Uncategorized

First Things First

Homily for The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
Deacon Douglas McManaman

In the first Reading, we find ourselves back in the desert. Moses calls attention to the experience of the Israelites: “Remember how for forty years now the Lord, your God, has directed all your journeying in the desert, so as to test you by affliction…” (Deut 8, 2). It was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who led them out into and through the desert: a pillar of fire by night, a pillar of cloud by day. And they had to experience the hunger and thirst of living in the desert wilderness because they had to learn to depend on God. And this is a hard lesson to learn. But the Lord leads all of us, at certain points in our lives, out into the desert wilderness in order that we may learn to depend on Him, to allow him to lead.

Many of us, however, have a very real fear that “if I give my finger to God, he’s going to take my whole hand”. And so, we hold back, unwilling to surrender our entire selves. For many of us it takes a lifetime to learn to give God not just our hand, but our entire body. In the meantime, He does allow us to see what happens when we have Him take a back seat while we take the lead. Imagine if the Israelites were to lead themselves out of Egypt and through the desert. Would they have made it to the land of promise, the land of Canaan? No, they would not have. God has to lead because of three important factors: 1) He is all powerful, which means he can do whatever he wants. Nothing limits God; 2) He’s all knowing, so He knows what is best for us and what conditions need to be in place for us to achieve that end; and 3) He wills the best for us, which is what it means to say that God is Love. He wills our greatest good and happiness, and He knows better than we do what constitutes our greatest happiness and precisely how to bring it about, and He has the power to bring it about, but not without our cooperation. He won’t force himself upon us; for love is not love unless it is freely given, and friendship is a two-way street. He offers us His friendship and waits for our response. And God is patient; He will wait our entire lives if He has to.

So, we have to allow Him to lead, but we are creatures of habit, and we are afraid. That is why He allows us to taste the lifelessness and desolation of the wilderness, which is life as it eventually becomes when we choose to take charge. But we cannot lead, because we are not all knowing, and we are profoundly limited and vulnerable, for all of us are just one freak accident from paralysis and becoming completely dependent upon the care of others or from ending up on the street. But for some strange reason, that isn’t obvious to most people. They seem to believe that such things couldn’t happen to them.

The manna with which God fed Israel in the desert is of course a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. The message is simple: If we don’t eat, we die. I remember watching the 2004 film Supersize Me. The director of this film decides to subsist on food from the McDonald’s menu for an entire month. Soon his energy level drops and he begins to experience horrible side effects. I don’t mean to put down McDonald’s–I think they have the best coffee and fast food is very convenient at times. But notice what happens when he goes from a healthy diet to a steady diet of food that is meant only to have occasionally.

For me, the parallel is obvious. We cannot feed sporadically on the Bread of Life. The Eucharist has to be our staple. It is the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ, in the act of sacrificing himself to God the Father. We are fed on Christ himself. He is our food. If we neglect that food and instead choose to feed on other things in this world that are good, just not Christ, like entertainment, travel, trips to exotic places, fine cuisine, etc., gradually our spiritual energy level plummets. These things cannot sustain us. We were created for the Bread of Life, Christ himself. Without a steady diet of the Eucharist, we slowly die.

The spiritual life must be first; God must be first; Christ must be first; the Bread of Life must be first. God will take care of the rest. He said it himself: “Don’t worry about what you are to eat and what you are to drink and what you are to wear; seek first the kingdom of God and all these other things will be provided” (Mt 6, 33).

God will lead us through turbulent waters and through the heat of the desert, towards the land of promise. But we must make an act of the will, a commitment to stay the course despite how we feel on certain days, an act of the will to allow him to lead in our married lives, and in our work, so that our work becomes his work, no matter what that is, whether that’s cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors or high finance. It all has dignity because it is work and work is holy.

When we consume the Eucharist, we become what we eat. We become Christ. What this means is that when we leave the parish Church and enter back into our homes and into the world of work, we bring Christ into the home and into the world. A home with Christ in it is a peaceful home, and it is through us that Christ is in the world. And if it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me (Gal 2, 20), then the way others relate to me and you is the way they relate to Christ, and that becomes their salvation, no matter what religion they are (Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, or no religion at all). In relating to you, who have become Christ in consuming his body and blood, they relate to Christ without necessarily being aware of it. And if they love you, they love Christ without even knowing it.

 

 

An Important Note for My Students Regarding the Use of ChatGPT

Douglas McManaman

Recently I came across a journal assignment that had an opening sentence that was word for word identical to that of another student. I mentioned this to my daughter and she just smiled. She said: ChatGPT. I asked her to explain to me how this works, so she took one of my journal assignments that my students are required to complete and showed me how it is done, by actually inputting the url links to the articles I had assigned and the questions I wanted them to cover. Lo and behold, a very well written journal assignment that summarizes an article that I wrote, as well as an article from a recent pope, and which incorporates answers to the questions I assigned. The AI product even included a line that began with: “I learned that…”, a line that I see very often from my students.

Now, I have no problem with students using AI in order to procure basic information–I will often use it myself to summarize a book that I am interested in purchasing, to see if I want to pursue the book further. The problem with using ChatCPT to do an assignment for you, however, is fundamentally a moral problem, and a serious one at that. I’d like to explain this, because for some reason, I had a difficult time getting my daughter to understand this, which made me wonder whether some of my students would also have the same difficulty. 

So, allow me to make two points. The first is that using ChatCPT to complete an assignment for you is really no different than having someone do your homework, essay, or journal for you. In short, it is a matter of cheating, which in turn is a matter of lying. This brings me to my next point: you and I determine our moral identity, our character, by the moral choices that we make. Moral character is not the same as one’s personality. Character describes the kind of person that you are, the kind of person that you have made yourself to be by the moral choices you have made and continue to make in your life. So, a person can have a very nice personality, but bad moral character–he or she might be a liar, which is a person who cannot be trusted. And I become a liar by choosing to lie, or a thief by choosing to take something that does not belong to me, or a killer by actually killing someone, or an adulterer by choosing to commit adultery, etc. 

What frightens me about students who use ChatGPT to complete a journal assignment that involves reading an article and/or watching a video is that they are becoming liars, persons who cannot be trusted. Now, this is a problem because every moral choice we make comes back to us in the end, either to bless us or curse us. It was always a challenge to get my young grade 9 students to understand the harm they do to themselves when they lie–sure, they often get away with it, but the deficiency in their character which their choice brought about stays with them until they make a choice inconsistent with their previous lie–which is what it means to repent, that is, to have a change of heart. But it is disconcerting to think that some adults, not all, need to have this pointed out to them. One’s character is one’s “heart” (the will), and so a good character is a good heart. I’ve always said to my students that character is everything. Our eternal destiny is determined by our character, and the more I go on in life, the more I see that the problems of this world for the most part boil down to matters of character. There is so much suffering in this life as a result of deficient moral character. What is at the root of failed marriages? Very often it’s a matter of bad character, i.e, someone’s infidelity, or impatience, or taking oneself too seriously, selfishness, etc. What is at the root of traffic jams? Often it is a matter of construction, but too often it is a matter of a serious vehicle accident up ahead, which in turn was the result of impatience, which is a moral vice–someone was in too much of a hurry and was driving recklessly. No need to spell out the root causes of war, poverty and hunger. Everything we do comes back to us in the end. Eastern religions referred to this as karma, which is a teaching that expresses a universal experience.

The purpose of an assignment, in my case a religion assignment, is to have my students acquire the knowledge and intellectual disposition that they will need in the classroom, in order to create the conditions in their own classrooms that will allow students to question further and build on what we give them, which often leads to new avenues to explore and new insights. All this gets thwarted when we choose to use AI tools to do the work for us.



Is Francis Responsible for the Current Decline in Vocations?

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Some errors seem to never go away. I refer, in particular, to those that result from reasoning on the basis of statistical data. Last year I took it upon myself to challenge a particular priest, one rather averse to Pope Francis, who wrote that vocations to the priesthood began to drop in 2013, the year that Cardinal Bergoglio became pope. The implication, of course, is that Francis’ papacy is uninspiring to others, unlike that of John Paul II or Benedict XVI, and is the reason for the drop in vocations. Since then, I have come across that very claim more than once, from conservative Catholic writers who should know better. 

For years I’ve maintained that inductive reasoning and, more specifically, plausibility theory is far more important for seminarians than classical Aristotelian logic–not to suggest that the latter can be neglected. A rigorous course in statistics would go a long way as well. However, statistics courses typically do not allot enough time for students to think about the epistemological implications of statistical principles; for I have watched young students, after a full semester of statistics, go on to embrace the most statistically erroneous claims of applied postmodernism (critical whiteness theory, why police should be defunded, the pay gap between male and female soccer players, etc.). Students need time to ponder the implications for knowledge, especially the knowledge implications of analysis of variance (ANOVA), but they are not given the opportunity because strictly speaking, that takes us outside the realm of mathematical statistics, and time is short. Moreover, it is always a temptation to engage in “intuitive statistics”, for it is effortless, but as Daniel Kahneman showed, even professional statisticians, when engaging in “intuitive statistics” (outside the office), tend to make the same errors that non-professionals make regularly. 

The inference that Pope Francis is the reason for the decline in vocations, given that the decline began in 2013, the year he became pope, is rooted in a very basic inductive error. Informal logic refers to this as the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). To achieve reasonable probability, there are so many variables that we would have to control for in order to properly discern the relationship between the independent and dependent variables in this case (i.e., the Francis papacy [independent variable] and the drop in vocations [dependent variable]). The reason for the need to test rigorously is that this reasoning by itself is invalid:

If p (independent variable), then q (dependent variable)
q (dependent variable)
Therefore, p

Using real terms, one easily sees the invalidity of this form:

If I get Covid 19 (p), then I will come down with a fever (q)
I have come down with a fever (q).
Therefore, I got Covid 19. 

Not at all, for there are a number of possible hypotheses that can account for the fever. Similarly, there are many factors that are involved in the decline in vocations—an obvious one is birth control. People are having fewer children. That itself is going to be a significant factor in fewer men entering the seminary, and we know that vocations arise out of the family, and the family has been in decline since the late 1960s. We would have to look back at least 30 years before the time Cardinal Bergoglio became pope, which takes us to the 1980s, a time when shows that mocked traditional family life were beginning to become popular, i.e., Married with Children, and later Dawson’s Creek, etc. This period was followed by the nihilism of the 90s, which was skeptical of the very possibility of moral adulthood (I.e., Seinfeld, Family Guy, etc.). Other factors to consider are the state of our parishes in the 1980s and onwards, the quality of preaching perhaps, the sex abuse scandals, the general lack of outreach to youth at the parish level, lack of missionary zeal among complacent clergy, the tenor of postmodern culture, especially in the university environment, the relatively high level of prosperity in society, etc. Thirty years of these and other factors would inevitably take their toll on vocations in the West. In this light, it is highly unlikely that the principal factor for the decline in vocations was Francis’ papacy.  

So, either these claimants have forgotten the statistics they allege to have studied, or like the vast majority of those who had to take statistics, they did not spend sufficient time pondering the epistemological implications of the mathematics of probability–or, they are simply engaging in “intuitive statistics” and are too blinded by their aversion towards Pope Francis to notice the unwarranted nature of their conclusion.