Faith Requires Commitment, Not Warm Fuzzy Feelings about the Blood of Jesus!

GK Chesterton, the great English apologist for the faith wrote: "It is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."  I recently received this comment in response to my posting: “Bringing False Christianity Into the Public Square:

You have shown well the shallowness of our commitment to Christ. Your own commitment could be deepened by ceasing to use abortion as a foil to the rest of your argument. It shows that you haven't really taken to heart the realization that abortion is the taking of an innocent life. How else could you describe as 'sanctimonious veneer' the countless hours spent by thousands fighting for the pre-born, helping the newborns and comforting those recovering from the horror of abortion. When using the "what if Jesus walked in" standard, you could speculate on what He would say about the killing of huge numbers of innocent children and its comparative importance to health care and other important needs.

Now the curious thing is that in the postng while I mentioned universal access to health care, immigration, the death penalty, warfare, on the poor both here and abroad, violence as entertainment and weapons of violence, care for the environment, and the gross disparity of wealth in our society, I did not mention abortion.  If I did not mention, it I can hardly be accused of using it as a “foil.” Moreover there were other issues I did not mention, some of because there is no question that evangelicals embrace them.  They are not the contentious issues that can provide a litmus test of fidelity to the preaching of Jesus.  There is no doubt that evangelicals—authentic and phony—oppose abortion.  My denunciation is that opposition to abortion is no guarantee that a person is evangelical.  People are opposed to abortion for many reasons.  Some are opposed for religious reasons—including Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists.  Some are opposed for philosophical reasons—including many atheists and agnostics.  Some—indeed many—are opposed because they see the links between abortion and the collapse of traditional social values: same sex marriage, divorce, pre-marital sex, changing attitudes on gender.  Some even see it as a woman’s health issue and view abortion as potentially dangerous to the health and welfare of women.  All that is well and good.  But all I say to them is “Good luck with your endeavors;  I hope we have some mutual success.”   The only reason that counts in my book for being opposed to abortion is that it undermines the Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Jesus in the Gospels, God alone is the author and giver of life and God alone can directly take a human life.  Life is totally within the authority of God and a disciple of Jesus Christ must be committed to that principle.  In the same sense just because a person is in favor of providing refuge to immigrants or health care to the poor doesn’t mean he or she is an evangelical.  I am happy to see people working for goals I believe are central to the Kingdom of God regardless of their personal religious convictions, but my passion lies not with the issue but the motivation. 

Now I am not going to get into the “seamless garment issue” though I firmly espouse it.  What I am going to say is that the principle of protecting the Life of the Unborn is one jewel in the Catholic Magisterial Crown, it is one jewel and we have to buy the entire package.  If we are authentically Catholic—and for me the person who is fully Catholic is fully evangelical because the teachings of the Catholic Church, though not yet perfect, enshrine the principles of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we must accept the entire magisterium of the Church.  This is neither liberal nor conservative.  The magisterium of the Catholic Church says that the direct taking of an unborn life is a grave sin of injustice.  The magisterium of the Catholic Church says that the sacrament of Matrimony is between one man and one woman for the duration of their lives.  But the magisterium of the Catholic Church also speaks about all God’s children having a right to education.  And it speaks of all God’s Children having a right to migrate to seek better and safer lives.  And it says that the salaries of workers and managers should be in reasonable proportion.  And it says that all life—even the life of the criminal—must be protected, explicitly citing the United States as a particular example where the death penalty is being abused. 

You can be opposed to abortion—that does not make you a disciple of Jesus Christ.  You can be in favor of liberal immigration policies—that does not make you a disciple of Jesus Christ.  It is the whole ball of wax, embraced not because it fits our political agenda or because our friends think that way but because when I encounter Jesus in the Gospel and the community of the faithful that adhere to the Gospel, I realize it can be no other way. 

Now not everyone can equally invest himself in one facet or another of working for God’s Kingdom.  Some will put more of their energy in one cause or another than a third.  What is important is that Jesus’s disciples work together in harmony.  And so when I refer to “the sanctimonious veneer” of those who spend “countless hours fighting for the pre-born,”  I am not referring to true disciples but to those who pick and choose the unborn but turn their back on the immigrant or the person without health care.  I can also speak of the “sanctimonious veneer” of the pants-suited 80 year-old-nun with a pro-choice button protesting at Fort Benning GA.  It is not enough to be liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican.  And the end of the day we have to be disciples, pure and simple, nothing else.

Back to the Roots

I recently read about a movie that won awards at Cannes and is up for an Oscar (category: Short Film) called Ave Maria.  The title is meant to be somewhat ironic as the film is about a group of Orthodox Jewish settlers in Palestine that crash their car in front of a monastery of nuns.  As I understand the story from what I have read the plot develops around the fact that the settlers can’t use the phone as it is the Sabbath and the nuns can’t talk because they have a vow of silence.  Now, actually, no Catholic Order has a vow where their members can’t talk: that is a myth, but it works the plot apparently and it does introduce my point: religion, when it becomes an end in itself, goes toxic.  If Jews cannot use the phone in a genuine emergency or nuns can’t speak in order to help others in a crisis, there is something wrong.  As I just said, this story has a bit of an artificial set-up as the strictest of rabbis would agree that in an emergency a phone-call could be made and no Catholic Order, no matter how contemplative, is bound to a total silence.  But the fact of the matter is that from the radical jihadists of Islam to the tea-evangelists of Christianity, there are those who trump common decency with a toxic religiosity.  When settlers use some claim that God allegedly gave them sovereignty over a land and use that claim to justify bulldozing the houses and the orchards of people who have lived on that land long before the days when Joshua led the children of Israel into the Promised Land—that is toxic religion.  When Buddhists persecute the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar (Burma) that is toxic religion.  When Hindus attack Christian churches and faithful in India that is toxic religion.  When Pakistani Muslims use charges of blasphemy against their Christian neighbors to justify violence and plunder, that is toxic religion.  And when “Christians” use their religious beliefs to justify discrimination against others because they are Muslims or immigrants or over LGBT issues then those “religious” beliefs are not longer authentically Christian but are a toxic corruption of our Christian faith. 

I think that it is time for us Christians to move beyond religion and for us Catholics to lead the way.  As a historian it is clear from the available sources, including the New Testament, that Christ did not intend to establish a new religion.  He founded a community of people whom he called to lead a new and different sort of life.  As a historian I am used to reading how Christianity was one religion among many in the later Roman Empire.  I disagree with that.  From reading Paul or the Gospels, I don’t see any indication that the Christians saw themselves as a religion.  The followed “The Way” (see Acts 9:2; 19:9; 19:23; 24:14;24:42).  At that time they were still within the embrace of Judaism—it was only with the composure of the twelfth of the Eighteen Benedictions, the proscription of the minim or heretics, around the year 80 AD that the Christians were expelled from the Synagogue and Christianity began to develop separately from Judaism.   “The Way” was not meant to be a religion per se but a Way of Life, a path of discipleship that transcends any notion of “religion.”

Now before I get accused of heresy by the krazies who troll this site, let me distinguish between “religion” and “Church.”  According to the gospels, Christ invited together a community, an ἐκκλησία of disciples. Εκκλησία of course is the Greek word for “Church” (as a community of people, not as a building).  Yes Jesus came to establish a “Church” but that does not mean he came to establish the “Roman Catholic Church.”  The Catholic Church (Roman and otherwise) is certainly a principal heir of the ecclesial legacy of Christ’s disciples, but is also the product of an evolutionary process that has historically developed into something quite more institutionally complex than the original communities of disciples.  By institutionally complex I mean that it historically developed doctrinally, liturgically, and governmentally (though perhaps guided by the Holy Spirit) according to human design.  So while I do not think that Jesus intended to establish a new religion, I do think he established an ἐκκλησία, a Church, a community of those who were consecrated to live according to his way.   I think it might be time to move beyond the consciousness of “religion” and refocus on being a community of such disciples. 

What do I mean by a “community of disciples?”   I am not a huge fan of George Weigel or even of his book Evangelical Catholicism but I do think in that book Weigel gives us the focus for a genuine Catholic renewal when he writes

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord. 

I think that disciples are those who develop that genuine friendship with the Risen Lord through—and this is crucial—through the Scriptures, the Sacraments, Prayer, and one aspect that Weigel (in his American individualism) overlooked: community.  In the Church, the community of disciples, we together delve into the scriptures, break the Bread of Christ’s Body, and nourish our lives of intimate prayer with Christ.  If we do that genuinely and with sincerity there is no room for prejudice, no room for hatred.  We remember the commandment: love your enemies, pray for your persecutors.  If you love those who love you: what merit is there in that: even the pagans do as much. 

There are those in our society who take to themselves the appellation “evangelicals” but for the most part they are deceivers and frauds.  By their fruits will you know them.  They incite division and fear; they divide and set people against one another. And they do so in the name of Jesus.  All Christians, including us Catholics, are called to be evangelicals: witnesses to the Gospel.  By this will all people know you are my disciples: by the love that you have for one another.  It is not by our self-righteous looking down on those who are different from us, whom we judge to be sinners or non-believers that we are witnesses.  It is not by encouraging fear and hatred, by calling for people to be “sent back to where they came from,” or denies housing or education or jobs because they “aren’t like us” that we are witnesses.  When we buy into the current climate of anger and fear and prejudice we cease to be witnesses to Christ and his Gospel.  We become “evangelists” of a false gospel, the word of the Father of Lies rather than the Word of God. 

Reason 6 On Why The Revised Rites of Vatican II Are Superior To The Preconciliar Rites

Let’s go back to our series on why I maintain that the current Roman Rite of the Mass is superior to the unreformed rites used previous to the Council.  I had enumerated 10 reasons—in response to a rather supercilious article by the ever supercilious Professor Peter Kwasniewski of Wyoming Catholic College making the counter-claim—that I believe make it clear why the current Rites, though still in need of much work, are a vast improvement over the Traditional Liturgy.  We had looked at the first five claims.   Now let’s go to the sixth.

The liturgy walks us through the cycle of Christ’s birth, life, teaching, suffering, death, resurrection and sending the Holy Spirit. 

Now, remember I am not giving a set of abstract reflections here. I am talking from experience.   I grew up under the Tridentine Liturgy.   I was an altar boy with that Rite.  I went to Mass daily under that Rite.  I am not some armchair pontificator still in my 40’s or 50’s (or late 20’s) that whines about some supposed loss of reverence or why women don’t invest more in mantillas when a lace shawl makes them look so much more sexily piously subservient to male fantasies authority. When it comes to the Traditional Latin Mass, I’ve been there; done that; and got the cotta.  (A cotta is a sort of ecclesiastical T-shirt, a type of surplice that ends at about the line of the pubis.)

One of the things I remember most of being an altar boy in the old days of the TLM was the constancy of the Black Mass.  No, I am not referring to Satanic Worship.  We didn’t know about such things in those days before Stephen King.  I mean that weekdays, despite a rich and deep calendar of saints that kept being ignored were given to Requiem Masses.  Day after day, week after week, Mass was invariably the same.  The same introit.  The same epistle.  The same gradual. The same gospel. The same cradling voice of the aged Mrs. Steffans coming from the choir loft as she pedaled the harmonium.    Everything was Requiem Aeternam dona eis Domine. Mass after Mass, day after day, week after week.   And of course once one got into the “Mass of the Faithful” (more or less equivalent to today’s Liturgy of the Eucharist) nothing ever changed. Nothing.  Ever.  One didn’t get to hear the gospels unfold the cycle of Jesus’s Incarnation, birth, teaching, miracles, suffering, death, and Resurrection.  O sure, there were Advent Sundays and Lent Sundays and Easter Sundays where you got a somewhat bare-bones account, a sketchy outline of the gospel story, Gospel Highlights as it were, but it was all so abstract and far-away because it just wasn’t tied together through the week.  All in all, we heard less than 15% of the Gospels read to us during the liturgy—and that presumes, of course, that we knew our Latin well enough to comprehend the readings that were being mumbled by the priest at the altar without a vernacular repetition.  Yes, we had missals, but who used them.  Mass was good for two, maybe three trips around the beads.  I mean, really???  It just removed by mystery of Christ’s Life, Death, and Resurrection to a sort of mental tableau for us to contemplate through the veil of the centuries, sucking life and color from it to reduce it to nothing more than a spiritual representation of the same cheap plaster tableaux with which our churches were over-decorated. 

These many years later I am all but a daily communicant.  There are days, relatively few, when I am not at Mass. There is always a reason if I am not.  I want to go to morning Mass.  I find that the systematic reading of the scriptures and especially the Gospels nourishes me and makes the reality of Christ’s life something very tangible.  My Latin is more than sufficient that were the Mass in Latin I would still find great value in it—but it is infinitely richer for me when I can pick up the nuances of the prayers without doing the mental gymnastics of interfacing two languages.  (I have studied the Latin texts, and especially those of the Eucharistic Prayers, carefully in order to better understand the precise theology they contain and I must say, Liturgiam Authenicam be damned, Vox Clara has done a huge screw-up of those translations in which they have sacrificed sound theology for their own political purposes.)  I find that the role of the Holy Spirit in consecrating the Eucharist and in uniting us in Eucharistic Unity is so much more developed in the new Eucharistic Prayers over the faint epiclesis of the Roman Canon.  The Mass is the highlight of my day, not simply in the way of some pious reverie, but in what integrates my day, what gives it shape and depth.  I have come to not just understand but in some way appropriate the cycle of Christ’s life, from the appearance of the Baptist in the desert until the rush of the Holy Spirit upon those in the Upper Room, into my life.  Part of this is that it has been long journey through sixty-some years, but it is the collapse of the TLM in favor of the Novus Ordo that let it be a journey and not be stuck in that short-circuited cycle of an infinity of Black Masses which marked my youth.  It is, to cite Jaroslav Pelikan, the difference between living faith and dead faith.  

Let That Fire Fall From Heaven

Irish Crowds celebrating victory
in Same-Sex Marriage Referendum

Well, I was going to run quickly through Methodism and then into the Second Great Awakening, but that will have to wait a day or two as I want to make some comments about Ireland and the national referendum that overwhelming endorsed changing the national Constitution to include the right of same-sex couples to marriage.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin said the Church (in Ireland) needs a “reality check” to see if it has drifted away from its younger members.  All due respect to His Grace, but sort of reminds me of the “Captain Obvious” commercials for Hotels.com.   On the other hand, at least the good Archbishop is one step ahead of his American confreres (including those who work—or used to work—at the Vatican) in their ostrich-like head-in-the-sand approach. 

I remember reading a book several years ago, A Whisper of God: Essays on Post-Catholic Ireland by Richard Clarke, now Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland.  Bishop Clarke was way out ahead of his Catholic colleagues in identifying the reality that Ireland has over the past four decades moved very rapidly from a devoutly Catholic country where the faithful followed the directions of their parish priests to a society in which people think for themselves and have no difficulty in adjusting to the changed social realities.  Bishop Clarke (he was then Bishop of Meath and Kildare) and I shared a platform some years back when invited by a Roman Catholic Religious Order of men to help chart their future in Ireland.  He astutely named the very dramatic changes in Irish society and the impact those changes were to have on the Catholic Church in Ireland and what the Church must do if it wants to remain a part of Irish life.  We could use a similar analysis today.  Of course, Andrew Greeley warned us thirty years ago but remained only a voice crying in the desert.  Thanks to pressure from the infamous Cardinal John Cody, then Archbishop of Chicago, we chose to ignore Greely’s spot-on sociological research.  We need to be careful and ignore no longer or we will see—as the Pew Survey released last week—the Catholic Church shrink into total irrelevancy in American life. 

To a certain extent I think this does tie into the theme I am currently working on of the Great Awakenings.  I think an evangelical revival, a truly evangelical revival, not a fundamentalist reign of terror, is needed in America today to give a boost not only to the Catholic Church, but to all the Churches of Christian orthodoxy, that is to say all the Churches that profess the faith of the traditional Christian creeds.  As you probably note from earlier postings I am intrigued by George Weigel’s definition of Evangelical Catholicism.

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

I think that if the Catholic Church wants to capture the spiritual imagination of the next generation it must address the following issues.

1.   Integrity.  The Church—and Church leaders in particular—need walk the walk they preach.  In particular they need to embrace a less materialistic and consumerist lifestyle and adopt the servant-model of Church in both their personal lives and episcopal ministries.  A key part of this re-visioning is to drop the C.E.O. model of the majority of bishops and the Renaissance Prince model of that wing-nut minority that parades around in Church-drag.  Pastors are neither executives nor princesses but loving fathers of adult sons and daughters. 

2.   We need to re-vision ourselves as Church not as an institution but as a people commissioned by baptism to spread the Gospel of the Kingdom of God in concrete terms of establishing among ourselves and inviting others into a culture of community, peace-building, and a passion for a more just world, 

3.   We need to refashion ourselves as Church not only to be more inclusive and welcoming, but to put the emphasis on community—a family of people who know one another and are invested in one another’s lives as we encourage each other to grow in discipleship.  Part of this community emphasis has to be the development of small groups in the parishes to network in mission and fellowship. 

4.   We as Church need to redo our moral theology to bring its historic values—rooted in the scriptures and tradition—into dialogue with the social, biological, and psychological sciences to come up with a credible anthropology and, in particular, a sound theology of human sexuality.

5.   We as Church needs to permit greater inculturation in its worship, maintaining a unity of faith but recognizing the vast cultural differences that cut across not only nations and language groups, but age and economic groups within societies. 

6.   We as Church need to rethink and re-theologize our understanding of sin in a way that reminds us that we are a community of redeemed sinners and not an “us” (the saved) faction in an otherwise damned world of a supposedly unredeemed “them.” 

7.   We need a reemphasis on spirituality and an empowering of the average Joe or Mary Christian to develop a rich personal spiritual life, rooted in a personal friendship with Jesus as encountered in the scriptures, the sacraments, the community of the faithful, and the poor. 

8.   We need to move beyond the clerical/lay distinction in the Body of Christ so that each Christian is empowered to make full use of the gifts of the Holy Spirit entrusted to him or to her by God for the good of all the Church and indeed, the entire world.

9.   Without abandoning our historic faith and the creeds that express it, we need to move from a Church marked by doctrines and rules to a community of faith where people personally encounter Christ through the fellowship of believers, worship, preaching, and mission. 

There is some redundancy in what I propose and there probably are other features that I am overlooking but the current model of Church is not working.  Religion in general and Christianity in particular are fast losing their credibility in this post-modern world and it is time for a radical renewal of our identity as Church.  The work of theologians such as Avery Dulles, Karl Raher, Edward Schillebeeckx, Yves Congar, Hans Kung, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Richard McBrien, Jean Vanier, Elizabeth Johnson, Marie Dominique Chenu, and—surprising to some—Josef Ratzinger, make just such a renewal possible, even imperative.   Indeed, while I am not happy about the way Weigel unfolds his thesis in Evangelical Catholicism, I concur with him that the fundamental shift in Catholicism began not with Vatican II, or even with Pius XII’s revolutionary encyclicals Mystici Corporis,  Divino Afflante Spiritu, and  Mediator Dei, but can be traced back to the fundamental shift in Catholicity by Leo XIII at the end of the 19^th century.  Leo’s embracing of the cause of the non-establishment working class with Rerum Novarum, his naming the very non-traditional John Henry Newman to the cardinaliate, and his reconciliation with democracy in his recognition of the Third French Republic may seem to us today small potatoes, but they signify a very dramatic shift in the direction of the Institutional Church that would bear fruit in the Second Vatican Council.  Up to that point the Church had been little more than a well-embalmed vestige of Renaissance Catholicism, but Leo breathed the Spirit upon those bones and we have seen them slowly come back to life.  Now is the time to unbind the resurrected Church and let it go free into the future where we, as Church, can fulfill the great commission to bring the Good News of God’s Kingdom to all nations.  Happy Pentecost.