St. Thomas More Chicago

The episode in this morning’s Gospel – the meeting of Our Lord with the Canaanite woman – puts me in mind of another conversation Our Lord had with another woman - with St. Teresa of Jesus – Teresa of Avila.  There are several versions of this famed conversation, including one involving Teresa’s having fallen into a puddle of mud.  But the one I like the best focuses on St. Teresa’s life in her religious community.  Teresa was a Carmelite; she was also a mystic; she was sometime in such metaphysical, transcendental, communion and conversation with Our Lord that others at times observed her to be levitating, especially during the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Now one might think that those fellow sisters, seeing this miraculous occurrence, would have been edified, and perhaps even perceived and even used it as an actual grace sent by God for themselves.  And perhaps some did, but others of her sisters evidently did not, instead accusing Teresa of all kinds of mischief; some even saying she was in league with the devil.  Much of this accusation took the form of backbiting and gossip; does this at all sound familiar?—gossip was not an invention of the 20th or the 21st centuries.  Finally Teresa had had enough, and so, in one of her mystical conversations with Her Best Friend Our Lord, she complained…Do You see how they all treat me.  Why do You allow it?  Came the answer…Teresa, that’s how I treat all My friends….It’s no wonder You have so few, Teresa replied.

Imagine having the kind of closeness, that deep friendship, the genuine intimacy with Our Lord, that you could say that to Him and get away with it.  Yet that is precisely what Our Lord wants for each of us.  He doesn’t want us to be strangers, or just acquaintances, or even just on good terms; He wants to be our Best Friend - yours and mine.

The woman in the Gospel this morning is a Canaanite.  St. Matthew says Our Lord and his disciples had withdrawn to the region of Tyre and Sidon.  This is the only time in the Gospels that speak of Jesus coming close to leaving the borders of the Holy Land.  Tyre and Sidon still exist today; they are in Lebanon, north of Israel, and so going beyond the boundaries of the Holy Land is quite significant in Our Lord’s ministry.  And in the Bible, over the centuries, the Canaanites are cast in a very bad light.  Among their false gods and goddesses were Baal (who was reduced to a laughingstock by the prophet Elijah) and Astarte; the Canaanites practice fertility rites, child sacrifice, and many other abominations.  The Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament declares about them… The land itself vomits out its inhabitants….  This helps to explain both Our Lord’s initial and protracted coolness and the disgust of the apostles (…Send her away, Lord….).  Yet she calls Our Lord…Son of David…, perceiving in Him His power to cure her daughter of her demonic possession.  Her initial approach to Our Lord shows us that God will offer His sufficient grace to everyone, no matter whom, where, or when–even to this daughter of pagan gods, goddesses, and multiple abominations.  And she takes that initial actual grace from God in hand, and she persists in it, against all obstacles (even the sting of being referred to as a…dog…).  She turns even that around and tells Our Lord that there are…dogs… and then there are…dogs…–there are the unclean scavengers who roam through the garbage, and then there are the domesticated house animals that lie near the dinner tables of the children of Israel.  She takes that little initial actual grace and persists in it until it has the effect she desires.  One might imagine Our Lord with a look of satisfaction–even perhaps a slight grin–as He tells her…O woman, great is thy faith.  Let it be done for you as you wish….

God gives each one created in His image and likeness–which is to say every person, including each one of us–that same grace.  It is always there; we don’t need to ask for it.  Our Lord wants to be the Best Friend we have–and He is the Best Friend any of us could ever have.  But we must persist in that friendship so that grace will have the desired effect in us.  But it would seem that, today—in our own day and age—too many Catholics do not have friendship with Our Lord and, even worse, many either have little interest in that kind of relation with Christ or—worst of all—many do not know how to go about allowing Our Lord to be their best friend.  They simply do not know how to persist in the life of grace—in God’s life available to every man.  This lack—of divine friendship, of interest in divine friendship, of awareness of how to gain an intimate friendship with Our Divine Lord—manifests itself in all kinds of ways today.  The large number of Catholics who are so casual about the practice of the Faith—not faithful to Sunday Mass, never going to confession, hardly ever praying; or, once in church, do not genuflect because they have no understanding of toward Whom and toward Where their genuflection should be placed; those who dress inappropriately for Mass; those who see little difference between a church and an amphitheatre; those who during the homily spend a lot of time conversing, texting, or reading the parish bulletin.  Or those Catholic politicians of either political party who try to live spiritually schizophrenic lives, by claiming personal opposition to, but yet consistently voting for, abortion, same-sex marriage, contraceptive permissiveness for school-aged children, assisted suicide, or any of the other anti-life issues that is embraced by so much of our culture.  These behaviors indicate a deep misunderstanding of what it means to be Catholic, coupled with a tendency to take one’s cues from the prevailing ideas of the culture rather than from the Church herself.  For the Church teaches infallibly in matters of faith and morals (commonly called Catholic doctrine, or when formally proclaimed as such, Catholic dogma).  Catholic doctrine is guaranteed by God Himself; but when those claiming to be Catholic and claiming to understand what that means assert that doctrine is a matter of opinion, while specific social strategies can be dogmatically approved or rejected, then we are no longer dealing with a Catholic mind, and that person can never have a truly intimate relation in the life of divine grace with Our Lord, because He tells us that He Himself is the Truth.  The Catholic whose mind and attachments are primarily formed by the world will then relativize doctrine and absolutize their own opinions, rather than submit to all that the Church teaches must be held as true.  They can then never know the Truth Which is Christ; not knowing Him Who is Truth Itself, they can not have an intimate relation with Him.

Likewise, a similar obstacle to intimacy with Our Lord can occur in one’s evaluation of the Church herself, for the Church has both human and Divine elements, both fallible and infallible.  For example, if a Catholic is willing to cooperate with grace, Catholic doctrine and the sacraments infallibly then engender holiness; however, the Church’s administrative programs bear fruit only according to their prudential matching of the right action to the right situation, and the behavior of individual churchmen bears fruit according to their own individual personal conformity with Christ.  For this reason, when a Catholic says…I am leaving the Church—especially because of this Church teaching, or because Father or Bishop So-and-so did this or that—and so they in effect say…I don’t need the Church to have intimacy or friendship with Christ…because they dislike or react negatively to particular programs and policies or to things that particular churchmen have done, they can never have an intimate friendship with Our Lord, because Our Lord gave us the Church as the sole means of intimate friendship with Himself.  A Catholic reacts with a Catholic mindset only if he distinguishes such human things as bad administrative decisions or sinful churchmen from the essential holiness of the Church herself.  The tendency to dismiss the Church because, in this or that era, the actions of some Church leaders were either immoral or ill-suited to the needs of the time, is to characterize incorrectly the Church by her human element.  This tendency to judge the Church by her human and fallible elements, which are very frequently alleged as reasons for rejecting her infallible teachings, is simply another example of a mind and heart formed not by Christ but by the world—today by instruments like The New York Times.  And a mind and heart formed by the world (formed by the Times or The Chicago Tribune) can never be one in mind and heart with Our Lord, Who gives us not the world but the Church as our means of salvation. 

And recall that the Canaanite woman came to Our Lord not for herself but for the healing of her daughter.  So in our own friendship with Our Lord, we must persist especially in hope and in prayer for those who may have lost their own friendship with Christ; He desires to be their Best Friend too.  Intimacy with Christ—having Our Lord as our best friend—cannot ever mean that we exclude others from the relation we have with Our Lord.  Again, Our Lord gave us the Church as His chosen means of, not only my salvation or your salvation, but of the salvation of everyone.  To speak of Jesus and me to the exclusion of anyone else automatically will exclude Jesus Himself, Who told us over and over again to see Him and find Him in the faces of both our neighbor and the stranger, in both our loved ones and our enemies.  Very likely, as in the case of St. Teresa of Jesus, if we face sufferings, especially at the hands of those who should be closest to us, it means our friendship with Our Lord is growing; recall His words to Teresa…I treat all my friends that way….  And if we truly persist in grace by prayer, by our communion with the Church and especially by faithful reception of the sacraments, Our Lord will surely remain our Best Friend; even if, as St. Teresa said…it’s no wonder you have so few…; even if He is the only Friend we have, He really is the only Friend any of us needs absolutely, because He is, always and only, the best.

The Twentieth Sunday of the Year

          Stranger and stranger yet, life ever does seem to get.  As I reflected this past week on today’s Gospel and Our Lord’s parable of the unjust—but clever and wily and industrious—steward, it was difficult for me not to see certain parallels with the goings-on culminating last week in Congress and in the White House: the master, the steward, and the laborers.  It was hard f0r me to see much self-abandonment and altruism in the actions of our elected representatives relating to the raising of the government’s debt limitation; it, at least to me, appeared to be rather strategies in self-interest and politics—especially in election, or re-election politics—since one important action now is postponed until after the November 2012 election.  In the Gospel we have a master (whom we should not in this case confuse with God); a master who nobody much likes (he is portrayed as an absentee landlord).  The master’s steward has been caught with his hand in the till, and so his livelihood as steward is about to come to an end.  The steward, of course, is angry; judging from his performance as steward, he does not have his master’s best interests at heart.  Now he has found a way to get even.  Debts in Palestine—contrary to the Old Testament prohibition of usury—included interest prefigured into the debt.  If 40 barrels was borrowed, the debtor, as in the first instance in the parable, would automatically owe 100 barrels; it is somewhat like the value-added tax in many European countries; the price for an item may be 100 euros; the tax of 23 euros is hidden in that total of 100 euros owed for the purchase, rather than being added at the moment of the transaction.  So here the steward has found a way to ingratiate himself with the master’s debtors: ‘you borrowed 40 barrels of oil and so you now owe 100 in repayment; give the master 50 instead—so he’ll make less; I will get even with him, and you’ll owe me one.’  The master praises the steward for his ingenuity in his facing his personal crisis and so is not so annoyed even though he the master has lost some profit.  He still made a little profit, and in this case there seems to be honor among thieves.  No one has lost anything of what he originally had: the master has his money back; the steward has probably skimmed something for himself and now has a lot of his masters’ former debtors now in his debt—and those who were in debt to the master are now debt free.  Ingenuity combined with self-interest—and note, there seems neither any help nor concern for those in need.  Whether master, steward, or debtors, it is all about me, me, and me.  Would that—Our Lord almost laments—would that the children of light were as energetic as promoting the Kingdom of God as are the children of darkness in promoting their own self-interests.  Does it not resemble the way much political, social, economic life operates?  And is it not the direction in which promoters of abortion and same-sex marriage want the rules to head?  Years ago, the well-known columnist for the Chicago Daily News Mike Royko opined that the motto of the Chicago City Council should be Ubi est mihi?—Where’s mine?  Is that not what secular culture and the religion of self-success want the world to cry out: Where’s mine?

           

Beginning in August 2012, all private insurers in the US must provide women with coverage for FDA-approved contraception--including sterilization and contraceptives that have an abortifacient effect--under a mandate announced on last Monday by the US Department of Health and Human Services. According to the department, insurers must provide this coverage—a quote here—…without charging a copayment, deductible, or coinsurance….  The decision was announced in time to take effect for colleges and universities that offer health-care plans for their students.  HHS is led by Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic whose bishop has exhorted her not to receive Holy Communion.  There is in this regulation of the president’s administration an exemption for certain religious employers, but the exemption is extremely narrow.  The Church would have to cease either hiring or serving non-Catholics to qualify for the exemption.  Plus, the drugs that Americans would be forced to subsidize under the new rule include Ella, a drug approved by the FDA as an emergency contraceptive, but which can act like the abortion drug RU-486—it can abort an established pregnancy weeks after conception.  It is hard to see anything, moral or otherwise, that is not objectionable about this decision.  Most importantly, of course, the new mandate forces health insurers to pay for the immoral use of drugs, therefore violating God’s law, which ought to be no small consideration.  It even forces those insurers who may abhor contraception to participate.  And finally, it forces all Americans who pay for health insurance, whether privately or through taxes, to subsidize this immorality.  But there are also other objections that ought to be raised as well.  Pregnancy is not a disease, and the use of contraception to prevent it is purely elective.  It forces health insurance to subsidize inherently risky behavior—the link between contraception and promiscuity is simple and clear, as is the link between promiscuity and a wide variety of diseases.  Moreover, contraceptive ‘treatments’ carry a significant health risk of their own.  Encouraging women married to men (you see how specific we now have to be—women married to men) not to bear children runs completely contrary to our social interests.  Around the world, countries afflicted with this mentality face rapidly aging populations demanding support, a support which the smaller younger populations will not be willing to provide, and very likely will not be able to provide.  We reap what we sow, and when we sow nothing, there is nothing to reap.

           

So, the new Health and Human Services mandate is wrong on every level.  This is yet another example of the energetic ingenuity of the efforts of today’s parable’s children of darkness.  And so what about…the children of light?  Perhaps one purpose of Our Lord’s telling this story is to compare the enthusiastic response the children of darkness show in their dealings with other children of darkness to the lackluster response of the disciples—those who can rightly be called the children of light—to the Kingdom of God.  And the children of light now?  Today’s children of light?  Will they—we—roll over and play dead—we 56 million Catholics in America who, each at our baptism, were presented with a candle signifying our acceptance of the light of Christ, signifying that on that day each one became one of the children of light?  Roll over and pretend not to notice, as Catholics did when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973; or when so called Gay Pride parades each year began to take over our streets and, more horribly, the attention of our children; or when Oregon first legalized assisted suicide; or when—not states made up of non-Catholics—but when Catholic states like Massachusetts, and Connecticut, and New York said any two humans could enter into marriage; or when our own state of Illinois, with its Catholic governor and Catholic senate president and Catholic house speaker, legalized unions between any two humans, making those civil unions “a marriage” in all but the name?  When will Catholics in America learn the lesson of this 2000-year-old parable?  Will this latest plot of the children of darkness—led I am certain by the Prince of Darkness—this clever ingenious plot to make each of us pay for contraception and abortion disguised as emergency contraception—will this be the final straw that awakens the Catholic sleeping giant in America?  Or will that giant look, yawn, and again—roll over?

           

Last Thursday the Church observed and celebrated the Feast of St. Jean Marie Vianney—the Cure of Ars—the patron of parish priests.  There is a lesson to be learned, I think, in the very small number of secular, diocesan, priests like the Cure of Ars, who have been canonized.  That small number of canonized secular, diocesan priests could very well be a big reason why the sleeping American Catholic giant continues to sleep in the face of continuous abomination after abomination.  In the Office of Matins last Thursday, we read these words written by the cure:…the Christian’s treasure is not on earth but in heaven.  Our thoughts, then, ought to be directed to where our treasure is…  But the cure is not telling us to ignore the evil goings-on here on earth.  He tells us:…this is the glorious duty of man: to pray and to love….  Is it love to ignore these continuing successive abominations?  Is it love to allow our culture to continue to descend into destructive death?  Is ignoring the death of American Christian culture how we will attain our treasure in heaven?  Can ignoring this possibly unite us to God forever?  Is this loving our neighbor as ourselves?  …And still worse, the cure continues,…there are some who seem to speak to the good God like this: ‘I will only say a couple of things to You, and then I will be rid of You.’  I often think that when we come to adore the Lord, we would receive everything we ask for, if we would ask with living faith and with a pure heart….  We, Catholics in America, must learn the lesson of this parable: we have the power, and the opportunity, and now again yet another chance, to end the abominations infecting our national life today, if we have the will to do so—having that will, having a living faith and having a pure heart, we would receive everything we ask for…because all along, God has been on our side.

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, August 7th, 2011