RCIA Horror Stories

When I was coming into the Church almost a decade ago, I loved RCIA. I couldn't wait for every Sunday to come, when after Mass my wife and I along with a few other catechumens and candidates would head out behind the parish to the classroom-trailers up on the hillside to have RCIA. We had a very dedicated and knowledgeable RCIA instructor who knew what he was talking about, loved the Catholic faith and was able to bring in a few other really gifted people to teach (some of them had worked or trained under Fr. Hardon). All in all, it was a great experience.

Years later, when I began teaching RCIA, I was pleased to find that my classes almost got unanimously positive responses from the people who went through it; actually, not "almost unanimous," but completely unanimous - I never had a real complaint from anyone.

Thus, my personal experience of RCIA as a student and later as a teacher was very positive and I was never aware that, in most parishes and for many people, RCIA is seen as a waste of time or a downright nightmare. One thing I found very disillusioning about RCIA was that it is presented (at the Rite of Election) as a very ancient process that goes back to the earliest days of the Church. I was made to feel like I was partaking of a very ancient tradition; since I was a baby Catholic, I didn't know any better. But I did notice as I read the lives of other famous converts from even the early 20th century there was no mention of RCIA. Of course, come to find out that RCIA was created basically by committee in 1972 and has very little to do with the ancient Church. When I was told that RCIA was a very ancient tradition, what was meant was that the process of a bishop scrutinizing the candidates for admission into the Church is ancient, but there is of course no direct connection between the modern RCIA rites and anything in the early Church. Perhaps some of the liturgical prayers are modeled after patristic era prayers, but modeling a thing on something of antiquity and the thing actually being from antiquity are different matters altogether.

One horror story I heard from RCIA concerned a young woman who wanted to convert from Protestantism. I knew this woman - she worked at a local Christian bookstore. I used to go in there and try to get her to come to my RCIA classes; she said she was very interested in Catholicism and wanted to look into it but just wasn't sure. She was very sincere and seemed like somebody who was disinterestedly seeking the truth for its own sake. Well, eventually I stopped running into her after she quit the store, but I later found out that she did indeed decide to respond to the grace God had given her and seek entry into the Catholic Church. She went to the nearest Catholic Church and signed up for classes. After a few RCIA sessions, she began to feel like she wasn't getting anything specifically Catholic out of the class; it was a bunch of generic Christian stuff, like God is a loving God, Jesus forgives, etc. Finally, she asked the instructor, "Why should I specifically be Catholic over any other Christian denomination?" The instructor told her, "That's for you to figure out, not me." She got upset and said, "So you can't give me one reason why I should be Catholic and not go back to my Protestant congregation?" The instructor shook his head and said, "You are thinking too much in terms of black and white and right and wrong. That's not how Catholics think." Disgusted, the woman quit the classes and went back to her Protestant church, where I believe she happily remains to this day.

Now, what are we to make of this? This woman, a devout Christian, may now live and die in the Protestant church. Is it her fault? Will God hold her guilty of the sin of heresy or schism? For heaven's sake, the woman wanted to be Catholic. She went so far as to seek visible, full communion witht he Church; then some half-cocked RCIA instructor chastised her for thinking in terms of black and white for asking the very reasonable question, "Why should I be Catholic?" It is my guess that on the day of judgment the woman will fare better than the RCIA director.

I heard another RCIA tale where a older couple, who had basically studied themselves into the Church, were going through the classes because they had to and the nun teaching them said that contraception was a matter of conscience. The catechumens (who knew more about Catholicism than the nun) brought in Humanae Vitae and tried to discuss it, but the nun raged at them and said, "Who are you to judge what other people do?" In this case too the persosn left the classes, but fortunately they found their way into the Church through some other avenue.

RCIA is right up there with Youth Groups and Social Justice Ministries as an example of things done poorly in the vast majority of parishes. Why is RCIA so bad almost universally? Well, RCIA itself is not a bad program; as I said, I had a great experience with it and the people that have entered the Church under me have as well. It can be done well. The problem is with the people who wind up running these things, and the pastors who refuse to allow orthodox Catholicism to be taught. In most (but not all) parishes, RCIA is in the hands of women who came of age in the 1960's; if you don't believe me, do a Google image search of the term "RCIA director", or have a look here.

I think ultimately the Church ought to reconsider the whole idea of RCIA; it is too bureaucratic, too cookie-cutter to fit the needs of everybody. It often fails to address the core philosophical-spitritual needs of the person (as evidenced by the very low rate of people who remain in or join the parish after completing RCIA - in most parishes about 10%, though happily higher in mine). Prior to Vatican II instruction was more individualized; a person might take three months or three years of instruction depending on his specific level of understanding - and most of the time it was taught by a priest. Most priests these days delegate this to lay volunteers or employees because they are far too busy because there are far too few priests to go around; but those are another set of problems, though not unrelated.

In the meantime, let's get some younger people heading up our RCIA programs - people who know and love Jesus Christ, who were not around for the insanity of the 60's and who want to pass on the truth to others - people who know that the truth itself is transformative and that what the world desperately needs is persons who will boldly stand up and say, "Yes. There is a right and wrong. There is a true and false, and this is the Truth..."

Anything less is building on sand.

A tribute from my Youth Group

This past weekend I was away on a Summer Conference with my Youth Group. It went truly excellently; most of the kids agreed it was the best parish-sponsored event/retreat they had ever been to. It was also very special because it was my last major event with the kids of our parish, as I am moving on to another job this Fall. Quite to my surprise, some of the kids put together this touching tribute video. I laughed through a lot of it because the kids' comments were very funny, but my mom cried when she watched it. Sorry to keep putting YG stuff up here, but I just think it is cool.

I still have one more Youth Group video, our mini-film, to put up, which I will hopefully by tomorrow.

Some intelligent discussion on Cortez

I'm currently enrolled in an American history course that I am mandated to take to graduate from my college program even though I've already had enough history courses to last me until the Second Coming. In this online history class, we are currently studying the Spanish Conquest of Mexico (groan). The professor makes us read these online excerpts and then has us write essays on what we read. Here's an example of some of the "intelligent" discussion that goes on in the discussion board. This is copied and pasted from one of the posts; remember, this is college level writing and is supposed to be the equivalent of a quiz grade since it is like a weekly essay:

I guess you cant say Cortez was an evil man, he thought it was the will of the gods to take power in the civilization and control it using Montezuma. So pretty much Cortez tryed to convert all the Indian people to Christianity or they would suffer gods raff [gods "raff"?] through his hands. How did he know the gods would kill them for their non-belief? Im not saying he was terrible, I mean he really thought that he was saving them from the evil. But why was the gods will to kill all non-believers or hethens? Religion was huge in those times, bigger than our society, they went by the entire book of the old testament. Pretty much anyone who didnt follow it was killed, tortured, or just shunned from society and ignored by everyone. For one beief of something different in the world, you were not tolerated. Would it have been different if their gods were not involved or our god?

Of course the tribe didnt take it too well with this religious take over and they got rid of Cortez and his puppet Montezuma. But they should have killed Cortez when they had the chance and he came back with all the enemy Indian tribes and just masicured [sic] them all, it was no contest. Then when the tribes that worked with Cortez did not want his religion either, he came with his Europeon army and killed them as well. They had too much technology, muskets and armor against their arrows it was not even a battle.

Religion seemed to spark alot of histories conflicts, the war in the middle east (before we got there), and world war II just to name a few. Would it have been different if there wasnt a religion? Would there be more peace without religion? What if we didnt find a god, how would we be different?  

"God is Love"

As many of you know, besides being a blogger, Youth Director and professional loser, I am also an amateur musician. A few months ago, before my surgery, I started recording a song I wrote at my friend's studio. We got most of the song completed, but a few weeks ago his hard drive crashed and the song was lost. Luckily I had  a rough mix of the track that he had made for me sometime prior. Seeing that the song would probably not getting finished, I threw some images up over it and turned it into a little music video, which I now present here for your listening enjoyment. The only thing is, since it was a rough mix, there are some parts where there are no backing vocals (where there ought to be) and a lot of the levels aren't mixed right, but other than that it's pretty okay, except for that my singing is awful.

By the way, I will be away hosting a conference for our parish's Youth Group for the weekend, so I won't be back posting until probably Monday night.

Guitars, vocals, bass are by me; song is an original composition. My friend played the piano and the drums are done by a computer program.

Chesterton on...wife beating!?

I just came across this thought from Chesterton in an essay entitled "Divorce versus Democracy", originally featured in the 1915 edition of Nash's Magazine and reprinted in the November, 2001 edition of "The Chesterton Review" (Vol. XXVII, No.4 ). To put it in context, Chesterton is arguing against a relaxation in divorce laws in England, arguing (correctly, I think) that the causes put forward for a relaxation in divorce laws by the British government at the time were actually symptoms of the injustice of British society and themselves responsible for the increase in divorces. In this context, he discusses wife beating ("cruelty"), which he says is frequently grounds for divorce. Yet, he argues, if the British society were not so unjustly structured and the poor not ground down so hard, the husband would have less occasion to beat his wife. He then goes on a little tangent about wife-hitting, in which he says it is sometimes a "self-defense." The argument seems to be that wife beating is just a symptom of something else, and that judges should not grant divorces just because husbands may "hit out" at their wives once in awhile. Here's the excerpt from "Divorce versus Democracy":

A poor woman does not judge her husband as a bully by whether he has ever hit out. One might as well say that a schoolboy judges whether another schoolboy is a bully by whether he has ever hit out. The poor wife, like the schoolboy, judges him as a bully by whether he is a bully. She knows that while wife-beating really may be a crime, wife-hitting is sometimes very like just self-defense. No one knows better than she does that her husband often has a great deal to put up with: sometimes she means him to; sometimes she is justified. She comes and tells all this to the magistrates again and again; in police court after police court women with black eyes try to explain the thing to judges with no eyes...In these people's lives the rooms are crowded, the tempers are torn to rags, the natural exits are forbidden. In such societies it is as abominable to punish or divorce people for a blow as it would be to punish or divorce a gentleman for slamming the door (pp. 450-451).

It's hard to draw more out of it than this since the blurb is only a tangent in a bigger essay. Chesterton seems to be saying that domestic violence is the result of a stifling social situation that blocks off all the "natural exits" of a man's aggression, and that it does not make sense to grant a divorce because of isolated cases of "wife-hitting" which are (apparently) to be expected from time to time just as much as a gentleman slamming a door.

I don't know what to make of this, especially of GK's comment that wife-hitting is sometimes a "just self-defense." Does anybody have any input or comments on this? It be interesting to send this to Dale Ahlquist (or maybe Armstrong?) and get his take on it.

St. Boniface and the zeal of Gideon

Today is the Feast of St. Boniface, the great missionary to the Germans, the destroyer of the oak of Thor and one of the patrons of this blog. The story of the chopping down of Thor's sacred oak in order to convince the Frisians that their gods were powerless reminds me of another great story, this one from the Old Testament - that of Gideon, as found in Judges 6-8.

Both Gideon and St. Boniface destroyed a pagan shrine in the name of the Lord; Boniface did so in a pagan land as part of a missionary work while Gideon did so within Israel as part of a "reevangelization", and at the Lord's command. Look at what God says to Gideon in Judges 6:

"That night the Lord said to him: Take a bullock of thy father's, and another bullock of seven years, and thou shalt destroy the altar of Baal, which is thy father's: and cut down the grove that is about the altar. And thou shalt build an altar to the Lord thy God, in the top of this rock, whereupon thou didst lay the sacrifice before: and thou shalt take the second bullock, and shalt offer a holocaust upon a pile of the wood, which thou shalt cut down out of the grove. Then Gideon, taking ten men of his servants, did as the Lord had commanded him. But fearing his father's house, and the men of that city, he would not do it by day, but did all by night.

"And when the men of that town were risen in the morning, they saw the altar of Baal destroyed, and the grove cut down, and the second bullock laid upon the altar, which then was built. And they said one to another: Who hath done this? And when they inquired for the author of the fact, it was said: Gideon, the son of Joash, did all this. And they said to Joash: Bring out thy son hither, that he may die: because he hath destroyed the altar of Baal, and hath cut down his grove. He answered them: "Are you the avengers of Baal, that you fight for him? he that is his adversary, let him die before to morrow light appear: if he be a god, let him revenge himself on him that hath cast down his altar." From that day Gideon was called Jerobaal, because Joash had said: "Let Baal revenge himself on him that hath cast down his altar" (Judges 6:25-32).

Both Gideon and St. Boniface act on the principle that was much later explicated by Leo XIII - that "error should not have equal rights with the truth" (Libertas, 34). Did not the Frisians have a "right" to worship their own gods in their own manner in their own land? Do not the worshipers of Baal have the "right" to maintain a temple to Baal in their village? Boniface and Gideon did not think so, and in the latter case, God even positively commanded Gideon to destroy the pagan shrine. Gideon is called by God a "mighty man of valor" and praised for his zeal in carrying out God's commands.

The implication behind these actions is that, like divorce among the Jews and idolatry among the Gentiles, the existence of pagan shrines is something that God tolerated for a time but never positively willed or endorsed.  St. Paul teaches this in Acts 17:

"Being therefore the offspring of God, we must not suppose the divinity to be like unto gold or silver or stone, the graving of art and device of man. And God indeed having winked at the times of this ignorance, now declareth unto men that all should every where do penance. Because he hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world in equity, by the man whom he hath appointed: giving faith to all, by raising him up from the dead" (Acts 17:29-31).

While it is of course true, as Vatican II taught, that "elements of truth" can be found in all religions, it is also true that the importance of these scattered elements is often overstated. No doubt there were elements of truth in Baal worship, as in the worship of Thor, but Gideon and St. Boniface did not seem interested in these elements of truth, nor did St. Paul seem interested in dialoguing with the Greeks about their "elements of truth" but rather stated that God had in former times overlooked their ignorance but now called them to repent. And why would these saints be interested in mere elements of truth when they each possessed the truth from the source? I think Catholics that get too excited about "elements of truth" in other religions are a little mixed up in their focus - it's like showing a profound interest in the crumbs under your dinner table while ignoring the hot meal that is up on top and ready to be eaten.

Besides this, Gideon and St. Boniface both understood that pagan shrines and pagan worship are so offensive to God and so intrinsically evil that any other good that might be found within them was overshadowed by the great evil that idolatry is. Though Boniface labored in a foreign land, it was a land that was claimed for Christ, and the existence of any pagan shrine within this land was an offense to God and to Boniface. The chopping of the tree of Thor is an act of claiming the land for Christ, just as, in a lesser and more humble way, were the lovingly carved crosses of St. Isaac Jogues that the saint etched in the trees around Ossernenon whenever he could find a spare moment away from his Mohawk captives, "so that, seeing it, the demons might take flight...that the enemy might flee before it, and that through it, O Lord, my King, thou might rule in the midst of thy enemies, the enemies of the Cross, the unbelievers, the pagans who dwell in these lands and the demons who rule far and wide throughout all these regions" (Saint Among Savages, Talbot, 284). The chopping of Thor's oak, the destruction of Baal's shrine and the humble crosses of St. Isaac are all proclamations of divine victory and conquest of God over pagan error.

That pagan shrines have no place in lands under Christian dominion or lands even in the process of becoming Christianized is such a well attested fact of our Tradition that it would take too long to cite all the instances in sacred history of pagan shrines being destroyed (but anyway, check here, here, here and here). Given this long tradition, what should our attitude towards the pagan shrines in our midst today be?

I think this answer is easy in those countries that are predominantly Catholic or Catholic officially, or in places which are officially set aside as Catholic shrines. One thing is for sure: any Catholics who were present at Fatima the day in 2004 when a Hindu prayer service was carried out on one of our Lady's altars ought to have rushed in their with the zeal of Gideon, thrown down those pagan idols and hurled those Hindu priests out on their ear. That was a unique situation, however. Even if physically destroying pagan shrines is no longer a reality, we ought to never rejoice when new pagan shrines are erected - like the nonsense that occurs in many big cities where a Catholic bishop will send congratulations when the Buddhists, Hindus or Muslims open up a new multi-million dollar pagan shrine. Contrast this with the attitudes that have been prevalent in our history - Pope Gregory the Great was noted for his justice toward the Jews; yet even he did not restore the synagogues that had been taken from them at Palermo by Bishop Victor and dedicated as churches, although he obliged the bishop to pay for them. During the Merovingian period a synagogue at Orleans was destroyed by the mob, and the Jews were unable to induce King Guntram to permit it to be rebuilt (584).

Perhaps the most well-known example is the protest which St. Ambrose made to Emperor Theodosius when the latter sought to rebuild a burned Jewish synagogue at the expense of a local bishop. Though Ambrose admits Christians were responsible for the burning of the synagogue, nevertheless he sees it as a positive evil for Christians to ever contribute to pagan worship under any circumstances:

"There is, then, no adequate cause for such a commotion, that the people should be so severely punished for the burning of a building, and much less since it is the burning of a synagogue, a home of unbelief, a house of impiety, a receptacle of folly, which God Himself has condemned... Will you give this triumph over the Church of God to the Jews? This trophy over Christ's people, this exultation, O Emperor, to the unbelievers? This rejoicing to the Synagogue, this sorrow to the Church?" (St. Ambrose, Letter XL:14,20).

The modernist mind no doubt recoils at these examples of religious intolerance from our history. The modernist can easily wipe away such embarassing examples, since for him there is no need to maintain anuy real continuity with tradition. But what is the orthodox Catholic to do? Start going out an burning down mosques? Hardly. Such an action would not be condoned today in a pluralistic society, much less in America where Catholics are a minority and don't really have any grounds on which to boast that this is a Catholic country - our position is more akin to those Catholics who lived in the Holy Land during the Middle Ages, just one minority among many other religious groups, finding themselves in a culture that was by and large hostile to their values, having to do what evangelical work they could when and wherever it was possible but also attempting to live in peace with their Muslim overlords. Things would not have gone well for them had they started burning mosques, nor would things go well for the Church in America if we started doing like things. What would be the norm in a thoroughly Catholic society where the Church's teaching was reflected in the government is different than what we would expect to see in a pluralist society like the United States.

Even if we have to tolerate pagan shrines in our midst for the time being, we ought to have some refutation to the modernist critique that the examples from our history cited above are completely incompatible with Christian charity. To those conditioned to see all religions as equally valid, it is indeed difficult to see how Christian charity can exist in the heart of somebody who is tearing down a pagan altar. But Romano Amerio in his excellent book Iota Unum reminds us that the opposition between charity and severity in a false dichotomy. He says:

"This setting up of the principle of mercy as opposed to severity ignores the fact that in the mind of the Church the condemnation of error is itself a work of mercy, since by pinning down error those laboring under it are corrected and others are preserved from falling into it" (Iota Unum, 40).

Mercy is not making pagans feel good about their false religion. Gideon was being merciful when he threw down the altar of Baal. Cortez is being merciful and charitable to the Aztecs when he breaks off the head of Huitzilipotchli and sends it toppling down the steps of the teocalli to smash apart before the stunned eyes of the angered Indians. St. Boniface chopped down the oak out of love for the Frisians and as an act of mercy for their souls, as St. Benedict did when he toppled the statue of Apollo, by which he hoped to deliver them from their ignorance. Ignorance of the truth is bondage, let us remember.

While destroying pagan places of worship is not a prudent course of action to take in our own country, let us remember the great deeds of men like St. Boniface and Gideon, and let us never grow accustomed to all of the paganism around us just because we are used to seeing it so much - let us see in these shrines the same horror and loathing that they inspired in the heart of Gideon and remember that "the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens" (Ps. 95:5). It would be fitting to close with the words of the illustrious St. Paul, who reminds us that the pagan gods are actually demons, and some of the Church's most venerable saints:

""What then? Do I say that what is offered in sacrifice to idols is any thing? Or that the idol is any thing? But the things which the heathens sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils and not to God. And I would not that you should be made partakers with devils. You cannot drink the chalice of the Lord and the chalice of devils: you cannot be partakers of the table of the Lord and of the table of devils" (1 Cor. 10:19-21).

"All nations then had devils for their gods: those whom they called gods, were devils, as the Apostle more openly saith, ‘The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice unto devils, and not to God.’ …For when he had said, ‘He is more to be feared than all gods:’ he added, ‘As for all the gods of the heathen, they are devils’" (St. Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 96, 5-6).

"The consummative cause of idolatry was the influence of the demons who offered themselves to the worship of erring men, giving answers from idols or doing things which to men seemed marvelous, whence the Psalmist says (Psalm 95:5): ‘All the gods of the gentiles are devils’" (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. xciv, a. 4).

"All the invocations of the pagans are hateful to God because all their gods are devils" (St. Francis Xavier, quoted in James Brodrick, S.J., Saint Francis Xavier [New York: Wicklow Press, 1952] p. 135).

Glenn Beck is ignorant

Here's some undeniable proof that Glenn Beck is ignorant, at least with regards to history, has no clue whatsoever what he's talking about. This is wrong on so many levels.

Sacral Kingship: The Christian Revolution (part 3)

We are now up to the third chapter on my thesis on Christian sacral kingship, in which I examine how Christianity both altered prevailing concepts of political authority in the Mediterranean world and fused the older traditions of power, both eastern and western, in the new relation between Church and State, Sacerdos and Imperium. As always, I welcome comments and critiques.

 

Chapter Two: The Christian Revolution

 The reason the pagan world could never integrate an eastern, “theocratic” view of kingship with the western, “popular” view of authority was that, from a pagan standpoint, the two systems were mutually exclusive. For those peoples of the eastern lands who were accustomed to autocratic rule, the idea of giving power to the people seemed like the height of folly. To the Greeks and Romans, the idea of absolute authority coming from the gods could not but imply arbitrariness, despotism and tyranny. The Greeks and Romans could never adequately conceive of an authority whose sanction to rule came straight from the gods/God, but whose power was mitigated and mediated into something other than despotism. This was the function the Christian Church would play. But what was so revolutionary about Christianity politically? Jesus had not been the first preacher of a coming kingdom, nor was He the last. What was different about His message that changed the face of ancient political power?

In the New Testament

Paradoxically, the fact is that Christianity was able to alter the way mankind viewed politics because it had so little to say about politics. The Gospels come with no indication of any sort of ideal political state. If philosophers were to turn to the Gospels and Epistles to find out whether an autocracy was better than a democracy or how much authority a king should have, they would be very disappointed, for the New Testament says very little on the subject. The most significant, and indeed only, passage in which Jesus addresses the issue is when he teaches His disciples to “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”1 This answer is perplexing, because it is at once an answer and the evasion of an answer. He gives this injunction, but does not delineate what is Caesar’s and what exactly is God’s. Where does the authority of the one sphere end and the other begin? Where do they meet? The whole tumultuous history of Church and State relations throughout the Middle Ages is an attempt to answer these questions.

The only other statements about temporal rulership in the New Testament are found in the works of St. Paul, who briefly discusses the topic in his famous treatise on Christian political life in the Epistle to the Romans. There he explains that the Christian is obliged to obey those in government as they obey God, because all temporal authority comes from God. “For,” he writes, “there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted from God. Therefore, he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and…will incur judgment.”2 Jesus Himself seemed to hint at this same idea when He said to Pilate, “You would have no power over me had it not been given you from above,”3 implying that even the authority that Pilate was abusing in order to crucify the Son of God was itself from God. The view of temporal authority alluded to in the Gospels seems then to be that all authority, even when it is abused, comes from God and must be respected as such.4 This is manifest in Paul’s frequent commands, carried on by subsequent generations of Christians, to offer up prayers for those in authority.5

Two things are revolutionary about the strikingly simple view of political authority presented in the New Testament. First, it is a religious philosophy that does not have a corresponding idealized political structure to go with it. This is a true novelty, for the ancient world rarely produced religions that were not state religions and never really produced gods unless they were state gods.6 The Old Testament had the Law of Moses, but also the divinely instituted Kingdom of David under the house of David centered around Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon. Yahweh, though Creator of all mankind, was primarily the Lord God of Israel, a national God. The old Roman religion, centered on the worship of Mars and later Jupiter, was a civic religion entirely. The numerous deities of the city-states of Mesopotamia, from Uruk to Lagash were likewise all civic in nature; not to mention the highly state oriented view of religion in Pharonic Egypt. The otherwise abstract minds of the Greeks likewise identified the gods with state and community. Even in the skeptical age of Socrates and the Peloponnesian War they still identified their gods with the welfare of the state to such a degree that the defacing of some Hermae statues in Athens was taken as an act of treason against the state and the general Alcibiades was sentenced to death in absentia; several other Athenians were actually executed for similar crimes.7 Plato, too, had a ready made model state, put forward in his Republic, to go with his religious philosophy. All of these pre-Christian religions were also state systems and cultures. Though it is not within the scope of this work, we could also cite Islam as an example of a religious system that is also a political system. Christianity was revolutionary in that the Gospel did not come with a corresponding state system set up to go with it. It certainly had its foundation in the culture of the Jews, but the Church itself was like a chameleon that was able to take on the cultural trappings of whatever society it found itself in. This was the key to its unity and the reason why it alone has managed to become a truly world religion in a way that cultural-religions like Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, paganism and even Judaism never could.

The second innovative thing about Christianity was that, unlike Old Testament Judaism, it asserted that all authority, unequivocally, came from God. Being that it is an historically eastern religion, this is not surprising. But in the specific context of Christianity’s Jewish origins, it certainly is. Jews had always believed that the authority of the king came down from God, but only their king; the kings of the Gentiles were a different matter altogether. A Jew and a Christian could both easily assert that King Solomon was a king anointed by God and ruling Israel with God’s authority, but no pious Jew would have put forward the idea that the authority of persons like Antiochus IV Epiphanes or Emperor Caligula (both who committed outrages against the Jewish nation) came from God. This is contrasted greatly with the image Eusebius gives us of the Christian faithful, praying for the Emperors Diocletian, Galerius and Licinius even as the latter subject them to the most monstrous tortures. In short, the Christian revolution universalized the idea of the authority of the king coming from God. It was no longer just the authority of the Jewish king, or just the Pharaoh, or only the petty priest-kings of this or that Mesopotamian city-state, but all authority that descended from God. This idea, at least theoretically, made any type of Christian nationalism (akin to the Jewish type rampant in Judea from the time of Augustus to the time of Hadrian) an impossibility. Since every king held his authority from God, every king equally had a right to respect and honor; Christians were to give “respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due…Honor all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.”8 This ideal of the universal divine origin of all authority did much to establish the early medieval idea of sacrosanct kingship.9 In the earliest centuries of the Church, this honor would have been reserved to the Roman Emperor alone, the only "king" known in the west. Yet, as the Middle Ages progressed and national kings asserted their power against that of an ever weakening Roman (and then Holy Roman) Empire, this teaching on the authority of kings was applied to all in authority. "A king is an emperor in his kingdom," went the popular saying of the Middle Ages.

Render to Caesar

Christ’s command to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” was relatively easy to fulfill in the early centuries of Christianity. The world of the Church and the secular world of Rome were divided by a deep chasm. Christians generally fulfilled Christ’s precept in two ways. On the positive side, they were submissive to the laws, paid their taxes in due time, showed fitting honor to the civil magistrates and performed social works of charity. On the negative side, they usually refrained from military service, tried not to make use of the Roman courts,10 stayed out of civic positions early on, remained aloof from the circuses and spectacles, and were conspicuously absent at civic religious services, where sacrifices were made to the state gods, the emperor, and the “Genius of the Roman People.”11 Later, many retreated from civic life all together and went into monasteries. It was generally pretty clear cut where the dividing line was between the City of God and the City of Man, and Christians could easily steer clear of the latter if they had enough fortitude to turn their back on the culture of their day.

This is attested to by the fact that the Church Fathers of the ante-Nicean period spent very little time writing on matters of state and politics. By the time of Emperor Septimius Severus (r.193-211), Christianity had become more entrenched and Christians were taking up civil posts in the government; yet even then few Christian authors of the time address the issue of Church-State relations. The one exception perhaps is Tertullian, who dourly complained from the harsh deserts of North Africa, declaring that “no official position in the state ought to be held by any true Christian.”12 Most Church Fathers of the time were writing treatises against heresies (Irenaeus), exegetical works (Origen), or catechetical materials (Cyril of Jerusalem). The question about where the temporal and spiritual spheres met and ended remained untouched since Church-State integration was not a lively issue in the days of the persecutions.

The advent of a Christian Emperor changed this arrangement and threw endless complexities into the question of how a Christian was supposed to relate to the secular state. It was easy to render to Caesar the things that were Caesar's and to God the things that were God’s, but what was one to do when Caesar and God were on the same team? The ascension of Constantine as sole emperor in 324 ushered in a new era of ideology regarding the relations of Church and State. His embrace of the faith following the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 has provided grounds for endless speculation among historians about his motives; modern popular history tends to see his conversion as a political convention with little personal conviction done in order to secure power, using the Church as his tool.

Two common errors must be refuted in dealing with this topic. One is to believe that the post-Nicene Church was largely a political construction of Constantine made to serve his personal agenda, whose clergy were subsequently knavish goons ready to act on his every beckon call. Some of the more unscholarly of Protestant historians hold this view, which tends to transform the Catholic Church into just another Roman institution created by Constantine. The second common error is to assume that the Church, once invested with political clout, began to pander to the idols of power and money and stopped criticizing the establishment in exchange for imperial patronage.

Contrary to those who see the post-Nicene Church as a tool of Constantine created by him to serve his purposes, it is evident that the structure and hierarchy of the Church were intact and functioning well before the advent of Constantine. Though his ascension increased prestige of the Church greatly, there was very little alteration to the structure or organization of the Church during the Constantinian period; if there was a change, it was certainly not done by Constantine.¹³ Changes in organization certainly would come later, but they were long after the period of Constantine and instituted equally by the Church and State. It is often emphasized how zealous Constantine was in supporting Christianity and stomping out paganism, but what is often under emphasized is how enthusiastically the Church supported Constantine and flocked to his cause. Christians had labored many long years under godless emperors and were quite willing to openly praise the first Christian emperor as a new David or a new Solomon. It seemed like a new golden age was dawning, ushered in by Constantine.

The second error, that the Church relaxed its preaching of the Gospel in exchange for wealth, prestige and power, is refuted by a look at the ancient practice of parrhesia. In contrast to the pre-Constantinian fathers, who wrote little about politics and generally derided those in authority as godless, it now became the standard in ecclesiastical circles to praise the emperor as a friend of God and at the same time pay close attention to his political actions. After all, one had to make certain that the emperor was not also giving an upper hand to heretics, pagans or Jews. Not only did bishops gradually come to pay close attention to imperial affairs, but they began to speak their mind to the emperors freely when the latter might be tempted to enact a piece of legislation that the bishops thought was less than Christian. This boldness of speech came to be viewed subsequently as a right and prerogative of the clergy, called parrhesia in the east. For example, St. Ambrose boldly says to the usurper-emperor Eugenius in 393, “I have no fear telling your majesties, the emperors, what I feel with my own conviction,” and later says of the emperor Theodosius I, “I did not hesitate to speak with him face to face.”14 He cites Psalm 118:46, “I was not ashamed to speak in the presence of the king,” as justification for his considerable license in speaking to the Imperial Majesty. In the same letter to Eugenius, Ambrose strictly censures the Emperor for giving large donations to supporters who were pagans, saying, “The imperial power is great, but consider, O emperor, how great God is…You are indeed the emperor, but you must all the more submit to God.”15 When pestering Theodosius about the way he handled a synagogue burning affair, Ambrose bluntly opens the body of his epistle with the statement, “It is not fitting for an emperor to refuse freedom of speech or for a bishop not to say what he thinks.”16 No one of any rank under Caligula or Domitian or even better emperors like Trajan and Severus, would have ever been permitted to take such a tone with His Imperial Majesty; this was something new.

A great example of this freedom of speech exercised by clergy in the presence of the emperors comes from the life of St. Athanasius. He had the boldness to track down Constantine himself while the emperor was out on a hunting trip and stand in the way of his entourage, refusing to move until the emperor allowed him to vindicate himself before his Arian accusers. Constantine himself recorded his amazement at Athanasius’ boldness: 

As I was entering on a late occasion our all-happy home of Constantinople, which bears our name (I chanced at the time to be on horseback) on a sudden the Bishop Athanasius, with certain others whom he had with him, approached me in the middle of the road, so unexpectedly as to occasion me much amazement….I did not however enter into conversation with him at that time, nor grant him an interview…but gave orders for his removal, when with increasing boldness he claimed only this favor [i.e., that he should be allowed to plead his case before the Emperor]…17

This new air of boldness to speak on the part of the clergy was something quite different from the imperial flattery and proskynesis that Diocletian required of his attendants (and that lay people were still required to pay to the Christian emperors).

This idea of parrhesia, the freedom and duty of the clergy to speak freely with and even rebuke the Christian emperors, disproves the commonly held assumption of modern history that the Church slavishly pandered to the imperial will, part out of servile fear and part from a hope of gaining influence. On the contrary, from the very beginning of the Middle Ages the trend is the Church and the bishops knocking heads with the leaders of state, continually beseeching and imploring the temporal authorities to obey the Gospel and respect the rights of the Church. The Church and State were like an old married couple who bickered constantly, the Church playing the part of the nagging wife, the State of the sometimes disinterested husband. The relation of the bishops to the Emperor in the age of Constantine is indeed complex, but it was certainly not one of knavish servitude nor one of arrogant independence. The Church was ready to praise Constantine, but not pander to him. It was eager enough to applaud his legislation that favored Catholics, but equally eager to condemn his acts that favored Arians. The Church was more than willing to laud and acclaim a pious and God-fearing Christian ruler, as the Christians of the fourth century welcomed Constantine and the Israelites of the eleventh century B.C. welcomed David. At the same time, the Church was always ready to step in and rebuke a king who had acted wickedly, as Ambrose did when Theodosius massacred the people of Thessalonica and Nathan did when David killed Uriah.

Eternal Victory

Very early on, during the reign of Constantine, Christian writers and imperial propagandists began to merge the ideas of the eternal Roman Empire with the eternal reign of God. The two were never totally confused (as in ancient Egypt where the Pharaoh was first the incarnate Horus and later the divine son of Ra) but they were integrated.18 Had not the book of Proverbs said, “the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord”?19 All that the reign of God and the reign of the Emperor needed to integrate was a point on which they could meet, a fulcrum on which the two sides could balance. That crux was military triumph.

This goes back to the very beginning, to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. Though the reported vision of Constantine, the cross emblazoned with the words “In this sign thou shalt conquer” (In hoc signo vinces) was later applied by ecclesiastics like Eusebius to the spiritual triumph of Christianity over paganism, its initial context was that of a military victory. Constantine certainly took it this way, and ordered the chi rho sign painted on all his soldiers’ shields. The victory of his forces that day seemed to confirm that the Christian God was not only the true God, but the God who ensured military victory. The first fusion of Church and State functions was a military one. Thus, from the very beginning the idea of the pious Christian ruler was connected with the idea of military glory. This connection would prevail over all Christendom, from the Byzantine east to the remotest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

The Christian message had revolutionized the way men thought about government. No longer was God seen as a state god bound up with the interests of a particular people, as Jupiter Capitolinus, Athena Parthenos or the Lord God of Israel, but as a God who was God of all peoples and thus all authority, even corrupt authority, got its mandate from Him. This lack of a nationalistic emphasis enabled Christianity to flourish in whatever culture it took root in and prosper under whatever governor or emperor happened to be in power at the time.

The early Christians respected all authority as coming from God and prayed for their rulers, even bad ones. The advent of Constantine and the subsequent Christianization of the Roman Empire complicated the relationship, but the two remained separate entities and were not merged but integrated. The post-Constantinian Church was obedient to the Christian emperors, as it had been to all emperors, but enjoyed a new boldness (parrhesia) to evaluate their acts in light of the Gospels and criticize them accordingly. This duty fell largely to the bishops. With its insistence that all authority was not of human origin but came from God, as well as its degree of responsibility and accountability that it required of Christian rulers, Christianity became the perfect synthesis of the older, pagan political traditions of the east and the west and thus accomplished peacefully what Xerxes, Alexander, Caesar and Diocletian had been unable to do militarily or politically. In its emphasis on the authority of the ruler coming straight from heaven, it preserved the best qualities of the eastern theocratic monarchies. In its utilization of the body of bishops as a kind of ecclesiastical senate that had the ear of the emperors and enjoyed a considerable amount of free speech (parrhesia) with him, it also provided an outlet for the continuation of the western, senatorial tradition based around the assembly to continue. After all, the Greek word for Church, ekklesia, is the same word used for assemblies of the Greek city-states. In the Christian Church, the representative assemblies of the west were finally able to coexist with the sacerdotal monarchs of the east.

As Church and State gradually grew used to existing side-by-side, certain ecclesiastical rights were introduced into political functions, so that specific state rituals also became Church rituals. The first aspect that the two institutions were able to converge on was that of military triumph. The idea of the pious Christian emperor as Victor was most popular in the east, where imperial custom prevailed much longer than in the west, which was becoming increasingly germanicized. It is to the post-Constantinian emperors of Constantinople that we must now turn.

 

Footnotes

1 Matt. 22:21

2Rom. 13:1-2 (see also Tit. 3:1, I Pet. 2:13-17)

3 John 19:11

4 As in the example of David, refusing to strike down Saul even when he had both the right and the opportunity (I Sam. 24:1-22; 26:1-25).

5 I Tim. 2:1-2. Eusebius reveals how seriously Christians took this command to pray for those in authority when he says that the Christian communities of Asia Minor offered up prayers for the welfare of the Co-Emperor Licinius (319) even when he was in the process of pursuing a savage campaign of persecution against them. Eusebius calls this act of praying for rulers the “ancestral custom” of the Christians (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 10.8).

6 Not unless one counts the deities of sky and earth, such as Gaea, Cybele, etc. But these most ancient of deities probably represent the remnants of a primal religion left over from before such a time as there was organized states. But once ancient cultures civilized and urbanized, the gods they developed were always state gods.

7Thucydides, History, 6.27-28,61

8 Rom 13:7; I Pet. 2:13-17

9 One result of this is that assassination of monarchs was a relatively rare occurrence in the Middle Ages. Most medieval kings met their ends peacefully. By contrast, a majority of the final Roman emperors died unnatural deaths.

10 Following St. Paul’s injunction of I Cor. 6:1-8: “When one of you has a grievance against a brother, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints?…I say this to your shame…brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers?”

11Michael Grant, History of Rome (Michael Grant Publications: London, 1979), 304

12 Grant, 307

13Some might object that the Council of Nicaea was called at Constantine’s request, and that this constitutes a major change in the Church at the hand of the Emperor. But though the Council was certainly pivotal, it only reaffirmed what had been the orthodox position all along and proposed no novelty.

14 St. Ambrose, Letter 57

15ibid.

16St. Ambrose, Letter 40

17William Thomas Walsh, Saints in Action, (Hanover House: Garden City, NY, 1961),191

18Jan Assman, The Mind of Egypt, Translated by Andrew Jenkins (Metropolitan Books: New York, 1996), 184

19Pr. 21:1

Communion Straw Men

In our Diocesan publication, "FAITH Magazine," I recently came across an article on the reception of Holy Communion that made my eye-twitch; not necessarily because it said anything wrong per se, but because it gave only half of the answer and neglected to provide a ton of historical and liturgical information that would have been more helpful in answering the question. The question posed was whether or not communion in the hand was disrespectful. The question is answered by Fr. Joe Krupp, a popular priest in our diocese who runs a Q&A segment in the diocesan magazine. Here is the article in its entirety, which I will comment on afterward:

Q: Recently, at church, someone told me receiving communion in the hand is disrespectful. Is this accurate? How should I receive communion?

A: I’ve gotten this one and variations on it from a few readers – I hope my information helps. Before we dive into the “how” and the “why” though, I’d like to take a moment and explain why these are important issues and not “nit-picking.”

We call the Eucharist the blessed sacrament. All of our sacraments are amazing, but when we talk about the Eucharist, we are talking about the one from which all the others flow. It is the most potent spiritual medicine available to us. Because of its amazing power and beauty, we are always to use one word above all others in relation to it: reverence. Here’s a pretty powerful passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

“Therefore, whoever eats the body or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 11:27)

So, with that in mind, how are we to receive? According to the laws of the church, there are two ways we can receive Communion: on the hand or on the tongue. To be clear, both ways of receiving are approved by the church. The folks who told you receiving Communion in the hand is a mortal sin were wrong.

So, if we receive on the hand, how do we do it? Look at this quote from St. Cyril of Jerusalem: “When you approach holy Communion, make the left hand into a throne for the right, which will receive the king.” Pope Paul VI added, “Then, with your lower hand, take the consecrated host and place it in your mouth.” For those who receive Communion on the hand, please be sure and follow this practice. Receiving one-handed or cupping the hand is not the right way to receive.

For those who receive in the mouth, the key is to tilt your head back and extend your tongue so that there is no danger of the host falling. Simply opening your mouth is not safe or sanitary. This practice also is affirmed by our history – Pope Leo the Great referred to receiving in the mouth when he wrote about the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John.

In both cases, focus on being reverent. I’ve seen both Communion-in-the-hand and Communion-in-the-mouth folks approach the Eucharist with tremendous respect and honor; and I’ve seen the opposite as well.

Our posture in approaching the Eucharist needs to be different, as well: We should stand ready – alert and prepared to receive Jesus attentiveness and love in our hearts. Our “Amen” should be loud and clear – a strong affirmation of our communal belief.

I’ve received letters from folks about priests not allowing them to receive Communion on the hand and from folks whose priests do not allow them to receive on the tongue. The priest has no authority to do such a thing on either side. I would suggest you politely share with your priest your concerns and ask him to change his personal rule. If not, then I would follow up with a letter to the bishop.

For those of you who have a strong opinion about how others should receive, I invite you to focus on how you and your family receive. Don’t worry about others. Jesus promised that he would guide us as a church and we need to cling to those words. It’s not our duty to save the church, but to let Jesus save us through it.

Enjoy another day in God’s presence!

First of all, kudos to Fr. Joe for pointing out that this is an important issue, is not "nit-picking" and that those who find themselves being forced to receive according to the priest's whim ought to take a stand on it. However, I do have several concerns about the approach Fr. Joe took that jumped out at me the very first time I read this article.

My first problem is the straw-man that Fr. Joe sets up to answer the question. Let's look at the original question again: "Recently, at church, someone told me receiving communion in the hand is disrespectful. Is this accurate? How should I receive communion?" The question is whether or not receiving communion in the hand is "disrespectful." Now let's see how Fr. Joe answers: "The folks who told you receiving Communion in the hand is a mortal sin were wrong." The person did not ask if communion in the hand was a mortal sin; they asked if it was "disrespectful," by which I am assuming they mean irreverent. Fr. Joe completely passes up the question as to whether or not communion in the hand is disrespectful and merely says that it is not a "mortal sin", which is something completely different. To be sure, every liturgical derivation which is a mortal sin is also disrespectful, but not everything disrespectful is a mortal sin.

Delving into this issue of disrespect a little more, note that the entire answer to the question is framed not in terms of which way of reception is intrinsically more reverent, but around whether or not both forms are equally permissible. Here is Fr. Joe's essential argument:

So, with that in mind, how are we to receive? According to the laws of the church, there are two ways we can receive Communion: on the hand or on the tongue. To be clear, both ways of receiving are approved by the church. The folks who told you receiving Communion in the hand is a mortal sin were wrong.

This is another straw-man. The person asked whether communion in the hand is irreverent; Fr. Joe answers that communion in the hand is legal. Perhaps he is making the assumption that no option the Church legalizes could be any more or less reverent than any other option, that all options are created equal, so to speak; but even if so, the question of the legality of communion in the hand is not in question. It is the reverence of communion in the hand that has been challenged, and it is a little bit misleading to answer the question by appealing to legality as if legality and reverence were equivocal terms. We all know that in many liturgical areas the Church allows many "options", some of which are less reverent than others. 

This, by the way, is the standard answer I have usually seen given by non-traditionalist Catholic apologists, at least when questioned on communion publicly: an appeal to the equal legality of either form of reception with the implicit assumption that one is just as good as the other because they are both "approved."

The appeal to history is also a little one-sided. Fr. Joe cites the famous quote by St. Cyril on how to receive in the hand; after discussing communion in the hand, he goes on to the communion on the tongue with the casual statement, "This practice also is affirmed by our history," as if communion in the hand and communion in the tongue were two practices that have always existed side by side with equal usage! As if reception in the hand was the historic norm but that reception on the tongue was "also affirmed!" To simply refer to the whole 1500 year tradition of communion on the tongue, which was the universal norm throughout the whole Church for most of her history and affirmed by so many saints and popes, with the casual statement "This practice also is affirmed" is a colossal understatement and (in my opinion) misleading, as if one were to say that the Church allows altar girls but that using boys for altar servers is "also" historical.

Regarding the history of the practice, notice that nowhere in the article does Fr. Joe point out that communion on the tongue has been the norm for centuries upon centuries and that even now it is the norm in many parts of the world. He does not say that communion in the hand was only accepted in the past few decades and only as a concession. Rather, he tries to paint both forms as equally historical with an equally valid historical pedigree. While it is certainly true that communion in the hand existed in the early Church, it is patently false to insinuate that it has just as impressive a historical pedigree as communion on the tongue or that it was just one of two equally used modes of reception. It is well known that Communion in the hand began spreading during the early nineteen-sixties, in Catholic circles in Holland and originally as a form of dissent. It began, then, as an aping of the Protestant practice, or at the very least as a "false archaeologism" - it certainly does not have the venerable sanction of tradition that communion on the tongue does, and Catholics deserve to know this.

One other thing that ought to be cleared up - when Fr. Joe goes on to speak about how to receive, he says:

In both cases, focus on being reverent. I’ve seen both Communion-in-the-hand and Communion-in-the-mouth folks approach the Eucharist with tremendous respect and honor; and I’ve seen the opposite as well.

In this and the suceeding paragraphs, he seems to imply that whether or not a reception is reverent is entirely dependent upon the subjective disposition and actions of the recipient. There is of course some truth to this, but as I said above, this is not the whole truth. When the questioner asked whether communion in the hand was disrespectful, he was not asking about one's personal dispositions but whether the mode of reception in the hand was objectively disrespectful. Sometimes we can have the best dispositions, be in a state of grace, etc. but the mode of reception itself can be irreverent; for example, unleavened hosts distributed by a lay person dressed up like a clown. That is an extreme example, but the point is that sometimes we need to look not at the disposition of the recipient but at the mode of distribution itself - this is what the question was addressing, whether taken objectively, communion in the hand is less reverent than communion in the tongue. Instead of answering this, Fr. Joe seems to say that as each mode is equally legal, so each mode is equally reverent depending on the disposition of the recipient.

Also, why no mention that Pope Benedict himself mandates that at papal masses communion must be received not only on the tongue but kneeling? Surely the pope's own actions would have provided a valuable insight into which "option" the Church seems to think is best?

Regarding the actual question as to whether or not communion in the hand is intrinsically more disrespectful than communion in the tongue (the question Fr. Joe should have answered), I refer you to this article by Jude Huntz in a 1997 edition of "Homiletic and Pastoral Review."

I'm not going to go on and on about all the arguments in favor of communion in the hand; that's not the point of this post. The point is that if people bring up this question, they deserve an honest answer, one that is at least true to history and logically consistent. Simply pointing out that both modes of reception are legal is hardly an answer; it is the absence of an answer. I like Fr. Joe and usually read his Q&A column with a smile, but I think this time a more thorough answer would have been better, especially as this is likely to become a more live issue in the near future as the Church continues to realign herself with Tradition.

What does God have against us?

This is an interesting question that has come up in the course of my studies of the Book of Revelation in the context of some talks I am preparing for my Youth Group on discerning the will of God.This question deals with the phrase "I have this against you", which is oft repeated by the Lord in His letters to the seven churches found in Rev. 2-3. After greeting each local church and commending them for their fidelity, He calls to mind their sins and says "I have this against you." Consider the following verses:

• "But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first" (Rev. 2:4)
  
  
• "But I have a few things against you; you have some who hold the teaching of Balaam...you also have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent then" (Rev. 2:15).
  
  
• "But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess..." (Rev. 2:20).

So Scripture very clearly says that God has things "against" these churches. Since these are churches that God is speaking to, it is evident that, at face value, God can be "against" believers if they are unfaithful, which at the very least should be an admonition for us to remain in God's favor!

And yet, if we turn to the Epistle to the Romans, we see a very different statement, where St. Paul assures us that God is for us, not against us:

"And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?" (Rom. 8:28-31)

Since Paul is speaking here of those He "foreknew", those who are "justified" and "glorified", we may presume he is speaking of the Church. Speaking of the Church he says "If God is for us, who can be against us?" The implied answer is "nobody." Why? Again, the implication is because God is always for us and never against us. How could God be "against" His own Church? How could Christ be "against" His Bride? "No man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church, because we are members of His body" (Eph. 5:29). So we seem to have a contradiction - St. Paul teaches that God is for us, not against us, and that because we are His Body, the Bride of Christ, for this very reason does Christ cherish and nurture us rather than being "against" us. Yet St. John tells us very plainly that in some cases, God can be "against" the Church.

An easy answer would be to say that God is for us if we are righteous but becomes against us when we sin, since the instances mentioned in Revelation clearly deal with sin. I don't think this answer really does the issue justice though; is God really so fickle that He pledges eternal devotion to us, as a husband does a wife, but that the second we make a mistake He suddenly becomes "against" us? In some ways yes. If we commit a mortal sin, we know that we put ourselves outside God's grace; if we were to die in that state, we would find God "against" us in that we would face exclusion from heaven. But apart from the case of the sinner who actually dies in mortal sin, is the disposition of God rightly said to be "against" the believer when he commits a sin? Can God ever really be "against" a baptized believer?

One could of course try to say that one ceases being a "believer" or one of the "faithful" when they commit a sin, but this would be a Manichean view of the Church as a community of the "perfect", such as adopted by various Calvinist communities throughout history. No; the words of Christ that He has something "against" someone are addressed not to people in the world, but to the Church. So, again, can God ever be "against" a baptized believer?

Of course, if we start with St. Paul's statement that God is for us, we ought to assume that this is an absolute statement with regards to the Elect; that is, God is always for us, not just when we happen to be on the straight and narrow, but even if we screw up. If there could be windows or segments of time when God was not for us but against us, then Paul would not have been able to boast rhetorically "who can be against us?" The structure of the sentence implies that God is always for us. If nothing else, the parable of the Prodigal Son reminds us that even if we flee from God and become mired in sin, God is still "for us", still on "our side." Did the father suddenly become an enemy of the prodigal once he left home? Is the father's disposition such that he becomes against his own son when the latter leaves but then changes his disposition when the son returns? On the contrary, we see in the parable of the Prodigal Son a fatherly love that is ever for his son, even when the latter wanders.

If God is always for us, then it follows that when it says that He has things "against" us that it cannot mean in a literal sense that God has turned against us, just like those who believe in penal substitution assert happened when God the Father allegedly "turned his back" on our Lord while He suffered. But what other way can we take Christ's phrase in Revelation that He has things "against" different churches?

We know that when we speak of God changing His dispositions towards us, it is really an anthropomorphic way of saying that we have changed. Since God is simple and changeless, He cannot "get mad" and then "calm down" afterward; when we speak of God being angry when we sin and then being restored to His friendship, this assuaging His anger, we know that it is not as if He was sitting there in heaven all blissful until we sinned and then we disturbed His peace and made Him angry; rather, our language and ways of speaking metaphorically about God's changing passions are really descriptions of our changing relationship with Him. When we say God was angry with us when we sinned but now we are in His favor, we are not describing the whims of a Persian potentate but are rather explaining that we ourselves have changed our relation to Him - we have gone from a state of deprivation of sanctifying grace (being under God's "anger") to a state of possessing sanctifying grace (being in God's "favor"). But it is we who have changed, not God.

So, when God lists things He has against us in Revelation, He is not calling them to mind for His benefit, but rather for ours. When God, who is perfect, says to a man, "I have this against you," is He not rather saying, "You have done this against Me?" Remember, the Holy Spirit, our Lord tells us, plays an important role in "convicting" us of sin (John 16:8). When God speaks to us, it is often to awaken our own consciences to our need for His grace, especially in the case of those in the Church who, as in Revelation, think they are spiritually mature when really they are weak. "You have the name of being alive, yet you are dead" (Rev. 3:1). "You say, 'I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing;' not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked" (Rev. 3:17).

When God asks Adam, "Where are you?" He does not ask because He doesn't know where Adam is; He does it so Adam will realize that he is estranged from God. Likewise, when God lists all the things He has "against" us, it is because He wants us to understand the things we have against Him - and in thus knowing what we have done against God can we truly repent, for it is necessary to admit our sins in order to be restored to grace. If we do not see this, we are hypocrites and liars  and "the truth is not in us" (1 John 1:8).

God is our Father. He sent His Son to atone for our sins by making a perfect sacrifice of Himself on the cross. Out of this sacrificial love was born the Church, the Bride of Christ, for whom our Lord ever intercedes at the right hand of the Father. Even when we sin, though we lose God's grace, God doesn't stop loving us or alter His fundamental disposition of mercy towards us, just as the father of the Prodigal Son did not cease loving the prodigal or ever stop being "for" him. When God mentions in Revelation that He holds things "against" us, it is not He who is compiling a hit list against us, as if he is our political enemy, but it is His way of showing us what we have done against Him, and even then always with a view of bringing about repentance, as our Lord says in Revelation: ""But I have a few things against you; you have some who hold the teaching of Balaam...you also have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent then" (Rev. 2:15).

I think this is a biblical and orthodox solution to the problem; of course, much hinges on what we mean by God being "for" or "against" somebody, but I think this explanation solves the problem without getting bogged down in semantics. I'm sure you will all let me know if this is heresy or not.

St. Bede the Venerable

Today is the feast of St. Bede the Venerable, one of my favorite saints of the Church. Bede, a Doctor of the Church, was born in 672 in Northumberland and lived his whole life in this region in the vicinity of the monastery of Jarrow, where he was to spend all but seven years of his life. Bede was dedicated to God at the tender age of seven as an oblate at a time when the custom of dedicating children to the monastic life was widely practiced. Bede describes his own upbringing in the last chapter of his "Ecclesiastical History of the English People":

A the age of seven I was, by the care of my relations, given to the most reverend Abbot Benedict, and afterward to Ceolfrid, to be educated. From that time I have spent the whole of my life within that monastery, devoting all my pains to the study of the Scriptures, and amid the observance of monastic discipline and the daily charge of singing in the Church, it has been ever my delight to learn or teach or write.

Thus did St. Bede labor for the remainder of his life in the scholarly work of a monk, toiling away in the scriptorium at Jarrow, copying and explicating the Sacred Scriptures. Though remembered primarily by medievalists as a historian for his history on the English Church, Bede considered himself first a Scripture scholar and a scribe whose job it was to make known the wisdom of the Scriptures. He says:

From the time of my admission to the priesthood to my present fifty-ninth year, I have endeavored for my own use and that of my brethren, to make brief notes upon the holy Scripture, either out of the works of the venerable Fathers or in conformity with their meaning and interpretation.

St. Bede toiled endlessly in the tedious but monumental work of a monastic scribe, according to tradition, working even until the very hour of his death on the vigil of the Ascension in 735. The day he died the saint was still busy dictating a translation of the Gospel of St. John. In the evening the boy Wilbert, who was writing it, said to him: "There is still one sentence, dear master, which is not written down." And when this had been supplied, and the boy had told him it was finished, "Thou hast spoken truth", Bede answered, "it is finished. Take my head in thy hands for it much delights me to sit opposite any holy place where I used to pray, that so sitting I may call upon my Father." And thus upon the floor of his cell singing, "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost" and the rest, he peacefully breathed his last breath, according to the account of Cuthbert, his beloved disciple.

St. Bede is a wonderful example for the modern Church, for just as he labored to bring the light of Christ to the people in the midst of the Dark Ages, so is our world, which is plunged into an age darker than anything Bede could have known, in need of the light of Christ.

One of his most beautiful prayers:

And I pray thee, loving Jesus, that as Thou hast graciously given me to drink in with delight the words of Thy knowledge, so Thou wouldst mercifully grant me to attain one day to Thee, the fountain of all wisdom and to appear forever before Thy face. Amen.

Why "dialogue" will never win converts

Why has "dialogue" as a model for interaction between Christians and other religions failed to produce any fruit? Undoubtedly because in a model of interaction between the Church and non-Christian religions that is based on "dialogue" and "meaningful exchange of experiences" there is a misplaced emphasis on learning about one another rather than on the salvation of souls. For a long time I thought this failure of the dialogue approach was a strategic blunder; i.e., I thought it was poorly thought out, untested in Christian history, prone to engender confusion and all in all was just a bad idea. While maintaining all of these things, I now see that any approach to non-Christian religions that is based solely on "dialogue" as its cornerstone is not only strategically a bad move but is actually antithetical to the spirit of the Gospel and is doomed to failure essentially and innately. One who chooses to pursue the route of "dialogue" by that very fact ensures the failure of their efforts.

This thought came to me while reading Josef Pieper's book Tradition: Concept and Claim, which is not so much about the theological or ecclesiological concepts of tradition but rather tradition in the broader, philosophical sense. Pieper points out that Tradition is too often defined as the simple handing on of information from one group to another; this is the definition one gets of tradition in secular dictionaries of sociological college courses that study "folklore." Yet, Pieper says, this in itself cannot be tradition, for otherwise such things as simple reporting would be considered tradition: a reporter goes out and gains information and conveys this information to an audience, yet nobody would claim that tradition has taken place. The same could be said for a scholar publishing a work on an historical epoch. I can write a book about ancient Rome and  pass on the knowledge of ancient Rome to a third party reader via the book, but I am not really passing on a tradition, just knowledge.

One difference, of course, is that Tradition doesn't just pass on knowledge, but passes on knowledge in its cultural context. But the critical distinction needs to be placed on the recipient of the tradition. When a true act of tradition takes place, someone passes on the tradition to a recipient, who assents to it and makes it his own. Pieper says of the act of receiving tradition:

"[This] is what the act looks like, in which the activity of tradition first reaches its goal and is consummated, by means of which alone someone "is part of a tradition" and participates in it. This is reception in the strictest meaning of the term, hearing something and really taking it seriously. I accept what someone else offers me and presents to me. I allow him to give it to me...Taken all together, this means that accepting and receiving tradition has the structure of belief. It is belief, since belief means accepting something as true and valid not on the basis of my own insight. but by relying on someone else" (Pieper, Tradition: Concept and Claim. St. Augustine Press, 2010.pp. 18-19).

According to Pieper, the act of "receiving" a tradition is akin to an act of faith - when receiving a tradition, one is put in a disposition of humility, receiving as a gift something being given by another (hence the verbs about something being "passed on" or "handed down" in relation to tradition). To accept what is handed down is not to just understand facts; rather, it is to assent to and receive the tradition, thus making oneself "part of the tradition" and the next line in the chain. In fact, it is only in assenting to the tradition and becoming part of the tradition that one can even fully understand the tradition.

Here is where the problem with dialogue comes in. The entire Christian message -call it the Gospel, the Good News, the Faith, the Teaching, whatever - is, in its most essential form, Tradition. All throughout the New Testament and the Fathers, the Gospel is spoken of as something that is received and then handed on; i.e., a Tradition, something that is given and that as a tradition demands assent. It is not a set of facts given out for one to ponder, but a tradition that is given and that the recipient must actively receive. Consider these verses and how the Faith is portrayed as a tradition:

Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a narration of the things that have been accomplished among us, according as they have delivered them unto us... (Luke 1:1-2).

For I delivered unto you first of all, which I also received: how that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures: And that he was buried: and that he rose again according to the scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3-4).

For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread... (1 Cor. 11:23).


And the things which thou hast heard of me by many witnesses, the same commend to faithful men who shall be fit to teach others also (2 Tim. 2:2).

Therefore, brethren, stand fast: and hold the traditions, which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle (2 Thess. 2:15).

In all these verses we see that the Gospel is essentially a Tradition. So he who would really know the Gospel and enter into it must not only learn about it but receive it as a Tradition. But in a situation where the Gospel as tradition is replaced by dialoguing "about" the Gospel, we see that the message is robbed of all its power and vitality because we are no longer seeking to pass on a tradition but to simply relate facts and experiences. No matter how weighty our facts or how compelling our experiences, these can ultimately never produce conversions or belief because the essence of what the Gospel is has now been removed. Without the element of "handing on and receiving" that St. Paul sees as central to the Gospel, how can we be surprised if efforts at simple "dialogue" do not produce conversions? Indeed, they are incapable of doing so, just like a car with its engine removed is no longer capable of transporting anybody anywhere.

When we approach non-Christians from a position of dialogue (versus handing on a message that demands assent, that actually asks something of the hearer), we are merely telling facts and experiences about the Gospel without even preaching the Gospel to them. This is infidelity to the call of Christ and unfair to the hearer, who has a right to hear the Word of Life from the Body of Christ.

Given that this approach has been a dismal failure, we see that the proponents of dialogue have tried to rework the entire notion of Christian missions to say, in effect, "That's okay that our dialogue-based model has not produced any conversions, because we're not really trying to "convert" people anymore anyway. We just want to share mutually validating experiences enriched through dialogue about the contributions our respective faith communities make to our spiritual growth." In other words, they failed to find gold and covered it up by claiming they were never looking for it in the first place. Dialogue-based approaches have failed to win souls for Christ and it is now denied that winning souls is even a goal. That's too outmoded and based on an "ecclesiology of conversion." How medieval.

Is there a place for dialogue? Of course. Every evangelical encounter starts as dialogue, but i(and this is the distinction) t is a dialogue that goes someplace - that leads from the conveyance of facts to the proposition that the hearers take some of concrete action on what they have heard. St. Paul might begin his sermon on the Areopagus with a dialogue about the comparative merits of Greek religion, but this only serves as a springboard to lead him into the essential message - the preaching of the Gospel, where he warns them that God will no longer overlook their ignorance, that He demands all nations repent of their sins because God has fixed a Day of Judgment, and that this Judge will be none other than Jesus Christ. What St. Paul certainly does not do is tell the Greeks how great their paganism is and then encourage them to continue to worship their false gods and petition then for worldly favors like "peace on earth." This is the difference between limp-wristed dialogue and real, Spirit-filled preaching that leads to repentance, conversions and baptisms.

The real place of dialogue, as St. Thomas Aquinas tells us in the introduction to the Summa (I.Q.1,art.8), is to establish common ground with somebody so as to delineate the parameters of the debate. But that this dialogue should lead to a disputation, with the express purpose of coming to a conclusion, is never questioned by St. Thomas. When we do dialogue with someone, it is to establish our common ground; to know basically from which angle we have to deliver the Gospel message. But to dialogue endlessly without ever delivering the message is to not only fail to fulfill the mandate of Christ to preach to every creature, but is also a failure to even properly use dialogue as a tool, since it substitutes for an end what is only a means.

So long as dialogue and "mutual enrichment" are treated as ends in themselves, no pagans will be moved or impressed with the Catholic Faith. They will only further look down on us for compromising our principles and will continue to siphon off weak members of the Body of Christ who no longer know why they call themselves Christians. I highly recommend Pieper's short and very readable little book on Tradition for a refresher on what Tradition is and how it is handed on. But let us all in the meantime remember St. Paul's malediction in 1 Corinthians and make it our own: "Woe unto me if I preach not the gospel!" (1 Cor. 9:16).

Veni Sancte Spiritus from Milan