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St. John the Baptist, prophet of Advent and preacher of repentance

"The Preaching of St. John the Baptist" by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1490)

Carl E. Olson | On the Readings for December 4, 2016, the Second Sunday of Advent

Readings:
• Isa 11:1-10
• Ps 72:1-2, 7-8, 12-13, 17
• Rom 15:4-9
• Mt 3:1-12

If you saw John the Baptist preaching on a street corner, what might you think of him? He would be a wiry man, wild in appearance, bearded and dressed in rough clothing. His message would be direct, but also mysterious: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” He would offer free baptisms and would, from time to time, have less than kind words for various authorities who watched him baptize.

He would be, in today’s terms, a troublemaker, a religious fanatic, a fundamentalist, a narrow-minded zealot.

Jesus, however, told His disciples, “Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist…” (Matt 11:11). This wasn’t merely the affection of the Savior for His cousin, but a striking assertion of John’s place in salvation history. John the Baptist, like so many of the Old Testament prophets, was contrary and confrontational. He drew attention to things usually passed over in polite society, especially the reality of sin and the need for repentance. He denounced hypocrisy, spiritual sloth, and injustice. And today’s Gospel reading—which contains the first mention of John in Scripture—describes him as the final and greatest forerunner of the Messiah: “A voice of one crying out in the desert…”

In his book The Advent of Salvation, the great biblical scholar, Jean Cardinal Daniélou, wrote, “Since the coming of Christ goes on forever—He is always He who is to come in the world and in the Church—there is always an Advent going on, and this Advent is filled by John the Baptist. It is John the Baptist's peculiar grace that he prepares the way for what is about to happen.” The Church has long made the connection between John the Baptist and Advent because John perfectly symbolizes—or, better, lives and expresses—the key themes of this season: anticipation, preparation, humility, repentance. His baptism was one of repentance, but he readily acknowledged that it would give way to the baptism of “the Holy Spirit and fire” offered by Jesus.

John, who was filled with the Holy Spirit even before he was born, knew that his work was to prepare himself and others for the One who would offer the fullness of the Holy Spirit. “The fire of the Spirit dwells in him,” states the Catechism, “and makes him the forerunner of the coming Lord” (CCC 718). He, like all of the prophets, pointed to the Messiah. And he, like all of God’s faithful, did the bidding of the Savior. But John, the Catechism also points out, was more than a prophet, for “with John the Baptist, the Holy Spirit begins the restoration to man of ‘the divine likeness’” (CCC 720).

Drawing again from modern parlance, we might say that John the Baptist worked himself out of a job. Jesus, having declared the greatness of John, remarks, “yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Matt 11:11). How so? The greatness of John was in his faithfulness to the call of proclaiming the Son of God. But that does not match the greatness of those who, by grace, have been baptized into the life of the Son of God. They are filled with the divine life of God, made possible by the redemptive work of the Cross. The New Covenant is greater than the Old Covenant, and it establishes the Kingdom of God, which is what John the Baptist and the other prophets anticipated and desired.

The heart of John is revealed beautifully in his statement, found in John’s Gospel, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30). That is, I think, a perfect prayer for Advent. It speaks of a heart completely given to the Holy Spirit. It describes the essence of being a disciple of Jesus Christ. It reveals a man who speaks the truth in the wilderness, regardless of what everyone else on the street corner might think of him.  

Cardinal Sarah’s pastoral call to “turn to the Lord”

Cardinal Robert Sarah celebrates Mass in Port-au-Prince in January 2011. (CNS photo/Paul Jeffrey)

Cardinal Sarah’s pastoral call to “turn to the Lord” | Jeanette Flood | CWR

Some de-mythologizing needs to take place in order for many to accept Cardinal Sarah’s call to celebrate Mass “ad orientem.”

With Advent around the corner, one cannot help but wonder if any pastors or bishops will accept the controversial invitation Cardinal Robert Sarah made last July. As keynote speaker at the 2016 Sacra Liturgia conference, the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments called for a “return to a common orientation of priest and people eastwards.” He urged that the change be implemented beginning on the first Sunday in Advent.

The news was met with intense consternation in some quarters and a tendency to paint Cardinal Sarah as a rogue throw-back, suffering from a warped nostalgia. With the dampening reaction made by the Holy See Press Office shortly afterward, followed by the considerable papal changes to the membership of the congregation, it is unlikely that there will be widespread implementation at this time, but it does not follow that there will be none.

What is clear is that a great deal of education and de-mythologizing must take place first.

Anti-Vatican II?

I can understand the shock and even aversion to Sarah’s proposal. I was raised on the idea that before Vatican II, the Church was stuck in the Middle Ages and the priest said Mass with his “back to the people.” In fact, when the opportunity arose in the ’90s for me to attend ad orientem Masses, I avoided it for some time.

I was blessed to work in-house at Ignatius Press for two years. While I liked and respected the Press’ founder and editor, Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, I was a little hesitant to attend his Masses. I had grown up in the charismatic movement, and expected his style of Mass—while fine for those who liked it—to be too different from my spirituality for me to enjoy.

When I finally went, it turned out to be a real eye-opener. I was pleasantly surprised to find how much I learned and, ultimately, how perfect it was.

What really struck me was that Father didn’t “turn his back to us” the whole time as I expected, but frequently turned around to address us. As he explained to me afterward, “When I’m talking to the people, I face the people. When I’m talking to God, I face God.” He didn’t have his back to us but his face to God. He was facing God with us, leading us in prayer.

Years later, Father Fessio wrote:

I don’t say Mass “with my back to the people” any more than Patton went through Germany with his “back to the soldiers.” Patton led the Third Army across Germany and they followed him to achieve a goal. The Mass is part of the Pilgrim Church on the way to our goal, our heavenly homeland. This world is not our heavenly homeland. We don’t sit around in a circle and look at each other. We want to look with each other and with the priest towards the rising sun, the rays of grace, where the Son will come again in glory on the clouds.

Father Fessio didn’t come up with this all on his own. The director for his doctoral thesis was Joseph Ratzinger. In other words, Father Fessio studied with the future Pope Benedict XVI less than a decade after Vatican II. Ratzinger was not only present at the Council, in the capacity of a peritus (expert, or consulting theologian), but was a shining light there, a featured speaker on theological topics. As early as 1967, Ratzinger spoke of “exaggerations and aberrations” that had crept in to the new Mass, asking, “Must every Mass, for instance, be celebrated facing the people?” [1] This indicates that that orientation was not intended by the Council to be the norm.

The change took hold nonetheless (along with many others made in a free-form “spirit of Vatican II”). Years later, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then-Cardinal Ratzinger reflected:

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

Digging into Pope Francis' remarks about the "old Latin Mass", "rigidity" and "insecurity"

Pope Francis celebrates Mass in St. Peter's Basilica Nov. 13. (CNS photo/Remo Casilli, Reuters)

 
Recent remarks by the Holy Father about young people and the Extraordinary Form sound more like the words of a psychologist than a pastor.

by Carl E. Olson on The Dispatch at Catholic World Report

A November 10th article by CNS reporter Cindy Wooden about a new collection, in Italian, of homilies and speeches given by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been raising eyebrows. And even some ire. The problem, to be clear, isn't in Wooden's reporting, but in some excerpts from the book, specifically a new interview given by Pope Francis to his close confidant Fr. Antonio Spadaro SJ, who is Editor-in-Chief of Civiltà Cattolica. The except in question is at the very end of the article:

Listening to people’s stories, including in the confessional, is essential for preaching the Gospel, he said. “The further you are from the people and their problems, the further you hide behind a theology framed as ‘You must and you must not,’ which doesn’t communicate anything, which is empty, abstract, lost in nothingness.”

Asked about the liturgy, Pope Francis insisted the Mass reformed after the Second Vatican Council is here to stay and “to speak of a ‘reform of the reform’ is an error.

In authorizing regular use of the older Mass, now referred to as the “extraordinary form,” now-retired Pope Benedict XVI was “magnanimous” toward those attached to the old liturgy, he said. “But it is an exception."

Pope Francis told Father Spadaro he wonders why some young people, who were not raised with the old Latin Mass, nevertheless prefer it.

“And I ask myself: Why so much rigidity? Dig, dig, this rigidity always hides something, insecurity or even something else. Rigidity is defensive. True love is not rigid.”

Those who follow Francis' various addresses and interviews closely will recognize the usual rhetoric: the implication that theology (or doctrine) is somehow opposed to pastoral ministry, the psycho-analysis of those the Pope disagrees with, the pretense to contemplation without evidence of much insight, and the digs—in more than one sense, in this case—at supposed rigidity, insecurity, and defensiveness.

Much could be said about the the excerpt above, but I'll first note, in fairness, that the full context of the remarks isn't known and the remarks are apparently not official translations. That said, it's hard to not be disappointed, or even troubled, by the Holy Father's comments and approach. And there are a couple of deep ironies involved. One of them is that Francis insists strongly in the need to close to the people and their problems, but then, in remarking on why some young people (and plenty of older people as well) would be attracted to the "old Latin Mass", gives every appearance of not having really been close to any of the young people in question. I don't attend the Extraordinary Form (EF), but I know several people who do, including many younger folks, and I have talked to them at length about the EF and the Ordinary Form. To respond to these young people and their motives with shallow neo-Freudian dismissals comes off as both unfair and uncharitable.

A second irony is that this excerpt, as it stands, does not give the impression of a sensitive and caring pastor, but of an annoyed and arrogant man who cannot fathom why people many decades younger than himself would think or act differently than he thinks they should.

Part of the problem, to return to a point stressed in detail in my October 2016 editorial, is that pitting theology and doctrine over and against pastoral ministry is going to create a number of problems and will lead, again and again, to a skewed reading of people and events.

Continue reading on the CWR site.

The saints are sealed, called, and saved by God

"Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven" (1428-30) by Fra Angelico [WikiArt.org]

by Carl E. Olson | The Dispatch at CWR

A passage from The Apocalypse is read on the Solemnity of All Saints because it describes the reason we were created: to be holy ones

Readings:
• Rev 7:2-4, 9-14
• Psa 24:1BC-2, 3-4AB, 5-6
• 1 Jn 3:1-3
• Mt 5:1-12a

Many readers are understandably confused or puzzled when hearing a passage from the Book of Revelation. It is unfortunate, however, that many end up dismissing what they’ve heard. In so doing, they miss out on some of the most joyful passages of sacred Scripture. Yes, that's right—joyful. 

Today’s first reading is a perfect example of such a passage. It is read on the Solemnity of All Saints because it describes the reason we were created. Using a multitude of references to the Old Testament, John the Revelator shows what it means to be a saint, a “holy one.” I wish to highlight three of the characteristics shared by all saints revealed in the seventh chapter of The Apocalypse. The word apokalypsis, by the way, refers to an “unveiling”—primarily of Jesus Christ, of course, but also of God’s fulfilled work of salvation and his plan for each of us.

The first characteristic of all the saints is they are sealed by God. Prior to judgment being sent from the throne room of heaven upon the wickedness of man, the servants of God are to be sealed, or marked, and thus set apart as holy. This imagery is drawn from the ninth chapter of Ezekiel, which describes the Lord commanding a mysterious “man clothed in linen” to go through Jerusalem and “put a mark upon the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it” (Ezek. 9:3-4). Those who loved God and who hated sin were saved; all others perished. The mark described by Ezekiel would protect the righteous Israelites from four rapidly approaching judgments, to be carried out by Babylon (another name used often in the Book of Revelation).

Jesus was set apart by the Father with a seal (Jn. 6:27). Those who are baptized into Christ are also marked, with the seal of the Holy Spirit, which is both familial and judicial in nature. Those marked by God belong to him; they are now of his household—the Church—and are under his authority and protection from eternal damnation (see Catechism, pars. 1295-6). 

The second characteristic of saints, which builds on the first, is that they are servants and sons of God.

Continue reading on the CWR site.

The Parable of the Perfect Father

Detail from "The Return of the Prodigal Son" by Rembrandt (1669).

Carl E. Olson | On the Readings for Sunday, September 11, 2016

Readings:
• Ex 32:7-11, 13-14
• Ps 51:3-4, 12-13, 17, 19
• 1 Tim 1:12-17
• Lk 15:1-32

The parable of the prodigal son is well known, arguably the most famous of Jesus’ parables. Yet, as Scripture scholar Joachim Jeremias states in The Parables of Jesus (New York, 1963), it “might more correctly be called the parable of the Father’s Love…”, for it is a powerful and unforgettable depiction of God’s love and mercy.

While the two sons are decidedly human—sinful, self-centered, materialistic—the father exhibits a serene, pervasive holiness that reveals the heart of the heavenly Father. In Dives in misericordia, his encyclical on the mercy of God, Pope John Paul II noted that although the word “mercy” doesn’t appear in the famous parable, “it nevertheless expresses the essence of the divine mercy in a particularly clear way.” Read carefully, the parable offers a wealth of insight into our relationship with our heavenly Father; it offers a glimpse of the Father’s face. But it also is a mirror that confronts us with our own distorted priorities and self-centered attitudes.

For example, the younger son’s request for his share of the estate was not just an impulsive, youthful demand for autonomy, but a harsh renunciation of his father. In essence, his demand was a way of publicly declaring, “I wish you were dead!” The son, wrote St. Peter Chrysologus, “is weary of his father’s own life. Since he cannot shorten his father’s life, he works to get possession of his property.” In rejecting his father and the life-giving communion he once had with him, he lost the privilege of being a son and embarked upon a calamitous course.

As a father myself, I think it is safe to say that most ordinary fathers would have objected to the son’s request, even refused to consider it. Yet our heavenly Father does not object; he respects our freedom—his great gift to us—even when we use it to rebel against him. So the father divided up the property; in doing so, grace was destroyed and communion was severed. The familial bond was broken, and the son took his money into the “far country,” a reference to a place of utter emptiness and spiritual desolation.

“What is farther away,” asked St. Ambrose, “then to depart from oneself, and not from a place? … Surely whoever separates himself from Christ is an exile from his country, a citizen of the world” The physical distance was not as painful as the loss of familial love and embrace; the son’s inner life vanished as quickly as did his inheritance. He is soon faced with eating unclean swill while tending unclean animals, the swine.

How did the son come to his senses? An answer can be found in today’s epistle, in which St. Paul confesses his sins of blasphemy, persecution, and arrogance, and explains he has “been mercifully treated because I acted out of ignorance in my unbelief.” By God’s grace he—a prodigal son—recognized his sinfulness. Confronted by Christ on the dusty road to Damascus, he experienced divine grace and mercy.

The prodigal son knew his father had every right to disown him, to consider him dead and gone. But he was willing to admit his sin and become a nameless hired hand. Yet, even as he tried to articulate a cry for mercy, he was wrapped in mercy—held, kissed, clothed, and restored to life. Having walked away in petulant selfishness, the son had embraced death; having been embraced by his patient and compassionate father, he was restored to life.

John Paul II explained that God is not just Creator, but “He is also Father: He is linked to man, whom He called to existence in the visible world, by a bond still more intimate than that of creation. It is love which not only creates the good but also grants participation in the very life of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For he who loves desires to give himself.” The merciful Father waits for the dead, eager to clothe them with new life.

(This is "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the September 12, 2010, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)

Cardinal Raymond Burke on Life, Truth, Mother Teresa, Islam, and Cardinal Sarah

U.S. Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, patron of the Knights and Dames of Malta, and Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Astana, Kazakhstan, walk in the 6th annual March for Life in Rome May 8, 2016. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

by Carl E. Olson | Catholic World Report

Speaking to reporters from Rome about his new book, the American prelate goes on record about Christians and Muslims (they don't worship the same God) and Cardinal Sarah (“I agree with him completely...").

In a wide-ranging international teleconference call on Monday with media members, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke spoke in detail about many timely topics, including the priority of standing up for life in addressing poverty and other social ills, the witness and message of Mother Teresa, essential differences between Christianity and Islam, and the recent controversy over remarks by Cardinal Robert Sarah about liturgical orientation. The occasion of the call was Cardinal Burke's recent book Hope For the World: To Unite All Things in Christ (Ignatius Press), an interview given to French author Guillaume d'Alançon in 2015, and translated by Michael J. Miller for Ignatius Press.

 

Since being named a bishop by Pope John Paul II in 1994, Cardinal Burke has become one of more well-known prelates in the English-speaking world, known for his willingness to address controversial topics forthrightly, despite often being criticized. Noted as a canon lawyer, Cardinal Burke was made a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010, and then called to Rome to become Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. During the two recent Synods on the Family, Cardinal Burke spoke out often about his concerns, telling CWR during the October 2014 gathering that he thought the Synod's mid-term report "lacks a solid foundation in the Sacred Scriptures and the Magisterium", a remark made a month after he was removed from his position as Prefect and named chaplain to the Order of Malta by Pope Francis.

Cardinal Burke, conversing from Rome, told reporters that his new book was motivated by a desire to reflect on his upbringing and how he discerned his vocation as priest, and also "to reflect as a pastor, as a bishop, on certain on certain critical issues of the day". As such, he noted, the book is a "kind of testimony of faith on my part", and the hope is that the book, in keeping with its title, will "give hope" to readers.

Asked about an apparent shifting of priorities among American bishops since the beginning of Francis' pontificate, Cardinal Burke pointed out that while the issues of abortion, poverty, immigration, and global warming all have "moral importance", the Church's tradition and philosophical reason both indicate that "the fundamental question has to be the question of human life itself, the respect for the inviolable dignity of human life and of its Creator, of its Source, and the union of a man and a woman in marriage, which according to God's plan is the place where new human life is welcomed and nurtured."

He expressed concern that the matter of human life and the issues of abortion, artificial insemination, contraception, and euthanasia be placed somehow on the same level as "questions regarding immigration and poverty." The first priority, he emphasized, must be given to proper respect for human life and for the family in order to have "the right orientations in addressing all of the other questions" and challenges faced by people in daily life. It makes no sense, he pointed out, to be concerned with immigration or poverty "if human life itself is not protected in society ... The first justice accorded to any human being is to respect life itself, which is received from God..." Cardinal Burke observed there are some who advocate an elimination of certain parts of the population in order to fight poverty, or who adhere to a "contraceptive mentality" in order to pursue a sort of "social engineering" harmful to society and to individuals.

The former Archbishop of St. Louis emphasized that bishops have a responsibility to proclaim the truth of Christ in love within the Church, following the example of Christ himself, knowing that the love that will "best serve society is the truth, a truth that respects God's plan for us from the moment of creation..." When he travels, the cardinal said, he finds that people want to hear "the truth of the faith" from priests, bishops, and cardinals—"they aren't interested in my personal opinions about things, which won't save their souls, and I am as aware of that as they are; they look to me to reflect very deeply on the truths of the Faith and their application on society today, and to speak to that truth with love and care for society." The fundamental mission of Catholics in the world is to be united to Christ and to "give witness to the truth", a witness that is "very much needed in our time".

Asked how it was that he, as a young seminarian in the Sixties, avoided falling into the "craziness" of that era, Cardinal Burke credited his parents and his upbringing. He acknowledged he was not unaffected by the "tumultuous" times, especially after going to Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, in 1968 to study philosophy. He credits the "stable and good" discipline, prayer life, and formation he experienced in minor seminary, which he entered at the age of fourteen. He lamented that so many seminarians, seminary professors, and priests at CUA abandoned their vocations and ministry during that time. But he "simply couldn't be convinced that this so-called 'new way', this 'new Church'" was a good and right path, as if what he had been taught growing up was now "wrong and needed to be abandoned". He expressed, however, "great sympathy" for many of those who lost their way, saying that it was a "very tumultuous time and we were young".

Reflecting on the upcoming canonization of Mother Teresa by Pope Francis on Sunday, September 4th, Cardinal Burke expressed his happiness that the famous nun will be named a saint, saying "she has been an inspiration to me from my years in the seminary when I first came to know her".

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

Saint Teresa of Jesus and the Search for the Sacred

Saint Teresa of Jesus and the Search for the Sacred | Fr. Erik Varden, OCSO | Catholic World Report

Does the Church’s liturgy enable, now, the expression and communication of sacred realities? Is the ‘sacred’ still a meaningful category?

Among the signal events to mark the Church’s life in 2015 was the 500th birthday of St Teresa of Jesus. The year’s peak event, her feast on 15 October, was overshadowed by headlines from the Synod; yet this year has been nonetheless a Teresian year, calling to mind the Castilian Doctor’s formidable legacy. I found myself gently haunted by Teresa while reading Fr Uwe Michael Lang’s Signs of The Holy One.

I should like, with her help, to reflect on questions raised by the book. For this is a volume that interrogates. It formulates problems not susceptible of easy resolution. There is material here for an examen of consciousness. I invoke the term ‘consciousness’ advisedly. Although Fr Lang mainly addresses issues of liturgical praxis, he knows better than just to bemoan the transgression of rubrics. He points towards a breakdown of sense in liturgy. He shows how this breakdown ominously points to senselessness likewise in life and belief. It is tempting to imagine his subtitle ending with a question mark: ‘Liturgy, Ritual, and Expression of the Sacred?’ Does the Church’s liturgy enable, now, the expression and communication of sacred realities? Is the ‘sacred’ still a meaningful category?

The book’s first part expounds the sense-content of ‘sacredness’ as defined by modern anthropology and theology. The sheer variety of approaches bewilders. This is brought out in the second part, which indicates wrong turns taken in sacred architecture, music, and art over the past half-century. They happened because the signifier ‘sacred’ was often put, as it were, on its head. Hijacked by human criteria, it could no longer effectively point upward and out to the transcendent. The crisis of sacred liturgy and art is thus a crisis of purpose, of finality. By way of illustration, Fr Lang cites examples apt to make the reader smile. Really, though, there is cause for sadness. When the proclamatory impact of Christian devotion is compromised; when the aesthetic response to faith becomes purely subjective, cut off from a sharable paradigm; when ritual seems little more than fortuitously repeated action: then woe is us, for the Gospel is not preached with the force it requires and deserves. What can we do? How can we respond? We might turn for counsel to the half-millenarian, plain-speaking Doctor of Ávila.

Teresa’s Autobiography, completed in her fiftieth year, chronicles the irruption of the divine into an ordinary life. Seeing Teresa at a distance, we may object to the adjective ‘ordinary’. She seems anything but! Teresa, however, argued this point with passion. She was conscious of singular favour shown her; but she insisted that nothing in her nature marked her out from the common run of men and women. She presents her life in its extraordinariness as a typical life, an exemplar each of us might emulate, had we but faith and courage to surrender to God’s work in us. The trajectory she traces reaches from the outset right to the loftiest end of spiritual life. She counsels souls who wobble ‘like hens, with feet tied together’ but also those who soar like eagles (xxxix.12).¹ Nor does she forget the perplexing darkness of the long intermediate stage when the soul, like a timid dove, is dazzled by rare glimpses of God’s Sun while, ‘when looking at itself, its eyes are blinded by clay. The little dove is blind’ (xx.29). Everything she writes, she tells us, is born of experience. For long years she herself ‘had neither any joy in God nor pleasure in the world’ (viii.2). She lived in an in-between state, a no-woman’s land. What changed it? No summary can do justice to her subtle account of the transformative miracle wrought in her by God. We can, though, get some sense of its impact. Teresa testifies how, at a decisive juncture, ‘todos los que me conocían veían claro estar otra mi alma’: her soul had become other; it was no longer what it used to be (xxviii.13). She had seen something that changed her way of seeing. It caused others to see her differently. It was not, she says, a matter of ‘a radiance that dazzles’, rather of ‘a soft whiteness’, ‘an infused radiance’ that, for being gentle, was so unlike any earthly light that in comparison with it ‘the brightness of our sun seems dim’. Measured against Uncreated Light all light of this world seems ‘artificial’. Had we a choice, she assures us, we should never again ‘want to open our eyes for the purpose of seeing it’ (xxviii.5). To entertain such grace is not just sweetness and joy. It brings on a new kind of homelessness, a numbing sense of being out of place, and that for good. At the end of her book Teresa remarks that life in this world seems to her now ‘a kind of sleep’ (xl.22). She yearns to awaken to eternity. She is weary of being torn apart by existential - or better, essential - tension, for ‘natural weakness’ cannot sustain such spiritual vehemence (xl.7). Anyone who makes even moderate progress in prayer is reminded, like her, of how little Spirit our natural human frame can bear. ‘¡Válgame Dios!’, he or she might exclaim with Teresa: ‘God help me!’

Teresa is a witness to the beautiful dimension of faith. When she speaks of it, she is categorical: ‘The fact of seeing Christ left an impression of his exceeding beauty etched on my soul to this day: once was enough’ (xxxvii.4). This beauty is disturbing, even dangerous.

Continue reading on the CWR site.

The Assumption" by Monsignor Ronald Knox

The Assumption | Mgr. Ronald Knox | From Pastoral and Occasional Sermons | August 15th | Ignatius Insight

A cave Jeremias found there, in which he set down tabernacle and ark and incense-altar, and stopped up the entrance behind him. There were some that followed; no time they lost in coming up to mark the spot, but find it they could not.—2 Machabees 2:5-6.

After this, God's heavenly temple was thrown open, and the ark of the covenant was plain to view, standing in his temple.—Apocalypse 11:19.

The Son of God came to earth to turn our hearts away from earth, Godwards. The material world in which we live was, by his way of it, something immaterial; it didn't matter. We were not to be always worrying about our clothes being shabby, or wondering where our next meal was to come from; the God who fed the sparrows and clothed the lilies would see to all that. We were not to resent the injuries done to us by our neighbours; the aggressor was welcome to have a slap at the other cheek, and when he took away our greatcoat he was to find that we had left our coat inside it. Life itself, the life we know, was a thing of little value; it was a cheap bargain, if we lost life here to attaIn the life hereafter. There was a supernatural world, interpenetrating, at a higher level, the world of our experience; it has its own laws, the only rule we were to live by, its own prizes, which alone were worth the winning. All that he tried to teach us; and we, intent on our own petty squabbles, our sordid struggle for existence, cold-shouldered him at first, and then silenced his protest with a cross.

His answer was to rise from the dead; and then, for forty days in the world's history, that supernatural life which he had preached to us flourished and functioned under the conditions of earth. A privileged few saw, with mortal eyes, the comings and goings of immortality, touched with their hands the impalpable. For forty days; then, as if earth were too frail a vessel to contain the mystery, the tension was suddenly relaxed. He vanished behind a cloud; the door of the supernatural shut behind him, and we were left to the contemplation of this material world, drab and barren as ever.

What was the first thing the apostles saw when they returned from the mount of the Ascension to the upper room? "Together with Mary"—is it only an accident that the Mother of God is mentioned just here, by name, and nowhere else outside the gospels? The Incarnate Word had left us, as silently as he came to us, leaving no trace behind him of his passage through time. No trace? At least, in the person of his blessed Mother, he had bequeathed to us a keepsake, a memory. She was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, the new Eve of the new Adam. That body of hers, still part of the material order of things, had housed and suckled God. As long as she lived, there would still be a link, a golden link, between this lower earth and Paradise. As long as she lived; and even if it was God's will that she, Eve's daughter, should undergo the death that was Eve's penalty, the penalty she had never incurred, her mortal remains would still be left with us, an echo from the past, an influence on our lives. We men, since we are body and soul, do honour even to the lifeless bodies which have housed the dead; Napoleon rests in the Invalides, Lenin at Moscow. The day would come when there would be pilgrimages from all over the world to the shrines of Peter and Paul at Rome, of James at Compostela. Was it not reasonable to hope that somewhere, at Jerusalem, perhaps, or at Ephesus, we should be privileged to venerate the mortal remains of her through whom salvation came to us? Or perhaps at Bethlehem, Bethlehem-Ephrata, this new Ark of God would rest, as the ark rested of old; "And now, at Ephrata, we have heard tidings of what we looked for" [1] —the old tag from the Psalms should still ring true.

God disposed otherwise. Jewish tradition recorded that when Jerusalem was destroyed by the armies of Babylon, the prophet Jeremias took the ark of God away from the city, and buried it in some secret cleft of the rock; it was never seen again. Never again, except by St John, in his vision on the isle of Patmos; he saw the ark of God, but in heaven. And so it was with this new Ark of God, the virgin body that had been his resting-place. When and where she passed away from this earth, or in what manner, nobody can tell us for certain. But we know where she is. When Elias was carried up into heaven, the sons of the prophets at Jericho asked Eliseus if they might go out in search of him; "it may be", they said, "the spirit of the Lord has carried him off and left him on some hill-top or in some cleft of the valleys." He consented grudgingly, and when they returned from their fruitless errand, greeted them with the words; "Did I not tell you not to send?" [2] So it is with the body of the blessed Virgin: nowhere in Christendom will you hear the rumour of it. So many churches, all over the world, eagerly claiming to possess the relics of this or that saint; who shall tell us whether John the Baptist sleeps at Amiens, or at Rome? But never of our Lady; and if any of us still hoped to find that inestimable treasure, the Holy Father has called off the search, only the other day. We know where her body is; it is in heaven.

Of course, we knew it all along. For myself, I have never doubted the doctrine of the Assumption since I heard it preached forty-four years ago, in an Anglican church over at Plymouth. You see, we get it all wrong about body and soul, simply because our minds are dominated by matter. We think it the most natural thing in the world that soul and body should be separated after death; that the body should remain on earth and the soul go to heaven, once it is purged and assoiled. But it isn't a natural thing at all; soul and body were made for one another, and the temporary divorce between them is something out of the way, something extraordinary, occasioned by the Fall. In our blessed Lady, not born under the star of that defeat, human nature was perfectly integrated; body and soul belonged to one another, as one day, please God, yours and mine will.

Long ago, in those fields of Bethlehem, Ruth had gleaned in the footsteps of her beloved; and he, secretly, had given charge to the reapers to drop handfuls of corn on purpose, so that she might fill her bosom the sooner. So he, whose reapers are the angels, would leave for his blessed Mother a special portion of those graces that were to enrich mankind. The child-bearing which brought, to us others, redemption from the fault of our first parents should bring, to her, exemption; the empty tomb, which assures us that our bodies will rise at the judgment, was for her the earnest of an immediate resurrection; Christ the first-fruits, and who should glean them, but she? For that, heaven is the richer, earth the poorer. We can go to Lourdes, and offer adoration in the place where her feet stood; we cannot press with our lips some precious reliquary containing the hand that swaddled Christ. In a world so dominated by matter, in which matter itself seems to carry the seeds of its own destruction, there is no material object left that can link our destinies with hers.

And yet, is the loss all loss? When the dogma of the Assumption was defined a friend of mine, a very intelligent Mohammedan, congratulated me on the gesture which the Holy Father had made; a gesture (said he) against materialism. And I think he was right. When our Lord took his blessed Mother, soul and body, into heaven, he did honour to the poor clay of which our human bodies are fashioned. It was the first step towards reconciling all things in heaven and earth to his eternal Father, towards making all things new. "The whole of nature", St Paul tells us, "groans in a common travail all the while. And not only do we see that, but we ourselves do the same; we ourselves although we have already begun to reap our spiritual harvest, groan in our hearts, waiting for that adoption which is the ransoming of our bodies from their slavery." [3] That transformation of our material bodies to which we look forward one day has been accomplished—we know it now for certain-in her.

When the Son of God came to earth, he came to turn our hearts away from earth, Godwards. And as the traveller, shading his eyes while he contemplates some long vista of scenery, searches about for a human figure that will give him the scale of those distant surroundings, so we, with dazzled eyes looking Godwards, identify and welcome one purely human figure close to his throne. One ship has rounded the headland, one destiny is achieved, one human perfection exists. And as we watch it, we see God clearer, see God greater, through this masterpiece of his dealings with mankind.

(A sermon broadcast from Buckfast Abbey, Devon, on the Feast of Our Lady Assumption, 15 August 1954.)

ENDNOTES:

[1] Psalm 131:6.
[2] 4 Kings 2:16, 18.
[3] Romans 8:22-3.

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Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links:

• IgnatiusInsight.com Author Page for Monsignor Ronald Knox
• The Modern Distaste for Religion | Ronald Knox
• The Mind of Knox | David Rooney
• The School of Ronald Knox | An Interview with David Rooney
• The Monsignor and the Don | An Interview with Fr. Milton Walsh
• Monsignor Ronald Knox: Convert, Priest, Apologist | An Interview with Fr. Milton Walsh
• Experience, Reason, and Authority in the Apologetics of Ronald Knox | Milton Walsh | From Ronald Knox As Apologist
• The Four Marks of the Church | Ronald A. Knox
• Review of The Belief of Catholics | Carl E. Olson
• Ronald Knox, Apologist | Carl E. Olson
• A Lesson Learned From Monsignor Ronald A. Knox | Carl E. Olson
• Converts and Saints | An Interview with Joseph Pearce

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Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was the son of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester and it appeared that he, being both spiritually perceptive and intellectually gifted, would also have a successful life as an Anglican prelate. But while in school in the early 1900s Knox began a long struggle between his love for the Church of England and his growing attraction to the Catholic Church. He converted to Catholicism at the age of twenty-nine, became a priest, and wrote numerous books on spiritual and literary topics, including The Belief of Catholics, Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes, The Hidden Stream: The Mysteries of the Christian Faith, Pastoral and Occasional Sermons, and many more. Visit Knox's IgnatiusInsight.com author page for more information about his life and work.

The Purifying Fire of Dividing, Divine Love

Detail of "The Sacred Heart of Jesus" by Salvador Dali (1962).

The Purifying Fire of Dividing, Divine Love | Carl E. Olson

The Readings for Sunday, August 14th show that Jesus causes division and brings unity for one and the same reason: He is both the scandal that divides and the Savior who unites.

Readings:
• Jer 38:4-6, 8-10
• Ps 40:2, 3, 4, 18
• Heb 12:1-4
• Lk 12:49-53

In the summer of 2007, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a document containing “responses to some questions regarding certain aspects of the doctrine of the Church.” It carefully re-articulated some important Catholic teachings about the nature of the Church, meant to help Catholics avoid various “erroneous interpretations which in turn give rise to confusion and doubt.” 

Predictably, many media outlets sensationalized the contents of the document and ran headlines such as “Vatican hits ‘wounded’ Christian churches,” as though the teaching “that the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church” is somehow new to the Vatican, the pope, or Catholicism. Of course, it isn’t. Yet that didn’t keep some Catholics from expressing their outrage at the supposed “intolerance” coming from a backwards and “polarizing” Pope Benedict XVI. 

One Catholic, in a letter to the editor of the Detroit Free Press, lamented what he described as the “believe-what-we-say-or-leave’” mentality of the Catholic Church. “I hope all of us will start acting more like Jesus…”, he wrote, “simply passing along love, peace and goodness to others.” 

That letter writer would do well to read both the document he wrongly criticizedand today’s Gospel reading, which describes Jesus explaining that He has “come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” This is a reference back to the third chapter of Luke’s Gospel and John the Baptist’s explanation that the Messiah “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” and that He will burn the chaff “with unquenchable fire” (Lk 3:16-17). Like the prophet Elijah, who called down fire from heaven to consume his enemies (2 Kgs 1:10-14), the presence of Jesus often caused violence and disturbance—not because He opposed love and peace, but because the destruction of evil and sin demanded a violent, active love. Only through bloodshed and sacrifice will peace be fully established, and then only at the end of time. 

Many theologians and authors have tried in recent decades to warp the Gospels and remake Jesus into a sort of mild-mannered self-help guru who never uttered a disturbing word or made a shocking comment. Yet Jesus stated that He would bring division, even among families, setting parents against children. This is painful to consider, but it has often been the case: sometimes the one who enters the family of God must turn his back on father, mother, and siblings. 

To take up modern terminology, Jesus came to apply shock therapy to the ailing hearts and souls of those lost in sin. The fire that He gave—and continues to give through His Church and the sacraments—is the burning life and the transforming energy of the Holy Spirit, which consumes what is weak and wanting while purifying and enlightening the minds of those who follow Him. “As fire transforms into itself everything it touches,” remarks the Catechism, “so the Holy Spirit transforms into the divine life whatever is subjected to his power” (CCC 1127; cf. 696). 

That transformation is ultimately an all-or-nothing reality; there is, in fact, a “believe-what-we-say-or-leave” aspect to Catholicism, although it is far better expressed as “believe-what-He-says-or-leave”. Jesus causes division and brings unity for one and the same reason: He is both the scandal that divides and the Savior who unites. The bloody Cross is the scarlet line that separates and a steady tie that binds. 

As the Letter to the Hebrews states today, the Cross is shameful to many. But for those who have their eyes fixed on Jesus, the Cross is the ladder to joy and life. The theologian Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in reflecting on martyrdom and the cost of discipleship, once wrote that the “only valid response” to the death of Christ on the Cross “is to be prepared to die for him, and even more, to be dead in him.” Through that death comes real peace; in that death we experience true and abiding love. Yes, indeed, let us start acting more like Jesus!

(This "Opening the Word" originally appeared in a slightly different form in the August 19, 2007, issue of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)

A noteworthy (but little noted) revolution at World Youth Day 2016

A pilgrim prays during the opening Mass for World Youth Day July 26 at Blonia Park in Krakow, Poland. (CNS photo/Bob Roller)

by Carl E. Olson | The Dispatch at CWR

I've never been to a World Youth Day event, but have followed the last few as closely as possible via news accounts, blogs, and conversations with friends who have attended. This August 7th blog post by Fr. David Friel, a young priest (ordained in 20110 from Philadelphia, highlights something I'd not seen in other coverage of the recent events in Kraków (granted, I read only a slim portion of the countless articles and posts out there):

There was one truly remarkable part of the WYD celebrations that did not receive as much attention as these other details, yet it was revolutionary. I am speaking about the music used at the major English-speaking catechesis sessions.

This year, the main English-speaking catechesis was held at Tauron Arena, renamed “Mercy Centre” for the week. Each day, roughly 15,000 pilgrims packed the arena to hear keynote talks by Cardinal Seán O’Malley, Cardinal Tagle, and Cardinal Dolan. At the conclusion of the morning session, Mass was celebrated in the arena.

Nothing is new about the general structure of the catechesis I have just described. The revolutionary part was the music used at the Masses in Tauron Arena. Typically, these Masses feature pop concert-style praise & worship led by an on-stage band. This year, however, the preparations for these large-scale liturgies were entrusted to the Dominican Liturgical Centre in Kraków. Fr. Lukasz Misko, OP was invited to serve as Director of Music for the English-language liturgies, and he, in turn, invited fellow-blogger Christopher Mueller to serve as conductor for all of these liturgies (as he announced here). The result was an experience very different from the norm.

Notably, not a single hymn was sung during Mass. Praise & worship songs were used throughout the day at the arena, before and after Mass, but no garden variety metrical hymns or songs were sung during Mass, from the Sign of the Cross to the Final Blessing. This, in itself, is revolutionary.

Fr. Friel provides some details about the music and then notes: "This sea change is not insignificant. It means that the project of advocating truly sacred music within the present liturgical movement is bearing practical fruit. Even three years ago, at WYD 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, no one would have expected what transpired at the Mercy Centre in Kraków." He also provides the text of a letter that was included in the program for music, written by Fr. Lukasz Misko, OP, who was Director of Music for English-language liturgies, WYD 2016. Fr. Misko states, in part:

These English-language liturgies are the fruit of a long and ongoing collaboration between Dominican Friars in Poland and their Dominican brethren in the United States. And one of the first impressions you may have is, a lot of this music is unfamiliar. What we hope you’ll take away from these Masses, though—alongside the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the camaraderie of thousands of new Catholic friends from around the globe—is a sense of how beautiful the music of the Mass can be.

Dominicans especially cherish Gregorian chant, and yet they believe that the beauty of sacred music does not belong to one particular genre. It flows from a basic requirement found in different musical styles, which might be summed up as, “it’s all about God, and He’s a Mystery.” Inexpressible and ineffable, the Mystery of God is always ahead of us, approached but never comprehended, and therefore our liturgical music—filled with awe and love for Him—should reflect that fundamental humility. This week we are drawing from a wide variety of the Church’s music, including Gregorian chant, sacred polyphony, traditional hymnody, and contemporary praise and worship. ...

And it’s all about God, and He’s a Mystery. The unfamiliarity of this beautiful choral music gives us a chance to experience God anew at each liturgy. We can’t apply our usual “traditional music = conservative” or “contemporary music = liberal” thinking. We must become open to the vastness of God, and beauty offers us a powerful means of doing that; true beauty calls us out of ourselves, orients us to something greater, and stirs up a longing for the transcendent. Sacred music, the expression of the deepest human yearning for the most profound Mystery of Love, creates in us a special dimension whereby we can be permeated and transformed by the Eternal beauty of God, Himself.

Do read Fr. Friel's entire post.

Your days should be numbered!

Author tells how the Catholic Church’s liturgical calendar provided a spiritual renewal

SAN FRANCISCO, August 9, 2016 – Chene Heady was a devout Catholic whose daily concerns were shaped primarily by forces other than his faith: career demands as a college professor, financial decisions, scheduling conflicts, etc. He worked long hours, and had limited regular interaction with his wife, also a busy professional, and young daughter. He was the typical overextended and anonymous modern Catholic man — until he tried a fascinating experiment that drastically rearranged his life, which he chronicles in his encouragingly honest memoir, NUMBERING MY DAYS: How the Liturgical Calendar Rearranged My Life.
 
After reading about the importance of the Catholic Church’s liturgical year, Heady decided to take on the challenge of living as though the Church’s calendar, not the secular one, stood as the center of his life. He observed the Church’s seasons and feasts, and meditated on its daily readings, every day for a year. It was an immensely rewarding decision, as Heady found that his life, and his relationships, including with his wife and daughter, became more meaningful and fruitful.
 
One of the myriad ailments afflicting the modern world is the loss of the sense of the sacredness of time, a deafness to the rhythms that accentuate a truly Catholic life. Heady provides the antidote in NUMBERING MY DAYS, and describes how the liturgy is our universal story and alters our imperfect existence, even when we believe we’re stretched thin and feel as though our lives are devoid of meaning.
 
“Through engaging personal stories, Chene Heady shows just how much it will change your life to center your days on the liturgical calendar,” says Jennifer Fulwiler, author of Something Other Than God. “Highly recommended!”
 
For more information, to request a review copy or to schedule an interview with Chene Heady, please contact Kevin Wandra (404-788-1276 or [email protected]) of Carmel Communications.    

“What is the mark of a Christian?”

Detail from "Christ Leading the Apostles to Mount Tabor" by Lorenzo Lotto (1512).

A Scriptural Reflection by Carl E. Olson on the Readings for Sunday, August 7, 2016

Readings:
• Wis 18:6-9
• Ps 33:1, 12, 18-19, 20-22
• Heb 11:1-2, 8-19
• Lk 12:32-48

“What is the mark of a Christian?” asked St. Basil in his work, Moralia, which is a guide living a morally upright life in the world. How might we answer this question? To be kind. To be charitable. To give to the poor. These are all good answers, but St. Basil’s answer emphasized something else: “It is to watch daily and hourly and to stand prepared in that state of total responsiveness pleasing to God, knowing that the Lord will come at an hour that he does not expect.” A true Christian is vigilant, meaning he is ready to hear God’s word and to respond accordingly.

Today’s readings are about vigilance, especially as they relate to the virtues of faith and hope. In fact, vigilance is really impossible with faith and hope, for the disciple of Christ stands prepared because he believes in faith that the Lord has come and will come, and because he believes in hope that Christ will fulfill the promises granted through the new covenant, the Church, and the sacraments.

The Book of Wisdom was written by a well-educated, anonymous Jewish author living around Alexandria, Egypt, between 180 and 50 B.C. The “night of the Passover” was, of course, a definitive moment for the Israelites. “It was a night of watching by the LORD, to bring them out of the land of Egypt” (Ex. 12:42). The vigilance kept on the night of Passover was based on the promise and the “knowledge of the oaths in which they put their faith,” which had been given to them by God through Moses.

This vigilance was not just a matter of waiting and watching, however, for it also involved the sacrifice of an unblemished lamb. The blood of the lamb was to be put on the doorposts as a sign of their faith, and then the lamb was to be eaten (Ex. 12:3-14). This led, then, to two essential acts: the liberation of the people and the destruction of their enemies.

Hebrews 11 is a powerful, even poetic, celebration of vigilant, active faith. It opens by stating that faith “is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things no seen.” Faith is rooted in God’s actions and words in the past and looks with hope toward the future and “a better homeland, a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:16). Abraham, filled with faith, obeyed when he was called to go to the promised land. Vigilant, he responded, even though he was not certain of where God was leading him, but believing that God had a prepared a city for him.

That city is heaven, the new Jerusalem, the dwelling place of God. There is but one holy land, and it was inaugurated by Jesus Christ, who is the new Moses, “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2). He inaugurated the kingdom through preaching and teaching, and by establishing the Church, the “little flock” referred to in today’s Gospel. “The Word of the Lord,” states Lumen Gentium, “is compared to a seed which is sown in a field; those who hear the Word with faith and become part of the little flock of Christ, have received the Kingdom itself” (par. 5).

Again, vigilance and obedience are essential; those who listen with anticipation and respond in faith will receive the Kingdom. Jesus’ exhortation to alert faith is meant for all Christians, but he explained to Peter that his words held a special gravity for the apostles and their successors. The master, Jesus, has given his servants, the apostles, unique authority in the household of God. The slothful or ignorant servant will suffer severely. “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” 

Our prayer should echo that uttered by Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, that we will be “completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action” (CCC 260).

(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the August 8, 2010, issue of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)

 

Reason, Authority, and the Roman Rite

Celebration of Pontifical Solemn Mass at Sacra Liturgia 2016, at Church of our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory, Westminster. (www.facebook.com/Sacraliturgia2013/)

Reason, Authority, and the Roman Rite | Dr. Leroy A. Huizenga | CWR

Catholics are often finding themselves in a situation in which the Church’s authorities sometimes seem to set themselves against the Church’s own teaching and rites.

Catholicism esteems reason without rationalism, authority without authoritarianism. Catholicism works when the Church’s authorities act in a rational manner, using their reason to interpret the Church’s teaching rightly and in turn to teach it with fidelity. As the Magisterium is servant to the Word of God, as a pope is bound to the Magisterium, ecclesial authority at every level is constrained by the truth of the Church’s teaching.

Contradiction and a thousand cuts

Sometimes, however, it seems the Church’s authorities use their authority as bishops, or, on a parish or diocesan level, as priests or lay functionaries, to subvert, correct, or contradict what’s said plainly in the Church’s official documents. For instance, it’s not too hard to find ecclesial authorities nowadays who will advert to conscience in suggesting the faithful can be unfaithful to what the Church teaches in its Catechism on (say) sexuality if their consciences tell them contrary, and in doing so also contradict what the Catechism says on conscience (cf. CCC 1776-1802). 

It’s hard on laypeople and lower clergy who are trying to be faithful to the Church’s teaching when the Church’s authorities act, speak, and govern in ways that undercut, sell short, or sell out Catholic teaching as it’s spelled out in the Church’s official documents. It’s hard to explain to our children why, sometimes, what we teach them in their religious instruction differs from what they experience or what some ecclesial authority says.

The texts say what they say, from the documents of Vatican II to the Catechism and beyond, to say nothing of what came before. Catholics can read, and some can read Latin. Catholics are rational; our reason can make good sense of the texts’ presentation of authoritative human and divine teaching. Sometimes, however, it seems the glorious truths of our official documents suffer the death of a thousand cuts from the knives of a thousand committees by the time they travel from Rome to parishes in Portlandia or Lake Woebegone. But the texts are there, published officially as books or on the internet by organs of the Vatican or episcopal conferences. Presumably, the Church’s authorities want the official texts read. And so Catholics read. 

And yet Catholics often encounter contradictions between what an official document says and what’s happening on the ground in parishes and diocese. There’s one subject Church in history, one mystical Church which is Jesus Christ as head with his members, but sometimes it seems as if there’s two. Were one to raise the issue of discrepancies between Catholic teaching and local practice on matters moral or liturgical, one might imagine certain authorities in the mold of Chico Marx’s character Chicolini in the Marx Brothers’ movie Duck Soup, saying, “Well, who you gonna believe? Me, or your own eyes?” But Catholics can read. They can read the Catechism, the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the rubrics of the Roman Rite, the actual text of the GIRM—some of us in Latin. 

Obedience to the rubrics

With regard to liturgy, the Church has been in this situation since the introduction of the Novus Ordo Missae, now the ‘Ordinary Form’ of the Roman Rite, for its celebration is often at odds with what the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium says, with what its own rubrics say, and with what the General Instruction of the Roman Missal for the Ordinary Form instructs. And so those who desire faithful liturgy find contemporary practice lacking, for they can read the texts.

Certainly every text needs interpretation (even reading a grocery list is low-level interpretation as our minds make sense of the black marks on the paper), but modern Catholic documents are not so arcane that it takes episcopal oracles to reveal their mysterious secrets to us. Catholics are not gnostics, and modern Catholic documents are written to be understood. Catholics are people of reason. Catholics can read, and believe they should read. Yet the lay faithful often encounter the worst sort of clericalism when they run up against legalistic authoritarians insisting they alone can know what the official texts say, and come up with some pretense for inaction.

But the liturgical texts say what they say. And whatever other practices have arisen, such as versus populum, the liturgical texts at issue assume that ad orientem posture is the normative posture for the Roman Rite. Those who desire a return to the ad orientem posture are not angling and agitating for their own particular personal preferences and predilections, but rather desire fidelity in liturgy, obedience to the rubrics. They trust the Church, and desire her teaching and law on matters liturgical obeyed. It’s shame and scandal that some distrust the Church so much and regard the faithful so little that they feel free to ignore the Church’s liturgical teaching.

A liturgical tempest

And so we come to the latest development in the furore over ad orientem that Cardinal Sarah unleashed—a tempest born of one Cardinal’s clarion call to liturgical fidelity.

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

Quick thoughts on the ultimate purpose of canon law and social doctrine

The interior of St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Chicago, Illinois (Wikipedia)

Carl E. Olson | The Dispatch at Catholic World Report

And what is real social justice? The Book of Revelation answers that important question.

In his most recent column, Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland, Oregon, points out something that every Catholic should know:

The Church’s Code of Canon Law contains 1,752 laws covering everything from the structural organization of the Church as the people of God, the teaching of the Faith, the sacramental life of the Church, the administration of the material goods of the Church, and even penal and procedural law. But lest any of us (especially canon lawyers) forget the purpose of all of this body of law, the very last law (or “canon”) states that the “salvation of souls”, which must always be the supreme law of the Church, must be kept before our eyes.

The salvation of souls. How often do we hear this language in the Church today? Not very often, I am afraid. And yet that is the very mission of the Church!

Quite right. But how often do we hear that the essential point of Christianity is to help the poor, or to seek social justice (more on that in a moment), or implement better programs for healthcare, education, and what not? Quite often. But everything in and of the Church should be oriented toward the ultimate goal of bringing people—by the grace of God, of course—into saving communion with the Triune God. Archbishop Sample says:

Why am I emphasizing this point, you may ask? Because I sincerely think that we are in danger of losing our focus in fulfilling the mission that Christ has entrusted to all of us in the Church. Our ultimate mission is to bring as many people as possible into the one People of God, to incorporate them into the one Body of Christ, and be built up as the temple of God, animated by the Holy Spirit. The gift of eternal salvation is the greatest gift God has given to us, a gift that was purchased at a great price, the blood of his only begotten Son. ...

It seems our current environment cultivates the opposite view. Our culture seems to tell us that the way to life is easy and wide, and most people find it, while to find the road to destruction is narrow and hard, and really very few people end up there. I go by our blessed Lord’s words.

Part of the reason I think that we are in danger of losing the essential and primary message of salvation of souls is based on how I see many people defining what it means to be a good Catholic. Many people have reduced being a good and faithful Catholic to being nice, tolerant and doing good works. They think if we do service projects for the poor and needy, and don’t make any judgments about human behavior and sin, then we are fulfilling the Gospel mandate.

"While it is a good and even essential thing that a disciple of Jesus care for the poor and seek justice for the oppressed in this world," he adds, "there is so much more to the message of redemption in Jesus Christ. We must follow the Ten Commandments, avoid sin, and repent and seek forgiveness when we fail. Our eternal salvation depends on all these things, as Jesus himself taught. 'If you love me, you will keep my commandments.' (John 14:15)". As a certain document of the Second Vatican Council summarized matters:

Christ, having been lifted up from the earth has drawn all to Himself. Rising from the dead He sent His life-giving Spirit upon His disciples and through Him has established His Body which is the Church as the universal sacrament of salvation. Sitting at the right hand of the Father, He is continually active in the world that He might lead men to the Church and through it join them to Himself and that He might make them partakers of His glorious life by nourishing them with His own Body and Blood. Therefore the promised restoration which we are awaiting has already begun in Christ, is carried forward in the mission of the Holy Spirit and through Him continues in the Church in which we learn the meaning of our terrestrial life through our faith, while we perform with hope in the future the work committed to us in this world by the Father, and thus work out our salvation. (LG, 48)

Then there is the matter of "social justice", which has often become a sort of mindless mantra of those looking to attach deeper meaning to whatever political agenda or ideological project they are pushing, selling, or supporting.

Continue reading.

Mary, Martha, and "the better part"

"Christ with Martha and Mary" by Mikhail Nesterov (1911).

Carl E. Olson | On the Readings for Sunday, July 17, 2016

Readings:
• Gen 18:1-10a
• Ps 15:2-3, 3-4, 5
• Col 1:24-28
• Lk 10:38-42

Americans are, generally speaking, a pragmatic and practical people. We know how to get things done, how to organize, how to make a plan and put it into action. Work may be “a rat race” and “a grind,” but we take satisfaction in knowing we work hard, do a good job, and are productive members of society. 

But to what end? 

By “end,” I mean “ultimate end.” This question is pursued relentlessly and with sometimes unsettling results in the little classic, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (Ignatius Press, 2009), written in the 1950s by the German philosopher, Josef Pieper. Western man overvalues work, Pieper argued, and he has lost the meaning and importance of true leisure, instead substituting shallow entertainment and empty diversions. Leisure is essential to be whole, and the soul of leisure is “divine worship” of the Creator. “Celebration of God in worship,” writes Pieper, “cannot be done unless it is done for its own sake.”

Hold that thought and cut away to the dusty, first-century village of Bethany and the home of Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus. Jesus, having told his disciples of his approaching suffering and death and having performed healings and exorcisms (Lk. 9), was likely ready for a brief respite before heading into Jerusalem, just two miles away. Martha was an exemplary hostess. She believed, at the very least, that Jesus was a great prophet, and she took pride in treating this friend and guest of distinction to the finest care and food (note the clear parallels with today’s reading from Genesis). And so Martha was busily preparing and serving food, even while her sister, Mary, sat at the feet of Jesus, listening to him speak.

What happened next was not an ordinary part of Semitic culture and hospitality: Martha sought to draw Jesus into the middle of a domestic disagreement. And she pulled out all of the stops in doing so, employing the guilt trip (“Lord, do you not care…”), playing the victim card (“that my sister has left by myself…”), and employing the exasperated demand (“Tell her to help me”). Things went from agreeable to awkward quickly!

I’ve heard the words of Jesus interpreted sometimes as being a rebuke to Martha. But that is unfair to Martha and it skews, or misses altogether, the essential point. The Church Fathers are quite agreed on this point. St. Gregory the Great, for example, wrote, “For what is set forth by Mary, who sitting down gave ear to the words of our Lord, save the life of contemplation? And what by Martha, so busied with outward services, save the life of action? Now Martha's concern is not reproved, but that of Mary is even commended.” He then arrived at this vital conclusion: “For the merits of the active life are great, but of the contemplative, far better.” Everything that Martha did was good. Yet in pursuing good things, she overlooked the greatest good.

What was it? Mary, in sitting at Jesus’ feet, showed her submission to him. She literally “listened to his word”; that is, she listened to the logos of the Logos. She was completely and wholly present to the Incarnate Word; there was no practical end to this being present, for it was simply an act of love and worship. “To cling to God and to the things of God,” wrote St. John Cassian, “this must be our major effort, this must be the road that the heart follows unswervingly. Any diversion, however impressive, must be regarded as secondary, low-grade and certainly dangerous.” And St. Ambrose sums it up perfectly: “Do not let service divert the knowledge of the heavenly Word.”

Mary, in choosing “the better part” had made the right choice. She completely gave her attention and herself to the Lord, fully aware of the Word of God present in flesh and blood, and in spoken word. In so choosing, she gained what could never be taken from her.

 (This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the July 18, 2010, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)

Sinners, Prophets, and the Business of Heaven

"Christ in the House of Simon" by Dieric Bouts (c 1420-1475)

Sinners, Prophets, and the Business of Heaven | Carl E. Olson | On the Readings for Sunday, June 12, 2016

Readings:

2 Sm 12:7-10, 13
Ps 32:1-2, 5, 7, 11
Gal 2:16, 19-21
Lk 7:36—8:3 or 7:36-50

What did the most famous king in the Old Testament and a poor, anonymous woman in the Gospels have in common? They were both sinners. They were both in need of forgiveness. And they both knew it.

King David’s sin is as well-known as the woman’s sin in today’s Gospel reading is unknown. David, having witnessed the beauty of the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of David’s loyal warriors, arranged to have Uriah put on the front lines of battle, where he was killed. It was the darkest moment of David’s often magnificent and noble life, and the king finally confessed to the prophet Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” In the Psalm written after Nathan had confronted him about his murderous actions, the repentant David wrote, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. … Deliver me from bloodguilt, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance” (Psa. 51:10, 14). 

David’s life and sin were chronicled in great detail, by others and by himself. His remorse was expressed with poetic poignancy by his own pen. It is quite a contrast to the sinful woman who came to the house of the Pharisee where Jesus was invited to dine. Her name is not given, her sins are not described or listed, and if she uttered any words, they are not recorded. She may have been a prostitute; whatever the case, her sins were apparently public and well-known. 

These various facts and details are not of primary concern to Luke the Evangelist because he is intent on revealing Christ’s mercy, love, and power to forgive sins. “You perceive,” wrote St. Peter Chrysologus about this particular story, “that Christ came to the Pharisee’s table not to be filled with food for the body but to carry on the business of heaven while he was in the flesh.” 

A significant amount of this business of heaven was worked out within the earthly context of Jesus’ ongoing debates and confrontations with the Pharisees. The host, the Pharisee Simon, was concerned with judging—was Jesus a true prophet?—which is why Jesus asked him a question that required his judgment as a Pharisee, an interpreter of the Law. Simon, in judging rightly the answer to Jesus’ question, rendered judgment upon his own actions, or lack of actions. The problem was that Simon, like many of the Pharisees, was fixated on the letter of law, while failing to love the Giver of the law. 

Put another way, Simon had asked Jesus into his home in order to judge Jesus, while the sinful woman sought out Jesus in order to kiss and anoint his feet. The Pharisee wished to stand face to face with the Incarnate Word in stubborn wariness; the woman desired only to worship at his feet in a silent act of vulnerable love. She did not have to give verbal expression to her sorrow and repentance for her actions spoke louder than words. Her sins, Jesus said, were forgiven “because she has shown great love” and because of her faith: “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

We are not saved by faith alone but, as the Apostle Paul told the Galatians, who were being tempted to embrace a form of Pharisaism: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6). Faith, James emphasized, is dead without works—and those works are animated by charity and oriented toward God and neighbor (James 2:8-18). 

“To err human,” wrote Alexander Pope, “to forgive divine.” That is the essential message of today’s readings, which unflinchingly point out man’s sinful ways while rejoicing in God’s merciful ways. All of us—famous kings and unnamed women and everyone between—are sinners, and Christ died for us so that we, as Paul writes, can be crucified with Christ and thus truly live by faith and love.

(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the June 13, 2010, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.) 

Cardinal Sarah: In facing liturgical East, we experience "the primacy of God and of adoration"

Cardinal Robert Sarah celebrates Mass on January 12, 2011. (CNS photo/Paul Jeffrey)

Cardinal Sarah: In facing liturgical East, we experience "the primacy of God and of adoration" | Carl E. Olson | The Dispatch at Catholic World Report

In a recent interview with a French publication, the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, explains how God can put "back at the center" of the liturgy.

The most recent edition (June 3) of the French publication Famille Chrétienne has a lengthy interview with Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, part of which is available online (in French only). While touching on several topics, the focus of the interview is liturgy and worship. As usual, Cardinal Sarah is both eloquent and direct, qualities that will be familiar to those who have read God or Nothing (Ignatius Press, 2015), the Cardinal's autobiographical interview with French journalist Nicholas Diat. 

Asked how we, as Catholics, can put God "back at the center" of the liturgy, Cardinal Sarah emphasizes that the liturgy "is the door to our union with God. If Eucharistic celebrations turn into human self-celebrations, there is a great danger, because God disappears. We have to start by placing God back at the center of the liturgy. If the man is the center, the church becomes a merely human society, a simple NGO, as Pope Francis said." 

What is the remedy? Cardinal Sarah first emphasizes the necessity of "a true conversion of the heart." He then states: "Vatican II insisted on a major point: in this area, the important thing is not what we do, but what God does. No human work will ever be able to accomplish what is found at the heart of the Mass: the sacrifice of the cross." The liturgy, the Prefect notes, "allows us to go outside the walls of this world. Rediscovering the sacredness and beauty of the liturgy therefore requires a work of formation for the laity, the priests and the bishops. I am talking about an interior conversion." As he has done before, notably in a detailed reflection published earlier this year, Cardinal Sarah emphasizes the importance of silence: "In order to put God back at the center of the liturgy, silence is necessary too: the ability to be quiet so as to listen to God and his word. I maintain that we only meet God in silence and by pondering his word in the depths of our heart."

This insistence on conversion—which is "to turn toward God"—and contemplative silence leads to the recognition "that our bodies must participate in this conversion." And the best way to realize this bodily participation is by facing liturgical East (ad orientem) in worship:

The best way is certainly to celebrate with the priests and the faithful all turned in the same direction: towards the Lord who comes. It is not a matter of celebrating with one’s back to the faithful or facing them, as you sometimes hear. That is not where the problem lies. It is about turning together towards the apse, which symbolizes the East, where the cross of the risen Lord is enthroned. By this way of celebrating, we will experience, even in our bodies, the primacy of God and of adoration. We will understand that the liturgy is first of all our participation in the perfect sacrifice of the cross. I have experienced it personally; by celebrating in this way, the assembly, headed by the priest, is as though drawn in by the mystery of the Cross at the moment of the elevation.

Cardinal Sarah is asked if this way of celebrating is allowed. Yes, he responds, it is indeed "lawful and in keeping with the letter and the spirit of the Council." He notes that in a June 2015 article that he wrote for L’Osservatore Romano, "I proposed that the priests and the faithful turn toward the East at least during the Penitential Rite, during the singing of the Gloria, the Prayers of the Faithful and the Eucharistic Prayer." 

Naturally, Cardinal Sarah is asked about Vatican II and the "change in orientation of the altar". 

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

The Blessed Sacrament: It's either All or nothing

"Communion of the Apostles" by Fra Angelico (1440-41)

The Blessed Sacrament: It's either All or nothing | Carl E. Olson 

On the Readings for May 29, 2016, The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ

Readings:
• Gen 14:18-20
• Ps 110:1, 2, 3, 4
• 1 Cor 11:23-26
• Lk 9:11b-17

Shortly after my wife and I entered the Catholic Church in 1997, I had a conversation with an Evangelical friend that was as disconcerting as it was friendly. A.J., who I met in Bible college several years earlier, was curious about the Catholic doctrine that the Eucharist is the true Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. I say “curious” because A.J., unlike some of my other Protestant friends, was not really bothered or offended by this belief, merely puzzled. After much discussion, he said, “I don’t see what the big deal is. I believe that Communion is symbolic, and you believe it is more than a symbol. But, either way, we’re both Christians.”

His comment surprised me because it was readily evident to me—as it is to many Protestants—that the Catholic belief in the Eucharist (shared by Eastern Orthodox and Ancient Oriental Christians) is an “all or nothing” proposition. If the Eucharist is Jesus, it calls for a response of humble acceptance; if the Eucharist is not really Jesus, it is an idolatrous offense against God—worshipping bread and wine as though they are somehow divine.

On this feast day celebrating the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, the readings reveal, in different ways, the truthfulness of the ancient and consistent belief in the Eucharist. It is fitting that this great mystery has ancient roots in one of most mysterious of all biblical figures: the priest Melchizedek, who makes just one historical appearance in the Scriptures (Gen. 14:18-20), is mentioned once more in the Old Testament (Ps. 110:4), and then reappears in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Having just left the battlefield, Abram encountered the “king of Salem”, who was also a “priest of God Most High.” Melchizedek brought bread and wine to Abram and blessed the patriarch, and Abram responded with a tithe. Both actions indicated Melchizedek’s superior position, as noted in the letter to the Hebrews (Heb 7:1-7). It is the first time a priest is mentioned in the Scriptures, several centuries before the Hebrews had a priesthood.

“The Christian tradition,” the Catechism states, “considers Melchizedek, ‘priest of God Most High,’ as a prefiguration of the priesthood of Christ, the unique ‘high priest after the order of Melchizedek’” (CCC 1544, 1333). Christ’s priesthood is superior to the Aaronic priesthood. Because He is the Son of God and is God Himself (the argument of Hebrews 1), His priesthood is validated by His eternal nature and His infinite being (Heb. 7:16, 24ff). Melchizedek’s importance lies in his loyalty to God Most High, the purity of his intentions, and his sacrifice of bread and wine.  He represents a time when the priesthood was part of the natural order of family structure. By establishing the New and universal covenant through His death and resurrection, Jesus Christ formed a new and everlasting family of God, bound not by ethnicity, but by grace and the Holy Spirit.

And because Jesus is God, He is able to give the household of God His Body and Blood for the nourishment of soul and body, and for the forgiveness of sins. By providing this Eucharistic banquet, a foretaste of the Kingdom of God, He fulfills the promise of a worldwide family of God foreshadowed in the person of the king-priest Melchizedek. The feeding of the five thousand, described in today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, anticipates and represents the sacrament of the Eucharist, as Christ miraculously feeds—with the assisting hands and efforts of His priests, the Apostles—those who hunger to hear His words.

If the bread and wine remained unchanged, Christ would be, at best, equal to Melchizedek. But the King of Kings said, “This is my body that is for you”, and the High Priest declared, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The Eucharist is Jesus Christ. That is the great truth we humbly celebrate today—and every day we receive the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the June 10, 2007, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)

Biblical preaching and healing the culture

"The Ascension" (1305) by Giotto [WikiArt.org]

By George Weigel | The Dispatch at CWR

At the root of today’s culture of happy-go-lucky hedonism, which inevitably leads to debonair nihilism, is a profound deprecation of the human.

If Catholics in the United States are going to be healers of our wounded culture, we’re going to have to learn to see the world through lenses ground by biblical faith. That form of depth perception only comes from an immersion in the Bible itself. So spending ten or fifteen minutes a day with the word of God is a must for the evangelical Catholic of the twenty-first century.

Biblical preaching that breaks open the text so that we can see the world, and ourselves, aright is another 21st-century Catholic imperative.

There is far too little biblically-based catechetical preaching, at which the Fathers of the Church in the first millennium excelled, today. The Church still learns from their ancient homilies in the Liturgy of the Hours, but the kind of expository preaching the Fathers did is rarely heard at either Sunday or weekday Masses. It must be, though, if the Church’s people are to be equipped to convert and heal contemporary culture. For the first step in that healing process is to penetrate the fog, see ourselves for who we are, and understand our situation for what it is.

How might biblical preaching help us do that?

Take the recent Solemnity of the Ascension as an example. The essential truth of the Ascension is that it marked the moment in salvation history at which humanity – glorified humanity, to be sure, but humanity nonetheless – was incorporated into the thrice-holy God. The God of the Bible is God-with-us, Emmanuel. But, with the Ascension and Christ’s glorification “at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:3), humanity is “with God.” If the Incarnation, Christ’s coming in the flesh, teaches us that God is not distant from us, and if the Passion teaches us that God is “with us” even in suffering and death, then the Ascension teaches us that one like us is now “with God,” and indeed in God. Which means that humanity is capable of being sanctified, even divinized.

Eastern Christian theology calls this theosis, “divinization,” and it’s a hard concept for many western Christians to grasp. Yet here is what St. Basil the Great, one of the Cappadocian Fathers of the Church, teaches about the sending of the Holy Spirit, promised in Acts 1:8 at the Ascension: “Through the Spirit we acquire a likeness to God; indeed we attain what is beyond our most sublime aspirations – we become God.” What can that possibly mean?

Continue reading at www.CatholicWorldReport.com.

The Image of Man Has Been Raised Up: On the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord

"The Ascension" (1305) by Giotto [WikiArt.org]

by Carl E. Olson 

"You ascended into glory, O Christ our God, and You delighted the disciples with the promise of the Holy Spirit. Through this blessing, they were assured that You are the Son of God, the Redeemer of the World."
—Troparion for the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Feast of the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ 

"Christ's Ascension is therefore not a spectacle for the disciples but an event into which they themselves are included. It is a sursum corda, a movement toward the above into which we are all called. It tells us that man can live toward the above, that he is capable of attaining heights. More: the altitude that alone is suited to the dimensions of being human is the altitude of God himself. Man can live at this height, and only from this height do we properly understand him. The image of man has been raised up, but we have the freedom to tear it down or to let ourselves be raised." 
— Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, from Images of Hope: Meditations On Major Feasts (Ignatius Press, 2006) 

Readings: 
• Acts 1:1-11
• Psa. 47:2-3, 6-7, 8-9
• Eph. 1:17-23 or Heb. 9:24-28; 10:19-23
• Lk 24:46-53

"As he blessed them he parted from them and was taken up to heaven." (Lk 24:51)

With these simple, matter-of-fact words, Luke describes the Ascension of Jesus, expressed even more concisely in the Creed: "He ascended into heaven." This event is so important for Luke that the Acts of the Apostles opens with a description of the same event. As the disciples looked on, Luke records, Jesus "was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight" (Acts 1:9). Mark's account, heard today, is equally direct and succinct: "So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God" (Mk. 16:19).

This dramatic moment has been celebrated in the Church on the fortieth day after Easter since the earliest centuries. Some of the Church Fathers, including Augustine, said that the feast had been observed since the time of the apostles, although the earliest evidence of its celebration dates to the fifth century. In the Latin Rite in the United States the Feast of the Ascension is one of six solemnities, the others being the solemnities of Mary, Mother of God (January 1); the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (August 15); All Saints (November 1), the Immaculate Conception (December 8), and the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ (December 25). 

Despite being a solemnity and a holy day of obligation, the Feast of the Ascension is sometimes completely overlooked or not given much attention. Ask Catholics what is the significance of the Feast and answers aren't always immediate. The rather mysterious nature of the Feast is heightened in some ecclesiastical provinces by its transference from the sixth Thursday of Easter to the following Sunday. In a way, the Solemnity bears a resemblance to the sacrament of Confirmation, the exact meaning of which is not always understood well and suffers for not being more clearly explained and comprehended. 

This occasional murkiness is unfortunate because the Ascension is such a joyful event in the work and life of Jesus Christ, as well as being a vital reality in the ongoing life and mission of the Church. To appreciate this joy and vitality we should keep in mind what the Catechism of the Catholic Church states about the liturgical calendar: The Church, "in the course of the year, . . . unfolds the whole mystery of Christ from his Incarnation and Nativity through his Ascension, to Pentecost and the expectation of the blessed hope of the coming of the Lord" (CCC, 1194).

Hinted at here are revealing parallels between the Incarnation and the Ascension and between the Nativity and Pentecost. In the Incarnation the eternal Son of God took on human nature in order to save mankind. By the power of the Holy Spirit, divinity and humanity were united in one Person; the Word became flesh (Jn 1:14) and lowered Himself to the level of dust and death. The Nativity is the physical, outward revelation of this reality: the Christ Child is born and history and the world are never the same.

At the Ascension the crucified, risen Son of God returns to His Father. Having descended to dusty earth, He now returns to heavenly glory. Having conquered death, He ascends to eternal life. But He returns to the right hand of the Father not just as the Word, but as the Incarnate Word. The doors of heaven are now open and humanity can now approach the throne room of God, the way having been paved by the life, death, and resurrection of the God-man. Pentecost, finally, is the manifestation of the God-man's Church, which is both human and divine. The Church was revealed to the world on that day—fifty days after Easter—by the power of the Holy Spirit.

All of this theology is nice enough, but what does it mean for us? It means the Feast of the Ascension is a celebration of salvation won. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that "in the Eastern Church this feast was known as analepsis, the taking up, and also as the episozomene, the salvation, denoting that by ascending into His glory Christ completed the work of our redemption." The tendency is often to think of the Resurrection as the culmination of Jesus' salvific work, but it is the Ascension that places the final stamp of approval on the sacrificial and victorious work of our Savior. This is beautifully expressed in the first chapter of Paul's epistle to the Ephesians:

May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe, in accord with the exercise of his great might: which he worked in Christ, raising him from the dead and seating him at his right hand in the heavens ... (Eph. 1:17-20).

Now that the Incarnate Son of God has ascended into heaven and sits in the throne room of God, mankind can follow. United to the Son through baptism and deepening communion with Him through reception of the Holy Eucharist and the other sacraments, the hope of heaven is ours. 

"The ascension of Christ is our elevation," declared Leo the Great in a sermon on the Ascension, "Hope for the body is also invited where the glory of the Head preceded us. Let us exult, dearly beloved, with worthy joy and be glad with a holy thanksgiving. Today we not only are established as possessors of paradise, but we have even penetrated the heights of the heavens in Christ." Where the sin of the first Adam closed the gates of Paradise, the righteousness of the new Adam has opened them wide. 

Jesus promised His disciples that He would prepare a place for them (Jn. 14). Because of the Ascension, we know He has prepared a place for those who are His. Because of the Ascension, we have the hope of His return and of our future passage into glory. "The Ascension, then," Pope John Paul II explained in May 2000, "is a Trinitarian epiphany which indicates the goal to which personal and universal history is hastening. Even if our mortal body dissolves into the dust of the earth, our whole redeemed self is directed on high to God, following Christ as our guide."

Our Guide has come, died, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. Let us celebrate the Feast!

(This article was originally published in 2004 in Our Sunday Visitor in a slightly different form.)