Who is Pope Francis?

Since the election of Pope Francis, Catholics of every stripe have been reading tea leaves to divine what sort of man he is, what kind of pope he will prove to be. Those on the Left see and fear a Jesuit who was held in contempt by the other Jesuits in Argentina because he stood in the breach against Liberation Theology, and those on the Right see and fear a Jesuit who behaves like a Jesuit in the celebration of the sacred liturgy. And partisans of every kind are stamping and sweating like frightened horses, wondering what these signs portend. To one and all I say: Chill out.

Papa Bergoglio is the 266th Bishop of Rome, and there will be a 267th. In our long history we have had great saints and craven cowards and brave reformers and depraved degenerates along with mystics, theologians, fools, worldlings, philosophers, warriors, diplomats, and a few men of world-historical stature. They each did their bit and then went to their judgment. And after each came another. The same will be true here.

Beyond that, however, here is what we know. Jorge Bergoglio is a man of intense and orthodox Catholic faith which he lives in great personal simplicity and complete dedication to the least of Christ’s brethren. These commitments incline him to brush aside many of the traditional dignities of his office, both as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and now as Bishop of Rome, and to Traditionalists, brushing aside anything traditional is a sign of danger. But let’s be candid: many of the trappings of the hierarchy are derived from Imperium more than from Evangelium, and from time to time it is useful for the Church to ponder this distinction and make whatever changes will bring the Gospel more clearly to the center of the Church’s life.

Meanwhile on the Left, Papa Bergoglio’s simple and accessible style has awakened hope of “progress” in those who would like to see the Catholic Church transmogrify itself into the Anglican Communion, but that is a fool’s hope, and those who want women priests and a Catholic blessing on contraception and same sex marriage will wait in vain until the Last Day. The gentle smile and personal humility of Pope Francis do not mean that he isn’t an orthodox Catholic who will defend the Church in the public square, and if you doubt that, just ask the socialist tyrant who presently lives in the presidential palace of Argentina.

Now, let’s talk about the liturgy. Long before the Liturgy Wars that followed the Second Vatican Council, the expression “He’s as useless as a Jesuit in Holy Week” had a hallowed history. By this phrase priests meant to say that Jesuits generally have no interest and little competence in the ars celebrandi to which so much attention was directed in the last pontificate. The dramatic change in style between Benedict XVI and Francis has caused no little discomfort to those who hoped that the return of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite would lead to the final defeat of living room liturgy in the Western Church, but I suspect that Papa Bergoglio’s liturgical praxis is not a sign that he’s some sort of ritual Bolshevik. Rather, it is simply a pointed reminder that he is a Jesuit and therefore that he will be “useless in Holy Week.”

One final thought. In his new book Evangelical Catholicism, George Weigel argues that the Church is presently living through a transition from its Counter Reformation arrangement to something new: its Evangelical Catholic configuration. I believe that Weigel is correct, and one consequence of that transition will be the letting go of whatever in the Church is derived from Imperium rather than from Evangelium. This process has been underway in fits and starts for more than a century, and it will continue -- and, I suspect, accelerate -- in new ways during the pontificate of Pope Francis. Those who are discomfited by this transition would do well to consider the arguments made by Weigel in his book and to bear in mind the essential differences between matters of style and matters of substance. Jorge Bergoglio manifestly believes that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe, and he will fulfill his new duties as Bishop of Rome and Pastor of the Universal Church according to the truth of the Gospel. If he chooses, however, not to maintain some of the accoutrements of a Renaissance prince, then let no one read into that more than Pope Francis intends: Ecclesia Semper Reformanda et Purificanda.

Chrism Mass Homily of Pope Francis

HOMILY OF POPE FRANCIS

HOLY THURSDAY CHRISM MASS

ST PETER'S BASILICA

28 MARCH 2013

Dear Brothers and Sisters, This morning I have the joy of celebrating my first Chrism Mass as the Bishop of Rome. I greet all of you with affection, especially you, dear priests, who, like myself, today recall the day of your ordination.

The readings of our Mass speak of God’s “anointed ones”: the suffering Servant of Isaiah, King David and Jesus our Lord. All three have this in common: the anointing that they receive is meant in turn to anoint God’s faithful people, whose servants they are; they are anointed for the poor, for prisoners, for the oppressed… A fine image of this “being for” others can be found in the Psalm: “It is like the precious oil upon the head, running down upon the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down upon the collar of his robe” (Ps 133:2). The image of spreading oil, flowing down from the beard of Aaron upon the collar of his sacred robe, is an image of the priestly anointing which, through Christ, the Anointed One, reaches the ends of the earth, represented by the robe.

The sacred robes of the High Priest are rich in symbolism. One such symbol is that the names of the children of Israel were engraved on the onyx stones mounted on the shoulder-pieces of the ephod, the ancestor of our present-day chasuble: six on the stone of the right shoulder-piece and six on that of the left (cf. Ex 28:6-14). The names of the twelve tribes of Israel were also engraved on the breastplate (cf. Es 28:21). This means that the priest celebrates by carrying on his shoulders the people entrusted to his care and bearing their names written in his heart. When we put on our simple chasuble, it might well make us feel, upon our shoulders and in our hearts, the burdens and the faces of our faithful people, our saints and martyrs of whom there are many in these times…

From the beauty of all these liturgical things, which is not so much about trappings and fine fabrics than about the glory of our God resplendent in his people, alive and strengthened, we turn to a consideration of activity, action. The precious oil which anoints the head of Aaron does more than simply lend fragrance to his person; it overflows down to “the edges”. The Lord will say this clearly: his anointing is meant for the poor, prisoners and the sick, for those who are sorrowing and alone. The ointment is not intended just to make us fragrant, much less to be kept in a jar, for then it would become rancid … and the heart bitter.

A good priest can be recognized by the way his people are anointed. This is a clear test. When our people are anointed with the oil of gladness, it is obvious: for example, when they leave Mass looking as if they have heard good news. Our people like to hear the Gospel preached with “unction”, they like it when the Gospel we preach touches their daily lives, when it runs down like the oil of Aaron to the edges of reality, when it brings light to moments of extreme darkness, to the “outskirts” where people of faith are most exposed to the onslaught of those who want to tear down their faith. People thank us because they feel that we have prayed over the realities of their everyday lives, their troubles, their joys, their burdens and their hopes. And when they feel that the fragrance of the Anointed One, of Christ, has come to them through us, they feel encouraged to entrust to us everything they want to bring before the Lord: “Pray for me, Father, because I have this problem”, “Bless me”, “Pray for me” – these words are the sign that the anointing has flowed down to the edges of the robe, for it has turned into prayer. The prayers of the people of God. When we have this relationship with God and with his people, and grace passes through us, then we are priests, mediators between God and men. What I want to emphasize is that we need constantly to stir up God’s grace and perceive in every request, even those requests that are inconvenient and at times purely material or downright banal – but only apparently so – the desire of our people to be anointed with fragrant oil, since they know that we have it. To perceive and to sense, even as the Lord sensed the hope-filled anguish of the woman suffering from hemorrhages when she touched the hem of his garment. At that moment, Jesus, surrounded by people on every side, embodies all the beauty of Aaron vested in priestly raiment, with the oil running down upon his robes. It is a hidden beauty, one which shines forth only for those faith-filled eyes of the woman troubled with an issue of blood. But not even the disciples – future priests – see or understand: on the “existential outskirts”, they see only what is on the surface: the crowd pressing in on Jesus from all sides (cf. Lk 8:42). The Lord, on the other hand, feels the power of the divine anointing which runs down to the edge of his cloak.

We need to “go out,” then, in order to experience our own anointing, its power and its redemptive efficacy: to the “outskirts” where there is suffering, bloodshed, blindness that longs for sight, and prisoners in thrall to many evil masters. It is not in soul-searching or constant introspection that we encounter the Lord: self-help courses can be useful in life, but to live by going from one course to another, from one method to another, leads us to become pelagians and to minimize the power of grace, which comes alive and flourishes to the extent that we, in faith, go out and give ourselves and the Gospel to others, giving what little ointment we have to those who have nothing, nothing at all.

A priest who seldom goes out of himself, who anoints little – I won’t say “not at all” because, thank God, our people take our oil from us anyway – misses out on the best of our people, on what can stir the depths of his priestly heart. Those who do not go out of themselves, instead of being mediators, gradually become intermediaries, managers. We know the difference: the intermediary, the manager, “has already received his reward”, and since he doesn’t put his own skin and his own heart on the line, he never hears a warm, heartfelt word of thanks. This is precisely the reason why some priests grow dissatisfied, become sad priests, lose heart and become in some sense collectors of antiques or novelties – instead of being shepherds living with “the smell of the sheep”, shepherds in the midst of their flock, fishers of men. True enough, the so-called crisis of priestly identity threatens us all and adds to the broader cultural crisis; but if we can resist its onslaught, we will be able to put out in the name of the Lord and cast our nets. It is not a bad thing that reality itself forces us to “put out into the deep”, where what we are by grace is clearly seen as pure grace, out into the deep of the contemporary world, where the only thing that counts is “unction” – not function – and the nets which overflow with fish are those cast solely in the name of the One in whom we have put our trust: Jesus.

Dear lay faithful, be close to your priests with affection and with your prayers, that they may always be shepherds according to God’s heart.

Dear priests, may God the Father renew in us the Spirit of holiness with whom we have been anointed. May he renew his Spirit in our hearts, that this anointing may spread to everyone, even to those “outskirts” where our faithful people most look for it and most appreciate it. May our people sense that we are the Lord’s disciples; may they feel that their names are written upon our priestly vestments and that we seek no other identity; and may they receive through our words and deeds the oil of gladness which Jesus, the Anointed One, came to bring us. Amen.

Why Am I a Catholic?

The Chapel at Princeton University

On Sunday 4 November 2012, I preached the following homily at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville, South Carolina.

Thirty years ago tomorrow, on 5 November 1982, to the astonishment of my friends, to the bewilderment of my family, and to my everlasting wonderment, I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church. As unexpected as that turn in my life was, even stranger was the day fourteen months earlier when I woke up in the morning an atheist and a scientific materialist and went to sleep that night a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. That day of my conversion to Christ was unexpected on two counts: First, from the age of thirteen I had been a sincerely convinced atheist, and second, I chose Princeton University for my undergraduate work, in part, because it was far from the Christ-haunted South of my childhood. I went to Princeton precisely to escape the ignorance and superstition I saw dripping from everything in this part of the world and in the hope of living with others of similar convictions in what I then regarded as the light of pure reason, and to arm myself for battle I enrolled during my first semester in a course called “Christianity and its Critics.” So, to find myself a few months later introduced to the Lord Jesus by students and teachers at Princeton was a life-changing surprise.

The final moments of my conversion to Christ in October 1981 constitute for me an indelible experience of fire: purifying, transforming, illuminating fire. When the fire passed and I came back to myself, I turned to my friend and classmate who was the indispensable instrument of grace that night and asked where I could go to be baptized, and immediately I was confronted with the scandal of division among Christians. Why aren’t Lutherans Presbyterians? Why aren’t Anglicans Baptists? And why is it that the only thing to which they all agree is that they aren’t Catholics?

In my search for an answer to those questions, I turned to the only clergyman on campus whom I knew: an Episcopal priest. He sketched a brief account of the very messy history of heresy and schism among Christians and suggested that I could approach my search in one of two ways: start from our time and work backwards or start from the beginning of Christianity and work forwards to find the causes of the disagreements and separations that afflict the Church. And then he added that since there is only one Lord, one Faith, and one Baptism, I did not have to wait until I sorted through this mess to be baptized. So in January 1982 I was born again by water and the Holy Spirit in an Anglican font, even as I continued to read about the life and faith of the first Christians and the shape of the Church in which they lived together.

For six months I worshipped as an Anglican while I spent every available hour reading the New Testament, the Church Fathers, and the decrees of the early ecumenical Councils. Friends, both Catholic and Protestant, suggested books which I inhaled, and evening after evening the main course at dinner was theological disputation. Then came a day in high summer when, after finishing John Henry Newman’s spiritual autobiography, I thought to myself: I do not protest anything taught by the Catholic Church, so I can no longer be a Protestant. To that point I had never met a Catholic priest, so I asked a friend to introduce me to one, and at our first meeting in his office, I said “Father, I have to become a Catholic.” He sent me home with several books to read and questions to think about, and when I returned the following week he asked if I was still certain about my convictions. I answered “Yes, I have to become a Catholic, and I think I am called to be a priest.”

My teacher was Father Peter Stravinskas, and he spent the next few months explaining what I needed to know to make a profession of faith with a clear and certain conscience, often while we strolled through the peerless campus of Princeton University or that of the nearby Institute for Advanced Study. At length, on the evening of 5 November 1982, I stood before the altar in the chapel of the Poor Clare Monastery in Bordentown, New Jersey, and professed the faith of the Church in the ancient Creed of Nicaea and Constantinople and then added “I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.” With those words, I was a Catholic, and in the next few minutes I received the sacraments of Confirmation and the Holy Eucharist to complete my sacramental initiation into the Lord Jesus and his holy Church. 

And here I am today, thirty years later, still in wonderment that I should be a Christian and a Catholic Christian at that, especially because the secular and rationalist existence I so eagerly sought as a boy is now available everywhere. Indeed, it is not only available, it is pressed upon us from every side with great urgency by the chattering classes who have come to believe that all religions, particularly Christianity, and Catholicism most especially, are the enemy of human freedom and flourishing. And we must acknowledge that those who regard the Christian faith as superstition and the Catholic Church as a bulwark of darkness and ignorance are presently having their way with us. One in ten Americans today is an ex-Catholic, and more than half of those who still identify themselves as Catholics do not live the Catholic faith or practice our religion in any observable way. This great falling away is happening throughout the West, and that is among the many reasons why the just concluded meeting of the Synod of Bishops in Rome spent three weeks discussing the Church’s need for a New Evangelization to transmit the Gospel in our time.

But while I am delighted that the bishops are taking notice of these things, the truth is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not transmitted by new offices in the Roman Curia or more documents from the Roman Pontiff; the Gospel is transmitted by disciples of Jesus Christ who have come to “believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.” What is necessary for those of us still trying to transmit the Gospel in this way is to acknowledge that the Church is now perceived by many people as a stumbling block rather than an instrument of communion with God. 

We see the Church that saved Europe from the Dark Ages, that built schools, invented hospitals and founded universities. We see the Church that designed and raised up the most glorious buildings our civilization has ever produced and then filled them with art and music of unsurpassed beauty. We see the Church that brought the light of the Gospel to every part of the world even as it was first encountered by Europeans. We see the Church that provided the intellectual and cultural foundations for the rule of law in a limited State and for the scientific revolution to which so many people today look for their salvation. In short, we who already believe what the Church believes see her as a light-filled instrument for the transmission of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and as a perpetual witness to the Father’s eternal Plan of Salvation for the entire human race in Jesus Christ. 

But many of those who do not share our faith look at the same Church and see a loathsome agent of oppression and bastion of ignorance, an unwanted survival from the Middle Ages which arrays itself against human progress and happiness by resisting the sexual revolution and teaching that there is an objective moral law which we do not make and to which we are all accountable, and not a few of those who see the Church in this way are baptized Catholics. Some of them are ordained. That too is among the many reasons we need a New Evangelization.

But before we can be instruments of the New Evangelization, we need to know why we are disciples of the Lord Jesus and members of his Catholic Church. Thirty years ago I came at these questions from outside the Church, as a young man seeking to understand the world and his place in it, but most Catholics are born into Catholic families and take these things for granted. These people are often called cradle Catholics to distinguish them from those like myself who are usually called converts, but the term cradle Catholic implies that one can be born a Catholic and that is simply false. No one is born a Catholic; one can only be born again a Catholic, and even the Baptism of infants is a sacrament of faith - the faith of the Church, the faith of the child’s parents, the faith of the child’s godparents. This is the faith in which the child should be instructed and formed until the day when he can renew with his own heart and mind and voice the promises of his Baptism and take his place among the disciples of the Lord Jesus who believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God. In other words, all Catholics must be converts of one sort or the other or else they do not know what Catholicism is.

At this point, though, we must acknowledge a perennial problem in the life of the Church: Catholics do not always live according to the faith we profess. In fact, many of us fail to do so in ways that are scandalous and even horrifying, and when an errant believer is also a bishop or priest, then the damage done to the Church’s credibility is even greater. As a consequence, those who do not share our faith, including some souls who might feel drawn to the Church as a fellowship of Christ’s disciples, can point to the notorious sins of Catholics with dismay and then try to justify rejecting her claims because of the cognitive dissonance that always follows a conspicuous contradiction between the faith we profess and the lives we lead.

Two answers to such objections are readily available. First, that all men have sinned and are deprived of God’s glory is an essential truth of the Gospel, and no one should ever be surprised when Christians sin. Disappointed perhaps, but never surprised. The sacraments do not deprive us of our freedom, and fallen men and women - which all Christians remain - struggle every day not to misuse their freedom. When Christians sin, even scandalously, even when they are ordained, they are in a strange way confirming the faith they profess: we are all sinners in need of redemption, and we cannot save ourselves. That’s the first answer to the charge that the sins of Christians put the lie to the claim of the Church’s holiness, and the second answer is a bit more abstract. Just as the divine and human natures of the Lord Jesus co-exist in one person so that the Son of Mary is both God and man, so too in the Church the human and divine co-exist so that she is both a fellowship of sinners and the spotless bride of Christ. The holiness of the Church comes not from the moral character of Christians; it comes rather from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who is the soul of the Body of Christ, giving life and holiness to the Church so that she may fulfill her Great Commission to teach the Gospel to all nations. There is and can be no separation between the Lord Jesus Christ and his Church, and it is only in and with the Church that we can come to know, love, and serve the Lord Jesus as he fully reveals himself to us in Word and Sacrament.

When I became convinced of this truth thirty years ago, I went to a priest and said “Father, I have to become a Catholic,” and three decades later I remain grateful every day for the grace of God that drew me to full communion with his one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church - the Church of Jesus Christ fully and rightly ordered through history, the Church governed by Simon Peter and his successors, the Bishops of Rome, in union with all the bishops of the world who stand in apostolic succession as authentic teachers of the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe.

So, why am I a Catholic? Because I believe it’s all true. Because I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God. And because I want everyone I know, everyone I meet to find in the Catholic Church what I found: the goodness of grace, the truth of the Gospel, and the beauty of holiness. Here, in the Catholic Church, is where we find the freedom of the children of God; here in the Catholic Church is where we are born again to everlasting life; here in the Catholic Church is where we are nourished with the Body and Blood of the Savior; here in the Catholic Church is where we let go of sin and all of our false selves and discover our true dignity and destiny - a glory that surpasses anything we can imagine. 

But those of us who believe these things must take note. In the service of leading others to find these truths in the Catholic Church, we can no longer begin our witness by saying “the Church teaches,” because as we have seen, the Church herself is a stumbling block for so many. Instead, we must now begin with the simple witness of our own lives and then lead others to know, love, and serve the Lord Jesus Christ by helping them to receive him with saving faith as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. To do this in full measure, we must of course eventually come to “the Church teaches,” but to avoid the difficulties aroused in our time by the Church herself, we should begin the journey of evangelization by talking about what “the Gospel reveals” not with what “the Church teaches.” And to do that, we must know and believe the Gospel ourselves, something which is directly dependent on our own knowledge of Holy Scripture, our own life of regular prayer, and our own love for others in action. 

Now, for those of you who were hoping (or fearing) that I would preach today about Tuesday’s election, please understand that I just did. You see, every serious political dispute is, at root, first a theological dispute, and when one believes everything that God has revealed for our salvation, then many political arguments are already resolved. For example, one who believes everything the Catholic Church teaches to be revealed by God does not support abortion, does not support the redefinition of marriage, does not support the reduction of the natural human right to freedom of religion to the laughably inadequate substitute of freedom to worship, and does not support massive government interference in free markets of honest exchange. Moreover, those who believe everything the Catholic Church teaches to be revealed by God not only do not support these things; they also do not vote for politicians who do. And in this way the Church is involved in the political process, not as a partisan actor but as an evangelical witness. The Gospel of Jesus Christ not only changes individual lives, it also forms cultures and shapes entire civilizations, only a small part of which involves politics. And right now, our civilization is dying and is in need of a new proclamation of the timeless truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever, but proclaimed now with new ardor, new methods, and new conviction.

So, if we want to contribute to the New Evangelization by being Evangelical Catholics, let us renew our commitment to study and pray with the Bible, to live the promises of our Baptism, to serve those in need, and to receive the sacraments of the New and Eternal Covenant regularly and worthily, and by so doing, to be prepared to draw others to Jesus Christ and his Church through radical conversion, deep fidelity, joyful discipleship, and courageous evangelism. That is how I was led to the Catholic Church thirty years ago, and that is how we will help others arrive at the day when they can say with a clear and certain conscience “I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.”

Praised be Jesus Christ! Now and forever!

Obama at the Smith Dinner? Yes.

Alfred Emanuel Smith (1873 - 1944) was the 42nd Governor of New York, and in 1928 he became the first Catholic to run for President of the United States. In 1945, one year after Smith's death, Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, inaugurated the Alfred E. Smith Dinner to honor the public service of Smith and Catholics in political life and to raise funds for Catholic Charities. For 67 years, the Smith Dinner has been one of the fixtures of New York's social, political and philanthropic life, and the famed Dinner is an intersection of leading figures in politics, culture, and the Church. Because Smith was the first Catholic to run for President, the dinner has also traditionally included the presidential candidates when it is held in an election year. In 2008, for example, John McCain and Barack Obama (pictured above) were invited by Edward Cardinal Egan, and both accepted. Following this well-established precedent, Timothy Cardinal Dolan has invited Mitt Romney and Barack Obama to attend this year's Smith Dinner, and now Cardinal Dolan is coming under attack from elements of the pro-life movement in the United States because he invited President Obama to the Smith Dinner. I believe that the critics are wrong and should stop their protests of the Cardinal's decision.

Although we must oppose President Obama's pro-death policies with every fiber of our being, it is nonetheless true that he is one of the two candidates for the presidency, and the Church must have open channels of communication with both major parties and their leaders -- including (perhaps especially) the ones with whom we disagree about fundamental matters of justice.

Cardinal Dolan did the proper thing by inviting Barack Obama to this October's Smith Dinner, and those in the pro-life movement who are protesting this decision are doing their movement and the Church no favor. Let it be, friends.

The Dictatorship of Relativism

On 19 April 2005, the College of Cardinals elected Joseph Ratzinger to follow Blessed Pope John Paul II on the Chair of St. Peter, and on that day he became Pope Benedict XVI. The day before his election to the papacy, Joseph Ratzinger, in his capacity as Dean of the College of Cardinals, celebrated a Mass “Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice” (For Electing the Roman Pontiff) which was the last public event before the beginning of the Conclave in the Sistine Chapel.

During that Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica with the Cardinals concelebrating, Ratzinger preached about the importance of them all understanding the situation of the Church in our time, and he pointed to the principal danger confronting Christianity in the early 21st Century:

“Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine’, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

The dictatorship of relativism is the means by which those who hate Christianity will attempt to drive Christians from the public square, and this dictatorship, like all dictatorships, will almost certainly lead to fierce persecutions of those who will not submit to its illegitimate rule.

I thought of that this week as I watched the absurd little storm surrounding a Southern fast food chain named Chick-fil-A. The man who founded the company is a serious Christian, and so is his son who now runs the company. The owners of Chick-fil-A have attempted from the modest beginnings of their enterprise to conduct business as Christian gentlemen; for example, their stores are never open on Sunday. It should come as no surprise, then, that these purveyors of delicious chicken sandwiches think that the word marriage means the lifelong bond of one man and one woman. But the mayors of Boston and Chicago, among others, were shocked (Shocked!) to learn that anyone alive today held such primitive, retrograde, bigoted and hateful notions, let alone that they had the temerity to admit such things in public. And that’s when the dictatorship of relativism bared its teeth. Thomas Menino and Rahm Emanuel both declared in public that they would oppose the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain expanding in their cities because the CEO had engaged in hate speech by suggesting that God’s eternal plan for marriage had something to do with the propagation of our species and that no legislature or judge could rearrange the natural order of things by declaring falsehood to be truth.

For now, both of these ideologues have backed off from their overheated rhetoric, and one or two voices in the land have been raised in defense of the First Amendment. But the honest ferocity of the first response of Menino, Emanuel and their fellow travellers should not be forgotten: they wanted to put a Christian businessman out of business because he has “a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church” which they regard as fundamentalism. That is the dictatorship of relativism, and this is how it starts.

Our Lady of Medjugorje?

Medjugorje is a village located (since the crack-up of Yugoslavia) in Bosnia and Herzegovina but populated almost totally by Croats. Since June 1981, a small group of villagers have claimed that the Blessed Virgin Mary regularly appears to them with messages from heaven, and despite the constant warnings of the local bishop that there is no basis to believe these claims, Medjugorje has become the third most visited pilgrimage site in Europe. Many Catholics of undoubted orthodoxy have been to Medjugorje and reported that they saw there only abundant signs of grace at work in the thousands of pilgrims who come there to pray. And yet ... and yet there are very serious counter-signs also at work in Medjugorje. 


The most serious of these counter-signs is the man who was once the spiritual director of the self-proclaimed visionaries and a champion of the alleged apparitions. His name is Tomislav Vlašić, and he was once a Franciscan priest. He is now a disgraced ex-Catholic and laicized former priest who has taken to shilling New Age nonsense to pay the bills. It turns out that one of the main promoters of belief in the alleged apparitions at Medjugorje is a heretic, a degenerate and probably a sociopath. In 1976, for example, he impregnated a Franciscan sister, whom he convinced to flee to Germany to hide the child. And this was the man who assisted the alleged seers in telling the world that they were receiving messages from the Mother of God.


The partisans of the Medjugorje devotion invariably rebut all objections to these alleged apparitions with an appeal to the abundant spiritual fruits which come to those who make pilgrimage there. But this is not sufficient. Many Muslims and Mormons lead lives of great goodness, but their religions are false. Many Calvinists and Lutherans shame too many Catholics in their devotion to the Lord Jesus, their knowledge of Holy Scripture, and their holiness of life, but much of their doctrine is heretical and they live in separation from the Church of Christ fully and rightly ordered in history. The apparent fruit of holiness in the lives of pilgrims to Medjugorje is simply not evidence that the claims being made by the alleged seers are true, and until and unless the Holy Father makes a definitive judgment on this matter, the only certain guidance we have are the decrees of the Bishop of Mostar, the diocese in which Medjugorje is located. Two successive local bishops have asked that there be no pilgrimages to Medjugorje, and any Catholic who goes there to give credence to the claim of Marian apparitions is doing so against the legitimate authority of the local diocesan pastor.


In March 2010, Pope Benedict XVI created a special commission to investigate everything about Medjugorje and submit a report to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. No further public statements about this matter have been made, so we must assume that the work of this commission is not yet complete. Until the Bishop of Rome makes a determination about this matter, no Catholic should promote devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the presently illicit and presumptuous title of "Our Lady of Medjugorje". 


And beyond that, let us remember that the Christian faith cannot be based upon or guided by visions, locutions, apparitions, or so-called "private revelations" of any kind. When the Church approves locutions or apparitions and only when the Church approves them, these devotions can be useful to some of the faithful as an optional means of enriching their spiritual life, but our faith is given only to the Word of God -- the Word of God Eternal (God the Father's Only-begotten Son), the Word of God Incarnate (the Lord Jesus Christ), and the Word of God Written (the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments). The age of revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle, and no new word will be spoken to the human race because the final and full revelation of the Father's eternal plan of salvation has already been made in and by the Lord Jesus Christ.

"The Eagle has landed."

From Bill Bennet at The American Patriot's Daily Almanac:

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin floated high above the lifeless surface of the moon in a boxy, four-legged landing vehicle named the Eagle. The radio hissed, and a voice called across space from Mission Control in Houston, a quarter of a million miles away: "You are go for powered descent." An engine fired, and the fragile craft began its downward journey.

It would not go exactly as planned. Alarm signals flashed inside the tiny cabin, warning that Eagle's computer was overloaded. As the spacecraft hurtled toward the surface, engineers in Houston had seconds to decide whether to abort the mission.

"Eagle, you are go for a landing," they directed. The astronauts continued their descent, but when Armstrong looked out the window to study the moon's surface, he realized that they were not where they should be. The computer was supposed to guide the Eagle to a smooth landing area. It had overshot the mark by four miles and was heading toward a crater of jagged boulders.

Another warning light blinked. They were running out of landing fuel. Armstrong took command from the computer. The Eagle scooted over ridges and craters as he searched for a place to set down. The low-fuel signal flashed. There was no turning back now. A cloud of dust rose toward the Eagle. Silence ... and then Neil Armstrong's voice crackled to Earth across the gulf of space: "The Eagle has landed."

A few hours later, Armstrong and then Aldrin stepped onto the moon's surface. Together they planted a US flag. When they departed, they left behind a plaque bearing this message:

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH

FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON

JULY 1969, A.D.

WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND

Called to Communion

Called to Communion is a splendid website run by converts to the Catholic Faith from the various parts of Reformed Christianity -- meaning Calvinists of one stripe or another. If you know Presbyterians with questions about Catholicism, please suggest that they visit www.calledtocommunion.com. The essays and commentary are always thoughtful, articulate, charitable, and directed to an exploration of serious theological matters without rancor.

Religious Freedom and the US Government

Here is the text of my Holy Week letter to the people of St. Mary's, Greenville:


Dear Friends in Christ,


This year our parish will be 160 years old, and as American institutions go, that is a venerable age. But our Church is 2,000 years old, and Christianity stands in continuity with the 2,000 years between the calling of Abraham and the coming of the Lord Jesus. And in the 4,000 year history of Israel and the Church, we have seen empires rise and fall, tyrants come and go, nations be born and die, whole civilizations wax and wane -- all of which means that we can take the long view of history when confronted with the difficulties of any particular day. But taking the long view does not diminish the suffering of those who are right now being persecuted for their faith or reduce the urgency of our obligation always to bear witness to the truth of the Gospel.


There are many places in the world today where being a Christian is to be a target of discrimination, oppression, and violence. More men, women and children died in the 20th century because of their Christian faith than in all the nineteen centuries before, and the the first decade of the 21st century has shown that the making of martyrs goes on and on. We should be grateful that we do not live in a land where churches are blown up, where Christians are murdered in the street or sold into slavery and forced to convert to Islam, or where teaching the Holy Scriptures and celebrating the sacraments of the New Covenant is a crime. Such persecution goes on every day, year in and year out, in almost every place where Islamic sharia or Communist dictatorship is the law of the land, and Christians by the thousands suffer unspeakable torments rather than renounce their Lord and Savior. This is an extreme example of what may be called the “Cost of Discipleship”, and it can serve as an effective inspiration for us to ask what we would sacrifice for the sake of our faith.


Put in this context, our present struggle against the overreaching arrogance of the Federal Government seems a small matter, but it is precisely in such small ways that the persecution of Christians has ever begun. Every Catholic bishop in the United States is united in rejecting the decision by the President and the Secretary of Health and Human Services that would classify as non-religious institutions all of our hospitals, clinics, colleges, and universities simply because they serve people without regard for their religious identity. It is this decision by the present Administration to define our institutions as non-religious that allows the disputed HHS regulation to force the Church to pay for procedures and medications that are intrinsically immoral through the health insurance we provide for our employees. And that is the heart of the arrogance of this disastrous decision: the Federal Government, not the Church, will decide what is and what is not a religious institution.


In the two millennia since the Lord Jesus gave us the Great Commission to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth and celebrate the sacraments until he returns in glory, the Church has encountered opposition of some sort in every time and place. And this is no surprise: Christ warned us that it would be so. But in the Church’s long struggle to secure her liberty and fulfill her divine duty, the United States of America has long stood as a rare example of how people of every faith and no faith can live together free of compulsion from the State. That is until now. Our rare example of religious freedom respected by the State is in grave danger of becoming yet another place where princes, potentates, czars, commissars and imams decide for others what is and what is not a part of their religion. And the main weapon being used against the liberty of the Church in this present fight is one about which Pope Benedict XVI has been warning us for years: the dictatorship of relativism.


“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Can you imagine these stirring words of our Declaration of Independence being written today by anyone in our government who is responsible for the disputed HHS mandate? The very notion of self-evident truths is trod underfoot by the dictatorship of relativism, and the cultural toxins of skepticism, irony and cynicism have all but excluded any appeal to right reason from public life.


My friends, the Church is not a political party, and the Gospel is not an ideology. We are the children of God by adoption, called into communion with God and with each other in the mystical Body of Christ and charged with the sacred duty to proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord to all nations. To fulfill that duty, the Church has ever sought the freedom to conduct apostolates of many kinds: schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, clinics, charitable services, nursing homes, etc. We do these things not because the people we serve are Catholics but because we are Catholics, and no matter whom we serve, the institutions sponsored by the Church are truly religious because it is in obedience to the teaching of the Lord Jesus that we do these things. Insisting on the freedom to conduct our own institutions according to our faith is not an illegitimate imposition of the Church on the State; it is an elemental principle of justice. This simple precept, once a self-evident truth, is now under assault by the Federal Government, and it is our duty to resist this campaign against religious freedom with every means at our disposal. For us, right here and right now, this is part of the Cost of Discipleship.


As we enter Holy Week, let us be mindful of the age-old struggle between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world, so that we may have clarity about which Kingdom claims our first allegiance. The Mass of Palm Sunday opens with an acclamation that helps us find that true allegiance: Hosanna to the Son of David; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the King of Israel. Hosanna in the highest.


Praised be Jesus Christ! Now and for ever!

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

Father Jeffrey Steenson,

today named the first Ordinary,

celebrating an Anglican Use Mass

at the Newark Cathedral in June 2010.

In accordance with the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has today erected for the United States a Personal Ordinariate for Anglicans who desire to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving their Anglican patrimony. This new pastoral structure is titled after the symbol of the authority of the Bishop of Rome to teach, sanctify and govern as pastor of the universal Church: the Chair of St. Peter.


The first Ordinary is Father Jeffrey Steenson. Until his reception into the Catholic Church in 2007, Father Steenson was a bishop in the Episcopal Church and had previously served as rector of several traditional parishes in the Episcopal Church, including the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont, PA where Father George Rutler has once served.


This is but another step in the long process of trying to gather together small groups of Anglicans, both clergy and laity, who desire to become Catholics while retaining their corporate identity as parishes in this new Ordinariate -- essentially a non-territorial diocese. Anglicans anywhere in the United States who desire to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church and preserve their corporate identity should now be in touch with Father Steenson.


The new Ordinariate website is at www.usordinariate.org.

Father Conrad Kimbrough, RIP

Father Kimbrough and friends.

Born 10 May 1927

Ordained 11 February 1978

Died 5 July 2011

Here is the text of my homily for the Mass of Christian Burial 

celebrated on 8 July 2011

at Sacred Heart Church, Salisbury.

In the Temple at Jerusalem, a veil of cloth separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the sacred precincts; this was a token of the distance between the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man. This is the veil that was torn in two at the death of the Lord Jesus (Luke 23:45), signaling that the types and figures of the Old Covenant had given way to the reality of the New Covenant. But even in these last days, sinful man is still separated from the holiness of the living God, and to glimpse his glory, the veil must be drawn back. The task of a priest, Father Kimbrough used to say, is to draw back the veil between God and man and then hide himself in the folds. And so he did, first as an ordained minister of the Episcopal Church and then as a priest of Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church; for decade after decade, Father Kimbrough drew back the veil for us and then hid himself in the folds.

One of the many reasons he found it so easy to rest content hidden in the folds is that he lived his entire life against the horizon of his death. In fact, it is arguable that no man ever thought so much about the day and manner of his death and with as much tranquility as did Father Kimbrough, with the possible exception of St. Paul, who wrote to the Church at Philippi that “… to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21)

Conrad Lewis Kimbrough was born right here is Salisbury on 10 May 1927 -- or, as he loved to point out, on Confederate Memorial Day, and he wasn’t just born here, he was born again here by water and the Holy Spirit at the First United Methodist Church of Salisbury when he was eleven years old. He began to attend Methodist Sunday School when he was just three, and from his teachers, his mother, and above all from the Sacred Scriptures, he learned the truth of the Gospel and never departed from the life changing conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord.

When he was in high school, young Conrad suggested that the sanctuary of the Methodist Church seemed a little bit bare and that it should be adorned with a picture of the Lord Jesus, before which he thought should stand a table with two candles on it. Years later he would recall that day as the first of many times someone said to him, “You should be a Catholic.”

During the first year of his undergraduate studies, Conrad made a decision that changed his life. On 8 April 1945, one month before his 18th birthday and the end of the Second World War in Europe, he was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and in so doing, Conrad was convinced that he was fulfilling the counsel of his Methodist classmate to become a Catholic -- albeit, as he would have put it then, in the English, rather than the Italian, branch of the Church. This conviction would sustain his faith, his life, and his work in the Episcopal Church for over thirty years, almost all of which was in Wisconsin, near the seminary he loved, Nashotah House, in what was then called the Biretta Belt of the Episcopal Church -- a swath of Anglican dioceses and parishes that were, both in creed and ritual form, self-consciously catholic.

During those three decades in Wisconsin, Father Kimbrough mastered the art of drawing back the veil between God and man through the celebration of the sacred liturgy, the preaching of the Gospel, and the guidance of the lost. Father Kimbrough was heir to the renovation of Anglicanism initiated by the 19th century Oxford Movement, led by the brilliant English scholar and Anglican priest Blessed John Henry Newman, but like Newman, who later left the Church of England and became a Catholic priest, Conrad Kimbrough was increasingly beset by doubts about the reality of the ancient Church, of Catholic faith and order, in a Christian community formed by schism during the 16th century Protestant Reformation.

The resolution of these doubts took many years for Father Kimbrough to work out, and while he was still living in Wisconsin, he was invited by friends in Stevens Point to a large gathering of Catholics who were joining a cardinal visiting from Europe for a Mass in a gym. Father Kimbrough’s Catholic friends introduced him to the foreign cardinal, with whom he had a conversation about Anglicanism and his doubts, and Father Kimbrough was delighted that this Catholic bishop from a far country knew so much about Anglicanism and was so sympathetic to his situation. Although he could not receive Holy Communion at the cardinal’s Mass, Father Kimbrough stayed until the end, and to avoid being in anyone’s way, he sat high up on the last bleacher of the gymnasium. As the procession passed by far beneath on the gym floor, the visiting cardinal stopped and gestured for Father Kimbrough to come down. He was deeply moved and ever after said that he felt like sinful Zacchaeus being called down from the sycamore tree. He knelt down to receive the cardinal’s blessing, and that very night Conrad Kimbrough decided to be received into the Catholic Church. Less than one year later, the entire world was introduced to that same cardinal from a far country as Pope John Paul II.

Having become a Catholic in Wisconsin, Conrad Kimbrough returned to the land of his birth in the hope of being able to serve the Catholic Church as a priest in North Carolina. Bishop Michael Begley of Charlotte received Father Kimbrough with great generosity and respect for his twenty-five years of service as an Anglican minister, and on 11 February 1978, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, Conrad Kimbrough was ordained to the priesthood of Jesus Christ. He was 50 years old and just beginning the work of his life in the Catholic Church.

Over the next twenty-five years, Father Kimbrough served as pastor of five parishes in the Diocese of Charlotte, and in not one of those assignments was he ever accused of being a superlative administrator. Papers were scattered throughout his rectory on every horizontal surface, mail was left unopened for days, even weeks -- especially mail from the chancery, and when the mail finally was opened, it was then dropped wherever Father Kimbrough happened to be standing or sitting, usually never to be thought of again. But despite the administrative chaos, there was something going on in and through this priest that changed lives.

First as a Methodist, then as an Episcopalian, and finally as a Catholic, Conrad Kimbrough knew more surely than he knew his own existence that God exists; he knew that the one, only, living and true God has revealed himself to man through the Covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David; he knew that God has revealed himself through the Law and the Prophets of Israel; and he knew that God has revealed himself -- unveiled himself -- finally and fully through the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. With a combination of childlike trust in the truth of the Gospel and the simplicity of faith that is found only on the far side of decades of complexity and struggle, Father Kimbrough served as a powerful instrument of grace for those struggling to live the Catholic Faith, for those lost in doubt and sin, and for those searching for something or Someone they knew only that they did not yet know. This was true throughout his ministry as a Catholic priest, but it was perhaps nowhere more pellucidly clear than during his service as pastor of St. Benedict’s, Greensboro.

It was there that I first met him in 1985. I was a callow seminarian, and he was a crusty, cantankerous curmudgeon who had no patience for ecclesiastical fools. We were an instant pair: the Old Coot and the Young Coot. As I listened to him preach week after week, I heard the Fathers of the Church speaking down the ages. As I watched him spend hours in the confessional and in gentle conversation with the lost and broken souls who came to his door, I understood the Lord’s insistence that what we do for the least of his brethren, we do for him. As I served his Mass day after day, I saw the veil drawn back and watched the priest hide himself in the folds so that we could behold the glory of the Word made flesh, now made present on the Church’s altar. And I was not alone in seeing these things. The flowering of vocations to the priesthood and religious life which came forth from that small congregation is an enduring and remarkable sign of grace. Another powerful sign of grace were the many marriages formed and strengthened by this celibate priest’s faithful witness to God’s eternal plan for married love.

Besides seeking to strengthen marriages and to encourage vocations to the priesthood and religious life, Father Kimbrough’s twin passions were proclaiming the Gospel of Life and bringing souls into the Catholic Church. When he was arrested for praying in front of an abortion chamber, he started making converts behind bars. On one occasion he asked me to accompany him to the county jail with a Mass kit and the holy oils. In a glass room about five feet square, he baptized and confirmed a trembling young man who was accused of and later convicted for murder, and then Father Kimbrough celebrated Mass on a tiny table so that this new Christian -- now repentant and radiant in the certainty of God’s mercy -- could receive for the first and perhaps last time the flesh and blood of the Savior. In that dreadful place we chanted the Missa de Angelis while guards and inmates alike looked on in wonder.

Everyone who knew Father Kimbrough has a story like that: absolutely uncompromising faith expressed in always surprising tenderness. It was an irresistible combination, and the lives of countless souls were shaped for the better by the witness of a priest who sought always to hide himself in the folds of the veil drawn back and who spoke most often not of his ordination, but of his baptism, the sacrament in which he was made -- as he loved to say -- a member of Christ, a child of God, and an heir of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Beyond his passion for the Church, the Gospel, the sacraments, and the life of grace, Conrad loved the place of his birth and loved everyone to whom he was related, which, if you give credence to his tales, was pretty much everyone he ever met. “Sure is good to be back here in Rowan County,” he would say every time he came home, and he meant it. He intended to lie here in this earth until the Last Day, when he would be restored to his parents and siblings and nieces and nephews and first cousins, and second cousins, and third cousins, and all his cousins from the first generation of Man to the last. Betsy, Frank, and Norman, your brother loved you and your families because you are his flesh and blood, but he also loved you and all of us because he lived and loved in Christ Jesus.

In these last years, his health faltered and his body failed, but his faith never wavered. Let St. Paul speak for Conrad Kimbrough: “I consider that the sufferings of  this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” (Romans 8: 18-19) Another word for revealing is unveiling. 

After he returned to Maryfield from the hospital, Father Kimbrough knew that he was dying. He asked for the photographs of his spiritual sons and daughters in the priesthood and religious life to be moved to his little room, and family and friends came to speak to him of love and gratitude and grace. On the morning I saw him last, I arrived just after Father Benjamin Roberts finished saying Mass, and we sat together at the bedside. It was Eastertide, so we sang a hymn of the Resurrection:

Christ the Lord is risen today;

Christians, haste your vows to pay;

Offer ye your praises meet

At the Paschal Victim’s feet;

For the sheep the Lamb hath bled,

Sinless in the sinner’s stead,

Christ the Lord is ris’n on high:

Now he lives no more to die.

When we finished the hymn, I said to him, “Father, soon you will be at the wedding feast of the Lamb. The veil will be drawn back for the final time. There will be no signs, and no more sacraments. Just the reality of the Lamb once slain who dies no more.” He asked me to repeat those words to you today.

Now let’s return to St. Paul’s description of creation’s eager longing for the unveiling of the glory that makes us the free children of God. The Apostle writes that “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now, and not only creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” (Romans 8: 21-23)

St. Paul’s vision of our present suffering surpassed by future glory through our adoption by grace and the redemption of our bodies in Jesus Christ is why Conrad Kimbrough lived his entire life in joyful expectation of this day. And now that we are here to commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Father Kimbrough would be the first to remind us that we are here to pray for God’s mercy on his soul, to pray for the forgiveness of his sins, and to pray for the hastening of that bright vision in which Conrad Lewis Kimbrough will no longer need signs or sacraments because the veil has been drawn back once and forever so that this faithful priest, who will no longer need to hide in the folds, can see his Lord even as he is seen and be changed from glory into glory.

Thanks be to God for the life of his servant Conrad Lewis Kimbrough. May Christ Jesus the merciful Savior acknowledge him now as a sheep of his own fold, a lamb of his own flock, a sinner of his own redeeming, a preacher of his own Gospel, and a steward of his own Mysteries.

Grant rest, we pray O Lord, to your priest Conrad with all your saints in light, where sorrow and pain are no more, but perfect peace and everlasting life. Amen.

Anglicans and Invalid Sacraments

When Catholics speak of Anglicans and sacramental invalidity, most people would assume that we're speaking of Holy Orders. But there is another kind of sacramental invalidity which will make it impossible for many Anglicans, both lay and ordained, to be received into the Catholic Church through Anglicanorum coetibus or any other means, and that invalidity is in the Sacrament of Marriage.


The Catholic Church believes that only Catholics are bound to marry in the Catholic Church (according to canonical form) and, therefore, that any two baptized Christians who consent to marry each other are by their exchange of consent creating between themselves the bond of sacramental marriage. (N.B. And this is despite the fact that Protestants generally do not count marriage as a sacrament, but there it is.) So, for example, if two Anglicans get married by any means (a judge, an Anglican minister, an Elvis chaplain at a Vegas wedding chapel), then they are bound to each other by the lifelong sacrament of matrimony. If that marriage ends in divorce, however, and one or both them marry again, then in the second relationship they are married only in civil law and do not have the sacrament of marriage because the existing prior bond is presumed by the law of the Church to continue to exist in the sacrament, even after the civil divorce.


The only way to determine with moral certitude whether or not the first marriage was or was not a true sacrament of Christ and the Church is to allow an ecclesiastical court, or tribunal, to do a thorough investigation of the former marriage, which enjoys in law the presumption of validity. If sufficient evidence can be adduced to prove to moral certitude that the presumed sacrament never came into being, then the tribunal can declare that the former marriage was a civil contract only and not a sacrament, leaving the former partners free to marry in the Church as though for the first time.


Significant numbers of Anglicans are now in their second or third marriage (or more), and until and unless each of their prior marriages is investigated by a tribunal of the Catholic Church, it is not possible to receive them into the Catholic Church. Because this matter is so little understood, it often comes as a great surprise to people who want to become Catholics but find the way is closed to them by living in an invalid marriage, and given how sensitive this matter is, the persons involved will often give many reasons other than the real reason for their decision not to become Catholics. Look for this to happen with great frequency in the coming days as the personal Ordinariate comes closer and closer in the United States. The reasons given for remaining Anglicans may very well not be the real reasons.

Sturm und Drang Over the New Roman Missal

Unless you've been living in a tent for the past year, you should be aware that this fall on the First Sunday of Advent (27 November 2011), the Catholic Church in the United States will begin using a new translation of the Roman Missal, the book which contains all of the prayers needed to say Mass.


The new translation, the work of nearly a decade, is certainly not perfect, and the process used to reach the final product was perhaps not the best that could have been devised. Nevertheless, the new translation is certainly a great improvement over the "Sacramentary" that we've been using for forty years, a book that is not so much a translation of the Missale Romanum as it is an adaptation.


Now that we're in the home stretch of the process and parishes are beginning to study and practice the new texts, a few of the people who have been involved in preparing the new Missal but who did not get everything they wanted are beginning to hold their breath until they turn blue and fall down. That, at any rate, is how an open letter from Father Anthony Ruff, OSB to the bishops of the United States reads to me. This is simply petulant narcissism dressed up as noble protest of injustice. I regret that Father Anthony has chosen this forum to express these sentiments, not least because he has contributed in many ways over recent years to improving the celebration of the sacred liturgy in our country. But, I suspect that this sort of tantrum is to be expected in the final run-up to the new Missal, given the number of people who wanted a say in the work and didn't get what they wanted.


As for me and my house, we look forward to the new translation, even with all its imperfections, and I hope that in due course everyone will remember the purpose of the entire exercise: to celebrate more faithfully the sacred mysteries of our redemption in Jesus Christ.

Calling All Anglicans!

Any Anglican in the United States who wants to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church under the provisions of the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus should be in direct contact with Donald Cardinal Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington.


If not now, when? If not you, who? It's time. It's past time. Just do it.

An Extreme Need for Silence

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Yad Vashem is Israel’s official memorial to the martyrs of the Nazi Holocaust, or as it is called by the Jews, the Shoah. The Hebrew words Yad Vashem, taken from the Prophet Isaiah, mean “a place and a name.” At Yad Vashem the millions of Jews who were exterminated like vermin have both a place of final rest and a name to be remembered. During the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, Pope John Paul the Great made a pilgrimage to Yad Vashem, and there in the powerfully stark Hall of Remembrance he spoke of the horror inflicted upon the Jews by a dehumanizing ideology of hatred. In part, the pope said:

“In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember … Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah … I have come to Yad Vashem to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything, especially of human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust.”

Over six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, and they were murdered in the most degrading of all possible conditions. The ideology of National Socialism had declared that they were subhuman and therefore unworthy even of the right to exist, and so by the millions they were murdered. But make no mistake; this was not the sudden violence of a rioting and lawless mob. No, the extermination of the Jews was carefully planned and methodically carried out over many years by well-educated professional men who loved their families, and were kind to their pets, and served their nation with skill and determination. These men went to concerts and plays; they went to fine dinners and took vacations with friends; they read poetry and classical literature and taught their children to play Bach and Beethoven. And they coldly, systematically murdered human beings by the millions with a clear conscience, because they found a way to convince themselves that those who were dying were beasts rather than men.

At Yad Vashem, John Paul asked: “How could man have such utter contempt for man?" Then the pope answered: "Because he had reached the point of contempt for God.”

But my friends, we do not have to look back to Nazi Germany and the death camps to find such contempt for God. No, we can find it right here among us, in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. On 22 January 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States, by a 7 to 2 vote, announced that it had discovered in the Constitution of the United States a previously unknown right of mothers to murder their children, and in the thirty-eight years since that national disgrace, we Americans have murdered more than 50 million human beings in the womb, with some estimates placing the butcher’s bill closer to 60 million. In other words, in the name of personal liberty and freedom of choice, we Americans have now exterminated more human beings than presently live in Spain and Ireland combined.

How could man, how would we, have such utter contempt for man? Because we have reached the point of contempt for God.

For decades before the infamous decision in Roe v. Wade, men and women of the radical and secular American Left -- taking their lead from the revolutionaries of the often violent European Left -- had been building a case to demonstrate that Biblical religion and the God revealed in the Bible are the enemies of human freedom. The default setting of the Mandarins of our high culture -- in our universities, in journalism, in entertainment and the arts, and in politics of the Left -- is that the human person is an autonomous individual free of all obligations to others, who must provide for himself the meaning of life and who has only the duty to pursue pleasure and self-realization wherever they may be found. Moreover, the secular mind holds that there is no universal moral truth, and even if there were, we could not know it; therefore, each person must find his own truth. This perverse philosophy was aptly described by Professor Allan Bloom (in The Closing of the American Mind) as debonair nihilism, and supported by the sexual revolution and the counter-cultural movements of the ’60’s, this vision of human life declares that unborn children are simply lumps of tissue that may be surgically removed from the mother’s body for any reason she may have. In fact, unquestionable commitment to this hateful ideology is now so deeply entrenched in the mind of the Left that we may call support for unrestricted abortion on demand the sacrament of secularism.

Think back to Nazi Germany: the atrocities committed against Jews were planned and executed by law-abiding and seemingly civilized men, and now we are doing exactly the same thing. Supported by unjust laws, our cultural and political elites are almost wholly captive to a hateful ideology that declares certain classes of human beings not to be human, and in the name of that ideology we are engaged in bloodletting of unimaginable proportions. Worse still, this abattoir of human misery is aided and abetted by false preachers in much of what remains of liberal Protestantism, who seek to excuse abortion as a private and tragic choice that is sometimes sadly necessary in difficult circumstances. But, friends, murdering innocent children is never necessary. And after nearly 60 million such murders, we’re no longer talking about private tragedies; in fact, after four decades of judicial murder, we’re facing a civilizational crisis.

Last week in Philadelphia, the depraved consequences of a generation of genocide were finally exposed to public view. We learned that a licensed medical doctor named Kermit Gosnell ran a chamber of horrors worthy of Dr. Mengele’s obscene experiments at Auschwitz, and this he did with impunity for decades because public officials looked the other way year after year after year. And this they did because abortion is considered absolutely sacrosanct by those who make and enforce the laws in too many parts of our country. Now, you might be tempted to think that the slaughterhouse of Kermit Gosnell is an extreme example that we may dismiss because it is so grotesque, but the only difference between what happened in Gosnell’s death chamber for decades and what is happening every day in every so-called clinic where abortions are performed is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.

How could man, how could we, have such utter contempt for man? Because we have reached the point of contempt for God.

My friends, the United States of America is drowning in the blood of tens of millions of murdered babies who are martyrs to a loathsome ideology which dehumanizes us by allowing us to dehumanize them. And the first step away from this abomination is for each and every one of us to refuse to consent to or cooperate with in any way the lies on which the ideology of abortion stands.

Let’s start with language. Abortion is not about the freedom to choose; it is about the license to kill. Abortion is murder. It is murder most foul, and it must stop. In the Name of God, it must stop. In the name of Man, it must stop. In the name of all that is holy and good and true and beautiful, it must stop. And so I beg you: never consent to abortion. Never cooperate with abortion. Never excuse abortion. Never vote for a politician who will support abortion. Never remain silent when your family and friends and neighbors and colleagues consent to abortion or decide to vote for a politician who will support abortion. Never accept the lie about human nature and human life which is required to imagine that a human child is a lump of tissue. Never be seduced by the seemingly civilized men and women who fill the air waves and the lecture halls and the court rooms and the political chambers and even, sometimes, the pulpits of this land with the lie that we can murder our children in the name of human freedom without becoming the same kind of monsters who marched millions of Jews into the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Next, let’s think about what we can do to promote a culture of life. We can support every effort by the Church and by pro-life groups to bear witness to the truth of the Gospel of Life. We can support programs that provide practical assistance to women with unwanted or crisis pregnancies. We can support adoption programs, chastity education, and a new counter-cultural movement informed this time by the Gospel which sets us free from slavery to sin. We can give pastoral care to those wounded by abortion, starting with the mothers who killed their children. We can bear witness to anyone who will listen that children, even in the womb, are human persons with inalienable rights, starting with the right to live and be nurtured rather than to be murdered, dismembered, and cast away as medical waste.

To paraphrase John Paul the Great: In the face of more than 50 million murdered children, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of abortion.

Let us dare to hope that one day, a day sooner rather than later, a great national monument will be raised in memory of the tens of millions of Americans who have died and are continuing to die in the holocaust of abortion. Let us hope that Americans of every creed and color, of every party and persuasion, will one day come to such a place of silence and remembrance to honor those who lives were taken from them by others who denied their humanity.

But until the murder of the unborn is ended and until such a shrine of silence and remembrance exists, we can hasten its coming by never being silent about abortion, never allowing our fellow Americans to forget that a holocaust is going on among us right now, every day. And even as we speak out about abortion in private conversation, in the public square, and in political action, let us now, in this holy place of remembrance, keep watchful silence in memory of the millions of martyred children and beg for the mercy of God upon our nation for this crime against God and man that cries out to heaven for His justice.

The culture of death and its secular sacrament, abortion, are indeed a great darkness. But “the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death, light has arisen” (Matthew 4:16). That light is the Lord Jesus Christ, and to Him we pray:

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.