomenon rooted in the increased feminization of western culture. However, the fear of being canceled is also fundamentally effeminate. It is particularly ironic to uncover this fear in the Church, for Christ was canceled; the very redemption of humanity was the result of a “cancellation”, and we are called to share in that cancellation (Jn 15, 18; Mt 10, 17-19). Catholic leaders who find themselves in the midst of a war must indeed fight with prudence and strategy, for one has to be able to discern what battles are worth our attention and which ones waste time and energy–a prudence not always exemplified in conservative Catholics; for there’s a fine line between audacity and strong leadership, but there is a difference between a prudence that has as its end the avoidance of battle and a prudence that has victory as its end. Avoiding battle for the sake of peace does not achieve peace in the end, because peace must be “made” (Mt 5, 9), and “making” is an activity, not a passivity. Those who fear being canceled to the point of rendering the kerygma of the Church palatable to the enemies of the Church essentially love their own livelihood over the spiritual and moral integrity of the vulnerable. Such fear is unbecoming of a Christian, let alone a pastor or bishop, for each one of us is called to be a peacemaker, and the harmony that peace is (pax) can only be achieved by engaging in a difficult battle that upsets those who love evil and despise everything the Church loves. 

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_387catholiceducationandproclamation.html

Deacon Doug McManaman

I’d like to focus on the notion of the kingdom of God, which is so prominent in the New Testament. It is such an important notion, but it is rather difficult because it is so multifaceted. The kingdom of God is at the heart of Christ’s preaching. 

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” (Mk 1, 14-15)

Jesus speaks specifically of the good news of the kingdom of God (Lk 4, 43). I’ve often asked my students in the past: “You have had about 10 years of Catholic education, and you’ve heard the words “good news”, and of course the word ‘gospel’ means good news. Tell me: what is the good news?” More often than not, they simply have no clue. I once met a Catholic nun in the U.S who was beginning to buy into the latest ideological fads, political in nature, that are typically nothing more than temporary substitutes for the authentic kerygma of the Church, and as I was arguing with her, it became rather obvious that she seemed to me to lack a basic understanding of the faith. So at one point I asked her: “What is the good news of the gospel?” She too was stuck for an answer, which is why over the years I have wondered whether or not she is still a Catholic nun. I say this to stress the point that political ideologies are not the gospel. Christ was not a political revolutionary; he did not speak of “social justice”–which is not to suggest that Christ’s teaching and his life have no social implications, they certainly do, but the cart must never be placed before the horse. Christ came to proclaim the good news; he came to establish it. He is the good news. 

The good news is the establishment of the kingdom of God in him. But what does that mean exactly? Certainly this is strange language to modern ears; for we don’t speak of kingdoms, but provinces, nations, countries, and we speak of Prime Ministers and Presidents, not kings. So what does this really mean? 

Consider this historically. Under king David, the nation of Israel became a kingdom that subjugates other nations. In fact, at the time of Christ, the Jews were expecting a Messiah who would restore Israel to its former status as a kingdom. They were expecting a Messiah like David, a soldier who would lead the defeat of the Romans and free Israel from Roman occupation. But that is not the kingdom Jesus came to establish. He said to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (Jn 18, 36). And in the synoptic gospels, Jesus foretells his passion three times. The reason is that he is preparing his followers so that they may come to understand his true mission. He came to defeat another enemy, the one enemy that man cannot defeat; for he came to conquer sin and its offspring, which is death. The good news of the gospel is the resurrection. And if death has been conquered, sin has been conquered, because death is the effect of sin; for death entered into the world as a result of the sin of the first parents of the human race. 

But ‘good news’ (gospel) and ‘kingdom of God’ are often used together in the New Testament.  A king governs a kingdom, and a kingdom is an empire that subjugates other nations. Christ came to establish the kingdom of God over and against the kingdom of darkness. The kingdom of darkness is a different kingdom. Recall the story of Genesis: “God said ‘Let there be light’, and God separated the light from the darkness”. This is the creation of the angelic realm. Angels are immaterial, pure spirits, created intellectual lights, and so they are not limited by matter and subject to time as material things are, such as human persons, who are composites of spirit and matter. And angels choose instantaneously whether to serve God or rebel against God. And so, immediately after God created the light of the angelic spirits, God separated light from darkness, that is, He separated the good angels from the rebellious, the angels of darkness. And we know from a study of the fall of man in Genesis chapter 3 that the devil, the prince of darkness, draws the first parents of the human race into the current of his own rebellion. Through his inspiration, darkness enters into the world. The result of the first sin is death, concupiscence, and a loss of the life of grace and the sense of the divine. Sin and darkness spread throughout the world as history continues. 

Moving right into the New Testament to the biblical story of the temptation in the wilderness, the devil tempts Jesus in the desert. In the second temptation in the gospel of Luke, we read: “Then the Devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, “I shall give to you all this power and their glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me.” Jesus said to him in reply, “It is written: ‘You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.’” Notice what the devil says: “…the kingdoms of the world have been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish”. And in the first chapter of the gospel of John, we read that the light entered the darkness. Jesus came to free man from the kingdom of darkness. He came to defeat that kingdom, to take back what rightfully belongs to God, to free man from the dominion of Satan. In the first letter of John, we read: “Indeed, the Son of God was revealed to destroy the works of the devil.” 

Christ came to buy back (redeem) the human race, to deliver man from the darkness of this kingdom. And so a battle ensues. This temptation in the wilderness is the first round of this battle, and the first round goes to Christ. This kingdom, the kingdom of darkness, is both a visible and an invisible kingdom. Its origin is invisible (the demonic realm); its effects are visible in human sinfulness manifest in history. This is a kingdom that was established in the beginning, not at a particular time in history, as was the Roman or Alexandrian empires. When the first parents cooperated with the evil one and chose to taste radical independence from God, for themselves and their offspring, they submitted themselves to him. They rejected their status as children dependent upon God. Christ came to undo the work of the evil one, and the work of the evil one was to draw humanity into his own sin and rebellion, with all its effects. Christ came to reverse that. 

But how is Christ going to reverse that? He reverses that in his Incarnation, death, and resurrection. By his Incarnation, the Second Person of the Trinity joins his divinity to our humanity. The Son dwells among us. The signs of the impending defeat of the kingdom of darkness occur almost immediately, beginning with the overcoming of temptation in the desert, but they continue in the miracles Christ worked, in his miracles over nature (changing water into wine, the calming of the storm, etc.), in the raising of a 12 year old girl from the dead and the raising of Lazarus, which imply his power over death, and most importantly in his forgiving others of their sins, something only God can do. All these are signs that the kingdom of God is among us. 

When Jesus returned to Capernaum after some days, it became known that he was at home. Many gathered together so that there was no longer room for them, not even around the door, and he preached the word to them. They came bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. Unable to get near Jesus because of the crowd, they opened up the roof above him. After they had broken through, they let down the mat on which the paralytic was lying. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Child, your sins are forgiven.”

Now some of the scribes were sitting there asking themselves, “Why does this man speak that way? He is blaspheming. Who but God alone can forgive sins?” Jesus immediately knew in his mind what they were thinking to themselves, so he said, “Why are you thinking such things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, pick up your mat and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins on earth”, he said to the paralytic, “I say to you, rise, pick up your mat, and go home.” He rose, picked up his mat at once, and went away in the sight of everyone. They were all astounded and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this.” (Mk 2, 1-12)

Christ, who is Messiah, exercises power over the kingdom of darkness; he forgives sins and cures the sick. Rise up, he says, just as he will say to Lazarus and the 12 year old girl whom he raised from the dead. Christ exercises dominion over death. But his definitive defeat of this kingdom takes place on Good Friday. By dying, he destroys death, by rising, he restores life. His blood is the price he paid for the sins of man, and the proof that they have been forgiven is his resurrection, for sin begets death, but divine grace begets life. 

So what is this kingdom of God? The kingdom of God is something that cannot be adequately expressed in one answer, which is why we have a multitude of parables of the kingdom. Each one highlights one aspect of that kingdom. What we can say is that it is not of this world. Indeed, it is in this world, but it is not of this world. It is not a political kingdom. And like the kingdom of darkness, it is both visible and invisible. Its origin is invisible; its sustaining source is invisible–the Holy Spirit is invisible. But it is visible insofar as Christ is visible, and insofar as the kingdom has a grip on visible human beings, in particular the visible Church that Christ established on the twelve foundation stones of the Apostles. And, it is a kingdom that grows and develops in history. Consider the parable of the mustard seed: 

He proposed another parable to them. “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a person took and sowed in a field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants. It becomes a large bush, and the ‘birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.’” (Mt 13, 31-32)

A very short parable, but it conveys only an aspect of that kingdom, namely, its developmental nature: the kingdom of God develops and evolves in history; it begins small, but grows, develops in time, within history. 

The kingdom of God is an invisible kingdom that is here, within the confines of space and time, developing like a plant. The kingdom of God is the redemptive presence of God through the power of the reconciling Spirit. Christ said that he has overcome the world. Christ redeemed us. His presence, his influence, his life, his grace, is in the world. It has been joined to matter. The divine life, divine grace, is intimately present to a sufficient degree to each individual person, and it is up to each person to accept that grace or reject it. Those who accept his grace and cooperate with it will possess sanctifying grace, which is a supernatural quality that is indwelling and habitual, unlike sufficient grace. To be in a state of sanctifying grace does not mean one has achieved spiritual perfection. Rather, it means that one has freely opened himself to the divine nature, which now dwells within; for grace is a sharing in the divine life. This makes one a member of Christ’s Mystical Body, for the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles on Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is the very soul of the Church. Hence, the kingdom of God is present in the world, through that Mystical Body. 

The king, who is Christ, is the king of the universe, but he does not reign by force. He does not compel. First and foremost, he reigns within; he reigns through the free cooperation of human persons, and so Christ reigns in his Church. But he does not yet reign in the world of which he is king. Not yet. The world will not allow him to. There is still darkness, enmity, strife, war, between the offspring of the evil one and the offspring of the woman (Gn 3, 15). And so we see history as a battle. We are at war. You are at war. It is not a war fought with conventional weaponry. It is a spiritual battle. My spiritual director would always remind teachers: “There is a war for the souls of our students”. And our responsibility as teachers is to enter into this battle and go to war for them, for their sake, to protect them from the subtle influence of darkness. And that means coming to know that faith, and above all witnessing to the joy of Christ’s resurrection, the joy of belonging to that kingdom, being under the influence of that kingdom, allowing that kingdom, that redemptive presence, to have dominion over your own life; it involves praying for our students, helping them to see the world through the eyes of faith. It is a highly dignified vocation. A very noble one. It’s no longer completely in the hands of the clergy, the religious, as it was of old, when the schools were run by the religious orders. Now, it is up to you and me to carry on that mission, to enter into that battle. 

So, even now, Christ is still in the process of defeating his enemies, but he defeats his enemies in the same way that he did when he came among us 2000 years ago in Palestine: as a servant, a humble servant, through the power of the cross. He does not come in military and political power, as did the kings of history. He defeats the kingdom of darkness in “weakness”, for “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Co 1, 25). God is so powerful that he defeated the one enemy that man could not defeat, namely sin and death, and he did so by dying on a cross. The eternal Person of the Son, who is Life and Light, allowed himself to be swallowed up in death, like a mound of earth would swallow up a stick of dynamite, only to be detonated. Christ’s life fills the darkness of death with the light of life. For the rest of us, dying is loss, it is defeat, but for God, dying is victory. And our dying becomes light and victory in him. 

And so the crucifix has become the most powerful sign under which we operate–that is why it is so important to have a crucifix in every room of our house, especially in each classroom, and not the resurrected figures fixed to a cross, but a crucifix; Satan recoils from the crucifix, because it is the sign of his definitive defeat.

Another parable of the kingdom that illustrates an aspect of the kingdom is the following:

“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened.” (Mt 13, 33)

Yeast takes time to influence the entire loaf. The kingdom of God is in the world like yeast. A teacher is above all yeast, and a good teacher has influence. That’s the power of a teacher. Influence. It is a real tragedy to have a teacher spend over 30 years in the classroom, with a mission to witness to the good news of the kingdom, to inspire kids to enter that world of grace, truth, and joy, and to neglect that mission completely, to waste those years, by seeing his teaching profession merely as a job, to become totally preoccupied with making his life easier, doing as little as possible. The light that they could have brought into the classroom but did not, because their faith was lifeless, limp, unenlightened and ineffective. Such teachers are forgettable, for instead of bringing light into the classroom, they bring tension, darkness, and hardness. 

It is the faith of the Church that it is impossible for man, outside of Christ, to establish peace and justice on earth. Man is inclined to sin. In the Psalms we read: “Unless the Lord builds the house, in vain to the builders labor” (Ps 127, 1). The fullness of the kingdom will only be achieved in the Second Coming of Christ, the Parousia. What we do in the meantime is allow Christ the King to reign in our own lives, and we influence people that way. When Christ the King reigns in our lives, we begin to love with the heart of Christ. We love with humility. We love with the love that we see from the cross, which is a love the world cannot understand, because the world only understands power and politics. It does not understand the humility of the divine love. The world admires strength, wealth, fame, youthfulness, etc. But God the Father admires His Son, who:

…though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2, 6-11)

The kingdom of God, as we said above, is an invisible kingdom, but it is visible insofar as it dwells within the hearts of visible sinful, flawed, neurotic human beings who make up Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church. Christ the king reigns in his Church, and Christ reigns in the hearts of our Protestant brethren who speak and act in his name, and he also reigns implicitly and perhaps pre-consciously in many of our Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, etc., brothers and sisters of good will, who are open to divine grace, whose decisions are moved by divine grace, even without them knowing it explicitly. These are part of the invisible Church.

There will always be conflict between the two kingdoms. We know this from the words of Christ himself who said: “If the world hates me, know that it will hate you too” (Jn 15, 18). We also know this from as far back as the book of Genesis: “I shall put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers. She will crush your head, while you will bite at her heel” (3, 15). The woman is Israel, as well as the New Israel, Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church, and the Blessed Mother, whose offspring is Jesus. That battle plays out in history, and we are part of it. The specific task assigned to us is to bring the light of the gospel, the commands of Christ, and the message of Christ’s forgiveness of sins to the students entrusted to us. We labor for the next 30 years or so, but in the end, the Lord will take our labors, all our works of charity, as a builder takes wood, glass, and steel, and he will make the final product. But he will usher in the fullness of the kingdom, and when that will occur, no one knows. In large part it does depend on us in that we create the conditions for his ushering in the fullness of that kingdom; we delay that coming or we hasten it by our cooperation or lack of cooperation. Moreover, eternal life with God in the fullness of the kingdom will include the resurrection of the body, our bodies, for we profess this in the Creed, and it will include the Beatific Vision, which is the vision of God as He is in Himself. To see God as He is in Himself is to possess the Supreme Good, the source of all that is Good. Everything you and I desire in this life is ultimately a desire for God, for everything we desire in this life is only a finite good which does not satisfy indefinitely, but only temporarily. The human heart was created by God and for God, and in the human heart is an infinite thirst, and only one thing in reality is infinite, and that is God Himself. The happiness of the eternal possession of God (heaven) is unimaginable. It is not in any way comparable to a Club Med vacation. Any depiction of heaven in film or media is necessarily false, for it is beyond our ability to conceive. However, the more you grow in prayer and begin to experience the joy of intimacy with God and grow in a deeper sense of the divine, you will begin to get glimpses of what the happiness of heaven really is and what it is not; for this is a very subtle joy that is indescribable. 

But the joy of heaven begins now, in this life. Christ said that “the kingdom of God is within you”. Too often, Catholic teachers speak as if our mission is to build a utopia, that the kingdom of God is some sort of utopian society that we create, and so the gospel is once again reduced to politics, and what happens then is that political action takes priority, rather than the personal action of the pursuit of holiness, through prayer, confession, Eucharist, works of charity, etc., and soon the teaching of religion becomes a matter of encouraging students to political activism. The fact is social justice will naturally proceed from a life that is growing in holiness. 

St. Paul tells us that you are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and so each one of us is called to be a sacred space, a temple that houses the presence of God. The light that will fill that temple if we are open will certainly illuminate our own life, our own interior, but as teachers, that light will illuminate the space outside of us so that others can begin to make their way through the darkness. That is the great blessing of the vocation of a Catholic teacher. The greatest joy in store for those who have sought first the kingdom of God and left all else to God’s providence will be the awareness that they’ve loved God far more than they thought they did and that the Lord has accomplished so much more, through their efforts, labors and sufferings, than they could have possibly imagined. 

Deacon Doug McManaman

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_386postmodernismctholiceducation.html

Homily for the Memorial of St. John Bosco

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_384heaartofshepherd.html

Deacon Doug McManaman

            These are fabulous readings, and they are so appropriate for this feast day of St. John Bosco. Just take that opening in the first reading: 

Thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.

            That’s the heart of Christ right there. He is the good shepherd who goes searching for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And if you know anything of the life of Don Bosco, you know that he too had the heart of a shepherd, the heart of Christ. Don Bosco was no “sanctuary priest”. He was not one to shelter himself in the rectory, only to come out to say Mass, and then go back in. Some young priests today choose to live out their priesthood in precisely this way, believing that all one needs to do is have a reverent liturgy with nice candles, elaborate vestments, a bit of Latin thrown in here and there, a sanctimonious countenance and nicely folded hands, and a strict observance of the rubrics, and the world will automatically be saved. Where these young men got this idea I have no clue, but that certainly was not Don Bosco’s vision of the priesthood. Like a true missionary, he went out in search of the lost, out into the streets to meet with the young and unemployed, to interact with them, to pay attention to them, to really know them. 

            I’ve known a lot of priests in my life, but there are three in particular who stand out, for they were widely beloved priests. The first priest was from the Archdiocese of Washington D.C., who back in 1979 picked me up hitchhiking outside of Columbus, Ohio, and who was the turning point in my life. He was a great friend from that point onwards. He witnessed our marriage, baptized our daughter, but he was murdered on June 8th, 2000. The rectory was robbed and the housekeeper found him dead the next morning, stabbed to death. I remember that day looking at the Washington Post online and seeing, on the front page, the face of Father Tom Wells. That was probably the only time the anti-Catholic Washington Post spoke positively about the Church. The headline included the caption: “Widely beloved priest…”. And he was widely loved. Going anywhere with him was always a bit of a pain, because no matter where we were, someone would know him and come up to him. The other priest friend of mine, Father Don Sanvido, is also widely loved. He’s retired, but he is still pestered by all sorts of former parishioners to do weddings, funerals, Masses, visits, etc. And the 3rd priest in my life who is also widely loved is a Salesian in this parish. 

            Very recently I began to reflect upon these three priests, wondering what it was that made them so widely beloved. It certainly was not any kind of theological liberalism; they are very faithful to Catholic teaching and were always willing to preach the hard and difficult truths, much more than I am. The reason they are so widely loved is that they have a genuine interest in people. When you meet them, they are genuinely interested in you. They want to know about you. They ask about you, they listen to you with great interest, about your life, what you do, how you got there, your unique gifts, and they are genuinely delighted in you. And that’s a rare quality. Not many people are like that. Many people have known you a long time, but they don’t know anything about you, because they don’t ask, and they don’t ask, because they are not interested. 

            But the heart of Christ is a heart that is interested in people. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, who was a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, points out that the more we pray, the more we enter the heart of God, but there in the heart of God, we discover our neighbor, who was conceived there from all eternity. At that point, we are moved to return to earth to seek out that neighbor. That’s why the more a person grows in holiness, the more interested they are in concrete individual human persons, that is, interested in their world. 

            And that’s why St. John Bosco was so widely loved, why he befriended countless young people and influenced the world through those young people in ways that are simply beyond our ability to conceive. He was genuinely interested in people, young people in particular.

            The next portion of the readings that struck me was from the gospel: 

Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones, for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven.

            This is the harshest thing Jesus ever said in the New Testament: it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the sea. I don’t know where people get the idea that Jesus was always nice and accepting of everyone and everything, that he’d never say an unkind or offensive word to anyone. This is what the Cardinal of Toronto refers to as the “meringue Jesus”, sweet and light, like the meringue on top of a lemon pie. Followers of the “meringue Jesus” don’t read the New Testament; if they did, they’d see that Jesus can be rather offensive at times, especially to Pharisees. In any case, what’s the issue here? The issue is scandalizing these little ones who believe in Christ. There is nothing that Jesus values more than the heart of a child, which is why he commands us to change and become as little children. That alone is the condition for entering into the kingdom of God. But the heart of a child can be corrupted by the bad influence of others. 

            The other day I had a Confirmation class of about 40 grade 7s. We were talking about Original Sin and I asked how many of them have a ‘sense of the divine’ (sensus divinitatis), that sense or awareness of the presence of God within your life. I wasn’t expecting many hands to go up, but many hands went up, a clear majority. There’s a remarkable innocence in these kids; they believe, they are open to the Lord, and I did tell them that they could lose that sense of the divine in their lives as they get older, that they really need to make sure they don’t lose that, but to value it, nurture it, protect it. 

            There are, however, adults in this world–basically the culture in which we live–who will be in the lives of these kids, perhaps their teachers, or their professors when they are old enough, or a family doctor, a next door neighbor, or even their own parents, who through their words, their demeanor, their own lack of faith and devotion, etc., might cause these little ones to stop believing, stop praying, and eventually lose that sense of the divine. This is death penalty material for Jesus. The reason is that there is nothing he values more than the heart of a child that believes in the Lord. And that’s why he commands us to change and become as little children. In the garden of Eden, after the sin of the first parents, God approaches: “When they heard the sound of the Lord God walking about in the garden … the man and his wife hid themselves from the Lord God among the trees”. One of the effects of Original Sin is this tendency to flee at the approach of God, which is the root of the loss of the sensus divinitatis. Man cannot tolerate the truth about himself. After the first sin, they saw that they were naked and felt shame. This is significant because children are fine with walking around naked, and they do so without shame, but the first sin was a rejection of our status as “child” dependent upon God. The first parents chose to be their own god, independent and sufficient unto themselves, and so man’s natural tendency now is towards prideful self-sufficiency.

            But here, in this gospel, Christ commands us to reverse all this. We are to become as children, naked and without shame, unself-conscious like children, humble like children. Humility is a strange and interesting virtue, for so many people believe they have it; moreover, you can believe you have it, without having an ounce of it. Moreover, the truly humble will not perceive that they have it, because a virtue is a certain kind of excellence, but the truly humble do not for a minute entertain the thought that they possess such excellence. They never look at themselves in the spiritual mirror and delight in what they see; they are empty of any kind of self-satisfaction and complacency. That’s what we are called to, and the more we go down that road, the more joyful we will be, like children who are full of wonder and delight in the simplest things. So too will our lives become full of wonder, for we will begin to see the hand of God everywhere.

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_382homily1.29.2023ordinarytime4.html

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_383transgenderedstudents.html

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_381catholicsexualethics.html

Deacon Doug McManaman

Sexual morality has become a rather difficult area to approach at both the high school and university levels. It is not easy to find the most effective approach that will allow students to begin to question popular sexual mores and at least begin to appreciate, to some degree, the beauty and wisdom of Catholic sexual ethics. There is no doubt in my mind that a necessary prerequisite for students is an appreciation for some of the fundamentals of plausible reasoning. This permits us to see that knowledge is not easy to acquire and that a conclusion or position we hold is always derived from a set of data. That body of information may be empirical data, or rational data, or a mixture of both.[1] But what is particularly noteworthy about conclusions implied by a set of data is that new information–often the result of more life experience and/or studying what others have discovered and written–can and often does call a person to revise his/her position on an issue. This process occurs in the sciences all the time. It occurs less so with human beings dealing with issues outside the sciences, because most people today, it seems, are less aware of just how much of a role plausible reasoning plays in our everyday lives. The bottom line is that since we are always information deficient, we ought to cultivate a healthy skepticism regarding our own way of seeing things, that is, a sense of the tentativeness of “truth as I currently see it”, as well as a genuine openness to dialogue and learning. This is more difficult to do when treating moral issues than it is scientific questions; for scientific discoveries typically do not impact our lifestyle choices in a way that is subjectively unsatisfying–they often make life much easier (i.e., warmer houses in the winter, cooler houses in the summer, more convenient travel from one place to another, cures for diseases, vaccines, computers, cell phones, etc.). But discovering that some choices that we’ve been making are not as morally innocent as we might have thought can offend a person’s sense of pride, for example, and those newly discovered values call us to change, which is almost always uncomfortable, at least to the degree that our choices have become habitual. This is especially the case in the area of sexual ethics.

What also makes moral matters somewhat more difficult to discuss is value-blindness. What we choose to love above all in life has repercussions in terms of what we are able to see. If the self is at the center of a person’s life, his or her perception of value will significantly differ from the person who has made God the center. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle points out: “As a person is, so does he see”. What this means is that our moral character shapes what we see as a value and a disvalue. The coward, for example, will regard the brave man as reckless, and the foolhardy will regard the truly brave as cowards. The impatient will regard the truly patient person as impassive, and the unchaste will regard the chaste as prudish, etc. We have a tendency to make ourselves the measure of what is true and good, and in the area of morality, this makes life easier because in doing so we keep the demands that moral norms make on us to a minimum. And so the study of morality requires a tremendous amount of honesty with oneself and a genuine openness to personal moral reform. But honesty and openness are moral virtues, and so the serious study of morality presupposes a degree of morally noble character; without it, a person will simply be indifferent to the science of ethics.[2]

I’d like to start with the distinction between three categories of importance, a distinction made explicit by German moral philosopher Deitrich von Hildebrand. First, there is an importance that he refers to as 1) the subjectively satisfying, i.e., a compliment, the consumption of tasty pizza, the enjoyment of a cool breeze on a hot day, etc. There is also a kind of importance that is best described as 2) “objectively good for me”, such as “my education”, or “my life”, “my friendships”, “my skills”, “my marriage”, an act of generosity directed towards me, etc. These are intelligible human goods that contribute to my well-being as a human person. Finally there is what von Hildebrand refers to as 3) the important-in-itself, that is, “value”, without any necessary reference to “me”. I am not a skilled poet, nor do I read poetry, but I recognize beautiful poetry as something that is important-in-itself, that is, a value. I recognize the intelligible human goods that contribute to my own flourishing, but as a result of my ability to apprehend the other as a person of the same nature as myself as well as my ability to grasp the natures of things as they are in themselves, I understand that human life is a good not just for me, but is a value in a way that transcends me as an individual–that is, in itself. So too with beauty, integrity, justice, etc. An act of honesty is important-in-itself, a value, regardless of the fact that this act might make my life temporarily uncomfortable, or might even result in my death; an act of great generosity and sacrifice that has no bearing on my life is something we typically notice and whose nobility we admire—at least those who are not entirely value-blind. These are morally significant values that are important in themselves.[3]

Joy has something to do with the ability to recognize value, the important-in-itself, and to live for what is true, good, and beautiful in itself, not merely insofar as these are objectively good for me, or subjectively satisfying. In other words, joy has something to do with learning to love and live for what is truly larger than the self. Pleasure, on the other hand, is always “in me”, or “in us”; but joy is something else entirely; it is probably more accurate to say that “we are in it”. As such, joy has something to do with being able to see that we live in the midst of a reality that has an intelligibility, a complexity, and a beauty that is forever larger than us. Life is an ever-expanding frontier of ignorance,[4] and this experience is joyful for the person with humility and a profound sense of wonder–for the more we discover, the more we realize how much more there is to know and contemplate. But the mystery of the universe is summed up in the ordinary human person, who is  important-in-himself or herself, that is, who has an intrinsic ontological value. A significant part of charity towards others is learning to recognize that value and being willing and able to mirror that importance back to the other, so that he/she is more fully awakened to it.

Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Anthony Bloom once said that the more we pray, the more we enter into the heart of God, who is the unutterable mystery. But within that heart, we discover our neighbor. At that point, we are moved to return to this world in order to seek out that neighbor, who is henceforth seen as one who exists first and foremost, from all eternity, in the heart of God, which is the realm of mystery. And so we look upon each person as one who is always more than what we understand him or her to be. It is no longer the self that is loved most, but God, who is Goodness Itself, Beauty Itself, and Truth Itself, and our responses to every value, especially a morally relevant value, is an implicit and indirect response to God.[5]

Wedded love is such a value. What is it that two people want when they say they want to be married? This is not always easy for people to articulate, but in the end, after much prodding, what they seem to want is to give themselves entirely, completely, totally to another, and to have the other freely receive that total self-giving. Moreover, they want the other to give themselves completely, entirely, and totally in return, and to receive that complete self-giving. However, according to biblical anthropology, I am my body–as opposed to some a-sexual pseudo-angelic entity within that body–, and so to give myself is to give my body.[6] For another to receive my self-giving is to receive my body within her own. That is why sexual union between a man and a woman has been called the act of marriage; for marriage is a joining of two into a one flesh union, and the natural expression of that union is sexual intercourse, in which the two become reproductively one organism. 

Now to give one’s bodily self to another completely, not partially, implies an exclusive self-giving, and if it is total, it is until there is no longer any body, that is, until death–otherwise the giving is divided, partial, and limited, which is not marriage. Such a nuptial relationship is unique and it demands an extraordinary generosity. A nuptial union is much more than a friendship; it is an indissoluble bond, a one body union, that transcends the two of them.[7]

A marriage is sustained by the perpetual will to bestow that unique nuptial value upon the other, a value that is exclusive, permanent, indissoluble, and healing. The act of sexual intercourse is an act of “being married”; it is a celebration and expression of that one flesh union. However, because it is so vehemently pleasurable, it is very easy to isolate the sexual act from its marital context for the sake of that pleasure. Doing so, however, changes its meaning entirely; for without marriage, the sexual act is no longer a celebration and expression of marital union (which is a morally relevant and ontological value), but an act that is reduced to the subjectively satisfying. 

Reverence for purity is rooted in reverence for the value of marriage. To reduce sexual activity to the subjectively satisfying is to abuse the marriage act, and to abuse the marriage act is to abuse marriage. Subjectively satisfying sexual acts (i.e., masturbation, oral sex, pornography, fornication, adultery, etc.) do not and cannot promote the fullness of a person’s moral nature, a nature that is only expanded by the surrender to morally relevant values. Such acts, on the contrary, very easily dispose a person to a predominant love of the subjectively satisfying and contribute to dulling a person’s ability to respond to morally significant values, in this case wedded love, which requires an ability to transcend oneself and to love the other for the sake of the other, not for the sake of what he or she does for me.

Not every adult is able to love another for the sake of the other, thus perpetually and unconditionally. What we are identifying is a morally and psychologically immature individual who is nevertheless old enough to marry. Although we always hope we are wrong, we are inclined to predict that such a person’s marriage will be relatively short lived, and any children from such a marriage will inevitably be hurt by such a state of affairs. It is not easy to develop eyes for the value of marriage when there are relatively few examples of good and faithful marriages around, that is, in a society in which the pursuit of the subjectively satisfying and separation and divorce have become the norm. Moreover, the separation of sex from its marital context, which contraception has made much easier, tends to keep us from regarding sex as anything more significant than going on a trip together or going out to the Dairy Queen for a sundae.

Questions of same-sex relationships are particularly difficult today, especially at the high school level. A necessary pre-condition for treating such issues is an overall framework of profound reverence for persons with same-sex attraction and a real sensitivity to the various needs, aspirations, fears, and difficulties that persons with same sex attraction might have. It is of the utmost importance to have established a very good rapport with all students before trying to teach anything on sexual matters–a patronizing, dogmatic, even slightly condescending approach that lacks understanding will often do more harm than good. I find that the best people to listen to with regard to same-sex issues are those who are gay and Catholic, that is, who have same-sex attraction and at the same time are committed to living lives of chastity. Eve Tushnet is one such writer; I found her chapter entitled “Order in Same Sex Love” in her book Tenderness, which is an account of the relationship between Dunstan Thompson (American poet) and Philip Trower, to be particularly inspiring. Thompson was a Harvard dropout who served in the U.S Army, while Trower was a British intelligence officer. The two met in England in 1945 and became lovers. Thompson’s early poetry was risky, erotic, and inflamed with “existential panic” [8], but after a number of years into their relationship, Thompson’s poetry began to change. Eve Tushnet writes: 

… in the aftermath of war, under the influences of country life and domestic happiness, Thompson’s poetry grew calm. He shifted from romantic, urgent, confessional poetry to classical themes handled elegantly. He began to experiment with form rather than sticking to a percussive iambic, that meter which thuds, inescapably, like a hangover headache or a fearful heart. Now he can write lines like, “The end of love is that the heart is still….Here I have found, as after thunder showers,/The friend my childhood promised me”….[9]

It was at this time that Thompson became, for the first time since Harvard, a practicing Catholic; for he had been slowly picking up pieces of the discarded faith of his youth, “the Rosary, a quick stop in a church to hear a homily, even a trip to Rome in 1950 to attend Pope Pius XII’s proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. He and Trower bicycled together to witness a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, not far from where they lived–and when the procession with the Eucharist passed by them, Thompson fell to his knees and crossed himself.” [10] It was in 1952, after seven years with Trower, that Thompson announced to him that he planned to return to the Church. Trower himself recalled: “If he took this step, Dunstan explained before he set out for London, the nature of our relationship would have to change. We should have to live chastely. Was I prepared for this. I said Yes.[11] Trower himself had begun to have doubts not so much about his relationship to Dunstan, but rather about the sexual aspect of that relationship. Trower soon followed Thompson into the Church. Although they renounced genital sexual activity, they did not stop loving one another, and they sought and received ecclesiastical permission to continue to live together.[12]

It is not possible to persuade someone of the wisdom and beauty of chastity, gay or straight, by abstract argument alone. Much of our data is empirical, the result of experience, which young people typically lack, and only a few of us were able, in our youth, to combine our limited experience with an apprehension of moral principles so as to allow us to see clearly what is morally right in these personal matters and choose accordingly. So we cannot expect all our students to immediately embrace what we teach them in these matters–or ought to be teaching them if we wish to be faithful to our Catholic mandate. However, our students still need and have a right to be introduced to the fundamentals of Catholic sexual ethics by a teacher who lives and breathes the faith, and loves the students and mirrors to them their fundamental importance. They may not buy what we have to say at this time in their lives, but the conditions might very well be in place years down the road that might help them to eventually realize, as did Trower and Thompson, that joy really does not come from an intimate sexual relationship, but comes from an ever deeper entry into the heart of God, our origin and end.

Notes

1. By rational data we mean such things as first principles that have the character of necessity, i.e., moral precepts such as “one may not do evil that good may come of it”, or “one ought to respect the other’s status as equal in dignity to oneself”, or “one ought to revere a value more than the merely subjectively satisfying”. Empirical data, on the contrary, lacks the transparency that universal principles possess by virtue of their level of abstraction. For example, “the divorce rate for couples who practice NFP is under 4%.” One cannot discover this through reason alone, but only through empirical investigation.

2. Openness to change seems to diminish with age. Dietrich von Hildebrand writes: “…when men become older and, within the framework of natural tendencies their characters and peculiarities undergo a process of solidification, the natural mobility and urge for change will tend to disappear. Such persons will then become much less accessible to elevating influences, less receptive to fresh stimuli (we are still speaking on purely natural presuppositions). We can no longer expect them to revise their mentality and to re-educate themselves, for they are already cast in a rigid mold” Transformation in Christ, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001. P. 14. However, when we consider these vital phases of youth from a supernatural point of view, the situation is entirely reversed. Hildebrand continues: “The readiness to change, the waxlike receptiveness towards Christ will tend not to vanish but to increase as man grows into a state of maturity. Accidental concerns and complications recede into the background; the pattern of life wins through to simplicity; the great decisive aspects of life become more clearly accentuated. The unrest incident to youth, the vacillating response to disparate appeals, the insatiable hunger for whatever appears attractive or beautiful will subside, and a steady orientation towards the essential and decisive become dominant. …this attainment of full maturity also implies eternal youth in a supernatural sense. It implies that the readiness to change, the determination to become a new man, and the unconditional willingness to crucify the old self should increase; that the impatience for Christ should not abate.” Ibid., p. 15.

3. Socrates said that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit an injustice. To suffer an injustice is subjectively unsatisfying, but if it is better to suffer an injustice than it is to commit an injustice, then there must be something higher, a higher importance, than that which subjectively satisfies, namely morally relevant value. The saint would sooner die than to bring into existence a disvalue through his own free choice, such as denouncing Christ, or lying, stealing, perjuring himself, etc., in order to save his life.

4. This expression comes from Physicist Richard Feynman who referred to science as an ever expanding frontier of ignorance. The more we learn, the more we discover how much more there is that we do not know, and this frontier of ignorance expands alongside our learning.

5. Dietrich von Hildebrand writes: “For our knowledge of moral values, of the moral obligation, of the natural moral law, the knowledge of God is not required. But objectively these data presuppose God. We do not pretend that the type of demonstration leading to God in both cases is the same. But without any doubt God manifests Himself in moral values; He speaks to us in moral obligation. The moral values, the moral law, the moral order, the moral obligation, the voice of our conscience, objectively presuppose God and are thus for our minds and knowledge hints at God’s existence. The undeniable world of values, and especially of moral values, testifies to the existence of God for the one who has “eyes to see, and ears that may hear.” Ethics. Steubenville, Ohio: Hildebrand Press, 2020. P. 483.

6. We have a tendency to think in dualistic terms, like the early Greek thinkers or more recently, Rene Descartes: we tend to regard the soul as the true self, while the body is regarded as something accidental or non-essential. But this is inconsistent with the biblical understanding of the human person. The Hebrew word soma, which is translated as body, refers to the whole person. Hence, you are your body.

7. The couple enter into a covenant, an agreement, to be a one flesh union, but what they intend cannot be achieved by them alone. The specific relationship of husband and wife can only be brought into being by God. The couple cannot unite themselves into a bond that only death can sever; they intend that, they commit to that, agree to that, they profess that in public, but at that point it is up to God to bring that relationship which is a “one flesh union” into existence. God joins the two. We know this through Scripture; for Christ said: “What God has joined together, let no man divide.” That includes the couple; they too are not to divide this; for it is an indissoluble union. For a realistic treatment on the nature of marriage, see Frank Sheed, Society and Sanity. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013. Pp. 110-132.

8. See Dana Gioia, “Two Poets Named Dunstan Thompson,” Hudson Review, Spring 2015, 

Two Poets Named Dunstan Thompson

9. Eve Tushnet. Tenderness. Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 2021. Kobo Version. “Order in Same Sex Love”. 

10. Ibid.

11. Gregory Wolfe, introduction to Here at Last Is Love, xxvi-xxvii. Quoted in Eve Tushnet, Tenderness. 

12. See William Doino Jr., “A Witness, in Life and Letters,” First Things, December 15, 2014, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/12/a-witness-in-life-and-letters

Deacon Doug McManaman

            There is a noticeable contrast between the kingship depicted in the first reading (2 Samuel 5. 1-3) and kingship depicted in the gospel (Luke 23. 35-43). In the book of Samuel (1 Samuel 18. 6-8), we get an insight into the kind of king Israel longed for, when David returned from battle. I quote: “When the men were returning home after David had killed the Philistine, the women came out from all the towns of Israel to meet King Saul with singing and dancing, with joyful songs and with tambourines and lutes. As they danced, they sang: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands”. And this refrain of course angered king Saul, who from that point onwards, scripture tells us, kept a jealous eye on David. A very different kingship is depicted in the gospel. Here, the leaders scoffed at Jesus, they mocked him: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God.”

            That’s our king. The one we are called to worship, and that’s the type of kingship we are called to live and embrace. When we were baptized, we were anointed priest, prophet and king, with sacred chrism. These are the three principal offices found in the Old Testament, and they are all summed up in the Person of Christ. He is the priest and the victim who offers himself on the altar of the cross for the salvation of the world; he is the final prophet because he is Truth Itself, the Word of the Father; and he is the true son of David, the king of kings. But what kind of king is he? He is a king who overcomes his enemies through the power of the cross. He does not come in military and political power; rather, he defeats the kingdom of darkness in “weakness”, for “the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” as St. Paul said (1 Corinthians 1. 25). For human beings, dying is loss, it is defeat, but for Christ, who is light and life, dying is victory and power. And our dying becomes light, life, and victory in him. 

            Christ did not redeem us from sin and death through his Sermon on the Mount, nor did he redeem us through the miracles he worked, or the parables he taught. He redeemed us by his suffering and death, by the offering of himself on Good Friday. And following our king means nothing other than taking up our cross, which is a sharing in his suffering, and in doing so we share in his work of saving. His kingship is the secret to our identity, who we really are and who we are meant to be. 

            Today marks the end of the liturgical year, and the readings focus our attention on this unique kingship, and next week marks the beginning of the liturgical year, Advent, which is a penitential season in which we prepare for the birth of our king. You wouldn’t know that it is a penitential season looking at the stores and malls and listening to the radio, etc. It seems we’ve begun to celebrate Christmas already. But advent is a silent penitential preparation for the birth of this king, whose throne is the cross on which he died and in doing so conquered the darkness of sin and death, the one enemy that man was unable to defeat.

            German theologian Karl Rahner said that the greatest glories of the Church are and remain completely unknown and unrecognized by all the members of the visible Church. These people will not be canonized. Such unique individuals are given a profound share in the suffering and humiliation of Christ, who was also unrecognized by the religious leaders of Israel and the people in this gospel today. One or two of those glories of the Church might very well be among us here. We wouldn’t know it, and if it is you, you wouldn’t know it. But the suffering lives of such people share deeply in Christ’s work of redemption, in winning souls for God. It’s a very mysterious thing how this works, how it is that Christ takes our sufferings, difficulties, frustrations, sacrifices, humiliations, and joins them to himself, to his own offering to the Father, in order that God the Father may deliver someone else from darkness, just as the sacrifice of St. Stephen was offered by Christ to God the Father in order to transform Saul to Paul, in the New Testament. 

            Why did Jesus put up with all this mockery and rejection? Basically, to show us that life in him is in many ways a learning to put up with one another. Life in him is about enduring, suffering, patiently putting up with one another. No one is exempt from this. We’re always aware of the difficulty of having to put up with certain others, but we are typically not aware of how difficult it has been for others to put up with us. But God does reveal it to us gradually, He reveals to us our flaws and imperfections slowly and piecemeal, to the degree that we are open and able to handle it. But becoming aware of that is important because it makes it much easier for us to accept the prospect of having to endure one another patiently, and most of all, the more we are emptied of illusions about ourselves, the more space we create within us for God to fill.  

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_379safeclassrooms.html

Deacon Douglas P. McManaman

Throughout my teen years and my early years as a teacher, I was a devoted practical joker. I fooled teachers, priests, friends, relatives and students with some of the most devious but enjoyable of practical jokes–not always enjoyable for the victim, however. From the very start of my teaching career, I was committed to studying the analytical moral philosophy of Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle and John Finnis, primarily for the sake of my students, because it was a highly structured system and adolescents like and need structure. I recall many years ago flipping through Volume III of Grisez’s Magnum Opus and noticing a subsection entitled “Jocose Lying”. I felt a physiological reaction at the sight of it. I did not want to read that, for fear of what I would discover. Is he going to argue that jocose lying is morally wrong? I closed the book and left it, but my conscience would not leave me alone, so a few days later I chose to read it. Much to my chagrin, the jokes I so loved to play on people, of which temporary lying was always a part, involved the manipulation of other peoples’ emotions, and so they violated the basic requirement to treat others in a way that respects their status as equal in dignity to oneself. It was obvious to me as I was reading it; for I hated it when my own emotions were being manipulated by the lies of a friend playing a good practical joke on me. And so I had to stop.

Although initially I found Grisez’s treatment of the issue subjectively unsatisfying, it was nevertheless beneficial. At least now there is one less manipulator in the world, and much less victims of emotional manipulation. The irony is that I had studied for years under some of the best moral philosophers in the world, but I still had to have something so basic pointed out to me. Although this idea of his was at the time unpleasant, subjectively unsatisfying, disappointing, even humiliating, and contrary to what I had always believed to be true, not for a second could I maintain that it was “unsafe”, much less “harmful”. The idea was true to the facts, and so it was pre-eminently safe, by virtue of that very fact. 

But “safe” and “unsafe” mean entirely different things within the context of postmodern woke culture. The father of postmodernism is Friedrich Nietzsche who maintained that reality is absurd, because it is unintelligible. It is unintelligible because it is unstable, in a constant state of pure flux, without permanency of any sort. Being is an illusion; there is only becoming. It follows that if reality is entirely without meaning in itself, then meaning is constructed, imposed upon reality through the vehicle of “sounds” or language. All science is a fiction. This of course means that there is no such thing as “truth itself”–the mind cannot conform to what is in a pure state of change; the mind must be able to grasp what is to some degree unchanging, stable enough for it to apprehend, but there is no stability, and so according to Nietzsche, knowledge is impossible. In this postmodern framework, education is fundamentally about power, not the pursuit of truth–for there is no such thing. And if truth is nothing but a product of an artificial power construct, one that has no more objective validity than any other construct, then “safe” or “unsafe” no longer mean the same thing as they would in a realist frame of mind. In a common sense realist perspective, an idea or claim that is true to reality is safe and beneficial to everyone by the very fact that it is true. If there is no “truth”, then a claim or idea is “unsafe” merely by virtue of the fact that it makes me uncomfortable, is disappointing, or contrary to my own personal worldview, which is my own or the dominant culture’s linguistic construct. “Unsafe” ideas are to be “deconstructed” and made “safe”, that is, pleasant. This latter perspective describes postmodern “wokeness”.

But this postmodern ideological narrative is entirely self-refuting and has it entirely backwards. It completely undermines the educational process, which in turn leads eventually and inevitably to a closed society, which according to Karl Popper is fundamentally “tribal” and governed by power, and whose social institutions are grounded on taboos. Is there anything more harmful and unsafe than a society closed to the pursuit of what is true, good, and beautiful in itself?

Science begins with a passionate interest in a problem. The logic of the scientific method proceeds from that starting point on the basis of the facts in evidence, and it moves towards a possible explanation of those facts (hypothesis), in order to solve an interesting problem. However, there are always a number of possible hypotheses that can account for the particular facts in evidence, and so each hypothesis must be tested in order to determine the most plausible one, given the limited information at our disposal. The most plausible hypothesis, given our limited set of data, may not remain so for long; new information may raise what was less plausible earlier to the place of maximal plausibility later. This logic describes not just scientific methodology, but our everyday knowledge acquisition as well. To test an idea in the humanities means “push back”, argument, dialogue, discussion, a dialectical process best illustrated in Plato’s dialogues. Over the years, I spent a great deal of time and effort trying to convince my own students to trust me, that their opposition, their disagreement with me, their difficult questions, in short, their push back, are not going to offend me, much less cost them marks. There is no education without “dialectic”–otherwise education becomes indoctrination, which is the method proper to a closed society. It was a difficult sell, because some of my brightest students, who could readily imagine difficulties with what they were being taught, were routinely “shut down” by their teachers throughout their entire Catholic school career. 

The woke language of “safe spaces”, “harmful” and “unsafe” classrooms simply has no place in Catholic elementary schools, high schools and universities. It is a language that has its roots in the absurd and self-refuting principles of postmodernism, completely incompatible and contrary to the fundamentals of a Judaic and Christian worldview. At the University of Chicago, the study of economics was said to be a “full contact sport”; one is free to embrace socialism, Keynesianism, classical liberalism, anarcho-capitalism, or anything in between, but one has to be ready and willing to debate it, defend it, and back it with evidence, because the plausibility of every idea needs to be tested. If the claims are true, they will withstand the test and everyone will be better off for it; if they are unsound, they won’t stand up to the pressure of a rigorous opposition. To impede that educational process for the sake of keeping students “safe” from feeling bad, “safe” from disappointment, from the painful process of growing in humility and the love of truth above the love of self, is to impose on them a most devious and harmful ideology that will keep them perpetually adolescent. That Catholic educators have begun to employ such ideological terminology is shameful.

http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_378homily10.9.2022ordinarytime28.html