Be difficult, sure, but not doubting

No longer the constant topic of conversation, the personality and priorities of the new Pope, Leo XIV, remain a matter of great curiosity.  It is suggested that one of the reasons he has spent time in the Papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo is to focus on and develop his practical and theological initiatives for governing the Church.  He is rumored to be composing “his first encyclical,” and identifying “his curia.”  All this remains to be seen, but that does not mean that we have not already had glimpses of what he considers important.

On July 31 he announced his intention that Saint John Henry Newman be declared a Doctor of the Church.  This has not sprung from the fertile recesses of his mind and personal pieties, but rather has been a hope and desire of many parties within the Church for some years, and is an idea that has received serious examination.  Only 37 other saints have received this designation and distinction.   

An Englishman of the nineteenth century (1801-1890), Cardinal Newman was a prominent Anglican cleric, thinker, preacher, and writer before his entrance into full communion with the Catholic Church, an act shocking in that time that lost him several friends and many supporters.  He was ordained Priest and founded the Birmingham Oratory.  In 1878, Pope Leo XII created him a cardinal though he had never been a bishop and granted him the unusual permission to remain in England at his Oratory.  

One of his sayings that I have often shared in the confessional with penitents who fear that they have doubted God, or the Faith, is that One thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.  That helpful assertion comes from Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, the book he published to explain his conversion and rebut accusations and calumnies from his detractors.  I found the whole paragraph from the fifth chapter of that book, and I think it is even more helpful in context.

I am far of course from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that, for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very sensitive of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as anyone; but I have never been able to see a connexion between apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. There of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I am speaking of difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines themselves, or to their relations with each other. A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him, without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain particular answer is the true one. Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon our minds with most power.

We know that our new Holy Father chose his regnal name in reference to his predecessor by one century.   Clearly Number Fourteen shares Number Thirteen’s estimation of John Henry Newman as one who has much to offer the Church.  We can explore the wealth of wisdom and insight this English saint has to offer while we await the manifestation of what our Anglophone Pope intends to emphasize in his leadership of that same Church.  It could even give us something fruitful to talk about. 

Monsignor Smith

Steady

This photo is also from 2006.

This week, a “blast from the past.”  Just for kicks, I went looking in my files for the first bulletin column I had saved there.  I found this from July 2006.  It seems not to have aged too badly, and probably still applies now as much as it did then.  So enjoy it this weekend, and see if you find any anachronisms.   Summer is a time for reflection after all, and what better object of our reflection than to discern what has changed, and what has stayed the same?

What a great neighborhood!  Everybody knows everybody and keeps track of one another’s families.  People leave, but they come back, and bring with them whatever they gained by their adventures.  Families, friends, community; it is a remarkable place to live.

But Jesus was not able to perform any mighty deed there.

What, you thought I was talking about Four Corners?  No, no – Nazareth.  They all knew one another and looked out for one another’s kids.  “Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary,
 and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? 
And are not his sisters here with us?”  But somehow, that neighborhood pulled itself together and pushed Jesus away when He came back and started preaching the Kingdom of God.  
And they took offense at him.  Somehow, in their tight-knit little community, there was not room for repentance and the call to conversion.   Maybe they thought they were doing just fine the way they were.

Well, you know, THIS is a great neighborhood, too, and I am glad to be back here.  It is a genuine community in a metropolitan area where so many people are satisfied to live as strangers; trust me, after my eight months at 5th and H NW.  And yes, that does mean that people here are definitely doing something right, and truly have something to be proud of.  

But the challenge for us here at Saint Bernadette, whether we call Indian Spring, Woodmoor, Burnt Mills, or whichever, our neighborhood, is to be the good ground on which the seed of the Word falls, and bears fruit thirty-, sixty-, or a hundredfold.  We need to make sure that the prophet who calls people back to God finds not a rebellious house, but ready hearts.  We cannot let our familiarity with one another – even our familiarity with Jesus – make us so comfortable that we turn away when He calls us to conversion.

My brothers and sister, we do live in a great place, among wonderful people.  I, for one, am grateful to be here.  But we have miles to go to the City of God, so let us always make room for Jesus – and his challenges to us – in our neighborhood.  He will perform many mighty deeds here!

God bless you and Our Lady watch over you,

Monsignor Smith

 

Can but won't

I can’t complain.

Rarely have I heard that statement that I didn’t think immediately to myself, Oh yes, you can.  I have heard you do it, innumerable times!  How quickly people give themselves nowhere near enough credit when it comes to the ability to complain.  

Priests can complain.  It’s part of our training, it seems.  Seminarians are EPIC complainers.  Rather like most people in an academic setting, the stakes are so small that the fighting is fierce.  Add to that the life-formation dimension of seminary, and the complaints accrue higher-payload warheads along with terminal guidance.  Ordination blunts the impulse or reduces the opportunities, but the finely hewn ability to complain remains.

Soldiers, similarly, are known for their ability to craft and deliver complaints; the skills develop even more highly when the soldiers are in action or on campaign.  Do you think this may be a phenomenon common to men in uniform?  Perhaps complaining is nurtured by being under someone else’s command, having certain – or all - aspects of one’s day and one’s life be outside one’s own control.  

The other circumstance that may contribute to gold-medal-winning complaining chops among seminarians and soldiers is the tempting availability of an audience.  Both groups of guys are surrounded by other guys in the same circumstances, enduring the same hardships, and eager to assign responsibility for the same miseries.  The complaints are then intended for an unhelpful but sympathetic audience.  Sympathy is perhaps better than nothing.

Recently I ran across an old cartoon of three devils behind an office door in hell, with the damned souls visible outside the door glass, suffering in silhouette.  The staff devils were guffawing with merriment as they read notes pulled from a conspicuously labeled “suggestion box.”  That would be an unhelpful and unsympathetic audience. 

Sometimes, we complain to achieve more than sympathy:  justice for our righteous cause, redress for some wrong done to us.  Whether we contact customer service of some firm, an ombudsman of some enormous organization, or some elected official’s staffer, we hope our complaint find a sympathetic and responsive ear.  All too often that hope is disappointed.

Convinced of the justice of our cause and the righteousness of our complaint, we can be moved to take our complaints even higher.  Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint.  (Psalm 64:1) The Psalmist lets us know that our impulse to complain is hardly a modern phenomenon, and our desire to be heard by the Almighty Redresser of Wrongs is as strong now as ever.  We can pronounce judgment on whether the Divine Ear is sympathetic or responsive much more critically than we judge the justice of our cause or the righteousness of our complaint.  Wait and see; wait and see.

Complaining brings judgment upon not only the complaint, however, but also the complainer.  Herein lies the peril.  Perhaps this invitation to scrutiny is overlooked too often, especially when the complainer address his complaint to God.   That kind of scrutiny, who can stand?  

Prudence and self-preservation dictate that I keep my complaint to myself.  The lassitude of summer brings an equanimity unavailable the rest of the year.   Despite all the failures of powers and potentates, authorities and agents to live up to my expectations in matters large and small, reticence settles over me like a humid afternoon.  How is the summer going, you ask?

I can’t complain.

Monsignor Smith

On finding delight

These all look to thee,
to give them their food in due season.
When thou givest to them,
they gather it up;
when thou openest thy hand,
they are filled with good things. Psalm 104: 27 - 28

It is the lean time of the year.  Not for the produce of the land, no; we are in the fat of that sweet season.   No, it is lean around the rectory.  Our summer student, Father Philip Tran, has finished his compressed course load at Catholic University for this year and whooshed away in his electric-mobile to return after some exploration to Beaumont, or more precisely, Winnie, Texas.  

Father Marcin Wiktor is also not here, though he did fool some people who spotted his car behind the rectory.  He drove back from Mississippi a few weeks ago and then promptly flew to Poland to visit his family.   He will be back shortly before his classes resume at CUA, later in August.

That means it’s down to just me and Father Swink.  As you know, he is a man of action, whereas I tend more toward contemplation.  Because most of the action has reached the end of its progress, such as his popular study of the First Letter of Saint Peter, he is fidgety.  After the last session I had to chase his lingering devotees off the parking lot!  Now he has no projects ready to hand; he is a bit at loose ends.  

Thus stymied here, he will be away for some of the coming weeks, seeking enrichment and enhancement of the spiritual and theological sort, only to bring it home and spend it on you when the regularly scheduled frenzy resumes.  It will be especially quiet around the holy House of Soubirous, at least until the Holy Day on the fifteenth.  Shortly after that the teachers will slip into the school while I look the other way, pretending all of August is a summer month even as the drumbeat grows louder.

Because of this personnel situation, if you can call it that, we will reduce our weekday Masses to one per day until the fourteenth of August.   The weekend Mass schedule will be the same as ever, though you might encounter some surprise visitors in the celebrant’s chair at those Masses.  You may even recognize them from previous visits.

But I who do not share Father Swink’s desire (and capacity!) for constant activity will enjoy the sweet fruit of summer, not only the actual fruit of peaches and plums and such, but also that calm that settles around here when almost everyone is somewhere else.  It will be too brief, but it is the most wonderful month of the year and I mean to enjoy it.

Both the sun overhead and the rich crop in the field feature this week in the lections for Sunday Mass.  The challenge for us is not to lose sight of what is truly precious, not to be distracted by false goods or lesser goods from what is truly good and life-giving.  That, I happily assert, is where contemplation comes in, and I invite you to join me in a reflective moment that requires nothing that will break a sweat.  We do not even have to perform the evaluation all alone.  It is never a bad time to ask the Lord, what is it that should delight me today?  

And in the answer to that question, there is nothing lean about this time of year.  

Monsignor Smith