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Ecclesiology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium [2020] is a remarkable book that I stumbled upon during a search for new books about Ecclesiology, the theological study of the Church itself. I devoured about half of it during the Memorial Day weekend. This work at hand is a collection of essays by Australian theologians and scholars. As Nigel Zimmerman’s preface explains, there are not a lot of theological institutions of higher learning in Australia, and the Australian contribution to worldwide theological studies is often overlooked. But Zimmerman explains that the theological community in “the land down under” has developed its own identity as it addresses its work for the twenty-first century. The Australian theologians, Zimmerman comments, are “not always well recognized and their work is sometimes overlooked because it does not sit easily within the calcified categories of left and right that has become the dominant paradigm over the last two generations.” [p. xiv]
Anyone who reads the papers or ministers in in the United States is painfully aware of the “calcified categories” of left and right in the Church. In the United States, for example, there are bishops debating whether President Biden may or may not receive holy communion while in Britain there are Catholics demanding to know how Prime Minister Boris Johnson could be married sacramentally after his two divorces. Underlying both questions—and many, many more like it—is the structure of the Catholic Church itself, i.e., how it derives its authority, how it manages itself in the present day, and what are the frontiers of reform. This is the branch of theology known as “ecclesiology,” and our Australian brethren have successfully identified this branch of the sacred sciences as the squeakiest of the wheels of the Pilgrim People of God. In terms of ecclesiological crises, the circumstances surrounding the abuse of minors—ranging from the poor screening and formation of clerics to the behavior of ordained ministers to the mismanagement and cover-up by bishops—is the most serious ecclesiological issue facing this generation of Catholics, for it casts doubt upon the Church’s ability to manage itself and to carry out its mission effectively. The abuse crisis complicates the nature of the relationship of the priesthood to the laity of the Church, i.e., what powers accrue to the lay baptized person in terms of the care and holiness of the Church? It is worthy of note that general knowledge of the abuse crisis did not originate from any agency of the Church, but from civil courts in Texas and Louisiana in the 1980’s and, most famously, from the Boston Globe in 2002, and the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s 2018 investigation of the state’s dioceses. When something goes this badly in a health care facility, for example, it is referred to by the facility and its investigators as “a signal event” which requires an analysis of what went wrong and what mechanisms within the institution need changing to prevent it happening again. America was witness to the recent mother of all law enforcement signal events, the murder of George Floyd, a year ago, and the country remains transfixed on how to prevent such miscarriages of due process in the future while preserving the effectiveness of the law-and-order establishment. Along the same lines, reformers within the Church continue to argue that the clerical culture of the Church prevents the transparency necessary to keep good order within the Church, and this concern includes matters of stewardship of finances and provision of necessary spiritual services. More specifically, the teaching of the Church that deacons, priests, and bishops are ontologically different [different in kind] as “other Christs” seems to provide cover for a “creeping infallibility” as one theologian put it, that obfuscates the need for lay wisdom and accountability. Solving the ecclesiastical problem begins with a common understanding of the nature and structure of the Church. I suppose as Catholics we were all raised with the mental template that Jesus ordered a church and here it is, with a few historical alterations along the way. Hopefully, by high school faith formation one has digested enough of Scripture and history to grasp that the evolution from the upper room at Pentecost to the billion plus institution of two dozen rites has been quite a ride, and the Church’s self-understanding has evolved considerably over two millennia. By the time I undertook graduate theological studies [1971-1974] Vatican II had recently completed, having issued two documents on the nature of the Church, Lumen Gentium [“Light to the Nations”] in 1964 and Gaudium et Spes [“Joy and Hope”] in 1965. The first essay of Ecclesiology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium opens with a history of those documents and how they have been received and treated over the years since the Council. The author of the essay, Tracey Rowland, discusses one of the most basic issues of the Church: the balance between the invisible mission of the Holy Spirit in the Church and the Church’s juridical commission—still entirely clerical--of Ruler and Teacher received from Christ. [p. 3] Or, put another way, how is the balance struck between the Spirit’s presence of holiness in all the baptized faithful and the exercise of authority by its duly ordained leaders, the divine Spirit and an imperfectly human institution? To our question earlier, how a Catholic maintains faith in the authoritative structure of teaching in the face of scandal, Rowland quotes Dorothy Day’s quip that “though the Church does sometimes play the harlot she will always be her mother.” [from Day’s “In Peace Is My Bitterness Most Bitter,” 1967] Rowland cites the descriptions of the Church in Lumen Gentium and observes that Vatican II never quite explains the marriage between the model of the Church as “The People of God” and the model of the Royal Priesthood. Vatican II did break considerable ground by introducing a new model or paradigm, that of the “people of God,” a significant break from the pyramid model of authority that has stood for centuries. One of the areas of conflict in catechetics and parish life is that most Catholic texts since 1964 have identified the Church as “the pilgrim people of God,” much like Moses and the Hebrews in the desert, collectively en route to a glorious future with Christ at the end of time. However, the uncertainty of pilgrim-hood runs counter to the immediate timeless structures of law and authority derived by the Church from its early association with the Roman Empire and later as master of Christendom from the medieval era. Rowland and many of the other contributors of Ecclesiology highlight a trend throughout the second half of the twentieth century of Church teachings emphasizing the unity of the Church [Communio], dating to Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Corporis in 1943, summarized quite well here, and continuing through Vatican II and the papacies of Paul VI [r. 1963-1978], John Paul II [r. 1978-2005], and Benedict XVI [r. 2005-2013]. A Church without internal unity ceases to be a sacrament of the living Christ, although the maintenance of communio has sometimes been pursued with an excess of uniformity and suspicion of innovative doctrinal and pastoral contributions. Interestingly, Pope Francis [r. 2013--] has opted for a different term, “synodality,” to describe the dynamic of the Church. Pope Francis has convoked a worldwide synod on the meaning and exercise of synodality, which he hopes will result in a greater participation of all the baptized in the Church’s twin missions of holiness and service. I will review Ecclesiology and the Beginning of the Third Millennium when I finish the book and return from vacation early in July. It is a difficult book at times and some of its contributors go off on esoteric tangents, but some of its essays are intriguing. The opening historical survey is best, and other good ones include a treatment on the nature of Confirmation and another, “Catholic, Inc.: On the Mechanized, Managerial Body of Christ.” If you would like an easier introduction into ecclesiology, I recommend Ecclesiology: The Church as Communion and Mission [2001] by Morris Pelzel. This text was written as a 120-page overview. You can sample this book on its Amazon site. Those of you currently in ministry, education, and catechetics may wish to refresh yourselves on ecclesiology given the pope's plans for the next two years. If he lives long enough, Pope Francis may put forward a new direction for ecclesiology in terms of how the Church thinks of itself and exercises its daily existence in the identity and service of Christ. A thrust in the direction of consultative governance would be resisted by many, though not all, bishops of the United States, particularly those who enjoy their power but do not enjoy accountability. The continuing strains in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which meets in a few days, are a festering wound in both the communio and synodal models of Church life.
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When Pope Francis issues his pastoral letter on Catechists this week, I hope he puts in a good word for CCD, or the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. This was the title of all religious instruction outside of structured university and seminary studies, dating back to 1536. In that year, the Abbot Castellino da Castello inaugurated a system of Sunday schools in Milan. Around 1560, a wealthy Milanese nobleman, Marco de Sadis-Cusani, having established himself in Rome, was joined by several zealous associates, both priests and laymen, and pledged to instruct both children and adults in Christian doctrine. Pope Pius IV, in 1562, made the Church of Saint Apollonia their central institution; but they also gave instructions in schools, in the streets and lanes, and even in private houses. As the association grew, it divided into two sections: the priests formed themselves into a religious congregation, the Fathers of Christian Doctrine, while the laymen remained in the world as "The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine.”
In 1884 the American Bishops—concerned about anti-Catholic bias in the public schools--established the principle of a Catholic school in every parish at the remarkable Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, ensuring that the education of youth would be conducted by professional teachers/catechists and preserving the standards established in 1560 by the original CCD. The same plenary council mandated a national Catholic university, eventually my alma mater the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., as well as a national catechism, the aptly named Baltimore Catechism. The American Catholic school system was without equal around the work for nearly a century. However, even at its zenith after World War II there were many Catholic youths who could not attend, for a wide range of reasons. Sheer geography and physical distance were a factor, particularly in rural parts of the nation where parishes were small and widely separated. But there were pastoral factors, too. Some families were estranged from the church for marital or other reasons and elected to use the public school system. While tuitions were low or, in my case, nonexistent, support of the Sunday offertory was expected. In the 1950’s my Catholic school closed at noon on Mondays so that the religious sisters and brothers could use the facility to teach Catholics from the local public schools in an arrangement called “released time.” The “CCD kids” were depicted in a bad odor by my Catholic school teachers; we were warned that if we had any valuables in our desk, we should take them home or they would be stolen by the public-school Catholics. Despite the poor attitudes, the fact remained that a large percentage of Catholic youths were catechized by professional teachers—most of them religious women--steeped in the nuances of Catholic life and worship. But in the early 1960’s a “perfect storm of troubles” began to bubble up for the schools and the released time religious instruction programs that depended upon them. In his treatment of these times in The Nature, Tasks and Scope of the Catechetical Ministry [2008] Father Berard Marthaler comments that “despite the euphoria of Vatican II, by the mid-1960’s many Catholics had grown pessimistic about the future of Catholic education in the United States.” [p. 45] To unpack this assessment would require a book unto itself, but statistics bear out that the mass exodus of women religious from Catholic school teaching for ministries to the poor or to exit religious life itself began in the 1960’s and has led to a near total absence of religious from Catholic schools and parishes in 2021. As a rule, religious community sisters were paid much less than lay counterparts, and their departure led to greater school budgets and increased tuitions. Pastors and bishops grew fatigued of maintaining ever increasing costs, and tuitions became a greater factor in the decision to place youngsters in Catholic schools. Whether the American Church could have sustained its schools with greater focus and commitment in the years immediately after Vatican II will be debated by historians for years to come. What we do have in hand is a remarkable document from the U.S. bishops in 1972, “To Teach as Jesus Did.” [See my Amazon review of the document here.] TTAJD is a remarkable work, almost utopian, in several respects. It sets adult education at the top of the formational pyramid while reemphasizing the value of established Catholic schools. It extends the catechetical umbrella to Catholic colleges and universities, naming departments of theology as intrinsic to both the world of academia and the general intellectual life of the Church. TTAJD, in its teaching on Catholic schools, emphasizes the unifying element of faith and religious experience in all the academic disciplines. This is a return to the university model of the Medieval era, the age of Thomas Aquinas, where all the arts and sciences point to the wisdom of God within the language and principles of each discipline. Consider the principles of scientific method, the replication of theories to establish their credibility. But it is also true that in TTAJD the bishops make a Faustian bargain, delicately extricating themselves from the Council of Baltimore’s 1884 school mandate with the assertion that, while Catholic schools were the preferred formation of choice, other possibilities might suffice. “Although the document recognizes ‘inherent limitations’ in part-time programs offered for young people who do not attend Catholic schools, including parental indifference and scheduling problems, it acknowledges that they have ‘considerable strengths that should be built upon.’ The fact that [free standing religious education programs] depend largely on volunteers, for example, contributes to the building of a Christian community, provides creative planners to develop innovative approaches, and expands opportunities for Christian leadership and service.” [Marthaler, p. 46] TTAJD acknowledged that at the time of its composition “many within and without the Church wondered whether Catholic schools had a future” and bishops reaffirmed that “Catholic schools afford the fullest and best opportunity to realize the threefold purpose of Christian education among children and young people.” [p. 46] But this endorsement did not bring forth a national restructuring of the existing school systems in terms of attracting new generations of students, long range fiscal planning, or most of all, a renewed commitment to the academic excellence of religious instruction. The remaining schools, for the most part, faced a perilous road ahead simply to survive. Statistically, Catholic schools have closed in disconcerting numbers since 1972 and even more so as dioceses declared bankruptcy after the clerical abuse crises in 2002. In February 2021, ABC News reported that two hundred Catholic schools in the U.S. closed their doors during the Covid epidemic, noting that there are now 5,981 Catholic schools in the United States, compared with more than 11,000 in 1970. For a fuller treatment of the Catholic school situation, this 2009 piece from the New York Times, “For Catholic Schools, Crisis and Catharsis,” summarizes the years since “To Teach as Jesus Did.” So how does this play out for catechists? While trends rarely have “critical mass” moments, one can argue that since 1972 the Catholic Church in the United States has passed the baton of religious education to volunteer catechists—and not simply for the young, but for adult students of the faith as well. Put simply, the odds are overwhelming that any Catholic in the United States who receives religious instruction of any sort is receiving it from a volunteer. I have served as an instructor for my diocese’s catechetical certification program for nearly forty years. I have great respect and affection for these ministers of religious education, and one can only imagine where we would be without them. I wish that our Church would be more candid with them about the history of faith formation in this country and help them appreciate the load they carry and the challenges they face. The catechists I know worry about their performance, about “getting it right.” Most do not know that they are carrying a burden for which their predecessors were trained in considerable depth and enjoyed a support system much greater than those available to catechists today. Perhaps the simplest way to address the challenges to catechists is to list them. Fifty years ago, a religious sister teaching CCD typically carried, at minimum, a bachelor’s degree, some years in the school classroom, a teaching certification by the state, and a lifestyle immersed in the past and present of the Church, with years of institutional formation in postulancy, novitiate, and formation to vows. A parish volunteer rarely enters the catechetical ministry with this background. Catechist training and certification programs, given the limited time available, can only scratch the minimum of the sacred sciences. When I retired from teaching in 2016, my diocese offered ten hours in the Hebrew Scripture and ten hours in the New Testament, two disciplines that form the basis of the study of theology and church life. There was little or no opportunity to introduce reference texts, responsible web sites, or useful periodical. By contrast, as professional teachers, religious sisters of earlier years had access to regular updating and professional workshops as well as an array of mainstream peer-reviewed journals and updates provided by reputable Catholic presses. Religious education classes are offered in something of an educational vacuum, with time for only the most rudimentary catechetical data. Catholic schools, by contrast, offered then and now an integration of religious belief with the other arts and sciences, as well as contemporary issues with structured time for discussion and research. Religious education classes suffer from a minimum of “face-time,” in comparison with daily Catholic school instruction. Aside from the limitations of a roughly 26-hour school year, teachers tell me that attendance is erratic, and continuity is difficult to sustain. [In TTAJD, the bishops cited the “voluntary nature” of religious education as one of its strengths; in practice, only the students take advantage of voluntary attendance.] Catechists today do not have the institutional clout that religious teaching sisters enjoyed. This is particularly true for salaried catechetical administrators and parish overseers of catechetics. There is no contractual protection nor is there realistic due process when an administrative catechist runs afoul of a micromanaging or dictatorial pastor. Parish employees in general rarely possess realistic job descriptions or meaningful work evaluations; on the contrary, it is commonplace for additional ah hoc responsibilities to be routed to the religious education director. There are several unique factors of twenty-first century American church life where catechists must brave new territory. One of these is the polarization of “left and right,” or progressive and conservative elements of Catholic parish life. Such divisions have been with us since Vatican II, but in recent years such divisions have become ensnared in the U.S. culture wars, which needs no explanation here. Consequently, the presentation of Scripture, Morality, Liturgy, and the other theological disciplines require a studied impartiality that was not the case when I began ministerial work in 1970. Coupled with this challenge is the reality of social media. Church ministers, including catechists, become easy prey to unjustified on-line criticism when teaching the “hard saying of Jesus.” But pedagogically speaking, the internet is awash in amateur and outdated church material. Catechetical instruction must now include insights into orthodox and peer-reviewed material from Catholic news services, educational enterprises, and publishing houses. Or, put another way, development of the skill of undertaking sound research. There is another hard truth for today’s catechists—Catholicism is ill. Attendance at weekly Eucharist is now recorded at 20-25%. When I entered ministry a half-century ago, about 50% of Catholics attended regularly. Recent research indicates that about 30% of Catholics understand the full nature of the Eucharist as the real Body and Blood of Christ. A few years ago, I attended a conference where a nationally famous religion journalist observed that since Vatican II each generation of Catholics is exponentially less educated in the faith than the previous one. While the decline in the number of ordained priests has been known for years [it was discussed at Vatican II, in fact], the moral clerical failures that have come to light in the last quarter century may be more damaging in terms of trust and, not to be forgotten, financial resources for the ministry. For about twenty-five years I was a member of the Franciscan Order, and my training corresponded to the first decade after Vatican II. All religious orders were expected to reform after the Council, and I remember distinctly how the superiors of my order used to proclaim, “Start with the young, and they will lead us!” Today I look back and recognize that this was a self-serving strategy—kicking the can down the road so that the rank and file would not be unduly discomfited. I think that any efforts down the road to revitalize the Church may be tempted to adopt this strategy, “if only we teach the kids better.” No, a true renewal of the Church—which of necessity includes a deeper understanding of the Scripture in adult life—must begin with adults. In his new pastoral letter on catechists issued May 11, Pope Francis speaks of the catechist as a community leader—or as I used to tell my student catechists, “You are the best educated Catholic in any roomful of parishioners.” This assumes a mastery of the Scripture and the Catholic tradition that we have not yet prepared you for. One of the biggest complaints about liturgy is the generally poor preaching. A major reason for bad sermons is that priests are not reading. Again, recent research has found that young people begin their discernment to stay or leave the Church around the age of ten. Poor preaching is leaving its mark even on the young. If you are not reading and studying as an indispensable part of the catechetical ministry, your teaching will be as big a turnoff. But, if you commit yourself to the life of scholarship that teaching involves, you will become a true apostle in the New Evangelization, the embrace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I had lunch this week with my good friend Mike. We get together on the patio of a local Panera’s restaurant for salads, cinnamon buns, and Hazelnut coffee every few months. Mike and I are contemporaries [mid 70’s] and we first met about ten years ago when I was teaching the catechetical certification course for the diocese and Mike was working on his certification to teach in the religious education program of his parish. When the diocesan face-to-face instruction program was abandoned in 2016 in favor of syndicated on-line instruction, Mike and I kept in touch as he has assumed broader responsibilities for instruction in his parish, working with middle school youth. Right now, like teachers across the country, he is manfully struggling with virtual learning at a time when many of his students are already on-line all day with their regular public-school learning. It is no easy task for him.
I belong to several national on-line religious education and parish ministry support groups, in part to keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening with parish ministry across the country. What is distressingly evident is how many parish catechists, schoolteachers, and ministers plod through their responsibilities “one page ahead of the students,” as the saying goes, not from an absence of dedication but from an absence of training and experience. But more than that, catechetics and parochial ministry operate from an absence of “the big picture” of the rich tradition of Church history and Biblical Revelation. Catechists seem overly anxious about imparting data—what is a mortal sin, how to make a good confession—without a rootedness in the theory and history of what they teach. How does the human mind and conscience work? What is evil? What does the Bible understand by the terms sin, forgiveness, redemption? In short, we are going through motions without an understanding of the world of religious reality behind the data. Our catechists—and, truthfully, our preachers—are “teaching for the test.” Ask any schoolteacher—retention of factual data rarely survives summer vacation. What distinguishes Mike and others like him is an innate sense that there is more to the faith than his elementary course material or the slow drumbeat of parish life he is exposed to, and he finds himself in a position of seeking a deeper knowledge of theology, very much on his own. During our lunch this week he had many questions about the nature and function of bishops, how they are appointed and the nature of their authority. [John O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II (2008) would have answered nearly all his questions about bishops, but who routinely advises our catechists--or any Catholic adult--on such resources?] Mike has lived his Catholic life under some poor bishops and some good ones—we agreed we are fortunate to live under a particularly good one right now, John Noonan in Orlando. Like many bishops, though, Noonan is handicapped in fully servicing the needs of Catholics like Mike by a multitude of roadblocks, the biggest one being that for generations now since Vatican II our educational efforts have been targeted to the lowest common denominator, such that the money for quality Catholic education in all its forms is hard to come by. There are attitudinal challenges to be met. Shakespeare was right when he wrote that “knowledge maketh a bloody entrance” and many years later Einstein observed that “information is not knowledge.” A seminary professor in my own time hit the mark when he opined that “piety comes and goes, stupidity remains forever.” [The faculty may have been discussing my theological progress fifty years ago.] All these points are pertinent to Catholic life. From what I hear from the pulpit and see offered on many websites, Catholic parish life rests content on commonplace information and simple piety. If you have ever wondered why sermons as a rule seem so pedestrian, one answer is the limited knowledge that priests and deacons bring to the pulpit; they are reduced to repeating what they know. The argument is made that raising the bar, drawing from the more profound Catholic sources of yesterday and today would “confuse the faithful.” This was the argument I heard from my diocesan director when I protested that our theology courses for catechists and others should aim higher than the lowest common denominator. I pointed out that many of our students were college graduates or comparably skilled, and that we were certifying them for responsibilities previously filled by professionally trained religious women. Moreover, most of us live in a society grappling with complex questions. I was teaching a sexual morality class a few years ago when some nurses taking the course asked about the morality of parents allowing their children to undergo sex change surgery. I was caught off-guard, in part because I didn’t know this was a general practice, and I had not come across case studies about this in my moral theology reading. As a psychotherapist, I was able to speculate that there was a civil and ethical question about a minor giving informed consent. But, like it or not, this is the world we live in, and adult Catholics—particularly its ministers and teachers—need a level of competence to offer moral insight and make prudent decisions. The “brain drain” in Catholic life is acute in all areas of theology, to questions as basic as the identity of Jesus Christ. He was born, lived, and died a Jew. How do his words make sense in the New Testament if we do not understand the world of the Old Testament? It was my contention then, as it is now, that religious ministry—and especially adult faith education—should be of a college level or very close to it. This challenge becomes more critical as religion is coopted into the American culture wars; the fact that some Catholics in the U.S. are “scandalized” by Pope Francis is an indication that Church teaching and theological discourse over at least the past century, if not further, has not percolated through to the general mindset of Catholics. In many cases Pope Francis is repeating centuries old teachings of saints and popes that never made their way into religious education or adult faith formation. The “dumbing down” of Catholic life to formulas and data obliterates our millennia of rich experience and thought, not to mention art and architecture. It leaves Catholic adults with incomplete options, such as an overemphasis on piety and devotion that cherry picks the Bible and the Catechism and results in a shallow evangelism vulnerable to misunderstanding and extremism. It is little known that the Church condemns a denial of reason in the exercise of faith, a heresy known as fideism and most recently condemned by Pope John Paul II. In other words, the exercise of reason—the study of Scripture and Tradition—is the necessary partner in a life of faith. I am encouraged that there are many Catholics like my friend Mike, hungry to enrich their faith and ministry for a greater appreciation of the wonder of God. This Café blog was founded with them in mind [though I find myself reading and studying more than ever to meet this challenge and discovering more of what I don’t know.] But my work is a drop in the bucket compared to what the institutional Church needs to be about in leading its people to wisdom. In the second installment I will do some daydreaming about access to theological study for all adult Catholics, and particularly for those who currently exercise ministry or hope to do so. On December 8, 2020, Pope Francis declared “The Year of St. Joseph.” I was a little confused as to why the date of December 8 was chosen, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, but the day coincides with the 150th anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s declaration of St. Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church. Later, Pope Pius XII declared Joseph the Patron of Workers, and Pope John Paul II honored him as the Guardian of the Redeemer. Pope Francis, while incorporating these historical honors into his own 2020 Apostolic Letter, “With a Father’s Heart,” brings the memory of Joseph into the twenty-first century in a very pointed way.
In his Letter, Francis describes Saint Joseph as “a beloved father, a tender and loving father, an obedient father, an accepting father, a father who is creatively courageous, a working father, a father in the shadows.” Although we take Joseph for granted as a major Biblical figure, our image of the man is constructed with remarkable little help from the Scriptures. Joseph is not mentioned at all in the Gospels of John and Mark, and little in St. Luke. We would not know that he was a carpenter except for a tiny fragment in Matthew 13:55. Joseph’s major role in the family of Jesus is chronicled only in the first two chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, which itself is overshadowed by a parallel account in Luke’s first two chapters, where Mary’s obedience is the pivotal devotional point highlighted consistently in the beads of the rosary. But In Matthew’s narrative Joseph is the pivotal character in the Infancy account. Mary says not a word. The angel communicates to Joseph the nature and meaning of Mary’s pregnancy. Joseph is described as a “just” or “righteous” man who is willing to stretch the boundaries of what is the legal thing to do in favor of what is the divinely inspired thing to do, provide protection and dignity to a young woman who, to all appearances, is pregnant outside of marriage. Joseph will continue to listen to this divine inspiration when he protects his family by fleeing into Egypt to avoid Herod, and then settles in an unfamiliar region of Galilee. This is the last we hear of Joseph, the assumption being that he raised, supported, and trained his [putative] son in the ways of Jewish life. As Pope Francis puts it, Joseph is “a father in obedience to God: with his ‘fiat’ he protects Mary and Jesus and teaches his Son to “do the will of the Father.” The pope goes on to describe Joseph as an “accepting Father” because he “accepted Mary unconditionally,” a critical witness in this world “where psychological, verbal, and physical violence toward women is so evident.” Francis goes on to underscore Joseph’s trusting in the Lord, even events he did not understand, “setting aside his own ideas” and reconciling himself with his own history. Joseph was “able to accept life as it is, with all its contradictions, frustrations, and disappointments.” In our time when the needs and rights of aliens—a basic concern of the Old Testament—has become a point of contention in the United States, Francis calls Joseph “the special patron of all those forced to leave their native lands because of war, hatred, persecution, and poverty…every poor, needy, suffering, or dying person, every stranger, every prisoner, every infirm person is ‘the child’ whom Joseph continues to protect.” From St. Joseph “we must learn…to love the Church and the poor.” The Church has long venerated St. Joseph as the Worker, and in 1955 Pope Pius XII instituted the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May 1 of each year as a counterbalance to the celebration of May Day in Communist bloc countries. In his A Marginal Jew I [1991] Father John Meier describes the work of a carpenter in Jesus’ day as a physical one, specifically the framing of new homes with trusses. [pp. 278-285] Both Joseph and Jesus would have been strong men for this kind of labor. If St. Luke is correct, the work was also sustaining; Joseph would not have been summoned to Bethlehem for a tax census were his profits insignificant. Pope Francis goes to great length to encourage sensitivity to a “renewed need to appreciate the importance of dignified work, of which St. Joseph is an exemplary patron.” I see on a variety of catechetical and religious websites numerous requests for ideas on how to integrate the year of St. Joseph into parish life. There are several opportunities here to be drawn from the figure of Joseph as he comes down to us from Scripture and historical devotion in the Church: Critical Bible Study: The only Scripture text which speaks of Joseph at any length is Matthew’s Gospel, and come Christmas we are prone to pass over it to Luke’s narrative for our study and reflection, as Luke more closely fits the narrative we carry around in our head. But Matthew focuses on the character of Joseph, referring to him as “a just man,” a powerful accolade in Hebrew literature. It is Joseph who, after making his mind up to take his courageous step to divorce her quietly and sparing her the wrath of the law, receives the divine assurance and revelation that he has done the right thing. Joseph continues to receive divine enlightenment on how to protect his family throughout Matthew’s narrative. The story of Joseph is a case study in the importance of critical analysis of the Biblical texts. Matthew has significant doctrinal and moral reasons for composing his Infancy narrative as he did, not least of all to emphasize how a just man, a descendant of Abraham, played a critical role in the Redemption narrative by being the kind of man he was. The treatment of women by men: Color me old fashioned, but I judge another man by how he treats women, whether that be in the home, the marketplace, or the church. There is great wisdom in Genesis in describing creation as a fruitful duality, “male and female he made them,” and I am grateful for the women in my life who have saved me from my worst self and nurtured me into a better self, past and present. The society of Joseph’s time was patriarchal in its customs and laws, which only underscores his “manning up” to protect his beloved from the consequences of a time when the scales were tipped against women. There is a Pro Life consideration under this by-line. In her 2019 bestseller Heartlands, an autobiographical description of rural poverty in her native Kansas, Sarah Smarsh describes in some detail the Saturday night struggles of the teenaged girls to convince their boyfriends to use condoms, against the emotional pleadings of their partners to please them. I do not need to spell out which sex bears the greater cost in these moral missteps. Respect for women is not just a public rubric. The dignity of work. The Covid-19 pandemic has only worsened what has long been a problem in our country and elsewhere, i.e., the chronic difficulties of making a living and supporting a family. I would add to this reality another factor, that some jobs and some careers are more rewarding than others. I would be lying if I said I had an answer to this human dilemma. It does seem that on such matters as job safety, wages, health care, and childcare, for example, the boundaries of the discussion are arbitrarily set to “market conditions,” i.e., what is profitable. Curiously, there is a rather large body of Church teaching on the rights of workers and the divine necessity of fairness to laborers, in no small part attributable to the example of St. Joseph, venerated as “The Worker” in our compendium of feasts. From Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum [1891] to John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens [1981], the Church is on record as teaching the basic rights and protections of workers, rights that would probably be viewed as too progressive or generous in American capitalist culture. A review of Catholic social justice teachings on the work force seems a fitting exercise for the Year of St. Joseph. Protection of the Alien. As noted above, Pope Francis describes Joseph as “the special patron of those forced to leave their native lands because of war, hatred, persecution, and poverty.” Despite the Old Testament’s frequent call for mercy for “the alien and the orphan,” the United States has had a troubled history with aliens seeking entry into our country to build a better life. In very recent times, our national policy toward aliens has actually created more orphans. The year of St. Joseph presents an excellent time for public discussion of a moral and just process by which immigrant may be processed into American life. At the very least, applicants must receive due process of law. But beyond that, reconciliation and affiliation of the estimated 11,000,000 persons currently in our country would be entirely consistent with our Biblical roots. I am thinking, too, of the DACA population, many of whom have been assisted by Catholic social justice groups and/or graduated from Catholic schools and colleges. We can only imagine how Joseph and his family depended upon citizens and even civil officials during their sojourn to foreign Egypt in flight from Herod. While there is plenty of room for debate about the details, the principle of welcoming and integrating well-intentioned seekers of admission and integration into our country today is fully consistent with a Biblically based faith. And come to think of it, most of us would not be here today if our ancestors had been denied at the gate. John, known as the “Baptist” in several but not all New Testament references, remains one of Scripture’s most intriguing figure. Our catechetics and preaching have led us to consider John as religion’s greatest advance man. The term “precursor” was one of those linguistic challenges of early religious education, up there with tabernacle, transubstantiation, and other terms given us in youth to unpack as adults. I was well on my way to middle school before the terminology of the Feast of the Circumcision was explained to me, in benign and generic ways. In a nutshell, our 1950’s religion classes depicted John as a strange and wooly character of the desert who baptized imperfectly until Jesus came on the scene to reorder the washing rite into our familiar sacrament of Baptism for the forgiveness of original sin.
My youthful religious education took place in an age when independent Bible reading of the texts was neither taught nor encouraged. I had no idea that around the Western World scholars were studying the Bible, Jewish history, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, among other sources, and discovering what a complex man it was whose path crisscrossed that of Jesus of Nazareth. As the Catholic Biblical scholar Father John Meier reminds us, John had a life before Jesus, and there is good evidence that his movement continued long after Jesus. [A Marginal Jew II, p. 22] In the New Testament Acts of the Apostles [Chapter 19: 1-7], Paul comes across a community of the baptized who tell him: “We have never even heard that there is a holy Spirit.” Paul deduces that these are followers of John, now long dead, suggesting that John’s message and ministry was a true entity unto itself. Meier’s commentary, which I laid out in some detail in the previous post on this stream below, notes the distinct ways in which John interacts with Jesus. The four Gospels each take a different vantage point for the relationship of John’s ministry and Jesus’ community. These differences are not necessarily contradictory; what they do show is the variety of ways each evangelist attempted to explain John and his role in the dramatic unfolding of God’s saving intervention. Meier maintains that the degree of difficulty across all four Gospels argues strongly for the historical reality of John, for no one would have gone to the trouble of inventing a figure so enigmatic as to create a world of puzzlement for the Christian Church. Last Sunday’s Gospel was taken from the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. Absent any Infancy narrative, Mark begins with John and Jesus meeting as adults. The description of John—the rugged solitary figure who lives off the land and attracts large crowds with his call to repentance--Mark’s description of John, whom he calls “the Baptist,” draws from the prophesies of Isaiah, the precursor going ahead to prepare the way of the Lord. Mark’s Christology or understanding of Jesus is that of One who has come to usher the new day of the Kingdom of God, and the Markan account of John fits very well with that understanding of Jesus. Mark gives us no idea of the relationship between John and Jesus prior to the baptism, and he does not speak of the two men encountering each other after the baptism. [There is truly little discourse between the two in all the Gospels.] But Mark is the only evangelist who provides a lengthy narrative of the death of John, killed by Herod. Interestingly, when Herod came to hear of Jesus and his works, he comments in Mark 6:16 “It is John whom I beheaded. He has been raised up.” Even after his death, John remained a widely revered figure. Matthew’s Gospel is one of two that contains an Infancy narrative of Jesus’ birth, but there is no mention of John until the two men meet as adults in much the same way as Mark had described earlier. However, Matthew is the first to describe John’s ministry in considerable detail, notably his fiery preaching. In Matthew’s Gospel John’s words are directed at Pharisees and Sadducees, easily identified populations within Jewish society. John castigates them with the colorful phrase, “brood of vipers.” He accuses them of laxity and indifference, scoffing at their reliance upon their bloodline to Abraham as a kind of assurance of divine favor. “For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones.” John warns that the one who is to follow him will baptize with the holy Spirit and with fire, separating wheat from chaff in one final judgment. This depiction of John from Matthew’s pen reinforces the evangelist’s understanding of Jesus as the new Moses, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets. John’s damning critique of a complacent Jewish leadership reinforces the conversion of other Jews to Christianity. Matthew’s audience was a church of Jewish converts to Christianity; in the face of persecution Matthew attempts to rally them into remaining faithful to Jesus, in whom all the Scriptures have been fulfilled. Matthew is the only evangelist to include a “transition clause” between John and Jesus at the time of baptism, almost a passing of the baton. When Jesus presents himself for baptism, John protests. “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?” Jesus replies that John should “allow it for now, for it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Biblical righteousness is a rich theme in the Old Testament, with its root understanding as devotion to God’s revealed Law, the Torah. Later Jesus himself would claim that “I have not come to destroy the Law and the prophets, but to bring them to fulfillment.” Luke’s Gospel is the only one to integrate John into the Infancy narrative of Jesus, long before his preaching and baptismal ministry. The pairing of the conception narratives in Luke 1 presents a powerful theological statement about both men. John’s birth is holy and marginally miraculous, but he is conceived naturally; the high priest Zechariah is his father. Jesus, by contrast, is conceived by the Holy Spirit in Mary, the true Son of God, and the ultimate Spirit-filled preacher of the Father’s message. Even the preborn John recognizes Jesus as divine, and “leaps in the womb” when his mother Elizabeth is visited by the pregnant Mary. As in the Gospel of Matthew, Luke devotes his third chapter to the preaching of John, nearly a verbatim retelling of Matthew’s account, suggesting a common source available to Matthew and Luke. [This hypothetical text is known as the Q-source.] Luke, whose Gospel has a universal flavor, gives clues that Gentiles may have also sought the baptism of John, as the evangelist cites soldiers and tax collectors—agents—of Rome—in John’s audience. Interestingly, Luke’s narrative relays that John was arrested by Herod and evidently not present when Jesus is baptized, suggesting that John may have had a circle of believers who assisted him. This may explain, too, why John’s disciples came to Jesus instead of John himself, to ask Jesus “are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” [Luke 7: 18-23] This enigmatic question of John is not viewed as a challenge to Jesus’ credentials, but perhaps more of a “gentle transition.” It is a linguistic opening for Luke to portray Jesus as the one who is God’s final statement to the world. “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard. The blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.” Luke’s reference is Isaiah 61, the apocalyptic forecast of deliverance of the poor and suffering. Luke’s inclusion of Isaiah’s language is a redirection from John’s message of future wrathful judgment toward an unspeakable outpouring of divine mercy as personified in Jesus. It is worth noting that Luke’s is the only Gospel to include such portraits of mercy as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Continuing in Chapter 7, Jesus goes on to praise John as the one who has gone ahead of him. “I tell you, among those born of women, no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” In the final Gospel, we have the Evangelist John depicting the Baptist John in the very first chapter. Again, the Evangelist John does not have an infancy narrative; the first meeting of Jesus and John [the Baptist] occurs in adulthood. The author opens his Gospel with the famous Christological hymn, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” From a literary analysis, this hymn as it appears in John’s Gospel is broken in several places by an editor, with references to John the Baptist, as in 1:6-8, “A man named John was sent from God. He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He [the Baptist] was not the light but came to testify to the light.” At the conclusion of the hymn the Evangelist describes John in much the same way as the previous Gospels do. When Jesus appears on the scene, John makes his famous profession of faith, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” The term ‘lamb” has multiple meanings. The NABRE Bible commentary says this: “The background for this title may be the victorious apocalyptic lamb who would destroy evil in the world (Rev 5–7; 17:14); the paschal lamb, whose blood saved Israel (Ex 12); and/or the suffering servant led like a lamb to the slaughter as a sin-offering (Is 53:7, 10). In any event, it is the strongest and most detailed affirmation of Jesus from the lips of John in all the Gospels. The Gospel of John is the only one which states that the Baptist had disciples, and even more remarkably, he encourages two of them, including one named Andrew, to go off and join Jesus as a disciple. [1: 35-37, from this Sunday’s Gospel.] Another curious point in the Gospel of John: the evangelist does not mention the actual baptism of Jesus, but in John 3:22ff. we hear that Jesus and his disciples were baptizing in the same locale as John. This disturbed a disciple of John, who complained to him that “everyone is coming to [Jesus].” John replies that “this joy of mine has been made complete. He must increase and I must decrease.” As the Gospel of John is the final one of the four, these words of the Baptist in John 3 are the final message of John the Baptist in the New Testament. John the Baptist is one of the most enigmatic figures of the Gospels, and even the four Gospels depict him in a variety of ways. The common thread throughout the Gospels is John’s officiating at the Baptism of Jesus, which we observe this weekend [January 9-10] at the Eucharist. But it may come as a surprise that there is more historical non-Biblical information about John than there is about Jesus. Consequently, to understand the Baptist, it is necessary to know what the ancient world thought about John as a free-standing figure, and then how the Christian evangelists integrated him into the New Testament narrative.
A primary Catholic scholarly source for Gospel study is Father John Meier [b. 1942], in retirement teaching courses at Notre Dame and completing his sixth volume of The Marginal Jew commentaries. [In 1988, when he began, he thought there would be only one volume!] In his second volume, Meier begins with a lengthy treatment on the Baptist called “John without Jesus” [pp. 19-99] and follows that with “Jesus with and without John” [pp. 100-233]. For Meier, John is a critical New Testament personage in his own right and in his interworking with Jesus. Thus, Meier examines what is known about John separate from the Christian Gospel sources. The primary source for our knowledge of John is the historical text of Flavius Josephus, The Jewish Antiquities. Josephus himself was a ubiquitous character who moved freely in Jewish and Roman circles, and he is a primary source for the terrible war of the Fall of Jerusalem, 66-70 A.D. It is in an earlier context that Josephus introduces John, specifically a rousing military defeat of King Herod at the hands of the Nabothian King Aretas IV around 35 A.D. This loss was a considerable shock to the Jews, and Josephus reports in his Antiquities his suspicions of why this calamity occurred. He writes: “But to some of the Jews it seemed that the army of Herod was destroyed by God—indeed, God quite justly punishing [Herod] to avenge what he had done to John, who was surnamed the Baptist. “For Herod killed him, although he was a good man and [simply] bade the Jews to join in baptism, provided that they were cultivating virtue and practicing justice toward one another and piety toward God. For [only] thus, in John’s opinion, would the baptism [he administered] indeed be acceptable to God, namely, if they used it to obtain not pardon for some sins but rather the cleansing of their bodies, inasmuch as [it was taken for granted that] their souls had already been purified by justice. “And when the others [namely, ordinary Jews] gathered together [around John]—for their excitement reached fever pitch as they listened to [his] words—Herod began to fear that John’s powerful ability to persuade people might lead to some sort of revolt, for they seemed likely to do whatever he counseled. So Herod decided to do away with John by a preemptive strike before he sparked a revolt. Herod considered this a better [course of action] than to wait until the situation changed and [then] to regret [his delay] when he was engulfed by a crisis. “And so, because of Herod’s suspicion, John was sent in chains to Machaerus, the mountain fortress previously mentioned; there he was killed. But the Jews were of the opinion that the army was destroyed to avenge John, God wishing to inflict harm on Herod.” [from John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew II, p. 20] Josephus’ portrayal of John the Baptist is easily recognizable to Christians, but his portrait is incomplete. Josephus tones down John’s eschatological and apocalyptic tendencies, i.e., language about future judgment and the end of the world. Luke’s Gospel [Chapter 3] portrays John as a firebrand who probably would have distressed civil authorities, particularly since Luke singles out soldiers and tax collectors as sinners needing baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Meier and others make the strong case that the historical existence of John the Baptist can be verified in both the Gospels and secular sources, notably Josephus. Meier applies the scholarly law of “multiple attestation” to the Gospels; John’s existence is recorded in all four Gospels, along with Jesus’ baptism, the calling of the twelve, the feeding of the 5000, the Last Supper, Pontius Pilate, Judas’s betrayal, and the Crucifixion, which all meet the standard of multiple attestation as having strong historical probability. However, John’s identity, ministry, and relationship to Jesus varies considerably across the four Gospels. Meier notes that John meets another marker of historical probability, “the criterion of embarrassment.” Consider for a moment that no Gospel writer would have included the betrayal of Peter during the Passion if it were not true. John is, is Meier’s words, a true “wild card” with prophetic heritage of the Old Testament but a certain independence as well. His direct contact with the Gospels is limited as well. The constant is his association with Jesus’ baptism, though even here the evangelists narrate the event in different ways. This weekend’s Mass account on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord is drawn from St. Mark, the Gospel of the B Cycle. Mark has no Infancy narrative and begins his Gospel by introducing the adult Jesus as Christ [“the anointed one’], the Son of God. Mark goes on to describe the Baptist as a descendant of the prophetic line of Israel, specifically the Prophet Isaiah. In practical terms Mark depicts John as a messenger preparing for the Lord by extending a baptism or washing for the forgiveness of sins. But this baptism is a preliminary step to what John calls a baptism of the Holy Spirit. Meyer makes the point that in Mark’s narrative there is a confusing disconnect. “The Old Testament prophesied the Baptist as the one who would prepare the way for Jesus; yet John never penetrated the mystery of Jesus’ identity, even when he baptized him.” [p. 21] There is more mystery. Mark continues his narrative with the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth and his baptism in the Jordan by John. What intrigues the reader—and centuries of readers of this Gospel of Mark—is the history before the event. How did Jesus come to the Jordan in the first place? Was he a typical layman, a Galilean carpenter, one of the hundreds moved by the preaching of this peripatetic Galilean preacher? Or was Jesus one of John’s inner circle of disciples, or as Meyer puts it, was John the mentor of Jesus? And, to go a step further, are there clues to what Jesus understood to be the nature of the water baptism? Was he shedding his sins, a thought entirely foreign to our understanding of Jesus’ nature? Or was Jesus giving good example? St. Matthew, writing after St. Mark, strongly suggests as much in his narrative. See Matthew 3 for his parallel account. The key to all four baptismal accounts is the encounter of Jesus with the Holy Spirit. In today’s Gospel a voice from the heavens proclaims: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” From the vantage point of Christian faith, the unity of Jesus’ earthly mission with the love and unity of his Father is conscious. Liturgically speaking, the encounter with the Spirit and God’s voice of identity answers the Christmas question of who this babe in Bethlehem is. Hence, the feast of the Baptism is the final day of the Advent-Christmas cycle of feasts. All four evangelists begin the public ministry of Jesus from this point, a ministry celebrated throughout the year as Ordinary Time. Parenthetically, the role of the Baptist becomes virtually invisible from this point in the Gospels, almost adversarial. The week between Christmas and New Year contains a stream of major feasts of saints that often gets overlooked in the aura of the Nativity observance. It may seem odd that the daily prayer life of the Church—the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours—is dominated for the most part by feasts which seem somewhat unconnected to the theme of Christmas. A simple explanation is that some saints enjoyed established observances before the liturgical feast of Christmas took root in the fourth century. In other cases, there is good historical proof that a saint died during the Octave or eight-day solemn observance of Christmas.
December 26: St. Stephen. According to St. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles [Chapters 6 and 7], Stephen is a major figure in the first years of the post-Resurrection Church. Formally designated by the Apostles as a deacon or community servant, Stephen was an outstanding preacher whose vigorous proclamation of Jesus as Savior in the Temple before the Sanhedrin led to his being stoned to death. He is venerated as the Church’s first martyr. According to St. Luke, as Stephen lay dying, he prayed aloud, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” And again, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” December 27: St. John the Apostle and Evangelist. This is the feast of the Apostle and Evangelist, and while we do not know exactly how and where he died, Christian legend has it that he miraculously escaped a martyr’s death. Third century Church writers state that he died in Ephesus, or present-day Turkey. It is certain that he was venerated with an annual feast long before the December 25 date of Christmas was established. John is portrayed with Peter in the Acts of the Apostles as performing signs and wonders in the days immediately following Pentecost. His greatest legacy is his authorship of the Gospel of John, though the final draft may have been completed by one of his disciples. The Church has long identified John as “the beloved disciple” of this Gospel. Likewise, John’s authorship is attested to four other New Testament books, i.e., three Epistles and the Book of Revelation. December 28: The Holy Innocents. The Church in Rome established an observance in the sixth century of the Holy Innocents. In Matthew 2 the evangelist writes that King Herod slaughtered all young boys about two years of age in Bethlehem, in a desperate effort to kill Jesus, who with his family had sought refuge in Egypt. This early Roman feast was observed in mourning and penance. Today these victims are honored as martyrs who died because of their relationship to Jesus, tenuous as it was, innocent victims of events far beyond their control. The plight of these children is indeed disturbing [Christian Romans certainly thought so], and thus it may be of some comfort that historians have never been able to verify St. Matthew’s Gospel account. In particular, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus has no mention of this crime of Herod’s in his history of the Jewish people, written in the first century. St. Matthew’s narrative of the Innocents is theological in nature, as is his entire Christmas narrative. It should be remembered that in the Book of Exodus the Egyptian pharaoh sets out to kill the firstborn babes to depopulate the Hebrew peoples. The infant Moses was rescued from this massacre. St. Matthew’s catechetical goal, so to speak, is to depict Jesus as the New Moses. St. Matthew’s intended audience of Jewish-Christians would have caught his intentions immediately. December 29: St. Thomas Becket [1118-1170 A.D.] St. Thomas Becket is closest to our times; he was martyred on December 29, 1170 in the Canterbury Cathedral. In many respects his life parallels the later St. Thomas More, a chancellor of England who ran afoul of his king. Becket was nominally a cleric, specifically an archdeacon. In fact, he was the executive assistant and father figure to King Henry II, and eventually Chancellor of England, who supported his king in his encroachments on Church property and policy. He was rewarded for his efforts with appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury. King Henry’s policies of appointing bishops came under fire from the reformist pope and later saint, Gregory VII. It seems that in his later years Thomas underwent a profound personal conversion and became an ardent protector of Church integrity and papal authority. His conversion greatly angered Henry, who famously proclaimed in the presence of several of his knights, “Who will rid me of this troublesome bishop?” Thomas was hacked to death in his church. Becket’s death has been immortalized in the twentieth century by T.S. Eliot’s 1935 play, Murder in the Cathedral. December 31: St. Sylvester. This fourth century saint is venerated for his long tenure as Bishop of Rome [314-335 A.D.] during the reign of the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. This Council, summoned by Constantine, declared the divinity of Christ against a heresy known as Arianism. The Nicene Creed, proclaimed at Mass, is a product of this Council and several that proceeded it; hence the name, “Nicene Creed.” The position of papacy was not yet developed, but Constantine invited Sylvester to attend the Council. The latter declined but sent two legates. Legend has it that Sylvester baptized Constantine and healed him from leprosy. In turn Constantine awarded to Sylvester [and his successors as bishops of Rome] spiritual and temporal authority over most of civilized Europe in a grant called the Donation of Constantine. This document was often invoked by future popes but was found to be a forgery in the fifteenth century. I recommend a reading of Matthew's Gospel, Chapter 2, as an introduction to today's post.
All four of the Gospels describe the adult Jesus as beginning his public ministry as a “Nazorean,” so it is safe to assume that the oral strand of belief received by Matthew in the 80’s A.D. included a common agreement that Jesus was a Galilean from the town of Nazareth. One can easily recall the Passion accounts where a crowd gathered in the courtyard and quickly identified Peter as a disciple of Jesus. Mark 14: 70 captures the scene well, as onlookers comment that “even your speech betrays you.” Nazoreans, in the region of Galilee, were removed from the more “metropolitan” Jerusalem by distance [about 100 miles], dialect, and sophistication. And while I have the Atlas open on my desk, Nazareth is also about 100 miles from Bethlehem. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Matthew has gone against the grain by depicting the home and residence of Jesus in Bethlehem at the time of his birth, and for about two years after that by his internal reckoning [Matthew 2:1]. By departing from common belief, Matthew has set the stage for the next scene in his introduction of Jesus as the New Moses. For Chapter 2 of his Gospel introduces new players and new information—this new “King of the Jews” would in fact be worshipped as a universal savior by Jew and pagan alike, while at the same become the object of rejection, persecution, and death. The future Gentiles who would be saved by Jesus’ cross are embodied in the beloved Christmas characters, the Three Kings. The Gospel does not tell us that they were kings, nor even that there were three of them. It does tell us that there were three presents. The Paulist Biblical Commentary admits that we look back to Matthew’s text through the eyes of later devotion and storytelling. The term magi “comes from the Greek magos, meaning “people possessed of superior knowledge, experts in some field, especially—as would appear to be the case here—astronomy/astrology.” [PBC, p. 912] The most important contribution to the story of these visitors is their non-Jewish identity. They are seekers of universal truth, and the unusual appearance of a star in the direction of Israel leads them to deduce that a new king has been born there. Kings and royalty came and went in the ancient world, so the interest of these magi in the destiny of Israel is rather remarkable. Matthew has created this account to demonstrate how all the nations of the world will come streaming to the New Jerusalem at the end time to worship the Lord. The Matthean text is inspired by the apocalyptic Isaiah 60, which happens to be the first reading of the Feast of the Epiphany in the Roman Catholic calendar. Matthew, in view of his Jewish-Christian audience, expands the definition of a “coming messiah” far beyond the restoration of a throne or a national revival; the New Jerusalem, of whom Jesus is its divine fulfillment, will bring God’s deliverance to all persons seeking truth and the way. There is no need to alter your home Christmas Nativity creche so long as we remember that the kings or wisemen were Gentile kings and wise men, or magi. The relationship of the future Jesus mission and the Gentiles is key to the text. If Matthew is unclear about how many magi actually stopped in Jerusalem on their quest, he is emphatic in his narrative of the danger they have stepped into, personified in King Herod the Great [73 B.C.-4 A.D.] Herod’s entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica makes for interesting reading. He had been a “player” in the famous Octavian-Marc Antony-Cleopatra drama and though he bet on Antony, the victor Octavian established Herod as king of all Judea and supported him until Herod’s final years, when paranoia and probable atherosclerosis created a dangerous and murderous tyrant. The Roman Emperor Augustus himself observed that “It’s better to be Herod’s pig, than his son.” In Matthew’s account, the magi approached the Jerusalem court at about the worst possible time to inquire where this newborn king could be found. The presence of the magi led the court and the temple to search what Scripture had predicted about the birthplace of the messiah, understood to be a Davidic future king. Matthew quotes the prophet Micah [Micah 5:2], though the PBC notes that Micah 5:6-7 is more likely a prediction of a new David, all the worse from Herod’s neurotic state of mind. Mindful of David’s own ruthlessness, Herod was determined not to become the new Saul, and he sends the magi on their way to Bethlehem, primarily to identify the child. Herod expresses enthusiasm in venerating the new young king, but his intent is to kill him. The magi follow the star “to the place where the child was.” i.e., at his home in Bethlehem. A key phrase in this narrative is the visitors’ prostrating themselves and doing homage.” [Matthew 2:11] It cannot be emphasized enough that these sincere seekers have come from Gentile lands, not to satisfy their curiosity but to adore God’s presence on earth. It is unlikely that these visitors understood Catholic incarnational or trinitarian theology, but their gifts give a splendid insight into what they did believe. Their gifts of gold and frankincense are inspired by Psalm 72:10 and Isaiah 60:6. Matthew’s inclusion of myrrh, an embalming ointment, does not have a direct reference in the Hebrew Scripture. It is a unique and inspired inclusion by Matthew, whose entire Infancy narrative is intended as an introduction to the new understanding of the messiah as “the suffering servant” whose body will need myrrh after the crucifixion. The magi were indeed wise men, for they returned to their country “by another way,” under the guidance of an angel, traveling nowhere near the Jerusalem court. Similarly, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and advised him of the dangers posed by Herod. The angel advised Joseph to take his family into Egypt [the journey from Bethlehem to Alexandria, Egypt is about 200 miles.] The “flight into Egypt” is a well-known staple of Catholic catechetics, but the parallel between Jesus and Moses has come into greater appreciation in modern times. The narrative is arranged to highlight the dual flights of Moses and Jesus from an Egyptian pharaoh and a Jewish king respectively, both children finding refuge in Egypt in divinely influenced fashion. A review of Exodus [1, 2] is helpful here. The Exodus narrative describes a frustrated pharaoh who is witnessing a dramatic demographic shift in which a healthy Hebrew fertility is threatening to override the native Egyptian population. After several measures to refract this population trend have failed, pharaoh is reduced to desperate genocide, ordering the execution of all young Hebrew boys on sight. King Herod is focused on the birth of just one young boy; the other youngsters of Bethlehem are collateral damage, and the Church has remembered them as victims of Herod’s search for Jesus in the December 28 Feast of the Holy Innocents, the first martyrs associated with the New Moses. Their deaths reinforce one of Matthew’s entire Infancy themes, that Jesus and his followers can expect persecution and death. Commentators also look to Jeremiah 31:15 as an indication that the loss of these children was foreseen by God. An an established Christmas devotion, the story of the massacre of the Innocents nonetheless cannot be verified by historical sources. Most commentators agree that, based on records we do have regarding Herod the Great, he was certainly capable of such a thing [he murdered his own family], but the massacre cannot be independently verified. The best historian of Herod’s time, Flavius Josephus, does not record the Bethlehem tragedy in his history of the Jewish people. In the Matthean narrative, this tragedy made it impossible for Joseph’s family to return to their home and given that Herod’s son Archelaus was reigning in Judea, Joseph took them to the safety of the rural town of Nazareth. The next time we encounter Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 3, he will be an adult known as a Nazorean when he presents for baptism from John the Baptist. Matthew 1 [for reference]
Matthew’s Infancy narrative begins with a genealogy of Jesus, “the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.” [Matthew 1:1] In his Coming Christ in Advent [1988] Father Raymond Brown writes that “I have been conducting a somewhat solitary campaign to make this Matthean genealogy a major Advent topic” and in a footnote he reminds us that “It is also assigned to the afternoon Mass on December 24—a Mass that seems not to be frequently celebrated in the U.S.A.” [p. 17] Personally I can only recall this opening text of the Gospel read once at a public Mass, and I must admit I never read the full list of Jesus’ ancestors at a public Mass as a pastor. In popular church lingo, the two genealogies of Jesus [from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke] are sometimes referred to as the “begets” or the “begats,” as in “Azor begot Zadok, Zadok begot the father of Achim, Achim begot Eliud,” etc. The Paulist Biblical Commentary [2018] explains that genealogies enforce the nature and importance of their subject; in the Matthean text Jesus is clearly defined as the offspring of David and Abraham. Identified with this heritage, Jesus will go on in this Gospel to fulfill the promises of Abraham and David. Abraham, of course, was esteemed as the father of the Jewish people; by the time of Jesus many of the twelve tribes had died out, and it is no accident that Matthew will describe Jesus’ selection of “the twelve” [disciples] as a statement that the integrity of Israel’s being has been restored. Likewise, the inclusion of David at the opening of the genealogy symbolizes that Jesus has fulfilled the expectations of a new David, though the Gospel bears witness to much confusion surrounding the way in which Jesus will define the promise of David. In Matthew’s later depiction of Holy Week, the crowds on Palm Sunday will salute Jesus with “Hosanna to the Son of David” but less than a week later will call for his death, agitated by the leadership of the Temple. The Hebrew language assigns a numerical value to its letters, and the name “David” equates to the sum of fourteen. Matthew, to enhance the Davidic relationship to Jesus, divides the genealogy into three clusters of fourteen descendants. Given the times and sources available, stretching back over two millennia, the literal accuracy of Jesus’ heritage cannot be assumed, but Matthew does include some “family skeletons.” The PBC commentator observes that there are several women in the family line with “histories;” some sexual, as was the case of Bathsheba, and some with a strong Gentile connection. The inclusion of women and sexual misconduct in the family line may have been Matthew’s way of inoculating the reader for the very peculiar conclusion of the genealogy. Matthew 1:15 reads “Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Of her was born Jesus, who is called the Messiah.” Last night at Mass as I professed the Creed I was struck again by the mystery and complexity of that phrase where we bow our heads and affirm: “For us men and our salvation, He came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.” Familiarity need not breed contempt, but it can dull our minds to the literal impact of these words and how the Incarnation event was experienced by the actual persons involved. Matthew’s text gives us a window into those events. He concludes the family line [1: 16] by defining Joseph as the husband of Mary, and Mary as the mother of Jesus. But Matthew is quick to point out that there is more to this story than meets the eye, and his narrative [1;18-25] outlines this complexity in his depiction of the conception and birth of Jesus. Matthew explains that Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but “before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit.” [1: 18] Matthew makes it clear that Joseph is not the natural father of Mary’s child. Joseph is described as a “righteous man,” i.e., a devout observer of the Jewish Law, who is greatly distressed that his future bride is carrying a child that is not his. Matthew’s account differs significantly from Luke’s in that the Matthean account provides no indication that Mary understood her pregnancy. Joseph, faithful observer of the Law, would have been within his rights to present his apparently unfaithful future bride to Jewish authorities for censure; Deuteronomy 22: 22-23 states that the penalty for infidelity in betrothal was stoning, though by Joseph’s day the penalty was mitigated to public disgrace and banning of the unfaithful woman [and her partner]. That Joseph, given his noted fidelity to the Law, would nonetheless seek to shield his bride-to-be from public wrath is an indication of an extraordinary moral sensitivity that goes beyond the Law and would foreshadow the mercy of Jesus later in this Gospel. Continuing the narrative, a divine intervention spared both Joseph and Mary the consequences of their dilemma. Joseph is visited by an angel in a dream, who counsels him to have no fear in taking Mary as his bride and Jesus as his legal son. Joseph learns from the angel that the child has been conceived by the Holy Spirit, a son who will “save the people from their sins.” Joseph then took Mary into his home in Bethlehem, with the evangelist explaining that “he had no relations with her until she bore a son, and he [Joseph] named him Jesus.” Matthew’s Christmas narrative illustrates the central role of Joseph in the unfolding of events, given that the genealogy has progressed from Abraham and David all the way to Joseph. Matthew’s narrative intends to reinforce the role of Jesus as Israel’s savior by emphasis upon the divine and legal fathers of Jesus. Given that Matthew’s Infancy Narrative is less well known than Luke’s, it may come as a surprise to hear that Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem, and that Jesus was, so to speak, born at home. How he would come to be known as “the Nazorean” is explained in Matthew 2, the next portion of the full narrative. Matthew’s statement that Joseph had no relations with Mary until she had borne Jesus has led some to wonder if Jesus had younger brothers and sisters. The scholars I have read indicate that this is unlikely. In the first instance, Matthew’s intention is to establish that Jesus is truly the offspring of the Holy Spirit, that there is no possibility Joseph himself sired the one we worship today as “Son of God.” Second, the evidence from Scripture and secondary sources that Jesus had siblings is just about nonexistent. And finally, for Catholics, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth appears to have roots from earliest Christian days. In his classic A Marginal Jew I [1991] Father John Meier presents third century evidence that enemies of Christianity in the third century attacked the Church by attacking Jesus’ legitimacy. The Christian writer Origen, around 250 A.D., reports hearing a tale from his enemy Celsus that Jesus fabricated the virgin birth scenario to conceal his illegitimate birth at the hands of a Roman soldier. Meier suggests that Celsus or someone created this slur by reworking the actual Gospel of Matthew, which was already widely available and read throughout the Mediterranean world. [pp. 222-229]. He adds that if enemies were attacking this doctrine so early in history, then belief in the virgin birth was already well-established in the Christian world. The four Gospels are a remarkable literary accomplishment, collectively and individually. Forget for a moment that Christian cherish these works as God’s truth, shared by the Holy Spirit in the inspiration of the writers, there are few if any parallels to these narrative biographies in their literary magnificence, and their compelling beauty is indeed no small aspect of God’s revelation here. The evangelists may or may not have been familiar with the fathers of written history, Herodotus and Thucydides, the Greek originators of the modern art who, five centuries before Jesus, crafted the “doing” of history into a narration of events with interpretive meaning.
For many centuries St. Matthew’s Gospel was called “the Gospel of the Church.” Through the medieval era this title seemed logical and appropriate. At the time, the Matthean Gospel was considered the first of the four to be composed; it is the longest of the four, and there survives many a stained-glass window with the evangelist, pen in hand, listening to the whisperings of an angel. St. Matthew’s Passion account, for example, was read annually on Palm Sunday. By 1800 scholars of the bible had begun critical studies of the four Gospels and gradually came to an understanding of both inspiration and biblical dating. By the twenty-first century the prevailing wisdom holds that St. Mark composed the first Gospel, that St. Matthew composed his Gospel at least a decade, and possibly more, after St. Mark’s and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The Matthean text rests upon the Markan text, an independent “Q Source,” and the evangelist’s own inspiration—an inspiration which producing a “Christmas Narrative.” We know next to nothing about the identity of St. Matthew. For several reasons, scholars are doubtful that the Apostle Matthew—the former tax collector—is the same person who composed the Gospel under that name. We are on safer footing in drawing from the internal clues of the Gospel itself. The Matthean text indicates an author who is deeply influence by the Hebrew Scripture. The term “according to the Scriptures” appears in St. Matthew more than in any other New Testament work. [The term “Scripture” in the early Church applied exclusively to the Hebrew canon of books, the “Old Testament.”] The author depicts Jesus as doing the works of Moses, such as delivering God’s law from on high, i.e., Sermon on the Mount, and feeding the people in the wilderness, i.e., the distributive miracle of the loaves and fishes. St. Matthew’s Gospel is believed to have originated in the city of Antioch [near modern Antakya, Turkey] at least a decade after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Relations between Christians and Jews who lived side by side were tense. Christians were wont to see the fall of Jerusalem as God’s judgment on Israel for rejecting the messiahship of Christ. Many Jews regarded Christians, particularly converts from Judaism, as traitors and blasphemers, outraged by the Christian contention that the crucified Jesus was one and the same as God [Yahweh]. Considering that Roman authorities generally tolerated the Jews for their ethic and long history while periodically persecuting Christians as subversives, it is easy to understand how Jewish Christians were tempted “to return home,” so to speak. It is in this context that the Gospel of Matthew developed, a text written to establish for all time that Jesus is the Messiah, the true son of Abraham, the new Moses, who has come to deliver the fullness of the Law and the fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies. In its unfolding biography the Gospel of St. Mathew will describe a Jesus who delivers a new moral code [the Eight Beatitudes], who battles with scribes and Pharisees over their legalism, and who takes a dim view of the mediocrity of Temple worship to the point that its leaders wanted him dead and were instrumental in making that happen. Only St. Matthew records the infamous line, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.” Using the text of St. Mark and the Q source, St. Matthew adds his original material under the influence of divine inspiration. Like his contemporary St. Luke, St. Matthew wished to lay out his theological position before delving into the adult ministry of Jesus, and he sculpted an infancy narrative as his signal statement of both the identity of Jesus and his meaning to the world. The infancy narrative, the first two chapters of his Gospel, is inspired in both a human and divine sense. Unfortunately, it is a narrative of which most Catholics are unaware, as the Gospel of St. Luke, with its Bethlehem portrayal, is the usual Gospel of choice for the Masses of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I would point out, though, the Matthean Christmas text is the recommended one for the Christmas Eve vigil Masses, though pastors have the option to use St. Luke and even the introduction to St. John’s Gospel. I might add here that the Christmas creche display is inspired primarily by St. Luke’s account, but the displays themselves were first erected in 1223 by St. Francis of Assisi. In the next post on this sequence, I will walk through St. Matthew’s Chapters 1 and 2 for a closer look at the faith realities expressed in each section, beginning with the genealogy of Jesus. I might recommend that you read St. Matthew’s Christmas texts as if you had never heard of St. Luke’s and were approaching this material for the first time. I recommend this particularly to catechists, preachers, and parents of young children who educate their offspring as “the first teachers of the faith.” In my previous Advent post I talked about the second century church writer Tatian, who attempted to morph together all four Gospels in his Diatessaron, an error that inhibits a fuller understanding of the divine inspiration behind each Gospel. It is an easy shortcut to fall into, and the multiple Christmas narratives are as good a place as any to teach foundation understanding of biblical reading and scholarship. |
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