Here is what’s going on here, and what isn’t.
1. The conversations between leaders of the SSPX and the Holy See are just that: conversations. These are not negotiations, for there is nothing to be negotiated; nor is this a dialogue between equal partners. On the one hand, we have the bishop of Rome and those curial officials whose work is an extension of his papal office; on the other hand, we have a society of clergy who have been living in disobedience to the Roman pontiff for decades, and their lay followers, many of whom are more confused than willfully schismatic. The purpose of these conversations is to make clear what the Second Vatican Council taught (especially about the nature of the Church), to listen politely to what the SSPX has to say, and to invite the SSPX back into the full communion of the Catholic Church, which the SSPX broke in 1988 when Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre committed the schismatic act of illicitly ordaining bishops without the authorization of the Roman pontiff (and against the direct, personal pleas of Pope John Paul II).

2. Despite what some “Vatican insiders” have said, these conversations do not represent a bold initiative by the Holy See; and despite the carping from the mainstream media, these conversations are not a craven papal concession to the demands of angry traditionalists whose dissent from Vatican II Benedict XVI is alleged to share. Rather, the conversations now underway are an act of pastoral charity by the pope, who is quite clear about the settled doctrine of the Church and who wishes to invite all, including members of the SSPX, to adhere to that doctrine. Nor is this about mutual enrichment; it is not easy to see how the Catholic Church is to be theologically enriched by the ideas of those who, whatever the depth of their traditional liturgical piety, reject the mid-20th century reform of Catholic thought of which Joseph Ratzinger was a leader. The pope is under no illusions on this score; his purpose is to invite the SSPX back into full communion, thus preventing the schism of 1988 from becoming a permanent wound in the Mystical Body of Christ.

3. The issues to be engaged in these conversations do not involve liturgy; the pope has addressed the legitimate pastoral needs of SSPX clergy and SSPX-affiliated laity by his decree allowing the unrestricted use of the 1962 Roman Missal. The real questions have to do with other matters. Does the SSPX accept the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on religious freedom as a fundamental human right that can be known by both reason and revelation? Does the SSPX accept that the age of altar-and-throne alliances, confessional states, and legally established Catholicism is over, and that the Catholic Church rejects the use of coercive state power on behalf of its truth claims? Does the SSPX accept the Council’s teaching on Jews and Judaism as laid down in Vatican II’s “Declaration on Non-Christian Religions” (“Nostra Aetate”), and does the SSPX repudiate all anti-Semitism? Does the SSPX accept the Council’s teaching on the imperative of pursuing Christian unity in truth and the Council’s teaching that elements of truth and sanctity exist in other Christian communities, and indeed in other religious communities?

Those are the real issues. Conversation about them is always welcome. Those who confuse conversation with negotiation make genuine conversation all the more difficult.

And let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.

In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis’ senior demon, Screwtape, explains to a junior demon, Wormwood, why God sends us “dry times:”

He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual temptation, because we design them for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” them to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

It’s an illustration of the double standard that often prevails when it comes to same-sex “marriage.”

Vidala was a deputy manager at a Brookstone store in Boston’s Logan Airport. Last August, a manager visiting from another store told Vidala she was planning to “marry” her female partner. Vidala said he “quickly changed the subject.” As a Christian, he considered homosexual behavior immoral, and same-sex “marriage” an “oxymoron.” The woman’s comments made him uncomfortable.

But the visiting manager didn’t get the message—or maybe she did. She talked about her wedding plans over and over. Vidala later told Fox new she was goading him into commenting on her relationship.

Vidala said, “By the fourth time she mentioned it, I felt God wanted me to express how I felt about the matter. So I did.” He told her, “Regarding your homosexuality, I think that’s bad stuff.” He also reported that he had intended to tell her he would prefer she not bring up the subject at work, but she just started laughing.

And then she told him, “Get over it…keep your opinions to yourself.” She then complained to human resources, and Vidala was fired. Why? Because by “imposing” his beliefs on her, it constituted “harassment.”

So pummeling a junior-level Christian employee with endless comments he finds offensive is OK. But making a single critical comment to a lesbian senior-level employee is a firing offense.

Even more disturbing is the reason Brookstone gave to back up its decision. In Massachusetts, same-sex “marriage” is legal. So a lesbian employee can prattle on about her wedding plans without harassing anyone. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

The implications of this are frightening. If same-sex “marriage” is foisted upon other states, then expressing disagreement with it—or even criticizing the homosexual lifestyle—could become a firing offense for everyone. If employers had taken this attitude 90 years ago, people could have lost their jobs for disagreeing with laws forbidding women from voting!

This is how far the gay agenda has come in this country. Any disagreement is portrayed as hatred and harassment. And the victim—as in this case—is often a Christian.

Peter Vidala’s firing will have one beneficial effect, at least. It will help the rest of us understand why same-sex “marriage” laws are like no other. Oppose them beforehand or speak out afterward, and you will be punished.

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Speaking to 800 priests at the shrine of Fatima in Portugal, the cardinal who heads the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy recently leveled criticism at priests for whom the priesthood has become “a kind of ecclesiastical profession which they carry out as civil servants.” Having only news reports to go on, I strongly suspect Cardinal Claudio Hummes said more than just that. I certainly hope so, because, although the comment contains much truth, it is seriously inadequate as it stands. In this current Year for Priests it’s important to point out why.

My biggest objection to the remark as reported concerns the slighting use of the expression “ecclesiastical profession.” What I suspect the cardinal meant—and what’s true enough—is that the priesthood isn’t just one more job alongside others. In making this perfectly reasonable point, however, it’s a mistake to say or imply that there’s something intrinsically wrong with, or at least inferior about, professions and jobs in general.

The Christian ideal of work is to do one’s job, whatever it may be, for the glory of God and the service of other human beings. Many people in many lines of work try to do exactly that each day. There is every reason for priests to try to do it too. Looking down our noses at the notion of “profession” isn’t helpful to that.

Nor is it helpful to suggest that there’s something wrong with having priests approach their work with a professional attitude. To be professional means doing one’s best to meet high standards of excellence in one’s work. People who aren’t professional are prepared to settle for sloppy, careless, just-getting-by performance. Surely this is not what we want of our priests.

I also take exception to the slap at priests who function as “civil servants” in the Church. Over the years I’ve encountered many of these men in chancery offices, national organizations, the Holy See, and other settings, and—making allowance for the occasional time-server—I’ve found many to be admirable priests whose administrative tasks are as much an expression of their priestly commitment as preparing a homily or teaching a catechism class.

True, priests in this situation often feel a need for some form of directly pastoral work on the side—to keep their hand in, as it were—and I admire them for that. But this is not a reflection on their office work as such.

Around the time Cardinal Hummes made his remarks, Pope Benedict also spoke to a group of Brazilian bishops about the priesthood. In this case, I have the advantage of having the full text of the Pope’s remarks, and I find them notably more nuanced and helpful than the snippets attributed to the cardinal.

The Pope’s central statement was this: “The role of the priest is essential and irreplaceable for the proclamation of the word and for the celebration of the sacraments.” That was said in the context of a discourse touching on questions raised about lay and clergy roles in the changing circumstances of today’s Church, including the shortage of priests in some places.

Against this background, Benedict XVI insisted, there is need for a “harmonious, correct and clear deepening of the relationship between the common priesthood [the baptismal priesthood or priesthood of the faithful] and the ministerial [ordained] priesthood.” The more aware lay people become of their responsibilities in the Church, he said, “the more clearly stand out the priest’s identity and his irreplaceable role.” Here’s a challenge and an opportunity for us all.

]]> http://catholicexchange.com/2009/11/21/124321/feed/ http://catholicexchange.com/2009/11/20/124248/ http://catholicexchange.com/2009/11/20/124248/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:00:46 +0000 Louie Verrecchio http://catholicexchange.com/2009/11/19/124248/ If the Holy Spirit was to manifest before you today to say, “I have a gift for you,” how would you respond?

Is there any chance you’d say, “Sounds great, but that’s probably not for me?” Of course not! Yet that’s…

As in water face answers to face, so the mind of man reflects the man.

This image of our ability for self-knowledge is beautifully accurate.  Note that the inspired writer does not say, “As in a mirror face answers to face,” but “as in water.”  Water reflects (to a degree), but water also distorts.  Disturb water just a little and the reflection vanishes.  Disturb the mind just a little and our ability to measure ourselves is gone as well.  This is part of why community and confession are so important in the life of the Christian.  We simply don’t know our own minds nearly as well as we think we do.  Today, take a step toward community and accountability and get away from the rugged individualism our culture preaches.  The Body of Christ has many members.  Draw near to them in love and ask God to give you wisdom through his Church.

Searching through the cemetery today was like looking for a needle in a haystack. There were no headstones — only plaques on the ground. It was a painstaking process to brush the leaves off of each stone so that we could read the names, searching for one that might be familiar. We only looked through one section. Amazingly, we actually did find my husband’s great-grandparents. He was so excited to find the burial place of these people he had never met! He took a picture of our children next to the stone.

This search for our ancestors only leaves me wanting to know more. We have pages and pages of information — names and dates and places of birth for people going back to the 1600s, yet that is all we know. It is amazing to think that if any one of these people wasn’t in this listing, my husband and I and our children would not be here. It took that particular combination of genes and parental influence to create each one of us. Good or bad, these people have contributed to who we are. They each played a part in God’s plan. Yet, we know so little. They lived and breathed and worked and loved and raised their children. Their lives mattered, yet their stories are lost forever.

Walking through cemeteries also always reminds me of my own impending death. This week’s Gospel (Mark 13:24-32) speaks of the end of time: “But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” The same holds true for our own personal deaths. None of us knows the day or hour that will be our last. Tomorrow is never guaranteed. All we have is today to make the most of. How we choose to use that gift of time is of vital importance.

As I wiped the leaves off of those grave markers today, I knew that many of those people had not been thought of in years. They had long since gone to their eternal destinations. I offered up a silent prayer for their souls. I know that one hundred years from now, I, too, will have been forgotten. To this world, I will be just a name and dates on a gravestone. Yet, like those that came before me, I, too, am part of God’s plan, made to know, love, and serve Him. I pray to fulfill that role well and to make the most of the time that He has given me.

He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.

“Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course, they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide, and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

“He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.” - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Especially over the course of the last few years, we have seen repeated efforts—in the courts, in state legislatures, in Congress, and on Pennsylvania Avenue—to erode what has been called the first freedom: religious liberty.

It isn’t hard to cite numerous cases where Christian organizations and individuals have been singled out and punished for adhering to their faith.

In New Jersey, a Methodist camp lost its tax exempt status for refusing to hold a same-sex civil union ceremony. In California, Christian doctors were successfully sued for refusing to offer in-vitro fertilization procedures for a lesbian couple. Catholic Charities in Boston had to shut down its adoption services because it was being forced by the state to place children with same-sex couples.

The current health care bill has no protections for religious medical personnel or health care providers who, by reason of conscience, refuse to participate in abortions. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act is gathering momentum in Congress. The bill would require even Christian-owned enterprises with more than 15 employees to hire those who do not share their faith.

The list could go on and on.

So why is religious freedom such a concern to us as Christians? Freedom of religion is called the first freedom for a reason. Our founding fathers recognized that without freedom of conscience, no other freedom can be guaranteed.

Christians, in fact, are the greatest defenders of religious freedom and human liberty—not just for Christians, but for all people. Compare religious freedom in those countries with a Christian heritage to the state of religious freedom in Islamic nations, communist countries, and Buddhist and Hindu nations, and you will see my point.

The reason that Christians place such a high value on human freedom is that freedom itself is part of the creation account in the Bible. God made humans in His image. He gave us a free will to choose to love, follow, and obey Him, or to follow our own way. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;

That free will, given us before the Fall, is part of human nature itself.

Perhaps more than anything else, it was this understanding of individual freedom that turned me into the kind of patriot who would willingly give his life for his country. It was the words of the Declaration of Independence that inspired me to join the Marines: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

So this question of human freedom goes to the very heart of who we are as Christians and as Americans.

So this Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, a statement signed by 125 evangelical, Orthodox, and Catholic leaders will be released—an historic declaration on life, the family, and religious freedom.

And please, today, go to ColsonCenter.org to view my Two-Minute Warning video on religious freedom. We will have some great resources for you. Then Friday at noon, we will have for you the declaration itself—probably the most important document I’ve ever signed.

The Church needs to understand the urgency of the hour and do its duty.

The ancient Catholic truth about Hell should terrify us. But it should terrify us into our wits, not out of them. It should prompt us to ask “How do I avoid such a thing?” just as a grisly photograph of a car crash in driver’s ed should prompt us to pay attention. And that, in turn, should prompt us to ask “What exactly am I avoiding? What is Hell?”

The Church tells us that Hell is not something that simply happens to you by accident, like a car crash. People in Hell will not be there because they were minding their own business, being decent folk, when suddenly an arbitrary God just stuck them there upon their death. Rather, the Catechism tells us that hell is the “state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed” (CCC 1033).

We don’t live in a universe where we are all trying to do our best but God inexplicably yearns to send some people to everlasting damnation if he can only find a way to make the charges stick. Rather, we are a race trapped in a complex rebellion against a God who has done and is continuing to do everything possible to save us. The truth is, God is eternally exerting his divine power to the utmost, up to and including enduring the horrors of crucifixion, to rescue us from the horrors of Hell. Even now he is endlessly pouring his love and grace out on us to enable us to say “yes” to his offer of salvation in Christ. But he will not make us automatons, because the whole point of salvation is to have creatures who retain their freedom and remain themselves, even as they drink fully of the ecstatic life of the Blessed Trinity.

That means there must always remain the real possibility that a creature can say “No” to him; a real ability for that creature to perform a sort of anti-miracle of free will and turn himself into a thing, a sort of ex-human, who will not have God, who bars the doors of his soul from the inside and renders himself forever incapable of receiving God’s life and love in any way.

That is what Hell is: our rejection of the life of God, our choice to exile ourselves to eternal loneliness and unending pain rather than abandon our pride. It is our decision to experience the fire of God’s love as the flames of endless punishment, to sever ourselves forever from all love, goodness, joy, and beauty. It is appalling. It is terrifying. But to anybody with even a passing familiarity of human history, it certainly is not impossible. The story of our race is studded with examples of men and women whose pride warped them into living nightmares by the exercise of their own free will. Ultimately, Hitler, Stalin, Charles Manson, Mao, Ilse Koch, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and other monsters made real choices that left them as near to being ex-humans as is possible in this life. Such choices cannot simply be explained away purely as the result of heredity and environment. More to the point, our choices to love (or not), which are known only to us and God, will ultimately spell the difference between Heaven and Hell.

This not to say that we can or should suppose we know who is in Hell. Hell is murky, says Lady Macbeth. It is dark there and it is not for us to claim knowledge of God’s mind. Even with somebody as evil as Hitler, we are to hope and pray for the dead and leave them to God. Jesus addresses his warnings of Hell to you , not to that guy who cut you off on the freeway. If you take away the lesson, “I thank you, O Lord, that I am not bound for Hell like that jerk” you may, like the Pharisee in the parable, be in for an ugly surprise when you get to the Pearly Gates and your deepest self is at long last revealed.

The central thing to remember is that when asked “Will many be saved or few?” Jesus answered, not the question but the questioner with eminently practical advice: “Strive to enter by the narrow way.” Don’t waste time trying to peer into your neighbor’s destiny. Focus on the only soul you have power to damn—your own—and hand it over to Jesus’ daily for the help you need to avoid Hell and gain eternal happiness in Heaven. For though you can damn your soul, he is mighty to save it.