What does God ask of you? This is a
question which the prophet Micah rhetorically asks and answers. His answer
follows: to act justly; to love tenderly; and, to walk humbly with God. Let us
concentrate on the latter point. But why does God ask this of me or you? Well,
He most assuredly cares about us all, collectively and individually. He gave us
free will—such a gift, but we have all abused it from time to time—sometimes in
small ways, but other times in a manner of great magnitude. Yet both God and
know that you and I will inexorably die. What then? Is that where acting justly
and loving tenderly? No, and that is why He sent His only son, Jesus Christ,
amongst us: to save us from our sins—for when we die, the inescapable question
is: did we ask our Creator and those against whom we transgressed for
forgiveness? This is a crucial way of walking humbly with God!
It may be this essence of our
salvation history and God’s plan—which we commemorate during this holy season of
Lent—that prompted the great poet and Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins to write his
poem “As kingfishers catch fire…” Hopkins was no stranger to proclaiming God
and all He created in his poetry—just think of his poems “The world is charged
with the grandeur of God…” and “Glory be to God for dappled things…” But I
return to the Kingfisher poem. Hopkins was not adverse to announcing God’s plan
of salvation for the human person—addressing this was an imperative for the
Jesuit poet and teacher. The stones of which he speaks that fall into the “roundy
well” might well be us. Man has fallen—the stones tumble into the well’s depth;
yet, Christ has come to save those who turn to Him. The kingfisher is no
ordinary bird, it is brilliant in appearance, it is King, and it is fisher.
Might it be Christ who has come to save us because, as we know, God so loved
the world that He sent His only son so that we might live with Him forever?
My dear sisters and brothers: we sin,
and when we do, we fall. We are those stones falling into a well that may
collapse upon us with its tumbly rock. But there is hope; there is
Christ—Christ the Kingfisher who searches not for food but for us when he
“catches fire!”
Hopkins’s the Kingfisher may also be
the one in the poem who cries out that the just person “justices”—i.e., does
justice (or, as Micah reminds us, to act justly), who keeps grace (or, again as
Micah reminds us, to love tenderly), and who is to be united with Christ. With
clarity, Hopkins announces that the person is in ten thousand places, and are
these those who are the one’s Micah says will walk humbly with God? If so, then
the plan for human salvation is in place. But something yet is still needed,
and what that is appears in the Lenten Celebration—a joyous occasion, as Saint
Matthew suggests—which we begin this day. So, three points about this
celebration now follow.
First, we are reminded of our need to
walk with God, the son incarnate during Lent. The prophet Joel announces the
time to pounder in our hearts what we have done so that we might return to God.
What an extraordinary gift this Lent is: to do just that by praying to/talking
with God. God’s mercy and forgiveness are there always: for the Kingfisher is
ever present. But do we—do you, do I—wish to turn to him? If that is the
question, the season to ponder it most effectively begins now. If all things
are possible for God, might his forgiveness extend to us?
Indeed it can and will, but one further thing is needed,
which leads me to the second point.
We must be reconciled with God as
Saint Paul reminds not only for the church in Corinth but for us as well! As Saint Paul
asserts, God desires us to serve the Son as his disciples—and this means we
must be ambassadors for Christ going out into a world as His ambassadors:
loving others tenderly, acting justly with them, knowing that along the way we
are walking humbly with God. To do this, we must acknowledge honestly who we
are: sinners loved by the one who made each of us. Therefore, to be His
ambassadors—His disciples united in God’s labors in this world—we must purify
ourselves. That is, we must turn from sinfulness and back to that grace, that
presence of God in our lives that makes us “justice” as Hopkins eloquently
argues, or to act justly as Micah asserts. Again, preparation is needed. But of
what kind? And this is where the third and final point comes into play.
Saint Matthew offers his counsel to
formulate what must be done in preparation: we do not pretend to honor God and
our neighbor; rather, we must do this knowingly and willingly with the
sincerity of our very fiber. This fundamental point necessitates turning to and
relying upon God in our prayer. While there is much to be said about good
works, these noble acts will have tarnish if the righteous deed is only for
others to see and without regard for our own need for our personal
purification. What is needed to make these works complete is that quiet place,
that inner room where we pray, where we talk with God. When we fast, even
though our outer appearance may be stunning, we follow suit—robustness on the
external, seeking God in the internal. Then God will see our authentic heart
over which we ponder with Him, as the prophet Joel counsels. We enter a sober
season, my friends, but it is not filled with gloom: it is, to the contrary,
joyous!
It is joyous because we
are serious about who we are, viz. Christ’s disciples; we know that the
Kingfisher is in our lives helping us to steer clear of sin and practice virtue
to act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with the one who came to save us
all.
I am certain that there are times
when what has been outlined here is our resolve for we recall those occasions
when we pondered in our hearts how best to serve God with fidelity. But there
is always temptation lurking in the dark corners of our lives—temptations that
we have allowed to sweep us up into sin and away from God. That is when an
example of those heroes God sends us to help us with our own purification
become most helpful.
One such example is our Holy Father
who made his remarkable announcement on Monday of renouncing the Chair of
Peter. What will he do, you might ask once he is no longer Peter? He has told
us: he will purify himself. He will use his remaining days to go to a private
place out of the public eye to pray to God and talk with Him.
Might we not do the same? Let us give
it our most hearty try during this holy season which we begin this day!
With this as our disposition, can the Kingfisher be far off?
Michael has again posted a Chuck Reid HuffPo column and, like several of Reid's other recent columns, the piece mixes some accurate reporting with some misguided assertions. Reid describes the Holy Father as the "last 20th century pope," he writes, and notes that "what he never did, what he never understood there was any need to do, was to open a serious and respectful dialogue with the secular world." This is a very strange and, in any event, quite wrong statement. One might start, for example, here.
Of course, when it comes to misguided commentary on Pope Benedict's legacy, service, thought, and work, it could be a lot worse. See, for example, Bill Keller's silly rant (translation: "The Pope failed to understand that, as Pope, he should have changed the Church and her teachings in order to make them more congenial to my own views.").
Here is a short reflection on Pope Benedict's Scholarly Legacy by Don Briel, Director of the Center for Catholic Studies at UST. Don emphasizes a point sorely missed by most of commentators in the popular press, with their reflexive attempts to fit everything into the easy categories of contemporary politics:
In the end, the insight of the scholar pope that the new
evangelization must proceed not on the grounds of disputation but in the
invitation to love, Deus Caritas Est, shaped a new understanding of the
vitality of orthodoxy, not as a safe middle between the extremes of
traditionalists and progressives but as a vital alternative to their
frozen fascination with political accounts of the Church.
And how did Pope Benedict attempt to break this 'frozen fascination'? Briel writes:
As expected, he placed a strong emphasis on addressing the amnesia of
European culture about its Christian roots, and in remarkably
sophisticated presentations in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome he
reminded secular governments about the essential role of faith in modern
democratic assumptions and insisted that faith could not be reduced to a
private principle and excluded from civic life. He forged unexpected
relations with atheistic and agnostic public intellectuals like Marcello
Pera and Jürgen Habermas, who testified to the dangers to the common
good and to the human person in certain instrumental political
developments in modern culture. As pope, his emphasis on the role of
faith in the modern world led Ratzinger to a number of interreligious
and ecumenical gestures despite his refusal to accept a lowest common
denominator approach to interreligious dialogue.
Every year the Church celebrates the season of Lent. It begins on Ash Wednesday with the traditional, sobering reminder, “Remember Man that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And just in case we forget, the Church sprinkles ashes over us, reminiscent of the ashes that we will become. Now, I am aware that cultural prejudices have led the Church to allow other versions of the reminder, lest we continue to sink into the depression lurking in the mind of each citizen of our psychologically haunted society, but I am a Hispanic Catholic, and we don't like those other formulas. Ash Wednesday is one of those few days all of us feel like going to Church, and if we do go, we expect the real thing, the reminder of death, and not some sort of watered down inspiration to live better lives. We want to be able to say what is a typical expression in our language: No somos nada. Actually, the allowed substitute formula, "repent and believe in the gospel," means the same thing, because Christian repentance is a real dying with Christ, and faith the beginning of a totally new existence, but those words have been "deprived of their meaning," as Walker Percy said. They have been evacuated of their full meaning, devalued as currency for communication, they now mean much less. It is hard, though, to devalue the words, “Remember, Man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And, in any case, there are those ashes to make it all quite concrete.
by Charles J. Reid, Jr., Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas
If reports are to be believed, Pope Benedict XVI's sudden resignation
shocked even his older brother Georg. And truly, the news came like a
thunderbolt. There has not been a papal resignation in modern times, if
by modern we mean the post-Reformation world. A pope resigned in 1415,
another in 1295.
There is no precedent for what this pope has done. His act should
therefore be seen as one of conspicuous courage, of insight into his own
limitations and humanity. Few men and women of ordinary accomplishment
have such self-awareness. Benedict's discernment in appreciating the
frailties of advancing years and his wisdom in acting accordingly are
extraordinary.
But the question of Benedict's legacy arises. How do we put his
career into perspective? More than anything, I believe he will be
remembered as a 20th-century European man. He personally experienced
the great crises of the century. He served very briefly in an
anti-aircraft unit in the German Wehrmacht at the end of World War II
and became an American prisoner of war at conflict's end. He entered
the seminary shortly after that and was ordained in 1951.
The 1950s saw the young Fr. Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict,
pursue an academic career. He became a professor of theology at the
University of Bonn in 1959, moving to Munster four years later and to
Tubingen in 1968.
It was at the Second Vatican Council where he established his
reputation, and it was not as a conservative. He was a protege of the
great German Cardinal and Archbishop of Cologne, Josef Frings. An
ecclesiastical opponent of the Nazis in World War II, Frings was a
reformer at the Council. Ratzinger, acting as Frings' ghost-writer,
Ratzinger actually authored some of the older man's reform
pronouncements.
The young Ratzinger formed lasting associations at the Council with
other great European voices for reform, particularly Karl Rahner, Hans
Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx. Together, they formed a company of
daring, intellectually vibrant voices. Rahner exploring new pathways to
understanding the Incarnation, Kung mining the riches of church history
to reopen the question of papal infallibility, and Schillebeeckx
contributing to the shape of conciliar documents like Lumen Gentium,
which gave definition and clarity to the Church in the modern world.
I very much appreciate all of the comments from my colleagues on MOJ about the resignation of Pope Benedict. I was just re-reading some of Benedict's early speeches as Pope. In those speeches from April and May 2005, he frequently notes his own frailities and inadequacies. He makes it clear that his vision was not to promote his own views. In an address to the clergy of Rome, he stated: "we are not sent to proclaim ourselves or our personal opinions, but the mystery of Christ and, in him, the measure of true humanism."
Discussing Benedict's legacy, while entirely to be expected, fails to understand that he viewed his role as proclaiming Christ. As John Breen noted, this was perhaps most effectively done in his homilies. One reads Benedict's homilies and it is easy to forget their author. This was precisely the point. As a teacher (and we would do well to follow this example in our own teaching), Benedict disappears and what shines forth is the Gospel and Jesus Christ.
His humble resignation reinforces the same point, as others have noted.
Benedict's success seems to have been, in the face of an increasingly secular world, to propose the Gospel with simplicity and depth.
Hearing the news yesterday morning on WGN that Pope Benedict XVI had announced that he would step down from his ministry as pope, I first thought “Oh, it must be April 1st” but then quickly realized that it was the middle of February and not April’s Fools Day, and that this was serious business indeed.
The news that Papa Ratzinger had announced his abdication of the Apostolic See and his ministry as the Bishop of Rome, Peter’s Successor, Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church effective February 28, 2013 was truly stunning. Here are some initial thoughts.
1. I think that Rocco Palmo (here) is right to note that Benedict reached this decision some time ago. Benedict clearly cited his health and age as the reason for his decision. “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”
In this, I think, Benedict is in effect saying 'There is no one man indispensable to the life of the Church . . . only the God/Man Jesus. Yet the man who succeeds Peter needs to have the strength and vitality that I lack precisely because the Church needs to be a vital force in the world . . . as a teacher and promoter of God's mercy in action. And although my successor will not be “young” as the world measures youth, I pray that he will have the youth of spirit to fulfill the role as Peter's successor -- to confirm the brethren in the faith -- in a way I am no long able. I trust that the Holy Spirit will guide the Church in this so that the Gospel can be preached with even greater efficacy.'
So construed, Benedict’s decision is itself an act of teaching – a demonstration of how we are to live our lives as Christians – to trust in the Lord and His providence. Although John Paul II decided to remain in office until his death and Benedict has chosen to step down, you can hear in the latter’s statement the teaching of his predecessor: “Be not afraid!”
2. Still, the timing is remarkable in that Benedict would choose to set the process in motion for the selection of his successor before Easter. Because Holy Week and the Paschal season are an especially hectic and demanding time for the pope, I agree with Jimmy Akin’s comment (here) that Benedict must truly feel that “his deterioration of health is serious.” Jimmy Akin also notes that stepping down now means that Benedict will not complete the important and ambitious work of the Year of Faith that he set out to do.
3. Many have noted that the abdication of a pope is extremely rare, and indeed is without precedent in modern times, the last pope to do so being Gregory XII in 1415.
It is, however, worth noting that an analogous situation already exists in the contemporary Church. In 2011, Nasrallah Sfeir, the long-ruling and much beloved Patriarch of the Maronite Catholic Church, stepped down because of his advanced age and Bechara Rai was elected to serve as the new head of the Lebanese church. Similarly, Lubomyr Husar stepped down and was succeeded in 2011 by Sviatuslav Shevchuck as the Major Archbishop (the de facto Patriarch) of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. (Other examples could be provided).
Although serving as Bishop of Rome – Pastor of the Universal Church, Servant of the Servants of God – carries with it special responsibilities and burdens, these are examples in which the heads of two respective churches within the Universal Church have stepped aside to leave the task of shepherding the flock of Christ to a younger man without fear of schism, without the fear that the elder man would interfere with the leadership of his successor.
4. We are of course left to ponder what Benedict’s legacy will be. In the first place, I think he be remembered as the pope who continued the important work of John Paul II in giving the Church a definitive and authentic interpretation of the Second Vatican Council – a point also made by Rev. Robert Barron (linked to in Kevin Lee’s recent post here).
Like his immediate predecessor, Benedict made secure a correct understanding of the Council by telling us what it was and what it was not. It was a council of reform and not a council of rupture with the twenty ecumenical councils that preceded it, either with respect to the contents of the faith or the structures of the Church, some of which (e.g. orders) are of divine origin and cannot be altered. It was far less a matter of reordering internal church affairs than it was an evangelical moment. It was a call by the Holy Spirit for the faithful to engage the world precisely as followers of Christ.
Rev. James Martin, S.J. has said (here) that Benedict will be remembered for his three encyclicals and for the books he published on Jesus of Nazareth while pope.
I think that his three encyclicals are important, but as I have written elsewhere (here) because of their nature as ecclesial documents and the process whereby they were generated, each lacks a certain polish.
More than his encyclicals, I think that as pope Benedict will be remembered for his sermons in a way not unlike Pope St. Leo the Great. He is an extraordinary homilist.
I also think he will be remembered for his theological writings prior to becoming pope. Joseph Ratzinger has a special talent as a thinker and writer for explaining complex theological ideas in a way that makes them understandable to modern men and women for whom talk of religious faith has become problematic. A great deal of contemporary theological writing seems to veer towards the drivel of a new age mysticism and syncretism or the dry prose of an engineering manual, or the latest party platform, providing little if any connection to the Living God of history – the God of Israel, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ. In his writings, Ratzinger has consistently mined the depths of scripture and the theological concepts of the great Catholic tradition (especially the Fathers) while connecting both to philosophy and contemporary thought in a way that provides new insights, all the while keeping the person of Jesus and our relationship with Him foremost in the minds of readers.
In terms of the nearly 1.2 billion people who make up the Catholic Church world-wide, only a tiny fraction were fortunate to be Joseph Ratzinger's graduate students. But through his writings and sermons, many have been given the opportunity to be his pupils, to be students in the Ratzinger seminar on faith and life.
Michael Sean Winters has a detailed response to the Catholic bishops' recent response to the Administration's proposed changes to the mandate. While there are (as usual!) some things in his post which strike me as sensible, I thought it missed the mark a bit in two places. First, there was what seemed to me to be an unfair swipe at the "lawyers" -- especially the great folks at the Becket Fund (who litigated the case that Winters and I agree was a huge win in Hosanna-Tabor, where the Court rejected what Winters and I agree was the Administration's strikingly unsound argument against the ministerial exception). "The lawyers" have had and should have an important role in this debate because we are talking about, well, a law, about what it actually says and does, and about whether that law is, well, legal. It is not fair to say that the Becket Fund has "an agenda that has more to do with politics than with pastoring" because -- while it's true that the lawyers at Becket are not pastors -- their work over the years has been admirably non-partisan, in the sense that they defend the religious liberty of all, "from the Amish to Zoroastrians." They do not do the work they do to help Republicans, or hurt Obama, but to defend what the Church's pastors at Vatican II reminded us is a fundamental human right.
It's also worth noting, I think, that the continuing urgent need for lawyers in this debate has been (to me) demonstrated by the unwillingness of many commentators, journalists, and bloggers to read carefully the new proposal and figure out what -- given the relevant regulatory and legal environment -- it actually would, and would not, (and can, and cannot) do. Although, as I've said several times, the proposed change to the definition of exempt religious employers is welcome, the confidence expressed in some quarters that the new proposal eliminates the basis for religious-freedom concerns is, it seems to me, premature. Of course, if we do, eventually, get a new version of the mandate that *does* answer the concerns, then that will be a very good thing. It is not the case that the "lawyers" want to litigate for the heck of it; they want to solve the problem.
Finally, Michael Sean writes: "The most disappointing aspect of the bishops’ statement was their continued insistence on an exemption for private, for-profit employers. As I wrote Monday, this is a proper concern for the Becket Fund, it is not a proper concern for the bishops. And, furthermore, I think we need to be very careful in this hyper-individualistic society of ours, in advocating an individual’s right to claim an exemption from a law based on their religious beliefs." I am afraid I disagree. While it is true (as I have said often on this blog) that the enterprise of accommodating faith-based objections to general laws can be a complicated one -- one that might well "play out" differently, in some cases, for for-profit employers than for parochial schools -- the idea that the religious-freedom rights of business owners is "not a proper concern for the bishops" seems very wrong to me. Religious-freedom is a human right, and is presented as such in authoritative Catholic teaching. How could violations of that right not be a concern of the bishops, simply because their own and the Church's institutional interests are (perhaps) taken care of. Winters is worried about the argument that "an individual [has a ] right to claim an exemption from a law based on their religious beliefs" and, to be sure, that argument can be abused and should, in some cases, be rejected. That said, there is nothing objectionably "indvidualistic" -- it's in Dignitatis humanae -- about the argument that religion-based exemptions from general laws should generally be extended, to the extent possible, consistent with public order and the common good.
Like Lisa, my only personal encounter with Joseph Ratzinger was a few weeks before his election as Pope, when he celebrated Mass at St. Peter's for those attending a confernce on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Gaudium et Spes. In his homily that day, he said:
... We should not be surprised if the attitudes toward Jesus, that we find in the Gospel, continue today in attitudes toward his Church. It is certainly true that today, when the Church commits herself to works of justice on a human level (and there are few institutions in the world which accomplish what the Catholic Church accomplishes for the poor and disadvantaged), the world praises the Church. But when the Church's work for justice touches on issues and problems which the world no longer sees as bound up with human dignity, like protecting the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death, or when the Church confesses that justice also includes our responsibilities toward God himself, then the world not infrequently reaches for the stones mentioned in our Gospel today...
As Christians we must constantly be reminded that the call of justice is not something which can be reduced to the categories of this world. ...
And so, to be workers of this true justice, we must be workers who are being made just, by contact with Him who is justice itself: Jesus of Nazareth. The place of this encounter is the Church, nowhere more powerfully present than in her sacraments and liturgy. The celebration of the Holy Triduum, which we will enter into next week, is the triumph of God's justice over human judgments. In the mystery of Good Friday, God is judged by man and condemned by human justice. In the Easter Vigil, the light of God's justice banishes the darkness of sin and death; the stone at the tomb (made of the same material as the stones in the hands of those who, in today's Gospel, seek to kill Christ) is pushed away forever, and human life is given a future, which, in going beyond the categories of this world, reveals the true meaning and the true value of earthly realities. ...
Michael Sean Winters calls attention, here, to Mark Silk's complaint about what he regards as the bishops' insufficiently enthusiastic embrace of the proposed (i.e., not-yet-adopted) new contraceptive-coverage mandate. In my view, the theme (which I've come across in several posts and pieces by commentators) that the bishops are somehow being churlish or ungrateful for observing that -- notwithstanding the welcome revision to the definition of exempt "religious employers" -- the mandate continues to burden religious liberty in regrettable and unnecessary ways is a strange one.
Two quick thought: Silk writes:
The bishops offer nothing to indicate that the many non-Catholics who receive health coverage at their colleges and hospitals may have rights of their own that ought to be recognized. Or that those institutions, by virtue of the substantial public funding they receive, might legitimately be distinguished from houses of worship.
Both of these sentences peddle mistakes. First, there is no question here of "recogniz[ing]" the "rights" of "non-Catholics" to receive free contraception-coverage from Catholic institutions. Even putting aside doubts about the wisdom of the mandate as a policy matter, the claim by those objecting to the mandate is not that these employers should be denied coverage, or (obviously) told they cannot use contraception. The complaint has been that, if the government thinks free contraceptive-coverage is a good thing, then the government should pay, rather than making the religious employers do it. No "rights" of non-Catholic employees are violated if their free contraceptive-coverage comes from the government, rather than from, say, Catholic Charities.
Second, it is wrong to say that the institutions in question "receive" "public money" in a way that somehow waters down their religious-ness. They don't "receive" money as a gift, or a subsidy -- they accept payment and reimbursement for benefits they provide to the community. There's no reason this relationship should push them into what Cardinal Dolan called "second class" religious-institution status.
