This motto has served me well! It has helped me to do many good things, albeit poorly! I would not recommend this motto for all: Many might not need it. I need it because my primary vulnerability, my "Achilles heel" is: discouragement! I am prone to be weak, insecure and lacking in confidence. This is, for me, a grave interior sin! It is Satan's primary weapon against me. God's plan for me is that I be a strong man: courageous, confident, steady, zealous, calm and even fierce in His purposes including my marriage, family and work! Satan wants me to be a wimp. I have found that when my standards are high I am more vulnerable to discouragement: "I am a failure at this." So I have come to accept that: "when I lower my expectations, my performance rises." And so, I am sloppy, irregular, distracted and haphazard in: house maintenance, handy man work, paperwork, administration...as well as my prayer life, fasting, participation in renewal movements, service of the needy, and a laundry list of other efforts. Consistently, I do these good things, poorly! It is a great blessing to do good things, however poorly. Among the most helpful books I have read is The Spirituality of Imperfection by Ernest Kurtz. His thesis is that knowing and owning imperfection, weakness, frailty and specific sinfulness is a privileged pathway to genuine wholeness and holiness. This leads to a deep, passionate yearning for and trust in Jesus our Lord! It liberates from moralism and and a piety of "spiritual bypassing" that masks weakness and sin. As a release from oppressive conscientiousness and perfectionism, it is light, delightful and refreshing. You might like it! Do something good...do it poorly...but do it...and enjoy it!
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Saturday, January 26, 2019
Tracey Rowlands on the Theology of Pope Francis
Tracey Rowlands, in a chapter on Liberation Theology in her recent Catholic Theology, opens a window on the thinking of Pope Francis by noting the influence of the Argentinian "People's Theology." Strikingly non-Marxist, this approach prefers "the people" to "class", claiming that the simple, uneducated, marginalized poor have an innocent, pure spiritual intuition that is denied the affluent, the educated and the powerful. Surely Pope Francis shares this view. Surely there is something to it: our faith is available to the little ones and often opaque to the learned. But I would suggest that our Pope is more complicated than this; indeed, Pope John Paul showed deeper reverence for the faith of the simple. In his very first address to the Cardinals after becoming Pope, Francis expressed disapproval of a "spiritual boquet" of thousands of rosaries sent to him by a group of the pious. It was a shockingly dismissive and condescending remark by a pastor of the flock.
Rowlands recalls his remark to a seminarian who was studying Fundamental Theology: "I can hardly think of something more boring." This gets to the heart of the matter: Francis is adverse to and incapable of prolonged, systematic theological thought.
She references a review he did years ago of books by Balthasar and Kasper in which he appreciated their shared sense that the Divine Mysteries far exceed any intellectual formulation. This, of course, is normal Catholic sensibility. But it is ordinarily wed to a deep respect for intellect and the sublime Truth and underlying logic of our faith. Francis, by contrast, is consistently disparaging of dogma and doctrine. He is a fierce anti-intellectualist!
Additionally, she highlights his failure to appreciate Balthasar in his assertion that logos precedes ethos: that action needs to be infused with contemplation; that pragma must express truth. In this she unveils Francis as a crude pragmatist, an irrationalist, an emmotivist. He exhorts the young to "make a mess" but provides no clear vision of purpose. Much like Trump, he is impulsive and unpredictable and lacking an overall strategic plan.
He is often referred to as a "Peronist" but in most ways he is a cosmopolitian, liberal elitist in his disgust for "walls" and his inattention to defending the local, the specific, and the national.He is at one moment friendly to gay liberation and the next hostile. He welcomes and praises the clerk who refused to issue licenses for gay weddings and the next day the entire Vatican back-tracks. He is most known and loved for his outreach to the marginalized but seems indifferent and dismissive of deplorable, Trump-voting rednecks, and their European counterparts, who are bereft of status, power and wealth but threatened by global change and immigration. In this he aligns himself with Western liberal elites in an uncritical manner.
So, again, he is not a consistent "popular" or "liberation" theologian: he is a rich, complex, convoluted bundle of often inconsistent and contradictory impulses. As a theologian, he is a catastrophe!
Rowlands recalls his remark to a seminarian who was studying Fundamental Theology: "I can hardly think of something more boring." This gets to the heart of the matter: Francis is adverse to and incapable of prolonged, systematic theological thought.
She references a review he did years ago of books by Balthasar and Kasper in which he appreciated their shared sense that the Divine Mysteries far exceed any intellectual formulation. This, of course, is normal Catholic sensibility. But it is ordinarily wed to a deep respect for intellect and the sublime Truth and underlying logic of our faith. Francis, by contrast, is consistently disparaging of dogma and doctrine. He is a fierce anti-intellectualist!
Additionally, she highlights his failure to appreciate Balthasar in his assertion that logos precedes ethos: that action needs to be infused with contemplation; that pragma must express truth. In this she unveils Francis as a crude pragmatist, an irrationalist, an emmotivist. He exhorts the young to "make a mess" but provides no clear vision of purpose. Much like Trump, he is impulsive and unpredictable and lacking an overall strategic plan.
He is often referred to as a "Peronist" but in most ways he is a cosmopolitian, liberal elitist in his disgust for "walls" and his inattention to defending the local, the specific, and the national.He is at one moment friendly to gay liberation and the next hostile. He welcomes and praises the clerk who refused to issue licenses for gay weddings and the next day the entire Vatican back-tracks. He is most known and loved for his outreach to the marginalized but seems indifferent and dismissive of deplorable, Trump-voting rednecks, and their European counterparts, who are bereft of status, power and wealth but threatened by global change and immigration. In this he aligns himself with Western liberal elites in an uncritical manner.
So, again, he is not a consistent "popular" or "liberation" theologian: he is a rich, complex, convoluted bundle of often inconsistent and contradictory impulses. As a theologian, he is a catastrophe!
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Open Letter to Police and Medics on Anointing of the Sick
January 22, 2019
Open Letter to
Jersey City Police and Emergency Medical Staff:
On Friday January
18, 2019 at 4 PM a patrol car and two ambulances responded to a
medical emergency here at 20 Greenville Avenue, Jersey City, our
Magnificat Home boarding home for single women. The team was entirely
diligent, focused and professional in reviving the patient and
getting her to the ICU in Bayonne. There was a problem, however,
regarding access for the Catholic priest to administer the sacrament
of Anointing of the Sick.
In their otherwise
correct focus, for over an hour, on reviving and sustaining the
patient, they firmly resisted access by the priest, on two occasions,
to anoint with the sacrament. Reluctantly, as the ambulance prepared
to depart, access was granted for the anointing on the forehead with
blessed oils, a process that took about 5 seconds.
Medics and police
need to know two facts about a Catholic who is in danger of death:
First, the emergency
anointing by a priest can be done in five seconds without
interrupting their work.
Second, for an
observant Catholic, access to this sacrament, when in danger of
death, is of absolute, ultimate importance.
Several comments by the medics and officers signaled that they did not understand what we wanted: "She may not be leaving here at all." "She is not dead yet." "We will let you pray before we leave."
Fortunately, the
patient was anointed and stayed alive another 36 hours before
expiring in the ICU. Had she, however, expired during that hour
without the sacrament it would have been, from a Catholic
perspective, an unnecessary tragedy and an unjust deprivation of a
religious right.
Experienced priests
and medics have assured me that ordinarily there is no problem as the
priest is granted access without any conflict and without disrupting
the emergency procedure. Surely, simple information on the two points
above (the brevity and gravity of the anointing) provided to medics
and police will suffice to prevent this problem going forward.
Thank you for your
attention to this!
Matt Laracy
Director, Magnificat
Home
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Ivan Illich: Prophetic Word for a Collapsing Church and Civilization
Hands down, number one on my list of "Most Underrated Catholic Thinkers of the 20th Century" is Ivan Illich of Cuernavaca: the learned, creative, anarchistic, controversial, eccentric genius, mystic and iconoclast. He is unknown today, except among a small group that recalls the fierce arguments he provoked in the 60s and 70s about Catholic missions, education, medicine and the nature of our entire bureaucratic, technocratic civilization. In the wake of the catastrophic summer of 2018 (death penalty revision, McCarrick, Pennsylvania report, Vigano), his message rings ever more lucid, profound, and inspirational. By a serendipitous, providential, personal coincidence, I recall, half a century ago, my summer of 1968 (the year our society imploded with the explosion of the Cultural Revolution) when I studied Spanish at Illich's center in Cuernavaca and was captivated by his breathtakingly radical critique of modernity and American Catholicism. Paradoxically, his critique was far more drastic and deep than anything coming out of the then-fashionable movements (anti-war, civil rights, incipient feminism, anti-capitalism, "Spirit of Vatican II," and the illusory sexual liberation of the pill); even as his was a deeply if eccentrically, really medieval, Catholic sensibility and spirituality. I am ever grateful that his influence on me was to grant some critical distance from the underlying pathology of modernity even as he deepened and enriched my Catholic faith. His message is essential for us for several reasons:
First, he called for a poor, de-institutionalized, humble Church...unburdened with schools, hospitals, and the entire complex of social agencies. In this vision, the Church (as hierarchy, as institution) could focus attention on the Word of God, worship, and simplicity/holiness of life. This vision appealed to me but for 50 years I rejected it, thinking of all the good done by Church agencies, especially for the poor and suffering. The events of Summer 2018 convinced me that the negatives of a bloated, bureaucratic Church outweigh the positives. The rise and persistence of Maciel/McCarrick/etc. is partly due to the big money they fed the Vatican bureaucracy and their expertise as ace administrators of mega-institutions. It is now clear that we will be better off as Church if the hierarchy releases control of the agencies of corporal mercy into the hands of the laity. Recall: the apostles surrendered custody of food distribution to the first deacons so that they could be free of distraction to attend to the Word of God! Something like that needs to happen today. Patiently, the laity have to take responsibiilty for acts of corporal mercy and justice and return the clergy to their proper work. Our own small Magnificat Home, in which we provide a home for 55 women, is an example: we have no organizational or legal tie to the institutional Church even as it is our faith that moves us. Similarly, Mother Angelica (as told in the biography by Raymond Arroyo) made a brilliant move some years ago when the American bishops and the Vatican were both considering moves to gain control of her television empire by invoking her vow of obedience: she convened an emergency meeting from her hospital bed and had control surrendered to an independent lay board. Whatever one thinks of EWTN, for sure it is better off free of episcopal or papal control and the pope and bishops are better off without that concern.
Secondly, as he became more controversial in his advocacy for drastic cultural/social revolution, he freely gave up his priestly powers for a deeply theological reason: he saw that the priest at the Eucharist convenes believers of all ideological and political persuasions: left/right, libertarian/anarchistic, socialist/capitalist, etc. If the priest is a fierce advocate for a specific policy or program, he becomes polarizing and divisive. Illich decided his vocation was to advocate his ideas and so he surrendered his liturgical privileges, freely and happily. He did, however, maintain his fidelity to his vows of celibacy and prayer of the liturgy of the hours. His lucid, definitive distinction between our Catholic faith and our political positions is sorely needed today when our Pope and his lieutenants have adopted a collection of policy positions (environment, immigration, death penalty) and consecrated them as sacrosanct in a leftist clericalism that is mercilessly divisive, arrogant and offensive.
Thirdly, in a broader, deeper critique of modernity itself he rejected the "giga...mega" nature of bureaucracy and technology in its cancerous overgrowth in that it inherently disables and dis-empowers the individual and local community in their own autonomy, agency and integrity. He advocate "tools of conviviality," preferring bicycles to airplanes and superhighways, face-to-face dialogue to school institutions, concrete and traditional self-care to technologies of medication and surgery. He saw that indigeneous peoples of Latin America were more active, free, convivial and communal in their traditional ways of housing, feeding and protecting themselves without the Western "necessities" of huge electrical, plumbing, and cultural systems. He understood that even those at the high end of our modern hierarchy...the rich, powerful, expert, credentialed...are bereft of the basic human competencies of caring for self, family and community. With Ellul, Schumacher and others, he called for an almost Amish or Luddite return to a humane smallness to restore agency and dignity. Surely, his diagnosis is pertinent to our current political-cultural crisis of alienation manifest in the Trump phenomenon.
Fourthly, Illich came to NYC in the 1950s and fell in love with the cultural, spiritual vitality of the urban, underclass Puerto Ricans. He seems to have also felt a contempt for the hegemonic Irish Catholic American Church that was so prosperous, fecund, confident and expansive at the time. This animus became pronounced and militant in the 1960s when he waged a fierce campaign against the North American (Cardinal Cushing, Maryknoll Father John Considine) plan to flood Latin American with missionaries. Enamored of primitive, Hispanic spirituality, Illich viewed the mission crusade as the crudest cultural imperialism as arrogant, superior Americans imported the church-rectory-convent-school complex and all the baggage of toxic American materialism, consumerism, and technology. Retrospectively, I for one see an exaggeration in his disgust with our own culture and his infatuation with that of Hispanics. Nevertheless, there is a powerful truth here: those closer to nature, tradition, family, location and tribe inherit an intuitive moral sense that has been largely lost in an industrial society of scientific control and arrogance. The Illichian perspective is especially helpful for those of my generation who grieve the loss of the flourishing Catholic world of our childhood and youth: full churches, large families, lots of vocations, expansive institutions. That Catholic world of 1945-65 was not as bad as Illich thought; but it is not as good as the nostalgic conservative imagination confects it. Illich is a positive correction: the Kingdom of God is coming, but not completely here; it was not here in the 1950s and is not here now; but it is coming. He helps us to cleanse our memory: remembering all the good but regretting the bad and hoping for ever more!
Lastly, his critique of modern medicine was the most drastic and problematic part of his legacy. I for one gratefully take my six daily pills (aspirin, Vitamin D, crestor, etc.) and appreciate the colon surgery that removed a cancerous growth the size of my fist. He refused medical care for his cancer at the end of his life. He suffered and died a "natural death" without the comforts of medicine. I cannot follow him there. But I admire his heroism and his belief that suffering is largely unavoidable and that we err in expecting complete relief from science and technology. He believed and lived the Gospel Truth: the resurrection comes through the crucifixion.
He was a great man! His was a magnificent intellect! May we emulate him! May his thought help us to purify our Church and heal our culture!May he pray for us!
First, he called for a poor, de-institutionalized, humble Church...unburdened with schools, hospitals, and the entire complex of social agencies. In this vision, the Church (as hierarchy, as institution) could focus attention on the Word of God, worship, and simplicity/holiness of life. This vision appealed to me but for 50 years I rejected it, thinking of all the good done by Church agencies, especially for the poor and suffering. The events of Summer 2018 convinced me that the negatives of a bloated, bureaucratic Church outweigh the positives. The rise and persistence of Maciel/McCarrick/etc. is partly due to the big money they fed the Vatican bureaucracy and their expertise as ace administrators of mega-institutions. It is now clear that we will be better off as Church if the hierarchy releases control of the agencies of corporal mercy into the hands of the laity. Recall: the apostles surrendered custody of food distribution to the first deacons so that they could be free of distraction to attend to the Word of God! Something like that needs to happen today. Patiently, the laity have to take responsibiilty for acts of corporal mercy and justice and return the clergy to their proper work. Our own small Magnificat Home, in which we provide a home for 55 women, is an example: we have no organizational or legal tie to the institutional Church even as it is our faith that moves us. Similarly, Mother Angelica (as told in the biography by Raymond Arroyo) made a brilliant move some years ago when the American bishops and the Vatican were both considering moves to gain control of her television empire by invoking her vow of obedience: she convened an emergency meeting from her hospital bed and had control surrendered to an independent lay board. Whatever one thinks of EWTN, for sure it is better off free of episcopal or papal control and the pope and bishops are better off without that concern.
Secondly, as he became more controversial in his advocacy for drastic cultural/social revolution, he freely gave up his priestly powers for a deeply theological reason: he saw that the priest at the Eucharist convenes believers of all ideological and political persuasions: left/right, libertarian/anarchistic, socialist/capitalist, etc. If the priest is a fierce advocate for a specific policy or program, he becomes polarizing and divisive. Illich decided his vocation was to advocate his ideas and so he surrendered his liturgical privileges, freely and happily. He did, however, maintain his fidelity to his vows of celibacy and prayer of the liturgy of the hours. His lucid, definitive distinction between our Catholic faith and our political positions is sorely needed today when our Pope and his lieutenants have adopted a collection of policy positions (environment, immigration, death penalty) and consecrated them as sacrosanct in a leftist clericalism that is mercilessly divisive, arrogant and offensive.
Thirdly, in a broader, deeper critique of modernity itself he rejected the "giga...mega" nature of bureaucracy and technology in its cancerous overgrowth in that it inherently disables and dis-empowers the individual and local community in their own autonomy, agency and integrity. He advocate "tools of conviviality," preferring bicycles to airplanes and superhighways, face-to-face dialogue to school institutions, concrete and traditional self-care to technologies of medication and surgery. He saw that indigeneous peoples of Latin America were more active, free, convivial and communal in their traditional ways of housing, feeding and protecting themselves without the Western "necessities" of huge electrical, plumbing, and cultural systems. He understood that even those at the high end of our modern hierarchy...the rich, powerful, expert, credentialed...are bereft of the basic human competencies of caring for self, family and community. With Ellul, Schumacher and others, he called for an almost Amish or Luddite return to a humane smallness to restore agency and dignity. Surely, his diagnosis is pertinent to our current political-cultural crisis of alienation manifest in the Trump phenomenon.
Fourthly, Illich came to NYC in the 1950s and fell in love with the cultural, spiritual vitality of the urban, underclass Puerto Ricans. He seems to have also felt a contempt for the hegemonic Irish Catholic American Church that was so prosperous, fecund, confident and expansive at the time. This animus became pronounced and militant in the 1960s when he waged a fierce campaign against the North American (Cardinal Cushing, Maryknoll Father John Considine) plan to flood Latin American with missionaries. Enamored of primitive, Hispanic spirituality, Illich viewed the mission crusade as the crudest cultural imperialism as arrogant, superior Americans imported the church-rectory-convent-school complex and all the baggage of toxic American materialism, consumerism, and technology. Retrospectively, I for one see an exaggeration in his disgust with our own culture and his infatuation with that of Hispanics. Nevertheless, there is a powerful truth here: those closer to nature, tradition, family, location and tribe inherit an intuitive moral sense that has been largely lost in an industrial society of scientific control and arrogance. The Illichian perspective is especially helpful for those of my generation who grieve the loss of the flourishing Catholic world of our childhood and youth: full churches, large families, lots of vocations, expansive institutions. That Catholic world of 1945-65 was not as bad as Illich thought; but it is not as good as the nostalgic conservative imagination confects it. Illich is a positive correction: the Kingdom of God is coming, but not completely here; it was not here in the 1950s and is not here now; but it is coming. He helps us to cleanse our memory: remembering all the good but regretting the bad and hoping for ever more!
Lastly, his critique of modern medicine was the most drastic and problematic part of his legacy. I for one gratefully take my six daily pills (aspirin, Vitamin D, crestor, etc.) and appreciate the colon surgery that removed a cancerous growth the size of my fist. He refused medical care for his cancer at the end of his life. He suffered and died a "natural death" without the comforts of medicine. I cannot follow him there. But I admire his heroism and his belief that suffering is largely unavoidable and that we err in expecting complete relief from science and technology. He believed and lived the Gospel Truth: the resurrection comes through the crucifixion.
He was a great man! His was a magnificent intellect! May we emulate him! May his thought help us to purify our Church and heal our culture!May he pray for us!
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