Water Flowing from the Temple

Reflecting on this great feast of the dedication of the Basilica of St. John Lateran, my thoughts are torn between trying to express my thoughts on the incomparable 1st reading for the feast from Ezechiel about the waters, the life-giving waters flowing from the Temple, on the 2nd reading where St. Paul reminds us that we are God's Temple, on the Gospel's "zeal for Your House will consume me", not to mention on the 2nd reading from the Office of Readings, that incomparable meditation of Caesarius of Arles, on the feast of dedication as a concrete reminder and celebration of the dignity of the baptized.

The water, life-giving as it is, the water from the Temple is going to win out this year in my thoughts for this day, despite the urgency I feel in reminding one and all, especially children of the last 40 years of our personal greatness as baptized people after the image of the temple, in that they maybe didn't hear as often as we older folk did that you are God's Temple and as Caesarius admonishes you must keep that temple spotless and filled with light!

Wasn't it St. Augustine who said that the Church is possessed of two life-giving fountains? From the one fountain within the Church flow the waters of baptism which purify the house of Satan and make it, our soul, the House of God. The other font is that of the tears of Penance which wash away sin and restore the fallen to light and life when sins are committed after baptism. Let the Scripture readings for today's feast, especially Ezechiel, move you. This abundance of life-giving water flowing from the Temple brings us hope and joy, hope and joy as God makes the desert bloom and freshens the salt sea.

In November, the month dedicated to the Holy Souls, we need to be caught up in the mystery of our glory in Christ, such that not only through penance and absolution, but through reparation for the punishment due for our sins and those of the world, we might wash and heal with the cleansing waters God has entrusted to His Church ourselves through the ministry of that Church and through our sacrifices and prayers on their behalf those who have preceded us in death unprepared for the beatific vision though not deserving of hell.

Vidi aquam! I saw water flowing from the Temple! Would that we could carry more of our world to the fountain of baptism! Vidi aquam! I saw water flowing from the Temple! Would that the tears of penance would flow more abundantly and regularly within the Church, for our sake and for the sake of the life of the world!

Sacrament of Penance

My recent move to an new assignment not quite half way around the world, after 6+ years of stabilitas loci, has made me more receptive than usual to countless anxious comments by laity regarding the sacrament of penance. A change of address like mine also means finding a new confessor in a place unknown to me and with perhaps a smaller number of priests to choose from who share a common language with me. Actually, things went quite well and with very little delay I am back on a regular program of confession. Thanks be to God.

As I say, my heart goes out in a very special way to all those who find it hard to catch a priest to hear their confession, who are embarrassed at Father's unreasonable demand that they make an appointment if they want to confess, who have to put up with the uncertainty of priests who don't do their part in confession strictly by the book (especially in terms of the formula of absolution). Justice requires more of priests and beyond simple justice the laity deserve better treatment.

I would be a fool to repeat the obvious, as the culprits, if you will, don't read my blog, but this too would seem to be part of the post-conciliar rupture we are still trying to heal. Granted, Penance was a special sacrament even before the reform, because it did let personalities shine through in a way the celebration of Holy Mass never could. Even in the good old days there could be fallings out between priest and penitent over issues of communication, fits of impatience and more. Let me say one thing to all priests of good will today and namely: You have to carry the burden of the harm done by some of your predecessors who worked actively to destroy among the faithful the good habit of regular confession (monthly and even more frequently). Only your presence in church, in the confessional, ready with the proper formula for confession, together with a regular positive catechesis for your parish or school encouraging frequent confession will help to restore what has been lost in some cases within families for 4 and 5 generations.

Good old auricular confession on a regular basis with a simple, doable penance of a concrete prayer feeds people. Over these last decades people were simply deprived of this nourishment as they were of basic knowledge of the faith. Sadly, it shows. St. John Vianney did penance, sacrificed himself to bring his parish of Ars back to God. We must do the same. Very simply, the proof is in the putting in our day as well.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

My heartfelt thanks to the blog RORATE CAELI for putting me onto the marvelous interview with Bishop Slattery published in the Catholic Register: Bishop Slattery Interview

Here's hoping and praying not so much for real fighters but rather that the gentle pastoral hand and heart would prevail and our people might be genuinely fed through the opportunity to worship Sundays and always in spirit and in truth.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Winning Hearts and Minds for Truth

Here's a really important book that needs to be put on college reading lists, if they still exist (must reads for any self-respecting B.A.):

10 BOOKS THAT SCREWED UP THE WORLD 

And 5 Others That Didn’t Help 

BENJAMIN WIKER, PH. D. 

Author of Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists
Copyright © 2008 by Benjamin Wiker (Kindle Edition)

Some might accuse me of the equivalent of recommending the old "Cliff Notes" as a substitute for really reading English literature, but in an age where folks don't read much if at all this might be the book that makes a difference in terms of thought and right thinking.

Deep down what moves me is the desire to find and apply the sandpaper treatment to a world's callous which continues to keep consciences or hearts numb, dead, thick, uncomprehending, indifferent to the atrocity which is abortion. Read the book as a primer for appreciating Dr. Wiker's conclusions! 

I'm only going to quote two statements out of many I highlighted for myself from those conclusions:

By following the trajectory of these books that screwed up the world, we can wonder whether the advance of “science” over theology is an unmitigated good, and whether it is really progress. Perhaps it is bringing us to a new age of technological barbarism, wherein humanity becomes ever more religiously obsessed with health and sexual pleasure as pseudo-gods, sacrificing anything and everything to these twin deities.

The ideas of God and sin might all seem too mythical for this scientific age until we recall that whether the bad thinker is Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, or Freud, the authors we’ve covered in this book were mythmakers. They were enthralled by entirely mythical states of nature, entirely fictional alternative Edens, entranced by entirely impossible utopian paradises. Tens of millions of lives were offered up to the twin fictions of an alternative Garden of Eden and an alternative paradise, each taken and presented (falsely) as scientific fact.

Wiker's great service in this book is not unlike that performed by the little boys along the road in the children's story The King's New Clothes. Dr. Wiker points a finger at what are supposed to be the reasoned pillars of common parlance and shows them to be neither, but rather a gaping abyss, which leaves us little to hope from any self-sufficient geek's laboratory and clamoring for a better life through science (when hospitals weren't so sterile you didn't catch megaviruses). 

In his Hitler chapter Dr. Wiker attributes a modicum of conscience to some of the henchmen who were carrying out the final solution. Personally, I seriously doubt if their alcohol abuse and listlessness came from qualms over what they were doing; they were lost and that is how lost people behave: killing didn't push them to despair; despairing of life and hope pushed them to kill.

The equation just does not work, minus our Creator and Redeemer.

Ad Orientem

Bishop speaks well about orientation of worship. He does so in the context of the Extraordinary Form. He speaks of worship ad Orientem as perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Extraordinary Form. Well done, Bishop!

Personally, I think we owe to our people a concerted effort to orient the Ordinary Form whenever possible. I'm waiting on the priest who originally did my chapel here in Kyiv in hopes very soon of making the small modifications to permit the orientation of this sacred space.

Not circular, but linear and focused on the Dawn from on High, Oriens, to Whom we owe our thanks and praise: many other things will fall into place once we get our focus right. We pray for each other and we live in hope.

SURSUM CORDA! HABEMUS AD DOMINUM!

My First Interview in Ukraine

For all my readers who are stronger in Ukrainian than I am, you might enjoy the site of Catholic Media Center. They have the distinction of publishing my first interview since I arrived in Kyiv a month ago!
Media Center Interview

The text was prepared in Italian. I am trusting and the first reviews or reactions are positive! Enjoy!

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