Category: Truth

There Is No Bible Without the Church

Second century Christians would have given their eye teeth for my Bible's table of Contents.
Second century Christians would have given their eye teeth for my Bible’s table of Contents.

Today1 is the feast of Pope St. Damasus I, the pope who many believe to have issued the first authoritative list of the books of the Bible in 382–the Decree of Damasus.2 Up until that point, there was no official canon of Scripture. Nobody knew with any certainty how many books belonged in the Old Testament, much less the New. And because Scripture doesn’t and can’t testify to its own inspiration, we would have been in a great deal of trouble if it were our only authority.

But God is good and bestowed authority on the Church. The Church, inspired by God, then pronounced by the power of the Holy Spirit which books were also inspired by God. The whole question merits a far longer discussion than I’ve got time for at the moment, but I’ll give you the crux of the whole Catholic-Protestant debate in a nutshell, as seen by Karl Keating in Catholicism and Fundamentalism.

  1. The Gospels are fairly reliable historical texts. While historians don’t consider them Gospel truth,3 they’re generally considered to be accurate as regards the major events and themes of the life of Christ.
  2. The Gospels tell us Jesus claimed to be God. While he doesn’t say outright, “I am God,” statements like, “Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8:58) and “The Father and I are one” (Jn 10:30) leave little room for any other interpretation.
  3. The Resurrection proves this claim. If you really want to hear me prove the divinity of Christ, watch this video. If you don’t have 40 minutes, suffice it to say that if he claimed to be God and then rose form the dead, he’s God.
  4. Jesus, who was divine, founded an inspired Church. Matthew 16:18-19. He gave Peter the keys and promised to protect his Church against error.
  5. The inspired Church gives us an inspired Bible. If you’re not convinced by the Decree of Damasus, we could find plenty of other authoritative lists. The date doesn’t matter so much for this discussion, just the fact of Scripture being canonized by the Church. Otherwise, how can we know which books belong? Augustine himself said, “I would not believe in the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so.”

Note that this isn’t a circular argument; it starts with the Bible as a historical text and ends with the Bible as an inspired text–two distinct and largely unrelated claims. What’s key here is that the inspiration of Scripture rests on the inspiration of the Church. Without an inspired Church, the argument falls apart.

In fact, I’ve never heard a reasonable argument for the canon of Scripture that didn’t rely on Christ’s power at work in the Church. Sure, people have had personal experiences of the Spirit at work in various individual books, but to know for sure that God inspired each book? That requires some kind of outside authority–an authority nobody outside of Rome4 even claims. You might feel that you know for sure that John is inspired or Isaiah or Deuteronomy. But unless you have a Church, the best you’re going to get is a “fallible collection of infallible books.”5 I’m not willing to stake my life on a fallible collection.

As always, Chesterton says it better than I:

Image courtesy of Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.
Image courtesy of Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.

What is any man who has been in the real outer world, for instance, to make of the everlasting cry that Catholic traditions are condemned by the Bible? It indicates a jumble of topsy-turvy tests and tail-foremost arguments, of which I never could at any time see the sense. The ordinary sensible sceptic or pagan is standing in the street (in the supreme character of the man in the street) and he sees a procession go by of the priests of some strange cult, carrying their object of worship under a canopy, some of them wearing high head-dresses and carrying symbolical staffs, others carrying scrolls and sacred records, others carrying sacred images and lighted candles before them, others sacred relics in caskets or cases, and so on. I can understand the spectator saying, “This is all hocus-pocus”; I can even understand him, in moments of irritation, breaking up the procession, throwing down the images, tearing up the scrolls, dancing on the priests and anything else that might express that general view. I can understand his saying, “Your croziers are bosh, your candles are bosh, your statues and scrolls and relics and all the rest of it are bosh.” But in what conceivable frame of mind does he rush in to select one particular scroll of the scriptures of this one particular group (a scroll which had always belonged to them and been a part of their hocus-pocus, if it was hocus-pocus); why in the world should the man in the street say that one particular scroll was not bosh, but was the one and only truth by which all the other things were to be condemned?  Why should it not be as superstitious to worship the scrolls as the statues, of that one particular procession? Why should it not be as reasonable to preserve the statues as the scrolls, by the tenets of that particular creed? To say to the priests, “Your statues and scrolls are condemned by our common sense,” is sensible. To say, “Your statues are condemned by your scrolls, and we are going to worship one part of your procession and wreck the rest,” is not sensible from any standpoint, least of all that of the man in the street.

Reject the whole of the Church if you like. Reject Saints and Mary and the Eucharist and the Pope AND Scripture. But to use the Scripture given to you by the pope to reject the pope? To take the Bible, which was far less certain to the early Church than was the virginity of Mary, and use it to reject Mary? Chesterton doesn’t think it makes any sense at all. I’m inclined to agree.

  1. Okay, yesterday by now. I got distracted. [↩]
  2. To be fair, his list only had 72 books–no Baruch. At the time, Baruch was often appended to Jeremiah, so I don’t worry about it. [↩]
  3. Ha. [↩]
  4. And the Eastern Orthodox bishops [↩]
  5. An actual quote from Protestant apologist Greg Boyd. [↩]

Conceived Without Sin

Public service announcement for the Catholics among us: the Immaculate Conception (December 8) is a holy day of obligation. Every year. Even if it’s on Saturday or Monday. So get to Mass tonight or tomorrow morning because by the afternoon it’ll be Sunday and you will have missed Mass.

Yes, that’s two days in a row. Or twice in three days if you go to a vigil tonight. Keep in mind that you’re only required to go to Mass 57 times in a year. If Mass is about an hour long, that’s 57 hours a year. There are 8,760 hours in a year.1 That’s less than one percent of your life.

**************

I once had a student look at me stubbornly and declare, “I think it’s kind of ridiculous that y’all think Mary was only pregnant for, like, 3 weeks.”

I blinked rapidly a few times, absolutely baffled, before I realized what was going on.

“You know that Immaculate Conception is about Mary’s conception, right? Like, little embryonic Mary in her momma’s womb? Nobody thinks Jesus was conceived on December 8 and born on December 25. That would be ridiculous.”

This is the Annunciation, not the Immaculate Conception. Well, it’s the Annunciation to the Immaculate Conception, but you know what I mean. Hopefully. (Henry Ossawa Tanner)

This kid’s assumption wasn’t an unusual one, more’s the pity, so before we get started, let’s clarify our terms right quick. The Immaculate Conception is Mary’s conception in her mother’s womb. It tells us that Mary was conceived without sin. It’s not talking about Jesus’ conception.2 It’s also not telling us that Mary was conceived in a supernatural manner; when Mary was conceived, her parents were decidedly not virgins. Her conception took place in the ordinary way; the miracle was that in the moment of her natural conception she was supernaturally preserved from Original Sin.

This dogma3 is a very difficult one for Protestants to understand, let alone accept. There’s an undercurrent in Protestantism that finds its roots in John Calvin’s theology: the idea of total depravity. Calvin (and Luther) believed that people were inherently sinful, defined by their sin. Luther is famous for having declared that he was “a lump of dung covered in snow.”4 Luther was so overwhelmed by his own sinfulness and God’s grace that he believe that he was worthless and sinful but was covered by God’s grace so as to make him pleasing to God. To the minds of the reformers, to be human was to be sinful.5 Because of this, the Catholic claim that Mary was without sin sounds like a claim of divinity. It’s important to clarify first of all that being immaculate is not the same as being divine. As Christians, we know that God made us very good.6 Sin mars us, but not having sin doesn’t make us superhuman, it makes us fully human. Adam and Eve were immaculate before the Fall, after all; they, like Mary, were created immaculate but merely human.

A common objection to the teaching that Mary was without sin is Romans 3:23: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” While Paul says “all” here, I think it’s clear that doesn’t mean that every single human person ever has committed a sin. Obviously Jesus didn’t. Neither do infants who die or the mentally handicapped who don’t have sufficient reason to commit sin. Clearly there are exceptions to this rhetorical “all.” So why not Mary?

Obviously, though, it’s not enough just to argue against those who oppose this doctrine. Let’s look instead at the affirmative. Clearly, the angel Gabriel’s approach to Mary indicates that she’s something special.

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you. But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1:26-30)

Angels don’t typically go around calling sinful humans “full of grace,” a term that could be better translated “you who have been completely grace-ized” if grace-ized were a word. Which it’s not. Hence the usual “full of grace.” Think about this: grace is God’s life within us. Sin separates us from God. So if Mary is sinful, a regular old village girl chock full of Original Sin, how can she be full of grace?

The New Eve reconciled with the first Eve. (Eve and Mary by Sr. Grace Remington, O.C.S.O)

And then there’s the fact that she has found favor with God. If she was lost in her sin, as we all were before Christ, how did she find favor with God? There’s something about the way she’s addressed that indicates that she’s different, something special.7

Naturally, Scripture isn’t entirely clear on this–if it were, there’d be no disagreement. But as Catholics, we recognize the Word of God as coming through Scripture and Tradition.8 So check out some super old stuff about Mary Immaculate.9

  • Hippolytus: He [Jesus] was the ark formed of incorruptible wood. For by this is signified that His tabernacle [Mary] was exempt from defilement and corruption.—235 AD
  • Origen: This Virgin Mother of the Only-begotten of God is called Mary, worthy of God, immaculate of the immaculate, one of the one.—244 AD
  • St. Ambrose: Mary, a Virgin not only undefiled but a Virgin whom grace had made inviolate, free of every stain of sin.—387 AD
  • St. Augustine, in response to Rom 3:23: All have sinned, except the holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom, for the honor of the Lord, I wish no question to be raised at all, when we are treating of sins. After all, how do we know what greater degree of Grace for a complete victory over sin was conferred on her who merited to conceive and bring forth Him Who all admit was without sin.–415 AD

Now, that’s not to say that anything some dude said forever ago has to be doctrine, but it’s certainly not a theological innovation if it was old news by the beginning of the third century.

Really, though, Mary’s sinlessness is just reasonable. People like to argue this by saying that a sinless person can’t come from a sinful one, which is a good instinct, I suppose. Of course, then Mary’s mom had to be sinless, and her mom, and hers, and eventually we have to trace it back to a sinless Eve, and that’s absurd.

Part of this idea is right, though–that Mary’s sinless nature was necessary for Jesus’ conception. Let’s try looking at it this way instead:

  1. Before the Fall, we were in relationship with God.
  2. Sin breaks this relationship.
  3. According to moral law, babies must be created through a loving, committed relationship between their parents.10
  4. This relationship would have been impossible if Mary had had Original Sin.11
  5. God doesn’t break moral laws, so he had to be in relationship with the mother of Christ.
  6. Mary had to be preserved from Original Sin.

Now this is just my reasoning here, not doctrine, so reject it if you like but it makes a lot of sense to me. There’s also the Ark of the Covenant connection: if the Ark was created so intentionally, formed out of perfect and pure materials in order to bear the symbolic presence of God, how much more would the tabernacle of the living God (the Blessed Virgin Mary) be pure and undefiled?

By the brilliant Peggy Aplseeds–go check out everything she’s ever done.

But–and this is the key to this question–Mary did NOT save herself. Yup, that was a bold, italicized, capital not. Her immaculate nature is not due to her merit. You see, the rest of us had to be redeemed–saved after we fell. Mary was preserved instead–saved preemptively–by the power of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. God who is outside of time used future graces to save her in order to make those graces possible.12 Pius IX made it very clear that Mary’s holiness comes entirely from God when he declared this dogma ex cathedra in 1854:

“The Most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin.”

So let’s make sure we’re clear on this. Mary did not save herself. Like you and me (God willing), she was saved by the merits of Christ’s death and resurrection. In order to make her the perfect vessel for the incarnation of his Son, the Father applied those graces to her in the moment of her conception to preserve her inviolate, untainted either by Original Sin or by its consequences. The Church reminds us of this in the prayers of the Mass and the Office for the Solemnity:

“O God, who by the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin prepared a worthy dwelling for your Son, grant, we pray, that, as you preserved her from every stain by virtue of the Death of your Son, which you foresaw, so, through her intercession, we, too, may be cleansed and admitted to your presence. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”

As always with the Blessed Mother, it’s essential that we remember that all doctrines about Mary are doctrines about God. All honor given to Mary is honor given to God. All love of Mary is love of God. When we celebrate the Immaculate Conception of Mary, we celebrate God’s incredible goodness in preparing the way for the Messiah. We celebrate his power to work miracles. We celebrate his ability to set things in motion that will only bear fruit years down the road. We recognize his providence and his desire to save us, whatever it takes. And with Mary we recognize our unworthiness and God’s unceasing clemency. With Mary, we proclaim the greatness of the Lord and rejoice in God our Savior.

This Advent season, let’s join our Mother in saying yes to God and allowing him to flood us with grace.

 

Want more on Mary? Here are all my posts tagged Mary. Enjoy!

  1. 8,784 this year. [↩]
  2. Jesus was immaculately conceived as well, of course, but that’s not what this term is referring to. [↩]
  3. And yes, it’s dogma. Proclaimed ex cathedra by Pius IX in 1854. [↩]
  4. Which, by the way, is an extraordinarily unpleasant surprise to discover in the midst of a snowball fight. [↩]
  5. While this line of thought is dominant in many Protestant traditions today, there are others that focus far less on sin. The idea that sinfulness is integral to the human condition maintains at least a subtle influence, though, on even the most “accepting” of communities. [↩]
  6. Gen 1:31 [↩]
  7. It probably doesn’t help with the Annunciation-Immaculate Conception confusion that this reading describing the Annunciation is read on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception…. [↩]
  8. 2 Thes 2:15, 1 Thes 2:13 [↩]
  9. Probably courtesy of www.catholic.com, although I’m reading it out of a Word document of mine. [↩]
  10. This doesn’t mean that those babies who are created in unloving or uncommitted acts are less human, just that God desires better for them [↩]
  11. See point 2. [↩]
  12. Which is rather brain-twisty but pretty cool if you ask me. And you did. [↩]

Purgatory? Prove It.

Once you get over your misconception that purgatory’s pretty much hell, it’s actually kind of a nice idea. We get to imagine that we’re still connected with our deceased loved ones, and while we’re at it, we can pretend that we actually have the ability do something for them. Plus, if we’re kind of jerks, we know we’ve still got purgatory do deal with our mess, so we don’t really have to be good on earth, right? For those who are looking for theological platitudes, purgatory’s a win-win-win.1

But is there any truth to it? Or, as a Jehovah’s Witness I spent the other morning with said, “That’s Catechism! I want Scripture!!”2

Well, we’ll start with Scripture. But as you probably know, we in the Catholic Church use Scripture and Tradition with a healthy sprinkling of good old-fashioned reason. After all, Scripture itself doesn’t say “Scripture alone.” And, of course, there are some pretty essential truths that all Christians3 believe that can’t be found explicitly in Scripture: the Trinity, for one, and the divinity of Christ. But this is a matter for another post.4 Let’s get back to purgatory.

If you’ve been around apologetics circles much, you know that the best defense we have of purgatory comes from 2 Maccabees. It says explicitly that it’s a good thing to pray for the dead. The problem? Protestants don’t use 2 Maccabees. For a long explanation, check out this paper I wrote in grad school.5 The quick version is that 2 Maccabees belongs to that group of 7 books called the Deuterocanon by Catholics and the Apocrypha by Protestants. The Protestant claim is that Jesus didn’t use these books, so they don’t belong in the Bible. The truth is much more complicated than that, but suffice it to say that Luther didn’t say a word about getting rid of Maccabees until Johann Eck brought up this passage in a debate on purgatory at Leipzig in 1519. Basically, Eck read the passage, Luther paused, and then he said (to the shock of everyone present) that it was irrelevant because that wasn’t Scripture. It sure sounds to me like he knew he was beat, so he changed the rules.

Want to see what was so decisively pro-purgatory that Luther had to start removing books of the Bible? Check it out:

On the following day, since the task had now become urgent, Judas and his companions went to gather up the bodies of the fallen and bury them with their kindred in their ancestral tombs. But under the tunic of each of the dead they found amulets sacred to the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear. So it was clear to all that this was why these men had fallen. They all therefore praised the ways of the Lord, the just judge who brings to light the things that are hidden. Turning to supplication, they prayed that the sinful deed might be fully blotted out. The noble Judas exhorted the people to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened because of the sin of those who had fallen. He then took up a collection among all his soldiers, amounting to two thousand silver drachmas, which he sent to Jerusalem to provide for an expiatory sacrifice. In doing this he acted in a very excellent and noble way, inasmuch as he had the resurrection in mind; for if he were not expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead. But if he did this with a view to the splendid reward that awaits those who had gone to rest in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Thus he made atonement for the dead that they might be absolved from their sin. (2 Mac 12:39-46)

So here we have these men who have died with sin on their souls. Clearly Judas is praying for the dead, and that’s a good thing. Why pray for the dead if not for their salvation? What else could they possibly need? They don’t need anything if they’re in heaven. And what could prayers possibly accomplish if they’re in hell? So they’re dead and not yet saved. Purgatory much?

In fact, Judas doesn’t just pray for them, he offers sacrifices for them after their death in the hopes that these prayers will purify their souls in the afterlife. Sounds a heck of a lot like offering Masses for the souls in purgatory to me.

But while this passage is very helpful for those of us who accept the Deuterocanon, it will accomplish very little with Protestants. If you’re really on your game, you can explain that even if this isn’t Scripture, it demonstrates what the accepted belief at the time of Christ was. If this is what people believed and Jesus said nothing to correct it, it stands to reason that they were right.

Our whole argument from Scripture doesn’t stand or fall on this passage, though. 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 talks about the process of judgment and salvation. Note that there is a process of purifying fire—what is evil will be burned, what is good will remain. And so the dead will be judged and then saved (purified) through fire.

According to the grace of God given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building upon it. But each one must be careful how he builds upon it, for no one can lay a foundation other than the one that is there, namely, Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw, the work of each will come to light, for the Day will disclose it. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire [itself] will test the quality of each one’s work. If the work stands that someone built upon the foundation, that person will receive a wage. But if someone’s work is burned up, that one will suffer loss; the person will be saved, but only as through fire.

Or how about Mt 5:25-26:

Settle with your opponent quickly while on the way to court with him. Otherwise your opponent will hand you over to the judge, and the judge will hand you over to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Amen, I say to you, you will not be released until you have paid the last penny.

Here’s a description of a man who’s been judged and found wanting.6 He’s imprisoned, but not consigned to Gehenna as so often in the Gospels. No, this man is put in jail until he has paid the last penny. It seems that having died and been judged, he’s making up for his failings until he’s “put all the jelly beans back in the jar,” if you will. It seems, then, that there’s potential to make up for your sins after death.

We’re still saved by the blood of Christ–no works righteousness here.

And finally, Revelation 21:27, as we discussed last week. “Nothing unclean shall enter heaven.” If you’re a sinner, you’re unclean. You may have been forgiven and washed in the blood of the Lamb, but anyone who’s attached to his sin is not completely purified. Purgatory purifies you, makes you ready for heaven. Without it, those of us who aren’t as holy as though claimed by Christ ought to be—well, we’d be in a lot of trouble.

So purgatory is at least supported by Scripture, if not exactly proven without 2 Maccabees. But it’s also all over the writings of the early Church. Rather than being a medieval invention, as is often claimed, the idea of praying and even having Masses said for the dead is an ancient one, a core part of the life of the early Church.

The earliest I’ve found is from the account of the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity in 202. Perpetua has a vision of a dead friend suffering.  She prays for him earnestly, then has a vision of him in glory. The obvious lesson is that her prayers had some effect on the state of his soul. There must, then, be something that happens after death that brings people from torment to glory.

Here are some quotations from the early Church that I’ll assume you can interpret yourself:7

  • Tertullian: “A woman, after the death of her husband . . . prays for his soul and asks that he may, while waiting, find rest; and that he may share in the first resurrection. And each year, on the anniversary of his death, she offers the sacrifice.” (216 AD)
  • St. Cyril of Jerusalem: “Then, we pray [in the anaphora] for the holy fathers and bishops who have fallen asleep, and in general for all who have fallen asleep before us, in the belief that it is a great benefit to the souls on whose behalf the supplication is offered, while the holy and tremendous Victim is present. . . . By offering to God our supplications for those who have fallen asleep, if they have sinned, we . . . offer Christ sacrificed for the sins of all, and so render favorable, for them and for us, the God who loves man.” (350 AD)
  • St. Monica: “Put this body anywhere! Don’t trouble yourselves about it! I simply ask you to remember me at the Lord’s altar wherever you are.” (late 4th century)
  • St. John Chrysostom: “Let us help and commemorate them. If Job’s sons were purified by their father’s sacrifice [Job 1:5], why would we doubt that our offerings for the dead bring them some consolation? Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them.” (392 AD)
  • St. Augustine: “Temporary punishments are suffered by some in this life only, by others after death, by others both now and then; but all of them before that last and strictest judgment. But not all who suffer temporal punishments after death will come to eternal punishments, which are to follow after that judgment.” (419 AD)
  • St. Gregory the Great: “As for certain lesser faults, we must believe that, before the Final Judgment, there is a purifying fire. He who is truth says that whoever utters blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will be pardoned neither in this age nor in the age to come. From this sentence we understand that certain offenses can be forgiven in this age, but certain others in the age to come.” (604 AD, referencing Mt 12:32)
The power of the Mass releases souls from Purgatory. See how it’s purifying them?

This clearly isn’t some later development—the concept of praying for the salvation of those who have already passed away pervades the writings of the early Church. That individuals believe something clearly doesn’t make it true. But when we see consistent support of an idea from the Church Fathers—particularly from bishops exercising their magisterial authority—it certainly supports the claim that this idea is in fact true, the consistent teaching of the Church.

Generally, I’d finish up with an explanation of the logic behind a doctrine, the reason component, but I think I pretty much covered that in my description of purgatory. Suffice it to say that the grace of God is sufficient and Christ’s sacrifice saves us, but being saved is not the same as being sanctified. If there were no opportunity for final purification, God in his justice would be bound to exclude many from the holiness of heaven. And what about those who aren’t Catholic? Certainly, God will not damn someone because he was never exposed to the Gospel, but a Hindu would be unprepared to worship the Triune God. Perhaps in that case, purgatory is more like an intensive RCIA program. In any event, purgatory is a gift from a merciful God who will stop at nothing when it comes to our salvation.

During November, the month when we commemorate our dead in a particular way, take some time to pray for the souls of the deceased. Today, Veterans Day, is a perfect day to offer a prayer or ten for the souls of those who gave their lives for our freedom, whether they died in the process or not. And while you’re at it, go ahead and ask them for their prayers, too. They’re sure not doing anything else.

 

P.S. If you’re in the Atlanta area, you should come to the Georgia Tech Catholic Center on Monday at 7. I’ll be speaking about the Reformation roots of the divisions in Christianity and their theological implications. Basically, some history, some apologetics, and some ecumenism to tie it together.

  1. Everyone’s picking up on the sarcasm, right? [↩]
  2. He followed this with, “I grew up Catholic and we never opened the Bible–not once!” My students will tell you (with some trace of bitterness, I imagine) that they had to memorize all the books of the Bible in order and at least one verse every week. Hardly a day went by that we didn’t open our Bibles. Trust me, if I believe something, I can support it from Scripture. [↩]
  3. Although, admittedly, not Jehovah’s Witnesses. [↩]
  4. And my talk on Monday at Georgia Tech–you should come! [↩]
  5. Seriously, you should read it. It’s so interesting!! [↩]
  6. Admittedly, this might not be about judgment and salvation, but every other discussion of judges in the Gospels is, so…. [↩]
  7. Pretty much any time I list quotations from the Church Fathers, I’m indebted to www.catholic.com, an incredible resource. [↩]

“I thought we got rid of purgatory.”

I have no idea why I mentioned purgatory to a Protestant friend while helping her clean her room when I was in college. Maybe because I hate cleaning and wanted credit for time served? In any event, I remember expecting it to be a throwaway comment. Until she responded.

“Purgatory? I thought we got rid of purgatory in the Middle Ages.”

Who got rid of purgatory? Since when has the Church gotten rid of anything? You seriously didn’t know Catholics believed in purgatory?

Turns out, it’s rather a hotly contested topic. So let’s explore, shall we?

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo – The Madonna of Carmel and the Souls of the Purgatory

First, what purgatory is not. Purgatory is not a final destination. It’s not a blank and empty place akin to limbo. It’s not a place where you earn salvation.1 Purgatory is a transient place for the cleansing (purging) of souls.

The idea is that those who die in a state of grace are saved. They’re destined for heaven. Many, though, are in need of some purification before they enter. Purgatory is a process of preparation for heaven and reparation for sins for those “who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified” (CCC 1030).

Preparation: “Nothing unclean shall enter it.”

The first element of purgatory is easier to understand. Revelation 21:27 tells us that nothing unclean shall enter heaven. You (I assume) and I are unclean. Despite having been restored to God’s graces by our baptism and subsequent confessions, we’re not entirely pure. In order to enter heaven, we must be cleansed. C.S. Lewis (himself a Protestant) put it this way:

“Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’ ‘It may hurt, you know’ – ‘Even so, sir.'” – C.S. Lewis, Letters To Malcolm

As always, it’s essential to point out that we are saved by God’s grace and by the merits of Christ’s Passion. We do not cleanse ourselves in purgatory, nor do the prayers of others cleanse us. God cleanses us through our suffering and in response to others’ prayers.

More than just removing your sin, though, purgatory removes your attachment to sin. I can’t imagine that many people die without even any venial sins on their souls, but most of those, I’m sure, still have some attachment to sin. Even this attachment must be cleansed before we’re able to rejoice in the presence of God.

I’m pretty sure they’re gonna do the wave for me when I get there. But it’s gonna be so much more awesome than any wave in any stadium ever.

I’ll be honest here: heaven doesn’t always sound that attractive to me. I mean, I want to be with Jesus more than anything. I’m homesick for heaven and I can’t wait to hang out with the Saints.2 I’m going to touch the leprous hands of St. Damien and hug the joyful St. Philip Neri and just stand near St. Teresa and wait for her to say something snarky. And I’m going to dance with Jesus. It’s going to be awesome.

But eternity is a long time. And I’m pretty sure eventually (within 24 hours), I’m going to get bored. I’m going to want to gossip or brag or just quit playing my stupid harp. If I went to heaven now, I wouldn’t be truly happy because I’d want to sin. See, I like my sin.3 Otherwise I wouldn’t sin. So if I’m going to be happy in heaven,4 I need to be cleansed not just of my sins (the mud of Lewis’ analogy) nor even of the residue of my sins (the stains left over–see below on reparation) but of my desire to sin (my love for mud?).

Even the cleansing isn’t enough, though. We have to be stretched, our capacity for God and good increased lest our minds literally be blown by meeting the Lord face to face. Think of it this way: you’ve been living your life in a windowless room in the dark.  Heaven is like the beach at noon—you’ll go blind if God doesn’t gradually turn the lights up.  And it’ll hurt like hell when he does, but you need that pain if you’re ever going to survive on the beach. Purgatory is the dimmer switch, the place where our capacity for God is stretched, our impurities refined.

This is the reason that purgatory has traditionally been described as a place of terrible suffering but also of unimaginable joy. It is a consuming fire that refines and burns off our sins, and yet it is the closest we’ve ever been to God. Wendell Berry describes the paradox:

I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment. And yet, in suffering that light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.

Reparation: “You will not be released until you have paid the last penny.”

In addition to preparing our souls for heaven, purgatory also enables us to make up for the evil we have done on earth. Once again, let me point out that you can’t ever atone for your own sins–it is Christ who saves you, Christ who forgives you, Christ who heals you and the world. But God, good father that he is, allows us to participate in our salvation and wants us to cooperate with him.

Now God is merciful. And because he is merciful, sin has consequences. Yes, because he is merciful. God in his mercy did not want us to do what is evil without consequences to serve as deterrents. So our sin merits two kinds of punishment: eternal and temporal.

Eternal punishment is, as all Christians agree, hell. Eternal punishment is a consequence of sin, as St. Paul says: the wages of sin is death (Rom 3:23). When you go to confession, God forgives you and your eternal punishment is satisfied by the death of Christ. You no longer merit hell. But there are still consequences to your actions, damage you’ve done to yourself and others and the Church and the world. When you do penance or receive an indulgence,5 you satisfy some of the debt of temporal punishment you owe. But if you die not having satisfied all your temporal punishment, you are given the opportunity to “give back” in purgatory. With the mud analogy from above, it’s as though confession washes the mud from your baptismal garment but it’s still stained. Purgatory bleaches it whiter than snow.

This chick is awesome.6

But your sin doesn’t just hurt you–it hurts everyone. It’s as though there’s a giant jar of jelly beans on display in your classroom7 and you run up to it, grab a fistful of jelly beans, and fling them on the floor. Why? Who knows. Apparently you’re kind of a jerk.

Now, if you apologize for having flung the jelly beans, your teacher can forgive you, but you still have to put jelly beans back in the jar. You’ve hurt everybody by your reckless hatred of jellybeans and if you’re truly sorry, you want to make up for it. If the school year ends and you haven’t replaced all the jelly beans you trampled, you need to…spend your summer collecting jelly beans? Okay, the analogy is getting weird. But you see my point.

When we pray or do good on earth, we’re putting jelly beans back in the cosmic jar. If we die having been forgiven for our awkward jelly bean outburst but we’re still in the red, we go to purgatory until we’ve put in enough jelly beans or someone has put them in for us.

That’s what we mean when we say Rest In Peace, you know.8

Because here’s the awesome (and hotly-contested) thing: if we haven’t replaced all the jelly beans by the time we leave school, somebody else can do it for us. This is where the idea of praying for the holy souls in purgatory comes in. It’s not that Christ’s Passion is insufficient or that God refuses to let people out of purgatory unless we say the magic words; it’s that God has established his Church as one family and given us the gift of intercessory prayer. I think that, if for no other reason, God allows us to pray for the dead to give us the consolation of being able to do something. I think Protestants are never more Catholic than when they lose a loved one. The natural inclination is to pray for those who have died–probably because God gave us that inclination.

Common Ground

Despite the fact that Catholics reference purgatory as a matter of course and Protestants think it sounds medieval, there’s really significant agreement on this doctrine. All Christians agree that we ought to do good to make up for the evil we’ve done; Catholics simply maintain that we must. All Christians agree that we must be purified in order to enter heaven; Catholics simply maintain that this purification is a process while Protestants would consider it an event, a moment of purification. Now, I’d argue that God tends to work in processes rather than events9 and that really we couldn’t handle sudden holiness. As with the beach analogy, we need our sanctification to be gradual.

“For the Lord your God is a consuming fire” (Dt 4:24).

But we agree that we need purification. And nobody ever said it took time–in a sense, purgatory is outside of time. And nobody ever said that it was a place–why would immaterial souls need a place? And nobody ever said that there was really fire–fire burning immaterial souls? The division really comes down to the sola fide vs. faith and works argument: Catholics assert that our salvation and the salvation of others can be affected by our works; Protestants, naturally, disagree. That’s a discussion for another post (or six), but I think at this point we can say that there is quite a lot of common ground here.

I’ll leave the defense of purgatory–Scripture and Tradition–for another post. For this feast of the Holy Souls10 during the month of November in which we remember our dead, I’ll leave you with this: the doctrine of purgatory acclaims that God’s mercy is without end; not even death can end the merciful love of God. Purgatory is not a threat. It doesn’t demonstrate God’s desire to punish but to heal. Purgatory tells us that God, who desires that all men be saved (1 Tim 2:4), will fight to the death and beyond for your soul. Let’s pray for the souls in purgatory this month, but let’s also live like souls that are destined for heaven. Praise God for his mercy in coming after every lost lamb of us.

 

  1. Strictly speaking, it’s not a place at all, but we’ll go with it. [↩]
  2. If you pray the Office of Readings, you read this line from St. Bernard of Clairvaux yesterday: “The saints have no need of honor from us; neither does our devotion add the slightest thing to what is theirs. Clearly, if we venerate their memory, it serves us, not them. But I tell you, when I think of them, I feel myself inflamed by a tremendous yearning.” If you don’t pray the Office of Readings, you should. It’s awesome. Download the free app now. [↩]
  3. This always shocks people. I’m not a serial killer. I like my stupid pathetic sin, not my terrifying, disgusting sin. Although, really, is there any other kind? [↩]
  4. Which is, I’m told, kind of the idea. [↩]
  5. I’ll write about those another day. [↩]
  6. Photo courtesy of Garry Knight. [↩]
  7. Work with me here. [↩]
  8. Photo courtesy of puuikibeach. [↩]
  9. Consider that he created gradually, revealed himself to the world gradually, and draws men’s hearts to himself gradually. [↩]
  10. What? It’s still November 2nd on the West Coast. [↩]

Year of Faith Boot Camp

I’ve been an apologist almost since I’ve been a Christian.1 I remember arguing theology in high school, uncatechised as I was, and coming up with answers that surprised me. I guess I was vocal enough that the Holy Spirit decided to give me the gift of understanding in order to preserve the Church from my heavy-handed ignorance.

The minute I realized that I wanted to spend my life teaching others about God,2 I started coming up with arguments for every single thing. Since the moment I started teaching, I was an apologist, always giving explanations rather than just definitions.

My second year of teaching, I inadvertently taught a year-long apologetics class. I say inadvertently because I thought it was supposed to be an apologetics class; I found out second semester that it wasn’t really but it was going so well that my department chair didn’t say anything. Oops? We’ll call that a little more Holy Spirit action.

The class I began that year (HSP class of 2010!) is the best thing I’ve ever done. My notes for the class are 125 pages of hardcore apologetics, answers to pretty much everything. We start the year as atheists and build to a solid orthodox Catholicism, using Scripture, Tradition, and reason to defend everything along the way. At the end of the year, I always ask if there are any more questions:

Any questions on priestly celibacy? *pause* Any questions on holy orders? *pause* Any questions on the sacraments of vocation? *pause* Any questions on any of the Sacraments? *smugly* Any questions on anything the Roman Catholic Church believes, teaches, and professes to be true?

Some student: Nope. I think you pretty much covered it.

God willing, this document will one day be a book. But soon, it’ll be a workshop! It’ll be a whirlwind version, of course, cramming something like 150 hours into 1-3 days, but you can move a lot more quickly when people are there voluntarily and aren’t going to be tested.

Here’s my plan: your parish or diocese or campus ministry or whatever sets aside a chunk of time–ideally Friday evening through Sunday evening, although we can do a short version in one day or a few evenings. We’ll have prayer and fellowship (Mass every day, maybe the Liturgy of the Hours, meals in common, even set it up as a retreat if you like) and tons of fascinating, energetic presentations building a case for the faith from the ground up.

The short version of the apologetics “boot camp” will cover the very basics:

  • Session One: Is there a God?
  • Session Two: Is Jesus God?
  • Session Three: Catholicism and Protestantism
  • Session Four: Revelation and the Church

If you’re up for a longer experience, we’ll add in some of the particulars (your choice):

  • Session A: Salvation by Faith Alone
  • Session B: The Papacy
  • Session C: The Eucharist
  • Session D: The Sacrament of Reconciliation
  • Session E: Mary and the Saints
  • Session F: Purgatory and Indulgences
  • Session G: The Church’s Moral Teachings

Doesn’t this sound awesome? Oh my gosh, you guys, I’m so excited! And it’s so perfect for the Year of Faith!

I’m thinking this will be good for people college-aged and up, although younger folks should certainly be welcomed. I’ve just never met a large group of high-schoolers who’d really be into something this hardcore. Maybe on a diocesan level….

So if you’re with me in thinking that this sounds awesome (or you just like me and want to help me serve the Lord), will you please, please help me out? Print out this page with all the basic info and take it to your pastor/campus minister/DRE/whoever. Tell them I’m practically free3 and that I’m awesome. Lie if you have to.4 If they’re not convinced, point them to any of my posts tagged apologetics or anything in the Truth category. Send them to watch this video, similar to what you’d see in Session Two, although more disjointed since my notes were in my car and my car was at a Firestone in Alabama and I was in Florida. I can do everything but 3 or 4 quotations from memory, though. Or take a look at this video, an excerpt from Session Four.

If you want to convince them that I’m entertaining, show them this picture:

Point out that I was sober. And that the clothing was a costume. But that even dressed like a fool, I’m still sporting a prominent crucifix. In the world but not of it, baby.

If you want to convince them that I’m holy, try this one instead:

That’s a breviary. Yeah, I’m totally into prayer.

Basically, I”m so excited about this that I’m just babbling now and my babbling is manifesting itself in the form of random pictures I found on facebook. So I’ll shut up and leave it in your hands–don’t you really, really want to go to all these sessions? Let’s make it happen!!

Apologetics Bootcamp

  1. By conviction, that is, not just by baptism. [↩]
  2. Which, incidentally, was the minute I found out one could do such a thing and get paid for it. You know, back when I used to want to get paid. [↩]
  3. Okay, I’m literally free. But “the worker deserves his wage” and all that (Mt 10:10), so, you know. Do what you can. [↩]
  4. That was a joke. [↩]

You Will Never Be an Angel.

I‘m so sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your childhood daydreams of wings and harps were sadly misguided. Hopefully most of you know this already, but you’d be amazed at the number of decently-educated Christians who are shocked when I tell them this:

Also, all dogs do not go to heaven. But that’s a post for another day.

You will never be an angel. All the angels there will ever be have already been made and they’re not taking applications for new members. You might just as well dream of dying and becoming a hippo. And you may have a little saint in heaven, but the only angel you’ve got in heaven is your guardian angel, the one who was given to you when you were conceived.1

A few years back, I mentioned this to a group of high school seniors and they were crushed. “Nobody ever told us that EVER!” they shouted. I’m not exaggerating; they actually shouted.

I felt certain that couldn’t be true. In twelve years of Catholic education, nobody ever mentioned what you become if you die and go to heaven? So I asked the next junior I saw:

“Jordan, if you die and go to heaven, what do you become?”

*pause* “Well, you don’t become an angel, I know that much.”

I suppose I was pleased by that (although still concerned that these kids didn’t know that a person in heaven is a saint, not an angel). But I just had to wonder: who told them they became angels?

Catholics certainly don’t believe this, but neither do Protestants. According to all the major world religions, when you die, you might become a saint or a god; you might cease to exist entirely or exist within the collective consciousness of the divine. You might live in a sensual paradise or be freed from the restrictions of the body. But one thing’s for sure: you do not become an angel.

Until Mormonism, that is, which apparently teaches2 that Adam is now Michael the Archangel and Noah is now Gabriel.3 And yet somehow I doubt that my Kansas kids, whose understanding of Mormonism comes entirely from South Park, have based their understanding of human nature on LDS doctrine.

When did Eeyore die? I bet that was a depressing movie.

So where did these kids get the idea that Grandma’s got wings? It seems that Dickens had a hand in it and Heart and Souls sure didn’t help. Cartoons show people dying and floating up to heaven where they get their angel duds. And then we read poems and gravestones and tattoos about “God’s littlest angel,” and we assume that all these grieving people must be right. The idea that someone we love taken too soon is an angel is consoling and only the worst kind of Scrooge would rob people of that little bit of light in the darkness of grief.

But truth always offers more consolation than platitudes. And there is deeper joy in the truth that those who are welcomed into the embrace of God are saints in heaven, watching over and interceding for us, than the Hallmark drivel that when you die you get wings.

Also, angels are not cute. Ever notice that any time an angel shows up in the Bible, the first thing it says is “Be not afraid?” Dudes must be pretty terrifying.

You see, an angel is an entirely different being from a human being. Angels are pure spirit; they’re not disembodied souls. They don’t have wings or halos because they don’t have bodies. Now, maybe they choose to manifest themselves with wings (Is 6) or halos when they appear to humans, but at other times they look like people (Gen 18) or robots (Dn 10) or glow sticks (Mt 28). Often, they don’t bother taking on the appearance of a body at all, because it’s not natural to them. They aren’t human; they never had bodies to begin with.4

Human beings, on the other hand, were created body and soul, a sort of natural-supernatural hybrid. There’s a famous Lewis quotation floating around the internet (and a women’s bathroom stall in Missouri):

Respectfully, Jack, I disagree.

Some googling tells me there’s no evidence Lewis ever said this, and it’s a good thing because this is some seriously bad theology. Real Christian theology has been clear on this for almost two millennia. You are not a soul trapped in a body.5 You are not a body with a spiritual component.6 You are a soul and you are a body. That’s what it means to be a human being.

You have an angel. You will never be an angel. (Guardian Angel by Pietro da Cortona, 1656)

Because we’re body and soul, valuing either the physical or the spiritual at the expense of the other is always going to mess us up. This is the reason that when we use our bodies without regard to our souls, we kill ourselves spiritually, emotionally, relationally. After all, the separation of body and soul is called death.

We know about this connection instinctively. A body without a soul isn’t called a person anymore but a corpse. And a soul without a body is incomplete as well–there’s something missing there. If you die and go to heaven, you’ll be a saint; you’ll be a soul without a body and more perfectly happy than you’ve ever been before, and yet you’ll be imperfect. Because, unlike the angels, you were not made to be pure spirit. You were made to be body and soul. Which is what we’re talking about every Sunday when we say, “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead.” This isn’t some metaphorical resurrection we’re talking about here–you’re actually going to get a body.

And here’s another moment where people usually start yelling–“We’re getting our bodies back? Nobody EVER TOLD US THAT EVER!!!”

Well, whether they told you that or not, you’ve been professing to believe it for years. We don’t know what the glorified body you’ll get at the end of the world will be like, exactly. Healthy and glorious for sure, maybe able to fly and walk through walls–I mean, who really knows?

What matters is that you’ll have a body because your body is integral to who you are. You’re not a spirit, you’re a person. You’ll never be an angel (just like you’ll never be a hippo) but, God willing, you’ll be a great saint. So why don’t we all toss the cartoon angel nonsense out the window and start living for reality–and for heaven–instead?

  1. Happy feast of the Guardian Angels! [↩]
  2. I say apparently because it’s very hard to get a handle on the teachings of Mormonism. I’ve never found a definitive resource online. This is, of course, complicated by the fact that the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormonism) is able to completely reverse Church doctrine. As in, “Polygamy used to be required; now it’s absolutely forbidden.” So if I’m wrong, I apologize. I’m going with what I found on the all-knowing internet. [↩]
  3. Happy belated Feast of the Archangels! [↩]
  4. Props to Christian Answers for the Scripture references. [↩]
  5. That’s Gnosticism. [↩]
  6. Shall we call that Modernism? [↩]

The Anglican Use Mass

**Note: this is a long one and probably only exciting if you’re kind of a nerd and want to know about rites and ordinariates and such. I find all this fascinating!**

My last post on the Church of England was, I know, not the usual for this blog. But the new ordinariates are just so complicated that I thought you’d want some background explaining the context from which this all arose. Now we all know that the Church of England came from the Catholic Church (didn’t they all?), that there is great beauty in their traditions and liturgies, that there have been divisions from the beginning, and that these divisions have recently become so significant that many members have been returning to Rome after nearly 500 years.

Because of the age and beauty of the CofE liturgy, because it is so similar to the Catholic liturgy, and because of pastoral sensitivity, the Church in her wisdom has determined that former Anglicans shouldn’t be expected just to dive in to the Catholic melting pot and lose their particularly Anglican culture. Instead, she’s established the option of entering via the ordinariate. Distinct ordinariates have been established in different countries; so far, there’s one in England, Scotland, and Wales, one in the US and Canada (although Canada will be establishing its own soon), and one in Australia. I’m going to go ahead and refer to all three as “the Ordinariate,” by which I’ll mean any one of the three–as far as I know, the only distinction is regional, each being headed by a different ordinary but without any other real differences.

For a little more background, let’s talk for a minute about different rites in the Church. The Catholic Church is divided into two arms, the Western and the Eastern. The vast majority of Catholics (98%) are Roman Catholics, members of the Western Church whose liturgical language is Latin. The other two percent belong to different Eastern rites of the Church. There are 22 different Eastern rites (check them out here–very cool information). Each of these rites is completely in union with Rome; they have all the same doctrine as Roman rite Catholics but different liturgies and some different rules. For example, Eastern rite priests are permitted to be married. On the other hand, many Eastern rite churches require that the faithful abstain from meat throughout all of Lent. Nothing huge and nothing doctrinal.

Eastern rite Catholics are not the same as the Eastern Orthodox. The Eastern Orthodox are not in union with Rome; they don’t recognize the authority of the Pope. So while Eastern rite Catholics may look much more like Eastern Orthodox (bearded clerics with their wives, ornate vestments worn by a priest behind an iconostasis), they’re totally different. As a Roman Catholic, you’re welcome to attend a Melkite Mass, receive communion, go to confession, even register at the parish. Because they’re Catholic. We are not welcome to receive Sacraments in the Orthodox Church (although they’re valid) because our two churches are not in communion with one another.

Got that? Okay, well, the Anglican use Mass celebrated by the Ordinariate is not a rite distinct from the Roman rite the way that the Melkite or Ruthenian is. In much the same way that the Extraordinary Form (Tridentine/”Latin” Mass) is a version of the Novus Ordo, the standard form of the Roman rite, the Anglican use is a version of the Roman rite. Because it’s not a distinct rite, it feels very similar to the Novus Ordo Mass that you’re used to attending every Sunday. It’s generally the same shape and many of the words are the same or similar. Eastern rite liturgies, on the other hand, can be dramatically different. I was once 20 minutes into a Ruthenian Mass before I realized that Mass had started!

Because it’s not a different rite, members of the Ordinariate don’t have any different rules from other Roman Catholics. Priests of the Ordinariate1 are permitted to be married if they had previously been CofE priests, but the norm will not be for married men to be ordained. Even those who have converted have to get permission from the pope to be dispensed of the obligation of celibacy. They use the same lectionary, a very similar liturgical calendar, and the same Code of Canon Law (as opposed to the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches). What’s different is the liturgy, as I’ll explain below, and the fact that it’s possible through the Ordinariate for entire Anglican parishes to convert to Catholicism, as was the case this past Saturday with the Anglican Cathedral of the Incarnation. Although there have been many difficulties because of red tape and property ownership, a number of entire Anglican parishes have already come over to Rome, maintaining their traditions and community while receiving the fullness of the Truth.

The idea is not to establish a new rite in the Church but to serve the needs of people who are so accustomed to lofty, sacral language in their liturgy, who cherish their roots in 16th century English Catholicism, and who may have lived for 60 years in a parish of 300 souls, a community much smaller than your average Catholic parish.

The Ordinariate is similar to the Archdiocese of the Military in that it covers a large area that is divided into more traditional geographical dioceses; parishes belonging to the Ordinariate (or the Archdiocese of the Military) are not part of the dioceses in which they physically exist but report directly to their particular ordinary.

Yet while the Archdiocese of the Military is in fact a diocese, the Ordinariate is not, technically. In the case of the U.S. Ordinariate, for example, the Ordinary is a former Episcopal bishop but has not been ordained a Catholic bishop. Msgr. Steenson is married, and while there have been many married priests in the Catholic tradition, there have never been married bishops (nor are there in Eastern Orthodoxy). Not being headed by a bishop, the Ordinariate clearly isn’t a diocese, although it’s closer to a diocese, as far as I can tell, than it is to anything else. The website of the U.S. Ordinariate explains the distinction this way:

However, a diocese is “territorial”: its members live in a specific geographical area. An ordinariate is “personal”: its members may live anywhere the ordinariate is authorized to function. They belong to the ordinariate because of a shared attribute; in this case, because they are former members of Episcopal or Anglican churches who now are Catholic, but wish to retain elements of their Anglican heritage.

The reason this is so hard to explain is that a personal ordinariate is a totally new thing in our Church. That’s why it was so exciting when Benedict XVI explained that this was going to happen–a totally new type of institute within the Church established to respond to a particular modern need of a particular group of people. Talk about New Evangelization–talk about pastoral compassion! I just find this all so exciting.

I’m hoping that gives you enough of an idea of what the Ordinariate is (not a rite, kind of like a diocese, similar to a movement, but mostly just all its own) to hear about the Mass I went to last week.

I was invited to daily Mass at the parish of St. Gregory the Great in Mobile. Since there are so few members of the Ordinariate in Mobile, Fr. Venuti is the pastor of St. Gregory, a community that meets at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, as well as being in residence at St. Mary’s, saying the Novus Ordo Mass for the rest of us. This is often the case with Ordinariate priests, especially as the Ordinariate is so new.

When I say “so few members,” I’m not kidding. At daily Mass, there was one person outside of Father’s wife and son and the friends I brought with me. From what I hear, Sunday Mass isn’t much bigger, providing you with an intimate community, if not the ability to sit back and observe. Fortunately, Mrs. Venuti was in the front, so we all just followed her lead. If you want to read exactly what we did, check out the order of the Mass here.

The first thing you notice, of course, are Father’s old school vestments and the fact that he’s facing ad orientem (or “with the people,” as opposed to towards the people). The language is different but familiar somehow–a more beautiful version of the usual, I guess. It really made me grateful for our new translation but hungry for the language I was hearing here: “that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name,” for example–it just feels more glorious to me.

The first moment my jaw dropped was right at the beginning: before the Kyrie, Father read the greatest commandment:

Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.

The rubrics said, though, that he could have chosen to read all 10 Commandments. A real examination of conscience, not just a second to think about our day. It made begging for mercy feel much more real.

When the Liturgy of the Word began,2 the different translation of Scripture (the Revised Standard Version or RSV) had that same foreign-yet-familiar feel. I can’t say that I prefer one or the other, but it certainly made me listen when the cadence was so different from the norm. The Mass had the standard form–first reading, psalm, Gospel acclamation, Gospel, homily–so familiar, I kept slipping and forgetting to say thou.

Father recited the petitions, filled with strong and poetic language like:

And to all thy people give thy heavenly grace, and especially to this congregation here present; that, with meek heart and due reverence, they may hear and receive thy holy Word, truly serving thee in holiness and righteousness all the days of their life.

And we most humbly beseech thee, of thy goodness, O Lord, to comfort and succor all those who, in this transitory life, are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity.

Now those are prayers! None of this “for Mary Sue on her birthday, that she would have a really fun day” nonsense that seems to creep into the Novus Ordo. The petitions seem to come only in four forms with no option to add specific intentions; they covered so much, though, that one wouldn’t really need to.

After the petitions, there was another penitential rite. I’m beginning to see why people talk about Catholic guilt–and yet I’m convinced that those who really humble themselves before God don’t drown in shame the way seculars often do. In any event, I found the placement beautiful; we’ve asked for blessings and we beg again for mercy before we approach the table:

Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, maker of all things, judge of all men: We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the remebrance of them is greivous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable.  Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; for thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, forgive us all that is past; and grant that we may ever hereafter serve and please thee in newness of life, to the honor and glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

It’s hardcore, but it was followed by Father saying, “Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.” (Other consoling verses were possible there as well.) In case that wasn’t sensitive enough for you, it was followed by the sign of peace.

The placement of the kiss of peace was once of my favorite things about this liturgy. It followed an act of contrition, so the act of offering peace to our neighbor stemmed directly from expressing our sorrow to God. It made the handshakes feel more like an effort at reconciliation than a coffee break, the way they often do in the Novus Ordo. And this reconciliation is just as tied to approaching the altar when placed right before the consecration as it is right before communion. I think moving it earlier also helps me stay focused from the Sanctus all the way through communion, rather than taking a break from prayer to chat before the Agnus Dei.

The Offertory seemed (to my untrained eye) to be almost identical to the Novus Ordo. The Eucharistic prayer was very similar as well, albeit with that high sacral language that I love. It wasn’t until the Our Father that I saw another significant difference–we kept going! We didn’t stop after evil. You know that awkward moment that you always forget to warn your Protestant friends about and they say “for thine” loudly while everybody else is silent? It didn’t happen. No “deliver us, Lord,” just straight through to the end and moved on. If that’s not a concession to Protestant prayer, I don’t know what is.

“Lord I am not worthy” took on greater depth and humility when preceded by this prayer, recited by all the people:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his Blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

We received communion kneeling at the altar rail–love it. And then prayer and blessing and dismissal. Like in the Extraordinary Form, the prologue to John’s Gospel is read at the end of Sunday Mass, a little throwback to the Tridentine Mass.

For most of the Mass, I pretty much knew what I was supposed to do and say, even if I didn’t know what was coming next. I had to remember to say “thee” and “thou” and keep my eyes on my missal for sudden divergences from the Novus Ordo, but it was much more familiar than the Eastern rite liturgies I’ve been to, much more accessible than the Extraordinary Form, and much more profound than the Novus Ordo.

Yup–I liked it better. Now, a lifelong Catholic can’t be a member of the Ordinariate–the purpose is to serve converts. I can, however, attend Anglican use Masses whenever I want to, and believe me, I will. The Latin of the Extraordinary Form is off-putting to me, but I’m beginning to understand when people lament the vernacular of the Novus Ordo. Maybe what we need, though, is a less vernacular vernacular–language that’s comprehensible but clearly sacred. That’s what the Anglican use Mass offers us, and that’s what I’ll be back for.

 

If you want to check it out for yourself, here are the American Ordinariate parishes, listed by state. If you’ve got more questions, check out the U.S. Ordinariate’s FAQ–very helpful. Fr. Venuti and some of his priest friends write for a blog on the Ordinariate, in case you’re a stalker like me and kind of obsessed with different liturgies.

  1. I met the first one ordained in the U.S., NBD [↩]
  2. read by Father’s wife, standing at the ambo holding their baby [↩]

The Church of England: A Brief (Catholic) History

If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you’ve probably figured out that I’m a grade-A nerd. I love old books and math jokes and I once consoled myself after a terrible football loss by reading a commentary on the Code of Canon Law (Bush Push 2005. I don’t want to talk about it.).

So I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I literally squealed with joy when I was invited to attend an Anglican use Catholic Mass on Thursday. By the (Catholic) priest’s wife, no less! I want to tell you all about the Mass, but I thought we might need some background first to clarify why this liturgy exists and how it connects to Anglicanism and to more mainstream Catholicism. So here you have a brief history of the Church of England1 (from a Catholic perspective, of course) from 1534 to Thursday at 1pm. Now, I’m not a historian, but I’ve studied this period some. I do think the background is necessary to understand the current situation, so I’m going to do my best. If you have to correct me, please be nice.

Courtesy of David M. Luebke

In the early 16th century, the Church was being torn apart like never before. Martin Luther began it all in 1517 by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg. That wasn’t in itself an act of rebellion,2 but it opened the door for the Protestant Reformation. Before long, most of Northern Europe had declared for Luther (or Calvin or Zwingli or anybody but Rome) and France was on the brink. England, though? England was strong. Often called Rome’s most faithful daughter, England had no interest in reformation. King Henry VIII was even declared a defender of the faith after St. Thomas More ghostwrote a tract for him that argued against Protestantism.

But then, tragedy. Henry wanted a divorce.3

Now, to be fair, this was rather a sketchy marriage. Henry had married the wife of his dead brother. Canon law forbids this. But Henry had gotten permission from Rome to marry her, so the marriage was valid. The Church can dispense from her rules,4 after all, just not from God’s rules.5

So Henry was married to a woman who “couldn’t give him a son.”6 Divorce is impossible,7 so Henry had to claim that the marriage had been invalid, that he couldn’t have married his late brother’s wife because the Pope didn’t have the authority to dispense him. Because the Pope didn’t have jurisdiction in England.

And so, because he wanted a male heir,8 Henry declared himself head of the Church in England.

But–and this seems ludicrous to Catholics today but it wasn’t as unreasonable before Vatican I reaffirmed papal infallibility–Henry still wanted to be Catholic. He wanted Mary and the Saints and Mass and Purgatory and really everything but, well, the Church. Henry was decidedly not a Protestant, so when he split, he created a church that was in schism, not a heretical sect.9

And throughout Henry’s lifetime, it stayed pretty darned Catholic. He considered himself an “English Catholic” and repeatedly condemned Protestantism. Without Rome, though, things can devolve rather quickly, and Englishmen were becoming Protestants in dramatic numbers. But the Church itself stayed fairly Catholic in “conservative” Henry’s lifetime.

When he seceded from Rome, Henry appointed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, the head bishop in his church. Unfortunately for Catholics, Cranmer had very Protestant sensibilities. He maintained much of the pomp and circumstance (and Catholic doctrine) during Henry’s lifetime, but when Edward VI took the throne in 1547, all bets were off.

Cranmer’s reforms were fairly gradual, beginning under Henry and continuing until Cranmer’s death in 1556. The great challenge he faced was developing a theology for one united church composed of every type of Christian, from the most traditional Catholics to the most radical Protestants. What resulted was a church defined by compromise and filled with language so vague as to allow for widely varying interpretations.

This is most evident in the gradual development of the language of the Eucharistic liturgy. In the 1549 liturgy, Cranmer changed the Roman “let this bread and wine become unto us the body and blood of Christ” to “let this bread and wine be unto us”—leaving room for physical or symbolic interpretation and widely regarded as a compromise between Catholics and Protestants. Three years later, the liturgy was changed to ask that those who receive the bread and wine “may be partakers of his most blessed body and blood,” language even less oriented toward the doctrine of transubstantiation, yet still without excluding it entirely from the language of the liturgy (although the rubrics very clearly deny it).10

Cranmer’s reforms were significant enough (rejecting purgatory, the Deuterocanonical books, and five of the Sacraments) to make the Church of England a decidedly Protestant church. The basic tenets of the CofE are expressed in the Thirty-Nine Articles, a document written after Cranmer’s execution11 but based largely on his writings.

Then follow a few centuries of great music, beautiful language, and some significant theological confusion (as some eras were more Catholic, others more Protestant). I’m going to skip over all that and jump to the twentieth century, where the Church of England’s roots in compromise begin to bear fruit.

Since its foundation, the CofE’s congregations have varied widely in their interpretation of church teaching. While the structure of services is generally the same, they can look dramatically different depending on how “high” or “low” the congregation is. It’s not just a matter of incense and statues, though, but of core beliefs. Some congregations, for example, believe in transubstantiation and sacramental absolution;12 others wouldn’t touch that popery with a ten foot pole. It’s even possible to find two priests in the same congregation with views on the Eucharist that are diametrically opposed, one saying it is actually Jesus, body, blood, soul, and divinity, the other saying it’s a piece of bread that symbolizes Jesus.

This spectrum of acceptable beliefs has increased divisions in the Church of England for centuries (sometimes but not always resulting in new denominations), but it came to a head in the late twentieth century with disagreement over the ordination of women. Different bishops’ conferences began ordaining women in the 1970s; the 1978 Lambeth conference allowed each region to determine its own policy on women’s ordination, saying, “…the holding together of diversity within a unity of faith and worship is part of the Anglican heritage.”13 The Church of England14 voted to allow women’s ordination (and got it signed off on by the Queen) in 1992.

Not surprisingly, all this didn’t go over so well with the more “Anglo-Catholic” communities, who agreed with Rome that women weren’t capable of holy orders. According to some reports,15 some 500 priests (and many more lay people) left the church over this development, most becoming Catholic.

In response to this mass exodus (and predating much of it), Rome issued a pastoral provision allowing that former Episcopalian priests might petition to be ordained as Catholic priests, even those who were married. Hundreds of priests have been ordained by virtue of this pastoral provision, issued in 1980. Many of these priests were permitted to celebrate the “Anglican use” of the Roman rite, a version of the Roman Catholic Mass that is heavily influenced by CofE language and traditions, based on the Roman Missal (Catholic) and the Book of Common Prayer (Anglican).

When this flow of converts slowed to a trickle, another controversy began to shake the Church of England: the question of homosexuality. Just as members differed widely on matters of faith, they disagreed vehemently on matters of morals. The issue came into the spotlight in 2003 when Gene Robinson was ordained a bishop despite being openly gay and living with his partner. Naturally, this event was extremely divisive in the Episcopal Church,16 with some entire congregations severing ties from the Episcopal Church and forming the Anglican Episcopal Church, a communion of traditional Church of England congregations in America.

In the years since, divisions between liberal and conservative members of the CofE have widened. I’ve been told that some of the more conservative congregations even use the Baltimore Catechism17 in their Sunday school classes. Those communities are far closer to Rome than they are to Canterbury, but their particularly Anglican traditions and liturgy and communities are rich and beautiful. Many have felt drawn to communion with Rome but are rightly reluctant to forsake their Anglican heritage.

Enter Benedict XVI.18 Since 1980, converted CofE priests had been permitted to “retain certain elements of the Anglican liturgy.”19 But this was a concession to a limited group and considered temporary. It allowed for the establishment of Anglican use parishes, but the understanding was that this was a temporary solution. In 2009, in a document called Anglicanorium Coenibus, the Holy Father announced the establishment of ordinariates, canonical groups with essentially the status of a diocese (think Archdiocese for the Military) formed to “allow Anglicans to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church whilst retaining much of their heritage and traditions.”20 These ordinariates are permanent groups intended to preserve perpetually the Anglican use liturgy and the communities with Anglican roots.

So here we have a community of Christians–fully in union with Rome–with all the benefits of Canterbury and of Rome. But you’ll have to wait to hear all about their rules and liturgy and canonical status–my “brief” history of the Church of England is already too long, so the Ordinariate will get its own post. Get excited!

  1. I’m going to use this term or “CofE” throughout–Anglicans and Episcopalians are Church of England, but the words aren’t interchangeable. “Church of England” might not always be correct, either, but it’s the best I can do. [↩]
  2. 91 of the Theses were perfectly fine. Even those that weren’t were his proposal for debate, not his rejection of the Church or the Pope, of whom he speaks very highly in the Theses. [↩]
  3. It’s all so very much more complicated than this. Here’s the CliffsNotes version. [↩]
  4. No meat on Fridays in Lent, you can’t be ordained until you’re 25, etc. [↩]
  5. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not lie, etc. [↩]
  6. She bore him daughters. When a man can’t father sons, that’s his fault, not his wife’s. Y-chromosome and all. [↩]
  7. Lk 16:18 [↩]
  8. Not just an heir–he had an heir. Women can inherit the throne in England and he had a daughter–“Bloody Mary.” [↩]
  9. Schism: denial of Church authority without denying any Church doctrine, e.g. the Eastern Orthodox; heresy: denial of Church doctrine, e.g. Protestantism. “Heretic” is not a derogatory term. All it means is that you disagree with the Catholic Church on a central issue. Protestants disagree with Catholics on many central issues. This does not make them bad or stupid or damned. When I say “heretical,” I am not suggesting that we burn anyone at the stake. [↩]
  10. Search for “partakers” on this page–very interesting. [↩]
  11. He was executed under Queen Mary, the Catholic queen who followed Edward, for his Protestant beliefs. [↩]
  12. The Catholic Church does not recognize these Sacraments as valid in the Church of England. Although their priests do have apostolic succession in theory, the changes to the prayer of ordination were significant enough to make the Sacrament invalid. Without valid Holy Orders, only baptism and marriage can be performed validly. [↩]
  13. http://www.religioustolerance.org/femclrg3.htm [↩]
  14. kind of but not really in charge of all members of the Anglican communion [↩]
  15. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1032526/Church-England-plans-male-superbishops-rebel-clergy-refuse-led-women.html [↩]
  16. the CofE in America [↩]
  17. A traditional Catholic catechism. [↩]
  18. and the point of this whole post [↩]
  19. http://www.pastoralprovision.org/history [↩]
  20. U.K. Ordinariate [↩]

Mary: Not God, Still Kind of a Rock Star

When I was little (and even snarkier than I am now, if you can believe that), I used to take pleasure in criticizing statues of the Madonna and child:

While I have tried balancing toddlers on one hand, it rarely works out this well.

“What’s wrong with sculptors, anyway? Haven’t they ever seen a woman holding a baby? All of these statues of Mary holding Jesus are so unnatural. She’s not a mom, she’s like a Jesus-holder. He’s all hovering in front of her in some impossible position. It can’t be that hard to sculpt a woman holding a baby!”

I’d go on to mention that if you want a baby to face out, you have to hold it by the crotch (because, you know, I had so much experience holding babies) and that was too awkward for the artists’ prudish sensibilities.

Clearly I, at 12, was an authority on art, theology, and child-rearing. I have no idea why anyone put up with me. I can only hope that I’m less obnoxious now.

The Manger, by Gertrude Kasebier. Lovely, isn’t it?

I’m still not a huge fan of awkward-looking art, but the above statue in a church in Missouri got me thinking the other day. While I still prefer the beauty of more natural, maternal images, there’s something to be said for the “Jesus-holder” approach to the Blessed Mother.

In older works of art, I find,1 Mary and Jesus are posed much less naturally. This might in part just be the style of the day, but I think there’s more to it than that. Before the Reformation–maybe even before the 20th century–art wasn’t just beautiful or devotional, it was catechetical. When Mary seemed to exist merely to present Jesus to the viewer, it taught believers the essential truth that Mary exists expressly to present Christ to the world.

Madonna and Child in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
Mary, Star of the Sea
La Vierge au Lys, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

See how Mary’s purpose in all these images is to bring Christ to the audience? Like somehow the artists didn’t get the memo that Catholics worship Mary and she is the center and meaning or our existence.

Oh, yeah. Cause we don’t. And she’s not.

Let’s go ahead and get a few things out of the way:

  • Mary is NOT God.
  • Catholics don’t think she’s God.
  • Catholics don’t worship her.
  • Mary didn’t save herself from sin.
  • Catholics don’t go to Mary instead of Jesus.

So why do we honor Mary, why celebrate her birthday (today!), why put up statues and pray rosaries and name all our daughters after her? A few simple reasons.

1. As Christians, we want to imitate Christ. Jesus was a good Jew,2 so he obeyed the commandments, notably the fourth commandment: honor your father and mother.3 Since we want to be like Christ, we honor his mother, too.

Let those who think that the Church pays too much attention to Mary give heed to the fact that Our Blessed Lord Himself gave ten times as much of His life to her as He gave to His Apostles. -Archbishop Fulton Sheen

But this is honor, not worship–dulia, not latria, for those Greek nerds among you. When we “pray to Mary,” we’re really just asking her to pray for us. We get that she’s just a creature, but we know how much Christ honored her,4 so we do the same.

Besides, how rude is it to go to somebody’s house and totally ignore his mom? That’s what we’re doing if we try to have a relationship with Christ without Mary. It might be possible, but it’s awkward and counter-intuitive.

2. We’re all about following the Bible. In Luke 1:48, Mary says, “From this day, all generations will call me blessed.” So we do.5

The Dominicans seem to have a corner on the “images of Christians under Mary’s mantle” market–at least online–but imagine more of a hodgepodge of Christians under her protection and you’ll see what I mean.

3. Mary is our Mother. On the cross, Jesus said seven things. Given that he was dying of asphyxiation and getting enough breath to say anything involved ripping the nails a little further through the flesh of his hands, I think we ought to take anything he says from the cross pretty seriously. One of those seven things was giving the Blessed Mother to the Beloved Disciple:

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his home. (Jn 19:26-27)

Note that John doesn’t use a name here, although we know that it’s him. He uses instead the title “the disciple whom he loved,” a title he uses for himself not because he’s super-arrogant but because he wants us to insert ourselves into this scene. We are the disciple whom Jesus loves and he gives us his mother, just as we recline on Jesus’ breast and follow him to his death and recognize him after he rises. So when Jesus gives Mary to John, he gives her to all of us.

And, of course, Revelation calls her the mother of all Christians (Rev 12:17).

Since Mary’s our mother, we honor her, we spend time with her, we keep pictures of her around the house, we ask her to pray for us. Maybe we even sing songs about her.6

She’s there for strength and guidance, but she’s not the goal.

But she’s our mother, not our God. Mary’s purpose in our lives is to hold our hands as we walk to God. Just as a baby learning to walk will hold his mom’s hands while walking to his dad, we hold Mary’s hands as we go together to the Father. It’s not about her and if we focused entirely on her, we’d fail, just like the baby would fall on his butt if he tried to walk forward while staring up at his mom. Any spirituality that has Mary as its ultimate goal is not Catholic–Marian spirituality is always to Christ through Mary.

4. Mary always brings people to Christ. Every time we see her in Scripture, she’s all about God. The reason she existed was to bring Christ into the world. The reason she continues to play such a role in our faith is because she’s bringing him to us again, just as she brought him to Elizabeth at the Visitation.

Mary and Elizabeth at the Visitation, by Corby Eisbacher–look at that joy!

She lives a life of obedience to the Father, directing people always toward her Son. Mary says very little in the Gospels, speaking only once during the adult life of Christ. On that occasion, at the wedding feast at Cana (Jn 2), Mary first intercedes for the people. Then, her famous last words: “Do whatever he tells you.”7

Do whatever he tells you. That’s it–that’s what she’s about. Any authentic Marian apparition always points people back to the Sacraments, to Christ present in the Eucharist. Because Mary knows, as do her children, that it’s just not about her.

For centuries, the moon has been a symbol of Mary, not because she’s a modern fertility goddess but because she, like the moon, has no light of her own. She’s only able to reflect the light of the sun.8 The moon is lovely only inasmuch as it shares slightly in the immense beauty of the sun; Mary is holy only inasmuch as she shares slightly in the immense holiness of her Son.

So we love Mary not instead of Christ but because of Christ.

Now, I wasn’t raised with Mary, so this was hard for me, too. I started praying the rosary long before I even thought it made sense, simply because I felt that God was calling me to. It took years of trying to develop a relationship with Mary before I came to understand that every single interaction I ever had with her was always drawing me closer to Christ.

I often hear Catholics say that you go to Mary when you “can’t” go to God, a statement that Protestants (and many Catholics) justly find outrageous. And yet there have been moments in my life because I am so broken that I felt I couldn’t go to God. I was angry or bitter or scared or whatever and I just needed my Momma. And as I tried to storm out of the church, she gently called my name, calmed me down, and brought me back to her poor, patient Son. Or she lifted my face, cast down and covered with tears, to look once more on my God. Those were moments when, rightly or wrongly, I couldn’t go straight to God. So my Momma took my hand and led me there herself.

My friends, Mary is nothing without Christ. And she does nothing but lead us closer to Christ. She’s so devoted to presenting Christ to us that she sacrifices her artistic sensibilities so we can see her as a Jesus-stand, awkwardly holding a baby holding the world in his hand. And somehow that awkwardness becomes more beautiful when we see what it really means: the Blessed Mother asking us to gaze on her son.

So join me today in honoring Our Lady for her intercession and guidance and motherly love. If this Mary stuff is still hard for you, maybe just chat with her for a minute to thank her for saying yes to God. If Mary’s your bffl, why not rock out a whole rosary as a birthday present? Definitely bake her a cake–it’s a feast day, after all.

Here’s to Mary of Nazareth–2000+ years and still going strong. Happy birthday, Momma!

 

Want some more hardcore apologetics on Mary? Try Mary, Ark of the Covenant, An Ancient Assumption, and Mary, Queen of the Universe.

  1. I’m not an art historian, I’ve just spent an hour googling images of the Madonna and Child. There are a lot of ugly ones out there. Also, Jesus is naked more often than seems natural. [↩]
  2. You did know that, right? [↩]
  3. The numbers are different for the Protestant commandments, but they say the same things. [↩]
  4. a lot [↩]
  5. “Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Both a line from the Hail Mary and a line from the Bible–Lk 1:42 and 11:27. [↩]
  6. I have a distinct memory of 8-year-old twins I know “singing” about how they missed their mommy: “Don’t take my mommy awayyyyy! She’s beautiful like a gypsy princess! Don’t take my mommy awayyyyyy!!” I’m not saying all Marian hymns are more poetic than that, but they certainly stem from a natural, human place, not an idolatrous one. [↩]
  7. Jn 2:5 [↩]
  8. St. Bonaventure: “As the moon, which stands between the sun and the earth, transmits to this latter whatever it receives from the former, so does Mary pour out upon us who are in this world the heavenly graces that she receives from the divine sun of justice.” [↩]

In Defense of Liturgy (With a Little Help from the Irish)

I read an essay a while back in which the author said that he never understood liturgy before he went to Notre Dame.1 It was the stadium, though, and not the Basilica that taught him about the importance of ritual. As he wandered the campus, he saw that there were certain things that must be done on a football Saturday: playing corn hole at a tailgate with a red solo cup full of cheap beer in one hand; eating a charred burger cooked by some student organization at a concession stand on God Quad; watching the band step off from the steps of Bond; lighting a candle at the Grotto.2 There was a certain dress code: jeans and an ND t-shirt (polos acceptable on men of a certain age). The game itself was filled with ritual, from the holler heralding kickoff to the keys jingling on third and long, from “we are ND” shouted like they meant it to the “pushups” on top of the crowd every time the Irish found the end zone. This completely unreligious experience was as liturgical as any the writer (an Evangelical, I think) had ever had.

In this supremely ritualized celebration, we begin to see that there is something liturgical about the human person, something that demands ritual and repeated actions. Just as game days and Christmas dinner and road trips take on the same shape each time, so must our worship. It’s unnatural to try to make worship “spontaneous,” as though resisting the urge to revel in what is familiar somehow makes the familiar less sacred, as though spontaneity is the ultimate value in worship, rather than faithfulness and truth.

There is, of course, an Evangelical Protestant inclination to reject “liturgy” because the “liturgical” becomes scripted, rote, stilted. To that I can only reply that all that is holy is liturgical, if by liturgical you mean ritualized and repeated. Every new mother  gazes at her baby with tears in her eyes and murmurs, “He’s beautiful.” Every groom looks on his bride with something like wonder as she walks down the aisle. And everyone watching at a deathbed holds his breath as the dying man takes his last. That our rituals become empty is our fault, not theirs. We coast through the Mass not because it is insufficiently passionate but because we are. If we could see it with new eyes, looking on the football festivities with the eyes of a freshman, not of a professor who’s had season tickets since Ara, we might begin to appreciate the liturgy that combines the passion of a thousand Saints into the unimpassioned droning of a twenty-first century congregation.

But the worse rejection of liturgy, I think, comes from within our own ranks, from those who want to cut some parts, embellish others, and add commentary throughout. Rather than lamenting the “vain repetition” of the Catholic Mass and moving on to their own (often more passionate but rarely less “liturgical”) services, as do our Protestant detractors, they try to change the liturgy that is cherished by so many. They sit during the fight song or drink milk at the tailgate or wear sundresses and pearls. There’s nothing wrong with those things–and yet, there really is.

One consequence of my new itinerant lifestyle is that I find myself at parishes as varied as American Catholics are, often with little advance warning of what I’m about to experience. In the past 6 weeks, I’ve been to Mass in 12 different states at about 35 difference churches, and let me tell you, there are as many ways of being Catholic as there are Catholics. And despite the joys of seeing Catholics of all shapes and sizes coming together for Mass, what’s struck me most has been the liturgical abuses: the Gospel proclaimed to a seated congregation, the Eucharist distributed to EMs before the priest has received, the hand-washing omitted, the precious blood consecrated in a pitcher and then poured into wooden chalices. And I just have to wonder: why?

I know that some of these priests or liturgy committees or parishes really feel that there’s a good reason to change the way Mass is celebrated. But I just go back to football Saturdays. If the band decided that they were going to skip the fight song and play instead a recently-deceased student’s favorite U2 song after every touchdown, that would be kind, but it wouldn’t be appropriate. The stadium would erupt in boos, letters would be written to the school newspaper, and sizable donations would be withdrawn. The fight song is sacred–you don’t mess with that, no matter how compelling the cause.

How much the worse if such a dramatic change was made arbitrarily–let’s say they decided to change from the traditional student-painted golden helmets to some half-black, leprechaun-emblazoned monstrosity for no apparent reason. The outrage would flood facebook like a clever new meme. Whether you loved football or not, you’d be shocked. When I asked my friend Steve if he’d seen the new uniforms, he shrugged: “You know I don’t care much about football.” Then I showed him the new helmet. “That’s not okay!” Because while the uniform itself may change, the helmets shouldn’t. Maybe the color of the helmets doesn’t matter, but the tradition does.

What makes the fight song or the helmet or “May I have your attention please” or pushups sacred isn’t their inherent value; the Irish are no less likely to win a championship with ugly helmets as they are with the lovely gold ones. What gives every moment of every fall Saturday meaning isn’t why we do it but that we do it. That 80,000 people put their arms around each other and sway to the Alma Mater, that we pump our fists like fighting Irishmen when a certain song is played (or keep our arms crossed in an X if we have the misfortune to live in Zahm), that we risk salmonella to eat an undercooked brat–we do that, together. We join as one body and in doing so give meaning to meaningless ritual.

Now, there’s nothing meaningless about the Mass. But there are steps and words and rites whose meaning we might not grasp–or whose meaning we think we understand to be patriarchal or misogynistic or whatnot. Yet there is a sanctity even to these, not because of what they mean, in this instance, but because seeming to mean nothing they mean obedience and unity and faithfulness. They mean that the Mass is home whether I’m in Jerusalem or Jersey. They mean that we have chosen our God and our Church over our own sensibilities. They mean, in an era of jumbotrons and snazzy uniforms, a tradition that goes back generations and honors those who’ve gone before, uniting us with our ancestors in a way that the latest trends in football or worship never could.

Of course, I’m not rejecting top-down innovations like the forward pass or Vatican II. I’m just begging stylists to leave the uniforms alone, players to stay classy, and fans to keep waving the coach’s initials during the 1812 Overture, whatever you think of his coaching abilities. And I’m not condemning anybody; I try really hard not to judge anybody, especially priests, for whom I have a particular love. I’m just begging priests to say what’s in black and do what’s in red, musicians to remember that this isn’t their show, and people in the pews to rejoice in your Church, even if you think you could do it better.

What makes the liturgy magical isn’t just the consecration or the proclamation of the Gospel; it’s the whole glorious game-day package. Chipping away at the parts we don’t like doesn’t do anything but cheapen it. So here’s to glorious football traditions and deep liturgies–may our rituals ever be mystery and our hearts ever rejoice to seek understanding.

  1. I have googled and googled to no avail. Anybody know where I read this? My apologies to the author for this attempt at paraphrase, but my memory of the essay is essential to the point I’m trying to make. [↩]
  2. If you haven’t been to a home game at ND, you’re missing out. [↩]