Author: Deacon Douglas McManaman

Some Thoughts on Homosexuality and Integrity

Deacon Douglas McManaman

One stumbling block among many traditional Catholics, when discussing LGBTQ+ issues, homosexuality, and related questions, is that they immediately think in terms of “sex” and seem unable to think outside that framework. When I mentioned this to a former student of mine who is openly gay, she immediately—and with considerable vexation—replied, “That’s so male!” I think she is entirely correct. This is, indeed, a tendency that is often associated with men, and, of course, those who have traditionally written the encyclicals and other Church documents on these matters have tended to be male. She, by contrast, understands that homosexuality and the issues surrounding it are primarily about “relationship” rather than sex, at least for the most part.

Another problem with Catholic discourse on homosexuality is the language of “disorder”. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we read: 

The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. (2358, CCC)

I have to agree with all those who strongly suggest that the language of disorder should become a thing of the past; for most people, upon hearing the word “disorder”, think “psychology” (i.e., Borderline Personality Disorder; Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Panic Disorder, etc.), and not “morality”, in which the word “disorder” has a very different and less offensive meaning (i.e., I have a disordered appetite for sweets). I am of the view that Carl Jung was on to something important when he wrote:  

In view of the recognized frequency of this phenomenon [homosexuality] its interpretation as a pathological perversion is very dubious. The psychological findings show that it is rather a matter of incomplete detachment from the hermaphroditic archetype, coupled with a distinct resistance to identify with the role of a one-sided sexual being. Such a disposition should not be adjudged negative in all circumstances, in so far as it preserves the archetype of the Original Man, which a one-sided sexual being has, up to a point, lost.[1]

This is not an easy thought to unpack, for there is a world of depth psychology behind it, but what is at least clear is that Jung does not treat homosexuality as a mental illness or pathology. The relationship between this insight and same sex sexual acts is, at least from a Catholic perspective, a bit more difficult to determine, but I believe we need to begin by carefully listening to and incorporating what Jungian psychology has to say about this. 

Furthermore, there is a significant difference between the repressed homosexual and the non-repressed homosexual. Over the years in my role as an educator and as a deacon, both among teaching colleagues and fellow clergy, I have met a number of repressed homosexuals, and such repression spawns a degree of misogyny, a resentment of strong and independent women and a corresponding preference for the submissive and sycophantic kind, an inordinate need to control and micromanage, narcissistic characteristics, resentment and vindictiveness. The non-repressed homosexual, on the contrary, is fully conscious of his or her homosexuality, is open about it, has accepted and embraced it (which does not necessarily imply a sexually active lifestyle), and is not ashamed of it. By virtue of that whole hearted embrace, such persons tend not to exhibit the aforementioned undesirable characteristics (i.e., misogyny, the disordered need to control, narcissism, resentment, etc).

Now, if homosexuality is not a disease, then shouldn’t homosexual actions be morally non-problematic? This is a very difficult question to answer convincingly. The best I can do, outside of a very dry and abstract natural law treatment of this question, is to present a case for chastity from a theological point of view, which means I will leave many people unconvinced. But I will begin with the fact that man was created to be a “priest of creation”, called to raise up and spiritualize the matter of the universe. Our purpose in this life is to “Christify” matter, and such a task is a struggle on many levels. 

A priest is one who offers sacrifice. At the Mass, the ministerial priest raises up matter, namely the bread and wine that were offered by the congregation, in order that they may be transformed by Christ into his sacrificed body and blood, under the appearance of bread and wine, in order to be given back to the congregation as food and drink. Nutrition in general is a raising up of matter followed by a transformation into living tissue. Man takes the matter of this universe and forms it into complex systems that serve a common end, namely the common good of the civil community. But his ultimate purpose is to offer up his life, his own matter, to become Christ (God became man so that man might become god). Human life is a priesthood, and in baptism, this priesthood is elevated and thus participates in Christ’s priesthood, for in baptism a person is anointed priest, prophet, and king. Individuation, in a Jungian perspective, is the integration of the conscious and unconscious mind to become a complete and unified self, and this is an essential part of this human achievement, for one must offer the whole of oneself and the best of oneself. 

The sexual drive is fundamentally a drive toward unity and integration, and the sexual act itself is in many ways ordered to help in the integration of the anima in the man and the animus in the woman.[2] He gives himself to her sexually, but in doing so receives her; she in turn receives him and in doing so gives herself to him. Not only is the result a reproductive completeness, but the beginnings of a psychological completeness. If the two have become a one flesh union and this act expresses that one flesh union, then he has become more completely himself insofar as he has become integrated with or joined to this woman, and vice versa.

The sexual act is indeed an act of marriage, an expression of conjugal love. If God calls a person to be married, he calls that person to participate in the Paschal Mystery in a particular way, to leave behind a world closed in on itself, a world in which a person caters to his/her own individual needs and wants, and henceforth turns to another. One sees the other romantically in the true sense of “romantic”, that is, with the divine vision (Dante), but at the same time with the real vision of the other’s imperfections, and the two help one another towards achieving that eschatological perfection. He gives himself to her completely, totally, for her sake, for the sake of that perfection that he beholds, and she as well. 

Moreover, the sexual act within marriage is a priestly act, a genuine exercise of that baptismal priesthood, in that the act of sexual union between husband and wife is an offering. Priesthood is about offering to God matter–in some cases a sacrificial victim, in other cases the first fruits of the harvest. The married couple offer themselves to one another. This offering, however, is at the same time an offering to God, because this is how God has called the two to love Him, that is, by loving one another. And so, just as the ministerial priest offers to God bread and wine that he may change those substances into the substance of Christ, to return them to us as the Bread of Life, in the act of sexual union husband and wife offer their matter to God, so to speak (sperm and egg), and God receives what is offered and changes it, infuses into it a human soul, so that it becomes a person. What God does with that offering at that moment is out of the couple’s control; they can only hope that this offering will be completed in the conception of a child; they exercise no dominion over it. That, of course, does not mean that the couple must intend to conceive a child every time they engage in the sexual act. There is a two-fold aspect to the sexual act that corresponds to the two-fold nature of marriage: it is a community of love and life. 

But every married couple gets to the point where they must move beyond the physical sex act (for example, the libido naturally wanes, or one of them becomes incapacitated in some way, i.e., develops Alzheimer’s, or just becomes too old), but unless their relationship has been fundamentally self-centered throughout, life’s struggles and an unrebellious relationship to those struggles have prepared and disposed them to love one another for their own sake, not for the sake of what they do for one another sexually. And this is what makes human life meaningful. Lasting joy in this life–which is not the same as pleasure–stems from a kind of seeking whose direction is away from the self towards the other’s good. This seeking involves a loss of self, a forgetting of self. This is the meaning of ecstasy, which describes a joy that is out of this world (ecstatic). It comes from the Greek word ekstasis, which means a displacement outside the self, a standing outside of oneself. The self is left behind, as it were. The result is an “other worldly” joy that comes upon a person without knowing where it came from. It’s a joy we have no control over. There’s a sense in which this joy is larger than we are, for it embraces us from all sides, like the womb that embraces the child within it. 

This is what Christ meant when he said anyone who saves his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. If our life is motivated primarily by the kind of desire in which we directly seek the satisfaction of the self on whatever level, we will lose it. We’ll never find rest. But Christ said: come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest. That begins with leaving ourselves behind and going in search of him, not for the sake of our own satisfaction, but because he is good, he is the divine mystery, the Incarnation of Goodness Itself. 

A married couple who are well past the physical/sexual are so much one body that love of self means love of the other. The rising above the physically sexual act is an essential part of this final spiritualization of matter, that is, the raising up of one’s matter (body) to become Christ most fully. To pursue the sexual act outside of this context of conjugal union will leave a person spiritually incomplete and unfulfilled.   

A non-repressed and openly gay man or woman who renounces genital sexual acts is in some ways ahead of the game and has the unique vocation to witness to the archetype of the Original Man, so to speak. This does not mean that his or her life will not be a struggle, but they are not the only ones who are called to sexual renunciation–virtually everyone is at one point or another. Rising above the physically sexual to a love that is ecstatic and selfless is the end to be achieved in this life, for this life is about learning to love and be loved. It is very difficult to convince others that the call to sexual renunciation is actually a positive, a gift in fact. In many cases, only life experience will bring a person to that realization. But who is the Original Man but Christ himself? [3] G. Studdert Kennedy writes: 

…if He was the warrior and the women blent into the unity of a new creation in whom there was neither male nor female because He had worked out within Himself that higher human harmony of both in which their age-long creative discord is destined finally to be resolved, that harmony was no easy miracle. In this, as always, He learned obedience by things that He suffered, and worked out His harmony as we must, after His example, work out ours, using the sex relationship and the poignancy of its appeal as one of our chiefest means of grace. It is in this perfect unity in Him of the Warrior and the Woman that I find the keystone to the quality of His life. He was the man woman, the mother father, the creative warrior complete.[4] 

This is why I believe that those Cardinals such as Pietro Parolin and Blase Cupich are right to call for a new paradigm with respect to certain moral questions. As in sense perception, there are certain angles that simply do not permit one to ask the questions that lead to new data that make possible certain insights that are otherwise missed. I believe most people today readily see that homosexuality is not a pathology, but if we as a Church continue to operate within a pathological model, I think we can reasonably expect faithful Catholics who are gay to repress it, which inevitably leads to a host of negative projections, such as those listed above. A natural law paradigm is fine as far as abstract moral problem solving goes, but a deeper and more psychological paradigm is necessary if we are going to begin to understand homosexuality more accurately and hope to stop driving away gay Catholics who choose to return to mass until they are finally shamed from the pulpit by “pastorally challenged” clergy, never to return. A non-repressed and openly gay Catholic is one who can live that faith without looking at women as inferiors, but as equals, who is free from the need to create and control an environment that fuels an unhealthy narcissism that exploits others, and who lives in hope and with a healthy self-esteem, and yes, a certain degree of pride.

Notes

  1. Carl G. Jung. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9/1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 71.
  2. “Jung believed that within every person there are elements of the opposite sex. This contrasexual core, which Jung calls the anima in the male personality and the animus in the female, performs the specific psychic function of connecting the conscious male or female ego-identity with the deeper regions of the unconscious which Jung calls the objective psyche. Jung calls this deep unconscious layer of the psyche objective because our subjective ego-consciousness gradually emerges out of its prior existence and continues to experience that existence as other than itself, alien to its own subjective ego-territory. In contrast to what Jung calls the personal layer of the unconscious, whose contents consist of repressed memories and traits which can be recalled to consciousness and experienced as belonging to the ego, the contents of the objective psyche, the archetypes, are more impersonal and collective in nature and hence harder to integrate into conscious adaptation…. Thus, to the conscious ego the anima or animus seems to be an impersonal “other” that confronts the ego from outside itself. Somehow the ego must learn to bring this force into connection with its own personal identity. Jung coined the word “anima” and “animus” as a result of observing in countless patients split-off sides of the psyche recurrently appearing in personified forms as male or female figures. One common example was the overly rational male who consistently dreamed of being confronted by an emotional and sexy female who tempted him into “irrational” behavior. On awakening, the dreamer still felt possessed by the mood of this dream anima-figure, invaded by a bittersweet mixture of excitement and longing. This anima-lure is typical of the way the unconscious tries to acquaint the one-sided ego with affects and impulses it has excluded from its conscious functioning. This is what Jung means when he says that the function of the contrasexual factor is to lead us to the deeper realms of the objective psyche. The anima-figure points the way, in this example, to the split-off nonrational side of life.” Ann Belford Ulanov. “C. G. Jung on Male and Female” in Male and Female: Christian Approaches to Sexuality, edited by Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse and Urban. T. Holmes, III. New York: Seabury Press, 1976, pp. 197-199.
  3. “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creatures. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created, things visible and invisible. All were created through him; all were created for him. He is before all else that is. In him everything continues in being. It is he who is head of the body, the church! He is the beginning, the first-born of the dead, so that primacy may be his in everything. It pleased God to make absolute fullness reside in him and, by means of him, to reconcile everything in his person, both on earth and in the heavens, making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col 1, 15-20).
  4. G. Studdert Kennedy. The Warrior, the Woman and the Christ: A Study of the Leadership of Christ. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1929, pp. 159-161. 

 

A Sudden Turn

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Last week (21st Sunday in Ordinary Time) the gospel reading was taken from the very same chapter of the very same gospel as today’s gospel (22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time), just one paragraph after last week’s gospel reading. We saw that Peter declared Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and Jesus said to him that “it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven”, and then Jesus makes Peter the head of the Church: “… on this rock I build my Church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it”. However, in the next paragraph he is calling Peter Satan and telling him that he is thinking not as God thinks but as man thinks. This is a tremendous irony. What does this mean?

What it shows is that Peter, the rock on which Christ has built his Church, the first Pope, can manage to “go off the rails”, so to speak. He can be inspired by God the Father on the one hand, but he can also find himself listening to the Evil One on the other. And what’s important to consider as well is the very subject matter. In the first instance, Jesus asks them: “Who do you say that I am?” This is a very important question, and it is crucial that the Church gets this right: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. And Jesus promises that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church that he established, and since Jesus called Satan the father of lies (untruth), this would seem to suggest that the Church will be protected from error in the most important matters pertaining to faith–and the identity of Jesus is certainly a matter of faith, for it has a bearing on our salvation. That’s where the charism of infallibility lies, namely on statements of faith, that is, on the deposit of faith.

In today’s gospel, the matter is not about a statement of faith; rather, it is about Peter’s understanding of that faith. It is about Peter’s attitude towards suffering, specifically his understanding of what kind of Messiah Jesus is. Jesus had to foretell his passion three times in the gospels, because the Jews were expecting an anointed king, like David, who conquered through the force of arms and who, like other kings of this world, was served hand and foot. This is not the kind of Messiah that Jesus is. Rather, Jesus was described by the prophet Isaiah, in chapter 53: “He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, knowing pain, like one from whom you turn your face, spurned, and we held him in no esteem. We thought of him as stricken, struck down by God and afflicted, …Like a lamb led to slaughter or a sheep silent before shearers he did not open his mouth. … For he was cut off from the land of the living, struck down for the sins of his people.”

The very notion of a king who would lower himself, who did not come to be served, but to serve and enter into human suffering and death, was simply unfathomable at this point in time. Jesus is indeed the Christ (Messiah), and that was revealed to Peter, but just what that means exactly is going to take time, and we see this in this gospel and in the history of the Church–the tendency to monarchy, opulence, the abuse of power, etc., is all there in our history in plain sight for all to see.

There’s a very important lesson in this. We have a tendency to idealize certain people, especially clergy: priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, etc. And Pope Francis warned against the tendency to put clergy on pedestals. Doing so is dangerous, for even the rock on which Christ built his Church can go off the rails and seriously misjudge a situation, to the point where Jesus actually calls him Satan. The problem is that when the faithful idealize clergy, they fail to recognize their own baptismal priesthood and the charisms God has given them for the building up of the body of Christ. What also tends to happen is that they eventually discover the humanness of the clergy, that they are just as flawed and sinful as anyone else, and then they are scandalized, seriously disillusioned, and the result is often that they abandon the faith and will never set foot inside a Church again. This happens all the time. Not with everyone, of course, because a good number of the faithful realize that our faith is about Christ first and foremost; it’s not about Peter, James or John, Bartholomew, Paul or Timothy. Even St. Paul reminds us of this when he says: “For it has been reported to me about you, my brothers, …that there are rivalries among you. I mean that each of you is saying, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I give thanks to God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say you were baptized in my name” (1 Co 1, 11-14).

In other words, it is all about Christ, not about us. And St. Augustine said that we pray every day “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us” because we are sinful. Every day we get it wrong, and we have to repent. Yet despite that, people still engage in hero-worship. Many of the faithful still insist on treating clergy as slightly more than human. After Pentecost, however, Peter got it; we see this when the Roman officer Cornelius fell at his feet to do him homage. Peter simply says to him: “Get up. I am only a human being.”

So although the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit and has the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals, every single member of the Church struggles every day with his or her own humanness and tendency to sin, and if you live with someone long enough, you’ll see it, even a pope. And a great deal of how we see the world and interpret the faith is shaped by that humanness, which is why we need always take our own point of view with a grain of salt.

Father Eugene Fulton from Larchmont, New York, years ago told me the story of two brothers from the UK who went into the seminary together and were later ordained together on the same day. After many years, however, the one brother became so disillusioned with the Church that he left the priesthood. He lost his faith entirely. The other brother stayed the course. The brother who left the priesthood and lost his faith was, years later, dying of cancer. When he was lying in a coma, the other brother was sitting by his bedside praying the rosary for him. At one point, the dying brother opened his eyes, sat up in bed, looked over at this brother praying and said: “It’s all about Christ. Go and tell the whole world”. He then laid back down and breathed his last. 

 

A Muslim and a Christian on the Road to Emmaus

Douglas P. McManaman

Originally published by Lifeissues.net, May 2, 2017

What always strikes me about the story of the road to Emmaus is that the disciples failed to recognize Jesus; while they were conversing and debating, Jesus himself drew near and walked with them, but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him. What was it that prevented them from recognizing him? I think the answer lies at the end of the reading. What was it that opened their eyes to recognizing him? The answer is the “breaking of the bread”; the Eucharist, which is the fundamental and central prayer of the Church; it is Christ in the act of sacrificing himself for us, and it is the act of receiving Christ in this sacrificial act. It is an act of communion, an entering into union with him. It is not in debating that we find him, it is in prayer that we begin to recognize him where we didn’t recognize him before.

This reminds me of a great story of a Trappist monk, Dom Christian de Chergé, whose cause for beatification has begun. He was the prior of the Monastery of Our Lady of Atlas in Algeria. Those monks had a great relationship with the Muslim villagers. The monks served them, and the villagers would invite them to their celebrations (i.e., birthdays, weddings, etc.), which the Monks gladly attended. Eventually, however, the monks were kidnapped and murdered by Muslim radicals hostile to the French.

But before that time, before he was a priest, when studying for the priesthood, he was a young staff officer of the French army. He was assigned to a certain district in Algeria and it was at that time when he met Mohammed, whose duty it was to protect the harvest, the roads, and public utilities. They developed a very good relationship, but what really cemented their friendship was their common love of God. What Christian found surprising is that, with Mohammed, he could talk unselfconsciously about God, unlike in France, where talking about God made people uncomfortable. And Mohammad would challenge Christian: “You Christians don’t know how to pray. We never see French soldiers praying. You say you believe in God. How can you not pray if you believe in God?” That was a question that Dom Christian says he had difficulty answering.

One day they (Mohammed and Christian) were making their rounds through the villages unarmed when suddenly they found themselves face to face with Muslim rebels, guns pointed at Christian’s chest. Mohammad stepped in front of the guns and said: “This soldier is a godly man and a friend of Muslims”. The rebels withdrew without harming Christian, but the next day they found Mohammad with his throat slit, lying by a well near his home where he lived with his wife and ten children.

This event had a profound influence on Dom Christian. He said it was the act that sealed his decision to become a monk in the Atlas Mountains in Algeria. He reflects: “Mohammed had given his life like Christ. He had imitated Christ. This act is celebrated in every Eucharist where Christians memorialize the gift that Christ made of his life and where each person is invited to enter into this gift to the praise of the Father.” For Christian, every Eucharist signified the gift of Mohammed’s life; in other words, in the Eucharistic gift of Mohammed, he recognized the gift of Christ himself.

And of course, there is no doubt about it, in loving Christian and giving his life for him, Mohammed loved Christ. Both of them were on the road to Emmaus; both of them did not realize at first that the person right beside him was Christ. Christian discovered it in Mohammed’s sacrifice, and of course he believes that Mohammed discovered, in paradise, that his love for his friend Christian was all along a love of Christ.

Pascal once said that the “heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”. In other words, love takes us into regions where the intellect, on its own, has no access, but once within those regions, the intellect begins to see what it otherwise would have missed. That’s why we truly come to know God through prayer. Study is important, but through study we come to know about God, in prayer we come to know God. Discussion and debate are one thing, and they have their place, but they don’t take us into the heart of God. Only the heart can reach the heart of God, and it is in the heart of God that we discover who our neighbor is. In other words, only in the heart of God do we discover that our neighbor is Christ. That’s a perception that the intellect on its own is not capable of. And that is the problem with all fundamentalism, whether we are talking about Catholic fundamentalism, Evangelical fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu or Jewish fundamentalism, or the political fundamentalism of the Left and Right. Fundamentalists believe that what they see with their heads only is complete and exhaustive – they have no sense of the limitations of their own way of seeing reality. They fail to realize that reality is much larger and far more complex than what is given through their own limited understanding. And so they take it upon themselves to be God’s spokesperson; history is filled with prophets of God who represent Him with great confidence and assurance – and of course they usually end up doing more harm than good.

But it is only within the context of his Eucharistic sacrifice that our eyes are opened, the eyes of the heart. In other words, only through love do we come to know God who dwells within our neighbor, and if we love, we will pray, and if we pray, we enter into the humility of God. With that humility, we begin to see others as God sees them.



An all inclusive covenant

Reflection for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deacon Douglas McManaman

The readings for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary time are very interesting, for what they show is the development of the covenant to its final stage. The covenant began with the family of Abraham, and so we could say the covenant was initially a family covenant. It was then renewed in Genesis 35, through Jacob, and by this time the covenant had expanded to a tribal covenant, as it were. With Moses, the covenant is again renewed between God and Israel, who by this time had become a nation of twelve tribes (national covenant), and with king David, Israel becomes a single kingdom, exercising dominion over other nations. So the covenant grows and develops like a living organism. Can it develop further? The answer is yes. In Christ, the new covenant becomes an international covenant, one that expands beyond the limits of a nation to one that includes all nations without any subjugation, for Jesus commissioned the Apostles to go out to all nations and proclaim the prince of peace, the good news of salvation. This is an essentially different covenant, sealed not in the blood of goats, but in the blood of Christ. The end goal of this development is the salvation of all.

God has revealed himself as absolute mercy, but most importantly as all inclusive mercy, extending to all nations: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation” (Mk 16, 15). That is what the word ‘Catholic’ means (from the Greek kataholos, or on the whole, or universal). In the first reading from Isaiah, the prophet foretells the coming of this new covenant. We read: “The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, ministering to him, loving the name of the Lord,… them I will bring to my holy mountain and make joyful in my house of prayer;… for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (56, 6-7). The joy of this house of prayer is the clue that we are talking about the good news, the gospel; for the good news is not a collection of “Thou shalt nots”; rather, the good news is that Christ is risen, that he conquered death, that our sins have been forgiven, our debt has been cancelled, not by virtue of anything we did, but as pure gift. That’s the source of our joy, not our own moral perfection. This brings us to the second reading; for none of us can speak of our own moral perfection. As St. Paul says: “For God delivered all to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all” (Rm 11, 32). 

The implications here are far reaching. God delivered all to disobedience. All of us are sinners. None of us can stand secure before God: “…whoever thinks he stands firm should beware lest he fall” (1 Co 10, 12). But there is a purpose to this decision to deliver all of us over to disobedience, and the purpose is that the Lord will have mercy on all so that we might know that mercy from within. In other words, God’s purpose is not to shame us, but to pour out his mercy and fill us with his life. God permits sin not to convince us of our sinfulness and imperfection, but to convince us of his incomprehensible mercy. That’s the good news. My friend once preached: “God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy”. That’s the news that alone brings joy. 

The good news is thus incompatible with the sanctimonious posture of one who wears a perpetually long face, or the finger wagging cleric who confuses moralizing with evangelization. Moreover, there are a number of people in our congregations who would very much like whoever is preaching, i.e., bishop, priest, or deacon, to be a conduit of their own anger, to preach homilies that shame and emphasize sin, or barring that, liturgical trivialities. There are some who delight more in the prospect of divine justice than in news of the divine mercy; for an excessively merciful God seems to imply a free pass to outsiders–while we insiders practiced mortification and reformed our lives. 

But Jesus addressed this attitude in the New Testament, both in the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Mt 20, 1-16), but especially in the parable of the prodigal son, for those of us who identify with the older son who refused to celebrate the return of his brother–I get nothing for my “righteousness” while he gets a feast after wasting his inheritance on a life of debauchery. What we fail to understand in our resentment is that we are where we are not by virtue of anything we have done, but by the sheer mercy of God. In short, we tend to fall into Semi-Pelagianism without realizing it.[1] 

Hence, “Us vs. Them” dualisms have no place in the new covenant, for divine grace is operative in the world, outside the visible boundaries of the Church. The Second Vatican Council was very clear on this. The Council Fathers rejected a rigid fortress mentality that saw the secular world as devoid of grace, a worldview that was par for the course in the Pre-Vatican period. On the contrary, by virtue of the Incarnation, grace touches all human beings, cultures, and situations, invisibly drawing everyone towards salvation and truth. Gaudium et Spes taught that grace works invisibly in the hearts of all people of good will and is thus active in other religions and cultures. Any truth, goodness and beauty found in secular culture and non-Christian religions acts as a preparation for the gospel, disposing a person towards the good news of the gospel; for error cannot achieve that, only grace can dispose us to further graces–and anyone the least bit familiar with the writings of the Sufis, Sikhs, Hinduism or Zen Buddhism, to name only a few, knows that they are jam packed with profound wisdom, insight, and inspiration (it is in this light that Richard Bergeron’s Hors de l’Église, plein de salut can best be understood). Even the atheist who sincerely seeks the truth and follows his/her conscience is actually moved by grace and can attain eternal salvation by that very fact. [2] As Cardinal Newman pointed out, the voice of conscience is the voice of God within the deepest recesses of the soul; for conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ. For an atheist to revere the voice of his conscience is for him to respond reverently to the aboriginal vicar of Christ. 

Belonging to Christ is not a matter of holding to certain propositions; rather, it is a matter of responding to divine grace, and our response to grace is implicit and unconscious before it is explicit (Ann Ulanov). Although your response and my response to grace is explicit, not everyone’s response makes it to that level. In other words, some people love Christ without even knowing it. We know this is true because if, as St. Paul said, it is no longer you who live but Christ who lives in you, then it follows that if the atheist or the non-Christian loves you and loves what you stand for, that is, your commitment to truth, goodness, justice and the well-being of all, then they love Christ without explicitly knowing it. 

Notes

  1. Semi-Pelagianism is a 5th century heresy that basically taught that although God’s grace is necessary for salvation, the first step towards faith is taken by us, without the aid of divine grace. So yes, argues the Semi-Pelagian, I am in a state of grace by virtue of God’s free gift of grace, but I took the first step, and grace was rewarded to me for doing so. Hence, I get some credit for where I am. The Church rejects this outright, much to the chagrin of most Catholics upon discovering this for the first time. The faith of the Church is that I get no credit at all, that all credit and all glory belong to God. Indeed, I cooperated with divine grace, but my cooperation with divine grace was itself a grace. And so there is no part of divine grace that I have earned in any way. In the Person of Christ, the justice of God has been revealed precisely as divine mercy. I am justified, made just, not by my own religiosity and piety, but by grace, so that no one may boast, as St. Paul says. 
  2. “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” (LG, 16).

 

Ecstasy

Homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deacon Douglas McManaman

What stands out to me in this gospel is that Jesus is moved to compassion for the crowd that followed him. The Greek word used here suggests that it was a compassion felt from the very core of his intestines. You could say he was physically moved at the sight of the people looking for him.

The very word “conversion” implies a moving in a new direction, that is, away from oneself and towards the mystery of God. Everyone in this world is seeking. Everyone. But not everyone’s seeking has the same trajectory. There are two directions: the first involves a seeking to directly satisfy an emptiness within me, the self, which is the direction that is characteristic of hunger and thirst. When we hunger for food or what have you, we seek to satisfy the self; when thirsty, we seek to satisfy the self. Even the more lofty pleasures, such as the enjoyment of beautiful art, or the enjoyment of tropical weather, beautiful sights from travel to exotic places, all these things are good, they are the object of this kind of desire, and they satisfy to a certain degree. But the satisfaction just does not last. The reason it does not last is because it is a seeking to directly satisfy a kind of hunger within. The direction this desire takes is toward the self. 

But there is a seeking that has a somewhat different trajectory. It is a seeking whose direction is away from the self towards another. It involves a loss of self, a forgetting of self. It is very hard to convince people that this kind of seeking alone brings enduring satisfaction, but this is the meaning of ecstasy, which describes a joy that is out of this world. Ecstatic. It comes from the Greek word ekstasis, which means a displacement outside the self, a standing outside of oneself. The self is left behind, as it were. The result is an “other worldly” joy that comes upon a person without our knowing where it came from. It’s a joy we have no control over, that is, we have no dominion over it. There’s a sense in which it is larger than we are, it embraces us from all sides, like the womb that embraces the child within it. 

This is what Christ meant when he said anyone who saves his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. If our life is motivated primarily by desire of the first kind, in which we directly seek the satisfaction of the self on whatever level, we will lose it. We’ll never find rest. But Christ said: come to me all you who labor and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest. That begins with leaving ourselves behind and going in search of him, not for the sake of our own satisfaction, but because he is good, he is the divine mystery. He is the Incarnation of Goodness Itself. 

Those who came looking for Jesus did not make any provisions for themselves. They forgot about themselves. They went looking for Jesus in a deserted place, because that’s where he was, grieving the death of John the Baptist. It was evening and they had nothing to eat. The disciples were ready to send them off so that they could fend for themselves. But then Jesus tells his disciples not to make them fend for themselves, but “feed them yourselves”, he says. 

The disciples are all too aware of their limits. They don’t have enough to do what Jesus asked them to do. What they have is inadequate. So what does Jesus do? He tells them: give me the little you have and I’ll do the rest, and he feeds them. He takes care of those whose hearts are set on finding him; for they moved him to compassion. Their pain was his pain.

And that’s the lesson. There are people in this world who are seeking the Lord, and the Lord calls us to feed them, not ourselves, but them. However, in our minds we can’t. We don’t have what it takes. But our purpose is to feed one another. And that’s where we find Christ, the person we are looking for; we find him in those who are seeking, those who are hungry and destitute. They are all around us. A life of service alone brings ecstasy. Nothing else. We only find life, meaning, joy, etc., in a self-forgetting exit of self, and never in a seeking to directly satisfy the emptiness of the self–we’ll be seeking forever, without rest. 

But we will feel our inadequacy and inability to really do anything for anyone, because we’ll sense our own limitations, as the disciples did when Jesus told them to feed the 5000 with nothing but 5 loaves and 2 fish. But this is where he comes in. Give it to me, he says to us. He’ll do it. Those 5 loaves and 2 fish symbolize us, our limited ability, limited resources. In a spirit of faith and trust, we just give it to him and he’ll do the rest. He’ll work through us in such a way that others will think we did so much for them, but in our minds we will have done nothing at all.

So we are all called to be miracle workers. And we will be miracle workers, but we won’t know it. That’s the beauty of it. We won’t know it. Only in the end will it be revealed to us just how much we did for others, or more accurately, how much the Lord did for the world through our limited efforts.

 

Seeking God

Deacon Douglas McManaman

One of my favorite scriptural texts is from the book of Wisdom: 

Resplendent and unfading is Wisdom, and she is readily perceived by those who love her, and found by those who seek her. She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her; one who watches for her at dawn will not be disappointed, for she will be found sitting at the gate (6, 12-14).

Wisdom is depicted here as a female divine person, which itself has tremendous implications that I have neither the time or space to pursue here.[1] But it is said that she is quick to make herself known to those who desire her—she goes out to meet them immediately. In fact, to desire her is to have been found already. 

Now in this gospel, Jesus goes to a deserted place to be by himself, to grieve the death of John the Baptist, but soon he discovers that a crowd of people have gone in search of him. He is moved with compassion. The Greek word esplagchnisthe implies a compassion that is from the very core of the body; for the word is derived from splagchna, which means internal organs or intestines. This is a compassion that Jesus feels in his intestines. He is physically moved by those who seek him. The reason is that he is the incarnation of Wisdom (Sophia) who immediately goes out to meet those who seek her.

Not everyone in life is a seeker after the highest things, but the Lord’s compassion goes out to those who seek, who are aware of their hunger, their need, in particular, their need for him. The first beatitude in fact is about them: Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who recognize their utter need for God, who know that need and make it their prime purpose in life to find God. Those who lack the awareness of their own poverty do not seek, and because they do not seek, they do not find. We can only hope that one day they will come to know that interior poverty and begin seeking. 

But what are the seekers looking for? They’re looking for a person, and this means they are seeking a relationship. Religion is fundamentally relationship.[2] In fact, life is all about relationship; life’s meaning centers around relationship. For teenagers, relationship is everything. The number one cause of suicide is lack of relationship (loneliness).[3] Pleasure is fine, but outside of relationship, it is short lived and unsatisfying. Joy, which is different from pleasure, has something essentially to do with relationship. 

But even human relationships only go so far, because we are so imperfect. Our two greatest needs are to love and be loved, but we are loved imperfectly and we in turn love imperfectly, and the reason is that disordered love of self gets in the way. But we want to be loved perfectly and we would like to love perfectly, and that is why God created us for himself. As St. Augustine said on his first page of his Confessions: “You created us for yourself Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”. He loves us perfectly and the more we allow ourselves to be loved by him–which is not easy to do–, the more perfectly we will be able to love others in return. 

The crowd that was seeking Jesus went looking for him in a deserted place, since that’s where Jesus went. And that’s where we find him even today, in a deserted place, which is a place that most people seem to avoid and have no use for. There are two places in particular that are for the most part deserted. The first place is silence. Most people, it seems, cannot tolerate silence for any extended length of time, so they fill silent spaces with noise, usually music or television. But as Mother Teresa so often said: “God speaks in the silence of the heart”. The other deserted place where we find God is in the least of our brethren, that is, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry, the lonely, those who cannot give us much in return for the time we give them. If we want to move the heart of God, we only need to make our way to these deserted places. It’s something to be able to move the all powerful God to action. 

The disciples, however, are ready to send them off so that they can fend for themselves, for these people came without making proper provisions for themselves, which is sort of like how Jesus told the Apostles to be (Lk 10, 4). They didn’t think to prepare, that’s how focused they were on finding him. But Jesus tells his disciples: “feed them yourselves”, that is, don’t make them fend for themselves. 

Of course, the disciples are all too aware of their limits. They don’t have enough to achieve what Jesus asks of them. What they have is inadequate. So what does he do? He tells them to give him the little they have and he’ll do the rest, and he feeds them. 

And that’s the lesson. There are people in this world who are seeking the Lord, and the Lord calls us to feed them, but in our minds we can’t. We don’t have what it takes. But our purpose really is to feed one another, in particular those who come looking for the Lord, those who are in the world and searching. It’s not about waiting for them to come to us. We need the ability to figure out who among us in the world are the seekers. And when we find them and feel our inadequacy and inability to really do anything for them, we just give the Lord the little that we have in a spirit of faith and trust that he’ll do the rest. He’ll work through us in such a way that others will think we did so much for them–in our minds we’ll have done nothing at all. 

So we are all called to be miracle workers. And we will be miracle workers, but we won’t know it. That’s the beauty of it. We won’t know it. Only in the end will it be revealed to us just how much we did for others, or better yet, how much the Lord did for the world through our limited efforts.

Notes

  1. “…if He was the warrior and the women blent into the unity of a new creation in whom there was neither male nor female because He had worked out within Himself that higher human harmony of both in which their age-long creative discord is destined finally to be resolved, that harmony was no easy miracle. In this, as always, He learned obedience by things that He suffered, and worked out His harmony as we must, after His example, work out ours, using the sex relationship and the poignancy of its appeal as one of our chiefest means of grace. It is in this perfect unity in Him of the Warrior and the Woman that I find the keystone to the quality of His life. He was the man woman, the mother father, the creative warrior complete.” G. Studdert Kennedy. The Warrior, the Woman and the Christ: A Study of the Leadership of Christ. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1929, pp. 159-161. Also, Julian of Norwich writes: “I saw that the Second Person, who is our Mother in essence, that same dearworthy Person has become our Mother in flesh. … the Second Person of the Trinity is our Mother in human nature in our essential creation. In Him we are grounded and rooted, and he is our Mother in mercy by taking on our fleshliness. And thus our Mother is to us various kinds of actions (in Whom our parts are kept unseparated) for in our Mother Christ, we benefit and grow,…” Revelations of Divine Love. Trans. Father John Julian. Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2011. Reading 140.
  2. “Religion is the relationship between God and human beings. We can think about God in various ways, but it is perhaps most appropriate to view God as the foundation of the universe; and by “human beings” I am referring to our individual consciousnesses. Various religions come into being in accordance with different ways of thinking about the relationship between God and humans. But what sort of relationship is the true religious relationship? …William Robertson Smith stated that religion does not emerge from fear of an unknowable power but from loving reverence for a God who has a blood relationship with oneself. Religion is not an individual’s optional relation with a supernatural power, but a communal relationship between members of a society and the power that maintains the peace and order of the society. At the base of all religions must be a relationship between God and humans in which they share the same nature-that is, a relationship like that between father and child. But for God and the human to share the same losses and gains and for God to save and protect us is not yet true religion. God must be the foundation of the universe and our own foundation as well. To take refuge in God is to take refuge in that foundation. God must also be the goal of the myriad things in the universe and therefore the goal of humans as well. Each person finds in God his or her own true goal. Just as the hands and feet are parts of the human, the human is a part of God. Our taking refuge in God seems in a certain respect to be a loss of the self, but in another respect it is the way we find the self. …God is the source of life, and we live only in God. In this respect alone is religion filled with life and does the feeling of true piety arise. If we merely resign and entrust ourselves to God, then we have yet to rid ourselves of the scent of the self and to realize the heart of true piety. That one finds the true self in God might be seen as emphasizing the self, but this is actually the reason for abandoning the self and praising God. Kitaro Nishida. An Inquiry Into The Good. London: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 153-154.
  3. Harry Stack Sullivan writes: “loneliness in itself is more terrible than anxiety.” See Harry Stack Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (W. W. Norton & Co., 1953), p. 262. Ann Ulanov writes: “Without lovingness released into human relationship, we suffer a deep loneliness that drives us into madness. In defense against that loneliness where we receive neither self nor other, we resort to polarization. Rather than preserve the tensions of agreement and difference, the similarities and dissimilarities of female and male sexuality, we either split them into opposing polarizations or substitute divisive politicizations for them”. Ulanov, Ann Belford. Receiving Woman – Studies in the Psychology and Theology of the Feminine. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981. Kindle Edition. 

 

A More Sober View of Priesthood

by: Deacon Douglas McManaman

I was driving home from visiting one of my brothers in a town north of Toronto and noticed an article by Janet Smith about the nephew (Kevin Wells) of the priest who, when I was 17 years old and hitchhiking with my 5-String banjo to Nashville, TN, gave me a lift from Columbus, Ohio and took me to Erlanger, Kentucky (Monsignor Tom Wells). I asked my wife to read it to me in the car while I was driving.

I found that I did not agree with either of them in what they were writing (re: priests who belong to the SSPX). But a memory returned to me while the article was being read to me, a memory that contains what I believe is an important point about the priesthood that I think is more relevant today than years earlier. I remember complaining to Father Wells about the priests in Canada, that they are not like him and how ridiculous it was that for me to return to the Church, I had to be placed on a highway outside of Columbus, Ohio to encounter a priest who was driving from Washington DC on his way to Kentucky, because between Toronto and Nashville, there just weren’t any around to do the job that Father Wells was able to do. That was the general idea of what I was saying to him, if I remember correctly. In any case, what I do clearly remember is that he disagreed with me. And he was adamant. He said to me: “That was a graced moment”. He kept objecting and insisting that the two or three hour period in the car on the way to Kentucky was a graced moment.

Yes, I thought, it was indeed a graced moment, but I didn’t quite understand how that was inconsistent with the point I was making. It took some years for me to get the point–probably because I was blinded by “hero worship”, which in Jungian terms is the projection of the Hero archetype from my own unconscious mind to an individual person, in this case, Kevin’s uncle, Monsignor Tom Wells. He knew something about himself that I did not. What was that? Well, in my eyes Father Wells was larger than life, as all heroes are, but he knew better. He knew that he was not larger than life, and that what resulted from that car ride was the result of divine grace (a graced moment), not Father Wells. In other words, grace was present in me in such a way that I was disposed to see and understand things that were happening on a different level–Father Wells may not have even been aware that anything was happening on another level–in fact, given his delight at the marvels of divine providence months later, it is probably the case that he wasn’t. He was just driving the car, answering my questions to the best of his ability, most importantly relating to me at an eye to eye level (no condescension, pretension, nor airs), being the generous and joyful guy that he was. Had it not been a graced moment, had I not been disposed a certain way by that grace while Father Wells remained the same joyful and generous priest that he was, then life would have gone on and I would not have returned to the Church but would probably be playing in some Bluegrass band somewhere in the U.S. Father Wells had no power to change me, and he knew it. He knew it because he said that he in fact was not responsible for my return to the Church. Grace was. God can use anyone. As Jesus said: “I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham” (Mt 3, 9). He chose to use Father Wells as an instrument, but God could have used anybody. The instrument certainly has some importance–you can’t pick up a watermelon with a plastic fork–, but without the disposition brought about by divine grace–which depends entirely on the will of God at the moment according to the plan of providence–, that journey to Nashville would have been no different than any other journey.

And this is the problem I had with the title of Kevin’s book that I reviewed years ago: The Priests We Need to Save the Church. I was uncomfortable with the title, but decided not to give it too much thought at the time nor mention it to him. But the Church does not need saving. The Church is Holy and Immaculate, because She has been saved by Christ, and there are no priests who are going to save anyone, much less the Church. Any ordained priest who thinks he is going to save anyone is suffering from a bad case of grandiosity. This is why I no longer have the patience to read certain conservative Catholic journals–because most if not all of their writers seem to believe that they are vessels of truth that the world and the Church desperately need. In short, they are delusional. They are no more vessels of truth than your typical columnist from the National Catholic Reporter–and there are some very good writers there.

In the past, shortly after my return to the Church in 1979, there were days when leaving the church after mass I said to myself: “What a pathetic homily!”, when not even 10 seconds later I see a man going up to the pastor to say: “That was a great homily, Father. It touched me deeply”. Many times I thought a particular pastor was a dud, only to learn later how many other people in the parish thought otherwise and how much he did for them. Recently I was out with someone who has quite a harrowing life story, a tremendous near death experience, and in his mind the parish he belongs to is feeding him like there’s no tomorrow and he does not want to move. I didn’t dare tell him what I know about the parish and the pastor. Obviously, the Lord is doing something for these people, despite their pastor and his refusal to take advantage of all the gifted people ready to serve. He’s a stifler, but as Father Wells would say, “God is in control”, and He knows what He’s doing in allowing this, that, and the other thing. But his pastor is certainly not responsible for the good that seems to be happening outside of my purview, any more than a wrench is responsible for my new car’s smooth and reliable performance.

I move some people with my homilies and leave others unmoved, and my priest friends will move others and leave many unsatisfied. We are not all alike, not all at the same place, and certainly not all “spiritually starved”. No parish needs me, and Father Wells would certainly agree that no parish needed him. They need Christ, and I’m not Christ, and neither is he. I’m a very limited human being with a very limited grasp on things, and some people may benefit from my particular way of doing things, but not everyone. And I am certainly not going to be responsible for the salvation of anyone’s soul. God alone will be. In fact, my efforts at saving anyone may very well do more harm than good if those efforts are accompanied by inordinate zeal. And looking back at my life, I do often shake my head at myself, but God must know that at every stage of my life, I’m profoundly limited and continually make mistakes. Why? Because He knows everything. More than that, He is all powerful, so He can and will accomplish all that He wants. So why would I worry? And why are any of us worrying? Why do so many of us behave like a bunch of frantic neurotics with a seriously flawed Manichean worldview that to us appears as orthodoxy? How many times did Jesus say: “Don’t worry”? Did he not say “Take heart, I have overcome the world” (Jn 16, 33)? Young priests fresh out of the seminary have not been chosen to save the Church. After 40 or more years in the priesthood, if they’ve learned anything at all, they are going to look back and say to themselves: “I knew nothing. I was not the slightest bit superior to anyone, and looking back I have to thank so many people for putting up with my obnoxious delusions rooted in the inexperience that is part and parcel of youth. The problem is I can’t, because most of them are dead and buried”.

 

Go forth, the Mass is ended!

Deacon Douglas McManaman

I received a text about the closing remarks of an Archbishop of a major U.S. city. A number of people were rather upset that the Archbishop would point to the altar and say to the congregation: “The consecration is not the most important part of the Mass, but rather the “sending forth”. I was asked to comment.

My first reaction was that this is a strange thing to be upset about; after all, the word ‘Mass’ is from the Latin missa, which means “dismissal” or, as the bishop indicated, “sending forth” (from the Latin verb mittere: to send, to discharge, to release). My friend took issue with my reply and began to argue: “Why not just do social work? Forget the Church and the “silly Eucharist”, he said. “It’s not that important anyways, at least not as much as sending forth”.

But the Archbishop did not say that the consecration is not important. Moreover, the movement outwards can hardly be classified as “social work”. Archbishop Romero, for example, was hardly a social worker; neither could Mother Teresa be classified as such, nor Mother Cabrini, Don Bosco or St. Vincent de Paul, etc. It seems to me, however, that there is a tendency among some clergy and laity to reduce Catholicism to the sanctuary. And this seems to be a perennial problem. In the early 20th century, English poet and chaplain of the British Army during WW1 G. Studdert Kennedy wrote:

The cry that is often raised, that we are going to secularize religion and take the clergy away from their purely “spiritual work”, is the cry of the man who dare not face the Cross. He wants to keep his Christ forever standing amid the lilies of the altar, with the sweet incense of worship rising around him, a weekly refuge from the distraught and vulgar world. He wants to lock Christ up in the Tabernacle, to keep Him in the silence of the secret place, where men must go down on their knees before they touch Him. But Christ wants to come out into the market-place, and down to the streets; He wants to eat and drink with prostitutes, to be mocked and spit upon by soldiers. He wants to call the dishonest trader from his office desk; to stand at his lathe beside the workman; and to bend with the mother over the washtub in the city of mean streets. He wants to go out into the world, that beauty and goodness and truth – beautiful things, good people, and true thought – may grow up around Him wherever He goes. You cannot keep Christ in your churches; He will break them into pieces if you try. He will make for the streets in spite of you, and go on with His own work; defying dead authorities, breaking down tyrannies, destroying shams, declaring open war against a Godless world. And wherever He goes the true Church will go with Him – the Church of those who are forgiven because they are bearing the sins of the world, and have learned how to forgive.

For me, that says it all and says it best. The Archbishop is simply emphasizing the fact that the Mass is ordered outwards, towards the world. The bread and wine that we offer becomes Christ in order that we become Christ, so that when we are sent out, we may bring Christ into the world, and that sending forth includes the priest who says Mass. In other words, it is not a matter of “you go forth” while “I stay here” among the lilies and the incense–although some very conservative clergy argue that “going forth” is for the laity only, while the priest remains inside. Things haven’t changed all that much since the 1920s. Whoever becomes Christ after consuming him will be moved to go out into the market-place, not to shop for dainty pastries and other fine delicacies, but to “eat and drink with prostitutes”, to mix it up with those whom Christ redeemed. Not everyone is so moved: “I don’t want to smell like sheep” protested one priest to a fellow Deacon, upset that Pope Francis would ever suggest such a thing.

The Mass is a beginning, not an ending; it is a means, and a means is subordinated to the end, which in this case is the “Christification” of the world, or rather the universe as a whole. The consecration is the beginning of that Christification of ordinary matter. The Mass is a movement, and the most important part of a movement is the final cause. This has to be emphasized for those who would like everything to revolve around the sanctuary, as though what takes place there is the sole purpose of the Christian life.