Freedom and Obedience, Vocation and Choice

"If I preach the gospel, this is no reason for me to boast, for an obligation has been imposed on me, and woe to me if I do not preach it! 17  If I do so willingly, I have a recompense, but if unwillingly, then I have been entrusted with a stewardship. 18  What then is my recompense? That, when I preach, I offer the gospel free of charge so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel. 19  Although I am free in regard to all, I have made myself a slave to all so as to win over as many as possible." (1 Cor. 9:16-19)


Again the other day I ran into a dear bishop who half apologized for taking young men into his seminary. We just don't think, do we? Why is it that we find it hard to see that the Old Testament Prophet Samuel, the little boy to whom God spoke directly in the Holy Place, turned over to the Lord by his mother shortly after she weaned him, is only a radical story because there is no ambiguity whatever in this woman, neither regarding to Whom she needs be grateful for her son nor concerning how she should show her gratitude to the Lord and her love for her son. God calls us to His service from our mother's womb. We are made for Him. We belong to Him.


If you challenge people on their hesitancy to allow a young man or young men from boyhood to pursue a vocation to priesthood, if you ask them what is to be gained by leaving a young man to aimlessly shift for himself (which is what happens when you postpone allowing him to make a commitment proportionate to his age), they cannot really have a cogent reply. The delayed or belated vocation of long ago does not become better for the use of euphemisms like "adult" or "mature". Rarely do these men tell you their vocation story without admitting that they had fled what they had known to be the case probably since the age of reason. How can there be virtue or merit in postponing your response to God's call?


Thanks be to God that older men do respond and become great priests. That is not the issue. The matter is spurning or scorning the enthusiasm of youth; at issue is our neglect for not seeking to identify and call forth from youth those who could potentially make good priests. Some people at this point might have issues about freedom and choice, as if a vocation to celibate priesthood or marriage and family life was like trying to decide between becoming a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon. "He's got it all together! He can be anything he wants to be!" she says... Maybe so, but God calls us out of knowledge and love. Better than the old village matchmaker who had a much better record than any computer dating service, the Lord knows us through and through and invites us to share in His saving work. How often when it comes to good do we choose better when we say "no"?


Obedience to God's call is ultimate self-actualization. If I'm stretching it by affirming such, then take St. Paul's understatement:


"If I preach the gospel, this is no reason for me to boast, for an obligation has been imposed on me, and woe to me if I do not preach it! 17  If I do so willingly, I have a recompense, but if unwillingly, then I have been entrusted with a stewardship. 18  What then is my recompense? That, when I preach, I offer the gospel free of charge so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel. 19  Although I am free in regard to all, I have made myself a slave to all so as to win over as many as possible." (1 Cor. 9:16-19)

I'm reading a marvelous book in Italian these days written by a young priest who just completed six years of service here at the Nunciature, Fr. Pavlo Vyshkovskyy, OMI.  The book documents the martyrdom of the Catholic Church in Ukraine under Communism. The chapter on the witness of priests and bishops touched me profoundly. Who but God alone, in His great and mysterious love, could ask such sacrifices, such suffering? These men fought really to stay with their people and be available for their people, never counting the cost. Is it love to try and delay or deprive a boy or a young man of his share in the sufferings of Christ? 


We must pray for vocations, yes, and by praying steadfastly for generous hearts in the young men and in their parents. 

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

 

No End to the Folly

Now even the Religious Information Service of Ukraine (RISU) is quoting the NYT! And that, to my way of thinking, is sad to say! Perhaps it just goes to show how few discerning readers there are in the world. Ostensibly the NYT article (via RISU) is a review of a preliminary report on "research" done by Rev. D. Paul Sullins, a sociologist at Catholic University who has interviewed over 70 married priests for a book he is writing.

 Who is kidding whom, by pretending to present marriage in our day and time as a stable platform for any profession, let alone Catholic priesthood? In case Rev. Sullins hasn't noticed, I think it more than safe to hold that traditional marriage and family life is in crisis:  50% divorce rate almost in the US, fewer and fewer young people in the Western world opting for the commitment of marriage, and here in Ukraine in 2011 one in five children born out of wedlock! And try to convince me in our all-invasive cell/smart phone culture that there are any professionals of any kind with a land line on their night stand ready to take calls day and night. Don't ask me to recommend the sociology department at Catholic U. if they have no more to offer than Sullins.

The crisis of the Latin Church is not centered on celibacy but on the more basic vocation or call to live our baptism. Too many people fall down when it comes to the basic call to holiness: there is no spiritual tension in their lives (take the practice of the Sacrament of Penance as one of the best indices for a person's honest effort to seek the Lord in all things and above all things). For decades already now young people have been turning their backs not only on celibate priesthood and the religious life, but simply on God, as we know Him through a holy life nourished by the life-giving Sacraments and teaching of His Church. Granted, it is frequently due to a poor upbringing, where they never learned even the most basic prayers at home and no one witnessed for them what St. Justin the Martyr articulated so clearly long, long ago: "We are Christians; we cannot live without Sunday Mass."

I am positively offended by stupid affirmations like: there have been 25,000 men who have left the priesthood since 1970 and only 40,000 priests in the US today. How many of those who left are dead at the moment? How many priests since 1970 served the Church in the US and happen to be dead at the moment? Spare me the nonsense of such numbers and, as I say, keep me far from such CU sociology.

I am very happy about the Anglican Ordinariate. Correct me if I am wrong, but there won't be another generation of married priests there except in so far as more Anglicans "swim the Tiber". I am thoroughly enjoying becoming acquainted with Greek Catholic priests here in Ukraine, of whom about 90% are married. Having so recently come out of the catacombs after such a long and dire persecution, I am sure that for the Greek Catholic faithful as well there is something euphoric about seeing all of a sudden these numbers of young priests with wife and babies in church. My guess is that these priestly families will perpetuate themselves as happened once long ago. I hope and pray too that they offer an inspiring example of marriage and family life to their young parishioners. There have however already been divorces or separations here, there are widowers already as well. Will these men embrace celibacy now as they are expected to do in the long tradition also of the Eastern Churches? I hope they do and do so gladly.


All of this is to say that our calling and our joy (married or not) is for the sake of the Kingdom. Physicians are incredible for their self-sacrifice, their long hours and hard work for their patients. I've known celibate physician priests whom people boast can juggle two careers, burning the candle at both ends, better than many a solitary priest. One of the marks of a true leader, however and more than efficiency, is his vision which stems from his ability to prioritize. From the Old Testament until today the Levite, the priest, the presbyter has the Lord as his portion and his cup. It is not as simply said or understood as to claim that celibacy is characteristic of the priestly life style because Jesus never married. Our sanctity, our prayer, should bind us as closely to Him as He was united with the Father. Celibacy is indeed for the sake of the Kingdom.

Excuse me this outburst, but my favorite reader service in Ukraine owes people more than rehashed NYT. I'm beginning to warm up for the Year of Faith proclaimed by the Holy Father for this coming October 2012. I hope it will go down in history as a genuine year in renewal of the faith, starting with a thoroughgoing evangelization of a new generation such that there might (thinking of last Sunday's first reading) be many more little Samuels who already at a tender age and faithfully for a whole life long sit up or stand up and say: "Here I am, Lord, since you called me."

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

 

do not bear the yoke with unbelievers

The passage from a letter of St. Augustine to Proba offered as the 2nd Reading for the office of this 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time encouraged me a lot this morning and provoked some rambling thoughts I'd like to share. Let me quote the part which was key in that process:

"Why he should ask us to pray, when he knows what we need before we ask him, may perplex us if we do not realize that our Lord and God does not want to know what we want (for he cannot fail to know it) but wants us rather to exercise our desire through our prayers, so that we may be able to receive what he is preparing to give us. His gift is very great indeed, but our capacity is too small and limited to receive it. That is why we are told: 'Enlarge your desires, do not bear the yoke with unbelievers.'

The deeper our faith, the stronger our hope, the greater our desire, the larger will be our capacity to receive that gift, which is very great indeed. 'No eye has seen it'; it has no color. 'No ear has heard it'; it has no sound. 'It has not entered man's heart'; man's heart must enter into it.

In this faith, hope and love we pray always with unwearied desire. However, at set times and seasons we also pray to God in words, so that by these signs we may instruct ourselves and mark the progress we have made in our desire, and spur ourselves on to deepen it. The more fervent the desire, the more worthy will be its fruit. When the Apostle tells us: 'Pray without ceasing', he means this: Desire unceasingly that life of happiness which is nothing if not eternal, and ask it of him who alone is able to give it."

Beyond that first motion to, yes, aspire to increase my own desire/longing within myself for that gift which comes from God, I spent some time marveling at that motion or inclination in the lives of the mother foundresses or co-foundresses of the religious congregations of women whose acquaintance I have made in these last years, namely of the sisters in the Nunciature of Port of Spain, the Siervas Guadalupanas de Christo Sacerdote, who just 50 years ago came into being in the midst of the needs of priests in Mexico City as the solitude and suffering of priests touched the heart of Maria de Jesus del Amore Misericordoso Guiza Barragan and of my congregation here in the Nunciature of Kyiv, the Sister Servants of Mary Immaculate, the first community of the apostolic life of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, co-founded by Blessed Josaphata Michaelina Hordashevska, in the last decade of the 19th Century to meet (as only women could) the needs of her own poor people.

Let us say that the boundless hearts of both of these women impressed others and unleashed in girls and young women, in particular, an almost instantaneous and generous response. Both congregations, as with so many others I have not had the honor to know personally, knew a first hour and which endured for decades of rapid growth and truly fruitful apostolate. St. Augustine would identify them as women of greater and more fervent desire whose charity for others (Christ's 2nd great commandment) flowed from and complemented their love for God (Christ's 1st commandment and our salvation). In both cases or should I say always with congregations of religious dedicated to the apostolate, we're dealing with energy, with love unleashed in the midst of misery. We're dealing with a wonder so radically and so well documented in the person of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, where women not only roll up their sleeves to get a job done, but they embrace the suffering of others heedless of the consequences for themselves. They work for a purpose, they work with method, but most importantly they do all out of love. By prayer and commitment they seek first the Lord and His Kingship over their hearts and lives.

I suppose there is something of the moment in all of this and that it would be too much to expect generation upon generation, century after century to catch the living flame ignited by a founder or foundress and those initial followers. Then again, why should it not be so? Apostolic fruitfulness, when the needs to be met continue, should not flag, should it? Do hearts become smaller with the passage of time? Why do some charisms or apostolates seem to play out? Why do they no longer capture the imagination of youth? "When the Apostle tells us: 'Pray without ceasing', he means this: Desire unceasingly that life of happiness which is nothing if not eternal, and ask it of him who alone is able to give it." 


Many would say that the vocations crisis of our day must be attributed to the sterility of a society choking on its own materialistic preoccupations. Were all these young women and girls who first followed my two foundresses all half-saints with a superior prayer life? It's possible, but it's more probable that St. Augustine's scenario for hopefully growing in desire through dedication to prayer was it. In a recent interview, the Latin bishop-archbishop of Kyiv spoke of continuing formation and commitment to witnessing to the Christian life in charity amidst the people to whom he is sent as the highest priorities for priestly ministry today.

In volume II: Spouse of the Word (Explorations in Theology, Ignatius Press, 1991) Hans Urs von Balthasar examines the phenomenon of secular institutes and consecration to Christ in the world. The chapter is titled: "Toward a Theology of the Secular Institute". My own first reticence about that witness is the fact that it is lived (by definition) so uninstitutionally out there in the world. It is a celibate witness to Baptism, which honestly has all the marks of the first hour of a religious institute. Over a century ago Blessed Josaphata cooperating in creating something, yes institutional, but entirely new for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. As daring as the priests who advised her and as she herself was, I guess we have the essential pattern for witness and apostolate in the Church right there. Daring and novelty are not the components worth seeking and fostering today, but the prayerful spirit and an unceasing desire for the Bridegroom.

The Pontifical Council for the Laity is in touch with all sorts of daring and novel efforts to witness to Christ in the world. From my own little experience, I am guessing they have (perhaps in the midst of excesses) the privilege of encountering all kinds of souls in expansion, with unbounded desire to love God and neighbor. I firmly believe and hope that in the misery of our world (Wall Street protests and riots in the center of Rome, ...) there are those who have caught the flame and will gather up the man who fell among robbers and left despoiled and near death by the side of the road. It's not utopian, but it certainly is beautiful and a challenge to me to open wide my heart.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Conscience as Primordial Vicar of Christ

Fr. Barron describes conscience

Without exaggerating, I find this one of the truly all-time brilliant descriptions of conscience discerned or distinguished in the midst of other voices or a world's competing noise/attractions.

Whether we are talking about moral living or choosing to follow God's will for my life (vocation choice), my question is whether being touched by that tiny whispering sound, as Elijah was, is or has been rendered more difficult today. I know the answer: It cannot be any more difficult than it was back then remembering that Elijah was very much alone in a world gone thoroughly mad and pagan. His whole-hearted response to God's call was by God's command and in His Hands the beginning of a reconquest, a restoration.

There have been no few Elijah-like "giants" in the course of these two millennia of the Lord's time (A.D.). We need only mention St. Benedict. My question is how all of the rest of us can hope and pray for good boys and girls who are at least as in love with Our Lord and His Blessed Mother as the children of Fatima were. Children, as they were, really facing off and winning against the hardened unbelievers and conspirators against faith of Portugal at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Maybe it is as simple as the Holy Father's WYD 2011 message exhorting not to be ashamed of Jesus... for the sake of His uncompromising love and total sacrifice. Maybe it is as simple as acquainting children with Jesus from tiny and... letting the little whispering voice do the rest?