faith

Miscellaneous Thoughts on Receiving Communion

Deacon Douglas McManaman

In the last little while, visiting a number of parishes, I have noticed that some parishioners–not many to be sure–will deliberately cross over onto another communion line in order to receive communion from the priest, as opposed to the extraordinary minister, a layman or laywoman. I inquired about this from one such person, and the reasoning, I found, had almost no coherence whatsoever. It seems to me that the very idea that one ought to receive communion from a priest and not a lay person is nothing more than liturgical snobbery. The entire Church received “holy communion” from a lay woman, namely Mary, Jesus’ own mother. That should settle the matter. But of course it doesn’t. 

Consider the optics if we were to employ Kant’s principle of universalizability to this issue. A parish priest requests help to distribute holy communion from some of the faithful, who then become extraordinary ministers of communion. The rest of the congregation, however, adopts the attitude that communion should only be received from a priest, not a laywoman or layman. The extraordinary ministers would be standing there the whole time, waiting and watching everyone line up and receive from the priest. It is safe to say that this would certainly frustrate the pastor who would like to finish the Mass at a reasonable time. 

But more to the point, is communion somehow different when it is received from the hands of a laywoman or layman? Is it less than Christ? Or, does a person receive something more, for example, a greater dignity perhaps, when he or she receives communion from a priest? If so, how does that work precisely? 

Perhaps it is about reverence, as the person I questioned insisted it is. And so, is it the case that if I wish to show greater reverence to Christ, I should receive communion from the hand of a priest as opposed to the hand of a laywoman or layman? Again, if so, how does that work? To show reverence to Christ pleases him; to show greater reverence to Christ pleases him more. And so I approach the communion minister, I bow or make some reverential gesture, receive the host and then move on, but if I were to receive from the hand of an ordained priest, somehow Christ is more pleased with me, because I’ve shown him greater reverence? I have not yet been able to figure this out, even with the help of one who insists on receiving communion only from a priest.

Moreover, “communion” means just that: “union”, not only with Christ, but with the entire worshipping community. Of course, there is diversity within that community and that should not be suppressed (diverse talents, experiences, angles on life, spiritualities, etc.), but liturgically some people insist on doing their own thing, and the result is that some are kneeling, most are standing, some receive on the tongue, and some–thankfully most–receive on the hand, some only from the priest, and some–thankfully most–from either a priest or layman/woman, whoever is available at the moment. Is it the case that some people have a need to separate themselves from the “commoners”? Whatever way we slice it, I can’t help but suspect that this is another instance of Phariseeism (from Aramaic perishayya, “separated ones”).

Christ ate with sinners and tax collectors, shared meals with them, thereby entering into a profound communion with them–given the Jewish understanding of what it means to share a meal–, thereby becoming ritually unclean in the eyes of the religious leaders, which is why they despised him. Jesus was not concerned about ritual purity, as we see from the parable of the Good Samaritan, and he despised the elitist and condescending arrogance of the Pharisees, referring to them as whitewashed tombs full of the bones of the dead and every kind of filth. His attitude appears to me to be the complete opposite of the semi-elitist attitude that insists on receiving communion from an ordained priest only, as though it were “below me” to receive from an ordinary layperson, as it was below the religious leaders to share a meal with those ignorant of the Torah. 

But I’ve been assured that this is not the sentiment. But then I am asked: Are not the priests’ hands anointed at his  Ordination? They are, but so are the hands of those who receive the anointing of the sick, and so too the heads of babies who are baptized. Confirmandi are anointed on the forehead at Confirmation. Anointing represents Christ (Gk: Christos, anointed one), and oil symbolizes strength, wealth and royalty. All of us have been anointed (in Baptism and Confirmation), and all of us share in the Royal Priesthood of the Faithful. The congregation is a congregation of priests, because Israel and the New Israel (the Church) is a “priestly people” (Exodus 19, 6). The laos (people) have been “set apart”. As our first Pope said:  “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people set apart for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (2 Peter 2, 9). That a baby’s head has been anointed with sacred chrism, endowing that child with a new identity, namely that of priest, prophet and king, does not in any way necessitate different behaviour on the part of others towards the baby. Some will zero in on that aspect of the ordination ceremony in which a priest’s hands are anointed and deduce that this somehow suggests that we should behave differently towards him–i.e., choose his communion line–and that doing so is “more reverent towards our Lord”. Somehow his hands add something to the significance of my receiving communion, but what exactly that is, I have no idea at this point.

I cannot help but think that this is another symptom of the disease of clericalism that Francis so often spoke out against. He explicitly warned the laity not to put priests on pedestals, and yet how this decision to receive only from the hand of a priest is not an instance of just such a practice is beyond me.  

Perhaps this practice of receiving communion only from an ordained priest is a subtle but real repudiation of the layperson’s sharing in the royal priesthood of the faithful. After all, the procession begins when the faithful leave their homes to go to the Church to celebrate Mass. The formal procession at the start of the Mass is merely a continuation of the procession that the people began when leaving their houses. The offertory is precisely the offering of this priestly people, an offering of their sufferings, their labor, their treasure, etc., and it takes the form of bread and wine (the parish purchases the bread and wine out of the treasury that comes from the people). The ministerial priest offers the bread and wine on behalf of this priestly people, the congregation. Christ receives that offering and changes it into himself, returning it to us, saying: “take and eat”. The priest is merely an instrument, an unworthy instrument as Pope Benedict XVI would often remind us. It is Christ who consecrates, it is Christ who is the single priest and victim. The ministerial priest is acting in persona Christi, which means that it is really Christ who is the agent who changes the offering (bread and wine) into himself–just as it is Christ, not the priest or deacon, who gives life in baptism and infuses the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity into the soul of the baptized, among other things. 

The function of a ministerial priest is different from the function of those who belong to the common priesthood of the faithful, but it is a function that is entirely at the service of the priestly people that is the congregation. One can certainly say that the priest is “set apart” for a specific work, and that is true, but he is set apart to serve the entire people who have been set apart from the world, who have become a holy nation, a kingdom of priests. The significance of his vocation cannot be understood apart from this community. In other words, his priestly function cannot be understood except within the larger context of the priestly nature of the community. I’m reminded of Pius X, when people were kissing his papal ring, his mother said to him: “Keep in mind that you wouldn’t be wearing that ring if it were not for this ring here” (pointing to her wedding ring). The ministerial priest is “set apart” to act on behalf of the priestly congregation, which is “a people set apart”. 

Peter himself gives us a clue to the resolution of this issue: “As Peter was about to enter, Cornelius met him and fell at his feet to worship him. But Peter helped him up. “Stand up,” he said, “I am only a man myself” (Acts 10, 26).

Some people look upon the clergy not as lowly common servants (feet washers), but as members of the British Royal Family, as it were, and within such a mindset, one will only hear the gospel within the framework of an old monarchical ecclesiology, which keeps a person from understanding the gospel’s radical nature.  

I’ve tried to understand this issue from various angles, but the reasoning continues to make as much sense to me as a person who believes, deep within his heart, that eating potato chips is an offence to koala bears, so instead he chooses to eat corn chips. 

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. 

Have Mercy On Me, A Sinner

Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deacon Douglas McManaman

My ministry as a deacon is to the sick, especially those who suffer from mental illness. I remember visiting a patient many years ago in the mental health unit of a hospital, and I recall very clearly that he was telling me that he “feels” horrible about himself. He also has thoughts running through his head that he cannot control or get rid of, and these thoughts cause him to feel horrible about himself, that he is twisted, unclean and tainted. At that moment, something occurred to me. I said: “I was talking to my students about Aristotle today, something he said in his Nicomachean Ethics: You are not what you feel, and you are not what you think. In other words, the opinions you hold do not define your character. Rather, you are what you will. Your character is determined by what you will to be. So you may feel that you are a horrible person, and you may have all sorts of thoughts running through your head that you cannot control, thoughts that suggest you are a terrible human being, but you are what you will. So, what do you want to be? The answer to that question will tell you who you really are. 

Well, I did not expect those words to have had an impact on him, but his eyes opened wide. He was delighted to hear that. God sees right into the heart, that is, he knows what constitutes your deepest desire, and so he knows who you really are, even if the rest of us do not. And since this patient desperately wants to be something completely other than what he feels himself to be and what he thinks himself to be, then he is profoundly good.

I never saw him again after that, but a couple of months later I received a card, a thank you note. It was from this patient; that was the first and last time I ever received a thank you note from a hospital patient. That simple ancient insight made all the difference in the world to him.

The tax collector in today’s gospel reminded me of this patient of mine. He felt horrible about himself, but his deepest desire was revealed in his prayer: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner”.

When the sun comes out and its rays penetrate through a window, we see how dirty the window really is, the spots, the grime and dirt, etc., but at night time, we don’t see those spots, for they are not visible. At night, the window looks clean. But of course it isn’t; it’s dirty, which we can only see during the day when the rays of light penetrate through the window. So too, God is light from light, as we say in the creed, and when God draws us close to himself, we see our spots, the grime and dirt. If we are not close to God, then we are in the dark, and the result is we cannot see our own dirt, grime and spots. Instead, we believe that we are clean, and we feel good about ourselves, and then it is much easier to look with contempt upon another. 

The Pharisee saw himself as okay; he was very pleased with himself. He had no shame in the presence of God, no sense of having fallen short in any way, because for the Pharisee, holiness is about religious works: “I fast twice a week and give a tenth of my income”, he said. But we are not saved by the works of the law, as Paul says. He writes: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.” (Eph 2, 8) The tax collector, on the other hand, saw nothing but his own sins: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner”. And that’s why the tax collector went down to his home justified. It was the light of divine grace that allowed him to recognize his own sinfulness. He had no contempt for others, only contempt for himself. 

Holiness is charity. Holiness is love. What we see in the Pharisees is sanctimony, which is a false holiness. In the Parable of the Last Judgment, the Son of Man does not say to us: “You did not genuflect properly; you didn’t dress properly for Mass; you weren’t reverent enough”, etc.,. No, he’s going to say “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, thirsty and you gave me something to drink, lonely and you visited me”, and so on. That’s reverence. Jesus berated the Pharisees for desiring seats of honor and delighting in titles and having people fawn all over them. We are going to be judged on how we serve those who are forgotten, those who have no importance, no social standing. That’s holiness; that’s genuine religion. The reason is that this is precisely where Jesus hides himself, as Mother Teresa would always say. Jesus disguises himself in the poor and the neglected. But century after century, Christians like to forget this and instead busy themselves with all sorts of piety. But piety, if it is genuine, will allow us to see and recognize Jesus in his various disguises. And if we truly love him, we will develop the ability to notice him in those who are forgotten and neglected, and we will love him in those who do not love themselves, who do not delight in themselves, but who doubt themselves and would never think to compare themselves to others. 

The Good News that Our God is an Unjust Judge

Deacon Douglas McManaman

The gospel reading for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary time is the Parable of the Widow and the Unrighteous Judge (Lk 18, 1-8). The figure for God the Father in this parable is, interestingly enough, an unjust judge, that is, one who has no fear of God and no respect for any human being. And he refuses to listen to a widow who is pleading for a just judgment, a woman who has lost her protection (her husband) and who has lost her social standing. He simply refuses to consider the merits of her case. So why is this kind of a judge a figure for God in this parable?

I contend that this is a very subtle proclamation of the good news of the gospel; for the unjust judge ends up granting her justice (ekdikeso), but not on the merits of her case, but merely for self-centered reasons: “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming”. In other words, “to get her off my back”.  

The same root root word is employed by Paul in his letter to the Romans: “There is none righteous (dikaios)” (3, 10), and “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified (dikaioumenoi) freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (3, 23). The verb is dikaioun, to justify, to render favorable. The same word is used in 2 Corinthians when Paul says: “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (dikaiosune theou). In other words, we are the ones who were given a favorable judgement, made righteous, justified, not on the merits of our lives, but purely on the basis of God’s good pleasure. We could even say “for self-centered reasons”, like the unjust judge. In other words, the reason for our justification is nothing more than that “he wanted to”, “he felt like it”, for he is not beholden to anything above himself–there is nothing above God–nor is he beholden to any human tribunal. 

To be the righteousness of God is to be justified, because to justify is to “make right” (jus). It means to stand in right relationship with God. We can’t do that; we have no power to justify ourselves, to redeem ourselves, to buy ourselves back from the slavery of sin. We cannot make up for sin. Only God can do that, and he does so in Christ, in his death, as a sheer gift, not as a result of anything we might have done, nor by virtue of any disposition or prior goodness on our part. All of us stand before God in need of redemption, in need of salvation, completely dependent upon one who can and does redeem us.

So why does Jesus hold up the unjust judge as a figure for God? The reason is that from our point of view, God is often seen as unjust. Think of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. The landowner hires laborers at different times of the day, but at the end of the day he pays the one who worked one hour the same wage as the one who worked a full day. They grumbled and saw that as a violation of justice. Consider the parable of the lost son (apollumai:  ‘being destroyed’), the son who “destroys himself” by his own choices, and the older son’s anger towards his father for his unjust royal treatment upon his return. In other words, God is like an unjust judge who pays no attention to the requirements of justice, but does what he pleases, and what pleases him above all else is raising the dead to life. If one is dead, one cannot do anything to earn that resurrection or help in the process, for one is dead. Jesus raised a 12 year old girl (the daughter of Jairus), and he raised the son of the widow of Nain, and he raised Lazarus from the dead. 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). 

God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy, said a long time priest friend of mine. That’s the God we worship. It would be terrible news if our justification depended upon the merits of our life, that is, terrible news if our God was a “Just Judge” who rendered judgements on the basis of how much our lives measure up to the standards of justice. 

When a defendant awaiting a verdict stands before a court judge, he or she is typically nervous, filled with fear, a servile fear. But God calls us to grow out of servile fear and into filial fear, which is not the fear of punishment, but a profound reverence for God that is so deep that sin loses all attraction. What human judge can cause us to lose all attraction to sin and self-seeking? If we stand before God with servile fear, we haven’t learned what we should have learned in this life; we have not embraced the good news of the gospel, and that may be in part because the good news was not proclaimed to us; for what is often proclaimed is a false gospel, a gospel reduced to a transaction: “If you do this, you will get that; if you don’t do this, you will not get that”. It’s the false gospel of salvation through works, the semi-Pelagian heresy that we have to do something to earn that initial grace. But we’ve earned nothing. It’s all grace, including the grace of our cooperation.

Jesus ends by asking: “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” If we project our own limits onto God, if we see God as a God who judges us on the merits of our case, on the basis of what we actually deserve, then we won’t pray much, at least not with a great deal of hope. But if we truly believe the good news of the divine mercy–which is not easy to believe–, then we will pray with great confidence, and when we pray with confidence, we begin to see miracles, especially when interceding for others. 

St. Paul says that it is the Holy Spirit who prays through us, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, so the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words (Rom 8, 26). When we pray for others, it is the Holy Spirit who prays through us, and God loves our children and all those for whom we pray infinitely more than we do, so whatever love we have for our children, it is merely a limited sharing in that love of his for them, and so we can pray for them without anxiety and uncertainty. Our God is an unjust judge. In other words, his mercy goes far beyond the demands of justice. He hears our prayers because he inspires them. And that is indeed hard to believe, which is why this reading ends with Christ saying: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”, specifically, the faith that we have nothing to fear in the servile sense, faith that we will get not what we deserve, but what he wants for us, which is a never ending sharing in his own happiness, which not only lasts forever, but which expands without end, an eternal life of unimaginable surprises. And God always gets what he wants in the end. 

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 above all, everyone is a Zen Master. 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.