Friday Thoughts - Manhood, Football, Fatherhood, and Fire

Photo by Br. Simon Stubbs, O.S.B.

Each year St. Joseph Seminary College and Notre Dame Seminary square off in an epic game of flag football. The former practice the whole of the fall semester while the later takes the idea of practice to the field participating in the Loyola New Orleans University intramural flag football league. Collegiate seminary vs. theologate. Philosophy vs. theology. Kant vs. Ratzinger (or Aquinas vs. Aquinas). This event does not only include a football game but a giant bonfire built log cabin notch style (we are well aware of the dangers of celebratory bonfires from other universities, God rest their souls). I have the distinct privilege of preaching at the mass before the event hits into manly mode with football and pyrotechnics. I thought I would share this for the sake of posterity but also as a ancillary reflection on manhood, fatherhood, and priesthood. There are some inside seminary jokes, but bare with them.

Stubbs

There’s something thoroughly cathartic in building something only to watch it burn down. There is something thoroughly uncathartic about preparing mentally and physically for a football game by building up a habitus of football skills only to be found unsatisfactory on the field through the victory of the opposing team. And, yet, in both of these, building and losing, we learn what it is to be a Christian man and a good father.

Stubbs

            The bonfire itself is a symbol of manhood. It is the culmination of hard work and sheer desire to outdo the height of the previous year. It requires the blood, sweat, and chainsaws of men willing to build an edifice for the sake of its slow destruction by the unpredictable force of fire. This is a seemingly futile undertaking, and yet it is an analogy for us as Christian men called to be a light in the darkness of this world. We have before us, in the bonfire, the pursuit of secular man. He builds a large house full of strong timber and at the pinnacle of the structure of his life all that it is worthy of is its collapse due to arson. It seemed to be a stable structure but under the weight of heat and flame it buckles.

            St. Paul, who we hear about in the first reading, built his house on the Pharisaical interpretation of the Torah. With one question, Christ knocks it down. Paul rebuilds on the foundation of the cross, which seems weak and unable to support the full missionary effort that he undertook. Yet, he arrives to the place of his “destruction” stronger and more stable than the Coliseum. We build our houses not on our own or by sheer will and the work of our hands. No, we build, with Christ, His church. Our future bride is symbolized in the two churches whose dedication we celebrate today, St. Peter’s Basilica and St. Paul Outside the Walls. Peter and Paul built the church on the stone rejected by the builders that became the cornerstone. A father builds a house for his family. A priest builds up the Church one soul at a time knowing the structure and foundation are not designed by him or sustained by him, but rather by Christ, who his our rock.

           

Stubbs

            Now, as for losing, this, in the eyes of the world, is the epitome of the worthlessness. It is unmanly to lose, especially for us Americans, to lose a football game. The loser feels totally emasculated. With regards to losing, I speak from experience. When it comes to flag football, I’m a loser. I have played in seven bonfire games. I won my last, indeed my only game, in 2003. Six years of losses can be disheartening, but apparently the Lord thought I hadn’t learned the lesson I share with you today. He put me in a parish this fall that had no coach for the middle school flag football team. The eighth graders coerced me to coach. Never did I think that the Bonfire game would actually prepare me for ministry. I coached a team from ages 9 to 13, with varying degrees of knowledge, skill, and natural athleticism, while myself having little knowledge about how to run a practice or design a playbook, or how to deal with a quarterback who is sobbing on the sideline at halftime.  We played five games, and we won none. I had to figure out how I was going to console these kids who worked hard in practice and even showed up to play a game on day with no school.

           

            Those five games as a whole and the multitude of practices will make them better men. They will realize that despite the hardest we can work; we will not always succeed. As men, we wish to put up the mirage that we stand on firm ground and are perpetual winners, but Christ, inviting Peter to come, shows us, that to be a man you must walk on choppy seas. Our power, our balance, is not solely ours. The true man and the good father is empowered and sustained by the Son who was sent by the Father to become man. Loosing reveals to us competition fails. What I have is nothing. I am merely a breath that passes like a fading shadow, like grass, which springs up in the morning, and by evening withers and fades. Our fatherhood, our manhood is contingent on the fatherhood and manhood of Jesus Christ.

           

            Bonfire Day, with its game and with its fire, teaches us that we are but mere men. It is by Christ that we gain our strength as we walk on the choppy seas of seminary formation and prepare to be fathers who build the Church through the ministry of the priesthood of Jesus Christ.

Friday Thoughts - Liturgy, the Nucleus of the Parish

Yes, I like adjectival clauses in my titles. Anyway, down to business. This is a short reflection on the 'ideal parish.'


The nucleus of the parish should and need be the liturgy.  The Second Vatican Council calls it the "source and summit" of our faith.  It is from which we gain strength as Christians, and it directs us towards our final goal, heaven.  For most of the parish, this will be the main communal interaction of the parishioners, every Sunday.  It, then, becomes not only the source and summit but also the main tool of the New Evangelization to a people inundated with the secular, devoid of God, devoid of morality, devoid of a sense of truth, goodness, oneness, and beauty.  The liturgy provides an experience of these four transcendentals.  Hence, it should not mitigate them for "pastoral" reasons but rather let them shine forth.  The liturgy shines forth the truth of salvation history in the Liturgy of the Word, showing to all who listen that God has worked to interact with and meet man and show that he was not only created in love, but is keep in being by Love.  The homily because a central aspect in revealing this truth.  The liturgy of the Eucharist allows the drama of the salvific sacrifice of Christ to show the truth that we are offered salvation and it is through this very sacrifice that we enter into it.  Truth is so relativized in our society that stability of the same ritual every Sunday allows the truth the Church carries with Her to manifest itself.  God is unchanging and the universality of the liturgy allows man to see this in the acts of His Church. Entering into Calvary and receiving the fruit of the tree of life, allows us to see what is good and what is evil.  Our consciences are formed by the unchanging truth manifested in the liturgy, which increases our desire to pursue what is truly good, the Almighty.  Nothing brings a community together better than taking part in communion with the One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, through the reception of the body, blood, soul, and divinity, of Jesus Christ.  Communally being directed toward the worship of God in music, interior prayer, and sacrifice manifests the Body of Christ, which unites all of the members of the Church. The flow of the liturgy, its setting, its music, its vestments give witness to symmetry, which witnesses to what is beautiful.  Beauty, I am convicted, is a great evangelizer.  It arrests the heart and allows the mind to temporarily separate itself from the lies it has attached itself to and experience something truly heavenly.   The architecture of the church should have direct the people in their worship.  Over the two millennia of the Church the cruciform, cathedral design seems to best direct the mind and the heart.  Filled with stained glass, art that is both realistic in portrayal but pious in its direction, and an altar fitting for the sacrifice that occurs on its pillars.  The sound system to should be unobtrusive and well mixed using the proper techniques in acoustics to not prevent dead spots or unnatural decay in the sound.

Sentimentalism, a Chestertonian Insight into Social Bias

We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no problem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything: as if one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental; it is simply snobbish. For if comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous—which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who says, with a sort of splutter, "Flog the brutes!" or who tells you with innocent obscenity "what he would do" with a certain man—always supposing the man's hands were tied. - G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

'Tis interesting this beautiful thought of Gilbert.  In one in the same statement, he says violent men and passive sentimentalists come from the same tree, namely ignorance of the human person.  Man is not merely the sentiment connected with human physical contact, not to deny its power, only to mitigate the popular belief in its power.  Nor does man need to be degraded as an ignominious idiot worth nothing more than torture.  

Man is worthy of being contemplated not for his own sake but to see that he is not the root of his existence or the power by which he lives.  He is immediately and brokenly contingent.  He requires both discipline and loving sentiment to become virtuous, insodoing it moves towards being fully human.  

Friday Thoughts - Canon Law and New Media

Now I'm sure Ed Peters has probably covered this in some sort of way or another, but something struck me in reading some of the canons in Church Administration class yesterday.

Canon 761

The various means available are to be used to proclaim Christian doctrine: first of all preaching and catechetical instruction, which always hold the principal place, but also the presentation of doctrine in schools, academies, conferences, and meeting of every type and its diffusion through public declarations in the press or in other instruments of social communication by legitimate authority on the occasion of certain events. (Italics added by me)

This is under the section entitled The Ministry of the Divine Wordas part of the teaching function of the Church.  Many of the previous canons are directed toward the ecclesial authority of the Roman Pontiff, the college of bishops, individual bishops, priests, and deacons.  Canon 759 references the ministry of the Divine Word entrusted to the laity.  The last two canons of this preface of the section, Canons 760-761, direct all the members of the Church, ordained and lay combined.   

This canon then is for all of us, bloggerss included.  It seems almost prophetic that Canon Law, codified in 1983, speaks of "other instruments of social communication" opening up wide for the possibility of proclaiming the Word of God through the social communication of weblogs, podcasts, vidcasts, and tweets.  We are called to use said means to proclaim the word of God, evangelize, and teach.   

"By legitimate authority" seems to focus on clergy, and indeed Pope Benedict XVI has directed priests especially to use these new means of social communication to evangelize.  

Now this certainly isn't a definitive license or even explicit message for the use of New Media in Evangelization, but the fact the "other instruments of social communication" is mentioned in the Code of Canon Law is a juridical step in the right direction for us here on the digital continent.

Europe and the Faith

I heard about Hillaire Belloc about 5 years ago from a classmate.  I had yet to delve into any of his works, until this past month.  Europe and the Faith was a great work introduction to his work.  His life work was to reconnect Britain with the Church.  He recognized modern man and his slow and sometimes violent turning away from Church established by Christ and maintained by his spirit.  

One of the modus operandi of Belloc's vision of history is that history is not merely material.  The effects of history are not merely human.  The thrusts and forces that move history toward or away from God and His Church are "not of this world."  There are things in history, like the Reformation, especially in England, that cannot merely be explained by human forces.  Cultural things collided.  Greed was rampant.  All would have fell had it been in on the shoulders of German princes and few radical minds.  It, however, gained force and permanency through the ascendancy to its minor positions by a single monarch, Henry VIII.  The schism exists because of one misguided man who made a decision many monarchs had previous, but at the most inopportune of times.  

Belloc makes the statement at the beginning and end of the book, "Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe."  Europe, as he knew it, in the early 20th Century was shaped by the faith of Jesus Christ handed down from the Apostles in the Roman Catholic Church.  The Church pushed forward the positive organization of the dying Roman empire and subsumed indeed in an almost perfect way, inculturated it.  

It is at the turn of the Reformation that Europe began to self destruct.  Fiefdom by fiefdom, kingdom by kingdom, nation by nation, Europe has slowly degraded the farther it has moved away from its foundation, that is, the Church.  

If Belloc was alive today, he could see almost the logical conclusion of his arguments.  France is in utter ruin being repopulated by Arabs, a peaceful version of what the Iberian peninsula experienced 1200 years ago.  Germany is still trying to recover from Fascist and Communist oppressions.  England welcomes riots and a general apathy even disgust, i.e. Dawkins, et al, of religion, Catholic or otherwise.  Italy even has its problems.  Finally, the last bastion of the Roman Catholic nation, Ireland is in total shambles, due in part to the clergy abuse scandal, but also to a lack of anything to root for.  No longer do they have to fight for their faith which had been so dear to them for the past four centuries.  To them it doesn't seem worth fighting for pedophiles and liars.  

There is hope.  Hope only in one thing, that is the Church.  She, as the bride of Christ, can reform and transform the European culture.  In its current state, the New Evangelization is ripe for the picking.


Notes:
The book takes a rather sweeping look at history.  He goes through each period selecting certain things to help make his point.  He desires for brevity as opposed to unnecessary depth.  As for a history book, it would work well in a Western Civ course, especially for those in a home school situation.  If I were a parent, I would give this to my child as supplementary reading because it corrects so much erroneous thoughts and assumptions regarding European history.


Highly Recommend.

Friday Thoughts - Secularism

I have started the mini-mester here at the seminary.  Our professor for the Sacraments of Healing has us reading Bl. John Paul II's Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliatio et Paenitentia.  I am thoroughly enjoying it.  It is backing up with theology what I have intuited.  Many things have struck me so far but JP II's definition of secularism is spot on, so I want to share it with you.  (For you long time readers, i.e. me, this goes back to the beginning of the blog, sharing quotes)

"Secularism" is by nature and definition a movement of ideas and behavior which advocates a humanism totally without God, completely centered upon the cult of action and production and caught up in the heady enthusiasm of consumerism and pleasure seeking, unconcerned with the danger of "losing one's soul." 

Guest Post: How to Understand Scandals and Other Things - Insights from Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Now for the final installment on Archbishop Fulton Sheen from Luke from Quiet, Dignity, and Grace.

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Insight #3: "If you do not live as you believe, you will begin to believe as you live."

This gem comes from what is now called the Sheen Catechism.  The Archbishop's skills as an orator are alive and well in this collection of 50 talks which are now available on mp3.  They were originally recorded in his private study and are truly beautiful.

In a discussion on the moral life, he lays out the idea that if we don't live as we at least claim to believe, eventually, our beliefs will change.  Why is this so?  Well, we human beings, as good as we may be at fooling others, are just not capable of fooling ourselves.  When there is a tension or a hypocrisy in our life, we want it gone.  If we Say we are Catholics, for instance, but begin gradually not living the way we ought to, then the eventual consequence is that we will very likely give up the belief.  We will choose a belief that better fits the way we live our lives.

Pithy though the quote may be, this quote has serious power from a spiritual, rational, practical, and even psychological point of view.  Sheen not only studied philosophy and theology, he also read heavily in modern psychology, trying to find the best of its efforts, even if it meant sifting through a lot of less useful ideas.  This quote has the power to transform your life if you understand it at an early enough age.  If you believe your religion is important, you had better live like it.  This doesn't mean you have to be perfect, of course.  Nobody is.  But you better do your best and you better make it a priority to live up to that standard.  If not, eventually, the battle gets more difficult.  And Sheen was expounding this in the golden age of American Catholicism.  What has happened since his era?  Mass attendance has fallen by almost 50%.  People have created a whole new brand of Catholicism in which they consider themselves Catholic but disagree and disobey major Church teachings as well as almost completely abandon sacramental practices.  Unfortunately for many people, they stopped living in a way that lined up with their belief.  And in due time, their beliefs changed.

Insight #4: How to Understand Scandals

First, a fact: There Are scandals.

This shows us that Christ chose the people of His Church in their human condition, he chose them as they are, not as they should be.  After all, Christ was a cause of many scandals; why should his Church, his Mystical Body, be exempt from scandal?  For instance, Christ's disciples knew that He was God made flesh.  But they witnessed his humiliations and, ultimately, his death on the Cross.  What greater scandal could there be than a dead God?

Christ experienced wants of hunger and thirst and even died at the hands of sinners.  So his Church experiences tragedy, scandal, and sin.  But Christ being in pain didn't mean that He was not God.  Christ's own death couldn't even triumph over the fact that He still was, is, and always will be God.  Similarly, Christ guarantees that his Church teaches the truth, but he doesn't guarantee that his teachers will always be perfect.

It is true that there are bad Catholics. But remember this.  While "our faith increases responsibility, it does not force obedience.  It increases blame, but it does not prevent sin.  If some Catholics are bad, it is not because they are members of Christ's Mystical Body, but it is because they aren't living up to its demands."

An Interesting Point

Think of the concept of a scandal.  Someone has to do something that disappoints someone else.  In other words, if a Catholic priest commits a sin and it becomes public knowledge, the only reason it would be a scandal is if you would expect a Catholic priest to be good.  So when people throw their arms up in disgust at the Church, they are really displaying that they look for something good in the Church.  Namely, they expect holiness.  That's a very important psychological point!  The media can only draw the scandal out and make great headlines because everybody Expects the Church to be Holy.

You never hear someone complain that a sun-worshiper or atheist has fallen in his or her duties.  No news headline would ever grab attention if it read "sun-worshiper steals money from church" or "humanist steals money from school."  Nobody expects anything from a sun-worshiper, humanist, etc.  But insert the word priest and we have a scandal.  It's easy to be a communist or an atheist, and it's very morally lax.  But it is demanding and morally difficult to be a Catholic.

Furthermore, if the Church, which some people criticize for its human failings, was actually a perfect institution....would anybody want to be a part of that?  If the Church was actually perfect, then most of us would be ineligible to join.  In fact, aside from Christ, Mary, and a few saints, we'd nearly all be cast out with the plants that grew on bad soil.  Christ told us some of the harvest would be thrown out at the end.  If being Catholic really kept us perfect, then Christ's words would be either a lie or they'd be impossible.  Because if we were all perfect, there would be none cast aside at the end.

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I apologize for this but blogger was acting up so I had to highlight in a weird color for you to see the most important text of the blog.  Go check out Luke's blog Quiet, Dignity, and Grace.