Spy Wednesday and Gnosticism

I just learned today from my pastor, who presided at Mass, that today during Holy Week is called "Spy Wednesday" inasmuch as the readings are about Judas. He took the occasion to preach about the Judas in each of us and, almost as important, about the current buzz over the Gospel of Judas. (See my post about that issue.)

Though I can't say the same for the congregation of mostly elderly women, I was deeply impressed with what he said about the Gnostic background and motivation of said gospel. Everything he said about Gnosticism's theology and spiritual effects was true and timely. If anybody there needed inoculation against the Gnostic gospel, they got it.

I wonder how many other priests are giving that shot. In the big cities and affluent suburbs, they should be giving it out freely.

Pennsylvania priest driven out by gays....in the priesthood

I know, it sounds sensationalistic and self-serving. But my experience as a student, a seminary adjunct prof, and a parish DRE confirms everything this unfortunate man says. Ponder it and learn.

The putative primacy of conscience

I've gotten good feedback from prominent ecclesiastics for an article I wrote for Pontifications: "The Primacy of Conscience: Real and Imagined." The imagined primacy of conscience has probably been the single biggest justification used by Catholics, clerical as well as lay, for dissent from definitive Church teachings, especially on moral issues. The real primacy of conscience is indeed definitive Catholic teaching. But it's vital to understand the difference.

At Zenit yesterday and today, Fr. Jospeh Koterski, Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, has given an interview in which he applies the real teaching to some controversial issues of the day. Both Part I and Part II are well worth reading. A lot of confusion would be dispelled if people took such words to heart.

Today's saint: Gemma Galgani

This is the sort of saint that most non-Catholics find incomprehensible and even many Catholics find embarassing when they bother to think of such people at all. That's one reason why I love her.

Best described as a "victim soul," she was miraculously cured in childhood by the archangel Gabriel of spinal tuberculosis. Persistent health problems got her consistently rejected by religious orders, so she lived a life of prayer, service, and penance, first in her own family and then, from age 21, in the home of a another family who generously took her in after she was orphaned. She conversed regularly with her guardian angel and was eventually granted the "stigmata," ongoing physical manifestations of the five wounds of Christ on the Cross. Demons regularly harassed her, physically and spiritually. She died, exhausted, at 25.

Her apostolate was one of prayer and example. She had little education, never preached or wrote anything for public consumption, and had no following of spiritual devotees in her lifetime. But Satan hated her so much that he abandoned his customary strategy of stealth to attack her openly and observably. In other words, she's the complete opposite of me. That's the other reason I love her.

Saint Gemma is a patron of orphans and pharmacists. Her intercession is also efficacious for "temptations" in the classical sense of the term: trials of any kind, especially those that draw one toward sin.

Alpha indeed

For the Archdiocese of Boston, Cardinal Sean O'Malley has just authorized the use of a new adult faith-formation program called "Alpha." Having been an adult faith-formation director in the past, I was curious about the program. And having perused the creating organization's Web site, I must say it's too bad that O'Malley is right.

Appropriately named, the Alpha program ought not to be necessary. It's like going back to the beginning that often never was: an adult version of what Catholics should be getting from the Church when they are in high school or college. By framing and motivating the fundamental questions of life, to which traditional Christianity provides the God-given answers, it gives the legions of ill- or non-evangelized adult Catholics a reason to care about church. They learn why a personal relationship with God, expressed and nourished by the Eucharist, is what gives lasting meaning to life. They even hear a little about how to have such a relationship. Imagine that! With admirable realism, the Alpha approach does not presuppose much knowledge of theology or even of distinctively Catholic doctrine. So we now have an excellent springboard for parish, family, and individual efforts already made in many parishes but are appreciated by only a few.

I'd love to lead such a thing on either a volunteer or paid basis. Thank you to the creators.

The Lord's Prayer for lawyers

I found this in a post up at the Catholic discussion group I used to manage. The person posting it does not give a source, but whoever the author is, they deserve some sort of award.

Our Father, whose predominant residence pattern is widely perceived as being in an exo-atmospheric environment, your name shall be treated, as a matterof course, in a reverential demeanor appropriate to existing protocol guidelines. It is to be hoped that, as an optimal result of the ongoing situational development, your form of governmental institution may be, in accordance with the appropriate procedures, finalized within the foreseeable future, in forms applicable to both bilateral and multilateral fora. It is therefore to be hoped that you will undertake the creation of the necessary administrative modalities to ensure the provision to recipient entities of requisite alimentary sustenance. Help our antagonists to recognize that any temporary, unvalidated, and erroneous presumptions of instances of our apparent non-compliance with duly undertaken obligations arise from their refusal to objectively assess the broad parameters of our clearly-demonstrated-over-time, historic pattern of full commitment and, most importantly, have no bearing on our relationship while noting that their consistent unquestionable pattern of non-compliant behavior introduces substantial concern over the sustained viability of their willingness to observe so essential a set of international obligations. We call upon you to reduce the availability of opportunities for any perceived deviation on our part from proscribed norms, both substantive and procedural, and reduce the willingness of our opponents to examine closely the facts of our position. For it is the Father, who has complete jurisdiction, and all encompassing authority indefinitely. Provide us with appropriate modalities for coming, with all deliberate expeditiousness, to closure, unless otherwise agreed between the parties.

Bullseye quote on today's young women

Over at Jimmy Akin's blog yesterday, Tim Jones came up with a marvelously astute observation:

For decades, girls have been taught how stupid (if not evil) men are, and then they are taught that if they want to really be a success in life, they should act more like men.

The context was a review of Pink's new, parodic music video "Stupid Girl," and he does not at all indulge himself with the childish generalization that all girls are stupid. In fact, Jones' point was that the fashionably tartish dress that girls—and, increasingly, not-so young-women—seem to be going in for is largely a reaction to the above-described double bind that females in our culture find themselves in. Read the post. Jones's points jibe perfectly with my own observations of life on the front line of the gender wars.

As of now, for example, there are as many female as male students in law, medical, and business schools, and there are far more women than men in college preparing for professional careers. Before the baby-boom generation has died out, therefore, women will likely be the majority of well-paid professionals. In traditionally male fashion, the stress in our society is on competition for prosperity, status, and power; women are about to win that competition. On the home front, women initiate divorce at least twice as often as men; when there are children involved, the wife usually gets the house and child custody and the ditched husband is forced to pay support; and of course, women have the sole legal say in whether or not to bring pregnancies to term. Marriage and family are thus looking like an increasingly raw deal for men. But are women happier as they accumulate power and wealth?

There's no evidence that they are. For one thing, and for easily understood evolutionary reasons, even highly successful women would rather not marry down; yet that's exactly what many women will have to do if they expect to marry at all; at the same time, men are slowly but steadily turning off to marriage and high-powered careers. Is it any wonder that increasing numbers of women despair of ever finding a stable marriage partner and turn to lives of fornication and/or single parenthood instead? Indeed the majority of women who initiate their divorces end up as single parents. Single parenthood is a tough row to hoe no matter how much money one has—I know, I've been one, and I was better off than many. Yet most divorced women would rather hoe that row than be with the men who are the fathers of their children. Says a lot, does it not?

Mind you, it does not say that men are any more evil or stupid than they ever were. Human nature just doesn't change like that. What it does say is that, for a variety of reasons of which the most basic is economic progress, women now expect more and tolerate less from men than they have throughout most of human history—and their standards, by and large, are not being met. Nobody is happy with such a state of affairs, whatever they may say. If it continues, our society is doomed.

As Jones has indicated, one of the ways in which females, especially younger ones, have reacted is by tarting themselves up. Girls want to be girls, women want to be women, but the only way our society seems to facilitate that anymore is by steering them into trashy sexuality. The irony, of course, is that women thus resume being the sexual objects for men that feminism supposedly freed them from being. The only difference is that, thanks to widespread contraception, legal abortion, and no-fault divorce, women can now treat men the same way. If they want to, that is. But do they really?

Again, I see no evidence that most do, and the few that do are not happy people. What I see all around is mass confusion and demoralization resulting from our culture's studied refusal to respect the natural differences between the sexes and its insistence on "liberating" everybody from pre-defined roles. Men don't know how to be men and women don't know how to be women anymore. Our intellectual élites can't even admit that there is such a thing as what-it-is-to-be-a-man and what-it-is-to-be-a-woman. There's no validation for achieving healthy gender identity because we've lost all but the most superficial ideas of what that might consist in.

For a thoughtful alternative to the mess, read this.

Suffering from the Church

I generally dislike collections of quotations. When followed as such, they tend to draw attention more to the speakers than to what is said. But in my rounds of the blogs last night, I stumbed on two isolated quotations that are just too good to pass up and comment on. This post is about the first.

It is from Flannery O'Connor, one of the best and certainly one of the most quotable writers of Catholic fiction in the twentieth century. My favorite quote of hers used to be her riposte to the lapsed Catholic Mary McCarthy. At a New York cocktail party crammed with cultured despisers of Christianity, McCarthy sensitively conceded the beautiful "symbolism" of the Eucharist. O'Connor could only say: "Well, if it's just a symbol, to hell with it"—a reply all the more effective for being unstudied and unpolished. That was the Holy Spirit at work, driving quite a stake through a vampire's heart. But here's an O'Connor quote just as good:

I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic....I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

That is now my favorite O'Connor quote. Even I, a far lesser talent, can say the same for myself. If it would not mean betraying confidences, reopening old wounds, and indirectly impugning a few innocents, I would be quite specific about how I've suffered from the Church. But my own sob story is not needed to establish what's important. What's important is that O'Connor's observation ought to apply to every adult Catholic even if it doesn't.

In fact, any serious, faithful, cradle Catholic has suffered from the Church. Some suffer because, having grown beyond emotional and spiritual adolescence, they find that their faith is at once more mature and less compromising than that of their own clergy. Some, by contrast, have suffered in such a way that they have never matured beyond spiritual and emotional adolescence. These days especially, it is evident that we suffer as much from the Church as for her. But we do so willingly because she is the body of Christ, in which our old selves are being crucified for the world's sake as well as our own. Don't forget that when the next ecclesiastical outrage surfaces.

The Gospel-of-Judas thing

A couple of old friends have asked me what I think of the current discussion about the Gospel of Judas. Many bloggers have already commented, some brilliantly. Examples: Mark Brumley (via Carl Olson) and Al Kimel. They express my overall attitude, but I think it important to highlight something we're seeing over and over again in this post-Christian age.

Many people seem to imagine that all this earnest talk is theologically significant. It is not. The Church knew quite well about the Gospel of Judas, and for that matter the gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and a few others dubbed by Elaine Pagels as "the Gnostic gospels." In the second century many people read them and some put credence in them. In response, the Church determined that such "gospels" did not accurately convey the faith of the Apostles. There's really no good reason to doubt that. And I said as much to Elaine when I took New Testament from her at Columbia way back in 1979 when she was finishing The Gnostic Gospels, which is still in print and has influenced millions.

Remember that, throughout that century, there were people who personally knew people who had personally known the Apostles. The question whether the Gnostic gospels were faithful accounts of Jesus, his life, and his teachings could accordingly be answered fairly and accurately in a recognizably human way. We know the answer given: only the four "canonical" gospels were judged reliable as records of the apostolic faith despite their evident divergence on some points, which were of course also known at the time. In the case of the Gospel of Judas, we have the testimony of St. Irenaeus (circa 180) that the Catholic Church even then considered it unreliable. Thus:

Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.

So, what we have here is a case of Christianity vs. Gnosticism, an argument that took place nearly 1,800 years ago and whose result we have known almost as long. Gnosticism was deemed bunk in the second century, and it's still bunk. Why, then, is it now being revived as though it were something new and exciting?

Simple: many people are bored with Christianity and prefer almost any of its competitors, including but not limited to Gnosticism. Hence the rage for The DaVinci Code, a piece of shoddy anti-Catholic propaganda masquerading as fiction. Almost anything, fact or fiction, that can be used to cast doubt on traditional, "mere" Christianity gets played up in the media and discussed in every quarter. The buzz thereby generated is then taken as evidence that something important is afoot and that the Church in on the defensive. It's the same thing one sees in lots of other areas. The mere fact that something is controverted, no matter how bad the reasons why, makes into a "controversial" issue something that, objectively speaking, there is no good reason to controvert. I shouldn't have to multiply examples of that.

I suppose that's part of the price we pay for living in a free, secular society. But it sure gives Old Scratch a wide opening indeed.

Bible memed

OK, I'm one of the privileged few whom Al Kimel at Pontifications has memed with Bible questions. My ego having been duly massaged, my answers follow each question.

1. How many Bibles are in your home?

Seven, all translations. I've thought about getting a Greek NT and Septuagint; but as those are available online now, I decided to save the money.

2. What rooms are they in?

Well, since I live in one room, using a garage to store the spillover, the answer is all too simple. I have only the NAB in my living space since, while not the best, it's the Catholic liturgical translation and thus makes it easiest to read with the Church.

3. What translations do you have?

NAB, Jerusalem, NIV, RSV, NRSV (Catholic), Douay-Rheims, and KJV.

4. Do you have a preference?

Sure: the Jerusalem, with Study Guide. The Catholic Study Bible, based on the NAB, is also OK, but the translation is pedestrian.

5. Nominate an interesting verse.

Isaiah 55:11.

Palm Sunday homiletics

Over at Open Book, Amy Welborn has asked for answers to a question from Fr. Martin Fox of Bonfire of the Vanities, namely, how long the homily on Palm Sunday should be given the length of the Gospel reading. I'm giving my answer here for two reasons.

First, Fr. Fox is a frequent commenter at Pontifications, where he and I often support each other in controversies. And so I want to give him more exposure. He is a solid priest and a useful blogger. Second, I am concerned about the content even more than the length of Palm Sunday homilies. So as not to derail Amy's thread, I'll declaim on the content issue here.

Because of the Gospel reading, the introit procession, and the blessing of palms, the Palm Sunday Mass is much longer than most. That alone is hard on parents of young children, for whom even a regular Mass is often taken up with fitfully successful efforts to keep their children well-behaved. That's a good argument for a shorter-than-usual homily at Masses attended by such families. But it's not a good argument for such a homily at other Masses. I know it's often said that standing during the long, dialogical Gospel reading is hard on some people; but if they can't stand that long without inviting a night of joint or foot pain, there's no good reason why they can't sit.

Even so, that issue is sometimes much ado about little. Of more concern to me is the issue of content. Since the readings are about the Passion, so too the homilies tend to be. I think that's a mistake. We have Holy Thursday and Good Friday to focus homilies on the Passion; on Palm Sunday, however, we are commemorating Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The contrast between that and the Passion is so obvious as to be a given; the focus should be on explaining it—a rich theme indeed. I found a good example here, but I'm sure some reader can point me to an even better one. I've looked at Augustine and Chrysostom, but their Palm Sunday homilies are on the passion narratives from Matthew and John, whereas today's Gospel was Mark's Passion.

The contrast in question has always hit me hard. So often in life I've seen people be acclaimed, even loved, only to be turned on later by some of the same people for understandable but wrong reasons. It's happened to me; and if it hasn't happened to you, you're lucky. Jesus of course knew what would happen to him, but he also accepted the adulation of the crowd as his due even as he rode into town on a donkey to signify that true royalty is attained by humility. He would need infinite humility not only to accept the suffering he faced, but even more not to become cynical in face of it. I know that I would be tempted to the deepest cynicism, and thus to despair, if I knew I was going to save people by letting them condemn, torture, and execute me as a grave threat to public order. Only a man who is God could fail to let that embitter him.

Since he didn't let it, he has provided an example for us all and empowered us to emulate it. What example? Are we all to be messiahs? No, and it would be foolish to try. The example is that of detachment: we are to enjoy the gift of life without expecting as our due that any temporal good will last. At any moment one can lose health, job, the love of spouse, one's good name, or anything else one rightly values; and eventually, one dies. The trick is to live in such a way that physical death is a gateway into eternal life rather than eternal death. As one Orthodox saint put it: "If you die before you die, then you won't die when you die." I think Jesus approached his entry into Jerusalem that way. It was his funeral before his death because he, unlike his admirers, knew as he rode what he was going to face. If we learn to approach the real pleasures and triumphs of life as mere foretastes of eternity, as ready to surrender them as to enjoy them, then they won't get in the way of our dying before we die. One might even learn to experience them in such a way that there will be no need for a funeral when one dies.

Back in the saddle

Sorry for the past week's dearth. I've been so busy at work that it's been all I can do, other than that, to eat, sleep, answer e-mails, and reply to a few particularly juicy things at Pontifications. Also, and much to my surprise, the Holy Spirit has been speaking to me in my dreams. I usually don't remember dreams and have never been the sort to put much stock in them. Dreams are often so ambiguous that interpreting them is a form of eisegesis guided more by wishful thinking than by the unvarnished truth. But I haven't had either problem this past week. There's been much to meditate on and learn from.

Now that Al Kimel has put discussion at Pontifications into hibernation for the next two weeks, I'll have more time for this blog. Look for daily posts. Also, I'm planning a new format with my blog guru. Don't be surprised if you see it in the next week or two.

Mary and the non-ordination of women

Note: this post also appears at Pontifications.

Defenders of the Catholic doctrine, and the Orthodox sense, that the Church has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood often point to Mary as evidence of her divine Son's will in this matter. They note, correctly, that Mary is revered in Sacred Tradition as the greatest and most powerful of mere creatures, "higher than the Cherubim, more glorious than the Seraphim," yet did not receive any formal office in the Church even as the all-male (and often rather disappointing) Apostles did. I have heard it said here and there that such a fact signifies something very important: in the divine economy, women are not to be ordained because none "need" to be, whereas some men do. I think that's true in a sense, but I have not yet seen it explained as cogently as it should be. This is my initial attempt to work toward such an explanation. The collaboration and research of others would be most welcome.

The appeal to Mary makes the valid point that sanctity and its summit, theosis, which are after all the point of being Christian, have nothing intrinsically to do with ordination. There have been many holy lay people, especially women, and many not-quite-holy clergy, who are all male. So if one can attain the summit of the Christian life without being ordained, why do some women (and men) consider ordination so important for themselves? Well, they believe they are "called" to it, so that the Church's recognizing said call seems to them a simple requirement of justice. Thus, advocates of women's ordination often dismiss the appeal to Mary as ill-disguised, ideological special pleading that offers put-upon women a mere sop as an insult to their just and legitimate aspiration to ordination. Yet what first led me, in the 1970s, to smell something fishy in that argument was the undeniable feminization of the Church.

Throughout her history, women have usually been the majority of adults in church and done the bulk of the actual work of the Church. Indeed, every parish priest knows how little—at least of a visible nature—he could accomplish without them. Nowadays, that is more true than ever, in the Catholic Church and particularly in those ecclesial communities that "ordain" women to the ministry—so much so that, if we did have women's ordination in the two communions that can plausibly claim historical and confessional continuity with the Church of the Apostles, I suspect the demographics would not take terribly long to yield a "priesthood" composed disproportionately of middle-aged and elderly women. (Among Catholic priests there would also be, I am convinced, a disproportionate number of gay and/or effeminate men, as there seems to be even now. But that issue is for another time.) Presided over exclusively by men nonetheless, the Church already has a hard time attracting laymen to church in numbers matching their proportion of the nominally Christian population. I don't even want to think about would happen if the Church were presided over by females in the same proportion in which females now populate congregations.

But such considerations only explain a suspicion. They do not prove that there would be anything intrinsically wrong with women's ordination even if what I and others suspect became reality. What would be cogent—even if not probative, inasmuch as arguments premised on articles of faith cannot compel intellectual assent any more than the articles themselves can—would be to show how WO advocates fundamentally misconceive the nature of the Church, of women, and of the priesthood. That's what I'd like to suggest. And it is on just such points that the example of Mary is supremely relevant.

The main theological point about Mariology is simple enough but seems to be curiously unmarked in most discussions: the Marian doctrines point up how Mary is always and pre-eminently what every disciple is called to be. We are all called to be God-bearers into and for the world; we are all called to be perpetually virginal, in the sense that we are destined for an eternal union with our divine Bridegroom that involves not sexual intercourse but something infinitely greater; in virtue of being reborn in baptism, we are all immaculately conceived for new and eternal life in the Spirit; in the general resurrection, all those who have accepted Christ in their hearts will be assumed body and soul into the eternal life he enjoys with the Father and the Holy Spirit. In all those ways, Mary is the figura, the type, of the Church and can only be understood in relation to the Church.

With that in mind, we can now deploy Hans Urs von Balthasar's seminal distinction between "the Marian charism" and "the Petrine charism" in the Church. The Marian charism is that of every Christian: loving submission and witness to God, in and through Jesus Christ, through which each of us made in the image of God, male and female, become by adoption what he is by nature. As such, the Marian charism is the more fundamental of the two. It constitutes that priesthood of all believers by which they make of themselves and their lives a "spiritual sacrifice" and thus share in the priesthood of the One High Priest, Jesus Christ. The "sacerdotal" or "ministerial" priesthood, which is a manifestation of the hierarchy's Petrine charism of teaching, sanctifying, and governing authority, exists solely to serve and facilitate the Marian charism of all believers. This becomes clearer on the analogy of faith.

The Church is one body with her Lord, with her as Bride and him as Bridegroom in a mystical marriage. Mary represents us all as, collectively, Bride; the bishops, priests, and deacons, bearers of the Petrine charism, collectively represent Christ as Bridegroom. Both poles are essential for the unity, efficacy, and fertility of the Church. But they do not merely represent: they help to bring about what they represent. Thus the hierarchical constitution of the Church is itself, like consecrated celibacy, sacramental even though not numbered among the official sacraments. As with everything sacramental, what the sexes are by nature, and as understood in mutual complementarity, is what makes them "fit" to be used by divine grace as sacramental signs. Thus the female is more apt by nature to represent how humanity in general is related to God and how Christians in particular are related to their Lord; the male is more apt by nature to represent how God relates to humanity in general and how Christ in particular is related to the Church. That is the only possible significance I can find in God's choice to become incarnate as a male. Everything God does is mysterious, but nothing God does is accidental or arbitrary. We cannot say that things had to be so; but it makes perfect sense that they are thus and not otherwise.

Now the Church, as Vatican II pointed out in Lumen Gentium, is the universal "sacrament" of "salvation" and "unity." Her purpose is to bring Christ into the world for its salvation and unity. As Mother of God, the pre-eminent "God-bearer", Mary is thus the pre-eminent member of the Church, indeed is the Mother of the Church, which is her Son's Mystical Body. In this she does what women in general are to do for the Church and the world. They, like she, are called to be the "heart" of the Church and the world by their loving, unreserved reception of the divine gift of Himself. Thus women precisely qua female signify how every disciple, man as well as woman, is called to relate to God. Men, on the other hand, are called to signify the divine self-giving itself, and thus signify qua male God's relation to the Church and the world. By bearing Christ into the world, women do that too, as all are called to do. To the extent we participate in the divine life by grace, we all do so merely as persons baptized into Christ in whom, and in that sense, "there is neither male nor female" (Galatians 3:28). But as Tradition has taught us from the beginning, our sexuality, our mutually oriented identities as male and female, each retain their special significance in the economy of salvation. Each represents what all are called to, but each does so in polar tension with the other.

It is precisely by emulating God's self-immolation in Christ that husbands as well as priests are called to exercise the Petrine charism of headship in the Church for the world. Within the Church, the chief sacramental means by which priests do so is offering the Eucharistic sacrifice which participates, across time, in the once-for-all self-immolation of Christ and yields for us, in the transubstantiated bread and wine, Christ himself as the food that transforms us into Him. By such means, some men are elevated by grace to a dignity that faithful women, like Mary, enjoy merely as God-bearers. Men, it seems, have to be given some specific and formal role in the oikonoumia so as to signify God as they are meant to; women just have to be, and thus to love, as they are naturally inclined to. Both sexes are used by God; but the male seems to require being given something objective and external to do, like the sacerdotal priesthood and the formal sacraments that only it can confect; whereas for the female, as for Mary, just being what she is seems to suffice. We have no record of anything specific Mary did after her Son's Ascension. No, she was just the holiest member of the young Church; all instinctively revered and looked to her. Sort of like my recently deceased Aunt Rachel in that domestic church known as her extended family.

The reservation of the ministerial priesthood to men, then, seems to be one of God's ways of elevating men to spiritual equality with women. This is anticipated in traditional Judaism, where women, unlike men, are not required to perform religious acts at set times. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has pointed out, women are as much the recipients of the divine promise and love as men, but partly for that reason, nothing is allowed to interfere with their ability to make home and family, the heart of society with many associated demands, their top priority. That holds for all women, even those women who are more successful at work and career than their husbands or male relatives. By their maternity, be it spiritual only or also physical, women by nature bear the divine within themselves in a more fundamental way then men. They are where God is, as it were, as distinct from just what God uses—though of course he uses women too.

When I was a boy, I always thought it unfair of God that women got to have babies while men didn't, and that men had to die in combat while women didn't. (The latter of course, thanks to the spiritual blindness of our culture, is no longer the case.) What Aunt Rachel told me in reply has always stayed with me: "Michael, God spares men the pain of childbirth because they wouldn't be able to take it, and he lets them be priests because if he didn't give them something specific and important-looking to do, they would become intolerable." Indeed. And the example of Mary explains why the same does not hold for women.

You shall be as gods....

Today's second reading, from Romans 8:8-11, has always been one of my favorite passages from the Bible. Here it is:

Brothers and sisters: Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh; on the contrary, you are in the spirit, if only the Spirit of God dwells in you. Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit dwelling in you.

Before we get into what "in the flesh"means, and the difference between 'spirit' and 'the Spirit of Christ', note how different the emphasis here is from most Western Christians' preoccupations as Christians. Most tend to think of the attainment of eternal life in juridical or even forensic terms: you believe P, Q, etc. and do A, B, etc. so as to get to heaven; refuse, and you don't get to heaven. That's an immature moral universe to live in, and it's very thin gruel. Unfortified, it causes sterility, boredom, and resentment that in turn make "backsliding" inevitable. What Paul is really on about is a new, abundant life: one infinitely more valuable, joyful, and lasting than life as we normally experience it, which is life "in the flesh." The doctrines and rules, and the deeds that go along with them, are merely expressions of that new life.

To be "in the flesh" in the sense contrary to "in the spirit" does not mean to be disembodied or to live as though the body doesn't matter. The body matters a great deal, else God would not have become truly incarnate and lived as such. The point of the things of this world, including the body and all that goes with it, is to be vehicles for what God is trying to make of us: little Christs, gods in fact, whose origin and destiny far transcends this world. To be "in the flesh" is to fail to get that point and live as though the things of this world had value and meaning apart from it. That way leads to death—eternal death, in fact. To be "in the spirit" is to get the point and live accordingly "in the world but not of it."

The Holy Spirit, who is God, empowers our souls, which are spiritual, to do just that. To the extent we accept and use that power, our very bodies and selves are transformed along with our own respective corners of the universe. Isn't that so much more exciting, and motivating, than wealth, sex, and power, which are so ephemeral? In fact, isn't it so much more realistic than the serpent's deceptive promise in the Garden of Eden: "You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil"?

In the form of the serpent, Satan promised that to our first parents as their reward for disobeying God and deciding for themselves what's right and wrong. He told them they "would not die" if they did that. But of course they did; and because they did what they did, we die too. Spiritually, in fact, we're born dead. But the real way to become gods is to die in Christ and be reborn in the Spirit, in subjection to God and to the whole Christ, i.e., the risen Jesus and the Church with which he is one body. As an obscure Orthodox saint said: "If you die before you die, you will not die when you die." That's the law of the spirit as opposed to the flesh. Obeying it is true freedom.

Follow-up to "Where are the boys?"

Yesterday at Pontifications, I was deeply struck by a comment made by somebody with the handle 'Marcy On' in a thread about male headship in marriage:

Where patriarchal dignity is not respected, human males refrain more often from marrying, (though not necessarily from fathering children) and more women therefore live unmarried, too. American Black culture is a contemporary example
of this disaster.

And, aside from some in the feminized elite classes, most males will avoid institutions where their male dignity is not respected. Consider the gender demographics of the clergy in “mainline” churches. There is no demographic future in this.

From an evolutionary psych point of view, Christianity is certainly a feminization of religion, because it hypervalorizes love, ie, affiliation, over rank…among humans. It may have been (and likely was) a powerful and necessary softening of the patriarchal impulse. BUT, it was enacted within a larger frame of patriarchal Deity. So-called Christian feminism, by de-masculinizing the Christian God, has eroded the frame in which the revelation was meant to function. And the end result is, at best, Unitarianism in drag (ie, the Episcopal Church).

And if you have erased the significant differences between the father and the mother (and functionally made both of them mothers, one talented at it, one pathetic at it), why not erase the difference between parents and children, and make them all parents, or all children? Watching TV these days, you can see it played out. It’s not pretty. Or funny.

One way to look at contemporary liberalism is that it is the revenge of the primitive mother on the father, since it (publicly, anyway) makes affiliation trump rank in every situation. (Covertly, of course, the mother uses affiliate to create rank, as she always has). Perhaps Marduk killed Tiamat for a reason? Is there a segement of this worldview that does not either pathologize or devalue classical, ie real and actual, experience-able maleness? And when western liberal culture has reached its apogee, say, in modern Western Europe, who shows up to challenge it? The most misogynistic, violent, and patriarchal religion in history, unapologetic and ravenous, dressed in the clothing of a race-victim. Who do you think will win that one?

Burnham was right, I think, and liberalism may be the ideology that justifies and accelerates the suicide of the West. And the castrating animus hidden inside almost every form of feminism is central to it. Wouldn’t it be charming if the logical (that is, naturally and historically logical) outcome of Betty Friedan is the Burka?

Just thinkin’ out loud. St Paul is by no means a hero of mine, but I think he had a point here.

I think he did too; the Pauline point in question may be found in Ephesians 5. Marcy herself has many other stunning ones. Frankly, her (I presume the writer is female) comment inspired my post of yesterday Where are the Boys? She articulated my thoughts better and more courageously than I ever have or still have.

Thanks, Marcy. I don't know who you are, but I hope you see this.

A hearty "Vaffanculo!"

Right now, my two favorite Catholics (besides the Pope, of course) are SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia (left, gesturing in a manner I'll get to in a moment) and Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska. Within the past week, both have in effect said "Vaffanculo!" to their critics, which is Sicilian for a phrase everybody on earth (well, almost everybody; it begins with 'F') understands very well.

The Boston Herald describes the occasion and context of Scalia's gesture very well. It is a gesture that usually accompanies the utterance of "Vaffanculo!" Nobody who's grown up in an Italian-American neighborhood, as I did, needs any introduction to this. I love the fact that Scalia did it with great gusto and humor while emerging from Sunday Mass. But that's only the latest reason why he's my favorite lay Catholic at the moment. The main reason, which is why I welcome the latest one, is that he's a jurist who thoroughly understands natural law and why it is the basis of this republic's moral legitimacy. He has been joined on the bench lately by two fellow Catholics, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. The former's moral views are definitely pro-life; for good reasons, he's been too cagey so far to let on what he'd like to do about Roe v Wade. As for Alito, his professional nickname is 'Scalito'. Enough said. Everybody who cares knows that all they need is one more vote to start the counter-revolution. Oremus.

Then there's the doughty bishop, who has just defied the USCCB-appointed National Review Board's attempt to force him to use sex-abuse-education materials that he deems morally inappropriate and in any case mistargeted. Here's his statement:

Some woman named Patricia O'Donnell Ewers, who is the Chair of something
called "A National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People", has said that her Board "calls for strong fraternal correction of the Diocese of Lincoln." The Diocese of Lincoln has nothing to be corrected for, since the Diocese of Lincoln is and has always been in full compliance with all laws of the Catholic Church and with all civil laws. Furthermore, Ewers and her Board have no authority in the Catholic Church and the Diocese of Lincoln does not recognize them as having any significance.

It is well known that some of the members of Ewers' Board are ardent advocates of partial birth abortion, other abortions, human cloning, and other moral errors. It is understandable then how such persons could dislike the Diocese of Lincoln, which upholds the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.

The words attributed to Ewers seem to confirm the suspicion that the members of her Board are unfamiliar with Catholic teachings, Catholic ecclesiology, and even the basic rudiments of the Catholic Catechism. Rather than concerning themselves with the Diocese of Lincoln about which they appear completely ignorant, Ewers and her colleagues would occupy themselves in a better way by learning something about the Catholic religion and the traditions and doctrines and laws of the Catholic Church.

The Diocese of Lincoln does not see any reason for the existence of Ewers and her organization.

I culled the statement from here, where you can also read some of the comments people have made.

Now I will be among the first to admit that both Scalia and Bruskewitz have been a tad excessive. But all the same, it's the right sort of excess—just the sort needed in a time and climate when the other side grants itself license for far greater excess. (If you don't believe me about that greater license, just read what's said on secular-liberal and liberal-Catholic sites about the President of the United States and the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church.) My heroes du jour have issued the plain talk, and gesturing, that is occasionally needed. Bravo!

Let us all pray for such courage as well as praise it.

Sex and the City of God

For anybody interested in gaining a brief, painless, and reliable overview of the Catholic understanding of sex and marriage, philosopher Phil Blosser's talk (linked in my title) is one of the best out there. Read it all.

You know, there's a lot of good, unsung evangelical work being done by Catholic lay people who believe and are excited by what the Church teaches about these topics. The clergy, however, seem to be divided largely into those who don't know about that and those who, though they know, either don't care or don't agree. None of that is a reaction to the work's quality, which on the whole is quite high, like Blosser's. I could come up with sociological explanations, but they would be almost beside the point. The real reason, I believe, is that most clergy feel futile about this range of topics.

Most are celibates who are often told, by lay dissenters, that their celibacy disqualifies them from comment. And it is true that, to the extent they are faithful to their vows, they cannot speak from direct, ongoing experience. But many vocations these days are coming from men who have had the necessary experience. And in any event, modelling the truth about sex and marriage does not require such experience. The truth is that sex and marriage, rightly undrstood and engaged in, are forms of the Christian vocation. They signify, and help bring about by signifying, that personal intercommunion of love made possible only by complete, mutual self-gift. Priests and religious who live their vocations well both understand that and model it, which is essential as a witness for the married. In the years during and after Vatican II, many abandoned such vocations or re-interpreted them so radically as to obscure that witness. And in my experience since, only a minority of priests witness to it with enough enthusiasm and conviction to be credible. The cohort of priests my age and older seem, in particular, to be dominated by men without the necessary enthusiasm and conviction. The younger priests tend to be different and better, but they are still a minority and mostly lack assignments that carry authority beyond that of the priesthood itself.

Still, things are slowly improving as those in the Church, lay and clerical, who remember what they consider "the bad old days" are replaced by those who remember only John Paul the Great. His theology of the body will only take off in the decades ahead.

Jesus Decoded

Thanks largely to the tireless work of Catholic author and blogger Amy Welborn, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops now has an effective anti-Da Vinci Code website up. I thought it well to call attention to that when the mass-market paperback of the book has just come out.

Fr. George Rutler, one of the most effective writers in contemporary American Catholicism, says it well:

I am not habitually speechless, but I find myself almost tongue-tied at the number of sane and intelligent people who take seriously the claims of the popular novel, The Da Vinci Code. Discounting the self-deluded who use it as an excuse to "lose" the faith they never truly had, the situation points up the deep ignorance of many nominal Catholics. This is not an indictment: It is a summons to knowledge.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has a new website (www.Jesusdecoded.com) designed to help save people from the gossamer bliss that comes from the anesthetic quality of ignorance. The Da Vinci book creates a fantasy about Mary Magdalene, while claiming to base this on serious research. It develops a half-baked version of the heresy of Arius, who was more erudite, if less entrepreneurial, than the novel's author. The book makes ridiculous and anachronistic speculations about the Emperor Constantine and the Christian creed. All this is exposed on the bishops' website, and is treated at even greater length in various pamphlets and books by other writers who have made something of a cottage industry out of showing the delicacy of the novel's familiarity with history.

We might expect that a generation the majority of whose college seniors cannot identify Lincoln or Churchill might confuse St. John and St. Mary Magdalene. One can only hope that when a best-selling novel flaunts ignorance to a pyrotechnical degree, readers will realize how easily they are duped and how much they must learn. Lent is an appropriate time for such learning. G. K. Chesterton devoted a book to the mystery of Catholicism called The Thing. Anyone who allows his brain a little exercise from time to time will face the fact that the Catholic Church has been the most important "Thing" in the annals of civilization. But if it is only a "Thing," and not Christ among us, it will haunt to distraction. Catholicism haunts the minds of men as the Ethical Culture Society or Anti-Vivisection Society does not, and haunted men do not write books about albino Unitarian assassins. The whole world was haunted until it was inspired by the Holy Spirit who leads into all truth. Of course, we are free to remain ignorant, as Pontius Pilate preferred to do. It is only speculation, but he may have spent his retirement back in Italy reading some morbid novels.

The difficulty with that is that most of the people likely to understand it are those who don't need it in order to be inoculated against the TDC virus. Sort of like sacramental confession.

Where are the boys?

The latest piece (linked through the above title) about the increasing number of young men living with their parents, a phenomenon not limited to race, class, or country, is one more bit of evidence that young men are, on average, becoming less motivated and educated than young women. Nobody is quite sure why. But I believe that, in the West, it is a sign of the suicide of the West.

What tends to motivate people to grow up are marriage and work. For ordinary men who aren't creative, self-motivated professionals, marriage has ordinarily tended to motivate work when nothing else would. The same goes even for divorced men. I myself work at a job that doesn't interest me, and that is well beneath my abilities, because I must pay child support. The sort of job for which I'm best qualified has never been plentiful; I'm considered overqualified for nearly any other sort of job for which qualifications matter; so I have one for which qualifications don't matter. Until my luck changes—which will probably only happen after much more hard work to that end—the only alternative scenario is homelessness and jail. If I had a third way—living rent-free and otherwise low-cost with relatives so that I could pursue my writing and research—I would not hesitate to do so. But that's not the sort of attitude that's worrisome in itself and that one finds in the legion of young layabouts today. They just don't seem to care about doing anything constructive with their lives. They are not motivated by marriage and work. That is very worrisome indeed. But why aren't they?

Any answer is necessarily going to be speculative at this point, but I have a strong intuition about what it should contain. Clearly, young men are less and less motivated than previous generations by marriage and work because they are losing the conviction that either is worth the effort. One reason for that is that their parents, the government, or whomever are able to support them while they play their games—whatever the games may be in the particular case. Economic growth worldwide makes that possible to a degree unprecedented in prior generations. Why endure the unpleasantness of reporting to a job or doing the academic grind when one can lead a perfectly comfortable, carefee life without doing so? But of course, that doesn't explain why young women, who presumably have the same option open to them to the same extent, are not availing themselves more of it.

I believe I have the answer. I can't prove it and I doubt it will be popular. But I am certain of it.

The problem is that the kind of society we have in the West today, which is spreading gradually througout the world, does not give most young men any model or reason for being men. Athletic and military pursuits still retain their macho appeal, of course, but the majority of young men today will never be able to define who they are by such means. The same goes for other physically challenging pursuits. While the vast majority of risky, dangerous jobs are still done by men and probably always will be, they are only a small percentage of jobs. For the most part and for the vast majority of men, the reasons people can think of and give for motivating them have nothing to do with their being men. You work so that you can have what you need and want without being a burden to others; you marry because love and children are Good Things. All that is true, but it holds for both sexes indifferently. What does it mean to be a man as distinct from a woman, and how does one become that? I challenge you to come up with one person in ten nowadays who can give a serious answer. Many would even reject the question. But most men need to understand what it is to be a man in relation to women and work if they are going to be motivated to relate to either responsibly.

Women tend not to understand that because they are what they are without having to do anything specific beyond what they have always been uniquely equipped by nature to do. When they marry, bear children, and raise them, they are the "heart" of society. Most young women take that option for granted, and can function accordingly in a "womanly" manner, even when they choose not to exercise it. The answer to the question "What is it to be a woman?" is thus obvious even when not articulated. A woman is something one is. But a man is something one becomes. Maleness in the spiritual sense, as distinct from its rather minimal biological sense, is an achievement not a given. So when a young man hasn't been given any clear guidance about what that achievement would distinctively look like, he is not motivated to pursue it. How can you be motivated to pursue what you do not know and have been led, in many cases, to believe you shouldn't even ask about?

Actually, it's even worse than that. Maleness and fatherhood are unfashionable. It's socially acceptable now to make fun of masculinity but not of femininity. In the application of family law, fathers are often treated as little more than sperm donors and cash cows. Beyond that, fatherhood is no longer widely understood and valued because authority, of which fatherhood is perhaps the most basic form, is now understood in purely functional terms when it is not denigrated altogether.

Accordingly, we are witnessing the slow suicide of the West, expressed in family breakdown, rampant sexual irresponsibility, and birth rates below replacement level. Most people give little thought to that. They had better start before there's nothing left worth thinking about.

Where there can be no compromise

The Pope said something very interesting yesterday if not altogether new. He is said to have said, at a private audience with the European Popular Party (EPP), that

...from the perspective of the Catholic Church, certain fundamental principles of European civilization are not negotiable, involving "the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person." The Church, he said, cannot compromise in the defense of human life and of the natural family founded on marriage.

The moral principles at stake in those matters, the Pope continued, "are not truths of faith, even though they receive further light and confirmation from faith; they are inscribed in human nature itself and therefore they are common to all humanity." The principles of natural law, he said, apply "to all people, irrespective of any religious affiliation they may have."

The European Union must uphold the natural law, and defend its Christian heritage, the Pope said. Failing to do so, he said, "would be a sign of immaturity, if not weakness."

What's interesting about that is the appeal is to natural law rather than divine revelation. If valid, it undercuts the claim of secularists that the Church's moral input is sectarian and therefore unwelcome in a secular state.

Of course, secularists who bother exercising more than their knee reflexes argue that the appeal is not valid. They believe the principles in question are not "inscribed in the human heart" but are just one set of opinions among many, whose plausibility to some is sustained mostly by the residual authority of the Church. But that is to mistake a transient social condition for a philosophical necessity.

The American Declaration of Independence appeals to "the laws of nature and of nature's God" as the basis of the new nation. Such laws were understood to justify not only independence but also the form of government envisioned for the new nation. While fully understandable only within the context of Christian civilization, that appeal to what sociologists of religion call "ethical monotheism" was not sectarian. It was signed on to by deists as well as by the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority; and Jews have never had a problem with it. Muslims do, of course, but that is another story which proves nothing philosophically. So the Pope is on firm historical and philosophical ground here.

In fact, he is on firmer ground than the secularists. Once some sort of appeal to an objective set of norms based on the transcendent is eschewed as the moral basis of the state, then the only alternative is the will of those best able to get their way. In a democracy, that will mean the will of the majority more often than in non-democratic states. Now the will of the majority is not always right or even prudent. But one cannot question the will of the majority if what's right is only the will of the majority. Militant secularism, understood as entailing the rejection of any objective, binding source of morality beyond human decision, cannot even sustain the legitimacy of democracy. The only alternative on offer is natural law. Enter the Pope, Antonin Scalia, and I hope John Roberts.