Asleep at the Helm

I am honored by friends known and less known, who quite regularly send me manuscripts of articles and talks not yet out on the public square. Rarely do they admonish "FYI only"; that is a given and their trust is not to be betrayed. Permit me a quote from an undisclosed source, which captures quite elegantly what must be the best approach possible to a very painful issue, namely that of addressing or analyzing the Church's failures when it comes to carrying forth the work of evangelization:

"For almost two millennia now, the Church has striven, in the power of the Spirit, to fulfill the Great Commission: to “go...and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” [Matthew 28.19-20]. The trajectory of that striving has been uneven, jagged, anything but smooth." 

In these words I see reflected the Church's ups and downs over these two millennia: times and places of bitter suffering and persecution alternating with genuine flourishing, marked by expansion, countless baptisms, the heroic sanctity of men and women in all walks of life and with great teaching. Our Gospel image for somehow explaining those times of hardship usually refers to Jesus sleeping through a storm on Lake Gennesareth in the stern of the boat, not at the helm where perforce one of the Apostles must be in charge. We imagine ourselves as striving on our own but somehow always in God's Hands and dependent on His intervention when necessary to save the barque of Peter.

Right as all that is, I think it is important to be reminded that the barque of Peter is not some kind of ghost ship cutting its path through the Bermuda Triangle, its helmsman long dead or asleep. Christ established His Church on the Rock of Peter; the Church does the binding and loosing in His Name. St. Augustine was among those great Fathers and Doctors who trembled at the awesome burden coming to the Apostles and to their successors in the office of Bishop for the sake of the life of the world. The imagery usually cited to admonish or condemn those who fail is drawn from animal husbandry, from shepherding, the dog which does not bark to alert shepherd and flock to the danger at hand, the bad shepherd who drops and runs, abandoning the flock to the wolf, the lion and the bear.

True as it is that certain situations may be beyond our control, such as refer to the horrible persecution visited upon the Christians of the Mideast and North Africa these days, the lack of due diligence, the uncertain trumpet not really sounding the alarm, would more often be the root cause of why the devil, always prowling about looking for someone to devour, gets the upper hand and with the helmsman asleep, we find the ship all but lost on stormy seas.

If you happen to know him from his video blog, Michael Voris grates on a lot of people's nerves as he almost hisses out his condemnations of what he calls "the church of nice" which fails in its duty to truth and to the fullness of the Gospel message. Let the Gospel itself (even without Michael's help) admonish the shepherds to be always vigilant, not sleeping, with staff in hand to defend the sheep against the wickedness and the snares of the devil. Caritas Christi urget nos. The love of Christ impels us to give of ourselves totally, to lay down our lives for the sake of His beloved flock. With the Lord on board, seemingly at times asleep in the stern, let us cut the course He has set out for us regardless of the wind and the waves.

The old rhetorical thing about ours being "the best of times and the worst of times" doesn't really help much, nor does dwelling overly on the sad state of metaphysics. Maybe that is the genius of renewing Baptismal Promises at Easter, before professing our belief in the Triune God and in His Church, we renounce, we reject Satan, his works and his empty promises. Helmsmen, wake up! Shepherds and watchmen, to your post! Yes, it is the Lord Who guards the city, but by His grace and in His Name we keep vigil!

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

Russian Orthodoxy - Once upon a Time

My Life's Journey

The Memoirs of Metropolitan Evlogy

As Put Together according to His Accounts by T. Manukhin

Part One

Translated by Alexander Lisenko

St. Vladimir's Seminary Press

Yonkers, New York, 2014

By sheer happenstance, a gift, I find myself initiated into a world propagated until now by Russian speakers, that being the world of Metropolitan Evlogy, now available in a most readable English translation. I don't know if I will be quite so interested in volume two, which takes up with his move to Berlin in 1921 to assume his duties as Russian Orthodox Metropolitan for Western Europe, but this first part from his birth in old Russia in 1868 up until then has truly been captivating.

Apart from giving to the Bolshevik Revolution a very personal perspective, I found Part One particularly captivating because it recounts his life as Bishop of Lublin, vicar of the Archbishop of Warsaw-Kholm, Archbishop of Kholm, and then Archbishop of Volynia, which is to say here in my territory of Ukraine.

During his imprisonment at the end of World War I, Evlogy was for a time house guest of Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytskiy in Lviv. Places familiar to me have taken on new historical depth, thanks to his memoirs. There's even an odd little encounter with the "Red Prince", the tragic, comic Habsburg figure who sought to set himself up as ruler over Ukraine.

If I were to claim that Evlogy's Russian chauvinism was oppressive I would be lying. At the distance of a century, his prejudices against Polish and Ukrainian Catholics, his disdain for Austrians and his characterization of Don Cossacks border on the humorous, viz. his refusal to accept food or drink at the old Dominican monastery not far from Pochaiv for fear of being poisoned by the good friars who received him so warmly.

Anyway, volume one reads quite well and offers a wealth of information about a famous offspring of a Russian Orthodox priestly family, about the world in which he lived. I do not regret a moment spent and would not hesitate to recommend it to others.

Living with Alice in Hope

Despite the wise counsel of very savvy friends to "take Rod Dreher sparingly", I cannot help recommending, especially to parents and young adults, his recent blogpost entitled "The Post-Indiana Future for Christians" The article is wide-ranging and touches on many topics, among the more frightening being the sad state of major US law schools. Read the article also for what it has to say about child rearing! Many things spin out in classic Dreher, but I think he is right, especially when it comes to the topic of nurturing children.

No doubt those who hold for the Kingship of Jesus Christ, who proclaim Him crucified, died and buried, risen victorious over sin and death for the salvation of the world will not falter, regardless of the pressures upon us. Even so, I want to recommend a book by Alice von Hildebrand which I reviewed here recently: Memoirs of a Happy Failure. 

Maybe that is why my friends counsel against "overdosing" on Rod Dreher? We need to be rooted like Alice. Rooted in the Cross, sobered by the silence of the Tomb and overwhelmed by the proclamation of Easter Joy.

HE IS RISEN AS HE SAID, THE CONQUEROR OF SIN AND DEATH!

And with the dawn comes the Alleluia!

A Little Priest's Day Reflection

In the quiet of Holy Thursday, I took the time to read this relatively long article about the process and results of  liturgical reform of Holy Week. Rorate Caeli is presenting in English translation a work by Stefano Carusi, from Disputationes Theologicae: THE REFORM OF HOLY WEEK IN THE YEARS 1951-1956 FROM LITURGY TO THEOLOGY BY WAY OF THE STATEMENTS OF CERTAIN LEADING THINKERS (ANNIBALE BUGNINI, CARLO BRAGA, FERDINANDO ANTONELLI).

There is no denying that if you are not a specialist, then you have to be immersed in the topic and its issues as they face the Church today, this is if you want to make sense of the reading or time devoted to reading. For me, the article opened a new vista while confirming a fundamental principle which under-girds my own approach to the liturgical question and its importance for the life of the Roman Catholic Church: Liturgical law and discipline cannot be arbitrary. Much of the scandal of today in matters liturgical has to do not so much with egregious abuse as it does with the arbitrary character of the reform and the consequent attitude which tends to poison our approach to Divine Worship. While there is merit in a recovery of sobriety and decorum, in strict adherence to the rubrics for the celebration of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, it is not the heart of the problem. Restoration is required; returning to that reset point in the past which will enable us to heal the rupture with the tradition and then seek cautiously to respond to the question of the organic development of the Roman Rite in the light of the Constitution on the Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council.

This article was a wake-up call for me in the sense that I had presumed, on the basis of my impressions of Pope Pius XII, that the Holy Week Reform, begun just before my birth and implemented when I just had kindergarten behind me, was something of that seriousness or profound respect for the edifice of cult, which I was trying to imagine for the future. Anyway, to my friends who follow my liturgical ramblings, I wish to give notice quite simply that the hoped for reset, the restoration required to heal the scandal of arbitrariness in matters liturgical must precede this reform as well.

It looks as though caprice had the upper hand in 1956 as well. We are scandalized by the rumblings coming out of certain sectors in the Church today, related to marriage and family, well, it would seem that the immediate post-war period saw some rather vociferous clamoring concerning matters liturgical.

Nonetheless, I still hope and pray that decorum will find its way into every celebration of the Ordinary Form and that worship ad Orientem will help, along with a generous offering of the option of the Extraordinary Form, to center and deepen our faith in the Lord Jesus.

For the sake of His Sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world!

The perfection of love

When you are dealing with Saint Augustine, I think it impossible to reduce down to a single favorite quote or passage. The great Father and Doctor of the Church never stops surprising me and that is indeed good. The Second Reading from the Office for this Wednesday in Holy Week is somewhere near the top of the list:

"Dear brethren, the Lord has marked out for us the fullness of love that we ought to have for each other. He tells us: No one has greater love than the man who lays down his life for his friends. In these words, the Lord tells us what the perfect love we should have for one another involves. John, the evangelist who recorded them, draws the conclusion in one of his letters: As Christ laid down his life for us, so we too ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. We should indeed love one another as he loved us, he who laid down his life for us.

  This is surely what we read in the Proverbs of Solomon: If you sit down to eat at the table of a ruler, observe carefully what is set before you; then stretch out your hand, knowing that you must provide the same kind of meal yourself. What is this ruler’s table if not the one at which we receive the body and blood of him who laid down his life for us? What does it mean to sit at this table if not to approach it with humility? What does it mean to observe carefully what is set before you if not to meditate devoutly on so great a gift? What does it mean to stretch out one’s hand, knowing that one must provide the same kind of meal oneself, if not what I have just said: as Christ laid down his life for us, so we in our turn ought to lay down our lives for our brothers? This is what the apostle Paul said: Christ suffered for us, leaving us an example, that we might follow in his footsteps.

  This is what is meant by providing “the same kind of meal.” This is what the blessed martyrs did with such burning love. If we are to give true meaning to our celebration of their memorials, to our approaching the Lord’s table in the very banquet at which they were fed, we must, like them, provide “the same kind of meal.”

  At this table of the Lord we do not commemorate the martyrs in the same way as we commemorate others who rest in peace. We do not pray for the martyrs as we pray for those others, rather, they pray for us, that we may follow in his footsteps. They practised the perfect love of which the Lord said there could be none greater. They provided “the same kind of meal” as they had themselves received at the Lord’s table.

  This must not be understood as saying that we can be the Lord’s equals by bearing witness to him to the extent of shedding our blood. He had the power of laying down his life; we by contrast cannot choose the length of our lives, and we die even if it is against our will. He, by dying, destroyed death in himself; we are freed from death only in his death. His body did not see corruption; our body will see corruption and only then be clothed through him in incorruption at the end of the world. He needed no help from us in saving us; without him we can do nothing. He gave himself to us as the vine to the branches; apart from him we cannot have life.

  Finally, even if brothers die for brothers, yet no martyr by shedding his blood brings forgiveness for the sins of his brothers, as Christ brought forgiveness to us. In this he gave us, not an example to imitate but a reason for rejoicing. Inasmuch, then, as they shed their blood for their brothers, the martyrs provided “the same kind of meal” as they had received at the Lord’s table. Let us then love one another as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us."

It is one up on a piece I wrote for friends unknown in Ireland, but may help contextualize my own poor attempt to say something of worth about an issue foremost in the minds of many.

The Persecution of Christians Looms Larger

Even if the June issue of the journal entitled 'CHRISTVS REGNAT' (which is published twice a year by the Catholic Heritage Association in Ireland: www.catholicheritage.blogspot.com) is still a ways off, I thought it appropriate to put down in writing now, during Passiontide, my reflections on the troubling question of the suffering caused through attack on the Church and on Christians, and the duties we owe to our fellow Christians under persecution. I thank Thomas Murphy for agreeing to the publication of this text also on my blog, DEO VOLENTE EX ANIMO (http://deovolenteexanimo.blogspot.com/). As Mr. Murphy pointed out to me when proposing the topic, the persecution of Christians is very much on the minds and in the prayers of the members of the Catholic Heritage Association and ought to be more so for all of us, brothers and sisters in Christ.

As odd as it sounds, I suppose we ought to be grateful that as a Church we can still attract persecution, that our Christianity has not become so lackluster that the power of Satan simply ignores us in the world. The why’s and the how’s of persecution of Christians today are multiple. A short article can’t really do them all justice, but I hope it can set some things clear and motivate all of us to prayerful solidarity on behalf of our brothers and sisters in Christ, who find themselves, for whatever reason, under trial.

Where to begin? Perhaps we should start with the words “The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians”? This statement teaches by describing what has happened time and again in the history of the Church: persecution and repression, even unto death, have not stifled but rather fostered the growth of the Church. Not only have their courage and singular attachment to Jesus Christ inspired others to martyrdom, but ultimately and often even quite immediately the accounts of the passio of certain martyrs have drawn others to faith in Christ. Similarly, it can be said of confessors of the faith, who laid their lives on the line for the Lord Jesus, even though the supreme sacrifice of their life’s blood was not required of them.

As Christians, we don’t seek banishment, prison, torture or martyrdom for ourselves, nor do we wish these on others, especially not on our brothers and sisters in Christ, whether close at hand or far from us in terms of space or custom. Nowhere does it say in explaining the quote about the blood of martyrs being the seed of Christians that the Church wishes people to be martyred for the sake of its own increment. We don’t solicit names for some list of martyr volunteers, such that the Church might grow and prosper. We know from the teaching of the Church Fathers, from the ranks of the great and saintly Doctors of the Church, of those who went overboard in their zeal for martyrdom; the Church does not accord them the title of saint because of this excessive longing to the point of provocation, to emulate Christ in His suffering and death; no one calls down martyrdom upon himself, despite his readiness and fervent prayer to receive that grace, as long as it be God’s will and not his own.  When martyrdom happens, we stand in awe before the witness of those called to testify with the supreme sacrifice of their own lives to Christ, the King of Martyrs and Confessors.

Part of the art or insight of the novel of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, “Callista: a Tale of the Third Century”, is to illustrate the inexplicable in all of what came to be for good through the persecution under Diocletian of the Church in North Africa and through the shedding of the blood of Callista in defense of the Gospel. Blessed Newman offers a great and profound gift (and in the form of historical fiction) accessible to all who seek to enter more profoundly into the mystery of the role played by persecution in the life of the Church, then and now, as well as answering the question concerning the stuff of which martyrs are made by the grace of God.  Yes, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians”, but the mystery is intimately tied to Golgotha; the Gospel of St. John refers to Christ’s Death on the Cross as His being lifted up and drawing all to Himself, His Glorification, yes, but in and through His sorrowful Passion. We stand speechless on Calvary, whether at the foot of His Cross or that of those whose lives most perfectly emulate His through their martyrdom. We are drawn to Him and to them because of the absolute clarity of the witness of their love.

Time and again, we find people grappling with the injustice suffered by those under persecution and doubly so when it regards fellow Christians. Perhaps this is what makes any measure of persecution which may enter your life or mine so hard to accept. It is simply not fair; you don’t heap abuse on people of good will. It is a theme much rooted in the Old Testament with reference to the suffering of the virtuous man or of the innocent (cf. Wisdom 2:1,12-22). The relativism plaguing contemporary society, which denies the truth which comes from God alone, would beat down everything perceived as putting limits on their pretended options and unfettered choices. Of late, there has been much talk on college and university campuses of the so-called “new PC”, a moralizing “Political Correctness” which tolerates no linguistic bounds (not even standard pronouns: he, she, his or her) to their inglorious self-seeking (much of it centered on the topic of gender). Especially in North America and Western Europe, people berate the Church as tyrannical and judgmental, insisting that matters of personality and sexuality are questions of preference, not nature, of a self-centered longing hardly distinguishable from the caprice of the moment. The loneliness, the abandonment of Calvary is very much a part of this path of suffering, to be borne by those who object to such nonsense. Wickedness rejects virtue and turns its back on God; it pushes away not only fraternal correction but any form of counsel, denying even to parents the right to lovingly tell an errant, not-all-that-adult child that he or she is wrong and far from God.

Even in our supposedly civilized world we find Christians ostracized or otherwise persecuted and taken before the courts for defending marriage, for seeking to save unborn children from abortion, for wearing a little necklace with a cross to work. What is it, if not persecution, when court action threatens the possibility of a Catholic school to be just that, namely Catholic, both in its teaching and in its hiring policy? Our Catholic hospitals come under pressure from so-called good Catholic doctors on staff, who for money or prestige want to admit procedures which fly in the face of the unconditional respect due to the human person. Catholic social services are forced to close their doors rather than accept that they must also favor the placement with same-sex couples of children up for adoption.  Examples of this kind of discrimination against the Church or believing Christians could be recounted without number. Their common point of departure might be a denial of the existence of objective truth, but they are all shot through with the same venom of that black heart described in the Book of Wisdom, which refuses righteousness its due:

“Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them, and they did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hoped for the wages of holiness, nor discerned the prize for blameless souls; for God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.” (Wisdom 2:21-24)

This too is persecution, and while short of martyrdom, we pray for ourselves and those thus subjected that by the grace of God they might be of good courage, persevere and through their sufferings bear much fruit for Christ’s Kingdom.

Another image of persecution, however, I would wager is foremost in our thoughts. For most of us, our mind’s eye is filled with images from the news of the last months of the persecution and martyrdom of our fellow Christians from the Middle East and North Africa. Brutal men waving black flags, dumping the lifeless bodies of small children, young men being crucified or shot in the back of the head, or the twenty-one Coptic Christian martyrs brutally beheaded in Libya with the name of Jesus upon their lips! We are confronted with something on the rampage, which touts itself as Islam. It has been almost a millennium, but here we are again threatened with the extinction of Christianity in the lands of its birthplace and first flowering. Not only the Holy Land and its region have witnessed such trials; we need think only of Nigeria and Pakistan. Not only groups professing to be Muslim have been persecuting Christians, as Hindu rage in India would attest. Godless regimes in China and North Korea do not lag far behind in their fury to repress the faith.

We would like to see the leaders of our home countries championing the cause of justice before international forums, but we find groups like the UN to be generally impotent, and our own leaders diffident if not indifferent when it comes to the persecution of Christians. Nobody seems to care much even about the monitoring bodies meant to inform or document this specific type of terror, even as it happens in Europe. Hearts need to change and, as such, we must be confident and persevering in our prayer. Ours is not only a struggle against wicked men but against the powers of darkness. I would recommend the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel for your regular recitation and devotion.

St. Michael the Archangel,

defend us in battle.

Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.

May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,

and do thou,

O Prince of the heavenly hosts,

by the power of God,

thrust into hell Satan,

and all the evil spirits,

who prowl about the world

seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

Hosanna!

For some reason, I think I profited from a rather quiet celebration of Palm Sunday. What stands out for me is the particular poignancy of the Hosanna to the Son of David by the children of the Hebrews. The reading of the Passion from the Gospel of St. Mark only further accentuated this feeling for me. Can I trace its origin back to the scene of the anointing in Bethany? Or was it the exchange on the Mount of Olives, about how striking the shepherd would shake the faith of the sheep and cause them all to disperse? Perhaps, more than circumstance, the grace of the moment was the fruit of something cumulative but yet not planned or engineered on my part, yes, truly a prompting, a gift.

I think the poignancy is sort of that: resulting from the sense of a type of interior tug of war, almost a vacillation, a pulling back and forth of my heart between attachment to Christ, the Beloved, smitten for our offences, and flight before the dread of having to share fully in this His cup, which will not pass. The children's Hosanna is neither ignorant nor distorted, but reflects the allegiance we all owe to Mary's Child, bruised, derided, cursed, defiled. Of course, the solitude of the Passion belongs to Jesus alone. Even so, we are to watch and pray, not to have our rest, but indeed to accompany Him beyond the hosannas.

My Holy Week prayer for one and all would be for the grace to watch and pray with Jesus, to draw the tug-of-war just that much closer to a definitive win for attachment to the Son of David. Hosanna! 

G.K. Chesterton: The Most Freeing Person I have ever known!

What's Wrong with the World

Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith) 

(2012-05-12). Kindle Edition.

"Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all these pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl's hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed."  (pp. 282-283).

Normally, I read G.K. Chesterton for pleasure, for fun. He's terribly witty and the most wholesome type of entertainment. This little book came my way free of charge on Kindle, but I would not have begrudged paying for it. It is truly a find. Not everyone is convinced that our world would be better with the kind of distributivism which Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc were so keen on promoting. Take and read this book, not for the arguments pointing to distributivism, but for its profound anthropology. Chesterton argues radical social change for the sake of the human person. You might come up with very different conclusions concerning how to better society, but you'll find no better illustration or icon representing the human family. 

Chesterton is marvelously encouraging about the possibility of bringing home the victory and making things, not only better, but right:

"We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed." (pp. 32-33).

Relativism probably has no greater enemy than Chesterton and we have a great ally to cheer us on in our struggle to restore culture, Catholic Culture, please!