United we stand, divided we fall

Australia’s George Cardinal Pell said of our contemporary Catholic challenge,

If we go under, we surrender to the tides that are breaking up families, decreasing the birth rate, the challenges of alcoholism and drugs and pornography. If we collapse or we wobble disastrously, it won’t be for the good of the western world at all.

A second century Christian author said something similar:

To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.

Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body’s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.

We miss you, Papa

In honor of Pope Benedict’s abdication of the Holy See, I wanted to share a cultural token of his amazing visit to Great Britain in 2010. To accompany Benedict’s visit, a contemporary pop music band called Ooberfüse wrote a song about the human thirst for justice and love that marvelously captures some of the core themes of B16′s three encyclicals. The band sees its mission as “infusing the increasingly moribund traditions of western pop with fresh vigour.”

Any pop culture icon-band that thinks things like that is worth taking note of, in my book.

Take a few minutes to listen and thank God for Benedict, even as you pray for him:

It’s 8 p.m. in Rome: Goodbye, Holy Father

Pic from thismamaneedscoffee.blogspot.com

More Words on this Last Day

Below is a Vatican Radio translation of the Holy Father’s words to the College of Cardinals this morning:

Dear beloved brothers,

I welcome you all with great joy and cordially greet each one of you. I thank Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who as always, has been able to convey the sentiments of the College, Cor ad cor loquitur. Thank you, Your Eminence, from my heart.

And referring to the disciples of Emmaus, I would like to say to you all that it has also been a joy for me to walk with you over the years in light of the presence of the Risen Lord.

As I said yesterday, in front of thousands of people who filled St. Peter’s Square, your closeness, your advice, have been a great help to me in my ministry.

In these 8 years we have experienced in faith beautiful moments of radiant light in the Churches’ journey along with times when clouds have darkened the sky.

We have tried to serve Christ and his Church with deep and total love which is the soul of our ministry.

We have gifted hope that comes from Christ alone, and which alone can illuminate our path.

Together we can thank the Lord who has helped us grow in communion, to pray to together, to help you to continue to grow in this deep unity so that the College of Cardinals is like an orchestra, where diversity, an expression of the universal Church, always contributes to a superior harmony of concord.

I would like to leave you with a simple thought that is close to my heart, a thought on the Church, Her mystery, which is for all of us, we can say, the reason and the passion of our lives. I am helped by an expression of Romano Guardini’s, written in the year in which the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council approved the Constitution Lumen Gentium, his last with a personal dedication to me, so the words of this book are particularly dear to me .

Guardini says: “The Church is not an institution devised and built at table, but a living reality. She lives along the course of time by transforming Herself, like any living being, yet Her nature remains the same. At Her heart is Christ.”

This was our experience yesterday, I think, in the square.

We could see that the Church is a living body, animated by the Holy Spirit, and truly lives by the power of God, She is in the world but not of the world.

She is of God, of Christ, of the Spirit, as we saw yesterday.

This is why another eloquent expression of Guardini’s is also true: “The Church is awakening in souls.”

The Church lives, grows and awakens in those souls which like the Virgin Mary accept and conceive the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit. They offer to God their flesh and in their own poverty and humility become capable of giving birth to Christ in the world today.

Through the Church the mystery of the Incarnation remains present forever. Christ continues to walk through all times in all places. Let us remain united, dear brothers, to this mystery, in prayer, especially in daily Eucharist, and thus serve the Church and all humanity. This is our joy that no one can take from us.

Prior to bidding farewell to each of you personally, I want to tell you that I will continue to be close to you in prayer, especially in the next few days, so that you may all be fully docile to the action of the Holy Spirit in the election of the new Pope.

May the Lord show you what is willed by Him. And among you, among the College of Cardinals, there is also the future Pope, to whom, here to today, I already promise my unconditional reverence and obedience. For all this, with affection and gratitude, I cordially impart upon you my Apostolic Blessing.

Below is a Vatican Radio translation of the farewell discourse by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Dean of the College of Cardinals to Pope Benedict XVI.

Holiness,

With great trepidation the cardinals present in Rome gather around you today, once again to show their deep affection and express their heartfelt gratitude for your selfless witness of apostolic service, for the good of the Church of Christ and of all humanity.

Last Saturday, at the end of the Spiritual Exercises in the Vatican, you thanked your collaborators from the Roman Curia, with these moving words: My friends, I would like to thank all of you not only for this week but for the past eight years, during which you have carried with me, with great skill, affection, love and loyalty, the weight of the Petrine ministry.

Beloved and revered Successor of Peter, it is we who must thank you for the example you have given us in the past eight years of Pontificate.

On 19 April 2005 you joined the long line of successors of the Apostle Peter, and today, 28 February 2013, you are about to leave us, as we wait for the helm of the Barque of Peter to pass into other hands.

Thus the apostolic succession continues, which the Lord promised His Holy Church, until the voice of the Angel of the Apocalypse is heard proclaim on earth : “Tempus non erit amplius … consummabitur mysterium Dei” (Ap 10, 6-7) “there is no longer time: the mystery of God is finished.”

So ends the history of the Church, together with the history of the world, with the advent of a new heaven and a new earth.

Holy Father, with deep love we have tried to accompany you on your journey, reliving the experience of the disciples of Emmaus who, after walking with Jesus for a good stretch of road, said to one another: “Were not our hearts burning [within us] while he spoke to us on the way?” (Luke 24:32).

Yes, Holy Father, know that our hearts burned too as we walked with you in the past eight years. Today we want to once again express our gratitude.

Together we repeat a typical expression of your dear native land “Vergelt’s Gott” — God reward you!

Upon this Rock

This quote from Thomas Macaulay, nineteenth century British poet, historian, Whig politician and Evangelical Christian, offers a powerful meditation during these final days of Benedict’s pontificate. It was penned in the 1850s, so very much has happened since then to further add color to his point.

Regardless whether the upcoming weeks and months bring intrigue or inspiration, shame or glory, fear or hope, Christ’s placement of the papacy — and so the Church — safely shepherding God’s flock at the threshold of Hades should always plant our hope secure.

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.

Papa, oh why are you leaving?

Pope Benedict’s Angelus address on Sunday offered a most remarkable rationale for his impending resignation: ascending the mountain of meditation, prayer. The faltering strength of an octogenarian takes on the forgotten truth of an old Russian proverb: old age is for prayer.

Here, read the excerpt for yourself:

Dear brothers and sisters, I hear this Word of God addressed to me in a special way during this moment of my life. [applause from crowd] Thank you! The Lord is calling me to “scale the mountain,” to dedicate myself still more to prayer and to meditation. But this does not mean abandoning the Church – on the contrary, if God asks this of me, it is to serve the Church with the same dedication and the same love with which I have tried to do so hitherto, but in a way that is more adapted to my age and my strength. Let us invoke the intercession of the Virgin Mary: may she help us always to follow the Lord Jesus in prayer and in active charity.

Remarkable for a Pope to say such words, that is, since the last — and only! — pope to resign for the sake of greater solitude and prayer was that other faltering octogenarian pope, St. Celestine V, way back in 1295 A.D.

It’s clear from the pope’s own words that his decision to step down reflects his belief that the Church in the 21st century faces immense, complex and increasingly high-paced challenges, both from within and without, which require from Christ’s Vicar a pastoral energy, political savvy and cultural sagacity that he believes he no longer possesses (or at least in regard to ‘pastoral energy’ and to the degree rightly required by the exigencies of a postmodern papacy).

But it’s also clear from the pope’s words Sunday that he believes something else: whoever sits in St. Peter’s Chair, or any seat of authority in the Church, must be a person of deep prayer. True to his chosen papal name, Benedict clearly believes the ‘mystical secret’ to future success of the Church’s mission lies in its contemplative vocation. Concomitantly, he believes that the post-conciliar Church has been beset by the heresy of “activism” — i.e. it has become a Church of planning committees, pastoral initiatives, programs and action plans that has forgotten how to pray like the ancients: before and above all else, crying out to God with longing, ardent, deep, gritty, heartfelt and Spirit-groaning prayer.

For Benedict, the “Augustinian” theologian of grace, this stunted approach to the Church’s mission requires a new confession of the absolute primacy of divine grace – the Church is the work of the Trinity before it is the work of humanity.

By retiring into a life of prayer for the Church, Pope Benedict seems to be offering a prophetic statement about the vocational effectiveness of the priest-pastor: if you wish to bring to the world Christ’s new evangelization you must, in the words of St. John Vianney, be “above all else a man of prayer…a pauper who begs all needful things from God.”

Why? Because it’s not your Church, or your cosmos, but His.

Flectamus genua, “let us kneel.”

Songs and Wisdom from Africa, Cappadocia

In honor of Black History Month, I wanted to share two treasures. First, a lecture by a great scholar of African American religious history, Albert Rabateau, on “Seeing Christ in the Poor” in which he weaves into one the suffering wisdom of black slaves in antebellum America and the pastoral wisdom of some 4th century Cappadocian Church Fathers. Below the article and its link, I also share with you this hidden treasure I found today — three African American spirituals sung by a group of college students at Albany State University.

This morning I want to draw upon two deep reservoirs of Tradition — by which I mean the living presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church — that are important in my life academically and personally.  The first rises from the Christianity of African-American slaves in antebellum America; the second from the 4th century pastoral work of several Christian bishops in Cappadocia in the eastern part of the Late Roman Empire.  For these reservoirs converge (flow together) as resources for renewal in the ongoing struggle against poverty and oppression.  Read more…

Now, enjoy the sounds:

Malachy, Lightning and Peter

Someone asked if I would address the “Prophecy of St. Malachy,” and Monday’s eerie lightening strike on St. Peter’s Basilica shortly after Benedict’s resignation announcement. As I am limited on time, I will only sketch out a reply here.

Malachy

I really got into this Malachy-thing in the late 1980s when someone I knew, who was big-time into end of world prophecies, scared the tar out of me one night by telling me the Malachy story with great dramatic flair.

In brief, St Malachy was a 12th century Irish bishop who, it is said, received a series of visions about the future of the papacy while in Rome where he was to receive his palliums from Pope Innocent II. I say, “it is said,” because this Malachy visionary story did not come to light for 400 years after his death. Always a suspicious sign, especially since Malachy’s illustrious biographer, Vatican insider St Bernard of Clairvaux, never mentioned this important detail.

In the late 16th century, a Benedictine monk named Arnold de Wyon claimed to have re-discovered this “lost” document in the Vatican archives and published what he said were Malachy’s 112 short, cryptic Latin phrases that describe each pope from Pope Celestine II (d 1144) on. And, by Wyon’s counting, B16 is #111.

The Catholic tradition has had is share of apocalyptic thinkers, especially since the Cistercian monk,  Joachim of Fiore (who, btw, lived around the time of St. Malachy), offered a wildly apocalyptic and highly influential visionary picture of the Church’s “future.” Fiore’s work led to an explosion of failed apocalyptic predictions over the next 4 centuries, tied especially to the Franciscan order and the papacy.  If you are interested in reading about this, which would help set the context for understanding Wyon’s approach to the Malachy prophecies, Bernard McGinn’s “Introduction” in his book on medieval apocalypticism is really good.

So what do I think of the Malachy prophecies? Well, like McGinn, I think they are a terrific study in the ways medieval apocalyptic literature was used by monastic communities to help effect reform in the Church; not as intentional deception, but, as with the Book of Revelation itself, as a literary strategy for communicating the real gravity of the Church’s mission to carry out in itself Christ’s spectacularly dramatic triumph over evil. Though the “end” will come one day, and Christ will judge all of history and all humanity, the Church has always been loathe to deal with codes and dates. Thank God.

As for the details of the prophecy, I would concur with Marcellino D’Ambrosio’s brief and critical analysis, found here.

Lightning

As for the lightning strike? Well, as with the story of the violent thunderstorm accompanying the proclamation of the Dogma of Papal Infallibility by Pope Pius IX in 1870, it can be interpreted, if we can think like the ancients and read God’s voice through nature’s power, as a dramatic punctuation on the gravity of the matter at hand.  Just think of the fact that in the book of Exodus the Law was given to Moses in the midst of a violent thunderstorm in the Sinai desert, serving as a sacrament of awe for those who were present.

The gospel according to Neal

So that’s my off handed take, for what it’s worth. Or, I could be wrong and the next pope could be Peter the Roman, last of the pontiffs, herald of time’s demise and forerunner of Christ’s dread judgment.

In the mean time, I will take the advice of desert father Abba Poeman. A disciple once questioned him, “Abba, what would you do if you knew that Christ was to return in glory this day?” Abba Poeman replied, “I would rise at the usual time and pray the psalms. Then I would share some bread with my brothers, tend to my garden and again return to pray until the noon hour…”

In other words, live faithfully every moment as if Christ were coming in glory, in the awe of lightning. The Vicar of Christ is daily God’s sacramental call for us to repent before the dread judgment.

Thank you God for B16

As I received the news of Pope Benedict’s announced resignation from the papacy, I was, after the initial shock, overcome by a profound feeling of gratitude for the gift he has given the Church by lending his brilliance to the work Bl. John Paul II — the work of confirming and further developing the ecclesial shape of the reformation effected by the Second Vatican Council.

As with his namesake, the father of Western monasticism, St. Benedict of Nursia, Pope Benedict called for the stabilization of the Church ad intra as a prerequisite for the evangelization of the world ad extra. He called for a tradition-retrieving, vibrant and world-engaging orthodoxy of faith, rooted in the blazing charity of Christ and sustained in its new, outwardly-turned ardor by the sure hope that is within us.

Yesterday, as I prayed over the news I immediately thought of the words Pope Benedict spoke in his first address to the Cardinals who elected him; words that I am certain continue to sustain him in this time of decision:

Dear Ones, this intimate recognition for a gift of divine mercy prevails in my heart in spite of everything. I consider this a grace obtained for me by my venerated predecessor, John Paul II. It seems I can feel his strong hand squeezing mine; I seem to see his smiling eyes and listen to his words, addressed to me especially at this moment: ‘Do not be afraid!’

Best or Worst of Times?

Someone the other day was talking with me about how bad it is getting for the Church in the U.S. as the cultural tide is turning against more and more of the Church’s teachings. They said to me, “Do you agree?”

Spontaneously, that quintessentially Catholic response to most questions came to mind: sic et non, yes and no. But, as most often happens when someone asks me a question I did not expect, I thought of four great quotes after our brief subsequent exchange. SO I will share with you a bit of what I would have said to him had I had these quotes at my immediate command:

“Christianity is greatest when it is hated by the world.” — St. Ignatius of Antioch, d. 108 A.D. from his Letter to the Romans 3.3

Why? It gives us an opportunity to give voice to the Gospel while we have the attention of those who care enough to reject our message:

Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who defame your good conduct in Christ may themselves be put to shame. — 1 Peter 3:15

It gives us the privileged opportunity to demonstrate the character of divine love. Indeed, Jesus’ most persuasive proclamation came as He spoke what St. Paul entitled, “The word of the cross” (1 Cor 1:18):

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect. — Matthew 5:43-48

And finally, as people who believe in Divine Providence, and especially in God’s proclivity to draw the greatest goods out of the greatest evils, it’s always important to find the hopeful opportunity — the hidden grace — that is always present in the midst of threat:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

A gentleman I met in Tallahassee, Florida, had a great way of phrasing what I’m getting at: Times of adversity always show of what mettle you’re made, and without adversity you’re always an unknown quantity.