FRIDAY POTPOURRI: FREEZE FRAME

Dei Verbum paragraph 12

 

A mother, seeing her son make an ugly face at one of his friends pulled him aside and said, “Son, I want to tell you a story about a little boy who always made faces like the one you made.  One day his face froze that way and he was looked on as ugly by everybody.  Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?”

 

The little boy thought about it for a moment and said, “Okay, I’ll go play with him for a while if he doesn’t have any friends because of his face.”

 

Writings, stories, and the like are subject to interpretation and occasionally we can divine the wrong message; the author intends one thing, the listener receives another.  (Just ask a priest how often that happens with his homilies.)  Scripture is no less susceptible to this.  Though it is God speaking to us, He is speaking to us through human authors.  If we want to understand what Scripture is really saying we must first determine the medium that the author is using.  The Bible is not a book.  It is a collection of books – a small library containing books on poetry, history, stories, parables, music, and the whole lot.  A parable cannot be read in the same way that a book on history is read.  And sometimes history was recorded in a different (but no less accurate way) than modern history is recorded.

 

That being said, even though the Bible is many books, there must be unity among them.  The message must be consistent from beginning to end.  And interpretation of the Scripture (held firmly in check by Sacred Tradition among Catholics) must be consistent from first century to last.  This is where the Church plays a vital role in interpreting Scripture.  And by “Church” we do not mean three old men in Rome as the common fancy makes it out to be.  Chesterton would refer to it as the democracy of the dead.  It is the understood experience of the faith beginning with Apostles, the early Church Fathers, the lived faith of 2,000 years of Catholics, and how Catholics live the faith around the world.  It will not be the case that Holy Spirit will suddenly tell the pope that it’s now Okay to have same sex marriage or that baptism should only be performed on adults.  That is not the experience of the Church going back 2,000 years.  To be able to do that as many Churches do, would be to say what was truth in 1592 is not true in 2004.  It would be just as logical to say what is true at 2:00PM on Wednesday is not true on Thursday at 6:24AM.  Truth is either truth or it is not.  Modern culture says truth is subjective.  (But then is it truth?)  The Catholic Church holds that truth is always truth and it is universal (or it is not truth.)

NOTHING NEW?

Perhaps you have heard the brouhaha over the new teacher’s contracts in the Diocese of Cleveland.  I do understand the angst about them.  Essentially there is nothing different about them per se, but on the other hand there is something very different about them.

 

What is not different about them is that there is no new information in them.  What was implied before is now spelled out.  A public life lived in accord with the faith was expected before and is expected now.

 

What is different is now it is spelled out on more controversial topics.  Living in invalid marriages, publically supporting abortion rights, and a host of other points have been spelled out more explicitly.  This is partly in response to the new healthcare mandates, partly to help stave off litigation, and partly to reestablish a stronger Catholic identity in our schools.

 

Is it a good idea?  Not being a lawyer or a politician I am not sold either way.  But there is an aspect of this whole dust storm that is coming to light that illuminates a profound misunderstanding about what we are (supposed to be) doing as Catholic schools.  A reading of some Letters to the Editor as of late give example.

 

One of these letters read something like this: “It is a shame that the Catholic Church is forcing the issue on what constitutes a good Catholic.  By limiting the pool of teachers, we will be missing out on great educators, which can only harm our schools and our students.  We want our kids to have the best teachers.”

 

Such a statement betrays a deep confusion of the nature of Catholic schools.  A Catholic school is not a public school, it is not even a private school, it is a parochial school.  Unlike public schools which are becoming more and more limited in passing on culture, discipline, ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, or even God, and unlike private schools who are there to simply provide a superior education (hopefully), a Catholic school is also about the formation of the human person, imbuing ideas of the good with very clear ideas of what that is.  She passes on truth, concepts of what is holy, beautiful, and how one should live embracing the respect of life, family, the dignity of the human person, and all that entails with the 2,000 year understanding of the revealed truths of the faith.

 

It is culture that we are passing on, not simply knowledge.  If it were not for the faith and the culture we would close our schools or make them profitable private schools as has happened to so many of our colleges and high schools. 

 

So let’s say there is a police officer that comes to your child’s school to teach about staying off of drugs.  He is very effective.  The kids love him.  He is popular with the parents.  But he also has a website promoting illegal drug use and the kids know it.  He admitted to the kids that he regularly uses drugs though they should stay off of them.  He was quoted in the newspaper as saying that drugs should be made legal and available.  No matter how good he is in the classroom and while in the school building, do you really want him teaching your kids about drugs?

 

Our faith is a culture, not a set of facts in a book.  It cannot be taught like math.  It is caught, not taught.  No one can “teach Catholicism” while living a life contrary to it for then it becomes a dead message.

WORSHIPPING THE MIRROR

“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members,” so said the comedian Groucho Marks.  I would probably say the same thing about a Church.  I don’t want a Church that says I have no need to grow and develop.  Nor do I need a Church that validates my held beliefs.  I want a Church that challenges me, asks me difficult questions, shakes up my assumptions, makes me think, urges me to growth, and ardently desires to transform me into a saint.

 

Many Christian Churches have, for the large part, abandoned this vision.  I was riding with a gentleman the other day who proudly spoke of his Church and how they do not even expect him to make an effort to look like Church is anything special on Sunday.  “I can go in ratty shorts and T-shirt.  And the music is rock and roll.”  He was in his upper 50s.  I said, “Wow.  My parish is kinda headed in the opposite direction.  I think it attracts the younger families more.  It is my goal to expect more of them.”

 

The same could be said of philosophy and theology.  Many Churches (non-Catholic) have changed their beliefs to an extraordinary degree.  Go back to even the year 1900, and if we could do a graph, the rate of change would start slowly and then skyrocket.  Really, what teaching in most Christian denominations do not simply mimic popular culture?  Abortion, contraception, same sex marriage . . . gads, why even bother listing them all?  Modern Church is about worshipping what we already believe and enshrining it in our weekend services.

 

Cultures cultivate.  And our current culture is cultivating our Churches.  It reforms them, informs them, coaxing God to change His mind on virtually any popular topic on order to match ours, the enlightened ones.  Glad God is catching up.

 

It is one of the strengths of the Catholic Church that it is also so terribly cultural on a world wide (and historical) scale.  It is a culture that cannot be voted into changing, or coaxed into matching the local thought beliefs, or pressured into accepting outside influence on its theology.  It is designed to influence culture, not be influenced by it.  If your faith, parish, or diocese is not working to change the family, city, or nation for the good, then it is failing.  (If it is more influenced than influencing, it is dying.) 

 

It doesn’t mean anybody has to listen.  But we are not excused from being loyal to the truths of the faith.  For if we are not leaven, we are salt that has gone flat.

FRIDAY POTPOURRI: A STRONG CONSTITUTION

In the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church or Lumen Gentium (they really need a marketing person to make their titles more appetizing) the Church attempts to explain to the world who she is.  (If you’ve not caught on, this is the next document we are reviewing as suggested we do during the Year of Faith by our papal emeritus.)  In the first paragraph it states, “she proposes, for the benefit of the faithful and of the whole world to set forth, as clearly as possible . . . her own nature and universal mission.”

 

In deceivingly dense writing, the second paragraph takes us on a quick trip through salvation history pointing out that our creation through the second person of the Blessed Trinity was a totally gratuitous (in the best sense) act of our God, that it was redeemed by Him, and will eventually “return” to Him through the power of the Holy Spirit.  A Christocentric Church, She is caught up in the mystery and mission that God has set forth and hence will, in some sense, always be mysterious.

 

It is God’s power that is making His kingdom grow in the world and we are brought back to that original unity for which we were made primarily through the celebration of the Eucharist through which, “the unity of believers, who form the one body in Christ, is both expressed and brought about.”  So we are also Eucharistically centered.

 

When Jesus’ mission came to completion, the Holy Spirit was sent to “continually sanctify the Church . . .”  We are constantly made new and each given gifts to aid the Church (the Body of Christ) in Her mission.  The Church is bride calling out in the spirit to Her Spouse, the Bridegroom (Jesus) and “hence the universal (read catholic) Church is seen to be ‘a people brought into unity from the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’”  (Do you see where John Paul II might have begun getting his idea concerning the Theology of the Body?)  Cool stuff.

 

Gads!  And that’s just the first 4 paragraphs there is a lot more to glean out of it than what was presented here but this give you a taste.

PUTTING YOURSELF OUT THERE

If you are looking to get married you don’t hide things about yourself in order to lure someone into marrying you.  One of two things might happen as a result: 1) You will be somewhat unhappy hiding something for the rest of your life or 2) Your spouse will be feel angry and betrayed when whatever it is you are concealing becomes exposed.

 

For some reason (and I occasionally fall for it myself) preachers do the same thing in trying to “keep the numbers up.”  Dicey and controversial topics are not brought up in homilies, prayer services, or classes because we might lose people.  So leading up to the last election much of the Catholic Church was caught with its pants down trying to proclaim a message but unfortunately for much of the Church it was too late: Catholics did not need to be reminded about what our faith says about many of these touchy topics, they needed introduced to a mindset that produces these beliefs.  A pamphlet or a homily one week before the election aint gonna cut it.

 

There is a gentleman who works at St. Sebastian who happens to not be Catholic.  One day he stopped me and presents me with a list of topics ranging from abortion to health care.  “When was the last time you preached on any of these topics?” he asked me for he was greatly saddened that he had not heard any of this talked about at all at his church ever.  “Our faith is supposed to help us understand these things.  If we don’t hear about them at church there are plenty of other people out there working hard to have us think the way they want us to think about them.”

 

Now I admit that I am intimidated to speak on some of these matters.  But they are what they are – they are who we are.  It is not matter of politics – it is Catholic 101.  That some of these topics happen to line up with hot button issues going on in politics is just happenstance.  And we must be honest about who we are for we are in covenant together and that means full disclosure as one would hope a future spouse would offer.

 

Just one last note: I know there is some amount of wiggle room in some of these topics.  I am just saying we must talk about them as Church.  Only then can someone make a clear, full, and free decision if they want to be part of (or leave) this intimate Communion of people.

THE WHOLE BALL OF YARN

It was such a happy time when the law was changed and we could begin turning right on red. What a relief that was! No more senselessly sitting at light with no traffic is sight! When that law was changed, it did not have an influence on other laws to any great extent. We did not have to redefine stopping or driving or intersections or the definition of cars. Most laws are rather independent of each other in this way. Where this changes is when law starts touching on morals.

Church teaching is mostly faith and morals and at least within the Catholic Church it is very difficult to change a teaching on faith and morals without having a profound effect on other teachings. Unlike many Protestant denominations that see individual teachings as independent agents that can change if the church body thinks Scripture can be reinterpreted to support a particular issue.

It is not quite the same with Catholic teaching. Catholic teaching more like a great ball of yarn. You cannot take one strand and pull on it without affecting the whole ball. Catholic teaching is that solid and interconnected.

For example, some denominations see no problem in allowing same sex marriage. It is an independent issue and a decision on this matter affects only this independent teaching. Ta-da. However to change this one teaching would be to put much of Catholic teaching into question. How sex is defined will in part define for us what it means to be a human being. It makes us reevaluate what the purpose of sex is and what marriage is. That will change what it means to be in relation with each other and with our God. For such a radical change in the 2000 years of Church teaching would mean a change in the very fabric of what it is to be Church and how faith is handed on. It would mean that there is possibility of a complete cut with Tradition and that faith is not necessarily a thing to be passed on from one generation to the next for it may not be the same thing from one generation to the next.

Our faith teaching is solidly built on Scripture and Tradition, well thought out and heavily interdependent. That is not to say that there is no room for dissention. There is. To begin there is a hierarchy of belief, those things that are essential for being called catholic and those things that, while important, are not essential. Otherwise for a person to dissent the first step would be to know WHY, through Scripture and Tradition, a certain teaching is taught and how it is interdependent with other teachings and the ramifications of changing it.

So if someone is saying that a teaching should be changed because, “This seems more fair,” or “Jesus just wants us to love,” or, “this is more modern and where people are today,” run away.

Run very far away.