The Pope's Monthly Prayer Intention: For Persecuted Christians

The Passion of Saint John the Baptist

Back in June we celebrated the nativity of St. John the Baptist, the only birth we observe on the liturgical calendar, other than those of Jesus and Mary.  John is the last of the Old Testament prophets, and his life is intimately intertwined with our Lord's from the time of their respective conceptions.  John's, in Old Testament style, was miraculous in so far as God guided nature, taking one who was thought to be baron (St. Elizabeth) and allowing her to be her fertile, causing surprise and wonder in the people.  With Jesus, he shows that he is the master of nature, intervening in human affairs in such a way as to totally surpass people's expectations.   

In his death we see that John was a true prophet, suffering and dying for the Word he professed.  It is no accident that the first reading from today's Mass is from the book of Jeremiah.  This past Sunday we heard that he was thrown down a well by the officials of Jerusalem because he was preaching against war and foreign alliances that would lead to doom.  Tradition tells us that he left the city as it was falling to the enemy, only to be murdered in Egypt.  He accepted the call to preach as we heard today, but professing the Word of God came at a great personal cost.

John also was fearless in his preaching of the Word.  He preached justice, equity and personal repentance.  His words were strong, calling those who came out to him a "brood of vipers" who needed to repent and so avoid the great wrath that was to come.  It was not for these things that he was beheaded though.  John told Herod, the puppet ruler of Galilee, that it was not lawful for him to have Herodias, his sister-in-law, as his wife while his brother was still alive.  John was defending the sanctity of marriage, and touching upon something so personal to Herod's way of life that it excited his ire.  He had John arrested, and Herodias manipulated a situation to effect his execution.

Today the Church is called to be prophetic.  She is vocal on issues of economic justice, racial equality, immigration reform and other social issues as seen through the lens of the Gospel.  When we do we are sometimes criticized, sometimes lauded and mainly, it seems to me, ignored.  But when we get up and say that marriage is a union of one man and one woman, for the good of the couple and the raising of a family we are accused of every vile epitaph imaginable.  We are called bigots and homophobes.  The former Archbishop of Buenos Aires was heavily criticized by that country's president for preaching that core doctrine of the faith (for those who don't know who I'm referring to, the archbishop in question is now the much lauded Pope Francis).   When we preach these truths we are touching to core of the human person.  Economics and politics can seem distant to us, especially in this age when the news has been dumbed down to such a large extent.  But our sexuality is tied to our inner self and identity, and so if we are told that maybe we are misusing it we react, sometimes violently, to the messenger.  But preach the truth we must in season and out, no matter the cost.

We do not preach this out of hate, but out of love.  I don't want to see people persecuted or abused because of their sexual orientation.  I believe that what goes on in the privacy of people's homes is none of my business, unless lives are in danger or they want to make it my business by way of the confessional.  I believe who people choose to live with is none of my business, for that matter.  But I can't believe in same sex marriages because it can never be a marriage in the way the Christian community has always understood it.  And just so gays don't think that I'm singling them out, straight couples who purposely exclude the possibility of children from their lives are in relationships that fall short of Christian marriage as well.

I'm not judging if the partners love each other.  I'm not questioning their mutual devotion.  But marriage, at a certain level, transcends these things. It's a commitment made for life that must endure many hardships, including the possibility of falling out of love, and the dimming of the sexual appetite.  It has it's feet planted in the here and now, with eyes fixed on the future, all the way into eternity. 

John the Baptist was put to death for defending the truth of marriage, in his case it's exclusive and indissoluble nature.  We are called to preach the manifold truths of the Gospel, whose implications touch every aspect of our personal, social, cultural and political lives.  We must profess it even when it is hard;  Always with clarity, always with charity.  Ready to accept any consequence that may come. 

Fr. Barron Comments on Eucharist as Sacrifice: Second in a Series

Fr. Jose Carlos Contreras, SDB, Delared Innocent, Freed From Prison!

Fr. Jose Carlos Contreras, SDB has spent four years in prison in Mexico for the rape and murder of 16 year old Itzachel Shantal González López, crimes he did not commit.  Yesterday the Supreme Court of Mexico, in a 4-1 decision, declared Fr. Jose Carlos innocent of all charges. 

The court's decision stated that the priest was convicted without proof that he was the rapist, and called the evidence and accompanying narrative of the overall events presented by prosecutors illogical and beyond the boundaries of common sense.

Today, the feast of the Queenship of Mary, Fr. Jose Carlos will be celebrating a Mass of thanksgiving with his family.

To echo the words of the statement put out by the Salesian Provence of Guadalajara, we have gratitude to God for Father's freedom.  It is hard to imagine the hardships that he endured over these years.  By all accounts he continued to be a priest for the other prisoners of the jail, giving guidance and consolation at a time he himself was suffering so much.  We pray for him as he makes his adjustment back into his regular Salesian life.  We pray for all those unjustly convicted, as well as the victims of the drug violence in Mexico, of which this episode appears to be a part.

Most of all we must remember that there is a young girl who will never grow up to be a woman.  We continue to pray for Itzachel Shantal González López, for her family, and that justice may be done in her case.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus from the Apostleship of Prayer

A Serious Man // DVD Review

Larry Gopnik is having a bad day.  This quiet, more than slightly nebbish physics professor's ordinary life is disrupted in an afternoon by a student who tries to bribe him in a failed attempt to raise his midterm grade (later the student tries extortion), he gets into a property line dispute with his goy neighbor, and his wife Judith (Sari Lennik) reveals that she's been seeing a close friend on the sly and wants a divorce.   Plus, his tenure request is endangered by a series of anonymous letters besmirching his character that keep on arriving to members of the tenure board, and the Columbia Record Club is hounding him for payment on a subscription that his son secretly took out in his name.  More bad things happen in the following days, including several sudden deaths, but you get the point. In the midst of this Larry, an observant Jew, wonders where Hashem (the Hebrew word used to refer to God in informal conversation) is in all this madness and confusion. Does life have meaning, or is everything that happens to us the product of random chance?  The rabbis he consults don't seem to know the answer, and one even tells him that Hashem owes him no answer, even though he plants the curiosity within us from the start.  As Larry frustratingly muses, if he gives us the question, why won't he give us the answer?

This is the set up for the Coen Brothers 2009 offering A Serious Man. The film is set in an Upper Midwest, mostly Jewish suburb in 1967.  It's based on Joel and Ethan Coen's own childhood neighborhood in Minnesota, and while the late 60's setting is somewhat superfluous, except to make certain gags possible, it does add to the atmosphere.  Though the film asks serious questions about God and fate, taking a critical view on the existance of a providential God and the ability of religion to answer the deeper questions of life's meaning, it's an affectionate, and often funny look at what it was like to grow up Jewish (albeit in the Coen Brother's dark style).

A Serious Man is billed as a modern retelling of the Book of Job, but the only thing the main character, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), has in common with his Biblical counter part is that bad things start happening to him, seemingly out of nowhere, and he wonders where God is in all the suffering.  The difference is that Job was a serious man of property and wealth who lost it all, and got it all back, and then some, after his time of trial was over.  If we are honest in reading Job we are left with more questions than answers, even if the Divine author wraps everything up neatly at the end.  Here, Gopnik is an every-man who schleps his way through life, contently enough, to find himself suddenly confronted with calamities that thrown him for an existential loop, forcing him to questions the meaning of life and faith.  When things begin to turn around for the better real problems seem to be barreling down just as the film is ending.  We are left with the same questions as Job, only without the pretty bow and with a dose of palpable dread.

This isn't an easy movie to follow, especially since there really isn't a driving, clearly focused plot, and scenes are inserted that don't seem to be serving the story, such as there is.  This doesn't mean that these bits don't work, because they do; especially a bizarre Yiddish language prologue about a suspected ghost that takes place in another century and location.  Then there's the story of the dentist and goy's teeth; very funny but still leaves you scratching your head as to why we took the detour.  But the scenes themselves work, especially the one about the goy's teeth, in so far as they highlight the idea that life itself is a movie without a plot and the more you try to tease one out the more frustrated you will get. 

What I saw as a key to understanding the movie was an encounter at the end of the film between Larry's son Danny (Aaron Wolf) and the aged Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell).  It is the boy's Bar Mitzvah day and he goes into the old sages cluttered and slightly spooky office to be congratulated.  Featured prominently amid all sorts of strange scientific specimens in jars and random bric a brac is a copy of Caravaggio's Sacrifice of Issac, depicting another biblical story that makes one question what God's up to.  As he sits nervously, the grizzled and wizened wise man begins to slowly paraphrase the opening lines to a Jefferson Airplane song popular at the time:

     "When the truth is found to be lies,
     And all the hope within you dies,
     then what?"

This is the key question of the movie, even if Larry hasn't come to see the answers offered by faith to be lies yet.  The Rabbi Nachtner (perfectly played by George Wyner), who Larry consults after an unsatisfying sit down with the "junior" rabbi, can only tell him how God doesn't work as opposed to how he actually does (a later funeral scene shows that he doesn't have a grip on what the afterlife is about either).  He dismisses questions of ultimate meaning as annoying tooth aches that will go away with time.  For his part, Marshak, like the other rabbis, offers no answers, just the grandfatherly admonition to "be a good boy," as he returns the boy's transistor radio that had been confiscated by the Hebrew teacher at the beginning of the movie.  But where does one go when the basic assumptions that guide our life don't seem to be valid anymore?

In the end A Serious Man leaves us with questions, and no answers.  When what we were raised to believe doesn't seem to match up with the realities of life, what do we do?  Do we give in to hopelessness?  Obviously the Christian answer is no; life has a purpose and their is a plan even if we can't figure it out in our own time.  But I don't want to dismiss the questions, because, while God gives us more to work with than Rabbi Nachtner gives him credit for, he does leave plenty of room for mystery, wonder and questioning.  There isn't a person who hasn't had to grapple with these questions at one time or another, including great saints of strong faith.  The Coen Brothers make us grapple with them with humor, irony but also with a clear sense of appreciation for the religious and cultural tradition they were raised in, even if they are unsure how they view its deeper implications.

The Assumption of Mary from AOP

Fr. Robert Barron: The Sacrament of the Eucharist as a Sacred Meal

This is a part of what I'm assuming will be a three part installment from Fr. Barron on the Eucharist.  He speaks of it here as a sacred meal, tracing the origins of this concept through the Old Testament and into the ministry of Jesus.  From how he set this video up, I'm guessing he will explore the ideas of the Eucharist as a sacrifice and as True Presence in the future.

One of the struggles of the Post-Vatican II period has been over how the celebration of the Eucharist should be viewed.  In the Pre-Conciliar period the stress was placed on the sacrificial aspect of the Mass.  Over the last fifty years more of an emphasis has been placed on the Mass as a communal meal.  But rather than trying to show the complementary nature of these two qualities of the Mass they have too often placed in opposition, as if these things were mutually exclusive.  Here Fr. Barron is trying to demonstrate that what we have is a case of both-and, not either-or.

Mother from AOP

Chicago Bound

PLYMOUTH, MA - I've been and will continue to write a little less frequently over the next couple of weeks, not just because we're in what is the usual vacation-retreat time of year for most priests.  I have been given a new assignment that began on August 1, though I won't be actually moving in until the eighth (I'm squeezing in some time with my family between assignments).  I am no longer the pastor of St. Anthony's in Elizabeth, New Jersey and now hold the same position (in absentia) at St. John Bosco Parish on Chicago's North West Side.  It came as a surprise, especially since I had been green lighted for another term in Jersey, but things happen, as they say, and so I pack up and go in faith.

People are constantly asking how I feel about moving, and in truth I feel very much conflicted about it.  I spent five very happy years at St. John Bosco as parochial vicar before going on to be Coordinator of Youth Ministry (CYM) at Salesian High, New Rochelle.  I would be lying if I said I wasn't excited about going back.  But I was the  pastor at St. Anthony's, and the experience of leaving has not been the same as leaving other places that I've been.  A pastor is more than an administrator, he is called to be the spiritual father of the people in his care.  Don Bosco once said that he would never accept the position because of the grave responsibility that a shepherd of souls has for every person who lives within his parish boundaries. 

Some times we Salesians (and I'm guessing it's the same with most religious) view our assignments as jobs.  We do get attached, and many of us find moving difficult, especially as we get older and more settled in our ways.  But being a pastor is different from the other positions we hold because of its paternal nature.  A director, who is the superior of the religious community, also has this paternal quality.  But he is use to Salesians being transferred in and out, or students or club members graduating or aging out of the program.  A parish community is far more stable and we get to be a part of the lives of the families under our care and share in all the joys and sorrows of their lives.  If we are fulfilling our duties faithfully (or even not as well as we should, as I have observed) the people do become attached to us.  This filial or paternal relationship is real and parting becomes hard for "both sides," even, as in my case, the pastor has fond feelings for the place he's going. 

There is no easy answer.  The dwindling number of priests makes filling positions difficult and movement almost constant.  Staying too long in a place can bring complacency, stagnation and worse; a sense of entitlement and privilege on the part of the priest.  But constant change is unsettling for the people and makes establishing a consistent program, not to mention trusting relationships, almost impossible.

This last point, the importance of relationships, is what I believe the Holy Father is trying to stress to us.  Programs and strategic planning are important, but only if they facilitate a personal encounter with Christ.  Priests and religious, in a special way, are called to be the face, voice and hands of the Lord in the world now.  Do they have this role exclusively in the Church?  No, but they do have it in a unique way, and it's power can be undermined by the constant shifting of personnel.  The people will be respectful, but they will be slow to truly bond with their pastors and the pastor's associates if they have grown accustomed to them not being around for long. 

These are observations, not complaints.  I am looking forward to going back to St. John Bosco.  While leaving St. Anthony's is hard, I understand it and accept it in the spirit of obedience and bowing before the mystery that is God's will.  Pray for me as I begin this next phase as I pray for you all who read The Ax, and for all your loved ones.

Fr. Barron's Take on Pope Francis and World Youth Day

Parents and Teachers: A Lesson on Conscience From Pope Francis via the Apostleship of Prayer