Category: Truth

It’s Okay to Laugh at the Apostles, Right?

Have you ever noticed what fools the Apostles are? I mean, they’re kind of the comic relief of the Gospels. Check them out:

“Loaves, fish, we get it! Can we maybe get some pizza?”

Jesus: *feeds 5000 people with 5 loaves and 2 fish*
Apostles: Oh, no! Now there are 4000 hungry people? What are we going to do??? (Mt 14-15)

Jesus: Beware the leaven of the Pharisees.
Apostles: Aw, shoot, he’s mad because we forgot to bring snacks!
Jesus: Seriously? Snacks? Remember yesterday when I fed the 4000? Seriously? Nobody gets what I’m going for here? (Mk 8)

Jesus: I’m going to die and rise again.
Peter: Nuh-uh, Jesus, no you’re not! (Mt 16–yes, right after Jesus made him pope.)

Jesus: I’m going to die and rise again.
Apostles: Okay, but really, who do you think is the best?  Me, or him? Because I think it’s me, but he thinks it’s him and…. (Mk 9)

“Seriously, Peter, PUT AWAY THE SWORD!”

Jesus: I’m going to die and rise again.
James and John: Yeah, cool, can we ride shotgun? Like, can we sit next to you? (Mk 10)

Jesus: One of you will betray me.
Apostles: I would never do that because I’m the best. No, I’m the best! No, I’m the best!
Jesus: Oh, let’s just go so I can be handed over.
Apostles: No, Jesus, it’s okay. See, we have two swords here!
Jesus: Oh my goodness I am SO DONE with you people!! (Lk 22)

Jesus: BAM! I totally rose from the dead!
Apostles: (once they’re done being terrified) Cool. We’re going fishing. (Jn 21)

Okay, so I’m paraphrasing here. But taken all together, this is some pretty damning evidence against their eligibility for Mensa. They’re not very bright, they’re not very holy, and they’re not very brave. Remember how 10 of the 11 (we’ll leave Judas out of all this) ran away when Jesus was taken? And remember how they kept hiding after he died? And remember how they were still hiding in the upper room 50 days after he rose? They weren’t exactly written as heroes.

But aside from the fact that ordinary Apostles teach us that God can use any one of us, flawed as we are, I think comparing the Apostles before Pentecost to the Apostles after Pentecost teaches us something dramatic.

The transformation of the apostles and the spread of Christianity throughout the known world not by violence but by preaching was impossible without the Holy Spirit.

The Apostles are uneducated, mostly fishermen, not philosophers and public speakers. Acts 4:13 makes this clear: “Observing the boldness of Peter and John and perceiving them to be uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and they recognized them as the companions of Jesus.”

There was nothing charismatic about these guys. They weren’t clever or persuasive or attractive. They were “ordinary and uneducated men.” They had no business changing the world.

And even if they had been little cult leaders in the making, they were too cowardly to do anything as risky as preaching Christ crucified. Before the resurrection, they were so scared, Peter ran from a serving woman. But on Pentecost, he preaches to thousands. What changed? If Jesus didn’t rise, what made these inept cowards into brave evangelists? How did men who could barely follow a conversation convert the brightest minds of the ancient world?

That’s yesterday’s Saint, Bartholomew, holding the flesh that was flayed from his body. Awesome.

Remember, if you will, that 10 of the 11 Apostles who walked with Christ and touched his resurrected body–risen with the wounds of his crucifixion–died to tell the story. And poor John didn’t survive to old age for lack of his enemies’ trying–they boiled him and poisoned him, he just wouldn’t die. The Apostles knew for sure and for certain that Jesus had risen from the dead and they gave their lives to spread the news.

They were convincing in ways they’d never been convincing, passionate and courageous and brilliant where before they’d been…well…ordinary at best. And what did they get out of it?

Well, first, they made themselves look like morons. Then they established insanely difficult standards of behavior. Finally, they were tortured and executed in excruciating ways–joyfully embracing shameful deaths for love of the Risen Christ.

Peter Kreeft exposes how ridiculous it is to credit anything but the resurrection with their transformation:

If the miracle of the Resurrection did not really happen, then an even more incredible miracle happened: twelve Jewish fishermen invented the world’s biggest lie for no reason at all and died for it with joy, as did millions of others. This myth, this lie, this elaborate practical joke transformed lives, gave despairing souls a reason to live and selfish souls a reason to die, gave cynics joy and libertines conscience, put martyrs in the hymns and hymns in the martyrs—all for no reason. A fantastic con job, a myth, a joke. (Fundamentals of the Faith)

Sure.

See, there’s just no other explanation I can come up with for the peaceable spreading of Christianity throughout its first three centuries. Say what you want about Christendom and the Crusades, that first century, when people still remembered having known Jesus of Nazareth, that was some serious Holy Spirit action.

Otherwise, you’re telling me that incompetent, timid, ill-educated Jews transformed the world so that they could make themselves look dumb and get tortured in new and exciting ways? That all eleven of them were so committed to this lie that not one broke despite ridicule and sleepless nights and failure and fear?

If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of the Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with? (C.F.D. Moule)

It just doesn’t make sense to me.

And look at the fact that the Roman Catholic Church, a bureaucracy as inept as any the world has ever seen, has lasted longer than the greatest empires of earth—if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, why do we still exist? If he didn’t rise, who inspired and strengthened the Apostles? If the resurrection isn’t true, why on earth did they all throw their lives away to say it is?

Shoot, friends, there’s just too much happy coincidence in this if there isn’t grace. I know I’m presupposing that the Gospels are fairly historically accurate (a post for another day), but I just can’t get past the Apostles. This is what made me a Christian all those years ago: the eyewitness testimony of eleven weak men with nothing to gain and everything to lose. I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s got to be something there.

So go ahead, laugh at the Apostles. I think God chose the foolish of this world to shame the wise for the very reason that their weakness and simplicity and lowliness makes his power that much more evident. Choosing Peter as the first pope may seem foolish, but the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom. Thank the Lord for our weak, scared, foolish Apostles and the way their poverty testifies to God’s power. Thank him, too, that our flaws frame his beauty just as theirs did.

 

I’ve got all this on my mind because of the Office of Readings from yesterday, the feast of St. Bartholomew. As usual, the Doctors of the Church say it better than I.

From a homily on the first letter to the Corinthians by Saint John Chrysostom

Paul had this in mind when he said: The weakness of God is stronger than men. That the preaching of these men was indeed divine is brought home to us in the same way. For how otherwise could twelve uneducated men, who lived on lakes and rivers and wastelands, get the idea for such an immense enterprise? How could men who perhaps had never been in a city or a public square think of setting out to do battle with the whole world? That they were fearful, timid men, the evangelist makes clear; he did not reject the fact or try to hide their weaknesses. Indeed he turned these into a proof of the truth. What did he say of them? That when Christ was arrested, the others fled, despite all the miracles they had seen, while he who was leader of the others denied him!

How then account for the fact that these men, who in Christ’s lifetime did not stand up to the attacks by the Jews, set forth to do battle with the whole world once Christ was dead—if, as you claim, Christ did not rise and speak to them and rouse their courage? Did they perhaps say to themselves: “What is this? He could not save himself but he will protect us? He did not help himself when he was alive, but now that he is dead he will extend a helping hand to us? In his lifetime he brought no nation under his banner, but by uttering his name we will win over the whole world?” Would it not be wholly irrational even to think such thoughts, much less to act upon them?

It is evident, then, that if they had not seen him risen and had proof of his power, they would not have risked so much.

Mary, Queen of the Universe

“The Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe docks each Sunday at 0800 and welcomes visitors of all planetary affiliations.”

As a Catholic, if you’ve gone to Disney World in the past 20 years, you’ve probably been to the nearby shrine that serves visitors to the theme park: the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe.

Is it bad that I laugh every time I hear that name?  It’s not that I disagree with the theology behind it, I just think it sounds a little bit ridiculous, like she won some intergalactic beauty contest or something.  If I were funnier, I could write an Onion piece on this….

But those who named the Shrine were right–as the mother of the King of the Universe, Mary is the Queen of the Universe.  It’s really that simple.

And yet this understanding of Mary as our mother and our queen is one of the issues that most deeply divides Christians.  As I pointed out before in my discussion of Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant, the Old Testament often has more to tell us about Mary than the New Testament does.1

As Christians, we know that the entirety of history built to the climax of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ.  Salvation history (the story of God’s redemptive work in the world) is directed towards Christ, which means that the people and events of the Old Testament have significance beyond themselves.  Throughout the Old Testament, we find “types” or foreshadowings of New Testament realities.  So the flood is a type of baptism, manna is a type of the Eucharist, and David is a type of Jesus.

He’s the king of the world!

Now every Christian knows that Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords.  So it stands to reason that the king of Israel is a type of Christ, just as Israel is a type of the Church, the people of God.  If the king is a type of Christ, then the king’s mother would be a type of Christ’s mother: Mary.  So we want to pay attention every time we see the mother of the king mentioned in the Old Testament–which, as it turns out, is quite frequently–to see what it tells us about the mother of our Lord.

As the mother of King Solomon, Bathsheba’s our best example of the queen mother in Israel (yes, she does more than bathe on the roof), particularly because we see her both as the king’s wife and as the queen mother, two very different roles.

You’d be amazed how hard it is to find a painting of Bathsheba with her clothes on. Here, she’s petitioning David to make her son Solomon king.

Let’s start with Bathsheba as wife of King David.  In 1 Kings 1:16 and 1:31, Bathsheba visits King David to ask a favor.  Twice she enters his presence and twice she pays homage to him.  The wife of the king in ancient Israel had no role at court for the simple reason that the king might have many wives.  So there was no real queen in Israel, only a queen mother.2  Despite her intimate relationship with David, Bathsheba approaches the king as his subject, not as his queen.

After David dies and Solomon takes the throne, however, everything’s different.  Adonijah, Solomon’s half brother, wants something from Solomon, so he asks Bathsheba to intercede on his behalf, saying, “Please ask King Solomon, who will not refuse you” (1 Kgs 2:17).

Then Bathsheba went to King Solomon to speak to him for Adonijah, and the king stood up to meet her and paid her homage. Then he sat down upon his throne, and a throne was provided for the king’s mother, who sat at his right.  She said, “There is one small favor I would ask of you. Do not refuse me.” The king said to her, “Ask it, my mother, for I will not refuse you.” (1 Kgs 2:19-20)

This is a totally different story.  Before, she paid the king homage.  Here, as the queen mother, the King pays her homage and then gives her a throne at his right hand.  The placement here is key: it tells us that she’s second in authority.  This isn’t just some honorary title–she plays a real role here.  And as his second-in-command, she has a particular privilege to intercede for others.  Adonijah pointed it out and Solomon confirms it when he tells her that he will not refuse her.

As it turns out, Adonijah’s asked for something that Solomon can’t grant.3  But I don’t think it hurts our case for the queen mother’s intercessory power that he refuses her.  The queen mother isn’t the ultimate authority, she just has some serious influence.  He won’t refuse her if he can help it, but it’s really his decision.

So we see from the beginning of the line of David that the queen mother is someone really special, just not as special as the king.  She’s honored by the king and by all the people and is given the power to intercede.  See where I’m going with this?

And it’s not just Bathsheba–throughout the books of Kings and Chronicles (the books that talk about the deeds of the kings of Israel and Judah), each time a new king takes office, his mother is named.  In 1 Kings 15:13, we see that the office is so official that a queen mother can even be deposed.  In 2 Kings 11, the queen mother kills off all her son’s descendants (she thinks).  When they’re all dead, she becomes the ruler of Judah automatically.  Since there is no heir, the crown seems to revert to the second-in-command: the queen mother.  This isn’t some ceremonial title, it’s something real.

And then there’s Jeremiah 13:18: “Say to the king and to the queen mother: come down from your throne; from your heads fall your magnificent crowns.”  Here the king and the queen both have authority, both have a throne, both have a crown.

Throughout the Old Testament, the mother of the king plays a very important role, one that must be honored by all the king’s subjects.  It stands to reason that this would extend to the queen mother of the New Testament as well, and the book of Revelation supports this.  In Revelation 12:1 we see Mary crowned with twelve stars, the number of completion.  This tells us that the mother of all believers (Rev 12:17) is the queen of everything.

Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Filippo Lippi–thanks for the help in figuring this out, friends!

So when Catholics talk about Mary, we’re not trying to give her a place above or equal to or even close to Christ’s.  Any good Catholic painting of the Blessed Mother in heaven shows her lower than Christ and off to the side.  We know better than to worship her; all we’re asking is to treat the mother of the King of kings the way we would treat any queen mother.  We want to honor her (Lk 1:48) and to ask for her intercession simply because she is particularly beloved by the Lord.  We revere her above any other creature but we know that she is just that: creature, not creator.

I’ll leave you with the inimitable words of the second Vatican Council:

“Mary’s function as mother of men in no way obscures or diminishes this unique mediation of Christ, but rather shows its power. But the Blessed Virgin’s salutary influence on men . . . flows forth from the superabundance of the merits of Christ, rests on his mediation, depends entirely on it, and draws all its power from it.” (Lumen Gentium 60)

Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth and all the Galaxies and the Whole Stinking Universe, pray for us!  Happy Coronation of Mary to you all.

  1. For much of this, as with most of my understanding of Marian theology, I am eternally indebted to Scott Hahn, particularly in his book Hail, Holy Queen. [↩]
  2. In fact, the word “queen” in the Old Testament always refers either to a pagan queen or to the queen mother. Jezebel isn’t even considered a queen, although she bosses people around like she is. [↩]
  3. He wants to be married to David’s concubine Abishag. Not only is this creepy, it would set him up as David’s successor and give him a claim as rival for the throne. Adonijah thought he was all clever–right till he got killed for it. [↩]

An Ancient Assumption

On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII made the second infallible statement ever made by a pope.1  Since this was only 60 years ago,2 it’s easy to assume that it’s an innovation, a made-up doctrine that has nothing to do with the faith of the Apostles.  But there was nothing new about the doctrine, just the way it was expressed.  With a shout and a bang, he declared to be infallible a teaching that everyone had pretty much been cool with forever: the Assumption of Mary.

From the Cathedral at Chartres–have you been there? If so, have you been back since they started cleaning the glass? It’s incredible.

What is it?

The official teaching is that at the end of her life, Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven.  Note that she didn’t ascend (by her own power, as Christ did), but was assumed by God’s power.  There is no official stance on whether she floated up kicking and somersaulting, fell asleep,3 appeared to die, or chose to die but was immediately reunited with her body when she was assumed.  What matters is that she lives bodily in heaven with Christ, taken there by God’s miraculous grace.

Why do we believe it?

First and foremost, we believe it because it’s been presented to us as revealed by God.  The Holy Father almost never makes infallible proclamations.  Here, he’s exercising his power of infallibility4 to tell us this is true, so we accept it on faith.

But while that might be admirable on a personal level, it’s certainly not convincing.  As always, I’m a big fan of Scripture, Tradition, and reason to help us through.

Scripture doesn’t give us anything explicit, as is the case with many issues, it being a finite book.  Today’s first reading is as close as we get, where it describes a woman (Rev 12:1) who is the Ark of the Covenenant (Rev 11:19), the mother of the Savior (Rev 12:5), and the mother of all believers (Rev 12:17).  Sure sounds like Mary to me.  Verse 6 tells us that she “fled into the desert where she had a place prepared by God.”  So the mother of the Savior, having finished her task, is taken up into a special place prepared for her.  Works for me.

Tradition on the matter isn’t quite as ancient as it is on many Catholic doctrines, but it dramatically predates the Reformation.  Apocryphal texts describe it as early as the 4th century, but I can see why we might not care about them.  Some of the heavy hitters pick it up pretty early, too, along with some more obscure theologians.

The Apostles took up her body on a bier and placed it in a tomb; and they guarded it, expecting the Lord to come. And behold, again the Lord stood by them; and the holy body having been received, He commanded that it be taken in a cloud into paradise: where now, rejoined to the soul, [Mary] rejoices with the Lord’s chosen ones. . . (St. Gregory of Tours, Eight Books of Miracles 1:4, A.D. 575).

It was fitting that the she, who had kept her virginity intact in childbirth, should keep her own body free from all corruption even after death. It was fitting that she, who had carried the Creator as a child at her breast, should dwell in the divine tabernacles. It was fitting that the spouse, whom the Father had taken to himself, should live in the divine mansions. It was fitting that she, who had seen her Son upon the cross and who had thereby received into her heart the sword of sorrow which she had escaped when giving birth to him, should look upon him as he sits with the Father, It was fitting that God’s Mother should possess what belongs to her Son, and that she should be honored by every creature as the Mother and as the handmaid of God (St. John Damascene, Dormition of Mary, A.D. 697)

By the end of the seventh century, Mary’s Assumption was so established as fact that it had its own feast day already, according to Pope St. Sergius.5

I think reason‘s strongest on this one.  We know that death (meaning the separation of body and soul) is a consequence of sin.  St. Paul tells us that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23).6  If Mary was without sin (which, I suppose, merits its own post, but just go with it for now), then she couldn’t have died.  Her time on earth came to an end, so God brought her to heaven body and soul (like Elijah and Enoch, so there’s a precedent).

Besides, not one church in the whole world claims to have Mary’s body.  In a world where a church, a museum, and a mosque all claim to have John the Baptist’s head (with three others apparently having been destroyed over the course of history), this silence on the location of Mary’s body is deafening.

I’m inclined to think it’s this one (Mary’s Tomb, an Orthodox church in the Kidron Valley of Jerusalem) simply because it looks older and cooler.

Two churches in Jerusalem claim to be the tomb of Mary, along with one in Ephesus, but nobody claims to have even a pinky toe of the world’s most important Saint.  For a Church that was grabbing at every body part imaginable to ascribe it to a Saint, this is pretty significant.  Not only was there no body, nobody even pretended that there was.  This only makes sense to me if the early Church understood that Mary had been assumed long before anyone bothered to write about it.

And then, of course, there’s the whole parallel between Mary and the Ark of the Covenant (linked above).  It’s unreasonable to assume7 that God would allow the vessel that contained his only-begotten Son to rot.  Her body had been made sacred and deserved to be treated with honor.  If he could preserve her from decay, why wouldn’t he?

Why did it happen?

Do you ever wonder, in the midst of scriptural acrobatics and wordy New Advent articles, why God did these things in the first place?  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that question–he’s always got a reason, and usually more than one.  There’s nothing unfaithful about trying to figure out why, and often it leads us to deeper faith.

Obviously, there are the theological explanations: that Mary’s immaculate nature could not suffer death, that God glorified Mary by giving her an end like that of his Son, or that our feminist God desired “that not only the soul and body of a man, but also the soul and body of a woman should have obtained heavenly glory.”8  Perhaps Mary was given a glorified body that she might teach us how to be fully human when we get our bodies back.9

Look how eager she is to touch him–she’s so cute!

Or maybe Jesus just loved his Momma so much that he wanted to be with her in heaven.  If you’ve got Spotify, do yourself a favor and listen to this song by Danielle Rose, a testimony to how beautiful the body of Mary is because of how it held and loved the body of Christ.  Maybe beneath all the theological significance is a sweet example of a son who just wanted to be with his Momma.  Maybe what we need to learn from it is to be homesick for heaven the way Mary was, to long to be in the presence of Christ so desperately that when our time comes we practically fly there.

There’s nothing innovative about the doctrine of the Assumption.  It’s an ancient doctrine whose beauty is ever-new, drawing us deeper into a love of Our Lady and a longing for heaven.  So praise God for the event and the Solemnity and the ex cathedra proclamation, and praise God especially for the gift of his mother as our mother, loving us from heaven and teaching us to follow Christ.

Mary Assumed into Heaven, pray for us!

 

  1. There are those who think that early popes made ex cathedra statements, but I haven’t seen any direct evidence of this. Certainly this was only the second of the modern era. [↩]
  2. I say things like “only 60 years ago” to teenagers and they look at me like I’m crazy, but in the grand scheme of the Church, 60 years ain’t much. [↩]
  3. Eastern Christians call this the Dormition, the falling asleep of Mary. [↩]
  4. I had almost finished a post on infallibility yesterday when WordPress ate it. Eventually, I’ll overcome my discouragement and rewrite it. Bear with me. [↩]
  5. No link on this one as nothing’s showing up in my feeble Google searches, but I have it on Pius XII’s authority, so we’ll go with it. [↩]
  6. Can I just tell you that I stumble over this every time I encounter it because I know the verb is supposed to be singular but the subject is clearly plural and WHAT is going on with THAT??? [↩]
  7. hah [↩]
  8. Munificentissimus Deus 33 [↩]
  9. You did know that we’re getting our bodies back, right? When we die, at best we become saints, but never angels. And at the end of the world, we’ll get our bodies back and I think we’ll be able to fly but there’s no official teaching on the matter 😛 [↩]

I’d Make a Great Priest

I’d make a great priest–I really would!  I’m knowledgeable, I’m faithful, I’m an excellent listener, and, boy, can I preach.1  I’d touch hearts in the confessional and set parishes on fire.

It’s not that I wouldn’t be a good priest, it’s that I can’t be a priest.

Look at it this way: those little girls I told you about?  I spend more time with them than their dad ever has.  I flew to Indiana for Megan’s first communion earlier this year; I’d bet money that he doesn’t even know her middle name.  He hasn’t seen them in years; I’m there every summer.  I may be a much better father to them than he is, but I can’t be their father.

I might not be so great at giraffey things like walking on those spindly legs.

Or how about this: I’d be an incredible giraffe.–bear with me here.  I’d be the first singing giraffe ever.  I’d be able to read and write and spell prehensile when blogging about my awesome prehensile tongue.  But I can’t be a giraffe.  It’s not a matter of being good enough–I’m not capable.  I don’t have the giraffeness it takes to be a giraffe, the maleness it takes to be a father, or the essence it takes to be a priest.

What we have to get here is that nobody’s saying women aren’t good enough to be priests.  Nobody loved women more than Jesus.  When he rose from the dead, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene (happy feast day!), and yet he didn’t invite her to the Last Supper.  He honored her above all the apostles but he didn’t make her a priest.  Not because she wasn’t good enough but because it wasn’t possible.

And quit telling me that the Church hates women.  You can’t spend more than 15 minutes around real Catholics without wondering if they don’t maybe worship the Virgin Mary.  You can’t feel the way we do about the blessed Mother and hate women.  So this has to be a matter not of talent but of capability–not of intelligence and piety and compassion but of something innate to men that women don’t possess.

Intrinsic to this whole question is the idea that men and women are essentially different in more than just chromosomes and their biological expression.  That’s what the church is assuming when she says (infallibly, btw) that women can’t be in persona Christi because they aren’t male.2

For a long time, I thought this was stupid.  Do priests then have to be Semitic and have beards and wear sandals?  Don’t be ridiculous.

But those things are all accidents (remember when we talked about substance and accidents?)–they’re characteristics that don’t define a person.  Jesus’ gender, on the other hand, is substance.  It’s essential to who he is.

Think about it this way: if John and Mary pull a Freaky Friday and switch bodies, John doesn’t become a woman.  His maleness is not a mere function of his body–it’s who he is.  We’d say that he was a man trapped in a woman’s body, not that he had become a woman.  He may have long hair, pink fingernails, and great legs, but he’s still a man.

We have to keep this in mind when we’re discussing women’s ordination: the Church has never said that women weren’t good enough to be priests but that they weren’t capable.  Just like my dad would have made a great mom but he can’t be a mom.  He doesn’t have the femaleness required.

So if you’re a Catholic, you accept this because of Scripture (Jesus didn’t ordain women) and Tradition (the Church has never ordained women and has said infallibly that women can’t be ordained).  You can argue all you like that Jesus was restricted by his culture, but then you’re a) ignoring the fact that everything he did flew in the face of cultural norms–prostitutes and tax collectors, anyone? and b) denying the divinity of Christ who would certainly have rejected those customs if he though it necessary, for that time or ours.

But why is this true??  I always got that I had to accept this, but it took a near miracle for me to see why God had designed things this way.  I had to know what there is about “maleness” that is intrinsic to priesthood.  C.S. Lewis (himself an Anglican) explains this brilliantly.  If you’re short on time, definitely read him instead of me.

Lewis doesn’t say much, though, about the argument that really makes sense of all this for me.  He understands that women can’t represent God to men the way that men can, not because they’re not kind or loving or wise enough but because God is masculine in relationship to his people.  God is the initiator, the one who gives to his Bride who receives.  (Forget your personal relationships for a minute and just recognize the significance of the act of sex in terms of what it means to be masculine or feminine.)  So when priests act in persona Christi, they can only do that by fully imaging Christ the Bridegroom.

When he stretched out his arms on the cross, Jesus consummated his marriage with his Bride the Church.  At each Mass, we step outside of time to that one sacrifice.  When the priest takes the host in his hands, he speaks the words of Christ once again, “This is my body, which will be given up for you.”  This moment in the Mass is the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the marital act of Bridegroom and Bride.  It is offered by Christ through the person of the priest.

That’s why the gender of the priest is essential.  The Mass is a marital act, an act of complete self-giving by Christ to his Church.  If a woman were the priest, each Mass would be the image of a homosexual union.  Think what you want about gay marriage in America, it’s pretty clear where the Church has to stand on the issue of the morality of homosexual actions (Rom 1:26-27, 1 Tim 1:10, 1 Cor 6:9).  And the Church’s central act of worship has to be in line with God’s plan for men and women as much as everything else the Church does.

If priesthood were a matter of talent, I’d make a great priest.  If Christianity were entirely reasonable (as Lewis says), it would be appalling to deny holy orders to women.  But when we enter the realm of the divine, we have to accept that there may be some truths that counter contemporary human wisdom.

Second wave feminism taught us that equality meant sameness, that if men and women were equal it meant that they were interchangeable.  What makes humanity so beautiful, though, is the difference between and complementarity of the sexes.  And I think the great downfall of second wave feminism, even from a secular perspective, is that it tries so hard to champion the value of women while telling women they have to be men.

Gloria Steinem didn’t argue in favor of respect for the feminine genius, as did John Paul II; she declared that women, being as good as men, were just like men.  So instead of earning the dignity we always deserved while embracing our femininity, we were told to want sex as much as men (and as indiscriminately as boys who are unworthy of the name “men”), to be as unemotional as men (without being bitches), and to work harder than men (since deep down we all know that women aren’t really as smart as men), all while looking hot.

Believe, me, I’m a feminist.  You are, too.  But I understand that to be a good woman, I don’t have to be a man.  I can be as athletic or emotional or nurturing or intelligent as is natural to me without comparing myself to anyone else’s ideal.  I can wear spike heels or Converse, work 10 hour days at the office or 16 hour days at home or never work a day in my life.  I can be girly or tough or quiet or nerdy or all of the above.  I’ve never let my culture define who I am because my self worth doesn’t lie in what I do but in who I am: I am His.

I’ve had people ask me in the past if it’s hard to be a woman in the Catholic Church.  My Episcopalian grandmother tells me every time I see her that it’s a shame I can’t be a priest.  But, having been blessed to accept this teaching, I’ve found that I love the Church all the more because of it.  I would never want to be a member of a church whose doctrine is swayed by the sensibilities of the world.  I feel so blessed to take refuge in a bastion of truth that stands firm in the face of onslaughts from every side.

I did feel a little sorry for myself for a while until I began to understand the beauty of being a woman in the Church.  Sure, men can be priests, but most aren’t.  Every woman, though, can be pursued by divine love in a way that speaks particularly to a woman’s heart.  Every woman can picture herself in the arms of Christ in a way that’s meaningless (or disturbing) to most men.  No, I can’t say Mass, and nothing will ever change that.  But I can read the Song of Songs as a love letter to me.  I can hear the voice of my lover crying out to me in the Eucharist, be lost in the romance of his embrace, and live as a princess in his kingdom.

And I wouldn’t trade that for a sham priesthood.  Not for anything.

  1. Please excuse the bragging here–I’m making a point. [↩]
  2. If you haven’t yet read my most recent post on priesthood, please do. This post won’t make much sense if you don’t have that background. [↩]

What Is the Priesthood?

I was trying to write about women’s ordination per my promise of this weekend, I really was.  But I kept having to parenthetically define my terms, so I figured I’ll sketch out a quick theology of the priesthood today so we’re all on the same page.  Expect the argument against women’s ordination soon.

First, can I just remind you how much I love the priesthood?

Good.

A priest in vestments about to be executed.

I think much of the rhetoric surrounding women’s ordination comes from a misunderstanding of the priesthood.  We tend to equate Catholic priests with Protestant ministers.  They often serve similar functions, but they’re not the same–not at all.  You see, Protestant ministers are ministers because of what they do: preach, pray, lead.  Catholic priests are priests because of who they are.  At ordination, they receive an indelible mark, a mark that can’t be removed.1  This mark makes them alter Christus, another Christ.  Their souls are changed.  Even if they never preach, pray, or lead a day in their lives, they’re still “priests forever according to the order of Melchizedek” (Ps 110:4, Heb 7:17).

Because of this special character imprinted on their souls, priests act in persona Christi, in the person of Christ, when they function as priests.  It’s Christ who blesses you through the priest, Christ who consecrates, Christ who absolves.  In Mt 10:1 (and parallels), Jesus commissions his apostles (the first priests, although they’re not ordained until later) to heal and exorcise, exactly what he’s doing.  After the resurrection (Mt 28:20), he tells them to teach as well.  So Jesus himself sends the first priests out to fulfill his role in the world.

But they’re not just doing the same work as Jesus–they’re doing his work.  In Lk 10:16, he tells them that those who hear them hear him.  He’s giving them his authority and sending them into the world as he was sent.

Why don’t I ever get to confess in a field?

It’s most clear in Jn 20:21-23, a passage where Jesus gives the apostles the power to absolve sins.  He says to them, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  These men aren’t just reminders of Jesus, they’re his presence in the world.  And when he gives them the power to absolve (“Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them”), we can’t help but remember the line “Who but God alone can forgive sins?” (Lk 5:21)  Indeed, only God can forgive sins.  Which must mean that when priests absolve, they do it by Christ’s power, not their own.

Jesus instituted the Sacrament of Holy Orders on Holy Thursday at the Last Supper.  In John 17:17, he prays, “Consecrate them, Father, in the truth” and goes on to say “As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.”  As Christ is the Father’s presence in the world (not the same as the Father but acting on his behalf with his authority), so priests are Christ’s presence in the world (not the same as Christ but acting on his behalf with his authority).  At the moment of this prayer, the apostles became priests.

A Franciscan priest prays with a man about to be executed.

Throughout the early Church (Acts 6:6, 13:3, 14:23; 1 Tim 4:14), the office of priesthood is passed down through the laying on of hands.  In this way, the priests who follow the Apostles share in their priestly character just as Judas’ successor, St. Matthias, enjoyed the same apostolic privileges that Judas had thrown away (Acts 1:26).  This apostolic succession is a top priority in the early Church for one reason: it is absolutely necessary that the Church have priests, not merely ministers.  Preaching and praying and leading are wonderful, but anybody can do that.  To be a priest, one must be ordained by a successor of the apostles in order to be alter Christus.

So when priests function as priests, they have that priestly power not by their own merit but because they share in the one high priesthood of Christ.

I was at Mass with a 3-year-old one day.  Afterward, she saw the priest who had celebrated the Mass walking around in street clothes.  She tugged on my shirt.  “Meg, that man looks like God.”

“No, honey, that’s not God,” I said.  “That’s the priest.”

“I know,” she insisted, “but he looks like God.”

“No, sweetie, he looks like the priest because he is the priest.  He’s not God.”

“I know,” she said, exasperated that I would think she was so dumb as to imagine that we could see God outside of Mass.  “But he looks like that green God what was at the front of the church.” (It was Ordinary Time—green vestments.)  I realized that she, in her youthful credulity, understood in persona Christi better than I ever had.  In Mass, the priest is God.  Outside Mass, of course, he’s not God, he’s just some guy (well, still alter Christus, but functioning as a regular person).  Wow.

A missionary priest anoints a dying woman.

This doesn’t mean that individual priests are infallible or impeccable or even particularly nice.  It means that they act as Christ when they say Mass or hear confessions or anoint the sick or give blessings.  They might be jerks sometimes, but their character as another Christ remains.

Because they are in persona Christi, priests are married to the Church.  Ephesians 5 famously tells us that Christ is the Bridegroom and the Church is the Bride; all of Revelation echoes this.  The cross is Christ’s marriage bed where he gives himself completely to us forever.  This marital covenant with his bride the Church is renewed on the altar at each Mass, where Christ renewedly offers us his very self in the Eucharist.  This is what it means to be a priest: to stand in the place of Christ doing for the Bride what only her Groom can do.  This image of Christ’s marital love for his Church is inherent to the priesthood.

With this understanding of priests as being ordained in the upper room, consecrated to be in persona Christi, and the bridegrooms of the Church, we’ll finally be able to explore why women aren’t capable of Holy Orders.  Soon, I promise.

 

If you’re reading this before 8:15 am (Eastern) on Thursday, tune in to KWKY to hear me talk about discernment.  That’s 8 hours from now.  If you’re up and reading now, I sure hope you’re not up again then.

  1. I know you know a “former priest.”  He’s still a priest (can still absolve sins if the penitent is in danger of death), he’s just not permitted to function as a priest and is released from his obligation of celibacy.  For all intents and purposes, he’s a lay man.  But technically, still a priest. [↩]

Maybe I’m Not Smarter Than Aquinas?

My father stayed home with us when I was growing up.  When he did work, he was a nurse.1  My mother worked, my last name was hyphenated–is that enough information to let you know that I wasn’t raised with a traditional understanding of gender roles?

Until I was a teenager, I honestly believed that men and women were the same–as in, I thought that women were physically as strong as men.  To recap, my dad bench pressed 400 pounds.  My mom clearly did not.  But my ideology was stronger than my logic and I remained convinced that the only difference between men and women was a minor accident of anatomy.

So when I found myself a Catholic in high school, I had a few bones to pick with the magisterium.  The biggest one, of course, was women’s ordination.  If women were just as good as men (which I knew the Church taught), why on earth couldn’t they be priests?  To my second-wave feminist mind, it was extreme patriarchal mysogyny.

This is a picture of me being a nerd. Give me a break, I thought the post needed an image.

So, like any good nerd, I began to research–rather belligerently, to be sure.  I asked friends and priests; I even read the Catechism on it.  Had the internet been more than a mass of awkward chat rooms at the time, I might have had a better shot at figuring it out, but I found myself at the end of my research with nothing more than I’d had at the beginning.  It still sounded like this Church I had given my life over to was telling me that women weren’t good enough to be priests.  How medieval could you get?

But I’d read Matthew 16:18-192 and John 6 and I knew I was stuck with the Catholic Church.  And I knew that if the Catholic Church was true (which I was convinced it was), she had to be right–about everything.  You see, the central claim of the Catholic Church is her claim of infallible authority.  If she’s not right about everything, she can’t claim to be right about anything.  I knew that if I rejected Church authority on this matter, I needed to find a new Church.

So I decided that maybe 2000 years of the world’s greatest minds might–might–actually know more than I did on something.  Maybe Aquinas and Augustine and Irenaeus and Tertullian and Chrysostom and all those ecumenical councils actually knew more about God than I did.  Maybe the infallible Church I claimed to believe in was infallible on everything, like she claimed, and not just on the things that made sense to me.

In the end, I realized that I trusted the Church more than I trusted myself, which was saying a lot.  So I submitted to the Church.  I sucked it up and accepted the teaching, not understanding it, because I accepted the Church’s claim of authority.

Six months later, I realized that I not only believed it, I understood it.  In submitting to the authority of Christ and his Church, I had made an act of faith, one far greater than my conversion had been.  For an arrogant intellectual like me to accept an unpalatable doctrine on faith, not reason, was almost miraculous.

I honestly believe that the Lord withheld understanding from me in order to call me to a deeper faith.  Up to that point, everything I believed, I believed because it was logical.  I had done the research and learned the arguments and I was completely convinced of every other truth claim the Church made.  There was nothing virtuous about my faith: in my mind, it was completely the product of my reason.  Catholicism seemed to be a product of my brilliant intellect, and God knew I needed more.

When I found myself up against a doctrine I didn’t understand, a doctrine I couldn’t accept, I had to learn to trust.  I had to follow God not because of what he’d proven but because of who he was.  I had to submit to the Church not because I had checked out her argument and given it the Meg Hunter-Kilmer seal of approval but because I accepted the Church as a truth-telling thing.3

I think that for intellectuals, this is where the rubber meets the road.  Catholicism is supremely logical, but nobody ever became a Saint by reason alone–or even a real believer.  You can argue and reason and explain your way almost to the Tiber,4 but it takes a leap of faith to swim across.

And this is the downfall for many of the most intelligent people.  If you’ve always understood everything, if you’ve been able to give a reasoned explanation of everything you’ve ever believed, it takes a heroic submission of the intellect to step from reason into mystery.  There is nothing in the faith that is illogical, but some of it is supralogical.  The Trinity is not accessible to our reason, but it’s not contrary to reason, either.  It’s above reason.  As a smarty-pants, accepting that something that you don’t get might be true is an almost super-human feat.  But that’s why we have grace.

The moment I decided (by the grace of God) to accept the Church’s authority was the moment my belief became faith.  It’s that faith that’s brought me through confusion and doubt and crisis and left me stronger on the other side, and it’s because I finally decided that I was all in.  I believed in the Church more than I believed in myself.  She hasn’t let me down yet.

So here’s an appeal to all of you who know better than the Church: you can’t.  Either you believe that the Catholic Church is the true Church of Christ, preserved from error when speaking authoritatively on matters of faith and morals, or you don’t.  If you don’t believe in every single thing the Church proclaims to be revealed my God, that’s fine.  Either submit anyway or find a new Church.  Because if the Catholic Church is wrong, she’s really wrong–and arrogant, and possibly evil.  Why would you want to be a part of that?

But if you do–if you believe that the Catholic Church is the Church Christ established in Mt 16:18-19, promising that the gates of hell would not prevail against it–you’ve got to accept everything the Church teaches.  Real Presence and contraception and homosexuality and confession and obligatory Mass attendance–all the hard stuff along with the fun stuff.

When it comes to infallibility, you’re either all in or all out.  There is no middle ground.

Stay tuned for an explanation of the all-male priesthood–an argument that was made clear to me only after I accepted it as truth.  Look for it in a few days.

  1. Before you call him a pansy, you should know that he also bench pressed 400 and trained dobermans and rottweilers. [↩]
  2. And so I say to you, you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. [↩]
  3. From G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy: “This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive.” [↩]
  4. The river that runs through Rome–get it? [↩]

Touching His Pierced Hands

One of the coolest churches I went to in Europe was this itty bitty (by Roman standards), dark thing covered with scaffolding.  A few blocks from St. John Lateran, Santa Croce is a monument to the work of St. Helena, mother of Constantine and patron Saint of archaeologists.  She actually carted back a few shiploads of dirt from her time in the Holy Land so that this church could be built on holy ground.

The interior is rather lackluster, but around a corner and through to the back is a display of relics unlike anything I’ve seen elsewhere–including the Holy Land itself.1  There’s marble from Bethlehem, Calvary, and the tomb; the cross beam of the good thief’s cross; a nail; a thorn from the crown of thorns; pretty awesome, all.

On the left. I remember it grosser than this.

But the clincher for me was this: St. Thomas’ finger.

EW!

Okay, yeah, but if you’ve been Catholic in Europe for any time at all, you’ve gotten used to the veneration (never worship) of shriveled body parts.  This isn’t just a finger, though.  This is “put your finger in the holes in my hands.”  This is the finger that probed the wounds of the risen Christ, the finger that proved the Resurrection.

Or maybe it’s just some old nasty finger.  The point here isn’t the authenticity of the relic but the truth of the Gospel.

Because prophecies and miracles and centuries of conversions aside, it really all comes down to this: the pierced hands.  The pierced hands tell us that this man was truly crucified.  And the living flesh that surrounds the holes declares that he rose again.

If Jesus claimed to be God2 and he rose from the dead, he’s God.  The resurrection is the ultimate proof of Christianity, as Jesus himself told us (Mt 12:38-42).  So when Thomas touches the holes in Jesus’ hands and side, he knows with certainty that Jesus rose from the dead.  And if he rose from the dead, he can’t just be some great moral teacher, as C.S. Lewis so brilliantly explains in Mere Christianity:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” ((Among my favorite things ever written, if you’re keeping track.))

So when Thomas sticks his hands in the side of Christ, he doesn’t just know that this man was crucified and verified dead.  He doesn’t just know that this crucified man is walking around happily 2 days later, teleporting between Jerusalem and Emmaus and walking through doors.  (And I’m not talking alohomora throught the door, I’m talking Casper the Friendly Ghost through the door.)  No, Thomas doesn’t just know that this Jesus guy is something special.  In that moment, with that intimate gesture of love and proof, Thomas knows that Jesus is God.  Creator of the universe, ground of all being, our origin and destination.  No big deal.

Whatever they may not have understood before the Passion, the Apostles knew at this point that Jesus’ claims were radical, so radical they were revolutionary, for good or for ill.  There was no going back to regular everyday Judaism if this Jesus was for real, and he was.  This was no ghost, no impressive con artist “Walking” on “water” and “healing” the “blind.”  This guy was d-e-a-d dead.  And now he’s fine.  There’s was no going back to life as they knew it.

Not that they didn’t try.  Thomas doubts so seriously that he needs physical proof.  I’ve met more than one Thomas in my day, claiming that he’ll believe in God if God shows himself.  “Blessed are those who have not seen but have believed.”

Peter believes, he just doesn’t know what to do about it.  So after the Resurrection, Peter goes fishing.  Jesus rose from the dead, but for Peter it’s just another day at the office.  How many of us have been there, moved by the Spirit one moment and then back to gossiping and lying the minute the retreat is over?

Both of these men are called out, Thomas by being reprimanded for his unbelief, Peter by being reminded that his mission is far greater than fishing.  But there’s something so sweet about their correction.  Jesus could easily have ignored Thomas, saying that if he wasn’t ready to believe, that was his problem.  He could have let Peter be a mess and chosen the much holier John instead.  But God doesn’t cut his losses when it comes to souls.  He does whatever it takes.

Caravaggio–dude knew his stuff.

I’ve often wondered if Thomas wasn’t the whole reason Jesus rose with holes.  His glorified body was healed of the signs of his scourging, but the holes in his hands and side remained.  What if the God of the universe chose to spend eternity in a “damaged” body simply because that’s what Thomas needed?  What if that line in the Gospel is really there only for you?  What if the Holy Spirit inspired that composer centuries ago just so that you’d hear that song today?  What if God created lilacs just so the smell of them would remind you of his love?  It’s not impossible.

See, we serve an infinite God who manages to dwell in the human heart.  Somehow, he’s able to be for everyone and for each one all at the same time.  For Peter, he built a charcoal fire.3  For Thomas, he rose with holes.  What are the pierced hands he holds out to you to prove his love?  I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

 

 

As an aside, some people have been asking where to find my official facebook page.  It should be in the top right corner of your screen, but if you’re having trouble finding it, click here.  Follow me on Pinterest and Twitter, too!

  1. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, a relic is an item associated with Christ or a Saint–a body part, more famously, or a prayer book or item of clothing. They’re not magic, but God often uses them as means to help us identify with a Saint and grow in holiness.  He sometimes even uses them as channels of miraculous grace. This is Biblical: see Acts 19:12. [↩]
  2. While he never said the words outright, it’s hard to read Jn 8:58, Jn 14:6, or Jn 17:5–among many others–any other way. [↩]
  3. A charcoal fire only shows up twice in the Gospel: Jn 19:15-18 and Jn 21.  Peter’s denial and his reconciliation.  Coincidence?  HA! [↩]

HHS and the Thrill of Persecution

If you’re connected to the Catholic world at all, you’ve probably picked up on the outrage surrounding the HHS mandate.

In case you’re not, let me summarize (in overly-simplified language–try this if you want more details):

Department of Health and Human Services: All employers have to provide insurance that covers contraception and sterilization.
Catholic Church: Except us, right?
HHS: No, you, too.
CC: Freedom of religion?
HHS: Okay, fine, if you employ and serve only members of your religion, you’re exempt.
CC: So you’re saying that to follow our consciences, our hospitals have to turn away all non-Catholics?  Our schools can’t educate non-Catholics?  Not going to happen.  We’ll just shut everything down.
Obama: Sorry, folks!  How about a compromise?  You don’t have to cover the contraception.  You just have to pay for insurance that does.
CC: Seriously?  We’re still paying for it if we’re paying for other people to pay for it.
Most of the US: What’s the big deal?  They’re not saying you have to use contraception, just that you have to provide it to others.
CC: Cool, well, you don’t have to kill those toddlers, you just have to pay for the bullets.

Even if that were true, we’re not trying to restrict access to birth control. Just refusing to pay for it.

US: Why is the Catholic Church so anti-woman?  Why are you taking away our rights?  Are we going back to the Dark Ages?
CC: Whoa, we’re not even saying contraception should be illegal, just that we’re not going to buy it for you.
US: You have to!  It’s a basic human right not to get pregnant!
CC: We didn’t want to do this, but…sued!

Hope that catches you up.

The U.S. Bishops have been united on this issue–something that may not have happened in the history of our nation.  And they’re calling all Catholics–and all other Americans, religious or not–to take a stand against this violation of the First Amendment.  Today begins what the Bishops have called a Fortnight for Freedom.  They’re asking for prayer, fasting, education, and action from today, the vigil of the feast of Sts. John Fisher and Thomas More (martyred by their government for refusing to violate their religious convictions), through Independence Day.

They’re so sweet–how could you upset them?

This is huge.  This isn’t about contraception–as far as I know, we stopped fighting that in the secular arena after Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965.  This is about being compelled–as an institution and as individuals–to violate our consciences.  This is about the government making a law prohibiting the free exercise of our religious conviction against contraception.  It’s a direct violation of the first amendment,1 which means this isn’t just a Catholic issue.  Protestants, Jews, even Atheists should be concerned when the Bill of Rights is being ignored.  And they are.

.
I don’t think the Obama administration was expecting anything like this.  Theologically, the Catholic Church is a bastion of strength in an ever-changing world; politically, American Catholics (and our bishops) have been compromising for generations.  I think everyone expected some grumbling and then a mass submission to the mandate.  After all, 98% of Catholics use contraception anyway.2

But this time we seem to have been pushed too far.  God has strengthened our shepherds and they are refusing to compromise on this.  A mandate that required employers to allow women to opt in and pay for their own contraception we might have compromised on.  But we’re not going to define contraception as “preventive medicine” because we’re not going to define pregnancy as a disease.  And we’re not going to allow a nation built on the free exercise of religion to prevent us from exercising ours–indeed, to force us to violate it.

We’re not imposing our views on anyone here.  If you want contraception, there are any number of ways to get it cheap or even free.  If you want your employer to pay for it, find a different job.  The Church’s refusal to submit here doesn’t make it impossible for other people to sin.  It just means we’re not funding it.

“What will happen?” my students asked once they realized the gravity of this situation.

Cardinal Dolan: Fines and imprisonment? Bring it, Mr. President.

“Oh, we’ll take the government to court.  And I think we’ll win.  But if we don’t, we still won’t do it.  We’ll pay the fines until there’s no money left.  And then our bishops will go to prison en masse.  It’s happened before.”

There was a glow in their eyes when I said that–they weren’t scared, they were excited.  I can preach the Passion till I’m blue in the face, but it’s not real to them.  The idea of people they know going willingly to prison rather than betray God?  That got their blood pumping.

Is anybody else kind of excited about this?  I mean, we’re talking institutionalized persecution here.  And if nothing else, persecution separates the wheat from the chaff.  No more of this cultural Catholicism or cafeteria Catholicism.  When we have to suffer for Christ, we may lose a lot of Christians but we’ll gain a lot of saints.  After all, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.  Now I can’t imagine anyone’s going to die over this.  President Obama doesn’t look much like Diocletian or Elizabeth I.  No, it’ll just be fines and censures and maybe imprisonment for the really important folk.  On this issue, anyway.  But for the first time in living memory, American Catholics are really going to have to decide: Christ or the world.

So it’s fitting that the Fortnight begins on the Vigil of the English Martyrs.  St. Thomas More‘s refusal to sign the Act of Succession didn’t disinherit the unborn Princess Elizabeth.  It didn’t hurt anybody but him.  He suffered for it.  We might suffer, too.  But I’d rather be headless in the company of the Saints than gutless at the right hand of Henry VIII or President Obama.  And so we fight.

In the words of our bishops, “We cannot–we will not–comply with this unjust law.”  Please join me in fasting, praying, and working for freedom.

 

Find out what your diocese is doing here.

*I don’t necessarily agree with everything said in the pages I link to above, just think they’re worth considering.*

  1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. [↩]
  2. Which, by the way, is a made up statistic that involved polling only sexually active women of childbearing age who wanted to avoid pregnancy. Besides (to quote someone, I’ve forgotten who), “100% of Catholics sin, but the Church isn’t changing her position on that, either.” [↩]

Source and Summit and Everything in Between: Why the Eucharist

As I walked my nephew through his prayers last night, we enjoyed the following exchange:

Me: Can you tell God how great he is?  What did Jesus do that was great?

John Paul: He took bwead and wine and tuwned it into his body and bwood!

I swear I’m not making this up.  Completely unaware of tomorrow’s feast (or my epic series of Eucharist posts), the one event from the life of Christ that struck my 2-year-old nephew as awesome was the institution of the Eucharist.

Yes, I’m taking notes for the hagiography.

Just so everybody knows that his theology’s sound, John Paul has also been known to stop playing, look up, and say, “Thank you fow Jesus fow dying fow me!”  He’s a little preposition happy at the moment.

But he’s on the right track.  Somehow, his little child’s mind gets that the Eucharist is just as essential as the Passion.  In fact, it’s an extension of the Passion.

Behold the Lamb of God

I’m sure everyone reading this knows that the Passover is a type (a foreshadowing) of the Passion.  But bear with me here (And turn to Exodus 12 if this is news).  In order to save his people from slavery to Egypt (sin), God ordered them to take an unblemished lamb (sinless Lamb of God) and slaughter it (crucify him) at twilight (during an eclipse).  He ordered that not a bone of it be broken (Jn 19:36) and that the Israelites anoint their doorposts with its blood (be baptized and saved by the blood of the Lamb).*

People usually finish drawing the eery parallels there (although can I point out that John the Baptist called Jesus the Lamb of God–sacrificial victim–just before Jesus was baptized, symbolizing his union with sinners and his death?  Sweet.) but that’s only the first part of the ritual.  Any Jew will tell you that the meat (hehe) of the Passover ritual is the Seder meal.  In fact, Exodus spends more time commanding that than it does commanding the sacrifice, going so far as to say that all Israelites must eat the lamb (Ex 12:47–I guess Jewish vegetarians just have to suck it up one day a year).

The Old Testament is engineered intentionally by God to reveal the New in the light of Christ.  We start to understand the purpose of the Ark of the Covenant when we look at Mary.  We get a sense of worship when we look at the temple (incense, anyone?) and we can’t understand Baptism without the flood and the Red Sea.  So what’s with all the sacrifice stuff all over the Pentateuch?  And why is it always telling them who was supposed to eat of the sacrifice?

That’s right.  Many kinds of sacrifices had to be consumed entirely, others eaten by priests, and some eaten by the one who offered it.  The idea was that you offered your best to God, who made it sacred.  Some of it went to the priests, some was burned up, but some was given back to you.  You then feasted with your family, thanking God for the opportunity to make a sacrifice (now there’s some good theology) and being sanctified by consuming what was holy.  The ancient understanding of holiness was that it was contagious.  If you touched something unclean, you became unclean; if you touched something holy, you became holy (or got struck dead–2 Sam 6).  God called the Israelites to consume their sacrifices so that they might become holy as their heavenly Father is holy.  For Ancient Jews, a sacrifice without a meal was incomplete.  A Passover without a Seder was sacrilege.

Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is clearly a Paschal (Passover/Easter) sacrifice; so where’s the meal?  Well, he had to go a little out of order, but the Apostles consumed the Lamb of God at the Last Supper, when he offered his body and blood to them under the form of bread and wine.  You cannot have the Passion without the Last Supper–you cannot have Christianity without the Eucharist.**

Because for the Israelites, sacrifice was necessary, yes.  But the feast was how they shared in that sacrifice.  The meal was the source of sanctity for them just as the Eucharist is for us.  It’s the source of our faith as well.  In John, Peter makes his profession of faith after the bread of life discourse.  In Luke, the disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognize the risen Christ until after he broke open the Scriptures for them (Liturgy of the Word) and then took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them (Lk 24:30).  It’s through consuming the Passover Lamb that we are drawn to faith.

And here’s the thing of it: this isn’t just some accident of allegory where we felt as though we had to get all the details right.  “Okay, well, there’s something in here about eating it standing up, so let’s nix the altar rails….”  No–God created the Passover for the purpose of showing us what the Passion meant–and showing us that it didn’t end on the cross or in the empty tomb or even on Ascension Thursday.

My friends, Jesus loved you too much to spend only 33 years on earth.  It wasn’t enough for him to live for you, nor to die, nor even to rise again.  He needed to be with you, here for you, every moment of every day.

At the Last Supper, he made this promise: I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you (Jn 14:18).  This wasn’t a promise made only to his Apostles, merely a promise of the Resurrection.  He’d told them about that a half dozen times.  They weren’t suddenly going to get it now.  No, this was a promise to you that he would offer himself for you not once but eternally.

“I refuse,” he said, as he stared death in the face, “I refuse to leave her.  I will come back for her.  I will wait for her, weaker than I was on the Cross, poorer than I was in the manger.  I will suffer abuse and ridicule, be ignored and profaned, every day for the rest of time rather than leave her.  And most days she won’t bother to come see me.  And she’ll receive me without a thought about me.  And some days–Father, forgive her–she’ll come to me mired in sin.  But I will never leave her nor forsake her.  I will wait for her in the tabernacle.  I will stare at her from the monstrance.  I will kiss her as she receives.  I will dwell in her heart.  I will be borne in her life.  I will not leave her.”

The act of receiving is so intimate, this moment at which we accept the love of another person given entirely for us.  We the Church walk up the aisle to our groom.  When a groom takes his bride to their marriage bed, when they consummate their marriage, they say to one another, “I give myself completely to you forever.”  And each time they make love, they renew the covenant of their marriage, making again with their bodies the vows they spoke on their wedding day: I give myself completely to you forever.

As he stretched out his arms on the cross, Jesus said to his bride the Church, “I give myself completely to you forever.”  In the person of the priest, he says at each Mass, “This is my body, which will be given up for you”–I give myself completely to you forever.  That is the promise of the Eucharist, the sign by which Christ renews his covenant with the Church.  It’s an act of marital love, and act of intimacy so profound that it’s called the summit of the Christian life.  Jesus, the lover of your soul, is drawing you to himself, giving himself completely to you–not just spiritually but physically–begging that you be captivated by him as he is by you.  Begging that you give yourself in return.

Sure, he could do this by sending his Spirit into our heart or stirring up a desire for union with him.  But God made us physical and spiritual–he knows that we’re not purely spiritual creatures and we can’t survive on the spirit alone.  He gave us the Eucharist as a physical expression of the all-encompassing, life-giving love we were made for.  The reality of his presence allows us to give ourselves completely to him as he offers himself completely to us.

This physical reality of the Sacrament touches our hearts in a way that spiritual certainty just can’t.  Because it’s real.  It’s tangible, it’s physical, and it’s beautiful.  A perfect love for Christ would desire to possess him completely–which we do when we receive.  A perfect love for Christ would desire to be transformed into him–which we are when we receive.  A perfect love for Christ would desire to give ourselves completely to him–which we can when we receive.

Praise God for the gift, the incredible gift of the Eucharist.  Here is the one place where you are fully known, loved exactly as you are, and called to be greater.  Here is the one place where you are completely accepted by the one person whose acceptance matters.  My friends, if you are blessed to be Catholic, please, oh, please learn to love Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  You won’t always feel it (Lord knows I don’t) but when you choose to see him with eyes of faith, your life will be transformed.  The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian faith.  It is our strength to endure and the reason we sing.  It is the promise of his love and a foretaste of heaven.  It is, quite literally, the meaning of life.

Jesus longs to love you in the Eucharist.  Let him.

 

*Can I just tell you that when this was first explained to me it absolutely blew my mind?  I was in high school and I seriously freaked out.  I knew Jesus and all, but I had no idea that this Christian thing could be intellectually stimulating.  Little did I know….

**Incidentally, this seems to have been Tolkien’s biggest problem with The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe; Lewis set up a whole Passion narrative with no Last Supper, a whole Passover with no Seder.

Everybody’s Doing It: Church Tradition on the Eucharist

Yesterday’s post (I hope) made it pretty clear that Scripture supports the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist.  In all things, though, we need to look to Church Tradition as well.  1 Thes 2:13 and 2 Thes 2:15–among many other verses–tell us that we need both Scripture and the inspired Tradition of the Church in order to come to a fuller understanding of our faith.  But that’s an argument for another day.

Church Fathers

Suffice it to say that whether or not you believe in the Church’s ability to speak infallibly, it’s hard to argue with the unanimous tradition of the early Church Fathers.  After all, these guys were only a few generations removed from Jesus–early in the game of telephone, if you will.  It stands to reason that their understanding of the faith has been less corrupted than what it might have become centuries later.

This was the clear understanding of the reformers.  Facing an ornate, bureaucratic Church weighed down by what appeared to be the accumulated “traditions of men” (Mark 7:8), Luther and his colleagues sought to go “ad fontes,” to the sources.  Their theory was that a Christianity 1500 years removed from Christ couldn’t possibly know what Christ taught unless it looked to the early Christian Church.  Now, Luther tended to look at Scripture alone, but his theory seems to indicate that the earliest Christians were almost as reliable.

So when we’re talking about the Eucharist, let’s start with the earliest Christians.  If we’ve got a consensus in Scripture and a consensus in the early Church, I don’t think there’s much left to argue.

The Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His graciousness, raised from the dead. -St. Ignatius of Antioch, around 100 AD

As Jesus Christ our Savior being incarnate by God’s Word took flesh and blood for our salvation, so also we have been taught that the food consecrated by the Word of prayer which comes from him, from which our flesh and blood are nourished by transformation, is the flesh and blood of that incarnate Jesus. -St. Justin Martyr, around 150 AD

Could not Christ’s word, which can make from nothing what did not exist, change existing things into what they were not before? It is no less a feat to give things their original nature than to change their nature. -St. Ambrose of Milan, 4th century

Since Christ himself has declared the bread to be his body, who can have any further doubt? Since he himself has said quite categorically, “This is my blood,” who would dare to question it and say that it is not his blood? -St. Cyril of Jerusalem, late 4th century

Cyril asks the exact question here: who, John Calvin, are you to say that Jesus didn’t mean what he said?  It seems that Cyril was just making a point, though, not addressing anyone in particular; history tells us of absolutely no mainstream Christian denying the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist during his time.

Actually, we have no record of anything of the kind for more than 1000 years after the time of Christ.  Berengarius of Tours in 1088 is the first Christian on record as denying that the Eucharist is the true body and blood of Jesus.  This idea of a “symbolic” or “spiritual” presence of Jesus was so foreign to the early Church that nobody even considered it for a thousand years and when someone did they branded him a heretic and ran him out of town.

You want to tell me that 1000 years of Christians were all completely wrong on this central mystery of their faith?  Doesn’t sound ad fontes to me.

Saints Throughout History

The Saints’ obsession with the Eucharist didn’t stop in the early Church, though.  Love of the Blessed Sacrament is a hallmark of sanctity, found in the lives of every Saint we have adequate information on.  Here are some highlights:

 Material food first changes into the one who eats it, and then, as a consequence, restores to him lost strength and increases his vitality.  Spiritual food, on the other hand, changes the person who eats it into itself.  Thus the effect proper to this Sacrament is the con­ver­sion of a man into Christ, so that he may no longer live, but Christ lives in him; conse­quent­ly, it has the double effect of restoring the spiritual strength he had lost by his sins and defects, and of increasing the strength of his virtues. -St. Thomas Aquinas, 13th century

I don’t know how many of you are aware of how desperately Catholic Tolkien was, but I hope you see the connection between Aquinas’ understanding of the Eucharist and Tolkien’s description of elven lembas (waybread–viaticum, anyone?).

Can you believe this is just what popped up when I googled lembas?

The lembas had a virtue without which they would long ago have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam’s mind was filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats. And yet, this way bread of the Elves had potency that increased as travelers relied upon it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind. -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (For more on lembas, check this out.)

I know, right?  Here’s St. Francis of Assisi, “the most Christlike man since Christ”:

And just as He appeared before the holy Apostles in true flesh, so now He has us see Him in the Sacred Bread. Looking at Him with the eyes of their flesh, they saw only His Flesh, but regarding Him with the eyes of the spirit, they believed that He was God. In like manner, as we see bread and wine with our bodily eyes, let us see and believe firmly that it is His Most Holy Body and Blood, True and Living. (12th century)

Let’s listen to the Little Flower:

Do you realize that Jesus is there in the tabernacle expressly for you–for you alone? He burns with the desire to come into your heart. -St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 19th century

Or her namesake, Mother Teresa of Calcutta:

When you look at the crucifix, you understand how much Jesus loved you. When you look at the Sacred Host you understand how much Jesus loves you now.

You can find tons of these all over the internet because the Saints agree with Christ: this is his body.

Regular Folk

I just couldn’t leave this smorgasbord of quotations on the Eucharist without my very favorites, from regular people (okay, geniuses, but not Saints).

Blaise Pascal, famous for being a philosopher and a mathematician and one of the greatest minds of all time, sums it up quite nicely:

How I hate such foolishness as not believing in the Eucharist!  If the Gospel is true, if Jesus Christ is God, where is the difficulty?

Tolkien didn’t stop at allusion when discussing his love of the Eucharist.  In a letter to his son, he explained what the love of his life was:

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament…..There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that.

Twenty years later, his feelings were much the same:

 I fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning – and by the mercy of God never have fallen out again: but alas! I indeed did not live up to it…Out of wickedness and sloth I almost ceased to practice my religion – especially at Leeds, and at 22 Northmoor Road. Not for me the Hound of Heaven, but the never-ceasing silent appeal of Tabernacle, and the sense of starving hunger.

This, friends–this is what it means to be a Catholic.  To hunger for the Eucharist, to be enamored of Christ’s body and blood, here present to us at all times, sinners that we are.

I leave you with the words of Flannery O’Connor, an American Catholic author from the early 20th century.  She says what we, perhaps, would say: I can’t explain it, but I believe it with everything that I am.

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She just wrote that book, “A Charmed Life.”) She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. . . . Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most portable person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.

That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.

All the rest of life is expendable.

Tomorrow: Source and Summit and Everything in Between: Why the Eucharist.