Category Archives: Theology

“Conscience is a window to Truth.” – Rev. Wojciech Giertych, OP, Theologian for the Papal Household

Wojciech_Giertych_810_500_55_s_c1

ROME, November 4, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Conscience is a window to truth, according to the pope’s theologian. And an act of conscience is an act of reason, not something to be confused with feelings.

Father Wojciech Giertych, Theologian for the Papal Household, aka Master of the Sacred Palace, sat down with LifeSiteNews during the final week of the Vatican’s Synod on the Family to discuss some of the issues considered during the international gathering of bishops called to address challenges to the family.

Father Giertych did not take part in the synod, and he was therefore not privy to any of the closed discussion occurring there, nor was he able to speak to specific synod developments.

However, the one on-call theologian for the pope, Father Giertych is a valuable resource on the Church’s teaching. And he was able to offer clarity on some of the moral areas discussed so widely at the synod.

Given the underlying question of conscience during the synod gathering, LifeSiteNews asked Father Giertych about the prevalent indifference to sin in society and its implications. He concurred that there is an absence of a sense of sin today in many parts of the world, with the effects carrying over into real consequences for people’s lives.

“If the perception of moral truth is unclear, then people are lost,” Father Giertych said. “People aren’t quite sure what is right and what is wrong.”

Following this, conscience is now often cited to allow permission for people to act on their impulses and desires, without regard for sin or consequence.

Specific to the synod, a term that received attention was “inviolability of conscience,” which seeks to establish an individual’s personal conscience as paramount, without necessarily first defining conscience.

Father Giertych told LifeSiteNews that we have to be careful in what we mean by the term “conscience.”

“Conscience is the act of practical reason,” he stated.

“Many people identify conscience with feelings,” said Father Giertych. “Feelings are secondary; conscience is a window to truth. … The conscience has to be formed to see the truth.”

We should not identify our conscience with our feelings, he continued. Rather, we have to go to the truth of the matter. And application of conscience is not an arbitrary thing.

“The idea of a subjective conscience, that I invent my moral principles as I go along – this is absurd. This is absolutely wrong.”
“You have to perceive the truth of the matter,” stated Father Giertych, “by reason.” This means taking all factors involved into account.

There are three specific criteria that determine an individual’s perception of the truth related to an act of conscience, Father Giertych told LifeSiteNews. These are the intention, the object of the act, and the circumstances. “If one is missing, then the whole act is inappropriate.”

The truth of an act of conscience can vary according those criteria.

One example he explained was the question of whether a doctor should amputate a patient’s limb. This is an extremely serious thing, and it would not be appropriate to take the limb in a medical setting where it could be saved. However, it is another matter entirely if leaving the limb will kill the patient.

Father Giertych clarified that while the conditions that establish the criteria surrounding an act of conscience can vary, the definition of conscience and its application do not.

“The idea of a subjective conscience, that I invent my moral principles as I go along – this is absurd. This is absolutely wrong,” he told LifeSiteNews.

The concept of conscience permeated much of the synod discussions, as it directly relates to the moral issues debated there.

Among the most hotly disputed matters was that of Holy Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.

Father Giertych revisited for LifeSiteNews the fundamental question of who should present him- or herself for the Eucharist.

“Every individual before he receives Holy Communion has to see that he receives the Communion worthily, believing this is the body and blood the soul and the divinity of Jesus Christ given under the species of bread and wine,” he said, “and that the individual is in a state of grace. That means that individual is not aware of having committed mortal sin.”

When someone is in a state of grave sin, Father Giertych said, he must be absolved of his sin before presenting himself for Communion.

“If that is the case, then it’s required to go to Confession and be absolved of the sin,” he stated.

A perfect conversion is necessary for worthiness to receive Communion, the papal theologian continued, and that means a conversion toward God and an aversion to sin.

The same can be said of any temptation, Father Giertych explained, as it is in the case of Catholics living objectively in a situation that is contrary to the moral truth.

No one is owed Communion; rather, it is a gift from the Lord to be given proper regard and handling.

“The graces of God we receive as a gift from God,” said Father Giertych, “and so we have to persist in an attitude of gratitude. … Whereas if we approach the gifts of God with our list of demands, it destroys the purity of our relationship with God. So any sort of sense of entitlement is incorrect. It’s inappropriate.”

“The teaching of St. Paul is clear,” the theologian explained: “we have to be worthy to receive the Eucharist, we cannot receive it unworthily, and affirmation of sin makes a person unworthy.”

When asked about the idea often expressed that Communion is not a prize for the perfect, but medicine for the sick, Father Giertych clarified that this does not negate the elements necessary to be worthy of receiving Communion.

“The sacraments are a nourishment,” he said, “but they’re nourishment that has to be received in truth, and in the pure relationship of gratitude towards God, and in the recognition of the light that God has given us.”

“The graces of God we receive as a gift from God, and so we have to persist in an attitude of gratitude.”

Father Giertych pointed out that the Commandments and moral teaching transmitted in the Church are also a gift, and that one must accept all of the gifts God gives to properly accept any.

“We receive Jesus not only on the sacraments, but also in the teaching that accompanies the sacraments,” he said.

And Father Giertych dismisses the idea of a supermarket approach, saying, “You enter the supermarket: ‘I want this, no, I don’t want that. … But in our relationship with God, we cannot impose upon God our own list of demands. ‘I want these graces, I don’t want those other graces…’ If we are pure in our relationship to God, we accept them all.”

To the argument that the Church must adapt Her teaching to align with society’s standards today, Father Giertych counters that today is not at all different from any other time in that no justification exists to allow the Church’s principles to be compromised.

It’s not a novelty that times change and the Church would face new challenges, he told LifeSiteNews.

The Church had to invent certain practical ways to help people to live the fullness of the Gospel in the past, he said, but the fullness of the Gospel has not changed.

“Human nature, the sacraments, divine grace, what we receive from Christ and the identity of the Church, the mission of the Church has not changed. [T]he principles have not changed; human nature has not changed. And the guidance that God gave us ultimately in the Word made flesh, in Christ, that does not change.”

Regarding the concept discussed during the synod of Church decentralization, Father Giertych was quick to correct a misconception that the Vatican controls everything. He said the term decentralization refers to government.

He also clarified that the Church has always defended the concept of subsidiarity – the idea that it’s always best to handle things on the local level whenever possible.

“The local bishop should address his individual diocese’s problems by applying the Gospel, Church teaching, and tradition.”
But the idea that any doctrinal matters could be managed at the diocesan level is wrong, he said, as it is not the local bishop’s place to do so.

Individual bishops must handle issues in their respective dioceses, but only within the confines of upholding Church teaching. A bishop cannot decide doctrinal issues because he hasn’t the authority, as the Church’s teaching comes from the Church and therefore cannot be changed.

“The local bishop should address his individual diocese’s problems,” said Father Giertych, “by applying the Gospel, Church teaching, and tradition.”

Love,
Matthew

“Offer it up!” -Redemptive Suffering

keep-calm-and-offer-it-up-7

God’s Infinite Wisdom, Love, & Plan for Mercy for Whole World:  Christ on the Cross!  There is no other way!!  There is nothing more necessary, nothing more sufficient!!!  Nothing more pleasing to the Father-God; the Creator of Heaven & Earth, the Great I AM!!!  The Author of all Life!!!  Yes, Jesus!!!  Yes, Jesus!!!  I say:  Yes, Lord!!!  Amen.  Amen.

However elegantly constructed, something seems missing in our explanations of suffering. That missing thing is Someone.

Excerpted from “The Truth of Catholicism” with permission of HarperCollins.

“Offer it up to God, for the souls in purgatory or in reparation for your own sins.” That stock answer (which is almost never heard these days) strikes many Catholics today as lying somewhere between quaint and cruel. Perhaps there was something more going on here, though. For that answer attempted to link our suffering here and now to the redemptive suffering of Christ, and to the purification that the grace of Christ can work in our own lives and the lives of our dead friends and relatives. That is no small thing. Besides, as a famous Catholic writer of liberal disposition once said in criticizing the contemporary Catholic loss of a sense of redemptive suffering, “What else are you going to tell the kid as the dentist comes at him with that drill?”

Suffering, in the Catholic view of things, is a mystery. By “mystery,” Catholic theology means not a puzzle to be solved as Sherlock Holmes would do, but a reality that can only be grasped and comprehended in an act of love. There is no “answer” to the problem of suffering in the sense that there are answers to questions like “Was Alger Hiss guilty?” or “What is two plus two?” The Church has always believed and taught that there is a different kind of answer to the question “Why do we suffer?” That answer takes us directly into the heart of the Church, which is Jesus Christ.

That Jesus Christ is a suffering redeemer has been a shock and an offense since the first days of Christianity. The challenge of belief in a redeemer whose victorious strength is displayed in his weakness may be greater today than at any other time in the past two thousand years, given our culture’s resistance to the idea that suffering is the necessary path to beatitude or human flourishing.

But that is the mystery — the profoundly human mystery — of suffering. Dogs and cats and pandas feel pain. Only human beings suffer. That fact should suggest that there is a link between suffering and the essence of our humanity. Pondering that link is an opening into the entire Catholic story about the world and about us. In that story we meet an even more astonishing proposal. God’s answer to suffering is not to avoid it, or deny it, or blame it on human folly. God’s answer to suffering is to embrace it — to enter the world in the person of His Son, to redeem suffering through suffering.

Redemptive Suffering

The Bible, Pope John Paul II notes in his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris, is a “great book about suffering.” In it we encounter many instances of that “pain of the soul” which is the worst form of human suffering: the death of one’s children, one’s spouse, loved ones, the fear of annihilation, barrenness, exile, persecution and mockery, loneliness and betrayal, the prosperity of the wicked amid the misery of the just, unfaithfulness and ingratitude. Suffering, in the biblical world, clearly has to do with evil. We suffer when we experience evil.

Still, the Christian conviction, drawn from the first chapter of the Hebrew Bible, is that creation is essentially good. Evil is not a coprinciple of creation, as in other ancient religious systems. If the world God created is essentially good and yet there is evil in the world, evil and good must be somehow related. Evil, John Paul writes, “is a certain lack, limitation, or distortion of good.” Illness is a deprivation of health; a lie is a distortion of the truth. We suffer, the Pope suggests, because of evil, but that very suffering points us toward a good. Suffering is caught up in the interplay of good and evil in the world. Suffering is enmeshed in the mystery of human freedom.

The Bible sometimes describes suffering as a punishment for the evil we do, but that punishment, the Pope suggests, is also linked to good. The punishment “creates the possibility of rebuilding goodness” in the person who suffers. This, John Paul underlines, “is an extremely important aspect of suffering.” Suffering opens up possibilities for the breakthrough of good, for “conversion,” for our becoming the kind of people who can enjoy beatitude with God, because we “recognize the divine mercy in this call to repentance.”  AMEN!!!  AMEN!!!  AMEN!!!!  Praise Him!!!  Praise Him, Church!!!  Praise Him!!!!!  Let the Earth resound with the Glory of God!!!!  AMEN!!! AMEN!!!!  AMEN!!!

Still, the Pope suggests, the mystery of suffering is not ultimately susceptible to rational explanation. However elegantly constructed, our explanations leave us dissatisfied. Something seems missing. That missing something, the Pope suggests, is in fact someone: Jesus Christ.

God’s love, which was so great that it burst the boundaries of God’s inner life and poured itself forth in creation, is “the ultimate source of the meaning of everything that exists,” including, of course, the meaning of suffering. Learning that “love is…the fullest source of the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering” requires not a rational argument, but a demonstration. That is what God has “given…in the cross of Jesus Christ.”

The entire life of Christ points inexorably toward the cross. Jesus’ human life is a growth into the world of suffering to which he responds by his healings. Those healings, both physical and psychological, are signs that the Kingdom of God, a world beyond suffering, is breaking into this world. Yet even as he heals the suffering, Christ suffers. He experiences exhaustion, homelessness, the misunderstanding of those closest to Him. When Peter rebukes Jesus for saying that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer, Jesus turns on the fisherman and calls him “Satan” (Matthew 16.23). Slowly, relentlessly, the net of hostility closes around Jesus, and the crux of the matter is at hand: the moment in which to link suffering to love in the passion of the cross.

Christ’s was an “incomparable depth and intensity of suffering.” Christ suffers as a man, but “insofar as the man who suffers is in person the only begotten Son Himself,” John Paul writes, Christ’s suffering has a cosmic and divine density that is “capable of embracing the measure of evil” contained in the whole of human history. As the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it in almost frightening language, we cannot imagine what agonies that entailed. What it would mean to “bear the burden of the world’s guilt, to experience in oneself the inner perversion of a humankind that refuses any sort of service, any sort of respect, to God” is beyond our comprehension. We cannot imagine the suffering involved when the Son takes on Himself all that the Father finds abominable. Yet that is what Christ suffers on the cross.

In Christ on the cross, we meet the triune God’s “eternal…plan…to clear out all the refuse of the world’s sin by burning it in the fire of suffering love.” Christ’s passion is the embodiment in history of “the fire that has burned eternally in God as [a] blazing passion,” the passion of resolute and radical love. God burns for the world to enter into this divine passion. For that to happen, the burning love of God in Himself must reach out to the world and redeem it by consuming everything in the world that is incapable of love, including evil and suffering.

That is what happens on the cross when, in obedience to the Father and in the most profound act of self-giving love, the Son takes all the world’s evil upon Himself, including the evil of death. On the cross, Balthasar writes, two eternal realities meet: “God’s fury, which will make no compromises with sin but can only reject it and burn it to ashes, and God’s love, which begins to reveal itself precisely at the place of this inexorable confrontation.” The cross is not the end of the story. On the cross, evil and death are overcome through redemptive suffering. Christ conquers suffering by his “obedience unto death,” which the Father vindicates in the resurrection.

In the mystery of God’s love, burning its way through the world and through history, the moment of catastrophe is, in truth, the moment of liberation.”

Love,
Matthew

Jaded? Try the tenderness of His Heart…

All_Saints_Catholic_Church_(St._Peters,_Missouri)_-_stained_glass,_sacristy,_Sacred_Heart_detail

This life, this world is a cold, cruel, arbitrary, brutal place.  We know this.  What saves us from total despair?  His tenderness of Heart.  Mt 11:28-29.

charlie_johnson

-by Charlie Johnson, a former Calvinist, is embracing his new Catholic faith.

“The world, it seems, is full of both crisis and triumph. The world’s problems can make any compassionate person feel helpless. The world’s problems can give any cynic his fodder. The triumphs? Well, often they can be hard to locate. Usually because they are small things. I saw a woman on TV handing out bottles of water to refugees in Hungary and I cried. What a beautiful thing. I can’t do that. I am not in Hungary. But I can do some small things. I can promote some small kindness today. A small kindness is a great triumph.

I have found that most people are rather pessimistic about the world. I know I have been. And seeds of that are probably still evident in my daily milieu. But when I discover truth – the truth of kindness -, it gives me immense hope. Once upon a time, when I suffered greatly under the weight of such intense existential questioning and depression, I never imagined I could experience a sustained disposition of joy. But this kindness has brought me great joy.

A Christian will not have an effective religion unless he sees its source. It is true that a man died for the lost and downtrodden. But a message of salvation, I think, is insufficient if there is no Great Affection intrinsically attached to it. I was a Christian for a long, long time before I knew that God liked me and smiled at my presence. God has great affection for me. And a kind heart – the likes of which no other kindness can match.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus is an image that provokes a confused reaction in me. I want to recoil at the sight of it. A bleeding heart, punctured by thorn. But then I cannot take my eyes off it. There is no greater symbol for human nature than the heart. The thing that keeps the blood going, giving life.

I cannot escape it no matter how much I try. I have tried to come up with a better answer. But all I know is that the most effective religious observance is knowing the kindness of Christ. When I have hated myself the only remedy I can find is kindness. When I have hated others the only remedy that has sorted me out is kindness. When the world goes black to me and all I see are grim faces of disapproval, the only remedy is the affectionate smile of a Savior.

The Sacred Heart tells us of Jesus’ humanity. That he is not an abstract idea or fanciful thought meant to encourage positive emotions. The Sacred Heart imagines the heart of Jesus, exposed and aflame with life. It is crowned with thorns, pierced through by an instrument meant to usurp his status as king. He wears it gladly. I keep the image of the sacred heart close to me because it reminds me of his burning love when I get jaded.

The most important thing ever is knowing Jesus and the tenderness of his Sacred Heart.”

“O Sacred Heart of Jesus, we place our trust in Thee!”  -traditional McCormick family aspirational prayer.

Love,
Matthew

Sanctifying Grace: Transformed/Fundamentally Changed/Renewed/Reborn/Made Whole/Made Completely New, not just covered…

grace_a_way_of_life

-from http://www.catholic.com/tracts/grace-what-it-is-and-what-it-does

Sanctifying grace implies a real transformation of the soul. Recall that most of the Protestant Reformers denied that a real transformation takes place. They said God doesn’t actually wipe away our sins. Our souls don’t become spotless and holy in themselves. Instead, they remain corrupted, sinful, full of sin. God merely throws a cloak (of snow over dung) over them and treats them as if they were spotless, knowing all the while that they’re not.

But that isn’t the Catholic view. We believe souls really are cleansed by an infusion of the supernatural life. Paul speaks of us as “a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17), “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24). Of course, we’re still subject to temptations to sin; we still suffer the effects of Adam’s Fall in that sense (what theologians call “concupiscence”); but God removes the guilt from our souls. We may still have a tendency to sin, but God has removed the sins we have, much like a mother might wash the dirt off of a child who has a tendency to get dirty again.

Our souls don’t become something other than souls when God cleanses them and pours his grace into them (what the Bible refers to as “infused” [“poured”] grace, cf. Acts 10:45, Rom. 5:5 Titus 3:5–7); they don’t cease to be what they were before. When grace elevates nature, our intellects are given the new power of faith, something they don’t have at the merely natural level. Our wills are given the new powers of hope and charity, things also absent at the merely natural level.”

Love,
Matthew

Natural Revelation & Faith

natural_revelation

Dr. Benedict Nguyen is the new Diocese of Venice Director of Communications and Office of Worship. He began his position on June 30 and comes from the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisc.
Dr. Benedict Nguyen is the new Diocese of Venice Director of Communications and Office of Worship. He began his position on June 30 and comes from the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisc.

-by Dr. Benedict Nguyen, M.T.S., J.D./J.C.L., D.Min (ABD)

“Let’s do some distinguishing here. It’s very interesting the great Aristotle says when we are defining things, we are really distinguishing things. We really want to see how things are distinguished from other things. What makes it itself? So let’s distinguish a little bit here. Philosophy and the term we use called “sciences”. Philosophy, coming again from two Greek words, philos, sophas, lover of wisdom, or love of wisdom. Philos, love, and sophos or sophia, wisdom. In philosophy, we study the truths based on natural revelation, studying true bits of information based on what is naturally revealed. Now what do we mean by “naturally revealed?”

In our Catholic tradition, we believe that there are two ways that God makes Himself known. The first way is through what we call the “book of nature”, what God has created. We see this immediately in Romans 1 when St. Paul says ever since the beginning of time, they know the Creator by the things that He has created (-cf Rm 1:20), I paraphrase. That means that natural things that are created, how God puts the world out, that’s part of reality; those things that are in relation to Him, such as the sunrise, such as the science, such as our reason, our philosophy, our logic. All these things that are naturally created by God, we pursue those, so that we know God exists, that He is there, and that we know about God. Not that He’s not love, that He’s all-powerful, almighty. Yes, I will say the incarnation of these things as well. These things are natural revelation, things that we see in the world. The Psalms tell us the heavens declare the glory of God (-cf Ps 19:1). The glory, the nature of God, part of his word, part of his nature, we discern from the things that are around us.

The source of philosophy, what we would call science, is natural revelation, what God has created. Reason alone can bring us to that. Reason has a certain methodology. The methodology of each reason is logic, logical principles. The Greeks understood that, even without divine revelation, even without Jesus Christ, they were able to understand if this then this then this, the syllogism. These things that we work out logically in our brains, these things came from reason alone. That’s the methodology. In empiricism, or what we would call in the modern world scientific method, by testing something and getting results, and retesting and doing it again, that methodology that we find in “science” is a way of pursuing God.

One of the worst and most tragic things that I think that has happened particularly to modern education is that we compartmentalize these things as if they were not related. So your religion department, your theological department is compartmentalized from your science department, compartmentalized from your English and history department, compartmentalize from the physical education. All of these things are compartmentalized. The way we Catholic Christians would look at it is that we would say, “No, these are one subject. The subject is God.” We are going to do it in all these different ways. In the science class, in this biology class, we seek God in seeing how organisms function. In this astronomy class, we seek God by seeing how stars and these things live out their function. In our history class, we seek God by seeing his hand through the events of human history. And our theology class – we’ll get to that in a little bit – we seek God in a different way. Reason alone in natural revelation, in philosophy is the methodology, but that methodology still it is the pursuit of truth, still is the pursuit of goodness, still is the pursuit of beauty, the transcendentals, and yes, that is the pursuit of God; philosophy, the sciences, based on what God has revealed. The book of nature, the book that God has laid out for us to read, and to decipher, and to understand, and to seek to understand that on reason alone man coming to a knowledge of God.

The world is wonderful. Science is wonderful. Philosophy is wonderful. Why? Because we’re trying to figure out God. We’re trying to pursue God in the things that He has made. Paul certainly understood this in Romans 1:20. That’s why the natural law of tradition comes in and says, “Well, wait a minute. If there are things in our nature, certain meanings and certain things that we understand about God, it must also be built in nature certain ways to act in response to that.” So just like we would respond to Jesus’ teaching, just like we would respond to what we would call supernatural revelation, we also respond to natural revelation in the way things are put together.

An example: My tongue was designed for various purposes. From the nature of the tongue, we know that it is meant to convey truth. When I use my tongue not to convey truth, we fail at honoring nature by doing what God has created is supposed to be meant for. That’s why we call it a lie. That’s why we call it a sin, because it goes against nature. It goes against natural revelation. It goes against what God has revealed to us to be so, so that we can pursue Him.

For example: natural revelation would be understanding that God is all-powerful using reason alone. Aristotle came to the conclusion that not only does God exist – even if he didn’t call Him God, as we know God, but he knew that a supreme being must exist, and that supreme being must also be almighty because of the nature. There’s certainly philosophical proof of that. That would be a natural revelation. There would be no way that Aristotle could fully grasp that God is a Trinity from reason alone. Certainly we have reasonable explanations, but at the end of the day those explanations can only reflect that God is a Trinity, and not prove that God is a Trinity. I certainly think the philosophical reason to show that it doesn’t go against reason, but that God is a Trinity is simply a fact that is revealed to us, hence we call these things mysteries. Not that they contradict reason, but that they go beyond reason. Now those who are not Christians, when they hear something like “beyond reason”, they think it’s a copout for us. It certainly isn’t. If something went against reason that would be a cop out for us. That would be us trying to say, “No, I know that this isn’t reasonable. I know this isn’t true, but we’re just going to except it anyway.” That is not the faith. That is not Christian. That’s not Catholicism. That is not God.

Contradictions do not exist in our faith. Things that go beyond reason certainly do, and they happen all the time. I’ll give you an example. A person who was very atheist at the time was talking to me. He said, “I can’t except your notion of mystery.” We were talking about this very thing. I said, “I can’t except contradiction either, but mysteries of my faith aren’t contradictions.” I said, “You know what? You accept mysteries as well. There are things that go beyond reason that you accept.” He said, “Can you give me an example?” And I said, “Yes. The number system.”

Who was ever counted the end of the number system? But yet we accept the number system. It is a mystery. It doesn’t contradict reason. It’s perfectly logical that numbers go on and on and on and on. But certainly it would contradict reason if we had two ones, or two twos, or whatever. But that a number system – a number line goes on and on – that’s perfectly logical, but beyond reason. Can we prove that numbers never end? The answer is there’s no mathematician that can prove numbers never end. Because of that, we still accept that numbers are infinite. It would be silly for a mathematician, an atheist mathematician, to say, “No, I don’t accept the infinity of numbers because I can’t prove it. I can’t prove that numbers never end, so therefore I don’t accept that.” Nobody would say that. All mathematicians accept that numbers never end, but yet they can’t prove it. It goes beyond reason; it goes beyond the scientific methodology. Supernatural revelation is when God comes and He reveals to us things that go beyond our reason, things that we would not have come up with, or that we would have so much trouble coming up with, we would have never gotten there.

That God is a Trinity, that Jesus Christ, the 33-year-old Jewish man who walked on the earth 2000 years ago was both a man, fully man and fully God, goes beyond our understanding. That God is full of justice and full of mercy at the same time goes beyond reason. Not against it, but beyond it. That all the truths of our faith are contained in the person of Jesus Christ. All of these mysteries of our faith, the mystery of eschatology, the mystery of Jesus Christ, the mystery of the Trinity, the mystery of the Holy Spirit. These are mysteries. These are beautiful mysteries. In the Catholic tradition, mysterium, in the Greek, it’s translated as sacramentum, as well. The sacraments, for us, are mysteries. Not contradictions, but mysteries that go beyond reasons that were revealed to us. As a matter of fact, in the eastern churches, both Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches, they refer to the sacraments as the divine mysteries. Understanding that these things go beyond reason and not against them.

Theology takes both natural revelation and supernatural revelation.  Both the things that have been created, and the things that have been revealed to us. Reason plus faith, Fides et Ratio. We accept natural revelation through reason and empiricism, scientific discovery, rational explanation, philosophy. Theology takes all that, presumes all that, and it’s top of that as well, the faith aspect. Faith here is not blind. Faith here is not shrugging our shoulders and saying, “Oh, well.” Faith here is accepting something based on the authority of someone else. Whereas the natural revelation, we accept the truth based on our scientific methodology, our proof, our reasoning it out. Faith, supernatural revelation, is accepted based on the authority of someone else. Now, at first that sounds like a copout. “Oh, it’s not reasonable.” Well, no, it is reasonable; it just goes beyond our reason. When it goes beyond our reason, we have to ask why, and the why is because we rely on the authority of someone else. That’s faith. Faith is not just throwing up your shoulders and accepting something that is untrue. Faith is accepting something as true because the person who has revealed it to us, the person who has said to us, “this is so,” they are credible.

I’ll give you an example. I have never seen China. I have never done an experiment to prove that China is there. I accept that China is there based on the credibility of the people who make movies, of people who make maps, of people who make books and photography/topography and things like that. I accept that it’s true. I have never done a scientific experiment to make sure that China is there. The only way I can do that is to actually go there. That would be natural revelation. That would be logic and empiricism. If I got on the plane and went to China. If, on the other hand, my teacher told me, “Yeah, there’s a place called China.” And I see photography, I see all these things, and I don’t doubt that these are fake; I believe that China is there. It’s pretty well established that China is there because these are credible sources.

What if that credible source was Jesus Christ – the God-man? What if that credible source was God, Himself? That supernatural revelation that has been revealed to us is credible then because God must be based on logic, all good, all-powerful, cannot deceive nor be deceived. If that’s the case, then what we have, the revelation that we have of God, is credible. So it goes back again to Jesus Christ and His revelation, if He’s crazy, He’s not credible – “aut Deus, aut malus homo”. If He’s a liar, He’s not credible. But if He is the Lord, He is credible. This revelation must be taken then because His credibility is there. So St. Anselm, in the High Middle Ages, in the 1200’s defined theology as “faith seeking understanding” – “fides quarens intellectum”. Faith accepting things on somebody else’s authority, but then now we’re driving that, and going after that to see the reasons for it. That is theology. Philosophy, natural revelation, reason and empiricism, and that theology taking all of that, not going against that, not going instead of that, assuming all of that, adding to it the credibility of Jesus Christ, the credibility of God, we accept on His credibility. Now that thing, that truth that we have accepted on that, we start to work out. That working out is theology. It’s the science of theology.”

Until the mid-19th century, what we call “science” today, was known as “natural philosophy”.

Love,
Matthew

What is theology?

Theology

The academic study of languages is informative and educative. The practical learning of languages is necessary when living in the culture where it is used. It is important to recall, in comparison, in terms of vocabulary, English is like a pint glass, Hebrew is like a shot glass, a more ancient language logically more limited, and Greek is like a pitcher, or so I have been told. I think this is important to remember as we tease apart terms, and all rationality is about defining one’s terms.

Dr. Benedict Nguyen is the new Diocese of Venice Director of Communications and Office of Worship. He began his position on June 30 2015 and comes from the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisc.
Dr. Benedict Nguyen is the new Diocese of Venice Director of Communications and Office of Worship. He began his position on June 30 and comes from the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisc.

-by Dr. Benedict Nguyen, M.T.S., J.D./J.C.L., D.Min (ABD) Dr. Nguyen taught me my Intro to Theology course at the Avila Institute.

“What is theology? If we talk about spiritual theology, before we can dive into that, we have to see what is theology. So the etymology of the word – which is the place, the root of the word – comes from two Greek words. “Theos” meaning God. “Logos” meaning a whole host of things. If you take a Greek lexicon – and for us academic nerds we call Greek, for some reason, a lexicon as opposed to a dictionary – really, it’s such a generic – if you take a Greek lexicon, and you look up the word logos, and if it’s a good lexicon, you’ll see that the entry for logos goes on for column after column after column, sometimes even pages. The word logos is so rich in meaning, it means logic. Logic. A logic. You know that logic itself comes from logos. So it’s science, a reason, a body of knowledge.

But we also know that John in his gospel starts with Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος (logos), “In the beginning was the Word”-Jn 1:1. So, yes, it is the study of God that if you think logos, the word itself, and start to unpack its meaning you’ll see that theology is so much more than just an academic study; so much more that just a body of knowledge. That you can see that God is so much more than some type of mathematical formula. St. Thomas puts it this way: the study of God and all things in relation to God. So it’s not just this fact about God, that fact about God. So when we speak about theology, it has to be more than just a body of knowledge. It has to be more than just facts about God. In other words, in our Christian tradition, which we’ll see if we follow this to a logical conclusion about logos, if we follow it through to that, we can see very clearly that you cannot be truly a theologian if you are not a theist, a Christian, a believer in that. You would have to qualify that word theology, such and such theology, such and such theology. We in our Christian Catholic tradition, we would have to say “No!”,theology is the entirety of truth, in the relation to God.

That’s what St. Thomas says theology is. It’s not just a bunch of tidbits of information. How we view theology is what we see everything in relation to God. So I always tell my students, if someone were to ask me, “Why are you Catholic? Why are you Christian?” My response would have to be “Because I accept everything that is real. Anything that is real, I accept that.” That entirety of knowledge, that entirety of truth starting from the existence of God all the way down to minutiae of scientific experimentation, and things like that. Is it true? Yes. And if it is, then that entire thing is what we would call theology, or what we would call Christianity, and what I would call Catholicism because those questions have to be there.

Does God exist? If you say yes, that separates you from the atheists and agnostics, those who don’t believe in God. We would accept that it’s true, but they must accept something that they hold not to be true. It is a contradiction. So with that then, do you accept that it’s a Trinity, that there are three persons in one God? I’d say yes. The Muslim and the Jew would say no. We’d part ways. We’d really go and go and going all the way to these truths, all of these truths that are laid out, that is the theology. That is the “theos logos”. That is this something that we study that is not just tidbits of information, but is ALL things in relation to God.

What is theology then? We’re distinguishing out between philosophy and theology. Theology is the study of supernatural truth. Theology is the study of God and pursuing God via not just natural revelation, but also supernatural revelation. What do we mean by this? Natural revelation is the things that God has created. Natural revelation – I’m sorry, yeah, natural revelation is the things God has created. The world, science, things like that. Supernatural revelation is those things that God simply has revealed to us. Supernatural revelation is usually those things that we could never have come up with on our own. Things are at least very difficult to come up with on our own; that we would need help in order to grasp, and to know, and to understand.”

Love,
Matthew

Sep 14 – Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Agnolo_Gaddi_-_Discovery_of_the_True_Cross_-_WGA08367
-by Agnolo Gaddi, ca 1380, “Discovery of the True Cross”, fresco, Santa Croce, Florence, Italy, please click on the image for greater detail

albertthomasdempsey

-by Br Albert Thomas Dempsey, OP

“When the people of Israel complained against God during their wandering in the desert, God sent saraph serpents among them. It was not until Moses, at the Lord’s command, raised a serpent on a pole that all who looked upon it were cured (Num 21:6-9). The Church Fathers saw in this a prefigurement of Christ’s mounting on the cross, a promise that future generations would be saved by considering His passion and contemplating its instrument, the cross.

From this belief arose both the practice of concentrating on a crucifix when praying and today’s feast, the Exaltation of the Cross, which honors the cross’ instrumental role in the salvation of the world. Yet, if Christ’s crucifixion occurred during the Feast of Passover in the springtime, why does the Church celebrate His cross on September 14, roughly five months later? To discover the answer, one must look to the earliest centuries of Christianity.

The hostility of Jewish leaders and the persecution of Roman authorities made it difficult for Christians to frequent places associated with the life of Christ. Moreover, the province of Judea was thrust into turmoil by three revolts against Roman authority in the century following Christ’s ascension (Jerusalem was razed in 70 AD and rebuilt as a Roman city in 135 AD). Nevertheless, the Christians of the Holy Land strove to preserve orally their knowledge of the locations associated with Christ’s life. Their efforts would bear fruit two centuries later.

Born of humble parentage in the middle of the third century in Asia Minor, St. Helena married an ambitious Roman soldier named Constantius and bore him a son, Constantine, in 272 AD. Though Constantius, who eventually became emperor, cast aside his wife for a more advantageous match, his son nevertheless remained faithful to her. When Constantine himself became the first Christian emperor of Rome, he honored his mother with the title of ‘Augusta’ and converted her to Christianity. The saint took to her new religion zealously, impressing her contemporaries with her abundant virtue.

When Constantine conquered the eastern half of the Roman Empire in 323 AD, at long last, Christians in the Holy Land could worship openly. In thanksgiving for his successes, the emperor ordered a number of churches be built with public funds at Christian sites throughout the Levant.

Despite being well into her seventies, St. Helena burned with a desire to walk the ground her Savior’s feet had trodden. Shortly after the Council of Nicaea, she set out on a pilgrimage to pray for her son and grandchildren, visiting numerous churches and bishops along the way and generously aiding the needy. However, she found that some holy places had been forgotten, while others were occupied by pagan temples to discourage worship. In Jerusalem, the site of the Lord’s burial had been itself buried under a mound of earth and surmounted by a temple to Venus; St. Helena ordered the temple razed, the earth removed, and a monumental church erected on the site.

The cross, too, had been hidden by the Jews, cast into a ditch or well and covered over. Moved by the Holy Spirit, St. Helena had sought it during her pilgrimage. Upon reaching Jerusalem, she prayed that the cross might not remain hidden and, lo and behold, three crosses were found among the rubble heaped over Holy Sepulchre.

Identifying the True Cross by its inscription, St. Helena rejoiced and sent the nails to her son, one for his crown and another for his bridle, a reminder, according to St. Ambrose, that rulers must be mindful of Christ and, by His grace, curb their appetites. St. Helena and St. Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, confirmed the identity of the cross by laying it alongside the body of a dying man, who miraculously recovered.

St. Helena died shortly after returning to Rome at the age of eighty. The church she ordered constructed over the Holy Sepulchre was completed in 335 AD and dedicated on September 14, when the cross was brought outside for the veneration of the faithful. St. Helena’s discovery of the cross and the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre have been celebrated jointly from the fourth century onward.

Medieval and Renaissance depictions of religious events are often, at first glance, puzzling: Christ is shown teaching not on the shore of Galilee but along the coast of Geneva, with its mountains and gothic spires; the martyrs tormented not by Roman centurions but Italian condottierri. Surely the artists knew better! In fact, most of them did. Yet they wished to impress upon their viewers that sacred history is not mythology: the gospels and the lives of the saints describe real events that happened to real people, as real as the windmills of Holland or the towns of the Rhineland.

Similarly, today’s feast and the life of St. Helena remind us of the fullness of Christ’s Incarnation: the Lord is not merely a tale told to children, nor simply a concept bandied about by theologians. Rather, in partaking of our humanity, He shared in our particularity. He lived not once upon a time, but at that time; not somewhere, but there; and He suffered, not in the abstract, but concretely, upon a cross, the fragments of which the faithful can venerate to this day. St. Helena, pray for us that we may never forget the historicity of Christ.”

Love,
Matthew

Ideas have consequences: the reality of conscience

pinochio_cute

jimminy_cricket_conscience

“Simply having a conscience is insufficient. The gift of conscience requires, directly implies, a grave responsibility for proper formation.” -MPM

dennis-buonafede-w300x225

-by Dennis Buonafede

“…The awareness of conscience transcends time and culture. The Persians, Egyptians, Assyro-Babylonians and Hebrews all had an awareness of conscience, Confucius and Mencius in China did as well. Socrates associated conscience with an inner warning voice which he believed had its origin in God. The Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius in Rome, saw conscience as the voice of reason; again a manifestation of the spark of the divine in humanity. The early Church Fathers and the philosophers of the Middle Age each developed their understanding of conscience based on their knowledge and experience. For example, along with Scripture, St. Ambrose was influenced by Cicero, St. Augustine by Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas by Aristotle. [iii]

So central is conscience to the human person that its very existence is an argument for the existence of God. Dr. Kreeft explains:

“The argument from conscience is one of the only two arguments for the existence of God alluded to in Scripture, the other being the argument from design (both in Romans). Both arguments are essentially simple natural intuitions. Only when complex, artificial objections are made do these arguments begin to take on a complex appearance.

The simple, intuitive point of the argument from conscience is that everyone in the world knows, deep down, that he is absolutely obligated to be and do good, and this absolute obligation could come only from God. Thus everyone knows God, however obscurely, by this moral intuition, which we usually call conscience. Conscience is the voice of God in the soul.” [iv]

While today we describe conscience as a “feeling” that something is right or wrong, it would be more accurate to center conscience in the intellect, hence it is the knowledge of what is right and wrong. Yet “it is intuitive knowledge rather than rational or analytical knowledge, and it is first of all the knowledge that I must always do right and never wrong, the knowledge of my absolute obligation to goodness, all goodness: justice and charity and virtue and holiness; only in the second place is it the knowledge of which things are right and which things are wrong.” [v]

We see in Dr. Kreeft’s explanation that conscience is a metaphysical awareness. When we discussed the First Principles,[vi] we saw that one of the First Principles in the order of Being is the Moral Order, namely, that good ought to be pursued and evil avoided. Human beings, embedded in this metaphysical order, and gifted with intellect, are intuitively attuned to this reality. [vii]

The advent of Christianity did much to develop our understanding of conscience, but within the last few centuries a change in understanding has crept into the Western mindset. Conscience has become associated more with feeling than with fact and it enables individuals to circumvent what would seem to be common sense. In Catholic circles, this exultation of personal conscience is what “allows” Catholics for Choice to claim that they can support abortion and all forms of artificial birth control “in good conscience.” Even their main publication is entitled “Conscience”. [viii]

St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) foresaw this development when he wrote the following lament on the state of conscience to the Duke of Norfolk:

“[It is]the right of thinking, speaking, writing and acting, according to their judgment or their humour, without any thought of God at all. They do not even pretend to go by any moral rule, but they demand, what they think is an Englishman’s prerogative, to be his own master in all things, and to profess what he pleases, asking no-one’s leave, and accounting priest or preacher, speaker or writer, unutterably impertinent, who dares to say a word against his going to perdition, if he like it, in his own way. Conscience has rights because it has duties; but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations. It becomes a license to take up any or no religion, to take up this or that and let it go again, to go to Church, to go to Chapel, to boast of being above all religions and to be impartial critic of each of them. Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been superseded by a counterfeit, which the eighteen centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it, if they had. It is the right of self-will.” [ix]

Lessons from Pinocchio

In 1883, the Italian author Carlo Lorenzini published a book entitled Pinocchio, a story of a mischievous puppet that was brought to life and became human when he learned the value of self-sacrifice. Walt Disney produced a film in 1940 that kept the basis of the story but made Pinocchio more readily lovable than the original. Also, in the Disney version, the role of Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio’s conscience, was given a more prominent role.

The story of Pinocchio is a moral tale, but also has a more profound metaphysical element to it (which the original writers may or may not have been aware of). In the Disney version the Blue Fairy gives life to a wooden puppet that was created by a lonely carpenter named Geppetto, who made a wish that the puppet could be a real son. After a series of adventures Pinocchio learns self-sacrifice and the Blue Fairy makes him “human”.

In fact, Pinocchio was human the moment he had that principle of Life which was both rational and volitional. The movie showed us this when the first thing that Geppetto had Pinocchio do was to go to school. His “substance” was human, his “accidents” or “attributes” were those of a puppet. [x] What his choices and actions did was to make him either more human or less human. In the movie, Pinocchio goes to the Island of Pleasure and begins to transform into a donkey. The moral here is that denial or neglect of our true nature leads us to descend into a more materialistic existence, one more fitting to animals than humans, something that we can see plenty of evidence for in our Western society, especially among the young.

Pinocchio’s transformation at the end of the story, arising from his unselfish behaviour, was not a change in substance but a perfection of it. Unlike the Englishmen in St. Newman’s Letter, Pinocchio’s conscience did not lead him to self-will but rather to self-giving.

Ideas Have Consequences

It is obvious that our conscience alone is insufficient, as it needs to be formed and educated by solid moral teaching and example. Yet, at the same time, the Second Vatican Council declared that “Conscience is man’s most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths” (GS 16). From a philosophical perspective, the more we respond to a properly informed conscience, the more we conform to reality. The more we conform to reality, the more human we become. In the spiritual life, the Second Stage is often called the “Illuminative Stage” where, among other things, God’s grace illuminates and makes more sensitive our conscience.

When we examined Metaphysics we recognized that there is a logical (yet simultaneous) order in First Principles, beginning with Non-Contradiction and ending with the Moral Order. We also see in examining Human Nature, that we also have a logical (yet simultaneous) order in our being, starting with Reason that grasps the First Principles and ending with conscience; that desire to conform to the Moral Order. Our greatness is not that we can “know” reality but that we can willfully conform to that reality; not just to know truth but unite ourselves to Truth Incarnate, in cooperation with God’s Grace.

Pope Benedict, in response to a question on conscience, stated:

“In the Christian tradition, ‘conscience’, ‘con-scientia’, means ‘with knowledge’: that is, ourselves, our being is open and can listen to the voice of being itself, the voice of God. Thus, the voice of the great values is engraved in our being and the greatness of the human being is precisely that he is not closed in on himself, he is not reduced to the material, something quantifiable, but possesses an inner openness to the essentials and has the possibility of listening. In the depths of our being, not only can we listen to the needs of the moment, to material needs, but we can also hear the voice of the Creator himself and thus discern what is good and what is bad. Of course, this capacity for listening must be taught and encouraged.” [xi]

An End and a Beginning

Those readers who have been following this series may have noticed that philosophy, while “simple” and “common sense” in content, is difficult in comprehension. It is also time consuming. In God’s mercy, He aids our reason with Revelation and Grace. All of Human Nature is contained in the first four chapters of Genesis. The Law is found in the Ten Commandments. Our politics should be the Beatitudes. Yet unfortunately, we live in an age that has reduced Christian Revelation to just another option; equal among many.

As a Catholic teacher, my approach to the subject of philosophy is that it is a tool by which young people can be evangelized; it is what St. Aquinas calls the “Gospel of Natural Reason.” Focusing on the areas of speculative reason as outlined in Metaphysics and Human Nature, it is impossible not to come into an awareness of the Divine. Only willful avoidance of the Truth, as seen in the course of philosophical thought in the last five centuries, has led us to the point where Reason itself is in eclipse.

Yet speculative philosophy can only take us so far. Since human beings are, at their core, an acting person, they must know by which principles they ought to act. This leads us to the area of philosophy known as Ethics or Morals. It also includes Politics. Here we leave speculative philosophy behind and engage in Practical Philosophy or Applied Philosophy.

While I will be addressing specific moral and political issues, I will do so in the context of laying out the logical consequences and principles that flow from what we’ve discovered through speculative philosophy. Among the topics of discussion with be: “The Good,” “Happiness,” “Natural Law,” “Virtue,” “Principle of Double Effect,” “Human Rights,” “Solidarity” and “Subsidiarity,” among others.”

Love,
Matthew

Footnotes:

[iii] A good, yet brief, examination of conscience can be found at: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04268a.htm and the Catechism of the Catholic Church http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a6.htm

[iv] http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/conscience.htm

[v] ibid.

[vi] http://www.integratedcatholiclife.org/2015/06/dennis-buonafede-the-metaphysics-of-man-and-broccoli/

[vii] Of course, human history is rife with evil so our ability to know and do the good is limited. The doctrine of Original Sin explains why the intellect is darkened and the will is malicious. It also explains the need for the 10 Commandments to enlighten the Intellect and the necessity of Grace to give the Will the power to choose the good known by the intellect. Secular humanists, in contrast, place all their hope on “education” as if that was enough for men to change their behaviour.

[viii] http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/conscience/default.asp

[ix] Letter to the Duke of York, p.58 as quoted in: Newman Today, Volume 1, Ignatius Press, 1988, p.73

[x] See PRINCIPLE OF SUBSTANCE in http://www.integratedcatholiclife.org/2015/06/dennis-buonafede-the-metaphysics-of-man-and-broccoli/

[xi] http://annunciations.wordpress.com/2007/08/20/q-a-with-pope-benedict-xvi-formation-of-conscience/

“What judgments of God are not gifts?” -JRR Tolkien

the-crucifixion-1638

-“The Crucifixion”, Alonso Cano, 1638, 173 x 265 cm, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

“In order to perceive the true answer to the “why” of suffering, we must look to the revelation of divine love, the ultimate source of the meaning of everything that exists. Love is also the richest source of the meaning of suffering, which always remains a mystery: We are conscious of the insufficiency and inadequacy of our explanations. Christ causes us to enter into the mystery and to discover the “why” of suffering, as far as we are capable of grasping the sublimity of divine love. In order to discover the profound meaning of suffering . . . we must above all accept the light of revelation. . . . Love is also the fullest source of the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering. This answer has been given by God to man in the cross of Jesus Christ. (Salvifici Doloris, 13)”  -Pope St John Paul II

-by Joel Lovell, GQ, 8/17/15

“…the thing I’ve been thinking about the most since my time with Colbert is loss. The losses he’s experienced in his life, yes, but really the meaning we all make of our losses. Deaths of loved ones, the phases of our children’s lives hurtling by, jobs and relationships we never imagined would end. All of it. Among other things, our lives are compendiums of loss and change and what we make of it. I’ve never met anyone who’s faced that reality more meaningfully than Stephen Colbert. I suppose, more than anything, that’s what this story is about…

…he is the youngest of eleven kids and that his father and two of his brothers, Peter and Paul, the two closest to him in age, were killed in a plane crash when he was 10. His elder siblings were all off to school or on with their lives by then, and so it was just him and his mother at home together for years.

…He was completely traumatized, of course. And one way of contending with the cruel indifference of the universe is to be indifferent in return. But he was also raised in a deeply Catholic intellectual family (his father had been a dean of Yale Medical School and St. Louis University and the Medical College of South Carolina). And so his rebellion against the world was curiously self-driven and thoughtful. He refused to do anything his teachers required of him, but would come home every day and shut himself in his room and read books. “I had so many books taken away from me,” he said. “I read a book a day. Spent all of my allowance on books. Every birthday, confirmation, Christmas—books, please, stacks of books.”

He barely graduated from high school and then went to Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia only because a friend had applied there. He studied philosophy; he joined the school’s theater troupe. After his sophomore year he transferred to Northwestern’s theater program, where he was purely focused on drama. “I was doing Stanislavsky and Meisner, and I was sharing my pain with everyone around me,” he says in an interview that appears in Judd Apatow’s book Sick in the Head. “It was therapy as much as it was anything.”

And then he met Del Close, the legendary improv teacher and mentor and champion of the idea that improvisational comedy, when performed purely, was in fact high expressive art.

“I went, ‘I don’t know what this is, but I have to do it,’ ” he said. “I have to get up onstage and perform extemporaneously with other people.” He was part of the same Second City class that included Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello and Chris Farley. “Our first night professionally onstage,” he said, the longtime Second City director Jeff Michalski told them that the most important lesson he could pass on to them was this: “You have to learn to love the bomb.”

It took me a long time to really understand what that meant,” Colbert said. “It wasn’t ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get it next time.’ It wasn’t ‘Laugh it off.’ No, it means what it says. You gotta learn to love when you’re failing.… The embracing of that, the discomfort of failing in front of an audience, leads you to penetrate through the fear that blinds you…

…He said he trained himself, not just onstage but every day in life, even in his dream states, to steer toward fear rather than away from it. “I like to do things that are publicly embarrassing,” he said, “to feel the embarrassment touch me and sink into me and then be gone. I like getting on elevators and singing too loudly in that small space. The feeling you feel is almost like a vapor. The discomfort and the wishing that it would end that comes around you. I would do things like that and just breathe it in.” He stopped and took in a deep yogic breath, then slowly shook his head. “Nope, can’t kill me. This thing can’t kill me.”…

…That day after he got back from Michigan, we eventually got around to the question of how it could possibly be that he suffered the losses he’s suffered and somehow arrived here. It’s not just that he doesn’t exhibit any of the anger or open-woundedness of so many other comedians; it’s that he appears to be so genuinely grounded and joyful.

He sat silently for a while and then smiled. “Yeeeahhhh,” he said. “I’m not angry. I’m not. I’m mystified, I’ll tell you that. But I’m not angry.”

There were such depths in the way he said “mystified.”

It was hard to talk about these things, he said. “I want to answer in ways that are not pat. And so I want to take a moment and think of a way to answer that isn’t pre-packaged.”…

…Instead he said, “So my reaction when I hear that question isn’t”—he shifted into a somber, sonorous voice—“ ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about that.’ It’s that I don’t want to say this—ready?” He snapped his fingers and locked eyes with me in a pose of dramatic intensity. “MY. MOTHER.” His face softened. “But the answer is: my mother.”

He lifted his arms as if to take in the office, the people working and laughing outside his door, the city and the sky, all of it. “And the world,” he said. “It’s so…lovely. I’m very grateful to be alive, even though I know a lot of dead people.” The urge to be grateful, he said, is not a function of his faith. It’s not “the Gospel tells us” and therefore we give thanks. It is what he has always felt: grateful to be alive. “And so that act, that impulse to be grateful, wants an object. That object I call God. Now, that could be many things. I was raised in a Catholic tradition. I’ll start there. That’s my context for my existence, is that I am here to know God, love God, serve God, that we might be happy with each other in this world and with Him in the next—the catechism. That makes a lot of sense to me. I got that from my mom. And my dad. And my siblings.”

He was tracing an arc on the table with his fingers and speaking with such deliberation and care. “I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died…. And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.

“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that’s why. Maybe, I don’t know. That might be why you don’t see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It’s that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I’m grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.

“It’s not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can’t change everything about the world. You certainly can’t change things that have already happened.”…

…The next thing he said I wrote on a slip of paper in his office and have carried it around with me since. It’s our choice, whether to hate something in our lives or to love every moment of them, even the parts that bring us pain. “At every moment, we are volunteers.”

-by Sean Barry, SJ

“It’s strange to think of being grateful for difficult moments and experiences…And we also can find gratitude in the harder moments of loss and rejection…The surest way to find gratitude in these difficult moments is through prayer. That’s how we find “God in all things,” as the Jesuit motto goes. St. Ignatius taught that God is present and active within all people, things, and circumstances. In some instances, that is easy to see. At other times, it can be hard to see (or even imagine) God present in the messiness of our lives. Our task is to trust God’s presence is in the midst of each imperfect moment, and to lean into that reality through prayer, especially using the Ignatian Examen.

When I finally am able to find God at work in the midst of a situation, I can be grateful for some part of it. And this does not mean that I’m grateful for pain or hurt, either that I experienced or have caused. What it does mean is that I’m grateful for the good that has come out of these moments.

And so, whether or not it seems counter-intuitive, I can be grateful for those hard moments as well as the easy and beautiful ones. It is not always straightforward, especially since life and the world can be hard and full of brokenness and pain. And yet, if God is present in all things, then eventually, even if it takes years and a lot of processing, I can be grateful for even the difficult moments.”

“We could say that suffering . . . is present in order to unleash love in the human person, that unselfish gift of one’s “I” on behalf of other people, especially those who suffer. The world of human suffering unceasingly calls for, so to speak, another world: the world of human love; and in a certain sense man owes to suffering that unselfish love that stirs in his heart and actions.” (Salvific Doloris, 29)

“To suffer means to become particularly susceptible, particularly open to the working of the salvific powers of God, offered to humanity in Christ. In him God has confirmed his desire to act especially through suffering, which is man’s weakness and emptying of self, and he wishes to make his power known precisely in this weakness and emptying of self.” (Salvific Doloris, 23)

“Down through the centuries and generations it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace. To this grace many saints, such as St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and others, owe their profound conversion. A result of such a conversion is not only that the individual discovers the salvific meaning of suffering but above all that he becomes a completely new person. He discovers a new dimension, as it were, of his entire life and vocation.” (Salvific Doloris, 26)

Love, Praise Him & His holy will, His Providence,
Matthew

Jn 14:27

Good vs Evil vs Relativism: the ends never justify the means. Never. Ever. Ever. Never.

NeverEver

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.” – G.K. Chesterton

Here in Wisconsin, our legislature is debating the ban on sale of aborted fetal tissue, enflamed by the recent Planned Parenthood expose’ videos.  The dean of the medical school of the University of Wisconsin and a couple legislators have argued against this ban citing the benefits of medical research.  Clearly, I note, they are not catechized in Catholic teaching.

CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
PART THREE
LIFE IN CHRIST

SECTION ONE
MAN’S VOCATION LIFE IN THE SPIRIT

CHAPTER ONE
THE DIGNITY OF THE HUMAN PERSON

ARTICLE 4
THE MORALITY OF HUMAN ACTS

1749 Freedom makes man a moral subject. When he acts deliberately, man is, so to speak, the father of his acts. Human acts, that is, acts that are freely chosen in consequence of a judgment of conscience, can be morally evaluated. They are either good or evil.

I. THE SOURCES OF MORALITY

1750 The morality of human acts depends on:

– the object chosen;

– the end in view or the intention;

– the circumstances of the action.

The object, the intention, and the circumstances make up the “sources,” or constitutive elements, of the morality of human acts.

1751 The object chosen is a good toward which the will deliberately directs itself. It is the matter of a human act. The object chosen morally specifies the act of the will, insofar as reason recognizes and judges it to be or not to be in conformity with the true good. Objective norms of morality express the rational order of good and evil, attested to by conscience.

1752 In contrast to the object, the intention resides in the acting subject. Because it lies at the voluntary source of an action and determines it by its end, intention is an element essential to the moral evaluation of an action. The end is the first goal of the intention and indicates the purpose pursued in the action. The intention is a movement of the will toward the end: it is concerned with the goal of the activity. It aims at the good anticipated from the action undertaken. Intention is not limited to directing individual actions, but can guide several actions toward one and the same purpose; it can orient one’s whole life toward its ultimate end. For example, a service done with the end of helping one’s neighbor can at the same time be inspired by the love of God as the ultimate end of all our actions. One and the same action can also be inspired by several intentions, such as performing a service in order to obtain a favor or to boast about it.

1753 A good intention (for example, that of helping one’s neighbor) does not make behavior that is intrinsically disordered, such as lying and calumny, good or just. The end does not justify the means. Thus the condemnation of an innocent person cannot be justified as a legitimate means of saving the nation. On the other hand, an added bad intention (such as vainglory) makes an act evil that, in and of itself, can be good (such as almsgiving).39

1754 The circumstances, including the consequences, are secondary elements of a moral act. They contribute to increasing or diminishing the moral goodness or evil of human acts (for example, the amount of a theft). They can also diminish or increase the agent’s responsibility (such as acting out of a fear of death). Circumstances of themselves cannot change the moral quality of acts themselves; they can make neither good nor right an action that is in itself evil.

II. GOOD ACTS AND EVIL ACTS

1755 A morally good act requires the goodness of the object, of the end, and of the circumstances together. An evil end corrupts the action, even if the object is good in itself (such as praying and fasting “in order to be seen by men”).

The object of the choice can by itself vitiate an act in its entirety. There are some concrete acts – such as fornication – that it is always wrong to choose, because choosing them entails a disorder of the will, that is, a moral evil.

1756 It is therefore an error to judge the morality of human acts by considering only the intention that inspires them or the circumstances (environment, social pressure, duress or emergency, etc.) which supply their context. There are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object; such as blasphemy and perjury, murder and adultery. One may not do evil so that good may result from it.

IN BRIEF

1757 The object, the intention, and the circumstances make up the three “sources” of the morality of human acts.

1758 The object chosen morally specifies the act of willing accordingly as reason recognizes and judges it good or evil.

1759 “An evil action cannot be justified by reference to a good intention” (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Dec. praec. 6). The end does not justify the means.

1760 A morally good act requires the goodness of its object, of its end, and of its circumstances together.

1761 There are concrete acts that it is always wrong to choose, because their choice entails a disorder of the will, i.e., a moral evil. One may not do evil so that good may result from it.”

USCCB

Love,
Matthew