Posts
Mercy is love that suffers the weakness of the beloved. It bears an offense to affirm the dignity of the offender. Divine mercy is God's loving presence, dwelling in the abyss of our own misery. He reveals how much He suffers with us whenever we behold the Christ crucified. This is a mystery every Christian must experience. It is especially attached to the priesthood in the tension between the greatness of the ministry and the unworthiness of the minister. This post is the fourth and final part of a lecture given on the priesthood. It attempts to highlight the importance of praying for priests in this Year For the Priest.
Graham Greene's work the Power and the Glory presents a priest who helps us understand a dimension of the priestly witness of St. John Vianney. Graham Greene's whiskey priest is a very different man than St. John Vianney, and not just on the level of sobriety. The whiskey priest is fleeing for his life during the Mexican persecution of the Church in the 1920s. He is an unlikely martyr struggling with insobriety and self-absorption with a record of infidelity to his priestly promises. His ministry seems completely futile. Yet, he cannot help himself from being a priest.
He knows that he is a weak and petty man. In fact, he is too weak to flee for his life. He wants to escape. He could apostatize like one of his friends - but he sees his friend's tormented existence and he knows he is not strong enough to bear it. So he is driven to put his life on the line so that people can have the mass and confession: not by courage or piety, but by a certain sense of duty he cannot refuse.
It is concerning this combination of a sense of duty and feeling of unworthiness that we can draw a connection with the Curé d'Ars. John Vianney had no more of a sense of progressing in holiness than does the character created by Graham Greene. In fact, he felt that something about the priesthood was endangering him. The priestly ministry thrust him into a place where he was so concentrated on the salvation of others, he felt as if he were neglecting his own.
This anxiety over death -- death in this life or death in the life to come -- is a common experience for all those who follow Christ. We have an instinct for self-preservation which constantly balks at carrying the Cross. It is the love of God in us that helps us order this instinct for his glory. It is possible to follow Christ crucified in this way, not because of personal greatness or worthiness, but because of God's grace alone, the gift of his life that flows from the cross.
In the case of the priesthood, fidelity to serving Christ in his people, even when he is barely recognizable, is the Cup of the Covenant, the pathway to the place of crucifixion. The priest can follow this pathway because of a gift he received in Holy Orders. It is the grace of Christ, the very life of the Risen Lord, given in this sacrament that drives the priest - even if he does not know it. If he tries to deny it, it will not leave him in peace. This is because grace, in particular the grace of Holy Orders, comes in the form of love, and only by surrendering in love do we ever find the rest for which our hearts long.
This sheds some light on why the Year for the Priest is also a time to pray for priests who struggle with the priesthood. The Lord desires them to rest in his love. And yet some of them are tormented like Graham Greene's characters or like the Curé d'Ars on those occasions when he left his parish. On the one side there is the call to love God's people that lives in the hearts of the ordained. On the other, there is anxiety, some form of fear that makes a man want to runaway. It is in the cross section of these two movements that the Lord chooses to dwell with us, where he discloses the power of his mercy. As the brothers and sisters of those the Lord allows to dwell in this holy place, we must pray for them, that they might discover the embrace of the mercy of the Father.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The Priest is not his Own - Part III
In this post, we will try to bring into relief important aspects of Mystery of the Priesthood as witnessed by St. John Vianney through comparing his experience with a priest depicted by Miguel de Unamuno. We hope to show the essential connection between the truth of the faith and the nature of the priesthood, and the fruitful tension between the truth about the man who is a priest and the truth about the priesthood given to the man.
Before we can begin this comparison, we need to make some initial observations. First of all, the priestly ministry is often viewed as a cultural convention imposed from the outside to which a man must submit if he is to be a good priest. The Catholic Church however asserts that the priesthood is not the product of human culture, but something given by God. Now these two ways of seeing the priesthood play themselves out historically and culturally. For those who do not believe in God or that God can give a gift like the priesthood, it is completely baffling that the priesthood or religion should demand so much. For those who begin to understand what the Lord has given us in the priesthood, they can not believe that God would be so generous.
Another point to bear in mind is the intrinsic nature of divine gift of the priesthood. The Catholic priesthood is not extrinsic to humanity, but takes up and perfects something God has already planted in our nature. God created men and women with a priestly character - that is as his image and likeness the highest form of human activity is to enter into the rest of the Lord through worshipping Him. Much more could be said on this point, but for our purposes it is enough to assert that the priesthood of Christ takes up this priestly quality of our humanity, restores it to is full dignity and perfects it.
Another preliminary point to be made concerns the relationship of Christians to those ordained into the priesthood by the sacrament of Holy Orders. Christ's priesthood is something every Christian recieves at baptism. In a certain sense, every Christian is a priest - part of a nation of priests. By baptism, we offer acceptable worship to the Father through Christ Jesus for the salvation of the world. But the way Christ established his Church, the baptized cannot do this by themselves. They need to be lead by someone with the special authority of Christ which comes through the apostles. It is from among the members of Christ priesthood that some are selected by the bishops or successors of the apostles to lead, teach and sanctify the rest of Christ's body. To say that they are ordained means that they are given the Sacrament of Holy Orders - a sacrament of service that gives these men special grace to serve all those who are joined to the royal priesthood of Christ. When we speak of the Catholic priesthood, it is these ordained ministers of Christ's body to whom we are referring.
One final point that is essential for our conversation is what happens to someone who is ordained in Holy Orders for the priesthood. The ministerial priesthood is conferred through Holy Orders. When the bishop imposes his hands and consecrates a man to the servcie of God, the very heart of the man is changed. A new intrinsic power now flows from the Cross of Christ through him in a manner the Christ power has never flowed through his person before. Traditionally, we call this divine change of heart sacramental "character". The priestly character conferred in Holy Orders configures a man to Christ in such a way that he is able to signify the sanctifying power of Christ every time he is faithful to his ministry, even in the midst of weakness and failure. For this power to be revealed, all it takes is faith.
But now we get to the point of our refection, an existential question that many struggle with - is the power of faith really rooted in reality or is it merely psychological, the power of suggestion that moves emotions and imagination? The personal answer to the question has grave consequences for the way we approach our faith and our salvation. For many people today, faith is something sentimental, a nice idea we return to when life gets too hard.
When I worked in a parish some parishioners would get so upset with the Church whenever an appeal was made to an absolute value - like the sanctity of life or the indissolubility of marriage. They expected their faith to make them feel better about certain bad decisions, but the truth of the faith they had to deal with was not very consoling. But the truth rarely consoles at first. It challenges us. It makes us rethink what we have done. Time and again in my own life I have had the painful discovery that what I want is not the measure of truth, the truth is the measure of what I want. And, only after we have dealt with the truth do we begin to find a consolation that nothing else in the world can give.
The truth about the priesthood is part of this. And the odd thing about reality is that it refuses to limit itself to what we expect it to be. What is real never really fits into the categories we construct for it. In the end, we accept it for what it is - or live in a delusion. Similarly, only those who accept the priestly ministry for what it actually is discover the truth about it, and this truth can make all the difference in life.
To shed light on the essential connection between the truth of the faith and the nature of the priesthood, we will consider Unamuno's priest in his short story Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr. He depicts a preist driven by compassion for his village community in 19th Century Spain. His heart aches because of the looming reality of death and the lake of despair it occasions. Out of this compassion, Unamuno's priest promotes the Catholic faith. The problem is that for this priest, on a personal level, the faith is no more than a pious myth, a kind of sacred story for regular people to believe so they can face death with some kind of hope. In Unamuno's world, the truth is something so dreadful that "simple people could not live with it."
The priest's charade is not malicious, but well intentioned. Father Emmanuel, despite his lack of faith, sacrifices himself continuing to proclaim the pious myth entrusted to him so that his parishioners in Valverde de Lucerana might live life to the fullest. Unamuno's priest eventually becomes part of the myth himself. After his death, his parishioners come to “believe in Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, who, with no hope of immortality for himself, preserved their hope in it.”
For me, this depiction is especially sad because it captures something many people, and maybe some priests themselves, actually believe. Namely, the truth about life really is too hard and terrifying, and we need to avoid it if we are going get through it at all. For such people, religion or religious myth is a way to cope with pain so bitter that it simply can not be dealt with straight up. Now if all religion were only myth, than life really would be a sad affair.
But not all religion claims to be myth. In fact, the Christian faith as it has been preserved in the Catholic Church, claims to be the fullness of the truth. When the Church claims that Christ Jesus saves us from sin and death, it is declaring that real salvation exists, that life does not have to be a sad affair, that everything that is good, noble and true about humanity does not need to perish. If the Church invites men and woman to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God risen from the dead, it is because it is really true that those who believe in Him will not perish, but live forever.
The biggest difference between my own experiences and those Unamuno presents is most people who live a religious charade usually do not get much of a happy ending, even the romantic ending he provides. The despair behind the myth they peddle consumes them and always hurts those closest to them.
To understand the priesthood and experiences like St. John Vianney had, the starting place is to accept the proposition that Christianity is not a myth, but the stark and surprising truth. If we look at all the evil in the world, it truly is surprising that God really did create us and really does yearn for friendship with us. His desire is so great that the Father sent his only begotten Son to become one of us so that we might be able to join in the very love life of the Trinity, leading all creation into worship and praise. This truth is also stark. To make it possible for us to choose this friendship we needed to be freed from sin and death - and for this reason Jesus, the Son of God, died on the Cross.
Most people would agree that death is stark - but it sometimes is difficult to take sin seriously. Almost, every Christian has the tendency to think - "Gee God, does this behavior really need to change? After all, I am a pretty good guy." Yet, there really is something quite broken inside us, something that really needs to change, and by ourselves we do not have the strength to change it. We need God, not as an escape or distraction, but as the only One who can help us deal with who we really are. And this is where Unamuno's priest, as compassionate as he is, is really unable to help people. Unlike the Unamuno's Christianity which preserves a social order and a pleasant country existence, true Christianity seeks to transform the heart and save the whole world. The ministry of the priest must constantly deal with the relentlessy real - it does not have the luxury of sustaining pious myths.
The purpose of this reflection was to shed some light on the curious tension in the priestly ministry of St. John Vianney and his own feelings of unworthiness. Unamuno's character really captures something of the priestly heart when it comes to the compassion that the priesthood demands. A priest is asked to bear all the sorrows of the people entrusted to him, and a huge part of his ministry to console those who feel overwhelmed. Unlike St. Emmanuel the Good, however, the Curé d’Ars really did believe the Gospel. The love of God was not a story he promoted so that people could endure their meaningless lives.
St. John Vianney understood that each and every life has a deep and eternal meaning, even if he was anxious about what this meant for himself. In the face of his own feelings of unworthiness, the priesthood enabled him to help those entrusted to him find this meaning for their lives. They discovered through his ministry that they were truly loved in the most unimaginable way. And once they found that meaning, they could not possibly go back to the way they lived before: everything changed. Many of his parishioners devoted their lives in wonderful ways to living for the glory of God.
Before we can begin this comparison, we need to make some initial observations. First of all, the priestly ministry is often viewed as a cultural convention imposed from the outside to which a man must submit if he is to be a good priest. The Catholic Church however asserts that the priesthood is not the product of human culture, but something given by God. Now these two ways of seeing the priesthood play themselves out historically and culturally. For those who do not believe in God or that God can give a gift like the priesthood, it is completely baffling that the priesthood or religion should demand so much. For those who begin to understand what the Lord has given us in the priesthood, they can not believe that God would be so generous.
Another point to bear in mind is the intrinsic nature of divine gift of the priesthood. The Catholic priesthood is not extrinsic to humanity, but takes up and perfects something God has already planted in our nature. God created men and women with a priestly character - that is as his image and likeness the highest form of human activity is to enter into the rest of the Lord through worshipping Him. Much more could be said on this point, but for our purposes it is enough to assert that the priesthood of Christ takes up this priestly quality of our humanity, restores it to is full dignity and perfects it.
Another preliminary point to be made concerns the relationship of Christians to those ordained into the priesthood by the sacrament of Holy Orders. Christ's priesthood is something every Christian recieves at baptism. In a certain sense, every Christian is a priest - part of a nation of priests. By baptism, we offer acceptable worship to the Father through Christ Jesus for the salvation of the world. But the way Christ established his Church, the baptized cannot do this by themselves. They need to be lead by someone with the special authority of Christ which comes through the apostles. It is from among the members of Christ priesthood that some are selected by the bishops or successors of the apostles to lead, teach and sanctify the rest of Christ's body. To say that they are ordained means that they are given the Sacrament of Holy Orders - a sacrament of service that gives these men special grace to serve all those who are joined to the royal priesthood of Christ. When we speak of the Catholic priesthood, it is these ordained ministers of Christ's body to whom we are referring.
One final point that is essential for our conversation is what happens to someone who is ordained in Holy Orders for the priesthood. The ministerial priesthood is conferred through Holy Orders. When the bishop imposes his hands and consecrates a man to the servcie of God, the very heart of the man is changed. A new intrinsic power now flows from the Cross of Christ through him in a manner the Christ power has never flowed through his person before. Traditionally, we call this divine change of heart sacramental "character". The priestly character conferred in Holy Orders configures a man to Christ in such a way that he is able to signify the sanctifying power of Christ every time he is faithful to his ministry, even in the midst of weakness and failure. For this power to be revealed, all it takes is faith.
But now we get to the point of our refection, an existential question that many struggle with - is the power of faith really rooted in reality or is it merely psychological, the power of suggestion that moves emotions and imagination? The personal answer to the question has grave consequences for the way we approach our faith and our salvation. For many people today, faith is something sentimental, a nice idea we return to when life gets too hard.
When I worked in a parish some parishioners would get so upset with the Church whenever an appeal was made to an absolute value - like the sanctity of life or the indissolubility of marriage. They expected their faith to make them feel better about certain bad decisions, but the truth of the faith they had to deal with was not very consoling. But the truth rarely consoles at first. It challenges us. It makes us rethink what we have done. Time and again in my own life I have had the painful discovery that what I want is not the measure of truth, the truth is the measure of what I want. And, only after we have dealt with the truth do we begin to find a consolation that nothing else in the world can give.
The truth about the priesthood is part of this. And the odd thing about reality is that it refuses to limit itself to what we expect it to be. What is real never really fits into the categories we construct for it. In the end, we accept it for what it is - or live in a delusion. Similarly, only those who accept the priestly ministry for what it actually is discover the truth about it, and this truth can make all the difference in life.
To shed light on the essential connection between the truth of the faith and the nature of the priesthood, we will consider Unamuno's priest in his short story Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr. He depicts a preist driven by compassion for his village community in 19th Century Spain. His heart aches because of the looming reality of death and the lake of despair it occasions. Out of this compassion, Unamuno's priest promotes the Catholic faith. The problem is that for this priest, on a personal level, the faith is no more than a pious myth, a kind of sacred story for regular people to believe so they can face death with some kind of hope. In Unamuno's world, the truth is something so dreadful that "simple people could not live with it."
The priest's charade is not malicious, but well intentioned. Father Emmanuel, despite his lack of faith, sacrifices himself continuing to proclaim the pious myth entrusted to him so that his parishioners in Valverde de Lucerana might live life to the fullest. Unamuno's priest eventually becomes part of the myth himself. After his death, his parishioners come to “believe in Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, who, with no hope of immortality for himself, preserved their hope in it.”
For me, this depiction is especially sad because it captures something many people, and maybe some priests themselves, actually believe. Namely, the truth about life really is too hard and terrifying, and we need to avoid it if we are going get through it at all. For such people, religion or religious myth is a way to cope with pain so bitter that it simply can not be dealt with straight up. Now if all religion were only myth, than life really would be a sad affair.
But not all religion claims to be myth. In fact, the Christian faith as it has been preserved in the Catholic Church, claims to be the fullness of the truth. When the Church claims that Christ Jesus saves us from sin and death, it is declaring that real salvation exists, that life does not have to be a sad affair, that everything that is good, noble and true about humanity does not need to perish. If the Church invites men and woman to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God risen from the dead, it is because it is really true that those who believe in Him will not perish, but live forever.
The biggest difference between my own experiences and those Unamuno presents is most people who live a religious charade usually do not get much of a happy ending, even the romantic ending he provides. The despair behind the myth they peddle consumes them and always hurts those closest to them.
To understand the priesthood and experiences like St. John Vianney had, the starting place is to accept the proposition that Christianity is not a myth, but the stark and surprising truth. If we look at all the evil in the world, it truly is surprising that God really did create us and really does yearn for friendship with us. His desire is so great that the Father sent his only begotten Son to become one of us so that we might be able to join in the very love life of the Trinity, leading all creation into worship and praise. This truth is also stark. To make it possible for us to choose this friendship we needed to be freed from sin and death - and for this reason Jesus, the Son of God, died on the Cross.
Most people would agree that death is stark - but it sometimes is difficult to take sin seriously. Almost, every Christian has the tendency to think - "Gee God, does this behavior really need to change? After all, I am a pretty good guy." Yet, there really is something quite broken inside us, something that really needs to change, and by ourselves we do not have the strength to change it. We need God, not as an escape or distraction, but as the only One who can help us deal with who we really are. And this is where Unamuno's priest, as compassionate as he is, is really unable to help people. Unlike the Unamuno's Christianity which preserves a social order and a pleasant country existence, true Christianity seeks to transform the heart and save the whole world. The ministry of the priest must constantly deal with the relentlessy real - it does not have the luxury of sustaining pious myths.
The purpose of this reflection was to shed some light on the curious tension in the priestly ministry of St. John Vianney and his own feelings of unworthiness. Unamuno's character really captures something of the priestly heart when it comes to the compassion that the priesthood demands. A priest is asked to bear all the sorrows of the people entrusted to him, and a huge part of his ministry to console those who feel overwhelmed. Unlike St. Emmanuel the Good, however, the Curé d’Ars really did believe the Gospel. The love of God was not a story he promoted so that people could endure their meaningless lives.
St. John Vianney understood that each and every life has a deep and eternal meaning, even if he was anxious about what this meant for himself. In the face of his own feelings of unworthiness, the priesthood enabled him to help those entrusted to him find this meaning for their lives. They discovered through his ministry that they were truly loved in the most unimaginable way. And once they found that meaning, they could not possibly go back to the way they lived before: everything changed. Many of his parishioners devoted their lives in wonderful ways to living for the glory of God.
Monday, February 1, 2010
The Priest is not his Own - Part II
In our last post, we considered a particular problem which the witness of the Cure d'Ars suggests. The priest signifies something for us - and not just for us Catholics, but for the whole world. But what he signifies is disproportionate to his person. His existence points to Christ, under a specific aspect. While all the baptized participate in the mystery of Christ, the priest, in fact, participates in a unique way. But what distinguishes the priest's participation in the mystery of Christ from every other form of participation? In this post, we will try to identify what is unique to the priesthood. In particular, we will see that the priest shares not only in the priesthood of Christ in a unique way, but also in the mystery of Christ as victim. In Christ, and in the vocation of the priesthood, the work of sanctification (i.e. the ministry of making the Church holy) involves a special kind of self-offering.
Whatever it is, it is difficult to be faithful to. Even the Cure d'Ars struggled with this. In our last post, we considered how almost all his peers and superiors viewed him as incompetent. Some held him as too incompetent to be a priest. This was not for lack of intelligence. But it did have a lot to do with his own insecurities over his very late and very poor education. Yet if we stop here, we do not really fully see why the John Vianney struggled with a lack of confidence and why this lack of confidence was so great that he actually attempted to forsake his parish ministry on occasion. Here, we are going to consider a mystery that is at the heart of the priesthood for every man who tries to live it out to the full -- this feeling of unworthiness.
John Vianney was very concerned about his own salvation. Even as his efforts as a pastor met with great success, he had to fight back thoughts that perhaps he was decieving himself concerning where he really stood with God. Some of this self-doubt may have been brought on by his peers and teachers. Some of it also seems to have come from God. In fact, after he was made pastor of Ars, he asked the Lord to allow him to see the truth about himself. And even great saints can find the truth overwhelming.
The reason for this is that our hearts are filled with every kind of misery and weakness. This does not mean we are completely evil. But it means that what is good, noble and true about each of us needs to be saved – and only God can save it if we let Him. He never imposes Himself, but patiently deals with the darkness we suffer as we are ready and willing. This is why there are deep wounds that the Lord, in his mercy, does not allow us to see all at once. Otherwise, the magnitude of our brokenness can overwhelm us, and we despair.
So normally God allows us just a tiny peak of what he is suffering with us and in us. When He gives us this glimpse, it is only to move us to trust Him and cling to Him all the more. For the fact is, we are powerless to deal with the pain we carry within. And, God never intended that we should try to deal with it by ourselves. He yearns to deal with it - but to do this, as we have already mentioned, we must surrender to Him. In the case of the Curé of Ars, God wanted John Vianney to rely on Him alone - so the Lord showed him something about himself to completely humble him. And it did.
The unfortunate side-effect of this vision was that John Vianney struggled off and on with the desire to run off to a more austere form of religious life, and there in hidden anonymity to work out his salvation. He was afraid, in the effort to help others find salvation, he was taking the time he needed to fully surrender himself to the Lord.
It is here that we find a great mystery of the spiritual life that applies to everyone. When the Lord gives us a great work, He also gives a great grace - not only for the edification of others, but also for our own salvation. God is always more generous with those who are generous to Him.
Although John Vianney would run away on occasion, God always brought him back. The Curé was almost oblivious to the grace of God at work in him because he could only see his brokenness. The Lord however sent his parishioners and friends to intercept him before he got too far. It was through others, through those he ministered to, that the priest of Ars slowly accepted that God was sanctifying him, not despite his priestly ministry, but because of it. John Vianney learned to accept his unworthiness as an integral part of the mystery his vocation signified.
So, what is it the priest signifies? What is the reality to which his very person now points because he has been joined to the office of the priesthood? Fulton Sheen suggests a secondary meaning of Christ’s word’s “This is my Body” sheds light on this question. When the priest says the words of consecration, not only is bread and wine changed into the Body and Blood of Christ, the priest is also identifying himself with Christ in a sacramental way: He is a visible sign of an invisible reality, and that reality is Christ crucified. He is, after all, saying, “This is my Body.” Bishop Sheen suggests that we see at every mass what the person of the priest is become through Holy Orders a “priest-victim” who signifies Christ himself.
But now we get to what is perhaps the oddest part of this exploration. The priest is supposed to signify Christ, the Priest-Victim, whose perfect sacrifice has saved us from sin and death. In most cases, however, there seems to be very little of Christ’s perfection in the priest’s own personality. Not only do others see this - but the priest himself suffers it. Most priests experience something like John Vianney: they feel unworthy to point to Christ and at the same time, feel compelled to offer themselves as a sign of Christ for others. So what is it in the grace of Holy Orders that allows us to find Christ crucified in the priest? In order to answer this question, we will consider literary examples of the priesthood provided by Miguel de Unamuno and Graham Greene in our next post.
Whatever it is, it is difficult to be faithful to. Even the Cure d'Ars struggled with this. In our last post, we considered how almost all his peers and superiors viewed him as incompetent. Some held him as too incompetent to be a priest. This was not for lack of intelligence. But it did have a lot to do with his own insecurities over his very late and very poor education. Yet if we stop here, we do not really fully see why the John Vianney struggled with a lack of confidence and why this lack of confidence was so great that he actually attempted to forsake his parish ministry on occasion. Here, we are going to consider a mystery that is at the heart of the priesthood for every man who tries to live it out to the full -- this feeling of unworthiness.
John Vianney was very concerned about his own salvation. Even as his efforts as a pastor met with great success, he had to fight back thoughts that perhaps he was decieving himself concerning where he really stood with God. Some of this self-doubt may have been brought on by his peers and teachers. Some of it also seems to have come from God. In fact, after he was made pastor of Ars, he asked the Lord to allow him to see the truth about himself. And even great saints can find the truth overwhelming.
The reason for this is that our hearts are filled with every kind of misery and weakness. This does not mean we are completely evil. But it means that what is good, noble and true about each of us needs to be saved – and only God can save it if we let Him. He never imposes Himself, but patiently deals with the darkness we suffer as we are ready and willing. This is why there are deep wounds that the Lord, in his mercy, does not allow us to see all at once. Otherwise, the magnitude of our brokenness can overwhelm us, and we despair.
So normally God allows us just a tiny peak of what he is suffering with us and in us. When He gives us this glimpse, it is only to move us to trust Him and cling to Him all the more. For the fact is, we are powerless to deal with the pain we carry within. And, God never intended that we should try to deal with it by ourselves. He yearns to deal with it - but to do this, as we have already mentioned, we must surrender to Him. In the case of the Curé of Ars, God wanted John Vianney to rely on Him alone - so the Lord showed him something about himself to completely humble him. And it did.
The unfortunate side-effect of this vision was that John Vianney struggled off and on with the desire to run off to a more austere form of religious life, and there in hidden anonymity to work out his salvation. He was afraid, in the effort to help others find salvation, he was taking the time he needed to fully surrender himself to the Lord.
It is here that we find a great mystery of the spiritual life that applies to everyone. When the Lord gives us a great work, He also gives a great grace - not only for the edification of others, but also for our own salvation. God is always more generous with those who are generous to Him.
Although John Vianney would run away on occasion, God always brought him back. The Curé was almost oblivious to the grace of God at work in him because he could only see his brokenness. The Lord however sent his parishioners and friends to intercept him before he got too far. It was through others, through those he ministered to, that the priest of Ars slowly accepted that God was sanctifying him, not despite his priestly ministry, but because of it. John Vianney learned to accept his unworthiness as an integral part of the mystery his vocation signified.
So, what is it the priest signifies? What is the reality to which his very person now points because he has been joined to the office of the priesthood? Fulton Sheen suggests a secondary meaning of Christ’s word’s “This is my Body” sheds light on this question. When the priest says the words of consecration, not only is bread and wine changed into the Body and Blood of Christ, the priest is also identifying himself with Christ in a sacramental way: He is a visible sign of an invisible reality, and that reality is Christ crucified. He is, after all, saying, “This is my Body.” Bishop Sheen suggests that we see at every mass what the person of the priest is become through Holy Orders a “priest-victim” who signifies Christ himself.
But now we get to what is perhaps the oddest part of this exploration. The priest is supposed to signify Christ, the Priest-Victim, whose perfect sacrifice has saved us from sin and death. In most cases, however, there seems to be very little of Christ’s perfection in the priest’s own personality. Not only do others see this - but the priest himself suffers it. Most priests experience something like John Vianney: they feel unworthy to point to Christ and at the same time, feel compelled to offer themselves as a sign of Christ for others. So what is it in the grace of Holy Orders that allows us to find Christ crucified in the priest? In order to answer this question, we will consider literary examples of the priesthood provided by Miguel de Unamuno and Graham Greene in our next post.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
“The Priest is not his Own" Part I Based on a lecture given Wed., Jan. 27, 2010
Introduction:
This lecture, presented in the blog under several parts, considers the tension in the priest between the limits of his humanity and the responsibilities of his office, his lack of belief and the demands of his vocation, the appeal of the religious imagination and the rigorous realism of our faith, and, finally, the agony of laying down one’s life and the joy of encountering the Lord. As we consider this tension and the possibility of its resolution, we will see that the pathway to the Cross is through the person of the priest.
The Problem St. Jean Vianney Presents
Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney was considered very incompetent by almost all his peers and even most of those who had responsibility for his vocation. A bishop, desperately in need of priests after years of suppression following the French Revolution, thought he saw something more, and arranged for the rather late vocation to be examined under special circumstances. So although he was not able to master Latin well enough to take the ordinary exams required of those to be ordained, examiners did discover someone with exceptional skills in the discernment of moral issues as well as firm grasp of the catechetical truths of the faith. Based on this, the bishop ordained him. John Vianney however would struggle for years with a basic insecurity regarding his intellectual and administrative gifts. None of his peers could believe it when he was appointed pastor of the small parish in Ars, a little farm village miles outside of Lyons in the middle of nowhere. No one could have anticipated that through his faith in the Lord, this uncultured, small, simple man, (with a somewhat annoying high pitched voice) would turn this sleepy parish into a center of spiritual renewal for all of France.
Preliminary Reflections of the Catholic Priesthood and the Person of the Priest
To unlock part of the mystery that unfolds in the witness of this country priest, we must pause for a minute to consider the abyss that yawns between the ministry of the priesthood and the worthiness of the person to whom it is entrusted. In a few, but rare cases, this abyss is spanned – and the person grows into the ministry, becomes completely one with his most high calling. This is certainly the case with the Curé d’Ars. But no one begins the priestly vocation with a personality and character commensurate to the calling they have received.
Fulton Sheen, in his book, The Priest is not his Own, explains this phenomena in terms suggested by the Bible and the Roman Canon. After the words of institution, the Roman Canon recounts the sacrifices offered by Able, Abraham and Melchizedek. He says that Able offers God a blood sacrifice and that this is analogous to the many priests, especially in our century, who have laid down their life for the faith. Maximillian Kolbe, the subject of a future lecture, is an example of this kind of priest. In Auschwitz, he volunteered to be executed in substitution for another man who was the father of a family. He did this out of love and compassion, bringing hope to a hopeless place. There are many priests today all over the world who continue to offer this sacrifice of blood on behalf of others.
Bishop Sheen goes on to explain that not all priests are called to shed their blood for the faith, but that many priests spend their whole priestly ministry ready to do so. These priests offer with their lives a sacrifice like Abraham, a voluntary sacrifice. To understand what Bishop Sheen is trying to get at with “voluntary,” consider specifically Abraham’s willingness to offer even his own son, an image of God the Father. A couple of examples of just such a priest might be Francis Xavier Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan or Jean Bernard, both of whom we will also consider in future lectures. They were fully willing to die for the faith, and almost did. But God used them in other ways. There are many such priests today who quietly do their ministry, rejected, despised, and at the same time joyful, their all too voluntary sacrifices completely hidden, except to the Lord.
Finally, Bishop Sheen explains that priests, whether they shed their blood or live their ministry ready to or not, all priests are a kind of sacramental sacrifice like that offered by Melchizedek. Melchizedek offered a sacrifice of bread and wine when he blessed Abraham. These gifts were a signs of something beyond themselves. The foreshadowed a greater reality that no one could have anticipated. In fact, their full meaning was not revealed until the night before Jesus died, “This is my Body ...my Blood."
The point is, like the bread and wine at mass, that the priest signifies something more than he appears to be. Today at mass, the bread and wine continue to look like bread and wine after they are consecrated with Jesus’ own words, but we know by faith that they are not just bread and wine. They are the body and blood of Jesus. The point of the doctrine of transubstantiation and the real presence is that when we share in these gifts we enter into communion with the Lord himself, and our encounter with Him is transformative, giving us real power to live a new life. Similarly the priest appears to be a man, sometimes even a pathetic man. But he signifies something far beyond himself, and as he faithfully offers his ministry, what he signifies leads to a real and life changing encounter with the Lord himself.
Discussion continued in the next post -
This lecture, presented in the blog under several parts, considers the tension in the priest between the limits of his humanity and the responsibilities of his office, his lack of belief and the demands of his vocation, the appeal of the religious imagination and the rigorous realism of our faith, and, finally, the agony of laying down one’s life and the joy of encountering the Lord. As we consider this tension and the possibility of its resolution, we will see that the pathway to the Cross is through the person of the priest.
The Problem St. Jean Vianney Presents
Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney was considered very incompetent by almost all his peers and even most of those who had responsibility for his vocation. A bishop, desperately in need of priests after years of suppression following the French Revolution, thought he saw something more, and arranged for the rather late vocation to be examined under special circumstances. So although he was not able to master Latin well enough to take the ordinary exams required of those to be ordained, examiners did discover someone with exceptional skills in the discernment of moral issues as well as firm grasp of the catechetical truths of the faith. Based on this, the bishop ordained him. John Vianney however would struggle for years with a basic insecurity regarding his intellectual and administrative gifts. None of his peers could believe it when he was appointed pastor of the small parish in Ars, a little farm village miles outside of Lyons in the middle of nowhere. No one could have anticipated that through his faith in the Lord, this uncultured, small, simple man, (with a somewhat annoying high pitched voice) would turn this sleepy parish into a center of spiritual renewal for all of France.
Preliminary Reflections of the Catholic Priesthood and the Person of the Priest
To unlock part of the mystery that unfolds in the witness of this country priest, we must pause for a minute to consider the abyss that yawns between the ministry of the priesthood and the worthiness of the person to whom it is entrusted. In a few, but rare cases, this abyss is spanned – and the person grows into the ministry, becomes completely one with his most high calling. This is certainly the case with the Curé d’Ars. But no one begins the priestly vocation with a personality and character commensurate to the calling they have received.
Fulton Sheen, in his book, The Priest is not his Own, explains this phenomena in terms suggested by the Bible and the Roman Canon. After the words of institution, the Roman Canon recounts the sacrifices offered by Able, Abraham and Melchizedek. He says that Able offers God a blood sacrifice and that this is analogous to the many priests, especially in our century, who have laid down their life for the faith. Maximillian Kolbe, the subject of a future lecture, is an example of this kind of priest. In Auschwitz, he volunteered to be executed in substitution for another man who was the father of a family. He did this out of love and compassion, bringing hope to a hopeless place. There are many priests today all over the world who continue to offer this sacrifice of blood on behalf of others.
Bishop Sheen goes on to explain that not all priests are called to shed their blood for the faith, but that many priests spend their whole priestly ministry ready to do so. These priests offer with their lives a sacrifice like Abraham, a voluntary sacrifice. To understand what Bishop Sheen is trying to get at with “voluntary,” consider specifically Abraham’s willingness to offer even his own son, an image of God the Father. A couple of examples of just such a priest might be Francis Xavier Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan or Jean Bernard, both of whom we will also consider in future lectures. They were fully willing to die for the faith, and almost did. But God used them in other ways. There are many such priests today who quietly do their ministry, rejected, despised, and at the same time joyful, their all too voluntary sacrifices completely hidden, except to the Lord.
Finally, Bishop Sheen explains that priests, whether they shed their blood or live their ministry ready to or not, all priests are a kind of sacramental sacrifice like that offered by Melchizedek. Melchizedek offered a sacrifice of bread and wine when he blessed Abraham. These gifts were a signs of something beyond themselves. The foreshadowed a greater reality that no one could have anticipated. In fact, their full meaning was not revealed until the night before Jesus died, “This is my Body ...my Blood."
The point is, like the bread and wine at mass, that the priest signifies something more than he appears to be. Today at mass, the bread and wine continue to look like bread and wine after they are consecrated with Jesus’ own words, but we know by faith that they are not just bread and wine. They are the body and blood of Jesus. The point of the doctrine of transubstantiation and the real presence is that when we share in these gifts we enter into communion with the Lord himself, and our encounter with Him is transformative, giving us real power to live a new life. Similarly the priest appears to be a man, sometimes even a pathetic man. But he signifies something far beyond himself, and as he faithfully offers his ministry, what he signifies leads to a real and life changing encounter with the Lord himself.
Discussion continued in the next post -
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The Happiness which God Designs
The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstacy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.
(C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity on why God decided to create us with a free will, a will that could reject Him.)
For as the Father and the Son
and He who proceeds from them
live in one another,
so it would be with the bride,
for, taken wholly into God,
she will live the life of God.
(John of the Cross in Romances (trans. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez) reflecting on why God created the Church)
The Bridegroom' love, or rather the Bridegroom who is Love, asks only the commitment of love and faith. Let the beloved love in return. How can the Bride not love, the Bride of Love himself? How can Love not be loved?
(Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs: Sermon 83 (trans. G.R. Evans))
(C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity on why God decided to create us with a free will, a will that could reject Him.)
For as the Father and the Son
and He who proceeds from them
live in one another,
so it would be with the bride,
for, taken wholly into God,
she will live the life of God.
(John of the Cross in Romances (trans. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez) reflecting on why God created the Church)
The Bridegroom' love, or rather the Bridegroom who is Love, asks only the commitment of love and faith. Let the beloved love in return. How can the Bride not love, the Bride of Love himself? How can Love not be loved?
(Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs: Sermon 83 (trans. G.R. Evans))
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Spiritual Theology -- What is it?
For Catholics, in its broadest sense, spiritual theology studies the relations between what God has revealed about himself and what the Church experiences in her pilgrimage to Him. Some look at this study as a specialized part of moral theology (a study of how Christians ought to live). Others look at it in terms of an approach to dogmatic theology (a study of what Christians ought to believe). It is probably best to look at it as both - because the object of study is more simple than both morals and dogma. What I mean by this is that what we believe and how we live is completely rooted in the Church's ongoing encounter of Jesus Christ leading her into the arms of God.
It must be pointed out that what I just wrote is not accepted by most people. The very name of this science makes it very easy to misunderstand. There is a widespread and mistaken idea of what "spiritual" means. The general assumption is that spiritual things are less real than physical things. It is also assumed that the physical world is the main place for "real life." The spiritual world is a place we check out to quench our curiosity for the weird or else a place in which we seek comfort because "real life" is too painful to deal with. So the spiritual is reduced to prosaic, enchanting and consoling myths that help people get by. For those who think of the spiritual life in this way, spiritual theology is primarily in the realm of imagination and emotions. The problem with this is that the merely sentimental might help someone feel good for a little while, but it is never really enough in the long run. Myths can be a way to avoid reality, and reality is not the kind of thing one can safely turn his back on.
The truly spiritual is in the realm of what is good, beautiful and true. We find these things in the physical world, but what is merely visible does not limit them. In fact, they witness to something beyond the tangible stuff of life. In the ugliest moments of life, our most humiliating moments, and those times we really hurt someone entrusted to us - even in these moments, we can be tormented by the desire for truth and goodness which ought to be there. If our conscience cries out, it is because there is a standard of goodness against which we have not measured up. We did not make this standard. Nor did any culture produce it. Even though we cannot see this standard, it is no less real. And, our awareness or lack of awareness of it influences the way we see and experience everything.
When we look at what God has revealed about Himself and see the relations this has with the pilgrimage of the Church, we can glimpse a beautifully unfolding tapestry into which our own lives are weaved. The Church is the Bride of the Living God. She pilgrimages to her wedding feast. Each life expresses something contained in the mystery of the Church because each of us can accept or reject this journey for ourselves. Those who study and contemplation the tapestry or tradition of this pilgrimage find the most beautiful and difficult truths of all: God's unquenchable desire for real friendship with us, the complete extent of our rejection of Him, and the unfathomable depths to which He descends to win back our hearts. This study must deal with the stark realities of sin and death, and our aching desire for something beyond our own existence. It also must deal with penance, prayer and the discipline of the Christian life. Finally, and most important of all, it must strain to see our coming home, to where we really belong -- and this, in comprehensibly, in the embrace of God himself, his arms outstretched on the Cross.
The truly spiritual is in the realm of what is good, beautiful and true. We find these things in the physical world, but what is merely visible does not limit them. In fact, they witness to something beyond the tangible stuff of life. In the ugliest moments of life, our most humiliating moments, and those times we really hurt someone entrusted to us - even in these moments, we can be tormented by the desire for truth and goodness which ought to be there. If our conscience cries out, it is because there is a standard of goodness against which we have not measured up. We did not make this standard. Nor did any culture produce it. Even though we cannot see this standard, it is no less real. And, our awareness or lack of awareness of it influences the way we see and experience everything.
When we look at what God has revealed about Himself and see the relations this has with the pilgrimage of the Church, we can glimpse a beautifully unfolding tapestry into which our own lives are weaved. The Church is the Bride of the Living God. She pilgrimages to her wedding feast. Each life expresses something contained in the mystery of the Church because each of us can accept or reject this journey for ourselves. Those who study and contemplation the tapestry or tradition of this pilgrimage find the most beautiful and difficult truths of all: God's unquenchable desire for real friendship with us, the complete extent of our rejection of Him, and the unfathomable depths to which He descends to win back our hearts. This study must deal with the stark realities of sin and death, and our aching desire for something beyond our own existence. It also must deal with penance, prayer and the discipline of the Christian life. Finally, and most important of all, it must strain to see our coming home, to where we really belong -- and this, in comprehensibly, in the embrace of God himself, his arms outstretched on the Cross.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Year for the Priest
I am offering a series of lectures at the John Paul II Center for the New Evangelization. If you are interested, please follow the link below.
http://www.sjvdenver.edu/about-the-seminary/catechetical-school/the-virgin-mary-in-the-wisdom-of-the-saints
http://www.sjvdenver.edu/about-the-seminary/catechetical-school/the-virgin-mary-in-the-wisdom-of-the-saints
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)