Don Bosco's Relics Tour, Take Two: Stony Point

Archbishop Dolan and Fr. Steve Ryan at the Marian Shrine with the Relic of Don Bosco today
(Photo by Mary Kate Havranek)

I packed the monks into the Hyundai this morning around 9:15 and headed north up the Garden State to get to the Marian Shrine for the youth rally and Mass with Archbishop Dolan.  The trip was fraught with delays due to the rain and construction on 78.  When we did get to the Parkway the traffic was only a little better through the Newark exits, with the rain going from a drizzle to a deluge then back to a drizzle the whole way.  After almost and hour and a half we got to the Shrine and I had to negotiate with a fireman over where to park.   After a brief misunderstanding he let me park a lot closer than I expected.  I must say I felt up, despite the rain and the uncertainty over where this Mass would be, since it was obvious that doing it out doors was not going to happen.

There were students from Salesian High, Don Bosco Prep as well as a slew of other schools present, and various pilgrims from far and wide.  My guess is there were in the neighborhood of two thousand people, but I'm not good with estimating these things.

I ran into a few teachers from New Rochelle, and then a ton of students over the course of  the day.  It's only a few months, but I didn't realize how much I miss the Salesian High Boys.  I'm happy here in Elizabeth, to be sure, but it was the first time, seeing the teachers and students, that I felt a bit nostalgic. It was a blessing to get to work with and for them the past three years.  One of the many blessings I've received as a Salesian.

I found my way to Fr.  Lamagna Hall, where priests usually vest for Mass and found the Archbishop holding court amidst the priests gathered.  Fr. Jim Mulloy, the pride of Merrillville, Indiana, let me know that Mass was canceled and that they'd bring the various school groups into the new church in shifts to venerate the relic and hear the Archbishop speak.  

Archbishop Dolan was great, as usual.  He was very enthusiastic in a way that can't be faked.  This is the second time I've seen him with a gathering of young people, and he just has a natural way with them.  He tells it straight, but always with a positive, life affirming message.  He challenged us, young and not so young alike, to "dare to dream" and to put God at the center of our lives.  He spoke of his devotion to Don Bosco, that goes back to his grade school days in the 1950's and his teacher Sr. Mary Bosco, who was actually present at the event.


After we exited to allow the next shift into the church, there was more reminiscing with old friends and then I gathered the monks back and we retreated to a local diner for a quick bite in a dry place before heading back to New Jersey.
 

Obviously it was disappointing that the Mass had to be canceled, but the rain was something beyond any one's control.  Logistically, we (the Salesian Province) simply don't have an indoor space big enough to move an event like this in case the weather doesn't cooperate.  Three years ago it was the heat when the Rector Major visited, this time around it was the rain.  At this point I have no great pearl of wisdom to offer, other than this was promoted as a pilgrimage, and it is in that spirit it should be taken.  Pilgrimages involve sacrifice and a certain amount of inconvenience to be put up with by the traveler making the journey.  They aren't meant to be pleasure trips, or in this case an entertainment event.  In light of all this I think the organizers did what they could to make lemonade from the lemons they got, visa vi the weather.

So, these are my first raw impressions of the Relic Tour.  More on the Cathedral leg of the tour and a more thought out reflection in the days to come.

Don Bosco's Relics Tour, Take One

The next two days are going to be pretty busy, with the relics of Don Bosco arriving and the events at Stony Point and St. Patrick’s Cathedral tomorrow and Friday.  I’ll have my reflections on these days of prayer and pilgrimage over the weekend.  

My first thought is that it’s hard to believe that the day is finally here.  I know that many people have been working hard to make this a reality, and there are some who wonder if this is all going to be worth the time and expense in making the relics tour a reality.  Without questioning anyone’s sincerity, because I don’t, we need to have a bigger vision than just worrying about the material concerns connected with this event.  This is a time of grace, and it needs to be taken advantage of.

Don Bosco is one of the giants of the Faith that no one has heard of here in the USA (at least it seems that way sometimes).  He founded what has become the second largest religious community in the Church, and fathered a wider movement of lay people and diocesan clergy who cooperate with the Salesian mission to the young.  In some cases people have heard of Don Bosco or have heard of the Salesians but don’t know the connection between the two.  This is a time to connect the dots for them, sort of speak.

In the Salesian Family we have a dynamic combination of missionary outreach and Catholic spirituality, the active and the contemplative aspects of our Faith directed toward the salvation of the young.  It’s time to stop keeping our lamps lit under a bushel basket and shout it from the roof tops (excuse me for mixing my scriptural metaphors).  This tour of Don Bosco’s relics is a perfect opportunity to do that.

Ok, off the soap box for now.  I’m off to do a memorial Mass.  More on the relic tour soon. 

Vincent de Paul

I read three biographies during my retreat this past summer.  They were the lives of saints that I thought would help prepare me for the role I was taking on here in Elizabeth.  One was on St. Anthony of Padua (of course),  the other was St. John Vianny and the last was St. Vincent de Paul, who's feast we celebrate today.

That St. Vincent had an eventful life, there is no doubt; it's the stuff adventure stories are made of. But what fascinated me the most was that if you really think of about, his motives for becoming a priest were less than noble. I'm not saying he wasn't sincere as a young man, but he was just as concerned with the social status and economic security that came along with becoming a priest in the 17th century as with any desire to save souls.  In fact he spent years in and out of court to settle a claim he had on an inheritance that was owed him.  He was not a great sinner, to be sure.  But with all the connections he had made, and lucrative positions he had secured he could have settled for a quiet, comfortable life. 

St. Vincent's conversion didn't happen in a flash, but over time he came to see the needs around him.  He came to understand that the life of a disciple is one of service to others.  Instead continuing in a comfortable life he allowed God's grace to change him, and he became a tireless worker for the poor.  He used those connections, not for his own benefit, but for the good of others.  In addition he dedicated himself to the formation of the clergy, which what notoriously bad at that time.  He also became the father of several religious families, including Mother Seton's Sisters of Charity.

So, yes, St. Vincent could have lived the quiet comfortable life, but then no one would remember his name.

Twenty Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

'If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.'"

-Luke 16:31

When I look over the Gospel reading for this Sunday, the famous parable of Lazarus and the rich man, I am struck by the last line.  It reminds me of the need to live by faith, and not by sight, as the old hymn goes.  This is a bit ironic, I admit, since one of the main points of the reading is that the rich man was too “blind” to see the poor man at his door.  Surly it doesn’t take faith to see a person in need and help them?  There are people who help others for strictly humanitarian reasons, this is true.  But the point I’m trying to make is that if we keep a division in our minds between faith and everyday life, we can miss where God is talking to us in the ordinary events of our life.

I am a firm believer in miracles.  There are some people, we call them “demythologizers,” who strip the Gospels of their supernatural character and explain everything that the Lord did or said in human terms. These are the people who say that the multiplication of the loaves never happened, that the people there simply shared the bread they already had; that Jesus didn’t actually multiply anything.  But all they are doing is robbing the Word of God of an important message that it has for us.  In the life of Jesus miracles doubled as prophetic acts, pointing us to what life in the Kingdom of Heaven will mean.  They were also signs to the people of his age, well versed in the prophetic scriptures, that He was indeed the promised messiah.  For us today miracles are a confirmation of the faith we have already.   Necessary? Maybe not, but they are a generous gift to those who believe.

All the same miracles are rare, and are not meant to be the foundations of our faith.  Jesus was impatient with those who were constantly seeking signs and wonders, and wouldn’t take His word for it.  Blessed are those who have not seen, were not at the empty tomb, did not put their hands into Jesus’ pierced side and yet believe.  The rich man needed a sign of some kind, and thought if Lazarus was to rise from the dead it would be just the thing to convert his brothers.  But the message is no; you have Moses and the Prophets, listen to them.  We have, as well, the four Evangelists, St. Paul and the other letter writers, the Fathers of the Church and the Magisterium guided by the Holy Spirit, handing down the Apostolic Tradition through the ages; listen to them.

We also have the gift of the Spirit in Baptism and Confirmation.  This is supposed to help shape our vision so that we can see the divine all around us, working in the world.  It does not take faith to believe a miracle, but it takes faith to believe that God is in the ‘hood, in the poor and suffering; that God is love in a world that seems to prefer hate and war.  It demands faith to see Jesus in the beggar sleeping at our door.

The Pope in England II

These are a few very scattered reflections on the Pope's recent visit to the UK.

After all the controversy and build up, the Papal visit to England is over, and the Holy Father didn't come close to  being arrested.  There were protests, and even though some tried to down play it by working the percentages, almost 10,000 dissenters at one event is not insignificant.  Though he did make a great point about the demographic breakdown of  the protesters versus the faithful.  While the protesters were mainly white middle class sophisticates the author suggested we:

Compare the protestors to the Catholics in Hyde Park: old Polish ladies, tweedy gents from the shires, African hospital cleaners, self-consciously cool teenagers, Filipino checkout assistants and, as one of my friends put it, “some rather tarty-looking traveller women who’d obviously had a glass or two”. They don’t call it the Catholic Church for nothing: if not a universal cross-section of humanity, it was a damn sight closer to it than the humanist smugfest. (Damian Thompson, UK Guardian)

I'm just beginning to read through the Pope's words, but you have to hand it too him; he's unafraid.  He chose to defend the place of religion in public life on the spot where St. Thomas More was condemned for defending the role of the Papacy.  For those who will respond that St. Thomas was defending freedom of conscience, I counter that as a judge he had no problem condemning Protestants who were following their consciences no less sincerely.  No, he was standing against a civil authority that had overstepped it's legitimate bounds of authority, and I would add, competency, in declaring the King of England and his successors, supreme head of the church in England.  This was not done for religious reasons, but rather political expediency, the very motives Benedict is urging us to avoid.

He has made these hard points with clarity and charity. I have for a long time thought we are in a culture war, but the Pope is showing me that if it is a war, our weapons must be those of simple reason and a charitable heart, and of course, deep faith in Christ.

Phenomenology 1.2

It seems my post on phenomenology left some people in the dark.  This was not intentional, but what was purposeful was not going into a detailed analysis of this branch of thought.  In the context of the Theology of the Body it's enough to know that it was an influence.  You can understand and appreciate John Paul II's writing without knowing his influences, much like you can enjoy the Beatles and never know anything about Buddy Holly or Chuck Berry.  Like I wrote before, I don't want to get too caught up in the preliminaries and bore people with philosophy.

The other issue is time.  Things are beginning to heat up here in Elizabeth, and the spare time I use for this little project of mine is getting scarcer by the day.  I've been doing this TOB thing for over a month and still haven't gotten into the text with you all.  But I'll try, in brief, to sum up what phenomenology is.

Remember that beginning with Rene Descartes contemporary philosophy became more and more subjective in its vision of reality, meaning that the Western mind accepted that there is no universal truth that we can all agree on.  Truth either doesn't exist or we can't know it because of our limited human abilities. We also can't know what a thing is beyond it's outer physical attributes.  In contemporary thought what St. Thomas Aquinas called a thing's essence simply can't be known.  To put it in modern parlance, we really can't know what the definition of is is.  When Descartes says I think there for I am (his famous cogito ergo sum), he's placing the inner life of the mind as the only sure thing we can grasp on to.  Our vision of the outer world is tainted by our perceptions, which can be effected by any number of factors like past experiences, prejudices, or even physical defects.  There fore we can't trust our senses, and since it's through our sense that we learn, we can't really know things as they are, only as we perceive them.  (Are you still with me?  because I'm not sure even I am)   As the late Larry Azar, one of my professors from Iona, used to say Descartes put us in our minds and we've been trying to get out ever since.

Phenomenology was one of those attempts to get us out of our minds and into the real world again. It tried to analyze human actions by means of what is called bracketing; looking at an action or a thing as it is, putting aside all our preconceived notions.  This even includes any scientific knowledge we may have about a thing, in order to get to its essential meaning. 

The difficulty with phenomenology is that as a movement it quickly scattered into many different directions, so that you end up with someone like Jacques Derrida who believed that words have no inherent meaning beyond what we place on them (again, no such thing as universal truth).  Rather than taking us into the real world, you could argue he's gone full circle back into our mind.  Obviously John Paul II is taping into an earlier form of this philosophy when writing TOB, and is also at heart a follower of Thomas Aquinas and his Christian philosophy. 

It's tough, but I do have to get back to work, but I will return to an important point later;  why this all is important.  We often think of philosophy as being very detached from everyday life, especially when we start to to get into the details of these thinker's beliefs.  But the denial of objective truth had consequences and is a reality we are living with today.  What starts as a tiny, maybe even quirky movement is a university somewhere can spread into our common way of thinking, usually without us knowing it. 

The Pope in England

The Pope’s visit to England is making me reflect of St. Dominick Savio’s dream concerning that country’s eventual return to the Church of Rome and the role that the Holy Father would play in it. The pope he saw in his dream was Pius IX (sometimes called Don Bosco’s Pope because of their close relationship), but these prophetic visions need to be seen in a less than literal light. This is not the first time that Pope Benedict has been at the center of a Salesian prophesy. Don Bosco’s Dream of the Two Pillars had the pope being shot, recovering to steer the Barque of Peter again before finally dying. Then he is quickly replaced by one who would succeed in anchoring the boat between the two pillars of the Eucharist and Mary. Only three months after John Paul II’s death, who had survived an assassination attempt in 1981, we have photos of Pope Benedict sailing up the Rhine with a monstrance and a statue of Mary to kick off World Youth Day. More than one person, including cardinals and archbishops, saw a connection between Don Bosco’s dream and this event. Now we have him in England, not on a pastoral visit undertaken on his own initiative, as was pointed out to me, but by invitation of the government. What that means, I don’t know; I’ll leave that to others to ponder.


John Paul II was really the contemporary incarnation of “Don Bosco’s Pope” in many ways. He was a member of a Salesian parish for a time in his youth, and was taught by them when he studied theology underground during the Nazi occupation of Poland. He had a deep love and concern for the young people and for the Salesian family. He was very close with at least one Rector Major. When he died we did wonder how the relationship would change. Considering the fact that Pope Benedict chose Cardinal Tacisio Bertone, a Salesian as Secretary of State, I would say we still have a good friend in the Holy Father. But these are two very different men, full of paradoxes. John Paul was charismatic and connected with people immediately, but his writings could be dense and hard to understand. Benedict is a bit more reserved, and while no less an intellectual than John Paul was, his writings are more accessible. He has the gift of taking complex ideas and making them understandable. Responding to reports that the crowds for the present Holy Father were greater than those of his predecessor, Peggy Noonan commented that people came to see John Paul II, but that they’re coming to listen to Benedict XVI.


So, what the Pope’s visit to England will mean in the long run is a mystery. But I will go out on a limb and write that it is connected to Dominick Savio’s dream. Whether he is the pope to bring England back into to Catholic fold or whether he represents the first stage to be completed in later pontificates only time will tell the tale. But he’s taken concrete steps to out reach already by making it easier for Anglicans to enter the Church while keeping many of their liturgical traditions. So we could say the prophesy is being fulfilled before our eyes.


John Paul was the quintessential “Salesian Pope,” but in his own understated way Pope Benedict is proving to be just as much at the heart of the Salesian Family.

Phenomenology

I know that I’ve been going in a bunch of different directions in the last couple of weeks, but I’ll try to get back on track here.  We were beginning to look at the Theology of the Body (TOB) by examining it’s philosophical roots.  I really don’t want to get too bogged down in the philosophy, but to mention that John Paul II taught philosophy and was very familiar with the contemporary philosophical currents about him.  He was a man of his times, while also being firmly rooted in the Church’s Tradition.  The branch of philosophy that the late pope is most associated with is phenomenology, which developed in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century and arguably reached its peak about the mid 1900s.  

There is a lot of debate about how much John Paul II really was a phenomenologist since it can be argued that it’s more a way of doing philosophy than an intellectual movement with a set of firmly held beliefs.  For example there are a wide variety of thinkers who are sometimes called phenomenologists whose views are very different.   You have John Paul II and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (AKA Edith Stein) on one side and the likes of Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida on the other.  The first two stood firmly on the side of faith, the other two were atheists (to be fair, Derrida was a bit coy on the issue).  So the argument is that John Paul used the language and method of Phenomenology, but little more.

I must admit, that entire discussion is above my intellectual pay grade.  What I do know is that in TOB John Paul looks at scripture and tries to analyze it from the standpoint of experience, much like a phenomenologist would.  Contemporary philosophy had become more and more subjective, while traditional Catholic thought emphasized objective truth.  John Paul used this very contemporary method to bridge the gap between the two, showing how our personal experience points us to the universal truths of faith.

Like I wrote at the beginning, I don´t want to get too caught up in the philosophical part of the story.  As we move along I´ll try to point out where John Paul is using phenomenology as a springboard for  his teaching. But there is just one more stop we have to make before beginning TOB.  It’s a look at one of the great mystics in the history of the Church, and I must admit, one of my heroes, John of the Cross.  It is he who supplies the theological and spiritual foundation to TOB.

Thank You

Even though I’ve been bloging on and off since ’04, I really haven’t taken it seriously until the last couple of months. The audience, while still small, has grow steadily in recent weeks (We passed 500 hits all time this past weekend, most are since the end of July), and for this I am grateful to God and to you. I am also appreciative of the kind words and encouragement I've received from many of you. I really have no idea where this is going, but if you like what you read, spread the word. If there are topics you think I should address, let me know; I’ll see what I can do. And again, thank you for reading.

Reflections on 9/11

Yesterday (Friday, September 10), I was in my office doing data entry for today’s baptisms (the most tedious work imaginable; the data entry, not the baptisms). The doldrums were broken by the sound of a plane. This is not so unusual since we’re probably 2 miles from Newark Airport. It’s that this baby was flying low and moving fast. It was a jet fighter, (I understand that there may have been two) and it made four passes in about a five minute span. I didn’t see it, but Fr. Rich did and we got a call from our secretary’s husband who saw them from his back yard, just a few blocks away. One of our parishioners has connections in the Elizabeth PD so he gave a call. They knew what was up, but they weren’t talking.

The first time the plane passed overhead, the moment I realized that this wasn’t simply a jumbo jet making its approach but was a plane of war on patrol a feeling of dread came over me in a way I haven’t felt for a very long time. On 9/11 all those years ago I felt numb, but in the days and months that followed I felt this creeping sense of disquiet, like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. That subsided by the following spring, but then just after the first anniversary of the attacks I was in Chicago settling in to my new assignment when the terror level was raised to what ever color represents it’s time to put your head between your legs and kiss it goodbye. New York was armed camp, from what we could tell from the cable news stations, so the director, our financial administrator and I sat down to discuss what to do if a dirty bomb went off in the Loop. We concluded that we were close enough to down town that there probably wasn’t much we could do to save ourselves and the men in our community if the worst happened. We made sure we had enough canned food and bottled water and hoped for the best. My feelings those times mirrored what I felt growing up during the Cold War. I didn’t live through the Cuban Missile Crisis or anything like that, but there was an awareness that nuclear war was a real possibility. I certainly didn’t live in constant fear during those years, but there was a sense of the fragileness of life and that the future was far from assured. These were the feelings that came back to me for that brief moment yesterday morning.

In the end it is faith that sustains me in those moments. This is not to say that being a priest or a Christian will save me from hardships or tragedy, but that if I am doing what I am supposed to do right now, I have no need to fear, even if that something is as tedious as plugging names and addresses into a spreadsheet. Life is unpredictable, even without the threat of terrorism and nuclear war. We just have to live now, as if it’s our last day; live to the fullest this life that is a gift from God. We remember today those who died nine years ago. We pray for them and for their families that still struggle with pain and grief. But the greatest memorial we can give them is to remember that life is short and fragile, so we need to live every moment, not in fear, but in love.

Religious Freedom and its Limits

Many people have been asking me lately my opinion on the mosque controversy in Manhattan. I haven’t brought it into the blog, mainly because I didn’t think I had anything new to add to the discussion. I still might not, but for the sake of satisfying my questioners, I’ll have go at it.

Obviously, I’m a publicly religious man, so the preservation of religious freedom is important to me. I believe that the Constitution has been twisted to mean something it doesn’t say. The exact text of the establishment clause of the first Amendment reads: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Nowhere do the words “separation of church and state” or “wall of separation between church and state” appear in the clause. These phrases represent a particular interpretation of this clause; it is the prevailing one at this time, but it’s an interpretation nonetheless. There are people who want to keep religion in a box, on the shelf and out of public life and they use the Constitution to justify it. I don’t want to get sidetracked too far into a discussion on the nature of the constitution, but I only want to make clear that I don’t believe that the First Amendment was written to limit religion, but rather to safeguard its free practice.

In light of this, I have no problem with the idea of a mosque being built in New York City. I am against this particular mosque near Ground Zero though. On a related issue, I understand that our constitutionally protected freedom of speech allows us to do many things, like burning objects that have a symbolic value to make our point, but I’m against the burning of Korans by anyone, especially those who claim to be doing it for Christ. Do both groups have a right do what they’re proposing? Yes they do. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. I’m not writing as a constitutional scholar here, but there are reasonable limits to our rights. Some limits are imposed by the courts; some should be imposed on ourselves by using a little common sense. Both actions are insensitive and unnecessarily provocative. They are both, in their own ways, mean spirited acts that go against the values that religion in general should stand for.

In the case of the mosque, or community center, or whatever they want to call it, I have concerns as a citizen about the whole thing as well. While there are people who will cynically use the Constitution to limit religious freedom, there are those who will just as cynically use religious freedom to disguise less than holy objectives. I hate to use a popular cliché, but the Constitution is not a suicide pact. I want to know where the money is coming from and whether this community center will really be nothing more than a front for those who want to do damage to our country. In light of recent history, we would be foolish not to ask these questions.

So I am against the mosque, on both religious as well as civic grounds.

I Drink Your MILKSHAKE!

There Will Be Blood OOOO (4 Hallows out of 4)
Rated R for some violence.

I’m taking a break from Saleianity this week, mainly because I have to put a financial report into the weekly parish bulletin, and I spent too much time on the Theology of the Body and getting the Spanish edition of the blog up and running this past weekend.

But I did find time to take in a movie. This was done in the privacy of my room, so as you can guess it was a DVD, and so not a first run picture (no piracy here). In the spirit of "better late than never," it was 2007’s “There Will Be Blood,” based loosely on the Upton Sinclair novel “Oil!”. I understand writer-director P.T. Anderson only used the first 150 pages as a jumping off point for the story, though catapulting seems like a better way of putting it. This is one of the most unusual movies I've seen in the last few years, and I mean that as a compliment. Anderson leaves the viewer to make up his own mind as to what is going on without making things overly confusing, a favorite tactic of film makers who really have nothing to say but want to pretend. This wasn't as gory as I thought it was going to be, but it is brutal; not for the faint hearted.

I must say, I feel bad I didn’t see this one on the big screen when it came out. While Daniel Day Lewis certainly deserved his Oscar, (he has a couple of scenes where he's his usual out of body self) this is really a visual picture. There’s no dialogue for about the first ten minutes, and even after that the actors use facial expressions to project their thoughts and emotions more than words. The always exciting cinematography moves seamlessly between claustrophobic and sweeping, with the barren desert, that serves as the setting for the middle portion of the story, becoming almost a character itself. (As I bother to flip the DVD case over I see that Robert Elswit won for best cinematography, which makes sense)

I would be amiss not to point out that the film does go in for some tried and true anti-religious stereo typing. Eli Sunday, a Pentecostal style minister played by Paul Dano, is a fraud and anyone who is religious is either a fool or a conniver. It would be nice to see a movie where religion and religious people are actually taken seriously, and while the variation on this tired theme is handled more subtly than in most recent pictures, it’s still not very original. It seems like the only theology we get in films these days is the twisted kind found in certain horror movies, with all religious people being treated like Eli Sunday, only crasser. I long for the days of Carl Malden’s Fr. Barry or even Jason Miller’s Fr. Karras, but alas I fear they have passed away, hopefully not forever.

To be fair, the Godless are even worse. Lewis’ Daniel Plainview is a murderous, misanthropic maniac who brooks no competition in his pursuit of oil wealth. At the beginning he shows real humanity in the tender way he treats his son, but as the story progresses he becomes more and more erratic and violent as he pursues the digging of an oil well in a far off desert town.

But it would be an oversimplification to say Plainview is motivated strictly by money or even power. No, simple greed is left as Rev. Sunday’s great vice. Plainview is a man without family or roots who fosters an inner rage that we are left to guess at. He never reconciled with his estranged father before his death, and every close relationship he has turns out to be fake somehow. By his own admission he hates most people, but there is something in him that yearns for connectedness. He is constantly disappointed in the people who represent themselves as family and often with reason, but his disappointments provoke violence and drive him deeper into himself and his work. He becomes an isolated bitter man, trusting no one but a longtime adviser. Ultimately he rejects the only person who truly loves him because his entire life has been built on a competition that grants him only a hollow victory.

A.O. Scott, the fine film critic for the New York Times, took issue, in an otherwise enthusiastic review, with the story veering off into a psycho drama rather than expanding its critique of capitalism. But I think you could argue that in the character analysis of Plainview lies the social commentary. Plainview is successful at every turn, and even his apparent defeats turn out to be victories in the end, yet the more he gains the more and more he devolves into madness and isolation. For the purposes of the story Plainview is the embodiment of the capitalist system, a system built on a greed that can never be satisfied; a greed that destroys the bonds of family and society; a system that is dehumanizing and in the end self destructive. This isn't my view of capitalism, to be sure, but the one argued by the film through the warped mind of Daniel Plainview.

If you haven't picked it up by now, this is not a feel good movie. It has a dark, pessimistic view of humanity where almost everyone is not what they present themselves to be as they grasp for wealth and security. Plainview is the only transparent one here simply because the palpable contempt he has for all those around him makes his attempts at deception seem halfhearted. He hates people, and he doesn't care who knows it. The only sympathetic figures in the story are HW, Plainview’s son, but he has to suffer a disabling injury to earn that right, and Mary Sunday, Eli’s sister. They are the sole bright spots in an otherwise dark universe.

“There Will Be Blood” is a movie that defies easy analysis, and while I had problems with it’s view of human nature, to put it mildly, it was refreshing to see an American film that made me think without resorting to tricks and gimmicks.

Philosophy is not Pretty

The comedian Steve Martin used to say that people who study philosophy in college remember just enough to screw them up for the rest of their lives. It could be added that most people who haven’t studied it, and a good number who have, think it’s too much of a waste of time to even accomplish that much. As one who has a piece of paper hanging from his wall proclaiming him a bachelor of philosophy I can say that my studies didn’t do me any lasting emotional harm (some might disagree on that point). And while I tended to treat these courses as a means to an end without any lasting importance, my view on this has changed over the years. I now wish I had paid better attention and dug a little deeper back in the day. I don’t know that we have to go back to past ages where everyone who went to university left with a philosophy degree (a practice that endured in many Catholic colleges well into the 20th century), but there needs to be some renewal of philosophy in the core curriculum, if such a thing still exists. If we are screwed up today, to use Mr. Martin’s vulgarism, it’s because we don’t really understand why we believe what we believe, and this doesn’t apply to non-religious people only, but for people of faith as well.

Faith is enough to get you into heaven, for sure. There are worse things in life than not understanding St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine. To be versed in theology and philosophy doesn’t make you a saint. There was a professor of Scripture at Xavier when I was there who was very popular, and didn’t believe a word of what he taught. That is he approached the New Testament as an anthropologist might, not as a document of faith. I heard a beautiful and insightful lecture on Isaiah 6 by a professor at SUNY Purchase, but for him it was a poem, nothing more. Knowing something intellectually doesn’t mean that you really believe it, or really understand it in the same way. With faith we have a different way of seeing both the Scriptures and reality around us. We don’t need airtight arguments to convince us that Jesus Christ is the Way the Truth and the Life. But we don’t live in a world guided by the light of faith. We have friends, neighbors, coworkers, even family members who may not share our faith or may be uncertain if they really believe what the Church teaches. We ourselves may have doubts that won’t go way. Appealing to religious authority may not be enough to convince them, or us, of the truth of these teachings. This is where philosophy comes in. If we know enough of the intellectual underpinnings of our belief maybe we can at least convince them, as well as be convinced ourselves, of the reasonableness of our faith.

This is only a first step. What will ultimately convince people is our personal witness lived out in our lives. The writings of St. Thomas Aquinas have certainly helped people to better grasp their faith and even pushed some struggling with the idea of converting “over the edge” to embrace Christ. But it is the example of those like Bl. Theresa of Calcutta that truly move souls to change their lives for the better.

This is a long way around to say that I’m not making philosophy the be all and end all. But it is a tool, and an important one. The Theology of the Body was formulated by John Paul II, who was a philosopher, because the Church had reaffirmed its teaching that the use of artificial contraception is contrary to human dignity and the divine law. Many within the Church found this hard to accept, and to this day most Catholics ignore this teaching. His hope was to show people the religious justifications for this teaching, but also that it is in line with human reason as well.

And so I'm dusting off some old volumes, scouring some web sites and brushing up on my Aristotle, as well as Descartes and Kant. It's actually been enjoyable reacquainting myself with this material and I pray it bears fruit, not just for me but for you.

I had promised a posting on phenomenology, but I found that I need to go beyond TOB’s introduction to really do it justice. So, I’m still reading through some material and hope to have something on that by the end of the week.

Kant, You Romantic Fool

The last time we looked at the Theology of the Body we examined the philosophical roots of TOB, discussing the shift in the common world view after about 1500. In doing so I jumped over a few centuries to get to the idea of reductionism: that reality can be reduced to function, with no spiritual dimension to the material world. We should go back a bit though to see more clearly how we got to that point. There is one thinker who had tremendous influence on John Paul II, and really on all contemporary thought, who must be dealt with before going on.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a Prussian philosopher who spent almost his entire life in his hometown, never traveling more than a hundred miles from where he was born. In spite of his limited background his influence has been great. His work summed up and answered the philosophers that came before him, and all the philosophers that came after him have had to react to him in some way. His thought is too far reaching to summarize in a short space, so I’ll concentrate on the things that concern us most directly: his ideas on free will and the human person.

For Kant, to be human was to exercise free with without limits. This is not to say he didn’t believe in morality; he held to a very strict moral code. For him to be moral means acting in accordance with reason, so that what is irrational is also immoral. Any action that is based on desire, emotion or motivated by pleasure does not meet the standard of a rational act, and is thus immoral and dehumanizing. Any act that uses another person, not respecting his or her autonomy limits free will, and so is also immoral. Kant thought sex was dehumanizing because it is an action born of desire, emotion and, you got it, the seeking of pleasure. In his view sex partners are using each other as objects. This violates the individual’s free will and is immoral. Sex could be justified if the goal was procreation, which is rationally needed for the continuation of the human race, but for no other reason. As you can tell, Kant wasn’t big on Valentine’s Day; in fact he was never married.

It’s amazing to me that Kant was a devout Lutheran, and part of his goal was to set up a system that allowed for faith and the spiritual at a time when philosophers were becoming more and more materialistic. But his teaching on free will, which builds on Francis Bacon, soon became detached from his strict morality as questions over what is rational and who sets the standards of rationality rose up in later decades. Rather than safeguarding human dignity, Kant’s thought gave rise to increasingly individualistic philosophies that promoted the exercise of free will for the good of the individual or society, but often at the expense of others.

The challenge that John Paul II faced was maintaining the centrality of free will while convincing people that Christian morality is the highest way of using that freedom. Keep in mind that JPII was a philosopher, and he tried to use a new philosophical school to answer modern objections to faith. More on phenomenology next time.

Of Cabbages and Kings

The medieval period is often thought of as being backward and “unscientific,” denoted by the fact that we also call it the “Dark Ages.” These terms; Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Medieval and even Renaissance, for the time that followed, were applied by people centuries after the fact. The historian Morris Bishop observed that the people of the middle ages didn’t think they were living in the “middle” of anything, that is between the fall and rise of two great civilizations. They thought they were the continuation of ancient culture and tradition, as well as building upon it. Romano Guardini wrote that the medieval mind was much more subtle than it is given credit for today. For them humanity, nature and the spiritual realm were intimately connected, each functioning in harmony with the other. Through the study of actions, attributes and qualities it was possible to know what something was by its nature, and that a being was greater than the sum of its parts or practical function. Reality, including our earthly lives, had a purpose or an end to which it was directed. This end was ordained by God and it was our job, sort to speak, to find where our individual place was in this universal plan.

There is no doubt that at some point after 1350 new intellectual, cultural and scientific movements emerged that would lead to revolutionary changes in society. As the Theology of the Body´s introduction points out, beginning with Francis Bacon (1561—1626) the natural world became seen something to be mastered, controlled and manipulated rather than harmonized with. This process continued with Rene Descartes (1596-1650), further separating humanity, nature and the spiritual realm, putting them at odds with each other. Reality was no longer unified but fragmented, and our ability to know was limited to what could be observed. The nature of something was deemed unknowable, only its function could be discerned. There was no end to which reality was directed beyond what the individual decided it to be. In its extremes it lead to what some philosophers call reductionism; the human person is no more than a composite of parts without purpose or meaning. Human beings are a complex machine made up of the same biological “stuff” as the rest of creation. As the physiologist who discovered vitamin c once noted, “there is no real difference between a king and a cabbage.”

I do describe an extreme view, but this basic reductionism has trickled down to our common way of thinking and viewing the world and ourselves. Since the body has no inherent meaning or purpose beyond this life I can do what I want with it. This can lead, consciously or subconsciously, to accepting substance abuse, sexual excesses or various forms of self mutilation as morally neutral. In the realm of human sexuality specifically, it doesn’t matter who I have relations with since the body is a machine or organism to be satisfied, and nothing more. We need our body, so we’ll be careful about what we eat, to the point that we more and more speak about food in almost moral terms. How we care for the body is important, but what we do with it after is not.

TOB tries to get us back to a more integrated view of the body, that it does have a value and a purpose beyond function and pleasure. We should care for our bodies, certainly. But what we do with this gift we have been given has the greater importance. We are created in God’s image, not just because we have a soul, but the Divine is imaged in our bodies as well (but I’m getting a little ahead of myself). More on the philosophical roots of TOB next time.