Pope: Joseph is the just man, faithful to God's law

Five Years of "Ad Orientem" - Vultus Christi

I've seen a couple references to this posting. I can only say that I share Father's experience. He articulates it well. I hope other priests and bishops would  be able to have this same wonderful experience and share it with the worshiping community.

Five Years of "Ad Orientem" - Vultus Christi

Light of the World

I just finished reading Light of the World, Peter Seewald's new book interview of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. I liked it very much and found it easy to read. It would be my hope that many people from all walks of life would read it. It is already available on Kindle.

There are three things which I take away from the book: 1) reassurance about my own understanding of the Church's moral message and of my understanding of the Holy Father's liturgical priorities; 2) admiration for Peter Seewald, who knows how to ask good questions: 3) knowledge of an address/location I can point to and direct folks who still are playing strange with this great Pope of ours.

Light of the World cannot be mined like the Catechism for answers on all sorts of topics. Nonetheless the book has authority and could very well busy a book club or a continuing education group of priests for almost as many sessions as the book has chapters. Very simply, I would double-dog dare anyone to pitch the facile news commentary which for the most part detracts from the truth of this little book and read the thing. The Holy Father's frankness/openness or simplicity is so engaging, I think it would probably "crack some of the tougher nuts" out there if they'd just read it.

The light of truth changes the world, not ideologies

Strength in Patience and Calm

Joy and Renewal

          I’ve just been doing some ruminating over two men’s approach to what I think is part of our present Holy Father’s effort to see to it that the Church is for our day and time the “light on the lamp stand” or the “city on a mountain top” which cannot be hidden. I’m reflecting on the contribution or insights offered by Fr. Barron (Word on Fire) in a video focusing on Pope Benedict XVI as a “Witness to God”; I’m puzzling over Michael Voris (The Vortex) and his recent video on the Holy Father’s leadership in reform efforts, which Fr. Z. has dangled out there for comments (94 when I last looked).

Fr. Barron rightly insists on the Holy Father’s conscious efforts to bring God home again to Western culture or civil discourse. Michael Voris paints an almost dantesque “inferno” of present day church life where the present Pope’s contribution is positive but only cumulative to a long-term project, similar to that of his predecessors (not too much short of a millennium ago), who preached the crusades for the recovery of the Holy Land.

          I think if you asked them, these two men would tell you that although both take the Pope as the anchor for their video contributions, they are addressing fundamentally different issues. In terms of my own issues and thoughts, I can’t fully identify with either man’s approach and I guess I’m just grateful that it is Gaudete Sunday.

In response to a child’s question of the 1950’s about why the color change in the Advent candle for the 3^rd Week and why on this Sunday and on Laetare Sunday in Lent Father wore (and can still wear) vestments not only of a lighter violet color but of something closer to pink, which Sister was quick to specify was really another color called “old rose”, the impression was given that this Sunday was meant to give relief, by “lightening up” what should otherwise be a serious season…

Gaudete in Domino semper…No disrespect for Sister’s down to earth explanations intended, let me offer a slightly different slant to this Sunday’s message and hopefully provide a word of encouragement for those who remain stunned by “The Vortex” and have no particular opinion on whether or not one of Florence, Italy’s finest, Savonarola, shouldn’t be rehabilitated and canonized for having told it like it is to a Church which in its leadership rejected him and his message.

          Today’s Communion Antiphon reads: “Say to the anxious: be strong and fear not, our God will come to save us.” Preachers often pick up on other images from the readings for today, but the central message quoted from the Prophet Isaiah (35:1-6, 10) in the 1^st Reading for Year A is: “Look your God is coming, vengeance is coming, the retribution of God; he is coming to save you.” Our Gaudete is less the breather in the midst of earnestness and more the focus on the reason for our hope and namely the assurance that “…our God will come to save us”.

          For me, the 2^nd Reading for Year A taken from St. James (5:7-10) not only contextualizes this our Advent expectation but articulates the real reason for our joy, cloaked in “old rose” or no. No doubt St. John the Baptist from prison (today’s Gospel, Matt. 11:2-11) could find himself in this passage from St. James as well and sort out any questions he might have had about the One Who was to come after him:

“Be patient, brothers, until the Lord’s coming. Think of a farmer: how patiently he waits for the precious fruit of the ground until it has had the autumn rains and the spring rains! You too have to be patient; do not lose heart, because the Lord’s coming will be soon. Do not make complaints against one another, brothers, so as not to be brought to judgment yourselves; the Judge is already to be seen waiting at the gates. For your example, brothers, in submitting with patience, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.”

The key words which I have for my readers and for my two video presenters as they yearn to see the light of the Gospel shine forth for all to see are these: “…the Judge is already to be seen waiting at the gates.”

          I/we of the Faith always have reason to rejoice, yes, semper! My God is mighty in power; He comes to rule the earth. As St. Peter walking on the water could have kicked himself after the fact for allowing himself to be startled, yes petrified, by the wind and the waves, so there is no room in “old rose” for all those who discount the greatness of our God (the Judge is already to be seen waiting at the gates). Judgment, the last word is His and not ours by our complaints or judgments. Savonarola and his vigilantes/sympathizers could have better or would have better taken St. James at his word, which is God’s Word.

          The Crusades may not represent the apex of Catholic life, truly alive and asserting itself, but when one looks at the efficacy of preachers like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, or better, when one looks at the whole hearted and universal response to the call to take up the Crusader’s cross and repent of sin, which he and others addressed to a very compromised Church in that day, there is every reason to hope for a new time of conversion within the Church and society, a new renaissance in the best sense of the word:

“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

the ears of the deaf unsealed,

then the lame shall leap like a deer

and the tongues of the dumb sing for joy.”

The anxious or faint hearts are what they are, but our hope and our joy rests less in seeing sleeves rolled up, in the dawning of a new “by our bootstraps” reform movement, than in the joy which is ours in the Lord Who comes. That is not the “quietist” speaking, but the same St. James who tells us for God that faith without good works is dead. Read the 2^nd Reading again!

Properantes adventum diei Dei

Clothed With The Sun

Our Lady of Guadalupe – 2010

          Our Lady of Guadalupe is truly the woman of the Apocalypse. St. John in his Book of Revelations writes of a great sign which appeared in heaven: “a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown.” She bore a son destined to rule all nations. Our 2^nd Reading today closes with the words: “Victory and power and empire for ever have been won by our God, and all authority for his Christ.”

          Elizabeth in today’s Gospel passage from St. Luke points to her cousin Mary who is also expecting, calls her “the mother of my Lord”, and exclaims: “Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled”.

          In time, Guadalupe represents a one of a kind victory, a victory over sin and death as Spaniards and the indigenous population of the Americas found their way to each other in finding the Mother we have in common with the Son of God. Mary’s appearances freed people to choose.

          Today, the image on the tilma is not faded nor have centuries dimmed the essential message which Juan Diego was so glad to share with all comers and for the rest of his life after Mary chose him as her messenger of peace in answer to the archbishop’s prayers, in response to the tears of her children. Today as almost a half millennium ago Guadalupe stands for favor, stands for choice, stands for freedom. The sun in which she is clothed and the moon under her feet have not grown dim; yet today they brighten our path to Jesus.

          Mexico and our sisters are proud and happy today in a way that no battle won and no declaration of independence signed can make them or us. Adam and Eve were sorely mistaken in a fundamentally wrong choice they made. Day in and day out we encounter others who reach out and seize for themselves some delight which leaves them in the same hopeless and death dealing dilemma. Let the love of Mary for us her children at Guadalupe enlighten our every choice and put us on the path to that joy and oneness willed by God from all eternity and won for us by Christ upon the Cross.

Hope is not Hope if its Object is Seen!

Repent!

          Every now and again I run across someone in the blogosphere discussing his or her scruples about praying for the English-speaking world’s most in-your-face, rage-against-God-atheist, Christopher Hitchens, who suffers from cancer. I think the issue is one of not wanting to pray for somebody who would be classed among the unforgivable sinners against the Holy Spirit. As Christopher’s own brother, who himself found his way back to faith from atheism, still hasn’t given up on him, I guess, neither should we: as long as there is life and breath, there is hope of a change of heart, of genuine and full repentance.

Christopher’s brother would seem to have St. Paul on his side. In our Second reading for this Advent Sunday, St. Paul exhorts the Romans (15:4-9) and us:

“Everything that was written long ago in the scriptures was meant to teach us something about hope from the examples scripture gives of how people who did not give up were helped by God. And may he who helps us when we refuse to give up, help you all to be tolerant with each other, following the example of Christ Jesus, so that united in mind and voice you may give glory to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

  It can only be to God’s glory, then, for you to treat each other in the same friendly way as Christ treated you. The reason Christ became the servant of circumcised Jews was not only so that God could faithfully carry out the promises made to the patriarchs, it was also to get the pagans to give glory to God for his mercy, as scripture says in one place: For this I shall praise you among the pagans and sing to your name.”

We live in hope then that the call to repentance issued by John the Baptist will be heard and heeded. We live in hope that our human adversaries and those who openly rage against the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ might through our kindness, friendliness or charity be able to come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ, knowledge through Him of the God we cannot see and thereby be saved.

          My own issue on this 2^nd Sunday of Advent 2010 – Year A is a certain puzzlement over all those pagans and others out there who are not exactly raging against God, but whom we may lovingly class as ignorant, but perhaps better merit the judgment of being condemned as indifferent, as immersed either in the glitter and passing glow or sunk in the mud of this life. What are my or our possibilities for repeating the success of John the Baptist in preparing the way of the Lord and shaking these folks up? Is there…? There must be hope for some of them and somehow it’s up to me to extend to them the Baptist’s hand, isn’t it? How can I effectively work to bring them into the fold? Is the diet of locusts and wild honey, the rough and scant camel hair and leather covering still what legitimates the prophet and precursor today? Do my lack of sunken eyes, of bones sticking out all over and of being generally unkempt, do my extra pounds discredit me as a prophet or put me elsewhere than where the Lord would have His witnesses and shepherds toiling in the vineyard today?

The 2^nd reading from this morning’s Office of Readings comes from a commentary on Isaiah by Eusebius of Caesarea, where among other things this Father of the Church notes:

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God. The prophecy makes clear that it is to be fulfilled, not in Jerusalem but in the wilderness: it is there that the glory of the Lord is to appear, and God’s salvation is to be made known to all mankind.

  It was in the wilderness that God’s saving presence was proclaimed by John the Baptist, and there that God’s salvation was seen.”

? ? ?

It would seem pretty certain for Eusebius that all of the YouTube followers’ excitement over surprise Alleluia Choruses from G.F. Handel in Philadelphia shopping malls or Canadian fast food restaurants is misplaced. Jesus Himself asks His listeners to reflect on the “what did you go out in the wilderness to see?” The Lord Himself points to John the Baptist as central or prime to the economy of salvation.

Where is the “wilderness experience” in cradle-to-grave Catholicism and what does it teach about the urgency of never leaving the flock untended? Think of Ezekiel’s condemnation of shepherds not caring for the flock or of St. Augustine condemning the dumb dogs who will not bark in defense of that flock! If I am not obliged to cry out as John the Baptist did, leading people forth to that place of encounter with the Lord Who comes to rule the earth, how is this supposed to happen such that the sheep are separated from the goats flocking to the modern day equivalent of King Herod’s banquets? The distinction, the separation, judgment must come! Is our lack of identification with John the Baptist evidence of a lack of genuine faith, hope and God-like charity? Are we dulling, dumbing down or otherwise delaying the day of His Coming by not leading people out of the doomed metropolis, out to Him in the wilderness? Are we standing by idly as countless tumble over the precipice never thinking that life for us, created in the image and likeness of God, is everlasting and the choice between a joyful and a sorrowful eternity is by us to be made?

I think one aspect of the answer has to do with going back to our passage from St. Paul and looking closer at the matter of where our hope lies. Wicked old King Herod found his support in Christ’s day from the upright citizens of Jerusalem among the members of the party of the Sadducees, those who refused belief in the resurrection, eternal life, angels and all which went beyond the here and now. The Exodus from Egypt into the wilderness as more than a people’s sacrifice for the sake of self-determination was nonsense to them and the fact that they would not go out or heed John’s message sufficed to place them with the goats of Herod’s table on Judgment Day.

The puzzle then and now for me, however, is in seeing clearly just how the embrace of John the Baptist’s radical self-renunciation can be/must be the declaration of hope in the Lord Who comes to rule the earth. Expectantes beatam spem et adventum Domini Jesu Christi… Does turning to the Lord mean turning my back on something, and what? John the Baptist’s call to repent was the purest possible statement from a young man to the effect that I am willing to renounce all for the Lord of my life. It finds an eloquent echo in the conversion experiences of men like Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Ignatius of Loyola. The radical enthusiasm for the Gospel of so many of these saints immediate followers should give us pause as well.

The dawn of the informatic age heard clamors for making things “user friendly”. That particular mantra is gone as Iphones and Ipads have become child’s play things, but I fear that what might have been a legitimate demand for facilitating word processing, changing channels on a home entertainment center or streaming your every thought and action online, might be having an adverse effect on how we look at life and its demands, and therefore on how we present the Gospel. The Pharisees had their alliances with the Sadducees for whatever political reasons despite the fact that they were going in opposite directs in terms of God, time and eternity. That is probably the best explanation as to why John the Baptist, why Benedict of Nursia and why many others over the years have abandoned Jerusalem or Rome and its compromises to look for the Lord where He has chosen to come… to await him in the wilderness of self-denial and repentance.

It’s up to me to respond to his call and do my part to hasten the coming of the day of God!

Properantes Adventum Diei Dei