St. Catherine of Siena, The Crusader

The young woman from Siena is the most spectacular of the many magnificent saints Catherine: mystic, doctor of the Church, corrector of popes and monarchs...and she was a vigorous Crusader. Current events verify how right she was to so forcefully advocate the crusades. History alerts us that (with the singular exception of Spain), Islam violently takes control of a place and never loses that control. The entire world of early Christianity (Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, etc) is now completely Muslim and the very few Christians still there are now being ruthlessly and systematically persecuted and killed. With current trends, there will soon be really NO Christian presence in the very world that gave birth to our faith...and that includes even the Holy Land. Were it not for the crusades, each of my five daughters and six sisters would now likely be one of some man's many wives, they would be kidnapped or tortured if they aspired to an education, they would be stoned to death if they fell in love with a Christian man and executed if they converted to Christianity. There is a profound misogynist streak in that religion. Islam will not honor women as doctors or exalt one as Queen of heaven and earth! We know that the founder was a pedophile and an inflamed polygamist. The power of Islam is rooted in its merge of two forces, one very good the other evil: monotheism and the 10 commandments on the one hand, and violence and polygamy on the other. It is at once a noble monotheistic religion and at the same time an explosion of the primitive pagan energies of violence and sex. But the Crusades rescued Europe from this violent and oppressive religion. Today, Europe has lost its faith, drifts in a spineless nihilism, and is again vulnerable to becoming "Eurabia" within a few generations. But we need to be grateful for the Crusades. The myth of the Crusades as an evil, aggressive movement of the Church is, like so many Dark Legends (the Inquisition, Pius XII and the Jews, etc.) not entirely without some historic basis...the Church is, after all, made up of sinners. But the exaggeration is a product of powerful, and often unrecognized cultural forces, both fiercely anti-Catholic: our Anglo-Calvinist past (Puritans, Pilgrims and so forth) and a secular world that despises the Church. Like our fathers and uncles who fought the Nazi and Japanese empires in WWII, the Crusaders did wrong and made mistakes. We know that they had their own disgraces as we did with Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But we are grateful to that Great Generation that we are not living under Nazi law; and we are grateful to the great generations that we are not living under Sharia. And we need to alert our children to the pervasive, often invisible contempt for the Church which controls so much of our cultural narrative.

The Dissonance, the Pain, the Love of the Liberal Catholic

It is amazing: the depth, intensity and persistence of the love he has for the Church, the "Spirit of Vatican II" Catholic. For almost 40 years the liberal Catholic (one who rejects the Catholic view of sex and gender)has lived with dissonance, disappointment and sadness. Yet, he remains faithful to the Church. Logic would require that he merely move down the street to the Episcopalian or other Protestant congregation that mirrors his views. But a deeper, non-cognitive, emotional/spiritual bond keeps him united, if resentfully, to Mother Church. They are now starting to die off, for example those who were young priests or nuns in the 1960s and drank deeply of the euphoria for change. Many, I think especially of religious sisters, have lived generous lives of service to the poor. It is not their fault that they fail to understand and accept the Church's teaching. Swept along mimetically by cultural change, they remain reactive against a narrow and negative view of sex and gender that they attribute to the "pre-Vatican II" Church. They just do not get it! They missed the boat, the ship...the key catechesis of John Paul on sexuality. They haven't really heard it or read it or more likely they had already committed their intellects to a sterile view of sex. There is a great poignancy about them: their faith cannot be handed down to succeeding generations. They maintain a split loyalty: to the Church and to a liberalism that is hostile in fundamental ways to Catholicism. Their children cannot maintain this tortured ambivalence: they will move away from the faith or embrace it joyously in defiance of a social order gone anti-Catholic. There are almost no young priests and religious to carry the torch: religious vocations are almost all of a more conservative cast. The surge of optimism in reaction to Pope Francis will become, unfortunately, another disappointment. Pope Francis cannot change the Church in the fundamental ways they desire. And he does not want to. He seems compelled to downplay or avoid the important culture issues because he has a longing to reconcile and to show only mercy to "those on the outskirts." But regrettably, he is causing confusion: stirring up false hopes among liberals and discouragement among those of us committed to the Church's positions. This pope gives us good example by his way of life: simple, poor, charitable. But he will not reverse the body of teaching left by the previous dual-pontificate. Charity and justice require that we respect the Liberal Catholic...for the generous service to the poor, for the faithfulness to the Church. and for the pain of disappointment and dissonance suffered over these years.

The Vulnerability of Our Celibate (not bachelor) Priests

Dietrich von Hildebrand sees that the consecrated virgin gives up spousal union, the deepest earthly desire of the human heart, for an even deeper marriage: mystical union with Christ, the bridegroom of every human soul. A danger, however, is that if the consecrated does not push deeply into this communion, lesser human goods can fill the void that is left in the heart and soul. Even the work of ministry could become such a bogus substitute. When I shared this thought with my nephew, a Franciscan Friar now preparing for his final vows, he agreed but added: "For us, the ministry is third. First is union with Christ in prayer. Second is unity with the community in praise and life. And all this flows over into the service of love." This deep insight left me wondering: what does this mean for our non-religious priests, diocesan or even the fine Maryknollers and others I have known? They give up marriage and family but often they work and live independently, without the close communion of the friars and monks? It seems to me that the Church places them in a vulnerable, difficult position: they renounce spouse and family in the embrace of celibacy, but they are also bereft of the compensations and consolations of community living, which accompany poverty and obedience. Isn't it terribly easy for them to fall into a "bachelor life"...alone and in pursuit of their particular interests? What comes to your mind with the title "Monsignor?" For me it suggests a priest who is highly energetic, smart, efficient and something of a work-alcoholic, an achiever, too much of a Martha, not enough of a Mary. It seems to me that the best priests develop, in addition to a deep prayer life, their own unique network of supportive communities: priest support gatherings, 12-step groups, close friendships with lay people and families, and connections with lively ecclesial movements and prayer communities. The priest is primarily identified with Christ in the action of teaching, sanctifying and shepherding; but he, like all of us, needs concrete and practical help in drawing close to our Lord. Let us pray for our priests who face a tremendous challenge!

To The Rescue!

Yesterday these events grasped my attention: First, the Magnificat has the story of St. Felicity, the pregnant slave girl who died with that other "mother-martyr" St. Perpetua. Waiting to be executed, she and her small community prayed that she might deliver the baby and be able to suffer and die with the group. She was able to do so. She was led with Perpetua into the arena naked: her body still deformed by the pregnancy and her breasts dripping with milk. The Romans had the decency to cover her with cloth, but then handed her over to be gored by a wild cow before they beheaded her. Secondly, the kidnapping in Nigeria of over 200 school girls: inexpressibly horrific! Thirdly, the reading for yesterday in the Liturgy of the Hours has St. Ephrem narrating Jesus' descent into hell: "At length he came upon Eve, the mother of all the living. She was that vineyard whose enclosure her own hands had enabled death to violate, so that she could taste its fruit; thus the mother of all the living became the source of death for every living creature. But in her stead Mary grew up, a new vine in place of the old. Christ, the new life, dwelt within her. When death, with its customary impudence, came foraging for her mortal fruit, it encountered its own destruction in the hidden life that fruit contained. All unsuspecting, it swallowed him up, and in so doing released life itself and set free a multitude of men. Jesus came to earth, and descended into hell, to rescue Eve and to raise up Mary...to rescue Felicia and each of those Nigerian girls. He is our hero! I want to be on His squad!

Sexual Reverence (3): the Dark Side

"Fair and foul are close of kin, and fair needs four" I cried. Yeats As the holiest creation, sex can become the darkest reality. For many of us...maybe most of us in today's world...the abuse of sex is the quickest, easiest, smoothest path to hell. Because it is SO good, it can become SO bad! Since it is so dangerous, it demands a profound and delicate reverence. Even at its best, as spousal love, it retains four essential aspects that are dark in a deep way that requires decency: its intensity, its brutality,its association with lower bodily actions, and its relationship to death. Firstly, sexual arousal is an intense passion that takes over the person...physically, hormonally, mentally, volitionaly...to such a degree that we can say that the person "loses" his soul in the sense that intellect and will are overcome by emotional-physical desire. Again, within the protective and sanctifying shelter of marriage, this "loss of self" is blessed by God, open to life and motivated by a mutuality of self donation. It is, nevertheless, a real "loss of self" and demands a certain awe, protectiveness and fear. Secondly, even at its best as mutual conjugal surrender, the act of love retains a violent aspect: it is, after all, a penetration of the feminine by the masculine body. When invited and welcomed by the recipient in a posture of hope, trust and surrender, it becomes holy and good. But the brutal aspect remains even as it is transformed. We need to be aware that delicate spirits, especially females who are young and innocent, can be sensitive to this and even repelled. This is not abnormal or unhealthy, but a wholesome and realistic attitude. Advocates of the Playboy philosophy but even some students (usually men) of St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body sometimes are carried away by their reaction against puritanism to such a degree that they lose a sense of the complex, delicate, and profound nature of sex. Thirdly, we need not dwell on it but we need to acknowledge with Yeats: "Love has pitched it's tent in the place of excrement" and "'Foul and fair are near of kin and fair needs foul' I cried." Providence has associated the sublime with the ridiculous, the most holy with the very most profane. Why? I really don't know. But maybe He intended to further heighten the reverence, the delicacy, the protectiveness and the care we give to this, His holiest natural creation. Lastly, sex is close to death, psychologically and metaphysically. The deep exhaustion, release from tension and letdown after orgasm is itself a premonition of death. When the action expresses love, of course, this love endures and fills the ensuing quiet with deepest peace. But outside of such profound love, the act ends in desolation, despair and contempt: death! Other than death itself, sex is the most intense experience of "the flesh" and in its extreme volatility and fickleness it resounds with mortality. Sex is, then, a taste of death. As such, it needs to be redeemed by a love stronger than death. AS such it needs to move into such a deeper love: a love that is chaste and faithful unto and beyond death. And so, to review, these four deep, dark dimensions of sex are unavoidable. They require a deep reverence. The catechesis delivered to the Church by St. John Paul II has definitively proclaimed the positivity, the wholesomeness, the holiness of sex. But this positivity incorporates and transforms these four dimensions. And these four, in turn, add a gravity, a density, and a reverence to this Mystery.

Sexual Reverence (2):The Holiness of Sex

Sex is the holiest natural, physical creation for three reasons that mutually penetrate each other. First, it is God's plan to create new persons, souls that will live with Him forever. This alone makes it incomparably glorious, profound, and hopeful. Secondly, the physical union creates an incomparably deep union between two persons at every level: emotional, spiritual, intellectual, volitional and social. Because body-and-soul are a unity, the mutual penetration of the body creates an infinitely deeper union of heart, mind and soul. Therefore, in the right place, marriage that is blessed by God, it is a sacrament, an encounter with God Himself. Outside of that sacred precinct, it is a grave violation against God, the other and oneself. Thirdly, sexuality reaches into the deepest place of a person's mind, heart and soul. Sex is NEVER just sex. It is always a universe of moral and spiritual meanings: loyalty or betrayal, reverence or contempt, tenderness or brutality, truth or falsehood, beauty or ugliness, surrender or control, selfishness or generosity. Hildebrand notes that sins in this area pierce more deeply into the soul than comparable acts like gluttony, avarice, sloth or anger. Consider: which would be more toxic for a marriage and a family...alcoholism, anger or adultery? I would have to say that the last is far more intimate, profound, hurtful and disastrous. Since sex is sacred, it needs to be covered and sheltered by reverence in the way we speak, think, dress, look and act.

Sexual Reverence (1): For Women

Dietrich von Hildebrand's magisterial and inspiring Purity: the Mystery of Christian Sexuality has intensified my awareness of sexual reverence. In this posting, I want to reflect on the reverence we men give to women. My iconic, Christ-like virility is rooted above all in the mutual infusion of tenderness and reverence for women. Tenderness is the response, from my own gentle, peaceful, confident strength to woman in her sensitivity, preciousness and vulnerability. This tenderness is infused with a reverence before something inexpressibly sacred, holy and good. If virile tenderness is in part appreciation for feminine goodness-and-vulnerability, there is another reverence which genuflects before womanly strength, dignity, and honor. In this the male perceives a deeper, stronger, truer goodness in the woman, including the woman as bride, wife, mother, companion, sister, daughter and friend. In regard to the transcendentals, I have seen that women embody Beauty and Goodness more vividly and concretely while men are more vigorously oriented towards Truth. In this, we are created to balance, complement and fulfill each other. Proper virile reverence requires first of all the truthfulness of humility: this means that I consciously acknowledge my masculine sin towards women. This includes, of course: arrogance, lust, covetousness, superiority, fear, shame, and indifference towards what is most sacred and precious in women. Manly modesty and humility moves towards awareness of the distinctive strengths and charisms of women: the sensitivity, compassion, resilience, quiet wisdom, emotional intelligence, religious sense and innate purity and innocence. Esteem for and deference towards the distinctively feminine has the effect of awakening, strengthening, purifying, and directing all the energy, power and weakness of masculinity. Every woman is, then, for us men, a sacrosanct temple of infinite value. Along with Don Quiote, our purpose, mission and identity as "knights" absolutely requires that we honor each Dulcinea we meet, regardless of whatever mistakes mar her past. Catholic tradition instructs us to genuflect on the right knee before God alone, as in the Eucharist; but we may and should genuflect on our left knee to honor those of special worth. And so, as a man, I genuflect (interiorly) before every woman that I meet. Such inflamed reverence, allied with tenderness, is the only sure path to purity of heart: the sexual passions are so overwhelming that they do not yield to actions of the will and intellect unless those are themselves moved by passions more deep, purposeful, reliable and powerful. From the cross our Savior gave each of us a Mother, his own. I have found it miraculously helpful to consciously involve our Blessed Mother in every relationship, especially those that might be inflamed by sexual or romantic desire. Even more powerful, however, is the Eucharist: when I eat His Body and drink His Blood I ask Him to give me his attitude towards women...peaceful, confident, reverent, tender, delighted, generous, affirming, strong, protective, and innocent. The Eucharist, aided by regular confession, inflames me with a Love that purifies, lightens, and strengthens all my loves.

Divorce-Free Marriage Guarantee

The fine moral theologian Janet Smith famously gave her college students a guarantee that they would enjoy a guaranteed divorce-free marriage if they would do four simple things. She offered a $1,000 payoff for any student who did the four and came back to her divorced. The four are: go to mass every single Sunday, tithe 10% of your income to the Lord, wait until marriage for sex, and keep every act of love open to new life (no contraception although Natural Family Planning is fine.) I heartily agree with her. If you get money, worship, sexuality and new life right, you are in very good shape. Regarding the tithe I am loose: I don't see the 10% as sacrosanct. Those with weaker faith and/or smaller incomes might start off with 5% or even 2%. The idea is: give the top of your earnings to the Lord in the Church and in the less fortunate. Rick Warren started at 10% and increased it every year and currently he and his wife are giving 91%. I would, however, add a fifth...and a sixth practice to ensure a good marriage. The fifth: pray together! A couple HAS GOT TO pray together. It can be as simple as a Hail Mary or an Our Father...or a decade of the rosary...or simple spontaneous prayers: Lord, guide us! Jesus, we trust in you! Father, we thank you! Dear Lord, help us to understand each other, forgive each other, help each other! Marriage is difficult, at times impossible, even under the best circumstances. I know: I have the best circumstances. I have the best wife in the world and sometimes I just want to kill her! The misguidance of the world, the weakness of the flesh, and the lies of the devil all conspire to destroy marriages and families. If a young Christian couple cannot pray, just simply, together, something is wrong. It could be as simple as an embarrassment that has to be overcome by practice. Or it could be un-repented sin, or disbelief, or a resentment or toxic belief of some sort. They need to seek help from a good priest or minister. Prayer is essential! The sixth: Plug into some kind of more intensive Christian community. You simply HAVE TO TO hang out with people who are imitating Jesus. We are all mimetic...we are always and everywhere looking at others and imitating them, deliberately or unconsciously. You have to hang with folks who hang with Jesus. I pray especially for you young people who are now of marrying-age: May the Holy Spirit lead you to feed your heart and mind and soul with all you need to have fruitful, joyful marriages!

Did the Resurrected Jesus Appear to His Mother?

How did our Blessed Mother know that her son was risen? Did she learn from Peter, John or Mary Magdalen? Did she receive her own appearance? Or (as I will suggest) did she know, with certainty, in a more fitting manner? The Scriptures have no mention of a separate appearance to Mary and (aside from a misunderstood reference in St.Ambrose) there is likewise no evidence of such a tradition in the first millenium. Even St. Thomas knew nothing of such a revelation. However, just after the time of Aquinas, the tradition of such an appearance spread quickly and gained remarkably unanimous assent in medieval Christendom. St. Ignatius of Loyola has a meditation based on this event and assumes that anyone who doubts this reality is clearly a heretic. I think his logic is sound but I differ slightly in my conclusion. Our own St. John Paul II advocated forcefully for acceptance of this tradition in an audience in which he stated: "...the unique and special character of the Blessed Virgin’s presence at Calvary and her perfect union with the Son in his suffering on the Cross seem to postulate a very particular sharing on her part in the mystery of the Resurrection." http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/audiences/1997/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_21051997_en.html) Here again the logic is impeccable: Mary is close to Jesus at his conception, birth, private life, (not so clearly in his public life), in his passion, at Pentecost and now in heaven. It is hard to imagine that she was sidelined for the Resurrection. My suggestion is that she knew with certainty, through her mystic union with her son, that he was risen. She did not need an appearance: such would have been frivolous. We know that the disciples, with their lack of faith, desperately needed our Lord to show himself to them: doubting Thomas who touches the wounds, the discouraged and uncomprehending disciples at Emmaeus, the disbelieving apostles and their fishing expedition, and Peter with his three-fold denial redeemed by his triple-profession-of-love. But Mary did not need her son to appear: she already knew. I imagine it happened in the following manner. When Mary held the corpse of her son (the Pieta), she would have sunk into the deepest possible grief. When Jesus died, she herself died a psychological or metaphysical death, even as she continued to breathe. With his passion finally ended, there ensued the infinite quiet of death and she herself would have been relieved of the state of immense tension she suffered throughout the passion and would have relaxed into a quasi-death state herself. I imagine a psycho-neuro-physical collapse similar to what we know as "rest in the Spirit" or "being slain in the Spirit." Her sense of desolation was so complete and profound that is it more than metaphorical to say that she herself descended, with her Son, into hell. This dark night surely was deeper than that of St. John of the Cross or any other mystic. However, as she grasped her sons's corpse, as she collapsed in her own meta-death and sunk to the pit of hell, she knew, quietly and intuitively, deeply in her spirit, not emotionally or cognitively, but deeply-deeply-deeply that He had triumphed, that God had triumphed, that He was alive. Perhaps she was not discursively aware of it: she would have been incapable of saying "He is risen!" But she knew! Rising on Saturday, she would have gone about her day quietly, still exhausted and deeply grieving, but slowly and organically the Joy and Hope and intuition would grow. She would have been comforting others and in this her sense of God's presence and victory would be emerging. By the time she went to bed on Saturday night she would have known: Jesus is alive! She would know with complete interior certainty. And Sunday morning she would awaken and rise with her heart and soul exploding with Joy and Love! She had died, as a mother dies if her child dies, but she was alive in heaven...in heaven on earth. It was just a matter of time before her body would be taken to be with her soul which was already with her Son. Before, during and after Pentecost she would be a bounteous, flowing fountain of the Holy Spirit for the Church. She would be assumed into heaven, possibly from two distinct locations, Jerusalem and Ephesus, as differing traditions affirm. Since the Church has not spoken definitively on this question, we have the theological freedom to entertain any of these three, or other, views. However this third understanding does the most justice to what we know of the boundless union of love between Mary and her Son.