"Teach all nations ..."

One of the New Testament passage that stands out prominently in the recent writings, addresses, and homilies of Benedict XVI, as it did in John Paul II's pontificate, it is 1 Peter 3:15-16:

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.

Pope Benedict recently referred to this passage in speaking with the German Bishops about their dialogue with Muslims. Our Islamic brothers and sisters, Benedict asserted, "have the right to receive our humble and firm testimony on behalf of Jesus Christ," testimony that we must have the courage to deliver "with persuasive force."

The more one learns about the violence and ferocity of Muhammad and about the unalterable Qur'anic legacy he left for his later followers, the more one realizes that the greatest act of real charity a Christian can perform for his Muslim brothers and sisters is to try – with charity and all due respect – to convert them to Christianity; that is to say: to speak the truth to them. It is passing strange that so many Christians have come to believe that it is more charitable to reassure Muslims (condescendingly) that theirs is a religion of peace, one that is presumably in no need of what Christian faith has to offer above and beyond its fawning admiration and uncritical acceptance. At least our Muslim brothers and sisters do us the favor of trying to convert us, albeit too often menacingly, with violence or the threat of violence.

I’ve had major city taxi drivers urge their Islamic beliefs on me with a fervor that would cost Christians their lives in Saudi Arabia and other places in the world. In these tyrannical societies, therefore, one can hardly fault Christians for using discretion with regard to Jesus’ command to “go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” Christians in Islamic societies imperil their own lives when they try to follow this central tenet of their faith, and they endanger the lives of any Muslims they might succeed in converting. The comparable failure of Christians in the West is less respectable. Our efforts at inclusion are virtuous only up to the point where they violate our responsibility as Christians.

Writing about the controversy following Pope Benedict’s Regensburg University lecture, a writer for the Asia Times, quoted in the November 2006 edition of Touchstone Magazine [p. 59] argues that jihad “is the fundamental sacrament of Islam, the Muslim cognate of the Lord’s Supper in Christianity, that is, the unique form of sacrifice by which the individual believer communes with the Transcendent. To denounce jihad on theological grounds is a blow at the foundations of Islam, in effect a papal call for the conversion of the Muslims.”

That is a truly charitable position for a Christian to take, and most serious Christians know so in their heart of hearts. But it is not an easy position to take, shorn as it is of the feel-good acceptance of the conspicuously unacceptable, which amounts to declaring the innocuous superfluousness of Christianity.

Sadly, most Christians lack the faith required to re-evangelize themselves, their children, and their perfectly harmless fellow backsliding Christians. How can they be expected to evangelize others until the cooling embers of Christian faith are stirred again to flame?

"Something is taking place ..."

My New Year's posting mentioned Joseph Ratzinger's early book on St. Bonaventure's theology of history, which was written at about the time that René Girard was working out the mimetic anthropology that would eventually throw so much light on the historical meaning of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Apropos of the link between the work of these two important scholars is this from the future pope:

Certainly Scripture is closed objectively. But its meaning is advancing in a steady growth through history; and this growth is not yet closed. As the physical world contains seeds, so also Scripture contains "seeds"; that is, seeds of meaning. And this meaning develops in a constant process of grown in time. Consequently, we are able to interpret many things which the Fathers could not have known because for them these things still lay in the dark future while for us they are accessible as past history. Still other things remain dark for us. And so, new knowledge arises constantly from Scripture. Something is taking place; and this happening, this history, continues onward as long as there is history at all. ... In this way, the exegesis of Scripture becomes a theology of history; the clarification of the past leads to prophecy concerning the future. [The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, p. 9]

In Girard's case, the exegesis of Scripture, performed in light of anthropological data "which the Fathers could not have known," became a theory of culture which coaxed out of the Scriptural canon a new understanding of the unparalleled meaning and significance of the Gospel.

Having it both ways . . .

The first reading at last Friday's morning's Mass, commemorating the heroic martyrdom of Thomas Becket, was from the First Letter of John, and it included this: "Whoever says, 'I know him,' but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him." It is, of course, a judgment that probably falls on us all, as it most certainly falls on me. But the more conspicuous is the discrepancy between one's assertion of fidelity and one's adherence to the moral responsibilities that properly accompany it, and the more prominently on display is this discrepancy, the more others are scandalized by it.

Apropos the earlier 20-20 Hindsight post, here are a few of the critical votes cast by the most prominent Catholic in Washington today:

* Voted YES on allowing human embryonic stem cell research.

* Voted NO on restricting interstate transport of minors to get abortions.

* Voted NO on making it a crime to harm a fetus during another crime.

* Voted NO on banning partial-birth abortion except to save mother’s life.

* Voted NO on forbidding human cloning for reproduction & medical research.

* Voted NO on funding for health providers who don't provide abortion info.

* Voted NO on federal crime to harm fetus while committing other crimes.

* Voted NO on banning partial-birth abortions.

* Voted NO on barring transporting minors to get an abortion.

* Rated 100% by NARAL, indicating a perfect pro-abortion voting record.

There are dozens of Catholic politicians in Congress with voting records almost as shamelessly at odds with the central pillar of the Church's moral teaching as is Congresswoman Pelosi's. Most have bishops practiced in the dubious art of looking the other way at the appropriate moment.

Of all the many principles that constitute the Church's social and moral teachings, the sanctity of life and the mandate to protect the most innocent and most vulnerable from being killed in their mother's wombs is paramount. The Church's position on war, political injustice, discrimination, immigration, economic inequality, and so on, are all matters of prudential judgment with which the Church as a moral teacher is quite legitimately concerned, but for which she does not take a stand that is in any way comparable to her stand on the sanctity of life. These other matters are the proper concern of competent authorities in the secular realm. To try to justify the flagrant repudiation of the Church's preeminent moral imperative by pointing to a vote or two on tax policy or immigration or minimum wage is itself symptomatic of the moral incoherence which takes its most shocking form in the campaign to turn the killing of innocents into a victory for someone else's "rights."

"It is only if human life is respected from conception to death that the ethics of peace is also possible and credible," writes Benedict XVI; "it is only then that non-violence can express itself in every direction; only then that we truly welcome creation, and only then that we can arrive at true justice."

The faithful in the pews have been scandalized long enough by politicians who flout the sanctity of life in the most egregious way while enjoying the congeniality extended to them by members of the Catholic hierarchy and clergy and the honors bestowed on them by Catholic colleges and universities.

Here's something apropros from Fr. Richard John Neuhaus:

Without the Catholic Church, there would be no pro-life movement in America, and without the pro-life movement in America, there would be no pro-life movement in the world. This must never be forgotten. Today evangelicals and Catholics together, along with many others, are leading a pro-life cause that is attracting a new generation of young people who find it hard to believe that so many of their parents were so supine in going along with what John Paul II taught the world to recognize as "the culture of death." [First Things, January 2007]

History will almost certainly judge our tolerance of the intolerable (and the moral sleight of hand that justified it) harshly, but history is not the judge that ought most to concern those of us who claim allegiance to the One who was first recognized by the child in Elizabeth's womb.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Many years ago now, a brilliant young German scholar of the 20th century, Joseph Ratzinger, wrote a treatise on the theology of history implicit in the writings a brilliant Italian scholar of the 13th century, St. Bonaventure. He concluded the work with words that I hope will serve to express the theological virtue of hope appropriate to our hopes for the new year. Concluding his exploration of the Bonaventurian theology of history, Ratzinger wrote:

At the vanishing point of his theology of history we find the very same word which Augustine had used at the close of his City of God, which in itself is so different from the work of Bonaventure. That word is peace: "And then there will be peace." But for Bonaventure, this peace has come closer to earth. It is not that peace in the eternity of God which will never end and which will follow the dissolution of this world. It is a peace which God Himself will establish in this world which has seen so much blood and tears, as if at least at the end of time, God would show how things could have been and should have been in accordance with His plan. Here the breath of a new age is blowing; an age in which the desire for the glory of the other world is shaped by a deep love of this earth on which we live. But despite the difference that may separate the work of these two great Christian theologians, still there is a basic unity: both Augustine and Bonaventure know that the Church which hopes for peace in the future is, nonetheless, obliged to love in the present; and they both realize that the kingdom of eternal peace is growing in the hearts of those who fulfill Christ's law of love in their own particular age. Both see themselves subject to the word of the Apostle: "So there remain faith, hope, and love, these three. But the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor. 13:13).

Amen to that. Happy New Year.

Custody of the Eyes

In a recent reflection (again) in the Magnificat, a remark by the Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper caught my eye, if you'll pardon the pun (which you won't have noticed until you read what Pieper said):

The cultivation of the natural desire to see assumes the character of a measure of self-preservation and self-defense. And then studiositas (diligence) means especially this: that a person resists the nearly inescapable temption to indiscipline with all the power of selfless self-protection, that he radically closes off the inner space of his life against the pressing of unruly pseudoreality of empty sights and sounds - in order that, through and only through this asceticism of perception, he might safeguard or recoup that which truly constitutes man's living existence: to perceive the reality of God and of creation and to shape himself and the world by the truth that discloses itself only in silence. (Magnificat, Christmas 2006, p.95-6)

Such observations bring to mind Dante's depiction of the envious in the Purgatorio with their eyes wired shut to prevent them from lusting after the gaudy baubles of the world (made alluring by the fact that others desire them or seem pleased that they do), the parenthesis being a Girardian elaboration on the theme. But it also reminds me of something I read a few weeks ago in a recently published book by my friend Ann Astell entitled, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages. Ann is a medievalist and a deeply faithful woman, and her erudition and insight grace every page of her remarkable book. I found her treatment of the theological anthropology of Bernard of Clairvaux especially fascinating.

For Bernard, Ann tells us, the first sin is curiositas (curiosity) and the cure for it is humility.

For St. Bernard the starting point is always the reality of the fallen human condition, which is characterized by an ingrained curiositas and concupiscentia, defects that are two sides, as it were, of a single coin. Both constitute a disordered relationship to the other person, whom we are called to know and to love. Curiositas, an undue preoccupation with the affairs of others, constitutes a defective aspectus (attitude of mind or regard). Concupiscentia, a distorted (emotion, passion, drive) of longing, desires the other inordinately and craves what belongs to the other. Curiositas is cura (care or concern) grown wrong; cupiditas is the misdirection of love that results from it ... [67-8]

As flagrantly as our age urges the renunciation of traditional Christian virtues, especially in its trivialization and vulgarization of sexual intimacy, that attack on virtue is made possible because we have become inordinately preoccupied with others, and we have fallen under the mimetic spell of countless models. Adam's inattention consists, writes the poet Denise Levertov, of:

his confused attention to everything,
impassioned by multiplicity, his despair.
Multiplicity, his despair ...

For St. Bernard, the "principle reason why the invisible God willed to be seen in the flesh" was this:

He wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, but first drawing them into the salutary love of his humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love. [Astell, p. 86]

Therefore:

The soul at prayer should have before it a sacred image of the God-man, in his birth or infancy or as he was teaching or dying, or rising, or ascending. Whatever form it takes, this image must bind the soul with the love of virtue and expel carnal vices, eliminate temptations and quiet desires. [85]

In case you've been tardy in coming up with a New Year's resolution. That's Bernard's suggestion.

Suffering and Joy

In the reflection accompanying yesterday's lectionary readings in the Magnificat, a passage from Karl Adam included this:

The Christian never toils and suffers and dies alone, that word is absent from his vocabulary. Christianity is a living and a dying in full fellowship with Christ and his members. (p. 106).

As I have said earlier, I try to keep more personal posts to a minimum. Inasmuch as my life these days revolves around caring for Liz, I hope you will pardon yet another personal offering. It is another passage from John Paul II’s 1984 Apostolic Letter, Salvifici Doloris, which I have been reading to Liz each evening as we share what we call our "prayer and port time," including, as it does, readings from the Divine Office and a small (and sometimes not so small) glass of port.

John Paul II:

A source of joy is found in the overcoming of the sense of the uselessness of suffering, a feeling that is sometimes very strongly rooted in human suffering. This feeling not only consumes the person interiorly, but seems to make him a burden to others. The person feels condemned to receive help and assistance from others, and at the same time seems useless to himself. The discovery of the salvific meaning of suffering in union with Christ transforms this depressing feeling. Faith in sharing in the suffering of Christ brings with it the interior certainty that the suffering person "completes what is lacking in Christ's afflictions"; the certainty that in the spiritual dimension of the work of Redemption he is serving, like Christ, the salvation of his brothers and sisters. Therefore he is carrying out an irreplaceable service. … It is suffering, more than anything else, which clears the way for the grace which transforms human souls. Suffering, more than anything else, makes present in the history of humanity the powers of the Redemption. [§27]

"More than anything else ..."

Each evening, the port, the prayer, and the wisdom of a man who knew suffering and to whom Liz has looked for inspiration throughout her ordeal does wonders for us both.

Dictatorship of Relativism

The Brussels Journal monitors the collapse of European culture occasioned by the evacuation of its Christian underpinnings. In today's posting, BJ quotes a piece in the British press by Brendan O'Neill.

In elevating tolerance above all else – as an end in itself, the value to end all values – the authorities are effectively making a virtue of a vacuum, and attempting to put a positive spin on the profound uncertainty about what Britain stands for today. So the collapse of common values gets re-presented as ‘diversity’, and the inability to say what Britain represents is sexed-up and repackaged as ‘tolerance’ for other cultures and ways of life. Tolerance becomes a default position, adopted not from a standpoint of openness and experimentation, but from a position of doubt.

Secondly, and more ominously, Official Tolerance is censorious rather than genuinely tolerant. It is about stifling debate rather than encouraging it. It is a demand that we do not rock the boat or ask probing questions, instead just respecting everything. Except, that is, those who are judged to be intolerant. They can be slapped down and censored with impunity. Tolerance has become a new moral code that you transgress at your own risk.

Remember then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's "dictatorship of relativism"?

Saddam's Execution

News that Saddam Hussein's execution may be imminent is sad news, regardless of what a psychopathic murderer and torturer he was. It is sadder still that we in this society still tolerate state executions when we have the means for preventing evil-doers from causing harm (even to their fellow prisoners).

While many Iraqis will no doubt take heart at Saddam's execution, seeing it as a sign that the worst abuses of the Hussein regime are over, many will find it an excuse for more violence. Even at the level of sacrificial ritual, it will not "work." But it would be ludicrous to succumb to politically correct sentimentality and view Saddam as a martyr. We can leave that to the Sunnis fanatics.

To sincerely pray for Saddam in his final days or moments is to simply fulfill one's Christian duty toward a fellow sinner who will soon be in need, as we all will, of God's mercy.

Tenderness . . .

I came upon this photo among those I took in October when Liz and I attended the papal audience in Rome, and I felt the urge to share it with you. The girl's face is so beautiful, and Benedict was as kind as he was when he gave Liz a personal blessing just after her first brain surgery in 2005. His personal tenderness is really extraordinary, though this little girl could melt a heart of stone.

Democracy and Islam

In earlier posts, I have risked looking foolish by venturing an opinion or two on international issues. In one post I suggested that the Iraqi quagmire has its roots in the Bush administration's overly generous but anthropologically flawed perpetuation of Enlightenment liberalism's naive underestimation of the role of Christianity is laying the groundwork for the success of both democratic institutions and the market economy. Though the economic market might fair better in a culture religiously rooted in Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist traditions than might the democratic marketplace of ideas, neither democratic institutions nor market economies are likely to produce the fruits that they produced when laid on the moral foundations provided by Christianity.

Apropos of this, in a recent exploration of what he calls the incompatibility of Islam and democracy, the Norwegian journalist, Fjordman, concluded with this:

U.S. President George W. Bush said he would accept it if Iraqis voted to create an Islamic fundamentalist government in democratic elections. "I will be disappointed, but democracy is democracy."

Is it really equivalent, Mr. Bush?

This brings us back to Plato's criticism of democracy as just an advanced form of mob rule. And without any constraints, checks and balances, that definition is correct. Benjamin Franklin said that "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" This is why he and the other Founding Fathers wanted the USA to be a constitutional Republic, not a pure democracy.

It is strange that the United States wanted to export to Iraq a naïve concept of democracy, one that provided too few rights and guarantees for individuals and minorities, one that their own Founding Fathers had specifically rejected for precisely that reason. And this did not even include an assessment of Islam, in which harassing and persecuting minorities and suppressing individual liberty is a matter of principle.

Those of us who enjoy the unmerited privilege of living in a society shaped by the Judeo-Christian tradition commit the error that apparently Marie Antoinette never actually committed. We espouse a breezy "let them eat cake" attitude toward those who aspire to the social and material benefits we enjoy, blissfully unaware of the religious underpinnings without which democracy reverts to mob rule and the market to vulgar pandering.

20-20 Hindsight - Today's Kairos Moment

In his Trojan Horse in the City of God, Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote of the way a particular historical situation compels Christians to speak a perennial truth with special forcefulness. The Greek term for such moments is kairos, what von Hildebrand terms "the call of the hour." At such moments in history, von Hildebrand writes "the historical thematicity makes the promulgation of certain truths especially urgent."

Such a moment, for example, was the coming to power of National Socialism in Germany. The condemnation of totalitarianism and racism was called for at this very moment. Though these things were evil as such, and would have been evil in any historical period, condemnation of them was made thematic by the fact that National Socialism assumed power in 1933. Before then, the bishops had indeed condemned National Socialism, and membership in the party carried the penalty of excommunication. Unfortunately, however, the German bishops in 1933 failed to uphold this condemnation at the very hour when an even more solemn condemnation was called for. [76-77]

Condemning the Church for its failures (real and imagined) in confronting Hitler has become something of a cottage industry, a hobby of those who would not dare utter a politically incorrect word in the safety of the faculty lounge. But it is these same critics who loudly insist that the Church's position today on abortion and other moral issues represents an unwarranted interference of religion in political life. One simply can't have it both ways.

All of this only makes von Hildebrand's insights all the more prescience, inasmuch as he expressed them in a book published in 1967. They are conspicuously relevant to two neuralgic issues in our cultural life today: abortion most especially and the deconstruction of the traditional family. From a Christian point of view, what distinguishes these issues from all the other pressing moral concerns of our day is that they involve overt challenges not only to the unbroken Judeo-Christian moral tradition but to the anthropological reality which that tradition brings to religious fulfillment.

In addition to the standard human fecklessness, von Hildebrand argued that "an antipathy to the condemnation of secular 'orthodoxies' and religious deviations characterizes the mentality of our time."

Condemnation and the unmasking of errors is widely seen today as something hostile to love. [78]

Christians confronted with the moral quandary of a kairos moment, will find what von Hildebrand calls "a false irenicism" attractive, as many bishops have.

Instead of helping to convey the true message of Christ, our effort to adjust to the mentality of the other may so transform that message that acceptance of it no longer requires a conversion. [82]

What might be analogous today to the situation that the German bishops faced at Fulda in 1933? It seems to me it is the question that the Catholic bishops face concerning whether politicians who profit politically from their self-identification as Catholics but who are unwavering supporters of abortion on demand and who actively oppose the Church on a sundry of sexual morality issues should be allowed to publicly parade their mockery of Catholic moral doctrine by presenting themselves for the reception of the Eucharist. This is not "using the Eucharist as a political weapon" any more than it would have been to refuse communion to the officers of the Third Reich. The savagery of the latter may have been less hidden by pseudo-medical apparatus and less plausibly justified by moral obfuscations and a dissembling vocabulary than that of the former, but it is the former that has set the record for the slaughter of the innocent in our age.

To repeat:

Unfortunately, however, the German bishops in 1933 failed to uphold this condemnation at the very hour when an even more solemn condemnation was called for.

St. Stephen

On this feast of the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, some thoughts on the role of suffering in Christian life.

In his 1984 apostolic letter, Salvifici Doloris, John Paul II wrote at length on this theme. Christ, the late pope argued, gave humanity the Gospel of Suffering:

Christ did not conceal from his listeners the need for suffering. He said very clearly: "If any man would come after me... let him take up his cross daily ''

Christ does not explain in the abstract the reasons for suffering, but before all else he says: "Follow me!". Come! Take part through your suffering in this work of saving the world, a salvation achieved through my suffering!

The Master does not conceal the prospect of suffering from his disciples and followers. On the contrary, he reveals it with all frankness, indicating at the same time the supernatural assistance that will accompany them in the midst of persecutions and tribulations " for his name's sake."

The differentiation between persecutions and tribulations is felicitous, for it serves to remind one that the daily cross is more likely to take the form of tribulation than persecution, but that such tribulation is nevertheless an opportunity to "make up for what is lacking in the suffering of Christ."

Down through the centuries and generations it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace.

Anticipating his own physical deterioration in a way he could not have envisioned in 1984, John Paul goes on speak of suffering as bringing about the spiritual maturation of the one who suffers.

When this body is gravely ill, totally incapacitated, and the person is almost incapable of living and acting, all the more do interior maturity and spiritual greatness become evident, constituting a touching lesson to those who are healthy and normal.

A few thoughts on this Feast of St. Stephen, whose faith matured in the face of persecution and whose sufferings led to St. Paul's conversion.

Merry Christmas

The Joy of Sharing Joy

My daughter Aña is now a paramedic on an emergency response unit in Springfield, Massachusetts. She's come a long way from that Christmas many years ago when this photo was taken. I love the photo with a father's love for his daughter; that goes without saying. But there's another reason I love this photo. I have always felt that Aña's excitement on discovering the doll that Santa brought her exemplified the joy appropriate to Christmas, the joy that Simeon expresses in Luke's gospel, the joy that we go into debt every year in our fond and foolish attempt to both simulate and celebrate.

In this photograph, Aña is excited, not because she has a new toy, but because she has a new friend. Look at her face. That is how we Christians should feel when the mystery of the Incarnation finally dawns on us. Christianity exists to unwrap this breathtakingly beautiful gift, the gift of Christ present in our world and the Spirit of Christ "who dwells in our hearts," God's great gift to humanity.

The excitement appropriate to the recognition of this gift should be contagious, as it is here. Notice that Aña is not looking at her new doll; she is looking at those she loves. Aña's joy is the joy of sharing her joy. It is our duty and privilege to do likewise with the gift of faith.

Have a wonderful Christmas.

Freedom and Fulfillment

The gift of freedom, the mark of our having been made in the image and likeness of God, has been given to man, writes Dietrich von Hildebrand, so that he may "surrender to God in a way that carries the full sanction of his personality."

Humility: Wellspring of Virtue, p.14.

Apropos a prior post ...

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal has a piece today that fills in details apropos my more general post entitled "The Crutch of Disbelief" below. The Henninger piece is here.

A Primer for the New Year

This is no stocking stuffer. It belongs more in the category of a New Year's resolution. In any case, before I forget, I want to recommend an extremely valuable article by Mary Eberstadt entitled "The Scapegoats Among Us." It's here. It's a bit longer than most, but well worth taking the time to absorb.

More as time permits.

The Crutch of Disbelief . . .

Many people believe either that Christianity is nonsense or that any form of it that would be recognizable to the Christians of the past is too out of step with the age and too politically dangerous to be tolerated. They believe these things, not because they have given much thought to them, but because it is a huge comfort to them to believe them, a crutch, a cozy little belief that helps them make it through the day and sleep at night untroubled by anything more serious than how to derive as much pleasure and comfort from life as possible and to make it last as long as they can.

If Christians were as patronizing as their contemporary critics often are, they might decide not to disturb the warm blanket of comfort in which many non-believers wrap themselves. But, alas, there's too much at stake for that kind of indifference. Our children and grandchildren will have to live in the world that is being shaped in large measure by these reductionists. And, anyway, sooner or later the exigencies of life shatter our comforting myths, even and especially our comforting agnostic ones.

As the poet Philip Larkin put it: "What remains when disbelief is gone?"

The great French theologian, Henri de Lubac, has an answer, one worth keeping in mind when thinking about the issue I raised in the earlier post about the new Quetzalcoatl sculpture in San Francisco. De Lubac writes:

As soon as man ceases to be in contact with great mystical or religious forces, does he not inevitably come under the yoke of a harsher and blinder force, which leads him to perdition? It is what Vico called the age of ‘deliberate barbarism’, and that is the age in which we live.

The Drama of Atheistic Humanism, p. 90.

The Marian "Yes"

What the Cistercian monk, Fr. Mark Daniel Kirby, said this morning on his Vultus Christi weblog that inspires me to share a Christmas greeting touching on matters very close to the heart.

Dom Marco wrote:

One does not approach the Virgin of the Annunciation without discovering the Mother of Sorrows. The joyful “Yes” to Love conceived beneath the Virgin’s heart flowers into the sorrowful “Yes” to Love crucified, and the glorious “Yes” to Love risen from the tomb.

I have tried to use this weblog to further the objectives of the Cornerstone Forum, my exultations over the recent birth of my new granddaughter and a rare mention of more personal matters to the contrary notwithstanding. Though I have managed to post to the blog fairly regularly, I have usually done so by hastily composing a few thoughts in the wee hours of the morning, for, as some know, my beloved wife Liz is suffering from a brain tumor and is in need of regular care and attention.

So serious is Liz's health condition that any Christmas greeting from me that failed to acknowledge it would be unacceptably impersonal. So I hope it will not be thought maudlin or inappropriate to the sentiments usually associated with Christmas for me to interrupt the regular weblog postings to share a Christmas greeting that bespeaks the realities with which Liz and I are now confronted.

To return to Dom Marco's observation, what connects the Virgin of the Annunciation and the Mother of Sorrows is what Christ spoke of as being "handed over," something that, for a Christian, has nothing whatsoever to do with stoic resignation. The one being "handed over" can, as Christ did, pray fervently to be spared the cup of suffering and death, while at the same time subordinating one's heartfelt petition to the will of God. It is in this spirit that Liz and I are living this Advent season, awaiting Christ.

Be it done unto me according to your word.

We, too, have a role in the Christmas story.

Preparing a place in our crowded lives
for the inbreaking of Christ.

It begins with Advent:
with patience, with waiting,
with practicing the presence of God.

With Warmest Christmas Wishes,
from Liz and Gil Bailie

A few years ago, a friend gave Liz a reproduction of the painting of the woman at prayer. It captures the Marian spirit quite well and the Elizabethan spirit perfectly. It seemed the most appropriate image for this year's Christmas and Advent greeting.

Thank you for keeping Liz in your prayers.

News from the City of St. Francis

A front page blurb for a feature story within last Saturday's San Francisco Chronicle read: "Aztec Snake God Lords It Over a Mission District Mini-Park." The article read in part:

One Sunday last month, costumed dancers unveiled the revitalized park opposite the Brava Theater. The garden was an artful set designed for play, but it contained a secret: a stunning concrete and mosaic Quetzalcoatl, the mythic feathered sea serpent of the Aztecs.

It took center stage before excited children, parents and even Mayor Gavin Newsom (escorted by mounted police). The snake, dipping in and out of the rubberized paving that surrounds it, nimbly skirts slender jets of water that spout, erratically, straight up from the ground like Old Faithful. Its easy-to-climb, 10-foot-long head is studded with mirrors, flower-shaped tiles, and bits of glass and porcelain carefully set in place by volunteers assisting husband-and-wife designers Mark Roller and Colette Crutcher.

It's all quite charming, of course, and multicultural to a fault. The timing was a bit off, however, for the cheerful celebration of Quetzalcoatl took place in uncomfortable proximity to the central feast of the other Latino cultural heritage, Our Lady of Guadalupe. To make matters even more convoluted, within a few days of the celebration, Mel Gibson's Apocolypto opened in the theaters.
One thinks of Henry Adam's comparison of the Virgin and the Dynamo in his "Education of Henry Adams," in which he wondered whether the dynamo, which seemed to be the symbol par excellence of the new empirical and materialist age, would be a culturally fruitful as was the one to whom so many of the great European cathedrals were dedicated. The devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe was an explicit rejection of Quetzalcoatl and all his works, a central mythic figure in the mesoamerican cultures which were so savagely sacrificial.

Gibson's latest film has perhaps more to say about the cultural meaning of Christianity than did his The Passion of Christ. Like the earlier film, Gibson dwells at interminable length on scenes of endurance, a strange preoccupation of his, but in most respects the film is truly extraordinary. It depicts the state of the pre-Columbian cultures of the south in terms that will surely be unwelcome by the rose-colored-glasses multiculturalists among us, and it hits deftly at the end that help is on the way in the form of those who were to bring Christianity to that blood-drenched land.
Coincidently, yesterday, my old friend George Wesolek, a Cornerstone Forum board member and a man who is deeply involved in the cultural tensions with which San Francisco is now beset, sent me an email to which he had attached the LifesiteNews article originally entitled "Pro-Life Meaning of Our Lady of Guadalupe," which I heartily recommend to you. Here's a sample:

Academic William Tsamis writes that "in 1487, at the dedication of the great temple which stood in what is today Mexico City, a massive ritual sacrifice took place in which over 10,000 people perished on the temple's altars -- the killing was continual, four at a time, from sunrise to sunset."

The horrific practices of human sacrifice and the concentration on sacrifice of children, since they were considered 'pure', came to an end not only with the conquest of the Spaniards, but with the conversion of the native people of the Americas to Christianity. That happened to a large extent thanks to what Catholics and others believe was an apparition from heaven of Mary pregnant with the Christ Child - referred to as 'Our Lady of Guadalupe'. ...

For many in the pro-life movement, incidentally not only Catholics, Our Lady of Guadalupe, is seen as a symbol of hope for ending our modern-day human sacrifice of abortion which now far exceeds in number and kind the brutalities practiced by the Aztecs and Mayans.

U.S. philosopher Peter Kreeft, in his book Three Approaches to Abortion, makes the connection. He writes, "About 500 years ago, a strikingly similar culture of death reigned in Aztec Mexico. Some historians estimate that one out of every three children . . . were ritually sacrificed to their bloodthirsty and demanding god . . . exactly the same proportion of children conceived in America who are aborted today"

From Our Lady of Guadalupe to Quetzalcoatl: Cultural history in reverse.

Conservatives of the rubicon* variety will not be charmed.

*Rubicon (here and here)

Pros and Rubicons

(This post is a PS to the one just below it. If you haven't seen the earlier post, you might want to take a glance at it first.)

My trusty friend and Cornerstone Forum collaborator, Randy Coleman-Riese, suggests that it will not take the unkind long to find a hook for their denigrations: a rube. Says Randy: "the Encarta dictionary defines this as 'an offensive term for somebody who is regarded as naive or unsophisticated, especially from a rural area who is not used to city ways.'"

Rustics like those from backwater places like Nazareth?

Mercifully, Randy adds this: "Is this what is meant by being a fool for Christ?"

It's perfect. It doesn't get any better than this.

What better way to (preemptively) turn the other cheek (while keeping the tongue in it) than to provide even the laziest of detractors with a pre-installed, user-friendly mockery macro. One click and it launches.

Rubicon it is.

O, we few, we happy few ...