Vanity

Vanity is defined as "excessive pride in one's appearance, abilities or achievements." We immediately associate it with related descriptors: pompous, conceited, arrogant, superior, smug, complacent, and pretentious. Understood thus is is opposed to humility and modesty. However, we might also set it against another list of antonyms: self-hate, insecurity, timidity and passivity. Clearly, the operative word in the definition above is "excessive." So we see that a moderate measure of "vanity"...understood as self-esteem, self-assurance, self-delight, confidence, and wholesome pride...is a good thing. We speak favorably of "someone who is comfortable in her own skin." Indeed, one could hardly exercise any talent or gift...athletic, intellectual, spiritual, artistic...if one is not aware of and delighted by the exercise of that ability. Imagine: an athlete who is insecure and anxious, an intellectual who compulsively doubts himself, a leader who is passive and timid! Or: a Princess who has a negative image of herself! The feminine vocation of bringing Beauty into our world particularly needs a measure of vanity as humble, grateful self-delight. How can the Beauty radiate her loveliness if she does not intuitively sense it herself? This self-delight needs to be leavened and lightened, of course, by gratitude, generosity, modesty, innocence and humility. Part of every woman's vocation is to enhance, radiate and communicate Beauty. In my own virility, I participate in this mission in a minimum way: I vigorously recycle paper and bottles, I groom myself appropriately, and I wear the tasteful clothes my wife and daughters give me; but I appreciate...more than that, I crave, I cherish, I revere, I exult, I almost adore... the feminine presence and the feminine touch with all my heart and soul and mind and strength! An so: a woman who goes to the mirror to review her hair and makeup and appearance or who spends a few hours in catalogs looking for the perfect outfit at the right price...such a woman is not selfish, narcissistic or "vain" in a bad sense! No, she is exercising her charism and vocation of Beauty! When she finds that lovely dress...on sale!!!...she brings Joy and Exultation to heaven and earth. I know this with certainty...although it is not explicit in Scripture, not part of the Ordinary Magisterium, and cannot be verified by science...from my own reliable, mystical, intuitive communion with the angels and saints.

Glamour

In the waiting room of my cardiologist, I couldn't resist the invitation of Glamour magazine to look at the most beautiful people in the world. Wow! Very strong stuff for one with my constitution! But I had to wonder: What is glamour? And is it good or bad? Regularly, in renewing our baptismal vows we renounce "the glamour of evil." Clearly, evil is...or can be...glamorous. But is glamour itself evil? Is everything glamorous bad? The roots of the word are not promising: it is related to the word "grammar" but associated with the language of witchcraft and occult as in the casting of a spell over a victim. For some of us, something magical and powerful and dark like this is operating in the photographs in Glamour or images from the red carpet. The dictionary defines "glamour" as: the quality of fascinating, alluring or attracting, especially by charm and good looks. Less than satisfied with that, I offer my own definition: "The artful enhancement of (usually feminine) beauty." Glamour here is a form of art, a creative action that brings Beauty into our world, a movement that brings Joy to earth and Glory to God. I imagine a woman, of any age, preparing for a wedding or a prom or similar event: she is fastidiously preparing her hair, skin, nails, clothing and jewelry in order to enhance her beauty. Is this a bad thing? Since I am not an iconoclast (as are Protestants, Muslims, Jews and atheists), but a Catholic...and a flaming Balthasarian at that!!!...I am recklessly enthusiastic about anything associated with beauty, charm, and attraction. Glamour is a kind of play...it is a game of beauty: "Let me see how beautiful I can be!" The logic is: "I am beautiful as I am. Just for fun: lets enhance my beauty!" Three year olds "dress up" for fun...so does my 94 year old mother, every single day! Beauty is useless: it does not serve another purpose but is an end in itself. It is frui, not uti...to quote St. Augustine. It is not useful for an extrinsic goal, but is itself an end in itself, like sports, art, learning, love, and worship. Women do not (usually) dress up to seduce or court or entice or propagate or preserve the species. (How I despise Darwinian psychology!) They dress up to be beautiful! Just to be beautiful! It is said that women dress up for other women. There is truth to this because it is mostly other women who will appreciate the beauty. Loveliness, charm, delight, joy...these are transcendental, spiritual (but embodied) realities that transcend the crude simplifications of sexual attraction. And so, there is something heavenly and even divine about being lovely: playful, joyous, purposeless, extravagant, generous and effusive! Imagine a bouquet of magnificent flowers that are haphazard and disorganized. The average woman will admire them and then move immediately to gather, organize and harmonize them in order to ensure the overall loveliness of the entire bouquet. Something like this happens with glamour: everything works together...the hair style, colors, movement of the clothing, jewelry, and so forth. BUT...and this is an enormous BUT...Like all things that are heavenly and powerful and engaging (think food, competition, work, family, alcohol...) too much of a good thing can be...very bad. And so, glamour must be careful to be modest, pure, wholesome, limited, and humble. Glamour so easily can become immodest, impure, corrupted, pretentious and proud. Then it becomes a catastrophe! It is so strong that it can have a magical, spell-like quality...especially upon insecure men. Let me describe one possible reaction. Imagine someone like Joe DiMaggio or Jack Kennedy in the presence of Marilyn Monroe. She is in high heels and a tight-fitting dress with low cleavage, blonde hair is blowing in the wind, she is laughing with sensuous self-satisfaction. She is glamorous! The poor guy is toast! He is fascinated and in awe...she is desirable beyond limits...she is unreachable and distant...a veritable goddess of desire...he is worthless by comparison...it matters not that he is a power-hitter or the most powerful politician in the world...it matters not that he is handsome, smart, athletic, or charismatic...he is nothing, he is emasculated, he is powerless, he is worthless before such a goddess! He wants only to kneel before her in adoration, kiss her feet,and lose himself in a mutual gaze! Such glamour is emasculating, magical, and idolatrous! But let's consider a different scenario: a case of elegance, charm and beauty within the limits of modesty, truth, humility, serenity and charity. Gregory Peck is in the presence of the Audrey Hepburn Princess in Roman Holiday: he is enchanted, but also ennobled, humbled, inspired, and encouraged in his own virility and goodness by her exquisite innocence, purity and loveliness. This is beauty and glamour as iconic, as heavenly, as Joy!

The Pill, the Pope, the Bishops and Boldness

The best defense is a strong offence! The Church has been weak, defensive, and lacking courage and boldness in its fight for religious freedom against the Obamacare contraceptive mandate. Specifically, we have failed to aggressively attack the atrocity of contraception! Contraception is a disaster...but no one talks about it. The pill is poison for the feminine body. Recently, waiting in an ER room I read in a health magazine (bereft of moral consciousness other than "nature-awareness") that in addition to blood clots, cancer and the rest, we now know that sustained time on The Pill systematically and cumulatively diminishes about 40 or so essential nutrients in the woman's body. Your multivitamin will not replace these! Contraception is a CATASTROPHE...for the woman, the relationship, the family, the culture and the society. But the Obama-Clinton-Sibelius-Pelosi regime worships before it and indignantly demands that every Georgetown law student has an innate right to tax-payer funded "protection." The bishops have been a big disappintment: they have argued on the grounds of religious liberty only and have not attacked the substantive issue of why we oppose contraception. They have granted the high ground to the contraceptors (Even the name sounds bad!. They have given the impression that our objection is without substance, a pious preference, an eccentric and archaic holdover from the past. Pope Francis is even worse: if the bishops are in retreat, he is stampeding away from the battle with his flippant comments. We can only assume that he is as clueless about the USA as his comments indicate. Attack mode may not win this culture war but at least people will know what we stand for. It is called witness.Where are our heroic, virile, forceful bishops... like those who opposed communism in Eastern Europe and the Protestant establishment in America a hundred years ago?

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!