Video Thursday: Does God Exist?
The Forgotten Power of Suffering
221. Which are the chief means by which we satisfy God for the temporal punishment due to sin?
The chief means by which we satisfy God for the temporal punishment due to sin are: Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving, all spiritual and corporal works of mercy, and the patient suffering of the ills of life.- Rev. Thomas J. O’Brien, Advanced Catechism of Catholic Faith and Practice (1902)
The other day I wrote about the propensity in our modern society to avoid anything that might limit or impede our ability to “have it all.” While there are many causes for this shift, at least some blame can be attributed to our diminished sense of the value of suffering.
Traditionally, suffering was seen as a means of encountering Christ because Christ, in his humanity, endured the same physical and psychological pains we experience. Through his Incarnation Jesus joined himself to the human condition and raised it to perfection, including all of our pains and toils. The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that Jesus’ suffering “showed how his humanity was the free and perfect instrument of that divine love which desires the salvation of all people.” (119) Jesus became one of us and suffered for us out of love.
This shared experience unites us with Christ, especially by reminding us of his Passion and death. This is why our suffering can become a sacrifice to God — Christ’s suffering sanctifies our suffering and makes it holy. Take a moment to think about that: Christ has given us a powerful spiritual weapon in our own human suffering, a weapon the Church has long recognized! It has the power to release souls from Purgatory (no small thing!), serve as satisfaction for our sins and unite us more closely with Christ and the saints!
If only we would remember the power of suffering we might not be so eager to avoid it in our day-to-day lives. We might embrace Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving, the tiny indignities we face every day all the demands they place on us — demands of humility, hunger, treasure and time. (And for today’s busy person, what is more precious than time?!) We might even cease to look at corporal mortification as a weird medieval relic. Certainly we would recognize the Prosperity Gospel as the heresy it is.
So, the next time you find yourself stuck in traffic or asked to do something extra at work or in the parish, do what your grandparents did: offer it up to the poor souls in Purgatory. They, and you, will be better off for it.
Divine Butler? Don’t Bet On It
I recently finished reading Peter Kreeft’s book Back to Virtue. In this book, Kreeft claims that our current civilization may well be the weakest ever to grace the face of the planet. This is due, he says because we have lost the knowledge of virtue.
This is not to say that we are less virtuous as a people than those that came before us. It is, rather, that
We know more about what is less than ourselves but less about what is more than ourselves. When we act morally, we are better than our philosophy. Our ancestors were worse than theirs. Their problem was not living up to their principles. Ours is not having any.
Kreeft wrote Back to Virtue in 1986, and shortly after finishing the book I read an article that offers some pretty damning evidence that Kreeft was on to something. The article detailed the National Study of Youth and Religion. This study surveyed over 3,000 American teens about their religious beliefs and found that the overwhelming majority could not offer any articulate explanation or defense of their own religious beliefs or the beliefs of the religious body they belong to. Rather, they espoused what the researchers described as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” a religious philosophy that, while acknowledging the existence of a divine power, sees as the central goal of life being happy and feeling good about oneself.
This god, in the words of the researchers, “is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.”
I hope I don’t have to point out that a religious philosophy more antithetical to authentic Christianity would be hard to find.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism hinges on a god made, not so much in our image, as to our liking – a god that never criticizes, never badgers, never demands. A god that stays safely away in a box until we find ourselves in some crisis or in some need, who can then be marched out not to make things right but to make us feel better. This is a safe god.
The God of Christianity, however, is not safe. He is dangerous. He pops up when he’s not wanted, not invited. He charges us with impossible tasks. He asks us to build arks, to leave our homeland and travel to a strange new land of promise. He tells us that we are to lead his people out of slavery and gives us the strength to battle giants. He tells us to leave behind our families, our possessions, our lives to follow him. He tells us to take up our crosses.
He asks us, in the mystery we celebrated just two weeks ago, to die with him.
This is a far cry from the disinterested deity society seeks. This is a God who stands for something and expects us to do the same. This God pursues us like a jealous lover, a God so aptly described in Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven”:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat — and a voice beat
More instant than the Feet –
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
“I just don’t want to be limited by anything.”
This may well be the mantra of our age. It describes our attitude towards everything from food to television, children to transportation. (In fact, the direct quote above came from a recent episode of This Week in Tech during a conversation about bandwidth caps.) It is a message reinforced by the television we watch, the magazines we read and the ads that appear in both: get more, eat more, exercise more, have more fun. More. More.
What this attitude fails to realize, of course, is that we are finite beings. Despite what we are told in ads, we cannot “have it all” — and even if we could, how would we find the time or energy to enjoy it all? Imagine how difficult it would be to keep track of it. (To say nothing about the taxes!)
We have perverted free will — and our language to describe it — to such an extent that we put bandwidth caps and children in the same category as obstacles to our freedom. This is a gross failure to make some fundamental distinctions about authentic happiness and freedom, and one need only look at our culture to see that we are the poorer for it.
Do not get too relevant.
This year’s relevancies are often next year’s embarrassments. One who does not appreciate this should meditate on the Nehru Jacket and Death of God movement. The liturgy frees one from such compulsions. It must not succumb to them.
- Aidan Kavanaugh, Elements of Rite (1982, Pueblo)
Book Review: From Slave to Priest
From Slave to Priest: A Biography of the Reverend Augustine Tolton (1854-1897) is the story of Fr. Augustine Tolton, the first black priest in the United States (a number of mixed-race priests preceded him, but they self-identified as white). Written by Sister Caroline Hemesath in 1973, a new addition was released by Ignatius Press in 2006 with a forward by Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers.
Part of my interest in Fr. Tolton’s story is personal: he spent his formative years in Quincy, Illinois, and attended St. Francis Solanus College, which later became Quincy University, my alma mater (a number of the photos in the book come from the school’s archives). I remember hearing allusions to the first black priest during my time at Quincy, but it wasn’t until my graduate studies that I became acquainted with the larger story of Fr. Tolton’s life.
Born a slave to a Catholic family near Hannibal, Missouri, his father escaped to join the Union Army at the start of the Civil War; he was killed in battle. When he was 8 Augustine’s mother escaped with the boy and his two siblings across the Mississippi River and wound up in nearby Quincy. There he worked in a tobacco factory by day and, in his spare time and during the winter months, he received instruction from the local priests and religious sisters. It was during this time that he first felt God’s call to the priesthood.
Unfortunately Augustine was turned down by every seminary and religious order he applied to. Undeterred, he traveled to Rome where he studied at the Urban College de Propaganda Fide, after which he expected to be sent as a missionary priest to Africa. Instead he returned to Quincy where he pastored St. Joseph’s, the city’s black parish.
In Quincy Fr. Tolton met with resistance and outright hostility from white Catholics (who resented the donations he received from sympathetic whites) and black Protestants (who resented his evangelization of their congregants). Discouraged and not receiving any support from his bishop, he accepted a transfer to Chicago where he was put in charge of the city’s black Catholics. Starting with a small congregation meeting in a church basement, within a few years he led a growing parish and had begun construction on a new church building. His work in Chicago was cut short in 1897 when, upon returning home from a retreat, he collapsed (most likely as a result of heat stroke) and died. He is buried in Quincy at St. Peter’s Seminary.
Although she did a fair amount of research and interviews for the book (as evidenced by the bibliography), Sr. Hemesath presents Fr. Tolton’s life in a series of fictionalized vignettes, a sort of “speculative biography.” The result is, if not 100% accurate, extremely readable and provides a good picture of what Fr. Tolton’s life was probably like. She is particularly adept at presenting the trials Fr. Tolton endured: the constant rejection by seminaries in his own country, the years spent building up money to pay for studies in Rome, the harassment at the hands of a fellow priest in Quincy. His was not a happy life, insofar as he never seems to have found a place to truly call home where he could be a simple pastor (which seems to have been his only real wish).
On the other hand, his trials never diminished his love of the Church, even in its human brokenness. Fr. Tolton’s example of bearing his cross — a cross of racism, hate and bigotry — in a humble manner, calling on God for strength and help, is a timely reminder of how we are called to live out this Lenten season through almsgiving, fasting and prayer in recognition of our sinful nature. Rather than bemoan his fortune Fr. Tolton sought one thing only: to serve God and his people. May we, too, live out such a simple yet beautiful goal.
The Reality of Sin
If you’re looking for some reading to kick off this Lenten season, you could do a lot worse than this meditation from Tony Esolen:
Suppose I commit a grave sin. It does not matter what sort it is. The materialist says to me, “Yes, you did wrong, according to the customs of our age, and perhaps even according to the dictates of reason, if you follow them to their conclusion,” though of course no one is going to consult a book of modern rationalist philosophy before robbing a bank or deflowering the neighbor’s daughter, and it is much to be doubted that the book would decide the matter anyway. “But,” he continues, “you were programmed that way.” And here it does not matter what form the programming takes. “In fact, there really isn’t a ‘you’ who committed the action; we only use that pronoun because we can’t practically live otherwise. Now then, don’t you feel better?” Well, no, I don’t feel better. I feel immeasurably worse. For now I am even farther from forgiveness and healing than ever I was. When I committed the sin, at least I bore the dignity of sin; it was a weight on my shoulders, but it was a weight I took upon myself, and a weight that might someday be lifted. Now I am told that the weight is simply a part of my makeup; it will never be lifted; I should not even care whether it is lifted.
The Next Generation of Catholic Commentariat
For some reason, these past two weeks, I’ve been coming across some great Catholic videos online.
Here, Fr. Robert Barron talks about the challenge for young Catholics as they engage in faith conversations (and don’t think these challenges are only relevant to “public” commentators; they apply to all who evangelize — which means all the faithful!):
Chastity: The Freedom to Love
Working for the Church you get to meet a lot of interesting people from a variety of backgrounds. A principal who used to be a homeless artist, a fundamentalist Baptist-turned Episcapalian-turned Roman Catholic priest, and a former restaurant manager now giving presentations on married love and family life; I have the privilege of knowing all these folks.
Which is a way of saying that today I got to speak on the phone with Chris Godfrey, a former Super Bowl champion who is now running a program called Life Athletes that encourages students in live lives of virtue, abstinence, chastity, and respect for life. He sent me a link to a recent interview he did with Angela and David Franks; I thought it would be of interest:
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