Three articles worth our time in seriously reflecting upon the life, work and service of Benedict XVI. Two of the articles are written by Connecticut resident and friend, John Burger, an exceptional journalist. The other is a published essay by Australian Tracey Rowland, a well-known theologian and expert on the thought of Benedict.
1. Benedict XVI, the pope of surprises
2. “One of the truly great”: Pope Benedict passes at 95 on the last day of 2022
A trail is forming of new Catholics in recent times in England. A careful observer will acknowledge that several now former Anglican bishops have reconciled with the Mother Church: the Catholic Church, that is, after a period of discernment that has questioned the increasing secularization of the CofE.
Most Catholics on this side of the pond would not be too aware of these events in the CofE, or even care. But they ought to care. Catholics outside the UK need to be aware of the trends not only in ecclesial polity but also in theological reflection, in particular the reality of Divine Revelation. These recent conversions are good examples of the horizon of faith and reason.
For my money, the point worth exploring further is Ashenden’s point:
“Evangelicals of [Peter] Forster’s generation were always alive to the primacy of the Holy Spirit. They believed in the miraculous conversion of the heart and the rebirth of the soul. But to their dismay, the generation that followed would find progressive identity politics more compelling than repentance and would exchange salvation for social revolution.”
Gavin Ashenden, a recent “convert” himself adroitly explores the phenomenon in the UK in a blog post, “The Conversion of Evangelical Bishops to Rome –A Diagnosis.”
Before the Catholic Church, East and West goes further down the D.I.E (diversity, inclusion and equality) trail, she better come to terms with the radical agenda and consequences of the CofE. It is true, and we have experience here, the CofE is not projected to be serving the Good News and tradition for much longer. The American equivalent, the Episcopal Church, has adopted DIE and is now no more than a social justice group, a club of old elites unconcerned about preaching the liberating word of Jesus Christ and nor is it impacted by the sacramentality of Tradition. When you abandon true, apostolic and one catholicity of faith and reason you become no better than a society of do-gooders.
This post was written for the Order of the Holy Sepulchre for January 8, 2022.
“The place where the educational process unfolds must be a place where all of reality is presented” (Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education, 133).
This blog post is less about an educational theory of two well-known theologians than about staying in front of the reality we are presented as a place where grace operates in our life, that is, the inner Life of the Holy Trinity. Grace is relational not a bag of good things given by God to make us feel good.
As we move into 2022 I think we are faced with some serious questions regarding our life and work as members of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. Being in realtionship with the Holy Trinity requires us to face life squarely and with certainty. How do the real events of life of the human person affect us personally or the Church at large? What or who responds to our human questions? Do we place our constructed utopias in the path as an answer to the thirst within the heart of man?
“What does your Lord require of you, but to look at all things as they really are, to account them merely as His instruments, but to believe that good is good because He wills it, that He can bless as easily by hard stone as by bread, in the desert as in the fruitful field, if we have faith in Him who gives us the true bread from heaven?… Doubt not, then, His power to bring you through any difficulties, who gives you the command to encounter them” (St. John Henry Newman, CO).
As 2022 progresses I hope that we find the reason and hope for living: Jesus Christ here and now. Intellectually many of us know that only Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is the answer and response to reality as it is. But does this fact impact us deep in our sinews? Nicodemus knew this when Jesus challenged him to question to whom did he belong. The same challenge remains for us when we consider our Noble Ideal: teach the faith, feed the poor, educate children, visit the elderly, or live in relation with our enemies.
May Our Lady of Palestine, pray for us.
St. John Henry Newman, pray for us.
May Blessed Bartolo Longo, intercede for us.
| The Portsmouth Institute is beginning today. “As I Have Loved You” is the them taken from Fourth Gospel and commented upon by saints and theologians alike for centuries. Regrettably the 2021 iteration is virtual but worthy of our attention, as always. Allow me to share a prayer that I think will capture the trajectory of the work to be done. The opening prayer for the Portsmouth Institute is composed by Prior Michael Brunner, OSB, Prior of Portsmouth Abbey and Chancellor of Portsmouth Abbey School. |
We pray, Almighty Father, you sent your Son to save us and demonstrate to us the infinite depth of your love for us. Your son gave us the new overarching commandment to love one another in the same radical manner by which he loved us. Give us, Lord we pray, the grace, courage and strength to love as he did, meek and humble of heart. Help us to not strike back at those who strike out at us. Help us to love those we do not like, those with whom we disagree, those who vilify us. Help us to respond to them by loving as Jesus did and not with harsh words. Help us to love our country by showing it the way of love by our living it. Help us to actively love the loveless, the hopeless and the faithless.May the way, the truth and the life be visible to the world in us. Guide us, Lord, on this path of love so that we do not deceive ourselves by following the path of our own loves. Forgive us our failures and consider our right intentions as we live and work and build in the ways of your kingdom. May everything we do be according to your will and for your greater glory, as we follow Jesus Christ the King of hearts. In His name we pray, Amen. |
The Institute is a collaborative work of the monks of Portsmouth Abbey and St Louis Abbey with key laypeople offering a great program on faith and reason for 2021. Remember, faith and reason go hand-in-hand and is particularly catholic in scope and depth (think of Benedict XVI).
I have known some of the presenters at this year’s Institute for some time, and recommend that you dive deeply with them into the content they offer. I am particularly excited to hear John Cavadini, a friend I met at UND but who is a native of North Haven, Connecticut (a suburb of New Haven). He’s a stellar scholar and a man with a great, loving humanity.
Somehow I stumbled upon Dorothy Day’s 1949 essay, “The Scandal of the Works of Charity,” and found it challenging enough to ask if it is possible for 21st century Christians to reclaim a life of charity based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Can we who profess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, worship the Blessed Triune God through the Divine Liturgy (or the Sacrifice of the Mass) assist our brothers and sisters in need?
According to Day, Peter Maurin has an answer for us to consider and to enact. In part he says,
To get to the people, he pointed out it was necessary to embrace voluntary poverty, to strip yourself, which would give you the means to practice the works of mercy. To reach the man in the street you must go to the street. To reach the workers, you begin to study a philosophy of labor, and take up manual labor, useful labor, instead of white collar work. To be the least, to be the worker, to be poor, to take the lowest place and thus be the spark which would set afire the love of men towards each other and to God (and we can only show our love for God by our love for our fellows).
Striking is Day’s comment that “WE ARE ALL devoured by a passion for social justice today” given all the talk and public demonstration for racial justice today. I tend to think that secular and church people alike have an anemic even wrong sense of what constitutes justice and social reform. Much of the rhetoric is pure fantasy –shallow at best. What is missing in the conversation and in action is Jesus Christ. What is missing is having, knowing, loving the Savior at the center of everything. What is missing is prayer: the sacred Liturgy (Mass and Divine Office, personal and corporate). What got my attention in Day’s essay is her mentioning of the Catholic spirituality she fostered:
We have daily Mass at the Farm, and we are permitted by the Chancery Office to have the Blessed Sacrament at all times while a priest is with us and we are blessed in having an invalided priest visiting us these past fifteen months or so. We have Prime and Compline, we have sung Masses for all the big feast days, we have reading at the table during retreats, and sometimes when there is no retreat but a feast day to be celebrated.
The loss of the Center means the acceptance of alternative forms of centering; if Christ is not the center then the vacuum will be filled by something counterfeit. It seems to me that Catholics have forgotten the source and substance of Day and Maurin and the cloud of witnesses (saints). The people who have really forgotten the Day-Maurin source and substance are those who run Catholic Worker Houses with their secular agenda and no Christ-center. Of course, there are a few exceptions like the Catholic Worker House operated by Larry Chapp and his wife in Pennsylvania.
The works of Charity, spiritual and corporal, are revealed in the Gospel but are also found in the Old Testament. But sticking with the Christian dispensation I notice that there is typically no mention of Jesus’ Good Word in the sermonizing of the clergy. The Catholics of East and West have neglected to preach on Matthew 25 while giving good witness to the scope of what of is revealed. The result is that real face of the faith community’s “performance of the works of mercy” has become bourgeois and has virtually vanished. This neglect has contributed to the crazy-talk of what justice really means and why we all need to have a concern for matters of justice.
If we are going to be serious about the recovery of Works of Mercy we need allow our hearts and minds and hands be moved by the Gospel and good worship of God. Nothing fake and scandalous. The true scandal of the Works of Mercy is that it forces us to move from being self-made persons to the recognition that we are the Lord’s. The injustices we face today, then, are resolved in true faith in the Heart of Christ. It is there we know to whom we belong.
Today, we have the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. This feast is a beautiful occasion to venerate and to make reparation for the flippant use of the name that means, God saves.
St. Paul in his Letter to the Philippians wrote, “So that at Jesus’ name every knee must bend in the heavens, on the earth and under the earth, and every tongue proclaim to the glory of God the Father: Jesus Christ is Lord” (2:10-11).
May all who reverently call on the holy name of Jesus know the saving power and healing love of God. Four gifts when reverently invoking the Holy Name:
1. help in bodily needs;
2. help in spiritual trials;
3. help against Satan and his temptations;
4. every grace and blessing through the Holy Name of Jesus.
With the Novus Ordo observance of Epiphany the two liturgical observances can cohere. Some may be familiar with the Holy Name Society, first organized in 1274 and granted the status of a confraternity in 1564. Connecticut used to have the HNS in great numbers and now reduced to a handful today. I can think of only one and even there it is only a social group with no apologetic thrust.
One point that brings this feast into focus for those of us who follow the Benedictine charism is that the feast necessarily involves reverence for the Holy Name of Jesus, especially if we take seriously the role intercession before the Throne of Grace and adoration of the Lord. Keep this in mind.
DID THE POPE REFER TO FAITHFUL PRIESTS AS ADOLESCENTS?
Kudos to Mark Castor for looking past the inflammatory and irresponsible Breitbart headline to the Pope’s actual words.
ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT OF THE POPE’S WORDS FROM THE VATICAN WEBSITE:
“In recent months, people have not been able to participate in the liturgical celebrations, but have not stopped feeling like a community. They prayed individually or in the family, also through the means of social communication, spiritually united and perceiving that the embrace of the Lord went beyond the limits of space. The pastoral zeal and the creative concern of the priests have helped people to continue on the path of faith and not to remain alone in the face of pain and fear. This priestly creativity that has won some, few, “adolescent” expressions against the measures of authority, which has an obligation to protect the health of the people. Most of them were obedient and creative. I admired the apostolic spirit of many priests, who went by phone, knocking on doors, ringing houses: “I need something? I do the shopping … “. A thousand things. Proximity, creativity, without shame. These priests who remained beside their people in caring and daily sharing: they were a sign of the consoling presence of God. They were fathers, not teenagers. Unfortunately, not a few of them have died, as well as doctors and paramedical staff. And also among you there are some priests who have been sick and thank God they are healed. In you I thank all the Italian clergy, who have shown courage and love to the people.”
(Pope Francis, Address To Doctors, Nurses and Healthcare Professionals From Lombardy, 20 June 2020)
“The Orthodox Church in the Time of COVID-19”
The Wheel Journal (@wheeljournal) has an extraordinary online Symposium “The Orthodox Church in the Time of COVID-19” is available on YouTube.
The conversation is moderated by Joseph Clarke. The panelists include: Archpriest Alexis Vinogradov, Sister Vassa Larin, Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun, Father Peter Scorer, Dr. Gayle Woloschak, Archpriest Andrey Kordochkin, Deacon Nicholas Denysenko.
I highly recommend listening the symposium. It will open up some new perspectives.
“When you see the year ending, thank the Lord, because He had led you into this cycle of years. Stab the heart [‘prick the heart’] reckon up the time of your life, say to oneself: ‘The days run and pass by, the years fill-up, we have progressed much of the way; What good is there for us to do? Will we not depart from here, empty and deserted of all righteousness, the judgment at the doors, the rest of life leads us to our old age.’” — St. John Chrysostom
