Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Delving More Deeply Into the Holy Trinity
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| Fr. Robert Behnke |
Trinity Sunday is, for me and I suspect for many who preach, a particularly challenging Sunday. How can one say anything helpful, nourishing, spiritually significant let alone spiritually challenging, about the Mystery of God the Blessed Trinity, when in the first place man could never have figured out that God is a Trinity? God had to reveal supernaturally the mystery of what theology calls His “Godhead.” Though man can reason to the existence of God and following that, some truths about God, it would be utterly impossible for man on his own to have come to the conclusion that God is Three Divine Persons in one; God had to reveal this truth to man, because our reason cannot adequately wrap our minds even around the idea, let alone the reality. And the great blessing we celebrate, surely every day, especially at every Sacrifice of the Mass, but particularly on Trinity Sunday, is that we don’t have to figure God out on our own. Surely He has not, and will never, reveal to us all there could be to know about Himself; we would need to be God to know God in His fullness. But the blessing is that we who have met and believed in the Son of God Our Lord Jesus Christ have been told by Him all that we need to know about God. Anything that is true—any truth—can be either external or internal in relation to our own lives. We may know and be able to rattle off the names of the capitals of the fifty states, but that information remains really external – peripheral – to our lives until, perhaps, a person may become first a little curious, then mildly interested, and then passionate, about the history of America and her fifty states: how they came to be, how the boundaries were determined, how they were named, when they entered the union. Then that same knowledge that was once external – peripheral – incidental – now has become internal – important – significant – crucial – to the man who has come genuinely to breathe the study of American history. For one man, knowing the fifty capitals is merely incidental to his life; for another, it becomes like the marrow in his bones.
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| Archbishop Francis Chullikatt |
…In providing more than one fourth of all care for those who are suffering from HIV and AIDS, Catholic healthcare institutions know well the importance of access to treatment, care and support for the millions of people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS….The Holy See understands that, when referring to "young people," the definition of which enjoying no international consensus, States must always respect the responsibilities, rights and duties of parents to provide appropriate direction and guidance to their children, which includes having primary responsibility for the upbringing, development, and education of their children….States must acknowledge that the family, based on marriage being the equal partnership between one man and one woman and the natural and fundamental group unit of society, is indispensable in the fight against HIV and AIDS, for the family is where children learn moral values to help them live in a responsible manner and where the greater part of care and support is provided….The Holy See rejects references to terms such as "populations at high risk" because they treat persons as objects and can give the false impression that certain types of irresponsible behavior are somehow morally acceptable. The Holy See does not endorse the use of condoms/commodities including as part of HIV and AIDS prevention programs or classes/programs of education in sex/sexuality. Prevention programs or classes/programs of education in human sexuality should focus not on trying to convince the world that risky and dangerous behavior forms part of an acceptable lifestyle, but rather should focus on risk avoidance, which is ethically and empirically sound. The only safe and completely reliable method of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV is abstinence before marriage and respect and mutual fidelity within marriage, which is and must always be the foundation of any discussion of prevention and support. The Holy See does not accept so-called "harm reduction" efforts related to drug use. Such efforts do not respect the dignity of those who are suffering from drug addiction as they do not treat or cure the sick person, but instead falsely suggest that they cannot break free from the cycle of addiction. Such persons must be provided the necessary spiritual, psychological and familial support to break free from the addictive behavior in order to restore their dignity and encourage social inclusion. The Holy See rejects the characterization of persons who engage in prostitution as "sex workers" as this can give the false impression that prostitution could somehow be a legitimate form of work. Prostitution cannot be separated from the issue of the status and dignity of persons; governments and society must not accept such a dehumanization and objectification of persons. What is needed is a value-based approach to counter the disease of HIV and AIDS, an approach which provides the necessary care and moral support for those infected and which promotes living in conformity with the norms of the natural moral order, an approach which respects fully the inherent dignity of the human person….It may be true that, on first examination, many Christians think that the Blessed Trinity doesn't connect with anything much in either their life or worship. But our belief in the dignity of every human clearly follows from our belief in the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, and in particular from what we believe about how the Blessed Trinity interacts in the life of the world. Our Lord spells it out clearly and succinctly in speaking to Nicodemus in today’s Gospel: …God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through Him….
The action of the Blessed Trinity for us—our creation in God’s image, our salvation by God’s death, our adoption as children of God in the sacrament of baptism—these are the reasons why the Church has always fought—and still fights today—for respect for the dignity of every human person—why the Church fought in the past and still fights today against any power, any culture, any nation, any people, any opinion that diminishes the intrinsic worth of even a single human being. This is why the Church strenuously opposes abortion and opposes anyone who in any way supports abortion or even facilitates abortion; this is why the bishops of the USA just this past week formally reiterated the Church’s opposition to assisted suicide, something now legally allowable in three states, and something that I wouldn’t be surprised to debut soon in the Illinois legislature. This is why the Church has Catholic Charities, hospitals, nursing homes, grade and high schools, senior citizen centers; this is why the Church invented the idea of universities in the Middle Ages; this is why no single institution cares for more HIV/AIDS patients than the Catholic Church—because the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, Which is a mystery of unending, self-sacrificing, eternal, other-centered love—is at the heart of the Church, at the heart of the Catholic Faith. The nations of the West and their UN ambassadors believe that HIV/AIDS can be successfully treated by acting as if narcissistic sexual activity is good but must carry a caution in the form of a condom. The Church knows that HIV/AIDS—as well as every other evil on the planet—can only be fought and defeated with self-sacrificing love—a love that entails both self-respect and respect for the other rather, than by a utilitarian treatment of persons as objects, by passing out free condoms and giving instructions even to children on how to use them. The Church teaches that people have more dignity than the UN or the US government realizes; all people have a dignity that comes directly from their creation by God the Three-in-One—Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
In today’s Second Reading, St. Paul links belief in the Blessed Trinity with the daily practice of Christian living. Being in right relationship with God is the whole point of life as a Catholic:…Mend your ways…writes St. Paul….encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you…. In other words, act and live like what you are, as what God created you to be, a human being created in the image and likeness of the God Who is eternal, unending, everlasting love. If we can decide always to try to live as what we have been created to be, we will, on this Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, today have delved very deeply into the mystery of that Blessed Trinity, and in that mystery we will see God ever more clearly.
Trinity Sunday, June 19, 2011
In the Crosshairs
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| Fr. Robert Behnke |
At times, God the Holy Spirit may seem to be the Neglected Person of the Blessed Trinity. Though we speak of the Holy Spirit every time we make the Sign of the Cross, and also in the doxology Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit we pray to the Holy Spirit, in our conversations about God many people speak much more often of God the Father, and especially of God the Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. In a sense this is understandable, since God is essentially a Mystery—not to Himself but to us—revealed in nature as the one true God, but more fully by divine revelation as three divine persons in the one true God. We could not know there is a Trinity of Persons, yet only one God, had God not revealed this truth to us; we absolutely could not have figured this out on our own. You may know that a main objection to Christianity, and particularly to Catholicism, on the part of both Jews and Moslems is that, because we believe the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, Catholics are thus accused of believing in three “Gods.” Also, our own human minds more easily conceptualize the notion of “father” and “son” than “spirit.” Even the Catechism of the Catholic Church says far less about the Holy Spirit than about the Father and the Son. In this, the catechism follows the example of the Church’s ancient creeds–the Apostles Creed; the Nicene Creed which we will recite in a few moments. Likewise, the Catechism refers to the Holy Spirit as the Inexpressible Person, but the Person Whom we know: through the Scriptures which He inspired; in Tradition; in the Magisterium which He assists; in Baptism which makes us temples—dwelling places—of God the Holy Spirit; in the other six sacraments; in prayer; in every aspect of the Church’s life. The Church prays to the Holy Spirit more often than we might think: in the Gloria of the Mass; at the conclusion of prayers; in the Divine Office, especially on Sundays in the hymn Te Deum Laudamus. In the most important part of the Mass, it is God the Holy Spirit Whom the Church asks God the Father to send so that by the power of God the Holy Spirit bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Our Lord. The Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father and the Son; Our Lord tells us this Himself, assuring us that He and the Father are one – He who sees Me sees the Father—and in promising not to leave us orphans—not alone, not without Him, not without God—but to send the Holy Spirit–His Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Love between the Father and the Son, a Love so real that That Love is an Eternal Person, without beginning or end, in the triune community that is God.
Perhaps many Catholics connect the coming of God the Holy Spirit into their lives with their reception of the sacrament of Confirmation. True enough, but not the total picture. Recall that St. Paul tells us today, when we were baptized, we were…all given to drink of the one Spirit. In Baptism, God dwells in you; you are filled with sanctifying grace, God adopts you as His child and makes you an heir of heaven. What Baptism begins, Confirmation completes–the baptized person in Confirmation receives the supernatural ability to do what we cannot do under our own power—to be a witness to the truth of Christ found in His One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. That is exactly the transformation we see in the apostles on the first Pentecost. That word apostle means Spirit-enlightened witness. The disciples truly became apostles on Pentecost, or better said, they now know what it means to be an apostle - they are no longer afraid to witness to Jesus. And that word martyr means witness. Note the color red today, the color of the Holy Spirit. Because red is the color of blood, it is also the color of martyrs. It is the color of agape, the type of love that one has when he is willing to sacrifice everything, including one’s very own life, for Jesus. On the first Easter night, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus—after they recognized Jesus in the Breaking of the Bread and after He then disappears—they say to each other …Were not our hearts burning inside of us…. That is how Jesus loves us, and how He wants us to love Him. That is what Jesus does–His Sacred Heart burns with self-sacrificing love. That is what He wants from us; that is what Scripture means when it tells us God is Love.
Make no mistake; these are not idle, flowery, wispy thoughts and words. The witness of martyrdom has not disappeared; it is the golden thread that binds the Church with Our Lord for these two thousand years of the Church’s history. In the past, there have been times in which it was relatively safe—even comfortable—to be a Catholic (I think the 50s and the very early 60s were such a time in our country, but not in the nations under Communism); many more times in history, being a Catholic has been dangerous. All the martyrs, from St. Stephen to St. Maximilian Kolbe, show us this earthly danger. We now seem to be moving quickly, and deeper and deeper, into a period when in the United States it will inevitably become more and more dangerous to live a faithful practicing Catholic life. For that reason, we should pray every day to the Holy Spirit Who in the sacrament of Confirmation has already given us all we need to be faithful in a public way, that we will use His gifts to be faithful—faithful even to the point of martyrdom—since in so many ways our world is telling us that we really should not be free to be faithful Catholics in public; the culture says there is little or no place for Catholicism in the here and now of the public square—that it is wrong, a bad thing, even a crime, to be a faithful Catholic. We have seen, over just the past few weeks, how the Illinois civil union legislation has impacted the ability of the Illinois Catholic Charities to place children for adoption and foster care according to what the Church teaches about marriage and family. The freedom to be Catholic openly today in Illinois is at great risk.
Tonight's first reading, describing the descent of the Holy Spirit on Our Blessed Mother and the apostles, gives us a clue to the meaning of the experience of the first Pentecost. The reading from The Acts of the Apostles does not dwell on the fire, the wind and the noise, but on the transforming experience of the devout men and women living in Jerusalem from every nation under heaven. They hear these Galileans speaking foreign languages, so that each one of them hears the apostles preaching in their own language about the marvels of God. This miracle is the reversal of the tower of Babel experience, in which man’s language became confused because of man’s attempt to climb, under his own power, right up to heaven—man’s attempt to substitute himself for God. The descent of the Holy Spirit leading to the fearless preaching of the apostles shows forth the seeds of the Church as one holy, catholic and apostolic. The Gift of the Holy Spirit does not rule out difficulty, suffering or human effort. St Paul in today's second reading reminds the Christians in Corinth that the Church is like a human body and that the gifts of the Spirit are not about enthusiasm or special knowledge for an elite group, but a variety of gifts for building up the whole body of Christ, in which each of us has a part assigned to us by God. St. Paul's image of the Church as the mystical Body of Christ reflects the truth of today's Gospel: Our Risen Lord comes on Easter night to His closest followers—those who had deserted Him—to bring them now a peace which is not just a calming of hearts and conscience, but the surety of heart which will enable and embolden them to go out and preach the gospel to the very ends of the earth. Having overcome death, now Our Lord breathes His Spirit into them, to enable them to witness to Him; He gives them the power to withstand and overcome the power of this world—the sins of the world which He bore on Calvary.
For years now, the trend toward liberal dogmatism and political correctness is serving to muzzle religious Christians who are doing nothing else but carrying on the Church’s Pentecost mission. The hateful reaction on the part of homosexual activists and activist promoters of abortion—and the opposition to the Church on the part of many civil authorities, many of whom profess to he Catholic—the hateful reaction and the civic opposition to the Church’s legitimate request to be allowed merely to place children in homes, not according to some sectarian Church teaching, but according to the dictates of the law placed by God in human nature, demonstrates how serious the problem is becoming. And, though we probably don’t think about it too much, our next-door neighbor Canada, a country where homosexual marriage is legal and opposition to abortion meets with unhidden scorn, and often with violence, punitive fines, or even jail time, is less than 300 miles from Chicago–just across the river from Detroit.
The recent and still ongoing health care debate; stem cell research; the absolute secrecy of every confession a priest hears, even for the most horrendous of sins; the Church’s right to control her own structure and finances; the right for a Catholic to refuse to cooperate in any medical procedure the Church teaches is intrinsically evil; the right of priests to preach about doctrine and morality that touch upon political questions; the right of Catholics to defend their faith in the public square without fear or intimidation; the right for me to say what I am saying right now: all these things are right now seriously challenged in some section of our country. One has only to read most journalism in the secular press, a press which admires all kinds of perversion and seriously promotes all sorts of sins that cry to heaven. Most mainstream media, entertainment in movies and TV, all the rest—all have numbed the conscience of America; years and years of Will and Grace have turned perversion into acceptable, fuzzy, warm, cuddly, laudable social behavior. And those who openly object or oppose or even criticize any of this should know: the culture is coming after them next.
And then the rest of us. Then come the laws which will put all of us, five or ten years from now, in the crosshairs of district attorneys and an increasing politically correct legal system which will then judge us guilty: guilty for using forbidden words, guilty for defending forbidden doctrine, guilty for–as the politically correct culture puts it–guilty for promoting hatred.
Yet we should not fear; we can not fear. God keeps every one of His promises: He is with us always; He has sent us His Holy Spirit, the Spirit Whose works are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear–fear not of the police, fear not of the government–fear of the Lord. It is the same Holy Spirit that enabled those first apostles to face even death for the truth of Jesus and His Church. They knew that even death would not, could not, separate them from God–God Who is both Life and Love. No matter how difficult being a devout faithful Catholic may become, all this too will end. Yet God does not—God will never—force us, as we well know. Even God the Holy Spirit will not make us be His witness. God does not make us–but God makes us able. God is all just; God cannot require our doing what is impossible, so God makes us able to do all He requires, even to do what seems most painful, most difficult—even to do what is truly impossible without the help of God. That is what God the Holy Spirit did for the apostles on Pentecost; that is what God the Holy Spirit does for us each time we receive the sacraments worthily—He gives us an increase of grace—an increase of His own life, until, when, our having have remained faithful, our earthly life is complete, over, finished, in us God will be all in all.
Pentecost Sunday
Heaven : Our Life's Goal
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| Fr. Robert Behnke |
This past week, I read an article from the Our Sunday Visitor on Catholics who home-school their children. If you’re not aware of it, more and more Catholic parents are choosing to home-school their children for a variety of reasons, the chief of which is often dissatisfaction with the religious instruction their children have received in some Catholic schools. The article quoted a number of individuals—parents, priests, bishops, Catholic school officials—and, as might be expected, some were vociferously opposed; many others were adamantly in favor. Those in favor rightly pointed to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council: parents are the first teachers of their children. The matter becomes even more complicated when considering preparation for the sacraments, as canon law gives the pastor the right both to give instruction to and to determine the readiness of candidates for the sacraments of initiation; with children, this would usually concern First Holy Communion and Confirmation. The article did not break any new ground, nor did it reach any certain conclusion. And so what I found most interesting was not the article itself but the readers’ comments following the article. Most of those comments came from Catholics who have had experience with home-schooling. And the shortest comment was the one I also found the most profound: a reader stated …the reason I home-school my children is that I want them to get to heaven….
I wonder how many Catholics ever give serious reflection to this as their life’s goal: to get to heaven; to get the members of my family to heaven; to get my dearest and nearest—family, friends, neighbors—to heaven. I know that, by my listening to Catholics, in this one parish, whether within or outside of the confessional, there are many—perhaps very many—who are concerned, for themselves, and, even more concerned for those whom they love: children, spouses, even parents who seemingly have abandoned the Faith. They pray for them, have Masses offered for them, remember them at the moment of Holy Communion. But all those other Catholics—so many who seem to have lost sight of even the purpose of Our Lord’s incarnation, His coming to earth, His life, His teaching, especially His passion and His death—what do they think the ultimate purpose of all this is, if not for souls to be saved—for souls to get to heaven? This past week, Caritas International, an international charitable agency of the Holy See, meeting the past few days in Rome, unveiled a new video on its website, repeatedly stating its new motto One Human Family, Zero Poverty. The slogan was criticized by the President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Peter Cardinal Turkson of Ghana. He reminded the Church of Our Lord’s words…the poor you shall always have with you. Cardinal Turkson was not for a second criticizing or diminishing the Church’s consistent and important work of alleviating the suffering of the poor, but he was reminding the Church of its ultimate purpose, and so of the meaning of what Our Lord said…the poor you shall always have with you…; Our Lord did not come as a social reformer, to be an activist or a revolutionary; He came for a supernatural purpose: for redemption, for forgiveness of sins, that each of us might be watchful and ready and prepared for, not the end of the whole world, but for the end of our own world, for that most important moment of our whole life on earth—for the moment of our death and our own particular judgment. If that is not the first purpose of Christ’s death and resurrection, if that is not the first purpose of His giving us the Church, then everything we do here—all the sacraments, all the Masses, all the hours of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament—all this loses its meaning and purpose, and all those—especially all those fallen-away Catholics—who so assuredly claim they can pray to God in their living room or their bedroom or on the front porch or in the woods just as well as they can pray in any Catholic church—if nothing absolutely unique takes place just here—if what happens here can happen everywhere else—well, then they are right. They are then also right about not needing to remain faithful, not needing to keep the commandments and to live one’s life in harmony both with the natural law and with revealed truth. If Our Lord did not come for a supernatural purpose, to achieve a goal that man on his own could never achieve: that we might be saved, to redeem us, and if He did not leave us the Church as His instrument of salvation—then: why did He come, why did He suffer and die, why are we here right now?
But Our Lord had no need to come to earth if His purpose was just to pay us a visit, or to let us know He “cares,” or to give us an example. Because God is everywhere, none of those purposes would necessitate an incarnation—God taking on human flesh, our human nature—nor does any reason other than, as we say each Sunday in the Nicene Creed…for us men and for our salvation…explain and require His suffering and His death. St. Peter states today for us the reason for the coming of Emmanuel—God with us—…Christ suffered for sins once…that He might lead you to God…. And Our Lord, on the very night before He dies—because that night is the moment at which, and the context in which, He speaks the words of today’s Gospel—is telling those first disciples—the apostles—those for whom He is about to suffer and die—what He requires, of them and of us—what He requires of all who want to claim a share in His acts of salvation—what He requires of those who want to go to heaven, to be led to God:…If you love Me, you will keep My commandments….Whoever has My commandments and observes them is the one Who loves Me. And whoever loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and reveal Myself to Him….
Twice in such a brief space—twice as He is about to be apprehended and brought before the Sanhedrin, before the chief priest, before Pilate—twice at this singular moment, Our Lord teaches…if you love Me, you will keep My commandments…. None of the apostles—cowards though most of them proved to be—none asked Which commandments? All of them? All the time? Can we change some we don’t like? If some prove to be inconvenient, or opposed to popular opinion, may we adapt, or change, or drop some? That, simply put then, and simply put now—if someone wants to get to heaven—changing the intent of Our Lord’s words is simply out of the question. And recall, too, in that group of apostles stood Simon, now Peter, meaning Rock—the rock on which Our Lord said He would build His Church. Peter, for all his cowardice, understood what it would now mean for him to be that rock; at that moment. He might not have liked what it meant, but he understood—because he would soon betray Our Lord—it meant suffering, even eventual death—but Peter, who was so often used to questioning Our Lord, arguing with Him, sometimes even putting his foot right into his mouth—here Peter is silent, for he realizes that he must now be the rock on which the proclamation of the path to heaven—…keep My commandments…—now rests.
If Our Lord makes keeping His commandments the way to heaven, could He be so unloving as not to give us a sure and certain way of knowing precisely what is required of those who want to do as He prescribes? We should be both happy and thankful to know that the successor of Peter, the Holy Father, has the authority to proclaim the truth, so that each individual has not to make up his own mind about what Our Lord means and wants. The infallibility of the pope and of the Church’s magisterium is a gift revealing the great mercy of God, to preserve true faith in the world, and to restrain freedom of opinion from its own suicidal excesses. And this is precisely why polls telling us what “most Catholics” think or believe about this or that issue are of use only in giving us a number, but not at all of any use in determining supernatural truth. Likewise, this is precisely why the prominent issues of the day—same-sex unions, homosexual “marriage,” contraception, abortion, adoption of innocent little babies by two daddies and no mommy or vice versa—why all these must be seen and acted upon with the eyes of faith, and why the truth of these matters must be determined by what Our Lord has given us to be the certain guide to what He requires of His 21st-century disciples—the teaching authority of the Church. Catholic Charities of Illinois has this past week laid off its adoption and foster-care workers because the state legislature refused to give agencies opposed to adoption by same-sex couples an exemption to the requirements of the state’s new civil union law that will take effect this Wednesday; no question: a loss here, in this life on earth, but on earth faithful to Christ, and to the meaning of His words…the poor you shall always have with you…. Loving Our Lord—keeping His commandments—getting to heaven—all three go indivisibly together.
Many—surely not all—but many who, in whole or, especially, in part, abandon the practice of the Catholic Faith do so because they say things such as …following Jesus has nothing to do with all those Catholic teachings and rules…; they want to move down the cafeteria line, choosing what appeals to their spiritual appetite. On the other hand, every single person whom in my 38 years of the priesthood I have seen embrace the practice of the Catholic Faith has done so because they were convinced by the certainty of the Faith; they discovered that making up their own mind about each individual tenet they would believe was getting out of hand; often a convert would say something like I can’t really tell you what my previous church believed, because no one could say for sure. Everyone I have ever known who chose to become Catholic did so because the Catholic Church was certain about what is true and what is required; only the Catholic Church claims for itself its identity as the one true Church of Jesus Christ. No other Christian denomination has even dared apply for that position. If loving Our Lord and getting to heaven means keeping His commandments, only one Church speaks with certainty about exactly what that means. How God finally judges the heart and soul of each person is a mystery known only to Him. But in terms of getting to heaven, I have never heard of an instance of a death-bed conversion to the Lutheran Church, or the Baptist, or Episcopal, or Methodist, or Presbyterian, or Orthodox, or to any other church. I know only of death-bed conversions to the Catholic Church. When it comes down to that final, ultimate, moment of my life, I want to be certain I have been, and am now, in the right pew.
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
Decisions, Decisions.... and Touching the Feet of Christ
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| Fr. Robert Behnke |
This past week, likewise, events altered my usual method, in that an item in the news so caught my attention that I decided there was a reason to switch the course of my homily theme and remarks. I had intended to address that this day, in the ordinary form of the Roman Rite, logically can only be called Ascension Thursday Sunday, an illogical title for an illogic observance of the Ascension of Our Lord—though this is not an issue in this extraordinary form (though I saw online that today there is an Tridentine observance of what is called an external solemnity of the Ascension at St. John Cantius, a Mass offer by Bishop Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin). I thought when it happened, and experience now confirms my opinion, that the decision on the part of most provinces’ bishops to move the feast to Sunday makes little sense, especially because this particular feast so clearly demands a Thursday observance to be in line with Scripture and the Tradition. So I thought this feast-on-wheels would provide a fitting opportunity to speak about the important difference in the Faith between divinely revealed truth (which comes from God Who can neither deceive nor be deceived) and mere human decision, which can obviously be mistaken, even tragically mistaken, and even mistaken when decided by a priest, a bishop, or even a whole gaggle of bishops. If you have not heard, the Bishops Conference of England and Wales has reinstituted abstinence from meat on every Friday of the year, beginning this coming September; these same bishops are seriously considering moving, from Sundays, the Epiphany back to January 6th, the Ascension back to 40 days after Easter Sunday, and Corpus Christi back to the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. They did not have to admit to a mistake in having moved these feasts from their centuries-old place in the calendar to the nearest Sunday, since their consideration of changing the change speaks for itself. It is important for Catholics, as aggravated as any Catholic might become by a decision of priests or bishops with which one may even vehemently disagrees, to remember that not all decisions taken by the Church are of equal importance (our salvation does not depend, for example, on the date of the Feast of Corpus Christi), and that the Holy Spirit, Whose coming the Church celebrates next Sunday on Pentecost, remains always with the Church, to prevent and impede such decisions that would otherwise prove fatal for the Faith.
That was my plan—that was where my preparation was taking me—until last Friday. The past week was kind of a bad news week for Catholics, and for any genuinely believing Christians. First, civil union licenses on June 1st, then civil union ceremonies on June 2nd—all accompanied by much media fanfare and public falderal, sickening and patronizing speeches by politicians, and plenty of Eli’s cheesecake to go around. And then the announcement that the dioceses of Rockford, Peoria, and Joliet have shut down their foster-care apparatus because of the new civil union law (our archdiocese stopped foster-care services in 2007 because of a similar county ordinance and an insurance issue). Many of the readers’ comments in the Tribune regarding these diocesan shutdowns were nothing but hateful and biased. Then, Friday morning, I saw the news that the Holy Father received Vice-President Biden who was in Rome to observe the 150th anniversary of the Italian nation. It wasn’t that audience which angered me; the Holy Father is the pastor of the whole world, and in his being that pastor, he is charged with correction of any wayward member of his flock. The fact that the audience was not on the pope’s public schedule and was not announced ahead of time by either the Vatican or the White House, and the fact that no comment by either party was made after the audience, leads to a reasonable speculation that perhaps a kind of scolding took place. It wasn’t the vice-president who was doing the scolding. The fact of the meeting came to light only because reporters, who were present to cover the arrival of the president of the Palestinian territories for a papal audience, also recognized the vice-president’s limousine. What got to me was the typical reporting of the secular media. Here is a small sample from Friday’s USA Today:
“Did Pope Benedict take Vice President Biden to school today on abortion? We may not know. Their brief Vatican meeting today was strictly private, diplomatic speak for how we're not going to get photos or a transcript of Pope Benedict XVI's meeting, just like we didn't get them when then-speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Benedict in 2009. What unites the visits of the top American leaders? These are two faithful, Mass-attending Catholics who vote for all the social justice issues that the U.S. bishops stand for on topics like peace, poverty and immigration. But their views favoring abortion rights wipe all that away to the thinking of those for whom abortion is a litmus test….The Associated Press, in covering the Biden/Benedict visit, picked up the Catholic Vote "non-negotiable" lingo that actually never appears in the current U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops policy on Faithful Citizenship. That document, intended to guide voters on Catholic teachings, not to endorse specific candidates, has traditionally been reissued each presidential election cycle. Last time, conservatives, campaigning for stronger public condemnation, and denial of communion for Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, were unhappy with the document. Later this month, when the bishops hold their semiannual meeting, they're set to discuss whether they're going to plunge into the fray again, revising Faithful Citizenship for 2012….”
It is absolutely true, and so the Church teaches, that only God can read the hearts of all men. But it is likewise absolutely true that, because of the gift of free will, no one is forced by God to profess the Catholic Faith, so that anyone who wills to be a Catholic and so to be known by others as a Catholic has a responsibility to be Catholic with honesty and integrity: to profess the Faith correctly and in its entirety. To equate faithful Catholicism with, as this reporter states,…Mass attending...is absurd, since even the most hardened of unrepentant sinners, or any schismatic, or any Lutheran, or even any atheist, is free to attend Mass every Sunday and they are even free, as the modernists would put it,…to get something out of it…. But that something cannot be sanctifying grace if they in any direct way act to make abortion possible, and thus that person who makes abortion possible is not a faithful Catholic, no matter how often they attend Mass or even may—sacrilegiously—receive Holy Communion. The sacraments are not magic; they do not turn sinners into saints unless the sinner chooses repentance for himself as the narrow door to eternal life. Quite frankly, I had had it—had it with all this continuing public intentional misstatement of what the Church believes and teaches and all the intentional miss-definition of what is a faithful Catholic. Then I took another hard look at today’s Gospel—the Sunday after Ascension Thursday—and allowed a little humility to substitute for what I was believing was my entitlement to anger and judgment of what surely are sins of the enemies of life:
…These things I have spoken to you that you may not be scandalized. They will expel you from the synagogues. Yes, the hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think he is offering worship to God. And these things they will do because they have not known the Father nor Me. But these things I have spoken to you, that when the time for them has come you may remember that I told you….
And then I came across this meditation written by Pope Benedict when he was Cardinal Ratzinger:
You are surely familiar with all those precious, naïve images in which only the feet of Jesus are visible, sticking out of the cloud, at the heads of the apostles. The cloud, for its part, is a dark circle on the perimeter; on the inside, however, blazing light. It occurs to me that precisely in the apparent naïveté of this representation something very deep comes into view. All we see of Christ in the time of history are his feet and the cloud. His feet—what are they? We are reminded, first of all, of a peculiar sentence from the Resurrection account in Matthew’s Gospel, where it is said that the women held onto the feet of the Risen Lord and worshipped him. As the Risen One, he towers over earthly proportions. We can still only touch his feet; and we touch them in adoration. Here we could reflect that we come as worshippers, following his trail, close to his footsteps. Praying, we go to him; praying, we touch him, even if in this world, so to speak, always only from below, only from afar, always only on the trail of his earthly steps. At the same time it becomes clear that we do not find the footprints of Christ when we look only below, when we measure only footprints and want to subsume faith in the obvious. The Lord is movement toward above, and only in moving ourselves, in looking up and ascending, do we recognize him. When we read the Church Fathers something important is added. The correct ascent of man occurs precisely where he learns, in humbly turning toward his neighbor, to bow very deeply, down to his feet, down to the gesture of the washing of feet. It is precisely humility, which can bow low, that carries man upward. This is the dynamic of ascent that the feast of the Ascension wants to teach us.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
The Evolution of Liturgy
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| Fr. Robert Behnke |
In case you missed it, last Sunday at this Mass Father Campbell delivered what in my opinion was an excellent homily, using as his touchstone the recently issued instruction of the Congregation of the Faith’s instruction Ecclesiae Universae, which was sent to all the world’s bishops to clarify aspects of the motu proprio of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI Summorum Pontificum, in which the Pope extended the use of this ancient form of the Mass to any who desire it. Among the practical issues settled are May one receive Holy Communion in the hand?—No; May altar girls be used?—No; May the vernacular be used for the epistle and gospel?-Only at Low Mass; Must the group requesting the ancient Mass have existed before the issuance of the motu proprio in July of 2007—No. Using the recent instruction clarifying the motu proprio as a starting point, Father Campbell eloquently traced the ups and downs of the history of the Mass from the council until the present. Today I would just like to add a few of my own thoughts and observations.
Father Campbell remarked, I believe, that the decree of the Second Vatican Council on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Consilium, was the first decree issued by the council. Sacrosanctum Consilium was, in fact, issued in December 1963, only a year and two months from the council’s beginning. This is an important point, because it demonstrates the supreme importance of the liturgy—especially the liturgy of the Mass—in the life of the Church. As you heard last week, there really was nothing revolutionary in that document. Rather than being revolutionary, I think it would be accurate to call the document evolutionary, because it evolved from the continuing evolution of the liturgy—again, especially from the liturgy of the Mass. In the 1950s and 60s, I was growing up in a very traditional parish on the far northwest side of Chicago (St. Francis Borgia was so traditional that, even though the mandate had come down, not from the council as Father Campbell noted last Sunday—not from Rome—but from the Archdiocese of Chicago that by a certain date Mass had to be celebrated facing the people, the pastor Father Stokes had the altar in the new church which opened on Christmas of 1964 firmly cemented facing not the people but facing the large crucifix hanging over that altar—just as we have here); yet, during the 1950s, we ask a parish were singing English hymns at all Sunday Low Masses; at daily school Masses, which were all High Masses, the entire congregation—children and adults—sang all the ordinary parts of the Mass—Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei—and of course they were sung in Latin. This was the express wish of all the popes throughout the 20th century, beginning with Pope St. Pius X. So my childhood parish—and a number of others (I found this out when I went to Quigley North for high school and compared parishes with other high school seminarians of the time—were doing what the popes had asked; what the council taught about the liturgy simply evolved from what the popes had been saying and what many were already doing in some form.
Dancing in the aisles; drums and banjos and electric guitars; vestments of burlap and drapery and upholstery materials; Michael, row the boat ashore, Kumbaya, and the famous line from Luther’s A Mighty Fortress is Our God:…For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe; His might and power are great and armed with cruel fate, On earth is not his equal…referring to the pope; Eagles’ Wings, and hands dirty from holding and grasping, now receiving the very Body of the Risen Lord; standing ‘round the altar, standing for the consecration, standing for Holy Communion—puling, saccharin melodies and self-congratulating lyrics: none of these things was either envisioned nor required by anything the Second Vatican Council said or did. And one of the greatest mysteries to me is the illogical and arrogant opposition on the part of many clerics—especially my age and older—to any use of this ancient and reverent and God-centered form of the Mass; it is a mystery because, for those my age and older, it had to be this very form of the Mass that attracted them to the priesthood, that nourished their vocation in its earliest stages of growth. Likewise, it was this form of the Mass that produced countless saints. So many martyrs died for this form of the Mass. So many were converted by this form of the Mass. So many vocations to the priesthood, to the religious life, to faithful Catholic marriages were inspired by this Mass. Pope St. Gregory the Great, Pope St. Gregory VII, St. Louis IX, St. Joan of Arc, St. Dominic, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Clare of Assisi, Ss. John Fisher and Thomas More, St. John Vianney, St. Elizabeth Seton, St. Katherine Drexel, Pope St. Pius X, St. John Bosco and St. Dominic Savio, St. Maria Goretti, St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Padre Pio, St. Josemaria Escriva—the list could go on and on: they all met God in this very form of the Mass. So it is a mystery to me why so many denigrate and ridicule and insult this Mass; I pray it is out of gross ignorance rather than out of gross malice. Perhaps the greatest thing about Universae Ecclesiae is the pope’s insistence that that this ancient form of the Mass be given the honor and respect due to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Anything less, whether out of ignorance or malice, is truly gross.
St. Thomas Aquinas (who offered this form of the Mass each day his entire life as a priest, and who was inspired by this Mass to write such beautiful liturgical prose and poetry—the Pange Lingua/Tantum Ergo being a single example), when speaking of the variety of religious orders in the Church, liked to cite the psalm which, in the Latin version, describes the Church as circumdata varietate—surrounded by variety. The pains and purgatories of the years after the council have taught us to treat variety with more than a little caution, since variety and pluralism come in two forms: legitimate and anarchic. Pope Benedict wishes a legitimate liturgical variety in the present moment of the Church’s life: he names this the ordinary and the extraordinary forms of the Mass. The Church must not misunderstand the meaning of these words: the Mass of 1970—what is often called the Novus Ordo—for the present moment is the ordinary form in that is continues to be what most Catholics ordinarily experience when they attend Mass. The ancient Mass—the extraordinary form—is called that only because at the present moment its frequency of use is extraordinary when compared to the use of the Novus Ordo. The pope clearly states that he wants both forms to be available for all, and each form to enrich the other. Where God is leading the Church in all this remains yet a mystery. But we have both comfort and the assurance of divine hope from the revealed word of God in today’s epistle of St. James—one of the so-called Catholic epistle: Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights, with Whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration…. Until Our Lord comes again in glory, the Mass will always be what it has always been: the Mass.
Given The Fourth Sunday after Easter
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