This post by Fr. Dwight Longenecker is as good an explanation of the structural problems within Anglicanism today as anything I’ve read. The decision-making process is so thoroughly political that losers in the political process never consider that the Holy Spirit is leading the church in the opposite direction. Instead, they simply regroup and try again next time.
This life of St. Dominic was first published in 1857 in England; apparently it remains one of the best lives of St. Dominic in the English language, though it has its blind spots. In 1857, it was understood by everyone that the Rosary was given to St. Dominic by the Blessed Virgin Mary herself, and promulgated widely by him; more recent research has shown that the first mention of the Rosary in any text follows Dominic’s death by quite a long time, and that the origin of the Rosary is correspondingly more recent. There are likely other similar errors. But I gather that there aren’t that many biographies of Dominic in English; and one of the reasons, which is hinted at in the book, is that Protestant England has generally looked on Dominic without fondness.
Protestant England, as everyone knows, was frequently at war with Catholic Spain. The Elizabethans were skilled propagandists, and one of their favorite topics was the Spanish Inquisition, which consequently everyone expected. I wouldn’t want to whitewash the Inquisition, but a lot of what we English speakers think we know about it goes back to British propaganda. Now, as everyone knows, St. Dominic preached against the Albigensian heresy; and in fact the Inquisition was founded to combat the Albigensian heresy, and many of the early inquisitors were Dominicans. Dominic, in fact had nothing to do with the founding of the Inquistion (and it wasn’t the Spanish Inquisition in any event), and though there were excesses in the crusade against the Albigensians, so far as I can tell the inquisitors weren’t responsible for them. But be that as it may; Dominic was Catholic, and Spanish, and was around when the Inquisition was founded, and so, three centuries and more later, England used him as a symbol of everything she hated. Drane says remarkably little about all this, under the circumstances, but she takes some slight pains to clear the good names of St. Dominic and his early followers.
I found the book both interesting and frustrating. We are told quite a bit about the saintliness of Dominic’s life, and about his travels, and about various miracles that took place in his vicinity, all of which are interesting and about which I am glad to be informed. But Dominic founded the Order of Preachers, and I was really hoping to know just what he preached about, and how he preached it. Alas, his sermons generally weren’t preserved. Part of being a saint is the possession of the virtues in heroic measure, and that includes humility; where we know a lot about a saint’s life from the saint’s own hand, it’s generally because the saint was ordered to write about themselves by some superior. So Dominic wasn’t inclined to preserve his own words in writing, and apparently nobody else was either, alas, whether out of deference to him or out of a sort of corporate humility.
So. I enjoyed reading it; and I was left wanting much, much more.
Phil at Brandywine Books has a post on ways to read the Bible, and asks, “How do you read the Bible?” This reminded me of something I’d read recently that I’m trying to put into practice, and that I’ve been meaning to write about anyway.
Pope Benedict meets with many groups, and gets asked many questions. Our Sunday Visitor recently collated quite a few of these into a short book, the aptly named Questions and Answers, which was edited by Amy Welborn’s husband Michael Dubrueil. In one session, a 21-year-old chemical engineering student asks how he can read the Bible and understand it. The Pope answers that there are three ways for the believer to read the Bible, all of which are necessary. He begins,
It must first of all be said that one must not read Sacred Scripture as one reads any kind of historical book, such as, for example, Homer, Ovid, or Horace; it is necessary to truly read it as the Word of God—that is, by entering into a conversation with God…. One should not read Scripture in an academic way, but with prayer, saying to the Lord, “Help me to understand your Word, what it is you want to tell me in this passage.”
A great way to do this is the aptly named practice of lectio divina, which is a slightly more formal technique for doing the above; it involves reading the passage several times, chewing on and meditating on the words, and generally giving the Spirit the opportunity to point things out and make them plain.
So that’s the first way: to understand Scripture with the Lord, in this passage, in this moment. But what about trying to get an appreciation for the Bible as a whole, or to come to understanding of how the Old Testament relates to the New Testament? Benedict goes on,
Sacred Scripture introduces one into communion with the family of God. Thus, one should not read Sacred Scripture on one’s one. Of course, it is always important to read the Bible in a very personal way, in a personal conversation with God; but at the same time it is important to read it in the company of people with whom one can advance, letting oneself be helped by the great masters of lectio divina…. These teachers help us to understand better, and also how to interpret Sacred Scripture properly. Moreover, it is appropriate in general to read it in the company of friends who are journeying with me, who are seeking, together with me, how to live in Christ, to find what life the Word of God brings us.
In short, understanding the Bible is hard: we should rely on good teachers to bring us to understanding.
And then, the third way is read the Bible with the Church as a whole, in the Liturgy. Benedict concludes,
I think we should learn to do three things: To read it in a personal colloquium with the Lord; to read it with the guidance of teachers who have the experience of faith, who have penetrated Sacred Scripture; and to read it in the great company of the Church, in whose liturgy these events never cease to become present anew and in which the Lord speaks with us today.
I find that in my life I’m doing quite a bit of the third, through Sunday mass, and the Liturgy of the Hours every day; and quite a bit of the second, through the various books I’ve been studying, mostly recently Scott Hahn’s A Father Who Keeps His Promises (which I need to review Real Soon Now); the first I’ve been doing much less of, and I’m trying to change that.
Yesterday I said that “to love well is to suffer well.” I was pondering that today in the context of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, and realized that each of the Joyful Mysteries is shot through with suffering. The events themselves are joyful, indeed, especially in their significance for us, but there is significant suffering for the principles—especially when we remember that suffering is relative, and that little things can sometimes throw us more out of kilter than big ones.
In the Annunciation, we celebrate the coming of the messiah, and Mary’s amazing “Yes” to God. But Mary had to risk censure from her intended, Joseph, and no doubt from both his family and her own. I expect there were some tense moments. No sure does this happen than Mary travels off to her cousin Elizabeth’s house. Note this: Mary went way out of her way to help Elizabeth. Then, about seven months after the birth of John the Baptist, while on the verge of giving birth herself, Mary has to travel with Joseph to Bethlehem, there to be housed with farm animals. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us, I am given to understand, that Mary (being sinless) would have had an easy pregnancy and delivery, not bringing forth her child in pain and tears as Eve did; and if so, one can assume that Mary wouldn’t have had to deal with morning sickness, either. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine that travelling (on a donkey if she were lucky) in the last week of pregnancy can have been all that comfortable. Eight days later, she and Joseph bring Jesus to Jerusalem to be presented in the temple. Travelling with a newborn, what fun. But this time, there’s pain to spread around. Simeon and Anna had been waiting for their entire lives for the messiah to come, and no doubt wondering if he ever would, and of course it all ended in a circumcision. And then, finally, we have the discovery of Jesus in the temple, following days of concern, worry, and anxiety.
Note that in every case, the pain or inconvenience is a necessary part of the event. If Simeon and Anna had not been waiting, they would not have rejoiced so when the messiah was before them.
Now, I admit that we aren’t talking about major torment. In these five mysteries we don’t see Jesus being flogged at the pillar, or carrying his cross to Calvary. St. Therese of Lisieux said that it isn’t necessary to do great things for God; it is simply necessary to do little things with great love. And that’s the key to each of these events: the pain, the inconvenience, the heartache, all are borne with great love, for God’s sake. And so they are ennobled; and so the joy is all the sweeter, because it came at a cost.
This book is one of the best I’ve read all year, and maybe longer. I can already tell that it’s one I’ll come back to, time and again–it’s that good. The author, a cradle fundamentalist, converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult, and wrote a book about it entitled Evangelical is Not Enough. Ten years later, he wrote this book, an extended meditation on what it means to be a Christian of the Catholic variety.
Any religion has three components: a moral code, a set of beliefs, and the day-to-day practices. Howard skips over the moral code, which Catholics and other Christians largely agree about it; and he discusses doctrine only to the extent that Catholics and other Christians disagree about it. By far the largest chunk of the book is about the day-to-day Catholic practices that give serious non-Catholics the heebie-jeebies: praying with the saints, for example, but most especially and beautifully the Sacrifice of the Mass. He goes into great and beautiful detail about the Mass, and what it means, and why we Catholics do what we do.
This is not a dry, technical book, I hasten to add. What this is, really, is a love-letter to the Roman Catholic Church, and to Christ its Head, in thanksgiving for all of His many and great blessings. I learned a lot from it, not so much in terms of specific facts, but in terms of how everything in Catholic practice works together. He didn’t just show me the landmarks; he revealed all of the terrain between them.
If you’re a Catholic, and you want to get more out of your faith, I’d suggest reading this book; and if you’re a Protestant who’s worried that his Catholic friends might not be saved, I’d definitely suggest reading this book. And if you’re no kind of Christian at all, you might find it interesting to see what all the noise is about. Highly recommended.
Jen at Et Tu has just written a timely post on the dangers of looking for validation in the comments on your blog posts. I link to it because it speaks to some things I’ve been thinking about, and indirectly to one of the reasons why I’ve not been posting much recently: intellectual vanity.
As I noted a while back, I’m currently fascinated by the Dominicans, the “Order of Preachers”. One of the Dominican mottos is to contemplate, and then share the fruits of your contemplation. I’ve been doing a lot of contemplating over the last year, and there are many things I’ve thought might be worthy of sharing. I’ve posted a few of them. But every time I do that, I start waiting and hoping that someone will notice how brilliant I am—that I’ll get buckets of links, and tons of positive comments, and that generally I’ll be regarded as the neatest thing since sliced bread. And while not every such link gets noticed, I’ve gotten just enough encouragement to keep looking for it.
And that means that my goal hasn’t been to teach, or to help others, or to give glory to God, but rather to accumulate glory for myself—which, as I realized some months ago, is intellectual vanity. Consequently, I more or less put myself on a blogging diet whilst pondering this. And I’ve come to a number of conclusions. First is that I need to spend more time with real flesh-and-blood people and less time with pixels (i.e., with people at our parish, with friends, and with family). Second is that blogging about the things I’m thinking about is OK, but I need to watch my attitude.
So, if you liked this post, feel free not to tell me. 
Last year, when I was studying up on the Catholic Church, I reflected that Theology and Moral Philosophy should be more like Physics. That is to say, knowledge should accumulate. A beginning student of hysics isn’t told to go back to first principles, conduct his own experiments, re-derive all of the necessary math, and in general rebuild modern physics from scratch. If this were necessary, nobody would ever learn modern physics. Instead, our student is guided rapidly through the basics of physics, doing proofs and experiments for enrichment, and then on in like manner until the subject is grasped and the student can make use of his new knowledge. If God is objectively true, there should be a similar system of knowledge for theology and moral philosophy that has been built up over the years. Scripture is foundational and essential, but its implications (and the implications of human nature in general) are not always obvious, and yet everyone seemed to start from scripture and build their own superstructure on top it. Not surprisingly, different authorities often disagree.
I found the body of knowledge I was looking for in the Catholic Church and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). The moral principles in the CCC are rooted in scripture and in human nature, and represent a treasury of knowledge built up over thousands years that extends back to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks as well as to the ancient Hebrews. It’s massive, all encompassing, and consistent, and I was delighted to discover it.
Great! Theology and Moral Philosophy are like Physics!
In one sense, that is, but not in every sense, as Pope Benedict explains in section 24 of Spe Salvi:
First of all, we must acknowledge that incremental progress is possible only in the material sphere…in the field of ethical awareness and moral decision-making, there is no similar possibility of accumulation for the simple reason that man’s freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew. These decisions cannot simply be made for us in advance by others—if that were the case, we would no longer be free.
In other words, physical matter has no free will, and so always follows the rules. We can build machines, in line with the laws of physics and chemistry, and they do what we expect them to do. And we can hand them over to others who don’t understanding a thing about physics and chemistry, and they still work! I live at the apex of a pyramid of technology with my laptop and my cell phone and my video games and air conditioning and refrigeration and central heating and all manner of things, some of which I have a good understanding, some of which I have a marginal understanding, and some to which I’m completely oblivious. But even if I had no understanding, all of these gadgets would still work for me! I can stand on top of this pyramid of knowledge without possessing even the capstone.
Moral knowledge is different. There’s no such thing as a gadget of virtue. I can’t go to Target and buy some Fortitude for my kids, and maybe a little Wisdom on the side. I can’t say to my oldest son, “Hey Dave! Come over here, I need to upgrade your Prudence!” People aren’t machines; you can’t program them to be good. If you want to stand at the apex of the pyramid of moral knowledge, you need to acquire the whole pyramid. And you need to do it yourself; no one can do it for you. And you need to acquire it not with your head, your intellect, but with your heart, your will. Understanding moral teaching intellectually is useful, but if it doesn’t enter your will, you don’t possess it. And if it has entered your will, understanding it intellectually isn’t strictly necessary. Reading about another country isn’t the same as living there; and if you live there, you know what it’s like without reading about it.
Acquiring that pyramid of virtue is difficult, and very few ever stand at the apex (we call them “saints”). And we need help to ascend it, which, fortunately, God is delighted to give us.
All of this has implications for society, to wit: utopia is impossible. We cannot build the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth. We cannot design the perfect society, with perfect rules, in which everyone will always automatically have everything they need and there will be no want, and everyone will be happy, precisely because people are not machines. Society is not a machine. No matter what rules and institutions you devise, people are free to subvert them, and (without that moral grounding) they will. Or, if your system is designed specifically so that people are not free to subvert it, cannot prevent it from working, then you have taken away their freedom, and your system is not the Kingdom of Heaven, is not truly utopia.
So what are our responsibilities with regard to Society? We must strive, with God’s help, to acquire all virtue. A society is only as good as its members. We must strive to provide just rules and institutions. We can’t build utopia, but there’s no reason to settle for less than the best we can do. And we must strive—as individuals—to serve those in need, because they are in need right now. Ignoring the needs of those around us in favor of trying to build the Perfect Society in which they will no longer be in need is a cop-out. It merely inflates us with pride while failing to accomplish the goal…and meanwhile, those around us are still in need.
Actually, it’s been almost three-and-a-half months; I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours in mid-January, and it’s now nearly the end of April. For the beginning of this project, see the series of posts that begins here.
I don’t really have a lot to say, except that I’m still praying Morning and Evening Prayer, Night Prayer, and most days the Office of Readings as well. Many such projects start out well, with the enthusiasm born of novelty, and then lapse as the novelty fades. This has not been the case, so far. The Divine Office just plain works for me; it helps me to pray when I feel dry, and it’s even more rewarding when I don’t. God is faithful, and the Divine Office helps me to be faithful in response. This is very cool!
The one resource I’d like to add to those I mentioned in the series of posts linked above is John Brook’s The School of Prayer, which does a better of job of explaining why it is that praying the Liturgy of the Hours is a worthwhile thing to do. In a nutshell, it’s because it teaches us to pray, using the prayers—the psalms—which the Lord himself gave us. But Brook goes into more detail than that; he also has a detailed commentary on every psalm in Morning and Evening Prayer. Highly recommended.
I used to tell people, “There’s no such thing as Society. There’s only People.” Most of them, especially the more liberal, would look at me really funny. It’s an overstatement, but I think it’s mostly true. And what I mean by it is, the only real way to change society is to change the hearts and minds of individual people. There are lots of ways to do that, but when you’re thinking in terms of Society most of those ways begin to look like a sledgehammer…or, maybe, a pile-driver. It’s hard to be subtle when you’re dealing with people as a mass of population. If you want to be subtle, you need to work with each individual heart, each individual mind. Of course, it’s almost impossible to do that when you’re dealing with People as a mass of population. Hence the constant temptation to try to engineer Society.
Over at Amy Welborn’s place, she quotes somebody named Angelo Matera, who said (in a much longer excerpt) “This is the spiritual method of the lay movements, not the political method used by Catholic pressure groups.” It occurred to me, on reading this, that this “political method” is based on a subtle fallacy: that the “powers that be” are a ring in the nose of the body politic, and if you manipulate them properly you can steer the body politic in the direction you want it to go. There’s some truth to this, in the political arena; but it doesn’t work very well as a form of social engineering. Just because you’ve got the leaders going the way you want them to, doesn’t mean that the rank-and-file are going to buy into it. And this is even more true in the world of the Catholic Church, where the Magisterium doesn’t answer to the voters in any American sense.
On the other hand, the Christian faith is precisely the thing that can change hearts and minds across society, because it changes them one heart and mind at a time. More to the point, Christ asks each of us to change our own heart, our own mind—to allow Him to change them for us. Christianity is attractive, not coercive. We witness to others through our lives; we call out to others to come drink of the living water and never thirst again. They, then, can choose to change their own hearts and minds, with Christ’s help.
The bottom line is this: if you really want to change the world, don’t bother with the political process. Let Christ lead you into service. Serve those He leads you to. Let Him use you to lead others into service.
Follow Christ and the World (and the Church!) can take care of itself.
Been quiet recently, not because things have been quiet, but because there’s been a lot going on. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and a lot of praying, and a lot of thinking, and I haven’t generally felt like discussing any of it with the world at large.
No offense.
But yesterday was a significant milestone that I’d like to record. Most Catholic bloggers went all out for Easter Sunday, and Easter Sunday was indeed a glorious day; I went to the Easter Vigil, and then the whole family got up in time for the Easter Sunrise mass at a park not far from where we live that’s perched on the side of a mountain high above Los Angeles with a view I simply could not believe. And the air was warm and crystal clear.
But yesterday was even better. Because yesterday was the day that Jane, after mumble, mumble years as an Anglican, was received in the Catholic Church, was confirmed, and made her first communion as a Catholic. Two of our kids were able to receive their first communion along with her. And then we all went to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream.
We’re here. We’re finally all here. For this I am truly thankful. (And the ice cream was nice, too.)