Ubi Petrus

Is it possible someone out there does not know about St. Francis of Assisi? I’d venture to guess that, at least in the West, he is known to more people than even St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas. He was, of course, born to wealth and lived a rather ostentatious youth. After slowly moving to a more true relationship with God, a chance encounter with a leper became the new start of his life of poverty and service and eventually found the order of Friars Minor. And who could ever mention St. Francis without mentioning his rather unique relationship with all of nature as God’s creation. I could go on, but you’re better served with more well-written articles such as the one in the Catholic Encyclopedia or Catholic Culture. This little tidbit from Lives of the Saints really struck me:

Francis went in search of shelter, singing the divine praises. He met a band of robbers, who asked him who he was. He answered, ‘I am the herald of the great King’. They beat him and threw him into a ditch full of snow. He went on singing the praises of God.

And thus the difference between the great saints and rabble like me – I can’t imagine that if I were beaten and thrown into the snow I’d jump up and sing the praises of God. I certainly wish that I were that saintly, but not yet; perhaps through the intercession of Saint Francis?

Dr. Ed Peters has a distressingly vivid account of his participation in a Life Chain this past weekend. I was positively shocked, and I mean that word in its intended fullness, to read his account of one lady who, shall we say, disagreed with the pro-life cause:

A young woman in her 20s, driving by in a nice car, leaned far out her driver-side window and, in a scream of pure hate, shreiked “Kill the babies! Kill the babies! Kill’em all!” My first thought was, “Something’s been let out of hell on a 12-hour pass.”

There are times when you allow yourself to sit back in some level of satisfaction, feeling that things are going at least slightly better for the pro-life cause than they were only a few years ago. Then something like this slaps you directly across the face with the realization that Satan has no need of sleep and no desire to sit back in the middle of this war. No, indeed the war is not over but has only just begun. There is no time for us to sit in our foxholes and relax, not with an enemy who does not give up at the first sign of defeat. There is much to do, much to do. Holy saints pray for us, God help us!

Today we celebrate the Memorial of the Guardian Angels. I’m sure many as children memorized and probably comforted by the prayer, Angel of God. It is, to me, strangely comforting and discomforting at the same time to know that there is always a Guardian Angel watching over me, trying to help me do what is right and to move closer to that life God calls me to. That much is comforting – it is somewhat discomforting to contemplate after a sin, no matter how small, that God did not just stop at the Resurrection and His Church to provide for my salvation but even sent a special messenger whose careful guidance I have just shrugged off. Perhaps that’s my Irish guilt showing through.

But enough of me. Catholic Culture has a great guide with a plethora of links about our Guardian Angels here. And to finish of this topic, from a sermon by Saint Bernard, from the Office of Readings today:

Even though we are children and have a long, a very long and dangerous way to go, with such protectors what have we to fear? They who keep us in all our ways cannot be overpowered or led astray, much less lead us astray. They are loyal, prudent, powerful. Why then are we afraid? We have only to follow them, stay close to them, and we shall dwell under the protection of God’s heaven.

One of my favorite concepts to contemplate (you know, in my copious amounts of free time) is the concept of God existing outside of time – not just without it or without affect from it but entirely outside it. Our RCIA class today touched on our “Images of God” (i.e. how we picture, if you will, God in our minds) and the concept of predestination (Calvinist) came up. I relayed to those there the concept that for God everything is happening “Now”, there is no past that has come and gone nor a future that has not happened yet. Then, of course, I mentioned that it’s a great way to give yourself a headache if you contemplate that for a sufficiently long time.

Fortunately for me, I had just recently finished The Screwtape Letters (aside: any book that I can finish in under two days’ reading has something going for it – who would think of a religious book as a page-turner?) so I had the fine opportunity to utilize C.S. Lewis‘ fine turn of phrase about the “unbounded Now”. Again, as a refresher, this is the demon Screwtape writing to his nephew Wormwood, a tempter demon, so the good/bad inversion is not unintentional.

You, being a spirit, will find it difficult to understand how he gets into this confusion. But you must remember that he takes Time for an ultimate reality. He supposes that the Enemy, like himself, sees some things as present, remembers others as past, and anticipates others as future; or even if he believes that the Enemy does not see things that way, yet, in his heart of hearts, he regards this as a peculiarity of the Enemy’s mode of perception – he doesn’t really think (though he would say he did) that things as the Enemy sees them are things as they are! If you tried to explain to him that men’s prayers today are one of the innumerable co-ordinates with which the Enemy harmonises the weather of tomorrow, he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going to make those prayer and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so. And he would add that the weather on a given day can be traced back through its causes to the original creation of matter itself – so that the whole thing, both on the human and on the material side, is given ‘from the word go’. What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us; that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in his temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events. Why that creative act leaves room for their free will is the problem of problems, the secret behind the Enemy’s nonsense about ‘Love’. How it does so is no problem at all; for the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it.

That last bit is simply a phenomenal door-closing on the concept of irreversible predestination. To assert, as some Protestant faiths do, that one can sin as many times as one wants to without any necessity of interior repentance and waltz directly into Heaven because he or she “has been saved” is positively mind-blowing in my estimation. My favorite retort to the question, “have you been saved?” remains to this day, “I am today”. Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time holding on the one hand the concept of Jesus’ forgiveness while also holding on the other the fact that forgiveness or not doesn’t really matter because you never had a choice to begin with.

Not that I’m surprised to have been struck by a quotable quote after only one night of reading C.S. Lewis, but this one caught my eye quickly. Towards the end of letter 21 of The Screwtape Letters we find Wormwood giving this advice:

We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun – the finely graded differences that run from ‘my boots’ through ‘my dog, ‘my servant’, ‘my wife’, ‘my father’, ‘my master’, and ‘my country’, to ‘my God’. They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of ‘my boots’, the ‘my’ of ownership. Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by ‘my teddy bear’ not the old imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful) but ‘the bear I can pull to pieces if I like’. And at the other end of the scale, we have taught men to say ‘my God’ in a sense not really very different from ‘my boots’, meaning ‘the God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit – the God I have done a corner in’.

Yeeps. That’s a rather scathing indictment of how people allow their laxity in language to transform itself into a laxity in understanding. We all at times are guilty of trying to turn God into someone we can control – sometimes by bartering, sometimes by berating, sometimes by what we think is manipulating. At the same time, despite the gravity of these problems it seems even more grave for those who think God is what they want Him to be and that there is somehow something God owes them for being, in their own definition, good. For those times we have taken God for granted, and for those who are blinded by their own ambition towards God we humbly pray.

I’ve assiduously avoided commenting on the Pope’s speech at Regensburg for several reasons, none of them particularly good. However, my Pope John Paul II quote-a-day calendar gave me a surprise the other day by addressing the “other” part of his speech – you know, the one not about Islam. The part that probably was intended to be to focal point of the speech, at least to the local audience to whom it was delivered.

Modern rationalism does not tolerate mystery. It does not accept the mystery of man as male and female nor is it willing to admit that the full truth about man has been revealed in Jesus Christ. In particular, it does not accept the great mystery proclaimed in the Letter to the Ephesians, but radically opposes it. For rationalism, it is unthinkable that God should be the redeemer, much less that He should be the bridegroom, the primordial and unique source of the human love between spouses. Rationalism provides a radically different way of looking at creation and the meaning of human existence. But once man begins to lose sight of a God who loves him, a God who calls man through Christ to live in Him and with Him, and once the family no longer has the possibility of sharing in the great mystery, what is left except the mere temporal dimension of life? — (Letter to Families for the International Year of the Family, 1994)

I am struck repeatedly by the similarity in thought between John Paul II and Benedict. While I knew the “God’s Rottweiler” routine was a joke at best I hadn’t expected this level of continuity. Looking back now, I have absolutely no idea why I thought that way – it seems positively silly. Unfortunately, I think many are still allowing themselves to be stuck in their preconceived notions of what this Pope and this pontificate will bring. I am heartened to see he has not allowed these short-sighted people to deter him from speaking what needs to be said

I finally finished Introduction to Catholicism from the Didache Series tonight, which I’ll post a more full note on later. Thanks to the convenient coincident timing of my birthday I had a gift certificate to spend so I picked up C.S. Lewis’ classic The Screwtape Letters and Butler’s Lives of the Saints (yes, I avoided the one from Richard McBrien if only on principal). These are a pair of staples in the library of any serious Catholic, and I feel like I’ve patched a major hole in mine that has festered far too long. Such are the trials of being a convert – you start so many years behind those blessed to be Catholics their whole lives.

As a parent, I’m often struck by the tendency of other parents to have the lives of their children laid out before them and to act as if their parental fiat is all it takes for this to be. But sadly, in this age of “wisdom” I have near-to-never heard a parent suggest they hope Sally has a calling to a religious life or that Johnny become a priest. I think it a reflection on our society that some bemoan and bewail the priest shortage, some to the point of referring to it as the crisis of our times, but yet are possessed of a blissful unawareness perhaps even an intentional unawareness of the role they can play as parent in the path of this contemporary crisis. “We need more priests,” they say. “But not my son,” they whisper. God calls whom he calls to what he calls them and in the way and time he calls, and woe be it to that person that would tempt God’s child from the path God has laid out before him.

I address you, Christian families. Parents, give thanks to the Lord if He has called one of your children to the consecrated life. It is to be considered a great honor – as it always has been – that the Lord should look upon a family and choose to invite one of its members to set out on the path of the evangelical counsels! Cherish the desire to give the Lord one of your children so that God’s love can spread in the world. What fruit of conjugal love could be more beautiful than this?
— Pope John Paul II, Vita Consecrata n. 107

As reported here and here, Cardinal O’Malley has dipped his toe in the blogging waters. We should all hop over there and check it out and offer our support for this endeavor. This is a truly great way to open up the Church and her leaders and make them more accessible to the 21st century man and woman. It’s my not-very-humble opinion that this type of real-time and honest communication is the beginning of the road out of the mess the child abuse scandal has caused. I think this is the type of openness the Second Vatican Council had in mind. Let us pray his endeavor meets with success and inspires more of our leaders.