Notes from a Catholic marriage
I was recently out at the New England campus of Thomas Aquinas College, where I gave a lecture on the patriarch Abraham. It was a blessing to see the little pioneer community in their cavernous campus, planting a 50-year-old tradition on new soil. The lecture is available here:
https://www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/shaping-vessel-mercy-life-abraham
Here’s a funny coincidence: my father was out there a couple of years ago, and he lectured on Abraham Lincoln!
Questions from a man in the trenches, with answers from yours truly:
When we read a biblical passage, what is the criteria for determining when the biblical author is making an assertion; and when the author is expressing his opinion, or making an assumption? The same question would relate to the Church Fathers scientific and historical knowledge of their day, compared with the scientific and historical knowledge of our day.
The initial problem here is that most of us are unaware of the intricacies of our own speech. We think there is a simple on/off between assertion and non-assertion, and we think it is fairly clear which is which, so we want to know what are the two or three criteria one would need to detect the on/off in Scripture. Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent is helpful for beginning to explore how many subtle distinctions there are within our own experience of thinking and claiming. Add in the further complications of multiple genres of text and distance in time and culture, and you can imagine that a list of criteria for determining when Scripture is or is not asserting could go on more or less indefinitely. How many ways are there for a human being to signal his intent linguistically? It would be like trying to make an exhaustive list of criteria for determining whether an individual from any given contemporary culture is serious or telling a joke.
Continue reading “The Bible: inerrancy, inspiration, etc.”Last night I gave a lecture to interested students about why we should obey authorities. As I have listened to people and watched the Internet over the years, I have had the impression that most people in fact do not believe we have any obligation to obey authorities, so decided to enrich our local conversation with another viewpoint. Download here or listen here:
The lecture was followed by a lively Q&A. Download here or listen here:
On the Feast of the Annunciation, Kyle Washut, Kent Lasnoski, and I had a round-table talk about the most famous treatment of the Annuncation, namely Bernard of Clairvaux’s Missus Est. Although we mostly stayed with the themes Bernard raises, we went on some fruitful tangents as well. All in all, I thought it was a great way to celebrate the day!
Here’s the video:
You can download an audio-only file by clicking here, or you can listen via this embedded player:
Aleitia.org recently published an excellent article on how lectors are often given bad advice. When lectors receive any training at all, which is rare enough, their preparation is borrowed from the many books on public speaking: Make eye contact, make a personal connection with the audience, etc. But the reality is that lectoring is not in the category of public speaking at all. It is public reading.
The point is well taken, and raises a question: How did we reach a point where people not only lector badly, but can’t even identify what category of action “lectoring” would go in?
Here’s my suggestion: We reached this point because “public reading” is no longer a thing. People do not read out loud to each other anymore. To read at Mass is not mere public reading, of course. It is a sacral action. So one might say that we have not only lost the “species,” i.e., sacred public reading, but we have even lost the “genus,” i.e., public reading itself.
Much of what needs to happen to fix lectoring needs to come from those in authority. But for a lasting difference, the deepest solutions to our problems rarely come from the top down. While we wait for priests or bishops to establish and enforce good practices, we need to take humbler steps at home: we need to read out loud to each other. To our kids, to our spouses, to our friends. Reading out loud in the home needs to become a thing again, a normal pastime.
For both inspiration and realistic, nitty gritty advice, I highly recommend the Read-Aloud Revival blog by Sarah McKenzie. Her book is superb as well. It can take as little as a few minutes once per week to sow the humble seeds of a future liturgical blessing.
On the Solemnity of All Saints, we stop to remember that salvation is not something that belongs primarily to me or to you. Salvation belongs to the Heavenly Jerusalem, to the City of God, and we are saved by joining that august community. Even though my friendship with Jesus is closer than any other, still my union with him is union in his body. Consequently, the Solemnity of All Saints resists being a merely private affair.
This is one reason why I love our yearly public procession. Students, faculty, and staff of Wyoming Catholic College gather downtown and parade through Main Street and up to the parish church with the Eucharist in the lead. We sing songs and walk, old and young, big and little. Continue reading “All Saints: A Public Feast”
Over the past few months, I have been using thinklikeaquinas.com to post content for my undergraduate theology students. So far we have been working our way through Aquinas’s Compendium of Theology, and I have posted short introductions to the chapters.
Our past two classes have been devoted to particular themes in the Gospel of John. Today, I posted a half-hour lecture offering a general introduction to John’s Gospel, together with a .pdf of my outline of how I think the text is organized. Some of you may be interested, so I thought I’d link to it from this, my main blog:
One and Triune God
Some friends and I have begun a series of conversations about Charles Taylors’ enormous book, A Secular Age. Taylor first defines “secularity” in terms of the “conditions of belief,” that is, what made it hard not to believe in God 400 years ago as compared to what makes it hard to believe in God today. He begins by describing the pre-modern consciousness and contrasting it with the modern consciousness, and then spends about 600 pages (practically a page per year) narrating the change from one to the other. Continue reading “A first look at Charles Taylor”
As the crisis surrounding Cardinal McCarrick and the Vigano letters unfolds, I have not said much. For the most part, my thoughts have already been put out there by others, and to be honest, I’m too tired most of the time to write something fresh. But as I see more evidence that Catholics in the trenches are feeling their faith shudder under the impact of cascading revelations of corruption among Church officials, I think it might be good to review just a couple of basic points of Catholic belief.
Now, let’s be clear: I think the crisis is big. In fact, I am personally inclined to think that a tremendous punishment is looming over the Church, and I am inclined to think that the current crisis is the tip of that punishment. Preparation for next week’s classes required that I re-read the account of Sodom and Gomorrah, and I felt chills run up and down my spine. But still and all, we have to keep our heads. So, two basic points:
1. The validity of a sacrament does not depend on the personal holiness of the priest.
This was hammered out in the Donatist crisis way back in the time of St. Augustine. Jesus has given us the sacraments as channels of grace, and he was not so stupid as to make the efficacy of the sacrament depend on whether the priest is in a state of grace or not. If the sacrament of Baptism depended on the priest’s personal state of grace, for example, then no one could be sure of being baptized. You just can’t know from outward appearances whether a priest is in a state of grace–as we are re-discovering in a rather dramatic fashion.
So even when Cardinal McCarrick was abusing seminarians and doing whatever horrid things he did, the sacraments he celebrated were real sacraments. He himself increased his own guilt by celebrating them, but the people who received the Eucharist from him really did receive the body and blood of Jesus. (I received the Eucharist from McCarrick, so this is not an abstract statement for me.)
2. The pope’s teaching authority does not depend on his personal holiness.
Whatever you think of Pope Francis, to the degree that he engages his papal office, to that degree his teachings have authority. There have been some truly stinky popes in history who nonetheless left us authoritative teachings. Jesus was not so stupid as to make the authority of the Magisterium depend on the state of grace of the bishops.
So yes, Pope Francis has taught some things with real authority. As annoying as it is that Cupich seemed to rank environmental concerns over care for abuse victims, still and all, Pope Francis’s statements about the environment mostly continue and confirm statements made by the two previous popes. The fact that Pope Francis devoted an encyclical to the issue gives real magisterial clout to the Church’s position on the environment.
Surprisingly, Pope Francis has not engaged his authority to any great degree on a lot of divisive issues. Amoris Laetitia has a low rank among magisterial documents, and is easily overshadowed by previous documents. Even the change to the Catechism on the death penalty is a low-level intervention, technically speaking. In theory, Pope Francis could have issued a papal bull with “I define, declare, and decree” and so on and so forth on any issue he wanted, so it is remarkable how little he has actually engaged his authority in this stormy pontificate.
Amidst the real calamity, let’s keep our heads. The crisis does not trace back to Pope Francis: Our Lady of Fatima was warning people to do penance for sexual impurity way back in the nineteen teens. And Jesus knew these kinds of times were coming. Worse times are probably still to come. But let’s keep on frequenting the sacraments and reverencing the authority of the Magisterium. Just because the world has gone crazy doesn’t mean you have to.
Holy Saturday has always been for me a day of subdued joy. It is not yet the day of resurrection, but we are past the time of agony; the contest has been decided, but the victor not yet announced.
The Christian’s life is one of following Christ’s pattern. Even though he was the Son of God in person, he took on himself weakness and weariness, a life of loneliness and wandering; even though we are baptized into the Trinity and have become adopted children of God, freed from the sin of our parents, we live this life in frailty and sorrow. Christ died as a sacrifice for the world’s sins, and then rose in triumph over death; we will all die in union with him, offering ourselves to God, and on the last day we will rise in the likeness of his risen glory.
But between our bodily death and the day of judgment, we will live in Holy Saturday. The world will be unaware of our victory in Christ. Our agony will be over, the time of weakness and loneliness gone, but our triumph will not yet be apparent.
Easter is when we pre-live the end of the all things. This may be one reason why so many people feel more emotion at Christmas time, which has become wrapped up with family and gifts and wreathes and trees and on and on: Christmas is more in this world, because recalls the entering of God into this our vail of tears, and it brings us the solace of Christ here with us now. Easter is more glorious in itself, and of course it commemorates something that has already happened, but Easter is more about the future. Right now we are alive in the spirit, but still dead in the flesh, as Christ was during his earthly life. Of course the risen Christ is brings the resurrection of our souls, but the fact is that our ultimate conformity to the risen Christ will come on a day whose glory we cannot yet comprehend, with a joy we cannot yet comprehend.
Today, we contemplate the end of everything familiar to us and the expectation of unimaginable glory. It is not quite sad, but not yet the exhilaration that awaits us—a few hours from now.