What's a faithful Catholic to do?

It has been a strange week or two around here.  Almost a month after last month’s revelation that a credible allegation had been made concerning behavior by Cardinal McCarrick toward a youth almost fifty years ago, suddenly other allegations are coming forward.  Two long stories in the New YorkTimeslast week finally were acknowledged this week by our own local papers. More information, more testimony, and more disturbing behavior strung together into a pattern, have brought forth more recrimination, more condemnation, and more exculpation.  Everybody suddenly is an expert on how this happened, whose fault it was, and what the Church needs to do differently starting now.

I hope you will not find it unhelpful if I remain circumspect in the matter, at least in public and on the record.  Love for Christ and His Church has generated much public outcry, but I warn you to be wary of the less laudable interests that have also been very much at work.  

Reading a simple news story has for decades now been anything but simple.  The five basic questions every news story should address -- Who, what, when, where, and how?– have yielded to the necessity of maintaining a narrative that advances a position or program.  Thus it now falls to the reader to answer a question about any story he encounters: why?  Why is this story here?  Why is this information included, why is other information missing?  Why is it published now, since nothing “new” is in this so-called “news?”  Examining this can reveal far more about what the so-called journalist is trying to accomplish than what is actually occurring in the wide world.

The details about the strange life and behavior of Cardinal McCarrick are emerging in the confluence of conflicting narratives and programs.  Youmay be looking at it purely in the context of love for Christ and His Church, but it would be a misjudgment to assume the same of any given reporter or commentator.  

Jesus’ example of and call to kenotic (self-sacrificing) love is both an invitation to all who hear Him to take up our cross and follow Him, and an offer to provide the superabundant fruit of His own perfect sacrifice to repair the damage we do ourselves and the world when we fail or refuse to take up our cross and follow.  

Jesus’ example of and call to kenotic (self-sacrificing) love is NOT universally well received.  In the first Christian century, Saint Paul said to some it was a scandal and to others a stumbling-block; in our time many public voices tell us it is an outrage, an injustice, a tool of oppression, and a badge of ignorance.  

The Church is Christ’s perduring presence in the world and His unrelenting activity to bring to completion His Father’s will that all mankind be saved.  She cannot embrace, advocate, or advance any admixture or dilution of His saving Word, nor has she. This has ever set her apart, and for this she is abominated by the selfish ones.

There are those who say corruption in one of the ministers or members of the Church is a sign that the Church is not Holy.  

There are those who say that holding Christ’s perfect sacrifice as the mark and model of authentic communion between God and Man is not human. 

These two diametrically opposed opinions, sometimes held simultaneously in the minds of the same persons, are now smashing headlong into one another in the rush to analyze and respond to these latest revelations.  If you examine these arguments closely, you will quickly find that rooted in such falsehood, they cannot stand.  Dismiss them like so much rubbish.

Clinging to what humility I can muster, I make no prescription for the Church, or for you.  Facing human sinfulness full-on, in the place we most devoutly hoped not to find it, we take refuge in the one prescription our God has both administered, and taken on Himself: the mystery of the Cross.  Ave crux, spes unica!-- Hail the Cross, our only hope!

Monsignor Smith

You believe that?

Here’s the second half of the interview with Walker Percy that I began last week.  Perhaps you are beginning to get a grip on his sense; not only his sense of humor, but also his sense of the Faith, of the world, and of how to break through false sensibilities.   Perhaps you are even beginning to get a sense of why I enjoy his writing so much! He presents himself as quite the curmudgeon, and cares not one whit for more delicate sensitivities that we might now lump under “political correctness,” though this interview predates that term.  But his point is very much worth making, and I hope it will help you see past some of the limits that “permissible language" has placed on contemporary conversation, and even conviction.  

Monsignor Smith

Q: You don’t act or talk like a Christian. Aren’t they supposed to love one another and do good works?
A: Yes.

Q: You don’t seem to have much use for your fellowman or do many good works.
A: That’s true.  I haven’t done a good work in years.

Q: In fact, if I may be frank, you strike me as being rather negative in your attitude, cold-blooded, aloof, derisive, self-indulgent, more fond of the beautiful things of this world than of God.
A: That’s true.

Q: You even seem to take certain satisfaction in the disasters of the twentieth-century and to savor the imminence of world catastrophe rather than world peace, which all religions seek.
A: That’s true.

Q: You don’t seem to have much use for your fellow Christians, to say nothing of Ku Kluxers, ACLU’ers, northerners, southerners, fem-libbers, anti-fem-libbers, homosexuals, anti-homosexuals, Republicans, Democrats, hippies, anti-hippies, senior citizens.
A: That’s true – though taken as individuals they turn out to be more or less like oneself, i.e., sinners, and we get along fine.

Q: Even Ku Kluxers?
A: Sure.

Q: How do you account for your belief?
A: I can only account for it as a gift from God.

Q: Why would God make you such a gift when there are others who seem more deserving, that is, serve their fellowman?
A: I don’t know.  God does strange things.  For example, he picked as one of his saints a fellow in northern Syria, a local nut, who stood on top of a pole for thirty-seven years.

Q: We are not talking about saints.
A: That’s true.

Q: We are talking about what you call a gift.
A: You want me to explain it? How would I know?  The only answer I can give is that I asked for it, in fact demanded it.  I took it as an intolerable state of affairs to have found myself in this life and in this age, which is a disaster by any calculation, without demanding a gift commensurate with the offense.  So I demanded it.  No doubt other people feel differently.

Q: But shouldn’t faith bear some relation to the truth, facts?
A: Yes.  That’s what attracted me, Christianity’s rather insolent claim to be true, with the implication that other religions are more or less false.

Q: You believe that?
A: Of course.

Q: I see. Moving right along now –

Questions He Wanted to Answer

In order to enjoy a little lassitude in the summer swelter, I am letting one of my favorite authors share with you, through an interviewer, some of his insights into the Faith we share.
Monsignor Smith

Walker Percy was one of the most notable Southern writers of his lifetime (along with Flannery O’Connor, of course) who was able to speak about faith without actually speaking about faith.  The following is an interview from “Questions They Never Asked Me,” which appears in Conversations with Walker Percy:

Q: What kind of Catholic are you?
A. Bad.

Q: No. I mean are you liberal or conservative?
A: I no longer know what those words mean.

Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?A: I don’t know what that means, either. Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?

Q: Yes.
A: Yes.

Q: How is such a belief possible in this day and age?
A: What else is there?

Q: What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
A: That’s what I mean.

Q: To say nothing of Judaism and Protestantism.
A: Well, I would include them along with the Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.

Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A: Yes.

Q: Why?
A: It’s not good enough.

Q: Why not?
A: This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.”  That won’t do.  A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight.  Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God.  In fact I demand it.  I refuse to settle for anything less.  I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.

Q: Grabbed aholt?
A: A Louisiana expression.

Q: But isn’t the Catholic Church in a mess these days, badly split, its liturgy barbarized, vocations declining?
A: Sure. That’s a sign of its divine origins, that it survives these periodic disasters.

To be continued….next week.

Don't stop: On drinking from the fire hose

While last week I responded to the patriotic urge to reflect on our nation, this week I want to plunge deeper into the depth and breadth of our Catholic treasury and share with you a reflection from one of the great Fathers of the Church, perhaps the greatest from the Syriac tradition.  Ephrem, customarily called “the Syrian,” reminds us of the life of Christian faith that thrived in that part of the world before its military conquest by the forces of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula.  

I subtitle this reflection “On drinking from a firehose,” because he works the “spring of life” metaphor to explain to us why we need to keep returning to the Word of God revealed in Scripture and Tradition even after we drunk deeply.  Whenever one of your family – or even you! – wonder why we must return again and again to the same passages of Scripture and the same prayers and antiphons, let this help you find the answer.  Who among us does not always again find something hitherto unnoticed?   So it was in the fourth century and so it is for us in the twenty-first.  Enjoy!

Monsignor Smith

Lord, who can comprehend even one of your words. We lose more of it than we grasp, like those who drink from a living spring.  For God’s word offers different facets according to the capacity of the listener, and the Lord has portrayed his message in many colors, so that whoever gazes upon it can see in it what suits him.  Within it he has buried manifold treasures, so that each of us might grow rich in seeking them out.

The word of God is a tree of life that offers us blessed fruit from each of its branches.  It is like that rock which was struck open in the wilderness, from which all were offered spiritual drink. As the Apostle says: They ate spiritual food and they drank spiritual drink.

And so whenever anyone discovers some part of the treasure, he should not think that he has exhausted God’s word. Instead he should feel that this is all that he was able to find of the wealth contained in it.  Nor should he say that the word is weak and sterile or look down on it simply because this portion was all that he happened to find.  But precisely because he could not capture it all he should give thanks for its riches.

Be glad then that you are overwhelmed, and do not be saddened because he has overcome you. A thirsty man is happy when he is drinking, and he is not depressed because he cannot exhaust the spring. So let this spring quench your thirst, and not your thirst the spring.  For from it you can satisfy your thirst without exhausting the spring, then when you thirst again you can drink from it once more; but if when your thirst is sated the spring is also dried up, then your victory would turn to your own harm.

Be thankful then for what you have received, and do not be saddened at all that such an abundance still remains.What you have received and attained is your present share, while what is left will be your heritage. For what you could not take at one time because of your weakness, you will be able to grasp at another if you only persevere. So do not foolishly try to drain in one draught what cannot be consumed all at once, and do not cease out of faintheartedness from what you will be able to absorb as time goes on.  

From a commentary on the Diatesseron by Saint Ephrem, deacon+373

What constitutes us

Everybody needs a break now and then, so while I go visit our friend Fr. Nick at his parish on Long Island this week, let me help you prepare for our national holiday with my column from three years ago:

The concept of “American exceptionalism” has almost as many definitions as there are commentators on it.  I have long been fascinated by the term, whether its first best use was by Alexis de Tocqueville or Josef Stalin, both of whom are candidates for credit.  Some would assert that the only exceptional aspect of our country is that it is ours, which is thus the same thing that makes any country exceptional.  While I could not endorse any particular theory, it seems sufficiently commonsense to acknowledge that there is something authentically exceptional about our nation.

My first candidate for the ground of exceptionality would be our form of government, the Constitution, and that this form of government is the first and defining characteristic of the country. Ethnicity, culture, and geography all contributed to our nation’s earliest self-understanding and establishment, but did not even then, much less do they now, define what makes the United States of America, the United States of America. 

Lest anyone think that the USA was simply the first of a historical generation of nations to be born of revolution and coalesce by constitution, one need examine the suggested “other examples.”  The French staged a revolution with the express intention of emulating what they saw in our society, but “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” quickly descended into tyranny and bloodshed by committee.  We are all aware of how the Russian and other so-called “revolutions” played out, pursued as they were in the names of ideologies that led to domination by ideologues. Many Latin American nations claim their own “George Washingtons” who nonetheless failed to manifest not only his executive virtues, but also and especially his virtuous relinquishing of executive power.  Anybody familiar with the European Union’s huge phonebook-size assemblage of regulations knows it is a “Constitution” in name alone.

I think what lies at the root of the current mocking of American exceptionalism is a rejection of the possibility that anything can be an exception.  There is a desire to subordinate the character of USA to a rule, and by that rule to take away any privilege or responsibility that would belong to a truly exceptional nation.  

Both privilege and responsibility are eliminated by the tyranny of false equality, which refuses to admit not only any exception, but also the possibility of authentic difference.  The reality of difference is manifest in the differences between and among human beings and all the creatures of the earth. Good and evil, true and false, reality and fiction, beauty and disorder are truly and clearly different.  The only way to deny or suppress these differences is to erect a false equality through authority and power.  That authority and power is necessarily in opposition to the author of all these differences, our Creator. 

My willingness to accept that the United States is exceptional among nations is rooted in my belief that among human beings there are lives that are exceptional.  That belief is founded on my acquaintance with the perfectly exceptional man who is God, Jesus Christ.  His immaculately conceived mother, the Virgin Mary, is not only an exception to the rule of original sin, but also a model of and invitation to acceptance of the privilege and responsibility that comes with freedom from the rule, with being an exception.

The inherent difference among human lives is reflected in the differences of the societies they erect.  The true differences between good and evil, true and false, between God and everything else, undergird a world where every human soul is called to be exceptional in a way that he or she is uniquely capable of being.  This is the foundational freedom that can be suppressed but not eliminated, as it inheres in our very souls.  Better than anywhere else or in any other time, this is the freedom that has until now been both provided and protected in our exceptional nation’s exceptional Constitution.

God bless America, and God bless you.

Monsignor Smith

Tend your garden

Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. (John 15:2-3)

Our modern distance from the agrarian world in which Jesus walked and taught and found the subject matter for his parables can sometimes leave us lacking for understanding.  The best example perhaps is the familiar depiction of the lovely lady in a snow-white gown, ostensibly the Blessed Mother, holding in her arms a snow-white lamb, ostensibly the Lamb of God.  Anyone who has even encountered a lamb or any other baby animal would know that no garment that held it would remain snow white for long!

But we are not so far removed from all that imagery, because this week we have some pruned some branches.  In order to prepare for work that will be done to the church next month, we had to make way for the scaffolding along the exterior walls.  My first thought was simply to cut back the holly trees that grew there, and in fact that is what we did to the two that grow by the entrance to the Saint Joseph transept.

But the hollies along the west side of the church are different; they are Nellie Stevens hollies that have grown in both root and branch to the point of being an obstacle to pedestrians and even a threat to the integrity of the building.  We have cut them back several times, but as the Lord reminds us, that only makes them grow back bigger, and faster.  This week we cut them down, leaving that side of the church quite bare.  New plantings will be placed alongside the church this fall once the scaffolding has been removed. But in the meantime, we have a chance to admire how large and very well-built our handsome church truly is.  Perhaps that will motivate even more folks to participate in the Capital Campaign to bring it “up to snuff” for the next sixty years.

This also brought our attention to the holly trees on either side of the old entrance to the school.  These were Nellie Stevens as well, and to give you a clue as to how they grow, when they were planted there were six of them, three on either side.  Over the years, first one pair, then another was removed until only one stood on either side.  Each of those kept growing and taking over the sidewalk and the front of the building.  Each time we pruned them – an expensive proposition on trees that size – they simply came back bigger and faster.   So, it was time for them to go.

This one photo shows before and after the holly tree removal in front of the school,
though "before" is on the right, and "after" is on the left.
Now they are both gone; new plants to arrive soon.

Now we can see the entire façade of our handsome original school building, and its cornerstone: A.D. 1946!  I think it is the best-looking school building in the Archdiocese, at least among those still being used as schools.  In short order, new plantings will go in that will enhance it, not shroud it.

Jesus elsewhere mentions a tree that does not bear fruit, and must be cut down.   When this happens in the gardens most familiar to us, it comes as a shock to our system.  It reminds us that these plants have a purpose they must fulfill or cease to enjoy their privileged position.  

So too must we do the necessary pruning in our lives, trimming off any growth that is not fruitful; that is, cutting away sinful inclinations that grow up in us, however “natural” they may seem.  This is an understanding we dare not avoid even if our lives be anything but agrarian.

Monsignor Smith

Nowhere

There is nowhere else I would rather be, and no better way to spend a Sunday!  Let me right now thank everybody who participated in the celebration of my anniversary of ordination last week.  It wasn’t crazy or over the top; it was just a great chance to celebrate the 11:00 Mass (on the last weekend before the choir starts summer vacation) and to visit in the Stricker Room with so many people.  It is, as most of you have figured out, my favorite thing to do, and my favorite place to do it.

Thanks to the people who worked so hard to make it beautiful, and everybody who brought treats to eat; and especially to the Holy Name guys, the Religious Ed families, the Well-Read Women, the Tuesday Club, and the Sodality for all their efforts and contributions; and to Margaret McDermott, Jasmine Kuzner, Mary Phillips, and Jackie Nguyen who pulled it all together; and the Rectory Staff especially for just showing up and admitting they know me.   Thanks for all you said, the notes you wrote, and the time you spent; thanks especially to everybody who came even though it wasn’t “your” Mass time.

In a nice bit of symmetry, Sunday this weekend marks the completion of the first DAY of priesthood for the three newest priests of the Archdiocese: Father Oscar Astigarraga, Father Andrew Clyne, and Father Kevin Fields.  Their assignments will be revealed soon, which are still closely-held secrets as I write this. Keep them in your prayers, please, as they begin the wild and wonderful ride that is following in Christ’s priestly footsteps.

More news is that we are receiving a new Auxiliary Bishop. Our Holy Father Pope Francis announced last Friday that Msgr. Michael Fisher, Vicar for Clergy in our Archdiocese for the past twelve years, has been called to the Order of Bishops.  We had been “down one” since Bishop Barry Knestout was appointed to lead the Diocese of Richmond over the winter.  

Bishop-elect Fisher is a delightful man we priests know well, like, and respect, because for so long he has been taking care of us, our assignments, and our concerns.  We are delighted at the news, and glad that once again our local church will have three auxiliary bishops to help with the heavy workload that surrounds our Cardinal Archbishop. 

There are two things about his ordination to the episcopate that are worthy of your attention.  First is that it is really really soon – Friday 29 June, at 2:00 in the afternoon.  That is an unusually short time for him and us to get ready!  Second, his consecration will occur at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.  Because this church is three or four times the size of our Cathedral, where such events usually occur, and only twenty minutes from here, and has abundant parking, it is a perfect opportunity for you to attend, possibly your first ever episcopal consecration.  Y’all come!

Speaking of celebrations you should attend, work is underway to have a send-off reception to Father Gallaugher before he moves on to his new assignment.  He will move officially on 5 July, but will begin to “fade away” even before that.  Plan to come on Sunday 24 June to the 11:00 Mass, and to the MSR afterward, to wish him well.  

There is much to celebrate these days, with the last day of school, the Stanley Cup, and the eternal saving presence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the sacramental ministries of the Church.  Where else would you rather be?

Monsignor Smith