St. Jerome from AOP

Third in a Series: Fr. Barron comments on The Sacrament of the Eucharist as Real Presence

The Value of Silence from AOP

Quick Takes: The Pope and Prince Amukamara

Further Thoughts on Pope Francis' Interview 

As I hinted at previously the Pope's recent interview, along with other statements he has made, has been read by many in both secular and Church circles as representing a change of policy, much like what happens when a new political party comes into power in a country, at the Vatican.  There is no doubt that Francis' words and actions are a change of tone over previous pontificates, but we should be careful not to read a change of substance in the Pope's words.  As I wrote before, the Pope has spoken out against abortion recently, and the Catholic News Agency reported today that he ordered the excommunication of a priest in Australia, functioning without the proper faculties, who was publicly supporting gay marriage and abortion.  As one cardinal put it in response to questions of Francis' orthodoxy, the Pope is still Catholic.

Nonetheless there are those who would normally be considered on the "right" and involved with the pro-life movement who are troubled by the Holy Father's words.  Janet Smith, apologist, speaker and philosophy professor at the University of Dallas, who has been out spoken for years about the evils of artificial contraception and abortion, wrote a piece in First Things questioning what the Pope meant by saying we shouldn't be "obsessed" with particular moral issues when preaching the Gospel.  While she is never hostile toward the Pope, and strikes a conciliatory note at the end, you can feel the hurt and confusion of one toiling faithfully in the fields for years who feels a bit betrayed (she doesn't say that, this is strictly my impression of the article).

I  have a great deal of respect for Dr. Smith, and have often drawn on her materials in preparing classes and homilies.  I don't disagree with many of the points she makes, but in the end we have to match the words and the actions together.  The Holy Father is trying to stress the love God has for us all while pointing out that sin is ugly.  He is telling us that we need to be mindful of a wide variety of concerns, and at the same time he isn't afraid to discipline someone who steps out of line in very particular ways.    

A Prince Among Men

New York (Football) Giants corner back Prince Amukamara revealed in an interview on the Muscle and Fitness website that some of his teammates call him the "Black Tim Tebow."  The 24 year old is engaged to be married, but is "unashamed" to say that the is a virgin and has never had an alcoholic drink in his life.  He is a practicing Catholic, and from his youth has seen the path of chastity and sobriety as a way to heaven.  He does say that he might break the no drinking policy at his bachelor party, though I hope he takes that one slow.

My first reaction was: Fantastic.  Professional athletes, musicians, actors and just about anyone in the sports and entertainment field are surrounded by temptations the average person can't imagine.  That is a big reason why lasting, lifelong marriages are so hard to come by in Hollywood.  Add on to that the ego that goes along with being in the NFL, and the sense of entitlement so many young, suddenly rich and famous people often feel; to not let it go to your head, to stay grounded and true to your faith is quite an accomplishment.  For a game that has been marred in recent years by stories of murder and off the field violence, the Tebows and Amukamaras of the world come as breath of fresh air.

My second reaction was, what a shame he felt compelled to say that he "wasn't ashamed" of living his faith. Against living virtuously there is no law, except in the eyes of the twisted.  But ours is such an age when virtue makes headlines.  I noticed the story last week on Drudge, who linked to the local CBS afiliate in New York, and the next morning it was all over the place, even making London's Daily Mail.  It reminded me a little bit of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where monogamy is thought of as perverted, and any one who only sleeps with only one partner is thought of as "one of those girls."

Prince, congratulatuions on your upcoming nuptuals, and remember;  If you stay true to the faith you'll never have to worry about feeling ashamed (well, maybe except for how the G-Men have played the first three weeks of the season).

The Pope's Interview: What He "Really" Means

 
Back in the 1960's, shortly after the Second Vatican Council, Rome announced modifications to the Friday abstinence from meat, which was in effect for the entire year, not just during Lent.  In essence, Friday was still to be observed as a day of penance in commemoration of Our Lord's Passion, but one could substitute some other appropriate penance for the ordinary practice of going meatless.  Individual dioceses were also able to modify the observance in light of local customs.  But not eating meat was still considered the ordinary way of observing Friday as a day of penance, with the Lenten practice of meatless Fridays remaining in force.  This is still the prescribed discipline of the Church today.  By the time the secular press got hold of the story it was reduced to VATICAN SAYS: HOT DOGS FOR EVERYONE ON FRIDAYS.  That meat was now permissible fare on Fridays, without any of the nuances, was all most of the faithful, and even many priests, ever heard about the change.  As one priest who lived through that period told me, most Catholics, including priests, got their news about the Church from secular tabloids like The New York Daily News more than from the L' Osservatore Romano.  To this day most Catholics think the Church changed Her long standing discipline without qualification.  I will admit that in the big picture whether you eat meat or not on Friday may seem like a small matter, but the example is illustrative of how the secular press often over simplifies stories about the Church, and sometimes just gets them plain wrong.
This past Friday I was on my way to the airport and saw a man standing on a median at a traffic light selling the paper.  It was the Sun-Times, which is the tabloid daily here in Chicago.  He wore a nylon vest with a see-through panel on the front and back that housed the front page.  The headline was bold and succinct as you would expect from a tabloid: POPE RIPS FOCUS ON GAYS, ABORTION. The Sun-Times was making reference to an interview of Pope Francis published last week in several Jesuit journals around the world and here in the States by the Society of Jesus' flagship publication America.  I read the interview finally, after hearing and reading much about it and can say that the Holy Father "rips" no one.  His comments about gays, abortion and contraception were less than a paragraph of a rather lengthy interview that covers a variety of topics.  He isn't supporting same sex marriage or suggesting abortion is OK. In fact the day after the interview first appeared His Holiness met with a gathering of Italian OG-BYNs and spoke of the evils of abortion and the need to promote the Gospel of Life.  So what did the Pope mean? 

What the Holy Father is saying that what comes first and foremost is the proclamation of the Gospel message of salvation and repentance.  We live in a wounded world with people who are spiritually injured and these wounds need to be healed first.  He likens the Church to a field hospital.  In a triage situation where a person has a compound fracture and is bleeding to death you don't ask about his cholesterol and blood sugar - to use Pope Francis' example.  There is time for that once the patient has been stabilized.  But the first proclamation of the Gospel needs to be about God's love and mercy.  Once the person has been introduced to Jesus Christ, and has that personal encounter with Him then the doctrines and moral  teachings can be introduced in a more systematic way.  Once the person knows Jesus, has a relationship with Him the doctrines will be better understood and seen as flowing naturally from being a disciple, as opposed to being a "disjointed" collection of moral imperatives that don't seem to have a link to life in general, let alone to life in Christ.

The Holy Father is at once subtle and clear that we are to always separate behavior from the person.  In the case of homosexuals, the teaching is clear on homosexual acts, and as a son of the Church the Pope holds to them.  But we also have the person who is a child of God who needs to be treated as such; with respect, dignity and love. 

Is the truth of the Church's teachings on human sexuality to be taught and proclaimed?  Yes.  But so are Her teachings on social justice, respect for the environment, the dignity of the disabled, the proper care of the sick and the need for an active and deep prayer life, to name a few things.  We need to preach it all, but as Pope Francis said, we don't have to preach it all at once.  So when the Pope talks to gynecologists he'll speak about abortion, and when he speaks to the unemployed in Sardinia, as he did the other day, he'll speak of the dangers of globalization and the need for an economic system that puts people and their right to work ahead of greed.  He will chose the right time and place to proclaim the message needed in the moment, and he is reminding all of us charged with preaching to do the same. 

In the end the reaction to the Pope's interview highlights our contemporary crisis of a politicized Church, with people taking sides as liberals and conservatives.  With his words of conciliation and talk of mercy many liberals see an ally in Pope Francis, hoping that the changes they've been waiting for since 1965 are finally on the way.  Conservatives, stung that the Holy Father is seemingly not as stringent on liturgy and "hammering heretics" as his immediate predecessors are scrambling to explain what the Pope really meant. This misses the point.  We are neither a liberal nor a conservative Church in the way that the world understands these words.  Christ is concerned about the poor and the afflicted, wants us to form a more perfect and just world.  He also calls us as individuals to a high standard of personal holiness and self control. He is interested about what goes on in the chambers of the senate and also in the spiritual chambers of our hearts, and yes, even in the privacy of our bedrooms.  Nonetheless we can never reduce Him to a political candidate, a self help guru or puritanical moralist.  He loves us with the deepest love imaginable, beyond our imagining, really, but will never flash an OK sign at us and say, "Your OK, I'm OK."  He will always challenge us to move beyond our opinions, beyond our certitudes and beyond our comfort to surrender all to Him. 

And one final message to everyone out there: beware stories about the Church appearing in the secular news services, be they print, radio or television.  They usually over simplyfy things and force bloggers like me to slave over  posts like this.

Lasting Peace

Last Saturday, September 7, the Holy Father asked Catholics to fast and pray for peace in Syria.  While there appears to be a diplomatic solution in the offing, the outcome of the crisis is still in doubt, albeit less so than forty-eight hours ago.  In taking such a strong stand against military action Pope Francis has faced criticism from some people in the press.  He has been accused of taking sides against the United Stated in the conflict.  This is a misinterpretation of the Pope’s words and actions.  He is calling on all sides to slow down, use the diplomatic process and avoid a conflict that could grow into a wider, far more destructive war.  The Holy Father is calling upon us,  as disciples of Christ, to use our spiritual weapons, namely prayer and fasting, to aid in bringing healing to a world in conflict.

This striving for peace must not be confined to nice thoughts or abstract wishes.  We must make peace an everyday reality of our lives.  It is true that we as individuals can do little to influence the course of human events directly and immediately.  We are living our everyday lives; trying to make a living, or going to school.  Maybe we are retired.  Either way we have worries of our own right here.  We are not great and powerful people.  How can we make world peace a reality?

We help make world peace a reality by making peace right here and now with the people we live with and around.  When we forgive a brother or sister who has offended us, we are making a more peaceful world.  When we act with kindness toward a neighbor, especially one we may not get along with, we are making the world more peaceful.  When we reconcile with someone who has offended us, or we reach out a hand and seek forgiveness for our own sins, we are making the world more peaceful.  We shouldn’t think of the world as only places that are far away.  The world for us is the house and the block in.  It is the place we work and the school we attend.  If there is no peace in these places we should not be surprised when there is no peace in the wider world.  

As active and honest citizens should we vote, call our congressman and sign petitions?  Yes.  But all the political action will be useless if there is no conversion of heart.  There is a saying that all politics is local.  We can also say that the struggle for peace in the world begins locally.  Actually, we should say it begins inside of each and every one of us.  The Holy Father asked us for a day of fasting and prayer, and I would like to think that the quick turn of events is a result of our heeding of this call.  But we simply can’t return to old ways once the crisis is diverted and expect lasting change.  An attitude of simplicity, self-denial and openness to the Spirit of reconciliation is a key to forming a world of true peace; not for a day or an evening, but every day and at every moment, beginning with the people right around us.  May Christ our light open our hearts and minds so that we can be peacemakers right here and now in the place we live.  

Here is Pope Francis in his own words from last Saturday

Blue Jasmine // Movie Review

 

I slipped away for a few hours last week and saw the latest Woody Allen directed film Blue Jasmine.  I would not count this as a must see, except if you are a dedicated Allen fan.  This is not a comedy, though it does have plenty of comedic touches.  That it's a drama is not why I don't recommend it.  Allen can do serious material.  He is also under-appreciated as a visual director, I think, and his keen sense of composition and the taking in of majestic landscapes is on display here.  But it is the writing, the thing that he's best known for, that bogs the movie down. There is a certain out of touch quality to Blue Jasmine, derived I think from a combination of the writer-director's age and socio-economic class, that makes it feel like he's imagining what his working class characters must be like without actually having met any in real life.   They're sympathetic, but more than a little superficial in their rendering.

To put it in a nutshell; Cate Blanchett plays the title character; a woman married to a Bernie Madoff like swindler (Alec Baldwin).  She's living the high life in New York, willfully unaware of her husband's crooked business dealings and numerous marital infidelities.  Eventually he's found out, on both counts; needless to say they lose it all.   The husband goes to jail, eventually commits suicide, and the emotionally fragile Jasmine goes to live with her working class sister in San Francisco.  Both sisters were adopted, and there is this ongoing debate between them, which never seems to go anywhere, as to whether genes are responsible for the divergence in their social standings.  The story is told in flashbacks, and we see that Jasmine was emotionally brittle even before her fall from grace, and may be responsible, in part, for her predicament.

Allen makes about a movie a year and writes his own material.  This is a clear formula for plenty of hits and misses, and this is a miss.  I didn't catch last year's To Rome with Love, but did see Midnight in Paris, and liked it very much.  But even there, as with Blue Jasmine, I was aware the entire time that Woody Allen had written the dialogue.  He has this strange way of trying to sound natural that still comes off as mannered and contrived.  I find this less problematic with comedy, but with drama it seems to undercut the power of the performances.  And beyond the visuals, the strength of this film lies in the performances, especially by Blanchett and Baldwin.  Unfortunately they are made to deliver lines that I'm not sure real people would ever say, or at least not in the way they're formulated.  The big exception is one scene between Blanchett and Baldwin that I have a strange feeling is mirroring real life way more than the whole Madoff thing they have going on here. 

As I think I've said in other places, mediocre Woody Allen is still better than most film makers out there when they bring their "A Game."  So a reluctant pass on Blue Jasmine, but maybe wait for the DVD and catch it then.

One of the Proud 77%

Of the many things I began to write about over the last several months but never finished was something on a poll Rasmussen released around Easter Week reporting that 86 percent of respondents believe Jesus was an actual historical figure, with 77% believing he resurrected. One of the big claims that the new atheists try to push is the idea that Jesus never really lived; he was a myth created by the early Church, and possibly by St. Paul.  The numbers seem to indicate that they are not making great inroads, if we take into account that the non Christian population in the US is growing, a group that would be disinclined to believe in the Resurrection to begin with.

But what of this idea that Jesus never existed?  It is true that he never wrote anything that we know about, outside of those mysterious scribblings he made on the ground with his finger when he confronted those who accused the woman caught in adultery.  The very claim that he rose from the dead discounts skeletal remains.  There is no birth certificate or obituary we can look at, even if such things existed back in the first century.  We don't seem to have any contemporary accounts of Jesus' life, outside of the Jewish historian Flavious Josephus.  But the brief passages referring to Jesus are suspected of being a later incursion into to text, and are so unreliable (though there does seem to be scholars who take varying positions on the topic).

When it comes to the historical reality of Jesus we have are two things we can hang our hat on, as I see it.

One is that we do have the New Testament cannon that is unjustly discounted because of their standing as Sacred Scripture.  Yes, they tell stories of the miraculous, and so what?  Even if you don't believe Jesus was a worker of wonders, all it proves is that his followers liked to guild the rose a bit (a position I do not take, of course).  The Evangelists, especially Luke goes to great lengths to place Jesus' life in an historical context, unlike the ancient myths, and in John there is constant harping about how all that was described was being communicated by a witness to the events; a witness whose testimony is true.  The Evangelists name the names of people who were at the cross or on the road to Emmaus, as if to say, "if you don't believe me, go ask them. They're still alive (at the time of this writing), they can set you straight."

Beyond the four canonical Gospels, we have the letters of Paul, as well as the others.  They were written before the Gospel accounts and attest to Jesus' death and resurrection.  Along with "Jesus Birthers" there are those who question Jesus' divinity, or his self understanding of his divine nature.  They will go as far as to claim that the Evangelists made it up, or that the Gospels really don't say that he's God.  Well, if the Gospels don't convince you, then go to the letters, written twenty to thirty years before the Gospels.  Here we see a firm profession of the divinity of Jesus and the bodily resurrection.  These were what the early Christians believed going back to the first generation, attested to by witnesses (Peter) and by those who consulted with those who knew the Lord during his earthy ministry (Paul).

The second point is that so many, including ten of the surviving 12 Apostles died as martyrs.  Judas committed suicide and John died as an old man, but endured exiles and torture for the faith.  Unlike our own time and place, in the Mediterranean of the first century everybody was religious, and it was a very public thing.  Most people were polytheistic.  One of the popular God's was Sol Invictus - the Unconquered  Sun, and while he was very popular, as Pope Francis writes in his first Encyclical, quoting Justin Martyr, no one was know to be willing to die for his belief in the sun god.  Yet thousands gave their lives for their belief in the Son of God, Jesus Christ.  It's possible for a few fanatics to give their lives for a myth maybe, but only if they were also insane; but thousands over centuries starting right from the beginning?  I doubt it.  Someone would have cracked.  Sure, some ran away to save their hides, but none said it was a scam.


And so yes, I believe in Jesus the historical person and Resurrected Savior.  I believe because it's reasonable to me, as well as being a matter of faith.  In the end, I wouldn't put my faith in something that didn't make sense.