New Song - Page 20 of 49 - Notes from a Catholic marriage

St. Aaron

July 1

The commemoration of Saint Aaron, of the tribe of Levi, who was anointed by his brother Moses with holy oil as a priest of the Old Testament and was buried on Mount Hor.

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May Holy Mary and all the saints intercede to the Lord for us, that we may merit to be helped and saved by him who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

V. Precious in the sight of the Lord

R. Is the death of his holy ones.

V. May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life. And may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in pace.

R. Amen

[To learn about praying this and other Martyrology entries, see this page.]

The solemnity of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul. Simon, John’s son and Andrew’s brother, was the first among the disciples to confess the Christ, the Son of the living God, by whom he was called Peter. Paul, the Apostle to the gentiles, preached Christ crucified to Jews and Greeks. Both, out of love for and faith in Jesus Christ, announced the gospel in the city of Rome and died as martyrs under the emperor Nero. The first, according to tradition, was fastened to a cross upside down and buried in the Vatican along the via Triumphali, while the other faced a sword and was buried along the via Ostiensi. Today the whole world celebrates their triumph with equal honor and veneration.

***

May Holy Mary and all the saints intercede to the Lord for us, that we may merit to be helped and saved by him who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

V. Precious in the sight of the Lord

R. Is the death of his holy ones.

V. May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life. And may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in pace.

R. Amen

[To learn about praying this and other Martyrology entries, see this page.]

Missed some really neat saints

In the general craziness of the month, I missed a couple of truly marvelous biblical saints:

June 14

In Samaria or Sabaste in Palestine, the commemoration of Saint Elisha who, a disciple of Elijah, was a prophet in Israel from the time of King Joram to the days of Joash; although he did not leave behind any oracles, nonetheless, by working miracles for those in need he announced the coming salvation to all men.

June 15

The commemoration of Saint Amos, prophet, a herdsman of Tekoa and a dresser of sycamores whom the Lord sent to the sons of Israel, that he might vindicate the Lord’s justice and holiness against their lies.

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These liturgical commemorations keep reminding me that we do not read the biblical authors as long-dead but as members of that “cloud of witnesses” cheering us on.

Argumentum ex umbris verborum

Over at Rorate Coeli, folks seemed to know what they thought of Pope Francis’s new encyclical the moment it came out. All they had to do was pump the encyclical through a word cloud generator and shazam! The truth was out:

They add this little note: “Word Cloud of the Encyclical: Not exactly, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30)” The biggest word in the whole cloud is “human”–and notice the little arrow they put in, pointing to the tiny word “Jesus”? Cute!

Now that we have the master method for determining the catholicity of papal encyclicals, I wonder what would happen if we generated a word cloud for some old classic? Let’s try Libertas praestantissimum, by Leo XIII:

Shoot. The biggest word is “liberty”–and Jesus doesn’t even appear in the cloud! And did you notice that “reason” has huge letters, while “faith” is nowhere to be seen? Now that we know the secret to judging magisterial documents, we may need to re-write the history of doctrine….

[A tip of the hat to Peter Kwasniewski, who both found the Rorate link and created the Libertas word cloud.]

A secret for reading Laudato Si

Over at Patheos, my good friend Joseph Susanka maintains a blog that people actually read. So it was an honor when he posted (with permission) some words of mine about reading the Pope’s new encyclical, Laudato Si. Feeling in a strange way at one remove from myself, I quote my own words from Joseph’s blog:

I am in the middle of reading the encyclical myself, so I can’t offer you anything detailed yet, but one thought weighs on me as I read.

Everyone who finds the encyclical troubling should start by listing the “I like it” elements and the “This bothers me” elements. Then he should do one more thing: write down at least ONE element in the encyclical that genuinely challenges him, that is, one way in which he feels this encyclical may change his mind on something he has thought for a long time.

The Spirit leads the Church through weak human beings, and yet we have to be on the lookout for God in the midst of it all. As Fulton Sheen once remarked, Jesus Christ rode into Jerusalem on an ass. If we don’t make a real effort to find ONE element in an encyclical that changes our attitude or conviction, then we have failed as readers.

Maybe a Catholic makes a real effort and can’t find it. If the effort was real, that’s not a failure: God asks for our ears, not for our accomplishments. But I would be surprised–shocked, even–if most readers could not find at least ONE element in this present document that falls neither in the “I like” or the “I don’t like” columns, but in the column titled, “This hurts in a good way.”

Going to heaven with the Eucharist

Austin Kleon, creativity guru, has this advice for literary types: “Don’t try to write a book while taking care of a newborn baby.” That, of course, is exactly what I have been doing, and the blog has suffered accordingly.

Happily, sometimes a friend steps in to do my work for me. Peter Kwasniewski took some e-mails I wrote to him years ago and reshaped them into the first half of an article on the Eucharist; he sent a draft to me and I made some edits, drafted a new introduction, and ta-da! A new publication.

My own advice for literary types: Always include at least one over-achiever in your circle of advisors.

The objective objection

My previous Kasper post was devoted to his argument based on spiritual communion. Because the Church has said that the divorced and remarried can make a spiritual communion at Mass, Kasper said:

For the one who receives spiritual communion is one with Jesus Christ. How can he or she then be in contradiction to Christ’s commandment? Why, then, can’t he or she also receive sacramental communion?

Last time I focused on the nature of a “spiritual communion”. This time I want to look at the second half, where Kasper asks how, if these people are in union with Jesus, can they be in contradiction to Christ’s commandment? Part of the answer is in my last post, where I pointed out that being allowed to make a spiritual communion does not imply that one is in a state of grace. For the rest of the answer, let’s take a look at the language the Church has used on this issue. I’ll put the key phrases in bold print.

In 1981, the bishops of the world had a synod at which they talked about the family and the question was raised: can the divorced and remarried receive communion? The bishops said no, they can’t, and John Paul reported on their conclusion in his post-synodal exhortation Familiaris Consortio:

However, the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried. They are unable to be admitted thereto from the fact that their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist.

In 1994, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Ratzinger, was compelled to answer proposals for allowing the divorced and remarried to receive communion. Just before quoting the Familiaris Consortio passage given above, the CDF’s letter says: “If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Holy Communion as long as this situation persists.”

In 2007, a synod of bishops was held on the Eucharist, and again they discussed whether the divorced and remarried can receive communion, and they again said no. Pope Benedict XVI reported their conclusion in his post-synodal exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis:

The Synod of Bishops confirmed the Church’s practice, based on Sacred Scripture (cf. Mk 10:2- 12), of not admitting the divorced and remarried to the sacraments, since their state and their condition of life objectively contradict the loving union of Christ and the Church signified and made present in the Eucharist.

There are two things to note about the Church’s choice of words. First, the exclusion from communion is based on an objective condition, not on a subjective state of sin or grace. The Church knows well that people who do what are objectively mortal sins are not always subjectively guilty of mortal sin. People might not understand what they do, or they might act under some kind of partial coercion–lots of factors can affect a subjective state. So when the Church excludes DivRem’s from communion, she is not making a blanket statement that everyone who has been divorced and remarried is in a subjective state of mortal sin. The exclusion is based on the easily accessible and objective fact of being divorced and remarried.

Second, we have to notice that this is an objective condition, not a one-time event. Someone could steal or murder or lie or commit some other objectively very bad deed, and yet they get up the next day and they are not stealing or murdering or lying or whatever. It was a deed, not a condition. But if someone went down to the parish and told them to erase his name from the registry because he had rejected the Church, that would be an ongoing condition: he not only did something one day, but as a result he is now in a condition of exclusion from the Church and from communion. He may not even be subjectively guilty for his actions–maybe he was badly catechized and badly treated by a priest and so on–but he still cannot receive communion because of his objective, ongoing condition.

To wrap up, we find two major holes in Kasper’s argument. He says that spiritual communion implies being one with Jesus, which means one cannot be in opposition to his commandment. But we find that spiritual communion does not imply being one with Jesus, and we find that being spiritually one with Jesus is compatible (in some cases) with being in a condition objectively opposed to his commandment. Kasper has not actually addressed what the Church has said on this issue.

But he’s not done. Stay tuned.

St. Barnabas

June 11

The memorial of Saint Barnabas, Apostle, who, being a good man and full of the Holy Spirit and of faith, and numbered among the first believers in Jerusalem, preached the gospel at Antioch and introduced the newly converted Paul of Tarsus into the number of the brothers and accompanied him on his first journey to evangelize Asia Minor; later, he was present at the Council of Jerusalem and, having returned to his fatherland, the island of Cyprus, he spread the Gospel.

***

May Holy Mary and all the saints intercede to the Lord for us, that we may merit to be helped and saved by him who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

V. Precious in the sight of the Lord

R. Is the death of his holy ones.

V. May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life. And may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in pace.

R. Amen

[To learn about praying this and other Martyrology entries, see this page.]

Spiritual communion for the divorced and remarried

At long last, we get down to the “Kasper proposal,” which has increasingly stood out in my mind as the real gravitational center of this entire book. Kasper opens by pointing to something the Church has already said:

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith provided a guideline already in 1994 when it declared—and Benedict XVI reiterated it at the World Meeting of Families in Milan in 2012—that the divorced and remarried admittedly cannot receive sacramental communion, but can indeed receive spiritual communion.

The CDF document mentioned here was a letter addressing an earlier incarnation of the Kasper proposal and rejecting it. We’ll return to that letter in the next post. Kasper continues by arguing that this suggestion is not only insufficient but self-contradictory:

Many will be grateful for this statement. But it also raises questions. For the one who receives spiritual communion is one with Jesus Christ. How can he or she then be in contradiction to Christ’s commandment? Why, then, can’t he or she also receive sacramental communion?

Within the same paragraph Kasper quickly runs on to new arguments, but let’s stop and consider this first salvo sentence by sentence. His first claim is that “the one who receives spiritual communion is one with Jesus Christ.” Stated this way, without qualification, his claim is false.

The reason has to do with what “spiritual communion” means. A “spiritual communion” is a serious and formal desire to receive the sacrament of communion when sacramental reception is unavailable or illicit. If the one person making this act of desire is rightly disposed, God can grant the effects of the sacrament. It is like a “baptism by desire,” only with the Eucharist.

If someone in mortal sin were to make a formal act of desire for the Eucharist, he would not receive the effects of the sacrament any more than someone in mortal sin receiving the sacrament itself would receive the effects of the sacrament. It is simply not true that anyone who makes this act of “spiritual communion” is in union with Jesus Christ, any more than it is true that anyone who saunters through the communion line is in a spiritual union with Jesus Christ.

However, sacramental communion and spiritual communion are different in an important way: in the sacrament of the Eucharist, the body and blood of Jesus is an objective reality in the recipient, regardless of whether the one receiving the sacrament is well or badly disposed to receive it. In spiritual communion Jesus is not present in the recipient unless the person is well disposed, and even then he is only present interiorly and invisibly.

Consequently, to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist in mortal sin is a bad thing, both because it treats Christ’s body and blood disrespectfully and because it falsely signifies to others that the believer is in spiritual union with Christ. But making a spiritual communion while in mortal sin is a good thing: not only is there no false outward sign of unity, but making an act of desire for the Eucharist is a good first step toward getting out of mortal sin and back into to union with Christ. So reception of the sacrament in mortal sin makes for more sin, but spiritual communion while in mortal sin disposes one to less sin.

There we have one hole in Kasper’s argument. Next time, we’ll look at the next sentence.

Methinks the Cardinal doth protest too much

After a long hiatus, the blog is back. If you thought I was dead, I hope you have been praying for my soul.

Cardinal Kasper turns his attention to a second situation, namely those who really had valid, sacramental marriages and yet by some tragic circumstance their life partnership is broken and one or both have contracted a second, civil marriage. He begins by warning:

It would be mistaken to seek the resolution of the problem in a generous expansion of the annulment process. The disastrous impression would thereby be created that the Church is proceeding in a dishonest way by granting what, in reality, are divorces.

This is surely right, although I would be hard pressed to find another description of Kasper’s approach to this point as something other than a “generous expansion of the annulment process.” He has suggested that we strip away the judicial process and entrust the whole thing to an individual who knows the people well and will be sympathetic; he offers no account of how this will result in anything but more annulments.

It reminds me of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who had a habit of penning the most outrageous theological statements and then appending, “but not in a heretical sense, of course”—leaving his unhappy reader to figure it out. And I know a fellow whose trademark conversational tick is to preface all his potentially upsetting remarks by denying he means to do what he is doing: “I don’t mean this at all to criticize anyone,” but you’re all doing a lousy job; “I don’t mean this at all to disparage what was done before me,” but it nearly wrecked the place.

Already I find it hard to believe Kasper’s protestations of caution. But as we get further into his text, it will get even harder to believe in his sincerity.