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Vatican 2 à la Daniélou

A dear friend of mine sent me this interview with a prominent Jesuit theologian of the early-mid 20th century, Cardinal Jean Daniélou, whose work helped till the soils from which the Second Vatican Council sprouted.  It’s quite intriguing, and quite contemporary for a 1972 interview on the state of consecrated life…

Interview of Cardinal Jean Daniélou on Vatican Radio, October 23, 1972

Q: Your Eminence, is there really a crisis of religious life, and can you give us its dimensions?

A: I think that there is now a very grave crisis of religious life, and that one should not speak of renewal, but rather of decadence. I think that this crisis is hitting the Atlantic area above all. Eastern Europe and the countries of Africa and Asia present in this regard a better state of spiritual health. This crisis is manifesting itself in all areas. The evangelical counsels are no longer considered as consecrations to God, but are seen in a sociological and psychological perspective. We are concerned about not presenting a bourgeois facade, but on the individual level poverty is not practiced. The group dynamic replaces religious obedience; with the pretext of reacting against formalism, all regularity of the life of prayer is abandoned and the first consequence of this state of confusion is the disappearance of vocations, because young people require a serious formation. And moreover there are the numerous and scandalous desertions of religious who renege on the pact that bound them to the Christian people.

Q: Can you tell us what, in your view, are the causes of this crisis?

A: The essential source of this crisis is a false interpretation of Vatican II. The directives of the Council were very clear: a greater fidelity of religious men and women to the demands of the Gospel expressed in the constitutions of each institute, and at the same time an adaptation of the modalities of these constitutions to the conditions of modern life. The institutes that are faithful to these directives are seeing true renewal, and have vocations. But in many cases the directives of Vatican II have been replaced with erroneous ideologies put into circulation by magazines, by conferences, by theologians. And among these errors can be mentioned:

- Secularization. Vatican II declared that human values must be taken seriously. It never said that we should enter into a secularized world in the sense that the religious dimension would no longer be present in society, and it is in the name of a false secularization that men and women are renouncing their habits, abandoning their works in order to take their places in secular institutions, substituting social and political activities for the worship of God. And this goes against the grain, among other things, with respect to the need for spirituality that is being manifested in today’s world.
- A false conception of freedom that brings with it the devaluing of the constitutions and rules and exalts spontaneity and improvisation. This is all the more absurd in that Western society is currently suffering from the absence of a discipline of freedom. The restoration of firm rules is one of the necessities of religious life.
- An erroneous conception of the changing of man and of the Church. Even if these change, the constitutive elements of man and of the Church are permanent, and bringing into question the constitutive elements of the constitutions of the religious orders is a fundamental error.

Q: But do you see any remedies for overcoming this crisis?

A: …Religious life is called to a grandiose future in technological society; the more this is developed, the more it will make felt the need for the manifestation of God. This is precisely the aim of religious life, but in order to carry out its mission it must rediscover its authentic meaning and break radically with a secularization that is destroying it in its essence and preventing it from attracting vocations.

Shepherd Heart

This is the season for ordinations to the diaconate and priesthood.  A joyous time!

I have been to many ordinations over the years, and never tire of them.  Today I was reminded of an ordination in Tallahassee years ago that my wife ‘did’ the music for, and I specifically recalled this lovely contemporary setting of Psalm 23 that she chose/sang.  It wraps this God-shepherd psalm around the ministerial priesthood of Jesus Christ.

Wrapped tightly, as they should be.

Ascension Homily

Feast of the Ascension of the Lord – May 20, 2012

St. Augustin Parish – Des Moines, Iowa

Deacon Mike Manno

Readings: Acts 1: 1-11;  Ephesians 1:17-23;  Mark 16: 15-20

Good morning:

Today, of course, is the feast of the Ascension of the Lord.  It used to be celebrated on a Thursday, forty days after Easter, but in most of the United States it is celebrated on the Sunday following. I guess this is the Church’s version of all those holidays that Congress has moved to either a Monday or a Friday so we can have three-day weekends.

Of course we’ll have a three-day weekend coming up for Memorial Day, and I’m looking forward to that … as an old formula car racer I really look forward to the Indianapolis 500!

The first reading today talks about Jesus being taken up into heaven.  The angels who appeared to the apostles told them that Jesus would return in “the same way you have seen him going into heaven.”

So we have from our readings today the promise that Jesus will return again.  What we don’t know is when.  And there is something else we don’t know … and it is asked by Jesus in Chapter 18 of Luke’s Gospel about his return: “When the Son of Man comes,” he asks, “will he find faith on earth?”

Think about that for a minute.  Jesus confides in his disciples his concerns about what he will find when he returns, as we know he will.

So let’s ask ourselves, if Jesus were to return today, what would he find?  Would he find faith?

Listen to what our Holy Father told members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith last January: “In vast areas of the earth the faith risks being extinguished, like a flame without fuel. We are facing a profound crisis of faith, a loss of a religious sense which represents one of the greatest challenges for the Church today.”

            Ever increasingly we look out at a world that has substituted its own god for the God of Salvation.  It’s a god of accommodation with the world, not the God that has created the world; a god of rationalization, not the God of absolute truth; a god that we find in ourselves, not the transcended God that demands obedience.

Yes, obedience.

We have a God that demands as much and he set out rules for life in the Scriptures and especially through Jesus in the New Testament.  Jesus, you see, wasn’t just a first century sandal-clad hippy whose ministry preached peace and love – oh he did preach peace and love, but he also preached a gospel of faithfulness to God’s commands – and in speaking of hell, which he did with greater frequency than heaven, he warned that those who disregarded his commands would end up there.

So following up on the Pope’s remarks, are we being faithful to the whole Gospel, or just those parts of it with which we agree? Or are we compromising with the culture around us, and accepting lifestyles that go beyond God’s commands.

I don’t think anything is more illustrative of this than the recent conversation about so-called gay marriage.  Clearly there is a biblical injunction against homosexual conduct and just as clearly large numbers of people who call themselves Christian simply approve of it and ignore the Scriptural injunction.

Of course, the Church doesn’t ignore it.  And it has preached and campaigned against that conduct.  And we have condemned it; not the people, but the act.

But isn’t it interesting that it is homosexual sex that gets all the attention from the orthodox.  Jesus and Scripture condemn all out of wedlock sex, but how many of us wink and nod approval to our friends and children who are living in sin after deciding to “shack-up.”  Is that not as worthy of condemnation as gay marriage?

And what about those who live in adultery after a divorce who have not had their prior marriages annulled?  Is that not part of the faith that Jesus left us?  Or what about the millions of Catholics who contracept? That prohibition goes back to the Apostles and what would be called our first catechism, the Didache; yet where is the response to that? Is it only homosexual sex that we condemn?

And it’s not just sexual morality that concerns us; how about those that use the economic system to drive down the poor to their own advantage; or those who use the legal system to gain an unfair – yet perhaps legal – advantage over a competitor?

And there are good, Catholic families that discourage vocations in favor of grandchildren; as well as Catholic institutions that abandon their Catholic identities for political advantage.

Is not our faith a full, balanced meal? Yet far too many of us choose to dine à la carte, accepting only those truths that correspond to a private world view.

We rely on the excuse of our conscience to enable our rationalizations, rather than using our faith to inform our conscience.

Have we accommodated our faith to the surrounding culture so much that we can’t see what is happening?  Have we become so non-judgmental that we refuse to see sin where it exists?

But I suppose in a culture that is quickly trying to remove God from our societal discourse this should come as no surprise. We live in a society that is today governed by moral relativism rather than principles of truth; by tolerance of all forms of conduct rather than the commands of our God.

We may, in short, have reached the point Richard Niebhur suggested where we have created our own deity; a god without wrath who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministry of a messiah without a cross.

When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith?

Or will he find millions of lost souls whose accommodation with the world has left them empty and without hope.  Will he find a world full of fatherless children because we have disregarded the value of marriage and family?

And how many of our children will he not find because we have ended their lives in what should be the safest place for them, their mother’s womb? Will he find that we have lost the moral ability to draw a line between right and wrong, between faith and fantasy, or between heaven and hell?

Will he find us striving for the City of God or the City of Gomorrah?

When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith?

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Blog user notes…

Please note: as with all my blog entries, for those who get emailed blogs, for ‘full effect’ you really must view the blog entry by clicking on the blog title and going to the WordPress site.  There you can see youtubes and such better.  Also, the hyperlinked words are inserted to offer a multi-dimensional view of the ideas I attempt to convey in my blog; so please feel free to click if you dare!

Thank you for wanting to read this Blog.  Pax Christi, Tom

A Canonical lawsuit?

Unfortunately, I found that Georgetown today lacks the integrity to consistently live the Catholic identity it claims.  While faith and spirituality are embraced at Georgetown, they are respected only so long as they are either confined within the walls of Dahlgren Chapel, or diluted to appease the dictatorship of relativism which is sweeping our civilization. Read more…

Magnify, do or die

In this month awash in Our Lady, I’d like to share a few words on her ‘song,’ the Magnificat.

Mary’s soul ‘magnifies’ (megalunei) the Lord. But how do you magnify the Infinite?

Here’s my take.

The invisible God longs to be made visibly manifested to us flesh-and-soul creatures who are stamped with his image. In biblical language, God wishes to show his glory in, to and through us. But he can only do that in those who freely consent to manifest the image-and-likeness he made us to be — to reflect his attributes (e.g. justice, mercy, kindness, patience, joy, love) in our very flesh and bones.

Mary accomplished this as no other. She not only manifested God, reflected his attributes, and shone with his glory, but she (gasp!) gave him our flesh and blood and bones so that he could be magnified for us to see, hear, touch, smell and taste. In Catholic lingo, she sacramentalized him, echoing his Opening Word, ‘let there be light,’ with her fiat, ‘let it be done.’

O Mary, intercede for us that we may magnify the magnificent glory of our majestic God.

{a personal note — my favorite contemporary setting of Mary’s Magnificat, worth the 99 cents}

‘Thou hast ascended, O Christ our God, King of the universe…’

After appearing to his disciples for 40 days after the resurrection, Jesus returns to the Father in an act of final and supreme exaltation as he bears our nail-marked humanity into the innermost depths of the Trinity.  And this he does not for himself, but to open the way for all humanity to follow him into the true House of God not made by human hands.

He departs, but after nine days his Spirit will arrive to flood the earth not with death and destruction but with the new life and redemption flowing from the open side of the Crucified; making Pentecost a recapitulation of the ancient Flood that gathers humanity into the blood-stained Barque of the new-Noah.

The Ascension is, therefore, the completion of the extraordinary dynamism of the Incarnation—in Christ, God’s descent as a slave opened the way for our exaltation as sons and daughters of the Most High King. In his ascent, Christ places forever a human heart in the Father’s Heart; and in the Spirit’s descent on Pentecost, Jesus, with fiery passion, invites and empowers the rest of humanity to follow the very same way he trod from the depths to the heights.  That fiery invitation and empowerment, that divine-human tête-à-tête, that sacred tryst between Spirit and flesh is what we call the sacramental Liturgy.

Let the Fire fall…countdown, nine days (well, actually, six with our accommodated Ascension date).

Facing Jesus

‘Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus.’  - Hebrews 12:2

Recently, I offered a day of reflection to a local parish staff on the theme of Encountering God in the Ordinary.  Part of the day’s focus was on this pithy passage above.  As part of a series of stories I shared, I told them about an interview I once saw with a NASA engineer who studied the Shroud of Turin as part of the STURP project.  He was allowed to spend an entire night alone with the Shroud while he studied it, and the next day he was asked in an interview if he had any special ‘experience’ during that time.  He remarked, ‘No, I’m not a religious man; but what did strike me was this — the body of the man imaged on the shroud is terribly tortured, while the face is totally serene.  It’s as if the face and the body don’t match.’

When I heard those words, this passage from Hebrews lit up my imagination. That face. In the midst of the chaos and pain and turmoil of the Passion, his face was serene, fixed on the Father.

When your life seems to look more like his body, fix your eyes on his Face.