Ubi Petrus

Or, perhaps, who do you know, and how? Fr. Daren Zehnle posted a fantastic homily for Trinity Sunday and within you’ll find this nugget:

If we do not know him whom we love we run the risk of loving a false notion or impression of God, a shadow of God, as it were; we run the risk of loving a god made in our own image. Far too many people today love God as they imagine him to be rather than as he truly is because they do not truly know him, because they do not seek his face (cf. Psalm 105:4).

These are they who love a god who does not care what we do but simply accepts us as we are. These love a mistaken notion of God whom they say wants nothing more of us than that we be good people; that it doesn’t matter what we think, believe, wear, listen to, speak or buy. These also are they who believe God to be somehow distant and lonely, aloof from the cares of the world, the Creator of all who has since distanced himself from his creation.

He sounds positively Ratzingerian. Which is also to say, he’s dead right on the mark. The Church, and indeed the world, needs more homilies like this. That sound you hear is God calling us back to the faith delivered to us by the Fathers, often at the cost of their blood and built upon His Body and His Blood. Go. Read. Be edified. Then … do something about it!

Kansas City Catholic has a wonderful post on his Bishop taking his seminarians on pilgrimage. It certainly seems Bishop Finn has taken a concerted interest in vocations in his diocese, and it looks to be having positive results. This reminds me… The Diocese of Manchester will be having a Seventh Trumpet Mass and Eucharistic Procession for vocations this coming Sunday, on the Feast of Corpus Christi. With any luck, I’ll see you there!

Just as a reminder, it is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is not a jazz fest. Not even if Father mentions that you are an accomplished jazz pianist. Ah, the pains of substitute priests. The Mass is the Mass, a jazz fest is a jazz fest and never should the twain meet. ‘Nuff said. *grumpf*

That’s one of the first questions, and the hardest to answer, whenever someone is thinking about undertaking a new experience. For those life-changing experiences, that question is often followed quickly by “how does it work”; these two questions then usually repeat in varying order over and again due to the intensity of the questioning. If you know anyone who is contemplating a vocation to the priesthood, Fr. Jay Toborowsky at Young Fogeys (I guess, by definition, I’d probably be one of them) has some beautiful reflections on the nine-year-anniversary of his ordination and his first Mass.

I think his analogy of the process to Holy Orders to courting, engagement and marriage is a very good one (at least from the “never been close to Holy Orders” perspective) because it approaches the subject from an angle most people are at least fairly familiar with. One other reason to point those contemplating The Jump here: his obvious love of his vocation. It provides a good opportunity to point out the fact that recent surveys have shown the priesthood to have the highest job satisfaction. Certainly, those surveys is no reason to jump for the collar, but they do give the lie to the meme that priests are always disgruntled. Anyway, enough of my rambling. Go. Read.

Whew, it feels like forever since I’ve had a chance to sit down and blog. Okay, it’s been over a week – no wonder I was starting to twitch… Anyway, over at RCP a couple of days ago there was an exquisite post examining the hermeneutic of continuity (the hermeneutic itself, not the blog). At times educational, insightful and inspirational, it deserves your attention even if it is on the long side. I’ll start with the conclusion and let you re-start at the beginning.

I ask you: What paths do we have before us on which we can choose to move forward? We can dismiss his plan as naïve and ineffective, making snide remarks behind his back. We can distrust him, essentially labeling him as a deceiver who is using this idea of harmonizing Vatican II with the rest of Tradition as a means of leading the flock astray. Or we can follow his lead as our spiritual father, putting our trust in him and putting into action his hermeneutic.

Mike Aquilina has a portion of an interview with Carl Sommer, author of We Look for a Kingdom: The Everyday Lives of the Early Christians up here. The book indeed looks rather interesting – a look into the lives of the early Christians, but not just from an ecclesiological or theological or apologetic perspective but rather one which reconstructs their very daily lives without the filter of what is important to us now. The whole interview looks rather interesting, but being a liturgical nit like I am, thi sin particular caught my attention.

The anti-liturgical bias, which manifests itself outside Catholicism in the more charismatic forms of worship, and within Catholicism in the spirit of experimentation that has prevailed in the past thirty years, has had a more subtle, but nonetheless real, effect. The assumption that the words of Scripture that we read in the Liturgy of the Word, and the salvific act of Christ that we memorialize in the Liturgy of the Eucharist need somehow to be packaged and marketed have led to a trivialization of the Gospel message itself. I recently heard Donald Trump assert on TV that “Nothing sells itself.” That may be true of the products of this world, about which Mr. Trump knows more than I. But the Gospel can and does sell itself every day. We need to get out of the way, and let the ancient Liturgy speak for itself.

Indeed, if Christ Himself does not “sell” to someone, how self-important must we feel if we think we can add something to Him out of whole cloth? Certainly we are His hands and feet in this world, as it were, but that only works when what we give comes from our unity with Him, not from outside or solely from within ourselves. Indeed, “get out of the way, and let the ancient Liturgy speak for itself.”

I know there are some out there who dislike stained glass windows in churches. Even after hearing the “but they make the church so dark” explanation it still makes absolutely no sense to me. But hey, I have quite the capacity to be obtuse, so I’ve generally left it alone as an effort to be nice. Until today.

Through some as-yet unverified miracle my kids and I were able to leave early enough this morning to make it to Mass before school. I’ve always wanted to do this more with them, but school starts very early and Mass therefore even earlier so it’s just never happened. For almost the entire time nothing out of the ordinary happened (it strikes me now just how … obtuse … that sounds) – until Mass was over and we were gathering our things. My daughter looked up at one of the stained glass windows in the church and asked, “Daddy, what is that picture about?” Needless to say, I panicked until I recognized it as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. So I explained told them the story of the Good Samaritan, explained its meaning to them as best I could to kids their ages and then told them that all the windows in this church are made like that, to tell a story that we can and need to learn from.

Far from making the church dark, that window opened a ray of light on the minds of both of my children and provided me a teaching moment I may never have otherwise had. In that one moment, two childrens’ minds were expanded and I was challenged both to display my faith and to make it understandable to others. To be blunt, show me how to do that with a clear pane of glass. If you think stained glass makes the church too dark, ask my kids about the Good Samaritan. If you think it’s too dark maybe it’s because you’ve been staring at the pane too long and not taking in what is going on all around it. Our churches can and should, indeed must, speak to us – there is far too much to revelation to leave it just to words.

Yesterday the New Hampshire Union Leader had this story (emphasis mine):

Attorney General Kelly Ayotte and Assistant Attorney General Will Delker will speak on the state audit of the Diocese of Manchester’s sexual abuse policy Thursday, May 24, at Millette Manor, directly behind St. Louis de Gonzague/St. Aloysius Church, 48 West Hollis St. Nashua.

The talk, sponsored by the Greater Nashua affiliate of Voice of the Faithful, will take place, at 7PM

Ayotte and Delker will review the diocese’s actions to fulfill its obligation to cooperate with the state in establishing effective child protection policies and procedures. The second annual audit was released earlier this month, in the midst of tensions between the state and the church that could end up in court.

Yes, that wonderfully Church-friendly and ever-helpful VoTF. The same one you can get excommunicated for being a member of in some dioceses. If the AG intends to use this to show how impartial the audit was, chumming it up with VoTF is not exactly the best way to do it. And people wonder why I cast a suspicious eye towards this AG and these audits…

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has reached a settlement on 46 of its pending sexual abuse cases. CNA has the info:

Los Angeles, May 16, 2007 / 08:52 am (CNA).- Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles announced yesterday that the archdiocese will have to sell its headquarters so that it can meet its financial obligations to “the alleged victims of clergy sexual abuse.”

I’m not really sure where to go with this. Selling the Chancery is a very interesting symbolic move if nothing else. According to the Cardinal, no parishes or parish schools will be affected by the property sales to cover the expenses. Diogenes, however, notes that there are still hundreds of cases left. There are only so many ways all this will work out, and the ones that don’t hurt other innocent people keep getting further and further away. Satan certainly has gotten his pound of flesh out of this whole situation…