First Communion

We had 105 kids make their first communion in our parish today. The priest talked about communion being a family meal and Jesus coming into their hearts. That is all good and important stuff to learn. But their is another side that gets pretty much ignored. The bit about communion being a sacrifice. I can get why. These kids are grade 2 and they looked very cute all dressed up. For you to explain the Eucharist as sacrifice you would need to make them understand sin. I mean if we don't get that we are sinners then why are we making sacrifices in the first place? But we don't just need to see ourselves as sinners but as big sinners. We need a sacrifice that is bigger than any human sacrifice could be. Can we tell 8 year-old kids that their sin is that bad? Do we really believe our sin is that bad? We do and we don't.

I know as a child I understood sin and atonement. I did bad things and I was punished and that made things right. But then I became a teenager and my sins got worse. There was a point where there was no punishment my parents could give that was bad enough to make up for the things I did. That was when the atoning sacrifice of Jesus became real to me. Of course, as a protestant, I did not connect it with the Lord's Supper at all. But if I had it might have been powerful for me to understand that my real sins needed a real sacrifice offered for me at mass by the priest. Not just an abstract atonement many years ago for the sins of the world but Jesus' body and blood presented today for my sins.

But how old do you have to be to get that? For me it would have been early teens. No way I understood my sins that well when I was 8. We understand that. Our parish does not recommend kids go to first confession until grade 4. So they know in grade 2 they are not ready to seriously contemplate their sin and the way it effects their relationship with God. So they teach them about the mass as a holy family meal but largely skip the idea of the mass as sacrifice. I remember a talk by Bishop Sample saying that if you don't understand the mass as sacrifice you don't understand the mass at all. Is that really true? Should we simply not have kids at communion until they can understand their personal need for atonement before God?

I wonder how many ever get it. How many ever see their sins being atoned for by Jesus body and blood being presented to God on the altar by the priest as a sacrifice during the mass? I don't have any statistics but my gut feeling is many don't. We need to teach it better. Part of that is actual catechism instruction and part of it is liturgical practice as well. What we believe happens in a Sunday morning mass is radically different from what protestant believe happens in a Sunday morning service. We need to explain that and we need to change the way we do things to reflect that as well. I am not sure we do either well.

Oprah and the Big Questions of Life

Why the big fuss over her? She seems perfect for our time. She talks about things that are real and important. Quite often she makes you feel like you have learned something true about humanity. But after 25 years what has she learned? I read a number of reflections on Oprah's ideas and nobody seems to have arrived at anything. Everyone seems sure they are richer for having encountered her but nobody can say exactly what gem of spiritual truth she has left them with. Something we didn't already know or know as well without her.

This is why she is so perfect for our time. Modern society is marked by fear of the big questions in life. What is the meaning of life? Where did we come from and where are we going? How do we know what is really good and true and noble and praiseworthy? These are scary questions because the answers can change your life a lot. Modern man loves to play the skeptic with anyone trying to answer the questions. This is good. You don't want to order your life around an answer without scrutinizing it. But there is such a fear of making a mistake that the analyzing and scrutinizing never stops. Oprah is good at that. After 25 years she has taken us exactly nowhere. She has investigated every possible answer but settled on none.

It is like a man who moves from woman to woman. Dates a few times but never gets serious with anyone. At a superficial level such a man seems enviable. Especially if the women are beautiful. Our imaginations can make us sure he is having the most amazing life. It could certainly make for a popular TV show. But is that happiness? If after 25 years he still has not developed any sort of emotional intimacy with any woman should we really be jealous? Isn't the adventure of sharing a life together better than 1000 first dates? It is too personal to put on TV but the best things in life are.

Oprah is like that for spirituality. She can't be compared to the great spiritual thinkers because they all taught something. They settled on one answer to life's big questions and developed a deep intimacy with it. That has blessed the world with great wisdom. Oprah has done nothing of the sort. We would not pay much attention to her if she did. She has been on 1000 first dates with interesting world and life views. They make for good TV. We imagine that she was touched deeply and positively. But mostly she just went on the the next one.

Oprah's modus operandi is the very opposite of the liar, lord, lunatic argument of CS Lewis. She was about damning things with faint praise. Saying nice things about Jesus but refusing to bow down to Him as Lord. Then moving on the Buddha and doing the same. Not really taking seriously the claims of Christ and His church. Atheists are a bit more honest in saying that if Christianity is wrong about Jesus and the bible it is a huge error. Conversely if Christianity is right then atheism is a huge error. But Oprah's position and modern society's position is the one that makes no sense. To pretend neither is really right or wrong. That we can embrace both whenever we like and it is all good.

Answers and Courage

Over at Whispers in Loggia Rocco highlights the winner of the Notre Dame Laetare medal. It is a nun from his native Philadelphia named Sr Mary Scullion. The quote he selected as his title was “Our faith does not give us answers; it gives us courage.” That struck me as very sad. More than sad. Almost evil. This sister is highly respected for her service to the poor. That is awesome. That service gives her a platform. Speaking at Notre Dame's commencement is just one such opportunity she has to be heard. But why use that platform to declare your faith to be bankrupt of truth? That it is useful for motivation but not so much for knowing anything? Does she believe that? Not really. She talks about the dignity of the human person about being drawn toward mercy, compassion, and justice. I don't think she wonders if those things are really true. Not the way she lives her life around them. But she has bought into the idea that rejecting dogma is a virtue. Unfortunately places like Notre Dame embrace that school of thought as well.

The trouble is that motivation by itself is useless. The Muslims who drove planes into the World Trade Center were motivated. Their problem was not that they lacked courage but that they lacked answers. They had dogma but they had wrong dogma. People will look for truth. If the church refuses to give it to them they will find it somewhere else. Secular people don't refuse to give answers. Evangelicals don't have a problem being sure of themselves. The Catholic church claims the authority to be able to define dogma that secularists and evangelicals deny. Yet it is often the Catholics who get all timid and start saying things like their faith does not provide any answers. Why is that?

Pope Benedict once said there was a danger in serving the poor. When Jesus becomes an instrument for serving the poor He becomes less than God. That Jesus is no longer the goal but social justice is the goal. What he said is that when that happens you not only lose Jesus but you fail at true social justice as well. Practically speaking it means that Catholics working with the poor want to avoid the church's sexual morality. They don't want to talk about abortion or homosexual acts as things that are evil. Just accept people and show them mercy and compassion. To a point that is true. Our first line should not be one of moral judgement. But if we truly love people then we should find occasion to teach them the whole truth. Even if, at least initially, they are not going to look good in the light of that truth. Still telling them that this is what God is calling them to and having faith that He will give them the grace to live it just as He gives you the grace to live it.

When we water down the gospel to make it easier for others to live it we are putting them lower than ourselves. We can embrace the fullness of the Catholic faith but the people we minister to can't. We need to edit it for them. Or do we edit it for ourselves? It is always the counter-cultural pieces of the faith that we want to leave out. Is it really impossible for the poor to live them? Or is it because we fear of losing respect in the secular world? At the end of the day answers and courage are not opposites. It takes real courage to give real answers.

If you look at Bl. Teresa of Calcutta you see something different. She never made disagreements over doctrine a problem in her serving the poor. Still she never allowed anyone to be confused about what she believed. She lectured secular elites on the immorality of abortion and contraception. She would see an address like the Notre Dame speech as a great opportunity to make that point.Always mindful of where her audience is at but always wanting to not leave them there but to bring them closer to sainthood. For her the poor were a powerful way to get closer to Jesus but Jesus remained the goal. Not just for her but for everyone. You can't get there by running away from truth.

Good Thoughts on an Old Debate

Janet Smith writes an article in First Things that goes back to the "Is Lying Ever Justified?"debate. Here is a quote:

Can the defense of some false signification be squared with the traditional absolute prohibition of lying? A close consideration of the analogy with the use of lethal force and the taking of property should help us see that the absolute prohibition can be retained. Neither Aquinas nor the Church understands the use of lethal force in defense of innocent life to be an “exception” to the prohibition of murder. Nor does the taking or destroying of property belonging to another when necessary to avert some great evil function as an “exception” to the prohibition of theft. Murder is the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being. Theft is taking something against the reasonable will of the owner, and a reasonable owner would approve of taking property to protect important goods. Therefore, properly stated, although killing and the taking of property are sometimes morally permissible, the norms against murder and theft remain absolute, without exception. Similarly, I believe that the telling of some falsehoods and other forms of false signification are compatible with the absolute prohibition of lying.

The mistake that Aquinas makes (and those words do stick in my throat!) is that he analyzes the question of lying with a prelapsarian understanding of the purpose of signification—an understanding that presumes the innocence of man before the Fall. He does not make this same mistake in respect to the protection of life and property: He realizes that behavior in reference to human life and property is necessarily different in the postlapsarian world. Before the Fall, man has no need to use force against another, nor need he destroy another’s property (or even possess property). But after the Fall, innocent life is often threatened, and property owners are often absent or unreasonable. Thus new forms of behavior are permissible given new realities, behavior directed towards defending human life and protecting other important goods.

I found her argument quite convincing. After reading both sides of the debate I wasn't quite sure. My intuition told me that there should be cases where lies can be told morally. It just bothered me that the arguments of Aquinas that continue to be defended by many Catholics I respect never seemed like they were adequately dealt with. As a Catholic I want to think with the church and not just follow my private judgement. So I didn't want to just say the tradition is just wrong. I wanted something that takes the church's non-infallible teaching seriously. This did that well.

I had trouble finding a quote because the whole thing gets quite involved. Yet if you read the whole thing it makes a very strong case without getting too hard to follow. I was listening to Peter Kreeft say that sanctity and sanity are never in conflict. Catholicism is both. In this debate there were time I was feeling like I had to choose one or the other. This is both sane and holy.

Logic and Atheism

Anthony Layne has a post about a common logic error atheists make. He starts with this quote:

The problem basically is, you and all the other believers in all the diverse religions in the world will shut your ears to the logic that says for a start, two religions cannot be correct because they contradict each other. For example, the gods of Islam and Catholicism are not the same god, no matter how you try and make it so. So we see convinced passionate faith from both and yet a Hindu knows with equal certainty both are wrong.

He does a nice job of showing how that logic fails. But people are convinced by it none the less. Why is that? It is not because they can't think logically. At least that isn't the typical reason people accept bad logic. I think the common reason is the unspoken assumption. There is an extra premise in the argument who's truth is so deeply ingrained it is never stated let alone questioned. What is the premise here? That no one religion is likely to be more right than the others or at least no one religion can be known to be more right than the others. This is something every religious person would reject. Religious people are not vaguely religious. They belong to a specific religion. They believe that this specific religion is the truth or very close to the truth. If they didn't they would not be a part of it. I believed that when I was reformed. I believe it now as a Catholic.

So why do people accept this premise? The idea that because everyone claims to know the truth that nobody does? I think the root of it is in protestantism. When I first looked seriously at Catholicism one of my first aversions was to the very idea of a pope. The notion that one man or one office could somehow have a better connection with God than anyone else seemed just silly to me. Where did I get that reaction? Protestant tradition. It is one of the bedrock assumptions of protestantism that no office like the pope can exist. What bible verse is it based on? There isn't one. We just knew the papacy is nonsense.

But how far is that assumption from the assumption that no religion can be right when everyone else is wrong? It is almost the same idea. If there can be no pope there can be no Jesus. If there is no vicar of Christ then how can there be a Christ? Christ just means "anointed one". If Pope Benedict cannot be anointed to teach the true faith in a way nobody else is then how can Jesus be anointed to teach the true faith in a way Mohammad is not?

So if protestantism is granted it's premise that the papacy cannot be taken seriously because God simply does not work that way then the atheists logic suddenly looks a lot better. The notion that one religion is true among the many does not make sense because it boils down to a pope. You can find smaller and smaller subgroups that have the best truth and it comes down to one individual or group that is at the center of the truth. If that is ruled out then the argument can be shown to be valid.

But what if you explicitly stated that as a premise?

• There are many contradictory ideas about religion.
• There is no infallible individual or group
• Therefore no religion can be correct

If a protestant could see that his anti-papal premise logically leads to the conclusion that all religion is false then he might re-examine it. I mean how many pope-like figures do we have in the bible? Moses, Abraham, David, the kings, the prophets, etc. How many religions have grown up without a pope-like figure? Calvin. Luther, Wesley, Joseph Smith, how pope-like were they?

Once you examine the role of such leaders you come to realize the power of the argument. It is not a matter of whether you have a pope but who it is. It could be yourself or your pastor. But why could it not be the bishop of Rome? Why is it so hard to believe that in such a mass of religious opinion God will give you a light and He will do it precisely that way?

Is the Pro-Life Cause Winning?

Trevin Wax argues that the pro-life side is winning the fight for the hearts and minds of Americans. There certainly is some evidence. People seem to view abortion as morally questionable. Part of it is due to better technology. Ultra sound pictures make it harder and harder to look the other way. Pro-abortion people constantly find themselves arguing for ignorance. Don't inform women about what an abortion is. They openly admit a picture of a fetus is pro-life propaganda. It is. But how do you keep people from looking closely at the thing in the center of the debate?

Polls show most Americans now describe themselves as pro-life. That is great. But it is not enough. People have to see a pro-life society as possible. In order to have a pro-life society you need to recover some sense of chastity. It is ironic that the pro-choice side's best argument is that we don't have a choice. We can't avoid abortion because we can't avoid casual sex. No matter how much we want to be pro-life if we can't achieve some level of sexual self-control as a society it isn't really practical.

That is the argument we are still losing. To say we are losing it would be to suggest the argument is even being made. I am not sure that it is. Is a chaste society possible? Sure it is. You will never get rid of sexual sin but you can get to a point where it is rare enough that society can care for the children that come from it. How do we do it? Think about how we got from there to here. Prior to the sexual revolution abortion was not required. So it is possible to create a moral environment where most people remain pure until they can accept the responsibility of raising a child.

So what happened with the sexual revolution? Basically two things. First, mass media became much more powerful and much less moral. Secondly, artificial contraception was made easier. These two things were the main causes of the sexual revolution. They are both rooted in technological advances. So what can we do? Can we uninvent the pill or the television? No. But we can change our thinking about them. We can understand the moral implications of these things and react as a society. Scripture tells us that where sin abounds so grace abound all the more. We do not have to concede that sin has simply won and sexual purity is now something we can only expect from a small minority of the population.

So how does it start? It starts with the church. We need to be willing to teach clearly that contraception and pornography are wrong. How many church leaders are even going there. It is like teaching on these topics has been out-sourced to a select group of chastity speakers. We need to make clear the whole church is on board. It is not an optional part of Christianity. It is essential to a coherent Christian world view. I know we like to be ecumenical and all but we need to be clear. Being wrong on contraception is not a small error. It makes all of Christian morality illogical and unworkable. It distorts the way we think about human life which is about as bad a moral error as you can make.

Once you start making the case seriously and not running away from you own teaching then amazing things can happen. The same sorts of things Trevin Wax was point out on the abortion question. The appeal to reason and the appeal to conscience do have an impact over time. That is how the church won the battle for sexual morality over pagan Rome. Just teach it and live it. Over time society will see the two lifestyles and the Holy Spirit will give them eyes to see the Christian way is better. But we have to put it out there. If we are living something that is an incoherent mix of the secular and the Christian it will have little chance of wining the day. That is where the pro-life cause is now. Making some points but not presenting a sustainable, livable alternative to the culture of death.

St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther

I am still thinking about church history. Carl Trueman is a great guy to read when it comes to that. He is protestant but he has lots of good insights. He said something recently that related to the Luther, St Thomas Aquinas thought I was having:

Any intellectual historian of any merit will tell you that the last 1,000 years in the West have only produced two moments of paradigm shifting significance, and neither of them was the Reformation.  The first was the impact of the translation into Latin of Aristotle's metaphysical works.  This demanded a response from the thirteenth century church.  The response, most brilliantly represented by Thomas Aquinas, revolutionized education, transformed the philosophical landscape, opened up fruitful new avenues for theological synthesis, and set the basic shape of university education until the early eighteenth century.  Within this intellectual context, the Reformation was to represent a critical development of Augustinian anti-Pelagianism in terms of the understanding of the church and of salvation, but it did not represent quite the foundational paradigm shift that is often assumed.

It is interesting that a protestant sees the development God brought thought Aquinas and Aristotle as much more important than the reformation. That is the positive changes were much more significant. The negative changes from the reformation in terms of the stunning loss of church unity were severe. Nothing St Thomas did was anywhere near the unqualified disaster that Luther left behind in that area. What Luther brought was a rediscovery of something the church had already learned, namely that Pelagianism is wrong. The church needed to be reminded of this truth but not at the cost of knocking down a large number of other truths. So Luther was hugely destructive and made only a minor positive contribution by comparison.

Looking at history this way makes more and more sense to me. The combination of faith and reason that St Thomas blessed the world with was just too much. That the light of Christ got brighter and people ran. I sense this whenever I read Thomist thinkers. There is a grace there that demands a reaction. Do you want to think like the angelic doctor or are you going to dismiss him as too … too something? William of Ockham was one of the first in the ladder camp. Luther followed him. They refused to think in the categories and accept the reasoning of St Thomas.

The trouble is that when God offers more of Himself to us and we reject that offer we don’t end up in the same place as before. We get out of the mode of wanting as much of God as we can have and being willing to pay any price. We start to see our opinions and thought patterns as something we don’t want to surrender. It is too humiliating to accept that even these are soaked in sin and must be transformed by God’s grace. It is too personal. We are afraid we will get lost. But we can never get lost in God. We are because God wills us to be. So thinking more like God will never cause us to lose our identity. On the contrary, nothing could be more true to yourself than learning to match you intellect to that of your creator. Because God is the author of your essence He can make you more yourself than you can be on your own.

This view of history would put the reformation into the same category as the enlightenment. Trueman’s other big even of the last 1000 years. They would be seen as different ways of running away from the revelation of Christ being unrolled by the church. The developments end up being reductions and simplifications. From the sola’s of the reformation to the increasing anti-supernatural bias of recent centuries we have seen the big picture simplified by merely declaring large segments of human endeavor to be unimportant. But parallel to all this, the Catholic faith has continued to develop. This synthesis of Greek philosophy and Jesus’ revelation has continued to grow and continues to be a light calling those who want to embrace the fullness of truth no matter the cost.