Ubi Petrus

No, sadly I wasn’t able to go. But after reading Fr. Martin Fox’s reports here, here and here, a heretofore unfound determination welled up inside me. Every once in a while someone tells a story and you feel like you’re right there watching it happen – for whatever reason, that was my reaction to these posts. I missed it this year, by the grace of God I won’t miss it next year. Will you?

I was debating whether to write anything today, given that I’m far from the most authoritative source on the subject, but after reading Father Larry’s post at Eyes of Faith I’ll let him do the talking. My question to you, good friend, is this: have you done your part today to work for an end to abortion and the culture of death which holds our world so seemingly firmly in its grip? I’m not usually one to push this issue since I have historically found an excuse to keep me from performing some sort of act, either of penance or extra prayers or what have you.

Through some miracle I noticed that the church right near my house had its lights on each morning when I came home from dropping the kids off (the advantages of working from home periodically) and lo and behold, they now have daily Mass at 8:00. I walked in just as they were finishing the Rosary – there were probably around 20 people or so, not bad at all.

So starting the day with Mass is good enough usually. Then I suggested to my son that instead of taking a nap he could pray the Rosary with me. Much to my surprise he gleefully jumped at the chance, asking only which Rosary he could use. There is something uniquely edifying about praying with your own child. And to top it off, he suggested of his own volition that we should do this every Monday, Wednesday and Friday when I’m home in time. It is a great stand of theology that God gives that we may give back, and that in giving back we receive even more greatly. My son just may make me holier than I would have made myself… Deo gratias! So…if you haven’t done anything “special” today, maybe right now is a good time to find something, even if it is a small thing.

From then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s God is Near Us, a homily on Acts 2:42:

And so I beg you, do not allow this breath of prayer, however pressed you may be, to cease in your everyday priestly life. We need the breath of prayer. You will see how it bears fruit. Let prayer spread its influence in the congregations. In order that the Eucharist may live, they need this space of prayer, which is open to us through the praise of God, rendered possible by praying vespers together. Praying the rosary and the stations of the Cross, everything by way of prayer that has developed in the fullness of the Christian faith – we need it again today. We need it especially in a world that is bored amid the perfection of its occupations, that is not just preoccupied with itself but wishes to be touched by him who alone can give our lives meaning.

Personal pious devotions have long been one of the vertebrae of the Catholic faith, and their setting aside in recent decades as antiquated and outmoded has proven to be a painful reminder of how much we don’t understand ourselves. These devotions, these models of prayer, some have considered ‘accretions’ but I suggest that they when properly formed and properly utilized were natural and organic formations of the Spirit working in the Church to reach to more and more of those who strain toward the God they can never fully know in this life. As the Pope says elsewhere, our Churches must once again become fully alive, places where Jesus is rarely left alone, that the life given by the Life may flow out from the doors of our churches at the sounding of “Ite, missa est!” God has given us a history that we might remember it as our paternity, not that we might dismiss it as arcane.

Do you wish your son to be obedient? From the first, “but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph 6:4). Never deem it unnecessary that he should listen diligently to the divine Scriptures. For there the first thing he hears will be this: “Honor your father and your mother” (Ex 20:12), so you will win your reward

Never say that the reading of Scripture is the business of monks. Am I making a monk of him? No. There is no need for him to become a monk. Why be so afraid of a thing so replete with so much advantage? Make him a Christian. For it is altogether necessary for laymen to be acquainted with the lessons derived from this source – but especially for children. For theirs is an age full of folly; and to this folly are added the bad examples derived from the pagan myths, where they are made acquainted with heroes so admired, who are slaves of their passions, and cowards with regard to death…

…I do not say this to prevent you teaching him these things [politics and worldly knowledge], but to prevent your attending to them exclusively. Do not imagine that the monk alone stands in need of these lessons from Scripture. Of all others, the children just about to enter the world specially need them. — St. John Chrysostom, homily to the Ephesians

As if doing this properly was not already enough of a concern for me, this is like being hit over the head about it. There’s nothing like a Father of the Church leering at you and thundering, “attend to your duties!” to get your attention. I only wish there were more books out there like Mike Aquilina’s The Fathers of the Church to continue to push forward, to keep me from settling in to the comfortable. Okay, so there are many out there which I simply need to find, but this one is a masterful work. I’m probably not done referencing this book, nor will I be likely to any time soon.

The most basic Christian gesture in prayer is and always will be the sign of the Cross. It is a way of confessing Christ crucified with one’s very body, in accordance with the programmatic words of St. Paul: “[W]e preach Christ Crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Hews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:23f). Again he says: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2). To seal oneself with the sign of the Cross is a visible and public Yes to him who suffered for us; to him who in the body has made God’s love visible, even to the utmost; to the God who reigns not by destruction but by the humility of suffering and love, which is stronger than all the power of the world and wiser than all the calculating intelligence of men. The sign of the Cross is a confession of faith: I believe in him who suffered for me and rose again; in him who has transformed the sign of shame into a sign of hope and of the love of God that is present with us. The confession of faith is a confession of hope: I believe in him who in his weakness is the Almighty; in him who can and will save me even in apparent absence and impotence. By signing ourselves with the Cross, we place ourselves under the protection of the Cross, hold it in front of us like a shield that will guard us in all the distress of daily life and give us the courage to go on. We accept it as a signpost that we follow: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mk 8:34). The Cross shows us the road of life – the imitation of Christ.

One does wonder if the depth of the symbolism of such a formerly frequent act has not been lost on this generation. Cardinal Ratzinger brought out this wonderful depth in his The Spirit of the Liturgy in the above quote. It seems so many find it another aspect of Catholicism that was to be shunned along with pious devotions, something that was quaint and antiquated, something that kept us from “relating” to others in this world. I say it is an act we need to recover, something whose depth we need to rediscover, since while we are in this world, we are not of this world. It is in doing the small things that great things are accomplished, and it is God who makes this happen. So…have you made the sign of the cross today?

Indolent Server has a very interesting question posted here. Just how long should a homily be at your “normal” Sunday (i.e. not Easter or other High Holy Day)? In my opinion and experience, 10 minutes is about right, but do participate in the discussion. The only thing worse than holding a wrong understanding is to do so and never be corrected, so if you disagree, pour it on!

I’ve just begun reading Mike Aquilina’s wonderful book, The Fathers of the Church. While I haven’t yet made my way through much of it, I now have an inordinate hankerin’ to find a copy of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, among many others and really dig into patristics in a major way. The field is so rich, and their words so eloquent, one cannot spend any time with them and not feel changed in some way.

This little snip is from St. Ignatius of Antioch, written during his travel to Rome to face execution under the emperor Trajan. To read his graphic description of what he knew awaited him and yet to see it immediately countered with his great desire to face this test, or in his terms, to “attain to Jesus Christ” is at once unnerving and heartening. Would that we all could face the challenges to our faith made by this world with such enthusiasm and vigor.

Pardon me: I know what is for my benefit. Now I begin to be a disciple. And let no one, visible or invisible, envy me that I should attain to Jesus Christ. Let fire and the cross; let the crowds of wild beasts; let tearings, breakings, and dislocations of bones; let cutting off of members; let shatterings of the whole body; and let all the dreadful torments of the devil come upon me: only let me attain to Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Having worked for the first part of my professional career at a college, I have a little bit of an insider’s view (or so I like to think) on what people in higher education are like and think. First, suffice it to say the old saying that “the battles in academia are so fierce because the stakes are so small” is entirely true. Aside from that, however, the following quote from Timothy O’Donnell’s article on academic freedom in this month’s Crisis magazine is something I only wish more in Catholic higher education would read and contemplate.

The university exists for one specific purpose – to help form and shape the minds of its students in their search for the acquisition of truth. In this noble effort, the cultivation of an appreciation of the good and the beautiful is also crucial, for as John Paul II stated in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Catholic university’s goal is “to help students think rigorously, to act rightly and to serve the cause of humanity better.”

A Catholic university’s specific task is consecrated to this goal of using the light of faith and sound reason in the service of truth. In uniting these two orders, which characterize so much of what is best in the Catholic tradition – epitomized in the writings of Aquinas and many other Fathers and Doctors of the Church – there is an openness to the fullness of reality that is often lacking in the secular model of the university. Sound philosophy and theology, faithful to the roots of their disciplines, have a crucial role to play within the structure of the university community, particularly in the pursuit and preservation of academic freedom.

The article as a whole is an excellent reflection on the concept of academic freedom qua freedom. As such, it reminds us that freedom in any sense is not license, but rather ensuring the recipient has been equipped with sufficient knowledge and skills to understand how to do the right. Perhaps it is time for those in this country, indeed the rest of Western civilization, to become re-educated on exactly what true freedom is, what it entails, and what it requires. Perhaps then we could see the first steps of coming around the corner on this raggedy ride we seem to be on. One can hope.

In her post on the issues raised by Bishop Trautman regarding the new translation of the Roman Missal, particularly the pro multis component, Amy gave us this little nugget:

After we attended the Byzantine liturgy at Christmas down in Knoxville, Michael observed that one of the fruits of a liturgy like that (and remember, it was in English), with its chant, movement, constant back-and-forth between congregation and priest/deacon, incense, iconostasis, etc., was that it rouses curiosity. It prompts you to ask questions, it inspires you to think and to seek because it is not all laid out like a pancake on your plate. Face it. God is Mystery. Who is God? How can God be, what is the power of this Love and Mercy? Is it possible that in this mess of world, redemption awaits me, you, all of us, invites us, entices us? It is not about willful obtuseness. It is about, at some level, imaging the reality of God’s Presence, even as we acknoweldge the reality of that Presence. That is what sign and symbol is all about. By flattening the symbols, by making all very ordinary, we communicate that God is ordinary, that there’s nothing much to this religious business, nothing much at all.

Christian faith is this amazing, heady mix of paradoxes and contradictions. The gospel is grasped by the simple, by children. God is here, right here among us. But that God is …well…God, One mysterious and immanent all at the same time. Pastorally concerned liturgy seems to end up in this odd place in which, because the symbols and rituals are stripped, made ordinary and endlessly explained, we understand far less than we did before.

Now, neither of us is about to suggest that those who care about good liturgy flee the Latin rite for the nearest Byzantine rite church, but the rest of the point remains. Mystery. In recent years (and even not-so-recent years) it has been the butt of many concerns and even quite a few jokes. You know, how the nun at school would explain anything she didn’t know as “it’s a mystery”. But we needn’t descend to that level. Does it not say something of the current state of the liturgy that the “preferred” response to the Mysterium Fidei is one that in fact is invented and not a translation of any approved Latin response?

But back to mystery. In times past people complained that it was not “mystery” but “obfuscation” that was the goal of the clerics, with their back to the people, their whispered prayers et cetera. One need only look at the lived experience (to use a term so popular with those interested in changing what they feel like changing) of those who have experienced both forms to see the effect of an honest participation in both. It’s an experience of the “other”, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes uplifting, but always of “other”, not of “same”. If liturgy deprives us of the experience of “other” for the comfort of conversation just like we have anywhere else, it has deprived us of that one chance we have to bring us out of where we are today to where God would have us be.