For catechists looking for discussion material in teaching the Commandments, sometimes the resources fall right into your lap. Consider the Seventh Commandment.
I am told that I was in Forbes Field in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1947 when Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers stole home plate from third base. [I was born a few months later.] I have stayed with the game all my life. In junior college seminary, I was listed on the depth chart as a catcher, though in truth I was the “break glass in case of emergency” replacement on the squad. So, I was intrigued at the breaking news story this week regarding cheating by the Houston Astros and possibly several other teams, specifically the issue of electronic stealing of the secret signals that all teams develop to assist their players in communicating with one another. For those of you who do not follow baseball or its rules closely, the Washington Post has a fine layman’s summary of the scandal in its sport section. My reaction to the Houston story was surprise. I thought all teams were stealing signs with technology. In the 1950’s I watched the “Baseball Game of the Week” in black and white on Saturday afternoons, and Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blattner, the announcers, routinely instructed the center field TV cameras to hone in on the catcher’s finger symbols to his pitcher. [Old Diz’ won 30 games as a pitcher himself two decades before, when baseball was broadcast only on the radio.] My bigger reaction was the possibility of using this Houston scandal and others like it for catechetical purposes. What an interesting way to teach the Seventh Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Steal.’ I am assuming for our discussions here that we are dealing with competitive sports, where the object is to win by outperforming and outwitting one’s opponent for monetary or other tangible compensation. Cheating/stealing which brings actual harm to players in competition: Fifth and Seventh Commandment. There have been some scandals in sports where the drive to obtain a competitive edge crossed into moral compromise that few would condone. I think the most egregious offense to athletic enterprise in my lifetime was the “bounty scandal” or “Bounty Gate” plot engineered by 27 New Orleans Saints football players and some coaches. Coaches and players created a pool of money to be awarded for injuring an opposing star player and forcing him out of the game. Bounty Gate was in full swing in 2009 when the Saints won a Superbowl. Saints’ head coach Sean Payton was suspended for one year. As for baseball, another set of questionable circumstances a century earlier—corporate as much as personal--led directly to the death of a baseball player during a Major League Baseball game. In 1920 a New York Yankee pitcher, Carl Mays, struck Cleveland Indians player Ray Chapman in the head with a pitch that led to Chapman’s death twelve hours later. Historians note that at the time of Chapman’s death major leagues used a minimum amount of baseballs during a game, and pitchers routinely ground the singular baseball into the dirt or rubbed it with tobacco or licorice. As games wore on, the pitched baseball was nearly impossible to see. In addition, Mays threw an “underhand” pitch [or a submarine pitch in today’s lingo] as well as a “spitter,” both of which were legal at the time. That said, baseball authorities rushed through several reforms after Chapman’s death, including increasing the number of clean baseballs and outlawing the spitter [a pitch loaded up with saliva, tobacco, or Vaseline], whose projection is nearly impossible for a batter to pick up in time to protect himself. Mays was not punished and won 200 games over his long career. Protection devices such as batting helmets would come into common use only many years later, though not soon enough to protect the Boston Red Sox's Tony Conigliaro, struck in the eye in 1967 by a pitch from journeyman Jack Hamilton which partially blinded him. Though not directly related to on the field competition, it is worth noting that many baseball team owners have taken prompt steps to protect fans in the stands with extensions of screenings to avoid contact with foul balls after several recent serious injuries in the stands. Strategy: It depends how far you go: All discussions of stretching the boundaries of legal or customary strategy must begin with Wee Willie Keeler. Baseball has changed its rules countless times to maintain a competitive balance, on the grounds that competition for money ought to provide both sides with a level playing field, physically as well as strategically. Players and their owners, on the other hand, have been looking for the competitive edge since the game became organized and have worked to create new environments to circumvent these rule changes. In 1899 Wee Willie Keeler, then playing for the Brooklyn Superbas [Dodgers], struck out just twice all year! His secret was an otherworldly expertise at bunting, which he could apparently execute at will. He was so good at it, in fact, that baseball instituted the “third-strike foul bunt rule” to reign him in. But Willie worked his way around this new rule by developing a swing which resulted in an inordinately high bounce in the infield, the “Baltimore Chop,” which provided ample opportunity for a batter to race to first base for a single before an infielder could field the ball. The chop is still legal, though I guess no one could pull it off like Wee Willie. But at 5’4” the diminutive Keeler needed true architectural assistance in 1903. Playing for the first time on his home field with the New York Highlanders [Yankees] he discovered that the dip in right field was so severe that he could not see home plate. Consequently, the Highlanders built him a wooden platform in right field to allow him a better jump on the batted ball. Tinkering with ballparks for specific team needs continues to this day. The most common adjustment is moving fences in [for more home runs] or out [to assist poor pitching]. Major League Baseball apparently does not dictate the size of an outfield so long as it is within reason. “Reason” can be a loose term. When the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to the Los Angeles Coliseum [1958-1961], the right field fence stood 440’ from home plate, the left field fence at 271’. Every change brings advantage to some and disadvantage to others. Over the years pitching mounds have been raised [to help the pitcher] and lowered [to help the batter.] The strike zone interpretation is dependent upon league regulations and the discretion of the umpires. In 1973 the American League enacted a rule whereby the weakest batter in the starting lineup could be replaced by a stronger hitter from the bench throughout the game, the “designated hitter” rule.” Professional sports are businesses which need to draw fans to the park and [especially] TV and wireless streaming. A winning team, with a few exceptions, is a winning product for baseball owners and, lest we forget, for individual baseball players whose good statistics put them In positions to demand higher salaries or navigate to other teams for more lucrative contracts. Which leads us to our next moral dilemma… PEDS or Performing Enhancement Drugs. While pharmaceutical enhancements have always played a role in baseball and probably all sports, the practice grew wildly out of control after 1994. Baseball players went on strike and no World Series was played. Fan reaction toward baseball was highly negative, and Major League Baseball was desperate for some “good news.” Sure enough, the quest for Babe Ruth’s all-time home run records by Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and others captured the front pages of the sports sections of the newspapers. As new PED’s became available some of baseballs best pitchers and home run hitters began to employ their use to build muscle, increase strength, and recover more quickly from injuries. The drugs themselves, notably anabolic steroids, had been banned from baseball from some time, but many PEDS are difficult to test for, and at the turn of the 21st century, as home run records were eclipsed in almost comic proportions, and players like Bonds visibly beefed up to Herculean size, investigators were dependent upon players’ testimony and a federal investigation of a pharmaceutical supply house, Balco. Those who went to jail and/or were suspended from baseball did so on charges of perjury or obstruction of justice. As with several other scandals listed above, there is individual and corporate guilt. The players who used enhancers obviously cheated against players who played it straight, both on their own teams and the opposition. They shortcutted the laborious gym work that all successful professionals engage religiously. They “stole”—and there is no other way to put it—the credit of true accomplished record holders, notably Hank Aaron’s career record of 753 home runs. And, as any baseball fan will admit, there is a taint of scandal and fraud hanging over the entire steroid era, such that the accomplishments of truly fine winning teams and statistically exceptional players will always be regarded with a mental asterisk. And then there was Houston. This is a baseball scandal where the technology ran ahead of the game. Looked at one way, the Astros were attempting to steal signs in the great tradition of baseball. Sign stealing is legal so long as no electronics are used. After World War II, when baseball games began to be televised with center field cameras, owners resisted on the grounds that the catcher’s pitch calls could be recorded and analyzed. However, the commercial TV cameras remained in place as they do to this day. In the 1960’s and 1970’s Lou Brock, probably the best base stealer in history, used an 8mm camera to film pitchers’ deliveries from the dugout in order to time his jumps toward second base. No one objected. The holy grail of stealing catchers’ signs is a system that makes the stolen code immediately accessible to the batter. The time a catcher gives his pitch sign to the pitcher and the pitcher hurls the ball across the plate is a matter of seconds, around 5 or 10. The Astros installed a camera in their home park in center field, which beamed an instant signal to a TV monitor in the dugout. Baseball allowed the installation of video screens in dugouts a few years ago when the practice of instant replay review by umpires became available as it is in professional football. An unintended consequence of the dugout monitors was the almost instantaneous visibility of the catcher’s signals to the Houston players. Since the computer age, baseball players and teams amass huge amounts of statistical and visual data on every opponent’s roster. Batters already know pitchers’ tendencies, what their best pitches are, and when they are likely to throw them. One of the true arts of pitching is delivering the unexpected to the plate, and this is the final frontier of baseball espionage, gaining knowledge of what the pitcher is going to throw. The Astros crossed the sound barrier with a surprisingly low-tech solution: having knowledge of what the next pitch will be, players signaled the batter by rapping on the dugout garbage can with a bat. One swat on the can for a fast ball, two swats for a slower breaking pitch like a curve ball. Numerous videos have emerged this past week confirming the [literal] trash talk to the batter. A pitcher on the Astros 2017 championship team, Mike Fiers, was traded to the Oakland A’s and he briefed his new teammates on what to watch out for, later providing a long interview to the baseball news service, The Athletic. Was the system effective? Probably less so today, now that the system has been publicly confirmed, and very recent accusations involved several major league teams besides the Astros. Many baseball insiders had suspicions of sign stealing before the Astros system was in full throttle during the 2017 World Series with the Dodgers, won by Houston. Was it costly? It is worth noting the psychological anguish caused by the Astros system to just one man, a Dodgers’ pitcher, Yu Darvish. Darvish started two games in the World Series for Los Angeles and was pounded by Astros’ hitting. He did not last past three innings in either start [a World Series record which still stands.] After the Series, to add insult to injury, Astros players told Darvish that he [Darvish] was tipping his pitches. This caused the pitcher to question his pitching mechanics and his general effectiveness. The Dodgers traded him before the 2018 season. Houston’s 2017 World Series victory will be carried through generations with “the mental asterisk” of baseball fans and historians. While there have been countless instances of moral and technical breakdowns in every institution, including the Catholic Church, a moral crisis is wasted if it does not lead to fruitful discussion, evaluation, and reform. Issues involving the Seventh Commandment demand as much attention as we have traditionally rendered the Sixth. To paraphrase the Gospel, “What does it profit an organization to gain the whole world—or at least a World Series Championship—but suffer the loss of its soul?”
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I continue the prowl for updated books and topics for those interested in pursuing contemporary Catholic theological thought, pastoral practice, and catechetics. I am particularly regretful that time to read is so precious that I cannot be timelier on all the Catechist Café posts; the poor “Monday Morality” stream has not seen action since July.
So, I reached back into my past for inspiration, to 1973, when I was required to write a semester paper as a credit elective. The Washington Theological Coalition, as my school was called then, taught a core curriculum for all students for theological masters degrees, but we were permitted to choose a specialty, and mine was morality. In my school, the morality department embraced both Christian ethics and spirituality, somewhat like the Catechism’s organization today. Having been skillfully advised by priest/graduates from the classes ahead of me, I was careful to choose a topic that I figured my professors knew nothing about. So, for my independent study, I proposed “Women’s Liberation and the Church.” I think my faculty readers were intrigued more than anything else, and when pressed for my objectives, I said that there was a large body of secular literature and certainly much media activism coming forward on behalf of the equality of women, and that I hadn’t seen much Catholic literature or action on the subject in the 1960’s. [There were, in fact, several Catholic women who had published on the subject by the early 1970’s, but I was unaware of that.] I don’t recall setting out to critique the Church, but I was already mindful of Father Andrew Greeley’s observation that “the Church arrives on the scene a little breathless and a little late.” I did have a dim sense that feminism, like the antiwar movement, then at its peak, was something the Church would have to deal with pastorally and academically. And, I was just plain interested. As much as I loved the Catholic University Mullen Library in my university days, it was not exactly noted for its secular feminist literature, which necessitated my making frequent trips up Rhode Island Avenue to the Maryland Book Exchange, which sat adjacent to the University of Maryland. It was a massive independent textbook/research book dealer, the prices kept very low for us struggling young radicals. The Book Exchange was a great help to me, and I returned home with piles of used copies of the works of feminist thinkers and activists obtained at bargain prices. [I could never understand how, during an anti-war demonstration, the store was later set on fire.] I was lucky that I was a full-time graduate student of the Coalition. Had I continued at Catholic University, where I obtained my B.A., I don’t think I would have had the freedom to undertake that kind of research, at least under the auspices of its school of theology. CU was more buttoned down, a pontifical university. Its few forays into radical politics had not gone particularly well. In March 1971 several of my classmates attended a lecture by a radical feminist, Ti Grace Atkinson, at the CU student union, who in her comments made a statement about the Virgin Mary that was both tasteless and blasphemous. William F. Buckley’s sister Pat rushed from the audience to the stage and took a swing at Ms. Atkinson; the story subsequently ran in the Washington Post and Time Magazine. The Coalition, which I attended, was formed in 1969 by a consortium of religious orders who pooled their best academics into an academy that seemed more at home with the tenor of Vatican II as we understood it then. It was not simply the secular crusading for women’s rights that generated my interest, though. I went into this paper project with several real life “givens” from my Catholic life. Attending summer school at St. Bonaventure University for several summers with religious sisters from the Northeast, working retreats for religious in DC and New Hampshire, and working with several Georgetown women’s high schools providing weekend retreats, I came quite naturally to the idea of working with women in ministry. I heard a great deal from them about the struggles of religious women’s communities with local bishops and what today we would call clericalism. But long before that, as a kid I noticed quite a difference in the lifestyles of priests and nuns. I was in the fourth grade when I was called to the principal’s office. I liked Sister Macrina and we got on well, but a summons is still a summons. In front of her eighth-grade girls’ class [she had no office], she asked if my dad could drive the sisters of the parish convent to the community’s motherhouse in downtown Buffalo for the wake of one of their religious confreres who had died. [I always wondered later how she knew he had just purchased a new 1957 Chevy 9-passenger station wagon for our growing family.] My dad and I took care of business, and after the sisters were dropped off, I told him it was too bad the convent didn’t have its own car. I knew the four priests in my parish each owned a car—I used to get paid to wash them. But back to 1973 Washington: I read a lot of authors who probably would not be recognized today—Erica Jong, Kate Millet, Simone de Beauvoir, among others—and Betty Friedan, whose 1963 The Feminine Mystique is still respected as one of the best popular analyses of women’s unrest in the United States after World War II. As I recall, Friedan discussed the power of male corporations and institutions in shaping the self-image of American women. In my generation we still joke about TV’s June Cleaver doing her housework in pearls, but Friedan was the first author to critique this stereotype as a form of masculine economic suppression. Friedan made very good sense to me, as she resonated with protests of other forms of commercialized pressure [e.g., the tobacco industry and the auto industry] and she prepped me for examining the limited Catholic writing available at that time on women’s identity. The two Catholic authors I can still remember are Sidney Callahan and Mary Daly. Callahan’s best-known work at the time was Beyond Birth Control [1968]. I regret I do not have a copy of my paper today, but my memory is that the author, a psychologist and a mother of six children, was attempting to hold together “the Catholic middle” in the face of Pope Paul’s teaching banning the use of artificial birth control. The idea of a male authority figure legislating on medical issues of deep concern to women—without their input—was, at the least, questionable to many, and Callahan, who remains a devout Catholic, was attempting to take the debate to a higher plane. It is quite a leap from Callahan’s maternal and spiritual outlook to that of Mary Daly. Did twentieth-century Catholic higher education produce a more controversial iconoclast of Catholicism’s male history and orientation than Mary Daly? Daly died in 2010 at age 81. Her life, academic history, and writings are truly one of a kind. She began her career as a Catholic theologian at Boston College. Her early work, The Church and the Second Sex, nearly cost her a tenured position. [If you want to see what could get you fired from Boston College, there is a generous excerpt from this book on Amazon here.] Looking at her career and the development of her thought, can one even call her a Catholic theologian? My professors thought so. Boston College thought so for a long time. There was a long list of theologians exploring the outer edges of the Catholic universe at the time, and Daly would have been one of them. But note that she was among the first women to reach full doctoral and faculty status and join the faculty of a Catholic university. Amazing as this may sound today, Catholic women were not permitted to seek masters and doctoral level degrees at any Catholic institution of higher learning in the United States until after World War II. [Sidney Callahan's advanced degrees were in the field of psychology.] At the time I read Daly, she was emphasizing the structural and existential struggles of being a woman throughout history in the Church, a reality that more recent historical research has affirmed. Just today Phyllis Zagano raised the historical theological slant against femininity in her reporting on the Amazon Synod now in session in Rome. As her research and speculation later unfolded, Daly turned to new language and concepts of God purified of masculine overtones. At some point she consciously moved from theology to philosophical sociology, plumbing the depths of both universal womanhood and male manipulation of the female experience. She was actually taken to court for her refusal to allow males in her classes; she argued that the collegian women in her classes behaved differently in the presence of boys. I do think she served the Church well in at least two critical ways. First, she put the troubled past of the Church before the world with her initial books and reminded us that Christianity is not exempt from the adage that “the victors write the history.” This was my biggest takeaway from reading her and formed the basis for my concluding paragraph, that Catholics must approach our common life with the understanding that our tradition is cast by the masculine mind. Her second contribution is a philosophical error, for want of a better word, that has remained a prod to my conscience for many years. Daly’s method of thought was based on a primacy of female experience. She came to be criticized by women of color, who argued at she, a prosperous and highly regarded white woman, was overreaching, that she could not know the experience of women in multiple cultures and settings. One can see that establishing an infallible primacy of one’s own judgments of moral reality based solely on limited human experience, male or female, is a road to a type of chaos that we are presently experiencing in religion and society. The basic theological issue in play here today is the forum of personal experience and conscience vis-à-vis a common vision of love and justice, or put another way, my ability to “sympathize” or to “feel with” the suffering and hopes of others. It is common to hear Vatican II Catholics referred to as “cafeteria Catholics,” implying a process of picking and choosing which doctrines and moral teachings to be observed, based upon individual subjective feelings. On the other hand, blind obedience—in this case to a male and clerical structure—has proven the wisdom of Lord Acton’s nineteenth century dictum, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Nearly a half-century later feminism, in the best sense of the word, remains one of our Church’s greatest moral frontiers. It addresses the very heart of how we think and feel in our religious identity. I am pleased to say that much of the best moral writing in Catholic academics is the product of women theologians. In future posts I will be working with Sister Anne E. Patrick’s Liberating Conscience: Feminist Explorations in Catholic Moral Theology [1997] and Sister Margaret Farley’s Just Love [2006] to go much beyond what was available to me in 1973. I burned a lot of gas and spent a pile of money on books, but I did get an A. I do wonder, though, if in 2019 there is any seminary anywhere that would allow a seminarian to do a project like this. It is a much more button downed church world today. I’m rather glad I had the privilege. How do we know what God wants? How do we learn it? How do we communicate it? How do we teach it? This Monday stream of the Cafe on Morality has been woefully neglected; this is the first 2019 entry, and I returned to the Catechism’s treatment of morality today, specifically paragraph 2000 and thereabouts on the specifics of justification and on to specific moral directives of right and wrong. Catholic moral theology, as I posted on the Saturday, July 27 stream, has officially maintained a stately code of good and evil. It would be immature to deny the importance of moral direction, with the proviso that the crisp confident judicial language of the Catechism should never gloss over the existential battle to do good and avoid evil. Jesus’ agony in the garden was not play acting for our benefit, but a template of crisis thinking that accompanies doing the Father’s will, and not one’s own.
If we do consciously hold to the Christian creed, we believe there is an ultimate judgment with consequences beyond the grave. I don’t pay attention to discussions about the precise time of the “Second Coming of Christ” in part because Jesus himself said that such speculation is a waste of time (“that Hour is known only to the Father”) but also because my own eternal judgment is a reasonably imminent and predictable event, time wise; the actuarial tables provided by my retirement/financial planner indicate that a death date of age 87 would be financially advantageous for me. So, if the Catechist Cafe should suddenly go silent in 2037, there is good chance I will be able to speak more authoritatively on judgment at that time. It is true that for many seniors, there is a young person trapped in an old body yelling “what the hell happened?” Unless illness or early dementia shortcuts reflective moral thinking, those of my age cohort find us looking backward toward a panorama we never had in earlier years, a fuller picture of our lives from our earliest memories to our present state of moral consciousness. My personal experience on this score is something that does consume my quiet, meditative prayer time. With the maturity of age, I look back at decades of opportunities and omissions and I wonder how God will judge me. George Bernard Shaw famously observed that “youth is wasted on the young.” Sometimes I feel that age is wasted on seniors. Recall the touching scene from “The Shawshank Redemption” where Red (Morgan Freeman) sits before the prison review board in his later years and tells the board how he wishes he could go back and talk to his younger self who murdered another man probably four decades earlier. The wisdom of seniority can be painful for seniors but would have been enormously helpful to us in our youth and adulthood, not to mention our children and others entrusted to our care. I wish there were some way for us to share the trench warfare of moral struggle with the generations behind us. This is, after all, how the Church formed itself over two millennia, struggling with evil, error, and ignorance before bequeathing later generations with principles whose bloodless formulations belie the work of their composition. Every human’s life comes face to face with this crucible of assessment. Ashley G. Miller, in her excellent essay of July 23 in Crisis Magazine, addresses the inevitability of our moment of truth: “Sooner or later, people take stock of life and wonder what it is for—and we ought to prepare them to answer. No matter how successful we become, none of us gets to escape this question, any more than we can escape the questions of how to live, or how to understand the world, or of how to organize our society. The person with the successful job and the nice home will still, one day, be called to make an account of himself.” Although I have written to this point from the vantage of 70+ years, my intent is to inspire thinking about “moral conversation” across generations. It was inspired when I returned to the morality quadrant of the Catechism and the drift in modern catechetics toward a one-dimensional dependence upon moral teachings so economically taut that human experience and the life of conscience formation is practically extraneous. As early as 600 A.D. the Irish monks, the first true systematic moral theologians, recognized the complexity of human experience and sought to instill penitents with a wisdom of why their actions were wrong and how they might improve their consciences, often by the selection of a unique penance. [The “three Hail Mary” penances are an impoverished vestige from the day when an Irish sinner might be told to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.] There are cases in the Irish penitential books where a man who kills another man will be instructed by his confessor to assume financial support for the dead man’s widow and children. One might quickly respond that this is simple justice, but the moral intent here was to convey the value of another man’s life and the irreparable grief and damage wrought upon to a family [probably an extended family.] To this degree a man in his relative youth acquires some sense of the evil he is capable of doing and the high stakes of the decisions he makes. I have to think that in our own time when Pope John Paul II reemphasized the priority of individual confession over communal rites, he hoped that wise confessors would also take this tack of teaching and conveying wisdom, but an overly enduring judicial approach to this sacrament [‘legal absolution”] has considerably reduced its ability to convey spiritual insight and moral wisdom. “Hearing confession” is an art; without the art it has the moving power of paying a parking ticket. The same can be said for catechetics. In the Ashley Miller essay I cited above, the author makes another compelling point: “My own understanding of humanity and the human need for salvation is based more on all of my experience gained from reading about people and their emotions, downfalls, reactions, courage, and tenaciousness throughout history than by the facts laid out in a catechism class. Reading of humanity leads one first to the truth that salvation is needed, and also to the questions and answers of how to achieve salvation.” “Reading of humanity” can be expanded into the present moment and into the existence of each of us as we assess our lifelong struggle to meet God and know the divine way through the wars we have waged with our sins. If we bear the least bit of insight and thoughtfulness, we would have to admit that we have learned a great deal from God and have amassed a wisdom of considerable value. How do we share that? Perhaps one step is being honest about how hard it has been to attain and live a measure of faith. Two years ago, the Catholic research center CARA released a landmark study, “Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics.” The study noted that a statistically significant number of Catholics have made their minds up to disaffiliate by the age of 10! This got me to wondering how I would address this phenomenon were I still pastoring today. Something I might experiment with—perhaps in place of post-initiation elementary school aged CCD—would be a circle of five fathers and five ten-year-old sons. Research shows that this youthful population thinks more intently and deeply about the Church than is generally believed. Let them talk. Let them lay out their questions and criticisms. We may not like what we hear, but we would already have accomplished a major goal in proving to them that they are affiliated, something that is usually taken for granted. A second achievement would be the demonstration that matters of truth and morals can be talked about in language other than “church-ese.” [I dread reading ecclesiastical documents which typically come down in Rococo style.] A third would be the introduction of an adult population to the cultural jargon of the young. As a therapist in private practice I had a thriving “Goth” population; several of them, wearing “sneakers” created from black electricians’ tape, explained to me that the Goth community at the local high school was established to protect themselves from bullying and harassment from other students who were angry at classmates who liked study, the arts, and superior academic performance. I was into my 50’s then but quite naïve about the intensity of bullying. What do adults bring to the table? For starters, some candid admissions that when we were ten, we couldn’t bear the Stations of the Cross, either. We, too, could barely see the altar, and we were scared, too, of bullies and gangs. We can introduce them, gradually, to grown up life, to how much we worried about how we were going feed them and hold on to jobs that we didn’t particularly like. We can talk about the peace and quiet we found in church when we lit a candle and asked God for help. In other words, share the meat and potatoes of a faith life and the way it got you through. With consideration for age appropriateness, it is fair game to talk about failure and how much it has cost in adult life. The important point here is that the curiosity of youth has opportunity to intermingle with those who have labored some years in the heat of the day. What we used to call “community” can be better expressed as “talking.” For the foreseeable future I will use the Monday Morality stream to highlight key paragraphs of the Catechism [without the church-ese] in a fashion that allows us to face our ultimate meeting with God, with realism and hope as well as the pain of imperfect humanity we all bear in common. My wife Margaret returned on December 21 from a week's work in Tijuana, Mexico, assisting refugees seeking legal entry into the United States at the Tijuana point of entry. She had been recruited as a translator for medical and legal personnel also volunteering from the United States, though her work would eventually include numerous humanitarian services. She was profoundly moved by her time there and hopes to return next year, if possible, circumstances permitting.
On her return she put her thoughts on paper for her family, and I thought that passing them on to you on this final day of 2018, and on the "Monday Morality Stream" no less, might be an appropriate way to conclude the Cafe's 2018 year of posting. A week at the border A week ago I was home getting things ready for my trip to Tijuana. Right now I am sitting in the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport trying to process all I have experienced. I think it will take quite a while for all I have seen, heard, and experienced to really sink in and settle within me. I don’t think some of it will ever make sense to me. The organizer of our group had told us not to go with any preconceived notions. She warned that things changed daily, sometimes hourly. I was going as an interpreter, but I wasn’t sure what that would involve. There were two doctors going in our group, so I brushed up on my medical vocabulary in Spanish. I bought a Spanish-English dictionary that emphasized vocabulary from Central and South America. I thought I might be translating documents such as birth and marriage certificates, so I brought some blank templates with me to make translations quicker. Turns out I didn’t need any of this. The two doctors in our group spoke Spanish and the need for interpreters was much greater than the need to translate documents. Most of my days were spent interpreting. At 7: 00 AM each day I went to Chaparral. It is a public plaza at the foot of Ped West, the major pedestrian border crossing in Tijuana. It is here that migrants seeking asylum go each day to see if it is their turn to speak to a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official and begin the process. Hundreds of migrants go there each morning. Some of them have been waiting for their number to be called for six weeks or more. The scene is usually orderly, but the whole process is abominable. According to US law, anyone who presents at the US border and asks for asylum needs to be given the opportunity to present their case. Why are they fleeing their home country? Have they been victims of a violent crime? Are they being persecuted for their political opinions and actions? All these and many more questions will be asked. Most people will not qualify for asylum, but they do not know all the specifics, so they come trying. It is the only path open to them. The poor, uneducated, and marginalized have no hope of receiving a visa since the US has all but eliminated visas for people coming from these countries. Thousands of people from Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua arrive in Tijuana. Some also come from Africa, the Caribbean islands, and as far away as Russia. They arrive at the busiest border to the USA, one that routinely allows 3,000 people a day to enter. But for some reason CBP says they can only process a very small number of asylum seekers each day. So a list has been formed. It is against US law to have a waiting list, so the US government does not admit that the list exists. The Mexican government also denies that it is keeping a list. But I have seen the list. I know that CBP communicates to Grupo Beta, a supposed humanitarian group, just how many people they are willing to process on any given day. While I was there the number ranged from 20 to 95. There is no way of telling. So the migrants show up at 7:00 AM each day once their number is getting close. If you are not there when your number is called, you miss your chance and go to the end of the list; another six weeks is added to your wait. My job at Chaparral was three-fold. I was an observer of the process, a provider of information about services available, and an interpreter. As an observer I walked among the people waiting, being visible to the police and Grupo Beta. I was there to make sure that nobody was harassed, that women with small children were safe, and that this extra-official list was being implemented without negative intervention from Grupo Beta. The list is maintained by the migrants themselves, a group of four who pass management of the list to others once their own numbers get called. I was also there to let the migrants know about services available to them. Al Otro Lado, the group I was there to support, offers a talk every day about the asylum process, and volunteer lawyers do one-on-one consults after the meeting. Free meals are provided each evening at 5. Clothing is distributed to anyone who needs it. My job was to let the migrants know that assistance was available for most of their needs. Finally, I was an interpreter. Many of the volunteer lawyers did not speak Spanish. If those of us who were observers came across migrants who were about to be transported to the initial CBP interview and who had never spoken to a lawyer, we helped the lawyer give a mini-lesson on the asylum process and their rights under US law. Our group of observers waited among those whose numbers had been called and were now on line waiting to board busses. Most were so upbeat and happy to have reached this point, to have passed this hurdle. Because most had been to the talks at Al Otro Lado and because of the incredible rumor mill in the camps and shelters, they were aware that the next step would be going to a detention center in the US. Even going to a detention center was seen as better than returning to their country of origin. What going to a detention center involved was anybody’s guess. It changes constantly. Al Otro Lado tries to prepare people for the worst case scenario. Mothers and children might be separated from fathers. Fathers traveling alone with children might be separated from them. Some might be tagged with an ankle monitor and simply released into the streets of San Diego with no information about shelters or assistance available. Important documents are taken from migrants when they enter detention centers. Sometimes documents are not returned unless the migrant knows to ask for them. While I was there this week, Al Otro Lado began a new service. They scan the migrant’s documents, store them digitally, and give them a card with directions on how to retrieve them. While most of the migrants do not understand the system, there are aide groups in the States that will be able to do it for them and the documents will not be lost forever. In the afternoon I worked where needed. Most of the time it was interpreting for law students who were volunteering to do Credible Fear Interviews. This was the crucial juncture where questions were asked of the migrants to see if they were probable candidates for a successful asylum claim. If they were not, they were told what their alternatives were. It was not our right or intention to tell people what to do. We were there to give information so that people could make informed decisions. It was a heart wrenching thing to experience. One afternoon I was not needed as an interpreter so I found a broom and swept the floors and staircases. They had been bothering me since I got there! Two afternoons I gave English classes in a small shelter. The people there were mostly very young, and the person in charge was looking for ways to keep them productively engaged during their long days of waiting. Without a doubt my favorite task was acting as wedding coordinator/interpreter. Yes, wedding coordinator. Every day that there is a minister available, weddings are held at 3:00 PM at Enclave Caracol. Enclave is a marvelous grass roots cooperative offering nutritious meals to the poor of Tijuana. They also have an all day coffee bar and lounge where all are welcome to come in off the street and rest a while. They own the four story building where Al Otro Lado is operating free of charge. First floor houses the coffee bar and kitchen. Second floor has been taken over as processing center for clothing donations for the migrants. Third floor is where Al Otro Lado offers its legal services. Fourth floor is where Al Otro Lado has its operations center and a lovely terrace looking out over downtown Tijuana. Weddings take place on the terrace. I had the privilege of interpreting every day for a Unitarian minister who was volunteering for a week. Migrants wishing to get married signed up in the morning or just showed up at three. A volunteer from New Orleans purchased a few flowers each afternoon, and the bride got to have a simple, one-flower bouquet. Someone purchased some very inexpensive rings so there was a lasting symbol of the vows exchanged. One couple had been together for 29 years and their three daughters ranging in age from 16 to 22 were witnesses. Another couple were married in a civil ceremony in their home country but wanted a religious blessing on their union. I had to keep tissues in my pocket to give to brides and grooms who were moved by actually being able to profess their love and vow to be there for each other in the future just as they had been in the past. It was such an honor to be a part of this. Many of the volunteers came up to witness the weddings and experience the most joyful thing that happened at Enclave every day. I have been so impressed by the people with whom I came in contact. The group from the Florida Immigrant Coalition with whom I traveled and worked were amazing. Such talented, caring women. They were knowledgeable in their fields and insightful and compassionate when offering their services to the migrants. There were two doctors, a psychologist, a paralegal and two interpreters. And our amazing leader who transported us to various shelters, bought and delivered clothing, shoes, and food for the migrants, and made sure everyone in our group was safe, fed, and never alone. I was touched by the sheer number of young law students who gave up part of their Christmas vacation to serve in whatever capacity was needed. Most did Credible Fear Interviews, but some scanned documents or offered childcare while parents spoke to legal advisors. Experienced immigration attorneys did one-on-one interventions, acted as legal observers at Chaparral , and trained newly arrived attorneys on how things were organized. All was done from the heart. Not what you usually hear about lawyers. What can I say about the migrants with whom I interacted? Their faces are etched in my memory forever. Their stories will stay with me always. The very sad young mother sitting on the curb nursing her baby in the cold morning, to whom I gave the devastating news that she would not get to present her case for at least six weeks. The upbeat 15 year old who was sure she would get asylum as an unaccompanied minor, and was not aware that CBP had stopped processing unaccompanied minors because of the bad press their treatment was getting in the states. The married couple who were two of the keepers of the list with whom I struck up a friendship, but with whom I will never be able to communicate again. The 20 year old woman ready to give birth any day who had arrived without a plan; she innocently thought she would get preferential treatment because she was pregnant. The mother who decided to give custody of her nine year old son to her niece because he was a US citizen, and she did not have a strong case for asylum. They came from a part of Mexico where gangs run everything and the police do nothing. She was afraid that he would either die from a stray bullet or buckle to pressure and become a gang member himself. I could go on, but remembering them just makes me sad. This has basically been a recounting of events as they unfolded for me during the week I was in Tijuana. It does not begin to describe my emotions and what I have learned. It will take me a long time to unpack that and let it reveal itself in my life. Thanks for all your support and love. I am blessed to have such a wonderful family. I will be away for the next seven days, but I have left links and book reviews you might enjoy in my absence. See you soon! The Cure D’Ars Today
George William Rutler Reviewed by Thomas J. Burns (2007) This is an intriguing and pious treatment of St. John Vianney [1786-1859], but the book defies easy categorization. The outline is clearly the life of the mystical French parish priest best known for his extraordinary grace as a confessor, but the author has skillfully set Vianney in the aftermath of the “troubles” of his country—the Revolution, the Gallican Church controversy, Napoleon—while from time to time speculating on Vianney’s spirituality and pastoral approaches vis-à-vis the post-Vatican II era. George William Rutler is honest about his feelings toward the Enlightenment. In an extensive appendix he provides an overview of the French Church and its relationships with the succession of governments from Louis XVI and beyond. In Rutler’s view the “Daughter of the Church” [France] was hardly the virginal bride, with most of its clergy and bishops nondescript and woefully lacking in vision and piety. Thomas Mores and John Fishers were hard to come by. Vianney’s formative years run concurrent with a quarter-century ecclesiastical malaise, most noticeably in France but in actuality through much of Western Europe. Rutler describes Vianney’s youth as the age of “the home church,” when domestic instruction and prayer carried faithful Frenchmen through a period of persecution, ambivalent priests [or no priests at all, in many circumstances.] He learned to farm but not to read, as Rutler puts it, though his early sense of a priestly calling compelled him to master reading skills, albeit with very modest success. His vocational aspirations were nearly derailed by military draft. For two years Vianney lived underground to avoid conscription. Rutler argues that the Napoleonic cause, poisoned, as it were, with assaults on the lands and the office of the papacy, was beneath the dignity of this pious young man. If there were religious superiors of character in France at this time, Vianney was fortunate to have encountered them in his formative steps to orders. His piety and faith, if not his book learning, seemed have been the deciding factors in his tenuous approval for ordination. Many years later, in my own lifetime, a seminary rector commented to me that “piety comes and goes, stupidity remains forever.” Vianney would be the exception to the rule. Once ordained, Vianney would serve a brief and rather successful term as an assistant pastor at Ecully until he received his own parish in Ars. Ars in fact had but one church—and seven saloons. The church had recently served as a shrine to the Goddess of Reason, among other things. If anything the residents of Ars were perplexed to see a pastor who actually cared about ringing the bells, providing instruction, and preparing his sermons. As is often the case, pastoral solicitude was not initially welcomed or understood by a people unbothered by matters of the soul, and episodes of enmity from time to time were not unheard of. But Vianney’s gift as a confessor, a trait already noticeable at Ecully, soon became noteworthy in Ars as well. Rutler tends to assume that Vianney’s remarkably austere life and spiritually are at its heart, and naturally there is truth to this. His fame reached far beyond Ars, but it is hard to gauge what contemporaries really thought of him. I was disappointed that the author did not say more about Vianney’s ritual and practice within the confessional rite. For example, did Vianney have a rare perceptive psychological skill set that prompted his penitents to unburden their most secret crimes, vices, and sinful attitudes? For Rutler, the cause is less important than the effects. Not only did Vianney save individual souls, but he seemed engaged in a struggle for the reign of God itself in Ars, a turmoil that brought him face to face with Satan. Rutler treats of the demonic assaults upon the saint with appropriate balance, much as the Evangelists did in recounting Christ’s words and deeds of the kingdom. Vianney also wrestled within himself. On three distinct occasions Vianney tried to flee Ars. Again, it is not clear precisely why. The most likely reason is his celebrity status as a confessor, which he probably found annoying and distracting. But most likely, the strain of confessional encounter, coupled with a profound sense of humility and inadequacy, led him to possible scrupulous fear that his penitential ministry just might be an outrageous affront to God in the sacramental forum. To his credit, he recognized these temptations and urges for what they were and did not succumb to them. Rutler’s style is philosophical and meditational. He has a love [some might say a lust] for reversing familiar phrases to extract new meanings. While his sympathies lie with a triumphal Church, he is candid in his assessments about bishops and popes who compromised the holiness of the Church by opportunism, pride, fear, or intellectual arrogance. Vianney, in this framework, represents a restoration of the true dignity and spirituality of Holy Orders, a man unsullied by the type of “enlightenment” that muddled many pulpits in his day. One of the purposes of this book is a restoration of the Sacrament of Penance. Writing in 1988 Rutler could not help but notice the disappearance of personal confession from Roman Catholic life. Rather than rail about it, the author includes a second appendix, the sermons of Pope John Paul II given during a retreat for priests at Ars in October, 1986. The talks themselves are revitalizing and nurturing, a reflection of Vianney’s exhortations to see parochial sacramental life as the extension of the Reign of God. Rutler comments that when the event was announced, a number of priests protested to the Vatican on the grounds that Vianney was not an appropriate model for the priest of today. There is sadness in hearing of this, but the author does his best to make things right by giving us a heartwarming sense of what we are missing in contemporary parish life. For al least the next two weeks I am directing all posting to the Sunday Stream to discuss the recent Pennsylvania report on clerical child abuse, including its implications for catechetics and Church/parish life. You can jump over to Sunday's stream by clicking here.
I was not happy with the limited posting I was able to do in June, and I feel like I left a lot of you hanging. One reason for the limited posts is several changes in my circumstances. Back in May I opened a free mental health service in the local Catholic Church here in my town. It is open Fridays all day, and in less than a month the available time slots were full. I am enjoying it very much, but I cannot do anything else on Friday, which eliminates another day I can devote to the Café. I continue to work Mondays at the Catholic Charities Clinic in Eustis, Florida; in fact, I will be driving over in an hour or two.
A second issue is the increasing demand for more reading prior to posting. There are several streams going at the same time which call for more research. Certainly, the Thursday stream on Luther and the Reformation is one; the nature of evil in the Monday Morality stream is another. This year I began commenting on the First Readings on the Sunday Mass, which meant a return to Old Testament studies, a discipline which is not one of my greatest strengths. When I started the Café four years ago, one of my goals was to introduce busy professionals to the best of new religious, catechetical, and theological works. This assumes reading the books first! A third issue is retirement itself. Having turned 70 this year, I am finding that increasingly friends and family need contact and attention. Again, I am very pleased to become more involved in their lives, but this too devours the hours of the day. On the other hand, all the medical advice for seniors speaks of exercise and interpersonal interactions as means of maintaining a sound mind and a good spirit. This is a time of life to cultivate and enrich the relationships I already have, and perhaps engage in new ones. I know a fair amount of people who have outlived their friends and face their final years in an undesired solitude. And, I am beginning to feel older. While I continue to be blessed with good health, I am no longer the young buck who could read till 2 AM. If I stay up that late, I will feel it the next day, like a hangover. When I was on retreat with the Trappists two weeks ago, I talked about all of this with a wise monk who reminded me that the senior population brings an example of transition and serenity, and he gently challenged me to stop running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I have no intention of discontinuing the Café, because aside from the pressures of brewing up new flavors frequently, it is one of the more pleasurable enterprises in my life. Realistically it is probably best to say that the weekly grind of each stream will be tapered back to two weeks instead of weekly. On days when I am on the road, like family reunions, I may post with more spontaneity and less pedantic. Old bloggers don’t die, they just reign it in a bit. 2104 "All men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and his Church, and to embrace it and hold on to it as they come to know it. This duty derives from "the very dignity of the human person." It does not contradict a "sincere respect" for different religions which frequently "reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men," nor the requirement of charity, which urges Christians "to treat with love, prudence and patience those who are in error or ignorance with regard to the faith."
Para. 2104 is yet another segment under the heading of the First Commandment, and it takes us into the subject of Christian anthropology, i.e., what makes up a human being. Way back in para. 33, which treats of anthropology at considerable length, the Catechism quotes St. Thomas Aquinas, “…man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality ‘that everyone calls God.’” Put another way, it is the nature of humankind to enjoy the God-given inclination toward high purpose by creation itself, before the intervention of Revelation and religious formation. Para. 2104 does not make sense unless recognition of God and the Church [broadly understood] lies within the capacity of human nature as we are, i.e., we are born with some basic capacity to strive for the truth about God and to both increase the search for that truth and to embrace it for personal conduct. In the current state of public affairs, here in our own country and elsewhere, one would be justified to conclude that either large segments of the population turn their backs on this innate drive to seek the things of God, or that some powerful force is presently blocking inner consciousness of man’s inherent sense of the drive for the divine. As a catechist and a psychotherapist, I find this question compelling. It is a form of the question of the nature of evil, and trust me, we won’t have a clear-cut answer to the nature of evil within the lifetime of the Café postings. But as a counselor I recognize in practice and read in the professional literature that some individuals suffer impairments that make clear thought and ethical management next to impossible. Catholic moral theology, in my opinion, has not addressed the question of those with impaired judgment or underdeveloped capacity. I am thinking specifically of addictions—the opioid crisis, for example—and another cohort that is rarely understood or discussed in pastoral context, those with personality disorders [antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, etc.] With the personality disorders, the origins are generally unknown but believed to be genetic. A common trait of all personality disorders is the absence of any clinically proven cure or treatment regimen, particularly troubling given that the prevalence of PD of all types is about 9% of the population. I learned the hard way that insurance companies do not reimburse PD because no talking therapy style has been proved effective. In terms of the moral status of afflicted individuals, I recommend a stretching of para. 2104’s final admonition “"to treat with love, prudence and patience those who are in error or ignorance with regard to the faith." Throughout my career as a pastor I always provided full Catholic funeral rites for those who had committed suicide. Neurological factors impede an embrace of God and his truth; are there other, outside forces in play? I was taught as a boy that God was in a titanic struggle with Satan for my 8-year-old soul, and I needn’t prolong any discussion about belief in Satan, devils, or demonic spirits introducing evil and sin into the world. Discussions along these lines, though, take us to the mythic world of creation, and for our purposes, the story of Adam and Eve [though in fairness some cultural creation myths predate the Garden narrative by at least 1500 years.] While on retreat last week I would sit up in the absolute silence and darkness of the monastery setting reading and reflecting upon Stephen Greenblatt’s The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (2017). Greenblatt’s work has significant implications for thoughtful adherents to the Bible in its treatment of how three religious traditions [Hebrew, Islamic, and in primary detail, Christianity] understood the “fall of man” narrative, the wounding that universally impairs the ability to seek God. The author makes the point that simply because the historical and literary evidence precludes the possibility of the Garden narrative as literal history, the bigger questions involve the creation of the story as we have it, and how the predominant Christian interpretation—involving Original Sin—stands up to the actual text and its uses through Church history. The early Genesis texts of creation and fall seem ancient because of their placement in the Bible, i.e., at the beginning. However, the Adam and Eve narrative was written quite late in the revelation process, perhaps around the end of the Babylonian Captivity (597-539 B.C.) and inserted earlier into the Hebrew Canon. The multiple authors may have been attempting to unseat the predominant creation myth in that portion of the world, the venerable tale of Gilgamesh, probably the oldest writing on earth. The Genesis texts are a combination of philosophy and theology: an attempt to explain sin, suffering, and errant human desire while at the same time providing a template for the relationship of God with his people. For our purposes here, it is worth noting that nowhere in creation is there mention of outside evil influences; the serpent is “the most cunning of all the creatures God had made.” The early narratives of Noah and the Tower of Babel simply reinforce man’s sinful, rebellious nature. Jewish interpretation of Adam and Eve’s disobedience emphasized the natural state of man as sinful and imperfect. [Noah’s son sinned right off the boat, so to speak.] Islamic interpretation is more benign; “…Islamic tradition characterized the wrongdoing that led to this expulsion as an error rather than as a heinous crime transmitted to all posterity.” [p. 7] In the Christian era St. Paul identifies Adam’s sin vis-à-vis the cross of Christ as a universal sin, and it is important to recall the origin of the name of Adam, i.e., “from clay.” One can read Paul’s Letter to the Romans as saying that God could have picked anyone out of a crowd, put him in Adam’s place, and the results would have been the same. The idea of Adam’s sin as a literal event resulting in a cosmic moral disfigurement of the human species—a theology that many Church documents still put forth today under the title of Original Sin—can be traced to St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.). I have a link here to Augustine’s biography if you are unfamiliar with his place in Christian history. To understand Augustine’s interpretation of the Garden narrative, the basis of Original Sin, the moral anthropology of humankind, and the catechetical model of redemption we use almost unthinkingly today, it is important to look at Augustine’s own tortuous journey to Christianity and his baptism by St. Ambrose of Milan. I will continue this thread next Monday. 2101 In many circumstances, the Christian is called to make promises to God. Baptism and Confirmation, Matrimony and Holy Orders always entail promises. Out of personal devotion, the Christian may also promise to God this action, that prayer, this alms-giving, that pilgrimage, and so forth. Fidelity to promises made to God is a sign of the respect owed to the divine majesty and of love for a faithful God.
I married relatively late in life (age 50) to my wife who had been widowed in her 20’s. Both of us had developed professional lives over the years and had achieved a strong measure of personal autonomy and self-assurance. At the time of our marriage we each owned our own homes. By objective measures, we could have progressed as single people in the world. But for all of that, the strange works of Providence brought us together at a Friday evening wedding Mass in October 1998. When doing our “paper work” for the wedding with our pastor/vicar general, he stated that in his judgment the pre-Cana program of the diocese would not significantly raise our marital/spiritual IQ, and he recommended instead that we consider a spiritual retreat of several days with the Trappists at Mepkin Abbey outside of Charleston, South Carolina. We did, and we will be returning to Mepkin in a few weeks, coincidentally in the year of our twentieth wedding anniversary. I remember the day of my wedding, sitting in my own house and attempting to study for my state medical licensure exam a week later. But my mind was understandably elsewhere, and I had the chance to reflect upon the vow I would be taking that evening. I remember that afternoon as one of the most enlightening in my ongoing spiritual journey. For I realized that I would be taking a vow with significant implications for myself, my wife, and my God. In very practical terms I understood that my daily lifestyle was no longer exclusively mine. There would be no more walking in the door from work and flipping on ESPN. Meals would be healthier, at regular times, and prepared with more than a passing nod to nutrition. But beyond that was the greater sense of the sacrament itself. I reflected that I was committing to create an environment where my wife would experience the presence of God. I knew in her heart that she shared her vow in the same way. I admit that I had taken vows before in my lifetime; when I was 24 I took solemn vows with the Franciscan Order. I must own that failure for the rest of my life, despite Rome’s permission for “exclaustration” or release from vows. But I would say that looking back, I was much younger and the language of the vows for religious life was quite broad. I knew the act of making the vows was “grave matter” as the Catechism and Canon Law would say, but the target commitment was to a broad spectrum: God, the Church, the thousands of Franciscans around the world who wore the same habit. I see today that solemn vow classes in my old order are quite small; perhaps the formation for vows commands more of a candidate’s focus than it did of mine. And, in my day, the solemn vows made by a seminarian were often viewed as a step on the ladder to ordination to the priesthood, as much as we tried to put that out of our heads and reflect about our pledge of a common life to the brothers. Para. 2101 speaks of making solemn promises/vows to God. It is interesting that the paragraph speaks of sacraments as the primordial vows or promises. Theologically speaking, when a religious man or woman makes solemn vows, he or she is taking an oath before God to intensify his or her earlier Baptismal vows into an intensified way of life under the rule of an established religious order/community and its duly authorized superiors. Living the vows should be quite specific: foregoing intimate personal relationships to focus upon the spiritual and practical needs of one’s designated fraternity, for example, or accepting work positions consistent with the intentions of the founder and the official rule. Members of religious orders have vowed themselves to a rigorous specific lifestyle as a powerful sign to the Church and the world at large that baptism leads to glory and reward beyond the grave. The variety of religious orders bears witness to the many ways the baptismal life can be intensified—from strict cloister to the soup kitchen. Consider the unique charism of Mepkin Abbey. The old catechisms spoke of sacraments as “giving grace;” this phrasing was removed from modern catechetics for its overly mechanical tone. And yet any basic mental health text speaks of “concreteness” as an essential quality of the therapeutic process. To promise to do good sounds a lot like “I need to lose weight” or “I need to cut back on my drinking.” A health care provider will likely respond with a request for a concrete plan of action with a measurable outcome, usually called a “treatment plan.” The patient and I may agree that he attend four AA meetings in the coming week; if he fails this plan, we would need to examine exactly why he missed and what is his true state of mind about sobriety. The general intention always sounds worthy, but the devil “and all his pomps” are in the details. Just as religious take vows in the context of their common life, the same would be true in the sacrament of marriage. The theological definition of marriage vows is virtually the same as the popular understanding. The vows are made by each party to each other. Sacramentally, the couple executes the sacrament; the priest is present as an official witness. [Interestingly, the Church recognizes the validity of marriage between two baptized Protestants.] The vow is made to God with the understanding that in baptism the reality of God already exists in the wedding couple. The Church assumes that the vows made at Baptism [and their “subset” in religious life], Confirmation, Eucharist, Marriage and Orders are lifelong. While this may seem a mighty challenge, a married couple does take comfort in the assurance of long-term personal, conjugal, emotional, and material support. I have been advocating for more intense counsel and input on the lived dynamic of marriage for engaged couples since I was ordained 44 years ago. Church programs or pre-Cana squander too much precious time on Church teachings regarding contraception, in vitro fertilization, etc. to a captive audience. The art of compromise, making decisions, hashing through disagreements, use of substances, managing money, etc. become true game breakers. Each area of distress deserves concrete attention and skill building. Preparation for all vows must keep in mind the last sentence of para. 2101, “Fidelity to promises made to God is a sign of the respect owed to the divine majesty and of love for a faithful God.” Baptized Catholics can make other vows and promises to God, as per 2101, which I would classify as intensification of the vows of sacraments. In the Middle Ages Christians vowed to make pilgrimage to the Holy Land as part of their penitential [Penance] experience. Today such personal vows, which may include perpetual virginity, are made with the blessing of the Church, and are best initiated with discernment of a spiritual director or confessor. 2100 Outward sacrifice, to be genuine, must be the expression of spiritual sacrifice: "The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit. . . . "17 The prophets of the Old Covenant often denounced sacrifices that were not from the heart or not coupled with love of neighbor.18 Jesus recalls the words of the prophet Hosea: "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice."19 The only perfect sacrifice is the one that Christ offered on the cross as a total offering to the Father's love and for our salvation.20 By uniting ourselves with his sacrifice we can make our lives a sacrifice to God.
It has been a month since I posted on the Monday Morality stream, perhaps excusable given the emphasis upon the Easter Season, as well as the nature of the First Commandment chapter of the Catechism itself. The First Commandment treats of the human being’s many responsibilities to his or her Creator, and this covers a considerable amount of material. I decided not to treat of every paragraph in this section, given that some repeat earlier material, and some spell out moral responsibilities to God with more concrete expression. My calculation was that the specific teachings might be more useful. Para. 2100 picks up a prominent theme from the later books of the Hebrew Scriptures and then forms a critical principle in New Testament writing, notably the Gospel. The moral imperative of this Catechism teaching involves inner and outer integrity in the worship and adoration of God. In our own times I suppose this a variation of the theme “Sunday Catholic,” where one might put in the hour obligation of Mass with no tangible or observable impact on the conduct of the rest of the week. As a side bar here, there is considerable discussion in sociological circles about the relationship of belief in God and living an upright life, as this October 2017 PEW report indicates. The Catechism and the Bible, for that matter, assume a revealing God who continues to teach and make holy his community of believers. Although we can know nothing approaching God’s qualities, we can certainly possess insight in God’s vision of how he wishes to be loved, through the entire earthly sojourn of his son, Jesus, referred to by a twentieth century theologian as “the grammar of God’s utterance.” The Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.) defined that Jesus had one operational and congruent personality even though he fully possesses two distinct natures, the divine and the human. Chalcedon, like many of the early councils, developed a life of its own that enables Catholic believers even now to couch their moral understandings of themselves in a modern language. In the counseling profession, there is a term coined by the mid-20th century therapist and author Carl Rogers, “congruence.” In Rogerian thinking, an individual will not approach a state of mental satisfaction if there is a difference between one’s internal self-portrait and the life that one is actually living. Had Rogers lived and consulted at the Council of Chalcedon, he would have advised that Jesus is the perfectly congruent being, despite the fact that he possessed two natures. When Jesus had a thought, it was the product of the two natures perfectly joined. As my Christology professor observed, Jesus was not a schizophrenic tortured soul with his divine nature at war with his human nature. Para. 2100 draws from Scriptural reference in its opening remark on “outward sacrifice” being genuine as an expression of spiritual sacrifice. Anyone who offers outward worship in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or the Islamic faith, for that matter, must act with a corresponding inner conviction in mind and action. Para. 2100 almost goes as far as to say that the action of forgiveness by a believer is more pleasing to God than the sacrifice in its quotation of Jesus citing the Prophet Hosea, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” The Catholic Mass rite represents a congruence in its prayers of adoration and sacrifice to God while celebrating a penitential rite at the opening and a greeting of peace before the breaking of the bread. The hope of course is that this congruence survives the church parking lot! Para. 2100 gives an opportunity to look at new ways of examining our consciences daily and in preparing for confession. The first step is a candid assessment of what I actually do believe. No one can say his or her belief system is perfectly formed: we wrestle with our prejudices, our self-will, our vices, our cruelties. Little wonder that the Catechism quotes “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit.” This assessment must consider to what extent God actually matters and whether we even have an impulse to adore and give thanks. A rider to this assessment is our disposition to the Roman Catholic Church itself. I will admit that this factor plays heavily into my examen every day. Only a fool enters self-examination expecting to be pleased with the outcome. St. Luke paints a portrait of one man at worship who was exceptionally pleased with his inner evaluation, and we see what Jesus thought of that. The pleasing adoration of God includes transparency, a laying bare of my true self, and an earnest desire that the “broken spirit” be healed. The “doing” is the “rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey was wont to say. Having sought forgiveness, how do we make future adoration and sacrifice an unsullied act pleasing to the Father? Again, we look to Luke, who describes a master’s enormous forgiveness of debt to his chief steward, only to have the steward shake down his underling for payment of a tiny debt. The goal of moral theology and psychotherapy is to assist its clients in living and acting in congruence with their better selves. For the baptized, the search for congruence is always the quest to walk in the footsteps of Christ, whose own sacrifice of his life is defined as the perfect worship act for all time. |
MORALITYArchives
February 2024
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