christianity | A Catholic Philosophy and Theology Resource Page by Deacon Douglas McManaman

The Evolution of the Temple

Homily for the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome
Deacon Douglas McManaman

In the first reading, Ezekiel has a vision of the temple of Jerusalem, where water was flowing from below the threshold toward the east, from the right side. The water gives life to whatever it touches. But we know from the gospel reading that the temple of Jerusalem foreshadows the true temple, which is the temple of Jesus’ body, from whose right side water flowed as a result of the open wound caused by the centurion’s lance. And that water from his side symbolizes baptism, which brings to life all who are immersed therein.

And so we’ve gone from the temple made of stone to the living temple of Christ’s body. But the second reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians takes this even further. He says: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (3, 16). You and I are temples of the Holy Spirit because we have put on Christ, as Paul says in Galatians: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ” (3, 27).

And so we’ve gone from the temple of Jerusalem, made of stone, which will eventually be destroyed, to the temple of Christ’s body, which was destroyed but restored in his resurrection, to the faithful, each one of whom is the temple of the Holy Spirit. But, it does not stop there. Jesus not only houses himself in the baptized, he houses himself in all those who suffer, as we read in the Parable of the Last Judgment: I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, thirsty and you gave me something to drink, lonely and in prison and you visited me. When did we see you this way? As long as you did this to the least of my brethren, you did it to me (Mt 25, 31-46).

As Mother Teresa never tired of saying, Jesus disguises himself in the poor and suffering. They house Christ without their knowing it necessarily, and they are all around us. And not everyone who belongs to Christ is explicitly aware of the fact, and not everyone who explicitly belongs to the visible Church actually does so, for Christ said it himself: “Did we not prophecy in your name, cast out demons in your name? …go away from me, I never knew you; I do not know where you come from” (See Mt 7, 21-23; Lk 13, 27).

Desecration of the temple incensed Jesus because desecration was rooted in a failure to discern the sacred, and that spiritual blindness was caused by the greed of the money changers. And what angers Jesus today is the same failure to see and discern the sacred (himself) in the suffering, the struggling, ordinary human persons who have lost their social standing. We don’t have to take “poor”, “thirsty”, and “in prison” literally. These terms include the sick who are poor in health, and all those oppressed at work by an emotionally abusive boss or a toxic workplace environment, or those oppressed by a mental illness, or a lonely elderly person virtually abandoned by his or her family, or a teenager who feels alienated and estranged from parents going through a divorce, or alienated by an alcoholic father or mother, and so on. Christ is housed by the suffering of this world because he identifies with them, and that’s what love does. And if this is true, it follows that a hospital room, for example, is holy ground. I know of one priest who was so convinced of this that he would take off his shoes when visiting the sick in hospital. A classroom of young students is holy ground as well; a prison cell is holy ground, and so too a street shelter. Wherever we encounter suffering human beings, we have found Christ. A Carmelite biblical scholar recently mentioned to me that when he was in the city, he gave some money to a person living on the street, who responded by calling out to him: “God bless you”. This priest is emphatic that this man’s blessing has greater significance than if it were a blessing from the Pope himself.

Speaking of which, Pope Leo XIV, in a recent homily, said that “we must dream of and build a more humble Church; a Church that does not stand upright like the Pharisee, triumphant and inflated with pride, but bends down to wash the feet of humanity; a Church that does not judge as the Pharisee does the tax collector, but becomes a welcoming place for all; a Church that does not close in on itself, but remains attentive to God so that it can similarly listen to everyone. Let us commit ourselves to building a Church that is entirely synodal, ministerial and attracted to Christ and therefore committed to serving the world” (30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 26 October, 2025). Amen.

The Widow’s Joy

Deacon Douglas McManaman

In this gospel (Lk 7, 11-17), Jesus does what he does best and what he enjoys doing most, which is to raise the dead to life. Some people like playing golf; some people like going fishing, some like camping, but Jesus, he likes raising the dead to life. He raised a 12 year old girl (the daughter of Jairus), he raised Lazarus from the dead, and in this gospel today he raised the only son of the widow of Nain. And he raises us from the dead as well: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our sins, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with him,…” (Eph 2, 4-5).

Consider too that if a person is dead, he or she cannot do anything to earn that resurrection or help in the process; for he’s dead. So, if we are raised (justified), we who were dead in our sins, it was not as a result of anything we might have done. It was all his doing. That’s the God we worship, and that’s the good news. Everything is sheer gift. We don’t have to earn anything. We can’t earn anything. We just have to receive it, which can be difficult. It is difficult to open ourselves up to God’s generosity; we don’t feel we deserve it, and of course we don’t, but that’s besides the point. It’s not about us, but about his love for us. In the letter to the Colossians, we read: “And even when you were dead in transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims,…he removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross” (2, 13-15).

This is important because we have a tendency to slip back into the legalism that forgiveness is conditional upon what we do. But we are not saved by our works; we are saved by Christ’s generosity, his initiative, his incarnation and death on the cross. All our transgressions have been obliterated. The prison doors have been unlocked–we are free to go. No charges are hovering over and against us. If we could only believe that good news, our lives would change radically; we’d be living in the joy of Easter. Confession is not the sacrament in which we suddenly receive the forgiveness that was previously not there; rather, we are given the grace to open ourselves up to the forgiveness that has always been there. It is not God who has a hard time forgiving us; we have a very hard time believing that we’ve been forgiven, and the reason is our awareness that if we were in God’s place, we’d likely forgive very few people, until they earned it in some way. Our limited love keeps us from receiving God’s forgiveness of ourselves. Incidentally, that is why some people would like me or whoever is preaching to preach hard, for they would like the preacher to be a conduit of their anger at the world. That is the kind of Pope some Catholics today would like to see as well.

But this is a clue to the difference between the saint and the non-saint. It’s not that the one is so holy and the other is not. No, the saints have a profound awareness of their own sinfulness, like the tax collector we heard about last week (Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner), and they admit it–the saint would not think for a second that he or she is a cut above anyone. The difference is that the saint believes the good news and receives it, allows himself or herself to be touched by it.

There won’t be any sense that we deserve heaven nor any sense that we will be given our rightful due. That wouldn’t be heaven; it is much better than that. Heaven is unimaginable gratitude and joy, and a pale image of that joy might be the joy that the widow received in getting back her only son from the dead. Just consider the pain of losing your only child, and then your child is restored to you. That’s a small taste of the joy of heaven. Think of the sadness we felt after losing someone we were close to: a sibling, a parent, grandparent, a son, daughter, or close friend. We are all going to experience such a loss if we haven’t already, but the good news is that all that we lost will be restored to us. Their happiness, the happiness of those who have died but whom we will see again, will be our own happiness. And our love for God will be made perfect, and so God’s happiness will be our own as well, and if our love for God is perfected, our love for all who belong to him (everyone) will be perfected, and then their happiness will also become our own. It is just not possible to get our heads around the joy that awaits us. This life is precisely about preparing for the joy of heaven, but we prepare for this joy by expanding our capacity to be loved and our capacity to love.

The first reading from Wisdom (3, 1-9) mentions the furnace and the dross. That’s kind of what suffering does to us in our lives, similar to the furnace burning off the dross so that in the end, we are left with pure gold. Human beings seem to be at their worst in times of prosperity, but we are at our best in times of suffering, which is why God allows suffering to enter our lives, that is, in order to shape us, like a blacksmith shapes the iron, by heating and pounding it into a beautiful sword, or whatever is he is making. So when we find ourselves engulfed in darkness and despair, like the widow of Nain would have experienced at the death of her only son, we need to keep in mind that sunrise always follows the darkness and a joy we cannot conceive will soon be ours.

Is Everyone in Heaven a Taoist?

Deacon Douglas McManaman

A short video clip of Father Dan Reehil was shared with me on Facebook recently. In this short segment he said that a woman in his last parish asked him about her mother who had died, but was a Baptist, not a Catholic–she was inquiring about her mother’s soul. Father Reehil said although she did her best in life, raised her kids well, ultimately we really don’t know where she is, she might be in purgatory, which is why we pray for the deceased. But then he said to her: “Well you know, everybody who is in heaven is Catholic”. The woman became angry at this and said: “Well, my mother was not Catholic”. He replied to her: “Well she is now if she’s there. It’s not a question of that section is for the baptists and that section is for the Lutherans, and the Calvinists are at the back, and the Catholics get the front row seats. No. When you go to heaven, you embrace everything that’s true. And the fullness of it is in this Church that Jesus founded”.

Half truths are dangerous, and I believe this might be an instance of a half truth. I can’t help but feel terribly disappointed at having to witness what appears to be an “ecumenically challenged” priest continue to perpetuate a sectarian “us and them” cast of mind, despite his failed attempt to transcend religious tribalism (by insisting there are no denominational sections in heaven). There is one point he made, however, that is indisputable, and that is when we get to heaven, we embrace everything that is true. It would have been nice had he ended there. For if it is the case that in heaven we embrace everything that is true, that would suggest that in heaven everyone is also a Taoist, and everyone a Sikh; everyone is a Hindu, and everyone a Jew, Muslim and Catholic, and so on. We could also say that everyone is Lutheran, for we will embrace everything that Luther got right. But we would also embrace everything that Roman Catholicism got right. If one insists that Roman Catholicism got everything right and has no need of further development, then I think it is safe to say that one has not studied enough Church history.

Nevertheless, Father Reehil proceeds to assert that the fullness of “it” (truth) is in this Church that Jesus founded, pointing to his own. The difficulty is knowing precisely what that means. For some people it means that “whatever you have—all you who are outside the Roman Catholic Church—, we have too, but you on the outside don’t have what we have”. The idea is that “when you get to heaven, you will keep what you have that is true and good, which we already have, but you will get what you did not have before, and so you will realize that we were right all along”, or words to that effect. To be fair, it is not clear whether Father Reehil would take that step, but too many Catholics do.

Instead of this line of thought, I would like to submit the following: those who are not Christian, but who are in heaven, indeed embraced or possessed Christ in the first place–or better yet, were and are possessed by Christ–, for Christ is the Logos, the eternal Word uttered by the First Person of the Trinity, and divine grace is the indwelling of the Trinity, and there is no entering into the kingdom of God except through grace. Hence, they died in a state of grace. And to possess Christ (or be held by him), even without one’s explicit awareness, is to possess the fullness of truth, because Christ is that fullness (Jn 14, 6), and one need not be explicitly a Christian to love and seek the truth. But to seek him is to have been found by him who is always searching for us–which is the reason anyone seeks him in the first place. In the 2nd century, St. Justin Martyr wrote:

Christ is the Logos [Divine Word] of whom the whole race of men partake. Those who lived according to Logos are Christians, even if they were considered atheists, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus.

Also writing in the 2nd century was St. Irenaeus who wrote:

There is one and the same God the Father and His Logos, always assisting the human race, with varied arrangements, to be sure, and doing many things, and saving from the beginning those who are saved, for they are those who love and, according to their generation (genean) follow His Logos.

One problem with the tribal “we’re right, the rest of you are wrong” model is that if I (the Catholic) were to possess all the knowledge that you possess, but more, then dialogue is unnecessary. All that is needed is a lecture from me, so that you can learn from me–but I could learn nothing theologically significant from you, for dialogue presupposes that there are two of us who are in need of rising to a higher space in which we both are enlarged and enhanced. Hence, dialogue can be nothing more than a sham.

But ecumenical dialogue is not a sham. We learn from everyone, and we believe that the Church, which is much larger than the Roman tradition and embraces the Eastern traditions and includes the entire fellowship of believers (i.e., non-Catholics), is Christ’s Mystical Body. This means that the Church is intimately joined to Christ. But it is Christ “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2, 3), not me, a Catholic. Every member of the pilgrim Church is “on the way”, growing and learning, yet at every moment each one of us is limited by time and geography. It is also the case that at every moment Christ, the fullness of truth, gives himself to the Church, in his Eucharistic self-offering, and so there is a sense in which I possess that fullness, since Christ has given himself to me. At the same time, however, I am unable to appropriate all that Christ is, in all his fullness, by virtue of my own limitations—I get so many things wrong throughout my life. And this is the case with every member of Christ’s Mystical Body.

So, has Christ not given all of himself to the Baptist, the Lutheran, the Episcopalian, and Presbyterian, etc., as well, all of whom have entered into the tomb of Christ and risen with him, through their baptism? Of course he has, for every time I pick up something written by George MacDonald, for example, I am made so much better. And the same is the case when I get to learn from Robert Farrar Capon, G. Studdert Kennedy, Jurgen Moltmann, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse and Ann Belford Ulanov, Christoph F. Blumhardt, Thomas Allin, Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, James Cone, Gerhard O. Forde, Samuel Terrien, Phyllis Trible, and so many more who are not Roman Catholic. We’d all be so much less without them.

Discerning Personhood: A Reflection on the Leper Who Returns

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Only one out of the ten who were cured of leprosy returned to thank Jesus. This is not to suggest that the other nine were without any gratitude–it is hard to imagine that anyone who knew the isolation and poverty of a life with leprosy in the first century could be lacking in gratitude for getting his life back. Who knows what their response was later on in their lives? But the one who did return to offer thanks clearly saw the Person behind his restoration, a Person to be thanked, namely the Person of Jesus, and that awareness was the root of his return.

The very word ‘religion’ (Latin: re-ligare) implies a return and reunion, but such a return will only happen with those who are able to discern the Person behind the good things that happen to us every day. I’m reminded of a Hasidic tale in which a group of Jewish scholars were very upset that the renowned Jewish philosopher Maimonides would dare suggest that Aristotle knew more about the spheres in the heavens than Ezekiel. The rabbi of Rizhyn said to them:

“It is just as our master Maimonides says. Two people entered the palace of a king. One took a long time over each room, examined the gorgeous stuffs and treasures with the eyes of an expert and could not see enough. The other walked through the halls and knew nothing but this: ‘This is the king’s house, this is the king’s robe. A few steps more and I shall behold my Lord, the King.” (From Tales of the Hasidim, by Martin Buber, Book II, p. 58.)

Ezekiel saw the cosmos as a person’s house (the king), that is, the Lord God himself, which moved him to search further in order to find him. The Indigenous too have thoroughly “personalized” the natural word; trees, the sun, the moon, the eagle, a mountain, etc., are all regarded as kin; we are all part of a larger interconnected family, and so all things in the universe are at some level our relatives. This “personalized” way of looking at the world tends to foster a greater reverence for creation, as opposed to the depersonalized mode of thinking characteristic of the Western world, which of course has led to a number of manmade environmental disasters over the years.

Now one may dismiss this way of looking at the world as “pagan” until one realizes that St. Francis of Assisi saw things in much the same way. In The Canticle of the Sun, he refers to “Brother Sun, Brother Wind and Air, Brother Fire” and “Sister Moon and Stars” and “Sister Earth our Mother”, etc. This is not a matter of projecting human qualities onto non-living things, but is rooted in the ability to discern a Person, the divine Person, behind the goodness and beauty of the cosmos, which continually announces that goodness and sings God’s praises (See Dan 3, 24-90). This was the predominant intuition of the Samaritan leper whom Jesus healed, and it is this “sense of the divine” that is at the root of all genuine religion.

But this sense of the divine Person is also the source of our ability to see the personhood of every human being, whether that person is developmentally disabled, or is almost completely incapacitated by Alzheimer’s, battling the infirmities of old age or suffering from a debilitating and terminal illness. We begin to realize that what is before our eyes is not simply a hunk of matter, a mere individual, but a human person, and this person was willed into existence by God for his/her own sake, not for my sake or even for the sake of society at large. When we discern the divine Person behind the cosmos and behind the life that is ours, then we are moved to love him as well as the human persons that he brought into existence for their sake, regardless of their condition, because we see them, as we see ourselves, as persons of intrinsic value and inviolable dignity, images of the divine Person. It is very possible to look at a human being and not see that ‘personhood’; at that point, we become capable of tremendous indifference, even violence. But when we become explicitly aware of that ‘personhood’ in others, we can begin to love them with the heart of God, and as St. Augustine says in his Confessions, God loves each one of us as if there is only one of us to love.

If we don’t see the divine Person behind all that is, we may end up interpreting human existence much like some atheistic existentialists do, who see human existence as absurd, as an arena of perpetual conflict and struggle for survival, who think that love is reducible to the will to power, that the only kind of love we are capable of is the love of another primarily for the sake of what that person can do for me. As that attitude proliferates, life becomes increasingly empty and lonely, which spawns a variety of destructive behaviors, such as substance abuse, mass shootings, suicide and the request to be euthanized, etc.

The Samaritan leper turns around and goes in search of Jesus to thank him for giving him his life back. And that’s what conversion is, a 180 degree turn, and it begins with a recognition that we are known and loved by a Person much larger than ourselves and much larger than the world, and it is the awareness that we are loved which changes us and allows us to love in return, especially those who depend upon us because they simply cannot take care of themselves. And we begin to see that Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID) is never an option. The only option is to love and care for the infirm to the very end, so that their death becomes a final prayer, a final offering to God in thanksgiving for all that He has given.

The Jerusalem Talmud teaches that to destroy one soul is to destroy an entire world. It also teaches the converse, that anyone who sustains one soul is credited with sustaining an entire world. It is quite something to behold a hospital parking lot and to consider the hundreds of vehicles parked there every day, belonging to the nurses, doctors, surgeons, support staff, etc., all working towards a single end, which is the care of the sick and suffering. It is holy work, and it has a value in the eyes of God that is beyond the grasp of a single person, because to sustain one soul is credited with sustaining an entire world. There is a kingdom that works against this in very subtle ways, a kingdom that Christ came to defeat. We choose which kingdom we wish to belong to: the one in which human life is disposable, or the one in which individual human life is regarded as sacred and of immeasurable value.

Our Priestly, Prophetic, and Royal Identity

Reflection on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_432feastholycrosshomily.html

Deacon Douglas McManaman

After 400 years of slavery, the Hebrew people were finally delivered, and what a miraculous delivery it was, which Jews to this day remember at Passover. And yet, many of them became impatient on their way to the land of Canaan. They “spoke against God and against Moses”, and they detested the miserable food they were given to eat (Num 21, 4-9).

Now I’ve never spent any time in the desert, and I have never felt hunger pangs or desert induced thirst, so I’m not going to pronounce judgment on these people, but it is rather clear that they have lost a sense of the importance of their own history, for they began to long for a return to life under Egyptian slavery, because they had better food: melons and other fruits, fish and meat, and as much bread as they could eat. It was this that they valued more than their very own identity as the covenant people of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were willing to surrender that identity and remain in slavery, if it meant better quality food.

The God of the Old Testament took the initiative and revealed himself to Abraham and made a covenant with him, promising to make him the father of a great nation. Count the stars; that’s how numerous your descendents will be (Gn 15, 5). And this did not happen on account of anything Abraham did. It was an act of pure generosity. Furthermore, this gift was not merely for Abraham and his descendants, but was ordered to the whole of humanity: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; …All the families of the earth will find blessing in you” (Gn 12, 3). And God revealed to Abraham in a dream that his descendents will be slaves in a foreign land: “Know for certain that your descendants will reside as aliens in a land not their own, where they shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation they must serve, and after this they will go out with great wealth” (Gn 15, 13).

These people under Moses are the very fulfillment of that promise; for they were on their way to the land promised to Abraham and his descendants, and it is from this land that blessing will go forth to all of humanity, ultimately through Jesus, whose covenant will extend to the whole of humanity. The dignity of that Jewish identity has immeasurable value, but many of them, in the circumstances of the desert, forgot about it or became indifferent to it when they began to compare the quality of food they enjoyed in Egypt with the food they have now.

We too have an identity, and it is linked to the identity of the Hebrew people who have been set free. We are the people who share in the blessing that was promised to Abraham, that all nations will be blessed through him. The saviour of humanity was born of a Jewish woman, and Christ came into this world in view of Good Friday, in order to enter into our death so as to destroy it, to inject it with his divine life so that death would no longer have the final word over your life and my life. Just as the blood of the Passover lamb delivered the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery, so too the blood of the lamb of God delivers us from the slavery of sin and death. We are sons and daughters of Abraham in the Person of Christ, and when we were baptized, we were anointed with sacred chrism and given a share in the three-fold identity of Christ, namely that of “priest, prophet, and king”; for Christ is the eschatological priest who offered himself on the altar of the cross for the deliverance of humanity; he is the prophet that Moses spoke of in Deuteronomy, 18: “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kindred, and will put my words into the mouth of the prophet and he shall tell them all that I command” (v. 18); and of course, Christ is the king of kings, a king who does not compel, but who defeats the one enemy that man could not defeat, namely death, by allowing himself to be swallowed up by death.

So although you are not clergy, you are indeed priests. You exercise a genuine priesthood as a result of that baptismal anointing. Everything you do in life, such as ordinary parenting, or driving a truck, teaching children, nursing the sick, mopping floors, prosecuting the guilty or defending your clients, medical research, etc., is now made holy, for our life and labor is an offering lived out in the Person of Christ, for the bringing forth of God’s kingdom and the christification of the cosmos. The ministerial priesthood is ordered to serve this larger royal priesthood of the faithful, to help the faithful to become aware of that priestly identity, to maintain it, and not obscure it, as was done in the past.

And you are prophets, for your new life is a genuine sharing in Christ’s prophetic office. That is precisely why Pope Francis taught that the Church is fundamentally Synodal, that is, a listening Church; for the Church is fundamentally a communio fidelium (a communion of the faithful), and the faithful have a genuine sensus fidelium (a sense of the faith) that arises from this communion, and according to Francis, the communio hierarchica (the hierarchical communion) must carefully listen to the unique and intuitive insights of the faithful, because as sharers in Christ’s prophetic office, the Lord speaks to the Church today through them. Francis writes: “Let us trust in our People, in their memory and in their ‘sense of smell,’ let us trust that the Holy Spirit acts in and with our People and that this Spirit is not merely the ‘property’ of the ecclesial hierarchy.”[1] Two years earlier he wrote: “To find what the Lord asks of his Church today, we must lend an ear to the debates of our time and perceive the “fragrance” of the men of this age, so as to be permeated with their joys and hopes, with their griefs and anxieties. At that moment we will know how to propose the good news on the family with credibility.”[2]

And your new life is a share in Christ’s kingship. Whatever authority you have been given in this life, that is, in the family, or at school, at work, in government, etc., it is not to be exercised with a sense of self-importance, as a “lording over” others. All authority must become a genuine service and thus involve a kenotic lowering of self (Mt 20, 25-26; Phil 2, 1-8); for only in this way will the exercise of authority not spawn resistance and rebellion.

Priest, prophet, and king is our identity, and it is easy to forget that identity by becoming so caught up in the pleasures of this world that we begin to believe that this life is fundamentally about enjoyment and the pleasures of the present moment. The kingdom of God, says St. Paul, is not a matter of eating and drinking; rather, it is a matter of justice, harmony within humanity, and the joy of the Holy Spirit (Romans 14, 17), and our new life in Christ is to be directed to that universal brotherhood, which can only be established through the relentless pursuit of justice.

The bronze serpent in the desert is a foreshadowing of Christ, the crucified and risen one. It is when we look upon him, our priest, prophet, and king that our lives are made whole. Of course, to “look upon” does not mean “a glance”. Rather, it means that this cross is the focal point of our existence, for the cross alone brings healing and power to our lives. And this is the paradox of Good Friday: our king is so powerful that he defeats his enemy by allowing himself to be defeated, and our source of strength and healing is precisely the weakness of God and the death of God.

Notes

1. “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to cardinal Marc Ouellet President of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America”, 19 March 2016, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160319_pont-comm-america-latina.html. See also Ormond Rush. “Inverting the Pyramid: The Sensus Fidelium in a Synodal Church”. Theological Studies. 2017, Vol. 78(2) 299 –325.

2. Pope Francis, “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis during the Meeting on the Family” (Vatican City, October 4, 2014), http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2014/october/documents/papa-francesco_20141004_incontro-per-la-famiglia.html. The call to listen has been very difficult for a good number of clerics who were raised within a certain theological paradigm in which clergy see themselves as an elite class with “all the answers”, while the laity are little more than passive receptacles of clerical wisdom from on high. In 1906, Pope Pius X wrote: “The Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the Pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.” Pope Pius X, Vehementer Nos (February 11, 1906), 8, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_11021906_vehementer-nos.html.

Hypocrisy and the Dangers of Disillusionment

Hypocrisy and the Dangers of Disillusionment @Where Peter Is

Deacon Douglas P. McManaman

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. (Mt 23, 27-28).

The word hypocrite is from the Greek word hypokrites: stage actor. A hypocrite is essentially a pretender, that is, a liar. What is presented on the outside is a facade that has very little correspondence with what is within, as the words of a liar do not correspond to what is in the mind. Jesus referred to the scribes and Pharisees as “whitewashed tombs full of the bones of the dead”, a first century Palestinian way of saying “they’re full of s___”.

And of course things have not changed in two thousand years. I’ve been a Deacon for 17 years and I’ve seen my share of clerical elitism, opportunism, clerical envy, insecurity, pettiness, micromanaging, and immaturity, in short, clericalism, a disease that Francis spoke out against so often during his papacy. And there seems to be an increasing number of young men who are more interested in liturgical etiquette and decor, vestments, altar cloths, cassocks and ferraiolos, Latin, and clerical privilege than they are in Christ hidden in the struggles of ordinary families, in the poor, the sick and hospitalized, the lonely, in short, the suffering. If you have reverent liturgy—which means elaborate vestments, altar candles, perfectly folded hands, chant and incense, etc—, everything will take care of itself in the world and life in the Church will be as it was in the 40s, or so I’ve been told.

Of course, what appears on the outside does not always correspond to what is actually there, as a whitewashed tomb hides the filth buried within. Perhaps it is a good thing that a number of the faithful do not see through the charade–when in fact it is a charade–, because disillusionment can be dangerous. Some people will in time see through the facade as a result of circumstances that helped to reveal the true character of the cleric behind it, and those who do will either leave the Church altogether or they will realize that our faith is not about the clergy, but about Christ, and so they choose to “run with patience” (Heb 12, 1). I marvel at the faith of the latter, but they are certainly in the minority. I’m reminded of Sister Joan Chittister’s first trip to Rome. She writes:

The first time I went to Rome, experienced the intrigues of the Curia, saw the politics of the system, watched the maneuverings of national clerical alliances, and realized how helpless women were in the face of all of it, I felt years of ecclesiastical conditioning go to dust under my feet. What was there left to believe in? Where was the Shangri-La of my religious dreams? How could I possibly continue to profess any commitment to any of this? It was all so human. It was all so venal. It was all so depressing. “Don’t worry,” the old monk said to me. “You’ll be all right. Everybody who comes to Rome loses their faith here the first two weeks.” Then, he smiled a small smile and added, “Then in the last two weeks, they put it back where it should have been to begin with: in Jesus.” (The face of God is imprinted on everyone, June 24, 2024)

We do have a tendency to idealize the Church. Despite the warnings of our late Holy Father, so many continue to place clergy on pedestals, in some cases carrying on like fawning sycophants, but grace does not obliterate nature, and the members of the hierarchy suffer from the same cognitive limitations that constrain everyone else in the world, and when those caught up in the illusion of clerical superiority are eventually disillusioned, they find themselves in a “no man’s land” that can lead to 1) a higher level of spiritual growth, that is, a resurrection that follows upon a death, or 2) anger, which if not resolved can fester into bitter rebellion. Sister Joan continues:

I grew immensely in those four weeks—out of spiritual infancy into spiritual adulthood. Out of adoration of the church, into worship of the God whom this tradition had made accessible to me. To understand the value of the church, ironically, I had to understand its limitations. To worship God I had to stop worshiping the things of God. “Open yourself to the Tao,” the Tao Te Ching teaches, “then trust your natural responses and everything will fall into place.” Now I knew what that meant (Ibid.).

It will take at least a century to see the reforms of Vatican II established and fully in place, which is another 40 years. At the Council, we saw a return to an earlier Apostolic model of the Church as laos (Gk: people).[1] The Church is first and foremost the people of God (Cf. Lumen gentium, 9-17), that is, the laos from which is derived the English word ‘laity’. Included in that people (laos) are the presbyters (elders, but which has come to be translated as priests) and the episcopos (Gk: overseer, i.e., bishop). In the Apostolic era, presbyters did not enjoy “clerical status”; rather, the entire Church was kleros. In 1 Peter, chapter 5, 2-4, we read:

Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight [thereof], not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; Neither as being lords over [God’s] heritage (kleros: lot, inheritance), but being examples (types, models) to the flock.

The kleros, the Lord’s inheritance, is the entire people of God, the people he has chosen as his own: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people chosen as his inheritance” (Ps 33, 12). This of course includes those in Holy Orders. Clericalization, the process by which servant-leaders were separated from the laos and given a privileged status, was a gradual phenomenon, and it was particularly in the 4th century when Christianity became the official religion of the Empire that the “clerical state” of the pagan priesthood of the Roman Empire was transferred to the servant-leaders (presbyters and episcopi) of the Christian Church, elevating them above the laity, so to speak, portraying them as the ‘chosen ones’ (kleros).[2]

Those ordained to be servant-leaders (deacons, priests, bishops, etc.) come from the people (laos) to whom they are called to serve, not the other way around, and servants are not elevated above, but remain at the feet of those they serve (Jn 13, 1-17).[3] As Jesus said in Matthew:

You know how those who exercise authority among the Gentiles lord it over them; their great ones make their importance felt. It cannot be that way with you. Anyone among you who aspires to greatness must serve the rest, and whoever wants to rank first among you, must serve the needs of all (20, 25-26).

It is rather remarkable that this text of scripture has for centuries gone in one ecclesiastical ear and out the other, but having to endure emotionally abusive clergy can turn out to be a blessing in many ways. For example, encountering “clergy” whose priesthood was little more than the sanctuary and who have been almost completely indifferent to social outreach, who have as much pastoral prudence as a young teenager–not to mention misogyny, chauvinism, and an institutionally entrenched sexism–, has allowed me to come to a deeper appreciation for my older colleagues who grew up in a time when a much greater percentage of the clergy were just like that. I did not understand my colleagues who wrote for the Catholic New Times and who were very politically minded and social justice oriented, until relatively recently. I would never have come to appreciate them as I have had I not been exposed to clerical minded elitists who lack basic hospitality, thoughtfulness, generosity, and humility.

We know from history that love of liturgy can co-exist with profound sexual immaturity, not to mention a serious lack of concern for the faithful. What is loved in such cases is the liturgical ambiance of the sanctuary, which has become for them a stage on which one performs and takes delight in the fact that the eyes of all in the congregation are focused “on me”. But this delight does not sustain, but leaves a person empty, because at its roots it is essentially a degree of narcissism. Joy that sustains a vocation is the joy of loving (Mother Theresa), the joy that is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. This is the joy of allowing yourself to be used as an instrument through which the Holy Spirit reaches into the most impoverished regions of the world’s darkness; it is the joy of being dead so that the life of Christ can be made manifest through us (2 Co 4, 10), to those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

NOTES

1. At the Council, Belgian Bishop Emile-Joseph De Smedt intervened with the following: “In the first chapters of the Draft the traditional picture of the Church predominates. You know the pyramid: the pope, the bishops, the priests, who preside and, when they receive the powers, who teach, sanctify, and govern; then, at the bottom, the Christian people who instead receive and somehow seem to occupy second place in the Church.

We should note that hierarchical power is only something transitory. It belongs to our status on the way. In the next life, in the final state, it will no longer have a purpose, because the elect will have reached perfection, perfect unity in Christ. What remains is the People of God; what passes is the ministry of the hierarchy.

In the People of God we are all joined to others and have the same basic rights and duties. We all share in the royal priesthood of the People of God. The pope is one of the faithful; bishops, priests, lay people, religious: we are all the faithful. We go to the same sacraments; we all need the forgiveness of sins, the eucharistic bread, and the Word of God; we are all heading towards the same homeland, by God’s mercy and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

But as long as the People of God is on the way, Christ brings it to perfection by means of the sacred ministry of the hierarchy. All power in the Church is for ministering, for serving: a ministry of the Word, a ministry of grace, a ministry of governance. We did not come to be served but to serve.

We must be careful lest in speaking about the Church we fall into a kind of hierarchism, clericalism, episcopolatry, or papolatry. What is most important is the People of God; to this People of God, to this Bride of the Word, to this living Temple of the Holy Spirit, the hierarchy must supply its humble services so that it may grow and reach perfect manhood, the fullness of Christ. Of this growing life the hierarchical Church is the good mother: Mother Church.” Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II, 32 vols. (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1970-99) I/4, 142–44. See Ormond Rush. “Inverting the Pyramid: The Sensus Fidelium in a Synodal Church”. Theological Studies, 2017, Vol 78(2). P. 301.

2. See Piet F. Fransen. Hermeneutics of the Councils and Other Studies: “Some Aspects of the Dogmatization of Office”, p. 382-389. Collected by J.E. Mertens and F. De Graeve, Leuven University Press, 1985. See also Joe Holland, Roman Catholic Clericalism: Pacem in Terris Press, 2024, p. 61-62. Yves Congar. Power and Poverty in the Church: The Renewal and Understanding of Service. New York: Paulist Press. 2016. See also Joseph Mattam, S. J. “Clergy-Laity Divide in the Church”. New Leader, (Chennai, India,) July 2012. https://www.churchauthority.org/clergy-laity-divide-in-the-church-mattam/.

3. The “pyramid model” is really an anachronism that perpetuates a number of dualisms that have proved dangerous to the Church and civilization, such as the two-tiered notion of “nature and grace”, or the depiction of the ordinary work of the laity as profane and directed outward to the world vs. the life of “clerics” as holy, interior, ordered to the sanctuary; or the laity not called to a life of holiness vs. “clerics” and religious who are; or the depiction of the earth and the world as the profane realm vs. the interior as the realm of the sacred; or science as profane vs. theology as sacred; or body, matter, marriage and sex as shameful vs. the soul and celibacy as higher, etc.

Suicide, Depression, and Salvation

https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_420suicide.depression.salvation.html

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Soon after ordination in 2008 I began to minister to those who suffer from mental illness (mental sufferers), and over the years I have known a few who have taken their own lives, including a former student and parent of that student, as well as patients that I came to know in ministry. On a couple of occasions I found myself situated between a rock and a hard place when asked by a patient suffering from depression whether she would automatically go straight to hell if she were to take her own life. The problem, I tell them, is that if I were to say ‘yes’, I’d be telling you something that I simply do not for an instant believe and feel that I’d be lying; if I were to say ‘no’, that it is not necessarily the case that you are going to hell for taking your own life, you might receive that as permission, and I cannot grant you that permission. Interestingly enough, the few that have asked me this understood, and as far as I know, none of those took their own lives.

But I have dealt with a number of patients before in the face of whose sufferings I have honestly said to myself, with tremendous fear and trepidation: “If I had to suffer the depression they are experiencing at this moment, I sincerely don’t think I could endure it. I’m afraid I’d “do myself in”.” I perceived very clearly my own inability to go on, on my own strength.

One of the most significant moments in my life as a deacon was Christmas, 2011. Two days before Christmas, on the last day of school before the holidays in front of a classroom of senior high school students, I began to sweat and shake. I had to leave school quickly and went straight home to bed. Soon my head and shoulders were wracked with pain and my body was shaking with chills. The pain soon made its way down to my arms and wrists, and then my back and legs. Christmas dinner for me that year was a can of tuna; on Boxing Day I had to go to the Emergency. The emergency physician thought I could have polymyalgia rheumatica, a condition that typically strikes those who are 50+ and there is no known cure. I was given prednisone and oxycodone and sent home–the oxycodone was so powerful that I was too frightened to take any more after the first day.

I honestly believed that I would not be returning to the classroom again, that my teaching career had come to an end, for I could not imagine teaching while in such pain. More importantly, I was battling deep despair—for no medical expert had an answer, none could tell me whether a light would eventually appear at the end of this tunnel. I was on the phone with my spiritual director every night, and I remember saying to him at one point: “I think I’m beginning to appreciate what my patients, who suffer from clinical depression, have to go through every day.” The thought that I had to endure this darkness for another week, let alone for years to come, was terrifying, and so I began to train myself to think not one week at a time, or one day at a time, but one moment at a time.

Things began to change when my spiritual director casually advised me to say the following prayer: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit; into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit”. Of course, I knew that prayer, for it is part of the Night Prayer of the Breviary that we are required to pray daily. But when one has been saying a certain prayer for years on end, after a time it can become just words, without a great deal of thought behind them. So I decided that I would say this prayer, think of the words, and mean it. If I was no longer able to continue to teach and had to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, then your will be done, Lord; into your hands I commend my spirit.

That night I had the best sleep I’d had in years. I woke up feeling as though a cool breeze had passed through my body. I was still in a lot of pain, but the despair and darkness were gone, and eventually I was slowly weaned off of the prednisone. It turned out that my illness was not polymyalgia rheumatica, but the medical experts to this day have no idea what it was. Nevertheless, the experience was very important for me.

Not that I ever had the inclination to do so, but I would not pronounce judgment on anyone in the throes of clinical depression who decided to take his/her own life, and I continue to be unpleasantly surprised that a good number of the faithful are under the false impression that anyone who does so is automatically consigned to a state of eternal damnation–and worse, that there are still a number of “pastorally challenged” clergy—few in number—who believe and teach this, and refuse to conduct a funeral mass for such a person.

Traditionally, there are three conditions required for one to be in a state of sin: knowledge, free deliberation, and serious matter. Clearly, taking one’s life constitutes “serious matter”, but free deliberation is the condition in which there is a serious mitigating factor, namely clinical depression. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., writes:

All too many people today still hold the belief that suicide somehow represents a rash but rational act committed by otherwise healthy persons. When someone takes his or her own life, the usual reactions are of shock and bewilderment. How could she do such a thing? She never gave any sign that anything was wrong. Or, Why didn’t he call me? I knew he lost his job … he and Janet split … but why this? But suicide is not an act committed by an otherwise healthy and rational person. On the contrary, more often than not, the person who commits suicide is in the throes of a severe depression when taking his or her life. And in most cases the act is preceded by severe depression with increasing signs and symptoms of hopelessness and despair. About two-thirds of the people who take their own lives suffer from major depression or bipolar disorder. Almost everyone else who commits suicide has depression, alcohol or substance abuse, or a delusional illness like schizophrenia.¹

On 9/11, a number of people jumped off of the World Trade Center to their deaths. Did they freely choose to take their own lives? They certainly did not; and those who take their own lives to escape the utter darkness, the feeling of utter hopelessness, the depression they’ve had to endure for decades, are very much like those who jump from a burning building to avoid the flames.

There is a distinction between small ‘d’ depression and major depressive disorder, which typically features a dramatic change in mood (sadness, anxiety, apathy, numbness, either separate or in combination), a loss of vitality, energy, concentration, as well as muddled thinking, a loss of self-esteem, a sense of uselessness, profound pessimism, and suicidal impulses. In some cases, anxiety and panic disorder occur as manifestations of the depression.² What I experienced in 2011 was not major depressive disorder (clinical depression), but something much less severe; however, it provided me with some appreciation for what those who do suffer from this debilitating illness have to endure.

The Vocation of Mental Illness

On Holy Thursday night in Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the worst mental anguish, and he called Peter, James, and John to accompany him for one hour. But they could not do so; they slept. Mental sufferers, on the other hand, do not sleep; rather, they keep Christ company in his mental distress–and he keeps them company in theirs. Friendships are typically founded upon common qualities and interests. The special gift that mental sufferers are given by Christ is precisely this common experience, which makes them special friends of Christ. Thus, it is easy for me to believe that, instead of eternal despair, they will encounter the Lord’s gratitude for keeping him company in his mental anguish throughout all those years they had to endure it. Caryll Houselander writes:

Mental patients often live out their lives in Gethsemane, and without alleviation for the fear and conflict that they suffer–and here it is that we discover the very core of the vocation of those who serve them. …Their great need is that which Christ pleaded for in Gethsemane–compassion. He did not ask them to try to do away with his anguish or to alleviate his passion, but simply to be with him, to enter into his suffering through compassion. But this even Peter, who would so gladly have swept the passion away, could not do! ‘Then he went back to his disciples to find them asleep; and he said to Peter, had you no strength then to watch with me even for an hour?’

It is the same today. In the mental sufferer Christ asks first of all and most of all for compassion, for those who will simply be with him, who will see through the sweat of his agony to the secret of his love.³

In terms of the proclamation of hope and the good news of divine mercy, I think I can safely argue that the traditional kerygma has been rather deficient over the centuries, and so many of the faithful today have had to carry the wounds of that deficiency for decades. We speak of the unfathomable mercy of God and his unconditional love on the one hand, and on the other hand we undermine and belie the claim as we project our own limits onto God, preaching what he is able to forgive and not able to forgive, turning the justice of God, revealed in Christ as absolute mercy, into an absurdity so much beneath the worst examples of human “justice”.No doctrine can be true which makes Jesus less than God, or which makes God less than Jesus.⁴ Priest and poet G. Studdert Kennedy writes:

A thousand mysteries begin to clear away, if we cling persistently to that great Name of God which is given by St. John: “God is Love” –the Love that was revealed in Jesus. That is not one of His attributes; that is His very Self. Cling to that Name, and use it, in all these great passages:

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Love hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”

“Love, for our sakes, in His own Body bare our sins upon the tree.” “Him that never knew sin, Love made to be sin for us.”

Doesn’t a light begin to break through?

I remember being called upon to visit a man who was in prison for forgery and embezzlement. He was the queerest, crookedest, hardest-hearted specimen of humanity that it has ever been my luck to strike, and I could not move him an inch nearer repentance. The only sign of softening that he showed at all, was when he asked me to go and see his mother. I went. She came down, looking worn and sleepless, and that I expected. But there was something about her which I, being young, could not understand. She was bitterly ashamed, and in my pity for her I wondered, What has she to be ashamed of? And then there came the light, and I murmured to myself: Surely she hath borne his griefs and carried his sorrows; the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed, if there be any power that can heal him. He has gone astray and turned to his own way, and Love hath laid on her the iniquity of her son. The mother-heart which knew but little sin, Love hath made to feel exceeding sinful for his sake. I understood and, in a measure, the eternal mystery cleared. That love which a woman can pour out upon her son, and which makes her so entirely one with him, that his sin is her sin, his disgrace is her disgrace, his shame is her shame, is the nearest that we can get upon earth to the love of God; to what God is.

It was that love, extended to infinity, which beat within the human heart of Christ, God Incarnate, and made Him feel to every man, every woman, and every child in all the world, as that mother felt for her son; so that our sins became His sins; our disgrace His disgrace; our shame His shame; and in His own Body He bare our sins upon the tree.⁵

A close priest friend of mine once preached that God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy. This is the God who has been revealed in the Person of Christ, the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost. He does not wait for us to seek Him out, rather, He goes in search of us and will not stop until He finds what He is looking for. This is what is so important about the parable of the lost coin. We miss the radical nature of the divine mercy when we focus solely on the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep, and overlook this very short parable in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. At least the prodigal son freely chose to return home to beg for mercy; the lost sheep is alive enough to bleat in the wilderness, enabling the Shepherd to follow the sound in order to find it and bring it home. Both are alive. But a coin is a lump of inert matter; it is dead. It cannot rise up and make its way home nor cry out for mercy. It is entirely lost, hidden in the dust of a first century Palestinian floor. But God’s love is comparable to the love of a woman who lights a lamp and sweeps the house, searching carefully until she finds it. This is what God is like. St. Paul says, “While we were sinners, Christ died for us”. In other words, before we turned to him and repented, He loved us. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4, 10). This is the heart of the mystery of grace that so few have been able to grasp, more than likely as a result of the tendency to look at sin through a juridical lens. As Studdert Kennedy points out: “Sin did estrange man from God; but it never has, and it never could, estrange God from man. God never waits for us to come to Him, God is for ever coming to us–He is the coming God.”⁶ Further, he writes: “We get much nearer to the significance of the forgiveness of sins, when we think of it in terms of life, than when we think of it in terms of law. Forgiveness is always regeneration, new birth; sin is always a process of decay, rather than an act of disobedience.”⁷

If I am saved, I am saved personally, but not individually. It is the person, not the individual, who has been created in the image and likeness of God, who is a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a plurality in unity. I am saved as a plurality, a member of Christ’s Mystical Body, a member of a Brotherhood, a community in which salvation is made possible. And if I am not saved individually, it is because I am not redeemed individually, and by extension I am not condemned or lost individually. Many others share in responsibility for my state of being lost. This, I believe, is the point made by the Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

My friends, ask God for gaiety. Be gay as children, as the birds of the sky. And let not human sin confound you in your deeds, do not be afraid that it will frustrate your task and not allow it to be accomplished, do not say: ‘Strong is sin, strong is impiety, strong is the vicious world in which men live, and we are alone and helpless, that vicious world will frustrate us and not allow us to accomplish our good deeds.’ Avoid, O children, this melancholy! There is but one salvation from it: take yourself and make yourself a respondent for all human sin. Friend, this is indeed truly so, for no sooner do you sincerely make yourself the respondent of all creatures and all things than you will immediately see that it is in reality thus and that it is you who are guilty for all creatures and all things.⁸

Sin is not a private affair between me and God, or you and God, but is a public affair. My sins have repercussions that extend beyond the circle of my own private relationship with God; they adversely affect others in ways that I am currently unaware of. If one person is in hell, we are all in hell, for the “one” who is in hell is my brother, my sister to whom I am attached—to whom I am a respondent. There is nothing I can do to detach myself from him so that he suffers by himself and I am left unaffected: “… if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Mt 5, 24). I will never be saved completely as long as my brother, my sister, is in hell and has something against me (See 1 Co 15, 20-28). The love of Christ was universal in the fullest sense of the word, and we are called to love in the same way: “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (Jn 13, 34). The mother has made herself responsible (a respondent) for the sins of her son, for she looked worn and sleepless, an image of God, whose worn out and sleepless face is Christ crowned with thorns. She bore his griefs and carried his sorrows, and the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed. If I choose to love as I have been loved by Christ crowned with thorns, then I will carry the sorrows of the condemned, the chastised (kolasis), and the heavenly liturgy will wait for us, in the Person of Christ, to destroy hell’s brass gates, who destroyed those gates on Holy Saturday.⁹ We cannot endure the suffering of our damned son or daughter, for if we belong to Christ, we are joined to their suffering (1 Co 12, 26). Mental sufferers too do not allow us to suffer alone because they do not allow Christ to suffer alone; for Christ purchased their suffering, making them co-redeemers, that is, sin-bearers. Caryll Houselander writes:

This is a vocation in which everyone, not only the specialist, has some part because it depends on an attitude of mind and heart, which for the majority of people must mean a change of mind and heart toward the mental sufferer, who is of all suffering people the least understood. This change of heart, and with it power to help the mental sufferer, means learning to recognise Christ in the patient and to recognize the patient’s own vocation, his part in Christ’s passion and his gift to the world. For he, by his unique suffering, is taking part in the world’s redemption.

This must never be forgotten. The mental sufferer must never be regarded as one whose life is without purpose or meaning, as a burden to his family, or as one who gives nothing to those who care for him, because he is in fact giving the redeeming suffering of Christ, on which the salvation of the world and each one of us depends.¹⁰

Some Final Thoughts

Of course, the clinically depressed are also sinners, like everyone else, but their depression is not an indication or the result of a moral failure—at least not a genuine mental illness consistent with holiness¹¹—, and much less is it a punishment for sin— another offshoot of a juridical paradigm, which formed the background of centuries of bad preaching. Their suffering is a vocation, as is ours, which always involves sin-bearing to one degree or another, whatever that vocation is. God the Son entered into human suffering in order to redeem it and make us sharers in his redemption. Those who suffer from mental illness share in this to a somewhat greater extent than the rest of us.

To be called to minister to them either professionally (I.e., the psychiatrist and psychiatric nurse) or non professionally is to be called to a highly noble task. It is a ministry of compassion in the true sense of that word: “to suffer with…” It is a mission of accompaniment, a call to taste their darkness, and this we do to the degree that we love them. Our task is to join the light of our hope and the joy of the risen Christ to their darkness. To the degree that we taste their darkness, they taste our joy and the hope of new life. Although we may not have the privilege of being Christ’s special friends, those called to minister to them may have the next best thing, namely the vocation to serve them who in turn accompany Christ in his mental anguish. The evolution of that branch of medical science that seeks to understand and treat clinical depression and other mental disorders is a sacred history because it is ordered to the good of man, whose existence is ordered to Christ: “For all were created through him and for him” (Col 1, 16). Those current achievements are the fruit of creative conflict, a battle rooted in the love of humanity, ordered to the overcoming of an illness that cripples so many human persons.¹²

Notes

1. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., Understanding Depression: What We Know and What You Can Do About It. New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2002, pp. 133-134.

2. Ibid., p. 23. See also p. 51ff.

3. Caryll Houselander. “The Care of the Mentally Ill” in The Mother of Christ. London: Sheed and Ward, 1978, p. 104.

4. G. A. Studdert Kennedy. The Wicket Gate or Plain Bread. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1935, p. 197.

5. Ibid., pp. 197-199.

6. Ibid., p. 178.

7. Ibid., p. 178-179. About twenty years later, Nicholas Berdyaev writes: “There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. To overcome the servile conception means movement within, movement in depth. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God. It is impossible and inadmissible to construct an ontology of evil. The idea of an eternal hell is, therefore, absurd and evil. Evil is but a pathway, a testing, a disruption; to fall into sin is above all else a testing of freedom. Man moves towards the light through the darkness. Dostoyevsky revealed this more profoundly than anyone.” The Divine and the Human, trans. R. M. French. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. p. 89.

8. Bk 6, ch. 3 (g). translated by David McDuff. New York: Penguin Books, 2003, p. 414.

9. “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, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 78. Commenting on this text, Metropolitan Hilarion writes: “Clearly, Cyril perceives the victory of Christ over hell and death as complete and definitive. For him, hell loses authority both over those who are in its power and those who are to become its prey in the future. Thus the descent into Hades, a single and unique action, is perceived as a timeless event. The raised body of Christ becomes the guarantee of universal salvation, the beginning of the way leading human nature to ultimate deification.” Ibid. Consider, as well, Fulton Sheen’s vision of the man on a cross. Upon attempting to take the nails out of his feet, the man said: “Let them be; for I cannot be taken down until every man, woman, and child come together to take me down”.

10. Op.cit., p. 96-97.

11. In this article, I have limited myself to discussing mental illness consistent with sanctity; there is, however, mental illness that is inconsistent with sanctity. See Thomas Verner Moore. Heroic Sanctity and Insanity: An Introduction to the Spiritual Life and Mental Hygiene. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959.

12. “It was not only of his historical passion that he spoke when he said, ‘Lay up in your hearts these words; for it shall come to pass, that the son of man shall be delivered into the hands of men’. For as long as this world lasts, and men live and love and suffer and die in it, the passion of Christ will go on, and he will suffer it in the lives of men. Because this is so, all vocations, however varied outwardly, have fundamentally the same object, the comforting of Christ, and there is none of which this more true than that of caring for the mentally ill.” Caryll Houselander, Op.cit., p. 96.

Cloud of Witnesses

Homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deacon Doug McManaman

There is a line in the 2nd reading from Hebrews that struck me, and it is the following: “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely…” (Heb 12, 1-4). This notion that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses is so important. The expression refers to the faithful individuals from the past, including of course those saints who have been canonized.

When I was a full-time teacher, I used to visit my best friend Father Don Sanvido of the Hamilton Diocese a couple of times every semester, to give him a break from preaching, etc. I am an early riser, and this one morning I got up just before 5 am, went to the living room of the rectory, and said my breviary. When I finished, I looked up and noticed, on a large bookshelf, Butler’s four volume Lives of the Saints. I went up to the books, closed my eyes, randomly selected a volume, opened the book and placed my finger on a randomly selected page. Wherever my finger landed, I would read the life of that saint. I landed on some 3rd century saint I’ve never heard of before. After reading about her life, less than a page of that volume, I felt tremendous inspiration. I felt awakened. So I did it once more, this time choosing a different volume, landing on a 6th century male saint. His life and character was totally different from the first woman I’d read about, but I felt inspired once again, like I had just drank a large glass of orange juice. The feeling was actually in my body.

And this is the lie we’ve been fed for years in the world of entertainment: goodness is boring; evil is interesting. But it’s really the other way around; goodness is profoundly interesting and inspiring, while evil is nothing but an empty promise. Goodness inspires and fills, but people tend to believe the opposite. My first 10 years of teaching were in a very poor and broken neighbourhood of Toronto, but every year our students would raise over 60 thousand food items for the Food Bank at Christmas, more than any other institution in the city. At first, we’d notify the media, the local newspapers, but no one was interested. However, let there be a non-fatal stabbing in the school Cafeteria and it’s on every local news channel by 6 o’clock in the evening.

The lives and stories of the faithful are far more interesting. Think of a typical coffee shop, a Tim Horton’s for example. Practically everyone there is a non entity to you, and you are a non entity to them. But if any one of us were to sit down at a table where some old man is having his coffee and were to ask him to spend the next hour or so telling us about himself, his life history, etc., a whole world would open up before us and his life would acquire color and significance, and we’d never see him the same way again. Consider the number of tombstones in a typical cemetery. Each one represents a massive biography that would easily exceed two thousand pages. I am convinced that in our first few thousand years in heaven, we’re going to be reading biographies–without the actual books, that is, we will be coming to know the deepest meaning of every human person in the kingdom of God. The life of each person is a unique instance and expression of the workings of divine providence. We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, and we hope one day to be part of that communion of saints.

But that is a frightening thought, in many ways. I think of the third volume of the Lord of the Rings, the scene in which Gandalf comes before Theoden, King of Rohan, who is under a spell that was cast by the diabolical character, Wormtongue. Gandalf is trying to get through to the King that he needs to call his people to take up arms and join in the resistance against Saruman’s forces. The king, however, is just not awake to the danger that is approaching, but Gandalf finally breaks the spell and Theoden suddenly realizes what he has to do and gathers his men for battle. Eowen, the king’s daughter, arms herself for battle because she too is determined to fight the evil that threatens. Theoden is finally struck down in the battle of Pelennor, and as she kneels down beside her dying father, he says the following: “My body is broken. I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed”.

That is a tremendous line: “I shall not now be ashamed”. In other words, I would have been ashamed having died refusing to enter into battle and suffer for the sake of my people, but not now. We are destined to join our fathers and mothers, and the question I have often asked myself over the years is whether or not I will feel ashamed in their mighty company. Think of the courageous lives of our great saints, like St. Patrick, who in the 4th century was captured by Irish marauders and was a slave for 6 years in a region of Northern Ireland. He finally escaped and walked more than 200 miles to board a ship back to Britain. Years later, as a result of a dream he had in which the Irish were calling him to return, he actually returns as a missionary, surrounded by danger and living in hardship. Or consider the life of St. John de Brebeuf among the Hurons, in 17th century Canada, in the brutal Canadian winters, without heated vehicles, traveling in the freezing temperatures, long trips by canoe and portages over land, carrying canoes and supplies around rapids and waterfalls, living on corn mush for weeks on end. Or St. Isaac Jogues who was tortured, his hands mutilated, and yet after going back to France actually returned to the missions and ended his life as a martyr. Or St. Maximilian Kolbe, whose feast we just celebrated, who took the place of a polish sergeant chosen to die by starvation in a Nazi concentration camp in retaliation for an escaped prisoner. It took Maximillian two weeks to die of starvation. Or St. Thomas More who refused to take the oath of Parliament and was confined to the Tower of London for more than a year before being found guilty of treason. All he had to do was take a simple oath, and he would have been restored to his former position with all the perks of high office, an estate in Chelsea, a life of ease and prestige. Instead, he chose not to violate his conscience, and he had his head cut off for it–he was originally scheduled to be hung, drawn and quartered, but at the last minute the king had mercy and commuted the sentence to beheading. And then you have great saints in our day like Mother Theresa who left the comforts of the Loretto Convent to live on the streets of Calcutta.

These are the kinds of people we are going to be in the presence of in the kingdom of God. That could turn out to be a rather uncomfortable experience, at least initially. Their lives were on fire with the fire that Jesus spoke of in Luke: “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12, 49). God is a consuming fire and their lives were burning with it.

And that’s what the spiritual life is about, becoming more and more disposed to be lit by the fire of the divine love for the human beings that Christ came to die for. In the end, that is the only real joy in life, the joy of loving others, as Mother Teresa worded it. As St. John of the Cross wrote: “In the evening of this life, we will be judged on love alone”. Nothing else; not our accomplishments or awards, not our social status, not even the office we might have held in the Church. Only on love, that is, on how large the fire is that burns within us.